you are in danger of forgetting the final end of all ambition read
"Grays Elegy."

"Can storied urn, or animated bust
Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
Can honor's voice provoke the silent dust
Or flattery sooth the dull cold ear of death?"

If you wish to be transported to the mystic cloud-land of fancy, read
Hawthorne.

"Sleeping or waking, we hear not the airy footsteps of the strange
things that almost happen. He knew not that a phantom of wealth had
thrown a golden hue upon its waters. Nor that one of death had
threatened to crimson them with his blood, all in the brief hour since
he lay down to sleep."

To a dreamy and poetic mind what can be more exquisite than these few
lines: "The next morning Hieronymus put the scroll into his bosom, and
went his way in search of the Fountain of Oblivion. A few days brought
him to the skirts of the Black forest. He entered, not without a feeling
of dread, that land of shadows, and passed onward under melancholy pines
and cedars, whose branches grew abroad and mingled together, and, as
they swayed up and down, filled the air with solemn twilight and a sound
of sorrow. As he advanced into the forest the waving moss hung, like
curtains, from the branches overhead, and more shut out the light of
heaven; and he knew the Fountain of Oblivion was not far off. Even then
the sound of falling waters was mingling with the roar of the pines
above him; and ere long he came to a river, moving in solemn majesty
through the forest, and falling with a dull, leaden sound into a