"I know them well," replied Burrel; "but I do not like them so much as you do."
"Nay, nay!" said Blanche Delaware. "I have said nothing in their favour. What makes you believe I admire them more than yourself?"
"Simply because every body of taste must esteem them highly," replied Burrel; "and women who do esteem them, will always esteem them more than men can do. A woman's heart and mind, Miss Delaware, by the comparative freshness which it retains more or less through life, can appreciate the gentle, the sweet, and the simple, better than a man's; and thus, while the mightier and more majestic beauties of Wordsworth's muse affect your sex equally with ours, the softer and finer shades of feeling--the touches of artless nature and simplicity, which appear almost weak to us, have all their full effect to you."
"But if you own that, and feel that," said Blanche Delaware, "why cannot you admire the same beauties?"
"For this reason," replied Burrel, "man's mental taste, like his corporeal power of tasting, gets corrupted, or rather paralyzed, in his progress through the world, by the various stimulants he applies to it. He drinks his bottle of strong and heady wine, which gradually loses its effect, and he takes more, till at length nothing will satisfy him but cayenne pepper."
"But if he appreciates gentler pleasures," said Captain Delaware, "he must be able in some degree to enjoy them."
"Of course," replied Burrel, "there are moments when the cool and pleasant juice of a peach, or the simple refreshment of a glass of lemonade, will be delightful; and in such moments it is, that he feels he has stimulated away a sense, and a delightful one. Thus with poetry, and literature in general, the mind, by reading a great many things it would be better without, loses its relish for every thing that does not excite and heat the imagination--which is neither more nor less than the mental palate;--and though there are moments when the heart, softened and at ease, finds joys in all the sweet simplicity which would have charmed it for ever in an unsophisticated state, yet still it returns to cayenne pepper, and only remembers the other feelings, as of pleasures lost for ever. With regard to Wordsworth's poetry, perhaps no one ever did him more injustice than I did once. With a very superficial knowledge of his works, I fancied that I despised them all; and it was only from being bored about them by his admirers, that I determined to read them every line, that I might hate them with the more accuracy."
Blanche Delaware smiled, and her father spoke, perhaps, the feelings of both. "We have found you out, Mr. Burrel," he said; "and understand your turn for satirizing yourself."
"I am not doing so now, I can assure you," replied Burrel. "What I state is exactly the fact. I sat down to read Wordsworth's works, with a determination to dislike them, and I succeeded in one or two poems, which have been cried up to the skies; but, as I went on, I found so often a majestic spirit of poetical philosophy, clothing itself in the full sublime of simplicity, that I felt reproved and abashed, and I read again with a better design. In doing so, though I still felt that there was much amidst all the splendour that I could neither like nor admire, yet I perceived how and why others might, and would, find great beauties and infinite sweetness in that which palled upon my taste; and I perceived, also, that the fault lay in me far more than in the poetry. The beauties I felt more than ever, and some of the smaller pieces, I am convinced, will live for ages, with the works of Shakspeare and Milton."
"They will, indeed," said Sir Sidney Delaware, "as long as there is taste in man. Nevertheless, the poet--who is perhaps as great a philosopher, too, as ever lived--has sacrificed, like many philosophers, an immense gift of genius to a false hypothesis in regard to his art; and has consequently systematically poured forth more trash than perhaps any man living. His poems, collected, always put me in mind of an account I have somewhere read of the diamond mines of Golconda, where inestimable jewels were found mingled with masses of soft mud. But you have long done breakfast, Mr. Burrel. Come, Blanche, I am going to take Mr. Burrel to the terrace, and descant most dully on all the antiquities of the house. Let us have your company, my love; for we shall meet with so many old things, it may be as well to have something young to relieve them!"