For now first she fell into the company of books--
old-fashioned ones no doubt, but perhaps even therefore the more fit for
her, who was an old-fashioned, gentle, ignorant, thoughtful child. Among
the rest in the farmhouse, she came upon the two volumes of a book called
The Preceptor, which contained various treatises laying down "the first
principles of Polite Learning:" these drew her eager attention; and with
one or other of the not very handy volumes in her hand, she would steal out
of sight of the farm, and lapt in the solitude of the moor, would sit and
read until at last the light could reveal not a word more. Even the
Geometry she found in them attracted her not a little; the Rhetoric and
Poetry drew her yet more; but most of all, the Natural History, with its
engravings of beasts and birds, poor as they were, delighted her; and from
these antiquated repertories she gathered much, and chiefly that most
valuable knowledge, some acquaintance with her own ignorance. There also,
in a garret over the kitchen, she found an English translation of
Klopstock's Messiah, a poem which, in the middle of the last and in the
present century, caused a great excitement in Germany, and did not a
little, I believe, for the development of religious feeling in that
country, where the slow-subsiding ripple of its commotion is possibly not
altogether unfelt even at the present day.
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