monk, was not the loss of so many books and parchments. It was the
paralysis of a great lobe of human memory, fatal lesion had fallen on
the localized organ of recollection in the brain of humanity. If we had
the 200 plays of Aeschylus, the 160 of Sophocles, the last books of
Livy, the missing annals of Tacitus, which this library held, the
stature of these writers would not be increased. Like the greater peaks
of every chain they already rise as they recede. It is only the
foot-hill that needs bulk. These, and lost books like them, would fill
for us the full measures of classic memory. As library after library
perished and book after book shared the fate of those fathered by
Ptolemy, the wreck and loss of human memory went on. The ages that we
call dark lacked not in men of action. Those ages of faith had their men
of thought matching any before or after. They laid for us the
foundations of a civil liberty more indestructible than that of Rome.
The piers of that great arch of law along which our rights daily travel
in safety were built by them. Their architecture and their sculpture
equals any. Their knowledge of the earth, as a whole, was immeasureably
in advance of classic conception. They furnished in Dante one of the two
or three poets for all time, and in the Roman Church they gave the race
a creation and conception of whose future it would be a rash man who
ventured to say that it was destined to be less than its past, imperial
as its history has been. These ages were dark, not from lack of light
and of leading, but from lack of memory. The ages had lost touch of the
elbow in their march through the dark defile of time. The Renaissance
was less the revival of human knowledge than the recovery of human
memory. Age was joined again to age in the unbroken sequence of
continuous recollection, and Greece laid her hands to transmit an
Apostolic succession of memory on the bowed and studious head of the
modern world.

To play its part in transmitting and preserving human memory this
library is tonight opened and dedicated. Our Library Committee, and you,
sir, its head, who have shown us that whole libraries of comment may be
condensed into a volume by your magic alembic, providing for criticism a
new instrument of precision akin to the measurements and the analysis of
the exact science--you, sir, in the loving care you have given this
building, have not been providing a retreat for scholars; you have built
and fashioned