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I believe that it induces a habit of calm reflectiveness, which causes us to take less prejudiced, perhaps less zealous views of life, and to be therefore less irritable in our converse with our fellow-creatures. On the other hand, I confess that it induces a certain lassitude, and a lounging, easy mode of life, which is fatal both to the precision of manners and the vivacity of conversation.
He had taken to exercise his brains prematurely, not only in learning, but also in reflection; and a reflectiveness that is indulged before we have a rigid mastery of the emotions, or have slain them, is apt to make a young man more than commonly a child of nerves: nearly as much so as the dissipated, with the difference that they are hilarious while wasting their treasury, which he is not; and he may recover under favouring conditions, which is a point of vantage denied to them.
But her unexercised reflectiveness was on the highroad of accepted doctrines, with their chorus of the moans of gossips for supernatural intervention to give us justice. She had not learnt that those innocents, pushed by an excessive love of pleasure, are for the term lower in the scale than their wary darker cousins, and must come to the diviner light of intelligence through suffering.
'Nancy says that she's afraid he won't get well. 'Oh, you don't say that! Oh, how very sad! But let us hope. I can't think it's so bad as that. Horace sat in thought. Mrs. Damerel, her bright eyes subduing their gaiety to a keen reflectiveness, put several questions regarding the invalid, then for a moment meditated. 'Well, we must hope for the best.
By the end of the first week, Wilfrid had accommodated himself to his circumstances. His fretting at the regulations imposed for his health almost ceased. At first this change was viewed with suspicion, especially when he became more absorbed in reflectiveness, and seemed to have less taste for conversation. However, he was perfectly cheerful; there were no further symptoms to excite alarm.
Miss Leonora, of course, would not for kingdoms have confessed that any new light had come into her mind, or that some very ordinary people in Carlingford, no one of whom she could have confidently affirmed to be a converted person, had left a certain vivid and novel impression upon her thoughts. She went along much more slowly than usual in this new mood of reflectiveness.
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