e, that
he is charmed by the look of things and people, and that he wakens
every morning with a renewed appetite for work and pleasure. Desire and
curiosity are the two eyes through which he sees the world in the most
enchanted colours: it is they that make women beautiful or fossils
interesting: and the man may squander his estate and come to beggary,
but if he keeps these two amulets he is still rich in the possibilities
of pleasure. Suppose he could take one meal so compact and comprehensive
that he should never hunger any more; suppose him at a glance, to take
in all the features of the world and allay the desire for knowledge;
suppose him to do the like in any province of experience--would not that
man be in a poor way for amusement ever after?

One who goes touring on foot with a single volume in his knapsack reads
with circumspection, pausing often to reflect, and often laying the book
down to contemplate the landscape or the prints in the inn parlour; for
he fears to come to an end of his entertainment, and be left
companionless on the last stages of his journey. A young fellow recently
finished the works of Thomas Carlyle, winding up, if we remember aright,
with the ten notebooks upon Frederick the Great. "What!" cried the young
fellow, in consternation, "is there no more Carlyle? Am I left to the
daily papers?" A more celebrated instance is that of Alexander, who wept
bitterly because he had no more worlds to subdue. And when Gibbon had
finished the "Decline and Fall," he had only a few moments of joy; and
it was with a "sober melancholy" that he parted from his labours.

Happily we all shoot at the moon with ineffectual arrows; our hopes are
set on inaccessible El Dorado; we come to an end of nothing here below.
Interests are only plucked up to sow themselves again, like mustard. You
would think, when the child was born, there would be an end to trouble;
and yet it is only the beginning of fresh anxieties; and when you have
seen it through its teething and its education, and at last its
marriage, alas! it is only to have new fears, new quivering
sensibilities, with every day; and the health of your children's
children grows as touching a concern as that of your own. Again, when
you have married your wife, you would think you were got upon a hilltop,
and might begin to go downward by an easy slope. But you have only ended
courting to begin marriage. Falling in love and winning love are often
difficult tasks t