the good offices of the memory; it is very valuable as a handmaid to the
higher powers of the intellect. I have, however, generally observed that
where much attention has been devoted to the recollection of names,
facts, dates, &c., the higher species of intellectual cultivation have
been neglected: attention to them, on the other hand, would never
involve any neglect of the advantages of memory; for a cultivated
intellect can suggest to itself a thousand associative links by which it
can be assisted and rendered much more extensively useful than a mere
verbal memory could ever be. The more of these links (called by
Coleridge hooks-and-eyes) you can invent for yourself, the more will
your memory become an intellectual faculty. By such means, also, you can
retain possession of all the information with which your reading may
furnish you, without paying such exclusive attention to those tangible
and immediate results of study as would deprive you of the more solid
and permanent ones. These latter consist, as I said before, in the
improvement of the mind itself, and not in its furniture. A modern
author has remarked, that the improvement of the mind is like the
increase of money from compound interest in a bank, as every fresh
increase, however trifling, serves as a new link with which to connect
still further acquisitions. This remark is strikingly illustrative of
the value of an intellectual kind of memory. Every new idea will serve
as a "hook-and-eye," with which you can fasten together the past and the
future; every new fact intellectually remembered will serve as an
illustration of some formerly-established principle, and, instead of
burdening you with the separate difficulty of remembering itself, will
assist you in remembering other things.

It is a universal law, that action is in inverse proportion to power;
and therefore the deeply-thinking mind will find a much greater
difficulty in drawing out its capabilities on short notice, and