Then dead souls woke; the thoughts of men Whose bones were dust revived again; The cloister's silence found a tongue, Old prophets spake, old poets sung. And here, to-day, the dead look down, The kings of mind again we crown; We hear the voices lost so long, The sage's word, the sibyl's song. Here Greek and Roman find themselves Alive along these crowded shelves; And Shakespeare treads again his stage, And Chaucer paints anew his age. As if some Pantheon's marbles broke Their stony trance, and lived and spoke, Life thrills along the alcoved hall, The lords of thought await our call! J. G. WHITTIER. THE REFERENCE LIBRARY One of the great offices of a Reference Library is to keep at the service of everybody what everybody cannot keep at home for his own service. It is not convenient to every man to have a very large telescope; I may wish to study the skeleton of a whale but my house is not large enough to hold one; I may be curious in microscopes but I may have no money to buy one of my own. But provide an institution like this and here is the telescope, here is the microscope, and here the skeleton of the whale. Here are the great picture, the mighty book, the ponderous atlas, the great histories of the world. They are here always ready for the use of every man without his being put to the cost of purchase or the discomfort of giving them house-room. Here are books that we only want to consult occasionally and which are very costly. These are the books proper for a Library like this--mighty cyclopaedias, prodigious charts, books that only Governments can publish. It is almost the only place where I would avoid cheapness as a plague and run away from mean printing and petty pages with disgust.--GEORGE DAWSON. _Address at the opening of the Birmingham Free Reference Library_, 1866. IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM LIBRARY