During the very cold weather which ushered in our last spring, I was one night sitting in my dormitory, before a blazing fire, luxuriating in that most selfish of all pleasures, _vulgo_ a "brown study." There was something so indescribably comfortable in my situation, that, although I had half a dozen unprepared lectures for the next morning staring me in the face, I found it a matter of utter impossibility to open a text book, still less to direct my attention even for the shortest time to its contents. Stretched in my capacious arm chair--my feet toasting before the aforesaid blazing fire--I lay listening with a dreamy sort of consciousness, to the continual, dull, unceasing hum of the falling snow. Regardless and entirely independent of the cold and storm without, my eyes fixed on the fanciful figures, changeable as the images of the Kaleidescope, which the burning coals assumed--in a word, settled in that position, a description of which has been so often attempted--and which every man who has one particle of soul about him has often and oftentimes enjoyed, I fell into a long train of reflections as absorbing and delightful as they were false and illusory. The future--the present--the past--castles in the air--my far distant home--were the most prominent and strongly marked images in the scenes which flitted across the magic mirror of my fancy. "I thought about myself and the whole earth, Of man the wonderful, and of the stars, And how the deuce they ever could have birth; And then I thought of earthquakes and of wars; How many miles the moon might have in girth; Of air balloons, and of the many bars To perfect knowledge--of the boundless skies."