A REGAL HOME FOR PRINCELY BOOKS The library which stands senior to all other American book collections, owned by the oldest of the country's universities, has at last the outward and visible housing adequate to the value long placed upon it by all with expert knowledge of books and their uses. Harvard's possessions of lettered sort, ranging up the scale from present-day pamphlets to the rarest of yesterday's volumes rarely bound, are exceeded in point of numbers by the Congressional Library at Washington, the magnificent Astor-Tilden-Lenox collection in the heart of busy New York, and the Boston Public Library; but as a storehouse of materials for the scholar and special student the Cambridge institution yields place to not one of even such a trio. best of a generation these riches have, indeed, been crowded into little room, practically stored away in the inadequate chambers and corridors and even cellars of old Gore Hall, and while everyone in touch with the situation recognized the imperative need for ampler and more modern accommodations, no one came forward with the wherewithal to provide them. But at last Gore Hall is no more; a building has been completed fit in every way to hold and display the ancient seat of learning's volumes and manuscripts, and this splendid edifice, which ranks architecturally with the best of American collegiate structures, stands as the memorial to one of the "Titanic" victims, one of the university's younger sons but one of the world's true bibliophiles, who bequeathed to his Alma Mater many times over the most valuable collection of books she has ever received-in intrinsic worth far surpassing that first gift of all received when John Harvard's self started her library with his modest benefaction of less than four hundred little volumes. The far-flung world of book-lovers, which knows no "border nor breed nor birth," is aware that this munificent gift of Mrs. George D. Widener, of Philadelphia, was prompted by a desire to furnish proper home for the literary gatherings of her son, Harry Elkins Widener, who, though his name was added to Harvard's graduate roster only seven years ago, is none the less an out standing figure in the history of American book collecting. Even before graduation had called him from daily association with that "Yard" where lovers of books and makers of books for generations have been accustomed to come and go, he had begun to get together what was to prove one of the most valuable collections of rare volumes in the New World, and he had pursued his hobby with a passion as persistent as it was intelligent until the black April of 1912 swept him down in the swirling waters of the North Atlantic. Young Mr. Widener (he was but twenty-seven) had brought together first editions of Shakespeare, Milton and Spenser, Johnson, Goldsmith and Gray, Keats and Shelley, Dickens and Thackeray, Meredith and "R. L. S.," till his library boasted an assembly probably unique of its sort. Many of his findings were copies personally associated with their authors; perhaps inscribed for presentation to someone scarcely less famous than the writer, or annotated with author's corrections to be made in later edition. He who had searched out these volumes was of course innately possessed of a deep love for books, but it was also noteworthy that his knowledge of them, a knowledge intimate and technical, was exceptionally accurate and extensive. Few were better judges of such than the late Bernard Quaritch, and he had voiced unqualified praise of this youthful bibliophile's unusual qualifications to stand with the foremost collectors of modern days. Knowing that it was for him that Dr. Rosenbach, of Philadelphia, bought in the Van Antwerp folio Shakespeare of 1623 for eighteen thousand dollars, and that, at the sale of the first part of the Hoe library, he was the underbidder, at nineteen thousand dollars, for the Gutenberg Bible on vellum (which went out to the shelves of Mr. Huntington of Los Angeles), it is easy enough to say: "Of course; anyone with so long a purse can gather fine books." Nothing could be wider of the truth. Mere money will purchase miles of handsome bindings and yet never enable one not endowed with the litterateur's heart and mind to fill high cases with such unique jewels of letters as were those of Mr. Widener's. If ample means be a sine qua non for such collecting, so, too, and not one whit less, are entire enthusiasm, immensely detailed knowledge, and the nicest discrimination, and these are not the findings of the open market-place. It is to be recorded, too, that his was the exceptionally fortunate opportunity of sitting at the feet of Beverly Chew, who, since Robert Hoe is no longer here, must be accounted the dean of American book-lovers, at once in wide learning and in that singleeyed desire which, after all, has the most to do with making the veritable collector. mortar. When the will of the young enthusiast disclosed that his really princely library was to go to Harvard, the university was confronted with the humiliating fact that it had no suitable place for the deposit of such a collection; antique Gore had become so crammed with books that mere navigation among the stacks had become difficult. Then came forward the widowed mother of the donor, with an offer now given shapely form in stone and Her two-million dollar gift, be it added, offers large interest to book-lovers and library users quite apart from her son's collection which is to be its hub and centre. For in this building will be applied the "laboratory principle." Harvard intends to do what Oxford's Bodleian has been doing for centuries, and do it better. An accredited visitor from any country on the globe will find himself as much at home in one of the private rooms of the Widener Memorial as in his own library, and just outside the door he will have immediate access to all the treasures that the Harvard collections contain. In similar fashion the undergraduates are to be provided with such facilities for work among the shelves as have been quite impossible in outgrown, inadequate Gore. If the visiting scholars and the Harvard professors are to have eighty private studies scattered about the building, the students are to have no fewer than 350 little separate "cubicles," each furnished with desk and chair, where they may read in seclusion, with needed volumes on their tables and any other book required close at hand in the stacks. On the main floor, reached by the steps from the Yard, the memorial feature has its most imposing illustration. The visitor passes through the doors into a vestibule, which opens into a great entrance-hall, this in turn leading to the Widener Memorial Hall. This is an apartment measuring 40 by 32 feet, lighted on each side by a court. Beyond is the room for the installation of the Widener collection, a chamber 38 by 60 feet. Here will be placed and exhibited the items which make up a library so striking that none doubts but that it would have come, with only a grant of those years snatched from the man in so horrible a fashion, to be possibly the premier private book collection in the world. Mr. Widener's ambition, voiced with a characteristic modesty, would without a doubt have fully come to pass: "I should like, some day, to own a library of a sort to distinguish me in all the world of books." He had set himself to the achievement of his self-appointed task with a singleness of purpose that was itself large assurance of ultimate succcss. Five brief years had accomplished much, for while other American collectors excelled him in the range of their acquisitions, not one, with the single exception of Mr. Huntington, had to show volumes of such surpassing quality, such absolute immaculate copies of the great rarities of two hemispheres. In the eyes of their fortunate possessor, the favorite single tome of all these was, perhaps, the Countess of Pembroke's own copy of that famed Arcadia, which her immortal brother Sir Philip Sidney had dedicated to her "kindly eyes," in 1580. Turning reverently back the old binding of Elizabethan red morocco, its sides curiously ornamented with hearts and flames of tarnished gold, with its intertwined initials of the house of Sidney and Montgomery in the midst, one finds on the title page the signature of the Earl of Ancram (himself a poet) and his record of the presentation of the book to him by the Countess of Montgomery, who had received it directly from her mother, "Pembroke's lady." It was later owned by Richard Heber, then by Sir Henry Hope, and so came down to its present stand through the libraries of Clarence Bement and George C. Thomas. Scarcely less valuable than this is the actual Eikon Basilike, allegedly from the august pen of the first Charles Stuart, and certainly cherished, read and reread, by the son, second of the name. The authorship question need not be entered upon; the ownership is beyond dispute, bearing the royal arms upon a binding of Mearne's own laying; and Mearne, it will be remembered, was the king of English binders, in those far-gone days, as well as the English king's binder. Close by this rest a first edition of Beaumont and Fletcher's plays, a fine folio of 1647, once the property of the second Earl of Bridgewater, "the Elder Brother" of Milton's Comus, and a Life of Johnson, which the garrulous Boswell's self once sent to the artist friend of "the great leviathan of learning," Sir Joshua Reynolds, to whom this foremost of biographies had been dedicated. Yet another all but priceless quartet are these: sturdy Sam Butler's personal copy of his Hudibras (1663), a "first," of course; a particularly tall, clean issue of Walpole's Noble Authors, formerly on the shelves of the poet-painter Blake, and annotated by him; Coleridge's Lay Sermons of 1817, later endorsed by "S. T. C.," and, a humorously unique Ingoldsby Legends. By this is meant not merely that the three amusing volumes appear in their several first issues, but that on the blank page which, by some freak, appeared in the earliest of the trio, Barham had written (to his publisher and printer) By a blunder for which I have only to thank THOS. INGOLDSBY. While Mr. Widener had many fine Byrons, one item well out of the ordinary is found in a copy of Tom Moore's Lalla Rookh, formerly owned by the Noble Lord, who, on the fly-leaf had penned a quatrain. After careful research, the late owner had decided the lines were unpublished, and surely they are characteristic of the disillusioned poet : The keenest pangs the wretched find Are rapture to the dreary void, That waste of feelings unemploy'd. The Browning items are notable. Here is the Marathon: An Epic, set to paper by Elizabeth Barrett when a girl yet in her teens, and a personal copy of those Sonnets from the |