On this May-Day, when Nature is putting on her new spring suit of green, and decking herself with new buds and flowers; when every blade of grass shooting up through the brown sod, and every quaint little package of leaf unrolling itself on the bough are new; when restless men and women, carting their Lares and Penates through the streets, are seeking new homes; when new breezes from the North come shiveringly down upon us, telling new stories they learned of the icebergs on their way; and when new asparagus and onions are coming into the market; on this new day, I am free to confess I like the old. I like old books. I think there is more virtue, and wit, and sense, and solid stuff in the old tomes--brass-clasped and vellum-paged mayhap, made to last forever by the old worthies, over whose heads hundreds of springs have come and gone, and generations of birds have sung, and they none the wiser, for they left their souls in the tomes--than in the reams of gaudy modern trash, born in all sorts of ways, in all sorts of places, and of all sorts of parents, with lives as permanent as a tadpole's, and, like many a human being, carrying all the usefulness and beauty they possess in their covers. Gilt goes a great way with a book, as it does with a man. There are a great many gilded men and women it won't do to touch or examine too closely. The moment you handle them, the gilt rubs off and shows the pewter underneath. There are a great many books of the same description. I like old wine. There is virtue in the mildewed, cobwebbed bottle, which one of your family, whose portrait hangs in the hall because he is a little old fashioned for the drawing room, placed in the cellar years ago. Break the neck of the bottle, and see how the imprisoned genii of the wine leap sparkling into the sunshine, clad in gold, and fragrant as a rose you stumble upon in the woods. No aquafortis, logwood, or burnt shavings here. This is the nectar which refreshed the giants of old time, which Horace sang, and Anacreon drank, with which Dante pledged Beatrice, and which runs through Beethoven's _Scherzos_, and inspired the Brindisis of the masters.