profound stirrings of soul, with a sudden hunger for knowledge which consumed his days with fire, and "with passionate longing to drain the cup of experience at a draft." He was "at the morning hour when the whole world turns to gold." "The boy had suddenly become a poet." Chatterton was too proud to eat a gift dinner, though nearly starved, and committed suicide at seventeen for lack of appreciation. John Hunter was dull and hated study, but at twenty his mind awoke as did that of Patrick Henry, who before was a lonely wanderer, sitting idly for hours under the trees. Alexander Murray awoke to life at fifteen and acquired several languages in less than two years. Gifford was distraught for lack of reading, went to sea at thirteen, became a shoemaker, studying algebra late at night, was savagely unsociable, sunk into torpor from which he was roused to do splenetic and vexatious tricks, which alienated his friends. Rittenhouse at fourteen was a plowboy, covering the fences with figures, musing on infinite time and space. Benjamin Thompson was roused to a frenzy for sciences at fifteen; at seventeen walked nine miles daily to attend lectures at Cambridge; and at nineteen married a widow of thirty-three. Franklin had a passion for the sea; at thirteen read poetry all night; wrote verses and sold them on the streets of Boston; doubted everything at fifteen; left home for good at seventeen; started the first public library in Philadelphia before he was twenty-one. Robert Fulton was poor, dreamy, mercurial, devoted to nature, art, and literature. He became a painter of talent, then a poet, and left home at seventeen. Bryant was sickly till fourteen and became permanently well thereafter; was precociously devoted to nature, religion, prayed for poetic genius and wrote Thanatopsis before he was eighteen. Jefferson doted on animals and nature at fourteen, and at seventeen studied fifteen hours a day. Garfield, though living in Ohio, longed for the sea, and ever after this period the sight of a ship gave him a strange thrill. Hawthorne was devoted to the sea and wanted to sail on and on forever and never touch shore again. He would roam through the Maine woods alone; was haunted by the fear that he would die before twenty-five. Peter Cooper left home at seventeen; was passionately altruistic; and at eighteen vowed he would build a place like his New York Institute. Whittier at fourteen found a copy of Burns, which excited him and changed the current of his life. Holmes had a passion for flowers, broke into poetry at fifteen, and had very romantic attachments to certain trees. J. T. Trowbridge learned German, French, and Latin alone before twenty-one; composed poetry at the plow and wrote it out in the evening. Henry followed a rabbit under the Public Library at Albany, found a hole in the floor that admitted him to the shelves, and, unknown to any one, read all the fiction the library contained, then turned to physics, astronomy, and chemistry, and