HIS MENTAL HISTORY. 309 



to stand alone ; and a first consequence of the improve- 

 ment was that I exchanged my many companions for a 

 few friends. I became a thorough admirer of nature for 

 its own sake; before, I had only affected to love it 

 from finding so much written in its praise. I was first 

 delighted by the mild, the calm, the beautiful, next by 

 the wild, the terrible, the sublime. Years passed on, 

 and man became my study. I delighted in tracing the 

 progress of the species, from the extreme of barbarism 

 to that of refinement, and in marking the various shades 

 of intellectual character. Studies of a more abstract 

 class succeeded, and I became a metaphysician. I strove 

 to penetrate into the first causes and to anticipate the 

 remoter consequences of things; and reasoned on subjects 

 such as those which employed the fiends in Milton when 

 they "found no end in wandering mazes lost," but I soon 

 perceived that the over-subtle thinker reaps only a 

 harvest of doubt, and that, when truth is our object, it 

 is quite as possible to miss the mark by overshooting as 

 by falling short. In the progress related, and I cannot 

 trace it further, habits have been successively formed 

 and relinquished, and appetites acquired and satiated. 

 But though many of these have long .since ceased, much 

 of that which they accumulated for me still remains, 

 wrought up in some degree into one entire mass, but in 

 some degree also bearing in their separate portions the 

 colour and stamp of the period at which they were ac- 

 quired. I find, too, that as in the progress of my mind 

 (to use your own happy language) " What were at one 

 time the subjects of thought and reason to me have be- 

 come first principles/' so habits and modes of thinking 

 which have been formed under the influence of our 

 second nature custom have become to me what seem 

 primary tendencies of the mind ; and that if there be 



