Several of his compositions were appearing occasionally in the athenaeum at the time when this correspondence with Miss Barrett commenced.
"The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2)"
Frederic G. Kenyon
36-40. The facts are pointed out by Professor Cowan in The athenaeum, December 3, 1904, and had been recognised by Dr. Hay Fleming.
"John Knox and the Reformation"
Andrew Lang
These were the Library of Congress, 300,000; Boston Public Library, 300,000; New York Mercantile Library, 160,000; Harvard College Library, 154,000; Astor Library, 152,000; Philadelphia Mercantile Library, 126,000; House of Representatives Library, 125,000; Boston athenaeum, 105,000; Library Company of Philadelphia, 104,000. In 1913 there were in this class 82 libraries, or over nine times as many, including 14 libraries of 300,000 to 2,000,000 volumes, a class which did not exist in 1875. Meanwhile the individual book remains just what it always was, the utterance of one mind addressed to another mind, and the individual reader has no more hours in the day nor days in his life; he has no more eyes nor hands nor-we reluctantly confess-brains than he had in 1875. But, fast as our libraries grow, not even their growth fully represents the avalanche of books that is every year poured upon the reader's devoted head by the presses of the world.
"The Booklover and His Books"
Harry Lyman Koopman