Who so loves believes the impossible. - Elizabeth Barrett Browning

A cheerful genius suits the times, / And all true poets laugh unquenchably / Like Shakespeare and the gods.

Books, books, books!
I had found the secret of a garret room
Piled high with cases in my father’s name;
Piled high, packed large, — where, creeping in and out
Among the giant fossils of my past,
Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs
Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there
At this or that box, pulling through the gap,
In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy,
The first book first. And how I felt it beat
Under my pillow, in the morning’s dark,
An hour before the sun would let me read!
My books!

And then people ask me what I mean in [words torn out]. I hope you were among the six who understood or half understood my ‘Poet’s Vow’ — that is, if you read it at all. Uncle Hedley made a long pause at the first part. But I have been reading, too, Sheridan Knowles’s play of the ‘Wreckers.’ It is full of passion and pathos, and made me shed a great many tears.