To follow the general idea of the poet more closely, to apply it more generally to human nature at large, will probably reward our labour. For this purpose, we may call up before our eyes the painful, though too common picture, which the mind, where the glow of fancy triumphs over reason, and the mere impulse of sensibility supersedes reflection and settled principle, exhibits in its progress through the world.
To a mind of high wrought feelings, and heated imagination, the entrance of life is fairy ground. The objects which solicit attention, viewed through the medium of that elevated hope which youth alone inspires, shine with a brilliancy of tint not their own. The face of universal nature impresses the soul with secret influence, a delicious rapture, which gives a new charm to being, and the heart, intoxicated with its own sensations, expands with an unbounded warmth to all existence.
The desert of the world is decorated with the fleeting visions of a raised and glowing fancy, while the eye rests, with unsuspicious wonder, on the splendid prospects which the magic of early expectation calls up on every side. Filled with that strong enthusiasm which elevates whilst it deludes, the mind soon is taught to feel, that in the crowd of pleasures, which court her acceptance, something is still deficient. The finer and more exalted ideas, which stimulate incessantly to action, are still without an object worthy of all their energy. The powers of the soul languish, and are depressed, from the narrowness of the sphere in which they have yet moved, the master strings of the heart are yet untouched, the higher, stronger passions of the breast are to be rouzed before the keenness of expectation can be gratified. The charms of friendship, the delicate and intoxicating sensations which attend the first delicious emotions of the tender passion, rush on the imagination with violence, to which even the energy of youthful ambition is feeble and impotent in comparison. It seems that but a dream of pleasure, a prospect of bliss, has been presented to the view, which friendship and love alone can realize and render perfect.
The enthusiast now looks eagerly around for the objects, which a heart, yet unacquainted with the realities of things, and wound up to its highest pitch, tells him are alone able to fill that void which still aches within the bosom. In the moment of delusion, the connections are formed which are to stamp existence with happiness or misery in the extreme. A blind impulse overpowers deliberation, and the heart expands itself for the reception of inmates, whose value it has not for a moment paused to ascertain. The measure of happiness is now for a moment full. The mind, conscious that the energy of sentiment no longer languishes in inaction, feels those wishes compleated, which the vividity of imagination had before but imperfectly suggested, and yields without reserve to the novel emotions, which begin to make part of its existence. On every side the heart is cheered by the smile of affection, on every side the arms of friendship are expanded with inviting openness.
The wand of deception creates a little world around, where nothing meets the eye but the mutual efforts of emulative exertion, and the smile of beneficence exulting over its own work. And love! sacred love! who that has truly felt thy first pure, and delicious influence, but learns, even if the object be delusion, that the few moments which thy power can confer, are of more value than whole existences unanimated by thy holy and vital flame.
But this rapture is not to last. The time is to come when the prospect which depended on the influence of passion, however noble, and prejudice, however honest, shall melt away from the view. The mind, raised to a pitch of enjoyment above the reality of sublunary happiness, is in danger when the faces of things appear at once in their proper colours, of sinking to a degree equally below it. He, who in the glow of his earlier feelings, feasted his eye with increasing transport, on the gay and captivating scenery, with which the creative power of an ardent imagination had overspread the barrenness of reality, now begins to find a thousand little deceptions wear away. The insipidity and nakedness of many an object, which, at a distance, had attracted his eagerness, and roused the keenness of his passions, press so close upon him, that even prejudice and enthusiasm fail to operate the accustomed delusion.
The little vanity, so often interwoven with the best natures, receives a variety of unexpected and grievous wounds. As the mists which clouded his better judgment retire, on every side he discovers with astonishment, that a dupe to self-deception, he has, like a blind idolator, fallen prostrate before the gaudy images his own hands have formed and decorated. He perceives that he has walked in a world of his own creation, that life and man are still before him to study, and he only recovers his cooler reason to feel the loss of that mental elevation, that brilliant perception of things, which, though ideal, were so dear to him.
But perhaps this is not all, nor does the discovery which scourges vanity, and detects the harmless fallacies of judgment, alone await him. Perhaps the hour of deception has treasured up disappointment more heavy and intolerable. What are his sensations, if the truth he now begins anxiously and fearfully to learn, is brought immediately home to his own bosom, and he is doomed to feel that the exalted and glowing ideas of friendship, which first expanded his soul, shrink even in his view, and leave his breast void and desolate. When in the heart, which his earliest ideas had imaged as the residence of that sacred passion, the trial of experience detects hollowness and falsehood. When it is his bitter lot to mark the progress of alienated affection, to watch the subsidence of cooling attachment, to feel the ties connected in an honest and unsuspicious bosom with all his first enjoyments of happiness, beginning one by one to untwine. When he is to groan under the pang of the heart, which accompanies the tearing out of the thousand little habits of confidence, the innumerable kindly affections, which long custom had rooted in the soul, and made a part of the pleasantness of existence; or when he is to experience the agony of the moment, when he, in whom the bosom fondly trusted, insults the confidence he has cruelly violated, and aggravates by unfeeling mockery the distress his perfidy has excited.
But if this can be borne, perhaps the last and most fearful shock awaits him; the tenderest strings of his soul are to be more cruelly rent, and the wound, which before smarted almost to madness, rendered at once incurable. There are finer and more exalted ties, comprehending the best feelings, the dearest relations of which our natures are capable. Their severing is accompanied by sensations to which the wound of violated friendship itself is feeble, and, to minds of a certain frame, communicates that deadly stroke, to which the power of all other human evils, would have been inadequate. Such are those which unexpected treachery, from that quarter where the soul had gathered up its best and tenderest hope, must call forth, and few are the hearts, round the ruggedness of whose nature so little of the softer feelings are entwined, as not to feel the full keenness of that wound which the tearing of the ties of love inflicts, though its firmness had been inaccessible to the force of common calamities. The distress is more complicated and hopeless from its nature than any other, and the pangs of a thousand discordant passions are crouded and concentrated into that terrible moment which discovers infidelity, where the confiding heart had fondly rested all its prospects of happiness. Under other strokes of calamity the soul gains force and dignity from the greatness of unmerited misfortunes, and rouses every latent power to combat against evil fate.
In the school of distress the energies of the mind are disclosed, and, learning our own powers, we combat against the impression of adversity till we are able to contemn it. But here the sufferer finds himself as it were waked suddenly from a dream of happiness to intolerable misery; with his mind unnerved and weakened by passion, all the resources of fortitude lying dormant, every tender sensation doubly acute, every softening feeling alive. From the object of tenderness and idolatry of one, who was the world to him, he at once finds himself a deserted and despised being; he sees his best and finest feelings blasted for ever, his honest sources of pleasure and peace cut off at one stroke, with the terrible aggravation that the hand to which alone he could look for comfort and healing under the wound of calamity, instead of being stretched out to save him, itself lodges the dagger in his breast.