in me well-nigh forty years ago. There has been no year of
those many when I have not read him and loved him with something of the
early fire if not all the early conflagration; and each successive poem
of his has been for me a fresh joy.

He went with me into the world from my village when I left it to make my
first venture away from home. My father had got one of those legislative
clerkships which used to fall sometimes to deserving country editors when
their party was in power, and we together imagined and carried out a
scheme for corresponding with some city newspapers. We were to furnish a
daily, letter giving an account of the legislative proceedings which I
was mainly to write up from material he helped me to get together. The
letters at once found favor with the editors who agreed to take them, and
my father then withdrew from the work altogether, after telling them who
was doing it. We were afraid they might not care for the reports of a
boy of nineteen, but they did not seem to take my age into account, and I
did not boast of my youth among the lawmakers. I looked three or four
years older than I was; but I experienced a terrible moment once when a
fatherly Senator asked me my age. I got away somehow without saying, but
it was a great relief to me when my twentieth birthday came that winter,
and I could honestly proclaim that I was in my twenty-first year.

I had now the free range of the State Library, and I drew many sorts of
books from it. Largely, however, they were fiction, and I read all the
novels of Bulwer, for whom I had already a great liking from 'The
Caxtons' and 'My Novel.' I was dazzled by them, and I thought him a
great writer, if not so great a one as he thought himself. Little or
nothing of those romances, with their swelling prefaces about the poet
and his function, their glittering criminals, and showy rakes and rogues
of all kinds, and their patrician perfume and social splendor, remained
with me; they may have been better or worse; I will not attempt to say.
If I may call my fascination with them a passion at all, I must say that
it was but a fitful fever. I also read many volumes of Zschokke's
admirable tales, which I found in a translation in the Library, and I
think I began at the same time to find out De Quincey. These authors I
recall out of the many that passed through my mind almost as tracelessly
as they passed through my hands. I got at some versions of Icelandic
poems, in the met