The odes of Pindar (with few exceptions, and these chiefly in the shorter ones) seem by intention to die away by soft gradations into a languid interest, like most of the landscapes of the great elder painters. Modern ode-writers have commonly preferred a continued rising of interest.
[Sidenote: "ONE MUSIC AS BEFORE, BUT VASTER"]
The shattering of long and deep-rooted associations always places the mind in an angry state, and even when our own understandings have effected the revolution, it still holds good, only we apply the feeling to and against our former faith and those who still hold it--[a tendency] shown in modern infidels. Great good, therefore, of such revolution as alters, not by exclusion, but by an enlargement that includes the former, though it places it in a new point of view.
After the formation of a new acquaintance, found, by some weeks' or months' unintermitted communion, worthy of all our esteem, affection and, perhaps, admiration, an intervening absence, whether we meet again or only write, raises it into friendship, and encourages the modesty of our nature, impelling us to assume the language and express all the feelings of an established attachment.
The _thinking_ disease is that in which the feelings, instead of embodying themselves in _acts_, ascend and become materials of general reasoning and intellectual pride. The dreadful consequences of this perversion [may be] instanced in Germany, _e.g._, in Fichte _versus_ Kant, Schelling _versus_ Fichte and in Verbidigno [Wordsworth] _versus_ S. T. C. Ascent where nature meant descent, and thus shortening the process--viz., _feelings_ made the subjects and tangible substance of thought, instead of actions, realizations, _things done_, and as such externalised and remembered. On such meagre diet as feelings, evaporated embryos in their progress to _birth_, no moral being ever becomes healthy.
Empires, states, &c., may be beautifully illustrated by a large clump of coal placed on a fire--Russia, for instance--or of small coal moistened, and by the first action of the heat of any government not absolutely lawless, formed into a cake, as the northern nations under Charlemagne--then a slight impulse from the fall of accident, or the hand of patriotic foresight, splits [the one] into many, and makes each [fragment] burn with its own flame, till at length all burning equally, it becomes again one by universal similar action--then burns low, cinerises, and without accession of rude materials goes out.