The Senate of the United States Author:Henry Cabot Lodge Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A GREAT LIBRARY' This noble gift to learning comes to us with the shadow of a tragic sorrow - resting upon it. Unbidden there rises in our minds the thought o... more »f Lycidas, with all the glory of youth about him, the victim of . . . that fatal and perfidious bark Built in th' eclipse, and rigged with curses dark, That sank so low that sacred head of thine. But with the march of the years, which have devoured past generations, and to which we too shall succumb, the shadow of grief will pass, while the great memorial will remain. It is a monument to a lover of books, and in what more gracious guise than this can a man's memory go down to a remote posterity? He is the benefactor and the exemplar of a great host, for within that ample phrase all gather who have deep in their hearts the abiding love of books and literature. They meet there upon common ground and with a like loyalty, from the bibliomaniac with his measured leaves, to the homo unius libri; /rom the great collector with the spoils of the world-famous printers and binders spread around him, to the poor student, whoappeals most to our hearts, with all the immortalities of genius enclosed in some battered, shilling volumes crowded together upon a few shabby shelves. 1 An address at tho presentation of the Widcner Memorial Library to Harvard University, June 24, 1915. 1 Harry Elkins Widener, in memory of whom this library was given, was drowned on the Titanic. But the true lovers of books are a goodly company one and all. No one is excluded except he who heaps up volumes of large cost with no love in his heart but only a cold desire to gratify a whim of fashion, or those others who deal in the books of the past as if they were postage stamps or bric-a-brac, as if they were soulless, senseless things; who sp...« less