Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: agara, or a prairie, or the lakes, or the father of rivers. But what visitor crosses the sea to view our libraries ? Who has ever heard of them abroad, except their diminutive size and meager character has given them a " bad eminence ?" We have not a single library with one hundred thousand volumes, while there are several in Europe with five times this number of books, and one or two with a million or more. Indeed, our largest public libraries would attract no special notice in a small town on the Continent. And our libraries (unless there may be recent exceptions) have been as much wanting in the quality of their books, as in their quantity. To look at many of the volumes that are to be found in our public libraries, one would think, that those who by a figure of speech are called the donors, ought to pay for their storage, particularly, where they mar the appearance of very nice library halls. They remind one of the books that are sometimes sent to the missionaries of the western section of our country, apparently because the proprietors The Paris correspondent of an American journal has recently written of what he terms the largest library in the world. He says: " The Bibliotheque Rationale, in the Rae Richelieu contains at the present time fourteen hundred thousand volumes, or about four times the whole number of books in the public libraries of Massachusetts. The volumes are mostly in handsome binding of colored leather enriched with gilt, and are placed in solid walls from floor to ceiling, with net work for protection as high as the hand can reach." chapter{Section 4know not how else to dispose of them,—forgetting that the only light that many books can shed is that evolved when they are used to kindle fires. America has produced a few authors worthy the name ...