dispute as, after its wrappage of corn has been shelled off, the cob's
ownership is worth a quarrel.

As thoughts bodied in words uttered make up conversation, thought
incarnate in words written constitutes literature. The gross sum of
thought with which God has seen to dower the human mind, though vast, is
finite, and may be exhausted. Indeed, we are told this had been already
done so long ago as times whereof Holy Writ takes cognizance. Since that
time, then, men have been echoing and reechoing the same old ideas. And
though words, too, are finite, their permutations are infinite. What
Himalayan piles of paper, river-coursed by Danubes and Niagaras of ink,
hath the 'itch of writing' aggregated! And yet, Ganganelli says that
every thing that man has ever written might be contained within six
thousand folio volumes, if filled with only original matter. But how
books lie heaped on one another, weighing down those under, weighed down
by those above them; each crushed and crushing; their thoughts, like
bones of skeletons corded in convent vault, mingled in confusion--like
those which Hawthorne tells us Miriam saw in the burial-cellar of the
Capuchin friars in Rome, where, when a dead brother had lain buried an
allotted period, his remains, removed from earth to make room for a
successor, were piled with those of others who had died before him.

It is said Aurora once sought and gained from Jove the boon of
immortality for one she loved; but forgetting to request also perpetual
youth, Tithonus gradually grew old, his thin locks whitened, his wasting
frame dwindled to a shadow, and his feeble voice thinned down till it
became inaudible. And just so ideas, although immortal, were it not for
author-borrowers, through age grown obsolete, might virtually perish.
But by and by, just as some precious thought is being lost unto the
world, let there come some Medea, by whose potent sorcery that old and
withered idea receives new life-blood through its shrunken veins, and it
starts to life again with recreated vigor--another AEson, with the bloom
of youth upon him. Besides in this way playing the physician to save old
ideas from a burial alive, the author-borrower often delivers many a
prolific mother-thought of a whole family of children--as a prism from
out a parent ray of colorless light brings all the bright colors of the
spectrum, which, from red to violet, were all waiting there only for its
assistance to leap into existence;