The vacancy of solitude, by leaving the mind to its own ideas, encourages to a great excess these wild and eccentric sallies of the imagination. He who has an opportunity to indulge, without interruption or restraint the delightful musings of an excursive fancy, will soon lose all relish for every other pleasure, and neglect every employment which tends to interrupt the gratification of such an enchanting though dangerous propensity. During the quietude of a sequestered life, imagination usurps the throne of reason, and all the feeble faculties of the mind obey her dictates, until her voice becomes despotic. If the high powers be exercised on the agreeable appearances of nature, and the various entertainments, poetry, painting, music, or any of the elegant arts, are capable of affording, … Then the inexpressive strain Diffuses its enchantment; fancy dreams Of sacred fountains, and elysian groves, And vales of bliss; the intellectual Power Bends from his awful throne a wandering ear, And smiles; the passions, gently smoothed away, Sink to divine repose, and love and joy Alone are waking. But if the mind, as in the solitude of monastic seclusion, fixes its attention on ascetic subjects, and fires the fancy with unnatural legends, the soul, instead of sinking to divine repose, feels a morbid melancholy and discontented torpor, which extinguishes all rational reflection, and engenders the most fantastic visions. Men even of strong natural understandings, highly improved by education, have, in some instances, not been able to resist the fatal effects of intense application, and long continued solitude. The learned Molanus, having, during a course of many years, detached his mind from all objects of sense, neglected all seasonable and salutary devotion, and giving an uncontrolled license to his imagination fancied, in the latter part of his life, that he was a _barley corn_; and although he received his friends with great courtesy and politeness, and conversed upon subjects both of science and devotion with great ease and ingenuity, he could never afterward be persuaded to stir from home, lest, as he expressed his apprehension, he should be picked up in the street, and swallowed by a fowl.