Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/430

406 which those of us who were made of rougher clay could well endure.

Nature seemed to have designed him for the republic of letters, and at an early period he gave promise of a literary career of rare distinction. His preparation for that career was, indeed, not such as the reader of his writings and the listener to his speech would suppose it to have been. He had not passed through the classical course of a college or university, although his personality might have been taken to present the very ideal of a university man. It cannot even be said that he had enjoyed the advantage of a methodical and continuous education of any sort. To be sure, he had as a boy something more than the ordinary elementary schooling. But beyond that he did his reading, and gathered his knowledge, and cultivated his abilities very much according to his own individual tastes and his adventitious opportunities.

His father, a prosperous banker, intended him for commercial pursuits and placed him in a mercantile house. But there he learned quickly that commercial pursuits were not for him. Seventeen years old, he joined, for a while, with his brother Burrill, as a boarder, the famous Brook Farm community, that assemblage of fine moral and intellectual enthusiasms, given to the cultivation of somewhat fantastic ideals. There his poetic and at the same time soberly discriminating mind accepted all there was of noble inspiration, but kept aloof from extravagant theories. Then he lived, once more with his brother Burrill, for two years on a farm near Concord, Massachusetts, again studying what he liked—history, languages, literature, art, philosophy—and, meanwhile, enjoying the conversation of Emerson and of the remarkable men that gathered around that sage, and sipping their “transcendentalism” as much as his constantly sober mind could digest and assimilate.