There were many favourite volumes out of which the spirit seemed to vanish at once and for ever.
We endeavoured unsuccessfully to revive by our own efforts the amusement which we had been taught to find in the faded flatteries and absurdities that passed between Miss Seward and her admirers, or to retrace for ourselves the complications of female jealousy which played round Cowper's tea-table at Olney.

We awoke to the discovery that the charm was not in us, nor altogether in the books themselves.

The talisman, which endowed with life and meaning all that it touched, had passed away from among us, leaving recollections which are our most cherished, as they must ever be our proudest, possession.
Macaulay thought it probable that he could re-write Sir Charles Grandison from memory, and certainly he might have done so with his sister's help.

But his intimate acquaintance with a work was no proof of its merit.

"There was a certain prolific author," says Lady Trevelyan, "named Mrs.Meeke, whose romances he all but knew by heart; though he quite agreed in my criticism that they were one just like another, turning on the fortunes of some young man in a very low rank of life who eventually proves to be the son of a Duke.