Frankenstein: Volume III, chapter 1 (18), p.161
Clerval! Beloved friend! Even now it delights me to record your words and to dwell on the praise of which you are so eminently deserving. He was a being formed in the ‘very poetry of nature.’ His wild and enthusiastic imagination was chastened by the sensibility of his heart. His soul overflowed with ardent affections, and his friendship was of that devoted and wondrous nature that the world-minded teach us to look
for only in the imagination. But even human sympathies
were not sufficient to satisfy his eager mind. The scenery of
external nature, which others regard only with admiration,
he loved with ardour:
The sounding cataract
Haunted him like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to him
An appetite; a feeling, and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, or any interest
Unborrow’d from the eye.*
[*Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey”.]
' But in Clerval I saw the image of my former self, and anxious to gain experience and instruction. ... .' (Volume III, chapter 2)