The mountains will sink, the valleys be filled up; all will be once more dead level--still indeed parti-coloured, but without light and shadow, and with the colours reduced in number, and robbed of all their vividness.

The chiaro-oscuro will have gone from life; the moral landscape, whose beauty and grandeur is at present so much extolled, will have dissolved like an insubstantial pageant.

Vice and virtue will be set before us in the same grey light; every deeper feeling either of joy or sorrow, of desire or of repulsion, will lose its vigour, and cease any more to be resonant.
It may be said indeed, and very truly, that under favourable circumstances there must always remain a joy in the mere act of living, in the exercising of the bodily functions, and in the exciting and appeasing of the bodily appetites.

Will anything, it may be asked, for instance, rob the sunshine of its gladness, or deaden the vital influence of a spring morning ?--when the sky is a cloudless blue, and the sea is like a wild hyacinth, when the pouring brooks seem to live as they sparkle, and the early air amongst the woodlands has the breath in it of unseen violets?
All this, it is quite true, will be left to us; this and a great deal more.

This, however, is but one side of the picture.