It is more innocent than opium-eating,
though, like opium-eating, it unlocks to us artificial paradises. I try
to say what I have found in books, what distractions from the world, what
teaching (not much), and what consolations.
In beginning an _autobiographia literaria_, an account of how, and in
what order, books have appealed to a mind, which books have ever above
all things delighted, the author must pray to be pardoned for the sin of
egotism. There is no other mind, naturally, of which the author knows so
much as of his own. _On n'a que soi_, as the poor girl says in one of M.
Paul Bourget's novels. In literature, as in love, one can only speak for
himself. This author did not, like Fulke Greville, retire into the
convent of literature from the strife of the world, rather he was born to
be, from the first, a dweller in the cloister of a library. Among the
poems which I remember best out of early boyhood is Lucy Ashton's song,
in the "Bride of Lammermoor":--
"Look not thou on beauty's charming,
Sit thou still when kings are arming,
Taste not when the wine-cup glistens,
Speak not when the people listens,
Stop thine ear against the singer,
From the red gold keep thy finger,
Vacant heart, and hand, and eye,
Easy live and quiet die."
The rhymes, unlearned, clung to my memory; they would sing themselves to
me on the way to school, or cricket-field, and, about the age of ten,
probably without quite understanding them, I had chosen them for a kind
of motto in life, a tune to murmur along the _fallentis semita vitae_.
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