—­I confess there are times when I feel like the friend I mentioned to you some time ago,—­I hate the very sight of a book.  Sometimes it becomes almost a physical necessity to talk out what is in the mind, before putting anything else into it.  It is very bad to have thoughts and feelings, which were meant to come out in talk, strike in, as they say of some complaints that ought to show outwardly.

I always believed in life rather than in books.  I suppose every day of earth, with its hundred thousand deaths and something more of births,—­with its loves and hates, its triumphs and defeats, its pangs and blisses, has more of humanity in it than all the books that were ever written, put together.  I believe the flowers growing at this moment send up more fragrance to heaven than was ever exhaled from all the essences ever distilled.

—­Don’t I read up various matters to talk about at this table or elsewhere?—­No, that is the last thing I would do.  I will tell you my rule.  Talk about those subjects you have had long in your mind, and listen to what others say about subjects you have studied but recently.  Knowledge and timber shouldn’t be much used, till they are seasoned.

—­Physiologists and metaphysicians have had their attention turned a good deal of late to the automatic and involuntary actions of the mind.  Put an idea into your intelligence and leave it there an hour, a day, a year, without ever having occasion to refer to it.  When, at last, you return to it, you do not find it as it was when acquired.  It has domiciliated itself, so to speak,—­become at home,—­entered into relations with your other thoughts, and integrated itself with the whole fabric of the mind.—­Or take a simple and familiar example; Dr. Carpenter has adduced it.  You forget a name, in conversation,—­go on talking, without making any effort to recall it,—­and presently the mind evolves it by its own involuntary and unconscious action, while you were pursuing another train of thought, and the name rises of itself to your lips.

There are some curious observations I should like to make about the mental machinery, but I think we are getting rather didactic.

—­I should be gratified, if Benjamin Franklin would let me know something of his progress in the French language.  I rather liked that exercise he read us the other day, though I must confess I should hardly dare to translate it, for fear some people in a remote city where I once lived might think I was drawing their portraits.

—­Yes, Paris is a famous place for societies.  I don’t know whether the piece I mentioned from the French author was intended simply as Natural History, or whether there was not a little malice in his description.  At any rate, when I gave my translation to B. F. to turn back again into French, one reason was that I thought it would sound a little bald in English, and some people might think it was meant to have some local bearing or other,—­which the author, of course, didn’t mean, inasmuch as he could not be acquainted with anything on this side of the water.