James Mill had focused his energies relentlessly on developing his son’s analytical and critical powers, and had seen no place for poetry in that scheme. But what the younger Mill in his misery came to see was the disturbing truth that “the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings…when no other mental habit is cultivated, and the analysing spirit remains without its natural complements and correctives.” And the wearing away of feelings was a great and complex loss.
