p of that great
company no man can number of wise men made perfect by time.

But to the seeing eye and the hearing ear, awake and attentive to all
that a library is, not for men but for man, not for individuals but for
the race, a greater than Solomon is here, and a mightier shape fills
these halls and looks down from these shelves than all the trooped and
illustrious dead. These books, shelf on shelf, these volumes, which fit
subject by subject into the storied arch of human knowledge, resting one
side on metaphysics and the other on history, the science of mind and
the science of man, seem existent human memory. The complete library
would round and fill the record of the race. At best, we have but a
beggarly fragment. If a single copy of each of the 13,000,000 volumes
which dropped from the press in 450 years were by some glad miracle
multiplying knowledge gathered in one place, human memory would be
unbroken for this short span of its long stay on the globe. Of
13,000,000 but 1,000,000 rest in the largest library on earth in
Bloomsbury Square, and not a half are gathered in all known libraries.
But such as it is, large or small complete or incomplete, a great
library to its capacity gives, as this has begun to do, the only measure
we have of the recollection of the race. Here we stand face to face not
with men or nations, race or people, but with man. Blindly our humanity
still struggles to shape its thought, dumb, inarticulate, unconscious,
travelling in darkness and laboring in pain, century by century, and
generation by generation, in the slow pilgrimage toward the conscious
and consecration before it. The thunder of its power who shall know? Who
shall sound its depths or scale its heights? Who shall know it in all
its compass and sound, measure the confines thereof or prophesy its far
final coming? These are all hid in the inscrutable decrees of God from
the sight of men, but here, here and in places like this there rises
before us like an exhalation of the past in these volumes, in this
library, the majestic and visible memory of man.

Rightly here, as in that larger treasure house in London, have we
gathered museum and library under the same roof. These shapeless
fragments worked by the early cunning of savage man, these inscribed
marbles and sculptured slabs, these tablets and relics of another and a
distant life, these all, each in its place, play their part in the
recorded memory of the race. Out of every f