had money enough, what would
I do? Perhaps, if you and master did not hold me, I might go to Cairo,
and down the Red sea to Bengal, and take a ramble in India. Would this
be better than building and planting? It would surely give more variety
to the eye, and more amplitude to the mind. Half fourteen thousand would
send me out to see other forms of existence, and bring me back to
describe them.

I answer this the day on which I had yours of the 9th, that is on the
11th. Let me know when it comes. I am, &c.

XXXI.--To MRS. THRALE.

Lichfield, August 2, 1775.

MADAM,--I dined to-day at Stowhill, and am come away to write my letter.
Never, surely, was I such a writer before. Do you keep my letters? I am
not of your opinion, that I shall not like to read them hereafter; for
though there is in them not much history of mind, or anything else, they
will, I hope, always be, in some degree, the records of a pure and
blameless friendship, and, in some hours of languor and sadness, may
revive the memory of more cheerful times.

Why you should suppose yourself not desirous hereafter to read the
history of your own mind, I do not see. Twelve years, on which you now
look, as on a vast expanse of life, will, probably, be passed over
uniformly and smoothly, with very little perception of your progress,
and with very few remarks upon the way. The accumulation of knowledge,
which you promise to yourself, by which the future is to look back upon
the present, with the superiority of manhood to infancy, will, perhaps,
never be attempted, or never will be made; and you will find, as
millions have found before you, that forty-five has made little sensible
addition to thirty-three.

As the body, after a certain time, gains no increase of height, and
little of strength, there is, likewise, a period, though more variable
by external causes, when the mind commonly attains its stationary point,
and very little advances its powers of reflection, judgment, and
ratiocination. The body may acquire new modes of motion, or new
dexterities of mechanick operations, but its original strength receives
not improvement: the mind may be stored with new languages, or new
sciences, but its power of thinking remains nearly the same, and, unless
it attains new subjects of meditation, it commonly produces thoughts of
the same force and the same extent, at very distant intervals of life;
as the tree, unless a foreign fruit be ingrafted, gives, year after
y