I am not sure, but I think it was through some volume which I found in his charge that I first came to know of De Quincey; he was fond of Dr. Holmes’s poetry; he loved Whittier and Longfellow, each represented in his slender stock by some distinctive work.  There were several stray volumes of Thackeray’s minor writings, and I still have the ’Yellowplush Papers’ in the smooth red cloth (now pretty well tattered) of Appleton’s Popular Library, which I bought there.  But most of the books were in the famous old brown cloth of Ticknor & Fields, which was a warrant of excellence in the literature it covered.  Besides these there were standard volumes of poetry, published by Phillips & Sampson, from wornout plates; for a birthday present my mother got me Wordsworth in this shape, and I am glad to think that I once read the “Excursion” in it, for I do not think I could do so now, and I have a feeling that it is very right and fit to have read the “Excursion.”  To be honest, it was very hard reading even then, and I cannot truthfully pretend that I have ever liked Wordsworth except in parts, though for the matter of that, I do not suppose that any one ever did.  I tried hard enough to like everything in him, for I had already learned enough to know that I ought to like him, and that if I did not, it was a proof of intellectual and moral inferiority in me.  My early idol, Pope, had already been tumbled into the dust by Lowell, whose lectures on English Poetry had lately been given in Boston, and had met with my rapturous acceptance in such newspaper report as I had of them.  So, my preoccupations were all in favor of the Lake School, and it was both in my will and my conscience to like Wordsworth.  If I did not do so it was not my fault, and the fault remains very much what it first was.

I feel and understand him more deeply than I did then, but I do not think that I then failed of the meaning of much that I read in him, and I am sure that my senses were quick to all the beauty in him.  After suffering once through the “Excursion” I did not afflict myself with it again, but there were other poems of his which I read over and over, as I fancy it is the habit of every lover of poetry to do with the pieces he is fond of.  Still, I do not make out that Wordsworth was ever a passion of mine; on the other hand, neither was Byron.  Him, too, I liked in passages and in certain poems which I knew before I read Wordsworth at all; I read him throughout, but I did not try to imitate him, and I did not try to imitate Wordsworth.

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,