Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/39

 least to read it before I was sixteen. The task had its discouragements, not lightened, even in after years, when I read in their famous and delightful correspondence Carlyle's advice to Emerson to possess himself of the German language; it could be done, wrote Carlyle, in six weeks! But, like Emerson, I was afflicted with the postponement and debility of the blond constitution, and I observed that, except in great moments of unappreciated sacrifice, my grandfather preferred to read his German himself rather than to listen to my renditions.

I have spoken of the house as the old house, and I do that as viewing it from the point of disadvantage of the years that have gone since it grew out of that haze and mist and darkness of early recollections into a place that was ablaze with light at evening and full of the constant wonder and delight of the company of a large family. It was, indeed, an old house then, with a high-gabled roof at one wing, that made an attic which we called, with a sense of its mystery, the "dark room,"—a room, however, not so dark that I could not see to read the old bound volumes of a newspaper an uncle had once edited;—one could lie under the little gable windows and pore over the immense quartos, or more than quartos, and exercise the imagination by reading of some long dead event, and, with a great effort, project one's self back to that time, and pretend to read with none other than its contemporary impressions.

The cellar of the house was not so interesting, though it was mysterious, and far more terrifying.