"Certainly the Art of Writing is the most miraculous of all
things man has devised. Odin's Runes were the first form
of the work of a Hero; Books, written words, are still miraculous Runes, the latest form! In Books lies the soul of the
whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past,
when the body and material substance of it has altogether
vanished like a dream. Mighty fleets and armies, harbors
and arsenals, vast cities, high-domed, many-engined, -- they are precious, great: but what do they become? Agamemnon,
the many Agamemnons, Pericleses, and their Greece; all is
gone now to some ruined fragments, dumb mournful wrecks
and blocks: but the Books of Greece! There Greece, to
every thinker, still very literally lives; can be called up again
into life. No magic Rune is stranger than a Book. All that
Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as
in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the
chosen possession of men."
Thomas Carlyle "Heroes, Hero Worship and The Heroic in History" 1841
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