THE ABSTRACT SELF On Friday night, Feb. 8, 1805
On Friday Night, 8th Feb. 1805, my feeling, in sleep, of exceeding great love for my infant, seen by me in the dream!—yet so as it might be Sara, Derwent, or Berkley, and still it was an individual babe and mine.
"All look or likeness caught from earth,
All accident of kin or birth,
Had pass'd away. There seem'd no trace
Of aught upon her brighten'd face,
Upraised beneath the rifted stone,
Save of one spirit all her own;
She, she herself, and only she,
Shone through her body visibly."
Poetical Works, 1893, p. 172.
This abstract self is, indeed, in its nature a Universal personified, as Life, Soul, Spirit, etc. Will not this prove it to be a deeper feeling, and of such intimate affinity with ideas, so as to modify them and become one with them; whereas the appetites and the feelings of revenge and anger co-exist with the ideas, not combine with them, and alter the apparent effect of this form, not the forms themselves? Certain modifications of fear seem to approach nearest to this love-sense in its manner of acting.
Those whispers just as you have fallen asleep—what are they, and whence?
LITERA SCRIPTA MANET Monday, Feb 11, 1805