I never pass by Craven Street without recalling this, and so it has come to pass that by such memories and associations London in a thousand ways is always reviving my early life in America. The _Noctes Ambrosianae_ puzzled me, as did the Bible, but I read, read, read, _toujours_. My uncle Amos lent me the "Arabian Nights," though my father strictly prohibited it. But the zest of the forbidden made me study it with wondrous love. The reader may laugh, but it is a fact that having obtained "Mother Goose's Melodies," I devoured them with a strange interest reflected from Washington Irving. The truth is, that my taste had been so precociously developed, that I unconsciously found a _literary_ merit or charm in them as I did in all fairy-tales, and I remember being most righteously indignant once when a young bookseller told me that I was getting to be too old to read such stuff! The truth was, that I was just getting to be old enough to appreciate it as folk- lore and literature, which he never did. The great intellectual influence which acted on me most powerfully after Irving was an incomplete volume of about 1790, called "The Poetical Epitome." It consisted of many of Percy's "Relics" with selections of ballads, poems, and epigrams of many eminent writers. I found it a few years after at a boarding-school, where I continually read it as before. As I was backward in my studies, my parents, very injudiciously so far as learning was concerned, removed me from Mr. Walker's school, and put me under the care of T. Bronson Alcott, who had just come to Philadelphia. This was indeed going from the frying-pan into the very fire, so far as curing idleness and desultory habits and a tendency to romance and wild speculation was concerned. For Mr. Alcott was the most eccentric man who ever took it on himself to train and form the youthful mind. He did not really teach any practical study; there was indeed some pretence at geography and arithmetic, but these we were allowed to neglect at our own sweet will. His forte was "moral influence" and "sympathetic intellectual communion" by talking; and oh, heaven! what a talker he was! He was then an incipient Transcendentalist, and he did not fail to discover in me the seeds of the same plant. He declared that I had a marvellous imagination, and encouraged my passion for reading anything and everything to the very utmost. It is a fact that at nine years of age his disquisitions on and readings from Spenser's "Faerie Queen" actually induced me to read the entire work, of which he was very proud, reminding me of it in 1881, when I went to Harvard to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa poem. He also read thoroughly into us the "Pilgrim's Progress," Quarles's "Emblems," Northcote's "Fables," much Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Milton, all of which sunk into my very soul, educating me indeed "ideally" as no boy perhaps in Philadelphia had ever