Mind in the making : a study in mental development / by Edgar James Swift.

  • Edgar James Swift
Date:
1908
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Mind in the making : a study in mental development / by Edgar James Swift. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    he devoted all his hours of study to the whole wide realm of fine arts and belles-lettres,’J1 The university professors to whom he showed his poems could see noth- ing of value in them, and “the poet was seized with rage and contempt for everything he had ever written in poetry and prose, and he mercilessly threw almost all the fine things which he had brought along from Frank- furt into the fire.”2 When the time for taking his doc- tor’s degree arrived he failed because his thesis was unsatisfactory, and so he was obliged to be contented with a license. Henry Ward Beecher at ten years of age, according to his sister, Mrs. Stowe, “was a poor writer, a miser- able speller, with a thick utterance, and a bashful reti- cence which seemed like stolid stupidity. . . . He was not marked by the prophecies even of partial friends for any brilliant future. He had precisely the organi- zation which often passes for dullness in early boyhood. He had great deficiency in verbal memory—a deficiency marked in him through life. ... In forecasting his horoscope, had any one taken the trouble then to do it, the last success that ever would have been predicted for him would have been that of an orator. ‘When Henry is sent to me with a message,’ said a good aunt, ‘I always have to make him say it three times. The first time I have no manner of an idea more than if he spoke in Choctaw; the second, I catch a word now and then; by the third time I begin to understand.’ . . . The other children memorized readily and were bril- liant reciters [of the catechism], but Henry, blushing, stammering, confused, and hopelessly miserable, stuck 1 Albert Bielschowsky’s Life of Goethe, trans. by W. A. Cooper, Vol. I, p. 73, * Ibid., pp. 46-47.