'Mein alter Herr' (von Stein) 'pflegte dann wohl scherzend zu sagen: Ich müsse von irgend eine Hexe meinen Altem als ein Wechselbalg in's Nest gelegt seyn; ich gehöre offenbar einem Stamm amerikanischer wilden an, und habe noch die Hühnerhundnase zum Auswittern des verschiedenen Blutes.' Arndt, speaking of his power to detect at sight (when seen at a distance) Russians, English, etc., says that Von Stein replied thus in his surprise. But I have cited the passage as one which amply illustrates the suspensive form of sentence in the German always indicated by a colon (:), thus: 'zu sagen: Ich müsse'—to say that I must have been (p. 164).
The active sense of fearful, viz., that which causes and communicates terror—not that which receives terror—was undoubtedly in Shakespeare's age, but especially amongst poets, the preponderant sense. Accordingly I am of opinion that even in neutral cases, such as are open indifferently to either sense, viz., that which affrights, or that which is itself affrighted, the bias in Shakespeare's interpretation of the feeling lay towards the former movement. For instance, in one of his sonnets:
'Oh, fearful meditation! where, alas!'
the true construction I believe to be—not this: Oh, though deriving terror from the circumstances surrounding thee, suffering terror from the entourage of considerations pursuing thee; but this: Oh, thought impressing and creating terror, etc. A 'fearful' agent in Shakespeare's use is not one that shrinks in alarm from the act, but an agent that causes others to shrink; not panic-struck, but panic-striking.
Miss Edgeworth, let me remark, commits trespasses on language that are really past excusing. In one place she says that a man 'had a contemptible opinion' of some other man's understanding. Such a blunder is not of that class which usage sanctions, and an accuracy not much short of pedantry would be argued in noticing: it is at once illiterate and vulgar in the very last degree. I mean that it is common amongst vulgar people, and them only. It ranks, for instance, with the common formula of 'I am agreeable, if you prefer it.'
Style is the disentangling of thoughts or ideas reciprocally involved in each other.
4.—Theological and Religious.
Religion under any of its aspects, revealing or consoling—religion in connection with any of its affinities, ethics or metaphysics, when self-evoked by a person of earnest nature, not imposed from without by the necessities of monastic life, not caught as a contagion from the example of friends that surround you, argues some 'vast volcanic agency' moving at subterraneous depths below the ordinary working mind of daily life, and entitled by its own intrinsic grandeur to ennoble the curiosity (else a petty passion) which may put questions as to its origin. In any case of religion arising, as a spontaneous birth, in the midst of alien forces, it is inevitable to ask for its why and its whence. Religion considered as a sentiment of devotion, as a yearning after some dedication to an immeasurable principle of that noblest temple among all temples—'the upright heart and pure,' or religion, again, as the apprehension of some mighty synthesis amongst truths dimly perceived heretofore amidst separating clouds, but now brought into strict indissoluble connection, proclaims a revolution so great that it is otherwise not to be accounted for than as the breaking out of a germ of the supernatural in man as a seed from a hitherto barren soil.
Sin is that secret word, that dark aporréton of the human race, undiscoverable except by express revelation, which having once been laid in the great things of God as a germinal principle, has since blossomed into a vast growth of sublime ideas known only to those nations who have lived under the moulding of Scriptural truth—and comprehending all functions of the Infinite operatively familiar to man. Yes, I affirm that there is no form through which the Infinite reveals itself in a sense comprehensible by man and adequate to man; that there is no sublime agency which compresses the human mind from infancy so as to mingle with the moments of its growth, positively none but has been in its whole origin—in every part—and exclusively developed out of that tremendous mystery which lurks under the name of sin.