Part 4

THE HON. CAROLINE NORTON.

ON PARTING WITH MY BOOKS

Ye dear companions of my silent hours, Whose pages oft before my eyes would strew So many sweet and variegated flowers-- Dear Books, awhile, perhaps for ay, adieu! The dark cloud of misfortune o'er me lours: No more by winter's fire--in summer's bowers, My toil-worn mind shall be refreshed by you: We part! sad thought! and while the damp devours Your leaves, and the worm slowly eats them through, Dull Poverty and its attendant ills, Wasting of health, vain toil, corroding care, And the world's cold neglect, which surest kills, Must be my bitter doom; yet I shall bear Unmurmuring, for my good perchance these evils are.

J. H. LEIGH HUNT.

TO MY BOOKS ON PARTING WITH THEM

As one who, destined from his friends to part, Regrets his loss, yet hopes again erewhile, To share their converse and enjoy their smile, And tempers as he may affliction's dart,-- Thus, loved associates! chiefs of elder Art! Teachers of wisdom! who could once beguile My tedious hours, and lighten every toil, I now resign you; nor with fainting heart; For pass a few short years, or days, or hours, And happier seasons may their dawn unfold, And all your sacred fellowship restore; When, freed from earth, unlimited its powers, Mind shall with mind direct communion hold, And kindred spirits meet to part no more.--W. ROSCOE.

TRUE FRIENDS THAT CHEER

It is a beautiful incident in the story of Mr. Roscoe's misfortunes, and one which cannot fail to interest the studious mind, that the parting with his books seems to have touched upon his tenderest feelings, and to have been the only circumstance that could provoke the notice of his Muse. The scholar only knows how dear these silent, yet eloquent, companions of pure thoughts and innocent hours become in the season of adversity. When all that is worldly turns to dross around us, these only retain their steady value. When friends grow cold, and the converse of intimates languishes into vapid civility and commonplace, these only continue the unaltered countenance of happier days, and cheer us with that true friendship which never deceived hope nor deserted sorrow.--W. IRVING. _The Sketch Book._

MY BOOKS

Sadly as some old mediaeval knight Gazed at the arms he could no longer wield, The sword two-handed and the shining shield Suspended in the hall, and full in sight, While secret longings for the lost delight Of tourney or adventure in the field Came over him, and tears but half concealed Trembled and fell upon his beard of white, So I behold these books upon their shelf, My ornaments and arms of other days; Not wholly useless, though no longer used, For they remind me of my other self, Younger and stronger, and the pleasant ways, In which I walked, now clouded and confused.

H. W. LONGFELLOW.

TO SIR HENRY GOODYER

When I would know thee, Goodyer, my thought looks Upon thy well-made choice of friends, and books; Then do I love thee, and behold thy ends In making thy friends books, and thy books friends: Now must I give thy life and deed the voice Attending such a study, such a choice; Where, though it be love that to thy praise doth move, It was a knowledge that begat that love.

BEN JONSON.

OUR BEST ACQUAINTANCE

While you converse with lords and dukes, I have their betters here--my books; Fixed in an elbow chair at ease I choose my companions as I please. I'd rather have one single shelf Than all my friends, except yourself; For after all that can be said Our best acquaintance are the dead.

T. SHERIDAN.

THE TRUE ELYSIAN FIELDS

In my garden I spend my days; in my library I spend my nights. My interests are divided between my geraniums and my books. With the flower I am in the present; with the book I am in the past. I go into my library, and all history unrolls before me. I breathe morning air of the world while the scent of Eden's roses yet lingered in it, while it vibrated only to the world's first brood of nightingales, and to the laugh of Eve. I see the pyramids building; I hear the shoutings of the armies of Alexander; I feel the ground shake beneath the march of Cambyses. I sit as in a theatre,--the stage is time, the play is the play of the world. What a spectacle it is! What kingly pomp, what processions file past, what cities burn to heaven, what crowds of captives are dragged at the chariot-wheels of conquerors! I hiss or cry 'Bravo' when the great actors come on shaking the stage. I am a Roman Emperor when I look at a Roman coin. I lift Homer, and I shout with Achilles in the trenches. The silence of the unpeopled Syrian plains, the out-comings and in-goings of the patriarchs, Abraham and Ishmael, Isaac in the fields at eventide, Rebekah at the well, Jacob's guile, Esau's face reddened by desert sun-heat, Joseph's splendid funeral procession--all these things I find within the boards of my Old Testament. What a silence in those old books as of a half-peopled world--what bleating of flocks--what green pastoral rest--what indubitable human existence! Across brawling centuries of blood and war, I hear the bleating of Abraham's flocks, the tinkling of the bells of Rebekah's camels. O men and women, so far separated, yet so near, so strange, yet so well-known, by what miraculous power do I know ye all! Books are the true Elysian fields where the spirits of the dead converse, and into these fields a mortal may venture unappalled. What king's court can boast such company? What school of philosophy such wisdom? The wit of the ancient world is glancing and flashing there. There is Pan's pipe, there are the songs of Apollo. Seated in my library at night, and looking on the silent faces of my books, I am occasionally visited by a strange sense of the supernatural. They are not collections of printed pages, they are ghosts. I take one down and it speaks with me in a tongue not now heard on earth, and of men and things of which it alone possesses knowledge. I call myself a solitary, but sometimes I think I misapply the term. No man sees more company than I do. I travel with mightier cohorts around me than ever did Timour or Genghis Khan on their fiery marches. I am a sovereign in my library, but it is the dead, not the living, that attend my levees.--A. SMITH. _Dreamthorp._

BOOKS AND FRIENDS

One drachma for a good book, and a thousand talents for a true friend;-- So standeth the market, where scarce is ever costly: Yea, were the diamonds of Golconda common as shingles on the shore, A ripe apple would ransom kings before a shining stone: And so, were a wholesome book as rare as an honest friend, To choose the book be mine: the friend let another take.

M. F. TUPPER. _Proverbial Philosophy._

A blessed companion is a book,--a book that, fitly chosen, is a life-long friend.--D. JERROLD. _Books._

May I a small house and large garden have! And a few friends, and many books, both true.

A. COWLEY. _The Wish._

THE DESIRABLE TABERNACLE

O celestial gift of divine liberality, descending from the Father of light to raise up the rational soul even to heaven!... Undoubtedly, indeed, thou hast placed thy desirable tabernacle in books, where the Most High, the Light of light, the Book of Life, hath established thee. Here then all who ask receive, all who seek find thee, to those who knock thou openest quickly. In books cherubim expand their wings, that the soul of the student may ascend and look around from pole to pole, from the rising to the setting sun, from the north and from the sea. In them the most high incomprehensible God Himself is contained and worshipped....

Let us consider how great a commodity of doctrine exists in books, how easily, how secretly, how safely they expose the nakedness of human ignorance without putting it to shame. These are the masters who instruct us without rods and ferules, without hard words and anger, without clothes or money. If you approach them, they are not asleep; if investigating you interrogate them, they conceal nothing; if you mistake them, they never grumble; if you are ignorant, they cannot laugh at you.--R. DE BURY. _Philobiblon._

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.

There is no other method of fixing those thoughts which arise and disappear in the mind of man, and transmitting them to the last periods of time; no other method of giving a permanency to our ideas, and preserving the knowledge of any particular person, when his body is mixed with the common mass of matter, and his soul retired into the world of spirits. Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation, as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.--J. ADDISON. _Spectator_, 166.

IN PRISON

O happy be the day which gave that mind Learning's first tincture--blest thy fostering care, Thou most beloved of parents, worthiest sire! Which, taste-inspiring, made the lettered page My favourite companion: most esteemed, And most improving! Almost from the day Of earliest childhood to the present hour Of gloomy, black misfortune, books, dear books, Have been, and are, my comforts. Morn and night, Adversity, prosperity, at home, Abroad, health, sickness,--good or ill report, The same firm friends; the same refreshment rich And source of consolation. Nay, e'en here Their magic power they lose not; still the same, Of matchless influence in this prison-house, Unutterably horrid; in an hour Of woe, beyond all fancy's fictions drear.

W. DODD. _Thoughts in Prison._

THE DEPOSITARY OF EVERYTHING HONOURABLE

Books are the depositary of everything that is most honourable to man. Literature, taken in all its bearings, forms the grand line of demarcation between the human and the animal kingdoms. He that loves reading has everything within his reach. He has but to desire; and he may possess himself of every species of wisdom to judge and power to perform....

Books gratify and excite our curiosity in innumerable ways. They force us to reflect. They hurry us from point to point. They present direct ideas of various kinds, and they suggest indirect ones. In a well-written book we are presented with the maturest reflections, or the happiest flights, of a mind of uncommon excellence. It is impossible that we can be much accustomed to such companions, without attaining some resemblance of them. When I read Thomson, I become Thomson; when I read Milton, I become Milton. I find myself a sort of intellectual chameleon, assuming the colour of the substances on which I rest. He that revels in a well-chosen library has innumerable dishes, and all of admirable flavour. His taste is rendered so acute, as easily to distinguish the nicest shades of difference. His mind becomes ductile, susceptible to every impression, and gaining new refinement from them all. His varieties of thinking baffle calculation, and his powers, whether of reason or fancy, become eminently vigorous.--W. GODWIN. _The Inquirer: Of an Early Taste for Reading._

LOVE THAT IS LARGE

There is a period of modern times, at which the love of books appears to have been of a more decided nature than at either of these--I mean the age just before and after the Reformation, or rather all that period when book-writing was confined to the learned languages. Erasmus is the god of it. Bacon, a mighty book-man, saw, among his other sights, the great advantage of loosening the vernacular tongue, and wrote both Latin and English. I allow this is the greatest closeted age of books; of old scholars sitting in dusty studies; of heaps of 'illustrious obscure', rendering themselves more illustrious and more obscure by retreating from the 'thorny queaches' of Dutch and German names into the 'vacant interlunar caves' of appellations latinized or translated. I think I see all their volumes now, filling the shelves of a dozen German convents. The authors are bearded men, sitting in old wood-cuts, in caps and gowns, and their books are dedicated to princes and statesmen, as illustrious as themselves. My old friend Wierus, who wrote a thick book, _De Praestigiis Daemonum_, was one of them, and had a fancy worthy of his sedentary stomach. I will confess, once for all, that I have a liking for them all. It is my link with the bibliomaniacs, whom I admit into our relationship, because my love is large and my family pride nothing. But still I take my idea of books read with a gusto, of companions for bed and board, from the two ages beforementioned. The other is of too book-worm a description. There must be both a judgement and a fervour; a discrimination and a boyish eagerness; and (with all due humility) something of a point of contact between authors worth reading and the reader. How can I take Juvenal into the fields, or Valcarenghius _De Aortae Aneurismate_ to bed with me? How could I expect to walk before the face of nature with the one; to tire my elbow properly with the other, before I put out my candle and turn round deliciously on the right side? Or how could I stick up _Coke upon Littleton_ against something on the dinner-table, and be divided between a fresh paragraph and a mouthful of salad?--J. H. LEIGH HUNT. _My Books._

A CATHOLIC TASTE IN BOOKS

To mind the inside of a book is to entertain one's self with the forced product of another man's brain. Now I think a man of quality and breeding may be much amused with the natural sprouts of his own.

_Lord Foppington in 'The Relapse'._

An ingenious acquaintance of my own was so much struck with this bright sally of his Lordship, that he has left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of his originality. At the hazard of losing some credit on this head, I must confess that I dedicate no inconsiderable portion of my time to other people's thoughts. I dream away my life in others' speculations. I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me.

I have no repugnances. Shaftesbury is not too genteel for me, nor Jonathan Wild too low. I can read any thing which I call a _book_. There are things in that shape which I cannot allow for such.

In this catalogue of _books which are no books_--_biblia a-biblia_--I reckon Court Calendars, Directories, Pocket Books, Draught Boards bound and lettered at the back, Scientific Treatises, Almanacks, Statutes at Large; the works of Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Beattie, Soame Jenyns, and, generally, all those volumes which 'no gentleman's library should be without'; the Histories of Flavius Josephus (that learned Jew), and Paley's _Moral Philosophy_. With these exceptions, I can read almost any thing. I bless my stars for a taste so catholic, so unexcluding.

I confess that it moves my spleen to see these _things in books' clothing_ perched upon shelves, like false saints, usurpers of true shrines, intruders into the sanctuary, thrusting out the legitimate occupants. To reach down a well-bound semblance of a volume, and hope it is some kind-hearted play-book, then, opening what 'seem its leaves', to come bolt upon a withering Population Essay. To expect a Steele, or a Farquhar, and find--Adam Smith. To view a well-arranged assortment of blockheaded Encyclopaedias (Anglicanas or Metropolitanas) set out in an array of Russia, or Morocco, when a tithe of that good leather would comfortably re-clothe my shivering folios; would renovate Paracelsus himself, and enable old Raymund Lully to look like himself again in the world. I never see these impostors but I long to strip them, to warm my ragged veterans in their spoils.--C. LAMB. _Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading._

A SENSE OF HUMOUR

I am not prepared to back Charles Lamb's Index Expurgatorius. It is difficult, almost impossible, to find the book from which something either valuable or amusing may not be found, if the proper alembic be applied. I know books that are curious, and really amusing, from their excessive badness. If you want to find precisely how a thing ought not to be said, you take one of them down and make it perform the service of the intoxicated Spartan slave. There are some volumes in which, at a chance opening, you are certain to find a mere platitude delivered in the most superb and amazing climax of big words, and others in which you have a like happy facility in finding every proposition stated with its stern forward, as sailors say, or in some other grotesque mismanagement of composition. There are no better farces on or off the stage than when two or three congenial spirits ransack books of this kind, and compete with each other in taking fun out of them.--J. H. BURTON. _The Book-Hunter._

BOOKS THE TRUE LEVELLERS

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds, and these invaluable means of communication are in the reach of all. In the best books great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. God be thanked for books! They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are the true levellers. They give to all, who will faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence, of the best and greatest of our race. No matter how poor I am. No matter though the prosperous of my own time will not enter my obscure dwelling. If the Sacred Writers will enter and take up their abode under my roof, if Milton will cross my threshold to sing to me of Paradise, and Shakespeare to open to me the worlds of imagination and the workings of the human heart, and Franklin to enrich me with his practical wisdom, I shall not pine for want of intellectual companionship, and I may become a cultivated man, though excluded from what is called the best society in the place where I live.

To make this means of culture effectual a man must select good books, such as have been written by right-minded and strong-minded men, real thinkers, who instead of diluting by repetition what others say, have something to say for themselves, and write to give relief to full, earnest souls; and these works must not be skimmed over for amusement, but read with fixed attention and a reverential love of truth. In selecting books we may be aided much by those who have studied more than ourselves. But, after all, it is best to be determined in this particular a good deal by our own tastes.--W. E. CHANNING. _Self-Culture._

AUTHORS AS LOVERS OF BOOKS

I love an author the more for having been himself a lover of books.... We conceive of Plato as a lover of books; of Aristotle certainly; of Plutarch, Pliny, Horace, Julian, and Marcus Aurelius. Virgil, too, must have been one; and, after a fashion, Martial. May I confess that the passage which I recollect with the greatest pleasure in Cicero, is where he says that books delight us at home, _and are no impediment abroad_; travel with us, ruralize with us. His period is rounded off to some purpose: '_Delectant domi, non impediunt foris; peregrinantur, rusticantur._' I am so much of this opinion, that I do not care to be anywhere without having a book or books at hand, and like Dr. Orkborne, in the novel of _Camilla_, stuff the coach or post-chaise with them whenever I travel. As books, however, become ancient, the love of them becomes more unequivocal and conspicuous. The ancients had little of what we call learning. They made it. They were also no very eminent buyers of books--they made books for posterity. It is true, that it is not at all necessary to love many books, in order to love them much. The scholar, in Chaucer, who would rather have

At his beddes head A twenty bokes, clothed, in black and red, Of Aristotle and his philosophy, Than robès rich, or fiddle, or psaltry--

doubtless beat all our modern collectors in his passion for reading.... Dante puts Homer, the great ancient, in his Elysium, upon trust; but a few years afterwards, _Homer_, the book, made its appearance in Italy, and Petrarch, in a transport, put it upon his bookshelves, where he adored it, like 'the unknown God'. Petrarch ought to be the god of the Bibliomaniacs, for he was a collector and a man of genius, which is an union that does not often happen. He copied out, with his own precious hand, the manuscripts he rescued from time, and then produced others for time to reverence. With his head upon a book he died.--J. H. LEIGH HUNT. _My Books._

The sweet serenity of books.--H. W. LONGFELLOW.

THE THEORY OF BOOKS