I am an inveterate rummager in the ruins of an ancient civilization. Our own. But I am only one man. That is why I believe that the Church must take up this task of preservation, or rather must seize the opportunity to become, once again and in the broadest sense, Mater et Magistra (Mother and Teacher) to a barbarian world.

Let me suggest one means for doing this.

Recently I found, online, a copy of Wordsworth's famous "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," re-published in Boston in 1884 by Daniel Lothrop and Company, long after the poet wrote it. It contains two portraits of the poet, furnished by the Wordsworth Society, and ten additional illustrations by a variety of artists.

Appended to the poem are notes from the secretary of the Wordsworth Society, taken from an edition of the poet's collected works. And in these notes, we find the bulk of an important letter describing an incident the writer witnessed when the poet said he had, when he was young, sometimes to grasp something hard like a tree or a wall to persuade himself that the material world really existed.

In this discussion, the annotator is careful to point out what similarity there was - and was not - between Wordsworth's idealism and that of Plato. For Wordsworth was somehow still Christian, and indeed his nephew Christopher became an Anglican bishop and a hymn writer of some importance. From him we get the mighty hymn for Epiphany, "Songs of Thankfulness and Praise."

This slim book was not intended for college professors, but for any lover of poetry; I imagine it might be presented as a birthday gift. The publisher, Daniel Lothrop, had devoted his life to bringing good and great literature to the common people, and especially to children.

A brief glance at his life gives us a look into a lost world. At age 14, Lothrop was ready to enter college, but he decided to wait a year, and during that year he was pitched instead into business concerns, helping his brother run a drug store, and selling books at the store too, on the side.

Three years later, still as only a 17-year-old boy, he bought and stocked another store, this one devoted more to selling books than nostrums, to be run by another brother.

At age 19, he bought out a bookstore in New Hampshire and built it up into one of the most important in New England, a center of literary culture. That became the source of Lothrop and Company, which specialized in books for children - as Lothrop himself put it, books that would encourage them in right living and right thinking.

The man's tastes were neither sectarian nor prissy. They were, shall we say, catholic. I am looking at another of his firm's works, a book he himself put together, Ideal Poems, from the English Poets (1883), containing poems by Burns, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, both of the Brownings, and others.

Apparently, Lothrop and the people who bought such books believed that "A Man's a Man for A' That," "To a Skylark," and "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix" were perfectly fit for children to read, to understand, and to take into their hearts.

I have often done my rummaging in antique stores and, well, junk shops, where I have found, among thousands of individual books, a complete and original set of The Catholic Encyclopedia, itself an immense compendium of cultural, historical, linguistic, philosophical, and theological learning; hard-cover classics in Latin, Greek, German, French, and Italian; complete hard-cover sets of the works of Moliere, Washington Irving, Sir Walter Scott, William Thackeray, George Eliot, and Somerset

Maugham; invaluable bound copies, six or twelve months' worth at a time, of old literary and cultural magazines such as The Century, Harper's, and Scribner's.

These are things I have myself acquired, and for every one such that I have culled, I have left countless books and collections where they were. For most of these, I have paid very little, and sometimes nothing at all: the sets of Irving and Eliot were at t...