... As to my German fancy, it still possesses me. If I hold my present purpose and can by hook or crook get two or three hundred dollars, I shall go in a year or two and you shall have letters from Germany ad contentum. But where am I to get the needful? Would it were as in the days of wise King Solomon, when gold and silver were to be had for the picking up. I do not, however, give myself much trouble about these things. I am fed and clad, and am permitted to learn something, and is not this enough? Said Erasmus, when a student at Paris, poor and in rags, “I will first buy Greek books and then clothes.” As for my present situation, it is laborious enough. My school numbers in all nearly eighty, and the average attendance is about sixty-five, most of whom are unruly sailors, who have to be managed with a strong hand. By dint of hard flogging I have got them into tolerable subjection, but still it is wearisome business. I am paid twenty-five dollars a month with my board in one family through the whole term. Of literary intelligence I have not much to tell you, for though not very far from the Emporium, I am not near enough to hear the “on dits” before they are fairly “>on dits”! Dr. Channing has lately published a book on Emancipation, which is fully worthy of him, and a little book of Coleridge's, called Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, has lately been republished. As for my own reading, it is principally theological. I have just begun the study of Swedenborg. Next to the longing for moral freedom, for the subjection of the body to the law of the spirit, my most earnest wish is for a revelation of
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[28]
So far as the records show, the battle did not come off. The new school-master was received with toleration if not with enthusiastic approval.
After the usual struggle with the larger boys he made friends among both parents and children, earned the honor of a namesake, and taught his winter school through to the end.
On January 10, 1841, he wrote from Scituate to his friend Barrett:
Harper and Brothers, New York and London, 1907.
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