The name had a
magnetic effect upon me, the more so as during my self-development and
self-education it had seemed to me an aspiration--a something perhaps
never to be familiarly known, yet distinct enough, and at all events
inspiriting. And now I recalled how in my early boyhood, in my father's
house, I had got a certain piece of news out of some newspaper or
another, or at least that is how the matter stood in my memory. I
gathered that in Switzerland a man of forty, who lived retired from the
world,--Pestalozzi by name,--had taught himself, alone and unaided,
reading, writing, and arithmetic. Just at that time I was feeling the
slowness and insufficiency of my own development, and this news quieted
me, and filled me with the hope and trust that I, too, might, through my
own endeavour, repair the deficiencies of my bringing-up. As I have
grown older I have also found it consolatory to remark how the culture
of vigorous, capable men has not seldom been acquired remarkably late in
life. And in general I must acknowledge it as part of the groundwork
underlying my life and the evolution of my character, that the
contemplation of the actual existences of real men always wrought upon
my soul, as it were, by a fruitful rain and the genial warmth of
sunshine; while the isolated truths these lives enshrined, the
principles those who lived them had thought out and embodied in some
phrase or another, fell as precious seed-corn, as it were, or as solvent
salt crystals upon my thirsty spirit.
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