A SUNSET
A beautiful sunset, the sun setting behind Newlands across the foot of the lake. The sky is cloudless, save that there is a cloud on Skiddaw, one on the highest mountains in Borrowdale, some on Helvellyn, and that the sun sets in a glorious cloud. These clouds are of various shapes, various colours, and belong to their mountains and have nothing to do with the sky. N.B.—There is something metallic, silver playfully and imperfectly gilt and highly polished, or, rather, something mother-of-pearlish, in the sun-gleams on ice, thin ice.
EXTREMES MEET
I have repeatedly said that I could make a volume if only I had noted down, as they occurred to my recollection, the instances of the proverb "Extremes Meet." This night, Sunday, December 11, 1803, half-past eleven, I have determined to devote the last nine pages of my pocket-book to a collection of the same.
1.
The parching air
Burns frore and cold performs the effect of fire.Paradise Lost, ii. 594.
2. Insects by their smallness, the mammoth by its hugeness, terrible.
3. In the foam-islands in a fiercely boiling pool, at the bottom of a waterfall, there is sameness from infinite change.
4. The excess of humanity and disinterestedness in polite society, the desire not to give pain, for example, not to talk of your own diseases and misfortunes, and to introduce nothing but what will give pleasure, destroy all humanity and disinterestedness, by making it intolerable, through desuetude, to listen to the complaints of our equals, or of any, where the listening does not gratify or excite some vicious pride and sense of superiority.
5. It is difficult to say whether a perfectly unheard-of subject or a crambe bis cocta, if chosen by a man of genius, would excite in the higher degree the sense of novelty. Take, as an instance of the latter, the "Orestes" of Sotheby.
6. Dark with excess of light.
7. Self-absorption and worldly-mindedness (N.B.—The latter a most philosophical word).
8. The dim intellect sees an absolute oneness, the perfectly clear intellect knowingly perceives it. Distinction and plurality lie in the betwixt.
9. The naked savage and the gymnosophist.
10. Nothing and intensest absolute being.
11. Despotism and ochlocracy.
ABSTRUSE RESEARCH
A dirty business! "How," said I, with a great effort to conquer my laziness and a great wish to rest in the generality, "what do you include under the words 'dirty business'"? I note this in order to remember the reluctance the mind has in general to analysis.