The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac | Page 5

most important
undertaking of my life, I recall the sense of abhorrence with which I
have at different times read the confessions of men famed for their
prowess in the realm of love. These boastings have always shocked me,
for I reverence love as the noblest of the passions, and it is impossible
for me to conceive how one who has truly fallen victim to its benign
influence can ever thereafter speak flippantly of it.
Yet there have been, and there still are, many who take a seeming
delight in telling you how many conquests they have made, and they
not infrequently have the bad taste to explain with wearisome prolixity
the ways and the means whereby those conquests were wrought; as,
forsooth, an unfeeling huntsman is forever boasting of the game he has
slaughtered and is forever dilating upon the repulsive details of his
butcheries.
I have always contended that one who is in love (and having once been
in love is to be always in love) has, actually, no confession to make.
Love is so guileless, so proper, so pure a passion as to involve none of
those things which require or which admit of confession. He, therefore,
who surmises that in this exposition of my affaires du coeur there is to
be any betrayal of confidences, or any discussion, suggestion, or hint
likely either to shame love or its votaries or to bring a blush to the
cheek of the fastidious--he is grievously in error.
Nor am I going to boast; for I have made no conquests. I am in no
sense a hero. For many, very many years I have walked in a pleasant
garden, enjoying sweet odors and soothing spectacles; no
predetermined itinerary has controlled my course; I have wandered

whither I pleased, and very many times I have strayed so far into the
tangle- wood and thickets as almost to have lost my way. And now it is
my purpose to walk that pleasant garden once more, inviting you to
bear me company and to share with me what satisfaction may accrue
from an old man's return to old-time places and old-time loves.
As a child I was serious-minded. I cared little for those sports which
usually excite the ardor of youth. To out-of-door games and exercises I
had particular aversion. I was born in a southern latitude, but at the age
of six years I went to live with my grandmother in New Hampshire,
both my parents having fallen victims to the cholera. This change from
the balmy temperature of the South to the rigors of the North was not
agreeable to me, and I have always held it responsible for that delicate
health which has attended me through life.
My grandmother encouraged my disinclination to play; she recognized
in me that certain seriousness of mind which I remember to have heard
her say I inherited from her, and she determined to make of me what
she had failed to make of any of her own sons--a professional
expounder of the only true faith of Congregationalism. For this reason,
and for the further reason that at the tender age of seven years I
publicly avowed my desire to become a clergyman, an ambition wholly
sincere at that time-- for these reasons was I duly installed as prime
favorite in my grandmother's affections.
As distinctly as though it were but yesterday do I recall the time when I
met my first love. It was in the front room of the old homestead, and
the day was a day in spring. The front room answered those purposes
which are served by the so-called parlor of the present time. I
remember the low ceiling, the big fireplace, the long, broad
mantelpiece, the andirons and fender of brass, the tall clock with its
jocund and roseate moon, the bellows that was always wheezy, the wax
flowers under a glass globe in the corner, an allegorical picture of
Solomon's temple, another picture of little Samuel at prayer, the high,
stiff-back chairs, the foot-stool with its gayly embroidered top, the
mirror in its gilt-and-black frame--all these things I remember well, and
with feelings of tender reverence, and yet that day I now recall was
well-nigh threescore and ten years ago!
Best of all I remember the case in which my grandmother kept her
books, a mahogany structure, massive and dark, with doors composed

of diamond-shaped figures of glass cunningly set in a framework of
lead. I was in my seventh year then, and I had learned to read I know
not when. The back and current numbers of the ``Well- Spring'' had
fallen prey to my insatiable appetite for literature. With the story of the
small boy who stole a pin, repented of and confessed that crime, and
then became a