I wear out my restlessness circling round about her shining height, and breaking ever and anon momentarily from her fostering hand, to cling to it again with laughter, and so move on. Is it a braver sentiment to fret after reported continents? I would follow the moon around the untried earth, for the asking; and yet, and yet, O "three-hilled rebel town"! hate my own free spirit did it not thirst for thee on a ship that sailed against the Golden Horn, between Caucasus and the pinnacles of Greece.
THE passion for collecting books, beginning with the Greeks, passed to the Roman senators and patriots, and thence to every corner of the civilized earth. A philosopher might sigh, like Omar at Alexandria, over the thousand thousand superfluities, whose survival embitters the thought of the lost volumes of Varro and Livy, the wellnigh inaccessible tomes of Al Farabi of Farab ("who knew or wrote so much as he?"), of Berni, of Martorell; or of those princely libraries instanced by Irish antiquarians, which were swept away by Noah's flood!
A line of shelves, throne by throne, filled with illustrious figures, what else is that but a presence-chamber kinglier than a king's, the Temple of Wisdom, more reverend than the altars of Pallas? Men have lived and died, like motes of the air, hovering about this hoarded preciousness of ages, and forgetful ever of the awakened world, with its exquisite outlook into the future. In the pathetic companionship of books lived Southey, long after their beauty was shut out from him, passing his trembling hand up and down their ranks, and taking comfort in the certainty that they had not forsaken him.
Remembering a bibliopole's sincere care in gathering his treasures, the taste and tenderness he spends upon them, the actual individuality of the owner of which they partake, and which they proclaim with startling fidelity so long as they are together, an auctioneer's sale of a private library seems one of the cruelest things in the daily annals of a city. Yet if not transferred, in numbers or in the mass, to some benign shelter, the darlings of bygone hours are sure to be launched friendless on the rough chances of trade. A second-hand book is verily a pitiful thing. It is broken down by adversity, and ready to meet your advances half-way. It appreciates care of any sort, poor waif that it is! lacking attention so long in the dingy precincts of a shop. Nothing is more gratifying to the eye searching for tokens of humanity, like a shipwrecked sailor along the sands of a lonely island, than its curled edges, "bethumbed horribly," especially if the author thereof be dear to you. What a precious, homely tribute! What delicater flattery, than to catch sight of a modest volume, supposing you take some parental interest in it, in a condition which, _à posteriori_, does _not_ suggest soap and water?