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dreams of Joanna Southcote,.. or perhaps even as cold as Unitarianism, the money would have been forthcoming.

SIR THOMAS MORE.

And surely it is honourable to human nature that it should be so!

MONTESINOS.

How? honourable to human nature that we should be acted upon more powerfully by error and delusion, than by a reasonable prospect of direct and tangible benefit to ourselves and others?

SIR THOMAS MORE.

Say rather that what is spiritual affects men more than what is material; that they seek more ardently after ideal good than after palpable and perishable realities. This is honourable to your nature and no man will ever be ranked among the great benefactors of his species unless he feels and understands this truth and acts upon it. Upon this ground it is that the moral Archimedes must take his stand. We must take wider views of the subject. For the present I leave you to your young companions, who are waiting yonder with expectation in their looks.

By this time we had nearly past over the

VOL. I.

L

fell, and had begun to descend upon Castlerigg. The children had halted beside a rocky basin in the mountain-stream, to remind me of a sight which we had once enjoyed there, and to enjoy it again in recollection. It was a flock of geese who in the bright sunshine of a summer's day were sporting in that basin, and with such evident joyousness that it was a pleasure to behold their joy. Sometimes they thrust their long necks under the water straight down, and turned up their broad yellow feet; sometimes rose half up, shaking and clapping their wings; sometimes with retorted head pruned themselves as they floated. Their motion did not in the slightest degree defile the water; for there was no soil to disturb; the stream, flowing from its mountainsprings, over a bed of rock, had contracted no impurity in its course, and these birds were so delicately clean that they could not sully it; the few feathers which they plucked or shook off were presently carried away by the current. It was the most beautiful scene of animal enjoyment that I ever beheld, or ever shall behold: the wildness of the spot, the soft green turf upon the bank, the beauty of that basin, (and they only who have seen mountain-streams in a country of clear waters can imagine how beautiful such basins are,) the colour of the

stream, which acquired a chrysolite tinge from the rock over which it ran, and the dazzling whiteness of the birds, heightened by the sunshine, composed a picture, which, like that of Wordsworth's daffodils, when it has once been seen, the inward eye can re-create, but which no painter could represent. Our dear N. felt this, and regretted the impossibility of preserving any adequate representation of what he declared to be the most striking and beautiful incident he had ever the good fortune to behold. I thought of the story in Museus's Tales, (a fiction known to the Arabians as well as the Germans,) and had they been swans instead of geese, could almost have fancied they were Fairies in that form, and have looked about for a veil.

148

COLLOQUY VII.

THE MANUFACTURING SYSTEM.

FRANKLIN, who of all philosophers seems to have possessed the greatest share of good, practical, every-day sense, (and the least of comprehensive philosophy,) has written a playful essay upon early rising, wherein he assures his readers that the sun actually appears during the greater part of the year many hours before they are in the habit of leaving their beds; and he endeavours to convince them that it would be worth their while to profit by this discovery, and save the expense of candles in the evening by making use of the early daylight. In this instance he has well applied his favourite principle of trying every thing by the rule of profit and loss,..a principle which he has been but too successful in impressing upon his countrymen. Wesley has published an excellent sermon upon the same subject. The better to enforce his precepts, he required his preachers to hold forth

at five in the morning, and expected his people to attend them.

Whoever has tasted the breath of morning, knows that the most invigorating and most delightful hours of the day are commonly spent in bed, though it is the evident intention of nature that we should enjoy and profit by them. Children awake early and would be up and stirring long before the arrangements of the family permit them to use their limbs. We are thus broken in from childhood to an injurious habit: and yet were we not necessarily the slaves of society, that habit might be shaken off with more ease than it was imposed. We rise with the sun at Christmas; it were but continuing so to do till the middle of April, and without any perceptible change we should find ourselves then rising at five o'clock; at which hour we might continue till September, and then accommodate ourselves again to the change of season, regulating always the time of retiring in the same proportion. They who require eight hours sleep would upon such a system go to bed at nine during four months. The propriety and the easiness of such an arrangement cannot be disputed; I confess, however, that my mode of life, independent as it is, is not independent enough for me to follow it.

"Inter causas malorum nostro

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