The colleges, whilst they provide us with libraries, furnish no
professor of books; and, I think, no chair is so much wanted. In a
library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends, but they are
imprisoned by an enchanter in these paper and leathern boxes; and,
though they know us, and have been waiting two, ten, or twenty centuries
for us,--some of them,--and are eager to give us a sign, and unbosom
themselves, it is the law of their limbo that they must not speak until
spoken to; and as the enchanter has dressed them, like battalions of
infantry, in coat and jacket of one cut, by the thousand and ten
thousand, your chance of hitting on the right one is to be computed by
the arithmetical rule of Permutation and Combination,--not a choice out
of three caskets, but out of half a million caskets all alike. But it
happens in our experience, that in this lottery there are at least fifty
or a hundred blanks to a prize. It seems, then, as if some charitable
soul, after losing a great deal of time among the false books, and
alighting upon a few true ones which made him happy and wise, would do a
right act in naming those which have been bridges or ships to carry him
safely over dark morasses and barren oceans, into the heart of sacred
cities, into palaces and temples. This would be best done by those great
masters of books who from time to time appear,--the Fabricii, the
Seldens, Magliabecchis, Scaligers, Mirandolas, Bayles, Johnsons, whose
eyes sweep the whole horizon of learning. But private readers, reading
purely for love of the book, would serve us by leaving each the shortest
note of what he found.--R. W. EMERSON. _Books._