and he called her 'the light of his declining years.' “I, meanwhile, lived my own life, such as it was, in silence. But it was not much of a life. It was not especially enjoyable, and it was altogether valueless. I produced nothing, accomplished nothing, was of no earthly use or benefit to anybody in the world--except a sort of convenient appendage to my wife. My favorite occupation--the only one that I cared any thing about--consisted in getting away by myself, and reading. My studio was my castle. Once inside it, with the door closed behind me, I was sure of not being disturbed. I, had forsworn my painting, as I fancied, for good and all. I had got utterly discouraged about it, had lost all zest in it, had vowed never to return to it. But up here in my studio I had a lot of books; and here for hours I would sit at the window, reading. My appetite for reading had recently become voracious, insatiable. I can't convey to you an idea of how dependent I was upon my books. They were the world in which I lived, moved, had my being. Away from them, I kept thinking about them, longing to get back to them. Not that I derived so much pleasure from them, but simply that I was unhappy unless I had them. They were to me, I suppose, in my dead-and-alive condition, something like what his drug is to an opium-eater--not so harmful, of course, but just as indispensable: a stimulant, which I could not do without. What the books were, doesn't matter. All sorts, from the latest sensational novel, or wildest exposition of spiritualism, up to Milton and the Bible. Yet, perhaps, I ought to give you the names of some of these books, for some of them produced a very deep and vivid impression upon me, and no doubt contributed more or less to my subsequent state of mind--helped, I mean, to bring it on. Well, I reread _Wilhelm Meister_; and I read for the first time Rousseau's _Confessions_, de Musset's _La Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle_, and Browning's _Inn Album_ and _The Ring and the Book_, besides many of his shorter poems. I mention these five particularly, because they were the ones that had really strong effects. They stirred me; pierced to my heart, and _hurt_ me; where other books merely interested or amused me. What I mean is, they appealed to my emotions, where other books merely appealed to my intelligence. Especially Browning. When I read Browning, the exhilaration was almost physical. It was like breathing some vivifying atmosphere, like drinking some powerful elixir. It made me glow and tingle through and through. It was as though the very inmost quick of my spirit had been touched, and made to throb and thrill. I had never supposed, I would never have believed, that any book could possibly have exerted such a profound and irresistible influence over the reader. My sensation was like an acute pain, that yet somehow verged toward--not pleasure--something deeper and better than pleasure. No music, not even Beethoven's or Wagner's, ever