He found it "dull and lonesome," and preferred rambling in the woods with his sister in search of berries, so that his indulgent father sent him back to his studies.

With the help of Dr.Wood in Latin, and another tutor in Greek, he contrived to enter Dartmouth College in August, 1797.

He was, of course, hastily and poorly prepared.

He knew something of Latin, very little of Greek, and next to nothing of mathematics, geography, or history.

He had devoured everything in the little libraries of Salisbury and Boscawen, and thus had acquired a desultory knowledge of a limited amount of English literature, including Addison, Pope, Watts, and "Don Quixote." But however little he knew, the gates of learning were open, and he had entered the precincts of her temple, feeling dimly but surely the first pulsations of the mighty intellect with which he was endowed.
"In those boyish days," he wrote many years afterwards, "there were two things which I did dearly love, reading and playing,--passions which did not cease to struggle when boyhood was over, (have they yet altogether ?) and in regard to which neither _cita mors_ nor the _victoria laeta_ could be said of either." In truth they did not cease, these two strong passions.
One was of the head, the other of the heart; one typified the intellectual, the other the animal strength of the boy's nature; and the two contending forces went with him to the end.