The next character we have to note

§ 26. The next character we have to note in the landscape-instinct (and on this much stress is to be laid), is its total inconsistency with all evil passion; its absolute contrariety (whether in the contest it were crushed or not) to all care, hatred, envy, anxiety, and moroseness. A feeling of this kind is assuredly not one to be lightly repressed, or treated with contempt.
But how, if it be so, the reader asks, can it be characteristic of passionate and unprincipled men, like Byron, Shelley, and such others, and not characteristic of the noblest and most highly principled men? abstract oil paintings for sale
First, because it is itself a passion, and therefore likely to be characteristic of passionate men. Secondly, because it is (§ 18) wholly a separate thing from moral principle, and may or may not be joined to strength of will, or rectitude of purpose; only, this much is always observable in the men whom it characterizes, that, whatever their faults or failings, they always understand and love noble qualities of character; they can conceive (if not certain phases of piety), at all events, self-devotion of the highest kind; they delight in all that is good, gracious, and noble; and though warped often to take delight also in what is dark or degraded,art oil paintings for sale, that delight is mixed with bitter self-reproach; or else is wanton, careless, or affected, while their delight in noble things is constant and sincere.

§ 27. Look back to the two lists given above, § 7. I have not lately read anything by Mrs. Radclyffe or George Sand, and cannot, therefore, take instances from them; Keats hardly introduced human character into his work; but glance over the others, and note the general tone of their conceptions. Take St. Pierre's Virginia, Byron's Myrrha, Angiolina, and Marina, and Eugene Sue's Fleur de Marie; and out of the other lists you will only be able to find Pamela, Clementina, and, I suppose, Clarissa,to put beside them; and these will not more than match Myrrha and Marina; leaving Fleur de Marie and Virginia rivalless. Then meditate a little, with all justice and mercy, over the two groups of names; and I think you will, at last, feel that there is a pathos and tenderness of heart among the lovers of nature in the second list, of which it is nearly impossible to estimate either the value or the danger; that the sterner consistency of the men in the first may, in great part, have arisen only from the,oil paintings of nature, to them, most merciful, appointment of having had religious teaching or disciplined education in their youth; while their want of love for nature, whether that love be originally absent, or artificially repressed, is to none of them an advantage. Johnson's indolence, Goldsmith's improvidence, Young's worldliness, Milton's severity, and Bacon's servility, might all have been less, if they could in any wise have sympathized with Byron's lonely joy in a Jura storm,or with Shelley's interest in floating paper boats down the Serchio. oil paintings wholesale