His earliest passion was for music. As a child he learned to play,
almost without instruction, on every kind of instrument he could find;
and while yet a boy he played the flute, organ, piano, violin, guitar,
and banjo, especially devoting himself to the flute in deference to
his father, who feared for him the powerful fascination of the violin.
For it was the violin-voice that, above all others, commanded his soul.
He has related that during his college days it would sometimes so exalt him
in rapture, that presently he would sink from his solitary music-worship
into a deep trance, thence to awake, alone, on the floor of his room,
sorely shaken in nerve.
In after years more than one listener remarked the strange violin effects
which he conquered from the flute. His devotion to music
rather alarmed than pleased his friends, and while it was here
that he first discovered that he possessed decided genius,
he for some time shared the early notion of his parents,
that it was an unworthy pursuit, and he rather repressed his taste.
He did not then know by what inheritance it had come to him,
nor how worthy is the art.
At the age of fourteen he entered the sophomore class of Oglethorpe College,
an institution under Presbyterian control near Midway, Ga.,
which had not vitality enough to survive the war. He graduated in 1860,
at the age of eighteen, with the first honors of his class,
having lost a year during which he took a clerkship in the Macon post-office.
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