Camerado, this is no book.
Who touches this, touches a man,
as Walt Whitman said of his own “Leaves of Grass.” They are not books. They are my friends. They are the splendid wayfarers I have met on my pilgrimage, and they are going on with me to the end. It was worth making the great adventure of life to find such company. Come revolutions and bereavements, come storm and tempest, come war or peace, gain or loss—these friends shall endure through all the vicissitudes of the journey. The friends of the flesh fall away, grow cold, are estranged, die, but these friends of the spirit are not touched with mortality. They were not born for death, no hungry generations tread them down, and with their immortal wisdom and laughter they give us the password to the eternal. You can no more exhaust them than you can exhaust the sunrise or the sunset, the joyous melody of Mozart or Scarlatti, the cool serenity of Velasquez or any other thing of beauty. They are a part of ourselves, and through their noble fellowship we are made freemen of the kingdoms of the mind—
... rich as the oozy bottom of the deep
In sunken wrack and sumless treasuries.
We do not say we have read these books: we say that we live in communion with these spirits.
I am not one who wants that communion to be too exclusive. When my old friend Peter Lane shook the dust of Fleet Street off his feet for ever and went down into the country he took Horace with him, and there he sits in his garden listening to an enchantment that never grows stale. It is a way Horace has. He takes men captive, as Falstaff took Bardolph captive. They cannot see the swallows gathering for their southern flight without thinking that they are going to breathe the air that Horace breathed, and asking them to carry some such message as John Marshall's:
Tell him, bird,
That if there be a Heaven where he is not,
One man at least seeks not admittance there.