inherited the tendency as to devote a good deal of my time, though,
I confess, after a somewhat desultory fashion, to the physical
sciences. It was chiefly the wonder they woke that drew me. I was
constantly seeing, and on the outlook to see, strange analogies, not
only between the facts of different sciences of the same order,
or between physical and metaphysical facts, but between physical
hypotheses and suggestions glimmering out of the metaphysical dreams
into which I was in the habit of falling. I was at the same time
much given to a premature indulgence of the impulse to turn
hypothesis into theory. Of my mental peculiarities there is no
occasion to say more.

The house as well as the family was of some antiquity, but no
description of it is necessary to the understanding of my narrative.
It contained a fine library, whose growth began before the invention
of printing, and had continued to my own time, greatly influenced,
of course, by changes of taste and pursuit. Nothing surely can more
impress upon a man the transitory nature of possession than his
succeeding to an ancient property! Like a moving panorama mine has
passed from before many eyes, and is now slowly flitting from before
my own.

The library, although duly considered in many alterations of the
house and additions to it, had nevertheless, like an encroaching
state, absorbed one room after another until it occupied the greater
part of the ground floor. Its chief room was large, and the walls
of it were covered with books almost to the ceiling; the rooms
into which it overflowed were of various sizes and shapes, and
communicated in modes as various--by doors, by open arches, by short
passages, by steps up and steps down.