e, how often has this
truth been impressed upon the mind!--such a library as that in the old
city of Nuremberg, housed in what was once a monastery, and looking so
ancient, quaint, and black-lettered, visibly and invisibly, that, if the
old monk in the legend who slipped over a thousand years while the
little bird sang to him in the wood, and was thereby taught, what he
could not understand in the written Word, that a thousand years in
God's sight are but as a day,--if that old monk had walked out of the
Nuremberg monastery and now walked back again, he might almost take up
the selfsame manuscript he had laid down a thousand years ago.

What invisible heads have ached, and hands become weary, over those
vellum volumes, with their bright initial letters! What hearts have
throbbed over the early printed book! How triumphantly was the first
copy, now worm-eaten and forgotten, contemplated by the author! How was
that invisible world which surrounded him to be stirred by that new
book!

We remember looking into one of the cell-like alcoves arranged for
students in a college library at Oxford, and watching a fellow of the
college (a type of scholars, grown old among books, rarely found in our
busy land) crooning over a strange black-letter folio, and laughing to
himself with a sort of invisible chuckle. The unseen in that volume was
revealed to us through that laugh of the old bookworm, and quite unseen
we partook of his amusement. Another alcove was vacant; a crabbed
manuscript, just laid down by the writer, was on the desk. He was
invisible; but the watchful guardian at the head of the room saw us
peering in, and warned us with a loud voice not to enter. Safely might
we have been permitted to do so, for we could hardly have deciphered at
a glance all the wisdom that lurked in the open page; yet that hidden
meaning, invisible to us, was of real value to the unseen writer.

There are many incidents connected with the visible and invisible of
libraries existing in the great houses of England, which could point a
moral in sketches of this subject. One, concerning a pamphlet found at
Woburn Abbey, has a peculiar interest.

Lord William Russell, eldest son of Francis, fourth Earl of Bedford,
after completing his education at Oxford, and travelling abroad for two
years, returned home in the winter of 1634. Young, handsome,
accomplished, and the eldest son of the House of Russell, the
fashionable world of London marked him as a