THERE 105. HERE are no such self-deceivers as those who think they reason when they only feel. 106. THERE life, opposed to the trammels of the outer, becomes too oppressive: moments when we wish that our mental horizon were less extended, thought less free; when we long to put the discursive soul into a narrow path like a railway, and force it to run on in a straight line to some determined goal. IF 107. F the deepest and best affections which God has given us sometimes brood over the heart like doves of peace,-they sometimes suck out our lifeblood like vampires. То 108. a Frenchman the words that express things seem often to suffice for the things themselves, and he pronounces the words amour, grâce, sensibilité, as if with a relish in his mouth- as if he tasted them THERE too, which hardly deserve the name of virtues. The word Virtue was synonymous in the old time with valour, and seems to imply contest; not merely passive goodness, but active resistance to evil. I wonder sometimes why it is that we so continually hear the phrase, "a virtuous woman," and scarcely ever that of a "virtuous man," except in poetry or from the pulpit. 110. A 66 LIE, though it be killed and dead, can sting sometimes, like a dead wasp. "ON 111. N me dit toute la journée dans le monde, telle opinion, telle idée, sont reçues. On ne sait donc pas qu'en fait d'opinion, et d'idées j'aime beaucoup mieux les choses qui sont rejettées que celles qui sont reçues?" 66 SENSE 112. ENSE can support herself handsomely in most countries on some eighteenpence a day, but for phantasy, planets and solar systems will not suffice." And thence do you infer the superiority of sense over phantasy? Shallow reasoning! God who made the soul of man of sufficient capacity to embrace whole worlds and systems of worlds, gave us thereby a foretaste of our immortality. "FAITH 113. in the hereafter is as necessary for the intellectual as the moral character, and to the man of letters as well as to the Christian, the present forms but the slightest portion of his existence.” Southey. "Genutzt dem Augen Goethe did not think so. blick," "Use the present," was his favourite maxim ; and always this notion of sacrificing or slighting the present seems to me a great mistake. It ought to be the most important part of our existence, as it is the only part of it over which we have power. It is in the present only that we absolve the past and lay the foundation for the future. 66 "JE 114. E allseitigen, je individueller," is a beautiful significant phrase, quite untranslateable, used, I think, by Rahel (Madame Varnhagen). It means that the more the mind can multiply on every side its capacities of thinking and feeling, the more individual, the more original, that mind becomes. 66 "I 115. WONDER," said C., "that facts should be called stubborn things. I wonder, too, seeing you can always oppose a fact with another fact, and that nothing is so easy as to twist, pervert, and argue or misrepresent a fact into twenty different forms. "Il n'y a rien qui s'arrange aussi facilement que les faits," Nothing so tractable as facts, said Benjamin Constant. True; so long as facts are only material,—or as one should say, mere matter of fact, you can modify them to a purpose, turn them upside down and inside out; but once vivify a fact with a feeling, and it stands up before us a living and a very stubborn thing. 116. VERY human being is born to influence some EVERY other human being; or many, or all human beings, in proportion to the extent and power of the sympathies, rather than of the intellect. It was said, and very beautifully said, that "one man's wit becomes all men's wisdom." Even more true is it that one man's virtue becomes a standard which raises our anticipation of possible goodness in all men. |