ur shelves. Much
of it is there already, and as one private library after another falls
into this by the natural law of gravitation, it will gradually acquire
all that is most valuable almost without effort. A scholar should not be
in a hurry to part with his books. They are probably more valuable to
him than they can be to any other individual. What Swedenborg called
"correspondence" has established itself between his intelligence and the
volumes which wall him within their sacred inclosure. Napoleon said that
his mind was as if furnished with drawers,--he drew out each as he wanted
its contents, and closed it at will when done with them. The scholar's
mind, to use a similar comparison, is furnished with shelves, like his
library. Each book knows its place in the brain as well as against the
wall or in the alcove. His consciousness is doubled by the books which
encircle him, as the trees that surround a lake repeat themselves in its
unruffled waters. Men talk of the nerve that runs to the pocket, but one
who loves his books, and has lived long with them, has a nervous filament
which runs from his sensorium to every one of them. Or, if I may still
let my fancy draw its pictures, a scholar's library is to him what a
temple is to the worshipper who frequents it. There is the altar sacred
to his holiest experiences. There is the font where his new-born thought
was baptized and first had a name in his consciousness. There is the
monumental tablet of a dead belief, sacred still in the memory of what it
was while yet alive. No visitor can read all this on the lettered backs
of the books that have gathered around the scholar, but for him, from the
Aldus on the lowest shelf to the Elzevir on the highest, every volume has
a language which none but he can interpret. Be patient with the
book-collector who loves his companions too well to let them go. Books
are not buried with their owners, and the veriest book-miser that ever
lived was probably doing far more for his successors than his more
liberal neighbor who despised his learned or unlearned avarice. Let the
fruit fall with the leaves still clinging round it. Who would have
stripped Southey's walls of the books that filled them, when, his mind no
longer capable of taking in their meaning, he would still pat and fondle
them with the vague loving sense of what they had once been to him,--to
him, the great scholar, now like a little child among his playthings?

We need in this cou