them otherwise. Innocence is joined with industry, pleasure with
business; and the mind is satisfied, though it is not engaged in
thinking or in doing any mischief.[1]

I have not much pleasure in writing these _Essays_, or in reading them
afterwards; though I own I now and then meet with a phrase that I like,
or a thought that strikes me as a true one. But after I begin them, I
am only anxious to get to the end of them, which I am not sure I shall
do, for I seldom see my way a page or even a sentence beforehand; and
when I have as by a miracle escaped, I trouble myself little more about
them. I sometimes have to write them twice over: then it is necessary
to read the _proof_, to prevent mistakes by the printer; so that by the
time they appear in a tangible shape, and one can con them over with a
conscious, sidelong glance to the public approbation, they have lost
their gloss and relish, and become 'more tedious than a twice-told
tale.' For a person to read his own works over with any great delight,
he ought first to forget that he ever wrote them. Familiarity naturally
breeds contempt. It is, in fact, like poring fondly over a piece of
blank paper; from repetition, the words convey no distinct meaning to
the mind--are mere idle sounds, except that our vanity claims an
interest and property in them. I have more satisfaction in my own
thoughts than in dictating them to others: words are necessary to
explain the impression of certain things upon me to the reader, but they
rather weaken and draw a veil over than strengthen it to myself.
However I might say with the poet, 'My mind to me a kingdom is,' yet I
have little ambition 'to set a throne or chair of state in the
understandings of other men.' The ideas we cherish most exist best in a
kind of shadowy abstraction,

Pure in the last recesses of the mind,