As a mind in this flat depressed tone is little fertile in thoughts, permit me to supply the place of them by some passages out of a singular book I have met with. You will think that it must have flowed not only from my pen but from my most inmost soul. "It is incalculable," says the author, "what an influence the objects which surround our childhood exercise over the whole formation of our character in after life. In the dark forests of the land of my birth, in my continual solitary wanderings where nature wears so romantic an aspect, arose my early love for my own meditations, and, when I was afterwards thrown among numbers of my own age at school, rendered it impossible to my disposition of mind, to form any intimate companionships, except those which I first began to discover _in myself_. "In the day my great pleasure was lonely wandering in the country:--in the evening, the reading of romantic fictions, which I connected in my mind with the scenes I was so familiar with; and whether I sat in winter in the chimney corner poring over my book, or in summer lay stretched in luxurious indolence under a tree, my hours were equally filled with all those misty and voluptuous dreams which were perhaps the essence of poetry, but which _I was not gifted with the genius to embody_. Such a temper is not made for intercourse with men. One while I pursued an object with restless activity,--another I lived in perfectly supine meditation. Nothing came up to my wishes or my imaginings, and my whole being was at last profoundly imbued with that bitter, melancholy philosophy, which taught me, like Faust, that knowledge is but useless stuff, that hope is but a cheat; and laid a curse upon me, like that which hangs on him who, amid all the joys of youth and the allurements of pleasure, feels the presence of a spirit of darkness ever around him. "The experience of longer and bitterer years makes me doubt whether this earth can ever bring forth a living form which can realize the visions of him who has dwelt too long absorbed in the creations of his own fancy." In another place, he says of a man who was much praised: "He was one of the macadamized Perfections of society. His greatest fault was his complete levelness and equality; you longed for a hill to climb;--for a stone, even if it lay in your way. Love can attach itself only to something prominent, were it even a thing that others might hate. One can hardly feel what is extreme for mediocrity." 'C'est vraiment une consolation!' Further: "Our senses may be enthralled by beauty; but absence effaces the impression, and reason may vanquish it." "Our vanity may make us passionately adore rank and distinction, but the empire of vanity is founded on sand." "Who can love Genius, and not perceive that the feelings it excites are a part of our own being and of our immortality?" _July 18th._