any pleasure, hardly with a moment's endurance. Yet I read aloud
sometimes for the pleasure of others, because reading is an
accomplishment of mine, and, in the slang use of the word
"accomplishment" as a superficial and ornamental attainment, almost the
only one I possess; and formerly, if I had any vanity at all connected
with any endowment or attainment of mine, it was with this, for I had
observed that no accomplishment was so rare. Players are the worst
readers of all:--reads vilely; and Mrs. ---, who is so celebrated, can
read nothing well but dramatic compositions: Milton she cannot read
sufferably. People in general either read poetry without any passion at
all, or else overstep the modesty of nature, and read not like scholars.
Of late, if I have felt moved by anything it has been by the grand
lamentations of Samson Agonistes, or the great harmonies of the Satanic
speeches in Paradise Regained, when read aloud by myself. A young lady
sometimes comes and drinks tea with us: at her request and M.'s, I now
and then read W-'s poems to them. (W., by-the-bye is the only poet I
ever met who could read his own verses: often indeed he reads admirably.)

For nearly two years I believe that I read no book, but one; and I owe it
to the author, in discharge of a great debt of gratitude, to mention what
that was. The sublimer and more passionate poets I still read, as I have
said, by snatches, and occasionally. But my proper vocation, as I well
know, was the exercise of the analytic understanding. Now, for the most
part analytic studies are continuous, and not to be pursued by fits and
starts, or fragmentary efforts. Mathematics, for instance, intellectual
philosophy, &c, were all become insupportable to me; I shrunk from them
with a sense of powerless and infantine feebleness that gave me an
anguish the greater from remembering the time when I grappled with them
to my own hourly delight; and for this further reason, because I had
devoted the labour of my whole life, and had dedicated my intellect,