Anne found history, biography, philosophy, in sufficient quantities to last her for a lifetime.
She found curious memoirs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as books on magic, on alchemy, on all the strange and recondite studies which at various periods have exercised human thought. French literature was well represented, and impelled by interest and curiosity, Anne began to recall the little of the language she had learnt with her governess as a child. In this endeavour she unexpectedly found a ready teacher in Mrs. Burbage, who, educated in a French convent up to the time of her marriage, spoke the language fluently, and liked to speak it. Naturally gifted as a linguist, Anne learnt quickly, and often from choice, as time went on, the two women spoke French together, rather than English.
But it was to the English poets that Anne most often returned. Poetry suited her nature. It was the form of art which to her, most fully expressed the heights and depths, the beauty and the terror, the haunting melancholy, the fear, the inexpressible longings, the regrets, the sadness, the innocent delights of life, which, in all its complexity, she had begun to recognize through the world of books.
In life, men went down to the sea in ships, and did business in great waters. In life, there had been beautiful cities, in which a many-coloured crowd of citizens and soldiers, of artists and thinkers, had jostled and fought, and painted their thoughts in churches, and on palace walls; built them into soaring towers, and mighty cathedrals; woven them into immortal books, and lived them in schemes for the regeneration of the world. In life, as Anne had come to know it through her reading, there had been, and still were, fierce passions of love and hate, swaying men and women as the trees of a forest are swayed by a rushing wind. Passions which had given birth to the great stories of the world—the stories of Helen of Troy, of Abelard and Heloise, of Launcelot and Guinevere, of Romeo and Juliet. In life, running like a dark mysterious stream, among the simpler sensations, the more elemental passions of humanity, there had been strange terrors, haunting curiosities, insatiable longings for the unattainable, the unknowable, the unrealized—the desire of the moth for the star.
In life too, there had always existed the fresh unspoiled delight in Nature’s loveliness; in the charming natural embroidery of earth’s garment. Delight in the simple things out of which, as her favourite Herrick told her, he rejoiced to make his songs.
“I sing of Books, of Blossoms, Birds, and Bowers;
Of April, May, of June, and July flowers——”
In poetry, as in a mirror, Anne found the result of all her reading reflected and transfigured.
It summed up for her all that she had learnt from other books, of love and life, and hope of immortality.
She began with Chaucer, and found him sweet and fresh and hardy as the hawthorn blossom with which he powders his English meadows. She found in him all the simple and tender emotions which have existed in the heart of man since he became human. The love of Custance for her child delighted her.