When we would show attention to strangers, it has been a Madison custom to take them into our cemetery. That grave yard is well worth showing. But in time to come I trust we shall rather exhibit our Libraries, and say; “These are our jewels.” Not tombs, but living shrines that on the living still work miracles,—the shrines where all the relics of the saints full of true virtue are preserved, where the dead live and the dumb speak—the dead sceptered sovereigns who still rule our spirits from their urns. This sun of our intellectual worlds is
“Made porous to receive
And drink the liquid light, firm to retain
Its gathered beams, great palace now of light,
Hither as to a fountain countless stars
Repairing in their golden urns draw light.”
Let us rejoice in it all glorious within, even as our Capitol and University parks are without.
A library,—the assembled souls of all men deem most wise, the only men who speak loud enough for posterity to hear;—reminds me of that fresco by Raphael, which I admired most of all his Vatican masterpieces, popularly styled “The School of Athens,” and which I hope to see hung up as the genius of our library hall, as I have seen it in many. In some one of the fifty-two figures glowing with life in that picture, every variety of culture has a representative. You see there the practical man, like Franklin's Poor Richard, in Diogenes rough and ready by his tub. Archimedes is drawing a diagram in the sand. On the broad steps of a temple stand Ptolemy, with the terrestrial and Hipparchus with the celestial globe. No sage is without a docile retinue. Socrates, with sly humor, is humbling the self-sufficient Alcibiades that he may rouse him to loftier aspirations. Pythagoras is writing among disciples, one of whom holds his musical scale, while above all, and in the midst of the temple, appear Aristotle, father of natural philosophy, pointing down to the earth, and Plato, the father of spiritual philosophy with hand uplifted toward heaven, man as it were feeling for God. The culture proffered in such a School of Athens, as Raphael painted—and as an ideal free library is to my mind, has its fittest emblem in the miracle of architecture, the dome,—which is well said to unite clustered arches and pillars and radiate in equal expansion towards every quarter of the earth, while with every convergent curve it soars heavenward, buried in air, and looking to the stars.
“Simple, erect, severe, austere, sublime.”
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