constitute Thought: and the act of thinking consists in their correct selection and arrangement for the purpose of promulgation by speech or writing, and which is very properly termed composition. When we reflect, that from our infancy to the natural decline of our intellectual powers, we are employed, during our waking hours, in the exercise of language;[8]--by conversation, often desultory, where we range through a variety of topics, as the bird sports from branch to twig; to the more deliberate act of composition, where the mind enduringly broods on the subject;--or when we read, and attentively consider the thoughts of others:--these occupations contribute to augment our vocabulary, and fix the meaning of the words we employ. By these words, and the intelligence that resides in them, although many centuries have passed by, we participate, and feel impregnated with the pure and exalted spirit that conceived the Iliad and Odyssey. Time has not diminished the vigour or impaired the beauty of those memorials that have survived the extinction of the Grecian states, and the glory of the eternal city; and such is the luminous correspondence of Language, that by transfusion into our vernacular idiom, we may receive a satisfactory measure of the original inspiration. Let it be kept in view, that Ideas, the frail associates of a perception, possess no permanence, are incapable of being transferred, and must fade away when our existence terminates. It is the word that forms the nucleus, and contains the intellectual deposit, that may become the inheritance of future generations. This process, in no manner or degree tends to subvert the spiritual nature of Thought, which has its source in the capacities whereby we perceive, remember, and comprehend that significant sounds or words are the commuted representatives of the objects of intelligence. The perceptive organs of many animals are more exquisitely endowed than man, and their local memory more retentive; yet they are wholly incapable of comprehending language or calculating numbers;--capacities by which the Creator has exclusively dignified the human race.