AWAKENING LOVE OF NATURE 59 



by my eager search for points of view of the landscape, especially 

 those which included the Ohio River, which from the first had 

 been a source of movement to me, at the outset awaking the 

 sense of mystery, which swiftly passed to that of beauty. The 

 sense of mystery, that emotion which makes against the com- 

 monplace state of mind, was from the beginning strong in me, 

 as I believe it is in most sensitive persons. At first it was min- 

 gled with the primitive fear, fear of the dark, of the depths 

 of the earth, of the great river, of men and animals. This sense 

 of mystery appears to have been a kind of emboldened fear, and, 

 with that of natural beauty, to have evolved itself from the 

 feeling of awe before the great mystery of all things. At first 

 this aesthetic sense seemed to relate only to the larger aspects of 

 the world, to sunrise and sunset and the vistas of the great 

 stream. Though my father was given to a love for flowers 

 and I was in the habit of caring for them in the garden and 

 greenhouse, they did not greatly delight me while I was a child ; 

 all emotional sense of the beauty of such things began to develop 

 some time after puberty. 



Turning now to my formal schooling, it may be said that I 

 had none of any account until I was more than ten years of age. 

 My father judged it well to let me go my way up to that time; 

 all the slight efforts to cage me in a room and make me learn 

 definite lessons seem to have made me ill. I suspect that a 

 share of this illness was fictitious, contrived to avoid the hated 

 caging in the school-room, but it had a real basis in a certain 

 abnormal nervous sensitiveness which has always made the 

 house a prison to me. That it was not from laziness is shown 

 by my considerable zeal in following my vagarious activities. 

 Between eleven and twelve, I was sent to the above-mentioned 

 barracks school, which was under the charge of the government 

 chaplain, an educated Virginian of high character and ancient 

 lineage. The teaching was mainly in the hands of two men who 

 were sergeants in the permanent garrison of the post, men of 

 training and large quality, who, as was often the case in the old 



