and not be defiled? Who can look upon the workings of grief and
rejoice, or associate with guilt and be pure? It has been by mingling
with men, not only in their haunts but their emotions, that I have
learned to know them. I have descended into the receptacles of vice; I
have taken lessons from the brothel and the hell; I have watched feeling
in its unguarded sallies, and drawn from the impulse of the moment
conclusions which gave the lie to the previous conduct of years. But
all knowledge brings us disappointment, and this knowledge the most--the
satiety of good, the suspicion of evil, the decay of our young
dreams, the premature iciness of age, the reckless, aimless, joyless
indifference which follows an overwrought and feverish excitation--These
constitute the lot of men who have renounced _hope_ in the acquisition
of _thought_, and who, in learning the motives of human actions, learn
only to despise the persons and the things which enchanted them like
divinities before.

FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.

I told you, dear Monkton, in my first letter, of my favorite retreat in
Mr. Mandeville's grounds. I have grown so attached to it, that I spend
the greater part of the day there.

I am not one of those persons who always perambulate with a book in
their hands, as if neither nature nor their own reflections could afford
them any rational amusement. I go there more frequently _en paresseux_
than _en savant_: a small brooklet which runs through the grounds
broadens at last into a deep, clear, transparent lake. Here fir and elm
and oak fling their branches over the margin and beneath their shade I
pass all the hours of noon-day in the luxuries of a dreamer's reverie.
It is true, however, that I am never less idle than when I appear the
most so. I am like Prospero in his desert island, and surround myself
with spirits. A spell trembles upon the leaves; every wave comes fraught
to me with its peculiar music: and an Ariel seems to whisper the secrets
of every breeze, which comes to my forehead laden with the perfumes of
the West. But do not think, Mounton, that it is only good spirits
which haunt the recesses of my solitude. To push the metaphor to
exaggeration--Memory is my Sycorax, and Gloom is the Caliban
she conceives. But let me digress from myself to my less idle
occupations;--I have of late diverted my thoughts in some measure by a
recurrence to a study to which I once was particularly devoted--history.
Have you ev