But before proceeding to inspect these successive forms of library evolution, the fact should be distinctly brought out as applicable to them all, that the American people started on their career in this country with an uncommon interest in books; and say what one will about American philistinism and American devotion to the practical, this people have always retained that ancient and primitive homage for books. To an extent, I think, unapproached elsewhere, they are, and they always have been, a bookish people. In some other nations there is, undoubtedly, a larger leisurely class; and among persons of that class there is a profounder and more extensive contact with books than is the case with us. But while among most other nations, the craving for books is the propensity of one class, with us it may be fairly described as the propensity of all classes. A certain tincture of bookishness has pervaded the American people from the beginning. Perhaps the most decided quality of American civilization has been its effort to unite the practical with the ideal; its passion for material results ennobled by the intellectual and the spiritual; its fine reverence for studiousness, even amid the persistent fury of dollar-hunting. And not only was this bookish trait visible in our colonial infancy but it may be said to have had an ante-natal origin. The two Englishmen who in the latter half of the 16th century did most to make possible the birth of American civilization in the first half of the 17th, were Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh; and both were men possessed by this large zest for ideas as well as for deeds; both were contemplative men as well as active men. The last glimpse that any surviving mortal had of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, before his ship went down in the sea, was of that stern hero sitting calmly on the deck, with a book in his hand, cheering his companions by telling them that heaven is as near by water as by land; and the last labor of Sir Walter Raleigh, before his judicial murder in the Tower, was to write one of the learnedest and stateliest books to be met with in the literature of modern men. And this flavor of bookishness which belonged to these two great pioneers and martyrs of American colonization, seems to have passed on to the men who successfully executed the grand project in which they had failed. When you run your eyes along the sturdy list of the great colony-founders of the 17th century--the men who carried out the fierce task of conveying English civilization across the Atlantic, and of making it take root and live in this wild soil--Captain John Smith, and William Bradford, and Winslow, and Robert Cushman, and the Winthrops, and Dudley, and Hooker, and Davenport, and Roger Williams, and William Penn, you will find them all, in some special sense, lovers of books, collectors of books, readers of books, even writers of books.