***** LIBRARY THOUGHTS *****

“…the library door stands open: having once entered, it seems unnecessary ever to go out again, except for intervals of food and sleep. It is silly, in the jargon of the age, to call the life among books a ‘life-substitute’; it is indeed a real life, if a curious submarine one, in that ocean ‘where each kind can straight its own resemblance find’ – and in that life one is apt to suffer a sea-change…”
R. Liddell - The Last Enchantments

CONTEMPLATING A SENSE OF LOSS

WHEN I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high pil`d books, in charact'ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And feel that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

                                            Keats