750 PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION J. 
very extraordinary system of education which had been im- 
posed upon him by his father—an education wholly intel- 
lectual and non-emotional, and one tending to develop in 
an abnormal degree the power and the habit of analysis. 
What concerns us here is Mill’s Second Lesson, and here 
IT must allow him to speak for himself :— 
“The other important change which my opinions at this 
time underwent was that I, for the first time, gave its proper 
place among the prime necessities of human well-being, to 
the internal culture of the individual. I ceased to attach 
almost exclusive importance to the ordering of outward 
circumstances, and the training of the human being for 
speculation and action. I had now learned by experience 
that the passive susceptibilities needed to be cultivated as 
well as the active capacities, and required to be nourished 
and enriched as well as guided.” He goes on to say that he 
‘“never turned recreant to intellectual culture,’ but he 
realised that the power and practice of analysis, though an 
essential condition of improvement, had consequences which 
required to be corrected by joiniig other kinds of cultiva- 
tion with it. “‘The cultivation of the feelings,” he says, 
“became one of the cardinal points of my ethical and philo- 
sophical creed.” Very significant for us is the sentence 
which follows:—-‘‘I now began to find meaning in the 
things which I had read and heard about the importance of 
poetry and art as instruments of human culture.” 
When Mill had thus been painfully convinced of the 
necessity of the culture of the feelings, he turned to music 
and poetry. His experience in music is interesting and 
amusing, and is often quoted, but does not concern us here. 
The first permanent relief he obtained. he tells us, from 
reading Wordsworth. He had tried Byron at the worst 
period of his depression, and got no good from him, “ but 
the reverse.’ | Wordsworth exactly suited his condition. 
This poet had himself passed through a very similar crisis, 
as recorded in the “ Ode on Intimations of Immortality in 
Early Childhood,” and also Wordsworth addressed himself 
to what had always been one of the strongest of Muill’s 
pleasurable susceptibilities—“ the love of rural objects and 
natural scenery.” But this was not the chief benefit which 
Mill derived: from him. ‘‘ What made Wordsworth’s poems 
a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed 
not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling and of 
thought coloured by feeling under the excitement of beauty. 
They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings which I 
was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source 
