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قراءة كتاب The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac

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‏اللغة: English
The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac

The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac

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دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
الصفحة رقم: 2

to know that the repose would be unbroken forevermore, since it came the glorious reward, my brother, of the friend who went gladly to it through his faith, having striven for it through his works?

ROSWELL MARTIN FIELD
Buena Park, December, 1895.




The Chapters in this Book

I   MY FIRST LOVE
II   THE BIRTH OF A NEW PASSION
III   THE LUXURY OF READING IN BED
IV   THE MANIA OF COLLECTING SEIZES ME
V   BALDNESS AND INTELLECTUALITY
VI   MY ROMANCE WITH FIAMMETTA
VII   THE DELIGHTS OF FENDER-FISHING
VIII   BALLADS AND THEIR MAKERS
IX   BOOKSELLERS AND PRINTERS, OLD AND NEW
X   WHEN FANCHONETTE BEWITCHED ME
XI   DIAGNOSIS OF THE BACILLUS LIBRORUM
XII   THE PLEASURES OF EXTRA-ILLUSTRATION
XIII   ON THE ODORS WHICH MY BOOKS EXHALE
XIV   ELZEVIRS AND DIVERS OTHER MATTERS
XV   A BOOK THAT BRINGS SOLACE AND CHEER
XVI   THE MALADY CALLED CATALOGITIS
XVII   THE NAPOLEONIC RENAISSANCE
XVIII   MY WORKSHOP AND OTHERS
XIX   OUR DEBT TO MONKISH MEN




I

MY FIRST LOVE

At this moment, when I am about to begin the most important undertaking of my life, I recall the sense of abhorrence with which I have at different times read the confessions of men famed for their prowess in the realm of love. These boastings have always shocked me, for I reverence love as the noblest of the passions, and it is impossible for me to conceive how one who has truly fallen victim to its benign influence can ever thereafter speak flippantly of it.

Yet there have been, and there still are, many who take a seeming delight in telling you how many conquests they have made, and they not infrequently have the bad taste to explain with wearisome prolixity the ways and the means whereby those conquests were wrought; as, forsooth, an unfeeling huntsman is forever boasting of the game he has slaughtered and is forever dilating upon the repulsive details of his butcheries.

I have always contended that one who is in love (and having once been in love is to be always in love) has, actually, no confession to make. Love is so guileless, so proper, so pure a passion as to involve none of those things which require or which admit of confession. He, therefore, who surmises that in this exposition of my affaires du coeur there is to be any betrayal of confidences, or any discussion, suggestion, or hint likely either to shame love or its votaries or to bring a blush to the cheek of the fastidious—he is grievously in error.

Nor am I going to boast; for I have made no conquests. I am in no sense a hero. For many, very many years I have walked in a pleasant garden, enjoying sweet odors and soothing spectacles; no predetermined itinerary has controlled my course; I have wandered whither I pleased, and very many times I have strayed so far into the tangle-wood and thickets as almost to have lost my way. And now it is my purpose to walk that pleasant garden once more, inviting you to bear me company and to share with me what satisfaction may accrue from an old man's return to old-time places and old-time loves.

As a child I was serious-minded. I cared little for those sports which usually excite the ardor of youth. To out-of-door games and exercises I had particular aversion. I was born in a southern latitude, but at the age of six years I went to live with my grandmother in New Hampshire, both my parents having fallen victims to the cholera. This change from the balmy temperature of the South to the rigors of the North was not agreeable to me, and I have always held it responsible for that delicate health which has attended me through life.

My grandmother encouraged my disinclination to play; she

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