ns tell
us of the degraded nature of man; and they tell us what is true. Yet man
is essentially a moral agent, and there is that immortal and
unextinguishable yearning for something pure and spiritual which will
plead against these poetical sensualists as long as man remains what he
is.

[261] 1. 37:

'The pilgrim oft,
At dead of night, 'mid his oraison, hears
Aghast the voice of TIME, disparting towers,' &c.

[262] Thomson's 'Summer,' 980:

'In Cairo's crowded streets,
The impatient merchant, wondering, waits in vain,
And Mecca saddens at the long delay.'

Scientific men are often too fond of aiming to be men of the world.
They crave too much for titles, and stars, and ribbons. If Bacon had
dwelt only in the court of Nature, and cared less for that of James the
First, he would have been a greater man, and a happier one too.

I heard lately from young Mr. Watt a noble instance of magnanimity in an
eminent French chemist. He had made a discovery, which he was informed
would, if he took out a patent, realise a large fortune. 'No,' said he,
'I do not live to amass money, but to discover Truth; and as long as she
attends me in my investigations so long will I serve her and her only.'

Sir ---- I know from my own experience was ruined by prosperity. The age
of Leo X. would have shone with greater brilliance if it had had more
clouds to struggle with. The age of Louis XIV. was formed by the Port
Royal amid the storms and thunders of the League. Racine lived in a
court till it became necessary to his existence, as his miserable death
proved. Those petty courts of Germany have been injurious to its
literature. They who move in them are too prone to imagine themselves to
be the whole world, and compared with the whole world they are nothing
more than these little specks in the texture of this hearth-rug.

As I was riding Dora's pony from Rydal to Cambridge, I got off, as I
occasionally did, to walk. I fell in with a sweet-looking peasant girl
of nine or ten years old. She had been to carry her father's dinner, who
was working in the fields, and she was wheeling a little wheelbarrow, in
which she collected manure from the roads for her garden at home. After
some talk I gave her a penny, for which she thanked me in the sweetest
way imaginable. I wish I had asked her whether she could read, and
whether she went to school. But I could not help being struck with the
happy arrangement which Nature