n is simply a means for the culture of the city of
Hartford, in all ways, because literature and art--not taken externally,
but absorbed as a part of our lives, not only of knowledge, but of
experience--are the things that make life worth living.

No one can speak too highly of the offices of a great library. It was
one of our great essayists, you remember, who said that the
monastery--speaking of it with reference to its books--was the ark that
floated down over the tempest and darkness of the middle ages, in order
to carry classic learning to the fifteenth century. They were
repositories of learning. That is the old idea. And for a long
time--almost to our day--that was the notion of the library. It was a
place to put something away. It was not even like a market for the sale
of provisions or eggs; indeed, if they were eggs the librarians thought
it their duty to sit on them, with the idea that they might hatch out
other books. That was a noble thing to do. But much better than that is
to scatter these books abroad among the people, so that we shall not
have reproduction--an egg for an egg--but that these books will so
revivify the life that we shall have books new, that express the actual
conditions and that appeal to the human life as it is. This is the
modern idea of the library. This great collection, which is not to be
secluded, is to be carried and even forced upon the people, so that it
shall enter into and become a part of their daily lives.

You remember, perhaps, what Milton says about the books, in that
noblest of noble defences of unlicensed printing, that "they are not
dead things. As good almost," he says, "kill a man as you kill a good
book. Who kills a man, kills a reasonable being, made in God's image.
Who destroys a good book destroys reason itself, kills the image of God
as it were, in the eye. Many a man," he goes on to say, "lives a burden
to the earth, but a good book is the precious life blood of a master
spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life; so
that if we slay a good book we would slay immortality rather than a
life."

Charles Hopkins Clark, who immediately followed Mr. Warner,
was at this time editor in chief of _The Hartford Courant_,
of which Mr. Warner was co-editor. Mr. Clark was born in
Hartford April 1, 1848, graduated at Yale, and joined the
_Courant_ staff in 1871, becoming editor in 1890.

One of the earliest sins of my youth, or