all whimsies that have come upon the parish from the days of the augurs
down to our own--would be disenchanted at once in a neighborhood
familiar with Del Rio, Wierus, Bodin, Scot, Glanvil, Webster, Casaubon,
and the Mathers. Good books are the enemies of delusion, the most
effectual extinguishers of self-conceit. Impersonal, dispassionate,
self-possessed, they reason without temper, and remain forever of the
same mind without obstinacy. The man who has the freedom of a great
library lengthens his own life without the weariness of living; he may
include all past generations in his experience without risk of senility;
not yet fifty, he may have made himself the contemporary of "the
world's gray fathers"; and with no advantages of birth or person, he may
have been admitted to the selectest society of all times and lands.

We live in the hope of seeing, if not a great library somewhere on this
continent, at least the foundations of such a one, laid broad enough and
deep enough to change hope into a not too remote certainty. Hitherto
America has erected but one statue in commemoration of a scholar, and we
cannot help wishing that the money that has been wasted in setting up
in effigy one or two departed celebrities we could mention had been
appropriated to a means of culture which, perhaps more than any other,
would be likely to give us men worthy of bronze or marble, but above the
necessity of them for memory.

* * * * *


RECENT AMERICAN PUBLICATIONS.


The Poetical Works of William Motherwell; with a Memoir of his Life.