It is certain, however, that he seriously regretted and soon set
himself to rectify the deficiencies of his early training. This was
one of the reasons which took him to Brook Farm. In the first entry
of the earliest of his diaries which has been preserved he thus
speaks of his hidden longing after knowledge. He was twenty-three
when these sentences were written, and he had been at Brook Farm for
several months:

"If I cast a glance upon a few years of my past life, it appears to
me mysteriously incomprehensible that I should be where I am now. I
confess sincerely that, although I have never labored for it, still,
something in me always dreamed of it. Once, when I was lying on the
floor, my mother said to my brother John, without anything previously
being spoken on the subject, and suddenly, in a kind of unconscious
speech, 'John, let Isaac go to college and study.' These words went
through me like liquid fire. He made some evasive answer and there it
ended. Although to study has always been the secret desire of my
heart from my youth, I never felt inclined to open my mind to any one
on the subject. And now I find, after a long time, that I have been
led here as strangely as possible."

His childhood seems to have been a serious one. In recurring to it in
later life, as he often did, he never spoke of any games or sports in
which he had shared, nor, in fact, of any amusements before the time
when he began to attend lectures and the theatre. It was the
childhood of what we call in America a self-made man--one in which
the plastic human material is rudely dealt with by circumstances. His
mother taught him his prayers, the schoolmistress his letters,
necessity his daily round of duties, and for the rest he was left