excavated ruts, alone broke the
desert-like prospect, as the burrows of life. Penetrating into these,
the eye saw men walking beneath the striated piles, with heads bent
forward and nervous fingering of brow. There the whole world, such as we
have known it, was buried beneath volumes, past all enumeration. There
was neither fauna nor flora, neither wilderness, tempest, nor any
familiar look of Nature, but only one boundless contiguity of books.
There was only man and space and one unceasing library, and the men
neither ate nor slept nor spoke. Nature was transformed into the
processes and products of writing, and man was now no longer lover,
friend, peasant, merchant, naturalist, traveller, gourmet, mechanic,
warrior, worshipper, but only an author. All other faculties had been
lost to him, and all resources for anything else had fled from his
universe. Anon some wrinkled, fidgety, cogitative being in human form
would add a new volume to some slope or tower of the monstrous
omni-patulent mass, or some sharp-glancing youth, with teeth set
unevenly on edge, would pull out a volume, look greedily and
half-believingly for a few moments, return it, and slink away. "What is
this world, and what means this life?" cried I, addressing an old man,
who had just tossed a volume aloft. "Where are we, and what about this?
Tell me, for I have not before seen and do not know." He glanced a
moment, then spoke, like a shade in hell, as follows:--"This is the
world, and here is human life. Man long enjoyed it, with wonderful
fulness and freshness of being. But a madness seized him; everybody
wrote books; the evil grew more and more; nought else was an object of
pursuit; till at last the earth was covered with tomes, and for long
ages now it has been buried beyond the reach of mortal. All forms of
life were exterminated. Man himself survives only as a literary shadow.
Each one writes a book, or a few books, and dies, vanishing into thin
air. Such is life,--a hecatomb!"

But even if it be supposed that mind could survive the toil, and the
earth the quantity of our accumulating books, there are other
difficulties. There are other imperative limitations, beyond which the
art of writing cannot go. Letters themselves limit the possibilities of
literature. For there is only a certain number of letters. These letters
are capable of only a certain number of combinations into words. This
limited number of possible words is capable only of a certai