stent fury of dollar-hunting.

And not only was this bookish trait visible in our colonial infancy but
it may be said to have had an ante-natal origin. The two Englishmen who
in the latter half of the 16th century did most to make possible the
birth of American civilization in the first half of the 17th, were Sir
Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh; and both were men possessed by
this large zest for ideas as well as for deeds; both were contemplative
men as well as active men. The last glimpse that any surviving mortal
had of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, before his ship went down in the sea, was
of that stern hero sitting calmly on the deck, with a book in his hand,
cheering his companions by telling them that heaven is as near by water
as by land; and the last labor of Sir Walter Raleigh, before his
judicial murder in the Tower, was to write one of the learnedest and
stateliest books to be met with in the literature of modern men.

And this flavor of bookishness which belonged to these two great
pioneers and martyrs of American colonization, seems to have passed on
to the men who successfully executed the grand project in which they had
failed. When you run your eyes along the sturdy list of the great
colony-founders of the 17th century--the men who carried out the fierce
task of conveying English civilization across the Atlantic, and of
making it take root and live in this wild soil--Captain John Smith, and
William Bradford, and Winslow, and Robert Cushman, and the Winthrops,
and Dudley, and Hooker, and Davenport, and Roger Williams, and William
Penn, you will find them all, in some special sense, lovers of books,
collectors of books, readers of books, even writers of books.

And what is true of the leaders of that great act of national
transmigration is true also of the men of less note who followed in it.
The first American immigrants were reading immigrants--immigrants who
brought in their hands not only axes and shovels, but books. Their
coming hither was due to the restlessness inflicted by the possession of
ideas. Books were to them a necessary part of the outfit for the voyage
and the settlement. And so rare and so precious were books in those days
that they were cherished as family treasures, and handed down as
heirlooms; nay, they were so dealt with in wills and in contracts as if
they rose almost to the dignity of real estate. In fact, in those days,
the possession of an unusual number of books, with the reput