Very few details of his early boyhood have been preserved; but these go
to show that his individuality soon appeared. "He was a pleasant child,
quite handsome, with golden curls," is almost the first news we have of
him; but his mastering sense of beauty soon made itself known. While
quite a little fellow, he is reported to have said of a woman who was
trying to be kind to him, "Take her away! She is ugly and fat, and has a
loud voice!" When still a very young school-boy, he was fond of taking
long walks entirely by himself; was seldom or never known to have a
companion; and in especial, haunted Legg's Hill, a place some miles from
his home. The impression of his mother's loss and loneliness must have
taken deep and irremovable hold upon his heart; the wide, bleak,
uncomprehended fact that his father would never return, that he should
never see him, seems to have sunk into his childish reveries like a
cabalistic spell, turning thought and feeling and imagination toward
mournful and mysterious things. Before he had passed from his mother's
care to that of the schoolmaster, it is known that he would break out
from the midst of childish broodings, and exclaim, "There, mother! I is
going away to sea, some time"; then, with an ominous shaking of the
head, "and I'll never come back again!" The same refrain lurked in his
mind when, a little older, he would tell his sisters fantastic tales,
and give them imaginary accounts of long journeys, which he should take
in future, in the course of which he flew at will through the air; on
these occasions he always ended with the same hopeless prophecy of his
failing to return.
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