Beneath this celestial vision is the heraldic
shield of the lady's family, thus throwing in a glimpse of visible
worldly grandeur. The borders and arabesques of this manuscript are
equal in execution to the miniatures, and the missal is one of rare
beauty.

Can we forbear alluding to that other treasure of Senator Sumner's
collection,--the Album which belonged to Camillus Cordoyn, who, more
than two centuries ago, entertained guests at his house as they
journeyed into Italy? One of these, Thomas Wentworth, afterwards Lord
Strafford, then a young man gayly travelling about the world, wrote his
name in the volume, little thinking of the block and the axe which were
to illustrate the closing chapter of his book of life. The immortal
Milton, on his return from Italy, was the guest of the same nobleman.
What would we not give for a look into that house at Geneva, and see
this little volume laid before the visitor! The glorious eyes of John
Milton looked over its pages, and perhaps he listened to the story of
some of the distinguished personages, now all forgotten, whose names and
heraldic shields are there. Then he turned to a blank leaf, and wrote
two lines from his own "Comus,"--

"If Virtue feeble were,
Heaven itself would stoop to her."

He signed his name on that 20th of June, 1639, and the host took back
the book. And now, more than two hundred years after, that page is held
as priceless in this great republic beyond the sea.

We should speak gratefully of the externals of books, because for two
long years our oculist did not allow us to open them. We dared not go
farther than their titles, yet even these were talismans which revealed
wide regions, and carried us from Indus to the Pole. We went with Arthur
Penrhyn Stanley to the Holy Land, discovered Nineveh with Layard,
explored Art treasures with Mrs. Jameson, plunged among icebergs with
Parry. A volume of Belzoni bore us not only to pyramids and mummies in
Egypt, but away to a strange old hall "in Padua, beyond the sea."
Cabalistic paintings cover the walls, misty with age; lurking in one
corner of the vast apartment is a gigantic wooden horse, that figured at
some public festival four hundred years ago, and now pauses, ready to
prance out of the mouldy past into the affrighted present; opposite
stand two Egyptian statues, cat-headed human figures, resting their
hands on their stone knees. These were gifts from Belzoni to his native
city of Pad