What a blessing it is to love books.  Everybody must love something, and I know of no objects of love that give such substantial and unfailing returns as books and a garden.  And how easy it would have been to come into the world without this, and possessed instead of an all-consuming passion, say, for hats, perpetually raging round my empty soul!  I feel I owe my forefathers a debt of gratitude, for I suppose the explanation is that they too did not care for hats.  In the centre of my library there is a wooden pillar propping up the ceiling, and preventing it, so I am told, from tumbling about our ears; and round this pillar, from floor to ceiling, I have had shelves fixed, and on these shelves are all the books that I have read again and again, and hope to read many times more–all the books, that is, that I love quite the best.  In the bookcases round the walls are many that I love, but here in the centre of the room, and easiest to get at, are those I love the best–the very elect among my favourites.

What a medley of books there is round my pillar!  Here is Jane Austen leaning against Heine–what would she have said to that, I wonder?–with Miss Mitford and Cranford to keep her in countenance on the other side.  Here is my Goethe, one of many editions I have of him, the one that has made the acquaintence of the ice-house and the poppies.  Here are Ruskin, Lubhock, White’s Selborne, Izaak Walton, Drummond, Herbert Spencer (only as much of him as I hope I understand and am afraid I do not), Walter Pater, Matthew Arnold, Thoreau, Lewis Carroll, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Hawthorne, Wuthering Heights, Lamb’s Essays, Johnson’s Lives, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne, Gibbon, the immortal Pepys, the egregious Boswell, various American children’s book that I loved as a child and read and love to this day; various French children’s books, loved for the same reason; whole rows of German children’s books, on which I was brought up, with their charming woodcuts of quaint little children in laced bodices, and good housemothers cutting bread and butter, and descriptions of the atmosphere of fearful innocence and pure religion and swift judgments and rewards in which they lived, and how the Finger Gottes was impressed on everything that happened to them; all the poets; most of the dramatists; and, I verily believe, every gardening book and book about gardens that has been published of late years.

No one says it quite like Elizabeth, do they?