Music soothes the din of philosophy and lightens incessantly over the heads of sages.[151]
How can the language of the poet be more expressive than nature? He is content that what he has already read in simple characters, or indifferently in all, be translated into the same again.
He is the true artist whose life is his material; every stroke of the chisel must enter his own flesh and bone and not grate dully on marble.[152]
The Springs.—What is any man's discourse to me if I am not sensible of something in it as steady and cheery as the creak of the crickets? In it the woods must be relieved against the sky. Men tire me when I am not constantly greeted and cheered in their discourse, as it were by the flux of sparkling streams.
I cannot see the bottom of the sky, because I cannot see to the bottom of myself. It is the symbol of my own infinity. My eye penetrates as far into the ether as that depth is inward from which my contemporary thought springs.
Not by constraint or severity shall you have access to true wisdom, but by abandonment, and childlike mirthfulness. If you would know aught, be gay before it.
June 24. When I read Cudworth I find I can tolerate all,—atomists, pneumatologists, atheists, and theists,—Plato, Aristotle, Leucippus, Democritus, and Pythagoras. It is the attitude of these men, more than any communication, which charms me. It is so rare to find a man musing. But between them and their commentators there is an endless dispute. But if it come to that, that you compare notes, then you are all wrong. As it is, each takes me up into the serene heavens, and paints earth and sky. Any sincere thought is irresistible; it lifts us to the zenith, whither the smallest bubble rises as surely as the largest.
Dr. Cudworth does not consider that the belief in a deity is as great a heresy as exists. Epicurus held that the gods were "of human form, yet were so thin and subtile, as that, comparatively with our terrestrial bodies, they might be called incorporeal; they having not so much carnem as quasi-carnem, nor sanguinem as quasi-sanguinem, a certain kind of aerial or ethereal flesh and blood." This, which Cudworth pronounces "romantical," is plainly as good doctrine as his own. As if any sincere thought were not the best sort of truth!
There is no doubt but the highest morality in the books is rhymed or measured,—is, in form as well as substance, poetry. Such is the scripture of all nations. If I were to compile a volume to contain the condensed wisdom of mankind, I should quote no rhythmless line.[153]
Not all the wit of a college can avail to make one harmonious line. It never happens. It may get so as to jingle, but a jingle is akin to a jar,—jars regularly recurring.[154]