o have a new life before them. Perhaps this is
ordered by Providence, that those who have no right to them may profit by
them, in that divine contempt of such profit which Providence so often
shows.

I cannot understand just how I came to know of the books, but I suppose
it was through the contemporary criticism which I was then beginning to
read, wherever I could find it, in the magazines and newspapers; and I
could not say why I thought it would be very 'comme il faut' to like
them. Probably the literary fine world, which is always rubbing
shoulders with the other fine world, and bringing off a little of its
powder and perfume, was then dawning upon me, and I was wishing to be of
it, and to like the things that it liked; I am not so anxious to do it
now. But if this is true, I found the books better than their friends,
and had many a heartache from their pathos, many a genuine glow of
purpose from their high import, many a tender suffusion from their
sentiment. I dare say I should find their pose now a little
old-fashioned. I believe it was rather full of sighs, and shrugs and
starts, expressed in dashes, and asterisks, and exclamations, but I am
sure that the feeling was the genuine and manly sort which is of all
times and always the latest wear. Whatever it was, it sufficed to win my
heart, and to identify me with whatever was most romantic and most
pathetic in it. I read 'Dream Life' first--though the 'Reveries of a
Bachelor' was written first, and I believe is esteemed the better book
--and 'Dream Life' remains first in my affections. I have now little
notion what it was about, but I love its memory. The book is associated
especially in my mind with one golden day of Indian summer, when I
carried it into the woods with me, and abandoned myself to a welter of
emotion over its page. I lay, under a crimson maple, and I remember how
the light struck through it and flushed the print with the gules of the
foliage. My friend was away by this time on one of his several absences
in the Northwest, and I was quite alone in the absurd and irrelevant
melancholy with which I read myself and my circumstances into the book. I
began to read them out again in due time, clothed with the literary airs
and graces that I admired in it, and for a long time I imitated Ik Marvel
in the voluminous letters I wrote my friend in compliance with his
Shakespearean prayer:

"To Milan let me hear from thee by letters,
Of thy success i