brain, to begin with. In saying that what interests you is what
concerns you, I mean intellectually, not materially. It may concern you,
in the pecuniary sense, to take an interest in the law; yet your mind,
left to itself, would take little or no interest in law, but an
absorbing interest in botany. The passionate studies of the young
Goethe, in many different directions, always in obedience to the
predominant interests of the moment, are the best example of the way in
which a great intellect, with remarkable powers of acquisition and
liberty to grow in free luxuriance, sends its roots into various soils
and draws from them the constituents of its sap. As a student of law, as
a university student even, he was not of the type which parents and
professors consider satisfactory. He neglected jurisprudence, he
neglected even his college studies, but took an interest in so many
other pursuits that his mind became rich indeed. Yet the wealth which
his mind acquired seems to have been due to that liberty of ranging by
which it was permitted to him to seek his own everywhere, according to
the maxim of French law, _chacun prend son bien ou il le trouve_. Had he
been a poor student, bound down to the exclusively legal studies, which
did not greatly interest him, it is likely that no one would ever have
suspected his immense faculty of assimilation. In this way men who are
set by others to load their memories with what is not their proper
intellectual food, never get the credit of having any memory at all, and
end by themselves believing that they have none. These bad memories are
often the best, they are often the selecting memories. They seldom win
distinction in examinations, but in literature and art. They are quite
incomparably superior to the miscellaneous memories that receive only as
boxes and drawers receive what is put into them. A good literary or
artistic memory is not like a post-office that takes in everything, but
like a very well-edited periodical which prints nothing that does not
harmonize with its intellectual life. A well-known author gave me this
piece of advice: "Take as many notes as you like, but when you write do
not look at them--what you remember is what you must write, and you
ought to give things exactly the degree of relative importance that
they have in your memory. If you forget much, it is well, it will only
save beforehand the labor of erasure." This advice would not be suitable
to every author; an