I do not miss the balmy showers—
When books are dry I o’er them pore.
No need that I should take the trouble
To go abroad to walk or ride,
For I can sit at home and double
Quite up with pain from Akenside.”
The punster is such a derelict, such a scoffed-at sinner, that he may not be taken very seriously. Others than Browne however, have gravely reproached the devotee of the library for his alleged lack of affection for the outer world and its beauties. But the man who knows his Gilbert White of Selborne, and his John Burroughs of the Hudson, cannot be wholly outside the ranks of nature-lovers. We may be uttering a truism when we say that as we grow older we come closer to mother earth, and as we strike off more and more years from our calendar all the sweet things of earth are nearer to us and the trees, the flowers, the fields, and the wide expanse of hill, river and valley take on a new meaning. A few days ago I “took a drive”, if one may avail of that wretched colloquial form of words, to the hamlet of Bedminster, name suggestive of Axminster with its carpets and Westminster with its monuments, as far as the site of the old church which was ruthlessly and needlessly destroyed by iconoclasts within a year or two. It was a delightful autumn drive, the joy of it tempered by the abominable automobile which infests our New Jersey roads with its hoots and stinks and cloudy mantle of dust: and the bookish associations surely did not detract from the pleasure. There is a good picture of the church in Melick’s “Story of an Old Farm”, a book containing a mine of information about a neighborhood filled with associations of the Revolution. When you pass by the graveyard which still remains, you cannot help thinking of the young English officer, wounded and captured at Princeton, who died on the journey to Morristown and was buried in that field where his monument remains at this day. Melick’s book is disorderly and needs condensing and arranging, but let no one tell me that the natural beauty of the country is lessened for me because I study it. It is one of those most often to be found on the library table in company with Ludwig Schumacher’s pretty story of the “Somerset Hills”.
Many of us may recall from our own experience examples of the peace and contentment, the grace and the dignity of book-lovers who have understood how to combine their pleasure with the active affairs of business. I remember affectionately one who had passed beyond the years of what Elisha Williams called “God Almighty’s statute of limitations”, and who went to his rest only a few months ago. Elbridge Goss, of Melrose, was a type of a New England gentleman, a man of business as well as a lover of literature and of historical pursuits, fond of his books and autographs, all in a mild, modest and unobtrusive way; a gentle, admirable man, deserving of esteem and honor. There was no pretense about him; he had a delightful simplicity, a true catholicity of sentiment; there was no envy, hatred or malice in his composition. His “Life of Paul Revere” has long been known favorably, and his other works, chiefly historical, were no less meritorious. His was a full, useful and well rounded life, and although his name may not be recorded among the famous, it will not be forgotten.
Some weeks before his death, he wrote to me thus: “As to your copy of Coleridge, has it the expunged verse from ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’? The genial Longfellow once picked up his copy from his centre-table and read it to me as follows:
‘A gust of wind sterte up behind