'At last!'
Wherever a boy finds a quiet place for reading--an attic lumbered with
rubbish, a bedroom cold and empty, even a corner on the stairs--he
makes of that place a theatre, in which he is the sole audience.
Before his eyes--to him alone--the drama is played, with scenery
complete and costume correct, by such actors as never yet played upon
any other stage, so natural, so lifelike--nay, so godlike, and for
that very reason so lifelike.
This boy sat where he could--in a crowded household it is not always
possible to get a quiet corner; wherever he sat, this stage rose up
before him and the play went on. He saw upon that stage all these
things of which I have spoken, and more. He saw the fight at Nombre de
Dios, the capture of the rich galleon, the sacking of Maracaibo. I do
not know whether other boys of that time were reading the American
authors with such avidity, or whether it was by some chance that these
books were thrown in his way. Washington Irving, Fenimore Cooper,
Prescott, Emerson (in parts), Longfellow, Whittier, Bryant, Edgar
Allan Poe, Lowell, Holmes, not to mention Thoreau, Herman Melville,
Dana, certain religious novelists and many others whose names I do not
recall, formed a tolerably large field of American reading for an
English boy--without prejudice, be it understood, to the writers of
his own country.
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