neatness of his hand-writing-in his care of the nice arrangement of his furniture and papers— in his hatred to see even a blot of ink upon a manuscript. All this regard to trifles was not frivolity—it was a trait of character-it belonged to the artist: without it he would not have had the habit of mind which made him what he was. We may detect the same traits in a smaller degree in Pope. With him it was less the love of order than of neatness-(a part of order.) In most poets the strongest intellectual passion is the love of beauty: and this often displays itself in the elegance of domestic detail. * fastidious in the flow of a curtain, is not frivolous-he but manifests the same taste which gives him his acumen in works of art, and polishes to an excess of smoothness the ivory mechanism of his verse. But this love of beauty in all its aspects is strongest in those whose early years have passed in the attempt to cultivate every faculty and excel in every pursuit. The students of the Universal acquire an almost intuitive instinct into the fluent harmony of things. Their early ambition opens to them a thousand sources of enjoyment. Wherever there is excellence they feel all the rapture of admiration. A landscape, a picture, a statue, a gem, a fine horse, a palace, the possessions of others--if worthy to be admired-their sense of enjoyment makes their own, while they regard;-sympathy, for the moment, appropriates them, and becomes the substitute of envy. We all flatter ourselves in our favourite tendencies, and, for my own part, I may deceive myself as to the nature of mine-but I consider that to love the Beautiful in all things, to surround ourselves, as far as our means permit, with all its evidences, not only elevates the thoughts and harmonizes the mind, but is a sort of homage that we owe to the gifts of God and the labours of man. The Beautiful is the Priest of the Benevolent. Yet, the ambition of the Universal is neither safe nor prudent, unless we cultivate some one pursuit above all the rest, making the others only its ministrants or its reliefs. If we know a 108 ON THE PASSION FOR THE UNIVERSAL. little of every thing, it will not do to write upon every thing but choosing that career of imagination or of thought for which we feel ourselves most fitted, and making this our main object, all the rest that we know or enjoy, illustrates and enlarges the scope of our chief design. It was wise in Milton, or in Homer, to pour the choicest of their multiform lore into their poems; but they might have been justiy termed superficial had they written separate essays upon each division of knowledge which they prove themselves to have cultivated. Far from complaining that life is too long, I honour the frankness of the old sage, who, living to a hundred, said his only regret was to die so soon. So vast is the mind of man, so various its faculties, so measureless the range of observation to feed and to elicit his powers, that if we had lived from the birth of the world till now, we could not have compassed a millionth part of that which our capacities, trained to the utmost, would enable us to grasp. It requires an eternity to develope all the elements of the soul! |