Anderson Dana had a horror of Unitarianism, and had heard that Charles was attending Unitarian meetings. “Ponder well the paths of thy feet,” he wrote in solemn warning to his perilously venturesome son, “lest they lead down to the very gates of hell.” Dana entered college without difficulty, and devoted much of his time to philosophy and general literature. He wrote to his friend, Dr. Austin Flint, whom he had met in Buffalo, and who had advised him to go to Harvard. I am in the focus of what Professor Felton calls “supersublimated transcendentalism,” and to tell the truth, I take to it rather kindly, though I stumble sadly at some notions. This was not strange, for besides hearing Unitarian discourse, young Dana was attending Emerson’s lectures at Harvard and reading Carlyle. [Illustration: CHARLES A. DANA AT THIRTY-EIGHT A Photograph Taken in 1857 When He Was Managing Editor of the New York “Tribune.” ] In his first term Dana stood seventh in a class of seventy-four. In the spring of 1840 he left Cambridge, but pursued the university studies at the home of his uncle in Guildhall, Vermont. Here, at an expense of about a dollar a week, he put in eight hours a day at his books, and for diversion went shooting or tinkered in the farm shop. His sister, then fifteen years old, was there, and he helped her with her studies. Dana returned to Harvard in the autumn, but not for long. His purse was about empty, and he found no means of replenishing it at Cambridge. In November the faculty gave him permission to be absent during the winter to “keep school.” Dana went to teach at Scituate, Massachusetts, getting twenty-five dollars a month and his board. His regret at leaving college was keen, for it meant that he would miss Richard Henry Dana’s lectures on poetry, and George Ripley’s on foreign literature. Young Dana’s mind was full in those days. There was the eager desire for education, with poverty in the path. He thought he saw a way around by going to Germany, where he could live cheaply at a university and be paid for teaching English. There was also a religious struggle. I feel now an inclination to orthodoxy, and am trying to believe the real doctrine of the Trinity. Whether I shall settle down in Episcopacy, Swedenborgianism, or Goethean indifference to all religion, I know not. My only prayer is, “God help me!” But the immediate reality was teaching school in a little town where most of the pupils were unruly sailors, and Dana faced it with good-natured philosophy. At the end of a day’s struggle to train some sixty or seventy Scituate youths, he went back to the home of Captain Webb, with whose family he boarded, and read Coleridge for literary quality, Swedenborg for religion, and “Oliver Twist” for diversion. Candles and whale-oil lamps were the only illuminants, and Dana’s eyes, never too strong, began to weaken.