ANTICIPATIONS IN NATURE AND IN THOUGHT Saturday night, April 14, 1805
In looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dim-glimmering through the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking for, a symbolical language for something within me that already and for ever exists, than observing anything new. Even when that latter is the case, yet still I have always an obscure feeling as if that new phenomena were the dim awaking of a forgotten or hidden truth of my inner nature. It is still interesting as a word—a symbol. It is Λογος the Creator, and the Evolver! [Now] what is the right, the virtuous feeling, and consequent action when a man having long meditated on and perceived a certain truth, finds another, a foreign writer, who has handled the same with an approximation to the truth as he had previously conceived it? Joy! Let Truth make her voice audible! While I was preparing the pen to write this remark, I lost the train of thought which had led me to it. I meant to have asked something else now forgotten. For the above answers itself. It needed no answer, I trust, in my heart.
[Printed in Life of S. T. C., by James Gillman, 1838, p. 311.]
THE HOPE OF HUMANITY, Easter Sunday, 1805
That beautiful passage in dear and honoured W. Wordsworth's "Michael," respecting the forward-looking Hope inspired pre-eminently by the birth of a child, was brought to my mind most forcibly by my own independent though, in part, anticipated reflections on the importance of young children to the keeping up the stock of Hope in the human species. They seem to be the immediate and secreting organ of Hope in the great organised body of the whole human race, in all men considered as the component atoms of Man—as young leaves are the organs of supplying vital air to the atmosphere.
Thus living on through such a length of years,
The Shepherd, if he loved himself, must needs
Have loved his Helpmate; but to Michael's heart
This son of his old age was yet more dear—
Less from instinctive tenderness, the same
Fond spirit that blindly works in the blood of all—
Than that a child, more than all other gifts
That earth can offer to declining man,
Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts,
And stirrings of inquietude, when they
By tendency of nature needs must fail.
—Poetical Works of W. WORDSWORTH, p. 133.
THE NORTHERN EASTER Easter Sunday, 1805