78 THROUGH LIBRARY WINDOWS 



boyish life; Milton's "Paradise Lost," the 

 grandest poem that was ever written, what a 

 winter it was to me in my early teens when first 

 read. Emerson's "Nature," and Ruskin's 

 "Modern Painters," books immortal to me; 

 Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables," without ex- 

 ception the greatest novel of the nineteenth 

 century; "Pride and Prejudice," read on just 

 recovering from a temporary illness, how 

 soothing and restful; "Pickwick," on ship- 

 board just from a month in London, and read 

 walking and laughing and weeping because it 

 was so real and funny; and so on for a score 

 and more of the best fiction. How the delight 

 and uplift and outlook of those days of first 

 communings with these great masters of litera- 

 ture come back to us as we take the old volumes 

 down and turn anew with tenderness their well- 

 worn leaves ! Those marginal notes, personal, 

 incidental, historical, artistic and literary; how 

 strange they seem to us now, records of our in- 

 ner and awakening thought, yet how dear and 

 choice — outweighing the very books them- 

 selves! How the wonderful law of associa- 

 tion interweaves one's past and present with 

 vivid colorings, so that one's feelings and 

 thoughts and actions are no longer isolated but 



