insisted on taking one of
the oars, and learning to row. It was not difficult, and I do not know a
pleasanter exercise. I soon became expert, and my train of thinking kept
time, as it were, with the oars, or I suffered the boat to be carried
along by the current, indulging a pleasing forgetfulness or fallacious
hopes. How fallacious! yet, without hope, what is to sustain life, but
the fear of annihilation--the only thing of which I have ever felt a
dread. I cannot bear to think of being no more--of losing myself--though
existence is often but a painful consciousness of misery; nay, it appears
to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or that this active,
restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow, should only be
organised dust--ready to fly abroad the moment the spring snaps, or the
spark goes out which kept it together. Surely something resides in this
heart that is not perishable, and life is more than a dream.

Sometimes, to take up my oar once more, when the sea was calm, I was
amused by disturbing the innumerable young star fish which floated just
below the surface; I had never observed them before, for they have not a
hard shell like those which I have seen on the seashore. They look like
thickened water with a white edge, and four purple circles, of different
forms, were in the middle, over an incredible number of fibres or white
lines. Touching them, the cloudy substance would turn or close, first on
one side, then on the other, very gracefully, but when I took one of them
up in the ladle, with which I heaved the water out of the boat, it
appeared only a colourless jelly.

I did not see any of the seals, numbers of which followed our boat when
we landed in Sweden; but though I like to sport in the water I should
have had no desire to join in their gambols.

Enough, you will say, of inanimate nature and of brutes, to use the
lordly phrase of man; let me hear something of the inhabitants.

The gentleman with whom I had business is the Mayor of Tonsberg. He
speaks English intelligibly, and, having a sound understanding, I was
sorry that his numerous occupations prevented my gaining as much
information from him as I could have drawn forth had we frequently
conversed. The people of the town, as far as I had an opportunity of
knowing their sentiments, are extremely well satisfied with his manner of
discharging his office. He has a degree of information and good sense
which excites respect, whil