the East; to see India
and far Cathay; to see the tropics and to live for a while in a
tropical island; to be carried along the Grand Canal of Venice in a
gondola; to see the gardens of Boccaccio and the cell of Savonarola;
to camp and hunt in the backwoods of Canada, and to walk the streets
of New York, all these things have I longed, from youth upwards, to
see and to do--yea, as ardently as ever Drake desired to set an
English sail upon the great and unknown sea, and all these things, and
many more, have been granted to me. One great thing--perhaps more than
one thing, one unsatisfied desire--remained undone. I would set foot
on the shore of New England. It is a sacred land, consecrated to me
long years ago, for the sake of the things which I used to read--for
the sake of the long-yearning thoughts of childhood and the dim and
mystic splendours which played about the land beyond the sunset, in
the days of my sunrise.

'At last!'

Wherever a boy finds a quiet place for reading--an attic lumbered with
rubbish, a bedroom cold and empty, even a corner on the stairs--he
makes of that place a theatre, in which he is the sole audience.
Before his eyes--to him alone--the drama is played, with scenery
complete and costume correct, by such actors as never yet played upon
any other stage, so natural, so lifelike--nay, so godlike, and for
that very reason so lifelike.

This boy sat where he could--in a crowded household it is not always
possible to get a quiet corner; wherever he sat, this stage rose up
before him and the play went on. He saw upon that stage all these
things of which I have spoken, and more. He saw the fight at Nombre de
Dios, the capture of the rich galleon, the sacking of Maracaibo. I do
not know whether other boys of that time were reading the American
authors with such avidity, or whether it was by some chance that these
books were thrown in his way. Washington Irving, Fenimore Cooper,
Prescott, Emerson (in parts), Longfellow, Whittier, Bryant, Edgar
Allan Poe, Lowell, Holmes, not to mention Thoreau, Herman Melville,
Dana, certain religious novelists and many others whose names I do not
recall, formed a tolerably large field of American reading for an
English boy--without prejudice, be it understood, to the writers of
his own country. To him the country of the American writers became
almost as well known as his own. One thing alone he could not read.
When he came to the War of Independence, he closed the