s little chance of beguiling a new
tune out of the one-stringed instrument on which we have been thrumming
so long. In this desperate necessity one is often tempted to think that,
if all the words of the dictionary were tumbled down in a heap and then
all those fortuitous juxtapositions and combinations that made tolerable
sense were picked out and pieced together, we might find among them some
poignant suggestions towards novelty of thought or expression. But,
alas! it is only the great poets who seem to have this unsolicited
profusion of unexpected and incalculable phrase, this infinite variety of
topic. For everybody else everything has been said before, and said over
again after. He who has read his Aristotle will be apt to think that
observation has on most points of general applicability said its last
word, and he who has mounted the tower of Plato to look abroad from it
will never hope to climb another with so lofty a vantage of speculation.
Where it is so simple if not so easy a thing to hold one's peace, why add
to the general confusion of tongues? There is something disheartening,
too, in being expected to fill up not less than a certain measure of
time, as if the mind were an hour-glass, that need only be shaken and set
on one end or the other, as the case may be, to run its allotted sixty
minutes with decorous exactitude. I recollect being once told by the
late eminent naturalist, Agassiz, that when he was to deliver his first
lecture as professor (at Zuerich, I believe) he had grave doubts of his
ability to occupy the prescribed three quarters of an hour. He was
speaking without notes, and glancing anxiously from time to time at the
watch that lay before him on the desk. "When I had spoken a half hour,"
he said, "I had told them everything I knew in the world, everything!
Then I began to repeat myself," he added, roguishly, "and I have done
nothing else ever since." Beneath the humorous exaggeration of the story
I seemed to see the face of a very serious and improving moral. And yet
if one were to say only what he had to say and then stopped, his audience
would feel defrauded of their honest measure. Let us take courage by the
example of the French, whose exportation of Bordeaux wines increases as
the area of their land in vineyards is diminished.

To me, somewhat hopelessly revolving these things, the undelayable year
has rolled round, and I find myself called upon to say something in this
place,