"Sordello." Books change like friends, like ourselves, like
everything; but they are most piquant in the contrasts they provoke,
when the friend who gave them and wrote them is a success, though we
laughed at him; a failure, though we believed in him; altered in any
case, and estranged from his old self and old days. The vanished
past returns when we look at the pages. The vicissitudes of years
are printed and packed in a thin octavo, and the shivering ghosts of
desire and hope return to their forbidden home in the heart and
fancy. It is as well to have the power of recalling them always at
hand, and to be able to take a comprehensive glance at the emotions
which were so powerful and full of life, and now are more faded and
of less account than the memory of the dreams of childhood. It is
because our books are friends that do change, and remind us of
change, that we should keep them with us, even at a little
inconvenience, and not turn them adrift in the world to find a dusty
asylum in cheap bookstalls. We are a part of all that we have read,
to parody the saying of Mr. Tennyson's Ulysses, and we owe some
respect, and house-room at least, to the early acquaintances who
have begun to bore us, and remind us of the vanity of ambition and
the weakness of human purpose. Old school and college books even
have a reproachful and salutary power of whispering how much a man
knew, and at the cost of how much trouble, that he has absolutely
forgotten, and is neither the better nor the worse for it. It will
be the same in the case of the books he is eager about now; though,
to be sure, he will read with less care, and forget with an ease and
readiness only to be acquired by practice.

But we were apologising for book-hunting, not because it teaches
moral lessons, as "dauncyng" also does, according to Sir Thomas
Elyot, in the "Boke called the Gouvernour," but because it affords a