we were striving to forget. It is this common consciousness, this participation in a common memory, which keeps us within call of each other in all the great crises of life, and makes our libraries places of confession and penitence. In the world's cathedral at Rome there are confessionals to whose impersonal sympathy appeals may be made in every language spoken by civilized men; but every library is a truer confessional, and a more universal, than St. Peter's. The dome which overarches every collection of great books is nothing less than the infinite sky which stretches over the life of man, and no human soul ever failed to find under it the shrine of its own tutelary saint. Literature keeps the whole race under constant conviction of sin, and there are hours when every man feels like locking his study door, so absolutely uncovered and revealed does his life lie in the speech of some great book.

Shakespeare knew us all so well that one feels the uselessness of any attempt at concealment in his presence; those penetrating eyes make all disguise impossible. He takes little account of our masquerade,

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except to sharpen the edge of his irony by a contrast between our pretension and the bare facts of our lives. And this revelation of our inner selves is the core of every book that endures. It is already clear that all the systems of philosophy have had their day, and are fast ceasing to be; and there is every prospect that the scholastic systems of theology are going the same road. The facts of life divine and human - transcend them all, and their poverty and inadequacy are more and more apparent. The universe is too vast for the girdle of thought; it sweeps away immeasurably, and fades out of imagination in the splendour of uncounted suns. There will be safe paths of knowledge through it for men of reverence and humility, but the old highway of human omniscience is falling into decay. The utmost service of the greatest man is to bring us one step nearer to the truth, not as it lies clear and absolute in the mind of the Infinite, but as it touches, reveals, and sustains this brief and troubled life of ours. Therefore it has been that the poets have done more for the highest truth than the philosophers,

unless the philosophers have also been poets, as has happened now and then since the days of Plato. One turns oftener for inspiration to Wordsworth's ode on "Immortality," or to Browning's "Death in the Desert" or "Saul," than to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason" or Spencer's "First Principles."

When I go into the great libraries I am oppressed, not by the mass of volumes packed together under a single roof, but by the complexity and vastness of the life that lies behind them. Books by the hundred thousand have been written to give that life expression, and yet how little has been said that goes to the very heart of existence ! When one has read the great books in all literatures, how much still remains unuttered within him!

CHAPTER XVII

A SECRET OF GENIUS

NE of the tests of greatness is bulk. Mere mass never demonstrated the possession of genius, but men who have borne the stamp of this rare and incommunicable quality have generally been creators on a great scale. One may write a single poem and give it the touch of immortality; a line may linger as long in the ear of the world as an epic or a lyric. But, as a rule, the man who writes one perfect verse adds to it many of a kindred beauty, and he who paints one great picture covers. the walls of the gallery. Genius is energy quite as much as insight, and whether it dwell in Shakespeare or in Napoleon, in Michael Angelo or in Gladstone, it is always the mother

of mighty works as well as of great thoughts. Shakespeare, Goethe, Lope de Vega, Molière, Tennyson, Browning, Hugo, Balzac, Scott, Thackeray, fill great space on the shelves of our libraries as well as in our histories of literature. In "Louis Lambert" Balzac describes certain forces, when they take possession of strong personalities, as " rivers of will; there is an impetus in these potential men which sweeps away all obstacles and rolls on with the momentum of a great stream. In men of genius the same tireless activity, the same forceful habit, are often found; nothing daunts them; nothing subdues them; they make all things tributary to self-expression.

The story of the achievements of Lope de Vega, of Scott, of Balzac, has at times. a hint of commerce with magical powers; so difficult is it to reconcile such marvellous fecundity, such extraordinary creative force, with the usual processes of production. Nature has fixed definite boundaries to the activity of most men; there is an invisible line beyond which they seem powerless to go. Upon the man of genius