140 The Last Book. [ Aue. 
should at length catch a spark of the etherial quality? Man, like 
another Prometheus, has informed them with the fire of genius: they 
have a motion and a voice—there is a meaning in their very margins : 
they administer to our wants; they bring us tears, and merriment, and 
invigorating thoughts; they refresh us with secret assurances, and 
attend on us in sickness and servitude. Is it surprising then that I 
should have beheld them, in a visionary hour, impregnate with the 
spirit of life; when I have deemed them, in cold and common moments, 
the embodied spirits of benevolence and wisdom? There are certain 
books which I regard as my oldest and dearest acquaintances—my 
physicians, my counsellors, my companions. A leaf or two torn from 
them would be as grey hairs plucked from the temples of a sage—as the 
rent mantle of Czsar to the eyes of the weeping men of Rome. To me 
at least they are something more than machines.—And here were 
thousands upon thousands,—all that art, science, religion, ethics, 
natural and unnatural history—all that the industry of man, and the 
great mine of creation, could find or furnish matter for—were revelling 
in the “nectared sweets” of a new edition of life, leaping from bough to 
bough, or floating for ever on the air, like a million birds, with plumed 
leaves and outspread covers. Here were books, gleaming with an 
eternal beauty, for which the casket of Darius that Alexander reserved 
to enshrine the works of Homer were a vulgar depository—books that 
should find no meaner sanctuary than the heart of the disciple of genius. 
Nor can such books, though hidden and overgrown with the weeds of 
memory, lie torpid and unproductive ; sooner or-later they will com- 
municate their virtues and wonders to the casket that encloses them: as 
the stone whereon Apollo was accustomed to lay his harp was found to 
yield at last the very notes of the instrument. These were the produc- 
tions of men that, according to the poet, had “ darkened nations when 
they died.” In another place were clusters of volumes pregnant with a 
sweet but fatal knowledge, like the apples of old; others like the more 
modern one that fell upon the head of Newton—giving birth at once to 
a head-ache and a system—heavy with glorious omens ; some like the 
golden one (these were poems) which Dignity and Wisdom and Beauty 
contended for on Ida; and not a few (to complete my plate of sitnilies 
like those that flourish in the Prophet’s Paradise, from whose cores 
issue girls of such singular beauty, that at their pleasure all the waters 
of the earth would cease to be bitter. Many you might perceive, re- 
sembling the fairest and sweetest fruits, that concealed some hard 
problem at the centre, with nothing but a withered kernel to repay the 
effort of breaking it; others, that would seem to sting the very hand 
that wooed them, held honey enough within to mitigate the pains of 
life, and sweeten its tasteless draught. Here perhaps, under the shade 
of a luxuriant bough, appeared a book that had floated proudly upon the 
full tide of popularity, and had as strangely and suddenly gone down— 
“ As though a rose should shut and bea bud again” — 
(to select one from the many beauties of a gifted but luckless writer, 
whose existence was—still in his own words— 
——“ Self-folding like a flower 
That faints into itself at evening hour.’’) 
In a word, there were volumes of every size and on every subject ; some 
that emit a music even in the turning of a leaf, and some wherein a leaf 
that had escaped the knife would be a pretext for passing on to the next 
