No one can speak too highly of the offices of a great library. It was one of our great essayists, you remember, who said that the monastery--speaking of it with reference to its books--was the ark that floated down over the tempest and darkness of the middle ages, in order to carry classic learning to the fifteenth century. They were repositories of learning. That is the old idea. And for a long time--almost to our day--that was the notion of the library. It was a place to put something away. It was not even like a market for the sale of provisions or eggs; indeed, if they were eggs the librarians thought it their duty to sit on them, with the idea that they might hatch out other books. That was a noble thing to do. But much better than that is to scatter these books abroad among the people, so that we shall not have reproduction--an egg for an egg--but that these books will so revivify the life that we shall have books new, that express the actual conditions and that appeal to the human life as it is. This is the modern idea of the library. This great collection, which is not to be secluded, is to be carried and even forced upon the people, so that it shall enter into and become a part of their daily lives. You remember, perhaps, what Milton says about the books, in that noblest of noble defences of unlicensed printing, that "they are not dead things. As good almost," he says, "kill a man as you kill a good book. Who kills a man, kills a reasonable being, made in God's image. Who destroys a good book destroys reason itself, kills the image of God as it were, in the eye. Many a man," he goes on to say, "lives a burden to the earth, but a good book is the precious life blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life; so that if we slay a good book we would slay immortality rather than a life." Charles Hopkins Clark, who immediately followed Mr. Warner, was at this time editor in chief of _The Hartford Courant_, of which Mr. Warner was co-editor. Mr. Clark was born in Hartford April 1, 1848, graduated at Yale, and joined the _Courant_ staff in 1871, becoming editor in 1890. One of the earliest sins of my youth, or rather one of the earliest that is burnt into my memory, was committed in the library of what was then the Young Men's Institute. I spoke out loud! The rebuke that I received sent me down the stairs overwhelmed with a sense of the enormity of my crime, yet more than sustained by joy to think that I had escaped the utter annihilation with which my reprimand was freighted. And I can say that the awe with which I used to enter that chamber of silence, and the fear with which I regarded the librarian were the common property of all the young people of that somewhat remote period. But long since we found out that the old librarian was one of the gentlest and most inoffensive men, and that we had misunderstood him as completely as he had misunderstood us.