A Ruined Library
Walter Herries Pollock. Written for the present collection.
“Imperious Cæsar dead and turn’d to clay
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.”
Here the live thought of buried Cæsar’s brain
Has served a lazy slut to lay the train
That lights a dunce’s fire. Here Homer’s seen
All torn or crumpled in the pettish spleen
Of some spoilt urchin. Here a leaf from Glanvil
Is reft to mark a place in ‘On the Anvil.’
Here, too, a heavy-blotted Shakspere’s page
Holds up an inky mirror to the age;
Here looking round you’re but too sure to see a
Heart-breaking wreck from the ‘Via Jacobæa;’
Here some rare pamphlet, long a-missing, lurks
In an odd volume of ‘Lord Bacon’s Works;’
Here may you find a Stillingfleet or Blair
Usurp the binding of a lost Voltaire;
And here a tattered Boyle doth gape ungently
Upon a damp-disfigured ‘Life of Bentley.’
Here half a Rabelais jostles for position
The quarter of a ‘Spanish Inquisition;’
Here Young’s ‘Night Thoughts’ lie mixed with Swinburne’s ‘Ballads’
’Mid scraps of works on Poisons and on Salads;
And here a rent and gilt-edged Sterne doth lack a ray
Of sun that falls upon a bulging Thackeray;
Here—but the tale’s too sad at length to tell
How a book-heaven’s been turned to a book-hell.