But I shan’t be dull. I have brought a few books with me, and I have a pretty fair library here. Yesterday, I opened all the bookcases, and was a long while rummaging about among the musty books. I found many curious things I had not noticed before: _Candide_, in a manuscript translation of somewhere about 1770; newspapers and magazines of the same period; _the Triumphant Chameleon_ (that is, Mirabeau), _le Paysan Perverti_, etc. I came across children’s books, my own, and my father’s, and my grandmother’s, and even, fancy, my great grandmother’s; in one dilapidated French grammar in a particoloured binding, was written in fat letters: ‘Ce livre appartient à Mlle Eudoxie de Lavrine,’ and it was dated 1741. I saw books I had brought at different times from abroad, among others, Goethe’s _Faust_. You’re not aware, perhaps, that there was a time when I knew _Faust_ by heart (the first part, of course) word for word; I was never tired of reading it.… But other days, other dreams, and for the last nine years, it has so happened, that I have scarcely had a Goethe in my hand. It was with an indescribable emotion that I saw the little book I knew so well, again (a poor edition of 1828). I brought it away with me, lay down on the bed, and began to read. How all that splendid first scene affected me! The entrance of the Spirit of the Earth, the words, you remember--‘on the tide of life, in the whirl of creation,’ stirred a long unfamiliar tremor and shiver of ecstasy. I recalled everything: Berlin, and student days, and Fräulein Clara Stick, and Zeidelmann in the _rôle_ of Mephistopheles, and the music of Radzivil, and all and everything.… It was a long while before I could get to sleep: my youth rose up and stood before me like a phantom; it ran like fire, like poison through my veins, my heart leaped and would not be still, something plucked at its chords, and yearnings began surging up.… You see what fantasies your friend gives himself up to, at almost forty, when he sits in solitude in his solitary little house! What if any one could have peeped at me! Well, what? I shouldn’t have been a bit ashamed of myself. To be ashamed is a sign of youth, too; and I have begun (do you know how?) to notice that I’m getting old. I’ll tell you how. I try in these days to make as much as I can of my happy sensations, and to make little of my sad ones, and in the days of my youth I did just the opposite. At times, one used to carry about one’s melancholy as if it were a treasure, and be ashamed of a cheerful mood.… But for all that, it strikes me, that in spite of all my experience of life, there is something in the world, friend Horatio, which I have not experienced, and that ‘something’ almost the most important.