kinds, and they last better than the summer fruit. And some, that,
like the Winter-Nelis, have been hard and uninviting until all the

rest have had their season, get their glow and perfume long after
the frost and snow have done their worst with the orchards. Beware

of rash criticisms; the rough and stringent fruit you condemn may
be an autumn or a winter pear, and that which you picked up beneath

the same bough in August may have been only its worm-eaten
windfalls. Milton was a Saint-Germain with a graft of the roseate

Early-Catherine. Rich, juicy, lively, fragrant, russet skinned old
Chaucer was an Easter-Beurre; the buds of a new summer were

swelling when he ripened.
- There is no power I envy so much - said the divinity-student - as

that of seeing analogies and making comparisons. I don't
understand how it is that some minds are continually coupling

thoughts or objects that seem not in the least related to each
other, until all at once they are put in a certain light, and you

wonder that you did not always see that they were as like as a pair
of twins. It appears to me a sort of miraculous gift.

[He is rather a nice young man, and I think has an appreciation of
the higher mental qualities remarkable for one of his years and

training. I try his head occasionally as housewives try eggs, -
give it an intellectual shake and hold it up to the light, so to

speak, to see if it has life in it, actual or potential, or only
contains lifeless albumen.]

You call it MIRACULOUS, - I replied, - tossing the expression with
my facialeminence, a little smartly, I fear. - Two men are walking

by the polyphloesboean ocean, one of them having a small tin cup
with which he can scoop up a gill of sea-water when he will, and

the other nothing but his hands, which will hardly hold water at
all, - and you call the tin cup a miraculous possession! It is the

ocean that is the miracle, my infant apostle! Nothing is clearer
than that all things are in all things, and that just according to

the intensity and extension of our mental being we shall see the
many in the one and the one in the many. Did Sir Isaac think what

he was saying when he made HIS speech about the ocean, - the child
and the pebbles, you know? Did he mean to speak slightingly of a

pebble? Of a spherical solid which stood sentinel over its
compartment of space before the stone that became the pyramids had

grown solid, and has watched it until now! A body which knows all
the currents of force that traverse the globe; which holds by

invisible threads to the ring of Saturn and the belt of Orion! A
body from the contemplation of which an archangel could infer the

entire inorganic universe as the simplest of corollaries! A throne
of the all-pervading Deity, who has guided its every atom since the

rosary of heaven was strung with beaded stars!
So, - to return to OUR walk by the ocean, - if all that poetry has

dreamed, all that insanity has raved, all that maddening narcotics
have driven through the brains of men, or smothered passion nursed

in the fancies of women, - if the dreams of colleges and convents
and boarding-schools, - if every human feeling that sighs, or

smiles, or curses, or shrieks, or groans, should bring all their
innumerable images, such as come with every hurried heart-beat, -

the epic which held them all, though its letters filled the zodiac,
would be but a cupful from the infinite ocean of similitudes and

analogies that rolls through the universe.
[The divinity-student honored himself by the way in which he

received this. He did not swallow it at once, neither did he
reject it; but he took it as a pickerel takes the bait, and carried

it off with him to his hole (in the fourth story) to deal with at
his leisure.]

- Here is another remark made for his especial benefit. - There is
a natural tendency in many persons to run their adjectives together

in TRIADS, as I have heard them called, - thus: He was honorable,
courteous, and brave; she was graceful, pleasing, and virtuous.

Dr. Johnson is famous for this; I think it was Bulwer who said you
could separate a paper in the "Rambler" into three distinct essays.

Many of our writers show the same tendency, - my friend, the
Professor, especially. Some think it is in humbleimitation of

Johnson, - some that it is for the sake of the stately sound only.
I don't think they get to the bottom of it. It is, I suspect, an

instinctive and involuntary effort of the mind to present a thought
or image with the THREE DIMENSIONS that belong to every solid, - an

unconscious handling of an idea as if it had length, breadth, and
thickness. It is a great deal easier to say this than to prove it,

and a great deal easier to dispute it than to disprove it. But
mind this: the more we observe and study, the wider we find the

range of the automatic and instinctive principles in body, mind,
and morals, and the narrower the limits of the self-determining

conscious movement.
- I have often seen piano-forte players and singers make such

strange motions over their instruments or song-books that I wanted
to laugh at them. "Where did our friends pick up all these fine

ecstatic airs?" I would say to myself. Then I would remember My
Lady in "Marriage a la Mode," and amuse myself with thinking how

affectation was the same thing in Hogarth's time and in our own.
But one day I bought me a Canary-bird and hung him up in a cage at

my window. By-and-by he found himself at home, and began to pipe
his little tunes; and there he was, sure enough, swimming and

waving about, with all the droopings and liftings and languishing
side-turnings of the head that I had laughed at. And now I should

like to ask, WHO taught him all this? - and me, through him, that
the foolish head was not the one swinging itself from side to side

and bowing and nodding over the music, but that other which was
passing its shallow and self-satisfied judgment on a creature made

of finer clay than the frame which carried that same head upon its
shoulders?

- Do you want an image of the human will, or the self-determining
principle, as compared with its prearranged and impassable

restrictions? A drop of water, imprisoned in a crystal; you may
see such a one in any mineralogical collection. One little fluid

particle in the crystalline prism of the solid universe!
- Weaken moral obligations? - No, not weaken, but define them.

When I preach that sermon I spoke of the other day, I shall have to
lay down some principles not fully recognized in some of your text-

books.
I should have to begin with one most formidablepreliminary. You

saw an article the other day in one of the journals, perhaps, in
which some old Doctor or other said quietly that patients were very

apt to be fools and cowards. But a great many of the clergyman's
patients are not only fools and cowards, but also liars.

[Immense sensation at the table. - Sudden retirement of the angular
female in oxydated bombazine. Movement of adhesion - as they say

in the Chamber of Deputies - on the part of the young fellow they
call John. Falling of the old-gentleman-opposite's lower jaw -

(gravitation is beginning to get the better of him.) Our landlady
to Benjamin Franklin, briskly, - Go to school right off, there's a

good boy! Schoolmistress curious, - takes a quick glance at
divinity-student. Divinity-student slightly flushed draws his

shoulders back a little, as if a big falsehood - or truth - had hit
him in the forehead. Myself calm.]

- I should not make such a speech as that, you know, without having
pretty substantial indorsers to fall back upon, in case my credit

should be disputed. Will you run up stairs, Benjamin Franklin,
(for B. F. had NOT gone right off, of course,) and bring down a

small volume from the left upper corner of the right-hand shelves?
[Look at the precious little black, ribbed backed, clean-typed,

vellum-papered 32mo. "DESIDERII ERASMI COLLOQUIA. Amstelodami.
Typis Ludovici Elzevirii. 1650." Various names written on title-

page. Most conspicuous this: Gul. Cookeson E. Coll. Omn. Anim.
1725. Oxon.

- O William Cookeson, of All-Souls College, Oxford, - then writing
as I now write, - now in the dust, where I shall lie, - is this

line all that remains to thee of earthlyremembrance? Thy name is
at least once more spoken by living men; - is it a pleasure to

thee? Thou shalt share with me my little draught of immortality, -
its week, its month, its year, - whatever it may be, - and then we

will go together into the solemn archives of Oblivion's
Uncatalogued Library!]