at I am in a queer state of mingled melancholy and exaltation. You know how much I live in and for books. Well, I have a curious feeling, a kind of premonition that there are great books coming out of this welter of human hopes and anguishes, perhaps A book in which the tempest-shaken soul of the race will speak out as it never has before. The Bible, you know, is rather a disappointment: it has never done for humanity what it should have done. I wonder why? Walt Whitman is going to do a great deal, but he is not quite what I mean. There is something coming—I don't know just what! I thank God I am a bookseller, trafficking in the dreams and beauties and curiosities of humanity rather than some mere huckster of merchandise. But how helpless we all are when we try to tell what goes on within us! I found this in one of Lafcadio Hearn's letters the other day—I marked the passage for you—
Baudelaire has a touching poem about an albatross, which you would like—describing the poet's soul superb in its own free azure—but helpless, insulted, ugly, clumsy when striving to walk on common earth—or rather, on a deck, where sailors torment it with tobacco pipes, etc.
You can imagine what evenings I have here among my shelves, now the long dark nights are come! Of course until ten o'clock, when I shut
