o travels by translation travels more hastily and
superficially, but brings home something that is worth having,
nevertheless. Translations properly used, by shortening the labor of
acquisition, add as many years to our lives as they subtract from the
processes of our education.

In such a library the sciences should be fully represented, that men may
at least learn to know in what a marvellous museum they live, what a
wonder worker is giving them an exhibition daily for nothing. Nor let
art be forgotten in all its many forms, not as the antithesis of
science, but as her elder or fairer sister, whom we love all the more
that her usefulness cannot be demonstrated in dollars and cents. I
should be thankful if an every day laborer among us could have his mind
illumined, as those of Athens and of Florence had, with some image of
what is best in architecture, painting and sculpture to train his crude
perceptions and perhaps call out latent faculties. I should like to see
the works of Ruskin within the reach of every artisan among us. For I
hope some day that the delicacy of touch and accuracy of eye that have
made our mechanics in some departments the best in the world may give us
the same supremacy in works of wider range and more purely ideal scope.

Voyages and travels I would also have, good store, especially the
earlier, when the world was fresh and unhackneyed and men saw things
invisible to the modern eye. They are fast sailing ships to waft away
from present trouble to the Fortunate Isles.

To wash down the dryer morsels that every library must necessarily
offer at its board, let there be plenty of imaginative literature, and
let its range be not too narrow to stretch from Dante to the elder
Dumas. The world of the imagination is not the world of abstraction and
nonentity, as some conceive, but a world formed out of chaos by the
sense of the beauty that _is_ in man and the earth on which he dwells.
It is the realm of might be, our heaven of refuge from the shortcomings
and disillusions of life. It is, to quote Spenser, who knew it well,

"The world's sweet inn from care and wearisome turmoil."

Do we believe, then, that God gave us in mockery this splendid faculty
of sympathy with things that are a joy forever? For my part, I believe
that the love and study of works of imagination is of practical utility
in a country so profoundly material in its leading tendencies as ours.
The hunger after purely intellectua