But what tossings and throbbings and anguish the patient endures we have no wish to depict. The one thing worth noticing is this, that although the sufferer is perfectly convinced that the whole world is, or ought to be, as wretched as himself, he has not, in all his compositions, one jot of compassion left--not one jot for any species of misery, not even that which resembles and re-echoes his own. Some calamities are said to teach us sympathy with the calamities of others--so sings Virgil, we remember--but this misery has the property of hardening the heart against any human sympathy whatever. One of these imaginary misanthropes cannot even tolerate the lamentations of another. You may listen to his outcries and denunciations if you will, but if, in your turn, you wish to bellow ever so little, you must go into the next field--go many fields off. Very curious is the hardness of heart bred out of a morbid passion of meditative discontent. Why does he _live_? why does he continue his miserable existence? is the only reflection which the sufferings of another man excite in our moody philosopher. For every lamenting wretch he has daggers, bowels of poison--no pity. If mankind could commit one simultaneous, universal act of suicide, it would be a most sublime deed--perhaps the only real act of wisdom and sublimity mankind has it in its power to perform. Well, this absurd and horrible, this very ridiculous and most afflictive of morbid conditions, our clear-minded authoress never seems to have passed through. She never gave the beggar a shilling, muttering some advice to buy a rope withal. If the money were spent in that way, and more were wanted, he should have _two_. She never lent her friend a brace of pistols by way of consolation for his losses. Or, since ladies, even when misanthropically disposed, have seldom anything to do with pistols, she never wove or platted for him a silken bowstring, and sent it in a perfumed envelope, with compliments and instructions how to use it. All this chapter of mental history has been a sealed book to her. We, for our parts, have no desire to open or to read further in it. The happiest step made by those whose temper and mode of thinking were likely to be formed by practical literature, was when they deserted Byron for Wordsworth, the _Childe Harold_ for the _Excursion_. If we were to indulge in "Recollections" of our own, we should have much to say--and to say with pleasure--of this second epoch, this Wordsworthian era. A very beautiful _Flora_ appeared upon the earth during this period. Life smiled again; nature and humanity were no longer divorced; one might love the solitude and beauty of hill and valley, lake and river, without hating man, or breathing any other sentiment than that of gratitude to Him who gave this life, who gave this nature.