of the highest order of poets like Shakespeare and Dante and Goethe; but that does not mean anything of value, and I never find my account in it.  I know it is not possible for any less than the greatest writer to abide lastingly in one’s life.  Some dazzling comer may enter and possess it for a day, but he soon wears his welcome out, and presently finds the door, to be answered with a not-at-home if he knocks again.  But it was only this morning that I read one of the new last poems of Tennyson with a return of the emotion which he first woke 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