the world, whom dungeons could not confine, nor oceans check, nor persecutions subdue,-whose path lay through the great region of ideas, and whose dominion was over the mind.

If such were the tendency of that great invention which leaped or bridged the barriers separating mind from mind and heart from heart, who shall calculate its effect in promoting private happiness? Books,-lighthouses erected in the great sea of time, - books, the precious depositories of the thoughts and creations of genius, books, by whose sorcery times past become time present, and the whole pageantry of the world's history moves in solemn procession before our eyes; these were to visit the firesides of the humble, and lavish the treasures of the intellect upon the poor. Could we have Plato, and Shakspeare, and Milton, in our dwellings, in the full vigor of their imaginations, in the full freshness of their hearts, few scholars would be affluent enough to afford them physical support; but the living images of their minds are within the eyes of all. From their pages their mighty souls look out upon us in all their grandeur and beauty, undimmed by the faults and follies of earthly existence, consecrated by time. Precious and priceless are the blessings which books scatter around our daily paths. We walk, in imagination, with the noblest spirits, through the most sublime and enchanting

regions, regions which, to all that is lovely in the

forms and colors of earth,

"Add the gleam,

The light that never was on sea or land,

The consecration and the poet's dream."

A motion of the hand brings all Arcadia to sight. The war of Troy can, at our bidding, rage in the narrowest chamber. Without stirring from our firesides, we may roam to the most remote regions of the earth, or soar into realms where Spenser's shapes of unearthly beauty flock to meet us, where Milton's angels peal in our ears the choral hymns of Paradise. Science, art, literature, philosophy, all that man has thought, all that man has done, the experience that has been bought with the sufferings of a hundred generations, all are garnered up for us in the world of books. There, among realities, in a "substantial world," we move with the crowned kings of thought. There our minds have a free range, our hearts a free utterance. Reason is confined within none of the

partitions which trammel it in life. conventionalism melts away as a

The hard granite of

thin mist. We call

things by their right names. Our lips give not the lie to our hearts. We bend the knee only to the great and good. We despise only the despicable; we honor only the honorable. In that world, no divinity hedges a king,

no accident of rank or fashion ennobles a dunce, or shields a knave. There, and almost only there, do our affections have free play. We can select our companions from among the most richly gifted of the sons of God, and they are companions who will not desert ús in poverty, or sickness, or disgrace. When everything else fails, when fortune frowns, and friends cool, and health forsakes us, when this great world of forms and shows appears a "two-edged lie, which seems but is not,” — when all our earth-clinging hopes and ambitions melt away into nothingness,

we are still not without friends to animate and console

us, — friends, in whose immortal countenances, as they look out upon us from books, we can discern no change; who will dignify low fortunes and humble life with their kingly presence; who will people solitude with shapes more glorious than ever glittered in palaces; who will consecrate sorrow and take the sting from care; and who, in the long hours of despondency and weakness, will send healing to the sick heart, and energy to the wasted brain. Well might Milton exclaim, in that impassioned speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, where every word leaps with intellectual life, "Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's

-

image; but who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye. Many a man lives a burden upon the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose for a life beyond life!"

Brit.

$. Déc kiss.

NOVELS AND NOVELISTS.*

CHARLES DICKENS.

MUCH has been said and written on the uses and abuses of fiction. Novel-writing and novel-reading have commonly been held in low estimation by grave and. sensible people, or rather by people whose gravity has been received as the appropriate garment of sense. Many are both amused, and ashamed of being amused by this class of compositions; and, accordingly, in the libraries of well-regulated families, untouched volumes of history and philosophy glitter on prominent bookshelves in all the magnificence of burnished bindings, while the poor, precious novel, dog's-eared and wasted as it may be by constant handling, is banished to some secret but accessible nook, in order that its modest merit may not evoke polite horror. It thus becomes a kind of humble companion, whose prattle is pleas

* Delivered before the Boston Mercantile Library Association, December, 1844.