If we have access to the opulent and powerful, we have an honorable, but difficult task to fulfil. To assume the often thankless office of soliciting frequent favors for friends, without losing the consideration necessary to success, requires peculiar tact, discernment and dignity.--Above all, it requires disinterested zeal. In attempting this delicate duty in the form of letters, we may soon dissipate our slender fund of credit. Letters of recommendation resemble a paper currency. They are redeemed in specie so long as they are issued discreetly, and in small amounts, but which become worse than blank paper, as soon as we multiply them too far.[43] Such is the intrinsic attraction of beneficence, that even if we refuse to practise it, we still love whatever retraces its image. A romance affects us. Pathetic scenes soften our hearts at the theatre. In thus embracing the shadow, we pay a sublime testimonial to the substance. The example of beneficence so readily finds its way to every heart, that we are affected even in thinking of those who practise it. The coldest hearts pay a tribute of veneration to those women, who, in consecrating themselves to the service of the poor and the sick, encounter extreme fatigue, disgust, and often abuse from the wretched objects themselves, in the squalidness and filth of prisons and hospitals. How beautiful to learn to put forth patience to mitigate the maladies of the body, and hope, to soothe those of the mind![44] Ye, who practise virtues thus touching and sublime, may well hope the highest recompenses of heaven. Such alone are worthy of your pure spirits. Ye seem to have passed in light across our dark sphere, only to fulfil a transient and celestial mission, to return again to your country. LETTER XIX. THE PLEASURES OF THE UNDERSTANDING. In the savage man the intellectual faculties sleep. As soon as his appetites are satisfied, he sees neither pleasures to desire, nor pains to fear. He lies down and sleeps again. This negative happiness would bring desolation to the heart of a civilized man. All his faculties have commenced their development. He experiences a new craving, which occupations, grave or futile, but rapidly changed and renewed, can alone appease. If there occur between them intervals which can be filled neither by remembrances, nor by necessary repose, lassitude and ennui intervene, and measure for him the length of these chasms in life by sadness. The next enemy to happiness, after vice, is ennui. Some escape it without much seeming calculation. My neighbor every morning turns over twenty gazettes, the state articles of which are copied the one from the other. Economising the pleasure of this reading, and gravely reposing in the intervals, he communicates, sometimes with an oracular tone, sometimes with a modest reserve, his reflections to those who surround him; and, at length, leaves the reading room with the importance of one who feels that he has discharged a debt to society.