Sentiment is
intellectualized emotion, emotion precipitated, as it were, in pretty
crystals by the fancy. This is the delightful staple of the poets of
social life like Horace and Beranger, or Thackeray, when he too rarely
played with verse. It puts into words for us that decorous average of
feeling to the expression of which society can consent without danger of
being indiscreetly moved. It is excellent for people who are willing to
save their souls alive to any extent that shall not be discomposing. It
is even satisfying till some deeper experience has given us a hunger
which what we so glibly call "the world" cannot sate, just as a water-ice
is nourishment enough to a man who has had his dinner. It is the
sufficing lyrical interpreter of those lighter hours that should make
part of every healthy man's day, and is noxious only when it palls men's
appetite for the truly profound poetry which is very passion of very soul
sobered by afterthought and embodied in eternal types by imagination.
True sentiment is emotion ripened by a slow ferment of the mind and
qualified to an agreeable temperance by that taste which is the
conscience of polite society. But the sentimentalist always insists on
taking his emotion neat, and, as his sense gradually deadens to the
stimulus, increases his dose till he ends in a kind of moral deliquium.
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