Very rarely will he squarely push the logic of a fact
     To its ultimate conclusion in unmitigated act.

In this instance, I think, Reason is going to win.  I feel the whole current of the world setting in that direction.

It’s quaint to think of old Woodrow, a kind of Cromwell-Wordsworth, going over to do his bit among the diplomatic shell-craters.  What I’m waiting for is the day when he’ll get back into private life and write a book about it.  There’s a job, if you like, for a man who might reasonably be supposed to be pretty tired in body and soul!  When that book comes out I’ll spend the rest of my life in selling it.  I ask nothing better!  Speaking of Wordsworth, I’ve often wondered whether Woodrow hasn’t got some poems concealed somewhere among his papers!  I’ve always imagined that he may have written poems on the sly.  And by the way, you needn’t make fun of me for being so devoted to George Herbert.  Do you realize that two of the most familiar quotations in our language come from his pen, viz.: 

     Wouldst thou both eat thy cake, and have it?

and

     Dare to be true:  nothing can need a ly;
     A fault, which needs it most, grows two thereby.

Forgive this tedious sermon!  My mind has been so tumbled up and down this autumn that I am in a queer state of mingled melancholy and exaltation.  You know how much I live in and for books.  Well, I have a curious feeling, a kind of premonition that there are great books coming out of this welter of human hopes and anguishes, perhaps A book in which the tempest-shaken soul of the race will speak out as it never has before.  The Bible, you know, is rather a disappointment:  it has never done for humanity what it should have done.  I wonder why?  Walt Whitman is going to do a great deal, but he is not quite what I mean.  There is something coming—­I don’t know just what!  I thank God I am a bookseller, trafficking in the dreams and beauties and curiosities of humanity rather than some mere huckster of merchandise.  But how helpless we all are when we try to tell what goes on within us!  I found this in one of Lafcadio Hearn’s letters the other day—­I marked the passage for you—­

Baudelaire has a touching poem about an albatross, which you would like—­describing the poet’s soul superb in its own free azure—­but helpless, insulted, ugly, clumsy when striving to walk on common earth—­ or rather, on a deck, where sailors torment it with tobacco pipes, etc.

You can imagine what evenings I have here among my shelves, now the long dark nights are come!  Of course until ten o’clock, when I shut up shop, I am constantly interrupted—­as I have been during this letter, once to sell a copy of Helen’s Babies and once to sell The Ballad of Reading Gaol, so you can see how varied are my clients’ tastes!  But later on, after we have had our evening cocoa and Helen has gone to bed, I prowl about the place,