Page:Sarah Sheppard - L. E. L.pdf/97



"Truly the history of most lives may be soon comprehended under three heads,—our follies, our faults and our misfortunes." "Nothing appears to me so absurd as placing our happiness in the opinion others entertain of our enjoyments, not in our own sense of them. The fear of being thought vulgar is the moral hydrophobia of the day; our weaknesses cost us a thousand times more regret and shame than our faults." "I believe genius to be acute feeling, gifted with the power of expression, and with that keen observation which early leads to reflection; and few can feel much of or think much on the various lessons of life, and not say, in the sorrowful language of the Psalmist, 'My soul is heavy within me.'" "Amid the many signs of that immortality of which our nature is so conscious, none has the certainty, the conviction, of affection; we feel that love, which is stronger and better than life, was made to outlast it. In the memory that survives the lost and the dear, we have minute evidence of a power over the grave; and religion, while it holds forth the assurance of a blessed re-union, is acknowledged and answered from our own heart. We stand beside the tomb, but we look beyond it, and sorrow is as the angel that sits at the gate of heaven." "Wordsworth is the most poetical of philosophers. Strange that a man can be so great a poet, and yet deficient in what are poetry's two grand requisites,—