only to the world's first brood of nightingales, and
to the laugh of Eve. I see the Pyramids building; I hear the shoutings
of the armies of Alexander; I feel the ground shake beneath the march
of Cambyses. I sit as in a theatre,--the stage is time, the play is
the play of the world. What a spectacle it is! What kingly pomp, what
processions file past, what cities burn to heaven, what crowds of
captives are dragged at the chariot-wheels of conquerors! I hiss, or
cry "Bravo," when the great actors come on the shaking stage. I am a
Roman emperor when I look at a Roman coin. I lift Homer, and I shout
with Achilles in the trenches. The silence of the unpeopled Syrian
plains, the out-comings and in-goings of the patriarchs, Abraham and
Ishmael, Isaac in the fields at eventide, Rebekah at the well, Jacob's
guile, Esau's face reddened by desert sun-heat, Joseph's splendid
funeral procession,--all these things I find within the boards of my
Old Testament. What a silence in those old books as of a half-peopled
world; what bleating of flocks; what green pastoral rest; what
indubitable human existence! Across brawling centuries of blood and
war I hear the bleating of Abraham's flocks, the tinkling of the bells
of Rebekah's camels. O men and women so far separated yet so near, so
strange yet so well known, by what miraculous power do I know ye all!
Books are the true Elysian fields, where the spirits of the dead
converse; and into these fields a mortal may venture unappalled. What
king's court can boast such company? What school of philosophy such
wisdom? The wit of the ancient world is glancing and flashing there.
There is Pan's pipe, there are the songs of Apollo. Seated in my
library at night, and looking on the silent faces of my books, I am
occasionally visited by a strange sense of the supernatural. They are
not collections of printed pages, they are ghosts. I take one down,
and it speaks with me in a tongue not now heard on earth, and of men
and things of which it alone possesses knowledge. I call myself a
solitary, but sometimes I think I misapply the term. No man sees more
company than I do. I travel with mightier cohorts around me than ever
did Timour or Genghis Khan on their fiery marches. I am a sovereign in
my library, but it is the dead, not the living, that attend my levees.

The house I dwell in stands apart from the little town, and relates
itself to the houses as I do to the inhabitants. It s