540 HENRY HOBSON RICHARDSON. 



Mr. Richardson received an appointment to West Point from 

 Judah P. Benjamin, who was then a Senator of the United States. 

 He went to the Military Academy and passed his examinations ; but 

 the death of his father changed his plans, and his education was trans- 

 ferred to Harvard College, where he entered in 1855, and graduated 

 in the Class of 1859. His college course, so far as one can learn, was 

 mai'ked by no extraordinary signs of promise. Bright, gay, popular, 

 he seems to have indicated no special disposition to the art in which 

 he was destined to make for himself such a brilliant career. Nor is it 

 possible to learn what led him just before his graduation to determine 

 upon architecture as his profession. 



It was the years immediately following graduation, — the years 

 from 1859 to 1865, — which brought out the character of Richardson 

 and filled him with enthusiasm for his chosen work. In those years the 

 war was raging. Richardson was studying in Paris. His resources, 

 which had till then been abundant, failed him entirely, and he was 

 obliged to work for his support. The strong pressure of poverty 

 behind him called forth the energy and persistency which were in him, 

 and the fascination of the work before him, which he speedily felt and 

 to which he heartily abandoned himself, quickened a genius before 

 unsuspected by himself or by his friends. He entered the office of a 

 French architect, and made drawings for several public buildings in 

 Paris. Thus he labored for his daily bread while he was eagerly 

 pursuing his studies. These years were the making of the man and 

 of the architect at once. 



Mr. Richardson returned to America, and began business for him- 

 self in New York on the 1st of January, 1866. He married on the 3d 

 of January, 1867, Julia Gorham Hayden, daughter of Dr. Hayden, 

 of Boston. 



The years from 1865 to 1871 were full of steadily increasing work 

 and constant progress towards those characteristics which in his later 

 life gave such broad and noble significance to all he did. His earliest 

 buildings were in Springfield, Massachusetts, where the railroad offices 

 and the Agawam Bank already gave evidence of his great power. The 

 Church of the Unity, however, in the same city, is a Gothic building, 

 and quite unlike the ecclesiastical structures of his later years. 



In 1871, Mr. Richardson began to build the Brattle Street Church 

 in Boston. In 1872, he prepared and presented his j^lans for Trinity 

 Church. About the same time he built the Cheney Buildings, in 

 Hartford, Connecticut. Not much later came the Memorial Library 

 at North Easton, the Public Library at Woburn, and the beginning of 



