with the woman he had loved, and who then marries this tender and gentle girl, and lives in great happiness with her till her death.  Murder in the first degree is flattered by his fate up to the point of letting him die peacefully in Boston after these dealings of his in England; and altogether his story could not be commended to people with a morbid taste for bloodshed.  Naturally enough the books were written by a perfectly good woman, the wife of an English clergyman, whose friends were greatly scandalized by them.  As a sort of atonement she wrote ‘Day after Day,’ the story of a dismal and joyless orphan, who dies to the sound of angelic music, faint and farheard, filling the whole chamber.  A carefuller study of the phenomenon reveals the fact that the seraphic strains are produced by the steam escaping from the hot-water bottles at the feet of the invalid.

As usual, I am not able fully to account for my liking of these books, and I am so far from wishing to justify it that I think I ought rather to excuse it.  But since I was really greatly fascinated with them, and read them with an evergrowing fascination, the only honest thing to do is to own my subjection to them.  It would be an interesting and important question for criticism to study, that question why certain books at a. certain time greatly dominate our fancy, and others manifestly better have no influence with us.  A curious proof of the subtlety of these Paul Ferroll books in the appeal they made to the imagination is the fact that I came to them fresh from ‘Romolo,’ and full of horror for myself in Tito; yet I sympathized throughout with Paul Ferroll, and was glad when he got away.

XXXI.  ERCKMANN-CHATRIAN, BJORSTJERNE BJORNSON

On my return to America, my literary life immediately took such form that most of my reading was done for review.  I wrote at first a good many of the lighter criticisms in ‘The Nation’, at New York, and after I went to Boston to become the assistant editor of the ‘Atlantic Monthly’ I wrote the literary notices in that periodical for four or five years.

It was only when I came into full charge of the magazine that I began to share these labors with others, and I continued them in some measure as long as I had any relation to it.  My reading for reading’s sake, as I had hitherto done it, was at an end, and I read primarily for the sake of writing about the book in hand, and secondarily for the pleasure it might give me.  This was always considerable, and sometimes so great that I forgot the critic in it, and read on and on for pleasure.  I was master to review this book or that as I chose, and generally I reviewed only books I liked to read, though sometimes I felt that I ought to do a book, and did it from a sense of duty; these perfunctory criticisms I do not think were very useful, but I tried to make them honest.