PRUDENCE VERSUS FRIENDSHIP
Among the countless arguments against the Paleyans state, this too—Can a wise moral legislator have made prudence the true principle-ground, and guide of moral conduct, where in almost all cases in which there is contemplation to act wrong the first appearances of prudence are in favour of immorality, and, in order to ground the contrary on a principle of prudence, it is necessary to refine, to calculate, to look far onward into an uncertain future? Is this a guide, or primary guide, that for ever requires a guide against itself? Is it not a strange system which sets prudence against prudence? Compare this with the Law of Conscience—Is it not its specific character to be immediate, positive, unalterable? In short, a priori, state the requisites of a moral guide, and apply them first to prudence, and then to the law of pure reason or conscience, and ask if we need fear the result if the Judge is pure from all bribes and prejudices.
What then are the real dictates of prudence as drawn from every man's experience in late manhood, and so lured from the intoxication of youth, hope, and love? How cold, how dead'ning, what a dire vacuum they would leave in the soul, if the high and supreme sense of duty did not form a root out of which new prospects budded. What, I say, is the clear dictate of prudence in the matter of friendship? Assuredly to like only, and never to be so attached as to be stripped naked by the loss. A friend may be a great-coat, a beloved a couch, but never, never our necessary clothing, our only means of quiet heart-repose! And, yet, with this the mind of a generous man would be so miserable, that prudence itself would fight against prudence, and advise him to drink off the draught of Hope, spite of the horrid and bitter dregs of disappointment, with which the draught will assuredly finish.
Though I have said that duty is a consolation, I have not affirmed that the scar of the wound of disappointed love and insulted, betrayed fidelity would be removed in this life. No! it will not—nay, the very duty must for ever keep alive feelings the appropriate objects of which are indeed in another world; but yet our human nature cannot avoid at times the connection of those feelings with their original or their first forms and objects; and so far, therefore, from removing the scar, will often and often make the wound open and bleed afresh. But, still, we know that the feeling is not objectless, that the counterfeit has a correspondent genuine, and this is the comfort.
A POET ON POETRY
Canzone XVIII. fra le Rime di Dante is a poem of wild and interesting images, intended as an enigma, and to me an enigma it remains, spite of all my efforts. Yet it deserves transcription and translation. A.D. 1806 [? 1807].
"Tre donne intorno al cuor mi son venute," &c.
[After the four first lines the handwriting is that of my old, dear, and honoured friend, Mr. Wade, of Bristol.—S. T. C.]
Ramsgate, Sept. 2nd, 1819.—I begin to understand the above poem, after an interval from 1805, during which no year passed in which I did not reperuse, I might say construe, parse, and spell it, twelve times at least—such a fascination had it, spite of its obscurity! It affords a good instance, by the bye, of that soul of universal significance in a true poet's composition, in addition to the specific meaning.