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Untitled Article
post-chaise , and departure through dusty roads for a distant and strange scene , must to her have been indispensable ; or did she prefer a poor lieutenant ' s love , and a cottage , and an elopement Y ' Now do not hurry me on , Maria , in this uncomfortable manner . I listen to your moralizing , and I expect you do the same by my descriptions .
c Miss Bullock became a sort of willow , bending beneath every blast , moral or physical , which passed over her . Mrs . Bullock remained a kind of sturdy oak , refusing to bow before even a storm ; but death , the " tremendous shadow , " which extinguishes the giant as easily as the glowworm , swept her awa y with a force as sudden as unseen!—once again he passed through Selina ' s home , but less hurriedly , and her father fell !
' Here let me pause to note a point of conduct peculiar to sickly sentimentality and morbid sensibility . Selina , who loved to weep over a pathetic fiction , was deficient of feeling and fortitude in the actual scene of sorrow ; while the circumstances , which tell the proudest piece of humanity that it is but humanity moved her with disgust and impatience . Not because she
understood and appreciated the higher portion of human nature did she cherish this irritability , but because she did not understand , did not appreciate that portion . Her feeling was like the love that lives on mere personal beauty , and which falls away , like the caterpillar , when the leaf loses its freshness . If we properly love
the nobler part of human nature , like the goddess who chose a mortal , we cast a veil of so much beauty over the common clay , as to create for it a charm even amid infirmity ; and thus it is that enlightened love lingers at the chair of age , bends over the couch of disease , and casts itself upon the sod ., where sleeps , at last ' , all that of the being so beloved could die .
In fact , Selina was not " affected by the reality of distress touching her heart , but by the showy resemblance of it striking her imagination—she pitied the plumage , but forgot the dying bird . " She wept , alas ! too little at the couch of vulgar pain , though the sufferer was an affectionate father ; but when he was dead she wore deep weepers , and melted over his memory . ' The time of sighs and sables passed away , and Selina stepped
forth in virgin white , the possessor of a much more considerable fortune than she had expected . The vanity inseparable from such a character , which courts the gaze that it affects to shun , soon blazoned abroad the important fact , and Selina grew proportionately interesting in the eyes of many who had hitherto overlooked her .
' Not butchers , but bankers and barristers , were upon the muster roll of the circle which , she called her friends . The weaknesses of her character , the habits which she had acquired in solitude , or from vulgar association , were subjects of ridicule which gave a relish to the breakfast of many a lounger who
Untitled Article
Sketches of Domestic Life . 451
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), July 1, 1835, page 451, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2647/page/15/
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