AND CHARACTER OF THE PASSIONS 



409 



. Mercy, and Truth, and hospitable Care, 

 And kind connubial Tenderness, are there ; 

 And Piety, with wishes placed above, 

 And sweetest Sympathy, and boundless Love. 



Goldsmith, altered. 



On the other hand, we behold issuing from the same source a variety of 

 restless and turbulent affections, which, from their characteristic violence, 

 contribute equally, perhaps, to the unhapplness of those who possess them, 

 and to the world on which they are exercised. To this tribe belong- avarice, 

 or the love of gain ; ambition, or the love of power ; pride and vanity, or the 

 love of pomp, splendour, and ostentation ; selfishness, or the love of the per- 

 son, in common language, self-love : though the whole of these being of a 

 selfish character, this latter term might, with as much propriety, apply to 

 every one of them, as that of charity, or the love of others, to each of the 

 preceding division. 



Most of these are admirably described or allegorized by Spenser in his 

 Faerie Queene, which will be found to afford a most powerful illustration of 

 the general hints here offered. I would readily bring instances in proof of 

 this remark if our time would allow : as a single example of the force of his 

 imagination, let me especially direct your attention to his entire delineation 

 of avarice or mammon, and particularly the following picturesoue representa- 

 tion of his dwelling : — 



Both roofe and floore, and walls, were all of gold, 

 Butoverijrowne with dust and old decay, 

 And hid in darkness, lliat none could behold 

 The hew thereof: for vew of clierefull day 

 Did never in that house itselfe display, 

 but a faint shadow of uncertain light : 

 Such as a lamp, whose lific does fahe away ; 

 Or as the moone, cloathed with clowdy night, 

 Does show to him that walkes in feare and sad affright.* 



Hope I have enumerated as the second main stream that emanates from 

 the passion of desire. Try the world, examine your own hearts, and you 

 will agree with me that this is its source. Hope must spring from desire, 

 and cannot exist without it: as it rises in the scale it becomes trust or con- 

 fidence ; and confidence, according to the alliance it forms with other feelings 

 or affections, gives birth to two very different families. United to a vigorous 

 judgment and an ardent imagination, it produces courage, magnanimity, 

 patience, intrepidity, enterprise ; combined with vanity or self-love, the 

 complex and mischievous brood is self-opinion, impudence, audacity, and 

 conceit. 



Hope, however, is not produced singly. It is a twin-passion, and its con- 

 genital sister is Fear. This has not been sufRciently attended to by pathogno- 

 mists ; but examine the general tenor and accompaniment of the passions as 

 they rise in your hearts, and you will find the present statement correct. 

 Hope and fear spring equally from desire — the hope of gaining the desired 

 object, and the fear of losing it. They run the same race, though with vary- 

 ing degrees of strength, and terminate their joint career in the antagonist 

 extreme points of fruition or despair ; the powers of hope growing gradu- 

 ally more intense as it approaches the former goal, and those of fear as it 

 approaches the latter. 



I have said, that at these boundaries they terminate their respective career; 

 but fear does not always cease with fruition. Uncertainty and change are 

 so strongly written on all earthly enjoyments, that even in the firmest pos- 

 session we have still some fear of losing them ; so that we can seldom say, 

 " What a man hath, why doth he yet fear for ]" though nothing is more per- 

 tinent than the opposite inquiry, " What a man hath, why doth he yet hope 

 for?" Fruition without fear is reserved for, and will be, the great prerogative 

 of a higher state of being. 



Fear, however, like hope, in its progress through life, forms other alliances 



* B. ii. canto vii. xxix. 



