Certainly the Art of Writing is the most miraculous of all things man
has devised. Odin's _Runes_ were the first form of the work of a Hero;
_Books_, written words, are still miraculous _Runes_, the latest form!
In Books lies the _soul_ of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible
voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has
altogether vanished like a dream. Mighty fleets and armies, harbours and
arsenals, vast cities, high-domed, many-engined,--they are precious,
great: but what do they become? Agamemnon, the many Agamemnons,
Pericleses, and their Greece; all is gone now to some ruined fragments,
dumb mournful wrecks and blocks: but the Books of Greece! There Greece,
to every thinker, still very literally lives; can be called-up again
into life. No magic Rune is stranger than a Book. All that Mankind has
done, thought, gained, or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in
the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men. Do not Books
still accomplish _miracles_, as _Runes_ were fabled to do? They persuade
men. Not the wretchedest circulating-library novel, which foolish girls
thumb and con in remote villages, but will help to regulate the actual
practical weddings and households of those foolish girls. So 'Celia'
felt, so 'Clifford' acted: the foolish Theorem of Life, stamped into
those young brains, comes out as a solid Practice one day. Consider
whether any _Rune_ in the wildest imagination of mythologist ever did
such wonders as, on the actual firm Earth, some Books have done! What
built St. Paul's Cathedral? Look at the heart of the matter, it was that
divine Hebrew BOOK--the word partly of the man Moses, an outlaw tending
his Midianitish herds, four thousand years ago, in the wildernesses of
Sinai! It is the strangest of things, yet nothing is truer. With the art
of Writing, of which Printing is a simple, an inevitable, and
comparatively insignificant corollary, the true reign of miracles for
mankind commenced. It related, with a wondrous new contiguity and
perpetual closeness, the Past and Distant with the Present in time and
place; all times and all places with this our actual Here and Now. All
things were altered for men; all modes of important work of men.--T.
CARLYLE. _Heroes and Hero-Worship._