It will no doubt have been already gathered that Unamuno, like all good Spaniards, delights in talk. Indeed, some of those who have observed how considerable a part of his leisure is spent in general conversation may have wondered how and when he finds time for the production of the large volume of his writing. The answer is that much of his thought is generated and shaped into form in the act of talking. He has a disrelish, amounting almost to a prejudice, for writing that has not the vibration and elasticity of living speech, the prose of men who are usually found to be non-talkers. “Ideas come with talking,” I have heard him say. “One must speak, one must have to put one’s thought into words, one must hear how the words sound spoken. Writing for oneself is not enough.” It is in the conversational encounter, in the face-to-face conflict of disputants, in the exertion to convince an opponent, to unravel a difficulty, to press home a personal conviction, that his mind is strung to its highest tension, seizes upon the aptest and keenest words with an instinctive sense of their effective values and wields them like sharp and flashing weapons. Returning to his study after a discussion at the Circulo Salmantino or an afternoon’s discourse on the wind-swept heights above the Tormes, he transcribes with the speed of dictation the substance of his argument or homily in phrases still vibrating with the passion of the spoken word. Hence his prose retains in a degree exceptional even in Spanish literature the qualities of animated talk--rapid, emphatic, exclamatory, elliptical, disjointed, charged with intonation and gesture. And this written talk, it must be noted, never develops into written oratory, for it is addressed in the first instance not to the general public but to the personal interlocutor; it is the continuation or recapitulation of talk with a friend, or the reply to the confessions of a correspondent, or sometimes the communing of the writer with _alter ego_.