The second danger is even more fatal.  A struggling tyro who makes an inartistic attempt to adorn his discourse with the most brilliant passages from Bossuet renders his production not only worthless but grotesque.  The man who can build a labourer’s cottage handsomely should be content; but when he attempts to engraft upon it the turrets and pilasters of the neighbouring mansion he covers his work not with ornament but ridicule.  “Am I then,” you will ask, “to cast aside the brilliant thoughts and happy imagery I meet in my reading?” No, I only ask you not to use them now.  Note them for re-reading.  Cast them as nuggets into the smelting-pot of your own brain.  Trust to time and the alchemy of thought to transmute them.  Wait till these thoughts become your thoughts.  The intellect will assimilate this foreign material and send it forth on some future occasion, palpitating with the warm blood of natural life, to strengthen the frame-work of your reasoning or adorn your composition with veins of natural beauty.

[Side note:  How shall I read?]

Read with a pencil and paper slip beside you, not only to jot down arguments and illustrations, but to seize on the inspirations that may come.  The thoughts we get from books are not at all as valuable as the train of natural ideas these books excite.  When the mind is once set going there is no knowing what rich ore it may strike.  When the brain throbs in labour with thought struggling for birth, when the soul is full and the imagination in flame, this is the golden moment.  Each idea now stands out clear cut as a cube of crystal, and colours of unwonted richness are draping the fancy.  Hence, at all hazards, lay hold of this inspiration.  Close the most interesting work; leave the most fascinating society; heed neither food nor sleep till it is secured.

For you this spirit may never breathe again.  Let this moment pass, and when you do invoke the intellect it is cold and barren, and the heart that yesterday blazed with living fires holds lifeless ashes now.  It is not always when you have pointed your pencils and spread the virgin page before you thought will come.  The ideas that have revolutionized the world came at times and in places most unlooked for.

When musing on the swaying Sanctuary lamp during Benediction, Galileo discovered the laws of the pendulum.  Such a trifle as the fall of an apple suggested the laws of gravitation to Newton; and the first idea of the steam engine came to Watt while he was watching the lid rising from the boiling kettle.  During a royal banquet the argument to crush the Manicheans grew on the great mind of St. Thomas, and the king made his secretary write it down on the spot.  Had not these men trained themselves to admit and welcome the angel visitant, no matter when or where he came, the stagnant pool of the world’s ignorance might have remained for ever unstirred.