What a creative power has an affectionate heart! There are
beings who cannot live without loving, as poets love; and who feel
the electric spark of genius, wherever it awakens sentiment or
grace. Maria had often thought, when disciplining her wayward
heart, "that to charm, was to be virtuous." "They who make me wish
to appear the most amiable and good in their eyes, must possess in
a degree," she would exclaim, "the graces and virtues they call
into action."
She took up a book on the powers of the human mind; but, her
attention strayed from cold arguments on the nature of what she
felt, while she was feeling, and she snapt the chain of the theory
to read Dryden's Guiscard and Sigismunda.
Maria, in the course of the ensuing day, returned some of the
books, with the hope of getting others--and more marginal notes.
Thus shut out from human intercourse, and compelled to view nothing
but the prison of vexed spirits, to meet a wretch in the same
situation, was more surely to find a friend, than to imagine a
countryman one, in a strange land, where the human voice conveys
no information to the eager ear.
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