"No," replied the Count, "not satiety, aspirations for and hopes of higher pleasures still; the last, the grandest, the noblest seeking for enjoyment that the universe can afford; the pursuit that leads us through the gates of the tomb to those abodes where the imperfections of enjoyment end, where the seeds of decay grow not up with the flowers that we plant, where the fruit is without the husk, and the music without the dissonance. This still is left us when all other enjoyments of life are exhausted, or have been tasted, or have been cast away, or have been destroyed. Depend upon it, Louis, that even the knowledge we acquire of the insufficiency of earth's enjoyment gives us greater power to advance in the scale of enjoyment; and that, if we choose to learn our lesson from the picture given us of the earthly paradise, we shall find a grand moral in the tree of eternal life having been planted by the tree of knowledge." "But still, my dear Count," replied the Chevalier, "you seem still to approach to my argument, while you deny its force. If such be the result of satiety, as you say it is, namely, to lead us to the aspiration after higher enjoyments, till those aspirations point to another world, surely it is better to arrive at that result as soon as possible." "No," replied the Count; "in the first place, I did not say that such was the result of satiety; I said that it was the result of discovering by experience the insufficiency of all earthly enjoyments to give perfect satisfaction to a high and immortal spirit and well-regulated mind. Satiety I hold to be quite the reverse of this; I hold it to be the degradation of our faculties of enjoyment, either by excessive indulgence, or by evil direction. The man who follows such a course of life as to produce any chance of reaching satiety, tends downward instead of upward, to lower rather than to higher pleasures, and exhausts his own capabilities, not the blessings of God. The opposite course produces the opposite result; we know and learn that all God's creations afford us some enjoyment, although we know and learn, at the same time, that it has been his will that none of those enjoyments upon earth should give complete and final satisfaction. Our capabilities of enjoying by enjoying properly are not blunted but acuminated; we fly from satiety instead of approaching it; and even while we learn to aspire to higher things, we lose not a particle of the power--except by the natural decay of our faculties--of enjoying even the slight foretaste that Heaven has given us here." "Solomon, Solomon, Solomon!" said his companion, "Solomon was evidently a misanthrope either by nature or by satiety. He had seen every thing under the sun, and he pronounced every thing vanity--ay, lighter than vanity itself."