A most affecting proof, that the human heart is not intrinsically bad, and that the obduracy and cold-blooded selfishness of the world is adventitious, and the result of our modes and our training, is, that the sisters of charity, the truly beneficent everywhere, create a deep sensation of respect in beholders. Efficient charity is almost the only thing, that no one feels disposed to question, or slander. A corpse was borne slowly by me, to the place of its long sleep. An immense procession followed with sorrow and respect impressed upon their countenances. I asked, whom they were burying. ‘A single woman without wealth or connexions.--But her life has been marked by beneficence.’ If that sex, which so instinctively desire to appear to advantage, knew, in what light a lady, distinguished by fortune and cultivation appears while traversing the dirty and dark lanes of a city, to seek out, and relieve cases of misery, they would practise charity, were it from no higher motive, than to create a sensation, and appear lovely. Every one knows the example of the sublime, quoted by Longinus from Moses. A passage in the Gospel seems to me still more sublime. _He went about doing good._ All other homage, than that which the heart pays to beneficence, is adventitious. This is real. Note 45, page 141. Of all the pleasures of our earthly sojourn, after those of a good conscience, the most varied, and yet equable, healthful and permanent are those of reading. ‘I have never,’ says a respectable writer, ‘passed a comfortable day without books since I was capable of reading.’ It is certainly pleasant, to be able to converse with the wise and instructed of all countries and all times without formality, without embarrassment, and just as long as we choose; and then dismiss one of them without any apology, and sit down with another. We travel without expense with them. We inhabit the tropics, or the polar circle, the table summits of mountains, or the wide plains, at our choice. We journey by land or by sea. We select congenial minds, and make them converse with us about our congenial pursuits. We throw away no voice. We never dialogue in wrath; and intelligence converses with intelligence, divested of terrene grossness and passion. When detained on long journeys, in some remote interior tavern, by a storm, or inability to find a conveyance, how keenly, while reading almanacks of the past years, and old fragments of books, found on the dusty shelf of the ordinary, have I felt the value of books, as a perfect cure for the impatience of such a position. In this state of privation and intellectual fasting, we master dull and tiresome books, which, under other circumstances, we should not have dreamed of reading. Then the mind is taught to pay the proper homage to these intellectual resources. The pleasures of winter reading, in the sacred privacy of the parlor, are thus finely described by Thomson, the painter of nature.