Quintilian says that the early blossom of talent is rarely followed by the fruit of great achievement, but the early works of a man or a youth are just as much fruit as his later ones. There is really no analogy between the early works of an author and the blossoms of a tree. The dreams, the visions, the aspirations of youth are more like blossoms. Probably no great man has been without them; but how they wither and fall, and how much more sober the aspect which life puts on before any solid achievements can be pointed to! There is usually something more fresh and pristine about the earlier works of a man--more buoyancy, more unction, more of the “fluid and attaching character;” but the ripest wisdom always goes with age. There are, no doubt, many strict and striking analogies between the mind and the body, their growth and decay, their health and disease, their assimilative, digestive, and reproductive processes. The mind is only a finer body. It is hardly a figure of speech to speak of wounded feelings, of a wounded spirit. How acute at first, and how surely healing with time. But the scar remains. Then there are real analogies, real parallels, between the mind and outward nature, in the laws of growth and decay, nutrition and reproduction. “The mind of Otho,” says Tacitus, “was not, like his body, soft and effeminate.” There are minds that are best described by the word masculine, and others by the word feminine. There are dull, sluggish minds, just as there are heavy, sluggish bodies, and the two usually go together. There are dry, lean minds, and there are minds full of unction and juice. We even use the phrase “mental dyspepsia,” but the analogy here implied is probably purely fanciful, though mental dissipation and mental intemperance are no idle words. Some persons acquire the same craze for highly exciting and stimulating mental food that others have for strong drink, or for pepper and other condiments. They lose their taste for simple, natural, healthful things,--for good sound literature,--and crave sensational novels and the Sunday newspapers. Doubtless a large part of the reading of the American people to-day is sheer mental dissipation, and is directed by an abnormal craving for mental excitement. There is degeneration in the physical world, and there is degeneration, strictly so called, in the intellectual world. There are proportion, relation, cause and effect, health and disease, in one as in the other. Logic is but the natural relation of parts as we see them in the organic world. In fact, logic is but health and proportion. The mind cannot fly any more than the body can; it progresses from one fact or consideration to another, step by step, though often, or perhaps generally, we are not conscious of the steps. A large view of truth may be suddenly revealed to the mind, as of a landscape from a hill-top; but the mind did not fly to the vantage ground; it reached it by a slow and maybe obscure process.