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.
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