Nothing can be more superficial than the intellects of men given over to formulas. They always imagine they can explore the depths of truth, if they can succeed in detecting an inch of its surface. When they arrive at the term of their own ideas, they believe they have exhausted the absolute. They frequently want feeling, because they have, in some way, destroyed their own spontaneity--that inexhaustible source of living and original thought, individualized and yet universal, of ever-thronging and vivid emotions. The most spontaneous writer of the present day is a woman; fresh, rugged, rich, and natural, as the wayside gold of the Dandelion above described by Lowell--hence her sudden and great popularity with the people. She feels strongly, and thinks justly, and fears not to say what the great God gives her. May she continue to pour her 'wayside gold' through the literary waves of the 'Atlantic'--and still keep the molten treasure bright and burnished for the service of our altar. Let her not fly too near the candles of the clergy, and thus sear her Psyche wings. Need I name Gail Hamilton? Pardon the digression, courteous reader, and let a woman greet a gifted sister as she passes on. Let me not be misunderstood in my estimate of the spontaneous and reflective faculties: they must _combine_ in any man _truly great_. If I have dwelt on spontaneity, it is because it has not been sufficiently prized or cultivated. The savant must have the faculties of the artist, as had Kepler; the artist those of the savant, as had Michael Angelo and Leonardo da Vinci. Study, reflective power, logical ability, erudition, are _absolutely_ necessary; but one of their principal functions is to be able to analyze aright the products of spontaneity; to give the soul the consciousness and comprehension of the innumerable phenomena which arise in it, in its varied relations with the world of ideas. The man who is at the same time _spontaneous_ and _reflective_, is alone _complete_, be he artist or savant; he lives, yet is able to analyze life. Of such mental character are indeed all men of true genius, whether mechanicians, architects, philosophers, savants, or artists. The truths surging dimly through the universal consciousness, find interpreters in the men of genius; through them the moral and religious ideas of an epoch take form, and crystallize themselves in poetry and the arts--as the laws of the divine geometry are realized in the crystallizations of minerals. Poetry and the arts may be regarded as the _sum_ of the absolute truths to the conception of which the masses have risen at any given period in the life of a people. Lamartine says: