their fellow-feeling men are led to behave justly, kindly, and
considerately to each other--that the difference between the cruelty of
the barbarous and the humanity of the civilised, results from the
increase of fellow-feeling; if we bear in mind that this faculty which
makes us sharers in the joys and sorrows of others, is the basis of all
the higher affections--that in friendship, love, and all domestic
pleasures, it is an essential element; if we bear in mind how much our
direct gratifications are intensified by sympathy,--how, at the theatre,
the concert, the picture gallery, we lose half our enjoyment if we have
no one to enjoy with us; if, in short, we bear in mind that for all
happiness beyond what the unfriended recluse can have, we are indebted
to this same sympathy;--we shall see that the agencies which communicate
it can scarcely be overrated in value.

The tendency of civilisation is more and more to repress the
antagonistic elements of our characters and to develop the social
ones--to curb our purely selfish desires and exercise our unselfish
ones--to replace private gratifications by gratifications resulting
from, or involving, the happiness of others. And while, by this
adaptation to the social state, the sympathetic side of our nature is
being unfolded, there is simultaneously growing up a language of
sympathetic intercourse--a language through which we communicate to
others the happiness we feel, and are made sharers in their happiness.

This double process, of which the effects are already sufficiently
appreciable, must go on to an extent of which we can as yet have no
adequate conception. The habitual concealment of our feelings
diminishing, as it must, in proportion as our feelings become such as do
not demand concealment, we may conclude that the exhibition of them will
become much more vivid than we now dare allow it to be; and this implies
a more expressive emotional language. At the same time, feelings of a
higher and more complex kind, as yet experienced only by the cultivated
few, will become general; and there will be a corresponding development
of the emotional language into more involved forms. Just as there has
silently grown up a language of ideas, which, rude as it at first was,
now enables us to convey with precision the most subtle and complicated
thoughts; so, there is still silently growing up a language of feelings,
which, notwithstanding its present imperfection, we may expect will