To be able to see and hear well--to feel healthy sensations--even to taste and smell properly, are most important qualifications for the pursuit of literature, and art, and science. If you read attentively the work of any truly illustrious poet, you will find that the whole of the imagery which gives power and splendor to his verse is derived from nature through one or other of these ordinary channels. Some philosophers have gone much farther than this, and have affirmed that the entire intellectual life is based ultimately upon remembered physical sensations; that we have no mental conception that is really independent of sensuous experience; and that the most abstract thought is only removed from sensation by successive processes of substitution, I have not space to enter into so great and mysterious a subject as this; but I desire to draw your attention to a truth very commonly overlooked by intellectual people, which is the enormous importance of the organs of sense in the highest intellectual pursuits. I will couple together two names which have owed their celebrity, one chiefly to the use of her ears, the other to the use of his eyes. Madame de Stael obtained her literary material almost exclusively by means of conversation. She directed, systematically, the talk of the learned and brilliant men amongst whom she lived to the subject which for the moment happened to occupy her thoughts. Her literary process (which is known to us in detail through the revelations of her friends) was purposely invented to catch everything that she heard, as a net catches fish in a river. First, she threw down on paper a very brief rough draft of the intended literary project. This she showed to few, but from it she made a second "state" (as an engraver would say), which she exhibited to some of her trusted friends, profiting by their hints and suggestions. Her secretary copied the corrected manuscript, incorporating the new matter, on paper with a very broad margin for farther additions. During all the time that it took to carry her work through these successive states, that ingenious woman made the best possible use of her ears, which were her natural providers. She made everybody talk who was likely to be of any use to her, and then immediately added what she had caught on the wide margin reserved for that purpose. She used her eyes so little that she might almost as well have been blind. We have it on her own authority, that were it not out of respect to custom, she would not open her window to see the Bay of Naples for the first time, whereas she would travel five hundred leagues to talk with a clever man whom she had never met.