s through it. Some libraries are worse
than others--seem to be made for tunnels. College libraries, perhaps,
are the worst. One can almost--if one stands still enough in them--hear
what is going on. It is getting to be practically impossible in a
college library to slink off to a side shelf by one's self, take down
some gentle-hearted book one does not need to read there and begin to
listen in it, without hearing some worthy person quietly, persistently
boring himself around the next corner. It is getting worse every year.
The only way a readable library book can be read nowadays is to take it
away from the rest of them. It must be taken where no other reading is
going on. The busy scene of a crowd of people--mere specialists and
others--gathered around roofing their minds in is no fitting place for a
great book or a live book to be read--a book that uncovers the universe.

On the other hand, it were certainly a trying universe if it were
uncovered all the time, if one had to be exposed to all of it and to all
of it at once, always; and there is no denying that libraries were
intended to roof men's minds in sometimes as well as to take the roofs
of their minds off. What seems to be necessary is to find some middle
course in reading between the scientist's habit of tunnelling under the
dome of knowledge and the poet's habit of soaring around in it. There
ought to be some principle of economy in knowledge which will allow a
man, if he wants to, or knows enough, to be a poet and a scientist both.
It is well enough for a mere poet to take a library as a spectacle--a
kind of perpetual Lick Observatory to peek at the universe with, if he
likes, and if a man is a mere scientist, there is no objection to his
taking a library as a kind of vast tunnel system, or chart for
burrowing. But the common educated man--the man who is in the business
of being a human being, unless he knows some middle course in a library,
knows how to use its Lick Observatory and its tunnel system both--does
not get very much out of it. If there can be found some principle of
economy in knowledge, common to artists and scientists alike, which will
make it possible for a poet to know something, and which will make it
possible for a scientist to know a very great deal without being--to
most people--a little underwitted, it would very much simplify the
problem of being educated in modern times, and there would be a general
gratefulness.

Far be it from me t