designated as weariness, which was rather the faintness of
rapturous delight; or until, sometimes, the failing of the light
invited me to go abroad, in the hope that a cool gentle breeze
might have arisen to bathe, with an airy invigorating bath, the
limbs which the glow of the burning spirit within had withered no
less than the glow of the blazing sun without.

One peculiarity of these books, or at least most of those I
looked into, I must make a somewhat vain attempt to describe.

If, for instance, it was a book of metaphysics I opened, I had
scarcely read two pages before I seemed to myself to be pondering
over discovered truth, and constructing the intellectual machine
whereby to communicate the discovery to my fellow men. With some
books, however, of this nature, it seemed rather as if the
process was removed yet a great way further back; and I was
trying to find the root of a manifestation, the spiritual truth
whence a material vision sprang; or to combine two propositions,
both apparently true, either at once or in different remembered
moods, and to find the point in which their invisibly converging
lines would unite in one, revealing a truth higher than either
and differing from both; though so far from being opposed to
either, that it was that whence each derived its life and power.
Or if the book was one of travels, I found myself the traveller.
New lands, fresh experiences, novel customs, rose around me. I
walked, I discovered, I fought, I suffered, I rejoiced in my
success. Was it a history? I was the chief actor therein. I
suffered my own blame; I was glad in my own praise. With a
fiction it was the same. Mine was the whole story. For I took
the place of the character who was most like myself, and his