Individuals of this character are the little chroniclers of the day. They are the little historians of the little events transpiring around them. They form a sort of cement for society—they furnish a species of connecting link between the past and the present. They embalm for a few years the memory of those who would otherwise have passed away and been forgotten. The smallest and greatest of the human race love fame. The temple at Ephesus was burnt down for fame, and it is the character which I have just been describing that gives a little fame to classes that would never have been heard of, and in old age such a being can tell the young around him of the deeds and achievements of their sires and grandsires and great grandsires. Such individuals as these are remarkable for very exact memories, and as they are never persons of much comprehension of mind, it has been generally imagined that good memories are rarely accompanied with good understandings. Hence the couplet of Pope,
| "When in the mind the Memory prevails, The more solid power of the understanding fails." |
This however is but one form which the memory assumes, and consequently we must draw no enlarged inferences from it. Women have generally much more of this memory than men. The sphere in which they move, the occupations in which they are engaged, the lesser necessity on their part for original thought and action of mind, all tend to produce this character.
The second class of mind, according to the division made above, is the poetic or sentimental—that species of mind which associates by the more distant analogies and resemblances, or contrast in objects, in their effects, or in the emotions which they excite. Imagination is the essence of such a mind as this. It enables us to see resemblances and contrasts where others see none. "How many are there," says Doct. Brown, "who have seen an old oak, half leafless amid the younger trees of the forest, and who are capable of remembering it when they think of the forest itself, or of events that happened there! But it is to the mind of Lucan that it rises by analogy, to the conception of a veteran chief:
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'Stat magni nominis umbra Qualis frugifero quercus sublimis in agro.'" |
What a scene for the enjoyment of love and friendship—what a group of delightful and beautiful images has Virgil brought together in two lines of his Eclogues!
| "Hic gelidi fontes, hic mollia prata Lycori, Hic nemus: hic ipso tecum consumerer oevo." |
Many have seen a starling in a cage, but it is a Sterne who in imagination sees a captive in his dungeon, half wasted away with long expectation and confinement. Pale and feverish, the western breeze for thirty years had not fanned his blood. He sees him sitting upon the ground in the farthest corner, on a little straw, alternately his chair and bed, with a little calendar of small sticks, and etching with a rusty nail another day of misery to add to the heap.
When this species of association is dwelt on too much the individual is characterized by a sort of sickly, morbid sentimentality, which is both highly unnatural, and very disagreeable. He is ever trying to display the effects of what Mary Woolstonecraft calls a "pumped up passion." Those writers whom Dr. Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments calls whining philosophers, possess minds of this order. They can never see happiness in one part of the world but to reflect on the misery which is experienced in another. Is our country at peace, happy and prosperous, than rejoice not at it, for there are millions of human beings suffering in China, Japan, Hindostan, and Bengal. Thompson's writings are deeply imbued with this whining philosophy, and so perhaps are Cowper's, as was to be expected from the state of his mind.