utiful to
behold! But now with the art of Writing, with the art of Printing, a
total change has come over that business. The Writer of a Book, is not
he a Preacher preaching not to this parish or that, on this day or
that, but to all men in all times and places? Surely it is of the last
importance that _he_ do his work right, whoever do it wrong;--that the
_eye_ report not falsely, for then all the other members are astray!
Well; how he may do his work, whether he do it right or wrong, or do
it at all, is a point which no man in the world has taken the pains
to think of. To a certain shopkeeper, trying to get some money for
his books, if lucky, he is of some importance; to no other man of any.
Whence he came, whither he is bound, by what ways he arrived, by what
he might be furthered on his course, no one asks. He is an accident in
society. He wanders like a wild Ishmaelite, in a world of which he is as
the spiritual light, either the guidance or the misguidance!

Certainly the Art of Writing is the most miraculous of all things man
has devised. Odin's _Runes_ were the first form of the work of a Hero;
_Books_ written words, are still miraculous _Runes_, the latest form!
In Books lies the _soul_ of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible
voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has
altogether vanished like a dream. Mighty fleets and armies, harbors and
arsenals, vast cities, high-domed, many-engined,--they are precious,
great: but what do they become? Agamemnon, the many Agamemnons,
Pericleses, and their Greece; all is gone now to some ruined fragments,
dumb mournful wrecks and blocks: but the Books of Greece! There Greece,
to every thinker, still very literally lives: can be called up again
into life. No magic _Rune_ is stranger than a Book. All that Mankind has
done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in
the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men.

Do not Books still accomplish _miracles_, as _Runes_ were fabled to do?
They persuade men. Not the wretchedest circulating-library novel,
which foolish girls thumb and con in remote villages, but will help to
regulate the actual practical weddings and households of those foolish
girls. So "Celia" felt, so "Clifford" acted: the foolish Theorem of
Life, stamped into those young brains, comes out as a solid Practice
one day. Consider whether any _Rune_ in the wildest imagination of
Mythologist ever did such wo