With the little store which he thus toilfully accumulated, he betook himself to New Haven, the seat of Yale College, although without a hope of being able to avail himself of its literary advantages. Here too he worked almost unaided. He took lodgings at an inn frequented by the students, though too poor to enter the university; and in the course of a few months, by unremitting study, he read through the whole Iliad in Greek, and had made considerable progress in Italian and German, besides extending his knowledge of Spanish and French. Having obtained, soon afterwards, a commercial appointment, he was partially released, for a space, from the mechanical drudgery in which he was so long engaged; and, as he was thus enabled to devote a little more time to his favourite studies, he contrived to learn Hebrew, and made his first advance towards a regular course of Oriental reading. But this interval of rest was a brief one; after a very mortifying failure, he was at last compelled to return once more to the anvil, as his only sure resource against poverty. Still, nevertheless, he toiled on in his enthusiastic struggle for knowledge. Even while engaged in this painful drudgery, “every moment,” says Mrs. Howitt,[199] “which he could steal out of the four-and-twenty hours was devoted to study; he rose early in the winter mornings, and, while the mistress of the house was preparing breakfast by lamplight, he would stand by the mantel-piece, with his Hebrew Bible on the shelf, and his lexicon in his hand, thus studying while he ate; the same method was pursued at the other meals; mental and bodily food being taken in together. This severe labour of mind, as might be expected, produced serious effects on his health; he suffered much from headaches, the characteristic remedy for which were two or three additional hours of hard forging, and a little less study.” An extract from his own weekly Diary, which Mrs. Howitt has preserved, tells the story of his struggle still more touchingly:—“_Monday_, June 18, headache; forty pages Cuvier’s Theory of the Earth, sixty-four pages French, eleven hours forging. _Tuesday_, sixty-five lines of Hebrew, thirty pages of French, ten pages Cuvier’s Theory, eight lines Syriac, ten ditto Danish, ten ditto Bohemian, nine ditto Polish, fifteen names of stars, ten hours forging. _Wednesday_, twenty-five lines Hebrew, fifty pages of astronomy, eleven hours forging. _Thursday_, fifty-five lines Hebrew, eight ditto Syriac, eleven hours forging. _Friday_, unwell; twelve hours forging. _Saturday_, unwell; fifty pages Natural Philosophy, ten hours forging. _Sunday_, lesson for Bible class.”