Hours in a Library Volume I Part 1

Hours in a Library.

Volume I.

by Leslie Stephen.

_OPINIONS OF AUTHORS_

Libraries are as the shrines where all the relics of the ancient saints, full of true virtue, and that without delusion or imposture, are preserved and reposed.--BACON, _Advancement of Learning_.

We visit at the shrine, drink in some measure of the inspiration, and cannot easily breathe in other air less pure, accustomed to immortal fruits.--HAZLITT'S _Plain Speaker_.

What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their labours to the Bodleian were reposing here as in some dormitory or middle state. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odour of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of the sciential apples which grew around the happy orchard.--CHARLES LAMB, _Oxford in the Long Vacation_.

My neighbours think me often alone, and yet at such times I am in company with more than five hundred mutes, each of whom communicates his ideas to me by dumb signs quite as intelligibly as any person living can do by uttering of words; and with a motion of my hand I can bring them as near to me as I please; I handle them as I like; they never complain of ill-usage; and when dismissed from my presence, though ever so abruptly, take no offence.--STERNE, _Letters_.

In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends imprisoned by an enchanter in paper and leathern boxes,--EMERSON, _Books, Society, and Solitude_.

Nothing is pleasanter than exploring in a library.--LANDOR, _Pericles and Aspasia_.

I never come into a library (saith Heinsius) but I bolt the door to me, excluding l.u.s.t, ambition, avarice, and all such vices whose nurse is idleness, the mother of ignorance and melancholy herself; and in the very lap of eternity, among so many divine souls, I take my seat with so lofty a spirit and sweet content that I pity all our great ones and rich men that know not their happiness.--BURTON, _Anatomy of Melancholy_.

I do not know that I am happiest when alone; but this I am sure of, that I am never long even in the society of her I love without a yearning for the company of my lamp and my utterly confused and tumbled-over library.--BYRON, _Moore's Life_.

Montesquieu used to say that he had never known a pain or a distress which he could not soothe by half an hour of a good book.--JOHN MORLEY, _On Popular Culture_.

There is no truer word than that of Solomon: 'There is no end of making books'; the sight of a great library verifies it; there is no end--indeed, it were pity there should be.--BISHOP HALL.

You that are genuine Athenians, devour with a golden Epicurism the arts and sciences, the spirits and extractions of authors.--CULVERWELL, _Light of Nature_.

He hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book; he hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink; his intellect is not replenished; he is only an animal, only sensible in the duller parts.--SHAKESPEARE, _Love's Labour's Lost_.

I have wondered at the patience of the antediluvians; their libraries were insufficiently furnished; how then could seven or eight hundred years of life be supportable?--COWPER, _Life and Letters by Southey_.

Unconfused Babel of all tongues! which e'er The mighty linguist Fame or Time the mighty traveller, That could speak or this could hear!

Majestic monument and pyramid!

Where still the shapes of parted souls abide Embalmed in verse; exalted souls which now Enjoy those arts they wooed so well below, Which now all wonders plainly see That have been, are, or are to be In the mysterious Library, The beatific Bodley of the Deity!

COWLEY, _Ode on the Bodleian_.

This to a structure led well known to fame, And called, 'The Monument of Vanished Minds,'

Where when they thought they saw in well-sought books The a.s.sembled souls of all that men thought wise, It bred such awful reverence in their looks, As if they saw the buried writers rise.

Such heaps of written thought; gold of the dead, Which Time does still disperse but not devour, Made them presume all was from deluge freed Which long-lived authors writ ere Noah's shower.

DAVENANT, _Gondibert_.

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a progeny of life in them, to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.--MILTON, _Areopagitica_.

Nor is there any paternal fondness which seems to savour less of absolute instinct, and which may be so well reconciled to worldly wisdom, as this of authors for their books. These children may most truly be called the riches of their father, and many of them have with true filial piety fed their parent in his old age; so that not only the affection but the interest of the author may be highly injured by those slanderers whose poisonous breath brings his book to an untimely end.--FIELDING, _Tom Jones_.

We whom the world is pleased to honour with the t.i.tle of modern authors should never have been able to compa.s.s our great design of everlasting remembrance and never-dying fame if our endeavours had not been so highly serviceable to the general good of mankind.--SWIFT, _Tale of a Tub_.

A good library always makes me melancholy, where the best author is as much squeezed and as obscure as a porter at a coronation.--SWIFT.

In my youth I never entered a great library but my predominant feeling was one of pain and disturbance of mind--not much unlike that which drew tears from Xerxes on viewing his immense army, and reflecting that in one hundred years not one soul would remain alive. To me, with respect to books, the same effect would be brought about by my own death. Here, said I, are one hundred thousand books, the worst of them capable of giving me some instruction and pleasure; and before I can have had time to extract the honey from one-twentieth of this hive in all likelihood I shall be summoned away.--DE QUINCEY, _Letter to a young man_.

A man may be judged by his library.--BENTHAM.

I ever look upon a library with the reverence of a temple.--EVELYN, _to Wotton_.

'Father, I should like to learn to make gold.' 'And what would'st thou do if thou could'st make it?' 'Why, I would build a great house and fill it with books.'--SOUTHEY, _Doctor_.

What would you have more? A wife? That is none of the indispensable requisites of life. Books? That is one of them, and I have more than I can use.--DAVID HUME, _Burton's 'Life_.'

Talk of the happiness of getting a great prize in the lottery! What is that to opening a box of books? The joy upon lifting up the cover must be something like that which we shall feel when Peter the porter opens the door upstairs, and says, 'Please to walk in, Sir.'--SOUTHEY, _Life_.

I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who did not love reading.--MACAULAY.

Our books ... do not our hearts hug them, and quiet themselves in them even more than in G.o.d?--BAXTER'S _Saint's Rest_.

It is our duty to live among books.--NEWMAN, _Tracts for the Times, No. 2_.