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Whether the feeling be fear, experienced at the appearance of a bird of prey, or "a fit of gladness" which bursts out when the animals are in good health and especially when young, or merely the desire of giving play to an excess of impressions and of vital power the necessity of communicating impressions, of playing, of chattering, or of simply feeling the proximity of other kindred living beings pervades Nature, and is, as much as any other physiological function, a distinctive feature of life and impressionability.
For although so much stress is laid upon the impressionability of first childhood and the ineffaceable marks that are engraven on it, yet as to all that belongs to the mind and judgment this third period, in the early years of adolescence, is more sensitive still, because real criticism is just beginning to be possible and appreciation is in its spring-tide, now for the first time fully alive and awake.
I suspect that a philosophical cause for such seemingly preternatural effects of crystal and iron will be found in connection with the extreme impressionability to changes in temperatures which is the characteristic both of crystal and iron. But if these materials do contain certain powers over exceptional constitutions, we do not arrive at a supernatural but at a natural phenomenon."
Odo's own mind, across which the events and emotions of the day still threw the fantastic shadows of an expiring illumination, was wrought to the highest state of impressionability.
At first sight it seems that this magnificent foliage must form a sense-organ of great perfection, capable of perceiving subtle odours, or almost inaudible vibrations of the air, or other phenomena to which our senses fail to respond; but the female warns us that we must not place too much reliance on such ideas; for although her maternal duties demand a degree of impressionability at least as great as that of the male, yet the plumes of her antennæ are extremely meagre, containing only six narrow leaves.
But women who are gifted with that rapid, gay impressionability which puts them en rapport with their surroundings, who have fancy and an excitable disposition, a quick susceptibility to the influences around them, are very charming in general society, but they are terrible to the awkward and the shy.
Or if we compare the universe accessible to sight with that accessible to sound the plight of the blind in contrast to that of the deaf there is the same discrepancy; the field of the eye is immensely richer, more various and more interesting than that of the ear. The difficulty appears to consist in the inferior impressionability of the eye to its particular order of beauty.
What, then, constitutes the essence of Andreyev's talent is an extreme impressionability, a daring in descriptions of the negative sides of reality, melancholy moods and the torments of existence. As he usually portrays general suffering and sickness rather than definite types, his heroes are mostly incarnations and symbols.
Those who think otherwise must forget their own past. Children's griefs are little, certainly; but so is the child, so is its endurance, so is its field of vision, while its nervous impressionability is keener than ours. Grief is a matter of relativity; the sorrow should be estimated by its proportion to the sorrower; a gash is as painful to one as an amputation to another.
Some things were imparted to her without her asking or wishing, and merely in virtue of her youth and impressionability. She took them from her environment without knowing it, and in this way she was coming by an English manner and an English tone; she was only the less American for being rather English without trying, when other Americans tried so hard.
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