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!