O! many, many are the seeings, hearings, of pure love that have a being of their own, and to call them by the names of things unsouled and debased below even their own lowest nature by associations accidental, and of vicious accidents, is blasphemy. What seest thou yonder? The lovely countenance of a lovely maiden, fervid yet awe-suffering with devotion—her face resigned to bliss or bale; or a bit of flesh; or, rather, that which cannot be seen unless by him whose very seeing is more than an act of mere sight—that which refuses all words, because words being, perforce, generalities do not awake, but really involve associations of other words as well as other thoughts—but that which I see, must be felt, be possessed, in and by its sole self! What! shall the statuary Pygmalion of necessity feel this for every part of the insensate marble, and shall the lover Pygmalion in contemplating the living statue, the heart-adored maiden, breathing forth in every look, every movement, the genial life imbreathed of God, grovel in the mire and grunt the language of the swinish slaves of the Circe, of vulgar generality and still more vulgar association? The Polyclete that created the Aphrodite καλλιπυγος, thought in acts, not words—energy divinely languageless— δια τον Λογον, ου συν επεσι, through the Word, not with words. And what though it met with Imp-fathers and Imp-mothers and Fiendsips at its christening in ts parents' absence!
THE MANUFACTURE OF PROPHESY
One of the causes of superstition, and also of enthusiasm, and, indeed, of all errors in matters of fact, is the great power with which the effect acts upon and modifies the remembrance of its cause, at times even transforming it in the mind. Let A have said a few words to B, which (by some change and accommodation of them to the event in the mind of B) have been remarkably fulfilled; and let B remind A of these words which he (A) had spoken, A will instantly forget all his mood, motive, and meaning, at the time of speaking them, nay, remember words he had never spoken, and throw back upon them, from the immediate event, an imagined fulfillment, a prophetic grandeur—himself, in his own faith, a seer of no small inspiration. We yet want the growth of a prophet and self-deceived wonder-worker step by step, through all the stages; and, yet, what ample materials exist for a true and nobly-minded psychologist! For, in order to make fit use of these materials, he must love and honour as well as understand human nature—rather, he must love in order to understand it.
THE CAPTIVE BIRD May 16th, 1808
O that sweet bird! where is it? It is encaged somewhere out of sight; but from my bedroom at the Courier office, from the windows of which I look out on the walls of the Lyceum, I hear it at early dawn, often, alas! lulling me to late sleep—again when I awake and all day long. It is in prison, all its instincts ungratified, yet it feels the influence of spring, and calls with unceasing melody to the Loves that dwell in field and greenwood bowers, unconscious, perhaps, that it calls in vain. O are they the songs of a happy, enduring day-dream? Has the bird hope? or does it abandon itself to the joy of its frame, a living harp of Eolus? O that I could do so!
Assuredly a thrush or blackbird encaged in London is a far less shocking spectacle, its encagement a more venial defect of just feeling, than (which yet one so often sees) a bird in a gay cage in the heart of the country—yea, as if at once to mock both the poor prisoner and its kind mother, Nature—in a cage hung up in a tree, where the free birds after a while, when the gaudy dungeon is no longer a scare, crowd to it, perch on the wires, drink the water, and peck up the seeds. But of all birds I most detest to see the nightingale encaged, and the swallow, and the cuckoo. Motiveless! monstrous! But the robin! O woes' woe! woe!—he, sweet cock-my-head-and-eye, pert-bashful darling, that makes our kitchen its chosen cage.