however, he met Mr. Hobbes, whose rude but forcible condemnation of papacy
restrained him from casting his lot with it. At seventeen, he saw one night a real
apparition of the just executed Strafford. The last act of his youth, which we can
note here, was soon after he was twenty, when he fell in love with the charming
and saintly Mary Collet. The rough Puritan Thorne had made her proposals at
which she revolted, but she and Inglesant confessed love to each other; she saw,
however, that they had a way of life marked out for themselves by an inner
impulse and light. This calling they must follow and abandon love, and now
John plunged into the war on the side of the King.
W. J. Stillman[42] has written with unusual interest and candor the story of his
own early life.
As a boy he was frenzied at the first sight of the sea; caught the whip and lashed
the horses in an unconscious delirium, and always remembered this as one of the
most vivid experiences of his life. He had a period of nature worship. His first
trout was a delirium, and he danced about wildly and furiously. He relates his
very vivid impressions of the religious orthodoxy in which he was reared,
especially revival sermons; his occasional falsehoods to escape severe
punishment; his baptism at ten or eleven in a river in midwinter; the somberness
of his intellectual life, which was long very apathetic; his phenomenal stupidity
for years; his sudden insurrections in which he thrashed bullies at school; his
fear that he should be sent home in disgrace for bad scholarship; and how at last,
after seven years of dulness, at the age of fourteen, "the mental fog broke away
suddenly, and before the term ended I could construe the Latin in less time than
it took to recite it, and the demonstrations of Euclid were as plain and clear as a
fairy story. My memory came back so distinctly that I could recite long poems
after a single reading, and no member of the class passed a more brilliant
examination at the end of the term than I; and, at the end of the second term, I
could recite the whole of Legendre's geometry, plane and spherical, from
beginning to end without a question, and the class examination was recorded as
the most remarkable which the academy had witnessed for many years. I have
never been able to conceive an explanation of this curious phenomenon, which I
record only as of possible interest to some one interested in psychology."
A. Bronson Alcott[43] was the son of a Connecticut farmer. He began a diary at
twelve; aspired vainly to enter Yale, and after much restlessness at the age of
nineteen left home with two trunks for Virginia to peddle on foot, hoping to