Poverty, wealth, many duties, or many affairs, distract and confuse him.' One sentence more is all that can be added here; and if it seems to be suggested by an aphorism of Bacon, it is equal to it in pith and penetration:--'Every _felicity_, as well as wife and children, is a hostage to fortune.' These sentences have been gathered chiefly from _Friends in Council_, though a few of them are taken from _Companions of my Solitude_. The two books are informed with the same spirit; and to a meditative person, one could not recommend a choicer store of reading. Those, however, to whom the works are as yet unknown, may wish to see some longer and more connected extract. It is difficult to decide upon what ought to be presented, where almost everything is exquisite; yet as a choice must be made, we will take some sentences from an essay on 'Despair,' wherein the writer offers a few remedial suggestions against the burden of remorse:-- 'To have erred in one branch of our duties, does not unfit us for the performance of all the rest, unless we suffer the dark spot to spread over our whole nature, which may happen almost unobserved in the torpor of despair. This kind of despair is chiefly grounded on a foolish belief that individual words or actions constitute the whole life of man; whereas they are often not fair representatives of portions even of that life. The fragments of rock in a mountain stream may tell much of its history, are, in fact, results of its doings, but they are not the stream. They were brought down when it was turbid; it may now be clear: they are as much the result of other circumstances as of the action of the stream: their history is fitful: they give us no sure intelligence of the future course of the stream, or of the nature of its waters; and may scarcely shew more than that it has not been always as it is. The actions of men are often but little better indications of the men themselves....