Cries Will In A Taking,
Who Would Not Be Crusty With Half A Year's Baking?'
I think this quip would leave us cold.
The 'Isles of Greece' seem
rather tawdry too; but on the 'Address to the Ocean,' or on 'The
Dying Gladiator,' 'time has writ no wrinkle.'
'Tis the morn, but dim and dark,
Whither flies the silent lark?' -
does the reader recall the moment when his eye first fell upon
these lines in the Fourth Reader; and 'surprised with joy,
impatient as the wind,' he plunged into the sequel? And there was
another piece, this time in prose, which none can have forgotten;
many like me must have searched Dickens with zeal to find it again,
and in its proper context, and have perhaps been conscious of some
inconsiderable measure of disappointment, that it was only Tom
Pinch who drove, in such a pomp of poetry, to London.
But in the Reader we are still under guides. What a boy turns out
for himself, as he rummages the bookshelves, is the real test and
pleasure. My father's library was a spot of some austerity; the
proceedings of learned societies, some Latin divinity,
cyclopaedias, physical science, and, above all, optics, held the
chief place upon the shelves, and it was only in holes and corners
that anything really legible existed as by accident. The Parent's
Assistant, Rob Roy, Waverley, and Guy Mannering, the Voyages of
Captain Woods Rogers, Fuller's and Bunyan's Holy Wars, The
Reflections of Robinson Crusoe, The Female Bluebeard, G. Sand's
Mare au Diable - (how came it in that grave assembly!), Ainsworth's
Tower of London, and four old volumes of Punch - these were the
chief exceptions.
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