Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Excerpt from Recollections, Personal and Literary
His youth showed again how much more inborn tendency has to do with one's life than any exter nal forces, such as guardianship, means, and what we call education. The thrush takes to the bough, wheresoever hatched and fledged. Many waters cannot quench genius, neither can the floods drown it.
The story of Dickens's boyhood, as told by him self, is not more pathetic, nor is its outcome more beautiful, than the story of Richard Henry Stod dard's experiences, his orphanage, his few years' meagre schooling, his work as a boy in all sorts of shifting occupations, the attempt to make a learned blacksmith of him, his final apprenticeship to iron moulding, at which he worked on the East Side from his eighteenth to his twenty-first year. As Dr. Griswold put it, he began to mould his thoughts into the symmetry of verse while he moulded the molten metal into shapes of grace. Stoddard, how ever, afterward said that a knowledge of foundries was not one of the learned doctor's strong points.
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