"In the year 1802, a new district school-house was built near our residence, to which I was transferred from the school on the meeting-house hill. It was kept by Mr. Wilkes Allen, afterwards a respectable clergyman at Chelmsford. I was now between eight and nine years old. My eldest brother had left school, and was in a counting-room in Boston; my second brother had entered college; and as we were, almost all of us little folks at Mr. Allen's, I was among the most advanced. I began the study of arithmetic at this time, using Pike as the text-book. I recollect proceeding to the extraction of the cube-root, without the slightest comprehension of the principle of that or any of the simplest arithmetical operations. I could have comprehended them, had they been judiciously explained, but I could not penetrate them without aid. At length I caught a glimpse of the principle of decimals. I thought I had made a discovery as confidently as Pythagoras did when he demonstrated the forty-seventh proposition of the first book of Euclid. I was proportionately annoyed when I afterwards discovered that I had been anticipated in finding out that 'a decimal is a fraction whose denominator is a unit with as many ciphers annexed as the numerator has places,' or rather in finding out precisely what this meant."
He entered college in 1807, and thus describes his first experiences there.
"I was thirteen years old in April, and entered a Freshman the following August, being the youngest member of my class. I lived the first year with my classmate, Charles P. Curtis, in a wooden building standing at the corner of the Main and Church Streets. It was officially known as the 'College House,' but known by the students as 'Wiswall's Den,' or, more concisely, 'The Den,'—whether from its comfortless character as a habitation or from some worse cause I do not know. There was a tradition that it had been the scene of a horrid domestic tragedy, and that it was haunted by the ghosts of the Wiswalls; but I cannot say that during the twelvemonth I lived in 'The Den' this tale was confirmed by my own experience.
"We occupied the southwest corner-chamber, up two flights of stairs,—a room about fourteen feet square, in which were contained two beds and the rest of our furniture, and our fuel, which was wood, and was kept under the beds. Two very small closets afforded a little additional space; but the accommodations were certainly far from brilliant. A good many young men who go to college are idlers; some, worse than idlers. I suppose my class in this respect was like other classes; but there was a fair proportion of faithful, studious students, and of well-conducted young men. I was protected in part, perhaps, by my youth, from the grosser temptations. I went through the prescribed studies of the year—which were principally a few books of Livy and Horace for the Latin, and 'Collectanea Græca Majora' for the Greek—about as well as most of the class; but the manner in which the ancient languages were then studied was deplorably superficial. It was confined to the most cursory reading of the text. Besides the Latin and Greek languages, we had a weekly recitation in Lowth's English Grammar, and in the Hebrew Grammar, without points; also in Arithmetic and History, the last from Millot's Compend as a text-book. In all these branches there was an entire want of apparatus; and the standard, compared with that which now exists, was extremely low. And yet, in all respects, I imagine a great improvement had taken place, in reference to college education, on the state of things which existed in the previous generation. The intense political excitement of the Revolutionary period seems to have unsettled the minds of men from the quiet pursuits of life."
Reminiscences like these of his own lead one to speak of his memory, which was of all kinds, and wonderful in all. His memory for things was as remarkable as that for words,—a parallel I have known in very few men. In this double memory lay his power, which often excited the surprise of other speakers, of introducing into a discourse which he had written out, and, as men said, committed to memory, a passage purely extempore, so precisely that no patch could be observed at the junctures. The truth is, that it was not a matter of much account with him whether he had written out a statement of a fact or not. He was sure of the fact. And in simple narrative he was as willing to use extempore language as language prepared. Mr. Emerson says, in some not very flattering criticisms on him,—"It was remarked, for a man who threw out so many facts, he was seldom convicted of a blunder." I do not think he had any system of training memory, beyond that of using it and calling on it pitilessly, which is, I believe, the central rule regarding it.
Here is a curious story of a feat of memory, in his sketch of his Sophomore year.
"I have mentioned Metaphysics as a study in which I succeeded. I mean, of course, only that I prepared myself thoroughly in the text-books. Watts's Logic was the first book studied in this branch,—not a very inviting treatise, compared with that of Archbishop Whately, but easily comprehended, and not repulsive. The account of the syllogistic method amused me; and the barbarous stanza describing the various syllogistic modes and figures dwelt for a long time in my memory, and has not wholly faded away. Locke's 'Essay concerning Human Understanding' came next. This was more difficult. I recollect we used to make sport of the first sentence in the 'Epistle to the Reader,' which was, 'I here put into thy hands what has been the diversion of some of my idle and heavy hours: if it has the good luck to prove so of any of thine, and thou hast but half so much pleasure in reading as I had in writing it, thou wilt as little think thy money, as I do my pains, ill bestowed.' I cannot say that we any of us derived much diversion from it; but I overcame its difficulty by the resolute purpose to accomplish whatever was required. We recited from it three times a day, the four first days of the week, the recitation of Thursday afternoon being a review of the rest. We were expected to give the substance of the author's remarks, but were at liberty to condense them, and to use our own words. Although the style of Mr. Locke is not remarkably compact, it required a greater maturity of mind than is possessed by many boys of fourteen to abridge his paragraphs, or state his principles or their illustrations more concisely than he does himself. I had at that time a memory which recoiled from nothing; and I soon found that the shortest process was to learn the text by heart nearly verbatim. I recollect particularly, on one occasion of the review on Thursday afternoon, that I was called upon to recite early, and, commencing with the portion of the week's study which came next, I went on repeating word for word and paragraph after paragraph, and finally, not being stopped by our pleased tutor,[E] page after page, till I finally went through in that way the greater part of the eleven recitations of the week. The celebrated passage on the Memory happened to be included. A portion of it, after the lapse of forty-seven years, remains in my recollection as distinctly as it did the day after I learned it. I refer to the passage beginning, 'Thus the ideas, as well as children, of our youth often die before us; and our minds represent to us those tombs to which we are approaching, where, though the brass and marble remain, yet the inscriptions are effaced by time, and the imagery moulders away.'
"I may observe, that, beautiful as is this language beyond anything else in the work of Locke, it will not stand the test of criticism. There is no resemblance between what befalls the ideas and the children of our youth; and supposing there were such a resemblance, there is not the slightest analogy between the premature decease of the ideas and the children of our youth and the disappearance of monumental inscriptions and imagery from the brass and marble of tombs. But I feel ashamed of this attempt to pick flaws in this beautiful passage."
But I must not dwell on these reminiscences. I am tempted to refer any reader interested in his work in the education of the people to an article on that subject in the seventh volume of Mr. Barnard's "Journal of Education."
I once heard him say that the mental faculty which had been of most use to him and had given him most pleasure was his facility in acquiring language. He said this on occasion of a visit to a county prison, where they had taken him to the cell of a person whom no one could understand. I think he had been called a Greek; but he proved to be an Italian. Mr. Everett was then Governor of the Commonwealth, and this was an official visit. It was a pretty illustration of republican institutions, that this poor prisoner in his solitude should first hear his own language from the chief magistrate. Mr. Everett addressed him first in the language of his supposed country,—I think in Greek,—and changed to Italian, when the prisoner spoke to him. He spoke French, German, Italian, and the Romaic with ease. He read the whole Hebrew Testament in his youth, and in Germany made considerable progress in Arabic; but I do not think that he kept up his Oriental languages in later years. He was fond of exercising himself in the other languages named, and almost always had some stated correspondence on his hands in each of them.