What a foe not only to life, but to all that dignifies and ennobles it, is Time! Our affections and our pleasures resemble those fabulous trees described by Saint Oderic: the fruits which they bring forth are no sooner ripened into maturity than they are transformed into birds and fly away.

But these reflections cannot yet be familiar to you.

Let us return to Cowley.

Do you feel any sympathy with his prose writings?
For some minds they have a great attraction." "They have for mine," answered I: "but then I am naturally a dreamer; and a contemplative egotist is always to me a mirror in which I behold myself." "The world," answered St.John, with a melancholy smile, "will soon dissolve, or forever confirm, your humour for dreaming; in either case, Cowley will not be less a favourite.

But you must, like me, have long toiled in the heat and travail of business, or of pleasure, which is more wearisome still, in order fully to sympathize with those beautiful panegyrics upon solitude which make perhaps the finest passages in Cowley.