But even more than in his professional triumphs, his increasing store of wealth, his animal health and strength, his patriotism, or his love for the works of God in nature, Forrest found during the last twenty years of his life a never-failing resource for his mind and heart in the treasures of literature. He gathered a library of between ten and fifteen thousand volumes, well selected, carefully arranged and catalogued, for the accommodation of which he set apart the finest apartment in his house, a lofty and spacious room running the whole length of the edifice. In this bright and cheerful room all the conveniences of use and comfort were collected. Beside his desk, where from his chair he could lay his hand on it, superbly bound in purple velvet, on a stand made expressly for it, rested his rare copy of the original folio edition of Shakspeare, valued at two thousand dollars. Around him, invitingly disposed, were the standard works of the historians, the biographers, the poets, and especially the dramatists and their commentators. Here he added to his shelved treasures many of the best new works as they appeared, keeping himself somewhat abreast with the fresh literature of the times in books like Motley’s Netherlands, Grimm’s Life of Michael Angelo, and Hawkins’s Life of Kean, which he read with a generous relish. Here, ensconced in an arm-chair by the window, or lolling on a lounge in the centre of the library, or seated at his study-table, he passed nearly all the leisure time of his lonely later years. Here he would occupy himself for many an hour of day and night,—hours that flew swiftly, laden with stingless enjoyment,— passing from volume to volume sipping the hived sweetnesses of the paradisal field of literature. Here, alone and quiet in the peopled solitude of books, he loved to read aloud by the hour together, listening to himself as if some one else were reading to him,—the perfection of his breathing and the ease of his articulation being such that the labor of utterance took nothing from the interest of the subject, while the rich music and accurate inflections of his voice added much. Here his not numerous intimates, with occasional callers from abroad,—Rees, Forney, and his particular favorite, Daniel Dougherty,—would often drop in, ever sure of an honest welcome and genial fellowship, and speed the time with wit and humor, reminiscence, anecdote, argument, joke, and repartee, vainly seeking to beguile him into that more general society which would have gladly welcomed what he could so richly give and take. An extract from a letter of his written in June, 1870, is of interest in this connection: