nd the books that
are best worth reading are those which lie the most beautifully. Yet,
in fairness, we must add that they are liars, not with intent to
mislead, but merely with the tenderest purpose to console. They are
the good Samaritans that find us robbed of all our dreams by the
roadside of life, bleeding and weeping and desolate; and such is their
skill and wealth and goodness of heart, that they not only heal up our
wounds, but restore to us the lost property of our dreams, on one
condition,--that we never travel with them again in the daylight.

A library is a better world, built by the brains and hearts of poets
and dreamers, as a refuge from the real world outside; and in it alone
is to be found the land of milk and honey which it promises.

"Milk and honey" would have been an appropriate inscription for the
delicious little library which parents who, I surmised, doted on
Nicolete in vain, had allowed her to build in a wild woodland corner of
her ancestral park, half a mile away from the great house, where, for
all its corridors and galleries, she could never feel, at all events,
spiritually alone. All that was most sugared and musical and generally
delusive in the old library of her fathers had been brought out to this
little woodland library, and to that nucleus of old leather-bound poets
and romancers, long since dead, yet as alive and singing on their
shelves as any bird on the sunny boughs outside, my young lady's
private purse had added all that was most sugared and musical and
generally delusive in the vellum bound Japanese-paper literature of our
own luxurious day. Nor were poets and romancers from over sea--in
their seeming simple paper covers, but with, oh, such complicated and
subtle insides!--absent from the court which Nicolete held here in the
greenwood. Never was such a nest of singing-birds. All day long, to
the ear of the spirit, there was in this little library a sound of
harping and singing and the telling of tales,--songs and tales of a
world that never was, yet shall ever be. Here day by day Nicolete fed
her young soul on the nightingale's-tongues of literature, and put down
her book only to listen to the nightingale's-tongues outside. Yea,
sun, moon, and stars were all in the conspiracy to lie to her of the
loveliness of the world and the good intentions of life. And now, thus
unexpectedly, I found myself joining the nefarious conspiracy. Ah,
well! was I not twenty myself, and f