The Atlantic Monthly | Page 8

"Feb. 12th, '62, ---- ----, Master's Mate."
All next day a great black Cloud Hung over the land from coast to coast; And the next, the Knocking was "pretty loud,"-- With a sudden Eclipse, as it were, of the sun,-- And the earth, all day, quaked--"Donelson!" But the next was the deadliest day of all, And the Master's Mate was not at Call! Yet nobody seemed to wonder why,-- There was something, perhaps, the Master knew Far better than we, for his Mate to do,-- And the Day went down with a bloody sky!
But when the long, long Night was past, And our Eagle, sweeping the traitor's crag, Circled to victory up the dome, The great Reveille was heard at last!-- They wrapped the Mate in his country's flag, And sent him in glory home!

THE VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE IN LIBRARIES.
A visible library is a goodly sight. We do not underrate the external value of books, when we say it is the invisible which forms their chief charm. Sometimes rather too much is said about "tall copies," and "large-paper copies," and "first editions," the binding, paper, type, and all the rest of the outside attraction, or the fancy price, which go to make up the collector's trade. The books themselves feel a little degraded, when this sort of conversation is carried on in their presence: some of them know well enough that occasionally they fall into hands which think more "of the coat than of the man who is under it." We must, however, be honest enough to confess that we are ourself a bibliomaniac, and few possessions are more valued than an old manuscript, written on vellum some five hundred years ago, of which we cannot read one word. Nor do we prize less the modern extreme of external attraction,--volumes exquisitely printed and adorned, bound by Rivière, in full tree-marbled calf, with delicate tooling on the back, which looks as if the frost-work from the window-pane on a cold January morning had been transmuted into gold, and laid on the leather. Ah, these are sights fit for the gods!
Nevertheless, we come back to our starting-point, that what is unseen forms the real value of the library. The type, the paper, the binding, the age, are all visible; but the soul that conceived it, the mind that arranged it, the hand that wrote it, the associations which cling to it, are the invisible links in a long chain of thought, effort, and history, which make the book what it is.
In wandering through the great libraries of Europe, how often has this truth been impressed upon the mind!--such a library as that in the old city of Nuremberg, housed in what was once a monastery, and looking so ancient, quaint, and black-lettered, visibly and invisibly, that, if the old monk in the legend who slipped over a thousand years while the little bird sang to him in the wood, and was thereby taught, what he could not understand in the written Word, that a thousand years in God's sight are but as a day,--if that old monk had walked out of the Nuremberg monastery and now walked back again, he might almost take up the selfsame manuscript he had laid down a thousand years ago.
What invisible heads have ached, and hands become weary, over those vellum volumes, with their bright initial letters! What hearts have throbbed over the early printed book! How triumphantly was the first copy, now worm-eaten and forgotten, contemplated by the author! How was that invisible world which surrounded him to be stirred by that new book!
We remember looking into one of the cell-like alcoves arranged for students in a college library at Oxford, and watching a fellow of the college (a type of scholars, grown old among books, rarely found in our busy land) crooning over a strange black-letter folio, and laughing to himself with a sort of invisible chuckle. The unseen in that volume was revealed to us through that laugh of the old bookworm, and quite unseen we partook of his amusement. Another alcove was vacant; a crabbed manuscript, just laid down by the writer, was on the desk. He was invisible; but the watchful guardian at the head of the room saw us peering in, and warned us with a loud voice not to enter. Safely might we have been permitted to do so, for we could hardly have deciphered at a glance all the wisdom that lurked in the open page; yet that hidden meaning, invisible to us, was of real value to the unseen writer.
There are many incidents connected with the visible and invisible of libraries existing in the great houses of England, which could point a moral in sketches of this subject. One, concerning a pamphlet found at Woburn Abbey, has a peculiar