--Books are the NEGATIVE pictures of thought, and the more sensitive
the mind that receives their images, the more nicely the finest
lines are reproduced. A woman, (of the right kind,) reading after
a man, follows him as Ruth followed the reapers of Boaz, and her
gleanings are often the finest of the wheat.
But it was in talking of Life that we came most clearly together.
I thought I knew something about that,--that I could speak or write
about it somewhat to the purpose.
To take up this fluid earthly being of ours as a sponge sucks up
water,--to be steeped and soaked in its realities as a hide fills
its pores lying seven years in a tan-pit,--to have winnowed every
wave of it as a mill-wheel works up the stream that runs through
the flume upon its float-boards,--to have curled up in the keenest
spasms and flattened out in the laxest languors of this breathing-
sickness, which keeps certain parcels of matter uneasy for three or
four score years,--to have fought all the devils and clasped all
the angels of its delirium,--and then, just at the point when the
white-hot passions have cooled down to cherry-red, plunge our
experience into the ice-cold stream of some human language or
other, one might think would end in a rhapsody with something of
spring and temper in it.
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