There is no detail. But there are to be found elsewhere the
memories of others which tell of his boyish enjoyment of the little
wilderness of joyous colors near the school to which he was sent-microcosm
of the greater wilderness in which his body and then his imagination were
to wander through all his mature days till his death. His own chronicle
has forgotten or ignored those elysian days and has not in all its length
a joyful note or a bright color.
This is the summary: His childhood was neither healthful nor buoyant....
Chemical experiment was his favorite hobby, involving a lonely, confined,
unwholesome sort of life, baneful to body and mind.... The age of fifteen
or sixteen produced a revolution; retorts and crucibles were forever
discarded.... He became enamoured of the woods, a fancy which soon gained
full control over the course of his literary pursuits.... He resolved to
confine his homage to the muse of history.... At the age of eighteen (born
in 1823) the plan (to whose execution he gave his long life) was, in its
most essential features, formed.
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