e
that I specially recall my _reviewing_ it mentally many times.

I have reviewed my early life in quiet, old-fashioned, shaded
Philadelphia and in rural New England so continually and carefully all
the time ever since it passed that I am sure its minutest detail on any
day would now be accurately recalled at the least suggestion. As I shall
almost certainly write this whole work without referring to a note or
journal or other document, it will be seen that I remember the past
pretty well. What is most remarkable in it all, if I _can_ make myself
intelligible, is that what between the deep and indelible impression made
on my mind by _books_, and that of scenery and characters now passed
away--the two being connected--it all seems to me now to be as it were
vividly depicted, coloured, or _written_ in my mind, like pages in an
illuminated or illustrated romance. As some one has said that dreams are
novels which we read when asleep, so bygone memories, when continually
revived and associated with the subtle and delicate influences of
_reading_, really become fixed literature to us, glide into it, and are
virtually turned to copy, which only awaits type. Thus a _scene_ to one
highly cultivated in art is really a picture, to a degree which few
actually realise, though they may fancy they do, because to actually
master this harmony requires so many years of study and thought that I
very rarely meet with perfect instances of it. De Quincey and Coleridge
are two of the best illustrations whom I can recall, while certain
analytical character-sifters in modern novels seem the farthest remote
from such genial naturalness.

At the end of the first year my brother returned to Philadelphia. I
passed the summer at Dr. Stimson's, in Dedham, wandering about in the
woods with my bow, fishing in the river, reading always whatever fate or
a small circulating library provided--I remember that "The Devil on Two
Sticks" and the "Narrative of Captain Boyle" were in it--and carving
spoons and serpents from wood, which was a premonition of my later work
in this line, and of my "Manual of Wood-Carving."

At this time something took place which deeply impressed me. This was
the two hundredth anniversary of the building of the town of Dedham,
which was celebrated with very great splendour: speeches, tents with pine-
boughs, music-booths, ginger-beer, side-shows--in short, all the pomp and
circumstance of a country fair allied to historic g