, I doubt
not, happy enough in their dark stalls, because they were horses, and
had plenty to eat; and I was at times quite happy enough in the dark
loft above, because I was a man, and could think and imagine. It is, I
believe, Addison who remarks, that if all the thoughts which pass
through men's minds were to be made public, the great difference which
seems to exist between the thinking of the wise and of the unwise would
be a good deal reduced; seeing that it is a difference which does not
consist in their not having the same weak thoughts in common, but
merely in the prudence through which the wise suppress their foolish
ones. I still possess notes of the cogitations of these solitary
evenings, ample enough to show that they were extraordinary combinations
of the false and the true; but I at the same time hold them sufficiently
in memory to remember, that I scarce, if at all, distinguished between
what was false and true in them at the time. The literature of almost
every people has a corresponding early stage, in which fresh thinking is
mingled with little conceits, and in which the taste is usually false,
but the feeling true.

Let me present my young readers, from my notes, with the variously
compounded cogitations of one of these quiet evenings. What formed so
long ago one of my exercises may now form one of theirs, if they but set
themselves to separate the solid from the unsolid thinking contained in
my abstract.

MUSINGS.

"I stood last summer on the summit of Tor-Achilty [a pyramidal hill
about six miles from Conon side], and occupied, when there, the
centre of a wide circle, about fifty miles in diameter. I can still
call up its rough-edged sea of hills, with the clear blue firmament
arching over, and the slant rays of the setting sun gleaming
athwart. Yes, over that circular field, fifty miles across, the
firmament closed all around at the horizon, as a watch-glass closes
round the dial-plate of the watch. Sky and earth seemed
co-extensive; and yet how incalculably vast their difference of
area! Thousands of systems seemed but commensurate, to the eye,
with a small district of earth fifty miles each way. But capacious
as the human imagination has been deemed, can it conceive of an
area of wider field? Mine cannot. My mind cannot take in more at a
glance, if I may so speak, than is taken in by the eye