FOOTNOTES:
[F] ["I find all things upon earth, even truth and joy, rather than friendship.">[
CHAPTER VIII
1811-1812
From all that meets or eye or ear,
There falls a genial holy fear,
Which, like the heavy dew of morn,
Refreshes while it bows the heart forlorn!
S. T. C.
TIME REAL AND IMAGINARY
How marked the contrast between troubled manhood, and joyously-active youth in the sense of time! To the former, time like the sun in an empty sky is never seen to move, but only to have moved. There, there it was, and now 'tis here, now distant! yet all a blank between. To the latter it is as the full moon in a fine breezy October night, driving on amid clouds of all shapes and hues, and kindling shifting colours, like an ostrich in its speed, and yet seems not to have moved at all. This I feel to be a just image of time real and time as felt, in two different states of being. The title of the poem therefore (for poem it ought to be) should be time real and time felt (in the sense of time) in active youth, or activity with hope and fullness of aim in any period, and in despondent, objectless manhood—time objective and subjective.
[The riddle is hard to read, but the underlying thought seems to be that in youth the sense of time is like the apparent motion of the moon through clouds, ever driving on, but ever seeming to stand still; whereas the sense of time in manhood is like the sun, which seems to be stationary, and yet, at short intervals, is seen to have moved. This is time felt in two different states of being. Time real is, as it were, sun or moon which move independently of our perceptions of their movements. The note (1811), no doubt, contains the germ of "Time Real and Imaginary" first published in "Sibylline Leaves" in 1817, which Coleridge in his Preface describes as a "school-boy poem," and interprets thus: "By imaginary time I meant the state of a schoolboy's mind when, on his return to school, he projects his being in his day-dreams, and lives in his next holidays, six months hence!" The explanation was probably an afterthought. "The two lovely children" who "run an endless race" may have haunted his schoolboy dreams, may perhaps have returned to the dreams of his troubled manhood, bringing with them the sense rather than the memory of youth, intermingled with a consciousness that youth was gone for ever, but the composition of the poem dates from 1811, or possibly 1815, when the preparation of the poems for the press would persuade him once more to express his thoughts in verse.]
TIME REAL AND IMAGINARY; AN ALLEGORY
On the wide level of a mountain's head,
(I knew not where, but 'twas some faery place)
Their pinions, ostrich-like, for sails outspread,
Two lovely children run an endless race,
A sister and a brother!
This far outstript the other;
Yet ever runs she with reverted face,
And looks and listens for the boy behind:
For he, alas! is blind!
O'er rough and smooth with even step he passed,
And knows not whether he be first or last.
[P. W., 1893, p. 187. See, too, Editor's Note, p. 638.]
THE HAG NIGHTMARE
Elucidation of my all-zermalming, [that is, all-crushing] argument on the subject of ghosts, apparitions, &c.
Night-mare is, I think, always, even when it occurs in the midst of sleep, and not as it more commonly does after a waking interval, a state not of sleep, but of stupor of the outward organs of sense—not in words, indeed, but yet in fact distinguishable from the suspended power of the senses in true sleep, while the volitions of reason, that is the faculty of comparison, &c., are awake though disturbed. This stupor seems to be occasioned by some painful sensations of unknown locality (most often, I believe, in the lower bowel) which, withdrawing the attention to itself from the sense of other realities present, makes us asleep to them, indeed, but otherwise awake. And, whenever the derangement occasions an interruption in the circulation, aided, perhaps, by pressure, awkward position, &c., the part deadened, as the hand, the arm, or the foot and leg, or the side, transmits double touch as single touch, to which the imagination, therefore, the true inward creatrix, instantly out of the chaos of elements or shattered fragments of memory, puts together some form to fit it. And this [imaginatio] derives an over-mastering sense of reality from the circumstance that the power of reason, being in good measure awake, most generally presents to us all the accompanying images very nearly as they existed the moment before, when we fell out of anxious wakefulness into this reverie. For example, the bed, the curtain, the room and its furniture, the knowledge of who lives in the next room, and so forth contribute to the illusion.... In short, the night-mare is not, properly, a dream, but a species of reverie, akin to somnambulism, during which the understanding and moral sense are awake, though more or less confused, and over the terrors of which the reason can exert no influence, because it is not true terror, that is, apprehension of danger, but is itself a specific sensation = terror corporeus sive materialis. The explanation and classification of these strange sensations, the organic material analogous (ideas materiales intermedias, as the Cartesians say) of Fear, Hope, Rage, Shame, and (strangest of all) Remorse, form at present the most difficult, and at the same time the most interesting problem of psychology, and are intimately connected with prudential morals, the science, that is, of morals not as the ground and law of duty, but in their relation to the empirical hindrances and focillations in the realising of the law by human beings. The solution of this problem would, perhaps, throw great doubt on the present [notion] that the forms and feelings of sleep are always the reflections and confused echoes of our waking thoughts and experiences.
A MOMENT AND A MAGIC MIRROR
What a swarm of thoughts and feelings, endlessly minute fragments, and, as it were, representations of all preceding and embryos of all future thought, lie compact in any one moment! So, in a single drop of water, the microscope discovers what motions, what tumult, what wars, what pursuits, what stratagems, what a circle-dance of death and life, death-hunting life, and life renewed and invigorated by death! The whole world seems here in a many-meaning cypher. What if our existence was but that moment? What an unintelligible, affrightful riddle, what a chaos of limbs and trunk, tailless, headless, nothing begun and nothing ended, would it not be? And yet scarcely more than that other moment of fifty or sixty years, were that our all? Each part throughout infinite diminution adapted to some other, and yet the whole a means to nothing—ends everywhere, and yet an end nowhere.
[Compare the three last lines of "What is Life?"
Is very life by consciousness unbounded?
And all the thoughts, pains, joys of mortal breath,
A war-embrace of wrestling life and death?
P. W., 1893, p. 173.]
THAT INWARD EYE, THE BLISS OF SOLITUDE
The love of Nature is ever returned double to us, not only the delighter in our delight, but by linking our sweetest, but of themselves perishable feelings to distinct and vivid images, which we ourselves, at times, and which a thousand casual recollections, recall to our memory. She is the preserver, the treasurer of our joys. Even in sickness and nervous diseases, she has peopled our imagination with lovely forms which have sometimes overpowered the inward pain and brought with them their old sensations. And even when all men have seemed to desert us and the friend of our heart has passed on, with one glance from his "cold disliking eye"—yet even then the blue heaven spreads it out and bends over us, and the little tree still shelters us under its plumage as a second cope, a domestic firmament, and the low creeping gale will sigh in the heath-plant and soothe us by sound of sympathy till the lulled grief lose itself in fixed gaze on the purple heath-blossom, till the present beauty becomes a vision of memory.
HESPERUS
I have never seen the evening star set behind the mountains, but it was as if I had lost a hope out of my soul, as if a love were gone, and a sad memory only remained. O it was my earliest affection, the evening star! One of my first utterances in verse was an address to it as I was returning from the New River, and it looked newly bathed as well as I. I remember that the substance of the sonnet was that the woman whom I could ever love would surely have been emblemed in the pensive serene brightness of that planet, that we were both constellated to it, and would after death return thither.
TO THE EVENING STAR
TO THE EVENING STAR
O meek attendant of Sol's setting blaze,
I hail, sweet star, thy chaste effulgent glow;
On thee full oft with fixed eye I gaze,
Till I methinks, all spirit seem to grow.
O first and fairest of the starry choir,
O loveliest 'mid the daughters of the night,
Must not the maid I love like thee inspire
Pure joy and calm delight?
Must she not be, as is thy placid sphere,
Serenely brilliant? Whilst to gaze awhile
Be all my wish 'mid Fancy's high career
E'en till she quit this scene of earthly toil;
Then Hope perchance might fondly sigh to join
Her image in thy kindred orb, O star benign!
[First printed from MS. Poetical and Dramatic Works, 1877-80; Poetical Works, 1893, p. 11.]
HEALTH, INDEPENDENCE, FRIENDSHIP
Where health is—at least, though pain be no stranger, yet when the breath can rise, and turn round like a comet at its perihelion in its ellipse, and again descend, instead of being a Sisiphus's stone; and the chest can expand as by its own volition and the head sits firm yet mobile aloft, like the vane of a tower on a hill shining in the blue air, and appropriating sunshine and moonlight whatever weight of clouds brood below—O when health and hope, and if not competence yet a debtless unwealth, libera et læta paupertas, is his, a man may have and love many friends, but yet, if indeed they be friends, he lives with each a several and individual life.
SELF-ABSORPTION AND SELFISHNESS
One source of calumny (I say source, because allophoby from hëautopithygmy is the only proper cause) may be found in this—every man's life exhibits two sorts of selfishness, those which are and those which are not objects of his own consciousness. A is thinking, perhaps, of some plan in which he may benefit another, and during this absorption consults his own little bodily comforts blindly—occupies the best place at the fire-side, or asks at once, "Where am I to sit?" instead of first inquiring after the health of another. Now the error lies here, that B, in complaining of A, first takes for granted either that these are acts of conscious selfishness in A, or, if he allows the truth, yet considers them just as bad (and so perhaps they may be in a certain sense), but forgets that his own life presents the same, judges of his own life exclusively by his own consciousness, that of another by conscious and unconscious in a lump. A monkey's anthropomorph attitudes we take for anthropic.
SELF-ADVERTISING PHILANTHROPY
Try not to become disgusted with active benevolence, or despondent because there is a philanthropy-trade. It is a sort of benefit-club of virtue, supported by the contributions of paupers in virtue, founded by genuine enthusiasts who gain a reputation for the thing—then slip in successors who know how to avail themselves of the influence and connections derived thereby—quite gratuitous, however, and bustling-active—but yet bribe high to become the unpaid physicians of the dispensary at St. Luke's Hospital, and bow and scrape and intrigue, Carlyleise and Knappise for it. And such is the [case with regard to] the slave trade. The first abolitionists were the good men who laboured when the thing seemed desperate—it was virtue for its own sake. Then the quakers, Granville Sharp, etc.—then the restless spirits who are under the action of tyrannical oppression from images, and, gradually, mixed vanity and love of power with it—the politicians + saints = Wilberforce. Last come the Scotchmen—and Brougham is now canvassing more successfully for the seat of Wilberforce, who retires with great honour and regret, from infirmities of age and enoughness. It is just as with the great original benefactors and founders of useful plans, Raleigh, Sir Hugh Middleton, etc.—men of genius succeeded by sharpers, but who often can better carry on what they never could have first conceived—and this, too, by their very want of those qualities and virtues which were necessary to the discovery.
"BUT LOVE IS INDESTRUCTIBLE"
All mere passions, like spirits and apparitions, have their hour of cock-crow, in which they must vanish. But pure love is, therefore, no mere passion; and it is a test of its being love, that no reason can be assigned why it should disappear. Shall we not always, in this life at least, remain animæ dimidiatæ?—must not the moral reason always hold out the perfecting of each by union of both as good and lovely? With reason, therefore, and conscience let love vanish, but let these vanish only with our being.
THE FEINT OF THE SLEEPLESS
The sick and sleepless man, after the dawn of the fresh day, is fain to watch the smoke now from this and then from the other chimney of the town from his bed-chamber, as if willing to borrow from others that sense of a new day, of a discontinuity between the yesterday and the to-day which his own sensations had not afforded. [Compare Wordsworth's "Blessed Barrier Between Day and Day," Wordsworth's Third Sonnet to Sleep, Poetical Works, 1889, 354.]
FIRST THOUGHTS AND FRIENDSHIP
O what wisdom could I talk to a YOUTH of genius and genial-heartedness! O how little could I teach! and yet, though despairing of success, I would attempt to enforce:—"Whenever you meet with a person of undoubted talents, more especially if a woman, and of apparent goodness, and yet you feel uncomfortable, and urged against your nature, and, therefore, probably in vain, to be on your guard—then take yourself to task and enquire what strong reason, moral or prudential, you have to form any intimacy or even familiarity with that person. If you after this (or moreover) detect any falsehood, or, what amounts to the same, proneness and quickness to look into, to analyse, to find out and represent evil or weakness in others (however this may be disguised even from the person's own mind by candour, [in] pointing out the good at the same time, by affectation of speculative truth, as psychologists, or of telling you all their thoughts as open-hearted friends), then let no reason but a strong and coercive one suffice to make you any other than as formal and distant acquaintance as circumstances will permit." And am I not now suffering, in part, for forcing my feelings into slavery to my notions, and intellectual admiration for a whole year and more with regard to ——? [So the MS.] If I played the hypocrite to myself, can I blame my fate that he has, at length, played the deceiver to me? Yet, God knows! I did it most virtuously!—not only without vanity or any self-interest of however subtle a nature, but from humility and a true delight in finding excellence of any kind, and a disposition to fall prostrate before it.
MILTON'S BLANK VERSE
To understand fully the mechanism, in order fully to feel the incomparable excellence of Milton's metre, we must make four tables, or a fourfold compartment, the first for the feet, single and composite, for which the whole twenty-six feet of the ancients will be found necessary; the second to note the construction of the feet, whether from different or from single words—for who does not perceive the difference to the ear between—
"Inextricable disobedience" and
"To love or not: in this we stand or fall"—
yet both lines are composed of five iambics? The third, of the strength and position, the concentration or diffusion of the emphasis. Fourth, the length and position of the pauses. Then compare his narrative with the harangues. I have not noticed the ellipses, because they either do not affect the rhythm, or are not ellipses, but are comprehended in the feet.
APHORISMS OR PITHY SENTENCES
Shall I compare man to a clockwork Catamaran, destined to float on in a meaner element for so many moments or hours, and then to explode, scattering its involucrum and itself to ascend into its proper element?
I am persuaded that we love what is above us more than what is under us.
Money—paper money—peace, war. How comes it that all men in all companies are talking of the depreciation, etc. etc.—and yet that a discourse on transubstantiation would not be a more withering sirocco than the attempt to explain philosophically the true cure and causes of that which interests all so vehemently?
All convalescence is a resurrection, a palingenesy of our youth—"and loves the earth and all that live thereon with a new heart." But oh! the anguish to have the aching freshness of yearning and no answering object—only remembrances of faithless change—and unmerited alienation!
The sun at evening holds up her fingers of both hands before her face that mortals may have one steady gaze—her transparent crimson fingers as when a lovely woman looks at the fire through her slender palms.
O that perilous moment [for such there is] of a half-reconciliation, when the coldness and the resentment have been sustained too long. Each is drawing toward the other, but like glass in the mid-state between fusion and compaction a single sand will splinter it.
Sometimes when I earnestly look at a beautiful object or landscape, it seems as if I were on the brink of a fruition still denied—as if Vision were an appetite; even as a man would feel who, having put forth all his muscular strength in an act of prosilience, is at the very moment held back—he leaps and yet moves not from his place.
Philosophy in general, but a plummet to so short a line that it can sound no deeper than the sounder's eyes can reach—and yet—in certain waters it may teach the exact depth and prevent a drowning.
The midnight wild beasts staring at the hunter's torch, or when the hunter sees the tiger's eye glaring on the red light of his own torch.
A summer-sailing on a still peninsulating river, and sweet as the delays of parting lovers.
Sir F[rancis] B[urdett], like a Lapland witch drowned in a storm of her own raising. Mr. Cobbett, who, for a dollar, can raise what, offer him ten thousand dollars, he could not allay.
August, 1811
Why do you make a book? Because my hands can extend but a few score inches from my body; because my poverty keeps those hands empty when my heart aches to empty them; because my life is short, and [by reason of] my infirmities; and because a book, if it extends but to one edition, will probably benefit three or four score on whom I could not otherwise have acted, and, should it live and deserve to live, will make ample compensation for all the aforestated infirmities. O, but think only of the thoughts, feelings, radical impulses that have been implanted in how many thousands by the little ballad of the "Children in the Wood"! The sphere of Alexander the Great's agency is trifling compared with it.
PRESENTIMENTS
One of the strangest and most painful peculiarities of my nature (unless others have the same, and, like me, hide it, from the same inexplicable feeling of causeless shame and sense of a sort of guilt, joined with the apprehension of being feared and shrunk from as a something transnatural) I will here record—and my motive, or, rather, impulse, to do this seems an effort to eloign and abalienate it from the dark adyt of my own being by a visual outness, and not the wish for others to see it. It consists in a sudden second sight of some hidden vice, past, present or to come, of the person or persons with whom I am about to form a close intimacy—which never deters me, but rather (as all these transnaturals) urges me on, just like the feeling of an eddy-torrent to a swimmer. I see it as a vision, feel it as a prophecy, not as one given me by any other being, but as an act of my own spirit, of the absolute noumenon, which, in so doing, seems to have offended against some law of its being, and to have acted the traitor by a commune with full consciousness independent of the tenure or inflected state of association, cause and effect, &c.
THE FIXED STARS OF TRUTH
As the most far-sighted eye, even aided by the most powerful telescope, will not make a fixed star appear larger than it does to an ordinary and unaided sight, even so there are heights of knowledge and truth sublime which all men in possession of the ordinary human understanding may comprehend as much and as well as the profoundest philosopher and the most learned theologian. Such are the truths relating to the logos and its oneness with the self-existent Deity, and of the humanity of Christ and its union with the logos. It is idle, therefore, to refrain from preaching on these subjects, provided only such preparations have been made as no man can be a Christian without. The misfortune is that the majority are Christians only in name, and by birth only. Let them but once, according to St. James, have looked down steadfastly into the law of liberty or freedom in their own souls (the will and the conscience), and they are capable of whatever God has chosen to reveal.
C'EST MAGNIFIQUE, MAIS CE N'EST PAS LA POÉSIE
A long line of (!!) marks of admiration would be its aptest symbol! It has given me the eye-ache with dazzlement, the brain-ache with wonderment, the stomach and all-ache with the shock and after-eddy of contradictory feelings. Splendour is there, splendour everywhere—distinct the figures as vivid—skill in construction of events—beauties numberless of form and thought. But there is not anywhere the "one low piping note more sweet than all"—there is not the divine vision of the poet, which gives the full fruition of sight without the effort—and where the feelings of the heart are struck, they are awakened only to complain of and recoil from the occasion. O! it is mournful to see and wonder at such a marvel of labour, erudition and talent concentered into such a burning-glass of factitious power, and yet to know that it is all in vain—like the Pyramids, it shows what can be done, and, like them, leaves in painful and almost scornful perplexity, why it was done, for what or whom.
SILENCE IS GOLDEN September 29th, 1812
Grand rule in case of quarrels between friends or lovers—never to say, hint, or do anything in a moment of anger or indignation or sense of ill-treatment, but to be passive—and even if the fit should recur the next morning, still to delay it—in short, however plausible the motive may be, yet if you have loved the persons concerned, not to say it till their love has returned toward you, and your feelings are the same as they were before. And for this plain reason—you knew this before, and yet because you were in kindness, you never felt an impulse to speak of it—then, surely, not now when you may perpetuate what would otherwise be fugitive.
THE DEVIL: A RECANTATION
"That not one of the peculiarities of Christianity, no one point in which, being clearly different from other religions or philosophies, it would have, at least, the possibility of being superior to all, is retained by the modern Unitarians." This remark is occasioned by my reflections on the fact that Christianity exclusively has asserted the positive being of evil or sin, "of sin the exceeding sinfulness"—and thence exclusively the freedom of the creature, as that, the clear intuition of which is, both, the result and the accompaniment of redemption. The nearest philosophy to Christianity is the Platonic, and it is observable that this is the mere antipodes of the Hartleio-Lockian held by the Unitarians; but the true honours of Christianity would be most easily manifested by a comparison even with that "nec pari nec secundo," but yet "omnibus aliis propriore," the Platonic! With what contempt, even in later years, have I not contemplated the doctrine of a devil! but now I see the intimate connection, if not as existent person, yet as essence and symbol with Christianity—and that so far from being identical with Manicheism, it is the surest antidote (that is, rightly understood).
CHAPTER IX
1814-1818
Lynx amid moles! had I stood by thy bed,
Be of good cheer, meek soul! I would have said:
I see a hope spring from that humble fear.
S. T. C.
SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY
The first man of science was he who looked into a thing, not to learn whether it could furnish him with food, or shelter, or weapons, or tools, or ornaments, or playwiths, but who sought to know it for the gratification of knowing; while he that first sought to know in order to be was the first philosopher. I have read of two rivers passing through the same lake, yet all the way preserving their streams visibly distinct—if I mistake not, the Rhone and the Adar, through the Lake of Geneva. In a far finer distinction, yet in a subtler union, such, for the contemplative mind, are the streams of knowing and being. The lake is formed by the two streams in man and nature as it exists in and for man; and up this lake the philosopher sails on the junction-line of the constituent streams, still pushing upward and sounding as he goes, towards the common fountain-head of both, the mysterious source whose being is knowledge, whose knowledge is being—the adorable I am in that I am.
PETRARCH'S EPISTLES
I have culled the following extracts from the First Epistle of the First Book of Petrarch's Epistle, that "Barbato Salmonensi." [Basil, 1554, i. 76.]
Vultûs, heu, blanda severi
Majestas, placidæque decus pondusque senectæ!
Non omnia terræ
Obruta! vivit amor, vivit dolor! Ora negatum
Dulcia conspicere; at flere et meminisse relictum est.
Jamque observatio vitæ
Multa dedit—lugere nihil, ferre omnia; jamque
Paulatim lacrymas rerum experientia tersit.
[Heu! et spem quoque tersit]
Pectore nunc gelido calidos miseremur amantes,
Jamque arsisse pudet. Veteres tranquilla tumultus
Mens horret, relegensque alium putat esse locutum.
But, indeed, the whole of this letter deserves to be read and translated. Had Petrarch lived a century later, and, retaining all his substantiality of head and heart, added to it the elegancies and manly politure of Fracastorius, Flaminius, Vida and their corrivals, this letter would have been a classical gem. To a translator of genius, and who possessed the English language as unembarrassed property, the defects of style in the original would present no obstacle; nay, rather an honourable motive in the well-grounded hope of rendering the version a finer poem than the original.
[Twelve lines of Petrarch's Ep. Barbato Salmonensi are quoted in the Biog. Liter. at the end of chapter x.; and a portion of the same poem was prefixed as a motto to "Love Poems" in the Sibylline Leaves, 1817, and the editions of P. W., 1828-9. Coleridge's Works, Harper & Brother, 1853, iii. 314. See, too, P. W., 1893, Editor's Note, pp. 614, 634.]
CORRUPTIO OPTIMI PESSIMA
A fine writer of bad principles or a fine poem on a hateful subject, such as the "Alexis" of Virgil or the "Bathyllus" of Anacreon, I compare to the flowers and leaves of the Stramonium. The flowers are remarkable sweet, but such is the fetid odour of the leaves that you start back from the one through disgust at the other.
A BLISS TO BE ALIVE
Zephyrs that captive roam among these boughs,
Strive ye in vain to thread the leafy maze?
Or have ye lim'd your wings with honey-dew?
Unfelt ye murmur restless o'er my head
And rock the feeding drone or bustling bees
That blend their eager, earnest, happy hum!
WHAT MAN HAS MADE OF MAN
Gravior terras infestat Echidna,
Cur sua vipereæ jaculantur toxica linguæ
Atque homini sit homo serpens. O prodiga culpæ
Germina, naturæque uteri fatalia monstra!
Queis nimis innocuo volupe est in sanguine rictus
Tingere, fraternasque fibras cognataque per se
Viscera, et arrosæ deglubere funera famæ.
Quæ morum ista lues!
25th Feb. 1819 Five years since the preceding lines were written on this leaf!! Ah! how yet more intrusively has the hornet scandal since then scared away the bee of poetic thought and silenced its "eager, earnest, happy hum"!
SAVE ME FROM MY FRIENDS
The sore evil now so general, alas! only not universal, of supporting our religion, just as a keen party-man would support his party in Parliament. All must be defended which can give a momentary advantage over any one opponent, no matter how naked it lays the cause open to another, perhaps, more formidable opponent—no matter how incompatible the two assumptions may be. We rejoice, not because our religion is the truth, but because the truth appears to be our religion. Talk with any dignified orthodoxist in the sober way of farther preferment and he will concrete all the grounds of Socinianism, talk Paley and the Resurrection as a proof and as the only proper proof of our immortality, will give to external evidence and miracles the same self-grounded force, the same fundamentality. Even so the old Puritans felt towards the Papists. Because so much was wrong, everything was wrong, and by denying all reverence to the fathers and to the constant tradition of the Catholic Churches, they undermined the wall of the city in order that it might fall on the heads of the Romanists—thoughtless that by this very act they made a Breach for the Arian and Socinian to enter.
DRIP DRIP DRIP DRIP
The ear-deceiving imitation of a steady soaking rain, while the sky is in full uncurtainment of sprinkled stars and milky stream and dark blue interspace. The rain had held up for two hours or more, but so deep was the silence of the night that the drip from the leaves of the garden trees copied a steady shower.
REMEDIUM AMORIS
So intense are my affections, and so despotically am I governed by them (not indeed so much as I once was, but still far, far too much) that I should be the most wretched of men if my love outlived my esteem. But this, thank Heaven! is the antidote. The bitterer the tear of anguish at the clear detection of misapplied attachment, the calmer I am afterwards. It is a funeral tear for an object no more.
THE CONCLUSION OF THE WHOLE MATTER
February 23, 1816.
I thought I expressed my thoughts well when I said, "There is no superstition but what has a religion as its base [or radical], and religion is only reason, seen perspectively by a finite intellect."
THE POWER OF WORDS
It is a common remark, in medical books for instance, that there are certain niceties which words, from their always abstract and so far general nature, cannot convey. Now this I am disposed to deny, that is, in any comparative sense. In my opinion there is nothing which, being equally known as any other thing, may not be conveyed by words with equal clearness. But the question of the source of the remark is, to whom? If I say that in jaundice the skin looks yellow, my words have no meaning for a man who has no sense of colours. Words are but remembrances, though remembrance may be so excited, as by the a priori powers of the mind to produce a tertium aliquid. The utmost, therefore that should be said is that every additament of perception requires a new word, which (like all other words) will be intelligible to all who have seen the subject recalled by it, and who have learnt that such a word or phrase was appropriated to it; and this may be attained either by a new word, as platinum, titanium, osmium, etc., for the new metals, or an epithet peculiarising the application of an old word. For instance, no one can have attended to the brightness of the eyes in a healthy person in high spirits and particularly delighted by some occurrence, and that of the eye of a person deranged or predisposed to derangement, without observing the difference; and, in this case, the phrase "a maniacal glitter of the eye" conveys as clear a notion as that jaundice is marked by yellow. There is, doubtless, a difference, but no other than that of the commencement of particular knowledge by the application of universal knowledge (that is to all who have the senses and common faculties of men), and the next step of knowledge when it particularises itself. But the defect is not in words, but in the imperfect knowledge of those to whom they are addressed. Then proof is obvious. Desire a physician or metaphysician, or a lawyer to mention the most perspicuous book in their several knowledges. Then bid them read that book to a sensible carpenter or shoemaker, and a great part will be as unintelligible as a technical treatise on carpentering to the lawyer or physician, who had not been brought up in a carpenter's shop or looked at his tools.
I have dwelt on this for more reasons than one: first, because a remark that seems at first sight the same, namely, that "everything clearly perceived may be conveyed in simple common language," without taking in the "to whom?" is the disease of the age—an arrogant pusillanimity, a hatred of all information that cannot be obtained without thinking; and, secondly, because the pretended imperfection of language is often a disguise of muddy thoughts; and, thirdly, because to the mind itself it is made an excuse for indolence in determining what the fact or truth is which is the premise. For whether there does or does not exist a term in our present store of words significant thereof—if not, a word must be made—and, indeed, all wise men have so acted from Moses to Aristotle and from Theophrastus to Linnæus.
The sum, therefore, is this. The conveyal of knowledge by words is in direct proportion to the stores and faculties of observation (internal or external) of the person who hears or reads them. And this holds equally whether I distinguish the green grass from the white lily and the yellow crocus, which all who have eyes understand, because all are equal to me in the knowledge of the facts signified—or of the difference between the apprehensive, perceptive, conceptive, and conclusive powers which I might [try to enunciate to] Doctors of Divinity and they would translate the words by Abra Ca Dabra.
FLOWERS OF SPEECH Sunday, April 30, 1816
Reflections on my four gaudy flower-pots, compared with the former flower-poems. After a certain period, crowded with counterfeiters of poetry, and illustrious with true poets, there is formed for common use a vast garden of language, all the showy and all the odorous words and clusters of words are brought together, and to be plucked by mere mechanic and passive memory. In such a state, any man of common poetical reading, having a strong desire (to be?—O no! but—) to be thought a poet will present a flower-pot gay and gaudy, but the composition! That is wanting. We carry on judgment of times and circumstances into our pleasures. A flower-pot which would have enchanted us before flower gardens were common, for the very beauty of the component flowers, will be rightly condemned as common-place, out of place (for such is a common-place poet)—it involves a contradiction both in terms and thought. So Homer's Juno, Minerva, etc., are read with delight—but Blackmore? This is the reason why the judgment of those who are newlings in poetic reading is not to be relied on. The positive, which belongs to all, is taken as the comparative, which is the individual's praise. A good ear which had never heard music—with what raptures would it praise one of Shield's or Arne's Pasticcios and Centos! But it is the human mind it praises, not the individual. Hence it may happen (I believe has happened) that fashionableness may produce popularity. "The Beggar's Petition" is a fair instance, and what if I dared to add Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard"?
SPIRITUAL BLINDNESS
Men who direct what they call their understanding or common-sense by rules abstracted from sensuous experience in moral and super-sensuous truths remind one of the zemmi (mus τυφλος or typhlus), "a kind of rat in which the skin (conjunctiva) is not even transparent over the eye, but is there covered with hairs as in the rest of the body. The eye (= the understanding), which is scarcely the size of the poppy-seed, is perfectly useless." An eel (murœna cœcilia) and the myxine (gastobranchus cœcus) are blind in the same manner, through the opacity of the conjunctiva.
INSECTS
Sir G. Staunton asserts that, in the forests of Java, spiders' webs are found of so strong a texture as to require a sharp-cutting instrument to make way through them. Pity that he did not procure a specimen and bring it home with him. It would be a pleasure to see a sailing-boat rigged with them—twisting the larger threads into ropes and weaving the smaller into a sort of silk canvas resembling the indestructible white cloth of the arindy or palma Christi silkworm.
The Libellulidæ fly all ways without needing to turn their bodies—onward, backward, right and left—with more than swallow-rivalling rapidity of wing, readiness of evolution, and indefatigable continuance.
The merry little gnats (Tipulidæ minimæ) I have myself often watched in an April shower, evidently "dancing the hayes" in and out between the falling drops, unwetted, or, rather, un-down-dashed by rocks of water many times larger than their whole bodies.
OF STYLE Sunday, January 25, 1817
A valuable remark has just struck me on reading Milton's beautiful passage on true eloquence, his apology for Smectymnuus. "For me, reader, though I cannot say," etc.—first, to shew the vastly greater numbers of admirable passages, in our elder writers, that may be gotten by heart as the most exquisite poems; and to point out the great intellectual advantage of this reading, over the gliding smoothly on through a whole volume of equability. But still, it will be said, there is an antiquity, an oddness in the style. Granted; but hear this same passage from the Smectymnuus, or this, or this. Every one would know at first hearing that they were not written by Gibbon, Hume, Johnson, or Robertson. But why? Are they not pure English? Aye! incomparably more so! Are not the words precisely appropriate, so that you cannot change them without changing the force and meaning? Aye! But are they not even now intelligible to man, woman, and child? Aye! there is no riddle-my-ree in them. What, then, is it? The unnatural, false, affected style of the moderns that makes sense and simplicity oddness.
OBDUCTÂ FRONTE SENECTUS
Even to a sense of shrinking, I felt in this man's face and figure what a shape comes to view when age has dried away the mask from a bad, depraved man, and flesh and colour no longer conceal or palliate the traits of the countenance. Then shows itself the indurated nerve; stiff and rigid in all its ugliness the inflexible muscle; then quiver the naked lips, the cold, the loveless; then blinks the turbid eye, whose glance no longer pliant fixes, abides in its evil expression. Then lie on the powerless forehead the wrinkles of suspicion and fear, and conscience-stung watchfulness. Contrast this with the countenance of Mrs. Gillman's mother as she once described it to me. This for "Puff and Slander,"[G] Highgate, 1817.
A "KINGDOM-OF-HEAVENITE"
When the little creature has slept out its sleep and stilled its hunger at the mother's bosom (that very hunger a mode of love all made up of kisses), and coos, and wantons with pleasure, and laughs, and plays bob-cherry with his mother, that is all, all to it. It understands not either itself or its mother, but it clings to her, and has an undeniable right to cling to her, seeks her, thanks her, loves her without forethought and without an afterthought.
A DIVINE EPIGRAM
Nec mihi, Christe, tua sufficiunt sine te, nec tibi placent mea sine me, exclaims St. Bernard. Nota Bene.—This single epigram is worth (shall I say—O far rather—is a sufficient antidote to) a waggon-load of Paleyan moral and political philosophies.
SERIORES ROSÆ
We all look up to the blue sky for comfort, but nothing appears there, nothing comforts, nothing answers us, and so we die.
Lie with the ear upon a dear friend's grave.
On the same man, as in a vineyard, grow far different grapes—on the sunny south nectar, and on the bleak north verjuice.
The blossom gives not only future fruit, but present honey. We may take the one, the other nothing injured.
Like some spendthrift Lord, after we have disposed of nature's great masterpiece and [priceless] heirloom, the wisdom of innocence, we hang up as a poor copy our [own base] cunning.
A PLEA FOR SCHOLASTIC TERMS
The revival of classical literature, like all other revolutions, was not an unmixed good. One evil was the passion for pure Latinity, and a consequent contempt for the barbarism of the scholastic style and terminology. For awhile the schoolmen made head against their assailants; but, alas! all the genius and eloquence of the world was against them, and by an additional misfortune the scholastic logic was professed by those who had no other attainments, namely, the monks, and these, from monkishness, were the enemies of all genius and liberal knowledge. They were, of course, laughed out of the field as soon as they lost the power of aiding their logic by the post-predicaments of dungeon, fire, and faggot. Henceforward speculative philosophy must be written classically, that is, without technical terms—therefore popularly—and the inevitable consequence was that those sciences only were progressive which were permitted by the apparent as well as real necessity of the case to have a scientific terminology—as mathesis, geometry, astronomy and so forth—while metaphysic sank and died, and an empirical highly superficial psychology took its place. And so it has remained in England to the present day. A man must have felt the pain of being compelled to express himself either laxly or paraphrastically (which latter is almost as great an impediment in intellectual construction as the translation of letters and symbols into the thought they represent would be in Algebra), in order to understand how much a metaphysician suffers from not daring to adopt the ivitates and eitates of the schoolmen as objectivity, subjectivity, negativity, positivity. April 29, 1817, Tuesday night.
THE BODY OF THIS DEATH
The sentimental cantilena respecting the benignity and loveliness of nature—how does it not sink before the contemplation of the pravity of nature, on whose reluctance and inaptness a form is forced (the mere reflex of that form which is itself absolute substance!) and which it struggles against, bears but for a while and then sinks with the alacrity of self-seeking into dust or sanies, which falls abroad into endless nothings or creeps and cowers in poison or explodes in havock! What is the beginning? what the end? And how evident an alien is the supernatural in the brief interval!
SPIRITUALISM AND MYSTICISM
There are many, alas! too many, either born or who have become deaf and dumb. So there are too many who have perverted the religion of the spirit into the superstition of spirits that mutter and mock and mow, like deaf and dumb idiots. Plans of teaching the deaf and dumb have been invented. For these the deaf and dumb owe thanks, and we for their sakes. Homines sumus et nihil humani a nobis alienum. But does it follow, therefore, that in all schools these plans of teaching should be followed? Yet in the other case this is insisted on—and the Holy Ghost must not be our guide because mysticism and ghosts may come in under this name. Why? Because the deaf and dumb have been promoted to superintendents of education at large for all!
IDEALISM AND SUPERSTITION
Save only in that in which I have a right to demand of every man that he should be able to understand me, the experience or inward witnessing of the conscience, and in respect of which every man in real life (even the very disputant who affects doubt or denial in the moment of metaphysical arguing) would hold himself insulted by the supposition that he did not understand it—save in this only, and in that which if it be at all must be unique, and therefore cannot be supported by an analogue, and which, if it be at all, must be first, and therefore cannot have an antecedent, and therefore may be monstrated, but cannot be demonstrated.—I am no ghost-seer, I am no believer in apparitions. I do not contend for indescribable sensations, nor refer to, much less ground my convictions on, blind feelings or incommunicable experiences, but far rather contend against these superstitions in the mechanic sect, and impeach you as guilty, habitually and systematically guilty, of the same. Guilty, I say, of superstitions, which at worst are but exceptions and fits in the poor self-misapprehending pietists, with whom, under the name mystics, you would fain confound and discredit all who receive and worship God in spirit and in truth, and in the former as the only possible mode of the latter. According to your own account, your own scheme, you know nothing but your own sensations, indescribable inasmuch as they are sensations—for the appropriate expression even of which we must fly not merely to the indeclinables in the lowest parts of speech, but to human articulations that only (like musical notes) stand for inarticulate sounds—the οι, οι, παπαι of the Greek tragedies, or, rather, Greek oratorios. You see nothing, but only by a sensation that conjures up an image in your own brain, or optic nerve (as in a nightmare), have an apparition, in consequence of which, as again in the nightmare, you are forced to believe for the moment, and are inclined to infer the existence of a corresponding reality out of your brain, but by what intermediation you cannot even form an intelligible conjecture. During the years of ill-health from disturbed digestion, I saw a host of apparitions, and heard them too—but I attributed them to an act in my brain. You, according to your own showing, see and hear nothing but apparitions in your brain, and strangely attribute them to things that are outside your skull. Which of the two notions is most like the philosopher, which the superstitionist? The philosopher who makes my apparitions nothing but apparitions—a brain-image nothing more than a brain-image—and affirm nihil super stare—or you and yours who vehemently contend that it is but a brain-image, and yet cry, "ast superstitit aliquid. Est super stitio alicujus quod in externo, id est, in apparenti non apparet."
What is outness, external and the like, but either the generalisation of apparence or the result of a given degree, a comparative intensity of the same? "I see it in my mind's eye," exclaims Hamlet, when his thoughts were in his own purview the same phantom, yea! in a higher intensity, became his father's ghost and marched along the platform. I quoted your own exposition, and dare you with these opinions charge others with superstition? You who deny aught permanent in our being, you with whom the soul, yea, the soul of the soul, our conscience and morality, are but the tune from a fragile barrel-organ played by air and water, and whose life, therefore, must of course be a pointing to—as of a Marcellus or a Hamlet—"Tis here! 'Tis gone!" Were it possible that I could actually believe such a system, I should not be scared from striking it, from its being so majestical!
THE GREATER DAMNATION
The old law of England punishes those who dig up the bones of the dead for superstitious or magical purposes, that is, in order to injure the living. What then are they guilty of who uncover the dormitories of the departed, and throw their souls into hell, in order to cast odium on a living truth?
DARWIN'S BOTANICAL GARDEN
Darwin possesses the epidermis of poetry but not the cutis; the cortex without the liber, alburnum, lignum, or medulla. And no wonder! for the inner bark or liber, alburnum, and wood are one and the same substance, in different periods of existence.
SEVENTEEN HUNDRED AND SIXTY YARDS NOT EXACTLY A MILE
"It is a mile and a half in height." "How much is that in yards or feet?" The mind rests satisfied in producing a correspondency in its own thoughts, and in the exponents of those thoughts. This seems to be a matter purely analytic, not yet properly synthetic. It is rather an interchange of equivalent acts, but not the same acts. In the yard I am prospective; in the mile I seem to be retrospective. Come, a hundred strides more, and we shall have come a mile. This, if true, may be a subtlety, but is it necessarily a trifle? May not many common but false conclusions originate in the neglect of this distinction—in the confounding of objective and subjective logic?
OF A TOO WITTY BOOK
I like salt to my meat so well that I can scarce say grace over meat without salt. But salt to one's salt! Ay! a sparkling, dazzling, lit-up saloon or subterranean minster in a vast mine of rock-salt—what of it?—full of white pillars and aisles and altars of eye-dazzling salt. Well, what of it?—'twere an uncomfortable lodging or boarding-house—in short, all my eye. Now, I am content with a work if it be but my eye and Betty Martin, because, having never heard any charge against the author of the adage, candour obliges me to conclude that Eliza Martin is "sense for certain." In short, never was a metaphor more lucky, apt, ramescent, and fructiferous—a hundred branches, and each hung with a different graft-fruit—than salt as typical of wit—the uses of both being the same, not to nourish, but to season and preserve nourishment. Yea! even when there is plenty of good substantial meat to incorporate with, stout aitch-bone and buttock, still there may be too much; and they who confine themselves to such meals will contract a scorbutic habit of intellect (i.e., a scurvy taste), and, with loose teeth and tender gums, become incapable of chewing and digesting hard matters of mere plain thinking.
SPOOKS
It is thus that the Glanvillians reason. First, they assume the facts as objectively as if the question related to the experimentable of our senses. Secondly, they take the imaginative possibility—that is, that the [assumed] facts involve no contradiction, [as if it were] a scientific possibility. And, lastly, they [advocate] them as proofs of a spiritual world and our own immortality. This last [I hold to] be the greatest insult to conscience and the greatest incongruity with the objects of religion.
N.B.—It is amusing, in all ghost stories, etc., that the recorders are "the farthest in the world from being credulous," or "as far from believing such things as any man."
If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke—Aye! and what then?
The more exquisite and delicate a flower of joy, the tenderer must be the hand that plucks it.
Floods and general inundations render for the time even the purest springs turbid.
For compassion a human heart suffices; but for full, adequate sympathy with joy, an angel's.