inct meaning
to the mind--are mere idle sounds, except that our vanity claims an
interest and property in them. I have more satisfaction in my own
thoughts than in dictating them to others: words are necessary to
explain the impression of certain things upon me to the reader, but they
rather weaken and draw a veil over than strengthen it to myself. However
I might say with the poet, 'My mind to me a kingdom is,' yet I have
little ambition 'to set a throne or chair of state in the understandings
of other men.' The ideas we cherish most exist best in a kind of shadowy
abstraction,

Pure in the last recesses of the mind,

and derive neither force nor interest from being exposed to public view.
They are old familiar acquaintance, and any change in them, arising
from the adventitious ornaments of style or dress, is little to their
advantage. After I have once written on a subject, it goes out of my
mind: my feelings about it have been melted down into words, and _then_
I forget. I have, as it were, discharged my memory of its old habitual
reckoning, and rubbed out the score of real sentiment. For the future
it exists only for the sake of others. But I cannot say, from my own
experience, that the same process takes place in transferring our
ideas to canvas; they gain more than they lose in the mechanical
transformation. One is never tired of painting, because you have to set
down not what you knew already, but what you have just discovered. In
the former case you translate feelings into words; in the latter, names
into things. There is a continual creation out of nothing going on.
With every stroke of the brush a new field of inquiry is laid open;
new difficulties arise, and new triumphs are prepared over them. By
comparing the imitation with the original, you see what you have done,
and how much you have still to do. The test of the senses is severer
than that of fancy, and an over-match even for the delusions of our
self-love. One part of a picture shames another, and you determine to
paint up to yourself, if you cannot come up to Nature. Every object
becomes lustrous from the light thrown back upon it by the mirror of
art: and by the aid of the pencil we may be said to touch and handle
the objects of sight. The air-drawn visions that hover on the verge of
existence have a bodily presence given them on the canvas: the form
of beauty is changed into a substance: the dream and the glory of the
universe is made 'palpable to