So we read Leigh Hunt’s confession that when he “cut open a new catalogue of old books, and put crosses against dozens of volumes in the list, out of the pure imagination of buying them, the possibility being out of the question.”
Poverty hath her victories no less renowned than wealth. To haunt the book-stores, there to see a long-desired work in luxurious and tempting style, reluctantly to abandon it for the present on account of the price; to go home and dream about it, to wonder, for a year, and perchance longer, whether it will ever again greet your eyes; to conjecture what act of desperation you might in heat of passion commit toward some more affluent man in whose possession you should thereafter find it; to see it turn up again in another book-shop, its charms slightly faded, but yet mellowed by age, like those of your first love, met in later life—with this difference, however, that whereas you crave those of the book more than ever, you are generally quite satisfied with yourself for not having, through the greenness of youth, yielded untimely to those of the lady; to ask with assumed indifference the price, and learn with ill-dissembled joy that it is now within your means; to say you’ll take it; to place it beneath your arm, and pay for it (or more generally order it “charged”); to go forth from that room with feelings akin to those of Ulysses when he brought away the Palladium from Troy; to keep a watchful eye on the parcel in the railway coach on your way home, or to gloat over the treasures of its pages, and wonder if the other passengers have any suspicion of your good fortune; and finally to place the volume on your shelf, and thenceforth to call it your own—this is indeed a pleasure denied to the affluent, so keen as to be akin to pain, and only marred by the palling which always follows possession and the presentation of your book-seller’s account three months afterwards.
XVI.
THE ARRANGEMENT OF BOOKS.
here was a time when I loved to see my books arranged with a view to uniformity of height and harmony of color without respect to subjects. That time I regard as my vealy period