reet and the Common (the very trees cannot live in
it), but one is out of reach. When one has to live in civilisation, as
most of us do, nearly all of one's time every day in the week, it means
a great deal. I can hardly say how much it means to me, in the daily
struggle with it, to be able to dodge behind the Athenaeum, to be able to
go in and sit down there, if only for a minute, to be behind glass, as
it were, to hear great, hungry Tremont Street chewing men up, hundreds
of trainloads at a time, into wood-pulp, smoothing them out into nobody
or everybody; it makes one feel, while it is not as it ought to be, as
if, after all, there might be some way out, as if some provision had
been made in this world, or might be made, for letting human beings live
on it.

The general sense of unsensitiveness in a modern library, of hurry and
rush and efficiency, above all, the kind of moral smugness one feels
there, the book-self-consciousness, the unprotected, public-street
feeling one has--all these things are very grave and important obstacles
which our great librarians, with their great systems--most of them--have
yet to reckon with. A little more mustiness, gentlemen, please, silence,
slowness, solitude with books, as if they were woods, unattainableness
(and oh, will any one understand it?), a little inconvenience, a little
old-fashioned, happy inconvenience; a chance to gloat and take pains and
love things with difficulties, a chance to go around the corners of one's
knowledge, to make modest discoveries all by one's self. It is no small
thing to go about a library having books happen to one, to feel one's
self sitting down with a book--one's own private Providence--turning the
pages of events.

One cannot help feeling that if a part of the money that is being spent
carnegieing nowadays, that is, in arranging for a great many books and a
great many people to pile up order among a great many books, could be
spent in providing hundreds of thousands of small libraries, or small
places in large ones, where men who would like to do it would feel safe
to creep in sometimes and open their souls--nobody looking--it would be
no more than fair.

* * * * *

Postscript. One has to be so much of one's time helpless before a
librarian in this world, one has to put him on his honour as a gentleman
so much, to expose such vast, incredible tracts of ignorance to him,
that I know only too well that I, of al