t. I can speak
a little to this point. For many years of my life I did nothing but
think. I had nothing else to do but solve some knotty point, or dip
in some abstruse author, or look at the sky, or wander by the pebbled
seaside--

To see the children sporting on the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore

I cared for nothing, I wanted nothing. I took my time to consider
whatever occurred to me, and was in no hurry to give a sophistical
answer to a question--there was no printer's devil waiting for me.
I used to write a page or two perhaps in half a year; and remember
laughing heartily at the celebrated experimentalist Nicholson, who
told me that in twenty years he had written as much as would make three
hundred octavo volumes. If I was not a great author, I could read with
ever fresh delight, 'never ending, still beginning,' and had no occasion
to write a criticism when I had done. If I could not paint like Claude,
I could admire 'the witchery of the soft blue sky' as I walked out, and
was satisfied with the pleasure it gave me. If I was dull, it gave me
little concern: if I was lively, I indulged my spirits. I wished well
to the world, and believed as favourably of it as I could. I was like
a stranger in a foreign land, at which I looked with wonder, curiosity,
and delight, without expecting to be an object of attention in return. I
had no relations to the state, no duty to perform, no ties to bind me to
others: I had neither friend nor mistress, wife nor child. I lived in a
world of contemplation, and not of action.

This sort of dreaming existence is the best. He who quits it to go
in search of realities generally barters repose for repeated
disappointments and vain regrets. His time, thoughts, and feelings are
no longer at his own disposal. From that instant he does not survey the
objects of nature as they are in themselves, but looks asquint at them
to see whether he cannot make them the instruments of his ambition,
interest, or pleasure; for a candid, undesigning, undisguised simplicity
of character, his views become jaundiced, sinister, and double: he takes
no farther interest in the great changes of the world but as he has
a paltry share in producing them: instead of opening his senses, his
understanding, and his heart to the resplendent fabric of the universe,
he holds a crooked mirror before his face, in which he may admire his
own person and pretensions, and just glance his eye aside to see