people to do one's
knowing with, if one has the habit of thinking in persons, it is still
more true that one does not need a large outfit of books.

As I sit in my library facing the fire I fancy I hear, sometimes, my
books eating each other up. One by one through the years they have
disappeared from me--only portraits or titles are left. The more
beautiful book absorbs the less and the greater folds itself around the
small. I seldom take down a book that was an enthusiasm once without
discovering that the heart of it has fled away, has stealthily moved
over, while I dreamed, to some other book. Lowell and Whittier are
footnotes scattered about in several volumes, now. J. G. Holland
(Sainte-Beuve of my youth!) is digested by Matthew Arnold and Matthew
Arnold by Walter Pater and Walter Pater by Walt Whitman. Montaigne and
Plato have moved over into Emerson, and Emerson has been distilled
slowly into--forty years. Holmes has dissolved into Charles Lamb and
Thomas Browne. A big volume of Rossetti (whom I oddly knew first) is
lost in a little volume of Keats, and as I sit and wait Ruskin and
Carlyle are going fast into a battered copy on my desk--of the Old
Testament. Once let the dramatic principle get well started in a man's
knowledge and it seems to keep on sending him up new currents the way
his heart does, whether he notices it or not. If a man will leave his
books and his people to themselves, if he will let them do with him and
with one another what they want to do, they all work while he sleeps. If
the spirit of knowledge, the dramatic principle in it, is left free,
knowledge all but comes to a man of itself, cannot help coming, like the
dew on the grass. With enough reading for persons one need not buy very
many books. One allows for unconscious cerebration in books. Books not
only have a way of being read through their backs, but of reading one
another.

V

The City, the Church, and the College

The greatest event of the nineteenth century was that somewhere in it,
at some immense and hidden moment in it, human knowledge passed silently
over from the emphasis of Persons to the emphasis of Things.

I have walked up and down Broadway when the whole street was like a
prayer to me--miles of it--a long dull cry to its little strip of
heaven. I have been on the Elevated--the huge shuttle of the great
city--hour by hour, had my soul woven into New York on it, back and
forth, up and down, until it was hardly a so