h the
doings of John Rann or Jerry Abershaw;[4] and the words "postchaise,"
the "great North road,"[5] "ostler," and "nag" still sound in my ears
like poetry. One and all, at least, and each with his particular
fancy, we read story-books in childhood; not for eloquence or
character or thought, but for some quality of the brute incident. That
quality was not mere bloodshed or wonder. Although each of these was
welcome in its place, the charm for the sake of which we read depended
on something different from either. My elders used to read novels
aloud; and I can still remember four different passages which I heard,
before I was ten, with the same keen and lasting pleasure. One I
discovered long afterwards to be the admirable opening of _What will
he Do with It?_[6] It was no wonder I was pleased with that. The other
three still remain unidentified. One is a little vague; it was about a
dark, tall house at night, and people groping on the stairs by the
light that escaped from the open door of a sickroom. In another, a
lover left a ball, and went walking in a cool, dewy park, whence he
could watch the lighted windows and the figures of the dancers as they
moved. This was the most sentimental impression I think I had yet
received, for a child is somewhat deaf to the sentimental. In the
last, a poet, who had been tragically wrangling with his wife, walked
forth on the sea-beach on a tempestuous night and witnessed the
horrors of a wreck.[7] Different as they are, all these early
favourites have a common note--they have all a touch of the romantic.

Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the poetry of circumstance.
The pleasure that we take in life is of two sorts--the active and the
passive. Now we are conscious of a great command over our destiny;
anon we are lifted up by circumstance, as by a breaking wave, and
dashed we know not how into the future. Now we are pleased by our
conduct, anon merely pleased by our surroundings. It would be hard to
say which of these modes of satisfaction is the more effective, but
the latter is surely the more constant. Conduct is three parts of
life,[8] they say; but I think they put it high. There is a vast deal
in life and letters both which is not immoral, but simply a-moral;
which either does not regard the human will at all, or deals with it
in obvious and healthy relations; where the interest turns, not upon
what a man shall choose to do, but on how he manages to do it; not on
the pas