'Ah !' said he, groaning, 'give
her back to me, console me for her, fill the void she has left in my
soul!'" Alas! in such cases, the void she leaves is only that she found.
The grief that seeks any other than its own society will erelong want an
object. This admirable parent allowed his son to become an outcast at
sixteen, without any attempt to reclaim him, in order to enjoy unmolested
a petty inheritance to which the boy was entitled in right of his mother.
"This conduct," Rousseau tells us, "of a father whose tenderness and
virtue were so well known to me, caused me to make reflections on myself
which have not a little contributed to make my heart sound. I drew from
it this great maxim of morals, the only one perhaps serviceable in
practice, to avoid situations which put our duties in opposition to our
interest, and which show us our own advantage in the wrong of another,
sure that in such situations, _however sincere may be one's love of
virtue_, it sooner or later grows weak without our perceiving it, _and
that we become unjust and wicked in action without having ceased to be
just and good in soul_."
This maxim may do for that "fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised
and unbreathed, that never sallies out and seeks its adversary," which
Milton could not praise,--that is, for a manhood whose distinction it is
not to be manly,--but it is chiefly worth notice as being the
characteristic doctrine of sentimentalism.
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