A man’s mental reactions with the atmosphere of life must go on, whether he will or no, as between his blood and the air he breathes.  As to catching the residuum of the process, or what we call thought,—­the gaseous ashes of burned-out thinking,—­the excretion of mental respiration,—­that will depend on many things, as, on having a favorable intellectual temperature about one, and a fitting receptacle.—­I sow more thought-seeds in twenty-four hours’ travel over the desert-sand, along which my lonely consciousness paces day and night, than I shall throw into soil where it will germinate, in a year.  All sorts of bodily and mental perturbations come between us and the due projection of our thought.  The pulse-like “fits of easy and difficult transmission” seem to reach even the transparent medium through which our souls are seen.  We know our humanity by its often intercepted rays, as we tell a revolving light from a star or meteor by its constantly recurring obscuration.

An illustrious scholar once told me, that, in the first lecture he ever delivered, he spoke but half his allotted time, and felt as if he had told all he knew.  Braham came forward once to sing one of his most famous and familiar songs, and for his life could not recall the first line of it;—­he told his mishap to the audience, and they screamed it at him in a chorus of a thousand voices.  Milton could not write to suit himself, except from the autumnal to the vernal equinox.  One in the clothing-business, who, there is reason to suspect, may have inherited, by descent, the great poet’s impressible temperament, let a customer slip through his fingers one day without fitting him with a new garment.  “Ah!” said he to a friend of mine, who was standing by, “if it hadn’t been for that confounded headache of mine this morning, I’d have had a coat on that man, in spite of himself, before he left the store.”  A passing throb, only,—­but it deranged the nice mechanism required to persuade the accidental human being, x, into a given piece of broadcloth, a.

We must take care not to confound this frequent difficulty of transmission of our ideas with want of ideas.  I suppose that a man’s mind does in time form a neutral salt with the elements in the universe for which it has special elective affinities.  In fact, I look upon a library as a kind of mental chemist’s shop, filled with the crystals of all forms and hues which have come from the union of individual thought with local circumstances or universal principles.

When a man has worked out his special affinities in this way, there is an end of his genius as a real solvent.  No more effervescence and hissing tumult as he pours his sharp thought on the world’s biting alkaline unbeliefs!  No more corrosion of the old monumental tablets covered with lies!  No more taking up of dull earths, and turning them, first into clear solutions, and then into lustrous prisms!