the newly green beeches in the west wood that is now precious sapphire
in my memory; it was the first time that I knowingly met Beauty.

And in the house there were books. The rubbish old Lady Drew read I
never saw; stuff of the Maria Monk type, I have since gathered, had
a fascination for her; but back in the past there had been a Drew of
intellectual enterprise, Sir Cuthbert, the son of Sir Matthew who built
the house; and thrust away, neglected and despised, in an old room
upstairs, were books and treasures of his that my mother let me rout
among during a spell of wintry wet. Sitting under a dormer window on a
shelf above great stores of tea and spices, I became familiar with much
of Hogarth in a big portfolio, with Raphael, there was a great book of
engravings from the stanzas of Raphael in the Vatican--and with most
of the capitals of Europe as they had looked about 1780, by means
of several pig iron-moulded books of views. There was also a broad
eighteenth century atlas with huge wandering maps that instructed me
mightily. It had splendid adornments about each map title; Holland
showed a fisherman and his boat; Russia a Cossack; Japan, remarkable
people attired in pagodas--I say it deliberately, "pagodas." There were
Terrae Incognitae in every continent then, Poland, Sarmatia, lands since
lost; and many a voyage I made with a blunted pin about that large,
incorrect and dignified world. The books in that little old closet had
been banished, I suppose, from the saloon during the Victorian revival
of good taste and emasculated orthodoxy, but my mother had no suspicion
of their character. So I read and understood the good sound rhetoric of
Tom Paine's "Rights of Man," and his "Common Sense," excellent books,
once praised by bishops and since sedulously lied about. Gulliver was
there unexpurgated, strong meat for a boy perhaps but not too strong I
hold--I have never regretted that I escaped niceness in these affairs.
The satire of Traldragdubh made my blood boil as it was meant to do,