weaken our sensibilities and deprave our judgments?
Doubtless, there are shocks of event and circumstance, public and
private, by which for all minds the truths of Nature will be elicited;
but sorrow for that individual or people to whom these special
interferences are necessary, to bring them into communion with the inner
spirit of things! for such intercourse must be profitless in proportion
as it is unfrequently irregular and transient. Words are too awful an
instrument for good and evil, to be trifled with; they hold above all
other external powers a dominion over thoughts. If words be not
(recurring to a metaphor before used) an incarnation of the thought, but
only a clothing for it, then surely will they prove an ill gift; such a
one as those possessed vestments, read of in the stories of
superstitious times, which had power to consume and to alienate from his
right mind the victim who put them on. Language, if it do not uphold,
and feed, and leave in quiet, like the power of gravitation or the air
we breathe, is a counter-spirit, unremittingly and noiselessly at work,
to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve. From a deep
conviction then that the excellence of writing, whether in prose or
verse, consists in a conjunction of Reason and Passion, a conjunction
which must be of necessity benign; and that it might be deduced from
what has been said that the taste, intellectual power and morals of a
country are inseparably linked in mutual dependence, I have dwelt thus
long upon this argument. And the occasion justifies me; for how could
the tyranny of bad taste be brought home to the mind more aptly than by
showing in what degree the feelings of nature yield to it when we are
rendering to our friends the solemn testimony of our love? more forcibly
than by giving proof that thoughts cannot, even upon this impulse,
assume an outward life without a transmutation and a fall.

_Epitaph on Miss Drummond in the Church of Broadsworth, Yorkshire_.
MASON.

Here sleeps what once was beauty, once was grace;
Grace, that with tenderness and sense combin'd
To form that harmony of soul and face,
Where beauty shines, the mirror of the mind.
Such was the maid, that in the morn of youth,
In virgin innocence, in Nature's pride,
Blest with each art, that owes its charm to truth,
Sunk in her Father's fond embrace, and died.
He weeps: O venerate the holy tear!
Faith lends her