Over some parts of the library, descended curtains of silk of various
dyes, none of which I ever saw lifted while I was there; and I felt
somehow that it would be presumptuous in me to venture to look within
them. But the use of the other books seemed free; and day after day I
came to the library, threw myself on one of the many sumptuous eastern
carpets, which lay here and there on the floor, and read, and read,
until weary; if that can be designated as weariness, which was rather
the faintness of rapturous delight; or until, sometimes, the failing of
the light invited me to go abroad, in the hope that a cool gentle breeze
might have arisen to bathe, with an airy invigorating bath, the limbs
which the glow of the burning spirit within had withered no less than
the glow of the blazing sun without.
One peculiarity of these books, or at least most of those I looked into,
I must make a somewhat vain attempt to describe.
If, for instance, it was a book of metaphysics I opened, I had scarcely
read two pages before I seemed to myself to be pondering over discovered
truth, and constructing the intellectual machine whereby to communicate
the discovery to my fellow men. With some books, however, of this
nature, it seemed rather as if the process was removed yet a great way
further back; and I was trying to find the root of a manifestation,
the spiritual truth whence a material vision sprang; or to combine
two propositions, both apparently true, either at once or in different
remembered moods, and to find the point in which their invisibly
converging lines would unite in one, revealing a truth higher than
either and differing from both; though so far from being opposed to
either, that it was that whence each derived its life and power. Or if
the book was one of travels, I found myself the traveller. New
lands, fresh experiences, novel customs, rose around me. I walked, I
discovered, I fought, I suffered, I rejoiced in my success. Was it a
history? I was the chief actor therein. I suffered my own blame; I was
glad in my own praise. With a fiction it was the same. Mine was the
whole story. For I took the place of the character who was most like
myself, and his story was mine; until, grown weary with the life of
years condensed in an hour, or arrived at my deathbed, or the end of the
volume, I would awake, with a sudden bewilderment, to the consciousness
of my present life, recognising the walls and roof around me, and
finding I joyed or sorrowed only in a book. If the book was a poem, the
words disappeared, or took the subordinate position of an accompaniment
to the succession of forms and images that rose and vanished with a
soundless rhythm, and a hidden rime.