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  ...with which they looked for each successive volume of the late Dr. Young's excellent series of old English prose-writers, and the delight with which they carried it home, fresh from the press and the bindery in its appropriate livery of evergreen. To most of us it was our first introduction to the highest society of letters, and we still feel grateful to the departed scholar who gave us to share the conversation of such men as Latimer, More, Sidney, Taylor, Browne, Fuller, and Walton. What a sense of security in an old book which time has criticized for us.   What a precious feeling of seclusion in having a double wall of centuries between us and the heats and clamors of contemporary literature! How limpid seems the thought, how pure the old wine of scholarship that has been settling for so many generations in those silent crypts and Falernian _amphorae_ of the Past! No other writers speak to us with the authority of those whose ordinary speech was that of our translation of the Scriptures; to no modern is that frank unconsciousness...   Lowell, James Russell

Excerpt from The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 01, No. 6, April, 1858 · This quote is about books - reading · Search on Google Books to find all references and sources for this quotation.

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