Complete. From “Marginalia.”

TO converse well, we need the cool tact of talent—to talk well, the glowing abandon of genius. Men of very high genius, however, talk at one time very well, at another very ill: well, when they have full time, full scope, and a sympathetic listener; ill, when they fear interruption and are annoyed by the impossibility of exhausting the topic during that particular talk. The partial genius is flashy—scrappy. The true genius shudders at incompleteness—imperfection—and usually prefers silence to saying the something which is not everything that should be said. He is so filled with his theme that he is dumb, first, from not knowing how to begin, where there seems eternally beginning behind beginning, and, second, from perceiving his true end at so infinite a distance. Sometimes, dashing into a subject, he blunders, hesitates, stops short, sticks fast, and because he has been overwhelmed by the rush and multiplicity of his thoughts, his hearers sneer at his inability to think. Such a man finds his proper element in those “great occasions” which confound and prostrate the general intellect.

  Nevertheless, by his conversation, the influence of the conversationist upon mankind in general is more decided than that of the talker by his talk; the latter invariably talks to best purpose with his pen. And good conversationists are more rare than respectable talkers. I know many of the latter; and of the former only five or six,—among whom I can call to mind, just now, Mr. Willis; Mr. J. T. S. Sullivan, of Philadelphia; Mr. W. M. R., of Petersburg, Va.; and Mrs. S——d, formerly of New York. Most people, in conversing, force us to curse our stars that our lot was not cast among the African nation mentioned by Eudoxus,—the savages who, having no mouths, never opened them, as a matter of course. And yet, if denied mouth, some persons whom I have in my eye would contrive to chatter on still—as they do now—through the nose.