THE EMPYREAN
Friday + Saturday, 12-1 o'clock [March 2, 1805.]
What a sky! the not yet orbed moon, the spotted oval, blue at one edge from the deep utter blue of the sky—a MASS of pearl-white cloud below, distant, and travelling to the horizon, but all the upper part of the ascent and all the height such profound blue, deep as a deep river, and deep in colour, and those two depths so entirely one, as to give the meaning and explanation of the two different significations of the epithet. Here, so far from divided, they were scarcely distinct, scattered over with thin pearl-white cloudlets—hands and fingers—the largest not larger than a floating veil! Unconsciously I stretched forth my arms as to embrace the sky, and in a trance I had worshipped God in the moon—the spirit, not the form. I felt in how innocent a feeling Sabeism might have begun. Oh! not only the moon, but the depths of the sky! The moon was the idea; but deep sky is, of all visual impressions, the nearest akin to a feeling. It is more a feeling than a sight, or, rather, it is the melting away and entire union of feeling and sight!
DISTEMPER'S WORST CALAMITY
Monday morning, which I ought not to have known not to be Sunday night, 2 o'clock, March 4, 1805.
My dreams to-night were interfused with struggle and fear, though, till the very last, not victors; but the very last, which awoke me, was a completed night-mare, as it gave the idea and sensation of actual grasp or touch contrary to my will and in apparent consequence of the malignant will of the external form, whether actually appearing or, as sometimes happened, believed to exist—in which latter case I have two or three times felt a horrid touch of hatred, a grasp, or a weight of hate and horror abstracted from all [conscious] form or supposal of form, an abstract touch, an abstract grasp, an abstract weight! Quam nihil ad genium Papiliane tuum! or, in other words, This Mackintosh would prove to be nonsense by a Scotch smile. The last [dream], that woke me, though a true night-mare, was, however, a mild one. I cried out early, like a scarcely-hurt child who knows himself within hearing of his mother. But, anterior to this, I had been playing with children, especially with one most lovely child, about two years or two and a half, and had repeated to her, in my dream, "The dews were falling fast," &c., and I was sorely frightened by the sneering and fiendish malignity of the beautiful creature, but from the beginning there had been a terror about it and proceeding from it. I shall hereafter, read the Vision in "Macbeth" with increased admiration.
["Quam nihil ad genium Papiniane tuum," was the motto of The Lyrical Ballads.]