THE

PENNSYLVANIA

SCHOOL JOURNAL.

Volume LXII.

That which makes a good Constitution must keep it, viz: men of wisdom and virtue :
qualities that, because they descend not with worldly inheritance, must be carefully
propagated by a virtuous education of youth.-WM. PENN.

N. C. SCHAEFFER, EDITOR.

Published at Lancaster by Thomas H. Burrowes from January, 1852, to 1870; by J. P. Wickersham and
J. P. McCaskey until 1881, and by J. P. McCaskey since 1881. Official Organ of the Department of Public
Instruction since July, 1854. Organ of Pennsylvania State Educational Association since 1852.

LANCASTER, PA.

J. P. MCCASKEY, PUBLISHER

1913

N my garden I spend my days; in my library I spend my nights. My

IN

interests are divided between my geraniums and my books. With the flowers I am in the present; with the books I am in the past. I go into my library, and all history unrolls before me. I breathe the morning air of the world while the scent of Eden's roses yet lingered in it, while it vibrated only to the world's first brood of nightingales, and to the laugh of Eve.

I see the pyramids building; I hear the shoutings of the armies of Alexander; I feel the ground shake beneath the march of Camby'ses. I sit as in a theatre, the stage is Time, the play is the World. What a spectacle it is! What kingly pomp, what processions file past, what cities burn to heaven, what crowds of captives are dragged at the chariot wheels of conquerors!

I hear or cry "Bravo!" when the great actors come on, shaking the stage. I am a Roman emperor when I look at a Roman coin. I lift old Homer, and I shout Achilles in the trenches. The silence of the empeopled Syrian plains, the out-comings and in-goings of the patriarchs, Abraham and Ishmael, Isaac in the fields at eventide, Rebekah at the well, Jacob's guile, Esau's face reddened by the desert sun-heat, Joseph's splendid funeral procession-all these things I find within the boards of my Old Testament.

What a silence in those old books, as of a half-peopled world; what bleating of flocks, what green pastoral rest, what indubitable human existence! Across brawling centuries of blood and war I hear the bleating of Abraham's flocks, the tinkling of the bells of Rebekah's camels.

O men and women, so far separated yet so near, so strange yet so wellknown, by what miraculous power do I know you all? Books are the true Elysian fields where the spirits of the dead converse, and into these fields a mortal may venture unappalled. What king's court can boast such company? What school of philosophy such wisdom?

There is Pan's pipe; there are the songs of Apollo. Seated in my library at night, and looking on the silent faces of my books, I am occasionally visited by a strange sense of the supernatural. They are not collections of printed pages; they are ghosts. I take one down, and it speaks with me in a tongue not now heard on earth, and of men and things of which it alone possesses the knowledge.

I call myself a solitary, but sometimes I think I misapply the term. No man sees more company than I do. I travel with mightier cohorts around me than ever did Timour or Genghis Khan on their fiery marches. I am a sovereign in my library; but it is the dead, not the living, that attend my levees.

24-132

27-10

CONTENTS OF VOLUME LXII.