I am charmed with your book-enchanted. You are a wonderful creature,
the most wonderful in the world--you and your other half together
--Miss Sullivan, I mean, for it took the pair of you to make a complete
and perfect whole. How she stands out in her letters! her brilliancy,
penetration, originality, wisdom, character, and the fine literary
competencies of her pen--they are all there.

Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was
that "plagiarism" farce! As if there was much of anything in any human
utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernal, the soul--let
us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable
material of all human utterances--is plagiarism. For substantially all
ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million
outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and
satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas
there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little
discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his
temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. When
a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten centuries
and ten thousand men--but we call it his speech, and really some
exceedingly small portion of it is his. But not enough to signify. It
is merely a Waterloo. It is Wellington's battle, in some degree, and we
call it his; but there are others that contributed. It takes a thousand
men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a
photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing--and the last man
gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite--that
is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine
parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure
and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do