only dangerous when it forgets that it is
special. When it encroaches on its betters,
when it claims exceptional certainty or
honor, it is impertinent, and should be rebuked;
but it has its own honor in its own
province, and is, in any case, to be preferred to
pretentious and flaunting sciolism.

A vast, even a bewildering prospect is
before us, for evil or for good; but for good,
unless it be our own fault, far more than for
evil. Books require no eulogy from me; none
could be permitted me, when they already
draw their testimonials from Cicero[4] and
Macaulay.[5] But books are the voices of the
dead. They are a main instrument of
communion with the vast human procession of
the other world. They are the allies of the
thought of man. They are in a certain sense
at enmity with the world. Their work is, at
least, in the two higher compartments of our
threefold life. In a room well filled with
them, no one has felt or can feel solitary.
Second to none, as friends to the individual,
they are first and foremost among the compages,
the bonds and rivets of the race,
onward from that time when they were first
written on the tablets of Babylonia and
Assyria, the rocks of Asia minor, and the
monuments of Egypt, down to the diamond