University of Virginia Library

THE
MUTABILITY OF LITERATURE,
A COLLOQUY IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY.

There are certain half-dreaming moods of mind, in which
we naturally steal away from noise and glare, and seek
some quiet haunt, where we may indulge our reveries,
and build our air castles undisturbed. In such a mood,
I was loitering about the old gray cloisters of Westminster
Abbey, enjoying that luxury of wandering thought
which one is apt to dignify with the name of reflection;
when suddenly an irruption of madcap boys from Westminster
school, playing at foot-ball, broke in upon the
monastic stillness of the place, making the vaulted passages
and mouldering tombs echo with their merriment.
I sought to take refuge from their noise by penetrating
still deeper into the solitudes of the pile, and applied to
one of the vergers for admission to the library. He conducted
me through a portal rich with the crumbling sculpture
of former ages, which opened upon a gloomy passage
leading to the Chapter-house, and the chamber in
which Doomsday Book is deposited. Just within the
passage is a small door on the left. To this the verger
applied a key; it was double locked, and opened with
some difficulty, as if seldom used. We now ascended a
dark narrow staircase, and passing through a second door,
entered the library.

I found myself in a lofty antique hall, the roof supported
by massive joists of old English oak. It was
soberly lighted by a row of Gothic windows at a considerable
height from the floor, and which apparently
opened upon the roofs of the cloisters. An ancient picture
of some reverend dignitary of the church in his
robes hung over the fire-place. Around the hall and in
a small gallery were the books, arranged in carved
oaken cases. They consisted principally of old polemical
writers, and were much more worn by time than use.
In the centre of the library was a solitary table, with
two or three books on it, an inkstand without ink, and

a few pens parched by long disuse. The place seemed fitted
for quiet study and profound meditation. It was buried
deep among the massive walls of the abbey, and shut
up from the tumult of the world, I could only hear now
and then the shouts of the schoolboys faintly swelling from
the cloisters, and the sound of a bell tolling for prayers, that
echoed soberly along the roofs of the abbey. By degrees
the shouts of merriment grew fainter and fainter, and at
length died away. The bell ceased to toll, and a profound
silence reigned through the dusky hall.

I had taken down a little thick quarto, curiously bound
in parchment, with brass clasps, and seated myself at the
table in a venerable elbow chair. Instead of reading, however,
I was beguiled by the solemn monastic air, and lifeless
quiet of the place, into a train of musing. As I looked
around upon the old volumes in their mouldering covers,
thus ranged on the shelves, and apparently never disturbed
in their repose, I could not but consider the library a kind of
literary catacomb, where authors, like mummies, are piously
entombed, and left to blacken and moulder in dusty oblivion.

How much, thought I, has each of these volumes, now
thrust aside with such indifference, cost some aching
head! how many weary days! how many sleepless
nights! How have their authors buried themselves in
the solitude of cells and cloisters; shut themselves up from
the face of man, and the still more blessed face of nature;
and devoted themselves to painful research and intense
reflection! And all for what? to occupy an inch
of dusty shelf—to have the title of their works read now
and then in a future age, by some drowsy churchman or
casual straggler like myself; and in another age to be
lost, even in remembrance. Such is the amount of this
boasted immortality. A mere temporary rumour, a local
sound; like the tone of that bell which has just tolled
among these towers, filling the ear for a moment—lingering
transiently in echo—and then passing away like a
thing that was not!