Romanticism Fails Again!

When I was a boy I found a book in a cave.
It was up above Ullswater.
I clambered down over huge boulders
And groped my way along a dim passage
Then in complete darkness
By touch alone I found it
My hand met something clammy and damp
But I knew it was a book
I could feel the pages.

I took it up.
It dripped as I bore it to the light
- not without trepidation
since had this been an H. P. Lovecraft story
I would have found
A tractatus of occult knowledge
Of nameless secrets from beyond the grave
Ancient, arcane and damned
Or, if written by M. R. James,
I would look back to see
A figure, dark, but oddly indistinct,
Following me from the cave.
This was how horror stories began!
I steeled myself for the supernatural
As I opened the book.

But it proved to be an electricians' manual
Scarcely occult even to the least technically-minded
and I thought, well,
how it came to be in the cave
so far from any power-source
might make a story in itself
but it wouldn't be the same!
Why bother?

As for the book
I can't remember what I did with it.