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.
Read more about this topic: Henry James, Sr.
Famous quotes containing the word youth:
“Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth
A Youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown,
Fair Science frown’d not on his humble birth,
And Melancholy mark’d him for her own.”
—Thomas Gray (1716–1771)
“What’s a man’s age? He must hurry more, that’s all;
Cram in a day, what his youth took a year to hold.”
—Robert Browning (1812–1889)
“If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)