e is some particular reason to suppose the contrary. But we get
glimpses now and then of a sphere of spiritual possibilities, where we,
dull as we are now, may sail in vast circles round the largest compass
of earthly intelligences.

----I confess there are times when I feel like the friend I mentioned
to you some time ago,--I hate the very sight of a book. Sometimes it
becomes almost a physical necessity to talk out what is in the mind,
before putting anything else into it. It is very bad to have thoughts
and feelings, which were meant to come out in talk, _strike in_, as they
say of some complaints that ought to show outwardly.

I always believed in life rather than in books. I suppose every day
of earth, with its hundred thousand deaths and something more of
births,--with its loves and hates, its triumphs and defeats, its pangs
and blisses, has more of humanity in it than all the books that were
ever written, put together. I believe the flowers growing at this moment
send up more fragrance to heaven than was ever exhaled from all the
essences ever distilled.

----Don't I read up various matters to talk about at this table or
elsewhere?--No, that is the last thing I would do. I will tell you my
rule. Talk about those subjects you have had long in your mind, and
listen to what others say about subjects you have studied but recently.
Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used till they are seasoned.

----Physiologists and metaphysicians have had their attention turned a
good deal of late to the automatic and involuntary actions of the mind.
Put an idea into your intelligence and leave it there an hour, a day, a
year, without ever having occasion to refer to it. When, at last,
you return to it, you do not find it as it was when acquired. It has
domiciliated itself, so to speak,--become at home,--entered into
relations with your other thoughts, and integrated itself with the whole
fabric of the mind. Or take a simple and familiar example. You forget
a name, in conversation,--go on talking, without making any effort to
recall it,--and presently the mind evolves it by its own involuntary and
unconscious action, while you were pursuing another train of thought,
and the name rises of itself to your lips.

There are some curious observations I should like to make about the
mental machinery, but I think we are getting rather didactic.

----I should be gratified, if Benjamin Franklin would let me know
something of his pro