Part 11

But have you ever rightly considered what the mere ability to read means? That it is the key that admits us to the whole world of thought and fancy and imagination; to the company of saint and sage, of the wisest and the wittiest at their wisest and wittiest moment? That it enables us to see with the keenest eyes, hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time? More than that, it annihilates time and space for us; it revives for us without a miracle the Age of Wonder, endowing us with the shoes of swiftness and the cap of darkness, so that we walk invisible like fern seed and witness unharmed the plague at Athens or Florence or London, accompanying Caesar on his marches, or look in on Catiline in council with his fellow-conspirators, or Guy Fawkes in the cellar of St. Stephen's. We often hear of people who will descend to any servility, submit to any insult, for the sake of getting themselves or their children into what is euphemistically called good society. Did it ever occur to them that there is a select society of all the centuries to which they and theirs can be admitted for the asking--a society, too, which will not involve them in ruinous expense and still more ruinous waste of time and health and faculties?

Southey tells us that, in his walk, one stormy day, he met an old woman, to whom, by way of greeting, he made the rather obvious remark that it was dreadful weather. She answered, philosophically, that, in her opinion, 'any weather was better than none!' I should be half inclined to say that any reading was better than none, allaying the crudeness of the statement by the Yankee proverb, which tells us that, though 'all deacons are good, there's odds in deacons.' Among books, certainly there is much variety of company, ranging from the best to the worst, from Plato to Zola, and the first lesson in reading well is that which teaches us to distinguish between literature and merely printed matter. The choice lies wholly with ourselves. We have the key put into our hands; shall we unlock the pantry or the oratory? There is a Wallachian legend which, like most of the figments of popular fancy, has a moral in it. One Bakala, a good-for-nothing kind of fellow in his way, having had the luck to offer a sacrifice especially well pleasing to God, is taken up into heaven. He finds the Almighty sitting in something like the best room of a Wallachian peasant's cottage--there is always something profoundly pathetic in the homeliness of the popular imagination, forced, like the princess in the fairy tale, to weave its semblance of gold tissue out of straw. On being asked what reward he desires for the good service he has done, Bakala, who had always passionately longed to be the owner of a bagpipe, seeing a half wornout one lying among some rubbish in a corner of the room, begs eagerly that it may be bestowed on him. The Lord, with a smile of pity at the meanness of his choice, grants him his boon, and Bakala goes back to earth delighted with his prize. With an infinite possibility within his reach, with the choice of wisdom, of power, of beauty at his tongue's end, he asked according to his kind, and his sordid wish is answered with a gift as sordid. Yes, there is a choice in books as in friends, and the mind sinks or rises to the level of its habitual society, is subdued, as Shakespeare says of the dyer's hand, to what it works in. Cato's advice, cum bonis ambula, consort with the good, is quite as true if we extend it to books, for they, too, insensibly give away their own nature to the mind that converses with them. They either beckon upward or drag down. And it is certainly true that the material of thought reacts upon the thought itself. Shakespeare himself would have been commonplace had he been paddocked in a thinly shaven vocabulary, and Phidias, had he worked in wax, only a more inspired Mrs. Jarley. A man is known, says the proverb, by the company he keeps, and not only so, but made by it. Milton makes his fallen angels grow small to enter the infernal council room, but the soul, which God meant to be the spacious chamber where high thoughts and generous aspirations might commune together, shrinks and narrows itself to the measure of the meaner company that is wont to gather there, hatching conspiracies against our better selves. We are apt to wonder at the scholarship of the men of three centuries ago and at a certain dignity of phrase that characterizes them. They were scholars because they did not read so many things as we. They had fewer books, but these were of the best. Their speech was noble, because they lunched with Plutarch and supped with Plato. We spend as much time over print as they did, but instead of communing with the choice thoughts of choice spirits, and unconsciously acquiring the grand manner of that supreme society, we diligently inform ourselves and cover the continent with a network of speaking wires to inform us of such inspiring facts as that a horse belonging to Mr. Smith ran away on Wednesday, seriously damaging a valuable carryall; that a son of Mr. Brown swallowed a hickory nut on Thursday; and that a gravel bank caved in and buried Mr. Robinson alive on Friday. Alas! it is we ourselves that are getting buried alive under this avalanche of earthy impertinences. It is we who, while we might each in his humble way be helping our fellows into the right path, or adding one block to the climbing spire of a fine soul, are willing to become mere sponges saturated from the stagnant goosepond of village gossip.

One is sometimes asked by young people to recommend a course of reading. My advice would be that they should confine themselves to the supreme books in whatever literature, or still better to choose some one great author, and make themselves thoroughly familiar with him. For, as all roads lead to Rome, so do they likewise lead away from it, and you will find that, in order to understand perfectly and weigh exactly any vital piece of literature, you will be gradually and pleasantly persuaded to excursions and explorations of which you little dreamed when you began, and will find yourselves scholars before you are aware. For remember that there is nothing less profitable than scholarship for the mere sake of scholarship, nor anything more wearisome in the attainment. But the moment you have a definite aim attention is quickened, the mother of memory, and all that you acquire groups and arranges itself in an order that is lucid, because everywhere and always it is in intelligent relation to a central object of constant and growing interest. This method also forces upon us the necessity of thinking, which is, after all, the highest result of all education. For what we want is not learning, but knowledge--that is, the power to make learning answer its true end as a quickener of intelligence and a widener of our intellectual sympathies. I do not mean to say that every one is fitted by nature or inclination for a definite course of study, or indeed for serious study in any sense. I am quite willing that these should 'browse in a library,' as Dr. Johnson called it, 'to their hearts' content. It is, perhaps, the only way in which time may be profitably wasted. But desultory reading will not make a "full man," as Bacon understood it, of one who has not Johnson's memory, his power of assimilation, and, above all, his comprehensive view of the relations of things. "Read not," says Lord Bacon, in his "Essay of Studies," "to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested--that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously (carefully), and some few to be read wholly and with diligence and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy." This is weighty and well said, and I would call your attention especially to the wise words with which the passage closes.

I have been speaking of such books as should be chosen for profitable reading. A public library, of course, must be far wider in its scope. It should contain something for all tastes, as well as the material for a thorough grounding in all branches of knowledge. It should be rich in books of reference, in encyclopaedias, where one may learn without cost of research what things are generally known. For it is far more useful to know these than to know those that are not generally known. Not to know them is the defect of those half trained and therefore hasty men who find a mare's nest on every branch of the tree of knowledge. A library should contain ample stores of history, which, if it do not always deserve the pompous title which Bolingbroke gave it, of philosophy teaching by example, certainly teaches many things profitable for us to know and lay to heart; teaches among other things how much of the present is still held in mortmain by the past; teaches that, if there be no controlling purpose, there is, at least, a sternly logical sequence in human affairs, and that chance has but a trifling dominion over them; teaches why things are and must be so and not otherwise; teaches, perhaps, more than anything else, the value of personal character as a chief factor in what used to be called destiny, for that cause is strong which has not a multitude but one strong man behind it. History is indeed mainly the biography of a few imperial men, and forces home upon us the useful lesson how infinitesimally important our own private affairs are to the universe in general. History is clarified experience, and yet how little do men profit by it--nay, how should we expect it of those who so seldom are taught anything by their own! Delusions, especially economical delusions, seem the only things that have any chance of an earthly immortality. I would have plenty of biography. It is no insignificant fact that eminent men have always loved their Plutarch, since example, whether for emulation or avoidance, is never so poignant as when presented to us in a striking personality. Autobiographies are also instructive reading to the student of human nature, though generally written by men who were more interesting to themselves than to their fellow-men. I have been told that Emerson and George Eliot agreed in thinking Rousseau's "Confessions" the most interesting book they had ever read.

A public library should also have many and full shelves of political economy, for the dismal science, as Carlyle called it, if it prove nothing else, will go far toward proving that theory is the bird in the bush, though she sing more sweetly than the nightingale, and that the millennium will not hasten its coming in deference to the most convincing string of resolutions that were ever unanimously adopted in public meeting. It likewise induces in us a profound distrust of social panaceas.

I would have a public library abundant in translations of the best books in all languages; for though no work of genius can be adequately translated, because every word of it is permeated with what Milton calls 'the precious life blood of a master spirit,' which cannot be transfused into the veins of the best translation, yet some acquaintance with foreign and ancient literatures has the liberalizing effect of foreign travel. He who travels by translation travels more hastily and superficially, but brings home something that is worth having, nevertheless. Translations properly used, by shortening the labor of acquisition, add as many years to our lives as they subtract from the processes of our education.

In such a library the sciences should be fully represented, that men may at least learn to know in what a marvellous museum they live, what a wonder worker is giving them an exhibition daily for nothing. Nor let art be forgotten in all its many forms, not as the antithesis of science, but as her elder or fairer sister, whom we love all the more that her usefulness cannot be demonstrated in dollars and cents. I should be thankful if an every day laborer among us could have his mind illumined, as those of Athens and of Florence had, with some image of what is best in architecture, painting and sculpture to train his crude perceptions and perhaps call out latent faculties. I should like to see the works of Ruskin within the reach of every artisan among us. For I hope some day that the delicacy of touch and accuracy of eye that have made our mechanics in some departments the best in the world may give us the same supremacy in works of wider range and more purely ideal scope.

Voyages and travels I would also have, good store, especially the earlier, when the world was fresh and unhackneyed and men saw things invisible to the modern eye. They are fast sailing ships to waft away from present trouble to the Fortunate Isles.

To wash down the dryer morsels that every library must necessarily offer at its board, let there be plenty of imaginative literature, and let its range be not too narrow to stretch from Dante to the elder Dumas. The world of the imagination is not the world of abstraction and nonentity, as some conceive, but a world formed out of chaos by the sense of the beauty that is in man and the earth on which he dwells. It is the realm of might be, our heaven of refuge from the shortcomings and disillusions of life. It is, to quote Spenser, who knew it well,

"The world's sweet inn from care and wearisome turmoil."

Do we believe, then, that God gave us in mockery this splendid faculty of sympathy with things that are a joy forever? For my part, I believe that the love and study of works of imagination is of practical utility in a country so profoundly material in its leading tendencies as ours. The hunger after purely intellectual delights, the content with ideal possessions, cannot but be good for us in maintaining a wholesome balance of the character and of the faculties. I for one shall never be persuaded, that Shakespeare left a less useful legacy to his countrymen than Watt. We hold all the deepest, all the highest satisfactions of life as tenants of imagination. Nature will keep up the supply of what are called hard-headed people without our help, and, if it come to that, there are other as good uses for heads as at the end of battering rams.

I know that there are many excellent people who object to the reading of novels as a waste of time, if not as otherwise harmful. But I think they are trying to outwit nature, who is sure to prove cunninger than they. Look at children. One boy shall want a chest of tools and one a book, and of those who want books one shall ask for a botany, another for a romance. They will be sure to get what they want, and we are doing a grave wrong to their morals by driving them to do things on the sly, to steal that food which their constitution craves and which is wholesome for them, instead of having it freely and frankly given them as the wisest possible diet. If we cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, so neither can we hope to succeed with the opposite experiment. But we may spoil the silk for its legitimate uses. I can conceive of no healthier reading for a boy, or girl either, than Scott's novels or Cooper's, to speak only of the dead. I have found them very good reading at least for one young man, for one middle-aged man, and for one who is growing old. No, no; banish the Antiquary, banish Leather Stocking, and banish all the world! Let us not go about to make life duller than it is.

But I must shut the doors of my imaginary library, or I shall never end. It is left for me to say a few words of fitting acknowledgment to Mr. Fitz for his judicious and generous gift. It is always a pleasure to me that I believe the custom of giving away money during their lifetime (and there is nothing harder for most men to part with, except prejudice) is more common with Americans than with any other people. It is a still greater pleasure to see that the favorite direction of their beneficence is toward the founding of colleges and libraries. My observation has led me to believe that there is no country in which wealth is so sensible of its obligations as our own. And, as most of our rich men have risen from the ranks, may we not fairly attribute this sympathy with their kind to the benign influence of democracy rightly understood? My dear and honored friend, George William Curtis, told me that he was sitting in front of the late Mr. Ezra Cornell in a convention, where one of the speakers made a Latin quotation. Mr. Cornell leaned forward and asked for a translation of it, which Mr. Curtis gave him. Mr. Cornell thanked him, and added: "If I can help it, no young man shall grow up in New York hereafter without the chance, at least, of knowing what a Latin quotation means when he hears it." This was the germ of Cornell University, and it found food for its roots in that sympathy and thoughtfulness for others of which I just spoke. This is the healthy side of that good nature which democracy tends to foster, and which is so often harmful when it has its root in indolence or indifference; especially harmful where our public affairs are concerned, and where it is easiest, because there we are giving away what belongs to other people. In this country it is as laudably easy to procure signatures to a subscription paper as it is shamefully so to obtain them for certificates of character and recommendations to office. And is not this public spirit a natural evolution from that frame of mind in which New England was colonized, and which found expression in these grave words of Robinson and Brewster: "We are knit together as a body in a most strict and sacred bond and covenant of the Lord, of the violation of which we make great conscience, and by virtue whereof we hold ourselves strictly tied to all care of each other's good, and of the whole." Let us never forget the deep and solemn import of these words. The problem before us is to make a whole of our many discordant parts, many foreign elements, and I know of no way in which this can better be done than by providing a common system of education and a common door of access to the best books by which that education may be continued, broadened, and made fruitful. For it is certain that, whatever we do or leave undone, those discordant parts and foreign elements are to be, whether we will or no, members of that body which Robinson and Brewster had in mind, bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh, for good or ill.

There is no way in which a man can build so secure and lasting a monument for himself as in a public library. Upon that he may confidently allow "Resurgam" to be carved, for through his good deed he will rise again in the grateful remembrance and in the lifted and broadened minds and fortified characters of generation after generation. The pyramids may forget their builders, but memorials such as this have longer memories.

Mr. Fitz has done his part in providing your library with a dwelling. It will be for the citizens of Chelsea to provide it with worthy habitants. So shall they, too, have a share in the noble eulogy of the ancient wise man: "The teachers shall shine as the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars forever and ever."

THE INFLUENCE OF GOOD BOOKS

The following paragraphs, which are from an address delivered by Rev. Dr. Collyer at the opening of the Richard Sugden Library at Spencer, Mass., are taken from a report in The Library Journal (September, 1889). The autobiographical portions, perhaps, are little related to the progress of libraries here in the United States, but their interest is so great that more of them have been included here than are strictly pertinent to our subject.

Robert Collyer was born in Keighley, Yorkshire, Eng., Dec. 8, 1823. He was apprenticed to a blacksmith as a boy of 14, came to Shoemakertown, Pa., with his parents in 1850 and followed there the trade of a hammermaker. Later he entered the ministry of the Unitarian church and in 1860 founded Unity church in Chicago. In 1879 he became pastor of the Church of the Messiah in New York City, where he died in 1912.

When Richard Sugden asked me to come to Spencer and say some word which would fit this occasion, I wrote him by the next mail that I should be ever so glad to come, and felt that it was a great honor to receive such an invitation, and a great pleasure. Nor was the trouble of much account--which touches us all who say Aye to such an invitation on the impulse of the moment and then wonder how we shall make our promise good. My old friend wanted me to come, and not another and better man, and to say the word which was in my heart to-day, whatever this might be; and this was enough, because I had read in the papers--what he was far too modest to tell me, beyond the merest mention--about the gift of Richard Sugden to his town, and so I said it makes no great matter what any man may say, the thing he has done tells its own story, and tells it more nobly than I could ever hope to do, more nobly and in this fashion which shames my speech. For our words float away on the summer winds, to be caught, it may be, and set in type and read by those who care for such things, and then to die and be forgotten; but this your friend and mine has done in Spencer will be eloquent with the silence which is golden, and still tell its tale when we are all dead and dust who gather here to-day. It is a poor and scant manhood which does not long now and then to be remembered some little while after the grass grows green and the daisies bloom on the grave. To have them speak of us at the fire-side and in the workshop and the market, remembering what was worthy in us and forgetting what was base, though there may be no more to tell by comparison than Dr. Ripley told down in Concord, as he stood by the dust of a man in his own town, and being sorely troubled to find some real worth in the man's life he could dwell on for a moment, said, "He was the best man I ever knew at a fire." I cannot even guess whether Richard Sugden ever thought of this as one of the rewards which must return to him for his gift to Spencer, and I love to think that to his generous heart the work was its own reward. But I say, as we stand here on this day of gift and dedication, that if this had been his sole purpose, to be held in grateful remembrance of his fellow-townsmen and their children through centuries of time, then he has taken out an insurance that will stand good always and keep his memory green in the town of Spencer. And not here alone, but far away across the sea in old Yorkshire, where his home was in the old time before he came to this new world to seek his fortune, and, far more and better than that, to earn it honestly and well. The story will be told there long after to-day and to-morrow, how one of the Sugdens who went out from among them gave this gift, and then the kith and kin will hold up their heads and feel that the fine old name has won still another patent of nobility. A poor youth he was in the narrow, contracted, dear old land, where the poor were held by a cruel bit. And a voice came to him, saying, "Get thee out from thy kindred and thy father's house unto a land that I will tell thee of"; and he followed the voice, as I did also, to the promised land; carved out his fortune honest and fair, I say, but then could not be content to enrich his own family alone, or, as so many do, to remember his town in his will. He must build this noble structure, please God, in his own lifetime, and convey it by free gift to you and yours forever; and so the work is done, and so well done, to all seeming, that if you care for the gift as your friend has cared for its creation, we may say, as old Andrew Fairservice said of the cathedral in Glasgow, "Keep airn and gunpooder aff it, and it will stand to the crack o'doom."

My friend and yours is also an Englishman and a Yorkshireman, as you know, by birth and breeding, as I am also, and I am the more glad and proud of what he has done for that reason; because I still love old England with a very tender love after these forty years of absence, as I know he does also. But I have had to notice how very many of us who came here from England to find a home in the American republic, and it may be make their fortune, can find nothing so good in this new world as that they left behind them, and no matter how much wealth they may win, they do nothing as a rule for the town they live in, like this your friend has done in Spencer. He could not be content to be a mere exile from England, he must be a citizen of the United States and blend his life with the life in this new world which has made him so much more of a man than he ever could have been had he stayed on that hill-side in old Yorkshire. This is the true home of his heart and life, here he won his wealth and found ample room to grow to be the man you honor, and here is one proof among many he has given in all these years, that while he was born in England and is proud of it, though he may not say so, he was born again in America, and does not love the old land less but the new land more, as every man must who comes here to share your life, if he is worth his salt.

You will pardon me, I know, as you receive the gift, for this word in praise of the giver, while he may find it hard to do so; but for that I do not care, because in asking me to come here and say the word that was in my heart he must run his risk and take it as it came to me, and insisted on being said. Richard Sugden falls into line with our home-born men far and wide, but especially in Massachusetts, who have done or are ready to do some such thing as he has done now in Spencer--building these public libraries in the towns where they live or from which they went away to seek their fortune; public libraries, which range with the schools and churches and the town halls; which are the four-square defence of our life as citizens of the republic and of our intelligence and virtue, when they are nobly maintained. They can do no nobler thing. They are sure of their reward, also, if they want one, in the grateful remembrance of their towns and cities, and open the way for others again who wonder what they can do to the finest purpose; men who have made their fortune and have not been struck by what we may call the greenback paralysis, through which the hand that gets takes all the strength from the hand that gives. What can we do better, they will say in such a case, than this Richard Sugden has done for Spencer, and many another man far and wide?--see to it that our town also shall have a public library, which shall be its pride and joy, and make perfect so far as we can the defence from ignorance and vice and crime; open a fountain from which the waters of life may flow forever for those who thirst for knowledge or whatever good books can give them? And, as I have had to notice up among the mountains this summer how I would not feel thirsty till I came to a clear, cool spring, but then would drink to my heart's content, so such fountains as these will also create the thirst they can so nobly allay, while still we keep on drinking in answer to their perpetual invitation, as the years come and go.

And now shall I tell you a very simple story touching my own life, which will help to make good my thought of the worth of this you are doing in Spencer through your free public library, and have been doing, as I understand, these 30 years, which is in itself a great and singular honor to your town, maintaining a free library and reading-room at your own proper charges, for which your friend and fellow-citizen has built this noble edifice, with some such feeling as he had in the old time who built the temple that the ark of the covenant and the rod which budded and the sacred books might have an abiding and splendid home. It was my lot to be born as your friend was and mine, in a poor and small home, with this thirst in my nature, as far back as I can remember, for something to read. And I mind very well the first book I ever bought with my own penny, the delectable history of Whittington and his Cat, which cast such a spell over my imagination that when I went up Highgate Hill over London the other summer, and saw the stone on which poor Dick sat down to hear the bells ringing far below, which lured him back again to fame and fortune, I found I was a small boy again reading my small wonder-book, and the old stone divided the honors of a tender interest with the red granite shaft set above the grave of the woman of finest genius England has to her name, George Eliot, which is a few minutes' walk away.

There were a few books in our small cottage of three rooms, but these were among the best in the English tongue, the Bible and Bunyan and Goldsmith, with a few more I do not now remember, but these I read as you drink at clear, cool springs. Then a man came along from over the moors and brought Burns with him, and another brought Shakespeare. My father borrowed these for me to read, and the world grew great and wide and wonderful to me as I read them, while to this day I notice that I care more for the history of England in Shakespeare's grand dramas than I do for Hume and Froude and Macaulay, so great was the spell cast again over my life. Then an old farmer came along with a couple of volumes, and said, "Here, lad, I notice thou is fond o' good reading, and I think thou will like to read these books." It was Irving's Sketch-Book and it was Christmas day, and I was away from home then and lonesome, wanting to be with my folks and to sit by the old fireside, but the magic wand of Irving touched me and stole away all my tears. Still, as you may see, this was only hand-to-mouth reading. I had never seen a public library, but had heard of them and longed to find one somewhere, sometime, as, I fear, I never had longed to find my way into heaven. Well, I heard of one that had been started only three miles away, and so I went with my heart in my mouth to see what I could find to read in the wonderful new library. I can see the books now standing on the shelves in the small upper room, and recall the old delight of my youth. I go into the Astor Library now and then when I have time, rich in the lore of all the ages, and have wandered through some of the finest in the world beside, but that small room in Addingham is still the story of one's first love. There were some 200 volumes, but here I was with all this wealth of books at my command at about the cost of three days' work in a year. I cannot tell you the story of that first grand passion and the delight of it. I had found a library. I like that honest Dutchman, a fine old scholar says, who told me that one page of Plato did him more good than ten bumpers of wine, and that was the way I felt about those 200 volumes. I had found out the unspeakable delight of drinking all my heart could desire, and struck the matchless intoxication of noble and wholesome books, that leave no headache or heartache when you are sober, only it was a good while before I got sober.

Then I came in due time to this new world and began to work again at the anvil in Pennsylvania, my own proper business I expected to follow all my life, and presently heard of a library in the small town of Hatboro, six or seven miles away, six one way and seven the other. A fine old farmer had found a long while ago that this was the noblest use he could make of a good deal of his money, to build up a library away among the rich green lands, and so there it was waiting for me with its treasure of good books. I see them again as they stand on the shelves, and think I could walk right in and lay my hands on those that won me most potently and cast their spell again over my heart, though it is five and thirty years since I was within the doors. I may mention Hawthorne among them all as the author I found there for the first time who won my heart for good and all, as we may say, and holds it still. Then I found a great treasure in no long time in Philadelphia, that I could no more exhaust than you can exhaust the spring we have been glancing at by drinking, which dips down toward the deepness of the world. I was still bound fast to the anvil, for this was our living, but there was my life, so far as good books could make it, rich for me and noble in the great library again seven miles away. So what matter about the hard day's work at the anvil, while there was some new volume to read when the day's work was done or old one to read with an ever new delight. My new book or old one, with the sweet green lane in the summer time where I could walk while the birds sang their mating song, and the fragrance of the green things growing floated on the soft summer air, and the fireside in winter with the good wife busy about the room, and the little ones sleeping in their cribs, I look back to those times still and wonder whether they were not the best I ever knew. I was reading some lines the other day in an old English ballad written 300 years ago, and they told the story of those times:

"O for a booke, and a shadie nook, eyther indoore, or out, With the green leaves whisp'ring overhede, or the streete cries all about, Where I maie reade, all at my ease, both of the New and Olde, For a right good Booke, whereon to looke, was better to me than Golde."

And so I touch the story of my own life for some poor evidence of what good books can do for us and for the worth of what you have been doing in Spencer all these years, and are made glad to day by this library building which crowns the good endeavor; a place that will not shame but will glorify your purpose and hold it to the noblest and best endeavors you can make in the time to come, for such a shrine will be sure to draw books to it always, worthy of its beauty and grace, and there will be other men and women also to follow in the steps of Richard Sugden, and bring to it costly works and rare and beautiful, worthy to be in the palaces of kings while still you will see to it that the noble provision of books for the general reading rests directly as it has done so long on your own generous care.

You have made this noble boon of good books easy and opulent for the workingmen of Spencer. When I came to this new world and had not heard as yet of that library among the green lands, but must have books on any terms, and the terms were hard, and the good wife watching not the dollars but the very cents because they must all be saved to furnish the little home, I can well remember how I bought a book one day for half a dollar, far too big to smuggle into the cottage, and hid it in the bushes, watched my chances the next day, and got it in all safe and sound; and some days after, when she caught me reading, and said, "Where did you get that book, my dear?" I answered, "Why, I have had it for some time"; and then she only said, "Indeed!" for she was patient with me and good; and then, it was in what somebody calls our treacle moon. The workingmen of Spencer fall on happy times. Here are books easy to come at as the water you drink and the air you breathe and stores of them which can never be exhausted. If it had come to pass thirty years ago that some man delving in your wild hills had struck gold, and all the eager manhood of New England had gone crazy to delve for gold where Spencer stands, and had found it in mighty stores, I wonder whether that would have been such a boon to Spencer and the world as this you have done--establishing great industries and wholesome and good; beckoning the working forces from far and wide to come here and take hold with you on such terms as we can find nowhere else outside this new world. Brother McGlynn, I remember, as we rode together to the funeral of Gen. Grant, called out some half-dozen times, "God's world for the workingman!" You did this who were the pioneers of the strong and steadfast town, and then you said, We must have a free public library, and pay the bills; we have got our churches started, and our schools, and our place for town-meeting--the tap-root of the tree of liberty in New England, a living tree, and no mere liberty-pole, and reaching down 200 years--now we must complete the walls of the city, which standeth four-square, by a free public library, and so do what men may to maintain a fair public virtue and intelligence within the lines of Spencer; these men we employ shall have books to read of every kind any man ought to read, and the ought shall be large and free and fair; and so the thing was done.

The thirty years have come and gone; the free public library has done its noble and beautiful work. It is a new departure we touch to-day in this ceremony of gift and acceptance. This library will grow always more worthy the name your friend and neighbor has made for it from this time. They say that in Scotland once a man sent for his minister and said, "If I give L20,000 to the church do you think it will be reckoned in my account when I get through down here?" And the minister said: "I do not feel sure about that; but it is weel worth the experiment." I do feel sure about this, and the worth of what you can do, to be placed to your credit, not yonder but right here in the town of Spencer. There can be no nobler investment, and but few as noble as this you have made these thirty years for all who have the hunger and thirst in them good books can satisfy; while still with poor Oliver in the story, we ask for more; and they are not dead things, as Milton says, but contain a potency of life as active as the soul from which they sprang: