here
in the civilised world there is a Pulpit, environed with all manner of
complex dignified appurtenances and furtherances, that therefrom a man
with the tongue may, to best advantage, address his fellow-men. They
felt that this was the most important thing; that without this there
was no good thing. It is a right pious work, that of theirs; beautiful
to behold! But now with the art of Writing, with the art of Printing,
a total change has come over that business. The Writer of a Book, is
not he a Preacher preaching not to this parish or that, on this day or
that, but to all men in all times and places? Surely it is of the last
importance that _he_ do his work right, whoever do it wrong;--that the
_eye_ report not falsely, for then all the other members are astray!
Well; how he may do his work, whether he do it right or wrong, or do
it at all, is a point which no man in the world has taken the pains to
think of. To a certain shopkeeper, trying to get some money for his
books, if lucky, he is of some importance; to no other man of any.
Whence he came, whither he is bound, by what ways he arrived, by what
he might be furthered on his course, no one asks. He is an accident in
society. He wanders like a wild Ishmaelite, in a world of which he is
as the spiritual light, either the guidance or the misguidance!

Certainly the art of writing is the most miraculous of all things man
has devised. Odin's _Runes_ were the first form of the work of a Hero;
_Books_, written words, are still miraculous _Runes_, of the latest
form! In Books lies the _soul_ of the whole Past Time; the articulate
audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it
has altogether vanished like a dream. Mighty fleets and armies,
harbours and arsenals, vast cities, high-domed, many-engined,--they
are precious, great: but what do they become? Agamemnon, the many
Agamemnons, Pericleses, and their Greece; all is gone now to some
ruined fragments, dumb mournful wrecks and blocks: but the Books of
Greece! There Greece, to every thinker, still very literally lives;
can be called-up again into life. No magic _Rune_ is stranger than a
Book. All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying
as in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen
possession of men.

Do not Books still accomplish _miracles_ as _Runes_ were fabled to do?
They persuade men. Not the wretchedest circulating-library novel,
which foolish girls