take any
pleasure in Wordsworth; and, in fact, all the poets who seemed to be
able to enjoy nature for itself--nature unrelieved or unimproved by
human figures--had no attractions for me. And here the dear Edward Roth
came in, and confirmed my taste. And there were heavy arguments with
other clever Philadelphians, Doctor Nolan, the scientist who loved
letters, and that amateur of literature, Charles Devenny.

As for Pope and his school, they seemed to represent an aspect of the
world as unreal as the world of Watteau, and with much less excuse; but
pictures of the kind I found in the "Journal" of Eug['e]nie de Gu['e]rin
had a living charm. At this time, I had not seen Matthew Arnold's paper
on Maurice de Gu['e]rin, and I did not know that any appreciation of his
sister had been written in English. I had seen a paragraph or two
written by some third-rate person who objected to her piety as
sentimental, and incomprehensible to the "Anglo-Saxon" world! That her
piety should be sentimental, if Eug['e]nie's sentiment can be
characterized by that term, seemed to me to be questionable; and it was
evident that any one who read French literature at all must be aware
that there were hundreds of beautiful sentiments and phrases which the
average "Anglo-Saxon" world found it impossible to comprehend.

The beloved home of Eug['e]nie, La Cayla, was not a gay place. It was even
more circumscribed than Miss Mitford's "Village"; but Eug['e]nie, being
less "Anglo-Saxon" than Miss Mitford, had more sentiment and a more
sensitive perception of the meaning of nature--though, when it comes to
sentimentalism, the English man or woman, who often masquerades under
the shelter of "Anglo-Saxonism," is as sentimental as the most
sentimental of sentimentalists. This is what I mean by the landscape
charm of Eug['e]nie de Gu['e]rin, and yet the picture in this case is not a
landscape, but the interior of a room:

I was admiring just now a little landscape, presented by my room,
as it was being illuminated with the rising sun. How pretty it was!
Never did I see a more beautiful effect of light on the paper,
thrown through painted trees. It was diaphanous, transparent. It
was almost wasted on my eyes; it ought to have been seen by a
painter. And yet does not God create the beautiful for everybody?
All our birds were singing this morning while I was at my prayers.
This accompaniment pleases me, though it distra