affection, all magnanimous sympathies and hopes, seem to me to be
engaged in as miserable a business as those African hunters who train
falcons to dart on gazelles, and pick out their beautiful eyes. The
illusiveness of life that results from teeming love and trust is as a
mist of gold sifted into the atmosphere, through which all the
objects of our regard loom, colossal and glittering. As we advance in
years, we should indeed learn to recognize, and make allowance for,
this refraction and these tints, but without ceasing to enjoy the
beautiful aggrandizement they bestow. When there is danger that a
character will melt into a mere mush of ungirt feelings, the
astringent and bracing use of satire is fit. The application of a
fleecing nonchalance or of a jibing scorn to a soul of strong and
ardent sentiment, is unfit. A certain divinity should hedge every
manifestation of trustful affection, even though it be misjudged. It
is for the most part profane to scoff an overstretched or misplaced
admiration: it calls rather for a considerate instruction which shall
tenderly set it right.

It is insipidity of the feelings that gives rise to sentimentality,
as, when the tongue is disordered, we are always trying it. The cure
of that insipidity is to direct upon it the energy of an objective
earnestness, a current of positive faith and love. No negative
treatment, of indifference or of contempt, can avail. Sentimentality,
frozen under the cutting breath of derision, resembles that loathsome
ice-lake of poison in the Scandinavian hell. Sentimentality, fired by
the glorious contagion of self-forgetful admiration and loyalty, is
raised into sentiment, or even divinized into enthusiasm. The author
will devote his best endeavor to do justice to both sides of the
subject treated in his book, taking warning from the partisans who
fix an exclusive attention on that aspect of it which they
respectively prefer. He will try to set down such true thoughts in
such a pure spirit, as, instead of drying up in his readers the
springs of generous faith, and disenchanting them of all romantic
expectation, will leave them at the end with a higher estimate of the
worth of human nature and of the sweetness of human life.

Ever so correct a perception of what we despise and detest leaves our
moral rank undetermined; but the measure of what we love and admire
is the measure of our own worth. It should never be forgotten, that
the most delicate and endu