a finer skill in
making distinctions to the eye than our forefathers achieved with all
their typographic struggles. Nor are our reference pages lacking in
beauty. But our familiarity with works of this class tends to obscure
their wonderful merit as time-savers and eye-savers. It is only when we
take up some foreign dictionary, printed with little contrast of type,
perhaps in German text, and bristling with unmeaning abbreviations, that
we appreciate our privilege. Surely this is a marvelous mechanical
triumph, to present the words of an author in such a form that the eye,
to take it in, needs but to sweep rapidly down the page, or, if it
merely glances at the page, it shall have the meaning of the whole so
focused in a few leading words that it can turn at once to the passage
sought, or see that it must look elsewhere. The saving of time so
effected may be interpreted either as a lengthening of life or as an
increased fullness of life, but it means also a lessening of friction
and thus an addition to human comfort.

We have been speaking of prose; but print has done as much or more to
interpret the meaning of poetry. We have before us a facsimile of
nineteen lines from the oldest Vatican manuscript of Vergil. The
hexameters are written in single lines; but this is the only help to the
eye. The letters are capitals and are individually very beautiful,
indeed, the lines are like ribbons of rich decoration; but the words are
not separated, and the punctuation is inconspicuous and primitively
simple, consisting merely of faint dots. Modern poetry, especially
lyric, with its wealth and interplay of rhyme, affords a fine
opportunity for the printer to mediate between the poet and his public,
and this he has been able to do by mere indention and leading, without
resorting to distinction of type. The reader of a sonnet or ballad
printed without these two aids to the eye is robbed of his rightful
clues to the construction of the verse. It seems hardly possible that a
poem could have been read aloud from an ancient manuscript, at sight,
with proper inflection; yet this is just what printing can make possible
for the modern reader. It has not usually done so, for the printer has
been very conservative; he has taken his conception of a page from
prose, and, not being compelled to, has not placed all the resources of
his art at the service of the poet. Accents, pauses, and certain
arbitrary signs might well be employed to indicate