and asparagus and revengeful sweet things. My morning friend turns his
back on me when I reenter the library; nor do I ever touch him in the
afternoon. Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will
not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they
are read suits them. If, for instance, I cannot read Thoreau in a
drawing-room, how much less would I ever dream of reading Boswell in the
grass by a pond! Imagine carrying him off in company with his great
friend to a lonely dell in a rye-field, and expecting them to be
entertaining. "Nay, my dear lady," the great man would say in mighty
tones of rebuke, "this will never do. Lie in a rye-field? What folly is
that? And who would converse in a damp hollow that can help it?" So I
read and laugh over my Boswell in the library when the lamps are lit,
buried in cushions and surrounded by every sign of civilisation, with
the drawn curtains shutting out the garden and the country solitude so
much disliked by both sage and disciple. Indeed, it is Bozzy who asserts
that in the country the only things that make one happy are meals. "I
was happy," he says, when stranded at a place called Corrichatachin in
the Island of Skye, and unable to get out of it because of the rain,--"I
was happy when tea came. Such I take it is the state of those who live
in the country. Meals are wished for from the cravings of vacuity of
mind, as well as from the desire of eating." And such is the
perverseness of human nature that Boswell's wisdom delights me even more
than Johnson's, though I love them both very heartily.

In the afternoon I potter in the garden with Goethe. He did not, I am
sure, care much really about flowers and gardens, yet he said many
lovely things about them that remain in one's memory just as
persistently as though they had been inspired expressions of actual
feelings; and the intellect must indeed have been gigantic that could so
beautifully pretend. Ordinary blunderers have to feel a vast amount