Lending their color to his
deportment, and softening his manners, they are, perhaps, even now, the
characteristics by which most of those who casually meet him would be
inclined to identify the man. But there are other qualities, not then
developed, but which have subsequently attained a firm and manly growth,
and are recognized as his leading traits among those who really know him.
Franklin Pierce's development, indeed, has always been the reverse of
premature; the boy did not show the germ of all that was in the man, nor,
perhaps, did the young man adequately foreshow the mature one.
In 1820, at the age of sixteen, he became a student of Bowdoin College,
at Brunswick, Maine. It was in the autumn of the next year that the
author of this memoir entered the class below him; but our college
reminiscences, however interesting to the parties concerned, are not
exactly the material for a biography. He was then a youth, with the boy
and man in him, vivacious, mirthful, slender, of a fair complexion, with
light hair that had a curl in it: his bright and cheerful aspect made a
kind of sunshine, both as regarded its radiance and its warmth; insomuch
that no shyness of disposition, in his associates, could well resist its
influence.
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