atanic
speeches in Paradise Regained, when read aloud by myself. A young lady
sometimes comes and drinks tea with us: at her request and M.'s, I now
and then read W-'s poems to them. (W., by-the-bye is the only poet I
ever met who could read his own verses: often indeed he reads admirably.)

For nearly two years I believe that I read no book, but one; and I owe it
to the author, in discharge of a great debt of gratitude, to mention what
that was. The sublimer and more passionate poets I still read, as I have
said, by snatches, and occasionally. But my proper vocation, as I well
know, was the exercise of the analytic understanding. Now, for the most
part analytic studies are continuous, and not to be pursued by fits and
starts, or fragmentary efforts. Mathematics, for instance, intellectual
philosophy, &c, were all become insupportable to me; I shrunk from them
with a sense of powerless and infantine feebleness that gave me an
anguish the greater from remembering the time when I grappled with them
to my own hourly delight; and for this further reason, because I had
devoted the labour of my whole life, and had dedicated my intellect,
blossoms and fruits, to the slow and elaborate toil of constructing one
single work, to which I had presumed to give the title of an unfinished
work of Spinosa's--viz., _De Emendatione Humani Intellectus_. This was
now lying locked up, as by frost, like any Spanish bridge or aqueduct,
begun upon too great a scale for the resources of the architect; and
instead of reviving me as a monument of wishes at least, and aspirations,
and a life of labour dedicated to the exaltation of human nature in that
way in which God had best fitted me to promote so great an object, it was
likely to stand a memorial to my children of hopes defeated, of baffled
efforts, of materials uselessly accumulated, of foundations laid that
were never to support a super-structure--of the grief and the ruin of the
architect. In this state of imbecility I had, for amusement, turned my
attention to political economy; my understanding, which formerly had been
as active and restless as a hyaena, could not, I suppose (so long as I
lived at all) sink into utter lethargy; and political economy offers this
advantage to a person in my state, that though it is eminently an organic
science (no part, that is to say, but what acts on the whole as the whole
again reacts on each part), yet the several parts may be detached and
contem