When Miss E. P. Peabody made his acquaintance, in 1836-37, he
had, for example, read all of Balzac that had then appeared; and there
is no record of this in the library lists. These lists alone, then,
giving four hundred volumes in seven years, supply him with one volume a
week,--not, on the whole, a meagre rate, when we consider the volumes of
magazines, the possible sources outside of the library, and the
numberless hours required for literary experiment. I do not fancy that
he plodded through books; but rather that he read with the easy energy
of a vigorous, original mind, though he also knew the taste of severe
study. "Bees," he observes in one place, "are sometimes drowned (or
suffocated) in the honey which they collect. So some writers are lost in
their collected learning." He did not find it necessary to mount upon a
pyramid of all learning previous to his epoch, in order to get the
highest standpoint for his own survey of mankind. Neither was he "a man
of parts," precisely; being in himself a distinct whole. His choice of
reading was ruled by a fastidious need. He was fond of travels for a
rainy day, and knew Mandeville; but at other times he took up books
which seem to lie quite aside from his known purposes. [Footnote: See
Appendix III.] Voltaire appears to have attracted him constantly; he
read him in the original, together with Rousseau. At one time he
examined Pascal, at another he read something of Corneille and a part of
Racine. Of the English dramatists, he seems at this time to have tried
only Massinger; "Inchbald's Theatre" also occurs.
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