

1827.] On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth. 269 



reflecting the universe, and the next, shook to air 1 To see the golden sun 

 and the azure sky, the outstretched ocean, to walk upon the green earth, 

 and to be lord of a thousand creatures, to look down giddy precipices or 

 over distant flowery vales, to see the world spread out under one's ringer 

 in a map, to bring the stars near, to view the smallest insects in a micro- 

 scope, to read history, and witness the revolutions of empires and the 

 succession of generations, to hear of the glory of Sidon and Tyre, of 

 Babylon and Susa, as of a faded pageant, and to say all these were, and 

 are now nothing, to think that we exist in such a point of time, and in 

 such a corner of space, to be at once spectators and a part of the moving 

 scene, to watch the return of the seasons, of spring and autumn, to hear 



" The stockdove plain amid the forest deep, 



That drowsy rustles to the sighing gale" 



to traverse desert wildernesses, to listen to the midnight choir, to visit 

 lighted halls, or plunge into the dungeon's gloom, or sit in crowded 

 theatres and see life itself mocked, to feel heat and cold, pleasure and pain, 

 right and wrong, truth and falsehood, to study the works of art and refine 

 the sense of beauty to agony, to worship fame and to dream of immor- 

 tality, to have read Shakspeare and belong to the same species as Sir 

 Isaac Newton ;* to be and to do all this, and then in a moment to be 



* Lady Wortley Montague says, in one of her letters, that "she would much rather be a 

 rich cffendi, with all his ignorance, than Sir Isaac Newton, with all his knowledge/' 

 This was not perhaps an impolitic choice, as she had a better chance of becoming one 

 than the other, there being many rich effendis to one Sir Isaac Newton. The wish was 

 not a very intellectual one. The same petulance of rank and sex breaks out every where 

 in these " Letters.'' She is constantly reducing the poets or philosophers who have the 

 misfortune of her acquaintance, to the figure they might make at her Ladyship's levee or 

 toilette, not considering that the public mind does not sympathize with this process of a 

 fastidious imagination. In the same spirit, she declares of Pope and Swift, that " had it 

 not been for the good-nature of mankind, these .two superior beings were entitled, by 

 their birth and hereditary fortune, to be only a couple of link-boys." Gulliver's Travels, 

 and the Rape of the Lock, go for nothing in this critical estimate, and the world raised the 

 authors to the rank of superior beings, in spite of their disadvantages of birth and fortune, 

 out of pure good-nature ! So, again, she says of Richardson, that he had never got be- 

 yond the servants' hall, and was utterly unfit to describe the manners of people of quality ; 

 till in the capricious workings of her vanity, she persuades herself that Clarissa is very 

 like what she was at her age, and that Sir Thomas and Lady Grand ison strongly re- 

 sembled what she had heard of her mother and remembered of her father. It is one 

 of the beauties and advantages of literature, that it is the means of abstracting the mind 

 from the narrowness of local and personal prejudices, and of enabling us to judge of 

 truth and excellence by their inherent merits alone. Woe be to the pen that would undo 

 this fine illusion (the only reality), and teach us to regulate our notions of genius and 

 virtue by the circumstances in which they happen to be placed ! You would not expect a 

 person whom you saw in a servant's hall, or behind a counter, to write Clarissa ; but 

 after he had written the work, to pre-judge it from the situation of the writer, is an un- 

 pardonable piece of injustice and folly. His merit could only be the greater from the 

 contrast. If literature is an elegant accomplishment, which none but persons of birth 

 and fashion should be allowed to excel in, or to exercise with advantage to the public, let 

 them by all means take upon them the ,t ask of enlightening and refining mankind : if they 

 decline this responsibility as too heavy for their shoulders, let those who do the drudgery 

 in their stead, however inadequately, for want of their polite example, receive the meed 

 that is their due, and not be treated as low pretenders who have encroached on the pro- 

 vince of their betters. Suppose Richardson to have been acquainted with the great man's 

 steward, or valet, instead of the great man himself, I will venture to say that there was 

 more difference between him who lived in an ideal world, and had the genius and felicity 

 to open that world to others, and his friend the steward, than between the lacquey 

 and the mere lord, or between those who lived in different rooms of the same house, 

 who dined on the same luxuries at different tables, who rode outside or inside of the 

 ' same coach, and were proud of wearing or of bestowing the same tawdry livery. If the 



