Nor need it be assumed that he was either lying or posing. With abundance of misfortune and no lack of disappointment, with outward things working pretty unanimously against him, he had enjoyed himself. In a word, he remained to the last what he had been from the first, a sentimentalist; and a sentimentalist, like a Christian, has joys that the world knows not of.
For a sentimentalist is one who, more than the majority of his fellows, cultivates and relishes his emotions. They are the chief of his living, the choicest of his crop, his “best of dearest and his only care;” as why should they not be, since they give him the most of what he most desires? Perhaps we should all be sentimentalists if we could. As it is, the number of such is relatively small, though even at that they may be said to be of various kinds, as their emotions are excited by various classes of objects.
If a man’s nature is religious, his sentimentalism, supposing him to have been born with that gift, naturally takes on a religious turn; he treasures the luxury of contrition and the raptures of assured forgiveness. Like one of the earliest and most celebrated of his kind, he can feed day and night upon tears,—having plentiful occasion, perhaps, for such a watery diet,—and be the more ecstatic in proportion as he sounds more and more deeply the unfathomable depths of his unworthiness. This, in part at least, is what is meant by the current phrase, “enjoying religion.” Devotional literature bears unbroken witness to its reality and fervors, from the Psalms of David down to the “Lives of the Saints” and the diaries of latter-day Methodism. There is nothing sweeter to the finer sorts of human nature than devotional self-effacement, whether it be sought as Nirvâna in the silence of a Buddhist’s cell, or as a gift of special grace in a tumultuous chorus of “Oh, to be nothing, nothing,” at a crowded conventicle. Small wonder that the
“willing soul would stay
In such a frame as this,
And sit and sing itself away
To everlasting bliss.”
Small wonder, surely; for, say what you will (and the remark is not half so much a truism as it sounds), one of the surest ways to be happy is to have happy feelings.
This cultivation of the religious sensibilities is probably the commonest, as at its best it is certainly the noblest form of what, meaning no offense,—though the word has been in bad company, and will never recover from the smirch,—we have called sentimentalism. But there are other forms, suited to other grades of human capacity, for all men are not saints.
There is, for example, especially in these modern times, a purely poetic susceptibility to the charms of the natural world; so that the favored subject of it, not every day, to be sure, but as often as the mood is upon him, shall experience joys ineffable,