mats and rubbish which had
littered his garret become precious. Every trivial fact in his private
biography becomes an illustration of this new principle, revisits the
day, and delights all men by its piquancy and new charm. Men say, Where
did he get this? and think there was something divine in his life. But
no; they have myriads of facts just as good, would they only get a lamp
to ransack their attics withal.

We are all wise. The difference between persons is not in wisdom but in
art. I knew, in an academical club, a person who always deferred to
me; who, seeing my whim for writing, fancied that my experiences had
somewhat superior; whilst I saw that his experiences were as good as
mine. Give them to me and I would make the same use of them. He held the
old; he holds the new; I had the habit of tacking together the old and
the new which he did not use to exercise. This may hold in the great
examples. Perhaps if we should meet Shakspeare we should not be
conscious of any steep inferiority; no, but of a great equality,--only
that he possessed a strange skill of using, of classifying, his facts,
which we lacked. For notwithstanding our utter incapacity to produce
anything like Hamlet and Othello, see the perfect reception this wit and
immense knowledge of life and liquid eloquence find in us all.

If you gather apples in the sunshine, or make hay, or hoe corn, and then
retire within doors and shut your eyes and press them with your hand,
you shall still see apples hanging in the bright light with boughs and
leaves thereto, or the tasselled grass, or the corn-flags, and this for
five or six hours afterwards. There lie the impressions on the retentive
organ, though you knew it not. So lies the whole series of natural
images with which your life has made you acquainted, in your memory,
though you know it not; and a thrill of passion flashes light on their
dark chamber, and the active power seizes instantly the fit image, as
the word of its momentary thought.

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure,
is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser
years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and
always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until
by and by we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish
person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature
paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal His