e in silence and solitude I endeavour to follow a train
of reasoning, to marshal and arrange a connected set of ideas, or in any
other way to improve my mind, to purify my conceptions, and to advance
myself in any of the thousand kinds of intellectual process. It is on
the alert, when I am engaged in animated conversation, whether my cue
be to take a part in the reciprocation of alternate facts and remarks in
society, or merely to sit an attentive listener to the facts and remarks
of others.

This state of the human mind may emphatically be called the state of
activity and attention.

So long as I am engaged in any of the ways here enumerated, or in any
other equally stirring mental occupations which are not here set down,
my mind is in a frame of activity.

But there is another state in which men pass their minutes and hours,
that is strongly contrasted with this. It depends in some men upon
constitution, and in others upon accident, how their time shall be
divided, how much shall be given to the state of activity, and how much
to the state of indolence.

In an Essay I published many years ago there is this passage.

"The chief point of difference between the man of talent and the
man without, consists in the different ways in which their minds are
employed during the same interval. They are obliged, let us suppose,
to walk from Temple-Bar to Hyde-Park-Corner. The dull man goes straight
forward; he has so many furlongs to traverse. He observes if he meets
any of his acquaintance; he enquires respecting their health and their
family. He glances perhaps the shops as he passes; he admires the
fashion of a buckle, and the metal of a tea-urn. If he experiences any
flights of fancy, they are of a short extent; of the same nature as the
flights of a forest-bird, clipped of his wings, and condemned to pass
the rest of his life in a farm-yard. On the other hand the man of talent
gives full scope to his imagination. He laughs and cries. Unindebted to
the suggestions of surrounding objects, his whole soul is employed.
He enters into nice calculations; he digests sagacious reasonings.
In imagination he declaims or describes, impressed with the deepest
sympathy, or elevated to the loftiest rapture. He makes a thousand
new and admirable combinations. He passes through a thousand imaginary
scenes, tries his courage, tasks his ingenuity, and thus becomes
gradually prepared to meet almost any of the many-coloured events of
human