"I am battling with the Spaniards this winter, but I have not the heart for it as I had for the Italians. _I doubt whether there are many valuable things that the key of knowledge will unlock in that language._" Another month, however, found him filled with the joy of one who has at last laid his hand upon that for which he has long been groping. He expressed this feeling very vividly in a letter quoted by Mr. Ticknor:-- "Did you never, in learning a language, after groping about in the dark for a long while, suddenly seem to turn an angle where the light breaks upon you all at once? The knack seems to have come to me within the last fortnight in the same manner as the art of swimming comes to those who have been splashing about for months in the water in vain." Spanish literature exercised upon his mind a peculiar charm, and he boldly dashed into the writing of Spanish even from the first. Ticknor's well-stored library supplied him with an abundance of books, and his own comments upon the Castilian authors in whom he revelled were now written not in English but in Spanish--naturally the Spanish of a beginner, yet with a feeling for idiom which greatly surprised Ticknor. Even in after years, Prescott never acquired a faultless Spanish diction; but he wrote with clearness and fluency, so that his Spanish was very individual, and, in this respect, not unlike the Latin of Politian or of Milton. Up to this time Prescott had been cultivating his mind and storing it with knowledge without having formed any clear conception of what he was to do with his intellectual accumulations. At first, when he formed a plan of systematic study, his object had been only the modest one of "general discipline," as he expressed it. As he went on, however, he seems to have had an instinctive feeling that even without intention he was moving toward a definite goal. Just what this was he did not know, but none the less he was not without faith that it would ultimately be revealed to him. Looking back over all the memoranda that he has left behind, it is easy now to see that his drift had always been toward historical investigation. His boyish tastes, already described, declared his interest in the lives of men of action. His maturer preferences pointed in the same direction. It has heretofore been noted that, in 1821, when he marked out for himself his first formal plan of study, he included "the compendious history of North America" as one of the subjects. While reading French he had dwelt especially upon the chroniclers and historians from Froissart down. In Spanish he had been greatly attracted by Mariana's _Historia de España_, which is still one of the Castilian classics; and this work had led him to the perusal of Mably's acute and philosophical _Étude de l'Histoire_. He himself long afterward explained that still earlier than this he had been strongly