Hornes Bushnell's[44] parents represented the Episcopal and liberal
Congregational Church. His early life was spent on a farm and in attending a
country academy. He became profoundly interested in religion in the early teens
and developed extreme interest in nature. At seventeen, while tending a carding
machine, he wrote a paper on Calvinism. At nineteen he united with the church,
and entered Yale when he was twenty-one, in 1823. Later he tried to teach
school, but left it, declaring he would rather lay stone wall; worked on a journal,
but withdrew, finding it a terrible life; studied law for a year, became a tutor at
Yale, experienced a reconversion and entered the ministry.
A well-known American, who wishes his name withheld, writes me of his youth
as follows:
"First came the love of emotion and lurid romance reading. My mind was full of
adventure, dreams of underground passages, and imprisoned beauties whom I
rescued. I wrote a story in red ink, which I never read, but a girl friend did, and
called it magnificent. The girl fever, too, made me idealize first one five years
older than I, later another three years older, and still later one of my own age. I
would have eaten dirt for each of them for a year or two; was extremely gallant
and the hero of many romances for two, but all the time so bashful that I scarcely
dared speak to one of them, and no schoolmate ever suspected it all. Music also
became a craze at fourteen. Before, I had hated lessons, now I was thrilled and
would be a musician, despite my parents' protests. I practised the piano
furiously; wrote music and copied stacks of it; made a list of several hundred
pieces and tunes, including everything musical I knew; would imagine a
crowded hall, where I played and swayed with fine airs. The vast assembly
applauded and would not let me go, but all the time it was a simple piece and I
was a very ordinary player. At fifty years, this is still a relic. I now in hours of
fatigue pound the piano and dreamily imagine dazed and enchanted audiences.
Then came oratory, and I glowed and thrilled in declaiming Webster's "Reply to
Hayne," "Thanatopsis," Byron's "Darkness," Patrick Henry, and best of all "The
Maniac," which I spouted in a fervid way wearing a flaming red necktie. I
remember a fervid scene with myself on a high solitary hill with a bald summit
two miles from home, where I once went because I had been blamed. I tried to
sum myself up, inventory my good and bad points. It was Sunday, and I was
keyed up to a frenzy of resolve, prayer, idealization of life; all grew all in a