es. That's what the books are for. The
bindings are never sold alone."

He then went on to tell me the prices and terms of payment, until it
really seemed that it would be cheaper to buy the books than to let him
carry them away again. Harriet stood in the doorway behind him frowning
and evidently trying to catch my eye. But I kept my face turned aside so
that I could not see her signal of distress and my eyes fixed on the
young man Dixon. It was as good as a play. Harriet there,
serious-minded, thinking I was being befooled, and the agent thinking he
was befooling me, and I, thinking I was befooling both of them--and all
of us wrong. It was very like life wherever you find it.

Finally, I took the book which he had been urging upon me, at which
Harriet coughed meaningly to attract my attention. She knew the danger
when I really got my hands on a book. But I made up as innocent as a
child. I opened the book almost at random--and it was as though, walking
down a strange road, I had come upon an old tried friend not seen before
in years. For there on the page before me I read:

"The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
But are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not."

And as I read it came back to me--a scene like a picture--the place, the
time, the very feel of the hour when I first saw those lines. Who shall
say that the past does not live! An odour will sometimes set the blood
coursing in an old emotion, and a line of poetry is the resurrection and
the life. For a moment I forgot Harriet and the agent, I forgot myself,
I even forgot the book on my knee--everything but that hour in the
past--a view of shimmering hot housetops, the heat and dust and noise of
an August evening in the city, the dumb weariness of it all, the
loneliness, the longing for green fields; and then these great lines of
Wordsworth, read for the first time, flooding in upon me:

"Great God! I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn:
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
And hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn."

When I had finished I found myself sta