The Solitary Summer | Page 9

of love that give such substantial and
unfailing returns as books and a garden. And how easy it would have
been to come into the world without this, and possessed instead of an
all-consuming passion, say, for hats, perpetually raging round my
empty soul! I feel I owe my forefathers a debt of gratitude, for I
suppose the explanation is that they too did not care for hats. In the
centre of my library there is a wooden pillar propping up the ceiling,

and preventing it, so I am told, from tumbling about our ears; and
round this pillar, from floor to ceiling, I have had shelves fixed, and on
these shelves are all the books that I have read again and again, and
hope to read many times more--all the books, that is, that I love quite
the best. In the bookcases round the walls are many that I love, but here
in the centre of the room, and easiest to get at, are those I love the
_best_--the very elect among my favourites. They change from time to
time as I get older, and with years some that are in the bookcases come
here, and some that are here go into the bookcases, and some again are
removed altogether, and are placed on certain shelves in the
drawing-room which are reserved for those that have been weighed in
the balance and found wanting, and from whence they seldom, if ever,
return. Carlyle used to be among the elect. That was years ago, when
my hair was very long, and my skirts very short, and I sat in the
paternal groves with Sartor Resartus, and felt full of wisdom and
_Weltschmerz_; and even after I was married, when we lived in town,
and the noise of his thunderings was almost drowned by the rattle of
droschkies over the stones in the street below, he still shone forth a
bright, particular star. Now, whether it is age creeping upon me, or
whether it is that the country is very still and sound carries, or whether
my ears have grown sensitive, I know not; but the moment I open him
there rushes out such a clatter of denunciation, and vehemence, and
wrath, that I am completely deafened; and as I easily get bewildered,
and love peace, and my chief aim is to follow the apostle's advice and
study to be quiet, he has been degraded from his high position round
the pillar and has gone into retirement against the wall, where the
accident of alphabet causes him to rest in the soothing society of one
Carina, a harmless gentleman, whose book on the Bagni di Lucca is on
his left, and a Frenchman of the name of Charlemagne, whose soporific
comedy written at the beginning of the century and called _Le
Testament de l'Oncle_, ou Les Lunettes Cassees, is next to him on his
right. Two works of his still remain, however, among the elect, though
differing in glory--his Frederick the Great, fascinating for obvious
reasons to the patriotic German mind, and his Life of Sterling, a quiet
book on the whole, a record of an uneventful life, in which the natural
positions of subject and biographer are reversed, the man of genius
writing the life of the unimportant friend, and the fact that the friend

was exceedingly lovable in no way lessening one's discomfort in the
face of such an anomaly. Carlyle stands on an eminence altogether
removed from Sterling, who stands, indeed, on no eminence at all,
unless it be an eminence, that (happily) crowded bit of ground, where
the bright and courageous and lovable stand together. We Germans
have all heard of Carlyle, and many of us have read him with due
amazement, our admiration often interrupted by groans at the
difficulties his style places in the candid foreigner's path; but without
Carlyle which of us would ever have heard of Sterling? And even in
this comparatively placid book mines of the accustomed vehemence are
sprung on the shrinking reader. To the prosaic German, nourished on a
literature free from thunderings and any marked acuteness of
enthusiasm, Carlyle is an altogether astonishing phenomenon.
And here I feel constrained to inquire sternly who I am that I should
talk in this unbecoming manner of Carlyle? To which I reply that I am
only a humble German seeking after peace, devoid of the least real
desire to criticise anybody, and merely anxious to get out of the way of
geniuses when they make too much noise. All I want is to read quietly
the books that I at present prefer. Carlyle is shut up now and therefore
silent on his comfortable shelf; yet who knows but what in my old age,
when I begin to feel really young, I may not once