e with one from an unexpected source.
Says Walt Whitman, in his "Democratic Vistas," speaking of the books
that have come down to us from antiquity:

A few immortal compositions, small in size, yet compassing
what measureless values of reminiscence, contemporary
portraitures, manners, idioms and beliefs, with deepest
inference, hint and thought, to tie and touch forever the
old, new body, and the old, new soul. These! and still
these! bearing the freight so dear--dearer than
pride--dearer than love. All the best experience of humanity
folded, saved, freighted to us here! Some of these tiny
ships we call Old and New Testament, Homer, Eschylus, Plato,
Juvenal, etc. Precious minims! I think if we were forced to
choose, rather than have you, and the likes of you, and what
belongs to and has grown of you, blotted out and gone, we
could better afford, appalling as that would be, to lose all
actual ships, this day fastened by wharf, or floating on
wave, and see them, with all their cargoes, scuttled and
sent to the bottom.

Gathered by geniuses of city, race or age, and put by them
in highest of art's forms, namely, the literary form, the
peculiar combinations, and the outshows of that city, age or
race, its particular modes of the universal attributes and
passions, its faiths, heroes, lovers and gods, wars,
traditions, struggles, crimes, emotions, joys (or the subtle
spirit of these) having been passed on to us to illumine our
own selfhood, and its experiences--what they supply,
indispensable and highest, if taken away, nothing else in
all the world's boundless storehouses could make up to us,
or ever again return.

PRINTING PROBLEMS FOR SCIENCE TO SOLVE

The book seems to have been regarded for hundreds of years--for
thousands of years if we include its prototypes--as a thing apart,
subject to its own laws of beauty, utility, and economy. But recently
men have come to realize that the book has no special esthetic license,
that what is barbarous art elsewhere is barbarous in the book; they also
recognize that the book is within the domain of economics, that the
invention of typography was primarily a reduction of cost, and that a
myriad later processes, which make the book what it is to-day, are all
developments of the same principle. What has not been so clearly seen is
that in