Various writers of splendid genius have tasked their imagination, to present us with the results of endowing a person with immortality on earth. Such a character has been delineated with great power by Godwin, in his St Leon; and by Croly in the story of _Salathiel, or the Wandering Jew_. It is an instructive labor, to record the wanderings, changes, weariness, abandonment, and final despair of a wretch cursed with immortality; and by the circumstance rendered a monster, out of relation with human beings; and cut off from all real sympathy with his mortal kind. It is questionable, whether these writers, or any others who have drawn similar pictures, have formed adequate conceptions, of what would be the actual result of an earthly immortality. The view of the author before me seems just. I can easily imagine the immortal delivered from earthly sorrows. But, when I contemplate him divested of the hopes, fears, affections and sympathies, which trace their origin to our common mortal nature, I cannot imagine the affections, that are to replace these. I can conceive none other, than a being, who would become drowsy at sixty, and sleepy at a hundred. All beyond presents to me a lethargy of almost unconscious existence, from which my fancy can devise no effort of sufficient energy to arouse him. In fact, it is sufficient, that nature has awarded, in her universal decree, that man should not be out of analogy and relation with the rest of nature; to convince us, that the decision involves our best interest. The more our views of nature enlarge, the more we become conscious, that she has arranged all her laws with such perfect wisdom, that if we could reverse any of them, we should do it at the expense of our own happiness.