Page:Sarah Sheppard - L. E. L.pdf/98

 imagination and passion! He describes what he has seen, and beautifully, because he is impressed with the beauty before his eyes. He creates nothing. I cannot recal one fine simile. He has often expressions of touching feeling; he is often melancholy, often tender, but with more of sympathy than energy. He never fills the atmosphere with music, lapping us in Elysium, like Moore; he never makes his readers fairly forget their very identity, like Scott; he never startles us with the depths of our secret thoughts; he never brings to our remembrance all that our own existence has had of poetry or passion, the earnestness of early hope, the bitterness of after-disappointment, like Byron; but he sits by the fireside, or wanders through the fields, and calls from their daily affections and sympathies foundations whereon to erect a scheme of the widest benevolence. He looks forth on the beautiful scenery amid which he has dwelt, and links with it a thousand ties of the human loveliness of thought. I would say his excellence is the moral sublime." "Strange it is, that people, unless in the way of ostentation, never value the blessings they possess!** The love which is born in childhood—an instinct deepening into a principle—retains to the end something of the freshness belonging to the hour of its birth; the amusement partaken, the trifling quarrel made up, the sorrows shared together, the punishment in which all were involved, the plans for the future, so fairy-tale like and so false, in which all indulged. What love makes allowances like household love? What takes an interest in small sorrows and small successes like household love? God forgive those who turn the household altar to a place of strife! Domestic dissension is the sacrilege of the heart."