mix with the world. The task becomes more hopeless with each
new disappointment. Rasselas pursues his investigation among the higher
ranks, in courts and cities; Nekayah, hers among the poor and humble,
in the shop and the hamlet. But when the brother and sister meet to
share their experiences, they both have the same tale to tell of human
discontent. Finally, in returning disappointed to Abyssinia, they
illustrate the tendency among men to look back with regret on the early
pleasures of life, abandoned for the impossible happiness which
discontent had taught them to seek.

On this slight thread of narrative, Johnson strung his thoughts with
great felicity. The characters, by the different view which they
entertain of life, are distinct and individual. The book is filled with
pregnant and beautiful passages, which leave a deep impression on the
reader. The words in which Imlac describes to the Prince and Princess
the dangers of an unrestrained imagination, might, with equal
propriety, find a place in a scientific treatise on the causes of
insanity, and in a collection of beautiful literary extracts:

To indulge the power of fiction, and send imagination out upon the
wing, is often the sport of those who delight too much in silent
speculation. When we are alone, we are not always busy; the labour
of excogitation is too violent to last long; the ardour of inquiry
will sometimes give way to idleness or satiety. He who has nothing
external that can divert him, must find pleasure in his own
thoughts, and must conceive himself what he is not; for who is
pleased with what he is? He then expatiates in boundless futurity,
and culls from all imaginable conditions that which for the present
moment he should most desire, amuses his desires with impossible
enjoyments, and confers upon his pride unattainable dominion. The
mind dances from scene to scene, unites all pleasures in all
combinations, and riots in delights which nature and fortune, with
all their bounty, cannot bestow.

In time, some particular train of ideas fixes the attention; all
other intellectual gratifications are rejected; the mind, in
weariness or leisure, recurs constantly to the favorite conception,
and feasts on the luscious falsehood whenever she is offended with
the bitterness of truth. By degrees, the reign of fancy is
confirmed; she grows first imperious, and in time, despotic