s rather intelligent myself. The P. G. S. of M.
had little to say to this, and after he had said how intelligent he was
awhile, the conversation was dropped.

* * * * *

The question that concerns me is, What shall a man do, how shall he act,
when he finds himself in the hush of a great library,--opens the door
upon it, stands and waits in the midst of it, with his poor outstretched
soul all by himself before IT,--and feels the books pulling on him? I
always feel as if it were a sort of infinite crossroads. The last thing
I want to know in a library is exactly what I want there. I am tired of
knowing what I want. I am always knowing what I want. I can know what I
want almost anywhere. If there is a place left on God's earth where a
modern man can go and go regularly and not know what he wants awhile, in
Heaven's name why not let him? I am as fond as the next man, I think, of
knowing what I am about, but when I find myself ushered into a great
library I do not know what I am about any sooner than I can help. I
shall know soon enough--God forgive me! When it is given to a man to
stand in the Assembly Room of Nations, to feel the ages, all the ages,
gathering around him, flowing past his life; to listen to the immortal
stir of Thought, to the doings of The Dead, why should a man
interrupt--interrupt a whole world--to know what he is about? I stand at
the junction of all Time and Space. I am the three tenses. I read the
newspaper of the universe.

It fades away after a little, I know. I go to the card catalogue like a
lamb to the slaughter, poke my head into Knowledge--somewhere--and am
lost, but the light of it on the spirit does not fade away. It leaves a
glow there. It plays on the pages afterward.

There is a certain fine excitement about taking a library in this
fashion, a sense of spaciousness of joy in it, which one is almost
always sure to miss in libraries--most libraries--by staying in them.
The only way one can get any real good out of a modern library seems to
be by going away in the nick of time. If one stays there is no help for
it. One is soon standing before the card catalogue, sorting one's wits
out in it, filing them away, and the sense of boundlessness both in
one's self and everybody else--the thing a library is for--is fenced off
for ever.

At least it seems fenced off for ever. One sees the universe barred and
patterned off with a kind of grating before it. It is a c