It is long before we discover that far richer
feeling is the result of a regard bent on the profound and the pure.
Hence the chief harm the poems did Alec, consisted in the rousing of
his strongest feelings towards imaginary objects of inferior
excellence, with the necessary result of a tendency to measure the
worth 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.
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