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Rh the posy of the gallant of the seventeenth century,—

But smile as you will, my cynical reader, life is but a poor farce, and drearily played too, when the emotional part of human nature is expunged therefrom. By all means let us have positive philosophy and abstract science, but I exhort you let us leaven these with the fancies of dreamland, and pleasures of sentiment and love; or, Is Life worth living, after all?

But I approach the end: at the moment when the Philosopher’s Stone might have been discovered, Cupid burst through my lattice, and, with a smile more of heaven than of earth, fixed his eyes on me, and seemed to beckon me to his abode. The shade of Paracelsus, too, had urged me to desist from my studies with the crucible. Thus it is,