or sometimes he plays the parson,
wedlocking thoughts from whose union issue new; as from yellow wedded to
red springs orange, a new, a secondary life; or enacts, maybe, the
brood-hen's substitute. Many a thought is a Leda egg, imprisoning twin
life-principles, which,, incubated in the eccaleobion brain of an
author-borrower, have blessed the world; but without such a
foster-parent, in some neglected nest staled and addled, had never burst
the shell.

Author-borrowing should also be encouraged, because it tends to
language's perfection, and thus to incrementing the value of the ideas
it vehicles; for though a gilding diction and elegant expression may not
directly increase a thought's intrinsic worth, yet by bestowing beauty
it increases its utility, and so adds relative value--just as a rosewood
veneering does to a basswood table. There may be as much raw timber in a
slab as in a bunch of shingles, but the latter is worth the most; it
will find a purchaser where the former would not. So there may be as
much truly valuable thought in a dull sermon as in a lively lecture;
but the lecture will please, and so instruct, where the dull sermon will
fall on an inattentive ear. Moreover, author minds are of two classes,
the one deep-thinking, the other word-adroit. Providence bestows her
favors frugally; and with the power of quarrying out huge lumps of
thought, ability to work them over into graceful form is rarely given.
This is no new doctrine, but a truth clearly recognized in metaphysics,
and evidenced in history. Cromwell was a prodigious thinker; but in
language, oh! how deficient. His thoughts, struggling to force
themselves out of that sphynx-like jargon which he spake and wrote,
appear like the treasures of the shipwrecked Trojans, swimming '_rari in
gurgite vasto_'--Palmyra columns, reared in the midst of a desert of
sentences. And Coleridge--than whom in the mines of mental science few
have dug deeper, and though Xerxes-hosts of word-slaves waited on his
pen--often wrote apparently mere bagatelle--the most transcendental
nonsense. Yet he who takes the pains to husk away his obscurity of style
will find solid ears of thought to recompense his labor. Bentham and
Kant required interpreters--Dumont and Cousin--to make understood what
was well worth understanding. These two kinds of
authors--thought-creditors and borrowing expressionists--are as mutually
necessary to each other to bring out idea in its most perfect shape