tions, that mind is inscribed. Books are the best type of the
influence of the past, and perhaps we shall get at the truth,--learn
the amount of this influence more conveniently,--by considering their
value alone.

The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received
into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new
arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into him
life; it went out from him truth. It came to him short-lived actions;
it went out from him immortal thoughts. It came to him business; it
went from him poetry. It was dead fact; now, it is quick thought. It
can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now
inspires.[15] Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which
it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing.

Or, I might say, it depends on how far the process had gone, of
transmuting life into truth. In proportion to the completeness of the
distillation, so will the purity and imperishableness of the product
be. But none is quite perfect. As no air-pump can by any means make a
perfect vacuum,[16] so neither can any artist entirely exclude the
conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book
of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, in all respects, to a
remote posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age.
Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each
generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will
not fit this.

Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which attaches to
the act of creation, the act of thought, is instantly transferred to
the record. The poet chanting was felt to be a divine man. Henceforth
the chant is divine also. The writer was a just and wise spirit.
Henceforward it is settled the book is perfect; as love of the hero
corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly the book becomes
noxious.[17] The guide is a tyrant. We sought a brother, and lo, a
governor. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, always
slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once so opened,
having once received this book, stands upon it, and makes an outcry if
it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by
thinkers, not by Man Thinking, by men of talent, that is, who start
wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of
principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their
duty