of man they became spirits of eternity through being converted into thoughts. The strength of the thought, its ability to live, its power to affect, depended absolutely upon the depth, force, and continuity of observation which was bestowed upon the original objects before their spiritual aspects were noted by man.
(2) Or, I might say, it depends on how far the process had gone of transmuting life into truth. In proportion to the completeness of the distillation, so will the purity and imperishableness of the product be. But none is quite perfect. As no air pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, in all respects, to a remote posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.
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