The middle-aged, too, might be seen with hair beginning to blanch from long hours devoted to the midnight lamp, and faces marked with "the pale cast of thought." Hope, though less sanguine in her promises, still lures them on, and they pass the venerable old, unconscious that they themselves are succeeding them in the same life of study, to be followed by the same results, privation, and solitude, until death closes the scene.

And yet a life of study is, perhaps, the one in which the privations compelled by poverty are the least felt to be a hardship.
Study, like virtue, is its own exceeding great reward, for it engrosses as well as elevates the mind above the sense of the wants so acutely felt by those who have no intellectual pursuits; and many a student has forgotten his own privations when reading the history of the great and good who have been exposed to even still more trying ones.

Days pass uncounted in such occupations.

Youth fleets away, if not happily, at least tranquilly, while thus employed; and maturity glides into age, and age drops into the grave, scarcely conscious of the gradations of each, owing to the mind having been filled with a continuous train of thought, engendered by study.
I have been reading some French poems by Madame Amabel Tastu; and very beautiful they are.

A sweet and healthy tone of mind breathes through them, and the pensiveness that characterises many of them, marks a reflecting spirit imbued with tenderness.