They, who are accustomed to think in this direction, will easily fill out the fine outline of the author’s views touching the right mode to arrest the flight of time. To add to this sketch would require an extent of detail, for which I have here no place. The general principle of this process seems to consist in meeting pain and adversity with a spirit so philosophic and firm that they will recoil from it; and to dwell upon every innocent enjoyment, as though it were our first, and would be our last; to prolong it by investing it with all possible moral relations; and to discipline the mind never to become hackneyed, sated, wearied, and callous to the sense of objects in which man is bound to feel an interest, alike by his duty and his nature. Never was a more stupid maxim, than that common one, that _nil admirari_ is the proper motto of a philosopher. To preserve a freshness, a juvenile sensibility of the heart for the admiration of whatever is new, beautiful and striking, for all the pleasures of taste and the understanding, seems to me the true secret of the highest wisdom. Who can fail to be inspired with disgust at witnessing the common spectacle of _cognoscenti_, men of _virtu_, travelled fools, who have been everywhere, and seen everything; and by the contemptuous sneer, with which they effect to see, hear, feel and speak of all, that passes under their present observation, instruct you, that they are too wise, and of a taste too refined, to be pleased with what satisfies untravelled people. For my part, when I hear them boast of the music, paintings and architecture of continental Europe, and England, as though all the sources of beauty were there, I can only say, that nature is always at hand, to mock at all the puny efforts of art; that she delights to mould living faces and forms in remote country cottages, that no _beau idéal_ can reach; that the songs of the birds, that return from other climes to their forsaken groves with the first sunny days of spring constitute a music richer to the heart, than the most fashionable opera; and that a pure spring landscape is a pictured thousand times more splendid, than any that ever adorned the walls of the Louvre. He, who preserves, to his utmost age, his youthful sensibility of heart, and who is willing to be pleased with whatever will impart innocent pleasure, will find innumerable and never failing occasions to give his heart up to the full impulses of joy.