Will he venture to present intellectual
conclusions in the drawing-room? The kitchen has a tone of its own
which all our efforts cannot elevate, and the drawing-room has its own
atmosphere, an atmosphere unfavorable to severe and manly thinking. You
cannot make cooks intellectual, and you must not be didactic with
ladies. Intellectual men always feel this difficulty, and most commonly
keep their intellect very much to themselves, when they are at home. If
they have not an outlet elsewhere, either in society or in literature,
they grow morbid.

Yet, although it is useless to attempt to elevate any human being above
his own intellectual level unless he gradually climbs himself as a man
ascends a mountain, there are nevertheless certain charities or
condescendences of the highly cultivated which may be good for the lower
intelligences that surround them, as the streams from the Alpine snows
are good for the irrigation of the valleys, though the meadows which
they water must forever remain eight or ten thousand feet below them.
And I believe that it would greatly add to the happiness of the
intellectual portion of mankind if they could more systematically
exercise these charities. It is quite clear that we can never effect by
chance conversation that total change in the mental state which is
gradually brought about by the slow processes of education; we cannot
give to an intellect that has never been developed, and which has fixed
itself in the undeveloped state, that power and activity which come only
after years of labor; but we may be able on many occasions to offer the
sort of help which a gentleman offers to an old woman when he invites
her to get up into the rumble behind his carriage. I knew an
intellectual lady who lived habitually in the country, and I may say
without fanciful exaggeration that the farmers' wives round about her
were considerably superior to what in all probability they would have
been without the advantage of her kindly and instructive conversation.
She possessed the happy art of conveying the sort of knowledge which
could be readily received by her hearers, and in a manner which made it
agreeable to them, so that they drew ideas from her quite naturally, and
her mind irrigated their minds, which would have remained permanently
barren without that help and refreshment. It would be foolish to
exaggerate the benefits of such intellectual charity as this, but it is
well, on the other hand, not to und