tempting appearances. The ease, the jocund gaiety, the unsuspecting
security of youth are fled: nor can we, without flying in the face of
common sense,

"From the last dregs of life, hope to receive
What its first sprightly runnings could not give."

If we can slip out of the world without notice or mischance, can
tamper with bodily infirmity, and frame our minds to the becoming
composure of _still-life_, before we sink into total insensibility, it
is as much as we ought to expect. We do not in the regular course of
nature die all at once: we have mouldered away gradually long before;
faculty after faculty, attachment after attachment, we are torn from
ourselves piece-meal while living; year after year takes something
from us; and death only consigns the last remnant of what we were to
the grave. The revulsion is not so great, and a quiet _euthanasia_ is
a winding-up of the plot, that is not out of reason or nature.

That we should thus in a manner outlive ourselves, and dwindle
imperceptibly into nothing, is not surprising, when even in our prime
the strongest impressions leave so little traces of themselves behind,
and the last object is driven out by the succeeding one. How little
effect is produced on us at any time by the books we have read, the
scenes we have witnessed, the sufferings we have gone through! Think
only of the variety of feelings we experience in reading an
interesting romance, or being present at a fine play--what beauty,
what sublimity, what soothing, what heart-rending emotions! You would
suppose these would last for ever, or at least subdue the mind to a
correspondent tone and harmony--while we turn over the page, while the
scene is passing before us, it seems as if nothing could ever after
shake our resolution, that "treason domestic, foreign levy, nothing
could touch us farther!" The first splash of mud we get, on entering
the street, the first pettifogging shop-keeper that cheats us out of
twopence, and the whole vanishes clean out of our remembrance, and we
become the idle prey of the most petty and annoying circumstances. The
mind soars by an effort to the grand and lofty: it is at home, in the
grovelling, the disagreeable, and the little. This happens in the
height and heyday of our existence, when novelty gives a stronger
impulse to the blood and takes a faster hold of the brain, (I have
known the impression on coming out of a gallery of pictures then last
half a day)--as we g