shorthand, perhaps concealing matter of profound truth and wisdom.
The world will never be the better for it. A few of the books were
Latin folios, written by Catholic authors; others demolished Papistry,
as with a sledge-hammer, in plain English. A dissertation on the Book
of Job--which only Job himself could have had patience to read--filled
at least a score of small, thick-set quartos, at the rate of two or
three volumes to a chapter. Then there was a vast folio body of
divinity,--too corpulent a body, it might be feared, to comprehend the
spiritual element of religion. Volumes of this form dated back two
hundred years or more, and were generally bound in black leather,
exhibiting precisely such an appearance as we should attribute to
books of enchantment. Others equally antique were of a size proper to
be carried in the large waistcoat pockets of old times,--diminutive,
but as black as their bulkier brethren, and abundantly interfused with
Greek and Latin quotations. These little old volumes impressed me as
if they had been intended for very large ones, but had been
unfortunately blighted at an early stage of their growth.

The rain pattered upon the roof and the sky gloomed through the dusty
garret-windows while I burrowed among these venerable books in search
of any living thought which should burn like a coal of fire or glow
like an inextinguishable gem beneath the dead trumpery that had long
hidden it. But I found no such treasure; all was dead alike; and I
could not but muse deeply and wonderingly upon the humiliating fact
that the works of man's intellect decay like those of his hands.
Thought grows mouldy. What was good and nourishing food for the
spirits of one generation affords no sustenance for the next. Books
of religion, however, cannot be considered a fair test of the enduring
and vivacious properties of human thought, because such books so
seldom really touch upon their ostensible subject, and have,