Reason may be the lever, but sentiment
gives you the fulcrum and the place to stand on if you want to move the
world. Even "sentimentality," which is sentiment overdone, is better
than that affectation of superiority to human weakness which is only
tolerable as one of the stage properties of full-blown dandyism, and is,
at best, but half-blown cynicism; which participle and noun you can
translate, if you happen to remember the derivation of the last of them,
by a single familiar word. There is a great deal of false sentiment in
the world, as there is of bad logic and erroneous doctrine; but--it is
very much less disagreeable to hear a young poet overdo his emotions, or
even deceive himself about them, than to hear a caustic-epithet flinger
repeating such words as "sentimentality" and "entusymusy,"--one of the
least admirable of Lord Byron's bequests to our language,--for the
purpose of ridiculing him into silence. An overdressed woman is not so
pleasing as she might be, but at any rate she is better than the oil of
vitriol squirter, whose profession it is to teach young ladies to avoid
vanity by spoiling their showy silks and satins.
The Lady was the first of our party who was invited to look through the
equatorial. Perhaps this world had proved so hard to her that she was
pained to think that other worlds existed, to be homes of suffering and
sorrow.
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