[137] Revelation x. 1-6. Some words and sentences of the original are omitted, either for the sake of brevity, or to heighten the dramatic effect.
[138] Hebrews xii. 18, 19, 22, 23.
[139] “In reading over this after an interval of twenty-three years I was wondering what I could have said that looked like contempt of age. May not slobberers have referred not to age but to the drivelling of decayed intellect, which is surely an ill guide in matters of understanding and consequently of faith?” MS. Note by John Thelwall, 1819.
[140] Patience—permit me as a definition of the word to quote one sentence from my first Address, p. 20. “Accustomed to regard all the affairs of man as a process, they never hurry and they never pause.” In his not possessing this virtue, all the horrible excesses of Robespierre did, I believe, originate.—MS. note to text of letter by S. T. Coleridge.
[141] Godliness—the belief, the habitual and efficient belief, that we are always in the presence of our universal Parent. I will translate literally a passage [the passage is from Voss’s Luise. I am enabled by the courtesy of Dr. Garnett, of the British Museum, to give an exact reference: Luise, ein ländliches Gedicht in drei Idyllen, von Johann Heinrich Voss, Königsberg, MDCCXCV. Erste Idylle, pp. 41-45, lines 303-339.—E. H. C.] from a German hexameter poem. It is the speech of a country clergyman on the birthday of his daughter. The latter part fully expresses the spirit of godliness, and its connection with brotherly-kindness. (Pardon the harshness of the language, for it is translated totidem verbis.)
“Yes! my beloved daughter, I am cheerful, cheerful as the birds singing in the wood here, or the squirrel that hops among the airy branches around its young in their nest. To-day it is eighteen years since God gave me my beloved, now my only child, so intelligent, so pious, and so dutiful. How the time flies away! Eighteen years to come—how far the space extends itself before us! and how does it vanish when we look back upon it! It was but yesterday, it seems to me, that as I was plucking flowers here, and offering praise, on a sudden the joyful message came, ‘A daughter is born to us.’ Much since that time has the Almighty imparted to us of good and evil. But the evil itself was good; for his loving-kindness is infinite. Do you recollect [to his wife] as it once had rained after a long drought, and I (Louisa in my arms) was walking with thee in the freshness of the garden, how the child snatched at the rainbow, and kissed me, and said: ‘Papa! there it rains flowers from heaven! Does the blessed God strew these that we children may gather them up?’ ‘Yes!’ I answered, ‘full-blowing and heavenly blessings does the Father strew who stretched out the bow of his favour; flowers and fruits that we may gather them with thankfulness and joy. Whenever I think of that great Father then my heart lifts itself up and swells with active impulse towards all his children, our brothers who inhabit the earth around us; differing indeed from one another in powers and understanding, yet all dear children of the same parent, nourished by the same Spirit of animation, and ere long to fall asleep, and again to wake in the common morning of the Resurrection; all who have loved their fellow-creatures, all shall rejoice with Peter, and Moses, and Confucius, and Homer, and Zoroaster, with Socrates who died for truth, and also with the noble Mendelssohn who teaches that the divine one was never crucified.’”
Mendelssohn is a German Jew by parentage, and deist by election. He has written some of the most acute books possible in favour of natural immortality, and Germany deems him her profoundest metaphysician, with the exception of the most unintelligible Immanuel Kant.—MS. note to text of letter by S. T. Coleridge.
[142] 2 Peter i. 5-7.
[143] They were criticised by Lamb in his letter to Coleridge Dec. 10, 1796 (xxxi. of Canon Ainger’s edition), but in a passage first printed in the Atlantic Monthly for February, 1891. The explanatory notes there printed were founded on a misconception, but the matter is cleared up in the Athenæum for June 13, 1891, in the article, “A Letter of Charles Lamb.”
[144] The reference is to a pamphlet of sixteen pages containing twenty-eight sonnets by Coleridge, Southey, Lloyd, Lamb, and others, which was printed for private circulation towards the close of 1796, and distributed among a few friends. Of this selection of sonnets, which was made “for the purpose of binding them up with the sonnets of the Rev. W. L. Bowles,” the sole surviving copy is now in the Dyce Collection of the South Kensington Museum. On the fly-leaf, in Coleridge’s handwriting, is a “presentation note” to Mrs. Thelwall. For a full account of this curious and interesting volume, see Coleridge’s Poetical and Dramatic Works, 4 vols., 1877-1880, ii. 377-379; also, Poetical Works (1893), 542-544.