'Oh! talk on, talk on! talk ever! do not cease talking to me!'
exclaimed Clotilde.

'You feel the mountain spirit?'

'I feel that you reveal it.'

'Tell me the books you have been reading.'

' Oh, light literature-poor stuff.'

'When we two read together you will not say that. Light literature is
the garden and the orchard, the fountain, the rainbow, the far view; the
view within us as well as without. Our blood runs through it, our
history in the quick. The Philistine detests it, because he has no view,
out or in. The dry confess they are cut off from the living tree, peeled
and sapless, when they condemn it. The vulgar demand to have their
pleasures in their own likeness--and let them swamp their troughs! they
shall not degrade the fame of noble fiction. We are the choice public,
which will have good writing for light reading. Poet, novelist,
essayist, dramatist, shall be ranked honourable in my Republic. I am
neither, but a man of law, a student of the sciences, a politician, on
the road to government and statecraft: and yet I say I have learnt as
much from light literature as from heavy-as much, that is, from the
pictures of our human blood in motion as from the clever assortment of
our forefatherly heaps of bones. Shun those who cry out against fiction
and have no taste for elegant writing. For to have no sympathy with the
playful mind is not to have a mind: it is a test. But name the books.'

She named one or two.