John Harrison Wilson, The life of Charles Henry Dana

[500] a most industrious and methodical student, with an unusual gift for language. It was doubtless to this gift, which he showed as a clerk in the dry-goods store at Buffalo, while acquiring a working knowledge of the Seneca Indian dialect, as well as of Latin, Greek, French, and Spanish, that he was indebted for his admission into Harvard College without a “condition.” When it is recalled that he had not attended school at all for eight years, during which he had no time he could call his own except Sundays and evenings, it becomes evident that he must have had very unusual application, as well as very unusual talents and ambition. It is also evident that he had a genuine thirst for knowledge, which, together with his aptitudes and tastes, gave special direction to his life-work and his career. Blessed with an extraordinary memory, his wide reading gave him at an early age an encyclopedic knowledge of both ancient and modern literature. He was not only familiar with the classics, but with all the great works of the German, French, Spanish, and Italian authors. For a time, at least, poetry was his special delight, and he knew the songs of Provence and the Romance tongues, as well as the Sagas, Low German, Scandinavian, and the plays of Ibsen.

For years Dana's chief form of intellectual entertainment was to gather a half-dozen friends-generally young and uninstructed, but occasionally a matured student, who could help on the rest — about him once or twice a week, and read with them some important book in a foreign tongue. He began this practice in Chicago with Dante, and continued it with other classics almost without intermission to the end of his life. As his eyes never recovered sufficiently from the injury done them at Harvard to permit him to use them with comfort in artificial light, the practice was for each member of the class to real eight or ten lines, so as to bring the passage fully and freshly to mind, when the reader would