1 06 INTRO D UCTION
periences and characters as well as stages of life. As regards you and me, the gradual annihilation of difference which time produces, and which you refer to with satis- faction, is to me, also, highly agreeable. The twenty )^ears which divide us seemed a great gulf a while ago, but now much narrower ; ten years hence it will be easily jumped, and in a hundred the ground will have closed, not only up to us, but over us.
As regards your teaching, I wish it may add comfort when I say that I have often inclined to regret that, after graduating, I suffered my father to tempt me [by an offer of five thousand dollars, as he once remarked] from the ushership to which I was about engaging myself for a single year. The exercise would have operated as a review of past studies, and would have fixed in the memory many things valuable to be remembered, but which a great variety of new studies have long either driven out of my head or rendered faint and imperfect in their impressions. It must be true that there is no " faculty " of Memory, which I doubt not depends wholly on association ; and I think it true that the associations of maturity are yet more strongly affined than those of child- hood, but they are more under the dominion of preconcep- tion and purpose. The relations of words, of thoughts, and of things are more influenced by our experiences and our philosophy, and it is harder to learn a new language or to remember absolute definitions. The mind inclines to generalization, and desires to have its facts previously stored up for use.
I therefore shall not pity your situation. I believe that you have already discovered how desirable a thing it is to be personally independent, and I think that you will derive not less satisfaction ten years hence in being master of
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