A young and peaceful tenant of the forests, who suddenly hears the sound of the huntsman's horn, or the report of a gun, leaps, bounds, and flies off, by the sole violence of the shock which it has experienced. Yet if this noise is without effect and ceases, the animal distinguishing the wonted silence of Nature, composes itself, halts, and returns to its tranquil retreat. But age and experience render it circumspect and timid, and having been wounded after a particular noise, the sensation of pain is retained in its internal sense, and when the same noise shall be again heard, it is renewed, combines itself with the actual agitation, and produces a permanent passion, a real fear; the animal flies with all its might, and frequently never returns to its usual abode.
Fear, then, is a passion of which brute animals are susceptible, though they have not, like us, rational or foreseen apprehensions. Of horror, rage, and love, they are also susceptible; but they have not our aversions, founded on reflection, our durable hatreds, or our constant friendships. These passions in brutes imply no knowledge, no ideas, and are founded solely on the experience of sentiment, or repetitions of pain and pleasure, and renovation of preceding sensations of the same kind. Fury, or natural courage, is remarkable in animals which have experienced and ascertained their strength, and found it superior to ours; fear is the portion of the weak, but love belongs to all. Love! thou innate desire! thou soul of nature! thou inexhaustible principle of existence! thou sovereign power, by which every thing breathes, and every thing is renewed! thou divine shame! thou seed of perpetuity infused by the Almighty into all which has the breath of life! thou precious sentiment, by which alone the most savage and frozen hearts are softened! thou first cause of all happiness, of all society! thou fertile source of every pleasure, of every delight! Love! why dost thou constitute the felicity of every other being, and bring misery alone to man?
The reason is obvious. Considered in a physical sense, this passion is good; in a moral one, it is attended with every evil. In what does the morality of love consist? in vanity; vanity in the pleasure of conquest, an error which proceeds from our putting too high a value upon it; the vanity of desiring exclusive possession, of which jealousy, a passion so base that we are ashamed to own it, is the constant attendant; vanity in the very mode of enjoying, or even relinquishing the object of our desires, if the wish of separation originates with ourselves; but if, instead of forsaking, we are forsaken by the beloved object, the humiliation is dreadful! and the discovery that we have been duped and deceived, not unoften hurries us into despair.