from the meshes of legal interpretation.

Here truly are the kings, and to them time is as if it were not. It has run against the Greek race and the Greek language, but not against Homer; it has run against medieval Florence and the Italy just on the threshold of the Renaissance, but not against Dante; it has run against the sturdy England of Elizabeth, but not against Shakespeare. All are dead save the kings, and when one remembers what they have outlived of power and wealth and learning and civilization, one feels that here are the inheritors of immortality. A library is, more truly than any other place to which men may go, a place of refuge against time. Not that time does not come here; those forgotten names on the upper shelves bear witness to its power; but here, at least, are some whose serene faces have the majesty of a work of Phidias; that large, calm, penetrating look of immortality of the elder kings when they stood in unbroken line with the gods. Every library which has its poets' corner-and what library has not?— possesses the memorials of royalty more truly than Westminster itself; more really, in fact, because these kings are not dead. They sway a mightier host to day than ever before, and the boundaries of their common realm are also the frontier lines of civilization. In such company the passage of time is, after all, a thing of little account. It destroys only the imperfect, the partial, the limited, the transitory; here are the truths over which time has

no power, because they are part of that eternity to which it is itself tributary. And just here is the secret of the immortality which these kings have inherited; they have passed through all the appearances of things, the passing symbols and the imperfect embodiments of truth to truth itself, which is contemporaneous with every age and race. Time destroys only the symbols and the inadequate expression of truth, but it is powerless to touch truth. The writers who were once famous and now forgotten were men who caught the aspect of the hour and gave it graceful or forceful expression; but when the hour passed, the book which grew out of it went with it as the flower goes with the season which saw its blossoming. The book of the moment often has immense vogue, while the book of the age, which comes in its company from the press, lies unnoticed; but the great book has its revenge. It lives to see its contemporary pushed up shelf by shelf until it finds its final resting-place in the garret or the auction room.

The conviction deepens in me year by year that the best possible education which any man can acquire is a genuine and intimate acquaintance with these few great minds who have escaped the wrecks of time and have become, with the lapse of years, a kind of impersonal wisdom, summing up the common experience of the race and distilling it drop by drop into the perfect forms of art. The man who knows his Homer thoroughly knows more about the

Greeks than he who has familiarized himself with all the work of the archæologist and philologist and historians of the Homeric age; the man who has mastered Dante has penetrated the secret of medievalism; the man who counts Shakespeare as his friend can afford to leave most other books about Elizabeth's England unread. To really know Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe is to know the best the world has thought and said and done, is to enter into that inheritance of experience and knowledge which is the truest, and at bottom the only, education. Most of us know too many writers, and waste our strength in a vain endeavor to establish relations of intimacy with a multitude of men, great and small, who profess to have some claim upon us. It is both pleasant and wise to have a large acquaintance, to know life broadly and at its best; but our intimate friends can never, in the nature of things, be many. We may know a host of interesting people, but we can really live with but a few. And it is these few and faithful ones whose names I see in the dying light of the old year and the first faint gleam of the new.

CHAPTER VIII.

A SCHOLAR'S DREAM.

THE delicate hands of the little clock on the mantel indicated that thirty minutes had passed since the musical chimes within had rung eleven. The open fire below was burning brightly, for the flame had eaten into the heart of the back log, and was transmuting its slow, rich growth into a warm glow that touched the outlines of the room with a soft splendor and made a charming picture of its mingled lights and shadows. The learning of the world. rose tier above tier on the shelves that filled the space between floor and ceiling, and following the lines of gold lettering along the unbroken rows one read august and imperial names in the kingdom of thought. An ample writing-table, piled high with pamphlets and books, stood in the center of the room, and the loose sheets of paper carelessly thrown together gave evidence of a work only recently interrupted. Without, the solemn silence of midnight and the radiant stars brooded over the stainless fields, white with freshly fallen snow.

Ralph Norton had been looking into the fire these thirty minutes, in a meditation that was almost wholly pathetic. His seventy years passed in swift

procession before him, coming up one by one out of the invisible past, and pronouncing an inaudible judgment upon his career. There was a presence of indefinable and unusual solemnity in the time, for it was the close of a century, and in a brief halfhour another hundred years would be rounded to completion. By the common judgment of the thinking world, Ralph Norton was the foremost man of his age; no other had felt its doubts so keenly, or drank in its inspiration with such a mighty thirst as he. His thought had searched into its secret places and mastered all its wisdom; his heart had felt its deep pulsations in the solitude of unbroken and heroic studies; his genius had given its spirit a voice of matchless compass and eloquence. For half a century the world had laid his words to heart, and built its faith upon his thinking. While the busy tides of activity ebbed and flowed through the great channels of civilization, he had lived apart in a deep, earnest, and whole-hearted consecration to truth. The clearly cut features, the keen, benignant eyes, the noble poise of head, the wistful expression as of one striving to pierce the heart of some mystery, were signs of a personality that had left its impress on two generations, and now, in its grand maturity, was still waiting for some larger fulfillment of the promise of life. Behind him, among the throng of books, indistinguishable in the dim light, were the works into which the life of his life had gone. They recorded explorations into many