They all went out to the portico with him when he took leave, and he went away charmed with their cordiality, and with several new ideas in his mind. One of the first effects of this enlightenment was that the major appeared at meeting the next day without a crape on his hat.
It was a fatiguing day, that Saturday; but at sunset their labors were over, all but arranging the books. The boxes containing these Mr. Yorke had brought into the sitting-room after tea, and the young people assisted him. He classified his library in a way of his own. Metaphysical works he placed over science, since "metaphysics is only physics etherized," he said. One shelf, named the Beehive, was filled with epigrams and satires. History and fiction were indiscriminately mingled. Mr. Yorke liked to quote Fielding—"pages which some droll authors have been facetiously pleased to call the history of England."
"There are certain time-honored lies which every intelligent and well-informed person is expected to be familiar with," he said. "Not to know Hume, De Foe, Fox, Cervantes, Froude, Le Sage, etc., argues one's self unknown."
In a corner of the case was the Olympus where Mr. Yorke's especial intellectual favorites were placed—among them Bolingbroke, Carlyle, Emerson, and Theodore Parker. "They are fine pagans," he said of the two last.
Mrs. Yorke mused in the chimney-corner, her head resting on her hand, the smouldering fire throwing a faint glow up in her face. Edith sat by a table looking over William Blake's illustrations of Blair's Grave—a set of plates that had just been sent them from England. The daughters took books from the boxes, and called their names; Carl, mounted on steps, placed the upper ones; and Mr. Yorke did everything they did, and more. He scolded, ordered, commented, and now and then opened a book to read a passage, or give an opinion of the author.
"Don't put Robert Browning beside Crashaw!" he cried out. "You might as well put Lucifer beside St. John."
"Why, I thought you admired Browning, papa," Melicent said.
"So I do; but half his lustre is phosphorescent. It is a spiritual decay, and the lightnings of a superb mind. But Crashaw is an angel. Edith must read him."
Looking at such a library, a Catholic remembers well that the serpent still coils about the tree of knowledge, hisses in the rustling of it, and poisons many a blossom with his breath. Worse yet, though the antidote is near, few or none take it. Those for whom slanders against the church are written, never read the refutation. How many who read in Motley's Dutch Republic that absolutions were sold in Germany at so many ducats for each crime, the most horrible crimes, either committed or to be committed, having an easy price—how many of those readers ask if it be true, or glance at a page which disproves the slander? Who on reading Prescott looks to the other side to see exposed his insinuations, his false deductions from true facts? How many of those countless thousands who have been nurtured on the calumnies of Peter Parley, drawing them in from their earliest childhood, have ever read a page on which his condemnation is written? And later, in the periodical literature of the day, with a thousand kindred attacks, how many of those who, within a few months, have read in the Atlantic Monthly Mrs. Child's impertinent article on Catholicism and Buddhism, stopped to see that her argument, such as it was, was directed less against the church than against Christianity itself? or looked in Marshall's Christian Missions to find that the resemblance is simply a reflection of the early labors of the only missionaries who have ever influenced Asia—the faint echoes of "the voice of one crying in the wilderness"?
But it is vain to multiply names. "The trail of the serpent is over them all."