Page:Romance & Reality 2.pdf/174

172 misemployed, require a definition when properly applied. Sentiment is the poetry of feeling. Feeling weeps over the grave of the beloved—sentiment weeps, and plants the early flower and the green tree, to weep too. The truth is, Mr. Trevyllian was deficient in one faculty—that of the imagination.

He would have said, "Why, what should it be but a simple and pretty flower?" Now, an imaginative individual finds out likenesses to human thoughts, connects its soon perishing with the speedy decay of hopes that open when the heart has a spring like the year; or some loved face has left on it the memory of its smile, and hence its green birth is "a divinely haunted place." The same lights and shadows which imagination flings over the primrose, it flings also over every other reality in life; and it may be doubted whether these were not "hidden mysteries" to Mr. Trevyllian. He was luxurious in his habits, and fastidious in his tastes, upon principle. He held that enjoyment was a duty owed to