On the whole, Adams preferred
his attic in Washington. He was educated enough. Ignorance paid
better, for at least it earned fifty dollars a month.
With this result Henry Adams's education, at his entry into
life, stopped, and his life began. He had to take that life as he
best could, with such accidental education as luck had given him;
but he held that it was wrong, and that, if he were to begin
again, he would do it on a better system. He thought he knew
nearly what system to pursue. At that time Alexander Agassiz had
not yet got his head above water so far as to serve for a model,
as he did twenty or thirty years afterwards; but the editorship
of the North American Review had one solitary merit; it made the
editor acquainted at a distance with almost every one in the
country who could write or who could be the cause of writing.
Adams was vastly pleased to be received among these clever people
as one of themselves, and felt always a little surprised at their
treating him as an equal, for they all had education; but among
them, only one stood out in extraordinary prominence as the type
and model of what Adams would have liked to be, and of what the
American, as he conceived, should have been and was not.
Thanks to the article on Sir Charles Lyell, Adams passed for a
friend of geologists, and the extent of his knowledge mattered
much less to them than the extent of his friendship, for
geologists were as a class not much better off than himself, and
friends were sorely few.
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