In Yale College

Yung Wing, after two years and a half spent at Monson, MA , was, in 1850, though but poorly fitted for want of time, admitted to the Freshman Class in Yale College. His career in college was, in some respects, a remarkable one. Owing to his inadequate preparations, he did not, though he worked hard, take a high stand in general scholarship, yet he excelled in the departments of writing and metaphysics, and made a sensation that was felt beyond the college walls by bearing off repeated prizes for English composition. Throughout his entire course he contended with poverty, a circumstance the explanation of which deserves notice. When he became a Christian, at Monson, he heard and at once accepted his Divine call to devote his life to the Christian service of his nation. But the form of that service⁠—what should it be? This question he had to answer, at least in part. The presumption was, and it was assumed by his friends and by the public so far as his case was known, that he would be a minister of the Gospel. But right then and there, after much careful and prayerful thinking, this boy of seventeen, though by no means doubting the value of Christian missions, fully recognizing the fact, indeed, that he himself was the direct fruit of Christian missions⁠—which, be it ever remembered, he was⁠—concluded, with an independence characteristic of him even at that age, that it was not best for him to be a missionary. He had a suspicion then, though indistinct, that he was wanted for something else. It was a costly conclusion and he was quite aware of it. It was against the views and hopes of the most of those who were around him, and by it, being without pecuniary means, he cut himself off from the resource of those charitable foundations that would have aided him as a student for the ministry. And so he was poor in college; he smiles now to remember how poor. Yet he received help from persons interested in him at New Haven and elsewhere, mainly through the medium of Professor Thatcher,