rsonal matters we load the memory with. Ideas are not clearly defined,
as the drift-wood in the river spoils the reflected image. We feel
nothing intensely; our experience is a blur without distinct form and
outline; in short we are incumbered with too much clay. Hence, when
a slow disease burns the dross and earth out of one, how keen and
susceptible his organization becomes! The mud-wall grows transparent.
Our senses lose their obtuseness, our capacity both for experience and
expression is enlarged, and we not only live deeper, but nearer the
surface.

It appears, then, that, as a general rule, our ability to express
ourselves is in proportion to the fineness of our organization. Women,
for this reason, are more adequate in expressing themselves than men;
they stand removed one degree farther from the earth, and are conscious
of feelings and sentiments that are never defined in our minds; the
detachment is more perfect; shades and boundaries are more clearly
brought out, and consequently the statement is more round and full.

One's capacity for expression is also affected by his experience,--not
experience in time and space, but soul-experience,--joy, sorrow,
pleasure, pain, love, hope, aspiration, and all intense feeling by which
the genesis of the inward man unfolded. What one has lived, that alone
can he adequately say. The outward is the measure of the inward; it is
as the earth and sky: so much earth as we see, so much sky takes form
and outline. The spiritual, it is true, is illimitable, but the actual
is the measure of that part of which we are made conscious. Experience
furnishes the handle, but the intellect must supply the blade.

Intense feeling of any kind afterward gives us more entire command over
some thought or power within us. Every inundation of passion enriches
and gives us a deeper soil. The most painful experiences are generally
the most productive. Cutting teeth is by no means a pleasant operation,
yet it increases our tools. Our lives are not thoroughly shaped out and
individualized till we have lived and suffered in every part of us. A
great feeling reveals new powers in the soul, as a deep breath fills
air-cells in the lungs that are not reached by an ordinary inhalation.
Love first revealed the poetic gift in Novalis; and in reading the
Autobiography of Goethe, one can but notice the quickening of his powers
after every new experience: a new love was a new push given the shuttle,
and a new