In Books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream. Mighty fleets and armies, harbors and arsenals, vast cities, high-domed, many-engined, — they are precious, great: but what do they become? Agamemnon, the many Agamemnons, Pericleses, and their Greece; all is gone now to some ruined fragments, dumb mournful wrecks and blocks: but the Books of Greece! There Greece, to every thinker, still very literally lives: can be called up again into life. No magic Rune is stranger than a Book. All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books.

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) Scottish essayist and historian

Lecture (1840-05-19), “The Hero as Man of Letters,” Home House, Portman Square, London
    (Source)

The lecture notes were collected by Carlyle into On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History, Lecture 5 (1841).