them. The scholar’s mind, to use a similar
comparison, is furnished with shelves, like his library.
Each book knows its place in the brain as well as against
the wall or in the alcove. His consciousness
is doubled by the books which encircle him, as the
trees that surround a lake repeat themselves in its
unruffled waters. Men talk of the nerve that runs
to the pocket, but one who loves his books, and has
lived long with them, has a nervous filament which
runs from his sensorium to every one of them.
Or, if I may still let my fancy draw its pictures,
a scholar’s library is to him what a temple
is to the worshipper who frequents it. There is
the altar sacred to his holiest experiences.
There is the font where his new-born thought was baptized
and first had a name in his consciousness. There
is the monumental tablet of a dead belief, sacred
still in the memory of what it was while yet alive.
No visitor can read all this on the lettered backs
of the books that have gathered around the scholar,
but for him, from the Aldus on the lowest shelf to
the Elzevir on the highest, every volume has a language
which none but he can interpret. Be patient with
the book-collector who loves his companions too well
to let them go. Books are not buried with their
owners, and the veriest book-miser that ever lived
was probably doing far more for his successors than
his more liberal neighbor who despised his learned
or unlearned avarice. Let the fruit fall with
the leaves still clinging round it. Who would
have stripped Southey’s walls of the books that
filled them, when, his mind no longer capable of taking
in their meaning, he would still pat and fondle them
with the vague loving sense of what they had once been
to him,—to him, the great scholar, now
like a little child among his playthings?
We need in this country not only the scholar, but
the virtuoso, who hoards the treasures which he loves,
it may be chiefly for their rarity and because others
who know more than he does of their value set a high
price upon them. As the wine of old vintages is
gently decanted out of its cobwebbed bottles with
their rotten corks into clean new receptacles, so
the wealth of the New World is quietly emptying many
of the libraries and galleries of the Old World into
its newly formed collections and newly raised edifices.
And this process must go on in an accelerating ratio.
No Englishman will be offended if I say that before
the New Zealander takes his stand on a broken arch
of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s
in the midst of a vast solitude, the treasures of the
British Museum will have found a new shelter in the
halls of New York or Boston. No Catholic will
think hardly of my saying that before the Coliseum
falls, and with it the imperial city, whose doom prophecy
has linked with that of the almost eternal amphitheatre,
the marbles, the bronzes, the paintings, the manuscripts
of the Vatican will have left the shores of the Tiber
for those of the Potomac, the Hudson, the Mississippi,
or the Sacramento. And what a delight in the pursuit
of the rarities which the eager book-hunter follows
with the scent of a beagle!