NATURE AND BOOKS. 33 



were, a sort of floating book in the mind, almost re- 

 making the soul. It seems as if the chief value of 

 books is to give us something to unlearn. Sometimes 

 I feel indignant at the false views that were instilled into 

 me in early days, and then again I see that that very 

 indignation gives me a moral life. I hope in the days 

 to come future thinkers will unlearn us, and find ideas 

 infinitely better. How marvellous it seems that there 

 should be found communities furnished with the printing- 

 press and fully convinced they are more intelligent than 

 ants, and yet deliberately refusing by a solid ' popular ' 

 vote to accept free libraries ! They look with scorn on 

 the mediaeval times, when volumes were chained in the 

 college library or to the desk at church. Ignorant times 

 those ! A good thing it would be if only three books 

 were chained to a desk, open and free in every parish 

 throughout the kingdom now. So might the wish to 

 unlearn be at last started in the inert mind of the mass. 

 Almost the only books left to me to read, and not to 

 unlearn very much, are my first books — the graven 

 classics of Greece and Rome, cut with a stylus so 

 deeply into the tablet they cannot be erased. Little of 

 the monograph or of classification, no bushel baskets 

 full of facts, no minute dissection of nature, no attempt 

 to find the soul under the scalpel. Thoughts which do 

 not exactly deal with nature direct in a mechanical way, 

 as the chemist labels all his gums and spices and earths 

 in small boxes — I wonder if anybody at Athens ever 

 made a collection of the coleoptera ? Yet in some way 

 they had got the spirit of the earth and sea, the soul of 

 the sun. This never dies ; this I wish not to unlearn ; 

 this is ever fresh and beautiful as a summer morning : — 



Such the golden crocus, 

 Fair flower of early spring ; the gopher white, 



D 



