In my own case there followed my acquaintance with these authors certain Boeotian years, when if I did not go backward I scarcely went forward in the paths I had set out upon.  They were years of the work, of the over-work, indeed, which falls to the lot of so many that I should be ashamed to speak of it except in accounting for the fact.  My father had sold his paper in Hamilton and had bought an interest in another at Dayton, and we were all straining our utmost to help pay for it.  My daily tasks began so early and ended so late that I had little time, even if I had the spirit, for reading; and it was not till what we thought ruin, but what was really release, came to us that I got back again to my books.  Then we went to live in the country for a year, and that stress of toil, with the shadow of failure darkening all, fell from me like the horror of an evil dream.  The only new book which I remember to have read in those two or three years at Dayton, when I hardly remember to have read any old ones, was the novel of ‘Jane Eyre,’ which I took in very imperfectly, and which I associate with the first rumor of the Rochester Knockings, then just beginning to reverberate through a world that they have not since left wholly at peace.  It was a gloomy Sunday afternoon when the book came under my hand; and mixed with my interest in the story was an anxiety lest the pictures on the walls should leave their nails and come and lay themselves at my feet; that was what the pictures had been doing in Rochester and other places where the disembodied spirits were beginning to make themselves felt.  The thing did not really happen in my case, but I was alone in the house, and it might very easily have happened.

If very little came to me in those days from books, on the other hand my acquaintance with the drama vastly enlarged itself.  There was a hapless company of players in the town from time to time, and they came to us for their printing.  I believe they never paid for it, or at least never wholly, but they lavished free passes upon us, and as nearly as I can make out, at this distance of time, I profited by their generosity, every night.  They gave two or three plays at every performance to houses ungratefully small, but of a lively spirit and impatient temper that would not brook delay in the representation; and they changed the bill each day.  In this way I became familiar with Shakespeare before I read him, or at least such plays of his as were most given in those days, and I saw “Macbeth” and “Hamlet,” and above all “Richard III.,” again and again.  I do not know why my delight in those tragedies did not send me to the volume of his plays, which was all the time in the bookcase at home, but I seem not to have thought of it, and rapt as I was in them I am not sure that they gave me greater pleasure, or seemed at all finer, than “Rollo,” “The Wife,” “The Stranger,” “Barbarossa,” “The Miser of Marseilles,” and the rest of the melodramas, comedies, and farces