CHAPTER I

1797-1801

"O Youth! for years so many and sweet,
'Tis known, that Thou and I were one."

S. T. C.

"We should judge of absent things by the absent. Objects which are present are apt to produce perceptions too strong to be impartially compared with those recalled only by the memory."Sir J. Stewart.

True! and O how often the very opposite is true likewise, namely, that the objects of memory are, often, so dear and vivid, that present things are injured by being compared with them, vivid from dearness!

Love, a myrtle wand, is transformed by the Aaron touch of jealousy into a serpent so vast as to swallow up every other stinging woe, and makes us mourn the exchange.

Love that soothes misfortune and buoys up to virtue—the pillow of sorrows, the wings of virtue.

Disappointed love not uncommonly causes misogyny, even as extreme thirst is supposed to be the cause of hydrophobia.

Love transforms the soul into a conformity with the object loved.

From the narrow path of virtue Pleasure leads us to more flowery fields, and there Pain meets and chides our wandering. Of how many pleasures, of what lasting happiness, is Pain the parent and Woe the womb!

Real pain can alone cure us of imaginary ills. We feel a thousand miseries till we are lucky enough to feel misery.

Misfortunes prepare the heart for the enjoyment of happiness in a better state. The life of a religious benevolent man is an April day. His pains and sorrows [what are they but] the fertilising rain? The sunshine blends with every shower, and look! how full and lovely it lies on yonder hill!

Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like playthings by the bedside of a child deadly sick.

Human happiness, like the aloe, is a flower of slow growth.

What we must do let us love to do. It is a noble chymistry that turns necessity into pleasure.

1. The first smile—what kind ofreason it displays. The first smile after sickness.

2. Asleep with the polyanthus held fast in its hand, its bells dropping over the rosy face.

3. Stretching after the stars.

4. Seen asleep by the light of glowworms.

5. Sports of infants; their excessive activity, the means being the end. Nature, how lovely a school-mistress!... Children at houses of industry.

6. Infant beholding its new-born sister.

7. Kissing itself in the looking-glass.

8. The Lapland infant seeing the sun.

9. An infant's prayer on its mother's lap. Mother directing a baby's hand. (Hartley's"love to Papa," scrawls pothooks and reads what he meant by them.)