Yet, when
it was all over, he seems to have enjoyed it, being a man who took
pleasure in most sorts of experience. He did not affect me, for that one
time, with such a sense of pleasure as Mr. Lowell did--Mr. Lowell, whom I
knew so much better, and who was so big, strong, humorous, kind, learned,
friendly, and delightfully natural.
Dr. Holmes, too, was a delightful companion, and I have merely tried to
make a sort of photographic "snap-shot" at him, in a single casual
moment, one of myriads of such moments. Turning to Dr. Holmes's popular,
as distinct from his professional writings, one is reminded, as one often
is, of the change which seems to come over some books as the reader grows
older. Many books are to one now what they always were; some, like the
Waverley novels and Shakespeare, grow better on every fresh reading.
There are books which filled me, in boyhood or in youth, with a sort of
admiring rapture, and a delighted wonder at their novelty, their
strangeness, freshness, greatness. Thus Homer, and the best novels of
Thackeray, and of Fielding, the plays of Moliere and Shakespeare, the
poems of--well, of all the real poets, moved this astonishment of
admiration, and being read again, they move it still. On a different
level, one may say as much about books so unlike each other, as those of
Poe and of Sir Thomas Browne, of Swift and of Charles Lamb.
There are, again, other books which caused this happy emotion of wonder,
when first perused, long since, but which do so no longer.
Pages:
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91