In that great maze of books I sighed, and said,—
'It is a grave-yard, and each tome a tomb;
Shrouded in hempen rags, behold the dead,
Coffined and ranged in crypts of dismal gloom,—
Food for the worm and redolent of mould,
Traced with brief epitaph in tarnished gold.'—
Ah, golden-lettered hope!—Ah, dolorous doom!
Yet, mid the common death, when all is cold,
And mildewed pride in desolation dwells,
A few great Immortalities of old
Stand brightly forth;—not tombs but living shrines,
Where from high saint or martyr virtue wells,
Which on the living yet works miracles,
Spreading a relic wealth, richer than golden mines.
THE SOUL'S VIATICUM
Books looked on as to their readers or authors do at the very first mention challenge pre-eminence above the world's admired fine things. Books are the glass of council to dress ourselves by. They are life's best business: vocation to these hath more emolument coming in than all the other busy terms of life. They are fee-less councillors, no delaying patrons, of easy access, and kind expedition, never sending away empty any client or petitioner. They are for company the best friends; in doubts, counsellors; in damp, comforters; Time's perspective; the home traveller's ship, or horse, the busy man's best recreation; the opiate of idle weariness; the mind's best ordinary; Nature's garden and seed-plot of Immortality. Time spent, needlessly, from them is consumed, but with them twice gained. Time captivated and snatched from thee by incursions of business, thefts of visitants, or by thy own carelessness lost, is by these redeemed in life; they are the soul's viaticum; and against death its cordial. In a true verdict, no such treasure as a library.—B. Whitelocke.
NOTES
Page 1. Lamb.—The extracts from the works of Charles Lamb are from the Oxford edition, edited by T. Hutchinson. Not content with 'grace' before Milton and Shakespeare, Lamb suggests elsewhere (see p. [130]) a solemn service.
P. 1. Petrarch.—When the love-sick Petrarch retired from Avignon to Vaucluse, in 1338, his only companions were his books; for his friends rarely visited him, alleging that his mode of life was unnatural. Petrarch replied as in the text, which is quoted from Mrs. S. Dodson's Life. On another occasion, however, Petrarch wrote: 'Many have found the multitude of their books a hindrance to learning, and abundance has bred want, as sometimes happens. But if the many books are at hand, they are not to be cast aside, but to be gleaned, and the best used; and care should be taken that those which might have proved seasonable auxiliaries do not become hindrances out of season.' See Leigh Hunt's reference on page [20] to Petrarch as 'the god of the Bibliomaniacs'.
P. 2. Waller.—Carlyle, aged 22, wrote to Robert Mitchell that, lacking society, he found 'books are a ready and effectual resource'. 'It is lawful,' he added, 'for the solitary wight to express the love he feels for those companions so steadfast and unpresuming—that go or come without reluctance, and that, when his fellow-animals are proud or stupid or peevish, are ever ready to cheer the languor of his soul, and gild the barrenness of life with the treasures of bygone times.'
Walter Pater, in Appreciations: Style, observes that 'different classes of persons, at different times, make, of course, very various demands upon literature. Still, scholars, I suppose, and not only scholars but all disinterested lovers of books, will always look to it, as to all other fine art, for a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from a certain vulgarity in the actual world. A perfect poem like Lycidas, a perfect fiction like Esmond, the perfect handling of a theory like Newman's Idea of a University, has for them something of the uses of a religious "retreat".'
P. 4. Chesterfield.—Folio, a book whose sheets are folded into two leaves; quarto, sheets folded into four leaves, abbreviated into 4to; octavo, sheets folded into eight leaves, 8vo; duodecimo, sheets folded into twelve leaves, 12mo. The first three words come to us from the Italian, through the French; the last is from the Latin duodecim.