"Yes, I should like it much."

So he read aloud the whole of this magnificent poem. I have listened to
Macready, to Edmund Kean, to Rachel, to Jenny Lind, to Fanny Kemble,--to
Webster, Clay, Everett, Harrison Gray Otis,--to Dr. Channing, Henry
Ward Beecher, Wendell Phillips, Father Taylor, Ralph Waldo Emerson,--to
Victor Hugo, Coquerel, Lacordaire; but none of them affected me as I was
affected by this reading. I forgot the place where I was, the motive of
my coming, the reader himself. I knew the poem almost by heart, yet I
seemed never to have heard it before. I was by the side of the doomed
mariner. I was the wedding-guest, listening to his story, held by his
glittering eye. I was with him in the storm, among the ice, beneath
the hot and copper sky. Booth became so absorbed in his reading, so
identified with the poem, that his tone and manner were saturated with
a feeling of reality. He actually thought himself the mariner,--so I am
persuaded,--while he was reading. As the poem proceeded, and we plunged
deeper and deeper into its mystic horrors, the actual world receded
into a dim, indefinable distance. The magnetism of this marvellous
interpreter had caught up himself, and me with him, into Dreamland, from
which we gently descended at the end of Part VI., and "the spell was
snapt."

"And now, all in my own countree,
I stood on the firm land,"--

returned from a voyage into the inane. Again I found myself sitting in
the little hotel parlor, by the side of a man with glittering eye, with
a third somebody on the other side of the table.

I drew a long breath.