Malice is the barb of beauty.  She’s just at present a trifle blunt.  She will knock over, but not transfix.  I am anxious to watch the effect she produces at Penarvon.  Poor little woman!  I paid a compliment to her eyes.  ‘I’ve got nothing else,’ said she.  Dine as well as you can while you are in England.  German cookery is an education for the sentiment of hogs.  The play of sour and sweet, and crowning of the whole with fat, shows a people determined to go down in civilization, and try the business backwards.  Adieu, curst Croat!  On the Wallachian border mayst thou gather philosophy from meditation.”

CHAPTER XLIV

Dexterously as Wilfrid has turned Tracy to his uses by means of the foregoing correspondence, in doing so he had exposed himself to the retributive poison administered by that cunning youth.  And now the Hippogriff seized him, and mounted with him into mid-air; not as when the idle boy Ganymede was caught up to act as cup-bearer in celestial Courts, but to plunge about on yielding vapours, with nothing near him save the voice of his desire.

The Philosopher here peremptorily demands the pulpit.  We are subject, he says, to fantastic moods, and shall dry ready-minted phrases picture them forth?  As, for example, can the words ‘delirium,’ or ‘frenzy,’ convey an image of Wilfrid’s state, when his heart began to covet Emilia again, and his sentiment not only interposed no obstacle, but trumpeted her charms and fawned for her, and he thought her lost, remembered that she had been his own, and was ready to do any madness to obtain her?  ‘Madness’ is the word that hits the mark, but it does not fully embrace the meaning.  To be in this state, says the Philosopher, is to be ‘On The Hippogriff;’ and to this, as he explains, the persons who travel to Love by the road of sentiment will come, if they have any stuff in them, and if the one who kindles them is mighty.  He distinguishes being on the Hippogriff from being possessed by passion.  Passion, he says, is noble strength on fire, and points to Emilia as a representation of passion.  She asks for what she thinks she may have; she claims what she imagines to be her own.  She has no shame, and thus, believing in, she never violates, nature, and offends no law, wild as she may seem.  Passion does not turn on her and rend her when it is thwarted.  She was never carried out of the limit of her own intelligent force, seeing that it directed her always, with the simple mandate to seek that which belonged to her.  She was perfectly sane, and constantly just to herself, until the failure of her voice, telling her that she was a beggar in the world, came as a second blow, and partly scared her reason.  Constantly just to herself, mind!  This is the quality of true passion.  Those who make a noise, and are not thus distinguishable, are on Hippogriff.

—­By which it is clear to me that my fantastic Philosopher means to indicate the lover mounted in this wise, as a creature bestriding an extraneous power.  “The sentimentalist,” he says, “goes on accumulating images and hiving sensations, till such time as (if the stuff be in him) they assume a form of vitality, and hurry him headlong.  This is not passion, though it amazes men, and does the madder thing.”