Choice Specimens of American Literature, and Literary Reader · Chapter 135=175.= Henry's Example No Argument for Indolence
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I cannot learn that he gave in his youth any evidence of that precocity which sometimes distinguishes uncommon genius. His companions recollect no instance of premature wit, no striking sentiment, no flash of fancy, no remarkable beauty or strength of expression, and no indication however slight, either of that impassioned love of liberty, or of that adventurous daring and intrepidity, which marked so strongly his future character. So far was he indeed from exhibiting any one prognostic of this greatness, that every omen foretold a life at best, of mediocrity, if not of insignificance. His person is represented as having been coarse, his manners uncommonly awkward, his dress slovenly, his conversation very plain, his aversion to study invincible, and his faculties almost entirely benumbed by indolence. No persuasion could bring him either to read or to work. On the contrary, he ran wild in the forest like one of the Aborigines of the country, and divided his life between the dissipation and uproar of the chase, and the languor of inaction.
His propensity to observe and comment upon the human character, was, so far as I can learn, the only circumstance which distinguished him advantageously from his youthful companions. This propensity seems to have been born with him, and to have exerted itself instinctively, the moment that a new subject was presented to his view. Its action was incessant, and it became at length almost the only intellectual exercise in which he seemed to take delight. To this cause, may be traced that consummate knowledge of the human heart which he finally attained, and which enabled him when he came upon the public stage, to touch the springs of passion with a master hand, and to control the resolutions and decisions of his hearers with a power almost more than mortal.
From what has been already stated, it will be seen how little education had to do with the formation of this great man's mind. He was indeed a mere child of nature, and nature seems to have been too proud and too jealous of her work, to permit it to be touched by the hand of art. She gave him Shakespeare's genius, and bade him, like Shakespeare, to depend on that alone. Let not the youthful reader, however, deduce from the example of Mr. Henry, an argument in favor of indolence, and the contempt of study. Let him remember that the powers which surmounted the disadvantage of those early habits, were such as very rarely appear upon this earth. Let him remember, too, how long the genius even of Mr. Henry was kept down, and hidden from the public view, by the sorcery of those pernicious habits; through what years of poverty and wretchedness they doomed him to struggle; and let him remember, that at length, when in the zenith of his glory. Mr. Henry himself, had frequent occasions to deplore the consequences of his early neglect of literature, and to bewail the ghosts of his departed hours.
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From "Eulogium on Adams and Jefferson."