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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 41705 ***
+
+Transcriber's note
+
+
+Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Printer
+errors have been changed and are listed at the end. All other
+inconsistencies are as in the original.
+
+Characters that could not be displayed directly in Latin-1 are
+transcribed as follows:
+
+    _ - Italic
+   ^ - superscript
+   {_C} - subscript C
+   [cir] - circle
+   [py] - pyramid
+   [rec] - rectangle
+   [scir] - small circle
+   [sq] - square
+   [V] - slant
+
+
+
+
+ANIMA POETÆ
+
+    FROM THE UNPUBLISHED
+    NOTE-BOOKS OF
+    SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
+
+
+    EDITED BY
+    ERNEST HARTLEY COLERIDGE
+
+
+    LONDON
+    WILLIAM HEINEMANN
+    MDCCCXCV
+
+    _All rights reserved_
+
+    _Entered at Stationers' Hall_
+
+    _Entered at the Library of Congress, Washington_
+
+    _Copyright_, 1895
+
+
+
+
+When shall I find time and ease to reduce my pocket-books and
+memorandums to an _Index_ or _Memoriæ Memorandorum_? If--aye! and alas!
+if I could see the last sheet of my _Assertio Fidei Christianæ, et
+eterni temporizantis_, having previously beheld my elements of
+Discourse, Logic, Dialectic, and Noetic, or Canon, Criterion, and
+Organon, with the philosophic Glossary--in one printed volume, and the
+Exercises in Reasoning as another--if--what then? Why, then I would
+publish all that remained unused, Travels and all, under the title of
+Excursions Abroad and at Home, what I have seen and what I have thought
+with a little of what I have felt, in the words in which I told and
+talked them to my pocket-books, the confidants who have _not_ betrayed
+me, the friends whose silence was _not_ detraction, and the inmates
+before whom I was not ashamed to complain, to yearn, to weep, or even to
+pray! To which are added marginal notes from many old books and one or
+two new ones, sifted through the Mogul Sieve of Duty towards my
+Neighbour--by [Greek: 'Estêse].
+
+_21 June, 1823._
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+_Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge_, which the
+poet's nephew and son-in-law, Henry Nelson Coleridge, published in 1835,
+was a popular book from the first, and has won the approval of two
+generations of readers. Unlike the _Biographia Literaria_, or the
+original and revised versions of _The Friend_, which never had their day
+at all, or the _Aids to Reflection_, which passed through many editions,
+but now seems to have delivered its message, the _Table Talk_ is still
+well known and widely read, and that not only by students of literature.
+The task which the editor set himself was a difficult one, but it lay
+within the powers of an attentive listener, possessed of a good memory
+and those rarer gifts of a refined and scholarly taste, a sound and
+luminous common sense. He does not attempt to reproduce Coleridge's
+conversation or monologue or impassioned harangue, but he preserves and
+notes down the detached fragments of knowledge and wisdom which fell
+from time to time from the master's lips. Here are "the balmy sunny
+islets of the blest and the intelligible," an unvexed and _harbourous_
+archipelago. Very sparingly, if at all, have those pithy "sentences" and
+weighty paragraphs been trimmed or pruned by the pious solicitude of the
+memorialist, but it must be borne in mind that the unities are more or
+less consciously observed, alike in the matter of the discourse and the
+artistic presentation to the reader. There is, in short, not merely a
+"mechanic" but an "organic regularity" in the composition of the work as
+a whole. A "myriad-minded" sage, who has seen men and cities, who has
+read widely and shaped his thoughts in a peculiar mould, is pouring out
+his stores of knowledge, the garnered fruit of a life of study and
+meditation, for the benefit of an apt learner, a discreet and
+appreciative disciple. A day comes when the marvellous lips are
+constrained to an endless silence, and it becomes the duty and privilege
+of the beloved and honoured pupil to "snatch from forgetfulness" and to
+hand down to posterity the great tradition of his master's eloquence. A
+labour of love so useful and so fascinating was accomplished by the
+gifted editor of the _Table Talk_, and it was accomplished once for all.
+The compilation of a new _Table Talk_, if it were possible, would be a
+mistake and an impertinence.
+
+The present collection of hitherto unpublished aphorisms, reflections,
+confessions and soliloquies, which for want of a better name I have
+entitled _Anima Poetæ_, does not in any way challenge comparison with
+the _Table Talk_. It is, indeed, essentially different, not only in the
+sources from which it has been compiled but in constitution and in aim.
+
+"Since I left you," writes Coleridge in a letter to Wordsworth of May
+12, 1812, "my pocket-books have been my sole confidants." Doubtless, in
+earlier and happier days, he had been eager not merely to record but to
+communicate to the few who would listen or might understand the
+ceaseless and curious workings of his ever-shaping imagination, but from
+youth to age note-books and pocket-books were his silent confidants, his
+"never-failing friends" by night and day.
+
+More than fifty of these remarkable documents are extant. The earliest
+of the series, which dates from 1795 and which is known as the "Gutch
+Memorandum Book," was purchased in 1868 by the trustees of the British
+Museum, and is now exhibited in the King's Library. It consists, for the
+most part, of fragments of prose and verse thrown off at the moment,
+and stored up for future use in poem or lecture or sermon. A few of
+these fragments were printed in the _Literary Remains_ (4 vols.
+1836-39), and others are to be found (pp. 103, 5, 6, 9 _et passim_) in
+Herr Brandl's _Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the English Romantic School_.
+The poetical fragments are printed _in extenso_ in Coleridge's _Poetical
+Works_ (Macmillan, 1893), pp. 453-58. A few specimens of the prose
+fragments have been included in the first chapter of this work. One of
+the latest note-books, an unfinished folio, contains the Autobiographic
+Note of 1832, portions of which were printed in Gillman's _Life of
+Coleridge_, pp. 9-33, and a mass of unpublished matter, consisting
+mainly of religious exercises and biblical criticism.
+
+Of the intervening collection of pocket-books, note-books, copy-books,
+of all shapes, sizes and bindings, a detailed description would be
+tedious and out of place. Their contents may be roughly divided into
+diaries of tours in Germany, the Lake District, Scotland, Sicily and
+Italy; notes for projected and accomplished works, rough drafts of
+poems, schemes of metre and metrical experiments; notes for lectures on
+Shakspere and other dramatists; quotations from books of travel, from
+Greek, Latin, German and Italian classics, with and without critical
+comments; innumerable fragments of metaphysical and theological
+speculation; and commingled with this unassorted medley of facts and
+thoughts and fancies, an occasional and intermitted record of personal
+feeling, of love and friendship, of disappointment and regret, of
+penitence and resolve, of faith and hope in the Unseen.
+
+Hitherto, but little use has been made of this life-long accumulation of
+literary material. A few specimens, "Curiosities of Literature" they
+might have been called, were contributed by Coleridge himself to
+Southey's _Omniana_ of 1812, and a further selection of some fifty
+fragments, gleaned from note-books 21-1/2 and 22, and from a third
+unnumbered MS. book now in my possession, were printed by H. N.
+Coleridge in the first volume of the _Literary Remains_ under the
+heading _Omniana 1809-1816_. The _Omniana_ of 1812 were, in many
+instances, re-written by Coleridge before they were included in
+Southey's volumes, and in the later issue, here and there, the editor
+has given shape and articulation to an unfinished or half-formed
+sentence. The earlier and later _Omniana_, together with the fragments
+which were published by Allsop in his _Letters, Conversations and
+Recollections of S. T. Coleridge_, in 1836, were included by the late
+Thomas Ashe in his reprint of the _Table Talk_, Bell & Co., 1884.
+
+Some fourteen or fifteen notes of singular interest and beauty, which
+belong to the years 1804, 1812, 1826, 1829, etc., were printed by James
+Gillman in his unfinished "Life of Coleridge," and it is evident that he
+contemplated a more extended use of the note-books in the construction
+of his second volume, or, possibly, the publication of a supplementary
+volume of notes or _Omniana_. Transcripts which were made for this
+purpose are extant, and have been placed at my disposal by the kindness
+of Mrs. Henry Watson, who inherited them from her grandmother, Mrs.
+Gillman.
+
+I may add that a few quotations from diaries of tours in the Lake
+Country and on the Continent are to be found in the foot-notes appended
+to the two volumes of _Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge_ which were
+issued in the spring of the present year.
+
+To publish the note-books _in extenso_ would be impracticable, if even
+after the lapse of sixty years since the death of the writer it were
+permissible. They are private memoranda-books, and rightly and properly
+have been regarded as a sacred trust by their several custodians. But it
+is none the less certain that in disburthening himself of the ideas and
+imaginations which pressed upon his consciousness, in committing them to
+writing and carefully preserving them through all his wanderings,
+Coleridge had no mind that they should perish utterly. The invisible
+pageantry of thought and passion which for ever floated into his
+spiritual ken, the perpetual hope, the half-belief that the veil of the
+senses would be rent in twain, and that he and not another would be the
+first to lay bare the mysteries of being, and to solve the problem of
+the ages--of these was the breath of his soul. It was his fate to
+wrestle from night to morn with the Angel of the Vision, and of that
+unequal combat he has left, by way of warning or encouragement, a broken
+but an inspired and inspiring record. "Hints and first thoughts" he bade
+us regard the contents of his memorandum-books--"_cogitabilia_ rather
+than _cogitata_ a me, not fixed opinions," and yet acts of obedience to
+the apostolic command of "Try all things: hold fast that which is
+good"--say, rather, acts of obedience to the compulsion of his own
+genius to "take a pen and write in a book all the words of the vision."
+
+The aim of the present work, however imperfectly accomplished, has been
+to present in a compendious shape a collection of unpublished aphorisms
+and sentences, and at the same time to enable the reader to form some
+estimate of those strange self-communings to which Coleridge devoted so
+much of his intellectual energies, and by means of which he hoped to
+pass through the mists and shadows of words and thoughts to a steadier
+contemplation, to the apprehension if not the comprehension of the
+mysteries of Truth and Being.
+
+The various excerpts which I have selected for publication are arranged,
+as far as possible, in chronological order. They begin with the
+beginning of Coleridge's literary career, and are carried down to the
+summer of 1828, when he accompanied Wordsworth and his daughter Dora on
+a six months' tour on the Continent. The series of note-books which
+belong to the remaining years of his life (1828-1834) were devoted for
+the most part to a commentary on the Old and New Testament, to
+theological controversy, and to metaphysical disquisition. Whatever
+interest they may have possessed, or still possess, appeals to the
+student, not to the general reader. With his inveterate love of humorous
+or facetious titles, Coleridge was pleased to designate these serious
+and abstruse dissertations as "The Flycatchers."
+
+My especial thanks are due to Amy, Lady Coleridge, who, in accordance
+with the known wishes of the late Lord Coleridge, has afforded me every
+facility for collating my own transcripts of the note-books, and those
+which were made by my father and other members of my family, with the
+original MSS. now in her possession.
+
+I have to also thank Miss Edith Coleridge for valuable assistance in the
+preparation of the present work for the press.
+
+The death of my friend, Mr. James Dykes Campbell, has deprived me of aid
+which he alone could give.
+
+It was due to his suggestion and encouragement that I began to compile
+these pages, and only a few days before his death he promised me (it was
+all he could undertake) to "run through the proofs with my pencil in my
+hand." He has passed away _multis flebilis_, but he lived to accomplish
+his own work both as critic and biographer, and to leave to all who
+follow in his footsteps a type and example of honest workmanship and of
+literary excellence.
+
+    ERNEST HARTLEY COLERIDGE.
+
+
+
+
+ANIMA POETÆ
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+_1797-1801_
+
+    "O Youth! for years so many and sweet,
+    'Tis known, that Thou and I were one."
+
+                                    S. T. C.
+
+
+[Sidenote: PAST AND PRESENT]
+
+"We should judge of absent things by the absent. Objects which are
+present are apt to produce perceptions too strong to be impartially
+compared with those recalled only by the memory." SIR J. STEWART.
+
+True! and O how often the very opposite is true likewise, namely, that
+the objects of memory are, often, so dear and vivid, that present things
+are injured by being compared with them, vivid from dearness!
+
+
+[Sidenote: LOVE]
+
+Love, a myrtle wand, is transformed by the Aaron touch of jealousy into
+a serpent so vast as to swallow up every other stinging woe, and makes
+us mourn the exchange.
+
+
+Love that soothes misfortune and buoys up to virtue--the pillow of
+sorrows, the wings of virtue.
+
+
+Disappointed love not uncommonly causes misogyny, even as extreme thirst
+is supposed to be the cause of hydrophobia.
+
+
+Love transforms the soul into a conformity with the object loved.
+
+
+[Sidenote: DUTY AND EXPERIENCE]
+
+From the narrow path of virtue Pleasure leads us to more flowery fields,
+and there Pain meets and chides our wandering. Of how many pleasures, of
+what lasting happiness, is Pain the parent and Woe the womb!
+
+
+Real pain can alone cure us of imaginary ills. We feel a thousand
+miseries till we are lucky enough to feel misery.
+
+
+Misfortunes prepare the heart for the enjoyment of happiness in a better
+state. The life of a religious benevolent man is an April day. His pains
+and sorrows [what are they but] the fertilising rain? The sunshine
+blends with every shower, and look! how full and lovely it lies on
+yonder hill!
+
+
+Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like
+playthings by the bedside of a child deadly sick.
+
+
+Human happiness, like the aloe, is a flower of slow growth.
+
+
+What we must do let us love to do. It is a noble chymistry that turns
+necessity into pleasure.
+
+
+[Sidenote: INFANCY AND INFANTS]
+
+1. The first smile--what kind of _reason_ it displays. The first smile
+after sickness.
+
+2. Asleep with the polyanthus held fast in its hand, its bells dropping
+over the rosy face.
+
+3. Stretching after the stars.
+
+4. Seen asleep by the light of glowworms.
+
+5. Sports of infants; their excessive activity, the means being the end.
+Nature, how lovely a school-mistress!... Children at houses of industry.
+
+6. Infant beholding its new-born sister.
+
+7. Kissing itself in the looking-glass.
+
+8. The Lapland infant seeing the sun.
+
+9. An infant's prayer on its mother's lap. Mother directing a baby's
+hand. (Hartley's "love to Papa," scrawls pothooks and reads what he
+meant by them.)
+
+10. The infants of kings and nobles. ("Princess unkissed and foully
+husbanded!")
+
+11. The souls of infants, a vision (_vide Swedenborg_).
+
+12. Some tales of an infant.
+
+13. [Greek: Storgê]. The absurdity of the Darwinian system (instanced
+by) birds and alligators.
+
+14. The wisdom and graciousness of God in the infancy of the human
+species--its beauty, long continuance, etc. (Children in the wind--hair
+floating, tossing, a miniature of the agitated trees below which they
+played. The elder whirling for joy the one in petticoats, a fat baby
+eddying half-willingly, half by the force of the gust, driven backward,
+struggling forward--both drunk with the pleasure, both shouting their
+hymn of joy.) [_Letters of S. T. C._, 1895, i. 408.]
+
+15. Poor William seeking his mother, in love with her picture, and
+having that union of beauty and filial affection that the Virgin Mary
+may be supposed to give.
+
+
+[Sidenote: POETRY]
+
+Poetry, like schoolboys, by too frequent and severe correction, may be
+cowed into dullness!
+
+
+Peculiar, not far-fetched; natural, but not obvious; delicate, not
+affected; dignified, not swelling; fiery, but not mad; rich in imagery,
+but not loaded with it--in short, a union of harmony and good sense, of
+perspicuity and conciseness. Thought is the body of such an ode,
+enthusiasm the soul, and imagery the drapery.
+
+
+Dr. Darwin's poetry is nothing but a succession of landscapes or
+paintings. It arrests the attention too often, and so prevents the
+rapidity necessary to pathos.
+
+
+The elder languages were fitter for poetry because they expressed only
+prominent ideas with clearness, the others but darkly.... Poetry gives
+most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood. It was
+so by me with Gray's "Bard" and Collins' Odes. The "Bard" once
+intoxicated me, and now I read it without pleasure. From this cause it
+is that what I call metaphysical poetry gives me so much delight.
+
+[Compare _Lecture_ vi. 1811-12, Bell & Co., p. 70; and _Table Talk_,
+Oct. 23, 1833, Bell & Co., p. 264.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: COMPARISONS AND CONTRASTS]
+
+Poetry which excites us to artificial feelings makes us callous to real
+ones.
+
+
+The whale is followed by waves. I would glide down the rivulet of quiet
+life, a trout.
+
+
+Australis [Southey] may be compared to an ostrich. He cannot fly, but he
+has such other qualities that he needs it not.
+
+
+Mackintosh _intertrudes_ not introduces his beauties.
+
+
+Snails of intellect who see only by their feelers.
+
+
+Pygmy minds, measuring others by their own standard, cry What a
+_monster_, when they view a man!
+
+
+Our constitution is to some like cheese--the rotten parts they like the
+best.
+
+
+Her eyes sparkled as if they had been cut out of a diamond-quarry in
+some Golconda of Fairyland, and cast such meaning glances as would have
+vitrified the flint in a murderer's blunderbuss.
+
+
+[A task] as difficult as to separate two dew-drops blended together on a
+bosom of a new-blown rose.
+
+
+I discovered unprovoked malice in his hard heart, like a huge toad in
+the centre of a marble rock.
+
+
+Men anxious for this world are like owls that wake all night to catch
+mice.
+
+
+At Genoa the word _Liberty_ is engraved on the chains of the galley
+slaves and the doors of prisons.
+
+
+Gratitude, worse than witchcraft, conjures up the pale, meagre ghosts of
+dead forgotten kindnesses to haunt and trouble [his memory].
+
+
+The sot, rolling on his sofa, stretching and yawning, exclaimed,
+"_Utinam hoc esset laborare._"
+
+
+Truth still more than Justice [is] blind, and needs Wisdom for her
+guide.
+
+
+[Sidenote: OF THINGS VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE]
+
+[A Proof of] the severity of the winter--the kingfisher [by] its slow,
+short flight permitting you to observe all its colours, almost as if it
+had been a flower.
+
+
+Little daisy--very late Spring, March. Quid si vivat? Do all things in
+faith. _Never pluck a flower again!_ Mem.
+
+
+[Sidenote: May 20, 1799]
+
+The nightingales in a cluster or little wood of blossomed trees, and a
+bat wheeling incessantly round and round! The noise of the frogs was
+not unpleasant, like the humming of spinning wheels in a large
+manufactory--now and then a distinct sound, sometimes like a duck, and,
+sometimes, like the shrill notes of sea-fowl.
+
+[This note was written one day later than S. T. C.'s last letter from
+Germany, May 19, 1799.]
+
+
+O Heavens! when I think how perishable things, how imperishable thoughts
+seem to be! For what is forgetfulness? Renew the state of affection or
+bodily feeling [so as to be the] same or similar, sometimes dimly
+similar, and, instantly, the trains of forgotten thoughts rise from
+their living catacombs!
+
+
+[Sidenote:[Sockburn] October 1799]
+
+Few moments in life are so interesting as those of our affectionate
+reception from a stranger who is the dear friend of your dear friend!
+How often you have been the subject of conversation, and how
+affectionately!
+
+[The note commemorates his first introduction to Mary and Sarah
+Hutchinson.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: Friday evening, Nov, 27, 1799]
+
+The immoveableness of all things through which so many men were
+moving--a harsh contrast compared with the universal motion, the
+harmonious system of motions in the country, and everywhere in Nature.
+In the dim light London appeared to be a huge place of sepulchres
+through which hosts of spirits were gliding.
+
+
+Ridicule the rage for quotations by quoting from "My Baby's
+Handkerchief." Analyse the causes that the ludicrous weakens memory, and
+laughter, mechanically, makes it difficult to remember a good story.
+
+
+Sara sent twice for the measure of George's[A] neck. He wondered that
+Sara should be such a fool, as she might have measured William's or
+Coleridge's--as "all poets' throttles were of one size."
+
+
+Hazlitt, the painter, told me that a picture never looked so well as
+when the pallet was by the side of it. Association, with the glow of
+production.
+
+
+Mr. J. Cairns, in the _Gentleman's Diary_ for 1800, supposes that the
+Nazarites, who, under the law of Moses, had their heads [shaved] must
+have used some sort of wigs!
+
+
+Slanting pillars of misty light moved along under the sun hid by
+clouds.
+
+
+Leaves of trees upturned by the stirring wind in twilight--an image of
+paleness, wan affright.
+
+
+A child scolding a flower in the words in which he had been himself
+scolded and whipped, is poetry--passion past with pleasure.
+
+
+[Sidenote: July 20, 1800]
+
+Poor fellow at a distance--idle? in this hay-time when wages are so
+high? [We] come near [and] then [see that he is] pale, can scarce speak
+or throw out his fishing rod.
+
+[This incident is fully described by Wordsworth in the last of the four
+poems on "Naming of Places."
+
+--_Poetical Works of W. Wordsworth_, 1889, p. 144.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: September 1, [1800]]
+
+The beards of thistle and dandelions flying about the lonely mountains
+like life--and I saw them through the trees skimming the lake like
+swallows.
+
+            ["And, in our vacant mood,
+    Not seldom did we stop to watch some tuft
+    Of dandelion seed or thistle's beard,
+    That skimmed the surface of the dead calm lake,
+    Suddenly halting now--a lifeless stand!
+    And starting off again with freak as sudden;
+    In all its sportive wanderings, all the while,
+    Making report of an invisible breeze
+    That was its wings, its chariot and its horse,
+    Its playmate, rather say, its moving soul."
+
+    _Ibid._ p. 143.]
+
+
+Luther--a hero, fettered, indeed, with prejudices--but with those very
+fetters he would knock out the brains of a modern _Fort Esprit_.
+
+
+_Comment._ Frightening by his prejudices, as a spirit does by clanking
+his chains.
+
+Not only words, as far as relates to speaking, but the knowledge of
+words as distinct component parts, which we learn by learning to
+read--what an immense effect it must have on our reasoning faculties!
+Logical in opposition to real.
+
+
+[Sidenote: 1797-1801]
+
+Children, in making new words, always do it analogously. Explain this.
+
+
+Hot-headed men confuse, your cool-headed gentry jumble. The man of warm
+feelings only produces order and true connection. In what a jumble M.
+and H. write, every third paragraph beginning with "Let us now return,"
+or "We come now to the consideration of such a thing"--that is, what _I
+said_ I _would_ come to in the contents prefixed to the chapter.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Dec. 19, 1800]
+
+The thin scattered rain-clouds were scudding along the sky; above them,
+with a visible interspace, the crescent moon hung, and partook not of
+the motion; her own hazy light filled up the concave, as if it had been
+painted and the colours had run.
+
+
+"He to whom all things are one, who draweth all things to one, and seeth
+all things in one, may enjoy true peace of mind and rest of
+spirit."--JEREMY TAYLOR'S _Via Pacis_.
+
+
+To each reproach that thunders from without may remorse groan an echo.
+
+
+A prison without ransom, anguish without patience, a sick bed in the
+house of contempt.
+
+
+To _think_ of a thing is different from to _perceive_ it, as "to walk"
+is from to "feel the ground under you;" perhaps in the same way
+too--namely, a succession of perceptions accompanied by a sense of
+_nisus_ and purpose.
+
+
+Space, is it merely another word for the perception of a capability of
+additional magnitude, or does this very perception presuppose the idea
+of space? The latter is Kant's opinion.
+
+
+A babe who had never known greater cruelty than that of being snatched
+away by its mother for half a moment from the breast in order to be
+kissed.
+
+
+To attempt to subordinate the idea of time to that of likeness.
+
+
+Every man asks _how_? This power to instruct is the true substratum of
+philosophy.
+
+
+Godwin's philosophy is contained in these words: _Rationem defectus esse
+defectum rationis_.--HOBBES.
+
+
+Hartley just able to speak a few words, making a fire-place of stones,
+with stones for fire--four stones for the fire-place, two for the
+fire--seems to illustrate a theory of language, the use of arbitrary
+symbols in imagination. Hartley walked remarkably soon and, therefore,
+learnt to talk remarkably late.
+
+
+Anti-optimism! Praised be our Maker, and to the honour of human nature
+is it, that we may truly call this an inhuman opinion. Man strives after
+good.
+
+
+Materialists unwilling to admit the mysterious element of our nature
+make it all mysterious--nothing mysterious in nerves, eyes, &c., but
+that nerves think, etc.! Stir up the sediment into the transparent
+water, and so make all opaque.
+
+
+[Sidenote: 1797-1801]
+
+As we recede from anthropomorphism we must go either to the Trinity or
+Pantheism. The Fathers who were Unitarians were anthropomorphites.
+
+
+[Sidenote: EGOTISM January 1801]
+
+Empirics are boastful and egotists because they introduce real or
+apparent novelty, which excites great opposition, [while] personal
+opposition creates re-action (which is of course a consciousness of
+power) associated with the person re-acting. Paracelsus was a boaster,
+it is true; so were the French Jacobins, and Wolff, though not a
+boaster, was persecuted into a habit of egotism in his philosophical
+writings; so Dr. John Brown, and Milton in his prose works; and those,
+in similar circumstances, who, from prudence, abstain from egotism in
+their writings are still egotists among their friends. It would be
+unnatural effort not to be so, and egotism in such cases is by no means
+offensive to a kind and discerning man.
+
+Some flatter themselves that they abhor egotism, and do not suffer it to
+appear _primâ facie_, either in their writings or conversation, however
+much and however personally they or their opinions have been opposed.
+What now? Observe, watch those men; their habits of feeling and thinking
+are made up of _contempt_, which is the concentrated vinegar of
+egotism--it is _lætitia mixta cum odio_, a notion of the weakness of
+another conjoined with a notion of our own comparative strength, though
+that weakness is still strong enough to be troublesome to us, though not
+formidable.
+
+          "--and the deep power of Joy
+    We see into the Life of Things."
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE EGO]
+
+By deep feeling we make our _ideas dim_, and this is what we mean by our
+life, ourselves. I think of the wall--it is before me a distinct image.
+Here I necessarily think of the _idea_ and the thinking _I_ as two
+distinct and opposite things. Now let me think of _myself_, of the
+thinking being. The idea becomes dim, whatever it be--so dim that I know
+not what it is; but the feeling is deep and steady, and this I call
+_I_--identifying the percipient and the perceived.
+
+    "O Thou! whose fancies from afar are brought."
+
+
+[Sidenote: March 17, 1801, Tuesday]
+
+[Sidenote: 1797-1801]
+
+Hartley, looking out of my study window, fixed his eyes steadily and for
+some time on the opposite prospect and said, "Will yon mountains
+_always_ be?" I shewed him the whole magnificent prospect in a
+looking-glass, and held it up, so that the whole was like a canopy or
+ceiling over his head, and he struggled to express himself concerning
+the difference between the thing and the image almost with convulsive
+effort. I never before saw such an abstract of _thinking_ as a pure act
+and energy--of thinking as distinguished from thought.
+
+
+[Sidenote: GIORDANO BRUNO]
+
+Monday, April 1801, and Tuesday, read two works of Giordano Bruno, with
+one title-page: _Jordani Bruni Nolani de Monade, Numero et Figurâ liber
+consequens. Quinque de Minimo, Magno et Mensurâ. Item. De
+Innumerabilibus Immenso, et Infigurabili seu de Universo et Mundis libri
+octo. Francofurti, Apud Joan. Wechelum et Petrum Fischerum consortes_,
+1591.
+
+Then follows the dedication, then the index of contents of the whole
+volume, at the end of which index is a Latin ode, conceived with great
+dignity and grandeur of thought. Then the work _De Monade, Numero et
+Figurâ, secretioris nempe Physicæ, Mathematicæ, et Metaphysicæ elementa_
+commences, which, as well as the eight books _De Innumerabili_, &c., is
+a poem in Latin hexameters, divided (each book) into chapters, and to
+each chapter is affixed a prose commentary. If the five books _de
+Minimo_, &c., to which this book is consequent are of the same
+character, I lost nothing in not having it. As to the work _De Monade_,
+it was far too numerical, lineal and Pythagorean for my comprehension.
+It read very much like Thomas Taylor and Proclus, &c. I by no means
+think it certain that there is no meaning in these works. Nor do I
+presume even to suppose that the meaning is of no value (till I
+understand a man's ignorance I presume myself ignorant of his
+understanding), but it is for others, at present, not for me. Sir P.
+Sidney and Fulk Greville shut the doors at their philosophical
+conferences with Bruno. If his conversation resembled this book, I
+should have thought he would have talked with a trumpet.
+
+The poems and commentaries, in the _De Immenso et Innumerabili_ are of a
+different character. The commentary is a very sublime enunciation of the
+dignity of the human soul, according to the principles of Plato.
+
+[Here follows the passage, "_Anima Sapiens ----ubique totus_," quoted in
+_The Friend_ (_Coleridge's Works_, ii. 109), together with a brief
+_résumé_ of Bruno's other works. See, too, _Biographia Literaria_,
+chapter ix. (_Coleridge's Works_, iii. 249).]
+
+
+[Sidenote: OBSERVATIONS AND REFLECTIONS]
+
+The spring with the little tiny cone of loose sand ever rising and
+sinking at the bottom, but its surface without a wrinkle.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Monday, September 14, 1801]
+
+Northern lights remarkably fine--chiefly a purple-blue--in shooting
+pyramids, moved from over Bassenthwaite behind Skiddaw. Derwent's
+birthday, one year old.
+
+
+[Sidenote: September 15, 1801]
+
+Observed the great half moon setting behind the mountain ridge, and
+watched the shapes its various segments presented as it slowly
+sunk--first the foot of a boot, all but the heel--then a little pyramid
+[py]--then a star of the first magnitude--indeed, it was not
+distinguishable from the evening star at its largest--then rapidly a
+smaller, a small, a very small star--and, as it diminished in size, so
+it grew paler in tint. And now where is it? Unseen--but a little fleecy
+cloud hangs above the mountain ridge, and is rich in amber light.
+
+
+I do not wish you to act from those truths. No! still and always act
+from your feelings; but only meditate often on these truths, that
+sometime or other they may become your feelings.
+
+
+The state should be to the religions under its protection as a
+well-drawn picture, equally eyeing all in the room.
+
+
+Quære, whether or no too great definiteness of terms in any language may
+not consume too much of the vital and idea-creating force in distinct,
+clear, full-made images, and so prevent originality. For original might
+be distinguished from positive thought.
+
+
+The thing that causes _in_stability in a particular state, of itself
+causes stability. For instance, wet soap slips off the ledge--detain it
+till it dries a little, and it _sticks_.
+
+
+Is there anything in the idea that citizens are fonder of good eating
+and rustics of strong drink--the one from the rarity of all such things,
+the other from the uniformity of his life?
+
+
+[Sidenote: October 19, 1801]
+
+[Sidenote: 1797-1801]
+
+On the Greta, over the bridge by Mr. Edmundson's father-in-law, the
+ashes--their leaves of that light yellow which autumn gives them, cast a
+reflection on the river like a painter's sunshine.
+
+
+[Sidenote: October 20, 1801]
+
+My birthday. The snow fell on Skiddaw and Grysdale Pike for the first
+time.
+
+[A life-long mistake. He was born October 21, 1772.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: Tuesday evening, 1/2 past 6, October 22, 1801]
+
+All the mountains black and tremendously obscure, except Swinside. At
+this time I saw, one after the other, nearly in the same place, two
+perfect moon-rainbows, the one foot in the field below my garden, the
+other in the field nearest but two to the church. It was
+grey-moonlight-mist-colour. Friday morning, Mary Hutchinson arrives.
+
+
+The art in a great man, and of evidently superior faculties, to be often
+_obliged_ to people, often his inferiors--in this way the enthusiasm of
+affection may be excited. Pity where we can help and our help is
+accepted with gratitude, conjoined with admiration, breeds an
+enthusiastic affection. The same pity conjoined with admiration, where
+neither our help is accepted nor efficient, breeds dyspathy and fear.
+
+
+_Nota bene_ to make a detailed comparison, in the manner of Jeremy
+Taylor, between the searching for the first cause of a thing and the
+seeking the fountains of the Nile--so many streams, each with its
+particular fountain--and, at last, it all comes to a name!
+
+
+The soul a mummy embalmed by Hope in the catacombs.
+
+
+To write a _series_ of love poems truly Sapphic, save that they shall
+have a large interfusion of moral sentiment and calm imagery--love in
+all the moods of mind, philosophic, fantastic--in moods of high
+enthusiasm, of simple feeling, of mysticism, of religion--comprise in it
+all the practice and all the philosophy of love!
+
+
+[Greek: Ho myrionous]--hyperbole from Naucratius' panegyric of Theodoras
+Chersites. Shakspere, _item_, [Greek: ho pollostos kai polyeidês tê
+poikilostrophô sophia. Ho megalophrônotatos tês alêtheias kêryx.]--LORD
+BACON.
+
+[Compare _Biographia Literaria_, cap. xv., "our myriad-minded Shakspere"
+and _footnote_. [Greek: Anêr myrionous] a phrase which I have borrowed
+from a Greek monk, who applies it to a Patriarch of Constantinople. I
+might have said that I have reclaimed rather than borrowed it; for it
+seems to belong to Shakspere, _de jure singulari, et ex privilegio
+naturæ. Coleridge's Works_, iii. 375.]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote A: Presumably George Dyer.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+_1802-1803_
+
+
+    "In a half sleep, he dreams of better worlds,
+    And dreaming hears thee still, O singing lark,
+    That singest like an angel in the clouds!"
+
+                                           S. T .C.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THOUGHTS AND FANCIES]
+
+No one can leap over his own shadow, but poets leap over death.
+
+
+The old world begins a new year. That is _ours_, but this is from God.
+
+
+We may think of time as threefold. Slowly comes the Future, swift the
+Present passes by, but the Past is unmoveable. No impatience will
+quicken the loiterer, no terror, no delight rein in the flyer, and no
+regret set in motion the stationary. Wouldst be happy, take the delayer
+for thy counsellor; do not choose the flyer for thy friend, nor the
+ever-remainer for thine enemy.
+
+
+[Sidenote: LIMBO]
+
+Vastum, incultum, solitudo mera, et incrinitissima nuditas.
+
+[_Crinitus_, covered with hair, is to be found in Cicero, _nuditas_ in
+Quintilian, but _incrinitissima_ is, probably, Coleridgian Latinity.]
+
+
+[An old man gloating over his past vices may be compared to the] devil
+at the very end of hell, warming himself at the reflection of the fire
+in the ice.
+
+
+Dimness of vision, mist, &c., magnify the powers of sight, numbness adds
+to those of touch. A numb limb seems twice its real size.
+
+
+Take away from sounds the sense of outness, and what a horrible disease
+would every minute become! A drive over a pavement would be exquisite
+torture. What, then, is sympathy if the feelings be not disclosed? An
+inward reverberation of the stifled cry of distress.
+
+
+Metaphysics make all one's thoughts equally corrosive on the body, by
+inducing a habit of making momently and common thought the subject of
+uncommon interest and intellectual energy.
+
+
+A kind-hearted man who is obliged to give a refusal or the like which
+will inflict great pain, finds a relief in doing it roughly and
+fiercely. Explain this and use it in Christabel.
+
+
+The unspeakable comfort to a good man's mind, nay, even to a criminal,
+to be _understood_--to have some one that understands one--and who does
+not feel that, on earth, no one does? The hope of this, always more or
+less disappointed, gives the passion to friendship.
+
+
+[Sidenote: October,1802]
+
+Hartley, at Mr. Clarkson's, sent for a candle. The _seems_ made him
+miserable. "What do you mean, my love?" "The seems, the seems. What
+seems to be and is not, men and faces, and I do not [know] what, ugly,
+and sometimes pretty, and these turn ugly, and they seem when my eyes
+are open and worse when they are shut--and the candle cures the
+_seems_."
+
+
+Great injury has resulted from the supposed incompatibility of one
+talent with another, judgment with imagination and taste, good sense
+with strong feeling, &c. If it be false, as assuredly it is, the opinion
+has deprived us of a test which every man might apply. [Hence] Locke's
+opinions of Blackmore, Hume's of Milton and Shakspere.
+
+
+[Sidenote: October 25, 1802]
+
+I began to look through Swift's works. First volume, containing "Tale of
+a Tub," wanting. Second volume--the sermon on the Trinity, rank
+Socinianism, _purus putus Socinianism_, while the author rails against
+the Socinians for monsters.
+
+
+The first sight of green fields with the numberless nodding gold cups,
+and the winding river with alders on its banks, affected me, coming out
+of a city confinement, with the sweetness and power of a sudden strain
+of music.
+
+
+Mem. to end my preface with "in short, speaking to the poets of the age,
+'_Primus vestrûm non sum, neque imus_.' I am none of the best, I am none
+of the meanest of you."--BURTON.
+
+
+"Et pour moi, le bonheur n'a commencé que lorsque je l'ai eu perdu. Je
+mettrais volontiers sur la porte du Paradis le vers que le Dante a mis
+sur celle de l'Enfer.
+
+'Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch' entrate.'"
+
+
+Were I Achilles, I would have had my leg cut off, and have got rid of my
+vulnerable heel.
+
+
+In natural objects we feel ourselves, or think of ourselves, only by
+_likenesses_--among men, too often by _differences_. Hence the soothing,
+love-kindling effect of rural nature--the bad passions of human
+societies. And why is difference linked with hatred?
+
+
+[Sidenote: TRANSCRIPTS FROM MY VELVET-PAPER POCKET-BOOKS]
+
+Regular post--its influence on the general literature of the country;
+turns two-thirds of the nation into writers.
+
+
+Socinianism, moonlight; methodism, a stove. O for some sun to unite heat
+and light!
+
+
+[Sidenote: Nov. 25, 1802]
+
+I intend to examine minutely the nature, cause, birth and growth of the
+verbal imagination, in the possession of which Barrow excels almost
+every other writer of prose.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Sunday, December 19]
+
+Remember the pear trees in the lovely vale of Teme. Every season Nature
+converts me from some unloving heresy, and will make a Catholic of me at
+last.
+
+
+A fine and apposite quotation, or a good story, so far from promoting,
+are wont to _damp_ the easy commerce of sensible chit-chat.
+
+
+We imagine ourselves discoverers, and that we have struck a light, when,
+in reality, at most, we have but snuffed a candle.
+
+
+A thief in the candle, consuming in a blaze the tallow belonging to the
+wick which has sunk out of sight, is an apt simile for a plagiarist from
+a dead author.
+
+
+An author with a new play which has been hissed off the stage is not
+unlike a boy who has launched on a pond a ship of his own making, and
+tries to prove to his schoolfellows that it _ought_ to have sailed.
+
+
+Repose after agitation is like the pool under a waterfall, which the
+waterfall has made.
+
+
+Something inherently mean in action! Even the creation of the universe
+disturbs my idea of the Almighty's greatness--would do so but that I
+perceive that thought with Him creates.
+
+
+The great federal republic of the universe.
+
+
+T. Wedgwood's objection to my "Things and Thoughts," because "thought
+always implies an act or _nisus_ of mind" is not well founded. A thought
+and thoughts are quite different words from Thought, as a fancy from
+Fancy, a work from Work, a life from Life, a force and forces from
+Force, a feeling, a writing [from Feelings, Writings.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: May 10, 1803]
+
+To _fall_ asleep. Is not a real _event_ in the body well represented by
+this phrase? Is it in _excess_ when on first _dropping_ asleep we
+_fall_ down precipices, or sink down, all things sinking beneath us, or
+drop down? Is there not a disease from deficiency of this critical
+sensation when people imagine that they have been awake all night, and
+actually lie dreaming, expecting and wishing for the critical sensation?
+
+[Compare the phrase, "precipices of distempered sleep," in the sonnet,
+"No more my visionary soul shall dwell," attributed by Southey to
+Favell.--_Life and Corresp._ of R. SOUTHEY, i. 224.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: A TREACHEROUS KNAVE]
+
+[He] drew out the secrets from men's hearts as the Egyptian enchanters
+by particular strains of music draw out serpents from their
+lurking-places.
+
+
+[Sidenote: COUNTRY AND TOWN]
+
+The rocks and stones put on a vital resemblance and life itself seemed,
+thereby, to forego its restlessness, to anticipate in its own nature an
+infinite repose, and to become, as it were, compatible with
+immoveability.
+
+
+Bright reflections, in the canal, of the blue and green vitriol bottles
+in the druggists' shops in London.
+
+
+A curious, and more than curious, fact, that when the country does not
+benefit, it depraves. Hence the violent, vindictive passions and the
+outrageous and dark and wild cruelties of very many country folk. [On
+the other hand] the continual sight of human faces and human houses, as
+in China, emasculates [and degrades.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: Monday night, June 8, 1803]
+
+"He who cannot wait for his reward has, in reality, not earned it."
+These words I uttered in a dream, in which a lecture I was giving--a
+very profound one, as I thought--was not listened to, but I was quizzed.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Tuesday night, July 19, 1803]
+
+Intensely hot day; left off a waistcoat and for yarn wore silk
+stockings. Before nine o'clock, had unpleasant chillness; heard a noise
+which I thought Derwent's in sleep, listened, and found it was a calf
+bellowing. Instantly came on my mind that night I slept out at Ottery,
+and the calf in the field across the river whose lowing so deeply
+impressed me. Chill + child and calf-lowing--probably the Rivers Greta
+and Otter. [_Letters of S.T.C._, 1895, i. 14, _note_.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: October, 1803]
+
+A smile, as foreign or alien to, as detached from the gloom of the
+countenance, as I have seen a small spot of light travel slowly and
+sadly along the mountain's breast, when all beside has been dark with
+the storm.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A PRINCIPLE OF CRITICISM.]
+
+Never to lose an opportunity of reasoning against the head-dimming,
+heart-damping principle of judging a work by its defects, not its
+beauties. Every work must have the former--we know it _a priori_--but
+every work has not the latter, and he, therefore, who discovers them,
+tells you something that you could not with certainty, or even with
+probability, have anticipated.
+
+
+[Sidenote: WORDSWORTH AND THE PRELUDE]
+
+I am sincerely glad that he has bidden farewell to all small poems, and
+is devoting himself to his great work, grandly imprisoning, while it
+deifies, his attention and feelings within the sacred circle and
+temple-walls of great objects and elevated conceptions. In those little
+poems, his own corrections coming of necessity so often--at the end of
+every fourteen or twenty lines, or whatever the poem might chance to
+be--wore him out; difference of opinion with his best friends irritated
+him, and he wrote, at times, too much with a sectarian spirit, in a sort
+of bravado. But now he is at the helm of a noble bark; now he sails
+right onward; it is all open ocean and a steady breeze, and he drives
+before it, unfretted by short tacks, reefing and unreefing the sails,
+hauling and disentangling the ropes. His only disease is the having been
+out of his element; his return to it is food to famine; it is both the
+specific remedy and the condition of health.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE INCOMMUNICABLE]
+
+Without drawing, I feel myself but half invested with language. Music,
+too, is wanting to me. But yet, though one should unite poetry,
+draftsman's skill, and music, the greater and, perhaps, nobler,
+certainly _all_ the subtler, parts of one's nature must be _solitary_.
+Man exists herein to himself and to God alone--yea! in how much only to
+God! how much lies _below_ his own consciousness!
+
+
+The tree or sea-weed like appearance of the side of the mountain, all
+white with snow, made by little bits of snow loosened. Introduce this
+and the stones leaping rabbit-like down on my sopha of sods. [_Vide_ p.
+60.]
+
+
+The sunny mist, the luminous gloom of Plato.
+
+
+[Sidenote: TIME AN ELEMENT OF GRIEF]
+
+Nothing affects me much at the moment it happens. It either stupefies
+me, and I, perhaps, look at a merry-make and dance-the-hay of flies, or
+listen entirely to the loud click of the great clock, or I am simply
+indifferent, not without some sense of philosophical self-complacency.
+For a thing at the moment is but a thing of the moment; it must be taken
+up into the mind, diffuse itself through the whole multitude of shapes
+and thoughts, not one of which it leaves untinged, between [not one of]
+which and it some new thought is not engendered. Now this is a work of
+time, but the body feels it quicker with me.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE POET AND THE SPIDER]
+
+On St. Herbert's Island, I saw a large spider with most beautiful legs,
+floating in the air on his back by a single thread which he was spinning
+out, and still, as he spun, heaving on the air, as if the air beneath
+was a pavement elastic to his strokes. From the top of a very high tree
+he had spun his line; at length reached the bottom, tied his thread
+round a piece of grass, and reascended to spin another--a net to hang,
+as a fisherman's sea-net hangs, in the sun and wind to dry.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE COMMUNICABLE]
+
+One excellent use of communication of sorrow to a friend is this, that
+in relating what ails us, we ourselves first know exactly what the real
+grief is, and see it for itself in its own form and limits. Unspoken
+grief is a misty medley of which the real affliction only plays the
+first fiddle, blows the horn to a scattered mob of obscure feelings.
+Perhaps, at certain moments, a single, almost insignificant sorrow may,
+by association, bring together all the little relicts of pain and
+discomfort, bodily and mental, that we have endured even from infancy.
+
+
+[Sidenote: NOSCITUR A SOCIIS]
+
+One may best judge of men by their pleasures. Who has not known men who
+have passed the day in honourable toil with honour and ability, and at
+night sought the vilest pleasure in the vilest society? This is the
+man's self. The other is a trick learnt by heart (for we may even learn
+the power of extemporaneous elocution and instant action as an automatic
+trick); but a man's pleasures--children, books, friends, nature, the
+Muse--O these deceive not.
+
+
+[Sidenote: TEMPERAMENT AND MORALS October, 1803]
+
+Even among good and sensible men, how common it is that one attaches
+himself scrupulously to the rigid performance of some minor virtue or
+makes a point of carrying some virtue into all its minutiæ, and is just
+as lax in a similar point, _professedly_ lax. What this is depends,
+seemingly, on temperament. _A_ makes no conscience of a little flattery
+in cases where he is certain that he is not acting from base or
+interested motives--in short, whenever his only motives are the
+amusement, the momentary pleasure given, &c., a medley of good nature,
+diseased proneness to sympathy, and a habit of _being wiser_ behind the
+curtain than his own actions before it. _B_ would die rather than
+deviate from truth and sincerity in this instance, but permits himself
+to utter, nay, publish the harshest censure of men as moralists and as
+literati, and that, too, on his simple _ipse dixit_, without assigning
+any reason, and often without having any, save that he himself
+_believes_ it--believes it because he _dislikes_ the man, and dislikes
+him probably for his looks, or, at best, for some one fault without any
+collation of the sum total of the man's qualities. Yet _A_ and _B_ are
+both good men, as the world goes. They do not act from conscious
+self-love, and are amenable to principles in their own minds.
+
+
+[Sidenote: BRIGHT OCTOBER October 21, 1803, Friday morning]
+
+A drizzling rain. Heavy masses of shapeless vapour upon the mountains (O
+the perpetual forms of Borrowdale!) yet it is no unbroken tale of dull
+sadness. Slanting pillars travel across the lake at long intervals, the
+vaporous mass whitens in large stains of light--on the lakeward ridge of
+that huge arm-chair of Lodore fell a gleam of softest light, that
+brought out the rich hues of the late autumn. The woody Castle Crag
+between me and Lodore is a rich flower-garden of colours--the brightest
+yellows with the deepest crimsons and the infinite shades of brown and
+green, the _infinite_ diversity of which blends the whole, so that the
+brighter colours seem to be colours upon a ground, not coloured things.
+Little woolpacks of white bright vapour rest on different summits and
+declivities. The vale is narrowed by the mist and cloud, yet through the
+wall of mist you can see into a bower of sunny light, in Borrowdale; the
+birds are singing in the tender rain, as if it were the rain of April,
+and the decaying foliage were flowers and blossoms. The pillar of smoke
+from the chimney rises up in the mist, and is just distinguishable from
+it, and the mountain forms in the gorge of Borrowdale consubstantiate
+with the mist and cloud, even as the pillar'd smoke--a shade deeper and
+a determinate form.
+
+
+[Sidenote: TELEOLOGY AND NATURE WORSHIP A PROTEST October 26, 1803]
+
+A most unpleasant dispute with Wordsworth and Hazlitt. I spoke, I fear,
+too contemptuously; but they spoke so irreverently, so malignantly of
+the Divine Wisdom that it overset me. Hazlitt, how easily raised to rage
+and hatred self-projected! but who shall find the force that can drag
+him up out of the depth into one expression of kindness, into the
+showing of one gleam of the light of love on his countenance. Peace be
+with him! But _thou_, dearest Wordsworth--and what if Ray, Durham, Paley
+have carried the observation of the aptitude of things too far, too
+habitually into pedantry? O how many worse pedantries! how few so
+harmless, with so much efficient good! Dear William, pardon pedantry in
+others, and avoid it in yourself, instead of scoffing and reviling at
+pedantry in good men and a good cause and _becoming_ a pedant yourself
+in a bad cause--even by that very act becoming one. But, surely, always
+to look at the superficies of objects for the purpose of taking delight
+in their beauty, and sympathy with their real or imagined life, is as
+deleterious to the health and manhood of intellect as, always to be
+peering and unravelling contrivance may be to the simplicity of the
+affection and the grandeur and unity of the imagination. O dearest
+William! would Ray or Durham have spoken of God as you spoke of Nature?
+
+
+[Sidenote: W. H.]
+
+Hazlitt to the feelings of anger and hatred, phosphorus--it is but to
+open the cork and it flames--but to love and serviceable friendship, let
+them, like Nebuchadnezzar, heat the furnace with a sevenfold heat, this
+triune, Shadrach, Meshach, Abed-nego, will shiver in the midst of it.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE ORIGIN OF EVIL Thursday October 27, 1803]
+
+I sate for my picture [to Hazlitt]--heard from Southey the "Institution
+of the Jesuits," during which some interesting idea occurred to me, and
+has escaped. I made out, however, the whole business of the origin of
+evil satisfactorily to my own mind, and forced H. to confess that the
+metaphysical argument reduced itself to this, Why did not infinite Power
+_always exclusively_ produce such beings as in each moment of their
+duration were infinite? why, in short, did not the Almighty create an
+absolutely infinite number of Almighties? The hollowness and impiety of
+the argument will be felt by considering that, suppose a universal
+happiness, a perfection of the moral as well as natural world, still the
+whole objection applies just as forcibly as at this moment. The
+malignity of the Deity (I shudder even at the assumption of this
+affrightful and Satanic language) is manifested in the creation of
+archangels and cherubs and the whole company of pure Intelligences
+burning in their unquenchable felicity, equally as in the creation of
+Neros and Tiberiuses, of stone and leprosy. Suppose yourself perfectly
+happy, yet, according to this argument, you _ought_ to charge God with
+malignity for having created you--your own life and all its comforts are
+in the indictment against the Creator--for surely even a child would be
+ashamed to answer, "No! I should still exist, only in that case, instead
+of being a man, I should be an infinite being." As if the word _I_ here
+had even the remotest semblance of a meaning. Infinitely more absurd
+than if I should write the fraction 1/1000 on a slate, then rub it out
+with my sponge, and write in the same place the integral number
+555,666,879, and then observe that the former figure was _greatly_
+improved by the measure, that _it_ was grown a far finer
+figure!--conceiting a _change_ where there had been positive
+substitution. Thus, then, it appears that the sole justification of
+those who, offended by the vice and misery of the created world, as far
+as we know it, impeach the power and goodness of the Almighty, making
+the proper cause of such vice and misery to have been a defect either of
+power or goodness--it appears, I say, that their sole justification
+rests on an argument which has nothing to do with vice and misery, as
+vice and misery--on an argument which would hold equally good in heaven
+as in hell--on an argument which it might be demonstrated no human being
+in a state of happiness could ever have conceived--an argument which a
+millennium would annihilate, and which yet would hold equally good then
+as now! But even in point of metaphysic the whole rests at last on the
+conceivable. Now, I appeal to every man's internal consciousness, if he
+will but sincerely and in brotherly simplicity silence the bustle of
+argument in his mind and the ungenial feelings that mingle with and fill
+up the mob, and then ask his own intellect whether, supposing he could
+conceive the creation of positively infinite and co-equal beings, and
+whether, supposing this not only possible but real, this has exhausted
+his notion of _creatability_? whether the intellect, by an unborn and
+original law of its essence, does not demand of infinite power more than
+merely infinity of number, infinity of sorts and orders? Let him have
+created this infinity of infinites, still there is space in the
+imagination for the creation of finites; but instead of these, let him
+again create infinites; yet still the same space is left, it is no way
+filled up. I feel, too, that the whole rests on a miserable sophism of
+applying to an Almighty Being such words as _all_. Why were not _all_
+Gods? But there is no _all_ in creation. It is composed of infinites,
+and the imagination, bewildered by heaping infinites on infinites and
+wearying of demanding increase of number to a number which it conceives
+already infinite, deserted by images and mocked by words, whose sole
+substance is the inward sense of difficulty that accompanies all our
+notions of infinity applied to numbers--turns with delight to distinct
+images and clear ideas, contemplates a _world_, an harmonious system,
+where an infinity of kinds subsist each in a multitude of individuals
+apportionate to its kind in conformity to laws existing in the divine
+nature, and therefore in the nature of things. We cannot, indeed,
+_prove_ this in any other way than by finding it as impossible to deny
+omniform, as eternal, agency to God--by finding it impossible to
+conceive that an omniscient Being should not have a distinct idea of
+finite beings, or that distinct ideas in the mind of God should be
+without the perfection of real existence, that is, imperfect. But this
+is a proof subtle indeed, yet not more so than the difficulty. The
+intellect that can start the one can understand the other, if his vices
+do not prevent him. Admit for a moment that "conceive" is equivalent to
+creation in the divine nature, synonymous with "to beget" (a feeling of
+which has given to marriage a mysterious sanctity and sacramental
+significance in the mind of many great and good men)--admit this, and
+all difficulty ceases, all tumult is hushed, all is clear and beautiful.
+We sit in the dark, but each by the side of his little fire, in his own
+group, and lo! the summit of the distant mountain is smitten with light.
+All night long it has dwelt there, and we look at it and know that the
+sun is not extinguished, that he is elsewhere bright and vivifying, that
+he is coming to us, to make our fires needless; yet, even now, that our
+cold and darkness are so called only in comparison with the heat and
+light of the coming day, never wholly deserted of the rays.
+
+This I wrote on Friday morning, forty minutes past three o'clock, the
+sky covered with one cloud that yet lies in dark and light shades, and
+though one smooth cloud, by the dark colour, it appears to be _steppy_.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A DREAM AND A PARENTHESIS Friday morning, 5 o'clock]
+
+Dozing, dreamt of Hartley as at his christening--how, as he was asked
+who redeemed him, and was to say, "God the Son," he went on humming and
+hawing in one hum and haw (like a boy who knows a thing and will not
+make the effort to recollect) so as to irritate me greatly. Awakening
+gradually, I was able completely to detect that it was the ticking of my
+watch, which lay in the pen-place in my desk, on the round table close
+by my ear, and which, in the diseased state of my nerves, had fretted
+on my ears. I caught the fact while Hartley's face and moving lips were
+yet before my eyes, and his hum and haw and the ticking of the watch
+were each the other, as often happens in the passing off of sleep--that
+curious modification of ideas by each other which is the element of
+_bulls_. I arose instantly and wrote it down. It is now ten minutes past
+five.
+
+
+To return to the question of evil--woe to the man to whom it is an
+uninteresting question, though many a mind over-wearied by it may shun
+it with dread. And here--N.B.--scourge with deserved and lofty scorn
+those critics who laugh at the discussion of old questions: God, right
+and wrong, necessity and arbitrement, evil, &c. No! forsooth, the
+question must be _new, spicy hot_ gingerbread, from a French
+constitution to a balloon, change of ministry, or, Which had the best of
+it in the parliamentary duel, Wyndham or Sheridan? or, at the best, a
+chymical thing [or] whether the new celestial bodies shall be called
+planets or asteroids--something new [it must be], something out of
+themselves--for whatever is _in_ them is deep within them--must be old
+as elementary nature [but] to find no contradiction in the union of old
+and novel--to contemplate the Ancient of Days with feelings new as if
+they _then_ sprang forth at His own Fiat--this marks the mind that feels
+the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it. But to return to
+the question. The whole rests on the sophism of imaginary change in a
+case of positive substitution. This, I fully believe, settles the
+question. The assertion that there is in the essence of the divine
+nature a necessity of omniform harmonious action, and that order and
+system (not number--in itself base, disorderly and irrational) define
+the creative energy, determine and employ it, and that number is
+subservient to order, regulated, organised, made beautiful and rational,
+an object both of imagination and intellect by order--this is no mere
+assertion, it is strictly in harmony with the fact. For the world
+appears so, and it is proved by whatever proves the being of God.
+Indeed, it is involved in the idea of God.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE AIM OF HIS METAPHYSIC]
+
+What is it that I employ my metaphysics on? To perplex our clearest
+notions and living moral instincts? To extinguish the light of love and
+of conscience, to put out the life of arbitrement, to make myself and
+others _worthless, soulless, Godless_? No, to expose the folly and the
+legerdemain of those who have thus abused the blessed organ of language,
+to support all old and venerable truths, to support, to kindle, to
+project, to make the reason spread light over our feelings, to make our
+feelings diffuse vital warmth through our reason--these are my objects
+and these my subjects. Is this the metaphysic that bad spirits in hell
+delight in?
+
+
+[Sidenote: IN THE VISIONS OF THE NIGHT Nov. 2, 1803, Wednesday morning,
+20 minutes past 2 o'clock]
+
+The voice of the Greta and the cock-crowing. The voice seems to grow
+like a flower on or about the water beyond the bridge, while the
+cock-crowing is nowhere particular--it is at any place I imagine and do
+not distinctly see. A most remarkable sky! the moon, now waned to a
+perfect ostrich egg, hangs over our house almost, only so much beyond
+it, garden-ward, that I can see it, holding my head out of the smaller
+study window. The sky is covered with whitish and with dingy cloudage,
+thin dingiest scud close under the moon, and one side of it moving, all
+else moveless; but there are two great breaks of blue sky, the one
+stretches over our house and away toward Castlerigg, and this is
+speckled and blotched with white cloud; the other hangs over the road,
+in the line of the road, in the shape of an ellipse or shuttle, I do not
+know what to call it--this is unspeckled, all blue, three stars in
+it--more in the former break, all unmoving. The water leaden-white, even
+as the grey gleam of water is in latest twilight. Now while I have been
+writing this and gazing between-whiles (it is forty minutes past two),
+the break over the road is swallowed up, and the stars gone; the break
+over the house is narrowed into a rude circle, and on the edge of its
+circumference one very bright star. See! already the white mass,
+thinning at its edge, _fights_ with its brilliance. See! it has bedimmed
+it, and now it is gone, and the moon is gone. The cock-crowing too has
+ceased. The Greta sounds on for ever. But I hear only the ticking of my
+watch in the pen-place of my writing-desk and the far lower note of the
+noise of the fire, perpetual, yet seeming uncertain. It is the low voice
+of quiet change, of destruction doing its work by little and little.
+
+
+[Sidenote: AURI SACRA FAMES]
+
+O! The impudence of those who dare hold property to be the great
+binder-up of the affections of the young to the old, &c., and Godwin's
+folly in his book! Two brothers in this country fought in the mourning
+coach, and stood with black eyes and their black clothes all blood over
+their father's grave.
+
+
+[Sidenote: EARLY DEATH November 1803]
+
+Poor Miss Dacre! born with a spinal deformity, that prophesied the early
+death it occasioned. Such are generally gentle and innocent beings. God
+seems to stamp on their foreheads the seal of death, in sign of
+appropriation. No evil dares approach the sacred hieroglyphic on this
+seal of redemption; we on earth interpret early death, but the heavenly
+spirits, that minister around us, read in it "Abiding innocence."
+
+
+Something to me delicious in the thought that one who dies a baby
+presents to the glorified Saviour and Redeemer that same sweet face of
+infancy which He blessed when on earth, and sanctified with a kiss, and
+solemnly pronounced to be the type and sacrament of regeneration.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE NIGHT SIDE OF NATURE November 9, Wednesday night, 45 min.
+past 6]
+
+The town, with lighted windows and noise of the _clogged_ passengers in
+the streets--sound of the unseen river. Mountains scarcely perceivable
+except by eyes long used to them, and supported by the images of memory
+flowing in on the impulses of immediate impression. On the sky, black
+clouds; two or three dim, untwinkling stars, like full stops on damp
+paper, and large stains and spreads of sullen white, like a tunic of
+white wool seen here and there through a torn and tattered cloak of
+black. Whence do these stains of white proceed all over the sky, so long
+after sunset, and from their indifference of place in the sky, seemingly
+unaffected by the west?
+
+
+[Sidenote: November 10, 1/2 past 2 o'clock, morning]
+
+Awoke, after long struggles, from a persecuting dream. The tale of the
+dream began in two _images_, in two sons of a nobleman, desperately fond
+of shooting, brought out by the footman to resign their property, and to
+be made believe that they had none. They were far too cunning for that,
+and as they struggled and resisted their cruel wrongers, and my interest
+for them, I suppose, increased, I became they--the duality
+vanished--Boyer and Christ's Hospital became concerned; yet, still, the
+former story was kept up, and I was conjuring him, as he met me in the
+street, to have pity on a nobleman's orphan, when I was carried up to
+bed, and was struggling up against some unknown impediment--when a noise
+of one of the doors awoke me. Drizzle; the sky uncouthly marbled with
+white vapours and large black clouds, their surface of a fine woolly
+grain, but in the height and key-stone of the arch a round space of sky
+with dim watery stars, like a friar's crown; the seven stars in the
+central seen through white vapour that, entirely shapeless, gave a
+whiteness to the circle of the sky, but stained with exceedingly thin
+and subtle flakes of black vapour, might be happily said in language of
+Boccace (describing Demogorgon, in his _Genealogia De Gli Dei_) to be
+_vestito d'una pallidezza affumicata_.
+
+[Sidenote: Tuesday night, 1/4 after 7]
+
+The sky covered with stars, the wind up--right opposite my window, over
+Brandelhow, as its centre, and extending from the gorge to Whinlatter,
+an enormous black cloud, exactly in the shape of an egg--this, the only
+cloud in all the sky, impressed me with a demoniacal grandeur. O for
+change of weather!
+
+[Sidenote: Sunday morning, Nov. 13, 1/2 past 2]
+
+The sky, in upon Grysdale Pike and onward to the Withop Fells, floored
+with flat, smooth, dark or dingy clouds, elsewhere starry. Though seven
+stars and all the rest in the height of the heaven be dimmed, those in
+the descent bright and frosty. The river has a loud voice,
+self-biographer of to-day's rain and thunder-showers. The owls are
+silent; they have been very musical. All weathers on Saturday the
+twelfth, storm and frost, sunshine, lightning and what not! God be
+praised, though sleepless, am marvellously bettered, and I take it for
+granted that the barometer has risen. I have been reading Barrow's
+treatise "On the Pope's Supremacy," and have made a note on the
+_L'Estrangeism_ of his style whenever his thoughts rendered it possible
+for the words to be pert, frisky and vulgar--which, luckily, could not
+be often, from the gravity of his subjects, the solidity and
+appropriateness of his thoughts, and that habitual geometrical
+_precision_ of mind which demanded the most _appropriate_ words. He
+seems to me below South in dignity; at least, South never sinks so low
+as B. sometimes.
+
+
+[Sidenote: AN OPTICAL ILLUSION]
+
+A pretty optical fact occurred this morning. As I was returning from
+Fletcher's, up the back lane and just in sight of the river, I saw,
+floating high in the air, somewhere over Mr. Banks', a noble kite. I
+continued gazing at it for some time, when, turning suddenly round, I
+saw at an equi-distance on my right, that is, over the middle of our
+field, a pair of kites floating about. I looked at them for some
+seconds, when it occurred to me that I had never before seen two kites
+together, and instantly the vision disappeared. It was neither more nor
+less than two pair of leaves, each pair on a separate stalk, on a young
+fruit tree that grew on the other side of the wall, not two yards from
+my eye. The leaves being alternate, did, when I looked at them as
+leaves, strikingly resemble wings, and they were the only leaves on the
+tree. The magnitude was given by the imagined distance, that distance by
+the former adjustment of the eye, which _remained_ in consequence of the
+deep impression, the length of time I had been looking at the kite, the
+pleasure, &c., and [the fact that] a new object [had] impressed itself
+on the eye.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE INWARD LIGHT]
+
+In Plotinus the system of the Quakers is most beautifully expressed in
+the fifth book of the Fifth Ennead (he is speaking of "the inward
+light"): "It is not lawful to enquire from whence it originated, for it
+neither approached hither, nor again departs from hence to some other
+place, but it either appears to us, or does not appear. So that we ought
+not to pursue it as if with a view of discerning its latent original,
+but to abide in quiet till it suddenly shines upon us, preparing
+ourselves for the blessed spectacle, like the eye waiting for the rising
+sun."
+
+
+[Sidenote: PARS ALTERA MEI]
+
+My nature requires another nature for its support, and reposes only in
+another from the necessary indigence of its being. Intensely similar yet
+not the same [must that other be]; or, may I venture to say, the same
+indeed, but dissimilar, as the same breath sent with the same force, the
+same pauses, and the same melody pre-imaged in the mind, into the flute
+and the clarion shall be the same _soul diversely incarnate_.
+
+
+[Sidenote: NOT THE BEAUTIFUL BUT THE GOOD]
+
+"ALL things desire that which is first from a necessity of nature,
+prophesying, as it were, that they cannot subsist without the energies
+of that first nature. But beauty is not first, it happens only to
+intellect, and creates restlessness and seeking; but good, which is
+present from the beginning and unceasingly to our innate appetite,
+abides with us even in sleep, and never seizes the mind with
+astonishment, and requires no peculiar reminiscence to convince us of
+its presence."--PLOTINUS.
+
+This is just and profound, yet perfect beauty being an abstract of good,
+in and for that particular form excites in me no passion but that of an
+admiration so quiet as scarcely to admit of the name _passion_, but one
+that, participating in the same root of soul, does yet spring up with
+excellences that I have not. To this I am driven by a desire of
+self-completion with a restless and inextinguishable love. God is not
+all things, for in this case He would be indigent of all; but all things
+are God, and eternally indigent of God. And in the original meaning of
+the word _essence_ as predicable of that concerning which you can say,
+This is he, or That is he (this or that rather than any other), in this
+sense of the word essence, I perfectly coincide with the Platonists and
+Plotinists that, if we add to the nature of God either essence or
+intellect or beauty, we deprive Him of being the Good himself, the only
+One, the purely and absolutely One.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A MOON-SET Friday, Nov. 25, 1803, morning 45 minutes past]
+
+After a night of storm and rain, the sky calm and white, by blue vapour
+thinning into formlessness instead of clouds, the mountains of height
+covered with snow, the secondary mountains black. The moon descending
+aslant the [V]^A, through the midst of which the great road
+winds, set exactly behind Whinlatter Point, marked A. She being an egg,
+somewhat uncouthly shaped, perhaps, but an ostrich's egg rather than any
+other (she is two nights more than a half-moon), she set behind the
+black point, fitted herself on to it like a cap of fire, then became a
+crescent, then a mountain of fire in the distance, then the peak itself
+on fire, one steady flame; then stars of the first, second and third
+magnitude, and vanishing, upboiled a swell of light, and in the next
+second the whole sky, which had been _sable blue_ around the yellow
+moon, whitened and brightened for as large a space as would take the
+moon half an hour to descend through.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE DEATH OF ADAM A DREAM Dec. 6, 1803]
+
+Adam travelling in his old age came to a set of the descendants of Cain,
+ignorant of the origin of the world, and treating him as a madman,
+killed him. A sort of dream which I had this night.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A MAN'S A MAN FOR ALL THAT]
+
+We ought to suspect reasoning founded wholly on the difference of man
+from man, not on their commonnesses, which are infinitely greater. So I
+doubt the wisdom of the treatment of sailors and criminals, because it
+is wholly grounded on their vices, as if the vices formed the whole or
+major part of their being.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A DEFENCE OF METAPHYSIC]
+
+Abstruse reasoning is to the inductions of common sense what reaping is
+to delving. But the implements with which we reap, how are they gained?
+by delving. Besides, what is common sense now was abstract reasoning
+with earlier ages.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A SUNSET]
+
+A beautiful sunset, the sun setting behind Newlands across the foot of
+the lake. The sky is cloudless, save that there is a cloud on Skiddaw,
+one on the highest mountains in Borrowdale, some on Helvellyn, and that
+the sun sets in a glorious cloud. These clouds are of various shapes,
+various colours, and belong to their mountains and have nothing to do
+with the sky. N.B.--There is something metallic, silver playfully and
+imperfectly gilt and highly polished, or, rather, something
+mother-of-pearlish, in the sun-gleams on ice, thin ice.
+
+
+[Sidenote: EXTREMES MEET]
+
+I have repeatedly said that I could make a volume if only I had noted
+down, as they occurred to my recollection, the instances of the proverb
+"Extremes Meet." This night, Sunday, December 11, 1803, half-past
+eleven, I have determined to devote the last nine pages of my
+pocket-book to a collection of the same.
+
+     1.                          The parching air
+     Burns frore and cold performs the effect of fire.
+
+                                 _Paradise Lost_, ii. 594.
+
+     2. Insects by their smallness, the mammoth by its hugeness,
+     terrible.
+
+     3. In the foam-islands in a fiercely boiling pool, at the
+     bottom of a waterfall, there is sameness from infinite change.
+
+     4. The excess of humanity and disinterestedness in polite
+     society, the desire not to give pain, for example, not to talk
+     of your own diseases and misfortunes, and to introduce nothing
+     but what will give pleasure, destroy all humanity and
+     disinterestedness, by making it intolerable, through desuetude,
+     to listen to the complaints of our equals, or of any, where the
+     listening does not gratify or excite some vicious pride and
+     sense of superiority.
+
+     5. It is difficult to say whether a perfectly unheard-of
+     subject or a _crambe bis cocta_, if chosen by a man of genius,
+     would excite in the higher degree the sense of novelty. Take,
+     as an instance of the latter, the "Orestes" of Sotheby.
+
+     6. Dark with excess of light.
+
+     7. Self-absorption and worldly-mindedness (N.B.--The latter a
+     most philosophical word).
+
+     8. The dim intellect sees an absolute oneness, the perfectly
+     clear intellect _knowingly perceives_ it. Distinction and
+     plurality lie in the betwixt.
+
+     9. The naked savage and the gymnosophist.
+
+     10. Nothing and intensest absolute being.
+
+     11. Despotism and ochlocracy.
+
+
+[Sidenote: ABSTRUSE RESEARCH]
+
+A dirty business! "How," said I, with a great effort to conquer my
+laziness and a great wish to rest in the generality, "what do you
+include under the words 'dirty business'"? I note this in order to
+remember the reluctance the mind has in general to analysis.
+
+
+The soul within the body--can I, any way, compare this to the reflection
+of the fire seen through my window on the solid wall, seeming, of
+course, within the solid wall, as deep within as the distance of the
+fire from the wall. I fear I can make nothing out of it; but why do I
+always hurry away from any interesting thought to do something
+uninteresting? As, for instance, when this thought struck me, I turned
+off my attention suddenly and went to look for the copy of Wolff which I
+had missed. Is it a cowardice of all deep feeling, even though
+pleasurable? or is it laziness? or is it something less obvious than
+either? Is it connected with my epistolary embarrassments?
+
+["The window of my library at Keswick is opposite to the fireplace. At
+the coming on of evening, it was my frequent amusement to watch the
+image or reflection of the fire that seemed burning in the bushes or
+between the trees in different parts of the garden."--_The Friend._
+_Coleridge's Works_, ii. 135.]
+
+
+As I was sitting at the foot of my bed, reading with my face downwards,
+I saw a phantom of my face upon the nightcap which lay just on the
+middle of my pillow--it was indistinct but of bright colours, and came
+only as my head bent low. Was it the action of the rays of my face upon
+my eyes? that is, did my eyes see my face, and from the sidelong and
+faint action of the rays place the image in that situation? But I moved
+the nightcap and I lost it.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Dec. 19, 1803, morning]
+
+I have only to shut my eyes to feel how ignorant I am whence these forms
+and coloured forms, and colours distinguishable beyond what I can
+distinguish, derive their birth. These varying and infinite co-present
+colours, what are they? I ask, to what do they belong in my waking
+remembrance? and almost never receive an answer. Only I perceive and
+know that whatever I change, in any part of me, produces some change in
+these eye-spectra; as, for instance, if I press my legs or change sides.
+
+
+[Sidenote: OF STREAMY ASSOCIATION]
+
+I will at least make the attempt to explain to myself the origin of
+moral evil from the streamy nature of association, which thinking curbs
+and rudders. Do not the bad passions in dreams throw light and show of
+proof upon this hypothesis? If I can but explain those passions I shall
+gain light, I am sure. A clue! a clue! a Hecatomb à la Pythagoras, if it
+unlabyrinth me.
+
+
+[Sidenote: December 28, 1803, 11 o'clock]
+
+I note the beautiful luminous shadow of my pencil-point which follows it
+from the candle, or rather goes before it and illuminates the word I am
+writing. But, to resume, take in the blessedness of innocent children,
+the blessedness of sweet sleep, do they or do they not contradict the
+argument of evil from streamy associations? I hope not, but all is to be
+thought over and _into_. And what is the height and ideal of mere
+association? Delirium. But how far is this state produced by pain and
+denaturalisation? And what are these? In short, as far as I can see
+anything in this total mist, vice is imperfect yet existing volition,
+giving diseased currents of association, because it yields on all sides
+and yet _is_--so, too, think of madness!
+
+
+[Sidenote: A DOUBTFUL EXPERIMENT]
+
+December 30th, half-past one o'clock, or, rather, Saturday morning,
+December 31st, put rolled bits of paper, many tiny bits of wick, some
+tallow, and the soap together. The whole flame, equal in size to
+half-a-dozen candles, did not give the light of one, and the letters of
+the book looked by the unsteady flare just as through tears or in
+dizziness--every line of every letter dislocated into angles, or like
+the mica in crumbly stones.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MOTION]
+
+The experiment over leaf illustrates my idea of motion, namely, that it
+is a presence and absence rapidly alternating, so that the fits of
+_absence_ exist continuously in the feeling, and the fits of presence
+_vice versâ_ continuedly in the eye. Of course I am speaking of motion
+psychologically, not physically, what it is in us, not what the
+supposed mundane cause may be. I believe that what we call _motion_ is
+our consciousness of motion arising from the interruption of motion, the
+action of the soul in suffering resistance. Free unresisted action, the
+going forth of the soul, life without consciousness, is, properly,
+infinite, that is unlimited. For whatever resists limits, and whatever
+is unresisted is unlimited. This, psychologically speaking, is space,
+while the sense of resistance or limitation is time, and motion is a
+synthesis of the two. The closest approach of time to space forms
+co-existent multitude.
+
+
+[Sidenote: RECOLLECTION AND REMEMBRANCE]
+
+There is an important distinction between the memory or reminiscent
+faculty of sensation which young children seem to possess in so small a
+degree, from their perpetual desire to have a tale repeated to them, and
+the memory of words and images which the very same children manifestly
+possess in an unusual degree, even to sealing-wax accuracy of retention
+and representation.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE ETHICS OF SPINOZA]
+
+If Spinoza had left the doctrine of miracles untouched, and had not
+written so powerfully in support of universal toleration, his ethics
+would never have brought on him the charge of Atheism. His doctrine, in
+this respect, is truly and severely orthodox, in the reformed Church;
+neither do I know that the Church of Rome has authoritatively decided
+between the Spinosists and Scotists in their great controversy on the
+nature of the being which creatures possess.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A UNITARIAN SCHOOLMAN]
+
+Creation is explained by Joannes Scotus Erigena as only a manifestation
+of the unity of God in forms--_et fit et facit, et creat et creatur_.
+Lib. 4. p. 7.
+
+P. 8. A curious and highly-philosophical account of the Trinity, and
+completely Unitarian. God is, is wise, and is living. The essence we
+call Father, the wisdom Son, the life the Holy Spirit. And he
+positively affirms that these three exist only as distinguishable
+relations--_habitudines_; and he states the whole doctrine to be an
+invention and condescension of Theology to the intellect of man, which
+must _define_, and consequently _personify_, in order to understand, and
+must have some phantom of understanding in order to keep alive in the
+heart the substantial faith. They are _fuel_ to the sacred fire--in the
+empyrean it may burn without fuel, and they who do so are seraphs.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A CROWD OF THOUGHTS]
+
+A fine epitheton of man would be "Lord of fire and light." All other
+creatures whose existence we perceive are mere alms-receivers of both.
+
+
+A company of children driving a hungry, hard-skinned ass out of a
+corn-field. The ass cannot by such weaklings be driven so hard but he
+will feed as he goes.
+
+
+Such light as lovers love, when the waxing moon steals in behind a
+black, black cloud, emerging soon enough to make the blush visible which
+the long kiss had kindled.
+
+
+All notions [remain] hushed in the phantasms of place and time that
+still escape the finest sieve and most searching winnow of our reason
+and abstraction.
+
+
+A rosemary tree, large as a timber tree, is a sweet sign of the
+antiquity and antique manners of the house against which it groweth.
+"Rosemary" (says Parkinson, _Theatrum Botanicum_ [London, 1640] p. 76)
+"is a herb of as great use with us in these days as any whatsoever, not
+only for physical but civil purposes--the civil uses, as all know, are
+at weddings, funerals, &c., to bestow on friends."
+
+
+Great harm is done by bad poets in trivialising beautiful expressions
+and images and associating disgust and indifference with the technical
+forms of poetry.
+
+
+Advantage of public schools. [They teach men to be] content with school
+praise when they publish. Apply this to Cottle and J. Jennings.
+
+
+Religious slang operates better on women than on men. N.B.--Why? I will
+give over--it is not _tanti_!
+
+
+Poem. Ghost of a mountain--the forms, seizing my body as I passed,
+became realities--I a ghost, till I had reconquered my substance.
+
+
+The sopha of sods. Lack-wit and the clock find him at last in the
+Yorkshire cave, where the waterfall is.
+
+[The reference is, no doubt, to Wordsworth's "Idiot Boy," which was
+composed at Nether Stowey, in 1798. In a letter addressed to John Wilson
+of June 5, 1802, Wordsworth discusses and discards the use of the word
+"lackwit" as an equivalent to "idiot." The "Sopha of Sods" was on
+Latrigg. In her journal for August, 1800, Dorothy Wordsworth records the
+making of a seat on Windybrow, a part of Latrigg. Possibly this was the
+"Sopha of Sods."--_Life of W. Wordsworth_, 1889, i. 268, 403.]
+
+
+The old stump of the tree, with briar-roses and bramble leaves wreathed
+round and round--a bramble arch--a foxglove in the centre.
+
+
+The palm, still faithful to forsaken deserts, an emblem of hope.
+
+
+The stedfast rainbow in the fast-moving, fast-hurrying hail-mist! What a
+congregation of images and feelings, of fantastic permanence amidst the
+rapid change of tempest--quietness the daughter of storm.
+
+
+[Sidenote: "POEM ON SPIRIT, OR ON SPINOZA"]
+
+I would make a pilgrimage to the deserts of Arabia to find the man who
+could make me understand how the _one can be many_. Eternal, universal
+mystery! It seems as if it were impossible, yet it _is_, and it is
+everywhere! It is indeed a contradiction in _terms_, and only in terms.
+It is the co-presence of feeling and life, limitless by their very
+essence, with form by its very essence limited, determinable, definite.
+
+
+[Sidenote: TRANS-SUBSTANTIATION]
+
+Meditate on trans-substantiation! What a conception of a miracle! Were
+one a Catholic, what a sublime oration might one not make of it?
+Perpetual, [Greek: pan]topical, yet offering no violence to the sense,
+exercising no domination over the free-will--a miracle always existing,
+yet perceived only by an act of the free-will--the beautiful fuel of the
+fire of faith--the fire must be pre-existent or it is not fuel, yet it
+feeds and supports and is necessary to feed and support the fire that
+converts it into his own nature.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE DANGER OF THE MEAN]
+
+Errors beget opposite errors, for it is our imperfect nature to run into
+extremes. But this trite, because ever-recurring, truth is not the
+whole. Alas! those are endangered who have avoided the extremes, as if
+among the Tartars, in opposition to a faction that had unnaturally
+lengthened their noses into monstrosity, there should arise another who
+had cut off theirs flat to the face, Socinians in physiognomy. The few
+who retained their noses as nature made them and reason dictated would
+assuredly be persecuted by the noseless party as adherents of the
+rhinocerotists or monster-nosed men, which is the case of those [Greek:
+archaspistai] [braves] of the English Church, called Evangelicals.
+Excess of Calvinism produced Arminianism, and those not in excess must
+therefore be Calvinists!
+
+
+[Sidenote: ALAS! THEY HAD BEEN FRIENDS IN YOUTH]
+
+To a former friend who pleaded how near he formerly had been, how near
+and close a friend! Yes! you were, indeed, near to my heart and native
+to my soul--a part of my being and its natural, even as the chaff to
+corn. But since that time, through whose fault I will be mute, I have
+been thrashed out by the flail of experience. Because you have been,
+therefore, never more can you be a part of the grain.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Oct. 31, 1803 AVE PH[OE]BE IMPERATOR]
+
+The full moon glided behind a black cloud. And what then? and who cared?
+It was past seven o'clock in the morning. There is a small cloud in the
+east, not larger than the moon and ten times brighter than she! So
+passes night, and all her favours vanish in our minds ungrateful!
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE ONE AND THE GOOD]
+
+In the chapter on abstract ideas I might introduce the subject by
+quoting the eighth Proposition of Proclus' "Elements of Theology." The
+whole of religion seems to me to rest on and in the question: The One
+and The Good--are these words or realities? I long to read the schoolmen
+on the subject.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A MORTAL AGONY OF THOUGHT]
+
+There are thoughts that seem to give me a power over my own life. I
+could kill myself by persevering in the thought. Mem., to describe as
+accurately as may be the approximating symptoms. I met something very
+like this observation where I should least have expected such a
+coincidence of sentiment, such sympathy with so wild a feeling of
+mine--in p. 71 of Blount's translation of "The Spanish Rogue," 1623.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+_1804_
+
+    "Home-sickness is no baby-pang."--S. T. C.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE UNDISCIPLINED WILL]
+
+This evening, and indeed all this day, I ought to have been reading and
+filling the margins of Malthus. ["An Essay on the Principles of
+Population, &c., London," 1803, 4to. The copy annotated by Coleridge is
+now in the British Museum.]
+
+I had begun and found it pleasant. Why did I neglect it? Because I ought
+not to have done this. The same applies to the reading and writing of
+letters, essays, etc. Surely this is well worth a serious analysis,
+that, by understanding, I may attempt to heal it. For it is a deep and
+wide disease in my moral nature, at once elm-and-oak-rooted. Is it love
+of liberty, of spontaneity or what? These all express, but do not
+explain the fact.
+
+[Sidenote: Tuesday morning, January 10, 1804]
+
+After I had got into bed last night I said to myself that I had been
+pompously enunciating as a difficulty, a problem of easy and common
+solution--viz., that it was the effect of association. From infancy up
+to manhood, under parents, schoolmasters, inspectors, etc., our
+pleasures and pleasant self-chosen pursuits (self-chosen because
+pleasant, and not originally pleasant because self-chosen) have been
+forcibly interrupted, and dull, unintelligible rudiments, or painful
+tasks imposed upon us instead. Now all duty is felt as a _command_, and
+every command is of the nature of an offence. Duty, therefore, by the
+law of association being felt as a command from without, would naturally
+call up the sensation of the pain roused from the commands of parents
+and schoolmasters. But I awoke this morning at half-past one, and as
+soon as disease permitted me to think at all, the shallowness and
+sophistry of this solution flashed upon me at once. I saw that the
+phenomenon occurred far, far too early: I have observed it in infants of
+two or three months old, and in Hartley I have seen it turned up and
+layed bare to the unarmed eye of the merest common sense. The fact is
+that interruption of itself is painful, because and as far as it acts as
+_disruption_. And thus without any reference to or distinct recollection
+of my former theory I saw great reason to attribute the effect, wholly,
+to the streamy nature of the associative faculty, and the more, as it is
+evident that they labour under this defect who are most reverie-ish and
+streamy--Hartley, for instance, and myself. This seems to me no common
+corroboration of my former thought or the origin of moral evil in
+general.
+
+
+[Sidenote: COGITARE EST LABORARE]
+
+A time will come when passiveness will attain the dignity of worthy
+activity, when men shall be as proud within themselves of having
+remained in a state of deep tranquil emotion, whether in reading or in
+hearing or in looking, as they now are in having figured away for an
+hour. Oh! how few can transmute activity of mind into emotion! Yet there
+are as active as the stirring tempest and playful as the may-blossom in
+a breeze of May, who can yet for hours together remain with _hearts_
+broad awake, and the _understanding_ asleep in all but its retentiveness
+and _receptivity_. Yea, and (in) the latter (state of mind) evince as
+great genius as in the former.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A SHEAF OF ANECDOTES, Sunday morning, Feb. 5, 1804]
+
+I called on Charles Lamb fully expecting him to be out, and intending
+all the way, to write to him. I found him at home, and while sitting and
+talking to him, took the pen and note-paper and began to write.
+
+
+As soon as Holcroft heard that Mary Wollstonecraft was dead, he took a
+chaise and came with incredible speed to "have Mrs. Godwin opened for a
+remarkable woman!"
+
+
+[Sidenote: Sunday morning, Feb. 13, 1804]
+
+Lady Beaumont told me that when she was a child, previously to her
+saying her prayers, she endeavoured to think of a mountain or great
+river, or something great, in order to raise up her soul and kindle it.
+
+
+Rickman has a tale about George Dyer and his "Ode to the Hero Race."
+"Your Aunt, Sir," said George to the Man of Figures, "your Aunt is a
+very sensible woman. Why I read Sir, my Ode to her and she said that it
+was a very pretty Thing. There are very few women, Sir! that possess
+that fine discrimination, Sir!"
+
+
+The huge Organ Pipe at Exeter, larger than the largest at Haarlem, at
+first was dumb. Green determined to make it speak, and tried all means
+in vain, till at last he made a second pipe precisely alike, and placed
+it at its side. _Then_ it spoke.
+
+
+Sir George Beaumont found great advantage in learning to draw from
+Nature through gauze spectacles.
+
+
+At Göttingen, at Blumenbach's lectures on Psychology, when some
+anatomical preparations were being handed round, there came in and
+seated himself by us Englishmen a _Hospitator_, one, that is, who
+attends one or two lectures unbidden and unforbidden and gratis, as a
+stranger, and on a claim, as it were, of hospitality. This _Hospes_ was
+the uncouthest, strangest fish, pretending to human which I ever beheld.
+I turned to Greenough and "Who broke his bottle?" I whispered.
+
+
+Godwin and Holcroft went together to Underwood's chambers. "Little Mr.
+Underwood," said they, "we are perfectly acquainted with the subject of
+your studies, only ignorant of the particulars. What is the difference
+between a thermometer and a barometer?"
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE ADOLESCENCE OF LOVE]
+
+It is a pleasure to me to perceive the buddings of virtuous loves, to
+know their minutes of increase, their stealth and silent growings--
+
+A pretty idea, that of a good soul watching the progress of an
+attachment from the first glance to the time when the lover himself
+becomes conscious of it. A poem for my "Soother of Absence."
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE RAGE FOR MONITION]
+
+    To J. Tobin, Esq., April 10, 1804.
+
+Men who habitually enjoy robust health have, too generally, the trick,
+and a very cruel one it is, of imagining that they discover the secret
+of all their acquaintances' ill health in some malpractice or other;
+and, sometimes, by gravely asserting this, here there and everywhere (as
+who likes his penetration [hid] under a bushel?), they not only do all
+they can, without intending it, to deprive the poor sufferer of that
+sympathy which is always a comfort and, in some degree, a support to
+human nature, but, likewise, too often implant serious alarm and
+uneasiness in the minds of the person's relatives and his nearest and
+dearest connections. Indeed (but that I have known its inutility, that I
+should be ridiculously sinning against my own law which I was
+propounding, and that those who are most fond of advising are the least
+able to hear advice from others, as the passion to command makes men
+disobedient) I should often have been on the point of advising you
+against the two-fold rage of advising and of discussing character, both
+the one and the other of which infallibly generates presumption and
+blindness to our own faults. Nay! more particularly where, from whatever
+cause, there exists a slowness to understand or an aptitude to mishear
+and consequently misunderstand what has been said, it too often renders
+an otherwise truly good man a mischief-maker to an extent of which he is
+but little aware. Our friends' reputation should be a religion to us,
+and when it is lightly sacrificed to what self-adulation calls a love of
+telling the truth (in reality a lust of talking something seasoned with
+the cayenne and capsicum of personality), depend upon it, something in
+the heart is warped or warping, more or less according to the greater or
+lesser power of the counteracting causes. I confess to you, that being
+exceedingly low and heart-fallen, I should have almost sunk under the
+operation of reproof and admonition (the whole too, in my conviction,
+grounded on utter mistake) at the moment I was quitting, perhaps for
+ever! my dear country and all that makes it so dear--but the high esteem
+I cherish towards you, and my sense of your integrity and the reality of
+your attachment and concern blows upon me refreshingly as the sea-breeze
+on the tropic islander. Show me anyone made better by blunt advice, and
+I may abate of my dislike to it, but I have experienced the good effects
+of the contrary in Wordsworth's conduct to me; and, in Poole and others,
+have witnessed enough of its ill effects to be convinced that it does
+little else but harm both to the adviser and the advisee.
+
+[See _Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge_, Letter cli., ii. 474, 475.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: PLACES AND PERSONS, Thursday, April 19, 1804]
+
+This is Spain! That is Africa! Now, then, I have seen Africa! &c., &c.
+O! the power of names to give interest. When I first sate down, with
+Europe on my left and Africa on my right, both distinctly visible, I
+felt a quickening of the movements in the blood, but still it felt as a
+pleasure of _amusement_ rather than of thought or elevation; and at the
+same time, and gradually winning on the other, the nameless silent forms
+of nature were working in me, like a tender thought in a man who is
+hailed merrily by some acquaintance in his work, and answers it in the
+same tone. This is Africa! That is Europe! There is _division_, sharp
+boundary, abrupt change! and what are they in nature? Two mountain banks
+that make a noble river of the interfluent sea, not existing and acting
+with distinctness and manifoldness indeed, but at once and as one--no
+division, no change, no antithesis! Of all men I ever knew, Wordsworth
+himself not excepted, I have the faintest pleasure in things contingent
+and transitory. I never, except as a forced courtesy of conversation,
+ask in a stage-coach, Whose house is that? nor receive the least
+additional pleasure when I receive the answer. Nay, it goes to a disease
+in me. As I was gazing at a wall in Caernarvon Castle, I wished the
+guide fifty miles off that was telling me, In this chamber the Black
+Prince was born (or whoever it was). I am not certain whether I should
+have seen with any emotion the mulberry-tree of Shakspere. If it were a
+tree of no notice in itself, I am sure that I should feel by an
+effort--with self-reproach at the dimness of the feeling; if a striking
+tree, I fear that the pleasure would be diminished rather than
+increased, that I should have no unity of feeling, and find in the
+constant association of Shakspere having planted it an intrusion that
+prevented me from wholly (as a whole man) losing myself in the flexures
+of its branches and intertwining of its roots. No doubt there are times
+and conceivable circumstances in which the contrary would be true, in
+which the thought that under this rock by the sea-shore I know that
+Giordano Bruno hid himself from the pursuit of the enraged priesthood,
+and overcome with the power and sublimity of the truths for which they
+sought his life, thought his life therefore given him that he might bear
+witness to the truths, and _morti ultra occurrens_, returned and
+surrendered himself! So, here, on this bank Milton used to lie, in late
+May, when a young man, and familiar with all its primroses, made them
+yet dearer than their dear selves, by that sweetest line in the Lycidas,
+"And the rathe primrose that forsaken dies:" or from this spot the
+immortal deer-stealer, on his escape from Warwickshire, had the first
+view of London, and asked himself, And what am I to do there? At certain
+times, uncalled and sudden, subject to no bidding of my own or others,
+these thoughts would come upon me like a storm, and fill the place with
+something more than nature. But these are not contingent or transitory,
+they are nature, even as the elements are nature--yea, more to the
+human mind, for the mind has the power of abstracting all agency from
+the former and considering [them] as mere effects and instruments. But a
+Shakspere, a Milton, a Bruno, exist in the mind as pure _action_,
+defecated of all that is material and passive. And the great moments
+that formed them--it is a kind of impiety against a voice within us, not
+to regard them as predestined, and therefore things of now, for ever,
+and which were always. But it degrades the sacred feeling, and is to it
+what stupid superstition is to enthusiastic religion, when a man makes a
+pilgrimage to see a great man's shin-bone found unmouldered in his
+coffin. Perhaps the matter stands thus. I could feel amused by these
+things, and should be, if there had not been connected with the great
+name upon which the amusement wholly depends a higher and deeper
+pleasure, that will [not] endure the co-presence of so mean a companion;
+while the mass of mankind, whether from nature or (as I fervently hope)
+from error of rearing and the worldliness of their after-pursuits, are
+rarely susceptible of any other pleasures than those of _amusement_,
+gratification of curiosity, novelty, surprise, wonderment, from the
+glaring, the harshly-contrasted, the odd, the accidental, and find the
+reading of the _Paradise Lost_ a task somewhat alleviated by a few
+entertaining incidents, such as the pandemonium and self-endwarfment of
+the devils, the fool's paradise and the transformation of the infernal
+court into serpents and of their intended applauses into hisses.
+
+["Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself were exact, but harmonious opposites
+in this--that every old ruin, hill, river or tree called up in his mind
+a host of historical or biographical associations; whereas, for myself,
+I believe I should walk over the plain of Marathon without taking more
+interest in it than in any other plain of similar features."--_Table
+Talk_, August 4, 1833, Bell & Co., 1834, p. 242.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE INTOLERANCE OF CONVERTS]
+
+Why do we so very, very often see men pass from one extreme to the
+other? [Greek: stodkardia] [Stoddart, for instance]. Alas! they
+sought not the truth, but praise, self-importance, and above all [the
+sense of] something doing! Disappointed, they hate and persecute their
+former opinion, which no man will do who by meditation had adopted it,
+and in the course of unfeigned meditation gradually enlarged the circle
+and so get out of it. For in the perception of its falsehood he will
+form a perception of certain truths which had made the falsehood
+plausible, and can never cease to venerate his own sincerity of
+intention and Philalethie. For, perhaps, we never _hate_ any opinion, or
+can do so, till we have _impersonated_ it. We hate the persons because
+they oppose us, symbolise that opposition under the form and words of
+the opinion and then hate the person for the opinion and the opinion for
+the person.
+
+[For some weeks after his arrival at Valetta Coleridge remained as the
+guest of Dr. John (afterwards Sir John) Stoddart, at that time H.M.
+Advocate at Malta.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: FACTS AND FICTION]
+
+Facts! Never be weary of discussing and exposing the hollowness of
+these. [For, in the first place,] every man [is] an accomplice on one
+side or the other, [and, secondly, there is] _human testimony_. "You
+were in fault, I hear," said B to C, and B had heard it from A. [Now] A
+had said, "And C, God bless her, was perhaps the innocent occasion"! But
+what a trifle this to the generality of blunders!
+
+
+[Sidenote: CANDOUR ANOTHER NAME FOR CANT]
+
+[I have no pity or patience for that], blindness which comes from
+putting out your own eyes and in mock humility refusing to form an
+opinion on the right and the wrong of a question. "If we say so of the
+Sicilians, why may not Buonaparte say this of the Swiss?" and so forth.
+As if England and France, Swiss and Sicilian were the x y z of Algebra,
+naked names of unknown quantities. [What is this but] to fix morals
+without morality, and [to allow] general rules to supersede all
+particular thought? And though it be never acted on in reality, yet the
+opinion is pernicious. It kills public spirit and deadens national
+effort.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A SIMILE]
+
+The little point, or, sometimes, minim globe of flame remains on the
+[newly] lighted taper for three minutes or more unaltered. But, see, it
+is given over, and then, at once, the flame darts or plunges down into
+the wick, then up again, and all is bright--a fair cone of flame, with
+its black column in it, and minor cone, shadow-coloured, resting upon
+the blue flame the common base of the two cones, that is, of the whole
+flame. A pretty detailed simile in the manner of J. Taylor might be made
+of this, applying it to slow learners, to opportunities of grace
+manifestly neglected and seemingly lost and useless.
+
+
+[Sidenote: O STAR BENIGN]
+
+Monday evening, July 9, 1804, about 8 o'clock. The glorious evening star
+coasted the moon, and at length absolutely crested its upper tip.... It
+was the most singular and at the same time beautiful sight I ever
+beheld. Oh, that it could have appeared the same in England, at
+Grasmere!
+
+
+[Sidenote: NEFAS EST AB HOSTE DOCERI]
+
+In the Jacobinism of anti-jacobins, note the dreariest feature of
+Jacobins, a contempt for the institutions of our ancestors and of past
+wisdom, which has generated Cobbetts and contempt of the liberty of the
+press and of liberty itself. Men are not wholly unmodified by the
+opinion of their fellow-men, even when they happen to be enemies or
+(still worse) of the opposite faction.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE MANY AND THE ONE]
+
+I saw in early youth, as in a dream, the birth of the planets; and my
+eyes beheld as _one_ what the understanding afterwards divided into (1)
+the origin of the masses, (2) the origin of their motions, and (3) the
+site or position of their circles and ellipses. All the deviations, too,
+were seen as one intuition of one the self-same necessity, and this
+necessity was a law of spirit, and all was spirit. And in matter all
+beheld the past activity of others or their own--and this reflection,
+this echo is matter--its only essence, if essence it be. And of this,
+too, I saw the necessity and understood it, but I understood not how
+infinite multitude and manifoldness could be one; only I saw and
+understood that it was yet more out of my power to comprehend how it
+could be otherwise--and in this unity I worshipped in the depth of
+knowledge that passes all understanding the Being of all things--and in
+Being their sole goodness--and I saw that God is the One, the
+Good--possesses it not, but _is it_.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE WINDMILL AND ITS SHADOW]
+
+The visibility of motion at a great distance is increased by all that
+increases the the distinct visibility of the moving object. This
+Saturday, August 3, 1804, in the room immediately under the tower in St.
+Antonio, as I was musing on the difference, whether ultimate or only of
+degree, between _auffassen_ and _erkennen_ (an idea received and an idea
+acquired) I saw on the top of the distant hills a shadow on the sunny
+ground moving very fast and wave-like, yet always in the same place,
+which I should have attributed to the windmill close by, but the
+windmill (which I saw distinctly too) appeared at rest. On steady
+gazing, however, (and most plainly with my spy-glass) I found that it
+was not at rest, but that this was its shadow. The windmill itself was
+white in the sunshine, and there were sunny white clouds at its back,
+the shadow black on the white ground.
+
+
+[Sidenote: SYRACUSE Thursday night at the Opera, September 27, 1804]
+
+In reflecting on the cause of the "meeting soul" in music, the seeming
+recognisance etc., etc., the whole explanation of _memory_ as in the
+nature of _accord_ struck upon me; accord produces a phantom of memory,
+because memory is always in accord.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Oct. 5, 1804]
+
+Philosophy to a few, religion with many, is the friend of poetry, as
+producing the two conditions of pleasure arising from poetry, namely
+tranquillity and the attachment of the affections to _generalisations_.
+God, soul, Heaven, the Gospel miracles, etc., are a sort of _poetry_
+compared with Lombard Street and Change Alley speculations.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A SERIOUS MEMORANDUM Syracuse, Saturday, Oct. 5, 1804]
+
+In company, indeed, with all except a very chosen few, never dissent
+from anyone as to the _merits_ of another, especially in your own
+supposed department, but content yourself with praising, in your turn;
+the really good praises of the unworthy are felt by a good man, and man
+of genius as detractions from the worthy, and robberies--so the _flashy_
+moderns seem to _rob_ the ancients of the honours due to them, and Bacon
+and Harrington are _not_ read because Hume and Condillac _are_. This is
+an evil; but oppose it, if at all, in books in which you can evolve the
+whole of your reasons and feeling, not in conversation when it will be
+inevitably attributed to envy. Besides, they who praise the unworthy
+must be the injudicious: and the eulogies of critics without taste or
+judgment are the natural pay of authors without feeling or genius--and
+why rob them? _Sint unicuique sua præmia._ Coleridge! Coleridge! will
+you never learn to appropriate your conversation to your company! Is it
+not desecration, indelicacy, and a proof of great weakness and even
+vanity to talk to, etc. etc., as if you [were talking to] Wordsworth or
+Sir G. Beaumont?
+
+
+[Sidenote: "CAST NOT YOUR PEARLS BEFORE SWINE"]
+
+[Sidenote: Oct. 11, Syracuse, Lecky's, midnight]
+
+O young man, who hast seen, felt and known the truth, to whom reality is
+a phantom and virtue and mind the sole actual and permanent being, do
+not degrade the truth in thee by disputing. Avoid it! do not by any
+persuasion be tempted to it! Surely not by vanity or the weakness of the
+pleasure of communicating thy thoughts and awaking sympathy, but not
+even by the always mixed hope of producing conviction. This is not the
+mode, this is not the time, not the place. [Truth will be better served]
+by modestly and most truly saying, "Your arguments are all consequent,
+if the foundation be admitted. I do not admit the foundation. But this
+will be a business for moments of thought, for a Sabbath-day of your
+existence. Then, perhaps, a voice from within will say to you, better,
+because [in a manner] more adapted to you, all I can say. But if I felt
+this to _be_ that day or that moment, a sacred sympathy would at once
+compel and inspire me to the task of uttering the very truth. Till then
+I am right willing to bear the character of a mystic, a visionary, or
+self-important juggler, who nods his head and says, 'I could if I
+would.' But I cannot, I _may_ not, bear the reproach of profaning the
+truth which is my life in moments when all passions heterogeneous to it
+are eclipsing it to the exclusion of its dimmest ray. I might lose my
+tranquillity, and in acquiring the _passion_ of proselytism lose the
+_sense_ of conviction. I might become _positive_! Now I am _certain_! I
+might have the heat and fermentation, now I have the warmth of life."
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE YEARNING OF THE FINITE FOR THE INFINITE: Oct. 13, 1804,
+Saturday, Syracuse]
+
+Each man having a spark (to use the old metaphor) of the Divinity, yet a
+whole fire-grate of humanity--each, therefore, will legislate for the
+whole, and spite of the _De gustibus non est disputandum_, even in
+trifles--and, till corrected by experience, at least, in this endless
+struggle of presumption, really occasioned by the ever-working spark of
+the Universal, in the disappointments and baffled attempts of each, all
+are disposed to [admit] the _jus extrinsecum_ of Spinoza, and recognise
+that reason as the highest which may not be understood as the best, but
+of which the concrete possession is felt to be the strongest. Then come
+society, habit, education, misery, intrigue, oppression, then
+_revolution_, and the circle begins anew. Each man will universalise his
+notions, and, yet, each is variously finite. To _reconcile_, therefore,
+is truly the work of the inspired! This is the true _Atonement_--that
+is, to reconcile the struggles of the infinitely various finite with the
+_permanent_.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A MEASURE IN SELF-REPROOF]
+
+Do not be too much discouraged, if any virtue _should_ be mixed, in your
+consciousness, with affectation and imperfect sincerity, and some
+vanity. Disapprove of this, and continue the practice of the good
+feeling, even though mixed, and it will _gradually_ purify itself.
+_Probatum est_. Disapprove, be _ashamed_ of the thought, of its always
+continuing thus, but do not harshly quarrel with your present self, for
+all virtue subsists in and by pleasure. S. T. C. Sunday evening, October
+14, 1804.
+
+But a great deal of this is constitutional. That constitution which
+predisposes to certain virtues, the [Greek: Dôron Theôn], has this
+[Greek: temenos Nemeseôs] in it. It is the dregs of sympathy, and while
+we are _weak_ and dependent on each other, and each is forced to think
+often for himself, sympathy will have its dregs, and the strongest, who
+have least of these, have the dregs of other virtues to strain off.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE OPERA]
+
+All the objections to the opera are equally applicable to tragedy and
+comedy without music, and all proceed on the false principle that
+theatrical representations are _copies_ of nature, whereas they are
+imitations.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A SALVE FOR WOUNDED VANITY]
+
+When you are harassed, disquieted, and have little dreams of resentment,
+and mock triumphs in consequence of the clearest perceptions of unkind
+treatment and strange misconceptions and illogicalities, palpably from
+bad passion, in any person connected with you, suspect a sympathy in
+yourself with some of these bad passions--vanity, for instance. Though a
+sense of wounded justice is possible, nay, probably, forms a part of
+your uneasy feelings, yet this of itself would yield, at the first
+moment of reflection, to pity for the wretched state of a man too
+untranquil and perpetually selfish to love anything for itself or
+without some end of vanity or ambition--who detests all poetry, tosses
+about in the impotence of desires disproportionate to his powers, and
+whose whole history of his whole life is a tale of disappointment in
+circumstances where the hope and pretension was always unwise, often
+presumptuous and insolent. Surely an intuition of this restless and
+no-end-having mood of mind would at once fill a hearer having no
+sympathy with these passions with tender melancholy, virtuously mixed
+with grateful unpharisaic self-complacency. But a patient _almost_, but
+not quite, recovered from madness, yet on its confines, finds in the
+notions of madness that which irritates and haunts and makes unhappy.
+
+
+[Sidenote: OFFICIAL DISTRUST]
+
+Malta, Friday, Nov. 23, 1804.
+
+One of the heart-depressing habits and temptations of men in power, as
+governors, &c., is to make _instruments_ of their fellow-creatures, and
+the moment they find a man of honour and talents, instead of loving and
+esteeming him, they wish to _use him_. Hence that self-betraying
+side-and-down look of cunning; and they justify and inveterate the habit
+by believing that every individual who approaches has selfish designs on
+them.
+
+
+[Sidenote: FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE"]
+
+Days and weeks and months pass on, and now a year--and the sea, the sea,
+and the breeze have their influences on me, and [so, too, has the
+association with] good and sensible men. I feel a pleasure upon me, and
+I am, to the outward view, cheerful, and have myself no distinct
+consciousness of the contrary, for I use my faculties, not, indeed, at
+once, but freely. But, oh! I am never happy, never deeply gladdened. I
+know not--I have forgotten--what the _joy_ is of which the heart is
+full, as of a deep and quiet fountain overflowing insensibly, or the
+gladness of joy, when the fountain overflows ebullient.
+
+
+The most common appearance in wintry weather is that of the sun under a
+sharp, defined level line of a stormy cloud, that stretches one-third or
+half round the circle of the horizon, thrice the height of the space
+that intervenes between it and the horizon, which last is about half
+again as broad as the sun. [At length] out comes the sun, a mass of
+brassy light, himself lost and diffused in his [own] strong splendour.
+Compare this with the beautiful summer _set_ of colours without cloud.
+
+
+Even in the most tranquil dreams, one is much less a mere spectator
+[than in reveries or day-dreams]. One seems always about to do, [to be]
+suffering, or thinking or talking. I do not recollect [in dreams] that
+state of feeling, so common when awake, of thinking on one subject and
+looking at another; or [of looking] at a whole prospect, till at last,
+perhaps, or by intervals, at least, you only look passively at the
+prospect.
+
+
+[Sidenote: MULTUM IN PARVO]
+
+At Dresden there is a cherry-stone engraved with eighty-five portraits.
+Christ and the Twelve Apostles form one group, the table and supper all
+drawn by the letters of the text--at once portraits and language. This
+is a universal particular language--Roman Catholic language with a
+vengeance.
+
+
+The beautifully _white_ sails of the Mediterranean, so carefully, when
+in port, put up into clean bags; and the interesting circumstance of the
+Spéronara's sailing without a compass--by an obscure sense of time.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THROUGH DOUBT TO FAITH]
+
+So far from deeming it, in a religious point of view, criminal to spread
+doubts of God, immortality and virtue (that 3 = 1) in the minds of
+individuals, I seem to see in it a duty--lest men by taking the _words_
+for granted never attain the feeling or the true _faith_. They only
+forbear, that is, even to suspect that the idea is erroneous or the
+communicators deceivers, but do not _believe_ the idea itself. Whereas
+to _doubt_ has more of faith, nay even to disbelieve, than that blank
+negation of all such thoughts and feelings which is the lot of the herd
+of church-and-meeting-trotters.
+
+
+[Sidenote: AN APOLOGY FOR COTTLE]
+
+The Holy Ghost, say the harmonists, left all the solecisms, Hebraisms,
+and low Judaic prejudices as evidences of the credibility of the
+Apostles. So, too, the Theophneusty left Cottle his Bristolisms, not to
+take away the credit from him and give it to the Muses.
+
+
+[Sidenote: FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE"]
+
+His fine mind met vice and vicious thoughts by accident only, as a poet
+running through terminations in the heat of composing a rhyme-poem on
+the purest and best subjects, startles and half-vexedly turns away from
+a foul or impure word.
+
+
+The gracious promises and sweetnesses and aids of religion are alarming
+and distressful to a trifling, light, fluttering gay child of fashion
+and vanity, as its threats and reproaches and warnings--as a little bird
+which fears as much when you come to give it food as when you come with
+a desire to kill or imprison it.
+
+
+That is a striking legend of Caracciolo and his floating corse, that
+came to ask the King of Naples' pardon.
+
+
+Final causes answer to why? not to how? and who ever supposed that they
+did?
+
+
+O those crinkled, ever-varying circles which the moonlight makes in the
+not calm, yet not wavy sea! Quarantine, Malta, Saturday, Nov. 10, 1804.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE CREATIVE POWER OF WORDS AND IMAGES]
+
+Hard to express that sense of the analogy or likeness of a thing which
+enables a symbol to represent it so that we think of the thing itself,
+yet knowing that the thing is not present to us. Surely on this
+universal fact of words and images depends, by more or less mediations,
+the imitation, instead of the _copy_ which is illustrated, in very
+nature Shaksperianised--that Proteus essence that could assume the very
+form, but yet known and felt not to be the thing by that difference of
+the substance which made every atom of the form another thing, that
+likeness not identity--an exact web, every line of direction
+miraculously the same, but the one worsted, the other silk.
+
+
+[Sidenote: SHAKSPERE AND MALONE]
+
+Rival editors have recourse to necromancy to know from Shakspere himself
+who of them is the fittest to edit and illustrate him. Describe the
+meeting, the ceremonies of conjuration, the appearance of the spirit,
+the effect on the rival invokers. When they have resumed courage, the
+arbiter appointed by them asks the question. They listen, Malone leaps
+up while the rest lay their heads at the same instant that the arbiter
+re-echoes the words of the spirit, "Let Malone!" The spirit shudders,
+then exclaims in the dread and angry utterance of the dead, "No! no! Let
+me alone, I said, inexorable boobies!"
+
+O that eternal bricker-up of Shakspere! Registers, memorandum-books--and
+that Bill, Jack and Harry, Tom, Walter and Gregory, Charles, Dick and
+Jim, lived at that house, but that nothing more is known of them. But,
+oh! the importance when half-a-dozen players'-bills can be made to
+stretch through half-a-hundred or more of pages, though there is not one
+word in them that by any force can be made either to illustrate the
+times or life or writings of Shakspere, or, indeed, of any time. And,
+yet, no edition but this gentleman's name _burs_ upon it--_burglossa_
+with a vengeance. Like the genitive plural of a Greek adjective, it is
+Malone, Malone, Malone, [Greek: Malôn, Malôn, Malôn].
+
+[Edmund Malone's _Variorum_ edition of Shakspere was published in 1790.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: OF THE FROWARDNESS OF WOMAN December 11, 1804]
+
+It is a remark that I have made many times, and many times, I guess,
+shall repeat, that women are infinitely fonder of clinging to and
+beating about, hanging upon and keeping up, and reluctantly letting fall
+any doleful or painful or unpleasant subject, than men of the same class
+and rank.
+
+
+[Sidenote: NE QUID NIMIS]
+
+A young man newly arrived in the West Indies, who happened to be sitting
+next to a certain Captain Reignia, observed by way of introducing a
+conversation, "It is a very fine day, sir!" "Yes, sir," was the abrupt
+reply, "and be damned to it; it is never otherwise in this damned
+rascally climate."
+
+
+[Sidenote: WE ASK NOT WHENCE BUT WHAT AND WHITHER]
+
+I addressed a butterfly on a pea-blossom thus, "Beautiful Psyche, soul
+of a blossom, that art visiting and hovering o'er thy former friends
+whom thou hast left!" Had I forgot the caterpillar? or did I dream like
+a mad metaphysician that the caterpillar's hunger for plants was
+self-love, recollection, and a lust that in its next state refined
+itself into love? Dec. 12, 1804.
+
+
+[Sidenote: ANALOGY]
+
+Different means to the same end seem to constitute analogy. Seeing and
+touching are analogous senses with respect to magnitude, figure,
+&c.--they would, and to a certain extent do, supply each other's place.
+The air-vessels of fish and of insects are analogous to lungs--the end
+the same, however different the means. No one would say, "Lungs are
+analogous to lungs," and it seems to me either inaccurate or involving
+some true conception obscurely, when we speak of planets by analogy of
+ours--for here, knowing nothing but likeness, we presume the difference
+from the remoteness and difficulty, in the vulgar apprehension, of
+considering those pin-points as worlds. So, likewise, instead of the
+phrase "analogy of the past," applied to historical reasoning, nine
+times out of ten I should say, "by the example of the past." This may
+appear verbal trifling, but "_animadverte quam sit ab improprietate
+verborum pronum hominibus prolabi in errores circa res_." In short,
+analogy always implies a difference in kind and not merely in degree.
+There is an analogy between dimness and numbness and a certain state of
+the sense of hearing correspondent to these, which produces confusion
+with _magnification_, for which we have no name. But between light green
+and dark green, between a mole and a lynceus, there is a gradation, no
+analogy.
+
+[Sidenote: COROLLARY]
+
+Between beasts and men, when the same actions are performed by both, are
+the means analogous or different only in degree? That is the question!
+The sameness of the end and the equal fitness of the means prove no
+identity of means. I can only read, but understand no arithmetic. Yet,
+by Napier's tables or the _House-keepers' Almanack_, I may even arrive
+at the conclusion quicker than a tolerably expert mathematician. Yet,
+still, reading and reckoning are utterly different things.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THOMAS WEDGWOOD AND REIMARUS]
+
+In Reimarus on _The Instincts of Animals_, Tom Wedgwood's
+ground-principle of the influx of memory on perception is fully and
+beautifully detailed.
+
+["Observations Moral and Philosophical on the Instinct of Animals, their
+Industry and their Manners," by Herman Samuel Reimarus, was published in
+1770. See _Biographia Literaria_, chapter vi. and _Note_, by Mrs. H. N.
+Coleridge in the Appendix, _Coleridge's Works_, Harper & Brothers, iii.
+225, 717.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: HINC ILLA MARGINALIA]
+
+It is often said that books are companions. They are so, dear, very dear
+companions! But I often, when I read a book that delights me on the
+whole, feel a pang that the author is not present, that I cannot
+_object_ to him this and that, express my sympathy and gratitude for
+this part and mention some facts that self-evidently overset a second,
+start a doubt about a third, or confirm and carry [on] a fourth thought.
+At times I become restless, for my nature is very social.
+
+
+[Sidenote: CORRUPTIO OPTIMI PESSIMA]
+
+"Well" (says Lady Ball), "the Catholic religion is better than none."
+Why, to be sure, it is called a religion, but the question is, Is it a
+religion? Sugar of lead! better than no sugar! Put oil of vitriol into
+my salad--well, better than no oil at all! Or a fellow vends a poison
+under the name of James' powders--well, we must get the best we
+can--better that than none! So did not our noble ancestors reason or
+feel, or we should now be slaves and even as the Sicilians are at this
+day, or worse, for even they have been made less foolish, in spite of
+themselves, by others' wisdom.
+
+
+[Sidenote: REIMARUS AND THE "INSTINCTS OF ANIMALS"]
+
+I have read with wonder and delight that passage of Reimarus in which he
+speaks of the immense multitude of plants, and the curious, regular
+_choice_ of different herbivorous animals with respect to them, and the
+following pages in which he treats of the pairing of insects and the
+equally wonderful processes of egg-laying and so forth. All in motion!
+the sea-fish to the shores and rivers--the land crab to the sea-shore! I
+would fain describe all the creation thus agitated by the one or other
+of the three instincts--self-preservation, childing, and
+child-preservation. Set this by Darwin's theory of the maternal
+instinct--O mercy! the blindness of the man! and it is imagination,
+forsooth! that misled him--too much poetry in his philosophy! this
+abject deadness of all that sense of the obscure and indefinite, this
+superstitious fetish-worship of lazy or fascinated fancy! O this,
+indeed, deserves to be dwelt on.
+
+
+Think of all this as an absolute revelation, a real presence of Deity,
+and compare it with historical traditionary religion. There are two
+revelations--the material and the moral--and the former is not to be
+seen but by the latter. As St. Paul has so well observed: "By worldly
+wisdom no man ever arrived at God;" but having seen Him by the moral
+sense, then we _understand_ the outward world. Even as with books, no
+book of itself teaches a language in the first instance; but having by
+sympathy of soul learnt it, we then understand the book--that is, the
+_Deus minor_ in His work.
+
+
+The _hirschkäfer_ (stag-beetle) in its worm state makes its bed-chamber,
+prior to its metamorphosis, half as long as itself. Why? There was a
+stiff horn turned under its belly, which in the fly state must project
+and harden, and this required exactly that length.
+
+
+The sea-snail creeps out of its house, which, thus hollowed, lifts him
+aloft, and is his boat and cork jacket; the Nautilus, additionally,
+spreads a thin skin as a sail.
+
+
+All creatures obey the great game-laws of Nature, and fish with nets of
+such meshes as permit many to escape, and preclude the taking of many.
+So two races are saved, the one by taking part, and the other by part
+not being taken.
+
+
+[Sidenote: ENTOMOLOGY VERSUS ONTOLOGY]
+
+Wonderful, perplexing divisibility of life! It is related by D. Unzer,
+an authority wholly to be relied on, that an _ohrwurm_ (earwig) cut in
+half ate its own hinder part! Will it be the reverse with Great Britain
+and America? The head of the rattlesnake severed from the body bit it
+and squirted out its poison, as is related by Beverley in his History of
+Virginia. Lyonnet in his Insect. Theol. tells us that he tore a wasp in
+half and, three days after, the fore-half bit whatever was presented to
+it of its former food, and the hind-half darted out its sting at being
+touched. Stranger still, a turtle has been known to live six months with
+his head off, and to wander about, yea, six hours after its heart and
+intestines (all but the lungs) were taken out! How shall we think of
+this compatibly with the monad soul? If I say, what has spirit to do
+with space?--what odd dreams it would suggest! or is every animal a
+republic _in se_? or is there one Breeze of Life, "at once the soul of
+each, and God of all?" Is it not strictly analogous to generation, and
+no more contrary to unity than it? But IT? Aye! there's the twist in the
+logic. Is not the reproduction of the lizard a complete generation? O it
+is easy to dream, and, surely, better of these things than of a £20,000
+prize in the lottery, or of a place at Court. Dec. 13, 1804.
+
+
+[Sidenote: FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE"]
+
+To trace the if not absolute birth, yet the growth and endurancy of
+language, from the mother talking to the child at her breast. O what a
+subject for some happy moment of deep feeling and strong imagination!
+
+
+Of the Quintetta in the Syracuse opera and the pleasure of the
+voices--one and not one, they leave, seek, pursue, oppose, fight with,
+strengthen, annihilate each other, awake, enliven, soothe, flatter and
+embrace each other again, till at length they die away in one tone.
+There is no sweeter image of wayward yet fond lovers, of seeking and
+finding, of the love-quarrel, and the making-up, of the losing and the
+yearning regret, of the doubtful, the complete recognition, and of the
+total melting union. Words are not interpreters, but fellow-combatants.
+
+
+Title for a Medical Romance:--The adventures, rivalry, warfare and final
+union and partnership of Dr. Hocus and Dr. Pocus.
+
+
+Idly talk they who speak of poets as mere indulgers of fancy,
+imagination, superstition, etc. They are the bridlers by delight, the
+purifiers; they that combine all these with reason and order--the true
+protoplasts--Gods of Love who tame the chaos.
+
+
+To deduce instincts from obscure recollections of a pre-existing
+state--I have often thought of it. "Ey!" I have said, when I have seen
+certain tempers and actions in Hartley, "that is I in my future state."
+So I think, oftentimes, that my children are my soul--that multitude and
+division are not [O mystery!] necessarily subversive of unity. I am sure
+that two very different meanings, if not more, lurk in the word One.
+
+
+The drollest explanation of instinct is that of Mylius, who attributes
+every act to pain, and all the wonderful webs and envelopes of spiders,
+caterpillars, etc., absolutely to fits of colic or paroxysms of dry
+belly-ache!
+
+
+This Tarantula-dance of repetitions and vertiginous argumentation _in
+circulo_, begun in imposture and self-consummated in madness!
+
+
+While the whole planet (_quoad_ its Lord or, at least, Lord-Lieutenancy)
+is in stir and bustle, why should not I keep in time with the tune, and,
+like old Diogenes, roll my tub about?
+
+
+I cannot too often remember that to be deeply interested and to be
+highly satisfied are not always commensurate. Apply this to the
+affecting and yet unnatural passages of the _Stranger_ or of _John
+Bull_, and to the finest passages in Shakspere, such as the death of
+Cleopatra or Hamlet.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A SUNDOG Dec. 15, 1804]
+
+Saw the limb of a rainbow footing itself on the sea at a small apparent
+distance from the shore, a thing of itself--no substrate cloud or even
+mist visible--but the distance glimmered through it as through a thin
+semi-transparent hoop.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE SQUARE, THE CIRCLE, THE PYRAMID]
+
+To be and to act, two in Intellect (that mother of orderly multitude,
+and half-sister of Wisdom and Madness) but one in essence = to rest, and
+to move = [sq] and a [cir]! and out of the infinite combinations of
+these, from the more and the less, now of one now of the other, all
+pleasing figures and the sources of all pleasure arise. But the pyramid,
+that base of stedfastness that rises, yet never deserts itself nor can,
+approaches to the [cir]. Sunday. Midnight. Malta. December 16th, 1804.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE PYRAMID IN ART]
+
+I can make out no other affinity [in the pyramid] to the circle but by
+taking its evanescence as the central point, and so, having thus gained
+a melting of the radii in the circumference [by proceeding to] _look_ it
+into the object. Extravagance! Why? Does not everyone do this in looking
+at any conspicuous three stars together? does not every one see by the
+inner vision, a triangle? However, this is in art; but the prototype in
+nature is, indeed, loveliness. In Nature there are no straight lines, or
+[such straight lines as there are] have the soul of curves, from
+activity and positive rapid energy. Or, whether the line seem curve or
+straight, yet _here_, in nature, is motion--motion in its most
+significant form. It is motion in that form which has been chosen to
+express motion in general, hieroglyphical from pre-eminence, [and by
+this very pre-eminence, in the particular instance, made significant of
+motion in its totality]. Hence, though it chance that a line in nature
+should be perfectly straight, there is no need here of any curve whose
+effect is that of embleming motion and counteracting actual solidity by
+that emblem. For here the line [in contra-distinction to the line in
+art] is actual motion, and therefore a balancing _Figurite_ of rest and
+solidity. But I will study the wood-fire this evening in the Palace.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Wednesday Night, 11 o'clock, December 19]
+
+I see now that the eye refuses to decide whether it be surface or
+convexity, for the exquisite oneness of the flame makes even its angles
+so different from the angles of tangible substances. Its exceeding
+oneness added to its very subsistence in motion is the very _soul_ of
+the loveliest curve--it does not need its body as it were. Its sharpest
+point is, however, rounded, and besides it is cased within its own
+penumbra.
+
+
+[Sidenote: FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE" Friday Morning, Dec. 21, 8
+o'clock]
+
+How beautiful a circumstance, the improvement of the flower, from the
+root up to that crown of its life and labours, that bridal-chamber of
+its beauty and its two-fold love, the nuptial and the parental--the
+womb, the cradle, and the nursery of the garden!
+
+
+_Quisque sui faber_--a pretty simile this would make to a young lady
+producing beauty by moral feeling.
+
+
+Nature may be personified as the [Greek: polymêchanos erganê], an ever
+industrious Penelope, for ever unravelling what she has woven, for ever
+weaving what she has unravelled.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE MEDITERRANEAN]
+
+Oh, said I, as I looked at the blue, yellow, green and purple-green sea,
+with all its hollows and swells, and cut-glass surfaces--oh, what an
+_ocean_ of lovely forms! And I was vexed, teased that the sentence
+sounded like a play of words! _That_ it was not--the mind within me was
+struggling to express the marvellous distinctness and unconfounded
+personality of each of the million millions of forms, and yet the
+individual unity in which they subsisted.
+
+
+A brisk gale and the foam that peopled the _alive_ sea, most
+interestingly combined with the number of white sea-gulls, that,
+repeatedly, it seemed as if the foam-spit had taken life and wing and
+had flown up--the white precisely-same-colour birds rose up so close by
+the ever-perishing white-water wavehead, that the eye was unable to
+detect the illusion which the mind delighted to indulge in. O that sky,
+that soft, blue, mighty arch resting on the mountain or solid sea-like
+plain--what an awful omneity in unity! I know no other perfect union of
+the sublime with the beautiful, so that they should be felt, that is,
+at the same minute, though by different faculties, and yet, each faculty
+be predisposed, by itself, to receive the specific modifications from
+the other. To the eye it is an inverted goblet, the inside of a sapphire
+basin, perfect beauty in shape and colour. To the mind, it is immensity;
+but even the eye feels as if it were [able] to look through with [a] dim
+sense of the non-resistance--it is not exactly the feeling given to the
+organ by solid and limited things, [but] the eye feels that the
+limitation is in its own power, not in the object. But [hereafter] to
+pursue this in the manner of the old Hamburg poet [Klopstock].
+
+
+[Sidenote: I WILL LIFT UP MINE EYES TO THE HILLS]
+
+One travels along with the lines of a mountain. Years ago I wanted to
+make Wordsworth sensible of this. How fine is Keswick vale! Would I
+repose, my soul lies and is quiet upon the broad level vale. Would it
+act? it darts up into the mountain-top like a kite, and like a
+chamois-goat runs along the ridge--or like a boy that makes a sport on
+the road of running along a wall or narrow fence!
+
+
+[Sidenote: FORM AND FEELING]
+
+One of the most noticeable and fruitful facts in psychology is the
+modification of the same feeling by difference of form. The Heaven lifts
+up my soul, the sight of the ocean seems to widen it. We feel the same
+force at work, but the difference, whether in mind or body that we
+should feel in actual travelling horizontally or in direct ascent,
+_that_ we feel in fancy. For what are our feelings of this kind but a
+motion imagined, [together] with the feelings that would accompany that
+motion, [but] less distinguished, more blended, more rapid, more
+confused, and, thereby, co-adunated? Just as white is the very emblem of
+one in being the confusion of all.
+
+
+[Sidenote: VERBUM SAPIENTIBUS]
+
+Mem.--Not to hastily abandon and kick away the means after the end is or
+seems to be accomplished. So have I, in blowing out the paper or match
+with which I have lit a candle, blown out the candle at the same
+instant.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE CONTINUITY OF SENSATIONS]
+
+How opposite to nature and the fact to talk of the "one moment" of Hume,
+of our whole being an aggregate of successive single sensations! Who
+ever felt a single sensation? Is not every one at the same moment
+conscious that there co-exist a thousand others, a darker shade, or less
+light, even as when I fix my attention on a white house or a grey bare
+hill or rather long ridge that runs out of sight each way (how often I
+want the German _unübersekbar_!) [untranslatable]--the pretended
+sight-sensation, is it anything more than the light-point in every
+picture either of nature or of a good painter? and, again,
+subordinately, in every component part of the picture? And what is a
+moment? Succession with interspace? Absurdity! It is evidently only the
+_icht-punct_ in the indivisible undivided duration.
+
+
+See yonder rainbow strangely preserving its form on broken clouds, with
+here a bit out, here a bit in, yet still a rainbow--even as you might
+place bits of coloured ribbon at distances, so as to preserve the form
+of a bow to the mind. Dec. 25, 1804.
+
+
+[Sidenote: HIS CONVERSATION, A NIMIETY OF IDEAS, NOT OF WORDS]
+
+There are two sorts of talkative fellows whom it would be injurious to
+confound, and I, S. T. Coleridge, am the latter. The first sort is of
+those who use five hundred words more than needs to express an
+idea--that is not my case. Few men, I will be bold to say, put more
+meaning into their words than I, or choose them more deliberately and
+discriminately. The second sort is of those who use five hundred more
+ideas, images, reasons, &c., than there is any need of to arrive at
+their object, till the only object arrived at is that the mind's eye of
+the bystander is dazzled with colours succeeding so rapidly as to leave
+one vague impression that there has been a great blaze of colours all
+about something. Now this is my case, and a grievous fault it is. My
+illustrations swallow up my thesis. I feel too intensely the
+omnipresence of all in each, platonically speaking; or, psychologically,
+my brain-fibres, or the spiritual light which abides in the
+brain-marrow, as visible light appears to do in sundry rotten mackerel
+and other _smashy_ matters, is of too general an affinity with all
+things, and though it perceives the _difference_ of things, yet is
+eternally pursuing the likenesses, or, rather, that which is common
+[between them]. Bring me two things that seem the very same, and then I
+am quick enough [not only] to show the difference, even to
+hair-splitting, but to go on from circle to circle till I break against
+the shore of my hearers' patience, or have my concentricals dashed to
+nothing by a snore. That is my ordinary mishap. At Malta, however, no
+one can charge me with one or the other. I have earned the general
+character of being a quiet well-meaning man, rather dull indeed! and who
+would have thought that he had been a _poet_! "O, a very wretched
+poetaster, ma'am! As to the reviews, 'tis well known he half-ruined
+himself in paying cleverer fellows than himself to write them," &c.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE EMBRYONIC SOUL]
+
+How far might one imagine all the theory of association out of a system
+of growth, by applying to the brain and soul what we know of an embryo?
+One tiny particle combines with another its like, and, so, lengthens and
+thickens, and this is, at once, memory and increasing vividness of
+impression. One might make a very amusing allegory of an embryo soul up
+to birth! Try! it is promising! You have not above three hundred volumes
+to write before you come to it, and as you write, perhaps, a volume once
+in ten years, you have ample time.
+
+My dear fellow! never be ashamed of scheming--you can't think of living
+less than 4000 years, and that would nearly suffice for your present
+schemes. To be sure, if they go on in the same ratio to the performance,
+then a small difficulty arises; but never mind! look at the bright side
+always and die in a dream! Oh!
+
+
+[Sidenote: OF A NEW HYPOTHESIS]
+
+The evil effect of a new hypothesis or even of a new nomenclature is,
+that many minds which had familiarised themselves to the old one, and
+were riding on the road of discovery accustomed to their horse, if put
+on a new animal, lose time in learning how to sit him; while the others,
+looking too stedfastly at a few facts which the jeweller Hypothesis had
+set in a perfectly beautiful whole, forget to dig for more, though
+inhabitants of a Golconda. However, it has its advantages too, and these
+have been ably pointed out. It excites contradiction, and is thence a
+stimulus to new experiments to _support_, and to a more severe
+repetition of these experiments and of other new ones to _confute_
+[arguments pro and con]. And, besides, one must alloy severe truth with
+a little fancy, in order to mint it into common coin.
+
+
+[Sidenote: HIS INDEBTEDNESS TO GERMAN PHILOSOPHY]
+
+In the preface of my metaphysical works, I should say--"Once for all,
+read Kant, Fichte, &c., and then you will trace, or, if you are on the
+hunt, track me." Why, then, not acknowledge your obligations step by
+step? Because I could not do so in a multitude of glaring resemblances
+without a lie, for they had been mine, formed and full-formed, before I
+had ever heard of these writers, because to have fixed on the particular
+instances in which I have really been indebted to these writers would
+have been hard, if possible, to me who read for truth and
+self-satisfaction, and not to make a book, and who always rejoiced and
+was jubilant when I found my own ideas well expressed by others--and,
+lastly, let me say, because (I am proud, perhaps, but) I seem to know
+that much of the _matter_ remains my own, and that the _soul_ is mine. I
+fear not him for a critic who can confound a fellow-thinker with a
+compiler.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE METAPHYSICIAN AT BAY]
+
+Good heavens! that there should be anything at all, and not nothing. Ask
+the bluntest faculty that pretends to reason, and, if indeed he have
+felt and reasoned, he must feel that something is to be sought after out
+of the vulgar track of Change-Alley speculation.
+
+If my researches are shadowy, what, in the name of reason, are you? or
+do you resign all pretence to reason, and consider yourself--nay, even
+that in a contradiction--as a passive [cir] among Nothings?
+
+
+[Sidenote: MEANS TO ENDS]
+
+How flat and common-place! O that it were in my heart, nerves, and
+muscles! O that it were the _prudential_ soul of all I love, of all who
+deserve to be loved, in every proposed action to ask yourself, To what
+end is this? and how is this the means? and not the means to something
+else foreign to or abhorrent from my purpose? _Distinct means to
+distinct ends!_ With friends and beloved ones follow the heart. Better
+be deceived twenty times than suspect one-twentieth of once; but with
+strangers, or enemies, or in a quarrel, whether in the world's
+squabbles, as Dr. Stoddart's and Dr. Sorel in the Admiralty Court at
+Malta; or in moral businesses, as mine with Southey or Lloyd (O pardon
+me, dear and honoured Southey, that I put such a name by the side of
+yours....)--in all those cases, write your letter, disburthen yourself,
+and when you have done it--even as when you have pared, sliced,
+vinegared, oiled, peppered and salted your plate of cucumber, you are
+directed to smell it, and then throw it out of the window--so, dear
+friend, vinegar, pepper and salt your letter--your cucumber argument,
+that is, cool reasoning previously sauced with passion and
+sharpness--then read it, eat it, drink it, smell it, with eyes and ears
+(a small catachresis but never mind), and then throw it into the
+fire--unless you can put down in three or four sentences (I cannot allow
+more than one side of a sheet of paper) the _distinct end_ for which you
+conceive this letter (or whatever it be) to be the _distinct means_! How
+trivial! Would to God it were only _habitual_! O what is sadder than
+that the _crambe bis cocta_ of the understanding should be and remain a
+foreign dish to the efficient _will_--that the best and loftiest
+precepts of wisdom should be trivial, and the worst and lowest modes of
+folly habitual.
+
+
+[Sidenote: VERBAL CONCEITS]
+
+I have learnt, sometimes not _at all_, and seldom _harshly_, to chide
+those conceits of words which are analogous to sudden fleeting
+affinities of mind. Even, as in a dance, you touch and join and off
+again, and rejoin your partner that leads down with you the dance, in
+spite of these occasional off-starts--for they, too, not merely conform
+to, but are of and in and help to form the delicious harmony. Shakspere
+is not a thousandth part so faulty as the [scir][scir][scir]
+believe him. "Thus him that over-rul'd I over-sway'd," etc., etc. I
+noticed this to that bubbling ice-spring of cold-hearted, mad-headed
+fanaticism, the late Dr. Geddes, in the "_Heri vidi fragilem frangi,
+hodie mortalem mori_."
+
+[Dr. Alexander Geddes, 1737-1802, was, _inter alia_, author of a revised
+translation of the Scriptures.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE BRIGHT BLUE SEA]
+
+How often I have occasion to notice with pure delight the depth of the
+exceeding blueness of the Mediterranean from my window! It is often,
+indeed, purple; but I am speaking of its blueness--a perfect blue, so
+very pure an one. The sea is like a night-sky; and but for its
+_planities_, it were as if the night-sky were a thing that turned round
+and lay in the day-time under the paler Heaven. And it is on this
+expanse that the vessels have the fine white dazzling cotton sails.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE BIRTH OF THE IDEA]
+
+Centuries before their mortal incarnation, Jove was wont to manifest to
+the gods the several creations as they emerged from the divine ideal.
+Now it was reported in heaven that an unusually fair creation of a woman
+was emerging, and Venus, fearful that her son should become enamoured as
+of yore with Psyche (what time he wandered alone, his bow unslung, and
+using his darts only to cut out her name on rocks and trees, or, at
+best, to shoot hummingbirds and birds of Paradise to make
+feather-chaplets for her hair, and the world, meanwhile, grown loveless,
+hardened into the Iron Age), entreats Jove to secrete this form [of
+perilous beauty]. But Cupid, who had heard the report, and fondly
+expected a re-manifestation of Psyche, hid himself in the hollow of the
+sacred oak beneath which the Father of Gods had withdrawn as to an
+unapproachable adytum, and beheld the Idea emerging in its _First
+Glory_. Forthwith the wanton was struck blind by the splendour ere yet
+the blaze had defined itself with form, and now his arrows strike but
+vaguely.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE CONVERSION OF CERES]
+
+I have somewhere read, or I have dreamt, a wild tale of Ceres' loss of
+Proserpine, and her final recovery of her daughter by means of Christ
+when He descended into hell, at which time she met Him and abjured all
+worship for the future.
+
+It were a quaint mythological conceit to feign that the gods of Greece
+and Rome were some of the _best_ of the fallen spirits, and that of
+their number _Apollo_, Mars, and the Muses were converted to
+Christianity, and became different saints.
+
+
+[Sidenote: AS THE SPARKS FLY UPWARD]
+
+The ribbed flame--its snatches of impatience, that half-seem, and only
+_seem_ that half, to baffle its upward rush--the eternal unity of
+individualities whose essence is in their distinguishableness, even as
+thought and _fancies_ in the mind; the points of so many cherubic swords
+snatched back, but never discouraged, still fountaining upwards:--flames
+self-snatched up heavenward, if earth supply the fuel, heaven the dry
+light air--themselves still making the current that will fan and spread
+them--yet all their force in vain, if of itself--and light dry air,
+heaped fuel, fanning breeze as idle, if no inward spark lurks there, or
+lurks unkindled. Such a spark, O man! is thy Free Will--the star whose
+beams are Virtue!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+_1805_
+
+    Alone, alone, all, all alone,
+      Alone on a wide, wide sea!
+    And never a saint took pity on
+      My soul in agony.
+
+                                S. T. C.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE SENSE OF MAGNITUDE Tuesday, Jan. 15, 1805]
+
+This evening there was the most perfect and the brightest halo circling
+the roundest and brightest moon I ever beheld. So bright was the halo,
+so compact, so entire a circle, that it gave the whole of its area, the
+moon itself included, the appearance of a solid opaque body, an enormous
+planet. It was as if this planet had a circular trough of some
+light-reflecting fluid for its rim (that is the halo) and its centre
+(that is the moon) a small circular basin of some fluid that still more
+copiously reflected, or that even emitted light; and as if the
+interspatial area were somewhat equally substantial but sullen. Thence I
+have found occasion to meditate on the nature of the sense of magnitude
+and its absolute dependence on the idea of _substance_; the consequent
+difference between magnitude and spaciousness, the dependence of the
+idea on double-touch, and thence to evolve all our feelings and ideas of
+magnitude, magnitudinal sublimity, &c., from a scale of our own bodies.
+For why, if form constituted the sense, that is, if it were pure vision,
+as a perceptive sense abstracted from _feeling_ in the organ of vision,
+why do I seek for mountains, when in the flattest countries the clouds
+present so many and so much more romantic and _spacious_ forms, and the
+coal-fire so many, so much more varied and lovely forms? And whence
+arises the pleasure from musing on the latter? Do I not, more or less
+consciously, fancy myself a Lilliputian to whom these would be
+mountains, and so, by this factitious scale, make them mountains, my
+pleasure being consequently playful, a voluntary poem in hieroglyphics
+or picture-writing--"_phantoms_ of sublimity," which I continue to know
+to be _phantoms_? And form itself, is not its main agency exerted in
+individualising the thing, making it _this_ and _that_, and thereby
+facilitating the shadowy measurement of it by the scale of my own body?
+
+Yon long, not unvaried, ridge of hills, that runs out of sight each way,
+it is _spacious_, and the pleasure derivable from it is from its
+_running_, its _motion_, its assimilation to action; and here the scale
+is taken from my life and soul, and not from my body. Space is the
+Hebrew name for God, and it is the most perfect image of _soul, pure
+soul_, being to us nothing but unresisted action. Whenever action is
+resisted, limitation begins--and limitation is the first constituent of
+body--the more omnipresent it is in a given space, the more that space
+is _body_ or matter--and thus all body necessarily presupposes soul,
+inasmuch as all resistance presupposes action. Magnitude, therefore, is
+the intimate blending, the most perfect union, through its whole sphere,
+in every minutest part of it, of action and resistance to action. It is
+spaciousness in which space is filled up--that is, as we well say,
+transmitted by incorporate accession, not destroyed. In all limited
+things, that is, in _all forms_, it is at least fantastically stopped,
+and, thus, from the positive _grasp_ to the mountain, from the mountain
+to the cloud, from the cloud to the blue depth of sky, which, as on the
+top of Etna, in a serene atmosphere, seems to go _behind_ the sun, all
+is _graduation_, that precludes division, indeed, but not distinction;
+and he who endeavours to overturn a distinction by showing that there is
+no chasm, by the old sophism of the _cumulus_ or the horse's tail, is
+still diseased with the _formication_,[B] the (what is the nosological
+name of it? the hairs or dancing infinites of black specks seeming
+always to be before the eye), the araneosis of corpuscular
+materialism.--S. T. C.
+
+
+[Sidenote: STRAY THOUGHTS FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE"]
+
+The least things, how they evidence the superiority of English artisans!
+Even the Maltese wafers, for instance, that stick to your mouth and
+fingers almost so as to make it impossible to get them off without
+squeezing them into a little pellet, and yet will not stick to the
+paper.
+
+
+Everyone of tolerable education feels the _imitability_ of Dr. Johnson's
+and other-such's style, the inimitability of Shakspere's, &c. Hence, I
+believe, arises the partiality of thousands for Johnson. They can
+imagine _themselves_ doing the same. Vanity is at the bottom of it. The
+number of imitators proves this in some measure.
+
+
+Of the feelings of the English at the sight of a convoy from England.
+Man cannot be selfish--that part of me (my beloved) which is distant, in
+space, excites the same feeling as the "ich"[C] distant from me in
+time. My friends are indeed my soul!
+
+
+[Sidenote: Jan. 22, 1805.]
+
+I had not moved from my seat, and wanted the stick of sealing-wax,
+nearly a whole one, for another letter. I could not find it, it was not
+on the table--had it dropped on the ground? I searched and searched
+everywhere, my pockets, my fobs, impossible places--literally it had
+vanished, and where was it? It had stuck to my _elbow_, I having leaned
+upon it ere it had grown cold! A curious accident, and in no way similar
+to that of the butcher and his steel in his mouth which he was seeking
+for. Mine was true accident.
+
+
+The maxims which govern the Courts of Admiralty, their "betwixt and
+between" of positive law and the dictates of right reason, resemble the
+half-way _inter jus et æquitatem_ of Roman jurisprudence. It were worth
+while to examine the advantages of this as far as it is a real
+_modification_, its disadvantages as far as it appears a _jumble_.
+
+
+Seeing a nice bed of glowing embers with one junk of firewood well
+placed, like the remains of an old edifice, and another well-nigh
+mouldered one corresponding to it, I felt an impulse to put on three
+pieces of wood that exactly completed the perishable architecture,
+though it was eleven o'clock, though I was that instant going to bed,
+and there could be, in common ideas, no possible use in it. Hence I seem
+(for I write not having yet gone to bed) to suspect that this disease of
+totalising, of perfecting, may be the bottom impulse of many, many
+actions, in which it never is brought forward as an avowed or even
+agnised as a conscious motive.
+
+Mem.--to collect facts for a comparison between a _wood_ and a _coal_
+fire, as to sights and sounds and bodily feeling.
+
+
+I have read somewhere of a sailor who dreamt that an encounter with the
+enemy was about to take place, and that he should discover cowardice
+during action. Accordingly he awakes his brother the Captain, and bids
+him prepare for an engagement. At daybreak a ship is discovered on the
+horizon and the sailor, mindful of his dream, procures himself to be
+tied to a post. At the close of the day he is released unwounded but
+dead from fright. Apply this incident to Miss Edgeworth's Tales, and all
+similar attempts to cure faults by detailed forewarnings, which leave on
+the similarly faulty an impression of fatality that extinguishes hope.
+
+
+What precedes to the voice follows to the eye, as 000.1 and 100. A, B,
+C--were they men, you would say that "C" went first, but being letters,
+things of voice and ear in their original, we say that "A" goes first.
+
+
+There are many men who, following, made 1 = 1000, being placed at head,
+become useless cyphers, mere finery for form's sake.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Feb. 1, 1805, Friday, Malta]
+
+Of the millions that use the pen, how many (query) understand the story
+of this machine, the action of the slit, eh? I confess, ridiculous as it
+must appear to those who do understand it, that I have not been able to
+answer the question off-hand to myself, having only this moment thought
+of it.
+
+
+[Sidenote: Feb. 3, 1805]
+
+The gentlest form of Death, a Sylphid Death, passed by, beheld a
+sleeping baby--became, Narcissus-like, enamoured of its own self in the
+sweet counterfeit, seized it and carried it off as a mirror close by the
+green Paradise--but the reviving air awakened the babe, and 'twas death
+that died at the sudden loss.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE FRENCH LANGUAGE AND POETRY Feb. 4, 1805]
+
+I cannot admit that any language can be unfit for poetry, or that there
+is any language in which a divinely inspired architect may not sustain
+the lofty edifice of verse on its two pillars of sublimity and pathos.
+Yet I have heard Frenchmen, nay, even Englishmen, assert that of the
+German, which contains perhaps an hundred passages equal to the--
+
+    Und ein Gott ist, ein heiliger Wille lebt,
+      Wie auch der menschliche wanke;--
+
+and I have heard both German and Englishmen (and these, too, men of true
+feeling and genius, and so many of them that such company of my betters
+makes me not ashamed to the having myself been guilty of this injustice)
+assert that the French language is insusceptible of poetry in its higher
+and purer sense, of poetry which excites emotion not merely creates
+amusement, which demands continuous admiration, not regular recurrence
+of conscious surprise, and the effect of which is love and joy.
+Unfortunately the manners, religion and government of France, and the
+circumstances of its emergence from the polyarchy of feudal barony, have
+given a bad taste to the Parisians--so bad a one as doubtless to have
+mildewed many an opening blossom. I cannot say that I know and can name
+any one French writer that can be placed among the greater poets, but
+when I read the inscription over the Chartreuse--
+
+    C'est ici que la Mort et la Verité
+      Elevent leurs flambeaux terribles;
+    C'est de cette demeure au monde inaccessible
+      Que l'on passe à l'Eternité
+
+I seem to feel that if France had been for ages a Protestant nation, and
+a Milton had been born in it, the French language would not have
+precluded the production of a "Paradise Lost," though it might, perhaps,
+that of a Hamlet or a Lear.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE ABSTRACT SELF On Friday night, Feb. 8, 1805]
+
+On Friday Night, 8th Feb. 1805, my feeling, in sleep, of exceeding great
+love for my infant, seen by me in the dream!--yet so as it might be
+Sara, Derwent, or Berkley, and still it was an individual babe and mine.
+
+    "All look or likeness caught from earth,
+    All accident of kin or birth,
+    Had pass'd away. There seem'd no trace
+    Of aught upon her brighten'd face,
+    Upraised beneath the rifted stone,
+    Save of one spirit all her own;
+    She, she herself, and only she,
+    Shone through her body visibly."
+
+    _Poetical Works_, 1893, p. 172.
+
+This abstract self is, indeed, in its nature a Universal personified, as
+Life, Soul, Spirit, etc. Will not this _prove_ it to be a _deeper_
+feeling, and of such intimate affinity with ideas, so as to modify them
+and become one with them; whereas the appetites and the feelings of
+revenge and anger co-exist with the ideas, not combine with them, and
+alter the apparent effect of this form, not the forms themselves?
+Certain modifications of fear seem to approach nearest to this
+love-sense in its manner of acting.
+
+
+Those whispers just as you have fallen asleep--what are they, and
+whence?
+
+
+[Sidenote: LITERA SCRIPTA MANET Monday, Feb 11, 1805]
+
+I must own to a superstitious dread of the destruction of paper worthy
+of a Mahometan. But I am also ashamed to confess to myself what pulling
+back of heart I feel whenever I wish to light a candle or kindle a fire
+with a Hospital or Harbour Report, and what a cumulus lies on my table,
+I not able to conjecture of what use they can ever be, and yet trembling
+lest what I then destroyed might be of some use in the way of knowledge.
+This seems to be the excess of a good feeling, but it is ridiculous.
+
+
+[Sidenote: COWPER'S "LINES TO MRS. UNWIN"]
+
+It is not without a certain sense of self-reproof, as well as
+self-distrust, that I ask, or, rather, that my understanding suggests to
+me the query, whether this divine poem (in so original a strain of
+thought and feeling honourable to human nature) would not have been more
+perfect if the third, fourth, and fifth stanzas had been omitted, and
+the tenth and eleventh transposed so as to stand as the third and
+fourth. It is not, perhaps not at all, but, certainly, not principally
+that I feel any meanness in the "needles;" but, not to mention that the
+words "once a shining store" is a speck in the diamond (in a less dear
+poem I might, perhaps, have called it more harshly a _rhyme-botch_), and
+that the word "restless" is rather too strong an impersonation for the
+serious tone, the _real_ness of the poem, and seems to tread too closely
+on the mock-heroic; but that it seems not true to poetic feeling to
+introduce the affecting circumstance of dimness of sight from decay of
+nature on an occasion so remote from the [Greek: to katholou], and that
+the fifth stanza, graceful and even affecting as the spirit of the
+playfulness is or would be, at least, in a poem having less depth of
+feeling, breaks in painfully here--the age and afflicting infirmities
+both of the writer and his subject seem abhorrent from such trifling
+of--scarcely fancy, for I fear, if it were analysed, that the whole
+effect would be found to depend on phrases hackneyed, and taken from the
+alms-house of the Muses. The test would be this: read the poem to a
+well-educated but natural woman, an unaffected, gentle being, endued
+with sense and sensibility--substituting the tenth and eleventh stanzas
+for those three, and some days after shew her the poem as it now stands.
+I seem to be sure that she would be shocked--an alien would have
+intruded himself, and be found sitting in a circle of dear friends whom
+she expected to have found _all to themselves_.
+
+
+[Sidenote: ETYMOLOGY]
+
+To say that etymology is a science--is to use this word in its laxest
+and improper sense. But our language, except, at least, in poetry, has
+dropped the word "lore"--the _lehre_ of the Germans, the _logos_ of the
+Greek. Either we should have retained the word and ventured on
+_Root-lore_, _verse-lore_, etc., or have adopted the Greek as a single
+word as well as a word in combination. All novelties appear or are
+rather felt as ridiculous in language; but, if it had been once adopted,
+it would have been no stranger to have said that etymo_logy_ is a _logy_
+which perishes from a plethora of probability, than that the _art_ of
+war is an _art_ apparently for the destruction and subjugation of
+particular states, but really for the lessening of bloodshed and the
+preservation of the liberties of mankind. Art and Science are both too
+much appropriated--our language wants terms of comprehensive generality,
+implying the kind, not the degree or species, as in that good and
+necessary word _sensuous_, which we have likewise dropped, opposed to
+sensual, sensitive, sensible, etc., etc. Chymistry has felt this
+difficulty, and found the necessity of having one word for the supposed
+cause, another for the effect, as in caloric or calorific, opposed to
+heat; and psychology has still more need of the reformation.
+
+
+[Sidenote: SENTIMENT, AN ANTIDOTE TO CASUISTRY]
+
+The Queen-bee in the hive of Popish Error, the great mother of the
+swarm, seems to me their tenet concerning Faith and Works, placing the
+former wholly in the rectitude, nay, in the rightness of intellectual
+conviction, and the latter in the definite and, most often, the material
+action, and, consequently, the assertion of the dividuous nature and
+self-existence of works. Hence the doctrine of damnation out of the
+Church of Rome--of the one visible Church--of the absolute efficiency
+_in se_ of all the Sacraments and the absolute merit of ceremonial
+observances. Consider the incalculable advantage of chiefly dwelling on
+the virtues of the heart, of habits of feeling and harmonious action,
+the music of the adjusted string at the impulse of the breeze, and, on
+the other hand, the evils of books concerning particular actions, minute
+cases of conscience, hair-splitting directions and decisions, O how
+illustrated by the detestable character of most of the Roman Catholic
+casuists! No actions should be distinctly described but such as
+manifestly tend to awaken the heart to efficient feeling, whether of
+fear or of love--actions that, falling back on the fountain, keep it
+full, or clear out the mud from its pipes, and make it play in its
+abundance, shining in that purity in which, at once, the purity and the
+light is each the cause of the other, the light purifying, and the
+purified receiving and reflecting the light, sending it off to others;
+not, like the polished mirror, by reflection from itself, but by
+transmission through itself.
+
+
+[Sidenote: 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!
+
+
+[Sidenote: 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_.]
+
+
+That deep intuition of our _one_ness, is it not at the bottom of many of
+our faults as well as virtues? the dislike that a bad man should have
+any virtues, a good man any faults? And yet, too, a something noble and
+incentive is in this.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE OMNISCIENT THE COMFORTER]
+
+What comfort in the silent eye upraised to God! "_Thou_ knowest." O!
+what a thought! Never to be friendless, never to be unintelligible! The
+omnipresence has been generally represented as a spy, a sort of
+Bentham's Panopticon.[D] O to feel what the pain is to be utterly
+unintelligible and then--"O God, thou understandest!"
+
+
+[Sidenote: POETS AS CRITICS OF POETS]
+
+The question should be fairly stated, how far a man can be an adequate,
+or even a good (as far as he goes) though inadequate critic of poetry
+who is not a poet, at least, _in posse_? Can he be an adequate, can he
+be a good critic, though not commensurate [with the poet criticised]?
+But there is yet another distinction. Supposing he is not only not a
+poet, but is a bad poet! What then?
+
+
+[Sidenote: IMMATURE CRITICS March 16, 1805]
+
+[The] cause of the offence or disgust received by the _mean_ in good
+poems when we are young, and its diminution and occasional evanescence
+when we are older in true taste [is] that, at first, we are from various
+causes delighted with _generalities_ of nature which can all be
+expressed in dignified words; but, afterwards, becoming more intimately
+acquainted with Nature in her detail, we are delighted with _distinct_,
+vivid ideas, and with vivid ideas most when made distinct, and can most
+often forgive and sometimes be delighted with even a low image from art
+or low life when it gives you the very thing by an illustration, as, for
+instance, Cowper's stream "inlaying" the level vale as with silver, and
+even Shakspere's "shrill-tongued Tapster's answering shallow wits"
+applied to echoes in an _echofull_ place.
+
+
+[Sidenote: ATTENTION AND SENSATION March 17, 1805]
+
+Of the not being able to know whether you are smoking in the dark or
+when your eyes are shut: item, of the ignorance in that state of the
+difference of beef, veal, &c.--it is all attention. Your ideas being
+shut, other images arise which you must _attend to_, it being the habit
+of a _seeing_ man to attend chiefly to _sight_. So close your eyes,
+(and) you attend to the ideal images, and, attending to them, you
+abstract your _attention_. It is the same when deeply thinking in a
+reverie, you no longer hear distinct sound made to you. But what a
+strange inference that there were no sounds!
+
+
+[Sidenote: ST. COLUMBA]
+
+I love St. Combe or Columba and he shall be my saint. For he is not in
+the Catalogue of Romish Saints, having never been canonised at Rome, and
+because this Apostle of the Picts lived and gave his name to an island
+on the Hebrides, and from him Switzerland was christianised.
+
+
+[Sidenote: EXPERIENCE AND BOOK KNOWLEDGE Midnight, April 5, 1805]
+
+"I will write," I said, "as truly as I can from experience, actual
+individual experience, not from book-knowledge." But yet it is wonderful
+how exactly the knowledge from good books coincides with the experience
+of men of the world. How often, when I was younger, have I noticed the
+deep delight of men of the world who have taken late in life to
+literature, on coming across a passage the force of which had either
+escaped me altogether, or which I knew to be true from books only and at
+second hand! Experience is necessary, no doubt, if only to give a light
+and shade in the mind, to give to some one idea a greater vividness than
+to others, and thereby to make it a _Thing_ of _Time_ and actual
+reality. For all ideas being equally vivid, the whole becomes a dream.
+But, notwithstanding this and other reasons, I yet believe that the saws
+against book-knowledge are handed down to us from times when books
+conveyed only abstract science or abstract morality and religion.
+Whereas, in the present day, what is there of real life, in all its
+goings on, trades, manufactures, high life, low life, animate and
+inanimate that is not to be found in books? In these days books are
+conversation. And this, I know, is for evil as well as good, but for
+good, too, as well as evil.
+
+
+[Sidenote: DUTY AND SELF INTEREST Sunday morning 4 o'clock, April 7,
+1805]
+
+How feebly, how unlike an English cock, that cock crows and the other
+answers! Did I not particularly notice the _un_likeness on my first
+arrival at Malta? Well, to-day I will disburthen my mind. Yet one thing
+strikes me, the difference I find in myself during the past year or two.
+My enthusiasm for the happiness of mankind in particular places and
+countries, and my eagerness to promote it, seems to decrease, and my
+sense of duty, my hauntings of conscience, from any stain of thought or
+action to increase in the same ratio. I remember having written a
+strong letter to my most dear and honoured Wordsworth in consequence of
+his "Ode to Duty," and in that letter explained this as the effect of
+selfness in a mind incapable of gross self-interest--I mean, the
+decrease of hope and joy, the soul in its round and round flight forming
+narrower circles, till at every gyre its wings beat against the
+_personal self_. But let me examine this more accurately. It may be that
+the phenomena will come out more honourable to our nature.
+
+
+[Sidenote: EVIL PRODUCES EVIL]
+
+It is as trite as it is mournful (but yet most instructive), and by the
+genius that can produce the strongest impressions of novelty by rescuing
+the stalest and most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the
+very circumstance of their universal admission--admitted so instantly as
+never to be _reflected_ on, never by that sole key of reflection
+admitted into the effective, legislative chamber of the heart--so true
+that they lose all the privileges of Truth, and, as extremes meet by
+being _truisms_, correspond in utter inefficiency with universally
+acknowledged errors (in Algebraic symbols Truisms = Falsehoodisms =
+[scir][scir])--by that genius, I say, might good be worked in
+considering the old, old Methusalem saw that "evil produces evil." One
+error almost compels another. Tell one lie, tell a hundred. Oh, to show
+this, _a priori_, by bottoming it in all our faculties and by
+experience of touching examples!
+
+
+[Sidenote: JOHN WORDSWORTH Monday, April 8, 1805]
+
+The favourite object of all Oriental tales, and that which, whist it
+inspired their authors in the East, still inspires their readers
+everywhere, is the impossibility of baffling Destiny--the perception
+that what we considered as the means of one thing becomes, in a strange
+manner, the direct means of the reverse. O dear John Wordsworth! what
+joy at Grasmere that you were made Captain of the Abergavenny, and so
+young too! Now it was next to certain that you would in a few years
+settle in your native hills and be verily one of the _Concern_! Then
+came your share in the brilliant action with Linois. (I was at Grasmere
+in spirit only, but in spirit I was one of the rejoicers--as joyful as
+any, and, perhaps, more joyous!) This, doubtless, not only enabled you
+to lay in a larger and more advantageous cargo, but procured you a
+voyage to India instead of China, and in this circumstance a next to
+certainty of independence--and all these were decoys of Death! Well, but
+a nobler feeling than these vain regrets would become the friend of the
+man whose last words were: "I have done my duty! let her go!" Let us do
+our _duty_! all else is a dream, life and death alike a dream. This
+short sentence would comprise, I believe, the sum of all profound
+philosophy, of ethics and metaphysics conjointly, from Plato to Fichte!
+
+[_Vide Letters of S. T. C._, 1895, ii. 495, _note_.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: LOVE THE DIVINE ESSENCE]
+
+The best, the truly lovely in each and all, is God. Therefore the truly
+beloved is _the symbol of God_ to whomever it is truly beloved by, but
+it may become perfect and maintained love by the function of the two.
+The lover worships in his beloved that final consummation of itself
+which is produced in his own soul by the action of the soul of the
+beloved upon it, and that final perception of the soul of the beloved
+which is in part the consequence of the reaction of his (so ameliorated
+and regenerated) soul upon the soul of his beloved, till each
+contemplates the soul of the other as involving his own, both in its
+givings and its receivings, and thus, still keeping alive its _outness_,
+its _self-oblivion_ united with self-warmth, still approximates to God!
+Where shall I find an image for this sublime symbol which, ever
+involving the presence of Deity, yet tends towards it ever? Shall it be
+in the attractive powers of the different surfaces of the earth? each
+attraction the vicegerent and representative of the central attraction,
+and yet being no other than that attraction itself? By some such feeling
+as this I can easily believe the mind of Fénelon and Madame Guyon to
+have coloured its faith in the worship of saints, but that was most
+dangerous. It was not idolatry in _them_, but it encouraged idolatry in
+others. Now, the pure love of a good man for a good woman does not
+involve this evil, but it multiplies, intensifies the good.
+
+
+[Sidenote: ORDER IN DREAMS]
+
+Dreamt that I was saying or reading, or that it was read to me, "Varrius
+thus prophesied vinegar at his door by damned frigid tremblings." Just
+after, I woke. I fell to sleep again, having in the previous doze
+meditated on the possibility of making dreams regular; and just as I had
+passed on the other side of the confine of dozing, I afforded this
+specimen: "I should have thought it Vossius rather than Varrius, though,
+Varrius being a great poet, the idea would have been more suitable to
+him, only that all his writings were unfortunately lost in the _Arrow_."
+Again I awoke. _N.B._--The _Arrow_, Captain Vincent's frigate, from
+which our Malta letters and dispatches had been previously thrown
+overboard, was taken by the French, in February 1805. This _illustrates
+the connection of dreams_.
+
+
+[Sidenote: ORANGE BLOSSOM April 8, 1805]
+
+I never had a more lovely twig of orange-blossoms, with four old last
+year's leaves with their steady green well-placed among them, than
+to-day, and with a rose-twig of three roses [it] made a very striking
+nosegay to an Englishman, The Orange Twig was so very full of blossoms
+that one-fourth of the number becoming fruit of the natural size would
+have broken the twig off. Is there, then, disproportion here? or waste?
+O no! no! In the first place, here is a prodigality of beauty; and what
+harm do they do by existing? And is not man a being capable of Beauty
+even as of Hunger and Thirst? And if the latter be fit objects of a
+final cause, why not the former? But secondly [Nature] hereby multiplies
+manifold the chances of a proper number becoming fruit--in this twig,
+for instance, for one set of accidents that would have been fatal to the
+year's growth if only as many blossoms had been on it as it was designed
+to bear fruit, there may now be three sets of accidents--and no harm
+done. And, thirdly and lastly, for _me_ at _least_--or, at least, at
+present, for in nature doubtless there are many additional reasons, and
+possibly for _me_ at some future hour of reflection, after some new
+influx of information from books or observance-and, thirdly, these
+blossoms are Fruit, fruit to the winged insect, fruit to man--yea! and
+of more solid value, perhaps, than the orange itself! O how the Bees
+be-throng and be-murmur it! O how the honey tells the tale of its
+birthplace to the sense of sight and odour! and to how many minute and
+uneyeable insects beside! So, I cannot but think, ought I to be talking
+to Hartley, and sometimes to detail all the insects that have arts or
+implements resembling human--the sea-snails, with the nautilus at their
+head; the wheel-insect, the galvanic eel, etc.
+
+[This note was printed in the _Illustrated London News_, June 10, 1893.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: 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 [Greek: Logos] 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.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: 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.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE NORTHERN EASTER Easter Sunday, 1805]
+
+The English and German climates and that of northern France possess,
+among many others, this one little beauty of uniting the mysteries of
+positive with those of natural religion--in celebrating the symbolical
+resurrection of the human soul in that of the Crucified, at the time of
+the actual resurrection of the "living life" of nature.
+
+
+[Sidenote: SPIRITUAL RELIGION]
+
+Religion consists in truth and virtue, that is, the permanent, the
+_forma efformans_, in the flux of things without, of feelings and images
+within. Well, therefore, does the Scripture speak of the Spirit as
+praying to the Spirit, "The Lord said to my Lord." God is the essence as
+well as the object of religion.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A SUPPOSITION Wednesday, April 17, 1805]
+
+I would not willingly kill even a flower, but were I at the head of an
+army, or a revolutionary kingdom, I would do my duty; and though it
+should be the ordering of the military execution of a city, yet,
+supposing it to be my duty, I would give the order--and then, in awe,
+listen to the uproar, even as to a thunderstorm--the awe as tranquil,
+the submission to the inevitable, to the unconnected with myself, as
+profound. It should be as if the lightning of heaven passed along my
+sword and destroyed a man.
+
+
+[Sidenote: ENTHUSIASM]
+
+Does the sober judgement previously measure out the banks between which
+the stream of enthusiasm shall rush with its torrent-sound? Far rather
+does the stream itself plough up its own channel and find its banks in
+the adamant rocks of nature!
+
+
+[Sidenote: ADHÆSIT PAVIMENTO COR]
+
+There are times when my thoughts--how like music! O that these times
+were more frequent! But how can they be, I being so hopeless, and for
+months past so incessantly employed in official tasks, subscribing,
+examining, administering oaths, auditing, and so forth?
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE REALISATION OF DEATH]
+
+John Tobin dead, and just after the success of his play! and Robert
+Allen dead suddenly!
+
+O when we are young we lament for death only by sympathy, or with the
+general feeling with which we grieve for misfortunes in general, but
+there comes a time (and this year is the time that has come to me) when
+we lament for death as death, when it is felt for itself, and as itself,
+aloof from all its consequences. Then comes the grave-stone into the
+heart with all its mournful names, then the bell-man's or clerk's verses
+subjoined to the bills of mortality are no longer common-place.
+
+[John Tobin the dramatist died December 7, 1804. His play entitled "The
+Honeymoon" was published in 1805.
+
+Robert Allen, Coleridge's contemporary and school-friend, held the post
+of deputy-surgeon to the 2nd Royals, then on service in Portugal. He was
+a friend of Dr. (afterwards Sir J.) Stoddart, with whom Coleridge stayed
+on his first arrival at Malta. See _Letters of Charles Lamb_, Macmillan,
+1888, i. 188.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: LOVE AND DUTY]
+
+Würde, worthiness, VIRTUE, consist in the mastery over the sensuous and
+sensual impulses; but love requires INNOCENCE. Let the lover ask his
+heart whether he can endure that his mistress should have _struggled_
+with a sensual impulse for another man, though she overcame it from a
+sense of duty to him. Women are LESS offended with men, in part, from
+the vicious habits of men, and, in part, from the difference of bodily
+constitution. Yet, still, to a pure and truly loving woman this must be
+a painful thought. That he should struggle with and overcome ambition,
+desire of fortune, superior beauty, &c., or with objectless desire of
+any kind, is pleasing, but _not_ that he has struggled with positive,
+appropriated desire, that is, desire _with_ an object. Love, in short,
+requires an absolute peace and harmony between all parts of human
+nature, such as it is; and it is offended by any _war_, though the
+battle should be decided in favour of the worthier. This is, perhaps,
+the final cause of the _rarity_ of true love, and the efficient and
+immediate cause of its difficulty. Ours is a life of probation. We are
+to contemplate and obey _duty_ for its own sake, and in order to do
+this, we, in our present imperfect state of being, must see it not
+merely abstracted from but in direct opposition to the _wish_, the
+_inclination_. Having perfected this, the highest possibility of human
+nature, man may then with safety harmonise _all_ his being with this--he
+may _love_. To perform duties absolutely from the sense of duty is the
+_ideal_, which, perhaps, no human being ever can arrive at, but which
+every human being ought to try to draw near unto. This is, in the only
+wise, and, verily, in a most sublime sense, to see God face to face,
+which, alas! it seems too true that no man can do and _live_, that is, a
+_human_ life. It would become incompatible with his organization, or
+rather, it would _transmute_ it, and the process of that transmutation,
+to the senses of other men, would be called death. Even as to the
+caterpillar, in all probability, the caterpillar dies, and he either,
+which is most probable, does not see (or, at all events, does not see
+the connection between the caterpillar and) the butterfly, the beautiful
+Psyche of the Greeks.
+
+
+[Sidenote: HAPPINESS MADE PERFECT]
+
+Those who in this life love in perfection, if such there be, in
+proportion as their love has no struggles, see God darkly and through a
+veil. For when duty and pleasure are absolutely co-incident, the very
+nature of our organisation necessitates that duty will be contemplated
+as the symbol of pleasure, instead of pleasure being (as in a future
+life we have faith it will be) the symbol of duty. For herein lies the
+distinction between human and angelic happiness. Humanly happy I call
+him who in enjoyment _finds_ his duty; angelically happy he, who seeks
+and finds his duty in enjoyment.
+
+Happiness in general may be defined, not the aggregate of pleasurable
+sensations--for this is either a dangerous error and the creed of
+sensualists, or else a mere translation or wordy paraphrase--but the
+state of that person who, in order to enjoy his nature in the highest
+manifestation of conscious _feeling_, has no need of doing wrong, and
+who, in order to do right, is under no necessity of abstaining from
+enjoyment.
+
+[_Vide Life of S. T. C._, by James Gillman, 1838, pp. 176-78.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: THOUGHT AND THINGS]
+
+Thought and reality are, as it were, two distinct corresponding sounds,
+of which no man can say positively which is the voice and which the
+echo.
+
+Oh, the beautiful fountain or natural well at Upper Stowey! The images
+of the weeds which hung down from its sides appear as plants growing up,
+straight and upright, among the water-weeds that really grow from the
+bottom of the well, and so vivid was the image, that for some moments,
+and not till after I had disturbed the water, did I perceive that their
+roots were not neighbours, and they side-by-side companions. So ever,
+then I said, so are the happy man's thoughts and things, [or in the
+language of the modern philosophers] his ideas and impressions.
+
+
+[Sidenote: SUPERSTITION]
+
+The two characteristics which I have most observed in Roman Catholic
+mummery processions, baptisms, etc., are, first, the immense _noise_ and
+jingle-jingle as if to frighten away the dæmon common-sense; and,
+secondly, the unmoved, stupid, uninterested faces of the conjurers. I
+have noticed no exception. Is not the very nature of superstition in
+general, as being utterly sensuous, _cold_ except where it is _sensual_?
+Hence the older form of idolatry, as displayed in the Greek mythology,
+was, in some sense, even preferable to the Popish. For whatever life
+did and could exist in superstition it brought forward and sanctified in
+its rites of Bacchus, Venus, etc. The papist by pretence of suppression
+warps and denaturalises. In the pagan [ritual, superstition] burnt with
+a bright flame, in the popish it consumes the soul with a smothered fire
+that stinks in darkness and smoulders like gum that burns but is
+incapable of light.
+
+
+[Sidenote: ILLUSION Sunday Midnight, May 12, 1805]
+
+At the Treasury, La Valetta, Malta, in the room the windows of which
+directly face the piazzas and vast saloon built for the archives and
+Library and now used as the Garrison Ball-room, sitting at one corner of
+a large parallelogram table well-littered with books, in a red
+arm-chair, at the other corner of which (diagonally) {_C}[rec]^D Mr.
+Dennison had been sitting--he and I having conversed for a long time, he
+bade me good night, and retired--I meaning to retire too, however sunk
+for five minutes or so into a doze and on suddenly awaking up I saw him
+as distinctly sitting in the chair, as I had, really, some ten minutes
+before. I was startled, and thinking of it, sunk into a second doze, out
+of which awaking as before I saw again the same appearance; not more
+distinct indeed, but more of his form--for at the first time I had seen
+only his face and bust--but now I saw as much as I could have seen if
+he had been really there. The appearance was very nearly that of a
+person seen through thin smoke distinct indeed, but yet a sort of
+distinct _shape_ and _colour_, with a diminished sense of
+_substantiality_--like a face in a clear stream. My nerves had been
+violently agitated yesterday morning by the attack of three dogs as I
+was mounting the steps of Captain Pasley's door--two of them savage
+Bedouins, who wounded me in the calf of my left leg. I have noted this
+down, not three minutes having intervened since the illusion took place.
+Often and often I have had similar experiences and, therefore, resolved
+to write down the particulars whenever any new instance should occur, as
+a weapon against superstition, and an explanation of ghosts--Banquo in
+"Macbeth" the very same thing. I once told a lady the reason why I did
+not believe in the existence of ghosts, etc., was that I had seen too
+many of them myself. N.B. There were on the table a common black
+wine-bottle, a decanter of water, and, between these, one of the
+half-gallon glass flasks which Sir G. Beaumont had given me (four of
+these full of port), the cork in, covered with leather, and having a
+white plated ring on the top. I mention this because since I wrote the
+former pages, on blinking a bit a third time, and opening my eyes, I
+clearly _detected_ that this high-shouldered hypochondriacal bottle-man
+had a great share in producing the effect. The metamorphosis was
+clearly beginning, though I snapped the spell before it had assumed a
+recognisable form. The red-leather arm-chair was so placed at the corner
+that the flask was exactly between me and it--and the lamp being close
+to my corner of the large table, and not giving much light, the chair
+was rather obscure, and the brass nails where the leather was fastened
+to the outward wooden rim reflecting the light more copiously were seen
+almost for themselves. What if instead of immediately checking the
+sight, and then pleased with it as a philosophical _case_, I had been
+frightened and encouraged it, and my understanding had joined _its vote_
+to that of my senses?
+
+My own shadow, too, on the wall not far from Mr. D.'s chair--the white
+paper, the sheet of Harbour Reports lying spread out on the table on the
+other side of the bottles--influence of mere colour, influence of
+shape--wonderful coalescence of scattered colours at distances, and,
+then, all going to some one shape, and the modification! Likewise I am
+more convinced by repeated observation that, perhaps, always in a very
+minute degree but assuredly in certain states and postures of the eye,
+as in drowsiness, in the state of the brain and nerves after distress or
+agitation, especially if it had been accompanied by weeping, and in
+many others, we see our own faces, and project them according to the
+distance given them by the degree of indistinctness--that this may
+occasion in the highest degree the Wraith (_vide_ a hundred Scotch
+stories, but better than all, Wordsworth's most wonderful and admirable
+poem, Peter Bell, when he sees his own figure), and, still oftener, that
+it facilitates the formation of a human face out of some really present
+object, and from the alteration of the distance among other causes never
+suspected as the occasion and substratum.
+
+                                           S. T. C.
+
+N.B.--This is a valuable note, re-read by me, Tuesday morning, May 14.
+
+[Compare _Table Talk_ for January 3 and May 1, 1823, Bell & Co., 1884,
+pp. 20, 31-33. See, too, _The Friend_, First Landing Place Essay, iii.,
+_Coleridge's Works_, Harper & Brothers, 1853, ii. 134-137.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE"]
+
+Mem. always to bear in mind that profound sentence of Leibnitz that
+men's intellectual errors consist chiefly in _denying_. What they
+_affirm_ with _feeling_ is, for the most part, right--if it be a real
+affirmation, and not affirmative in form, negative in reality. As, for
+instance, when a man praises the French stage, meaning and implying his
+dislike of Shakspere [and the Elizabethan dramatists].
+
+
+"Facts--stubborn facts! None of your theory!" A most entertaining and
+instructive essay might be written on this text, and the sooner the
+better. Trace it from the most absurd credulity--_e.g._, in
+Fracastorius' _De Sympathiâ_, cap. i. and the Alchemy Book--even to that
+of your modern agriculturists, relating their own facts and swearing
+against each other like ships' crews. O! it is the relation of the
+facts--not the facts, friend!
+
+
+Speculative men are wont to be condemned by the general. But who more
+speculative then Sir Walter Raleigh, and _he_, even he, brought the
+potato to Europe. Good heavens! let me never eat a roasted potato
+without dwelling on it, and detailing its train of consequences.
+Likewise, too, _dubious_ to the philosopher, but to be clapped chorally
+by the commercial world, he, this mere wild speculatist, introduced
+tobacco.
+
+
+For a nation to make peace only because it is tired of war, and, as it
+were, in order just to take breath, is in direct subversion of the end
+and object of the war which was its sole justification. 'Tis like a poor
+way-sore foot traveller getting up behind a coach that is going the
+contrary way to his.
+
+
+The eye hath a two-fold power. It is, verily, a window through which you
+not only look _out_ of the house, but can look into it too. A statesman
+and diplomatist should for this reason always wear spectacles.
+
+
+Worldly men gain their purposes with worldly men by that instinctive
+belief in sincerity. Hence (nothing immediately and passionately
+contradicting it) the effect of the "with unfeigned esteem," "entire
+devotion," and the other smooth phrases in letters, all, in short, that
+sea-officers call _oil_, and of which they, with all their bluntness,
+well understand the use.
+
+
+The confusion of metaphor with reality is one of the fountains of the
+many-headed Nile of credulity, which, overflowing its banks, covers the
+world with miscreations and reptile monsters, and feeds by its many
+mouths the sea of blood.
+
+
+A ready command of a limited number of words is but a playing cat-cradle
+dexterously with language.
+
+
+Plain contra-reasoning may be compared with boxing with fists.
+Controversy with boxing is the cestus, that is, the lead-loaded glove,
+like the pugilists in the Æneid. But the stiletto! the envenomed
+stiletto is here. What worse? (a Germanism) Yes! the poisoned Italian
+glove of mock friendship.
+
+
+The more I reflect, the more exact and close appears to me the analogy
+between a watch and watches, and the conscience and consciences of men,
+on the one hand, and that between the sun and motion of the heavenly
+bodies in general and the reason and goodness of the Supreme on the
+other. Never goes quite right any one, no two go exactly the same; they
+derive their dignity and use as being substitutes and exponents of
+heavenly motions, but still, in a thousand instances, they are and must
+be our instructors by which we must act, in practice presuming a
+coincidence while theoretically we are aware of incalculable variations.
+
+
+    One lifts up one's eyes to heaven, as if to seek there what one had
+      lost on earth--eyes,
+    Whose half-beholdings through unsteady tears
+    Gave shape, hue, distance to the inward dream.
+
+
+[Sidenote: GREAT MEN THE CRITERION OF NATIONAL WORTH]
+
+Schiller, disgusted with Kotzebuisms, deserts from Shakspere! What!
+cannot we condemn a counterfeit and yet remain admirers of the original?
+This is a sufficient proof that the first admiration was not sound, or
+founded on sound distinct perceptions [or, if sprung from], a sound
+feeling, yet clothed and manifested to the consciousness by false ideas.
+And now the French stage is to be re-introduced. O Germany! Germany! why
+this endless rage for novelty? Why this endless looking out of thyself?
+But stop, let me not fall into the pit against which I was about to warn
+others. Let me not confound the discriminating character and genius of a
+nation with the conflux of its individuals in cities and reviews. Let
+England be Sir Philip Sidney, Shakspere, Milton, Bacon, Harrington,
+Swift, Wordsworth; and never let the names of Darwin, Johnson, Hume,
+_fur_ it over. If these, too, must be England let them be another
+England; or, rather, let the first be old England, the spiritual,
+Platonic old England, and the second, with Locke at the head of the
+philosophers and Pope [at the head] of the poets, together with the long
+list of Priestleys, Paleys, Hayleys, Darwins, Mr. Pitts, Dundasses, &c.,
+&c., be the representatives of commercial Great Britain. These have
+[indeed] their merits, but are as alien to me as the Mandarin
+philosophers and poets of China. Even so Leibnitz, Lessing, Voss, Kant,
+shall be _Germany_ to me, let whatever coxcombs rise up, and _shrill_ it
+away in the grasshopper vale of reviews. And so shall Dante, Ariosto,
+Giordano Bruno, be my Italy; Cervantes my Spain; and O! that I could
+find a France for my love. But spite of Pascal, Madame Guyon and
+Molière, France is my Babylon, the mother of whoredoms in morality,
+philosophy and taste. The French themselves feel a foreignness in these
+writers. How indeed is it possible at once to _love_ Pascal and
+Voltaire?
+
+
+[Sidenote: AN INTELLECTUAL PURGATORY Tuesday morning, May 14, 1805]
+
+With any distinct remembrance of a past life there could be no fear of
+death as death, no idea even of death! Now, in the next state, to meet
+with the Luthers, Miltons, Leibnitzs, Bernouillis, Bonnets, Shaksperes,
+etc., and to live a longer and better life, the good and wise entirely
+among the good and wise, might serve as a step to break the abruptness
+of an immediate Heaven? But it must be a human life; and though the
+faith in a hereafter would be more firm, more undoubting, yet, still, it
+must not be a sensuous remembrance of a death passed over. No! [it would
+be] something like a dream that you had not died, but had been taken
+off; in short, the real events with the obscurity of a dream,
+accompanied with the notion that you had never died, but that death was
+yet to come. As a man who, having walked in his sleep, by rapid openings
+of his eyes--too rapid to be observable by others or rememberable by
+himself--sees and remembers the whole of his path, mixing it with many
+fancies _ab intra_, and, awaking, remembers, but yet as a dream.
+
+
+[Sidenote: OF FIRST LOVES]
+
+'Tis one source of mistakes concerning the merits of poems, that to
+those read in youth men attribute all that praise which is due to poetry
+in general, merely considered as select language in metre. (Little
+children should not be taught verses, in my opinion; better not to let
+them set eyes on verse till they are ten or eleven years old.) Now,
+poetry produces two kinds of pleasure, one for each of the two
+master-movements and impulses of man, the gratification of the love of
+variety, and the gratification of the love of uniformity--and that by a
+recurrence delightful as a painless and yet exciting act of memory--tiny
+breezelets of surprise, each one destroying the ripplets which the
+former had made--yet all together keeping the surface of the mind in a
+bright dimple-smile. So, too, a hatred of vacancy is reconciled with the
+love of rest. These and other causes often make [a first acquaintance
+with] poetry an overpowering delight to a lad of feeling, as I have
+heard Poole relate of himself respecting Edwin and Angelina. But so it
+would be with a man bred up in a wilderness by Unseen Beings, who should
+yet converse and discourse rationally with him--how beautiful would not
+the first other man appear whom he saw and knew to be a man by the
+resemblance to his own image seen in the clear stream; and would he not,
+in like manner, attribute to the man all the divine attributes of
+humanity, though, haply, he should be a very ordinary, or even a most
+ugly man, compared with a hundred others? Many of us who have felt this
+with respect to women have been bred up where few are to be seen; and I
+acknowledge that, both in persons and in poems, it is well _on the
+whole_ that we should retain our first love, though, alike in both
+cases, evils have happened as the consequence.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE MADDENING RAIN August 1, 1805]
+
+The excellent fable of the maddening rain I have found in Drayton's
+"Moon Calf," most miserably marred in the telling! vastly inferior to
+Benedict Fay's Latin exposition of it, and that is no great thing.
+_Vide_ his Lucretian Poem on the Newtonian System. Never was a finer
+tale for a satire, or, rather, to conclude a long satirical poem of five
+or six hundred lines.
+
+[For excellent use of this fable, see _The Friend_, No. 1, June 9, 1809,
+_Coleridge's Works_, Harper & Brothers, ii. 21, 22.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: SENTIMENTS BELOW MORALS]
+
+Pasley remarked last night (2nd August 1805), and with great precision
+and originality, that men themselves, in the present age, were not so
+much degraded as their sentiments. This is most true! almost all men
+nowadays act and feel more nobly than they think--yet still the vile,
+cowardly, selfish, calculating ethics of Paley, Priestley, Locke, and
+other Erastians do woefully influence and determine our course of
+action.
+
+
+[Sidenote: TIME AND ETERNITY]
+
+O the complexities of the ravel produced by time struggling with
+eternity! _a_ and _b_ are different, and eternity or duration makes them
+one--this we call modification--the principle of all greatness in finite
+beings, the principle of all contradiction and absurdity.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE PASSION FOR THE MOT PROPRE August 3, 1805 Saturday]
+
+It is worthy notice (shewn in the phrase "I envy him such and such a
+thing," meaning only, "I regret I cannot share with him, have the same
+as he, without depriving him of it, or any part of it,") the instinctive
+passion in the mind for a _one word_ to express _one act_ of
+feeling--[one] that is, in which, however complex in reality, the mind
+is _conscious_ of no discursion and synthesis _a posteriori_. On this
+instinct rest all the improvements (and, on the habits formed by this
+instinct and [the] knowledge of these improvements, Vanity rears all the
+Apuleian, Apollonian, etc., etc., corruptions) of style. Even so with
+our Johnson.
+
+
+[Sidenote: BULLS OF ACTION]
+
+There are _bulls_ of action equally as of thought, [for] (not to allude
+to the story of the Irish labourer who laid his comrade all his wages
+that he would not carry him down in his hod from the top to the bottom
+of a high house, down the ladder) the feeling of vindictive honour in
+duelling, and the feudal revenges anterior to duelling, formed a true
+bull; for they were superstitious Christians, knew it was wrong, and yet
+knew it was right--they would be damned deservedly if they did, and, if
+they did not, they thought themselves deserving of being damned.
+
+
+[Sidenote: PSEUDO-POETS]
+
+The pseudo-poets Campbell, Rogers, etc., both by their writings and
+moral character tend to bring poetry into disgrace, and, but that men in
+general are the slaves of the same wretched infirmities, they would [set
+their seal on this disgrace,] and it would be well. The true poet could
+not smother the sacred fire ("his heart burnt within him and he spake"),
+and wisdom would be justified by her children. But the false poet--that
+is, the no-poet--finding poetry in contempt among the many, of whose
+praise, whatever he may affirm, he is alone ambitious, would be
+prevented from scribbling.
+
+
+[Sidenote: LANDING PLACES]
+
+The progress of human intellect from earth to heaven is not a Jacob's
+ladder, but a geometrical staircase with five or more landing-places.
+That on which we stand enables us to see clearly and count all below us,
+while that or those above us are so transparent for our eyes that they
+appear the canopy of heaven. We do not see them, and believe ourselves
+on the highest.
+
+["Among my earliest impressions I still distinctly remember that of my
+first entrance into the mansion of a neighbouring baronet, awefully
+known to me by the name of the Great House [Escot, near Ottery St. Mary,
+Devon].... Beyond all other objects I was most struck with the
+magnificent staircase, relieved at well-proportioned intervals by
+spacious landing-places.... My readers will find no difficulty in
+translating these forms of the outward senses into their intellectual
+analogies, so as to understand the purport of _The Friend's_
+Landing-Places." _The Friend_, "The Landing-Place," Essay iv.
+_Coleridge's Works_, Harper & Brothers, 1853, ii. 137, 138.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: WILLIAM BROWNE OF OTTERY]
+
+In the _Threnæ_ or funeral songs and elegies of our old poets, I am
+often impressed with the idea of their resemblance to hired weepers in
+Rome and among the Irish, where he who howled the loudest and most
+wildly was the most capital mourner and was at the head of his trade.
+So [too] see William Browne's elegy on Prince Henry (_Britt. Past.
+Songs_ v.), whom, perhaps, he never spoke to. Yet he is a dear fellow,
+and I love him, that W. Browne who died at Ottery, and with whose family
+my own is united, or, rather, connected and acquainted.
+
+[Colonel James Coleridge, the poet's eldest surviving brother and Henry
+Langford Browne of Combe-Satchfield married sisters, Frances and Dorothy
+Taylor, whose mother was one of five co-heiresses of Richard Duke of
+Otterton.
+
+It is uncertain whether a William Browne of Ottery St. Mary, who died in
+1645, was the author of _The Shepherd's Pipe_ and _Britannia's
+Pastorals_. Two beautiful inscriptions on a tomb in St. Stephen's Chapel
+in the collegiate church of St. Mary Ottery, were, in Southey's opinion
+(doubtless at Coleridge's suggestion), composed by the poet William
+Browne.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: "ASCEND A STEP IN CHOOSING A FRIEND" TALMUD]
+
+God knows! that at times I derive a comfort even from my infirmities, my
+sins of omission and commission, in the joy of the deep feeling of the
+opposite virtues in the two or three whom I love in my heart of hearts.
+Sharp, therefore, is the pain when I find faults in these friends
+opposite to my virtues. I find no comfort in the notion of average, for
+I wish to love even more than to be beloved, and am so haunted by the
+conscience of my many failings that I find an unmixed pleasure in
+esteeming and admiring, but, as the recipient of esteem or admiration, I
+feel as a man, whose good dispositions are still alive, feels in the
+enjoyment of a _darling_ property on a doubtful title. My instincts are
+so far dog-like that I love beings superior to myself better than my
+equals. But the notion of inferiority is so painful to me that I never,
+in common life, feel a man my inferior except by after-reflection. What
+seems vanity in me is in great part attributable to this feeling. But of
+this hereafter. I will cross-examine myself.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A CAUTION TO POSTERITY]
+
+There are actions which left undone mark the greater man; but to have
+done them does not imply a bad or mean man. Such, for instance, are
+Martial's compliments of Domitian. So may we praise Milton without
+condemning Dryden. By-the-bye, we are all too apt to forget that
+contemporaries have not the same _wholeness_, and _fixedness_ in their
+notions of persons' characters, that we their posterity have. They can
+_hope_ and _fear_ and _believe_ and _disbelieve_. We make up an ideal
+which, like the fox or lion in the fable, never changes.
+
+
+[Sidenote: FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE"]
+
+I have several times seen the stiletto and the rosary come out of the
+same pocket.
+
+
+A man who marries for love is like a frog who leaps into a well. He has
+plenty of water but then he cannot get out.
+
+
+[Not until national ruin is imminent will Ministers contemplate the
+approach of national danger]; as if Judgment were overwhelmed like
+Belgic towns in the sea, and showed its towers only at dead low water.
+
+
+The superiority of the genus to the particular may be illustrated by
+music. How infinitely more perfect in passion and its transition than
+even poetry, and poetry again than painting! And yet how marvellous is
+genius in all its implements!
+
+[Compare _Table Talk_, July 6, 1833. H. N. C. _foot-note_. Bell & Co.,
+1884, p. 240.]
+
+
+Those only who feel no originality, no consciousness of having received
+their thoughts and opinions from immediate inspiration are anxious to be
+thought original. The certainty, the feeling that he is right, is enough
+for the man of genius, and he rejoices to find his opinions plumed and
+winged with the authority of several forefathers.
+
+
+The water-lily in the midst of the lake is equally refreshed by the
+rain, as the sponge on the sandy sea-shore.
+
+
+In the next world the souls of dull good men serve for bodies to the
+souls of the Shaksperes and Miltons, and in the course of a few
+centuries, when the soul can do without its vehicle, the bodies will by
+advantage of good company have refined themselves into souls fit to be
+clothed with like bodies.
+
+
+How much better it would be, in the House of Commons, to have everything
+that is, and by the spirit of English freedom must be legal, legal and
+open! The reporting, for instance, should be done by shorthandists
+appointed by Government. There are, I see, weighty arguments on the
+other side, but are they not to be got over?
+
+
+Co-arctation is not a bad phrase for that narrowing in of breadth on
+both sides as in my interpolation of Schiller.
+
+                                       "And soon
+    The narrowing line of day-light that ran after
+    The closing door was gone."
+
+    _Piccolomini_, ii. sc. 4, _P.W._, p. 257.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE DEVIL WITH A MEMORY THE FIRST SINNER]
+
+In order not to be baffled by the infinite ascent of the heavenly
+angels, the devil feigned that all (the [Greek: tagathon], that is,
+God himself included) sprang from nothing. And now he has a pretty task
+to multiply, without paper or slate, the exact number of all the
+animalcules, and the eggs and embryos of each planet, by some other, and
+the product by a third and that product by a fourth, and he is not to
+stop till he has gone through the planets of half the universe, the
+number of which being infinite, it is considered by the devils in
+general a great puzzle. A dream in a doze.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE SUN OF RIGHTEOUSNESS]
+
+A bodily substance, an unborrowed Self--God in God immanent! The Eternal
+Word! That goes forth yet remains! Crescent and Full and Wane, yet ever
+entire and one, it dawns, and sets, and crowns the height of heaven. At
+the same time, the dawning and setting sun, at the same time the
+zodiac--while each, in its own hour, boasts and beholds the exclusive
+Presence, a peculiar Orb, each the great Traveller's inn, yet still the
+unmoving Sun--
+
+    Great genial Agent in all finite souls;
+    And by that action puts on finiteness,
+    Absolute Infinite, whose dazzling robe
+    Flows in rich folds, and plays in shooting hues
+    Of infinite finiteness.
+
+
+[Sidenote: FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE." Syracuse, September 26, 1805]
+
+I was standing gazing at the starry heaven, and said, "I will go to bed,
+the next star that shoots." Observe this, in counting fixed numbers
+previous to doing anything, and deduce from man's own unconscious
+acknowledgment man's _dependence_ on something more apparently and
+believedly subject to regular and certain laws than his own will and
+reason.
+
+
+To Wordsworth in the progression of spirit, once Simonides, or
+Empedocles, or both in one--
+
+"Oh! that my spirit, purged by death of its weaknesses, which are, alas!
+my identity, might flow into thine, and live and act in thee and be
+thine!"
+
+
+Death, first of all, eats of the Tree of Life and becomes immortal.
+Describe the frightful metamorphosis. He weds the Hamadryad of the Tree
+[and begets a twy-form] progeny. This in the manner of Dante.
+
+
+Sad drooping children of a wretched parent are those yellowing leaflets
+of a broken twig, broke ere its June.
+
+
+We are not inert in the grave. St. Paul's corn in the ground proves this
+scripturally, and the growth of infants in their sleep by natural
+analogy. What, then, if our spiritual growth be in proportion to the
+length and depth of the sleep! With what mysterious grandeur does not
+this thought invest the grave, and how poor compared with this an
+immediate Paradise!
+
+
+I awake and find my beloved asleep, gaze upon her by the taper that
+feebly illumines the darkness, then fall asleep by her side; and we both
+awake together for _good_ and _all_ in the broad daylight of heaven.
+
+
+Forget not to impress as often and as manifoldly as possible the _totus
+in omni parte_ of Truth, and its consequent interdependence on
+co-operation and, _vice versâ_, the fragmentary character of action, and
+its absolute dependence on society, a majority, etc. The blindness to
+this distinction creates fanaticism on one side, alarm and prosecution
+on the other. Jacobins or soul-gougers. It is an interesting fact or
+fable that the stork (the emblem of filial or conjugal piety) never
+abides in a monarchy.
+
+
+Commend me to the Irish architect who took out the foundation-stone to
+repair the roof.
+
+
+Knox and the other reformers were _Scopæ viarum_--that is, highway
+besoms.
+
+
+The Pine Tree blasted at the top was applied by Swift to himself as a
+prophetic emblem of his own decay. The Chestnut is a fine shady tree,
+and its wood excellent, were it not that it dies away at the _heart_
+first. Alas! poor me!
+
+
+[Sidenote: TASTE, AN ETHICAL QUALITY]
+
+Modern poetry is characterised by the poets' _anxiety_ to be always
+striking. There is the same march in the Greek and Latin poets.
+Claudian, who had powers to have been anything--observe in him this
+anxious, craving vanity! Every line, nay, every word, stops, looks full
+in your face, and asks and _begs_ for praise! As in a Chinese painting,
+there are no distances, no perspective, but all is in the foreground;
+and this is nothing but vanity. I am pleased to think that, when a mere
+stripling, I had formed the opinion that true taste was virtue, and that
+bad writing was bad feeling.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A PLEA FOR POETIC LICENSE]
+
+The desire of carrying things to a greater height of pleasure and
+admiration than, _omnibus trutinatis_, they are susceptible of, is one
+great cause of the corruption of poetry. Both to understand my own
+reasoning and to communicate it, ponder on Catullus' hexameters and
+pentameters, his "_numine abusum homines_" [Carmen, lxxvi. 4] [and
+similar harsh expressions]. It is not whether or no the very same ideas
+expressed with the very same force and the very same naturalness and
+simplicity in the versification of Ovid and Tibullus, would not be
+still more delightful (though even that, for any number of poems, may
+well admit a doubt), but whether it is _possible_ so to express them and
+whether, in every attempt, the result has not been to substitute manner
+for matter, and point that will not bear reflection (so fine that it
+breaks the moment you try it) for genuine sense and true feeling, and,
+lastly, to confine both the subjects, thoughts, and even words of poetry
+within a most beggarly cordon. _N.B._--The same criticism applies to
+Metastasio, and, in Pope, to his quaintness, perversion, unnatural
+metaphors, and, still more, the cold-blooded use, for artifice or
+connection, of language justifiable only by enthusiasm and passion.
+
+
+[Sidenote: RICHARDSON]
+
+I confess that it has cost, and still costs, my philosophy some exertion
+not to be vexed that I must admire, aye, greatly admire, Richardson. His
+mind is so very vile a mind, so oozy, hypocritical, praise-mad, canting,
+envious, concupiscent! But to understand and draw _him_ would be to
+produce a work almost equal to his own; and, in order to do this,
+"_down, proud Heart, down_" (as we teach little children to say to
+themselves, bless them!), all hatred down! and, instead thereof,
+charity, calmness, a heart fixed on the good part, though the
+understanding is surveying all. Richardson felt truly the defect of
+Fielding, or what was not his excellence, and made that his _defect_--a
+trick of uncharitableness often played, though not exclusively, by
+contemporaries. Fielding's talent was observation, not meditation. But
+Richardson was not philosopher enough to know the difference--say,
+rather, to understand and develop it.
+
+
+[Sidenote: HIS NEED OF EXTERNAL SOLACE]
+
+O there are some natures which under the most cheerless all-threatening
+nothing-promising circumstances can draw hope from the invisible, as the
+tropical trees that in the sandy desolation produce their own lidded
+vessels full of the waters from air and dew! Alas! to my root not a drop
+trickles down but from the watering-pot of immediate friends. And, even
+so, it seems much more a sympathy with their feeling rather than hope of
+my own. So should I feel sorrow, if Allston's mother, whom I have never
+seen, were to die?
+
+
+[Sidenote: MINUTE CRITICISM]
+
+Stoddart passes over a poem as one of those tiniest of tiny night-flies
+runs over a leaf, casting its shadow, three times as long as itself, yet
+only just shading one, or at most two letters at a time.
+
+
+[Sidenote: DR. PRICE]
+
+A maidservant of Mrs. Clarkson's parents had a great desire to hear Dr.
+Price, and accordingly attended his congregation. On her return, being
+asked "Well, what do you think?" &c., "Ai--i," replied she, "there was
+neither the poor nor the Gospel." Excellent that on the fine
+_respectable_ attendants of Unitarian chapels, and the moonshine,
+heartless head-work of the sermons.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A _DOCUMENT HUMAIN_]
+
+The mahogany tables, all, but especially the large dining-table,
+[marked] with the segments of circles (deep according to the passion of
+the dice-box plunger), chiefly half-circles, O the anger and spite with
+which many have been thrown! It is truly a written history of the
+fiendish passion of gambling. Oct. 12, 1806. Newmarket.
+
+
+[Sidenote: PINDAR]
+
+The odes of Pindar (with few exceptions, and these chiefly in the
+shorter ones) seem by intention to die away by soft gradations into a
+languid interest, like most of the landscapes of the great elder
+painters. Modern ode-writers have commonly preferred a continued rising
+of interest.
+
+
+[Sidenote: "ONE MUSIC AS BEFORE, BUT VASTER"]
+
+The shattering of long and deep-rooted associations always places the
+mind in an angry state, and even when our own understandings have
+effected the revolution, it still holds good, only we apply the feeling
+to and against our former faith and those who still hold it--[a
+tendency] shown in modern infidels. Great good, therefore, of such
+revolution as alters, not by exclusion, but by an enlargement that
+includes the former, though it places it in a new point of view.
+
+
+[Sidenote: TO ALLSTON]
+
+After the formation of a new acquaintance, found, by some weeks' or
+months' unintermitted communion, worthy of all our esteem, affection
+and, perhaps, admiration, an intervening absence, whether we meet again
+or only write, raises it into friendship, and encourages the modesty of
+our nature, impelling us to assume the language and express all the
+feelings of an established attachment.
+
+
+[Sidenote: MORBID SENTIMENT]
+
+The _thinking_ disease is that in which the feelings, instead of
+embodying themselves in _acts_, ascend and become materials of general
+reasoning and intellectual pride. The dreadful consequences of this
+perversion [may be] instanced in Germany, _e.g._, in Fichte _versus_
+Kant, Schelling _versus_ Fichte and in Verbidigno [Wordsworth] _versus_
+S. T. C. Ascent where nature meant descent, and thus shortening the
+process--viz., _feelings_ made the subjects and tangible substance of
+thought, instead of actions, realizations, _things done_, and as such
+externalised and remembered. On such meagre diet as feelings, evaporated
+embryos in their progress to _birth_, no moral being ever becomes
+healthy.
+
+
+[Sidenote: "PHANTOMS OF SUBLIMITY"]
+
+Empires, states, &c., may be beautifully illustrated by a large clump of
+coal placed on a fire--Russia, for instance--or of small coal moistened,
+and by the first action of the heat of any government not absolutely
+lawless, formed into a cake, as the northern nations under
+Charlemagne--then a slight impulse from the fall of accident, or the
+hand of patriotic foresight, splits [the one] into many, and makes each
+[fragment] burn with its own flame, till at length all burning equally,
+it becomes again one by universal similar action--then burns low,
+cinerises, and without accession of rude materials goes out.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A MILD WINTER]
+
+Winter slumbering soft, seemed to smile at visions of buds and blooms,
+and dreamt so livelily of spring, that his stern visage had relaxed and
+softened itself into a dim likeness of his dream. The soul of the vision
+breathed through and lay like light upon his face.
+
+But, heavens! what an outrageous day of winter this is and has been!
+Terrible weather for the last two months, but this is horrible! Thunder
+and lightning, floods of rain, and volleys of hail, with such frantic
+winds. December 1806.
+
+[This note was written when S. T. C. was staying with Wordsworth at the
+Hall Farm, Coleorton.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: MOONLIGHT GLEAMS AND MASSY GLORIES]
+
+In the first [entrance to the wood] the spots of moonlight of the
+wildest outlines, not unfrequently approaching so near to the shape of
+man and the domestic animals most attached to him as to be easily
+confused with them by fancy and mistaken by terror, moved and started as
+the wind stirred the branches, so that it almost seemed like a flight of
+recent spirits, sylphs and sylphids dancing and capering in a world of
+shadows. Once, when our path was over-canopied by the meeting boughs, as
+I halloed to those a stone-throw behind me, a sudden flash of light
+dashed down, as it were, upon the path close before me, with such rapid
+and indescribable effect that my life seemed snatched away from me--not
+by terror but by the whole attention being suddenly and unexpectedly
+seized hold of--if one could conceive a violent blow given by an unseen
+hand, yet without pain or local sense of injury, of the weight falling
+here or there, it might assist in conceiving the feeling. This I found
+was occasioned by some very large bird, who, scared by my noise, had
+suddenly flown upward, and by the spring of his feet or body had driven
+down the branch on which he was aperch.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote B: When instead of the general feeling of the lifeblood in its
+equable individual motion, and the consequent wholeness of the one
+feeling of the skin, we feel as if a heap of ants were running over
+us--_the one_ corrupting into _ten thousand_--so in _araneosis_, instead
+of the one view of the air, or blue sky, a thousand specks, etc., dance
+before the eye. The metaphor is as just as, of a metaphor, anyone has a
+right to claim, but it is clumsily expressed.]
+
+[Footnote C: I have the same anxiety for my friend now in England as for
+myself, that is to be, or may be, two months hence.]
+
+[Footnote D: "A prison so constructed that the inspector can see each of
+the prisoners at all times without being seen by them."]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+_September 1806--December 1807_
+
+    Alas! for some abiding-place of love,
+    O'er which my spirit, like the mother dove,
+    Might brood with warming wings!
+
+                                     S. T. C.
+
+
+[Sidenote: DREAMS AND SHADOWS]
+
+I had a confused shadow rather than an image in my recollection, like
+that from a thin cloud, as if the idea were descending, though still in
+some measureless height.
+
+
+As when the taper's white cone of flame is seen double, till the eye
+moving brings them into one space and then they become one--so did the
+idea in my imagination coadunate with your present form soon after I
+first gazed upon you.
+
+
+    And in life's noisiest hour
+    There whispers still the ceaseless love of thee,
+    The heart's self-solace and soliloquy.
+
+
+    You mould my hopes, you fashion me within,
+    And to the leading love-throb in my heart
+    Through all my being, all my pulses beat.
+    You lie in all my many thoughts like light,
+    Like the fair light of dawn, or summer light,
+    On rippling stream, or cloud-reflecting lake--
+    And looking to the Heaven that beams above you,
+    How do I bless the lot that made me love you!
+
+
+[Sidenote: KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING]
+
+In all processes of the understanding the shortest way will be
+discovered the last and this, perhaps, while it constitutes the great
+advantage of having a teacher to put us on the shortest road at the
+first, yet sometimes occasions a difficulty in the comprehension,
+inasmuch as the longest way is more near to the existing state of the
+mind, nearer to what if left to myself, on starting the thought, I
+should have thought next. The shortest way gives me the _knowledge_
+best, but the longest makes me more _knowing_.
+
+
+[Sidenote: PARTISANS AND RENEGADES]
+
+When a party man talks as if he hated his country, saddens at her
+prosperous events, exults in her disasters and yet, all the while, is
+merely hating the opposite party, and would himself feel and talk as a
+patriot were he in a foreign land [_he_ is a party man]. The true
+monster is he (and such alas! there are in these monstrous days,
+"vollendeter Sündhaftigkeit"), who abuses his country when out of his
+country.
+
+
+[Sidenote: POPULACE AND PEOPLE]
+
+Oh the profanation of the sacred word _the People_! Every brutal
+Burdett-led mob, assembled on some drunken St. Monday of faction, is the
+People forsooth, and each leprous ragamuffin, like a circle in geometry,
+is, at once, one and all, and calls its own brutal self, "_us_ the
+People." And who are the friends of the People? Not those who would wish
+to elevate each of them, or, at least, the child who is to take his
+place in the flux of life and death, into something worthy of esteem and
+capable of freedom, but those who flatter and infuriate them, as they
+_are_. A contradiction in the very thought! For if, really, they are
+good and wise, virtuous and well-informed, how weak must be the motives
+of discontent to a truly moral being--but if the contrary, and the
+motives for discontent proportionably strong, how without guilt and
+absurdity appeal to them as judges and arbiters? He alone is entitled to
+a share in the government of all, who has learnt to govern himself.
+There is but one possible ground of a right of freedom--viz., to
+understand and revere its duties.
+
+[_Vide Life of S. T. C._, by James Gillman, 1838, p. 223.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE." May 28, 1807 Bristol]
+
+How villainously these metallic pencils have degenerated, not only in
+the length and quantity, but what is far worse, in the _quality_ of the
+metal! This one appears to have no superiority over the worst sort sold
+by the Maltese shopkeepers.
+
+
+Blue sky through the glimmering interspaces of the dark elms at twilight
+rendered a lovely deep yellow-green--all the rest a delicate blue.
+
+
+The hay-field in the close hard by the farm-house--babe, and totterer
+little more [than a babe]--old cat with her eyes blinking in the sun and
+little kittens leaping and frisking over the hay-lines.
+
+
+What an admirable subject for an Allston would Tycho Brahe be, listening
+with religious awe to the oracular gabble of the idiot, whom he kept at
+his feet, and used to feed with his own hands!
+
+
+The sun-flower ought to be cultivated, the leaves being excellent
+fodder, the flowers eminently melliferous, and the seeds a capital food
+for poultry, none nourishing quicker or occasioning them to lay more
+eggs.
+
+
+Serpentium allapsus timet. Quære--_allapse_ of serpents. _Horace_.--What
+other word have we? Pity that we dare not Saxonise as boldly as our
+forefathers, by unfortunate preference, Latinised. Then we should have
+on-glide, _angleiten_; onlook _anschauen_, etc.
+
+
+I moisten the bread of affliction with the water of adversity.
+
+
+If kings are gods on earth, they are, however, gods of earth.
+
+
+Parisatis poisoned one side of the knife with which he carved, and eat
+of the same joint the next slice unhurt--a happy illustration of
+affected self-inclusion in accusation.
+
+
+It is possible to conceive a planet without any general atmosphere, but
+in which each living body has its peculiar atmosphere. To hear and
+understand, one man joins his atmosphere to that of another, and,
+according to the sympathies of their nature, the aberrations of sound
+will be greater or less, and their thoughts more or less intelligible. A
+pretty allegory might be made of this.
+
+
+Two faces, each of a confused countenance. In the eyes of the one,
+muddiness and lustre were blended; and the eyes of the other were the
+same, but in them there was a red fever that made them appear more
+fierce. And yet, methought, the former struck a greater trouble, a fear
+and distress of the mind; and sometimes all the face looked meek and
+mild, but the eye was ever the same.
+
+[Qu. S. T. C. and De Quincey?]
+
+
+Shadow--its being subsists in shaped and definite nonentity.
+
+
+Plain sense, measure, clearness, dignity, grace over all--these made the
+genius of Greece.
+
+
+Heu! quam miserum ab illo lædi, de quo non possis queri! Eheu! quam
+miserrimum est ab illo lædi, de quo propter amorem non possis queri!
+
+
+Observation from Bacon after reading Mr. Sheridan's speech on Ireland:
+"Things will have their first or second agitation; if they be not tossed
+on the arguments of council, they will be tossed on the waves of
+fortune."
+
+
+The death of an immortal has been beautifully compared to an Indian fig,
+which at its full height declines its branches to the earth, and there
+takes root again.
+
+
+The blast rises and falls, and trembles at its height.
+
+
+A passionate woman may be likened to a wet candle spitting flame.
+
+
+TO LOVE.
+
+It is a duty, nay, it is a religion to that power to shew that, though
+it makes all things--wealth, pleasure, ambition--worthless, yea, noisome
+for themselves; yet for _it_self can it produce all efforts, even if
+only to secure its name from scoffs as the child and parent of
+slothfulness. Works, therefore, of general profit--works of abstruse
+thought [will be born of love]; activity, and, above all, virtue and
+chastity [will come forth from his presence].
+
+
+The moulting peacock, with only two of his long tail-feathers remaining,
+and those sadly in tatters, yet, proudly as ever, spreads out his ruined
+fan in the sun and breeze.
+
+
+Yesterday I saw seven or eight water-wagtails following a feeding horse
+in the pasture, fluttering about and hopping close by his hoofs, under
+his belly, and even so as often to tickle his nostrils with their pert
+tails. The horse shortens the grass and they get the insects.
+
+
+Sic accipite, sic credite, ut mereamini intelligere: fides enim debet
+præcedere intellectum, ut sit intellectus fidei præmium.
+
+_S. August. Sermones De Verb. Dom._
+
+Yet should a friend think foully of that wherein the pride of thy
+spirit's purity is in shrine.
+
+          O the agony! the agony!
+    Nor Time nor varying Fate,
+    Nor tender Memory, old or late,
+    Nor all his Virtues, great though they be,
+    Nor all his Genius can free
+    His friend's soul from the agony!
+
+[So receive, so believe [divine ideas] that ye may earn the right to
+understand them. For faith should go before understanding, in order that
+understanding may be the reward of faith.]
+
+
+[Greek: Hote enthousiasmos epineusin tina theian hechein dokei kai tô
+mantikô genei plêsiazein.] _Strabo Geographicus._
+
+Though Genius, like the fire on the altar, can only be kindled from
+heaven, yet it will perish unless supplied with appropriate fuel to feed
+it; or if it meet not with the virtues whose society alone can reconcile
+it to earth, it will return whence it came, or, at least, lie hid as
+beneath embers, till some sudden and awakening gust of regenerating
+Grace, [Greek: anazôpyrei], rekindles and reveals it anew.
+
+[Now the inspiration of genius seems to bear the stamp of Divine assent,
+and to attain to something of prophetic strain.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: FALLINGS FROM US, VANISHINGS]
+
+I trust you are very happy in your domestic being--very; because, alas!
+I know that to a man of sensibility and more emphatically if he be a
+literary man, there is _no_ medium between that and "the secret pang
+that eats away the heart." ... Hence, even in dreams of sleep, the soul
+never _is_, because it either cannot or dare not be any _one_ thing, but
+lives in _approaches_ touched by the outgoing pre-existent ghosts of
+many feelings. It feels for ever as a blind man with his protruded staff
+dimly through the medium of the instrument by which it pushes off, and
+in the act of repulsion--(O for the eloquence of Shakspere, who alone
+could feel and yet know how to embody those conceptions with as curious
+a felicity as the thoughts are subtle!)--as if the finger which I saw
+with eyes, had, as it were, another finger, invisible, touching me with
+a ghostly touch, even while I feared the real touch from it. What if, in
+certain cases, touch acted by itself, co-present with vision, yet not
+coalescing? Then I should see the finger as at a distance, and yet feel
+a finger touching which was nothing but it, and yet was not it. The two
+senses cannot co-exist without a sense of causation. The _touch_ must be
+the effect of that finger [which] I see, and yet it is not yet near to
+me, and therefore it is not it, and yet it is it. Why it is is in an
+imaginary pre-duplication!
+
+_N.B._--There is a passage in the second part of Wallenstein expressing,
+not explaining, the same feeling. "The spirits of great events stride on
+before the events"--it is in one of the last two or three scenes:--
+
+                                  "As the sun,
+    Ere it is risen, sometimes paints its image
+    In the atmosphere, so often do the spirits
+    Of great events, stride on before the events."
+
+    [WALLENSTEIN, Part II., act v. sc. 1. _P. W._,
+    1893, p. 351.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CLERICAL ERRORS]
+
+It is worth noting and endeavouring to detect the Law of the Mind, by
+which, in writing earnestly while we are thinking, we omit words
+necessary to the sense. It will be found, I guess, that we seldom omit
+the material word, but generally the word by which the mind expresses
+its modification of the _verbum materiale_. Thus, in the preceding page,
+7th line, _medium_ is the _materiale_: that was its own brute, inert
+sense--but the _no_ is the mind's action, its _use_ of the word.
+
+I think this a hint of some value. Thus, _the_ is a word in constant
+combination with the passive or material words; but _to_ is an act of
+the mind, and I had written _the_ detect instead of _to_ detect. Again,
+when my sense demanded "the" to express a distinct modification of some
+_verbum materiale_, I remember to have often omitted it in writing. The
+principle is evident--the mind borrows the _materia_ from without, and
+is passive with regard to it as the mere subject "stoff"--a simple event
+of memory takes place; but having the other in itself, the inward Having
+with its sense of security passes for the outward Having--or is all
+memory an anxious act, and thereby suspended by vivid security? or are
+both reasons the same? or if not, are they consistent, and capable of
+being co-or sub-ordinated? It will be lucky if some day, after having
+written on for two or three sheets rapidly and as a first copy, without
+correcting, I should by chance glance on this note, not having thought
+at all about it during or before the time of writing; and then to
+examine every word omitted.
+
+
+[Sidenote: BIBLIOLOGICAL MEMORANDA]
+
+To spend half-an-hour in Cuthill's shop, examining Stephen's
+_Thesaurus_, in order to form an accurate idea of its utilities above
+Scapula, and to examine the _Budæo-Tusan-Constantine_, whether it be the
+same or as good as Constantine, and the comparative merits of
+Constantine with Scapula.
+
+3. To examine Bosc relatively to Brunck, and to see after the new German
+_Anthologia_.
+
+4. Before I quit town, to buy Appendix (either No. 1430 or 1431), 8_s._
+or 18_s._ What a difference! ten shillings, because the latter, the
+Parma Anacreon, is on large paper, green morocco; the former is neat in
+red morocco, but the type the same.
+
+5. To have a long morning's ramble with De Quincey, first to Egerton's,
+and then to the book haunts.
+
+6. To see if I can find that Arrian with Epictetus which I admired so
+much at Mr. Leckie's.
+
+7. To find out D'Orville's _Daphnis_, and the price. Is there no other
+edition? no cheap German?
+
+8. To write out the passage from Strada's _Prolusions_ at Cuthill's.
+
+9. Aristotle's Works, and to hunt for Proclus.
+
+10. In case of my speedy death, it would answer to buy a £100 worth of
+carefully-chosen books, in order to attract attention to my library and
+to give accession to the value of books by their co-existing with
+co-appurtenants--as, for instance, Plato, Aristotle; Plotinus, Porphyry,
+Proclus: Schoolmen, Interscholastic; Bacon, Hobbes; Locke, Berkeley;
+Leibnitz, Spinoza; Kant and the critical Fichte, and Wissenschaftslehre,
+Schelling, &c.
+
+[The first edition of Robert Constantin's _Lexicon Græco-Lat._ was
+published at Geneva in 1564. A second ed. _post correctiones_ G. Budæi
+et J. Tusani, at Basle, in 1584.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: [Greek: panta rhei]]
+
+Our mortal existence, what is it but a stoppage in the blood of life, a
+brief eddy from wind or concourse of currents in the ever-flowing ocean
+of pure Activity, who beholds pyramids, yea, Alps and Andes, giant
+pyramids, the work of fire that raiseth monuments, like a generous
+victor o'er its own conquest, the tombstones of a world destroyed! Yet
+these, too, float adown the sea of Time, and melt away as mountains of
+floating ice.
+
+
+
+[Sidenote: DISTINCTION IN UNION]
+
+Has every finite being (or only some) the temptation to become intensely
+and wholly conscious of its distinctness and, as a result, to be
+betrayed into the wretchedness of _division_? Grosser natures, wholly
+swallowed up in selfishness which does not rise to self-love, never even
+acquire that sense of distinctness, while, to others, love is the first
+step to re-union. It is a by-word that religious enthusiasm borders on
+and tends to sensuality--possibly because all our powers work together,
+and as a consequence of striding too vastly up the ladder of existence,
+a great _round_ of the ladder is omitted, namely, love to some, _Eine
+verschiedene_, of our own kind. Then let Religion love, else will it not
+only partake of, instead of being partaken by, and so co-adunated with,
+the summit of love, but will necessarily include the nadir of love,
+that is, appetite. Hence will it tend to dissensualise its nature into
+fantastic passions, the idolatry of Paphian priestesses.
+
+
+[Sidenote: IN WONDER ALL PHILOSOPHY BEGAN]
+
+Time, space, duration, action, active passion passive, activeness,
+passiveness, reaction, causation, affinity--here assemble all the
+mysteries known. All is known-unknown, say, rather, _merely_ known. All
+is unintelligible, and yet Locke and the stupid adorers of that _fetish_
+earth-clod take all for granted. By the bye, in poetry as well as
+metaphysics, that which we first meet with in the dawn of our mind
+becomes ever after _fetish_, to the many at least. Blessed he who first
+sees the morning star, if not the sun, or purpling clouds his
+harbingers. Thence is _fame_ desirable to a great man, and thence
+subversion of vulgar fetishes becomes a duty.
+
+Rest, motion! O ye strange locks of intricate simplicity, who shall find
+the key? He shall throw wide open the portals of the palace of sensuous
+or symbolical truth, and the Holy of Holies will be found in the adyta.
+Rest = enjoyment and death. Motion = enjoyment and life. O the depth of the
+proverb, "Extremes meet"!
+
+
+[Sidenote: IN A TWINKLING OF THE EYE]
+
+The "break of the morning"--and from inaction a nation starts up into
+motion and wide fellow-consciousness! The trumpet of the Archangel--and
+a world with all its troops and companies of generations starts up into
+a hundredfold expansion, power multiplied into itself cubically by the
+number of all its possible acts--all the potential springing into power.
+Conceive a bliss from self-conscience, combining with bliss from
+increase of action; the first dreaming, the latter dead-asleep in a
+grain of gunpowder--conceive a huge magazine of gunpowder and a flash of
+lightning awakes the whole at once. What an image of the resurrection,
+grand from its very inadequacy. Yet again, conceive the living, moving
+ocean--its bed sinks away from under and the whole world of waters falls
+in at once on a thousand times vaster mass of intensest fire, and the
+whole prior orbit of the planet's successive revolutions is possessed by
+it at once (_Potentia fit actus_) amid the thunder of rapture.
+
+
+[Sidenote: SINE QUÂ NON]
+
+Form is factitious being, and thinking is the process; imagination the
+laboratory in which the thought elaborates essence into existence. A
+philosopher, that is, a nominal philosopher without imagination, is a
+_coiner_. Vanity, the _froth_ of the molten mass, is his _stuff_, and
+verbiage the stamp and impression. This is but a deaf metaphor--better
+say that he is guilty of forgery. He presents the same sort of _paper_
+as the honest barterer, but when you carry it to the bank it is found to
+be drawn to _Outis_, _Esq._ His words had deposited no forms there,
+payable at sight--or even at any imaginable _time_ from the date of the
+draft.
+
+
+[Sidenote: SOLVITUR SUSPICIENDO]
+
+The sky, or rather say, the æther at Malta, with the sun apparently
+suspended in it, the eye seeming to pierce beyond and, as it were,
+behind it--and, below, the æthereal sea, so blue, so _ein zerflossenes_,
+the substantial image, and fixed real reflection of the sky! O! I could
+annihilate in a deep moment all possibility of the needle-point,
+pin's-head system of the _atomists_ by one submissive gaze!
+
+
+[Sidenote: A GEM OF MORNING]
+
+A dewdrop, the pearl of Aurora, is indeed a true _unio_. I would that
+_unio_ were the word for the dewdrop, and the pearl be called _unio
+marinus_.
+
+
+_VER_, _ZER_, AND _AL_
+
+O for the power to persuade all the writers of Great Britain to adopt
+the _ver_, _zer_, and _al_ of the German! Why not verboil, zerboil;
+verrend, zerrend? I should like the very words _verflossen_,
+_zerflossen_, to be naturalised:
+
+    And as I looked now feels my soul creative throes,
+    And now all joy, all sense _zerflows_.
+
+I do not know, whether I am in earnest or in sport while I recommend
+this _ver_ and _zer_; that is, I cannot be sure whether I feel, myself,
+anything ridiculous in the idea, or whether the feeling that seems to
+imply this be not the effect of my anticipation of and sympathy with the
+ridicule of, perhaps, all my readers.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE LOVER'S HUMILITY]
+
+To you there are many like me, yet to me there is none like you, and you
+are always like yourself. There are groves of night-flowers, yet the
+night-flower sees only the moon.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+_1808-1809_
+
+                     Yea, oft alone,
+    Piercing the long-neglected holy cave
+    The haunt obscure of old Philosophy,
+    He bade with lifted torch its starry walls
+    Sparkle, as erst they sparkled to the flame
+    Of odorous lamps tended by Saint and Sage.
+
+                                         S. T. C.
+
+
+[Sidenote: INOPEM ME COPIA FECIT]
+
+If one thought leads to another, so often does it blot out another. This
+I find when having lain musing on my sofa, a number of interesting
+thoughts having suggested themselves, I conquer my bodily indolence, and
+rise to record them in these books, alas! my only confidants. The first
+thought leads me on indeed to new ones; but nothing but the faint memory
+of having had these remains of the other, which had been even more
+interesting to me. I do not know whether this be an idiosyncrasy, a
+peculiar disease, of _my_ particular memory--but so it is with _me_--my
+thoughts crowd each other to death.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A NEUTRAL PRONOUN]
+
+Quære--whether we may not, _nay_ ought not, to use a neutral pronoun
+relative, or representative, to the word "Person," where it hath been
+used in the sense of _homo_, _mensch_, or noun of the common gender, in
+order to avoid particularising man or woman, or in order to express
+either sex indifferently? If this be incorrect in syntax, the whole use
+of the word Person is lost in a number of instances, or only retained by
+some stiff and strange position of words, as--"not letting the _person_
+be aware, _wherein offence has been given_"--instead of--"wherein he or
+she has offended." In my [judgment] both the specific intention and
+general _etymon_ of "Person" in such sentences, fully authorise the use
+of _it_ and _which_ instead of he, she, him, her, who, whom.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE HUMBLE COMPLAINT OF THE LOVER]
+
+If love be the genial sun of human nature, unkindly has he divided his
+rays [in acting] on me and my beloved! On her hath he poured all his
+light and splendour, and my being doth he permeate with his invisible
+rays of heat alone. She shines and is cold like the tropic fire-fly--I,
+dark and uncomely, would better resemble the cricket in hot ashes. My
+soul, at least, might be considered as a cricket eradiating the heat
+which gradually cinerising the heart produces the embers and ashes from
+among which it chirps out of its hiding-place.
+
+N.B.--This put in simple and elegant verse, [would pass] as an imitation
+of Marini, and of too large a part of the madrigals of Guarini himself.
+
+
+[Sidenote: TRUTH]
+
+Truth _per se_ is like unto quicksilver, bright, agile, harmless.
+Swallow a pound and it will run through unaltered and only, perhaps, by
+its weight force down impurities from out the system. But mix and
+comminute it by the mineral acid of spite and bigotry, and even truth
+becomes a deadly poison--medicinal only when some other, yet deadlier,
+lurks in the bones.
+
+
+[Sidenote: LOVE THE INEFFABLE]
+
+O! many, many are the seeings, hearings, of pure love that have a being
+of their own, and to call them by the names of things unsouled and
+debased below even their own lowest nature by associations accidental,
+and of vicious accidents, is _blasphemy_. What seest thou yonder? The
+lovely countenance of a lovely maiden, fervid yet awe-suffering with
+devotion--her face resigned to bliss or bale; or a _bit_ of _flesh_; or,
+rather, that which cannot be seen unless by him whose very seeing is
+more than an act of mere sight--that which refuses all words, because
+words being, perforce, generalities do not awake, but really involve
+associations of other words as well as other thoughts--but that which I
+see, must be felt, be possessed, in and by its sole self! What! shall
+the _statuary_ Pygmalion of necessity feel this for every part of the
+insensate marble, and shall the lover Pygmalion in contemplating the
+living statue, the heart-adored maiden, breathing forth in every look,
+every movement, the genial life imbreathed of God, grovel in the mire
+and grunt the language of the swinish slaves of the Circe, of vulgar
+generality and still more vulgar association? The Polyclete that created
+the Aphrodite [Greek: kallipygos], thought in acts, not words--energy
+divinely languageless--[Greek: dia ton Logon, ou syn epesi], through
+_the_ Word, not with _words_. And what though it met with Imp-fathers
+and Imp-mothers and Fiendsips at its christening in its parents'
+absence!
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE MANUFACTURE OF PROPHESY]
+
+One of the causes of superstition, and also of enthusiasm, and, indeed,
+of all errors in matters of fact, is the great power with which the
+effect acts upon and modifies the remembrance of its cause, at times
+even transforming it in the mind. Let _A_ have said a few words to _B_,
+which (by some change and accommodation of them to the event in the mind
+of _B_) have been remarkably fulfilled; and let _B_ remind _A_ of these
+words which he (_A_) had spoken, _A_ will instantly forget all his mood,
+motive, and meaning, at the time of speaking them, nay, remember words
+he had never spoken, and throw back upon them, from the immediate event,
+an imagined fulfillment, a prophetic grandeur--himself, in his own
+faith, a seer of no small inspiration. We yet want the growth of a
+prophet and self-deceived wonder-worker _step by step_, through all the
+stages; and, yet, what ample materials exist for a true and nobly-minded
+psychologist! For, in order to make fit use of these materials, he must
+love and honour as well as understand human nature--rather, he must love
+in order to understand it.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE CAPTIVE BIRD May 16th, 1808]
+
+O that sweet bird! where is it? It is encaged somewhere out of sight;
+but from my bedroom at the _Courier_ office, from the windows of which I
+look out on the walls of the Lyceum, I hear it at early dawn, often,
+alas! lulling me to late sleep--again when I awake and all day long. It
+is in prison, all its instincts ungratified, yet it feels the influence
+of spring, and calls with unceasing melody to the Loves that dwell in
+field and greenwood bowers, unconscious, perhaps, that it calls in vain.
+O are they the songs of a happy, enduring day-dream? Has the bird hope?
+or does it abandon itself to the joy of its frame, a living harp of
+Eolus? O that I could do so!
+
+
+Assuredly a thrush or blackbird encaged in London is a far less shocking
+spectacle, its encagement a more venial defect of just feeling, than
+(which yet one so often sees) a bird in a gay cage in the heart of the
+country--yea, as if at once to mock both the poor prisoner and its kind
+mother, Nature--in a cage hung up in a tree, where the free birds after
+a while, when the gaudy dungeon is no longer a scare, crowd to it, perch
+on the wires, drink the water, and peck up the seeds. But of all birds I
+most detest to see the nightingale encaged, and the swallow, and the
+cuckoo. Motiveless! monstrous! But the robin! O woes' woe! woe!--he,
+sweet cock-my-head-and-eye, pert-bashful darling, that makes our kitchen
+its chosen cage.
+
+
+[Sidenote: ARCHITECTURE AND CLIMATE]
+
+If we take into consideration the effect of the climates of the North,
+_Gothic_, in contra-distinction to Greek and Græco-Roman architecture,
+is rightly so named. Take, for instance, a rainy, windy day, or sleet,
+or a fall of snow, or an icicle-hanging frost, and then compare the
+total effect of the South European roundnesses and smooth perpendicular
+surface with the ever-varying angles and meeting-lines of the
+North-European or Gothic styles.
+
+[The above is probably a dropped sentence from the report of the First
+or Second Lecture of the 1818 series. See _Coleridge's Works_ (Harper
+and Brothers, 1853), iv. 232-239.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: NEITHER BOND NOR FREE]
+
+The demagogues address the lower orders as if they were negroes--as if
+each individual were an inseparable part of the order, always to remain,
+_nolens volens_, poor and ignorant. How different from Christianity,
+which for ever calls on us to detach ourselves spiritually not merely
+from our rank, but even from our body, and from the whole world of
+sense!
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE MAIDEN'S PRIMER]
+
+The one mighty main defect of female education is that everything is
+taught but reason and the means of retaining affection. This--this--O!
+it is worth all the rest told ten thousand times:--how to greet a
+husband, how to receive him, how never to recriminate--in short, the
+power of pleasurable thoughts and feelings, and the mischief of giving
+pain, or (as often happens when a husband comes home from a party of old
+friends, joyous and full of heart) the love-killing effect of cold, dry,
+uninterested looks and manners.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE HALFWAY HOUSE Wednesday night, May 18th, 1808]
+
+Let me record the following important remark of Stuart, with whom I
+never converse but to receive some distinct and rememberable improvement
+(and if it be not remembered, it is the defect of my memory--which,
+alas! grows weaker daily--or a fault from my indolence in not noting it
+down, as I do this)--that there is a period in a man's life, varying in
+various men, from thirty-five to forty-five, and operating most strongly
+in bachelors, widowers, or those worst and miserablest widowers, unhappy
+husbands, in which a man finds himself at the _top of the hill_, and
+having attained, perhaps, what he wishes, begins to ask himself, What is
+all this for?--begins to feel the vanity of his pursuits, becomes
+half-melancholy, gives in to wild dissipation or self-regardless
+drinking; and some, not content with these (not _slow_) poisons, destroy
+themselves, and leave their ingenious female or female-minded friends to
+fish out some _motive_ for an act which proceeded from a _motive-making_
+impulse, which would have acted even without a motive (even as the
+terror[E] in nightmare is a bodily sensation, and though it most often
+calls up consonant images, yet, as I know by experience, can take
+effect equally without any); or, if not so, yet like gunpowder in a
+smithy, though it will not go off without a spark, is _sure_ to receive
+one, if not this hour, yet the next. I had _felt_ this truth, but never
+saw it before clearly: it came upon me at Malta under the melancholy,
+dreadful feeling of finding myself to be _man_, by a distinct division
+from boyhood, youth, and "young man." Dreadful was the feeling--till
+then life had flown so that I had always been a boy, as it were; and
+this sensation had blended in all my conduct, my willing acknowledgment
+of superiority, and, in truth, my meeting every person as a superior at
+the first moment. Yet if men survive this period, they commonly become
+cheerful again. That is a comfort for mankind, _not for me_!
+
+
+[Sidenote: HIS OWN GENIUS]
+
+My inner mind does not justify the thought that I possess a genius, my
+_strength_ is so very small in proportion to my power. I believe that I
+first, from internal feeling, made or gave light and impulse to this
+important distinction between strength and power, the oak and the tropic
+annual, or biennial, which grows nearly as high and spreads as large as
+the oak, but in which the _wood_, the _heart_ is wanting--the vital
+works vehemently, but the immortal is not with it. And yet, I think, I
+must have some analogue of genius; because, among other things, when I
+am in company with Mr. Sharp, Sir J. Mackintosh, R. and Sydney Smith,
+Mr. Scarlett, &c. &c., I feel like a child, nay, rather like an
+inhabitant of another planet. Their very faces all act upon me,
+sometimes, as if they were ghosts, but more often as if I were a ghost
+among them--at all times as if we were not consubstantial.
+
+
+[Sidenote: NAME IT AND YOU BREAK IT]
+
+"The class that ought to be kept separate from all others"--and this
+said by one of themselves! O what a confession that it is no longer
+separated! Who would have said this even fifty years ago? It is the
+howling of ice during a thaw. When there is any just reason for saying
+this, it ought not to be said, it is already too late. And though it may
+receive the assent of the people of "the squares and places," yet what
+does that do, if it be the ridicule of all other classes?
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE DANGER OF OVER-BLAMING]
+
+The general experience, or rather supposed experience, prevails over the
+particular knowledge. So many causes oppose man to man, that he _begins_
+by thinking of other men worse than they deserve, and receives his
+punishment by at last thinking worse of himself than the truth is.
+
+
+[Sidenote: EXCESS OF SELF-ESTEEM]
+
+Expressions of honest self-esteem, in which _self_ was only a diagram of
+the _genus_, will excite sympathy at the minute, and yet, even among
+persons who love and esteem you, be remembered and quoted as ludicrous
+instances of strange self-involution.
+
+
+[Sidenote: DEFECT OF SELF-ESTEEM. May 23, 1808]
+
+Those who think lowliest of themselves, perhaps with a _feeling_
+stronger than rational comparison would justify, are apt to feel and
+express undue asperity for the faults and defects of those whom they
+habitually have looked up to as to their superiors. For placing
+themselves very low, perhaps too low, wherever a series of experiences,
+struggled against for a while, have at length convinced the mind that in
+such and such a moral habit the long-idolised superior is far below even
+itself, the grief and anger will be in proportion. "If even _I_ could
+never have done this, O anguish, that _he_, so much my superior, should
+do it! If even _I_ with all my infirmities have not this defect, this
+selfishness, that _he_ should have it!" This is the course of thought.
+Men are bad enough; and yet they often think themselves worse than they
+are, among other causes by a reaction from their own uncharitable
+thoughts. The poisoned chalice is brought back to our own lips.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A PRACTICAL MAN]
+
+He was grown, and solid from his infancy, like that most _useful_ of
+domesticated animals, that never runs but with some prudent motive to
+the mast or the wash-tub and, at no time a slave to the present moment,
+never even grunts over the acorns before him without a scheming squint
+and the segment, at least, of its wise little eye cast toward those on
+one side, which his neighbour is or may be about to enjoy.
+
+
+[Sidenote: LUCUS A NON LUCENDO]
+
+Quære, whether the high and mighty Edinburghers, &c., have not been
+elevated into guardians and overseers of taste and poetry for much the
+same reason as St. Cecilia was chosen as the guardian goddess of music,
+because, forsooth, so far from being able to compose or play herself,
+she could never endure any other instrument than the jew's-harp or
+Scotch bag-pipe? No! too eager recensent! you are mistaken, there is no
+anachronism in this. We are informed by various antique bas-reliefs that
+the bag-pipe was well known to the Romans, and probably, therefore, that
+the Picts and Scots were even then fond of seeking their fortune in
+other countries.
+
+
+[Sidenote: LOVE AND MUSIC]
+
+"Love is the spirit of life and music the life of the spirit."
+
+Q. What is music? A. Poetry in its grand sense! Passion and order at
+once! Imperative power in obedience!
+
+Q. What is the first and divinest strain of music? A.--In the
+intellect--"Be able to will that thy maxims (rules of individual
+conduct) should be the law of all intelligent being!"
+
+In the heart, or practical reason, "Do unto others as thou wouldst be
+done by." This in the widest extent involves the test, "Love thy
+neighbour as thyself, and God above all things." For, conceive thy being
+to be all-including, that is, God--thou knowest that _thou_ wouldest
+command thyself to be beloved above all things.
+
+[For the motto at the head of this note see the lines "Ad Vilmum
+Axiologum." _P. W._, 1893, p. 138.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: CONSCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY]
+
+From what reasons do I believe in _continuous_ and ever-continuable
+consciousness? From conscience! Not for myself, but for my conscience,
+that is, my affections and duties towards others, I should have no
+self--for self is definition, but all boundary implies neighbourhood and
+is knowable only by neighbourhood or relations. Does the understanding
+say nothing in favour of immortality? It says nothing for or against;
+but its silence gives consent, and is better than a thousand arguments
+such as mere understanding could afford. But miracles! "Do you speak of
+them as proofs or as natural consequences of revelation, whose presence
+is proof only by precluding the disproof that would arise from their
+absence?" "Nay, I speak of them as of positive fundamental proofs."
+Then I dare answer you "Miracles in that sense are blasphemies in
+morality, contradictions in reason. God the Truth, the actuality of
+logic, the very _logos_--He deceive his creatures and demonstrate the
+properties of a triangle by the confusion of all properties! If a
+miracle merely means an event before inexperienced, it proves only
+itself, and the inexperience of mankind. Whatever other definition be
+given of it, or rather attempted (for no other not involving direct
+contradiction can be given), it is blasphemy. It calls darkness light,
+and makes Ignorance the mother of Malignity, the appointed nurse of
+religion--which is knowledge as opposed to mere calculating and
+conjectural understanding. Seven years ago, but oh! in what happier
+times--I wrote thus--
+
+    O ye hopes! that stir within me!
+      Health comes with you from above!
+    God is _with_ me! God is _in_ me!
+      I _cannot_ die: for life is love!
+
+And now, that I am alone and utterly hopeless for myself, yet still I
+love--and more strongly than ever feel that conscience or the duty of
+love is the proof of continuing, as it is the cause and condition of
+existing consciousness. How beautiful the harmony! Whence could the
+proof come, so appropriately, so conformly with all nature, in which the
+cause and condition of each thing is its revealing and infallible
+prophecy!
+
+And for what reason, say, rather, for what cause, do you believe
+immortality? Because I _ought_, therefore I _must_!
+
+[The lines "On revisiting the sea-shore," of which the last stanza is
+quoted, were written in August, 1801. [_P.W._, 1893, p. 159.] If the
+note was written exactly seven years after the date of that poem, it
+must belong to the summer of 1808, when Coleridge was living over the
+_Courier_ office in the Strand.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE CAP OF LIBERTY]
+
+Truly, I hope not irreverently, may we apply to the French nation the
+Scripture text, "From him that hath nothing shall be taken that which he
+hath"--that is, their pretences to being free, which are the same as
+nothing. They, the illuminators, the discoverers and sole possessors of
+the true philosopher's stone! Alas! it proved both for them and Europe
+the _Lapis Infernalis_.
+
+
+[Sidenote: VAIN GLORY]
+
+Lord of light and fire? What is the universal of man in all, but
+especially in savage states? Fantastic ornament and, in general, the
+most frightful deformities--slits in the ears and nose, for instance.
+What is the solution? Man will not be a mere thing of nature: he will
+be and shew himself a power of himself. Hence these violent disruptions
+of himself from all other creatures! What they are made, that they
+remain--they are Nature's, and wholly Nature's.
+
+
+[Sidenote: CHILDREN OF A LARGER GROWTH]
+
+Try to contemplate mankind as children. These we love tenderly, because
+they are beautiful and happy; we know that a sweet-meat or a top will
+transfer their little love for a moment, and that we shall be repelled
+with a grimace. Yet we are not offended.
+
+
+[Sidenote: CHYMICAL ANALOGIES]
+
+I am persuaded that the chymical technology, as far as it was borrowed
+from life and intelligence, half-metaphorically, half-mystically, may be
+brought back again (as when a man borrows of another a sum which the
+latter had previously borrowed of him, because he is too polite to
+remind him of a debt) to the use of psychology in many instances, and,
+above all, [may be re-adapted to] the philosophy of language, which
+ought to be experimentative and analytic of the elements of
+meaning--their double, triple, and quadruple combinations, of simple
+aggregation or of composition by balance of opposition.
+
+Thus innocence is distinguished from virtue, and _vice versâ_. In both
+of them there is a positive, but in each opposite. A decomposition must
+take place in the first instance, and then a new composition, in order
+for innocence to become virtue. It loses a positive, and then the base
+attracts another different positive, by the higher affinity of the same
+base under a different temperature for the latter.
+
+I stated the legal use of the innocent as opposed to mere _not guilty_
+(he was not only acquitted, but was proved innocent), only to shew the
+existence of a _positive_ in the former--by no means as confounding this
+use of the word with the moral pleasurable feeling connected with it
+when used of little children, maidens, and those who in mature age
+preserve this sweet fragrance of vernal life, this mother's gift and
+so-seldom-kept keepsake to her child, as she sends him forth into the
+world. The distinction is obvious. Law agnizes actions alone, and
+character only as presumptive or illustrative of particular action as to
+its guilt or non-guilt, or to the commission or non-commission. But our
+moral feelings are never pleasurably excited except as they refer to a
+state of being--and the most glorious actions do not delight us as
+separate acts, or, rather, facts, but as representatives of the being of
+the agent--mental stenographs which bring an indeterminate extension
+within the field of easy and simultaneous vision, diffused being
+rendered visible by condensation. Only for the hero's sake do we exult
+in the heroic act, or, rather, the act abstracted from the hero would no
+longer appear to us heroic. Not, therefore, solely from the advantage of
+poets and historians do the deeds of ancient Greece and Rome strike us
+into admiration, while we relate the very same deeds of barbarians as
+matters of curiosity, but because in the former we refer the deed to the
+individual exaltation of the agent, in the latter only to the physical
+result of a given state of society. Compare the [heroism of that] Swiss
+patriot, with his bundle of spears turned towards his breast, in order
+to break the Austrian pikemen, and that of the Mameluke, related to me
+by Sir Alexander Ball, who, when his horse refused to plunge in on the
+French line, turned round and _backed_ it on them, with a certainty of
+death, in order to effect the same purpose. In the former, the state of
+mind arose from reason, morals, liberty, the sense of the duty owing to
+the independence of his country, and its continuing in a state
+compatible with the highest perfection and development; while the latter
+was predicative only of mere animal habit, ferocity, and unreasoned
+antipathy to strangers of a different dress and religion.
+
+
+[Sidenote: BOOKS IN THE AIR]
+
+If, contrary to my expectations--alas! almost, I fear, to my wishes--I
+should live, it is my intention to make a catalogue of the Greek and
+Latin Classics, and of those who, like the author of the _Argenis_
+[William Barclay, 1546-1605], and Euphormio, Fracastorius, Flaminius,
+etc., deserve that name though moderns--and every year to apply all my
+book-money to the gradual completion of the collection, and buy no other
+books except German, if the continent should be opened again, except
+Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Jonson. The two last I have, I
+believe, but imperfect--indeed, B. and F. worthless, the best plays
+omitted. It would be a pleasing employment, had I health, to translate
+the Hymns of Homer, with a disquisitional attempt to settle the question
+concerning the _personality_ of Homer. Such a thing in two volumes,
+_well done_, by philosophical notes on the mythology of the Greeks,
+distinguishing the sacerdotal from the poetical, and both from the
+philosophical or allegorical, fairly grown into two octavos, might go a
+good way, if not all the way, to the Bipontine Latin and Greek Classics.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A TURTLE-SHELL FOR HOUSE-HOLD TUB]
+
+I almost fear that the alteration would excite surprise and uneasy
+contempt in Verbidigno's mind (towards one less loved, at least); but
+had I written the sweet tale of the "Blind Highland Boy," I would have
+substituted for the washing-tub, and the awkward stanza in which it is
+specified, the images suggested in the following lines from Dampier's
+Travels, vol. i. pp. 105-6:--"I heard of a monstrous green turtle once
+taken at the Port Royal, in the Bay of Campeachy, that was four feet
+deep from the back to the belly, and the belly six feet broad. Captain
+Rock's son, of about nine or ten years of age, went in it as in a boat,
+on board his father's ship, about a quarter of a mile from the shore."
+And a few lines before--"The green turtle are so called because their
+shell is greener than any other. It is very thin and clear, and better
+clouded than the Hawksbill, but 'tis used only for _inlays_, being
+_extraordinary_ thin." Why might not some mariners have left this shell
+on the shore of Loch Leven for a while, about to have transported it
+inland for a curiosity, and the blind boy have found it? Would not the
+incident be in equal keeping with that of the child, as well as the
+image and tone of romantic uncommonness?
+
+["In deference to the opinion of a friend," this substitution took
+place. A promise made to Sara Coleridge to re-instate the washing-tub
+was, alas! never fulfilled. See _Poetical Works_ of W. Wordsworth, 1859,
+pp. 197, and 200 _footnote_.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE TENDER MERCIES OF THE GOOD]
+
+Tremendous as a Mexican god is a strong sense of duty--separate from an
+enlarged and discriminating mind, and gigantic ally disproportionate to
+the size of the understanding; and, if combined with obstinacy of
+self-opinion and indocility, it is the parent of tyranny, a promoter of
+inquisitorial persecution in public life, and of inconceivable misery in
+private families. Nay, the very virtue of the person, and the
+consciousness that _it_ is sacrificing its own happiness, increases the
+obduracy, and selects those whom it best loves for its objects. _Eoque
+immitior quia ipse tolerat_ (not _toleraverat_) is its inspiration and
+watchword.
+
+
+[Sidenote: HINTS FOR "THE FRIEND"]
+
+A nation of reformers looks like a scourer of silver-plate--black all
+over and dingy, with making things white and brilliant.
+
+
+A joint combination of authors leagued together to declaim for or
+against liberty may be compared to Buffon's collection of smooth mirrors
+in a vast fan arranged to form one focus. May there not be gunpowder as
+well as corn set before it, and the latter will not thrive, but become
+cinders?
+
+
+A good conscience and hope combined are like fine weather that
+reconciles travel with delight.
+
+
+Great exploits and the thirst of honour which they inspire, enlarge
+states by enlarging hearts.
+
+
+The rejection of the love of glory without the admission of Christianity
+is, truly, human darkness lacking human light.
+
+
+Heaven preserve me from the modern epidemic of a proud ignorance!
+
+
+Hypocrisy, the deadly crime which, like Judas, kisses Hell at the lips
+of Redemption.
+
+
+Is't then a mystery so great, what God and the man, and the world is?
+No, but we hate to hear! Hence a mystery it remains.
+
+
+The massy misery so prettily hidden with the gold and silver
+leaf--_bracteata felicitas_.
+
+
+[Sidenote: CONCERNING BELLS]
+
+If I have leisure, I may, perhaps, write a wild rhyme on the _Bell_,
+from the mine to the belfry, and take for my motto and Chapter of
+Contents, the two distichs, but especially the latter--
+
+    Laudo Deum verum, plebem voco, congrego clerum:
+    Defunctos ploro, pestem fugo, festa decoro.
+    Funera plango, fulgura frango, sabbata pango:
+    Excito lentos, dissipo ventos, paco cruentos.
+
+
+The waggon-horse _celsâ cervice eminens clarumque jactans
+tintinnabulum_. Item, the cattle on the river, and valley of dark pines
+and firs in the Hartz.
+
+
+The army of Clotharius besieging Sens were frightened away by the bells
+of St. Stephen's, rung by the contrivance of Lupus, Bishop of Orleans.
+
+
+For ringing the largest bell, as a Passing-bell, a high price was wont
+to be paid, because being heard afar it both kept the evil spirits at a
+greater distance, and gave the chance of the greater number of prayers
+_pro mortuo_, from the pious who heard it.
+
+
+Names of saints were given to bells that it might appear the voice of
+the Saint himself calling to prayer. Man will humanise all things.
+
+[It is strange that Coleridge should make no mention of Schiller's "Song
+of the Bell," of which he must, at any rate, have heard the title.
+Possibly the idea remained though its source was forgotten. The Latin
+distichs were introduced by Longfellow in his "Golden Legend."
+
+Of the cow-bells in the Hartz he gives the following account in an
+unpublished letter to his wife. April-May, 1799. "But low down in the
+valley and in little companies on each bank of the river a multitude of
+green conical fir-trees, with herds of cattle wandering about almost
+every one with a cylindrical bell around its neck, of no inconsiderable
+size. And as they moved, scattered over the narrow vale, and up among
+the trees of the hill, the noise was like that of a great city in the
+stillness of the Sabbath morning, where all the steeples, all at once
+are ringing for Church. The whole was a melancholy scene and quite new
+to me."]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote E:
+
+    [O heaven, 'twas frightful! now run down and stared at
+    By shapes more ugly than can be remembered--
+    Now seeing nothing and imagining nothing,
+    But only being afraid--stifled with Fear!
+    And every goodly, each familiar form
+    Had a strange somewhat that breathed terrors on me!
+
+(_From my MS. tragedy_ [S. T. C.]) _Remorse_, iv. 69-74--but the passage
+is omitted from _Osorio_, act iv. 53 _sq. P. W._, pp. 386-499]].
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+_1810_
+
+                         O dare I accuse
+    My earthly lot as guilty of my spleen,
+    Or call my destiny niggard! O no! no!
+    It is her largeness, and her overflow,
+    Which being incomplete, disquieteth me so!
+
+                                        S. T. C.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A PIOUS ASPIRATION]
+
+My own faculties, cloudy as they may be, will be a sufficient direction
+to me in plain daylight, but my friend's wish shall be the pillar of
+fire to guide me darkling in my nightly march through the wilderness.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THOUGHT AND ATTENTION]
+
+Thought and attention are very different things. I never expected the
+former, (viz., _selbst-thätige Erzeugung dessen, wovon meine Rede war_)
+from the readers of _The Friend_. I did expect the latter, and was
+disappointed. Jan. 3, 1810.
+
+This is a most important distinction, and in the new light afforded by
+it to my mind, I see more plainly why mathematics cannot be a
+substitute for logic, much less for metaphysics, that is,
+transcendental logic, and why, therefore, Cambridge has produced so few
+men of genius and original power since the time of Newton. Not only it
+does not call forth the balancing and discriminating power [_that_ I saw
+long ago] but it requires only _attention,_ not _thought_ or
+self-production.
+
+
+[Sidenote: LAW AND GOSPEL]
+
+"The man who squares his conscience by the law" was, formerly, a phrase
+for a prudent villain, an unprincipled coward. At present the law takes
+in everything--the things most incongruous with its nature, as the moral
+motive, and even the feelings of sensibility resulting from accidents of
+cultivation, novel-reading for instance. If, therefore, _at all_ times,
+the law would be found to have a much greater influence on the actions
+of men than men generally suppose, or the agents were themselves
+conscious of, this influence we must expect to find augmented at the
+present time in proportion to the encroachments of the law on religion,
+the moral sense, and the sympathies engendered by artificial rank.
+Examine this and begin, for instance, with reviews, and so on through
+the common legal immoralities of life, in the pursuits and pleasures of
+the higher half of the middle classes of society in Great Britain.
+
+
+[Sidenote: CATHOLIC REUNION]
+
+"Hence (_i.e._, from servile and thrall-like fear) men came to scan the
+Scriptures by the letter and in the covenant of our redemption magnified
+the external signs more than the quickening power of the
+Spirit."--MILTON'S _Review of Church Government_, vol. i. p. 2.
+
+It were not an unpleasing fancy, nor one wholly unworthy of a serious
+and charitable Christianity, to derive a shadow of hope for the
+conversion and purification of the Roman Apostasy from the conduct and
+character of St. Peter as shadowing out the history of the Latin Church,
+whose ruling pastor calls himself the successor of that saint. Thus, by
+proud _humility_, he hazarded the loss of his heavenly portion in
+objecting to Christ's taking upon himself a lowly office and character
+of a servant (hence the pomps and vanities with which Rome has tricked
+out her bishops, &c.), the eager drawing of the fleshly sword in defence
+of Christ; the denying of Christ at the cross (in the apostasy); but,
+finally, his bitter repentance at the third crowing of the cock (perhaps
+Wickliffe and Huss the first, Luther the second, and the third yet to
+come-or, perhaps Wickliffe and Luther the first, the second may be the
+present state of humiliation, and the third yet to come). After this her
+eyes will be opened to the heavenly vision of the universal acceptance
+of Christ of all good men of all sects, that is, that faith is a moral,
+not an intellectual act.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE IDEAL MARRIAGE]
+
+On some delightful day in early spring some of my countrymen hallow the
+anniversary of their marriage, and with love and fear go over the
+reckoning of the past and the unknown future. The wife tells with
+half-renewed modesty all the sweet feelings that she disguised and
+cherished in the courting-time; the man looks with a tear full in his
+eye and blesses the hour when for the first time (and oh! let it be the
+last) he spake deep and solemn to a beloved being--"Thou art mine and I
+am thine, and henceforward I shield and shelter [thee] against the
+world, and thy sorrows shall be my sorrows, and though abandoned by all
+men, we two will abide together in love and duty."
+
+In the holy eloquent solitude where the very stars that twinkle seem to
+be a _voice_ that suits the dream, a voice of a dream, a voice soundless
+and yet for the _ear_ not the _eye_ of the soul, when the winged soul
+passes over vale and mountain, sinks into glens, and then climbs with
+the cloud, and passes from cloud to cloud, and thence from sun to
+sun--never is she alone. Always one, the dearest, accompanies and even
+when he melts, diffused in the blue sky, she melts at the same moment
+into union with the beloved.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A SUPERFLUOUS ENTITY]
+
+That our religious faiths, by the instincts which lead us to
+metaphysical investigation, are founded in a practical necessity, not a
+mere intellectual craving after knowledge, and systematic conjecture, is
+evinced by the interest which all men take in the questions of future
+existence, and the being of God; while even among those who are
+speculative by profession a few phantasts only have troubled themselves
+with the questions of pre-existence, or with attempts to demonstrate the
+_posse_ and _esse_ of a devil. But in the latter case more is involved.
+Concerning pre-existence men in general have neither care nor belief;
+but a devil is taken for granted, and, if we might trust words, with the
+same faith as a Deity--"He neither believes God or devil." And yet,
+while we are delighted in hearing proofs of the one, we never think of
+asking a simple question concerning the other. This, too, originates in
+a practical source. The Deity is not a mere solution of difficulties
+concerning origination, but a truth which spreads light and joy and hope
+and certitude through all things--while a devil _is_ a mere solution of
+an enigma, an assumption to silence our uneasiness. That end answered
+(and most easily are such ends answered), we have no further concern
+with it.
+
+
+[Sidenote: PSYCHOLOGY IN YOUTH AND MATURITY]
+
+The _great change_--that in youth and early manhood we psychologise and
+with enthusiasm but all out of ourselves, and so far ourselves only as
+we descry therein some general law. Our own self is but the diagram, the
+triangle which represents all triangles. Afterward we pyschologise out
+of others, and so far as they differ from ourselves. O how hollowly!
+
+
+[Sidenote: HAIL AND FAREWELL!]
+
+We have been for many years at a great distance from each other, but
+that may happen with no real breach of friendship. All intervening
+nature is the _continuum_ of two good and wise men. We are now
+separated. You have combined arsenic with your gold, Sir Humphry! You
+are brittle, and I will rather dine with Duke Humphry than with you.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A GENUINE "ANECDOTE"]
+
+Sara Coleridge says, on telling me of the universal sneeze produced on
+the lasses while shaking my carpet, that she wishes my snuff would
+_grow_, as I sow it so plentifully!
+
+[This points to the summer of 1810, the five months spent at Greta Hall
+previous to the departure south with Basil Montagu.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: SPIRITUAL RELIGION]
+
+A thing cannot be one _and_ three at the same time! True! but _time_
+does not apply to God. He is neither one in time nor three in time, for
+he exists not in time at all--the Eternal!
+
+The truly religious man, when he is not conveying his feelings and
+beliefs to other men, and does not need the medium of words--O! how
+little does he find in his religious sense either of form or of
+number--it is _infinite_! Alas! why do we all seek by instinct for a
+God, a supersensual, but because we feel the insufficiency, the
+unsubstantiality of all _forms_, and formal being for itself. And shall
+we explain _a_ by _x_ and then _x_ by _a_--give a soul to the body, and
+then a body to the soul--_ergo_, a body to the body--feel the weakness
+of the weak, and call in the strengthener, and then make the very
+weakness the substratum of the strength? This is worse than the poor
+Indian! Even he does not make the tortoise support the elephant, and yet
+put the elephant under the tortoise!
+
+But we are too social, we become in a sort idolaters--for the means we
+are obliged to use to excite notions of truth in the minds of others we
+by witchcraft of slothful association impose on ourselves for the truths
+themselves. Our intellectual bank stops payment, and we pass an act by
+acclamation that hereafter the paper promises shall be the gold and
+silver itself--and ridicule a man for a dreamer and reviver of
+antiquated dreams who believes that gold and silver exist. This may do
+as well in the market, but O! for the universal, for the man himself the
+difference is woeful.
+
+
+[Sidenote: TRUTH]
+
+The immense difference between being glad to find Truth _it_, and to
+find _it_ TRUTH! O! I am ashamed of those who praise me! For I know that
+as soon as I tell them my mind on another subject, they will shrink and
+abhor me. For not because I enforced a truth were they pleased in the
+first instance, but because I had supported a favourite notion of theirs
+which they loved for its and their sake, and therefore would be glad to
+find it true--not that loving Truth they loved this opinion as one of
+its forms and consequences. The root! the root must be attacked!
+
+
+[Sidenote: A TIME TO CRY OUT]
+
+Among the evils that attend a conscientious author who writes in a
+corrupt age, is the necessity he is under of exposing himself even to
+plausible charges of envy, mortified vanity, and, above all, of
+self-conceit before those whose bad passions would make even the most
+improbable charges plausible.
+
+What _can_ he do? Tell the truth, and the whole truth plainly, and with
+the natural affection which it inspires, and keeping off (difficult
+task!) all _scorn_ (for to suppress resentment is easy), let him trust
+the bread to the waters in the firm faith that wisdom shall be justified
+by her children. Vanity! self-conceit! What vanity, what self-conceit?
+What say I more than this? Ye who think and feel the same will love and
+esteem me by the law of sympathy, and _value_ me according to the
+comparative effect I have made on your intellectual powers, in enabling
+you better to defend before others, or more clearly to _onlook_
+(_anschauen_) in yourselves the truths to which your noblest being bears
+witness. The rest I leave to the judgment of posterity, utterly
+unconcerned whether _my name_ be attached to these opinions or (_my_
+writings forgotten) another man's.
+
+But what can I say, when I have declared my abhorrence of the _Edinburgh
+Review_? In vain should I tell my critics that were I placed on the rack
+I could not remember ten lines of my own poems, and that on seeing my
+own name in their abuse, I regard it only as a symbol of Wordsworth and
+Southey, and that I am well aware that from utter disregard and oblivion
+of anything and all things which they can know of me by experience, my
+name is mentioned only because they have heard that I was Wordsworth's
+and Southey's friend.
+
+
+[Sidenote: HINTS FOR "THE FRIEND"]
+
+The brightest luminaries of earth give names to the dusky spots in the
+selenography of Helvetius.
+
+
+The intrepidity of a pure conscience and a simple principle [may be]
+compared to a life-boat, and somewhat in the detail, stemming with a
+little rudder the tumbling ruins of the sea, rebounding from the rocks
+and shelves in fury.
+
+
+Duns Scotus affirms that the certainty of faith is the greatest
+certainty--a dark speech which is explained and proved by the dependence
+of the theoretic powers on the practical. But Aristotle admits that
+demonstrated truths are inferior in kind of certainty to the
+indemonstrable out of which the former are deduced.
+
+
+Faithful, confident reliance on man and on God is the last and hardest
+virtue! And wherefore? Because we must first have earned a FAITH in
+ourselves. Let the conscience pronounce: "Trust in thyself!" Let the
+whole heart be able to say, "I trust in myself," and those whomever we
+_love_ we shall rely on, in proportion to that love.
+
+
+A testy patriot might be pardoned for saying with Falstaff, when Dame
+Quickly told him "She came from the two parties, forsooth," "The Devil
+take one party and his Dam the other." John Bull has suffered more for
+their sake, more than even the supererogatory cullibility of his
+disposition is able to bear.
+
+
+Lavater fixed on the simplest physiognomy in his whole congregation, and
+pitched his sermon to his comprehension. Narcissus either looks at or
+thinks of his looking glass, for the same wise purpose I presume.
+
+
+Reviewers resemble often the English jury and the Italian conclave, they
+are incapable of eating till they have condemned or craned.
+
+
+The Pope [may be compared to] an old lark, who, though he leaves off
+soaring and singing in the height, yet has his spurs grow longer and
+sharper the older he grows.
+
+
+Let us not, because the foliage waves in necessary obedience to every
+breeze, fancy that the tree shakes also. Though the slender branch bend,
+one moment to the East and another to the West, its motion is
+circumscribed by its connection with the unyielding trunk.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A HINT FOR "CHRISTABEL"]
+
+My first cries mingled with my mother's death-groan, and she beheld the
+vision of glory, ere I the earthly sun. When I first looked up to Heaven
+consciously, it was to look up after, or for, my mother.
+
+
+[Sidenote: "ALL THOUGHTS ALL PASSIONS ALL DELIGHTS"]
+
+The two sweet silences--first in the purpling dawn of love-troth, when
+the heart of each ripens in the other's looks within the unburst calyx,
+and fear becomes so sweet that it seems but a fear of losing hope in
+certainty; the second, when the sun is setting in the calm eve of
+confident love, and [the lovers] in mute recollection enjoy each other.
+"I fear to speak, I fear to hear you speak, so deeply do I now enjoy
+your presence, so totally possess you in myself, myself in you. The very
+sound would break the union and separate _you-me_ into you and me. We
+both, and this sweet room, its books, its furniture, and the shadows on
+the wall slumbering with the low, quiet fire are all _our_ thought, one
+harmonious imagery of forms distinct on the still substance of one deep
+feeling, love and joy--a lake, or, if a stream, yet flowing so softly,
+so unwrinkled, that its flow is life, not change--that state in which
+all the individuous nature, the distinction without division of a vivid
+thought, is united with the sense and substance of intensest reality."
+
+And what if joy pass quick away? Long is the track of Hope before--long,
+too, the track of recollection after, as in the Polar spring the sun [is
+seen in the heavens] sixteen days before it really rises, and in the
+Polar autumn ten days after it has set; so Nature, with Hope and
+Recollection, pieces out our short summer.
+
+
+[Sidenote: WORDS AND THINGS]
+
+N.B.--In my intended essay in defence of punning (Apology for
+Paronomasy, _alias_ Punning), to defend those turns of words--
+
+        Che l'onda chiara,
+    El'ombra non men cara--
+
+in certain styles of writing, by proving that language itself is formed
+upon associations of this kind--that possibly the _sensus genericus_ of
+whole classes of words may be thus deciphered (as has indeed been
+attempted by Mr. White, of Clare Hall), that words are not mere symbols
+of things and thoughts, but themselves things, and that any harmony in
+the things symbolised will perforce be presented to us more easily, as
+well as with additional beauty, by a correspondent harmony of the
+symbols with each other. Thus, _heri vidi fragilem frangi, hodie
+mortalem mori_; Gestern seh ich was gebrechliches brechen, heute was
+sterbliches sterben, compared with the English. This the beauty of
+homogeneous languages. So _Veni, vidi, vici_.
+
+[This note follows an essay on Giambattista Strozzi's Madrigals,
+together with a transcription of twenty-seven specimens. The substance
+of the essay is embodied in the text of Chapter xvi. of the "Biographia
+Literaria," and a long footnote. The quotation is from the first
+madrigal, quoted in the note, which is not included in those transcribed
+in Notebook 17.--_Coleridge's Works_, iii. (Harper & Brothers, 1853),
+pp. 388-393.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: ASSOCIATION]
+
+Important suggestion on 4th March, 1810 (Monday night). The law of
+association clearly begins in common causality. How continued but by a
+_causative power_ in the soul? What a proof of _causation_ and _power_
+from the very law of mind, and cluster of facts adduced by Hume to
+overthrow it!
+
+
+[Sidenote: COROLLARY]
+
+It is proud ignorance that, as a disease of the mind, alone superinduces
+the necessity of the _medium_ of metaphysical philosophy. The errors
+into which a sound, unaffected mind is led by the nature of things
+(Thing as the substratum of power)--no errors at all, any more than the
+motion of the sun. "So it _appears_"--and that is most true--but when
+pride will work up these phenomena into a _system_ of _things in
+themselves_, then they become most pernicious errors, and it is the duty
+of true mind to examine these with all the virtues of the
+intellect--patience, humility, etc.
+
+
+[Sidenote: MOTHER WIT]
+
+"By aid of a large portion of mother's wit, Paine, though an unlearned
+man, saw the absurdity of the Christian religion." Mother's wit, indeed!
+Wit from his mother the earth--the earthy and material wit of the
+_flesh_ and its lusts. One ounce of mother-wit may be worth a pound of
+learning, but a grain of the Father's wisdom is worth a ton of
+mother-wit--yea! of both together.
+
+
+[Sidenote: OF EDUCATION]
+
+"O it is but an infant! 'tis but a child! he will be better as he grows
+older." "O! she'll grow ashamed of it. This is but waywardness." Grant
+all this--that _they_ will _out_grow these particular actions, yet with
+what HABITS of _feeling_ will they arrive at youth and manhood?
+Especially with regard to obedience, how is it possible that they should
+struggle against the boiling passions of youth by means of obedience to
+their own conscience who are to meet the dawn of conscience with the
+broad meridian of disobedience and habits of self-willedness? Besides,
+when are the rebukes, the chastisements to commence? Why! about nine or
+ten, perhaps, when, for the father at least, [the child] is less a
+plaything--when, therefore, anger is not healed up in its mind, either
+by its own infant versatility and forgetfulness, or by after
+caresses--when everything is remembered individually, and sense of
+injustice felt. For the boy very well remembers the different treatment
+when he was a child; but what has been so long permitted becomes a right
+to him. Far better, in such a case, to have them sent off to others--a
+strict schoolmaster--than to breed that contradiction of feeling toward
+the same person which subverts the very _principle_ of our impulses.
+Whereas, in a tender, yet obedience-exacting and improvement-enforcing
+education, though very gradually, and by small doses at a time, yet
+always going on--yea! even from a twelvemonth old--at six or seven the
+child really has outgrown all things that annoy, just at the time when,
+as the charm of infancy begins to diminish, they would begin really to
+annoy.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE DANGERS OF ADAPTING TRUTH TO THE MINDS OF THE VULGAR]
+
+There are, in every country, times when the few who know the truth have
+clothed it for the vulgar, and addressed the vulgar in the vulgar
+language and modes of conception, in order to convey any part of the
+truth. This, however, could not be done with safety, even to the
+_illuminati_ themselves in the first instance; but to their successors,
+habit gradually turned lie into belief, partial and _stagnate_ truth
+into ignorance, and the teachers of the vulgar (like the Franciscan
+friars in the South of Europe) became a part of the vulgar--nay, because
+the laymen were open to various impulses and influences, which their
+instructors had built out (compare a brook in open air, liable to
+rainstreams and rills from new-opened fountains, to the same running
+through a mill guarded by sluice-gates and back-water), they became the
+vulgarest of the vulgar, till, finally, resolute not to detach
+themselves from the mob, the mob at length detaches itself from them,
+and leaves the mill-race dry, the moveless, rotten wheels as
+day-dormitories for bats and owls, and the old grindstones for wags and
+scoffers of the taproom to whet their wits on.
+
+
+[Sidenote: POETRY AND PROSE]
+
+When there are few literary men, and the vast 999999/10000000 of the
+population are ignorant, as was the case of Italy from Dante to
+Metastasio, _from causes I need not here put down, there will be a
+poetical language_; but that a poet ever uses a word as poetical--that
+is, formally--which he, in the same mood and thought, would not use in
+prose or conversation, Milton's Prose Works will assist us in
+disproving. But as soon as literature becomes common, and critics
+numerous in any country, and a large body of men seek to express
+themselves habitually in the most precise, sensuous, and impassioned
+words, the difference as to mere words ceases, as, for example, the
+German prose writers. Produce to me _one_ word out of Klopstock,
+Wieland, Schiller, Goethe, Voss, &c., which I will not find as
+frequently used in the most energetic prose writers. The sole difference
+in style is that poetry demands a severe keeping--it admits nothing that
+prose may not often admit, but it oftener rejects. In other words, it
+presupposes a more continuous state of passion. _N.B._--Provincialisms
+of poets who have become the supreme classics in countries one in
+language but under various states and governments have aided this false
+idea, as, in Italy, the Tuscanisms of Dante, Ariosto, and Alfieri,
+foolishly imitated by Venetians, Romans, and Neapolitans. How much this
+is against the opinion of Dante, see his admirable treatise on "Lingua
+Volgare Nobile," the first, I believe, of his prose or _prose and verse_
+works; for the "Convito" and "La Vita Nuova" are, one-third, in metre.
+
+
+[Sidenote: WORLDLY WISE]
+
+I would strongly recommend Lloyd's "State Worthies" [_The Statesmen and
+Favourites of England since the Reformation._ By David Lloyd. London,
+1665-70] as the manual of every man who would rise in the world. In
+every twenty pages it recommends contradictions, but he who cannot
+reconcile them for himself, and discover which suits his plan, can never
+rise in the world. _N.B._--I have a mind to draw a complete character of
+a worldly-wise man out of Lloyd. He would be highly-finished, useful,
+honoured, popular--a man revered by his children, his wife, and so
+forth. To be sure, he must not expect to be _beloved_ by _one_
+proto-friend; and, if there be truth in reason or Christianity, he will
+go to hell--but, even so, he will doubtless secure himself a most
+respectable place in the devil's chimney-corner.
+
+
+[Sidenote: HINTS FOR "THE FRIEND"]
+
+The falseness of that so very common opinion, "Mathematics, aye, that is
+something! that has been useful--but metaphysics!" Now fairly compare
+the two, what each has really done.
+
+But [be thou] only concerned to find out truth, which, on what side
+soever it appears, is always _victory_ to every honest mind.
+
+
+Christianity, too (as well as Platonism and the school of Pythagoras),
+has its esoteric philosophy, or why are we forbidden to cast pearls
+before swine? But who are the swine? Are they the poor and despised, the
+unalphabeted in worldly learning? O, no! the rich whose hearts are
+steeled by ignorance of misery and habits of receiving slavish
+obedience--the dropsical learned and the St. Vitus' [bewitched]
+sciolist.
+
+
+In controversy it is highly useful to know whether you are really
+addressing yourself to an opponent or only to partisans, with the
+intention of preserving them firm. Either is well, but they should never
+be commingled.
+
+
+In her letter to Lord Willoughby Queen Elizabeth hath the word "eloign."
+There is no exact equivalent in modern use. Neither "withdraw" or
+"absent" are precisely synonymous.
+
+
+We understand Nature just as if, at a distance, we looked at the image
+of a person in a looking-glass, plainly and fervently discoursing, yet
+what he uttered we could decipher only by the motion of the lips or by
+his mien.
+
+
+I must extract and transcribe from the preface to the works of
+Paracelsus that eloquent defence of technical new words and of old words
+used in a new sense. The whole preface is exceedingly lively, and
+(excepting the mountebank defence of intentional obscurity and the
+attack on logic, as if it were ever intended to be an organon of
+discovery of material truth and directly, instead of a formal
+preliminary assisting the mind indirectly, and showing what cannot be
+truth, and what has not been proved truth,) very just.
+
+
+The Chinese call the monsoon whirlwind, when more than usually fierce,
+the elephant. This is a fine image--a mad wounded war-elephant.
+
+
+The poor oppressed Amboynese, who bear with patience the extirpation of
+their clove and nutmeg trees, in their fields and native woods, and the
+cruel taxes on sugar, their staff of life, will yet, at once and
+universally, rise up in rebellion and prepare to destroy in despair all
+and everything, themselves included, if any attempt is made to destroy
+any individual's Tatanaman, the clove-tree which each Amboynese plants
+at the birth of each of his children. Very affecting!
+
+
+[Sidenote: GENIUS]
+
+The man of genius places things in a new light. This trivial phrase
+better expresses the appropriate effects of genius than Pope's
+celebrated distich--
+
+     "What oft was thought but ne'er so well exprest."
+
+It has been thought distinctly, but only possessed, as it were, unpacked
+and unsorted. The poet not only displays what, though often seen in its
+unfolded mass, had never been opened out, but he likewise adds
+something, namely, light and relations. Who has not seen a rose, or
+sprig of jasmine or myrtle? But behold those same flowers in a posy or
+flower-pot, painted by a man of genius, or assorted by the hand of a
+woman of fine taste and instinctive sense of beauty!
+
+
+[Sidenote: LOVE]
+
+To find our happiness incomplete without the happiness of some other
+given person or persons is the definition of affection in general, and
+applies equally to friendship, to the parental and to the conjugal
+relations. But what is love? Love as it may subsist between two persons
+of different senses? This--and what more than this? The mutual
+dependence of their happiness, each on that of the other, each being at
+once cause and effect. You, therefore, I--I, therefore you. The sense of
+this reciprocity of well-being, is that which first stamps and
+legitimates the name of happiness in all the other advantages and
+favourable accidents of nature, or fortune, without which they would
+change their essence and become like the curse of Tantalus, insulting
+remembrances of misery, of that most unquiet of all miseries, means of
+happiness blasted and transformed by incompleteness, nay, by the loss of
+the sole organ through which we could enjoy them.
+
+Suppose a wide and delightful landscape, and what the eye is to the
+light, and the light to the eye, that interchangeably is the lover to
+the beloved. "O best beloved! who lovest _me_ the best!" In strictest
+propriety of application might he thus address her, if only she with
+equal truth could echo the same sense in the same feeling. "Light of
+mine eye! by which alone I not only see all I see, but which makes up
+more than half the loveliness of the objects seen, yet, still, like the
+rising sun in the morning, like the moon at night, remainest thyself and
+for thyself, the dearest, fairest form of all the thousand forms that
+derive from thee all their visibility, and borrow from thy presence
+their chiefest beauty!"
+
+
+[Sidenote: COTTLE'S "FREE VERSION OF THE PSALMS"]
+
+Diamond + oxygen = charcoal. Even so on the fire-spark of his zeal did
+Cottle place the King-David diamonds, and caused to pass over them the
+oxygenous blast of his own inspiration, and lo! the diamond becomes a
+bit of charcoal.
+
+
+[Sidenote: FRIENDSHIP AND MARRIAGE]
+
+     "Ich finde alles eher auf der Erde, so gar Wahrheit und Freude,
+     als Freundschaft."--JEAN PAUL.[F]
+
+This for the motto--to examine and attest the fact, and then to explain
+the reason. First, then, there are the extraordinary qualifications
+demanded for true friendship, arising from the multitude of causes that
+make men delude themselves and attribute to friendship what is only a
+similarity of pursuit, or even a mere dislike of feeling oneself alone
+in anything. But, secondly, supposing the friendship to be as real as
+human nature ordinarily permits, yet how many causes are at constant war
+against it, whether in the shape of violent irruptions or unobserved yet
+constant wearings away by dyspathy, &c. Exemplify this in youth and then
+in manhood. First, there is the influence of wives, how frequently
+deadly to friendship, either by direct encroach, or, perhaps,
+intentional plans of alienation! Secondly, there is the effect of
+families, by otherwise occupying the heart; and, thirdly, the action of
+life in general, by the worldly-wise, chilling effects of prudential
+anxieties.
+
+Corollary. These reflections, however, suggest an argument in favour of
+the existing indissolubility of marriage.
+
+To be compelled to make it up, or consent to be miserable and
+disrespected, is indeed a coarse plaister for the wounds of love, but so
+it must be while the patients themselves are of coarse make and
+unhealthy humours.
+
+
+[Sidenote: IMAGINATION]
+
+His imagination, if it must be so called, is at all events of the
+pettiest kind--it is an _imaginunculation_. How excellently the German
+_Einbildungskraft_ expresses this prime and loftiest faculty, the
+power of co-adunation, the faculty that forms the many into
+one--_In-eins-bildung!_ Eisenoplasy, or esenoplastic power, is
+contradistinguished from fantasy, or the mirrorment, either catoptric or
+metoptric--repeating simply, or by transposition--and, again,
+involuntary [fantasy] as in dreams, or by an act of the will.
+
+[See _Biog. Lit._, cap. x.; _Coleridge's Works_, iii. 272. See also
+_Blackwood's Magazine_, March 1840, No. ccxciii., Art. The Plagiarisms
+of S. T. Coleridge.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: PUBLIC OPINION AND THE SERVICES]
+
+Ministers, as in the Admiralty, or War Office, compared to managers of
+theatres. The numerous absurd claims at length deaden their sense of
+judgment to real merit, and superinduce in the mind an anticipation of
+clamorous vanity. Hence the great importance of the public voice,
+forcing them to be just. This, how illustrated by the life of
+Nelson--the infamous coldness with which all his claims were
+received--especially Mr. Wyndham's answer, July 21, 1795. And no wonder!
+for such is the state of moral feeling even with the English public,
+that an instance of credulity to an ingenious scheme which has failed in
+the trial will weigh more heavily on a minister's character than to have
+stifled in the birth half-a-dozen such men as Nelson or Cochrane, or
+such schemes as that of a floating army. Nelson's life is a perpetual
+comment on this.
+
+
+[Sidenote: SERMONS ANCIENT AND MODERN]
+
+Of moral discourses and fine moral discussions in the pulpit--"none of
+your Methodist stuff for me." And, yet, most certain it is, that never
+were either ministers or congregations so strict in all morality as at
+the time when nothing but fine _moral_ discourses (that is calculations
+in self-love) would have driven a preacher from the pulpit--and when
+the clergy thought it their pulpit-duty to preach Christ and Him
+crucified, and the why and the wherefore--and that the soberest,
+law-obeying, most prudent nation in the world would need Him as much as
+a nation of drunkards, thieves and profligates. How was this? Why, I
+take it, those old parsons thought, very wisely, that the pulpit was the
+place for truths that applied to all men, humbled all alike (not
+mortified one or two, and sent the rest home, scandal-talking with
+pharisaic "I thank thee, God, I am not as so and so, but I was glad to
+hear the parson"), comforted all, frightened all, offended all, because
+they were all _men_--that private vices depend so much on particular
+circumstances, that without making the pulpit a lampoon shop, (or, even
+supposing the genius of him who wrote Isaac Jenkins, without particulars
+not suited to the pulpit) that it would be a cold generality affair--and
+that, therefore, they considered the pulpit as _one_ part of their duty,
+but to their whole congregation as _men_, and that the other part of
+their duty, which they thought equally binding on them, was to each and
+every member of that congregation as John Harris, or James Tomkins, in
+private conversation--and, like that of Mr. Longford, sometimes to
+rebuke and warn, sometimes to comfort, sometimes and oftener to
+instruct, and render them capable of understanding his sermon. In short
+they would _preach_ as Luther, and would converse as Mr. Longford to
+Isaac Jenkins.
+
+[_The History of Isaac Jenkins, a Moral Fiction._ By Thomas Beddoes,
+M.D., 1793].
+
+
+[Sidenote: HEAVINESS MAY ENDURE FOR A NIGHT]
+
+With a loving generous man whose activity of intellect is exerted
+habitually on truth and events of permanent, or, at least, general
+interest still warmed and coloured by benevolent enthusiasm
+self-unconsciously, and whose heart-movements are all the property of
+the few, whom he dearly loves--with such a man, for the vast majority of
+the wrongs met with in life, that at all affect him, a one-night's sleep
+provides the oblivion and the cure--he awakes from his slumbers and his
+resentment at the same moment. Yesterday is gone and the clouds of
+yesterday. The sun is born again, and how bright and joyous! and I am
+born again! But O! there may be wrongs, for which with our best efforts
+for the most perfect suppression, with the absence, nay, the
+impossibility of anger or hate, yet, longer, deeper sleep is required
+for the heart's oblivion, and thence renewal--even the long total sleep
+of death.
+
+To me, I dare avow, even this connects a new soothing with the thought
+of death, an additional lustre in anticipation to the confidence of
+resurrection, that such sensations as I have so often had after small
+wrongs, trifling quarrels, on first awaking in a summer morn after
+refreshing sleep, I shall experience after death for those few wounds
+too deep and broad for the _vis medicatrix_ of mortal life to fill
+wholly up with new flesh--those that, though healed, yet left an
+unsightly scar which, too often, spite of our best wishes, opened anew
+at other derangements and indispositions of the mental health, even when
+they were altogether unconnected with the wound itself or its
+occasions--even as the scars of the sailor, the relics and remembrances
+of sword or gun-shot wounds (first of all his bodily frame giving way to
+ungenial influences from without or from within), ache and throb at the
+coming in of rain or easterly winds, and open again and bleed anew, at
+the attack of fever, or injury from deficient or unwholesome food--that
+even for these I should enjoy the same delightful annihilation of them,
+as of ordinary wrongs after sleep.
+
+
+I would say to a man who reminded me of a friend's unkind words or deeds
+which I had forgiven--Smoking is very well while we are all smoking,
+even though the head is made dizzy by it and the candle of reason burns
+red, dim and thick; but, for Heaven's sake, don't put an old pipe to my
+nose just at breakfast time, among dews and flowers and sunshine.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote F: ["I find all things upon earth, even truth and joy, rather
+than friendship."]]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+_1811-1812_
+
+    From all that meets or eye or ear,
+    There falls a genial holy fear,
+    Which, like the heavy dew of morn,
+    Refreshes while it bows the heart forlorn!
+
+                                       S. T. C.
+
+
+[Sidenote: TIME REAL AND IMAGINARY]
+
+How marked the contrast between troubled manhood, and joyously-active
+youth in the sense of time! To the former, time like the sun in an empty
+sky is never seen to move, but only to have _moved_. There, there it
+was, and now 'tis here, now distant! yet all a blank between. To the
+latter it is as the full moon in a fine breezy October night, driving on
+amid clouds of all shapes and hues, and kindling shifting colours, like
+an ostrich in its speed, and yet seems not to have moved at all. This I
+feel to be a just image of time real and time as felt, in two different
+states of being. The title of the poem therefore (for poem it ought to
+be) should be time real and time felt (in the sense of time) in active
+youth, or activity with hope and fullness of aim in any period, and in
+despondent, objectless manhood--time objective and subjective.
+
+[The riddle is hard to read, but the underlying thought seems to be that
+in youth the sense of time is like the apparent motion of the moon
+through clouds, ever driving on, but ever seeming to stand still;
+whereas the sense of time in manhood is like the sun, which seems to be
+stationary, and yet, at short intervals, is seen to have moved. This is
+time _felt_ in two different states of being. Time real is, as it were,
+sun or moon which move independently of our perceptions of their
+movements. The note (1811), no doubt, contains the germ of "Time Real
+and Imaginary" first published in "Sibylline Leaves" in 1817, which
+Coleridge in his Preface describes as a "school-boy poem," and
+interprets thus: "By imaginary time I meant the state of a schoolboy's
+mind when, on his return to school, he projects his being in his
+day-dreams, and lives in his next holidays, six months hence!" The
+explanation was probably an afterthought. "The two lovely children" who
+"run an endless race" may have haunted his schoolboy dreams, may perhaps
+have returned to the dreams of his troubled manhood, bringing with them
+the sense rather than the memory of youth, intermingled with a
+consciousness that youth was gone for ever, but the composition of the
+poem dates from 1811, or possibly 1815, when the preparation of the
+poems for the press would persuade him once more to express his thoughts
+in verse.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: TIME REAL AND IMAGINARY; AN ALLEGORY]
+
+    On the wide level of a mountain's head,
+      (I knew not where, but 'twas some faery place)
+    Their pinions, ostrich-like, for sails outspread,
+      Two lovely children run an endless race,
+        A sister and a brother!
+        This far outstript the other;
+    Yet ever runs she with reverted face,
+    And looks and listens for the boy behind:
+        For he, alas! is blind!
+    O'er rough and smooth with even step he passed,
+    And knows not whether he be first or last.
+
+[_P. W._, 1893, p. 187. See, too, Editor's _Note_, p. 638.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE HAG NIGHTMARE]
+
+Elucidation of my _all-zermalming_, [that is, all-crushing] argument on
+the subject of ghosts, apparitions, &c.
+
+Night-mare is, I think, always, even when it occurs in the midst of
+sleep, and not as it more commonly does after a waking interval, a state
+not of sleep, but of stupor of the outward organs of sense--not in
+words, indeed, but yet in fact distinguishable from the suspended power
+of the senses in true sleep, while the volitions of reason, that is the
+faculty of comparison, &c., are awake though disturbed. This stupor
+seems to be occasioned by some painful sensations of unknown locality
+(most often, I believe, in the lower bowel) which, withdrawing the
+attention to itself from the sense of other realities present, makes us
+asleep to them, indeed, but otherwise awake. And, whenever the
+derangement occasions an interruption in the circulation, aided,
+perhaps, by pressure, awkward position, &c., the part deadened, as the
+hand, the arm, or the foot and leg, or the side, transmits double touch
+as single touch, to which the imagination, therefore, the true inward
+creatrix, instantly out of the chaos of elements or shattered fragments
+of memory, puts together some form to fit it. And this [_imaginatio_]
+derives an over-mastering sense of reality from the circumstance that
+the power of reason, being in good measure awake, most generally
+presents to us all the accompanying images very nearly as they existed
+the moment before, when we fell out of anxious wakefulness into this
+reverie. For example, the bed, the curtain, the room and its furniture,
+the knowledge of who lives in the next room, and so forth contribute to
+the illusion.... In short, the night-mare is not, properly, a dream, but
+a species of reverie, akin to somnambulism, during which the
+understanding and moral sense are awake, though more or less confused,
+and over the terrors of which the reason can exert no influence,
+because it is not true _terror_, that is, apprehension of danger, but is
+itself a specific sensation = _terror corporeus sive materialis_. The
+explanation and classification of these strange sensations, the organic
+material analogous (_ideas materiales intermedias_, as the Cartesians
+say) of Fear, Hope, Rage, Shame, and (strangest of all) Remorse, form at
+present the most difficult, and at the same time the most interesting
+problem of psychology, and are intimately connected with prudential
+morals, the science, that is, of morals not as the ground and law of
+duty, but in their relation to the empirical hindrances and focillations
+in the realising of the law by human beings. The solution of this
+problem would, perhaps, throw great doubt on the present [notion] that
+the forms and feelings of sleep are always the reflections and confused
+echoes of our waking thoughts and experiences.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A MOMENT AND A MAGIC MIRROR]
+
+What a swarm of thoughts and feelings, endlessly minute fragments, and,
+as it were, representations of all preceding and embryos of all future
+thought, lie compact in any one moment! So, in a single drop of water,
+the microscope discovers what motions, what tumult, what wars, what
+pursuits, what stratagems, what a circle-dance of death and life,
+death-hunting life, and life renewed and invigorated by death! The whole
+world seems here in a many-meaning cypher. What if our existence was
+but that moment? What an unintelligible, affrightful riddle, what a
+chaos of limbs and trunk, tailless, headless, nothing begun and nothing
+ended, would it not be? And yet scarcely more than that other moment of
+fifty or sixty years, were that our all? Each part throughout infinite
+diminution adapted to some other, and yet the whole a means to
+nothing--ends everywhere, and yet an end nowhere.
+
+[Compare the three last lines of "What is Life?"
+
+    Is very life by consciousness unbounded?
+    And all the thoughts, pains, joys of mortal breath,
+    A war-embrace of wrestling life and death?
+
+    _P. W._, 1893, p. 173.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: THAT INWARD EYE, THE BLISS OF SOLITUDE]
+
+The love of Nature is ever returned double to us, not only the delighter
+in our delight, but by linking our sweetest, but of themselves
+perishable feelings to distinct and vivid images, which we ourselves, at
+times, and which a thousand casual recollections, recall to our memory.
+She is the preserver, the treasurer of our joys. Even in sickness and
+nervous diseases, she has peopled our imagination with lovely forms
+which have sometimes overpowered the inward pain and brought with them
+their old sensations. And even when all men have seemed to desert us
+and the friend of our heart has passed on, with one glance from his
+"cold disliking eye"--yet even then the blue heaven spreads it out and
+bends over us, and the little tree still shelters us under its plumage
+as a second cope, a domestic firmament, and the low creeping gale will
+sigh in the heath-plant and soothe us by sound of sympathy till the
+lulled grief lose itself in fixed gaze on the purple heath-blossom, till
+the present beauty becomes a vision of memory.
+
+
+[Sidenote: HESPERUS]
+
+I have never seen the evening star set behind the mountains, but it was
+as if I had lost a hope out of my soul, as if a love were gone, and a
+sad memory only remained. O it was my earliest affection, the evening
+star! One of my first utterances in verse was an address to it as I was
+returning from the New River, and it looked newly bathed as well as I. I
+remember that the substance of the sonnet was that the woman whom I
+could ever love would surely have been emblemed in the pensive serene
+brightness of that planet, that we were both constellated to it, and
+would after death return thither.
+
+[Sidenote: TO THE EVENING STAR]
+
+    TO THE EVENING STAR
+
+    O meek attendant of Sol's setting blaze,
+      I hail, sweet star, thy chaste effulgent glow;
+    On thee full oft with fixed eye I gaze,
+      Till I methinks, all spirit seem to grow.
+    O first and fairest of the starry choir,
+      O loveliest 'mid the daughters of the night,
+    Must not the maid I love like thee inspire
+      _Pure_ joy and _calm_ delight?
+    Must she not be, as is thy placid sphere,
+      Serenely brilliant? Whilst to gaze awhile
+    Be all my wish 'mid Fancy's high career
+      E'en till she quit this scene of earthly toil;
+    Then Hope perchance might fondly sigh to join
+    Her image in thy kindred orb, O star benign!
+
+[First printed from MS. _Poetical and Dramatic Works_, 1877-80;
+_Poetical Works_, 1893, p. 11.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: HEALTH, INDEPENDENCE, FRIENDSHIP]
+
+Where health is--at least, though pain be no stranger, yet when the
+breath can rise, and turn round like a comet at its perihelion in its
+ellipse, and again descend, instead of being a Sisiphus's stone; and the
+chest can expand as by its own volition and the head sits firm yet
+mobile aloft, like the vane of a tower on a hill shining in the blue
+air, and appropriating sunshine and moonlight whatever weight of clouds
+brood below--O when health and hope, and if not competence yet a
+debtless _unwealth, libera et læta paupertas_, is his, a man may have
+and love many friends, but yet, if indeed they be friends, he lives with
+each a several and individual life.
+
+
+[Sidenote: SELF-ABSORPTION AND SELFISHNESS]
+
+One source of calumny (I say _source_, because _allophoby_ from
+_hëautopithygmy_ is the only proper _cause_) may be found in this--every
+man's life exhibits two sorts of selfishness, those which are and those
+which are not objects of his own consciousness. _A_ is thinking,
+perhaps, of some plan in which he may benefit another, and during this
+absorption consults his own little bodily comforts blindly--occupies the
+best place at the fire-side, or asks at once, "Where am I to sit?"
+instead of first inquiring after the health of another. Now the error
+lies here, that _B_, in complaining of _A_, first takes for granted
+either that these are acts of conscious selfishness in _A_, or, if he
+allows the truth, yet considers them just as bad (and so perhaps they
+may be in a certain sense), but _forgets_ that his own life presents the
+same, judges of his own life exclusively by his own consciousness, that
+of another by conscious and unconscious in a lump. A monkey's
+anthropomorph attitudes we take for anthropic.
+
+
+[Sidenote: SELF-ADVERTISING PHILANTHROPY]
+
+Try not to become disgusted with active benevolence, or despondent
+because there is a _philanthropy-trade_. It is a sort of benefit-club of
+virtue, supported by the contributions of paupers in virtue, founded by
+genuine enthusiasts who gain a reputation for the thing--then slip in
+successors who know how to avail themselves of the influence and
+connections derived thereby--quite gratuitous, however, and
+bustling-active--but yet _bribe high_ to become the unpaid physicians of
+the dispensary at St. Luke's Hospital, and bow and scrape and intrigue,
+Carlyleise and Knappise for it. And such is the [case with regard to]
+the slave trade. The first abolitionists were the good men who laboured
+when the thing seemed desperate--it was virtue for its own sake. Then
+the quakers, Granville Sharp, etc.--then the restless spirits who are
+under the action of tyrannical oppression from images, and, gradually,
+mixed vanity and love of power with it--the politicians + saints =
+Wilberforce. Last come the Scotchmen--and Brougham is now canvassing
+more successfully for the seat of Wilberforce, who retires with great
+honour and regret, from infirmities of age and _enoughness_. It is just
+as with the great original benefactors and founders of useful plans,
+Raleigh, Sir Hugh Middleton, etc.--men of genius succeeded by sharpers,
+but who often can better carry on what they never could have first
+conceived--and this, too, by their very want of those qualities and
+virtues which were necessary to the discovery.
+
+
+[Sidenote: "BUT LOVE IS INDESTRUCTIBLE"]
+
+All mere passions, like spirits and apparitions, have their hour of
+cock-crow, in which they must vanish. But pure love is, therefore, no
+_mere_ passion; and it is a test of its being love, that no reason can
+be assigned _why_ it should disappear. Shall we not always, in this life
+at least, remain _animæ dimidiatæ_?--must not the moral reason always
+hold out the perfecting of each by union of both as good and lovely?
+With reason, therefore, and conscience let love vanish, but let these
+vanish only with our being.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE FEINT OF THE SLEEPLESS]
+
+The sick and sleepless man, after the dawn of the fresh day, is fain to
+watch the smoke now from this and then from the other chimney of the
+town from his bed-chamber, as if willing to borrow from others that
+sense of a new day, of a discontinuity between the yesterday and the
+to-day which his own sensations had not afforded. [Compare Wordsworth's
+"Blessed Barrier Between Day and Day," Wordsworth's Third Sonnet to
+Sleep, _Poetical Works_, 1889, 354.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: FIRST THOUGHTS AND FRIENDSHIP]
+
+O what wisdom could I _talk_ to a YOUTH of genius and
+genial-heartedness! O how little could I teach! and yet, though
+despairing of success, I would attempt to enforce:--"Whenever you meet
+with a person of undoubted talents, more especially if a woman, and of
+apparent goodness, and yet you feel uncomfortable, and urged against
+your nature, and, therefore, probably in vain, to be on your guard--then
+take yourself to task and enquire what strong reason, moral or
+prudential, you have to form any intimacy or even familiarity with that
+person. If you after this (or moreover) detect any falsehood, or, what
+amounts to the same, proneness and quickness to look into, to analyse,
+to find out and represent evil or weakness in others (however this may
+be disguised even from the person's own mind by _candour_, [in] pointing
+out the good at the same time, by affectation of speculative truth, as
+psychologists, or of telling you all their thoughts as open-hearted
+friends), then let no reason but a strong and coercive one suffice to
+make you any other than as formal and distant acquaintance as
+circumstances will permit." And am I not now suffering, in part, for
+forcing my feelings into slavery to my notions, and intellectual
+admiration for a whole year and more with regard to ---- ? [So the MS.]
+If I played the hypocrite to myself, can I blame my fate that he has, at
+length, played the deceiver to me? Yet, God knows! I did it most
+virtuously!--not only without vanity or any self-interest of however
+subtle a nature, but from humility and a true delight in finding
+excellence of any kind, and a disposition to fall prostrate before it.
+
+
+[Sidenote: MILTON'S BLANK VERSE]
+
+To understand fully the mechanism, in order fully to feel the
+incomparable excellence of Milton's metre, we must make four tables, or
+a fourfold compartment, the first for the feet, single and composite,
+for which the whole twenty-six feet of the ancients will be found
+necessary; the second to note the construction of the feet, whether from
+different or from single words--for who does not perceive the difference
+to the ear between--
+
+    "Inextricable disobedience" and
+
+    "To love or not: in this we stand or fall"--
+
+yet both lines are composed of five iambics? The third, of the strength
+and position, the concentration or diffusion of the _emphasis_. Fourth,
+the length and position of the pauses. Then compare his narrative with
+the harangues. I have not noticed the ellipses, because they either do
+not affect the rhythm, or are not ellipses, but are comprehended in the
+feet.
+
+
+[Sidenote: APHORISMS OR PITHY SENTENCES]
+
+Shall I compare man to a clockwork Catamaran, destined to float on in a
+meaner element for so many moments or hours, and then to explode,
+scattering its _involucrum_ and itself to ascend into its proper
+element?
+
+
+I am persuaded that we love what is above us more than what is under
+us.
+
+
+Money--paper money--peace, war. How comes it that all men in all
+companies are talking of the depreciation, etc. etc.--and yet that a
+discourse on transubstantiation would not be a more withering sirocco
+than the attempt to explain philosophically the true cure and causes of
+that which interests all so vehemently?
+
+
+All convalescence is a resurrection, a palingenesy of our youth--"and
+loves the earth and all that live thereon with a new heart." But oh! the
+anguish to have the aching freshness of yearning and no answering
+object--only remembrances of faithless change--and unmerited alienation!
+
+
+The sun at evening holds up her fingers of both hands before her face
+that mortals may have one steady gaze--her transparent crimson fingers
+as when a lovely woman looks at the fire through her slender palms.
+
+
+O that perilous moment [for such there is] of a half-reconciliation,
+when the coldness and the resentment have been sustained too long. Each
+is drawing toward the other, but like glass in the mid-state between
+fusion and compaction a single sand will splinter it.
+
+
+Sometimes when I earnestly look at a beautiful object or landscape, it
+seems as if I were on the _brink_ of a fruition still denied--as if
+Vision were an _appetite_; even as a man would feel who, having put
+forth all his muscular strength in an act of prosilience, is at the very
+moment _held back_--he leaps and yet moves not from his place.
+
+
+Philosophy in general, but a plummet to so short a line that it can
+sound no deeper than the sounder's eyes can reach--and yet--in certain
+waters it may teach the exact depth and prevent a drowning.
+
+
+The midnight wild beasts staring at the hunter's torch, or when the
+hunter sees the tiger's eye glaring on the red light of his own torch.
+
+
+A summer-sailing on a still peninsulating river, and sweet as the delays
+of parting lovers.
+
+
+Sir F[rancis] B[urdett], like a Lapland witch drowned in a storm of her
+own raising. Mr. Cobbett, who, for a dollar, can raise what, offer him
+ten thousand dollars, he could not allay.
+
+
+[Sidenote: August, 1811]
+
+Why do you make a book? Because my hands can extend but a few score
+inches from my body; because my poverty keeps those hands empty when my
+heart aches to empty them; because my life is short, and [by reason of]
+my infirmities; and because a book, if it extends but to one edition,
+will probably benefit three or four score on whom I could not otherwise
+have acted, and, should it live and deserve to live, will make ample
+compensation for all the aforestated infirmities. O, but think only of
+the thoughts, feelings, radical impulses that have been implanted in how
+many thousands by the little ballad of the "Children in the Wood"! The
+sphere of Alexander the Great's agency is trifling compared with it.
+
+
+[Sidenote: PRESENTIMENTS]
+
+One of the strangest and most painful peculiarities of my nature (unless
+others have the same, and, like me, hide it, from the same inexplicable
+feeling of causeless shame and sense of a sort of guilt, joined with the
+apprehension of being feared and shrunk from as a something
+transnatural) I will here record--and my motive, or, rather, impulse, to
+do this seems an effort to eloign and abalienate it from the dark adyt
+of my own being by a visual outness, and not the wish for others to see
+it. It consists in a sudden second sight of some hidden vice, past,
+present or to come, of the person or persons with whom I am about to
+form a close intimacy--which never deters me, but rather (as all these
+transnaturals) urges me on, just like the feeling of an eddy-torrent to
+a swimmer. I see it as a vision, feel it as a prophecy, not as one
+_given_ me by any other being, but as an act of my own spirit, of the
+absolute _noumenon_, which, in so doing, seems to have offended against
+some law of its being, and to have acted the traitor by a commune with
+full consciousness independent of the tenure or inflected state of
+association, cause and effect, &c.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE FIXED STARS OF TRUTH]
+
+As the most far-sighted eye, even aided by the most powerful telescope,
+will not make a fixed star appear larger than it does to an ordinary and
+unaided sight, even so there are heights of knowledge and truth sublime
+which all men in possession of the ordinary human understanding may
+comprehend as much and as well as the profoundest philosopher and the
+most learned theologian. Such are the truths relating to the _logos_ and
+its oneness with the self-existent Deity, and of the humanity of Christ
+and its union with the _logos_. It is idle, therefore, to refrain from
+preaching on these subjects, provided only such preparations have been
+made as no man can be a Christian without. The misfortune is that the
+majority are Christians only in name, and by birth only. Let them but
+once, according to St. James, have looked down steadfastly into the
+_law_ of liberty or freedom in their own souls (the will and the
+conscience), and they are capable of whatever God has chosen to reveal.
+
+
+[Sidenote: C'EST MAGNIFIQUE, MAIS CE N'EST PAS LA POÉSIE]
+
+A long line of (!!) marks of admiration would be its aptest symbol! It
+has given me the eye-ache with dazzlement, the brain-ache with
+wonderment, the stomach and all-ache with the shock and after-eddy
+of contradictory feelings. Splendour is there, splendour
+everywhere--distinct the figures as vivid--skill in construction of
+events--beauties numberless of form and thought. But there is not
+anywhere the "one low piping note more sweet than all"--there is not the
+divine vision of the poet, which gives the full fruition of sight
+without the effort--and where the feelings of the heart are struck, they
+are awakened only to complain of and recoil from the occasion. O! it is
+mournful to see and wonder at such a marvel of labour, erudition and
+talent concentered into such a burning-glass of factitious power, and
+yet to know that it is all in vain--like the Pyramids, it shows what can
+be done, and, like them, leaves in painful and almost scornful
+perplexity, why it was done, for what or whom.
+
+
+[Sidenote: SILENCE IS GOLDEN September 29th, 1812]
+
+Grand rule in case of quarrels between friends or lovers--never to say,
+hint, or do _anything_ in a moment of anger or indignation or sense of
+ill-treatment, but to be passive--and even if the fit should recur the
+next morning, still to delay it--in short, however plausible the motive
+may be, yet if you have loved the persons concerned, not to say it till
+their love has returned toward you, and your feelings are the same as
+they were before. And for this plain reason--you knew this before, and
+yet because you were in kindness, you never felt an impulse to speak of
+it--then, surely, not now when you may perpetuate what would otherwise
+be fugitive.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE DEVIL: A RECANTATION]
+
+"That not one of the _peculiarities_ of Christianity, no one point in
+which, being clearly different from other religions or philosophies, it
+would have, at least, the _possibility_ of being superior to all, is
+retained by the modern Unitarians." This remark is occasioned by my
+reflections on the fact that Christianity _exclusively_ has asserted the
+_positive_ being of evil or sin, "of sin the exceeding sinfulness"--and
+thence exclusively the _freedom_ of the creature, as that, the clear
+intuition of which is, both, the result and the accompaniment of
+redemption. The nearest philosophy to Christianity is the Platonic, and
+it is observable that this is the mere antipodes of the
+Hartleio-Lockian held by the Unitarians; but the true honours of
+Christianity would be most easily manifested by a comparison even with
+that "_nec pari nec secundo_," but yet "_omnibus aliis propriore_," the
+Platonic! With what contempt, even in later years, have I not
+contemplated the doctrine of a devil! but now I see the intimate
+connection, if not as existent _person_, yet as essence and symbol with
+Christianity--and that so far from being identical with Manicheism, it
+is the surest antidote (that is, rightly understood).
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+_1814-1818_
+
+
+    Lynx amid moles! had I stood by thy bed,
+    Be of good cheer, meek soul! I would have said:
+    I see a hope spring from that humble fear.
+
+                                           S. T. C.
+
+
+[Sidenote: SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY]
+
+The first man of science was he who looked into a thing, not to learn
+whether it could furnish him with food, or shelter, or weapons, or
+tools, or ornaments, or _playwiths_, but who sought to know it for the
+gratification of _knowing_; while he that first sought to _know_ in
+order to _be_ was the first philosopher. I have read of two rivers
+passing through the same lake, yet all the way preserving their streams
+visibly distinct--if I mistake not, the Rhone and the Adar, through the
+Lake of Geneva. In a far finer distinction, yet in a subtler union,
+such, for the contemplative mind, are the streams of knowing and being.
+The lake is formed by the two streams in man and nature as it exists in
+and for man; and up this lake the philosopher sails on the junction-line
+of the constituent streams, still pushing upward and sounding as he
+goes, towards the common fountain-head of both, the mysterious source
+whose being is knowledge, whose knowledge is being--the adorable I AM IN
+THAT I AM.
+
+
+[Sidenote: PETRARCH'S EPISTLES]
+
+I have culled the following extracts from the First Epistle of the First
+Book of Petrarch's Epistle, that "Barbato Salmonensi." [Basil, 1554, i.
+76.]
+
+                      Vultûs, heu, blanda severi
+    Majestas, placidæque decus pondusque senectæ!
+
+                          Non omnia terræ
+    Obruta! vivit amor, vivit dolor! Ora negatum
+    Dulcia conspicere; at flere et meminisse relictum est.
+
+                  Jamque observatio vitæ
+    Multa dedit--lugere nihil, ferre omnia; jamque
+    Paulatim lacrymas rerum experientia tersit.
+      [Heu! et spem quoque tersit]
+
+    Pectore nunc gelido calidos miseremur amantes,
+    Jamque arsisse pudet. Veteres tranquilla tumultus
+    Mens horret, relegensque alium putat esse locutum.
+
+But, indeed, the whole of this letter deserves to be read and
+translated. Had Petrarch lived a century later, and, retaining all his
+_substantiality_ of head and heart, added to it the elegancies and manly
+politure of Fracastorius, Flaminius, Vida and their corrivals, this
+letter would have been a classical gem. To a translator of genius, and
+who possessed the English language as unembarrassed property, the
+defects of style in the original would present no obstacle; nay, rather
+an honourable motive in the well-grounded hope of rendering the version
+a finer poem than the original.
+
+[Twelve lines of Petrarch's Ep. _Barbato Salmonensi_ are quoted in the
+_Biog. Liter._ at the end of chapter x.; and a portion of the same poem
+was prefixed as a motto to "Love Poems" in the _Sibylline Leaves_, 1817,
+and the editions of _P. W._, 1828-9. _Coleridge's Works_, Harper &
+Brother, 1853, iii. 314. See, too, _P. W._, 1893, _Editor's Note_, pp.
+614, 634.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: CORRUPTIO OPTIMI PESSIMA]
+
+A fine writer of bad principles or a fine poem on a hateful subject,
+such as the "Alexis" of Virgil or the "Bathyllus" of Anacreon, I compare
+to the flowers and leaves of the Stramonium. The flowers are remarkable
+sweet, but such is the fetid odour of the leaves that you start back
+from the one through disgust at the other.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A BLISS TO BE ALIVE]
+
+    Zephyrs that captive roam among these boughs,
+    Strive ye in vain to thread the leafy maze?
+    Or have ye lim'd your wings with honey-dew?
+    Unfelt ye murmur restless o'er my head
+    And rock the feeding drone or bustling bees
+    That blend their eager, earnest, happy hum!
+
+
+[Sidenote: WHAT MAN HAS MADE OF MAN]
+
+    Gravior terras infestat Echidna,
+    Cur sua vipereæ jaculantur toxica linguæ
+    Atque homini sit homo serpens. O prodiga culpæ
+    Germina, naturæque uteri fatalia monstra!
+    Queis nimis innocuo volupe est in sanguine rictus
+    Tingere, fraternasque fibras cognataque per se
+    Viscera, et arrosæ deglubere funera famæ.
+    Quæ morum ista lues!
+
+25th Feb. 1819 Five years since the preceding lines were written on this
+leaf!! Ah! how yet more intrusively has the hornet scandal since then
+scared away the bee of poetic thought and silenced its "eager, earnest,
+happy hum"!
+
+
+[Sidenote: SAVE ME FROM MY FRIENDS]
+
+The sore evil now so general, alas! only not universal, of supporting
+our religion, just as a keen party-man would support his party in
+Parliament. All must be defended which can give a momentary advantage
+over any one opponent, no matter how naked it lays the cause open to
+another, perhaps, more formidable opponent--no matter how incompatible
+the two assumptions may be. We rejoice, not because our religion is the
+truth, but because the truth appears to be our religion. Talk with any
+dignified orthodoxist in the sober way of farther preferment and he will
+concrete all the grounds of Socinianism, talk Paley and the Resurrection
+as a proof and as the only proper _proof_ of our immortality, will give
+to external evidence and miracles the same self-grounded force, the same
+fundamentality. Even so the old Puritans felt towards the Papists.
+Because so much was wrong, everything was wrong, and by denying all
+reverence to the fathers and to the constant tradition of the Catholic
+Churches, they undermined the wall of the city in order that it might
+fall on the heads of the Romanists--thoughtless that by this very act
+they made a Breach for the Arian and Socinian to enter.
+
+
+[Sidenote: DRIP DRIP DRIP DRIP]
+
+The ear-deceiving imitation of a steady soaking rain, while the sky is
+in full uncurtainment of sprinkled stars and milky stream and dark blue
+interspace. The rain had held up for two hours or more, but so deep was
+the silence of the night that the _drip_ from the leaves of the garden
+trees _copied_ a steady shower.
+
+
+[Sidenote: REMEDIUM AMORIS]
+
+So intense are my affections, and so despotically am I governed by them
+(not indeed so much as I once was, but still far, far too much) that I
+should be the most wretched of men if my love outlived my esteem. But
+this, thank Heaven! is the antidote. The bitterer the tear of anguish at
+the clear detection of misapplied attachment, the calmer I am
+afterwards. It is a funeral tear for an object no more.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE CONCLUSION OF THE WHOLE MATTER]
+
+February 23, 1816.
+
+I thought I expressed my thoughts well when I said, "There is no
+superstition but what has a religion as its base [or radical], and
+religion is only reason, seen perspectively by a finite intellect."
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE POWER OF WORDS]
+
+It is a common remark, in medical books for instance, that there are
+certain niceties which words, from their always abstract and so far
+general nature, cannot convey. Now this I am disposed to deny, that is,
+in any comparative sense. In my opinion there is nothing which, being
+equally known as any other thing, may not be conveyed by words with
+equal clearness. But the question of the source of the remark is, to
+whom? If I say that in jaundice the skin looks yellow, my words have no
+meaning for a man who has no sense of colours. Words are but
+remembrances, though remembrance may be so excited, as by the _a priori_
+powers of the mind to produce a _tertium aliquid_. The utmost, therefore
+that should be said is that every additament of perception requires a
+new word, which (like all other words) will be intelligible to all who
+have seen the subject recalled by it, and who have learnt that such a
+word or phrase was appropriated to it; and this may be attained either
+by a new word, as _platinum_, _titanium_, _osmium_, etc., for the new
+metals, or an epithet peculiarising the application of an old word. For
+instance, no one can have attended to the brightness of the eyes in a
+healthy person in high spirits and particularly delighted by some
+occurrence, and that of the eye of a person deranged or predisposed to
+derangement, without observing the difference; and, in this case, the
+phrase "a maniacal glitter of the eye" conveys as clear a notion as that
+jaundice is marked by yellow. There is, doubtless, a difference, but no
+other than that of the _commencement_ of particular knowledge by the
+application of universal knowledge (that is to all who have the senses
+and common faculties of men), and the next step of knowledge when it
+particularises itself. But the defect is not in words, but in the
+imperfect knowledge of those to whom they are addressed. Then proof is
+obvious. Desire a physician or metaphysician, or a lawyer to mention
+the most perspicuous book in their several knowledges. Then bid them
+read that book to a sensible carpenter or shoemaker, and a great part
+will be as unintelligible as a technical treatise on carpentering to the
+lawyer or physician, who had not been brought up in a carpenter's shop
+or looked at his tools.
+
+I have dwelt on this for more reasons than one: first, because a remark
+that seems at first sight the same, namely, that "everything clearly
+perceived may be conveyed in simple common language," without taking in
+the "to whom?" is the disease of the age--an arrogant pusillanimity, a
+hatred of all information that cannot be obtained without thinking; and,
+secondly, because the pretended imperfection of language is often a
+disguise of muddy thoughts; and, thirdly, because to the mind itself it
+is made an excuse for indolence in determining what the fact or truth is
+which is the premise. For whether there does or does not exist a term in
+our present store of words significant thereof--if not, a word must be
+made--and, indeed, all wise men have so acted from Moses to Aristotle
+and from Theophrastus to Linnæus.
+
+The sum, therefore, is this. The conveyal of knowledge by words is in
+direct proportion to the stores and faculties of observation (internal
+or external) of the person who hears or reads them. And this holds
+equally whether I distinguish the green grass from the white lily and
+the yellow crocus, which all who have eyes understand, because all are
+equal to me in the knowledge of the facts signified--or of the
+difference between the apprehensive, perceptive, conceptive, and
+conclusive powers which I might [try to enunciate to] Doctors of
+Divinity and they would translate the words by _Abra Ca Dabra_.
+
+
+[Sidenote: FLOWERS OF SPEECH Sunday, April 30, 1816]
+
+Reflections on my four gaudy flower-pots, compared with the former
+flower-poems. After a certain period, crowded with counterfeiters of
+poetry, and illustrious with true poets, there is formed for common use
+a vast _garden_ of language, all the showy and all the odorous words and
+clusters of words are brought together, and to be plucked by mere
+mechanic and passive memory. In such a state, any man of common poetical
+reading, having a strong desire (to be?--O no! but--) to be thought a
+poet will present a flower-pot gay and gaudy, but the _composition_!
+That is wanting. We carry on judgment of times and circumstances into
+our pleasures. A flower-pot which would have enchanted us before flower
+gardens were common, for the very beauty of the component flowers, will
+be rightly condemned as common-place, out of place (for such is a
+common-place poet)--it involves a contradiction both in terms and
+thought. So Homer's Juno, Minerva, etc., are read with delight--but
+Blackmore? This is the reason why the judgment of those who are newlings
+in poetic reading is not to be relied on. The positive, which belongs to
+all, is taken as the comparative, which is the individual's praise. A
+good ear which had never heard music--with what raptures would it praise
+one of Shield's or Arne's Pasticcios and Centos! But it is the human
+mind it praises, not the individual. Hence it may happen (I believe has
+happened) that fashionableness may produce popularity. "The Beggar's
+Petition" is a fair instance, and what if I dared to add Gray's "Elegy
+in a Country Churchyard"?
+
+
+[Sidenote: SPIRITUAL BLINDNESS]
+
+Men who direct what they call their understanding or common-sense by
+rules abstracted from sensuous experience in moral and super-sensuous
+truths remind one of the zemmi (mus [Greek: typhlos] or _typhlus_), "a
+kind of rat in which the skin (conjunctiva) is not even transparent over
+the eye, but is there covered with hairs as in the rest of the body. The
+eye (= the understanding), which is scarcely the size of the poppy-seed,
+is perfectly useless." An eel (_muroena coecilia_) and the myxine
+(_gastobranchus coecus_) are blind in the same manner, through the
+opacity of the conjunctiva.
+
+
+[Sidenote: INSECTS]
+
+Sir G. Staunton asserts that, in the forests of Java, spiders' webs are
+found of so strong a texture as to require a sharp-cutting instrument to
+make way through them. Pity that he did not procure a specimen and bring
+it home with him. It would be a pleasure to see a sailing-boat rigged
+with them--twisting the larger threads into ropes and weaving the
+smaller into a sort of silk canvas resembling the indestructible white
+cloth of the arindy or _palma Christi_ silkworm.
+
+
+The _Libellulidæ_ fly all ways without needing to turn their
+bodies--onward, backward, right and left--with more than
+swallow-rivalling rapidity of wing, readiness of evolution, and
+indefatigable continuance.
+
+
+The merry little gnats (_Tipulidæ minimæ_) I have myself often watched
+in an April shower, evidently "dancing the hayes" in and out between the
+falling drops, unwetted, or, rather, un-down-dashed by rocks of water
+many times larger than their whole bodies.
+
+
+[Sidenote: OF STYLE Sunday, January 25, 1817]
+
+A valuable remark has just struck me on reading Milton's beautiful
+passage on true eloquence, his apology for Smectymnuus. "For me, reader,
+though I cannot say," etc.--first, to shew the vastly greater numbers
+of admirable passages, in our elder writers, that may be gotten by
+heart as the most exquisite poems; and to point out the great
+intellectual advantage of this reading, over the gliding smoothly on
+through a whole volume of equability. But still, it will be said, there
+is an antiquity, an oddness in the style. Granted; but hear this same
+passage from the Smectymnuus, or this, or this. Every one would know at
+first hearing that they were not written by Gibbon, Hume, Johnson, or
+Robertson. But why? Are they not pure English? Aye! incomparably more
+so! Are not the words precisely appropriate, so that you cannot change
+them without changing the force and meaning? Aye! But are they not even
+now intelligible to man, woman, and child? Aye! there is no
+riddle-my-ree in them. What, then, is it? The unnatural, false, affected
+style of the moderns that makes sense and simplicity _oddness_.
+
+
+[Sidenote: OBDUCTÂ FRONTE SENECTUS]
+
+Even to a sense of shrinking, I felt in this man's face and figure what
+a shape comes to view when age has dried away the mask from a bad,
+depraved man, and flesh and colour no longer conceal or palliate the
+traits of the countenance. Then shows itself the indurated nerve; stiff
+and rigid in all its ugliness the inflexible muscle; then quiver the
+naked lips, the cold, the loveless; then blinks the turbid eye, whose
+glance no longer pliant _fixes_, abides in its evil expression. Then lie
+on the powerless forehead the wrinkles of suspicion and fear, and
+conscience-stung watchfulness. Contrast this with the countenance of
+Mrs. Gillman's mother as she once described it to me. This for "Puff and
+Slander,"[G] Highgate, 1817.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A "KINGDOM-OF-HEAVENITE"]
+
+When the little creature has slept out its sleep and stilled its hunger
+at the mother's bosom (that very hunger a mode of love all made up of
+kisses), and coos, and wantons with pleasure, and laughs, and plays
+bob-cherry with his mother, that is all, all to it. It understands not
+either itself or its mother, but it clings to her, and has an undeniable
+right to cling to her, seeks her, thanks her, loves her without
+forethought and without an afterthought.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A DIVINE EPIGRAM]
+
+_Nec mihi, Christe, tua sufficiunt sine te, nec tibi placent mea sine
+me_, exclaims St. Bernard. _Nota Bene._--This single epigram is worth
+(shall I say--O far rather--is a sufficient antidote to) a waggon-load
+of Paleyan moral and political philosophies.
+
+
+[Sidenote: SERIORES ROSÆ]
+
+We all look up to the blue sky for comfort, but nothing appears there,
+nothing comforts, nothing answers us, and so we die.
+
+
+Lie with the ear upon a dear friend's grave.
+
+
+On the same man, as in a vineyard, grow far different grapes--on the
+sunny south nectar, and on the bleak north verjuice.
+
+
+The blossom gives not only future fruit, but present honey. We may take
+the one, the other nothing injured.
+
+
+Like some spendthrift Lord, after we have disposed of nature's great
+masterpiece and [priceless] heirloom, the wisdom of innocence, we hang
+up as a poor copy our [own base] cunning.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A PLEA FOR SCHOLASTIC TERMS]
+
+The revival of classical literature, like all other revolutions, was not
+an unmixed good. One evil was the passion for pure Latinity, and a
+consequent contempt for the barbarism of the scholastic style and
+terminology. For awhile the schoolmen made head against their
+assailants; but, alas! all the genius and eloquence of the world was
+against them, and by an additional misfortune the scholastic logic was
+professed by those who had no other attainments, namely, the monks, and
+these, from monkishness, were the enemies of all genius and liberal
+knowledge. They were, of course, laughed out of the field as soon as
+they lost the power of aiding their logic by the post-predicaments of
+dungeon, fire, and faggot. Henceforward speculative philosophy must be
+written classically, that is, without technical terms--therefore
+popularly--and the inevitable consequence was that those sciences only
+were progressive which were permitted by the apparent as well as real
+necessity of the case to have a scientific terminology--as mathesis,
+geometry, astronomy and so forth--while metaphysic sank and died, and an
+empirical highly superficial psychology took its place. And so it has
+remained in England to the present day. A man must have felt the pain of
+being compelled to express himself either laxly or paraphrastically
+(which latter is almost as great an impediment in intellectual
+construction as the translation of letters and symbols into the thought
+they represent would be in Algebra), in order to understand how much a
+metaphysician suffers from not daring to adopt the _ivitates_ and
+_eitates_ of the schoolmen as objectivity, subjectivity, negativity,
+positivity. April 29, 1817, Tuesday night.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE BODY OF THIS DEATH]
+
+The sentimental _cantilena_ respecting the benignity and loveliness of
+nature--how does it not sink before the contemplation of the pravity of
+nature, on whose reluctance and inaptness a form is forced (the mere
+reflex of that form which is itself absolute substance!) and which it
+struggles against, bears but for a while and then sinks with the
+alacrity of self-seeking into dust or _sanies_, which falls abroad into
+endless nothings or creeps and cowers in poison or explodes in havock!
+What is the beginning? what the end? And how evident an alien is the
+supernatural in the brief interval!
+
+
+[Sidenote: SPIRITUALISM AND MYSTICISM]
+
+There are many, alas! too many, either born or who have become deaf and
+dumb. So there are too many who have perverted the religion of the
+spirit into the superstition of spirits that mutter and mock and mow,
+like deaf and dumb idiots. Plans of teaching the deaf and dumb have been
+invented. For these the deaf and dumb owe thanks, and we for their
+sakes. _Homines sumus et nihil humani a nobis alienum._ But does it
+follow, therefore, that in _all_ schools these plans of teaching should
+be followed? Yet in the other case this is insisted on--and the Holy
+Ghost must not be our guide because mysticism and ghosts may come in
+under this name. Why? Because the deaf and dumb have been promoted to
+superintendents of education at large for all!
+
+
+[Sidenote: IDEALISM AND SUPERSTITION]
+
+Save only in that in which I have a right to demand of every man that he
+should be able to understand me, the experience or inward witnessing of
+the conscience, and in respect of which every man in real life (even the
+very disputant who affects doubt or denial in the moment of metaphysical
+arguing) would hold himself insulted by the supposition that he did not
+understand it--save in this only, and in that which if it be at all must
+be _unique_, and therefore cannot be supported by an analogue, and
+which, if it be at all, must be first, and therefore cannot have an
+antecedent, and therefore may be _monstrated_, but cannot be
+_de_monstrated.--I am no ghost-seer, I am no believer in apparitions. I
+do not contend for indescribable sensations, nor refer to, much less
+ground my convictions on, blind feelings or incommunicable experiences,
+but far rather contend against these superstitions in the mechanic sect,
+and impeach you as guilty, habitually and systematically guilty, of the
+same. Guilty, I say, of superstitions, which at worst are but exceptions
+and _fits_ in the poor self-misapprehending pietists, with whom, under
+the name mystics, you would fain confound and discredit _all_ who
+receive and worship God in spirit and in truth, and in the former as
+the only possible mode of the latter. According to your own account,
+your own scheme, you know nothing but your own sensations, indescribable
+inasmuch as they are sensations--for the appropriate expression even of
+which we must fly not merely to the indeclinables in the lowest parts of
+speech, but to human articulations that only (like musical notes) _stand
+for_ inarticulate sounds--the [Greek: oi, oi, papai] of the Greek
+tragedies, or, rather, Greek oratorios. You see nothing, but only by a
+sensation that conjures up an image in your own brain, or optic nerve
+(as in a nightmare), have an apparition, in consequence of which, as
+again in the nightmare, you are _forced_ to believe for the moment, and
+are _inclined_ to infer the existence of a corresponding reality out of
+your brain, but by what intermediation you cannot even form an
+intelligible conjecture. During the years of ill-health from disturbed
+digestion, I saw a host of apparitions, and heard them too--but I
+attributed them to an act in my brain. You, according to your own
+showing, see and hear nothing but apparitions in your brain, and
+strangely attribute them to things that _are_ outside your skull. Which
+of the two notions is most like the philosopher, which the
+superstitionist? The philosopher who makes my apparitions nothing but
+apparitions--a brain-image nothing more than a brain-image--and affirm
+_nihil super stare_--or you and yours who vehemently contend that it is
+but a brain-image, and yet cry, "_ast superstitit aliquid. Est super
+stitio alicujus quod in externo, id est, in apparenti non apparet_."
+
+What is outness, external and the like, but either the generalisation of
+apparence or the result of a given degree, a comparative intensity of
+the same? "I see it in my mind's eye," exclaims Hamlet, when his
+thoughts were in his own purview the same phantom, yea! in a higher
+intensity, became his father's ghost and marched along the platform. I
+quoted your own exposition, and dare you with these opinions charge
+others with superstition? You who deny aught permanent in our being, you
+with whom the soul, yea, the soul of the soul, our conscience and
+morality, are but the _tune_ from a fragile barrel-organ played by air
+and water, and whose life, therefore, must of course be a _pointing_
+to--as of a Marcellus or a Hamlet--"Tis here! 'Tis gone!" Were it
+possible that I could actually believe such a system, I should not be
+scared from striking it, from its being so _majestical_!
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE GREATER DAMNATION]
+
+The old law of England punishes those who dig up the bones of the dead
+for superstitious or magical purposes, that is, in order to injure the
+living. What then are they guilty of who uncover the dormitories of the
+departed, and throw their souls into hell, in order to cast odium on a
+living truth?
+
+
+[Sidenote: DARWIN'S BOTANICAL GARDEN]
+
+Darwin possesses the _epidermis_ of poetry but not the _cutis_; the
+_cortex_ without the _liber_, _alburnum_, _lignum_, or _medulla_. And no
+wonder! for the inner bark or _liber_, alburnum, and wood are one and
+the same substance, in different periods of existence.
+
+
+[Sidenote: SEVENTEEN HUNDRED AND SIXTY YARDS NOT EXACTLY A MILE]
+
+"It is a mile and a half in height." "How much is that in yards or
+feet?" The mind rests satisfied in producing a correspondency in its own
+thoughts, and in the exponents of those thoughts. This seems to be a
+matter purely analytic, not yet properly synthetic. It is rather an
+interchange of equivalent acts, but not the same acts. In the yard I am
+prospective; in the mile I seem to be retrospective. Come, a hundred
+strides more, and we shall have come a mile. This, if true, may be a
+subtlety, but is it necessarily a trifle? May not many common but false
+conclusions originate in the neglect of this distinction--in the
+confounding of objective and subjective logic?
+
+
+[Sidenote: OF A TOO WITTY BOOK]
+
+I like salt to my meat so well that I can scarce say grace over meat
+without salt. But salt to one's salt! Ay! a sparkling, dazzling, lit-up
+saloon or subterranean minster in a vast mine of rock-salt--what of
+it?--full of white pillars and aisles and altars of eye-dazzling salt.
+Well, what of it?--'twere an uncomfortable lodging or boarding-house--in
+short, _all my eye_. Now, I am content with a work if it be but my eye
+and Betty Martin, because, having never heard any charge against the
+author of the adage, candour obliges me to conclude that Eliza Martin is
+"sense for certain." In short, never was a metaphor more lucky, apt,
+ramescent, and fructiferous--a hundred branches, and each hung with a
+different graft-fruit--than salt as typical of wit--the uses of both
+being the same, not to nourish, but to season and preserve nourishment.
+Yea! even when there is plenty of good substantial meat to incorporate
+with, stout aitch-bone and buttock, still there may be too much; and
+they who confine themselves to such meals will contract a scorbutic
+habit of intellect (_i.e._, a scurvy taste), and, with loose teeth and
+tender gums, become incapable of chewing and digesting hard matters of
+mere plain thinking.
+
+
+[Sidenote: SPOOKS]
+
+It is thus that the Glanvillians reason. First, they assume the facts as
+objectively as if the question related to the experimentable of our
+senses. Secondly, they take the imaginative possibility--that is, that
+the [assumed] facts involve no contradiction, [as if it were] a
+scientific possibility. And, lastly, they [advocate] them as proofs of
+a spiritual world and our own immortality. This last [I hold to] be the
+greatest insult to conscience and the greatest incongruity with the
+objects of religion.
+
+N.B.--It is amusing, in all ghost stories, etc., that the recorders are
+"the farthest in the world from being credulous," or "as far from
+believing such things as any man."
+
+
+If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower
+presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if
+he found that flower in his hand when he awoke--Aye! and what then?
+
+
+The more exquisite and delicate a flower of joy, the tenderer must be
+the hand that plucks it.
+
+
+Floods and general inundations render for the time even the purest
+springs turbid.
+
+
+For compassion a human heart suffices; but for full, adequate sympathy
+with joy, an angel's.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[Footnote G: A projected satire, of which, perhaps, the lines headed "A
+Character" were an instalment. See _P. W._, 1893, pp. 195-642. _Letters
+of S. T. C._, 1895, ii. 631.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+_1819-1828_
+
+    Where'er I find the Good, the True, the Fair,
+    I ask no names--God's spirit dwelleth there!
+    The unconfounded, undivided Three,
+    Each for itself, and all in each, to see
+    In man and Nature, is Philosophy.
+
+                                         S. T. C.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE MOON'S HALO AN EMBLEM OF HOPE]
+
+The moon, rushing onward through the coursing clouds, advances like an
+indignant warrior through a fleeing army; but the amber halo in which
+she moves--O! it is a circle of Hope. For what she leaves behind her has
+not lost its radiance as it is melting away into oblivion, while, still,
+the other semi-circle catches the rich light at her approach, and
+heralds her ongress.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A COMPLEX VEXATION]
+
+It is by strength of mind that we are to untwist the tie or copula of
+the besom of affliction, which not nature but the strength of
+imagination had twisted round it, and thus resolve it into its component
+twigs, and conquer in detail "one down and t'other come on"! _Dividendo
+diminuitur_--which forms the true ground of the advantage accruing from
+communicating our griefs to another. We enable ourselves to see them
+each in its true magnitude.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF ENGLAND]
+
+After re-perusal of my inefficient, yet not feeble efforts in behalf of
+the poor little white slaves in the cotton-factories, I ask myself, "But
+still are we not better than the other nations of Christendom?"
+Yes--Perhaps. I don't know. I dare not affirm it. Better than the French
+certainly! Mammon _versus_ Moloch and Belial. But Sweden, Norway,
+Germany, the Tyrol? No.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE MEED OF PRAISE]
+
+There is a species of applause scarcely less genial to a poet, whether
+bard, musician, or artist, than the vernal warmth to the feathered
+songsters during their nest-building or incubation--a sympathy, an
+expressed hope, that is the open air in which the poet breathes, and
+without which the sense of power sinks back on itself like a sigh heaved
+up from the tightened chest of a sick man. Alas! alas! alas!
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE GREAT UNKNOWN]
+
+Anonymity is now an artifice to acquire celebrity, as a black veil is
+worn to make a pair of bright eyes more conspicuous.
+
+
+[Sidenote: BOOK-LEARNING FOR LEGISLATORS]
+
+For the same reasons that we cannot now act by impulses, but must think,
+so now must every legislator be a man of sound book-learning, because he
+cannot, if he would, think or act from the simple dictates of unimproved
+but undepraved common sense. Newspapers, reviews, and the conversation
+of men who derive their opinions from newspapers and reviews will secure
+for him artificial opinions, if he does not secure them for himself from
+purer and more authentic sources. There is now no such being as a
+country gentleman. Like their relation, the Dodo, the race is extinct,
+or if by accident one has escaped, it belongs to the Museum, not to
+active life, or the purposes of active life.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THEISM AND ATHEISM]
+
+The more I read and reflect on the arguments of the truly philosophical
+theists and atheists, the more I feel convinced that the ultimate
+difference is a moral rather than an intellectual one, that the result
+is an x y z, an acknowledged insufficiency of the known to account for
+itself, and, therefore, a something unknown--that to which, while the
+atheist leaves it a blank in the understanding, the theist dedicates his
+noblest feelings of love and awe, and with which, by a moral syllogism,
+he connects and unites his conscience and actions. For the words
+goodness and wisdom are clearly only reflexes of the effect, just as
+when we call the unknown cause of cold and heat by the name of its
+effects, and _know_ nothing further. For if we mean that a Being like
+man, with human goodness and intellect, only magnified, is the cause,
+that is, that the First Cause is an immense man (as according to
+Swedenborg and Zinzendorf), then come the insoluble difficulties of the
+incongruity of qualities whose very essence implies finiteness, with a
+Being _ex hypothesi_ infinite.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE MIND'S EYE]
+
+An excellent instance of the abstraction [from objects of the sense]
+that results from the attention converging to any one object, is
+furnished by the oily rags, broken saucers, greasy phials, dabs, crusts,
+and smears of paints in the laboratory of a Raphael, or a Claude
+Lorraine, or a Van Huysum, or any other great master of the beautiful
+and becoming. In like manner, the mud and clay in the modelling hand of
+a Chantrey--what are they to him whose total soul is awake, in his eye
+as a subject, and before his eye as some ideal of beauty _objectively_?
+The various objects of the senses are as little the objects of _his_
+senses, as the ink with which the "Lear" was written, existed in the
+consciousness of a Shakspere.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A LAND OF BLISS]
+
+The humming-moth with its glimmer-mist of rapid unceasing motion before
+the humble-bee within the flowering bells and cups--and the eagle
+_level_ with the clouds, himself a cloudy speck, surveys the vale from
+mount to mount. From the cataract flung on the vale, the broadest
+fleeces of the snowy foam light on the bank flowers or the water-lilies
+in the stiller pool below.
+
+
+[Sidenote: TIME AND ETERNITY]
+
+The defect of Archbishop Leighton's reasoning is the taking eternity for
+a sort of time, a _baro major_, a baron of beef or quarter of lamb, out
+of which and off which time is cut, as a brisket or shoulder--while,
+even in common discourse, without any design of sounding the depth of
+the truth or of weighing the words expressing it in the hair-balance of
+metaphysics, it would be more convenient to consider eternity the _simul
+et totum_ as the _antitheton_ of time.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE LITERARY STERILITY OF ISLAMISM]
+
+The extraordinary florency of letters under the Spanish Caliphate in
+connection with the character and capabilities of Mohammedanism has
+never yet been treated as its importance requires. Halim II, founder of
+the University of Cordova, and of numerous colleges and libraries
+throughout Spain, is said to have possessed a library of six hundred
+thousand MSS., the catalogue filling forty-four volumes. Nor were his
+successors behind him in zeal and munificence. That the prime article of
+Islamism, the uni-personality of God, is one cause of the downfall, say
+rather of the merely meteoric existence of their literary age, I am
+persuaded, but the exclusive scene (in Spain) suggests many interesting
+views. With a learned class Mohammedanism could not but pass into Deism,
+and Deism never did, never can, establish itself as a religion. It is
+the doctrine of the tri-unity that connects Christianity with
+philosophy, gives a positive religion a specific interest to the
+philosopher, and that of redemption to the moralist and psychologist.
+Predestination, in the plenitude, in which it is equivalent to fatalism,
+was the necessary alternative and _succedaneum_ of Redemption, and the
+Incarnation the only preservative against pantheism on one side, and
+anthropomorphism on the other. The Persian (Europeans in Asia) form of
+Mohammedanism is very striking in this point of view.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE SPIRIT OF A PEOPLE]
+
+It is not by individual character that an individual can derive just
+conclusions respecting a community or an age. Conclusions so drawn are
+the excuse of selfish, narrow and pusillanimous statesmen, who, by
+dwelling on the kindred baseness or folly of the persons with whom they
+come in immediate contact, lose all faith in human nature, ignorant that
+even in these a spark is latent which would light up and consume the
+worthless overlay in a national moment. The spirit of a race is the
+character of a people, the sleep or the awakening of which depends on a
+few minds, pre-ordained for this purpose, and sometimes by the mere
+removal of the dead weight of a degenerate Court or nobility pressing on
+the spring. So I doubt not would it be with the Turks, were the Porte
+and its seraglio conquered by Russia. But the spirit of a race ought
+never to be supposed extinct, but on the other hand no more or other
+ought to be expected than the race contains in itself. The true cause of
+the irrecoverable fall of Rome is to be found in the fact, that Rome was
+a city, a handful of men that multiplied its subjects incomparably
+faster than its citizens, so that the latter were soon dilute and lost
+in the former. On a similar principle colonists in modern times
+degenerate by _excision_ from their race (the ancient colonies were
+_buds_). This, I think, applies to the Neapolitans and most of the
+Italian States. A nest of republics keep each other alive; but a
+patchwork of principalities has the effect of excision by insulation, or
+rather by compressure. How long did the life of Germany doze under these
+ligatures! Yet did we not _despair wrongfully_ of the people? The spirit
+of the race survived, of which literature was a part. Hence I dare not
+despair of Greece, because it has been barbarised and enslaved, but not
+split up into puny independent governments under Princes of their own
+race. The Neapolitans have always been a conquered people, and
+degenerates in the original sense of the word, _de genere_--they have
+lost their race, though what it was is uncertain. Lastly, the individual
+in all things is the prerogative of the divine knowledge. What it is,
+our eyes can see only by what it has in common, and this can only be
+seen in communities where neither excision, nor ligature, nor commixture
+exists. Despotism and superstition will not extinguish the character of
+a race, as Russia testifies. But again, take care to understand that
+character, and expect no other fruit than the root contains in its
+nature.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE FLIGHT OF MOHAMMED]
+
+Had I proceeded, in concert with R. Southey, with the "Flight and Return
+of Mohammed," [1799] I had intended to introduce a disputation between
+Mahomet, as the representative of unipersonal Theism with the
+Judaico-Christian machinery of angels, genii, and prophets, an idolater
+with his gods, heroes, and spirits of the departed mighty, and a
+fetish-worshipper who adored the invisible alone, and held no religion
+common to all men or any number of men other than as they chanced at the
+same moment to be acted on by the same influence--even as when a hundred
+ant-hills are in motion under the same burst of sunshine. And, still,
+chiefly for the sake of the last scheme, I should like to do something
+of the kind. My enlightened fetish-divine would have been an Okenist, a
+zoo-magnetist and (a priest of) the night-side of Nature.
+
+[For the fragment entitled "Mahomet," see _P. W._, 1893, p. 139, and
+editor's _Note_, p. 615.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: PRUDENCE _VERSUS_ FRIENDSHIP]
+
+Among the countless arguments against the Paleyans state, this too--Can
+a wise moral legislator have made _prudence_ the true principle-ground,
+and guide of moral conduct, where in almost all cases in which there is
+contemplation to act wrong the first appearances of prudence are in
+favour of immorality, and, in order to ground the contrary on a
+principle of prudence, it is necessary to refine, to calculate, to look
+far onward into an uncertain future? Is this a guide, or primary guide,
+that for ever requires a guide against itself? Is it not a strange
+system which sets prudence against prudence? Compare this with the Law
+of Conscience--Is it not its specific character to be immediate,
+positive, unalterable? In short, _a priori_, state the requisites of a
+moral guide, and apply them first to prudence, and then to the law of
+pure reason or conscience, and ask if we need fear the result if the
+Judge is pure from all bribes and prejudices.
+
+What then are the real dictates of prudence as drawn from every man's
+experience in late manhood, and so lured from the intoxication of
+youth, hope, and love? How cold, how dead'ning, what a dire vacuum they
+would leave in the soul, if the high and supreme sense of duty did not
+form a root out of which new prospects budded. What, I say, is the clear
+dictate of prudence in the matter of friendship? Assuredly to _like_
+only, and never to be so attached as to be stripped naked by the loss. A
+friend may be a great-coat, a beloved a couch, but never, never our
+necessary clothing, our only means of quiet heart-repose! And, yet, with
+this the mind of a generous man would be so miserable, that prudence
+itself would fight against prudence, and advise him to drink off the
+draught of Hope, spite of the horrid and bitter dregs of disappointment,
+with which the draught will assuredly finish.
+
+Though I have said that duty is a consolation, I have not affirmed that
+the scar of the wound of disappointed love and insulted, betrayed
+fidelity would be removed in _this_ life. No! it will not--nay, the very
+duty must for ever keep alive feelings the appropriate objects of which
+are indeed in another world; but yet our human nature cannot avoid at
+times the connection of those feelings with their original or their
+first forms and objects; and so far, therefore, from removing the scar,
+will often and often make the wound open and bleed afresh. But, still,
+we know that the feeling is not objectless, that the counterfeit has a
+correspondent genuine, and this is the comfort.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A POET ON POETRY]
+
+_Canzone XVIII. fra le Rime di Dante_ is a poem of wild and interesting
+images, intended as an enigma, and to me an enigma it remains, spite of
+all my efforts. Yet it deserves transcription and translation. A.D. 1806
+[? 1807].
+
+"Tre donne intorno al cuor mi son venute," &c.
+
+[After the four first lines the handwriting is that of my old, dear, and
+honoured friend, Mr. Wade, of Bristol.--S. T. C.]
+
+_Ramsgate, Sept. 2nd, 1819._--I _begin_ to understand the above poem,
+after an interval from 1805, during which no year passed in which I did
+not reperuse, I might say construe, parse, and spell it, twelve times at
+least--such a fascination had it, spite of its obscurity! It affords a
+good instance, by the bye, of that soul of _universal_ significance in a
+true poet's composition, in addition to the specific meaning.
+
+
+[Sidenote: GREAT AND LITTLE MINDS]
+
+Great minds can and do create the taste of the age, and one of the
+contingent causes which warp the taste of nations and ages is, that men
+of genius in part yield to it, and in part are acted on by the taste of
+the age.
+
+
+Common minds may be compared to the component drops of the stream of
+life--men of genius to the large and small bubbles. What if they break?
+they are still as good as the rest--drops of water.
+
+
+[Sidenote: SUBJECT AND OBJECT]
+
+In youth our happiness is hope; in age the recollection of the hopes of
+youth. What else can there be?--for the substantial mind, for the _I_,
+what else can there be? Pleasure? Fruition? Filter hope and memory from
+pleasure, and the more entire the fruition the more is it the death of
+the _I_. A neutral product results that may exist for others, but no
+longer for itself--a coke or a slag. To make the object one with us, we
+must become one with the object--_ergo, an_ object. _Ergo_, the object
+must be itself a subject--partially a favourite dog, principally a
+friend, wholly God, _the_ Friend. God is Love--that is, an object that
+is absolutely subject (God is a spirit), but a subject that for ever
+condescends to become the object for those that meet Him subjectively.
+[As in the] Eucharist, [He is] verily and truly present to the Faithful,
+neither [by a] _trans_ nor _con_, but [by] _substantiation_.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE THREE ESTATES OF BEING]
+
+We might as well attempt to conceive more than three dimensions of
+space, as to imagine more than three kinds of living existence--God,
+man, and beast. And even of these the last (division) is obscure, and
+scarce endures a fixed contemplation without passing into an unripe or
+degenerated humanity.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A LIFE-LONG ERROR]
+
+My mother told my wife that I was a year younger, and that there was a
+blunder made either in the baptismal register itself or in the
+transcript sent for my admission into Christ's Hospital; and Mrs. C.,
+who is older than myself, believes me only 48. Be this as it may, in
+_life_, if not in years, I am, alas! nearer to 68.
+
+[S. T. C. was born on October 21, 1772. Consequently, on October 20,
+1819, he was not yet forty-seven. He entered his forty-eighth year
+October 21, 1819.]
+
+
+[Sidenote: AN UNWRITTEN SONNET]
+
+N.B.--A sonnet on the child collecting shells and pebbles on the
+sea-shore or lake-side, and carrying each with a fresh shout of delight
+and admiration to the mother's apron, who smiles and assents to each
+"This is pretty!" "Is not that a nice one?" and then when the prattler
+is tired of its _conchozetetic_ labours lifts up her apron and throws
+them out on her apron. Such are our first discoveries both in science
+and philosophy.--S. T. Coleridge, Oct. 21, 1819.
+
+
+[Sidenote: MILTON AND SHAKSPERE]
+
+Found Mr. G. with Hartley in the garden, attempting to explain to
+himself and to Hartley a feeling of a something not present in Milton's
+works, that is, in "Paradise Lost," "Paradise Regained," and "Samson
+Agonistes," which he _did_ feel delightedly in the "Lycidas," and (as I
+added afterwards) in the Italian sonnets compared with the English. And
+this appeared to me to be the _poet_ appearing and wishing to appear as
+the poet, and, likewise, as the man, as much as, though more rare than,
+the father, the brother, the preacher, and the patriot. Compare with
+Milton, Chaucer's "Fall of the Leaf" and Spenser throughout, and you
+cannot but _feel_ what Gillman meant to convey. What is the solution?
+This, I believe--but I must premise that there is a _synthesis_ of
+intellectual insight including the mental object, the organ of the
+correspondent being indivisible, and this (O deep truth!) because the
+objectivity consists in the universality of its subjectiveness--as when
+it _sees_, and millions _see_ even so, and the seeing of the millions is
+what constitutes to _A_ and to each of the millions the _objectivity_ of
+the sight, the equivalent to a common object--a synthesis of _this_, I
+say, and of proper external object which we call _fact_. Now, this it is
+which we find in religion. It is more than philosophical truth--it is
+other and more than historical fact; it is not made up by the addition
+of the one to the other, but it is the _identity_ of both, the
+co-inherence.
+
+Now, this being understood, I proceed to say, using the term objectivity
+(arbitrarily, I grant), for this identity of truth and fact, that Milton
+hid the poetry in or transformed (not trans-substantiated) the poetry
+into this objectivity, while Shakspere, in all things, the divine
+opposite or antithetic correspondent of the divine Milton, transformed
+the objectivity into poetry.
+
+Mr. G. observed as peculiar to the Hamlet, that it alone, of all
+Shakspere's plays, presented to him a moving along _before_ him; while
+in others it was a moving, indeed, but with which he himself moved
+equally in all and with all, and without any external something by which
+the motion was manifested, even as a man would move in a balloon--a
+sensation of motion, but not a sight of moving and having been moved.
+And why is this? Because of all the characters of Shakspere's plays
+Hamlet is the only character with which, by contra-distinction from the
+rest of the _dramatis personæ_, the fit and capable reader identifies
+himself as the representation of his own contemplative and strictly
+proper and very own being (action, etc., belongs to others, the moment
+we call it our own)--hence the events of the play, with all the
+characters, move because you stand still. In the other plays, your
+identity is equally diffused over all. Of no parts can you say, as in
+Hamlet, they are moving. But ever it is _we_, or that period and portion
+of human action, which is unified into a dream, even as in a dream the
+personal unity is diffused and severalised (divided to the sight though
+united in the dim feeling) into a sort of reality. Even so [it is with]
+the styles of Milton and Shakspere--the same weight of effect from the
+exceeding _felicity_ (subjectively) of Shakspere, and the exceeding
+_propriety_ (_extra arbitrium_) of Milton.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A ROYAL ROAD TO KNOWLEDGE]
+
+The best plan, I think, for a man who would wish his mind to continue
+growing is to find, in the first place, some means of ascertaining for
+himself whether it does or no; and I can think of no better than early
+in life, say after three-and-twenty, to procure gradually the works of
+some two or three great writers--say, for instance, Bacon, Jeremy
+Taylor, and Kant, with the _De Republicâ_, _De Legibus_, the _Sophistes_
+and _Politicus_ of Plato, and the _Poetics_, _Rhetorics_, and _Politics_
+of Aristotle--and amidst all other reading, to make a point of
+reperusing some one, or some weighty part of some one of these every
+four or five years, having from the beginning a separate note-book for
+each of these writers, in which your impressions, suggestions,
+conjectures, doubts and judgments are to be recorded with date of each,
+and so worded as to represent most sincerely the exact state of your
+convictions at the time, such as they would be if you did not (which
+this plan will assuredly make you do sooner or later) anticipate a
+change in them from increase of knowledge. "It is possible that I am in
+the wrong, but so it now appears to me, after my best attempts; and I
+must therefore put it down in order that I may find myself so, if so I
+am." It would make a little volume to give in detail all the various
+moral as well as intellectual advantages that would result from the
+systematic observation of the plan. Diffidence and hope would
+reciprocally balance and excite each other. A continuity would be given
+to your being, and its progressiveness ensured. All your knowledge
+otherwise obtained, whether from books or conversation or experience,
+would find centres round which it would organise itself. And, lastly,
+the habit of confuting your past self, and detecting the causes and
+occasions of your having mistaken or overlooked the truth, will give you
+both a quickness and a winning kindness, resulting from sympathy, in
+exposing the errors of others, as if you were an _alter ego_, of his
+mistake. And such, indeed, will your antagonist appear to you, another
+past self--in all points in which the falsity is not too plainly a
+derivation from a corrupt heart and the predominance of bad passion or
+worldly interests overlaying the love of truth as truth. And even in
+this case the liveliness with which you will so often have expressed
+yourself in your private note-books, in which the words, unsought for
+and untrimmed because intended for your own eye, exclusively, were the
+first-born of your first impressions, when you were either enkindled by
+admiration of your writer, or excited by a humble disputing with him
+reimpersonated in his book, will be of no mean rhetorical advantage to
+you, especially in public and extemporary debate or animated
+conversation.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE IDEA OF GOD]
+
+Did you deduce your own being? Even that is less absurd than the conceit
+of deducing the Divine being? Never would you have had the notion, had
+you not had the idea--rather, had not the idea worked in you like the
+memory of a name which we cannot recollect and yet feel that we have and
+which reveals its existence in the mind only by a restless anticipation
+and proves its _a priori_ actuality by the almost explosive
+instantaneity with which it is welcomed and recognised on its
+re-emersion out of the cloud, or its re-ascent from the horizon of
+consciousness.
+
+
+[Sidenote: APHORISMS AND ADAGES]
+
+I should like to know whether or how far the delight I feel, and have
+always felt, in adages or aphorisms of universal or very extensive
+application is a general or common feeling with men, or a peculiarity of
+my own mind. I cannot describe how much pleasure I have derived from
+"Extremes meet," for instance, or "Treat everything according to its
+nature," and, the last, "Be"! In the last I bring all inward rectitude
+to its test, in the former all outward morality to its rule, and in the
+first all problematic results to their solution, and reduce apparent
+contraries to correspondent opposites. How many hostile tenets has it
+enabled me to contemplate as fragments of truth, false only by negation
+and mutual exclusion?
+
+
+[Sidenote: IGNORE THYSELF July 12, 1822]
+
+I have myself too often of late used the phrase "rational self-love" the
+same as "enlightened self-love." O no more of this! What have love,
+reason or light to do with _self_, except as the dark and evil spirit
+which it is given to them to overcome! _Soul-love_, if you please. O
+there is more stuff of thought in our simple and pious fore-elders'
+adjuration, "Take pity of your poor soul!" than in all the volumes of
+Paley, Rochefoucauld, and Helvetius!
+
+
+[Sidenote: RUGIT LEO]
+
+N.B.--The injurious manner in which men of genius are treated, not only
+as authors, but even when they are in social company. _A_ is believed to
+be, or talked of as, a man of unusual talent. People are anxious to
+meet him. If he says little or nothing, they wonder at the report, never
+considering whether they themselves were fit either to excite, or if
+self-excited to receive and comprehend him. But with the simplicity of
+genius he attributes more to them than they have, and they put questions
+that cannot be answered but by a return to first principles, and then
+they complain of him as not conversing, but lecturing. "He is quite
+intolerable," "Might as well be hearing a sermon." In short, in answer
+to some objection, _A_ replies, "Sir, this rests on the distinction
+between an _idea_ and an _image_, and, likewise, its difference from a
+perfect _conception_." "Pray, sir, explain." Because he does not and
+cannot [state the case as concisely as if he had been appealed to about
+a hand at] whist, 'tis "Lord! how long he talks," and they never ask
+themselves, Did this man force himself into your company? Was he not
+dragged into it? What is the practical result? That the man of genius
+should live as much as possible with beings that simply love him, from
+relationship or old association, or with those that have the same
+feelings with himself; but in all other company he will do well to cease
+to be the man of genius, and make up his mind to appear dull or
+commonplace as a companion, to be the most silent except upon the most
+trivial subjects of any in the company, to turn off questions with a
+joke or a pun as not suiting a wine-table, and to trust only to his
+writings.
+
+
+[Sidenote: A BROKEN HEART]
+
+Few die of a _broken heart_, and these few (the surgeons tell us) know
+nothing of it, and, dying suddenly, leave to the dissector the first
+discovery. O this is but the shallow remark of a hard and unthinking
+prosperity! Have you never seen a stick broken in the middle, and yet
+cohering by the rind? The fibres, half of them actually broken and the
+rest sprained and, though tough, unsustaining? O many, many are the
+broken-hearted for those who know what the moral and practical heart of
+the man is!
+
+
+[Sidenote: VOX HIEMALIS Thursday, Sept. 30, 1824]
+
+Now the breeze through the stiff and brittle-becoming foliage of the
+trees counterfeits the sound of a rushing stream or water-flood suddenly
+sweeping by. The sigh, the modulated continuousness of the murmur is
+exchanged for the confusion of overtaking sounds--the self-evolution of
+the One, for the clash or stroke of ever-commencing contact of the
+multitudinous, without interspace, by confusion. The short gusts rustle
+and the ear feels the unlithesome dryness, before the eye detects the
+coarser, duller, though deeper green, deadened and not [yet] awakened
+into the hues of decay--echoes of spring from the sepulchral vault of
+winter. The aged year, conversant with the forms of its youth and
+forgetting all the intervals, feebly reproduces them [as it were, from],
+memory.
+
+
+[Sidenote: CONSTANCY Friday, June 9, 1826]
+
+"Constancy lives in realms above." This exclusion of constancy from the
+list of earthly virtues may be a poet's exaggeration, but, certainly, it
+is of far rarer occurrence in _all_ relations of life than the young and
+warm-hearted are willing to believe, but in cases of _exclusive_
+attachment (that is, in Love, properly so-called, and yet distinct from
+Friendship), and in the _highest_ form of the Virtue, it is _so_ rare
+that I cannot help doubting whether an instance of _mutual_ constancy in
+effect ever existed. For there are two sorts of constancy, the one
+negative, where there is no _transfer_ of affection, where the bond of
+attachment is not broken though it may be attenuated to a thread--this
+may be met with, not so seldom, and, where there is goodness of heart,
+it may be expected--but the other sort, or _positive_ constancy, where
+the affection endures in the same intensity with the same or increased
+tenderness and _nearness_, of this it is that I doubt whether once in an
+age an instance occurs where _A_ feels it toward _B_, and _B_ feels it
+towards _A_, and _vice versâ_.
+
+
+[Sidenote: FLOWERS AND LIGHT April 18, 1826]
+
+Spring flowers, I have observed, look best in the day, and by sunshine:
+but summer and autumnal flower-pots by lamp or candle-light. I have now
+before me a flower-pot of cherry-blossoms, polyanthuses, double violets,
+periwinkles, wall-flowers, but how dim and dusky they look! The scarlet
+anemone is an exception, and three or four of them with all the rest of
+the flower-glass sprays of white blossoms, and one or two periwinkles
+for the sake of the dark green leaves, green stems, and flexible elegant
+form, make a lovely group both by sun and by candle-light.
+
+
+Grove, Highgate.
+
+[Sidenote: THE BREATH OF SPRING Feb. 28, 1827]
+
+What an interval! Heard the singing birds this morning in our garden for
+the first time this year, though it rained and blew fiercely; but the
+long frost has broken up, and the wind, though fierce, was warm and
+westerly.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE IDEA OF LIFE May 5, 1827]
+
+To the right understanding of the most awfully _concerning_ declaration
+of Holy Writ there has been no greater obstacle than the want of insight
+into the nature of Life--what it is and what it is not. But in order to
+this, the mind must have been raised to the contemplation of the
+_Idea_--the life celestial, to wit--or the distinctive essence and
+character of the Holy Spirit. Here Life is _Love_--communicative,
+outpouring love. _Ergo_, the terrestrial or the Life of Nature ever the
+shadow and opposite of the Divine is appropriative, absorbing
+_appetence_. But the great mistake is, that the soul cannot continue
+without life; for, if so, with what propriety can the portion of the
+reprobate soul be called Death? What if the natural life have two
+possible terminations--true Being and the falling back into the dark
+Will?
+
+
+[Sidenote: A COMPREHENSIVE FORMULA]
+
+The painter-parson, Rev. Mr. Judkin, is about to show off a Romish
+priest converted to the Protestant belief, on Sunday next at his church,
+and asked of me (this day, at Mr. Gray's, Friday, 27th July, 1827)
+whether I knew of any form of recantation but that of Archbishop
+Tenison. I knew nothing of Tenison's or any other, but expressed my
+opinion that no other recantation ought to be required than a
+declaration that he admitted no outward authority superior to, or
+co-ordinate with, the canonical Scriptures, and no interpreter that
+superseded or stood in the place of the Holy Spirit, enlightening the
+mind of each true believer, according to his individual needs. I can
+conceive a person holding all the articles that distinguish the Romish
+from the Protestant conception, with this one exception; and, yet, if he
+did make this exception, and professed to believe them, because he
+thought they were contained in, or to be fairly inferred from, right
+reason and the Scriptures, I should consider him as true a Protestant
+as Luther, Knox, or Calvin, and a far better than Laud and his
+compeers, however meanly I might think of him as a philosopher and
+theologian. The laying so great a stress on transubstantiation I have
+long regarded as the great calamity or error of the Reformation--if not
+constrained by circumstances, the great _error_--or, if constrained, the
+great _calamity_.
+
+
+[Sidenote: THE NIGHT IS AT HAND August 1, 1828]
+
+The sweet prattle of the chimes--counsellors pleading in the court of
+Love--then the clock, the solemn sentence of the mighty Judge--long
+pause between each pregnant, inappellable word, too deeply weighed to be
+reversed in the High-Justice-Court of Time and Fate. A more richly
+solemn sound than this eleven o'clock at Antwerp I never heard--dead
+enough to be opaque as central gold, yet clear enough to be the mountain
+air.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX OF PROPER NAMES
+
+
+    _Abergavenny, The_, 132
+
+    Achilles, 25
+
+    Adam, 51
+
+    Adar River, 261
+
+    Africa, 70, 71
+
+    Alexander the Great, 256
+
+    Alfieri, 230
+
+    Allen, Robert, 139, 140 _n_
+
+    Allston, Washington, 167, 175
+
+    Anacreon, 183, 263
+
+    Antonio, St., 78
+
+    Antwerp, 307
+
+    Aphrodite, 192
+
+    Apollo, 110
+
+    Ariosto, 151, 230
+
+    Aristotle, 183, 222, 268, 298
+
+    Arne, 270
+
+    Arrian, 183
+
+    Augustine, St., 179
+
+
+    Bacon, F. (Lord Verulam), 21, 79, 151, 177, 183, 298
+
+    Ball, Sir Alexander, 206
+
+    Ball, Lady, 92
+
+    Barrow, J., 26, 47
+
+    Bassenthwaite, 18
+
+    Barclay, W. ("Argenis"), 207
+
+    Beaumont, Francis, 207
+
+    Beaumont, Sir George, 67, 79, 145
+
+    Beaumont, Lady, 67
+
+    Beddoes, Thomas, M.D., 239 _n_
+
+    Bentham, 127
+
+    Berkeley, Bishop, 183
+
+    Bernard, Saint, 273
+
+    Bernouilli, 152
+
+    Beverley, 94
+
+    Blackmore, 24, 270
+
+    Blount, Sir Edward, 63
+
+    Blumenbach, 67
+
+    Boccaccio, 46
+
+    Bonnet, 152
+
+    Borrowdale, 34, 35, 52
+
+    Bosch, 182
+
+    Boyer, J., 14
+
+    Brandelhow, 46
+
+    Bristol, 293 _n_
+
+    Brunck, 182
+
+    Brougham, Lord, 250
+
+    Brown, Dr. J., 14
+
+    Browne, William, 158 and _n_
+
+    Bruno, Giordano, 16, 17 _n_, 72, 73, 151
+
+    Buffon, 209
+
+    Buonaparte, 75
+
+    Burdett, Sir F., 174, 255
+
+    Burton, Robert, 25
+
+
+    Cain, 51
+
+    Cairns, M. J., 9
+
+    Calvin, 307
+
+    Cambridge, 214
+
+    Campbell, T., 156
+
+    Campeachy, Bay of, 208
+
+    Caracciolo, 87
+
+    Caernarvon Castle, 71
+
+    Castle Crag, 34
+
+    Castlerigg, 43
+
+    Catullus, 165
+
+    Cecilia, St., 200
+
+    Ceres, 110
+
+    Cervantes, 152
+
+    Chantrey, 286
+
+    Charlemagne, 170
+
+    Chartreuse, 119
+
+    Chaucer, 296
+
+    Chersites, Theodoras, 21
+
+    China, 29, 132, 151
+
+    Christ's Hospital, 46, 295
+
+    Cicero, 23 _n_
+
+    Circe, 192
+
+    Clarkson, Thomas, 24
+
+    Clarkson, Mrs., 167
+
+    Claudian, 165
+
+    Clotharius, 211
+
+    Cobbett, W., 76, 255
+
+    Cochrane (Earl of Dundonald). 237
+
+    Coleorton, 171 _n_
+
+    Coleridge, Berkeley, 120
+
+    Coleridge, Derwent, 18, 29, 120
+
+    Coleridge, Hartley, 3, 13, 15, 24, 40, 41, 65, 66, 96, 135, 296
+
+    Coleridge, Colonel James, 158 _n_.
+
+    Coleridge, S. T., 9, 23 _n_, 64 _n_, 75 _n_, 103, 140 _n_, 157 and _n_,
+    158 _n_, 169, 177 _n_, 195 _n_, 196 _n_, 203 _n_, 211 _n_, 225 _n_,
+    236 _n_, 242 _n_, 246 _n_, 248 _n_, 263 _n_, 273 _n_, 293 _n_,
+    295 and _n_
+
+    Coleridge, Sara (Mrs. S. T.), 9, 218, 295
+
+    Coleridge, Sara (Mrs. H. N. Coleridge), 120, 208 _n_.
+
+    Collins, 5
+
+    Combe, S., 129
+
+    Combe Satchfield, 158 _n_.
+
+    Condillac, 79
+
+    Constantine, Budæo-Tusan, 182
+
+    Cordova, 287
+
+    Cottle, Joseph, 60, 86, 235
+
+    _Courier_ Office, 193, 203 _n_
+
+    Cowper, William, 121, 128
+
+    Cuthill, Mr., 182, 183
+
+
+    Dampier, Travels of, 208
+
+    Dante, 25, 151, 229, 230, 293
+
+    Daphnis, D'Orvilles, 183
+
+    Darwin, Dr., 5, 92, 151, 280
+
+    David, King, 235
+
+    Davy, Sir H., 218
+
+    Dennison, Mr., 144, 146
+
+    De Quincey, 177 _n_, 183
+
+    Diogenes, 97
+
+    Domitian, 159
+
+    Drayton, 154
+
+    Dresden, 85
+
+    Dryden, 159
+
+    Duke Richard, 158 _n_
+
+    Dundas (Lord Melville), 151
+
+    Durham, 35, 36
+
+    Dyer, George, 9 _n_, 67
+
+
+    Edgeworth, Miss, 117
+
+    Elizabeth, Queen, 231
+
+    Empedocles, 163
+
+    Eolus, 193
+
+    Epictetus, 183
+
+    Erigena, Joannes Scotus, 58
+
+    Escot, 157 _n_
+
+    Etna, 114
+
+    Euphormio, 207
+
+    Exeter, 67
+
+
+    Favell, 28 _n_
+
+    Fay, Benedict, 154
+
+    Fénelon, 133
+
+    Fichte, 106, 133, 169, 183
+
+    Fielding, 166, 167
+
+    Flaminius, 207, 263
+
+    Fletcher, John, 207
+
+    Fracastorius, 148, 207, 263
+
+    France, 75, 119, 120, 152
+
+
+    Geddes, Dr. Alexander, 109 _n_
+
+    Geneva, Lake of, 261
+
+    Genoa, 7
+
+    Germany, 8 _n_, 151, 169, 284, 289
+
+    Gibbon, 272
+
+    Gillman, James, 296, 297
+
+    Gillman, Mrs., 273
+
+    Glanvillians, The, 281
+
+    Godwin, W., 13, 66, 68
+
+    Goethe, 229
+
+    Göttingen, 67
+
+    Grasmere, 76, 132
+
+    Gray, Thomas, 5, 270
+
+    Greece, 110, 177, 206, 289
+
+    Greenough, 68
+
+    Greta River, 19, 29, 43, 44
+
+    Greta Hall, 218 _n_
+
+    Greville, Fulk, 17
+
+    Grysdale Pike, 19, 46
+
+    Guarini, 191
+
+    Guyon, Madame, 133, 152
+
+
+    Haarlem, 67
+
+    Halim II., 287
+
+    Hamburg, 101
+
+    Harrington, J., 79, 151
+
+    Hartz, 211 and _n_
+
+    Hayley, 151
+
+    Hazlitt, W., 9, 35, 36
+
+    Hebrides, 129
+
+    Helvellyn, 52
+
+    Helvetius, 301
+
+    Henry, Prince, 158
+
+    Herbert's, St., Island, 32
+
+    Hobbes, 13, 183
+
+    Holcroft, 66, 68
+
+    Homer, 207, 270
+
+    Horace, 176
+
+    Hume, David, 24, 79, 102, 151, 272
+
+    Huss, 215
+
+    Hutchinson, Mary (Mrs. Wordsworth), 8 _n_, 20
+
+    Hutchinson, Sarah, 8 _n_
+
+
+    India, 132
+
+    Ireland, 177
+
+    Italy, 152, 229
+
+
+    Java, 271
+
+    Jennings, J., 60
+
+    Johnson, Dr., 115, 151, 155, 272
+
+    Jonson, Ben, 207
+
+    Judkin, Rev. Mr., 306
+
+
+    Kant, 12, 106, 151, 169, 183
+
+    Keswick, 54 _n_, 101
+
+    Klopstock, 101, 229
+
+    Knox, John, 164, 307
+
+
+    Lamb, Charles, 66, 140 _n_.
+
+    Latrigg, 60 _n_
+
+    Laud, 307
+
+    Lavater, 223
+
+    Leckie, 183
+
+    Leibnitz, 147, 151, 152, 183
+
+    Leighton, 287
+
+    Lessing, 151
+
+    Linnæus, 268
+
+    Lloyd, Charles, 107
+
+    Lloyd, David, 230
+
+    Locke, 24, 151, 155, 183, 185
+
+    Loch Leven, 208
+
+    Lodore, 34
+
+    London, 9, 28, 194
+
+    Lorraine, Claude, 286
+
+    Lupus, 211
+
+    Luther, 11, 152, 215, 239, 307
+
+    Lyceum, 193
+
+    Lyonnet, 94
+
+
+    Mackintosh, Sir J., 6, 126, 198
+
+    Malone, E., 88, 89 _n_
+
+    Malta, 75 _n_, 83, 87, 98, 104, 107, 130, 140 _n_, 144, 187, 197
+
+    Malthus, Rev. J., 64
+
+    Marathon, 74 _n_
+
+    Marini, G. B., 191
+
+    Martial, 159
+
+    Massinger, 207
+
+    Mediterranean, 85, 109
+
+    Metastasio, 166, 229
+
+    Middleton, Sir Hugh, 250
+
+    Milton, 14, 24, 72, 73, 120, 151, 152, 159, 161, 215 _n_, 229, 253,
+    271, 296, 297, 298
+
+    Mohammed, 290, 291 _n_.
+
+    Molière, 152
+
+    Montagu, Basil, 218 _n_.
+
+    Moses, 9, 268
+
+    Mylius, Johann Christoph., 96
+
+
+    Naples, King of, 87
+
+    Naucratius, 21
+
+    Nelson, Lord, 237
+
+    Newlands, 52
+
+    Newmarket, 168
+
+    New River, 168
+
+    Newton, Sir Isaac, 214
+
+    Nile, 20
+
+    Norway, 284
+
+
+    Okenist, An, 291
+
+    Orleans, 211
+
+    Otter River, 29
+
+    Otterton, 158 _n_
+
+    Ottery St. Mary, 29, 157 _n_, 158 _n_
+
+    Ovid, 165
+
+
+    Paine, Tom, 226
+
+    Paley, Archdeacon, 35, 151, 155, 265, 301
+
+    Paracelsus, 14, 232
+
+    Parisatis, 176
+
+    Parkinson (_Theatrum Botanicum_), 59
+
+    Pascal, 152
+
+    Pasley, Captain, 145, 154
+
+    Paul, Jean (Richter), 235
+
+    Paul, St., 93, 163
+
+    Penelope, Nature a, 100
+
+    Peter, St., 215
+
+    Petrarch, 262, 263 _n_
+
+    Picts, The, 129
+
+    Pindar, 168
+
+    Pitt, 151
+
+    Plato, 31, 133, 183, 298
+
+    Plotinus, 48, 49, 183
+
+    Polyclete, 192
+
+    Poole, T., 70, 153
+
+    Pope, 151, 166, 233
+
+    Porphyry, 183
+
+    Port Royal, 208
+
+    Porte, The, 289
+
+    Portugal, 140 _n_
+
+    Price, Dr., 167
+
+    Priestley, Dr., 151, 155
+
+    Prince, The Black, 71
+
+    Proclus, 17, 63, 183
+
+    Proserpine, 110
+
+    Psyche, 89, 109, 142
+
+    Pygmalion, 192
+
+    Pyramids, The, 258
+
+    Pythagoras, 55, 231
+
+
+    Quintilian, 23 _n_
+
+
+    Raleigh, Sir W., 148, 250
+
+    Raphael, 286
+
+    Ray (or Wray), John, 35, 36
+
+    Reignia, Captain, 89
+
+    Reimarus, Herman Samuel, 91 _n_, 92
+
+    Rhone River, 261
+
+    Richardson, Samuel, 166, 167
+
+    Rickman, J., 67
+
+    Robertson, William, 272
+
+    Rochefoucauld, 301
+
+    Rock, Captain (son of), 208
+
+    Rogers, Samuel, 156
+
+    Rome, Church of, 58, 124, 215
+
+    Rome, 110, 129, 206, 289
+
+    Russia, 170, 289
+
+
+    Scapula, 182
+
+    Scarlett (James Lord Abinger), 198
+
+    Schelling, 169, 183
+
+    Schiller, 150, 161, 181, 211 _n_, 229
+
+    Scott, Sir Walter, 74 _n_
+
+    Scotus, Duns, 222
+
+    Sens, 211
+
+    Shakspere, 21, 24, 71, 72, 73, 88, 89 _n_, 97, 108, 115, 127, 128, 145,
+    147, 150, 151, 152, 161, 180, 286, 297, 298
+
+    Sharp, Grenville, 250
+
+    Sharp, Richard, 158, 198
+
+    Sheridan, R. B., 41, 177
+
+    Shield, 270
+
+    Sidney, Sir Philip, 17, 151
+
+    Simonides, 163
+
+    Skiddaw, 18, 19, 52
+
+    Smith, Robert, 198
+
+    Smith, Sydney, 198
+
+    Sorel, Dr., 107
+
+    Sotheby, William, 53
+
+    South, 47
+
+    Southey, 6, 28 _n_, 36, 107, 158 _n_, 221, 290
+
+    Spain, 70, 152, 287
+
+    Spenser, 296
+
+    Spinoza, 57, 81, 183
+
+    Staunton, Sir G., 271
+
+    Stephen's, St., 211
+
+    Stephen's Thesaurus, 182
+
+    Stewart, Sir James, 1
+
+    Stoddart (Dr. afterwards Sir J.), 74, 75 _n_, 107, 140 _n_, 167
+
+    Stowey, Upper, 143
+
+    Stowey, Nether, 60 _n_
+
+    Strabo, Geographicus, 179
+
+    Strada, Prolusions of, 183
+
+    Strozzi, Giambatista, 225
+
+    Stuart, Daniel, 195
+
+    Sweden, 284
+
+    Swedenborg, 286
+
+    Swift, Dean, 24, 151, 164
+
+    Swinside, 19
+
+    Switzerland, 129
+
+    Syracuse, 95
+
+
+    Tantalus, 234
+
+    Taylor, Dorothy, 158 _n_
+
+    Taylor, Frances, 158 _n_
+
+    Taylor, Jeremy, 12, 20, 76, 298
+
+    Taylor, Thomas, 17
+
+    Teme, Valley of, 26
+
+    Tenison, Archbishop, 306
+
+    Theophrastus, 268
+
+    Tiberius, 37
+
+    Tibullus, 165
+
+    Tobin, J., 68, 139, 140 _n_
+
+    Tyrol, The, 284
+
+
+    Underwood, Mr., 68
+
+    Unzer, D., 94
+
+
+    Valetta, 75 _n_, 144
+
+    Van Huysum, 286
+
+    Varrius, 134
+
+    Vida, 263
+
+    Vincent, Captain, 134
+
+    Virgil, 263
+
+    Virginia, 94
+
+    Voltaire, 152
+
+    Voss, 151, 229
+
+    Vossius, 134
+
+
+    Wade, Mr., 293 _n_
+
+    Wedgwood, T., 27, 91
+
+    Whinlatter, 46, 50
+
+    White, Mr. (of Clare Hall, Camb.), 225
+
+    Wickliffe, 215
+
+    Wieland, 229
+
+    Wilberforce, 250
+
+    Willoughby, Lord, 231
+
+    Wilson, John, 60 _n_
+
+    Windybrow, 60 _n_
+
+    Withop Fells, 47
+
+    Wollstonecraft, Mary, 66
+
+    Wordsworth, Dorothy, 60 _n_
+
+    Wordsworth, John, 132
+
+    Wordsworth, William, 4, 10 _n_, 30, 35, 36, 60 _n_, 70, 71,
+    79, 101, 131, 137, 138 _n_, 147, 151, 163, 169, 171 _n_,
+    201 _n_, 207, 208 _n_, 221, 251 _n_
+
+    Wyndham, 41, 237
+
+
+    Zinzendorf, 286
+
+
+
+
+INDEX OF TITLES
+
+NOTE.--_Brief paragraphs and sentences to which no title has been given,
+in the text will be found indexed under the following headings._
+
+
+    Abstruse Research, 53-56
+
+    Anecdotes, A Sheaf of, 66-68
+
+    Aphorisms and Pithy Sentences, 253-256
+
+    Comparisons and Contrasts, 5-7
+
+    Country and Town, 28-29
+
+    Dreams and Shadows, 172-173
+
+    Duty and Experience, 2-3
+
+    For the _Soother in Absence_, 84-85; 86-87; 95-97; 99-100; 115-118;
+    147-150; 159-161; 162-165; 175-180
+
+    Hints for _The Friend_, 209, 210; 221-223; 230-233
+
+    Observations and Reflections, 17-21
+
+    _Seriores Rosæ_, 274
+
+    Things Visible and Invisible, 7-14
+
+    Thoughts, a Crowd of, 58-61
+
+    Thoughts and Fancies, 22-25
+
+    Transcripts from my Velvet Pocket Books, 26-28
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+    _Abstruse Research_, 53-55
+      Face, the phantom of, 54
+      Eye-spectra, 55
+      Reluctance of mind to analyse, 53
+      Soul within the body. Window at Keswick, 54
+
+    A bliss, &c., 264
+
+    Adam's death, 51
+
+    Alas! they had been friends, &c., 62
+
+    Allston, To, 169
+
+    All thoughts, all passions, &c., 224
+
+    A man's a man, &c., 51
+
+    Analogy, 89-91
+
+    Anecdote, a genuine, 218
+
+    _Anecdotes, a Sheaf of_, 66-68
+      Beaumont, Sir G., and gauze spectacles, 67
+      Beaumont, Lady, her prayers, 67
+      Göttingen and the _hospes_, 67
+      Godwin, Holcroft, and Underwood, 68
+      Holcroft and M. Wollstonecraft, 66
+      Exeter, the organ pipe, 67
+      Lamb, Charles, a call upon, 66
+      Rickman and George Dyer, 67
+
+    Anticipations in Nature, &c., 136
+
+    Aphorisms and Adages, 300-301
+
+    _Aphorisms and Pithy Sentences_, 253-256
+      Bookmaking, 256
+      Burdett, Sir Francis, 255
+      Catamaran, man compared with, 253
+      Convalescence without love, 254
+      Half-reconciliation, 254
+      Hunter, the light of his torch, 255
+      Love, inspired by superiority, 253
+      Money, the depreciation of, 254
+      Peninsulating river, 255
+      Philosophy, its plummet-line, 255
+      Sun, the rosy fingers of, 254
+      Vision and appetite, 255
+
+    Architecture and Climate, 194
+
+    Art, the pyramid in, 98
+      An afterthought, 99
+
+    As the sparks fly upward, 110
+
+    Ascend a step, etc., 158-159
+
+    Aspiration, a pious, 213
+
+    Association, 226
+
+    Association, of streamy, 55
+
+    A time to cry out, 220-221
+
+    Attention and sensation, 128
+
+    _Auri sacra fames_, 44
+
+    Ave Phoebe Imperator, 63
+
+
+    Being, the three estates of, 294
+
+    Bells, concerning, 210-212
+      Clotharius, 211
+      Latin distichs, 210
+      Names of bells, 211
+      Passing bells, 211
+      Waggon-horse, &c., in the Hartz, 211
+      Note on Schiller's 'Song of the Bell,' &c., 211
+
+    Bibliological memoranda, 182-183
+
+    Bird, the captive, 193
+
+    Birds caged, especially the robin, 194
+
+    Bliss, a land of, 286-287
+
+    Book-knowledge and experience, 129
+
+    Book-learning for legislators, 285
+
+    Books in the air, 206-207
+
+    Bright October, 34
+
+    Browne, William, of Ottery and Note, 157-158
+
+    Bruno, Giordano, 16, 17
+
+    Bulls in action, 156
+
+    But love is indestructible, 250
+
+
+    Candour another name for cant, 75
+
+    Catholic reunion, 215
+
+    Cast not your pearls, &c., 80-81
+
+    Ceres, the conversion of, 110
+
+    _C'est magnifique_, etc., 258
+
+    Children of a larger growth, 204
+
+    Christabel, a hint for, 223
+
+    Chymical analogies, 204-206
+
+    Clerical errors, the psychology of, 181-182
+
+    _Cogitare est laborare_, 66
+
+    Communicable, the, 32
+
+    _Comparisons and Contrasts_, 5-7
+      Constitution, the, and rotten cheese, 6
+      Eyes, meaning glances from, 6
+      Genoa, "Liberty" on prisons of, 7
+      Gratitude, the curse of, 7
+      Intellect, snails of, 6
+      Mackintosh, the style of, 6
+      Malice, 6
+      Minds, pygmy, 6
+      Poetry, the effect of, 5
+      Sot, the prayer of, 7
+      Southey, an ostrich, 6
+      Trout, his likeness to, 5
+      Truth, the blindness of, 7
+      Two dew-drops, 6
+      Worldly-minded men, like owls, 7
+
+    Columba, St., 129
+
+    Conceits, verbal, 108
+
+    Conscience and immortality, 201-3
+
+    Constancy, etc., 304
+
+    Conversation, his, a nimiety, &c., 103-104
+
+    Converts, the intolerance of, 74
+
+    _Corruptio optimi pessima_, 92, 263
+
+    Cottle, an apology for, 86
+
+    Cottle, free version of the Psalms, 235
+
+    _Country and Town_, 28-29
+      Calf-lowing, a reminiscence of Ottery, 29
+      Coloured bottles, reflections of, 28
+      Country, depraving effect of, 25
+      Lecture, dream concerning a, 29
+      Smiles on men and mountains, 29
+      Stones like life, and life motionless as stones, 28
+
+    Critics, immature, 128
+
+    Criticism, a principle of, 30
+
+    Criticism, minute, 167
+
+
+    Darwin's "Botanical Garden," 280
+
+    Death, the realisation of, 139-140
+
+    Delusion, an optical, 47
+
+    Devil, the, with a memory, 161-162
+
+    Devil, the, a recantation, 259-260
+
+    Distemper's worst calamity, 126-127
+
+    Distinction in union, 184
+
+    _Document humain_, 168
+
+    Dream, a, and a parenthesis, 40
+
+    Dreams, order in, 134
+
+    _Dreams and Shadows_, 172-173
+      Idea, the descent of, 172
+      Taper's cone of flame, a simile, 172
+      "As in life's noisiest hour," etc., 172
+      "You mould my thoughts," etc., 173
+
+    Drip, drip, drip, drip, 165
+
+    _Duty and Experience_, 2, 3
+      Human happiness, 3
+      Chymistry, a noble, 3
+      Metaphysical opinion in anguish, 3
+      Misfortunes a fertilising rain, 2
+      Pleasure and pain, 2
+      Real pain a panacea, 2
+
+    Duty and self-interest, 130-131
+
+
+    Early death, 44, 45
+
+    Easter, the Northern, 138
+
+    Education, of, 227-228
+
+    Ego, the, 15
+
+    Egotism, 14
+
+    Empyrean, the, 125
+
+    England, the righteousness of, 284
+
+    Enthusiasm, 139
+
+    Entity, a superfluous, 217
+
+    Entomology _v._ ontology, 94
+
+    Epigram, a divine, 273
+
+    Error, a life-long (his age), 295
+
+    Etymology, 123-124
+
+    Evil, the origin of, 36-42
+
+    Evil produces evil, 131
+
+    Experience and book knowledge, 129-130
+
+    Experiment, a doubtful, 56
+
+    Extremes meet, 52, 53
+
+
+    Facts and Fiction, 75
+
+    Fallings from us vanishings, 180-181
+
+    "Floods and general inundations," 282
+
+    First thoughts and friendship, 251, 252
+
+    Flowers and light, 304, 305
+
+    Flowers of speech, 269, 270
+
+    Form and feeling, 101
+
+    Formula, a comprehensive, 306-307
+
+    "For compassion a human heart," 282
+
+    _For the soother in absence_, 84-85
+      Dreams and reveries, 85
+      Dresden, the engraved cherry-stone, 85
+      Mediterranean, the white sails on, 85
+      Outwardly happy but no joy within, 84
+      Sunset in winter, and summer-set, 84
+
+    _For the soother in absence_, 86-87
+      Caracciolo and his floating corse, 87
+      Final causes, 87
+      Moonlight, crinkled circles on the sea, 87
+      Religion repels the gay, 86
+      Vicious thoughts and rhyme-terminations, 86
+      Diogenes, why not? 97
+      Interest and satisfaction, 97
+
+    _For the soother in absence_, 95-97
+      Language, its growth, etc., 95
+      Medical romance--a title, 96
+      Mylius, 96
+      Poets the bridlers of delight, 96
+      Quintetta, the, in the Syracuse Opera, 95
+      Recollections of pre-existent state, 96
+      Tarantula dance of argumentation, 97
+
+    _For the soother in absence_, 99-100
+      _Quisque sui faber_, 99
+      Nature a Penelope, 100
+      Root to the crown--growth of the flower, 99
+
+    _For the soother in absence_, 115-118
+      Admiralty Court maxims, 116
+      Convoy from England, 115
+      Cyphers, 118
+      Death and the sleeping baby, 118
+      Faults and forewarnings, Miss Edgeworth, 117
+      Johnson, Dr., and Shakspere, 115
+      Pen-slit, the action of, 118
+      Sealing-wax--where was it? 116
+      Totalising, disease of, 116
+      Voice and eye--precedence and sequence, 118
+      Wafers, Maltese, 115
+
+    _For the soother in absence_, 147-150
+      Conscience and watches, 150
+      Contra-reasoning and controversy, 149
+      Earthly losses and heaven, 150
+      Eye, the twofold power of, 149
+      Facts and the relation of them, 148
+      Metaphor and reality, 149
+      Negation begets errors, 147
+      Speculative men not unpractical, 148
+      War, the weariness of, no excuse for peace, 148
+      Word-play a cat's cradle, 149
+      Worldly men, their belief in sincerity, 149
+
+    _For the soother in absence_, 159-161
+      _Co-arctation_, 161
+      Dull souls may become great poet's bodies, 161
+      Judgment compared to Belgic towns, 160
+      Lover married, a frog in a well, 160
+      Music and the genus and particular, 160
+      Originality not claimed by the original, 160
+      Shorthandists for the House of Commons, 161
+      Stiletto and the rosary, 159
+      Water-lily and the sponge, 160
+
+    _For the Soother in Absence_, 162-164
+      Death and the tree of life, 163
+      Grave, our growth in, 163
+      Irish architect, 164
+      _Scopæ viarum_, 164
+      Shooting stars and bedtime, 162
+      Sleep, the lovers', 164
+      Swift and the pine-tree, 164
+      Truth and action, 164
+      Wordsworth, an aspiration, 163
+      Yellowing leaflets, 163
+
+    _For the Soother in Absence_, 175-180
+      Affliction and adversity, 176
+      _Allapse_ of serpents, 176
+      Atmosphere, every man his own, 176
+      Augustine, St., and a friend's misjudgment, 179
+      Blast, the, 178
+      Blue sky, yellow green at twilight, 175
+      Greece, the genius of, 177
+      Hayfield and still life, 175
+      _Heu! quam miserum_, 177
+      Indian fig and death of an immortal, 177
+      Kings, what kind of gods? 176
+      Love, the mighty works of, 178
+      Metallic pencils, 175
+      Parisatis, and the poisoned knife, 176
+      Peacock moulting, 178
+      Shadow, 177
+      Sheridan, and Bacon, 177
+      Sunflowers, 175
+      Strabo Geographicus on genius, 179
+      Two faces, etc., 176-177
+      Tycho Brahe, a subject for Allston, 175
+      Water-wagtails, 178
+      Woman, a passionate, a simile, 178
+
+    French language and poetry, 118-120
+
+    Friendship and marriage, 235-236
+
+
+    Genius, 233
+
+    Genius, his own, 197-198
+
+    German philosophy, his indebtedness to, 106
+
+    God, the idea of, 300
+
+    Great and little minds, 293
+
+    Great men and national worth, 150-152
+
+
+    Hail and farewell, 218
+
+    Halfway house, the, 195-197
+
+    Happiness made perfect, 142
+
+    Hazlitt, W., 36
+
+    Health, independence, and friendship, 248
+
+    Heart, a broken, 303
+
+    Heaviness, may endure, &c., 239, 240
+
+    Hesperus, 247, 248
+
+    _Hinc illa marginalia_, 91-92
+
+    _Hints for the Friend_, 209, 210
+      Authors and Buffon's fan, 209
+      Conscience good, and fine weather, 209
+      Great deeds, great hearts, and great states, 209
+      Hypocrisy, 210
+      Massy misery, 210
+      Mystery from wilful deafness, 210
+      No glory and no Christianity, a total eclipse, 210
+      Proud ignorance, 210
+      Reformers like scourers of silver plate, 209
+
+    _Hints for the Friend_, 221-223
+      Conscience, a pure, like a life-boat, 221
+      Dame Quickly on parties, 222
+      Duns Scotus on faith, 222
+      Foliage, not the trunk, 223
+      Helvetius, his selenography, 221
+      Lavater and Narcissus, 223
+      Pope, the, a simile, 233
+      Reliance on God and man, 222
+      Reviewers like jurymen, 223
+
+    _Hints for the Friend_, 230-233
+      Amboynese, and their clove trees, 232
+      Eloign, a word of Queen Elizabeth's, 231
+      Esoteric Christianity, 231
+      Mathematics and metaphysics, 230
+      Monsoon, the Chinese elephant, 232
+      Nature, the perception of, a comparison, 232
+      Paracelsus, on new words, 232
+      Partisans or opponents, how to address them, 231
+
+    Hope, the moon's halo an emblem of, 238
+
+    Humanity, the hope of, 137, 138
+
+    Humility, the lover's, 188
+
+    Hypothesis, of a new, 105
+
+
+    I will lift up, etc., 101
+
+    Idea, the birth of, 109
+
+    Idealist, the, at bay, 277-279
+
+    "If a man could pass through paradise," 282
+
+    Ignore thyself, 301
+
+    Illusion (Mr. Dennison and the "bottle man"), 144-147
+
+    Imagination 'eisenoplasy,' 236
+
+    In a twinkling of an eye, 185-186
+
+    In wonder all philosophy began, 185
+
+    Incommunicable, the, 31
+
+    Infancy and infants, 3, 4
+
+    Infinite, the, and the finite, 81
+
+    _Inopem me copia fecit_, 189
+
+    Insects, 271
+      _Spiders' webs in Java_, 271
+      _Libellulidæ_, 271
+      _Tipulidæ minimæ_, 271
+
+    Islamism, 287, 288
+
+
+    "Kingdom of Heavenite," a, 273
+
+    Knave, a treacherous, 28
+
+    Knowledge, a royal road to, 298-300
+
+    Knowledge and Understanding, 173
+
+
+    Landing places, 157
+
+    Law and gospel, 214
+
+    Liberty, the cap of, 203
+
+    Life, the idea of, 305
+
+    Light, the inward, 48
+
+    _Litera scripta manet_, 121
+
+    Love, 1-2
+      Affected by jealousy, 1
+      soother of misfortune, 2
+      Disappointed, 2
+      The transformer, 2
+
+    Love, 233-235
+
+    Love, the adolescence of, 68
+
+    Love, the divine essence, 133-134
+
+    Love and duty, 140-142
+
+    Love, the ineffable, 191-192
+
+    Love and music, 200-201
+
+    Lover, the humble complaint of, 190
+
+    Loves, of first, 153-154
+
+    _Lucus a non lucendo_, 200
+
+
+    Magnitude, the sense of, 112-115
+
+    Maiden's primer, 195
+
+    Marriage, the ideal, 216
+
+    Mean, the danger of, 62
+
+    Means to ends, 107
+
+    Mediterranean, the, 100
+      "A brisk gale and the foam," 100
+
+    Memorandum, a serious, 79
+
+    Metaphysic, a defence of, 42
+
+    Metaphysician, the, at bay, 106
+
+    Metaphysic, the aim of his, 42
+
+    Milton's blank verse, 253
+
+    Milton and Shakspere, 296-8
+
+    Mohammed, the flight of, 290-291
+
+    Moment, a, and a magic mirror, 245-246
+
+    Monition, the rage for, 68-70
+
+    Moonlight gleams and massy glories, 171
+
+    Moonset, a, 50
+
+    Morning, a gem of, 187
+
+    _Mot propre_, the passion for, 155
+
+    Mother wit, 226
+
+    Motion, the psychology of, 56-57
+
+    _Multum in parvo_, 85
+
+
+    Name it and you break it, 198
+
+    Nature, the night side of, 45-47
+
+    _Ne quid nimis_, 89
+
+    _Nefas est ab hoste doceri_, 76
+
+    Neither bond nor free, 195
+
+    Neutral pronoun, a, 190
+
+    Night, in the visions of, 43, 44
+
+    Nightmare, the hag, 243-245
+
+    _Noscitur a sociis_, 32
+
+    Not the beautiful, etc., 49-50
+
+
+    _Obductâ fronte senectus_, 272-273
+
+    _Observations and Reflections_, 17-21
+      Ashes in autumn, 19
+      Citizens eat, rustics drink, 19
+      Definition hostile to images, 19
+      First cause and source of the Nile, 20
+      Love poems, a scheme of, 20
+      Moon, the setting, 18
+      My birthday, 19
+      Northern Lights, Derwent's birthday, 18
+      Shakspere and Naucratius, 21
+      Soul the mummy, an emblem, 20
+      Spring with cone of sand, 17
+      Stability and Instability, the cause of, 19
+      State, the eye of, 18
+      Superiors and inferiors, 20
+      Truths and feelings, 18
+      Two moon-rainbows, 19
+
+    Of a too witty book, 280-281
+
+    Official distrust, 83
+
+    O star benign! 76
+
+    O thou whose fancies, etc., 15-16
+
+    Omniscient, the comforter, 127
+
+    One music as before, etc. 168
+
+    One, the, and the good, 63
+
+    One, the many and the, 77
+
+    Opera, the, 82
+
+    Orange blossom, 134-136
+
+    Over-blaming, the danger of, 198
+
+
+    [Greek: PANTA RHEI], 183-184
+
+    _Pars altera mei_, 49
+
+    Partisans and renegades, 173-174
+
+    Past and present, 1
+
+    People, the spirit of a, 288-290
+
+    Petrarch's epistles, 262, 263
+
+    Phantoms of sublimity, 170
+
+    Philanthropy and self-advertisement, 249, 250
+
+    Philosophy the friend of poetry, 78
+
+    Pindar, 168
+
+    Places and persons, 70-74
+
+    Poet, a, on poetry, 294
+
+    Poet, the, and the spider, 32
+
+    Poetic licence, a plea for, 165-166
+
+    Poetry, 4
+      Correction of, 4
+      Dr. Darwin, 5
+      Elder languages, the fitter for, 5
+      Ode, definition of, 4
+
+    Poetry and prose, 229-230
+
+    Poets as critics of poets, 127-128
+
+    Populace and people, 174
+
+    Posterity, a caution to, 159
+
+    Practical man, a, 199-200
+
+    Praise, the meed of, 284
+
+    Presentiments, 256-257
+
+    Price, Dr., 167-168
+
+    Prophecy, the manufacture of, 192-193
+
+    Prudence _versus_ friendship, 291-293
+
+    Pseudo-poets, 156
+
+    Psychology in youth and maturity, 218
+
+    Public opinion and the services, 237
+
+    Purgatory, an intellectual, 152-153
+
+
+    Rain, the maddening, 154
+
+    Recollection and remembrance, 57
+
+    Reimarus and the instinct of animals, 92-95
+
+    Religion, spiritual, 138, 218-219
+
+    _Remedium amoris_, 266
+
+    Richardson, 166-167
+
+    Righteousness, the sun of, 162
+
+    _Rugit leo_, 301-303
+
+
+    Save me from my friends, 264-265
+
+    Science and philosophy, 261-262
+
+    Scholastic terms, a plea for, 274-275
+
+    Schoolman, a Unitarian, 58
+
+    Sea, the bright blue, 109
+
+    Self, the abstract, 120
+
+    Self-absorption and selfishness, 249
+
+    Self-esteem, excess of, 198, 199
+
+    Self-esteem, defect of, 199
+
+    Self-reproof, a measure in, 81-82
+
+    Sensations, the continuity of, 102, 103
+
+    Sentiment an antidote to casuistry, 124-125
+
+    Sentiment, morbid, 169-170
+
+    Sentiments below morals, 154
+
+    _Seriores Rosæ_, 274
+      "Lie with the ear," 274
+      "Like some spendthrift lord," 274
+      "On the same man as in a vineyard," 274
+      "The blossom gives not only," 274
+      "We all look up," 274
+
+    Sermons, ancient and modern, 237-239
+
+    Seventeen hundred and sixty yards, etc., 280
+
+    Shakspere and Malone, 88
+
+    Subject and object, 294
+
+    Silence is golden, 259
+
+    Simile, a, 76
+
+    _Sine qua non_, 186
+
+    Sleepless, the feint of the, 251
+
+    Solace, external, his need of, 167
+
+    _Solvitur suspiciendo_, 187
+
+    Sonnet, an unwritten, 295
+
+    Soul, the embryonic, 104
+
+    Spinoza, a poem on spirit or on, 61
+
+    Spinoza, the ethics of, 57
+
+    Spiritual blindness, 270
+
+    Spiritualism and mysticism, 276-277
+
+    Spooks, 281
+
+    Spring, the breath of, 305
+
+    Square, the, the circle, the pyramid, 97
+
+    Star, to the evening, 247
+
+    Style of Milton, Smectymnuus, etc., 271
+
+    Subject and object, 294
+
+    Sundog, a, 97
+
+    Sunset, a, 52
+
+    Superstition, 143-144
+
+    Supposition, a, 138
+
+    Syracuse, 78
+
+
+    Taste, an ethical quality, 165
+
+    Teleology and nature worship, 35
+
+    Temperament and morals, 33
+
+    That inward eye, etc., 246, 247
+
+    The body of this death, 276
+
+    The conclusion of the whole matter, 266
+
+    The greater damnation, 279
+
+    The mind's eye, 286
+
+    "The more exquisite," etc., 282
+
+    The night is at hand, 307
+
+    "The sunny mist," etc., 31
+
+    The tender mercies of the good, 208-209
+
+    "The tree or sea-weed like," etc., 31
+
+    Theism and Atheism, 285-286
+
+    _Things Visible and Invisible_, 7-14
+      Anthropomorphism and the Trinity, 14
+      Anti-optimism, 13
+      Babe, its sole notion of cruelty, 13
+      Cairns, J., on the Nazarites, 9
+      Child scolding a flower, 10
+      Children's words, analogous, 11
+      Dandelions, beards of, note, 10
+      Dyer, George, and poets' throttles, 9
+      Fisherman, the idle, note, 10
+      Friends' friends, reception by, note, 8
+      Godwin, a definition of, 13
+      Hartley's fire-place of stones, 13
+      Hazlitt's theory of picture and palette, 9
+      "Hot-headed men confuse," 11
+      "How," the substratum of philosophy, 13
+      Kingfishers' flight, 7
+      "Little Daisy," etc., 7
+      London and Nature, 8
+      Luther, his prejudices, 11
+         Comment, 11
+      Materialists and mystery, 14
+      Nightingale and frogs in Germany, note, 7
+      Quotations, rage for, 9
+      Reproaches and remorse, 12
+      Sickbed and prison, 12
+      "Slanting pillars of misty light," 9
+      Space a perception of additional magnitude, 12
+      Taylor, Jeremy, quotation from _Via Pacis_, 12
+      "The thin scattered rain-clouds," 12
+      Things perishable, thoughts imperishable, 8
+      Thinking and perceiving, 12
+      Time and likeness, 13
+      Upturned leaves, 10
+
+    _Thoughts, a Crowd of_, 58-61
+      Children and hard-skinned ass, 59
+      Ghost of a mountain, 60
+      Light as lovers love, 59
+      Man, epitheton of, 58
+      Palm, the, 61
+      Place and time, 59
+      Poets' bad and beautiful expressions, 59
+      Public schools, advantage of, 60
+      Rainbows stedfast in mist, 61
+      Rosemary tree, a, 59
+      Slang, religious, 60
+      Sopha of sods, note, 60
+      Stump of a tree, 61
+
+    Thought, a mortal agony of, 63
+
+    Thought and attention, 213-214
+
+    _Thoughts and Fancies_, 22-25
+      Achilles and his heel, 25
+      Devil at the very end of hell, 23
+      Dimness and numbness, 23
+      Friendship and comprehension, 24
+      Green fields after the city, 25
+      Happiness and paradise, 25
+      Hartley and the "seems," 24
+      Kind-hearted men refuse roughly, 23
+      Limbo, 22
+      Metaphysics, their effect on the thoughts, 23
+      Nature for likeness, men for difference, 25
+      Old world, the, and the new year, 22
+      Opposite talents not incompatible, 24
+      Poets and death, 22
+      Poets, his rank among, 25
+      Sounds and outness, 23
+      Swift and Socinianism, 24
+      Time as threefold, 22
+
+    Thought and things, 143
+
+    Thoughts-how like music at times! 139
+
+    Through doubt to faith, 85
+
+    Time an element of grief, 31
+
+    Time and eternity, 155
+
+    Time, real and imaginary, note, 241-243
+
+    _Transcripts from my velvet pocket-books_, 26-28
+      Action, the meanness of, 27
+      Barrow and the verbal imagination, 26
+      Candle-snuffers not discoverers, 26
+      Falling asleep, 27
+      New play compared to toy ship, 27
+      Plagiarist, a thief in the candle, 26
+      Post, its influence, 26
+      Quotation and conversation, 26
+      Repose after agitation, 27
+      Socinianism and methodism, 26
+      Teme, the valley of, 26
+      Universe, the federal republic of, 27
+      Wedgwood, T., and thoughts and things, 27
+
+    Transubstantiation, 61-62
+
+    Truth, 191, 220
+
+    Truth, the danger of adapting, &c., 228
+
+    Truth, the fixed stars of, 257
+
+    Turtle-shell, a, for household tub, 207-208
+
+
+    Unwin, Mrs., Cowper's lines to, 121-123
+
+    Unknown, the great, 284
+
+
+    Vain Glory, 203-204
+
+    _Verbum sapientibus_, 102
+
+    _Ver, zer, and al_, 187
+
+    Vexation, a complex, 283
+
+    _Vox hiemalis_, 303-304
+
+
+    We ask not whence, etc., 89
+
+    Wedgwood, T., and Reimarus, 91
+
+    What man has made of man, 264-265
+
+    Will, the undisciplined, 64-66
+
+    Windmill and its shadow, 77-78
+
+    Winter, a mild, 170
+
+    Woman's frowardness, 89
+
+    Words and things, 225
+
+    Words, creative power of, and images, 87
+
+    Words, the power of, 266-269
+
+    Wordsworth and _The Prelude_, 30
+
+    Wordsworth, John, 132
+
+    Worldly wise, 230
+
+    Wounded vanity, a salve for, 82-83
+
+
+Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO. London & Edinburgh
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Transcriber's note
+
+
+The following changes have been made to the text:
+
+Page ix: "ceasless" changed to ceaseless".
+
+Page 73: "wordliness" changed to "worldliness".
+
+Page 173: "PARTIZANS" changed to "PARTISANS".
+
+Page 218: "pyschologise" changed to "psychologise".
+
+Page 253: "strenghth" changed to "strength".
+
+Page 320: "lifelong" changed to "life-long".
+
+Page 320: "Caraccioli" changed to "Caracciolo".
+
+Page 323: "philososhy" changed to "philosophy".
+
+Page 324: "Partizans" changed to "Partisans".
+
+Page 327: "Righteousnesss" changed to "Righteousness".
+
+Page 330: "rainclouds" changed to "rain-clouds'.
+
+Page 330: "hardskinned" changed to "hard-skinned".
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Anima Poetæ, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 41705 ***