e flint, and steel? Click!
click! click!--Al-h-h! knuckles that time! click! click! CLICK! a spark
has taken, and is eating into the black tinder, as a six-year-old eats
into a sheet of gingerbread.

Presently, after hammering away for his five minutes with mere words, the
spark of a happy expression took somewhere among the mental combustibles,
and then for ten minutes we had a pretty, wandering, scintillating play
of eloquent thought, that enlivened, if it did not kindle, all around it.
If you want the real philosophy of it, I will give it to you. The chance
thought or expression struck the nervous centre of consciousness, as the
rowel of a spur stings the flank of a racer. Away through all the
telegraphic radiations of the nervous cords flashed the intelligence that
the brain was kindling, and must be fed with something or other, or it
would burn itself to ashes.

And all the great hydraulic engines poured in their scarlet blood, and
the fire kindled, and the flame rose; for the blood is a stream that,
like burning rock-oil, at once kindles, and is itself the fuel. You can't
order these organic processes, any more than a milliner can make a rose.
She can make something that looks like a rose, more or less, but it takes
all the forces of the universe to finish and sweeten that blossom in your
button-hole; and you may be sure that when the orator's brain is in a
flame, when the poet's heart is in a tumult, it is something mightier
than he and his will that is dealing with him! As I have looked from one
of the northern windows of the street which commands our noble
estuary,--the view through which is a picture on an illimitable canvas
and a poem in innumerable cantos,--I have sometimes seen a pleasure-boat
drifting along, her sail flapping, and she seeming as if she had neither
will nor aim. At her stern a man was laboring to bring her head round
with an oar, to little purpose, as it seemed to those who watched him
pulling and tugging. But all at once the wind of heaven, which had
wandered all the way from Florida or from Labrador, it may be, struck
full upon the sail, and it swelled and rounded itself, like a white bosom
that had burst its bodice, and--

--You are right; it is too true! but how I love these pretty phrases! I
am afraid I am becoming an epicure in words, which is a bad thing to be,
unless it is dominated by something infinitely better than itself. But
there is a fascination in the mere sound of