words, we deprive ourselves of much innocent pleasure and useful information. For a great deal of our best knowledge is obtained by mutual intercourse and for the most valuable comforts of life we are indebted to the social and benevolent attentions of one another.

Let it not be objected, that some great men, as Newton, have been remarkably absent in company. Persons, who are engaged in sublime study, and who are known to employ their time and faculties in adorning human nature by the investigation of useful truth, may be indulged in such peculiarities of behaviour, as in men of common talents neither are, nor ought to be tolerated. For, in regard to the former, we are willing to suppose, that, if they overlook us, it is because they are engrossed by matters of greater importance: but this is a compliment, which we should not think ourselves obliged to pay the latter, at least in ordinary cases. And I scruple not to say, that it would have been better for Newton himself, as well as for society, if he had been free from the weakness abovementioned. For then his thoughts and his amusements would have been more diversified, and his health probably better, and his precious life still longer than it was: and a mind like his, fully displayed in free and general conversation, would have been, to all who had the happiness to approach him, an inexhaustible source of instruction and delight.

Great, indeed, and many are the advantages of habitual attention. Clearness of understanding, extensive knowledge, and exact memory, are its natural consequences. It is even beneficial to health, by varying the succession of our ideas and sensations; and it gives us the command of our thoughts, and enables us at all times to act readily,

and with presence of mind. As they who live retired are disconcerted at the sight of a stranger; as he whose body has never been made pliant by exercise cannot perform new motions either gracefully or easily; so the man, who has contracted a habit of ruminating upon a few things and overlooking others, is fluttered, and at a loss, whenever he finds himself, as he often does, in unexpected circumstances. He looks round amazed, like one raised suddenly from sleep. Not remembering what happened the last moment, he knows nothing of the cause of the present appearance, nor can form any conjecture with respect to its tendency. If you ask him a question, it is some time before he can recollect himself so far as to attend to you; he hesitates, and you must repeat your words before he can understand them: and when he has with difficulty made himself master of your meaning, he cannot, without an effort, keep out of his usual track of thinking, so long as is necessary for framing an explicit reply. This may look like exaggeration; but nothing is more certain, than that habits of inattention, contracted early, and long persisted in, will in time form such a characBEATTIE.

ter.

THE POWER OF IMAGINATION.

In a large and uninhabited building, like a church, the wind may howl; doors and windows may clap; the creaking of rusty hinges may be heard; a stone, or a bit of plaster, may drop with some noise from the mouldering wall; the light of the moon may gleam unexpectedly through a cranny, and, where it falls on the broken pavement, form an appearance not unlike a human face

illuminated, or a naked human body, which the peasant, whose chance it is to see it, may readily mistake for a ghost, or some other tremendous being. In the forsaken apartments of an old castle, rats and jack-daws may raise an uproar, that shall seem to shake the whole edifice to the foundation. Piles of ruins, especially when surrounded with trees and underwood, give shelter to owls and wild cats, and other creatures, whose screaming, redoubled with echoes, may, to the superstitious ear, seem to be, as Shakspeare says, "no mortal business, nor no sound that the earth owns." In deep groves, by twilight, our vision must be so indistinct, that a bush may, without enchantment, assume the form of a fiend or monster; and the crashing of branches, tossed by the wind, or grated against one another, may sound like groans and lamentations. By the side of a river, in a still or in a stormy evening, many noises may be heard, sufficient to alarm those, who would rather tremble at a prodigy, than investigate a natural cause: a sudden change, or increase of the wind, by swelling the roar of the far-off torrent, or by dashing the waters in a new direction against rocks or hollow banks, may produce hoarse and uncommon sounds; and the innocent gambols of a few otters have been known to occasion, those yells, which the vulgar of this country mistake for laughing or crying, and ascribe to a certain goblin, who is supposed to dwell in the waters, and to take delight in drowning the bewildered traveller.

These, and the like considerations, if duly attended to, would overcome many of those terrors that haunt the ignorant and the credulous, restore soundness to the imagination, and, as Persius says,

in his usual rough but expressive manner," pull the old grandmother out of our entrails." And the habit of encountering such imaginary terrors, and of being often alone in darkness, will greatly conduce to the same end. The spirit of free inquiry, too, is in this, as in all other respects, friendly to our nature. By the glimmering of the moon, I have once and again beheld, at midnight, the exact form of a man or woman, sitting silent and motionless by my bedside. Had I hid my head, without daring to look the apparition in the face, I should have passed the night in horrors, and risen in the morning with the persuasion of having seen a ghost. But, rousing myself, and resolving to find out the truth, I discovered, that it was nothing more than the accidental disposition of my clothes upon a chair.-Once I remember to have been alarmed at seeing, by the faint light of the dawn, a coffin laid out between my bed and the window. I started up; and recollecting, that I had heard of such things having been seen by others, I set myself to examine it, and found, that it was only a stream of yellowish light, falling in a particular manner upon the floor, from between the window-curtains. And so lively was the appearance, that, after I was thoroughly satisfied of the cause, it continued to impose on my sight as before, till the increasing light of the morning dispelled it. These facts are perhaps too trivial to be recorded but they serve to show, that free inquiry, with a very small degree of fortitude, may sometimes, when one is willing to be rational, prove a cure to certain diseases of imagination.

BEATTIE.

REALITY HEIGHTENED BY IMAGINATION.

In the beginning of life, and while experience is confined to a small circle, we admire every thing, and are pleased with very moderate excellence. A peasant thinks the hall of his landlord the finest apartment in the universe, listens with rapture to the strolling ballad-singer, and wonders at the rude wooden cuts that adorn his ruder compositions. A child looks upon his native village as a town; upon the brook that runs by as a river; and upon the meadows and hills in the neighbourhood, as the most spacious and beautiful that can be. But when, after a long absence, he returns, in his declining years, to visit once before he die the dear spot that gave him birth, and those scenes whereof he remembers rather the original charms than the exact proportions, how is he disappointed to find every thing so debased and so diminished! The hills seem to have sunk into the ground, the brook to be dried up, and the village to be forsaken of its people; the parish-church, stripped of all its fancied magnificence, is become low, gloomy, and narrow; and the fields are now only the miniature of what they were. Had he never left this spot, his notions might have remained the same as at first; and had he travelled but a little way from it, they would not perhaps have received any material enlargement. It seems then to be from observation of many things of the same or similar kinds, that we acquire the talent of forming ideas more perfect than the real objects that lie immediately around us: and these ideas we may improve gradually more and more, according to the vivacity of our mind, and extent of our experience, till at last we