to a delicate boy, and after he had settled down, from his father's
house at Chovensbury, to learn the Fortune, East and Sabre business that
he began to collect the books which now formed his collection. His
intense fondness for books had come to him late in life, as love of
literature goes. He was reading at twenty-eight and thirty literature
which, when it is read at all, is as a rule read ten years younger
because the taste is there and is voracious for satisfaction,--as a
young and vigorous animal for its meals. But at twenty-eight and thirty,
reading for the first time, he read sometimes with a sense of
revelation, always with an enormous satisfaction. Especially the poets.
And constantly in the poets he was coming across passages the sheer
beauty of which shook him precisely as the Byron lines had first shaken
him.

His books appeared to indicate a fair number and a fair diversity of
interests; but their diversity presented to him a common quality or
group of qualities. Some history, some sociology, some Spencer, some
Huxley, some Haeckel, a small textbook of geology, a considerable
proportion of pure literature, Morley's edition of lives of literary
men, the English essayists in a nice set, Shakespeare in many forms and
so much poetry that at a glance his library was all poetry. All the
books were picked up at second-hand dealers' in Tidborough, none had
cost more than a few shillings. The common quality that bound them was
that they stirred in him imaginative thought: they presented images,
they suggested causes, they revealed processes; the common group of
qualities to which they ministered were beauty and mystery, sensibility
and wonder. They made him think about things, and he liked thinking
about things; the poets filled his mind with beauty, and he was
strangely stirred by beauty.