rcase come troops of alert, gowned figures, while overhead, above
all the pleasant stir and murmur of life, hang in the dark sky the
unchanging stars.

III

BOOKS

The one room in my College which I always enter with a certain sense of
desolation and sadness is the College library. There used to be a story
in my days at Cambridge of a book-collecting Don who was fond of
discoursing in public of the various crosses he had to bear. He was
lamenting one day in Hall the unwieldy size of his library. "I really
don't know what to do with my books," he said, and looked round for
sympathy. "Why not read them?" said a sharp and caustic Fellow
opposite. It may be thought that I am in need of the same advice, but
it is not the case. There are, indeed, many books in our library; but
most of them, as D. G. Rossetti used to say in his childhood of his
father's learned volumes, are "no good for reading." The books of the
College library are delightful, indeed, to look at; rows upon rows of
big irregular volumes, with tarnished tooling and faded gilding on the
sun-scorched backs. What are they? old editions of classics, old
volumes of controversial divinity, folios of the Fathers, topographical
treatises, cumbrous philosophers, pamphlets from which, like dry ashes,
the heat of the fire that warmed them once has fled. Take one down: it
is an agreeable sight enough; there is a gentle scent of antiquity; the
bumpy page crackles faintly; the big irregular print meets the eye with
a pleasant and leisurely mellowness. But what do they tell one? Very
little, alas! that one need know, very much which it would be a
positive mistake to believe. That is the worst of erudition--that the
next scholar sucks the few drops of honey that you have accumulated,
sets right your blunders, and you are superseded. You have handed on
the torch, perhaps, and even trimmed it. Your errors, your patient
explanations, were a necessary step in the progress of knowledge; but
now the procession has turned the corner, and is out of sight.

Yet even here, it pleases me to think, some mute and unsuspected
treasure may lurk unknown. In a room like this, for over a couple of
centuries, stood on one of the shelves an old rudely bound volume of
blank paper, the pages covered with a curious straggling cipher; no one
paid any heed to it, no one tried to spell its secrets. But the day
came when a Fellow who was both inquisitive and leisurely took up the
old volume