I was widening my knowledge of it helplessly and involuntarily, and I was always chancing upon some book that served this end among the great number of books that I read merely for my pleasure without any real result of the sort.  Schlegel’s ‘Lectures on Dramatic Literature’ came into my hands not long after I had finished my studies in the history of the Spanish theatre, and it made the whole subject at once luminous.  I cannot give a due notion of the comfort this book afforded me by the light it cast upon paths where I had dimly made my way before, but which I now followed in the full day.

Of course, I pinned my faith to everything that Schlegel said.  I obediently despised the classic unities and the French and Italian theatre which had perpetuated them, and I revered the romantic drama which had its glorious course among the Spanish and English poets, and which was crowned with the fame of the Cervantes and the Shakespeare whom I seemed to own, they owned me so completely.  It vexes me now to find that I cannot remember how the book came into my hands, or who could have suggested it to me.  It is possible that it may have been that artist who came and stayed a month with us while she painted my mother’s portrait.  She was fresh from her studies in New York, where she had met authors and artists at the house of the Carey sisters, and had even once seen my adored Curtis somewhere, though she had not spoken with him.  Her talk about these things simply emparadised me; it lifted me into a heaven of hope that I, too, might some day meet such elect spirits and converse with them face to face.  My mood was sufficiently foolish, but it was not such a frame of mind as I can be ashamed of; and I could wish a boy no happier fortune than to possess it for a time, at least.

XXIII.  TENNYSON

I cannot quite see now how I found time for even trying to do the things I had in hand more or less.  It is perfectly clear to me that I did none of them well, though I meant at the time to do none of them other than excellently.  I was attempting the study of no less than four languages, and I presently added a fifth to these.  I was reading right and left in every direction, but chiefly in that of poetry, criticism, and fiction.  From time to time I boldly attacked a history, and carried it by a ’coup de main,’ or sat down before it for a prolonged siege.  There was occasionally an author who worsted me, whom I tried to read and quietly gave up after a vain struggle, but I must say that these authors were few.  I had got a very fair notion of the range of all literature, and the relations of the different literatures to one another, and I knew pretty well what manner of book it was that I took up before I committed myself to the task of reading it.  Always I read for pleasure, for the delight of knowing something more; and this pleasure is a very different thing from amusement, though I read a great deal for mere amusement, as I do still, and to take my mind away from unhappy or harassing thoughts.  There are very few things that I think it a waste of time to have read; I should probably have wasted the time if I had not read them, and at the period I speak of I do not think I wasted much time.