the cultivation of reason rather than fancy, having perhaps more of
the deeper and acuter characteristics of the poet than those calm
and half-callous properties of nature supposed to belong to the
metaphysician and the calculating moralist, Mordaunt was above all men
fondly addicted to solitude, and inclined to contemplations less useful
than profound. The untimely death of Isabel, whom he had loved with that
love which is the vent of hoarded and passionate musings long nourished
upon romance, and lavishing the wealth of a soul that overflows with
secreted tenderness upon the first object that can bring reality to
fiction,--that event had not only darkened melancholy into gloom, but
had made loneliness still more dear to his habits by all the ties
of memory and all the consecrations of regret. The companionless
wanderings; the midnight closet; the thoughts which, as Hume said of
his own, could not exist in the world, but were all busy with life in
seclusion,--these were rendered sweeter than ever to a mind for which
the ordinary objects of the world were now utterly loveless; and the
musings of solitude had become, as it were, a rightful homage and
offering to the dead. We may form, then, some idea of the extent to
which, in Mordaunt's character, principle predominated over inclination,
and regard for others over the love of self, when we see him tearing
his spirit from its beloved retreats and abstracted contemplations,
and devoting it to duties from which its fastidious and refined
characteristics were particularly calculated to revolt. When we have
considered his attachment to the hermitage, we can appreciate the virtue
which made him among the most active citizens in the great world;
when we have considered the natural selfishness of grief, the pride of
philosophy, the indolence of meditation, the eloquence of wealth, which
says, "Rest, and toil not," and the temptation within, which says, "Obey
the voice,"--when we have considered these, we can perhaps do justice
to the man who, sometimes on foot and in the coarsest attire, travelled
from inn to inn and from hut to hut; who made human misery the object
of his search and human happiness of his desire; who, breaking aside an
aversion to rude contact, almost feminine in its extreme, voluntarily
sought the meanest companions, and subjected himself to the coarsest
intrusions; for whom the wail of affliction or the moan of hunger was
as a summons which allowed neither h