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The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams
page 50 of 594 (08%)
Dickens, Bulwer, Tennyson, Macaulay, Carlyle, and the rest --
they were devoured; but as far as happiness went, the happiest
hours of the boy's education were passed in summer lying on a
musty heap of Congressional Documents in the old farmhouse at
Quincy, reading "Quentin Durward," "Ivanhoe," and " The
Talisman," and raiding the garden at intervals for peaches and
pears. On the whole he learned most then.


CHAPTER III

WASHINGTON (1850-1854)

EXCEPT for politics, Mount Vernon Street had the merit of
leaving the boy-mind supple, free to turn with the world, and if
one learned next to nothing, the little one did learn needed not
to be unlearned. The surface was ready to take any form that
education should cut into it, though Boston, with singular
foresight, rejected the old designs. What sort of education was
stamped elsewhere, a Bostonian had no idea, but he escaped the
evils of other standards by having no standard at all; and what
was true of school was true of society. Boston offered none that
could help outside. Every one now smiles at the bad taste of
Queen Victoria and Louis Philippe -- the society of the forties
-- but the taste was only a reflection of the social slack-water
between a tide passed, and a tide to come. Boston belonged to
neither, and hardly even to America. Neither aristocratic nor
industrial nor social, Boston girls and boys were not nearly as
unformed as English boys and girls, but had less means of
acquiring form as they grew older. Women counted for little as
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