Their want of mental coloring-matter makes them sensitive to those impressions which stronger minds neglect or never feel at all.

Many of them die young, and all of them are tinged with melancholy.

There is no more beautiful illustration of the principle of compensation which marks the Divine benevolence than the fact that some of the holiest lives and some of the sweetest songs are the growth of the infirmity which unfits its subject for the rougher duties of life.

When one reads the life of Cowper, or of Keats, or of Lucretia and Margaret Davidson,--of so many gentle, sweet natures, born to weakness, and mostly dying before their time,--one cannot help thinking that the human race dies out singing, like the swan in the old story.

The French poet, Gilbert, who died at the Hotel Dieu, at the age of twenty-nine,--( killed by a key in his throat, which he had swallowed when delirious in consequence of a fall,)--this poor fellow was a very good example of the poet by excess of sensibility.