The Chinese call the monsoon whirlwind, when more than usually fierce, the elephant. This is a fine image--a mad wounded war-elephant.
The poor oppressed Amboynese, who bear with patience the extirpation of their clove and nutmeg trees, in their fields and native woods, and the cruel taxes on sugar, their staff of life, will yet, at once and universally, rise up in rebellion and prepare to destroy in despair all and everything, themselves included, if any attempt is made to destroy any individual's Tatanaman, the clove-tree which each Amboynese plants at the birth of each of his children. Very affecting!
The man of genius places things in a new light. This trivial phrase better expresses the appropriate effects of genius than Pope's celebrated distich--
"What oft was thought but ne'er so well exprest."
It has been thought distinctly, but only possessed, as it were, unpacked and unsorted. The poet not only displays what, though often seen in its unfolded mass, had never been opened out, but he likewise adds something, namely, light and relations. Who has not seen a rose, or sprig of jasmine or myrtle? But behold those same flowers in a posy or flower-pot, painted by a man of genius, or assorted by the hand of a woman of fine taste and instinctive sense of beauty!
To find our happiness incomplete without the happiness of some other given person or persons is the definition of affection in general, and applies equally to friendship, to the parental and to the conjugal relations. But what is love? Love as it may subsist between two persons of different senses? This--and what more than this? The mutual dependence of their happiness, each on that of the other, each being at once cause and effect. You, therefore, I--I, therefore you. The sense of this reciprocity of well-being, is that which first stamps and legitimates the name of happiness in all the other advantages and favourable accidents of nature, or fortune, without which they would change their essence and become like the curse of Tantalus, insulting remembrances of misery, of that most unquiet of all miseries, means of happiness blasted and transformed by incompleteness, nay, by the loss of the sole organ through which we could enjoy them.