The pulse-like "fits of easy and difficult transmission" seem to reach even the transparent medium through which our souls are seen.
We know our humanity by its often intercepted rays, as we tell a revolving light from a star or meteor by its constantly recurring obscuration.
An illustrious scholar once told me, that, in the first lecture he ever delivered, he spoke but half his allotted time, and felt as if he had told all he knew.

Braham came forward once to sing one of his most famous and familiar songs, and for his life could not recall the first line of it;--he told his mishap to the audience, and they screamed it at him in a chorus of a thousand voices.

Milton could not write to suit himself, except from the autumnal to the vernal equinox.

One in the clothing-business, who, there is reason to suspect, may have inherited, by descent, the great poet's impressible temperament, let a customer slip through his fingers one day without fitting him with a new garment.
"Ah!" said he to a friend of mine, who was standing by, "if it hadn't been for that confounded headache of mine this morning, I'd have had a coat on that man, in spite of himself, before he left-the store." A passing throb, only,--but it deranged the nice mechanism required to persuade the accidental human being, X, into a given piece of broadcloth, A.
We must take care not to confound this frequent difficulty of transmission of our ideas with want of ideas.

I suppose that a man's mind does in time form a neutral salt with the elements in the universe for which it has special elective affinities.