第9章

Now, Professor,--said he,--I have drawn something out of your bank, you know; and just so sure as you keep drawing out your soul's currency without making new deposits, the next thing will be, NOFUNDS,--and then where will you be, my boy? These little bits of paper mean your gold and your silver and your copper, Professor; and you will certainly break up and go to pieces, if you don't hold on to your metallic basis.

There is something in that,--said I.--Only I rather think life can coin thought somewhat faster than I can count it off in words.What if one shall go round and dry up with soft napkins all the dew that falls of a June evening on the leaves of his garden? Shall there be no more dew on those leaves thereafter? Marry, yea,--many drops, large and round and full of moonlight as those thou shalt have absterged!

Here am I, the Professor,--a man who has lived long enough to have plucked the flowers of life and come to the berries,--which are not always sad-colored, but sometimes golden-hued as the crocus of April, or rosy-cheeked as the damask of June; a man who staggered against books as a baby, and will totter against them, if he lives to decrepitude; with a brain full of tingling thoughts, such as they are, as a limb which we call "asleep," because it is so particuly awake, is of pricking points; presenting a key-board of nerve-pulps, not as yet tanned or ossified, to finger-touch of all outward agencies; knowing nothing of the filmy threads of this web of life in which we insects buzz awhile, waiting for the gray old spider to come along; contented enough with daily realities, but twirling on his finger the key of a private Bedlam of ideals; in knowledge feeding with the fox oftener than with the stork,--loving better the breadth of a fertilizing inundation than the depth of narrow artesian well;finding nothing too small for his contemplation in the markings of the grammatophora subtilissima, and nothing too large in the movement of the solar system towards the star Lambda of the constellation Hercules;--and the question is, whether there is anything left for me, the Professor, to suck out of creation, after my lively friend has had his straw in the bung-hole of the Universe!

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.