He never had the means to accumulate
a library of any size, but he had a passion for books.
"There yet lingers with me a superstitious reverence for literature of
all kinds," he writes in "The Old Manse." "A bound volume has a charm in
my eyes similar to what scraps of manuscript possess for the good
Mussulman; ... every new book or antique one may contain the 'open
sesame,'--the spell to disclose treasures hidden in some unsuspected
cave of Truth."
When he lived at the Wayside, and would occasionally bring home a small
package of books from Boston, these furnished him fresh pleasure for
many days. He would carry some favorite of them with him everywhere,
from room to room or to his hill-top. He was, as we have seen, a cordial
admirer of other writers, seldom vexing himself with a critical review
of their merits and defects, but applying to them instead the test of
his own catholic capacity for enjoyment. The deliberate tone in which he
judges his own works, in his letters, shows how little his mind was
impressed by the greatness of their fame and of the genius found in
them. There could not have been a more modest author, though he did not
weakly underrate his work. "Recognition," he once said to Mr. Howells,
"makes a man very modest."
An attempt has also been made to show that he had little interest in
animals, partly based, ludicrous as it may seem, on his bringing them
into only one of his books. In his American journals, however, there is
abundant evidence of his acute sympathy in this direction; at the Old
Manse he fried fish for his dog Leo, when he says he should not have
done it for himself; and in the Trosachs he finds a moment for pitying
some little lambs startled by the approach of his party.
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