I should say falsely were I to say with Petrarch,
Vommene in guiza d'orbo senza luce,
Che non sa ove si vada, e pur si parte.
But I may say with the Doctor's name-sake Daniel de Bosola in Webster's tragedy,4 “I look no higher than I can reach: they are the gods that must ride on winged horses. A lawyer's mule, of a slow pace, will both suit my disposition and business: for mark me, when a man's mind rides faster than his horse can gallop, they quickly both tire.”—Moreover
———This I hold
A secret worth its weight in gold
To those who write as I write now,
Not to mind where they go, or how,
Thro' ditch, thro' bog, o'er hedge and stile,
Make it but worth the reader's while,
And keep a passage fair and plain
Always to bring him back again.5
4 DUCHESS OF MALFI.
5 CHURCHILL.
“You may run from major to minor,” says Mrs. Bray in one of her letters to Dr. Southey, “and through a thousand changes, so long as you fall into the subject at last, and bring back the ear to the right key at the close.”
Where we are at this present reading, the attentive reader cannot but know; and if the careless one has lost himself, it is his fault, not mine. We are in the parenthesis between the Doctor's courtship and his marriage. Life has been called a parenthesis between our birth and death; the history of the human race is but a parenthesis between two cataclasms of the globe which it inhabits; time itself only a parenthesis in eternity. The interval here, as might be expected after so summary a wooing, was not long; no settlements being required, and little preparation. But it is not equally necessary for me to fix the chapter, as it was for them to fix the day.
Montaigne tells us that he liked better to forge his mind than to furnish it. I have a great liking for old Michel, Seigneur de Montaigne, which the well-read reader may have perceived;—who indeed has ever made his acquaintance without liking him? I have moreover some sympathies with him; but upon this point we differ. It is more agreeable to me to furnish than to forge,—intellectually speaking, to lay in than to lay out;—to eat than to digest. There is however (following the last similitude) an intermediate process enjoyed by the flocks and herds, but denied to Aldermen; that process affords so apt a metaphor for an operation of the mind, that the word denoting it has passed into common parlance in its metaphorical acceptation, and its original meaning is not always known to those who use it.
It is a pleasure to see the quiet full contentment which is manifested both in the posture and look of animals when they are chewing the cud. The nearest approach which humanity makes toward a similar state of feeling, seems to be in smoking, when the smoker has any intellectual cud on which to chew. But ruminating is no wholesome habit for man, who, if he be good for any thing, is born as surely to action as to trouble;—it is akin to the habit of indulging in day dreams, which is to be eschewed by every one who tenders his or her own welfare.