Author: Sydney George Fisher

Publisher: Theclassics.Us

Published: 2013-09

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 9781230251752

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1911 edition. Excerpt: ... of Horace's odes I translated into poor English rhymes; they were printed; I have never seen them since. My brother was a far better Latin scholar than myself, and in one of his vacations we read Juvenal together. But I never mastered his style so as to read him with ease and pleasure. Ar this period of my life I passed a great deal of time alone. My amusements were fishing, and shooting, and riding; and all these were without a companion. I loved this occasional solitude then, and have loved it ever since, and love it still. I like to contemplate nature, and to hold communion, unbroken by the presence of human beings, with "this universal frame, thus wondrous fair;" I like solitude also as favorable to thoughts less lofty. I like to let the thoughts go free, and indulge in their excursions. And when thinking is to be done, one must, of course, be alone. No man knows himself who does not thus, sometimes, keep his own company. At a subsequent period of life, I have found that my lonely journeys, when following the court on its circuits, have afforded many an edifying day.,"/ (Autobiography, Correspondence, vol. i. Some of the great speeches of his life, he relates, were worked out on solitary journeys or during amusements. The argument in the Dartmouth College case was mainly arranged, he says, on a journey from Boston to Barnstable and back, and the oration at Bunker Hill was in great part composed while trout fishing in Mashpee Brook, near Cape Cod. In the spring of 1804, the family resources ran so low again that it became necessaVy for either his brother or himself to undertake something that would bring in a little money. They found in Boston a college friend, Dr. Perkins, afterwards a physician of some distinction, who was just...