, as
glass and mercury to mirror objects. Dim, indeed, is the reflection of
the glass without its coating of quicksilver; and amalgam, without a
plate on which to spread it, can never form a mirror. The metal and the
silex are

'Useless each without the other;'

but wed them, and from their union spring life-like images of life.

But it may be objected that in trying to improve a thought we often mar
it; just as in transplanting shrubs from the barren soil in which they
have become fast rooted, to one more fertile, we destroy them. 'Just as
the fabled lamps in the tomb of Terentia burned underground for ages,
but when removed into the light of day, went out in darkness.' That this
sometimes occurs, we own. Some ideas are as fragile as butterflies, whom
to handle is to destroy. But such are exceptions only, and should not
preclude attempts at improvement. If a bungler tries and fails, let him
be Anathema, Maranathema; but let not his failure deter from trial a
genuine artist. Nor is it an ignoble office to be thus shapers only of
great thinkers' thoughts--Python interpreters to oracles. Nor is his
work of slight account who thus--as sunbeams gift dark thunder-clouds
with 'silver lining' and a fringe of purple, as Time with ivy drapes a
rugged wall--hangs the beauties of expression round a rude but sterling
thought. Nay, oftentimes the shaper's labor is worth more than the
thought he shapes. For if the stock out of which the work is wrought be
ever more valuable than the workman's skill, then let canvas and
paint-pots impeach the fame of Raphael; rough blocks from Paros and
Pentelicus, the gold and ivory of the Olympian Jove; tear from the brow
of Phidias the laurel wreath with which the world has crowned him.
Supply of raw material is little without the ability to use it. Furnish
three men with stone and mortar, and while one is building an unsightly
heap of clumsy masonry, the architect will rear up a magnificent
cathedral--an Angelo, a St. Peter's. And so when ideas, which in their
crudeness are often as hard to be digested as unground corn, are run
through the mill of another's mind, and appear in a shape suited to
satisfy the most dyspeptic stomachs, does not the miller deserve a toll?

Finally, author-borrowing has been hallowed by its practice, in their
first essays, by all our greatest writers. Turn to the scroll on which
the world has written the names of those it holds as most illustrious.
How was it with