face, would be a mere blank, an endless waste to him. Persons of this
class have no more to say to a matter of fact staring them in the face,
without a label in its mouth, than they would to a hippopotamus."...

After all, the original way of writing books may turn out to be the
best. The first author, it is plain, could not have taken anything from
books, since there were no books for him to copy from; he looked at
things for himself. Anyhow the modern system fails, for where are the
amusing books from voracious students and habitual writers?

Moreover, in general, it will perhaps be found that persons devoted to
mere literature commonly become devoted to mere idleness. They wish to
produce a great work, but they find they cannot. Having relinquished
everything to devote themselves to this, they conclude on trial that
this is impossible; they wish to write, but nothing occurs to them:
therefore they write nothing and they do nothing. As has been said, they
have nothing to do; their life has no events, unless they are very poor;
with any decent means of subsistence, they have nothing to rouse them
from an indolent and musing dream. A merchant must meet his bills, or he
is civilly dead and uncivilly remembered; but a student may know nothing
of time, and be too lazy to wind lip his watch.

THE SEARCH FOR HAPPINESS

From 'William Cowper'

If there be any truly painful fact about the world now tolerably well
established by ample experience and ample records, it is that an
intellectual and indolent happiness is wholly denied to the children of
men. That most valuable author, Lucretius, who has supplied us and
others with an almost inexhaustible supply of metaphors on this topic,
ever dwells on the life of his gods with a sad and melancholy feeling
that no such life was possible on a crude and cumbersome earth. In
general, the two opposing agencies are marriage and lack of money;
either of these breaks the lot of literary and refined inaction at once
and forever. The first of these, as we have seen, Cowper had escaped;
his reserved and negligent reveries were still free, at least from the
invasion of affection. To this invasion, indeed, there is commonly
requisite the acquiescence or connivance of mortality; but all men are
born--not free and equal, as the Americans maintain, but, in the Old
World at least--basely subjected to the yoke of coin. It is in vain that
in this hemisphere we endeavor after impecuniary fanci