de for his especial benefit.--There is a
natural tendency in many persons to run their adjectives together
in _triads_, as I have heard them called,--thus: He was honorable,
courteous, and brave; she was graceful, pleasing, and virtuous. Dr.
Johnson is famous for this; I think it was Bulwer who said you could
separate a paper in the "Rambler" into three distinct essays. Many
of our writers show the same tendency,--my friend, the Professor,
especially. Some think it is in humble imitation of Johnson,--some that
it is for the sake of the stately sound only. I don't think they get
to the bottom of it. It is, I suspect, an instinctive and involuntary
effort of the mind to present a thought or image with the _three
dimensions_ that belong to every solid,--an unconscious handling of an
idea as if it had length, breadth, and thickness. It is a great deal
easier to say this than to prove it, and a great deal easier to dispute
it than to disprove it. But mind this: the more we observe and study,
the wider we find the range of the automatic and instinctive principles
in body, mind, and morals, and the narrower the limits of the
self-determining conscious movement.

----I have often seen piano-forte players and singers make such strange
motions over their instruments or song-books that I wanted to laugh at
them. "Where did our friends pick up all these fine ecstatic airs?" I
would say to myself. Then I would remember My Lady in "Marriage a la
Mode," and amuse myself with thinking how affectation was the same thing
in Hogarth's time and in our own. But one day I bought me a Canary-bird
and hung him up in a cage at my window. By-and-by he found himself at
home, and began to pipe his little tunes; and there he was, sure enough,
swimming and waving about, with all the droopings and liftings and
languishing side-turnings of the head that I had laughed at. And now I
should like to ask, WHO taught him all this?--and me, through him, that
the foolish head was not the one swinging itself from side to side and
bowing and nodding over the music, but that other which was passing its
shallow and self-satisfied judgment on a creature made of finer clay
than the frame which carried that same head upon its shoulders?

----Do you want an image of the human will, or the self-determining
principle, as compared with its prearranged and impassable restrictions?
A drop of water, imprisoned in a crystal; you may see such a one in any
mineralogical coll