awe!" "Quite right, young man; a very proper answer," exclaimed the
Master.'[A]

[Footnote A: _Literary Remains of C.S. Calverley_, p. 31.]

'Devotion mingled with awe' might be a very proper answer for me to
make to my own questions, but possessing that acquaintance with the
history of the most picturesque of all libraries which anybody can
have who loves books enough to devote a dozen quiet hours of
rumination to the pages of Mr. Macray's _Annals of the Bodleian
Library_, second edition, Oxford, 'at the Clarendon Press, 1890,' I
cannot honestly profess to entertain in my breast, with regard to it,
the precise emotions which C.S.C. declared took possession of him when
he regarded the decalogue. A great library easily begets affection,
which may deepen into love; but devotion and awe are plants hard to
rear in our harsh climate; besides, can it be well denied that there
is something in a huge collection of the ancient learning, of
mediaeval folios, of controversial pamphlets, and in the thick black
dust these things so woefully collect, provocative of listlessness and
enervation and of a certain Solomonic dissatisfaction? The two writers
of modern times, both pre-eminently sympathetic towards the past, who
have best described this somewhat melancholy and disillusioned frame
of mind are both Americans: Washington Irving, in two essays in _The
Sketch-Book_, 'The Art of Bookmaking' and 'The Mutability of
Literature'; and Nathaniel Hawthorne, in many places, but notably in
that famous chapter on 'The Emptiness of Picture Galleries,' in _The
Marble Faun_.

It is perhaps best not to make too great demands upon our slender
stock of deep emotions, not to rhapsodize too much, or vainly to