NORTH.
This is a fact of our nature too well understood by those whose mind labours with any store of fearful or bitter recollection, into which they dread to look. The approach to some place hideous to the memory produces the shivering of horror before it is beheld; and even within the spirit, in like manner, the approach to those dark places of thought where unsoothed sorrows lie buried, startles the mind, and warns it to turn the steps of thought another way.
TALBOYS.
The feeling that “that way madness lies;” and the recoiling from it, through a forefeeling of the pain which lies in the thoughts that might arise, is common to all strong passion that has held long possession of the mind.
NORTH.
A similar state is known in these imitations of passion, the works of art;—Music has power over us, not by the feelings which it produces distinctly in the mind, but by those many deep and passionate feelings which it barely touches, and of which it raises up, therefore, from moment to moment, obscure and undefined anticipations. In Painting, the Imagination is most powerfully excited often not by what is shown, but by what is dimly indicated. What is shown exhausts and limits the feelings that belong to it; what is indicated merely, opens up an insight into a whole world of feelings inexhaustible and illimitable.
SEWARD.
Such, indeed, is the nature of our mind; and these are examples of a general principle of thought and feeling.
NORTH.
This capacity of the Mind to be affected in slighter degree, but in similar manner, by anticipated feeling, is to be noticed in respect to all its more fixed and important emotions. It enters as a great element into all its moral judgments. The judgment of right or wrong is quick and decisive, but is rather unfrequently attended with very strong emotion. Those strongest emotions belong to rare occurrences; for the greater part of life is calm. But they have been felt, nevertheless, at times; so that the soul distinctly knows what is its emotion of moral abhorrence, and what its emotion of moral veneration. When lesser occasions arise, which do not put its feeling to the proof, it still is affected by a half-remembrance of what those feelings have been: a slighter emotion comes over it—an apprehension of that emotion which would be felt in strength, if it could be given way to. Thus even the very name of crimes affects the mind with a dim horror, though the Imagination is still remote from picturing to itself anything of the reality of acting them. Whatever great conceptions, then, are so linked in actual Nature with our moral emotions, that under the passionate strength of these emotions they must arise, some slight shadow of the same conceptions, some touch of the feelings which they are able to call up, will be present to the mind whenever it is morally moved.