Although, apparently, a practical disciple of Behmen, I am no believer in his visionary creed.
Quiet is not happiness; nor can the absence of all strong and painful emotion compensate for the weary heaviness of inert existence, passionless, dreamless, changeless.

The mind requires the excitement of active and changeful thought; the intellectual fountain, like the pool of Bethesda, has a more healthful influence when its deep waters are troubled.

There may, indeed, be happiness in those occasional 'sabbaths of the soul,' when calmness, like a canopy, overshadows it, and the mind, for a brief season, eddies quietly round and round, instead of sweeping onward; but none can exist in the long and weary stagnation of feeling, the silent, the monotonous, neverending calm, broken by neither hope nor fear." THE PROSELYTES.

(1833) THE student sat at his books.

All the day he had been poring over an old and time-worn volume; and the evening found him still absorbed in its contents.