Every feeling has its positive and its negative, and these in almost infinitely varying degrees: pleasure, displeasure; appreciation, depreciation; anticipation, foreboding; admiration, contempt; assurance, hesitancy; diffidence, complacency; and so on through many more delicate _nuances_ of feeling that are nameable, and yet more so delicate that language is too rough an instrument for their expression. It will be observed that all these feelings have certain conditions in common; none are distinctly moral or immoral; they have not arrived at the stage of definite thought; they exist vaguely in what would appear to be a semi-conscious intellectual region. Why then need we concern ourselves about this little known tract of that _terra incognita_ which we call human nature? This “why” is the question of the prose-philosopher--our poet sees deeper. In one of the most exquisitely discriminating passages in the whole field of poetry, he speaks of feelings of unremembered pleasure as having no slight or trivial influence on a good man’s life, as the source of “little nameless unremembered acts of kindness and of love.” Even the feeling of “_unremembered_ pleasure”--for it is possible to have the spring of association touched so lightly that one recovers the feeling of former pleasure without recovering the sensation, or the image which produced the sensation, but merely just the vague feeling of the pleasure, as when one hears the word ‘Lohengrin’ and does not wait, as it were, to recover the sensation of musical delight, but just catches a waft of the pleasure which the sensation brought--intangible, indefinite as they are, produce that glow of the heart which warms a good man to “acts of kindness and of love,” as little, as nameless, and as unremembered as the feelings out of which they spring. Nameless as they are, our poet does not hesitate to rank these trifling acts as the “best portion of a good man’s life.” But it is only out of the good man’s heart that these good issues come, because, as we have said, the feelings are not in themselves moral, they act upon that which is there, and the point brought before us is, that the influence of the feelings is equally powerful and indirect. Why should the recollection of Tintern Abbey cause a good man to do some little kind thing? We can only give the ultimate answer that “God has made us so,” that a feeling of even unremembered pleasure prompts the good man to give forth out of the good treasure of his heart in kindness and in love. We have but to think of the outcome of feelings at the negative pole to convince us of the nice exactitude of the poet’s psychology. We are not exactly displeased, but unpleased, dull, not quickened by any feeling of pleasure: let us ask ourselves if, in this condition of our feelings, we are prompted to any outpouring of love and kindness upon our neighbours. Here is another aspect of the feelings of very great importance to us who have the education of children.