ght 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 particularly 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