If you should ever happen to feel for one day an extraordinary
lightness and exhilaration of spirits, you will know that you must
pay for all this the price of corresponding depression--the hot fit
must be counterbalanced by the cold. Let us thank God that there
are beliefs and sentiments as to which the pendulum does not swing,
though even in these I have known it do so. I have known the young
girl who appeared thoroughly good and pious, who devoted herself
to works of charity, and (with even an over-scrupulous spirit)
eschewed vain company: and who by and bye learned to laugh at all
serious things, and ran into the utmost extremes of giddiness and
extravagant gaiety. And not merely should all of us be thankful if
we feel that in regard to the gravest sentiments and beliefs our
mind and heart remain year after year at the same fixed point:
I think we should be thankful if we find that as regards our
favourite books and authors our taste remains unchanged; that the
calm judgment of our middle age approves the preferences of ten
years since, and that these gather strength as time gives them the
witchery of old remembrances and associations. You enthusiastically
admired Byron once, you estimate him very differently now. You once
thought Festus finer than Paradise Loft, but you have swung away
from that. But for a good many years you have held by Wordsworth,
Shakspeare, and Tennyson, and this taste you are not likely to
outgrow. It is very curious to look over a volume which we once
thought magnificent, enthralling, incomparable, and to wonder
how on earth we ever cared for that stilted rubbish. No doubt the
pendulum swings quite as decidedly to your estimate of yourself
as to your estimate of any one else. It would be nothing at all to
have other people attacking and depreciating your writings, sermons,
and the like, if you yourself had entire confidence in them. The
mortifying thing is when your own taste and judgment say worse of