MAN'S PREROGATIVE
Books are a part of man's prerogative,
In formal ink they thoughts and voices hold,
That we to them our solitude may give,
And make time present travel that of old.
Our life fame pieceth longer at the end,
And books it farther backward do extend.
Sir T. Overbury. The Wife.
TO HIS BOOKS
Bright books: the perspectives to our weak sights,
The clear projections of discerning lights,
Burning and shining thoughts, man's posthume day,
The track of fled souls and their Milky Way,
The dead alive and busy, the still voice
Of enlarged spirits, kind Heaven's white decoys!
Who lives with you, lives like those knowing flowers,
Which in commerce with light spend all their hours;
Which shut to clouds, and shadows nicely shun,
But with glad haste unveil to kiss the Sun.
Beneath you, all is dark, and a dead night,
Which whoso lives in, wants both health and sight.
By sucking you the wise, like bees, do grow
Healing and rich, though this they do most slow,
Because most choicely; for as great a store
Have we of books as bees of herbs, or more;
And the great task to try, then know, the good,
To discern weeds, and judge of wholesome food,
Is a rare scant performance: for man dies
Oft ere 'tis done, while the bee feeds and flies.
But you were all choice flowers; all set and dressed
By old sage florists, who well knew the best;
And I amidst you all am turned a weed!
Not wanting knowledge, but for want of heed.
Then thank thyself, wild fool, that wouldst not be
Content to know—what was too much for thee.
H. Vaughan.
THE LEGACIES OF GENIUS
Quod nec Iovis ira, nec ignis,
Nec poterit ferrum, nec edax abolere vetustas.—Ovid.
Aristotle tells us, that the world is a copy or transcript of those ideas which are in the mind of the first Being, and that those ideas which are in the mind of man are a transcript of the world. To this we may add, that words are the transcript of those ideas which are in the mind of man, and that writing or printing is the transcript of words. As the Supreme Being has expressed, and as it were printed, his ideas in the creation, men express their ideas in books, which, by this great invention of these latter ages, may last as long as the sun and moon, and perish only in the general wreck of nature. Thus Cowley, in his poem on the Resurrection, mentioning the destruction of the universe, has these admirable lines:
Now all the wide extended sky,
And all the harmonious worlds on high
And Virgil's sacred work shall die.