Kindle Notes & Highlights
We have this moment your letter; I am angry with you for blaspheming the sweet season of nineteen: “O lovely source Of generous foibles, youth! when opening minds Are honest as the light, lucid as air, As fostering breezes kind, as linnets gay, Tender as buds, and lavish as the spring.” You will find out I am in a course of Shenstone, which I prescribe to all minds tinctured with the uncomfortable selfishness of the present age. The only way to be good, is to retain the generous mistakes, if they are such, of nineteen through life.
You are a boy, Rivers, I am a girl; and I hope we shall remain so as long as we live.
I should have been a pretty enough kind of a poetess, if papa had not attempted to teach me how to be one, and insisted on seeing my scribbles as I went on: these same Muses are such bashful misses, they won’t bear to be looked at. Genius is like the sensitive plant; it shrinks from the touch.
believe it Shenstone’s, That those are generally the best people, whose characters have been most injured by slanderers, as we usually find that the best fruit which the birds have been pecking at.
For my own part, I think those who never have been guilty of any indiscretion, are generally people who have very little active virtue.
Every season of life has its peculiar set of ideas; and we are greatly inclined to think nobody in the right, but those who are of the same opinion with ourselves.
Lucy looked lovely, but in another style; she was a sultana in all the pride of imperial beauty: her charms awed, but Emily’s invited; her look spoke resistless command, Emily’s soft persuasion.
Temple’s vanity and tenderness were gratified to the utmost: he drank eagerly the praises which envy itself could not have refused her.
I once again congratulate you, my dear, on this triumph of tenderness: you see love, like virtue, is not only its own reward, but sometimes intitles us to other rewards too.
It should always be considered, that those who marry from love, may grow rich; but those who marry to be rich, will never love.
But it is your great fault, my dear Emily, to suppose your love a phoenix, whereas he is only an agreable, worthy, handsome fellow, comme un autre. I suppose you will be very angry; but who cares? I will be angry too.
One must do something to give a little variety to life; and nothing is so amusing, or keeps the mind so pleasingly awake, especially in the country, as the flattery of an agreable fellow. I am not, however, quite sure I shall not look abroad for a flirt, for one’s friend’s husband is almost as insipid as one’s own.
Love is a pretty invention, but, I am told, is apt to mellow into friendship; a degree of perfection at which I by no means desire Fitzgerald’s attachment for me to arrive on this side seventy.
The affections are the true sources of enjoyment: love, friendship, and, if you will allow me to anticipate, paternal tenderness, all the domestic attachments, are sweet beyond words.
You are right, my dear Bell, and I am a prating coxcomb.
