The important thing about a cistern is water, and not many mouths to the pump. Having spent many years learning to express one idea in five ways, one might be glad to trade the five ways of expression for five ideas to be expressed in one way. Edward Everett, once President of Harvard University, could talk in five languages, and at Gettysburg spoke for two hours. Lincoln could speak in one language, and did so for two minutes. But the next morning Mr. Everett wrote to the President: "I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes." Lincoln's one language shames our knowledge of four languages, his three books shame our libraries, and our four years of college culture. Nor must we overlook the influence upon Lincoln's style of the parables of Jesus and the fables of AEsop. There are two invariable signs of genius in a boy,--one is the serious note, and the other is the picture-making note. All the great things represent serious thinking. The greatest artist of the last century was the most serious one,--Watt, with his Love and Life, and Love and Death, and Mammon, and Hope. The great poems have been the serious poems, the In Memoriam, and the Intimations of Immortality, the Hamlet and the Lear. The great orators have been the serious orators. The next sign of genius is the picture-making faculty. Men of talent evolve arguments, men of genius create emblems, parables and pictures. Minds oftentimes called profound use long abstractions, and are called deep thinkers, because nobody can understand them. But along comes a man of genius, and he squeezes the juice out of the abstract argument, and flings the rind away, and tells you what it is like. Measured in terms of genius, the parables of Jesus are the greatest literary achievements in history. AEsop's fables teach by pictures. "Pilgrim's Progress" is pictorial.