too.  After a season of scepticism he had become a religious man, like the rest of his race, but in his own fashion, which was not at all the fashion of my grandfather:  a Friend who had married out of Meeting, and had ended a perfervid Methodist.  My father, who could never get himself converted at any of the camp-meetings where my grandfather often led the forces of prayer to his support, and had at last to be given up in despair, fell in with the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, and embraced the doctrine of that philosopher with a content that has lasted him all the days of his many years.  Ever since I can remember, the works of Swedenborg formed a large part of his library; he read them much himself, and much to my mother, and occasionally a “Memorable Relation” from them to us children.  But he did not force them upon our notice, nor urge us to read them, and I think this was very well.  I suppose his conscience and his reason kept him from doing so.  But in regard to other books, his fondness was too much for him, and when I began to show a liking for literature he was eager to guide my choice.

His own choice was for poetry, and the most of our library, which was not given to theology, was given to poetry.  I call it the library now, but then we called it the bookcase, and that was what literally it was, because I believe that whatever we had called our modest collection of books, it was a larger private collection than any other in the town where we lived.  Still it was all held, and shut with glass doors, in a case of very few shelves.  It was not considerably enlarged during my childhood, for few books came to my father as editor, and he indulged himself in buying them even more rarely.  My grandfather’s book store (it was also the village drug-store) had then the only stock of literature for sale in the place; and once, when Harper & Brothers’ agent came to replenish it, he gave my father several volumes for review.  One of these was a copy of Thomson’s Seasons, a finely illustrated edition, whose pictures I knew long before I knew the poetry, and thought them the most beautiful things that ever were.  My father read passages of the book aloud, and he wanted me to read it all myself.  For the matter of that he wanted me to read Cowper, from whom no one could get anything but good, and he wanted me to read Byron, from whom I could then have got no harm; we get harm from the evil we understand.  He loved Burns, too, and he used to read aloud from him, I must own, to my inexpressible weariness.  I could not away with that dialect, and I could not then feel the charm of the poet’s wit, nor the tender beauty of his pathos.  Moore, I could manage better; and when my father read “Lalla Rookh” to my mother I sat up to listen, and entered into all the woes of Iran in the story of the “Fire Worshippers.”  I drew the line at the “Veiled Prophet of Khorassan,” though I had some sense of the humor of the poet’s conception of the critic in “Fadladeen.”  But I liked Scott’s poems far better, and got from Ispahan to Edinburgh with a glad alacrity of fancy.  I followed the “Lady of the Lake” throughout, and when I first began to contrive verses of my own I found that poem a fit model in mood and metre.