xcept
its influence on the immediate present, and nothing but the pure human
ingot would finally be left of the long whirlings in the crucible of
history. Some one has said that all recent literature is one gigantic
plagiarism from the past. Why plagiarize with toil the toils of the
past, when all that is good in them lives, necessarily and of its own
tendency, in the winged and growing spirit of man? The stream flows in a
channel, and is colored by all the ores of its banks, but it would be
absurd for it to attempt to take the channel up and carry it along with
itself out into the sea. Why should the tinted water of life attempt to
carry along with it not only the tint, but also the bank, ages back,
from which the tint proceeds?

As the world goes on, the multitude of books increases. They grow as
grows the human race,--but, unlike the human race, they have a material
immortality here below. Fossil books, unlike fossil rocks, have a power
of reproduction. Every new year leaves not only a new inheritance, but
generally a larger one than ever before. What is to be the result? The
ultimate prospect is portentous. If England has produced ten thousand
volumes of fiction (about three thousand new novels) during the last
forty years, how many books of all kinds has Christendom to answer for
in the same period? If the British Museum makes it a point to preserve a
copy of everything that is published, how long will it be before the
whole world will not be sufficient to contain the multitude thereof? At
present all the collections of the Museum, books, etc., occupy only
forty acres on the soil, and an average of two hundred feet towards the
sky. But even these outlines indicate a block of space which under
geometrical increase would in the shortest of geological periods make a
more complete conquest of the earth than has ever been made by fire or
water. To say nothing of the sorrows of the composition of these new
literary stores, how is man, whose years are threescore-and-ten, going
to read them? Surely the green earth will be transformed into a
wilderness of books, and man, reduced from the priest and interpreter of
Nature to a bookworm, will be like the beasts which perish.

The eye of fancy lately witnessed in a dream the vision of an age far in
the future. The surface of the earth was covered with lofty rectangles,
built up coral-like from small rectangles. There was neither tree nor
herb nor living creature. Walled paths,