shall revive, on beholding in nature, a Father, a Friend, a Rewarder. p. 70.

The rich and the great imagine, that every one is miserable, and out of the world, who does not live as they do; but they are the persons who, living far from nature, live out of the world. They would find thee, O eternal Beauty! always ancient, and alwas new; O life pure and blissful, of all those who truly live, if they sought thee only within themselves! Wert thou a steril mass of gold, or a victorious prince, who shall not be alive to-morrow, or some attractive and deceitful female, they would perceive thee, and ascribe to thee the power of conferring some pleasure upon them. Thy vain nature would employ their vanity. Thou wouldest be an object proportioned to their timid and grovelling thoughts. But, because thou art too much within themselves, where they never choose to look, and too magnificent externally, diffusing thyself through infinite space, thou remainest to them an unknown God. In loosing themselves, they have lost thee. p. 72.

The order, nay, the beauty, with which thou hast invested all thy creatures, to serve as so many steps by which man may raise himself to thee, are transformed into a veil, which conceals thee from his sickly eyes. Men have no sight but for vain shadows. The light dazzles them. Mere nothings are to them every thing; and all perfection passes with them for nothing. Nevertheless, he who never saw thee, has never seen any thing; he who has no relish for thee, is an utter stranger to true pleasure; he is as if he were not, and his whole life is only a miserable dream.

I myself, misled by the prejudices of a faulty education, pursued a vain felicity, in systems of science, in arms, in the favour of the great, sometimes in frivolous and dangerous pleasures. In all these agitations, I was hunting after calamity, while happiness was within my reach. At a distance from my native land, I sighed for joys which it contained not for me; and, nevertheless, thou wert bestowing on me blessings innumerable, scattered by thy bountiful hand

over the whole earth, which is the country of mankind.

I was anxious to think that I had no powerful protector, that I belonged to no corps; and by thee I have been protected amidst a thousand dangers, in which they could have afforded me no assistance. It grieved me to think of living solitary, unnoticed, unregarded; and thou hast vouchsafed to teach me, that solitude is far preferable to the bustle of a court, and liberty to grandeur. I never ceased to be happy, but when I ceased to trust in thee., Opposed to thee, all power is weakness; supported by thee, weakness becomes irresistible strength. p. 74.

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The corruption of the heart is the original source of our errors.

My ignorance of the means employed by nature, in the government of the world, is greater than I am able to express.

p. 92.

Not only, no hair falls from our head, and no sparrow to the ground, but not a pebble

rolls on the shore of the ocean, without the permission of God. p. 106.

He remarked that the surface of the water was there very smooth, which puzzled him exceedingly, by damping his hope of a communication between this bay and the South sea. He remained, nevertheless, convinced of such a passage; such is the pertinacity of man in favour of preconceived opinions, in the very face of evidence.

p. 111. These poor people made presents of fat geese to the Dutch mariners, with strong demonstrations of friendship; for calamity has, in all climates, a powerful tendency to conciliate affection between man and man.

p. 112.

The will of God is the ultimatum of all human knowledge.

God governs the world by variable powers, and deduces from these, harmonies which are invariable. In this harmonious course, the sun dispenses cold and heat, dryness and humidity, and derives from

these powers, each of them destructive by itself, latitudes so varied, and so temperate, all over the globe, that an infinite number of creatures, of an extreme delicacy, find in them every degree of temperature adapted to the nature of their frail existence.

p. 130. If during a period of three thousand years, and more, the cold had gone on increasing from year to year, in all these climates, their winters must now have been as long and as severe as in Greenland. But Lebanon, and the lofty provinces of Asia, have preserved the same temperature. The little isle of Ithaca is still covered in winter with the hoar frost; and it produces, as in the days of Telemacus, the laurel and the olive.

p. 175.

I have not had the felicity, like the primitive navigators, who discovered uninhabited islands, to contemplate the face of the ground as it came from the hand of the Creator. p. 178.