seeing how shabby the covers are and how long the book 
has stood there since it was bought at some sale of a 
gentleman's library in Suffolk, will let it go at that.

Thus, glancing round the bookshop, we make other such 
sudden capricious friendships with the unknown and the 
vanished whose only record is, for example, this little book 
of poems, so fairly printed, so finely engraved, too, with a 
portrait of the author. For he was a poet and drowned un-
timely, and his verse, mild as it is and formal and senten-
tious, sends forth still a frail fluty sound like that of a 
piano organ played in some back street resignedly by an 
old Italian organ-grinder in a corduroy jacket. There are 
travellers, too, row upon row of them, still testifying, in-
domitable spinsters that they were, to the discomforts that 
they endured and the sunsets they admired in Greece when 
Queen Victoria was a girl. A tour in Cornwall with a visit 
to the tin mines was thought worthy of voluminous record; 
people went slowly up the Rhine and did portraits of each 
other in Indian ink, sitting reading on deck beside a coil of 
rope; they measured the Pyramids; were lost to civiliza-
tion for years; converted Negroes in pestilential swamps. 
This packing up and going off, exploring deserts and catch-
ing fevers, settling in India for a lifetime, penetrating even 
to China and then returning to lead a parochial life at 
Edmonton, tumbles and tosses upon the dusty floor like an 
uneasy sea, so restless the English are, with the waves at 
their very door. The waters of travel and adventure seem 
to break upon little islands of serious effort and lifelong 
industry stood in jagged column upon the bookshop floor. 
In these piles of puce-bound volumes with gilt monograms 
on the back, thoughtful clergymen expound the Gospels; 
scholars are to be heard with their hammers and their 
chisels chipping clear the ancient texts of Euripides and 
Aeschylus. Thinking, annotating, expounding goes on at a 
prodigious rate all around us and over everything, like a 
punctual, everlasting tide, washes the ancient sea of fic-