The Magic Of Books

Thomas Carlyle

            Certainly the art of writing is the most miraculous of all things man has devised… In books lies the soul of the whole past time; the articulate audible voice of the past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream. Mighty fleets and armies, harbours and arsenals, vast cities, high-domed, many-engined, they are precious, great: but what do they become? Agamennon¹, the many Agamennons Pericleses², and their Greece; all is gone now to some ruined fragments, dumb mournful wrecks and blocks: but the books of Greece! There Greece, to every thinker, still very literally lives, can be called up again into life. No magic Rune³ is stranger than a book. All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books. They are the chosen possession of men.

Thomas Carlyle

(1)   Agamennon: a brave Greece King who led the armies in the war against Troy.

(2)   Pericles: a great Athenian Statmen (5^th century B.C.).

(3)   Rune: the name given to the letters in the old Teutonic alphabet, which were often used as magic signs