In my garden I spend my days; in my library I spend my nights. My
interests are divided between my geraniums and my books. With the flower
I am in the present; with the book I am in the past. I go into my
library, and all history unrolls before me. I breathe morning air of the
world while the scent of Eden's roses yet lingered in it, while it
vibrated only to the world's first brood of nightingales, and to the
laugh of Eve. I see the pyramids building; I hear the shoutings of the
armies of Alexander; I feel the ground shake beneath the march of
Cambyses. I sit as in a theatre,--the stage is time, the play is the
play of the world. What a spectacle it is! What kingly pomp, what
processions file past, what cities burn to heaven, what crowds of
captives are dragged at the chariot-wheels of conquerors! I hiss or cry
'Bravo' when the great actors come on shaking the stage. I am a Roman
Emperor when I look at a Roman coin. I lift Homer, and I shout with
Achilles in the trenches. The silence of the unpeopled Syrian plains,
the out-comings and in-goings of the patriarchs, Abraham and Ishmael,
Isaac in the fields at eventide, Rebekah at the well, Jacob's guile,
Esau's face reddened by desert sun-heat, Joseph's splendid funeral
procession--all these things I find within the boards of my Old
Testament. What a silence in those old books as of a half-peopled
world--what bleating of flocks--what green pastoral rest--what
indubitable human existence! Across brawling centuries of blood and war,
I hear the bleating of Abraham's flocks, the tinkling of the bells of
Rebekah's camels. O men and women, so far separated, yet so near, so
strange, yet so well-known, by what miraculous power do I know ye all!
Books are the true Elysian fields where the spirits of the dead
converse, and into these fields a mortal may venture unappalled. What
king's court can boast such company? What school of philosophy such
wisdom? The wit of the ancient world is glancing and flashing there.
There is Pan's pipe, there are the songs of Apollo. Seated in my library
at night, and looking on the silent faces of my books, I am occasionally
visited by a strange sense of the supernatural. They are not collections
of printed pages, they are ghosts. I take one down and it speaks with me
in a tongue not now heard on earth, and of men and things of which it
alone possesses knowledge. I call myself a solitary, but sometimes I
think I misapply the term. No man sees more company than I do. I travel
with mightier cohorts around me than ever did Timour or Genghis Khan on
their fiery marches. I am a sovereign in my library, but it is the dead,
not the living, that attend my levees.--A. SMITH. _Dreamthorp._