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.