sting of a somewhat more than
middle-aged female, with a parchment forehead and a dry little
"frisette" shingling it, a sallow neck with a necklace of gold
beads, a black dress too rusty for recent grief and contours in
basso-rilievo, left the table prematurely, and was reported to have
been very virulent about what I said. So I went to my good old
minister, and repeated the remarks, as nearly as I could remember
them, to him. He laughed good-naturedly, and said there was
considerable truth in them. He thought he could tell when people's
minds were wandering, by their looks. In the earlier years of his
ministry he had sometimes noticed this, when he was preaching;
--very little of late years. Sometimes, when his colleague was
preaching, he observed this kind of inattention; but after all, it
was not so very unnatural. I will say, by the way, that it is a
rule I have long followed, to tell my worst thoughts to my
minister, and my best thoughts to the young people I talk with.]

--I want to make a literary confession now, which I believe nobody
has made before me. You know very well that I write verses
sometimes, because I have read some of them at this table. (The
company assented,--two or three of them in a resigned sort of way,
as I thought, as if they supposed I had an epic in my pocket, and
was going to read half a dozen books or so for their benefit.)--I
continued. Of course I write some lines or passages which are
better than others; some which, compared with the others, might be
called relatively excellent. It is in the nature of things that I
should consider these relatively excellent lines or passages as
absolutely good. So much must be pardoned to humanity. Now I
never wrote a "good" line in my life, but the moment after it was
written it seemed a hundred years old. Very commonly I had a
sudden conviction that I had seen it somewhere. Possibly I may
have sometimes unconsciously stolen it, but I do not remember that
I ever once detected any historical truth in these sudden
convictions of the antiquity of my new thought or phrase. I have
learned utterly to distrust them, and never allow them to bully me
out of a thought or line.

This is the philosophy of it. (Here the number of the company was
diminished by a small secession.) Any new formula which suddenly
emerges in our consciousness has its roots in long trains of
thought; it is virtually old when it first makes its appearance
among the r