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Afresh, with conscious terrors vex me round,

That rest or intermission none I find.
Before mine eyes in opposition sits
Grim Death, my son and foe, who sets
them on,

And me, his parent, would full soon devour For want of other prey, but that he knows His end with mine involved, and knows that I 807 Should prove a bitter morsel, and his bane, Whenever that shall be: so Fate pronounced.

But thou, O father, I forewarn thee, shun His deadly arrow; neither vainly hope 811 To be invulnerable in those bright arms, Though tempered heavenly; for that mortal dint,

Save he who reigns above, none can resist."

She finished; and the subtle Fiend his lore

815 Soon learned, now milder, and thus answered smooth:

"Dear daughter-since thou claim'st me for thy sire,

And my fair son here show'st me, the dear pledge

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Wing silently the buxom1 air, embalmed With odors: there ye shall be fed and filled Immeasurably; all things shall be your prey."

He ceased; for both seemed highly pleased, and Death

845 Grinned horrible a ghastly smile, to hear His famine should be filled, and blessed his

maw

Destined to that good hour. No less rejoiced

His mother bad, and thus bespake her sire:

"The key of this infernal pit, by due 850 Of dalliance had with thee in Heaven, and And by command of Heaven's all-powerful joys

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King,

I keep, by him forbidden to unlock These adamantine gates; against all force Death ready stands to interpose his dart, Fearless to be o'ermatched by living might. 855

From out this dark and dismal house of But what owe I to his commands above, pain

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Who hates me, and hath hither thrust me

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demean themselves as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors. For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose

progeny they are; nay, they do pre- [10 serve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's [20 image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. 'Tis true, no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps there is no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected [30 truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse. We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise against the living labors of public men, how we spill that seasoned life of man, preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre, whereof the execution ends not [40 in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at that ethereal and fifth essence the breath of reason itself; slays an immortality rather than a life. .. But some will say, "What though the inventors were bad, the thing for all that may be good?" It may so; yet if that thing be no such deep invention, but obvious, and easy for any man to light on, and yet best and wisest common- [50 wealths through all ages and occasions have forborne to use it, and falsest seducers and oppressors of men were the first who took it up, and to no other purpose but to obstruct and hinder the first approach of Reformation, I am of those who believe, it will be a harder alchemy

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