The Library of Robert Hoe: A Contribution to the History of Bibliophilism in America

Front Cover
Duprat & Company, 1895 - Bibliography - 224 pages

From inside the book

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 148 - For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.
Page 132 - Homer ruled as his demesne ; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold : Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken ; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific — and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise — Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Page 102 - The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences. I know not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the language of conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words, and they would bleed ; they are vascular and alive.
Page 30 - And through the chink in the fractured floor Look down, and see a griesly sight; A vault where the bodies are buried upright ! There face by face, and hand by hand, The Claphams and Mauleverers stand; And, in his place, among son and sire, Is John de Clapham, that fierce Esquire, A valiant man, and a name of dread In the ruthless wars of the White and Red; Who dragged Earl Pembroke from Banbury Church And smote off his head on the stones of the porch...
Page 136 - I LOVE the old melodious lays Which softly melt the ages through, The songs of Spenser's golden days, Arcadian Sidney's silvery phrase, Sprinkling our noon of time with freshest morning dew. Yet, vainly in my quiet hours To breathe their marvellous notes I try ; I feel them, as the leaves and flowers In silence feel the dewy showers, And drink with glad still lips the blessing of the sky.
Page 150 - Her feet beneath her petticoat Like little mice stole in and out, As if they feared the light: But, oh ! she dances such a way— No sun upon an Easter day Is half so fine a sight.
Page 94 - I could write a treatise in praise of the moral elevation of Rabelais' work, which would make the Church stare and the conventicle groan, and yet would be truth, and nothing but the truth.
Page 148 - You write that they ask 1 30 florins : it must be the Mauritanian mountain Atlas, I think, and not a book, that you tell me is to be bought at so huge a price. Such is now the luxury of Typographers in printing books that the furnishing of a library seems to have become as costly as the furnishing of a villa. Since to me at least, on account of my blindness, painted maps can hardly be of use, vainly surveying as I do with blind eyes the actual globe of the earth...
Page 69 - I no sooner (saith he) come into the library, but I bolt the door to me, excluding lust, ambition, avarice, and all such vices, whose nurse is idleness, the mother of ignorance, and melancholy herself, and in the very lap of eternity, amongst so many divine souls, I take my seat, with so lofty a spirit and sweet content, that I pity all our great ones, and rich men that know not this happiness.
Page 137 - Our Nation are in his debt for a new English which hee taught them. E[u]phues and his England began first that language: All our Ladies were then his Schollers ; And that Beautie in Court, which could not Parley Eup*hueisme, was as little regarded ; as shee which now there, speakes not French.

Bibliographic information