Lumen de Lumine

On that eminent man Sir Thomas Bodley, magnificent founder of the Oxford Library.

Holy soul, and ashes equally holy, hail! May it be permitted once to remember your dust! A better ordered heaven, a fuller company of stars, You do not let its stars remain scattered. For you give homes even to books that properly wander, And are called the heaven in which the stars stand fixed. As fathers we give life to our offspring; you alone possess The means by which they may live that life. The arts recognise their lodging: here every hand enters After the midwives, no longer a stranger. A stage for the gown, a gathering that holds the learned world, A sea, or rather a wave more full than the sea; A meeting of minds, the furthest goal of the Lyceum, Where no work might enter unless it were more sacred; A catalogue of heroes, the all-knowing offspring of mind, This is a repository alive with a consciousness of its own. Bodley’s ample praise, the wider urn of the buried man, In which his death found life, and Death found its death. Broken there, Death fled; with all its arrows spent, Only the empty quiver filled its empty hands.

No voice is equal to you: in labouring to house the Muse, You have done what she could never find words to tell.

It is a pious duty to acknowledge those through whom you have advanced.