didn't they?" I assented hastily. How could I contradict so
agreeable a companion, especially as he was going, as fast as the train
could carry him, to take a rest cure?

Such is one victim of the passion for culture. He had probably read
nothing in his life save the newspapers and Dickens's 'American Notes,'
a work to which he referred with the bitterest resentment. But he had
attended lectures, and heard names, some of which remained tinkling in
his empty head. To his confused mind English literature was a period of
degeneracy, one and indissoluble, in which certain famous writers lived,
devoting what time they could snatch from the practice of what he called
the decadent vices to the worship of the bottle. There was no harm in
him. He was, as the common phrase has it, his own enemy. But he would
be better employed in looking at a game of baseball than in playing with
humane letters, and one cannot but regret that he should suffer thus
profoundly from a vicious system. Another victim of culture comes to my
mind. He, too, was from Boston, and as his intelligence was far deeper
than the other one's, his unhappiness was the greater. I talked to him
for a long day, and he had no conversation but of books. For him the
visible world did not exist. The printed page was the beginning and the
end of existence. He had read, if not wisely, at least voraciously, and
he displayed a wide and profound acquaintance with modern biography.
He had all the latest _Lives_ at his finger-tips. He knew where all our
great contemporaries lived, and who were their friends; he had
attended lectures on every conceivable subject; withal he was of a high
seriousness, which nothing could daunt. For him, as is but natural, the
works of Mr Arthur Benson held the last "message" of modern literature.
He could not look upon books as mere instruments of pleasure or
enjoyment. He wanted to extract from them that mysterious quality
called "help" by the elect of the lecture hall; and without the smallest
persuasion he told me which authors had "helped" him in his journey
through the world. Shelley, of course, stood first on the list, then
came Walt Whitman, and Pater was not far from the top. And there
was nothing more strange in this apostle of aesthetics than his
matter-of-fact air. His words were the words of a yearning spirit. His
tone was the tone of a statistician. Had he really read the books of
which he spoke? Did they really "help" him in the makin