All my experience of the world teaches me that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the safe side and the just side of a question is the generous side and the merciful side. This your mere worldly people do not seem to know, and therein make the sorriest and the vulgarest of all mistakes. “Pour être assez bon il faut l’être trop:” we all need more mercy than we deserve.
How often in this world the actions that we condemn are the result of sentiments that we love and opinions that we admire!
23.
A.—— observed in reference to some of her friends who had gone over to the Roman Catholic Church, “that the peace and comfort which they had sought and found in that mode of faith was like the drugged sleep in comparison with the natural sleep: necessary, healing perhaps, where there is disease and unrest, not otherwise.”
24.
“A poet,” says Coleridge, “ought not to pick nature’s pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to your imagination than your memory.”