The story of the Sun, New York, 1833-1918 / by Frank M. O'Brien.

204

THE STORY OF "THE SUN "

was of slender build, but strong. He belonged to the
Coffee Club, a literary organization, and he made a talk
to it on early English poetry.
" The best days of my life," he called this period.
Staats & Dana failed in the panic of 1837, and
Charles, then eighteen, and the possessor of two hundred dollars saved from his wages, decided to go to
Harvard. He left Buffalo in June, 1839, although his
father did not like the idea of letting him go to Har-,
vard.
"I know it ranks high as a literary institution, but
the influence it exerts in a religious way is most horrible even worse than Universalism."
Anderson Dana had a horror of Unitarianism, and
had heard that Charles was attending Unitarian meetings.
"Ponder well the paths of thy feet," he wrote in
solemn warning to his perilously venturesome son, "lest
they lead down to the very gates of hell."
Dana entered college without difficulty, and devoted
much of his time to philosophy and general literature.
He wrote to his friend, Dr. Austin Flint, whom he had
met in Buffalo, and who had advised him to go to Harvard.
I am in the focus of what Professor Felton calls
" supersublimated transcendentalism," and to tell the
truth, I take to it rather kindly, though I stumble sadly
at some notions.
This was not strange, for besides hearing Unitarian
discourse, young Dana was attending Emerson's lectures at Harvard and reading Carlyle.
In his first term Dana stood seventh in a class of
seventy-four. In the spring of 1840 he left Cambridge,
but pursued the university studies at the home of his