when the realities of life had taught me moderation, did the passionate emotions excited by seeing them again teach how glorious were the hopes that swelled my heart while gazing on them in those early days.
‘Melancholy attends on the best joys of a merely ideal life, else I should call most happy the hours in the garden, the hours in the book closet. Here were the best French writers of the last century; for my father had been more than half a Jacobin, in the time when the French Republic cast its glare of promise over the world. Here, too, were the Queen Anne authors, his models, and the English novelists; but among them I found none that charmed me. Smollett, Fielding, and the like, deal too broadly with the coarse actualities of life. The best of their men and women — so merely natural, with the nature found every day — do not meet our hopes. Sometimes the simple picture, warm with life and the light of the common sun, cannot fail to charm, — as in the wedded love of Fielding’s Amelia, — but it is at a later day, when the mind is trained to comparison, that we learn to prize excellence like this as it deserves. Early youth is prince-like: it will bend only to “the king, my father.” Various kinds of excellence please, and leave their impression, but the most commanding, alone, is duly acknowledged at that all-exacting age.
‘Three great authors it was my fortune to meet at this important period,— all, though of unequal, yet congenial powers, — all of rich and wide, rather than aspiring genius, — all free to the extent of the horizon their eye took in, — all fresh with impulse, racy with experience; never to be lost sight of, or superseded, but always to he apprehended more and more.
