Milton could not write to suit
himself, except from the autumnal to the vernal equinox. One in the
clothing-business, who, there is reason to suspect, may have inherited,
by descent, the great poet's impressible temperament, let a customer
slip through his fingers one day without fitting him with a new garment.
"Ah!" said he to a friend of mine, who was standing by, "if it hadn't
been for that confounded headache of mine this morning, I'd have had a
coat on that man, in spite of himself, before he left the store." A
passing throb, only,--but it deranged the nice mechanism required to
persuade the accidental human being, _x_, into a given piece of
broadcloth, _a_.
We must take care not to confound this frequent difficulty of
transmission of our ideas with want of ideas. I suppose that a man's
mind does in time form a neutral salt with the elements in the universe
for which it has special elective affinities. In fact, I look upon a
library as a kind of mental chemist's shop, filled with the crystals of
all forms and hues which have come from the union of individual thought
with local circumstances or universal principles.
When a man has worked out his special affinities in this way, there is
an end of his genius as a real solvent.
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