Do those of you who are musicians remember when you first apprehended the relations between the tonic and the dominant chords?  I have heard a small boy at a piano play these alternately for hours.  Such a performance is torture to you and me; it is the sweetest harmony to him, because it is new and has just come into his sphere of creative power.  When he is thoroughly satisfied that he can produce the effect at will, he abandons it for something newer and a little higher.  The boy who discovers, without being told, that the dominant chord, followed by the tonic, produces a certain musical effect, is doing something that for him is on a par with Wagner’s searching the piano for those marvellous effects of his that are often beyond technical explanation.

The child who reads what you think is a trivial book, re-reads it, and reads others like it, is doing this same thing in the domain of literature—­he is following the natural course that will bring him out at the top after a while.

When we distribute books, then, we distribute ideas, not only actual, but potential.  A book has in it not only the ideas that lie on its surface, but millions of others that are tied to these by invisible chords, of which we have touched on but a few—­the invisible ancestral memories of centuries ago, the foretastes of future thoughts in our older selves and our posterity of centuries hence.  When we think of it, it is hard to realize that a book has not a soul.

Gerald Stanley Lee, in his latest book, a collection of essays on millionaires, sneers at the efforts of the rich mill owners to improve their employees by means of libraries.  Life in a modern mill, he thinks, is so mechanical as to dull all the higher faculties.  “Andrew Carnegie,” he says (and he apparently uses the name merely as that of a type), “has been taking men’s souls away and giving them paper books.”

Now the mills may be soul-deadening—­possibly they are, though it is hard to benumb a soul—­but I will venture to say that for every soul that Mr. Carnegie, or anyone else, has taken away, he has created, awakened and stimulated a thousand by contact with that almost soul—­that near-soul—­that resides in books.  Mr. Lee’s books may be merely paper; mine have paper and ink only for their outer garb; their inner warp and woof is of the texture of spirit.

This is why I rejoice when a new library is opened.  I thank God for its generous donor.  I clasp hands with the far-reaching municipality that accepts and supports it.  I wish good luck to the librarians who are to care for it and give it dynamic force; I congratulate the public whose privilege it is to use it and to profit by it.

SIMON NEWCOMB:  AMERICA’S FOREMOST ASTRONOMER

Among those in all parts of the world whose good opinion is worth having, Simon Newcomb was one of the best known of America’s great men.  Astronomer, mathematician, economist, novelist, he had well-nigh boxed the compass of human knowledge, attaining eminence such as is given to few to reach, at more than one of its points.  His fame was of the far-reaching kind,—­penetrating to remote regions, while that of some others has only created a noisy disturbance within a narrow radius.