them down or cease to worship them, but some of their frailties grieved me and put me to secret shame for them.  I did not excuse these things in them, or try to believe that they were less evil for them than they would have been for less people.  This was after I came more or less to the knowledge of good and evil.  While I remained in the innocence of childhood I did not even understand the wrong.  When I realized what lives some of my poets had led, how they were drunkards, and swindlers, and unchaste, and untrue, I lamented over them with a sense of personal disgrace in them, and to this day I have no patience with that code of the world which relaxes itself in behalf of the brilliant and gifted offender; rather he should suffer more blame.  The worst of the literature of past times, before an ethical conscience began to inform it, or the advance of the race compelled it to decency, is that it leaves the mind foul with filthy images and base thoughts; but what I have been trying to say is that the boy, unless he is exceptionally depraved beforehand, is saved from these through his ignorance.  Still I wish they were not there, and I hope the time will come when the beast-man will be so far subdued and tamed in us that the memory of him in literature shall be left to perish; that what is lewd and ribald in the great poets shall be kept out of such editions as are meant for general reading, and that the pedant-pride which now perpetuates it as an essential part of those poets shall no longer have its way.  At the end of the ends such things do defile, they do corrupt.  We may palliate them or excuse them for this reason or that, but that is the truth, and I do not see why they should not be dropped from literature, as they were long ago dropped from the talk of decent people.  The literary histories might keep record of them, but it is loath some to think of those heaps of ordure, accumulated from generation to generation, and carefully passed down from age to age as something precious and vital, and not justly regarded as the moral offal which they are.

During the winter we passed at Columbus I suppose that my father read things aloud to us after his old habit, and that I listened with the rest.  I have a dim notion of first knowing Thomson’s ’Castle of Indolence’ in this way, but I was getting more and more impatient of having things read to me.  The trouble was that I caught some thought or image from the text, and that my fancy remained playing with that while the reading went on, and I lost the rest.  But I think the reading was less in every way than it had been, because his work was exhausting and his leisure less.  My own hours in the printing-office began at seven and ended at six, with an hour at noon for dinner, which I often used for putting down such verses as had come to me during the morning.  As soon as supper was over at night I got out my manuscripts, which I kept in great disorder, and written in several different hands on several different kinds of paper,