Americans on substantially the same terms as their own citizens, or of nations who have international agreements providing for reciprocity in the grant of copyright, to which the United States may at its pleasure become a party.

6. The benefit of copyright in the United States is not to take effect as to any foreigner until the actual existence of either of the conditions just recited, in the case of the nation to which he belongs, shall have been made known by a proclamation of the President of the United States.

One very material benefit has been secured through international copyright. Under it, authors are assured the control of their own text, both as to correctness and completeness. Formerly, republication was conducted on a "scramble" system, by which books were hastened through the press, to secure the earliest market, with little or no regard to a correct re-production. Moreover, it was in the power of the American publisher of an English book, or of a British publisher of an American one, to alter or omit passages in any work reprinted, at his pleasure. This license was formerly exercised, and imperfect, garbled, or truncated editions of an author's writings were issued without his consent, an outrage against which international copyright furnishes the only preventive.

Another benefit of copyright between nations has been to check the relentless flood of cheap, unpaid-for fiction, which formerly poured from the press, submerging the better literature. The Seaside and other libraries, with their miserable type, flimsy paper, and ugly form, were an injury alike to the eyesight, to the taste, and in many cases, to the morals of the community. More than ninety per cent. of these wretched "Libraries" were foreign novels. An avalanche of English and translated French novels of the "bigamy school" of fiction swept over the

land, until the cut-throat competition of publishers, after exhausting the stock of unwholesome foreign literature, led to the failure of many houses, and piled high the counters of book and other stores with bankrupt stock. Having at last got rid of this unclean brood, (it is hoped forever) we now have better books, produced on good paper and type, and worth preserving, at prices not much above those of the trash formerly offered us.

At the same time, standard works of science and literature are being published in England at prices which tend steadily toward increased popular circulation. Even conservative publishers are reversing the rule of small editions at high prices, for larger editions at low prices. The old three-volume novel is nearly supplanted by the one volume, well-printed and bound book at five or six shillings. Many more reductions would follow in the higher class of books, were not the measure of reciprocal copyright thus far secured handicapped by the necessity of re-printing on this side at double cost, if a large American circulation is in view.

The writers of America, with the steady and rapid progress of the art of making books, have come more and more to appreciate the value of their preservation, in complete and unbroken series, in the library of the government, the appropriate conservator of the nation's literature. Inclusive and not exclusive, as this library is wisely made by law, so far as copyright works are concerned, it preserves with impartial care the illustrious and the obscure. In its archives all sciences and all schools of opinion stand on equal ground. In the beautiful and ample repository, now erected and dedicated to literature and art through the liberal action of Congress, the intellectual wealth of the past and the present age will be handed down to the ages that are to follow.

POETRY OF THE LIBRARY.

THE LIBRARIAN'S DREAM.

1.

He sat at night by his lonely bed,
With an open book before him;
And slowly nodded his weary head,
As slumber came stealing o'er him.

2.

And he saw in his dream a mighty host
Of the writers gone before,

And the shadowy form of many a ghost
Glided in at the open door.

3.

Great Homer came first in a snow-white shroud,

And Virgil sang sweet by his side;

While Cicero thundered in accents loud,
And Caesar most gravely replied.

4.

Anacreon, too, from his rhythmical lips

The honey of Hybla distilled,

And Herodotus suffered a partial eclipse,

While Horace with music was filled.

5.

The procession of ancients was brilliant and long, Aristotle and Plato were there,

Thucydides, too, and Tacitus strong,

And Plutarch, and Sappho the fair.

6.

Aristophanes elbowed gay Ovid's white ghost,

And Euripides Xenophon led,

While Propertius laughed loud at Juvenal's jokes, And Sophocles rose from the dead.

7.

Then followed a throng to memory dear,

Of writers more modern in age,

Cervantes and Shakespeare, who died the same year, And Chaucer, and Bacon the sage.

8.

Immortal the laurels that decked the fair throng,

And Dante moved by with his lyre,

While Montaigne and Pascal stood rapt by his song, And Boccaccio paused to admire.

9.

Sweet Spenser and Calderon moved arm in arm,
While Milton and Sidney were there,

Pope, Dryden, and Molière added their charm,
And Bunyan, and Marlowe so rare.

10.

Then Gibbon stalked by in classical guise,

And Hume, and Macaulay, and Froude,

While Darwin, and Huxley, and Tyndall looked wise, And Humboldt and Comte near them stood.

11.

Dean Swift looked sardonic on Addison's face,

And Johnson tipped Boswell a wink,

Walter Scott and Jane Austen hobnobbed o'er a glass, And Goethe himself deigned to drink.

12.

Robert Burns followed next with Thomas Carlyle,

Jean Paul paired with Coleridge, too,

While De Foe elbowed Goldsmith, the master of style, And Fielding and Schiller made two.

13.

Rousseau with his eloquent, marvellous style,
And Voltaire, with his keen, witty pen,

Victor Hugo so grand, though repellent the while,
And Dumas and Balzac again.

14.

Dear Thackeray came in his happiest mood,

And stayed until midnight was done,

Bulwer-Lytton, and Reade, and Kingsley and Hood, And Dickens, the master of fun.

15.

George Eliot, too, with her matter-full page,

And Byron, and Browning, and Keats,

While Shelley and Tennyson joined youth and age,
And Wordsworth the circle completes.

16.

Then followed a group of America's best,
With Irving, and Bryant, and Holmes,
While Bancroft and Motley unite with the rest,
And Thoreau with Whittier comes.

17.

With his Raven in hand dreamed on Edgar Poe,
And Longfellow sweet and serene,

While Prescott, and Ticknor, and Emerson too,
And Hawthorne and Lowell were seen.

18.

While thus the assembly of witty and wise

Rejoiced the librarian's sight,

Ere the wonderful vision had fled from his eyes,
From above shone a heavenly light:

19.

And solemn and sweet came a voice from the skies,

"All battles and conflicts are done,

The temple of Knowledge shall open all eyes,
And law, faith, and reason are one!"

When the radiant dawn of the morning broke,
From his glorious dream the librarian woke.