Youth
Henry James Sr. was one of twelve children. At the age of thirteen, he was severely burned trying to stamp out a fire in a barn, and lost a leg to amputation. The three years he was bedridden reinforced his studious disposition. He entered Union College in 1828 and graduated in 1830. His father, a stern Presbyterian, disapproved of his religious ideas, but when the patriarch's will was broken he became an independently wealthy man. He studied at Princeton Theological Seminary from 1835 to 1837 to prepare for the ministry, but found himself disconcerted by "enormous difficulties which inhered in its philosophy," and abandoned the idea of becoming a minister.
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Famous quotes containing the word youth:
“We too are ashes as we watch and hear
The psalm, the sorrow, and the simple praise
Of one whose promised thoughts of other days
Were such as ours, but now wholly destroyed,
The service record of his youth wiped out,
His dream dispersed by shot, must disappear.”
—Karl Shapiro (b. 1913)
“Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting period. When it has come to the knowledge of good and evil it is stronger, but we care less about it.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)