of the passions themselves by their strength alone, and not by
their character--by their degree, and not by their kind. That they were
the forge-bellows, supplying the blast of the imagination to the fire
of love in which his life had begun to be remodelled, is not to be
counted among their injurious influences.

He had never hitherto meddled with his own thoughts or feelings--had
lived an external life to the most of his ability. Now, through falling
in love, and reading Byron, he began to know the existence of a world
of feeling, if not of thought; while his attempts at conversation with
the girls had a condensing if not crystallizing influence upon the
merely vaporous sensations which the poetry produced. All that was
wanted to give full force to the other influences in adding its own,
was the presence of the sultry evenings of summer, with the thunder
gathering in the dusky air. The cold days and nights of winter were now
swathing that brain, through whose aerial regions the clouds of
passion, driven on many shifting and opposing winds, were hurrying
along to meet in human thunder and human rain.

I will not weary my readers with the talk of three young people
enamoured of Byron. Of course the feelings the girls had about him
differed materially from those of Alec; so that a great many of the
replies and utterances met like unskilful tilters, whose staves passed
wide. In neither was the admiration much more than an uneasy delight in
the vivid though indistinct images of pleasure raised by the magic of
that "physical force of words" in which Byron excels all other English
poets, and in virtue of which, I presume, the French persist in
regarding Byron as our greatest poet, and in supposing that we agree
with them.

Alec gained considerably with Kate from becoming able to talk about her
favourite author, while she appeared to him more beautiful than
ever--the changes in the conversation constantly bringing out new
phases on her changeful countenance. He began to discover now what I
have already ventured to call the _fluidity_ of her expression; for he
was almost startled every time he saw her, by finding her different
from what he had expected to find her. Jean Paul somewhere makes a
lamentation over the fact that girls will never meet you in the morning
with the same friendliness with which they parted from you the night
before. But this was not the kind of change Alec found. She behaved
with perfect evenness to hi