FRIENDSHIP AND MARRIAGE
"Ich finde alles eher auf der Erde, so gar Wahrheit und Freude, als Freundschaft."—Jean Paul.[F]
This for the motto—to examine and attest the fact, and then to explain the reason. First, then, there are the extraordinary qualifications demanded for true friendship, arising from the multitude of causes that make men delude themselves and attribute to friendship what is only a similarity of pursuit, or even a mere dislike of feeling oneself alone in anything. But, secondly, supposing the friendship to be as real as human nature ordinarily permits, yet how many causes are at constant war against it, whether in the shape of violent irruptions or unobserved yet constant wearings away by dyspathy, &c. Exemplify this in youth and then in manhood. First, there is the influence of wives, how frequently deadly to friendship, either by direct encroach, or, perhaps, intentional plans of alienation! Secondly, there is the effect of families, by otherwise occupying the heart; and, thirdly, the action of life in general, by the worldly-wise, chilling effects of prudential anxieties.
Corollary. These reflections, however, suggest an argument in favour of the existing indissolubility of marriage.
To be compelled to make it up, or consent to be miserable and disrespected, is indeed a coarse plaister for the wounds of love, but so it must be while the patients themselves are of coarse make and unhealthy humours.
IMAGINATION
His imagination, if it must be so called, is at all events of the pettiest kind—it is an imaginunculation. How excellently the German Einbildungskraft expresses this prime and loftiest faculty, the power of co-adunation, the faculty that forms the many into one—In-eins-bildung! Eisenoplasy, or esenoplastic power, is contradistinguished from fantasy, or the mirrorment, either catoptric or metoptric—repeating simply, or by transposition—and, again, involuntary [fantasy] as in dreams, or by an act of the will.
[See Biog. Lit., cap. x.; Coleridge's Works, iii. 272. See also Blackwood's Magazine, March 1840, No. ccxciii., Art. The Plagiarisms of S. T. Coleridge.]