Well, I am preaching. I would make a very arrogant parson, wouldn't I, laying down the law more often than the prophets from that safe citadel, a pulpit; but please have patience, for I want you to comfort me. The book really has made me unhappy. It is the kind of book you must go on reading,--angry, rebelling at every page, but never leaving it till you've reached the last word. Then you throw it as hard as you can into the furthest corner of the room, and shake yourself as a dog does, come up out of muddy water, and think to shake it off as easily as he does his mud; but you can't, because it has burned itself into your soul. I don't suppose you will understand what I feel. When a person possesses very few things those few things are terribly precious. See the mother of the only child, and compare her conduct when it coughs with the conduct of the mother of six, all coughing. See how one agonizes; and see with what serenity the other brings out her bottle of mixture and pours it calmly down her children's throats. Well, I'm like the first mother, and you are like the second. I expect you knew long ago, and have never minded knowing, the littlenesses of my gods; but I, I felt as unsettled while I read about them, as uneasy, as fidgety, as frightened, as a horse being driven by somebody cruel, which knows that every minute the lash will come down in some fresh place. Think: I knew nothing about Harriet Westbrook and her tragic life and death; I had never heard of Emilia Viviani; of Mary; of her whose name was Eliza, but who soared aloft in the sunshine of Shelley's admiration re-christened Portia, only presently to descend once more into the font and come out luridly as the Brown Demon. I never knew that Keats loved somebody called Brawne, and that she was unwilling, that she saw little in him, in Endymion the godlike, the divinely gifted, and that he was so persistent, so unworthily persistent, that the only word I can find that at all describes it is the German _zappelnd._ I had never heard of Jean Armour, of the headlong descent from being 'him who walked in glory and in joy, Following his plough along the mountain-side' to hopeless black years spent in public-houses at the beck and call--think of it, think of the divine spirit forced to it by its body--of any one who would pay for a drink. I never knew about Coleridge's opium, or that to Carlyle he appeared as a helpless Psyche overspun with Church of England cobwebs, as a weak, diffusive, weltering, ineffectual man. I never knew that Wordsworth's greeting was a languid handful of numb, unresponsive fingers, that his speech was prolix, thin, endlessly diluted. I never knew that Milton had three wives, that the first one ran away from him a month after their marriage, that he was hard to his daughters, so hard that they wished him dead. All these things I never knew; and for years I have been walking with glorious spirits, and have been fed on honey-dew, and drunk the milk of Paradise.