*
It is in virtue of his own desires and curiosities that any
man continues to exist with even patience, that he is
charmed by the look of things and people, and that he
wakens every morning with a renewed appetite for work and
pleasure. Desire and curiosity are the two eyes through
which he sees the world in the most enchanted colours: it
is they that make women beautiful or fossils interesting:
and the man may squander his estate and come to beggary,
but if he keeps these two amulets he is still rich in the
possibilities of pleasure.
*
To look on the happy side of nature is common, in their
hours, to all created things. Some are vocal under a good
influence, are pleasing whenever they are pleased, and hand
on their happiness to others, as a child who, looking upon
lovely things, looks lovely. Some leap to the strains with
unapt foot, and make a halting figure in the universal
dance. And some, like sour spectators at the play, receive
the music into their hearts with an unmoved countenance,
and walk like strangers through the general rejoicing. But
let him feign never so carefully, there is not a man but
has his pulses shaken when Pan trolls out a stave of
ecstasy and sets the world a-singing.
*
Science writes of the world as if with the cold finger of a
starfish; it is all true; but what is it when compared to
the reality of which it discourses? where hearts beat high
in April, and death strikes, and hills totter in the
earthquake, and there is a glamour over all the objects of
sight, and a thrill in all noises for the ear, and Romance
herself has made her dwelling among men? So we come back
to the old myth, and hear the goat-footed piper making the
music which is itself the charm and terror of things; and
when a glen invites our visiting footsteps, fancy that Pan
leads us thither with a gracious tremolo; or when our
hearts quail at the thunder of the cataract, tell ourselves
that he has stamped his hoof in the nigh thicket.
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