condemnation of papacy restrained him from casting his lot with it. At seventeen, he saw one night a real ap- parition of the just executed Strafi^ord. 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 call- BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH ing they must follow and abandon love, and now John plunged into the war on the side of the King.
W. J. Stillman ^ 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 Mme 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 geometrj^, 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^ 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 teach school. Here he had a varying and often very hard experience for years.
1 The Autobiography of a Journalist. 2 vols. Houghton, Mifflin and Co., Boston, 1901.
2 A. Bronson Alcott, His Life and Philosophy. By F. B. Sanborn and W. T. Harris. Roberts Bros., Boston, 1893.
YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE Horace Bushnell's ^ 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 with- held, 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 ex- tremely 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 1 Horace Bushnell, Preacher and Theologian. By Theodore F. Hunger. Houghton, Mifflin and Co., Boston, 1899.
BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 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 jumble. My resolve to go to college was clinched then and there, and that hill will always remain my Pisgah and Moriah, Horeb and Sinai all in one. I paced back and forth in the wind and shouted, * I will make people know and revere me; I will do something '; and called everything to witness my vow that I never again would visit this spot till all was fulfilled." "Alas! " he says, "I have never been there since. Once, to a summer party who went, I made excuse for not keeping this rendezvous. It was too sacramental. Certainly it was a very deep and never-to-be-forgotten experience there all alone, when something of great moment to me certainly took place in my soul."
In the biography of Frederick Douglass ^ we are told that when he was about thirteen he began to feel deeply the moral yoke of slavery and to seek means of escaping it. He became interested in religion, was converted, and dreamed of and prayed for liberty. With great ingenuity he extracted knowledge of the alphabet and reading from white boys of his acquaintance. At sixteen, under a brutal master he revolted and was beaten until he was faint from loss of blood, and at seventeen he fought and whipped the brutal over- seer Covey, who would have invoked the law, which made death the punishment for such an offense, but for shame of having been worsted by a negro boy and from the reflection that there was no profit from a dead slave. Only at twenty did he escape into the new world of freedom.
Jacob Riis ^ "fell head over heels in love with sweet Elizabeth" when he was fifteen and she thirteen. His "courtship proceeded at a tumultuous pace, which first made the town laugh, then put it out of patience and made some staid matrons express the desire to box my ears soundly." She played among the lumber where he worked, and he watched her so intently that he scarred his shinbone with an adze he should have been minding. He cut off his forefinger with an ax when she was dancing on a beam near by, and once fell off a roof when craning his neck to see her go round a corner. At another time he ordered her father off the dance-floor, because he tried to take 1 By C. W. Chesnutt. (Beacon Biographies.) Small, Maynard and Co., Boston, 1899.
2 The Making of an American. Macmillan, 1901.
YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE his daughter home a few minutes before the appointed hour of mid- night. Young as he was, he was large and tried to run away to join the army, but finally went to Copenhagen to serve his apprenticeship with a builder, and here had an interview with Hans Christian Ander- sen.
Ellery Sedgwick tells us that at thirteen the mind of Thomas Paine ran on stories of the sea which his teacher had told him, and that he attempted to enlist on the privateer Terrible. He was restless at home for years, and shipped on a trading vessel at nineteen.
Indeed, modern literature in our tongue abounds in this element, from ''Childe Harold" to the second and third long chapters in Mrs. Ward's " David Grieve," ending with his engagement to Lucy Purcell; Thackeray's Arthur Pendennis and his characteristic love of the far older and scheming Fanny Fotheringay; David in James Lane Allen's "Reign of Law," who read Darwin, was expelled from the Bible College and the church, and finally was engaged to Gabriella; and scores more might be enumerated. There is even Sonny, * who, rude as he was and poorly as he did in all his studies, at the same age when he began to keep company, "tallered" his hair, tied a bow of ribbon to the buggy whip, and grew interested in manners, passing things, putting on his coat and taking off his hat at table, began to study his menagerie of pet snakes, toads, lizards, wrote John Burroughs, helped him and got help in return, took to observing, and finally wrote a book about the forest and its occupants, all of which is very hien trouve if not historic truth.
Two singular reflections always rearise in reading Goethe's autobiographical writings: first, that both the age and the place, with its ceremonies, festivals, great pomp and stirring events in close quarters in the little province where he lived, were especially adapted to educate children and absorb them in externals; and, second, that this wonderful boy had an extreme propen- sity for moralizing and drawing lessons of practical service from all about him. This is no less manifest in Wilhelm Meister 's Apprenticeship and Travels, which » Sonny. By Ruth McEnery Stuart. The Century Co., New York, BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH supplements the autobiography. Both together present a very unique type of adolescence, the elaborate story of which defies epitome. From the puppet craze well on into his precocious university life it was his passion to explore the widest ranges of experience and then to reflect, moralize, or poetize upon them. Perhaps no one ever studied the nascent stages of his own life and elaborated their every incident with such careful ob- servation and analysis. His peculiar diathesis enabled him to conserve their freshness on to full maturity, when he gave them literary form. Most lack power to fully utilize their own experience even for practical self- knowledge and guidance, but with Goethe nothing was wasted from which self -culture could be extracted.
Goethe's first impression of female loveliness was of a girl named Gretchen, v/ho served wine one evening, and whose face and form fol- lowed him for a long time. Their meetings always gave him a thrill of pleasure, and though his love was like many first loves, very spirit- ual and awakened by goodness and beauty, it gave a new brightness to the whole world, and to be near h2r seemed to him an indispensa- ble condition of his being. Her fiance was generally with her, and Goethe experienced a shock in finding that she had become a milliner's assistant, for although, like all natural boys of aristocratic families, he loved common people, this interest was not favored by his parents. The night following the coronation day several were compelled to spend in chairs, and he and his Gretchen, with others, slept, she with her head upon his shoulder, until all the others had awakened in the morning. At last they parted at her door, and for the first and last time they kissed but never met again, although he often wept in thinking of her. He was terribly affronted to fully realize that, although only two years older than himself, she should have re- garded him as a child. He tried to strip her of all loving qualities and think her odious, but her image hovered over him. The sanity of instinct innate in youth prompted him to lay aside as childish the foolish habit of weeping and railing, and his mortification that she regarded him somewhat as a nurse might, gradually helped to work his cure.
He was very fond of his own name, and, like young and un- YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE educated people, wrote or carved it anywhere; later placed near it that of a new love, Annette, and afterward on finding the tree he shed tears, melted toward her, and made an idyl. He was also seized with a passion of teasing her and dominating over her devotedness with wanton and tyrannical caprice, venting upon her the ill humor of his disappointments, and grew absurdly jealous and lost her after she had borne with him with incredible patience and after terrible scenes with her by which he gained nothing. Frenzied by his loss, he began to abuse his physical nature and was only saved from illness by the heaUng power of his poetic talent; the " Lover's Caprice" was written with the impetus of a boiling passion. In the midst of many serious events, a reckless humor, which was due to excess of life, developed which made him feel himself superior to the moment, and even to court danger. He played tricks, although rarely with pre- meditation. Later he mused much upon the transient nature of love and the mutability of character; the extent to which the senses could be indulged within the bounds of morality; he sought to rid himself of all that troubled him by writing song or epigram about it, which made him seem frivolous and prompted one friend to seek to subdue him by means of church forms, which he had severed on coming to Leipzig. By degrees he felt an epoch approaching when all respect for authority was to vanish, and he became suspicious and even despairing with regard to the best individuals he had known before and grew chummy with a young tutor whose jokes and fooleries were incessant. His disposition fluctuated between gaiety and melancholy, and Rousseau attracted him. Meanwhile his health declined until a long illness, which began with a hemorrhage, caused him to oscillate for days between life and death; and convalescence, generally so de- lightful, was marred by a serious tumor. His father's disposition was stern, and he could become passionate and bitter, and his mother's domesticity made her turn to religion, so that on coming home he formed the acquaintance of a religious circle. Again Goethe was told by a hostile child that he was not the true son of his father. This inoculated him with a disease that long lurked in his system and prompted various indirect investigations to get at the truth, during which he compared all distinguished guests with his own physiog- nomy to detect his own likeness.
Up to the Leipzig period he had great joy in wandering unknown, unconscious of self; but he soon began to torment himself with an al- most hypertrophied fancy that he was attracting much attention, that others' eyes were turned on his person to fix it in their memories, that he was scanned and found fault with; and hence he developed a love of the country, of the woods and solitary places, where he could BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH be hedged in and separated from all the world. Here he began to throw off his former habit of looking at things from the art stand- point and to take pleasure in natural objects for their own sake. His mother had almost grown up to consciousness in her two oldest children, and his first disappointment in love turned his thought all the more affectionately toward her and his sister, a year younger. He was long consumed with amazement over the newly awakening sense impulse that took intellectual forms and the mental needs that clothed themselves in sense images. He fell to building air castles of opposition lecture courses and gave himself up to many dreams of ideal university conditions. He first attended lectures diligently, but suffered much harm from being too advanced; learned a great deal that he could not regulate, and was thereby made uncomfortable; grew interested in the fit of his clothes, of which hitherto he had been careless. He was in despair at the uncertainty of his own taste and judgment, and almost feared he must make a complete change of mind, renouncing what he had hitherto learned, and so one day in great contempt for his past burned up his poetry, sketches, etc. He had learned to value and love the Bible, and owed his moral culture to it. Its events and symbols were deeply stamped upon him, so without being a pietist he was greatly moved at the scoffing spirit toward it which he met at the university. From youth he had stood on good terms with God, and at times he had felt that he had some things to forgive God for not having given better assist- ance to his infinite good-will. Under all this influence he turned to cabalism and became interested in crystals and the microcosm and macrocosm, and fell into the habit of despair over what he had been and believed just before. He conceived a kind of hermetical or neoplatonic godhead creating in more and more eccentric circles, until the last, which rose in contradiction, was Lucifer to whom creation was committed. He first of all imagined in detail an angelic host, and finally a whole theology was wrought out in petto. He used a gilt ornamented music-stand as a kind of altar with fumigating pastils for incense, where each morning God was ap- proached by offerings until one day a conflagration put a sudden end to these celebrations.
Hans Andersen,^ the son of a poor shoemaker, taught in a charity school at the dawn of puberty; vividly animated Bible stories from pictures painted on the wall; was dreamy and absent-minded; told 1 The Story of My Life. Works, vol. 8 new edition. Houghton, Mifflin and Co., Boston, 1894.
YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE continued stories to his mates; at confirmation vowed he would be famous; and finally, at fourteen, left home for Copenhagen, where he was violently stage-struck and worked his way from friendship with the bill-poster to the stage as page, shepherd, etc.; called on a famous dancer, who scorned him, and then, feeling that he had no one but God to depend on, prayed earnestly and often. For nearly a year, until his voice broke, he was a fine singer. He wet with his tears the eyes of a portrait of a heartless man that he might feel for him. He played with a puppet theater and took a childish delight in deck- ing the characters with gay remnants that he begged from shops; wrote several plays which no one would accept; stole into an empty theater one New Year's day to pray aloud on the middle of the stage; shouted with joy; hugged and kissed a beech-tree till people thought him insane; abhorred the thought of apprenticeship to Latin as he did to that of a trade, which was a constant danger; and was one of the most dreamy and sentimental, and by spells religious and prayer- ful, of youth.
George Ebers ^ remembered as a boy of eleven the revolution of '48 in Berlin, soon after which he was placed in Froebel's school at Keilhau. This great teacher with his noble associates, Middendorf, Barop, and Langekhal, lived with the boys; told the stirring stories of their own lives as soldiers in the war of liberation; led their pupils on long excursions in vacation, often lasting for months, and gave much liberty to the boys, who were allowed to haze not only their new mates, but new teachers. This transfer from the city to the country roused a veritable passion in the boy, who remained here till he was fifteen. Trees and cliffs were climbed, collections made, the Saale by moonlight and the lofty Steiger at sunset were explored. There were swimming and skating and games, and the maxim of the school, " Friede, Freude, Freiheit," ^ was lived up to. The boys hung on their teachers for stories. The teachers took their boys into their confidence for all their own literary aims, loves, and ideals. One had seen the corpse of Korner and another knew Prohaska. "The Roman postulate that knowledge should be imparted to boys ac- cording to a thoroughly tested method approved by the mature human intellect and which seems most useful to it for later life" was the old system of sacrificing the interests of the child for those of the man. Here childhood was to live itself out completely and naturally 1 The Story of My Life. Translated by M. J. Safford. D. Appleton and Co., New York, 1893.
2 Peace, joy, freedom.
BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH into an ever-renewed paradise. The temperaments, dispositions, and characters of each of the sixty boys were carefully studied and recorded. Some of these are still little masterpieces of psychological penetration, and this was made the basis of development. The ex- treme Teutonism cultivated by wrestling, shooting, and fencing, giving each a spot of land to sow, reap, and shovel, and all in an atmosphere of adult life, made an environment that fitted the transi- tion period as well as any that the history of education affords. Every tramp and battle were described in a book by each boy. When at fifteen Ebers was transferred to the Kottbus Gymnasium, he felt like a colt led from green pastures to the stable, and the period of effervescence made him almost possessed by a demon, so many sorts of follies did he commit. He wrote "a, poem of the world," fell in love with an actress older than himself, became known as foolhardy for his wild escapades, and only slowly sobered down.
In Gottfried Keller's " Der griine Heinrich," ^ the author, whom R. M. Meyer calls " the most eminent literary German of the nineteenth century," reviews the memories of his early life. This autobiography is a plain and very realistic story of a normal child, and not adulter- ated with fiction like Goethe's or with psychoses like Rousseau or Bashkirtseff. He seems a boy like all other boys, and his childhood and youth were in no wise extraordinary. The first part of this work, which describes his youth up to the age of eighteen, is the most im- portant, and everything is given with remarkable fidelity and minute- ness. It is a tale of little things. All the friendships and loves and impulses are there, and he is fundamentally selfish and utilitarian; God and nature were one, and only when his beloved Anna died did he wish to believe in immortality. He, too, as a child, found two kinds of love in his heart — the ideal and the sensual, very independent — the one for a young and innocent girl and the other for a superb young woman years older than he, pure, although the personification of sense. He gives a rich harvest of minute and sagacious observa- tions about his strange simultaneous loves; the peculiar tastes of food;