Page:The library a magazine of bibliography and library literature, Volume 6.djvu/246

234 The Library. geographical ; for there I found the Sacred Books of the East and Triibner's Oriental Series (which had been recovered at the New Renaissance from the libraries of Trondhjem and Reykjavik) all together in complete sets in the Oriental vestibule, which stood in the centre of the geographical department, and toward which the halls of the five continents converged. Here was brought to a focus the sacred quintessence of the Nile, the Ganges, and the Jordan. There was, however, a short underground cut from the Oriental vestibule into the great hall of the Christian era. I saw the titles of strange scrolls lining the walls of that crypt, but I cannot remember any. At last, after a longer stroll than usual through the century-halls, I sat down in that of Scec. XIX., amid fragments of telegraph-poles and re-constructed locomotives, put together like specimens of palaeontology. (A specially good one had been dug up from an eminence, a little to the north of the ancient city of the Pennsylvanian Philadelphia, and which anti- quarians declare was right in the heart of the nineteenth century extension of it, and the site of vast locomotive-works.) My eye wandered along the titles of the books (though most of those belonging to this hall were in a cellar underneath its crypt the cellar is said to be very large and deep, but I did not visit it) ; and I could trace, in electric succession, the mad course of the age. I saw the opening decade and the terrific teens, loud with Napoleon and the wild notes of Byron and Shelley lighted by coal-gas and portentous with the figures of steamboats ; men and women huddled together in factories, Wordsworth protesting in vain. Then the brisk twenties and thirties, and the first thunder of the railway. Then the broadening forties, with their penny mails, their telegraphs, "march of intellect," revolutions and spiritualism the figure of CARLYLE titanic in the rising chaos, his lips foaming with prophecies of doom. Then the fiery fifties, with new ferments in Europe, and unknown craters opening in Asia and America ; India rousing old hates of Christian and Moslem, China torn with stupendous rebellion, the United States seething to the boiling-point ; the golden words of Tenny- son and Ruskin half-heard amid the bursting dams of literature; evolution announced by Darwin; and the mind of the age plunging from spirit into matter. Then the savage sixties- North America one fratricidal field from the city of Mexico to Gettysburg ; the States of ancient Italy shaken like a kaleido- scope ; the names of Lincoln, Garibaldi, Bismarck, pregnant with new ideals of dominion ; the very bowels of London dug out