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 medieval 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, 
