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men. Hume doubted in his study, and believed in the world.

Mr. Robert Haskins quoted a significant proverb, That a woman could throw out with a spoon faster than a man could throw in with a shovel.

Always be sticking a tree, Jock,-it will be growing when ye are sleeping," was the thrifty Scotchman's dying advice. Always be setting a good action to grow, is the advice of a divine thrift. It is bearing you fruit all the time, knitting you to men's hearts, and to men's good and to God, and beyond this it is benefitting others by remembrance, by emulation, by love. The progress of moral nature is geometrical. Celestial economy!

AUTHORS OR BOOKS QUOTED OR REFERRED TO IN JOURNALS OF 1831

Homer, Iliad; Anaxagoras; Socrates; Plato, Republic; Aristotle, Poetica;

Cicero, De Senectute; Horace; Plutarch; Plotinus; Porphyry; Thomas à Kempis; Luther; Montaigne; Calvin ; Shakspeare, Sonnets; Bacon; Burton; Sir Thomas Browne; Milton; Jeremy

READING

443

1831] Taylor; Herbert; Lovelace; Swammerdam; Newton; Scougal; Fénelon; Young; Swedenborg;

Abraham Tucker (Edward Search); Samuel Johnson; Adam Smith; Burke; Schlegel, Guesses at Truth; Schiller; Wordsworth, Dion, Rob Roy, Laodamia, Happy Warrior; Mrs. Barbauld, The Brook; Dugald Stewart; Burns, To the Deil; Kirby; De Staël; Schelling; Scott; Byron; Campbell, Pleasures of Hope; Coleridge; Landor, Imaginary Conversations; Müller (Karl Otfried, or Wilhelm ?); Webster; Everett.

JOURNAL XXIII

1832

From (Blotting Book III) and Q

THE GOOD EAR

(From )

BOSTON, January 4, 1832.

MORE is understood than is expressed in the most diffuse discourse. It is the unsaid part of every lecture that does the most good. If my poor Tuesday evening lectures (borresco referens) were to any auditor the total of his exposition of Christianity, what a beggarly faith were it.

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Death," said you? We die daily. "Death,” the soul never dies.

Theory of agreeable and disagreeable people, alluded to by George Bradford,' that reflecting

1 George Partridge Bradford of Duxbury was, like his sister Sarah Alden, wife of Rev. Samuel Ripley of Waltham, through life a close friend of Mr. Emerson. Mr. Bradford was affectionate, refined, a born scholar and a lover of flowers. He prepared himself for the ministry, but was so modest and sensitive that he found himself unfitted for its public offices. He

1832]

PLAN FOR A BOOK

445

and self-improving minds are not agreeable company, but that indolent and deceitful, rather.

January 6.

Shall I not write a book on topics such as follow?

Chapter 1. That the mind is its own place; Chapter 2. That exact justice is done; Chapter 3. That good motives are at the bottom of (many) bad actions; e. g. Business before friends;

Chapter 4. That the soul is immortal;
On prayers;

Chapter 5.

Chapter 6. That the best is the true;

Chapter 7. That the mind discerns all things; Chapter 8. That the mind seeks itself in all things.

Chapter 9. That truth is its own warrant.

[Charles?] Sprague, [Rev. Mellish I.] Motte, [Edward] Wigglesworth, [Charles H., later Admiral?] Davis, [George P.] Bradford, [?] Willis, [Rev. George] Ripley, [?] Henry,

was a loyal member of the Brook Farm Community, and after its breaking up, became a teacher of classes of young ladies, an occupation for which his culture and enthusiasm admirably fitted him; also a devoted gardener.

!

[Cornelius Conway] Felton, [Rev. Frederic H.]

Hedge.1

[CRYSTALLIZATION]

January 7.

There is a process in the mind very analogous to crystallization in the mineral kingdom. I think of a particular fact of singular beauty and interest. In thinking of it I am led to many more thoughts which show themselves, first partially, and afterwards more fully. But in the multitude of them I see no order. When I would present them to others they have no beginning. There is no method. Leave them now, and return to them again. Domesticate them in your mind, do not force them into arrangement too hastily, and presently you shall find they will take their own order. And the order they assume is divine. It is God's architecture.

[EXCELLENCE IS TRUTH]

January 9.

I cannot help quoting from Mendelssohn's Phado the following rule, "All that which, being admitted as true, would procure the human

I Very likely a list of the serious-minded and scholarly young men who might meet for conversation or form a literary club.

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