I have thought that this grew from
the secluded life they live. Ardency is natural to the race, and this
restrained makes their lives one long romance. Their world is all of
imagination. The contacts of real life they never meet outside of their
prison-homes, and the influence of experience is never known. They are
seen through bars, are sought through bars, they love through bars--and
the struggle is, to escape from these restraints; and the moral of the
act or means for its accomplishment, or the object to be attained,
never enters the mind. Such natures properly reared to know the world,
to see it, hear it, and suffer it, tunes all the attributes of the mind
and heart to make sweet music. Nothing mellows the heart like sorrow;
nothing so softens the obduracy of our natures as experience. None,
sir, man or woman, are fitted for the world without the experiences its
contact brings. These experiences are teachings, and the bitter ones
the best. To be happy, we must have been miserable; it is the
idiosyncracy of the mind, to judge by comparison; and the eternal
absence of grief leaves the mind unappreciative of the incidents and
excitements which bring to him or her who have suffered, such exquisite
enjoyment.
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