In this mood I first read Dickens, whom I had known before in the reading I had listened to.  But now I devoured his books one after another as fast as I could read them.  I plunged from the heart of one to another, so as to leave myself no chance for the horrors that beset me.  Some of them remain associated with the gloom and misery of that time, so that when I take them up they bring back its dreadful shadow.  But I have since read them all more than once, and I have had my time of thinking Dickens, talking Dickens, and writing Dickens, as we all had who lived in the days of the mighty magician.  I fancy the readers who have come to him since he ceased to fill the world with his influence can have little notion how great it was.  In that time he colored the parlance of the English-speaking race, and formed upon himself every minor talent attempting fiction.  While his glamour lasted it was no more possible for a young novelist to escape writing Dickens than it was for a young poet to escape writing Tennyson.  I admired other authors more; I loved them more, but when it came to a question of trying to do something in fiction I was compelled, as by a law of nature, to do it at least partially in his way.

All the while that he held me so fast by his potent charm I was aware that it was a very rough magic now and again, but I could not assert my sense of this against him in matters of character and structure.  To these I gave in helplessly; their very grotesqueness was proof of their divine origin, and I bowed to the crudest manifestations of his genius in these kinds as if they were revelations not to be doubted without sacrilege.  But in certain small matters, as it were of ritual, I suffered myself to think, and I remember boldly speaking my mind about his style, which I thought bad.

I spoke it even to the quaint character whom I borrowed his books from, and who might almost have come out of his books.  He lived in Dickens in a measure that I have never known another to do, and my contumely must have brought him a pang that was truly a personal grief.  He forgave it, no doubt because I bowed in the Dickens worship without question on all other points.  He was then a man well on towards fifty, and he had come to America early in life, and had lived in our village many years, without casting one of his English prejudices, or ceasing to be of a contrary opinion on every question, political, religious and social.  He had no fixed belief, but he went to the service of his church whenever it was held among us, and he revered the Book of Common Prayer while he disputed the authority of the Bible with all comers.  He had become a citizen, but he despised democracy, and achieved a hardy consistency only by voting with the pro-slavery party upon all measures friendly to the institution which he considered the scandal and reproach of the American name.  From a heart tender to all, he liked to say wanton, savage and cynical things, but he bore no malice if you gainsaid him.