Books and Libraries.

[The permission of the heirs of James Russell Lowell has been given for the re-publication of selections from an address by him on the subject of "Books and Libraries."]

Our English ancestors, with that common-sense which is one of the most useful, though not one of the most engaging, properties of the race, made a rhyming proverb, which says that-

"When land and goods are gone and spent, Then learning is most excellent;"

and this is true so far as it goes, though it goes perhaps hardly far enough. The law also calls only the earth and what is immovably attached to it real property, but I am of opinion that those only are real possessions which abide with a man after he has been stripped of those others falsely so called, and which alone save him from seeming and from being the miserable forked radish to which the bitter scorn of Lear degraded every child of Adam. The riches of scholarship, the benignities of literature will defy fortune and outlive calamity. As they cannot be inherited, so they cannot be alienated. "Books," says Wordsworth, "are a real world," and he was thinking, doubtless, of such books as are not merely the triumphs of pure intellect, however supreme, but of those in which intellect infused with the sense of beauty aims rather to produce delight than conviction, or, if conviction, then through intuition rather than formal logic, and, leaving what Donne wisely calls-

"Unconcerning things matters of fact"

to science and the understanding, seeks to give ideal expression to those abiding realities of the spiritual world for which the outward and visible world serves at best but as the husk and symbol. Am I wrong in using the word realities? wrong in insisting on the distinction between the real and the actual? in assuming for the ideal an existence as absolute and self-subsistent as that which appeals to our senses, nay, so often cheats them, in the matter of fact? How very small a part of the world we truly live in is represented by what speaks to us through the senses when compared with that vast realm of the mind which is peopled by memory and imagination, and with such shining inhabitants! These walls, these faces, what are they in comparison with the countless images, the innumerable population which every one of us can summon up to the tiny show-box of the brain, in material breadth scarce a span, yet infinite as space and time? and in what, I pray, are those we gravely call historical characters, of which each new historian strains his neck to get a new and different view, in any sense more real than the personages of fiction? Do not serious and earnest men discuss Hamlet as they would Cromwell or Lincoln? Does Caesar, does Alaric, hold existence by any other or stronger tenure than the Christian of Bunyan or the Don Quixote of Cervantes or the Antigone of Sophocles? Is not the history which is