at the secret of my heart.

Wonder not that I, a bookman's son, and at certain periods of my life a
bookman myself, though of lowly grade in that venerable class,--wonder
not that I should thus, in that transition stage between youth and
manhood, have turned impatiently from books. Most students, at one time
or other in their existence, have felt the imperious demand of that
restless principle in man's nature which calls upon each son of Adam
to contribute his share to the vast treasury of human deeds. And though
great scholars are not necessarily, nor usually, men of action, yet
the men of action whom History presents to our survey have rarely been
without a certain degree of scholarly nurture. For the ideas which books
quicken, books cannot always satisfy. And though the royal pupil of
Aristotle slept with Homer under his pillow, it was not that he might
dream of composing epics, but of conquering new Ilions in the East.
Many a man, how little soever resembling Alexander, may still have the
conqueror's aim in an object that action only can achieve, and the book
under his pillow may be the strongest antidote to his repose. And how
the stern Destinies that shall govern the man weave their first delicate
tissues amidst the earliest associations of the child! Those idle tales
with which the old credulous nurse had beguiled my infancy,--tales of
wonder, knight-errantry, and adventure,--had left behind them seeds long
latent, seeds that might never have sprung up above the soil, but that
my boyhood was so early put under the burning-glass, and in the quick
forcing house, of the London world. There, even amidst books and study,
lively observation and petulant ambition broke forth from the lush
foliage of romance,--that fruitless leafiness of poetic youth! And there
passion, which is a revolution in all the elements of individual man,
had called anew state of being, turbulent and eager, out of the old
habits and conventional forms it had buried,--ashes that speak where the
fire has been. Far from me, as from any mind of some manliness, be
the attempt to create interest by dwelling at length on the struggles
against a rash and misplaced attachment, which it was my duty to
overcome; but all such love, as I have before implied, is a terrible
unsettler,--

"Where once such fairies dance, no grass doth ever grow."

To re-enter boyhood, go with meek docility through its disciplined
routine--how hard had I found that return, am