. Bright enough it looked while it was on the hearth, in the
midst of the sea-coal, the great bellows blowing away, and the rod or
the horse-shoe as red or as white as the burning coals. How it fizzes as
it goes into the trough of water, and how suddenly all the glow is
gone! It looks black and cold enough now. Just so with your passionate
incandescence. It is all well while it burns and scintillates in your
emotional centres, without articulate and connected expression; but the
minute you plunge it into the rhyme-trough it cools down, and becomes as
dead and dull as the cold horse-shoe. It is true that if you lay it cold
on the anvil and hammer away on it for a while it warms up somewhat.
Just so with the rhyming fellow,--he pounds away on his verses and
they warm up a little. But don't let him think that this afterglow
of composition is the same thing as the original passion. That found
expression in a few oh, oh's, eheu's, helas, helas's, and when the
passion had burned itself out you got the rhymed verses, which, as I
have said, are its ashes.

I thanked Number Seven for his poetical illustration of my thesis. There
is great good to be got out of a squinting brain, if one only knows
how to profit by it. We see only one side of the moon, you know, but a
fellow with a squinting brain seems now and then to get a peep at the
other side. I speak metaphorically. He takes new and startling views
of things we have always looked at in one particular aspect. There is a
rule invariably to be observed with one of this class of intelligences:
Never contradict a man with a squinting brain. I say a man, because I
do not think that squinting brains are nearly so common in women as they
are in men. The "eccentrics" are, I think, for the most part of the male
sex.

That leads me to say that persons with a strong instinctive tendency to
contradiction are apt to become unprofitable companions. Our thoughts
are plants that never flourish in inhospitable soils or chilling
atmospheres. They are all started under glass, so to speak; that is,
sheltered and fostered in our own warm and sunny consciousness. They
must expect some rough treatment when we lift the sash from the frame
and let the outside elements in upon them. They can bear the rain and
the breezes, and be all the better for them; but perpetual contradiction
is a pelting hailstorm, which spoils their growth and tends to kill them
out altogether.

Now stop and consider a moment