We are not to suppose that, however soothing and consolatory such feelings and hopes may have been, they weaned him from the world, or diminished his natural love of life; on the contrary, no one would have more gratefully received the services of a Medea, as the following passage will sufficiently testify. "Ah! could I recover any thing like that freshness of mind which I possessed at twenty-five, and which, like the dew of the dawning morning, covered all objects and nourished all things that grew, and in which they were more beautiful even than in midday sunshine,--what would I not give! All that I have gained in an active and not unprofitable life. How well I remember that delightful season, when, full of power, I sought for power in others; and power was sympathy, and sympathy power;--when the dead and the unknown, the great of other ages and of distant places were made, by the force of the imagination, my companions and friends;--when every voice seemed one of praise and love;--when every flower had the bloom and odour of the rose; and every spray or plant seemed either the poet's laurel, or the civic oak--which appeared to offer themselves as wreaths to adorn my throbbing brow. But, alas! this cannot be.----" After the example of the great Patriarch of Anglers, the author of Salmonia commences, through the assistance of the principal interlocutor of the dialogue, HALIEUS, to enumerate the delights of his art, and to vindicate it from the charge of cruelty. "_Halieus._--The search after food is an instinct belonging to our nature; and from the savage in his rudest and most primitive state, who destroys a piece of game, or a fish, with a club or spear, to man in the most cultivated state of society, who employs artifice, machinery, and the resources of various other animals, to secure his object, the origin of the pleasure is similar, and its object the same: but that kind of it requiring most art may be said to characterize man in his highest or intellectual state; and the fisher for salmon and trout with the fly employs not only machinery to assist his physical powers, but applies sagacity to conquer difficulties; and the pleasure derived from ingenious resources and devices, as well as from active pursuit, belongs to this amusement. Then, as to its philosophical tendency, it is a pursuit of moral discipline, requiring patience, forbearance, and command of temper. As connected with natural science, it may be vaunted as demanding a knowledge of the habits of a considerable tribe of created beings,--fishes, and the animals that they prey upon, and an acquaintance with the signs and tokens of the weather, and its changes, the nature of waters, and of the atmosphere. As to its poetical relations, it carries us into the most wild and beautiful scenery of nature; amongst the mountain lakes, and the clear and lovely streams that gush from the higher ranges of elevated hills, or that make their way through the cavities of calcareous strata.