that breathes and is sick and sorry; such passionate longing to help and
mend and comfort that which never can be helped and mended and
comforted; such eager looking to death, delicate death, as the one
complete and final consolation--before this revelation of yearning,
universal pity, every-day selfishness stands awe-struck and ashamed.

When I drive in the forests, Keats goes with me; and if I extend my
drive to the Baltic shores, and spend the afternoon on the moss beneath
the pines whose pink stems form the framework of the sea, I take
Spenser; and presently the blue waves are the ripples of the Idle Lake,
and a tiny white sail in the distance is Phaedria's shallow ship,
bearing Cymochles swiftly away to her drowsy little nest of delights.
How can I tell why Keats has never been brought here, and why Spenser is
brought again and again? Who shall follow the dark intricacies of the
elementary female mind? It is safer not to attempt to do so, but by
simply cataloguing them collectively under the heading Instinct, have
done with them once and for all.

What a blessing it is to love books. Everybody must love something, and
I know of no objects of love that give such substantial and unfailing
returns as books and a garden. And how easy it would have been to come
into the world without this, and possessed instead of an all-consuming
passion, say, for hats, perpetually raging round my empty soul! I feel I
owe my forefathers a debt of gratitude, for I suppose the explanation is
that they too did not care for hats. In the centre of my library there is
a wooden pillar propping up the ceiling, and preventing it, so I am told,
from tumbling about our ears; and round this pillar, from floor to
ceiling, I have had shelves fixed, and on these shelves are all the books
that I have read again and again, and hope to read many times more--all
the books, that is, that I love quite the best. In the bookcases round