Those lectures of Lowell’s had a great influence with me, and I tried to like whatever they bade me like, after a fashion common to young people when they begin to read criticisms; their aesthetic pride is touched; they wish to realize that they too can feel the fine things the critic admires.  From this motive they do a great deal of factitious liking; but after all the affections will not be bidden, and the critic can only avail to give a point of view, to enlighten a perspective.  When I read Lowell’s praises of him, I had all the will in the world to read Spencer, and I really meant to do so, but I have not done so to this day, and as often as I have tried I have found it impossible.  It was not so with Chaucer, whom I loved from the first word of his which I found quoted in those lectures, and in Chambers’s ‘Encyclopaedia of English Literature,’ which I had borrowed of my friend the organ-builder.

In fact, I may fairly class Chaucer among my passions, for I read him with that sort of personal attachment I had for Cervantes, who resembled him in a certain sweet and cheery humanity.  But I do not allege this as the reason, for I had the same feeling for Pope, who was not like either of them.  Kissing goes by favor, in literature as in life, and one cannot quite account for one’s passions in either; what is certain is, I liked Chaucer and I did not like Spencer; possibly there was an affinity between reader and poet, but if there was I should be at a loss to name it, unless it was the liking for reality; and the sense of mother earth in human life.  By the time I had read all of Chaucer that I could find in the various collections and criticisms, my father had been made a clerk in the legislature, and on one of his visits home he brought me the poet’s works from the State Library, and I set about reading them with a glossary.  It was not easy, but it brought strength with it, and lifted my heart with a sense of noble companionship.

I will not pretend that I was insensible to the grossness of the poet’s time, which I found often enough in the poet’s verse, as well as the goodness of his nature, and my father seems to have felt a certain misgiving about it.  He repeated to me the librarian’s question as to whether he thought he ought to put an unexpurgated edition in the hands of a boy, and his own answer that he did not believe it would hurt me.  It was a kind of appeal to me to make the event justify him, and I suppose he had not given me the book without due reflection.  Probably he reasoned that with my greed for all manner of literature the bad would become known to me along with the good at any rate, and I had better know that he knew it.