y was not with the modern library, but
with me. He thought I tried to carry too many likes and dislikes around
with me, that I was too sensitive. He seemed to think that I should
learn to be callous in places of public resort.

I said I had no very violent dislikes to deal with. The only thing I
could think of that was the matter with me in a library was that I had a
passion for books. I didn't like climbing over a barricade of catalogues
to get to books. I hated to feel partitioned off from them, to stand and
watch rows of people marking things between me and books. I thought that
things had come to a pretty pass, if a man could not so much as touch
elbows with a poet nowadays--with Plato, for instance--without carrying
a redoubt of terrible beautiful young ladies. I said I thought a great
many other people felt the way I did. I admitted there were other sides
to it, but there were times, I said, when it almost seemed to me that
this spontaneous uprising in our country--this movement of the Book
Lovers, for instance--was simply a struggle on the part of the people to
get away from Mr. Carnegie's libraries. They are hemming literature and
human nature in, on every side, or they are going to unless Mr. Carnegie
can buy up occasional old-fashioned librarians--some other kind than are
turned out in steel works--to put into them. Libraries are getting to be
huge Separators. Books that have been put through libraries are
separated from themselves. They are depersonalised--the human nature all
taken off. And yet when one thinks of it, with nine people out of
ten--the best people and the worst both--the sense of having a personal
relation to a book, the sense of snuggling up with one's own little life
to a book, is what books are for.

"To a man," I said, "to whom books are people, and the livest kind of
people, brothers of his own flesh, cronies of his life, the whole
business of getting a book in a library is full of resentment and
rebellion. He finds his rights, or what he thinks are his rights, being
treated as privileges, his most sacred and confidential relations, his
relations with the great, meddled with by strangers--pleasant enough
strangers, but still strangers. Perhaps he wishes to see John Milton. He
goes down town to a great unhomelike-looking building, and slides in at
the door. He steps up to a wall, and asks permission to see John Milton.
He waits in a kind of vague, unsatisfied fashion, but he feels that
mac