Page:John Uri Lloyd - Etidorhpa.djvu/13

 only a strong imagination can assume that a spirit hovers over and lingers around inanimate clay, here each title is a voice that speaks as though the heart of its creator still throbbed, the mind essence of the dead writer envelops the living reader. Take down that vellum-bound volume,—it was written in one of the centuries long past. The pleasant face of its creator, as fresh as if but a print of yesterday, smiles upon you from the exquisitely engraved copper-plate frontispiece; the mind of the author rises from out the words before you. This man is not dead and his comrades live. Turn to the shelves about, before each book stands a guardian spirit,—together they form a phantom army that, invisible to mortals, encircles the beholder.

Ah! this antique library is not as is a church graveyard, only a cemetery for the dead; it is also a mansion for the living. These alcoves are trysting places for elemental shades. Essences of disenthralled minds meet here and revel. Thoughts of the past take shape and live in this atmosphere,—who can say that pulsations unperceived, beyond the reach of physics or of chemistry, are not as ethereal mind-seeds which, although unseen, yet, in living brain, exposed to such an atmosphere as this, formulate embryotic