casting a character vector as an object

Greetings,

I need to compare the ratios of vector sizes like this:

length(object1) / length(object2)

I have many vector objects to compare, so I would like to do it in  
a loop.
I created a loop like this:


mat1 <- matrix()

for (i in 1:6)
{
   for (j in 1:6)
     {

       mat1[i,j] <- length( paste("object",i,sep="")) /
(paste("object",j,sep="") )

     }
}


The loop does not work, however, because   paste 
("object",i,sep="")  creates
a character vector of length 1.  Is there a way to cast this as an  
object so
that it can be evaluated in the loop?