Читать книгу Reveries of a Bachelor; or, A Book of the Heart онлайн

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If you are in a genial, careless mood, who is better than such extemporizers of feeling and nature—good-hearted fellows—as Sterne and Fielding?

And then, again, there are Milton and Isaiah, to lift up one’s soul until it touches cloud-land, and you wander with their guidance, on swift feet, to the very gates of heaven.

But this sparkling sensibility to one struggling under infirmity, or with grief or poverty, is very dreadful. The soul is too nicely and keenly hinged to be wrenched without mischief. How it shrinks, like a hurt child, from all that is vulgar, harsh and crude! Alas, for such a man!—he will be buffeted, from beginning to end; his life will be a sea of troubles. The poor victim of his own quick spirit he wanders with a great shield of doubt hung before him, so that none, not even friends, can see the goodness of such kindly qualities as belong to him. Poverty, if it comes upon him, he wrestles with in secret, with strong, frenzied struggles. He wraps his scant clothes about him to keep him from the cold; and eyes the world, as if every creature in it was breathing chill blasts at him, from every opened mouth. He threads the crowded ways of the city, proud in his griefs, vain in his weakness, not stopping to do good. Bulwer, in the New Timon, has painted in a pair of stinging Pope-like lines, this feeling in a woman: