acquaintance--with the world would alone be sufficient to account for it?--that knowledge is neither for the good nor the happy. Who can touch pitch, and not be defiled? Who can look upon the workings of grief and rejoice, or associate with guilt and be pure? It has been by mingling with men, not only in their haunts but their emotions, that I have learned to know them. I have descended into the receptacles of vice; I have taken lessons from the brothel and the hell; I have watched feeling in its unguarded sallies, and drawn from the impulse of the moment conclusions which gave the lie to the previous conduct of years. But all knowledge brings us disappointment, and this knowledge the most--the satiety of good, the suspicion of evil, the decay of our young dreams, the premature iciness of age, the reckless, aimless, joyless indifference which follows an overwrought and feverish excitation--These constitute the lot of men who have renounced _hope_ in the acquisition of _thought_, and who, in learning the motives of human actions, learn only to despise the persons and the things which enchanted them like divinities before. FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME. I told you, dear Monkton, in my first letter, of my favorite retreat in Mr. Mandeville's grounds. I have grown so attached to it, that I spend the greater part of the day there. I am not one of those persons who always perambulate with a book in their hands, as if neither nature nor their own reflections could afford them any rational amusement. I go there more frequently _en paresseux_ than _en savant_: a small brooklet which runs through the grounds broadens at last into a deep, clear, transparent lake. Here fir and elm and oak fling their branches over the margin and beneath their shade I pass all the hours of noon-day in the luxuries of a dreamer's reverie. It is true, however, that I am never less idle than when I appear the most so. I am like Prospero in his desert island, and surround myself with spirits. A spell trembles upon the leaves; every wave comes fraught to me with its peculiar music: and an Ariel seems to whisper the secrets of every breeze, which comes to my forehead laden with the perfumes of the West. But do not think, Mounton, that it is only good spirits which haunt the recesses of my solitude. To push the metaphor to exaggeration--Memory is my Sycorax, and Gloom is the Caliban she conceives. But let me digress from myself to my less idle occupations;-- I have of late diverted my thoughts in some measure by a recurrence to a study to which I once was particularly devoted--history. Have you ever remarked, that people who live the most by themselves reflect the most upon others; and that he who lives surrounded by the million never thinks of any but the one individual--himself?