Just when this passion began in me I should not be able to say; but
probably it was with my first reading of _Don Quixote_ in the later
eighteen-forties. I would then have been ten or twelve years old; and,
of course, I read that incomparable romance, not only greatest, but sole
of its kind, in English. The purpose of some time reading it in Spanish
and then the purpose of some time writing the author's life grew in me
with my growing years so strongly that, though I have never yet done
either and probably never shall, I should not despair of doing both if I
lived to be a hundred. In the mean time my wandering steps had early
chanced upon a Spanish grammar, and I had begun those inquiries in it
which were based upon a total ignorance of English accidence. I do not
remember how I felt my way from it to such reading of the language as
has endeared Spanish literature to me. It embraced something of
everything: literary and political history, drama, poetry, fiction; but
it never condescended to the exigencies of common parlance. These
exigencies did not exist for me in my dreams of seeing Spain which were
not really expectations. It was not until half a century later, when my
longing became a hope and then a purpose, that I foreboded the need of
practicable Spanish.
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