After dinner, at two o'clock,
I read history until four. I spent the next two hours in
walking alone in the woods and roads of Concord and the neighboring
towns, went back to the office at seven, read a little geometry
and algebra, reviewing the slender mathematics which I had
studied in college, and then spent two hours in reading Greek.
I read through Thucydides, Homer and Xenophon's Hellenica
and some other Greek books in that year. Sundays I went to
church twice, but shut myself up in a room at home the rest
of the day and read a great quantity of English literature,
including Milton, Spencer, Chaucer, George Herbert, South's
Sermons and other English classics, reading over again Butler's
Analogy and Jouffroy. It has been said that if a man wish
to acquire a pure English style he should give his days and
nights to Addison. I say that if a law student wish to acquire
a vigorous and manly English style, the fit vehicle for conveying
weighty thoughts to courts or juries or popular assemblages,
let him give his days and nights to Robert South.
I spent two years at the Law School after graduating from
the College.
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