There is the altar sacred
to his holiest experiences. There is the font where his new-born thought
was baptized and first had a name in his consciousness. There is the
monumental tablet of a dead belief, sacred still in the memory of what it
was while yet alive. No visitor can read all this on the lettered backs
of the books that have gathered around the scholar, but for him, from the
Aldus on the lowest shelf to the Elzevir on the highest, every volume has
a language which none but he can interpret. Be patient with the
book-collector who loves his companions too well to let them go. Books
are not buried with their owners, and the veriest book-miser that ever
lived was probably doing far more for his successors than his more
liberal neighbor who despised his learned or unlearned avarice. Let the
fruit fall with the leaves still clinging round it. Who would have
stripped Southey's walls of the books that filled them, when, his mind no
longer capable of taking in their meaning, he would still pat and fondle
them with the vague loving sense of what they had once been to him,--to
him, the great scholar, now like a little child among his playthings?
We need in this country not only the scholar, but the virtuoso, who
hoards the treasures which he loves, it may be chiefly for their rarity
and because others who know more than he does of their value set a high
price upon them.
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