“Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest & wittiest of men that could be picked out of all civil countries in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning & wisdom. The men themselves were hid & inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruptions, fenced by etiquette. But the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.” -Ralph Waldo Emerso