Few die of a broken heart, and these few (the surgeons tell us) know nothing of it, and, dying suddenly, leave to the dissector the first discovery. O this is but the shallow remark of a hard and unthinking prosperity! Have you never seen a stick broken in the middle, and yet cohering by the rind? The fibres, half of them actually broken and the rest sprained and, though tough, unsustaining? O many, many are the broken-hearted for those who know what the moral and practical heart of the man is!
VOX HIEMALIS Thursday, Sept. 30, 1824
Now the breeze through the stiff and brittle-becoming foliage of the trees counterfeits the sound of a rushing stream or water-flood suddenly sweeping by. The sigh, the modulated continuousness of the murmur is exchanged for the confusion of overtaking sounds—the self-evolution of the One, for the clash or stroke of ever-commencing contact of the multitudinous, without interspace, by confusion. The short gusts rustle and the ear feels the unlithesome dryness, before the eye detects the coarser, duller, though deeper green, deadened and not [yet] awakened into the hues of decay—echoes of spring from the sepulchral vault of winter. The aged year, conversant with the forms of its youth and forgetting all the intervals, feebly reproduces them [as it were, from], memory.
CONSTANCY Friday, June 9, 1826
"Constancy lives in realms above." This exclusion of constancy from the list of earthly virtues may be a poet's exaggeration, but, certainly, it is of far rarer occurrence in all relations of life than the young and warm-hearted are willing to believe, but in cases of exclusive attachment (that is, in Love, properly so-called, and yet distinct from Friendship), and in the highest form of the Virtue, it is so rare that I cannot help doubting whether an instance of mutual constancy in effect ever existed. For there are two sorts of constancy, the one negative, where there is no transfer of affection, where the bond of attachment is not broken though it may be attenuated to a thread—this may be met with, not so seldom, and, where there is goodness of heart, it may be expected—but the other sort, or positive constancy, where the affection endures in the same intensity with the same or increased tenderness and nearness, of this it is that I doubt whether once in an age an instance occurs where A feels it toward B, and B feels it towards A, and vice versâ.
FLOWERS AND LIGHT April 18, 1826
Spring flowers, I have observed, look best in the day, and by sunshine: but summer and autumnal flower-pots by lamp or candle-light. I have now before me a flower-pot of cherry-blossoms, polyanthuses, double violets, periwinkles, wall-flowers, but how dim and dusky they look! The scarlet anemone is an exception, and three or four of them with all the rest of the flower-glass sprays of white blossoms, and one or two periwinkles for the sake of the dark green leaves, green stems, and flexible elegant form, make a lovely group both by sun and by candle-light.