t I must not be
bored with a sense of depth--must not be required to strain my mental
vision to see into the bottom of a well; the fountain must flow out at
the surface, though it come from the centre of the globe. Then I can
fill my cup without any artificial aid, or any painful effort.

What we call depth in a book is often obscurity; and an author whose
meaning is got at only by severe mental exertion, and a straining of the
mind's eye, is generally weak in the backbone of him. Occasionally it is
the dullness of the reader, but oftener the obtuseness of the writer.

A strong vigorous writer is not obscure--at any rate, not habitually so;
never leaves his reader in doubt, or compels him to mount the lever and
help to raise his burden; but clutches it in his mighty grasp and hurls
it into the air, so that it is not only unencumbered by the soil that
gave it birth, but is wholly detached and relieved, and set off against
the clear blue of his imagination. His thought is not like a rock
propped up but still sod-bound, but is like a rock held aloft, or built
into a buttress, with definite shape and outline.

Let me next quote from "A Thought on Culture," which appeared in the
same publication a little later, and which is the first to bear his
signature:--

In the conduct of life a man should not show his knowledge, but his
wisdom; not his money--that were vulgar and foolish--but the result
of it--independence, courage, culture, generosity, manliness, and that
noble, humane, courteous air which wealth always brings to the right
sort of a man.

A display of mere knowledge, under most circumstances, is pedantry; an
exercise of wisdom is always godlike. We cannot pardon the absence of
knowledge, but itself must be hid. We can use a thing without absolutely
showing it, we can be reasonable without boring people with our logic,
and speak correctly without parsing our sentences.

The end of knowledge is not that a man may appear learned, any more than
the end of eating is that a man may seem to have a full stomach; but the
end of it is that a man may be wise, see and understand things as they
are; be able to adjust himself to the universe in which he is placed,
and judge and reason with the celerity of instinct, and that without
any conscious exercise of his knowledge. When we feel the food we have
eaten, something is wrong; so when a man is forever conscious of his
learning, he has not digested it, and it is an encumb