"We can no more make thoughts than seeds. How absurd, then, for a man to call himself a poet or _maker_! The ablest writer is a gardener first, and then a cook," (two very industrious professions at all events.) "His tasks are, carefully to select and cultivate his strongest and most nutritive thoughts; and, when they are ripe, to dress them wholesomely, and so that they may have a relish." A very succulent image. The next sentence which our eye falls upon is pretty, and we willingly extract it:-- "Leaves are light, and useless, and idle, and wavering, and changeable; they even dance: yet God has made them part of the oak. In so doing, he has given us a lesson not to deny the stout-heartedness within, because we see the lightsomeness without." The following truism we should have hardly thought deserving of a place amidst _Guesses_ at Truth; but, being admitted, the section devoted to it might surely have been preserved from obscurity to the close:-- "Time is no agent, as some people appear to think, that it should accomplish any thing of itself. Looking at a heap of stones for a thousand years will do no more toward building a house of them, than looking at them for a moment. For time, when applied to works of any kind, being only a succession of relevant acts, each furthering the work, it is clear that even an infinite succession of irrelevant and therefore inefficient acts would no more achieve or forward the completion, than an infinite number of jumps on the same spot would advance a man toward his journey's end. There is a _motion_, without progress in time as well as in space; where a thing often _remains stationary_, which appears to us to recede, while we are leaving it behind."