Dr. O’Rell has frequently expressed surprise that I have never wearied of and drifted away from the book-friendships of my earlier years.  Other people, he says, find, as time elapses, that they no longer discover those charms in certain books which attracted them so powerfully in youth. ``We have in our earlier days,’’ argues the doctor, ``friendships so dear to us that we would repel with horror the suggestion that we could ever become heedless or forgetful of them; yet, alas, as we grow older we gradually become indifferent to these first friends, and we are weaned from them by other friendships; there even comes a time when we actually wonder how it were possible for us to be on terms of intimacy with such or such a person.  We grow away from people, and in like manner and for similar reasons we grow away from books.’’

Is it indeed possible for one to become indifferent to an object he has once loved?  I can hardly believe so.  At least it is not so with me, and, even though the time may come when I shall no longer be able to enjoy the uses of these dear old friends with the old-time enthusiasm, I should still regard them with that tender reverence which in his age the poet Longfellow expressed when looking round upon his beloved books: 

  Sadly as some old mediaeval knight
      Gazed at the arms he could no longer wield—­
      The sword two-handed and the shining shield
  Suspended in the hall and full in sight,
  While secret longings for the lost delight
      Of tourney or adventure in the field
      Came over him, and tears but half concealed
  Trembled and fell upon his beard of white;
  So I behold these books upon their shelf
      My ornaments and arms of other days;
          Not wholly useless, though no longer used,
  For they remind me of my other self
     Younger and stronger, and the pleasant ways
          In which I walked, now clouded and confused.

If my friend O’Rell’s theory be true, how barren would be Age!  Lord Bacon tells us in his ``Apothegms’’ that Alonzo of Aragon was wont to say, in commendation of Age, that Age appeared to be best in four things:  Old wood best to burn; old wine to drink; old friends to trust; and old authors to read.  Sir John Davys recalls that ``a French writer (whom I love well) speaks of three kinds of companions:  Men, women and books,’’ and my revered and beloved poet-friend, Richard Henry Stoddard, has wrought out this sentiment in a poem of exceeding beauty, of which the concluding stanza runs in this wise: 

      Better than men and women, friend,
      That are dust, though dear in our joy and pain,
  Are the books their cunning hands have penned,
      For they depart, but the books remain;
  Through these they speak to us what was best
      In the loving heart and the noble mind;
  All their royal souls possessed
      Belongs forever to all mankind! 
  When others fail him, the wise man looks
  To the sure companionship of books.