Next to our bodily Sensations come in order of influence on our thoughts the Places in which we happen to do our thinking. Meditating like the pious Harvey “Among the Tombs” is one thing; doing the same on a breezy mountain side among the gorse and the heather, quite another. Jostling our way in a crowded street or roaming in a solitary wood, rattling in an English express train or floating by moonlight in a Venetian gondola or an Egyptian dahabieh, though each and all favorable conditions for thinking, create altogether distinct classes of lucubrations. If we endeavor to define what are the surroundings among which Thought is best sustained and most vigorous, we shall probably find good reason to reverse not a few of our accepted and familiar judgments. The common idea, for example, that we ponder very profoundly by the seashore, is, I am persuaded, a baseless delusion. We _think_ indeed that we are thinking, but for the most part our minds merely lie open, like so many oysters, to the incoming waves, and with scarcely greater intellectual activity. The very charm of the great Deep seems to lie in the fact that it reduces us to a state of mental emptiness and vacuity, while our vanity is soothed by the notion that we are thinking with unwonted emphasis and perseverance. Amphitrite, the enchantress, mesmerizes us with the monotonous passes of her billowy hands, and lulls us into a slumberous hypnotism wherein we meekly do her bidding, and fix our eyes and thoughts, like biologized men, on the rising and falling of every wave. If it be tempestuous weather, we watch open-mouthed till the beautiful white crests topple over and dash in storm and thunder up the beach; and, if it be a summer evening’s calm, we note with placid, never-ending contentment how the wavelets, like little children, run up softly and swiftly on the golden strand to deposit their gifts of shells and seaweed, and then retreat, shy and ashamed of their boldness, to hide themselves once again under the flowing skirts of Mother Ocean. Again, divines and poets have united to bolster up our convictions that we do a great deal of important thinking at night when we lie awake in bed. Every preacher points to the hours of the “silent midnight,” when his warnings will surely come home, and sit like incubi on the breast of sinners who, too often perhaps, have dozed in the day-time as they flew, bat-wise, over their heads from the pulpit. Shelley, in “Queen Mab,” affords us a terrible night scene of a king who, after his dinner of “silence, grandeur, and excess,” finds sleep abdicate his pillow (probably in favor of indigestion); and Tennyson, in “Locksley Hall,” threatens torments of memory still keener to the “shallow-hearted cousin Amy” whenever she may happen to lie meditating— “In the dead, unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof.”