touch with the past.
The nation which lives in the library will want knowledge of the
present. We know all too much as Americans of the peril of thinking by
the newspapers. German thought has run in the seclusive channel of the
academic library to the lack and loss of civic consciousness. Germany
was the last of modern states to act as a people. We were the first, the
balance and connection between the newspaper and the library, news and
liberal letters, the reporter and the professor, cuts up by the roots
the frequent conception of the library as a place occult, withheld,
untrod; shut apart from practical ends, the grant of society to the
scholar--useful to letters, useless to life. This "idol of the
market-place" falls to pieces confronted by the facts of social
structure. As well might the brain be held silent, the voice of memory
dumb, the light of consciousness in darkness by the side of the brute
mechanical forces of the body; silence, seclusion, separation from the
active life of society, these may be for the exchange and the
market-place, the railroad and the factory, vast, dumb mechanic
processes which perish in producing, but not for the library--not here,
not here. These walls ring with war. They sound with the conflicts of
the race. Here, rather than in any arsenal is heard

--"the infinite fierce chorus,
The cries of agony, the endless groan,
Which, through the ages that have gone before us,
In long reverberations reach our own."

Thus much for the library in organized society. Long since have we
known of books as the counsellors and comforters of men. To us all they
have been teachers, to each of us companions. That great majority,
greater in wisdom no less than in number, in which by the iron decrees
of fate so many are called and so few are chosen to lasting immortality,
holds all of whom living the world was not worthy, but of whom dead it
slowly seeks to be. Here and here alone in all shapes and forms, we
build the sepulchres of the prophets whom our fathers crucified and here
doubtless our children will build the sepulchres of those who in our day
are despised and afflicted of men for the truth's sake. In joy and in
grief, in life and in death some book supports, sustains, and soothes
each of us, and in this library the very light has been trained to teach
us at every window and door that we might enter it to pass within the
presence of the mighty dead, to enjoy the companionshi