"
"Your discrimination is just. After reading Miss Sedgwick, our
sympathies for our fellow creatures take a more humane range. We are
moved by an impulse to do good--to relieve the suffering--to
regulate our own action in regard to others by a higher and better
rule. You are a reader of the poets, too--and like myself, I
believe, are an admirer of Wordsworth's calm and deep sympathy with
the better and nobler principles of our nature."
"The simple beauty of Wordsworth has ever charmed me. How much of
the good and true, like precious jewels set in gold, are scattered
thickly over his pages!"
"And Byron and Shelly--can you not enjoy them?" Clarence asked, with
something of lively interest in her reply, expressed in his
countenance.
"It were but an affectation to say that I can find nothing in them
that is beautiful, nothing to please, nothing to admire. I have read
many things in the writings of these men that were exquisitely
beautiful. Many portions of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage are not
surpassed for grandeur, beauty, and force, in the English language:
and the Alastor of Shelly, is full of passages of exquisite
tenderness and almost unequalled finish of versification. But I have
never laid either of them down with feelings that I wished might
remain. They excite the mind to a feverish and unhealthy action.
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