view, from hence, is pleasing beyond description. Several natural openings, in the groves which surround the house, discover a variety of prospects, each of which has its peculiar beauties; and grottoes, alcoves, with other little edifices dispersed here and there, conspire to lull the imagination into a delightful tranquillity. Here could I ever stray, while the wrapt mind Recalls the long lost tale of many a hero, Or many a sage, who, from the mountain top, Unwearied, watches Cynthia's silver course, When nightly, from the east, slow rising, she Illumes the azure heav'n with soften'd light. As we walked together, through these pleasant scenes, our conversation turned on a variety of subjects, but all of the literate kind. He was pleased to observe, I had a taste for the sciences; and I, on the other hand, was surprised at the refined judgment he displayed in matters of imagination, having expected to find him immersed in mathematical speculations. He certainly abstracts too much, and expects to attain a state of knowledge beyond what our faculties are capable of. The objects of taste, says he, it must be allowed, constitute in themselves the nobler exercises of the soul: the philosophy of the passions is worthy the attention of mankind: the source, the ultimate basis of morality is of the last consequence to society, and well deserves to be enquired into.—But we lose ourselves in conjecture, instead of seeking for demonstration. Would not you smile, Mr. Stamford, at the sage, who, to explain the motion of a planet, should say it proceeded from a motive faculty, instead of investigating the respective momenta and directions of the projectile and centripetal forces? Is not certainty in the lower steps of science an acquisition more to be prized than the declamations of prejudice, or the endless maze of proofs founded on hypothesis? Nay, rather, ought we not first to make ourselves perfect in the rudiments of knowledge, before we pry into the arcana of the more subtle motions of intellectual substances? Demonstration is not confined to quantity alone. Ideas of the great and beautiful in nature, in sentiment, in ethics, and in all the branches of the sentient faculty, are as perfect as those of quantity, and their congruity with each other as perceptible. By the immediate application of two ideas an axiom may be formed. Definitions of terms should be premised; and, by the intervention of a chain of immediately concordant ideas, we might connect the proposition and consequence. Whence demonstration would be accomplished, and a man