If my researches are shadowy, what, in the name of reason, are you? or do you resign all pretence to reason, and consider yourself--nay, even that in a contradiction--as a passive [cir] among Nothings?
How flat and common-place! O that it were in my heart, nerves, and muscles! O that it were the _prudential_ soul of all I love, of all who deserve to be loved, in every proposed action to ask yourself, To what end is this? and how is this the means? and not the means to something else foreign to or abhorrent from my purpose? _Distinct means to distinct ends!_ With friends and beloved ones follow the heart. Better be deceived twenty times than suspect one-twentieth of once; but with strangers, or enemies, or in a quarrel, whether in the world's squabbles, as Dr. Stoddart's and Dr. Sorel in the Admiralty Court at Malta; or in moral businesses, as mine with Southey or Lloyd (O pardon me, dear and honoured Southey, that I put such a name by the side of yours....)--in all those cases, write your letter, disburthen yourself, and when you have done it--even as when you have pared, sliced, vinegared, oiled, peppered and salted your plate of cucumber, you are directed to smell it, and then throw it out of the window--so, dear friend, vinegar, pepper and salt your letter--your cucumber argument, that is, cool reasoning previously sauced with passion and sharpness--then read it, eat it, drink it, smell it, with eyes and ears (a small catachresis but never mind), and then throw it into the fire--unless you can put down in three or four sentences (I cannot allow more than one side of a sheet of paper) the _distinct end_ for which you conceive this letter (or whatever it be) to be the _distinct means_! How trivial! Would to God it were only _habitual_! O what is sadder than that the _crambe bis cocta_ of the understanding should be and remain a foreign dish to the efficient _will_--that the best and loftiest precepts of wisdom should be trivial, and the worst and lowest modes of folly habitual.
I have learnt, sometimes not _at all_, and seldom _harshly_, to chide those conceits of words which are analogous to sudden fleeting affinities of mind. Even, as in a dance, you touch and join and off again, and rejoin your partner that leads down with you the dance, in spite of these occasional off-starts--for they, too, not merely conform to, but are of and in and help to form the delicious harmony. Shakspere is not a thousandth part so faulty as the [scir][scir][scir] believe him. "Thus him that over-rul'd I over-sway'd," etc., etc. I noticed this to that bubbling ice-spring of cold-hearted, mad-headed fanaticism, the late Dr. Geddes, in the "_Heri vidi fragilem frangi, hodie mortalem mori_."
