62 NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SHALER 



"Siege of Corinth" and reciting it without error in one day. I 

 was less successful with German, but memorized several thou- 

 sand lines of its classics. Here I may turn aside to note the fact 

 that this habit of committing to memory was very common, 

 indeed fashionable, in the society in which I dwelt as a youth ; 

 it was held to be an index of culture, a necessary part of a gen- 

 tleman's outfit. I recall an old kinsman, a man who seemed 

 absorbed in a life made up of business cares and dissipations, 

 who, when suddenly called on in a gathering, declaimed Man- 

 fred's soliloquy correctly and with vigor. I have heard many 

 others of the same common stock do like feats. This fashion 

 seems to have been a survival of the old English habit, when 

 literature was taken more seriously than in this day. Thus it 

 was that by the time I was eighteen years of age, in competition 

 with the youths about me, I had stored away not less than fifty 

 thousand lines of English, Latin, and German verse, a large part 

 of which stays with me to this day and has been a helpful store. 



With Escher I found my way to the society of Germans in 

 Cincinnati, a most interesting group of men from whom I had 

 much enlargement. Some of the ablest of these were accus- 

 tomed to meet at a beer hall in the part of the town north of the 

 canal. There were many of these men of quality, the best of the 

 exiles of 1848. Of them I recall Stallo, afterwards minister 

 to Italy, a newspaper editor, and a rabbi whose name has not 

 abided with me though his admirable shape is still plain. These 

 were strong men: their talk made a great impression on me, 

 and their personal quality did much to lift me to a higher level 

 of ideals than any our people supplied. 



Gradually, probably with no purpose of teaching his philoso- 

 phy, Escher inducted me into the mystery of Hegel, so that by 

 the time I was seventeen I was deeply infected with his noble 

 madness. The field of metaphysical speculation opened before 

 me as a new universe; of all the vagarious devotions of my 

 childhood and youth this took the firmest hold upon me. I 

 began to read all I could of philosophers and their writings. 



