Characters of this description, equally venerable and happy, are numerous in Europe, both within and without the shades of academic bowers, and afford examples which, notwithstanding the tribe of errors and absurdities solitude occasionally engenders, should induce men of worldly pleasures to repress the antipathies they are in general inclined to feel against persons of studious and retired lives. CHAPTER IV. _The influence of solitude on the imagination._ The powers of imagination are great; and the effects produced by them, under certain circumstances, upon the minds of men of warm and sensible tempers, extraordinary and surprising. Multitudes have been induced by perturbed imaginations, to abandon the gay and cheerful haunts of men, and to seek, in dreary desolation, comfort and repose. To such extremes has this faculty, when distorted, hurried its unhappy subjects, that they have endured the severest mortification, denied themselves the common benefits of nature, exposed themselves to the keenest edge of winter’s cold, and the most scorching rays of summer’s heat, and indulged their distempered fancies in the wildest chimeras. These dreadful effects appear, on a first view, to be owing to some supernatural cause, and they agitate our senses, and confuse the understanding, as phenomena beyond the comprehension of reason; but the wonder vanishes when the cause is coolly and carefully explored; and the extravagances are traced up to their real source, and natural organization of man. The wild ideas of the hermit Anthony, who, in his gloomy retreat, fancied that Beelzebub appeared to him in the form of a beautiful female to torture his senses, and disturb his repose, originated in his natural character and disposition. His distempered fancy conjured up a fiend, which, in fact, existed in his unsubdued passions and incontinent desires. … From the enchanting cup Which fancy holds to all, the unwary thirst Of youth oft swallows a Circæan draught, That sheds a baleful tincture o’er the eye Of reason, till no longer he discerns, And only lives to err: then revel forth A furious band, that spurn him from the throne, And all is uproar. Hence the fevered heart Pants with delirious hope for tinsel charms.