of Sultan Amurath, who struck off some Persian heads, that his
physician, Vesalius, might see the spasms in the muscles of the neck.
His failures are the preparation of his victories. A new thought, or
a crisis of passion, apprises him that all that he has yet learned and
written is exoteric--is not the fact, but some rumor of the fact. What
then? Does he throw away the pen? No; he begins again to describe in
the new light which has shined on him,--if, by some means, he may yet
save some true word. Nature conspires. Whatever can be thought can be
spoken, and still rises for utterance, though to rude and stammering
organs. If they cannot compass it, it waits and works, until, at last,
it moulds them to its perfect will, and is articulated.

This striving after imitative expression, which one meets everywhere,
is significant of the aim of nature, but is mere stenography. There
are higher degrees, and nature has more splendid endowments for those
whom she elects to a superior office; for the class of scholars or
writers, who see connection where the multitude see fragments, and who
are impelled to exhibit the facts in order, and so to supply the axis
on which the frame of things turns. Nature has dearly at heart the
formation of the speculative man, or scholar. It is an end never lost
sight of, and is prepared in the original casting of things. He is no
permissive or accidental appearance, but an organic agent, one of the
estates of the realm, provided and prepared from of old and from
everlasting, in the knitting and contexture of things. Presentiments,
impulses, cheer him. There is a certain heat in the breast, which
attends the perception of a primary truth, which is the shining of the
spiritual sun down into the shaft of the mine. Every thought which
dawns on the mind, in the moment of its emergency announces its own
rank,--whether it is some whimsy, or whether it is a power.