hich they speak are dead. Books of power which transmit the spiritual
life of the race keep the self-same spirit through all the
transmigrations of speech. The scriptures of the race, no less than the
scriptures of religion, enjoy a pentecostal gift of tongues, and are
heard by every man in his own language. Where such books are few in
number, which a shelf or two will hold, there is a liberal education,
and no elective course which permits their exclusion offers intellectual
salvation. Some such books every race has found in its own literature as
it reached the full stature of universal humanity, as our own
English-speaking race, well-nigh within this generation, has discovered
in adding Shakespeare to our general schooling. By the production of
such books of power nations are justly measured. This is the wisdom
which keepeth a city from destruction. The ship of state, however
weighted with worldly wealth, moves a trackless keel through the waters
of history unless some poet wings its course with "the proud, full sail
of his great verse." We have all heard to-day from one whose lifelong
devotion has raised him to the foremost rank of scholarship.

"Weave a circle around him thrice
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise."

The study of such books is possible without any aid or apparatus
whatever; so near is the diviner of letters to every one of us. But the
first office which the library discharges in a university is in
providing the limitless and manifold interpretation which the ages have
builded about these great books of power. Better than all other books as
are the books of power when read without study, they are infinitely
bettered by all study. The literature of interpretation is only second
in value to the literature of inspiration. The study even of books of
power tends to become scholastic, narrow, provincial, letterwise, and
spiritually dead, unless it is quickened and corrected by the fruits of
the entire field of critical science. For lack of this more than one
sacred book has met a fate which makes one feel, as well kill a book as
give it a good name. Even in the teaching of books of power--which of
all teaching needs but a soul and the book to awake eternity--the
scholar is saved from himself by the library. He learns that with all
the inspired prophets of the race no scripture is of private
interpretation, that only time unlo