strong for us: Pero si
muove. When at night I look at the moon and stars, I seem stationary,
and they to hurry. Our love of the real draws us to permanence, but
health of body consists in circulation, and sanity of mind in variety
or facility of association. We need change of objects. Dedication to
one thought is quickly odious. We house with the insane, and must humor
them; then conversation dies out. Once I took such delight in Montaigne,
that I thought I should not need any other book; before that, in
Shakspeare; then in Plutarch; then in Plotinus; at one time in Bacon;
afterwards in Goethe; even in Bettine; but now I turn the pages of
either of them languidly, whilst I still cherish their genius. So with
pictures; each will bear an emphasis of attention once, which it cannot
retain, though we fain would continue to be pleased in that manner. How
strongly I have felt of pictures that when you have seen one well, you
must take your leave of it; you shall never see it again. I have had
good lessons from pictures which I have since seen without emotion or
remark. A deduction must be made from the opinion which even the wise
express of a new book or occurrence. Their opinion gives me tidings of
their mood, and some vague guess at the new fact, but is nowise to be
trusted as the lasting relation between that intellect and that thing.
The child asks, 'Mamma, why don't I like the story as well as when
you told it me yesterday?' Alas! child it is even so with the oldest
cherubim of knowledge. But will it answer thy question to say, Because
thou wert born to a whole and this story is a particular? The reason
of the pain this discovery causes us (and we make it late in respect to
works of art and intellect), is the plaint of tragedy which murmurs from
it in regard to persons, to friendship and love.

That immobility and absence of elasticity which we find in the arts,
we find with more pain in the artist. There is no power of expansion in
men. Our friends early appear to us as representatives of certain ideas
which they never pass or exceed. They stand on the brink of the ocean of
thought and power, but they never take the single step that would bring
them there. A man is like a bit of Labrador spar, which has no lustre as
you turn it in your hand until you come to a particular angle; then it
shows deep and beautiful colors. There is no adaptation or universal
applicability in men, but each has his special talent, and the maste