The maintenance of a due balance among the faculties now seemed to be of primary importance.

The cultivation of the feelings became one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed.

And my thoughts and inclinations turned in an increasing degree towards whatever seemed capable of being instrumental to that object.
I now began to find meaning in the things, which I had read or heard about the importance of poetry and art as instruments of human culture.
But it was some time longer before I began to know this by personal experience.

The only one of the imaginative arts in which I had from childhood taken great pleasure, was music; the best effect of which (and in this it surpasses perhaps every other art) consists in exciting enthusiasm; in winding up to a high pitch those feelings of an elevated kind which are already in the character, but to which this excitement gives a glow and a fervour, which, though transitory at its utmost height, is precious for sustaining them at other times.

This effect of music I had often experienced; but, like all my pleasurable susceptibilities, it was suspended during the gloomy period.