[Sidenote: FIRST THOUGHTS AND FRIENDSHIP]
O what wisdom could I _talk_ to a YOUTH of genius and genial-heartedness! O how little could I teach! and yet, though despairing of success, I would attempt to enforce:--"Whenever you meet with a person of undoubted talents, more especially if a woman, and of apparent goodness, and yet you feel uncomfortable, and urged against your nature, and, therefore, probably in vain, to be on your guard--then take yourself to task and enquire what strong reason, moral or prudential, you have to form any intimacy or even familiarity with that person. If you after this (or moreover) detect any falsehood, or, what amounts to the same, proneness and quickness to look into, to analyse, to find out and represent evil or weakness in others (however this may be disguised even from the person's own mind by _candour_, [in] pointing out the good at the same time, by affectation of speculative truth, as psychologists, or of telling you all their thoughts as open-hearted friends), then let no reason but a strong and coercive one suffice to make you any other than as formal and distant acquaintance as circumstances will permit." And am I not now suffering, in part, for forcing my feelings into slavery to my notions, and intellectual admiration for a whole year and more with regard to ---- ? [So the MS.] If I played the hypocrite to myself, can I blame my fate that he has, at length, played the deceiver to me? Yet, God knows! I did it most virtuously!--not only without vanity or any self-interest of however subtle a nature, but from humility and a true delight in finding excellence of any kind, and a disposition to fall prostrate before it.
To understand fully the mechanism, in order fully to feel the incomparable excellence of Milton's metre, we must make four tables, or a fourfold compartment, the first for the feet, single and composite, for which the whole twenty-six feet of the ancients will be found necessary; the second to note the construction of the feet, whether from different or from single words--for who does not perceive the difference to the ear between--
"To love or not: in this we stand or fall"--
yet both lines are composed of five iambics? The third, of the strength and position, the concentration or diffusion of the _emphasis_. Fourth, the length and position of the pauses. Then compare his narrative with the harangues. I have not noticed the ellipses, because they either do not affect the rhythm, or are not ellipses, but are comprehended in the feet.