would have been his own quivering,
animated, and animating personality. He would have impressed every one
of his associates, every one of whom would in turn have impressed a new
crowd, and thus the immortal array of influences would have gone on. Not
impressions on parchment, but impressions on the soul, not letters, but
thrills, would have been its result. Thus the magic of personal
influence of all kinds would have radiated from it in omnipresent and
colliding circlets forever, as the mighty imponderable agents are
believed to radiate from some hidden focal force. He would trace his
idea in the massive architecture and groping science of Egypt,--in the
elegant forms of worship, thought, institutes, and life among the
Greeks,--in the martial and systematizing genius of Rome,--and so on
through the ecclesiastical life of the Middle Ages, and the political
and scientific ambitions of modern times. Its operations have everywhere
been chemical, not mechanical. It has lived, not in the letter, but in
the spirit. Never dropping to the earth, it has been maintained as a
shuttlecock in spiritual regions by the dynamics of the soul. It has
wrought itself into the soul, the only living and immortal thing, and so
the proper place for ideas. Its mode of transmission has been by the
suffusion of the eye, the cheek, the lip, the manner, not by dead and
unsymbolical letters. It has had life, and not merely duration. It has
been perpetuated in cordate, not in dactylate characters. Its history
must not be sought away from the circle of life, but may be seen in the
current generation of men. The man whom you should meet on the street
would be the product of all the ideas and influences from the
foundation of the world, and his slightest act would reveal them all
vital within him. The libraries, which form dead recesses in the river
of life, would thus be swept into and dissolved in the current, and the
waters would have been deepened and colored by their dissolution.
Libraries are a sort of _debris_ of the world, but the spiritual
substance of them would thus enter into the organism of history. All the
last results of time would come to us, not through books, but through
the impressions of daily life. Whatsoever was unworthy to be woven into
the fibres of the soul would be overwhelmed by that oblivion which
chases humanity; all the time wasted in the wrong-headedness of
archaeology would be saved; for there would be nothing of the past e