LUX ET VERITAS

A visitor to this, the world's richest university, can hardly escape a visit to the library, famed as the largest on the planet belonging to an educational institution. He necessarily expects great splendor, nor is he disappointed. A three-story Corinthian facade is a satisfactory glory for introduction. Within, a double marble stairway and murals by Sargent are also sufficiently impressive. Shakespearean folios and holographs of Keats, along with original Spectator papers, provide an atmosphere of gentility. Tingling with anticipation, the sightseer passes from these treasures into the dingy depths of the reading-room.

There the full splendor of the Widener Library is revealed. In an atmosphere of medieval picturesqueness sit hundreds of students at tables. Diligently they pore over their books, sitting stiffly upright, apparently prevented from relaxation by an overweening lust for knowledge. Like St. Simeon Stylites on his pillar, they have abandoned the comforts of this world in devotion to their ideal. Into this romantic dungeon the clangor and lurid brightness of external civilization do not penetrate.

A romantic twilight envelops the workers, and upon the heavy air is borne an odor like none other in the modern world. It seems transported directly from the stately charnal-vaults of Chartres. Dimly, along the shadow-filled edges of the room, great banks of books may be seen, arousing in one a sense of the immensity of knowledge and of its intangibility. In this atmosphere one feels the spirit of the venerable Bede, who completed his biblical translation--despite failing eyesight--by candlelight in his cell at Jarrow. Great indeed is the library that fosters this passionate self-forgetfulness.