Page:Nightmare Abbey (1818).djvu/110

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NIGHTMARE ABBEY.
99

breathes through all the groves and valleys of the modern Parnassus: while science moves on in the calm dignity of its course, affording to youth delights equally pure and vivid,—to maturity, calm and grateful occupation,—to old age, the most pleasing recollections and inexhaustible materials of agreeable and salutary reflection; and, while its votary enjoys the disinterested pleasure of enlarging the intellect and increasing the comforts of society, he is himself independent of the caprices of human intercourse and the accidents of human fortune. Nature is his great and inexhaustible treasure. His days are always too short for his enjoyment: ennui is a stranger to his door. At peace with the world and with his own mind, he suffices to himself, makes all around him happy, and the close of his pleasing and