I have been looking at a cabinet of flies. Hundreds of them, each different, were arranged in order and named. Some I had to examine through a microscope. Their beauty was marvellous, but more marvellous was their variety. The differences, although the type was preserved, seemed inexhaustible, and all reasons for them broke down. If a particular modification is an advantage, why is it confined to one species? Why this range of colour? Why these purely fantastic forms? The only word we can say with certainty is that Nature is infinite and tends to infinite expression. Verum ego me satis clare ostendisse puto, a summa Dei potentia sive infinita natura infinita infinitis modis, hoc est, omnia necessario effluxisse, vel semper eadem necessitate sequi; eodem modo, ac ex natura trianguli ab æterno et in æternum sequitur ejus tres angulos æquari duobus rectis. Quare Dei omnipotentia actu ab æterno fuit et in æternum in eadem actualitate manebit.
Johnson is religious through and through, but there are passages in the Rambler and Idler dark as starless, moonless midnight. ‘None would have recourse to an invisible power, but that all other subjects have eluded their hopes . . . That misery does not make all virtuous, experience too certainly informs us; but it is no less certain that of what virtue there is, misery produces far the greatest part.’
There is seldom in life any occasion for great virtues, and we must not be disappointed if it passes without great passion. We must expect to be related to one another by nothing more than ordinary bonds and satisfied if human beings give us pleasure without excitement.
I have good reason to believe that I am passing on life’s journey through what almost all wayfarers therein have had to pass through, but nobody has told me of it.
How wonderful is the withdrawal of heat! It silently departs, the iron grows cold, but the heat spreads and lives!
‘Who knows, though he sees the snow-cold blossom shed,
If haply the heart that burned within the rose,
The spirit in sense, the life of life be dead?
If haply the wind that slays with storming snows
Be one with the wind that quickens?’swinburne, A Reminiscence.
With increase of reading we have fallen into a fireside, dilettante culture of ideas as an intellectual pleasure. Amos and Isaiah do not deal in ideas. Their strength lies in love and hatred, in the keenness and depth of their division between right and wrong. They repeat the work of God the Creator: chaotic sameness becomes diverse; the heavenly firmament mounts on high; there is Light and there is Darkness.
SHAKESPEARE
‘Glory to thee in the highest, thou confidant of our Creator!’ (Landor, Imaginary Conversations, Delille and Landor).
2 Henry VI. iii. 3.—The lines beginning with the one which follows are not in the old play and are Shakespeare’s own: