g, and
not otherwise. If he can communicate himself he can teach, but not by
words. He teaches who gives, and he learns who receives. There is no
teaching until the pupil is brought into the same state or principle in
which you are; a transfusion takes place; he is you and you are he; then
is a teaching, and by no unfriendly chance or bad company can he ever
quite lose the benefit. But your propositions run out of one ear as they
ran in at the other. We see it advertised that Mr. Grand will deliver
an oration on the Fourth of July, and Mr. Hand before the Mechanics'
Association, and we do not go thither, because we know that these
gentlemen will not communicate their own character and experience to
the company. If we had reason to expect such a confidence we should go
through all inconvenience and opposition. The sick would be carried
in litters. But a public oration is an escapade, a non-committal, an
apology, a gag, and not a communication, not a speech, not a man.

A like Nemesis presides over all intellectual works. We have yet to
learn that the thing uttered in words is not therefore affirmed. It must
affirm itself, or no forms of logic or of oath can give it evidence. The
sentence must also contain its own apology for being spoken.

The effect of any writing on the public mind is mathematically
measurable by its depth of thought. How much water does it draw? If it
awaken you to think, if it lift you from your feet with the great voice
of eloquence, then the effect is to be wide, slow, permanent, over the
minds of men; if the pages instruct you not, they will die like flies in
the hour. The way to speak and write what shall not go out of fashion is
to speak and write sincerely. The argument which has not power to reach
my own practice, I may well doubt will fail to reach yours. But take
Sidney's maxim:--"Look in thy heart, and write." He that writes to
himself writes to an eternal public. That statement only is fit to be
made public which you have come at in attempting to satisfy your own
curiosity. The writer who takes his subject from his ear and not from
his heart, should know that he has lost as much as he seems to have
gained, and when the empty book has gathered all its praise, and half
the people say, 'What poetry! what genius!' it still needs fuel to make
fire. That only profits which is profitable. Life alone can impart life;
and though we should burst we can only be valued as we make ourselves
valuable.