has made before me. You know very well that I write verses
sometimes, because I have read some of them at this table. (The
company assented,--two or three of them in a resigned sort of way,
as I thought, as if they supposed I had an epic in my pocket, and
was going to read half a dozen books or so for their benefit.)--I
continued. Of course I write some lines or passages which are
better than others; some which, compared with the others, might be
called relatively excellent. It is in the nature of things that I
should consider these relatively excellent lines or passages as
absolutely good. So much must be pardoned to humanity. Now I
never wrote a "good" line in my life, but the moment after it was
written it seemed a hundred years old. Very commonly I had a
sudden conviction that I had seen it somewhere. Possibly I may
have sometimes unconsciously stolen it, but I do not remember that
I ever once detected any historical truth in these sudden
convictions of the antiquity of my new thought or phrase. I have
learned utterly to distrust them, and never allow them to bully me
out of a thought or line.

This is the philosophy of it. (Here the number of the company was
diminished by a small secession.) Any new formula which suddenly
emerges in our consciousness has its roots in long trains of
thought; it is virtually old when it first makes its appearance
among the recognized growths of our intellect. Any crystalline
group of musical words has had a long and still period to form in.
Here is one theory.

But there is a larger law which perhaps comprehends these facts.
It is this. The rapidity with which ideas grow old in our memories
is in a direct ratio to the squares of their importance. Their