A Queen’s Favourite Book.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLII, Issue 3, 20 January 1909, Page 46

A Queen’s Favourite Book.

“tarmen Slyva,” the Queen of Roumania (a famous authoress), writes of her reading hobbies in the course of an article in the “ Pall Mall Magazine.” “ Bound differently so that my shortsighted eyes can find them from afar, there they stand, seeming never silent— Macaulay and Mahon, Shakespeare and Carlyle, Walter Scott and Chambers’s ‘English Literature’; and these I had as a girl of thirteen, ami they have wandered with me all over Europe; still to have the place of honour here in my mountain home. From the windows I look into the heart of the forest: the trees seem almost walking into the room, iand between them is a- glimpse of the sky where 1 see the sun rise, or the moon throw the castle’s fantastic shadow on the trees. .lust now they stand out black and dark against the dawn, ami the first carol of the first bird accompanies my thoughts, as they wander though my bookshelves trying to recall which 1 love best, and when they were most dear. Tin* time of life at which one reads is very essentia! to the appreciation of books. 1 knew Burns by heart when I could not get Racine into my head. “ Only the modern French poets, especially my adored Lccorntc de Lisle, write the kind of verse my ear can love. When I was thirteen I recited the ‘ Prisoner of (hiilon/ the ‘Odes of Horace,’ and * In Catilinam ’ in Latin, and know them still; ami tried to read ‘Manfred’ : when I was forty I couldn’t. I thought it unbearable, lamentable stuff ! 1 read Goethe’s ‘Sorrows of \\ either ’ at twentyand laughed till 1 cried over the book, that moved former generations not only to floods of tears but even to suicide. I remember whim 1 was quite a little girl seeing my mother and her la- . dpw with (‘yes swollen with crying over * I’ncle Tom’s Cabin,’ and when after 1 was forty .1 read it, I wondered what they had cried for. I thought the ‘ Luck <>f Roaring Camp’ and Baby Sylvester’ -o much more touching. 1 could have cried over that ! 11* yon have not re-read a hook for over twenty years, never presume to express your foldings about it, at least without adding the date at which yon made its acquaintance. The eternal book- Shakespeare and Pickens for example are excepted; they have no time, ami give no new impressions. Whenever I am tired I go back to Dickens, and i< read him with the same deep emotion and the same intense interest.*’ “ I never could abide history, and always preferred any other science, and above all. fiction. I hate published correspondence, and dislike memoirs. letters ought never to be published—it is always a horrible indiscretion —ami memoirs ought scarcely to be written, an they are mostly untrue.”