powers of the intellect.  I have, however, generally observed that where much attention has been devoted to the recollection of names, facts, dates, &c., the higher species of intellectual cultivation have been neglected:  attention to them, on the other hand, would never involve any neglect of the advantages of memory; for a cultivated intellect can suggest to itself a thousand associative links by which it can be assisted and rendered much more extensively useful than a mere verbal memory could ever be.  The more of these links (called by Coleridge hooks-and-eyes) you can invent for yourself, the more will your memory become an intellectual faculty.  By such means, also, you can retain possession of all the information with which your reading may furnish you, without paying such exclusive attention to those tangible and immediate results of study as would deprive you of the more solid and permanent ones.  These latter consist, as I said before, in the improvement of the mind itself, and not in its furniture.  A modern author has remarked, that the improvement of the mind is like the increase of money from compound interest in a bank, as every fresh increase, however trifling, serves as a new link with which to connect still further acquisitions.  This remark is strikingly illustrative of the value of an intellectual kind of memory.  Every new idea will serve as a “hook-and-eye,” with which you can fasten together the past and the future; every new fact intellectually remembered will serve as an illustration of some formerly-established principle, and, instead of burdening you with the separate difficulty of remembering itself, will assist you in remembering other things.

It is a universal law, that action is in inverse proportion to power; and therefore the deeply-thinking mind will find a much greater difficulty in drawing out its capabilities on short notice, and arranging them in the most effective position, than a mind of mere cleverness, of merely acquired, and not assimilated knowledge.  This difficulty, however, need not be permanent, though at first it is inevitable.  A woman’s mind, too, is less liable to it; as, however thoughtful her nature may be, this thoughtfulness is seldom strengthened by habit.  She is seldom called upon to concentrate the powers of her mind on any intellectual pursuits that require intense and long-continuous thought.  The few moments of intense thought which I recommend to you will never add to your thoughtfulness of nature any habits that will require serious difficulty to overcome.  It is also, unless a man be in public life, of more importance to a woman than to him to possess action, viz. great readiness in the use and disposal of whatever intellectual powers she may possess.  Besides this, you must remember that a want of quickness and facility in recollection, of ease and distinctness in expression, is quite as likely to arise from desultory and wandering habits of thought as from the slowness referable to deep reflection.  Most people find difficulty in forcing their thoughts to concentrate themselves on any given subject, or in afterwards compelling them to take a comprehensive glance of every feature of that subject.  Both these processes require much the same habits of mind:  the latter, perhaps, though apparently the more discursive in its nature, demands a still greater degree of concentration than the former.