hts 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,