Adventures among Books | Page 4

author did not, like Fulke Greville, retire into
the convent of literature from the strife of the world, rather he was born
to be, from the first, a dweller in the cloister of a library. Among the
poems which I remember best out of early boyhood is Lucy Ashton's
song, in the "Bride of Lammermoor":-

"Look not thou on beauty's charming, Sit thou still when kings are
arming, Taste not when the wine-cup glistens, Speak not when the
people listens, Stop thine ear against the singer, From the red gold keep
thy finger, Vacant heart, and hand, and eye, Easy live and quiet die."
The rhymes, unlearned, clung to my memory; they would sing
themselves to me on the way to school, or cricket-field, and, about the
age of ten, probably without quite understanding them, I had chosen
them for a kind of motto in life, a tune to murmur along the fallentis
semita vitae. This seems a queer idea for a small boy, but it must be
confessed.
"It takes all sorts to make a world," some are soldiers from the cradle,
some merchants, some orators; nothing but a love of books was the gift
given to me by the fairies. It was probably derived from forebears on
both sides of my family, one a great reader, the other a considerable
collector of books which remained with us and were all tried,
persevered with, or abandoned in turn, by a student who has not
blanched before the Epigoniad.
About the age of four I learned to read by a simple process. I had heard
the elegy of Cock Robin till I knew it by rote, and I picked out the
letters and words which compose that classic till I could read it for
myself. Earlier than that, "Robinson Crusoe" had been read aloud to me,
in an abbreviated form, no doubt. I remember the pictures of Robinson
finding the footstep in the sand, and a dance of cannibals, and the parrot.
But, somehow, I have never read "Robinson" since: it is a pleasure to
come.
The first books which vividly impressed me were, naturally, fairy tales,
and chap-books about Robert Bruce, William Wallace, and Rob Roy.
At that time these little tracts could be bought for a penny apiece. I can
still see Bruce in full armour, and Wallace in a kilt, discoursing across
a burn, and Rob Roy slipping from the soldier's horse into the stream.
They did not then awaken a precocious patriotism; a boy of five is
more at home in Fairyland than in his own country. The sudden
appearance of the White Cat as a queen after her head was cut off, the
fiendish malice of the Yellow Dwarf, the strange cake of crocodile eggs

and millet seed which the mother of the Princess Frutilla made for the
Fairy of the Desert--these things, all fresh and astonishing, but certainly
to be credited, are my first memories of romance. One story of a White
Serpent, with a woodcut of that mysterious reptile, I neglected to secure,
probably for want of a penny, and I have regretted it ever since. One
never sees those chap books now. "The White Serpent," in spite of all
research, remains introuvable. It was a lost chance, and Fortune does
not forgive. Nobody ever interfered with these, or indeed with any
other studies of ours at that time, as long as they were not prosecuted
on Sundays. "The fightingest parts of the Bible," and the Apocrypha,
and stories like that of the Witch of Endor, were sabbatical literature,
read in a huge old illustrated Bible. How I advanced from the fairy tales
to Shakespeare, what stages there were on the way--for there must have
been stages--is a thing that memory cannot recover. A nursery legend
tells that I was wont to arrange six open books on six chairs, and go
from one to the others, perusing them by turns. No doubt this was what
people call "desultory reading," but I did not hear the criticism till later,
and then too often for my comfort. Memory holds a picture, more vivid
than most, of a small boy reading the "Midsummer Night's Dream" by
firelight, in a room where candles were lit, and some one touched the
piano, and a young man and a girl were playing chess. The Shakespeare
was a volume of Kenny Meadows' edition; there are fairies in it, and
the fairies seemed to come out of Shakespeare's dream into the music
and the firelight. At that moment I think that I was happy; it seemed an
enchanted glimpse of eternity in Paradise; nothing resembling it
remains with me, out of all the years.
We went from the border to the south of England, when the number of
my years was six, and