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The idle mind will sometimes fall into contemplations that serve for nothing but to ruin the health, destroy good humour, hasten old age and wrinkles, and bring on an habitual melancholy.
To such contemplations, and to the repose of a mind and conscience at peace with itself, did the once, nay, ever-renowned hero of Poland, retire into the most sequestered mountains of Switzerland. A few friends, of the same closed accounts with the world, congregated around him; and there he dwelt several years, beloved and revered, as, indeed, he was wherever he planted his pilgrim staff.
Old age often turns pious to look away from ruins to some world where youth endures and where what ought to have been is not overtaken by decay before it has quite come to maturity. Lost in such abstract contemplations, the mind is weaned from mortal concerns. It forgets for a few moments a world in which it has so little more to do and so much, perhaps, still to suffer.
The novitiates then inquired after Demosthenes, Diogenes, and Epicurus; and were answered, "Demosthenes is not here, but with Plato; Diogenes, with his scholars, resides under Helicon, because of his little attention to worldly things, and his being engaged in heavenly contemplations; Epicurus dwells in a border to the west, and has no intercourse with us; because we distinguish between good and evil affections, and say, that good affections are one with wisdom, and evil affections are contrary to it."
My mind, elevated by these contemplations, ascended to the Divinity, and thence, seeing my fellow creatures follow in the blind track of their prejudices that of their errors and misfortunes, I cried out to them, in a feeble voice, which they could not hear: "Madmen! know that all your evils proceed from yourselves!"
To guard her own secrets and maintain herself aloof, she had taken of late to contemplations of nature; she cheated the aching of her own heart by seeking a meaning in the world around her, finding God in that desert of heaven and earth. When an unbeliever once perceives the presence of God, he flings himself unreservedly into Catholicism, which, viewed as a system, is complete.
In what does the inferiority of Virgil, for example, consist, but in his having hatched fancies in his contemplations which the calm mind rejects as absurdities. Then Tasso, with his enchanted forests and his other improbabilities; are they more than childish tales? tales, too, not in fancy to be compared with those of that venerable dry-nurse, Mother Bunch.
I could easily enough see that at present this was impossible; that the happiness I enjoyed would be of short duration, and this idea gave to my contemplations a tincture of melancholy, which, however, was not gloomy, but tempered with a flattering hope.
He is in a castle which is his in full propriety. No unwelcome guests can intrude; no harsh sounds can disturb his contemplations; he is the master, and can command a silence equal to that of the tomb, whenever he pleases. In this sense every man feels, while cribbed in a cabin of flesh, and shut up by the capricious and arbitrary injunctions of human communities, that he is not at home.
An enthusiast is easily led to believe what he wishes, and he mistakes his own feelings for warnings; the dreams arising from his daily contemplations for the interference of Heaven. He thinks himself armed by supernatural assistance, and warranted by the Almighty to pursue his course, even if that course should be contrary to the Almighty's precepts.
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