touch of paint before they laid it. LETTER II. TO A STUDENT IN THE FIRST ARDOR OF INTELLECTUAL AMBITION. The first freshness--Why should it not be preserved?--The dulness of the intellectual--Fictions and false promises--Ennui in work itself--Dürer's engraving of Melancholy--Scott about Dryden--Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth--Humboldt, Cuvier, Goethe--Tennyson's "Maud"--Preventives of _ennui_--Hard study for limited times--The _ennui_ of jaded faculties. I have been thinking about you frequently of late, and the burden or refrain of my thoughts has been "What a blessing he has in that first freshness, if only he could keep it!" But now I am beginning more hopefully to ask myself, "Why should he not keep it?" It would be an experiment worth trying, so to order your intellectual life, that however stony and thorny your path might be, however difficult and arduous, it should at all events never be dull; or, to express what I mean more accurately, that you yourself should never feel the depressing influences of dulness during the years when they are most to be dreaded. I want you to live steadily and happily in your intellectual labors, even to the natural close of existence, and my best wish for you is that you may escape a long and miserable malady which brain-workers very commonly suffer from when the first dreams of youth have been disappointed--a malady in which the intellectual desires are feeble, the intellectual hopes are few; whose victim, if he has still resolution enough to learn anything, acquires without satisfaction, and, if he has courage to create, has neither pride nor pleasure in his creations. If I were to sing the praises of knowledge as they have been so often sung by louder harps than mine, I might avoid so dreary a theme. It is easy to pretend to believe that the intellectual life is always sure to be interesting and delightful, but the truth is that, either from an unwise arrangement of their work, or from mental or physical causes which we will investigate to some extent before we have done with the subject, many men whose occupations are reputed to be amongst the most interesting have suffered terribly from _ennui_, and that not during a week or two at a time, but for consecutive years and years.