Never could I interest myself in a book if it were not the exact diet my
mind required at the time, or in the very immediate future. The mind
asked, received, and digested. So much was assimilated, so much
expelled; then, after a season, similar demands were made, the same
processes were repeated out of sight, below consciousness, as is the
case in a well-ordered stomach. Shelley, who fired my youth with
passion, and purified and upbore it for so long, is now to me as
nothing: not a dead or faded thing, but a thing out of which I
personally have drawn all the sustenance I can draw from him; and,
therefore, it (that part which I did not absorb) concerns me no more.
And the same with Gautier. Mdlle. de Maupin, that godhead of flowing
line, that desire not "of the moth for the star," but for such
perfection of arm and thigh as leaves passion breathless and fain of
tears, is now, if I take up the book and read, weary and ragged as a
spider's web, that has hung the winter through in the dusty, forgotten
corner of a forgotten room. My old rapture and my youth's delight I can
regain only when I think of that part of Gautier which is now incarnate
in me.

As I picked up books, so I picked up my friends. I read friends and
books with the same passion, with the same avidity; and as I discarded
my books when I had assimilated as much of them as my system required,
so I discarded my friends when they ceased to be of use to me. I employ
the word "use" in its fullest, not in its limited and twenty-shilling
sense. This parallel of the intellect to the blind unconsciousness of
the lower organs will strike some as a violation of man's best beliefs,
and as saying very little for the particular intellect that can be so
reduced. But I am not sure these people are right. I am inclined to
think that as you ascend the scale of thought to the great minds, these
unaccountable impulses, mysterious resolutions, sudden, but certain