[5] An excellent commentary on this is Clough’s
Perché pensa, pensando vecchia.
[6] Cf. Job xiv. 21:
“His sons come to honour, and he knoweth it not; and they are brought low, but he perceiveth it not of them.”
[7] So Bishop Butler, Analogy, ch. i.:
“We cannot argue from the reason of the thing that death is the destruction of living agents because we know not at all what death is in itself, but only some of its effects”.
[8] So Milton, enfolding this idea of death, Paradise Lost, ii., 672-3:—
What seemed his head
The likeness of a kingly crown had on.
[9] Cf. Plato, Phaedo, x.:—ἆρα ἔχει ἀληθειάν τινα ὄψις τε καὶ ἀκοὴ τοῖς ἀνθρώποις. ἤ τά γε τοιᾶυτα καὶ οἱ ποἱηταὶ ἡμὶν ἄει θρυλοῦσιν ὅτι οὐτ ακούομεν ἀκριβὲς οὐδὲν οὔτε ὁρῶμεν.
“Have sight and hearing any truth in them? Are they not, as poets are always telling us, inaccurate witnesses?”
“Have sight and hearing any truth in them? Are they not, as poets are always telling us, inaccurate witnesses?”
The proper commentary on the whole of this passage is Plato passim, but the Phaedo particularly, cf. Republic, vii., viii. and xiv.-xv.
[10] An allusion to the myth that when souls are sent to occupy a body again they drink of Lethe that they may forget their previous existence. See the famous passage towards the end of the tenth book of Plato’s Republic:
“All persons are compelled to drink a certain quantity of the water, but those who are not preserved by prudence drink more than the quantity, and each as he drinks forgets everything”.
So Milton, Paradise Lost, ii., 582-4.
[11] The best commentary on this will be found in Herbert Spencer’s Psychology.
[12] Compare with this Tennyson’s first sonnet (Works, Globe Edition, 25), and the lines in the Ancient Sage in the Passion of the Past (Id., 551). Cf. too the lines in Wordsworth’s ode on Intimations of Immortality:—
But there’s a tree, of many one,
A single field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone;
The pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat.
For other remarkable illustrations of this see the present writer’s Illustrations of Tennyson, p. 38.
[13] Cf. Coleridge, Ancient Mariner, iv.:—
“O happy living things ... I blessed them
The self-same moment I could pray.”
There is a close parallel between the former and the latter state described here and in Coleridge’s mystic allegory; in both cases the sufferers “wake to love,” the curse falling off them when they can “bless”.
[14] 1884. And all so variously wrought (with semi-colon instead of full stop at the end of the preceding line).