Left thus to myself in some degree, I unclosed the leaves of the
bookcase, and surveyed its grim array of "classics"--all new and
unmarked by any name, or sign of having been read--and from them I
selected a few worthies, through whose pages I delved drearily and
industriously, and most unprofitably it must be confessed. The only
living sensations I received from the contents of that bookcase were, I
am ashamed to acknowledge, from a few odd volumes of memoirs, and
collections of travels that I had happened to find stowed away behind
the others. The rest seemed sermons from the stars.
Captain Cook's voyages and Le Vaillant's descriptions did stir me very
slightly with their strong reality, and make me for a few hours forget
myself and my captivity; but all the rest prated at me like parrots,
from stately, pragmatical Johnson down to sentimental, maudlin Sterne.
I found them intolerable in the mood in which I was, nothing so
exhausting as the abstract! and closed the book desperately to resume my
diary, neglected since the awful events of Beauseincourt, but always to
me a resource in time of trouble and of solitude. Of pens, ink, paper,
there was no lack, and I wrote one day, Penelope-wise, what I destroyed
the next. Yet this very "jotting down" impressed upon my brain the few
incidents of my prison-house recorded here, that might otherwise have
faded from my memory in the twilight of monotony.
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