There is a species of applause scarcely less genial to a poet, whether bard, musician, or artist, than the vernal warmth to the feathered songsters during their nest-building or incubation—a sympathy, an expressed hope, that is the open air in which the poet breathes, and without which the sense of power sinks back on itself like a sigh heaved up from the tightened chest of a sick man. Alas! alas! alas!
THE GREAT UNKNOWN
Anonymity is now an artifice to acquire celebrity, as a black veil is worn to make a pair of bright eyes more conspicuous.
BOOK-LEARNING FOR LEGISLATORS
For the same reasons that we cannot now act by impulses, but must think, so now must every legislator be a man of sound book-learning, because he cannot, if he would, think or act from the simple dictates of unimproved but undepraved common sense. Newspapers, reviews, and the conversation of men who derive their opinions from newspapers and reviews will secure for him artificial opinions, if he does not secure them for himself from purer and more authentic sources. There is now no such being as a country gentleman. Like their relation, the Dodo, the race is extinct, or if by accident one has escaped, it belongs to the Museum, not to active life, or the purposes of active life.
THEISM AND ATHEISM
The more I read and reflect on the arguments of the truly philosophical theists and atheists, the more I feel convinced that the ultimate difference is a moral rather than an intellectual one, that the result is an x y z, an acknowledged insufficiency of the known to account for itself, and, therefore, a something unknown—that to which, while the atheist leaves it a blank in the understanding, the theist dedicates his noblest feelings of love and awe, and with which, by a moral syllogism, he connects and unites his conscience and actions. For the words goodness and wisdom are clearly only reflexes of the effect, just as when we call the unknown cause of cold and heat by the name of its effects, and know nothing further. For if we mean that a Being like man, with human goodness and intellect, only magnified, is the cause, that is, that the First Cause is an immense man (as according to Swedenborg and Zinzendorf), then come the insoluble difficulties of the incongruity of qualities whose very essence implies finiteness, with a Being ex hypothesi infinite.