James Parton, The life of Horace Greeley

[42] was eager to go to school. When the snow lay on the ground in drifts too deep for him to wade through, one of his aunts, who still lives to tell the story, would take him up on her shoulders and carry him to the door. He was the possessor that winter, of three books, the ‘Columbian Orator,’ Morse's Geography, and a spelling book. From the Columbian Orator, he learned many pieces by heart, and among others, that very celebrated oration which, probably the majority of the inhabitants of this nation have at some period of their lives been able to repeat, beginning,

You'd scarce expect one of my age,
To speak in public on the stage.

One of his schoolfellows has a vivid remembrance of Horace's reciting this piece before the whole school in Londonderry, before he was old enough to utter the words plainly. He had a lisping, whining little voice, says my informant, but spoke with the utmost confidence, and greatly to the amusement of the school. He spoke the piece so often in public and private, as to become, as it were, identified with it, as a man who knows one song, suggests that song by his presence, and is called upon to sing it wherever he goes.

It is a pity that no one thinks of the vast importance of those ‘Orators’ and reading books which the children read and wear out in reading, learning parts of them by heart, and repeating them over and over, till they become fixed in the memory and embedded in the character forever. And it is a pity that those books should contain so much false sentiment, inflated language, Buncombe oratory, and other trash, as they generally do! To compile a series of Reading Books for the common schools of this country, were a task for a conclave of the wisest and best men and women that ever lived; a task worthy of them, both from its difficulty and the incalculable extent of its possible results.

Spelling was the passion of the little orator during the first winters of his attendance at school. He spelt incessantly in school and out of school. He would lie on the floor at his grandfather's house, for hours at a time, spelling hard words, all that he could find in the Bible and the few other books within his reach. It was the