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