Nothing affects me much at the moment it happens. It either stupefies me, and I, perhaps, look at a merry-make and dance-the-hay of flies, or listen entirely to the loud click of the great clock, or I am simply indifferent, not without some sense of philosophical self-complacency. For a thing at the moment is but a thing of the moment; it must be taken up into the mind, diffuse itself through the whole multitude of shapes and thoughts, not one of which it leaves untinged, between [not one of] which and it some new thought is not engendered. Now this is a work of time, but the body feels it quicker with me.
THE POET AND THE SPIDER
On St. Herbert's Island, I saw a large spider with most beautiful legs, floating in the air on his back by a single thread which he was spinning out, and still, as he spun, heaving on the air, as if the air beneath was a pavement elastic to his strokes. From the top of a very high tree he had spun his line; at length reached the bottom, tied his thread round a piece of grass, and reascended to spin another—a net to hang, as a fisherman's sea-net hangs, in the sun and wind to dry.
THE COMMUNICABLE
One excellent use of communication of sorrow to a friend is this, that in relating what ails us, we ourselves first know exactly what the real grief is, and see it for itself in its own form and limits. Unspoken grief is a misty medley of which the real affliction only plays the first fiddle, blows the horn to a scattered mob of obscure feelings. Perhaps, at certain moments, a single, almost insignificant sorrow may, by association, bring together all the little relicts of pain and discomfort, bodily and mental, that we have endured even from infancy.
NOSCITUR A SOCIIS
One may best judge of men by their pleasures. Who has not known men who have passed the day in honourable toil with honour and ability, and at night sought the vilest pleasure in the vilest society? This is the man's self. The other is a trick learnt by heart (for we may even learn the power of extemporaneous elocution and instant action as an automatic trick); but a man's pleasures—children, books, friends, nature, the Muse—O these deceive not.