Pagan Papers | Page 4

force. And even in
a certain work by another and a very different painter -- though I
willingly acquit Mr Frith of any deliberate romantic intention -- you
shall find the element of romance in the vestiges of the old order still
lingering in the first transition period: the coach-shaped railway
carriages with luggage piled and corded on top, the red-coated guard,
the little engine tethered well ahead as if between traces. To those bred
within sight of the sea, steamers will always partake in somewhat of the
``beauty and mystery of the ships''; above all, if their happy childhood
have lain among the gleaming lochs and sinuous firths of the Western
Highlands, where, twice a week maybe, the strange visitant crept by
headland and bay, a piece of the busy, mysterious outer world. For
myself, I probably stand alone in owning to a sentimental weakness for
the night-piercing whistle -- judiciously remote, as some men love the
skirl of the pipes. In the days when streets were less wearily familiar
than now, or ever the golden cord was quite loosed that led back to
relinquished fields and wider skies, I have lain awake on stifling
summer nights, thinking of luckier friends by moor and stream, and
listening for the whistles from certain railway stations, veritable ``horns
of Elf-land, faintly blowing.'' Then, a ghostly passenger, I have taken
my seat in a phantom train, and sped up, up, through the map,
rehearsing the journey bit by bit: through the furnace-lit Midlands, and
on till the grey glimmer of dawn showed stone walls in place of hedges,
and masses looming up on either side; till the bright sun shone upon
brown leaping streams and purple heather, and the clear, sharp northern
air streamed in through the windows. Return, indeed, was bitter;
Endymion-like, ``my first touch of the earth went nigh to kill'': but it
was only to hurry northwards again on the wings of imagination, from
dust and heat to the dear mountain air. ``We are only the children who
might have been,'' murmured Lamb's dream babes to him; and for the

sake of those dream-journeys, the journeys that might have been, I still
hail with a certain affection the call of the engine in the night: even as I
love sometimes to turn the enchanted pages of the railway a b c, and
pass from one to the other name reminiscent or suggestive of joy and
freedom, Devonian maybe, or savouring of Wessex, or bearing me
away to some sequestered reach of the quiet Thames.
Non Libri Sed Liberi
It will never be clear to the lay mind why the book-buyer buys books.
That it is not to read them is certain: the closest inspection always fails
to find him thus engaged. He will talk about them -- all night if you let
him -- wave his hand to them, shake his fist at them, shed tears over
them (in the small hours of the morning); but he will not read them. Yet
it would be rash to infer that he buys his books without a remote
intention of ever reading them. Most book lovers start with the honest
resolution that some day they will ``shut down on'' this fatal practice.
Then they purpose to themselves to enter into their charmed circle, and
close the gates of Paradise behind them. Then will they read out of
nothing but first editions; every day shall be a debauch in large paper
and tall copies; and crushed morocco shall be familiar to their touch as
buckram. Meanwhile, though, books continue to flaunt their venal
charms; it would be cowardice to shun the fray. In fine, one buys and
continues to buy; and the promised Sabbath never comes.
The process of the purchase is always much the same, therein
resembling the familiar but inferior passion of love. There is the first
sight of the Object, accompanied of a catching of the breath, a
trembling in the limbs, loss of appetite, ungovernable desire, and a
habit of melancholy in secret places. But once possessed, once toyed
with amorously for an hour or two, the Object (as in the inferior
passion aforesaid) takes its destined place on the shelf -- where it stays.
And this saith the scoffer, is all; but even he does not fail to remark
with a certain awe that the owner goeth thereafter as one possessing a
happy secret and radiating an inner glow. Moreover, he is insufferably
conceited, and his conceit waxeth as his coat, now condemned to a
fresh term of servitude, groweth shabbier. And shabby though his coat
may be, yet will he never stoop to renew its pristine youth and gloss by
the price of any book. No man -- no human, masculine, natural man --
ever sells a