English classics I have picked up at these curbstone stalls. How
much more they mean to me than new books of later years! Here,
for instance, are two volumes of Dr. Johnson's works in good leather
binding, library style, which I have carried with me from one place
to another for over fifty years, and which in my youth I read and
reread, and the style of which I tried to imitate before I was
twenty. When I dip into "The Rambler" and "The Idler" now how dry
and stilted and artificial their balanced sentences seem! yet I
treasure them for what they once were to me. In my first essay
in the "Atlantic," forty-six years ago [in 1860], I said that
Johnson's periods acted like a lever of the third kind, and that
the power applied always exceeded the weight raised; and this
comparison seems to hit the mark very well. I did not read
Boswell's Life of him till much later. In his conversation
Johnson got the fulcrum in the right place.


I reached home on the twentieth of May with an empty pocket and
an empty stomach, but with a bagful of books. I remember the day
because the grass was green, but the air was full of those great
"goose-feather" flakes of snow which sometimes fall in late May.

I stayed home that summer of '55 and worked on the farm, and
pored over my books when I had a chance. I must have found
Locke's "Essay" pretty tough reading, but I remember buckling
to it, getting right down on "all fours," as one has to, to
follow Locke.

I think it was that summer that I read my first novel, "Charlotte
Temple," and was fairly intoxicated with it. It let loose a flood