[41] that peculiar nervous excitability which never entirely left him, and which at that early period sometimes caused serious anxiety among his friends. ‘Mental labor would just a little unsettle his delicate temperament’; and this was combined with internal disorders, of which nobody could ever tell— either then or years afterward—how much was real or how much imaginary. These traits of constitution also made his college life less happy than his childhood; and his distaste to all regular study made him no favorite with the Faculty, though his aims were always high and his morals unstained. He had much facility as a writer and speaker, was a contributor to ‘Harvardiana,’ and always claimed to have written in that magazine the first American review of Carlyle. His long and rambling autobiography in the Class Book closes with this expression of his purposes at graduation: ‘I shall most probably occupy myself in some literary pursuit in the West for six or seven years to come, and then, unless Heaven shall have given me some other pursuit, I shall return to Cambridge and study for the sacred office.’ He graduated with his Class in 1837; and a letter which he wrote to the Class Secretary, dated Haverhill, Massachusetts, November 4, 1847, bridges over the intervening years of his life:—
Prior to the prosecution of my present profession I was from October, 1837, to December, 1838, Principal of the Academy at Milford, New Hampshire. The first young man whom I fitted for college is the Rev. L. Jarvis Livermore, now settled in East Boston. The famous Hutchinson singers were there my pupils. From December, 1838, to June, 1842, I was located in Rhode Island, being Principal of Kent Academy for the first year, and afterward of the Rhode Island Central School in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, where I had youth from all parts of the country under my care, receiving some fifteen into my family. To the question, “What is your profession?” I reply, a public teacher, or preacher of theology and religion or righteousness, and also, in connection with it, that of minister, or servant in the great cause of human salvation from ignorance, malice, sin, disease, and suffering. To study this profession I stayed three years at Divinity College, Cambridge. I also was much with Dr. Lamson, editor of the Christian Examiner. But I really studied it as little at the
