NASSAUWS PUBLIC LIBRARY. 67 
cupant of this little but exquisitely furnished tenement is itself 
conscious of the gracefulness and beauty of the inner chambers 
of the house it occupies upon the submerged shelf of the ocean. 
Tt was a very pleasant surprise to find at Nassau a well selected 
Public Library of over seven thousand yolumes. It does much 
credit to the government which established and sustains it, and 
evidences wise statesmanship. Some of the other islands it is 
said, are similarly favored. A person, entitled to draw books, is 
permitted to take out five volumes at a time—a very liberal num- 
ber, and probably more than could be allowed if its patrons were 
more numerous. Isolated as New Providence is from the great 
world beyond the sea, the stranger, with the works of his favorite 
authors before him, is lonely no more. He is in the midst of a 
congenial world—the great world of letters—and no longer a 
stranger in a strange land. His mind is enriched and seeded 
with the great thoughts of the world’s greatest thinkers, present 
and past. Philosophers unlock the secrets of nature, and spread 
her most profound and subtle laws at his feet. Romance lays 
bare for him the mysteries (to some extent distorted and too 
highly colored) of the human heart, and the lights and shadows 
of all phases of human life. History, with graphic pen, dipped 
alike in truth and fable, portrays the rise, the decadence, and 
the fall of states and empires, and points, out the deep-seated 
causes that make and ruin nations, Divines cluster around him, 
and, while some fora greater or less fee permit him to look 
through their little pieces of smoked glass at the invisible world, 
others, with lips hallowed with celestial fire from God’s own 
altar, discourse eloquently upon the mysteries of life, death and 
immortality. While the poet, in soothing numbers, sings in- 
spired songs, conducts him on fancy’s wings through all space, 
and opens for him alike grim purgatorial doors and the golden 
gates of the celestial city. 
