orrow of the meanest thing that feels,"

and again in the White Doe of Rylstone, with the added teaching of that
gift, which we have from things beneath us, in thanks for the love they
cannot equally return; that anguish of our own,

"Is tempered and allayed by sympathies,
Aloft ascending and descending deep,
Even to the inferior kinds,"

so that I know not of anything more destructive of the whole theoretic
faculty, not to say of the Christian character and human intellect, than
those accursed sports in which man makes of himself, cat, tiger,
serpent, chaetodon, and alligator in one, and gathers into one
continuance of cruelty for his amusement all the devices that brutes
sparingly and at intervals use against each other for their
necessities.[32]

Sec. 3. Only with respect to plants, less affection than sympathy.

As we pass from those beings of whose happiness and pain we are certain
to those in which it is doubtful or only seeming, as possibly in
plants, (though I would fain hold, if I might, "the faith that every
flower, enjoys the air it breathes," neither do I ever crush or gather
one without some pain,) yet our feeling for them has in it more of
sympathy than of actual love, as receiving from them in delight far more
than we can give; for love, I think, chiefly grows in giving, at least
its essence is the desire of doing good, or giving happiness, and we
cannot feel the desire of that which we cannot conceive, so that if we
conceive not of a plant as capable of pleasure, we cannot desire to give
it pleasure, that is, we cannot love it in the entire sense of the term.

Nevertheless, the sympathy of very lofty and sensitive minds usually
reaches so far as to the conception of life in the plant, and so to
love, as with Shelley, of the sensitive plant, and Shakspeare always, as
he has taught us in the sweet voices of Ophelia and Perdita, and
Wordsworth always, as of the daffodils, and the celandine.

"It doth not love the shower, nor seek the cold.
This neither is its courage, nor its choice,
But its necessity in being old,"--

and so all other great poets (that is to say, great seers;[33]) nor do I
believe that any mind, however rude, is without some slight perception
or acknowledgment of joyfulness in breathless things, as most certainly
there are none but feel instinctive delight in the appearances of such
enj