96.
“It is worthy of notice that the external expressions appropriated to certain feelings undergo change at different periods of life and in different constitutions. The child cries and sobs from fear or pain, the adult more generally from sudden grief or warm affection, or sympathy with the feeling of others.”—Dr. Holland.
Those who have been accustomed to observe the ways of children will doubt the accuracy of this remark, though from the high authority of one of the most accomplished physiologists of our time. Children cry from grief, and from sympathy with grief, at a very early age. I have seen an infant in its mother’s arms, before it could speak, begin to whimper and cry when it looked up in her face, which was disturbed and bathed with tears; and that has always appeared to me an exquisite touch of most truthful nature in Wordsworth’s description of the desolation of Margaret:—
| “Her little child Had from its mother caught the trick of grief, And sighed amid its playthings.” |
97.
“Letters,” said Sir James Mackintosh, “must not be on a subject. Lady Mary Wortley’s letters on her journey to Constantinople are an admirable book of travels, but they are not letters. A meeting to discuss a question of science is not conversation, nor are papers written to another to inform or discuss, letters. Conversation is relaxation, not business, and must never appear to be occupation;—nor must letters.”
“A masculine character may be a defect in a female, but a masculine genius is still a praise to a writer of whatever sex. The feminine graces of Madame de Sevigné’s genius are exquisitely charming, but the philosophy and eloquence of Madame de Staël are above the distinctions of sex.”