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 poems, in the metre of “Hiawatha”; I had for a while a notion of studying Icelandic, and I did take out an Icelandic grammar and lexicon, and decided that I would learn the language later.  By this time I must have begun German, which I afterwards carried so far, with one author at least, as to find in him a delight only second to that I had in Tennyson; but as yet Tennyson was all in all to me in poetry.  I suspect that I carried his poems about with me a great part of the time; I am afraid that I always had that blue-and-gold Tennyson in my pocket; and I was ready to draw it upon anybody, at the slightest provocation.  This is the worst of the ardent lover of literature:  he wishes to make every one else share his rapture, will he, nill he.  Many good fellows suffered from my admiration of this author