" In a good library how swiftly time melts away! Not merely in the sense of its rapid passage through our absorption in other interests, but as an element in any consideration, it becomes entirely neglected. In practical business the present is our only actuality; the past has been cast down like a ladder whose rounds have helped us up to a height whence we never again expect to descend. Among books, all temporal successions are obliterated; Plato and Coleridge walk arm-in-arm; genial Chaucer and loving Elia shake hands; with them, with all, we stand enraptured upon the same plane of time, in one age, the ceaseless age of the communion of souls. Well did Ileinsius say, as he locked himself into the library of Leyden, Nunc sum in gremio sceculorum! —"Now I am in the lap of eternity! "

― Fitz Hugh Ludlow , The Hasheesh Eater: Being Passages from the Life of a Pythagorean