John Harrison Wilson, The life of Charles Henry Dana

[7] for literature and his determination to acquire a thorough education became the ruling purpose of his life. Although he dressed well and was agreeable in manners, he rather shunned than sought social gatherings. He thought they took too much time, and that he had better spend his evenings at home reading poetry, romance, and history. During this period he became greatly interested in the American Revolution and in the early presidents. He specially admired General Jackson, and sounded the praises of the great Tennesseean upon all proper occasions. From the first he was unusually independent in the selection of his books. Among the rest, he read and openly expressed his admiration for the works of Tom Paine, possibly because he may have been a distant kinsman, but certainly because he was a patriot who addressed his countrymen, in Common Sense and The Crisis, in virile and masterly English.

Until he was seventeen, Dana confined his general reading to the masters of English literature, and this fact doubtless accounts for the purity and vigor of the style which from that time forth characterized his correspondence as well as his more formal writings.

He was now in the period of his dawning ambition. The world and its mysteries were opening before him, and alluring him to explore and master their significance. With the avid curiosity which is the chief characteristic of youth, he sought by all the means within his reach to know, not only the history of his country, but the nature of man and the motive of his actions in the pursuits of life. He was indifferent to nothing which opened the secrets of history or revealed the laws of the visible world about him; but even in his earliest reading it is to be observed he showed a decided preference for the study of man and his attainments rather than for science; for literature and art rather than for mathematics and