catalogues as much as possible out of sight; now I savour them page by
page, and make a pleasant virtue of the discretion I must needs impose
upon myself. But greater still is the happiness of unpacking volumes
which one has bought without seeing them. I am no hunter of rarities; I
care nothing for first editions and for tall copies; what I buy is
literature, food for the soul of man. The first glimpse of bindings when
the inmost protective wrapper has been folded back! The first scent of
_books_! The first gleam of a gilded title! Here is a work the name of
which has been known to me for half a lifetime, but which I never yet
saw; I take it reverently in my hand, gently I open it; my eyes are dim
with excitement as I glance over chapter-headings, and anticipate the
treat which awaits me. Who, more than I, has taken to heart that
sentence of the _Imitatio_--"In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam
inveni nisi in angulo cum libro"?

I had in me the making of a scholar. With leisure and tranquillity of
mind, I should have amassed learning. Within the walls of a college, I
should have lived so happily, so harmlessly, my imagination ever busy
with the old world. In the introduction to his History of France,
Michelet says: "J'ai passe a cote du monde, et j'ai pris l'histoire pour
la vie." That, as I can see now, was my true ideal; through all my
battlings and miseries I have always lived more in the past than in the
present. At the time when I was literally starving in London, when it
seemed impossible that I should ever gain a living by my pen, how many
days have I spent at the British Museum, reading as disinterestedly as if
I had been without a care! It astounds me to remember that, having
breakfasted on dry bread, and carrying in my pocket another piece of
bread to serve for dinner, I settled myself at a desk in the great
Reading-Room with books before me which by no possibility could be a
source of immediate profit. At such a time, I worked through German