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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Biographia Literaria, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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+Title: Biographia Literaria
+
+Author: Samuel Taylor Coleridge
+
+Release Date: July, 2004  [EBook #6081]
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+[This file was first posted on November 3, 2002]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA ***
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+
+
+BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA
+
+by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+  CHAPTER
+
+      I  Motives to the present work--Reception of the Author's first
+           publication--Discipline of his taste at school--Effect of
+           contemporary writers on youthful minds--Bowles's Sonnets-
+           Comparison between the poets before and since
+
+     II   Supposed irritability of genius brought to the test of
+            facts--Causes and occasions of the charge--Its injustice
+
+    III  The Author's obligations to Critics, and the probable
+           occasion--Principles of modern criticism--Mr. Southey's
+           works and character
+
+     IV  The Lyrical Ballads with the Preface--Mr. Wordsworth's
+           earlier poems--On Fancy and Imagination--The investigation
+           of the distinction important to the Fine Arts
+
+      V  On the law of Association--Its history traced from Aristotle
+           to Hartley
+
+     VI  That Hartley's system, as far as it differs from that of
+           Aristotle, is neither tenable in theory, nor founded
+           in facts
+
+    VII  Of the necessary consequences of the Hartleian Theory--Of
+           the original mistake or equivocation which procured its
+           admission--Memoria technica
+
+   VIII  The system of Dualism introduced by Des Cartes--Refined
+           first by Spinoza and afterwards by Leibnitz into the
+           doctrine of Harmonia praestabilita--Hylozoism--Materialism
+           --None of these systems, or any possible theory of
+           Association, supplies or supersedes a theory of
+           Perception, or explains the formation of the Associable
+
+     XI  Is Philosophy possible as a science, and what are its
+           conditions?--Giordano Bruno--Literary Aristocracy, or the
+           existence of a tacit compact among the learned as a
+           privileged order--The Author's obligations to the Mystics-
+           To Immanuel Kant--The difference between the letter and
+           The spirit of Kant's writings, and a vindication of
+           Prudence in the teaching of Philosophy--Fichte's attempt
+           to complete the Critical system-Its partial success and
+           ultimate failure--Obligations to Schelling; and among
+           English writers to Saumarez
+
+      X  A Chapter of digression and anecdotes, as an interlude
+          preceding that on the nature and genesis of the Imagination
+          or Plastic Power--On Pedantry and pedantic expressions--
+          Advice to young authors respecting publication--Various
+          anecdotes of the Author's literary life, and the progress
+          of his opinions in Religion and Politics
+
+     XI  An affectionate exhortation to those who in early life feel
+          themselves disposed to become authors
+
+    XII  A Chapter of requests and premonitions concerning the perusal
+          or omission of the chapter that follows
+
+   XIII  On the Imagination, or Esemplastic power
+
+    XIV  Occasion of the Lyrical Ballads, and the objects originally
+          proposed--Preface to the second edition--The ensuing
+          controversy, its causes and acrimony--Philosophic
+          definitions of a Poem and Poetry with scholia
+
+     XV  The specific symptoms of poetic power elucidated in a
+          Critical analysis of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, and
+          Rape of Lucrece
+
+    XVI  Striking points of difference between the Poets of the
+          present age and those of the fifteenth and sixteenth
+          centuries--Wish expressed for the union of the
+          characteristic merits of both
+
+   XVII  Examination of the tenets peculiar to Mr. Wordsworth--
+          Rustic life (above all, low and rustic life) especially
+          unfavourable to the formation of a human diction-The
+          best parts of language the product of philosophers, not of
+          clowns or shepherds--Poetry essentially ideal and generic--
+          The language of Milton as much the language of real life,
+          yea, incomparably more so than that of the cottager
+
+  XVIII  Language of metrical composition, why and wherein essentially
+          different from that of prose--Origin and elements of metre
+          --Its necessary consequences, and the conditions thereby
+          imposed on the metrical writer in the choice of his diction
+
+    XIX  Continuation--Concerning the real object, which, it is
+          probable, Mr. Wordsworth had before him in his critical
+          preface--Elucidation and application of this
+
+     XX  The former subject continued--The neutral style, or that
+         common to Prose and Poetry, exemplified by specimens from
+         Chaucer, Herbert, and others
+
+    XXI  Remarks on the present mode of conducting critical journals
+
+   XXII  The characteristic defects of Wordsworth's poetry, with the
+         principles from which the judgment, that they are defects,
+         is deduced--Their proportion to the beauties--For the
+         greatest part characteristic of his theory only
+
+         SATYRANE'S LETTERS
+
+  XXIII  Critique on Bertram
+
+   XXIV  Conclusion
+
+
+
+So wenig er auch bestimmt seyn mag, andere zu belehren, so wuenscht er
+doch sich denen mitzutheilen, die er sich gleichgesinnt weis, (oder
+hofft,) deren Anzahl aber in der Breite der Welt zerstreut ist; er
+wuenscht sein Verhaeltniss zu den aeltesten Freunden dadurch wieder
+anzuknuepfen, mit neuen es fortzusetzen, und in der letzten Generation
+sich wieder andere fur seine uebrige Lebenszeit zu gewinnen. Er
+wuenscht der Jugend die Umwege zu ersparen, auf denen er sich selbst
+verirrte.                   (Goethe. Einleitung in die Propylaeen.)
+
+TRANSLATION.  Little call as he may have to instruct others, he wishes
+nevertheless to open out his heart to such as he either knows or hopes
+to be of like mind with himself, but who are widely scattered in the
+world: he wishes to knit anew his connections with his oldest friends,
+to continue those recently formed, and to win other friends among the
+rising generation for the remaining course of his life. He wishes to
+spare the young those circuitous paths, on which he himself had lost
+his way.
+
+
+
+
+
+BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+Motives to the present work--Reception of the Author's first
+publication--Discipline of his taste at school--Effect of contemporary
+writers on youthful minds--Bowles's Sonnets--Comparison between the
+poets before and since Pope.
+
+
+It has been my lot to have had my name introduced both in
+conversation, and in print, more frequently than I find it easy to
+explain, whether I consider the fewness, unimportance, and limited
+circulation of my writings, or the retirement and distance, in which I
+have lived, both from the literary and political world. Most often it
+has been connected with some charge which I could not acknowledge, or
+some principle which I had never entertained. Nevertheless, had I had
+no other motive or incitement, the reader would not have been troubled
+with this exculpation. What my additional purposes were, will be seen
+in the following pages. It will be found, that the least of what I
+have written concerns myself personally. I have used the narration
+chiefly for the purpose of giving a continuity to the work, in part
+for the sake of the miscellaneous reflections suggested to me by
+particular events, but still more as introductory to a statement of my
+principles in Politics, Religion, and Philosophy, and an application
+of the rules, deduced from philosophical principles, to poetry and
+criticism. But of the objects, which I proposed to myself, it was not
+the least important to effect, as far as possible, a settlement of the
+long continued controversy concerning the true nature of poetic
+diction; and at the same time to define with the utmost impartiality
+the real poetic character of the poet, by whose writings this
+controversy was first kindled, and has been since fuelled and fanned.
+
+In the spring of 1796, when I had but little passed the verge of
+manhood, I published a small volume of juvenile poems. They were
+received with a degree of favour, which, young as I was, I well know
+was bestowed on them not so much for any positive merit, as because
+they were considered buds of hope, and promises of better works to
+come. The critics of that day, the most flattering, equally with the
+severest, concurred in objecting to them obscurity, a general
+turgidness of diction, and a profusion of new coined double epithets
+[1]. The first is the fault which a writer is the least able to detect
+in his own compositions: and my mind was not then sufficiently
+disciplined to receive the authority of others, as a substitute for my
+own conviction. Satisfied that the thoughts, such as they were, could
+not have been expressed otherwise, or at least more perspicuously, I
+forgot to inquire, whether the thoughts themselves did not demand a
+degree of attention unsuitable to the nature and objects of poetry.
+This remark however applies chiefly, though not exclusively, to the
+Religious Musings. The remainder of the charge I admitted to its full
+extent, and not without sincere acknowledgments both to my private and
+public censors for their friendly admonitions. In the after editions,
+I pruned the double epithets with no sparing hand, and used my best
+efforts to tame the swell and glitter both of thought and diction;
+though in truth, these parasite plants of youthful poetry had
+insinuated themselves into my longer poems with such intricacy of
+union, that I was often obliged to omit disentangling the weed, from
+the fear of snapping the flower. From that period to the date of the
+present work I have published nothing, with my name, which could by
+any possibility have come before the board of anonymous criticism.
+Even the three or four poems, printed with the works of a friend [2],
+as far as they were censured at all, were charged with the same or
+similar defects, (though I am persuaded not with equal justice),--with
+an excess of ornament, in addition to strained and elaborate diction.
+I must be permitted to add, that, even at the early period of my
+juvenile poems, I saw and admitted the superiority of an austerer and
+more natural style, with an insight not less clear, than I at present
+possess. My judgment was stronger than were my powers of realizing its
+dictates; and the faults of my language, though indeed partly owing to
+a wrong choice of subjects, and the desire of giving a poetic
+colouring to abstract and metaphysical truths, in which a new world
+then seemed to open upon me, did yet, in part likewise, originate in
+unfeigned diffidence of my own comparative talent.--During several
+years of my youth and early manhood, I reverenced those who had re-
+introduced the manly simplicity of the Greek, and of our own elder
+poets, with such enthusiasm as made the hope seem presumptuous of
+writing successfully in the same style. Perhaps a similar process has
+happened to others; but my earliest poems were marked by an ease and
+simplicity, which I have studied, perhaps with inferior success, to
+impress on my later compositions.
+
+At school, (Christ's Hospital,) I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of
+a very sensible, though at the same time, a very severe master, the
+Reverend James Bowyer. He early moulded my taste to the preference of
+Demosthenes to Cicero, of Homer and Theocritus to Virgil, and again of
+Virgil to Ovid. He habituated me to compare Lucretius, (in such
+extracts as I then read,) Terence, and above all the chaster poems of
+Catullus, not only with the Roman poets of the, so called, silver and
+brazen ages; but with even those of the Augustan aera: and on grounds
+of plain sense and universal logic to see and assert the superiority
+of the former in the truth and nativeness both of their thoughts and
+diction. At the same time that we were studying the Greek tragic
+poets, he made us read Shakespeare and Milton as lessons: and they
+were the lessons too, which required most time and trouble to bring
+up, so as to escape his censure. I learned from him, that poetry, even
+that of the loftiest and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a
+logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult,
+because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and more
+fugitive causes. In the truly great poets, he would say, there is a
+reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of
+every word; and I well remember that, availing himself of the
+synonymes to the Homer of Didymus, he made us attempt to show, with
+regard to each, why it would not have answered the same purpose; and
+wherein consisted the peculiar fitness of the word in the original
+text.
+
+In our own English compositions, (at least for the last three years of
+our school education,) he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or
+image, unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might
+have been conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words [3].
+Lute, harp, and lyre, Muse, Muses, and inspirations, Pegasus,
+Parnassus, and Hippocrene were all an abomination to him. In fancy I
+can almost hear him now, exclaiming "Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink,
+boy, you mean! Muse, boy, Muse? Your nurse's daughter, you mean!
+Pierian spring? Oh aye! the cloister-pump, I suppose!" Nay certain
+introductions, similes, and examples, were placed by name on a list of
+interdiction. Among the similes, there was, I remember, that of the
+manchineel fruit, as suiting equally well with too many subjects; in
+which however it yielded the palm at once to the example of Alexander
+and Clytus, which was equally good and apt, whatever might be the
+theme. Was it ambition? Alexander and Clytus!-Flattery? Alexander and
+Clytus!--anger--drunkenness--pride--friendship--ingratitude--late
+repentance? Still, still Alexander and Clytus! At length, the praises
+of agriculture having been exemplified in the sagacious observation
+that, had Alexander been holding the plough, he would not have run his
+friend Clytus through with a spear, this tried, and serviceable old
+friend was banished by public edict in saecula saeculorum. I have
+sometimes ventured to think, that a list of this kind, or an index
+expurgatorius of certain well-known and ever-returning phrases, both
+introductory, and transitional, including a large assortment of modest
+egoisms, and flattering illeisms, and the like, might be hung up in
+our Law-courts, and both Houses of Parliament, with great advantage to
+the public, as an important saving of national time, an incalculable
+relief to his Majesty's ministers, but above all, as insuring the
+thanks of country attornies, and their clients, who have private bills
+to carry through the House.
+
+Be this as it may, there was one custom of our master's, which I
+cannot pass over in silence, because I think it imitable and worthy of
+imitation. He would often permit our exercises, under some pretext of
+want of time, to accumulate, till each lad had four or five to be
+looked over. Then placing the whole number abreast on his desk, he
+would ask the writer, why this or that sentence might not have found
+as appropriate a place under this or that other thesis: and if no
+satisfying answer could be returned, and two faults of the same kind
+were found in one exercise, the irrevocable verdict followed, the
+exercise was torn up, and another on the same subject to be produced,
+in addition to the tasks of the day. The reader will, I trust, excuse
+this tribute of recollection to a man, whose severities, even now, not
+seldom furnish the dreams, by which the blind fancy would fain
+interpret to the mind the painful sensations of distempered sleep; but
+neither lessen nor dim the deep sense of my moral and intellectual
+obligations. He sent us to the University excellent Latin and Greek
+scholars, and tolerable Hebraists. Yet our classical knowledge was the
+least of the good gifts, which we derived from his zealous and
+conscientious tutorage. He is now gone to his final reward, full of
+years, and full of honours, even of those honours, which were dearest
+to his heart, as gratefully bestowed by that school, and still binding
+him to the interests of that school, in which he had been himself
+educated, and to which during his whole life he was a dedicated thing.
+
+From causes, which this is not the place to investigate, no models of
+past times, however perfect, can have the same vivid effect on the
+youthful mind, as the productions of contemporary genius. The
+discipline, my mind had undergone, Ne falleretur rotundo sono et
+versuum cursu, cincinnis, et floribus; sed ut inspiceret quidnam
+subesset, quae, sedes, quod firmamentum, quis fundus verbis; an
+figures essent mera ornatura et orationis fucus; vel sanguinis e
+materiae ipsius corde effluentis rubor quidam nativus et incalescentia
+genuina;--removed all obstacles to the appreciation of excellence in
+style without diminishing my delight. That I was thus prepared for the
+perusal of Mr. Bowles's sonnets and earlier poems, at once increased
+their influence, and my enthusiasm. The great works of past ages seem
+to a young man things of another race, in respect to which his
+faculties must remain passive and submiss, even as to the stars and
+mountains. But the writings of a contemporary, perhaps not many years
+older than himself, surrounded by the same circumstances, and
+disciplined by the same manners, possess a reality for him, and
+inspire an actual friendship as of a man for a man. His very
+admiration is the wind which fans and feeds his hope. The poems
+themselves assume the properties of flesh and blood. To recite, to
+extol, to contend for them is but the payment of a debt due to one,
+who exists to receive it.
+
+There are indeed modes of teaching which have produced, and are
+producing, youths of a very different stamp; modes of teaching, in
+comparison with which we have been called on to despise our great
+public schools, and universities,
+
+                     in whose halls are hung
+    Armoury of the invincible knights of old--
+
+modes, by which children are to be metamorphosed into prodigies. And
+prodigies with a vengeance have I known thus produced; prodigies of
+self-conceit, shallowness, arrogance, and infidelity! Instead of
+storing the memory, during the period when the memory is the
+predominant faculty, with facts for the after exercise of the
+judgment; and instead of awakening by the noblest models the fond and
+unmixed love and admiration, which is the natural and graceful temper
+of early youth; these nurslings of improved pedagogy are taught to
+dispute and decide; to suspect all but their own and their lecturer's
+wisdom; and to hold nothing sacred from their contempt, but their own
+contemptible arrogance; boy-graduates in all the technicals, and in
+all the dirty passions and impudence of anonymous criticism. To such
+dispositions alone can the admonition of Pliny be requisite, Neque
+enim debet operibus ejus obesse, quod vivit. An si inter eos, quos
+nunquam vidimus, floruisset, non solum libros ejus, verum etiam
+imagines conquireremus, ejusdem nunc honor prasentis, et gratia quasi
+satietate languescet? At hoc pravum, malignumque est, non admirari
+hominem admiratione dignissimum, quia videre, complecti, nec laudare
+tantum, verum etiam amare contingit.
+
+I had just entered on my seventeenth year, when the sonnets of Mr.
+Bowles, twenty in number, and just then published in a quarto
+pamphlet, were first made known and presented to me, by a schoolfellow
+who had quitted us for the University, and who, during the whole time
+that he was in our first form (or in our school language a Grecian,)
+had been my patron and protector. I refer to Dr. Middleton, the truly
+learned, and every way excellent Bishop of Calcutta:
+
+                            qui laudibus amplis
+    Ingenium celebrare meum, calamumque solebat,
+    Calcar agens animo validum. Non omnia terra
+    Obruta; vivit amor, vivit dolor; ora negatur
+    Dulcia conspicere; at fiere et meminisse relictum est.
+
+It was a double pleasure to me, and still remains a tender
+recollection, that I should have received from a friend so revered the
+first knowledge of a poet, by whose works, year after year, I was so
+enthusiastically delighted and inspired. My earliest acquaintances
+will not have forgotten the undisciplined eagerness and impetuous
+zeal, with which I laboured to make proselytes, not only of my
+companions, but of all with whom I conversed, of whatever rank, and in
+whatever place. As my school finances did not permit me to purchase
+copies, I made, within less than a year and a half, more than forty
+transcriptions, as the best presents I could offer to those, who had
+in any way won my regard. And with almost equal delight did I receive
+the three or four following publications of the same author.
+
+Though I have seen and known enough of mankind to be well aware, that
+I shall perhaps stand alone in my creed, and that it will be well, if
+I subject myself to no worse charge than that of singularity; I am not
+therefore deterred from avowing, that I regard, and ever have regarded
+the obligations of intellect among the most sacred of the claims of
+gratitude. A valuable thought, or a particular train of thoughts,
+gives me additional pleasure, when I can safely refer and attribute it
+to the conversation or correspondence of another. My obligations to
+Mr. Bowles were indeed important, and for radical good. At a very
+premature age, even before my fifteenth year, I had bewildered myself
+in metaphysics, and in theological controversy. Nothing else pleased
+me. History, and particular facts, lost all interest in my mind.
+Poetry--(though for a school-boy of that age, I was above par in
+English versification, and had already produced two or three
+compositions which, I may venture to say, without reference to my age,
+were somewhat above mediocrity, and which had gained me more credit
+than the sound, good sense of my old master was at all pleased with,)
+--poetry itself, yea, novels and romances, became insipid to me. In my
+friendless wanderings on our leave-days [4], (for I was an orphan, and
+had scarcely any connections in London,) highly was I delighted, if
+any passenger, especially if he were dressed in black, would enter
+into conversation with me. For I soon found the means of directing it
+to my favourite subjects
+
+    Of providence, fore-knowledge, will, and fate,
+    Fixed fate, free will, fore-knowledge absolute,
+    And found no end in wandering mazes lost.
+
+This preposterous pursuit was, beyond doubt, injurious both to my
+natural powers, and to the progress of my education. It would perhaps
+have been destructive, had it been continued; but from this I was
+auspiciously withdrawn, partly indeed by an accidental introduction to
+an amiable family, chiefly however, by the genial influence of a style
+of poetry, so tender and yet so manly, so natural and real, and yet so
+dignified and harmonious, as the sonnets and other early poems of Mr.
+Bowles. Well would it have been for me, perhaps, had I never relapsed
+into the same mental disease; if I had continued to pluck the flower
+and reap the harvest from the cultivated surface, instead of delving
+in the unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic lore. And if in
+after time I have sought a refuge from bodily pain and mismanaged
+sensibility in abstruse researches, which exercised the strength and
+subtilty of the understanding without awakening the feelings of the
+heart; still there was a long and blessed interval, during which my
+natural faculties were allowed to expand, and my original tendencies
+to develop themselves;--my fancy, and the love of nature, and the
+sense of beauty in forms and sounds.
+
+The second advantage, which I owe to my early perusal, and admiration
+of these poems, (to which let me add,) though known to me at a somewhat
+later period, the Lewesdon Hill of Mr. Crowe bears more immediately on
+my present subject. Among those with whom I conversed, there were, of
+course, very many who had formed their taste, and their notions of
+poetry, from the writings of Pope and his followers; or to speak more
+generally, in that school of French poetry, condensed and invigorated
+by English understanding, which had predominated from the last
+century. I was not blind to the merits of this school, yet, as from
+inexperience of the world, and consequent want of sympathy with the
+general subjects of these poems, they gave me little pleasure, I
+doubtless undervalued the kind, and with the presumption of youth
+withheld from its masters the legitimate name of poets. I saw that the
+excellence of this kind consisted in just and acute observations on
+men and manners in an artificial state of society, as its matter and
+substance; and in the logic of wit, conveyed in smooth and strong
+epigrammatic couplets, as its form: that even when the subject was
+addressed to the fancy, or the intellect, as in the Rape of the Lock,
+or the Essay on Man; nay, when it was a consecutive narration, as in
+that astonishing product of matchless talent and ingenuity Pope's
+Translation of the Iliad; still a point was looked for at the end of
+each second line, and the whole was, as it were, a sorites, or, if I
+may exchange a logical for a grammatical metaphor, a conjunction
+disjunctive, of epigrams. Meantime the matter and diction seemed to me
+characterized not so much by poetic thoughts, as by thoughts
+translated into the language of poetry. On this last point, I had
+occasion to render my own thoughts gradually more and more plain to
+myself, by frequent amicable disputes concerning Darwin's Botanic
+Garden, which, for some years, was greatly extolled, not only by the
+reading public in general, but even by those, whose genius and natural
+robustness of understanding enabled them afterwards to act foremost in
+dissipating these "painted mists" that occasionally rise from the
+marshes at the foot of Parnassus. During my first Cambridge vacation,
+I assisted a friend in a contribution for a literary society in
+Devonshire: and in this I remember to have compared Darwin's work to
+the Russian palace of ice, glittering, cold and transitory. In the
+same essay too, I assigned sundry reasons, chiefly drawn from a
+comparison of passages in the Latin poets with the original Greek,
+from which they were borrowed, for the preference of Collins's odes to
+those of Gray; and of the simile in Shakespeare
+
+    How like a younker or a prodigal
+    The scarfed bark puts from her native bay,
+    Hugg'd and embraced by the strumpet wind!
+    How like the prodigal doth she return,
+    With over-weather'd ribs and ragged sails,
+    Lean, rent, and beggar'd by the strumpet wind!
+                             (Merch. of Ven. Act II. sc. 6.)
+
+to the imitation in the Bard;
+
+    Fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyr blows
+    While proudly riding o'er the azure realm
+    In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes,
+    Youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm;
+    Regardless of the sweeping whirlwind's sway,
+    That hush'd in grim repose, expects it's evening prey.
+
+(in which, by the bye, the words "realm" and "sway" are rhymes dearly
+purchased)--I preferred the original on the ground, that in the
+imitation it depended wholly on the compositor's putting, or not
+putting, a small capital, both in this, and in many other passages of
+the same poet, whether the words should be personifications, or mere
+abstractions. I mention this, because, in referring various lines in
+Gray to their original in Shakespeare and Milton, and in the clear
+perception how completely all the propriety was lost in the transfer,
+I was, at that early period, led to a conjecture, which, many years
+afterwards was recalled to me from the same thought having been
+started in conversation, but far more ably, and developed more fully,
+by Mr. Wordsworth;--namely, that this style of poetry, which I have
+characterized above, as translations of prose thoughts into poetic
+language, had been kept up by, if it did not wholly arise from, the
+custom of writing Latin verses, and the great importance attached to
+these exercises, in our public schools. Whatever might have been the
+case in the fifteenth century, when the use of the Latin tongue was so
+general among learned men, that Erasmus is said to have forgotten his
+native language; yet in the present day it is not to be supposed, that
+a youth can think in Latin, or that he can have any other reliance on
+the force or fitness of his phrases, but the authority of the writer
+from whom he has adopted them. Consequently he must first prepare his
+thoughts, and then pick out, from Virgil, Horace, Ovid, or perhaps
+more compendiously from his Gradus, halves and quarters of lines, in
+which to embody them.
+
+I never object to a certain degree of disputatiousness in a young man
+from the age of seventeen to that of four or five and twenty, provided
+I find him always arguing on one side of the question. The
+controversies, occasioned by my unfeigned zeal for the honour of a
+favourite contemporary, then known to me only by his works, were of
+great advantage in the formation and establishment of my taste and
+critical opinions. In my defence of the lines running into each other,
+instead of closing at each couplet; and of natural language, neither
+bookish, nor vulgar, neither redolent of the lamp, nor of the kennel,
+such as I will remember thee; instead of the same thought tricked up
+in the rag-fair finery of,
+
+    ------thy image on her wing
+    Before my fancy's eye shall memory bring,--
+
+I had continually to adduce the metre and diction of the Greek poets,
+from Homer to Theocritus inclusively; and still more of our elder
+English poets, from Chaucer to Milton. Nor was this all. But as it was
+my constant reply to authorities brought against me from later poets
+of great name, that no authority could avail in opposition to Truth,
+Nature, Logic, and the Laws of Universal Grammar; actuated too by my
+former passion for metaphysical investigations; I laboured at a solid
+foundation, on which permanently to ground my opinions, in the
+component faculties of the human mind itself, and their comparative
+dignity and importance. According to the faculty or source, from which
+the pleasure given by any poem or passage was derived, I estimated the
+merit of such poem or passage. As the result of all my reading and
+meditation, I abstracted two critical aphorisms, deeming them to
+comprise the conditions and criteria of poetic style;--first, that not
+the poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the
+greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of
+essential poetry;--secondly, that whatever lines can be translated
+into other words of the same language, without diminution of their
+significance, either in sense or association, or in any worthy
+feeling, are so far vicious in their diction. Be it however observed,
+that I excluded from the list of worthy feelings, the pleasure derived
+from mere novelty in the reader, and the desire of exciting wonderment
+at his powers in the author. Oftentimes since then, in pursuing French
+tragedies, I have fancied two marks of admiration at the end of each
+line, as hieroglyphics of the author's own admiration at his own
+cleverness. Our genuine admiration of a great poet is a continuous
+undercurrent of feeling! it is everywhere present, but seldom anywhere
+as a separate excitement. I was wont boldly to affirm, that it would
+be scarcely more difficult to push a stone out from the Pyramids with
+the bare hand, than to alter a word, or the position of a word, in
+Milton or Shakespeare, (in their most important works at least,)
+without making the poet say something else, or something worse, than
+he does say. One great distinction, I appeared to myself to see
+plainly between even the characteristic faults of our elder poets, and
+the false beauty of the moderns. In the former, from Donne to Cowley,
+we find the most fantastic out-of-the-way thoughts, but in the most
+pure and genuine mother English, in the latter the most obvious
+thoughts, in language the most fantastic and arbitrary. Our faulty
+elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to
+the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to
+the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous
+imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image,
+and half of abstract [5] meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the
+head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery.
+
+The reader must make himself acquainted with the general style of
+composition that was at that time deemed poetry, in order to
+understand and account for the effect produced on me by the Sonnets,
+the Monody at Matlock, and the Hope, of Mr. Bowles; for it is peculiar
+to original genius to become less and less striking, in proportion to
+its success in improving the taste and judgment of its contemporaries.
+The poems of West, indeed, had the merit of chaste and manly diction;
+but they were cold, and, if I may so express it, only dead-coloured;
+while in the best of Warton's there is a stiffness, which too often
+gives them the appearance of imitations from the Greek. Whatever
+relation, therefore, of cause or impulse Percy's collection of Ballads
+may bear to the most popular poems of the present day; yet in a more
+sustained and elevated style, of the then living poets, Cowper and
+Bowles [6] were, to the best of my knowledge, the first who combined
+natural thoughts with natural diction; the first who reconciled the
+heart with the head.
+
+It is true, as I have before mentioned, that from diffidence in my own
+powers, I for a short time adopted a laborious and florid diction,
+which I myself deemed, if not absolutely vicious, yet of very inferior
+worth. Gradually, however, my practice conformed to my better
+judgment; and the compositions of my twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth
+years--(for example, the shorter blank verse poems, the lines, which
+now form the middle and conclusion of the poem entitled the Destiny of
+Nations, and the tragedy of Remorse)--are not more below my present
+ideal in respect of the general tissue of the style than those of the
+latest date. Their faults were at least a remnant of the former
+leaven, and among the many who have done me the honour of putting my
+poems in the same class with those of my betters, the one or two, who
+have pretended to bring examples of affected simplicity from my
+volume, have been able to adduce but one instance, and that out of a
+copy of verses half ludicrous, half splenetic, which I intended, and
+had myself characterized, as sermoni propiora.
+
+Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an
+excess, which will itself need reforming. The reader will excuse me
+for noticing, that I myself was the first to expose risu honesto the
+three sins of poetry, one or the other of which is the most likely to
+beset a young writer. So long ago as the publication of the second
+number of the Monthly Magazine, under the name of Nehemiah
+Higginbottom, I contributed three sonnets, the first of which had for
+its object to excite a good-natured laugh at the spirit of doleful
+egotism, and at the recurrence of favourite phrases, with the double
+defect of being at once trite and licentious;--the second was on low
+creeping language and thoughts, under the pretence of simplicity; the
+third, the phrases of which were borrowed entirely from my own poems,
+on the indiscriminate use of elaborate and swelling language and
+imagery. The reader will find them in the note [7] below, and will I
+trust regard them as reprinted for biographical purposes alone, and
+not for their poetic merits. So general at that time, and so decided
+was the opinion concerning the characteristic vices of my style, that
+a celebrated physician (now, alas! no more) speaking of me in other
+respects with his usual kindness, to a gentleman, who was about to
+meet me at a dinner party, could not however resist giving him a hint
+not to mention 'The house that Jack built' in my presence, for "that I
+was as sore as a boil about that sonnet;" he not knowing that I was
+myself the author of it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+Supposed irritability of men of genius brought to the test of facts--
+Causes and occasions of the charge--Its injustice.
+
+
+I have often thought, that it would be neither uninstructive nor
+unamusing to analyze, and bring forward into distinct consciousness,
+that complex feeling, with which readers in general take part against
+the author, in favour of the critic; and the readiness with which they
+apply to all poets the old sarcasm of Horace upon the scribblers of
+his time
+
+    ------genus irritabile vatum.
+
+A debility and dimness of the imaginative power, and a consequent
+necessity of reliance on the immediate impressions of the senses, do,
+we know well, render the mind liable to superstition and fanaticism.
+Having a deficient portion of internal and proper warmth, minds of
+this class seek in the crowd circum fana for a warmth in common, which
+they do not possess singly. Cold and phlegmatic in their own nature,
+like damp hay, they heat and inflame by co-acervation; or like bees
+they become restless and irritable through the increased temperature
+of collected multitudes. Hence the German word for fanaticism, (such
+at least was its original import,) is derived from the swarming of
+bees, namely, schwaermen, schwaermerey. The passion being in an
+inverse proportion to the insight,--that the more vivid, as this the
+less distinct--anger is the inevitable consequence. The absense of all
+foundation within their own minds for that, which they yet believe
+both true and indispensable to their safety and happiness, cannot but
+produce an uneasy state of feeling, an involuntary sense of fear from
+which nature has no means of rescuing herself but by anger. Experience
+informs us that the first defence of weak minds is to recriminate.
+
+    There's no philosopher but sees,
+    That rage and fear are one disease;
+    Tho' that may burn, and this may freeze,
+    They're both alike the ague.
+
+But where the ideas are vivid, and there exists an endless power of
+combining and modifying them, the feelings and affections blend more
+easily and intimately with these ideal creations than with the objects
+of the senses; the mind is affected by thoughts, rather than by
+things; and only then feels the requisite interest even for the most
+important events and accidents, when by means of meditation they have
+passed into thoughts. The sanity of the mind is between superstition
+with fanaticism on the one hand, and enthusiasm with indifference and
+a diseased slowness to action on the other. For the conceptions of the
+mind may be so vivid and adequate, as to preclude that impulse to the
+realizing of them, which is strongest and most restless in those, who
+possess more than mere talent, (or the faculty of appropriating and
+applying the knowledge of others,)--yet still want something of the
+creative and self-sufficing power of absolute genius. For this reason
+therefore, they are men of commanding genius. While the former rest
+content between thought and reality, as it were in an intermundium of
+which their own living spirit supplies the substance, and their
+imagination the ever-varying form; the latter must impress their
+preconceptions on the world without, in order to present them back to
+their own view with the satisfying degree of clearness, distinctness,
+and individuality. These in tranquil times are formed to exhibit a
+perfect poem in palace, or temple, or landscape-garden; or a tale of
+romance in canals that join sea with sea, or in walls of rock, which,
+shouldering back the billows, imitate the power, and supply the
+benevolence of nature to sheltered navies; or in aqueducts that,
+arching the wide vale from mountain to mountain, give a Palmyra to the
+desert. But alas! in times of tumult they are the men destined to come
+forth as the shaping spirit of ruin, to destroy the wisdom of ages in
+order to substitute the fancies of a day, and to change kings and
+kingdoms, as the wind shifts and shapes the clouds [8]. The records of
+biography seem to confirm this theory. The men of the greatest genius,
+as far as we can judge from their own works or from the accounts of
+their contemporaries, appear to have been of calm and tranquil temper
+in all that related to themselves. In the inward assurance of
+permanent fame, they seem to have been either indifferent or resigned
+with regard to immediate reputation. Through all the works of Chaucer
+there reigns a cheerfulness, a manly hilarity which makes it almost
+impossible to doubt a correspondent habit of feeling in the author
+himself. Shakespeare's evenness and sweetness of temper were almost
+proverbial in his own age. That this did not arise from ignorance of
+his own comparative greatness, we have abundant proof in his Sonnets,
+which could scarcely have been known to Pope [9], when he asserted,
+that our great bard--
+
+    ------grew immortal in his own despite.
+                                   (Epist. to Augustus.)
+
+Speaking of one whom he had celebrated, and contrasting the duration
+of his works with that of his personal existence, Shakespeare adds:
+
+    Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
+    Tho' I once gone to all the world must die;
+    The earth can yield me but a common grave,
+    When you entombed in men's eyes shall lie.
+    Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
+    Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read;
+    And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,
+    When all the breathers of this world are dead:
+    You still shall live, such virtue hath my pen,
+    Where breath most breathes, e'en in the mouth of men.
+                                             SONNET LXXXI.
+
+I have taken the first that occurred; but Shakespeare's readiness to
+praise his rivals, ore pleno, and the confidence of his own equality
+with those whom he deemed most worthy of his praise, are alike
+manifested in another Sonnet.
+
+    Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,
+    Bound for the praise of all-too-precious you,
+    That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse,
+    Making their tomb, the womb wherein they grew?
+    Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write
+    Above a mortal pitch that struck me dead?
+    No, neither he, nor his compeers by night
+    Giving him aid, my verse astonished.
+    He, nor that affable familiar ghost,
+    Which nightly gulls him with intelligence,
+    As victors of my silence cannot boast;
+    I was not sick of any fear from thence!
+    But when your countenance fill'd up his line,
+    Then lack'd I matter, that enfeebled mine.
+                                          S. LXXXVI.
+
+In Spenser, indeed, we trace a mind constitutionally tender, delicate,
+and, in comparison with his three great compeers, I had almost said,
+effeminate; and this additionally saddened by the unjust persecution
+of Burleigh, and the severe calamities, which overwhelmed his latter
+days. These causes have diffused over all his compositions "a
+melancholy grace," and have drawn forth occasional strains, the more
+pathetic from their gentleness. But no where do we find the least
+trace of irritability, and still less of quarrelsome or affected
+contempt of his censurers.
+
+The same calmness, and even greater self-possession, may be affirmed
+of Milton, as far as his poems, and poetic character are concerned. He
+reserved his anger for the enemies of religion, freedom, and his
+country. My mind is not capable of forming a more august conception,
+than arises from the contemplation of this great man in his latter
+days;--poor, sick, old, blind, slandered, persecuted,--
+
+    Darkness before, and danger's voice behind,--
+
+in an age in which he was as little understood by the party, for whom,
+as by that against whom, he had contended; and among men before whom
+he strode so far as to dwarf himself by the distance; yet still
+listening to the music of his own thoughts, or if additionally
+cheered, yet cheered only by the prophetic faith of two or three
+solitary individuals, he did nevertheless
+
+                                  ------argue not
+    Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot
+    Of heart or hope; but still bore up and steer'd
+    Right onward.
+
+From others only do we derive our knowledge that Milton, in his latter
+day, had his scorners and detractors; and even in his day of youth and
+hope, that he had enemies would have been unknown to us, had they not
+been likewise the enemies of his country.
+
+I am well aware, that in advanced stages of literature, when there
+exist many and excellent models, a high degree of talent, combined
+with taste and judgment, and employed in works of imagination, will
+acquire for a man the name of a great genius; though even that
+analogon of genius, which, in certain states of society, may even
+render his writings more popular than the absolute reality could have
+done, would be sought for in vain in the mind and temper of the author
+himself. Yet even in instances of this kind, a close examination will
+often detect, that the irritability, which has been attributed to the
+author's genius as its cause, did really originate in an ill
+conformation of body, obtuse pain, or constitutional defect of
+pleasurable sensation. What is charged to the author, belongs to the
+man, who would probably have been still more impatient, but for the
+humanizing influences of the very pursuit, which yet bears the blame
+of his irritability.
+
+How then are we to explain the easy credence generally given to this
+charge, if the charge itself be not, as I have endeavoured to show,
+supported by experience? This seems to me of no very difficult
+solution. In whatever country literature is widely diffused, there
+will be many who mistake an intense desire to possess the reputation
+of poetic genius, for the actual powers, and original tendencies which
+constitute it. But men, whose dearest wishes are fixed on objects
+wholly out of their own power, become in all cases more or less
+impatient and prone to anger. Besides, though it may be paradoxical to
+assert, that a man can know one thing and believe the opposite, yet
+assuredly a vain person may have so habitually indulged the wish, and
+persevered in the attempt, to appear what he is not, as to become
+himself one of his own proselytes. Still, as this counterfeit and
+artificial persuasion must differ, even in the person's own feelings,
+from a real sense of inward power, what can be more natural, than that
+this difference should betray itself in suspicious and jealous
+irritability? Even as the flowery sod, which covers a hollow, may be
+often detected by its shaking and trembling.
+
+But, alas! the multitude of books and the general diffusion of
+literature, have produced other and more lamentable effects in the
+world of letters, and such as are abundant to explain, though by no
+means to justify, the contempt with which the best grounded complaints
+of injured genius are rejected as frivolous, or entertained as matter
+of merriment. In the days of Chaucer and Gower, our language might
+(with due allowance for the imperfections of a simile) be compared to
+a wilderness of vocal reeds, from which the favourites only of Pan or
+Apollo could construct even the rude syrinx; and from this the
+constructors alone could elicit strains of music. But now, partly by
+the labours of successive poets, and in part by the more artificial
+state of society and social intercourse, language, mechanized as it
+were into a barrel-organ, supplies at once both instrument and tune.
+Thus even the deaf may play, so as to delight the many. Sometimes (for
+it is with similes, as it is with jests at a wine table, one is sure
+to suggest another) I have attempted to illustrate the present state
+of our language, in its relation to literature, by a press-room of
+larger and smaller stereotype pieces, which, in the present Anglo-
+Gallican fashion of unconnected, epigrammatic periods, it requires but
+an ordinary portion of ingenuity to vary indefinitely, and yet still
+produce something, which, if not sense, will be so like it as to do as
+well. Perhaps better: for it spares the reader the trouble of
+thinking; prevents vacancy, while it indulges indolence; and secures
+the memory from all danger of an intellectual plethora. Hence of all
+trades, literature at present demands the least talent or information;
+and, of all modes of literature, the manufacturing of poems. The
+difference indeed between these and the works of genius is not less
+than between an egg and an egg-shell; yet at a distance they both look
+alike.
+
+Now it is no less remarkable than true, with how little examination
+works of polite literature are commonly perused, not only by the mass
+of readers, but by men of first rate ability, till some accident or
+chance [10] discussion have roused their attention, and put them on
+their guard. And hence individuals below mediocrity not less in
+natural power than in acquired knowledge; nay, bunglers who have
+failed in the lowest mechanic crafts, and whose presumption is in due
+proportion to their want of sense and sensibility; men, who being
+first scribblers from idleness and ignorance, next become libellers
+from envy and malevolence,--have been able to drive a successful trade
+in the employment of the booksellers, nay, have raised themselves into
+temporary name and reputation with the public at large, by that most
+powerful of all adulation, the appeal to the bad and malignant
+passions of mankind [11]. But as it is the nature of scorn, envy, and
+all malignant propensities to require a quick change of objects, such
+writers are sure, sooner or later, to awake from their dream of vanity
+to disappointment and neglect with embittered and envenomed feelings.
+Even during their short-lived success, sensible in spite of themselves
+on what a shifting foundation it rests, they resent the mere refusal
+of praise as a robbery, and at the justest censures kindle at once
+into violent and undisciplined abuse; till the acute disease changing
+into chronical, the more deadly as the less violent, they become the
+fit instruments of literary detraction and moral slander. They are
+then no longer to be questioned without exposing the complainant to
+ridicule, because, forsooth, they are anonymous critics, and
+authorized, in Andrew Marvell's phrase, as "synodical individuals" to
+speak of themselves plurali majestatico! As if literature formed a
+caste, like that of the Paras in Hindostan, who, however maltreated,
+must not dare to deem themselves wronged! As if that, which in all
+other cases adds a deeper dye to slander, the circumstance of its
+being anonymous, here acted only to make the slanderer inviolable!
+[12] Thus, in part, from the accidental tempers of individuals--(men
+of undoubted talent, but not men of genius)--tempers rendered yet more
+irritable by their desire to appear men of genius; but still more
+effectively by the excesses of the mere counterfeits both of talent
+and genius; the number too being so incomparably greater of those who
+are thought to be, than of those who really are men of genius; and in
+part from the natural, but not therefore the less partial and unjust
+distinction, made by the public itself between literary and all other
+property; I believe the prejudice to have arisen, which considers an
+unusual irascibility concerning the reception of its products as
+characteristic of genius.
+
+It might correct the moral feelings of a numerous class of readers, to
+suppose a Review set on foot, the object of which should be to
+criticise all the chief works presented to the public by our ribbon-
+weavers, calico-printers, cabinet-makers, and china-manufacturers;
+which should be conducted in the same spirit, and take the same
+freedom with personal character, as our literary journals. They would
+scarcely, I think, deny their belief, not only that the genus
+irritabile would be found to include many other species besides that
+of bards; but that the irritability of trade would soon reduce the
+resentments of poets into mere shadow-fights in the comparison. Or is
+wealth the only rational object of human interest? Or even if this
+were admitted, has the poet no property in his works? Or is it a rare,
+or culpable case, that he who serves at the altar of the Muses, should
+be compelled to derive his maintenance from the altar, when too he has
+perhaps deliberately abandoned the fairest prospects of rank and
+opulence in order to devote himself, an entire and undistracted man,
+to the instruction or refinement of his fellow-citizens? Or, should we
+pass by all higher objects and motives, all disinterested benevolence,
+and even that ambition of lasting praise which is at once the crutch
+and ornament, which at once supports and betrays, the infirmity of
+human virtue,--is the character and property of the man, who labours
+for our intellectual pleasures, less entitled to a share of our fellow
+feeling, than that of the wine-merchant or milliner? Sensibility
+indeed, both quick and deep, is not only a characteristic feature, but
+may be deemed a component part, of genius. But it is not less an
+essential mark of true genius, that its sensibility is excited by any
+other cause more powerfully than by its own personal interests; for
+this plain reason, that the man of genius lives most in the ideal
+world, in which the present is still constituted by the future or the
+past; and because his feelings have been habitually associated with
+thoughts and images, to the number, clearness, and vivacity of which
+the sensation of self is always in an inverse proportion. And yet,
+should he perchance have occasion to repel some false charge, or to
+rectify some erroneous censure, nothing is more common than for the
+many to mistake the general liveliness of his manner and language,
+whatever is the subject, for the effects of peculiar irritation from
+its accidental relation to himself. [13]
+
+For myself, if from my own feelings, or from the less suspicious test
+of the observations of others, I had been made aware of any literary
+testiness or jealousy; I trust, that I should have been, however,
+neither silly nor arrogant enough to have burthened the imperfection
+on genius. But an experience--(and I should not need documents in
+abundance to prove my words, if I added)--a tried experience of twenty
+years, has taught me, that the original sin of my character consists
+in a careless indifference to public opinion, and to the attacks of
+those who influence it; that praise and admiration have become yearly
+less and less desirable, except as marks of sympathy; nay that it is
+difficult and distressing to me to think with any interest even about
+the sale and profit of my works, important as, in my present
+circumstances, such considerations must needs be. Yet it never
+occurred to me to believe or fancy, that the quantum of intellectual
+power bestowed on me by nature or education was in any way connected
+with this habit of my feelings; or that it needed any other parents or
+fosterers than constitutional indolence, aggravated into languor by
+ill-health; the accumulating embarrassments of procrastination; the
+mental cowardice, which is the inseparable companion of
+procrastination, and which makes us anxious to think and converse on
+any thing rather than on what concerns ourselves; in fine, all those
+close vexations, whether chargeable on my faults or my fortunes, which
+leave me but little grief to spare for evils comparatively distant and
+alien.
+
+Indignation at literary wrongs I leave to men born under happier
+stars. I cannot afford it. But so far from condemning those who can, I
+deem it a writer's duty, and think it creditable to his heart, to feel
+and express a resentment proportioned to the grossness of the
+provocation, and the importance of the object. There is no profession
+on earth, which requires an attention so early, so long, or so
+unintermitting as that of poetry; and indeed as that of literary
+composition in general, if it be such as at all satisfies the demands
+both of taste and of sound logic. How difficult and delicate a task
+even the mere mechanism of verse is, may be conjectured from the
+failure of those, who have attempted poetry late in life. Where then a
+man has, from his earliest youth, devoted his whole being to an
+object, which by the admission of all civilized nations in all ages is
+honourable as a pursuit, and glorious as an attainment; what of all
+that relates to himself and his family, if only we except his moral
+character, can have fairer claims to his protection, or more authorize
+acts of self-defence, than the elaborate products of his intellect and
+intellectual industry? Prudence itself would command us to show, even
+if defect or diversion of natural sensibility had prevented us from
+feeling, a due interest and qualified anxiety for the offspring and
+representatives of our nobler being. I know it, alas! by woful
+experience. I have laid too many eggs in the hot sands of this
+wilderness, the world, with ostrich carelessness and ostrich oblivion.
+The greater part indeed have been trod under foot, and are forgotten;
+but yet no small number have crept forth into life, some to furnish
+feathers for the caps of others, and still more to plume the shafts in
+the quivers of my enemies, of them that unprovoked have lain in wait
+against my soul.
+
+    Sic vos, non vobis, mellificatis, apes!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+The Author's obligations to critics, and the probable occasion--
+Principles of modern criticism--Mr. Southey's works and character.
+
+
+To anonymous critics in reviews, magazines, and news-journals of
+various name and rank, and to satirists with or without a name in
+verse or prose, or in verse-text aided by prose-comment, I do
+seriously believe and profess, that I owe full two-thirds of whatever
+reputation and publicity I happen to possess. For when the name of an
+individual has occurred so frequently, in so many works, for so great
+a length of time, the readers of these works--(which with a shelf or
+two of beauties, elegant Extracts and Anas, form nine-tenths of the
+reading of the reading Public [14])--cannot but be familiar with the
+name, without distinctly remembering whether it was introduced for
+eulogy or for censure. And this becomes the more likely, if (as I
+believe) the habit of perusing periodical works may be properly added
+to Averroes' catalogue of Anti-Mnemonics, or weakeners of the memory
+[15]. But where this has not been the case, yet the reader will be apt
+to suspect that there must be something more than usually strong and
+extensive in a reputation, that could either require or stand so
+merciless and long-continued a cannonading. Without any feeling of
+anger therefore--(for which indeed, on my own account, I have no
+pretext)--I may yet be allowed to express some degree of surprise,
+that, after having run the critical gauntlet for a certain class of
+faults which I had, nothing having come before the judgment-seat in
+the interim, I should, year after year, quarter after quarter, month
+after month--(not to mention sundry petty periodicals of still quicker
+revolution, "or weekly or diurnal")--have been, for at least seventeen
+years consecutively, dragged forth by them into the foremost ranks of
+the proscribed, and forced to abide the brunt of abuse, for faults
+directly opposite, and which I certainly had not. How shall I explain
+this?
+
+Whatever may have been the case with others, I certainly cannot
+attribute this persecution to personal dislike, or to envy, or to
+feelings of vindictive animosity. Not to the former, for with the
+exception of a very few who are my intimate friends, and were so
+before they were known as authors, I have had little other
+acquaintance with literary characters, than what may be implied in an
+accidental introduction, or casual meeting in a mixed company. And as
+far as words and looks can be trusted, I must believe that, even in
+these instances, I had excited no unfriendly disposition. Neither by
+letter, nor in conversation, have I ever had dispute or controversy
+beyond the common social interchange of opinions. Nay, where I had
+reason to suppose my convictions fundamentally different, it has been
+my habit, and I may add, the impulse of my nature, to assign the
+grounds of my belief, rather than the belief itself; and not to
+express dissent, till I could establish some points of complete
+sympathy, some grounds common to both sides, from which to commence
+its explanation.
+
+Still less can I place these attacks to the charge of envy. The few
+pages which I have published, are of too distant a date, and the
+extent of their sale a proof too conclusive against their having been
+popular at any time, to render probable, I had almost said possible,
+the excitement of envy on their account; and the man who should envy
+me on any other, verily he must be envy-mad!
+
+Lastly, with as little semblance of reason, could I suspect any
+animosity towards me from vindictive feelings as the cause. I have
+before said, that my acquaintance with literary men has been limited
+and distant; and that I have had neither dispute nor controversy. From
+my first entrance into life, I have, with few and short intervals,
+lived either abroad or in retirement. My different essays on subjects
+of national interest, published at different times, first in the
+Morning Post and then in the Courier, with my courses of Lectures on
+the principles of criticism as applied to Shakespeare and Milton,
+constitute my whole publicity; the only occasions on which I could
+offend any member of the republic of letters. With one solitary
+exception in which my words were first misstated and then wantonly
+applied to an individual, I could never learn that I had excited the
+displeasure of any among my literary contemporaries. Having announced
+my intention to give a course of Lectures on the characteristic merits
+and defects of English poetry in its different aeras; first, from
+Chaucer to Milton; second, from Dryden inclusively to Thomson; and
+third, from Cowper to the present day; I changed my plan, and confined
+my disquisition to the former two periods, that I might furnish no
+possible pretext for the unthinking to misconstrue, or the malignant
+to misapply my words, and having stamped their own meaning on them, to
+pass them as current coin in the marts of garrulity or detraction.
+
+Praises of the unworthy are felt by ardent minds as robberies of the
+deserving; and it is too true, and too frequent, that Bacon,
+Harrington, Machiavel, and Spinoza, are not read, because Hume,
+Condillac, and Voltaire are. But in promiscuous company no prudent man
+will oppugn the merits of a contemporary in his own supposed
+department; contenting himself with praising in his turn those whom he
+deems excellent. If I should ever deem it my duty at all to oppose the
+pretensions of individuals, I would oppose them in books which could
+be weighed and answered, in which I could evolve the whole of my
+reasons and feelings, with their requisite limits and modifications;
+not in irrecoverable conversation, where however strong the reasons
+might be, the feelings that prompted them would assuredly be
+attributed by some one or other to envy and discontent. Besides I well
+know, and, I trust, have acted on that knowledge, that it must be the
+ignorant and injudicious who extol the unworthy; and the eulogies of
+critics without taste or judgment are the natural reward of authors
+without feeling or genius. Sint unicuique sua praemia.
+
+How then, dismissing, as I do, these three causes, am I to account for
+attacks, the long continuance and inveteracy of which it would require
+all three to explain? The solution seems to be this,--I was in habits
+of intimacy with Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Southey! This, however,
+transfers, rather than removes the difficulty. Be it, that, by an
+unconscionable extension of the old adage, noscitur a socio, my
+literary friends are never under the water-fall of criticism, but I
+must be wet through with the spray; yet how came the torrent to
+descend upon them?
+
+First then, with regard to Mr. Southey. I well remember the general
+reception of his earlier publications; namely, the poems published
+with Mr. Lovell under the names of Moschus and Bion; the two volumes
+of poems under his own name, and the Joan of Arc. The censures of the
+critics by profession are extant, and may be easily referred to:--
+careless lines, inequality in the merit of the different poems, and
+(in the lighter works) a predilection for the strange and whimsical;
+in short, such faults as might have been anticipated in a young and
+rapid writer, were indeed sufficiently enforced. Nor was there at that
+time wanting a party spirit to aggravate the defects of a poet, who
+with all the courage of uncorrupted youth had avowed his zeal for a
+cause, which he deemed that of liberty, and his abhorrence of
+oppression by whatever name consecrated. But it was as little objected
+by others, as dreamed of by the poet himself, that he preferred
+careless and prosaic lines on rule and of forethought, or indeed that
+he pretended to any other art or theory of poetic diction, except that
+which we may all learn from Horace, Quinctilian, the admirable
+dialogue, De Oratoribus, generally attributed to Tacitus, or Strada's
+Prolusions; if indeed natural good sense and the early study of the
+best models in his own language had not infused the same maxims more
+securely, and, if I may venture the expression, more vitally. All that
+could have been fairly deduced was, that in his taste and estimation
+of writers Mr. Southey agreed far more with Thomas Warton, than with
+Dr. Johnson. Nor do I mean to deny, that at all times Mr. Southey was
+of the same mind with Sir Philip Sidney in preferring an excellent
+ballad in the humblest style of poetry to twenty indifferent poems
+that strutted in the highest. And by what have his works, published
+since then, been characterized, each more strikingly than the
+preceding, but by greater splendour, a deeper pathos, profounder
+reflections, and a more sustained dignity of language and of metre?
+Distant may the period be, but whenever the time shall come, when all
+his works shall be collected by some editor worthy to be his
+biographer, I trust that an appendix of excerpta of all the passages,
+in which his writings, name, and character have been attacked, from
+the pamphlets and periodical works of the last twenty years, may be an
+accompaniment. Yet that it would prove medicinal in after times I dare
+not hope; for as long as there are readers to be delighted with
+calumny, there will be found reviewers to calumniate. And such readers
+will become in all probability more numerous, in proportion as a still
+greater diffusion of literature shall produce an increase of
+sciolists, and sciolism bring with it petulance and presumption. In
+times of old, books were as religious oracles; as literature advanced,
+they next became venerable preceptors; they then descended to the rank
+of instructive friends; and, as their numbers increased, they sank
+still lower to that of entertaining companions; and at present they
+seem degraded into culprits to hold up their hands at the bar of every
+self-elected, yet not the less peremptory, judge, who chooses to write
+from humour or interest, from enmity or arrogance, and to abide the
+decision "of him that reads in malice, or him that reads after
+dinner."
+
+The same retrograde movement may be traced, in the relation which the
+authors themselves have assumed towards their readers. From the lofty
+address of Bacon: "these are the meditations of Francis of Verulam,
+which that posterity should be possessed of, he deemed their
+interest:" or from dedication to Monarch or Pontiff, in which the
+honour given was asserted in equipoise to the patronage acknowledged:
+from Pindar's
+
+            ------'ep' alloi-
+    -si d'alloi megaloi: to d'eschaton kory-
+    phoutai basilensi. Maeketi
+            paptaine porsion.
+    Eiae se te touton
+    upsou chronon patein, eme
+    te tossade nikaphorois
+    omilein, prophanton sophian kath' El-
+    lanas eonta panta.--OLYMP. OD. I.
+
+there was a gradual sinking in the etiquette or allowed style of
+pretension.
+
+Poets and Philosophers, rendered diffident by their very number,
+addressed themselves to "learned readers;" then aimed to conciliate
+the graces of "the candid reader;" till, the critic still rising as
+the author sank, the amateurs of literature collectively were erected
+into a municipality of judges, and addressed as the Town! And now,
+finally, all men being supposed able to read, and all readers able to
+judge, the multitudinous Public, shaped into personal unity by the
+magic of abstraction, sits nominal despot on the throne of criticism.
+But, alas! as in other despotisms, it but echoes the decisions of its
+invisible ministers, whose intellectual claims to the guardianship of
+the Muses seem, for the greater part, analogous to the physical
+qualifications which adapt their oriental brethren for the
+superintendence of the Harem. Thus it is said, that St. Nepomuc was
+installed the guardian of bridges, because he had fallen over one, and
+sunk out of sight; thus too St. Cecilia is said to have been first
+propitiated by musicians, because, having failed in her own attempts,
+she had taken a dislike to the art and all its successful professors.
+But I shall probably have occasion hereafter to deliver my convictions
+more at large concerning this state of things, and its influences on
+taste, genius and morality.
+
+In the Thalaba, the Madoc, and still more evidently in the unique [16]
+Cid, in the Kehama, and, as last, so best, the Roderick; Southey has
+given abundant proof, se cogitare quam sit magnum dare aliquid in
+manus hominum: nec persuadere sibi posse, non saepe tractandum quod
+placere et semper et omnibus cupiat. But on the other hand, I
+conceive, that Mr. Southey was quite unable to comprehend, wherein
+could consist the crime or mischief of printing half a dozen or more
+playful poems; or to speak more generally, compositions which would be
+enjoyed or passed over, according as the taste and humour of the
+reader might chance to be; provided they contained nothing immoral. In
+the present age periturae parcere chartae is emphatically an
+unreasonable demand. The merest trifle he ever sent abroad had tenfold
+better claims to its ink and paper than all the silly criticisms on
+it, which proved no more than that the critic was not one of those,
+for whom the trifle was written; and than all the grave exhortations
+to a greater reverence for the public--as if the passive page of a
+book, by having an epigram or doggerel tale impressed on it, instantly
+assumed at once loco-motive power and a sort of ubiquity, so as to
+flutter and buz in the ear of the public to the sore annoyance of the
+said mysterious personage. But what gives an additional and more
+ludicrous absurdity to these lamentations is the curious fact, that if
+in a volume of poetry the critic should find poem or passage which he
+deems more especially worthless, he is sure to select and reprint it
+in the review; by which, on his own grounds, he wastes as much more
+paper than the author, as the copies of a fashionable review are more
+numerous than those of the original book; in some, and those the most
+prominent instances, as ten thousand to five hundred. I know nothing
+that surpasses the vileness of deciding on the merits of a poet or
+painter,--(not by characteristic defects; for where there is genius,
+these always point to his characteristic beauties; but)--by accidental
+failures or faulty passages; except the impudence of defending it, as
+the proper duty, and most instructive part, of criticism. Omit or pass
+slightly over the expression, grace, and grouping of Raffael's
+figures; but ridicule in detail the knitting-needles and broom-twigs,
+that are to represent trees in his back grounds; and never let him
+hear the last of his galli-pots! Admit that the Allegro and Penseroso
+of Milton are not without merit; but repay yourself for this
+concession, by reprinting at length the two poems on the University
+Carrier! As a fair specimen of his Sonnets, quote
+
+    "A Book was writ of late called Tetrachordon;"
+
+and, as characteristic of his rhythm and metre, cite his literal
+translation of the first and second Psalm! In order to justify
+yourself, you need only assert, that had you dwelt chiefly on the
+beauties and excellencies of the poet, the admiration of these might
+seduce the attention of future writers from the objects of their love
+and wonder, to an imitation of the few poems and passages in which the
+poet was most unlike himself.
+
+But till reviews are conducted on far other principles, and with far
+other motives; till in the place of arbitrary dictation and petulant
+sneers, the reviewers support their decisions by reference to fixed
+canons of criticism, previously established and deduced from the
+nature of man; reflecting minds will pronounce it arrogance in them
+thus to announce themselves to men of letters, as the guides of their
+taste and judgment. To the purchaser and mere reader it is, at all
+events, an injustice. He who tells me that there are defects in a new
+work, tells me nothing which I should not have taken for granted
+without his information. But he, who points out and elucidates the
+beauties of an original work does indeed give me interesting
+information, such as experience would not have authorized me in
+anticipating. And as to compositions which the authors themselves
+announce with
+
+    Haec ipsi novimus esse nihil,
+
+why should we judge by a different rule two printed works, only
+because the one author is alive, and the other in his grave? What
+literary man has not regretted the prudery of Spratt in refusing to
+let his friend Cowley appear in his slippers and dressing gown? I am
+not perhaps the only one who has derived an innocent amusement from
+the riddles, conundrums, tri-syllable lines, and the like, of Swift
+and his correspondents, in hours of languor, when to have read his
+more finished works would have been useless to myself, and, in some
+sort, an act of injustice to the author. But I am at a loss to
+conceive by what perversity of judgment, these relaxations of his
+genius could be employed to diminish his fame as the writer of
+Gulliver, or the Tale of a Tub. Had Mr. Southey written twice as many
+poems of inferior merit, or partial interest, as have enlivened the
+journals of the day, they would have added to his honour with good and
+wise men, not merely or principally as proving the versatility of his
+talents, but as evidences of the purity of that mind, which even in
+its levities never dictated a line which it need regret on any moral
+account.
+
+I have in imagination transferred to the future biographer the duty of
+contrasting Southey's fixed and well-earned fame, with the abuse and
+indefatigable hostility of his anonymous critics from his early youth
+to his ripest manhood. But I cannot think so ill of human nature as
+not to believe, that these critics have already taken shame to
+themselves, whether they consider the object of their abuse in his
+moral or his literary character. For reflect but on the variety and
+extent of his acquirements! He stands second to no man, either as an
+historian or as a bibliographer; and when I regard him as a popular
+essayist,--(for the articles of his compositions in the reviews are,
+for the greater part, essays on subjects of deep or curious interest
+rather than criticisms on particular works)--I look in vain for any
+writer, who has conveyed so much information, from so many and such
+recondite sources, with so many just and original reflections, in a
+style so lively and poignant, yet so uniformly classical and
+perspicuous; no one, in short, who has combined so much wisdom with so
+much wit; so much truth and knowledge with so much life and fancy. His
+prose is always intelligible and always entertaining. In poetry he has
+attempted almost every species of composition known before, and he has
+added new ones; and if we except the highest lyric,--(in which how
+few, how very few even of the greatest minds have been fortunate)--he
+has attempted every species successfully; from the political song of
+the day, thrown off in the playful overflow of honest joy and
+patriotic exultation, to the wild ballad; from epistolary ease and
+graceful narrative, to austere and impetuous moral declamation; from
+the pastoral charms and wild streaming lights of the Thalaba, in which
+sentiment and imagery have given permanence even to the excitement of
+curiosity; and from the full blaze of the Kehama,--(a gallery of
+finished pictures in one splendid fancy piece, in which,
+notwithstanding, the moral grandeur rises gradually above the
+brilliance of the colouring and the boldness and novelty of the
+machinery)--to the more sober beauties of the Madoc; and lastly, from
+the Madoc to his Roderick, in which, retaining all his former
+excellencies of a poet eminently inventive and picturesque, he has
+surpassed himself in language and metre, in the construction of the
+whole, and in the splendour of particular passages.
+
+Here then shall I conclude? No! The characters of the deceased, like
+the encomia on tombstones, as they are described with religious
+tenderness, so are they read, with allowing sympathy indeed, but yet
+with rational deduction. There are men, who deserve a higher record;
+men with whose characters it is the interest of their contemporaries,
+no less than that of posterity, to be made acquainted; while it is yet
+possible for impartial censure, and even for quick-sighted envy, to
+cross-examine the tale without offence to the courtesies of humanity;
+and while the eulogist, detected in exaggeration or falsehood, must
+pay the full penalty of his baseness in the contempt which brands the
+convicted flatterer. Publicly has Mr. Southey been reviled by men,
+who, as I would fain hope for the honour of human nature, hurled fire-
+brands against a figure of their own imagination; publicly have his
+talents been depreciated, his principles denounced; as publicly do I
+therefore, who have known him intimately, deem it my duty to leave
+recorded, that it is Southey's almost unexampled felicity, to possess
+the best gifts of talent and genius free from all their characteristic
+defects. To those who remember the state of our public schools and
+universities some twenty years past, it will appear no ordinary praise
+in any man to have passed from innocence into virtue, not only free
+from all vicious habit, but unstained by one act of intemperance, or
+the degradations akin to intemperance. That scheme of head, heart, and
+habitual demeanour, which in his early manhood, and first
+controversial writings, Milton, claiming the privilege of self-
+defence, asserts of himself, and challenges his calumniators to
+disprove; this will his school-mates, his fellow-collegians, and his
+maturer friends, with a confidence proportioned to the intimacy of
+their knowledge, bear witness to, as again realized in the life of
+Robert Southey. But still more striking to those, who by biography or
+by their own experience are familiar with the general habits of
+genius, will appear the poet's matchless industry and perseverance in
+his pursuits; the worthiness and dignity of those pursuits; his
+generous submission to tasks of transitory interest, or such as his
+genius alone could make otherwise; and that having thus more than
+satisfied the claims of affection or prudence, he should yet have made
+for himself time and power, to achieve more, and in more various
+departments, than almost any other writer has done, though employed
+wholly on subjects of his own choice and ambition. But as Southey
+possesses, and is not possessed by, his genius, even so is he master
+even of his virtues. The regular and methodical tenor of his daily
+labours, which would be deemed rare in the most mechanical pursuits,
+and might be envied by the mere man of business, loses all semblance
+of formality in the dignified simplicity of his manners, in the spring
+and healthful cheerfulness of his spirits. Always employed, his
+friends find him always at leisure. No less punctual in trifles, than
+steadfast in the performance of highest duties, he inflicts none of
+those small pains and discomforts which irregular men scatter about
+them, and which in the aggregate so often become formidable obstacles
+both to happiness and utility; while on the contrary he bestows all
+the pleasures, and inspires all that ease of mind on those around him
+or connected with him, which perfect consistency, and (if such a word
+might be framed) absolute reliability, equally in small as in great
+concerns, cannot but inspire and bestow; when this too is softened
+without being weakened by kindness and gentleness. I know few men who
+so well deserve the character which an antient attributes to Marcus
+Cato, namely, that he was likest virtue, in as much as he seemed to
+act aright, not in obedience to any law or outward motive, but by the
+necessity of a happy nature, which could not act otherwise. As son,
+brother, husband, father, master, friend, he moves with firm yet light
+steps, alike unostentatious, and alike exemplary. As a writer, he has
+uniformly made his talents subservient to the best interests of
+humanity, of public virtue, and domestic piety; his cause has ever
+been the cause of pure religion and of liberty, of national
+independence and of national illumination. When future critics shall
+weigh out his guerdon of praise and censure, it will be Southey the
+poet only, that will supply them with the scanty materials for the
+latter. They will likewise not fail to record, that as no man was ever
+a more constant friend, never had poet more friends and honourers
+among the good of all parties; and that quacks in education, quacks in
+politics, and quacks in criticism were his only enemies. [17]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+The Lyrical Ballads with the Preface--Mr. Wordsworth's earlier poems--
+On fancy and imagination--The investigation of the distinction
+important to the Fine Arts.
+
+
+I have wandered far from the object in view, but as I fancied to
+myself readers who would respect the feelings that had tempted me from
+the main road; so I dare calculate on not a few, who will warmly
+sympathize with them. At present it will be sufficient for my purpose,
+if I have proved, that Mr. Southey's writings no more than my own
+furnished the original occasion to this fiction of a new school of
+poetry, and to the clamours against its supposed founders and
+proselytes.
+
+As little do I believe that Mr. Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads were in
+themselves the cause. I speak exclusively of the two volumes so
+entitled. A careful and repeated examination of these confirms me in
+the belief, that the omission of less than a hundred lines would have
+precluded nine-tenths of the criticism on this work. I hazard this
+declaration, however, on the supposition, that the reader has taken it
+up, as he would have done any other collection of poems purporting to
+derive their subjects or interests from the incidents of domestic or
+ordinary life, intermingled with higher strains of meditation which
+the poet utters in his own person and character; with the proviso,
+that these poems were perused without knowledge of, or reference to,
+the author's peculiar opinions, and that the reader had not had his
+attention previously directed to those peculiarities. In that case, as
+actually happened with Mr. Southey's earlier works, the lines and
+passages which might have offended the general taste, would have been
+considered as mere inequalities, and attributed to inattention, not to
+perversity of judgment. The men of business who had passed their lives
+chiefly in cities, and who might therefore be expected to derive the
+highest pleasure from acute notices of men and manners conveyed in
+easy, yet correct and pointed language; and all those who, reading but
+little poetry, are most stimulated with that species of it, which
+seems most distant from prose, would probably have passed by the
+volumes altogether. Others more catholic in their taste, and yet
+habituated to be most pleased when most excited, would have contented
+themselves with deciding, that the author had been successful in
+proportion to the elevation of his style and subject. Not a few,
+perhaps, might, by their admiration of the Lines written near Tintern
+Abbey, on revisiting the Wye, those Left upon a Yew Tree Seat, The Old
+Cumberland Beggar, and Ruth, have been gradually led to peruse with
+kindred feeling The Brothers, the Hart-leap Well, and whatever other
+poems in that collection may be described as holding a middle place
+between those written in the highest and those in the humblest style;
+as for instance between the Tintern Abbey, and The Thorn, or Simon
+Lee. Should their taste submit to no further change, and still remain
+unreconciled to the colloquial phrases, or the imitations of them,
+that are, more or less, scattered through the class last mentioned;
+yet even from the small number of the latter, they would have deemed
+them but an inconsiderable subtraction from the merit of the whole
+work; or, what is sometimes not unpleasing in the publication of a new
+writer, as serving to ascertain the natural tendency, and consequently
+the proper direction of the author's genius.
+
+In the critical remarks, therefore, prefixed and annexed to the
+Lyrical Ballads, I believe, we may safely rest, as the true origin of
+the unexampled opposition which Mr. Wordsworth's writings have been
+since doomed to encounter. The humbler passages in the poems
+themselves were dwelt on and cited to justify the rejection of the
+theory. What in and for themselves would have been either forgotten or
+forgiven as imperfections, or at least comparative failures, provoked
+direct hostility when announced as intentional, as the result of
+choice after full deliberation. Thus the poems, admitted by all as
+excellent, joined with those which had pleased the far greater number,
+though they formed two-thirds of the whole work, instead of being
+deemed (as in all right they should have been, even if we take for
+granted that the reader judged aright) an atonement for the few
+exceptions, gave wind and fuel to the animosity against both the poems
+and the poet. In all perplexity there is a portion of fear, which
+predisposes the mind to anger. Not able to deny that the author
+possessed both genius and a powerful intellect, they felt very
+positive,--but yet were not quite certain that he might not be in the
+right, and they themselves in the wrong; an unquiet state of mind,
+which seeks alleviation by quarrelling with the occasion of it, and by
+wondering at the perverseness of the man, who had written a long and
+argumentative essay to persuade them, that
+
+    Fair is foul, and foul is fair;
+
+in other words, that they had been all their lives admiring without
+judgment, and were now about to censure without reason. [18]
+
+That this conjecture is not wide from the mark, I am induced to
+believe from the noticeable fact, which I can state on my own
+knowledge, that the same general censure has been grounded by almost
+every different person on some different poem. Among those, whose
+candour and judgment I estimate highly, I distinctly remember six who
+expressed their objections to the Lyrical Ballads almost in the same
+words, and altogether to the same purport, at the same time admitting,
+that several of the poems had given them great pleasure; and, strange
+as it might seem, the composition which one cited as execrable,
+another quoted as his favourite. I am indeed convinced in my own mind,
+that could the same experiment have been tried with these volumes, as
+was made in the well known story of the picture, the result would have
+been the same; the parts which had been covered by black spots on the
+one day, would be found equally albo lapide notatae on the succeeding.
+
+However this may be, it was assuredly hard and unjust to fix the
+attention on a few separate and insulated poems with as much aversion,
+as if they had been so many plague-spots on the whole work, instead of
+passing them over in silence, as so much blank paper, or leaves of a
+bookseller's catalogue; especially, as no one pretended to have found
+in them any immorality or indelicacy; and the poems, therefore, at the
+worst, could only be regarded as so many light or inferior coins in a
+rouleau of gold, not as so much alloy in a weight of bullion. A friend
+whose talents I hold in the highest respect, but whose judgment and
+strong sound sense I have had almost continued occasion to revere,
+making the usual complaints to me concerning both the style and
+subjects of Mr. Wordsworth's minor poems; I admitted that there were
+some few of the tales and incidents, in which I could not myself find
+a sufficient cause for their having been recorded in metre. I
+mentioned Alice Fell as an instance; "Nay," replied my friend with
+more than usual quickness of manner, "I cannot agree with you there!--
+that, I own, does seem to me a remarkably pleasing poem." In the
+Lyrical Ballads, (for my experience does not enable me to extend the
+remark equally unqualified to the two subsequent volumes,) I have
+heard at different times, and from different individuals, every single
+poem extolled and reprobated, with the exception of those of loftier
+kind, which as was before observed, seem to have won universal praise.
+This fact of itself would have made me diffident in my censures, had
+not a still stronger ground been furnished by the strange contrast of
+the heat and long continuance of the opposition, with the nature of
+the faults stated as justifying it. The seductive faults, the dulcia
+vitia of Cowley, Marine, or Darwin might reasonably be thought capable
+of corrupting the public judgment for half a century, and require a
+twenty years war, campaign after campaign, in order to dethrone the
+usurper and re-establish the legitimate taste. But that a downright
+simpleness, under the affectation of simplicity, prosaic words in
+feeble metre, silly thoughts in childish phrases, and a preference of
+mean, degrading, or at best trivial associations and characters,
+should succeed in forming a school of imitators, a company of almost
+religious admirers, and this too among young men of ardent minds,
+liberal education, and not
+
+    ------with academic laurels unbestowed;
+
+and that this bare and bald counterfeit of poetry, which is
+characterized as below criticism, should for nearly twenty years have
+well-nigh engrossed criticism, as the main, if not the only, butt of
+review, magazine, pamphlet, poem, and paragraph; this is indeed matter
+of wonder. Of yet greater is it, that the contest should still
+continue as undecided as [19] that between Bacchus and the frogs in
+Aristophanes; when the former descended to the realms of the departed
+to bring back the spirit of old and genuine poesy;--
+
+    CH.  Brekekekex, koax, koax.
+    D.   All' exoloisth' auto koax.
+         Ouden gar est' all', hae koax.
+         Oimozet' ou gar moi melei.
+    CH.  Alla maen kekraxomestha
+         g', oposon hae pharynx an haemon
+         chandanae di' haemeras,
+         brekekekex, koax, koax!
+    D.   Touto gar ou nikaesete.
+    CH.  Oude men haemas su pantos.
+    D.   Oude maen humeis ge dae m'
+         oudepote. Kekraxomai gar,
+         kan me deae, di' haemeras,
+         eos an humon epikrataeso tou koax!
+    CH.  Brekekekex, KO'AX, KOAX!
+
+During the last year of my residence at Cambridge, 1794, I became
+acquainted with Mr. Wordsworth's first publication entitled
+Descriptive Sketches; and seldom, if ever, was the emergence of an
+original poetic genius above the literary horizon more evidently
+announced. In the form, style, and manner of the whole poem, and in
+the structure of the particular lines and periods, there is a
+harshness and acerbity connected and combined with words and images
+all a-glow, which might recall those products of the vegetable world,
+where gorgeous blossoms rise out of a hard and thorny rind and shell,
+within which the rich fruit is elaborating. The language is not only
+peculiar and strong, but at times knotty and contorted, as by its own
+impatient strength; while the novelty and struggling crowd of images,
+acting in conjunction with the difficulties of the style, demands
+always a greater closeness of attention, than poetry,--at all events,
+than descriptive poetry--has a right to claim. It not seldom therefore
+justified the complaint of obscurity. In the following extract I have
+sometimes fancied, that I saw an emblem of the poem itself, and of the
+author's genius as it was then displayed.--
+
+    'Tis storm; and hid in mist from hour to hour,
+    All day the floods a deepening murmur pour;
+    The sky is veiled, and every cheerful sight
+    Dark is the region as with coming night;
+    Yet what a sudden burst of overpowering light!
+    Triumphant on the bosom of the storm,
+    Glances the fire-clad eagle's wheeling form;
+    Eastward, in long perspective glittering, shine
+    The wood-crowned cliffs that o'er the lake recline;
+    Those Eastern cliffs a hundred streams unfold,
+    At once to pillars turned that flame with gold;
+    Behind his sail the peasant strives to shun
+    The west, that burns like one dilated sun,
+    Where in a mighty crucible expire
+    The mountains, glowing hot, like coals of fire.
+
+The poetic Psyche, in its process to full development, undergoes as
+many changes as its Greek namesake, the butterfly [20]. And it is
+remarkable how soon genius clears and purifies itself from the faults
+and errors of its earliest products; faults which, in its earliest
+compositions, are the more obtrusive and confluent, because as
+heterogeneous elements, which had only a temporary use, they
+constitute the very ferment, by which themselves are carried off. Or
+we may compare them to some diseases, which must work on the humours,
+and be thrown out on the surface, in order to secure the patient from
+their future recurrence. I was in my twenty-fourth year, when I had
+the happiness of knowing Mr. Wordsworth personally, and while memory
+lasts, I shall hardly forget the sudden effect produced on my mind, by
+his recitation of a manuscript poem, which still remains unpublished,
+but of which the stanza and tone of style were the same as those of
+The Female Vagrant, as originally printed in the first volume of the
+Lyrical Ballads. There was here no mark of strained thought, or forced
+diction, no crowd or turbulence of imagery; and, as the poet hath
+himself well described in his Lines on revisiting the Wye, manly
+reflection and human associations had given both variety, and an
+additional interest to natural objects, which, in the passion and
+appetite of the first love, they had seemed to him neither to need nor
+permit. The occasional obscurities, which had risen from an imperfect
+control over the resources of his native language, had almost wholly
+disappeared, together with that worse defect of arbitrary and
+illogical phrases, at once hackneyed and fantastic, which hold so
+distinguished a place in the technique of ordinary poetry, and will,
+more or less, alloy the earlier poems of the truest genius, unless the
+attention has been specially directed to their worthlessness and
+incongruity [21]. I did not perceive anything particular in the mere
+style of the poem alluded to during its recitation, except indeed such
+difference as was not separable from the thought and manner; and the
+Spenserian stanza, which always, more or less, recalls to the reader's
+mind Spenser's own style, would doubtless have authorized, in my then
+opinion, a more frequent descent to the phrases of ordinary life, than
+could without an ill effect have been hazarded in the heroic couplet.
+It was not however the freedom from false taste, whether as to common
+defects, or to those more properly his own, which made so unusual an
+impression on my feelings immediately, and subsequently on my
+judgment. It was the union of deep feeling with profound thought; the
+fine balance of truth in observing, with the imaginative faculty in
+modifying, the objects observed; and above all the original gift of
+spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height
+of the ideal world around forms, incidents, and situations, of which,
+for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up
+the sparkle and the dew drops.
+
+This excellence, which in all Mr. Wordsworth's writings is more or
+less predominant, and which constitutes the character of his mind, I
+no sooner felt, than I sought to understand. Repeated meditations led
+me first to suspect,--(and a more intimate analysis of the human
+faculties, their appropriate marks, functions, and effects matured my
+conjecture into full conviction,)--that Fancy and Imagination were two
+distinct and widely different faculties, instead of being, according
+to the general belief, either two names with one meaning, or, at
+furthest, the lower and higher degree of one and the same power. It is
+not, I own, easy to conceive a more apposite translation of the Greek
+phantasia than the Latin imaginatio; but it is equally true that in
+all societies there exists an instinct of growth, a certain
+collective, unconscious good sense working progressively to
+desynonymize [22] those words originally of the same meaning, which
+the conflux of dialects supplied to the more homogeneous languages, as
+the Greek and German: and which the same cause, joined with accidents
+of translation from original works of different countries, occasion in
+mixed languages like our own. The first and most important point to be
+proved is, that two conceptions perfectly distinct are confused under
+one and the same word, and--this done--to appropriate that word
+exclusively to the one meaning, and the synonyme, should there be one,
+to the other. But if,--(as will be often the case in the arts and
+sciences,)--no synonyme exists, we must either invent or borrow a
+word. In the present instance the appropriation has already begun, and
+been legitimated in the derivative adjective: Milton had a highly
+imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful mind. If therefore I should
+succeed in establishing the actual existence of two faculties
+generally different, the nomenclature would be at once determined. To
+the faculty by which I had characterized Milton, we should confine the
+term 'imagination;' while the other would be contra-distinguished as
+'fancy.' Now were it once fully ascertained, that this division is no
+less grounded in nature than that of delirium from mania, or Otway's
+
+    Lutes, laurels, seas of milk, and ships of amber,
+
+from Shakespeare's
+
+    What! have his daughters brought him to this pass?
+
+or from the preceding apostrophe to the elements; the theory of the
+fine arts, and of poetry in particular, could not but derive some
+additional and important light. It would in its immediate effects
+furnish a torch of guidance to the philosophical critic; and
+ultimately to the poet himself. In energetic minds, truth soon changes
+by domestication into power; and from directing in the discrimination
+and appraisal of the product, becomes influencive in the production.
+To admire on principle, is the only way to imitate without loss of
+originality.
+
+It has been already hinted, that metaphysics and psychology have long
+been my hobby-horse. But to have a hobby-horse, and to be vain of it,
+are so commonly found together, that they pass almost for the same. I
+trust therefore, that there will be more good humour than contempt, in
+the smile with which the reader chastises my self-complacency, if I
+confess myself uncertain, whether the satisfaction from the perception
+of a truth new to myself may not have been rendered more poignant by
+the conceit, that it would be equally so to the public. There was a
+time, certainly, in which I took some little credit to myself, in the
+belief that I had been the first of my countrymen, who had pointed out
+the diverse meaning of which the two terms were capable, and analyzed
+the faculties to which they should be appropriated. Mr. W. Taylor's
+recent volume of synonymes I have not yet seen [23]; but his
+specification of the terms in question has been clearly shown to be
+both insufficient and erroneous by Mr. Wordsworth in the Preface added
+to the late collection of his Poems. The explanation which Mr.
+Wordsworth has himself given, will be found to differ from mine,
+chiefly, perhaps as our objects are different. It could scarcely
+indeed happen otherwise, from the advantage I have enjoyed of frequent
+conversation with him on a subject to which a poem of his own first
+directed my attention, and my conclusions concerning which he had made
+more lucid to myself by many happy instances drawn from the operation
+of natural objects on the mind. But it was Mr. Wordsworth's purpose to
+consider the influences of fancy and imagination as they are
+manifested in poetry, and from the different effects to conclude their
+diversity in kind; while it is my object to investigate the seminal
+principle, and then from the kind to deduce the degree. My friend has
+drawn a masterly sketch of the branches with their poetic fruitage. I
+wish to add the trunk, and even the roots as far as they lift
+themselves above ground, and are visible to the naked eye of our
+common consciousness.
+
+Yet even in this attempt I am aware that I shall be obliged to draw
+more largely on the reader's attention, than so immethodical a
+miscellany as this can authorize; when in such a work (the
+Ecclesiasical Polity) of such a mind as Hooker's, the judicious
+author, though no less admirable for the perspicuity than for the port
+and dignity of his language,--and though he wrote for men of learning
+in a learned age,--saw nevertheless occasion to anticipate and guard
+against "complaints of obscurity," as often as he was to trace his
+subject "to the highest well-spring and fountain." Which, (continues
+he) "because men are not accustomed to, the pains we take are more
+needful a great deal, than acceptable; and the matters we handle, seem
+by reason of newness (till the mind grow better acquainted with them)
+dark and intricate." I would gladly therefore spare both myself and
+others this labour, if I knew how without it to present an
+intelligible statement of my poetic creed,--not as my opinions, which
+weigh for nothing, but as deductions from established premises
+conveyed in such a form, as is calculated either to effect a
+fundamental conviction, or to receive a fundamental confutation. If I
+may dare once more adopt the words of Hooker, "they, unto whom we
+shall seem tedious, are in no wise injured by us, because it is in
+their own hands to spare that labour, which they are not willing to
+endure." Those at least, let me be permitted to add, who have taken so
+much pains to render me ridiculous for a perversion of taste, and have
+supported the charge by attributing strange notions to me on no other
+authority than their own conjectures, owe it to themselves as well as
+to me not to refuse their attention to my own statement of the theory
+which I do acknowledge; or shrink from the trouble of examining the
+grounds on which I rest it, or the arguments which I offer in its
+justification.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+On the law of Association--Its history traced from Aristotle to
+Hartley.
+
+
+There have been men in all ages, who have been impelled as by an
+instinct to propose their own nature as a problem, and who devote
+their attempts to its solution. The first step was to construct a
+table of distinctions, which they seem to have formed on the principle
+of the absence or presence of the Will. Our various sensations,
+perceptions, and movements were classed as active or passive, or as
+media partaking of both. A still finer distinction was soon
+established between the voluntary and the spontaneous. In our
+perceptions we seem to ourselves merely passive to an external power,
+whether as a mirror reflecting the landscape, or as a blank canvass on
+which some unknown hand paints it. For it is worthy of notice, that
+the latter, or the system of Idealism may be traced to sources equally
+remote with the former, or Materialism; and Berkeley can boast an
+ancestry at least as venerable as Gassendi or Hobbes. These
+conjectures, however, concerning the mode in which our perceptions
+originated, could not alter the natural difference of Things and
+Thoughts. In the former, the cause appeared wholly external, while in
+the latter, sometimes our will interfered as the producing or
+determining cause, and sometimes our nature seemed to act by a
+mechanism of its own, without any conscious effort of the will, or
+even against it. Our inward experiences were thus arranged in three
+separate classes, the passive sense, or what the School-men call the
+merely receptive quality of the mind; the voluntary; and the
+spontaneous, which holds the middle place between both. But it is not
+in human nature to meditate on any mode of action, without inquiring
+after the law that governs it; and in the explanation of the
+spontaneous movements of our being, the metaphysician took the lead of
+the anatomist and natural philosopher. In Egypt, Palestine, Greece,
+and India the analysis of the mind had reached its noon and manhood,
+while experimental research was still in its dawn and infancy. For
+many, very many centuries, it has been difficult to advance a new
+truth, or even a new error, in the philosophy of the intellect or
+morals. With regard, however, to the laws that direct the spontaneous
+movements of thought and the principle of their intellectual mechanism
+there exists, it has been asserted, an important exception most
+honourable to the moderns, and in the merit of which our own country
+claims the largest share. Sir James Mackintosh,--(who, amid the
+variety of his talents and attainments, is not of less repute for the
+depth and accuracy of his philosophical inquiries than for the
+eloquence with which he is said to render their most difficult results
+perspicuous, and the driest attractive,)--affirmed in the Lectures,
+delivered by him in Lincoln's Inn Hall, that the law of association as
+established in the contemporaneity of the original impressions, formed
+the basis of all true psychology; and that any ontological or
+metaphysical science, not contained in such (that is, an empirical)
+psychology, was but a web of abstractions and generalizations. Of this
+prolific truth, of this great fundamental law, he declared Hobbes to
+have been the original discoverer, while its full application to the
+whole intellectual system we owed to Hartley; who stood in the same
+relation to Hobbes as Newton to Kepler; the law of association being
+that to the mind, which gravitation is to matter.
+
+Of the former clause in this assertion, as it respects the comparative
+merits of the ancient metaphysicians, including their commentators,
+the School-men, and of the modern and British and French philosophers
+from Hobbes to Hume, Hartley, and Condillac, this is not the place to
+speak. So wide indeed is the chasm between Sir James Mackintosh's
+philosophical creed and mine, that so far from being able to join
+hands, we could scarcely make our voices intelligible to each other:
+and to bridge it over would require more time, skill, and power than I
+believe myself to possess. But the latter clause involves for the
+greater part a mere question of fact and history, and the accuracy of
+the statement is to be tried by documents rather than reasoning.
+
+First, then, I deny Hobbes's claim in toto: for he had been
+anticipated by Des Cartes, whose work De Methodo, preceded Hobbes's De
+Natura Humana, by more than a year. But what is of much more
+importance, Hobbes builds nothing on the principle which he had
+announced. He does not even announce it, as differing in any respect
+from the general laws of material motion and impact: nor was it,
+indeed, possible for him so to do, compatibly with his system, which
+was exclusively material and mechanical. Far otherwise is it with Des
+Cartes; greatly as he too in his after writings (and still more
+egregiously his followers De la Forge, and others) obscured the truth
+by their attempts to explain it on the theory of nervous fluids, and
+material configurations. But, in his interesting work, De Methodo, Des
+Cartes relates the circumstance which first led him to meditate on
+this subject, and which since then has been often noticed and employed
+as an instance and illustration of the law. A child who with its eyes
+bandaged had lost several of his fingers by amputation, continued to
+complain for many days successively of pains, now in this joint and
+now in that, of the very fingers which had been cut off. Des Cartes
+was led by this incident to reflect on the uncertainty with which we
+attribute any particular place to any inward pain or uneasiness, and
+proceeded after long consideration to establish it as a general law:
+that contemporaneous impressions, whether images or sensations, recall
+each other mechanically. On this principle, as a ground work, he built
+up the whole system of human language, as one continued process of
+association. He showed in what sense not only general terms, but
+generic images,--under the name of abstract ideas,--actually existed,
+and in what consist their nature and power. As one word may become the
+general exponent of many, so by association a simple image may
+represent a whole class. But in truth Hobbes himself makes no claims
+to any discovery, and introduces this law of association, or (in his
+own language) discursion of mind, as an admitted fact, in the solution
+alone of which, and this by causes purely physiological, he arrogates
+any originality. His system is briefly this; whenever the senses are
+impinged on by external objects, whether by the rays of light
+reflected from them, or by effluxes of their finer particles, there
+results a correspondent motion of the innermost and subtlest organs.
+This motion constitutes a representation, and there remains an
+impression of the same, or a certain disposition to repeat the same
+motion. Whenever we feel several objects at the same time, the
+impressions that are left, (or in the language of Mr. Hume, the
+ideas,) are linked together. Whenever therefore any one of the
+movements, which constitute a complex impression, is renewed through
+the senses, the others succeed mechanically. It follows of necessity,
+therefore, that Hobbes, as well as Hartley and all others who derive
+association from the connection and interdependence of the supposed
+matter, the movements of which constitute our thoughts, must have
+reduced all its forms to the one law of Time. But even the merit of
+announcing this law with philosophic precision cannot be fairly
+conceded to him. For the objects of any two ideas need not have co-
+existed in the same sensation in order to become mutually associable.
+The same result will follow when one only of the two ideas has been
+represented by the senses, and the other by the memory.
+
+Long however before either Hobbes or Des Cartes the law of association
+had been defined, and its important functions set forth by Ludovicus
+Vives. Phantasia, it is to be noticed, is employed by Vives to express
+the mental power of comprehension, or the active function of the mind;
+and imaginatio for the receptivity (via receptiva) of impressions, or
+for the passive perception. The power of combination he appropriates
+to the former: "quae singula et simpliciter acceperat imaginatio, ea
+conjungit et disjungait phantasia." And the law by which the thoughts
+are spontaneously presented follows thus: "quae simul sunt a phantasia
+comprehensa, si alterutrum occurrat, solet secum alterum
+representare." To time therefore he subordinates all the other
+exciting causes of association. The soul proceeds "a causa ad
+effectum, ab hoc ad instrumentum, a parte ad totum;" thence to the
+place, from place to person, and from this to whatever preceded or
+followed, all as being parts of a total impression, each of which may
+recall the other. The apparent springs "saltus vel transitus etiam
+longissimos," he explains by the same thought having been a component
+part of two or more total impressions. Thus "ex Scipione venio in
+cogitationem potentiae Turcicae, propter victorias ejus de Asia, in
+qua regnabat Antiochus."
+
+But from Vives I pass at once to the source of his doctrines, and (as
+far as we can judge from the remains yet extant of Greek philosophy)
+as to the first, so to the fullest and most perfect enunciation of the
+associative principle, namely, to the writings of Aristotle; and of
+these in particular to the treatises De Anima, and "De Memoria," which
+last belongs to the series of essays entitled in the old translations
+Parva Naturalia. In as much as later writers have either deviated
+from, or added to his doctrines, they appear to me to have introduced
+either error or groundless supposition.
+
+In the first place it is to be observed, that Aristotle's positions on
+this subject are unmixed with fiction. The wise Stagyrite speaks of no
+successive particles propagating motion like billiard balls, as
+Hobbes; nor of nervous or animal spirits, where inanimate and
+irrational solids are thawed down, and distilled, or filtrated by
+ascension, into living and intelligent fluids, that etch and re-etch
+engravings on the brain, as the followers of Des Cartes, and the
+humoral pathologists in general; nor of an oscillating ether which was
+to effect the same service for the nerves of the brain considered as
+solid fibres, as the animal spirits perform for them under the notion
+of hollow tubes, as Hartley teaches--nor finally, (with yet more
+recent dreamers) of chemical compositions by elective affinity, or of
+an electric light at once the immediate object and the ultimate organ
+of inward vision, which rises to the brain like an Aurora Borealis,
+and there, disporting in various shapes,--as the balance of plus and
+minus, or negative and positive, is destroyed or re-established,--
+images out both past and present. Aristotle delivers a just theory
+without pretending to an hypothesis; or in other words a comprehensive
+survey of the different facts, and of their relations to each other
+without supposition, that is, a fact placed under a number of facts,
+as their common support and explanation; though in the majority of
+instances these hypotheses or suppositions better deserve the name of
+upopoiaeseis, or suffictions. He uses indeed the word kinaeseis, to
+express what we call representations or ideas, but he carefully
+distinguishes them from material motion, designating the latter always
+by annexing the words en topo, or kata topon. On the contrary, in his
+treatise De Anima, he excludes place and motion from all the
+operations of thought, whether representations or volitions, as
+attributes utterly and absurdly heterogeneous.
+
+The general law of association, or, more accurately, the common
+condition under which all exciting causes act, and in which they may
+be generalized, according to Aristotle is this. Ideas by having been
+together acquire a power of recalling each other; or every partial
+representation awakes the total representation of which it had been a
+part. In the practical determination of this common principle to
+particular recollections, he admits five agents or occasioning causes:
+first, connection in time, whether simultaneous, preceding, or
+successive; second, vicinity or connection in space; third,
+interdependence or necessary connection, as cause and effect; fourth,
+likeness; and fifth, contrast. As an additional solution of the
+occasional seeming chasms in the continuity of reproduction he proves,
+that movements or ideas possessing one or the other of these five
+characters had passed through the mind as intermediate links,
+sufficiently clear to recall other parts of the same total impressions
+with which they had co-existed, though not vivid enough to excite that
+degree of attention which is requisite for distinct recollection, or
+as we may aptly express it, after consciousness. In association then
+consists the whole mechanism of the reproduction of impressions, in
+the Aristotelian Psychology. It is the universal law of the passive
+fancy and mechanical memory; that which supplies to all other
+faculties their objects, to all thought the elements of its materials.
+
+In consulting the excellent commentary of St. Thomas Aquinas on the
+Parva Naturalia of Aristotle, I was struck at once with its close
+resemblance to Hume's Essay on Association. The main thoughts were the
+same in both, the order of the thoughts was the same, and even the
+illustrations differed only by Hume's occasional substitution of more
+modern examples. I mentioned the circumstance to several of my
+literary acquaintances, who admitted the closeness of the resemblance,
+and that it seemed too great to be explained by mere coincidence; but
+they thought it improbable that Hume should have held the pages of the
+Angelic Doctor worth turning over. But some time after Mr. Payne
+showed Sir James Mackintosh some odd volumes of St. Thomas Aquinas,
+partly perhaps from having heard that he had in his Lectures passed a
+high encomium on this canonized philosopher; but chiefly from the
+fact, that the volumes had belonged to Mr. Hume, and had here and
+there marginal marks and notes of reference in his own hand writing.
+Among these volumes was that which contains the Parva Naturalia, in
+the old Latin version, swathed and swaddled in the commentary afore
+mentioned
+
+It remains then for me, first to state wherein Hartley differs from
+Aristotle; then, to exhibit the grounds of my conviction, that he
+differed only to err: and next as the result, to show, by what
+influences of the choice and judgment the associative power becomes
+either memory or fancy; and, in conclusion, to appropriate the
+remaining offices of the mind to the reason, and the imagination. With
+my best efforts to be as perspicuous as the nature of language will
+permit on such a subject, I earnestly solicit the good wishes and
+friendly patience of my readers, while I thus go "sounding on my dim
+and perilous way."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+That Hartley's system, as far as it differs from that of Aristotle, is
+neither tenable in theory, nor founded in facts.
+
+
+Of Hartley's hypothetical vibrations in his hypothetical oscillating
+ether of the nerves, which is the first and most obvious distinction
+between his system and that of Aristotle, I shall say little. This,
+with all other similar attempts to render that an object of the sight
+which has no relation to sight, has been already sufficiently exposed
+by the younger Reimarus, Maasz, and others, as outraging the very
+axioms of mechanics in a scheme, the merit of which consists in its
+being mechanical. Whether any other philosophy be possible, but the
+mechanical; and again, whether the mechanical system can have any
+claim to be called philosophy; are questions for another place. It is,
+however, certain, that as long as we deny the former, and affirm the
+latter, we must bewilder ourselves, whenever we would pierce into the
+adyta of causation; and all that laborious conjecture can do, is to
+fill up the gaps of fancy. Under that despotism of the eye (the
+emancipation from which Pythagoras by his numeral, and Plato by his
+musical, symbols, and both by geometric discipline, aimed at, as the
+first propaideuma of the mind)--under this strong sensuous influence,
+we are restless because invisible things are not the objects of
+vision; and metaphysical systems, for the most part, become popular,
+not for their truth, but in proportion as they attribute to causes a
+susceptibility of being seen, if only our visual organs were
+sufficiently powerful.
+
+From a hundred possible confutations let one suffice. According to
+this system the idea or vibration a from the external object A becomes
+associable with the idea or vibration m from the external object M,
+because the oscillation a propagated itself so as to re-produce the
+oscillation m. But the original impression from M was essentially
+different from the impression A: unless therefore different causes may
+produce the same effect, the vibration a could never produce the
+vibration m: and this therefore could never be the means, by which a
+and m are associated. To understand this, the attentive reader need
+only be reminded, that the ideas are themselves, in Hartley's system,
+nothing more than their appropriate configurative vibrations. It is a
+mere delusion of the fancy to conceive the pre-existence of the ideas,
+in any chain of association, as so many differently coloured billiard-
+balls in contact, so that when an object, the billiard-stick, strikes
+the first or white ball, the same motion propagates itself through the
+red, green, blue and black, and sets the whole in motion. No! we must
+suppose the very same force, which constitutes the white ball, to
+constitute the red or black; or the idea of a circle to constitute the
+idea of a triangle; which is impossible.
+
+But it may be said, that by the sensations from the objects A and M,
+the nerves have acquired a disposition to the vibrations a and m, and
+therefore a need only be repeated in order to re-produce m. Now we
+will grant, for a moment, the possibility of such a disposition in a
+material nerve, which yet seems scarcely less absurd than to say, that
+a weather-cock had acquired a habit of turning to the east, from the
+wind having been so long in that quarter: for if it be replied, that
+we must take in the circumstance of life, what then becomes of the
+mechanical philosophy? And what is the nerve, but the flint which the
+wag placed in the pot as the first ingredient of his stone broth,
+requiring only salt, turnips, and mutton, for the remainder! But if we
+waive this, and pre-suppose the actual existence of such a
+disposition; two cases are possible. Either, every idea has its own
+nerve and correspondent oscillation, or this is not the case. If the
+latter be the truth, we should gain nothing by these dispositions; for
+then, every nerve having several dispositions, when the motion of any
+other nerve is propagated into it, there will be no ground or cause
+present, why exactly the oscillation m should arise, rather than any
+other to which it was equally pre-disposed. But if we take the former,
+and let every idea have a nerve of its own, then every nerve must be
+capable of propagating its motion into many other nerves; and again,
+there is no reason assignable, why the vibration m should arise,
+rather than any other ad libitum.
+
+It is fashionable to smile at Hartley's vibrations and vibratiuncles;
+and his work has been re-edited by Priestley, with the omission of the
+material hypothesis. But Hartley was too great a man, too coherent a
+thinker, for this to have been done, either consistently or to any
+wise purpose. For all other parts of his system, as far as they are
+peculiar to that system, once removed from their mechanical basis, not
+only lose their main support, but the very motive which led to their
+adoption. Thus the principle of contemporaneity, which Aristotle had
+made the common condition of all the laws of association, Hartley was
+constrained to represent as being itself the sole law. For to what law
+can the action of material atoms be subject, but that of proximity in
+place? And to what law can their motions be subjected but that of
+time? Again, from this results inevitably, that the will, the reason,
+the judgment, and the understanding, instead of being the determining
+causes of association, must needs be represented as its creatures, and
+among its mechanical effects. Conceive, for instance, a broad stream,
+winding through a mountainous country with an indefinite number of
+currents, varying and running into each other according as the gusts
+chance to blow from the opening of the mountains. The temporary union
+of several currents in one, so as to form the main current of the
+moment, would present an accurate image of Hartley's theory of the
+will.
+
+Had this been really the case, the consequence would have been, that
+our whole life would be divided between the despotism of outward
+impressions, and that of senseless and passive memory. Take his law in
+its highest abstraction and most philosophical form, namely, that
+every partial representation recalls the total representation of which
+it was a part; and the law becomes nugatory, were it only for its
+universality. In practice it would indeed be mere lawlessness.
+Consider, how immense must be the sphere of a total impression from
+the top of St. Paul's church; and how rapid and continuous the series
+of such total impressions. If, therefore, we suppose the absence of
+all interference of the will, reason, and judgment, one or other of
+two consequences must result. Either the ideas, or reliques of such
+impression, will exactly imitate the order of the impression itself,
+which would be absolute delirium: or any one part of that impression
+might recall any other part, and--(as from the law of continuity,
+there must exist in every total impression, some one or more parts,
+which are components of some other following total impression, and so
+on ad infinitum)--any part of any impression might recall any part of
+any other, without a cause present to determine what it should be. For
+to bring in the will, or reason, as causes of their own cause, that
+is, as at once causes and effects, can satisfy those only who, in
+their pretended evidences of a God, having first demanded
+organization, as the sole cause and ground of intellect, will then
+coolly demand the pre-existence of intellect, as the cause and ground-
+work of organization. There is in truth but one state to which this
+theory applies at all, namely, that of complete light-headedness; and
+even to this it applies but partially, because the will and reason are
+perhaps never wholly suspended.
+
+A case of this kind occurred in a Roman Catholic town in Germany a
+year or two before my arrival at Goettingen, and had not then ceased
+to be a frequent subject of conversation. A young woman of four or
+five and twenty, who could neither read, nor write, was seized with a
+nervous fever; during which, according to the asseverations of all the
+priests and monks of the neighbourhood, she became possessed, and, as
+it appeared, by a very learned devil. She continued incessantly
+talking Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, in very pompous tones and with most
+distinct enunciation. This possession was rendered more probable by
+the known fact that she was or had been a heretic. Voltaire humorously
+advises the devil to decline all acquaintance with medical men; and it
+would have been more to his reputation, if he had taken this advice in
+the present instance. The case had attracted the particular attention
+of a young physician, and by his statement many eminent physiologists
+and psychologists visited the town, and cross-examined the case on the
+spot. Sheets full of her ravings were taken down from her own mouth,
+and were found to consist of sentences, coherent and intelligible each
+for itself, but with little or no connection with each other. Of the
+Hebrew, a small portion only could be traced to the Bible; the
+remainder seemed to be in the Rabbinical dialect. All trick or
+conspiracy was out of the question. Not only had the young woman ever
+been a harmless, simple creature; but she was evidently labouring
+under a nervous fever. In the town, in which she had been resident for
+many years as a servant in different families, no solution presented
+itself. The young physician, however, determined to trace her past
+life step by step; for the patient herself was incapable of returning
+a rational answer. He at length succeeded in discovering the place,
+where her parents had lived: travelled thither, found them dead, but
+an uncle surviving; and from him learned, that the patient had been
+charitably taken by an old Protestant pastor at nine years old, and
+had remained with him some years, even till the old man's death. Of
+this pastor the uncle knew nothing, but that he was a very good man.
+With great difficulty, and after much search, our young medical
+philosopher discovered a niece of the pastor's, who had lived with him
+as his house-keeper, and had inherited his effects. She remembered the
+girl; related, that her venerable uncle had been too indulgent, and
+could not bear to hear the girl scolded; that she was willing to have
+kept her, but that, after her patron's death, the girl herself refused
+to stay. Anxious inquiries were then, of course, made concerning the
+pastor's habits; and the solution of the phenomenon was soon obtained.
+For it appeared, that it had been the old man's custom, for years, to
+walk up and down a passage of his house into which the kitchen door
+opened, and to read to himself with a loud voice, out of his favourite
+books. A considerable number of these were still in the niece's
+possession. She added, that he was a very learned man and a great
+Hebraist. Among the books were found a collection of Rabbinical
+writings, together with several of the Greek and Latin Fathers; and
+the physician succeeded in identifying so many passages with those
+taken down at the young woman's bedside, that no doubt could remain in
+any rational mind concerning the true origin of the impressions made
+on her nervous system.
+
+This authenticated case furnishes both proof and instance, that
+reliques of sensation may exist for an indefinite time in a latent
+state, in the very same order in which they were originally impressed;
+and as we cannot rationally suppose the feverish state of the brain to
+act in any other way than as a stimulus, this fact (and it would not
+be difficult to adduce several of the same kind) contributes to make
+it even probable, that all thoughts are in themselves imperishable;
+and, that if the intelligent faculty should be rendered more
+comprehensive, it would require only a different and apportioned
+organization,--the body celestial instead of the body terrestrial,--to
+bring before every human soul the collective experience of its whole
+past existence. And this, this, perchance, is the dread book of
+judgment, in the mysterious hieroglyphics of which every idle word is
+recorded! Yea, in the very nature of a living spirit, it may be more
+possible that heaven and earth should pass away, than that a single
+act, a single thought, should be loosened or lost from that living
+chain of causes, with all the links of which, conscious or
+unconscious, the free-will, our only absolute Self, is coextensive and
+co-present. But not now dare I longer discourse of this, waiting for a
+loftier mood, and a nobler subject, warned from within and from
+without, that it is profanation to speak of these mysteries tois maede
+phantasteisin, os kalon to taes dikaiosynaes kai sophrosynaes
+prosopon, kai oute hesperos oute eoos outo kala. To gar horon pros to
+horomenon syngenes kai homoion poiaesamenon dei epiballein tae thea,
+ou gar an popote eiden ophthalmos haelion, haelioeidaes mae
+gegenaemenos oude to kalon an idae psychae, mae kagae genomenae--" to
+those to whose imagination it has never been presented, how beautiful
+is the countenance of justice and wisdom; and that neither the morning
+nor the evening star are so fair. For in order to direct the view
+aright, it behoves that the beholder should have made himself
+congenerous and similar to the object beheld. Never could the eye have
+beheld the sun, had not its own essence been soliform," (i.e. pre-
+configured to light by a similarity of essence with that of light)
+"neither can a soul not beautiful attain to an intuition of beauty."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+Of the necessary consequences of the Hartleian Theory--Of the original
+mistake or equivocation which procured its admission--Memoria
+technica.
+
+
+We will pass by the utter incompatibility of such a law--if law it may
+be called, which would itself be a slave of chances--with even that
+appearance of rationality forced upon us by the outward phaenomena of
+human conduct, abstracted from our own consciousness. We will agree to
+forget this for the moment, in order to fix our attention on that
+subordination of final to efficient causes in the human being, which
+flows of necessity from the assumption, that the will and, with the
+will, all acts of thought and attention are parts and products of this
+blind mechanism, instead of being distinct powers, the function of
+which it is to control, determine, and modify the phantasmal chaos of
+association. The soul becomes a mere ens logicum; for, as a real
+separable being, it would be more worthless and ludicrous than the
+Grimalkins in the cat-harpsichord, described in the Spectator. For
+these did form a part of the process; but, to Hartley's scheme, the
+soul is present only to be pinched or stroked, while the very squeals
+or purring are produced by an agency wholly independent and alien. It
+involves all the difficulties, all the incomprehensibility (if it be
+not indeed, os emoige dokei, the absurdity), of intercommunion between
+substances that have no one property in common, without any of the
+convenient consequences that bribed the judgment to the admission of
+the Dualistic hypothesis. Accordingly, this caput mortuum of the
+Hartleian process has been rejected by his followers, and the
+consciousness considered as a result, as a tune, the common product of
+the breeze and the harp though this again is the mere remotion of one
+absurdity to make way for another, equally preposterous. For what is
+harmony but a mode of relation, the very esse of which is percipi?--an
+ens rationale, which pre-supposes the power, that by perceiving
+creates it? The razor's edge becomes a saw to the armed vision; and
+the delicious melodies of Purcell or Cimarosa might be disjointed
+stammerings to a hearer, whose partition of time should be a thousand
+times subtler than ours. But this obstacle too let us imagine
+ourselves to have surmounted, and "at one bound high overleap all
+bound." Yet according to this hypothesis the disquisition, to which I
+am at present soliciting the reader's attention, may be as truly said
+to be written by Saint Paul's church, as by me: for it is the mere
+motion of my muscles and nerves; and these again are set in motion
+from external causes equally passive, which external causes stand
+themselves in interdependent connection with every thing that exists
+or has existed. Thus the whole universe co-operates to produce the
+minutest stroke of every letter, save only that I myself, and I alone,
+have nothing to do with it, but merely the causeless and effectless
+beholding of it when it is done. Yet scarcely can it be called a
+beholding; for it is neither an act nor an effect; but an impossible
+creation of a something nothing out of its very contrary! It is the
+mere quick-silver plating behind a looking-glass; and in this alone
+consists the poor worthless I! The sum total of my moral and
+intellectual intercourse, dissolved into its elements, is reduced to
+extension, motion, degrees of velocity, and those diminished copies of
+configurative motion, which form what we call notions, and notions of
+notions. Of such philosophy well might Butler say--
+
+    The metaphysic's but a puppet motion
+    That goes with screws, the notion of a notion;
+    The copy of a copy and lame draught
+    Unnaturally taken from a thought
+    That counterfeits all pantomimic tricks,
+    And turns the eyes, like an old crucifix;
+    That counterchanges whatsoe'er it calls
+    By another name, and makes it true or false;
+    Turns truth to falsehood, falsehood into truth,
+    By virtue of the Babylonian's tooth.
+
+The inventor of the watch, if this doctrine be true, did not in
+reality invent it; he only looked on, while the blind causes, the only
+true artists, were unfolding themselves. So must it have been too with
+my friend Allston, when he sketched his picture of the dead man
+revived by the bones of the prophet Elijah. So must it have been with
+Mr. Southey and Lord Byron, when the one fancied himself composing his
+Roderick, and the other his Childe Harold. The same must hold good of
+all systems of philosophy; of all arts, governments, wars by sea and
+by land; in short, of all things that ever have been or that ever will
+be produced. For, according to this system, it is not the affections
+and passions that are at work, in as far as they are sensations or
+thoughts. We only fancy, that we act from rational resolves, or
+prudent motives, or from impulses of anger, love, or generosity. In
+all these cases the real agent is a something-nothing-everything,
+which does all of which we know, and knows nothing of all that itself
+does.
+
+The existence of an infinite spirit, of an intelligent and holy will,
+must, on this system, be mere articulated motions of the air. For as
+the function of the human understanding is no other than merely to
+appear to itself to combine and to apply the phaenomena of the
+association; and as these derive all their reality from the primary
+sensations; and the sensations again all their reality from the
+impressions ab extra; a God not visible, audible, or tangible, can
+exist only in the sounds and letters that form his name and
+attributes. If in ourselves there be no such faculties as those of the
+will, and the scientific reason, we must either have an innate idea of
+them, which would overthrow the whole system; or we can have no idea
+at all. The process, by which Hume degraded the notion of cause and
+effect into a blind product of delusion and habit, into the mere
+sensation of proceeding life (nisus vitalis) associated with the
+images of the memory; this same process must be repeated to the equal
+degradation of every fundamental idea in ethics or theology.
+
+Far, very far am I from burthening with the odium of these
+consequences the moral characters of those who first formed, or have
+since adopted the system! It is most noticeable of the excellent and
+pious Hartley, that, in the proofs of the existence and attributes of
+God, with which his second volume commences, he makes no reference to
+the principle or results of the first. Nay, he assumes, as his
+foundations, ideas which, if we embrace the doctrines of his first
+volume, can exist no where but in the vibrations of the ethereal
+medium common to the nerves and to the atmosphere. Indeed the whole of
+the second volume is, with the fewest possible exceptions, independent
+of his peculiar system. So true is it, that the faith, which saves and
+sanctifies, is a collective energy, a total act of the whole moral
+being; that its living sensorium is in the heart; and that no errors
+of the understanding can be morally arraigned unless they have
+proceeded from the heart. But whether they be such, no man can be
+certain in the case of another, scarcely perhaps even in his own.
+Hence it follows by inevitable consequence, that man may perchance
+determine what is a heresy; but God only can know who is a heretic. It
+does not, however, by any means follow that opinions fundamentally
+false are harmless. A hundred causes may co-exist to form one complex
+antidote. Yet the sting of the adder remains venomous, though there
+are many who have taken up the evil thing, and it hurted them not.
+Some indeed there seem to have been, in an unfortunate neighbour
+nation at least, who have embraced this system with a full view of all
+its moral and religious consequences; some--
+
+    ------who deem themselves most free,
+    When they within this gross and visible sphere
+    Chain down the winged thought, scoffing ascent,
+    Proud in their meanness; and themselves they cheat
+    With noisy emptiness of learned phrase,
+    Their subtle fluids, impacts, essences,
+    Self-working tools, uncaus'd effects, and all
+    Those blind omniscients, those almighty slaves,
+    Untenanting creation of its God!
+
+Such men need discipline, not argument; they must be made better men,
+before they can become wiser.
+
+The attention will be more profitably employed in attempting to
+discover and expose the paralogisms, by the magic of which such a
+faith could find admission into minds framed for a nobler creed.
+These, it appears to me, may be all reduced to one sophism as their
+common genus; the mistaking the conditions of a thing for its causes
+and essence; and the process, by which we arrive at the knowledge of a
+faculty, for the faculty itself. The air I breathe is the condition of
+my life, not its cause. We could never have learned that we had eyes
+but by the process of seeing; yet having seen we know that the eyes
+must have pre-existed in order to render the process of sight
+possible. Let us cross-examine Hartley's scheme under the guidance of
+this distinction; and we shall discover, that contemporaneity,
+(Leibnitz's Lex Continui,) is the limit and condition of the laws of
+mind, itself being rather a law of matter, at least of phaenomena
+considered as material. At the utmost, it is to thought the same, as
+the law of gravitation is to loco-motion. In every voluntary movement
+we first counteract gravitation, in order to avail ourselves of it. It
+must exist, that there may be a something to be counteracted, and
+which, by its re-action, may aid the force that is exerted to resist
+it. Let us consider what we do when we leap. We first resist the
+gravitating power by an act purely voluntary, and then by another act,
+voluntary in part, we yield to it in order to alight on the spot,
+which we had previously proposed to ourselves. Now let a man watch his
+mind while he is composing; or, to take a still more common case,
+while he is trying to recollect a name; and he will find the process
+completely analogous. Most of my readers will have observed a small
+water-insect on the surface of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted
+shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the
+brook; and will have noticed, how the little animal wins its way up
+against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion,
+now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather
+strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no
+unapt emblem of the mind's self-experience in the act of thinking.
+There are evidently two powers at work, which relatively to each other
+are active and passive; and this is not possible without an
+intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and passive. In
+philosophical language, we must denominate this intermediate faculty
+in all its degrees and determinations, the IMAGINATION. But, in common
+language, and especially on the subject of poetry, we appropriate the
+name to a superior degree of the faculty, joined to a superior
+voluntary control over it.
+
+Contemporaneity, then, being the common condition of all the laws of
+association, and a component element in the materia subjecta, the
+parts of which are to be associated, must needs be co-present with
+all. Nothing, therefore, can be more easy than to pass off on an
+incautious mind this constant companion of each, for the essential
+substance of all. But if we appeal to our own consciousness, we shall
+find that even time itself, as the cause of a particular act of
+association, is distinct from contemporaneity, as the condition of all
+association. Seeing a mackerel, it may happen, that I immediately
+think of gooseberries, because I at the same time ate mackerel with
+gooseberries as the sauce. The first syllable of the latter word,
+being that which had coexisted with the image of the bird so called, I
+may then think of a goose. In the next moment the image of a swan may
+arise before me, though I had never seen the two birds together. In
+the first two instances, I am conscious that their co-existence in
+time was the circumstance, that enabled me to recollect them; and
+equally conscious am I that the latter was recalled to me by the joint
+operation of likeness and contrast. So it is with cause and effect: so
+too with order. So I am able to distinguish whether it was proximity
+in time, or continuity in space, that occasioned me to recall B on the
+mention of A. They cannot be indeed separated from contemporaneity;
+for that would be to separate them from the mind itself. The act of
+consciousness is indeed identical with time considered in its essence.
+I mean time per se, as contra-distinguished from our notion of time;
+for this is always blended with the idea of space, which, as the
+opposite of time, is therefore its measure. Nevertheless the accident
+of seeing two objects at the same moment, and the accident of seeing
+them in the same place are two distinct or distinguishable causes: and
+the true practical general law of association is this; that whatever
+makes certain parts of a total impression more vivid or distinct than
+the rest, will determine the mind to recall these in preference to
+others equally linked together by the common condition of
+contemporaneity, or (what I deem a more appropriate and philosophical
+term) of continuity. But the will itself by confining and intensifying
+[25] the attention may arbitrarily give vividness or distinctness to
+any object whatsoever; and from hence we may deduce the uselessness,
+if not the absurdity, of certain recent schemes which promise an
+artificial memory, but which in reality can only produce a confusion
+and debasement of the fancy. Sound logic, as the habitual
+subordination of the individual to the species, and of the species to
+the genus; philosophical knowledge of facts under the relation of
+cause and effect; a cheerful and communicative temper disposing us to
+notice the similarities and contrasts of things, that we may be able
+to illustrate the one by the other; a quiet conscience; a condition
+free from anxieties; sound health, and above all (as far as relates to
+passive remembrance) a healthy digestion; these are the best, these
+are the only Arts of Memory.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+The system of Dualism introduced by Des Cartes--Refined first by
+Spinoza and afterwards by Leibnitz into the doctrine of Harmonia
+praestabilita--Hylozoism--Materialism--None of these systems, or any
+possible theory of association, supplies or supersedes a theory of
+perception, or explains the formation of the associable.
+
+
+To the best of my knowledge Des Cartes was the first philosopher who
+introduced the absolute and essential heterogenity of the soul as
+intelligence, and the body as matter. The assumption, and the form of
+speaking have remained, though the denial of all other properties to
+matter but that of extension, on which denial the whole system of
+Dualism is grounded, has been long exploded. For since impenetrability
+is intelligible only as a mode of resistance; its admission places the
+essence of matter in an act or power, which it possesses in common
+with spirit; and body and spirit are therefore no longer absolutely
+heterogeneous, but may without any absurdity be supposed to be
+different modes, or degrees in perfection, of a common substratum. To
+this possibility, however, it was not the fashion to advert. The soul
+was a thinking substance, and body a space-filling substance. Yet the
+apparent action of each on the other pressed heavy on the philosopher
+on the one hand; and no less heavily on the other hand pressed the
+evident truth, that the law of causality holds only between
+homogeneous things, that is, things having some common property; and
+cannot extend from one world into another, its contrary. A close
+analysis evinced it to be no less absurd than the question whether a
+man's affection for his wife lay North-east, or South-west of the love
+he bore towards his child. Leibnitz's doctrine of a pre-established
+harmony; which he certainly borrowed from Spinoza, who had himself
+taken the hint from Des Cartes's animal machines, was in its common
+interpretation too strange to survive the inventor--too repugnant to
+our common sense; which is not indeed entitled to a judicial voice in
+the courts of scientific philosophy; but whose whispers still exert a
+strong secret influence. Even Wolf, the admirer and illustrious
+systematizer of the Leibnitzian doctrine, contents himself with
+defending the possibility of the idea, but does not adopt it as a part
+of the edifice.
+
+The hypothesis of Hylozoism, on the other side, is the death of all
+rational physiology, and indeed of all physical science; for that
+requires a limitation of terms, and cannot consist with the arbitrary
+power of multiplying attributes by occult qualities. Besides, it
+answers no purpose; unless, indeed, a difficulty can be solved by
+multiplying it, or we can acquire a clearer notion of our soul by
+being told that we have a million of souls, and that every atom of our
+bodies has a soul of its own. Far more prudent is it to admit the
+difficulty once for all, and then let it lie at rest. There is a
+sediment indeed at the bottom of the vessel, but all the water above
+it is clear and transparent. The Hylozoist only shakes it up, and
+renders the whole turbid.
+
+But it is not either the nature of man, or the duty of the philosopher
+to despair concerning any important problem until, as in the squaring
+of the circle, the impossibility of a solution has been demonstrated.
+How the esse assumed as originally distinct from the scire, can ever
+unite itself with it; how being can transform itself into a knowing,
+becomes conceivable on one only condition; namely, if it can be shown
+that the vis representativa, or the Sentient, is itself a species of
+being; that is, either as a property or attribute, or as an hypostasis
+or self subsistence. The former--that thinking is a property of matter
+under particular conditions,--is, indeed, the assumption of
+materialism; a system which could not but be patronized by the
+philosopher, if only it actually performed what it promises. But how
+any affection from without can metamorphose itself into perception or
+will, the materialist has hitherto left, not only as incomprehensible
+as he found it, but has aggravated it into a comprehensible absurdity.
+For, grant that an object from without could act upon the conscious
+self, as on a consubstantial object; yet such an affection could only
+engender something homogeneous with itself. Motion could only
+propagate motion. Matter has no Inward. We remove one surface, but to
+meet with another. We can but divide a particle into particles; and
+each atom comprehends in itself the properties of the material
+universe. Let any reflecting mind make the experiment of explaining to
+itself the evidence of our sensuous intuitions, from the hypothesis
+that in any given perception there is a something which has been
+communicated to it by an impact, or an impression ab extra. In the
+first place, by the impact on the percipient, or ens representans, not
+the object itself, but only its action or effect, will pass into the
+same. Not the iron tongue, but its vibrations, pass into the metal of
+the bell. Now in our immediate perception, it is not the mere power or
+act of the object, but the object itself, which is immediately
+present. We might indeed attempt to explain this result by a chain of
+deductions and conclusions; but that, first, the very faculty of
+deducing and concluding would equally demand an explanation; and
+secondly, that there exists in fact no such intermediation by logical
+notions, such as those of cause and effect. It is the object itself,
+not the product of a syllogism, which is present to our consciousness.
+Or would we explain this supervention of the object to the sensation,
+by a productive faculty set in motion by an impulse; still the
+transition, into the percipient, of the object itself, from which the
+impulse proceeded, assumes a power that can permeate and wholly
+possess the soul,
+
+    And like a God by spiritual art,
+    Be all in all, and all in every part.
+
+And how came the percipient here? And what is become of the wonder-
+promising Matter, that was to perform all these marvels by force of
+mere figure, weight and motion? The most consistent proceeding of the
+dogmatic materialist is to fall back into the common rank of soul-and-
+bodyists; to affect the mysterious, and declare the whole process a
+revelation given, and not to be understood, which it would be profane
+to examine too closely. Datur non intelligitur. But a revelation
+unconfirmed by miracles, and a faith not commanded by the conscience,
+a philosopher may venture to pass by, without suspecting himself of
+any irreligious tendency.
+
+Thus, as materialism has been generally taught, it is utterly
+unintelligible, and owes all its proselytes to the propensity so
+common among men, to mistake distinct images for clear conceptions;
+and vice versa, to reject as inconceivable whatever from its own
+nature is unimaginable. But as soon as it becomes intelligible, it
+ceases to be materialism. In order to explain thinking, as a material
+phaenomenon, it is necessary to refine matter into a mere modification
+of intelligence, with the two-fold function of appearing and
+perceiving. Even so did Priestley in his controversy with Price. He
+stripped matter of all its material properties; substituted spiritual
+powers; and when we expected to find a body, behold! we had nothing
+but its ghost--the apparition of a defunct substance!
+
+I shall not dilate further on this subject; because it will, (if God
+grant health and permission), be treated of at large and
+systematically in a work, which I have many years been preparing, on
+the Productive Logos human and divine; with, and as the introduction
+to, a full commentary on the Gospel of St. John. To make myself
+intelligible as far as my present subject requires, it will be
+sufficient briefly to observe.--1. That all association demands and
+presupposes the existence of the thoughts and images to be
+associated.--2. That the hypothesis of an external world exactly
+correspondent to those images or modifications of our own being, which
+alone, according to this system, we actually behold, is as thorough
+idealism as Berkeley's, inasmuch as it equally, perhaps in a more
+perfect degree, removes all reality and immediateness of perception,
+and places us in a dream-world of phantoms and spectres, the
+inexplicable swarm and equivocal generation of motions in our own
+brains.--3. That this hypothesis neither involves the explanation, nor
+precludes the necessity, of a mechanism and co-adequate forces in the
+percipient, which at the more than magic touch of the impulse from
+without is to create anew for itself the correspondent object. The
+formation of a copy is not solved by the mere pre-existence of an
+original; the copyist of Raffael's Transfiguration must repeat more or
+less perfectly the process of Raffael. It would be easy to explain a
+thought from the image on the retina, and that from the geometry of
+light, if this very light did not present the very same difficulty. We
+might as rationally chant the Brahim creed of the tortoise that
+supported the bear, that supported the elephant, that supported the
+world, to the tune of "This is the house that Jack built." The sic Deo
+placitum est we all admit as the sufficient cause, and the divine
+goodness as the sufficient reason; but an answer to the Whence and Why
+is no answer to the How, which alone is the physiologist's concern. It
+is a sophisma pigrum, and (as Bacon hath said) the arrogance of
+pusillanimity, which lifts up the idol of a mortal's fancy and
+commands us to fall down and worship it, as a work of divine wisdom,
+an ancile or palladium fallen from heaven. By the very same argument
+the supporters of the Ptolemaic system might have rebuffed the
+Newtonian, and pointing to the sky with self-complacent grin [26] have
+appealed to common sense, whether the sun did not move and the earth
+stand still.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+Is Philosophy possible as a science, and what are its conditions?--
+Giordano Bruno--Literary Aristocracy, or the existence of a tacit
+compact among the learned as a privileged order--The Author's
+obligations to the Mystics--to Immanuel Kant--The difference between
+the letter and the spirit of Kant's writings, and a vindication of
+prudence in the teaching of Philosophy--Fichte's attempt to complete
+the Critical system--Its partial success and ultimate failure--
+Obligations to Schelling; and among English writers to Saumarez.
+
+
+After I had successively studied in the schools of Locke, Berkeley,
+Leibnitz, and Hartley, and could find in none of them an abiding place
+for my reason, I began to ask myself; is a system of philosophy; as
+different from mere history and historic classification, possible? If
+possible, what are its necessary conditions? I was for a while
+disposed to answer the first question in the negative, and to admit
+that the sole practicable employment for the human mind was to
+observe, to collect, and to classify. But I soon felt, that human
+nature itself fought up against this wilful resignation of intellect;
+and as soon did I find, that the scheme, taken with all its
+consequences and cleared of all inconsistencies, was not less
+impracticable than contranatural. Assume in its full extent the
+position, nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu, assume it
+without Leibnitz's qualifying praeter ipsum intellectum, and in the
+same sense, in which the position was understood by Hartley and
+Condillac: and then what Hume had demonstratively deduced from this
+concession concerning cause and effect, will apply with equal and
+crushing force to all the other eleven categorical forms [27], and the
+logical functions corresponding to them. How can we make bricks
+without straw;--or build without cement? We learn all things indeed by
+occasion of experience; but the very facts so learned force us inward
+on the antecedents, that must be presupposed in order to render
+experience itself possible. The first book of Locke's Essay, (if the
+supposed error, which it labours to subvert, be not a mere thing of
+straw, an absurdity which, no man ever did, or indeed ever could,
+believe,) is formed on a sophisma heterozaetaeseos, and involves the
+old mistake of Cum hoc: ergo, propter hoc.
+
+The term, Philosophy, defines itself as an affectionate seeking after
+the truth; but Truth is the correlative of Being. This again is no way
+conceivable, but by assuming as a postulate, that both are ab initio,
+identical and coinherent; that intelligence and being are reciprocally
+each other's substrate. I presumed that this was a possible
+conception, (i.e. that it involved no logical inconsonance,) from the
+length of time during which the scholastic definition of the Supreme
+Being, as actus purissimus sine ulla potentialitate, was received in
+the schools of Theology, both by the Pontifician and the Reformed
+divines. The early study of Plato and Plotinus, with the commentaries
+and the THEOLOGIA PLATONICA of the illustrious Florentine; of Proclus,
+and Gemistius Pletho; and at a later period of the De Immenso et
+Innumerabili and the "De la causa, principio et uno," of the
+philosopher of Nola, who could boast of a Sir Philip Sidney and Fulke
+Greville among his patrons, and whom the idolaters of Rome burnt as an
+atheist in the year 1600; had all contributed to prepare my mind for
+the reception and welcoming of the Cogito quia Sum, et Sum quia
+Cogito; a philosophy of seeming hardihood, but certainly the most
+ancient, and therefore presumptively the most natural.
+
+Why need I be afraid? Say rather how dare I be ashamed of the Teutonic
+theosophist, Jacob Behmen? Many, indeed, and gross were his delusions;
+and such as furnish frequent and ample occasion for the triumph of the
+learned over the poor ignorant shoemaker, who had dared think for
+himself. But while we remember that these delusions were such, as
+might be anticipated from his utter want of all intellectual
+discipline, and from his ignorance of rational psychology, let it not
+be forgotten that the latter defect he had in common with the most
+learned theologians of his age. Neither with books, nor with book-
+learned men was he conversant. A meek and shy quietest, his
+intellectual powers were never stimulated into feverous energy by
+crowds of proselytes, or by the ambition of proselyting. Jacob Behmen
+was an enthusiast, in the strictest sense, as not merely
+distinguished, but as contra-distinguished, from a fanatic. While I in
+part translate the following observations from a contemporary writer
+of the Continent, let me be permitted to premise, that I might have
+transcribed the substance from memoranda of my own, which were written
+many years before his pamphlet was given to the world; and that I
+prefer another's words to my own, partly as a tribute due to priority
+of publication; but still more from the pleasure of sympathy in a case
+where coincidence only was possible.
+
+Whoever is acquainted with the history of philosophy, during the last
+two or three centuries, cannot but admit that there appears to have
+existed a sort of secret and tacit compact among the learned, not to
+pass beyond a certain limit in speculative science. The privilege of
+free thought, so highly extolled, has at no time been held valid in
+actual practice, except within this limit; and not a single stride
+beyond it has ever been ventured without bringing obloquy on the
+transgressor. The few men of genius among the learned class, who
+actually did overstep this boundary, anxiously avoided the appearance
+of having so done. Therefore the true depth of science, and the
+penetration to the inmost centre, from which all the lines of
+knowledge diverge to their ever distant circumference, was abandoned
+to the illiterate and the simple, whom unstilled yearning, and an
+original ebulliency of spirit, had urged to the investigation of the
+indwelling and living ground of all things. These, then, because their
+names had never been enrolled in the guilds of the learned, were
+persecuted by the registered livery-men as interlopers on their rights
+and privileges. All without distinction were branded as fanatics and
+phantasts; not only those, whose wild and exorbitant imaginations had
+actually engendered only extravagant and grotesque phantasms, and
+whose productions were, for the most part, poor copies and gross
+caricatures of genuine inspiration; but the truly inspired likewise,
+the originals themselves. And this for no other reason, but because
+they were the unlearned, men of humble and obscure occupations. When,
+and from whom among the literati by profession, have we ever heard the
+divine doxology repeated, I thank thee, O Father! Lord of Heaven and
+Earth! because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent,
+and hast revealed them unto babes [28]. No; the haughty priests of
+learning not only banished from the schools and marts of science all
+who had dared draw living waters from the fountain, but drove them out
+of the very Temple, which mean time the buyers, and sellers, and
+money-changers were suffered to make a den of thieves.
+
+And yet it would not be easy to discover any substantial ground for
+this contemptuous pride in those literati, who have most distinguished
+themselves by their scorn of Behmen, Thaulerus, George Fox, and
+others; unless it be, that they could write orthographically, make
+smooth periods, and had the fashions of authorship almost literally at
+their fingers' ends, while the latter, in simplicity of soul, made
+their words immediate echoes of their feelings. Hence the frequency of
+those phrases among them, which have been mistaken for pretences to
+immediate inspiration; as for instance, "It was delivered unto me; "--
+"I strove not to speak;"-"I said, I will be silent;"--"But the word
+was in my heart as a burning fire;"--"and I could not forbear." Hence
+too the unwillingness to give offence; hence the foresight, and the
+dread of the clamours, which would be raised against them, so
+frequently avowed in the writings of these men, and expressed, as was
+natural, in the words of the only book, with which they were familiar
+[29]. "Woe is me that I am become a man of strife, and a man of
+contention,--I love peace: the souls of men are dear unto me: yet
+because I seek for light every one of them doth curse me!" O! it
+requires deeper feeling, and a stronger imagination, than belong to
+most of those, to whom reasoning and fluent expression have been as a
+trade learnt in boyhood, to conceive with what might, with what inward
+strivings and commotion, the perception of a new and vital truth takes
+possession of an uneducated man of genius. His meditations are almost
+inevitably employed on the eternal, or the everlasting; for "the world
+is not his friend, nor the world's law." Need we then be surprised,
+that, under an excitement at once so strong and so unusual, the man's
+body should sympathize with the struggles of his mind; or that he
+should at times be so far deluded, as to mistake the tumultuous
+sensations of his nerves, and the co-existing spectres of his fancy,
+as parts or symbols of the truths which were opening on him? It has
+indeed been plausibly observed, that in order to derive any advantage,
+or to collect any intelligible meaning, from the writings of these
+ignorant Mystics, the reader must bring with him a spirit and judgment
+superior to that of the writers themselves:
+
+    And what he brings, what needs he elsewhere seek?
+
+--a sophism, which I fully agree with Warburton, is unworthy of
+Milton; how much more so of the awful Person, in whose mouth he has
+placed it? One assertion I will venture to make, as suggested by my
+own experience, that there exist folios on the human understanding,
+and the nature of man, which would have a far juster claim to their
+high rank and celebrity, if in the whole huge volume there could be
+found as much fulness of heart and intellect, as burst forth in many a
+simple page of George Fox, Jacob Behmen, and even of Behmen's
+commentator, the pious and fervid William Law.
+
+The feeling of gratitude, which I cherish toward these men, has caused
+me to digress further than I had foreseen or proposed; but to have
+passed them over in an historical sketch of my literary life and
+opinions, would have seemed to me like the denial of a debt, the
+concealment of a boon. For the writings of these Mystics acted in no
+slight degree to prevent my mind from being imprisoned within the
+outline of any single dogmatic system. They contributed to keep alive
+the heart in the head; gave me an indistinct, yet stirring and working
+presentiment, that all the products of the mere reflective faculty
+partook of death, and were as the rattling twigs and sprays in winter,
+into which a sap was yet to be propelled from some root to which I had
+not penetrated, if they were to afford my soul either food or shelter.
+If they were too often a moving cloud of smoke to me by day, yet they
+were always a pillar of fire throughout the night, during my
+wanderings through the wilderness of doubt, and enabled me to skirt,
+without crossing, the sandy deserts of utter unbelief. That the system
+is capable of being converted into an irreligious Pantheism, I well
+know. The Ethics of Spinoza, may, or may not, be an instance. But at
+no time could I believe, that in itself and essentially it is
+incompatible with religion, natural or revealed: and now I am most
+thoroughly persuaded of the contrary. The writings of the illustrious
+sage of Koenigsberg, the founder of the Critical Philosophy, more than
+any other work, at once invigorated and disciplined my understanding.
+The originality, the depth, and the compression of the thoughts; the
+novelty and subtlety, yet solidity and importance of the distinctions;
+the adamantine chain of the logic; and I will venture to add--(paradox
+as it will appear to those who have taken their notion of Immanuel
+Kant from Reviewers and Frenchmen)--the clearness and evidence, of the
+Critique of the Pure Reason; and Critique of the Judgment; of the
+Metaphysical Elements of Natural Philosophy; and of his Religion
+within the bounds of Pure Reason, took possession of me as with the
+giant's hand. After fifteen years' familiarity with them, I still read
+these and all his other productions with undiminished delight and
+increasing admiration. The few passages that remained obscure to me,
+after due efforts of thought, (as the chapter on original
+apperception,) and the apparent contradictions which occur, I soon
+found were hints and insinuations referring to ideas, which KANT
+either did not think it prudent to avow, or which he considered as
+consistently left behind in a pure analysis, not of human nature in
+toto, but of the speculative intellect alone. Here therefore he was
+constrained to commence at the point of reflection, or natural
+consciousness: while in his moral system he was permitted to assume a
+higher ground (the autonomy of the will) as a postulate deducible from
+the unconditional command, or (in the technical language of his
+school) the categorical imperative, of the conscience. He had been in
+imminent danger of persecution during the reign of the late king of
+Prussia, that strange compound of lawless debauchery and priest-ridden
+superstition: and it is probable that he had little inclination, in
+his old age, to act over again the fortunes, and hair-breadth escapes
+of Wolf. The expulsion of the first among Kant's disciples, who
+attempted to complete his system, from the University of Jena, with
+the confiscation and prohibition of the obnoxious work by the joint
+efforts of the courts of Saxony and Hanover, supplied experimental
+proof, that the venerable old man's caution was not groundless. In
+spite therefore of his own declarations, I could never believe, that
+it was possible for him to have meant no more by his Noumenon, or
+Thing in itself, than his mere words express; or that in his own
+conception he confined the whole plastic power to the forms of the
+intellect, leaving for the external cause, for the materiale of our
+sensations, a matter without form, which is doubtless inconceivable. I
+entertained doubts likewise, whether, in his own mind, he even laid
+all the stress, which he appears to do, on the moral postulates.
+
+An idea, in the highest sense of that word, cannot be conveyed but by
+a symbol; and, except in geometry, all symbols of necessity involve an
+apparent contradiction. Phonaese synetoisin: and for those who could
+not pierce through this symbolic husk, his writings were not intended.
+Questions which cannot be fully answered without exposing the
+respondent to personal danger, are not entitled to a fair answer; and
+yet to say this openly, would in many cases furnish the very advantage
+which the adversary is insidiously seeking after. Veracity does not
+consist in saying, but in the intention of communicating, truth; and
+the philosopher who cannot utter the whole truth without conveying
+falsehood, and at the same time, perhaps, exciting the most malignant
+passions, is constrained to express himself either mythically or
+equivocally. When Kant therefore was importuned to settle the disputes
+of his commentators himself, by declaring what he meant, how could he
+decline the honours of martyrdom with less offence, than by simply
+replying, "I meant what I said, and at the age of near fourscore, I
+have something else, and more important to do, than to write a
+commentary on my own works."
+
+Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre, or Lore of Ultimate Science, was to add
+the key-stone of the arch: and by commencing with an act, instead of a
+thing or substance, Fichte assuredly gave the first mortal blow to
+Spinozism, as taught by Spinoza himself; and supplied the idea of a
+system truly metaphysical, and of a metaphysique truly systematic:
+(i.e. having its spring and principle within itself). But this
+fundamental idea he overbuilt with a heavy mass of mere notions, and
+psychological acts of arbitrary reflection. Thus his theory
+degenerated into a crude [30] egoismus, a boastful and hyperstoic
+hostility to Nature, as lifeless, godless, and altogether unholy:
+while his religion consisted in the assumption of a mere Ordo
+ordinans, which we were permitted exoterice to call GOD; and his
+ethics in an ascetic, and almost monkish, mortification of the natural
+passions and desires. In Schelling's Natur-Philosophie, and the System
+des transcendentalen Idealismus, I first found a genial coincidence
+with much that I had toiled out for myself, and a powerful assistance
+in what I had yet to do.
+
+I have introduced this statement, as appropriate to the narrative
+nature of this sketch; yet rather in reference to the work which I
+have announced in a preceding page, than to my present subject. It
+would be but a mere act of justice to myself, were I to warn my future
+readers, than an identity of thought, or even similarity of phrase,
+will not be at all times a certain proof that the passage has been
+borrowed from Schelling, or that the conceptions were originally
+learnt from him. In this instance, as in the dramatic lectures of
+Schlegel to which I have before alluded, from the same motive of self-
+defence against the charge of plagiarism, many of the most striking
+resemblances, indeed all the main and fundamental ideas, were born and
+matured in my mind before I had ever seen a single page of the German
+Philosopher; and I might indeed affirm with truth, before the more
+important works of Schelling had been written, or at least made
+public. Nor is this coincidence at all to be wondered at. We had
+studied in the same school; been disciplined by the same preparatory
+philosophy, namely, the writings of Kant; we had both equal
+obligations to the polar logic and dynamic philosophy of Giordano
+Bruno; and Schelling has lately, and, as of recent acquisition, avowed
+that same affectionate reverence for the labours of Behmen, and other
+mystics, which I had formed at a much earlier period. The coincidence
+of Schelling's system with certain general ideas of Behmen, he
+declares to have been mere coincidence; while my obligations have been
+more direct. He needs give to Behmen only feelings of sympathy; while
+I owe him a debt of gratitude. God forbid! that I should be suspected
+of a wish to enter into a rivalry with Schelling for the honours so
+unequivocally his right, not only as a great and original genius, but
+as the founder of the Philosophy of Nature, and as the most successful
+improver of the Dynamic System [31] which, begun by Bruno, was re-
+introduced (in a more philosophical form, and freed from all its
+impurities and visionary accompaniments) by Kant; in whom it was the
+native and necessary growth of his own system. Kant's followers,
+however, on whom (for the greater part) their master's cloak had
+fallen without, or with a very scanty portion of, his spirit, had
+adopted his dynamic ideas, only as a more refined species of
+mechanics. With exception of one or two fundamental ideas, which
+cannot be withheld from Fichte, to Schelling we owe the completion,
+and the most important victories, of this revolution in philosophy. To
+me it will be happiness and honour enough, should I succeed in
+rendering the system itself intelligible to my countrymen, and in the
+application of it to the most awful of subjects for the most important
+of purposes. Whether a work is the offspring of a man's own spirit,
+and the product of original thinking, will be discovered by those who
+are its sole legitimate judges, by better tests than the mere
+reference to dates. For readers in general, let whatever shall be
+found in this or any future work of mine, that resembles, or coincides
+with, the doctrines of my German predecessor, though contemporary, be
+wholly attributed to him: provided, that the absence of distinct
+references to his books, which I could not at all times make with
+truth as designating citations or thoughts actually derived from him;
+and which, I trust, would, after this general acknowledgment be
+superfluous; be not charged on me as an ungenerous concealment or
+intentional plagiarism. I have not indeed (eheu! res angusta domi!)
+been hitherto able to procure more than two of his books, viz. the
+first volume of his collected Tracts, and his System of Transcendental
+Idealism; to which, however, I must add a small pamphlet against
+Fichte, the spirit of which was to my feelings painfully incongruous
+with the principles, and which (with the usual allowance afforded to
+an antithesis) displayed the love of wisdom rather than the wisdom of
+love. I regard truth as a divine ventriloquist: I care not from whose
+mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed, if only the words are
+audible and intelligible. "Albeit, I must confess to be half in doubt,
+whether I should bring it forth or no, it being so contrary to the eye
+of the world, and the world so potent in most men's hearts, that I
+shall endanger either not to be regarded or not to be understood."
+
+And to conclude the subject of citation, with a cluster of citations,
+which as taken from books, not in common use, may contribute to the
+reader's amusement, as a voluntary before a sermon: "Dolet mihi quidem
+deliciis literarum inescatos subito jam homines adeo esse, praesertim
+qui Christianos se profitentur, et legere nisi quod ad delectationem
+facit, sustineant nihil: unde et discipline severiores et philosophia
+ipsa jam fere prorsus etiam a doctis negliguntur. Quod quidem
+propositum studiorum, nisi mature corrigitur, tam magnum rebus
+incommodum dabit, quam dedit barbaries olim. Pertinax res barbaries
+est, fateor: sed minus potent tamen, quam illa mollities et persuasa
+prudentia literarum, si ratione caret, sapientiae virtutisque specie
+mortales misere circumducens. Succedet igitur, ut arbitror, haud ita
+multo post, pro rusticana seculi nostri ruditate captatrix illa
+communi-loquentia robur animi virilis omne, omnem virtutem masculam,
+profligatura nisi cavetur."
+
+A too prophetic remark, which has been in fulfilment from the year
+1680, to the present 1815. By persuasa prudentia, Grynaeus means self-
+complacent common sense as opposed to science and philosophic reason.
+
+Est medius ordo, et velut equestris, ingeniorum quidem sagacium, et
+commodorum rebus humanis, non tamen in primam magnitudinem patentium.
+Eorum hominum, ut sic dicam, major annona est. Sedulum esse, nihil
+temere loqui, assuescere labori, et imagine prudentiae et modistiae
+tegere angustiores partes captus, dum exercitationem ac usum, quo isti
+in civilibus rebus pollent, pro natura et magnitudine ingenii plerique
+accipiunt.
+
+"As therefore physicians are many times forced to leave such methods
+of curing as themselves know to be the fittest, and being overruled by
+the patient's impatiency, are fain to try the best they can: in like
+sort, considering how the case doth stand with this present age, full
+of tongue and weak of brain, behold we would (if our subject permitted
+it) yield to the stream thereof. That way we would be contented to
+prove our thesis, which being the worse in itself, is notwithstanding
+now by reason of common imbecility the fitter and likelier to be
+brooked."
+
+If this fear could be rationally entertained in the controversial age
+of Hooker, under the then robust discipline of the scholastic logic,
+pardonably may a writer of the present times anticipate a scanty
+audience for abstrusest themes, and truths that can neither be
+communicated nor received without effort of thought, as well as
+patience of attention.
+
+    "Che s'io non erro al calcolar de' punti,
+     Par ch' Asinina Stella a noi predomini,
+     E'l Somaro e'l Castron si sian congiunti.
+     Il tempo d'Apuleio piu non si nomini:
+     Che se allora un sol huom sembrava un Asino,
+     Mille Asini a' miei di rassembran huomini!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+A chapter of digression and anecdotes, as an interlude preceding that
+on the nature and genesis of the Imagination or Plastic Power--On
+pedantry and pedantic expressions--Advice to young authors respecting
+publication--Various anecdotes of the Author's literary life, and the
+progress of his opinions in Religion and Politics.
+
+
+"Esemplastic. The word is not in Johnson, nor have I met with it
+elsewhere." Neither have, I. I constructed it myself from the Greek
+words, eis en plattein, to shape into one; because, having to convey a
+new sense, I thought that a new term would both aid the recollection
+of my meaning, and prevent its being confounded with the usual import
+of the word, imagination. "But this is pedantry!" Not necessarily so,
+I hope. If I am not misinformed, pedantry consists in the use of words
+unsuitable to the time, place, and company. The language of the market
+would be in the schools as pedantic, though it might not be reprobated
+by that name, as the language of the schools in the market. The mere
+man of the world, who insists that no other terms but such as occur in
+common conversation should be employed in a scientific disquisition,
+and with no greater precision, is as truly a pedant as the man of
+letters, who either over-rating the acquirements of his auditors, or
+misled by his own familiarity with technical or scholastic terms,
+converses at the wine-table with his mind fixed on his museum or
+laboratory; even though the latter pedant instead of desiring his wife
+to make the tea should bid her add to the quant. suff. of thea
+Sinensis the oxyd of hydrogen saturated with caloric. To use the
+colloquial (and in truth somewhat vulgar) metaphor, if the pedant of
+the cloister, and the pedant of the lobby, both smell equally of the
+shop, yet the odour from the Russian binding of good old authentic-
+looking folios and quartos is less annoying than the steams from the
+tavern or bagnio. Nay, though the pedantry of the scholar should
+betray a little ostentation, yet a well-conditioned mind would more
+easily, methinks, tolerate the fox brush of learned vanity, than the
+sans culotterie of a contemptuous ignorance, that assumes a merit from
+mutilation in the self-consoling sneer at the pompous incumbrance of
+tails.
+
+The first lesson of philosophic discipline is to wean the student's
+attention from the degrees of things, which alone form the vocabulary
+of common life, and to direct it to the kind abstracted from degree.
+Thus the chemical student is taught not to be startled at
+disquisitions on the heat in ice, or on latent and fixible light. In
+such discourse the instructor has no other alternative than either to
+use old words with new meanings (the plan adopted by Darwin in his
+Zoonomia;) or to introduce new terms, after the example of Linnaeus,
+and the framers of the present chemical nomenclature. The latter mode
+is evidently preferable, were it only that the former demands a
+twofold exertion of thought in one and the same act. For the reader,
+or hearer, is required not only to learn and bear in mind the new
+definition; but to unlearn, and keep out of his view, the old and
+habitual meaning; a far more difficult and perplexing task, and for
+which the mere semblance of eschewing pedantry seems to me an
+inadequate compensation. Where, indeed, it is in our power to recall
+an unappropriate term that had without sufficient reason become
+obsolete, it is doubtless a less evil to restore than to coin anew.
+Thus to express in one word all that appertains to the perception,
+considered as passive and merely recipient, I have adopted from our
+elder classics the word sensuous; because sensual is not at present
+used, except in a bad sense, or at least as a moral distinction; while
+sensitive and sensible would each convey a different meaning. Thus too
+have I followed Hooker, Sanderson, Milton and others, in designating
+the immediateness of any act or object of knowledge by the word
+intuition, used sometimes subjectively, sometimes objectively, even as
+we use the word, thought; now as the thought, or act of thinking, and
+now as a thought, or the object of our reflection; and we do this
+without confusion or obscurity. The very words, objective and
+subjective, of such constant recurrence in the schools of yore, I have
+ventured to re-introduce, because I could not so briefly or
+conveniently by any more familiar terms distinguish the percipere from
+the percipi. Lastly, I have cautiously discriminated the terms, the
+reason, and the understanding, encouraged and confirmed by the
+authority of our genuine divines and philosophers, before the
+Revolution.
+
+    ------both life, and sense,
+    Fancy and understanding; whence the soul
+    Reason receives, and reason is her bring,
+    Discursive or intuitive: discourse [32]
+    Is oftest yours, the latter most is ours,
+    Differing but in degree, in kind the same.
+
+I say, that I was confirmed by authority so venerable: for I had
+previous and higher motives in my own conviction of the importance,
+nay, of the necessity of the distinction, as both an indispensable
+condition and a vital part of all sound speculation in metaphysics,
+ethical or theological. To establish this distinction was one main
+object of The Friend; if even in a biography of my own literary life I
+can with propriety refer to a work, which was printed rather than
+published, or so published that it had been well for the unfortunate
+author, if it had remained in manuscript. I have even at this time
+bitter cause for remembering that, which a number of my subscribers
+have but a trifling motive for forgetting. This effusion might have
+been spared; but I would fain flatter myself, that the reader will be
+less austere than an oriental professor of the bastinado, who during
+an attempt to extort per argumentum baculinum a full confession from a
+culprit, interrupted his outcry of pain by reminding him, that it was
+"a mere digression!" "All this noise, Sir! is nothing to the point,
+and no sort of answer to my questions!" "Ah! but," (replied the
+sufferer,) "it is the most pertinent reply in nature to your blows."
+
+An imprudent man of common goodness of heart cannot but wish to turn
+even his imprudences to the benefit of others, as far as this is
+possible. If therefore any one of the readers of this semi-narrative
+should be preparing or intending a periodical work, I warn him, in the
+first place, against trusting in the number of names on his
+subscription list. For he cannot be certain that the names were put
+down by sufficient authority; or, should that be ascertained, it still
+remains to be known, whether they were not extorted by some over
+zealous friend's importunity; whether the subscriber had not yielded
+his name, merely from want of courage to answer, no; and with the
+intention of dropping the work as soon as possible. One gentleman
+procured me nearly a hundred names for THE FRIEND, and not only took
+frequent opportunity to remind me of his success in his canvass, but
+laboured to impress my mind with the sense of the obligation, I was
+under to the subscribers; for, (as he very pertinently admonished me,)
+"fifty-two shillings a year was a large sum to be bestowed on one
+individual, where there were so many objects of charity with strong
+claims to the assistance of the benevolent." Of these hundred patrons
+ninety threw up the publication before the fourth number, without any
+notice; though it was well known to them, that in consequence of the
+distance, and the slowness and irregularity of the conveyance, I was
+compelled to lay in a stock of stamped paper for at least eight weeks
+beforehand; each sheet of which stood me in five pence previously to
+its arrival at my printer's; though the subscription money was not to
+be received till the twenty-first week after the commencement of the
+work; and lastly, though it was in nine cases out of ten impracticable
+for me to receive the money for two or three numbers without paying an
+equal sum for the postage.
+
+In confirmation of my first caveat, I will select one fact among many.
+On my list of subscribers, among a considerable number of names
+equally flattering, was that of an Earl of Cork, with his address. He
+might as well have been an Earl of Bottle, for aught I knew of him,
+who had been content to reverence the peerage in abstracto, rather
+than in concretis. Of course THE FRIEND was regularly sent as far, if
+I remember right, as the eighteenth number; that is, till a fortnight
+before the subscription was to be paid. And lo! just at this time I
+received a letter from his Lordship, reproving me in language far more
+lordly than courteous for my impudence in directing my pamphlets to
+him, who knew nothing of me or my work! Seventeen or eighteen numbers
+of which, however, his Lordship was pleased to retain, probably for
+the culinary or post-culinary conveniences of his servants.
+
+Secondly, I warn all others from the attempt to deviate from the
+ordinary mode of publishing a work by the trade. I thought indeed,
+that to the purchaser it was indifferent, whether thirty per cent of
+the purchase-money went to the booksellers or to the government; and
+that the convenience of receiving the work by the post at his own door
+would give the preference to the latter. It is hard, I own, to have
+been labouring for years, in collecting and arranging the materials;
+to have spent every shilling that could be spared after the
+necessaries of life had been furnished, in buying books, or in
+journeys for the purpose of consulting them or of acquiring facts at
+the fountain head; then to buy the paper, pay for the printing, and
+the like, all at least fifteen per cent beyond what the trade would
+have paid; and then after all to give thirty per cent not of the net
+profits, but of the gross results of the sale, to a man who has merely
+to give the books shelf or warehouse room, and permit his apprentice
+to hand them over the counter to those who may ask for them; and this
+too copy by copy, although, if the work be on any philosophical or
+scientific subject, it may be years before the edition is sold off.
+All this, I confess, must seem a hardship, and one, to which the
+products of industry in no other mode of exertion are subject. Yet
+even this is better, far better, than to attempt in any way to unite
+the functions of author and publisher. But the most prudent mode is to
+sell the copy-right, at least of one or more editions, for the most
+that the trade will offer. By few only can a large remuneration be
+expected; but fifty pounds and ease of mind are of more real advantage
+to a literary man, than the chance of five hundred with the certainty
+of insult and degrading anxieties. I shall have been grievously
+misunderstood, if this statement should be interpreted as written with
+the desire of detracting from the character of booksellers or
+publishers. The individuals did not make the laws and customs of their
+trade, but, as in every other trade, take them as they find them. Till
+the evil can be proved to be removable, and without the substitution
+of an equal or greater inconvenience, it were neither wise nor manly
+even to complain of it. But to use it as a pretext for speaking, or
+even for thinking, or feeling, unkindly or opprobriously of the
+tradesmen, as individuals, would be something worse than unwise or
+even than unmanly; it would be immoral and calumnious. My motives
+point in a far different direction and to far other objects, as will
+be seen in the conclusion of the chapter.
+
+A learned and exemplary old clergyman, who many years ago went to his
+reward followed by the regrets and blessings of his flock, published
+at his own expense two volumes octavo, entitled, A NEW THEORY OF
+REDEMPTION. The work was most severely handled in THE MONTHLY or
+CRITICAL REVIEW, I forget which; and this unprovoked hostility became
+the good old man's favourite topic of conversation among his friends.
+"Well!" (he used to exclaim,) "in the second edition, I shall have an
+opportunity of exposing both the ignorance and the malignity of the
+anonymous critic." Two or three years however passed by without any
+tidings from the bookseller, who had undertaken the printing and
+publication of the work, and who was perfectly at his ease, as the
+author was known to be a man of large property. At length the accounts
+were written for; and in the course of a few weeks they were presented
+by the rider for the house, in person. My old friend put on his
+spectacles, and holding the scroll with no very firm hand, began--
+"Paper, so much: O moderate enough--not at all beyond my expectation!
+Printing, so much: well! moderate enough! Stitching, covers,
+advertisements, carriage, and so forth, so much."--Still nothing
+amiss. Selleridge (for orthography is no necessary part of a
+bookseller's literary acquirements) L3. 3s. "Bless me! only three
+guineas for the what d'ye call it--the selleridge?" "No more, Sir!"
+replied the rider. "Nay, but that is too moderate!" rejoined my old
+friend. "Only three guineas for selling a thousand copies of a work in
+two volumes?" "O Sir!" (cries the young traveller) "you have mistaken
+the word. There have been none of them sold; they have been sent back
+from London long ago; and this L3. 3s. is for the cellaridge, or
+warehouse-room in our book cellar." The work was in consequence
+preferred from the ominous cellar of the publisher's to the author's
+garret; and, on presenting a copy to an acquaintance, the old
+gentleman used to tell the anecdote with great humour and still
+greater good nature.
+
+With equal lack of worldly knowledge, I was a far more than equal
+sufferer for it, at the very outset of my authorship. Toward the close
+of the first year from the time, that in an inauspicious hour I left
+the friendly cloisters, and the happy grove of quiet, ever honoured
+Jesus College, Cambridge, I was persuaded by sundry philanthropists
+and Anti-polemists to set on foot a periodical work, entitled THE
+WATCHMAN, that, according to the general motto of the work, all might
+know the truth, and that the truth might make us free! In order to
+exempt it from the stamp-tax, and likewise to contribute as little as
+possible to the supposed guilt of a war against freedom, it was to be
+published on every eighth day, thirty-two pages, large octavo, closely
+printed, and price only four-pence. Accordingly with a flaming
+prospectus,--"Knowledge is Power," "To cry the state of the political
+atmosphere,"--and so forth, I set off on a tour to the North, from
+Bristol to Sheffield, for the purpose of procuring customers,
+preaching by the way in most of the great towns, as an hireless
+volunteer, in a blue coat and white waistcoat, that not a rag of the
+woman of Babylon might be seen on me. For I was at that time and long
+after, though a Trinitarian (that is ad normam Platonis) in
+philosophy, yet a zealous Unitarian in religion; more accurately, I
+was a Psilanthropist, one of those who believe our Lord to have been
+the real son of Joseph, and who lay the main stress on the
+resurrection rather than on the crucifixion. O! never can I remember
+those days with either shame or regret. For I was most sincere, most
+disinterested. My opinions were indeed in many and most important
+points erroneous; but my heart was single. Wealth, rank, life itself
+then seemed cheap to me, compared with the interests of what I
+believed to be the truth, and the will of my Maker. I cannot even
+accuse myself of having been actuated by vanity; for in the expansion
+of my enthusiasm I did not think of myself at all.
+
+My campaign commenced at Birmingham; and my first attack was on a
+rigid Calvinist, a tallow-chandler by trade. He was a tall dingy man,
+in whom length was so predominant over breadth, that he might almost
+have been borrowed for a foundery poker. O that face! a face kat'
+emphasin! I have it before me at this moment. The lank, black, twine-
+like hair, pingui-nitescent, cut in a straight line along the black
+stubble of his thin gunpowder eye-brows, that looked like a scorched
+after-math from a last week's shaving. His coat collar behind in
+perfect unison, both of colour and lustre, with the coarse yet glib
+cordage, which I suppose he called his hair, and which with a bend
+inward at the nape of the neck,--the only approach to flexure in his
+whole figure,--slunk in behind his waistcoat; while the countenance
+lank, dark, very hard, and with strong perpendicular furrows, gave me
+a dim notion of some one looking at me through a used gridiron, all
+soot, grease, and iron! But he was one of the thorough-bred, a true
+lover of liberty, and, as I was informed, had proved to the
+satisfaction of many, that Mr. Pitt was one of the horns of the second
+beast in THE REVELATIONS, that spake as a dragon. A person, to whom
+one of my letters of recommendation had been addressed, was my
+introducer. It was a new event in my life, my first stroke in the new
+business I had undertaken of an author, yea, and of an author trading
+on his own account. My companion after some imperfect sentences and a
+multitude of hums and has abandoned the cause to his client; and I
+commenced an harangue of half an hour to Phileleutheros, the tallow-
+chandler, varying my notes, through the whole gamut of eloquence, from
+the ratiocinative to the declamatory, and in the latter from the
+pathetic to the indignant. I argued, I described, I promised, I
+prophesied; and beginning with the captivity of nations I ended with
+the near approach of the millennium, finishing the whole with some of
+my own verses describing that glorious state out of the Religious
+Musings:
+
+    ------Such delights
+    As float to earth, permitted visitants!
+    When in some hour of solemn jubilee
+    The massive gates of Paradise are thrown
+    Wide open, and forth come in fragments wild
+    Sweet echoes of unearthly melodies,
+    And odours snatched from beds of amaranth,
+    And they, that from the crystal river of life
+    Spring up on freshened wing, ambrosial gales!
+
+My taper man of lights listened with perseverant and praiseworthy
+patience, though, as I was afterwards told, on complaining of certain
+gales that were not altogether ambrosial, it was a melting day with
+him. "And what, Sir," he said, after a short pause, "might the cost
+be?" "Only four-pence,"--(O! how I felt the anti-climax, the abysmal
+bathos of that four-pence!)--"only four-pence, Sir, each number, to be
+published on every eighth day."--"That comes to a deal of money at the
+end of a year. And how much, did you say, there was to be for the
+money?"--"Thirty-two pages, Sir, large octavo, closely printed."--
+"Thirty and two pages? Bless me! why except what I does in a family
+way on the Sabbath, that's more than I ever reads, Sir! all the year
+round. I am as great a one, as any man in Brummagem, Sir! for liberty
+and truth and all them sort of things, but as to this,--no offence, I
+hope, Sir,--I must beg to be excused."
+
+So ended my first canvass: from causes that I shall presently mention,
+I made but one other application in person. This took place at
+Manchester to a stately and opulent wholesale dealer in cottons. He
+took my letter of introduction, and, having perused it, measured me
+from head to foot and again from foot to head, and then asked if I had
+any bill or invoice of the thing. I presented my prospectus to him. He
+rapidly skimmed and hummed over the first side, and still more rapidly
+the second and concluding page; crushed it within his fingers and the
+palm of his hand; then most deliberately and significantly rubbed and
+smoothed one part against the other; and lastly putting it into his
+pocket turned his back on me with an "over-run with these articles!"
+and so without another syllable retired into his counting house. And,
+I can truly say, to my unspeakable amusement.
+
+This, I have said, was my second and last attempt. On returning
+baffled from the first, in which I had vainly essayed to repeat the
+miracle of Orpheus with the Brummagem patriot, I dined with the
+tradesman who had introduced me to him. After dinner he importuned me
+to smoke a pipe with him, and two or three other illuminati of the
+same rank. I objected, both because I was engaged to spend the evening
+with a minister and his friends, and because I had never smoked except
+once or twice in my lifetime, and then it was herb tobacco mixed with
+Oronooko. On the assurance, however, that the tobacco was equally
+mild, and seeing too that it was of a yellow colour; not forgetting
+the lamentable difficulty, I have always experienced, in saying, "No,"
+and in abstaining from what the people about me were doing,--I took
+half a pipe, filling the lower half of the bowl with salt. I was soon
+however compelled to resign it, in consequence of a giddiness and
+distressful feeling in my eyes, which, as I had drunk but a single
+glass of ale, must, I knew, have been the effect of the tobacco. Soon
+after, deeming myself recovered, I sallied forth to my engagement; but
+the walk and the fresh air brought on all the symptoms again, and, I
+had scarcely entered the minister's drawing-room, and opened a small
+pacquet of letters, which he had received from Bristol for me; ere I
+sank back on the sofa in a sort of swoon rather than sleep.
+Fortunately I had found just time enough to inform him of the confused
+state of my feelings, and of the occasion. For here and thus I lay, my
+face like a wall that is white-washing, deathly pale and with the cold
+drops of perspiration running down it from my forehead, while one
+after another there dropped in the different gentlemen, who had been
+invited to meet, and spend the evening with me, to the number of from
+fifteen to twenty. As the poison of tobacco acts but for a short time,
+I at length awoke from insensibility, and looked round on the party,
+my eyes dazzled by the candles which had been lighted in the interim.
+By way of relieving my embarrassment one of the gentlemen began the
+conversation, with "Have you seen a paper to-day, Mr. Coleridge?"
+"Sir!" I replied, rubbing my eyes, "I am far from convinced, that a
+Christian is permitted to read either newspapers or any other works of
+merely political and temporary interest." This remark, so ludicrously
+inapposite to, or rather, incongruous with, the purpose, for which I
+was known to have visited Birmingham, and to assist me in which they
+were all then met, produced an involuntary and general burst of
+laughter; and seldom indeed have I passed so many delightful hours, as
+I enjoyed in that room from the moment of that laugh till an early
+hour the next morning. Never, perhaps, in so mixed and numerous a
+party have I since heard conversation, sustained with such animation,
+enriched with such variety of information and enlivened with such a
+flow of anecdote. Both then and afterwards they all joined in
+dissuading me from proceeding with my scheme; assured me in the most
+friendly and yet most flattering expressions, that neither was the
+employment fit for me, nor I fit for the employment. Yet, if I
+determined on persevering in it, they promised to exert themselves to
+the utmost to procure subscribers, and insisted that I should make no
+more applications in person, but carry on the canvass by proxy. The
+same hospitable reception, the same dissuasion, and, that failing, the
+same kind exertions in my behalf, I met with at Manchester, Derby,
+Nottingham, Sheffield,--indeed, at every place in which I took up my
+sojourn. I often recall with affectionate pleasure the many
+respectable men who interested themselves for me, a perfect stranger
+to them, not a few of whom I can still name among my friends. They
+will bear witness for me how opposite even then my principles were to
+those of Jacobinism or even of democracy, and can attest the strict
+accuracy of the statement which I have left on record in the tenth and
+eleventh numbers of THE FRIEND.
+
+From this rememberable tour I returned with nearly a thousand names on
+the subscription list of THE WATCHMAN; yet more than half convinced,
+that prudence dictated the abandonment of the scheme. But for this
+very reason I persevered in it; for I was at that period of my life so
+completely hag-ridden by the fear of being influenced by selfish
+motives, that to know a mode of conduct to be the dictate of prudence
+was a sort of presumptive proof to my feelings, that the contrary was
+the dictate of duty. Accordingly, I commenced the work, which was
+announced in London by long bills in letters larger than had ever been
+seen before, and which, I have been informed, for I did not see them
+myself, eclipsed the glories even of the lottery puffs. But alas! the
+publication of the very first number was delayed beyond the day
+announced for its appearance. In the second number an essay against
+fast days, with a most censurable application of a text from Isaiah
+for its motto, lost me near five hundred of my subscribers at one
+blow. In the two following numbers I made enemies of all my Jacobin
+and democratic patrons; for, disgusted by their infidelity, and their
+adoption of French morals with French psilosophy; and perhaps
+thinking, that charity ought to begin nearest home; Instead of abusing
+the government and the Aristocrats chiefly or entirely, as had been
+expected of me, I levelled my attacks at "modern patriotism," and even
+ventured to declare my belief, that whatever the motives of ministers
+might have been for the sedition, or as it was then the fashion to
+call them, the gagging bills, yet the bills themselves would produce
+an effect to be desired by all the true friends of freedom, as far as
+they should contribute to deter men from openly declaiming on
+subjects, the principles of which they had never bottomed and from
+"pleading to the poor and ignorant, instead of pleading for them." At
+the same time I avowed my conviction, that national education and a
+concurring spread of the Gospel were the indispensable condition of
+any true political melioration. Thus by the time the seventh number
+was published, I had the mortification--(but why should I say this,
+when in truth I cared too little for any thing that concerned my
+worldly interests to be at all mortified about it?)--of seeing the
+preceding numbers exposed in sundry old iron shops for a penny a
+piece. At the ninth number I dropt the work. But from the London
+publisher I could not obtain a shilling; he was a ------ and set me at
+defiance. From other places I procured but little, and after such
+delays as rendered that little worth nothing; and I should have been
+inevitably thrown into jail by my Bristol printer, who refused to wait
+even for a month, for a sum between eighty and ninety pounds, if the
+money had not been paid for me by a man by no means affluent, a dear
+friend, who attached himself to me from my first arrival at Bristol,
+who has continued my friend with a fidelity unconquered by time or
+even by my own apparent neglect; a friend from whom I never received
+an advice that was not wise, nor a remonstrance that was not gentle
+and affectionate.
+
+Conscientiously an opponent of the first revolutionary war, yet with
+my eyes thoroughly opened to the true character and impotence of the
+favourers of revolutionary principles in England, principles which I
+held in abhorrence,--(for it was part of my political creed, that
+whoever ceased to act as an individual by making himself a member of
+any society not sanctioned by his Government, forfeited the rights of
+a citizen)--a vehement Anti-Ministerialist, but after the invasion of
+Switzerland, a more vehement Anti-Gallican, and still more intensely
+an Anti-Jacobin, I retired to a cottage at Stowey, and provided for my
+scanty maintenance by writing verses for a London Morning Paper. I saw
+plainly, that literature was not a profession, by which I could expect
+to live; for I could not disguise from myself, that, whatever my
+talents might or might not be in other respects, yet they were not of
+the sort that could enable me to become a popular writer; and that
+whatever my opinions might be in themselves, they were almost equi-
+distant from all the three prominent parties, the Pittites, the
+Foxites, and the Democrats. Of the unsaleable nature of my writings I
+had an amusing memento one morning from our own servant girl. For
+happening to rise at an earlier hour than usual, I observed her
+putting an extravagant quantity of paper into the grate in order to
+light the fire, and mildly checked her for her wastefulness; "La,
+Sir!" (replied poor Nanny) "why, it is only Watchmen."
+
+I now devoted myself to poetry and to the study of ethics and
+psychology; and so profound was my admiration at this time of
+Hartley's ESSAY ON MAN, that I gave his name to my first-born. In
+addition to the gentleman, my neighbour, whose garden joined on to my
+little orchard, and the cultivation of whose friendship had been my
+sole motive in choosing Stowey for my residence, I was so fortunate as
+to acquire, shortly after my settlement there, an invaluable blessing
+in the society and neighbourhood of one, to whom I could look up with
+equal reverence, whether I regarded him as a poet, a philosopher, or a
+man. His conversation extended to almost all subjects, except physics
+and politics; with the latter he never troubled himself. Yet neither
+my retirement nor my utter abstraction from all the disputes of the
+day could secure me in those jealous times from suspicion and obloquy,
+which did not stop at me, but extended to my excellent friend, whose
+perfect innocence was even adduced as a proof of his guilt. One of the
+many busy sycophants of that day,--(I here use the word sycophant in
+its original sense, as a wretch who flatters the prevailing party by
+informing against his neighbours, under pretence that they are
+exporters of prohibited figs or fancies,--for the moral application of
+the term it matters not which)--one of these sycophantic law-mongrels,
+discoursing on the politics of the neighbourhood, uttered the
+following deep remark: "As to Coleridge, there is not so much harm in
+him, for he is a whirl-brain that talks whatever comes uppermost; but
+that ------! he is the dark traitor. You never hear HIM say a syllable
+on the subject."
+
+Now that the hand of Providence has disciplined all Europe into
+sobriety, as men tame wild elephants, by alternate blows and caresses;
+now that Englishmen of all classes are restored to their old English
+notions and feelings; it will with difficulty be credited, how great
+an influence was at that time possessed and exerted by the spirit of
+secret defamation,--(the too constant attendant on party-zeal)--during
+the restless interim from 1793 to the commencement of the Addington
+administration, or the year before the truce of Amiens. For by the
+latter period the minds of the partizans, exhausted by excess of
+stimulation and humbled by mutual disappointment, had become languid.
+The same causes, that inclined the nation to peace, disposed the
+individuals to reconciliation. Both parties had found themselves in
+the wrong. The one had confessedly mistaken the moral character of the
+revolution, and the other had miscalculated both its moral and its
+physical resources. The experiment was made at the price of great,
+almost, we may say, of humiliating sacrifices; and wise men foresaw
+that it would fail, at least in its direct and ostensible object. Yet
+it was purchased cheaply, and realized an object of equal value, and,
+if possible, of still more vital importance. For it brought about a
+national unanimity unexampled in our history since the reign of
+Elizabeth; and Providence, never wanting to a good work when men have
+done their parts, soon provided a common focus in the cause of Spain,
+which made us all once more Englishmen by at once gratifying and
+correcting the predilections of both parties. The sincere reverers of
+the throne felt the cause of loyalty ennobled by its alliance with
+that of freedom; while the honest zealots of the people could not but
+admit, that freedom itself assumed a more winning form, humanized by
+loyalty and consecrated by religious principle. The youthful
+enthusiasts who, flattered by the morning rainbow of the French
+revolution, had made a boast of expatriating their hopes and fears,
+now, disciplined by the succeeding storms and sobered by increase of
+years, had been taught to prize and honour the spirit of nationality
+as the best safeguard of national independence, and this again as the
+absolute pre-requisite and necessary basis of popular rights.
+
+If in Spain too disappointment has nipped our too forward
+expectations, yet all is not destroyed that is checked. The crop was
+perhaps springing up too rank in the stalk to kern well; and there
+were, doubtless, symptoms of the Gallican blight on it. If
+superstition and despotism have been suffered to let in their wolvish
+sheep to trample and eat it down even to the surface, yet the roots
+remain alive, and the second growth may prove the stronger and
+healthier for the temporary interruption. At all events, to us heaven
+has been just and gracious. The people of England did their best, and
+have received their rewards. Long may we continue to deserve it!
+Causes, which it had been too generally the habit of former statesmen
+to regard as belonging to another world, are now admitted by all ranks
+to have been the main agents of our success. "We fought from heaven;
+the stars in their courses fought against Sisera." If then unanimity
+grounded on moral feelings has been among the least equivocal sources
+of our national glory, that man deserves the esteem of his countrymen,
+even as patriots, who devotes his life and the utmost efforts of his
+intellect to the preservation and continuance of that unanimity by the
+disclosure and establishment of principles. For by these all opinions
+must be ultimately tried; and, (as the feelings of men are worthy of
+regard only as far as they are the representatives of their fixed
+opinions,) on the knowledge of these all unanimity, not accidental and
+fleeting, must be grounded. Let the scholar, who doubts this
+assertion, refer only to the speeches and writings of Edmund Burke at
+the commencement of the American war and compare them with his
+speeches and writings at the commencement of the French revolution. He
+will find the principles exactly the same and the deductions the same;
+but the practical inferences almost opposite in the one case from
+those drawn in the other; yet in both equally legitimate and in both
+equally confirmed by the results. Whence gained he the superiority of
+foresight? Whence arose the striking difference, and in most instances
+even, the discrepancy between the grounds assigned by him and by those
+who voted with him, on the same questions? How are we to explain the
+notorious fact, that the speeches and writings of Edmund Burke are
+more interesting at the present day than they were found at the time
+of their first publication; while those of his illustrious
+confederates are either forgotten, or exist only to furnish proofs,
+that the same conclusion, which one man had deduced scientifically,
+may be brought out by another in consequence of errors that luckily
+chanced to neutralize each other. It would be unhandsome as a
+conjecture, even were it not, as it actually is, false in point of
+fact to attribute this difference to the deficiency of talent on the
+part of Burke's friends, or of experience, or of historical knowledge.
+The satisfactory solution is, that Edmund Burke possessed and had
+sedulously sharpened that eye, which sees all things, actions, and
+events, in relation to the laws that determine their existence and
+circumscribe their possibility. He referred habitually to principles.
+He was a scientific statesman; and therefore a seer. For every
+principle contains in itself the germs of a prophecy; and, as the
+prophetic power is the essential privilege of science, so the
+fulfilment of its oracles supplies the outward and, (to men in
+general,) the only test of its claim to the title. Wearisome as
+Burke's refinements appeared to his parliamentary auditors, yet the
+cultivated classes throughout Europe have reason to be thankful, that
+he
+
+                                     ------went on refining,
+    And thought of convincing, while they thought of dining.
+
+Our very sign-boards, (said an illustrious friend to me,) give
+evidence, that there has been a Titian in the world. In like manner,
+not only the debates in parliament, not only our proclamations and
+state papers, but the essays and leading paragraphs of our journals
+are so many remembrancers of Edmund Burke. Of this the reader may
+easily convince himself, if either by recollection or reference he
+will compare the opposition newspapers at the commencement and during
+the five or six following years of the French revolution with the
+sentiments, and grounds of argument assumed in the same class of
+journals at present, and for some years past.
+
+Whether the spirit of jacobinism, which the writings of Burke
+exorcised from the higher and from the literary classes, may not, like
+the ghost in Hamlet, be heard moving and mining in the underground
+chambers with an activity the more dangerous because less noisy, may
+admit of a question. I have given my opinions on this point, and the
+grounds of them, in my letters to judge Fletcher occasioned by his
+charge to the Wexford grand jury, and published in the Courier. Be
+this as it may, the evil spirit of jealousy, and with it the Cerberean
+whelps of feud and slander, no longer walk their rounds, in cultivated
+society.
+
+Far different were the days to which these anecdotes have carried me
+back. The dark guesses of some zealous Quidnunc met with so congenial
+a soil in the grave alarm of a titled Dogberry of our neighbourhood,
+that a spy was actually sent down from the government pour
+surveillance of myself and friend. There must have been not only
+abundance, but variety of these "honourable men" at the disposal of
+Ministers: for this proved a very honest fellow. After three weeks'
+truly Indian perseverance in tracking us, (for we were commonly
+together,) during all which time seldom were we out of doors, but he
+contrived to be within hearing,--(and all the while utterly
+unsuspected; how indeed could such a suspicion enter our fancies?)--he
+not only rejected Sir Dogberry's request that he would try yet a
+little longer, but declared to him his belief, that both my friend and
+myself were as good subjects, for aught he could discover to the
+contrary, as any in His Majesty's dominions. He had repeatedly hid
+himself, he said, for hours together behind a bank at the sea-side,
+(our favourite seat,) and overheard our conversation. At first he
+fancied, that we were aware of our danger; for he often heard me talk
+of one Spy Nozy, which he was inclined to interpret of himself, and of
+a remarkable feature belonging to him; but he was speedily convinced
+that it was the name of a man who had made a book and lived long ago.
+Our talk ran most upon books, and we were perpetually desiring each
+other to look at this, and to listen to that; but he could not catch a
+word about politics. Once he had joined me on the road; (this
+occurred, as I was returning home alone from my friend's house, which
+was about three miles from my own cottage,) and, passing himself off
+as a traveller, he had entered into conversation with me, and talked
+of purpose in a democrat way in order to draw me out. The result, it
+appears, not only convinced him that I was no friend of jacobinism;
+but, (he added,) I had "plainly made it out to be such a silly as well
+as wicked thing, that he felt ashamed though he had only put it on." I
+distinctly remembered the occurrence, and had mentioned it immediately
+on my return, repeating what the traveller with his Bardolph nose had
+said, with my own answer; and so little did I suspect the true object
+of my "tempter ere accuser," that I expressed with no small pleasure
+my hope and belief, that the conversation had been of some service to
+the poor misled malcontent. This incident therefore prevented all
+doubt as to the truth of the report, which through a friendly medium
+came to me from the master of the village inn, who had been ordered to
+entertain the Government gentleman in his best manner, but above all
+to be silent concerning such a person being in his house. At length he
+received Sir Dogberry's commands to accompany his guest at the final
+interview; and, after the absolving suffrage of the gentleman honoured
+with the confidence of Ministers, answered, as follows, to the
+following queries: D. "Well, landlord! and what do you know of the
+person in question? L. I see him often pass by with maister ----, my
+landlord, (that is, the owner of the house,) and sometimes with the
+new-comers at Holford; but I never said a word to him or he to me. D.
+But do you not know, that he has distributed papers and hand-bills of
+a seditious nature among the common people? L. No, your Honour! I
+never heard of such a thing. D. Have you not seen this Mr. Coleridge,
+or heard of, his haranguing and talking to knots and clusters of the
+inhabitants?--What are you grinning at, Sir? L. Beg your Honour's
+pardon! but I was only thinking, how they'd have stared at him. If
+what I have heard be true, your Honour! they would not have understood
+a word he said. When our Vicar was here, Dr. L. the master of the
+great school and Canon of Windsor, there was a great dinner party at
+maister's; and one of the farmers, that was there, told us that he and
+the Doctor talked real Hebrew Greek at each other for an hour together
+after dinner. D. Answer the question, Sir! does he ever harangue the
+people? L. I hope your Honour an't angry with me. I can say no more
+than I know. I never saw him talking with any one, but my landlord,
+and our curate, and the strange gentleman. D. Has he not been seen
+wandering on the hills towards the Channel, and along the shore, with
+books and papers in his hand, taking charts and maps of the country?
+L. Why, as to that, your Honour! I own, I have heard; I am sure, I
+would not wish to say ill of any body; but it is certain, that I have
+heard--D. Speak out, man! don't be afraid, you are doing your duty to
+your King and Government. What have you heard? L. Why, folks do say,
+your Honour! as how that he is a Poet, and that he is going to put
+Quantock and all about here in print; and as they be so much together,
+I suppose that the strange gentleman has some consarn in the
+business."--So ended this formidable inquisition, the latter part of
+which alone requires explanation, and at the same time entitles the
+anecdote to a place in my literary life. I had considered it as a
+defect in the admirable poem of THE TASK, that the subject, which
+gives the title to the work, was not, and indeed could not be, carried
+on beyond the three or four first pages, and that, throughout the
+poem, the connections are frequently awkward, and the transitions
+abrupt and arbitrary. I sought for a subject, that should give equal
+room and freedom for description, incident, and impassioned
+reflections on men, nature, and society, yet supply in itself a
+natural connection to the parts, and unity to the whole. Such a
+subject I conceived myself to have found in a stream, traced from its
+source in the hills among the yellow-red moss and conical glass-shaped
+tufts of bent, to the first break or fall, where its drops become
+audible, and it begins to form a channel; thence to the peat and turf
+barn, itself built of the same dark squares as it sheltered; to the
+sheepfold; to the first cultivated plot of ground; to the lonely
+cottage and its bleak garden won from the heath; to the hamlet, the
+villages, the market-town, the manufactories, and the seaport. My
+walks therefore were almost daily on the top of Quantock, and among
+its sloping coombes. With my pencil and memorandum-book in my hand, I
+was making studies, as the artists call them, and often moulding my
+thoughts into verse, with the objects and imagery immediately before
+my senses. Many circumstances, evil and good, intervened to prevent
+the completion of the poem, which was to have been entitled THE BROOK.
+Had I finished the work, it was my purpose in the heat of the moment
+to have dedicated it to our then committee of public safety as
+containing the charts and maps, with which I was to have supplied the
+French Government in aid of their plans of invasion. And these too for
+a tract of coast that, from Clevedon to Minehead, scarcely permits the
+approach of a fishing-boat!
+
+All my experience from my first entrance into life to the present hour
+is in favour of the warning maxim, that the man, who opposes in toto
+the political or religious zealots of his age, is safer from their
+obloquy than he who differs from them but in one or two points, or
+perhaps only in degree. By that transfer of the feelings of private
+life into the discussion of public questions, which is the queen bee
+in the hive of party fanaticism, the partisan has more sympathy with
+an intemperate opposite than with a moderate friend. We now enjoy an
+intermission, and long may it continue! In addition to far higher and
+more important merits, our present Bible societies and other numerous
+associations for national or charitable objects, may serve perhaps to
+carry off the superfluous activity and fervour of stirring minds in
+innocent hyperboles and the bustle of management. But the poison-tree
+is not dead, though the sap may for a season have subsided to its
+roots. At least let us not be lulled into such a notion of our entire
+security, as not to keep watch and ward, even on our best feelings. I
+have seen gross intolerance shown in support of toleration; sectarian
+antipathy most obtrusively displayed in the promotion of an
+undistinguishing comprehension of sects: and acts of cruelty, (I had
+almost said,) of treachery, committed in furtherance of an object
+vitally important to the cause of humanity; and all this by men too of
+naturally kind dispositions and exemplary conduct.
+
+The magic rod of fanaticism is preserved in the very adyta of human
+nature; and needs only the re-exciting warmth of a master hand to bud
+forth afresh and produce the old fruits. The horror of the Peasants'
+war in Germany, and the direful effects of the Anabaptists' tenets,
+(which differed only from those of jacobinism by the substitution of
+theological for philosophical jargon,) struck all Europe for a time
+with affright. Yet little more than a century was sufficient to
+obliterate all effective memory of these events. The same principles
+with similar though less dreadful consequences were again at work from
+the imprisonment of the first Charles to the restoration of his son.
+The fanatic maxim of extirpating fanaticism by persecution produced a
+civil war. The war ended in the victory of the insurgents; but the
+temper survived, and Milton had abundant grounds for asserting, that
+"Presbyter was but OLD PRIEST writ large!" One good result, thank
+heaven! of this zealotry was the re-establishment of the church. And
+now it might have been hoped, that the mischievous spirit would have
+been bound for a season, "and a seal set upon him, that he should
+deceive the nation no more." [33] But no! The ball of persecution was
+taken up with undiminished vigour by the persecuted. The same fanatic
+principle that, under the solemn oath and covenant, had turned
+cathedrals into stables, destroyed the rarest trophies of art and
+ancestral piety, and hunted the brightest ornaments of learning and
+religion into holes and corners, now marched under episcopal banners,
+and, having first crowded the prisons of England, emptied its whole
+vial of wrath on the miserable Covenanters of Scotland [34]. A
+merciful providence at length constrained both parties to join against
+a common enemy. A wise government followed; and the established church
+became, and now is, not only the brightest example, but our best and
+only sure bulwark, of toleration!--the true and indispensable bank
+against a new inundation of persecuting zeal--Esto perpetua!
+
+A long interval of quiet succeeded; or rather, the exhaustion had
+produced a cold fit of the ague which was symptomatized by
+indifference among the many, and a tendency to infidelity or
+scepticism in the educated classes. At length those feelings of
+disgust and hatred, which for a brief while the multitude had attached
+to the crimes and absurdities of sectarian and democratic fanaticism,
+were transferred to the oppressive privileges of the noblesse, and the
+luxury; intrigues and favouritism of the continental courts. The same
+principles, dressed in the ostentatious garb of a fashionable
+philosophy, once more rose triumphant and effected the French
+revolution. And have we not within the last three or four years had
+reason to apprehend, that the detestable maxims and correspondent
+measures of the late French despotism had already bedimmed the public
+recollections of democratic phrensy; had drawn off to other objects
+the electric force of the feelings which had massed and upheld those
+recollections; and that a favourable concurrence of occasions was
+alone wanting to awaken the thunder and precipitate the lightning from
+the opposite quarter of the political heaven?
+
+In part from constitutional indolence, which in the very hey-day of
+hope had kept my enthusiasm in check, but still more from the habits
+and influences of a classical education and academic pursuits,
+scarcely had a year elapsed from the commencement of my literary and
+political adventures before my mind sank into a state of thorough
+disgust and despondency, both with regard to the disputes and the
+parties disputant. With more than poetic feeling I exclaimed:
+
+    The sensual and the dark rebel in vain,
+    Slaves by their own compulsion! In mad game
+    They break their manacles, to wear the name
+    Of freedom, graven on a heavier chain.
+    O Liberty! with profitless endeavour
+    Have I pursued thee many a weary hour;
+    But thou nor swell'st the victor's pomp, nor ever
+    Didst breathe thy soul in forms of human power!
+        Alike from all, howe'er they praise thee,
+        (Nor prayer nor boastful name delays thee)
+        From Superstition's harpy minions
+        And factious Blasphemy's obscener slaves,
+        Thou speedest on thy cherub pinions,
+    The guide of homeless winds and playmate of the waves!
+
+I retired to a cottage in Somersetshire at the foot of Quantock, and
+devoted my thoughts and studies to the foundations of religion and
+morals. Here I found myself all afloat. Doubts rushed in; broke upon
+me "from the fountains of the great deep," and fell "from the windows
+of heaven." The fontal truths of natural religion and the books of
+Revelation alike contributed to the flood; and it was long ere my ark
+touched on an Ararat, and rested. The idea of the Supreme Being
+appeared to me to be as necessarily implied in all particular modes of
+being as the idea of infinite space in all the geometrical figures by
+which space is limited. I was pleased with the Cartesian opinion, that
+the idea of God is distinguished from all other ideas by involving its
+reality; but I was not wholly satisfied. I began then to ask myself,
+what proof I had of the outward existence of anything? Of this sheet
+of paper for instance, as a thing in itself, separate from the
+phaenomenon or image in my perception. I saw, that in the nature of
+things such proof is impossible; and that of all modes of being, that
+are not objects of the senses, the existence is assumed by a logical
+necessity arising from the constitution of the mind itself,--by the
+absence of all motive to doubt it, not from any absolute contradiction
+in the supposition of the contrary. Still the existence of a Being,
+the ground of all existence, was not yet the existence of a moral
+creator, and governour. "In the position, that all reality is either
+contained in the necessary being as an attribute, or exists through
+him, as its ground, it remains undecided whether the properties of
+intelligence and will are to be referred to the Supreme Being in the
+former or only in the latter sense; as inherent attributes, or only as
+consequences that have existence in other things through him [35].
+Were the latter the truth, then notwithstanding all the pre-eminence
+which must be assigned to the Eternal First from the sufficiency,
+unity, and independence of his being, as the dread ground of the
+universe, his nature would yet fall far short of that, which we are
+bound to comprehend in the idea of GOD. For, without any knowledge or
+determining resolve of its own, it would only be a blind necessary
+ground of other things and other spirits; and thus would be
+distinguished from the FATE of certain ancient philosophers in no
+respect, but that of being more definitely and intelligibly
+described."
+
+For a very long time, indeed, I could not reconcile personality with
+infinity; and my head was with Spinoza, though my whole heart remained
+with Paul and John. Yet there had dawned upon me, even before I had
+met with the CRITIQUE OF THE PURE REASON, a certain guiding light. If
+the mere intellect could make no certain discovery of a holy and
+intelligent first cause, it might yet supply a demonstration, that no
+legitimate argument could be drawn from the intellect against its
+truth. And what is this more than St. Paul's assertion, that by
+wisdom,--(more properly translated by the powers of reasoning)--no man
+ever arrived at the knowledge of God? What more than the sublimest,
+and probably the oldest, book on earth has taught us,
+
+    Silver and gold man searcheth out:
+    Bringeth the ore out of the earth, and darkness into light.
+
+    But where findeth he wisdom?
+    Where is the place of understanding?
+
+    The abyss crieth; it is not in me!
+    Ocean echoeth back; not in me!
+
+    Whence then cometh wisdom?
+    Where dwelleth understanding?
+
+    Hidden from the eyes of the living
+    Kept secret from the fowls of heaven!
+
+    Hell and death answer;
+    We have heard the rumour thereof from afar!
+
+    GOD marketh out the road to it;
+    GOD knoweth its abiding place!
+
+    He beholdeth the ends of the earth;
+    He surveyeth what is beneath the heavens!
+
+    And as he weighed out the winds, and measured the sea,
+    And appointed laws to the rain,
+    And a path to the thunder,
+    A path to the flashes of the lightning!
+
+    Then did he see it,
+    And he counted it;
+    He searched into the depth thereof,
+    And with a line did he compass it round!
+
+    But to man he said,
+    The fear of the Lord is wisdom for thee!
+    And to avoid evil,
+    That is thy understanding. [36]
+
+I become convinced, that religion, as both the cornerstone and the
+key-stone of morality, must have a moral origin; so far at least, that
+the evidence of its doctrines could not, like the truths of abstract
+science, be wholly independent of the will. It were therefore to be
+expected, that its fundamental truth would be such as might be denied;
+though only, by the fool, and even by the fool from the madness of the
+heart alone!
+
+The question then concerning our faith in the existence of a God, not
+only as the ground of the universe by his essence, but as its maker
+and judge by his wisdom and holy will, appeared to stand thus. The
+sciential reason, the objects of which are purely theoretical, remains
+neutral, as long as its name and semblance are not usurped by the
+opponents of the doctrine. But it then becomes an effective ally by
+exposing the false show of demonstration, or by evincing the equal
+demonstrability of the contrary from premises equally logical [37].
+The understanding meantime suggests, the analogy of experience
+facilitates, the belief. Nature excites and recalls it, as by a
+perpetual revelation. Our feelings almost necessitate it; and the law
+of conscience peremptorily commands it. The arguments, that at all
+apply to it, are in its favour; and there is nothing against it, but
+its own sublimity. It could not be intellectually more evident without
+becoming morally less effective; without counteracting its own end by
+sacrificing the life of faith to the cold mechanism of a worth less
+because compulsory assent. The belief of a God and a future state, (if
+a passive acquiescence may be flattered with the name of belief,) does
+not indeed always beget a good heart; but a good heart so naturally
+begets the belief, that the very few exceptions must be regarded as
+strange anomalies from strange and unfortunate circumstances.
+
+From these premises I proceeded to draw the following conclusions.
+First, that having once fully admitted the existence of an infinite
+yet self-conscious Creator, we are not allowed to ground the
+irrationality of any other article of faith on arguments which would
+equally prove that to be irrational, which we had allowed to be real.
+Secondly, that whatever is deducible from the admission of a self-
+comprehending and creative spirit may be legitimately used in proof of
+the possibility of any further mystery concerning the divine nature.
+Possibilitatem mysteriorum, (Trinitatis, etc.) contra insultus
+Infidelium et Haereticorum a contradictionibus vindico; haud quidem
+veritatem, quae revelatione sola stabiliri possit; says Leibnitz in a
+letter to his Duke. He then adds the following just and important
+remark. "In vain will tradition or texts of scripture be adduced in
+support of a doctrine, donec clava impossibilitatis et contradictionis
+e manibus horum Herculum extorta fuerit. For the heretic will still
+reply, that texts, the literal sense of which is not so much above as
+directly against all reason, must be understood figuratively, as Herod
+is a fox, and so forth."
+
+These principles I held, philosophically, while in respect of revealed
+religion I remained a zealous Unitarian. I considered the idea of the
+Trinity a fair scholastic inference from the being of God, as a
+creative intelligence; and that it was therefore entitled to the rank
+of an esoteric doctrine of natural religion. But seeing in the same no
+practical or moral bearing, I confined it to the schools of
+philosophy. The admission of the Logos, as hypostasized (that is,
+neither a mere attribute, nor a personification) in no respect removed
+my doubts concerning the Incarnation and the Redemption by the cross;
+which I could neither reconcile in reason with the impassiveness of
+the Divine Being, nor in my moral feelings with the sacred distinction
+between things and persons, the vicarious payment of a debt and the
+vicarious expiation of guilt. A more thorough revolution in my
+philosophic principles, and a deeper insight into my own heart, were
+yet wanting. Nevertheless, I cannot doubt, that the difference of my
+metaphysical notions from those of Unitarians in general contributed
+to my final re-conversion to the whole truth in Christ; even as
+according to his own confession the books of certain Platonic
+philosophers (libri quorundam Platonicorum) commenced the rescue of
+St. Augustine's faith from the same error aggravated by the far darker
+accompaniment of the Manichaean heresy.
+
+While my mind was thus perplexed, by a gracious providence for which I
+can never be sufficiently grateful, the generous and munificent
+patronage of Mr. Josiah, and Mr. Thomas Wedgwood enabled me to finish
+my education in Germany. Instead of troubling others with my own crude
+notions and juvenile compositions, I was thenceforward better employed
+in attempting to store my own head with the wisdom of others. I made
+the best use of my time and means; and there is therefore no period of
+my life on which I can look back with such unmingled satisfaction.
+After acquiring a tolerable sufficiency in the German language [38] at
+Ratzeburg, which with my voyage and journey thither I have described
+in The Friend, I proceeded through Hanover to Goettingen.
+
+Here I regularly attended the lectures on physiology in the morning,
+and on natural history in the evening, under Blumenbach, a name as
+dear to every Englishman who has studied at that university, as it is
+venerable to men of science throughout Europe! Eichhorn's lectures on
+the New Testament were repeated to me from notes by a student from
+Ratzeburg, a young man of sound learning and indefatigable industry,
+who is now, I believe, a professor of the oriental languages at
+Heidelberg. But my chief efforts were directed towards a grounded
+knowledge of the German language and literature. From professor
+Tychsen I received as many lessons in the Gothic of Ulphilas as
+sufficed to make me acquainted with its grammar, and the radical words
+of most frequent occurrence; and with the occasional assistance of the
+same philosophical linguist, I read through [39] Ottfried's metrical
+paraphrase of the gospel, and the most important remains of the
+Theotiscan, or the transitional state of the Teutonic language from
+the Gothic to the old German of the Swabian period. Of this period--
+(the polished dialect of which is analogous to that of our Chaucer,
+and which leaves the philosophic student in doubt, whether the
+language has not since then lost more in sweetness and flexibility,
+than it has gained in condensation and copiousness)--I read with
+sedulous accuracy the Minnesinger (or singers of love, the Provencal
+poets of the Swabian court) and the metrical romances; and then
+laboured through sufficient specimens of the master singers, their
+degenerate successors; not however without occasional pleasure from
+the rude, yet interesting strains of Hans Sachs, the cobbler of
+Nuremberg. Of this man's genius five folio volumes with double columns
+are extant in print, and nearly an equal number in manuscript; yet the
+indefatigable bard takes care to inform his readers, that he never
+made a shoe the less, but had virtuously reared a large family by the
+labour of his hands.
+
+In Pindar, Chaucer, Dante, Milton, and many more, we have instances of
+the close connection of poetic genius with the love of liberty and of
+genuine reformation. The moral sense at least will not be outraged, if
+I add to the list the name of this honest shoemaker, (a trade by the
+by remarkable for the production of philosophers and poets).
+
+His poem entitled THE MORNING STAR, was the very first publication
+that appeared in praise and support of Luther; and an excellent hymn
+of Hans Sachs, which has been deservedly translated into almost all
+the European languages, was commonly sung in the Protestant churches,
+whenever the heroic reformer visited them.
+
+In Luther's own German writings, and eminently in his translation of
+the Bible, the German language commenced. I mean the language as it is
+at present written; that which is called the High-German, as contra-
+distinguished from the Platt-Teutsch, the dialect on the flat or
+northern countries, and from the Ober-Teutsch, the language of the
+middle and Southern Germany. The High German is indeed a lingua
+communis, not actually the native language of any province, but the
+choice and fragrancy of all the dialects. From this cause it is at
+once the most copious and the most grammatical of all the European
+tongues.
+
+Within less than a century after Luther's death the German was
+inundated with pedantic barbarisms. A few volumes of this period I
+read through from motives of curiosity; for it is not easy to imagine
+any thing more fantastic, than the very appearance of their pages.
+Almost every third word is a Latin word with a Germanized ending, the
+Latin portion being always printed in Roman letters, while in the last
+syllable the German character is retained.
+
+At length, about the year 1620, Opitz arose, whose genius more nearly
+resembled that of Dryden than any other poet, who at present occurs to
+my recollection. In the opinion of Lessing, the most acute of critics,
+and of Adelung, the first of Lexicographers, Opitz, and the Silesian
+poets, his followers, not only restored the language, but still remain
+the models of pure diction. A stranger has no vote on such a question;
+but after repeated perusal of the works of Opitz my feelings justified
+the verdict, and I seemed to have acquired from them a sort of tact
+for what is genuine in the style of later writers.
+
+Of the splendid aera, which commenced with Gellert, Klopstock, Ramler,
+Lessing, and their compeers, I need not speak. With the opportunities
+which I enjoyed, it would have been disgraceful not to have been
+familiar with their writings; and I have already said as much as the
+present biographical sketch requires concerning the German
+philosophers, whose works, for the greater part, I became acquainted
+with at a far later period.
+
+Soon after my return from Germany I was solicited to undertake the
+literary and political department in the Morning Post; and I acceded
+to the proposal on the condition that the paper should thenceforwards
+be conducted on certain fixed and announced principles, and that I
+should neither be obliged nor requested to deviate from them in favour
+of any party or any event. In consequence, that journal became and for
+many years continued anti-ministerial indeed, yet with a very
+qualified approbation of the opposition, and with far greater
+earnestness and zeal both anti-Jacobin and anti-Gallican. To this hour
+I cannot find reason to approve of the first war either in its
+commencement or its conduct. Nor can I understand, with what reason
+either Mr. Perceval, (whom I am singular enough to regard as the best
+and wisest minister of this reign,) nor the present Administration,
+can be said to have pursued the plans of Mr. Pitt. The love of their
+country, and perseverant hostility to French principles and French
+ambition are indeed honourable qualities common to them and to their
+predecessor. But it appears to me as clear as the evidence of the
+facts can render any question of history, that the successes of the
+Perceval and of the existing ministry have been owing to their having
+pursued measures the direct contrary to Mr. Pitt's. Such for instance
+are the concentration of the national force to one object; the
+abandonment of the subsidizing policy, so far at least as neither to
+goad nor bribe the continental courts into war, till the convictions
+of their subjects had rendered it a war of their own seeking; and
+above all, in their manly and generous reliance on the good sense of
+the English people, and on that loyalty which is linked to the very
+[40] heart of the nation by the system of credit and the
+interdependence of property.
+
+Be this as it may, I am persuaded that the Morning Post proved a far
+more useful ally to the Government in its most important objects, in
+consequence of its being generally considered as moderately anti-
+ministerial, than if it had been the avowed eulogist of Mr. Pitt. The
+few, whose curiosity or fancy should lead them to turn over the
+journals of that date, may find a small proof of this in the frequent
+charges made by the Morning Chronicle, that such and such essays or
+leading paragraphs had been sent from the Treasury. The rapid and
+unusual increase in the sale of the Morning Post is a sufficient
+pledge, that genuine impartiality with a respectable portion of
+literary talent will secure the success of a newspaper without the aid
+of party or ministerial patronage. But by impartiality I mean an
+honest and enlightened adherence to a code of intelligible principles
+previously announced, and faithfully referred to in support of every
+judgment on men and events; not indiscriminate abuse, not the
+indulgence of an editor's own malignant passions, and still less, if
+that be possible, a determination to make money by flattering the envy
+and cupidity, the vindictive restlessness and self-conceit of the
+half-witted vulgar; a determination almost fiendish, but which, I have
+been informed, has been boastfully avowed by one man, the most
+notorious of these mob-sycophants! From the commencement of the
+Addington administration to the present day, whatever I have written
+in THE MORNING POST, or (after that paper was transferred to other
+proprietors) in THE COURIER, has been in defence or furtherance of the
+measures of Government.
+
+    Things of this nature scarce survive that night
+    That gives them birth; they perish in the sight;
+    Cast by so far from after-life, that there
+    Can scarcely aught be said, but that they were!
+
+Yet in these labours I employed, and, in the belief of partial friends
+wasted, the prime and manhood of my intellect. Most assuredly, they
+added nothing to my fortune or my reputation. The industry of the week
+supplied the necessities of the week. From government or the friends
+of government I not only never received remuneration, nor ever
+expected it; but I was never honoured with a single acknowledgment, or
+expression of satisfaction. Yet the retrospect is far from painful or
+matter of regret. I am not indeed silly enough to take as any thing
+more than a violent hyperbole of party debate, Mr. Fox's assertion
+that the late war (I trust that the epithet is not prematurely
+applied) was a war produced by the Morning Post; or I should be proud
+to have the words inscribed on my tomb. As little do I regard the
+circumstance, that I was a specified object of Buonaparte's resentment
+during my residence in Italy in consequence of those essays in the
+Morning Post during the peace of Amiens. Of this I was warned,
+directly, by Baron Von Humboldt, the Prussian Plenipotentiary, who at
+that time was the minister of the Prussian court at Rome; and
+indirectly, through his secretary, by Cardinal Fesch himself. Nor do I
+lay any greater weight on the confirming fact, that an order for my
+arrest was sent from Paris, from which danger I was rescued by the
+kindness of a noble Benedictine, and the gracious connivance of that
+good old man, the present Pope. For the late tyrant's vindictive
+appetite was omnivorous, and preyed equally on a Duc d'Enghien [41],
+and the writer of a newspaper paragraph. Like a true vulture [42],
+Napoleon with an eye not less telescopic, and with a taste equally
+coarse in his ravin, could descend from the most dazzling heights to
+pounce on the leveret in the brake, or even on the field mouse amid
+the grass. But I do derive a gratification from the knowledge, that my
+essays contributed to introduce the practice of placing the questions
+and events of the day in a moral point of view; in giving a dignity to
+particular measures by tracing their policy or impolicy to permanent
+principles, and an interest to principles by the application of them
+to individual measures. In Mr. Burke's writings indeed the germs of
+almost all political truths may be found. But I dare assume to myself
+the merit of having first explicitly defined and analyzed the nature
+of Jacobinism; and that in distinguishing the Jacobin from the
+republican, the democrat, and the mere demagogue, I both rescued the
+word from remaining a mere term of abuse, and put on their guard many
+honest minds, who even in their heat of zeal against Jacobinism,
+admitted or supported principles from which the worst parts of that
+system may be legitimately deduced. That these are not necessary
+practical results of such principles, we owe to that fortunate
+inconsequence of our nature, which permits the heart to rectify the
+errors of the understanding. The detailed examination of the consular
+Government and its pretended constitution, and the proof given by me,
+that it was a consummate despotism in masquerade, extorted a
+recantation even from the Morning Chronicle, which had previously
+extolled this constitution as the perfection of a wise and regulated
+liberty. On every great occurrence I endeavoured to discover in past
+history the event, that most nearly resembled it. I procured, wherever
+it was possible, the contemporary historians, memorialists, and
+pamphleteers. Then fairly subtracting the points of difference from
+those of likeness, as the balance favoured the former or the latter, I
+conjectured that the result would be the same or different. In the
+series of essays entitled "A comparison of France under Napoleon with
+Rome under the first Caesars," and in those which followed "On the
+probable final restoration of the Bourbons," I feel myself authorized
+to affirm, by the effect produced on many intelligent men, that, were
+the dates wanting, it might have been suspected that the essays had
+been written within the last twelve months. The same plan I pursued at
+the commencement of the Spanish revolution, and with the same success,
+taking the war of the United Provinces with Philip II as the ground
+work of the comparison. I have mentioned this from no motives of
+vanity, nor even from motives of self defence, which would justify a
+certain degree of egotism, especially if it be considered, how often
+and grossly I have been attacked for sentiments, which I have exerted
+my best powers to confute and expose, and how grievously these charges
+acted to my disadvantage while I was in Malta. Or rather they would
+have done so, if my own feelings had not precluded the wish of a
+settled establishment in that island. But I have mentioned it from the
+full persuasion that, armed with the two-fold knowledge of history and
+the human mind, a man will scarcely err in his judgment concerning the
+sum total of any future national event, if he have been able to
+procure the original documents of the past, together with authentic
+accounts of the present, and if he have a philosophic tact for what is
+truly important in facts, and in most instances therefore for such
+facts as the dignity of history has excluded from the volumes of our
+modern compilers, by the courtesy of the age entitled historians.
+
+To have lived in vain must be a painful thought to any man, and
+especially so to him who has made literature his profession. I should
+therefore rather condole than be angry with the mind, which could
+attribute to no worthier feelings than those of vanity or self-love,
+the satisfaction which I acknowledged myself to have enjoyed from the
+republication of my political essays (either whole or as extracts) not
+only in many of our own provincial papers, but in the federal journals
+throughout America. I regarded it as some proof of my not having
+laboured altogether in vain, that from the articles written by me
+shortly before and at the commencement of the late unhappy war with
+America, not only the sentiments were adopted, but in some instances
+the very language, in several of the Massachusetts state papers.
+
+But no one of these motives nor all conjointly would have impelled me
+to a statement so uncomfortable to my own feelings, had not my
+character been repeatedly attacked, by an unjustifiable intrusion on
+private life, as of a man incorrigibly idle, and who intrusted not
+only with ample talents, but favoured with unusual opportunities of
+improving them, had nevertheless suffered them to rust away without
+any efficient exertion, either for his own good or that of his fellow
+creatures. Even if the compositions, which I have made public, and
+that too in a form the most certain of an extensive circulation,
+though the least flattering to an author's self-love, had been
+published in books, they would have filled a respectable number of
+volumes, though every passage of merely temporary interest were
+omitted. My prose writings have been charged with a disproportionate
+demand on the attention; with an excess of refinement in the mode of
+arriving at truths; with beating the ground for that which might have
+been run down by the eye; with the length and laborious construction
+of my periods; in short with obscurity and the love of paradox. But my
+severest critics have not pretended to have found in my compositions
+triviality, or traces of a mind that shrunk from the toil of thinking.
+No one has charged me with tricking out in other words the thoughts of
+others, or with hashing up anew the cramben jam decies coctam of
+English literature or philosophy. Seldom have I written that in a day,
+the acquisition or investigation of which had not cost me the previous
+labour of a month.
+
+But are books the only channel through which the stream of
+intellectual usefulness can flow? Is the diffusion of truth to be
+estimated by publications; or publications by the truth, which they
+diffuse or at least contain? I speak it in the excusable warmth of a
+mind stung by an accusation, which has not only been advanced in
+reviews of the widest circulation, not only registered in the bulkiest
+works of periodical literature, but by frequency of repetition has
+become an admitted fact in private literary circles, and thoughtlessly
+repeated by too many who call themselves my friends, and whose own
+recollections ought to have suggested a contrary testimony. Would that
+the criterion of a scholar's utility were the number and moral value
+of the truths, which he has been the means of throwing into the
+general circulation; or the number and value of the minds, whom by his
+conversation or letters, he has excited into activity, and supplied
+with the germs of their after-growth! A distinguished rank might not
+indeed, even then, be awarded to my exertions; but I should dare look
+forward with confidence to an honourable acquittal. I should dare
+appeal to the numerous and respectable audiences, which at different
+times and in different places honoured my lecture rooms with their
+attendance, whether the points of view from which the subjects treated
+of were surveyed,--whether the grounds of my reasoning were such, as
+they had heard or read elsewhere, or have since found in previous
+publications. I can conscientiously declare, that the complete success
+of the REMORSE on the first night of its representation did not give
+me as great or as heart-felt a pleasure, as the observation that the
+pit and boxes were crowded with faces familiar to me, though of
+individuals whose names I did not know, and of whom I knew nothing,
+but that they had attended one or other of my courses of lectures. It
+is an excellent though perhaps somewhat vulgar proverb, that there are
+cases where a man may be as well "in for a pound as for a penny." To
+those, who from ignorance of the serious injury I have received from
+this rumour of having dreamed away my life to no purpose, injuries
+which I unwillingly remember at all, much less am disposed to record
+in a sketch of my literary life; or to those, who from their own
+feelings, or the gratification they derive from thinking
+contemptuously of others, would like job's comforters attribute these
+complaints, extorted from me by the sense of wrong, to self conceit or
+presumptuous vanity, I have already furnished such ample materials,
+that I shall gain nothing by withholding the remainder. I will not
+therefore hesitate to ask the consciences of those, who from their
+long acquaintance with me and with the circumstances are best
+qualified to decide or be my judges, whether the restitution of the
+suum cuique would increase or detract from my literary reputation. In
+this exculpation I hope to be understood as speaking of myself
+comparatively, and in proportion to the claims, which others are
+entitled to make on my time or my talents. By what I have effected, am
+I to be judged by my fellow men; what I could have done, is a question
+for my own conscience. On my own account I may perhaps have had
+sufficient reason to lament my deficiency in self-control, and the
+neglect of concentering my powers to the realization of some permanent
+work. But to verse rather than to prose, if to either, belongs the
+voice of mourning for
+
+    Keen pangs of Love, awakening as a babe
+    Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart;
+    And fears self-willed that shunned the eye of hope;
+    And hope that scarce would know itself from fear;
+    Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain,
+    And genius given and knowledge won in vain;
+    And all which I had culled in wood-walks wild,
+    And all which patient toil had reared, and all,
+    Commune with thee had opened out--but flowers
+    Strewed on my corpse, and borne upon my bier,
+    In the same coffin, for the self-same grave!
+
+These will exist, for the future, I trust, only in the poetic strains,
+which the feelings at the time called forth. In those only, gentle
+reader,
+
+    Affectus animi varios, bellumque sequacis
+    Perlegis invidiae, curasque revolvis inanes,
+    Quas humilis tenero stylus olim effudit in aevo.
+    Perlegis et lacrymas, et quod pharetratus acuta
+    Ille puer puero fecit mihi cuspide vulnus.
+    Omnia paulatim consumit longior aetas,
+    Vivendoque simul morimur, rapimurque manendo.
+    Ipse mihi collatus enim non ille videbor;
+    Frons alia est, moresque alii, nova mentis imago,
+    Vox aliudque sonat--Jamque observatio vitae
+    Multa dedit--lugere nihil, ferre omnia; jamque
+    Paulatim lacrymas rerum experientia tersit.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+An affectionate exhortation to those who in early life feel themselves
+disposed to become authors.
+
+
+It was a favourite remark of the late Mr. Whitbread's, that no man
+does any thing from a single motive. The separate motives, or rather
+moods of mind, which produced the preceding reflections and anecdotes
+have been laid open to the reader in each separate instance. But an
+interest in the welfare of those, who at the present time may be in
+circumstances not dissimilar to my own at my first entrance into life,
+has been the constant accompaniment, and (as it were) the under-song
+of all my feelings. Whitehead exerting the prerogative of his
+laureateship addressed to youthful poets a poetic Charge, which is
+perhaps the best, and certainly the most interesting, of his works.
+With no other privilege than that of sympathy and sincere good wishes,
+I would address an affectionate exhortation to the youthful literati,
+grounded on my own experience. It will be but short; for the
+beginning, middle, and end converge to one charge: never pursue
+literature as a trade. With the exception of one extraordinary man, I
+have never known an individual, least of all an individual of genius,
+healthy or happy without a profession, that is, some regular
+employment, which does not depend on the will of the moment, and which
+can be carried on so far mechanically that an average quantum only of
+health, spirits, and intellectual exertion are requisite to its
+faithful discharge. Three hours of leisure, unannoyed by any alien
+anxiety, and looked forward to with delight as a change and
+recreation, will suffice to realize in literature a larger product of
+what is truly genial, than weeks of compulsion. Money, and immediate
+reputation form only an arbitrary and accidental end of literary
+labour. The hope of increasing them by any given exertion will often
+prove a stimulant to industry; but the necessity of acquiring them
+will in all works of genius convert the stimulant into a narcotic.
+Motives by excess reverse their very nature, and instead of exciting,
+stun and stupify the mind. For it is one contradistinction of genius
+from talent, that its predominant end is always comprised in the
+means; and this is one of the many points, which establish an analogy
+between genius and virtue. Now though talents may exist without
+genius, yet as genius cannot exist, certainly not manifest itself,
+without talents, I would advise every scholar, who feels the genial
+power working within him, so far to make a division between the two,
+as that he should devote his talents to the acquirement of competence
+in some known trade or profession, and his genius to objects of his
+tranquil and unbiassed choice; while the consciousness of being
+actuated in both alike by the sincere desire to perform his duty, will
+alike ennoble both. "My dear young friend," (I would say) "suppose
+yourself established in any honourable occupation. From the
+manufactory or counting house, from the law-court, or from having
+visited your last patient, you return at evening,
+
+    Dear tranquil time, when the sweet sense of Home
+    Is sweetest------
+
+to your family, prepared for its social enjoyments, with the very
+countenances of your wife and children brightened, and their voice of
+welcome made doubly welcome, by the knowledge that, as far as they are
+concerned, you have satisfied the demands of the day by the labour of
+the day. Then, when you retire into your study, in the books on your
+shelves you revisit so many venerable friends with whom you can
+converse. Your own spirit scarcely less free from personal anxieties
+than the great minds, that in those books are still living for you!
+Even your writing desk with its blank paper and all its other
+implements will appear as a chain of flowers, capable of linking your
+feelings as well as thoughts to events and characters past or to come;
+not a chain of iron, which binds you down to think of the future and
+the remote by recalling the claims and feelings of the peremptory
+present. But why should I say retire? The habits of active life and
+daily intercourse with the stir of the world will tend to give you
+such self-command, that the presence of your family will be no
+interruption. Nay, the social silence, or undisturbing voices of a
+wife or sister will be like a restorative atmosphere, or soft music
+which moulds a dream without becoming its object. If facts are
+required to prove the possibility of combining weighty performances in
+literature with full and independent employment, the works of Cicero
+and Xenophon among the ancients; of Sir Thomas More, Bacon, Baxter, or
+to refer at once to later and contemporary instances, Darwin and
+Roscoe, are at once decisive of the question."
+
+But all men may not dare promise themselves a sufficiency of self-
+control for the imitation of those examples: though strict scrutiny
+should always be made, whether indolence, restlessness, or a vanity
+impatient for immediate gratification, have not tampered with the
+judgment and assumed the vizard of humility for the purposes of self-
+delusion. Still the Church presents to every man of learning and
+genius a profession, in which he may cherish a rational hope of being
+able to unite the widest schemes of literary utility with the
+strictest performance of professional duties. Among the numerous
+blessings of Christianity, the introduction of an established Church
+makes an especial claim on the gratitude of scholars and philosophers;
+in England, at least, where the principles of Protestantism have
+conspired with the freedom of the government to double all its
+salutary powers by the removal of its abuses.
+
+That not only the maxims, but the grounds of a pure morality, the mere
+fragments of which
+
+    ------the lofty grave tragedians taught
+    In chorus or iambic, teachers best
+    Of moral prudence, with delight received
+    In brief sententious precepts; [43]
+
+and that the sublime truths of the divine unity and attributes, which
+a Plato found most hard to learn and deemed it still more difficult to
+reveal; that these should have become the almost hereditary property
+of childhood and poverty, of the hovel and the workshop; that even to
+the unlettered they sound as common place, is a phaenomenon, which
+must withhold all but minds of the most vulgar cast from undervaluing
+the services even of the pulpit and the reading desk. Yet those, who
+confine the efficiency of an established Church to its public offices,
+can hardly be placed in a much higher rank of intellect. That to every
+parish throughout the kingdom there is transplanted a germ of
+civilization; that in the remotest villages there is a nucleus, round
+which the capabilities of the place may crystallize and brighten; a
+model sufficiently superior to excite, yet sufficiently near to
+encourage and facilitate, imitation; this, the unobtrusive, continuous
+agency of a protestant church establishment, this it is, which the
+patriot, and the philanthropist, who would fain unite the love of
+peace with the faith in the progressive melioration of mankind, cannot
+estimate at too high a price. It cannot be valued with the gold of
+Ophir, with the precious onyx, or the sapphire. No mention shall be
+made of coral, or of pearls: for the price of wisdom is above rubies.
+The clergyman is with his parishioners and among them; he is neither
+in the cloistered cell, nor in the wilderness, but a neighbour and a
+family-man, whose education and rank admit him to the mansion of the
+rich landholder, while his duties make him the frequent visitor of the
+farmhouse and the cottage. He is, or he may become, connected, with
+the families of his parish or its vicinity by marriage. And among the
+instances of the blindness, or at best of the short-sightedness, which
+it is the nature of cupidity to inflict, I know few more striking than
+the clamours of the farmers against Church property. Whatever was not
+paid to the clergyman would inevitably at the next lease be paid to
+the landholder, while, as the case at present stands, the revenues of
+the Church are in some sort the reversionary property of every family,
+that may have a member educated for the Church, or a daughter that may
+marry a clergyman. Instead of being foreclosed and immovable, it is in
+fact the only species of landed property, that is essentially moving
+and circulative. That there exist no inconveniences, who will pretend
+to assert? But I have yet to expect the proof, that the inconveniences
+are greater in this than in any other species; or that either the
+farmers or the clergy would be benefited by forcing the latter to
+become either Trullibers or salaried placemen. Nay, I do not hesitate
+to declare my firm persuasion, that whatever reason of discontent the
+farmers may assign, the true cause is this; that they may cheat the
+parson, but cannot cheat the steward; and that they are disappointed,
+if they should have been able to withhold only two pounds less than
+the legal claim, having expected to withhold five. At all events,
+considered relatively to the encouragement of learning and genius, the
+establishment presents a patronage at once so effective and
+unburdensome, that it would be impossible to afford the like or equal
+in any but a Christian and Protestant country. There is scarce a
+department of human knowledge without some bearing on the various
+critical, historical, philosophical and moral truths, in which the
+scholar must be interested as a clergyman; no one pursuit worthy of a
+man of genius, which may not be followed without incongruity. To give
+the history of the Bible as a book, would be little less than to
+relate the origin or first excitement of all the literature and
+science, that we now possess. The very decorum, which the profession
+imposes, is favourable to the best purposes of genius, and tends to
+counteract its most frequent defects. Finally, that man must be
+deficient in sensibility, who would not find an incentive to emulation
+in the great and burning lights, which in a long series have
+illustrated the church of England; who would not hear from within an
+echo to the voice from their sacred shrines,
+
+    Et Pater Aeneas et avunculus excitat Hector.
+
+But, whatever be the profession or trade chosen, the advantages are
+many and important, compared with the state of a mere literary man,
+who in any degree depends on the sale of his works for the necessaries
+and comforts of life. In the former a man lives in sympathy with the
+world, in which he lives. At least he acquires a better and quicker
+tact for the knowledge of that, with which men in general can
+sympathize. He learns to manage his genius more prudently and
+efficaciously. His powers and acquirements gain him likewise more real
+admiration; for they surpass the legitimate expectations of others. He
+is something besides an author, and is not therefore considered merely
+as an author. The hearts of men are open to him, as to one of their
+own class; and whether he exerts himself or not in the conversational
+circles of his acquaintance, his silence is not attributed to pride,
+nor his communicativeness to vanity. To these advantages I will
+venture to add a superior chance of happiness in domestic life, were
+it only that it is as natural for the man to be out of the circle of
+his household during the day, as it is meritorious for the woman to
+remain for the most part within it. But this subject involves points
+of consideration so numerous and so delicate, and would not only
+permit, but require such ample documents from the biography of
+literary men, that I now merely allude to it in transitu. When the
+same circumstance has occurred at very different times to very
+different persons, all of whom have some one thing in common; there is
+reason to suppose that such circumstance is not merely attributable to
+the persons concerned, but is in some measure occasioned by the one
+point in common to them all. Instead of the vehement and almost
+slanderous dehortation from marriage, which the Misogyne, Boccaccio
+[44] addresses to literary men, I would substitute the simple advice:
+be not merely a man of letters! Let literature be an honourable
+augmentation to your arms; but not constitute the coat, or fill the
+escutcheon!
+
+To objections from conscience I can of course answer in no other way,
+than by requesting the youthful objector (as I have already done on a
+former occasion) to ascertain with strict self-examination, whether
+other influences may not be at work; whether spirits, "not of health,"
+and with whispers "not from heaven," may not be walking in the
+twilight of his consciousness. Let him catalogue his scruples, and
+reduce them to a distinct intelligible form; let him be certain, that
+he has read with a docile mind and favourable dispositions the best
+and most fundamental works on the subject; that he has had both mind
+and heart opened to the great and illustrious qualities of the many
+renowned characters, who had doubted like himself, and whose
+researches had ended in the clear conviction, that their doubts had
+been groundless, or at least in no proportion to the counter-weight.
+Happy will it be for such a man, if among his contemporaries elder
+than himself he should meet with one, who, with similar powers and
+feelings as acute as his own, had entertained the same scruples; had
+acted upon them; and who by after-research (when the step was, alas!
+irretrievable, but for that very reason his research undeniably
+disinterested) had discovered himself to have quarrelled with received
+opinions only to embrace errors, to have left the direction tracked
+out for him on the high road of honourable exertion, only to deviate
+into a labyrinth, where when he had wandered till his head was giddy,
+his best good fortune was finally to have found his way out again, too
+late for prudence though not too late for conscience or for truth!
+Time spent in such delay is time won: for manhood in the meantime is
+advancing, and with it increase of knowledge, strength of judgment,
+and above all, temperance of feelings. And even if these should effect
+no change, yet the delay will at least prevent the final approval of
+the decision from being alloyed by the inward censure of the rashness
+and vanity, by which it had been precipitated. It would be a sort of
+irreligion, and scarcely less than a libel on human nature to believe,
+that there is any established and reputable profession or employment,
+in which a man may not continue to act with honesty and honour; and
+doubtless there is likewise none, which may not at times present
+temptations to the contrary. But wofully will that man find himself
+mistaken, who imagines that the profession of literature, or (to speak
+more plainly) the trade of authorship, besets its members with fewer
+or with less insidious temptations, than the Church, the law, or the
+different branches of commerce. But I have treated sufficiently on
+this unpleasant subject in an early chapter of this volume. I will
+conclude the present therefore with a short extract from Herder, whose
+name I might have added to the illustrious list of those, who have
+combined the successful pursuit of the Muses, not only with the
+faithful discharge, but with the highest honours and honourable
+emoluments of an established profession. The translation the reader
+will find in a note below [45]. "Am sorgfaeltigsten, meiden sie die
+Autorschaft. Zu frueh oder unmaessig gebraucht, macht sie den Kopf
+wueste and das Herz leer; wenn sie auch sonst keine ueble Folgen
+gaebe. Ein Mensch, der nur lieset um zu druecken, lieset
+wahrscheinlich uebel; und wer jeden Gedanken, der ihm aufstosst, durch
+Feder and Presse versendet, hat sie in kurzer Zeit alle versandt, und
+wird bald ein blosser Diener der Druckerey, ein Buchstabensetzer
+werden."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+A chapter of requests and premonitions concerning the perusal or
+omission of the chapter that follows.
+
+
+In the perusal of philosophical works I have been greatly benefited by
+a resolve, which, in the antithetic form and with the allowed
+quaintness of an adage or maxim, I have been accustomed to word thus:
+until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant
+of his understanding. This golden rule of mine does, I own, resemble
+those of Pythagoras in its obscurity rather than in its depth. If
+however the reader will permit me to be my own Hierocles, I trust,
+that he will find its meaning fully explained by the following
+instances. I have now before me a treatise of a religious fanatic,
+full of dreams and supernatural experiences. I see clearly the
+writer's grounds, and their hollowness. I have a complete insight into
+the causes, which through the medium of his body has acted on his
+mind; and by application of received and ascertained laws I can
+satisfactorily explain to my own reason all the strange incidents,
+which the writer records of himself. And this I can do without
+suspecting him of any intentional falsehood. As when in broad day-
+light a man tracks the steps of a traveller, who had lost his way in a
+fog or by a treacherous moonshine, even so, and with the same tranquil
+sense of certainty, can I follow the traces of this bewildered
+visionary. I understand his ignorance.
+
+On the other hand, I have been re-perusing with the best energies of
+my mind the TIMAEUS of Plato. Whatever I comprehend, impresses me with
+a reverential sense of the author's genius; but there is a
+considerable portion of the work, to which I can attach no consistent
+meaning. In other treatises of the same philosopher, intended for the
+average comprehensions of men, I have been delighted with the masterly
+good sense, with the perspicuity of the language, and the aptness of
+the inductions. I recollect likewise, that numerous passages in this
+author, which I thoroughly comprehend, were formerly no less
+unintelligible to me, than the passages now in question. It would, I
+am aware, be quite fashionable to dismiss them at once as Platonic
+jargon. But this I cannot do with satisfaction to my own mind, because
+I have sought in vain for causes adequate to the solution of the
+assumed inconsistency. I have no insight into the possibility of a man
+so eminently wise, using words with such half-meanings to himself, as
+must perforce pass into no meaning to his readers. When in addition to
+the motives thus suggested by my own reason, I bring into distinct
+remembrance the number and the series of great men, who, after long
+and zealous study of these works had joined in honouring the name of
+Plato with epithets, that almost transcend humanity, I feel, that a
+contemptuous verdict on my part might argue want of modesty, but would
+hardly be received by the judicious, as evidence of superior
+penetration. Therefore, utterly baffled in all my attempts to
+understand the ignorance of Plato, I conclude myself ignorant of his
+understanding.
+
+In lieu of the various requests which the anxiety of authorship
+addresses to the unknown reader, I advance but this one; that he will
+either pass over the following chapter altogether, or read the whole
+connectedly. The fairest part of the most beautiful body will appear
+deformed and monstrous, if dissevered from its place in the organic
+whole. Nay, on delicate subjects, where a seemingly trifling
+difference of more or less may constitute a difference in kind, even a
+faithful display of the main and supporting ideas, if yet they are
+separated from the forms by which they are at once clothed and
+modified, may perchance present a skeleton indeed; but a skeleton to
+alarm and deter. Though I might find numerous precedents, I shall not
+desire the reader to strip his mind of all prejudices, nor to keep all
+prior systems out of view during his examination of the present. For
+in truth, such requests appear to me not much unlike the advice given
+to hypochondriacal patients in Dr. Buchan's domestic medicine;
+videlicet, to preserve themselves uniformly tranquil and in good
+spirits. Till I had discovered the art of destroying the memory a
+parte post, without injury to its future operations, and without
+detriment to the judgment, I should suppress the request as premature;
+and therefore, however much I may wish to be read with an unprejudiced
+mind, I do not presume to state it as a necessary condition.
+
+The extent of my daring is to suggest one criterion, by which it may
+be rationally conjectured beforehand, whether or no a reader would
+lose his time, and perhaps his temper, in the perusal of this, or any
+other treatise constructed on similar principles. But it would be
+cruelly misinterpreted, as implying the least disrespect either for
+the moral or intellectual qualities of the individuals thereby
+precluded. The criterion is this: if a man receives as fundamental
+facts, and therefore of course indemonstrable and incapable of further
+analysis, the general notions of matter, spirit, soul, body, action,
+passiveness, time, space, cause and effect, consciousness, perception,
+memory and habit; if he feels his mind completely at rest concerning
+all these, and is satisfied, if only he can analyse all other notions
+into some one or more of these supposed elements with plausible
+subordination and apt arrangement: to such a mind I would as
+courteously as possible convey the hint, that for him the chapter was
+not written.
+
+    Vir bonus es, doctus, prudens; ast haud tibi spiro.
+
+For these terms do in truth include all the difficulties, which the
+human mind can propose for solution. Taking them therefore in mass,
+and unexamined, it required only a decent apprenticeship in logic, to
+draw forth their contents in all forms and colours, as the professors
+of legerdemain at our village fairs pull out ribbon after ribbon from
+their mouths. And not more difficult is it to reduce them back again
+to their different genera. But though this analysis is highly useful
+in rendering our knowledge more distinct, it does not really add to
+it. It does not increase, though it gives us a greater mastery over,
+the wealth which we before possessed. For forensic purposes, for all
+the established professions of society, this is sufficient. But for
+philosophy in its highest sense as the science of ultimate truths, and
+therefore scientia scientiarum, this mere analysis of terms is
+preparative only, though as a preparative discipline indispensable.
+
+Still less dare a favourable perusal be anticipated from the
+proselytes of that compendious philosophy, which talking of mind but
+thinking of brick and mortar, or other images equally abstracted from
+body, contrives a theory of spirit by nicknaming matter, and in a few
+hours can qualify its dullest disciples to explain the omne scibile by
+reducing all things to impressions, ideas, and sensations.
+
+But it is time to tell the truth; though it requires some courage to
+avow it in an age and country, in which disquisitions on all subjects,
+not privileged to adopt technical terms or scientific symbols, must be
+addressed to the Public. I say then, that it is neither possible nor
+necessary for all men, nor for many, to be philosophers. There is a
+philosophic (and inasmuch as it is actualized by an effort of freedom,
+an artificial) consciousness, which lies beneath or (as it were)
+behind the spontaneous consciousness natural to all reflecting beings.
+As the elder Romans distinguished their northern provinces into Cis-
+Alpine and Trans-Alpine, so may we divide all the objects of human
+knowledge into those on this side, and those on the other side of the
+spontaneous consciousness; citra et trans conscientiam communem. The
+latter is exclusively the domain of pure philosophy, which is
+therefore properly entitled transcendental, in order to discriminate
+it at once, both from mere reflection and representation on the one
+hand, and on the other from those flights of lawless speculation
+which, abandoned by all distinct consciousness, because transgressing
+the bounds and purposes of our intellectual faculties, are justly
+condemned, as transcendent [46]. The first range of hills, that
+encircles the scanty vale of human life, is the horizon for the
+majority of its inhabitants. On its ridges the common sun is born and
+departs. From them the stars rise, and touching them they vanish. By
+the many, even this range, the natural limit and bulwark of the vale,
+is but imperfectly known. Its higher ascents are too often hidden by
+mists and clouds from uncultivated swamps, which few have courage or
+curiosity to penetrate. To the multitude below these vapours appear,
+now as the dark haunts of terrific agents, on which none may intrude
+with impunity; and now all aglow, with colours not their own, they are
+gazed at as the splendid palaces of happiness and power. But in all
+ages there have been a few, who measuring and sounding the rivers of
+the vale at the feet of their furthest inaccessible falls have
+learned, that the sources must be far higher and far inward; a few,
+who even in the level streams have detected elements, which neither
+the vale itself nor the surrounding mountains contained or could
+supply [47]. How and whence to these thoughts, these strong
+probabilities, the ascertaining vision, the intuitive knowledge may
+finally supervene, can be learnt only by the fact. I might oppose to
+the question the words with which [48] Plotinus supposes Nature to
+answer a similar difficulty. "Should any one interrogate her, how she
+works, if graciously she vouchsafe to listen and speak, she will
+reply, it behoves thee not to disquiet me with interrogatories, but to
+understand in silence, even as I am silent, and work without words."
+
+Likewise in the fifth book of the fifth Ennead, speaking of the
+highest and intuitive knowledge as distinguished from the discursive,
+or in the language of Wordsworth,
+
+    "The vision and the faculty divine;"
+
+he says: "it is not lawful to inquire from whence it sprang, as if it
+were a thing subject to place and motion, for it neither approached
+hither, nor again departs from hence to some other place; but it
+either appears to us or it does not appear. So that we ought not to
+pursue it with a view of detecting its secret source, but to watch in
+quiet till it suddenly shines upon us; preparing ourselves for the
+blessed spectacle as the eye waits patiently for the rising sun." They
+and they only can acquire the philosophic imagination, the sacred
+power of self-intuition, who within themselves can interpret and
+understand the symbol, that the wings of the air-sylph are forming
+within the skin of the caterpillar; those only, who feel in their own
+spirits the same instinct, which impels the chrysalis of the horned
+fly to leave room in its involucrum for antenna, yet to come. They
+know and feel, that the potential works in them, even as the actual
+works on them! In short, all the organs of sense are framed for a
+corresponding world of sense; and we have it. All the organs of spirit
+are framed for a correspondent world of spirit: though the latter
+organs are not developed in all alike. But they exist in all, and
+their first appearance discloses itself in the moral being. How else
+could it be, that even worldlings, not wholly debased, will
+contemplate the man of simple and disinterested goodness with
+contradictory feelings of pity and respect? "Poor man! he is not made
+for this world." Oh! herein they utter a prophecy of universal
+fulfilment; for man must either rise or sink.
+
+It is the essential mark of the true philosopher to rest satisfied
+with no imperfect light, as long as the impossibility of attaining a
+fuller knowledge has not been demonstrated. That the common
+consciousness itself will furnish proofs by its own direction, that it
+is connected with master-currents below the surface, I shall merely
+assume as a postulate pro tempore. This having been granted, though
+but in expectation of the argument, I can safely deduce from it the
+equal truth of my former assertion, that philosophy cannot be
+intelligible to all, even of the most learned and cultivated classes.
+A system, the first principle of which it is to render the mind
+intuitive of the spiritual in man (i.e. of that which lies on the
+other side of our natural consciousness) must needs have a great
+obscurity for those, who have never disciplined and strengthened this
+ulterior consciousness. It must in truth be a land of darkness, a
+perfect Anti-Goshen, for men to whom the noblest treasures of their
+own being are reported only through the imperfect translation of
+lifeless and sightless motions. Perhaps, in great part, through words
+which are but the shadows of notions; even as the notional
+understanding itself is but the shadowy abstraction of living and
+actual truth. On the IMMEDIATE, which dwells in every man, and on the
+original intuition, or absolute affirmation of it, (which is likewise
+in every man, but does not in every man rise into consciousness) all
+the certainty of our knowledge depends; and this becomes intelligible
+to no man by the ministry of mere words from without. The medium, by
+which spirits understand each other, is not the surrounding air; but
+the freedom which they possess in common, as the common ethereal
+element of their being, the tremulous reciprocations of which
+propagate themselves even to the inmost of the soul. Where the spirit
+of a man is not filled with the consciousness of freedom (were it only
+from its restlessness, as of one still struggling in bondage) all
+spiritual intercourse is interrupted, not only with others, but even
+with himself. No wonder then, that he remains incomprehensible to
+himself as well as to others. No wonder, that, in the fearful desert
+of his consciousness, he wearies himself out with empty words, to
+which no friendly echo answers, either from his own heart, or the
+heart of a fellow being; or bewilders himself in the pursuit of
+notional phantoms, the mere refractions from unseen and distant truths
+through the distorting medium of his own unenlivened and stagnant
+understanding! To remain unintelligible to such a mind, exclaims
+Schelling on a like occasion, is honour and a good name before God and
+man.
+
+The history of philosophy (the same writer observes) contains
+instances of systems, which for successive generations have remained
+enigmatic. Such he deems the system of Leibnitz, whom another writer
+(rashly I think, and invidiously) extols as the only philosopher, who
+was himself deeply convinced of his own doctrines. As hitherto
+interpreted, however, they have not produced the effect, which
+Leibnitz himself, in a most instructive passage, describes as the
+criterion of a true philosophy; namely, that it would at once explain
+and collect the fragments of truth scattered through systems
+apparently the most incongruous. The truth, says he, is diffused more
+widely than is commonly believed; but it is often painted, yet oftener
+masked, and is sometimes mutilated and sometimes, alas! in close
+alliance with mischievous errors. The deeper, however, we penetrate
+into the ground of things, the more truth we discover in the doctrines
+of the greater number of the philosophical sects. The want of
+substantial reality in the objects of the senses, according to the
+sceptics; the harmonies or numbers, the prototypes and ideas, to which
+the Pythagoreans and Platonists reduced all things: the ONE and ALL of
+Parmenides and Plotinus, without [49] Spinozism; the necessary
+connection of things according to the Stoics, reconcilable with the
+spontaneity of the other schools; the vital-philosophy of the
+Cabalists and Hermetists, who assumed the universality of sensation;
+the substantial forms and entelechies of Aristotle and the schoolmen,
+together with the mechanical solution of all particular phaenomena
+according to Democritus and the recent philosophers--all these we
+shall find united in one perspective central point, which shows
+regularity and a coincidence of all the parts in the very object,
+which from every other point of view must appear confused and
+distorted. The spirit of sectarianism has been hitherto our fault, and
+the cause of our failures. We have imprisoned our own conceptions by
+the lines, which we have drawn, in order to exclude the conceptions of
+others. J'ai trouve que la plupart des Sectes ont raison dans une
+bonne partie de ce qu'elles avancent, mais non pas tant en ce qu'elles
+nient.
+
+A system, which aims to deduce the memory with all the other functions
+of intelligence, must of course place its first position from beyond
+the memory, and anterior to it, otherwise the principle of solution
+would be itself a part of the problem to be solved. Such a position
+therefore must, in the first instance be demanded, and the first
+question will be, by what right is it demanded? On this account I
+think it expedient to make some preliminary remarks on the
+introduction of Postulates in philosophy. The word postulate is
+borrowed from the science of mathematics [50]. In geometry the primary
+construction is not demonstrated, but postulated. This first and most
+simple construction in space is the point in motion, or the line.
+Whether the point is moved in one and the same direction, or whether
+its direction is continually changed, remains as yet undetermined. But
+if the direction of the point have been determined, it is either by a
+point without it, and then there arises the straight line which
+incloses no space; or the direction of the point is not determined by
+a point without it, and then it must flow back again on itself, that
+is, there arises a cyclical line, which does enclose a space. If the
+straight line be assumed as the positive, the cyclical is then the
+negation of the straight. It is a line, which at no point strikes out
+into the straight, but changes its direction continuously. But if the
+primary line be conceived as undetermined, and the straight line as
+determined throughout, then the cyclical is the third compounded of
+both. It is at once undetermined and determined; undetermined through
+any point without, and determined through itself. Geometry therefore
+supplies philosophy with the example of a primary intuition, from
+which every science that lays claim to evidence must take its
+commencement. The mathematician does not begin with a demonstrable
+proposition, but with an intuition, a practical idea.
+
+But here an important distinction presents itself. Philosophy is
+employed on objects of the inner SENSE, and cannot, like geometry,
+appropriate to every construction a correspondent outward intuition.
+Nevertheless, philosophy, if it is to arrive at evidence, must proceed
+from the most original construction, and the question then is, what is
+the most original construction or first productive act for the inner
+sense. The answer to this question depends on the direction which is
+given to the inner sense. But in philosophy the inner sense cannot
+have its direction determined by an outward object. To the original
+construction of the line I can be compelled by a line drawn before me
+on the slate or on sand. The stroke thus drawn is indeed not the line
+itself, but only the image or picture of the line. It is not from it,
+that we first learn to know the line; but, on the contrary, we bring
+this stroke to the original line generated by the act of the
+imagination; otherwise we could not define it as without breadth or
+thickness. Still however this stroke is the sensuous image of the
+original or ideal line, and an efficient mean to excite every
+imagination to the intuition of it.
+
+It is demanded then, whether there be found any means in philosophy to
+determine the direction of the inner sense, as in mathematics it is
+determinable by its specific image or outward picture. Now the inner
+sense has its direction determined for the greater part only by an act
+of freedom. One man's consciousness extends only to the pleasant or
+unpleasant sensations caused in him by external impressions; another
+enlarges his inner sense to a consciousness of forms and quantity; a
+third in addition to the image is conscious of the conception or
+notion of the thing; a fourth attains to a notion of his notions--he
+reflects on his own reflections; and thus we may say without
+impropriety, that the one possesses more or less inner sense, than the
+other. This more or less betrays already, that philosophy in its first
+principles must have a practical or moral, as well as a theoretical or
+speculative side. This difference in degree does not exist in the
+mathematics. Socrates in Plato shows, that an ignorant slave may be
+brought to understand and of himself to solve the most difficult
+geometrical problem. Socrates drew the figures for the slave in the
+sand. The disciples of the critical philosophy could likewise (as was
+indeed actually done by La Forge and some other followers of Des
+Cartes) represent the origin of our representations in copper-plates;
+but no one has yet attempted it, and it would be utterly useless. To
+an Esquimaux or New Zealander our most popular philosophy would be
+wholly unintelligible. The sense, the inward organ, for it is not yet
+born in him. So is there many a one among us, yes, and some who think
+themselves philosophers too, to whom the philosophic organ is entirely
+wanting. To such a man philosophy is a mere play of words and notions,
+like a theory of music to the deaf, or like the geometry of light to
+the blind. The connection of the parts and their logical dependencies
+may be seen and remembered; but the whole is groundless and hollow,
+unsustained by living contact, unaccompanied with any realizing
+intuition which exists by and in the act that affirms its existence,
+which is known, because it is, and is, because it is known. The words
+of Plotinus, in the assumed person of Nature, hold true of the
+philosophic energy. To theoroun mou, theoraema poiei, osper oi
+geometrai theorountes graphousin; all' emon mae graphousaes,
+theorousaes de, uphistantai ai ton somaton grammai. With me the act of
+contemplation makes the thing contemplated, as the geometricians
+contemplating describe lines correspondent; but I not describing
+lines, but simply contemplating, the representative forms of things
+rise up into existence.
+
+The postulate of philosophy and at the same time the test of
+philosophic capacity, is no other than the heaven-descended KNOW
+THYSELF! (E coelo descendit, Gnothi seauton). And this at once
+practically and speculatively. For as philosophy is neither a science
+of the reason or understanding only, nor merely a science of morals,
+but the science of BEING altogether, its primary ground can be neither
+merely speculative nor merely practical, but both in one. All
+knowledge rests on the coincidence of an object with a subject. (My
+readers have been warned in a former chapter that, for their
+convenience as well as the writer's, the term, subject, is used by me
+in its scholastic sense as equivalent to mind or sentient being, and
+as the necessary correlative of object or quicquid objicitur menti.)
+For we can know that only which is true: and the truth is universally
+placed in the coincidence of the thought with the thing, of the
+representation with the object represented.
+
+Now the sum of all that is merely OBJECTIVE, we will henceforth call
+NATURE, confining the term to its passive and material sense, as
+comprising all the phaenomena by which its existence is made known to
+us. On the other hand the sum of all that is SUBJECTIVE, we may
+comprehend in the name of the SELF or INTELLIGENCE. Both conceptions
+are in necessary antithesis. Intelligence is conceived of as
+exclusively representative, nature as exclusively represented; the one
+as conscious, the other as without consciousness. Now in all acts of
+positive knowledge there is required a reciprocal concurrence of both,
+namely of the conscious being, and of that which is in itself
+unconscious. Our problem is to explain this concurrence, its
+possibility and its necessity.
+
+During the act of knowledge itself, the objective and subjective are
+so instantly united, that we cannot determine to which of the two the
+priority belongs. There is here no first, and no second; both are
+coinstantaneous and one. While I am attempting to explain this
+intimate coalition, I must suppose it dissolved. I must necessarily
+set out from the one, to which therefore I give hypothetical
+antecedence, in order to arrive at the other. But as there are but two
+factors or elements in the problem, subject and object, and as it is
+left indeterminate from which of them I should commence, there are two
+cases equally possible.
+
+1. EITHER THE OBJECTIVE IS TAKEN AS THE FIRST, AND THEN WE HAVE TO
+ACCOUNT FOR THE SUPERVENTION OF THE SUBJECTIVE, WHICH COALESCES WITH
+IT.
+
+The notion of the subjective is not contained in the notion of the
+objective. On the contrary they mutually exclude each other. The
+subjective therefore must supervene to the objective. The conception
+of nature does not apparently involve the co-presence of an
+intelligence making an ideal duplicate of it, that is, representing
+it. This desk for instance would (according to our natural notions)
+be, though there should exist no sentient being to look at it. This
+then is the problem of natural philosophy. It assumes the objective or
+unconscious nature as the first, and as therefore to explain how
+intelligence can supervene to it, or how itself can grow into
+intelligence. If it should appear, that all enlightened naturalists,
+without having distinctly proposed the problem to themselves, have yet
+constantly moved in the line of its solution, it must afford a strong
+presumption that the problem itself is founded in nature. For if all
+knowledge has, as it were, two poles reciprocally required and
+presupposed, all sciences must proceed from the one or the other, and
+must tend toward the opposite as far as the equatorial point in which
+both are reconciled and become identical. The necessary tendency
+therefore of all natural philosophy is from nature to intelligence;
+and this, and no other is the true ground and occasion of the
+instinctive striving to introduce theory into our views of natural
+phaenomena. The highest perfection of natural philosophy would consist
+in the perfect spiritualization of all the laws of nature into laws of
+intuition and intellect. The phaenomena (the material) most wholly
+disappear, and the laws alone (the formal) must remain. Thence it
+comes, that in nature itself the more the principle of law breaks
+forth, the more does the husk drop off, the phaenomena themselves
+become more spiritual and at length cease altogether in our
+consciousness. The optical phaenomena are but a geometry, the lines of
+which are drawn by light, and the materiality of this light itself has
+already become matter of doubt. In the appearances of magnetism all
+trace of matter is lost, and of the phaenomena of gravitation, which
+not a few among the most illustrious Newtonians have declared no
+otherwise comprehensible than as an immediate spiritual influence,
+there remains nothing but its law, the execution of which on a vast
+scale is the mechanism of the heavenly motions. The theory of natural
+philosophy would then be completed, when all nature was demonstrated
+to be identical in essence with that, which in its highest known power
+exists in man as intelligence and self-consciousness; when the heavens
+and the earth shall declare not only the power of their maker, but the
+glory and the presence of their God, even as he appeared to the great
+prophet during the vision of the mount in the skirts of his divinity.
+
+This may suffice to show, that even natural science, which commences
+with the material phaenomenon as the reality and substance of things
+existing, does yet by the necessity of theorizing unconsciously, and
+as it were instinctively, end in nature as an intelligence; and by
+this tendency the science of nature becomes finally natural
+philosophy, the one of the two poles of fundamental science.
+
+2. OR THE SUBJECTIVE IS TAKEN AS THE FIRST, AND THE PROBLEM THEN IS,
+HOW THERE SUPERVENES TO IT A COINCIDENT OBJECTIVE.
+
+In the pursuit of these sciences, our success in each, depends on an
+austere and faithful adherence to its own principles, with a careful
+separation and exclusion of those, which appertain to the opposite
+science. As the natural philosopher, who directs his views to the
+objective, avoids above all things the intermixture of the subjective
+in his knowledge, as for instance, arbitrary suppositions or rather
+suflictions, occult qualities, spiritual agents, and the substitution
+of final for efficient causes; so on the other hand, the
+transcendental or intelligential philosopher is equally anxious to
+preclude all interpellation of the objective into the subjective
+principles of his science, as for instance the assumption of impresses
+or configurations in the brain, correspondent to miniature pictures on
+the retina painted by rays of light from supposed originals, which are
+not the immediate and real objects of vision, but deductions from it
+for the purposes of explanation. This purification of the mind is
+effected by an absolute and scientific scepticism, to which the mind
+voluntarily determines itself for the specific purpose of future
+certainty. Des Cartes who (in his meditations) himself first, at least
+of the moderns, gave a beautiful example of this voluntary doubt, this
+self-determined indetermination, happily expresses its utter
+difference from the scepticism of vanity or irreligion: Nec tamen in
+Scepticos imitabar, qui dubitant tantum ut dubitent, et praeter
+incertitudinem ipsam nihil quaerunt. Nam contra totus in eo eram ut
+aliquid certi reperirem [51]. Nor is it less distinct in its motives
+and final aim, than in its proper objects, which are not as in
+ordinary scepticism the prejudices of education and circumstance, but
+those original and innate prejudices which nature herself has planted
+in all men, and which to all but the philosopher are the first
+principles of knowledge, and the final test of truth.
+
+Now these essential prejudices are all reducible to the one
+fundamental presumption, THAT THERE EXIST THINGS WITHOUT US. As this
+on the one hand originates, neither in grounds nor arguments, and yet
+on the other hand remains proof against all attempts to remove it by
+grounds or arguments (naturam furca expellas tamen usque redibit;) on
+the one hand lays claim to IMMEDIATE certainty as a position at once
+indemonstrable and irresistible, and yet on the other hand, inasmuch
+as it refers to something essentially different from ourselves, nay
+even in opposition to ourselves, leaves it inconceivable how it could
+possibly become a part of our immediate consciousness; (in other words
+how that, which ex hypothesi is and continues to be extrinsic and
+alien to our being, should become a modification of our being) the
+philosopher therefore compels himself to treat this faith as nothing
+more than a prejudice, innate indeed and connatural, but still a
+prejudice.
+
+The other position, which not only claims but necessitates the
+admission of its immediate certainty, equally for the scientific
+reason of the philosopher as for the common sense of mankind at large,
+namely, I AM, cannot so properly be entitled a prejudice. It is
+groundless indeed; but then in the very idea it precludes all ground,
+and separated from the immediate consciousness loses its whole sense
+and import. It is groundless; but only because it is itself the ground
+of all other certainty. Now the apparent contradiction, that the
+former position, namely, the existence of things without us, which
+from its nature cannot be immediately certain, should be received as
+blindly and as independently of all grounds as the existence of our
+own being, the Transcendental philosopher can solve only by the
+supposition, that the former is unconsciously involved in the latter;
+that it is not only coherent but identical, and one and the same thing
+with our own immediate self consciousness. To demonstrate this
+identity is the office and object of his philosophy.
+
+If it be said, that this is idealism, let it be remembered that it is
+only so far idealism, as it is at the same time, and on that very
+account, the truest and most binding realism. For wherein does the
+realism of mankind properly consist? In the assertion that there
+exists a something without them, what, or how, or where they know not,
+which occasions the objects of their perception? Oh no! This is
+neither connatural nor universal. It is what a few have taught and
+learned in the schools, and which the many repeat without asking
+themselves concerning their own meaning. The realism common to all
+mankind is far elder and lies infinitely deeper than this hypothetical
+explanation of the origin of our perceptions, an explanation skimmed
+from the mere surface of mechanical philosophy. It is the table
+itself, which the man of common sense believes himself to see, not the
+phantom of a table, from which he may argumentatively deduce the
+reality of a table, which he does not see. If to destroy the reality
+of all, that we actually behold, be idealism, what can be more
+egregiously so, than the system of modern metaphysics, which banishes
+us to a land of shadows, surrounds us with apparitions, and
+distinguishes truth from illusion only by the majority of those who
+dream the same dream? "I asserted that the world was mad," exclaimed
+poor Lee, "and the world said, that I was mad, and confound them, they
+outvoted me."
+
+It is to the true and original realism, that I would direct the
+attention. This believes and requires neither more nor less, than the
+object which it beholds or presents to itself, is the real and very
+object. In this sense, however much we may strive against it, we are
+all collectively born idealists, and therefore and only therefore are
+we at the same time realists. But of this the philosophers of the
+schools know nothing, or despise the faith as the prejudice of the
+ignorant vulgar, because they live and move in a crowd of phrases and
+notions from which human nature has long ago vanished. Oh, ye that
+reverence yourselves, and walk humbly with the divinity in your own
+hearts, ye are worthy of a better philosophy! Let the dead bury the
+dead, but do you preserve your human nature, the depth of which was
+never yet fathomed by a philosophy made up of notions and mere logical
+entities.
+
+In the third treatise of my Logosophia, announced at the end of this
+volume, I shall give (Deo volente) the demonstrations and
+constructions of the Dynamic Philosophy scientifically arranged. It
+is, according to my conviction, no other than the system of Pythagoras
+and of Plato revived and purified from impure mixtures. Doctrina per
+tot manus tradita tandem in vappam desiit! The science of arithmetic
+furnishes instances, that a rule may be useful in practical
+application, and for the particular purpose may be sufficiently
+authenticated by the result, before it has itself been fully
+demonstrated. It is enough, if only it be rendered intelligible. This
+will, I trust, have been effected in the following Theses for those of
+my readers, who are willing to accompany me through the following
+chapter, in which the results will be applied to the deduction of the
+Imagination, and with it the principles of production and of genial
+criticism in the fine arts.
+
+THESIS I
+
+Truth is correlative to being. Knowledge without a correspondent
+reality is no knowledge; if we know, there must be somewhat known by
+us. To know is in its very essence a verb active.
+
+THESIS II
+
+All truth is either mediate, that is, derived from some other truth or
+truths; or immediate and original. The latter is absolute, and its
+formula A. A.; the former is of dependent or conditional certainty,
+and represented in the formula B. A. The certainty, which adheres in
+A, is attributable to B.
+
+SCHOLIUM. A chain without a staple, from which all the links derived
+their stability, or a series without a first, has been not inaptly
+allegorized, as a string of blind men, each holding the skirt of the
+man before him, reaching far out of sight, but all moving without the
+least deviation in one straight line. It would be naturally taken for
+granted, that there was a guide at the head of the file: what if it
+were answered, No! Sir, the men are without number, and infinite
+blindness supplies the place of sight?
+
+Equally inconceivable is a cycle of equal truths without a common and
+central principle, which prescribes to each its proper sphere in the
+system of science. That the absurdity does not so immediately strike
+us, that it does not seem equally unimaginable, is owing to a
+surreptitious act of the imagination, which, instinctively and without
+our noticing the same, not only fills up the intervening spaces, and
+contemplates the cycle (of B. C. D. E. F. etc.) as a continuous circle
+(A.) giving to all collectively the unity of their common orbit; but
+likewise supplies, by a sort of subintelligitur, the one central
+power, which renders the movement harmonious and cyclical.
+
+THESIS III
+
+We are to seek therefore for some absolute truth capable of
+communicating to other positions a certainty, which it has not itself
+borrowed; a truth self-grounded, unconditional and known by its own
+light. In short, we have to find a somewhat which is, simply because
+it is. In order to be such, it must be one which is its own predicate,
+so far at least that all other nominal predicates must be modes and
+repetitions of itself. Its existence too must be such, as to preclude
+the possibility of requiring a cause or antecedent without an
+absurdity.
+
+THESIS IV
+
+That there can be but one such principle, may be proved a priori; for
+were there two or more, each must refer to some other, by which its
+equality is affirmed; consequently neither would be self-established,
+as the hypothesis demands. And a posteriori, it will be proved by the
+principle itself when it is discovered, as involving universal
+antecedence in its very conception.
+
+SCHOLIUM. If we affirm of a board that it is blue, the predicate
+(blue) is accidental, and not implied in the subject, board. If we
+affirm of a circle that it is equi-radial, the predicate indeed is
+implied in the definition of the subject; but the existence of the
+subject itself is contingent, and supposes both a cause and a
+percipient. The same reasoning will apply to the indefinite number of
+supposed indemonstrable truths exempted from the profane approach of
+philosophic investigation by the amiable Beattie, and other less
+eloquent and not more profound inaugurators of common sense on the
+throne of philosophy; a fruitless attempt, were it only that it is the
+two-fold function of philosophy to reconcile reason with common sense,
+and to elevate common sense into reason.
+
+THESIS V
+
+Such a principle cannot be any THING or OBJECT. Each thing is what it
+is in consequence of some other thing. An infinite, independent [52]
+thing, is no less a contradiction, than an infinite circle or a
+sideless triangle. Besides a thing is that, which is capable of being
+an object which itself is not the sole percipient. But an object is
+inconceivable without a subject as its antithesis. Omne perceptum
+percipientem supponit.
+
+But neither can the principle be found in a subject as a subject,
+contra-distinguished from an object: for unicuique percipienti aliquid
+objicitur perceptum. It is to be found therefore neither in object nor
+subject taken separately, and consequently, as no other third is
+conceivable, it must be found in that which is neither subject nor
+object exclusively, but which is the identity of both.
+
+THESIS VI
+
+This principle, and so characterised manifests itself in the SUM or I
+AM; which I shall hereafter indiscriminately express by the words
+spirit, self, and self-consciousness. In this, and in this alone,
+object and subject, being and knowing, are identical, each involving
+and supposing the other. In other words, it is a subject which becomes
+a subject by the act of constructing itself objectively to itself; but
+which never is an object except for itself, and only so far as by the
+very same act it becomes a subject. It may be described therefore as a
+perpetual self-duplication of one and the same power into object and
+subject, which presuppose each other, and can exist only as
+antitheses.
+
+SCHOLIUM. If a man be asked how he knows that he is? he can only
+answer, sum quia sum. But if (the absoluteness of this certainty
+having been admitted) he be again asked, how he, the individual
+person, came to be, then in relation to the ground of his existence,
+not to the ground of his knowledge of that existence, he might reply,
+sum quia Deus est, or still more philosophically, sum quia in Deo sum.
+
+But if we elevate our conception to the absolute self, the great
+eternal I AM, then the principle of being, and of knowledge, of idea,
+and of reality; the ground of existence, and the ground of the
+knowledge of existence, are absolutely identical, Sum quia sum [53]; I
+am, because I affirm myself to be; I affirm myself to be, because I
+am.
+
+THESIS VII
+
+If then I know myself only through myself, it is contradictory to
+require any other predicate of self, but that of self-consciousness.
+Only in the self-consciousness of a spirit is there the required
+identity of object and of representation; for herein consists the
+essence of a spirit, that it is self-representative. If therefore this
+be the one only immediate truth, in the certainty of which the reality
+of our collective knowledge is grounded, it must follow that the
+spirit in all the objects which it views, views only itself. If this
+could be proved, the immediate reality of all intuitive knowledge
+would be assured. It has been shown, that a spirit is that, which is
+its own object, yet not originally an object, but an absolute subject
+for which all, itself included, may become an object. It must
+therefore be an ACT; for every object is, as an object, dead, fixed,
+incapable in itself of any action, and necessarily finite. Again the
+spirit (originally the identity of object and subject) must in some
+sense dissolve this identity, in order to be conscious of it; fit
+alter et idem. But this implies an act, and it follows therefore that
+intelligence or self-consciousness is impossible, except by and in a
+will. The self-conscious spirit therefore is a will; and freedom must
+be assumed as a ground of philosophy, and can never be deduced from
+it.
+
+THESIS VIII
+
+Whatever in its origin is objective, is likewise as such necessarily
+finite. Therefore, since the spirit is not originally an object, and
+as the subject exists in antithesis to an object, the spirit cannot
+originally be finite. But neither can it be a subject without becoming
+an object, and, as it is originally the identity of both, it can be
+conceived neither as infinite nor finite exclusively, but as the most
+original union of both. In the existence, in the reconciling, and the
+recurrence of this contradiction consists the process and mystery of
+production and life.
+
+THESIS IX
+
+This principium commune essendi et cognoscendi, as subsisting in a
+WILL, or primary ACT of self-duplication, is the mediate or indirect
+principle of every science; but it is the immediate and direct
+principle of the ultimate science alone, i.e. of transcendental
+philosophy alone. For it must be remembered, that all these Theses
+refer solely to one of the two Polar Sciences, namely, to that which
+commences with, and rigidly confines itself within, the subjective,
+leaving the objective (as far as it is exclusively objective) to
+natural philosophy, which is its opposite pole. In its very idea
+therefore as a systematic knowledge of our collective KNOWING,
+(scientia scientiae) it involves the necessity of some one highest
+principle of knowing, as at once the source and accompanying form in
+all particular acts of intellect and perception. This, it has been
+shown, can be found only in the act and evolution of self-
+consciousness. We are not investigating an absolute principium
+essendi; for then, I admit, many valid objections might be started
+against our theory; but an absolute principium cognoscendi. The result
+of both the sciences, or their equatorial point, would be the
+principle of a total and undivided philosophy, as, for prudential
+reasons, I have chosen to anticipate in the Scholium to Thesis VI and
+the note subjoined. In other words, philosophy would pass into
+religion, and religion become inclusive of philosophy. We begin with
+the I KNOW MYSELF, in order to end with the absolute I AM. We proceed
+from the SELF, in order to lose and find all self in GOD.
+
+THESIS X
+
+The transcendental philosopher does not inquire, what ultimate ground
+of our knowledge there may lie out of our knowing, but what is the
+last in our knowing itself, beyond which we cannot pass. The principle
+of our knowing is sought within the sphere of our knowing. It must be
+some thing therefore, which can itself be known. It is asserted only,
+that the act of self-consciousness is for us the source and principle
+of all our possible knowledge. Whether abstracted from us there exists
+any thing higher and beyond this primary self-knowing, which is for us
+the form of all our knowing must be decided by the result.
+
+That the self-consciousness is the fixed point, to which for us all is
+mortised and annexed, needs no further proof. But that the self-
+consciousness may be the modification of a higher form of being,
+perhaps of a higher consciousness, and this again of a yet higher, and
+so on in an infinite regressus; in short, that self-consciousness may
+be itself something explicable into something, which must lie beyond
+the possibility of our knowledge, because the whole synthesis of our
+intelligence is first formed in and through the self-consciousness,
+does not at all concern us as transcendental philosophers. For to us,
+self-consciousness is not a kind of being, but a kind of knowing, and
+that too the highest and farthest that exists for us. It may however
+be shown, and has in part already been shown earlier, that even when
+the Objective is assumed as the first, we yet can never pass beyond
+the principle of self-consciousness. Should we attempt it, we must be
+driven back from ground to ground, each of which would cease to be a
+ground the moment we pressed on it. We must be whirled down the gulf
+of an infinite series. But this would make our reason baffle the end
+and purpose of all reason, namely, unity and system. Or we must break
+off the series arbitrarily, and affirm an absolute something that is
+in and of itself at once cause and effect (causa sui), subject and
+object, or rather the absolute identity of both. But as this is
+inconceivable, except in a self-consciousness, it follows, that even
+as natural philosophers we must arrive at the same principle from
+which as transcendental philosophers we set out; that is, in a self-
+consciousness in which the principium essendi does not stand to the
+principlum cognoscende in the relation of cause to effect, but both
+the one and the other are co-inherent and identical. Thus the true
+system of natural philosophy places the sole reality of things in an
+ABSOLUTE, which is at once causa sui et effectus, pataer autopator,
+uios heautou--in the absolute identity of subject and object, which it
+calls nature, and which in its highest power is nothing else than
+self-conscious will or intelligence. In this sense the position of
+Malebranche, that we see all things in God, is a strict philosophical
+truth; and equally true is the assertion of Hobbes, of Hartley, and of
+their masters in ancient Greece, that all real knowledge supposes a
+prior sensation. For sensation itself is but vision nascent, not the
+cause of intelligence, but intelligence itself revealed as an earlier
+power in the process of self-construction.
+
+    Makar, ilathi moi;
+    Pater, ilathi moi
+    Ei para kosmon,
+    Ei para moiran
+    Ton son ethigon!
+
+Bearing then this in mind, that intelligence is a self-development,
+not a quality supervening to a substance, we may abstract from all
+degree, and for the purpose of philosophic construction reduce it to
+kind, under the idea of an indestructible power with two opposite and
+counteracting forces, which by a metaphor borrowed from astronomy, we
+may call the centrifugal and centripetal forces. The intelligence in
+the one tends to objectize itself, and in the other to know itself in
+the object. It will be hereafter my business to construct by a series
+of intuitions the progressive schemes, that must follow from such a
+power with such forces, till I arrive at the fulness of the human
+intelligence. For my present purpose, I assume such a power as my
+principle, in order to deduce from it a faculty, the generation,
+agency, and application of which form the contents of the ensuing
+chapter.
+
+In a preceding page I have justified the use of technical terms in
+philosophy, whenever they tend to preclude confusion of thought, and
+when they assist the memory by the exclusive singleness of their
+meaning more than they may, for a short time, bewilder the attention
+by their strangeness. I trust, that I have not extended this privilege
+beyond the grounds on which I have claimed it; namely, the conveniency
+of the scholastic phrase to distinguish the kind from all degrees, or
+rather to express the kind with the abstraction of degree, as for
+instance multeity instead of multitude; or secondly, for the sake of
+correspondence in sound in interdependent or antithetical terms, as
+subject and object; or lastly, to avoid the wearying recurrence of
+circumlocutions and definitions. Thus I shall venture to use potence,
+in order to express a specific degree of a power, in imitation of the
+Algebraists. I have even hazarded the new verb potenziate, with its
+derivatives, in order to express the combination or transfer of
+powers. It is with new or unusual terms, as with privileges in courts
+of justice or legislature; there can be no legitimate privilege, where
+there already exists a positive law adequate to the purpose; and when
+there is no law in existence, the privilege is to be justified by its
+accordance with the end, or final cause, of all law. Unusual and new-
+coined words are doubtless an evil; but vagueness, confusion, and
+imperfect conveyance of our thoughts, are a far greater. Every system,
+which is under the necessity of using terms not familiarized by the
+metaphysics in fashion, will be described as written in an
+unintelligible style, and the author must expect the charge of having
+substituted learned jargon for clear conception; while, according to
+the creed of our modern philosophers, nothing is deemed a clear
+conception, but what is representable by a distinct image. Thus the
+conceivable is reduced within the bounds of the picturable. Hinc
+patet, qui fiat, ut cum irrepraesentabile et impossibile vulgo ejusdem
+significatus habeantur, conceptus tam continui, quam infiniti, a
+plurimis rejiciantur, quippe quorum, secundum leges cognitionis
+intuitivae, repraesentatio est impossibilis. Quanquam autem harum e
+non paucis scholis explosarum notionum, praesertim prioris, causam hic
+non gero, maximi tamen momendi erit monuisse. gravissimo illos errore
+labi, qui tam perverse argumentandi ratione utuntur. Quicquid enim
+repugnat legibus intellectus et rationis, utique est impossibile; quod
+autem, cum rationis purae sit objectum, legibus cognitionis intuitivae
+tantummodo non subest, non item. Nam hic dissensus inter facultatem
+sensitivam et intellectualem, (quarum indolem mox exponam,) nihil
+indigitat, nisi, quas mens ab intellectu acceptas fert ideas
+abstractas, illas in concreto exsequi et in intuitus commutare
+saepenumero non posse. Haec autem reluctantia subjectiva mentitur, ut
+plurimum, repugnantiam aliquam objectivam, et incautos facile fallit,
+limitibus, quibus mens humana circumscribitur, pro iis habitis, quibus
+ipsa rerum essentia continetur. [54]
+
+Critics, who are most ready to bring this charge of pedantry and
+unintelligibility, are the most apt to overlook the important fact,
+that, besides the language of words, there is a language of spirits--
+(sermo interior)--and that the former is only the vehicle of the
+latter. Consequently their assurance, that they do not understand the
+philosophic writer, instead of proving any thing against the
+philosophy, may furnish an equal, and (caeteris paribus) even a
+stronger presumption against their own philosophic talent.
+
+Great indeed are the obstacles which an English metaphysician has to
+encounter. Amongst his most respectable and intelligent judges, there
+will be many who have devoted their attention exclusively to the
+concerns and interests of human life, and who bring with them to the
+perusal of a philosophic system an habitual aversion to all
+speculations, the utility and application of which are not evident and
+immediate. To these I would in the first instance merely oppose an
+authority, which they themselves hold venerable, that of Lord Bacon:
+non inutiles Scientiae existimandae sunt, quarum in se nullus est
+usus, si ingenia acuant et ordinent.
+
+There are others, whose prejudices are still more formidable, inasmuch
+as they are grounded in their moral feelings and religious principles,
+which had been alarmed and shocked by the impious and pernicious
+tenets defended by Hume, Priestley, and the French fatalists or
+necessitarians; some of whom had perverted metaphysical reasonings to
+the denial of the mysteries and indeed of all the peculiar doctrines
+of Christianity; and others even to the subversion of all distinction
+between right and wrong. I would request such men to consider what an
+eminent and successful defender of the Christian faith has observed,
+that true metaphysics are nothing else but true divinity, and that in
+fact the writers, who have given them such just offence, were
+sophists, who had taken advantage of the general neglect into which
+the science of logic has unhappily fallen, rather than metaphysicians,
+a name indeed which those writers were the first to explode as
+unmeaning. Secondly, I would remind them, that as long as there are
+men in the world to whom the Gnothi seauton is an instinct and a
+command from their own nature, so long will there be metaphysicians
+and metaphysical speculations; that false metaphysics can be
+effectually counteracted by true metaphysics alone; and that if the
+reasoning be clear, solid and pertinent, the truth deduced can never
+be the less valuable on account of the depth from which it may have
+been drawn.
+
+A third class profess themselves friendly to metaphysics, and believe
+that they are themselves metaphysicians. They have no objection to
+system or terminology, provided it be the method and the nomenclature
+to which they have been familiarized in the writings of Locke, Hume,
+Hartley, Condillac, or perhaps Dr. Reid, and Professor Stewart. To
+objections from this cause, it is a sufficient answer, that one main
+object of my attempt was to demonstrate the vagueness or insufficiency
+of the terms used in the metaphysical schools of France and Great
+Britain since the revolution, and that the errors which I propose to
+attack cannot subsist, except as they are concealed behind the mask of
+a plausible and indefinite nomenclature.
+
+But the worst and widest impediment still remains. It is the
+predominance of a popular philosophy, at once the counterfeit and the
+mortal enemy of all true and manly metaphysical research. It is that
+corruption, introduced by certain immethodical aphorisming eclectics,
+who, dismissing not only all system, but all logical connection, pick
+and choose whatever is most plausible and showy; who select, whatever
+words can have some semblance of sense attached to them without the
+least expenditure of thought; in short whatever may enable men to talk
+of what they do not understand, with a careful avoidance of every
+thing that might awaken them to a moment's suspicion of their
+ignorance. This alas! is an irremediable disease, for it brings with
+it, not so much an indisposition to any particular system, but an
+utter loss of taste and faculty for all system and for all philosophy.
+Like echoes that beget each other amongst the mountains, the praise or
+blame of such men rolls in volleys long after the report from the
+original blunderbuss. Sequacitas est potius et coitio quam consensus:
+et tamen (quod pessimum est) pusillanimitas ista non sine arrogantia
+et fastidio se offert. [55]
+
+I shall now proceed to the nature and genesis of the Imagination; but
+I must first take leave to notice, that after a more accurate perusal
+of Mr. Wordsworth's remarks on the Imagination, in his preface to the
+new edition of his poems, I find that my conclusions are not so
+consentient with his as, I confess, I had taken for granted. In an
+article contributed by me to Mr. Southey's Omniana, On the soul and
+its organs of sense, are the following sentences. "These (the human
+faculties) I would arrange under the different senses and powers: as
+the eye, the ear, the touch, etc.; the imitative power, voluntary and
+automatic; the imagination, or shaping and modifying power; the fancy,
+or the aggregative and associative power; the understanding, or the
+regulative, substantiating and realizing power; the speculative
+reason, vis theoretica et scientifica, or the power by which we
+produce or aim to produce unity, necessity, and universality in all
+our knowledge by means of principles a priori [56]; the will, or
+practical reason; the faculty of choice (Germanice, Willkuehr) and
+(distinct both from the moral will and the choice,) the sensation of
+volition, which I have found reason to include under the head of
+single and double touch." To this, as far as it relates to the subject
+in question, namely the words (the aggregative and associative power)
+Mr. Wordsworth's "objection is only that the definition is too
+general. To aggregate and to associate, to evoke and to combine,
+belong as well to the Imagination as to the Fancy." I reply, that if,
+by the power of evoking and combining, Mr. Wordsworth means the same
+as, and no more than, I meant by the aggregative and associative, I
+continue to deny, that it belongs at all to the Imagination; and I am
+disposed to conjecture, that he has mistaken the copresence of Fancy
+with Imagination for the operation of the latter singly. A man may
+work with two very different tools at the same moment; each has its
+share in the work, but the work effected by each is distinct and
+different. But it will probably appear in the next chapter, that
+deeming it necessary to go back much further than Mr. Wordsworth's
+subject required or permitted, I have attached a meaning to both Fancy
+and Imagination, which he had not in view, at least while he was
+writing that preface. He will judge. Would to Heaven, I might meet
+with many such readers! I will conclude with the words of Bishop
+Jeremy Taylor: "He to whom all things are one, who draweth all things
+to one, and seeth all things in one, may enjoy true peace and rest of
+spirit." [57]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+On the imagination, or esemplastic power
+
+
+    O Adam, One Almighty is, from whom
+    All things proceed, and up to him return,
+    If not deprav'd from good, created all
+    Such to perfection, one first matter all,
+    Endued with various forms, various degrees
+    Of substance, and, in things that live, of life;
+    But more refin'd, more spiritous and pure,
+    As nearer to him plac'd, or nearer tending,
+    Each in their several active spheres assigu'd,
+    Till body up to spirit work, in bounds
+    Proportion'd to each kind. So from the root
+    Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves
+    More aery: last the bright consummate flower
+    Spirits odorous breathes: flowers and their fruit,
+    Man's nourishment, by gradual scale sublim'd,
+    To vital spirits aspire: to animal:
+    To intellectual!--give both life and sense,
+    Fancy and understanding; whence the soul
+    REASON receives, and reason is her being,
+    Discursive or intuitive. [58]
+
+"Sane dicerentur si res corporales nil nisi materiale continerent,
+verissime in fluxu consistere, neque habere substantiale quicquam,
+quemadmodum et Platonici olim recte agnovere."
+
+"Hinc igitur, praeter pure mathematica et phantasiae subjecta, collegi
+quaedam metaphysica solaque mente perceptibilia, esse admittenda et
+massae materiali principium quoddam superius et, ut sic dicam, formale
+addendum: quandoquidem omnes veritates rerum corporearum ex solis
+axiomatibus logisticis et geometricis, nempe de magno et parvo, toto
+et parte, figura et situ, colligi non possint; sed alia de causa et
+effectu, actioneque et passione, accedere debeant, quibus ordinis
+rerum rationes salventur. Id principium rerum, an entelecheian an vim
+appellemus, non refert, modo meminerimus, per solam Virium notionem
+intelligibiliter explicari." [59]
+
+    Sebomai noeron
+    Kruphian taxin
+    Chorei TI MESON
+    Ou katachuthen. [60]
+
+
+Des Cartes, speaking as a naturalist, and in imitation of Archimedes,
+said, give me matter and motion and I will construct you the universe.
+We must of course understand him to have meant; I will render the
+construction of the universe intelligible. In the same sense the
+transcendental philosopher says; grant me a nature having two contrary
+forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other
+strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity, and I will cause
+the world of intelllgences with the whole system of their
+representations to rise up before you. Every other science presupposes
+intelligence as already existing and complete: the philosopher
+contemplates it in its growth, and as it were represents its history
+to the mind from its birth to its maturity.
+
+The venerable sage of Koenigsberg has preceded the march of this
+master-thought as an effective pioneer in his essay on the
+introduction of negative quantities into philosophy, published 1763.
+In this he has shown, that instead of assailing the science of
+mathematics by metaphysics, as Berkeley did in his ANALYST, or of
+sophisticating it, as Wolf did, by the vain attempt of deducing the
+first principles of geometry from supposed deeper grounds of ontology,
+it behoved the metaphysician rather to examine whether the only
+province of knowledge, which man has succeeded in erecting into a pure
+science, might not furnish materials, or at least hints, for
+establishing and pacifying the unsettled, warring, and embroiled
+domain of philosophy. An imitation of the mathematical method had
+indeed been attempted with no better success than attended the essay
+of David to wear the armour of Saul. Another use however is possible
+and of far greater promise, namely, the actual application of the
+positions which had so wonderfully enlarged the discoveries of
+geometry, mutatis mutandis, to philosophical subjects. Kant having
+briefly illustrated the utility of such an attempt in the questions of
+space, motion, and infinitely small quantities, as employed by the
+mathematician, proceeds to the idea of negative quantities and the
+transfer of them to metaphysical investigation. Opposites, he well
+observes, are of two kinds, either logical, that is, such as are
+absolutely incompatible; or real, without being contradictory. The
+former he denominates Nihil negativum irrepraesentabile, the
+connection of which produces nonsense. A body in motion is something--
+Aliquid cogitabile; but a body, at one and the same time in motion and
+not in motion, is nothing, or, at most, air articulated into nonsense.
+But a motory force of a body in one direction, and an equal force of
+the same body in an opposite direction is not incompatible, and the
+result, namely, rest, is real and representable. For the purposes of
+mathematical calculus it is indifferent which force we term negative,
+and which positive, and consequently we appropriate the latter to
+that, which happens to be the principal object in our thoughts. Thus
+if a man's capital be ten and his debts eight, the subtraction will be
+the same, whether we call the capital negative debt, or the debt
+negative capital. But in as much as the latter stands practically in
+reference to the former, we of course represent the sum as 10-8. It is
+equally clear that two equal forces acting in opposite directions,
+both being finite and each distinguished from the other by its
+direction only, must neutralize or reduce each other to inaction. Now
+the transcendental philosophy demands; first, that two forces should
+be conceived which counteract each other by their essential nature;
+not only not in consequence of the accidental direction of each, but
+as prior to all direction, nay, as the primary forces from which the
+conditions of all possible directions are derivative and deducible:
+secondly, that these forces should be assumed to be both alike
+infinite, both alike indestructible. The problem will then be to
+discover the result or product of two such forces, as distinguished
+from the result of those forces which are finite, and derive their
+difference solely from the circumstance of their direction. When we
+have formed a scheme or outline of these two different kinds of force,
+and of their different results, by the process of discursive
+reasoning, it will then remain for us to elevate the thesis from
+notional to actual, by contemplating intuitively this one power with
+its two inherent indestructible yet counteracting forces, and the
+results or generations to which their inter-penetration gives
+existence, in the living principle and in the process of our own self-
+consciousness. By what instrument this is possible the solution itself
+will discover, at the same time that it will reveal to and for whom it
+is possible. Non omnia possumus omnes. There is a philosophic no less
+than a poetic genius, which is differenced from the highest perfection
+of talent, not by degree but by kind.
+
+The counteraction then of the two assumed forces does not depend on
+their meeting from opposite directions; the power which acts in them
+is indestructible; it is therefore inexhaustibly re-ebullient; and as
+something must be the result of these two forces, both alike infinite,
+and both alike indestructible; and as rest or neutralization cannot be
+this result; no other conception is possible, but that the product
+must be a tertium aliquid, or finite generation. Consequently this
+conception is necessary. Now this tertium aliquid can be no other than
+an inter-penetration of the counteracting powers, partaking of both.
+
+     *     *     *     *     *     *
+
+Thus far had the work been transcribed for the press, when I received
+the following letter from a friend, whose practical judgment I have
+had ample reason to estimate and revere, and whose taste and
+sensibility preclude all the excuses which my self-love might possibly
+have prompted me to set up in plea against the decision of advisers of
+equal good sense, but with less tact and feeling.
+
+"Dear C.
+
+    "You ask my opinion concerning your Chapter on the Imagination,
+both as to the impressions it made on myself, and as to those which I
+think it will make on the Public, i.e. that part of the public, who,
+from the title of the work and from its forming a sort of introduction
+to a volume of poems, are likely to constitute the great majority of
+your readers.
+
+"As to myself, and stating in the first place the effect on my
+understanding, your opinions and method of argument were not only so
+new to me, but so directly the reverse of all I had ever been
+accustomed to consider as truth, that even if I had comprehended your
+premises sufficiently to have admitted them, and had seen the
+necessity of your conclusions, I should still have been in that state
+of mind, which in your note in Chap. IV you have so ingeniously
+evolved, as the antithesis to that in which a man is, when he makes a
+bull. In your own words, I should have felt as if I had been standing
+on my head.
+
+"The effect on my feelings, on the other hand, I cannot better
+represent, than by supposing myself to have known only our light airy
+modern chapels of ease, and then for the first time to have been
+placed, and left alone, in one of our largest Gothic cathedrals in a
+gusty moonlight night of autumn. 'Now in glimmer, and now in gloom;'
+often in palpable darkness not without a chilly sensation of terror;
+then suddenly emerging into broad yet visionary lights with coloured
+shadows of fantastic shapes, yet all decked with holy insignia and
+mystic symbols; and ever and anon coming out full upon pictures and
+stone-work images of great men, with whose names I was familiar, but
+which looked upon me with countenances and an expression, the most
+dissimilar to all I had been in the habit of connecting with those
+names. Those whom I had been taught to venerate as almost super-human
+in magnitude of intellect, I found perched in little fret-work niches,
+as grotesque dwarfs; while the grotesques, in my hitherto belief,
+stood guarding the high altar with all the characters of apotheosis.
+In short, what I had supposed substances were thinned away into
+shadows, while everywhere shadows were deepened into substances:
+
+    If substance might be call'd that shadow seem'd,
+    For each seem'd either!
+
+"Yet after all, I could not but repeat the lines which you had quoted
+from a MS. poem of your own in the FRIEND, and applied to a work of
+Mr. Wordsworth's though with a few of the words altered:
+
+             ------An Orphic tale indeed,
+    A tale obscure of high and passionate thoughts
+    To a strange music chanted!
+
+"Be assured, however, that I look forward anxiously to your great book
+on the CONSTRUCTIVE PHILOSOPHY, which you have promised and announced:
+and that I will do my best to understand it. Only I will not promise
+to descend into the dark cave of Trophonius with you, there to rub my
+own eyes, in order to make the sparks and figured flashes, which I am
+required to see.
+
+"So much for myself. But as for the Public I do not hesitate a moment
+in advising and urging you to withdraw the Chapter from the present
+work, and to reserve it for your announced treatises on the Logos or
+communicative intellect in Man and Deity. First, because imperfectly
+as I understand the present Chapter, I see clearly that you have done
+too much, and yet not enough. You have been obliged to omit so many
+links, from the necessity of compression, that what remains, looks (if
+I may recur to my former illustration) like the fragments of the
+winding steps of an old ruined tower. Secondly, a still stronger
+argument (at least one that I am sure will be more forcible with you)
+is, that your readers will have both right and reason to complain of
+you. This Chapter, which cannot, when it is printed, amount to so
+little as an hundred pages, will of necessity greatly increase the
+expense of the work; and every reader who, like myself, is neither
+prepared nor perhaps calculated for the study of so abstruse a subject
+so abstrusely treated, will, as I have before hinted, be almost
+entitled to accuse you of a sort of imposition on him. For who, he
+might truly observe, could from your title-page, to wit, "My Literary
+Life and Opinions," published too as introductory to a volume of
+miscellaneous poems, have anticipated, or even conjectured, a long
+treatise on Ideal Realism which holds the same relation in
+abstruseness to Plotinus, as Plotinus does to Plato. It will be well,
+if already you have not too much of metaphysical disquisition in your
+work, though as the larger part of the disquisition is historical, it
+will doubtless be both interesting and instructive to many to whose
+unprepared minds your speculations on the esemplastic power would be
+utterly unintelligible. Be assured, if you do publish this Chapter in
+the present work, you will be reminded of Bishop Berkeley's Siris,
+announced as an Essay on Tar-water, which beginning with Tar ends with
+the Trinity, the omne scibile forming the interspace. I say in the
+present work. In that greater work to which you have devoted so many
+years, and study so intense and various, it will be in its proper
+place. Your prospectus will have described and announced both its
+contents and their nature; and if any persons purchase it, who feel no
+interest in the subjects of which it treats, they will have themselves
+only to blame.
+
+"I could add to these arguments one derived from pecuniary motives,
+and particularly from the probable effects on the sale of your present
+publication; but they would weigh little with you compared with the
+preceding. Besides, I have long observed, that arguments drawn from
+your own personal interests more often act on you as narcotics than as
+stimulants, and that in money concerns you have some small portion of
+pig-nature in your moral idiosyncrasy, and, like these amiable
+creatures, must occasionally be pulled backward from the boat in order
+to make you enter it. All success attend you, for if hard thinking and
+hard reading are merits, you have deserved it.
+                                       Your affectionate, etc."
+
+In consequence of this very judicious letter, which produced complete
+conviction on my mind, I shall content myself for the present with
+stating the main result of the chapter, which I have reserved for that
+future publication, a detailed prospectus of which the reader will
+find at the close of the second volume.
+
+The Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The
+primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of
+all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the
+eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary
+Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the
+conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of
+its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its
+operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate:
+or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events
+it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even
+as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.
+
+FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but
+fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of
+memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is
+blended with, and modified by that empirical phaenomenon of the will,
+which we express by the word Choice. But equally with the ordinary
+memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the
+law of association.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+Occasion of the Lyrical Ballads, and the objects originally proposed--
+Preface to the second edition--The ensuing controversy, its causes and
+acrimony--Philosophic definitions of a Poem and Poetry with scholia.
+
+
+During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our
+conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry,
+the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful
+adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest
+of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm,
+which accidents of light and shade, which moon-light or sunset
+diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent
+the practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature.
+The thought suggested itself--(to which of us I do not recollect)--
+that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the
+incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and
+the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the
+affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally
+accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense
+they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of
+delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency.
+For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life;
+the characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every
+village and its vicinity, where there is a meditative and feeling mind
+to seek after them, or to notice them, when they present themselves.
+
+In this idea originated the plan of the LYRICAL BALLADS; in which it
+was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and
+characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer
+from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth
+sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing
+suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic
+faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as
+his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and
+to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the
+mind's attention to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the
+loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible
+treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and
+selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and
+hearts that neither feel nor understand.
+
+With this view I wrote THE ANCIENT MARINER, and was preparing among
+other poems, THE DARK LADIE, and the CHRISTABEL, in which I should
+have more nearly realized my ideal, than I had done in my first
+attempt. But Mr. Wordsworth's industry had proved so much more
+successful, and the number of his poems so much greater, that my
+compositions, instead of forming a balance, appeared rather an
+interpolation of heterogeneous matter. Mr. Wordsworth added two or
+three poems written in his own character, in the impassioned, lofty,
+and sustained diction, which is characteristic of his genius. In this
+form the LYRICAL BALLADS were published; and were presented by him, as
+an experiment, whether subjects, which from their nature rejected the
+usual ornaments and extra-colloquial style of poems in general, might
+not be so managed in the language of ordinary life as to produce the
+pleasurable interest, which it is the peculiar business of poetry to
+impart. To the second edition he added a preface of considerable
+length; in which, notwithstanding some passages of apparently a
+contrary import, he was understood to contend for the extension of
+this style to poetry of all kinds, and to reject as vicious and
+indefensible all phrases and forms of speech that were not included in
+what he (unfortunately, I think, adopting an equivocal expression)
+called the language of real life. From this preface, prefixed to poems
+in which it was impossible to deny the presence of original genius,
+however mistaken its direction might be deemed, arose the whole long-
+continued controversy. For from the conjunction of perceived power
+with supposed heresy I explain the inveteracy and in some instances, I
+grieve to say, the acrimonious passions, with which the controversy
+has been conducted by the assailants.
+
+Had Mr. Wordsworth's poems been the silly, the childish things, which
+they were for a long time described as being had they been really
+distinguished from the compositions of other poets merely by meanness
+of language and inanity of thought; had they indeed contained nothing
+more than what is found in the parodies and pretended imitations of
+them; they must have sunk at once, a dead weight, into the slough of
+oblivion, and have dragged the preface along with them. But year after
+year increased the number of Mr. Wordsworth's admirers. They were
+found too not in the lower classes of the reading public, but chiefly
+among young men of strong sensibility and meditative minds; and their
+admiration (inflamed perhaps in some degree by opposition) was
+distinguished by its intensity, I might almost say, by its religious
+fervour. These facts, and the intellectual energy of the author, which
+was more or less consciously felt, where it was outwardly and even
+boisterously denied, meeting with sentiments of aversion to his
+opinions, and of alarm at their consequences, produced an eddy of
+criticism, which would of itself have borne up the poems by the
+violence with which it whirled them round and round. With many parts
+of this preface in the sense attributed to them and which the words
+undoubtedly seem to authorize, I never concurred; but on the contrary
+objected to them as erroneous in principle, and as contradictory (in
+appearance at least) both to other parts of the same preface, and to
+the author's own practice in the greater part of the poems themselves.
+Mr. Wordsworth in his recent collection has, I find, degraded this
+prefatory disquisition to the end of his second volume, to be read or
+not at the reader's choice. But he has not, as far as I can discover,
+announced any change in his poetic creed. At all events, considering
+it as the source of a controversy, in which I have been honoured more
+than I deserve by the frequent conjunction of my name with his, I
+think it expedient to declare once for all, in what points I coincide
+with the opinions supported in that preface, and in what points I
+altogether differ. But in order to render myself intelligible I must
+previously, in as few words as possible, explain my views, first, of a
+Poem; and secondly, of Poetry itself, in kind, and in essence.
+
+The office of philosophical disquisition consists in just distinction;
+while it is the privilege of the philosopher to preserve himself
+constantly aware, that distinction is not division. In order to obtain
+adequate notions of any truth, we must intellectually separate its
+distinguishable parts; and this is the technical process of
+philosophy. But having so done, we must then restore them in our
+conceptions to the unity, in which they actually co-exist; and this is
+the result of philosophy. A poem contains the same elements as a prose
+composition; the difference therefore must consist in a different
+combination of them, in consequence of a different object being
+proposed. According to the difference of the object will be the
+difference of the combination. It is possible, that the object may be
+merely to facilitate the recollection of any given facts or
+observations by artificial arrangement; and the composition will be a
+poem, merely because it is distinguished from prose by metre, or by
+rhyme, or by both conjointly. In this, the lowest sense, a man might
+attribute the name of a poem to the well-known enumeration of the days
+in the several months;
+
+    "Thirty days hath September,
+     April, June, and November," etc.
+
+and others of the same class and purpose. And as a particular pleasure
+is found in anticipating the recurrence of sounds and quantities, all
+compositions that have this charm super-added, whatever be their
+contents, may be entitled poems.
+
+So much for the superficial form. A difference of object and contents
+supplies an additional ground of distinction. The immediate purpose
+may be the communication of truths; either of truth absolute and
+demonstrable, as in works of science; or of facts experienced and
+recorded, as in history. Pleasure, and that of the highest and most
+permanent kind, may result from the attainment of the end; but it is
+not itself the immediate end. In other works the communication of
+pleasure may be the immediate purpose; and though truth, either moral
+or intellectual, ought to be the ultimate end, yet this will
+distinguish the character of the author, not the class to which the
+work belongs. Blest indeed is that state of society, in which the
+immediate purpose would be baffled by the perversion of the proper
+ultimate end; in which no charm of diction or imagery could exempt the
+BATHYLLUS even of an Anacreon, or the ALEXIS of Virgil, from disgust
+and aversion!
+
+But the communication of pleasure may be the immediate object of a
+work not metrically composed; and that object may have been in a high
+degree attained, as in novels and romances. Would then the mere
+superaddition of metre, with or without rhyme, entitle these to the
+name of poems? The answer is, that nothing can permanently please,
+which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not
+otherwise. If metre be superadded, all other parts must be made
+consonant with it. They must be such, as to justify the perpetual and
+distinct attention to each part, which an exact correspondent
+recurrence of accent and sound are calculated to excite. The final
+definition then, so deduced, may be thus worded. A poem is that
+species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by
+proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all
+other species--(having this object in common with it)--it is
+discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as
+is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.
+
+Controversy is not seldom excited in consequence of the disputants
+attaching each a different meaning to the same word; and in few
+instances has this been more striking, than in disputes concerning the
+present subject. If a man chooses to call every composition a poem,
+which is rhyme, or measure, or both, I must leave his opinion
+uncontroverted. The distinction is at least competent to characterize
+the writer's intention. If it were subjoined, that the whole is
+likewise entertaining or affecting, as a tale, or as a series of
+interesting reflections; I of course admit this as another fit
+ingredient of a poem, and an additional merit. But if the definition
+sought for be that of a legitimate poem, I answer, it must be one, the
+parts of which mutually support and explain each other; all in their
+proportion harmonizing with, and supporting the purpose and known
+influences of metrical arrangement. The philosophic critics of all
+ages coincide with the ultimate judgment of all countries, in equally
+denying the praises of a just poem, on the one hand, to a series of
+striking lines or distiches, each of which, absorbing the whole
+attention of the reader to itself, becomes disjoined from its context,
+and forms a separate whole, instead of a harmonizing part; and on the
+other hand, to an unsustained composition, from which the reader
+collects rapidly the general result unattracted by the component
+parts. The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by
+the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive
+at the final solution; but by the pleasureable activity of mind
+excited by the attractions of the journey itself. Like the motion of a
+serpent, which the Egyptians made the emblem of intellectual power; or
+like the path of sound through the air;--at every step he pauses and
+half recedes; and from the retrogressive movement collects the force
+which again carries him onward. Praecipitandus est liber spiritus,
+says Petronius most happily. The epithet, liber, here balances the
+preceding verb; and it is not easy to conceive more meaning condensed
+in fewer words.
+
+But if this should be admitted as a satisfactory character of a poem,
+we have still to seek for a definition of poetry. The writings of
+Plato, and Jeremy Taylor, and Burnet's Theory of the Earth, furnish
+undeniable proofs that poetry of the highest kind may exist without
+metre, and even without the contradistringuishing objects of a poem.
+The first chapter of Isaiah--(indeed a very large portion of the whole
+book)--is poetry in the most emphatic sense; yet it would be not less
+irrational than strange to assert, that pleasure, and not truth was
+the immediate object of the prophet. In short, whatever specific
+import we attach to the word, Poetry, there will be found involved in
+it, as a necessary consequence, that a poem of any length neither can
+be, nor ought to be, all poetry. Yet if an harmonious whole is to be
+produced, the remaining parts must be preserved in keeping with the
+poetry; and this can be no otherwise effected than by such a studied
+selection and artificial arrangement, as will partake of one, though
+not a peculiar property of poetry. And this again can be no other than
+the property of exciting a more continuous and equal attention than
+the language of prose aims at, whether colloquial or written.
+
+My own conclusions on the nature of poetry, in the strictest use of
+the word, have been in part anticipated in some of the remarks on the
+Fancy and Imagination in the early part of this work. What is poetry?
+--is so nearly the same question with, what is a poet?--that the answer
+to the one is involved in the solution of the other. For it is a
+distinction resulting from the poetic genius itself, which sustains
+and modifies the images, thoughts, and emotions of the poet's own
+mind.
+
+The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man
+into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other
+according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and
+spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each,
+by that synthetic and magical power, to which I would exclusively
+appropriate the name of Imagination. This power, first put in action
+by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive,
+though gentle and unnoticed, control, laxis effertur habenis, reveals
+"itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant"
+qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general with the
+concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with the
+representative; the sense of novelty and freshness with old and
+familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion with more than
+usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self-possession with
+enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement; and while it blends and
+harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to
+nature; the manner to the matter; and our admiration of the poet to
+our sympathy with the poetry. Doubtless, as Sir John Davies observes
+of the soul--(and his words may with slight alteration be applied, and
+even more appropriately, to the poetic Imagination)--
+
+    Doubtless this could not be, but that she turns
+      Bodies to spirit by sublimation strange,
+    As fire converts to fire the things it burns,
+      As we our food into our nature change.
+
+    From their gross matter she abstracts their forms,
+      And draws a kind of quintessence from things;
+    Which to her proper nature she transforms
+      To bear them light on her celestial wings.
+
+    Thus does she, when from individual states
+      She doth abstract the universal kinds;
+    Which then re-clothed in divers names and fates
+      Steal access through the senses to our minds.
+
+Finally, Good Sense is the Body of poetic genius, Fancy its Drapery,
+Motion its Life, and Imagination the Soul that is everywhere, and in
+each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+The specific symptoms of poetic power elucidated in a critical
+analysis of Shakespeare's VENUS AND ADONIS, and RAPE of LUCRECE.
+
+
+In the application of these principles to purposes of practical
+criticism, as employed in the appraisement of works more or less
+imperfect, I have endeavoured to discover what the qualities in a poem
+are, which may be deemed promises and specific symptoms of poetic
+power, as distinguished from general talent determined to poetic
+composition by accidental motives, by an act of the will, rather than
+by the inspiration of a genial and productive nature. In this
+investigation, I could not, I thought, do better, than keep before me
+the earliest work of the greatest genius, that perhaps human nature
+has yet produced, our myriad-minded [61] Shakespeare. I mean the VENUS
+AND ADONIS, and the LUCRECE; works which give at once strong promises
+of the strength, and yet obvious proofs of the immaturity, of his
+genius. From these I abstracted the following marks, as
+characteristics of original poetic genius in general.
+
+1. In the VENUS AND ADONIS, the first and most obvious excellence is
+the perfect sweetness of the versification; its adaptation to the
+subject; and the power displayed in varying the march of the words
+without passing into a loftier and more majestic rhythm than was
+demanded by the thoughts, or permitted by the propriety of preserving
+a sense of melody predominant. The delight in richness and sweetness
+of sound, even to a faulty excess, if it be evidently original, and
+not the result of an easily imitable mechanism, I regard as a highly
+favourable promise in the compositions of a young man. The man that
+hath not music in his soul can indeed never be a genuine poet.
+Imagery,--(even taken from nature, much more when transplanted from
+books, as travels, voyages, and works of natural history),--affecting
+incidents, just thoughts, interesting personal or domestic feelings,
+and with these the art of their combination or intertexture in the
+form of a poem,--may all by incessant effort be acquired as a trade,
+by a man of talent and much reading, who, as I once before observed,
+has mistaken an intense desire of poetic reputation for a natural
+poetic genius; the love of the arbitrary end for a possession of the
+peculiar means. But the sense of musical delight, with the power of
+producing it, is a gift of imagination; and this together with the
+power of reducing multitude into unity of effect, and modifying a
+series of thoughts by some one predominant thought or feeling, may be
+cultivated and improved, but can never be learned. It is in these that
+"poeta nascitur non fit."
+
+2. A second promise of genius is the choice of subjects very remote
+from the private interests and circumstances of the writer himself. At
+least I have found, that where the subject is taken immediately from
+the author's personal sensations and experiences, the excellence of a
+particular poem is but an equivocal mark, and often a fallacious
+pledge, of genuine poetic power. We may perhaps remember the tale of
+the statuary, who had acquired considerable reputation for the legs of
+his goddesses, though the rest of the statue accorded but
+indifferently with ideal beauty; till his wife, elated by her
+husband's praises, modestly acknowledged that she had been his
+constant model. In the VENUS AND ADONIS this proof of poetic power
+exists even to excess. It is throughout as if a superior spirit more
+intuitive, more intimately conscious, even than the characters
+themselves, not only of every outward look and act, but of the flux
+and reflux of the mind in all its subtlest thoughts and feelings, were
+placing the whole before our view; himself meanwhile unparticipating
+in the passions, and actuated only by that pleasurable excitement,
+which had resulted from the energetic fervour of his own spirit in so
+vividly exhibiting what it had so accurately and profoundly
+contemplated. I think, I should have conjectured from these poems,
+that even then the great instinct, which impelled the poet to the
+drama, was secretly working in him, prompting him--by a series and
+never broken chain of imagery, always vivid and, because unbroken,
+often minute; by the highest effort of the picturesque in words, of
+which words are capable, higher perhaps than was ever realized by any
+other poet, even Dante not excepted; to provide a substitute for that
+visual language, that constant intervention and running comment by
+tone, look and gesture, which in his dramatic works he was entitled to
+expect from the players. His Venus and Adonis seem at once the
+characters themselves, and the whole representation of those
+characters by the most consummate actors. You seem to be told nothing,
+but to see and hear everything. Hence it is, from the perpetual
+activity of attention required on the part of the reader; from the
+rapid flow, the quick change, and the playful nature of the thoughts
+and images; and above all from the alienation, and, if I may hazard
+such an expression, the utter aloofness of the poet's own feelings,
+from those of which he is at once the painter and the analyst; that
+though the very subject cannot but detract from the pleasure of a
+delicate mind, yet never was poem less dangerous on a moral account.
+Instead of doing as Ariosto, and as, still more offensively, Wieland
+has done, instead of degrading and deforming passion into appetite,
+the trials of love into the struggles of concupiscence; Shakespeare
+has here represented the animal impulse itself, so as to preclude all
+sympathy with it, by dissipating the reader's notice among the
+thousand outward images, and now beautiful, now fanciful
+circumstances, which form its dresses and its scenery; or by diverting
+our attention from the main subject by those frequent witty or
+profound reflections, which the poet's ever active mind has deduced
+from, or connected with, the imagery and the incidents. The reader is
+forced into too much action to sympathize with the merely passive of
+our nature. As little can a mind thus roused and awakened be brooded
+on by mean and indistinct emotion, as the low, lazy mist can creep
+upon the surface of a lake, while a strong gale is driving it onward
+in waves and billows.
+
+3. It has been before observed that images, however beautiful, though
+faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words,
+do not of themselves characterize the poet. They become proofs of
+original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant
+passion; or by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion;
+or when they have the effect of reducing multitude to unity, or
+succession to an instant; or lastly, when a human and intellectual
+life is transferred to them from the poet's own spirit,
+
+    Which shoots its being through earth, sea, and air.
+
+In the two following lines for instance, there is nothing
+objectionable, nothing which would preclude them from forming, in
+their proper place, part of a descriptive poem:
+
+    Behold yon row of pines, that shorn and bow'd
+    Bend from the sea-blast, seen at twilight eve.
+
+But with a small alteration of rhythm, the same words would be equally
+in their place in a book of topography, or in a descriptive tour. The
+same image will rise into semblance of poetry if thus conveyed:
+
+    Yon row of bleak and visionary pines,
+    By twilight glimpse discerned, mark! how they flee
+    From the fierce sea-blast, all their tresses wild
+    Streaming before them.
+
+I have given this as an illustration, by no means as an instance, of
+that particular excellence which I had in view, and in which
+Shakespeare even in his earliest, as in his latest, works surpasses
+all other poets. It is by this, that he still gives a dignity and a
+passion to the objects which he presents. Unaided by any previous
+excitement, they burst upon us at once in life and in power,--
+
+    "Full many a glorious morning have I seen
+     Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye."
+
+    "Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
+     Of the wide world dreaming on things to come--
+
+          *     *     *     *     *     *
+          *     *     *     *     *     *
+
+    The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured,
+    And the sad augurs mock their own presage;
+    Incertainties now crown themselves assur'd,
+    And Peace proclaims olives of endless age.
+    Now with the drops of this most balmy time
+    My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes,
+    Since spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme,
+    While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes.
+    And thou in this shalt find thy monument,
+    When tyrants' crests, and tombs of brass are spent."
+
+As of higher worth, so doubtless still more characteristic of poetic
+genius does the imagery become, when it moulds and colours itself to
+the circumstances, passion, or character, present and foremost in the
+mind. For unrivalled instances of this excellence, the reader's own
+memory will refer him to the LEAR, OTHELLO, in short to which not of
+the "great, ever living, dead man's" dramatic works? Inopem em copia
+fecit. How true it is to nature, he has himself finely expressed in
+the instance of love in his 98th Sonnet.
+
+    From you have I been absent in the spring,
+    When proud-pied April drest in all its trim,
+    Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing;
+    That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him.
+    Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell
+    Of different flowers in odour and in hue,
+    Could make me any summer's story tell,
+    Or from their proud lap pluck them, where they grew
+    Nor did I wonder at the lilies white,
+    Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
+    They were, tho' sweet, but figures of delight,
+    Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
+    Yet seem'd it winter still, and, you away,
+    As with your shadow, I with these did play!"
+
+Scarcely less sure, or if a less valuable, not less indispensable mark
+
+    Gonimon men poiaetou------
+    ------hostis rhaema gennaion lakoi,
+
+will the imagery supply, when, with more than the power of the
+painter, the poet gives us the liveliest image of succession with the
+feeling of simultaneousness:--
+
+    With this, he breaketh from the sweet embrace
+    Of those fair arms, which bound him to her breast,
+    And homeward through the dark laund runs apace;--
+
+         *     *     *     *     *     *
+
+    Look! how a bright star shooteth from the sky,
+    So glides he in the night from Venus' eye.
+
+4. The last character I shall mention, which would prove indeed but
+little, except as taken conjointly with the former;--yet without which
+the former could scarce exist in a high degree, and (even if this were
+possible) would give promises only of transitory flashes and a
+meteoric power;--is depth, and energy of thought. No man was ever yet
+a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.
+For poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge,
+human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language. In Shakespeare's
+poems the creative power and the intellectual energy wrestle as in a
+war embrace. Each in its excess of strength seems to threaten the
+extinction of the other. At length in the drama they were reconciled,
+and fought each with its shield before the breast of the other. Or
+like two rapid streams, that, at their first meeting within narrow and
+rocky banks, mutually strive to repel each other and intermix
+reluctantly and in tumult; but soon finding a wider channel and more
+yielding shores blend, and dilate, and flow on in one current and with
+one voice. The VENUS AND ADONIS did not perhaps allow the display of
+the deeper passions. But the story of Lucretia seems to favour and
+even demand their intensest workings. And yet we find in Shakespeare's
+management of the tale neither pathos, nor any other dramatic quality.
+There is the same minute and faithful imagery as in the former poem,
+in the same vivid colours, inspirited by the same impetuous vigour of
+thought, and diverging and contracting with the same activity of the
+assimilative and of the modifying faculties; and with a yet larger
+display, a yet wider range of knowledge and reflection; and lastly,
+with the same perfect dominion, often domination, over the whole world
+of language. What then shall we say? even this; that Shakespeare, no
+mere child of nature; no automaton of genius; no passive vehicle of
+inspiration, possessed by the spirit, not possessing it; first studied
+patiently, meditated deeply, understood minutely, till knowledge,
+become habitual and intuitive, wedded itself to his habitual feelings,
+and at length gave birth to that stupendous power, by which he stands
+alone, with no equal or second in his own class; to that power which
+seated him on one of the two glory-smitten summits of the poetic
+mountain, with Milton as his compeer not rival. While the former darts
+himself forth, and passes into all the forms of human character and
+passion, the one Proteus of the fire and the flood; the other attracts
+all forms and things to himself, into the unity of his own ideal. All
+things and modes of action shape themselves anew in the being of
+Milton; while Shakespeare becomes all things, yet for ever remaining
+himself. O what great men hast thou not produced, England, my
+country!--Truly indeed--
+
+    We must be free or die, who speak the tongue,
+    Which Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold,
+    Which Milton held. In everything we are sprung
+    Of earth's first blood, have titles manifold.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+Striking points of difference between the Poets of the present age and
+those of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries--Wish expressed for the
+union of the characteristic merits of both.
+
+
+Christendom, from its first settlement on feudal rights, has been so
+far one great body, however imperfectly organized, that a similar
+spirit will be found in each period to have been acting in all its
+members. The study of Shakespeare's poems--(I do not include his
+dramatic works, eminently as they too deserve that title)--led me to a
+more careful examination of the contemporary poets both in England and
+in other countries. But my attention was especially fixed on those of
+Italy, from the birth to the death of Shakespeare; that being the
+country in which the fine arts had been most sedulously, and hitherto
+most successfully cultivated. Abstracted from the degrees and
+peculiarities of individual genius, the properties common to the good
+writers of each period seem to establish one striking point of
+difference between the poetry of the fifteenth and sixteenth
+centuries, and that of the present age. The remark may perhaps be
+extended to the sister art of painting. At least the latter will serve
+to illustrate the former. In the present age the poet--(I would wish
+to be understood as speaking generally, and without allusion to
+individual names)--seems to propose to himself as his main object, and
+as that which is the most characteristic of his art, new and striking
+images; with incidents that interest the affections or excite the
+curiosity. Both his characters and his descriptions he renders, as
+much as possible, specific and individual, even to a degree of
+portraiture. In his diction and metre, on the other hand, he is
+comparatively careless. The measure is either constructed on no
+previous system, and acknowledges no justifying principle but that of
+the writer's convenience; or else some mechanical movement is adopted,
+of which one couplet or stanza is so far an adequate specimen, as that
+the occasional differences appear evidently to arise from accident, or
+the qualities of the language itself, not from meditation and an
+intelligent purpose. And the language from Pope's translation of
+Homer, to Darwin's Temple of Nature [62], may, notwithstanding some
+illustrious exceptions, be too faithfully characterized, as claiming
+to be poetical for no better reason, than that it would be intolerable
+in conversation or in prose. Though alas! even our prose writings, nay
+even the style of our more set discourses, strive to be in the
+fashion, and trick themselves out in the soiled and over-worn finery
+of the meretricious muse. It is true that of late a great improvement
+in this respect is observable in our most popular writers. But it is
+equally true, that this recurrence to plain sense and genuine mother
+English is far from being general; and that the composition of our
+novels, magazines, public harangues, and the like is commonly as
+trivial in thought, and yet enigmatic in expression, as if Echo and
+Sphinx had laid their heads together to construct it. Nay, even of
+those who have most rescued themselves from this contagion, I should
+plead inwardly guilty to the charge of duplicity or cowardice, if I
+withheld my conviction, that few have guarded the purity of their
+native tongue with that jealous care, which the sublime Dante in his
+tract De la volgare Eloquenza, declares to be the first duty of a
+poet. For language is the armoury of the human mind; and at once
+contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future
+conquests. Animadverte, says Hobbes, quam sit ab improprietate
+verborum pronum hominihus prolabi in errores circa ipsas res! Sat
+[vero], says Sennertus, in hac vitae brevitate et naturae obscuritate,
+rerum est, quibus cognoscendis tempus impendatur, ut [confusis et
+multivotis] sermonibus intelligendis illud consumere opus non sit.
+[Eheu! quantas strages paravere verba nubila, quae tot dicunt ut nihil
+dicunt;--nubes potius, e quibus et in rebus politicis et in ecclesia
+turbines et tonitrua erumpunt!] Et proinde recte dictum putamus a
+Platone in Gorgia: os an ta onomata eidei, eisetai kai ta pragmata: et
+ab Epicteto, archae paideuseos hae ton onomaton episkepsis: et
+prudentissime Galenus scribit, hae ton onomaton chraesis tarachtheisa
+kai taen ton pragmaton epitarattei gnosin.
+
+Egregie vero J. C. Scaliger, in Lib. I. de Plantis: Est primum,
+inquit, sapientis officium, bene sentire, ut sibi vivat: proximum,
+bene loqui, ut patriae vivat.
+
+Something analogous to the materials and structure of modern poetry I
+seem to have noticed--(but here I beg to be understood as speaking
+with the utmost diffidence)--in our common landscape painters. Their
+foregrounds and intermediate distances are comparatively unattractive:
+while the main interest of the landscape is thrown into the
+background, where mountains and torrents and castles forbid the eye to
+proceed, and nothing tempts it to trace its way back again. But in the
+works of the great Italian and Flemish masters, the front and middle
+objects of the landscape are the most obvious and determinate, the
+interest gradually dies away in the background, and the charm and
+peculiar worth of the picture consists, not so much in the specific
+objects which it conveys to the understanding in a visual language
+formed by the substitution of figures for words, as in the beauty and
+harmony of the colours, lines, and expression, with which the objects
+are represented. Hence novelty of subject was rather avoided than
+sought for. Superior excellence in the manner of treating the same
+subjects was the trial and test of the artist's merit.
+
+Not otherwise is it with the more polished poets of the fifteenth and
+sixteenth centuries, especially those of Italy. The imagery is almost
+always general: sun, moon, flowers, breezes, murmuring streams,
+warbling songsters, delicious shades, lovely damsels cruel as fair,
+nymphs, naiads, and goddesses, are the materials which are common to
+all, and which each shaped and arranged according to his judgment or
+fancy, little solicitous to add or to particularize. If we make an
+honourable exception in favour of some English poets, the thoughts too
+are as little novel as the images; and the fable of their narrative
+poems, for the most part drawn from mythology, or sources of equal
+notoriety, derive their chief attractions from the manner of treating
+them; from impassioned flow, or picturesque arrangement. In opposition
+to the present age, and perhaps in as faulty an extreme, they placed
+the essence of poetry in the art. The excellence, at which they aimed,
+consisted in the exquisite polish of the diction, combined with
+perfect simplicity. This their prime object they attained by the
+avoidance of every word, which a gentleman would not use in dignified
+conversation, and of every word and phrase, which none but a learned
+man would use; by the studied position of words and phrases, so that
+not only each part should be melodious in itself, but contribute to
+the harmony of the whole, each note referring and conducting to the
+melody of all the foregoing and following words of the same period or
+stanza; and lastly with equal labour, the greater because unbetrayed,
+by the variation and various harmonies of their metrical movement.
+Their measures, however, were not indebted for their variety to the
+introduction of new metres, such as have been attempted of late in the
+Alonzo and Imogen, and others borrowed from the German, having in
+their very mechanism a specific overpowering tune, to which the
+generous reader humours his voice and emphasis, with more indulgence
+to the author than attention to the meaning or quantity of the words;
+but which, to an ear familiar with the numerous sounds of the Greek
+and Roman poets, has an effect not unlike that of galloping over a
+paved road in a German stage-waggon without springs. On the contrary,
+the elder bards both of Italy and England produced a far greater as
+well as more charming variety by countless modifications, and subtle
+balances of sound in the common metres of their country. A lasting and
+enviable reputation awaits that man of genius, who should attempt and
+realize a union;--who should recall the high finish, the
+appropriateness, the facility, the delicate proportion, and above all,
+the perfusive and omnipresent grace, which have preserved, as in a
+shrine of precious amber, the Sparrow of Catullus, the Swallow, the
+Grasshopper, and all the other little loves of Anacreon; and which,
+with bright, though diminished glories, revisited the youth and early
+manhood of Christian Europe, in the vales of [63] Arno, and the groves
+of Isis and of Cam; and who with these should combine the keener
+interest, deeper pathos, manlier reflection, and the fresher and more
+various imagery, which give a value and a name that will not pass away
+to the poets who have done honour to our own times, and to those of
+our immediate predecessors.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+Examination of the tenets peculiar to Mr. Wordsworth--Rustic life
+(above all, low and rustic life) especially unfavourable to the
+formation of a human diction--The best parts of language the product
+of philosophers, not of clowns or shepherds--Poetry essentially ideal
+and generic--The language of Milton as much the language of real life,
+yea, incomparably more so than that of the cottager.
+
+
+As far then as Mr. Wordsworth in his preface contended, and most ably
+contended, for a reformation in our poetic diction, as far as he has
+evinced the truth of passion, and the dramatic propriety of those
+figures and metaphors in the original poets, which, stripped of their
+justifying reasons, and converted into mere artifices of connection or
+ornament, constitute the characteristic falsity in the poetic style of
+the moderns; and as far as he has, with equal acuteness and clearness,
+pointed out the process by which this change was effected, and the
+resemblances between that state into which the reader's mind is thrown
+by the pleasurable confusion of thought from an unaccustomed train of
+words and images; and that state which is induced by the natural
+language of impassioned feeling; he undertook a useful task, and
+deserves all praise, both for the attempt and for the execution. The
+provocations to this remonstrance in behalf of truth and nature were
+still of perpetual recurrence before and after the publication of this
+preface. I cannot likewise but add, that the comparison of such poems
+of merit, as have been given to the public within the last ten or
+twelve years, with the majority of those produced previously to the
+appearance of that preface, leave no doubt on my mind, that Mr.
+Wordsworth is fully justified in believing his efforts to have been by
+no means ineffectual. Not only in the verses of those who have
+professed their admiration of his genius, but even of those who have
+distinguished themselves by hostility to his theory, and depreciation
+of his writings, are the impressions of his principles plainly
+visible. It is possible, that with these principles others may have
+been blended, which are not equally evident; and some which are
+unsteady and subvertible from the narrowness or imperfection of their
+basis. But it is more than possible, that these errors of defect or
+exaggeration, by kindling and feeding the controversy, may have
+conduced not only to the wider propagation of the accompanying truths,
+but that, by their frequent presentation to the mind in an excited
+state, they may have won for them a more permanent and practical
+result. A man will borrow a part from his opponent the more easily, if
+he feels himself justified in continuing to reject a part. While there
+remain important points in which he can still feel himself in the
+right, in which he still finds firm footing for continued resistance,
+he will gradually adopt those opinions, which were the least remote
+from his own convictions, as not less congruous with his own theory
+than with that which he reprobates. In like manner with a kind of
+instinctive prudence, he will abandon by little and little his weakest
+posts, till at length he seems to forget that they had ever belonged
+to him, or affects to consider them at most as accidental and "petty
+annexments," the removal of which leaves the citadel unhurt and
+unendangered.
+
+My own differences from certain supposed parts of Mr. Wordsworth's
+theory ground themselves on the assumption, that his words had been
+rightly interpreted, as purporting that the proper diction for poetry
+in general consists altogether in a language taken, with due
+exceptions, from the mouths of men in real life, a language which
+actually constitutes the natural conversation of men under the
+influence of natural feelings. My objection is, first, that in any
+sense this rule is applicable only to certain classes of poetry;
+secondly, that even to these classes it is not applicable, except in
+such a sense, as hath never by any one (as far as I know or have
+read,) been denied or doubted; and lastly, that as far as, and in that
+degree in which it is practicable, it is yet as a rule useless, if not
+injurious, and therefore either need not, or ought not to be
+practised. The poet informs his reader, that he had generally chosen
+low and rustic life; but not as low and rustic, or in order to repeat
+that pleasure of doubtful moral effect, which persons of elevated rank
+and of superior refinement oftentimes derive from a happy imitation of
+the rude unpolished manners and discourse of their inferiors. For the
+pleasure so derived may be traced to three exciting causes. The first
+is the naturalness, in fact, of the things represented. The second is
+the apparent naturalness of the representation, as raised and
+qualified by an imperceptible infusion of the author's own knowledge
+and talent, which infusion does, indeed, constitute it an imitation as
+distinguished from a mere copy. The third cause may be found in the
+reader's conscious feeling of his superiority awakened by the contrast
+presented to him; even as for the same purpose the kings and great
+barons of yore retained, sometimes actual clowns and fools, but more
+frequently shrewd and witty fellows in that character. These, however,
+were not Mr. Wordsworth's objects. He chose low and rustic life,
+"because in that condition the essential passions of the heart find a
+better soil, in which they can attain their maturity, are less under
+restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in
+that condition of life our elementary feelings coexist in a state of
+greater simplicity, and consequently may be more accurately
+contemplated, and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of
+rural life germinate from those elementary feelings; and from the
+necessary character of rural occupations are more easily comprehended,
+and are more durable; and lastly, because in that condition the
+passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent
+forms of nature."
+
+Now it is clear to me, that in the most interesting of the poems, in
+which the author is more or less dramatic, as THE BROTHERS, MICHAEL,
+RUTH, THE MAD MOTHER, and others, the persons introduced are by no
+means taken from low or rustic life in the common acceptation of those
+words! and it is not less clear, that the sentiments and language, as
+far as they can be conceived to have been really transferred from the
+minds and conversation of such persons, are attributable to causes and
+circumstances not necessarily connected with "their occupations and
+abode." The thoughts, feelings, language, and manners of the shepherd-
+farmers in the vales of Cumberland and Westmoreland, as far as they
+are actually adopted in those poems, may be accounted for from causes,
+which will and do produce the same results in every state of life,
+whether in town or country. As the two principal I rank that
+independence, which raises a man above servitude, or daily toil for
+the profit of others, yet not above the necessity of industry and a
+frugal simplicity of domestic life; and the accompanying unambitious,
+but solid and religious, education, which has rendered few books
+familiar, but the Bible, and the Liturgy or Hymn book. To this latter
+cause, indeed, which is so far accidental, that it is the blessing of
+particular countries and a particular age, not the product of
+particular places or employments, the poet owes the show of
+probability, that his personages might really feel, think, and talk
+with any tolerable resemblance to his representation. It is an
+excellent remark of Dr. Henry More's, that "a man of confined
+education, but of good parts, by constant reading of the Bible will
+naturally form a more winning and commanding rhetoric than those that
+are learned: the intermixture of tongues and of artificial phrases
+debasing their style."
+
+It is, moreover, to be considered that to the formation of healthy
+feelings, and a reflecting mind, negations involve impediments not
+less formidable than sophistication and vicious intermixture. I am
+convinced, that for the human soul to prosper in rustic life a certain
+vantage-ground is prerequisite. It is not every man that is likely to
+be improved by a country life or by country labours. Education, or
+original sensibility, or both, must pre-exist, if the changes, forms,
+and incidents of nature are to prove a sufficient stimulant. And where
+these are not sufficient, the mind contracts and hardens by want of
+stimulants: and the man becomes selfish, sensual, gross, and hard-
+hearted. Let the management of the Poor Laws in Liverpool, Manchester,
+or Bristol be compared with the ordinary dispensation of the poor
+rates in agricultural villages, where the farmers are the overseers
+and guardians of the poor. If my own experience have not been
+particularly unfortunate, as well as that of the many respectable
+country clergymen with whom I have conversed on the subject, the
+result would engender more than scepticism concerning the desirable
+influences of low and rustic life in and for itself. Whatever may be
+concluded on the other side, from the stronger local attachments and
+enterprising spirit of the Swiss, and other mountaineers, applies to a
+particular mode of pastoral life, under forms of property that permit
+and beget manners truly republican, not to rustic life in general, or
+to the absence of artificial cultivation. On the contrary the
+mountaineers, whose manners have been so often eulogized, are in
+general better educated and greater readers than men of equal rank
+elsewhere. But where this is not the case, as among the peasantry of
+North Wales, the ancient mountains, with all their terrors and all
+their glories, are pictures to the blind, and music to the deaf.
+
+I should not have entered so much into detail upon this passage, but
+here seems to be the point, to which all the lines of difference
+converge as to their source and centre;--I mean, as far as, and in
+whatever respect, my poetic creed does differ from the doctrines
+promulgated in this preface. I adopt with full faith, the principle of
+Aristotle, that poetry, as poetry, is essentially ideal, that it
+avoids and excludes all accident; that its apparent individualities of
+rank, character, or occupation must be representative of a class; and
+that the persons of poetry must be clothed with generic attributes,
+with the common attributes of the class: not with such as one gifted
+individual might possibly possess, but such as from his situation it
+is most probable before-hand that he would possess. If my premises are
+right and my deductions legitimate, it follows that there can be no
+poetic medium between the swains of Theocritus and those of an
+imaginary golden age.
+
+The characters of the vicar and the shepherd-mariner in the poem of
+THE BROTHERS, and that of the shepherd of Green-head Ghyll in the
+MICHAEL, have all the verisimilitude and representative quality, that
+the purposes of poetry can require. They are persons of a known and
+abiding class, and their manners and sentiments the natural product of
+circumstances common to the class. Take Michael for instance:
+
+    An old man stout of heart, and strong of limb.
+    His bodily frame had been from youth to age
+    Of an unusual strength: his mind was keen,
+    Intense, and frugal, apt for all affairs,
+    And in his shepherd's calling he was prompt
+    And watchful more than ordinary men.
+    Hence he had learned the meaning of all winds,
+    Of blasts of every tone; and oftentimes
+    When others heeded not, He heard the South
+    Make subterraneous music, like the noise
+    Of bagpipers on distant Highland hills.
+    The Shepherd, at such warning, of his flock
+    Bethought him, and he to himself would say,
+    `The winds are now devising work for me!'
+    And truly, at all times, the storm, that drives
+    The traveller to a shelter, summoned him
+    Up to the mountains: he had been alone
+    Amid the heart of many thousand mists,
+    That came to him and left him on the heights.
+    So lived he, until his eightieth year was past.
+    And grossly that man errs, who should suppose
+    That the green valleys, and the streams and rocks,
+    Were things indifferent to the Shepherd's thoughts.
+    Fields, where with cheerful spirits he had breathed
+    The common air; the hills, which he so oft
+    Had climbed with vigorous steps; which had impressed
+    So many incidents upon his mind
+    Of hardship, skill or courage, joy or fear;
+    Which, like a book, preserved the memory
+    Of the dumb animals, whom he had saved,
+    Had fed or sheltered, linking to such acts,
+    So grateful in themselves, the certainty
+    Of honourable gain; these fields, these hills
+    Which were his living Being, even more
+    Than his own blood--what could they less? had laid
+    Strong hold on his affections, were to him
+    A pleasurable feeling of blind love,
+    The pleasure which there is in life itself.
+
+On the other hand, in the poems which are pitched in a lower key, as
+the HARRY GILL, and THE IDIOT BOY, the feelings are those of human
+nature in general; though the poet has judiciously laid the scene in
+the country, in order to place himself in the vicinity of interesting
+images, without the necessity of ascribing a sentimental perception of
+their beauty to the persons of his drama. In THE IDIOT BOY, indeed,
+the mother's character is not so much the real and native product of a
+"situation where the essential passions of the heart find a better
+soil, in which they can attain their maturity and speak a plainer and
+more emphatic language," as it is an impersonation of an instinct
+abandoned by judgment. Hence the two following charges seem to me not
+wholly groundless: at least, they are the only plausible objections,
+which I have heard to that fine poem. The one is, that the author has
+not, in the poem itself, taken sufficient care to preclude from the
+reader's fancy the disgusting images of ordinary morbid idiocy, which
+yet it was by no means his intention to represent. He was even by the
+"burr, burr, burr," uncounteracted by any preceding description of the
+boy's beauty, assisted in recalling them. The other is, that the
+idiocy of the boy is so evenly balanced by the folly of the mother, as
+to present to the general reader rather a laughable burlesque on the
+blindness of anile dotage, than an analytic display of maternal
+affection in its ordinary workings.
+
+In THE THORN, the poet himself acknowledges in a note the necessity of
+an introductory poem, in which he should have portrayed the character
+of the person from whom the words of the poem are supposed to proceed:
+a superstitious man moderately imaginative, of slow faculties and deep
+feelings, "a captain of a small trading vessel, for example, who,
+being past the middle age of life, had retired upon an annuity, or
+small independent income, to some village or country town of which he
+was not a native, or in which he had not been accustomed to live. Such
+men having nothing to do become credulous and talkative from
+indolence." But in a poem, still more in a lyric poem--and the Nurse
+in ROMEO AND JULIET alone prevents me from extending the remark even
+to dramatic poetry, if indeed even the Nurse can be deemed altogether
+a case in point--it is not possible to imitate truly a dull and
+garrulous discourser, without repeating the effects of dullness and
+garrulity. However this may be, I dare assert, that the parts--(and
+these form the far larger portion of the whole)--which might as well
+or still better have proceeded from the poet's own imagination, and
+have been spoken in his own character, are those which have given, and
+which will continue to give, universal delight; and that the passages
+exclusively appropriate to the supposed narrator, such as the last
+couplet of the third stanza [64]; the seven last lines of the tenth
+[65]; and the five following stanzas, with the exception of the four
+admirable lines at the commencement of the fourteenth, are felt by
+many unprejudiced and unsophisticated hearts, as sudden and unpleasant
+sinkings from the height to which the poet had previously lifted them,
+and to which he again re-elevates both himself and his reader.
+
+If then I am compelled to doubt the theory, by which the choice of
+characters was to be directed, not only a priori, from grounds of
+reason, but both from the few instances in which the poet himself need
+be supposed to have been governed by it, and from the comparative
+inferiority of those instances; still more must I hesitate in my
+assent to the sentence which immediately follows the former citation;
+and which I can neither admit as particular fact, nor as general rule.
+"The language, too, of these men has been adopted (purified indeed
+from what appear to be its real defects, from all lasting and rational
+causes of dislike or disgust) because such men hourly communicate with
+the best objects from which the best part of language is originally
+derived; and because, from their rank in society and the sameness and
+narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the action of
+social vanity, they convey their feelings and notions in simple and
+unelaborated expressions." To this I reply; that a rustic's language,
+purified from all provincialism and grossness, and so far
+reconstructed as to be made consistent with the rules of grammar--
+(which are in essence no other than the laws of universal logic,
+applied to psychological materials)--will not differ from the language
+of any other man of common sense, however learned or refined he may
+be, except as far as the notions, which the rustic has to convey, are
+fewer and more indiscriminate. This will become still clearer, if we
+add the consideration--(equally important though less obvious)--that
+the rustic, from the more imperfect development of his faculties, and
+from the lower state of their cultivation, aims almost solely to
+convey insulated facts, either those of his scanty experience or his
+traditional belief; while the educated man chiefly seeks to discover
+and express those connections of things, or those relative bearings of
+fact to fact, from which some more or less general law is deducible.
+For facts are valuable to a wise man, chiefly as they lead to the
+discovery of the indwelling law, which is the true being of things,
+the sole solution of their modes of existence, and in the knowledge of
+which consists our dignity and our power.
+
+As little can I agree with the assertion, that from the objects with
+which the rustic hourly communicates the best part of language is
+formed. For first, if to communicate with an object implies such an
+acquaintance with it, as renders it capable of being discriminately
+reflected on, the distinct knowledge of an uneducated rustic would
+furnish a very scanty vocabulary. The few things and modes of action
+requisite for his bodily conveniences would alone be individualized;
+while all the rest of nature would be expressed by a small number of
+confused general terms. Secondly, I deny that the words and
+combinations of words derived from the objects, with which the rustic
+is familiar, whether with distinct or confused knowledge, can be
+justly said to form the best part of language. It is more than
+probable, that many classes of the brute creation possess
+discriminating sounds, by which they can convey to each other notices
+of such objects as concern their food, shelter, or safety. Yet we
+hesitate to call the aggregate of such sounds a language, otherwise
+than metaphorically. The best part of human language, properly so
+called, is derived from reflection on the acts of the mind itself. It
+is formed by a voluntary appropriation of fixed symbols to internal
+acts, to processes and results of imagination, the greater part of
+which have no place in the consciousness of uneducated man; though in
+civilized society, by imitation and passive remembrance of what they
+hear from their religious instructors and other superiors, the most
+uneducated share in the harvest which they neither sowed, nor reaped.
+If the history of the phrases in hourly currency among our peasants
+were traced, a person not previously aware of the fact would be
+surprised at finding so large a number, which three or four centuries
+ago were the exclusive property of the universities and the schools;
+and, at the commencement of the Reformation, had been transferred from
+the school to the pulpit, and thus gradually passed into common life.
+The extreme difficulty, and often the impossibility, of finding words
+for the simplest moral and intellectual processes of the languages of
+uncivilized tribes has proved perhaps the weightiest obstacle to the
+progress of our most zealous and adroit missionaries. Yet these tribes
+are surrounded by the same nature as our peasants are; but in still
+more impressive forms; and they are, moreover, obliged to
+particularize many more of them. When, therefore, Mr. Wordsworth adds,
+"accordingly, such a language"--(meaning, as before, the language of
+rustic life purified from provincialism)--"arising out of repeated
+experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and a far more
+philosophical language, than that which is frequently substituted for
+it by Poets, who think that they are conferring honour upon themselves
+and their art in proportion as they indulge in arbitrary and
+capricious habits of expression;" it may be answered, that the
+language, which he has in view, can be attributed to rustics with no
+greater right, than the style of Hooker or Bacon to Tom Brown or Sir
+Roger L'Estrange. Doubtless, if what is peculiar to each were omitted
+in each, the result must needs be the same. Further, that the poet,
+who uses an illogical diction, or a style fitted to excite only the
+low and changeable pleasure of wonder by means of groundless novelty,
+substitutes a language of folly and vanity, not for that of the
+rustic, but for that of good sense and natural feeling.
+
+Here let me be permitted to remind the reader, that the positions,
+which I controvert, are contained in the sentences--"a selection of
+the real language of men;"--"the language of these men" (that is, men
+in low and rustic life) "has been adopted; I have proposed to myself
+to imitate, and, as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of
+men."
+
+"Between the language of prose and that of metrical composition, there
+neither is, nor can be, any essential difference:" it is against these
+exclusively that my opposition is directed.
+
+I object, in the very first instance, to an equivocation in the use of
+the word "real." Every man's language varies, according to the extent
+of his knowledge, the activity of his faculties, and the depth or
+quickness of his feelings. Every man's language has, first, its
+individualities; secondly, the common properties of the class to which
+he belongs; and thirdly, words and phrases of universal use. The
+language of Hooker, Bacon, Bishop Taylor, and Burke differs from the
+common language of the learned class only by the superior number and
+novelty of the thoughts and relations which they had to convey. The
+language of Algernon Sidney differs not at all from that, which every
+well-educated gentleman would wish to write, and (with due allowances
+for the undeliberateness, and less connected train, of thinking
+natural and proper to conversation) such as he would wish to talk.
+Neither one nor the other differ half as much from the general
+language of cultivated society, as the language of Mr. Wordsworth's
+homeliest composition differs from that of a common peasant. For
+"real" therefore, we must substitute ordinary, or lingua communis. And
+this, we have proved, is no more to be found in the phraseology of low
+and rustic life than in that of any other class. Omit the
+peculiarities of each and the result of course must be common to all.
+And assuredly the omissions and changes to be made in the language of
+rustics, before it could be transferred to any species of poem, except
+the drama or other professed imitation, are at least as numerous and
+weighty, as would be required in adapting to the same purpose the
+ordinary language of tradesmen and manufacturers. Not to mention, that
+the language so highly extolled by Mr. Wordsworth varies in every
+county, nay in every village, according to the accidental character of
+the clergyman, the existence or non-existence of schools; or even,
+perhaps, as the exciteman, publican, and barber happen to be, or not
+to be, zealous politicians, and readers of the weekly newspaper pro
+bono publico. Anterior to cultivation the lingua communis of every
+country, as Dante has well observed, exists every where in parts, and
+no where as a whole.
+
+Neither is the case rendered at all more tenable by the addition of
+the words, "in a state of excitement." For the nature of a man's
+words, where he is strongly affected by joy, grief, or anger, must
+necessarily depend on the number and quality of the general truths,
+conceptions and images, and of the words expressing them, with which
+his mind had been previously stored. For the property of passion is
+not to create; but to set in increased activity. At least, whatever
+new connections of thoughts or images, or --(which is equally, if not
+more than equally, the appropriate effect of strong excitement)--
+whatever generalizations of truth or experience the heat of passion
+may produce; yet the terms of their conveyance must have pre-existed
+in his former conversations, and are only collected and crowded
+together by the unusual stimulation. It is indeed very possible to
+adopt in a poem the unmeaning repetitions, habitual phrases, and other
+blank counters, which an unfurnished or confused understanding
+interposes at short intervals, in order to keep hold of his subject,
+which is still slipping from him, and to give him time for
+recollection; or, in mere aid of vacancy, as in the scanty companies
+of a country stage the same player pops backwards and forwards, in
+order to prevent the appearance of empty spaces, in the procession of
+Macbeth, or Henry VIII. But what assistance to the poet, or ornament
+to the poem, these can supply, I am at a loss to conjecture. Nothing
+assuredly can differ either in origin or in mode more widely from the
+apparent tautologies of intense and turbulent feeling, in which the
+passion is greater and of longer endurance than to be exhausted or
+satisfied by a single representation of the image or incident exciting
+it. Such repetitions I admit to be a beauty of the highest kind; as
+illustrated by Mr. Wordsworth himself from the song of Deborah. At her
+feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at her feet he bowed, he fell:
+where he bowed, there he fell down dead. Judges v. 27.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+Language of metrical composition, why and wherein essentially
+different from that of prose--Origin and elements of metre--Its
+necessary consequences, and the conditions thereby imposed on the
+metrical writer in the choice of his diction.
+
+
+I conclude, therefore, that the attempt is impracticable; and that,
+were it not impracticable, it would still be useless. For the very
+power of making the selection implies the previous possession of the
+language selected. Or where can the poet have lived? And by what rules
+could he direct his choice, which would not have enabled him to select
+and arrange his words by the light of his own judgment? We do not
+adopt the language of a class by the mere adoption of such words
+exclusively, as that class would use, or at least understand; but
+likewise by following the order, in which the words of such men are
+wont to succeed each other. Now this order, in the intercourse of
+uneducated men, is distinguished from the diction of their superiors
+in knowledge and power, by the greater disjunction and separation in
+the component parts of that, whatever it be, which they wish to
+communicate. There is a want of that prospectiveness of mind, that
+surview, which enables a man to foresee the whole of what he is to
+convey, appertaining to any one point; and by this means so to
+subordinate and arrange the different parts according to their
+relative importance, as to convey it at once, and as an organized
+whole.
+
+Now I will take the first stanza, on which I have chanced to open, in
+the Lyrical Ballads. It is one the most simple and the least peculiar
+in its language.
+
+    "In distant countries have I been,
+     And yet I have not often seen
+     A healthy man, a man full grown,
+     Weep in the public roads, alone.
+     But such a one, on English ground,
+     And in the broad highway, I met;
+     Along the broad highway he came,
+     His cheeks with tears were wet
+     Sturdy he seemed, though he was sad;
+     And in his arms a lamb he had."
+
+The words here are doubtless such as are current in all ranks of life;
+and of course not less so in the hamlet and cottage than in the shop,
+manufactory, college, or palace. But is this the order, in which the
+rustic would have placed the words? I am grievously deceived, if the
+following less compact mode of commencing the same tale be not a far
+more faithful copy. "I have been in a many parts, far and near, and I
+don't know that I ever saw before a man crying by himself in the
+public road; a grown man I mean, that was neither sick nor hurt,"
+etc., etc. But when I turn to the following stanza in The Thorn:
+
+    "At all times of the day and night
+     This wretched woman thither goes;
+     And she is known to every star,
+     And every wind that blows
+     And there, beside the Thorn, she sits,
+     When the blue day-light's in the skies,
+     And when the whirlwind's on the hill,
+     Or frosty air is keen and still,
+     And to herself she cries,
+     Oh misery! Oh misery!
+     Oh woe is me! Oh misery!"
+
+and compare this with the language of ordinary men; or with that which
+I can conceive at all likely to proceed, in real life, from such a
+narrator, as is supposed in the note to the poem; compare it either in
+the succession of the images or of the sentences; I am reminded of the
+sublime prayer and hymn of praise, which Milton, in opposition to an
+established liturgy, presents as a fair specimen of common extemporary
+devotion, and such as we might expect to hear from every self-inspired
+minister of a conventicle! And I reflect with delight, how little a
+mere theory, though of his own workmanship, interferes with the
+processes of genuine imagination in a man of true poetic genius, who
+possesses, as Mr. Wordsworth, if ever man did, most assuredly does
+possess,
+
+    "The Vision and the Faculty divine."
+
+One point then alone remains, but that the most important; its
+examination having been, indeed, my chief inducement for the preceding
+inquisition. "There neither is nor can be any essential difference
+between the language of prose and metrical composition." Such is Mr.
+Wordsworth's assertion. Now prose itself, at least in all
+argumentative and consecutive works, differs, and ought to differ,
+from the language of conversation; even as [66] reading ought to
+differ from talking. Unless therefore the difference denied be that of
+the mere words, as materials common to all styles of writing, and not
+of the style itself in the universally admitted sense of the term, it
+might be naturally presumed that there must exist a still greater
+between the ordonnance of poetic composition and that of prose, than
+is expected to distinguish prose from ordinary conversation.
+
+There are not, indeed, examples wanting in the history of literature,
+of apparent paradoxes that have summoned the public wonder as new and
+startling truths, but which, on examination, have shrunk into tame and
+harmless truisms; as the eyes of a cat, seen in the dark, have been
+mistaken for flames of fire. But Mr. Wordsworth is among the last men,
+to whom a delusion of this kind would be attributed by anyone, who had
+enjoyed the slightest opportunity of understanding his mind and
+character. Where an objection has been anticipated by such an author
+as natural, his answer to it must needs be interpreted in some sense
+which either is, or has been, or is capable of being controverted. My
+object then must be to discover some other meaning for the term
+"essential difference" in this place, exclusive of the indistinction
+and community of the words themselves. For whether there ought to
+exist a class of words in the English, in any degree resembling the
+poetic dialect of the Greek and Italian, is a question of very
+subordinate importance. The number of such words would be small
+indeed, in our language; and even in the Italian and Greek, they
+consist not so much of different words, as of slight differences in
+the forms of declining and conjugating the same words; forms,
+doubtless, which having been, at some period more or less remote, the
+common grammatic flexions of some tribe or province, had been
+accidentally appropriated to poetry by the general admiration of
+certain master intellects, the first established lights of
+inspiration, to whom that dialect happened to be native.
+
+Essence, in its primary signification, means the principle of
+individuation, the inmost principle of the possibility of any thing,
+as that particular thing. It is equivalent to the idea of a thing,
+whenever we use the word, idea, with philosophic precision. Existence,
+on the other hand, is distinguished from essence, by the
+superinduction of reality. Thus we speak of the essence, and essential
+properties of a circle; but we do not therefore assert, that any
+thing, which really exists, is mathematically circular. Thus too,
+without any tautology we contend for the existence of the Supreme
+Being; that is, for a reality correspondent to the idea. There is,
+next, a secondary use of the word essence, in which it signifies the
+point or ground of contra-distinction between two modifications of the
+same substance or subject. Thus we should be allowed to say, that the
+style of architecture of Westminster Abbey is essentially different
+from that of St. Paul, even though both had been built with blocks cut
+into the same form, and from the same quarry. Only in this latter
+sense of the term must it have been denied by Mr. Wordsworth (for in
+this sense alone is it affirmed by the general opinion) that the
+language of poetry (that is the formal construction, or architecture,
+of the words and phrases) is essentially different from that of prose.
+Now the burden of the proof lies with the oppugner, not with the
+supporters of the common belief. Mr. Wordsworth, in consequence,
+assigns as the proof of his position, "that not only the language of a
+large portion of every good poem, even of the most elevated character,
+must necessarily, except with reference to the metre, in no respect
+differ from that of good prose, but likewise that some of the most
+interesting parts of the best poems will be found to be strictly the
+language of prose, when prose is well written. The truth of this
+assertion might be demonstrated by innumerable passages from almost
+all the poetical writings, even of Milton himself." He then quotes
+Gray's sonnet--
+
+    "In vain to me the smiling mornings shine,
+     And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire;
+     The birds in vain their amorous descant join,
+     Or cheerful fields resume their green attire.
+     These ears, alas! for other notes repine;
+     _A different object do these eyes require;
+     My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine;
+     And in my breast the imperfect joys expire._
+     Yet morning smiles the busy race to cheer,
+     And new-born pleasure brings to happier men;
+     The fields to all their wonted tribute bear;
+     To warm their little loves the birds complain:
+     _I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear,
+     And weep the more, because I weep in vain."_
+
+and adds the following remark:--"It will easily be perceived, that the
+only part of this Sonnet which is of any value, is the lines printed
+in italics; it is equally obvious, that, except in the rhyme, and in
+the use of the single word `fruitless' for fruitlessly, which is so
+far a defect, the language of these lines does in no respect differ
+from that of prose."
+
+An idealist defending his system by the fact, that when asleep we
+often believe ourselves awake, was well answered by his plain
+neighbour, "Ah, but when awake do we ever believe ourselves asleep?"
+Things identical must be convertible. The preceding passage seems to
+rest on a similar sophism. For the question is not, whether there may
+not occur in prose an order of words, which would be equally proper in
+a poem; nor whether there are not beautiful lines and sentences of
+frequent occurrence in good poems, which would be equally becoming as
+well as beautiful in good prose; for neither the one nor the other has
+ever been either denied or doubted by any one. The true question must
+be, whether there are not modes of expression, a construction, and an
+order of sentences, which are in their fit and natural place in a
+serious prose composition, but would be disproportionate and
+heterogeneous in metrical poetry; and, vice versa, whether in the
+language of a serious poem there may not be an arrangement both of
+words and sentences, and a use and selection of (what are called)
+figures of speech, both as to their kind, their frequency, and their
+occasions, which on a subject of equal weight would be vicious and
+alien in correct and manly prose. I contend, that in both cases this
+unfitness of each for the place of the other frequently will and ought
+to exist.
+
+And first from the origin of metre. This I would trace to the balance
+in the mind effected by that spontaneous effort which strives to hold
+in check the workings of passion. It might be easily explained
+likewise in what manner this salutary antagonism is assisted by the
+very state, which it counteracts; and how this balance of antagonists
+became organized into metre (in the usual acceptation of that term),
+by a supervening act of the will and judgment, consciously and for the
+foreseen purpose of pleasure. Assuming these principles, as the data
+of our argument, we deduce from them two legitimate conditions, which
+the critic is entitled to expect in every metrical work. First, that,
+as the elements of metre owe their existence to a state of increased
+excitement, so the metre itself should be accompanied by the natural
+language of excitement. Secondly, that as these elements are formed
+into metre artificially, by a voluntary act, with the design and for
+the purpose of blending delight with emotion, so the traces of present
+volition should throughout the metrical language be proportionately
+discernible. Now these two conditions must be reconciled and co-
+present. There must be not only a partnership, but a union; an
+interpenetration of passion and of will, of spontaneous impulse and of
+voluntary purpose. Again, this union can be manifested only in a
+frequency of forms and figures of speech, (originally the offspring of
+passion, but now the adopted children of power), greater than would be
+desired or endured, where the emotion is not voluntarily encouraged
+and kept up for the sake of that pleasure, which such emotion, so
+tempered and mastered by the will, is found capable of communicating.
+It not only dictates, but of itself tends to produce a more frequent
+employment of picturesque and vivifying language, than would be
+natural in any other case, in which there did not exist, as there does
+in the present, a previous and well understood, though tacit, compact
+between the poet and his reader, that the latter is entitled to
+expect, and the former bound to supply this species and degree of
+pleasurable excitement. We may in some measure apply to this union the
+answer of Polixenes, in the Winter's Tale, to Perdita's neglect of the
+streaked gilliflowers, because she had heard it said,
+
+    "There is an art, which, in their piedness, shares
+     With great creating nature.
+     POL.                      Say there be;
+     Yet nature is made better by no mean,
+     But nature makes that mean; so, o'er that art,
+     Which, you say, adds to nature, is an art,
+     That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
+     A gentler scion to the wildest stock;
+     And make conceive a bark of baser kind
+     By bud of nobler race. This is an art,
+     Which does mend nature,--change it rather; but
+     The art itself is nature."
+
+Secondly, I argue from the effects of metre. As far as metre acts in
+and for itself, it tends to increase the vivacity and susceptibility
+both of the general feelings and of the attention. This effect it
+produces by the continued excitement of surprise, and by the quick
+reciprocations of curiosity still gratified and still re-excited,
+which are too slight indeed to be at any one moment objects of
+distinct consciousness, yet become considerable in their aggregate
+influence. As a medicated atmosphere, or as wine during animated
+conversation, they act powerfully, though themselves unnoticed. Where,
+therefore, correspondent food and appropriate matter are not provided
+for the attention and feelings thus roused there must needs be a
+disappointment felt; like that of leaping in the dark from the last
+step of a stair-case, when we had prepared our muscles for a leap of
+three or four.
+
+The discussion on the powers of metre in the preface is highly
+ingenious and touches at all points on truth. But I cannot find any
+statement of its powers considered abstractly and separately. On the
+contrary Mr. Wordsworth seems always to estimate metre by the powers,
+which it exerts during, (and, as I think, in consequence of), its
+combination with other elements of poetry. Thus the previous
+difficulty is left unanswered, what the elements are, with which it
+must be combined, in order to produce its own effects to any
+pleasurable purpose. Double and tri-syllable rhymes, indeed, form a
+lower species of wit, and, attended to exclusively for their own sake,
+may become a source of momentary amusement; as in poor Smart's distich
+to the Welsh Squire who had promised him a hare:
+
+    "Tell me, thou son of great Cadwallader!
+     Hast sent the hare? or hast thou swallow'd her?"
+
+But for any poetic purposes, metre resembles, (if the aptness of the
+simile may excuse its meanness), yeast, worthless or disagreeable by
+itself, but giving vivacity and spirit to the liquor with which it is
+proportionally combined.
+
+The reference to THE CHILDREN IN THE WOOD by no means satisfies my
+judgment. We all willingly throw ourselves back for awhile into the
+feelings of our childhood. This ballad, therefore, we read under such
+recollections of our own childish feelings, as would equally endear to
+us poems, which Mr. Wordsworth himself would regard as faulty in the
+opposite extreme of gaudy and technical ornament. Before the invention
+of printing, and in a still greater degree, before the introduction of
+writing, metre, especially alliterative metre, (whether alliterative
+at the beginning of the words, as in PIERCE PLOUMAN, or at the end, as
+in rhymes) possessed an independent value as assisting the
+recollection, and consequently the preservation, of any series of
+truths or incidents. But I am not convinced by the collation of facts,
+that THE CHILDREN IN THE WOOD owes either its preservation, or its
+popularity, to its metrical form. Mr. Marshal's repository affords a
+number of tales in prose inferior in pathos and general merit, some of
+as old a date, and many as widely popular. TOM HICKATHRIFT, JACK THE
+GIANT-KILLER, GOODY TWO-SHOES, and LITTLE RED RIDING-HOOD are
+formidable rivals. And that they have continued in prose, cannot be
+fairly explained by the assumption, that the comparative meanness of
+their thoughts and images precluded even the humblest forms of metre.
+The scene of GOODY TWO-SHOES in the church is perfectly susceptible of
+metrical narration; and, among the thaumata thaumastotata even of the
+present age, I do not recollect a more astonishing image than that of
+the "whole rookery, that flew out of the giant's beard," scared by the
+tremendous voice, with which this monster answered the challenge of
+the heroic TOM HICKATHRIFT!
+
+If from these we turn to compositions universally, and independently
+of all early associations, beloved and admired; would the MARIA, THE
+MONK, or THE POOR MAN'S ASS of Sterne, be read with more delight, or
+have a better chance of immortality, had they without any change in
+the diction been composed in rhyme, than in their present state? If I
+am not grossly mistaken, the general reply would be in the negative.
+Nay, I will confess, that, in Mr. Wordsworth's own volumes, the
+ANECDOTE FOR FATHERS, SIMON LEE, ALICE FELL, BEGGARS, and THE SAILOR'S
+MOTHER, notwithstanding the beauties which are to be found in each of
+them where the poet interposes the music of his own thoughts, would
+have been more delightful to me in prose, told and managed, as by Mr.
+Wordsworth they would have been, in a moral essay or pedestrian tour.
+
+Metre in itself is simply a stimulant of the attention, and therefore
+excites the question: Why is the attention to be thus stimulated? Now
+the question cannot be answered by the pleasure of the metre itself;
+for this we have shown to be conditional, and dependent on the
+appropriateness of the thoughts and expressions, to which the metrical
+form is superadded. Neither can I conceive any other answer that can
+be rationally given, short of this: I write in metre, because I am
+about to use a language different from that of prose. Besides, where
+the language is not such, how interesting soever the reflections are,
+that are capable of being drawn by a philosophic mind from the
+thoughts or incidents of the poem, the metre itself must often become
+feeble. Take the last three stanzas of THE SAILOR'S MOTHER, for
+instance. If I could for a moment abstract from the effect produced on
+the author's feelings, as a man, by the incident at the time of its
+real occurrence, I would dare appeal to his own judgment, whether in
+the metre itself he found a sufficient reason for their being written
+metrically?
+
+    And, thus continuing, she said,
+    "I had a Son, who many a day
+    Sailed on the seas; but he is dead;
+    In Denmark he was cast away;
+    And I have travelled far as Hull to see
+    What clothes he might have left, or other property.
+
+    The Bird and Cage they both were his
+    'Twas my Son's Bird; and neat and trim
+    He kept it: many voyages
+    This Singing-bird hath gone with him;
+    When last he sailed he left the Bird behind;
+    As it might be, perhaps, from bodings of his mind.
+
+    He to a Fellow-lodger's care
+    Had left it, to be watched and fed,
+    Till he came back again; and there
+    I found it when my Son was dead;
+    And now, God help me for my little wit!
+    I trail it with me, Sir! he took so much delight in it."
+
+If disproportioning the emphasis we read these stanzas so as to make
+the rhymes perceptible, even tri-syllable rhymes could scarcely
+produce an equal sense of oddity and strangeness, as we feel here in
+finding rhymes at all in sentences so exclusively colloquial. I would
+further ask whether, but for that visionary state, into which the
+figure of the woman and the susceptibility of his own genius had
+placed the poet's imagination,--(a state, which spreads its influence
+and colouring over all, that co-exists with the exciting cause, and in
+which
+
+    "The simplest, and the most familiar things
+     Gain a strange power of spreading awe around them,") [67]
+
+I would ask the poet whether he would not have felt an abrupt downfall
+in these verses from the preceding stanza?
+
+    "The ancient spirit is not dead;
+     Old times, thought I, are breathing there;
+     Proud was I that my country bred
+     Such strength, a dignity so fair:
+     She begged an alms, like one in poor estate;
+     I looked at her again, nor did my pride abate."
+
+It must not be omitted, and is besides worthy of notice, that those
+stanzas furnish the only fair instance that I have been able to
+discover in all Mr. Wordsworth's writings, of an actual adoption, or
+true imitation, of the real and very language of low and rustic life,
+freed from provincialisms.
+
+Thirdly, I deduce the position from all the causes elsewhere assigned,
+which render metre the proper form of poetry, and poetry imperfect and
+defective without metre. Metre, therefore, having been connected with
+poetry most often and by a peculiar fitness, whatever else is combined
+with metre must, though it be not itself essentially poetic, have
+nevertheless some property in common with poetry, as an intermedium of
+affinity, a sort, (if I may dare borrow a well-known phrase from
+technical chemistry), of mordaunt between it and the super-added
+metre. Now poetry, Mr. Wordsworth truly affirms, does always imply
+passion: which word must be here understood in its most general sense,
+as an excited state of the feelings and faculties. And as every
+passion has its proper pulse, so will it likewise have its
+characteristic modes of expression. But where there exists that degree
+of genius and talent which entitles a writer to aim at the honours of
+a poet, the very act of poetic composition itself is, and is allowed
+to imply and to produce, an unusual state of excitement, which of
+course justifies and demands a correspondent difference of language,
+as truly, though not perhaps in as marked a degree, as the excitement
+of love, fear, rage, or jealousy. The vividness of the descriptions or
+declamations in Donne or Dryden, is as much and as often derived from
+the force and fervour of the describer, as from the reflections, forms
+or incidents, which constitute their subject and materials. The wheels
+take fire from the mere rapidity of their motion. To what extent, and
+under what modifications, this may be admitted to act, I shall attempt
+to define in an after remark on Mr. Wordsworth's reply to this
+objection, or rather on his objection to this reply, as already
+anticipated in his preface.
+
+Fourthly, and as intimately connected with this, if not the same
+argument in a more general form, I adduce the high spiritual instinct
+of the human being impelling us to seek unity by harmonious
+adjustment, and thus establishing the principle that all the parts of
+an organized whole must be assimilated to the more important and
+essential parts. This and the preceding arguments may be strengthened
+by the reflection, that the composition of a poem is among the
+imitative arts; and that imitation, as opposed to copying, consists
+either in the interfusion of the same throughout the radically
+different, or of the different throughout a base radically the same.
+
+Lastly, I appeal to the practice of the best poets, of all countries
+and in all ages, as authorizing the opinion, (deduced from all the
+foregoing,) that in every import of the word essential, which would
+not here involve a mere truism, there may be, is, and ought to be an
+essential difference between the language of prose and of metrical
+composition.
+
+In Mr. Wordsworth's criticism of Gray's Sonnet, the reader's sympathy
+with his praise or blame of the different parts is taken for granted
+rather perhaps too easily. He has not, at least, attempted to win or
+compel it by argumentative analysis. In my conception at least, the
+lines rejected as of no value do, with the exception of the two first,
+differ as much and as little from the language of common life, as
+those which he has printed in italics as possessing genuine
+excellence. Of the five lines thus honourably distinguished, two of
+them differ from prose even more widely, than the lines which either
+precede or follow, in the position of the words.
+
+    "A different object do these eyes require;
+     My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine;
+     And in my breast the imperfect joys expire."
+
+But were it otherwise, what would this prove, but a truth, of which no
+man ever doubted?--videlicet, that there are sentences, which would be
+equally in their place both in verse and prose. Assuredly it does not
+prove the point, which alone requires proof; namely, that there are
+not passages, which would suit the one and not suit the other. The
+first line of this sonnet is distinguished from the ordinary language
+of men by the epithet to morning. For we will set aside, at present,
+the consideration, that the particular word "smiling" is hackneyed,
+and, as it involves a sort of personification, not quite congruous
+with the common and material attribute of "shining." And, doubtless,
+this adjunction of epithets for the purpose of additional description,
+where no particular attention is demanded for the quality of the
+thing, would be noticed as giving a poetic cast to a man's
+conversation. Should the sportsman exclaim, "Come boys! the rosy
+morning calls you up:" he will be supposed to have some song in his
+head. But no one suspects this, when he says, "A wet morning shall not
+confine us to our beds." This then is either a defect in poetry, or it
+is not. Whoever should decide in the affirmative, I would request him
+to re-peruse any one poem, of any confessedly great poet from Homer to
+Milton, or from Aeschylus to Shakespeare; and to strike out, (in
+thought I mean), every instance of this kind. If the number of these
+fancied erasures did not startle him; or if he continued to deem the
+work improved by their total omission; he must advance reasons of no
+ordinary strength and evidence, reasons grounded in the essence of
+human nature. Otherwise, I should not hesitate to consider him as a
+man not so much proof against all authority, as dead to it.
+
+The second line,
+
+    "And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire;--"
+
+has indeed almost as many faults as words. But then it is a bad line,
+not because the language is distinct from that of prose; but because
+it conveys incongruous images; because it confounds the cause and the
+effect; the real thing with the personified representative of the
+thing; in short, because it differs from the language of good sense!
+That the "Phoebus "is hackneyed, and a school-boy image, is an
+accidental fault, dependent on the age in which the author wrote, and
+not deduced from the nature of the thing. That it is part of an
+exploded mythology, is an objection more deeply grounded. Yet when the
+torch of ancient learning was re-kindled, so cheering were its beams,
+that our eldest poets, cut off by Christianity from all accredited
+machinery, and deprived of all acknowledged guardians and symbols of
+the great objects of nature, were naturally induced to adopt, as a
+poetic language, those fabulous personages, those forms of the
+[68]supernatural in nature, which had given them such dear delight in
+the poems of their great masters. Nay, even at this day what scholar
+of genial taste will not so far sympathize with them, as to read with
+pleasure in Petrarch, Chaucer, or Spenser, what he would perhaps
+condemn as puerile in a modern poet?
+
+I remember no poet, whose writings would safelier stand the test of
+Mr. Wordsworth's theory, than Spenser. Yet will Mr. Wordsworth say,
+that the style of the following stanza is either undistinguished from
+prose, and the language of ordinary life? Or that it is vicious, and
+that the stanzas are blots in THE FAERY QUEEN?
+
+    "By this the northern wagoner had set
+     His sevenfold teme behind the stedfast starre,
+     That was in ocean waves yet never wet,
+     But firme is fixt and sendeth light from farre
+     To all that in the wild deep wandering arre
+     And chearfull chaunticlere with his note shrill
+     Had warned once that Phoebus' fiery carre
+     In hast was climbing up the easterne hill,
+     Full envious that night so long his roome did fill."
+
+    "At last the golden orientall gate
+     Of greatest heaven gan to open fayre,
+     And Phoebus fresh, as brydegrome to his mate,
+     Came dauncing forth, shaking his deawie hayre,
+     And hurl'd his glist'ring beams through gloomy ayre:
+     Which when the wakeful elfe perceived, streightway
+     He started up, and did him selfe prepayre
+     In sun-bright armes and battailous array;
+     For with that pagan proud he combat will that day."
+
+On the contrary to how many passages, both in hymn books and in blank
+verse poems, could I, (were it not invidious), direct the reader's
+attention, the style of which is most unpoetic, because, and only
+because, it is the style of prose? He will not suppose me capable of
+having in my mind such verses, as
+
+    "I put my hat upon my head
+     And walk'd into the Strand;
+     And there I met another man,
+     Whose hat was in his hand."
+
+To such specimens it would indeed be a fair and full reply, that these
+lines are not bad, because they are unpoetic; but because they are
+empty of all sense and feeling; and that it were an idle attempt to
+prove that "an ape is not a Newton, when it is self-evident that he is
+not a man." But the sense shall be good and weighty, the language
+correct and dignified, the subject interesting and treated with
+feeling; and yet the style shall, notwithstanding all these merits, be
+justly blamable as prosaic, and solely because the words and the order
+of the words would find their appropriate place in prose, but are not
+suitable to metrical composition. The CIVIL WARS of Daniel is an
+instructive, and even interesting work; but take the following
+stanzas, (and from the hundred instances which abound I might probably
+have selected others far more striking):
+
+    "And to the end we may with better ease
+     Discern the true discourse, vouchsafe to shew
+     What were the times foregoing near to these,
+     That these we may with better profit know.
+     Tell how the world fell into this disease;
+     And how so great distemperature did grow;
+     So shall we see with what degrees it came;
+     How things at full do soon wax out of frame."
+
+    "Ten kings had from the Norman Conqu'ror reign'd
+     With intermix'd and variable fate,
+     When England to her greatest height attain'd
+     Of power, dominion, glory, wealth, and state;
+     After it had with much ado sustain'd
+     The violence of princes, with debate
+     For titles and the often mutinies
+     Of nobles for their ancient liberties."
+
+    "For first, the Norman, conqu'ring all by might,
+     By might was forc'd to keep what he had got;
+     Mixing our customs and the form of right
+     With foreign constitutions, he had brought;
+     Mast'ring the mighty, humbling the poorer wight,
+     By all severest means that could be wrought;
+     And, making the succession doubtful, rent
+     His new-got state, and left it turbulent."
+
+Will it be contended on the one side, that these lines are mean and
+senseless? Or on the other, that they are not prosaic, and for that
+reason unpoetic? This poet's well-merited epithet is that of the
+"well-languaged Daniel;" but likewise, and by the consent of his
+contemporaries no less than of all succeeding critics, "the prosaic
+Daniel." Yet those, who thus designate this wise and amiable writer
+from the frequent incorrespondency of his diction to his metre in the
+majority of his compositions, not only deem them valuable and
+interesting on other accounts; but willingly admit, that there are to
+be found throughout his poems, and especially in his EPISTLES and in
+his HYMEN'S TRIUMPH, many and exquisite specimens of that style which,
+as the neutral ground of prose and verse, is common to both. A fine
+and almost faultless extract, eminent as for other beauties, so for
+its perfection in this species of diction, may be seen in Lamb's
+DRAMATIC SPECIMENS, a work of various interest from the nature of the
+selections themselves, (all from the plays of Shakespeare's
+contemporaries),--and deriving a high additional value from the notes,
+which are full of just and original criticism, expressed with all the
+freshness of originality.
+
+Among the possible effects of practical adherence to a theory, that
+aims to identify the style of prose and verse,--(if it does not indeed
+claim for the latter a yet nearer resemblance to the average style of
+men in the viva voce intercourse of real life)--we might anticipate
+the following as not the least likely to occur. It will happen, as I
+have indeed before observed, that the metre itself, the sole
+acknowledged difference, will occasionally become metre to the eye
+only. The existence of prosaisms, and that they detract from the merit
+of a poem, must at length be conceded, when a number of successive
+lines can be rendered, even to the most delicate ear, unrecognizable
+as verse, or as having even been intended for verse, by simply
+transcribing them as prose; when if the poem be in blank verse, this
+can be effected without any alteration, or at most by merely restoring
+one or two words to their proper places, from which they have been
+transplanted [69] for no assignable cause or reason but that of the
+author's convenience; but if it be in rhyme, by the mere exchange of
+the final word of each line for some other of the same meaning,
+equally appropriate, dignified and euphonic.
+
+The answer or objection in the preface to the anticipated remark "that
+metre paves the way to other distinctions," is contained in the
+following words. "The distinction of rhyme and metre is regular and
+uniform, and not, like that produced by (what is usually called)
+poetic diction, arbitrary, and subject to infinite caprices, upon
+which no calculation whatever can be made. In the one case the reader
+is utterly at the mercy of the poet respecting what imagery or diction
+he may choose to connect with the passion." But is this a poet, of
+whom a poet is speaking? No surely! rather of a fool or madman: or at
+best of a vain or ignorant phantast! And might not brains so wild and
+so deficient make just the same havoc with rhymes and metres, as they
+are supposed to effect with modes and figures of speech? How is the
+reader at the mercy of such men? If he continue to read their
+nonsense, is it not his own fault? The ultimate end of criticism is
+much more to establish the principles of writing, than to furnish
+rules how to pass judgment on what has been written by others; if
+indeed it were possible that the two could be separated. But if it be
+asked, by what principles the poet is to regulate his own style, if he
+do not adhere closely to the sort and order of words which he hears in
+the market, wake, high-road, or plough-field? I reply; by principles,
+the ignorance or neglect of which would convict him of being no poet,
+but a silly or presumptuous usurper of the name. By the principles of
+grammar, logic, psychology. In one word by such a knowledge of the
+facts, material and spiritual, that most appertain to his art, as, if
+it have been governed and applied by good sense, and rendered
+instinctive by habit, becomes the representative and reward of our
+past conscious reasonings, insights, and conclusions, and acquires the
+name of Taste. By what rule that does not leave the reader at the
+poet's mercy, and the poet at his own, is the latter to distinguish
+between the language suitable to suppressed, and the language, which
+is characteristic of indulged, anger? Or between that of rage and that
+of jealousy? Is it obtained by wandering about in search of angry or
+jealous people in uncultivated society, in order to copy their words?
+Or not far rather by the power of imagination proceeding upon the all
+in each of human nature? By meditation, rather than by observation?
+And by the latter in consequence only of the former? As eyes, for
+which the former has pre-determined their field of vision, and to
+which, as to its organ, it communicates a microscopic power? There is
+not, I firmly believe, a man now living, who has, from his own inward
+experience, a clearer intuition, than Mr. Wordsworth himself, that the
+last mentioned are the true sources of genial discrimination. Through
+the same process and by the same creative agency will the poet
+distinguish the degree and kind of the excitement produced by the very
+act of poetic composition. As intuitively will he know, what
+differences of style it at once inspires and justifies; what
+intermixture of conscious volition is natural to that state; and in
+what instances such figures and colours of speech degenerate into mere
+creatures of an arbitrary purpose, cold technical artifices of
+ornament or connection. For, even as truth is its own light and
+evidence, discovering at once itself and falsehood, so is it the
+prerogative of poetic genius to distinguish by parental instinct its
+proper offspring from the changelings, which the gnomes of vanity or
+the fairies of fashion may have laid in its cradle or called by its
+names. Could a rule be given from without, poetry would cease to be
+poetry, and sink into a mechanical art. It would be morphosis, not
+poiaesis. The rules of the Imagination are themselves the very powers
+of growth and production. The words to which they are reducible,
+present only the outlines and external appearance of the fruit. A
+deceptive counterfeit of the superficial form and colours may be
+elaborated; but the marble peach feels cold and heavy, and children
+only put it to their mouths. We find no difficulty in admitting as
+excellent, and the legitimate language of poetic fervour self-
+impassioned, Donne's apostrophe to the Sun in the second stanza of his
+PROGRESS OF THE SOUL.
+
+    "Thee, eye of heaven! this great Soul envies not;
+     By thy male force is all, we have, begot.
+     In the first East thou now beginn'st to shine,
+     Suck'st early balm and island spices there,
+     And wilt anon in thy loose-rein'd career
+     At Tagus, Po, Seine, Thames, and Danow dine,
+     And see at night this western world of mine:
+     Yet hast thou not more nations seen than she,
+     Who before thee one day began to be,
+     And, thy frail light being quench'd, shall long, long outlive
+                                                           thee."
+
+Or the next stanza but one:
+
+    "Great Destiny, the commissary of God,
+     That hast mark'd out a path and period
+     For every thing! Who, where we offspring took,
+     Our ways and ends see'st at one instant: thou
+     Knot of all causes! Thou, whose changeless brow
+     Ne'er smiles nor frowns! O! vouchsafe thou to look,
+     And shew my story in thy eternal book," etc.
+
+As little difficulty do we find in excluding from the honours of
+unaffected warmth and elevation the madness prepense of pseudopoesy,
+or the startling hysteric of weakness over-exerting itself, which
+bursts on the unprepared reader in sundry odes and apostrophes to
+abstract terms. Such are the Odes to jealousy, to Hope, to Oblivion,
+and the like, in Dodsley's collection and the magazines of that day,
+which seldom fail to remind me of an Oxford copy of verses on the two
+SUTTONS, commencing with
+
+    "Inoculation, heavenly maid! descend!"
+
+It is not to be denied that men of undoubted talents, and even poets
+of true, though not of first-rate, genius, have from a mistaken theory
+deluded both themselves and others in the opposite extreme. I once
+read to a company of sensible and well-educated women the introductory
+period of Cowley's preface to his "Pindaric Odes," written in
+imitation of the style and manner of the odes of Pindar. "If," (says
+Cowley), "a man should undertake to translate Pindar, word for word,
+it would be thought that one madman had translated another as may
+appear, when he, that understands not the original, reads the verbal
+traduction of him into Latin prose, than which nothing seems more
+raving." I then proceeded with his own free version of the second
+Olympic, composed for the charitable purpose of rationalizing the
+Theban Eagle.
+
+    "Queen of all harmonious things,
+     Dancing words and speaking strings,
+     What god, what hero, wilt thou sing?
+     What happy man to equal glories bring?
+     Begin, begin thy noble choice,
+     And let the hills around reflect the image of thy voice.
+     Pisa does to Jove belong,
+     Jove and Pisa claim thy song.
+     The fair first-fruits of war, th' Olympic games,
+     Alcides, offer'd up to Jove;
+     Alcides, too, thy strings may move,
+     But, oh! what man to join with these can worthy prove?
+     Join Theron boldly to their sacred names;
+     Theron the next honour claims;
+     Theron to no man gives place,
+     Is first in Pisa's and in Virtue's race;
+     Theron there, and he alone,
+     Ev'n his own swift forefathers has outgone."
+
+One of the company exclaimed, with the full assent of the rest, that
+if the original were madder than this, it must be incurably mad. I
+then translated the ode from the Greek, and as nearly as possible,
+word for word; and the impression was, that in the general movement of
+the periods, in the form of the connections and transitions, and in
+the sober majesty of lofty sense, it appeared to them to approach more
+nearly, than any other poetry they had heard, to the style of our
+Bible, in the prophetic books. The first strophe will suffice as a
+specimen:
+
+    "Ye harp-controlling hymns! (or) ye hymns the sovereigns of harps!
+     What God? what Hero?
+     What Man shall we celebrate?
+     Truly Pisa indeed is of Jove,
+     But the Olympiad (or the Olympic games) did Hercules establish,
+     The first-fruits of the spoils of war.
+     But Theron for the four-horsed car,
+     That bore victory to him,
+     It behoves us now to voice aloud:
+     The Just, the Hospitable,
+     The Bulwark of Agrigentum,
+     Of renowned fathers
+     The Flower, even him
+     Who preserves his native city erect and safe."
+
+But are such rhetorical caprices condemnable only for their deviation
+from the language of real life? and are they by no other means to be
+precluded, but by the rejection of all distinctions between prose and
+verse, save that of metre? Surely good sense, and a moderate insight
+into the constitution of the human mind, would be amply sufficient to
+prove, that such language and such combinations are the native product
+neither of the fancy nor of the imagination; that their operation
+consists in the excitement of surprise by the juxta-position and
+apparent reconciliation of widely different or incompatible things. As
+when, for instance, the hills are made to reflect the image of a
+voice. Surely, no unusual taste is requisite to see clearly, that this
+compulsory juxtaposition is not produced by the presentation of
+impressive or delightful forms to the inward vision, nor by any
+sympathy with the modifying powers with which the genius of the poet
+had united and inspirited all the objects of his thought; that it is
+therefore a species of wit, a pure work of the will, and implies a
+leisure and self-possession both of thought and of feeling,
+incompatible with the steady fervour of a mind possessed and filled
+with the grandeur of its subject. To sum up the whole in one sentence.
+When a poem, or a part of a poem, shall be adduced, which is evidently
+vicious in the figures and centexture of its style, yet for the
+condemnation of which no reason can be assigned, except that it
+differs from the style in which men actually converse, then, and not
+till then, can I hold this theory to be either plausible, or
+practicable, or capable of furnishing either rule, guidance, or
+precaution, that might not, more easily and more safely, as well as
+more naturally, have been deduced in the author's own mind from
+considerations of grammar, logic, and the truth and nature of things,
+confirmed by the authority of works, whose fame is not of one country
+nor of one age.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+Continuation--Concerning the real object which, it is probable, Mr.
+Wordsworth had before him in his critical preface--Elucidation and
+application of this.
+
+
+It might appear from some passages in the former part of Mr.
+Wordsworth's preface, that he meant to confine his theory of style,
+and the necessity of a close accordance with the actual language of
+men, to those particular subjects from low and rustic life, which by
+way of experiment he had purposed to naturalize as a new species in
+our English poetry. But from the train of argument that follows; from
+the reference to Milton; and from the spirit of his critique on Gray's
+sonnet; those sentences appear to have been rather courtesies of
+modesty, than actual limitations of his system. Yet so groundless does
+this system appear on a close examination; and so strange and
+overwhelming [70] in its consequences, that I cannot, and I do not,
+believe that the poet did ever himself adopt it in the unqualified
+sense, in which his expressions have been understood by others, and
+which, indeed, according to all the common laws of interpretation they
+seem to bear. What then did he mean? I apprehend, that in the clear
+perception, not unaccompanied with disgust or contempt, of the gaudy
+affectations of a style which passed current with too many for poetic
+diction, (though in truth it had as little pretensions to poetry, as
+to logic or common sense,) he narrowed his view for the time; and
+feeling a justifiable preference for the language of nature and of
+good sense, even in its humblest and least ornamented forms, he
+suffered himself to express, in terms at once too large and too
+exclusive, his predilection for a style the most remote possible from
+the false and showy splendour which he wished to explode. It is
+possible, that this predilection, at first merely comparative,
+deviated for a time into direct partiality. But the real object which
+he had in view, was, I doubt not, a species of excellence which had
+been long before most happily characterized by the judicious and
+amiable Garve, whose works are so justly beloved and esteemed by the
+Germans, in his remarks on Gellert, from which the following is
+literally translated. "The talent, that is required in order to make,
+excellent verses, is perhaps greater than the philosopher is ready to
+admit, or would find it in his power to acquire: the talent to seek
+only the apt expression of the thought, and yet to find at the same
+time with it the rhyme and the metre. Gellert possessed this happy
+gift, if ever any one of our poets possessed it; and nothing perhaps
+contributed more to the great and universal impression which his
+fables made on their first publication, or conduces more to their
+continued popularity. It was a strange and curious phaenomenon, and
+such as in Germany had been previously unheard of, to read verses in
+which everything was expressed just as one would wish to talk, and yet
+all dignified, attractive, and interesting; and all at the same time
+perfectly correct as to the measure of the syllables and the rhyme. It
+is certain, that poetry when it has attained this excellence makes a
+far greater impression than prose. So much so indeed, that even the
+gratification which the very rhymes afford, becomes then no longer a
+contemptible or trifling gratification." [71]
+
+However novel this phaenomenon may have been in Germany at the time of
+Gellert, it is by no means new, nor yet of recent existence in our
+language. Spite of the licentiousness with which Spenser occasionally
+compels the orthography of his words into a subservience to his
+rhymes, the whole FAIRY QUEEN is an almost continued instance of this
+beauty. Waller's song GO, LOVELY ROSE, is doubtless familiar to most
+of my readers; but if I had happened to have had by me the Poems of
+Cotton, more but far less deservedly celebrated as the author of the
+VIRGIL TRAVESTIED, I should have indulged myself, and I think have
+gratified many, who are not acquainted with his serious works, by
+selecting some admirable specimens of this style. There are not a few
+poems in that volume, replete with every excellence of thought, image,
+and passion, which we expect or desire in the poetry of the milder
+muse; and yet so worded, that the reader sees no one reason either in
+the selection or the order of the words, why he might not have said
+the very same in an appropriate conversation, and cannot conceive how
+indeed he could have expressed such thoughts otherwise without loss or
+injury to his meaning.
+
+But in truth our language is, and from the first dawn of poetry ever
+has been, particularly rich in compositions distinguished by this
+excellence. The final e, which is now mute, in Chaucer's age was
+either sounded or dropt indifferently. We ourselves still use either
+"beloved" or "belov'd" according as the rhyme, or measure, or the
+purpose of more or less solemnity may require. Let the reader then
+only adopt the pronunciation of the poet and of the court, at which he
+lived, both with respect to the final e and to the accentuation of the
+last syllable; I would then venture to ask, what even in the
+colloquial language of elegant and unaffected women, (who are the
+peculiar mistresses of "pure English and undefiled,") what could we
+hear more natural, or seemingly more unstudied, than the following
+stanzas from Chaucer's TROILUS AND CRESEIDE.
+
+    "And after this forth to the gate he wente,
+     Ther as Creseide out rode a ful gode pass,
+     And up and doun there made he many' a wente,
+     And to himselfe ful oft he said, Alas!
+     Fro hennis rode my blisse and my solas
+     As woulde blisful God now for his joie,
+     I might her sene agen come in to Troie!
+       And to the yondir hil I gan her Bide,
+     Alas! and there I toke of her my leve
+     And yond I saw her to her fathir ride;
+     For sorow of whiche mine hert shall to-cleve;
+     And hithir home I came whan it was eve,
+     And here I dwel, out-cast from ally joie,
+     And steal, til I maie sene her efte in Troie.
+       "And of himselfe imaginid he ofte
+     To ben defaitid, pale and woxin lesse
+     Than he was wonte, and that men saidin softe,
+     What may it be? who can the sothe gesse,
+     Why Troilus hath al this hevinesse?
+     And al this n' as but his melancolie,
+     That he had of himselfe suche fantasie.
+       Anothir time imaginin he would
+     That every wight, that past him by the wey,
+     Had of him routhe, and that thei saien should,
+     I am right sory, Troilus wol dey!
+     And thus he drove a daie yet forth or twey,
+     As ye have herde: suche life gan he to lede
+     As he that stode betwixin hope and drede:
+       For which him likid in his songis shewe
+     Th' encheson of his wo as he best might,
+     And made a songe of words but a fewe,
+     Somwhat his woful herte for to light,
+     And whan he was from every mann'is sight
+     With softe voice he of his lady dere,
+     That absent was, gan sing as ye may here:
+
+          *     *     *     *     *     *
+
+       This song, when he thus songin had, ful Bone
+     He fil agen into his sighis olde
+     And every night, as was his wonte to done;
+     He stode the bright moone to beholde
+     And all his sorowe to the moone he tolde,
+     And said: I wis, whan thou art hornid newe,
+     I shall be glad, if al the world be trewe!"
+
+Another exquisite master of this species of style, where the scholar
+and the poet supplies the material, but the perfect well-bred
+gentleman the expressions and the arrangement, is George Herbert. As
+from the nature of the subject, and the too frequent quaintness of the
+thoughts, his TEMPLE; or SACRED POEMS AND PRIVATE EJACULATIONS are
+Comparatively but little known, I shall extract two poems. The first
+is a sonnet, equally admirable for the weight, number, and expression
+of the thoughts, and for the simple dignity of the language. Unless,
+indeed, a fastidious taste should object to the latter half of the
+sixth line. The second is a poem of greater length, which I have
+chosen not only for the present purpose, but likewise as a striking
+example and illustration of an assertion hazarded in a former page of
+these sketches namely, that the characteristic fault of our elder
+poets is the reverse of that, which distinguishes too many of our more
+recent versifiers; the one conveying the most fantastic thoughts in
+the most correct and natural language; the other in the most fantastic
+language conveying the most trivial thoughts. The latter is a riddle
+of words; the former an enigma of thoughts. The one reminds me of an
+odd passage in Drayton's IDEAS
+
+    As other men, so I myself do muse,
+    Why in this sort I wrest invention so;
+    And why these giddy metaphors I use,
+    Leaving the path the greater part do go;
+    I will resolve you: I am lunatic! [72]
+
+The other recalls a still odder passage in THE SYNAGOGUE: or THE
+SHADOW OF THE TEMPLE, a connected series of poems in imitation of
+Herbert's TEMPLE, and, in some editions, annexed to it.
+
+               O how my mind
+                     Is gravell'd!
+                          Not a thought,
+               That I can find,
+                     But's ravell'd
+                          All to nought!
+               Short ends of threds,
+                     And narrow shreds
+                          Of lists,
+                     Knots, snarled ruffs,
+                          Loose broken tufts
+                              Of twists,
+    Are my torn meditations ragged clothing,
+    Which, wound and woven, shape a suit for nothing:
+    One while I think, and then I am in pain
+    To think how to unthink that thought again.
+
+Immediately after these burlesque passages I cannot proceed to the
+extracts promised, without changing the ludicrous tone of feeling by
+the interposition of the three following stanzas of Herbert's.
+
+
+    VIRTUE.
+
+    Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
+    The bridal of the earth and sky,
+    The dew shall weep thy fall to-night;
+        For thou must die.
+
+    Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave
+    Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye
+    Thy root is ever in its grave,
+        And thou must die.
+
+    Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,
+    A box, where sweets compacted lie
+    My music shews, ye have your closes,
+        And all must die.
+
+
+         THE BOSOM SIN:
+    A SONNET BY GEORGE HERBERT.
+
+      Lord, with what care hast thou begirt us round,
+      Parents first season us; then schoolmasters
+      Deliver us to laws; they send us bound
+      To rules of reason, holy messengers,
+    Pulpits and Sundays, sorrow dogging sin,
+      Afflictions sorted, anguish of all sizes,
+      Fine nets and stratagems to catch us in,
+    Bibles laid open, millions of surprises;
+    Blessings beforehand, ties of gratefulness,
+      The sound of Glory ringing in our ears
+      Without, our shame; within, our consciences;
+    Angels and grace, eternal hopes and fears.
+      Yet all these fences and their whole array
+      One cunning bosom-sin blows quite away.
+
+
+    LOVE UNKNOWN.
+
+    Dear friend, sit down, the tale is long and sad
+    And in my faintings, I presume, your love
+    Will more comply than help. A Lord I had,
+    And have, of whom some grounds, which may improve,
+    I hold for two lives, and both lives in me.
+    To him I brought a dish of fruit one day,
+    And in the middle placed my heart. But he
+                                     (I sigh to say)
+    Look'd on a servant, who did know his eye,
+    Better than you know me, or (which is one)
+    Than I myself. The servant instantly,
+    Quitting the fruit, seiz'd on my heart alone,
+    And threw it in a font, wherein did fall
+    A stream of blood, which issued from the side
+    Of a great rock: I well remember all,
+    And have good cause: there it was dipt and dyed,
+    And wash'd, and wrung: the very wringing yet
+    Enforceth tears. "Your heart was foul, I fear."
+    Indeed 'tis true. I did and do commit
+    Many a fault, more than my lease will bear;
+    Yet still ask'd pardon, and was not denied.
+    But you shall hear. After my heart was well,
+    And clean and fair, as I one eventide
+                                     (I sigh to tell)
+    Walk'd by myself abroad, I saw a large
+    And spacious furnace flaming, and thereon
+    A boiling caldron, round about whose verge
+    Was in great letters set AFFLICTION.
+    The greatness shew'd the owner. So I went
+    To fetch a sacrifice out of my fold,
+    Thinking with that, which I did thus present,
+    To warm his love, which, I did fear, grew cold.
+    But as my heart did tender it, the man
+    Who was to take it from me, slipt his hand,
+    And threw my heart into the scalding pan;
+    My heart that brought it (do you understand?)
+    The offerer's heart. "Your heart was hard, I fear."
+    Indeed 'tis true. I found a callous matter
+    Began to spread and to expatiate there:
+    But with a richer drug than scalding water
+    I bath'd it often, ev'n with holy blood,
+    Which at a board, while many drank bare wine,
+    A friend did steal into my cup for good,
+    Ev'n taken inwardly, and most divine
+    To supple hardnesses. But at the length
+    Out of the caldron getting, soon I fled
+    Unto my house, where to repair the strength
+    Which I had lost, I hasted to my bed:
+    But when I thought to sleep out all these faults,
+                                      (I sigh to speak)
+    I found that some had stuff'd the bed with thoughts,
+    I would say thorns. Dear, could my heart not break,
+    When with my pleasures ev'n my rest was gone?
+    Full well I understood who had been there:
+    For I had given the key to none but one:
+    It must be he. "Your heart was dull, I fear."
+    Indeed a slack and sleepy state of mind
+    Did oft possess me; so that when I pray'd,
+    Though my lips went, my heart did stay behind.
+    But all my scores were by another paid,
+    Who took my guilt upon him. "Truly, Friend,
+    "For aught I hear, your Master shews to you
+    "More favour than you wot of. Mark the end.
+    "The font did only what was old renew
+    "The caldron suppled what was grown too hard:
+    "The thorns did quicken what was grown too dull:
+    "All did but strive to mend what you had marr'd.
+    "Wherefore be cheer'd, and praise him to the full
+    "Each day, each hour, each moment of the week
+    "Who fain would have you be new, tender quick."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+The former subject continued--The neutral style, or that common to
+Prose and Poetry, exemplified by specimens from Chaucer, Herbert, and
+others.
+
+
+I have no fear in declaring my conviction, that the excellence defined
+and exemplified in the preceding chapter is not the characteristic
+excellence of Mr. Wordsworth's style; because I can add with equal
+sincerity, that it is precluded by higher powers. The praise of
+uniform adherence to genuine, logical English is undoubtedly his; nay,
+laying the main emphasis on the word uniform, I will dare add that, of
+all contemporary poets, it is his alone. For, in a less absolute sense
+of the word, I should certainly include Mr. Bowies, Lord Byron, and,
+as to all his later writings, Mr. Southey, the exceptions in their
+works being so few and unimportant. But of the specific excellence
+described in the quotation from Garve, I appear to find more, and more
+undoubted specimens in the works of others; for instance, among the
+minor poems of Mr. Thomas Moore, and of our illustrious Laureate. To
+me it will always remain a singular and noticeable fact; that a
+theory, which would establish this lingua communis, not only as the
+best, but as the only commendable style, should have proceeded from a
+poet, whose diction, next to that of Shakespeare and Milton, appears
+to me of all others the most individualized and characteristic. And
+let it be remembered too, that I am now interpreting the controverted
+passages of Mr. Wordsworth's critical preface by the purpose and
+object, which he may be supposed to have intended, rather than by the
+sense which the words themselves must convey, if they are taken
+without this allowance.
+
+A person of any taste, who had but studied three or four of
+Shakespeare's principal plays, would without the name affixed scarcely
+fail to recognise as Shakespeare's a quotation from any other play,
+though but of a few lines. A similar peculiarity, though in a less
+degree, attends Mr. Wordsworth's style, whenever he speaks in his own
+person; or whenever, though under a feigned name, it is clear that he
+himself is still speaking, as in the different dramatis personae of
+THE RECLUSE. Even in the other poems, in which he purposes to be most
+dramatic, there are few in which it does not occasionally burst forth.
+The reader might often address the poet in his own words with
+reference to the persons introduced:
+
+    "It seems, as I retrace the ballad line by line
+     That but half of it is theirs, and the better half is thine."
+
+Who, having been previously acquainted with any considerable portion
+of Mr. Wordsworth's publications, and having studied them with a full
+feeling of the author's genius, would not at once claim as
+Wordsworthian the little poem on the rainbow?
+
+    "The Child is father of the Man, etc."
+
+Or in the LUCY GRAY?
+
+    "No mate, no comrade Lucy knew;
+     She dwelt on a wide moor;
+     The sweetest thing that ever grew
+     Beside a human door."
+
+Or in the IDLE SHEPHERD-BOYS?
+
+    "Along the river's stony marge
+     The sand-lark chants a joyous song;
+     The thrush is busy in the wood,
+     And carols loud and strong.
+     A thousand lambs are on the rocks,
+     All newly born! both earth and sky
+     Keep jubilee, and more than all,
+     Those boys with their green coronal;
+     They never hear the cry,
+     That plaintive cry! which up the hill
+     Comes from the depth of Dungeon-Ghyll."
+
+Need I mention the exquisite description of the Sea-Loch in THE BLIND
+HIGHLAND BOY. Who but a poet tells a tale in such language to the
+little ones by the fire-side as--
+
+    "Yet had he many a restless dream;
+     Both when he heard the eagle's scream,
+     And when he heard the torrents roar,
+     And heard the water beat the shore
+         Near where their cottage stood.
+
+    Beside a lake their cottage stood,
+    Not small like our's, a peaceful flood;
+    But one of mighty size, and strange;
+    That, rough or smooth, is full of change,
+        And stirring in its bed.
+
+    For to this lake, by night and day,
+    The great Sea-water finds its way
+    Through long, long windings of the hills,
+    And drinks up all the pretty rills
+        And rivers large and strong:
+
+    Then hurries back the road it came
+    Returns on errand still the same;
+    This did it when the earth was new;
+    And this for evermore will do,
+        As long as earth shall last.
+
+    And, with the coming of the tide,
+    Come boats and ships that sweetly ride,
+    Between the woods and lofty rocks;
+    And to the shepherds with their flocks
+        Bring tales of distant lands."
+
+I might quote almost the whole of his RUTH, but take the following
+stanzas:
+
+    But, as you have before been told,
+    This Stripling, sportive, gay, and bold,
+    And, with his dancing crest,
+    So beautiful, through savage lands
+    Had roamed about with vagrant bands
+        Of Indians in the West.
+
+    The wind, the tempest roaring high,
+    The tumult of a tropic sky,
+    Might well be dangerous food
+    For him, a Youth to whom was given
+    So much of earth--so much of heaven,
+        And such impetuous blood.
+
+    Whatever in those climes he found
+    Irregular in sight or sound
+    Did to his mind impart
+    A kindred impulse, seemed allied
+    To his own powers, and justified
+        The workings of his heart.
+
+    Nor less, to feed voluptuous thought,
+    The beauteous forms of nature wrought,
+    Fair trees and lovely flowers;
+    The breezes their own languor lent;
+    The stars had feelings, which they sent
+        Into those magic bowers.
+
+    Yet in his worst pursuits, I ween,
+    That sometimes there did intervene
+    Pure hopes of high intent
+    For passions linked to forms so fair
+    And stately, needs must have their share
+        Of noble sentiment."
+
+But from Mr. Wordsworth's more elevated compositions, which already
+form three-fourths of his works; and will, I trust, constitute
+hereafter a still larger proportion;--from these, whether in rhyme or
+blank verse, it would be difficult and almost superfluous to select
+instances of a diction peculiarly his own, of a style which cannot be
+imitated without its being at once recognised, as originating in Mr.
+Wordsworth. It would not be easy to open on any one of his loftier
+strains, that does not contain examples of this; and more in
+proportion as the lines are more excellent, and most like the author.
+For those, who may happen to have been less familiar with his
+writings, I will give three specimens taken with little choice. The
+first from the lines on the BOY OF WINANDER-MERE,--who
+
+    "Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls,
+     That they might answer him.--And they would shout
+     Across the watery vale, and shout again,
+     With long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud
+     Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild
+     Of mirth and jocund din! And when it chanced,
+     That pauses of deep silence mocked his skill,
+     Then sometimes in that silence, while he hung
+     Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
+     Has carried far into his heart the voice
+     Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene [73]
+     Would enter unawares into his mind
+     With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
+     Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received
+     Into the bosom of the steady lake."
+
+The second shall be that noble imitation of Drayton [74] (if it was
+not rather a coincidence) in the lines TO JOANNA.
+
+    --"When I had gazed perhaps two minutes' space,
+    Joanna, looking in my eyes, beheld
+    That ravishment of mine, and laughed aloud.
+    The Rock, like something starting from a sleep,
+    Took up the Lady's voice, and laughed again!
+    That ancient woman seated on Helm-crag
+    Was ready with her cavern; Hammar-scar
+    And the tall Steep of Silver-How sent forth
+    A noise of laughter; southern Lougbrigg heard,
+    And Fairfield answered with a mountain tone.
+    Helvellyn far into the clear blue sky
+    Carried the lady's voice!--old Skiddaw blew
+    His speaking trumpet!--back out of the clouds
+    From Glaramara southward came the voice:
+    And Kirkstone tossed it from its misty head!"
+
+The third, which is in rhyme, I take from the SONG AT THE FEAST OF
+BROUGHAM CASTLE, upon the restoration of Lord Clifford, the Shepherd,
+to the Estates and Honours of his Ancestors.
+
+        ------"Now another day is come,
+        Fitter hope, and nobler doom;
+        He hath thrown aside his crook,
+        And hath buried deep his book;
+        Armour rusting in his halls
+        On the blood of Clifford calls,--
+        'Quell the Scot,' exclaims the Lance!
+        Bear me to the heart of France,
+        Is the longing of the Shield--
+        Tell thy name, thou trembling Field!--
+        Field of death, where'er thou be,
+        Groan thou with our victory!
+        Happy day, and mighty hour,
+        When our Shepherd, in his power,
+        Mailed and horsed, with lance and sword,
+        To his ancestors restored,
+        Like a re-appearing Star,
+        Like a glory from afar,
+        First shall head the flock of war!"
+
+   "Alas! the fervent harper did not know,
+    That for a tranquil Soul the Lay was framed,
+    Who, long compelled in humble walks to go,
+    Was softened into feeling, soothed, and tamed.
+
+    Love had he found in huts where poor men lie;
+    His daily teachers had been woods and rills,
+    The silence that is in the starry sky,
+    The sleep that is among the lonely hills."
+
+The words themselves in the foregoing extracts, are, no doubt,
+sufficiently common for the greater part.--But in what poem are they
+not so, if we except a few misadventurous attempts to translate the
+arts and sciences into verse? In THE EXCURSION the number of
+polysyllabic (or what the common people call, dictionary) words is
+more than usually great. And so must it needs be, in proportion to the
+number and variety of an author's conceptions, and his solicitude to
+express them with precision.--But are those words in those places
+commonly employed in real life to express the same thought or outward
+thing? Are they the style used in the ordinary intercourse of spoken
+words? No! nor are the modes of connections; and still less the breaks
+and transitions. Would any but a poet--at least could any one without
+being conscious that he had expressed himself with noticeable
+vivacity--have described a bird singing loud by, "The thrush is busy
+in the wood?"--or have spoken of boys with a string of club-moss round
+their rusty hats, as the boys "with their green coronal?"--or have
+translated a beautiful May-day into "Both earth and sky keep jubilee!"
+--or have brought all the different marks and circumstances of a
+sealoch before the mind, as the actions of a living and acting power?
+Or have represented the reflection of the sky in the water, as "That
+uncertain heaven received into the bosom of the steady lake?" Even the
+grammatical construction is not unfrequently peculiar; as "The wind,
+the tempest roaring high, the tumult of a tropic sky, might well be
+dangerous food to him, a youth to whom was given, etc." There is a
+peculiarity in the frequent use of the asymartaeton (that is, the
+omission of the connective particle before the last of several words,
+or several sentences used grammatically as single words, all being in
+the same case and governing or governed by the same verb) and not less
+in the construction of words by apposition ("to him, a youth"). In
+short, were there excluded from Mr. Wordsworth's poetic compositions
+all, that a literal adherence to the theory of his preface would
+exclude, two thirds at least of the marked beauties of his poetry must
+be erased. For a far greater number of lines would be sacrificed than
+in any other recent poet; because the pleasure received from
+Wordsworth's poems being less derived either from excitement of
+curiosity or the rapid flow of narration, the striking passages form a
+larger proportion of their value. I do not adduce it as a fair
+criterion of comparative excellence, nor do I even think it such; but
+merely as matter of fact. I affirm, that from no contemporary writer
+could so many lines be quoted, without reference to the poem in which
+they are found, for their own independent weight or beauty. From the
+sphere of my own experience I can bring to my recollection three
+persons of no every-day powers and acquirements, who had read the
+poems of others with more and more unallayed pleasure, and had thought
+more highly of their authors, as poets; who yet have confessed to me,
+that from no modern work had so many passages started up anew in their
+minds at different times, and as different occasions had awakened a
+meditative mood.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+Remarks on the present mode of conducting critical journals.
+
+
+Long have I wished to see a fair and philosophical inquisition into
+the character of Wordsworth, as a poet, on the evidence of his
+published works; and a positive, not a comparative, appreciation of
+their characteristic excellencies, deficiencies, and defects. I know
+no claim that the mere opinion of any individual can have to weigh
+down the opinion of the author himself; against the probability of
+whose parental partiality we ought to set that of his having thought
+longer and more deeply on the subject. But I should call that
+investigation fair and philosophical in which the critic announces and
+endeavours to establish the principles, which he holds for the
+foundation of poetry in general, with the specification of these in
+their application to the different classes of poetry. Having thus
+prepared his canons of criticism for praise and condemnation, he would
+proceed to particularize the most striking passages to which he deems
+them applicable, faithfully noticing the frequent or infrequent
+recurrence of similar merits or defects, and as faithfully
+distinguishing what is characteristic from what is accidental, or a
+mere flagging of the wing. Then if his premises be rational, his
+deductions legitimate, and his conclusions justly applied, the reader,
+and possibly the poet himself, may adopt his judgment in the light of
+judgment and in the independence of free-agency. If he has erred, he
+presents his errors in a definite place and tangible form, and holds
+the torch and guides the way to their detection.
+
+I most willingly admit, and estimate at a high value, the services
+which the EDINBURGH REVIEW, and others formed afterwards on the same
+plan, have rendered to society in the diffusion of knowledge. I think
+the commencement of the EDINBURGH REVIEW an important epoch in
+periodical criticism; and that it has a claim upon the gratitude of
+the literary republic, and indeed of the reading public at large, for
+having originated the scheme of reviewing those books only, which are
+susceptible and deserving of argumentative criticism. Not less
+meritorious, and far more faithfully and in general far more ably
+executed, is their plan of supplying the vacant place of the trash or
+mediocrity, wisely left to sink into oblivion by its own weight, with
+original essays on the most interesting subjects of the time,
+religious, or political; in which the titles of the books or pamphlets
+prefixed furnish only the name and occasion of the disquisition. I do
+not arraign the keenness, or asperity of its damnatory style, in and
+for itself, as long as the author is addressed or treated as the mere
+impersonation of the work then under trial. I have no quarrel with
+them on this account, as long as no personal allusions are admitted,
+and no re-commitment (for new trial) of juvenile performances, that
+were published, perhaps forgotten, many years before the commencement
+of the review: since for the forcing back of such works to public
+notice no motives are easily assignable, but such as are furnished to
+the critic by his own personal malignity; or what is still worse, by a
+habit of malignity in the form of mere wantonness.
+
+    "No private grudge they need, no personal spite
+     The viva sectio is its own delight!
+     All enmity, all envy, they disclaim,
+     Disinterested thieves of our good name:
+     Cool, sober murderers of their neighbour's fame!"
+                                                 S. T. C.
+
+Every censure, every sarcasm respecting a publication which the
+critic, with the criticised work before him, can make good, is the
+critic's right. The writer is authorized to reply, but not to
+complain. Neither can anyone prescribe to the critic, how soft or how
+hard; how friendly, or how bitter, shall be the phrases which he is to
+select for the expression of such reprehension or ridicule. The critic
+must know, what effect it is his object to produce; and with a view to
+this effect must he weigh his words. But as soon as the critic
+betrays, that he knows more of his author, than the author's
+publications could have told him; as soon as from this more intimate
+knowledge, elsewhere obtained, he avails himself of the slightest
+trait against the author; his censure instantly becomes personal
+injury, his sarcasms personal insults. He ceases to be a critic, and
+takes on him the most contemptible character to which a rational
+creature can be degraded, that of a gossip, backbiter, and
+pasquillant: but with this heavy aggravation, that he steals the
+unquiet, the deforming passions of the world into the museum; into the
+very place which, next to the chapel and oratory, should be our
+sanctuary, and secure place of refuge; offers abominations on the
+altar of the Muses; and makes its sacred paling the very circle in
+which he conjures up the lying and profane spirit.
+
+This determination of unlicensed personality, and of permitted and
+legitimate censure, (which I owe in part to the illustrious Lessing,
+himself a model of acute, spirited, sometimes stinging, but always
+argumentative and honourable, criticism) is beyond controversy the
+true one: and though I would not myself exercise all the rights of the
+latter, yet, let but the former be excluded, I submit myself to its
+exercise in the hands of others, without complaint and without
+resentment.
+
+Let a communication be formed between any number of learned men in the
+various branches of science and literature; and whether the president
+and central committee be in London, or Edinburgh, if only they
+previously lay aside their individuality, and pledge themselves
+inwardly, as well as ostensibly, to administer judgment according to a
+constitution and code of laws; and if by grounding this code on the
+two-fold basis of universal morals and philosophic reason, independent
+of all foreseen application to particular works and authors, they
+obtain the right to speak each as the representative of their body
+corporate; they shall have honour and good wishes from me, and I shall
+accord to them their fair dignities, though self-assumed, not less
+cheerfully than if I could inquire concerning them in the herald's
+office, or turn to them in the book of peerage. However loud may be
+the outcries for prevented or subverted reputation, however numerous
+and impatient the complaints of merciless severity and insupportable
+despotism, I shall neither feel, nor utter aught but to the defence
+and justification of the critical machine. Should any literary Quixote
+find himself provoked by its sounds and regular movements, I should
+admonish him with Sancho Panza, that it is no giant but a windmill;
+there it stands on its own place, and its own hillock, never goes out
+of its way to attack anyone, and to none and from none either gives or
+asks assistance. When the public press has poured in any part of its
+produce between its mill-stones, it grinds it off, one man's sack the
+same as another, and with whatever wind may happen to be then blowing.
+All the two-and-thirty winds are alike its friends. Of the whole wide
+atmosphere it does not desire a single finger-breadth more than what
+is necessary for its sails to turn round in. But this space must be
+left free and unimpeded. Gnats, beetles, wasps, butterflies, and the
+whole tribe of ephemerals and insignificants, may flit in and out and
+between; may hum, and buzz, and jar; may shrill their tiny pipes, and
+wind their puny horns, unchastised and unnoticed. But idlers and
+bravadoes of larger size and prouder show must beware, how they place
+themselves within its sweep. Much less may they presume to lay hands
+on the sails, the strength of which is neither greater nor less than
+as the wind is, which drives them round. Whomsoever the remorseless
+arm slings aloft, or whirls along with it in the air, he has himself
+alone to blame; though, when the same arm throws him from it, it will
+more often double than break the force of his fall.
+
+Putting aside the too manifest and too frequent interference of
+national party, and even personal predilection or aversion; and
+reserving for deeper feelings those worse and more criminal intrusions
+into the sacredness of private life, which not seldom merit legal
+rather than literary chastisement, the two principal objects and
+occasions which I find for blame and regret in the conduct of the
+review in question are first, its unfaithfulness to its own announced
+and excellent plan, by subjecting to criticism works neither indecent
+nor immoral, yet of such trifling importance even in point of size
+and, according to the critic's own verdict, so devoid of all merit, as
+must excite in the most candid mind the suspicion, either that dislike
+or vindictive feelings were at work; or that there was a cold
+prudential pre-determination to increase the sale of the review by
+flattering the malignant passions of human nature. That I may not
+myself become subject to the charge, which I am bringing against
+others, by an accusation without proof, I refer to the article on Dr.
+Rennell's sermon in the very first number of the EDINBURGH REVIEW as
+an illustration of my meaning. If in looking through all the
+succeeding volumes the reader should find this a solitary instance, I
+must submit to that painful forfeiture of esteem, which awaits a
+groundless or exaggerated charge.
+
+The second point of objection belongs to this review only in common
+with all other works of periodical criticism: at least, it applies in
+common to the general system of all, whatever exception there may be
+in favour of particular articles. Or if it attaches to THE EDINBURGH
+REVIEW, and to its only corrival (THE QUARTERLY), with any peculiar
+force, this results from the superiority of talent, acquirement, and
+information which both have so undeniably displayed; and which
+doubtless deepens the regret though not the blame. I am referring to
+the substitution of assertion for argument; to the frequency of
+arbitrary and sometimes petulant verdicts, not seldom unsupported even
+by a single quotation from the work condemned, which might at least
+have explained the critic's meaning, if it did not prove the justice
+of his sentence. Even where this is not the case, the extracts are too
+often made without reference to any general grounds or rules from
+which the faultiness or inadmissibility of the qualities attributed
+may be deduced; and without any attempt to show, that the qualities
+are attributable to the passage extracted. I have met with such
+extracts from Mr. Wordsworth's poems, annexed to such assertions, as
+led me to imagine, that the reviewer, having written his critique
+before he had read the work, had then pricked with a pin for passages,
+wherewith to illustrate the various branches of his preconceived
+opinions. By what principle of rational choice can we suppose a critic
+to have been directed (at least in a Christian country, and himself,
+we hope, a Christian) who gives the following lines, portraying the
+fervour of solitary devotion excited by the magnificent display of the
+Almighty's works, as a proof and example of an author's tendency to
+downright ravings, and absolute unintelligibility?
+
+    "O then what soul was his, when on the tops
+     Of the high mountains he beheld the sun
+     Rise up, and bathe the world in light! He looked--
+     Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth,
+     And ocean's liquid mass, beneath him lay
+     In gladness and deep joy. The clouds were touched,
+     And in their silent faces did he read
+     Unutterable love. Sound needed none,
+     Nor any voice of joy: his spirit drank
+     The spectacle! sensation, soul, and form,
+     All melted into him; they swallowed up
+     His animal being; in them did he live,
+     And by them did he live: they were his life."
+
+Can it be expected, that either the author or his admirers, should be
+induced to pay any serious attention to decisions which prove nothing
+but the pitiable state of the critic's own taste and sensibility? On
+opening the review they see a favourite passage, of the force and
+truth of which they had an intuitive certainty in their own inward
+experience confirmed, if confirmation it could receive, by the
+sympathy of their most enlightened friends; some of whom perhaps, even
+in the world's opinion, hold a higher intellectual rank than the
+critic himself would presume to claim. And this very passage they find
+selected, as the characteristic effusion of a mind deserted by
+reason!--as furnishing evidence that the writer was raving, or he
+could not have thus strung words together without sense or purpose! No
+diversity of taste seems capable of explaining such a contrast in
+judgment.
+
+That I had over-rated the merit of a passage or poem, that I had erred
+concerning the degree of its excellence, I might be easily induced to
+believe or apprehend. But that lines, the sense of which I had
+analysed and found consonant with all the best convictions of my
+understanding; and the imagery and diction of which had collected
+round those convictions my noblest as well as my most delightful
+feelings; that I should admit such lines to be mere nonsense or
+lunacy, is too much for the most ingenious arguments to effect. But
+that such a revolution of taste should be brought about by a few broad
+assertions, seems little less than impossible. On the contrary, it
+would require an effort of charity not to dismiss the criticism with
+the aphorism of the wise man, in animam malevolam sapientia haud
+intrare potest.
+
+What then if this very critic should have cited a large number of
+single lines and even of long paragraphs, which he himself
+acknowledges to possess eminent and original beauty? What if he
+himself has owned, that beauties as great are scattered in abundance
+throughout the whole book? And yet, though under this impression,
+should have commenced his critique in vulgar exultation with a
+prophecy meant to secure its own fulfilment? With a "This won't do!"
+What? if after such acknowledgments extorted from his own judgment he
+should proceed from charge to charge of tameness and raving; flights
+and flatness; and at length, consigning the author to the house of
+incurables, should conclude with a strain of rudest contempt evidently
+grounded in the distempered state of his own moral associations?
+Suppose too all this done without a single leading principle
+established or even announced, and without any one attempt at
+argumentative deduction, though the poet had presented a more than
+usual opportunity for it, by having previously made public his own
+principles of judgment in poetry, and supported them by a connected
+train of reasoning!
+
+The office and duty of the poet is to select the most dignified as
+well as
+
+    "The gayest, happiest attitude of things."
+
+The reverse, for in all cases a reverse is possible, is the
+appropriate business of burlesque and travesty, a predominant taste
+for which has been always deemed a mark of a low and degraded mind.
+When I was at Rome, among many other visits to the tomb of Julius II.
+I went thither once with a Prussian artist, a man of genius and great
+vivacity of feeling. As we were gazing on Michael Angelo's MOSES, our
+conversation turned on the horns and beard of that stupendous statue;
+of the necessity of each to support the other; of the super-human
+effect of the former, and the necessity of the existence of both to
+give a harmony and integrity both to the image and the feeling excited
+by it. Conceive them removed, and the statue would become un-natural,
+without being super-natural. We called to mind the horns of the rising
+sun, and I repeated the noble passage from Taylor's HOLY DYING. That
+horns were the emblem of power and sovereignty among the Eastern
+nations, and are still retained as such in Abyssinia; the Achelous of
+the ancient Greeks; and the probable ideas and feelings, that
+originally suggested the mixture of the human and the brute form in
+the figure, by which they realized the idea of their mysterious Pan,
+as representing intelligence blended with a darker power, deeper,
+mightier, and more universal than the conscious intellect of man; than
+intelligence;--all these thoughts and recollections passed in
+procession before our minds. My companion who possessed more than his
+share of the hatred, which his countrymen bore to the French, had just
+observed to me, "a Frenchman, Sir! is the only animal in the human
+shape, that by no possibility can lift itself up to religion or
+poetry:" when, lo! two French officers of distinction and rank entered
+the church! "Mark you," whispered the Prussian, "the first thing which
+those scoundrels will notice--(for they will begin by instantly
+noticing the statue in parts, without one moment's pause of admiration
+impressed by the whole)--will be the horns and the beard. And the
+associations, which they will immediately connect with them will be
+those of a he-goat and a cuckold." Never did man guess more luckily.
+Had he inherited a portion of the great legislator's prophetic powers,
+whose statue we had been contemplating, he could scarcely have uttered
+words more coincident with the result: for even as he had said, so it
+came to pass.
+
+In THE EXCURSION the poet has introduced an old man, born in humble
+but not abject circumstances, who had enjoyed more than usual
+advantages of education, both from books and from the more awful
+discipline of nature. This person he represents, as having been driven
+by the restlessness of fervid feelings, and from a craving intellect
+to an itinerant life; and as having in consequence passed the larger
+portion of his time, from earliest manhood, in villages and hamlets
+from door to door,
+
+     "A vagrant Merchant bent beneath his load."
+
+Now whether this be a character appropriate to a lofty didactick poem,
+is perhaps questionable. It presents a fair subject for controversy;
+and the question is to be determined by the congruity or incongruity
+of such a character with what shall be proved to be the essential
+constituents of poetry. But surely the critic who, passing by all the
+opportunities which such a mode of life would present to such a man;
+all the advantages of the liberty of nature, of solitude, and of
+solitary thought; all the varieties of places and seasons, through
+which his track had lain, with all the varying imagery they bring with
+them; and lastly, all the observations of men,
+
+    "Their manners, their enjoyments, and pursuits,
+     Their passions and their feelings="
+
+which the memory of these yearly journeys must have given and recalled
+to such a mind--the critic, I say, who from the multitude of possible
+associations should pass by all these in order to fix his attention
+exclusively on the pin-papers, and stay-tapes, which might have been
+among the wares of his pack; this critic, in my opinion, cannot be
+thought to possess a much higher or much healthier state of moral
+feeling, than the Frenchmen above recorded.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+The characteristic defects of Wordsworth's poetry, with the principles
+from which the judgment, that they are defects, is deduced--Their
+proportion to the beauties--For the greatest part characteristic of
+his theory only.
+
+
+If Mr. Wordsworth have set forth principles of poetry which his
+arguments are insufficient to support, let him and those who have
+adopted his sentiments be set right by the confutation of those
+arguments, and by the substitution of more philosophical principles.
+And still let the due credit be given to the portion and importance of
+the truths, which are blended with his theory; truths, the too
+exclusive attention to which had occasioned its errors, by tempting
+him to carry those truths beyond their proper limits. If his mistaken
+theory have at all influenced his poetic compositions, let the effects
+be pointed out, and the instances given. But let it likewise be shown,
+how far the influence has acted; whether diffusively, or only by
+starts; whether the number and importance of the poems and passages
+thus infected be great or trifling compared with the sound portion;
+and lastly, whether they are inwoven into the texture of his works, or
+are loose and separable. The result of such a trial would evince
+beyond a doubt, what it is high time to announce decisively and aloud,
+that the supposed characteristics of Mr. Wordsworth's poetry, whether
+admired or reprobated; whether they are simplicity or simpleness;
+faithful adherence to essential nature, or wilful selections from
+human nature of its meanest forms and under the least attractive
+associations; are as little the real characteristics of his poetry at
+large, as of his genius and the constitution of his mind.
+
+In a comparatively small number of poems he chose to try an
+experiment; and this experiment we will suppose to have failed. Yet
+even in these poems it is impossible not to perceive that the natural
+tendency of the poet's mind is to great objects and elevated
+conceptions. The poem entitled FIDELITY is for the greater part
+written in language, as unraised and naked as any perhaps in the two
+volumes. Yet take the following stanza and compare it with the
+preceding stanzas of the same poem.
+
+    "There sometimes doth a leaping fish
+     Send through the tarn a lonely cheer;
+     The crags repeat the raven's croak,
+     In symphony austere;
+     Thither the rainbow comes--the cloud--
+     And mists that spread the flying shroud;
+     And sun-beams; and the sounding blast,
+     That, if it could, would hurry past;
+     But that enormous barrier holds it fast."
+
+Or compare the four last lines of the concluding stanza with the
+former half.
+
+    "Yes, proof was plain that, since the day
+     On which the Traveller thus had died,
+     The Dog had watched about the spot,
+     Or by his Master's side:
+     How nourish'd here through such long time
+     He knows, who gave that love sublime,--
+     And gave that strength of feeling, great
+     Above all human estimate!"
+
+Can any candid and intelligent mind hesitate in determining, which of
+these best represents the tendency and native character of the poet's
+genius? Will he not decide that the one was written because the poet
+would so write, and the other because he could not so entirely repress
+the force and grandeur of his mind, but that he must in some part or
+other of every composition write otherwise? In short, that his only
+disease is the being out of his element; like the swan, that, having
+amused himself, for a while, with crushing the weeds on the river's
+bank, soon returns to his own majestic movements on its reflecting and
+sustaining surface. Let it be observed that I am here supposing the
+imagined judge, to whom I appeal, to have already decided against the
+poet's theory, as far as it is different from the principles of the
+art, generally acknowledged.
+
+I cannot here enter into a detailed examination of Mr. Wordsworth's
+works; but I will attempt to give the main results of my own judgment,
+after an acquaintance of many years, and repeated perusals. And
+though, to appreciate the defects of a great mind it is necessary to
+understand previously its characteristic excellences, yet I have
+already expressed myself with sufficient fulness, to preclude most of
+the ill effects that might arise from my pursuing a contrary
+arrangement. I will therefore commence with what I deem the prominent
+defects of his poems hitherto published.
+
+The first characteristic, though only occasional defect, which I
+appear to myself to find in these poems is the inconstancy of the
+style. Under this name I refer to the sudden and unprepared
+transitions from lines or sentences of peculiar felicity--(at all
+events striking and original)--to a style, not only unimpassioned but
+undistinguished. He sinks too often and too abruptly to that style,
+which I should place in the second division of language, dividing it
+into the three species; first, that which is peculiar to poetry;
+second, that which is only proper in prose; and third, the neutral or
+common to both. There have been works, such as Cowley's Essay on
+Cromwell, in which prose and verse are intermixed (not as in the
+Consolation of Boetius, or the ARGENIS of Barclay, by the insertion of
+poems supposed to have been spoken or composed on occasions previously
+related in prose, but) the poet passing from one to the other, as the
+nature of the thoughts or his own feelings dictated. Yet this mode of
+composition does not satisfy a cultivated taste. There is something
+unpleasant in the being thus obliged to alternate states of feeling so
+dissimilar, and this too in a species of writing, the pleasure from
+which is in part derived from the preparation and previous expectation
+of the reader. A portion of that awkwardness is felt which hangs upon
+the introduction of songs in our modern comic operas; and to prevent
+which the judicious Metastasio (as to whose exquisite taste there can
+be no hesitation, whatever doubts may be entertained as to his poetic
+genius) uniformly placed the aria at the end of the scene, at the same
+time that he almost always raises and impassions the style of the
+recitative immediately preceding. Even in real life, the difference is
+great and evident between words used as the arbitrary marks of
+thought, our smooth market-coin of intercourse, with the image and
+superscription worn out by currency; and those which convey pictures
+either borrowed from one outward object to enliven and particularize
+some other; or used allegorically to body forth the inward state of
+the person speaking; or such as are at least the exponents of his
+peculiar turn and unusual extent of faculty. So much so indeed, that
+in the social circles of private life we often find a striking use of
+the latter put a stop to the general flow of conversation, and by the
+excitement arising from concentred attention produce a sort of damp
+and interruption for some minutes after. But in the perusal of works
+of literary art, we prepare ourselves for such language; and the
+business of the writer, like that of a painter whose subject requires
+unusual splendour and prominence, is so to raise the lower and neutral
+tints, that what in a different style would be the commanding colours,
+are here used as the means of that gentle degradation requisite in
+order to produce the effect of a whole. Where this is not achieved in
+a poem, the metre merely reminds the reader of his claims in order to
+disappoint them; and where this defect occurs frequently, his feelings
+are alternately startled by anticlimax and hyperclimax.
+
+I refer the reader to the exquisite stanzas cited for another purpose
+from THE BLIND HIGHLAND BOY; and then annex, as being in my opinion
+instances of this disharmony in style, the two following:
+
+    "And one, the rarest, was a shell,
+     Which he, poor child, had studied well:
+     The shell of a green turtle, thin
+     And hollow;--you might sit therein,
+         It was so wide, and deep."
+
+    "Our Highland Boy oft visited
+     The house which held this prize; and, led
+     By choice or chance, did thither come
+     One day, when no one was at home,
+         And found the door unbarred."
+
+Or page 172, vol. I.
+
+    "'Tis gone forgotten, let me do
+     My best. There was a smile or two--
+     I can remember them, I see
+     The smiles worth all the world to me.
+     Dear Baby! I must lay thee down:
+     Thou troublest me with strange alarms;
+     Smiles hast thou, sweet ones of thine own;
+     I cannot keep thee in my arms;
+     For they confound me: as it is,
+     I have forgot those smiles of his!"
+
+Or page 269, vol. I.
+
+    "Thou hast a nest, for thy love and thy rest
+     And though little troubled with sloth
+     Drunken lark! thou would'st be loth
+     To be such a traveller as I.
+         Happy, happy liver!
+     _With a soul as strong as a mountain river
+     Pouring out praise to th' Almighty giver,_
+     Joy and jollity be with us both!
+     Hearing thee or else some other,
+         As merry a brother
+     I on the earth will go plodding on
+     By myself cheerfully till the day is done."
+
+The incongruity, which I appear to find in this passage, is that of
+the two noble lines in italics with the preceding and following. So
+vol. II. page 30.
+
+    "Close by a Pond, upon the further side,
+     He stood alone; a minute's space I guess,
+     I watch'd him, he continuing motionless
+     To the Pool's further margin then I drew;
+     He being all the while before me full in view."
+
+Compare this with the repetition of the same image, the next stanza
+but two.
+
+    "And, still as I drew near with gentle pace,
+     Beside the little pond or moorish flood
+     Motionless as a Cloud the Old Man stood,
+     That heareth not the loud winds when they call;
+     And moveth altogether, if it move at all."
+
+Or lastly, the second of the three following stanzas, compared both
+with the first and the third.
+
+    "My former thoughts returned; the fear that kills;
+     And hope that is unwilling to be fed;
+     Cold, pain, and labour, and all fleshly ills;
+     And mighty Poets in their misery dead.
+     But now, perplex'd by what the Old Man had said,
+     My question eagerly did I renew,
+     'How is it that you live, and what is it you do?'
+
+    "He with a smile did then his words repeat;
+     And said, that gathering Leeches far and wide
+     He travell'd; stirring thus about his feet
+     The waters of the Ponds where they abide.
+     `Once I could meet with them on every side;
+     'But they have dwindled long by slow decay;
+     'Yet still I persevere, and find them where I may.'
+
+     While he was talking thus, the lonely place,
+     The Old Man's shape, and speech, all troubled me
+     In my mind's eye I seemed to see him pace
+     About the weary moors continually,
+     Wandering about alone and silently."
+
+Indeed this fine poem is especially characteristic of the author.
+There is scarce a defect or excellence in his writings of which it
+would not present a specimen. But it would be unjust not to repeat
+that this defect is only occasional. From a careful reperusal of the
+two volumes of poems, I doubt whether the objectionable passages would
+amount in the whole to one hundred lines; not the eighth part of the
+number of pages. In THE EXCURSION the feeling of incongruity is seldom
+excited by the diction of any passage considered in itself, but by the
+sudden superiority of some other passage forming the context.
+
+The second defect I can generalize with tolerable accuracy, if the
+reader will pardon an uncouth and new-coined word. There is, I should
+say, not seldom a matter-of-factness in certain poems. This may be
+divided into, first, a laborious minuteness and fidelity in the
+representation of objects, and their positions, as they appeared to
+the poet himself; secondly, the insertion of accidental circumstances,
+in order to the full explanation of his living characters, their
+dispositions and actions; which circumstances might be necessary to
+establish the probability of a statement in real life, where nothing
+is taken for granted by the hearer; but appear superfluous in poetry,
+where the reader is willing to believe for his own sake. To this
+actidentality I object, as contravening the essence of poetry, which
+Aristotle pronounces to be spoudaiotaton kai philosophotaton genos,
+the most intense, weighty and philosophical product of human art;
+adding, as the reason, that it is the most catholic and abstract. The
+following passage from Davenant's prefatory letter to Hobbes well
+expresses this truth. "When I considered the actions which I meant to
+describe; (those inferring the persons), I was again persuaded rather
+to choose those of a former age, than the present; and in a century so
+far removed, as might preserve me from their improper examinations,
+who know not the requisites of a poem, nor how much pleasure they
+lose, (and even the pleasures of heroic poesy are not unprofitable),
+who take away the liberty of a poet, and fetter his feet in the
+shackles of an historian. For why should a poet doubt in story to mend
+the intrigues of fortune by more delightful conveyances of probable
+fictions, because austere historians have entered into bond to truth?
+An obligation, which were in poets as foolish and unnecessary, as is
+the bondage of false martyrs, who lie in chains for a mistaken
+opinion. But by this I would imply, that truth, narrative and past, is
+the idol of historians, (who worship a dead thing), and truth
+operative, and by effects continually alive, is the mistress of poets,
+who hath not her existence in matter, but in reason."
+
+For this minute accuracy in the painting of local imagery, the lines
+in THE EXCURSION, pp. 96, 97, and 98, may be taken, if not as a
+striking instance, yet as an illustration of my meaning. It must be
+some strong motive--(as, for instance, that the description was
+necessary to the intelligibility of the tale)--which could induce me
+to describe in a number of verses what a draughtsman could present to
+the eye with incomparably greater satisfaction by half a dozen strokes
+of his pencil, or the painter with as many touches of his brush. Such
+descriptions too often occasion in the mind of a reader, who is
+determined to understand his author, a feeling of labour, not very
+dissimilar to that, with which he would construct a diagram, line by
+line, for a long geometrical proposition. It seems to be like taking
+the pieces of a dissected map out of its box. We first look at one
+part, and then at another, then join and dove-tail them; and when the
+successive acts of attention have been completed, there is a
+retrogressive effort of mind to behold it as a whole. The poet should
+paint to the imagination, not to the fancy; and I know no happier case
+to exemplify the distinction between these two faculties. Master-
+pieces of the former mode of poetic painting abound in the writings of
+Milton, for example:
+
+    "The fig-tree; not that kind for fruit renown'd,
+    "But such as at this day, to Indians known,
+    "In Malabar or Decan spreads her arms
+    "Branching so broad and long, that in the ground
+    "The bended twigs take root, and daughters grow
+    "About the mother tree, a pillar'd shade
+    "High over-arch'd and ECHOING WALKS BETWEEN;
+    "There oft the Indian herdsman, shunning heat,
+    "Shelters in cool, and tends his pasturing herds
+    "At hoop-holes cut through thickest shade."
+
+This is creation rather than painting, or if painting, yet such, and
+with such co-presence of the whole picture flashed at once upon the
+eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura. But the poet must likewise
+understand and command what Bacon calls the vestigia communia of the
+senses, the latency of all in each, and more especially as by a
+magical penny duplex, the excitement of vision by sound and the
+exponents of sound. Thus, "The echoing walks between," may be almost
+said to reverse the fable in tradition of the head of Memnon, in the
+Egyptian statue. Such may be deservedly entitled the creative words in
+the world of imagination.
+
+The second division respects an apparent minute adherence to matter-
+of-fact in character and Incidents; a biographical attention to
+probability, and an anxiety of explanation and retrospect. Under this
+head I shall deliver, with no feigned diffidence, the results of my
+best reflection on the great point of controversy between Mr.
+Wordsworth and his objectors; namely, on the choice of his characters.
+I have already declared, and, I trust justified, my utter dissent from
+the mode of argument which his critics have hitherto employed. To
+their question, "Why did you choose such a character, or a character
+from such a rank of life?"--the poet might in my opinion fairly
+retort: why with the conception of my character did you make wilful
+choice of mean or ludicrous associations not furnished by me, but
+supplied from your own sickly and fastidious feelings? How was it,
+indeed, probable, that such arguments could have any weight with an
+author, whose plan, whose guiding principle, and main object it was to
+attack and subdue that state of association, which leads us to place
+the chief value on those things on which man differs from man, and to
+forget or disregard the high dignities, which belong to Human Nature,
+the sense and the feeling, which may be, and ought to be, found in all
+ranks? The feelings with which, as Christians, we contemplate a mixed
+congregation rising or kneeling before their common Maker, Mr.
+Wordsworth would have us entertain at all times, as men, and as
+readers; and by the excitement of this lofty, yet prideless
+impartiality in poetry, he might hope to have encouraged its
+continuance in real life. The praise of good men be his! In real life,
+and, I trust, even in my imagination, I honour a virtuous and wise
+man, without reference to the presence or absence of artificial
+advantages. Whether in the person of an armed baron, a laurelled bard,
+or of an old Pedlar, or still older Leech-gatherer, the same qualities
+of head and heart must claim the same reverence. And even in poetry I
+am not conscious, that I have ever suffered my feelings to be
+disturbed or offended by any thoughts or images, which the poet
+himself has not presented.
+
+But yet I object, nevertheless, and for the following reasons. First,
+because the object in view, as an immediate object, belongs to the
+moral philosopher, and would be pursued, not only more appropriately,
+but in my opinion with far greater probability of success, in sermons
+or moral essays, than in an elevated poem. It seems, indeed, to
+destroy the main fundamental distinction, not only between a poem and
+prose, but even between philosophy and works of fiction, inasmuch as
+it proposes truth for its immediate object, instead of pleasure. Now
+till the blessed time shall come, when truth itself shall be pleasure,
+and both shall be so united, as to be distinguishable in words only,
+not in feeling, it will remain the poet's office to proceed upon that
+state of association, which actually exists as general; instead of
+attempting first to make it what it ought to be, and then to let the
+pleasure follow. But here is unfortunately a small hysteron-proteron.
+For the communication of pleasure is the introductory means by which
+alone the poet must expect to moralize his readers. Secondly: though I
+were to admit, for a moment, this argument to be groundless: yet how
+is the moral effect to be produced, by merely attaching the name of
+some low profession to powers which are least likely, and to qualities
+which are assuredly not more likely, to be found in it? The Poet,
+speaking in his own person, may at once delight and improve us by
+sentiments, which teach us the independence of goodness, of wisdom,
+and even of genius, on the favours of fortune. And having made a due
+reverence before the throne of Antonine, he may bow with equal awe
+before Epictetus among his fellow-slaves
+
+                      ------"and rejoice
+    In the plain presence of his dignity."
+
+Who is not at once delighted and improved, when the Poet Wordsworth
+himself exclaims,
+
+    "Oh! many are the Poets that are sown
+     By Nature; men endowed with highest gifts
+     The vision and the faculty divine,
+     Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse,
+     Nor having e'er, as life advanced, been led
+     By circumstance to take unto the height
+     The measure of themselves, these favoured Beings,
+     All but a scattered few, live out their time,
+     Husbanding that which they possess within,
+     And go to the grave, unthought of. Strongest minds
+     Are often those of whom the noisy world
+     Hears least."
+
+To use a colloquial phrase, such sentiments, in such language, do
+one's heart good; though I for my part, have not the fullest faith in
+the truth of the observation. On the contrary I believe the instances
+to be exceedingly rare; and should feel almost as strong an objection
+to introduce such a character in a poetic fiction, as a pair of black
+swans on a lake, in a fancy landscape. When I think how many, and how
+much better books than Homer, or even than Herodotus, Pindar or
+Aeschylus, could have read, are in the power of almost every man, in a
+country where almost every man is instructed to read and write; and
+how restless, how difficultly hidden, the powers of genius are; and
+yet find even in situations the most favourable, according to Mr.
+Wordsworth, for the formation of a pure and poetic language; in
+situations which ensure familiarity with the grandest objects of the
+imagination; but one Burns, among the shepherds of Scotland, and not a
+single poet of humble life among those of English lakes and mountains;
+I conclude, that Poetic Genius is not only a very delicate but a very
+rare plant.
+
+But be this as it may, the feelings with which,
+
+    "I think of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy,
+     The sleepless Soul, that perished in his pride;
+     Of Burns, who walk'd in glory and in joy
+     Behind his plough, upon the mountain-side"--
+
+are widely different from those with which I should read a poem, where
+the author, having occasion for the character of a poet and a
+philosopher in the fable of his narration, had chosen to make him a
+chimney-sweeper; and then, in order to remove all doubts on the
+subject, had invented an account of his birth, parentage and
+education, with all the strange and fortunate accidents which had
+concurred in making him at once poet, philosopher, and sweep! Nothing,
+but biography, can justify this. If it be admissible even in a novel,
+it must be one in the manner of De Foe's, that were meant to pass for
+histories, not in the manner of Fielding's: In THE LIFE OF MOLL
+FLANDERS, Or COLONEL JACK, not in a TOM JONES, or even a JOSEPH
+ANDREWS. Much less then can it be legitimately introduced in a poem,
+the characters of which, amid the strongest individualization, must
+still remain representative. The precepts of Horace, on this point,
+are grounded on the nature both of poetry and of the human mind. They
+are not more peremptory, than wise and prudent. For in the first place
+a deviation from them perplexes the reader's feelings, and all the
+circumstances which are feigned in order to make such accidents less
+improbable, divide and disquiet his faith, rather than aid and support
+it. Spite of all attempts, the fiction will appear, and unfortunately
+not as fictitious but as false. The reader not only knows, that the
+sentiments and language are the poet's own, and his own too in his
+artificial character, as poet; but by the fruitless endeavours to make
+him think the contrary, he is not even suffered to forget it. The
+effect is similar to that produced by an Epic Poet, when the fable
+and the characters are derived from Scripture history, as in THE
+MESSIAH of Klopstock, or in CUMBERLAND'S CALVARY; and not merely
+suggested by it as in the PARADISE LOST of Milton. That illusion,
+contradistinguished from delusion, that negative faith, which simply
+permits the images presented to work by their own force, without
+either denial or affirmation of their real existence by the judgment,
+is rendered impossible by their immediate neighbourhood to words and
+facts of known and absolute truth. A faith, which transcends even
+historic belief, must absolutely put out this mere poetic analogon of
+faith, as the summer sun is said to extinguish our household fires,
+when it shines full upon them. What would otherwise have been yielded
+to as pleasing fiction, is repelled as revolting falsehood. The effect
+produced in this latter case by the solemn belief of the reader, is in
+a less degree brought about in the instances, to which I have been
+objecting, by the balked attempts of the author to make him believe.
+
+Add to all the foregoing the seeming uselessness both of the project
+and of the anecdotes from which it is to derive support. Is there one
+word, for instance, attributed to the pedlar in THE EXCURSION,
+characteristic of a Pedlar? One sentiment, that might not more
+plausibly, even without the aid of any previous explanation, have
+proceeded from any wise and beneficent old man, of a rank or
+profession in which the language of learning and refinement are
+natural and to be expected? Need the rank have been at all
+particularized, where nothing follows which the knowledge of that rank
+is to explain or illustrate? When on the contrary this information
+renders the man's language, feelings, sentiments, and information a
+riddle, which must itself be solved by episodes of anecdote? Finally
+when this, and this alone, could have induced a genuine Poet to
+inweave in a poem of the loftiest style, and on subjects the loftiest
+and of most universal interest, such minute matters of fact, (not
+unlike those furnished for the obituary of a magazine by the friends
+of some obscure "ornament of society lately deceased" in some obscure
+town,) as
+
+    "Among the hills of Athol he was born
+     There, on a small hereditary Farm,
+     An unproductive slip of rugged ground,
+     His Father dwelt; and died in poverty;
+     While He, whose lowly fortune I retrace,
+     The youngest of three sons, was yet a babe,
+     A little One--unconscious of their loss.
+     But ere he had outgrown his infant days
+     His widowed Mother, for a second Mate,
+     Espoused the teacher of the Village School;
+     Who on her offspring zealously bestowed
+     Needful instruction."
+
+    "From his sixth year, the Boy of whom I speak,
+     In summer tended cattle on the Hills;
+     But, through the inclement and the perilous days
+     Of long-continuing winter, he repaired
+     To his Step-father's School,"-etc.
+
+For all the admirable passages interposed in this narration, might,
+with trifling alterations, have been far more appropriately, and with
+far greater verisimilitude, told of a poet in the character of a poet;
+and without incurring another defect which I shall now mention, and a
+sufficient illustration of which will have been here anticipated.
+
+Third; an undue predilection for the dramatic form in certain poems,
+from which one or other of two evils result. Either the thoughts and
+diction are different from that of the poet, and then there arises an
+incongruity of style; or they are the same and indistinguishable, and
+then it presents a species of ventriloquism, where two are represented
+as talking, while in truth one man only speaks.
+
+The fourth class of defects is closely connected with the former; but
+yet are such as arise likewise from an intensity of feeling
+disproportionate to such knowledge and value of the objects described,
+as can be fairly anticipated of men in general, even of the most
+cultivated classes; and with which therefore few only, and those few
+particularly circumstanced, can be supposed to sympathize: In this
+class, I comprise occasional prolixity, repetition, and an eddying,
+instead of progression, of thought. As instances, see pages 27, 28,
+and 62 of the Poems, vol. I. and the first eighty lines of the VIth
+Book of THE EXCURSION.
+
+Fifth and last; thoughts and images too great for the subject. This is
+an approximation to what might be called mental bombast, as
+distinguished from verbal: for, as in the latter there is a
+disproportion of the expressions to the thoughts so in this there is a
+disproportion of thought to the circumstance and occasion. This, by
+the bye, is a fault of which none but a man of genius is capable. It
+is the awkwardness and strength of Hercules with the distaff of
+Omphale.
+
+It is a well-known fact, that bright colours in motion both make and
+leave the strongest impressions on the eye. Nothing is more likely
+too, than that a vivid image or visual spectrum, thus originated, may
+become the link of association in recalling the feelings and images
+that had accompanied the original impression. But if we describe this
+in such lines, as
+
+    "They flash upon that inward eye,
+     Which is the bliss of solitude!"
+
+in what words shall we describe the joy of retrospection, when the
+images and virtuous actions of a whole well-spent life, pass before
+that conscience which is indeed the inward eye: which is indeed "the
+bliss of solitude?" Assuredly we seem to sink most abruptly, not to
+say burlesquely, and almost as in a medley, from this couplet to--
+
+    "And then my heart with pleasure fills,
+     And dances with the daffodils."    Vol. I. p. 328.
+
+The second instance is from vol. II. page 12, where the poet having
+gone out for a day's tour of pleasure, meets early in the morning with
+a knot of Gipsies, who had pitched their blanket-tents and straw-beds,
+together with their children and asses, in some field by the road-
+side. At the close of the day on his return our tourist found them in
+the same place. "Twelve hours," says he,
+
+    "Twelve hours, twelve bounteous hours are gone, while I
+     Have been a traveller under open sky,
+     Much witnessing of change and cheer,
+     Yet as I left I find them here!"
+
+Whereat the poet, without seeming to reflect that the poor tawny
+wanderers might probably have been tramping for weeks together through
+road and lane, over moor and mountain, and consequently must have been
+right glad to rest themselves, their children and cattle, for one
+whole day; and overlooking the obvious truth, that such repose might
+be quite as necessary for them, as a walk of the same continuance was
+pleasing or healthful for the more fortunate poet; expresses his
+indignation in a series of lines, the diction and imagery of which
+would have been rather above, than below the mark, had they been
+applied to the immense empire of China improgressive for thirty
+centuries:
+
+    "The weary Sun betook himself to rest:--
+     --Then issued Vesper from the fulgent west,
+     Outshining, like a visible God,
+     The glorious path in which he trod.
+     And now, ascending, after one dark hour,
+     And one night's diminution of her power,
+     Behold the mighty Moon! this way
+     She looks, as if at them--but they
+     Regard not her:--oh, better wrong and strife,
+     Better vain deeds or evil than such life!
+     The silent Heavens have goings on
+     The stars have tasks!--but these have none!"
+
+The last instance of this defect,(for I know no other than these
+already cited) is from the Ode, page 351, vol. II., where, speaking of
+a child, "a six years' Darling of a pigmy size," he thus addresses
+him:
+
+    "Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep
+     Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,
+     That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,
+     Haunted for ever by the Eternal Mind,--
+     Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
+     On whom those truths do rest,
+     Which we are toiling all our lives to find!
+     Thou, over whom thy Immortality
+     Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave,
+     A Present which is not to be put by!"
+
+Now here, not to stop at the daring spirit of metaphor which connects
+the epithets "deaf and silent," with the apostrophized eye: or (if we
+are to refer it to the preceding word, "Philosopher"), the faulty and
+equivocal syntax of the passage; and without examining the propriety
+of making a "Master brood o'er a Slave," or "the Day" brood at all; we
+will merely ask, what does all this mean? In what sense is a child of
+that age a Philosopher? In what sense does he read "the eternal deep?"
+In what sense is he declared to be "for ever haunted" by the Supreme
+Being? or so inspired as to deserve the splendid titles of a Mighty
+Prophet, a blessed Seer? By reflection? by knowledge? by conscious
+intuition? or by any form or modification of consciousness? These
+would be tidings indeed; but such as would pre-suppose an immediate
+revelation to the inspired communicator, and require miracles to
+authenticate his inspiration. Children at this age give us no such
+information of themselves; and at what time were we dipped in the
+Lethe, which has produced such utter oblivion of a state so godlike?
+There are many of us that still possess some remembrances, more or
+less distinct, respecting themselves at six years old; pity that the
+worthless straws only should float, while treasures, compared with
+which all the mines of Golconda and Mexico were but straws, should be
+absorbed by some unknown gulf into some unknown abyss.
+
+But if this be too wild and exorbitant to be suspected as having been
+the poet's meaning; if these mysterious gifts, faculties, and
+operations, are not accompanied with consciousness; who else is
+conscious of them? or how can it be called the child, if it be no part
+of the child's conscious being? For aught I know, the thinking Spirit
+within me may be substantially one with the principle of life, and of
+vital operation. For aught I know, it might be employed as a secondary
+agent in the marvellous organization and organic movements of my body.
+But, surely, it would be strange language to say, that I construct my
+heart! or that I propel the finer influences through my nerves! or
+that I compress my brain, and draw the curtains of sleep round my own
+eyes! Spinoza and Behmen were, on different systems, both Pantheists;
+and among the ancients there were philosophers, teachers of the EN KAI
+PAN, who not only taught that God was All, but that this All
+constituted God. Yet not even these would confound the part, as a
+part, with the whole, as the whole. Nay, in no system is the
+distinction between the individual and God, between the Modification,
+and the one only Substance, more sharply drawn, than in that of
+Spinoza. Jacobi indeed relates of Lessing, that, after a conversation
+with him at the house of the Poet, Gleim, (the Tyrtaeus and Anacreon
+of the German Parnassus,) in which conversation Lessing had avowed
+privately to Jacobi his reluctance to admit any personal existence of
+the Supreme Being, or the possibility of personality except in a
+finite Intellect, and while they were sitting at table, a shower of
+rain came on unexpectedly. Gleim expressed his regret at the
+circumstance, because they had meant to drink their wine in the
+garden: upon which Lessing in one of his half-earnest, half-joking
+moods, nodded to Jacobi, and said, "It is I, perhaps, that am doing
+that," i.e. raining!--and Jacobi answered, "or perhaps I;" Gleim
+contented himself with staring at them both, without asking for any
+explanation.
+
+So with regard to this passage. In what sense can the magnificent
+attributes, above quoted, be appropriated to a child, which would not
+make them equally suitable to a bee, or a dog, or afield of corn: or
+even to a ship, or to the wind and waves that propel it? The
+omnipresent Spirit works equally in them, as in the child; and the
+child is equally unconscious of it as they. It cannot surely be, that
+the four lines, immediately following, are to contain the explanation?
+
+        "To whom the grave
+    Is but a lonely bed without the sense or sight
+        Of day or the warm light,
+    A place of thought where we in waiting lie;"--
+
+Surely, it cannot be that this wonder-rousing apostrophe is but a
+comment on the little poem, "We are Seven?"--that the whole meaning of
+the passage is reducible to the assertion, that a child, who by the
+bye at six years old would have been better instructed in most
+Christian families, has no other notion of death than that of lying in
+a dark, cold place? And still, I hope, not as in a place of thought!
+not the frightful notion of lying awake in his grave! The analogy
+between death and sleep is too simple, too natural, to render so
+horrid a belief possible for children; even had they not been in the
+habit, as all Christian children are, of hearing the latter term used
+to express the former. But if the child's belief be only, that "he is
+not dead, but sleepeth:" wherein does it differ from that of his
+father and mother, or any other adult and instructed person? To form
+an idea of a thing's becoming nothing; or of nothing becoming a thing;
+is impossible to all finite beings alike, of whatever age, and however
+educated or uneducated. Thus it is with splendid paradoxes in general.
+If the words are taken in the common sense, they convey an absurdity;
+and if, in contempt of dictionaries and custom, they are so
+interpreted as to avoid the absurdity, the meaning dwindles into some
+bald truism. Thus you must at once understand the words contrary to
+their common import, in order to arrive at any sense; and according to
+their common import, if you are to receive from them any feeling of
+sublimity or admiration.
+
+Though the instances of this defect in Mr. Wordsworth's poems are so
+few, that for themselves it would have been scarcely just to attract
+the reader's attention toward them; yet I have dwelt on it, and
+perhaps the more for this very reason. For being so very few, they
+cannot sensibly detract from the reputation of an author, who is even
+characterized by the number of profound truths in his writings, which
+will stand the severest analysis; and yet few as they are, they are
+exactly those passages which his blind admirers would be most likely,
+and best able, to imitate. But Wordsworth, where he is indeed
+Wordsworth, may be mimicked by copyists, he may be plundered by
+plagiarists; but he cannot be imitated, except by those who are not
+born to be imitators. For without his depth of feeling and his
+imaginative power his sense would want its vital warmth and
+peculiarity; and without his strong sense, his mysticism would become
+sickly--mere fog, and dimness!
+
+To these defects which, as appears by the extracts, are only
+occasional, I may oppose, with far less fear of encountering the
+dissent of any candid and intelligent reader, the following (for the
+most part correspondent) excellencies. First, an austere purity of
+language both grammatically and logically; in short a perfect
+appropriateness of the words to the meaning. Of how high value I deem
+this, and how particularly estimable I hold the example at the present
+day, has been already stated: and in part too the reasons on which I
+ground both the moral and intellectual importance of habituating
+ourselves to a strict accuracy of expression. It is noticeable, how
+limited an acquaintance with the masterpieces of art will suffice to
+form a correct and even a sensitive taste, where none but master-
+pieces have been seen and admired: while on the other hand, the most
+correct notions, and the widest acquaintance with the works of
+excellence of all ages and countries, will not perfectly secure us
+against the contagious familiarity with the far more numerous
+offspring of tastelessness or of a perverted taste. If this be the
+case, as it notoriously is, with the arts of music and painting, much
+more difficult will it be, to avoid the infection of multiplied and
+daily examples in the practice of an art, which uses words, and words
+only, as its instruments. In poetry, in which every line, every
+phrase, may pass the ordeal of deliberation and deliberate choice, it
+is possible, and barely possible, to attain that ultimatum which I
+have ventured to propose as the infallible test of a blameless style;
+namely: its untranslatableness in words of the same language without
+injury to the meaning. Be it observed, however, that I include in the
+meaning of a word not only its correspondent object, but likewise all
+the associations which it recalls. For language is framed to convey
+not the object alone but likewise the character, mood and intentions
+of the person who is representing it. In poetry it is practicable to
+preserve the diction uncorrupted by the affectations and
+misappropriations, which promiscuous authorship, and reading not
+promiscuous only because it is disproportionally most conversant with
+the compositions of the day, have rendered general. Yet even to the
+poet, composing in his own province, it is an arduous work: and as the
+result and pledge of a watchful good sense of fine and luminous
+distinction, and of complete self-possession, may justly claim all the
+honour which belongs to an attainment equally difficult and valuable,
+and the more valuable for being rare. It is at all times the proper
+food of the understanding; but in an age of corrupt eloquence it is
+both food and antidote.
+
+In prose I doubt whether it be even possible to preserve our style
+wholly unalloyed by the vicious phraseology which meets us everywhere,
+from the sermon to the newspaper, from the harangue of the legislator
+to the speech from the convivial chair, announcing a toast or
+sentiment. Our chains rattle, even while we are complaining of them.
+The poems of Boetius rise high in our estimation when we compare them
+with those of his contemporaries, as Sidonius Apollinaris, and others.
+They might even be referred to a purer age, but that the prose, in
+which they are set, as jewels in a crown of lead or iron, betrays the
+true age of the writer. Much however may be effected by education. I
+believe not only from grounds of reason, but from having in great
+measure assured myself of the fact by actual though limited
+experience, that, to a youth led from his first boyhood to investigate
+the meaning of every word and the reason of its choice and position,
+logic presents itself as an old acquaintance under new names.
+
+On some future occasion, more especially demanding such disquisition,
+I shall attempt to prove the close connection between veracity and
+habits of mental accuracy; the beneficial after-effects of verbal
+precision in the preclusion of fanaticism, which masters the feelings
+more especially by indistinct watch-words; and to display the
+advantages which language alone, at least which language with
+incomparably greater ease and certainty than any other means, presents
+to the instructor of impressing modes of intellectual energy so
+constantly, so imperceptibly, and as it were by such elements and
+atoms, as to secure in due time the formation of a second nature. When
+we reflect, that the cultivation of the judgment is a positive command
+of the moral law, since the reason can give the principle alone, and
+the conscience bears witness only to the motive, while the application
+and effects must depend on the judgment when we consider, that the
+greater part of our success and comfort in life depends on
+distinguishing the similar from the same, that which is peculiar in
+each thing from that which it has in common with others, so as still
+to select the most probable, instead of the merely possible or
+positively unfit, we shall learn to value earnestly and with a
+practical seriousness a mean, already prepared for us by nature and
+society, of teaching the young mind to think well and wisely by the
+same unremembered process and with the same never forgotten results,
+as those by which it is taught to speak and converse. Now how much
+warmer the interest is, how much more genial the feelings of reality
+and practicability, and thence how much stronger the impulses to
+imitation are, which a contemporary writer, and especially a
+contemporary poet, excites in youth and commencing manhood, has been
+treated of in the earlier pages of these sketches. I have only to add,
+that all the praise which is due to the exertion of such influence for
+a purpose so important, joined with that which must be claimed for the
+infrequency of the same excellence in the same perfection, belongs in
+full right to Mr. Wordsworth. I am far however from denying that we
+have poets whose general style possesses the same excellence, as Mr.
+Moore, Lord Byron, Mr. Bowles, and, in all his later and more
+important works, our laurel-honouring Laureate. But there are none, in
+whose works I do not appear to myself to find more exceptions, than in
+those of Wordsworth. Quotations or specimens would here be wholly out
+of place, and must be left for the critic who doubts and would
+invalidate the justice of this eulogy so applied.
+
+The second characteristic excellence of Mr. Wordsworth's work is: a
+correspondent weight and sanity of the Thoughts and Sentiments,--won,
+not from books; but--from the poet's own meditative observation. They
+are fresh and have the dew upon them. His muse, at least when in her
+strength of wing, and when she hovers aloft in her proper element,
+
+    Makes audible a linked lay of truth,
+    Of truth profound a sweet continuous lay,
+    Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes!
+
+Even throughout his smaller poems there is scarcely one, which is not
+rendered valuable by some just and original reflection.
+
+See page 25, vol. II.: or the two following passages in one of his
+humblest compositions.
+
+    "O Reader! had you in your mind
+     Such stores as silent thought can bring,
+     O gentle Reader! you would find
+     A tale in every thing;"
+
+and
+
+    "I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds
+     With coldness still returning;
+     Alas! the gratitude of men
+     Has oftener left me mourning;"
+
+or in a still higher strain the six beautiful quatrains, page 134.
+
+    "Thus fares it still in our decay:
+     And yet the wiser mind
+     Mourns less for what age takes away
+     Than what it leaves behind.
+
+     The Blackbird in the summer trees,
+     The Lark upon the hill,
+     Let loose their carols when they please,
+     Are quiet when they will.
+
+     With Nature never do they wage
+     A foolish strife; they see
+     A happy youth, and their old age
+     Is beautiful and free!
+
+     But we are pressed by heavy laws;
+     And often glad no more,
+     We wear a face of joy, because
+     We have been glad of yore.
+
+     If there is one, who need bemoan
+     His kindred laid in earth,
+     The household hearts that were his own,
+     It is the man of mirth.
+
+     My days, my Friend, are almost gone,
+     My life has been approved,
+     And many love me; but by none
+     Am I enough beloved;"
+
+or the sonnet on Buonaparte, page 202, vol. II. or finally (for a
+volume would scarce suffice to exhaust the instances,) the last stanza
+of the poem on the withered Celandine, vol. II. p. 312.
+
+    "To be a Prodigal's Favorite--then, worse truth,
+     A Miser's Pensioner--behold our lot!
+     O Man! That from thy fair and shining youth
+     Age might but take the things Youth needed not."
+
+Both in respect of this and of the former excellence, Mr. Wordsworth
+strikingly resembles Samuel Daniel, one of the golden writers of our
+golden Elizabethan age, now most causelessly neglected: Samuel Daniel,
+whose diction bears no mark of time, no distinction of age which has
+been, and as long as our language shall last, will be so far the
+language of the to-day and for ever, as that it is more intelligible
+to us, than the transitory fashions of our own particular age. A
+similar praise is due to his sentiments. No frequency of perusal can
+deprive them of their freshness. For though they are brought into the
+full day-light of every reader's comprehension; yet are they drawn up
+from depths which few in any age are privileged to visit, into which
+few in any age have courage or inclination to descend. If Mr.
+Wordsworth is not equally with Daniel alike intelligible to all
+readers of average understanding in all passages of his works, the
+comparative difficulty does not arise from the greater impurity of the
+ore, but from the nature and uses of the metal. A poem is not
+necessarily obscure, because it does not aim to be popular. It is
+enough, if a work be perspicuous to those for whom it is written, and
+
+    "Fit audience find, though few."
+
+To the "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of
+early Childhood" the poet might have prefixed the lines which Dante
+addresses to one of his own Canzoni--
+
+    "Canzone, i' credo, che saranno radi
+     Color, che tua ragione intendan bene,
+     Tanto lor sei faticoso ed alto."
+
+    "O lyric song, there will be few, I think,
+     Who may thy import understand aright:
+     Thou art for them so arduous and so high!"
+
+But the ode was intended for such readers only as had been accustomed
+to watch the flux and reflux of their inmost nature, to venture at
+times into the twilight realms of consciousness, and to feel a deep
+interest in modes of inmost being, to which they know that the
+attributes of time and space are inapplicable and alien, but which yet
+can not be conveyed, save in symbols of time and space. For such
+readers the sense is sufficiently plain, and they will be as little
+disposed to charge Mr. Wordsworth with believing the Platonic pre-
+existence in the ordinary interpretation of the words, as I am to
+believe, that Plato himself ever meant or taught it.
+
+    Polla oi ut' anko-
+    nos okea belae
+    endon enti pharetras
+    phonanta synetoisin; es
+    de to pan hermaeneon
+    chatizei; sophos o pol-
+    la eidos phua;
+    mathontes de labroi
+    panglossia, korakes os,
+    akranta garueton
+    Dios pros ornicha theion.
+
+Third (and wherein he soars far above Daniel) the sinewy strength and
+originality of single lines and paragraphs: the frequent curiosa
+felicitas of his diction, of which I need not here give specimens,
+having anticipated them in a preceding page. This beauty, and as
+eminently characteristic of Wordsworth's poetry, his rudest assailants
+have felt themselves compelled to acknowledge and admire.
+
+Fourth; the perfect truth of nature in his images and descriptions as
+taken immediately from nature, and proving a long and genial intimacy
+with the very spirit which gives the physiognomic expression to all
+the works of nature. Like a green field reflected in a calm and
+perfectly transparent lake, the image is distinguished from the
+reality only by its greater softness and lustre. Like the moisture or
+the polish on a pebble, genius neither distorts nor false-colours its
+objects; but on the contrary brings out many a vein and many a tint,
+which escape the eye of common observation, thus raising to the rank
+of gems what had been often kicked away by the hurrying foot of the
+traveller on the dusty high road of custom.
+
+Let me refer to the whole description of skating, vol. I. page 42 to
+47, especially to the lines
+
+    "So through the darkness and the cold we flew,
+     And not a voice was idle. with the din
+     Meanwhile the precipices rang aloud;
+     The leafless trees and every icy crag
+     Tinkled like iron; while the distant hills
+     Into the tumult sent an alien sound
+     Of melancholy, not unnoticed, while the stars,
+     Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west
+     The orange sky of evening died away."
+
+Or to the poem on THE GREEN LINNET, vol. I. page 244. What can be more
+accurate yet more lovely than the two concluding stanzas?
+
+    "Upon yon tuft of hazel trees,
+     That twinkle to the gusty breeze,
+     Behold him perched in ecstasies,
+         Yet seeming still to hover;
+     There! where the flutter of his wings
+     Upon his back and body flings
+     Shadows and sunny glimmerings,
+         That cover him all over.
+
+     While thus before my eyes he gleams,
+     A Brother of the Leaves he seems;
+     When in a moment forth he teems
+         His little song in gushes
+     As if it pleased him to disdain
+     And mock the Form which he did feign
+     While he was dancing with the train
+         Of Leaves among the bushes."
+
+Or the description of the blue-cap, and of the noontide silence, page
+284; or the poem to the cuckoo, page 299; or, lastly, though I might
+multiply the references to ten times the number, to the poem, so
+completely Wordsworth's, commencing
+
+    "Three years she grew in sun and shower"--
+
+Fifth: a meditative pathos, a union of deep and subtle thought with
+sensibility; a sympathy with man as man; the sympathy indeed of a
+contemplator, rather than a fellow-sufferer or co-mate, (spectator,
+haud particeps) but of a contemplator, from whose view no difference
+of rank conceals the sameness of the nature; no injuries of wind or
+weather, or toil, or even of ignorance, wholly disguise the human face
+divine. The superscription and the image of the Creator still remain
+legible to him under the dark lines, with which guilt or calamity had
+cancelled or cross-barred it. Here the Man and the Poet lose and find
+themselves in each other, the one as glorified, the latter as
+substantiated. In this mild and philosophic pathos, Wordsworth appears
+to me without a compeer. Such as he is: so he writes. See vol. I. page
+134 to 136, or that most affecting composition, THE AFFLICTION OF
+MARGARET ---- OF ----, page 165 to 168, which no mother, and, if I may
+judge by my own experience, no parent can read without a tear. Or turn
+to that genuine lyric, in the former edition, entitled, THE MAD
+MOTHER, page 174 to 178, of which I cannot refrain from quoting two of
+the stanzas, both of them for their pathos, and the former for the
+fine transition in the two concluding lines of the stanza, so
+expressive of that deranged state, in which, from the increased
+sensibility, the sufferer's attention is abruptly drawn off by every
+trifle, and in the same instant plucked back again by the one despotic
+thought, bringing home with it, by the blending, fusing power of
+Imagination and Passion, the alien object to which it had been so
+abruptly diverted, no longer an alien but an ally and an inmate.
+
+    "Suck, little babe, oh suck again!
+     It cools my blood; it cools my brain;
+     Thy lips, I feel them, baby! They
+     Draw from my heart the pain away.
+     Oh! press me with thy little hand;
+     It loosens something at my chest
+     About that tight and deadly band
+     I feel thy little fingers prest.
+     The breeze I see is in the tree!
+     It comes to cool my babe and me."
+
+    "Thy father cares not for my breast,
+     'Tis thine, sweet baby, there to rest;
+     'Tis all thine own!--and if its hue
+     Be changed, that was so fair to view,
+     'Tis fair enough for thee, my dove!
+     My beauty, little child, is flown,
+     But thou wilt live with me in love;
+     And what if my poor cheek be brown?
+     'Tis well for me, thou canst not see
+     How pale and wan it else would be."
+
+Last, and pre-eminently, I challenge for this poet the gift of
+Imagination in the highest and strictest sense of the word. In the
+play of fancy, Wordsworth, to my feelings, is not always graceful, and
+sometimes recondite. The likeness is occasionally too strange, or
+demands too peculiar a point of view, or is such as appears the
+creature of predetermined research, rather than spontaneous
+presentation. Indeed his fancy seldom displays itself, as mere and
+unmodified fancy. But in imaginative power, he stands nearest of all
+modern writers to Shakespeare and Milton; and yet in a kind perfectly
+unborrowed and his own. To employ his own words, which are at once an
+instance and an illustration, he does indeed to all thoughts and to
+all objects--
+
+                       "------add the gleam,
+     The light that never was, on sea or land,
+     The consecration, and the Poet's dream."
+
+I shall select a few examples as most obviously manifesting this
+faculty; but if I should ever be fortunate enough to render my
+analysis of Imagination, its origin and characters, thoroughly
+intelligible to the reader, he will scarcely open on a page of this
+poet's works without recognising, more or less, the presence and the
+influences of this faculty. From the poem on the YEW TREES, vol. I.
+page 303, 304.
+
+        "But worthier still of note
+    Are those fraternal Four of Borrowdale,
+    Joined in one solemn and capacious grove;
+    Huge trunks!--and each particular trunk a growth
+    Of intertwisted fibres serpentine
+    Up-coiling, and inveterately convolved;
+    Not uninformed with phantasy, and looks
+    That threaten the profane;--a pillared shade,
+    Upon whose grassless floor of red-brown hue,
+    By sheddings from the pinal umbrage tinged
+    Perennially--beneath whose sable roof
+    Of boughs, as if for festal purpose, decked
+    With unrejoicing berries--ghostly shapes
+    May meet at noontide; FEAR and trembling HOPE,
+    SILENCE and FORESIGHT; DEATH, the Skeleton,
+    And TIME, the Shadow; there to celebrate,
+    As in a natural temple scattered o'er
+    With altars undisturbed of mossy stone,
+    United worship; or in mute repose
+    To lie, and listen to the mountain flood
+    Murmuring from Glazamara's inmost caves."
+
+The effect of the old man's figure in the poem of RESOLUTION AND
+INDEPENDENCE, vol. II. page 33.
+
+    "While he was talking thus, the lonely place,
+     The Old Man's shape, and speech, all troubled me
+     In my mind's eye I seemed to see him pace
+     About the weary moors continually,
+     Wandering about alone and silently."
+
+Or the 8th, 9th, 19th, 26th, 31st, and 33rd, in the collection of
+miscellaneous sonnets--the sonnet on the subjugation of Switzerland,
+page 210, or the last ode, from which I especially select the two
+following stanzas or paragraphs, page 349 to 350.
+
+    "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
+     The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
+     Hath had elsewhere its setting,
+         And cometh from afar.
+     Not in entire forgetfulness,
+     And not in utter nakedness,
+     But trailing clouds of glory do we come
+     From God, who is our home:
+     Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
+     Shades of the prison-house begin to close
+         Upon the growing Boy;
+     But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
+         He sees it in his joy!
+     The Youth who daily further from the East
+     Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
+         And by the vision splendid
+         Is on his way attended;
+     At length the Man perceives it die away,
+     And fade into the light of common day."
+
+And page 352 to 354 of the same ode.
+
+    "O joy! that in our embers
+     Is something that doth live,
+     That nature yet remembers
+     What was so fugitive!
+     The thought of our past years in me doth breed
+     Perpetual benedictions: not indeed
+     For that which is most worthy to be blest;
+     Delight and liberty, the simple creed
+     Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,
+     With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:--
+     Not for these I raise
+     The song of thanks and praise;
+     But for those obstinate questionings
+     Of sense and outward things,
+     Fallings from us, vanishings;
+     Blank misgivings of a Creature
+     Moving about in worlds not realized,
+     High instincts, before which our mortal Nature
+     Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised!
+     But for those first affections,
+     Those shadowy recollections,
+     Which, be they what they may,
+     Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
+     Are yet a master light of all our seeing;
+     Uphold us--cherish--and have power to make
+     Our noisy years seem moments in the being
+     Of the eternal Silence; truths that wake
+         To perish never;
+     Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
+     Nor Man nor Boy,
+     Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
+     Can utterly abolish or destroy!
+     Hence, in a season of calm weather,
+     Though inland far we be,
+     Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
+     Which brought us hither;
+     Can in a moment travel thither,--
+     And see the children sport upon the shore,
+     And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore."
+
+And since it would be unfair to conclude with an extract, which,
+though highly characteristic, must yet, from the nature of the
+thoughts and the subject, be interesting or perhaps intelligible, to
+but a limited number of readers; I will add, from the poet's last
+published work, a passage equally Wordsworthian; of the beauty of
+which, and of the imaginative power displayed therein, there can be
+but one opinion, and one feeling. See White Doe, page 5.
+
+    "Fast the church-yard fills;--anon
+     Look again and they all are gone;
+     The cluster round the porch, and the folk
+     Who sate in the shade of the Prior's Oak!
+     And scarcely have they disappeared
+     Ere the prelusive hymn is heard;--
+     With one consent the people rejoice,
+     Filling the church with a lofty voice!
+     They sing a service which they feel:
+     For 'tis the sun-rise now of zeal;
+     And faith and hope are in their prime
+     In great Eliza's golden time."
+
+    "A moment ends the fervent din,
+     And all is hushed, without and within;
+     For though the priest, more tranquilly,
+     Recites the holy liturgy,
+     The only voice which you can hear
+     Is the river murmuring near.
+     --When soft!--the dusky trees between,
+     And down the path through the open green,
+     Where is no living thing to be seen;
+     And through yon gateway, where is found,
+     Beneath the arch with ivy bound,
+     Free entrance to the church-yard ground--
+     And right across the verdant sod,
+     Towards the very house of God;
+     Comes gliding in with lovely gleam,
+     Comes gliding in serene and slow,
+     Soft and silent as a dream.
+     A solitary Doe!
+     White she is as lily of June,
+     And beauteous as the silver moon
+     When out of sight the clouds are driven
+     And she is left alone in heaven!
+     Or like a ship some gentle day
+     In sunshine sailing far away
+     A glittering ship that hath the plain
+     Of ocean for her own domain."
+
+        *     *     *     *     *     *
+
+    "What harmonious pensive changes
+     Wait upon her as she ranges
+     Round and through this Pile of state
+     Overthrown and desolate!
+     Now a step or two her way
+     Is through space of open day,
+     Where the enamoured sunny light
+     Brightens her that was so bright;
+     Now doth a delicate shadow fall,
+     Falls upon her like a breath,
+     From some lofty arch or wall,
+     As she passes underneath."
+
+The following analogy will, I am apprehensive, appear dim and
+fantastic, but in reading Bartram's Travels I could not help
+transcribing the following lines as a sort of allegory, or connected
+simile and metaphor of Wordsworth's intellect and genius.--"The soil
+is a deep, rich, dark mould, on a deep stratum of tenacious clay; and
+that on a foundation of rocks, which often break through both strata,
+lifting their backs above the surface. The trees which chiefly grow
+here are the gigantic, black oak; magnolia grandi-flora; fraximus
+excelsior; platane; and a few stately tulip trees." What Mr.
+Wordsworth will produce, it is not for me to prophesy but I could
+pronounce with the liveliest convictions what he is capable of
+producing. It is the FIRST GENUINE PHILOSOPHIC POEM.
+
+The preceding criticism will not, I am aware, avail to overcome the
+prejudices of those, who have made it a business to attack and
+ridicule Mr. Wordsworth's compositions.
+
+Truth and prudence might be imaged as concentric circles. The poet may
+perhaps have passed beyond the latter, but he has confined himself far
+within the bounds of the former, in designating these critics, as "too
+petulant to be passive to a genuine poet, and too feeble to grapple
+with him;----men of palsied imaginations, in whose minds all healthy
+action is languid;----who, therefore, feed as the many direct them, or
+with the many are greedy after vicious provocatives."
+
+So much for the detractors from Wordsworth's merits. On the other
+hand, much as I might wish for their fuller sympathy, I dare not
+flatter myself, that the freedom with which I have declared my
+opinions concerning both his theory and his defects, most of which are
+more or less connected with his theory, either as cause or effect,
+will be satisfactory or pleasing to all the poet's admirers and
+advocates. More indiscriminate than mine their admiration may be:
+deeper and more sincere it cannot be. But I have advanced no opinion
+either for praise or censure, other than as texts introductory to the
+reasons which compel me to form it. Above all, I was fully convinced
+that such a criticism was not only wanted; but that, if executed with
+adequate ability, it must conduce, in no mean degree, to Mr.
+Wordsworth's reputation. His fame belongs to another age, and can
+neither be accelerated nor retarded. How small the proportion of the
+defects are to the beauties, I have repeatedly declared; and that no
+one of them originates in deficiency of poetic genius. Had they been
+more and greater, I should still, as a friend to his literary
+character in the present age, consider an analytic display of them as
+pure gain; if only it removed, as surely to all reflecting minds even
+the foregoing analysis must have removed, the strange mistake, so
+slightly grounded, yet so widely and industriously propagated, of Mr.
+Wordsworth's turn for simplicity! I am not half as much irritated by
+hearing his enemies abuse him for vulgarity of style, subject, and
+conception, as I am disgusted with the gilded side of the same
+meaning, as displayed by some affected admirers, with whom he is,
+forsooth, a "sweet, simple poet!" and so natural, that little master
+Charles and his younger sister are so charmed with them, that they
+play at "Goody Blake," or at "Johnny and Betty Foy!"
+
+Were the collection of poems, published with these biographical
+sketches, important enough, (which I am not vain enough to believe,)
+to deserve such a distinction; even as I have done, so would I be done
+unto.
+
+For more than eighteen months have the volume of Poems, entitled
+SIBYLLINE LEAVES, and the present volume, up to this page, been
+printed, and ready for publication. But, ere I speak of myself in the
+tones, which are alone natural to me under the circumstances of late
+years, I would fain present myself to the Reader as I was in the first
+dawn of my literary life:
+
+    When Hope grew round me, like the climbing vine,
+    And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seem'd mine!
+
+For this purpose I have selected from the letters, which I wrote home
+from Germany, those which appeared likely to be most interesting, and
+at the same time most pertinent to the title of this work.
+
+
+
+
+SATYRANE'S LETTERS
+
+
+
+LETTER I
+
+
+On Sunday morning, September 16, 1798, the Hamburg packet set sail
+from Yarmouth; and I, for the first time in my life, beheld my native
+land retiring from me. At the moment of its disappearance--in all the
+kirks, churches, chapels, and meeting-houses, in which the greater
+number, I hope, of my countrymen were at that time assembled, I will
+dare question whether there was one more ardent prayer offered up to
+heaven, than that which I then preferred for my country. "Now then,"
+(said I to a gentleman who was standing near me,) "we are out of our
+country." "Not yet, not yet!" he replied, and pointed to the sea;
+"This, too, is a Briton's country." This bon mot gave a fillip to my
+spirits, I rose and looked round on my fellow-passengers, who were all
+on the deck. We were eighteen in number, videlicet, five Englishmen,
+an English lady, a French gentleman and his servant, an Hanoverian and
+his servant, a Prussian, a Swede, two Danes, and a Mulatto boy, a
+German tailor and his wife, (the smallest couple I ever beheld,) and a
+Jew. We were all on the deck; but in a short time I observed marks of
+dismay. The lady retired to the cabin in some confusion, and many of
+the faces round me assumed a very doleful and frog-coloured
+appearance; and within an hour the number of those on deck was
+lessened by one half. I was giddy, but not sick, and the giddiness
+soon went away, but left a feverishness and want of appetite, which I
+attributed, in great measure, to the saeva Mephitis of the bilge-
+water; and it was certainly not decreased by the exportations from the
+cabin. However, I was well enough to join the able-bodied passengers,
+one of whom observed not inaptly, that Momus might have discovered an
+easier way to see a man's inside, than by placing a window in his
+breast. He needed only have taken a saltwater trip in a packet-boat.
+
+I am inclined to believe, that a packet is far superior to a stage-
+coach, as a means of making men open out to each other. In the latter
+the uniformity of posture disposes to dozing, and the definitiveness
+of the period, at which the company will separate, makes each
+individual think more of those to whom he is going, than of those with
+whom he is going. But at sea, more curiosity is excited, if only on
+this account, that the pleasant or unpleasant qualities of your
+companions are of greater importance to you, from the uncertainty how
+long you may be obliged to house with them. Besides, if you are
+countrymen, that now begins to form a distinction and a bond of
+brotherhood; and if of different countries, there are new incitements
+of conversation, more to ask and more to communicate. I found that I
+had interested the Danes in no common degree. I had crept into the
+boat on the deck and fallen asleep; but was awakened by one of them,
+about three o'clock in the afternoon, who told me that they had been
+seeking me in every hole and corner, and insisted that I should join
+their party and drink with them. He talked English with such fluency,
+as left me wholly unable to account for the singular and even
+ludicrous incorrectness with which he spoke it. I went, and found some
+excellent wines and a dessert of grapes with a pine-apple. The Danes
+had christened me Doctor Teology, and dressed as I was all in black,
+with large shoes and black worsted stockings, I might certainly have
+passed very well for a Methodist missionary. However I disclaimed my
+title. What then may you be? A man of fortune? No!--A merchant? No!--A
+merchant's traveller? No!--A clerk? No!--Un Philosophe, perhaps? It
+was at that time in my life, in which of all possible names and
+characters I had the greatest disgust to that of "un Philosophe." But
+I was weary of being questioned, and rather than be nothing, or at
+best only the abstract idea of a man, I submitted by a bow, even to
+the aspersion implied in the word "un Philosophe."--The Dane then
+informed me, that all in the present party were Philosophers likewise.
+Certes we were not of the Stoick school. For we drank and talked and
+sung, till we talked and sung all together; and then we rose and
+danced on the deck a set of dances, which in one sense of the word at
+least, were very intelligibly and appropriately entitled reels. The
+passengers, who lay in the cabin below in all the agonies of sea-
+sickness, must have found our bacchanalian merriment
+
+                                      ------a tune
+    Harsh and of dissonant mood from their complaint.
+
+I thought so at the time; and, (by way, I suppose, of supporting my
+newly assumed philosophical character,) I thought too, how closely the
+greater number of our virtues are connected with the fear of death,
+and how little sympathy we bestow on pain, where there is no danger.
+
+The two Danes were brothers. The one was a man with a clear white
+complexion, white hair, and white eyebrows; looked silly, and nothing
+that he uttered gave the lie to his looks. The other, whom, by way of
+eminence I have called the Dane, had likewise white hair, but was much
+shorter than his brother, with slender limbs, and a very thin face
+slightly pockfretten. This man convinced me of the justice of an old
+remark, that many a faithful portrait in our novels and farces has
+been rashly censured for an outrageous caricature, or perhaps
+nonentity. I had retired to my station in the boat--he came and seated
+himself by my side, and appeared not a little tipsy. He commenced the
+conversation in the most magnific style, and, as a sort of pioneering
+to his own vanity, he flattered me with such grossness! The parasites
+of the old comedy were modest in the comparison. His language and
+accentuation were so exceedingly singular, that I determined for once
+in my life to take notes of a conversation. Here it follows, somewhat
+abridged, indeed, but in all other respects as accurately as my memory
+permitted.
+
+THE DANE.  Vat imagination! vat language! vat vast science! and vat
+eyes! vat a milk-vite forehead! O my heafen! vy, you're a Got!
+
+ANSWER.  You do me too much honour, Sir.
+
+THE DANE.  O me! if you should dink I is flattering you!--No, no, no!
+I haf ten tousand a year--yes, ten tousand a year--yes, ten tousand
+pound a year! Vel--and vat is dhat? a mere trifle! I 'ouldn't gif my
+sincere heart for ten times dhe money. Yes, you're a Got! I a mere
+man! But, my dear friend! dhink of me, as a man! Is, is--I mean to ask
+you now, my dear friend--is I not very eloquent? Is I not speak
+English very fine?
+
+ANSWER.  Most admirably! Believe me, Sir! I have seldom heard even a
+native talk so fluently.
+
+THE DANE.  (Squeezing my hand with great vehemence.) My dear friend!
+vat an affection and fidelity ve have for each odher! But tell me, do
+tell me,--Is I not, now and den, speak some fault? Is I not in some
+wrong?
+
+ANSWER.  Why, Sir! perhaps it might be observed by nice critics in the
+English language, that you occasionally use the word "is" instead of
+"am." In our best companies we generally say I am, and not I is or
+I'se. Excuse me, Sir! it is a mere trifle.
+
+THE DANE.  O!--is, is, am, am, am. Yes, yes--I know, I know.
+
+ANSWER.  I am, thou art, he is, we are, ye are, they are.
+
+THE DANE.  Yes, yes,--I know, I know--Am, am, am, is dhe praesens, and
+is is dhe perfectum--yes, yes--and are is dhe plusquam perfectum.
+
+ANSWER.  And art, Sir! is--?
+
+THE DANE.  My dear friend! it is dhe plusquam perfectum, no, no--dhat
+is a great lie; are is dhe plusquam perfectum--and art is dhe plasquam
+plue-perfectum--(then swinging my hand to and fro, and cocking his
+little bright hazel eyes at me, that danced with vanity and wine)--You
+see, my dear friend that I too have some lehrning?
+
+ANSWER.  Learning, Sir? Who dares suspect it? Who can listen to you
+for a minute, who can even look at you, without perceiving the extent
+of it?
+
+THE DANE.  My dear friend!--(then with a would-be humble look, and in
+a tone of voice as if he was reasoning) I could not talk so of prawns
+and imperfectum, and futurum and plusquamplue perfectum, and all dhat,
+my dear friend! without some lehrning?
+
+ANSWER.  Sir! a man like you cannot talk on any subject without
+discovering the depth of his information.
+
+THE DANE.  Dhe grammatic Greek, my friend; ha! ha! Ha! (laughing, and
+swinging my hand to and fro--then with a sudden transition to great
+solemnity) Now I will tell you, my dear friend! Dhere did happen about
+me vat de whole historia of Denmark record no instance about nobody
+else. Dhe bishop did ask me all dhe questions about all dhe religion
+in dhe Latin grammar.
+
+ANSWER.  The grammar, Sir? The language, I presume--
+
+THE DANE.  (A little offended.) Grammar is language, and language is
+grammar--
+
+ANSWER.  Ten thousand pardons!
+
+THE DANE.  Vell, and I was only fourteen years--
+
+ANSWER.  Only fourteen years old?
+
+THE DANE. No more. I vas fourteen years old--and he asked me all
+questions, religion and philosophy, and all in dhe Latin language--and
+I answered him all every one, my dear friend! all in dhe Latin
+language.
+
+ANSWER.  A prodigy! an absolute prodigy!
+
+THE DANE.  No, no, no! he was a bishop, a great superintendent.
+
+ANSWER.  Yes! a bishop.
+
+THE DANE.  A bishop--not a mere predicant, not a prediger.
+
+ANSWER.  My dear Sir! we have misunderstood each other. I said that
+your answering in Latin at so early an age was a prodigy, that is, a
+thing that is wonderful; that does not often happen.
+
+THE DANE.  Often! Dhere is not von instance recorded in dhe whole
+historia of Denmark.
+
+ANSWER.  And since then, Sir--?
+
+THE DANE.  I was sent ofer to dhe Vest Indies--to our Island, and
+dhere I had no more to do vid books. No! no! I put my genius anodher
+way--and I haf made ten tousand pound a year. Is not dhat ghenius, my
+dear friend?--But vat is money?--I dhink dhe poorest man alive my
+equal. Yes, my dear friend; my little fortune is pleasant to my
+generous heart, because I can do good--no man with so little a fortune
+ever did so much generosity--no person--no man person, no woman person
+ever denies it. But we are all Got's children.
+
+Here the Hanoverian interrupted him, and the other Dane, the Swede,
+and the Prussian, joined us, together with a young Englishman who
+spoke the German fluently, and interpreted to me many of the
+Prussian's jokes. The Prussian was a travelling merchant, turned of
+threescore, a hale man, tall, strong, and stout, full of stories,
+gesticulations, and buffoonery, with the soul as well as the look of a
+mountebank, who, while he is making you laugh, picks your pocket. Amid
+all his droll looks and droll gestures, there remained one look
+untouched by laughter; and that one look was the true face, the others
+were but its mask. The Hanoverian was a pale, fat, bloated young man,
+whose father had made a large fortune in London, as an army-
+contractor. He seemed to emulate the manners of young Englishmen of
+fortune. He was a good-natured fellow, not without information or
+literature; but a most egregious coxcomb. He had been in the habit of
+attending the House of Commons, and had once spoken, as he informed
+me, with great applause in a debating society. For this he appeared to
+have qualified himself with laudable industry: for he was perfect in
+Walker's Pronouncing Dictionary, and with an accent, which forcibly
+reminded me of the Scotchman in Roderic Random, who professed to teach
+the English pronunciation, he was constantly deferring to my superior
+judgment, whether or no I had pronounced this or that word with
+propriety, or "the true delicacy." When he spoke, though it were only
+half a dozen sentences, he always rose: for which I could detect no
+other motive, than his partiality to that elegant phrase so liberally
+introduced in the orations of our British legislators, "While I am on
+my legs." The Swede, whom for reasons that will soon appear, I shall
+distinguish by the name of Nobility, was a strong-featured, scurvy-
+faced man, his complexion resembling in colour, a red hot poker
+beginning to cool. He appeared miserably dependent on the Dane; but
+was, however, incomparably the best informed and most rational of the
+party. Indeed his manners and conversation discovered him to be both a
+man of the world and a gentleman. The Jew was in the hold: the French
+gentleman was lying on the deck so ill, that I could observe nothing
+concerning him, except the affectionate attentions of his servant to
+him. The poor fellow was very sick himself, and every now and then ran
+to the side of the vessel, still keeping his eye on his master, but
+returned in a moment and seated himself again by him, now supporting
+his head, now wiping his forehead and talking to him all the while in
+the most soothing tones. There had been a matrimonial squabble of a
+very ludicrous kind in the cabin, between the little German tailor and
+his little wife. He had secured two beds, one for himself and one for
+her. This had struck the little woman as a very cruel action; she
+insisted upon their having but one, and assured the mate in the most
+piteous tones, that she was his lawful wife. The mate and the cabin
+boy decided in her favour, abused the little man for his want of
+tenderness with much humour, and hoisted him into the same compartment
+with his sea-sick wife. This quarrel was interesting to me, as it
+procured me a bed, which I otherwise should not have had.
+
+In the evening, at seven o'clock, the sea rolled higher, and the Dane,
+by means of the greater agitation, eliminated enough of what he had
+been swallowing to make room for a great deal more. His favourite
+potation was sugar and brandy, i.e. a very little warm water with a
+large quantity of brandy, sugar, and nutmeg His servant boy, a black-
+eyed Mulatto, had a good-natured round face, exactly the colour of the
+skin of the walnut-kernel. The Dane and I were again seated, tete-a-
+tete, in the ship's boat. The conversation, which was now indeed
+rather an oration than a dialogue, became extravagant beyond all that
+I ever heard. He told me that he had made a large fortune in the
+island of Santa Cruz, and was now returning to Denmark to enjoy it. He
+expatiated on the style in which he meant to live, and the great
+undertakings which he proposed to himself to commence, till, the
+brandy aiding his vanity, and his vanity and garrulity aiding the
+brandy, he talked like a madman--entreated me to accompany him to
+Denmark--there I should see his influence with the government, and he
+would introduce me to the king, etc., etc. Thus he went on dreaming
+aloud, and then passing with a very lyrical transition to the subject
+of general politics, he declaimed, like a member of the Corresponding
+Society, about, (not concerning,) the Rights of Man, and assured me
+that, notwithstanding his fortune, he thought the poorest man alive
+his equal. "All are equal, my dear friend! all are equal! Ve are all
+Got's children. The poorest man haf the same rights with me. Jack!
+Jack! some more sugar and brandy. Dhere is dhat fellow now! He is a
+Mulatto--but he is my equal.--That's right, Jack! (taking the sugar
+and brandy.) Here you Sir! shake hands with dhis gentleman! Shake
+hands with me, you dog! Dhere, dhere!--We are all equal my dear
+friend! Do I not speak like Socrates, and Plato, and Cato--they were
+all philosophers, my dear philosophe! all very great men!--and so was
+Homer and Virgil--but they were poets. Yes, yes! I know all about it!
+--But what can anybody say more than this? We are all equal, all Got's
+children. I haf ten tousand a year, but I am no more dhan de meanest
+man alive. I haf no pride; and yet, my dear friend! I can say, do! and
+it is done. Ha! ha! ha! my dear friend! Now dhere is dhat gentleman
+(pointing to Nobility) he is a Swedish baron--you shall see. Ho!
+(calling to the Swede) get me, will you, a bottle of wine from the
+cabin. SWEDE.--Here, Jack! go and get your master a bottle of wine
+from the cabin. DANE. No, no, no! do you go now--you go yourself you
+go now! SWEDE. Pah!--DANE. Now go! Go, I pray you." And the Swede
+went!!
+
+After this the Dane commenced an harangue on religion, and mistaking
+me for un philosophe in the continental sense of the word, he talked
+of Deity in a declamatory style, very much resembling the devotional
+rants of that rude blunderer, Mr. Thomas Paine, in his Age of Reason,
+and whispered in my ear, what damned hypocrism all Jesus Christ's
+business was. I dare aver, that few men have less reason to charge
+themselves with indulging in persiflage than myself. I should hate it,
+if it were only that it is a Frenchman's vice, and feel a pride in
+avoiding it, because our own language is too honest to have a word to
+express it by. But in this instance the temptation had been too
+powerful, and I have placed it on the list of my offences. Pericles
+answered one of his dearest friends, who had solicited him on a case
+of life and death, to take an equivocal oath for his preservation:
+Debeo amicis opitulari, sed usque ad Deos [75]. Friendship herself
+must place her last and boldest step on this side the altar. What
+Pericles would not do to save a friend's life, you may be assured, I
+would not hazard merely to mill the chocolate-pot of a drunken fool's
+vanity till it frothed over. Assuming a serious look, I professed
+myself a believer, and sunk at once an hundred fathoms in his good
+graces. He retired to his cabin, and I wrapped myself up in my great
+coat, and looked at the water. A beautiful white cloud of foam at
+momently intervals coursed by the side of the vessel with a roar, and
+little stars of flame danced and sparkled and went out in it: and
+every now and then light detachments of this white cloud-like foam
+darted off from the vessel's side, each with its own small
+constellation, over the sea, and scoured out of sight like a Tartar
+troop over a wilderness.
+
+It was cold, the cabin was at open war with my olfactories, and I
+found reason to rejoice in my great coat, a weighty high-caped,
+respectable rug, the collar of which turned over, and played the part
+of a night-cap very passably. In looking up at two or three bright
+stars, which oscillated with the motion of the sails, I fell asleep,
+but was awakened at one o'clock, Monday morning, by a shower of rain.
+I found myself compelled to go down into the cabin, where I slept very
+soundly, and awoke with a very good appetite at breakfast time, my
+nostrils, the most placable of all the senses, reconciled to, or
+indeed insensible of the mephitis.
+
+Monday, September 17th, I had a long conversation with the Swede, who
+spoke with the most poignant contempt of the Dane, whom he described
+as a fool, purse-mad; but he confirmed the boasts of the Dane
+respecting the largeness of his fortune, which he had acquired in the
+first instance as an advocate, and afterwards as a planter. From the
+Dane and from himself I collected that he was indeed a Swedish
+nobleman, who had squandered a fortune, that was never very large, and
+had made over his property to the Dane, on whom he was now utterly
+dependent. He seemed to suffer very little pain from the Dane's
+insolence. He was in a high degree humane and attentive to the English
+lady, who suffered most fearfully, and for whom he performed many
+little offices with a tenderness and delicacy which seemed to prove
+real goodness of heart. Indeed his general manners and conversation
+were not only pleasing, but even interesting; and I struggled to
+believe his insensibility respecting the Dane philosophical fortitude.
+For though the Dane was now quite sober, his character oozed out of
+him at every pore. And after dinner, when he was again flushed with
+wine, every quarter of an hour or perhaps oftener he would shout out
+to the Swede, "Ho! Nobility, go--do such a thing! Mr. Nobility!--tell
+the gentlemen such a story, and so forth;" with an insolence which
+must have excited disgust and detestation, if his vulgar rants on the
+sacred rights of equality, joined to his wild havoc of general grammar
+no less than of the English language, had not rendered it so
+irresistibly laughable.
+
+At four o'clock I observed a wild duck swimming on the waves, a single
+solitary wild duck. It is not easy to conceive, how interesting a
+thing it looked in that round objectless desert of waters. I had
+associated such a feeling of immensity with the ocean, that I felt
+exceedingly disappointed, when I was out of sight of all land, at the
+narrowness and nearness, as it were, of the circle of the horizon. So
+little are images capable of satisfying the obscure feelings connected
+with words. In the evening the sails were lowered, lest we should run
+foul of the land, which can be seen only at a small distance. And at
+four o'clock, on Tuesday morning, I was awakened by the cry of "land!
+land!" It was an ugly island rock at a distance on our left, called
+Heiligeland, well known to many passengers from Yarmouth to Hamburg,
+who have been obliged by stormy weather to pass weeks and weeks in
+weary captivity on it, stripped of all their money by the exorbitant
+demands of the wretches who inhabit it. So at least the sailors
+informed me.--About nine o'clock we saw the main land, which seemed
+scarcely able to hold its head above water, low, flat, and dreary,
+with lighthouses and land-marks which seemed to give a character and
+language to the dreariness. We entered the mouth of the Elbe, passing
+Neu-werk; though as yet the right bank only of the river was visible
+to us. On this I saw a church, and thanked God for my safe voyage, not
+without affectionate thoughts of those I had left in England. At
+eleven o'clock on the same morning we arrived at Cuxhaven, the ship
+dropped anchor, and the boat was hoisted out, to carry the Hanoverian
+and a few others on shore. The captain agreed to take us, who
+remained, to Hamburg for ten guineas, to which the Dane contributed so
+largely, that the other passengers paid but half a guinea each.
+Accordingly we hauled anchor, and passed gently up the river. At
+Cuxhaven both sides of the river may be seen in clear weather; we
+could now see the right bank only. We passed a multitude of English
+traders that had been waiting many weeks for a wind. In a short time
+both banks became visible, both flat and evidencing the labour of
+human hands by their extreme neatness. On the left bank I saw a church
+or two in the distance; on the right bank we passed by steeple and
+windmill and cottage, and windmill and single house, windmill and
+windmill, and neat single house, and steeple. These were the objects
+and in the succession. The shores were very green and planted with
+trees not inelegantly. Thirty-five miles from Cuxhaven the night came
+on us, and, as the navigation of the Elbe is perilous, we dropped
+anchor.
+
+Over what place, thought I, does the moon hang to your eye, my dearest
+friend? To me it hung over the left bank of the Elbe. Close above the
+moon was a huge volume of deep black cloud, while a very thin fillet
+crossed the middle of the orb, as narrow and thin and black as a
+ribbon of crape. The long trembling road of moonlight, which lay on
+the water and reached to the stern of our vessel, glimmered dimly and
+obscurely. We saw two or three lights from the right bank, probably
+from bed-rooms. I felt the striking contrast between the silence of
+this majestic stream, whose banks are populous with men and women and
+children, and flocks and herds--between the silence by night of this
+peopled river, and the ceaseless noise, and uproar, and loud
+agitations of the desolate solitude of the ocean. The passengers below
+had all retired to their beds; and I felt the interest of this quiet
+scene the more deeply from the circumstance of having just quitted
+them. For the Prussian had during the whole of the evening displayed
+all his talents to captivate the Dane, who had admitted him into the
+train of his dependents. The young Englishman continued to interpret
+the Prussian's jokes to me. They were all without exception profane
+and abominable, but some sufficiently witty, and a few incidents,
+which he related in his own person, were valuable as illustrating the
+manners of the countries in which they had taken place.
+
+Five o'clock on Wednesday morning we hauled the anchor, but were soon
+obliged to drop it again in consequence of a thick fog, which our
+captain feared would continue the whole day; but about nine it cleared
+off, and we sailed slowly along, close by the shore of a very
+beautiful island, forty miles from Cuxhaven, the wind continuing
+slack. This holm or island is about a mile and a half in length,
+wedge-shaped, well wooded, with glades of the liveliest green, and
+rendered more interesting by the remarkably neat farm-house on it. It
+seemed made for retirement without solitude--a place that would allure
+one's friends, while it precluded the impertinent calls of mere
+visitors. The shores of the Elbe now became more beautiful, with rich
+meadows and trees running like a low wall along the river's edge; and
+peering over them, neat houses and, (especially on the right bank,) a
+profusion of steeple-spires, white, black, or red. An instinctive
+taste teaches men to build their churches in flat countries with
+spire-steeples, which, as they cannot be referred to any other object,
+point, as with silent finger, to the sky and stars, and sometimes,
+when they reflect the brazen light of a rich though rainy sun-set,
+appear like a pyramid of flame burning heavenward. I remember once,
+and once only, to have seen a spire in a narrow valley of a
+mountainous country. The effect was not only mean but ludicrous, and
+reminded me against my will of an extinguisher; the close
+neighbourhood of the high mountain, at the foot of which it stood, had
+so completely dwarfed it, and deprived it of all connection with the
+sky or clouds. Forty-six English miles from Cuxhaven, and sixteen from
+Hamburg, the Danish village Veder ornaments the left bank with its
+black steeple, and close by it is the wild and pastoral hamlet of
+Schulau. Hitherto both the right and left bank, green to the very
+brink, and level with the river, resembled the shores of a park canal.
+The trees and houses were alike low, sometimes the low trees over-
+topping the yet lower houses, sometimes the low houses rising above
+the yet lower trees. But at Schulau the left bank rises at once forty
+or fifty feet, and stares on the river with its perpendicular facade
+of sand, thinly patched with tufts of green. The Elbe continued to
+present a more and more lively spectacle from the multitude of fishing
+boats and the flocks of sea gulls wheeling round them, the clamorous
+rivals and companions of the fishermen; till we came to Blankaness, a
+most interesting village scattered amid scattered trees, over three
+hills in three divisions. Each of the three hills stares upon the
+river, with faces of bare sand, with which the boats with their bare
+poles, standing in files along the banks, made a sort of fantastic
+harmony. Between each facade lies a green and woody dell, each deeper
+than the other. In short it is a large village made up of individual
+cottages, each cottage in the centre of its own little wood or
+orchard, and each with its own separate path: a village with a
+labyrinth of paths, or rather a neighbourhood of houses! It is
+inhabited by fishermen and boat-makers, the Blankanese boats being in
+great request through the whole navigation of the Elbe. Here first we
+saw the spires of Hamburg, and from hence, as far as Altona, the left
+bank of the Elbe is uncommonly pleasing, considered as the vicinity of
+an industrious and republican city--in that style of beauty, or rather
+prettiness, that might tempt the citizen into the country, and yet
+gratify the taste which he had acquired in the town. Summer-houses and
+Chinese show-work are everywhere scattered along the high and green
+banks; the boards of the farm-houses left unplastered and gaily
+painted with green and yellow; and scarcely a tree not cut into shapes
+and made to remind the human being of his own power and intelligence
+instead of the wisdom of nature. Still, however, these are links of
+connection between town and country, and far better than the
+affectation of tastes and enjoyments for which men's habits have
+disqualified them. Pass them by on Saturdays and Sundays with the
+burghers of Hamburg smoking their pipes, the women and children
+feasting in the alcoves of box and yew, and it becomes a nature of its
+own. On Wednesday, four o'clock, we left the vessel, and passing with
+trouble through the huge masses of shipping that seemed to choke the
+wide Elbe from Altona upward, we were at length landed at the Boom
+House, Hamburg.
+
+
+
+LETTER II
+
+To a lady.
+
+
+                                                     RATZEBURG.
+Meine liebe Freundinn,
+    See how natural the German comes from me, though I have not yet
+been six weeks in the country!--almost as fluently as English from my
+neighbour the Amtsschreiber, (or public secretary,) who as often as we
+meet, though it should be half a dozen times in the same day, never
+fails to greet me with--"---ddam your ploot unt eyes, my dearest
+Englander! vhee goes it!"--which is certainly a proof of great
+generosity on his part, these words being his whole stock of English.
+I had, however, a better reason than the desire of displaying my
+proficiency: for I wished to put you in good humour with a language,
+from the acquirement of which I have promised myself much edification
+and the means too of communicating a new pleasure to you and your
+sister, during our winter readings. And how can I do this better than
+by pointing out its gallant attention to the ladies? Our English
+affix, ess, is, I believe, confined either to words derived from the
+Latin, as actress, directress, etc., or from the French, as mistress,
+duchess, and the like. But the German, inn, enables us to designate
+the sex in every possible relation of life. Thus the Amtmann's lady is
+the Frau Amtmanninn--the secretary's wife, (by the bye, the handsomest
+woman I have yet seen in Germany,) is die allerliebste Frau
+Amtsschreiberinn--the colonel's lady, die Frau Obristinn or
+Colonellinn--and even the parson's wife, die Frau Pastorinn. But I am
+especially pleased with their Freundinn, which, unlike the amica of
+the Romans, is seldom used but in its best and purest sense. Now, I
+know it will be said, that a friend is already something more than a
+friend, when a man feels an anxiety to express to himself that this
+friend is a female; but this I deny--in that sense at least in which
+the objection will be made. I would hazard the impeachment of heresy,
+rather than abandon my belief that there is a sex in our souls as well
+as in their perishable garments; and he who does not feel it, never
+truly loved a sister--nay, is not capable even of loving a wife as she
+deserves to be loved, if she indeed be worthy of that holy name.
+
+Now I know, my gentle friend, what you are murmuring to yourself--
+"This is so like him! running away after the first bubble, that chance
+has blown off from the surface of his fancy; when one is anxious to
+learn where he is and what he has seen." Well then! that I am settled
+at Ratzeburg, with my motives and the particulars of my journey
+hither, will inform you. My first letter to him, with which doubtless
+he has edified your whole fireside, left me safely landed at Hamburg
+on the Elbe Stairs, at the Boom House. While standing on the stairs, I
+was amused by the contents of the passage-boat. which crosses the
+river once or twice a day from Hamburg to Haarburg. It was stowed
+close with all people of all nations, in all sorts of dresses; the men
+all with pipes in their mouths, and these pipes of all shapes and
+fancies--straight and wreathed, simple and complex, long and short,
+cane, clay, porcelain, wood, tin, silver, and ivory; most of them with
+silver chains and silver bole-covers. Pipes and boots are the first
+universal characteristic of the male Hamburgers that would strike the
+eye of a raw traveller. But I forget my promise of journalizing as
+much as possible.--Therefore, Septr. 19th Afternoon. My companion,
+who, you recollect, speaks the French language with unusual propriety,
+had formed a kind of confidential acquaintance with the emigrant, who
+appeared to be a man of sense, and whose manners were those of a
+perfect gentleman. He seemed about fifty or rather more. Whatever is
+unpleasant in French manners from excess in the degree, had been
+softened down by age or affliction; and all that is delightful in the
+kind, alacrity and delicacy in little attentions, etc., remained, and
+without bustle, gesticulation, or disproportionate eagerness. His
+demeanour exhibited the minute philanthropy of a polished Frenchman,
+tempered by the sobriety of the English character disunited from its
+reserve. There is something strangely attractive in the character of a
+gentleman when you apply the word emphatically, and yet in that sense
+of the term which it is more easy to feel than to define. It neither
+includes the possession of high moral excellence, nor of necessity
+even the ornamental graces of manner. I have now in my mind's eye a
+person whose life would scarcely stand scrutiny even in the court of
+honour, much less in that of conscience; and his manners, if nicely
+observed, would of the two excite an idea of awkwardness rather than
+of elegance: and yet every one who conversed with him felt and
+acknowledged the gentleman. The secret of the matter, I believe to be
+this--we feel the gentlemanly character present to us, whenever, under
+all the circumstances of social intercourse, the trivial not less than
+the important, through the whole detail of his manners and deportment,
+and with the ease of a habit, a person shows respect to others in such
+a way, as at the same time implies in his own feelings an habitual and
+assured anticipation of reciprocal respect from them to himself. In
+short, the gentlemanly character arises out of the feeling of Equality
+acting, as a Habit, yet flexible to the varieties of Rank, and
+modified without being disturbed or superseded by them. This
+description will perhaps explain to you the ground of one of your own
+remarks, as I was englishing to you the interesting dialogue
+concerning the causes of the corruption of eloquence. "What perfect
+gentlemen these old Romans must have been! I was impressed, I
+remember, with the same feeling at the time I was reading a
+translation of Cicero's philosophical dialogues and of his epistolary
+correspondence: while in Pliny's Letters I seemed to have a different
+feeling--he gave me the notion of a very fine gentleman." You uttered
+the words as if you had felt that the adjunct had injured the
+substance and the increased degree altered the kind. Pliny was the
+courtier of an absolute monarch--Cicero an aristocratic republican.
+For this reason the character of gentleman, in the sense to which I
+have confined it, is frequent in England, rare in France, and found,
+where it is found, in age or the latest period of manhood; while in
+Germany the character is almost unknown. But the proper antipode of a
+gentleman is to be sought for among the Anglo-American democrats.
+
+I owe this digression, as an act of justice to this amiable Frenchman,
+and of humiliation for myself. For in a little controversy between us
+on the subject of French poetry, he made me feel my own ill behaviour
+by the silent reproof of contrast, and when I afterwards apologized to
+him for the warmth of my language, he answered me with a cheerful
+expression of surprise, and an immediate compliment, which a gentleman
+might both make with dignity and receive with pleasure. I was pleased
+therefore to find it agreed on, that we should, if possible, take up
+our quarters in the same house. My friend went with him in search of
+an hotel, and I to deliver my letters of recommendation.
+
+I walked onward at a brisk pace, enlivened not so much by anything I
+actually saw, as by the confused sense that I was for the first time
+in my life on the continent of our planet. I seemed to myself like a
+liberated bird that had been hatched in an aviary, who now, after his
+first soar of freedom, poises himself in the upper air. Very naturally
+I began to wonder at all things, some for being so like and some for
+being so unlike the things in England--Dutch women with large umbrella
+hats shooting out half a yard before them, with a prodigal plumpness
+of petticoat behind--the women of Hamburg with caps plaited on the
+caul with silver, or gold, or both, bordered round with stiffened
+lace, which stood out before their eyes, but not lower, so that the
+eyes sparkled through it--the Hanoverian with the fore part of the
+head bare, then a stiff lace standing up like a wall perpendicular on
+the cap, and the cap behind tailed with an enormous quantity of ribbon
+which lies or tosses on the back:
+
+    "Their visnomies seem'd like a goodly banner
+     Spread in defiance of all enemies."
+
+The ladies all in English dresses, all rouged, and all with bad teeth:
+which you notice instantly from their contrast to the almost animal,
+too glossy mother-of-pearl whiteness and the regularity of the teeth
+of the laughing, loud-talking country-women and servant-girls, who
+with their clean white stockings and with slippers without heel
+quarters, tripped along the dirty streets, as if they were secured by
+a charm from the dirt: with a lightness too, which surprised me, who
+had always considered it as one of the annoyances of sleeping in an
+Inn, that I had to clatter up stairs in a pair of them. The streets
+narrow; to my English nose sufficiently offensive, and explaining at
+first sight the universal use of boots; without any appropriate path
+for the foot-passengers; the gable ends of the houses all towards the
+street, some in the ordinary triangular form and entire as the
+botanists say; but the greater number notched and scolloped with more
+than Chinese grotesqueness. Above all, I was struck with the profusion
+of windows, so large and so many, that the houses look all glass. Mr.
+Pitt's window tax, with its pretty little additionals sprouting out
+from it like young toadlets on the back of a Surinam toad, would
+certainly improve the appearance of the Hamburg houses, which have a
+slight summer look, not in keeping with their size, incongruous with
+the climate, and precluding that feeling of retirement and self-
+content, which one wishes to associate with a house in a noisy city.
+But a conflagration would, I fear, be the previous requisite to the
+production of any architectural beauty in Hamburg: for verily it is a
+filthy town. I moved on and crossed a multitude of ugly bridges, with
+huge black deformities of water wheels close by them. The water
+intersects the city everywhere, and would have furnished to the genius
+of Italy the capabilities of all that is most beautiful and
+magnificent in architecture. It might have been the rival of Venice,
+and it is huddle and ugliness, stench and stagnation. The Jungfer
+Stieg, (that is, Young Ladies' Walk), to which my letters directed me,
+made an exception. It was a walk or promenade planted with treble rows
+of elm trees, which, being yearly pruned and cropped, remain slim and
+dwarf-like. This walk occupies one side of a square piece of water,
+with many swans on it perfectly tame, and, moving among the swans,
+shewy pleasure-boats with ladies in them, rowed by their husbands or
+lovers.------
+
+(Some paragraphs have been here omitted.)------thus embarrassed by sad
+and solemn politeness still more than by broken English, it sounded
+like the voice of an old friend when I heard the emigrant's servant
+inquiring after me. He had come for the purpose of guiding me to our
+hotel. Through streets and streets I pressed on as happy as a child,
+and, I doubt not, with a childish expression of wonderment in my busy
+eyes, amused by the wicker waggons with movable benches across them,
+one behind the other, (these were the hackney coaches;) amused by the
+sign-boards of the shops, on which all the articles sold within are
+painted, and that too very exactly, though in a grotesque confusion,
+(a useful substitute for language in this great mart of nations;)
+amused with the incessant tinkling of the shop and house door bells,
+the bell hanging over each door and struck with a small iron rod at
+every entrance and exit;--and finally, amused by looking in at the
+windows, as I passed along; the ladies and gentlemen drinking coffee
+or playing cards, and the gentlemen all smoking. I wished myself a
+painter, that I might have sent you a sketch of one of the card
+parties. The long pipe of one gentleman rested on the table, its bole
+half a yard from his mouth, fuming like a censer by the fish-pool--the
+other gentleman, who was dealing the cards, and of course had both
+hands employed, held his pipe in his teeth, which hanging down between
+his knees, smoked beside his ancles. Hogarth himself never drew a more
+ludicrous distortion both of attitude and physiognomy, than this
+effort occasioned nor was there wanting beside it one of those
+beautiful female faces which the same Hogarth, in whom the satirist
+never extinguished that love of beauty which belonged to him as a
+poet, so often and so gladly introduces, as the central figure, in a
+crowd of humorous deformities, which figures, (such is the power of
+true genius!) neither acts, nor is meant to act as a contrast; but
+diffuses through all, and over each of the group, a spirit of
+reconciliation and human kindness; and, even when the attention is no
+longer consciously directed to the cause of this feeling, still blends
+its tenderness with our laughter: and thus prevents the instructive
+merriment at the whims of nature or the foibles or humours of our
+fellow-men from degenerating into the heart-poison of contempt or
+hatred.
+
+Our hotel DIE WILDE MAN, (the sign of which was no bad likeness of the
+landlord, who had ingrafted on a very grim face a restless grin, that
+was at every man's service, and which indeed, like an actor rehearsing
+to himself, he kept playing in expectation of an occasion for it)--
+neither our hotel, I say, nor its landlord were of the genteelest
+class. But it has one great advantage for a stranger, by being in the
+market place, and the next neighbour of the huge church of St.
+Nicholas: a church with shops and houses built up against it, out of
+which wens and warts its high massy steeple rises, necklaced near the
+top with a round of large gilt balls. A better pole-star could
+scarcely be desired. Long shall I retain the impression made on my
+mind by the awful echo, so loud and long and tremulous, of the deep-
+toned clock within this church, which awoke me at two in the morning
+from a distressful dream, occasioned, I believe, by the feather bed,
+which is used here instead of bed-clothes. I will rather carry my
+blanket about with me like a wild Indian, than submit to this
+abominable custom. Our emigrant acquaintance was, we found, an
+intimate friend of the celebrated Abbe de Lisle: and from the large
+fortune which he possessed under the monarchy, had rescued sufficient
+not only for independence, but for respectability. He had offended
+some of his fellow-emigrants in London, whom he had obliged with
+considerable sums, by a refusal to make further advances, and in
+consequence of their intrigues had received an order to quit the
+kingdom. I thought it one proof of his innocence, that he attached no
+blame either to the alien act, or to the minister who had exerted it
+against him; and a still greater, that he spoke of London with
+rapture, and of his favourite niece, who had married and settled in
+England, with all the fervour and all the pride of a fond parent. A
+man sent by force out of a country, obliged to sell out of the stocks
+at a great loss, and exiled from those pleasures and that style of
+society which habit had rendered essential to his happiness, whose
+predominant feelings were yet all of a private nature, resentment for
+friendship outraged, and anguish for domestic affections interrupted--
+such a man, I think, I could dare warrant guiltless of espionnage in
+any service, most of all in that of the present French Directory. He
+spoke with ecstasy of Paris under the Monarchy: and yet the particular
+facts, which made up his description, left as deep a conviction on my
+mind, of French worthlessness, as his own tale had done of emigrant
+ingratitude. Since my arrival in Germany, I have not met a single
+person, even among those who abhor the Revolution, that spoke with
+favour, or even charity of the French emigrants. Though the belief of
+their influence in the organization of this disastrous war (from the
+horrors of which, North Germany deems itself only reprieved, not
+secured,) may have some share in the general aversion with which they
+are regarded: yet I am deeply persuaded that the far greater part is
+owing to their own profligacy, to their treachery and hardheartedness
+to each other, and the domestic misery or corrupt principles which so
+many of them have carried into the families of their protectors. My
+heart dilated with honest pride, as I recalled to mind the stern yet
+amiable characters of the English patriots, who sought refuge on the
+Continent at the Restoration! O let not our civil war under the first
+Charles be paralleled with the French Revolution! In the former, the
+character overflowed from excess of principle; in the latter from the
+fermentation of the dregs! The former, was a civil war between the
+virtues and virtuous prejudices of the two parties; the latter,
+between the vices. The Venetian glass of the French monarchy shivered
+and flew asunder with the working of a double poison.
+
+Sept. 20th.  I was introduced to Mr. Klopstock, the brother of the
+poet, who again introduced me to Professor Ebeling, an intelligent and
+lively man, though deaf: so deaf, indeed, that it was a painful effort
+to talk with him, as we were obliged to drop our pearls into a huge
+ear-trumpet. From this courteous and kind-hearted man of letters, (I
+hope, the German literati in general may resemble this first
+specimen), I heard a tolerable Italian pun, and an interesting
+anecdote. When Buonaparte was in Italy, having been irritated by some
+instance of perfidy, he said in a loud and vehement tone, in a public
+company--"'tis a true proverb, gli Italiani tutti ladroni"--(that is,
+the Italians all plunderers.) A lady had the courage to reply, "Non
+tutti; ma BUONA PARTE," (not all, but a good part, or Buonaparte.)
+This, I confess, sounded to my ears, as one of the many good things
+that might have been said. The anecdote is more valuable; for it
+instances the ways and means of French insinuation. Hoche had received
+much information concerning the face of the country from a map of
+unusual fulness and accuracy, the maker of which, he heard, resided at
+Duesseldorf. At the storming of Duesseldorf by the French army, Hoche
+previously ordered, that the house and property of this man should be
+preserved, and intrusted the performance of the order to an officer on
+whose troop he could rely. Finding afterwards, that the man had
+escaped before the storming commenced, Hoche exclaimed, "HE had no
+reason to flee! It is for such men, not against them, that the French
+nation makes war, and consents to shed the blood of its children." You
+remember Milton's sonnet--
+
+    "The great Emathian conqueror bid spare
+     The house of Pindarus when temple and tower
+     Went to the ground"------
+
+Now though the Duesseldorf map-maker may stand in the same relation to
+the Theban bard, as the snail, that marks its path by lines of film on
+the wall it creeps over, to the eagle that soars sunward and beats the
+tempest with its wings; it does not therefore follow, that the Jacobin
+of France may not be as valiant a general and as good a politician, as
+the madman of Macedon.
+
+From Professor Ebeling's Mr. Klopstock accompanied my friend and me to
+his own house, where I saw a fine bust of his brother. There was a
+solemn and heavy greatness in his countenance, which corresponded to
+my preconceptions of his style and genius.--I saw there, likewise, a
+very fine portrait of Lessing, whose works are at present the chief
+object of my admiration. His eyes were uncommonly like mine, if
+anything, rather larger and more prominent. But the lower part of his
+face and his nose--O what an exquisite expression of elegance and
+sensibility!--There appeared no depth, weight, or comprehensiveness in
+the forehead.--The whole face seemed to say, that Lessing was a man of
+quick and voluptuous feelings; of an active but light fancy; acute;
+yet acute not in the observation of actual life, but in the
+arrangements and management of the ideal world, that is, in taste, and
+in metaphysics. I assure you, that I wrote these very words in my
+memorandum-book with the portrait before my eyes, and when I knew
+nothing of Lessing but his name, and that he was a German writer of
+eminence.
+
+We consumed two hours and more over a bad dinner, at the table d'hote.
+"Patience at a German ordinary, smiling at time." The Germans are the
+worst cooks in Europe. There is placed for every two persons a bottle
+of common wine--Rhenish and Claret alternately; but in the houses of
+the opulent, during the many and long intervals of the dinner, the
+servants hand round glasses of richer wines. At the Lord of Culpin's
+they came in this order. Burgundy--Madeira--Port--Frontiniac--
+Pacchiaretti--Old Hock--Mountain--Champagne--Hock again--Bishop, and
+lastly, Punch. A tolerable quantum, methinks! The last dish at the
+ordinary, viz. slices of roast pork, (for all the larger dishes are
+brought in, cut up, and first handed round and then set on the table,)
+with stewed prunes and other sweet fruits, and this followed by cheese
+and butter, with plates of apples, reminded me of Shakespeare [76],
+and Shakespeare put it in my head to go to the French comedy.
+
+Bless me! why it is worse than our modern English plays! The first act
+informed me, that a court martial is to be held on a Count Vatron, who
+had drawn his sword on the Colonel, his brother-in-law. The officers
+plead in his behalf--in vain! His wife, the Colonel's sister, pleads
+with most tempestuous agonies--in vain! She falls into hysterics and
+faints away, to the dropping of the inner curtain! In the second act
+sentence of death is passed on the Count--his wife, as frantic and
+hysterical as before: more so (good industrious creature!) she could
+not be. The third and last act, the wife still frantic, very frantic
+indeed!--the soldiers just about to fire, the handkerchief actually
+dropped; when reprieve! reprieve! is heard from behind the scenes: and
+in comes Prince Somebody, pardons the Count, and the wife is still
+frantic, only with joy; that was all!
+
+O dear lady! this is one of the cases, in which laughter is followed
+by melancholy: for such is the kind of drama, which is now substituted
+every where for Shakespeare and Racine. You well know, that I offer
+violence to my own feelings in joining these names. But however meanly
+I may think of the French serious drama, even in its most perfect
+specimens; and with whatever right I may complain of its perpetual
+falsification of the language, and of the connections and transitions
+of thought, which Nature has appropriated to states of passion; still,
+however, the French tragedies are consistent works of art, and the
+offspring of great intellectual power. Preserving a fitness in the
+parts, and a harmony in the whole, they form a nature of their own,
+though a false nature. Still they excite the minds of the spectators
+to active thought, to a striving after ideal excellence. The soul is
+not stupefied into mere sensations by a worthless sympathy with our
+own ordinary sufferings, or an empty curiosity for the surprising,
+undignified by the language or the situations which awe and delight
+the imagination. What, (I would ask of the crowd, that press forward
+to the pantomimic tragedies and weeping comedies of Kotzebue and his
+imitators), what are you seeking? Is it comedy? But in the comedy of
+Shakespeare and Moliere the more accurate my knowledge, and the more
+profoundly I think, the greater is the satisfaction that mingles with
+my laughter. For though the qualities which these writers pourtray are
+ludicrous indeed, either from the kind or the excess, and exquisitely
+ludicrous, yet are they the natural growth of the human mind and such
+as, with more or less change in the drapery, I can apply to my own
+heart, or at least to whole classes of my fellow-creatures. How often
+are not the moralist and the metaphysician obliged for the happiest
+illustrations of general truths and the subordinate laws of human
+thought and action to quotations, not only from the tragic characters,
+but equally from the Jaques, Falstaff, and even from the fools and
+clowns of Shakespeare, or from the Miser, Hypochondriast, and
+Hypocrite, of Moliere! Say not, that I am recommending abstractions:
+for these class-characteristics, which constitute the instructiveness
+of a character, are so modified and particularized in each person of
+the Shakesperian Drama, that life itself does not excite more
+distinctly that sense of individuality which belongs to real
+existence. Paradoxical as it may sound, one of the essential
+properties of geometry is not less essential to dramatic excellence,
+and, (if I may mention his name without pedantry to a lady,) Aristotle
+has accordingly required of the poet an involution of the universal in
+the individual. The chief differences are, that in geometry it is the
+universal truth itself, which is uppermost in the consciousness, in
+poetry the individual form in which the truth is clothed. With the
+ancients, and not less with the elder dramatists of England and
+France, both comedy and tragedy were considered as kinds of poetry.
+They neither sought in comedy to make us laugh merely, much less to
+make us laugh by wry faces, accidents of jargon, slang phrases for the
+day, or the clothing of commonplace morals in metaphors drawn from the
+shops or mechanic occupations of their characters; nor did they
+condescend in tragedy to wheedle away the applause of the spectators,
+by representing before them fac-similes of their own mean selves in
+all their existing meanness, or to work on their sluggish sympathies
+by a pathos not a whit more respectable than the maudlin tears of
+drunkenness. Their tragic scenes were meant to affect us indeed, but
+within the bounds of pleasure, and in union with the activity both of
+our understanding and imagination. They wished to transport the mind
+to a sense of its possible greatness, and to implant the germs of that
+greatness during the temporary oblivion of the worthless "thing, we
+are" and of the peculiar state, in which each man happens to be;
+suspending our individual recollections and lulling them to sleep amid
+the music of nobler thoughts.
+
+Hold!--(methinks I hear the spokesman of the crowd reply, and we will
+listen to him. I am the plaintiff, and he the defendant.)
+
+DEFENDANT.  Hold! are not our modern sentimental plays filled with the
+best Christian morality?
+
+PLAINTIFF.  Yes! just as much of it, and just that part of it, which
+you can exercise without a single Christian virtue--without a single
+sacrifice that is really painful to you!--just as much as flatters
+you, sends you away pleased with your own hearts, and quite reconciled
+to your vices, which can never be thought very ill of, when they keep
+such good company, and walk hand in hand with so much compassion and
+generosity; adulation so loathsome, that you would spit in the man's
+face who dared offer it to you in a private company, unless you
+interpreted it as insulting irony, you appropriate with infinite
+satisfaction, when you share the garbage with the whole stye, and
+gobble it out of a common trough. No Caesar must pace your boards--no
+Antony, no royal Dane, no Orestes, no Andromache!
+
+D.  No: or as few of them as possible. What has a plain citizen of
+London, or Hamburg, to do with your kings and queens, and your old
+school-boy Pagan heroes? Besides, every body knows the stories; and
+what curiosity can we feel----
+
+P.  What, Sir, not for the manner?--not for the delightful language of
+the poet?--not for the situations, the action and reaction of the
+passions?
+
+D.  You are hasty, Sir! the only curiosity, we feel, is in the story:
+and how can we be anxious concerning the end of a play, or be
+surprised by it, when we know how it will turn out?
+
+P.  Your pardon, for having interrupted you! we now understand each
+other. You seek then, in a tragedy, which wise men of old held for the
+highest effort of human genius, the same gratification, as that you
+receive from a new novel, the last German romance, and other dainties
+of the day, which can be enjoyed but once. If you carry these feelings
+to the sister art of Painting, Michael Angelo's Sixtine Chapel, and
+the Scripture Gallery of Raphael can expect no favour from you. You
+know all about them beforehand; and are, doubtless, more familiar with
+the subjects of those paintings, than with the tragic tales of the
+historic or heroic ages. There is a consistency, therefore, in your
+preference of contemporary writers: for the great men of former times,
+those at least who were deemed great by our ancestors, sought so
+little to gratify this kind of curiosity, that they seemed to have
+regarded the story in a not much higher light, than the painter
+regards his canvass: as that on, not by, which they were to display
+their appropriate excellence. No work, resembling a tale or romance,
+can well show less variety of invention in the incidents, or less
+anxiety in weaving them together, than the DON QUIXOTE of Cervantes.
+Its admirers feel the disposition to go back and re-peruse some
+preceding chapter, at least ten times for once that they find any
+eagerness to hurry forwards: or open the book on those parts which
+they best recollect, even as we visit those friends oftenest whom we
+love most, and with whose characters and actions we are the most
+intimately acquainted. In the divine Ariosto, (as his countrymen call
+this, their darling poet,) I question whether there be a single tale
+of his own invention, or the elements of which, were not familiar to
+the readers of "old romance." I will pass by the ancient Greeks, who
+thought it even necessary to the fable of a tragedy, that its
+substance should be previously known. That there had been at least
+fifty tragedies with the same title, would be one of the motives which
+determined Sophocles and Euripides, in the choice of Electra as a
+subject. But Milton--
+
+D.  Aye Milton, indeed!--but do not Dr. Johnson and other great men
+tell us, that nobody now reads Milton but as a task?
+
+P.  So much the worse for them, of whom this can be truly said! But
+why then do you pretend to admire Shakespeare? The greater part, if
+not all, of his dramas were, as far as the names and the main
+incidents are concerned, already stock plays. All the stories, at
+least, on which they are built, pre-existed in the chronicles,
+ballads, or translations of contemporary or preceding English writers.
+Why, I repeat, do you pretend to admire Shakespeare? Is it, perhaps,
+that you only pretend to admire him? However, as once for all, you
+have dismissed the well-known events and personages of history, or the
+epic muse, what have you taken in their stead? Whom has your tragic
+muse armed with her bowl and dagger? the sentimental muse I should
+have said, whom you have seated in the throne of tragedy? What heroes
+has she reared on her buskins?
+
+D.  O! our good friends and next-door neighbours--honest tradesmen,
+valiant tars, high-spirited half-pay officers, philanthropic Jews,
+virtuous courtezans, tender-hearted braziers, and sentimental rat-
+catchers!--(a little bluff or so, but all our very generous, tender-
+hearted characters are a little rude or misanthropic, and all our
+misanthropes very tender-hearted.)
+
+P.  But I pray you, friend, in what actions great or interesting, can
+such men be engaged?
+
+D.  They give away a great deal of money; find rich dowries for young
+men and maidens who have all other good qualities; they brow-beat
+lords, baronets, and justices of the peace, (for they are as bold as
+Hector!)--they rescue stage coaches at the instant they are falling
+down precipices; carry away infants in the sight of opposing armies;
+and some of our performers act a muscular able-bodied man to such
+perfection, that our dramatic poets, who always have the actors in
+their eye, seldom fail to make their favourite male character as
+strong as Samson. And then they take such prodigious leaps!! And what
+is done on the stage is more striking even than what is acted. I once
+remember such a deafening explosion, that I could not hear a word of
+the play for half an act after it: and a little real gunpowder being
+set fire to at the same time, and smelt by all the spectators, the
+naturalness of the scene was quite astonishing!
+
+P.  But how can you connect with such men and such actions that
+dependence of thousands on the fate of one, which gives so lofty an
+interest to the personages of Shakespeare, and the Greek Tragedians?
+How can you connect with them that sublimest of all feelings, the
+power of destiny and the controlling might of heaven, which seems to
+elevate the characters which sink beneath its irresistible blow?
+
+D.  O mere fancies! We seek and find on the present stage our own
+wants and passions, our own vexations, losses, and embarrassments.
+
+P.  It is your own poor pettifogging nature then, which you desire to
+have represented before you?--not human nature in its height and
+vigour? But surely you might find the former with all its joys and
+sorrows, more conveniently in your own houses and parishes.
+
+D.  True! but here comes a difference. Fortune is blind, but the poet
+has his eyes open, and is besides as complaisant as fortune is
+capricious. He makes every thing turn out exactly as we would wish it.
+He gratifies us by representing those as hateful or contemptible whom
+we hate and wish to despise.
+
+P.  (aside.) That is, he gratifies your envy by libelling your
+superiors.
+
+D.  He makes all those precise moralists, who affect to be better than
+their neighbours, turn out at last abject hypocrites, traitors, and
+hard-hearted villains; and your men of spirit, who take their girl and
+their glass with equal freedom, prove the true men of honour, and,
+(that no part of the audience may remain unsatisfied,) reform in the
+last scene, and leave no doubt in the minds of the ladies, that they
+will make most faithful and excellent husbands: though it does seem a
+pity, that they should be obliged to get rid of qualities which had
+made them so interesting! Besides, the poor become rich all at once;
+and in the final matrimonial choice the opulent and high-born
+themselves are made to confess; that VIRTUE IS THE ONLY TRUE NOBILITY,
+AND THAT A LOVELY WOMAN IS A DOWRY OF HERSELF!!
+
+P.  Excellent! But you have forgotten those brilliant flashes of
+loyalty, those patriotic praises of the King and Old England, which,
+especially if conveyed in a metaphor from the ship or the shop, so
+often solicit and so unfailingly receive the public plaudit! I give
+your prudence credit for the omission. For the whole system of your
+drama is a moral and intellectual Jacobinism of the most dangerous
+kind, and those common-place rants of loyalty are no better than
+hypocrisy in your playwrights, and your own sympathy with them a gross
+self-delusion. For the whole secret of dramatic popularity consists
+with you in the confusion and subversion of the natural order of
+things, their causes and their effects; in the excitement of surprise,
+by representing the qualities of liberality, refined feeling, and a
+nice sense of honour, (those things rather which pass among you for
+such), in persons and in classes of life where experience teaches us
+least to expect them; and in rewarding with all the sympathies, that
+are the dues of virtue, those criminals whom law, reason, and religion
+have excommunicated from our esteem!
+
+And now--good night! Truly! I might have written this last sheet
+without having gone to Germany; but I fancied myself talking to you by
+your own fireside, and can you think it a small pleasure to me to
+forget now and then, that I am not there? Besides, you and my other
+good friends have made up your minds to me as I am, and from whatever
+place I write you will expect that part of my "Travels" will consist
+of excursions in my own mind.
+
+
+
+LETTER III
+
+
+                                                     RATZEBURG.
+No little fish thrown back again into the water, no fly unimprisoned
+from a child's hand, could more buoyantly enjoy its element, than I
+this clean and peaceful house, with this lovely view of the town,
+groves, and lake of Ratzeburg, from the window at which I am writing.
+My spirits certainly, and my health I fancied, were beginning to sink
+under the noise, dirt, and unwholesome air of our Hamburg hotel. I
+left it on Sunday, Sept. 23rd, with a letter of introduction from the
+poet Klopstock, to the Amtmann of Ratzeburg. The Amtmann received me
+with kindness, and introduced me to the worthy pastor, who agreed to
+board and lodge me for any length of time not less than a month. The
+vehicle, in which I took my place, was considerably larger than an
+English stage-coach, to which it bore much the same proportion and
+rude resemblance, that an elephant's ear does to the human. Its top
+was composed of naked boards of different colours, and seeming to have
+been parts of different wainscots. Instead of windows there were
+leathern curtains with a little eye of glass in each: they perfectly
+answered the purpose of keeping out the prospect and letting in the
+cold. I could observe little therefore, but the inns and farmhouses at
+which we stopped. They were all alike, except in size: one great room,
+like a barn, with a hay-loft over it, the straw and hay dangling in
+tufts through the boards which formed the ceiling of the room, and the
+floor of the loft. From this room, which is paved like a street,
+sometimes one, sometimes two smaller ones, are enclosed at one end.
+These are commonly floored. In the large room the cattle, pigs,
+poultry, men, women, and children, live in amicable community; yet
+there was an appearance of cleanliness and rustic comfort. One of
+these houses I measured. It was an hundred feet in length. The
+apartments were taken off from one corner. Between these and the
+stalls there was a small interspace, and here the breadth was forty-
+eight feet, but thirty-two where the stalls were; of course, the
+stalls were on each side eight feet in depth. The faces of the cows,
+etc. were turned towards the room; indeed they were in it, so that
+they had at least the comfort of seeing each other's faces. Stall-
+feeding is universal in this part of Germany, a practice concerning
+which the agriculturist and the poet are likely to entertain opposite
+opinions--or at least, to have very different feelings. The woodwork
+of these buildings on the outside is left unplastered, as in old
+houses among us, and, being painted red and green, it cuts and
+tesselates the buildings very gaily. From within three miles of
+Hamburg almost to Molln, which is thirty miles from it, the country,
+as far as I could see it, was a dead flat, only varied by woods. At
+Molln it became more beautiful. I observed a small lake nearly
+surrounded with groves, and a palace in view belonging to the King of
+Great Britain, and inhabited by the Inspector of the Forests. We were
+nearly the same time in travelling the thirty-five miles from Hamburg
+to Ratzeburg, as we had been in going from London to Yarmouth, one
+hundred and twenty-six miles.
+
+The lake of Ratzeburg runs from south to north, about nine miles in
+length, and varying in breadth from three miles to half a mile. About
+a mile from the southernmost point it is divided into two, of course
+very unequal, parts by an island, which, being connected by a bridge
+and a narrow slip of land with the one shore, and by another bridge of
+immense length with the other shore, forms a complete isthmus. On this
+island the town of Ratzeburg is built. The pastor's house or vicarage,
+together with the Amtmann's Amtsschreiber's, and the church, stands
+near the summit of a hill, which slopes down to the slip of land and
+the little bridge, from which, through a superb military gate, you
+step into the island-town of Ratzeburg. This again is itself a little
+hill, by ascending and descending which, you arrive at the long
+bridge, and so to the other shore. The water to the south of the town
+is called the Little Lake, which however almost engrosses the beauties
+of the whole the shores being just often enough green and bare to give
+the proper effect to the magnificent groves which occupy the greater
+part of their circumference. From the turnings, windings, and
+indentations of the shore, the views vary almost every ten steps, and
+the whole has a sort of majestic beauty, a feminine grandeur. At the
+north of the Great Lake, and peeping over it, I see the seven church
+towers of Luebec, at the distance of twelve or thirteen miles, yet as
+distinctly as if they were not three. The only defect in the view is,
+that Ratzeburg is built entirely of red bricks, and all the houses
+roofed with red tiles. To the eye, therefore, it presents a clump of
+brick-dust red. Yet this evening, Oct. 10th, twenty minutes past five,
+I saw the town perfectly beautiful, and the whole softened down into
+complete keeping, if I may borrow a term from the painters. The sky
+over Ratzeburg and all the east was a pure evening blue, while over
+the west it was covered with light sandy clouds. Hence a deep red
+light spread over the whole prospect, in undisturbed harmony with the
+red town, the brown-red woods, and the yellow-red reeds on the skirts
+of the lake. Two or three boats, with single persons paddling them,
+floated up and down in the rich light, which not only was itself in
+harmony with all, but brought all into harmony.
+
+I should have told you that I went back to Hamburg on Thursday (Sept.
+27th) to take leave of my friend, who travels southward, and returned
+hither on the Monday following. From Empfelde, a village half way from
+Ratzeburg, I walked to Hamburg through deep sandy roads and a dreary
+flat: the soil everywhere white, hungry, and excessively pulverised;
+but the approach to the city is pleasing. Light cool country houses,
+which you can look through and see the gardens behind them, with
+arbours and trellis work, and thick vegetable walls, and trees in
+cloisters and piazzas, each house with neat rails before it, and green
+seats within the rails. Every object, whether the growth of nature or
+the work of man, was neat and artificial. It pleased me far better,
+than if the houses and gardens, and pleasure fields, had been in a
+nobler taste: for this nobler taste would have been mere apery. The
+busy, anxious, money-loving merchant of Hamburg could only have
+adopted, he could not have enjoyed the simplicity of nature. The mind
+begins to love nature by imitating human conveniences in nature; but
+this is a step in intellect, though a low one--and were it not so, yet
+all around me spoke of innocent enjoyment and sensitive comforts, and
+I entered with unscrupulous sympathy into the enjoyments and comforts
+even of the busy, anxious, money-loving merchants of Hamburg. In this
+charitable and catholic mood I reached the vast ramparts of the city.
+These are huge green cushions, one rising above the other, with trees
+growing in the interspaces, pledges and symbols of a long peace. Of my
+return I have nothing worth communicating, except that I took extra
+post, which answers to posting in England. These north German post
+chaises are uncovered wicker carts. An English dust-cart is a piece of
+finery, a chef d'auvre of mechanism, compared with them and the
+horses!--a savage might use their ribs instead of his fingers for a
+numeration table. Wherever we stopped, the postilion fed his cattle
+with the brown rye bread of which he eat himself, all breakfasting
+together; only the horses had no gin to their water, and the postilion
+no water to his gin. Now and henceforward for subjects of more
+interest to you, and to the objects in search of which I left you:
+namely, the literati and literature of Germany.
+
+Believe me, I walked with an impression of awe on my spirits, as W----
+and myself accompanied Mr. Klopstock to the house of his brother, the
+poet, which stands about a quarter of a mile from the city gate. It is
+one of a row of little common-place summer-houses, (for so they
+looked,) with four or five rows of young meagre elm trees before the
+windows, beyond which is a green, and then a dead flat intersected
+with several roads. Whatever beauty, (thought I,) may be before the
+poet's eyes at present, it must certainly be purely of his own
+creation. We waited a few minutes in a neat little parlour, ornamented
+with the figures of two of the Muses and with prints, the subjects of
+which were from Klopstock's odes. The poet entered. I was much
+disappointed in his countenance, and recognised in it no likeness to
+the bust. There was no comprehension in the forehead, no weight over
+the eye-brows, no expression of peculiarity, moral or intellectual, on
+the eyes, no massiveness in the general countenance. He is, if
+anything, rather below the middle size. He wore very large half-boots,
+which his legs filled, so fearfully were they swollen. However, though
+neither W---- nor myself could discover any indications of sublimity
+or enthusiasm in his physiognomy, we were both equally impressed with
+his liveliness, and his kind and ready courtesy. He talked in French
+with my friend, and with difficulty spoke a few sentences to me in
+English. His enunciation was not in the least affected by the entire
+want of his upper teeth. The conversation began on his part by the
+expression of his rapture at the surrender of the detachment of French
+troops under General Humbert. Their proceedings in Ireland with regard
+to the committee which they had appointed, with the rest of their
+organizing system, seemed to have given the poet great entertainment.
+He then declared his sanguine belief in Nelson's victory, and
+anticipated its confirmation with a keen and triumphant pleasure. His
+words, tones, looks, implied the most vehement Anti-Gallicanism. The
+subject changed to literature, and I inquired in Latin concerning the
+history of German poetry and the elder German poets. To my great
+astonishment he confessed, that he knew very little on the subject. He
+had indeed occasionally read one or two of their elder writers, but
+not so as to enable him to speak of their merits. Professor Ebeling,
+he said, would probably give me every information of this kind: the
+subject had not particularly excited his curiosity. He then talked of
+Milton and Glover, and thought Glover's blank verse superior to
+Milton's. W---- and myself expressed our surprise: and my friend gave
+his definition and notion of harmonious verse, that it consisted, (the
+English iambic blank verse above all,) in the apt arrangement of
+pauses and cadences, and the sweep of whole paragraphs,
+
+    "with many a winding bout
+     Of linked sweetness long drawn out,"
+
+and not in the even flow, much less in the prominence of antithetic
+vigour, of single lines, which were indeed injurious to the total
+effect, except where they were introduced for some specific purpose.
+Klopstock assented, and said that he meant to confine Glover's
+superiority to single lines. He told us that he had read Milton, in a
+prose translation, when he was fourteen [77]. I understood him thus
+myself, and W---- interpreted Klopstock's French as I had already
+construed it. He appeared to know very little of Milton or indeed of
+our poets in general. He spoke with great indignation of the English
+prose translation of his MESSIAH. All the translations had been bad,
+very bad--but the English was no translation--there were pages on
+pages not in the original--and half the original was not to be found
+in the translation. W---- told him that I intended to translate a few
+of his odes as specimens of German lyrics--he then said to me in
+English, "I wish you would render into English some select passages of
+THE MESSIAH, and revenge me of your countryman!". It was the liveliest
+thing which he produced in the whole conversation. He told us, that
+his first ode was fifty years older than his last. I looked at him
+with much emotion--I considered him as the venerable father of German
+poetry; as a good man; as a Christian; seventy-four years old; with
+legs enormously swollen; yet active, lively, cheerful, and kind, and
+communicative. My eyes felt as if a tear were swelling into them. In
+the portrait of Lessing there was a toupee periwig, which enormously
+injured the effect of his physiognomy--Klopstock wore the same,
+powdered and frizzled. By the bye, old men ought never to wear powder
+--the contrast between a large snow-white wig and the colour of an old
+man's skin is disgusting, and wrinkles in such a neighbourhood appear
+only channels for dirt. It is an honour to poets and great men, that
+you think of them as parts of nature; and anything of trick and
+fashion wounds you in them, as much as when you see venerable yews
+clipped into miserable peacocks.--The author of THE MESSIAH should
+have worn his own grey hair.--His powder and periwig were to the eye
+what Mr. Virgil would be to the ear.
+
+Klopstock dwelt much on the superior power which the German language
+possessed of concentrating meaning. He said, he had often translated
+parts of Homer and Virgil, line by line, and a German line proved
+always sufficient for a Greek or Latin one. In English you cannot do
+this. I answered, that in English we could commonly render one Greek
+heroic line in a line and a half of our common heroic metre, and I
+conjectured that this line and a half would be found to contain no
+more syllables than one German or Greek hexameter. He did not
+understand me [78]: and I, who wished to hear his opinions, not to
+correct them, was glad that he did not.
+
+We now took our leave. At the beginning of the French Revolution
+Klopstock wrote odes of congratulation. He received some honorary
+presents from the French Republic, (a golden crown I believe), and,
+like our Priestley, was invited to a seat in the legislature, which he
+declined. But when French liberty metamorphosed herself into a fury,
+he sent back these presents with a palinodia, declaring his abhorrence
+of their proceedings: and since then he has been perhaps more than
+enough an Anti-Gallican. I mean, that in his just contempt and
+detestation of the crimes and follies of the Revolutionists, he
+suffers himself to forget that the revolution itself is a process of
+the Divine Providence; and that as the folly of men is the wisdom of
+God, so are their iniquities instruments of his goodness. From
+Klopstock's house we walked to the ramparts, discoursing together on
+the poet and his conversation, till our attention was diverted to the
+beauty and singularity of the sunset and its effects on the objects
+around us. There were woods in the distance. A rich sandy light, (nay,
+of a much deeper colour than sandy,) lay over these woods that
+blackened in the blaze. Over that part of the woods which lay
+immediately under the intenser light, a brassy mist floated. The trees
+on the ramparts, and the people moving to and fro between them, were
+cut or divided into equal segments of deep shade and brassy light. Had
+the trees, and the bodies of the men and women, been divided into
+equal segments by a rule or pair of compasses, the portions could not
+have been more regular. All else was obscure. It was a fairy scene!--
+and to increase its romantic character, among the moving objects, thus
+divided into alternate shade and brightness, was a beautiful child,
+dressed with the elegant simplicity of an English child, riding on a
+stately goat, the saddle, bridle, and other accoutrements of which
+were in a high degree costly and splendid. Before I quit the subject
+of Hamburg, let me say, that I remained a day or two longer than I
+otherwise should have done, in order to be present at the feast of St.
+Michael, the patron saint of Hamburg, expecting to see the civic pomp
+of this commercial Republic. I was however disappointed. There were no
+processions, two or three sermons were preached to two or three old
+women in two or three churches, and St. Michael and his patronage
+wished elsewhere by the higher classes, all places of entertainment,
+theatre, etc. being shut up on this day. In Hamburg, there seems to be
+no religion at all; in Luebec it is confined to the women. The men
+seemed determined to be divorced from their wives in the other world,
+if they cannot in this. You will not easily conceive a more singular
+sight, than is presented by the vast aisle of the principal church at
+Luebec, seen from the organ loft: for being filled with female
+servants and persons in the same class of life, and all their caps
+having gold and silver cauls, it appears like a rich pavement of gold
+and silver.
+
+I will conclude this letter with the mere transcription of notes,
+which my friend W---- made of his conversations with Klopstock, during
+the interviews that took place after my departure. On these I shall
+make but one remark at present, and that will appear a presumptuous
+one, namely, that Klopstock's remarks on the venerable sage of
+Koenigsburg are to my own knowledge injurious and mistaken; and so far
+is it from being true, that his system is now given up, that
+throughout the Universities of Germany there is not a single professor
+who is not either a Kantean or a disciple of Fichte, whose system is
+built on the Kantean, and presupposes its truth; or lastly who, though
+an antagonist of Kant, as to his theoretical work, has not embraced
+wholly or in part his moral system, and adopted part of his
+nomenclature. "Klopstock having wished to see the CALVARY of
+Cumberland, and asked what was thought of it in England, I went to
+Remnant's (the English bookseller) where I procured the Analytical
+Review, in which is contained the review of Cumberland's CALVARY. I
+remembered to have read there some specimens of a blank verse
+translation of THE MESSIAH. I had mentioned this to Klopstock, and he
+had a great desire to see them. I walked over to his house and put the
+book into his hands. On adverting to his own poem, he told me he began
+THE MESSIAH when he was seventeen; he devoted three entire years to
+the plan without composing a single line. He was greatly at a loss in
+what manner to execute his work. There were no successful specimens of
+versification in the German language before this time. The first three
+cantos he wrote in a species of measured or numerous prose. This,
+though done with much labour and some success, was far from satisfying
+him. He had composed hexameters both Latin and Greek as a school
+exercise, and there had been also in the German language attempts in
+that style of versification. These were only of very moderate merit.--
+One day he was struck with the idea of what could be done in this way
+--he kept his room a whole day, even went without his dinner, and found
+that in the evening he had written twenty-three hexameters, versifying
+a part of what he had before written in prose. From that time, pleased
+with his efforts, he composed no more in prose. Today he informed me
+that he had finished his plan before he read Milton. He was enchanted
+to see an author who before him had trod the same path. This is a
+contradiction of what he said before. He did not wish to speak of his
+poem to any one till it was finished: but some of his friends who had
+seen what he had finished, tormented him till he had consented to
+publish a few books in a journal. He was then, I believe, very young,
+about twenty-five. The rest was printed at different periods, four
+books at a time. The reception given to the first specimens was highly
+flattering. He was nearly thirty years in finishing the whole poem,
+but of these thirty years not more than two were employed in the
+composition. He only composed in favourable moments; besides he had
+other occupations. He values himself upon the plan of his odes, and
+accuses the modern lyrical writers of gross deficiency in this
+respect. I laid the same accusation against Horace: he would not hear
+of it--but waived the discussion. He called Rousseau's ODE TO FORTUNE
+a moral dissertation in stanzas. I spoke of Dryden's ST. CECILIA; but
+he did not seem familiar with our writers. He wished to know the
+distinctions between our dramatic and epic blank verse. He recommended
+me to read his HERMANN before I read either THE MESSIAH or the odes.
+He flattered himself that some time or other his dramatic poems would
+be known in England. He had not heard of Cowper. He thought that Voss
+in his translation of THE ILIAD had done violence to the idiom of the
+Germans, and had sacrificed it to the Greeks, not remembering
+sufficiently that each language has its particular spirit and genius.
+He said Lessing was the first of their dramatic writers. I complained
+of NATHAN as tedious. He said there was not enough of action in it;
+but that Lessing was the most chaste of their writers. He spoke
+favourably of Goethe; but said that his SORROWS OF WERTER was his best
+work, better than any of his dramas: he preferred the first written to
+the rest of Goethe's dramas. Schiller's ROBBERS he found so
+extravagant, that he could not read it. I spoke of the scene of the
+setting sun. He did not know it. He said Schiller could not live. He
+thought DON CARLOS the best of his dramas; but said that the plot was
+inextricable.--It was evident he knew little of Schiller's works:
+indeed, he said, he could not read them. Buerger, he said, was a true
+poet, and would live; that Schiller, on the contrary, must soon be
+forgotten; that he gave himself up to the imitation of Shakespeare,
+who often was extravagant, but that Schiller was ten thousand times
+more so. He spoke very slightingly of Kotzebue, as an immoral author
+in the first place, and next, as deficient in power. At Vienna, said
+he, they are transported with him; but we do not reckon the people of
+Vienna either the wisest or the wittiest people of Germany. He said
+Wieland was a charming author, and a sovereign master of his own
+language: that in this respect Goethe could not be compared to him,
+nor indeed could any body else. He said that his fault was to be
+fertile to exuberance. I told him the OBERON had just been translated
+into English. He asked me if I was not delighted with the poem. I
+answered, that I thought the story began to flag about the seventh or
+eighth book; and observed, that it was unworthy of a man of genius to
+make the interest of a long poem turn entirely upon animal
+gratification. He seemed at first disposed to excuse this by saying,
+that there are different subjects for poetry, and that poets are not
+willing to be restricted in their choice. I answered, that I thought
+the passion of love as well suited to the purposes of poetry as any
+other passion; but that it was a cheap way of pleasing to fix the
+attention of the reader through a long poem on the mere appetite.
+Well! but, said he, you see, that such poems please every body. I
+answered, that it was the province of a great poet to raise people up
+to his own level, not to descend to theirs. He agreed, and confessed,
+that on no account whatsoever would he have written a work like the
+OBERON. He spoke in raptures of Wieland's style, and pointed out the
+passage where Retzia is delivered of her child, as exquisitely
+beautiful. I said that I did not perceive any very striking passages;
+but that I made allowance for the imperfections of a translation. Of
+the thefts of Wieland, he said, they were so exquisitely managed, that
+the greatest writers might be proud to steal as he did. He considered
+the books and fables of old romance writers in the light of the
+ancient mythology, as a sort of common property, from which a man was
+free to take whatever he could make a good use of. An Englishman had
+presented him with the odes of Collins, which he had read with
+pleasure. He knew little or nothing of Gray, except his ELEGY written
+in a country CHURCH-YARD. He complained of the fool in LEAR. I
+observed that he seemed to give a terrible wildness to the distress;
+but still he complained. He asked whether it was not allowed, that
+Pope had written rhymed poetry with more skill than any of our
+writers--I said I preferred Dryden, because his couplets had greater
+variety in their movement. He thought my reason a good one; but asked
+whether the rhyme of Pope were not more exact. This question I
+understood as applying to the final terminations, and observed to him
+that I believed it was the case; but that I thought it was easy to
+excuse some inaccuracy in the final sounds, if the general sweep of
+the verse was superior. I told him that we were not so exact with
+regard to the final endings of the lines as the French. He did not
+seem to know that we made no distinction between masculine and
+feminine (i.e. single or double,) rhymes: at least he put inquiries to
+me on this subject. He seemed to think that no language could be so
+far formed as that it might not be enriched by idioms borrowed from
+another tongue. I said this was a very dangerous practice; and added,
+that I thought Milton had often injured both his prose and verse by
+taking this liberty too frequently. I recommended to him the prose
+works of Dryden as models of pure and native English. I was treading
+upon tender ground, as I have reason to suppose that he has himself
+liberally indulged in the practice."
+
+The same day I dined at Mr. Klopstock's, where I had the pleasure of a
+third interview with the poet. We talked principally about indifferent
+things. I asked him what he thought of Kant. He said that his
+reputation was much on the decline in Germany. That for his own part
+he was not surprised to find it so, as the works of Kant were to him
+utterly incomprehensible--that he had often been pestered by the
+Kanteans; but was rarely in the practice of arguing with them. His
+custom was to produce the book, open it and point to a passage, and
+beg they would explain it. This they ordinarily attempted to do by
+substituting their own ideas. I do not want, I say, an explanation of
+your own ideas, but of the passage which is before us. In this way I
+generally bring the dispute to an immediate conclusion. He spoke of
+Wolfe as the first Metaphysician they had in Germany. Wolfe had
+followers; but they could hardly be called a sect, and luckily till
+the appearance of Kant, about fifteen years ago, Germany had not been
+pestered by any sect of philosophers whatsoever; but that each man had
+separately pursued his inquiries uncontrolled by the dogmas of a
+master. Kant had appeared ambitious to be the founder of a sect; that
+he had succeeded: but that the Germans were now coming to their senses
+again. That Nicolai and Engel had in different ways contributed to
+disenchant the nation; but above all the incomprehensibility of the
+philosopher and his philosophy. He seemed pleased to hear, that as yet
+Kant's doctrines had not met with many admirers in England--did not
+doubt but that we had too much wisdom to be duped by a writer who set
+at defiance the common sense and common understandings of men. We
+talked of tragedy. He seemed to rate highly the power of exciting
+tears--I said that nothing was more easy than to deluge an audience,
+that it was done every day by the meanest writers.
+
+I must remind you, my friend, first, that these notes are not intended
+as specimens of Klopstock's intellectual power, or even "colloquial
+prowess," to judge of which by an accidental conversation, and this
+with strangers, and those too foreigners, would be not only
+unreasonable, but calumnious. Secondly, I attribute little other
+interest to the remarks than what is derived from the celebrity of the
+person who made them. Lastly, if you ask me, whether I have read THE
+MESSIAH, and what I think of it? I answer--as yet the first four books
+only: and as to my opinion--(the reasons of which hereafter)--you may
+guess it from what I could not help muttering to myself, when the good
+pastor this morning told me, that Klopstock was the German Milton--"a
+very German Milton indeed!!!"
+
+Heaven preserve you, and                         S. T. COLERIDGE.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+Quid quod praefatione praemunierim libellum, qua conor omnem
+offendiculi ansam praecidere? [79] Neque quicquam addubito, quin ea
+candidis omnibus faciat satis. Quid autem facias istis, qui vel ob
+ingenii pertinaciam sibi satisfieri nolint, vel stupidiores sint, quam
+ut satisfactionem intelligant? Nam quemadmodum Simonides dixit,
+Thessalos hebetiores esse, quam ut possint a se decipi, ita quosdam
+videas stupidiores, quam ut placari queant. Adhaec, non mirum est
+invenire quod calumnietur, qui nihil aliud quaerit, nisi quod
+calumnietur.                         ERASMUS ad Dorpium, Theologum.
+
+
+In the rifacimento of THE FRIEND, I have inserted extracts from the
+CONCIONES AD POPULUM, printed, though scarcely published, in the year
+1795, in the very heat and height of my anti-ministerial enthusiasm:
+these in proof that my principles of politics have sustained no
+change.--In the present chapter, I have annexed to my Letters from
+Germany, with particular reference to that, which contains a
+disquisition on the modern drama, a critique on the Tragedy of
+BERTRAM, written within the last twelve months: in proof, that I have
+been as falsely charged with any fickleness in my principles of
+taste.--The letter was written to a friend: and the apparent
+abruptness with which it begins, is owing to the omission of the
+introductory sentences.
+
+You remember, my dear Sir, that Mr. Whitbread, shortly before his
+death, proposed to the assembled subscribers of Drury Lane Theatre,
+that the concern should be farmed to some responsible individual under
+certain conditions and limitations: and that his proposal was
+rejected, not without indignation, as subversive of the main object,
+for the attainment of which the enlightened and patriotic assemblage
+of philodramatists had been induced to risk their subscriptions. Now
+this object was avowed to be no less than the redemption of the
+British stage not only from horses, dogs, elephants, and the like
+zoological rarities, but also from the more pernicious barbarisms and
+Kotzebuisms in morals and taste. Drury Lane was to be restored to its
+former classical renown; Shakespeare, Jonson, and Otway, with the
+expurgated muses of Vanbrugh, Congreve, and Wycherley, were to be
+reinaugurated in their rightful dominion over British audiences; and
+the Herculean process was to commence, by exterminating the speaking
+monsters imported from the banks of the Danube, compared with which
+their mute relations, the emigrants from Exeter 'Change, and Polito
+(late Pidcock's) show-carts, were tame and inoffensive. Could an
+heroic project, at once so refined and so arduous, be consistently
+entrusted to, could its success be rationally expected from, a
+mercenary manager, at whose critical quarantine the lucri bonus odor
+would conciliate a bill of health to the plague in person? No! As the
+work proposed, such must be the work-masters. Rank, fortune, liberal
+education, and (their natural accompaniments, or consequences)
+critical discernment, delicate tact, disinterestedness, unsuspected
+morals, notorious patriotism, and tried Maecenasship, these were the
+recommendations that influenced the votes of the proprietary
+subscribers of Drury Lane Theatre, these the motives that occasioned
+the election of its Supreme Committee of Management. This circumstance
+alone would have excited a strong interest in the public mind,
+respecting the first production of the Tragic Muse which had been
+announced under such auspices, and had passed the ordeal of such
+judgments: and the tragedy, on which you have requested my judgment,
+was the work on which the great expectations, justified by so many
+causes, were doomed at length to settle.
+
+But before I enter on the examination of BERTRAM, or THE CASTLE OF ST.
+ALDOBRAND, I shall interpose a few words, on the phrase German Drama,
+which I hold to be altogether a misnomer. At the time of Lessing, the
+German stage, such as it was, appears to have been a flat and servile
+copy of the French. It was Lessing who first introduced the name and
+the works of Shakespeare to the admiration of the Germans; and I
+should not perhaps go too far, if I add, that it was Lessing who first
+proved to all thinking men, even to Shakespeare's own countrymen, the
+true nature of his apparent irregularities. These, he demonstrated,
+were deviations only from the accidents of the Greek tragedy; and from
+such accidents as hung a heavy weight on the wings of the Greek poets,
+and narrowed their flight within the limits of what we may call the
+heroic opera. He proved, that, in all the essentials of art, no less
+than in the truth of nature, the Plays of Shakespeare were
+incomparably more coincident with the principles of Aristotle, than
+the productions of Corneille and Racine, notwithstanding the boasted
+regularity of the latter. Under these convictions were Lessing's own
+dramatic works composed. Their deficiency is in depth and imagination:
+their excellence is in the construction of the plot; the good sense of
+the sentiments; the sobriety of the morals; and the high polish of the
+diction and dialogue. In short, his dramas are the very antipodes of
+all those which it has been the fashion of late years at once to abuse
+and enjoy, under the name of the German drama. Of this latter,
+Schiller's ROBBERS was the earliest specimen; the first fruits of his
+youth, (I had almost said of his boyhood), and as such, the pledge,
+and promise of no ordinary genius. Only as such, did the maturer
+judgment of the author tolerate the Play. During his whole life he
+expressed himself concerning this production with more than needful
+asperity, as a monster not less offensive to good taste, than to sound
+morals; and, in his latter years, his indignation at the unwonted
+popularity of the ROBBERS seduced him into the contrary extremes, viz.
+a studied feebleness of interest, (as far as the interest was to be
+derived from incidents and the excitement of curiosity); a diction
+elaborately metrical; the affectation of rhymes; and the pedantry of
+the chorus.
+
+But to understand the true character of the ROBBERS, and of the
+countless imitations which were its spawn, I must inform you, or at
+least call to your recollection, that, about that time, and for some
+years before it, three of the most popular books in the German
+language were, the translations Of YOUNG'S NIGHT THOUGHTS, HERVEY'S
+MEDITATIONS, and RICHARDSON'S CLARISSA HARLOW. Now we have only to
+combine the bloated style and peculiar rhythm of Hervey, which is
+poetic only on account of its utter unfitness for prose, and might as
+appropriately be called prosaic, from its utter unfitness for poetry;
+we have only, I repeat, to combine these Herveyisms with the strained
+thoughts, the figurative metaphysics and solemn epigrams of Young on
+the one hand; and with the loaded sensibility, the minute detail, the
+morbid consciousness of every thought and feeling in the whole flux
+and reflux of the mind, in short the self-involution and dreamlike
+continuity of Richardson on the other hand; and then to add the
+horrific incidents, and mysterious villains, (geniuses of supernatural
+intellect, if you will take the authors' words for it, but on a level
+with the meanest ruffians of the condemned cells, if we are to judge
+by their actions and contrivances)--to add the ruined castles, the
+dungeons, the trap-doors, the skeletons, the flesh-and-blood ghosts,
+and the perpetual moonshine of a modern author, (themselves the
+literary brood of the CASTLE OF OTRANTO, the translations of which,
+with the imitations and improvements aforesaid, were about that time
+beginning to make as much noise in Germany as their originals were
+making in England),--and as the compound of these ingredients duly
+mixed, you will recognize the so-called German drama. The olla podrida
+thus cooked up, was denounced, by the best critics in Germany, as the
+mere cramps of weakness, and orgasms of a sickly imagination on the
+part of the author, and the lowest provocation of torpid feeling on
+that of the readers. The old blunder, however, concerning the
+irregularity and wildness of Shakespeare, in which the German did but
+echo the French, who again were but the echoes of our own critics, was
+still in vogue, and Shakespeare was quoted as authority for the most
+anti-Shakespearean drama. We have indeed two poets who wrote as one,
+near the age of Shakespeare, to whom, (as the worst characteristic of
+their writings), the Coryphaeus of the present drama may challenge the
+honour of being a poor relation, or impoverished descendant. For if we
+would charitably consent to forget the comic humour, the wit, the
+felicities of style, in other words, all the poetry, and nine-tenths
+of all the genius of Beaumont and Fletcher, that which would remain
+becomes a Kotzebue.
+
+The so-called German drama, therefore, is English in its origin,
+English in its materials, and English by re-adoption; and till we can
+prove that Kotzebue, or any of the whole breed of Kotzebues, whether
+dramatists or romantic writers, or writers of romantic dramas, were
+ever admitted to any other shelf in the libraries of well-educated
+Germans than were occupied by their originals, and apes' apes in their
+mother country, we should submit to carry our own brat on our own
+shoulders; or rather consider it as a lack-grace returned from
+transportation with such improvements only in growth and manners as
+young transported convicts usually come home with.
+
+I know nothing that contributes more to a clearer insight into the
+true nature of any literary phaenomenon, than the comparison of it
+with some elder production, the likeness of which is striking, yet
+only apparent, while the difference is real. In the present case this
+opportunity is furnished us, by the old Spanish play, entitled
+Atheista Fulminato, formerly, and perhaps still, acted in the churches
+and monasteries of Spain, and which, under various names (Don Juan,
+the Libertine, etc.) has had its day of favour in every country
+throughout Europe. A popularity so extensive, and of a work so
+grotesque and extravagant, claims and merits philosophical attention
+and investigation. The first point to be noticed is, that the play is
+throughout imaginative. Nothing of it belongs to the real world, but
+the names of the places and persons. The comic parts, equally with the
+tragic; the living, equally with the defunct characters, are creatures
+of the brain; as little amenable to the rules of ordinary probability,
+as the Satan Of PARADISE LOST, or the Caliban of THE TEMPEST, and
+therefore to be understood and judged of as impersonated abstractions.
+Rank, fortune, wit, talent, acquired knowledge, and liberal
+accomplishments, with beauty of person, vigorous health, and
+constitutional hardihood,--all these advantages, elevated by the
+habits and sympathies of noble birth and national character, are
+supposed to have combined in Don Juan, so as to give him the means of
+carrying into all its practical consequences the doctrine of a godless
+nature, as the sole ground and efficient cause not only of all things,
+events, and appearances, but likewise of all our thoughts, sensations,
+impulses and actions. Obedience to nature is the only virtue: the
+gratification of the passions and appetites her only dictate: each
+individual's self-will the sole organ through which nature utters her
+commands, and
+
+    "Self-contradiction is the only wrong!
+     For, by the laws of spirit, in the right
+     Is every individual character
+     That acts in strict consistence with itself."
+
+That speculative opinions, however impious and daring they may be, are
+not always followed by correspondent conduct, is most true, as well as
+that they can scarcely in any instance be systematically realized, on
+account of their unsuitableness to human nature and to the
+institutions of society. It can be hell, only where it is all hell:
+and a separate world of devils is necessary for the existence of any
+one complete devil. But on the other hand it is no less clear, nor,
+with the biography of Carrier and his fellow atheists before us, can
+it be denied without wilful blindness, that the (so called) system of
+nature (that is, materialism, with the utter rejection of moral
+responsibility, of a present Providence, and of both present and
+future retribution) may influence the characters and actions of
+individuals, and even of communities, to a degree that almost does
+away the distinction between men and devils, and will make the page of
+the future historian resemble the narration of a madman's dreams. It
+is not the wickedness of Don Juan, therefore, which constitutes the
+character an abstraction, and removes it from the rules of
+probability; but the rapid succession of the correspondent acts and
+incidents, his intellectual superiority, and the splendid accumulation
+of his gifts and desirable qualities, as co-existent with entire
+wickedness in one and the same person. But this likewise is the very
+circumstance which gives to this strange play its charm and universal
+interest. Don Juan is, from beginning to end, an intelligible
+character: as much so as the Satan of Milton. The poet asks only of
+the reader, what, as a poet, he is privileged to ask: namely, that
+sort of negative faith in the existence of such a being, which we
+willingly give to productions professedly ideal, and a disposition to
+the same state of feeling, as that with which we contemplate the
+idealized figures of the Apollo Belvidere, and the Farnese Hercules.
+What the Hercules is to the eye in corporeal strength, Don Juan is to
+the mind in strength of character. The ideal consists in the happy
+balance of the generic with the individual. The former makes the
+character representative and symbolical, therefore instructive;
+because, mutatis mutandis, it is applicable to whole classes of men.
+The latter gives it living interest; for nothing lives or is real, but
+as definite and individual. To understand this completely, the reader
+need only recollect the specific state of his feelings, when in
+looking at a picture of the historic (more properly of the poetic or
+heroic) class, he objects to a particular figure as being too much of
+a portrait; and this interruption of his complacency he feels without
+the least reference to, or the least acquaintance with, any person in
+real life whom he might recognise in this figure. It is enough that
+such a figure is not ideal: and therefore not ideal, because one of
+the two factors or elements of the ideal is in excess. A similar and
+more powerful objection he would feel towards a set of figures which
+were mere abstractions, like those of Cipriani, and what have been
+called Greek forms and faces, that is, outlines drawn according to a
+recipe. These again are not ideal; because in these the other element
+is in excess. "Forma formans per formam formatam translucens," [80] is
+the definition and perfection of ideal art.
+
+This excellence is so happily achieved in the Don Juan, that it is
+capable of interesting without poetry, nay, even without words, as in
+our pantomime of that name. We see clearly how the character is
+formed; and the very extravagance of the incidents, and the super-
+human entireness of Don Juan's agency, prevents the wickedness from
+shocking our minds to any painful degree. We do not believe it enough
+for this effect; no, not even with that kind of temporary and negative
+belief or acquiescence which I have described above. Meantime the
+qualities of his character are too desirable, too flattering to our
+pride and our wishes, not to make up on this side as much additional
+faith as was lost on the other. There is no danger (thinks the
+spectator or reader) of my becoming such a monster of iniquity as Don
+Juan! I never shall be an atheist! I shall never disallow all
+distinction between right and wrong! I have not the least inclination
+to be so outrageous a drawcansir in my love affairs! But to possess
+such a power of captivating and enchanting the affections of the other
+sex!--to be capable of inspiring in a charming and even a virtuous
+woman, a love so deep, and so entirely personal to me!--that even my
+worst vices, (if I were vicious), even my cruelty and perfidy, (if I
+were cruel and perfidious), could not eradicate the passion!--to be so
+loved for my own self, that even with a distinct knowledge of my
+character, she yet died to save me!--this, sir, takes hold of two
+sides of our nature, the better and the worse. For the heroic
+disinterestedness, to which love can transport a woman, can not be
+contemplated without an honourable emotion of reverence towards
+womanhood: and, on the other hand, it is among the miseries, and
+abides in the dark ground-work of our nature, to crave an outward
+confirmation of that something within us, which is our very self, that
+something, not made up of our qualities and relations, but itself the
+supporter and substantial basis of all these. Love me, and not my
+qualities, may be a vicious and an insane wish, but it is not a wish
+wholly without a meaning.
+
+Without power, virtue would be insufficient and incapable of revealing
+its being. It would resemble the magic transformation of Tasso's
+heroine into a tree, in which she could only groan and bleed. Hence
+power is necessarily an object of our desire and of our admiration.
+But of all power, that of the mind is, on every account, the grand
+desideratum of human ambition. We shall be as Gods in knowledge, was
+and must have been the first temptation: and the coexistence of great
+intellectual lordship with guilt has never been adequately represented
+without exciting the strongest interest, and for this reason, that in
+this bad and heterogeneous co-ordination we can contemplate the
+intellect of man more exclusively as a separate self-subsistence, than
+in its proper state of subordination to his own conscience, or to the
+will of an infinitely superior being.
+
+This is the sacred charm of Shakespeare's male characters in general.
+They are all cast in the mould of Shakespeare's own gigantic
+intellect; and this is the open attraction of his Richard, Iago,
+Edmund, and others in particular. But again; of all intellectual
+power, that of superiority to the fear of the invisible world is the
+most dazzling. Its influence is abundantly proved by the one
+circumstance, that it can bribe us into a voluntary submission of our
+better knowledge, into suspension of all our judgment derived from
+constant experience, and enable us to peruse with the liveliest
+interest the wildest tales of ghosts, wizards, genii, and secret
+talismans. On this propensity, so deeply rooted in our nature, a
+specific dramatic probability may be raised by a true poet, if the
+whole of his work be in harmony: a dramatic probability, sufficient
+for dramatic pleasure, even when the component characters and
+incidents border on impossibility. The poet does not require us to be
+awake and believe; he solicits us only to yield ourselves to a dream;
+and this too with our eyes open, and with our judgment perdue behind
+the curtain, ready to awaken us at the first motion of our will: and
+meantime, only, not to disbelieve. And in such a state of mind, who
+but must be impressed with the cool intrepidity of Don john on the
+appearance of his father's ghost:
+
+ "GHOST.--Monster! behold these wounds!
+
+ "D. JOHN.--I do! They were well meant and well performed, I see.
+
+ "GHOST.------Repent, repent of all thy villanies.
+  My clamorous blood to heaven for vengeance cries,
+  Heaven will pour out his judgments on you all.
+  Hell gapes for you, for you each fiend doth call,
+  And hourly waits your unrepenting fall.
+  You with eternal horrors they'll torment,
+  Except of all your crimes you suddenly repent. (Ghost sinks.)
+
+ "D. JOHN.--Farewell, thou art a foolish ghost. Repent, quoth he!
+  what could this mean? Our senses are all in a mist sure.
+
+ "D. ANTONIO.--(one of D. Juan's reprobate companions.) They are not!
+  'Twas a ghost.
+
+ "D. LOPEZ.--(another reprobate.) I ne'er believed those foolish tales
+  before.
+
+ "D. JOHN.--Come! 'Tis no matter. Let it be what it will, it must be
+  natural.
+
+ "D. ANT.--And nature is unalterable in us too.
+
+ "D. JOHN.--'Tis true! The nature of a ghost can not change our's."
+
+Who also can deny a portion of sublimity to the tremendous consistency
+with which he stands out the last fearful trial, like a second
+Prometheus?
+
+                  "Chorus of Devils.
+ "STATUE-GHOST.--Will you not relent and feel remorse?
+
+ "D. JOHN.--Could'st thou bestow another heart on me I might. But
+  with this heart I have, I can not.
+
+ "D. LOPEZ.--These things are prodigious.
+
+ "D. ANTON.--I have a sort of grudging to relent, but something holds
+  me back.
+
+ "D. LOP.--If we could, 'tis now too late. I will not.
+
+ "D. ANT.--We defy thee!
+
+ "GHOST.--Perish ye impious wretches, go and find the punishments laid
+  up in store for you!
+
+  (Thunder and lightning. D. Lop. and D. Ant. are swallowed up.)
+
+ "GHOST To D. JOHN.--Behold their dreadful fates, and know that thy
+  last moment's come!
+
+ "D. JOHN.--Think not to fright me, foolish ghost; I'll break your
+  marble body in pieces and pull down your horse.
+          (Thunder and lightning--chorus of devils, etc.)
+
+ "D. JOHN.--These things I see with wonder, but no fear.
+  Were all the elements to be confounded,
+  And shuffled all into their former chaos;
+  Were seas of sulphur flaming round about me,
+  And all mankind roaring within those fires,
+  I could not fear, or feel the least remorse.
+  To the last instant I would dare thy power.
+  Here I stand firm, and all thy threats contemn.
+  Thy murderer (to the ghost of one whom he had murdered)
+  Stands here! Now do thy worst!"
+          (He is swallowed up in a cloud of fire.)
+
+In fine the character of Don John consists in the union of every thing
+desirable to human nature, as means, and which therefore by the well
+known law of association becomes at length desirable on their own
+account. On their own account, and, in their own dignity, they are
+here displayed, as being employed to ends so unhuman, that in the
+effect, they appear almost as means without an end. The ingredients
+too are mixed in the happiest proportion, so as to uphold and relieve
+each other--more especially in that constant interpoise of wit,
+gaiety, and social generosity, which prevents the criminal, even in
+his most atrocious moments, from sinking into the mere ruffian, as far
+at least, as our imagination sits in judgment. Above all, the fine
+suffusion through the whole, with the characteristic manners and
+feelings, of a highly bred gentleman gives life to the drama. Thus
+having invited the statue-ghost of the governor, whom he had murdered,
+to supper, which invitation the marble ghost accepted by a nod of the
+head, Don John has prepared a banquet.
+
+ "D. JOHN.--Some wine, sirrah! Here's to Don Pedro's ghost--he should
+  have been welcome.
+
+ "D. LOP.--The rascal is afraid of you after death.
+                                   (One knocks hard at the door.)
+
+ "D. JOHN.--(to the servant)--Rise and do your duty.
+
+ "SERV.--Oh the devil, the devil!  (Marble ghost enters.)
+
+ "D. JOHN.--Ha! 'tis the ghost! Let's rise and receive him! Come,
+  Governour, you are welcome, sit there; if we had thought you would
+  have come, we would have staid for you.
+
+     *     *     *     *     *     *
+
+  Here, Governour, your health! Friends, put it about! Here's
+  excellent meat, taste of this ragout. Come, I'll help you, come
+  eat, and let old quarrels be forgotten.  (The ghost threatens him
+  with vengeance.)
+
+ "D. JOHN.--We are too much confirmed--curse on this dry discourse.
+  Come, here's to your mistress, you had one when you were living:
+  not forgetting your sweet sister.                (devils enter.)
+
+ "D. JOHN.--Are these some of your retinue? Devils, say you? I'm
+  sorry I have no burnt brandy to treat 'em with, that's drink fit
+  for devils," etc.
+
+Nor is the scene from which we quote interesting, in dramatic
+probability alone; it is susceptible likewise of a sound moral; of a
+moral that has more than common claims on the notice of a too numerous
+class, who are ready to receive the qualities of gentlemanly courage,
+and scrupulous honour, (in all the recognised laws of honour,) as the
+substitutes of virtue, instead of its ornaments. This, indeed, is the
+moral value of the play at large, and that which places it at a
+world's distance from the spirit of modern jacobinism. The latter
+introduces to us clumsy copies of these showy instrumental qualities,
+in order to reconcile us to vice and want of principle; while the
+Atheista Fulminato presents an exquisite portraiture of the same
+qualities, in all their gloss and glow, but presents them for the sole
+purpose of displaying their hollowness, and in order to put us on our
+guard by demonstrating their utter indifference to vice and virtue,
+whenever these and the like accomplishments are contemplated for
+themselves alone.
+
+Eighteen years ago I observed, that the whole secret of the modern
+jacobinical drama, (which, and not the German, is its appropriate
+designation,) and of all its popularity, consists in the confusion and
+subversion of the natural order of things in their causes and effects:
+namely, in the excitement of surprise by representing the qualities of
+liberality, refined feeling, and a nice sense of honour (those things
+rather which pass amongst us for such) in persons and in classes where
+experience teaches us least to expect them; and by rewarding with all
+the sympathies which are the due of virtue, those criminals whom law,
+reason, and religion have excommunicated from our esteem.
+
+This of itself would lead me back to BERTRAM, or the CASTLE OF ST.
+ALDOBRAND; but, in my own mind, this tragedy was brought into
+connection with THE LIBERTINE, (Shadwell's adaptation of the Atheista
+Fulminato to the English stage in the reign of Charles the Second,) by
+the fact, that our modern drama is taken, in the substance of it, from
+the first scene of the third act of THE LIBERTINE. But with what
+palpable superiority of judgment in the original! Earth and hell, men
+and spirits are up in arms against Don John; the two former acts of
+the play have not only prepared us for the supernatural, but
+accustomed us to the prodigious. It is, therefore, neither more nor
+less than we anticipate when the Captain exclaims: "In all the dangers
+I have been, such horrors I never knew. I am quite unmanned:" and when
+the Hermit says, that he had "beheld the ocean in wildest rage, yet
+ne'er before saw a storm so dreadful, such horrid flashes of
+lightning, and such claps of thunder, were never in my remembrance."
+And Don John's burst of startling impiety is equally intelligible in
+its motive, as dramatic in its effect.
+
+But what is there to account for the prodigy of the tempest at
+Bertram's shipwreck? It is a mere supernatural effect, without even a
+hint of any supernatural agency; a prodigy, without any circumstance
+mentioned that is prodigious; and a miracle introduced without a
+ground, and ending without a result. Every event and every scene of
+the play might have taken place as well if Bertram and his vessel had
+been driven in by a common hard gale, or from want of provisions. The
+first act would have indeed lost its greatest and most sonorous
+picture; a scene for the sake of a scene, without a word spoken; as
+such, therefore, (a rarity without a precedent), we must take it, and
+be thankful! In the opinion of not a few, it was, in every sense of
+the word, the best scene in the play. I am quite certain it was the
+most innocent: and the steady, quiet uprightness of the flame of the
+wax-candles, which the monks held over the roaring billows amid the
+storm of wind and rain, was really miraculous.
+
+The Sicilian sea coast: a convent of monks: night: a most portentous,
+unearthly storm: a vessel is wrecked contrary to all human
+expectation, one man saves himself by his prodigious powers as a
+swimmer, aided by the peculiarity of his destination--
+
+ "PRIOR.------All, all did perish
+
+  FIRST MONK.--Change, change those drenched weeds--
+
+  PRIOR.--I wist not of them--every soul did perish--
+                       Enter third Monk hastily.
+
+ "THIRD MONK.--No, there was one did battle with the storm
+  With careless desperate force; full many times
+  His life was won and lost, as tho' he recked not--
+  No hand did aid him, and he aided none--
+  Alone he breasted the broad wave, alone
+  That man was saved."
+
+Well! This man is led in by the monks, supposed dripping wet, and to
+very natural inquiries he either remains silent, or gives most brief
+and surly answers, and after three or four of these half-line
+courtesies, "dashing off the monks" who had saved him, he exclaims in
+the true sublimity of our modern misanthropic heroism--
+
+ "Off! ye are men--there's poison in your touch.
+  But I must yield, for this" (what?) "hath left me strengthless."
+
+So end the three first scenes. In the next (the Castle of St.
+Aldobrand,) we find the servants there equally frightened with this
+unearthly storm, though wherein it differed from other violent storms
+we are not told, except that Hugo informs us, page 9--
+
+ "PIET.--Hugo, well met. Does e'en thy age bear
+  Memory of so terrible a storm?
+
+  HUGO.--They have been frequent lately.
+
+  PIET.--They are ever so in Sicily.
+
+  HUGO.--So it is said. But storms when I was young
+  Would still pass o'er like Nature's fitful fevers,
+  And rendered all more wholesome. Now their rage,
+  Sent thus unseasonable and profitless,
+  Speaks like the threats of heaven."
+
+A most perplexing theory of Sicilian storms is this of old Hugo! and
+what is very remarkable, not apparently founded on any great
+familiarity of his own with this troublesome article. For when Pietro
+asserts the "ever more frequency" of tempests in Sicily, the old man
+professes to know nothing more of the fact, but by hearsay. "So it is
+said."--But why he assumed this storm to be unseasonable, and on what
+he grounded his prophecy, (for the storm is still in full fury), that
+it would be profitless, and without the physical powers common to all
+other violent sea-winds in purifying the atmosphere, we are left in
+the dark; as well concerning the particular points in which he knew
+it, during its continuance, to differ from those that he had been
+acquainted with in his youth. We are at length introduced to the Lady
+Imogine, who, we learn, had not rested "through" the night; not on
+account of the tempest, for
+
+    "Long ere the storm arose, her restless gestures
+     Forbade all hope to see her blest with sleep."
+
+Sitting at a table, and looking at a portrait, she informs us--First,
+that portrait-painters may make a portrait from memory,
+
+    "The limner's art may trace the absent feature."
+
+For surely these words could never mean, that a painter may have a
+person sit to him who afterwards may leave the room or perhaps the
+country? Secondly, that a portrait-painter can enable a mourning lady
+to possess a good likeness of her absent lover, but that the portrait-
+painter cannot, and who shall--
+
+    "Restore the scenes in which they met and parted?"
+
+The natural answer would have been--Why the scene-painter to be sure!
+But this unreasonable lady requires in addition sundry things to be
+painted that have neither lines nor colours--
+
+    "The thoughts, the recollections, sweet and bitter,
+     Or the Elysian dreams of lovers when they loved."
+
+Which last sentence must be supposed to mean; when they were present,
+and making love to each other.--Then, if this portrait could speak, it
+would "acquit the faith of womankind." How? Had she remained constant?
+No, she has been married to another man, whose wife she now is. How
+then? Why, that, in spite of her marriage vow, she had continued to
+yearn and crave for her former lover--
+
+    "This has her body, that her mind:
+     Which has the better bargain?"
+
+The lover, however, was not contented with this precious arrangement,
+as we shall soon find. The lady proceeds to inform us that during the
+many years of their separation, there have happened in the different
+parts of the world, a number of "such things;" even such, as in a
+course of years always have, and till the Millennium, doubtless always
+will happen somewhere or other. Yet this passage, both in language and
+in metre, is perhaps amongst the best parts of the play. The lady's
+love companion and most esteemed attendant, Clotilda, now enters and
+explains this love and esteem by proving herself a most passive and
+dispassionate listener, as well as a brief and lucky querist, who asks
+by chance, questions that we should have thought made for the very
+sake of the answers. In short, she very much reminds us of those
+puppet-heroines, for whom the showman contrives to dialogue without
+any skill in ventriloquism. This, notwithstanding, is the best scene
+in the Play, and though crowded with solecisms, corrupt diction, and
+offences against metre, would possess merits sufficient to out-weigh
+them, if we could suspend the moral sense during the perusal. It tells
+well and passionately the preliminary circumstances, and thus
+overcomes the main difficulty of most first acts, to wit, that of
+retrospective narration. It tells us of her having been honourably
+addressed by a noble youth, of rank and fortune vastly superior to her
+own: of their mutual love, heightened on her part by gratitude; of his
+loss of his sovereign's favour; his disgrace; attainder; and flight;
+that he (thus degraded) sank into a vile ruffian, the chieftain of a
+murderous banditti; and that from the habitual indulgence of the most
+reprobate habits and ferocious passions, he had become so changed,
+even in appearance, and features,
+
+    "That she who bore him had recoiled from him,
+     Nor known the alien visage of her child,
+     Yet still she (Imogine) lov'd him."
+
+She is compelled by the silent entreaties of a father, perishing with
+"bitter shameful want on the cold earth," to give her hand, with a
+heart thus irrecoverably pre-engaged, to Lord Aldobrand, the enemy of
+her lover, even to the very man who had baffled his ambitious schemes,
+and was, at the present time, entrusted with the execution of the
+sentence of death which had been passed on Bertram. Now, the proof of
+"woman's love," so industriously held forth for the sympathy, if not
+for the esteem of the audience, consists in this, that, though Bertram
+had become a robber and a murderer by trade, a ruffian in manners,
+yea, with form and features at which his own mother could not but
+"recoil," yet she (Lady Imogine) "the wife of a most noble, honoured
+Lord," estimable as a man, exemplary and affectionate as a husband,
+and the fond father of her only child--that she, notwithstanding all
+this, striking her heart, dares to say to it--
+
+    "But thou art Bertram's still, and Bertram's ever."
+
+A Monk now enters, and entreats in his Prior's name for the wonted
+hospitality, and "free noble usage" of the Castle of St. Aldobrand for
+some wretched shipwrecked souls, and from this we learn, for the first
+time, to our infinite surprise, that notwithstanding the
+supernaturalness of the storm aforesaid, not only Bertram, but the
+whole of his gang, had been saved, by what means we are left to
+conjecture, and can only conclude that they had all the same desperate
+swimming powers, and the same saving destiny as the hero, Bertram
+himself. So ends the first act, and with it the tale of the events,
+both those with which the tragedy begins, and those which had occurred
+previous to the date of its commencement. The second displays Bertram
+in disturbed sleep, which the Prior, who hangs over him, prefers
+calling a "starting trance," and with a strained voice, that would
+have awakened one of the seven sleepers, observes to the audience--
+
+    "How the lip works! How the bare teeth do grind!
+     And beaded drops course [81] down his writhen brow!"
+
+The dramatic effect of which passage we not only concede to the
+admirers of this tragedy, but acknowledge the further advantages of
+preparing the audience for the most surprising series of wry faces,
+proflated mouths, and lunatic gestures that were ever "launched" on an
+audience to "sear the sense." [82]
+
+ "PRIOR.--I will awake him from this horrid trance. This is no
+  natural sleep! Ho, wake thee, stranger!"
+
+This is rather a whimsical application of the verb reflex we must
+confess, though we remember a similar transfer of the agent to the
+patient in a manuscript tragedy, in which the Bertram of the piece,
+prostrating a man with a single blow of his fist, exclaims--"Knock me
+thee down, then ask thee if thou liv'st." Well; the stranger obeys,
+and whatever his sleep might have been, his waking was perfectly
+natural; for lethargy itself could not withstand the scolding
+Stentorship of Mr. Holland, the Prior. We next learn from the best
+authority, his own confession, that the misanthropic hero, whose
+destiny was incompatible with drowning, is Count Bertram, who not only
+reveals his past fortunes, but avows with open atrocity, his Satanic
+hatred of Imogine's lord, and his frantick thirst of revenge; and so
+the raving character raves, and the scolding character scolds--and
+what else? Does not the Prior act? Does he not send for a posse of
+constables or thief-takers to handcuff the villain, or take him either
+to Bedlam or Newgate? Nothing of the kind; the author preserves the
+unity of character, and the scolding Prior from first to last does
+nothing but scold, with the exception indeed of the last scene of the
+last act, in which, with a most surprising revolution, he whines,
+weeps, and kneels to the condemned blaspheming assassin out of pure
+affection to the high-hearted man, the sublimity of whose angel-sin
+rivals the star-bright apostate, (that is, who was as proud as
+Lucifer, and as wicked as the Devil), and, "had thrilled him," (Prior
+Holland aforesaid), with wild admiration.
+
+Accordingly in the very next scene, we have this tragic Macheath, with
+his whole gang, in the Castle of St. Aldobrand, without any attempt on
+the Prior's part either to prevent him, or to put the mistress and
+servants of the Castle on their guard against their new inmates;
+though he (the Prior) knew, and confesses that he knew, that Bertram's
+"fearful mates" were assassins so habituated and naturalized to guilt,
+that--
+
+    "When their drenched hold forsook both gold and gear,
+     They griped their daggers with a murderer's instinct;"
+
+and though he also knew, that Bertram was the leader of a band whose
+trade was blood. To the Castle however he goes, thus with the holy
+Prior's consent, if not with his assistance; and thither let us follow
+him.
+
+No sooner is our hero safely housed in the Castle of St. Aldobrand,
+than he attracts the notice of the lady and her confidante, by his
+"wild and terrible dark eyes," "muffled form," "fearful form," [83]
+"darkly wild," "proudly stern," and the like common-place indefinites,
+seasoned by merely verbal antitheses, and at best, copied with very
+slight change, from the Conrade of Southey's JOAN OF ARC. The lady
+Imogine, who has been, (as is the case, she tells us, with all soft
+and solemn spirits,) worshipping the moon on a terrace or rampart
+within view of the Castle, insists on having an interview with our
+hero, and this too tete-a-tete. Would the reader learn why and
+wherefore the confidante is excluded, who very properly remonstrates
+against such "conference, alone, at night, with one who bears such
+fearful form;" the reason follows--"why, therefore send him!" I say,
+follows, because the next line, "all things of fear have lost their
+power over me," is separated from the former by a break or pause, and
+besides that it is a very poor answer to the danger, is no answer at
+all to the gross indelicacy of this wilful exposure. We must therefore
+regard it as a mere after-thought, that a little softens the rudeness,
+but adds nothing to the weight, of that exquisite woman's reason
+aforesaid. And so exit Clotilda and enter Bertram, who "stands without
+looking at her," that is, with his lower limbs forked, his arms
+akimbo, his side to the lady's front, the whole figure resembling an
+inverted Y. He is soon however roused from the state surly to the
+state frantick, and then follow raving, yelling, cursing, she
+fainting, he relenting, in runs Imogine's child, squeaks "mother!" He
+snatches it up, and with a "God bless thee, child! Bertram has kissed
+thy child,"--the curtain drops. The third act is short, and short be
+our account of it. It introduces Lord St. Aldobrand on his road
+homeward, and next Imogine in the convent, confessing the foulness of
+her heart to the Prior, who first indulges his old humour with a fit
+of senseless scolding, then leaves her alone with her ruffian
+paramour, with whom she makes at once an infamous appointment, and the
+curtain drops, that it may be carried into act and consummation.
+
+I want words to describe the mingled horror and disgust with which I
+witnessed the opening of the fourth act, considering it as a
+melancholy proof of the depravation of the public mind. The shocking
+spirit of jacobinism seemed no longer confined to politics. The
+familiarity with atrocious events and characters appeared to have
+poisoned the taste, even where it had not directly disorganized the
+moral principles, and left the feelings callous to all the mild
+appeals, and craving alone for the grossest and most outrageous
+stimulants. The very fact then present to our senses, that a British
+audience could remain passive under such an insult to common decency,
+nay, receive with a thunder of applause, a human being supposed to
+have come reeking from the consummation of this complex foulness and
+baseness, these and the like reflections so pressed as with the weight
+of lead upon my heart, that actor, author, and tragedy would have been
+forgotten, had it not been for a plain elderly man sitting beside me,
+who, with a very serious face, that at once expressed surprise and
+aversion, touched my elbow, and, pointing to the actor, said to me in
+a half-whisper--"Do you see that little fellow there? he has just been
+committing adultery!" Somewhat relieved by the laugh which this droll
+address occasioned, I forced back my attention to the stage
+sufficiently to learn, that Bertram is recovered from a transient fit
+of remorse by the information, that St. Aldobrand was commissioned (to
+do, what every honest man must have done without commission, if he did
+his duty) to seize him and deliver him to the just vengeance of the
+law; an information which, (as he had long known himself to be an
+attainted traitor and proclaimed outlaw, and not only a trader in
+blood himself, but notoriously the Captain of a gang of thieves,
+pirates, and assassins), assuredly could not have been new to him. It
+is this, however, which alone and instantly restores him to his
+accustomed state of raving, blasphemy, and nonsense. Next follows
+Imogine's constrained interview with her injured husband, and his
+sudden departure again, all in love and kindness, in order to attend
+the feast of St. Anselm at the convent. This was, it must be owned, a
+very strange engagement for so tender a husband to make within a few
+minutes after so long an absence. But first his lady has told him that
+she has "a vow on her," and wishes "that black perdition may gulf her
+perjured soul,"--(Note: she is lying at the very time)--if she ascends
+his bed, till her penance is accomplished. How, therefore, is the poor
+husband to amuse himself in this interval of her penance? But do not
+be distressed, reader, on account of the St. Aldobrand's absence! As
+the author has contrived to send him out of the house, when a husband
+would be in his, and the lover's way, so he will doubtless not be at a
+loss to bring him back again as soon as he is wanted. Well! the
+husband gone in on the one side, out pops the lover from the other,
+and for the fiendish purpose of harrowing up the soul of his wretched
+accomplice in guilt, by announcing to her, with most brutal and
+blasphemous execrations, his fixed and deliberate resolve to
+assassinate her husband; all this too is for no discoverable purpose
+on the part of the author, but that of introducing a series of super-
+tragic starts, pauses, screams, struggling, dagger-throwing, falling
+on the ground, starting up again wildly, swearing, outcries for help,
+falling again on the ground, rising again, faintly tottering towards
+the door, and, to end the scene, a most convenient fainting fit of our
+lady's, just in time to give Bertram an opportunity of seeking the
+object of his hatred, before she alarms the house, which indeed she
+has had full time to have done before, but that the author rather
+chose she should amuse herself and the audience by the above-described
+ravings and startings. She recovers slowly, and to her enter,
+Clotilda, the confidante and mother confessor; then commences, what in
+theatrical language is called the madness, but which the author more
+accurately entitles, delirium, it appearing indeed a sort of
+intermittent fever with fits of lightheadedness off and on, whenever
+occasion and stage effect happen to call for it. A convenient return
+of the storm, (we told the reader before-hand how it would be), had
+changed--
+
+    "The rivulet, that bathed the convent walls,
+     Into a foaming flood: upon its brink
+     The Lord and his small train do stand appalled.
+     With torch and bell from their high battlements
+     The monks do summon to the pass in vain;
+     He must return to-night."
+
+Talk of the Devil, and his horns appear, says the proverb and sure
+enough, within ten lines of the exit of the messenger, sent to stop
+him, the arrival of Lord St. Aldobrand is announced. Bertram's ruffian
+band now enter, and range themselves across the stage, giving fresh
+cause for Imogine's screams and madness. St. Aldobrand, having
+received his mortal wound behind the scenes, totters in to welter in
+his blood, and to die at the feet of this double-damned adultress.
+
+Of her, as far as she is concerned in this fourth act, we have two
+additional points to notice: first, the low cunning and Jesuitical
+trick with which she deludes her husband into words of forgiveness,
+which he himself does not understand; and secondly, that everywhere
+she is made the object of interest and sympathy, and it is not the
+author's fault, if, at any moment, she excites feelings less gentle,
+than those we are accustomed to associate with the self-accusations of
+a sincere religious penitent. And did a British audience endure all
+this?--They received it with plaudits, which, but for the rivalry of
+the carts and hackney coaches, might have disturbed the evening-
+prayers of the scanty week day congregation at St. Paul's cathedral.
+
+    Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.
+
+Of the fifth act, the only thing noticeable, (for rant and nonsense,
+though abundant as ever, have long before the last act become things
+of course,) is the profane representation of the high altar in a
+chapel, with all the vessels and other preparations for the holy
+sacrament. A hymn is actually sung on the stage by the chorister boys!
+For the rest, Imogine, who now and then talks deliriously, but who is
+always light-headed as far as her gown and hair can make her so,
+wanders about in dark woods with cavern-rocks and precipices in the
+back-scene; and a number of mute dramatis personae move in and out
+continually, for whose presence, there is always at least this reason,
+that they afford something to be seen, by that very large part of a
+Drury Lane audience who have small chance of hearing a word. She had,
+it appears, taken her child with her, but what becomes of the child,
+whether she murdered it or not, nobody can tell, nobody can learn; it
+was a riddle at the representation, and after a most attentive perusal
+of the Play, a riddle it remains.
+
+    "No more I know, I wish I did,
+     And I would tell it all to you;
+     For what became of this poor child
+     There's none that ever knew."
+
+Our whole information [84] is derived from the following words--
+
+ "PRIOR.--Where is thy child?
+
+  CLOTIL.--(Pointing to the cavern into which she has looked)
+  Oh he lies cold within his cavern-tomb!
+  Why dost thou urge her with the horrid theme?
+
+  PRIOR.--(who will not, the reader may observe, be disappointed of
+  his dose of scolding)
+  It was to make (query wake) one living cord o' th' heart,
+  And I will try, tho' my own breaks at it.
+  Where is thy child?
+
+  IMOG.--(with a frantic laugh) The forest fiend hath snatched him--
+  He (who? the fiend or the child?) rides the night-mare thro' the
+  wizard woods."
+
+Now these two lines consist in a senseless plagiarism from the
+counterfeited madness of Edgar in Lear, who, in imitation of the gypsy
+incantations, puns on the old word mair, a hag; and the no less
+senseless adoption of Dryden's forest fiend, and the wisard stream by
+which Milton, in his Lycidas, so finely characterizes the spreading
+Deva, fabulosus amnis. Observe too these images stand unique in the
+speeches of Imogine, without the slightest resemblance to anything she
+says before or after. But we are weary. The characters in this act
+frisk about, here, there, and every where, as teasingly as the Jack o'
+Lantern-lights which mischievous boys, from across a narrow street,
+throw with a looking-glass on the faces of their opposite neighbours.
+Bertram disarmed, outheroding Charles de Moor in the Robbers, befaces
+the collected knights of St. Anselm, (all in complete armour) and so,
+by pure dint of black looks, he outdares them into passive poltroons.
+The sudden revolution in the Prior's manners we have before noticed,
+and it is indeed so outre, that a number of the audience imagined a
+great secret was to come out, viz.: that the Prior was one of the many
+instances of a youthful sinner metamorphosed into an old scold, and
+that this Bertram would appear at last to be his son. Imogine re-
+appears at the convent, and dies of her own accord. Bertram stabs
+himself, and dies by her side, and that the play may conclude as it
+began, to wit, in a superfetation of blasphemy upon nonsense, because
+he had snatched a sword from a despicable coward, who retreats in
+terror when it is pointed towards him in sport; this felo de se, and
+thief-captain--this loathsome and leprous confluence of robbery,
+adultery, murder, and cowardly assassination,--this monster, whose
+best deed is, the having saved his betters from the degradation of
+hanging him, by turning Jack Ketch to himself; first recommends the
+charitable Monks and holy Prior to pray for his soul, and then has the
+folly and impudence to exclaim--
+
+               "I die no felon's death,
+     A warriour's weapon freed a warriour's soul!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+
+It sometimes happens that we are punished for our faults by incidents,
+in the causation of which these faults had no share: and this I have
+always felt the severest punishment. The wound indeed is of the same
+dimensions; but the edges are jagged, and there is a dull underpain
+that survives the smart which it had aggravated. For there is always a
+consolatory feeling that accompanies the sense of a proportion between
+antecedents and consequents. The sense of Before and After becomes
+both intelligible and intellectual when, and only when, we contemplate
+the succession in the relations of Cause and Effect, which, like the
+two poles of the magnet manifest the being and unity of the one power
+by relative opposites, and give, as it were, a substratum of
+permanence, of identity, and therefore of reality, to the shadowy flux
+of Time. It is Eternity revealing itself in the phaenomena of Time:
+and the perception and acknowledgment of the proportionality and
+appropriateness of the Present to the Past, prove to the afflicted
+Soul, that it has not yet been deprived of the sight of God, that it
+can still recognise the effective presence of a Father, though through
+a darkened glass and a turbid atmosphere, though of a Father that is
+chastising it. And for this cause, doubtless, are we so framed in
+mind, and even so organized in brain and nerve, that all confusion is
+painful. It is within the experience of many medical practitioners,
+that a patient, with strange and unusual symptoms of disease, has been
+more distressed in mind, more wretched, from the fact of being
+unintelligible to himself and others, than from the pain or danger of
+the disease: nay, that the patient has received the most solid
+comfort, and resumed a genial and enduring cheerfulness, from some new
+symptom or product, that had at once determined the name and nature of
+his complaint, and rendered it an intelligible effect of an
+intelligible cause: even though the discovery did at the same moment
+preclude all hope of restoration. Hence the mystic theologians, whose
+delusions we may more confidently hope to separate from their actual
+intuitions, when we condescend to read their works without the
+presumption that whatever our fancy, (always the ape, and too often
+the adulterator and counterfeit of our memory,) has not made or cannot
+make a picture of, must be nonsense,--hence, I say, the Mystics have
+joined in representing the state of the reprobate spirits as a
+dreadful dream in which there is no sense of reality, not even of the
+pangs they are enduring--an eternity without time, and as it were
+below it--God present without manifestation of his presence. But these
+are depths, which we dare not linger over. Let us turn to an instance
+more on a level with the ordinary sympathies of mankind. Here then,
+and in this same healing influence of Light and distinct Beholding, we
+may detect the final cause of that instinct which, in the great
+majority of instances, leads, and almost compels the Afflicted to
+communicate their sorrows. Hence too flows the alleviation that
+results from "opening out our griefs: "which are thus presented in
+distinguishable forms instead of the mist, through which whatever is
+shapeless becomes magnified and (literally) enormous. Casimir, in the
+fifth Ode of his third Book, has happily [85] expressed this thought.
+
+                  Me longus silendi
+      Edit amor, facilesque luctus
+    Hausit medullas. Fugerit ocyus,
+    Simul negantem visere jusseris
+      Aures amicorum, et loquacem
+        Questibus evacuaris iram.
+
+    Olim querendo desinimus queri,
+    Ipsoque fletu lacryma perditur
+      Nec fortis [86] aeque, si per omnes
+        Cura volat residetque ramos.
+
+    Vires amicis perdit in auribus,
+    Minorque semper dividitur dolor,
+      Per multa permissus vagari
+        Pectora.--
+
+I shall not make this an excuse, however, for troubling my readers
+with any complaints or explanations, with which, as readers, they have
+little or no concern. It may suffice, (for the present at least,) to
+declare, that the causes that have delayed the publication of these
+volumes for so long a period after they had been printed off, were not
+connected with any neglect of my own; and that they would form an
+instructive comment on the chapter concerning authorship as a trade,
+addressed to young men of genius in the first volume of this work. I
+remember the ludicrous effect produced on my mind by the fast sentence
+of an auto-biography, which, happily for the writer, was as meagre in
+incidents as it is well possible for the life of an individual to be--
+"The eventful life which I am about to record, from the hour in which
+I rose into existence on this planet, etc." Yet when, notwithstanding
+this warning example of self-importance before me, I review my own
+life, I cannot refrain from applying the same epithet to it, and with
+more than ordinary emphasis--and no private feeling, that affected
+myself only, should prevent me from publishing the same, (for write it
+I assuredly shall, should life and leisure be granted me,) if
+continued reflection should strengthen my present belief, that my
+history would add its contingent to the enforcement of one important
+truth, to wit, that we must not only love our neighbours as ourselves,
+but ourselves likewise as our neighbours; and that we can do neither
+unless we love God above both.
+
+                     Who lives, that's not
+    Depraved or depraves? Who dies, that bears
+    Not one spurn to the grave of their friends' gift?
+
+Strange as the delusion may appear, yet it is most true, that three
+years ago I did not know or believe that I had an enemy in the world:
+and now even my strongest sensations of gratitude are mingled with
+fear, and I reproach myself for being too often disposed to ask,--Have
+I one friend?--During the many years which intervened between the
+composition and the publication of the CHRISTABEL, it became almost as
+well known among literary men as if it had been on common sale; the
+same references were made to it, and the same liberties taken with it,
+even to the very names of the imaginary persons in the poem. From
+almost all of our most celebrated poets, and from some with whom I had
+no personal acquaintance, I either received or heard of expressions of
+admiration that, (I can truly say,) appeared to myself utterly
+disproportionate to a work, that pretended to be nothing more than a
+common Faery Tale. Many, who had allowed no merit to my other poems,
+whether printed or manuscript, and who have frankly told me as much,
+uniformly made an exception in favour of the CHRISTABEL and the poem
+entitled LOVE. Year after year, and in societies of the most different
+kinds, I had been entreated to recite it and the result was still the
+same in all, and altogether different in this respect from the effect
+produced by the occasional recitation of any other poems I had
+composed.--This before the publication. And since then, with very few
+exceptions, I have heard nothing but abuse, and this too in a spirit
+of bitterness at least as disproportionate to the pretensions of the
+poem, had it been the most pitiably below mediocrity, as the previous
+eulogies, and far more inexplicable.--This may serve as a warning to
+authors, that in their calculations on the probable reception of a
+poem, they must subtract to a large amount from the panegyric, which
+may have encouraged them to publish it, however unsuspicious and
+however various the sources of this panegyric may have been. And,
+first, allowances must be made for private enmity, of the very
+existence of which they had perhaps entertained no suspicion--for
+personal enmity behind the mask of anonymous criticism: secondly for
+the necessity of a certain proportion of abuse and ridicule in a
+Review, in order to make it saleable, in consequence of which, if they
+have no friends behind the scenes, the chance must needs be against
+them; but lastly and chiefly, for the excitement and temporary
+sympathy of feeling, which the recitation of the poem by an admirer,
+especially if he be at once a warm admirer and a man of acknowledged
+celebrity, calls forth in the audience. For this is really a species
+of animal magnetism, in which the enkindling reciter, by perpetual
+comment of looks and tones, lends his own will and apprehensive
+faculty to his auditors. They live for the time within the dilated
+sphere of his intellectual being. It is equally possible, though not
+equally common, that a reader left to himself should sink below the
+poem, as that the poem left to itself should flag beneath the feelings
+of the reader.--But, in my own instance, I had the additional
+misfortune of having been gossiped about, as devoted to metaphysics,
+and worse than all, to a system incomparably nearer to the visionary
+flights of Plato, and even to the jargon of the Mystics, than to the
+established tenets of Locke. Whatever therefore appeared with my name
+was condemned beforehand, as predestined metaphysics. In a dramatic
+poem, which had been submitted by me to a gentleman of great influence
+in the theatrical world, occurred the following passage:--
+
+    "O we are querulous creatures! Little less
+     Than all things can suffice to make us happy:
+     And little more than nothing is enough
+     To make us wretched."
+
+Aye, here now! (exclaimed the critic) here come Coleridge's
+metaphysics! And the very same motive (that is, not that the lines
+were unfit for the present state of our immense theatres; but that
+they were metaphysics [87]) was assigned elsewhere for the rejection
+of the two following passages. The first is spoken in answer to a
+usurper, who had rested his plea on the circumstance, that he had been
+chosen by the acclamations of the people.--
+
+    "What people? How convened? or, if convened,
+     Must not the magic power that charms together
+     Millions of men in council, needs have power
+     To win or wield them? Rather, O far rather
+     Shout forth thy titles to yon circling mountains,
+     And with a thousand-fold reverberation
+     Make the rocks flatter thee, and the volleying air,
+     Unbribed, shout back to thee, King Emerick!
+     By wholesome laws to embank the sovereign power,
+     To deepen by restraint, and by prevention
+     Of lawless will to amass and guide the flood
+     In its majestic channel, is man's task
+     And the true patriot's glory! In all else
+     Men safelier trust to Heaven, than to themselves
+     When least themselves: even in those whirling crowds
+     Where folly is contagious, and too oft
+     Even wise men leave their better sense at home,
+     To chide and wonder at them, when returned."
+
+The second passage is in the mouth of an old and experienced courtier,
+betrayed by the man in whom he had most trusted.
+
+    "And yet Sarolta, simple, inexperienced,
+     Could see him as he was, and often warned me.
+     Whence learned she this?--O she was innocent!
+     And to be innocent is Nature's wisdom!
+     The fledge-dove knows the prowlers of the air,
+     Feared soon as seen, and flutters back to shelter.
+     And the young steed recoils upon his haunches,
+     The never-yet-seen adder's hiss first heard.
+     O surer than suspicion's hundred eyes
+     Is that fine sense, which to the pure in heart,
+     By mere oppugnancy of their own goodness,
+     Reveals the approach of evil."
+
+As therefore my character as a writer could not easily be more injured
+by an overt act than it was already in consequence of the report, I
+published a work, a large portion of which was professedly
+metaphysical. A long delay occurred between its first annunciation and
+its appearance; it was reviewed therefore by anticipation with a
+malignity, so avowedly and exclusively personal, as is, I believe,
+unprecedented even in the present contempt of all common humanity that
+disgraces and endangers the liberty of the press. After its
+appearance, the author of this lampoon undertook to review it in the
+Edinburgh Review; and under the single condition, that he should have
+written what he himself really thought, and have criticised the work
+as he would have done had its author been indifferent to him, I should
+have chosen that man myself, both from the vigour and the originality
+of his mind, and from his particular acuteness in speculative
+reasoning, before all others.--I remembered Catullus's lines.
+
+    Desine de quoquam quicquam bene velle mereri,
+      Aut aliquem fieri posse putare pium.
+    Omnia sunt ingrata: nihil fecisse benigne est:
+      Immo, etiam taedet, taedet obestque magis;
+    Ut mihi, quem nemo gravius nec acerbius urget,
+      Quam modo qui me unum atque unicum amicum habuit.
+
+But I can truly say, that the grief with which I read this rhapsody of
+predetermined insult, had the rhapsodist himself for its whole and
+sole object.
+
+     *     *     *     *     *     *
+
+I refer to this review at present, in consequence of information
+having been given me, that the inuendo of my "potential infidelity,"
+grounded on one passage of my first Lay Sermon, has been received and
+propagated with a degree of credence, of which I can safely acquit the
+originator of the calumny. I give the sentences, as they stand in the
+sermon, premising only that I was speaking exclusively of miracles
+worked for the outward senses of men. "It was only to overthrow the
+usurpation exercised in and through the senses, that the senses were
+miraculously appealed to. REASON AND RELIGION ARE THEIR OWN EVIDENCE.
+The natural sun is in this respect a symbol of the spiritual. Ere he
+is fully arisen, and while his glories are still under veil, he calls
+up the breeze to chase away the usurping vapours of the night-season,
+and thus converts the air itself into the minister of its own
+purification: not surely in proof or elucidation of the light from
+heaven, but to prevent its interception."
+
+"Wherever, therefore, similar circumstances co-exist with the same
+moral causes, the principles revealed, and the examples recorded, in
+the inspired writings, render miracles superfluous: and if we neglect
+to apply truths in expectation of wonders, or under pretext of the
+cessation of the latter, we tempt God, and merit the same reply which
+our Lord gave to the Pharisees on a like occasion."
+
+In the sermon and the notes both the historical truth and the
+necessity of the miracles are strongly and frequently asserted. "The
+testimony of books of history (that is, relatively to the signs and
+wonders, with which Christ came) is one of the strong and stately
+pillars of the church: but it is not the foundation!" Instead,
+therefore, of defending myself, which I could easily effect by a
+series of passages, expressing the same opinion, from the Fathers and
+the most eminent Protestant Divines, from the Reformation to the
+Revolution, I shall merely state what my belief is, concerning the
+true evidences of Christianity.  1. Its consistency with right Reason,
+I consider as the outer court of the temple--the common area, within
+which it stands.  2. The miracles, with and through which the Religion
+was first revealed and attested, I regard as the steps, the vestibule,
+and the portal of the temple.  3. The sense, the inward feeling, in
+the soul of each believer of its exceeding desirableness--the
+experience, that he needs something, joined with the strong
+foretokening, that the redemption and the graces propounded to us in
+Christ are what he needs--this I hold to be the true foundation of the
+spiritual edifice. With the strong a priori probability that flows in
+from 1 and 3 on the correspondent historical evidence of 2, no man can
+refuse or neglect to make the experiment without guilt. But, 4, it is
+the experience derived from a practical conformity to the conditions
+of the Gospel--it is the opening eye; the dawning light: the terrors
+and the promises of spiritual growth; the blessedness of loving God as
+God, the nascent sense of sin hated as sin, and of the incapability of
+attaining to either without Christ; it is the sorrow that still rises
+up from beneath and the consolation that meets it from above; the
+bosom treacheries of the principal in the warfare and the exceeding
+faithfulness and long-suffering of the uninteresting ally;--in a word,
+it is the actual trial of the faith in Christ, with its accompaniments
+and results, that must form the arched roof, and the faith itself is
+the completing key-stone. In order to an efficient belief in
+Christianity, a man must have been a Christian, and this is the
+seeming argumentum in circulo, incident to all spiritual Truths, to
+every subject not presentable under the forms of Time and Space, as
+long as we attempt to master by the reflex acts of the Understanding
+what we can only know by the act of becoming. Do the will of my
+Father, and ye shall know whether I am of God. These four evidences I
+believe to have been and still to be, for the world, for the whole
+Church, all necessary, all equally necessary: but at present, and for
+the majority of Christians born in Christian countries, I believe the
+third and the fourth evidences to be the most operative, not as
+superseding but as involving a glad undoubting faith in the two
+former. Credidi, ideoque intellexi, appears to me the dictate equally
+of Philosophy and Religion, even as I believe Redemption to be the
+antecedent of Sanctification, and not its consequent. All spiritual
+predicates may be construed indifferently as modes of Action or as
+states of Being, Thus Holiness and Blessedness are the same idea, now
+seen in relation to act and now to existence. The ready belief which
+has been yielded to the slander of my "potential infidelity," I
+attribute in part to the openness with which I have avowed my doubts,
+whether the heavy interdict, under which the name of Benedict Spinoza
+lies, is merited on the whole or to the whole extent. Be this as it
+may, I wish, however, that I could find in the books of philosophy,
+theoretical or moral, which are alone recommended to the present
+students of theology in our established schools, a few passages as
+thoroughly Pauline, as completely accordant with the doctrines of the
+Established Church, as the following sentences in the concluding page
+of Spinoza's Ethics. Deinde quo mens hoc amore divino, seu beatitudine
+magis gaudet, eo plus intelligit, hoc est, eo majorem in affectus
+habet potentiam, et eo minus ab affectibus, qui mali sunt, patitur;
+atque adeo ex eo, quod mens hoc amore divino, seu beatitudine gaudet,
+potestatem habet libidines coercendi; et quia humana potentia ad
+coercendos affectus in solo intellectu consistit; ergo nemo
+beatitudine gaudet, quia affectus coercuit, sed contra potestas
+libidines coercendi ex ipsa beatitudine oritur.
+
+With regard to the Unitarians, it has been shamelessly asserted, that
+I have denied them to be Christians. God forbid! For how should I
+know, what the piety of the heart may be, or what quantum of error in
+the understanding may consist with a saving faith in the intentions
+and actual dispositions of the whole moral being in any one
+individual? Never will God reject a soul that sincerely loves him: be
+his speculative opinions what they may: and whether in any given
+instance certain opinions, be they unbelief, or misbelief, are
+compatible with a sincere love of God, God can only know.--But this I
+have said, and shall continue to say: that if the doctrines, the sum
+of which I believe to constitute the truth in Christ, be Christianity,
+then Unitarianism is not, and vice versa: and that, in speaking
+theologically and impersonally, i.e. of Psilanthropism and
+Theanthropism as schemes of belief, without reference to individuals,
+who profess either the one or the other, it will be absurd to use a
+different language as long as it is the dictate of common sense, that
+two opposites cannot properly be called by the same name. I should
+feel no offence if a Unitarian applied the same to me, any more than
+if he were to say, that two and two being four, four and four must be
+eight.
+
+        alla broton
+    ton men keneophrones auchai
+        ex agathon ebalon;
+    ton d' au katamemphthent' agan
+    ischun oikeion paresphalen kalon,
+    cheiros elkon opisso, thumos atolmos eon.
+
+This has been my object, and this alone can be my defence--and O! that
+with this my personal as well as my LITERARY LIFE might conclude!--the
+unquenched desire I mean, not without the consciousness of having
+earnestly endeavoured to kindle young minds, and to guard them against
+the temptations of scorners, by showing that the scheme of
+Christianity, as taught in the liturgy and homilies of our Church,
+though not discoverable by human reason, is yet in accordance with it;
+that link follows link by necessary consequence; that Religion passes
+out of the ken of Reason only where the eye of Reason has reached its
+own horizon; and that Faith is then but its continuation: even as the
+day softens away into the sweet twilight, and twilight, hushed and
+breathless, steals into the darkness. It is night, sacred night! the
+upraised eye views only the starry heaven which manifests itself
+alone: and the outward beholding is fixed on the sparks twinkling in
+the awful depth, though suns of other worlds, only to preserve the
+soul steady and collected in its pure act of inward adoration to the
+great I AM, and to the filial WORD that re-affirmeth it from eternity
+to eternity, whose choral echo is the universe.
+
+
+    THEO, MONO, DOXA.
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES
+
+
+[1] The authority of Milton and Shakespeare may be usefully pointed
+out to young authors. In the Comus and other early poems of Milton
+there is a superfluity of double epithets; while in the Paradise Lost
+we find very few, in the Paradise Regained scarce any. The same remark
+holds almost equally true of the Love's Labour Lost, Romeo and Juliet,
+Venus and Adonis, and Lucrece, compared with the Lear, Macbeth,
+Othello, and Hamlet of our great Dramatist. The rule for the admission
+of double epithets seems to be this: either that they should be
+already denizens of our language, such as blood-stained, terror-
+stricken, self-applauding: or when a new epithet, or one found in
+books only, is hazarded, that it, at least, be one word, not two words
+made one by mere virtue of the printers hyphen. A language which, like
+the English, is almost without cases, is indeed in its very genius
+unfitted for compounds. If a writer, every time a compounded word
+suggests itself to him, would seek for some other mode of expressing
+the same sense, the chances are always greatly in favour of his
+finding a better word. Ut tanquam scopulum sic fugias insolens verbum,
+is the wise advice of Caesar to the Roman Orators, and the precept
+applies with double force to the writers in our own language. But it
+must not be forgotten, that the same Caesar wrote a Treatise for the
+purpose of reforming the ordinary language by bringing it to a greater
+accordance with the principles of logic or universal grammar.
+
+[2] See the criticisms on the Ancient Mariner, in the Monthly and
+Critical Reviews of the first volume of the Lyrical Ballads.
+
+[3] This is worthy of ranking as a maxim, (regula maxima,) of
+criticism. Whatever is translatable in other and simpler words of the
+same language, without loss of sense or dignity, is bad.  N.B.--By
+dignity I mean the absence of ludicrous and debasing associations.
+
+[4] The Christ's Hospital phrase, not for holidays altogether, but for
+those on which the boys are permitted to go beyond the precincts of
+the school.
+
+[5] I remember a ludicrous instance in the poem of a young tradesman:
+
+    "No more will I endure love's pleasing pain,
+     Or round my heart's leg tie his galling chain."
+
+[6] Cowper's Task was published some time before the Sonnets of Mr.
+Bowles; but I was not familiar with it till many years afterwards. The
+vein of satire which runs through that excellent poem, together with
+the sombre hue of its religious opinions, would probably, at that
+time, have prevented its laying any strong hold on my affections. The
+love of nature seems to have led Thomson to a cheerful religion; and a
+gloomy religion to have led Cowper to a love of nature. The one would
+carry his fellow-men along with him into nature; the other flies to
+nature from his fellow-men. In chastity of diction however, and the
+harmony of blank verse, Cowper leaves Thomson immeasurably below him;
+yet still I feel the latter to have been the born poet.
+
+[7] SONNET I
+
+    Pensive at eve, on the hard world I mused,
+    And m poor heart was sad; so at the Moon
+    I gazed and sighed, and sighed; for ah how soon
+    Eve saddens into night! mine eyes perused
+    With tearful vacancy the dampy grass
+    That wept and glitter'd in the paly ray
+    And I did pause me on my lonely way
+    And mused me on the wretched ones that pass
+    O'er the bleak heath of sorrow. But alas!
+    Most of myself I thought! when it befel,
+    That the soothe spirit of the breezy wood
+    Breath'd in mine ear: "All this is very well,
+    But much of one thing, is for no thing good."
+    Oh my poor heart's inexplicable swell!
+
+    SONNET II
+
+    Oh I do love thee, meek Simplicity!
+    For of thy lays the lulling simpleness
+    Goes to my heart, and soothes each small distress,
+    Distress the small, yet haply great to me.
+    'Tis true on Lady Fortune's gentlest pad
+    I amble on; and yet I know not why
+    So sad I am! but should a friend and I
+    Frown, pout and part, then I am very sad.
+    And then with sonnets and with sympathy
+    My dreamy bosom's mystic woes I pall:
+    Now of my false friend plaining plaintively,
+    Now raving at mankind in general;
+    But whether sad or fierce, 'tis simple all,
+    All very simple, meek Simplicity!
+
+    SONNET III
+
+    And this reft house is that, the which he built,
+    Lamented Jack! and here his malt he pil'd,
+    Cautious in vain! these rats, that squeak so wild,
+    Squeak not unconscious of their father's guilt.
+    Did he not see her gleaming thro' the glade!
+    Belike 'twas she, the maiden all forlorn.
+    What the she milk no cow with crumpled horn,
+    Yet, aye she haunts the dale where erst she stray'd:
+    And aye, beside her stalks her amorous knight
+    Still on his thighs their wonted brogues are worn,
+    And thro' those brogues, still tatter'd and betorn,
+    His hindward charms gleam an unearthly white.
+    Ah! thus thro' broken clouds at night's high noon
+    Peeps to fair fragments forth the full-orb'd harvest-moon!
+
+The following anecdote will not be wholly out of place here, and may
+perhaps amuse the reader. An amateur performer in verse expressed to a
+common friend a strong desire to be introduced to me, but hesitated in
+accepting my friend's immediate offer, on the score that "he was, he
+must acknowledge, the author of a confounded severe epigram on my
+Ancient Mariner, which had given me great pain." I assured my friend
+that, if the epigram was a good one, it would only increase my desire
+to become acquainted with the author, and begged to hear it recited:
+when, to my no less surprise than amusement, it proved to be one which
+I had myself some time before written and inserted in the "Morning
+Post," to wit
+
+    To the Author of the Ancient Mariner.
+
+        Your poem must eternal be,
+        Dear sir! it cannot fail,
+        For 'tis incomprehensible,
+        And without head or tail.
+
+[8] Of old things all are over old,
+    Of good things none are good enough;--
+    We'll show that we can help to frame
+    A world of other stuff.
+
+    I too will have my kings, that take
+    From me the sign of life and death:
+    Kingdoms shall shift about, like clouds,
+    Obedient to my breath.
+      Wordsworth's Rob Roy.--Poet. Works, vol. III. p. 127.
+
+[9] Pope was under the common error of his age, an error far from
+being sufficiently exploded even at the present day. It consists (as I
+explained at large, and proved in detail in my public lectures,) in
+mistaking for the essentials of the Greek stage certain rules, which
+the wise poets imposed upon themselves, in order to render all the
+remaining parts of the drama consistent with those, that had been
+forced upon them by circumstances independent of their will; out of
+which circumstances the drama itself arose. The circumstances in the
+time of Shakespeare, which it was equally out of his power to alter,
+were different, and such as, in my opinion, allowed a far wider
+sphere, and a deeper and more human interest. Critics are too apt to
+forget, that rules are but means to an end; consequently, where the
+ends are different, the rules must be likewise so. We must have
+ascertained what the end is, before we can determine what the rules
+ought to be. Judging under this impression, I did not hestitate to
+declare my full conviction, that the consummate judgment of
+Shakespeare, not only in the general construction, but in all the
+details, of his dramas, impressed me with greater wonder, than even
+the might of his genius, or the depth of his philosophy. The substance
+of these lectures I hope soon to publish; and it is but a debt of
+justice to myself and my friends to notice, that the first course of
+lectures, which differed from the following courses only, by
+occasionally varying the illustrations of the same thoughts, was
+addressed to very numerous, and I need not add, respectable audiences
+at the Royal institution, before Mr. Schlegel gave his lectures on the
+same subjects at Vienna.
+
+[10] In the course of one of my Lectures, I had occasion to point out
+the almost faultless position and choice of words, in Pope's original
+compositions, particularly in his Satires and moral Essays, for the
+purpose of comparing them with his translation of Homer, which, I do
+not stand alone in regarding, as the main source of our pseudo-poetic
+diction. And this, by the bye, is an additional confirmation of a
+remark made, I believe, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, that next to the man
+who forms and elevates the taste of the public, he that corrupts it,
+is commonly the greatest genius. Among other passages, I analyzed
+sentence by sentence, and almost word by word, the popular lines,
+
+    As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night, etc.
+                                                (Iliad. B. viii.)
+
+much in the same way as has been since done, in an excellent article
+on Chalmers's British Poets in the Quarterly Review. The impression on
+the audience in general was sudden and evident: and a number of
+enlightened and highly educated persons, who at different times
+afterwards addressed me on the subject, expressed their wonder, that
+truth so obvious should not have struck them before; but at the same
+time acknowledged--(so much had they been accustomed, in reading
+poetry, to receive pleasure from the separate images and phrases
+successively, without asking themselves whether the collective meaning
+was sense or nonsense)--that they might in all probability have read
+the same passage again twenty times with undiminished admiration, and
+without once reflecting, that
+
+          astra phaeinaen amphi selaenaen
+    phainet aritretea--
+
+(that is, the stars around, or near the full moon, shine pre-eminently
+bright) conveys a just and happy image of a moonlight sky: while it is
+difficult to determine whether, in the lines,
+
+    Around her throne the vivid planets roll,
+    And stars unnumber'd gild the glowing pole,
+
+the sense or the diction be the more absurd. My answer was; that,
+though I had derived peculiar advantages from my school discipline,
+and though my general theory of poetry was the same then as now, I had
+yet experienced the same sensations myself, and felt almost as if I
+bad been newly couched, when, by Mr. Wordsworth's conversation, I had
+been induced to re-examine with impartial strictness Gray's celebrated
+Elegy. I had long before detected the defects in The Bard; but the
+Elegy I had considered as proof against all fair attacks; and to this
+day I cannot read either without delight, and a portion of enthusiasm.
+At all events, whatever pleasure I may have lost by the clearer
+perception of the faults in certain passages, has been more than
+repaid to me by the additional delight with which I read the
+remainder.
+
+Another instance in confirmation of these remarks occurs to me in the
+Faithful Shepherdess. Seward first traces Fletcher's lines;
+
+    More foul diseases than e'er yet the hot
+    Sun bred thro' his burnings, while the dog
+    Pursues the raging lion, throwing the fog
+    And deadly vapour from his angry breath,
+    Filling the lower world with plague and death,
+
+to Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar,
+
+    The rampant lion hunts he fast
+      With dogs of noisome breath;
+    Whose baleful barking brings, in haste,
+      Pine, plagues, and dreary death!
+
+He then takes occasion to introduce Homer's simile of the appearance
+of Achilles' mail to Priam compared with the Dog Star; literally thus--
+
+"For this indeed is most splendid, but it was made an evil sign, and
+brings many a consuming disease to wretched mortals." Nothing can be
+more simple as a description, or more accurate as a simile; which,
+(says Seward,) is thus finely translated by Mr. Pope
+
+    Terrific Glory! for his burning breath
+    Taints the red air with fevers, plagues, and death!
+
+Now here--(not to mention the tremendous bombast)--the Dog Star, so
+called, is turned into a real dog, a very odd dog, a fire, fever,
+plague, and death-breathing, red. air-tainting dog: and the whole
+visual likeness is lost, while the likeness in the effects is rendered
+absurd by the exaggeration. In Spenser and Fletcher the thought is
+justifiable; for the images are at least consistent, and it was the
+intention of the writers to mark the seasons by this allegory of
+visualized puns.
+
+[11] Especially in this age of personality, this age of literary and
+political gossiping, when the meanest insects are worshipped with a
+sort of Egyptian superstition, if only the brainless head be atoned
+for by the sting of personal malignity in the tail;--when the most
+vapid satires have become the objects of a keen public interest,
+purely from the number of contemporary characters named in the patch-
+work notes, (which possess, however, the comparative merit of being
+more poetical than the text,) and because, to increase the stimulus,
+the author has sagaciously left his own name for whispers and
+conjectures.
+
+[12] If it were worth while to mix together, as ingredients, half the
+anecdotes which I either myself know to be true, or which I have
+received from men incapable of intentional falsehood, concerning the
+characters, qualifications, and motives of our anonymous critics,
+whose decisions are oracles for our reading public; I might safely
+borrow the words of the apocryphal Daniel; "Give me leave, O SOVEREIGN
+PUBLIC, and I shall slay this dragon without sward or staff." For the
+compound would be as the "pitch, and fat, and hair, which Daniel took,
+and did seethe them together, and made lumps thereof; this he put in
+the dragon's mouth, and so the dragon burst in sunder; and Daniel
+said, LO, THESE ARE THE GODS YE WORSHIP."
+
+[13] This is one instance among many of deception, by the telling the
+half of a fact, and omitting the other half, when it is from their
+mutual counteraction and neutralization, that the whole truth arises,
+as a tertium aliquid different from either. Thus in Dryden's famous
+line
+
+    Great wit (meaning genius) to madness sure is near allied.
+
+Now if the profound sensibility, which is doubtless one of the
+components of genius, were alone considered, single and unbalanced, it
+might be fairly described as exposing the individual to a greater
+chance of mental derangement; but then a more than usual rapidity of
+association, a more than usual power of passing from thought to
+thought, and image to image, is a component equally essential; and to
+the due modification of each by the other the genius itself consists;
+so that it would be just as fair to describe the earth, as in imminent
+danger of exorbitating, or of falling into the sun, according as the
+assertor of the absurdity confined his attention either to the
+projectile or to the attractive force exclusively.
+
+[14] For as to the devotees of the circulating libraries, I dare not
+compliment their pass-time, or rather kill-time, with the name of
+reading. Call it rather a sort of beggarly day-dreaming, during which
+the mind of the dreamer furnishes for itself nothing but laziness, and
+a little mawkish sensibility; while the whole materiel and imagery of
+the doze is supplied ab extra by a sort of mental camera obscura
+manufactured at the printing office, which pro tempore fixes,
+reflects, and transmits the moving phantasms of one mans delirium, so
+as to people the barrenness of a hundred other brains afflicted with
+the same trance or suspension of all common sense and all definite
+purpose. We should therefore transfer this species of amusement--(if
+indeed those can be said to retire a musis, who were never in their
+company, or relaxation be attributable to those, whose bows are never
+bent)--from the genus, reading, to that comprebensive class
+characterized by the power of reconciling the two contrary yet
+coexisting propensities of human nature, namely, indulgence of sloth,
+and hatred of vacancy. In addition to novels and tales of chivalry to
+prose or rhyme, (by which last I mean neither rhythm nor metre) this
+genus comprises as its species, gaming, swinging, or swaying on a
+chair or gate; spitting over a bridge; smoking; snuff-taking; tete-a-
+tete quarrels after dinner between husband and wife; conning word by
+word all the advertisements of a daily newspaper in a public house on
+a rainy day, etc. etc. etc.
+
+[15] Ex. gr. Pediculos e capillis excerptos in arenam jacere
+incontusos; eating of unripe fruit; gazing on the clouds, and (in
+genere) on movable things suspended in the air; riding among a
+multitude of camels; frequent laughter; listening to a series of jests
+and humorous anecdotes,--as when (so to modernize the learned
+Saracen's meaning) one man's droll story of an Irishman inevitably
+occasions another's droll story of a Scotchman, which again, by the
+same sort of conjunction disjunctive, leads to some etourderie of a
+Welshman, and that again to some sly hit of a Yorkshireman;--the habit
+of reading tomb-stones in church-yards, etc. By the bye, this
+catalogue, strange as it may appear, is not insusceptible of a sound
+psychological commentary.
+
+[16] I have ventured to call it unique; not only because I know no
+work of the kind in our language, (if we except a few chapters of the
+old translation of Froissart)--none, which uniting the charms of
+romance and history, keeps the imagination so constantly on the wing,
+and yet leaves so much for after reflection; but likewise, and
+chiefly, because it is a compilation, which, in the various
+excellencies of translation, selection, and arrangement, required and
+proves greater genius in the compiler, as living in the present state
+of society, than in the original composers.
+
+[17] It is not easy to estimate the effects which the example of a
+young man as highly distinguished for strict purity of disposition and
+conduct, as for intellectual power and literary acquirements, may
+produce on those of the same age with himself, especially on those of
+similar pursuits and congenial minds. For many years, my opportunities
+of intercourse with Mr. Southey have been rare, and at long intervals;
+but I dwell with unabated pleasure on the strong and sudden, yet I
+trust not fleeting, influence, which my moral being underwent on my
+acquaintance with him at Oxford, whither I had gone at the
+commencement of our Cambridge vacation on a visit to an old school-
+fellow. Not indeed on my moral or religious principles, for they had
+never been contaminated; but in awakening the sense of the duty and
+dignity of making my actions accord with those principles, both in
+word and deed. The irregularities only not universal among the young
+men of my standing, which I always knew to be wrong, I then learned to
+feel as degrading; learned to know that an opposite conduct, which was
+at that time considered by us as the easy virtue of cold and selfish
+prudence, might originate in the noblest emotions, in views the most
+disinterested and imaginative. It is not however from grateful
+recollections only, that I have been impelled thus to leave these my
+deliberate sentiments on record; but in some sense as a debt of
+justice to the man, whose name has been so often connected with mine
+for evil to which he is a stranger. As a specimen I subjoin part of a
+note, from The Beauties of the Anti-jacobin, in which, having
+previously informed the public that I had been dishonoured at
+Cambridge for preaching Deism, at a time when, for my youthful ardour
+in defence of Christianity, I was decried as a bigot by the proselytes
+of French phi-(or to speak more truly psi-)-losophy, the writer
+concludes with these words; "since this time he has left his native
+country, commenced citizen of the world, left his poor children
+fatherless, and his wife destitute. Ex his disce his friends, LAMB and
+SOUTHEY." With severest truth it may be asserted, that it would not be
+easy to select two men more exemplary in their domestic affections
+than those whose names were thus printed at full length as in the same
+rank of morals with a denounced infidel and fugitive, who had left his
+children fatherless and his wife destitute! Is it surprising, that
+many good men remained longer than perhaps they otherwise would have
+done adverse to a party, which encouraged and openly rewarded the
+authors of such atrocious calumnies? Qualis es, nescio; sed per quales
+agis, scio et doleo.
+
+[18] In opinions of long continuance, and in which we have never
+before been molested by a single doubt, to be suddenly convinced of
+an error, is almost like being convicted of a fault. There is a state
+of mind, which is the direct antithesis of that, which takes place
+when we make a bull. The bull namely consists in the bringing her
+two incompatible thoughts, with the sensation, but without the sense,
+of their connection. The psychological condition, or that which
+constitutes the possibility, of this state, being such disproportionate
+vividness of two distant thoughts, as extinguishes or obscures the
+consciousness of the intermediate images or conceptions, or wholly
+abstracts the attention from them. Thus in the well known bull, "I was
+a fine child, but they changed me:" the first conception expressed in
+the word "I," is that of personal identity--Ego contemplans: the second
+expressed in the word "me," is the visual image or object by which the
+mind represents to itself its past condition, or rather, its personal
+identity under the form in which it imagined itself previously to have
+existed,--Ego contemplatus. Now the change of one visual image for
+another involves in itself no absurdity, and becomes absurd only by
+its immediate juxta-position with the fast thought, which is rendered
+possible by the whole attention being successively absorbed to each
+singly, so as not to notice the interjacent notion, changed, which by
+its incongruity, with the first thought, I, constitutes the bull. Add
+only, that this process is facilitated by the circumstance of the words
+I, and me, being sometimes equivalent, and sometimes having a distinct
+meaning; sometimes, namely, signifying the act of self-consciousness,
+sometimes the external image in and by which the mind represents that
+act to itself, the result and symbol of its individuality. Now suppose
+the direct contrary state, and you will have a distinct sense of the
+connection between two conceptions, without that sensation of such
+connection which is supplied by habit. The man feels as if he were
+standing on his head though he cannot but see that he is truly
+standing on his feet. This, as a painful sensation, will of course
+have a tendency to associate itself with him who occasions it; even as
+persons, who have been by painful means restored from derangement, are
+known to feel an involuntary dislike towards their physician.
+
+[19] Without however the apprehensions attributed to the Pagan
+reformer of the poetic republic. If we may judge from the preface to
+the recent collection of his poems, Mr. W. would have answered with
+Xanthias--
+
+    su d' ouk edeisas ton huophon ton rhaematon,
+    kai tas apeilas; XAN, ou ma Di', oud' ephrontisa.--Ranae, 492-3.
+
+And here let me hint to the authors of the numerous parodies, and
+pretended imitations of Mr. Wordsworth's style, that at once to
+conceal and convey wit and wisdom in the semblance of folly and
+dulness, as is done in the Clowns and Fools, nay even in the Dogberry,
+of our Shakespeare, is doubtless a proof of genius, or at all events
+of satiric talent; but that the attempt to ridicule a silly and
+childish poem, by writing another still sillier and still more
+childish, can only prove (if it prove any thing at all) that the
+parodist is a still greater blockhead than the original writer, and,
+what is far worse, a malignant coxcomb to boot. The talent for mimicry
+seems strongest where the human race are most degraded. The poor,
+naked half human savages of New Holland were found excellent mimics:
+and, in civilized society, minds of the very lowest stamp alone
+satirize by copying. At least the difference which must blend with and
+balance the likeness, in order to constitute a just imitation,
+existing here merely in caricature, detracts from the libeller's
+heart, without adding an iota to the credit of his understanding.
+
+[20] The Butterfly the ancient Grecians made
+     The soul's fair emblem, and its only name--
+     But of the soul, escaped the slavish trade
+     Of mortal life! For to this earthly frame
+     Ours is the reptile's lot, much toil, much blame,
+     Manifold motions making little speed,
+     And to deform and kill the things whereon we feed.
+
+[21] Mr. Wordsworth, even in his two earliest poems, The Evening Walk
+and the Descriptive Sketches, is more free from this latter defect
+than most of the young poets his contemporaries. It may however be
+exemplified, together with the harsh and obscure construction, in
+which he more often offended, in the following lines:--
+
+    "'Mid stormy vapours ever driving by,
+     Where ospreys, cormorants, and herons cry;
+     Where hardly given the hopeless waste to cheer,
+     Denied the bread of life the foodful ear,
+     Dwindles the pear on autumn's latest spray,
+     And apple sickens pale in summer's ray;
+     Ev'n here content has fixed her smiling reign
+     With independence, child of high disdain."
+
+I hope, I need not say, that I have quoted these lines for no other
+purpose than to make my meaning fully understood. It is to be
+regretted that Mr. Wordsworth has not republished these two poems
+entire.
+
+[22] This is effected either by giving to the one word a general, and
+to the other an exclusive use; as "to put on the back" and "to
+indorse;" or by an actual distinction of meanings, as "naturalist,"
+and "physician;" or by difference of relation, as "I" and "Me" (each
+of which the rustics of our different provinces still use in all the
+cases singular of the first personal pronoun). Even the mere
+difference, or corruption, in the pronunciation of the same word, if
+it have become general, will produce a new word with a distinct
+signification; thus "property" and "propriety;" the latter of which,
+even to the time of Charles II was the written word for all the senses
+of both. There is a sort of minim immortal among the animalcula
+infusoria, which has not naturally either birth, or death, absolute
+beginning, or absolute end: for at a certain period a small point
+appears on its back, which deepens and lengthens till the creature
+divides into two, and the same process recommences in each of the
+halves now become integral. This may be a fanciful, but it is by no
+means a bad emblem of the formation of words, and may facilitate the
+conception, how immense a nomenclature may be organized from a few
+simple sounds by rational beings in a social state. For each new
+application, or excitement of the same sound, will call forth a
+different sensation, which cannot but affect the pronunciation. The
+after recollections of the sound, without the same vivid sensation,
+will modify it still further till at length all trace of the original
+likeness is worn away.
+
+[23] I ought to have added, with the exception of a single sheet which
+I accidentally met with at the printer's. Even from this scanty
+specimen, I found it impossible to doubt the talent, or not to admire
+the ingenuity, of the author. That his distinctions were for the
+greater part unsatisfactory to my mind, proves nothing against their
+accuracy; but it may possibly be serviceable to him, in case of a
+second edition, if I take this opportunity of suggesting the query;
+whether he may not have been occasionally misled, by having assumed,
+as to me he appears to have done, the non-existence of any absolute
+synonymes in our language? Now I cannot but think, that there are many
+which remain for our posterity to distinguish and appropriate, and
+which I regard as so much reversionary wealth in our mother tongue.
+When two distinct meanings are confounded under one or more words,--
+(and such must be the case, as sure as our knowledge is progressive
+and of course imperfect)--erroneous consequences will be drawn, and
+what is true in one sense of the word will be affirmed as true in
+toto. Men of research, startled by the consequences, seek in the
+things themselves--(whether in or out of the mind)--for a knowledge of
+the fact, and having discovered the difference, remove the
+equivocation either by the substitution of a new word, or by the
+appropriation of one of the two or more words, which had before been
+used promiscuously. When this distinction has been so naturalized and
+of such general currency that the language does as it were think for
+us--(like the sliding rule which is the mechanic's safe substitute for
+arithmetical knowledge)--we then say, that it is evident to common
+sense. Common sense, therefore, differs in different ages. What was
+born and christened in the Schools passes by degrees into the world at
+large, and becomes the property of the market and the tea-table. At
+least I can discover no other meaning of the term, common sense, if it
+is to convey any specific difference from sense and judgment in
+genere, and where it is not used scholastically for the universal
+reason. Thus in the reign of Charles II the philosophic world was
+called to arms by the moral sophisms of Hobbes, and the ablest writers
+exerted themselves in the detection of an error, which a school-boy
+would now be able to confute by the mere recollection, that compulsion
+and obligation conveyed two ideas perfectly disparate, and that what
+appertained to the one, had been falsely transferred to the other by a
+mere confusion of terms.
+
+[24] I here use the word idea in Mr. Hume's sense on account of its
+general currency amongst the English metaphysicians; though against my
+own judgment, for I believe that the vague use of this word has been
+the cause of much error and more confusion. The word, idea, in its
+original sense as used by Pindar, Aristophanes, and in the Gospel of
+St. Matthew, represented the visual abstraction of a distant object,
+when we see the whole without distinguishing its parts. Plato adopted
+it as a technical term, and as the antithesis to eidolon, or sensuous
+image; the transient and perishable emblem, or mental word, of the
+idea. Ideas themselves he considered as mysterious powers, living,
+seminal, formative, and exempt from time. In this sense the word Idea
+became the property of the Platonic school; and it seldom occurs in
+Aristotle, without some such phrase annexed to it, as according to
+Plato, or as Plato says. Our English writers to the end of the reign
+of Charles II or somewhat later, employed it either in the original
+sense, or Platonically, or in a sense nearly correspondent to our
+present use of the substantive, Ideal; always however opposing it,
+more or less to image, whether of present or absent objects. The
+reader will not be displeased with the following interesting
+exemplification from Bishop Jeremy Taylor. "St. Lewis the King sent
+Ivo Bishop of Chartres on an embassy, and he told, that he met a grave
+and stately matron on the way with a censer of fire in one band, and a
+vessel of water in the other; and observing her to have a melancholy,
+religious, and phantastic deportment and look, he asked her what those
+symbols meant, and what she meant to do with her fire and water; she
+answered, My purpose is with the fire to burn paradise, and with my
+water to quench the flames of hell, that men may serve God purely for
+the love of God. But we rarely meet with such spirits which love
+virtue so metaphysically as to abstract her from all sensible
+compositions, and love the purity of the idea." Des Cartes having
+introduced into his philosophy the fanciful hypothesis of material
+ideas, or certain configurations of the brain, which were as so many
+moulds to the influxes of the external world,--Locke adopted the term,
+but extended its signification to whatever is the immediate object of
+the mind's attention or consciousness. Hume, distinguishing those
+representations which are accompanied with a sense of a present object
+from those reproduced by the mind itself, designated the former by
+impressions, and confined the word idea to the latter.
+
+[25] I am aware, that this word occurs neither in Johnson's Dictionary
+nor in any classical writer. But the word, to intend, which Newton and
+others before him employ in this sense, is now so completely
+appropriated to another meaning, that I could not use it without
+ambiguity: while to paraphrase the sense, as by render intense, would
+often break up the sentence and destroy that harmony of the position
+of the words with the logical position of the thoughts, which is a
+beauty in all composition, and more especially desirable in a close
+philosophical investigation. I have therefore hazarded the word,
+intensify: though, I confess, it sounds uncouth to my own ear.
+
+[26] And Coxcombs vanquish Berkeley by a grin.
+
+[27] Videlicet; Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Mode, each consisting
+of three subdivisions. See Kritik der reinen Vernunft. See too the
+judicious remarks on Locke and Hume.
+
+[28] St. Luke x. 21.
+
+[29] An American Indian with little variety of images, and a still
+scantier stock of language, is obliged to turn his few words to many
+purposes, by likenesses so clear and analogies so remote as to give
+his language the semblance and character of lyric poetry interspersed
+with grotesques. Something not unlike this was the case of such men as
+Behmen and Fox with regard to the Bible. It was their sole armoury of
+expressions, their only organ of thought.
+
+[30] The following burlesque on the Fichtean Egoisnsus may, perhaps,
+be amusing to the few who have studied the system, and to those who
+are unacquainted with it, may convey as tolerable a likeness of
+Fichte's idealism as can be expected from an avowed caricature.
+
+The Categorical Imperative, or the annunciation of the new Teutonic
+God, EGOENKAIPAN: a dithyrambic ode, by QUERKOPF VON KLUBSTICK,
+Grammarian, and Subrector in Gymmasic.
+
+    Eu! Dei vices gerens, ipse Divus,
+    (Speak English, Friend!) the God Imperativus,
+    Here on this market-cross aloud I cry:
+    I, I, I! I itself I!
+    The form and the substance, the what and the why,
+    The when and the where, and the low and the high,
+    The inside and outside, the earth and the sky,
+    I, you and he, and he, you and I,
+    All souls and all bodies are I itself I!
+                  All I itself I!
+                  (Fools! a truce with this starting!)
+                  All my I! all my I!
+    He's a heretic dog who but adds Betty Martin!
+    Thus cried the God with high imperial tone;
+    In robe of stiffest state, that scoffed at beauty,
+    A pronoun-verb imperative he shone--
+    Then substantive and plural-singular grown
+    He thus spake on! Behold in I alone
+    (For ethics boast a syntax of their own)
+    Or if in ye, yet as I doth depute ye,
+    In O! I, you, the vocative of duty!
+    I of the world's whole Lexicon the root!
+    Of the whole universe of touch, sound, sight
+    The genitive and ablative to boot:
+    The accusative of wrong, the nominative of right,
+    And in all cases the case absolute!
+    Self-construed, I all other moods decline:
+    Imperative, from nothing we derive us;
+    Yet as a super-postulate of mine,
+    Unconstrued antecedence I assign
+    To X, Y, Z, the God Infinitivus!
+
+[31] It would be an act of high and almost criminal injustice to pass
+over in silence the name of Mr. Richard Saumarez, a gentleman equally
+well known as a medical man and as a philanthropist, but who demands
+notice on the present occasion as the author of "A new System of
+Physiology" in two volumes octavo, published 1797; and in 1812 of "An
+Examination of the natural and artificial Systems of Philosophy which
+now prevail" in one volume octavo, entitled, "The Principles of
+physiological and physical Science." The latter work is not quite
+equal to the former in style or arrangement; and there is a greater
+necessity of distinguishing the principles of the author's philosophy
+from his conjectures concerning colour, the atmospheric matter,
+comets, etc. which, whether just or erroneous, are by no means
+necessary consequences of that philosophy. Yet even in this department
+of this volume, which I regard as comparatively the inferior work, the
+reasonings by which Mr. Saumarez invalidates the immanence of an
+infinite power in any finite substance are the offspring of no common
+mind; and the experiment on the expansibility of the air is at least
+plausible and highly ingenious. But the merit, which will secure both
+to the book and to the writer a high and honourable name with
+posterity, consists in the masterly force of reasoning, and the
+copiousness of induction, with which he has assailed, and (in my
+opinion) subverted the tyranny of the mechanic system in physiology;
+established not only the existence of final causes, but their
+necessity and efficiency to every system that merits the name of
+philosophical; and, substituting life and progressive power for the
+contradictory inert force, has a right to be known and remembered as
+the first instaurator of the dynamic philosophy in England. The
+author's views, as far as concerns himself, are unborrowed and
+completely his own, as he neither possessed nor do his writings
+discover, the least acquaintance with the works of Kant, in which the
+germs of the philosophy exist: and his volumes were published many
+years before the full development of these germs by Schelling. Mr.
+Saumarez's detection of the Braunonian system was no light or ordinary
+service at the time; and I scarcely remember in any work on any
+subject a confutation so thoroughly satisfactory. It is sufficient at
+this time to have stated the fact; as in the preface to the work,
+which I have already announced on the Logos, I have exhibited in
+detail the merits of this writer, and genuine philosopher, who needed
+only have taken his foundation somewhat deeper and wider to have
+superseded a considerable part of my labours.
+
+[32] But for sundry notes on Shakespeare, and other pieces which have
+fallen in my way, I should have deemed it unnecessary to observe; that
+discourse here, or elsewhere does not mean what we now call
+discoursing; but the discursion of the mind, the processes of
+generalization and subsumption, of deduction and conclusion. Thus,
+Philosophy has hitherto been discursive; while Geometry is always and
+essentially intuitive.
+
+[33] Revelation xx. 3.
+
+[34] See Laing's History of Scotland.--Walter Scott's bards, ballads,
+etc.
+
+[35] Thus organization, and motion are regarded as from God, not in
+God.
+
+[36] Job, chap. xxviii.
+
+[37] Wherever A=B, and A is not=B, are equally demonstrable, the
+premise in each undeniable, the induction evident, and the conclusion
+legitimate--the result must be, either that contraries can both be
+true, (which is absurd,) or that the faculty and forms of reasoning
+employed are inapplicable to the subject--i.e. that there is a
+metabasis eis allo genos. Thus, the attributes of Space and time
+applied to Spirit are heterogeneous--and the proof of this is, that by
+admitting them explicite or implicite contraries may be demonstrated
+true--i.e. that the same, taken in the same sense, is true and not
+true.--That the world had a beginning in Time and a bound in Space;
+and That the world had not a beginning and has no limit;--That a self
+originating act is, and is not possible, are instances.
+
+[38] To those, who design to acquire the language of a country in the
+country itself, it may be useful, if I mention the incalculable
+advantage which I derived from learning all the words, that could
+possibly be so learned, with the objects before me, and without the
+intermediation of the English terms. It was a regular part of my
+morning studies for the first six weeks of my residence at Ratzeburg,
+to accompany the good and kind old pastor, with whom I lived, from the
+cellar to the roof, through gardens, farmyard, etc. and to call every,
+the minutest, thing by its German name. Advertisements, farces, jest
+books, and the conversation of children while I was at play with them,
+contributed their share to a more home-like acquaintance with the
+language than I could have acquired from works of polite literature
+alone, or even from polite society. There is a passage of hearty sound
+sense in Luther's German Letter on interpretation, to the translation
+of which I shall prefix, for the sake of those who read the German,
+yet are not likely to have dipped often in the massive folios of this
+heroic reformer, the simple, sinewy, idiomatic words of the original.
+"Denn man muss nicht die Buchstaben in der Lateinischen Sprache fragen
+wie man soll Deutsch reden: sondern man muss die Mutter in Hause, die
+Kinder auf den Gassen, den gemeinen Mann auf dem Markte, darum fragen:
+und denselbigen auf das Maul sehen wie sie reden, und darnach
+dolmetschen. So verstehen sie es denn, und merken dass man Deutsch mit
+ihnen redet."
+
+TRANSLATION.
+
+For one must not ask the letters in the Latin tongue, how one ought to
+speak German; but one must ask the mother in the house, the children
+in the lanes and alleys, the common man in the market, concerning
+this; yea, and look at the moves of their mouths while they are
+talking, and thereafter interpret. They understand you then, and mark
+that one talks German with them.
+
+[39] This paraphrase, written about the time of Charlemagne, is by no
+means deficient in occasional passages of considerable poetic merit.
+There is a flow, and a tender enthusiasm in the following lines (at
+the conclusion of Chapter XI.) which, even in the translation will
+not, I flatter myself, fail to interest the reader. Ottfried is
+describing the circumstances immediately following the birth of our
+Lord.
+
+    She gave with joy her virgin breast;
+    She hid it not, she bared the breast,
+    Which suckled that divinest babe!
+    Blessed, blessed were the breasts
+    Which the Saviour infant kiss'd;
+    And blessed, blessed was the mother
+    Who wrapp'd his limbs in swaddling clothes,
+    Singing placed him on her lap,
+    Hung o'er him with her looks of love,
+    And sooth'd him with a lulling motion.
+    Blessed; for she shelter'd him
+    From the damp and chilling air;
+    Blessed, blessed! for she lay
+    With such a babe in one blest bed,
+    Close as babes and mothers lie!
+    Blessed, blessed evermore,
+    With her virgin lips she kiss'd,
+    With her arms, and to her breast
+    She embraced the babe divine,
+    Her babe divine the virgin mother!
+    There lives not on this ring of earth
+    A mortal, that can sing her praise.
+    Mighty mother, virgin pure,
+    In the darkness and the night
+    For us she bore the heavenly Lord!
+
+Most interesting is it to consider the effect, when the feelings are
+wrought above the natural pitch by the belief of something mysterious,
+while all the images are purely natural. Then it is, that religion and
+poetry strike deepest.
+
+[40] Lord Grenville has lately re-asserted (in the House of Lords) the
+imminent danger of a revolution in the earlier part of the war against
+France. I doubt not, that his Lordship is sincere; and it must be
+flattering to his feelings to believe it. But where are the evidences
+of the danger, to which a future historian can appeal? Or must he rest
+on an assertion? Let me be permitted to extract a passage on the
+subject from The Friend. "I have said that to withstand the arguments
+of the lawless, the anti-Jacobins proposed to suspend the law, and by
+the interposition of a particular statute to eclipse the blessed light
+of the universal sun, that spies and informers might tyrannize and
+escape in the ominous darkness. Oh! if these mistaken men, intoxicated
+with alarm and bewildered by that panic of property, which they
+themselves were the chief agents in exciting, had ever lived in a
+country where there really existed a general disposition to change and
+rebellion! Had they ever travelled through Sicily; or through France
+at the first coming on of the revolution; or even alas! through too
+many of the provinces of a sister island; they could not but have
+shrunk from their own declarations concerning the state of feeling and
+opinion at that time predominant throughout Great Britain. There was a
+time--(Heaven grant that that time may have passed by!)--when by
+crossing a narrow strait, they might have learned the true symptoms of
+approaching danger, and have secured themselves from mistaking the
+meetings and idle rant of such sedition, as shrank appalled from the
+sight of a constable, for the dire murmuring and strange consternation
+which precedes the storm or earthquake of national discord. Not only
+in coffee-houses and public theatres, but even at the tables of the
+wealthy, they would have heard the advocates of existing Government
+defend their cause in the language and with the tone of men, who are
+conscious that they are in a minority. But in England, when the alarm
+was at its highest, there was not a city, no, not a town or village,
+in which a man suspected of holding democratic principles could move
+abroad without receiving some unpleasant proof of the hatred in which
+his supposed opinions were held by the great majority of the people;
+and the only instances of popular excess and indignation were on the
+side of the government and the established church. But why need I
+appeal to these invidious facts? Turn over the pages of history and
+seek for a single instance of a revolution having been effected
+without the concurrence of either the nobles, or the ecclesiastics, or
+the monied classes, in any country, in which the influences of
+property had ever been predominant, and where the interests of the
+proprietors were interlinked! Examine the revolution of the Belgic
+provinces under Philip II; the civil wars of France in the preceding
+generation; the history of the American revolution, or the yet more
+recent events in Sweden and in Spain; and it will be scarcely possible
+not to perceive that in England from 1791 to the peace of Amiens there
+were neither tendencies to confederacy nor actual confederacies,
+against which the existing laws had not provided both sufficient
+safeguards and an ample punishment. But alas! the panic of property
+had been struck in the first instance for party purposes; and when it
+became general, its propagators caught it themselves and ended in
+believing their own lie; even as our bulls to Borrowdale sometimes run
+mad with the echo of their own bellowing. The consequences were most
+injurious. Our attention was concentrated on a monster, which could
+not survive the convulsions, in which it had been brought forth,--even
+the enlightened Burke himself too often talking and reasoning, as if a
+perpetual and organized anarchy had been a possible thing! Thus while
+we were warring against French doctrines, we took little heed whether
+the means by which we attempted to overthrow them, were not likely to
+aid and augment the far more formidable evil of French ambition. Like
+children we ran away from the yelping of a cur, and took shelter at
+the heels of a vicious war horse." (Vol. II. Essay i. p. 21, 4th edit.)
+
+[41] I seldom think of the murder of this illustrious Prince without
+recollecting the lines of Valerius Flaccus:
+
+    ------super ipsius ingens
+    Instat fama viri, virtusque haud laeta tyranno;
+    Ergo anteire metus, juvenemque exstinguere pergit.
+                                           Argonaut, I. 29.
+
+[42] Theara de kai ton chaena kai taen dorkada,
+     Kai ton lagoon, kai to ton tauron genos.
+            Manuel Phile, De Animal. Proprietat. sect. I. i. 12.
+
+[43] Paradise Regained. Book IV. I. 261.
+
+[44] Vita e Costumi di Dante.
+
+[45] TRANSLATION.
+
+"With the greatest possible solicitude avoid authorship. Too early or
+immoderately employed, it makes the head waste and the heart empty;
+even were there no other worse consequences. A person, who reads only
+to print, to all probability reads amiss; and he, who sends away
+through the pen and the press every thought, the moment it occurs to
+him, will in a short time have sent all away, and will become a mere
+journeyman of the printing-office, a compositor."
+
+To which I may add from myself, that what medical physiologists affirm
+of certain secretions applies equally to our thoughts; they. too must
+be taken up again into the circulation, and be again and again re-
+secreted to order to ensure a healthful vigour, both to the mind and
+to its intellectual offspring.
+
+[46] This distinction between transcendental and transcendent is
+observed by our elder divines and philosophers, whenever they express
+themselves scholastically. Dr. Johnson indeed has confounded the two
+words; but his own authorities do not bear him out. Of this celebrated
+dictionary I will venture to remark once for all, that I should
+suspect the man of a morose disposition who should speak of it without
+respect and gratitude as a most instructive and entertaining book, and
+hitherto, unfortunately, an indispensable book; but I confess, that I
+should be surprised at hearing from a philosophic and thorough scholar
+any but very qualified praises of it, as a dictionary. I am not now
+alluding to the number of genuine words omitted; for this is (and
+perhaps to a greater extent) true, as Mr. Wakefield has noticed, of
+our best Greek Lexicons, and this too after the successive labours of
+so many giants in learning. I refer at present both to omissions and
+commissions of a more important nature. What these are, me saltem
+judice, will be stated at full in The Friend, re-published and
+completed.
+
+I had never heard of the correspondence between Wakefield and Fox till
+I saw the account of it this morning (16th September 1815) in the
+Monthly Review. I was not a little gratified at finding, that Mr.
+Wakefield had proposed to himself nearly the same plan for a Greek and
+English Dictionary, which I had formed, and began to execute, now ten
+years ago. But far, far more grieved am I, that he did not live to
+complete it. I cannot but think it a subject of most serious regret,
+that the same heavy expenditure, which is now employing in the
+republication of STEPHANUS augmented, had not been applied to a new
+Lexicon on a more philosophical plan, with the English, German, and
+French synonymes as well as the Latin. In almost every instance the
+precise individual meaning might be given in an English or German
+word; whereas in Latin we must too often be contented with a mere
+general and inclusive term. How indeed can it be otherwise, when we
+attempt to render the most copious language of the world, the most
+admirable for the fineness of its distinctions, into one of the
+poorest and most vague languages? Especially when we reflect on the
+comparative number of the works, still extant, written while the Greek
+and Latin were living languages. Were I asked what I deemed the
+greatest and most unmixed benefit, which a wealthy individual, or an
+association of wealthy individuals could bestow on their country and
+on mankind, I should not hesitate to answer, "a philosophical English
+dictionary; with the Greek, Latin, German, French, Spanish, and
+Italian synonymes, and with correspondent indexes." That the learned
+languages might thereby be acquired, better, in half the time, is but
+a part, and not the most important part, of the advantages which would
+accrue from such a work. O! if it should be permitted by Providence,
+that without detriment to freedom and independence our government
+might be enabled to become more than a committee for war and revenue!
+There was a time, when every thing was to be done by Government. Have
+we not flown off to the contrary extreme?
+
+[47] April, 1825. If I did not see it with my own eyes, I should not
+believe that I had been guilty of so many hydrostatic Bulls as bellow
+in this unhappy allegory or string of metaphors! How a river was to
+travel up hill from a vale far inward, over the intervening mountains,
+Morpheus, the Dream weaver, can alone unriddle. I am ashamed and
+humbled. S. T. Coleridge.
+
+[48] Ennead, III. 8. 3. The force of the Greek sunienai is imperfectly
+expressed by "understand;" our own idiomatic phrase "to go along with
+me" comes nearest to it. The passage, that follows, full of profound
+sense, appears to me evidently corrupt; and in fact no writer more
+wants, better deserves, or is less likely to obtain, a new and more
+correct edition-ti oun sunienai; oti to genomenon esti theama emon,
+siopaesis (mallem, theama, emon sioposaes,) kai physei genomenon
+theoraema, kai moi genomenae ek theorias taes odi, taen physin echein
+philotheamona uparkei. (mallem, kai moi hae genomenae ek theorias
+autaes odis). "What then are we to understand? That whatever is
+produced is an intuition, I silent; and that, which is thus generated,
+is by its nature a theorem, or form of contemplation; and the birth;
+which results to me from this contemplation, attains to have a
+contemplative nature." So Synesius:
+
+    'Odis hiera
+    'Arraeta gona
+
+The after comparison of the process of the natura naturans with that
+of the geometrician is drawn from the very heart of philosophy.
+
+[49] This is happily effected in three lines by Synesius, in his THIRD
+HYMN:
+
+    'En kai Pan'ta--(taken by itself) is Spinozism.
+    'En d' 'Apan'ton--a mere Anima Mundi.
+    'En te pro panton--is mechanical Theism.
+
+But unite all three, and the result is the Theism of Saint Paul and
+Christianity. Synesius was censured for his doctrine of the pre-
+existence of the soul; but never, that I can find, arraigned or deemed
+heretical for his Pantheism, though neither Giordano Bruno, nor Jacob
+Behmen ever avowed it more broadly.
+
+    Mystas de Noos,
+    Ta te kai ta legei,
+    Buthon arraeton
+    Amphichoreuon.
+    Su to tikton ephus,
+    Su to tiktomenon;
+    Su to photizon,
+    Su to lampomenon;
+    Su to phainomenon,
+    Su to kryptomenon
+    Idiais augais.
+    'En kai panta,
+    'En kath' heauto,
+    Kai dia panton.
+
+Pantheism is therefore not necessarily irreligious or heretical;
+though it may be taught atheistically. Thus Spinoza would agree with
+Synesius in calling God Physis en Noerois, the Nature in
+Intelligences; but he could not subscribe to the preceding Nous kai
+noeros, i.e. Himself Intelligence and intelligent.
+
+In this biographical sketch of my literary life I may be excused, if I
+mention here, that I had translated the eight Hymns of Synesius from
+the Greek into English Anacreontics before my fifteenth year.
+
+[50] See Schell. Abhandl. zur Erlaeuter. des Id. der
+Wissenschafslehre.
+
+[51] Des Cartes, Diss. de Methodo.
+
+[52] The impossibility of an absolute thing (substantia unica) as
+neither genus, species, nor individuum: as well as its utter unfitness
+for the fundamental position of a philosophic system, will be
+demonstrated in the critique on Spinozism in the fifth treatise of my
+Logosophia.
+
+[53] It is most worthy of notice, that in the first revelation of
+himself, not confined to individuals; indeed in the very first
+revelation of his absolute being, Jehovah at the same time revealed
+the fundamental truth of all philosophy, which must either commence
+with the absolute, or have no fixed commencement; that is, cease to be
+philosophy. I cannot but express my regret, that in the equivocal use
+of the word that, for in that, or because, our admirable version has
+rendered the passage susceptible of a degraded interpretation in the
+mind of common readers or hearers, as if it were a mere reproof to an
+impertinent question, I am what I am, which might be equally affirmed
+of himself by any existent being.
+
+The Cartesian Cogito ergo sum is objectionable, because either the
+Cogito is used extra gradum, and then it is involved to the sum and is
+tautological; or it is taken as a particular mode or dignity, and then
+it is subordinated to the sum as the species to the genus, or rather
+as a particular modification to the subject modified; and not pre-
+ordinated as the arguments seem to require. For Cogito is Sum
+Cogitans. This is clear by the inevidence of the converse. Cogitat,
+ergo est is true, because it is a mere application of the logical
+rule: Quicquid in genere est, est et in specie. Est (cogitans), ergo
+est. It is a cherry tree; therefore it is a tree. But, est ergo
+cogitat, is illogical: for quod est in specie, non NBCESSARIO in
+genere est. It may be true. I hold it to be true, that quicquid vere
+est, est per veram sui affirmationem; but it is a derivative, not an
+immediate truth. Here then we have, by anticipation, the distinction
+between the conditional finite! (which, as known in distinct
+consciousness by occasion of experience, is called by Kant's followers
+the empirical!) and the absolute I AM, and likewise the dependence or
+rather the inherence of the former in the latter; in whom "we live,
+and move, and have our being," as St. Paul divinely asserts, differing
+widely from the Theists of the mechanic school (as Sir J. Newton,
+Locke, and others) who must say from whom we had our being, and with
+it life and the powers of life.
+
+[54] TRANSLATION.
+
+"Hence it is clear, from what cause many reject the notion of the
+continuous and the infinite. They take, namely, the words
+irrepresentable and impossible in one and the same meaning; and,
+according to the forms of sensuous evidence, the notion of the
+continuous and the infinite is doubtless impossible. I am not now
+pleading the cause of these laws, which not a few schools have thought
+proper to explode, especially the former (the law of continuity). But
+it is of the highest importance to admonish the reader, that those,
+who adopt so perverted a mode of reasoning, are under a grievous
+error. Whatever opposes the formal principles of the understanding and
+the reason is confessedly impossible; but not therefore that, which is
+therefore not amenable to the forms of sensuous evidence, because it
+is exclusively an object of pure intellect. For this non-coincidence
+of the sensuous and the intellectual (the nature of which I shall
+presently lay open) proves nothing more, but that the mind cannot
+always adequately represent to the concrete, and transform into
+distinct images, abstract notions derived from the pure intellect. But
+this contradiction, which is in itself merely subjective (i.e. an
+incapacity in the nature of man), too often passes for an incongruity
+or impossibility in the object (i.e. the notions themselves), and
+seduces the incautious to mistake the limitations of the human
+faculties for the limits of things, as they really exist."
+
+I take this occasion to observe, that here and elsewhere Kant uses the
+term intuition, and the verb active (intueri Germanice anschauen) for
+which we have unfortunately no correspondent word, exclusively for
+that which can be represented in space and time. He therefore
+consistently and rightly denies the possibility of intellectual
+intuitions. But as I see no adequate reason for this exclusive sense
+of the term, I have reverted to its wider signification, authorized by
+our elder theologians and metaphysicians, according to whom the term
+comprehends all truths known to us without a medium.
+
+From Kant's Treatise De mundi sensibilis et intelligibilis forma et
+principiis. 1770.
+
+[55] Franc. Baconis de Verulam, NOVUM ORGANUM.
+
+[56] This phrase, a priori, is in common, most grossly misunderstood,
+and as absurdity burdened on it, which it does not deserve. By
+knowledge a priori, we do not mean, that we can know anything
+previously to experience, which would be a contradiction in terms; but
+that having once known it by occasion of experience (that is,
+something acting upon us from without) we then know, that it must have
+existed, or the experience itself would have been impossible. By
+experience only now, that I have eyes; but then my reason convinces
+me, that I must have had eyes in order to the experience.
+
+[57] Jer. Taylor's Via Pacis.
+
+[58] Par. Lost. Book V. I. 469.
+
+[59] Leibnitz. Op. T. II. P. II. p. 53.--T. III. p. 321.
+
+[60] Synesii Episcop. Hymn. III. I. 231
+
+[61] 'Anaer morionous, 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 Shakespeare, de jure singulari, et ex privilegio naturae.
+
+[62] First published in 1803.
+
+[63] These thoughts were suggested to me during the perusal of the
+Madrigals of Giovambatista Strozzi published in Florence in May, 1593,
+by his sons Lorenzo and Filippo Strozzi, with a dedication to their
+paternal uncle, Signor Leone Strozzi, Generale delle battaglie di
+Santa Chiesa. As I do not remember to have seen either the poems or
+their author mentioned in any English work, or to have found them in
+any of the common collections of Italian poetry; and as the little
+work is of rare occurrence; I will transcribe a few specimens. I have
+seldom met with compositions that possessed, to my feelings, more of
+that satisfying entireness, that complete adequateness of the manner
+to the matter which so charms us in Anacreon, joined with the
+tenderness, and more than the delicacy of Catullus. Trifles as they
+are, they were probably elaborated with great care; yet to the perusal
+we refer them to a spontaneous energy rather than to voluntary effort.
+To a cultivated taste there is a delight in perfection for its own
+sake, independently of the material in which it is manifested, that
+none but a cultivated taste can understand or appreciate.
+
+After what I have advanced, it would appear presumption to offer a
+translation; even if the attempt were not discouraged by the different
+genius of the English mind and language, which demands a denser body
+of thought as the condition of a high polish, than the Italian. I
+cannot but deem it likewise an advantage in the Italian tongue, in
+many other respects inferior to our own, that the language of poetry
+is more distinct from that of prose than with us. From the earlier
+appearance and established primacy of the Tuscan. poets, concurring
+with the number of independent states, and the diversity of written
+dialects, the Italians have gained a poetic idiom, as the Greeks
+before them had obtained from the same causes with greater and more
+various discriminations, for example, the Ionic for their heroic
+verses; the Attic for their iambic; and the two modes of the Doric for
+the lyric or sacerdotal, and the pastoral, the distinctions of which
+were doubtless more obvious to the Greeks themselves than they are to
+us.
+
+I will venture to add one other observation before I proceed to the
+transcription. I am aware that the sentiments which I have avowed
+concerning the points of difference between the poetry of the present
+age, and that of the period between 1500 and 1650, are the reverse of
+the opinion commonly entertained. I was conversing on this subject
+with a friend, when the servant, a worthy and sensible woman, coming
+in, I placed before her two engravings, the one a pinky-coloured plate
+of the day, the other a masterly etching by Salvator Rosa from one of
+his own pictures. On pressing her to tell us, which she preferred,
+after a little blushing and flutter of feeling, she replied "Why,
+that, Sir, to be sure! (pointing to the ware from the Fleet-street
+print shops);--it's so neat and elegant. T'other is such a scratchy
+slovenly thing." An artist, whose writings are scarcely less valuable
+than his pictures, and to whose authority more deference will be
+willingly paid, than I could even wish should be shown to mine, has
+told us, and from his own experience too, that good taste must be
+acquired, and like all other good things, is the result of thought and
+the submissive study of the best models. If it be asked, "But what
+shall I deem such?"--the answer is; presume those to be the best, the
+reputation of which has been matured into fame by the consent of ages.
+For wisdom always has a final majority, if not by conviction, yet by
+acquiescence. In addition to Sir J. Reynolds I may mention Harris of
+Salisbury; who in one of his philosophical disquisitions has written
+on the means of acquiring a just taste with the precision of
+Aristotle, and the elegance of Quinctilian.
+
+    MADRIGALI.
+
+    Gelido suo ruscel chiaro, e tranquillo
+    M'insegno Amor di state a mezzo'l giorno;
+    Ardean le solve, ardean le piagge, e i colli.
+    Ond' io, ch' al piu gran gielo ardo e sfavillo,
+    Subito corsi; ma si puro adorno
+    Girsene il vidi, che turbar no'l volli:
+    Sol mi specchiava, e'n dolce ombrosa sponda
+    Mi stava intento al mormorar dell' onda.
+
+    Aure dell' angoscioso viver mio
+    Refrigerio soave,
+    E dolce si, che piu non mi par grave
+    Ne'l ardor, ne'l morir, anz' il desio;
+    Deh voil ghiaccio, e le nubi, e'l tempo rio
+    Discacciatene omai, che londa chiara,
+    E l'ombra non men cara
+    A scherzare, a cantar per suoi boschetti,
+    E prati festa et allegrezza alletti.
+
+    Pacifiche, ma spesso in amorosa
+    Guerra co'fiori, e l'erba
+    Alla stagione acerba
+    Verdi insegne del giglio e della rosa,
+    Movete, Aure, pian pian; che tregua o posa,
+    Se non pace, io ritrove;
+    E so ben dove:--Oh vago, a mansueto
+    Sguardo, oh labbra d'ambrosia, oh rider, lieto!
+
+    Hor come un scoglio stassi,
+    Hor come un rio se'n fugge,
+    Ed hor crud' orsa rugge,
+    Hor canta angelo pio: ma che non fassi!
+    E che non fammi, O sassi,
+    O rivi, o belue, o Dii, questa mia vaga
+    Non so, se ninfa, o magna,
+    Non so, se donna, o Dea,
+    Non so, se dolce o rea?
+
+    Piangendo mi baciaste,
+    E ridendo il negaste:
+    In doglia hebbivi pin,
+    In festa hebbivi ria:
+    Nacque gioia di pianti,
+    Dolor di riso: O amanti
+    Miseri, habbiate insieme
+    Ognor paura e speme.
+
+    Bel Fior, tu mi rimembri
+    La rugiadosa guancia del bet viso;
+    E si vera l'assembri,
+    Che'n te sovente, come in lei m'affiso:
+    Et hor del vago riso,
+    Hor del serene sguardo
+    Io pur cieco riguardo. Ma qual fugge,
+    O Rosa, il mattin lieve!
+    E chi te, come neve,
+    E'l mio cor teco, e la mia vita strugge!
+
+    Anna mia, Anna dolce, oh sempre nuovo
+    E piu chiaro concento,
+    Quanta dolcezza sento
+    In sol Anna dicendo? Io mi pur pruovo,
+    Ne qui tra noi ritruovo,
+    Ne tra cieli armonia,
+    Che del bel nome suo piu dolce sia:
+    Altro il Cielo, altro Amore,
+    Altro non suona l'Ecco del mio core.
+
+    Hor che'l prato, e la selva si scoiora,
+    Al tuo serena ombroso
+    Muovine, alto Riposo,
+    Deh ch'io riposi una sol notte, un hora:
+    Han le fere, e git augelli, ognun talora
+    Ha qualche pace; io quando,
+    Lasso! non vonne errando,
+    E non piango, e non grido? e qual pur forte?
+    Ma poiche, non sent' egli, odine, Morte.
+
+    Risi e piansi d'Amor; ne pero mai
+    Se non in fiamma, o'n onda, o'n vento scrissi
+    Spesso msrce trovai
+    Crudel; sempre in me morto, in altri vissi:
+    Hor da' piu scuri Abissi al ciel m'aizai,
+    Hor ne pur caddi giuso;
+    Stance al fin qui son chiuso.
+
+[64] "I've measured it from side to side;
+      'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide."
+
+[65] "Nay, rack your brain--'tis all in vain,
+      I'll tell you every thing I know;
+      But to the Thorn, and to the Pond
+      Which is a little step beyond,
+      I wish that you would go:
+      Perhaps, when you are at the place,
+      You something of her tale may trace.
+
+      I'll give you the best help I can
+      Before you up the mountain go,
+      Up to the dreary mountain-top,
+      I'll tell you all I know.
+      'Tis now some two-and-twenty years
+      Since she (her name is Martha Ray)
+      Gave, with a maiden's true good will,
+      Her company to Stephen Hill;
+      And she was blithe and gay,
+      And she was happy, happy still
+      Whene'er she thought of Stephen Hill.
+
+      And they had fixed the wedding-day,
+      The morning that must wed them both
+      But Stephen to another maid
+      Had sworn another oath;
+      And, with this other maid, to church
+      Unthinking Stephen went--
+      Poor Martha! on that woeful day
+      A pang of pitiless dismay
+      Into her soul was sent;
+      A fire was kindled in her breast,
+      Which might not burn itself to rest.
+
+      They say, full six months after this,
+      While yet the summer leaves were green,
+      She to the mountain-top would go,
+      And there was often seen;
+      'Tis said a child was in her womb,
+      As now to any eye was plain;
+      She was with child, and she was mad;
+      Yet often she was sober sad
+      From her exceeding pain.
+      Oh me! ten thousand times I'd rather
+      That he had died, that cruel father!
+
+           *     *     *     *     *
+           *     *     *     *     *
+           *     *     *     *     *
+           *     *     *     *     *
+
+      Last Christmas when they talked of this,
+      Old Farmer Simpson did maintain,
+      That in her womb the infant wrought
+      About its mother's heart, and brought
+      Her senses back again:
+      And, when at last her time drew near,
+      Her looks were calm, her senses clear.
+
+      No more I know, I wish I did,
+      And I would tell it all to you
+      For what became of this poor child
+      There's none that ever knew
+      And if a child was born or no,
+      There's no one that could ever tell;
+      And if 'twas born alive or dead,
+      There's no one knows, as I have said:
+      But some remember well,
+      That Martha Ray about this time
+      Would up the mountain often climb."
+
+[66] It is no less an error in teachers, than a torment to the poor
+children, to enforce the necessity of reading as they would talk. In
+order to cure them of singing as it is called, that is, of too great a
+difference, the child is made to repeat the words with his eyes from
+off the book; and then, indeed, his tones resemble talking, as far as
+his fears, tears and trembling will permit. But as soon as the eye is
+again directed to the printed page, the spell begins anew; for an
+instinctive sense tells the child's feelings, that to utter its own
+momentary thoughts, and to recite the written thoughts of another, as
+of another, and a far wiser than himself, are two widely different
+things; and as the two acts are accompanied with widely different
+feelings, so must they justify different modes of enunciation. Joseph
+Lancaster, among his other sophistications of the excellent Dr. Bell's
+invaluable system, cures this fault of singing, by hanging fetters and
+chains on the child, to the music of which one of his school-fellows,
+who walks before, dolefully chants out the child's last speech and
+confession, birth, parentage, and education. And this soul-benumbing
+ignominy, this unholy and heart-hardening burlesque on the last
+fearful infliction of outraged law, in pronouncing the sentence to
+which the stern and familiarized judge not seldom bursts into tears,
+has been extolled as a happy and ingenious method of remedying--what?
+and how?--why, one extreme in order to introduce another, scarce less
+distant from good sense, and certainly likely to have worse moral
+effects, by enforcing a semblance of petulant ease and self-
+sufficiency, in repression and possible after-perversion of the
+natural feelings. I have to beg Dr. Bell's pardon for this connection
+of the two names, but he knows that contrast is no less powerful a
+cause of association than likeness.
+
+[67] Altered from the description of Night-Mair in the REMORSE.
+
+    "Oh Heaven! 'twas frightful! Now ran down and stared at
+     By hideous shapes that cannot be remembered;
+     Now seeing nothing and imagining nothing;
+     But only being afraid--stifled with fear!
+     While every goodly or familiar form
+     Had a strange power of spreading terror round me!"
+
+N.B.--Though Shakespeare has, for his own all justifying purposes,
+introduced the Night-Mare with her own foals, yet Mair means a Sister,
+or perhaps a Hag.
+
+[68] But still more by the mechanical system of philosophy which has
+needlessly infected our theological opinions, and teaching us to
+consider the world in its relation to god, as of a building to its
+mason, leaves the idea of omnipresence a mere abstract notion in the
+stateroom of our reason.
+
+[69] As the ingenious gentleman under the influence of the Tragic Muse
+contrived to dislocate, "I wish you a good morning, Sir! Thank you,
+Sir, and I wish you the same," into two blank-verse heroics:--
+
+    To you a morning good, good Sir! I wish.
+    You, Sir! I thank: to you the same wish I.
+
+In those parts of Mr. Wordsworth's works which I have thoroughly
+studied, I find fewer instances in which this would be practicable
+than I have met to many poems, where an approximation of prose has
+been sedulously and on system guarded against. Indeed excepting the
+stanzas already quoted from THE SAILOR'S MOTHER, I can recollect but
+one instance: that is to say, a short passage of four or five lines in
+THE BROTHERS, that model of English pastoral, which I never yet read
+with unclouded eye.--"James, pointing to its summit, over which they
+had all purposed to return together, informed them that he would wait
+for them there. They parted, and his comrades passed that way some two
+hours after, but they did not find him at the appointed place, _a
+circumstance of which they took no heed:_ but one of them, going by
+chance into the house, which at this time was James's house, learnt
+_there,_ that nobody had seen him all that day." The only change which
+has been made is in the position of the little word there in two
+instances, the position in the original being clearly such as is not
+adopted in ordinary conversation. The other words printed in italics
+were so marked because, though good and genuine English, they are not
+the phraseology of common conversation either in the word put in
+apposition, or in the connection by the genitive pronoun. Men in
+general would have said, "but that was a circumstance they paid no
+attention to, or took no notice of;" and the language is, on the
+theory of the preface, justified only by the narrator's being the
+Vicar. Yet if any ear could suspect, that these sentences were ever
+printed as metre, on those very words alone could the suspicion have
+been grounded.
+
+[70] I had in my mind the striking but untranslatable epithet, which
+the celebrated Mendelssohn applied to the great founder of the
+Critical Philosophy "Der alleszermalmende KANT," that is, the all-
+becrushing, or rather the all-to-nothing-crushing Kant. In the
+facility and force of compound epithets, the German from the number of
+its cases and inflections approaches to the Greek, that language so
+
+    "Bless'd in the happy marriage of sweet words."
+
+It is in the woful harshness of its sounds alone that the German need
+shrink from the comparison.
+
+[71] Sammlung einiger Abhandlungen von Christian Garve.
+
+[72] Sonnet IX.
+
+[73] Mr. Wordsworth's having judiciously adopted "concourse wild" in
+this passage for "a wild scene" as it stood to the former edition,
+encourages me to hazard a remark, which I certainly should not have
+made in the works of a poet less austerely accurate in the use of
+words, than he is, to his own great honour. It respects the propriety
+of the word, "scene," even in the sentence in which it is retained.
+Dryden, and he only in his more careless verses, was the first, as far
+as my researches have discovered, who for the convenience of rhyme
+used this word in the vague sense, which has been since too current
+even in our best writers, and which (unfortunately, I think) is given
+as its first explanation in Dr. Johnson's Dictionary and therefore
+would be taken by an incautious reader as its proper sense. In
+Shakespeare and Milton the word is never used without some clear
+reference, proper or metaphorical, to the theatre. Thus Milton:
+
+    "Cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm
+     A sylvan scene; and, as the ranks ascend
+     Shade above shade, a woody theatre
+     Of stateliest view."
+
+I object to any extension of its meaning, because the word is already
+more equivocal than might be wished; inasmuch as to the limited use,
+which I recommend, it may still signify two different things; namely,
+the scenery, and the characters and actions presented on the stage
+during the presence of particular scenes. It can therefore be
+preserved from obscurity only by keeping the original signification
+full in the mind. Thus Milton again,
+
+    ------"Prepare thee for another scene."
+
+[74] Which Copland scarce had spoke, but quickly every hill,
+     Upon her verge that stands, the neighbouring vallies fill;
+     Helvillon from his height, it through the mountains threw,
+     From whom as soon again, the sound Dunbalrase drew,
+     From whose stone-trophied head, it on the Windross went,
+     Which tow'rds the sea again, resounded it to Dent.
+     That Brodwater, therewith within her banks astound,
+     In sailing to the sea, told it to Egremound,
+     Whose buildings, walks, and streets, with echoes loud and long,
+     Did mightily commend old Copland for her song.
+                                     Drayton's POLYOLBION: Song XXX.
+
+[75] Translation. It behoves me to side with my friends, but only as
+far as the gods.
+
+[76] "Slender.  I bruised my shin with playing with sword and dagger
+for a dish of stewed prunes, and by my troth I cannot abide the smell
+of hot meat since."--So again, Evans.  "I will make an end of my
+dinner: there's pippins and cheese to come."
+
+[77] This was accidentally confirmed to me by an old German gentleman
+at Helmstadt, who had been Klopstock's school and bed-fellow. Among
+other boyish anecdotes, he related that the young poet set a
+particular value on a translation of the PARADISE LOST, and always
+slept with it under his pillow.
+
+[78] Klopstock's observation was partly true and partly erroneous. In
+the literal sense of his words, and, if we confine the comparison to
+the average of space required for the expression of the same thought
+in the two languages, it is erroneous. I have translated some German
+hexameters into English hexameter; and find, that on the average
+three English lines will express four lines German. The reason is
+evident: our language abounds in monosyllables and dissyllables. The
+German, not less than the Greek, is a polysyllable language. But in
+another point of view the remark was not without foundation. For the
+German possessing the same unlimited privilege of forming compounds,
+both with prepositions and with epithets, as the Greek, it can express
+the richest single Greek word in a single German one, and is thus
+freed from the necessity of weak or ungraceful paraphrases. I will
+content myself with one at present, viz. the use of the prefixed
+participles ver, zer, ent, and weg: thus reissen to rend, verreissen
+to rend away, zerreissen to rend to pieces, entreissen to rend off or
+out of a thing, in the active sense: or schmelzen to melt--ver, zer,
+ent, schmelzen--and in like manner through all the verbs neuter and
+active. If you consider only how much we should feel the loss of the
+prefix be, as in bedropt, besprinkle, besot, especially in our
+poetical language, and then think that this same mode of composition
+is carved through all their simple and compound prepositions, and many
+of their adverbs; and that with most of these the Germans have the
+same privilege as we have of dividing them from the verb and placing
+them at the end of the sentence; you will have no difficulty in
+comprehending the reality and the cause of this superior power in the
+German of condensing meaning, in which its great poet exulted. It is
+impossible to read half a dozen pages of Wieland without perceiving
+that in this respect the German has no rival but the Greek. And yet I
+feel, that concentration or condensation is not the happiest mode of
+expressing this excellence, which seems to consist not so much in the
+less time required for conveying an impression, as in the unity and
+simultaneousness with which the impression is conveyed. It tends to
+make their language more picturesque: it depictures images better. We
+have obtained this power in part by our compound verbs derived from
+the Latin: and the sense of its great effect no doubt induced our
+Milton both to the use and the abuse of Latin derivatives. But still
+these prefixed particles, conveying no separate or separable meaning
+to the mere English reader, cannot possibly act on the mind with the
+force or liveliness of an original and homogeneous language such as
+the German is, and besides are confined to certain words.
+
+[79] Praecludere calumniam, in the original.
+
+[80] Better thus: Forma specifica per formam individualem translucens:
+or better yet--Species individualisata, sive Individuum cuilibet
+Speciei determinatae in omni parte correspondens et quasi versione
+quadam eam interpretans et repetens.
+
+[81] ------"The big round tears
+     Cours'd one another down his innocent nose
+     In piteous chase,"
+
+says Shakespeare of a wounded stag hanging its head over a stream:
+naturally, from the position of the head, and most beautifully, from
+the association of the preceding image, of the chase, in which "the
+poor sequester'd stag from the hunter's aim had ta'en a hurt." In the
+supposed position of Bertram, the metaphor, if not false, loses all
+the propriety of the original.
+
+[82] Among a number of other instances of words chosen without reason,
+Imogine in the first act declares, that thunder-storms were not able
+to intercept her prayers for "the desperate man, in desperate ways who
+dealt"----
+
+    "Yea, when the launched bolt did sear her sense,
+     Her soul's deep orisons were breathed for him;"
+
+that is, when a red-hot bolt, launched at her from a thunder-cloud,
+had cauterized her sense, to plain English, burnt her eyes out of her
+head, she kept still praying on.
+
+    "Was not this love? Yea, thus doth woman love!"
+
+[83] This sort of repetition is one of this writers peculiarities, and
+there is scarce a page which does not furnish one or more instances--
+Ex. gr. in the first page or two. Act I, line 7th, "and deemed that I
+might sleep."--Line 10, "Did rock and quiver in the bickering glare."
+--Lines 14, 15, 16, "But by the momently gleams of sheeted blue, Did
+the pale marbles dare so sternly on me, I almost deemed they lived."--
+Line 37, "The glare of Hell."--Line 35, "O holy Prior, this is no
+earthly storm."--Line 38, "This is no earthly storm."--Line 42,
+"Dealing with us."--Line 43, "Deal thus sternly:"--Line 44, "Speak!
+thou hast something seen?"--"A fearful sight!"--Line 45, "What hast
+thou seen! A piteous, fearful sight."--Line 48, "quivering gleams."--
+Line 50, "In the hollow pauses of the storm."--Line 61, "The pauses of
+the storm, etc."
+
+[84] The child is an important personage, for I see not by what
+possible means the author could have ended the second and third acts
+but for its timely appearance. How ungrateful then not further to
+notice its fate!
+
+[85] Classically too, as far as consists with the allegorizing fancy
+of the modern, that still striving to project the inward,
+contradistinguishes itself from the seeming ease with which the poetry
+of the ancients reflects the world without. Casimir affords, perhaps,
+the most striking instance of this characteristic difference.--For his
+style and diction are really classical: while Cowley, who resembles
+Casimir in many respects, completely barbarizes his Latinity, and even
+his metre, by the heterogeneous nature of his thoughts. That Dr.
+Johnson should have passed a contrary judgment, and have even
+preferred Cowley's Latin Poems to Milton's, is a caprice that has, if I
+mistake not, excited the surprise of all scholars. I was much amused
+last summer with the laughable affright, with which an Italian poet
+perused a page of Cowley's Davideis, contrasted with the enthusiasm
+with which he first ran through, and then read aloud, Milton's Mansus
+and Ad Patrem.
+
+[86] Flectit, or if the metre had allowed, premit would have supported
+the metaphor better.
+
+[87] Poor unlucky Metaphysicks! and what are they? A single sentence
+expresses the object and thereby the contents of this science. Gnothi
+seauton:
+
+                                     Nosce te ipsum,
+    Tuque Deum, quantum licet, inque Deo omnia noscas.
+
+Know thyself: and so shalt thou know God, as far as is permitted to a
+creature, and in God all things.--Surely, there is a strange--nay,
+rather too natural--aversion to many to know themselves.
+
+
+
+
+
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+Project Gutenberg's Biographia Literaria, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Biographia Literaria
+
+Author: Samuel Taylor Coleridge
+
+Release Date: July, 2004 [EBook #6081]
+Last Updated: August 10, 2012
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Tapio Riikonen
+
+
+
+
+
+
+BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA
+
+By Samuel Taylor Coleridge
+
+
+
+LIST OF CONTENTS
+
+  CHAP.
+
+      I  Motives to the present work--Reception of the Author's first
+           publication--Discipline of his taste at school--Effect of
+           contemporary writers on youthful minds--Bowles's Sonnets--
+           Comparison between the poets before and since Pope
+
+     II   Supposed irritability of genius brought to the test of
+            facts--Causes and occasions of the charge--Its injustice
+
+    III  The Author's obligations to Critics, and the probable
+           occasion--Principles of modern criticism--Mr. Southey's
+           works and character
+
+     IV  The Lyrical Ballads with the Preface--Mr. Wordsworth's
+           earlier poems--On Fancy and Imagination--The investigation
+           of the distinction important to the Fine Arts
+
+      V  On the law of Association--Its history traced from Aristotle
+           to Hartley
+
+     VI  That Hartley's system, as far as it differs from that of
+           Aristotle, is neither tenable in theory, nor founded
+           in facts
+
+    VII  Of the necessary consequences of the Hartleian Theory--Of
+           the original mistake or equivocation which procured its
+           admission--Memoria technica
+
+   VIII  The system of Dualism introduced by Des Cartes--Refined
+           first by Spinoza and afterwards by Leibnitz into the
+           doctrine of Harmonia praestabilita--Hylozoism--Materialism
+           --None of these systems, or any possible theory of
+           Association, supplies or supersedes a theory of
+           Perception, or explains the formation of the Associable
+
+     XI  Is Philosophy possible as a science, and what are its
+           conditions?--Giordano Bruno--Literary Aristocracy, or the
+           existence of a tacit compact among the learned as a
+           privileged order--The Author's obligations to the Mystics-
+           To Immanuel Kant--The difference between the letter and
+           The spirit of Kant's writings, and a vindication of
+           Prudence in the teaching of Philosophy--Fichte's attempt
+           to complete the Critical system-Its partial success and
+           ultimate failure--Obligations to Schelling; and among
+           English writers to Saumarez
+
+      X  A Chapter of digression and anecdotes, as an interlude
+          preceding that on the nature and genesis of the Imagination
+          or Plastic Power--On Pedantry and pedantic expressions--
+          Advice to young authors respecting publication--Various
+          anecdotes of the Author's literary life, and the progress
+          of his opinions in Religion and Politics
+
+     XI  An affectionate exhortation to those who in early life feel
+          themselves disposed to become authors
+
+    XII  A Chapter of requests and premonitions concerning the perusal
+          or omission of the chapter that follows
+
+   XIII  On the Imagination, or Esemplastic power
+
+    XIV  Occasion of the Lyrical Ballads, and the objects originally
+          proposed--Preface to the second edition--The ensuing
+          controversy, its causes and acrimony--Philosophic
+          definitions of a Poem and Poetry with scholia
+
+     XV  The specific symptoms of poetic power elucidated in a
+          Critical analysis of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, and
+          Rape of Lucrece
+
+    XVI  Striking points of difference between the Poets of the
+          present age and those of the fifteenth and sixteenth
+          centuries--Wish expressed for the union of the
+          characteristic merits of both
+
+   XVII  Examination of the tenets peculiar to Mr. Wordsworth--
+          Rustic life (above all, low and rustic life) especially
+          unfavourable to the formation of a human diction-The
+          best parts of language the product of philosophers, not of
+          clowns or shepherds--Poetry essentially ideal and generic--
+          The language of Milton as much the language of real life,
+          yea, incomparably more so than that of the cottager
+
+  XVIII  Language of metrical composition, why and wherein essentially
+          different from that of prose--Origin and elements of metre
+          --Its necessary consequences, and the conditions thereby
+          imposed on the metrical writer in the choice of his diction
+
+    XIX  Continuation--Concerning the real object, which, it is
+          probable, Mr. Wordsworth had before him in his critical
+          preface--Elucidation and application of this
+
+     XX  The former subject continued--The neutral style, or that
+         common to Prose and Poetry, exemplified by specimens from
+         Chaucer, Herbert, and others
+
+    XXI  Remarks on the present mode of conducting critical journals
+
+   XXII  The characteristic defects of Wordsworth's poetry, with the
+         principles from which the judgment, that they are defects,
+         is deduced--Their proportion to the beauties--For the
+         greatest part characteristic of his theory only
+
+         SATYRANE'S LETTERS
+
+  XXIII  Critique on Bertram
+
+   XXIV  Conclusion
+
+
+
+So wenig er auch bestimmt seyn mag, andere zu belehren, so wuenscht
+er doch sich denen mitzutheilen, die er sich gleichgesinnt weis, (oder
+hofft,) deren Anzahl aber in der Breite der Welt zerstreut ist; er
+wuenscht sein Verhaeltniss zu den aeltesten Freunden dadurch wieder
+anzuknuepfen, mit neuen es fortzusetzen, und in der letzten Generation
+sich wieder andere fur seine uebrige Lebenszeit zu gewinnen. Er wuenscht
+der Jugend die Umwege zu ersparen, auf denen er sich selbst verirrte.
+(Goethe. Einleitung in die Propylaeen.)
+
+TRANSLATION. Little call as he may have to instruct others, he wishes
+nevertheless to open out his heart to such as he either knows or hopes
+to be of like mind with himself, but who are widely scattered in the
+world: he wishes to knit anew his connections with his oldest friends,
+to continue those recently formed, and to win other friends among the
+rising generation for the remaining course of his life. He wishes to
+spare the young those circuitous paths, on which he himself had lost his
+way.
+
+
+
+
+
+BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+Motives to the present work--Reception of the Author's first
+publication--Discipline of his taste at school--Effect of contemporary
+writers on youthful minds--Bowles's Sonnets--Comparison between the
+poets before and since Pope.
+
+
+It has been my lot to have had my name introduced both in conversation,
+and in print, more frequently than I find it easy to explain, whether
+I consider the fewness, unimportance, and limited circulation of my
+writings, or the retirement and distance, in which I have lived, both
+from the literary and political world. Most often it has been connected
+with some charge which I could not acknowledge, or some principle which
+I had never entertained. Nevertheless, had I had no other motive
+or incitement, the reader would not have been troubled with this
+exculpation. What my additional purposes were, will be seen in the
+following pages. It will be found, that the least of what I have written
+concerns myself personally. I have used the narration chiefly for the
+purpose of giving a continuity to the work, in part for the sake of
+the miscellaneous reflections suggested to me by particular events, but
+still more as introductory to a statement of my principles in Politics,
+Religion, and Philosophy, and an application of the rules, deduced from
+philosophical principles, to poetry and criticism. But of the objects,
+which I proposed to myself, it was not the least important to effect,
+as far as possible, a settlement of the long continued controversy
+concerning the true nature of poetic diction; and at the same time to
+define with the utmost impartiality the real poetic character of the
+poet, by whose writings this controversy was first kindled, and has been
+since fuelled and fanned.
+
+In the spring of 1796, when I had but little passed the verge of
+manhood, I published a small volume of juvenile poems. They were
+received with a degree of favour, which, young as I was, I well know
+was bestowed on them not so much for any positive merit, as because they
+were considered buds of hope, and promises of better works to come. The
+critics of that day, the most flattering, equally with the severest,
+concurred in objecting to them obscurity, a general turgidness of
+diction, and a profusion of new coined double epithets [1]. The first
+is the fault which a writer is the least able to detect in his own
+compositions: and my mind was not then sufficiently disciplined to
+receive the authority of others, as a substitute for my own conviction.
+Satisfied that the thoughts, such as they were, could not have been
+expressed otherwise, or at least more perspicuously, I forgot to
+inquire, whether the thoughts themselves did not demand a degree of
+attention unsuitable to the nature and objects of poetry. This remark
+however applies chiefly, though not exclusively, to the Religious
+Musings. The remainder of the charge I admitted to its full extent,
+and not without sincere acknowledgments both to my private and public
+censors for their friendly admonitions. In the after editions, I pruned
+the double epithets with no sparing hand, and used my best efforts to
+tame the swell and glitter both of thought and diction; though in truth,
+these parasite plants of youthful poetry had insinuated themselves into
+my longer poems with such intricacy of union, that I was often obliged
+to omit disentangling the weed, from the fear of snapping the flower.
+From that period to the date of the present work I have published
+nothing, with my name, which could by any possibility have come before
+the board of anonymous criticism. Even the three or four poems, printed
+with the works of a friend [2], as far as they were censured at all,
+were charged with the same or similar defects, (though I am persuaded
+not with equal justice),--with an excess of ornament, in addition to
+strained and elaborate diction. I must be permitted to add, that,
+even at the early period of my juvenile poems, I saw and admitted the
+superiority of an austerer and more natural style, with an insight not
+less clear, than I at present possess. My judgment was stronger than
+were my powers of realizing its dictates; and the faults of my language,
+though indeed partly owing to a wrong choice of subjects, and the desire
+of giving a poetic colouring to abstract and metaphysical truths,
+in which a new world then seemed to open upon me, did yet, in part
+likewise, originate in unfeigned diffidence of my own comparative
+talent.--During several years of my youth and early manhood, I
+reverenced those who had re-introduced the manly simplicity of the
+Greek, and of our own elder poets, with such enthusiasm as made the hope
+seem presumptuous of writing successfully in the same style. Perhaps
+a similar process has happened to others; but my earliest poems were
+marked by an ease and simplicity, which I have studied, perhaps with
+inferior success, to impress on my later compositions.
+
+At school, (Christ's Hospital,) I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of
+a very sensible, though at the same time, a very severe master, the
+Reverend James Bowyer. He early moulded my taste to the preference of
+Demosthenes to Cicero, of Homer and Theocritus to Virgil, and again of
+Virgil to Ovid. He habituated me to compare Lucretius, (in such extracts
+as I then read,) Terence, and above all the chaster poems of Catullus,
+not only with the Roman poets of the, so called, silver and brazen ages;
+but with even those of the Augustan aera: and on grounds of plain sense
+and universal logic to see and assert the superiority of the former in
+the truth and nativeness both of their thoughts and diction. At the
+same time that we were studying the Greek tragic poets, he made us read
+Shakespeare and Milton as lessons: and they were the lessons too, which
+required most time and trouble to bring up, so as to escape his
+censure. I learned from him, that poetry, even that of the loftiest and,
+seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe
+as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more
+complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes. In the truly
+great poets, he would say, there is a reason assignable, not only for
+every word, but for the position of every word; and I well remember
+that, availing himself of the synonymes to the Homer of Didymus, he made
+us attempt to show, with regard to each, why it would not have answered
+the same purpose; and wherein consisted the peculiar fitness of the word
+in the original text.
+
+In our own English compositions, (at least for the last three years of
+our school education,) he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image,
+unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might have been
+conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words [3]. Lute,
+harp, and lyre, Muse, Muses, and inspirations, Pegasus, Parnassus, and
+Hippocrene were all an abomination to him. In fancy I can almost hear
+him now, exclaiming "Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse,
+boy, Muse? Your nurse's daughter, you mean! Pierian spring? Oh aye!
+the cloister-pump, I suppose!" Nay certain introductions, similes,
+and examples, were placed by name on a list of interdiction. Among the
+similes, there was, I remember, that of the manchineel fruit, as suiting
+equally well with too many subjects; in which however it yielded the
+palm at once to the example of Alexander and Clytus, which
+was equally good and apt, whatever might be the theme. Was
+it ambition? Alexander and Clytus!--Flattery? Alexander and
+Clytus!--anger--drunkenness--pride--friendship--ingratitude--late
+repentance? Still, still Alexander and Clytus! At length, the praises of
+agriculture having been exemplified in the sagacious observation that,
+had Alexander been holding the plough, he would not have run his friend
+Clytus through with a spear, this tried, and serviceable old friend
+was banished by public edict in saecula saeculorum. I have sometimes
+ventured to think, that a list of this kind, or an index expurgatorius
+of certain well-known and ever-returning phrases, both introductory,
+and transitional, including a large assortment of modest egoisms, and
+flattering illeisms, and the like, might be hung up in our Law-courts,
+and both Houses of Parliament, with great advantage to the public, as
+an important saving of national time, an incalculable relief to his
+Majesty's ministers, but above all, as insuring the thanks of country
+attornies, and their clients, who have private bills to carry through
+the House.
+
+Be this as it may, there was one custom of our master's, which I
+cannot pass over in silence, because I think it imitable and worthy of
+imitation. He would often permit our exercises, under some pretext of
+want of time, to accumulate, till each lad had four or five to be looked
+over. Then placing the whole number abreast on his desk, he would
+ask the writer, why this or that sentence might not have found
+as appropriate a place under this or that other thesis: and if no
+satisfying answer could be returned, and two faults of the same kind
+were found in one exercise, the irrevocable verdict followed, the
+exercise was torn up, and another on the same subject to be produced, in
+addition to the tasks of the day. The reader will, I trust, excuse this
+tribute of recollection to a man, whose severities, even now, not seldom
+furnish the dreams, by which the blind fancy would fain interpret to the
+mind the painful sensations of distempered sleep; but neither lessen nor
+dim the deep sense of my moral and intellectual obligations. He sent
+us to the University excellent Latin and Greek scholars, and tolerable
+Hebraists. Yet our classical knowledge was the least of the good gifts,
+which we derived from his zealous and conscientious tutorage. He is now
+gone to his final reward, full of years, and full of honours, even of
+those honours, which were dearest to his heart, as gratefully bestowed
+by that school, and still binding him to the interests of that school,
+in which he had been himself educated, and to which during his whole
+life he was a dedicated thing.
+
+From causes, which this is not the place to investigate, no models
+of past times, however perfect, can have the same vivid effect on
+the youthful mind, as the productions of contemporary genius. The
+discipline, my mind had undergone, Ne falleretur rotundo sono et versuum
+cursu, cincinnis, et floribus; sed ut inspiceret quidnam subesset, quae,
+sedes, quod firmamentum, quis fundus verbis; an figures essent mera
+ornatura et orationis fucus; vel sanguinis e materiae ipsius corde
+effluentis rubor quidam nativus et incalescentia genuina;--removed all
+obstacles to the appreciation of excellence in style without diminishing
+my delight. That I was thus prepared for the perusal of Mr. Bowles's
+sonnets and earlier poems, at once increased their influence, and my
+enthusiasm. The great works of past ages seem to a young man things of
+another race, in respect to which his faculties must remain passive
+and submiss, even as to the stars and mountains. But the writings of a
+contemporary, perhaps not many years older than himself, surrounded by
+the same circumstances, and disciplined by the same manners, possess a
+reality for him, and inspire an actual friendship as of a man for a man.
+His very admiration is the wind which fans and feeds his hope. The
+poems themselves assume the properties of flesh and blood. To recite, to
+extol, to contend for them is but the payment of a debt due to one, who
+exists to receive it.
+
+There are indeed modes of teaching which have produced, and are
+producing, youths of a very different stamp; modes of teaching, in
+comparison with which we have been called on to despise our great public
+schools, and universities,
+
+                     in whose halls are hung
+    Armoury of the invincible knights of old--
+
+modes, by which children are to be metamorphosed into prodigies. And
+prodigies with a vengeance have I known thus produced; prodigies of
+self-conceit, shallowness, arrogance, and infidelity! Instead of
+storing the memory, during the period when the memory is the predominant
+faculty, with facts for the after exercise of the judgment; and instead
+of awakening by the noblest models the fond and unmixed love and
+admiration, which is the natural and graceful temper of early youth;
+these nurslings of improved pedagogy are taught to dispute and decide;
+to suspect all but their own and their lecturer's wisdom; and to
+hold nothing sacred from their contempt, but their own contemptible
+arrogance; boy-graduates in all the technicals, and in all the dirty
+passions and impudence of anonymous criticism. To such dispositions
+alone can the admonition of Pliny be requisite, Neque enim debet
+operibus ejus obesse, quod vivit. An si inter eos, quos nunquam vidimus,
+floruisset, non solum libros ejus, verum etiam imagines conquireremus,
+ejusdem nunc honor prasentis, et gratia quasi satietate languescet?
+At hoc pravum, malignumque est, non admirari hominem admiratione
+dignissimum, quia videre, complecti, nec laudare tantum, verum etiam
+amare contingit.
+
+I had just entered on my seventeenth year, when the sonnets of Mr.
+Bowles, twenty in number, and just then published in a quarto pamphlet,
+were first made known and presented to me, by a schoolfellow who had
+quitted us for the University, and who, during the whole time that he
+was in our first form (or in our school language a Grecian,) had been my
+patron and protector. I refer to Dr. Middleton, the truly learned, and
+every way excellent Bishop of Calcutta:
+
+                            qui laudibus amplis
+    Ingenium celebrare meum, calamumque solebat,
+    Calcar agens animo validum. Non omnia terra
+    Obruta; vivit amor, vivit dolor; ora negatur
+    Dulcia conspicere; at fiere et meminisse relictum est.
+
+It was a double pleasure to me, and still remains a tender recollection,
+that I should have received from a friend so revered the first knowledge
+of a poet, by whose works, year after year, I was so enthusiastically
+delighted and inspired. My earliest acquaintances will not have
+forgotten the undisciplined eagerness and impetuous zeal, with which I
+laboured to make proselytes, not only of my companions, but of all with
+whom I conversed, of whatever rank, and in whatever place. As my school
+finances did not permit me to purchase copies, I made, within less than
+a year and a half, more than forty transcriptions, as the best presents
+I could offer to those, who had in any way won my regard. And with
+almost equal delight did I receive the three or four following
+publications of the same author.
+
+Though I have seen and known enough of mankind to be well aware, that
+I shall perhaps stand alone in my creed, and that it will be well, if
+I subject myself to no worse charge than that of singularity; I am not
+therefore deterred from avowing, that I regard, and ever have regarded
+the obligations of intellect among the most sacred of the claims of
+gratitude. A valuable thought, or a particular train of thoughts, gives
+me additional pleasure, when I can safely refer and attribute it to the
+conversation or correspondence of another. My obligations to Mr. Bowles
+were indeed important, and for radical good. At a very premature age,
+even before my fifteenth year, I had bewildered myself in metaphysics,
+and in theological controversy. Nothing else pleased me. History, and
+particular facts, lost all interest in my mind. Poetry--(though for a
+school-boy of that age, I was above par in English versification, and
+had already produced two or three compositions which, I may venture to
+say, without reference to my age, were somewhat above mediocrity, and
+which had gained me more credit than the sound, good sense of my old
+master was at all pleased with,)--poetry itself, yea, novels and
+romances, became insipid to me. In my friendless wanderings on our
+leave-days [4], (for I was an orphan, and had scarcely any connections
+in London,) highly was I delighted, if any passenger, especially if he
+were dressed in black, would enter into conversation with me. For I soon
+found the means of directing it to my favourite subjects
+
+    Of providence, fore-knowledge, will, and fate,
+    Fixed fate, free will, fore-knowledge absolute,
+    And found no end in wandering mazes lost.
+
+This preposterous pursuit was, beyond doubt, injurious both to my
+natural powers, and to the progress of my education. It would perhaps
+have been destructive, had it been continued; but from this I was
+auspiciously withdrawn, partly indeed by an accidental introduction to
+an amiable family, chiefly however, by the genial influence of a style
+of poetry, so tender and yet so manly, so natural and real, and yet so
+dignified and harmonious, as the sonnets and other early poems of Mr.
+Bowles. Well would it have been for me, perhaps, had I never relapsed
+into the same mental disease; if I had continued to pluck the flower and
+reap the harvest from the cultivated surface, instead of delving in the
+unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic lore. And if in after time
+I have sought a refuge from bodily pain and mismanaged sensibility in
+abstruse researches, which exercised the strength and subtilty of the
+understanding without awakening the feelings of the heart; still there
+was a long and blessed interval, during which my natural faculties were
+allowed to expand, and my original tendencies to develop themselves;--my
+fancy, and the love of nature, and the sense of beauty in forms and
+sounds.
+
+The second advantage, which I owe to my early perusal, and admiration
+of these poems, (to which let me add,) though known to me at a somewhat
+later period, the Lewesdon Hill of Mr. Crowe bears more immediately on
+my present subject. Among those with whom I conversed, there were,
+of course, very many who had formed their taste, and their notions of
+poetry, from the writings of Pope and his followers; or to speak more
+generally, in that school of French poetry, condensed and invigorated by
+English understanding, which had predominated from the last century. I
+was not blind to the merits of this school, yet, as from inexperience of
+the world, and consequent want of sympathy with the general subjects of
+these poems, they gave me little pleasure, I doubtless undervalued the
+kind, and with the presumption of youth withheld from its masters
+the legitimate name of poets. I saw that the excellence of this kind
+consisted in just and acute observations on men and manners in an
+artificial state of society, as its matter and substance; and in the
+logic of wit, conveyed in smooth and strong epigrammatic couplets, as
+its form: that even when the subject was addressed to the fancy, or the
+intellect, as in the Rape of the Lock, or the Essay on Man; nay, when it
+was a consecutive narration, as in that astonishing product of matchless
+talent and ingenuity Pope's Translation of the Iliad; still a point
+was looked for at the end of each second line, and the whole was, as
+it were, a sorites, or, if I may exchange a logical for a grammatical
+metaphor, a conjunction disjunctive, of epigrams. Meantime the matter
+and diction seemed to me characterized not so much by poetic thoughts,
+as by thoughts translated into the language of poetry. On this last
+point, I had occasion to render my own thoughts gradually more and
+more plain to myself, by frequent amicable disputes concerning Darwin's
+Botanic Garden, which, for some years, was greatly extolled, not only
+by the reading public in general, but even by those, whose genius and
+natural robustness of understanding enabled them afterwards to act
+foremost in dissipating these "painted mists" that occasionally rise
+from the marshes at the foot of Parnassus. During my first Cambridge
+vacation, I assisted a friend in a contribution for a literary society
+in Devonshire: and in this I remember to have compared Darwin's work to
+the Russian palace of ice, glittering, cold and transitory. In the same
+essay too, I assigned sundry reasons, chiefly drawn from a comparison
+of passages in the Latin poets with the original Greek, from which they
+were borrowed, for the preference of Collins's odes to those of Gray;
+and of the simile in Shakespeare
+
+    How like a younker or a prodigal
+    The scarfed bark puts from her native bay,
+    Hugg'd and embraced by the strumpet wind!
+    How like the prodigal doth she return,
+    With over-weather'd ribs and ragged sails,
+    Lean, rent, and beggar'd by the strumpet wind!
+                             (Merch. of Ven. Act II. sc. 6.)
+
+to the imitation in the Bard;
+
+    Fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyr blows
+    While proudly riding o'er the azure realm
+    In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes,
+    Youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm;
+    Regardless of the sweeping whirlwind's sway,
+    That hush'd in grim repose, expects it's evening prey.
+
+(in which, by the bye, the words "realm" and "sway" are rhymes dearly
+purchased)--I preferred the original on the ground, that in the
+imitation it depended wholly on the compositor's putting, or not
+putting, a small capital, both in this, and in many other passages of
+the same poet, whether the words should be personifications, or mere
+abstractions. I mention this, because, in referring various lines in
+Gray to their original in Shakespeare and Milton, and in the clear
+perception how completely all the propriety was lost in the transfer,
+I was, at that early period, led to a conjecture, which, many years
+afterwards was recalled to me from the same thought having been started
+in conversation, but far more ably, and developed more fully, by
+Mr. Wordsworth;--namely, that this style of poetry, which I have
+characterized above, as translations of prose thoughts into poetic
+language, had been kept up by, if it did not wholly arise from, the
+custom of writing Latin verses, and the great importance attached to
+these exercises, in our public schools. Whatever might have been the
+case in the fifteenth century, when the use of the Latin tongue was so
+general among learned men, that Erasmus is said to have forgotten his
+native language; yet in the present day it is not to be supposed, that a
+youth can think in Latin, or that he can have any other reliance on the
+force or fitness of his phrases, but the authority of the writer
+from whom he has adopted them. Consequently he must first prepare his
+thoughts, and then pick out, from Virgil, Horace, Ovid, or perhaps more
+compendiously from his Gradus, halves and quarters of lines, in which to
+embody them.
+
+I never object to a certain degree of disputatiousness in a young man
+from the age of seventeen to that of four or five and twenty, provided I
+find him always arguing on one side of the question. The controversies,
+occasioned by my unfeigned zeal for the honour of a favourite
+contemporary, then known to me only by his works, were of great
+advantage in the formation and establishment of my taste and critical
+opinions. In my defence of the lines running into each other, instead of
+closing at each couplet; and of natural language, neither bookish, nor
+vulgar, neither redolent of the lamp, nor of the kennel, such as I will
+remember thee; instead of the same thought tricked up in the rag-fair
+finery of,
+
+    ------thy image on her wing
+    Before my fancy's eye shall memory bring,--
+
+I had continually to adduce the metre and diction of the Greek poets,
+from Homer to Theocritus inclusively; and still more of our elder
+English poets, from Chaucer to Milton. Nor was this all. But as it was
+my constant reply to authorities brought against me from later poets
+of great name, that no authority could avail in opposition to Truth,
+Nature, Logic, and the Laws of Universal Grammar; actuated too by my
+former passion for metaphysical investigations; I laboured at a solid
+foundation, on which permanently to ground my opinions, in the component
+faculties of the human mind itself, and their comparative dignity and
+importance. According to the faculty or source, from which the pleasure
+given by any poem or passage was derived, I estimated the merit of
+such poem or passage. As the result of all my reading and meditation,
+I abstracted two critical aphorisms, deeming them to comprise the
+conditions and criteria of poetic style;--first, that not the poem which
+we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure,
+possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential
+poetry;--secondly, that whatever lines can be translated into other
+words of the same language, without diminution of their significance,
+either in sense or association, or in any worthy feeling, are so far
+vicious in their diction. Be it however observed, that I excluded from
+the list of worthy feelings, the pleasure derived from mere novelty in
+the reader, and the desire of exciting wonderment at his powers in the
+author. Oftentimes since then, in pursuing French tragedies, I
+have fancied two marks of admiration at the end of each line, as
+hieroglyphics of the author's own admiration at his own cleverness.
+Our genuine admiration of a great poet is a continuous undercurrent of
+feeling! it is everywhere present, but seldom anywhere as a separate
+excitement. I was wont boldly to affirm, that it would be scarcely more
+difficult to push a stone out from the Pyramids with the bare hand, than
+to alter a word, or the position of a word, in Milton or Shakespeare,
+(in their most important works at least,) without making the poet
+say something else, or something worse, than he does say. One great
+distinction, I appeared to myself to see plainly between even the
+characteristic faults of our elder poets, and the false beauty of the
+moderns. In the former, from Donne to Cowley, we find the most fantastic
+out-of-the-way thoughts, but in the most pure and genuine mother
+English, in the latter the most obvious thoughts, in language the most
+fantastic and arbitrary. Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion
+and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the
+stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet
+broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something,
+made up, half of image, and half of abstract [5] meaning. The one
+sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point
+and drapery.
+
+The reader must make himself acquainted with the general style of
+composition that was at that time deemed poetry, in order to understand
+and account for the effect produced on me by the Sonnets, the Monody
+at Matlock, and the Hope, of Mr. Bowles; for it is peculiar to original
+genius to become less and less striking, in proportion to its success
+in improving the taste and judgment of its contemporaries. The poems of
+West, indeed, had the merit of chaste and manly diction; but they were
+cold, and, if I may so express it, only dead-coloured; while in the
+best of Warton's there is a stiffness, which too often gives them the
+appearance of imitations from the Greek. Whatever relation, therefore,
+of cause or impulse Percy's collection of Ballads may bear to the most
+popular poems of the present day; yet in a more sustained and elevated
+style, of the then living poets, Cowper and Bowles [6] were, to the best
+of my knowledge, the first who combined natural thoughts with natural
+diction; the first who reconciled the heart with the head.
+
+It is true, as I have before mentioned, that from diffidence in my own
+powers, I for a short time adopted a laborious and florid diction, which
+I myself deemed, if not absolutely vicious, yet of very inferior worth.
+Gradually, however, my practice conformed to my better judgment; and the
+compositions of my twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth years--(for example,
+the shorter blank verse poems, the lines, which now form the middle and
+conclusion of the poem entitled the Destiny of Nations, and the tragedy
+of Remorse)--are not more below my present ideal in respect of the
+general tissue of the style than those of the latest date. Their faults
+were at least a remnant of the former leaven, and among the many who
+have done me the honour of putting my poems in the same class with those
+of my betters, the one or two, who have pretended to bring examples of
+affected simplicity from my volume, have been able to adduce but
+one instance, and that out of a copy of verses half ludicrous, half
+splenetic, which I intended, and had myself characterized, as sermoni
+propiora.
+
+Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an
+excess, which will itself need reforming. The reader will excuse me for
+noticing, that I myself was the first to expose risu honesto the three
+sins of poetry, one or the other of which is the most likely to beset a
+young writer. So long ago as the publication of the second number of the
+Monthly Magazine, under the name of Nehemiah Higginbottom, I contributed
+three sonnets, the first of which had for its object to excite a
+good-natured laugh at the spirit of doleful egotism, and at the
+recurrence of favourite phrases, with the double defect of being at
+once trite and licentious;--the second was on low creeping language and
+thoughts, under the pretence of simplicity; the third, the phrases of
+which were borrowed entirely from my own poems, on the indiscriminate
+use of elaborate and swelling language and imagery. The reader will find
+them in the note [7] below, and will I trust regard them as reprinted
+for biographical purposes alone, and not for their poetic merits. So
+general at that time, and so decided was the opinion concerning the
+characteristic vices of my style, that a celebrated physician (now,
+alas! no more) speaking of me in other respects with his usual kindness,
+to a gentleman, who was about to meet me at a dinner party, could not
+however resist giving him a hint not to mention 'The house that Jack
+built' in my presence, for "that I was as sore as a boil about that
+sonnet;" he not knowing that I was myself the author of it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+Supposed irritability of men of genius brought to the test of
+facts--Causes and occasions of the charge--Its injustice.
+
+
+I have often thought, that it would be neither uninstructive nor
+unamusing to analyze, and bring forward into distinct consciousness,
+that complex feeling, with which readers in general take part against
+the author, in favour of the critic; and the readiness with which they
+apply to all poets the old sarcasm of Horace upon the scribblers of his
+time
+
+    ------genus irritabile vatum.
+
+A debility and dimness of the imaginative power, and a consequent
+necessity of reliance on the immediate impressions of the senses, do, we
+know well, render the mind liable to superstition and fanaticism. Having
+a deficient portion of internal and proper warmth, minds of this class
+seek in the crowd circum fana for a warmth in common, which they do not
+possess singly. Cold and phlegmatic in their own nature, like damp
+hay, they heat and inflame by co-acervation; or like bees they become
+restless and irritable through the increased temperature of collected
+multitudes. Hence the German word for fanaticism, (such at least was
+its original import,) is derived from the swarming of bees, namely,
+schwaermen, schwaermerey. The passion being in an inverse proportion to
+the insight,--that the more vivid, as this the less distinct--anger is
+the inevitable consequence. The absense of all foundation within their
+own minds for that, which they yet believe both true and indispensable
+to their safety and happiness, cannot but produce an uneasy state of
+feeling, an involuntary sense of fear from which nature has no means
+of rescuing herself but by anger. Experience informs us that the first
+defence of weak minds is to recriminate.
+
+    There's no philosopher but sees,
+    That rage and fear are one disease;
+    Tho' that may burn, and this may freeze,
+    They're both alike the ague.
+
+But where the ideas are vivid, and there exists an endless power of
+combining and modifying them, the feelings and affections blend more
+easily and intimately with these ideal creations than with the objects
+of the senses; the mind is affected by thoughts, rather than by things;
+and only then feels the requisite interest even for the most important
+events and accidents, when by means of meditation they have passed into
+thoughts. The sanity of the mind is between superstition with fanaticism
+on the one hand, and enthusiasm with indifference and a diseased
+slowness to action on the other. For the conceptions of the mind may be
+so vivid and adequate, as to preclude that impulse to the realizing of
+them, which is strongest and most restless in those, who possess more
+than mere talent, (or the faculty of appropriating and applying the
+knowledge of others,)--yet still want something of the creative and
+self-sufficing power of absolute genius. For this reason therefore,
+they are men of commanding genius. While the former rest content between
+thought and reality, as it were in an intermundium of which their
+own living spirit supplies the substance, and their imagination the
+ever-varying form; the latter must impress their preconceptions on the
+world without, in order to present them back to their own view with the
+satisfying degree of clearness, distinctness, and individuality. These
+in tranquil times are formed to exhibit a perfect poem in palace, or
+temple, or landscape-garden; or a tale of romance in canals that join
+sea with sea, or in walls of rock, which, shouldering back the billows,
+imitate the power, and supply the benevolence of nature to sheltered
+navies; or in aqueducts that, arching the wide vale from mountain to
+mountain, give a Palmyra to the desert. But alas! in times of tumult
+they are the men destined to come forth as the shaping spirit of ruin,
+to destroy the wisdom of ages in order to substitute the fancies of a
+day, and to change kings and kingdoms, as the wind shifts and shapes the
+clouds [8]. The records of biography seem to confirm this theory. The
+men of the greatest genius, as far as we can judge from their own works
+or from the accounts of their contemporaries, appear to have been of
+calm and tranquil temper in all that related to themselves. In the
+inward assurance of permanent fame, they seem to have been either
+indifferent or resigned with regard to immediate reputation. Through all
+the works of Chaucer there reigns a cheerfulness, a manly hilarity which
+makes it almost impossible to doubt a correspondent habit of feeling in
+the author himself. Shakespeare's evenness and sweetness of temper were
+almost proverbial in his own age. That this did not arise from ignorance
+of his own comparative greatness, we have abundant proof in his Sonnets,
+which could scarcely have been known to Pope [9], when he asserted, that
+our great bard--
+
+    ------grew immortal in his own despite.
+                                   (Epist. to Augustus.)
+
+Speaking of one whom he had celebrated, and contrasting the duration of
+his works with that of his personal existence, Shakespeare adds:
+
+    Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
+    Tho' I once gone to all the world must die;
+    The earth can yield me but a common grave,
+    When you entombed in men's eyes shall lie.
+    Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
+    Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read;
+    And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,
+    When all the breathers of this world are dead:
+    You still shall live, such virtue hath my pen,
+    Where breath most breathes, e'en in the mouth of men.
+                                             SONNET LXXXI.
+
+I have taken the first that occurred; but Shakespeare's readiness to
+praise his rivals, ore pleno, and the confidence of his own equality
+with those whom he deemed most worthy of his praise, are alike
+manifested in another Sonnet.
+
+    Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,
+    Bound for the praise of all-too-precious you,
+    That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse,
+    Making their tomb, the womb wherein they grew?
+    Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write
+    Above a mortal pitch that struck me dead?
+    No, neither he, nor his compeers by night
+    Giving him aid, my verse astonished.
+    He, nor that affable familiar ghost,
+    Which nightly gulls him with intelligence,
+    As victors of my silence cannot boast;
+    I was not sick of any fear from thence!
+    But when your countenance fill'd up his line,
+    Then lack'd I matter, that enfeebled mine.
+                                          S. LXXXVI.
+
+In Spenser, indeed, we trace a mind constitutionally tender, delicate,
+and, in comparison with his three great compeers, I had almost said,
+effeminate; and this additionally saddened by the unjust persecution of
+Burleigh, and the severe calamities, which overwhelmed his latter days.
+These causes have diffused over all his compositions "a melancholy
+grace," and have drawn forth occasional strains, the more pathetic
+from their gentleness. But no where do we find the least trace of
+irritability, and still less of quarrelsome or affected contempt of his
+censurers.
+
+The same calmness, and even greater self-possession, may be affirmed
+of Milton, as far as his poems, and poetic character are concerned.
+He reserved his anger for the enemies of religion, freedom, and his
+country. My mind is not capable of forming a more august conception,
+than arises from the contemplation of this great man in his latter
+days;--poor, sick, old, blind, slandered, persecuted,--
+
+    Darkness before, and danger's voice behind,--
+
+in an age in which he was as little understood by the party, for whom,
+as by that against whom, he had contended; and among men before whom he
+strode so far as to dwarf himself by the distance; yet still listening
+to the music of his own thoughts, or if additionally cheered,
+yet cheered only by the prophetic faith of two or three solitary
+individuals, he did nevertheless
+
+                                  ------argue not
+    Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot
+    Of heart or hope; but still bore up and steer'd
+    Right onward.
+
+From others only do we derive our knowledge that Milton, in his latter
+day, had his scorners and detractors; and even in his day of youth and
+hope, that he had enemies would have been unknown to us, had they not
+been likewise the enemies of his country.
+
+I am well aware, that in advanced stages of literature, when there exist
+many and excellent models, a high degree of talent, combined with taste
+and judgment, and employed in works of imagination, will acquire for
+a man the name of a great genius; though even that analogon of genius,
+which, in certain states of society, may even render his writings more
+popular than the absolute reality could have done, would be sought
+for in vain in the mind and temper of the author himself. Yet even in
+instances of this kind, a close examination will often detect, that the
+irritability, which has been attributed to the author's genius as its
+cause, did really originate in an ill conformation of body, obtuse pain,
+or constitutional defect of pleasurable sensation. What is charged to
+the author, belongs to the man, who would probably have been still more
+impatient, but for the humanizing influences of the very pursuit, which
+yet bears the blame of his irritability.
+
+How then are we to explain the easy credence generally given to this
+charge, if the charge itself be not, as I have endeavoured to show,
+supported by experience? This seems to me of no very difficult solution.
+In whatever country literature is widely diffused, there will be many
+who mistake an intense desire to possess the reputation of poetic
+genius, for the actual powers, and original tendencies which constitute
+it. But men, whose dearest wishes are fixed on objects wholly out of
+their own power, become in all cases more or less impatient and prone to
+anger. Besides, though it may be paradoxical to assert, that a man can
+know one thing and believe the opposite, yet assuredly a vain person may
+have so habitually indulged the wish, and persevered in the attempt, to
+appear what he is not, as to become himself one of his own proselytes.
+Still, as this counterfeit and artificial persuasion must differ, even
+in the person's own feelings, from a real sense of inward power, what
+can be more natural, than that this difference should betray itself
+in suspicious and jealous irritability? Even as the flowery sod, which
+covers a hollow, may be often detected by its shaking and trembling.
+
+But, alas! the multitude of books and the general diffusion of
+literature, have produced other and more lamentable effects in the world
+of letters, and such as are abundant to explain, though by no means to
+justify, the contempt with which the best grounded complaints of injured
+genius are rejected as frivolous, or entertained as matter of merriment.
+In the days of Chaucer and Gower, our language might (with due allowance
+for the imperfections of a simile) be compared to a wilderness of vocal
+reeds, from which the favourites only of Pan or Apollo could construct
+even the rude syrinx; and from this the constructors alone could elicit
+strains of music. But now, partly by the labours of successive
+poets, and in part by the more artificial state of society and social
+intercourse, language, mechanized as it were into a barrel-organ,
+supplies at once both instrument and tune. Thus even the deaf may play,
+so as to delight the many. Sometimes (for it is with similes, as it
+is with jests at a wine table, one is sure to suggest another) I have
+attempted to illustrate the present state of our language, in its
+relation to literature, by a press-room of larger and smaller stereotype
+pieces, which, in the present Anglo-Gallican fashion of unconnected,
+epigrammatic periods, it requires but an ordinary portion of ingenuity
+to vary indefinitely, and yet still produce something, which, if not
+sense, will be so like it as to do as well. Perhaps better: for it
+spares the reader the trouble of thinking; prevents vacancy, while
+it indulges indolence; and secures the memory from all danger of an
+intellectual plethora. Hence of all trades, literature at present
+demands the least talent or information; and, of all modes of
+literature, the manufacturing of poems. The difference indeed between
+these and the works of genius is not less than between an egg and an
+egg-shell; yet at a distance they both look alike.
+
+Now it is no less remarkable than true, with how little examination
+works of polite literature are commonly perused, not only by the mass of
+readers, but by men of first rate ability, till some accident or chance
+[10] discussion have roused their attention, and put them on their
+guard. And hence individuals below mediocrity not less in natural power
+than in acquired knowledge; nay, bunglers who have failed in the lowest
+mechanic crafts, and whose presumption is in due proportion to their
+want of sense and sensibility; men, who being first scribblers
+from idleness and ignorance, next become libellers from envy and
+malevolence,--have been able to drive a successful trade in the
+employment of the booksellers, nay, have raised themselves into
+temporary name and reputation with the public at large, by that most
+powerful of all adulation, the appeal to the bad and malignant passions
+of mankind [11]. But as it is the nature of scorn, envy, and all
+malignant propensities to require a quick change of objects, such
+writers are sure, sooner or later, to awake from their dream of vanity
+to disappointment and neglect with embittered and envenomed feelings.
+Even during their short-lived success, sensible in spite of themselves
+on what a shifting foundation it rests, they resent the mere refusal
+of praise as a robbery, and at the justest censures kindle at once into
+violent and undisciplined abuse; till the acute disease changing into
+chronical, the more deadly as the less violent, they become the fit
+instruments of literary detraction and moral slander. They are then no
+longer to be questioned without exposing the complainant to ridicule,
+because, forsooth, they are anonymous critics, and authorized, in Andrew
+Marvell's phrase, as "synodical individuals" to speak of themselves
+plurali majestatico! As if literature formed a caste, like that of
+the Paras in Hindostan, who, however maltreated, must not dare to deem
+themselves wronged! As if that, which in all other cases adds a deeper
+dye to slander, the circumstance of its being anonymous, here acted
+only to make the slanderer inviolable! [12] Thus, in part, from the
+accidental tempers of individuals--(men of undoubted talent, but not
+men of genius)--tempers rendered yet more irritable by their desire to
+appear men of genius; but still more effectively by the excesses of the
+mere counterfeits both of talent and genius; the number too being so
+incomparably greater of those who are thought to be, than of those
+who really are men of genius; and in part from the natural, but not
+therefore the less partial and unjust distinction, made by the public
+itself between literary and all other property; I believe the prejudice
+to have arisen, which considers an unusual irascibility concerning the
+reception of its products as characteristic of genius.
+
+It might correct the moral feelings of a numerous class of readers, to
+suppose a Review set on foot, the object of which should be to criticise
+all the chief works presented to the public by our ribbon-weavers,
+calico-printers, cabinet-makers, and china-manufacturers; which should
+be conducted in the same spirit, and take the same freedom with personal
+character, as our literary journals. They would scarcely, I think,
+deny their belief, not only that the genus irritabile would be found
+to include many other species besides that of bards; but that the
+irritability of trade would soon reduce the resentments of poets into
+mere shadow-fights in the comparison. Or is wealth the only rational
+object of human interest? Or even if this were admitted, has the poet
+no property in his works? Or is it a rare, or culpable case, that he
+who serves at the altar of the Muses, should be compelled to derive
+his maintenance from the altar, when too he has perhaps deliberately
+abandoned the fairest prospects of rank and opulence in order to
+devote himself, an entire and undistracted man, to the instruction or
+refinement of his fellow-citizens? Or, should we pass by all higher
+objects and motives, all disinterested benevolence, and even that
+ambition of lasting praise which is at once the crutch and ornament,
+which at once supports and betrays, the infirmity of human virtue,--is
+the character and property of the man, who labours for our intellectual
+pleasures, less entitled to a share of our fellow feeling, than that of
+the wine-merchant or milliner? Sensibility indeed, both quick and deep,
+is not only a characteristic feature, but may be deemed a component
+part, of genius. But it is not less an essential mark of true genius,
+that its sensibility is excited by any other cause more powerfully than
+by its own personal interests; for this plain reason, that the man of
+genius lives most in the ideal world, in which the present is still
+constituted by the future or the past; and because his feelings have
+been habitually associated with thoughts and images, to the number,
+clearness, and vivacity of which the sensation of self is always in an
+inverse proportion. And yet, should he perchance have occasion to repel
+some false charge, or to rectify some erroneous censure, nothing is more
+common than for the many to mistake the general liveliness of his manner
+and language, whatever is the subject, for the effects of peculiar
+irritation from its accidental relation to himself. [13]
+
+For myself, if from my own feelings, or from the less suspicious test
+of the observations of others, I had been made aware of any literary
+testiness or jealousy; I trust, that I should have been, however,
+neither silly nor arrogant enough to have burthened the imperfection on
+genius. But an experience--(and I should not need documents in abundance
+to prove my words, if I added)--a tried experience of twenty years, has
+taught me, that the original sin of my character consists in a careless
+indifference to public opinion, and to the attacks of those who
+influence it; that praise and admiration have become yearly less and
+less desirable, except as marks of sympathy; nay that it is difficult
+and distressing to me to think with any interest even about the sale
+and profit of my works, important as, in my present circumstances, such
+considerations must needs be. Yet it never occurred to me to believe or
+fancy, that the quantum of intellectual power bestowed on me by nature
+or education was in any way connected with this habit of my feelings;
+or that it needed any other parents or fosterers than constitutional
+indolence, aggravated into languor by ill-health; the accumulating
+embarrassments of procrastination; the mental cowardice, which is the
+inseparable companion of procrastination, and which makes us anxious to
+think and converse on any thing rather than on what concerns ourselves;
+in fine, all those close vexations, whether chargeable on my faults
+or my fortunes, which leave me but little grief to spare for evils
+comparatively distant and alien.
+
+Indignation at literary wrongs I leave to men born under happier stars.
+I cannot afford it. But so far from condemning those who can, I deem
+it a writer's duty, and think it creditable to his heart, to feel and
+express a resentment proportioned to the grossness of the provocation,
+and the importance of the object. There is no profession on earth, which
+requires an attention so early, so long, or so unintermitting as that of
+poetry; and indeed as that of literary composition in general, if it be
+such as at all satisfies the demands both of taste and of sound logic.
+How difficult and delicate a task even the mere mechanism of verse is,
+may be conjectured from the failure of those, who have attempted poetry
+late in life. Where then a man has, from his earliest youth, devoted
+his whole being to an object, which by the admission of all civilized
+nations in all ages is honourable as a pursuit, and glorious as an
+attainment; what of all that relates to himself and his family, if only
+we except his moral character, can have fairer claims to his protection,
+or more authorize acts of self-defence, than the elaborate products of
+his intellect and intellectual industry? Prudence itself would command
+us to show, even if defect or diversion of natural sensibility had
+prevented us from feeling, a due interest and qualified anxiety for the
+offspring and representatives of our nobler being. I know it, alas! by
+woful experience. I have laid too many eggs in the hot sands of this
+wilderness, the world, with ostrich carelessness and ostrich oblivion.
+The greater part indeed have been trod under foot, and are forgotten;
+but yet no small number have crept forth into life, some to furnish
+feathers for the caps of others, and still more to plume the shafts in
+the quivers of my enemies, of them that unprovoked have lain in wait
+against my soul.
+
+    Sic vos, non vobis, mellificatis, apes!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+The Author's obligations to critics, and the probable
+occasion--Principles of modern criticism--Mr. Southey's works and
+character.
+
+
+To anonymous critics in reviews, magazines, and news-journals of various
+name and rank, and to satirists with or without a name in verse or
+prose, or in verse-text aided by prose-comment, I do seriously believe
+and profess, that I owe full two-thirds of whatever reputation and
+publicity I happen to possess. For when the name of an individual has
+occurred so frequently, in so many works, for so great a length of time,
+the readers of these works--(which with a shelf or two of beauties,
+elegant Extracts and Anas, form nine-tenths of the reading of the
+reading Public [14])--cannot but be familiar with the name, without
+distinctly remembering whether it was introduced for eulogy or for
+censure. And this becomes the more likely, if (as I believe) the
+habit of perusing periodical works may be properly added to Averroes'
+catalogue of Anti-Mnemonics, or weakeners of the memory [15]. But where
+this has not been the case, yet the reader will be apt to suspect that
+there must be something more than usually strong and extensive in
+a reputation, that could either require or stand so merciless
+and long-continued a cannonading. Without any feeling of anger
+therefore--(for which indeed, on my own account, I have no pretext)--I
+may yet be allowed to express some degree of surprise, that, after
+having run the critical gauntlet for a certain class of faults which
+I had, nothing having come before the judgment-seat in the interim, I
+should, year after year, quarter after quarter, month after month--(not
+to mention sundry petty periodicals of still quicker revolution,
+"or weekly or diurnal")--have been, for at least seventeen years
+consecutively, dragged forth by them into the foremost ranks of the
+proscribed, and forced to abide the brunt of abuse, for faults directly
+opposite, and which I certainly had not. How shall I explain this?
+
+Whatever may have been the case with others, I certainly cannot
+attribute this persecution to personal dislike, or to envy, or to
+feelings of vindictive animosity. Not to the former, for with the
+exception of a very few who are my intimate friends, and were so before
+they were known as authors, I have had little other acquaintance
+with literary characters, than what may be implied in an accidental
+introduction, or casual meeting in a mixed company. And as far as words
+and looks can be trusted, I must believe that, even in these instances,
+I had excited no unfriendly disposition. Neither by letter, nor in
+conversation, have I ever had dispute or controversy beyond the common
+social interchange of opinions. Nay, where I had reason to suppose my
+convictions fundamentally different, it has been my habit, and I may
+add, the impulse of my nature, to assign the grounds of my belief,
+rather than the belief itself; and not to express dissent, till I could
+establish some points of complete sympathy, some grounds common to both
+sides, from which to commence its explanation.
+
+Still less can I place these attacks to the charge of envy. The few
+pages which I have published, are of too distant a date, and the extent
+of their sale a proof too conclusive against their having been popular
+at any time, to render probable, I had almost said possible, the
+excitement of envy on their account; and the man who should envy me on
+any other, verily he must be envy-mad!
+
+Lastly, with as little semblance of reason, could I suspect any
+animosity towards me from vindictive feelings as the cause. I have
+before said, that my acquaintance with literary men has been limited and
+distant; and that I have had neither dispute nor controversy. From my
+first entrance into life, I have, with few and short intervals, lived
+either abroad or in retirement. My different essays on subjects of
+national interest, published at different times, first in the Morning
+Post and then in the Courier, with my courses of Lectures on the
+principles of criticism as applied to Shakespeare and Milton, constitute
+my whole publicity; the only occasions on which I could offend any
+member of the republic of letters. With one solitary exception in
+which my words were first misstated and then wantonly applied to an
+individual, I could never learn that I had excited the displeasure of
+any among my literary contemporaries. Having announced my intention to
+give a course of Lectures on the characteristic merits and defects of
+English poetry in its different aeras; first, from Chaucer to Milton;
+second, from Dryden inclusively to Thomson; and third, from Cowper to
+the present day; I changed my plan, and confined my disquisition to the
+former two periods, that I might furnish no possible pretext for the
+unthinking to misconstrue, or the malignant to misapply my words, and
+having stamped their own meaning on them, to pass them as current coin
+in the marts of garrulity or detraction.
+
+Praises of the unworthy are felt by ardent minds as robberies of the
+deserving; and it is too true, and too frequent, that Bacon, Harrington,
+Machiavel, and Spinoza, are not read, because Hume, Condillac, and
+Voltaire are. But in promiscuous company no prudent man will oppugn
+the merits of a contemporary in his own supposed department; contenting
+himself with praising in his turn those whom he deems excellent. If
+I should ever deem it my duty at all to oppose the pretensions of
+individuals, I would oppose them in books which could be weighed and
+answered, in which I could evolve the whole of my reasons and feelings,
+with their requisite limits and modifications; not in irrecoverable
+conversation, where however strong the reasons might be, the feelings
+that prompted them would assuredly be attributed by some one or other
+to envy and discontent. Besides I well know, and, I trust, have acted on
+that knowledge, that it must be the ignorant and injudicious who extol
+the unworthy; and the eulogies of critics without taste or judgment are
+the natural reward of authors without feeling or genius. Sint unicuique
+sua praemia.
+
+How then, dismissing, as I do, these three causes, am I to account for
+attacks, the long continuance and inveteracy of which it would require
+all three to explain? The solution seems to be this,--I was in habits of
+intimacy with Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Southey! This, however, transfers,
+rather than removes the difficulty. Be it, that, by an unconscionable
+extension of the old adage, noscitur a socio, my literary friends are
+never under the water-fall of criticism, but I must be wet through with
+the spray; yet how came the torrent to descend upon them?
+
+First then, with regard to Mr. Southey. I well remember the general
+reception of his earlier publications; namely, the poems published with
+Mr. Lovell under the names of Moschus and Bion; the two volumes of poems
+under his own name, and the Joan of Arc. The censures of the critics by
+profession are extant, and may be easily referred to:--careless lines,
+inequality in the merit of the different poems, and (in the lighter
+works) a predilection for the strange and whimsical; in short, such
+faults as might have been anticipated in a young and rapid writer, were
+indeed sufficiently enforced. Nor was there at that time wanting a party
+spirit to aggravate the defects of a poet, who with all the courage of
+uncorrupted youth had avowed his zeal for a cause, which he deemed
+that of liberty, and his abhorrence of oppression by whatever name
+consecrated. But it was as little objected by others, as dreamed of by
+the poet himself, that he preferred careless and prosaic lines on rule
+and of forethought, or indeed that he pretended to any other art or
+theory of poetic diction, except that which we may all learn from
+Horace, Quinctilian, the admirable dialogue, De Oratoribus, generally
+attributed to Tacitus, or Strada's Prolusions; if indeed natural good
+sense and the early study of the best models in his own language had
+not infused the same maxims more securely, and, if I may venture the
+expression, more vitally. All that could have been fairly deduced was,
+that in his taste and estimation of writers Mr. Southey agreed far more
+with Thomas Warton, than with Dr. Johnson. Nor do I mean to deny, that
+at all times Mr. Southey was of the same mind with Sir Philip Sidney in
+preferring an excellent ballad in the humblest style of poetry to twenty
+indifferent poems that strutted in the highest. And by what have his
+works, published since then, been characterized, each more strikingly
+than the preceding, but by greater splendour, a deeper pathos,
+profounder reflections, and a more sustained dignity of language and of
+metre? Distant may the period be, but whenever the time shall come,
+when all his works shall be collected by some editor worthy to be his
+biographer, I trust that an appendix of excerpta of all the passages,
+in which his writings, name, and character have been attacked, from
+the pamphlets and periodical works of the last twenty years, may be an
+accompaniment. Yet that it would prove medicinal in after times I dare
+not hope; for as long as there are readers to be delighted with calumny,
+there will be found reviewers to calumniate. And such readers will
+become in all probability more numerous, in proportion as a still
+greater diffusion of literature shall produce an increase of sciolists,
+and sciolism bring with it petulance and presumption. In times of old,
+books were as religious oracles; as literature advanced, they next
+became venerable preceptors; they then descended to the rank of
+instructive friends; and, as their numbers increased, they sank still
+lower to that of entertaining companions; and at present they seem
+degraded into culprits to hold up their hands at the bar of every
+self-elected, yet not the less peremptory, judge, who chooses to write
+from humour or interest, from enmity or arrogance, and to abide the
+decision "of him that reads in malice, or him that reads after dinner."
+
+The same retrograde movement may be traced, in the relation which the
+authors themselves have assumed towards their readers. From the lofty
+address of Bacon: "these are the meditations of Francis of Verulam,
+which that posterity should be possessed of, he deemed their interest:"
+or from dedication to Monarch or Pontiff, in which the honour given was
+asserted in equipoise to the patronage acknowledged: from Pindar's
+
+            ------'ep' alloi--
+    si d'alloi megaloi: to d'eschaton kory-
+    phoutai basilensi. Maeketi
+            paptaine porsion.
+    Eiae se te touton
+    upsou chronon patein, eme
+    te tossade nikaphorois
+    omilein, prophanton sophian kath' El-
+    lanas eonta panta.--OLYMP. OD. I.
+
+there was a gradual sinking in the etiquette or allowed style of
+pretension.
+
+Poets and Philosophers, rendered diffident by their very number,
+addressed themselves to "learned readers;" then aimed to conciliate
+the graces of "the candid reader;" till, the critic still rising as the
+author sank, the amateurs of literature collectively were erected into a
+municipality of judges, and addressed as the Town! And now, finally,
+all men being supposed able to read, and all readers able to judge,
+the multitudinous Public, shaped into personal unity by the magic of
+abstraction, sits nominal despot on the throne of criticism. But, alas!
+as in other despotisms, it but echoes the decisions of its invisible
+ministers, whose intellectual claims to the guardianship of the Muses
+seem, for the greater part, analogous to the physical qualifications
+which adapt their oriental brethren for the superintendence of the
+Harem. Thus it is said, that St. Nepomuc was installed the guardian of
+bridges, because he had fallen over one, and sunk out of sight; thus
+too St. Cecilia is said to have been first propitiated by musicians,
+because, having failed in her own attempts, she had taken a dislike to
+the art and all its successful professors. But I shall probably have
+occasion hereafter to deliver my convictions more at large concerning
+this state of things, and its influences on taste, genius and morality.
+
+In the Thalaba, the Madoc, and still more evidently in the unique [16]
+Cid, in the Kehama, and, as last, so best, the Roderick; Southey has
+given abundant proof, se cogitare quam sit magnum dare aliquid in manus
+hominum: nec persuadere sibi posse, non saepe tractandum quod placere
+et semper et omnibus cupiat. But on the other hand, I conceive, that Mr.
+Southey was quite unable to comprehend, wherein could consist the crime
+or mischief of printing half a dozen or more playful poems; or to speak
+more generally, compositions which would be enjoyed or passed over,
+according as the taste and humour of the reader might chance to be;
+provided they contained nothing immoral. In the present age periturae
+parcere chartae is emphatically an unreasonable demand. The merest
+trifle he ever sent abroad had tenfold better claims to its ink and
+paper than all the silly criticisms on it, which proved no more than
+that the critic was not one of those, for whom the trifle was written;
+and than all the grave exhortations to a greater reverence for the
+public--as if the passive page of a book, by having an epigram or
+doggerel tale impressed on it, instantly assumed at once loco-motive
+power and a sort of ubiquity, so as to flutter and buz in the ear of the
+public to the sore annoyance of the said mysterious personage. But what
+gives an additional and more ludicrous absurdity to these lamentations
+is the curious fact, that if in a volume of poetry the critic should
+find poem or passage which he deems more especially worthless, he
+is sure to select and reprint it in the review; by which, on his own
+grounds, he wastes as much more paper than the author, as the copies of
+a fashionable review are more numerous than those of the original book;
+in some, and those the most prominent instances, as ten thousand to five
+hundred. I know nothing that surpasses the vileness of deciding on the
+merits of a poet or painter,--(not by characteristic defects; for where
+there is genius, these always point to his characteristic beauties;
+but)--by accidental failures or faulty passages; except the impudence
+of defending it, as the proper duty, and most instructive part, of
+criticism. Omit or pass slightly over the expression, grace,
+and grouping of Raffael's figures; but ridicule in detail the
+knitting-needles and broom-twigs, that are to represent trees in his
+back grounds; and never let him hear the last of his galli-pots! Admit
+that the Allegro and Penseroso of Milton are not without merit; but
+repay yourself for this concession, by reprinting at length the two
+poems on the University Carrier! As a fair specimen of his Sonnets,
+quote
+
+    "A Book was writ of late called Tetrachordon;"
+
+and, as characteristic of his rhythm and metre, cite his literal
+translation of the first and second Psalm! In order to justify yourself,
+you need only assert, that had you dwelt chiefly on the beauties and
+excellencies of the poet, the admiration of these might seduce the
+attention of future writers from the objects of their love and wonder,
+to an imitation of the few poems and passages in which the poet was most
+unlike himself.
+
+But till reviews are conducted on far other principles, and with far
+other motives; till in the place of arbitrary dictation and petulant
+sneers, the reviewers support their decisions by reference to fixed
+canons of criticism, previously established and deduced from the nature
+of man; reflecting minds will pronounce it arrogance in them thus to
+announce themselves to men of letters, as the guides of their taste
+and judgment. To the purchaser and mere reader it is, at all events, an
+injustice. He who tells me that there are defects in a new work,
+tells me nothing which I should not have taken for granted without his
+information. But he, who points out and elucidates the beauties of
+an original work does indeed give me interesting information, such
+as experience would not have authorized me in anticipating. And as to
+compositions which the authors themselves announce with
+
+    Haec ipsi novimus esse nihil,
+
+why should we judge by a different rule two printed works, only because
+the one author is alive, and the other in his grave? What literary man
+has not regretted the prudery of Spratt in refusing to let his friend
+Cowley appear in his slippers and dressing gown? I am not perhaps
+the only one who has derived an innocent amusement from the riddles,
+conundrums, tri-syllable lines, and the like, of Swift and his
+correspondents, in hours of languor, when to have read his more finished
+works would have been useless to myself, and, in some sort, an act
+of injustice to the author. But I am at a loss to conceive by what
+perversity of judgment, these relaxations of his genius could be
+employed to diminish his fame as the writer of Gulliver, or the Tale of
+a Tub. Had Mr. Southey written twice as many poems of inferior merit, or
+partial interest, as have enlivened the journals of the day, they
+would have added to his honour with good and wise men, not merely or
+principally as proving the versatility of his talents, but as evidences
+of the purity of that mind, which even in its levities never dictated a
+line which it need regret on any moral account.
+
+I have in imagination transferred to the future biographer the duty of
+contrasting Southey's fixed and well-earned fame, with the abuse and
+indefatigable hostility of his anonymous critics from his early youth to
+his ripest manhood. But I cannot think so ill of human nature as not
+to believe, that these critics have already taken shame to themselves,
+whether they consider the object of their abuse in his moral or his
+literary character. For reflect but on the variety and extent of his
+acquirements! He stands second to no man, either as an historian or as
+a bibliographer; and when I regard him as a popular essayist,--(for the
+articles of his compositions in the reviews are, for the greater part,
+essays on subjects of deep or curious interest rather than criticisms
+on particular works)--I look in vain for any writer, who has conveyed so
+much information, from so many and such recondite sources, with so many
+just and original reflections, in a style so lively and poignant, yet so
+uniformly classical and perspicuous; no one, in short, who has combined
+so much wisdom with so much wit; so much truth and knowledge with
+so much life and fancy. His prose is always intelligible and always
+entertaining. In poetry he has attempted almost every species of
+composition known before, and he has added new ones; and if we except
+the highest lyric,--(in which how few, how very few even of the greatest
+minds have been fortunate)--he has attempted every species successfully;
+from the political song of the day, thrown off in the playful overflow
+of honest joy and patriotic exultation, to the wild ballad; from
+epistolary ease and graceful narrative, to austere and impetuous moral
+declamation; from the pastoral charms and wild streaming lights of the
+Thalaba, in which sentiment and imagery have given permanence even to
+the excitement of curiosity; and from the full blaze of the Kehama,--(a
+gallery of finished pictures in one splendid fancy piece, in which,
+notwithstanding, the moral grandeur rises gradually above the brilliance
+of the colouring and the boldness and novelty of the machinery)--to
+the more sober beauties of the Madoc; and lastly, from the Madoc to
+his Roderick, in which, retaining all his former excellencies of a
+poet eminently inventive and picturesque, he has surpassed himself
+in language and metre, in the construction of the whole, and in the
+splendour of particular passages.
+
+Here then shall I conclude? No! The characters of the deceased, like the
+encomia on tombstones, as they are described with religious tenderness,
+so are they read, with allowing sympathy indeed, but yet with rational
+deduction. There are men, who deserve a higher record; men with whose
+characters it is the interest of their contemporaries, no less than
+that of posterity, to be made acquainted; while it is yet possible for
+impartial censure, and even for quick-sighted envy, to cross-examine
+the tale without offence to the courtesies of humanity; and while the
+eulogist, detected in exaggeration or falsehood, must pay the full
+penalty of his baseness in the contempt which brands the convicted
+flatterer. Publicly has Mr. Southey been reviled by men, who, as I would
+fain hope for the honour of human nature, hurled fire-brands against
+a figure of their own imagination; publicly have his talents been
+depreciated, his principles denounced; as publicly do I therefore, who
+have known him intimately, deem it my duty to leave recorded, that it
+is Southey's almost unexampled felicity, to possess the best gifts of
+talent and genius free from all their characteristic defects. To those
+who remember the state of our public schools and universities some
+twenty years past, it will appear no ordinary praise in any man to have
+passed from innocence into virtue, not only free from all vicious habit,
+but unstained by one act of intemperance, or the degradations akin to
+intemperance. That scheme of head, heart, and habitual demeanour, which
+in his early manhood, and first controversial writings, Milton, claiming
+the privilege of self-defence, asserts of himself, and challenges
+his calumniators to disprove; this will his school-mates, his
+fellow-collegians, and his maturer friends, with a confidence
+proportioned to the intimacy of their knowledge, bear witness to, as
+again realized in the life of Robert Southey. But still more striking to
+those, who by biography or by their own experience are familiar with the
+general habits of genius, will appear the poet's matchless industry
+and perseverance in his pursuits; the worthiness and dignity of those
+pursuits; his generous submission to tasks of transitory interest, or
+such as his genius alone could make otherwise; and that having thus more
+than satisfied the claims of affection or prudence, he should yet have
+made for himself time and power, to achieve more, and in more various
+departments, than almost any other writer has done, though employed
+wholly on subjects of his own choice and ambition. But as Southey
+possesses, and is not possessed by, his genius, even so is he master
+even of his virtues. The regular and methodical tenor of his daily
+labours, which would be deemed rare in the most mechanical pursuits,
+and might be envied by the mere man of business, loses all semblance of
+formality in the dignified simplicity of his manners, in the spring and
+healthful cheerfulness of his spirits. Always employed, his friends find
+him always at leisure. No less punctual in trifles, than steadfast in
+the performance of highest duties, he inflicts none of those small pains
+and discomforts which irregular men scatter about them, and which in
+the aggregate so often become formidable obstacles both to happiness
+and utility; while on the contrary he bestows all the pleasures, and
+inspires all that ease of mind on those around him or connected with
+him, which perfect consistency, and (if such a word might be framed)
+absolute reliability, equally in small as in great concerns, cannot but
+inspire and bestow; when this too is softened without being weakened
+by kindness and gentleness. I know few men who so well deserve the
+character which an antient attributes to Marcus Cato, namely, that
+he was likest virtue, in as much as he seemed to act aright, not in
+obedience to any law or outward motive, but by the necessity of a happy
+nature, which could not act otherwise. As son, brother, husband,
+father, master, friend, he moves with firm yet light steps, alike
+unostentatious, and alike exemplary. As a writer, he has uniformly made
+his talents subservient to the best interests of humanity, of public
+virtue, and domestic piety; his cause has ever been the cause of pure
+religion and of liberty, of national independence and of national
+illumination. When future critics shall weigh out his guerdon of praise
+and censure, it will be Southey the poet only, that will supply them
+with the scanty materials for the latter. They will likewise not fail to
+record, that as no man was ever a more constant friend, never had poet
+more friends and honourers among the good of all parties; and that
+quacks in education, quacks in politics, and quacks in criticism were
+his only enemies. [17]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+The Lyrical Ballads with the Preface--Mr. Wordsworth's earlier poems--On
+fancy and imagination--The investigation of the distinction important to
+the Fine Arts.
+
+
+I have wandered far from the object in view, but as I fancied to myself
+readers who would respect the feelings that had tempted me from the main
+road; so I dare calculate on not a few, who will warmly sympathize with
+them. At present it will be sufficient for my purpose, if I have proved,
+that Mr. Southey's writings no more than my own furnished the original
+occasion to this fiction of a new school of poetry, and to the clamours
+against its supposed founders and proselytes.
+
+As little do I believe that Mr. Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads were
+in themselves the cause. I speak exclusively of the two volumes so
+entitled. A careful and repeated examination of these confirms me in
+the belief, that the omission of less than a hundred lines would have
+precluded nine-tenths of the criticism on this work. I hazard this
+declaration, however, on the supposition, that the reader has taken it
+up, as he would have done any other collection of poems purporting to
+derive their subjects or interests from the incidents of domestic or
+ordinary life, intermingled with higher strains of meditation which
+the poet utters in his own person and character; with the proviso, that
+these poems were perused without knowledge of, or reference to,
+the author's peculiar opinions, and that the reader had not had his
+attention previously directed to those peculiarities. In that case,
+as actually happened with Mr. Southey's earlier works, the lines and
+passages which might have offended the general taste, would have been
+considered as mere inequalities, and attributed to inattention, not to
+perversity of judgment. The men of business who had passed their lives
+chiefly in cities, and who might therefore be expected to derive the
+highest pleasure from acute notices of men and manners conveyed in easy,
+yet correct and pointed language; and all those who, reading but little
+poetry, are most stimulated with that species of it, which seems
+most distant from prose, would probably have passed by the volumes
+altogether. Others more catholic in their taste, and yet habituated to
+be most pleased when most excited, would have contented themselves
+with deciding, that the author had been successful in proportion to the
+elevation of his style and subject. Not a few, perhaps, might, by their
+admiration of the Lines written near Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the
+Wye, those Left upon a Yew Tree Seat, The Old Cumberland Beggar,
+and Ruth, have been gradually led to peruse with kindred feeling
+The Brothers, the Hart-leap Well, and whatever other poems in that
+collection may be described as holding a middle place between those
+written in the highest and those in the humblest style; as for instance
+between the Tintern Abbey, and The Thorn, or Simon Lee. Should their
+taste submit to no further change, and still remain unreconciled to the
+colloquial phrases, or the imitations of them, that are, more or less,
+scattered through the class last mentioned; yet even from the small
+number of the latter, they would have deemed them but an inconsiderable
+subtraction from the merit of the whole work; or, what is sometimes not
+unpleasing in the publication of a new writer, as serving to ascertain
+the natural tendency, and consequently the proper direction of the
+author's genius.
+
+In the critical remarks, therefore, prefixed and annexed to the Lyrical
+Ballads, I believe, we may safely rest, as the true origin of the
+unexampled opposition which Mr. Wordsworth's writings have been since
+doomed to encounter. The humbler passages in the poems themselves were
+dwelt on and cited to justify the rejection of the theory. What in
+and for themselves would have been either forgotten or forgiven as
+imperfections, or at least comparative failures, provoked direct
+hostility when announced as intentional, as the result of choice after
+full deliberation. Thus the poems, admitted by all as excellent, joined
+with those which had pleased the far greater number, though they formed
+two-thirds of the whole work, instead of being deemed (as in all right
+they should have been, even if we take for granted that the reader
+judged aright) an atonement for the few exceptions, gave wind and fuel
+to the animosity against both the poems and the poet. In all perplexity
+there is a portion of fear, which predisposes the mind to anger. Not
+able to deny that the author possessed both genius and a powerful
+intellect, they felt very positive,--but yet were not quite certain
+that he might not be in the right, and they themselves in the wrong; an
+unquiet state of mind, which seeks alleviation by quarrelling with the
+occasion of it, and by wondering at the perverseness of the man, who had
+written a long and argumentative essay to persuade them, that
+
+    Fair is foul, and foul is fair;
+
+in other words, that they had been all their lives admiring without
+judgment, and were now about to censure without reason. [18]
+
+That this conjecture is not wide from the mark, I am induced to believe
+from the noticeable fact, which I can state on my own knowledge, that
+the same general censure has been grounded by almost every different
+person on some different poem. Among those, whose candour and judgment
+I estimate highly, I distinctly remember six who expressed their
+objections to the Lyrical Ballads almost in the same words, and
+altogether to the same purport, at the same time admitting, that several
+of the poems had given them great pleasure; and, strange as it might
+seem, the composition which one cited as execrable, another quoted as
+his favourite. I am indeed convinced in my own mind, that could the same
+experiment have been tried with these volumes, as was made in the well
+known story of the picture, the result would have been the same; the
+parts which had been covered by black spots on the one day, would be
+found equally albo lapide notatae on the succeeding.
+
+However this may be, it was assuredly hard and unjust to fix the
+attention on a few separate and insulated poems with as much aversion,
+as if they had been so many plague-spots on the whole work, instead of
+passing them over in silence, as so much blank paper, or leaves of a
+bookseller's catalogue; especially, as no one pretended to have found
+in them any immorality or indelicacy; and the poems, therefore, at the
+worst, could only be regarded as so many light or inferior coins in a
+rouleau of gold, not as so much alloy in a weight of bullion. A friend
+whose talents I hold in the highest respect, but whose judgment and
+strong sound sense I have had almost continued occasion to revere,
+making the usual complaints to me concerning both the style and subjects
+of Mr. Wordsworth's minor poems; I admitted that there were some few of
+the tales and incidents, in which I could not myself find a sufficient
+cause for their having been recorded in metre. I mentioned Alice Fell as
+an instance; "Nay," replied my friend with more than usual quickness of
+manner, "I cannot agree with you there!--that, I own, does seem to me
+a remarkably pleasing poem." In the Lyrical Ballads, (for my experience
+does not enable me to extend the remark equally unqualified to the two
+subsequent volumes,) I have heard at different times, and from different
+individuals, every single poem extolled and reprobated, with the
+exception of those of loftier kind, which as was before observed, seem
+to have won universal praise. This fact of itself would have made me
+diffident in my censures, had not a still stronger ground been furnished
+by the strange contrast of the heat and long continuance of the
+opposition, with the nature of the faults stated as justifying it. The
+seductive faults, the dulcia vitia of Cowley, Marine, or Darwin might
+reasonably be thought capable of corrupting the public judgment for half
+a century, and require a twenty years war, campaign after campaign, in
+order to dethrone the usurper and re-establish the legitimate taste.
+But that a downright simpleness, under the affectation of simplicity,
+prosaic words in feeble metre, silly thoughts in childish phrases, and
+a preference of mean, degrading, or at best trivial associations and
+characters, should succeed in forming a school of imitators, a company
+of almost religious admirers, and this too among young men of ardent
+minds, liberal education, and not
+
+    ------with academic laurels unbestowed;
+
+and that this bare and bald counterfeit of poetry, which is
+characterized as below criticism, should for nearly twenty years have
+well-nigh engrossed criticism, as the main, if not the only, butt of
+review, magazine, pamphlet, poem, and paragraph; this is indeed matter
+of wonder. Of yet greater is it, that the contest should still continue
+as undecided as [19] that between Bacchus and the frogs in Aristophanes;
+when the former descended to the realms of the departed to bring back
+the spirit of old and genuine poesy;--
+
+    CH.  Brekekekex, koax, koax.
+    D.   All' exoloisth' auto koax.
+         Ouden gar est' all', hae koax.
+         Oimozet' ou gar moi melei.
+    CH.  Alla maen kekraxomestha
+         g', oposon hae pharynx an haemon
+         chandanae di' haemeras,
+         brekekekex, koax, koax!
+    D.   Touto gar ou nikaesete.
+    CH.  Oude men haemas su pantos.
+    D.   Oude maen humeis ge dae m'
+         oudepote. Kekraxomai gar,
+         kan me deae, di' haemeras,
+         eos an humon epikrataeso tou koax!
+    CH.  Brekekekex, KO'AX, KOAX!
+
+During the last year of my residence at Cambridge, 1794, I became
+acquainted with Mr. Wordsworth's first publication entitled Descriptive
+Sketches; and seldom, if ever, was the emergence of an original poetic
+genius above the literary horizon more evidently announced. In the
+form, style, and manner of the whole poem, and in the structure of
+the particular lines and periods, there is a harshness and acerbity
+connected and combined with words and images all a-glow, which might
+recall those products of the vegetable world, where gorgeous blossoms
+rise out of a hard and thorny rind and shell, within which the rich
+fruit is elaborating. The language is not only peculiar and strong, but
+at times knotty and contorted, as by its own impatient strength; while
+the novelty and struggling crowd of images, acting in conjunction with
+the difficulties of the style, demands always a greater closeness of
+attention, than poetry,--at all events, than descriptive poetry--has
+a right to claim. It not seldom therefore justified the complaint of
+obscurity. In the following extract I have sometimes fancied, that I saw
+an emblem of the poem itself, and of the author's genius as it was then
+displayed.--
+
+    'Tis storm; and hid in mist from hour to hour,
+    All day the floods a deepening murmur pour;
+    The sky is veiled, and every cheerful sight
+    Dark is the region as with coming night;
+    Yet what a sudden burst of overpowering light!
+    Triumphant on the bosom of the storm,
+    Glances the fire-clad eagle's wheeling form;
+    Eastward, in long perspective glittering, shine
+    The wood-crowned cliffs that o'er the lake recline;
+    Those Eastern cliffs a hundred streams unfold,
+    At once to pillars turned that flame with gold;
+    Behind his sail the peasant strives to shun
+    The west, that burns like one dilated sun,
+    Where in a mighty crucible expire
+    The mountains, glowing hot, like coals of fire.
+
+The poetic Psyche, in its process to full development, undergoes as many
+changes as its Greek namesake, the butterfly [20]. And it is remarkable
+how soon genius clears and purifies itself from the faults and errors of
+its earliest products; faults which, in its earliest compositions, are
+the more obtrusive and confluent, because as heterogeneous elements,
+which had only a temporary use, they constitute the very ferment,
+by which themselves are carried off. Or we may compare them to some
+diseases, which must work on the humours, and be thrown out on the
+surface, in order to secure the patient from their future recurrence.
+I was in my twenty-fourth year, when I had the happiness of knowing Mr.
+Wordsworth personally, and while memory lasts, I shall hardly forget
+the sudden effect produced on my mind, by his recitation of a manuscript
+poem, which still remains unpublished, but of which the stanza and tone
+of style were the same as those of The Female Vagrant, as originally
+printed in the first volume of the Lyrical Ballads. There was here no
+mark of strained thought, or forced diction, no crowd or turbulence of
+imagery; and, as the poet hath himself well described in his Lines on
+revisiting the Wye, manly reflection and human associations had given
+both variety, and an additional interest to natural objects, which,
+in the passion and appetite of the first love, they had seemed to him
+neither to need nor permit. The occasional obscurities, which had risen
+from an imperfect control over the resources of his native language, had
+almost wholly disappeared, together with that worse defect of arbitrary
+and illogical phrases, at once hackneyed and fantastic, which hold so
+distinguished a place in the technique of ordinary poetry, and will,
+more or less, alloy the earlier poems of the truest genius, unless
+the attention has been specially directed to their worthlessness and
+incongruity [21]. I did not perceive anything particular in the mere
+style of the poem alluded to during its recitation, except indeed such
+difference as was not separable from the thought and manner; and the
+Spenserian stanza, which always, more or less, recalls to the reader's
+mind Spenser's own style, would doubtless have authorized, in my then
+opinion, a more frequent descent to the phrases of ordinary life, than
+could without an ill effect have been hazarded in the heroic couplet.
+It was not however the freedom from false taste, whether as to common
+defects, or to those more properly his own, which made so unusual an
+impression on my feelings immediately, and subsequently on my judgment.
+It was the union of deep feeling with profound thought; the fine balance
+of truth in observing, with the imaginative faculty in modifying, the
+objects observed; and above all the original gift of spreading the tone,
+the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world
+around forms, incidents, and situations, of which, for the common view,
+custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dew
+drops.
+
+This excellence, which in all Mr. Wordsworth's writings is more or
+less predominant, and which constitutes the character of his mind, I no
+sooner felt, than I sought to understand. Repeated meditations led me
+first to suspect,--(and a more intimate analysis of the human faculties,
+their appropriate marks, functions, and effects matured my conjecture
+into full conviction,)--that Fancy and Imagination were two distinct and
+widely different faculties, instead of being, according to the general
+belief, either two names with one meaning, or, at furthest, the lower
+and higher degree of one and the same power. It is not, I own, easy to
+conceive a more apposite translation of the Greek phantasia than the
+Latin imaginatio; but it is equally true that in all societies there
+exists an instinct of growth, a certain collective, unconscious good
+sense working progressively to desynonymize [22] those words originally
+of the same meaning, which the conflux of dialects supplied to the
+more homogeneous languages, as the Greek and German: and which the
+same cause, joined with accidents of translation from original works of
+different countries, occasion in mixed languages like our own. The first
+and most important point to be proved is, that two conceptions perfectly
+distinct are confused under one and the same word, and--this done--to
+appropriate that word exclusively to the one meaning, and the synonyme,
+should there be one, to the other. But if,--(as will be often the case
+in the arts and sciences,)--no synonyme exists, we must either invent
+or borrow a word. In the present instance the appropriation has already
+begun, and been legitimated in the derivative adjective: Milton had a
+highly imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful mind. If therefore I should
+succeed in establishing the actual existence of two faculties generally
+different, the nomenclature would be at once determined. To the
+faculty by which I had characterized Milton, we should confine the term
+'imagination;' while the other would be contra-distinguished as 'fancy.'
+Now were it once fully ascertained, that this division is no less
+grounded in nature than that of delirium from mania, or Otway's
+
+    Lutes, laurels, seas of milk, and ships of amber,
+
+from Shakespeare's
+
+    What! have his daughters brought him to this pass?
+
+or from the preceding apostrophe to the elements; the theory of the fine
+arts, and of poetry in particular, could not but derive some additional
+and important light. It would in its immediate effects furnish a torch
+of guidance to the philosophical critic; and ultimately to the poet
+himself. In energetic minds, truth soon changes by domestication into
+power; and from directing in the discrimination and appraisal of the
+product, becomes influencive in the production. To admire on principle,
+is the only way to imitate without loss of originality.
+
+It has been already hinted, that metaphysics and psychology have long
+been my hobby-horse. But to have a hobby-horse, and to be vain of it,
+are so commonly found together, that they pass almost for the same. I
+trust therefore, that there will be more good humour than contempt,
+in the smile with which the reader chastises my self-complacency, if I
+confess myself uncertain, whether the satisfaction from the perception
+of a truth new to myself may not have been rendered more poignant by the
+conceit, that it would be equally so to the public. There was a time,
+certainly, in which I took some little credit to myself, in the belief
+that I had been the first of my countrymen, who had pointed out the
+diverse meaning of which the two terms were capable, and analyzed the
+faculties to which they should be appropriated. Mr. W. Taylor's recent
+volume of synonymes I have not yet seen [23]; but his specification of
+the terms in question has been clearly shown to be both insufficient and
+erroneous by Mr. Wordsworth in the Preface added to the late collection
+of his Poems. The explanation which Mr. Wordsworth has himself given,
+will be found to differ from mine, chiefly, perhaps as our objects are
+different. It could scarcely indeed happen otherwise, from the advantage
+I have enjoyed of frequent conversation with him on a subject to which
+a poem of his own first directed my attention, and my conclusions
+concerning which he had made more lucid to myself by many happy
+instances drawn from the operation of natural objects on the mind. But
+it was Mr. Wordsworth's purpose to consider the influences of fancy and
+imagination as they are manifested in poetry, and from the different
+effects to conclude their diversity in kind; while it is my object to
+investigate the seminal principle, and then from the kind to deduce the
+degree. My friend has drawn a masterly sketch of the branches with their
+poetic fruitage. I wish to add the trunk, and even the roots as far as
+they lift themselves above ground, and are visible to the naked eye of
+our common consciousness.
+
+Yet even in this attempt I am aware that I shall be obliged to draw more
+largely on the reader's attention, than so immethodical a miscellany as
+this can authorize; when in such a work (the Ecclesiasical Polity) of
+such a mind as Hooker's, the judicious author, though no less admirable
+for the perspicuity than for the port and dignity of his language,--and
+though he wrote for men of learning in a learned age,--saw nevertheless
+occasion to anticipate and guard against "complaints of obscurity," as
+often as he was to trace his subject "to the highest well-spring and
+fountain." Which, (continues he) "because men are not accustomed to, the
+pains we take are more needful a great deal, than acceptable; and the
+matters we handle, seem by reason of newness (till the mind grow better
+acquainted with them) dark and intricate." I would gladly therefore
+spare both myself and others this labour, if I knew how without it
+to present an intelligible statement of my poetic creed,--not as my
+opinions, which weigh for nothing, but as deductions from established
+premises conveyed in such a form, as is calculated either to effect a
+fundamental conviction, or to receive a fundamental confutation. If I
+may dare once more adopt the words of Hooker, "they, unto whom we shall
+seem tedious, are in no wise injured by us, because it is in their own
+hands to spare that labour, which they are not willing to endure." Those
+at least, let me be permitted to add, who have taken so much pains to
+render me ridiculous for a perversion of taste, and have supported the
+charge by attributing strange notions to me on no other authority than
+their own conjectures, owe it to themselves as well as to me not to
+refuse their attention to my own statement of the theory which I do
+acknowledge; or shrink from the trouble of examining the grounds on
+which I rest it, or the arguments which I offer in its justification.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+On the law of Association--Its history traced from Aristotle to Hartley.
+
+
+There have been men in all ages, who have been impelled as by an
+instinct to propose their own nature as a problem, and who devote their
+attempts to its solution. The first step was to construct a table of
+distinctions, which they seem to have formed on the principle of the
+absence or presence of the Will. Our various sensations, perceptions,
+and movements were classed as active or passive, or as media partaking
+of both. A still finer distinction was soon established between the
+voluntary and the spontaneous. In our perceptions we seem to ourselves
+merely passive to an external power, whether as a mirror reflecting the
+landscape, or as a blank canvass on which some unknown hand paints it.
+For it is worthy of notice, that the latter, or the system of Idealism
+may be traced to sources equally remote with the former, or Materialism;
+and Berkeley can boast an ancestry at least as venerable as Gassendi
+or Hobbes. These conjectures, however, concerning the mode in which our
+perceptions originated, could not alter the natural difference of Things
+and Thoughts. In the former, the cause appeared wholly external,
+while in the latter, sometimes our will interfered as the producing or
+determining cause, and sometimes our nature seemed to act by a mechanism
+of its own, without any conscious effort of the will, or even against
+it. Our inward experiences were thus arranged in three separate classes,
+the passive sense, or what the School-men call the merely receptive
+quality of the mind; the voluntary; and the spontaneous, which holds the
+middle place between both. But it is not in human nature to meditate on
+any mode of action, without inquiring after the law that governs it;
+and in the explanation of the spontaneous movements of our being, the
+metaphysician took the lead of the anatomist and natural philosopher. In
+Egypt, Palestine, Greece, and India the analysis of the mind had reached
+its noon and manhood, while experimental research was still in its dawn
+and infancy. For many, very many centuries, it has been difficult to
+advance a new truth, or even a new error, in the philosophy of the
+intellect or morals. With regard, however, to the laws that direct the
+spontaneous movements of thought and the principle of their intellectual
+mechanism there exists, it has been asserted, an important exception
+most honourable to the moderns, and in the merit of which our own
+country claims the largest share. Sir James Mackintosh,--(who, amid the
+variety of his talents and attainments, is not of less repute for the
+depth and accuracy of his philosophical inquiries than for the
+eloquence with which he is said to render their most difficult results
+perspicuous, and the driest attractive,)--affirmed in the Lectures,
+delivered by him in Lincoln's Inn Hall, that the law of association as
+established in the contemporaneity of the original impressions,
+formed the basis of all true psychology; and that any ontological or
+metaphysical science, not contained in such (that is, an empirical)
+psychology, was but a web of abstractions and generalizations. Of this
+prolific truth, of this great fundamental law, he declared Hobbes to
+have been the original discoverer, while its full application to the
+whole intellectual system we owed to Hartley; who stood in the same
+relation to Hobbes as Newton to Kepler; the law of association being
+that to the mind, which gravitation is to matter.
+
+Of the former clause in this assertion, as it respects the comparative
+merits of the ancient metaphysicians, including their commentators, the
+School-men, and of the modern and British and French philosophers from
+Hobbes to Hume, Hartley, and Condillac, this is not the place to speak.
+So wide indeed is the chasm between Sir James Mackintosh's philosophical
+creed and mine, that so far from being able to join hands, we could
+scarcely make our voices intelligible to each other: and to bridge it
+over would require more time, skill, and power than I believe myself
+to possess. But the latter clause involves for the greater part a mere
+question of fact and history, and the accuracy of the statement is to be
+tried by documents rather than reasoning.
+
+First, then, I deny Hobbes's claim in toto: for he had been anticipated
+by Des Cartes, whose work De Methodo, preceded Hobbes's De Natura
+Humana, by more than a year. But what is of much more importance, Hobbes
+builds nothing on the principle which he had announced. He does not
+even announce it, as differing in any respect from the general laws of
+material motion and impact: nor was it, indeed, possible for him so
+to do, compatibly with his system, which was exclusively material and
+mechanical. Far otherwise is it with Des Cartes; greatly as he too
+in his after writings (and still more egregiously his followers De la
+Forge, and others) obscured the truth by their attempts to explain it on
+the theory of nervous fluids, and material configurations. But, in his
+interesting work, De Methodo, Des Cartes relates the circumstance which
+first led him to meditate on this subject, and which since then has been
+often noticed and employed as an instance and illustration of the law.
+A child who with its eyes bandaged had lost several of his fingers by
+amputation, continued to complain for many days successively of pains,
+now in this joint and now in that, of the very fingers which had
+been cut off. Des Cartes was led by this incident to reflect on the
+uncertainty with which we attribute any particular place to any inward
+pain or uneasiness, and proceeded after long consideration to establish
+it as a general law: that contemporaneous impressions, whether images
+or sensations, recall each other mechanically. On this principle, as
+a ground work, he built up the whole system of human language, as one
+continued process of association. He showed in what sense not only
+general terms, but generic images,--under the name of abstract
+ideas,--actually existed, and in what consist their nature and power.
+As one word may become the general exponent of many, so by association
+a simple image may represent a whole class. But in truth Hobbes
+himself makes no claims to any discovery, and introduces this law of
+association, or (in his own language) discursion of mind, as an
+admitted fact, in the solution alone of which, and this by causes purely
+physiological, he arrogates any originality. His system is briefly this;
+whenever the senses are impinged on by external objects, whether by
+the rays of light reflected from them, or by effluxes of their finer
+particles, there results a correspondent motion of the innermost and
+subtlest organs. This motion constitutes a representation, and there
+remains an impression of the same, or a certain disposition to repeat
+the same motion. Whenever we feel several objects at the same time, the
+impressions that are left, (or in the language of Mr. Hume, the ideas,)
+are linked together. Whenever therefore any one of the movements, which
+constitute a complex impression, is renewed through the senses, the
+others succeed mechanically. It follows of necessity, therefore, that
+Hobbes, as well as Hartley and all others who derive association from
+the connection and interdependence of the supposed matter, the movements
+of which constitute our thoughts, must have reduced all its forms to
+the one law of Time. But even the merit of announcing this law with
+philosophic precision cannot be fairly conceded to him. For the objects
+of any two ideas need not have co-existed in the same sensation in
+order to become mutually associable. The same result will follow when
+one only of the two ideas has been represented by the senses, and the
+other by the memory.
+
+Long however before either Hobbes or Des Cartes the law of association
+had been defined, and its important functions set forth by Ludovicus
+Vives. Phantasia, it is to be noticed, is employed by Vives to express
+the mental power of comprehension, or the active function of the mind;
+and imaginatio for the receptivity (via receptiva) of impressions, or
+for the passive perception. The power of combination he appropriates
+to the former: "quae singula et simpliciter acceperat imaginatio, ea
+conjungit et disjungait phantasia." And the law by which the thoughts
+are spontaneously presented follows thus: "quae simul sunt a phantasia
+comprehensa, si alterutrum occurrat, solet secum alterum representare."
+To time therefore he subordinates all the other exciting causes
+of association. The soul proceeds "a causa ad effectum, ab hoc ad
+instrumentum, a parte ad totum;" thence to the place, from place to
+person, and from this to whatever preceded or followed, all as being
+parts of a total impression, each of which may recall the other. The
+apparent springs "saltus vel transitus etiam longissimos," he explains
+by the same thought having been a component part of two or more total
+impressions. Thus "ex Scipione venio in cogitationem potentiae Turcicae,
+propter victorias ejus de Asia, in qua regnabat Antiochus."
+
+But from Vives I pass at once to the source of his doctrines, and (as
+far as we can judge from the remains yet extant of Greek philosophy)
+as to the first, so to the fullest and most perfect enunciation of the
+associative principle, namely, to the writings of Aristotle; and of
+these in particular to the treatises De Anima, and "De Memoria," which
+last belongs to the series of essays entitled in the old translations
+Parva Naturalia. In as much as later writers have either deviated from,
+or added to his doctrines, they appear to me to have introduced either
+error or groundless supposition.
+
+In the first place it is to be observed, that Aristotle's positions on
+this subject are unmixed with fiction. The wise Stagyrite speaks of no
+successive particles propagating motion like billiard balls, as Hobbes;
+nor of nervous or animal spirits, where inanimate and irrational solids
+are thawed down, and distilled, or filtrated by ascension, into living
+and intelligent fluids, that etch and re-etch engravings on the brain,
+as the followers of Des Cartes, and the humoral pathologists in general;
+nor of an oscillating ether which was to effect the same service for the
+nerves of the brain considered as solid fibres, as the animal
+spirits perform for them under the notion of hollow tubes, as Hartley
+teaches--nor finally, (with yet more recent dreamers) of chemical
+compositions by elective affinity, or of an electric light at once the
+immediate object and the ultimate organ of inward vision, which rises
+to the brain like an Aurora Borealis, and there, disporting in various
+shapes,--as the balance of plus and minus, or negative and positive,
+is destroyed or re-established,--images out both past and present.
+Aristotle delivers a just theory without pretending to an hypothesis;
+or in other words a comprehensive survey of the different facts, and
+of their relations to each other without supposition, that is, a fact
+placed under a number of facts, as their common support and explanation;
+though in the majority of instances these hypotheses or suppositions
+better deserve the name of upopoiaeseis, or suffictions. He uses indeed
+the word kinaeseis, to express what we call representations or ideas,
+but he carefully distinguishes them from material motion, designating
+the latter always by annexing the words en topo, or kata topon. On the
+contrary, in his treatise De Anima, he excludes place and motion from
+all the operations of thought, whether representations or volitions, as
+attributes utterly and absurdly heterogeneous.
+
+The general law of association, or, more accurately, the common
+condition under which all exciting causes act, and in which they may
+be generalized, according to Aristotle is this. Ideas by having been
+together acquire a power of recalling each other; or every partial
+representation awakes the total representation of which it had been
+a part. In the practical determination of this common principle to
+particular recollections, he admits five agents or occasioning
+causes: first, connection in time, whether simultaneous, preceding,
+or successive; second, vicinity or connection in space; third,
+interdependence or necessary connection, as cause and effect; fourth,
+likeness; and fifth, contrast. As an additional solution of the
+occasional seeming chasms in the continuity of reproduction he proves,
+that movements or ideas possessing one or the other of these five
+characters had passed through the mind as intermediate links,
+sufficiently clear to recall other parts of the same total impressions
+with which they had co-existed, though not vivid enough to excite that
+degree of attention which is requisite for distinct recollection, or
+as we may aptly express it, after consciousness. In association then
+consists the whole mechanism of the reproduction of impressions, in the
+Aristotelian Psychology. It is the universal law of the passive fancy
+and mechanical memory; that which supplies to all other faculties their
+objects, to all thought the elements of its materials.
+
+In consulting the excellent commentary of St. Thomas Aquinas on the
+Parva Naturalia of Aristotle, I was struck at once with its close
+resemblance to Hume's Essay on Association. The main thoughts were
+the same in both, the order of the thoughts was the same, and even the
+illustrations differed only by Hume's occasional substitution of more
+modern examples. I mentioned the circumstance to several of my literary
+acquaintances, who admitted the closeness of the resemblance, and
+that it seemed too great to be explained by mere coincidence; but
+they thought it improbable that Hume should have held the pages of the
+Angelic Doctor worth turning over. But some time after Mr. Payne showed
+Sir James Mackintosh some odd volumes of St. Thomas Aquinas, partly
+perhaps from having heard that he had in his Lectures passed a high
+encomium on this canonized philosopher; but chiefly from the fact, that
+the volumes had belonged to Mr. Hume, and had here and there marginal
+marks and notes of reference in his own hand writing. Among these
+volumes was that which contains the Parva Naturalia, in the old Latin
+version, swathed and swaddled in the commentary afore mentioned
+
+It remains then for me, first to state wherein Hartley differs from
+Aristotle; then, to exhibit the grounds of my conviction, that
+he differed only to err: and next as the result, to show, by what
+influences of the choice and judgment the associative power becomes
+either memory or fancy; and, in conclusion, to appropriate the remaining
+offices of the mind to the reason, and the imagination. With my best
+efforts to be as perspicuous as the nature of language will permit
+on such a subject, I earnestly solicit the good wishes and friendly
+patience of my readers, while I thus go "sounding on my dim and perilous
+way."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+That Hartley's system, as far as it differs from that of Aristotle, is
+neither tenable in theory, nor founded in facts.
+
+
+Of Hartley's hypothetical vibrations in his hypothetical oscillating
+ether of the nerves, which is the first and most obvious distinction
+between his system and that of Aristotle, I shall say little. This, with
+all other similar attempts to render that an object of the sight which
+has no relation to sight, has been already sufficiently exposed by the
+younger Reimarus, Maasz, and others, as outraging the very axioms
+of mechanics in a scheme, the merit of which consists in its being
+mechanical. Whether any other philosophy be possible, but the
+mechanical; and again, whether the mechanical system can have any
+claim to be called philosophy; are questions for another place. It is,
+however, certain, that as long as we deny the former, and affirm the
+latter, we must bewilder ourselves, whenever we would pierce into the
+adyta of causation; and all that laborious conjecture can do, is to fill
+up the gaps of fancy. Under that despotism of the eye (the emancipation
+from which Pythagoras by his numeral, and Plato by his musical, symbols,
+and both by geometric discipline, aimed at, as the first propaideuma of
+the mind)--under this strong sensuous influence, we are restless
+because invisible things are not the objects of vision; and metaphysical
+systems, for the most part, become popular, not for their truth, but in
+proportion as they attribute to causes a susceptibility of being seen,
+if only our visual organs were sufficiently powerful.
+
+From a hundred possible confutations let one suffice. According to
+this system the idea or vibration a from the external object A becomes
+associable with the idea or vibration m from the external object M,
+because the oscillation a propagated itself so as to re-produce the
+oscillation m. But the original impression from M was essentially
+different from the impression A: unless therefore different causes
+may produce the same effect, the vibration a could never produce the
+vibration m: and this therefore could never be the means, by which a and
+m are associated. To understand this, the attentive reader need only be
+reminded, that the ideas are themselves, in Hartley's system, nothing
+more than their appropriate configurative vibrations. It is a mere
+delusion of the fancy to conceive the pre-existence of the ideas, in any
+chain of association, as so many differently coloured billiard-balls in
+contact, so that when an object, the billiard-stick, strikes the first
+or white ball, the same motion propagates itself through the red, green,
+blue and black, and sets the whole in motion. No! we must suppose the
+very same force, which constitutes the white ball, to constitute the red
+or black; or the idea of a circle to constitute the idea of a triangle;
+which is impossible.
+
+But it may be said, that by the sensations from the objects A and M,
+the nerves have acquired a disposition to the vibrations a and m, and
+therefore a need only be repeated in order to re-produce m. Now we will
+grant, for a moment, the possibility of such a disposition in a
+material nerve, which yet seems scarcely less absurd than to say, that a
+weather-cock had acquired a habit of turning to the east, from the wind
+having been so long in that quarter: for if it be replied, that we must
+take in the circumstance of life, what then becomes of the mechanical
+philosophy? And what is the nerve, but the flint which the wag placed in
+the pot as the first ingredient of his stone broth, requiring only
+salt, turnips, and mutton, for the remainder! But if we waive this, and
+pre-suppose the actual existence of such a disposition; two cases
+are possible. Either, every idea has its own nerve and correspondent
+oscillation, or this is not the case. If the latter be the truth, we
+should gain nothing by these dispositions; for then, every nerve having
+several dispositions, when the motion of any other nerve is propagated
+into it, there will be no ground or cause present, why exactly the
+oscillation m should arise, rather than any other to which it was
+equally pre-disposed. But if we take the former, and let every idea have
+a nerve of its own, then every nerve must be capable of propagating its
+motion into many other nerves; and again, there is no reason assignable,
+why the vibration m should arise, rather than any other ad libitum.
+
+It is fashionable to smile at Hartley's vibrations and vibratiuncles;
+and his work has been re-edited by Priestley, with the omission of the
+material hypothesis. But Hartley was too great a man, too coherent a
+thinker, for this to have been done, either consistently or to any wise
+purpose. For all other parts of his system, as far as they are peculiar
+to that system, once removed from their mechanical basis, not only lose
+their main support, but the very motive which led to their adoption.
+Thus the principle of contemporaneity, which Aristotle had made the
+common condition of all the laws of association, Hartley was constrained
+to represent as being itself the sole law. For to what law can the
+action of material atoms be subject, but that of proximity in place? And
+to what law can their motions be subjected but that of time? Again, from
+this results inevitably, that the will, the reason, the judgment,
+and the understanding, instead of being the determining causes of
+association, must needs be represented as its creatures, and among its
+mechanical effects. Conceive, for instance, a broad stream, winding
+through a mountainous country with an indefinite number of currents,
+varying and running into each other according as the gusts chance to
+blow from the opening of the mountains. The temporary union of several
+currents in one, so as to form the main current of the moment, would
+present an accurate image of Hartley's theory of the will.
+
+Had this been really the case, the consequence would have been, that
+our whole life would be divided between the despotism of outward
+impressions, and that of senseless and passive memory. Take his law in
+its highest abstraction and most philosophical form, namely, that every
+partial representation recalls the total representation of which it was
+a part; and the law becomes nugatory, were it only for its universality.
+In practice it would indeed be mere lawlessness. Consider, how immense
+must be the sphere of a total impression from the top of St. Paul's
+church; and how rapid and continuous the series of such total
+impressions. If, therefore, we suppose the absence of all interference
+of the will, reason, and judgment, one or other of two consequences must
+result. Either the ideas, or reliques of such impression, will exactly
+imitate the order of the impression itself, which would be absolute
+delirium: or any one part of that impression might recall any other
+part, and--(as from the law of continuity, there must exist in every
+total impression, some one or more parts, which are components of some
+other following total impression, and so on ad infinitum)--any part
+of any impression might recall any part of any other, without a cause
+present to determine what it should be. For to bring in the will, or
+reason, as causes of their own cause, that is, as at once causes and
+effects, can satisfy those only who, in their pretended evidences of a
+God, having first demanded organization, as the sole cause and ground
+of intellect, will then coolly demand the pre-existence of intellect,
+as the cause and ground-work of organization. There is in truth but
+one state to which this theory applies at all, namely, that of complete
+light-headedness; and even to this it applies but partially, because the
+will and reason are perhaps never wholly suspended.
+
+A case of this kind occurred in a Roman Catholic town in Germany a year
+or two before my arrival at Goettingen, and had not then ceased to be
+a frequent subject of conversation. A young woman of four or five and
+twenty, who could neither read, nor write, was seized with a nervous
+fever; during which, according to the asseverations of all the priests
+and monks of the neighbourhood, she became possessed, and, as it
+appeared, by a very learned devil. She continued incessantly talking
+Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, in very pompous tones and with most distinct
+enunciation. This possession was rendered more probable by the known
+fact that she was or had been a heretic. Voltaire humorously advises the
+devil to decline all acquaintance with medical men; and it would have
+been more to his reputation, if he had taken this advice in the present
+instance. The case had attracted the particular attention of a
+young physician, and by his statement many eminent physiologists and
+psychologists visited the town, and cross-examined the case on the spot.
+Sheets full of her ravings were taken down from her own mouth, and
+were found to consist of sentences, coherent and intelligible each for
+itself, but with little or no connection with each other. Of the Hebrew,
+a small portion only could be traced to the Bible; the remainder seemed
+to be in the Rabbinical dialect. All trick or conspiracy was out of
+the question. Not only had the young woman ever been a harmless, simple
+creature; but she was evidently labouring under a nervous fever. In
+the town, in which she had been resident for many years as a servant in
+different families, no solution presented itself. The young physician,
+however, determined to trace her past life step by step; for the patient
+herself was incapable of returning a rational answer. He at length
+succeeded in discovering the place, where her parents had lived:
+travelled thither, found them dead, but an uncle surviving; and from him
+learned, that the patient had been charitably taken by an old Protestant
+pastor at nine years old, and had remained with him some years, even
+till the old man's death. Of this pastor the uncle knew nothing, but
+that he was a very good man. With great difficulty, and after much
+search, our young medical philosopher discovered a niece of the
+pastor's, who had lived with him as his house-keeper, and had inherited
+his effects. She remembered the girl; related, that her venerable uncle
+had been too indulgent, and could not bear to hear the girl scolded;
+that she was willing to have kept her, but that, after her patron's
+death, the girl herself refused to stay. Anxious inquiries were then,
+of course, made concerning the pastor's habits; and the solution of the
+phenomenon was soon obtained. For it appeared, that it had been the old
+man's custom, for years, to walk up and down a passage of his house into
+which the kitchen door opened, and to read to himself with a loud voice,
+out of his favourite books. A considerable number of these were still in
+the niece's possession. She added, that he was a very learned man and
+a great Hebraist. Among the books were found a collection of Rabbinical
+writings, together with several of the Greek and Latin Fathers; and the
+physician succeeded in identifying so many passages with those taken
+down at the young woman's bedside, that no doubt could remain in any
+rational mind concerning the true origin of the impressions made on her
+nervous system.
+
+This authenticated case furnishes both proof and instance, that reliques
+of sensation may exist for an indefinite time in a latent state, in
+the very same order in which they were originally impressed; and as we
+cannot rationally suppose the feverish state of the brain to act in any
+other way than as a stimulus, this fact (and it would not be difficult
+to adduce several of the same kind) contributes to make it even
+probable, that all thoughts are in themselves imperishable; and, that if
+the intelligent faculty should be rendered more comprehensive, it
+would require only a different and apportioned organization,--the body
+celestial instead of the body terrestrial,--to bring before every human
+soul the collective experience of its whole past existence. And this,
+this, perchance, is the dread book of judgment, in the mysterious
+hieroglyphics of which every idle word is recorded! Yea, in the very
+nature of a living spirit, it may be more possible that heaven and earth
+should pass away, than that a single act, a single thought, should be
+loosened or lost from that living chain of causes, with all the links of
+which, conscious or unconscious, the free-will, our only absolute Self,
+is coextensive and co-present. But not now dare I longer discourse of
+this, waiting for a loftier mood, and a nobler subject, warned from
+within and from without, that it is profanation to speak of these
+"mysteries tois maede phantasteisin, os kalon to taes dikaiosynaes kai
+sophrosynaes prosopon, kai oute hesperos oute eoos outo kala. To gar
+horon pros to horomenon syngenes kai homoion poiaesamenon dei epiballein
+tae thea, ou gar an popote eiden ophthalmos haelion, haelioeidaes mae
+gegenaemenos oude to kalon an idae psychae, mae kagae genomenae--to
+those to whose imagination it has never been presented, how beautiful is
+the countenance of justice and wisdom; and that neither the morning nor
+the evening star are so fair. For in order to direct the view aright,
+it behoves that the beholder should have made himself congenerous and
+similar to the object beheld. Never could the eye have beheld the sun,
+had not its own essence been soliform," (i.e. pre-configured to light
+by a similarity of essence with that of light) "neither can a soul not
+beautiful attain to an intuition of beauty."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+Of the necessary consequences of the Hartleian Theory--Of the original
+mistake or equivocation which procured its admission--Memoria technica.
+
+
+We will pass by the utter incompatibility of such a law--if law it may
+be called, which would itself be a slave of chances--with even that
+appearance of rationality forced upon us by the outward phaenomena of
+human conduct, abstracted from our own consciousness. We will agree
+to forget this for the moment, in order to fix our attention on that
+subordination of final to efficient causes in the human being, which
+flows of necessity from the assumption, that the will and, with the
+will, all acts of thought and attention are parts and products of this
+blind mechanism, instead of being distinct powers, the function of
+which it is to control, determine, and modify the phantasmal chaos
+of association. The soul becomes a mere ens logicum; for, as a real
+separable being, it would be more worthless and ludicrous than the
+Grimalkins in the cat-harpsichord, described in the Spectator. For these
+did form a part of the process; but, to Hartley's scheme, the soul is
+present only to be pinched or stroked, while the very squeals or purring
+are produced by an agency wholly independent and alien. It involves all
+the difficulties, all the incomprehensibility (if it be not indeed, os
+emoige dokei, the absurdity), of intercommunion between substances
+that have no one property in common, without any of the convenient
+consequences that bribed the judgment to the admission of the Dualistic
+hypothesis. Accordingly, this caput mortuum of the Hartleian process has
+been rejected by his followers, and the consciousness considered as a
+result, as a tune, the common product of the breeze and the harp
+though this again is the mere remotion of one absurdity to make way
+for another, equally preposterous. For what is harmony but a mode of
+relation, the very esse of which is percipi?--an ens rationale, which
+pre-supposes the power, that by perceiving creates it? The razor's edge
+becomes a saw to the armed vision; and the delicious melodies of Purcell
+or Cimarosa might be disjointed stammerings to a hearer, whose partition
+of time should be a thousand times subtler than ours. But this obstacle
+too let us imagine ourselves to have surmounted, and "at one bound high
+overleap all bound." Yet according to this hypothesis the disquisition,
+to which I am at present soliciting the reader's attention, may be as
+truly said to be written by Saint Paul's church, as by me: for it is the
+mere motion of my muscles and nerves; and these again are set in motion
+from external causes equally passive, which external causes stand
+themselves in interdependent connection with every thing that exists or
+has existed. Thus the whole universe co-operates to produce the minutest
+stroke of every letter, save only that I myself, and I alone, have
+nothing to do with it, but merely the causeless and effectless beholding
+of it when it is done. Yet scarcely can it be called a beholding; for
+it is neither an act nor an effect; but an impossible creation of a
+something nothing out of its very contrary! It is the mere quick-silver
+plating behind a looking-glass; and in this alone consists the poor
+worthless I! The sum total of my moral and intellectual intercourse,
+dissolved into its elements, is reduced to extension, motion, degrees
+of velocity, and those diminished copies of configurative motion, which
+form what we call notions, and notions of notions. Of such philosophy
+well might Butler say--
+
+    The metaphysic's but a puppet motion
+    That goes with screws, the notion of a notion;
+    The copy of a copy and lame draught
+    Unnaturally taken from a thought
+    That counterfeits all pantomimic tricks,
+    And turns the eyes, like an old crucifix;
+    That counterchanges whatsoe'er it calls
+    By another name, and makes it true or false;
+    Turns truth to falsehood, falsehood into truth,
+    By virtue of the Babylonian's tooth.
+
+The inventor of the watch, if this doctrine be true, did not in reality
+invent it; he only looked on, while the blind causes, the only true
+artists, were unfolding themselves. So must it have been too with my
+friend Allston, when he sketched his picture of the dead man revived by
+the bones of the prophet Elijah. So must it have been with Mr. Southey
+and Lord Byron, when the one fancied himself composing his Roderick, and
+the other his Childe Harold. The same must hold good of all systems of
+philosophy; of all arts, governments, wars by sea and by land; in short,
+of all things that ever have been or that ever will be produced. For,
+according to this system, it is not the affections and passions that are
+at work, in as far as they are sensations or thoughts. We only fancy,
+that we act from rational resolves, or prudent motives, or from impulses
+of anger, love, or generosity. In all these cases the real agent is a
+something-nothing-everything, which does all of which we know, and knows
+nothing of all that itself does.
+
+The existence of an infinite spirit, of an intelligent and holy will,
+must, on this system, be mere articulated motions of the air. For as the
+function of the human understanding is no other than merely to appear to
+itself to combine and to apply the phaenomena of the association; and
+as these derive all their reality from the primary sensations; and the
+sensations again all their reality from the impressions ab extra; a
+God not visible, audible, or tangible, can exist only in the sounds and
+letters that form his name and attributes. If in ourselves there be no
+such faculties as those of the will, and the scientific reason, we must
+either have an innate idea of them, which would overthrow the whole
+system; or we can have no idea at all. The process, by which Hume
+degraded the notion of cause and effect into a blind product of delusion
+and habit, into the mere sensation of proceeding life (nisus vitalis)
+associated with the images of the memory; this same process must be
+repeated to the equal degradation of every fundamental idea in ethics or
+theology.
+
+Far, very far am I from burthening with the odium of these consequences
+the moral characters of those who first formed, or have since adopted
+the system! It is most noticeable of the excellent and pious Hartley,
+that, in the proofs of the existence and attributes of God, with which
+his second volume commences, he makes no reference to the principle or
+results of the first. Nay, he assumes, as his foundations, ideas which,
+if we embrace the doctrines of his first volume, can exist no where but
+in the vibrations of the ethereal medium common to the nerves and to the
+atmosphere. Indeed the whole of the second volume is, with the fewest
+possible exceptions, independent of his peculiar system. So true is it,
+that the faith, which saves and sanctifies, is a collective energy, a
+total act of the whole moral being; that its living sensorium is in the
+heart; and that no errors of the understanding can be morally arraigned
+unless they have proceeded from the heart. But whether they be such, no
+man can be certain in the case of another, scarcely perhaps even in his
+own. Hence it follows by inevitable consequence, that man may perchance
+determine what is a heresy; but God only can know who is a heretic. It
+does not, however, by any means follow that opinions fundamentally
+false are harmless. A hundred causes may co-exist to form one complex
+antidote. Yet the sting of the adder remains venomous, though there
+are many who have taken up the evil thing, and it hurted them not. Some
+indeed there seem to have been, in an unfortunate neighbour nation at
+least, who have embraced this system with a full view of all its moral
+and religious consequences; some--
+
+    ------who deem themselves most free,
+    When they within this gross and visible sphere
+    Chain down the winged thought, scoffing ascent,
+    Proud in their meanness; and themselves they cheat
+    With noisy emptiness of learned phrase,
+    Their subtle fluids, impacts, essences,
+    Self-working tools, uncaus'd effects, and all
+    Those blind omniscients, those almighty slaves,
+    Untenanting creation of its God!
+
+Such men need discipline, not argument; they must be made better men,
+before they can become wiser.
+
+The attention will be more profitably employed in attempting to discover
+and expose the paralogisms, by the magic of which such a faith could
+find admission into minds framed for a nobler creed. These, it appears
+to me, may be all reduced to one sophism as their common genus; the
+mistaking the conditions of a thing for its causes and essence; and
+the process, by which we arrive at the knowledge of a faculty, for the
+faculty itself. The air I breathe is the condition of my life, not its
+cause. We could never have learned that we had eyes but by the process
+of seeing; yet having seen we know that the eyes must have pre-existed
+in order to render the process of sight possible. Let us cross-examine
+Hartley's scheme under the guidance of this distinction; and we shall
+discover, that contemporaneity, (Leibnitz's Lex Continui,) is the limit
+and condition of the laws of mind, itself being rather a law of matter,
+at least of phaenomena considered as material. At the utmost, it is to
+thought the same, as the law of gravitation is to loco-motion. In every
+voluntary movement we first counteract gravitation, in order to avail
+ourselves of it. It must exist, that there may be a something to be
+counteracted, and which, by its re-action, may aid the force that is
+exerted to resist it. Let us consider what we do when we leap. We first
+resist the gravitating power by an act purely voluntary, and then by
+another act, voluntary in part, we yield to it in order to alight on the
+spot, which we had previously proposed to ourselves. Now let a man watch
+his mind while he is composing; or, to take a still more common case,
+while he is trying to recollect a name; and he will find the process
+completely analogous. Most of my readers will have observed a small
+water-insect on the surface of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted
+shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the brook;
+and will have noticed, how the little animal wins its way up against the
+stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting
+the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a
+momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no unapt emblem of
+the mind's self-experience in the act of thinking. There are evidently
+two powers at work, which relatively to each other are active and
+passive; and this is not possible without an intermediate faculty, which
+is at once both active and passive. In philosophical language, we
+must denominate this intermediate faculty in all its degrees and
+determinations, the IMAGINATION. But, in common language, and especially
+on the subject of poetry, we appropriate the name to a superior degree
+of the faculty, joined to a superior voluntary control over it.
+
+Contemporaneity, then, being the common condition of all the laws of
+association, and a component element in the materia subjecta, the
+parts of which are to be associated, must needs be co-present with all.
+Nothing, therefore, can be more easy than to pass off on an incautious
+mind this constant companion of each, for the essential substance of
+all. But if we appeal to our own consciousness, we shall find that
+even time itself, as the cause of a particular act of association, is
+distinct from contemporaneity, as the condition of all association.
+Seeing a mackerel, it may happen, that I immediately think of
+gooseberries, because I at the same time ate mackerel with gooseberries
+as the sauce. The first syllable of the latter word, being that which
+had coexisted with the image of the bird so called, I may then think
+of a goose. In the next moment the image of a swan may arise before
+me, though I had never seen the two birds together. In the first two
+instances, I am conscious that their co-existence in time was the
+circumstance, that enabled me to recollect them; and equally conscious
+am I that the latter was recalled to me by the joint operation of
+likeness and contrast. So it is with cause and effect: so too with
+order. So I am able to distinguish whether it was proximity in time, or
+continuity in space, that occasioned me to recall B on the mention of A.
+They cannot be indeed separated from contemporaneity; for that would
+be to separate them from the mind itself. The act of consciousness is
+indeed identical with time considered in its essence. I mean time per
+se, as contra-distinguished from our notion of time; for this is always
+blended with the idea of space, which, as the opposite of time, is
+therefore its measure. Nevertheless the accident of seeing two objects
+at the same moment, and the accident of seeing them in the same place
+are two distinct or distinguishable causes: and the true practical
+general law of association is this; that whatever makes certain parts of
+a total impression more vivid or distinct than the rest, will determine
+the mind to recall these in preference to others equally linked together
+by the common condition of contemporaneity, or (what I deem a more
+appropriate and philosophical term) of continuity. But the will itself
+by confining and intensifying [25] the attention may arbitrarily give
+vividness or distinctness to any object whatsoever; and from hence we
+may deduce the uselessness, if not the absurdity, of certain recent
+schemes which promise an artificial memory, but which in reality can
+only produce a confusion and debasement of the fancy. Sound logic, as
+the habitual subordination of the individual to the species, and of
+the species to the genus; philosophical knowledge of facts under the
+relation of cause and effect; a cheerful and communicative temper
+disposing us to notice the similarities and contrasts of things, that
+we may be able to illustrate the one by the other; a quiet conscience;
+a condition free from anxieties; sound health, and above all (as far as
+relates to passive remembrance) a healthy digestion; these are the best,
+these are the only Arts of Memory.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+The system of Dualism introduced by Des Cartes--Refined first by
+Spinoza and afterwards by Leibnitz into the doctrine of Harmonia
+praestabilita--Hylozoism--Materialism--None of these systems, or any
+possible theory of association, supplies or supersedes a theory of
+perception, or explains the formation of the associable.
+
+
+To the best of my knowledge Des Cartes was the first philosopher who
+introduced the absolute and essential heterogenity of the soul as
+intelligence, and the body as matter. The assumption, and the form of
+speaking have remained, though the denial of all other properties
+to matter but that of extension, on which denial the whole system of
+Dualism is grounded, has been long exploded. For since impenetrability
+is intelligible only as a mode of resistance; its admission places the
+essence of matter in an act or power, which it possesses in common
+with spirit; and body and spirit are therefore no longer absolutely
+heterogeneous, but may without any absurdity be supposed to be different
+modes, or degrees in perfection, of a common substratum. To this
+possibility, however, it was not the fashion to advert. The soul was a
+thinking substance, and body a space-filling substance. Yet the apparent
+action of each on the other pressed heavy on the philosopher on the one
+hand; and no less heavily on the other hand pressed the evident truth,
+that the law of causality holds only between homogeneous things, that
+is, things having some common property; and cannot extend from one world
+into another, its contrary. A close analysis evinced it to be no less
+absurd than the question whether a man's affection for his wife lay
+North-east, or South-west of the love he bore towards his child.
+Leibnitz's doctrine of a pre-established harmony; which he certainly
+borrowed from Spinoza, who had himself taken the hint from Des Cartes's
+animal machines, was in its common interpretation too strange to survive
+the inventor--too repugnant to our common sense; which is not indeed
+entitled to a judicial voice in the courts of scientific philosophy;
+but whose whispers still exert a strong secret influence. Even Wolf,
+the admirer and illustrious systematizer of the Leibnitzian doctrine,
+contents himself with defending the possibility of the idea, but does
+not adopt it as a part of the edifice.
+
+The hypothesis of Hylozoism, on the other side, is the death of all
+rational physiology, and indeed of all physical science; for that
+requires a limitation of terms, and cannot consist with the arbitrary
+power of multiplying attributes by occult qualities. Besides, it answers
+no purpose; unless, indeed, a difficulty can be solved by multiplying
+it, or we can acquire a clearer notion of our soul by being told that we
+have a million of souls, and that every atom of our bodies has a soul
+of its own. Far more prudent is it to admit the difficulty once for all,
+and then let it lie at rest. There is a sediment indeed at the bottom
+of the vessel, but all the water above it is clear and transparent. The
+Hylozoist only shakes it up, and renders the whole turbid.
+
+But it is not either the nature of man, or the duty of the philosopher
+to despair concerning any important problem until, as in the squaring of
+the circle, the impossibility of a solution has been demonstrated. How
+the esse assumed as originally distinct from the scire, can ever unite
+itself with it; how being can transform itself into a knowing, becomes
+conceivable on one only condition; namely, if it can be shown that the
+vis representativa, or the Sentient, is itself a species of being;
+that is, either as a property or attribute, or as an hypostasis or self
+subsistence. The former--that thinking is a property of matter under
+particular conditions,--is, indeed, the assumption of materialism; a
+system which could not but be patronized by the philosopher, if only it
+actually performed what it promises. But how any affection from without
+can metamorphose itself into perception or will, the materialist has
+hitherto left, not only as incomprehensible as he found it, but has
+aggravated it into a comprehensible absurdity. For, grant that an object
+from without could act upon the conscious self, as on a consubstantial
+object; yet such an affection could only engender something homogeneous
+with itself. Motion could only propagate motion. Matter has no Inward.
+We remove one surface, but to meet with another. We can but divide
+a particle into particles; and each atom comprehends in itself the
+properties of the material universe. Let any reflecting mind make
+the experiment of explaining to itself the evidence of our sensuous
+intuitions, from the hypothesis that in any given perception there is
+a something which has been communicated to it by an impact, or
+an impression ab extra. In the first place, by the impact on the
+percipient, or ens representans, not the object itself, but only its
+action or effect, will pass into the same. Not the iron tongue, but
+its vibrations, pass into the metal of the bell. Now in our immediate
+perception, it is not the mere power or act of the object, but the
+object itself, which is immediately present. We might indeed attempt to
+explain this result by a chain of deductions and conclusions; but that,
+first, the very faculty of deducing and concluding would equally
+demand an explanation; and secondly, that there exists in fact no such
+intermediation by logical notions, such as those of cause and effect. It
+is the object itself, not the product of a syllogism, which is present
+to our consciousness. Or would we explain this supervention of the
+object to the sensation, by a productive faculty set in motion by
+an impulse; still the transition, into the percipient, of the object
+itself, from which the impulse proceeded, assumes a power that can
+permeate and wholly possess the soul,
+
+    And like a God by spiritual art,
+    Be all in all, and all in every part.
+
+And how came the percipient here? And what is become of the wonder-
+promising Matter, that was to perform all these marvels by force of
+mere figure, weight and motion? The most consistent proceeding of the
+dogmatic materialist is to fall back into the common rank of soul-and-
+bodyists; to affect the mysterious, and declare the whole process a
+revelation given, and not to be understood, which it would be profane
+to examine too closely. Datur non intelligitur. But a revelation
+unconfirmed by miracles, and a faith not commanded by the conscience,
+a philosopher may venture to pass by, without suspecting himself of any
+irreligious tendency.
+
+Thus, as materialism has been generally taught, it is utterly
+unintelligible, and owes all its proselytes to the propensity so common
+among men, to mistake distinct images for clear conceptions; and vice
+versa, to reject as inconceivable whatever from its own nature is
+unimaginable. But as soon as it becomes intelligible, it ceases to be
+materialism. In order to explain thinking, as a material phaenomenon, it
+is necessary to refine matter into a mere modification of intelligence,
+with the two-fold function of appearing and perceiving. Even so did
+Priestley in his controversy with Price. He stripped matter of all its
+material properties; substituted spiritual powers; and when we expected
+to find a body, behold! we had nothing but its ghost--the apparition of
+a defunct substance!
+
+I shall not dilate further on this subject; because it will, (if God
+grant health and permission), be treated of at large and systematically
+in a work, which I have many years been preparing, on the Productive
+Logos human and divine; with, and as the introduction to, a full
+commentary on the Gospel of St. John. To make myself intelligible as
+far as my present subject requires, it will be sufficient briefly to
+observe.--1. That all association demands and presupposes the existence
+of the thoughts and images to be associated.--2. That the hypothesis of
+an external world exactly correspondent to those images or modifications
+of our own being, which alone, according to this system, we actually
+behold, is as thorough idealism as Berkeley's, inasmuch as it equally,
+perhaps in a more perfect degree, removes all reality and immediateness
+of perception, and places us in a dream-world of phantoms and spectres,
+the inexplicable swarm and equivocal generation of motions in our own
+brains.--3. That this hypothesis neither involves the explanation, nor
+precludes the necessity, of a mechanism and co-adequate forces in the
+percipient, which at the more than magic touch of the impulse from
+without is to create anew for itself the correspondent object. The
+formation of a copy is not solved by the mere pre-existence of an
+original; the copyist of Raffael's Transfiguration must repeat more or
+less perfectly the process of Raffael. It would be easy to explain a
+thought from the image on the retina, and that from the geometry of
+light, if this very light did not present the very same difficulty.
+We might as rationally chant the Brahim creed of the tortoise that
+supported the bear, that supported the elephant, that supported the
+world, to the tune of "This is the house that Jack built." The sic
+Deo placitum est we all admit as the sufficient cause, and the divine
+goodness as the sufficient reason; but an answer to the Whence and Why
+is no answer to the How, which alone is the physiologist's concern.
+It is a sophisma pigrum, and (as Bacon hath said) the arrogance of
+pusillanimity, which lifts up the idol of a mortal's fancy and commands
+us to fall down and worship it, as a work of divine wisdom, an ancile or
+palladium fallen from heaven. By the very same argument the supporters
+of the Ptolemaic system might have rebuffed the Newtonian, and pointing
+to the sky with self-complacent grin [26] have appealed to common sense,
+whether the sun did not move and the earth stand still.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+Is Philosophy possible as a science, and what are its
+conditions?--Giordano Bruno--Literary Aristocracy, or the existence of
+a tacit compact among the learned as a privileged order--The Author's
+obligations to the Mystics--to Immanuel Kant--The difference between the
+letter and the spirit of Kant's writings, and a vindication of prudence
+in the teaching of Philosophy--Fichte's attempt to complete the Critical
+system--Its partial success and ultimate failure--Obligations to
+Schelling; and among English writers to Saumarez.
+
+
+After I had successively studied in the schools of Locke, Berkeley,
+Leibnitz, and Hartley, and could find in none of them an abiding place
+for my reason, I began to ask myself; is a system of philosophy; as
+different from mere history and historic classification, possible? If
+possible, what are its necessary conditions? I was for a while disposed
+to answer the first question in the negative, and to admit that the sole
+practicable employment for the human mind was to observe, to collect,
+and to classify. But I soon felt, that human nature itself fought up
+against this wilful resignation of intellect; and as soon did I find,
+that the scheme, taken with all its consequences and cleared of all
+inconsistencies, was not less impracticable than contranatural. Assume
+in its full extent the position, nihil in intellectu quod non prius
+in sensu, assume it without Leibnitz's qualifying praeter ipsum
+intellectum, and in the same sense, in which the position was understood
+by Hartley and Condillac: and then what Hume had demonstratively deduced
+from this concession concerning cause and effect, will apply with equal
+and crushing force to all the other eleven categorical forms [27], and
+the logical functions corresponding to them. How can we make bricks
+without straw;--or build without cement? We learn all things indeed by
+occasion of experience; but the very facts so learned force us inward on
+the antecedents, that must be presupposed in order to render experience
+itself possible. The first book of Locke's Essay, (if the supposed
+error, which it labours to subvert, be not a mere thing of straw, an
+absurdity which, no man ever did, or indeed ever could, believe,) is
+formed on a sophisma heterozaetaeseos, and involves the old mistake of
+Cum hoc: ergo, propter hoc.
+
+The term, Philosophy, defines itself as an affectionate seeking after
+the truth; but Truth is the correlative of Being. This again is no way
+conceivable, but by assuming as a postulate, that both are ab initio,
+identical and coinherent; that intelligence and being are reciprocally
+each other's substrate. I presumed that this was a possible conception,
+(i.e. that it involved no logical inconsonance,) from the length of time
+during which the scholastic definition of the Supreme Being, as actus
+purissimus sine ulla potentialitate, was received in the schools of
+Theology, both by the Pontifician and the Reformed divines. The early
+study of Plato and Plotinus, with the commentaries and the THEOLOGIA
+PLATONICA of the illustrious Florentine; of Proclus, and Gemistius
+Pletho; and at a later period of the De Immenso et Innumerabili and the
+"De la causa, principio et uno," of the philosopher of Nola, who could
+boast of a Sir Philip Sidney and Fulke Greville among his patrons, and
+whom the idolaters of Rome burnt as an atheist in the year 1600; had all
+contributed to prepare my mind for the reception and welcoming of the
+Cogito quia Sum, et Sum quia Cogito; a philosophy of seeming hardihood,
+but certainly the most ancient, and therefore presumptively the most
+natural.
+
+Why need I be afraid? Say rather how dare I be ashamed of the Teutonic
+theosophist, Jacob Behmen? Many, indeed, and gross were his delusions;
+and such as furnish frequent and ample occasion for the triumph of
+the learned over the poor ignorant shoemaker, who had dared think for
+himself. But while we remember that these delusions were such, as might
+be anticipated from his utter want of all intellectual discipline, and
+from his ignorance of rational psychology, let it not be forgotten that
+the latter defect he had in common with the most learned theologians
+of his age. Neither with books, nor with book-learned men was he
+conversant. A meek and shy quietest, his intellectual powers were never
+stimulated into feverous energy by crowds of proselytes, or by the
+ambition of proselyting. Jacob Behmen was an enthusiast, in
+the strictest sense, as not merely distinguished, but as
+contra-distinguished, from a fanatic. While I in part translate the
+following observations from a contemporary writer of the Continent, let
+me be permitted to premise, that I might have transcribed the substance
+from memoranda of my own, which were written many years before his
+pamphlet was given to the world; and that I prefer another's words to my
+own, partly as a tribute due to priority of publication; but still
+more from the pleasure of sympathy in a case where coincidence only was
+possible.
+
+Whoever is acquainted with the history of philosophy, during the last
+two or three centuries, cannot but admit that there appears to have
+existed a sort of secret and tacit compact among the learned, not to
+pass beyond a certain limit in speculative science. The privilege of
+free thought, so highly extolled, has at no time been held valid in
+actual practice, except within this limit; and not a single stride
+beyond it has ever been ventured without bringing obloquy on the
+transgressor. The few men of genius among the learned class, who
+actually did overstep this boundary, anxiously avoided the appearance of
+having so done. Therefore the true depth of science, and the penetration
+to the inmost centre, from which all the lines of knowledge diverge to
+their ever distant circumference, was abandoned to the illiterate and
+the simple, whom unstilled yearning, and an original ebulliency of
+spirit, had urged to the investigation of the indwelling and living
+ground of all things. These, then, because their names had never been
+enrolled in the guilds of the learned, were persecuted by the registered
+livery-men as interlopers on their rights and privileges. All without
+distinction were branded as fanatics and phantasts; not only those,
+whose wild and exorbitant imaginations had actually engendered only
+extravagant and grotesque phantasms, and whose productions were, for the
+most part, poor copies and gross caricatures of genuine inspiration; but
+the truly inspired likewise, the originals themselves. And this for no
+other reason, but because they were the unlearned, men of humble
+and obscure occupations. When, and from whom among the literati by
+profession, have we ever heard the divine doxology repeated, I thank
+thee, O Father! Lord of Heaven and Earth! because thou hast hid these
+things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes
+[28]. No; the haughty priests of learning not only banished from the
+schools and marts of science all who had dared draw living waters from
+the fountain, but drove them out of the very Temple, which mean time the
+buyers, and sellers, and money-changers were suffered to make a den of
+thieves.
+
+And yet it would not be easy to discover any substantial ground for
+this contemptuous pride in those literati, who have most distinguished
+themselves by their scorn of Behmen, Thaulerus, George Fox, and others;
+unless it be, that they could write orthographically, make smooth
+periods, and had the fashions of authorship almost literally at their
+fingers' ends, while the latter, in simplicity of soul, made their words
+immediate echoes of their feelings. Hence the frequency of those
+phrases among them, which have been mistaken for pretences to immediate
+inspiration; as for instance, "It was delivered unto me; "--"I strove
+not to speak;"-"I said, I will be silent;"--"But the word was in my
+heart as a burning fire;"--"and I could not forbear." Hence too the
+unwillingness to give offence; hence the foresight, and the dread of the
+clamours, which would be raised against them, so frequently avowed in
+the writings of these men, and expressed, as was natural, in the words
+of the only book, with which they were familiar [29]. "Woe is me that I
+am become a man of strife, and a man of contention,--I love peace: the
+souls of men are dear unto me: yet because I seek for light every one
+of them doth curse me!" O! it requires deeper feeling, and a stronger
+imagination, than belong to most of those, to whom reasoning and fluent
+expression have been as a trade learnt in boyhood, to conceive with what
+might, with what inward strivings and commotion, the perception of a
+new and vital truth takes possession of an uneducated man of genius.
+His meditations are almost inevitably employed on the eternal, or the
+everlasting; for "the world is not his friend, nor the world's law."
+Need we then be surprised, that, under an excitement at once so strong
+and so unusual, the man's body should sympathize with the struggles of
+his mind; or that he should at times be so far deluded, as to mistake
+the tumultuous sensations of his nerves, and the co-existing spectres of
+his fancy, as parts or symbols of the truths which were opening on
+him? It has indeed been plausibly observed, that in order to derive any
+advantage, or to collect any intelligible meaning, from the writings
+of these ignorant Mystics, the reader must bring with him a spirit and
+judgment superior to that of the writers themselves:
+
+    And what he brings, what needs he elsewhere seek?
+
+--a sophism, which I fully agree with Warburton, is unworthy of Milton;
+how much more so of the awful Person, in whose mouth he has placed it?
+One assertion I will venture to make, as suggested by my own experience,
+that there exist folios on the human understanding, and the nature
+of man, which would have a far juster claim to their high rank and
+celebrity, if in the whole huge volume there could be found as much
+fulness of heart and intellect, as burst forth in many a simple page of
+George Fox, Jacob Behmen, and even of Behmen's commentator, the pious
+and fervid William Law.
+
+The feeling of gratitude, which I cherish toward these men, has caused
+me to digress further than I had foreseen or proposed; but to have
+passed them over in an historical sketch of my literary life and
+opinions, would have seemed to me like the denial of a debt, the
+concealment of a boon. For the writings of these Mystics acted in
+no slight degree to prevent my mind from being imprisoned within the
+outline of any single dogmatic system. They contributed to keep alive
+the heart in the head; gave me an indistinct, yet stirring and working
+presentiment, that all the products of the mere reflective faculty
+partook of death, and were as the rattling twigs and sprays in winter,
+into which a sap was yet to be propelled from some root to which I had
+not penetrated, if they were to afford my soul either food or shelter.
+If they were too often a moving cloud of smoke to me by day, yet they
+were always a pillar of fire throughout the night, during my wanderings
+through the wilderness of doubt, and enabled me to skirt, without
+crossing, the sandy deserts of utter unbelief. That the system is
+capable of being converted into an irreligious Pantheism, I well know.
+The Ethics of Spinoza, may, or may not, be an instance. But at no time
+could I believe, that in itself and essentially it is incompatible with
+religion, natural or revealed: and now I am most thoroughly persuaded of
+the contrary. The writings of the illustrious sage of Koenigsberg, the
+founder of the Critical Philosophy, more than any other work, at once
+invigorated and disciplined my understanding. The originality, the
+depth, and the compression of the thoughts; the novelty and subtlety,
+yet solidity and importance of the distinctions; the adamantine chain
+of the logic; and I will venture to add--(paradox as it will appear to
+those who have taken their notion of Immanuel Kant from Reviewers and
+Frenchmen)--the clearness and evidence, of the Critique of the Pure
+Reason; and Critique of the Judgment; of the Metaphysical Elements
+of Natural Philosophy; and of his Religion within the bounds of Pure
+Reason, took possession of me as with the giant's hand. After fifteen
+years' familiarity with them, I still read these and all his other
+productions with undiminished delight and increasing admiration. The few
+passages that remained obscure to me, after due efforts of thought, (as
+the chapter on original apperception,) and the apparent contradictions
+which occur, I soon found were hints and insinuations referring to
+ideas, which KANT either did not think it prudent to avow, or which he
+considered as consistently left behind in a pure analysis, not of human
+nature in toto, but of the speculative intellect alone. Here therefore
+he was constrained to commence at the point of reflection, or natural
+consciousness: while in his moral system he was permitted to assume a
+higher ground (the autonomy of the will) as a postulate deducible from
+the unconditional command, or (in the technical language of his school)
+the categorical imperative, of the conscience. He had been in imminent
+danger of persecution during the reign of the late king of Prussia, that
+strange compound of lawless debauchery and priest-ridden superstition:
+and it is probable that he had little inclination, in his old age,
+to act over again the fortunes, and hair-breadth escapes of Wolf. The
+expulsion of the first among Kant's disciples, who attempted to complete
+his system, from the University of Jena, with the confiscation and
+prohibition of the obnoxious work by the joint efforts of the courts of
+Saxony and Hanover, supplied experimental proof, that the venerable
+old man's caution was not groundless. In spite therefore of his own
+declarations, I could never believe, that it was possible for him to
+have meant no more by his Noumenon, or Thing in itself, than his mere
+words express; or that in his own conception he confined the whole
+plastic power to the forms of the intellect, leaving for the external
+cause, for the materiale of our sensations, a matter without form, which
+is doubtless inconceivable. I entertained doubts likewise, whether, in
+his own mind, he even laid all the stress, which he appears to do, on
+the moral postulates.
+
+An idea, in the highest sense of that word, cannot be conveyed but by
+a symbol; and, except in geometry, all symbols of necessity involve an
+apparent contradiction. Phonaese synetoisin: and for those who could
+not pierce through this symbolic husk, his writings were not intended.
+Questions which cannot be fully answered without exposing the respondent
+to personal danger, are not entitled to a fair answer; and yet to say
+this openly, would in many cases furnish the very advantage which the
+adversary is insidiously seeking after. Veracity does not consist
+in saying, but in the intention of communicating, truth; and the
+philosopher who cannot utter the whole truth without conveying
+falsehood, and at the same time, perhaps, exciting the most malignant
+passions, is constrained to express himself either mythically or
+equivocally. When Kant therefore was importuned to settle the disputes
+of his commentators himself, by declaring what he meant, how could
+he decline the honours of martyrdom with less offence, than by simply
+replying, "I meant what I said, and at the age of near fourscore, I have
+something else, and more important to do, than to write a commentary on
+my own works."
+
+Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre, or Lore of Ultimate Science, was to add the
+key-stone of the arch: and by commencing with an act, instead of a thing
+or substance, Fichte assuredly gave the first mortal blow to Spinozism,
+as taught by Spinoza himself; and supplied the idea of a system truly
+metaphysical, and of a metaphysique truly systematic: (i.e. having
+its spring and principle within itself). But this fundamental idea he
+overbuilt with a heavy mass of mere notions, and psychological acts
+of arbitrary reflection. Thus his theory degenerated into a crude [30]
+egoismus, a boastful and hyperstoic hostility to Nature, as lifeless,
+godless, and altogether unholy: while his religion consisted in the
+assumption of a mere Ordo ordinans, which we were permitted exoterice
+to call GOD; and his ethics in an ascetic, and almost monkish,
+mortification of the natural passions and desires. In Schelling's
+Natur-Philosophie, and the System des transcendentalen Idealismus, I
+first found a genial coincidence with much that I had toiled out for
+myself, and a powerful assistance in what I had yet to do.
+
+I have introduced this statement, as appropriate to the narrative
+nature of this sketch; yet rather in reference to the work which I have
+announced in a preceding page, than to my present subject. It would be
+but a mere act of justice to myself, were I to warn my future readers,
+than an identity of thought, or even similarity of phrase, will not be
+at all times a certain proof that the passage has been borrowed from
+Schelling, or that the conceptions were originally learnt from him. In
+this instance, as in the dramatic lectures of Schlegel to which I have
+before alluded, from the same motive of self-defence against the charge
+of plagiarism, many of the most striking resemblances, indeed all the
+main and fundamental ideas, were born and matured in my mind before
+I had ever seen a single page of the German Philosopher; and I might
+indeed affirm with truth, before the more important works of Schelling
+had been written, or at least made public. Nor is this coincidence
+at all to be wondered at. We had studied in the same school; been
+disciplined by the same preparatory philosophy, namely, the writings
+of Kant; we had both equal obligations to the polar logic and dynamic
+philosophy of Giordano Bruno; and Schelling has lately, and, as of
+recent acquisition, avowed that same affectionate reverence for the
+labours of Behmen, and other mystics, which I had formed at a much
+earlier period. The coincidence of Schelling's system with certain
+general ideas of Behmen, he declares to have been mere coincidence;
+while my obligations have been more direct. He needs give to Behmen only
+feelings of sympathy; while I owe him a debt of gratitude. God forbid!
+that I should be suspected of a wish to enter into a rivalry with
+Schelling for the honours so unequivocally his right, not only as a
+great and original genius, but as the founder of the Philosophy of
+Nature, and as the most successful improver of the Dynamic System [31]
+which, begun by Bruno, was re-introduced (in a more philosophical form,
+and freed from all its impurities and visionary accompaniments) by Kant;
+in whom it was the native and necessary growth of his own system. Kant's
+followers, however, on whom (for the greater part) their master's cloak
+had fallen without, or with a very scanty portion of, his spirit, had
+adopted his dynamic ideas, only as a more refined species of mechanics.
+With exception of one or two fundamental ideas, which cannot be withheld
+from Fichte, to Schelling we owe the completion, and the most important
+victories, of this revolution in philosophy. To me it will be happiness
+and honour enough, should I succeed in rendering the system itself
+intelligible to my countrymen, and in the application of it to the most
+awful of subjects for the most important of purposes. Whether a work
+is the offspring of a man's own spirit, and the product of original
+thinking, will be discovered by those who are its sole legitimate
+judges, by better tests than the mere reference to dates. For readers in
+general, let whatever shall be found in this or any future work of
+mine, that resembles, or coincides with, the doctrines of my German
+predecessor, though contemporary, be wholly attributed to him: provided,
+that the absence of distinct references to his books, which I could
+not at all times make with truth as designating citations or thoughts
+actually derived from him; and which, I trust, would, after this general
+acknowledgment be superfluous; be not charged on me as an ungenerous
+concealment or intentional plagiarism. I have not indeed (eheu! res
+angusta domi!) been hitherto able to procure more than two of his
+books, viz. the first volume of his collected Tracts, and his System of
+Transcendental Idealism; to which, however, I must add a small pamphlet
+against Fichte, the spirit of which was to my feelings painfully
+incongruous with the principles, and which (with the usual allowance
+afforded to an antithesis) displayed the love of wisdom rather than the
+wisdom of love. I regard truth as a divine ventriloquist: I care not
+from whose mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed, if only the words
+are audible and intelligible. "Albeit, I must confess to be half in
+doubt, whether I should bring it forth or no, it being so contrary to
+the eye of the world, and the world so potent in most men's hearts, that
+I shall endanger either not to be regarded or not to be understood."
+
+And to conclude the subject of citation, with a cluster of citations,
+which as taken from books, not in common use, may contribute to the
+reader's amusement, as a voluntary before a sermon: "Dolet mihi quidem
+deliciis literarum inescatos subito jam homines adeo esse, praesertim
+qui Christianos se profitentur, et legere nisi quod ad delectationem
+facit, sustineant nihil: unde et discipline severiores et philosophia
+ipsa jam fere prorsus etiam a doctis negliguntur. Quod quidem propositum
+studiorum, nisi mature corrigitur, tam magnum rebus incommodum dabit,
+quam dedit barbaries olim. Pertinax res barbaries est, fateor: sed minus
+potent tamen, quam illa mollities et persuasa prudentia literarum,
+si ratione caret, sapientiae virtutisque specie mortales misere
+circumducens. Succedet igitur, ut arbitror, haud ita multo post, pro
+rusticana seculi nostri ruditate captatrix illa communi-loquentia robur
+animi virilis omne, omnem virtutem masculam, profligatura nisi cavetur."
+
+A too prophetic remark, which has been in fulfilment from the year
+1680, to the present 1815. By persuasa prudentia, Grynaeus means self-
+complacent common sense as opposed to science and philosophic reason.
+
+Est medius ordo, et velut equestris, ingeniorum quidem sagacium, et
+commodorum rebus humanis, non tamen in primam magnitudinem patentium.
+Eorum hominum, ut sic dicam, major annona est. Sedulum esse, nihil
+temere loqui, assuescere labori, et imagine prudentiae et modistiae
+tegere angustiores partes captus, dum exercitationem ac usum, quo isti
+in civilibus rebus pollent, pro natura et magnitudine ingenii plerique
+accipiunt.
+
+"As therefore physicians are many times forced to leave such methods of
+curing as themselves know to be the fittest, and being overruled by the
+patient's impatiency, are fain to try the best they can: in like sort,
+considering how the case doth stand with this present age, full of
+tongue and weak of brain, behold we would (if our subject permitted it)
+yield to the stream thereof. That way we would be contented to prove
+our thesis, which being the worse in itself, is notwithstanding now by
+reason of common imbecility the fitter and likelier to be brooked."
+
+If this fear could be rationally entertained in the controversial age
+of Hooker, under the then robust discipline of the scholastic logic,
+pardonably may a writer of the present times anticipate a scanty
+audience for abstrusest themes, and truths that can neither be
+communicated nor received without effort of thought, as well as patience
+of attention.
+
+    "Che s'io non erro al calcolar de' punti,
+     Par ch' Asinina Stella a noi predomini,
+     E'l Somaro e'l Castron si sian congiunti.
+     Il tempo d'Apuleio piu non si nomini:
+     Che se allora un sol huom sembrava un Asino,
+     Mille Asini a' miei di rassembran huomini!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+A chapter of digression and anecdotes, as an interlude preceding that on
+the nature and genesis of the Imagination or Plastic Power--On
+pedantry and pedantic expressions--Advice to young authors respecting
+publication--Various anecdotes of the Author's literary life, and the
+progress of his opinions in Religion and Politics.
+
+
+"Esemplastic. The word is not in Johnson, nor have I met with it
+elsewhere." Neither have, I. I constructed it myself from the Greek
+words, eis en plattein, to shape into one; because, having to convey a
+new sense, I thought that a new term would both aid the recollection of
+my meaning, and prevent its being confounded with the usual import of
+the word, imagination. "But this is pedantry!" Not necessarily so, I
+hope. If I am not misinformed, pedantry consists in the use of words
+unsuitable to the time, place, and company. The language of the market
+would be in the schools as pedantic, though it might not be reprobated
+by that name, as the language of the schools in the market. The mere
+man of the world, who insists that no other terms but such as occur in
+common conversation should be employed in a scientific disquisition, and
+with no greater precision, is as truly a pedant as the man of letters,
+who either over-rating the acquirements of his auditors, or misled by
+his own familiarity with technical or scholastic terms, converses at the
+wine-table with his mind fixed on his museum or laboratory; even though
+the latter pedant instead of desiring his wife to make the tea should
+bid her add to the quant. suff. of thea Sinensis the oxyd of hydrogen
+saturated with caloric. To use the colloquial (and in truth somewhat
+vulgar) metaphor, if the pedant of the cloister, and the pedant of the
+lobby, both smell equally of the shop, yet the odour from the Russian
+binding of good old authentic-looking folios and quartos is less
+annoying than the steams from the tavern or bagnio. Nay, though the
+pedantry of the scholar should betray a little ostentation, yet a
+well-conditioned mind would more easily, methinks, tolerate the fox
+brush of learned vanity, than the sans culotterie of a contemptuous
+ignorance, that assumes a merit from mutilation in the self-consoling
+sneer at the pompous incumbrance of tails.
+
+The first lesson of philosophic discipline is to wean the student's
+attention from the degrees of things, which alone form the vocabulary of
+common life, and to direct it to the kind abstracted from degree. Thus
+the chemical student is taught not to be startled at disquisitions on
+the heat in ice, or on latent and fixible light. In such discourse the
+instructor has no other alternative than either to use old words
+with new meanings (the plan adopted by Darwin in his Zoonomia;) or to
+introduce new terms, after the example of Linnaeus, and the framers
+of the present chemical nomenclature. The latter mode is evidently
+preferable, were it only that the former demands a twofold exertion of
+thought in one and the same act. For the reader, or hearer, is required
+not only to learn and bear in mind the new definition; but to unlearn,
+and keep out of his view, the old and habitual meaning; a far more
+difficult and perplexing task, and for which the mere semblance of
+eschewing pedantry seems to me an inadequate compensation. Where,
+indeed, it is in our power to recall an unappropriate term that had
+without sufficient reason become obsolete, it is doubtless a less evil
+to restore than to coin anew. Thus to express in one word all that
+appertains to the perception, considered as passive and merely
+recipient, I have adopted from our elder classics the word sensuous;
+because sensual is not at present used, except in a bad sense, or at
+least as a moral distinction; while sensitive and sensible would each
+convey a different meaning. Thus too have I followed Hooker, Sanderson,
+Milton and others, in designating the immediateness of any act or
+object of knowledge by the word intuition, used sometimes subjectively,
+sometimes objectively, even as we use the word, thought; now as the
+thought, or act of thinking, and now as a thought, or the object of
+our reflection; and we do this without confusion or obscurity. The very
+words, objective and subjective, of such constant recurrence in the
+schools of yore, I have ventured to re-introduce, because I could not
+so briefly or conveniently by any more familiar terms distinguish the
+percipere from the percipi. Lastly, I have cautiously discriminated the
+terms, the reason, and the understanding, encouraged and confirmed
+by the authority of our genuine divines and philosophers, before the
+Revolution.
+
+    ------both life, and sense,
+    Fancy and understanding; whence the soul
+    Reason receives, and reason is her bring,
+    Discursive or intuitive: discourse [32]
+    Is oftest yours, the latter most is ours,
+    Differing but in degree, in kind the same.
+
+I say, that I was confirmed by authority so venerable: for I had
+previous and higher motives in my own conviction of the importance, nay,
+of the necessity of the distinction, as both an indispensable condition
+and a vital part of all sound speculation in metaphysics, ethical or
+theological. To establish this distinction was one main object of
+The Friend; if even in a biography of my own literary life I can with
+propriety refer to a work, which was printed rather than published, or
+so published that it had been well for the unfortunate author, if it
+had remained in manuscript. I have even at this time bitter cause for
+remembering that, which a number of my subscribers have but a trifling
+motive for forgetting. This effusion might have been spared; but I
+would fain flatter myself, that the reader will be less austere than an
+oriental professor of the bastinado, who during an attempt to extort per
+argumentum baculinum a full confession from a culprit, interrupted his
+outcry of pain by reminding him, that it was "a mere digression!" "All
+this noise, Sir! is nothing to the point, and no sort of answer to my
+questions!" "Ah! but," (replied the sufferer,) "it is the most pertinent
+reply in nature to your blows."
+
+An imprudent man of common goodness of heart cannot but wish to turn
+even his imprudences to the benefit of others, as far as this is
+possible. If therefore any one of the readers of this semi-narrative
+should be preparing or intending a periodical work, I warn him, in the
+first place, against trusting in the number of names on his subscription
+list. For he cannot be certain that the names were put down by
+sufficient authority; or, should that be ascertained, it still remains
+to be known, whether they were not extorted by some over zealous
+friend's importunity; whether the subscriber had not yielded his name,
+merely from want of courage to answer, no; and with the intention of
+dropping the work as soon as possible. One gentleman procured me nearly
+a hundred names for THE FRIEND, and not only took frequent opportunity
+to remind me of his success in his canvass, but laboured to impress my
+mind with the sense of the obligation, I was under to the subscribers;
+for, (as he very pertinently admonished me,) "fifty-two shillings a year
+was a large sum to be bestowed on one individual, where there were so
+many objects of charity with strong claims to the assistance of the
+benevolent." Of these hundred patrons ninety threw up the publication
+before the fourth number, without any notice; though it was well known
+to them, that in consequence of the distance, and the slowness and
+irregularity of the conveyance, I was compelled to lay in a stock of
+stamped paper for at least eight weeks beforehand; each sheet of which
+stood me in five pence previously to its arrival at my printer's; though
+the subscription money was not to be received till the twenty-first week
+after the commencement of the work; and lastly, though it was in nine
+cases out of ten impracticable for me to receive the money for two or
+three numbers without paying an equal sum for the postage.
+
+In confirmation of my first caveat, I will select one fact among many.
+On my list of subscribers, among a considerable number of names equally
+flattering, was that of an Earl of Cork, with his address. He might as
+well have been an Earl of Bottle, for aught I knew of him, who had been
+content to reverence the peerage in abstracto, rather than in concretis.
+Of course THE FRIEND was regularly sent as far, if I remember right, as
+the eighteenth number; that is, till a fortnight before the subscription
+was to be paid. And lo! just at this time I received a letter from his
+Lordship, reproving me in language far more lordly than courteous for my
+impudence in directing my pamphlets to him, who knew nothing of me or my
+work! Seventeen or eighteen numbers of which, however, his Lordship
+was pleased to retain, probably for the culinary or post-culinary
+conveniences of his servants.
+
+Secondly, I warn all others from the attempt to deviate from the
+ordinary mode of publishing a work by the trade. I thought indeed, that
+to the purchaser it was indifferent, whether thirty per cent of the
+purchase-money went to the booksellers or to the government; and that
+the convenience of receiving the work by the post at his own door would
+give the preference to the latter. It is hard, I own, to have been
+labouring for years, in collecting and arranging the materials; to have
+spent every shilling that could be spared after the necessaries of life
+had been furnished, in buying books, or in journeys for the purpose of
+consulting them or of acquiring facts at the fountain head; then to buy
+the paper, pay for the printing, and the like, all at least fifteen per
+cent beyond what the trade would have paid; and then after all to give
+thirty per cent not of the net profits, but of the gross results of the
+sale, to a man who has merely to give the books shelf or warehouse room,
+and permit his apprentice to hand them over the counter to those who may
+ask for them; and this too copy by copy, although, if the work be on any
+philosophical or scientific subject, it may be years before the edition
+is sold off. All this, I confess, must seem a hardship, and one, to
+which the products of industry in no other mode of exertion are subject.
+Yet even this is better, far better, than to attempt in any way to unite
+the functions of author and publisher. But the most prudent mode is to
+sell the copy-right, at least of one or more editions, for the most that
+the trade will offer. By few only can a large remuneration be expected;
+but fifty pounds and ease of mind are of more real advantage to a
+literary man, than the chance of five hundred with the certainty
+of insult and degrading anxieties. I shall have been grievously
+misunderstood, if this statement should be interpreted as written
+with the desire of detracting from the character of booksellers or
+publishers. The individuals did not make the laws and customs of their
+trade, but, as in every other trade, take them as they find them. Till
+the evil can be proved to be removable, and without the substitution of
+an equal or greater inconvenience, it were neither wise nor manly even
+to complain of it. But to use it as a pretext for speaking, or even for
+thinking, or feeling, unkindly or opprobriously of the tradesmen, as
+individuals, would be something worse than unwise or even than unmanly;
+it would be immoral and calumnious. My motives point in a far different
+direction and to far other objects, as will be seen in the conclusion of
+the chapter.
+
+A learned and exemplary old clergyman, who many years ago went to his
+reward followed by the regrets and blessings of his flock, published
+at his own expense two volumes octavo, entitled, A NEW THEORY OF
+REDEMPTION. The work was most severely handled in THE MONTHLY or
+CRITICAL REVIEW, I forget which; and this unprovoked hostility became
+the good old man's favourite topic of conversation among his friends.
+"Well!" (he used to exclaim,) "in the second edition, I shall have an
+opportunity of exposing both the ignorance and the malignity of the
+anonymous critic." Two or three years however passed by without any
+tidings from the bookseller, who had undertaken the printing and
+publication of the work, and who was perfectly at his ease, as the
+author was known to be a man of large property. At length the accounts
+were written for; and in the course of a few weeks they were presented
+by the rider for the house, in person. My old friend put on
+his spectacles, and holding the scroll with no very firm hand,
+began--"Paper, so much: O moderate enough--not at all beyond my
+expectation! Printing, so much: well! moderate enough! Stitching,
+covers, advertisements, carriage, and so forth, so much."--Still
+nothing amiss. Selleridge (for orthography is no necessary part of
+a bookseller's literary acquirements) L3. 3s. "Bless me! only three
+guineas for the what d'ye call it--the selleridge?" "No more, Sir!"
+replied the rider. "Nay, but that is too moderate!" rejoined my old
+friend. "Only three guineas for selling a thousand copies of a work in
+two volumes?" "O Sir!" (cries the young traveller) "you have mistaken
+the word. There have been none of them sold; they have been sent
+back from London long ago; and this L3. 3s. is for the cellaridge,
+or warehouse-room in our book cellar." The work was in consequence
+preferred from the ominous cellar of the publisher's to the author's
+garret; and, on presenting a copy to an acquaintance, the old gentleman
+used to tell the anecdote with great humour and still greater good
+nature.
+
+With equal lack of worldly knowledge, I was a far more than equal
+sufferer for it, at the very outset of my authorship. Toward the close
+of the first year from the time, that in an inauspicious hour I left the
+friendly cloisters, and the happy grove of quiet, ever honoured Jesus
+College, Cambridge, I was persuaded by sundry philanthropists and
+Anti-polemists to set on foot a periodical work, entitled THE WATCHMAN,
+that, according to the general motto of the work, all might know the
+truth, and that the truth might make us free! In order to exempt it from
+the stamp-tax, and likewise to contribute as little as possible to the
+supposed guilt of a war against freedom, it was to be published on every
+eighth day, thirty-two pages, large octavo, closely printed, and price
+only four-pence. Accordingly with a flaming prospectus,--"Knowledge is
+Power," "To cry the state of the political atmosphere,"--and so forth,
+I set off on a tour to the North, from Bristol to Sheffield, for the
+purpose of procuring customers, preaching by the way in most of
+the great towns, as an hireless volunteer, in a blue coat and white
+waistcoat, that not a rag of the woman of Babylon might be seen on me.
+For I was at that time and long after, though a Trinitarian (that is
+ad normam Platonis) in philosophy, yet a zealous Unitarian in religion;
+more accurately, I was a Psilanthropist, one of those who believe our
+Lord to have been the real son of Joseph, and who lay the main stress on
+the resurrection rather than on the crucifixion. O! never can I remember
+those days with either shame or regret. For I was most sincere, most
+disinterested. My opinions were indeed in many and most important points
+erroneous; but my heart was single. Wealth, rank, life itself then
+seemed cheap to me, compared with the interests of what I believed to
+be the truth, and the will of my Maker. I cannot even accuse myself of
+having been actuated by vanity; for in the expansion of my enthusiasm I
+did not think of myself at all.
+
+My campaign commenced at Birmingham; and my first attack was on a rigid
+Calvinist, a tallow-chandler by trade. He was a tall dingy man, in whom
+length was so predominant over breadth, that he might almost have been
+borrowed for a foundery poker. O that face! a face kat' emphasin! I
+have it before me at this moment. The lank, black, twine-like hair,
+pingui-nitescent, cut in a straight line along the black stubble of his
+thin gunpowder eye-brows, that looked like a scorched after-math from a
+last week's shaving. His coat collar behind in perfect unison, both of
+colour and lustre, with the coarse yet glib cordage, which I suppose
+he called his hair, and which with a bend inward at the nape of the
+neck,--the only approach to flexure in his whole figure,--slunk in
+behind his waistcoat; while the countenance lank, dark, very hard, and
+with strong perpendicular furrows, gave me a dim notion of some one
+looking at me through a used gridiron, all soot, grease, and iron! But
+he was one of the thorough-bred, a true lover of liberty, and, as I was
+informed, had proved to the satisfaction of many, that Mr. Pitt was one
+of the horns of the second beast in THE REVELATIONS, that spake as a
+dragon. A person, to whom one of my letters of recommendation had been
+addressed, was my introducer. It was a new event in my life, my first
+stroke in the new business I had undertaken of an author, yea, and of
+an author trading on his own account. My companion after some imperfect
+sentences and a multitude of hums and has abandoned the cause to his
+client; and I commenced an harangue of half an hour to Phileleutheros,
+the tallow-chandler, varying my notes, through the whole gamut of
+eloquence, from the ratiocinative to the declamatory, and in the latter
+from the pathetic to the indignant. I argued, I described, I promised, I
+prophesied; and beginning with the captivity of nations I ended with the
+near approach of the millennium, finishing the whole with some of my own
+verses describing that glorious state out of the Religious Musings:
+
+    ------Such delights
+    As float to earth, permitted visitants!
+    When in some hour of solemn jubilee
+    The massive gates of Paradise are thrown
+    Wide open, and forth come in fragments wild
+    Sweet echoes of unearthly melodies,
+    And odours snatched from beds of amaranth,
+    And they, that from the crystal river of life
+    Spring up on freshened wing, ambrosial gales!
+
+My taper man of lights listened with perseverant and praiseworthy
+patience, though, as I was afterwards told, on complaining of certain
+gales that were not altogether ambrosial, it was a melting day with
+him. "And what, Sir," he said, after a short pause, "might the cost be?"
+"Only four-pence,"--(O! how I felt the anti-climax, the abysmal
+bathos of that four-pence!)--"only four-pence, Sir, each number, to be
+published on every eighth day."--"That comes to a deal of money at
+the end of a year. And how much, did you say, there was to be for
+the money?"--"Thirty-two pages, Sir, large octavo, closely
+printed."--"Thirty and two pages? Bless me! why except what I does in a
+family way on the Sabbath, that's more than I ever reads, Sir! all
+the year round. I am as great a one, as any man in Brummagem, Sir!
+for liberty and truth and all them sort of things, but as to this,--no
+offence, I hope, Sir,--I must beg to be excused."
+
+So ended my first canvass: from causes that I shall presently mention, I
+made but one other application in person. This took place at Manchester
+to a stately and opulent wholesale dealer in cottons. He took my letter
+of introduction, and, having perused it, measured me from head to foot
+and again from foot to head, and then asked if I had any bill or invoice
+of the thing. I presented my prospectus to him. He rapidly skimmed
+and hummed over the first side, and still more rapidly the second and
+concluding page; crushed it within his fingers and the palm of his hand;
+then most deliberately and significantly rubbed and smoothed one part
+against the other; and lastly putting it into his pocket turned his back
+on me with an "over-run with these articles!" and so without another
+syllable retired into his counting house. And, I can truly say, to my
+unspeakable amusement.
+
+This, I have said, was my second and last attempt. On returning baffled
+from the first, in which I had vainly essayed to repeat the miracle of
+Orpheus with the Brummagem patriot, I dined with the tradesman who had
+introduced me to him. After dinner he importuned me to smoke a pipe with
+him, and two or three other illuminati of the same rank. I objected,
+both because I was engaged to spend the evening with a minister and
+his friends, and because I had never smoked except once or twice in
+my lifetime, and then it was herb tobacco mixed with Oronooko. On the
+assurance, however, that the tobacco was equally mild, and seeing
+too that it was of a yellow colour; not forgetting the lamentable
+difficulty, I have always experienced, in saying, "No," and in
+abstaining from what the people about me were doing,--I took half a
+pipe, filling the lower half of the bowl with salt. I was soon however
+compelled to resign it, in consequence of a giddiness and distressful
+feeling in my eyes, which, as I had drunk but a single glass of ale,
+must, I knew, have been the effect of the tobacco. Soon after, deeming
+myself recovered, I sallied forth to my engagement; but the walk and the
+fresh air brought on all the symptoms again, and, I had scarcely entered
+the minister's drawing-room, and opened a small pacquet of letters,
+which he had received from Bristol for me; ere I sank back on the sofa
+in a sort of swoon rather than sleep. Fortunately I had found just time
+enough to inform him of the confused state of my feelings, and of
+the occasion. For here and thus I lay, my face like a wall that is
+white-washing, deathly pale and with the cold drops of perspiration
+running down it from my forehead, while one after another there dropped
+in the different gentlemen, who had been invited to meet, and spend the
+evening with me, to the number of from fifteen to twenty. As the
+poison of tobacco acts but for a short time, I at length awoke from
+insensibility, and looked round on the party, my eyes dazzled by the
+candles which had been lighted in the interim. By way of relieving my
+embarrassment one of the gentlemen began the conversation, with "Have
+you seen a paper to-day, Mr. Coleridge?" "Sir!" I replied, rubbing my
+eyes, "I am far from convinced, that a Christian is permitted to read
+either newspapers or any other works of merely political and temporary
+interest." This remark, so ludicrously inapposite to, or rather,
+incongruous with, the purpose, for which I was known to have visited
+Birmingham, and to assist me in which they were all then met, produced
+an involuntary and general burst of laughter; and seldom indeed have
+I passed so many delightful hours, as I enjoyed in that room from
+the moment of that laugh till an early hour the next morning.
+Never, perhaps, in so mixed and numerous a party have I since heard
+conversation, sustained with such animation, enriched with such variety
+of information and enlivened with such a flow of anecdote. Both then
+and afterwards they all joined in dissuading me from proceeding with
+my scheme; assured me in the most friendly and yet most flattering
+expressions, that neither was the employment fit for me, nor I fit for
+the employment. Yet, if I determined on persevering in it, they promised
+to exert themselves to the utmost to procure subscribers, and insisted
+that I should make no more applications in person, but carry on the
+canvass by proxy. The same hospitable reception, the same dissuasion,
+and, that failing, the same kind exertions in my behalf, I met with at
+Manchester, Derby, Nottingham, Sheffield,--indeed, at every place in
+which I took up my sojourn. I often recall with affectionate pleasure
+the many respectable men who interested themselves for me, a perfect
+stranger to them, not a few of whom I can still name among my friends.
+They will bear witness for me how opposite even then my principles were
+to those of Jacobinism or even of democracy, and can attest the strict
+accuracy of the statement which I have left on record in the tenth and
+eleventh numbers of THE FRIEND.
+
+From this rememberable tour I returned with nearly a thousand names on
+the subscription list of THE WATCHMAN; yet more than half convinced,
+that prudence dictated the abandonment of the scheme. But for this
+very reason I persevered in it; for I was at that period of my life
+so completely hag-ridden by the fear of being influenced by selfish
+motives, that to know a mode of conduct to be the dictate of prudence
+was a sort of presumptive proof to my feelings, that the contrary
+was the dictate of duty. Accordingly, I commenced the work, which was
+announced in London by long bills in letters larger than had ever been
+seen before, and which, I have been informed, for I did not see them
+myself, eclipsed the glories even of the lottery puffs. But alas!
+the publication of the very first number was delayed beyond the day
+announced for its appearance. In the second number an essay against fast
+days, with a most censurable application of a text from Isaiah for its
+motto, lost me near five hundred of my subscribers at one blow. In the
+two following numbers I made enemies of all my Jacobin and democratic
+patrons; for, disgusted by their infidelity, and their adoption of
+French morals with French psilosophy; and perhaps thinking, that charity
+ought to begin nearest home; Instead of abusing the government and the
+Aristocrats chiefly or entirely, as had been expected of me, I levelled
+my attacks at "modern patriotism," and even ventured to declare my
+belief, that whatever the motives of ministers might have been for the
+sedition, or as it was then the fashion to call them, the gagging bills,
+yet the bills themselves would produce an effect to be desired by all
+the true friends of freedom, as far as they should contribute to deter
+men from openly declaiming on subjects, the principles of which they had
+never bottomed and from "pleading to the poor and ignorant, instead
+of pleading for them." At the same time I avowed my conviction, that
+national education and a concurring spread of the Gospel were the
+indispensable condition of any true political melioration. Thus by the
+time the seventh number was published, I had the mortification--(but why
+should I say this, when in truth I cared too little for any thing that
+concerned my worldly interests to be at all mortified about it?)--of
+seeing the preceding numbers exposed in sundry old iron shops for a
+penny a piece. At the ninth number I dropt the work. But from the London
+publisher I could not obtain a shilling; he was a ------ and set me at
+defiance. From other places I procured but little, and after such delays
+as rendered that little worth nothing; and I should have been inevitably
+thrown into jail by my Bristol printer, who refused to wait even for a
+month, for a sum between eighty and ninety pounds, if the money had
+not been paid for me by a man by no means affluent, a dear friend,
+who attached himself to me from my first arrival at Bristol, who has
+continued my friend with a fidelity unconquered by time or even by my
+own apparent neglect; a friend from whom I never received an advice that
+was not wise, nor a remonstrance that was not gentle and affectionate.
+
+Conscientiously an opponent of the first revolutionary war, yet with
+my eyes thoroughly opened to the true character and impotence of the
+favourers of revolutionary principles in England, principles which
+I held in abhorrence,--(for it was part of my political creed, that
+whoever ceased to act as an individual by making himself a member of
+any society not sanctioned by his Government, forfeited the rights of
+a citizen)--a vehement Anti-Ministerialist, but after the invasion of
+Switzerland, a more vehement Anti-Gallican, and still more intensely
+an Anti-Jacobin, I retired to a cottage at Stowey, and provided for my
+scanty maintenance by writing verses for a London Morning Paper. I saw
+plainly, that literature was not a profession, by which I could expect
+to live; for I could not disguise from myself, that, whatever my talents
+might or might not be in other respects, yet they were not of the sort
+that could enable me to become a popular writer; and that whatever my
+opinions might be in themselves, they were almost equi-distant from
+all the three prominent parties, the Pittites, the Foxites, and the
+Democrats. Of the unsaleable nature of my writings I had an amusing
+memento one morning from our own servant girl. For happening to rise
+at an earlier hour than usual, I observed her putting an extravagant
+quantity of paper into the grate in order to light the fire, and mildly
+checked her for her wastefulness; "La, Sir!" (replied poor Nanny) "why,
+it is only Watchmen."
+
+I now devoted myself to poetry and to the study of ethics and
+psychology; and so profound was my admiration at this time of Hartley's
+ESSAY ON MAN, that I gave his name to my first-born. In addition to the
+gentleman, my neighbour, whose garden joined on to my little orchard,
+and the cultivation of whose friendship had been my sole motive in
+choosing Stowey for my residence, I was so fortunate as to acquire,
+shortly after my settlement there, an invaluable blessing in the society
+and neighbourhood of one, to whom I could look up with equal reverence,
+whether I regarded him as a poet, a philosopher, or a man. His
+conversation extended to almost all subjects, except physics and
+politics; with the latter he never troubled himself. Yet neither my
+retirement nor my utter abstraction from all the disputes of the day
+could secure me in those jealous times from suspicion and obloquy, which
+did not stop at me, but extended to my excellent friend, whose perfect
+innocence was even adduced as a proof of his guilt. One of the many busy
+sycophants of that day,--(I here use the word sycophant in its original
+sense, as a wretch who flatters the prevailing party by informing
+against his neighbours, under pretence that they are exporters of
+prohibited figs or fancies,--for the moral application of the term it
+matters not which)--one of these sycophantic law-mongrels, discoursing
+on the politics of the neighbourhood, uttered the following deep
+remark: "As to Coleridge, there is not so much harm in him, for he is a
+whirl-brain that talks whatever comes uppermost; but that ------! he is
+the dark traitor. You never hear HIM say a syllable on the subject."
+
+Now that the hand of Providence has disciplined all Europe into
+sobriety, as men tame wild elephants, by alternate blows and caresses;
+now that Englishmen of all classes are restored to their old English
+notions and feelings; it will with difficulty be credited, how great an
+influence was at that time possessed and exerted by the spirit of secret
+defamation,--(the too constant attendant on party-zeal)--during
+the restless interim from 1793 to the commencement of the Addington
+administration, or the year before the truce of Amiens. For by the
+latter period the minds of the partizans, exhausted by excess of
+stimulation and humbled by mutual disappointment, had become languid.
+The same causes, that inclined the nation to peace, disposed the
+individuals to reconciliation. Both parties had found themselves in
+the wrong. The one had confessedly mistaken the moral character of
+the revolution, and the other had miscalculated both its moral and
+its physical resources. The experiment was made at the price of great,
+almost, we may say, of humiliating sacrifices; and wise men foresaw that
+it would fail, at least in its direct and ostensible object. Yet it
+was purchased cheaply, and realized an object of equal value, and,
+if possible, of still more vital importance. For it brought about
+a national unanimity unexampled in our history since the reign of
+Elizabeth; and Providence, never wanting to a good work when men have
+done their parts, soon provided a common focus in the cause of Spain,
+which made us all once more Englishmen by at once gratifying and
+correcting the predilections of both parties. The sincere reverers of
+the throne felt the cause of loyalty ennobled by its alliance with that
+of freedom; while the honest zealots of the people could not but admit,
+that freedom itself assumed a more winning form, humanized by loyalty
+and consecrated by religious principle. The youthful enthusiasts who,
+flattered by the morning rainbow of the French revolution, had made a
+boast of expatriating their hopes and fears, now, disciplined by the
+succeeding storms and sobered by increase of years, had been taught
+to prize and honour the spirit of nationality as the best safeguard of
+national independence, and this again as the absolute pre-requisite and
+necessary basis of popular rights.
+
+If in Spain too disappointment has nipped our too forward expectations,
+yet all is not destroyed that is checked. The crop was perhaps springing
+up too rank in the stalk to kern well; and there were, doubtless,
+symptoms of the Gallican blight on it. If superstition and despotism
+have been suffered to let in their wolvish sheep to trample and eat it
+down even to the surface, yet the roots remain alive, and the
+second growth may prove the stronger and healthier for the temporary
+interruption. At all events, to us heaven has been just and gracious.
+The people of England did their best, and have received their rewards.
+Long may we continue to deserve it! Causes, which it had been too
+generally the habit of former statesmen to regard as belonging to
+another world, are now admitted by all ranks to have been the main
+agents of our success. "We fought from heaven; the stars in their
+courses fought against Sisera." If then unanimity grounded on moral
+feelings has been among the least equivocal sources of our national
+glory, that man deserves the esteem of his countrymen, even as patriots,
+who devotes his life and the utmost efforts of his intellect to the
+preservation and continuance of that unanimity by the disclosure
+and establishment of principles. For by these all opinions must be
+ultimately tried; and, (as the feelings of men are worthy of regard only
+as far as they are the representatives of their fixed opinions,) on the
+knowledge of these all unanimity, not accidental and fleeting, must be
+grounded. Let the scholar, who doubts this assertion, refer only to
+the speeches and writings of Edmund Burke at the commencement of the
+American war and compare them with his speeches and writings at the
+commencement of the French revolution. He will find the principles
+exactly the same and the deductions the same; but the practical
+inferences almost opposite in the one case from those drawn in the
+other; yet in both equally legitimate and in both equally confirmed by
+the results. Whence gained he the superiority of foresight? Whence arose
+the striking difference, and in most instances even, the discrepancy
+between the grounds assigned by him and by those who voted with him, on
+the same questions? How are we to explain the notorious fact, that
+the speeches and writings of Edmund Burke are more interesting at the
+present day than they were found at the time of their first publication;
+while those of his illustrious confederates are either forgotten, or
+exist only to furnish proofs, that the same conclusion, which one man
+had deduced scientifically, may be brought out by another in consequence
+of errors that luckily chanced to neutralize each other. It would be
+unhandsome as a conjecture, even were it not, as it actually is, false
+in point of fact to attribute this difference to the deficiency
+of talent on the part of Burke's friends, or of experience, or of
+historical knowledge. The satisfactory solution is, that Edmund Burke
+possessed and had sedulously sharpened that eye, which sees all things,
+actions, and events, in relation to the laws that determine their
+existence and circumscribe their possibility. He referred habitually
+to principles. He was a scientific statesman; and therefore a seer. For
+every principle contains in itself the germs of a prophecy; and, as the
+prophetic power is the essential privilege of science, so the fulfilment
+of its oracles supplies the outward and, (to men in general,) the
+only test of its claim to the title. Wearisome as Burke's refinements
+appeared to his parliamentary auditors, yet the cultivated classes
+throughout Europe have reason to be thankful, that he
+
+                                     ------went on refining,
+    And thought of convincing, while they thought of dining.
+
+Our very sign-boards, (said an illustrious friend to me,) give evidence,
+that there has been a Titian in the world. In like manner, not only the
+debates in parliament, not only our proclamations and state papers,
+but the essays and leading paragraphs of our journals are so many
+remembrancers of Edmund Burke. Of this the reader may easily convince
+himself, if either by recollection or reference he will compare the
+opposition newspapers at the commencement and during the five or six
+following years of the French revolution with the sentiments, and
+grounds of argument assumed in the same class of journals at present,
+and for some years past.
+
+Whether the spirit of jacobinism, which the writings of Burke exorcised
+from the higher and from the literary classes, may not, like the ghost
+in Hamlet, be heard moving and mining in the underground chambers
+with an activity the more dangerous because less noisy, may admit of
+a question. I have given my opinions on this point, and the grounds of
+them, in my letters to judge Fletcher occasioned by his charge to the
+Wexford grand jury, and published in the Courier. Be this as it may, the
+evil spirit of jealousy, and with it the Cerberean whelps of feud and
+slander, no longer walk their rounds, in cultivated society.
+
+Far different were the days to which these anecdotes have carried me
+back. The dark guesses of some zealous Quidnunc met with so congenial a
+soil in the grave alarm of a titled Dogberry of our neighbourhood, that
+a spy was actually sent down from the government pour surveillance of
+myself and friend. There must have been not only abundance, but variety
+of these "honourable men" at the disposal of Ministers: for this proved
+a very honest fellow. After three weeks' truly Indian perseverance in
+tracking us, (for we were commonly together,) during all which
+time seldom were we out of doors, but he contrived to be within
+hearing,--(and all the while utterly unsuspected; how indeed could such
+a suspicion enter our fancies?)--he not only rejected Sir Dogberry's
+request that he would try yet a little longer, but declared to him his
+belief, that both my friend and myself were as good subjects, for aught
+he could discover to the contrary, as any in His Majesty's dominions. He
+had repeatedly hid himself, he said, for hours together behind a bank at
+the sea-side, (our favourite seat,) and overheard our conversation. At
+first he fancied, that we were aware of our danger; for he often heard
+me talk of one Spy Nozy, which he was inclined to interpret of himself,
+and of a remarkable feature belonging to him; but he was speedily
+convinced that it was the name of a man who had made a book and lived
+long ago. Our talk ran most upon books, and we were perpetually desiring
+each other to look at this, and to listen to that; but he could not
+catch a word about politics. Once he had joined me on the road; (this
+occurred, as I was returning home alone from my friend's house, which
+was about three miles from my own cottage,) and, passing himself off
+as a traveller, he had entered into conversation with me, and talked
+of purpose in a democrat way in order to draw me out. The result, it
+appears, not only convinced him that I was no friend of jacobinism; but,
+(he added,) I had "plainly made it out to be such a silly as well as
+wicked thing, that he felt ashamed though he had only put it on." I
+distinctly remembered the occurrence, and had mentioned it immediately
+on my return, repeating what the traveller with his Bardolph nose had
+said, with my own answer; and so little did I suspect the true object
+of my "tempter ere accuser," that I expressed with no small pleasure my
+hope and belief, that the conversation had been of some service to the
+poor misled malcontent. This incident therefore prevented all doubt as
+to the truth of the report, which through a friendly medium came to me
+from the master of the village inn, who had been ordered to entertain
+the Government gentleman in his best manner, but above all to be silent
+concerning such a person being in his house. At length he received Sir
+Dogberry's commands to accompany his guest at the final interview;
+and, after the absolving suffrage of the gentleman honoured with the
+confidence of Ministers, answered, as follows, to the following queries:
+D. "Well, landlord! and what do you know of the person in question? L.
+I see him often pass by with maister ----, my landlord, (that is, the
+owner of the house,) and sometimes with the new-comers at Holford; but
+I never said a word to him or he to me. D. But do you not know, that he
+has distributed papers and hand-bills of a seditious nature among the
+common people? L. No, your Honour! I never heard of such a thing. D.
+Have you not seen this Mr. Coleridge, or heard of, his haranguing and
+talking to knots and clusters of the inhabitants?--What are you grinning
+at, Sir? L. Beg your Honour's pardon! but I was only thinking, how
+they'd have stared at him. If what I have heard be true, your Honour!
+they would not have understood a word he said. When our Vicar was here,
+Dr. L. the master of the great school and Canon of Windsor, there was a
+great dinner party at maister's; and one of the farmers, that was there,
+told us that he and the Doctor talked real Hebrew Greek at each other
+for an hour together after dinner. D. Answer the question, Sir! does he
+ever harangue the people? L. I hope your Honour an't angry with me. I
+can say no more than I know. I never saw him talking with any one, but
+my landlord, and our curate, and the strange gentleman. D. Has he not
+been seen wandering on the hills towards the Channel, and along the
+shore, with books and papers in his hand, taking charts and maps of
+the country? L. Why, as to that, your Honour! I own, I have heard; I am
+sure, I would not wish to say ill of any body; but it is certain, that I
+have heard--D. Speak out, man! don't be afraid, you are doing your duty
+to your King and Government. What have you heard? L. Why, folks do
+say, your Honour! as how that he is a Poet, and that he is going to put
+Quantock and all about here in print; and as they be so much together,
+I suppose that the strange gentleman has some consarn in the
+business."--So ended this formidable inquisition, the latter part of
+which alone requires explanation, and at the same time entitles the
+anecdote to a place in my literary life. I had considered it as a defect
+in the admirable poem of THE TASK, that the subject, which gives the
+title to the work, was not, and indeed could not be, carried on beyond
+the three or four first pages, and that, throughout the poem, the
+connections are frequently awkward, and the transitions abrupt and
+arbitrary. I sought for a subject, that should give equal room and
+freedom for description, incident, and impassioned reflections on men,
+nature, and society, yet supply in itself a natural connection to the
+parts, and unity to the whole. Such a subject I conceived myself to
+have found in a stream, traced from its source in the hills among the
+yellow-red moss and conical glass-shaped tufts of bent, to the first
+break or fall, where its drops become audible, and it begins to form a
+channel; thence to the peat and turf barn, itself built of the same dark
+squares as it sheltered; to the sheepfold; to the first cultivated
+plot of ground; to the lonely cottage and its bleak garden won from the
+heath; to the hamlet, the villages, the market-town, the manufactories,
+and the seaport. My walks therefore were almost daily on the top
+of Quantock, and among its sloping coombes. With my pencil and
+memorandum-book in my hand, I was making studies, as the artists call
+them, and often moulding my thoughts into verse, with the objects and
+imagery immediately before my senses. Many circumstances, evil and good,
+intervened to prevent the completion of the poem, which was to have been
+entitled THE BROOK. Had I finished the work, it was my purpose in the
+heat of the moment to have dedicated it to our then committee of public
+safety as containing the charts and maps, with which I was to have
+supplied the French Government in aid of their plans of invasion. And
+these too for a tract of coast that, from Clevedon to Minehead, scarcely
+permits the approach of a fishing-boat!
+
+All my experience from my first entrance into life to the present hour
+is in favour of the warning maxim, that the man, who opposes in toto the
+political or religious zealots of his age, is safer from their obloquy
+than he who differs from them but in one or two points, or perhaps only
+in degree. By that transfer of the feelings of private life into the
+discussion of public questions, which is the queen bee in the hive of
+party fanaticism, the partisan has more sympathy with an intemperate
+opposite than with a moderate friend. We now enjoy an intermission,
+and long may it continue! In addition to far higher and more important
+merits, our present Bible societies and other numerous associations
+for national or charitable objects, may serve perhaps to carry off
+the superfluous activity and fervour of stirring minds in innocent
+hyperboles and the bustle of management. But the poison-tree is not
+dead, though the sap may for a season have subsided to its roots. At
+least let us not be lulled into such a notion of our entire security, as
+not to keep watch and ward, even on our best feelings. I have seen gross
+intolerance shown in support of toleration; sectarian antipathy
+most obtrusively displayed in the promotion of an undistinguishing
+comprehension of sects: and acts of cruelty, (I had almost said,) of
+treachery, committed in furtherance of an object vitally important
+to the cause of humanity; and all this by men too of naturally kind
+dispositions and exemplary conduct.
+
+The magic rod of fanaticism is preserved in the very adyta of human
+nature; and needs only the re-exciting warmth of a master hand to bud
+forth afresh and produce the old fruits. The horror of the Peasants' war
+in Germany, and the direful effects of the Anabaptists' tenets,
+(which differed only from those of jacobinism by the substitution of
+theological for philosophical jargon,) struck all Europe for a time with
+affright. Yet little more than a century was sufficient to obliterate
+all effective memory of these events. The same principles with
+similar though less dreadful consequences were again at work from the
+imprisonment of the first Charles to the restoration of his son. The
+fanatic maxim of extirpating fanaticism by persecution produced a civil
+war. The war ended in the victory of the insurgents; but the temper
+survived, and Milton had abundant grounds for asserting, that "Presbyter
+was but OLD PRIEST writ large!" One good result, thank heaven! of this
+zealotry was the re-establishment of the church. And now it might have
+been hoped, that the mischievous spirit would have been bound for a
+season, "and a seal set upon him, that he should deceive the nation
+no more." [33] But no! The ball of persecution was taken up with
+undiminished vigour by the persecuted. The same fanatic principle that,
+under the solemn oath and covenant, had turned cathedrals into stables,
+destroyed the rarest trophies of art and ancestral piety, and hunted the
+brightest ornaments of learning and religion into holes and corners, now
+marched under episcopal banners, and, having first crowded the prisons
+of England, emptied its whole vial of wrath on the miserable Covenanters
+of Scotland [34]. A merciful providence at length constrained both
+parties to join against a common enemy. A wise government followed;
+and the established church became, and now is, not only the brightest
+example, but our best and only sure bulwark, of toleration!--the
+true and indispensable bank against a new inundation of persecuting
+zeal--Esto perpetua!
+
+A long interval of quiet succeeded; or rather, the exhaustion had
+produced a cold fit of the ague which was symptomatized by indifference
+among the many, and a tendency to infidelity or scepticism in the
+educated classes. At length those feelings of disgust and hatred,
+which for a brief while the multitude had attached to the crimes and
+absurdities of sectarian and democratic fanaticism, were transferred to
+the oppressive privileges of the noblesse, and the luxury; intrigues and
+favouritism of the continental courts. The same principles, dressed
+in the ostentatious garb of a fashionable philosophy, once more rose
+triumphant and effected the French revolution. And have we not
+within the last three or four years had reason to apprehend, that
+the detestable maxims and correspondent measures of the late French
+despotism had already bedimmed the public recollections of democratic
+phrensy; had drawn off to other objects the electric force of the
+feelings which had massed and upheld those recollections; and that a
+favourable concurrence of occasions was alone wanting to awaken the
+thunder and precipitate the lightning from the opposite quarter of the
+political heaven?
+
+In part from constitutional indolence, which in the very hey-day of
+hope had kept my enthusiasm in check, but still more from the habits and
+influences of a classical education and academic pursuits, scarcely
+had a year elapsed from the commencement of my literary and political
+adventures before my mind sank into a state of thorough disgust and
+despondency, both with regard to the disputes and the parties disputant.
+With more than poetic feeling I exclaimed:
+
+    The sensual and the dark rebel in vain,
+    Slaves by their own compulsion! In mad game
+    They break their manacles, to wear the name
+    Of freedom, graven on a heavier chain.
+    O Liberty! with profitless endeavour
+    Have I pursued thee many a weary hour;
+    But thou nor swell'st the victor's pomp, nor ever
+    Didst breathe thy soul in forms of human power!
+        Alike from all, howe'er they praise thee,
+        (Nor prayer nor boastful name delays thee)
+        From Superstition's harpy minions
+        And factious Blasphemy's obscener slaves,
+        Thou speedest on thy cherub pinions,
+    The guide of homeless winds and playmate of the waves!
+
+I retired to a cottage in Somersetshire at the foot of Quantock, and
+devoted my thoughts and studies to the foundations of religion and
+morals. Here I found myself all afloat. Doubts rushed in; broke upon me
+"from the fountains of the great deep," and fell "from the windows
+of heaven." The fontal truths of natural religion and the books of
+Revelation alike contributed to the flood; and it was long ere my ark
+touched on an Ararat, and rested. The idea of the Supreme Being appeared
+to me to be as necessarily implied in all particular modes of being as
+the idea of infinite space in all the geometrical figures by which space
+is limited. I was pleased with the Cartesian opinion, that the idea of
+God is distinguished from all other ideas by involving its reality; but
+I was not wholly satisfied. I began then to ask myself, what proof I
+had of the outward existence of anything? Of this sheet of paper for
+instance, as a thing in itself, separate from the phaenomenon or image
+in my perception. I saw, that in the nature of things such proof is
+impossible; and that of all modes of being, that are not objects of the
+senses, the existence is assumed by a logical necessity arising from the
+constitution of the mind itself,--by the absence of all motive to
+doubt it, not from any absolute contradiction in the supposition of the
+contrary. Still the existence of a Being, the ground of all existence,
+was not yet the existence of a moral creator, and governour. "In the
+position, that all reality is either contained in the necessary being as
+an attribute, or exists through him, as its ground, it remains undecided
+whether the properties of intelligence and will are to be referred to
+the Supreme Being in the former or only in the latter sense; as inherent
+attributes, or only as consequences that have existence in other things
+through him [35]. Were the latter the truth, then notwithstanding all
+the pre-eminence which must be assigned to the Eternal First from the
+sufficiency, unity, and independence of his being, as the dread ground
+of the universe, his nature would yet fall far short of that, which we
+are bound to comprehend in the idea of GOD. For, without any knowledge
+or determining resolve of its own, it would only be a blind
+necessary ground of other things and other spirits; and thus would
+be distinguished from the FATE of certain ancient philosophers in no
+respect, but that of being more definitely and intelligibly described."
+
+For a very long time, indeed, I could not reconcile personality with
+infinity; and my head was with Spinoza, though my whole heart remained
+with Paul and John. Yet there had dawned upon me, even before I had met
+with the CRITIQUE OF THE PURE REASON, a certain guiding light. If the
+mere intellect could make no certain discovery of a holy and intelligent
+first cause, it might yet supply a demonstration, that no legitimate
+argument could be drawn from the intellect against its truth. And what
+is this more than St. Paul's assertion, that by wisdom,--(more properly
+translated by the powers of reasoning)--no man ever arrived at the
+knowledge of God? What more than the sublimest, and probably the oldest,
+book on earth has taught us,
+
+    Silver and gold man searcheth out:
+    Bringeth the ore out of the earth, and darkness into light.
+
+    But where findeth he wisdom?
+    Where is the place of understanding?
+
+    The abyss crieth; it is not in me!
+    Ocean echoeth back; not in me!
+
+    Whence then cometh wisdom?
+    Where dwelleth understanding?
+
+    Hidden from the eyes of the living
+    Kept secret from the fowls of heaven!
+
+    Hell and death answer;
+    We have heard the rumour thereof from afar!
+
+    GOD marketh out the road to it;
+    GOD knoweth its abiding place!
+
+    He beholdeth the ends of the earth;
+    He surveyeth what is beneath the heavens!
+
+    And as he weighed out the winds, and measured the sea,
+    And appointed laws to the rain,
+    And a path to the thunder,
+    A path to the flashes of the lightning!
+
+    Then did he see it,
+    And he counted it;
+    He searched into the depth thereof,
+    And with a line did he compass it round!
+
+    But to man he said,
+    The fear of the Lord is wisdom for thee!
+    And to avoid evil,
+    That is thy understanding. [36]
+
+I become convinced, that religion, as both the cornerstone and the
+key-stone of morality, must have a moral origin; so far at least, that
+the evidence of its doctrines could not, like the truths of abstract
+science, be wholly independent of the will. It were therefore to be
+expected, that its fundamental truth would be such as might be denied;
+though only, by the fool, and even by the fool from the madness of the
+heart alone!
+
+The question then concerning our faith in the existence of a God, not
+only as the ground of the universe by his essence, but as its maker and
+judge by his wisdom and holy will, appeared to stand thus. The sciential
+reason, the objects of which are purely theoretical, remains neutral, as
+long as its name and semblance are not usurped by the opponents of the
+doctrine. But it then becomes an effective ally by exposing the false
+show of demonstration, or by evincing the equal demonstrability of the
+contrary from premises equally logical [37]. The understanding meantime
+suggests, the analogy of experience facilitates, the belief. Nature
+excites and recalls it, as by a perpetual revelation. Our feelings
+almost necessitate it; and the law of conscience peremptorily commands
+it. The arguments, that at all apply to it, are in its favour; and
+there is nothing against it, but its own sublimity. It could not be
+intellectually more evident without becoming morally less effective;
+without counteracting its own end by sacrificing the life of faith to
+the cold mechanism of a worth less because compulsory assent. The belief
+of a God and a future state, (if a passive acquiescence may be flattered
+with the name of belief,) does not indeed always beget a good heart;
+but a good heart so naturally begets the belief, that the very few
+exceptions must be regarded as strange anomalies from strange and
+unfortunate circumstances.
+
+From these premises I proceeded to draw the following conclusions.
+First, that having once fully admitted the existence of an infinite yet
+self-conscious Creator, we are not allowed to ground the irrationality
+of any other article of faith on arguments which would equally prove
+that to be irrational, which we had allowed to be real. Secondly, that
+whatever is deducible from the admission of a self-comprehending and
+creative spirit may be legitimately used in proof of the possibility
+of any further mystery concerning the divine nature. Possibilitatem
+mysteriorum, (Trinitatis, etc.) contra insultus Infidelium et
+Haereticorum a contradictionibus vindico; haud quidem veritatem, quae
+revelatione sola stabiliri possit; says Leibnitz in a letter to his
+Duke. He then adds the following just and important remark. "In
+vain will tradition or texts of scripture be adduced in support of a
+doctrine, donec clava impossibilitatis et contradictionis e manibus
+horum Herculum extorta fuerit. For the heretic will still reply, that
+texts, the literal sense of which is not so much above as directly
+against all reason, must be understood figuratively, as Herod is a fox,
+and so forth."
+
+These principles I held, philosophically, while in respect of revealed
+religion I remained a zealous Unitarian. I considered the idea of the
+Trinity a fair scholastic inference from the being of God, as a creative
+intelligence; and that it was therefore entitled to the rank of an
+esoteric doctrine of natural religion. But seeing in the same no
+practical or moral bearing, I confined it to the schools of philosophy.
+The admission of the Logos, as hypostasized (that is, neither a mere
+attribute, nor a personification) in no respect removed my doubts
+concerning the Incarnation and the Redemption by the cross; which I
+could neither reconcile in reason with the impassiveness of the Divine
+Being, nor in my moral feelings with the sacred distinction between
+things and persons, the vicarious payment of a debt and the vicarious
+expiation of guilt. A more thorough revolution in my philosophic
+principles, and a deeper insight into my own heart, were yet wanting.
+Nevertheless, I cannot doubt, that the difference of my metaphysical
+notions from those of Unitarians in general contributed to my final
+re-conversion to the whole truth in Christ; even as according to his own
+confession the books of certain Platonic philosophers (libri quorundam
+Platonicorum) commenced the rescue of St. Augustine's faith from the
+same error aggravated by the far darker accompaniment of the Manichaean
+heresy.
+
+While my mind was thus perplexed, by a gracious providence for which
+I can never be sufficiently grateful, the generous and munificent
+patronage of Mr. Josiah, and Mr. Thomas Wedgwood enabled me to finish
+my education in Germany. Instead of troubling others with my own crude
+notions and juvenile compositions, I was thenceforward better employed
+in attempting to store my own head with the wisdom of others. I made the
+best use of my time and means; and there is therefore no period of my
+life on which I can look back with such unmingled satisfaction. After
+acquiring a tolerable sufficiency in the German language [38] at
+Ratzeburg, which with my voyage and journey thither I have described in
+The Friend, I proceeded through Hanover to Goettingen.
+
+Here I regularly attended the lectures on physiology in the morning, and
+on natural history in the evening, under Blumenbach, a name as dear to
+every Englishman who has studied at that university, as it is venerable
+to men of science throughout Europe! Eichhorn's lectures on the New
+Testament were repeated to me from notes by a student from Ratzeburg,
+a young man of sound learning and indefatigable industry, who is now,
+I believe, a professor of the oriental languages at Heidelberg. But my
+chief efforts were directed towards a grounded knowledge of the German
+language and literature. From professor Tychsen I received as many
+lessons in the Gothic of Ulphilas as sufficed to make me acquainted with
+its grammar, and the radical words of most frequent occurrence; and with
+the occasional assistance of the same philosophical linguist, I read
+through [39] Ottfried's metrical paraphrase of the gospel, and the most
+important remains of the Theotiscan, or the transitional state of the
+Teutonic language from the Gothic to the old German of the Swabian
+period. Of this period--(the polished dialect of which is analogous to
+that of our Chaucer, and which leaves the philosophic student in doubt,
+whether the language has not since then lost more in sweetness and
+flexibility, than it has gained in condensation and copiousness)--I
+read with sedulous accuracy the Minnesinger (or singers of love, the
+Provencal poets of the Swabian court) and the metrical romances; and
+then laboured through sufficient specimens of the master singers, their
+degenerate successors; not however without occasional pleasure from the
+rude, yet interesting strains of Hans Sachs, the cobbler of Nuremberg.
+Of this man's genius five folio volumes with double columns are
+extant in print, and nearly an equal number in manuscript; yet the
+indefatigable bard takes care to inform his readers, that he never made
+a shoe the less, but had virtuously reared a large family by the labour
+of his hands.
+
+In Pindar, Chaucer, Dante, Milton, and many more, we have instances of
+the close connection of poetic genius with the love of liberty and of
+genuine reformation. The moral sense at least will not be outraged, if
+I add to the list the name of this honest shoemaker, (a trade by the by
+remarkable for the production of philosophers and poets).
+
+His poem entitled THE MORNING STAR, was the very first publication that
+appeared in praise and support of Luther; and an excellent hymn of Hans
+Sachs, which has been deservedly translated into almost all the European
+languages, was commonly sung in the Protestant churches, whenever the
+heroic reformer visited them.
+
+In Luther's own German writings, and eminently in his translation of the
+Bible, the German language commenced. I mean the language as it is
+at present written; that which is called the High-German, as contra-
+distinguished from the Platt-Teutsch, the dialect on the flat or
+northern countries, and from the Ober-Teutsch, the language of the
+middle and Southern Germany. The High German is indeed a lingua
+communis, not actually the native language of any province, but the
+choice and fragrancy of all the dialects. From this cause it is at once
+the most copious and the most grammatical of all the European tongues.
+
+Within less than a century after Luther's death the German was inundated
+with pedantic barbarisms. A few volumes of this period I read through
+from motives of curiosity; for it is not easy to imagine any thing more
+fantastic, than the very appearance of their pages. Almost every third
+word is a Latin word with a Germanized ending, the Latin portion being
+always printed in Roman letters, while in the last syllable the German
+character is retained.
+
+At length, about the year 1620, Opitz arose, whose genius more nearly
+resembled that of Dryden than any other poet, who at present occurs to
+my recollection. In the opinion of Lessing, the most acute of critics,
+and of Adelung, the first of Lexicographers, Opitz, and the Silesian
+poets, his followers, not only restored the language, but still remain
+the models of pure diction. A stranger has no vote on such a question;
+but after repeated perusal of the works of Opitz my feelings justified
+the verdict, and I seemed to have acquired from them a sort of tact for
+what is genuine in the style of later writers.
+
+Of the splendid aera, which commenced with Gellert, Klopstock, Ramler,
+Lessing, and their compeers, I need not speak. With the opportunities
+which I enjoyed, it would have been disgraceful not to have been
+familiar with their writings; and I have already said as much as the
+present biographical sketch requires concerning the German philosophers,
+whose works, for the greater part, I became acquainted with at a far
+later period.
+
+Soon after my return from Germany I was solicited to undertake the
+literary and political department in the Morning Post; and I acceded to
+the proposal on the condition that the paper should thenceforwards be
+conducted on certain fixed and announced principles, and that I should
+neither be obliged nor requested to deviate from them in favour of any
+party or any event. In consequence, that journal became and for many
+years continued anti-ministerial indeed, yet with a very qualified
+approbation of the opposition, and with far greater earnestness and zeal
+both anti-Jacobin and anti-Gallican. To this hour I cannot find reason
+to approve of the first war either in its commencement or its conduct.
+Nor can I understand, with what reason either Mr. Perceval, (whom I
+am singular enough to regard as the best and wisest minister of this
+reign,) nor the present Administration, can be said to have pursued the
+plans of Mr. Pitt. The love of their country, and perseverant hostility
+to French principles and French ambition are indeed honourable qualities
+common to them and to their predecessor. But it appears to me as clear
+as the evidence of the facts can render any question of history, that
+the successes of the Perceval and of the existing ministry have been
+owing to their having pursued measures the direct contrary to Mr.
+Pitt's. Such for instance are the concentration of the national force to
+one object; the abandonment of the subsidizing policy, so far at least
+as neither to goad nor bribe the continental courts into war, till
+the convictions of their subjects had rendered it a war of their own
+seeking; and above all, in their manly and generous reliance on the good
+sense of the English people, and on that loyalty which is linked to
+the very [40] heart of the nation by the system of credit and the
+interdependence of property.
+
+Be this as it may, I am persuaded that the Morning Post proved a far
+more useful ally to the Government in its most important objects,
+in consequence of its being generally considered as moderately anti-
+ministerial, than if it had been the avowed eulogist of Mr. Pitt. The
+few, whose curiosity or fancy should lead them to turn over the journals
+of that date, may find a small proof of this in the frequent charges
+made by the Morning Chronicle, that such and such essays or leading
+paragraphs had been sent from the Treasury. The rapid and unusual
+increase in the sale of the Morning Post is a sufficient pledge, that
+genuine impartiality with a respectable portion of literary talent
+will secure the success of a newspaper without the aid of party
+or ministerial patronage. But by impartiality I mean an honest and
+enlightened adherence to a code of intelligible principles previously
+announced, and faithfully referred to in support of every judgment
+on men and events; not indiscriminate abuse, not the indulgence of an
+editor's own malignant passions, and still less, if that be possible,
+a determination to make money by flattering the envy and cupidity, the
+vindictive restlessness and self-conceit of the half-witted vulgar; a
+determination almost fiendish, but which, I have been informed, has
+been boastfully avowed by one man, the most notorious of these
+mob-sycophants! From the commencement of the Addington administration to
+the present day, whatever I have written in THE MORNING POST, or (after
+that paper was transferred to other proprietors) in THE COURIER, has
+been in defence or furtherance of the measures of Government.
+
+    Things of this nature scarce survive that night
+    That gives them birth; they perish in the sight;
+    Cast by so far from after-life, that there
+    Can scarcely aught be said, but that they were!
+
+Yet in these labours I employed, and, in the belief of partial friends
+wasted, the prime and manhood of my intellect. Most assuredly, they
+added nothing to my fortune or my reputation. The industry of the week
+supplied the necessities of the week. From government or the friends of
+government I not only never received remuneration, nor ever expected it;
+but I was never honoured with a single acknowledgment, or expression
+of satisfaction. Yet the retrospect is far from painful or matter of
+regret. I am not indeed silly enough to take as any thing more than a
+violent hyperbole of party debate, Mr. Fox's assertion that the late war
+(I trust that the epithet is not prematurely applied) was a war produced
+by the Morning Post; or I should be proud to have the words inscribed on
+my tomb. As little do I regard the circumstance, that I was a specified
+object of Buonaparte's resentment during my residence in Italy in
+consequence of those essays in the Morning Post during the peace of
+Amiens. Of this I was warned, directly, by Baron Von Humboldt, the
+Prussian Plenipotentiary, who at that time was the minister of the
+Prussian court at Rome; and indirectly, through his secretary,
+by Cardinal Fesch himself. Nor do I lay any greater weight on the
+confirming fact, that an order for my arrest was sent from Paris, from
+which danger I was rescued by the kindness of a noble Benedictine, and
+the gracious connivance of that good old man, the present Pope. For the
+late tyrant's vindictive appetite was omnivorous, and preyed equally on
+a Duc d'Enghien [41], and the writer of a newspaper paragraph. Like a
+true vulture [42], Napoleon with an eye not less telescopic, and with a
+taste equally coarse in his ravin, could descend from the most dazzling
+heights to pounce on the leveret in the brake, or even on the field
+mouse amid the grass. But I do derive a gratification from the
+knowledge, that my essays contributed to introduce the practice of
+placing the questions and events of the day in a moral point of view;
+in giving a dignity to particular measures by tracing their policy or
+impolicy to permanent principles, and an interest to principles by the
+application of them to individual measures. In Mr. Burke's writings
+indeed the germs of almost all political truths may be found. But I
+dare assume to myself the merit of having first explicitly defined
+and analyzed the nature of Jacobinism; and that in distinguishing the
+Jacobin from the republican, the democrat, and the mere demagogue, I
+both rescued the word from remaining a mere term of abuse, and put on
+their guard many honest minds, who even in their heat of zeal against
+Jacobinism, admitted or supported principles from which the worst parts
+of that system may be legitimately deduced. That these are not
+necessary practical results of such principles, we owe to that fortunate
+inconsequence of our nature, which permits the heart to rectify the
+errors of the understanding. The detailed examination of the consular
+Government and its pretended constitution, and the proof given by me,
+that it was a consummate despotism in masquerade, extorted a recantation
+even from the Morning Chronicle, which had previously extolled this
+constitution as the perfection of a wise and regulated liberty. On every
+great occurrence I endeavoured to discover in past history the event,
+that most nearly resembled it. I procured, wherever it was possible,
+the contemporary historians, memorialists, and pamphleteers. Then fairly
+subtracting the points of difference from those of likeness, as the
+balance favoured the former or the latter, I conjectured that the result
+would be the same or different. In the series of essays entitled "A
+comparison of France under Napoleon with Rome under the first Caesars,"
+and in those which followed "On the probable final restoration of the
+Bourbons," I feel myself authorized to affirm, by the effect produced on
+many intelligent men, that, were the dates wanting, it might have
+been suspected that the essays had been written within the last twelve
+months. The same plan I pursued at the commencement of the Spanish
+revolution, and with the same success, taking the war of the United
+Provinces with Philip II as the ground work of the comparison. I have
+mentioned this from no motives of vanity, nor even from motives of self
+defence, which would justify a certain degree of egotism, especially
+if it be considered, how often and grossly I have been attacked for
+sentiments, which I have exerted my best powers to confute and expose,
+and how grievously these charges acted to my disadvantage while I was
+in Malta. Or rather they would have done so, if my own feelings had not
+precluded the wish of a settled establishment in that island. But I
+have mentioned it from the full persuasion that, armed with the two-fold
+knowledge of history and the human mind, a man will scarcely err in his
+judgment concerning the sum total of any future national event, if he
+have been able to procure the original documents of the past, together
+with authentic accounts of the present, and if he have a philosophic
+tact for what is truly important in facts, and in most instances
+therefore for such facts as the dignity of history has excluded from
+the volumes of our modern compilers, by the courtesy of the age entitled
+historians.
+
+To have lived in vain must be a painful thought to any man, and
+especially so to him who has made literature his profession. I should
+therefore rather condole than be angry with the mind, which could
+attribute to no worthier feelings than those of vanity or self-love,
+the satisfaction which I acknowledged myself to have enjoyed from the
+republication of my political essays (either whole or as extracts) not
+only in many of our own provincial papers, but in the federal journals
+throughout America. I regarded it as some proof of my not having
+laboured altogether in vain, that from the articles written by me
+shortly before and at the commencement of the late unhappy war with
+America, not only the sentiments were adopted, but in some instances the
+very language, in several of the Massachusetts state papers.
+
+But no one of these motives nor all conjointly would have impelled me
+to a statement so uncomfortable to my own feelings, had not my character
+been repeatedly attacked, by an unjustifiable intrusion on private life,
+as of a man incorrigibly idle, and who intrusted not only with ample
+talents, but favoured with unusual opportunities of improving them, had
+nevertheless suffered them to rust away without any efficient exertion,
+either for his own good or that of his fellow creatures. Even if the
+compositions, which I have made public, and that too in a form the most
+certain of an extensive circulation, though the least flattering to an
+author's self-love, had been published in books, they would have
+filled a respectable number of volumes, though every passage of merely
+temporary interest were omitted. My prose writings have been charged
+with a disproportionate demand on the attention; with an excess of
+refinement in the mode of arriving at truths; with beating the ground
+for that which might have been run down by the eye; with the length and
+laborious construction of my periods; in short with obscurity and the
+love of paradox. But my severest critics have not pretended to have
+found in my compositions triviality, or traces of a mind that shrunk
+from the toil of thinking. No one has charged me with tricking out in
+other words the thoughts of others, or with hashing up anew the cramben
+jam decies coctam of English literature or philosophy. Seldom have I
+written that in a day, the acquisition or investigation of which had not
+cost me the previous labour of a month.
+
+But are books the only channel through which the stream of intellectual
+usefulness can flow? Is the diffusion of truth to be estimated by
+publications; or publications by the truth, which they diffuse or at
+least contain? I speak it in the excusable warmth of a mind stung by an
+accusation, which has not only been advanced in reviews of the widest
+circulation, not only registered in the bulkiest works of periodical
+literature, but by frequency of repetition has become an admitted fact
+in private literary circles, and thoughtlessly repeated by too many who
+call themselves my friends, and whose own recollections ought to have
+suggested a contrary testimony. Would that the criterion of a scholar's
+utility were the number and moral value of the truths, which he has been
+the means of throwing into the general circulation; or the number and
+value of the minds, whom by his conversation or letters, he has excited
+into activity, and supplied with the germs of their after-growth!
+A distinguished rank might not indeed, even then, be awarded to
+my exertions; but I should dare look forward with confidence to
+an honourable acquittal. I should dare appeal to the numerous and
+respectable audiences, which at different times and in different places
+honoured my lecture rooms with their attendance, whether the points
+of view from which the subjects treated of were surveyed,--whether the
+grounds of my reasoning were such, as they had heard or read elsewhere,
+or have since found in previous publications. I can conscientiously
+declare, that the complete success of the REMORSE on the first night of
+its representation did not give me as great or as heart-felt a pleasure,
+as the observation that the pit and boxes were crowded with faces
+familiar to me, though of individuals whose names I did not know, and
+of whom I knew nothing, but that they had attended one or other of my
+courses of lectures. It is an excellent though perhaps somewhat vulgar
+proverb, that there are cases where a man may be as well "in for a pound
+as for a penny." To those, who from ignorance of the serious injury
+I have received from this rumour of having dreamed away my life to no
+purpose, injuries which I unwillingly remember at all, much less am
+disposed to record in a sketch of my literary life; or to those, who
+from their own feelings, or the gratification they derive from thinking
+contemptuously of others, would like job's comforters attribute these
+complaints, extorted from me by the sense of wrong, to self conceit or
+presumptuous vanity, I have already furnished such ample materials, that
+I shall gain nothing by withholding the remainder. I will not
+therefore hesitate to ask the consciences of those, who from their long
+acquaintance with me and with the circumstances are best qualified to
+decide or be my judges, whether the restitution of the suum cuique would
+increase or detract from my literary reputation. In this exculpation
+I hope to be understood as speaking of myself comparatively, and in
+proportion to the claims, which others are entitled to make on my time
+or my talents. By what I have effected, am I to be judged by my fellow
+men; what I could have done, is a question for my own conscience. On
+my own account I may perhaps have had sufficient reason to lament my
+deficiency in self-control, and the neglect of concentering my powers
+to the realization of some permanent work. But to verse rather than to
+prose, if to either, belongs the voice of mourning for
+
+    Keen pangs of Love, awakening as a babe
+    Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart;
+    And fears self-willed that shunned the eye of hope;
+    And hope that scarce would know itself from fear;
+    Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain,
+    And genius given and knowledge won in vain;
+    And all which I had culled in wood-walks wild,
+    And all which patient toil had reared, and all,
+    Commune with thee had opened out--but flowers
+    Strewed on my corpse, and borne upon my bier,
+    In the same coffin, for the self-same grave!
+
+These will exist, for the future, I trust, only in the poetic strains,
+which the feelings at the time called forth. In those only, gentle
+reader,
+
+    Affectus animi varios, bellumque sequacis
+    Perlegis invidiae, curasque revolvis inanes,
+    Quas humilis tenero stylus olim effudit in aevo.
+    Perlegis et lacrymas, et quod pharetratus acuta
+    Ille puer puero fecit mihi cuspide vulnus.
+    Omnia paulatim consumit longior aetas,
+    Vivendoque simul morimur, rapimurque manendo.
+    Ipse mihi collatus enim non ille videbor;
+    Frons alia est, moresque alii, nova mentis imago,
+    Vox aliudque sonat--Jamque observatio vitae
+    Multa dedit--lugere nihil, ferre omnia; jamque
+    Paulatim lacrymas rerum experientia tersit.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+An affectionate exhortation to those who in early life feel themselves
+disposed to become authors.
+
+
+It was a favourite remark of the late Mr. Whitbread's, that no man does
+any thing from a single motive. The separate motives, or rather moods of
+mind, which produced the preceding reflections and anecdotes have been
+laid open to the reader in each separate instance. But an interest in
+the welfare of those, who at the present time may be in circumstances
+not dissimilar to my own at my first entrance into life, has been
+the constant accompaniment, and (as it were) the under-song of all
+my feelings. Whitehead exerting the prerogative of his laureateship
+addressed to youthful poets a poetic Charge, which is perhaps the
+best, and certainly the most interesting, of his works. With no other
+privilege than that of sympathy and sincere good wishes, I would address
+an affectionate exhortation to the youthful literati, grounded on my
+own experience. It will be but short; for the beginning, middle, and
+end converge to one charge: never pursue literature as a trade. With the
+exception of one extraordinary man, I have never known an individual,
+least of all an individual of genius, healthy or happy without a
+profession, that is, some regular employment, which does not depend on
+the will of the moment, and which can be carried on so far mechanically
+that an average quantum only of health, spirits, and intellectual
+exertion are requisite to its faithful discharge. Three hours of
+leisure, unannoyed by any alien anxiety, and looked forward to
+with delight as a change and recreation, will suffice to realize in
+literature a larger product of what is truly genial, than weeks of
+compulsion. Money, and immediate reputation form only an arbitrary and
+accidental end of literary labour. The hope of increasing them by
+any given exertion will often prove a stimulant to industry; but the
+necessity of acquiring them will in all works of genius convert the
+stimulant into a narcotic. Motives by excess reverse their very nature,
+and instead of exciting, stun and stupify the mind. For it is one
+contradistinction of genius from talent, that its predominant end is
+always comprised in the means; and this is one of the many points, which
+establish an analogy between genius and virtue. Now though talents may
+exist without genius, yet as genius cannot exist, certainly not manifest
+itself, without talents, I would advise every scholar, who feels the
+genial power working within him, so far to make a division between
+the two, as that he should devote his talents to the acquirement of
+competence in some known trade or profession, and his genius to objects
+of his tranquil and unbiassed choice; while the consciousness of being
+actuated in both alike by the sincere desire to perform his duty, will
+alike ennoble both. "My dear young friend," (I would say) "suppose
+yourself established in any honourable occupation. From the manufactory
+or counting house, from the law-court, or from having visited your last
+patient, you return at evening,
+
+    Dear tranquil time, when the sweet sense of Home
+    Is sweetest------
+
+to your family, prepared for its social enjoyments, with the very
+countenances of your wife and children brightened, and their voice of
+welcome made doubly welcome, by the knowledge that, as far as they are
+concerned, you have satisfied the demands of the day by the labour of
+the day. Then, when you retire into your study, in the books on
+your shelves you revisit so many venerable friends with whom you can
+converse. Your own spirit scarcely less free from personal anxieties
+than the great minds, that in those books are still living for you! Even
+your writing desk with its blank paper and all its other implements will
+appear as a chain of flowers, capable of linking your feelings as well
+as thoughts to events and characters past or to come; not a chain of
+iron, which binds you down to think of the future and the remote by
+recalling the claims and feelings of the peremptory present. But why
+should I say retire? The habits of active life and daily intercourse
+with the stir of the world will tend to give you such self-command, that
+the presence of your family will be no interruption. Nay, the social
+silence, or undisturbing voices of a wife or sister will be like a
+restorative atmosphere, or soft music which moulds a dream without
+becoming its object. If facts are required to prove the possibility of
+combining weighty performances in literature with full and independent
+employment, the works of Cicero and Xenophon among the ancients; of
+Sir Thomas More, Bacon, Baxter, or to refer at once to later and
+contemporary instances, Darwin and Roscoe, are at once decisive of the
+question."
+
+But all men may not dare promise themselves a sufficiency of self-
+control for the imitation of those examples: though strict scrutiny
+should always be made, whether indolence, restlessness, or a vanity
+impatient for immediate gratification, have not tampered with the
+judgment and assumed the vizard of humility for the purposes of self-
+delusion. Still the Church presents to every man of learning and genius
+a profession, in which he may cherish a rational hope of being able
+to unite the widest schemes of literary utility with the strictest
+performance of professional duties. Among the numerous blessings
+of Christianity, the introduction of an established Church makes
+an especial claim on the gratitude of scholars and philosophers; in
+England, at least, where the principles of Protestantism have conspired
+with the freedom of the government to double all its salutary powers by
+the removal of its abuses.
+
+That not only the maxims, but the grounds of a pure morality, the mere
+fragments of which
+
+    ------the lofty grave tragedians taught
+    In chorus or iambic, teachers best
+    Of moral prudence, with delight received
+    In brief sententious precepts; [43]
+
+and that the sublime truths of the divine unity and attributes, which
+a Plato found most hard to learn and deemed it still more difficult to
+reveal; that these should have become the almost hereditary property of
+childhood and poverty, of the hovel and the workshop; that even to the
+unlettered they sound as common place, is a phaenomenon, which must
+withhold all but minds of the most vulgar cast from undervaluing the
+services even of the pulpit and the reading desk. Yet those, who confine
+the efficiency of an established Church to its public offices, can
+hardly be placed in a much higher rank of intellect. That to every
+parish throughout the kingdom there is transplanted a germ of
+civilization; that in the remotest villages there is a nucleus, round
+which the capabilities of the place may crystallize and brighten;
+a model sufficiently superior to excite, yet sufficiently near to
+encourage and facilitate, imitation; this, the unobtrusive, continuous
+agency of a protestant church establishment, this it is, which the
+patriot, and the philanthropist, who would fain unite the love of
+peace with the faith in the progressive melioration of mankind, cannot
+estimate at too high a price. It cannot be valued with the gold of
+Ophir, with the precious onyx, or the sapphire. No mention shall be made
+of coral, or of pearls: for the price of wisdom is above rubies. The
+clergyman is with his parishioners and among them; he is neither in
+the cloistered cell, nor in the wilderness, but a neighbour and a
+family-man, whose education and rank admit him to the mansion of the
+rich landholder, while his duties make him the frequent visitor of the
+farmhouse and the cottage. He is, or he may become, connected, with
+the families of his parish or its vicinity by marriage. And among the
+instances of the blindness, or at best of the short-sightedness, which
+it is the nature of cupidity to inflict, I know few more striking than
+the clamours of the farmers against Church property. Whatever was not
+paid to the clergyman would inevitably at the next lease be paid to the
+landholder, while, as the case at present stands, the revenues of the
+Church are in some sort the reversionary property of every family, that
+may have a member educated for the Church, or a daughter that may marry
+a clergyman. Instead of being foreclosed and immovable, it is in fact
+the only species of landed property, that is essentially moving and
+circulative. That there exist no inconveniences, who will pretend to
+assert? But I have yet to expect the proof, that the inconveniences are
+greater in this than in any other species; or that either the farmers
+or the clergy would be benefited by forcing the latter to become either
+Trullibers or salaried placemen. Nay, I do not hesitate to declare my
+firm persuasion, that whatever reason of discontent the farmers may
+assign, the true cause is this; that they may cheat the parson, but
+cannot cheat the steward; and that they are disappointed, if they should
+have been able to withhold only two pounds less than the legal claim,
+having expected to withhold five. At all events, considered relatively
+to the encouragement of learning and genius, the establishment presents
+a patronage at once so effective and unburdensome, that it would be
+impossible to afford the like or equal in any but a Christian and
+Protestant country. There is scarce a department of human knowledge
+without some bearing on the various critical, historical, philosophical
+and moral truths, in which the scholar must be interested as a
+clergyman; no one pursuit worthy of a man of genius, which may not be
+followed without incongruity. To give the history of the Bible as a
+book, would be little less than to relate the origin or first excitement
+of all the literature and science, that we now possess. The very
+decorum, which the profession imposes, is favourable to the best
+purposes of genius, and tends to counteract its most frequent defects.
+Finally, that man must be deficient in sensibility, who would not find
+an incentive to emulation in the great and burning lights, which in a
+long series have illustrated the church of England; who would not hear
+from within an echo to the voice from their sacred shrines,
+
+    Et Pater Aeneas et avunculus excitat Hector.
+
+But, whatever be the profession or trade chosen, the advantages are many
+and important, compared with the state of a mere literary man, who in
+any degree depends on the sale of his works for the necessaries and
+comforts of life. In the former a man lives in sympathy with the world,
+in which he lives. At least he acquires a better and quicker tact for
+the knowledge of that, with which men in general can sympathize. He
+learns to manage his genius more prudently and efficaciously. His
+powers and acquirements gain him likewise more real admiration; for they
+surpass the legitimate expectations of others. He is something besides
+an author, and is not therefore considered merely as an author. The
+hearts of men are open to him, as to one of their own class; and
+whether he exerts himself or not in the conversational circles of
+his acquaintance, his silence is not attributed to pride, nor his
+communicativeness to vanity. To these advantages I will venture to add
+a superior chance of happiness in domestic life, were it only that it is
+as natural for the man to be out of the circle of his household during
+the day, as it is meritorious for the woman to remain for the most part
+within it. But this subject involves points of consideration so numerous
+and so delicate, and would not only permit, but require such ample
+documents from the biography of literary men, that I now merely allude
+to it in transitu. When the same circumstance has occurred at very
+different times to very different persons, all of whom have some one
+thing in common; there is reason to suppose that such circumstance is
+not merely attributable to the persons concerned, but is in some measure
+occasioned by the one point in common to them all. Instead of the
+vehement and almost slanderous dehortation from marriage, which the
+Misogyne, Boccaccio [44] addresses to literary men, I would substitute
+the simple advice: be not merely a man of letters! Let literature be an
+honourable augmentation to your arms; but not constitute the coat, or
+fill the escutcheon!
+
+To objections from conscience I can of course answer in no other way,
+than by requesting the youthful objector (as I have already done on
+a former occasion) to ascertain with strict self-examination, whether
+other influences may not be at work; whether spirits, "not of health,"
+and with whispers "not from heaven," may not be walking in the twilight
+of his consciousness. Let him catalogue his scruples, and reduce them to
+a distinct intelligible form; let him be certain, that he has read with
+a docile mind and favourable dispositions the best and most fundamental
+works on the subject; that he has had both mind and heart opened to the
+great and illustrious qualities of the many renowned characters, who
+had doubted like himself, and whose researches had ended in the clear
+conviction, that their doubts had been groundless, or at least in no
+proportion to the counter-weight. Happy will it be for such a man, if
+among his contemporaries elder than himself he should meet with
+one, who, with similar powers and feelings as acute as his own,
+had entertained the same scruples; had acted upon them; and who by
+after-research (when the step was, alas! irretrievable, but for that
+very reason his research undeniably disinterested) had discovered
+himself to have quarrelled with received opinions only to embrace
+errors, to have left the direction tracked out for him on the high road
+of honourable exertion, only to deviate into a labyrinth, where when he
+had wandered till his head was giddy, his best good fortune was finally
+to have found his way out again, too late for prudence though not too
+late for conscience or for truth! Time spent in such delay is time
+won: for manhood in the meantime is advancing, and with it increase of
+knowledge, strength of judgment, and above all, temperance of feelings.
+And even if these should effect no change, yet the delay will at least
+prevent the final approval of the decision from being alloyed by
+the inward censure of the rashness and vanity, by which it had been
+precipitated. It would be a sort of irreligion, and scarcely less than
+a libel on human nature to believe, that there is any established and
+reputable profession or employment, in which a man may not continue to
+act with honesty and honour; and doubtless there is likewise none, which
+may not at times present temptations to the contrary. But wofully will
+that man find himself mistaken, who imagines that the profession of
+literature, or (to speak more plainly) the trade of authorship, besets
+its members with fewer or with less insidious temptations, than the
+Church, the law, or the different branches of commerce. But I have
+treated sufficiently on this unpleasant subject in an early chapter of
+this volume. I will conclude the present therefore with a short extract
+from Herder, whose name I might have added to the illustrious list of
+those, who have combined the successful pursuit of the Muses, not only
+with the faithful discharge, but with the highest honours and honourable
+emoluments of an established profession. The translation the reader
+will find in a note below [45]. "Am sorgfaeltigsten, meiden sie die
+Autorschaft. Zu frueh oder unmaessig gebraucht, macht sie den Kopf
+wueste and das Herz leer; wenn sie auch sonst keine ueble Folgen gaebe.
+Ein Mensch, der nur lieset um zu druecken, lieset wahrscheinlich uebel;
+und wer jeden Gedanken, der ihm aufstosst, durch Feder and Presse
+versendet, hat sie in kurzer Zeit alle versandt, und wird bald ein
+blosser Diener der Druckerey, ein Buchstabensetzer werden."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+A chapter of requests and premonitions concerning the perusal or
+omission of the chapter that follows.
+
+
+In the perusal of philosophical works I have been greatly benefited by
+a resolve, which, in the antithetic form and with the allowed quaintness
+of an adage or maxim, I have been accustomed to word thus: until you
+understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his
+understanding. This golden rule of mine does, I own, resemble those of
+Pythagoras in its obscurity rather than in its depth. If however the
+reader will permit me to be my own Hierocles, I trust, that he will
+find its meaning fully explained by the following instances. I have
+now before me a treatise of a religious fanatic, full of dreams and
+supernatural experiences. I see clearly the writer's grounds, and their
+hollowness. I have a complete insight into the causes, which through the
+medium of his body has acted on his mind; and by application of received
+and ascertained laws I can satisfactorily explain to my own reason all
+the strange incidents, which the writer records of himself. And this I
+can do without suspecting him of any intentional falsehood. As when in
+broad day-light a man tracks the steps of a traveller, who had lost his
+way in a fog or by a treacherous moonshine, even so, and with the same
+tranquil sense of certainty, can I follow the traces of this bewildered
+visionary. I understand his ignorance.
+
+On the other hand, I have been re-perusing with the best energies of my
+mind the TIMAEUS of Plato. Whatever I comprehend, impresses me with a
+reverential sense of the author's genius; but there is a considerable
+portion of the work, to which I can attach no consistent meaning.
+In other treatises of the same philosopher, intended for the average
+comprehensions of men, I have been delighted with the masterly good
+sense, with the perspicuity of the language, and the aptness of the
+inductions. I recollect likewise, that numerous passages in this author,
+which I thoroughly comprehend, were formerly no less unintelligible to
+me, than the passages now in question. It would, I am aware, be quite
+fashionable to dismiss them at once as Platonic jargon. But this I
+cannot do with satisfaction to my own mind, because I have sought in
+vain for causes adequate to the solution of the assumed inconsistency.
+I have no insight into the possibility of a man so eminently wise, using
+words with such half-meanings to himself, as must perforce pass into no
+meaning to his readers. When in addition to the motives thus suggested
+by my own reason, I bring into distinct remembrance the number and the
+series of great men, who, after long and zealous study of these works
+had joined in honouring the name of Plato with epithets, that almost
+transcend humanity, I feel, that a contemptuous verdict on my part might
+argue want of modesty, but would hardly be received by the judicious, as
+evidence of superior penetration. Therefore, utterly baffled in all
+my attempts to understand the ignorance of Plato, I conclude myself
+ignorant of his understanding.
+
+In lieu of the various requests which the anxiety of authorship
+addresses to the unknown reader, I advance but this one; that he will
+either pass over the following chapter altogether, or read the whole
+connectedly. The fairest part of the most beautiful body will appear
+deformed and monstrous, if dissevered from its place in the organic
+whole. Nay, on delicate subjects, where a seemingly trifling difference
+of more or less may constitute a difference in kind, even a faithful
+display of the main and supporting ideas, if yet they are separated from
+the forms by which they are at once clothed and modified, may perchance
+present a skeleton indeed; but a skeleton to alarm and deter. Though I
+might find numerous precedents, I shall not desire the reader to strip
+his mind of all prejudices, nor to keep all prior systems out of view
+during his examination of the present. For in truth, such requests
+appear to me not much unlike the advice given to hypochondriacal
+patients in Dr. Buchan's domestic medicine; videlicet, to preserve
+themselves uniformly tranquil and in good spirits. Till I had discovered
+the art of destroying the memory a parte post, without injury to its
+future operations, and without detriment to the judgment, I should
+suppress the request as premature; and therefore, however much I may
+wish to be read with an unprejudiced mind, I do not presume to state it
+as a necessary condition.
+
+The extent of my daring is to suggest one criterion, by which it may be
+rationally conjectured beforehand, whether or no a reader would lose
+his time, and perhaps his temper, in the perusal of this, or any other
+treatise constructed on similar principles. But it would be cruelly
+misinterpreted, as implying the least disrespect either for the moral
+or intellectual qualities of the individuals thereby precluded. The
+criterion is this: if a man receives as fundamental facts, and therefore
+of course indemonstrable and incapable of further analysis, the general
+notions of matter, spirit, soul, body, action, passiveness, time, space,
+cause and effect, consciousness, perception, memory and habit; if
+he feels his mind completely at rest concerning all these, and is
+satisfied, if only he can analyse all other notions into some one or
+more of these supposed elements with plausible subordination and apt
+arrangement: to such a mind I would as courteously as possible convey
+the hint, that for him the chapter was not written.
+
+    Vir bonus es, doctus, prudens; ast haud tibi spiro.
+
+For these terms do in truth include all the difficulties, which the
+human mind can propose for solution. Taking them therefore in mass, and
+unexamined, it required only a decent apprenticeship in logic, to draw
+forth their contents in all forms and colours, as the professors of
+legerdemain at our village fairs pull out ribbon after ribbon from their
+mouths. And not more difficult is it to reduce them back again to their
+different genera. But though this analysis is highly useful in rendering
+our knowledge more distinct, it does not really add to it. It does not
+increase, though it gives us a greater mastery over, the wealth which
+we before possessed. For forensic purposes, for all the established
+professions of society, this is sufficient. But for philosophy in its
+highest sense as the science of ultimate truths, and therefore scientia
+scientiarum, this mere analysis of terms is preparative only, though as
+a preparative discipline indispensable.
+
+Still less dare a favourable perusal be anticipated from the proselytes
+of that compendious philosophy, which talking of mind but thinking
+of brick and mortar, or other images equally abstracted from body,
+contrives a theory of spirit by nicknaming matter, and in a few hours
+can qualify its dullest disciples to explain the omne scibile by
+reducing all things to impressions, ideas, and sensations.
+
+But it is time to tell the truth; though it requires some courage to
+avow it in an age and country, in which disquisitions on all subjects,
+not privileged to adopt technical terms or scientific symbols, must be
+addressed to the Public. I say then, that it is neither possible nor
+necessary for all men, nor for many, to be philosophers. There is a
+philosophic (and inasmuch as it is actualized by an effort of freedom,
+an artificial) consciousness, which lies beneath or (as it were) behind
+the spontaneous consciousness natural to all reflecting beings. As the
+elder Romans distinguished their northern provinces into Cis-Alpine and
+Trans-Alpine, so may we divide all the objects of human knowledge into
+those on this side, and those on the other side of the spontaneous
+consciousness; citra et trans conscientiam communem. The latter is
+exclusively the domain of pure philosophy, which is therefore properly
+entitled transcendental, in order to discriminate it at once, both from
+mere reflection and representation on the one hand, and on the other
+from those flights of lawless speculation which, abandoned by all
+distinct consciousness, because transgressing the bounds and purposes of
+our intellectual faculties, are justly condemned, as transcendent [46].
+The first range of hills, that encircles the scanty vale of human life,
+is the horizon for the majority of its inhabitants. On its ridges the
+common sun is born and departs. From them the stars rise, and touching
+them they vanish. By the many, even this range, the natural limit and
+bulwark of the vale, is but imperfectly known. Its higher ascents are
+too often hidden by mists and clouds from uncultivated swamps, which
+few have courage or curiosity to penetrate. To the multitude below these
+vapours appear, now as the dark haunts of terrific agents, on which none
+may intrude with impunity; and now all aglow, with colours not their
+own, they are gazed at as the splendid palaces of happiness and power.
+But in all ages there have been a few, who measuring and sounding the
+rivers of the vale at the feet of their furthest inaccessible falls have
+learned, that the sources must be far higher and far inward; a few, who
+even in the level streams have detected elements, which neither the vale
+itself nor the surrounding mountains contained or could supply [47].
+How and whence to these thoughts, these strong probabilities, the
+ascertaining vision, the intuitive knowledge may finally supervene, can
+be learnt only by the fact. I might oppose to the question the words
+with which [48] Plotinus supposes Nature to answer a similar difficulty.
+"Should any one interrogate her, how she works, if graciously she
+vouchsafe to listen and speak, she will reply, it behoves thee not to
+disquiet me with interrogatories, but to understand in silence, even as
+I am silent, and work without words."
+
+Likewise in the fifth book of the fifth Ennead, speaking of the highest
+and intuitive knowledge as distinguished from the discursive, or in the
+language of Wordsworth,
+
+    "The vision and the faculty divine;"
+
+he says: "it is not lawful to inquire from whence it sprang, as if it
+were a thing subject to place and motion, for it neither approached
+hither, nor again departs from hence to some other place; but it either
+appears to us or it does not appear. So that we ought not to pursue it
+with a view of detecting its secret source, but to watch in quiet
+till it suddenly shines upon us; preparing ourselves for the blessed
+spectacle as the eye waits patiently for the rising sun." They and
+they only can acquire the philosophic imagination, the sacred power of
+self-intuition, who within themselves can interpret and understand the
+symbol, that the wings of the air-sylph are forming within the skin
+of the caterpillar; those only, who feel in their own spirits the same
+instinct, which impels the chrysalis of the horned fly to leave room in
+its involucrum for antenna, yet to come. They know and feel, that the
+potential works in them, even as the actual works on them! In short, all
+the organs of sense are framed for a corresponding world of sense; and
+we have it. All the organs of spirit are framed for a correspondent
+world of spirit: though the latter organs are not developed in all
+alike. But they exist in all, and their first appearance discloses
+itself in the moral being. How else could it be, that even worldlings,
+not wholly debased, will contemplate the man of simple and disinterested
+goodness with contradictory feelings of pity and respect? "Poor man!
+he is not made for this world." Oh! herein they utter a prophecy of
+universal fulfilment; for man must either rise or sink.
+
+It is the essential mark of the true philosopher to rest satisfied with
+no imperfect light, as long as the impossibility of attaining a fuller
+knowledge has not been demonstrated. That the common consciousness
+itself will furnish proofs by its own direction, that it is connected
+with master-currents below the surface, I shall merely assume as
+a postulate pro tempore. This having been granted, though but in
+expectation of the argument, I can safely deduce from it the equal truth
+of my former assertion, that philosophy cannot be intelligible to all,
+even of the most learned and cultivated classes. A system, the first
+principle of which it is to render the mind intuitive of the spiritual
+in man (i.e. of that which lies on the other side of our natural
+consciousness) must needs have a great obscurity for those, who have
+never disciplined and strengthened this ulterior consciousness. It must
+in truth be a land of darkness, a perfect Anti-Goshen, for men to whom
+the noblest treasures of their own being are reported only through the
+imperfect translation of lifeless and sightless motions. Perhaps, in
+great part, through words which are but the shadows of notions; even
+as the notional understanding itself is but the shadowy abstraction of
+living and actual truth. On the IMMEDIATE, which dwells in every man,
+and on the original intuition, or absolute affirmation of it, (which
+is likewise in every man, but does not in every man rise into
+consciousness) all the certainty of our knowledge depends; and this
+becomes intelligible to no man by the ministry of mere words from
+without. The medium, by which spirits understand each other, is not the
+surrounding air; but the freedom which they possess in common, as the
+common ethereal element of their being, the tremulous reciprocations
+of which propagate themselves even to the inmost of the soul. Where the
+spirit of a man is not filled with the consciousness of freedom (were it
+only from its restlessness, as of one still struggling in bondage) all
+spiritual intercourse is interrupted, not only with others, but even
+with himself. No wonder then, that he remains incomprehensible to
+himself as well as to others. No wonder, that, in the fearful desert of
+his consciousness, he wearies himself out with empty words, to which
+no friendly echo answers, either from his own heart, or the heart of a
+fellow being; or bewilders himself in the pursuit of notional phantoms,
+the mere refractions from unseen and distant truths through the
+distorting medium of his own unenlivened and stagnant understanding!
+To remain unintelligible to such a mind, exclaims Schelling on a like
+occasion, is honour and a good name before God and man.
+
+The history of philosophy (the same writer observes) contains instances
+of systems, which for successive generations have remained enigmatic.
+Such he deems the system of Leibnitz, whom another writer (rashly I
+think, and invidiously) extols as the only philosopher, who was himself
+deeply convinced of his own doctrines. As hitherto interpreted, however,
+they have not produced the effect, which Leibnitz himself, in a most
+instructive passage, describes as the criterion of a true philosophy;
+namely, that it would at once explain and collect the fragments of truth
+scattered through systems apparently the most incongruous. The truth,
+says he, is diffused more widely than is commonly believed; but it
+is often painted, yet oftener masked, and is sometimes mutilated and
+sometimes, alas! in close alliance with mischievous errors. The deeper,
+however, we penetrate into the ground of things, the more truth we
+discover in the doctrines of the greater number of the philosophical
+sects. The want of substantial reality in the objects of the senses,
+according to the sceptics; the harmonies or numbers, the prototypes and
+ideas, to which the Pythagoreans and Platonists reduced all things:
+the ONE and ALL of Parmenides and Plotinus, without [49] Spinozism; the
+necessary connection of things according to the Stoics, reconcilable
+with the spontaneity of the other schools; the vital-philosophy of the
+Cabalists and Hermetists, who assumed the universality of sensation;
+the substantial forms and entelechies of Aristotle and the schoolmen,
+together with the mechanical solution of all particular phaenomena
+according to Democritus and the recent philosophers--all these we shall
+find united in one perspective central point, which shows regularity
+and a coincidence of all the parts in the very object, which from every
+other point of view must appear confused and distorted. The spirit of
+sectarianism has been hitherto our fault, and the cause of our failures.
+We have imprisoned our own conceptions by the lines, which we have
+drawn, in order to exclude the conceptions of others. J'ai trouve que
+la plupart des Sectes ont raison dans une bonne partie de ce qu'elles
+avancent, mais non pas tant en ce qu'elles nient.
+
+A system, which aims to deduce the memory with all the other functions
+of intelligence, must of course place its first position from beyond the
+memory, and anterior to it, otherwise the principle of solution would
+be itself a part of the problem to be solved. Such a position therefore
+must, in the first instance be demanded, and the first question will be,
+by what right is it demanded? On this account I think it expedient
+to make some preliminary remarks on the introduction of Postulates
+in philosophy. The word postulate is borrowed from the science
+of mathematics [50]. In geometry the primary construction is not
+demonstrated, but postulated. This first and most simple construction in
+space is the point in motion, or the line. Whether the point is moved
+in one and the same direction, or whether its direction is continually
+changed, remains as yet undetermined. But if the direction of the point
+have been determined, it is either by a point without it, and then there
+arises the straight line which incloses no space; or the direction of
+the point is not determined by a point without it, and then it must flow
+back again on itself, that is, there arises a cyclical line, which does
+enclose a space. If the straight line be assumed as the positive, the
+cyclical is then the negation of the straight. It is a line, which at
+no point strikes out into the straight, but changes its direction
+continuously. But if the primary line be conceived as undetermined, and
+the straight line as determined throughout, then the cyclical is the
+third compounded of both. It is at once undetermined and determined;
+undetermined through any point without, and determined through itself.
+Geometry therefore supplies philosophy with the example of a primary
+intuition, from which every science that lays claim to evidence
+must take its commencement. The mathematician does not begin with a
+demonstrable proposition, but with an intuition, a practical idea.
+
+But here an important distinction presents itself. Philosophy is
+employed on objects of the inner SENSE, and cannot, like geometry,
+appropriate to every construction a correspondent outward intuition.
+Nevertheless, philosophy, if it is to arrive at evidence, must proceed
+from the most original construction, and the question then is, what is
+the most original construction or first productive act for the inner
+sense. The answer to this question depends on the direction which is
+given to the inner sense. But in philosophy the inner sense cannot
+have its direction determined by an outward object. To the original
+construction of the line I can be compelled by a line drawn before me
+on the slate or on sand. The stroke thus drawn is indeed not the line
+itself, but only the image or picture of the line. It is not from it,
+that we first learn to know the line; but, on the contrary, we
+bring this stroke to the original line generated by the act of the
+imagination; otherwise we could not define it as without breadth or
+thickness. Still however this stroke is the sensuous image of
+the original or ideal line, and an efficient mean to excite every
+imagination to the intuition of it.
+
+It is demanded then, whether there be found any means in philosophy
+to determine the direction of the inner sense, as in mathematics it is
+determinable by its specific image or outward picture. Now the inner
+sense has its direction determined for the greater part only by an act
+of freedom. One man's consciousness extends only to the pleasant or
+unpleasant sensations caused in him by external impressions; another
+enlarges his inner sense to a consciousness of forms and quantity; a
+third in addition to the image is conscious of the conception or notion
+of the thing; a fourth attains to a notion of his notions--he reflects
+on his own reflections; and thus we may say without impropriety, that
+the one possesses more or less inner sense, than the other. This more or
+less betrays already, that philosophy in its first principles must have
+a practical or moral, as well as a theoretical or speculative side.
+This difference in degree does not exist in the mathematics. Socrates in
+Plato shows, that an ignorant slave may be brought to understand and of
+himself to solve the most difficult geometrical problem. Socrates drew
+the figures for the slave in the sand. The disciples of the critical
+philosophy could likewise (as was indeed actually done by La Forge
+and some other followers of Des Cartes) represent the origin of our
+representations in copper-plates; but no one has yet attempted it, and
+it would be utterly useless. To an Esquimaux or New Zealander our most
+popular philosophy would be wholly unintelligible. The sense, the inward
+organ, for it is not yet born in him. So is there many a one among
+us, yes, and some who think themselves philosophers too, to whom the
+philosophic organ is entirely wanting. To such a man philosophy is a
+mere play of words and notions, like a theory of music to the deaf, or
+like the geometry of light to the blind. The connection of the parts and
+their logical dependencies may be seen and remembered; but the whole is
+groundless and hollow, unsustained by living contact, unaccompanied with
+any realizing intuition which exists by and in the act that affirms its
+existence, which is known, because it is, and is, because it is known.
+The words of Plotinus, in the assumed person of Nature, hold true of the
+philosophic energy. To theoroun mou, theoraema poiei, osper oi geometrai
+theorountes graphousin; all' emon mae graphousaes, theorousaes de,
+uphistantai ai ton somaton grammai. With me the act of contemplation
+makes the thing contemplated, as the geometricians contemplating
+describe lines correspondent; but I not describing lines, but simply
+contemplating, the representative forms of things rise up into
+existence.
+
+The postulate of philosophy and at the same time the test of philosophic
+capacity, is no other than the heaven-descended KNOW THYSELF! (E
+coelo descendit, Gnothi seauton). And this at once practically and
+speculatively. For as philosophy is neither a science of the reason or
+understanding only, nor merely a science of morals, but the science of
+BEING altogether, its primary ground can be neither merely speculative
+nor merely practical, but both in one. All knowledge rests on the
+coincidence of an object with a subject. (My readers have been warned
+in a former chapter that, for their convenience as well as the writer's,
+the term, subject, is used by me in its scholastic sense as equivalent
+to mind or sentient being, and as the necessary correlative of object or
+quicquid objicitur menti.) For we can know that only which is true: and
+the truth is universally placed in the coincidence of the thought with
+the thing, of the representation with the object represented.
+
+Now the sum of all that is merely OBJECTIVE, we will henceforth call
+NATURE, confining the term to its passive and material sense, as
+comprising all the phaenomena by which its existence is made known
+to us. On the other hand the sum of all that is SUBJECTIVE, we may
+comprehend in the name of the SELF or INTELLIGENCE. Both conceptions
+are in necessary antithesis. Intelligence is conceived of as exclusively
+representative, nature as exclusively represented; the one as conscious,
+the other as without consciousness. Now in all acts of positive
+knowledge there is required a reciprocal concurrence of both, namely
+of the conscious being, and of that which is in itself unconscious.
+Our problem is to explain this concurrence, its possibility and its
+necessity.
+
+During the act of knowledge itself, the objective and subjective are
+so instantly united, that we cannot determine to which of the two
+the priority belongs. There is here no first, and no second; both are
+coinstantaneous and one. While I am attempting to explain this intimate
+coalition, I must suppose it dissolved. I must necessarily set out from
+the one, to which therefore I give hypothetical antecedence, in order to
+arrive at the other. But as there are but two factors or elements in the
+problem, subject and object, and as it is left indeterminate from which
+of them I should commence, there are two cases equally possible.
+
+1. EITHER THE OBJECTIVE IS TAKEN AS THE FIRST, AND THEN WE HAVE TO
+ACCOUNT FOR THE SUPERVENTION OF THE SUBJECTIVE, WHICH COALESCES WITH IT.
+
+The notion of the subjective is not contained in the notion of the
+objective. On the contrary they mutually exclude each other. The
+subjective therefore must supervene to the objective. The conception of
+nature does not apparently involve the co-presence of an intelligence
+making an ideal duplicate of it, that is, representing it. This desk
+for instance would (according to our natural notions) be, though there
+should exist no sentient being to look at it. This then is the problem
+of natural philosophy. It assumes the objective or unconscious nature as
+the first, and as therefore to explain how intelligence can supervene to
+it, or how itself can grow into intelligence. If it should appear, that
+all enlightened naturalists, without having distinctly proposed the
+problem to themselves, have yet constantly moved in the line of its
+solution, it must afford a strong presumption that the problem itself
+is founded in nature. For if all knowledge has, as it were, two poles
+reciprocally required and presupposed, all sciences must proceed from
+the one or the other, and must tend toward the opposite as far as the
+equatorial point in which both are reconciled and become identical. The
+necessary tendency therefore of all natural philosophy is from nature to
+intelligence; and this, and no other is the true ground and occasion of
+the instinctive striving to introduce theory into our views of natural
+phaenomena. The highest perfection of natural philosophy would consist
+in the perfect spiritualization of all the laws of nature into laws
+of intuition and intellect. The phaenomena (the material) most wholly
+disappear, and the laws alone (the formal) must remain. Thence it comes,
+that in nature itself the more the principle of law breaks forth, the
+more does the husk drop off, the phaenomena themselves become more
+spiritual and at length cease altogether in our consciousness. The
+optical phaenomena are but a geometry, the lines of which are drawn
+by light, and the materiality of this light itself has already become
+matter of doubt. In the appearances of magnetism all trace of matter is
+lost, and of the phaenomena of gravitation, which not a few among the
+most illustrious Newtonians have declared no otherwise comprehensible
+than as an immediate spiritual influence, there remains nothing but
+its law, the execution of which on a vast scale is the mechanism of
+the heavenly motions. The theory of natural philosophy would then be
+completed, when all nature was demonstrated to be identical in
+essence with that, which in its highest known power exists in man as
+intelligence and self-consciousness; when the heavens and the earth
+shall declare not only the power of their maker, but the glory and the
+presence of their God, even as he appeared to the great prophet during
+the vision of the mount in the skirts of his divinity.
+
+This may suffice to show, that even natural science, which commences
+with the material phaenomenon as the reality and substance of things
+existing, does yet by the necessity of theorizing unconsciously, and
+as it were instinctively, end in nature as an intelligence; and by this
+tendency the science of nature becomes finally natural philosophy, the
+one of the two poles of fundamental science.
+
+2. OR THE SUBJECTIVE IS TAKEN AS THE FIRST, AND THE PROBLEM THEN IS, HOW
+THERE SUPERVENES TO IT A COINCIDENT OBJECTIVE.
+
+In the pursuit of these sciences, our success in each, depends on an
+austere and faithful adherence to its own principles, with a careful
+separation and exclusion of those, which appertain to the opposite
+science. As the natural philosopher, who directs his views to the
+objective, avoids above all things the intermixture of the subjective
+in his knowledge, as for instance, arbitrary suppositions or rather
+suflictions, occult qualities, spiritual agents, and the substitution of
+final for efficient causes; so on the other hand, the transcendental
+or intelligential philosopher is equally anxious to preclude all
+interpellation of the objective into the subjective principles of his
+science, as for instance the assumption of impresses or configurations
+in the brain, correspondent to miniature pictures on the retina painted
+by rays of light from supposed originals, which are not the immediate
+and real objects of vision, but deductions from it for the purposes of
+explanation. This purification of the mind is effected by an absolute
+and scientific scepticism, to which the mind voluntarily determines
+itself for the specific purpose of future certainty. Des Cartes who
+(in his meditations) himself first, at least of the moderns, gave
+a beautiful example of this voluntary doubt, this self-determined
+indetermination, happily expresses its utter difference from the
+scepticism of vanity or irreligion: Nec tamen in Scepticos imitabar,
+qui dubitant tantum ut dubitent, et praeter incertitudinem ipsam nihil
+quaerunt. Nam contra totus in eo eram ut aliquid certi reperirem [51].
+Nor is it less distinct in its motives and final aim, than in its proper
+objects, which are not as in ordinary scepticism the prejudices of
+education and circumstance, but those original and innate prejudices
+which nature herself has planted in all men, and which to all but the
+philosopher are the first principles of knowledge, and the final test of
+truth.
+
+Now these essential prejudices are all reducible to the one fundamental
+presumption, THAT THERE EXIST THINGS WITHOUT US. As this on the one hand
+originates, neither in grounds nor arguments, and yet on the other hand
+remains proof against all attempts to remove it by grounds or arguments
+(naturam furca expellas tamen usque redibit;) on the one hand lays
+claim to IMMEDIATE certainty as a position at once indemonstrable
+and irresistible, and yet on the other hand, inasmuch as it refers to
+something essentially different from ourselves, nay even in opposition
+to ourselves, leaves it inconceivable how it could possibly become a
+part of our immediate consciousness; (in other words how that, which
+ex hypothesi is and continues to be extrinsic and alien to our being,
+should become a modification of our being) the philosopher therefore
+compels himself to treat this faith as nothing more than a prejudice,
+innate indeed and connatural, but still a prejudice.
+
+The other position, which not only claims but necessitates the admission
+of its immediate certainty, equally for the scientific reason of the
+philosopher as for the common sense of mankind at large, namely, I AM,
+cannot so properly be entitled a prejudice. It is groundless indeed; but
+then in the very idea it precludes all ground, and separated from
+the immediate consciousness loses its whole sense and import. It is
+groundless; but only because it is itself the ground of all other
+certainty. Now the apparent contradiction, that the former position,
+namely, the existence of things without us, which from its nature
+cannot be immediately certain, should be received as blindly and as
+independently of all grounds as the existence of our own being, the
+Transcendental philosopher can solve only by the supposition, that the
+former is unconsciously involved in the latter; that it is not only
+coherent but identical, and one and the same thing with our own
+immediate self consciousness. To demonstrate this identity is the office
+and object of his philosophy.
+
+If it be said, that this is idealism, let it be remembered that it
+is only so far idealism, as it is at the same time, and on that very
+account, the truest and most binding realism. For wherein does the
+realism of mankind properly consist? In the assertion that there exists
+a something without them, what, or how, or where they know not, which
+occasions the objects of their perception? Oh no! This is neither
+connatural nor universal. It is what a few have taught and learned
+in the schools, and which the many repeat without asking themselves
+concerning their own meaning. The realism common to all mankind is far
+elder and lies infinitely deeper than this hypothetical explanation
+of the origin of our perceptions, an explanation skimmed from the mere
+surface of mechanical philosophy. It is the table itself, which the man
+of common sense believes himself to see, not the phantom of a table,
+from which he may argumentatively deduce the reality of a table, which
+he does not see. If to destroy the reality of all, that we actually
+behold, be idealism, what can be more egregiously so, than the system of
+modern metaphysics, which banishes us to a land of shadows, surrounds
+us with apparitions, and distinguishes truth from illusion only by the
+majority of those who dream the same dream? "I asserted that the world
+was mad," exclaimed poor Lee, "and the world said, that I was mad, and
+confound them, they outvoted me."
+
+It is to the true and original realism, that I would direct the
+attention. This believes and requires neither more nor less, than the
+object which it beholds or presents to itself, is the real and very
+object. In this sense, however much we may strive against it, we are all
+collectively born idealists, and therefore and only therefore are we at
+the same time realists. But of this the philosophers of the schools know
+nothing, or despise the faith as the prejudice of the ignorant vulgar,
+because they live and move in a crowd of phrases and notions from which
+human nature has long ago vanished. Oh, ye that reverence yourselves,
+and walk humbly with the divinity in your own hearts, ye are worthy of a
+better philosophy! Let the dead bury the dead, but do you preserve your
+human nature, the depth of which was never yet fathomed by a philosophy
+made up of notions and mere logical entities.
+
+In the third treatise of my Logosophia, announced at the end of this
+volume, I shall give (Deo volente) the demonstrations and constructions
+of the Dynamic Philosophy scientifically arranged. It is, according
+to my conviction, no other than the system of Pythagoras and of Plato
+revived and purified from impure mixtures. Doctrina per tot manus
+tradita tandem in vappam desiit! The science of arithmetic furnishes
+instances, that a rule may be useful in practical application, and for
+the particular purpose may be sufficiently authenticated by the result,
+before it has itself been fully demonstrated. It is enough, if only it
+be rendered intelligible. This will, I trust, have been effected in the
+following Theses for those of my readers, who are willing to accompany
+me through the following chapter, in which the results will be applied
+to the deduction of the Imagination, and with it the principles of
+production and of genial criticism in the fine arts.
+
+THESIS I
+
+Truth is correlative to being. Knowledge without a correspondent reality
+is no knowledge; if we know, there must be somewhat known by us. To know
+is in its very essence a verb active.
+
+THESIS II
+
+All truth is either mediate, that is, derived from some other truth
+or truths; or immediate and original. The latter is absolute, and its
+formula A. A.; the former is of dependent or conditional certainty, and
+represented in the formula B. A. The certainty, which adheres in A, is
+attributable to B.
+
+SCHOLIUM. A chain without a staple, from which all the links derived
+their stability, or a series without a first, has been not inaptly
+allegorized, as a string of blind men, each holding the skirt of the man
+before him, reaching far out of sight, but all moving without the least
+deviation in one straight line. It would be naturally taken for
+granted, that there was a guide at the head of the file: what if it were
+answered, No! Sir, the men are without number, and infinite blindness
+supplies the place of sight?
+
+Equally inconceivable is a cycle of equal truths without a common and
+central principle, which prescribes to each its proper sphere in the
+system of science. That the absurdity does not so immediately strike us,
+that it does not seem equally unimaginable, is owing to a surreptitious
+act of the imagination, which, instinctively and without our noticing
+the same, not only fills up the intervening spaces, and contemplates the
+cycle (of B. C. D. E. F. etc.) as a continuous circle (A.) giving to all
+collectively the unity of their common orbit; but likewise supplies,
+by a sort of subintelligitur, the one central power, which renders the
+movement harmonious and cyclical.
+
+THESIS III
+
+We are to seek therefore for some absolute truth capable of
+communicating to other positions a certainty, which it has not itself
+borrowed; a truth self-grounded, unconditional and known by its own
+light. In short, we have to find a somewhat which is, simply because it
+is. In order to be such, it must be one which is its own predicate,
+so far at least that all other nominal predicates must be modes and
+repetitions of itself. Its existence too must be such, as to preclude
+the possibility of requiring a cause or antecedent without an absurdity.
+
+THESIS IV
+
+That there can be but one such principle, may be proved a priori; for
+were there two or more, each must refer to some other, by which its
+equality is affirmed; consequently neither would be self-established,
+as the hypothesis demands. And a posteriori, it will be proved by
+the principle itself when it is discovered, as involving universal
+antecedence in its very conception.
+
+SCHOLIUM. If we affirm of a board that it is blue, the predicate (blue)
+is accidental, and not implied in the subject, board. If we affirm of
+a circle that it is equi-radial, the predicate indeed is implied in the
+definition of the subject; but the existence of the subject itself
+is contingent, and supposes both a cause and a percipient. The same
+reasoning will apply to the indefinite number of supposed indemonstrable
+truths exempted from the profane approach of philosophic investigation
+by the amiable Beattie, and other less eloquent and not more profound
+inaugurators of common sense on the throne of philosophy; a fruitless
+attempt, were it only that it is the two-fold function of philosophy
+to reconcile reason with common sense, and to elevate common sense into
+reason.
+
+THESIS V
+
+Such a principle cannot be any THING or OBJECT. Each thing is what it is
+in consequence of some other thing. An infinite, independent [52]
+thing, is no less a contradiction, than an infinite circle or a sideless
+triangle. Besides a thing is that, which is capable of being an object
+which itself is not the sole percipient. But an object is inconceivable
+without a subject as its antithesis. Omne perceptum percipientem
+supponit.
+
+But neither can the principle be found in a subject as a subject,
+contra-distinguished from an object: for unicuique percipienti aliquid
+objicitur perceptum. It is to be found therefore neither in object
+nor subject taken separately, and consequently, as no other third is
+conceivable, it must be found in that which is neither subject nor
+object exclusively, but which is the identity of both.
+
+THESIS VI
+
+This principle, and so characterised manifests itself in the SUM or
+I AM; which I shall hereafter indiscriminately express by the words
+spirit, self, and self-consciousness. In this, and in this alone,
+object and subject, being and knowing, are identical, each involving
+and supposing the other. In other words, it is a subject which becomes
+a subject by the act of constructing itself objectively to itself; but
+which never is an object except for itself, and only so far as by the
+very same act it becomes a subject. It may be described therefore as
+a perpetual self-duplication of one and the same power into object and
+subject, which presuppose each other, and can exist only as antitheses.
+
+SCHOLIUM. If a man be asked how he knows that he is? he can only answer,
+sum quia sum. But if (the absoluteness of this certainty having been
+admitted) he be again asked, how he, the individual person, came to be,
+then in relation to the ground of his existence, not to the ground of
+his knowledge of that existence, he might reply, sum quia Deus est, or
+still more philosophically, sum quia in Deo sum.
+
+But if we elevate our conception to the absolute self, the great eternal
+I AM, then the principle of being, and of knowledge, of idea, and of
+reality; the ground of existence, and the ground of the knowledge of
+existence, are absolutely identical, Sum quia sum [53]; I am, because I
+affirm myself to be; I affirm myself to be, because I am.
+
+THESIS VII
+
+If then I know myself only through myself, it is contradictory to
+require any other predicate of self, but that of self-consciousness.
+Only in the self-consciousness of a spirit is there the required
+identity of object and of representation; for herein consists the
+essence of a spirit, that it is self-representative. If therefore this
+be the one only immediate truth, in the certainty of which the reality
+of our collective knowledge is grounded, it must follow that the spirit
+in all the objects which it views, views only itself. If this could
+be proved, the immediate reality of all intuitive knowledge would be
+assured. It has been shown, that a spirit is that, which is its own
+object, yet not originally an object, but an absolute subject for which
+all, itself included, may become an object. It must therefore be an ACT;
+for every object is, as an object, dead, fixed, incapable in itself of
+any action, and necessarily finite. Again the spirit (originally
+the identity of object and subject) must in some sense dissolve this
+identity, in order to be conscious of it; fit alter et idem. But
+this implies an act, and it follows therefore that intelligence
+or self-consciousness is impossible, except by and in a will. The
+self-conscious spirit therefore is a will; and freedom must be assumed
+as a ground of philosophy, and can never be deduced from it.
+
+THESIS VIII
+
+Whatever in its origin is objective, is likewise as such necessarily
+finite. Therefore, since the spirit is not originally an object, and
+as the subject exists in antithesis to an object, the spirit cannot
+originally be finite. But neither can it be a subject without becoming
+an object, and, as it is originally the identity of both, it can be
+conceived neither as infinite nor finite exclusively, but as the most
+original union of both. In the existence, in the reconciling, and the
+recurrence of this contradiction consists the process and mystery of
+production and life.
+
+THESIS IX
+
+This principium commune essendi et cognoscendi, as subsisting in a WILL,
+or primary ACT of self-duplication, is the mediate or indirect principle
+of every science; but it is the immediate and direct principle of the
+ultimate science alone, i.e. of transcendental philosophy alone. For it
+must be remembered, that all these Theses refer solely to one of the
+two Polar Sciences, namely, to that which commences with, and rigidly
+confines itself within, the subjective, leaving the objective (as far
+as it is exclusively objective) to natural philosophy, which is its
+opposite pole. In its very idea therefore as a systematic knowledge of
+our collective KNOWING, (scientia scientiae) it involves the necessity
+of some one highest principle of knowing, as at once the source and
+accompanying form in all particular acts of intellect and perception.
+This, it has been shown, can be found only in the act and evolution of
+self-consciousness. We are not investigating an absolute principium
+essendi; for then, I admit, many valid objections might be started
+against our theory; but an absolute principium cognoscendi. The result
+of both the sciences, or their equatorial point, would be the principle
+of a total and undivided philosophy, as, for prudential reasons, I
+have chosen to anticipate in the Scholium to Thesis VI and the note
+subjoined. In other words, philosophy would pass into religion, and
+religion become inclusive of philosophy. We begin with the I KNOW
+MYSELF, in order to end with the absolute I AM. We proceed from the
+SELF, in order to lose and find all self in GOD.
+
+THESIS X
+
+The transcendental philosopher does not inquire, what ultimate ground of
+our knowledge there may lie out of our knowing, but what is the last in
+our knowing itself, beyond which we cannot pass. The principle of our
+knowing is sought within the sphere of our knowing. It must be some
+thing therefore, which can itself be known. It is asserted only, that
+the act of self-consciousness is for us the source and principle of
+all our possible knowledge. Whether abstracted from us there exists any
+thing higher and beyond this primary self-knowing, which is for us the
+form of all our knowing must be decided by the result.
+
+That the self-consciousness is the fixed point, to which for us all
+is mortised and annexed, needs no further proof. But that the self-
+consciousness may be the modification of a higher form of being, perhaps
+of a higher consciousness, and this again of a yet higher, and so on in
+an infinite regressus; in short, that self-consciousness may be
+itself something explicable into something, which must lie beyond
+the possibility of our knowledge, because the whole synthesis of our
+intelligence is first formed in and through the self-consciousness,
+does not at all concern us as transcendental philosophers. For to us,
+self-consciousness is not a kind of being, but a kind of knowing, and
+that too the highest and farthest that exists for us. It may however be
+shown, and has in part already been shown earlier, that even when the
+Objective is assumed as the first, we yet can never pass beyond the
+principle of self-consciousness. Should we attempt it, we must be driven
+back from ground to ground, each of which would cease to be a ground the
+moment we pressed on it. We must be whirled down the gulf of an infinite
+series. But this would make our reason baffle the end and purpose of
+all reason, namely, unity and system. Or we must break off the series
+arbitrarily, and affirm an absolute something that is in and of itself
+at once cause and effect (causa sui), subject and object, or rather the
+absolute identity of both. But as this is inconceivable, except in a
+self-consciousness, it follows, that even as natural philosophers
+we must arrive at the same principle from which as transcendental
+philosophers we set out; that is, in a self-consciousness in which the
+principium essendi does not stand to the principlum cognoscende in
+the relation of cause to effect, but both the one and the other are
+co-inherent and identical. Thus the true system of natural philosophy
+places the sole reality of things in an ABSOLUTE, which is at once
+causa sui et effectus, pataer autopator, uios heautou--in the absolute
+identity of subject and object, which it calls nature, and which in its
+highest power is nothing else than self-conscious will or intelligence.
+In this sense the position of Malebranche, that we see all things in
+God, is a strict philosophical truth; and equally true is the assertion
+of Hobbes, of Hartley, and of their masters in ancient Greece, that all
+real knowledge supposes a prior sensation. For sensation itself is but
+vision nascent, not the cause of intelligence, but intelligence itself
+revealed as an earlier power in the process of self-construction.
+
+    Makar, ilathi moi;
+    Pater, ilathi moi
+    Ei para kosmon,
+    Ei para moiran
+    Ton son ethigon!
+
+Bearing then this in mind, that intelligence is a self-development, not
+a quality supervening to a substance, we may abstract from all degree,
+and for the purpose of philosophic construction reduce it to kind, under
+the idea of an indestructible power with two opposite and counteracting
+forces, which by a metaphor borrowed from astronomy, we may call the
+centrifugal and centripetal forces. The intelligence in the one tends to
+objectize itself, and in the other to know itself in the object. It
+will be hereafter my business to construct by a series of intuitions
+the progressive schemes, that must follow from such a power with such
+forces, till I arrive at the fulness of the human intelligence. For
+my present purpose, I assume such a power as my principle, in order to
+deduce from it a faculty, the generation, agency, and application of
+which form the contents of the ensuing chapter.
+
+In a preceding page I have justified the use of technical terms in
+philosophy, whenever they tend to preclude confusion of thought, and
+when they assist the memory by the exclusive singleness of their meaning
+more than they may, for a short time, bewilder the attention by their
+strangeness. I trust, that I have not extended this privilege beyond
+the grounds on which I have claimed it; namely, the conveniency of the
+scholastic phrase to distinguish the kind from all degrees, or rather
+to express the kind with the abstraction of degree, as for instance
+multeity instead of multitude; or secondly, for the sake of
+correspondence in sound in interdependent or antithetical terms, as
+subject and object; or lastly, to avoid the wearying recurrence of
+circumlocutions and definitions. Thus I shall venture to use potence,
+in order to express a specific degree of a power, in imitation of the
+Algebraists. I have even hazarded the new verb potenziate, with its
+derivatives, in order to express the combination or transfer of powers.
+It is with new or unusual terms, as with privileges in courts of justice
+or legislature; there can be no legitimate privilege, where there
+already exists a positive law adequate to the purpose; and when there is
+no law in existence, the privilege is to be justified by its accordance
+with the end, or final cause, of all law. Unusual and new-coined
+words are doubtless an evil; but vagueness, confusion, and imperfect
+conveyance of our thoughts, are a far greater. Every system, which is
+under the necessity of using terms not familiarized by the metaphysics
+in fashion, will be described as written in an unintelligible style, and
+the author must expect the charge of having substituted learned jargon
+for clear conception; while, according to the creed of our modern
+philosophers, nothing is deemed a clear conception, but what is
+representable by a distinct image. Thus the conceivable is reduced
+within the bounds of the picturable. Hinc patet, qui fiat, ut cum
+irrepraesentabile et impossibile vulgo ejusdem significatus habeantur,
+conceptus tam continui, quam infiniti, a plurimis rejiciantur, quippe
+quorum, secundum leges cognitionis intuitivae, repraesentatio est
+impossibilis. Quanquam autem harum e non paucis scholis explosarum
+notionum, praesertim prioris, causam hic non gero, maximi tamen
+momendi erit monuisse. gravissimo illos errore labi, qui tam perverse
+argumentandi ratione utuntur. Quicquid enim repugnat legibus intellectus
+et rationis, utique est impossibile; quod autem, cum rationis purae
+sit objectum, legibus cognitionis intuitivae tantummodo non subest, non
+item. Nam hic dissensus inter facultatem sensitivam et intellectualem,
+(quarum indolem mox exponam,) nihil indigitat, nisi, quas mens ab
+intellectu acceptas fert ideas abstractas, illas in concreto exsequi
+et in intuitus commutare saepenumero non posse. Haec autem reluctantia
+subjectiva mentitur, ut plurimum, repugnantiam aliquam objectivam, et
+incautos facile fallit, limitibus, quibus mens humana circumscribitur,
+pro iis habitis, quibus ipsa rerum essentia continetur. [54]
+
+Critics, who are most ready to bring this charge of pedantry and
+unintelligibility, are the most apt to overlook the important
+fact, that, besides the language of words, there is a language of
+spirits--(sermo interior)--and that the former is only the vehicle of
+the latter. Consequently their assurance, that they do not understand
+the philosophic writer, instead of proving any thing against the
+philosophy, may furnish an equal, and (caeteris paribus) even a stronger
+presumption against their own philosophic talent.
+
+Great indeed are the obstacles which an English metaphysician has to
+encounter. Amongst his most respectable and intelligent judges, there
+will be many who have devoted their attention exclusively to the
+concerns and interests of human life, and who bring with them to
+the perusal of a philosophic system an habitual aversion to all
+speculations, the utility and application of which are not evident
+and immediate. To these I would in the first instance merely oppose an
+authority, which they themselves hold venerable, that of Lord Bacon: non
+inutiles Scientiae existimandae sunt, quarum in se nullus est usus, si
+ingenia acuant et ordinent.
+
+There are others, whose prejudices are still more formidable, inasmuch
+as they are grounded in their moral feelings and religious principles,
+which had been alarmed and shocked by the impious and pernicious tenets
+defended by Hume, Priestley, and the French fatalists or necessitarians;
+some of whom had perverted metaphysical reasonings to the denial of the
+mysteries and indeed of all the peculiar doctrines of Christianity;
+and others even to the subversion of all distinction between right
+and wrong. I would request such men to consider what an eminent and
+successful defender of the Christian faith has observed, that true
+metaphysics are nothing else but true divinity, and that in fact the
+writers, who have given them such just offence, were sophists, who had
+taken advantage of the general neglect into which the science of logic
+has unhappily fallen, rather than metaphysicians, a name indeed which
+those writers were the first to explode as unmeaning. Secondly, I would
+remind them, that as long as there are men in the world to whom the
+Gnothi seauton is an instinct and a command from their own nature, so
+long will there be metaphysicians and metaphysical speculations; that
+false metaphysics can be effectually counteracted by true metaphysics
+alone; and that if the reasoning be clear, solid and pertinent, the
+truth deduced can never be the less valuable on account of the depth
+from which it may have been drawn.
+
+A third class profess themselves friendly to metaphysics, and believe
+that they are themselves metaphysicians. They have no objection to
+system or terminology, provided it be the method and the nomenclature
+to which they have been familiarized in the writings of Locke, Hume,
+Hartley, Condillac, or perhaps Dr. Reid, and Professor Stewart. To
+objections from this cause, it is a sufficient answer, that one main
+object of my attempt was to demonstrate the vagueness or insufficiency
+of the terms used in the metaphysical schools of France and Great
+Britain since the revolution, and that the errors which I propose to
+attack cannot subsist, except as they are concealed behind the mask of a
+plausible and indefinite nomenclature.
+
+But the worst and widest impediment still remains. It is the
+predominance of a popular philosophy, at once the counterfeit and the
+mortal enemy of all true and manly metaphysical research. It is that
+corruption, introduced by certain immethodical aphorisming eclectics,
+who, dismissing not only all system, but all logical connection, pick
+and choose whatever is most plausible and showy; who select, whatever
+words can have some semblance of sense attached to them without the
+least expenditure of thought; in short whatever may enable men to talk
+of what they do not understand, with a careful avoidance of every thing
+that might awaken them to a moment's suspicion of their ignorance. This
+alas! is an irremediable disease, for it brings with it, not so much an
+indisposition to any particular system, but an utter loss of taste and
+faculty for all system and for all philosophy. Like echoes that beget
+each other amongst the mountains, the praise or blame of such men
+rolls in volleys long after the report from the original blunderbuss.
+Sequacitas est potius et coitio quam consensus: et tamen (quod pessimum
+est) pusillanimitas ista non sine arrogantia et fastidio se offert. [55]
+
+I shall now proceed to the nature and genesis of the Imagination; but I
+must first take leave to notice, that after a more accurate perusal of
+Mr. Wordsworth's remarks on the Imagination, in his preface to the new
+edition of his poems, I find that my conclusions are not so consentient
+with his as, I confess, I had taken for granted. In an article
+contributed by me to Mr. Southey's Omniana, On the soul and its organs
+of sense, are the following sentences. "These (the human faculties) I
+would arrange under the different senses and powers: as the eye, the
+ear, the touch, etc.; the imitative power, voluntary and automatic;
+the imagination, or shaping and modifying power; the fancy, or the
+aggregative and associative power; the understanding, or the regulative,
+substantiating and realizing power; the speculative reason, vis
+theoretica et scientifica, or the power by which we produce or aim to
+produce unity, necessity, and universality in all our knowledge by means
+of principles a priori [56]; the will, or practical reason; the faculty
+of choice (Germanice, Willkuehr) and (distinct both from the moral will
+and the choice,) the sensation of volition, which I have found reason to
+include under the head of single and double touch." To this, as far as
+it relates to the subject in question, namely the words (the aggregative
+and associative power) Mr. Wordsworth's "objection is only that the
+definition is too general. To aggregate and to associate, to evoke and
+to combine, belong as well to the Imagination as to the Fancy." I reply,
+that if, by the power of evoking and combining, Mr. Wordsworth means the
+same as, and no more than, I meant by the aggregative and associative,
+I continue to deny, that it belongs at all to the Imagination; and I
+am disposed to conjecture, that he has mistaken the copresence of Fancy
+with Imagination for the operation of the latter singly. A man may work
+with two very different tools at the same moment; each has its share in
+the work, but the work effected by each is distinct and different. But
+it will probably appear in the next chapter, that deeming it necessary
+to go back much further than Mr. Wordsworth's subject required or
+permitted, I have attached a meaning to both Fancy and Imagination,
+which he had not in view, at least while he was writing that preface. He
+will judge. Would to Heaven, I might meet with many such readers! I will
+conclude with the words of Bishop Jeremy Taylor: "He to whom all things
+are one, who draweth all things to one, and seeth all things in one, may
+enjoy true peace and rest of spirit." [57]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+On the imagination, or esemplastic power
+
+
+    O Adam, One Almighty is, from whom
+    All things proceed, and up to him return,
+    If not deprav'd from good, created all
+    Such to perfection, one first matter all,
+    Endued with various forms, various degrees
+    Of substance, and, in things that live, of life;
+    But more refin'd, more spiritous and pure,
+    As nearer to him plac'd, or nearer tending,
+    Each in their several active spheres assigu'd,
+    Till body up to spirit work, in bounds
+    Proportion'd to each kind. So from the root
+    Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves
+    More aery: last the bright consummate flower
+    Spirits odorous breathes: flowers and their fruit,
+    Man's nourishment, by gradual scale sublim'd,
+    To vital spirits aspire: to animal:
+    To intellectual!--give both life and sense,
+    Fancy and understanding; whence the soul
+    REASON receives, and reason is her being,
+    Discursive or intuitive. [58]
+
+"Sane dicerentur si res corporales nil nisi materiale continerent,
+verissime in fluxu consistere, neque habere substantiale quicquam,
+quemadmodum et Platonici olim recte agnovere."
+
+"Hinc igitur, praeter pure mathematica et phantasiae subjecta, collegi
+quaedam metaphysica solaque mente perceptibilia, esse admittenda et
+massae materiali principium quoddam superius et, ut sic dicam, formale
+addendum: quandoquidem omnes veritates rerum corporearum ex solis
+axiomatibus logisticis et geometricis, nempe de magno et parvo, toto
+et parte, figura et situ, colligi non possint; sed alia de causa et
+effectu, actioneque et passione, accedere debeant, quibus ordinis
+rerum rationes salventur. Id principium rerum, an entelecheian an vim
+appellemus, non refert, modo meminerimus, per solam Virium notionem
+intelligibiliter explicari." [59]
+
+    Sebomai noeron
+    Kruphian taxin
+    Chorei TI MESON
+    Ou katachuthen. [60]
+
+
+Des Cartes, speaking as a naturalist, and in imitation of Archimedes,
+said, give me matter and motion and I will construct you the universe.
+We must of course understand him to have meant; I will render the
+construction of the universe intelligible. In the same sense the
+transcendental philosopher says; grant me a nature having two contrary
+forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other
+strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity, and I will
+cause the world of intelllgences with the whole system of their
+representations to rise up before you. Every other science presupposes
+intelligence as already existing and complete: the philosopher
+contemplates it in its growth, and as it were represents its history to
+the mind from its birth to its maturity.
+
+The venerable sage of Koenigsberg has preceded the march of this
+master-thought as an effective pioneer in his essay on the introduction
+of negative quantities into philosophy, published 1763. In this he
+has shown, that instead of assailing the science of mathematics by
+metaphysics, as Berkeley did in his ANALYST, or of sophisticating it,
+as Wolf did, by the vain attempt of deducing the first principles
+of geometry from supposed deeper grounds of ontology, it behoved the
+metaphysician rather to examine whether the only province of knowledge,
+which man has succeeded in erecting into a pure science, might not
+furnish materials, or at least hints, for establishing and pacifying the
+unsettled, warring, and embroiled domain of philosophy. An imitation of
+the mathematical method had indeed been attempted with no better success
+than attended the essay of David to wear the armour of Saul. Another
+use however is possible and of far greater promise, namely, the actual
+application of the positions which had so wonderfully enlarged the
+discoveries of geometry, mutatis mutandis, to philosophical subjects.
+Kant having briefly illustrated the utility of such an attempt in the
+questions of space, motion, and infinitely small quantities, as employed
+by the mathematician, proceeds to the idea of negative quantities and
+the transfer of them to metaphysical investigation. Opposites, he
+well observes, are of two kinds, either logical, that is, such as are
+absolutely incompatible; or real, without being contradictory. The
+former he denominates Nihil negativum irrepraesentabile, the connection
+of which produces nonsense. A body in motion is something--Aliquid
+cogitabile; but a body, at one and the same time in motion and not in
+motion, is nothing, or, at most, air articulated into nonsense. But a
+motory force of a body in one direction, and an equal force of the
+same body in an opposite direction is not incompatible, and the
+result, namely, rest, is real and representable. For the purposes of
+mathematical calculus it is indifferent which force we term negative,
+and which positive, and consequently we appropriate the latter to that,
+which happens to be the principal object in our thoughts. Thus if a
+man's capital be ten and his debts eight, the subtraction will be the
+same, whether we call the capital negative debt, or the debt negative
+capital. But in as much as the latter stands practically in reference to
+the former, we of course represent the sum as 10-8. It is equally clear
+that two equal forces acting in opposite directions, both being finite
+and each distinguished from the other by its direction only, must
+neutralize or reduce each other to inaction. Now the transcendental
+philosophy demands; first, that two forces should be conceived which
+counteract each other by their essential nature; not only not in
+consequence of the accidental direction of each, but as prior to all
+direction, nay, as the primary forces from which the conditions of all
+possible directions are derivative and deducible: secondly, that
+these forces should be assumed to be both alike infinite, both alike
+indestructible. The problem will then be to discover the result or
+product of two such forces, as distinguished from the result of those
+forces which are finite, and derive their difference solely from the
+circumstance of their direction. When we have formed a scheme or outline
+of these two different kinds of force, and of their different results,
+by the process of discursive reasoning, it will then remain for us to
+elevate the thesis from notional to actual, by contemplating intuitively
+this one power with its two inherent indestructible yet counteracting
+forces, and the results or generations to which their inter-penetration
+gives existence, in the living principle and in the process of our own
+self-consciousness. By what instrument this is possible the solution
+itself will discover, at the same time that it will reveal to and for
+whom it is possible. Non omnia possumus omnes. There is a philosophic
+no less than a poetic genius, which is differenced from the highest
+perfection of talent, not by degree but by kind.
+
+The counteraction then of the two assumed forces does not depend on
+their meeting from opposite directions; the power which acts in them
+is indestructible; it is therefore inexhaustibly re-ebullient; and as
+something must be the result of these two forces, both alike infinite,
+and both alike indestructible; and as rest or neutralization cannot be
+this result; no other conception is possible, but that the product must
+be a tertium aliquid, or finite generation. Consequently this conception
+is necessary. Now this tertium aliquid can be no other than an
+inter-penetration of the counteracting powers, partaking of both.
+
+     *     *     *     *     *     *
+
+Thus far had the work been transcribed for the press, when I received
+the following letter from a friend, whose practical judgment I have had
+ample reason to estimate and revere, and whose taste and sensibility
+preclude all the excuses which my self-love might possibly have prompted
+me to set up in plea against the decision of advisers of equal good
+sense, but with less tact and feeling.
+
+"Dear C.
+
+    "You ask my opinion concerning your Chapter on the Imagination,
+both as to the impressions it made on myself, and as to those which I
+think it will make on the Public, i.e. that part of the public, who,
+from the title of the work and from its forming a sort of introduction
+to a volume of poems, are likely to constitute the great majority of
+your readers.
+
+"As to myself, and stating in the first place the effect on my
+understanding, your opinions and method of argument were not only so new
+to me, but so directly the reverse of all I had ever been accustomed
+to consider as truth, that even if I had comprehended your premises
+sufficiently to have admitted them, and had seen the necessity of your
+conclusions, I should still have been in that state of mind, which in
+your note in Chap. IV you have so ingeniously evolved, as the antithesis
+to that in which a man is, when he makes a bull. In your own words, I
+should have felt as if I had been standing on my head.
+
+"The effect on my feelings, on the other hand, I cannot better
+represent, than by supposing myself to have known only our light airy
+modern chapels of ease, and then for the first time to have been placed,
+and left alone, in one of our largest Gothic cathedrals in a gusty
+moonlight night of autumn. 'Now in glimmer, and now in gloom;' often
+in palpable darkness not without a chilly sensation of terror; then
+suddenly emerging into broad yet visionary lights with coloured shadows
+of fantastic shapes, yet all decked with holy insignia and mystic
+symbols; and ever and anon coming out full upon pictures and stone-work
+images of great men, with whose names I was familiar, but which looked
+upon me with countenances and an expression, the most dissimilar to all
+I had been in the habit of connecting with those names. Those whom I had
+been taught to venerate as almost super-human in magnitude of intellect,
+I found perched in little fret-work niches, as grotesque dwarfs; while
+the grotesques, in my hitherto belief, stood guarding the high altar
+with all the characters of apotheosis. In short, what I had supposed
+substances were thinned away into shadows, while everywhere shadows were
+deepened into substances:
+
+    If substance might be call'd that shadow seem'd,
+    For each seem'd either!
+
+"Yet after all, I could not but repeat the lines which you had quoted
+from a MS. poem of your own in the FRIEND, and applied to a work of Mr.
+Wordsworth's though with a few of the words altered:
+
+             ------An Orphic tale indeed,
+    A tale obscure of high and passionate thoughts
+    To a strange music chanted!
+
+"Be assured, however, that I look forward anxiously to your great book
+on the CONSTRUCTIVE PHILOSOPHY, which you have promised and announced:
+and that I will do my best to understand it. Only I will not promise to
+descend into the dark cave of Trophonius with you, there to rub my
+own eyes, in order to make the sparks and figured flashes, which I am
+required to see.
+
+"So much for myself. But as for the Public I do not hesitate a moment in
+advising and urging you to withdraw the Chapter from the present
+work, and to reserve it for your announced treatises on the Logos or
+communicative intellect in Man and Deity. First, because imperfectly as
+I understand the present Chapter, I see clearly that you have done too
+much, and yet not enough. You have been obliged to omit so many links,
+from the necessity of compression, that what remains, looks (if I may
+recur to my former illustration) like the fragments of the winding steps
+of an old ruined tower. Secondly, a still stronger argument (at least
+one that I am sure will be more forcible with you) is, that your readers
+will have both right and reason to complain of you. This Chapter, which
+cannot, when it is printed, amount to so little as an hundred pages,
+will of necessity greatly increase the expense of the work; and every
+reader who, like myself, is neither prepared nor perhaps calculated for
+the study of so abstruse a subject so abstrusely treated, will, as
+I have before hinted, be almost entitled to accuse you of a sort of
+imposition on him. For who, he might truly observe, could from your
+title-page, to wit, "My Literary Life and Opinions," published too as
+introductory to a volume of miscellaneous poems, have anticipated, or
+even conjectured, a long treatise on Ideal Realism which holds the same
+relation in abstruseness to Plotinus, as Plotinus does to Plato. It will
+be well, if already you have not too much of metaphysical disquisition
+in your work, though as the larger part of the disquisition is
+historical, it will doubtless be both interesting and instructive to
+many to whose unprepared minds your speculations on the esemplastic
+power would be utterly unintelligible. Be assured, if you do publish
+this Chapter in the present work, you will be reminded of Bishop
+Berkeley's Siris, announced as an Essay on Tar-water, which beginning
+with Tar ends with the Trinity, the omne scibile forming the interspace.
+I say in the present work. In that greater work to which you have
+devoted so many years, and study so intense and various, it will be in
+its proper place. Your prospectus will have described and announced both
+its contents and their nature; and if any persons purchase it, who
+feel no interest in the subjects of which it treats, they will have
+themselves only to blame.
+
+"I could add to these arguments one derived from pecuniary motives,
+and particularly from the probable effects on the sale of your present
+publication; but they would weigh little with you compared with the
+preceding. Besides, I have long observed, that arguments drawn from
+your own personal interests more often act on you as narcotics than as
+stimulants, and that in money concerns you have some small portion
+of pig-nature in your moral idiosyncrasy, and, like these amiable
+creatures, must occasionally be pulled backward from the boat in order
+to make you enter it. All success attend you, for if hard thinking and
+hard reading are merits, you have deserved it.
+
+"Your affectionate, etc."
+
+
+In consequence of this very judicious letter, which produced complete
+conviction on my mind, I shall content myself for the present with
+stating the main result of the chapter, which I have reserved for that
+future publication, a detailed prospectus of which the reader will find
+at the close of the second volume.
+
+The Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The
+primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all
+human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal
+act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I
+consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will,
+yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency,
+and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It
+dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this
+process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to
+idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as
+objects) are essentially fixed and dead.
+
+FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities
+and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory
+emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with,
+and modified by that empirical phaenomenon of the will, which we express
+by the word Choice. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must
+receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+Occasion of the Lyrical Ballads, and the objects originally
+proposed--Preface to the second edition--The ensuing controversy, its
+causes and acrimony--Philosophic definitions of a Poem and Poetry with
+scholia.
+
+
+During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our
+conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry,
+the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence
+to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty
+by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm, which
+accidents of light and shade, which moon-light or sunset diffused over
+a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability
+of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The thought suggested
+itself--(to which of us I do not recollect)--that a series of poems
+might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents
+were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed
+at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic
+truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations,
+supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every
+human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time
+believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class,
+subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and
+incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its
+vicinity, where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after
+them, or to notice them, when they present themselves.
+
+In this idea originated the plan of the LYRICAL BALLADS; in which it was
+agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters
+supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our
+inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to
+procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension
+of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr.
+Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object,
+to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a
+feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention
+to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the
+wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for
+which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude,
+we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither
+feel nor understand.
+
+With this view I wrote THE ANCIENT MARINER, and was preparing among
+other poems, THE DARK LADIE, and the CHRISTABEL, in which I should have
+more nearly realized my ideal, than I had done in my first attempt. But
+Mr. Wordsworth's industry had proved so much more successful, and the
+number of his poems so much greater, that my compositions, instead of
+forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous
+matter. Mr. Wordsworth added two or three poems written in his own
+character, in the impassioned, lofty, and sustained diction, which is
+characteristic of his genius. In this form the LYRICAL BALLADS were
+published; and were presented by him, as an experiment, whether
+subjects, which from their nature rejected the usual ornaments and
+extra-colloquial style of poems in general, might not be so managed in
+the language of ordinary life as to produce the pleasurable interest,
+which it is the peculiar business of poetry to impart. To the
+second edition he added a preface of considerable length; in which,
+notwithstanding some passages of apparently a contrary import, he was
+understood to contend for the extension of this style to poetry of all
+kinds, and to reject as vicious and indefensible all phrases and forms
+of speech that were not included in what he (unfortunately, I think,
+adopting an equivocal expression) called the language of real life. From
+this preface, prefixed to poems in which it was impossible to deny the
+presence of original genius, however mistaken its direction might
+be deemed, arose the whole long-continued controversy. For from the
+conjunction of perceived power with supposed heresy I explain the
+inveteracy and in some instances, I grieve to say, the acrimonious
+passions, with which the controversy has been conducted by the
+assailants.
+
+Had Mr. Wordsworth's poems been the silly, the childish things, which
+they were for a long time described as being had they been really
+distinguished from the compositions of other poets merely by meanness of
+language and inanity of thought; had they indeed contained nothing more
+than what is found in the parodies and pretended imitations of them;
+they must have sunk at once, a dead weight, into the slough of oblivion,
+and have dragged the preface along with them. But year after year
+increased the number of Mr. Wordsworth's admirers. They were found too
+not in the lower classes of the reading public, but chiefly among young
+men of strong sensibility and meditative minds; and their admiration
+(inflamed perhaps in some degree by opposition) was distinguished by its
+intensity, I might almost say, by its religious fervour. These facts,
+and the intellectual energy of the author, which was more or less
+consciously felt, where it was outwardly and even boisterously denied,
+meeting with sentiments of aversion to his opinions, and of alarm at
+their consequences, produced an eddy of criticism, which would of itself
+have borne up the poems by the violence with which it whirled them round
+and round. With many parts of this preface in the sense attributed
+to them and which the words undoubtedly seem to authorize, I never
+concurred; but on the contrary objected to them as erroneous in
+principle, and as contradictory (in appearance at least) both to other
+parts of the same preface, and to the author's own practice in the
+greater part of the poems themselves. Mr. Wordsworth in his recent
+collection has, I find, degraded this prefatory disquisition to the end
+of his second volume, to be read or not at the reader's choice. But he
+has not, as far as I can discover, announced any change in his poetic
+creed. At all events, considering it as the source of a controversy,
+in which I have been honoured more than I deserve by the frequent
+conjunction of my name with his, I think it expedient to declare once
+for all, in what points I coincide with the opinions supported in that
+preface, and in what points I altogether differ. But in order to render
+myself intelligible I must previously, in as few words as possible,
+explain my views, first, of a Poem; and secondly, of Poetry itself, in
+kind, and in essence.
+
+The office of philosophical disquisition consists in just distinction;
+while it is the privilege of the philosopher to preserve himself
+constantly aware, that distinction is not division. In order to obtain
+adequate notions of any truth, we must intellectually separate its
+distinguishable parts; and this is the technical process of philosophy.
+But having so done, we must then restore them in our conceptions to
+the unity, in which they actually co-exist; and this is the result of
+philosophy. A poem contains the same elements as a prose composition;
+the difference therefore must consist in a different combination of
+them, in consequence of a different object being proposed. According to
+the difference of the object will be the difference of the combination.
+It is possible, that the object may be merely to facilitate the
+recollection of any given facts or observations by artificial
+arrangement; and the composition will be a poem, merely because it is
+distinguished from prose by metre, or by rhyme, or by both conjointly.
+In this, the lowest sense, a man might attribute the name of a poem to
+the well-known enumeration of the days in the several months;
+
+    "Thirty days hath September,
+     April, June, and November," etc.
+
+and others of the same class and purpose. And as a particular pleasure
+is found in anticipating the recurrence of sounds and quantities,
+all compositions that have this charm super-added, whatever be their
+contents, may be entitled poems.
+
+So much for the superficial form. A difference of object and contents
+supplies an additional ground of distinction. The immediate purpose
+may be the communication of truths; either of truth absolute and
+demonstrable, as in works of science; or of facts experienced and
+recorded, as in history. Pleasure, and that of the highest and most
+permanent kind, may result from the attainment of the end; but it is not
+itself the immediate end. In other works the communication of pleasure
+may be the immediate purpose; and though truth, either moral or
+intellectual, ought to be the ultimate end, yet this will distinguish
+the character of the author, not the class to which the work belongs.
+Blest indeed is that state of society, in which the immediate purpose
+would be baffled by the perversion of the proper ultimate end; in which
+no charm of diction or imagery could exempt the BATHYLLUS even of an
+Anacreon, or the ALEXIS of Virgil, from disgust and aversion!
+
+But the communication of pleasure may be the immediate object of a work
+not metrically composed; and that object may have been in a high degree
+attained, as in novels and romances. Would then the mere superaddition
+of metre, with or without rhyme, entitle these to the name of poems? The
+answer is, that nothing can permanently please, which does not contain
+in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise. If metre be
+superadded, all other parts must be made consonant with it. They must be
+such, as to justify the perpetual and distinct attention to each
+part, which an exact correspondent recurrence of accent and sound are
+calculated to excite. The final definition then, so deduced, may be thus
+worded. A poem is that species of composition, which is opposed to works
+of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth;
+and from all other species--(having this object in common with it)--it
+is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as
+is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.
+
+Controversy is not seldom excited in consequence of the disputants
+attaching each a different meaning to the same word; and in few
+instances has this been more striking, than in disputes concerning the
+present subject. If a man chooses to call every composition a
+poem, which is rhyme, or measure, or both, I must leave his opinion
+uncontroverted. The distinction is at least competent to characterize
+the writer's intention. If it were subjoined, that the whole is likewise
+entertaining or affecting, as a tale, or as a series of interesting
+reflections; I of course admit this as another fit ingredient of a poem,
+and an additional merit. But if the definition sought for be that of a
+legitimate poem, I answer, it must be one, the parts of which mutually
+support and explain each other; all in their proportion harmonizing
+with, and supporting the purpose and known influences of metrical
+arrangement. The philosophic critics of all ages coincide with the
+ultimate judgment of all countries, in equally denying the praises of a
+just poem, on the one hand, to a series of striking lines or distiches,
+each of which, absorbing the whole attention of the reader to itself,
+becomes disjoined from its context, and forms a separate whole,
+instead of a harmonizing part; and on the other hand, to an unsustained
+composition, from which the reader collects rapidly the general result
+unattracted by the component parts. The reader should be carried
+forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity,
+or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the
+pleasureable activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey
+itself. Like the motion of a serpent, which the Egyptians made the
+emblem of intellectual power; or like the path of sound through
+the air;--at every step he pauses and half recedes; and from the
+retrogressive movement collects the force which again carries him
+onward. Praecipitandus est liber spiritus, says Petronius most happily.
+The epithet, liber, here balances the preceding verb; and it is not easy
+to conceive more meaning condensed in fewer words.
+
+But if this should be admitted as a satisfactory character of a poem,
+we have still to seek for a definition of poetry. The writings of Plato,
+and Jeremy Taylor, and Burnet's Theory of the Earth, furnish undeniable
+proofs that poetry of the highest kind may exist without metre, and even
+without the contradistringuishing objects of a poem. The first chapter
+of Isaiah--(indeed a very large portion of the whole book)--is poetry
+in the most emphatic sense; yet it would be not less irrational than
+strange to assert, that pleasure, and not truth was the immediate object
+of the prophet. In short, whatever specific import we attach to the
+word, Poetry, there will be found involved in it, as a necessary
+consequence, that a poem of any length neither can be, nor ought to be,
+all poetry. Yet if an harmonious whole is to be produced, the remaining
+parts must be preserved in keeping with the poetry; and this can be
+no otherwise effected than by such a studied selection and artificial
+arrangement, as will partake of one, though not a peculiar property of
+poetry. And this again can be no other than the property of exciting a
+more continuous and equal attention than the language of prose aims at,
+whether colloquial or written.
+
+My own conclusions on the nature of poetry, in the strictest use of the
+word, have been in part anticipated in some of the remarks on the Fancy
+and Imagination in the early part of this work. What is poetry?--is so
+nearly the same question with, what is a poet?--that the answer to the
+one is involved in the solution of the other. For it is a distinction
+resulting from the poetic genius itself, which sustains and modifies the
+images, thoughts, and emotions of the poet's own mind.
+
+The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man
+into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other
+according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and
+spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each,
+by that synthetic and magical power, to which I would exclusively
+appropriate the name of Imagination. This power, first put in action by
+the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though
+gentle and unnoticed, control, laxis effertur habenis, reveals "itself
+in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant" qualities:
+of sameness, with difference; of the general with the concrete; the idea
+with the image; the individual with the representative; the sense of
+novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects; a more than usual
+state of emotion with more than usual order; judgment ever awake and
+steady self-possession with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement;
+and while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still
+subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter; and our admiration
+of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry. Doubtless, as Sir John
+Davies observes of the soul--(and his words may with slight alteration
+be applied, and even more appropriately, to the poetic Imagination)--
+
+    Doubtless this could not be, but that she turns
+      Bodies to spirit by sublimation strange,
+    As fire converts to fire the things it burns,
+      As we our food into our nature change.
+
+    From their gross matter she abstracts their forms,
+      And draws a kind of quintessence from things;
+    Which to her proper nature she transforms
+      To bear them light on her celestial wings.
+
+    Thus does she, when from individual states
+      She doth abstract the universal kinds;
+    Which then re-clothed in divers names and fates
+      Steal access through the senses to our minds.
+
+Finally, Good Sense is the Body of poetic genius, Fancy its Drapery,
+Motion its Life, and Imagination the Soul that is everywhere, and in
+each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+The specific symptoms of poetic power elucidated in a critical analysis
+of Shakespeare's VENUS AND ADONIS, and RAPE of LUCRECE.
+
+
+In the application of these principles to purposes of practical
+criticism, as employed in the appraisement of works more or less
+imperfect, I have endeavoured to discover what the qualities in a poem
+are, which may be deemed promises and specific symptoms of poetic power,
+as distinguished from general talent determined to poetic composition
+by accidental motives, by an act of the will, rather than by the
+inspiration of a genial and productive nature. In this investigation, I
+could not, I thought, do better, than keep before me the earliest work
+of the greatest genius, that perhaps human nature has yet produced, our
+myriad-minded [61] Shakespeare. I mean the VENUS AND ADONIS, and the
+LUCRECE; works which give at once strong promises of the strength,
+and yet obvious proofs of the immaturity, of his genius. From these I
+abstracted the following marks, as characteristics of original poetic
+genius in general.
+
+1. In the VENUS AND ADONIS, the first and most obvious excellence is the
+perfect sweetness of the versification; its adaptation to the subject;
+and the power displayed in varying the march of the words without
+passing into a loftier and more majestic rhythm than was demanded by the
+thoughts, or permitted by the propriety of preserving a sense of melody
+predominant. The delight in richness and sweetness of sound, even to
+a faulty excess, if it be evidently original, and not the result of an
+easily imitable mechanism, I regard as a highly favourable promise in
+the compositions of a young man. The man that hath not music in his soul
+can indeed never be a genuine poet. Imagery,--(even taken from nature,
+much more when transplanted from books, as travels, voyages, and works
+of natural history),--affecting incidents, just thoughts, interesting
+personal or domestic feelings, and with these the art of their
+combination or intertexture in the form of a poem,--may all by incessant
+effort be acquired as a trade, by a man of talent and much reading,
+who, as I once before observed, has mistaken an intense desire of poetic
+reputation for a natural poetic genius; the love of the arbitrary
+end for a possession of the peculiar means. But the sense of musical
+delight, with the power of producing it, is a gift of imagination; and
+this together with the power of reducing multitude into unity of effect,
+and modifying a series of thoughts by some one predominant thought or
+feeling, may be cultivated and improved, but can never be learned. It is
+in these that "poeta nascitur non fit."
+
+2. A second promise of genius is the choice of subjects very remote from
+the private interests and circumstances of the writer himself. At least
+I have found, that where the subject is taken immediately from the
+author's personal sensations and experiences, the excellence of a
+particular poem is but an equivocal mark, and often a fallacious
+pledge, of genuine poetic power. We may perhaps remember the tale of the
+statuary, who had acquired considerable reputation for the legs of his
+goddesses, though the rest of the statue accorded but indifferently with
+ideal beauty; till his wife, elated by her husband's praises, modestly
+acknowledged that she had been his constant model. In the VENUS
+AND ADONIS this proof of poetic power exists even to excess. It is
+throughout as if a superior spirit more intuitive, more intimately
+conscious, even than the characters themselves, not only of every
+outward look and act, but of the flux and reflux of the mind in all its
+subtlest thoughts and feelings, were placing the whole before our view;
+himself meanwhile unparticipating in the passions, and actuated only
+by that pleasurable excitement, which had resulted from the energetic
+fervour of his own spirit in so vividly exhibiting what it had
+so accurately and profoundly contemplated. I think, I should have
+conjectured from these poems, that even then the great instinct, which
+impelled the poet to the drama, was secretly working in him, prompting
+him--by a series and never broken chain of imagery, always vivid and,
+because unbroken, often minute; by the highest effort of the picturesque
+in words, of which words are capable, higher perhaps than was ever
+realized by any other poet, even Dante not excepted; to provide a
+substitute for that visual language, that constant intervention and
+running comment by tone, look and gesture, which in his dramatic works
+he was entitled to expect from the players. His Venus and Adonis seem
+at once the characters themselves, and the whole representation of those
+characters by the most consummate actors. You seem to be told nothing,
+but to see and hear everything. Hence it is, from the perpetual activity
+of attention required on the part of the reader; from the rapid flow,
+the quick change, and the playful nature of the thoughts and images; and
+above all from the alienation, and, if I may hazard such an expression,
+the utter aloofness of the poet's own feelings, from those of which he
+is at once the painter and the analyst; that though the very subject
+cannot but detract from the pleasure of a delicate mind, yet never was
+poem less dangerous on a moral account. Instead of doing as Ariosto, and
+as, still more offensively, Wieland has done, instead of degrading and
+deforming passion into appetite, the trials of love into the struggles
+of concupiscence; Shakespeare has here represented the animal impulse
+itself, so as to preclude all sympathy with it, by dissipating the
+reader's notice among the thousand outward images, and now beautiful,
+now fanciful circumstances, which form its dresses and its scenery; or
+by diverting our attention from the main subject by those frequent witty
+or profound reflections, which the poet's ever active mind has deduced
+from, or connected with, the imagery and the incidents. The reader is
+forced into too much action to sympathize with the merely passive of our
+nature. As little can a mind thus roused and awakened be brooded on by
+mean and indistinct emotion, as the low, lazy mist can creep upon the
+surface of a lake, while a strong gale is driving it onward in waves and
+billows.
+
+3. It has been before observed that images, however beautiful, though
+faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words,
+do not of themselves characterize the poet. They become proofs of
+original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant
+passion; or by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion;
+or when they have the effect of reducing multitude to unity, or
+succession to an instant; or lastly, when a human and intellectual life
+is transferred to them from the poet's own spirit,
+
+    Which shoots its being through earth, sea, and air.
+
+In the two following lines for instance, there is nothing objectionable,
+nothing which would preclude them from forming, in their proper place,
+part of a descriptive poem:
+
+    Behold yon row of pines, that shorn and bow'd
+    Bend from the sea-blast, seen at twilight eve.
+
+But with a small alteration of rhythm, the same words would be equally
+in their place in a book of topography, or in a descriptive tour. The
+same image will rise into semblance of poetry if thus conveyed:
+
+    Yon row of bleak and visionary pines,
+    By twilight glimpse discerned, mark! how they flee
+    From the fierce sea-blast, all their tresses wild
+    Streaming before them.
+
+I have given this as an illustration, by no means as an instance, of
+that particular excellence which I had in view, and in which Shakespeare
+even in his earliest, as in his latest, works surpasses all other
+poets. It is by this, that he still gives a dignity and a passion to
+the objects which he presents. Unaided by any previous excitement, they
+burst upon us at once in life and in power,--
+
+    "Full many a glorious morning have I seen
+     Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye."
+
+    "Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
+     Of the wide world dreaming on things to come--
+
+          *     *     *     *     *     *
+          *     *     *     *     *     *
+
+    The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured,
+    And the sad augurs mock their own presage;
+    Incertainties now crown themselves assur'd,
+    And Peace proclaims olives of endless age.
+    Now with the drops of this most balmy time
+    My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes,
+    Since spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme,
+    While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes.
+    And thou in this shalt find thy monument,
+    When tyrants' crests, and tombs of brass are spent."
+
+As of higher worth, so doubtless still more characteristic of poetic
+genius does the imagery become, when it moulds and colours itself to the
+circumstances, passion, or character, present and foremost in the mind.
+For unrivalled instances of this excellence, the reader's own memory
+will refer him to the LEAR, OTHELLO, in short to which not of the
+"great, ever living, dead man's" dramatic works? Inopem em copia
+fecit. How true it is to nature, he has himself finely expressed in the
+instance of love in his 98th Sonnet.
+
+    From you have I been absent in the spring,
+    When proud-pied April drest in all its trim,
+    Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing;
+    That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him.
+    Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell
+    Of different flowers in odour and in hue,
+    Could make me any summer's story tell,
+    Or from their proud lap pluck them, where they grew
+    Nor did I wonder at the lilies white,
+    Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
+    They were, tho' sweet, but figures of delight,
+    Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
+    Yet seem'd it winter still, and, you away,
+    As with your shadow, I with these did play!"
+
+Scarcely less sure, or if a less valuable, not less indispensable mark
+
+    Gonimon men poiaetou------
+    ------hostis rhaema gennaion lakoi,
+
+will the imagery supply, when, with more than the power of the painter,
+the poet gives us the liveliest image of succession with the feeling of
+simultaneousness:--
+
+    With this, he breaketh from the sweet embrace
+    Of those fair arms, which bound him to her breast,
+    And homeward through the dark laund runs apace;--
+
+         *     *     *     *     *     *
+
+    Look! how a bright star shooteth from the sky,
+    So glides he in the night from Venus' eye.
+
+4. The last character I shall mention, which would prove indeed but
+little, except as taken conjointly with the former;--yet without which
+the former could scarce exist in a high degree, and (even if this were
+possible) would give promises only of transitory flashes and a meteoric
+power;--is depth, and energy of thought. No man was ever yet a great
+poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry
+is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts,
+human passions, emotions, language. In Shakespeare's poems the creative
+power and the intellectual energy wrestle as in a war embrace. Each in
+its excess of strength seems to threaten the extinction of the other.
+At length in the drama they were reconciled, and fought each with its
+shield before the breast of the other. Or like two rapid streams, that,
+at their first meeting within narrow and rocky banks, mutually strive
+to repel each other and intermix reluctantly and in tumult; but soon
+finding a wider channel and more yielding shores blend, and dilate, and
+flow on in one current and with one voice. The VENUS AND ADONIS did
+not perhaps allow the display of the deeper passions. But the story of
+Lucretia seems to favour and even demand their intensest workings. And
+yet we find in Shakespeare's management of the tale neither pathos,
+nor any other dramatic quality. There is the same minute and faithful
+imagery as in the former poem, in the same vivid colours, inspirited by
+the same impetuous vigour of thought, and diverging and contracting with
+the same activity of the assimilative and of the modifying faculties;
+and with a yet larger display, a yet wider range of knowledge
+and reflection; and lastly, with the same perfect dominion, often
+domination, over the whole world of language. What then shall we say?
+even this; that Shakespeare, no mere child of nature; no automaton of
+genius; no passive vehicle of inspiration, possessed by the spirit, not
+possessing it; first studied patiently, meditated deeply, understood
+minutely, till knowledge, become habitual and intuitive, wedded itself
+to his habitual feelings, and at length gave birth to that stupendous
+power, by which he stands alone, with no equal or second in his own
+class; to that power which seated him on one of the two glory-smitten
+summits of the poetic mountain, with Milton as his compeer not rival.
+While the former darts himself forth, and passes into all the forms of
+human character and passion, the one Proteus of the fire and the flood;
+the other attracts all forms and things to himself, into the unity of
+his own ideal. All things and modes of action shape themselves anew in
+the being of Milton; while Shakespeare becomes all things, yet for ever
+remaining himself. O what great men hast thou not produced, England, my
+country!--Truly indeed--
+
+    We must be free or die, who speak the tongue,
+    Which Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold,
+    Which Milton held. In everything we are sprung
+    Of earth's first blood, have titles manifold.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+Striking points of difference between the Poets of the present age and
+those of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries--Wish expressed for the
+union of the characteristic merits of both.
+
+
+Christendom, from its first settlement on feudal rights, has been so
+far one great body, however imperfectly organized, that a similar spirit
+will be found in each period to have been acting in all its members.
+The study of Shakespeare's poems--(I do not include his dramatic works,
+eminently as they too deserve that title)--led me to a more careful
+examination of the contemporary poets both in England and in other
+countries. But my attention was especially fixed on those of Italy, from
+the birth to the death of Shakespeare; that being the country in which
+the fine arts had been most sedulously, and hitherto most successfully
+cultivated. Abstracted from the degrees and peculiarities of individual
+genius, the properties common to the good writers of each period seem
+to establish one striking point of difference between the poetry of
+the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and that of the present age. The
+remark may perhaps be extended to the sister art of painting. At least
+the latter will serve to illustrate the former. In the present age the
+poet--(I would wish to be understood as speaking generally, and without
+allusion to individual names)--seems to propose to himself as his main
+object, and as that which is the most characteristic of his art, new and
+striking images; with incidents that interest the affections or excite
+the curiosity. Both his characters and his descriptions he renders,
+as much as possible, specific and individual, even to a degree of
+portraiture. In his diction and metre, on the other hand, he is
+comparatively careless. The measure is either constructed on no previous
+system, and acknowledges no justifying principle but that of the
+writer's convenience; or else some mechanical movement is adopted, of
+which one couplet or stanza is so far an adequate specimen, as that the
+occasional differences appear evidently to arise from accident, or the
+qualities of the language itself, not from meditation and an intelligent
+purpose. And the language from Pope's translation of Homer, to Darwin's
+Temple of Nature [62], may, notwithstanding some illustrious exceptions,
+be too faithfully characterized, as claiming to be poetical for no
+better reason, than that it would be intolerable in conversation or in
+prose. Though alas! even our prose writings, nay even the style of our
+more set discourses, strive to be in the fashion, and trick themselves
+out in the soiled and over-worn finery of the meretricious muse. It is
+true that of late a great improvement in this respect is observable in
+our most popular writers. But it is equally true, that this recurrence
+to plain sense and genuine mother English is far from being general; and
+that the composition of our novels, magazines, public harangues, and the
+like is commonly as trivial in thought, and yet enigmatic in expression,
+as if Echo and Sphinx had laid their heads together to construct it.
+Nay, even of those who have most rescued themselves from this contagion,
+I should plead inwardly guilty to the charge of duplicity or cowardice,
+if I withheld my conviction, that few have guarded the purity of their
+native tongue with that jealous care, which the sublime Dante in his
+tract De la volgare Eloquenza, declares to be the first duty of a poet.
+For language is the armoury of the human mind; and at once contains
+the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future conquests.
+Animadverte, says Hobbes, quam sit ab improprietate verborum pronum
+hominihus prolabi in errores circa ipsas res! Sat [vero], says
+Sennertus, in hac vitae brevitate et naturae obscuritate, rerum est,
+quibus cognoscendis tempus impendatur, ut [confusis et multivotis]
+sermonibus intelligendis illud consumere opus non sit. [Eheu! quantas
+strages paravere verba nubila, quae tot dicunt ut nihil dicunt;--nubes
+potius, e quibus et in rebus politicis et in ecclesia turbines et
+tonitrua erumpunt!] Et proinde recte dictum putamus a Platone in Gorgia:
+os an ta onomata eidei, eisetai kai ta pragmata: et ab Epicteto,
+archae paideuseos hae ton onomaton episkepsis: et prudentissime Galenus
+scribit, hae ton onomaton chraesis tarachtheisa kai taen ton pragmaton
+epitarattei gnosin.
+
+Egregie vero J. C. Scaliger, in Lib. I. de Plantis: Est primum, inquit,
+sapientis officium, bene sentire, ut sibi vivat: proximum, bene loqui,
+ut patriae vivat.
+
+Something analogous to the materials and structure of modern poetry I
+seem to have noticed--(but here I beg to be understood as speaking
+with the utmost diffidence)--in our common landscape painters. Their
+foregrounds and intermediate distances are comparatively unattractive:
+while the main interest of the landscape is thrown into the background,
+where mountains and torrents and castles forbid the eye to proceed, and
+nothing tempts it to trace its way back again. But in the works of the
+great Italian and Flemish masters, the front and middle objects of the
+landscape are the most obvious and determinate, the interest gradually
+dies away in the background, and the charm and peculiar worth of the
+picture consists, not so much in the specific objects which it conveys
+to the understanding in a visual language formed by the substitution of
+figures for words, as in the beauty and harmony of the colours, lines,
+and expression, with which the objects are represented. Hence novelty of
+subject was rather avoided than sought for. Superior excellence in
+the manner of treating the same subjects was the trial and test of the
+artist's merit.
+
+Not otherwise is it with the more polished poets of the fifteenth and
+sixteenth centuries, especially those of Italy. The imagery is almost
+always general: sun, moon, flowers, breezes, murmuring streams, warbling
+songsters, delicious shades, lovely damsels cruel as fair, nymphs,
+naiads, and goddesses, are the materials which are common to all, and
+which each shaped and arranged according to his judgment or fancy,
+little solicitous to add or to particularize. If we make an honourable
+exception in favour of some English poets, the thoughts too are as
+little novel as the images; and the fable of their narrative poems,
+for the most part drawn from mythology, or sources of equal notoriety,
+derive their chief attractions from the manner of treating them; from
+impassioned flow, or picturesque arrangement. In opposition to the
+present age, and perhaps in as faulty an extreme, they placed the
+essence of poetry in the art. The excellence, at which they aimed,
+consisted in the exquisite polish of the diction, combined with perfect
+simplicity. This their prime object they attained by the avoidance of
+every word, which a gentleman would not use in dignified conversation,
+and of every word and phrase, which none but a learned man would use;
+by the studied position of words and phrases, so that not only each
+part should be melodious in itself, but contribute to the harmony of
+the whole, each note referring and conducting to the melody of all the
+foregoing and following words of the same period or stanza; and lastly
+with equal labour, the greater because unbetrayed, by the variation and
+various harmonies of their metrical movement. Their measures, however,
+were not indebted for their variety to the introduction of new metres,
+such as have been attempted of late in the Alonzo and Imogen, and others
+borrowed from the German, having in their very mechanism a specific
+overpowering tune, to which the generous reader humours his voice and
+emphasis, with more indulgence to the author than attention to the
+meaning or quantity of the words; but which, to an ear familiar with the
+numerous sounds of the Greek and Roman poets, has an effect not unlike
+that of galloping over a paved road in a German stage-waggon without
+springs. On the contrary, the elder bards both of Italy and England
+produced a far greater as well as more charming variety by countless
+modifications, and subtle balances of sound in the common metres of
+their country. A lasting and enviable reputation awaits that man of
+genius, who should attempt and realize a union;--who should recall the
+high finish, the appropriateness, the facility, the delicate proportion,
+and above all, the perfusive and omnipresent grace, which have
+preserved, as in a shrine of precious amber, the Sparrow of Catullus,
+the Swallow, the Grasshopper, and all the other little loves of
+Anacreon; and which, with bright, though diminished glories, revisited
+the youth and early manhood of Christian Europe, in the vales of [63]
+Arno, and the groves of Isis and of Cam; and who with these should
+combine the keener interest, deeper pathos, manlier reflection, and the
+fresher and more various imagery, which give a value and a name that
+will not pass away to the poets who have done honour to our own times,
+and to those of our immediate predecessors.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+Examination of the tenets peculiar to Mr. Wordsworth--Rustic life (above
+all, low and rustic life) especially unfavourable to the formation of a
+human diction--The best parts of language the product of philosophers,
+not of clowns or shepherds--Poetry essentially ideal and generic--The
+language of Milton as much the language of real life, yea, incomparably
+more so than that of the cottager.
+
+
+As far then as Mr. Wordsworth in his preface contended, and most ably
+contended, for a reformation in our poetic diction, as far as he has
+evinced the truth of passion, and the dramatic propriety of those
+figures and metaphors in the original poets, which, stripped of their
+justifying reasons, and converted into mere artifices of connection or
+ornament, constitute the characteristic falsity in the poetic style of
+the moderns; and as far as he has, with equal acuteness and clearness,
+pointed out the process by which this change was effected, and the
+resemblances between that state into which the reader's mind is thrown
+by the pleasurable confusion of thought from an unaccustomed train
+of words and images; and that state which is induced by the natural
+language of impassioned feeling; he undertook a useful task, and
+deserves all praise, both for the attempt and for the execution. The
+provocations to this remonstrance in behalf of truth and nature were
+still of perpetual recurrence before and after the publication of this
+preface. I cannot likewise but add, that the comparison of such poems
+of merit, as have been given to the public within the last ten or twelve
+years, with the majority of those produced previously to the appearance
+of that preface, leave no doubt on my mind, that Mr. Wordsworth is fully
+justified in believing his efforts to have been by no means ineffectual.
+Not only in the verses of those who have professed their admiration
+of his genius, but even of those who have distinguished themselves
+by hostility to his theory, and depreciation of his writings, are the
+impressions of his principles plainly visible. It is possible, that with
+these principles others may have been blended, which are not equally
+evident; and some which are unsteady and subvertible from the narrowness
+or imperfection of their basis. But it is more than possible, that
+these errors of defect or exaggeration, by kindling and feeding the
+controversy, may have conduced not only to the wider propagation of the
+accompanying truths, but that, by their frequent presentation to the
+mind in an excited state, they may have won for them a more permanent
+and practical result. A man will borrow a part from his opponent the
+more easily, if he feels himself justified in continuing to reject a
+part. While there remain important points in which he can still feel
+himself in the right, in which he still finds firm footing for continued
+resistance, he will gradually adopt those opinions, which were the least
+remote from his own convictions, as not less congruous with his own
+theory than with that which he reprobates. In like manner with a kind of
+instinctive prudence, he will abandon by little and little his weakest
+posts, till at length he seems to forget that they had ever belonged
+to him, or affects to consider them at most as accidental and "petty
+annexments," the removal of which leaves the citadel unhurt and
+unendangered.
+
+My own differences from certain supposed parts of Mr. Wordsworth's
+theory ground themselves on the assumption, that his words had been
+rightly interpreted, as purporting that the proper diction for poetry
+in general consists altogether in a language taken, with due exceptions,
+from the mouths of men in real life, a language which actually
+constitutes the natural conversation of men under the influence of
+natural feelings. My objection is, first, that in any sense this rule
+is applicable only to certain classes of poetry; secondly, that even
+to these classes it is not applicable, except in such a sense, as
+hath never by any one (as far as I know or have read,) been denied or
+doubted; and lastly, that as far as, and in that degree in which it
+is practicable, it is yet as a rule useless, if not injurious, and
+therefore either need not, or ought not to be practised. The poet
+informs his reader, that he had generally chosen low and rustic life;
+but not as low and rustic, or in order to repeat that pleasure of
+doubtful moral effect, which persons of elevated rank and of superior
+refinement oftentimes derive from a happy imitation of the rude
+unpolished manners and discourse of their inferiors. For the pleasure
+so derived may be traced to three exciting causes. The first is the
+naturalness, in fact, of the things represented. The second is the
+apparent naturalness of the representation, as raised and qualified
+by an imperceptible infusion of the author's own knowledge and talent,
+which infusion does, indeed, constitute it an imitation as distinguished
+from a mere copy. The third cause may be found in the reader's conscious
+feeling of his superiority awakened by the contrast presented to
+him; even as for the same purpose the kings and great barons of yore
+retained, sometimes actual clowns and fools, but more frequently shrewd
+and witty fellows in that character. These, however, were not Mr.
+Wordsworth's objects. He chose low and rustic life, "because in that
+condition the essential passions of the heart find a better soil, in
+which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and
+speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of
+life our elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater simplicity,
+and consequently may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly
+communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from
+those elementary feelings; and from the necessary character of rural
+occupations are more easily comprehended, and are more durable; and
+lastly, because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated
+with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature."
+
+Now it is clear to me, that in the most interesting of the poems, in
+which the author is more or less dramatic, as THE BROTHERS, MICHAEL,
+RUTH, THE MAD MOTHER, and others, the persons introduced are by no means
+taken from low or rustic life in the common acceptation of those words!
+and it is not less clear, that the sentiments and language, as far as
+they can be conceived to have been really transferred from the minds
+and conversation of such persons, are attributable to causes and
+circumstances not necessarily connected with "their occupations and
+abode." The thoughts, feelings, language, and manners of the shepherd-
+farmers in the vales of Cumberland and Westmoreland, as far as they are
+actually adopted in those poems, may be accounted for from causes, which
+will and do produce the same results in every state of life, whether in
+town or country. As the two principal I rank that independence, which
+raises a man above servitude, or daily toil for the profit of others,
+yet not above the necessity of industry and a frugal simplicity
+of domestic life; and the accompanying unambitious, but solid and
+religious, education, which has rendered few books familiar, but the
+Bible, and the Liturgy or Hymn book. To this latter cause, indeed, which
+is so far accidental, that it is the blessing of particular countries
+and a particular age, not the product of particular places or
+employments, the poet owes the show of probability, that his personages
+might really feel, think, and talk with any tolerable resemblance to his
+representation. It is an excellent remark of Dr. Henry More's, that "a
+man of confined education, but of good parts, by constant reading of the
+Bible will naturally form a more winning and commanding rhetoric than
+those that are learned: the intermixture of tongues and of artificial
+phrases debasing their style."
+
+It is, moreover, to be considered that to the formation of healthy
+feelings, and a reflecting mind, negations involve impediments not less
+formidable than sophistication and vicious intermixture. I am
+convinced, that for the human soul to prosper in rustic life a certain
+vantage-ground is prerequisite. It is not every man that is likely to be
+improved by a country life or by country labours. Education, or original
+sensibility, or both, must pre-exist, if the changes, forms, and
+incidents of nature are to prove a sufficient stimulant. And where
+these are not sufficient, the mind contracts and hardens by want of
+stimulants: and the man becomes selfish, sensual, gross, and hard-
+hearted. Let the management of the Poor Laws in Liverpool, Manchester,
+or Bristol be compared with the ordinary dispensation of the poor
+rates in agricultural villages, where the farmers are the overseers and
+guardians of the poor. If my own experience have not been particularly
+unfortunate, as well as that of the many respectable country clergymen
+with whom I have conversed on the subject, the result would engender
+more than scepticism concerning the desirable influences of low and
+rustic life in and for itself. Whatever may be concluded on the other
+side, from the stronger local attachments and enterprising spirit of the
+Swiss, and other mountaineers, applies to a particular mode of pastoral
+life, under forms of property that permit and beget manners truly
+republican, not to rustic life in general, or to the absence of
+artificial cultivation. On the contrary the mountaineers, whose manners
+have been so often eulogized, are in general better educated and greater
+readers than men of equal rank elsewhere. But where this is not the
+case, as among the peasantry of North Wales, the ancient mountains, with
+all their terrors and all their glories, are pictures to the blind, and
+music to the deaf.
+
+I should not have entered so much into detail upon this passage,
+but here seems to be the point, to which all the lines of difference
+converge as to their source and centre;--I mean, as far as, and in
+whatever respect, my poetic creed does differ from the doctrines
+promulgated in this preface. I adopt with full faith, the principle of
+Aristotle, that poetry, as poetry, is essentially ideal, that it avoids
+and excludes all accident; that its apparent individualities of rank,
+character, or occupation must be representative of a class; and that
+the persons of poetry must be clothed with generic attributes, with the
+common attributes of the class: not with such as one gifted individual
+might possibly possess, but such as from his situation it is most
+probable before-hand that he would possess. If my premises are right and
+my deductions legitimate, it follows that there can be no poetic medium
+between the swains of Theocritus and those of an imaginary golden age.
+
+The characters of the vicar and the shepherd-mariner in the poem of THE
+BROTHERS, and that of the shepherd of Green-head Ghyll in the MICHAEL,
+have all the verisimilitude and representative quality, that the
+purposes of poetry can require. They are persons of a known and
+abiding class, and their manners and sentiments the natural product of
+circumstances common to the class. Take Michael for instance:
+
+    An old man stout of heart, and strong of limb.
+    His bodily frame had been from youth to age
+    Of an unusual strength: his mind was keen,
+    Intense, and frugal, apt for all affairs,
+    And in his shepherd's calling he was prompt
+    And watchful more than ordinary men.
+    Hence he had learned the meaning of all winds,
+    Of blasts of every tone; and oftentimes
+    When others heeded not, He heard the South
+    Make subterraneous music, like the noise
+    Of bagpipers on distant Highland hills.
+    The Shepherd, at such warning, of his flock
+    Bethought him, and he to himself would say,
+    `The winds are now devising work for me!'
+    And truly, at all times, the storm, that drives
+    The traveller to a shelter, summoned him
+    Up to the mountains: he had been alone
+    Amid the heart of many thousand mists,
+    That came to him and left him on the heights.
+    So lived he, until his eightieth year was past.
+    And grossly that man errs, who should suppose
+    That the green valleys, and the streams and rocks,
+    Were things indifferent to the Shepherd's thoughts.
+    Fields, where with cheerful spirits he had breathed
+    The common air; the hills, which he so oft
+    Had climbed with vigorous steps; which had impressed
+    So many incidents upon his mind
+    Of hardship, skill or courage, joy or fear;
+    Which, like a book, preserved the memory
+    Of the dumb animals, whom he had saved,
+    Had fed or sheltered, linking to such acts,
+    So grateful in themselves, the certainty
+    Of honourable gain; these fields, these hills
+    Which were his living Being, even more
+    Than his own blood--what could they less? had laid
+    Strong hold on his affections, were to him
+    A pleasurable feeling of blind love,
+    The pleasure which there is in life itself.
+
+On the other hand, in the poems which are pitched in a lower key, as the
+HARRY GILL, and THE IDIOT BOY, the feelings are those of human nature in
+general; though the poet has judiciously laid the scene in the country,
+in order to place himself in the vicinity of interesting images, without
+the necessity of ascribing a sentimental perception of their beauty
+to the persons of his drama. In THE IDIOT BOY, indeed, the mother's
+character is not so much the real and native product of a "situation
+where the essential passions of the heart find a better soil, in which
+they can attain their maturity and speak a plainer and more emphatic
+language," as it is an impersonation of an instinct abandoned by
+judgment. Hence the two following charges seem to me not wholly
+groundless: at least, they are the only plausible objections, which I
+have heard to that fine poem. The one is, that the author has not, in
+the poem itself, taken sufficient care to preclude from the reader's
+fancy the disgusting images of ordinary morbid idiocy, which yet it was
+by no means his intention to represent. He was even by the "burr, burr,
+burr," uncounteracted by any preceding description of the boy's beauty,
+assisted in recalling them. The other is, that the idiocy of the boy
+is so evenly balanced by the folly of the mother, as to present to the
+general reader rather a laughable burlesque on the blindness of anile
+dotage, than an analytic display of maternal affection in its ordinary
+workings.
+
+In THE THORN, the poet himself acknowledges in a note the necessity of
+an introductory poem, in which he should have portrayed the character
+of the person from whom the words of the poem are supposed to proceed:
+a superstitious man moderately imaginative, of slow faculties and deep
+feelings, "a captain of a small trading vessel, for example, who, being
+past the middle age of life, had retired upon an annuity, or small
+independent income, to some village or country town of which he was
+not a native, or in which he had not been accustomed to live. Such men
+having nothing to do become credulous and talkative from indolence." But
+in a poem, still more in a lyric poem--and the Nurse in ROMEO AND JULIET
+alone prevents me from extending the remark even to dramatic poetry, if
+indeed even the Nurse can be deemed altogether a case in point--it is
+not possible to imitate truly a dull and garrulous discourser, without
+repeating the effects of dullness and garrulity. However this may be, I
+dare assert, that the parts--(and these form the far larger portion of
+the whole)--which might as well or still better have proceeded from the
+poet's own imagination, and have been spoken in his own character,
+are those which have given, and which will continue to give, universal
+delight; and that the passages exclusively appropriate to the supposed
+narrator, such as the last couplet of the third stanza [64]; the seven
+last lines of the tenth [65]; and the five following stanzas, with
+the exception of the four admirable lines at the commencement of the
+fourteenth, are felt by many unprejudiced and unsophisticated hearts,
+as sudden and unpleasant sinkings from the height to which the poet had
+previously lifted them, and to which he again re-elevates both himself
+and his reader.
+
+If then I am compelled to doubt the theory, by which the choice of
+characters was to be directed, not only a priori, from grounds of
+reason, but both from the few instances in which the poet himself
+need be supposed to have been governed by it, and from the comparative
+inferiority of those instances; still more must I hesitate in my assent
+to the sentence which immediately follows the former citation; and
+which I can neither admit as particular fact, nor as general rule. "The
+language, too, of these men has been adopted (purified indeed from what
+appear to be its real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of
+dislike or disgust) because such men hourly communicate with the best
+objects from which the best part of language is originally derived; and
+because, from their rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle
+of their intercourse, being less under the action of social vanity,
+they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated
+expressions." To this I reply; that a rustic's language, purified from
+all provincialism and grossness, and so far reconstructed as to be made
+consistent with the rules of grammar--(which are in essence no
+other than the laws of universal logic, applied to psychological
+materials)--will not differ from the language of any other man of
+common sense, however learned or refined he may be, except as far as
+the notions, which the rustic has to convey, are fewer and more
+indiscriminate. This will become still clearer, if we add the
+consideration--(equally important though less obvious)--that the rustic,
+from the more imperfect development of his faculties, and from the
+lower state of their cultivation, aims almost solely to convey insulated
+facts, either those of his scanty experience or his traditional belief;
+while the educated man chiefly seeks to discover and express those
+connections of things, or those relative bearings of fact to fact, from
+which some more or less general law is deducible. For facts are valuable
+to a wise man, chiefly as they lead to the discovery of the indwelling
+law, which is the true being of things, the sole solution of their modes
+of existence, and in the knowledge of which consists our dignity and our
+power.
+
+As little can I agree with the assertion, that from the objects with
+which the rustic hourly communicates the best part of language is
+formed. For first, if to communicate with an object implies such an
+acquaintance with it, as renders it capable of being discriminately
+reflected on, the distinct knowledge of an uneducated rustic would
+furnish a very scanty vocabulary. The few things and modes of action
+requisite for his bodily conveniences would alone be individualized;
+while all the rest of nature would be expressed by a small number of
+confused general terms. Secondly, I deny that the words and combinations
+of words derived from the objects, with which the rustic is familiar,
+whether with distinct or confused knowledge, can be justly said to form
+the best part of language. It is more than probable, that many classes
+of the brute creation possess discriminating sounds, by which they can
+convey to each other notices of such objects as concern their food,
+shelter, or safety. Yet we hesitate to call the aggregate of such
+sounds a language, otherwise than metaphorically. The best part of human
+language, properly so called, is derived from reflection on the acts
+of the mind itself. It is formed by a voluntary appropriation of fixed
+symbols to internal acts, to processes and results of imagination, the
+greater part of which have no place in the consciousness of uneducated
+man; though in civilized society, by imitation and passive remembrance
+of what they hear from their religious instructors and other superiors,
+the most uneducated share in the harvest which they neither sowed,
+nor reaped. If the history of the phrases in hourly currency among our
+peasants were traced, a person not previously aware of the fact would
+be surprised at finding so large a number, which three or four centuries
+ago were the exclusive property of the universities and the schools;
+and, at the commencement of the Reformation, had been transferred from
+the school to the pulpit, and thus gradually passed into common life.
+The extreme difficulty, and often the impossibility, of finding words
+for the simplest moral and intellectual processes of the languages of
+uncivilized tribes has proved perhaps the weightiest obstacle to the
+progress of our most zealous and adroit missionaries. Yet these tribes
+are surrounded by the same nature as our peasants are; but in still more
+impressive forms; and they are, moreover, obliged to particularize many
+more of them. When, therefore, Mr. Wordsworth adds, "accordingly, such
+a language"--(meaning, as before, the language of rustic life purified
+from provincialism)--"arising out of repeated experience and regular
+feelings, is a more permanent, and a far more philosophical language,
+than that which is frequently substituted for it by Poets, who think
+that they are conferring honour upon themselves and their art in
+proportion as they indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of
+expression;" it may be answered, that the language, which he has in
+view, can be attributed to rustics with no greater right, than the style
+of Hooker or Bacon to Tom Brown or Sir Roger L'Estrange. Doubtless, if
+what is peculiar to each were omitted in each, the result must needs be
+the same. Further, that the poet, who uses an illogical diction, or a
+style fitted to excite only the low and changeable pleasure of wonder by
+means of groundless novelty, substitutes a language of folly and vanity,
+not for that of the rustic, but for that of good sense and natural
+feeling.
+
+Here let me be permitted to remind the reader, that the positions, which
+I controvert, are contained in the sentences--"a selection of the real
+language of men;"--"the language of these men" (that is, men in low and
+rustic life) "has been adopted; I have proposed to myself to imitate,
+and, as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men."
+
+"Between the language of prose and that of metrical composition, there
+neither is, nor can be, any essential difference:" it is against these
+exclusively that my opposition is directed.
+
+I object, in the very first instance, to an equivocation in the use of
+the word "real." Every man's language varies, according to the extent of
+his knowledge, the activity of his faculties, and the depth or quickness
+of his feelings. Every man's language has, first, its individualities;
+secondly, the common properties of the class to which he belongs; and
+thirdly, words and phrases of universal use. The language of Hooker,
+Bacon, Bishop Taylor, and Burke differs from the common language of the
+learned class only by the superior number and novelty of the thoughts
+and relations which they had to convey. The language of Algernon Sidney
+differs not at all from that, which every well-educated gentleman would
+wish to write, and (with due allowances for the undeliberateness, and
+less connected train, of thinking natural and proper to conversation)
+such as he would wish to talk. Neither one nor the other differ half as
+much from the general language of cultivated society, as the language
+of Mr. Wordsworth's homeliest composition differs from that of a common
+peasant. For "real" therefore, we must substitute ordinary, or lingua
+communis. And this, we have proved, is no more to be found in the
+phraseology of low and rustic life than in that of any other class. Omit
+the peculiarities of each and the result of course must be common to
+all. And assuredly the omissions and changes to be made in the language
+of rustics, before it could be transferred to any species of poem,
+except the drama or other professed imitation, are at least as numerous
+and weighty, as would be required in adapting to the same purpose the
+ordinary language of tradesmen and manufacturers. Not to mention,
+that the language so highly extolled by Mr. Wordsworth varies in every
+county, nay in every village, according to the accidental character
+of the clergyman, the existence or non-existence of schools; or even,
+perhaps, as the exciteman, publican, and barber happen to be, or not to
+be, zealous politicians, and readers of the weekly newspaper pro bono
+publico. Anterior to cultivation the lingua communis of every country,
+as Dante has well observed, exists every where in parts, and no where as
+a whole.
+
+Neither is the case rendered at all more tenable by the addition of
+the words, "in a state of excitement." For the nature of a man's words,
+where he is strongly affected by joy, grief, or anger, must necessarily
+depend on the number and quality of the general truths, conceptions and
+images, and of the words expressing them, with which his mind had been
+previously stored. For the property of passion is not to create; but
+to set in increased activity. At least, whatever new connections of
+thoughts or images, or--(which is equally, if not more than equally,
+the appropriate effect of strong excitement)--whatever generalizations
+of truth or experience the heat of passion may produce; yet the terms of
+their conveyance must have pre-existed in his former conversations, and
+are only collected and crowded together by the unusual stimulation. It
+is indeed very possible to adopt in a poem the unmeaning repetitions,
+habitual phrases, and other blank counters, which an unfurnished or
+confused understanding interposes at short intervals, in order to keep
+hold of his subject, which is still slipping from him, and to give him
+time for recollection; or, in mere aid of vacancy, as in the scanty
+companies of a country stage the same player pops backwards and
+forwards, in order to prevent the appearance of empty spaces, in the
+procession of Macbeth, or Henry VIII. But what assistance to the poet,
+or ornament to the poem, these can supply, I am at a loss to conjecture.
+Nothing assuredly can differ either in origin or in mode more widely
+from the apparent tautologies of intense and turbulent feeling, in which
+the passion is greater and of longer endurance than to be exhausted or
+satisfied by a single representation of the image or incident exciting
+it. Such repetitions I admit to be a beauty of the highest kind; as
+illustrated by Mr. Wordsworth himself from the song of Deborah. At her
+feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at her feet he bowed, he fell:
+where he bowed, there he fell down dead. Judges v. 27.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+Language of metrical composition, why and wherein essentially different
+from that of prose--Origin and elements of metre--Its necessary
+consequences, and the conditions thereby imposed on the metrical writer
+in the choice of his diction.
+
+
+I conclude, therefore, that the attempt is impracticable; and that, were
+it not impracticable, it would still be useless. For the very power of
+making the selection implies the previous possession of the language
+selected. Or where can the poet have lived? And by what rules could
+he direct his choice, which would not have enabled him to select and
+arrange his words by the light of his own judgment? We do not adopt the
+language of a class by the mere adoption of such words exclusively, as
+that class would use, or at least understand; but likewise by following
+the order, in which the words of such men are wont to succeed each
+other. Now this order, in the intercourse of uneducated men, is
+distinguished from the diction of their superiors in knowledge and
+power, by the greater disjunction and separation in the component parts
+of that, whatever it be, which they wish to communicate. There is a want
+of that prospectiveness of mind, that surview, which enables a man
+to foresee the whole of what he is to convey, appertaining to any one
+point; and by this means so to subordinate and arrange the different
+parts according to their relative importance, as to convey it at once,
+and as an organized whole.
+
+Now I will take the first stanza, on which I have chanced to open, in
+the Lyrical Ballads. It is one the most simple and the least peculiar in
+its language.
+
+    "In distant countries have I been,
+     And yet I have not often seen
+     A healthy man, a man full grown,
+     Weep in the public roads, alone.
+     But such a one, on English ground,
+     And in the broad highway, I met;
+     Along the broad highway he came,
+     His cheeks with tears were wet
+     Sturdy he seemed, though he was sad;
+     And in his arms a lamb he had."
+
+The words here are doubtless such as are current in all ranks of life;
+and of course not less so in the hamlet and cottage than in the shop,
+manufactory, college, or palace. But is this the order, in which the
+rustic would have placed the words? I am grievously deceived, if the
+following less compact mode of commencing the same tale be not a far
+more faithful copy. "I have been in a many parts, far and near, and I
+don't know that I ever saw before a man crying by himself in the public
+road; a grown man I mean, that was neither sick nor hurt," etc., etc.
+But when I turn to the following stanza in The Thorn:
+
+    "At all times of the day and night
+     This wretched woman thither goes;
+     And she is known to every star,
+     And every wind that blows
+     And there, beside the Thorn, she sits,
+     When the blue day-light's in the skies,
+     And when the whirlwind's on the hill,
+     Or frosty air is keen and still,
+     And to herself she cries,
+     Oh misery! Oh misery!
+     Oh woe is me! Oh misery!"
+
+and compare this with the language of ordinary men; or with that which
+I can conceive at all likely to proceed, in real life, from such a
+narrator, as is supposed in the note to the poem; compare it either in
+the succession of the images or of the sentences; I am reminded of the
+sublime prayer and hymn of praise, which Milton, in opposition to an
+established liturgy, presents as a fair specimen of common extemporary
+devotion, and such as we might expect to hear from every self-inspired
+minister of a conventicle! And I reflect with delight, how little a mere
+theory, though of his own workmanship, interferes with the processes of
+genuine imagination in a man of true poetic genius, who possesses, as
+Mr. Wordsworth, if ever man did, most assuredly does possess,
+
+    "The Vision and the Faculty divine."
+
+One point then alone remains, but that the most important; its
+examination having been, indeed, my chief inducement for the preceding
+inquisition. "There neither is nor can be any essential difference
+between the language of prose and metrical composition." Such is Mr.
+Wordsworth's assertion. Now prose itself, at least in all argumentative
+and consecutive works, differs, and ought to differ, from the language
+of conversation; even as [66] reading ought to differ from talking.
+Unless therefore the difference denied be that of the mere words, as
+materials common to all styles of writing, and not of the style itself
+in the universally admitted sense of the term, it might be naturally
+presumed that there must exist a still greater between the ordonnance
+of poetic composition and that of prose, than is expected to distinguish
+prose from ordinary conversation.
+
+There are not, indeed, examples wanting in the history of literature,
+of apparent paradoxes that have summoned the public wonder as new and
+startling truths, but which, on examination, have shrunk into tame and
+harmless truisms; as the eyes of a cat, seen in the dark, have been
+mistaken for flames of fire. But Mr. Wordsworth is among the last men,
+to whom a delusion of this kind would be attributed by anyone, who
+had enjoyed the slightest opportunity of understanding his mind and
+character. Where an objection has been anticipated by such an author as
+natural, his answer to it must needs be interpreted in some sense which
+either is, or has been, or is capable of being controverted. My object
+then must be to discover some other meaning for the term "essential
+difference" in this place, exclusive of the indistinction and community
+of the words themselves. For whether there ought to exist a class of
+words in the English, in any degree resembling the poetic dialect of
+the Greek and Italian, is a question of very subordinate importance. The
+number of such words would be small indeed, in our language; and even in
+the Italian and Greek, they consist not so much of different words, as
+of slight differences in the forms of declining and conjugating the same
+words; forms, doubtless, which having been, at some period more or less
+remote, the common grammatic flexions of some tribe or province, had
+been accidentally appropriated to poetry by the general admiration of
+certain master intellects, the first established lights of inspiration,
+to whom that dialect happened to be native.
+
+Essence, in its primary signification, means the principle of
+individuation, the inmost principle of the possibility of any thing, as
+that particular thing. It is equivalent to the idea of a thing, whenever
+we use the word, idea, with philosophic precision. Existence, on the
+other hand, is distinguished from essence, by the superinduction of
+reality. Thus we speak of the essence, and essential properties of a
+circle; but we do not therefore assert, that any thing, which really
+exists, is mathematically circular. Thus too, without any tautology we
+contend for the existence of the Supreme Being; that is, for a reality
+correspondent to the idea. There is, next, a secondary use of the word
+essence, in which it signifies the point or ground of contra-distinction
+between two modifications of the same substance or subject. Thus we
+should be allowed to say, that the style of architecture of Westminster
+Abbey is essentially different from that of St. Paul, even though both
+had been built with blocks cut into the same form, and from the same
+quarry. Only in this latter sense of the term must it have been denied
+by Mr. Wordsworth (for in this sense alone is it affirmed by the general
+opinion) that the language of poetry (that is the formal construction,
+or architecture, of the words and phrases) is essentially different from
+that of prose. Now the burden of the proof lies with the oppugner,
+not with the supporters of the common belief. Mr. Wordsworth, in
+consequence, assigns as the proof of his position, "that not only
+the language of a large portion of every good poem, even of the most
+elevated character, must necessarily, except with reference to the
+metre, in no respect differ from that of good prose, but likewise that
+some of the most interesting parts of the best poems will be found to be
+strictly the language of prose, when prose is well written. The truth of
+this assertion might be demonstrated by innumerable passages from almost
+all the poetical writings, even of Milton himself." He then quotes
+Gray's sonnet--
+
+    "In vain to me the smiling mornings shine,
+     And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire;
+     The birds in vain their amorous descant join,
+     Or cheerful fields resume their green attire.
+     These ears, alas! for other notes repine;
+     _A different object do these eyes require;
+     My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine;
+     And in my breast the imperfect joys expire._
+     Yet morning smiles the busy race to cheer,
+     And new-born pleasure brings to happier men;
+     The fields to all their wonted tribute bear;
+     To warm their little loves the birds complain:
+     _I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear,
+     And weep the more, because I weep in vain."_
+
+and adds the following remark:--"It will easily be perceived, that the
+only part of this Sonnet which is of any value, is the lines printed in
+italics; it is equally obvious, that, except in the rhyme, and in the
+use of the single word `fruitless' for fruitlessly, which is so far a
+defect, the language of these lines does in no respect differ from that
+of prose."
+
+An idealist defending his system by the fact, that when asleep we often
+believe ourselves awake, was well answered by his plain neighbour, "Ah,
+but when awake do we ever believe ourselves asleep?" Things identical
+must be convertible. The preceding passage seems to rest on a similar
+sophism. For the question is not, whether there may not occur in prose
+an order of words, which would be equally proper in a poem; nor whether
+there are not beautiful lines and sentences of frequent occurrence in
+good poems, which would be equally becoming as well as beautiful in good
+prose; for neither the one nor the other has ever been either denied
+or doubted by any one. The true question must be, whether there are not
+modes of expression, a construction, and an order of sentences, which
+are in their fit and natural place in a serious prose composition, but
+would be disproportionate and heterogeneous in metrical poetry; and,
+vice versa, whether in the language of a serious poem there may not be
+an arrangement both of words and sentences, and a use and selection
+of (what are called) figures of speech, both as to their kind, their
+frequency, and their occasions, which on a subject of equal weight would
+be vicious and alien in correct and manly prose. I contend, that in both
+cases this unfitness of each for the place of the other frequently will
+and ought to exist.
+
+And first from the origin of metre. This I would trace to the balance
+in the mind effected by that spontaneous effort which strives to hold in
+check the workings of passion. It might be easily explained likewise
+in what manner this salutary antagonism is assisted by the very state,
+which it counteracts; and how this balance of antagonists became
+organized into metre (in the usual acceptation of that term), by a
+supervening act of the will and judgment, consciously and for the
+foreseen purpose of pleasure. Assuming these principles, as the data of
+our argument, we deduce from them two legitimate conditions, which the
+critic is entitled to expect in every metrical work. First, that, as
+the elements of metre owe their existence to a state of increased
+excitement, so the metre itself should be accompanied by the natural
+language of excitement. Secondly, that as these elements are formed
+into metre artificially, by a voluntary act, with the design and for
+the purpose of blending delight with emotion, so the traces of present
+volition should throughout the metrical language be proportionately
+discernible. Now these two conditions must be reconciled and co-
+present. There must be not only a partnership, but a union; an
+interpenetration of passion and of will, of spontaneous impulse and
+of voluntary purpose. Again, this union can be manifested only in a
+frequency of forms and figures of speech, (originally the offspring of
+passion, but now the adopted children of power), greater than would be
+desired or endured, where the emotion is not voluntarily encouraged and
+kept up for the sake of that pleasure, which such emotion, so tempered
+and mastered by the will, is found capable of communicating. It not only
+dictates, but of itself tends to produce a more frequent employment of
+picturesque and vivifying language, than would be natural in any other
+case, in which there did not exist, as there does in the present, a
+previous and well understood, though tacit, compact between the poet and
+his reader, that the latter is entitled to expect, and the former bound
+to supply this species and degree of pleasurable excitement. We may
+in some measure apply to this union the answer of Polixenes, in the
+Winter's Tale, to Perdita's neglect of the streaked gilliflowers,
+because she had heard it said,
+
+    "There is an art, which, in their piedness, shares
+     With great creating nature.
+     POL.                      Say there be;
+     Yet nature is made better by no mean,
+     But nature makes that mean; so, o'er that art,
+     Which, you say, adds to nature, is an art,
+     That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
+     A gentler scion to the wildest stock;
+     And make conceive a bark of baser kind
+     By bud of nobler race. This is an art,
+     Which does mend nature,--change it rather; but
+     The art itself is nature."
+
+Secondly, I argue from the effects of metre. As far as metre acts in and
+for itself, it tends to increase the vivacity and susceptibility both
+of the general feelings and of the attention. This effect it produces by
+the continued excitement of surprise, and by the quick reciprocations
+of curiosity still gratified and still re-excited, which are too slight
+indeed to be at any one moment objects of distinct consciousness,
+yet become considerable in their aggregate influence. As a medicated
+atmosphere, or as wine during animated conversation, they act
+powerfully, though themselves unnoticed. Where, therefore, correspondent
+food and appropriate matter are not provided for the attention and
+feelings thus roused there must needs be a disappointment felt; like
+that of leaping in the dark from the last step of a stair-case, when we
+had prepared our muscles for a leap of three or four.
+
+The discussion on the powers of metre in the preface is highly ingenious
+and touches at all points on truth. But I cannot find any statement of
+its powers considered abstractly and separately. On the contrary Mr.
+Wordsworth seems always to estimate metre by the powers, which it exerts
+during, (and, as I think, in consequence of) its combination with other
+elements of poetry. Thus the previous difficulty is left unanswered,
+what the elements are, with which it must be combined, in order
+to produce its own effects to any pleasurable purpose. Double and
+tri-syllable rhymes, indeed, form a lower species of wit, and, attended
+to exclusively for their own sake, may become a source of momentary
+amusement; as in poor Smart's distich to the Welsh Squire who had
+promised him a hare:
+
+    "Tell me, thou son of great Cadwallader!
+     Hast sent the hare? or hast thou swallow'd her?"
+
+But for any poetic purposes, metre resembles, (if the aptness of the
+simile may excuse its meanness), yeast, worthless or disagreeable by
+itself, but giving vivacity and spirit to the liquor with which it is
+proportionally combined.
+
+The reference to THE CHILDREN IN THE WOOD by no means satisfies my
+judgment. We all willingly throw ourselves back for awhile into the
+feelings of our childhood. This ballad, therefore, we read under such
+recollections of our own childish feelings, as would equally endear to
+us poems, which Mr. Wordsworth himself would regard as faulty in the
+opposite extreme of gaudy and technical ornament. Before the invention
+of printing, and in a still greater degree, before the introduction of
+writing, metre, especially alliterative metre, (whether alliterative at
+the beginning of the words, as in PIERCE PLOUMAN, or at the end, as in
+rhymes) possessed an independent value as assisting the recollection,
+and consequently the preservation, of any series of truths or incidents.
+But I am not convinced by the collation of facts, that THE CHILDREN
+IN THE WOOD owes either its preservation, or its popularity, to its
+metrical form. Mr. Marshal's repository affords a number of tales in
+prose inferior in pathos and general merit, some of as old a date, and
+many as widely popular. TOM HICKATHRIFT, JACK THE GIANT-KILLER, GOODY
+TWO-SHOES, and LITTLE RED RIDING-HOOD are formidable rivals. And
+that they have continued in prose, cannot be fairly explained by the
+assumption, that the comparative meanness of their thoughts and images
+precluded even the humblest forms of metre. The scene of GOODY TWO-SHOES
+in the church is perfectly susceptible of metrical narration; and, among
+the thaumata thaumastotata even of the present age, I do not recollect a
+more astonishing image than that of the "whole rookery, that flew out
+of the giant's beard," scared by the tremendous voice, with which this
+monster answered the challenge of the heroic TOM HICKATHRIFT!
+
+If from these we turn to compositions universally, and independently of
+all early associations, beloved and admired; would the MARIA, THE MONK,
+or THE POOR MAN'S ASS of Sterne, be read with more delight, or have a
+better chance of immortality, had they without any change in the diction
+been composed in rhyme, than in their present state? If I am not grossly
+mistaken, the general reply would be in the negative. Nay, I will
+confess, that, in Mr. Wordsworth's own volumes, the ANECDOTE FOR
+FATHERS, SIMON LEE, ALICE FELL, BEGGARS, and THE SAILOR'S MOTHER,
+notwithstanding the beauties which are to be found in each of them where
+the poet interposes the music of his own thoughts, would have been more
+delightful to me in prose, told and managed, as by Mr. Wordsworth they
+would have been, in a moral essay or pedestrian tour.
+
+Metre in itself is simply a stimulant of the attention, and therefore
+excites the question: Why is the attention to be thus stimulated? Now
+the question cannot be answered by the pleasure of the metre itself;
+for this we have shown to be conditional, and dependent on the
+appropriateness of the thoughts and expressions, to which the metrical
+form is superadded. Neither can I conceive any other answer that can be
+rationally given, short of this: I write in metre, because I am about to
+use a language different from that of prose. Besides, where the language
+is not such, how interesting soever the reflections are, that are
+capable of being drawn by a philosophic mind from the thoughts or
+incidents of the poem, the metre itself must often become feeble. Take
+the last three stanzas of THE SAILOR'S MOTHER, for instance. If I could
+for a moment abstract from the effect produced on the author's feelings,
+as a man, by the incident at the time of its real occurrence, I would
+dare appeal to his own judgment, whether in the metre itself he found a
+sufficient reason for their being written metrically?
+
+    And, thus continuing, she said,
+    "I had a Son, who many a day
+    Sailed on the seas; but he is dead;
+    In Denmark he was cast away;
+    And I have travelled far as Hull to see
+    What clothes he might have left, or other property.
+
+    The Bird and Cage they both were his
+    'Twas my Son's Bird; and neat and trim
+    He kept it: many voyages
+    This Singing-bird hath gone with him;
+    When last he sailed he left the Bird behind;
+    As it might be, perhaps, from bodings of his mind.
+
+    He to a Fellow-lodger's care
+    Had left it, to be watched and fed,
+    Till he came back again; and there
+    I found it when my Son was dead;
+    And now, God help me for my little wit!
+    I trail it with me, Sir! he took so much delight in it."
+
+If disproportioning the emphasis we read these stanzas so as to make the
+rhymes perceptible, even tri-syllable rhymes could scarcely produce an
+equal sense of oddity and strangeness, as we feel here in finding rhymes
+at all in sentences so exclusively colloquial. I would further ask
+whether, but for that visionary state, into which the figure of the
+woman and the susceptibility of his own genius had placed the poet's
+imagination,--(a state, which spreads its influence and colouring over
+all, that co-exists with the exciting cause, and in which
+
+    "The simplest, and the most familiar things
+     Gain a strange power of spreading awe around them,") [67]
+
+I would ask the poet whether he would not have felt an abrupt downfall
+in these verses from the preceding stanza?
+
+    "The ancient spirit is not dead;
+     Old times, thought I, are breathing there;
+     Proud was I that my country bred
+     Such strength, a dignity so fair:
+     She begged an alms, like one in poor estate;
+     I looked at her again, nor did my pride abate."
+
+It must not be omitted, and is besides worthy of notice, that those
+stanzas furnish the only fair instance that I have been able to discover
+in all Mr. Wordsworth's writings, of an actual adoption, or true
+imitation, of the real and very language of low and rustic life, freed
+from provincialisms.
+
+Thirdly, I deduce the position from all the causes elsewhere assigned,
+which render metre the proper form of poetry, and poetry imperfect and
+defective without metre. Metre, therefore, having been connected with
+poetry most often and by a peculiar fitness, whatever else is combined
+with metre must, though it be not itself essentially poetic, have
+nevertheless some property in common with poetry, as an intermedium
+of affinity, a sort, (if I may dare borrow a well-known phrase from
+technical chemistry), of mordaunt between it and the super-added metre.
+Now poetry, Mr. Wordsworth truly affirms, does always imply passion:
+which word must be here understood in its most general sense, as an
+excited state of the feelings and faculties. And as every passion has
+its proper pulse, so will it likewise have its characteristic modes
+of expression. But where there exists that degree of genius and talent
+which entitles a writer to aim at the honours of a poet, the very act of
+poetic composition itself is, and is allowed to imply and to produce,
+an unusual state of excitement, which of course justifies and demands a
+correspondent difference of language, as truly, though not perhaps in as
+marked a degree, as the excitement of love, fear, rage, or jealousy. The
+vividness of the descriptions or declamations in Donne or Dryden, is as
+much and as often derived from the force and fervour of the describer,
+as from the reflections, forms or incidents, which constitute their
+subject and materials. The wheels take fire from the mere rapidity of
+their motion. To what extent, and under what modifications, this may
+be admitted to act, I shall attempt to define in an after remark on Mr.
+Wordsworth's reply to this objection, or rather on his objection to this
+reply, as already anticipated in his preface.
+
+Fourthly, and as intimately connected with this, if not the same
+argument in a more general form, I adduce the high spiritual instinct of
+the human being impelling us to seek unity by harmonious adjustment, and
+thus establishing the principle that all the parts of an organized whole
+must be assimilated to the more important and essential parts. This and
+the preceding arguments may be strengthened by the reflection, that the
+composition of a poem is among the imitative arts; and that imitation,
+as opposed to copying, consists either in the interfusion of the same
+throughout the radically different, or of the different throughout a
+base radically the same.
+
+Lastly, I appeal to the practice of the best poets, of all countries
+and in all ages, as authorizing the opinion, (deduced from all the
+foregoing,) that in every import of the word essential, which would
+not here involve a mere truism, there may be, is, and ought to be an
+essential difference between the language of prose and of metrical
+composition.
+
+In Mr. Wordsworth's criticism of Gray's Sonnet, the reader's sympathy
+with his praise or blame of the different parts is taken for granted
+rather perhaps too easily. He has not, at least, attempted to win or
+compel it by argumentative analysis. In my conception at least, the
+lines rejected as of no value do, with the exception of the two first,
+differ as much and as little from the language of common life, as those
+which he has printed in italics as possessing genuine excellence. Of the
+five lines thus honourably distinguished, two of them differ from prose
+even more widely, than the lines which either precede or follow, in the
+position of the words.
+
+    "A different object do these eyes require;
+     My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine;
+     And in my breast the imperfect joys expire."
+
+But were it otherwise, what would this prove, but a truth, of which no
+man ever doubted?--videlicet, that there are sentences, which would be
+equally in their place both in verse and prose. Assuredly it does not
+prove the point, which alone requires proof; namely, that there are not
+passages, which would suit the one and not suit the other. The first
+line of this sonnet is distinguished from the ordinary language of
+men by the epithet to morning. For we will set aside, at present, the
+consideration, that the particular word "smiling" is hackneyed, and,
+as it involves a sort of personification, not quite congruous with
+the common and material attribute of "shining." And, doubtless, this
+adjunction of epithets for the purpose of additional description, where
+no particular attention is demanded for the quality of the thing, would
+be noticed as giving a poetic cast to a man's conversation. Should the
+sportsman exclaim, "Come boys! the rosy morning calls you up:" he will
+be supposed to have some song in his head. But no one suspects this,
+when he says, "A wet morning shall not confine us to our beds." This
+then is either a defect in poetry, or it is not. Whoever should decide
+in the affirmative, I would request him to re-peruse any one poem, of
+any confessedly great poet from Homer to Milton, or from Aeschylus to
+Shakespeare; and to strike out, (in thought I mean), every instance of
+this kind. If the number of these fancied erasures did not startle him;
+or if he continued to deem the work improved by their total omission;
+he must advance reasons of no ordinary strength and evidence, reasons
+grounded in the essence of human nature. Otherwise, I should not
+hesitate to consider him as a man not so much proof against all
+authority, as dead to it.
+
+The second line,
+
+    "And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire;--"
+
+has indeed almost as many faults as words. But then it is a bad line,
+not because the language is distinct from that of prose; but because
+it conveys incongruous images; because it confounds the cause and the
+effect; the real thing with the personified representative of the thing;
+in short, because it differs from the language of good sense! That the
+"Phoebus" is hackneyed, and a school-boy image, is an accidental fault,
+dependent on the age in which the author wrote, and not deduced from
+the nature of the thing. That it is part of an exploded mythology, is an
+objection more deeply grounded. Yet when the torch of ancient learning
+was re-kindled, so cheering were its beams, that our eldest poets, cut
+off by Christianity from all accredited machinery, and deprived of all
+acknowledged guardians and symbols of the great objects of nature,
+were naturally induced to adopt, as a poetic language, those fabulous
+personages, those forms of the [68]supernatural in nature, which had
+given them such dear delight in the poems of their great masters. Nay,
+even at this day what scholar of genial taste will not so far sympathize
+with them, as to read with pleasure in Petrarch, Chaucer, or Spenser,
+what he would perhaps condemn as puerile in a modern poet?
+
+I remember no poet, whose writings would safelier stand the test of Mr.
+Wordsworth's theory, than Spenser. Yet will Mr. Wordsworth say, that the
+style of the following stanza is either undistinguished from prose,
+and the language of ordinary life? Or that it is vicious, and that the
+stanzas are blots in THE FAERY QUEEN?
+
+    "By this the northern wagoner had set
+     His sevenfold teme behind the stedfast starre,
+     That was in ocean waves yet never wet,
+     But firme is fixt and sendeth light from farre
+     To all that in the wild deep wandering arre
+     And chearfull chaunticlere with his note shrill
+     Had warned once that Phoebus' fiery carre
+     In hast was climbing up the easterne hill,
+     Full envious that night so long his roome did fill."
+
+    "At last the golden orientall gate
+     Of greatest heaven gan to open fayre,
+     And Phoebus fresh, as brydegrome to his mate,
+     Came dauncing forth, shaking his deawie hayre,
+     And hurl'd his glist'ring beams through gloomy ayre:
+     Which when the wakeful elfe perceived, streightway
+     He started up, and did him selfe prepayre
+     In sun-bright armes and battailous array;
+     For with that pagan proud he combat will that day."
+
+On the contrary to how many passages, both in hymn books and in blank
+verse poems, could I, (were it not invidious), direct the reader's
+attention, the style of which is most unpoetic, because, and only
+because, it is the style of prose? He will not suppose me capable of
+having in my mind such verses, as
+
+    "I put my hat upon my head
+     And walk'd into the Strand;
+     And there I met another man,
+     Whose hat was in his hand."
+
+To such specimens it would indeed be a fair and full reply, that these
+lines are not bad, because they are unpoetic; but because they are empty
+of all sense and feeling; and that it were an idle attempt to prove that
+"an ape is not a Newton, when it is self-evident that he is not a
+man." But the sense shall be good and weighty, the language correct and
+dignified, the subject interesting and treated with feeling; and yet
+the style shall, notwithstanding all these merits, be justly blamable as
+prosaic, and solely because the words and the order of the words would
+find their appropriate place in prose, but are not suitable to metrical
+composition. The CIVIL WARS of Daniel is an instructive, and even
+interesting work; but take the following stanzas, (and from the hundred
+instances which abound I might probably have selected others far more
+striking):
+
+    "And to the end we may with better ease
+     Discern the true discourse, vouchsafe to shew
+     What were the times foregoing near to these,
+     That these we may with better profit know.
+     Tell how the world fell into this disease;
+     And how so great distemperature did grow;
+     So shall we see with what degrees it came;
+     How things at full do soon wax out of frame."
+
+    "Ten kings had from the Norman Conqu'ror reign'd
+     With intermix'd and variable fate,
+     When England to her greatest height attain'd
+     Of power, dominion, glory, wealth, and state;
+     After it had with much ado sustain'd
+     The violence of princes, with debate
+     For titles and the often mutinies
+     Of nobles for their ancient liberties."
+
+    "For first, the Norman, conqu'ring all by might,
+     By might was forc'd to keep what he had got;
+     Mixing our customs and the form of right
+     With foreign constitutions, he had brought;
+     Mast'ring the mighty, humbling the poorer wight,
+     By all severest means that could be wrought;
+     And, making the succession doubtful, rent
+     His new-got state, and left it turbulent."
+
+Will it be contended on the one side, that these lines are mean and
+senseless? Or on the other, that they are not prosaic, and for that
+reason unpoetic? This poet's well-merited epithet is that of the
+"well-languaged Daniel;" but likewise, and by the consent of his
+contemporaries no less than of all succeeding critics, "the prosaic
+Daniel." Yet those, who thus designate this wise and amiable writer
+from the frequent incorrespondency of his diction to his metre in
+the majority of his compositions, not only deem them valuable and
+interesting on other accounts; but willingly admit, that there are to
+be found throughout his poems, and especially in his EPISTLES and in his
+HYMEN'S TRIUMPH, many and exquisite specimens of that style which, as
+the neutral ground of prose and verse, is common to both. A fine and
+almost faultless extract, eminent as for other beauties, so for its
+perfection in this species of diction, may be seen in Lamb's DRAMATIC
+SPECIMENS, a work of various interest from the nature of the selections
+themselves, (all from the plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries),--and
+deriving a high additional value from the notes, which are full of just
+and original criticism, expressed with all the freshness of originality.
+
+Among the possible effects of practical adherence to a theory, that aims
+to identify the style of prose and verse,--(if it does not indeed claim
+for the latter a yet nearer resemblance to the average style of men
+in the viva voce intercourse of real life)--we might anticipate the
+following as not the least likely to occur. It will happen, as I have
+indeed before observed, that the metre itself, the sole acknowledged
+difference, will occasionally become metre to the eye only. The
+existence of prosaisms, and that they detract from the merit of a poem,
+must at length be conceded, when a number of successive lines can be
+rendered, even to the most delicate ear, unrecognizable as verse, or
+as having even been intended for verse, by simply transcribing them as
+prose; when if the poem be in blank verse, this can be effected without
+any alteration, or at most by merely restoring one or two words to
+their proper places, from which they have been transplanted [69] for no
+assignable cause or reason but that of the author's convenience; but if
+it be in rhyme, by the mere exchange of the final word of each line
+for some other of the same meaning, equally appropriate, dignified and
+euphonic.
+
+The answer or objection in the preface to the anticipated remark
+"that metre paves the way to other distinctions," is contained in the
+following words. "The distinction of rhyme and metre is regular and
+uniform, and not, like that produced by (what is usually called) poetic
+diction, arbitrary, and subject to infinite caprices, upon which no
+calculation whatever can be made. In the one case the reader is utterly
+at the mercy of the poet respecting what imagery or diction he may
+choose to connect with the passion." But is this a poet, of whom a poet
+is speaking? No surely! rather of a fool or madman: or at best of a vain
+or ignorant phantast! And might not brains so wild and so deficient
+make just the same havoc with rhymes and metres, as they are supposed to
+effect with modes and figures of speech? How is the reader at the mercy
+of such men? If he continue to read their nonsense, is it not his own
+fault? The ultimate end of criticism is much more to establish the
+principles of writing, than to furnish rules how to pass judgment on
+what has been written by others; if indeed it were possible that the two
+could be separated. But if it be asked, by what principles the poet is
+to regulate his own style, if he do not adhere closely to the sort
+and order of words which he hears in the market, wake, high-road, or
+plough-field? I reply; by principles, the ignorance or neglect of which
+would convict him of being no poet, but a silly or presumptuous usurper
+of the name. By the principles of grammar, logic, psychology. In one
+word by such a knowledge of the facts, material and spiritual, that most
+appertain to his art, as, if it have been governed and applied by good
+sense, and rendered instinctive by habit, becomes the representative and
+reward of our past conscious reasonings, insights, and conclusions, and
+acquires the name of Taste. By what rule that does not leave the
+reader at the poet's mercy, and the poet at his own, is the latter
+to distinguish between the language suitable to suppressed, and the
+language, which is characteristic of indulged, anger? Or between that of
+rage and that of jealousy? Is it obtained by wandering about in search
+of angry or jealous people in uncultivated society, in order to copy
+their words? Or not far rather by the power of imagination proceeding
+upon the all in each of human nature? By meditation, rather than by
+observation? And by the latter in consequence only of the former? As
+eyes, for which the former has pre-determined their field of vision, and
+to which, as to its organ, it communicates a microscopic power? There
+is not, I firmly believe, a man now living, who has, from his own inward
+experience, a clearer intuition, than Mr. Wordsworth himself, that the
+last mentioned are the true sources of genial discrimination. Through
+the same process and by the same creative agency will the poet
+distinguish the degree and kind of the excitement produced by the very
+act of poetic composition. As intuitively will he know, what differences
+of style it at once inspires and justifies; what intermixture of
+conscious volition is natural to that state; and in what instances
+such figures and colours of speech degenerate into mere creatures of an
+arbitrary purpose, cold technical artifices of ornament or connection.
+For, even as truth is its own light and evidence, discovering at once
+itself and falsehood, so is it the prerogative of poetic genius
+to distinguish by parental instinct its proper offspring from the
+changelings, which the gnomes of vanity or the fairies of fashion may
+have laid in its cradle or called by its names. Could a rule be
+given from without, poetry would cease to be poetry, and sink into a
+mechanical art. It would be morphosis, not poiaesis. The rules of the
+Imagination are themselves the very powers of growth and production.
+The words to which they are reducible, present only the outlines
+and external appearance of the fruit. A deceptive counterfeit of the
+superficial form and colours may be elaborated; but the marble peach
+feels cold and heavy, and children only put it to their mouths. We find
+no difficulty in admitting as excellent, and the legitimate language of
+poetic fervour self-impassioned, Donne's apostrophe to the Sun in the
+second stanza of his PROGRESS OF THE SOUL.
+
+    "Thee, eye of heaven! this great Soul envies not;
+     By thy male force is all, we have, begot.
+     In the first East thou now beginn'st to shine,
+     Suck'st early balm and island spices there,
+     And wilt anon in thy loose-rein'd career
+     At Tagus, Po, Seine, Thames, and Danow dine,
+     And see at night this western world of mine:
+     Yet hast thou not more nations seen than she,
+     Who before thee one day began to be,
+     And, thy frail light being quench'd, shall long, long outlive
+                                                           thee."
+
+Or the next stanza but one:
+
+    "Great Destiny, the commissary of God,
+     That hast mark'd out a path and period
+     For every thing! Who, where we offspring took,
+     Our ways and ends see'st at one instant: thou
+     Knot of all causes! Thou, whose changeless brow
+     Ne'er smiles nor frowns! O! vouchsafe thou to look,
+     And shew my story in thy eternal book," etc.
+
+As little difficulty do we find in excluding from the honours of
+unaffected warmth and elevation the madness prepense of pseudopoesy, or
+the startling hysteric of weakness over-exerting itself, which bursts on
+the unprepared reader in sundry odes and apostrophes to abstract terms.
+Such are the Odes to jealousy, to Hope, to Oblivion, and the like, in
+Dodsley's collection and the magazines of that day, which seldom fail
+to remind me of an Oxford copy of verses on the two SUTTONS, commencing
+with
+
+    "Inoculation, heavenly maid! descend!"
+
+It is not to be denied that men of undoubted talents, and even poets
+of true, though not of first-rate, genius, have from a mistaken theory
+deluded both themselves and others in the opposite extreme. I once read
+to a company of sensible and well-educated women the introductory period
+of Cowley's preface to his "Pindaric Odes," written in imitation of
+the style and manner of the odes of Pindar. "If," (says Cowley), "a man
+should undertake to translate Pindar, word for word, it would be thought
+that one madman had translated another as may appear, when he, that
+understands not the original, reads the verbal traduction of him into
+Latin prose, than which nothing seems more raving." I then proceeded
+with his own free version of the second Olympic, composed for the
+charitable purpose of rationalizing the Theban Eagle.
+
+    "Queen of all harmonious things,
+     Dancing words and speaking strings,
+     What god, what hero, wilt thou sing?
+     What happy man to equal glories bring?
+     Begin, begin thy noble choice,
+     And let the hills around reflect the image of thy voice.
+     Pisa does to Jove belong,
+     Jove and Pisa claim thy song.
+     The fair first-fruits of war, th' Olympic games,
+     Alcides, offer'd up to Jove;
+     Alcides, too, thy strings may move,
+     But, oh! what man to join with these can worthy prove?
+     Join Theron boldly to their sacred names;
+     Theron the next honour claims;
+     Theron to no man gives place,
+     Is first in Pisa's and in Virtue's race;
+     Theron there, and he alone,
+     Ev'n his own swift forefathers has outgone."
+
+One of the company exclaimed, with the full assent of the rest, that
+if the original were madder than this, it must be incurably mad. I then
+translated the ode from the Greek, and as nearly as possible, word
+for word; and the impression was, that in the general movement of the
+periods, in the form of the connections and transitions, and in the
+sober majesty of lofty sense, it appeared to them to approach more
+nearly, than any other poetry they had heard, to the style of our Bible,
+in the prophetic books. The first strophe will suffice as a specimen:
+
+    "Ye harp-controlling hymns! (or) ye hymns the sovereigns of harps!
+     What God? what Hero?
+     What Man shall we celebrate?
+     Truly Pisa indeed is of Jove,
+     But the Olympiad (or the Olympic games) did Hercules establish,
+     The first-fruits of the spoils of war.
+     But Theron for the four-horsed car,
+     That bore victory to him,
+     It behoves us now to voice aloud:
+     The Just, the Hospitable,
+     The Bulwark of Agrigentum,
+     Of renowned fathers
+     The Flower, even him
+     Who preserves his native city erect and safe."
+
+But are such rhetorical caprices condemnable only for their deviation
+from the language of real life? and are they by no other means to be
+precluded, but by the rejection of all distinctions between prose and
+verse, save that of metre? Surely good sense, and a moderate insight
+into the constitution of the human mind, would be amply sufficient to
+prove, that such language and such combinations are the native product
+neither of the fancy nor of the imagination; that their operation
+consists in the excitement of surprise by the juxta-position and
+apparent reconciliation of widely different or incompatible things. As
+when, for instance, the hills are made to reflect the image of a
+voice. Surely, no unusual taste is requisite to see clearly, that
+this compulsory juxtaposition is not produced by the presentation of
+impressive or delightful forms to the inward vision, nor by any sympathy
+with the modifying powers with which the genius of the poet had united
+and inspirited all the objects of his thought; that it is therefore
+a species of wit, a pure work of the will, and implies a leisure and
+self-possession both of thought and of feeling, incompatible with the
+steady fervour of a mind possessed and filled with the grandeur of its
+subject. To sum up the whole in one sentence. When a poem, or a part of
+a poem, shall be adduced, which is evidently vicious in the figures and
+centexture of its style, yet for the condemnation of which no reason can
+be assigned, except that it differs from the style in which men actually
+converse, then, and not till then, can I hold this theory to be either
+plausible, or practicable, or capable of furnishing either rule,
+guidance, or precaution, that might not, more easily and more safely, as
+well as more naturally, have been deduced in the author's own mind from
+considerations of grammar, logic, and the truth and nature of things,
+confirmed by the authority of works, whose fame is not of one country
+nor of one age.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+Continuation--Concerning the real object which, it is probable, Mr.
+Wordsworth had before him in his critical preface--Elucidation and
+application of this.
+
+
+It might appear from some passages in the former part of Mr.
+Wordsworth's preface, that he meant to confine his theory of style, and
+the necessity of a close accordance with the actual language of men,
+to those particular subjects from low and rustic life, which by way of
+experiment he had purposed to naturalize as a new species in our English
+poetry. But from the train of argument that follows; from the reference
+to Milton; and from the spirit of his critique on Gray's sonnet; those
+sentences appear to have been rather courtesies of modesty, than actual
+limitations of his system. Yet so groundless does this system appear
+on a close examination; and so strange and overwhelming [70] in its
+consequences, that I cannot, and I do not, believe that the poet did
+ever himself adopt it in the unqualified sense, in which his expressions
+have been understood by others, and which, indeed, according to all the
+common laws of interpretation they seem to bear. What then did he
+mean? I apprehend, that in the clear perception, not unaccompanied with
+disgust or contempt, of the gaudy affectations of a style which passed
+current with too many for poetic diction, (though in truth it had as
+little pretensions to poetry, as to logic or common sense,) he narrowed
+his view for the time; and feeling a justifiable preference for the
+language of nature and of good sense, even in its humblest and least
+ornamented forms, he suffered himself to express, in terms at once too
+large and too exclusive, his predilection for a style the most remote
+possible from the false and showy splendour which he wished to explode.
+It is possible, that this predilection, at first merely comparative,
+deviated for a time into direct partiality. But the real object which
+he had in view, was, I doubt not, a species of excellence which had
+been long before most happily characterized by the judicious and amiable
+Garve, whose works are so justly beloved and esteemed by the Germans,
+in his remarks on Gellert, from which the following is literally
+translated. "The talent, that is required in order to make, excellent
+verses, is perhaps greater than the philosopher is ready to admit, or
+would find it in his power to acquire: the talent to seek only the apt
+expression of the thought, and yet to find at the same time with it the
+rhyme and the metre. Gellert possessed this happy gift, if ever any one
+of our poets possessed it; and nothing perhaps contributed more to the
+great and universal impression which his fables made on their first
+publication, or conduces more to their continued popularity. It was
+a strange and curious phaenomenon, and such as in Germany had been
+previously unheard of, to read verses in which everything was expressed
+just as one would wish to talk, and yet all dignified, attractive,
+and interesting; and all at the same time perfectly correct as to the
+measure of the syllables and the rhyme. It is certain, that poetry when
+it has attained this excellence makes a far greater impression than
+prose. So much so indeed, that even the gratification which the very
+rhymes afford, becomes then no longer a contemptible or trifling
+gratification." [71]
+
+However novel this phaenomenon may have been in Germany at the time
+of Gellert, it is by no means new, nor yet of recent existence in our
+language. Spite of the licentiousness with which Spenser occasionally
+compels the orthography of his words into a subservience to his rhymes,
+the whole FAIRY QUEEN is an almost continued instance of this beauty.
+Waller's song GO, LOVELY ROSE, is doubtless familiar to most of my
+readers; but if I had happened to have had by me the Poems of Cotton,
+more but far less deservedly celebrated as the author of the VIRGIL
+TRAVESTIED, I should have indulged myself, and I think have gratified
+many, who are not acquainted with his serious works, by selecting some
+admirable specimens of this style. There are not a few poems in that
+volume, replete with every excellence of thought, image, and passion,
+which we expect or desire in the poetry of the milder muse; and yet so
+worded, that the reader sees no one reason either in the selection or
+the order of the words, why he might not have said the very same in an
+appropriate conversation, and cannot conceive how indeed he could have
+expressed such thoughts otherwise without loss or injury to his meaning.
+
+But in truth our language is, and from the first dawn of poetry ever
+has been, particularly rich in compositions distinguished by this
+excellence. The final e, which is now mute, in Chaucer's age was either
+sounded or dropt indifferently. We ourselves still use either "beloved"
+or "belov'd" according as the rhyme, or measure, or the purpose of
+more or less solemnity may require. Let the reader then only adopt the
+pronunciation of the poet and of the court, at which he lived, both with
+respect to the final e and to the accentuation of the last syllable;
+I would then venture to ask, what even in the colloquial language of
+elegant and unaffected women, (who are the peculiar mistresses of "pure
+English and undefiled,") what could we hear more natural, or seemingly
+more unstudied, than the following stanzas from Chaucer's TROILUS AND
+CRESEIDE.
+
+    "And after this forth to the gate he wente,
+     Ther as Creseide out rode a ful gode pass,
+     And up and doun there made he many' a wente,
+     And to himselfe ful oft he said, Alas!
+     Fro hennis rode my blisse and my solas
+     As woulde blisful God now for his joie,
+     I might her sene agen come in to Troie!
+       And to the yondir hil I gan her Bide,
+     Alas! and there I toke of her my leve
+     And yond I saw her to her fathir ride;
+     For sorow of whiche mine hert shall to-cleve;
+     And hithir home I came whan it was eve,
+     And here I dwel, out-cast from ally joie,
+     And steal, til I maie sene her efte in Troie.
+       "And of himselfe imaginid he ofte
+     To ben defaitid, pale and woxin lesse
+     Than he was wonte, and that men saidin softe,
+     What may it be? who can the sothe gesse,
+     Why Troilus hath al this hevinesse?
+     And al this n' as but his melancolie,
+     That he had of himselfe suche fantasie.
+       Anothir time imaginin he would
+     That every wight, that past him by the wey,
+     Had of him routhe, and that thei saien should,
+     I am right sory, Troilus wol dey!
+     And thus he drove a daie yet forth or twey,
+     As ye have herde: suche life gan he to lede
+     As he that stode betwixin hope and drede:
+       For which him likid in his songis shewe
+     Th' encheson of his wo as he best might,
+     And made a songe of words but a fewe,
+     Somwhat his woful herte for to light,
+     And whan he was from every mann'is sight
+     With softe voice he of his lady dere,
+     That absent was, gan sing as ye may here:
+
+          *     *     *     *     *     *
+
+       This song, when he thus songin had, ful Bone
+     He fil agen into his sighis olde
+     And every night, as was his wonte to done;
+     He stode the bright moone to beholde
+     And all his sorowe to the moone he tolde,
+     And said: I wis, whan thou art hornid newe,
+     I shall be glad, if al the world be trewe!"
+
+Another exquisite master of this species of style, where the scholar and
+the poet supplies the material, but the perfect well-bred gentleman the
+expressions and the arrangement, is George Herbert. As from the nature
+of the subject, and the too frequent quaintness of the thoughts, his
+TEMPLE; or SACRED POEMS AND PRIVATE EJACULATIONS are Comparatively but
+little known, I shall extract two poems. The first is a sonnet, equally
+admirable for the weight, number, and expression of the thoughts, and
+for the simple dignity of the language. Unless, indeed, a fastidious
+taste should object to the latter half of the sixth line. The second is
+a poem of greater length, which I have chosen not only for the present
+purpose, but likewise as a striking example and illustration of an
+assertion hazarded in a former page of these sketches namely, that the
+characteristic fault of our elder poets is the reverse of that, which
+distinguishes too many of our more recent versifiers; the one conveying
+the most fantastic thoughts in the most correct and natural language;
+the other in the most fantastic language conveying the most trivial
+thoughts. The latter is a riddle of words; the former an enigma of
+thoughts. The one reminds me of an odd passage in Drayton's IDEAS
+
+    As other men, so I myself do muse,
+    Why in this sort I wrest invention so;
+    And why these giddy metaphors I use,
+    Leaving the path the greater part do go;
+    I will resolve you: I am lunatic! [72]
+
+The other recalls a still odder passage in THE SYNAGOGUE: or THE SHADOW
+OF THE TEMPLE, a connected series of poems in imitation of Herbert's
+TEMPLE, and, in some editions, annexed to it.
+
+               O how my mind
+                     Is gravell'd!
+                          Not a thought,
+               That I can find,
+                     But's ravell'd
+                          All to nought!
+               Short ends of threds,
+                     And narrow shreds
+                          Of lists,
+                     Knots, snarled ruffs,
+                          Loose broken tufts
+                              Of twists,
+    Are my torn meditations ragged clothing,
+    Which, wound and woven, shape a suit for nothing:
+    One while I think, and then I am in pain
+    To think how to unthink that thought again.
+
+Immediately after these burlesque passages I cannot proceed to the
+extracts promised, without changing the ludicrous tone of feeling by the
+interposition of the three following stanzas of Herbert's.
+
+
+    VIRTUE.
+
+    Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
+    The bridal of the earth and sky,
+    The dew shall weep thy fall to-night;
+        For thou must die.
+
+    Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave
+    Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye
+    Thy root is ever in its grave,
+        And thou must die.
+
+    Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,
+    A box, where sweets compacted lie
+    My music shews, ye have your closes,
+        And all must die.
+
+
+         THE BOSOM SIN:
+    A SONNET BY GEORGE HERBERT.
+
+      Lord, with what care hast thou begirt us round,
+      Parents first season us; then schoolmasters
+      Deliver us to laws; they send us bound
+      To rules of reason, holy messengers,
+    Pulpits and Sundays, sorrow dogging sin,
+      Afflictions sorted, anguish of all sizes,
+      Fine nets and stratagems to catch us in,
+    Bibles laid open, millions of surprises;
+    Blessings beforehand, ties of gratefulness,
+      The sound of Glory ringing in our ears
+      Without, our shame; within, our consciences;
+    Angels and grace, eternal hopes and fears.
+      Yet all these fences and their whole array
+      One cunning bosom-sin blows quite away.
+
+
+    LOVE UNKNOWN.
+
+    Dear friend, sit down, the tale is long and sad
+    And in my faintings, I presume, your love
+    Will more comply than help. A Lord I had,
+    And have, of whom some grounds, which may improve,
+    I hold for two lives, and both lives in me.
+    To him I brought a dish of fruit one day,
+    And in the middle placed my heart. But he
+                                     (I sigh to say)
+    Look'd on a servant, who did know his eye,
+    Better than you know me, or (which is one)
+    Than I myself. The servant instantly,
+    Quitting the fruit, seiz'd on my heart alone,
+    And threw it in a font, wherein did fall
+    A stream of blood, which issued from the side
+    Of a great rock: I well remember all,
+    And have good cause: there it was dipt and dyed,
+    And wash'd, and wrung: the very wringing yet
+    Enforceth tears. "Your heart was foul, I fear."
+    Indeed 'tis true. I did and do commit
+    Many a fault, more than my lease will bear;
+    Yet still ask'd pardon, and was not denied.
+    But you shall hear. After my heart was well,
+    And clean and fair, as I one eventide
+                                     (I sigh to tell)
+    Walk'd by myself abroad, I saw a large
+    And spacious furnace flaming, and thereon
+    A boiling caldron, round about whose verge
+    Was in great letters set AFFLICTION.
+    The greatness shew'd the owner. So I went
+    To fetch a sacrifice out of my fold,
+    Thinking with that, which I did thus present,
+    To warm his love, which, I did fear, grew cold.
+    But as my heart did tender it, the man
+    Who was to take it from me, slipt his hand,
+    And threw my heart into the scalding pan;
+    My heart that brought it (do you understand?)
+    The offerer's heart. "Your heart was hard, I fear."
+    Indeed 'tis true. I found a callous matter
+    Began to spread and to expatiate there:
+    But with a richer drug than scalding water
+    I bath'd it often, ev'n with holy blood,
+    Which at a board, while many drank bare wine,
+    A friend did steal into my cup for good,
+    Ev'n taken inwardly, and most divine
+    To supple hardnesses. But at the length
+    Out of the caldron getting, soon I fled
+    Unto my house, where to repair the strength
+    Which I had lost, I hasted to my bed:
+    But when I thought to sleep out all these faults,
+                                      (I sigh to speak)
+    I found that some had stuff'd the bed with thoughts,
+    I would say thorns. Dear, could my heart not break,
+    When with my pleasures ev'n my rest was gone?
+    Full well I understood who had been there:
+    For I had given the key to none but one:
+    It must be he. "Your heart was dull, I fear."
+    Indeed a slack and sleepy state of mind
+    Did oft possess me; so that when I pray'd,
+    Though my lips went, my heart did stay behind.
+    But all my scores were by another paid,
+    Who took my guilt upon him. "Truly, Friend,
+    "For aught I hear, your Master shews to you
+    "More favour than you wot of. Mark the end.
+    "The font did only what was old renew
+    "The caldron suppled what was grown too hard:
+    "The thorns did quicken what was grown too dull:
+    "All did but strive to mend what you had marr'd.
+    "Wherefore be cheer'd, and praise him to the full
+    "Each day, each hour, each moment of the week
+    "Who fain would have you be new, tender quick."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+The former subject continued--The neutral style, or that common to Prose
+and Poetry, exemplified by specimens from Chaucer, Herbert, and others.
+
+
+I have no fear in declaring my conviction, that the excellence defined
+and exemplified in the preceding chapter is not the characteristic
+excellence of Mr. Wordsworth's style; because I can add with equal
+sincerity, that it is precluded by higher powers. The praise of uniform
+adherence to genuine, logical English is undoubtedly his; nay, laying
+the main emphasis on the word uniform, I will dare add that, of all
+contemporary poets, it is his alone. For, in a less absolute sense of
+the word, I should certainly include Mr. Bowies, Lord Byron, and, as to
+all his later writings, Mr. Southey, the exceptions in their works being
+so few and unimportant. But of the specific excellence described in
+the quotation from Garve, I appear to find more, and more undoubted
+specimens in the works of others; for instance, among the minor poems of
+Mr. Thomas Moore, and of our illustrious Laureate. To me it will always
+remain a singular and noticeable fact; that a theory, which would
+establish this lingua communis, not only as the best, but as the only
+commendable style, should have proceeded from a poet, whose diction,
+next to that of Shakespeare and Milton, appears to me of all others the
+most individualized and characteristic. And let it be remembered too,
+that I am now interpreting the controverted passages of Mr. Wordsworth's
+critical preface by the purpose and object, which he may be supposed to
+have intended, rather than by the sense which the words themselves must
+convey, if they are taken without this allowance.
+
+A person of any taste, who had but studied three or four of
+Shakespeare's principal plays, would without the name affixed scarcely
+fail to recognise as Shakespeare's a quotation from any other play,
+though but of a few lines. A similar peculiarity, though in a less
+degree, attends Mr. Wordsworth's style, whenever he speaks in his own
+person; or whenever, though under a feigned name, it is clear that he
+himself is still speaking, as in the different dramatis personae of
+THE RECLUSE. Even in the other poems, in which he purposes to be most
+dramatic, there are few in which it does not occasionally burst forth.
+The reader might often address the poet in his own words with reference
+to the persons introduced:
+
+    "It seems, as I retrace the ballad line by line
+     That but half of it is theirs, and the better half is thine."
+
+Who, having been previously acquainted with any considerable portion
+of Mr. Wordsworth's publications, and having studied them with a full
+feeling of the author's genius, would not at once claim as Wordsworthian
+the little poem on the rainbow?
+
+    "The Child is father of the Man, etc."
+
+Or in the LUCY GRAY?
+
+    "No mate, no comrade Lucy knew;
+     She dwelt on a wide moor;
+     The sweetest thing that ever grew
+     Beside a human door."
+
+Or in the IDLE SHEPHERD-BOYS?
+
+    "Along the river's stony marge
+     The sand-lark chants a joyous song;
+     The thrush is busy in the wood,
+     And carols loud and strong.
+     A thousand lambs are on the rocks,
+     All newly born! both earth and sky
+     Keep jubilee, and more than all,
+     Those boys with their green coronal;
+     They never hear the cry,
+     That plaintive cry! which up the hill
+     Comes from the depth of Dungeon-Ghyll."
+
+Need I mention the exquisite description of the Sea-Loch in THE BLIND
+HIGHLAND BOY. Who but a poet tells a tale in such language to the little
+ones by the fire-side as--
+
+    "Yet had he many a restless dream;
+     Both when he heard the eagle's scream,
+     And when he heard the torrents roar,
+     And heard the water beat the shore
+         Near where their cottage stood.
+
+    Beside a lake their cottage stood,
+    Not small like our's, a peaceful flood;
+    But one of mighty size, and strange;
+    That, rough or smooth, is full of change,
+        And stirring in its bed.
+
+    For to this lake, by night and day,
+    The great Sea-water finds its way
+    Through long, long windings of the hills,
+    And drinks up all the pretty rills
+        And rivers large and strong:
+
+    Then hurries back the road it came
+    Returns on errand still the same;
+    This did it when the earth was new;
+    And this for evermore will do,
+        As long as earth shall last.
+
+    And, with the coming of the tide,
+    Come boats and ships that sweetly ride,
+    Between the woods and lofty rocks;
+    And to the shepherds with their flocks
+        Bring tales of distant lands."
+
+I might quote almost the whole of his RUTH, but take the following
+stanzas:
+
+    But, as you have before been told,
+    This Stripling, sportive, gay, and bold,
+    And, with his dancing crest,
+    So beautiful, through savage lands
+    Had roamed about with vagrant bands
+        Of Indians in the West.
+
+    The wind, the tempest roaring high,
+    The tumult of a tropic sky,
+    Might well be dangerous food
+    For him, a Youth to whom was given
+    So much of earth--so much of heaven,
+        And such impetuous blood.
+
+    Whatever in those climes he found
+    Irregular in sight or sound
+    Did to his mind impart
+    A kindred impulse, seemed allied
+    To his own powers, and justified
+        The workings of his heart.
+
+    Nor less, to feed voluptuous thought,
+    The beauteous forms of nature wrought,
+    Fair trees and lovely flowers;
+    The breezes their own languor lent;
+    The stars had feelings, which they sent
+        Into those magic bowers.
+
+    Yet in his worst pursuits, I ween,
+    That sometimes there did intervene
+    Pure hopes of high intent
+    For passions linked to forms so fair
+    And stately, needs must have their share
+        Of noble sentiment."
+
+But from Mr. Wordsworth's more elevated compositions, which already form
+three-fourths of his works; and will, I trust, constitute hereafter a
+still larger proportion;--from these, whether in rhyme or blank verse,
+it would be difficult and almost superfluous to select instances of a
+diction peculiarly his own, of a style which cannot be imitated without
+its being at once recognised, as originating in Mr. Wordsworth. It would
+not be easy to open on any one of his loftier strains, that does not
+contain examples of this; and more in proportion as the lines are more
+excellent, and most like the author. For those, who may happen to have
+been less familiar with his writings, I will give three specimens
+taken with little choice. The first from the lines on the BOY OF
+WINANDER-MERE,--who
+
+    "Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls,
+     That they might answer him.--And they would shout
+     Across the watery vale, and shout again,
+     With long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud
+     Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild
+     Of mirth and jocund din! And when it chanced,
+     That pauses of deep silence mocked his skill,
+     Then sometimes in that silence, while he hung
+     Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
+     Has carried far into his heart the voice
+     Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene [73]
+     Would enter unawares into his mind
+     With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
+     Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received
+     Into the bosom of the steady lake."
+
+The second shall be that noble imitation of Drayton [74] (if it was not
+rather a coincidence) in the lines TO JOANNA.
+
+    --"When I had gazed perhaps two minutes' space,
+    Joanna, looking in my eyes, beheld
+    That ravishment of mine, and laughed aloud.
+    The Rock, like something starting from a sleep,
+    Took up the Lady's voice, and laughed again!
+    That ancient woman seated on Helm-crag
+    Was ready with her cavern; Hammar-scar
+    And the tall Steep of Silver-How sent forth
+    A noise of laughter; southern Lougbrigg heard,
+    And Fairfield answered with a mountain tone.
+    Helvellyn far into the clear blue sky
+    Carried the lady's voice!--old Skiddaw blew
+    His speaking trumpet!--back out of the clouds
+    From Glaramara southward came the voice:
+    And Kirkstone tossed it from its misty head!"
+
+The third, which is in rhyme, I take from the SONG AT THE FEAST OF
+BROUGHAM CASTLE, upon the restoration of Lord Clifford, the Shepherd, to
+the Estates and Honours of his Ancestors.
+
+        ------"Now another day is come,
+        Fitter hope, and nobler doom;
+        He hath thrown aside his crook,
+        And hath buried deep his book;
+        Armour rusting in his halls
+        On the blood of Clifford calls,--
+        'Quell the Scot,' exclaims the Lance!
+        Bear me to the heart of France,
+        Is the longing of the Shield--
+        Tell thy name, thou trembling Field!--
+        Field of death, where'er thou be,
+        Groan thou with our victory!
+        Happy day, and mighty hour,
+        When our Shepherd, in his power,
+        Mailed and horsed, with lance and sword,
+        To his ancestors restored,
+        Like a re-appearing Star,
+        Like a glory from afar,
+        First shall head the flock of war!"
+
+   "Alas! the fervent harper did not know,
+    That for a tranquil Soul the Lay was framed,
+    Who, long compelled in humble walks to go,
+    Was softened into feeling, soothed, and tamed.
+
+    Love had he found in huts where poor men lie;
+    His daily teachers had been woods and rills,
+    The silence that is in the starry sky,
+    The sleep that is among the lonely hills."
+
+The words themselves in the foregoing extracts, are, no doubt,
+sufficiently common for the greater part.--But in what poem are they not
+so, if we except a few misadventurous attempts to translate the arts
+and sciences into verse? In THE EXCURSION the number of polysyllabic
+(or what the common people call, dictionary) words is more than usually
+great. And so must it needs be, in proportion to the number and variety
+of an author's conceptions, and his solicitude to express them with
+precision.--But are those words in those places commonly employed in
+real life to express the same thought or outward thing? Are they the
+style used in the ordinary intercourse of spoken words? No! nor are the
+modes of connections; and still less the breaks and transitions. Would
+any but a poet--at least could any one without being conscious that he
+had expressed himself with noticeable vivacity--have described a bird
+singing loud by, "The thrush is busy in the wood?"--or have spoken of
+boys with a string of club-moss round their rusty hats, as the boys
+"with their green coronal?"--or have translated a beautiful May-day into
+"Both earth and sky keep jubilee!"--or have brought all the different
+marks and circumstances of a sealoch before the mind, as the actions of
+a living and acting power? Or have represented the reflection of the sky
+in the water, as "That uncertain heaven received into the bosom of the
+steady lake?" Even the grammatical construction is not unfrequently
+peculiar; as "The wind, the tempest roaring high, the tumult of a tropic
+sky, might well be dangerous food to him, a youth to whom was given,
+etc." There is a peculiarity in the frequent use of the asymartaeton
+(that is, the omission of the connective particle before the last of
+several words, or several sentences used grammatically as single words,
+all being in the same case and governing or governed by the same verb)
+and not less in the construction of words by apposition ("to him, a
+youth"). In short, were there excluded from Mr. Wordsworth's poetic
+compositions all, that a literal adherence to the theory of his preface
+would exclude, two thirds at least of the marked beauties of his poetry
+must be erased. For a far greater number of lines would be sacrificed
+than in any other recent poet; because the pleasure received from
+Wordsworth's poems being less derived either from excitement of
+curiosity or the rapid flow of narration, the striking passages form a
+larger proportion of their value. I do not adduce it as a fair criterion
+of comparative excellence, nor do I even think it such; but merely as
+matter of fact. I affirm, that from no contemporary writer could so many
+lines be quoted, without reference to the poem in which they are found,
+for their own independent weight or beauty. From the sphere of my own
+experience I can bring to my recollection three persons of no every-day
+powers and acquirements, who had read the poems of others with more and
+more unallayed pleasure, and had thought more highly of their authors,
+as poets; who yet have confessed to me, that from no modern work had so
+many passages started up anew in their minds at different times, and as
+different occasions had awakened a meditative mood.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+Remarks on the present mode of conducting critical journals.
+
+
+Long have I wished to see a fair and philosophical inquisition into the
+character of Wordsworth, as a poet, on the evidence of his published
+works; and a positive, not a comparative, appreciation of their
+characteristic excellencies, deficiencies, and defects. I know no claim
+that the mere opinion of any individual can have to weigh down the
+opinion of the author himself; against the probability of whose parental
+partiality we ought to set that of his having thought longer and more
+deeply on the subject. But I should call that investigation fair and
+philosophical in which the critic announces and endeavours to establish
+the principles, which he holds for the foundation of poetry in general,
+with the specification of these in their application to the different
+classes of poetry. Having thus prepared his canons of criticism for
+praise and condemnation, he would proceed to particularize the most
+striking passages to which he deems them applicable, faithfully noticing
+the frequent or infrequent recurrence of similar merits or defects,
+and as faithfully distinguishing what is characteristic from what is
+accidental, or a mere flagging of the wing. Then if his premises be
+rational, his deductions legitimate, and his conclusions justly applied,
+the reader, and possibly the poet himself, may adopt his judgment in
+the light of judgment and in the independence of free-agency. If he has
+erred, he presents his errors in a definite place and tangible form, and
+holds the torch and guides the way to their detection.
+
+I most willingly admit, and estimate at a high value, the services which
+the EDINBURGH REVIEW, and others formed afterwards on the same plan,
+have rendered to society in the diffusion of knowledge. I think the
+commencement of the EDINBURGH REVIEW an important epoch in periodical
+criticism; and that it has a claim upon the gratitude of the literary
+republic, and indeed of the reading public at large, for having
+originated the scheme of reviewing those books only, which are
+susceptible and deserving of argumentative criticism. Not less
+meritorious, and far more faithfully and in general far more ably
+executed, is their plan of supplying the vacant place of the trash or
+mediocrity, wisely left to sink into oblivion by its own weight, with
+original essays on the most interesting subjects of the time, religious,
+or political; in which the titles of the books or pamphlets prefixed
+furnish only the name and occasion of the disquisition. I do not arraign
+the keenness, or asperity of its damnatory style, in and for itself, as
+long as the author is addressed or treated as the mere impersonation of
+the work then under trial. I have no quarrel with them on this account,
+as long as no personal allusions are admitted, and no re-commitment
+(for new trial) of juvenile performances, that were published, perhaps
+forgotten, many years before the commencement of the review: since for
+the forcing back of such works to public notice no motives are easily
+assignable, but such as are furnished to the critic by his own personal
+malignity; or what is still worse, by a habit of malignity in the form
+of mere wantonness.
+
+    "No private grudge they need, no personal spite
+     The viva sectio is its own delight!
+     All enmity, all envy, they disclaim,
+     Disinterested thieves of our good name:
+     Cool, sober murderers of their neighbour's fame!"
+                                                 S. T. C.
+
+Every censure, every sarcasm respecting a publication which the critic,
+with the criticised work before him, can make good, is the critic's
+right. The writer is authorized to reply, but not to complain. Neither
+can anyone prescribe to the critic, how soft or how hard; how friendly,
+or how bitter, shall be the phrases which he is to select for the
+expression of such reprehension or ridicule. The critic must know, what
+effect it is his object to produce; and with a view to this effect must
+he weigh his words. But as soon as the critic betrays, that he knows
+more of his author, than the author's publications could have told him;
+as soon as from this more intimate knowledge, elsewhere obtained, he
+avails himself of the slightest trait against the author; his censure
+instantly becomes personal injury, his sarcasms personal insults. He
+ceases to be a critic, and takes on him the most contemptible character
+to which a rational creature can be degraded, that of a gossip,
+backbiter, and pasquillant: but with this heavy aggravation, that he
+steals the unquiet, the deforming passions of the world into the museum;
+into the very place which, next to the chapel and oratory, should be our
+sanctuary, and secure place of refuge; offers abominations on the altar
+of the Muses; and makes its sacred paling the very circle in which he
+conjures up the lying and profane spirit.
+
+This determination of unlicensed personality, and of permitted and
+legitimate censure, (which I owe in part to the illustrious Lessing,
+himself a model of acute, spirited, sometimes stinging, but always
+argumentative and honourable, criticism) is beyond controversy the
+true one: and though I would not myself exercise all the rights of the
+latter, yet, let but the former be excluded, I submit myself to
+its exercise in the hands of others, without complaint and without
+resentment.
+
+Let a communication be formed between any number of learned men in the
+various branches of science and literature; and whether the president
+and central committee be in London, or Edinburgh, if only they
+previously lay aside their individuality, and pledge themselves
+inwardly, as well as ostensibly, to administer judgment according to
+a constitution and code of laws; and if by grounding this code on the
+two-fold basis of universal morals and philosophic reason, independent
+of all foreseen application to particular works and authors, they obtain
+the right to speak each as the representative of their body corporate;
+they shall have honour and good wishes from me, and I shall accord to
+them their fair dignities, though self-assumed, not less cheerfully than
+if I could inquire concerning them in the herald's office, or turn
+to them in the book of peerage. However loud may be the outcries for
+prevented or subverted reputation, however numerous and impatient the
+complaints of merciless severity and insupportable despotism, I shall
+neither feel, nor utter aught but to the defence and justification of
+the critical machine. Should any literary Quixote find himself provoked
+by its sounds and regular movements, I should admonish him with Sancho
+Panza, that it is no giant but a windmill; there it stands on its own
+place, and its own hillock, never goes out of its way to attack anyone,
+and to none and from none either gives or asks assistance. When
+the public press has poured in any part of its produce between its
+mill-stones, it grinds it off, one man's sack the same as another, and
+with whatever wind may happen to be then blowing. All the two-and-thirty
+winds are alike its friends. Of the whole wide atmosphere it does not
+desire a single finger-breadth more than what is necessary for its sails
+to turn round in. But this space must be left free and unimpeded. Gnats,
+beetles, wasps, butterflies, and the whole tribe of ephemerals and
+insignificants, may flit in and out and between; may hum, and buzz, and
+jar; may shrill their tiny pipes, and wind their puny horns, unchastised
+and unnoticed. But idlers and bravadoes of larger size and prouder show
+must beware, how they place themselves within its sweep. Much less may
+they presume to lay hands on the sails, the strength of which is
+neither greater nor less than as the wind is, which drives them round.
+Whomsoever the remorseless arm slings aloft, or whirls along with it in
+the air, he has himself alone to blame; though, when the same arm throws
+him from it, it will more often double than break the force of his fall.
+
+Putting aside the too manifest and too frequent interference of national
+party, and even personal predilection or aversion; and reserving for
+deeper feelings those worse and more criminal intrusions into the
+sacredness of private life, which not seldom merit legal rather than
+literary chastisement, the two principal objects and occasions which I
+find for blame and regret in the conduct of the review in question are
+first, its unfaithfulness to its own announced and excellent plan, by
+subjecting to criticism works neither indecent nor immoral, yet of such
+trifling importance even in point of size and, according to the critic's
+own verdict, so devoid of all merit, as must excite in the most candid
+mind the suspicion, either that dislike or vindictive feelings were at
+work; or that there was a cold prudential pre-determination to increase
+the sale of the review by flattering the malignant passions of human
+nature. That I may not myself become subject to the charge, which I am
+bringing against others, by an accusation without proof, I refer to
+the article on Dr. Rennell's sermon in the very first number of the
+EDINBURGH REVIEW as an illustration of my meaning. If in looking through
+all the succeeding volumes the reader should find this a solitary
+instance, I must submit to that painful forfeiture of esteem, which
+awaits a groundless or exaggerated charge.
+
+The second point of objection belongs to this review only in common with
+all other works of periodical criticism: at least, it applies in common
+to the general system of all, whatever exception there may be in favour
+of particular articles. Or if it attaches to THE EDINBURGH REVIEW, and
+to its only corrival (THE QUARTERLY), with any peculiar force, this
+results from the superiority of talent, acquirement, and information
+which both have so undeniably displayed; and which doubtless deepens
+the regret though not the blame. I am referring to the substitution
+of assertion for argument; to the frequency of arbitrary and sometimes
+petulant verdicts, not seldom unsupported even by a single quotation
+from the work condemned, which might at least have explained the
+critic's meaning, if it did not prove the justice of his sentence. Even
+where this is not the case, the extracts are too often made without
+reference to any general grounds or rules from which the faultiness or
+inadmissibility of the qualities attributed may be deduced; and without
+any attempt to show, that the qualities are attributable to the passage
+extracted. I have met with such extracts from Mr. Wordsworth's poems,
+annexed to such assertions, as led me to imagine, that the reviewer,
+having written his critique before he had read the work, had then
+pricked with a pin for passages, wherewith to illustrate the various
+branches of his preconceived opinions. By what principle of rational
+choice can we suppose a critic to have been directed (at least in a
+Christian country, and himself, we hope, a Christian) who gives the
+following lines, portraying the fervour of solitary devotion excited by
+the magnificent display of the Almighty's works, as a proof and
+example of an author's tendency to downright ravings, and absolute
+unintelligibility?
+
+    "O then what soul was his, when on the tops
+     Of the high mountains he beheld the sun
+     Rise up, and bathe the world in light! He looked--
+     Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth,
+     And ocean's liquid mass, beneath him lay
+     In gladness and deep joy. The clouds were touched,
+     And in their silent faces did he read
+     Unutterable love. Sound needed none,
+     Nor any voice of joy: his spirit drank
+     The spectacle! sensation, soul, and form,
+     All melted into him; they swallowed up
+     His animal being; in them did he live,
+     And by them did he live: they were his life."
+
+Can it be expected, that either the author or his admirers, should be
+induced to pay any serious attention to decisions which prove nothing
+but the pitiable state of the critic's own taste and sensibility? On
+opening the review they see a favourite passage, of the force and truth
+of which they had an intuitive certainty in their own inward experience
+confirmed, if confirmation it could receive, by the sympathy of their
+most enlightened friends; some of whom perhaps, even in the world's
+opinion, hold a higher intellectual rank than the critic himself would
+presume to claim. And this very passage they find selected, as the
+characteristic effusion of a mind deserted by reason!--as furnishing
+evidence that the writer was raving, or he could not have thus strung
+words together without sense or purpose! No diversity of taste seems
+capable of explaining such a contrast in judgment.
+
+That I had over-rated the merit of a passage or poem, that I had erred
+concerning the degree of its excellence, I might be easily induced to
+believe or apprehend. But that lines, the sense of which I had analysed
+and found consonant with all the best convictions of my understanding;
+and the imagery and diction of which had collected round those
+convictions my noblest as well as my most delightful feelings; that I
+should admit such lines to be mere nonsense or lunacy, is too much for
+the most ingenious arguments to effect. But that such a revolution of
+taste should be brought about by a few broad assertions, seems little
+less than impossible. On the contrary, it would require an effort of
+charity not to dismiss the criticism with the aphorism of the wise man,
+in animam malevolam sapientia haud intrare potest.
+
+What then if this very critic should have cited a large number of single
+lines and even of long paragraphs, which he himself acknowledges to
+possess eminent and original beauty? What if he himself has owned, that
+beauties as great are scattered in abundance throughout the whole
+book? And yet, though under this impression, should have commenced his
+critique in vulgar exultation with a prophecy meant to secure its own
+fulfilment? With a "This won't do!" What? if after such acknowledgments
+extorted from his own judgment he should proceed from charge to charge
+of tameness and raving; flights and flatness; and at length, consigning
+the author to the house of incurables, should conclude with a strain of
+rudest contempt evidently grounded in the distempered state of his own
+moral associations? Suppose too all this done without a single leading
+principle established or even announced, and without any one attempt at
+argumentative deduction, though the poet had presented a more than usual
+opportunity for it, by having previously made public his own principles
+of judgment in poetry, and supported them by a connected train of
+reasoning!
+
+The office and duty of the poet is to select the most dignified as well
+as
+
+    "The gayest, happiest attitude of things."
+
+The reverse, for in all cases a reverse is possible, is the appropriate
+business of burlesque and travesty, a predominant taste for which has
+been always deemed a mark of a low and degraded mind. When I was at
+Rome, among many other visits to the tomb of Julius II. I went thither
+once with a Prussian artist, a man of genius and great vivacity of
+feeling. As we were gazing on Michael Angelo's MOSES, our conversation
+turned on the horns and beard of that stupendous statue; of the
+necessity of each to support the other; of the super-human effect of the
+former, and the necessity of the existence of both to give a harmony and
+integrity both to the image and the feeling excited by it. Conceive
+them removed, and the statue would become un-natural, without being
+super-natural. We called to mind the horns of the rising sun, and I
+repeated the noble passage from Taylor's HOLY DYING. That horns were the
+emblem of power and sovereignty among the Eastern nations, and are still
+retained as such in Abyssinia; the Achelous of the ancient Greeks; and
+the probable ideas and feelings, that originally suggested the mixture
+of the human and the brute form in the figure, by which they realized
+the idea of their mysterious Pan, as representing intelligence blended
+with a darker power, deeper, mightier, and more universal than the
+conscious intellect of man; than intelligence;--all these thoughts and
+recollections passed in procession before our minds. My companion who
+possessed more than his share of the hatred, which his countrymen bore
+to the French, had just observed to me, "a Frenchman, Sir! is the only
+animal in the human shape, that by no possibility can lift itself up to
+religion or poetry:" when, lo! two French officers of distinction and
+rank entered the church! "Mark you," whispered the Prussian, "the
+first thing which those scoundrels will notice--(for they will begin by
+instantly noticing the statue in parts, without one moment's pause of
+admiration impressed by the whole)--will be the horns and the beard. And
+the associations, which they will immediately connect with them will be
+those of a he-goat and a cuckold." Never did man guess more luckily. Had
+he inherited a portion of the great legislator's prophetic powers, whose
+statue we had been contemplating, he could scarcely have uttered words
+more coincident with the result: for even as he had said, so it came to
+pass.
+
+In THE EXCURSION the poet has introduced an old man, born in humble but
+not abject circumstances, who had enjoyed more than usual advantages of
+education, both from books and from the more awful discipline of nature.
+This person he represents, as having been driven by the restlessness of
+fervid feelings, and from a craving intellect to an itinerant life; and
+as having in consequence passed the larger portion of his time, from
+earliest manhood, in villages and hamlets from door to door,
+
+     "A vagrant Merchant bent beneath his load."
+
+Now whether this be a character appropriate to a lofty didactick poem,
+is perhaps questionable. It presents a fair subject for controversy; and
+the question is to be determined by the congruity or incongruity of such
+a character with what shall be proved to be the essential constituents
+of poetry. But surely the critic who, passing by all the opportunities
+which such a mode of life would present to such a man; all the
+advantages of the liberty of nature, of solitude, and of solitary
+thought; all the varieties of places and seasons, through which his
+track had lain, with all the varying imagery they bring with them; and
+lastly, all the observations of men,
+
+    "Their manners, their enjoyments, and pursuits,
+     Their passions and their feelings="
+
+which the memory of these yearly journeys must have given and recalled
+to such a mind--the critic, I say, who from the multitude of possible
+associations should pass by all these in order to fix his attention
+exclusively on the pin-papers, and stay-tapes, which might have been
+among the wares of his pack; this critic, in my opinion, cannot be
+thought to possess a much higher or much healthier state of moral
+feeling, than the Frenchmen above recorded.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+The characteristic defects of Wordsworth's poetry, with the principles
+from which the judgment, that they are defects, is deduced--Their
+proportion to the beauties--For the greatest part characteristic of his
+theory only.
+
+
+If Mr. Wordsworth have set forth principles of poetry which his
+arguments are insufficient to support, let him and those who have
+adopted his sentiments be set right by the confutation of those
+arguments, and by the substitution of more philosophical principles. And
+still let the due credit be given to the portion and importance of the
+truths, which are blended with his theory; truths, the too exclusive
+attention to which had occasioned its errors, by tempting him to carry
+those truths beyond their proper limits. If his mistaken theory have at
+all influenced his poetic compositions, let the effects be pointed
+out, and the instances given. But let it likewise be shown, how far the
+influence has acted; whether diffusively, or only by starts; whether the
+number and importance of the poems and passages thus infected be great
+or trifling compared with the sound portion; and lastly, whether they
+are inwoven into the texture of his works, or are loose and separable.
+The result of such a trial would evince beyond a doubt, what it is high
+time to announce decisively and aloud, that the supposed characteristics
+of Mr. Wordsworth's poetry, whether admired or reprobated; whether they
+are simplicity or simpleness; faithful adherence to essential nature, or
+wilful selections from human nature of its meanest forms and under the
+least attractive associations; are as little the real characteristics of
+his poetry at large, as of his genius and the constitution of his mind.
+
+In a comparatively small number of poems he chose to try an experiment;
+and this experiment we will suppose to have failed. Yet even in these
+poems it is impossible not to perceive that the natural tendency of
+the poet's mind is to great objects and elevated conceptions. The
+poem entitled FIDELITY is for the greater part written in language,
+as unraised and naked as any perhaps in the two volumes. Yet take the
+following stanza and compare it with the preceding stanzas of the same
+poem.
+
+    "There sometimes doth a leaping fish
+     Send through the tarn a lonely cheer;
+     The crags repeat the raven's croak,
+     In symphony austere;
+     Thither the rainbow comes--the cloud--
+     And mists that spread the flying shroud;
+     And sun-beams; and the sounding blast,
+     That, if it could, would hurry past;
+     But that enormous barrier holds it fast."
+
+Or compare the four last lines of the concluding stanza with the former
+half.
+
+    "Yes, proof was plain that, since the day
+     On which the Traveller thus had died,
+     The Dog had watched about the spot,
+     Or by his Master's side:
+     How nourish'd here through such long time
+     He knows, who gave that love sublime,--
+     And gave that strength of feeling, great
+     Above all human estimate!"
+
+Can any candid and intelligent mind hesitate in determining, which of
+these best represents the tendency and native character of the poet's
+genius? Will he not decide that the one was written because the poet
+would so write, and the other because he could not so entirely repress
+the force and grandeur of his mind, but that he must in some part or
+other of every composition write otherwise? In short, that his only
+disease is the being out of his element; like the swan, that, having
+amused himself, for a while, with crushing the weeds on the river's
+bank, soon returns to his own majestic movements on its reflecting and
+sustaining surface. Let it be observed that I am here supposing the
+imagined judge, to whom I appeal, to have already decided against the
+poet's theory, as far as it is different from the principles of the art,
+generally acknowledged.
+
+I cannot here enter into a detailed examination of Mr. Wordsworth's
+works; but I will attempt to give the main results of my own judgment,
+after an acquaintance of many years, and repeated perusals. And though,
+to appreciate the defects of a great mind it is necessary to understand
+previously its characteristic excellences, yet I have already expressed
+myself with sufficient fulness, to preclude most of the ill effects that
+might arise from my pursuing a contrary arrangement. I will therefore
+commence with what I deem the prominent defects of his poems hitherto
+published.
+
+The first characteristic, though only occasional defect, which I appear
+to myself to find in these poems is the inconstancy of the style. Under
+this name I refer to the sudden and unprepared transitions from lines
+or sentences of peculiar felicity--(at all events striking and
+original)--to a style, not only unimpassioned but undistinguished. He
+sinks too often and too abruptly to that style, which I should place
+in the second division of language, dividing it into the three species;
+first, that which is peculiar to poetry; second, that which is only
+proper in prose; and third, the neutral or common to both. There have
+been works, such as Cowley's Essay on Cromwell, in which prose and verse
+are intermixed (not as in the Consolation of Boetius, or the ARGENIS
+of Barclay, by the insertion of poems supposed to have been spoken or
+composed on occasions previously related in prose, but) the poet passing
+from one to the other, as the nature of the thoughts or his own feelings
+dictated. Yet this mode of composition does not satisfy a cultivated
+taste. There is something unpleasant in the being thus obliged to
+alternate states of feeling so dissimilar, and this too in a species of
+writing, the pleasure from which is in part derived from the preparation
+and previous expectation of the reader. A portion of that awkwardness
+is felt which hangs upon the introduction of songs in our modern comic
+operas; and to prevent which the judicious Metastasio (as to whose
+exquisite taste there can be no hesitation, whatever doubts may be
+entertained as to his poetic genius) uniformly placed the aria at the
+end of the scene, at the same time that he almost always raises and
+impassions the style of the recitative immediately preceding. Even in
+real life, the difference is great and evident between words used as the
+arbitrary marks of thought, our smooth market-coin of intercourse,
+with the image and superscription worn out by currency; and those which
+convey pictures either borrowed from one outward object to enliven and
+particularize some other; or used allegorically to body forth the inward
+state of the person speaking; or such as are at least the exponents of
+his peculiar turn and unusual extent of faculty. So much so indeed, that
+in the social circles of private life we often find a striking use of
+the latter put a stop to the general flow of conversation, and by the
+excitement arising from concentred attention produce a sort of damp
+and interruption for some minutes after. But in the perusal of works of
+literary art, we prepare ourselves for such language; and the business
+of the writer, like that of a painter whose subject requires unusual
+splendour and prominence, is so to raise the lower and neutral tints,
+that what in a different style would be the commanding colours, are
+here used as the means of that gentle degradation requisite in order to
+produce the effect of a whole. Where this is not achieved in a poem,
+the metre merely reminds the reader of his claims in order to disappoint
+them; and where this defect occurs frequently, his feelings are
+alternately startled by anticlimax and hyperclimax.
+
+I refer the reader to the exquisite stanzas cited for another purpose
+from THE BLIND HIGHLAND BOY; and then annex, as being in my opinion
+instances of this disharmony in style, the two following:
+
+    "And one, the rarest, was a shell,
+     Which he, poor child, had studied well:
+     The shell of a green turtle, thin
+     And hollow;--you might sit therein,
+         It was so wide, and deep."
+
+    "Our Highland Boy oft visited
+     The house which held this prize; and, led
+     By choice or chance, did thither come
+     One day, when no one was at home,
+         And found the door unbarred."
+
+Or page 172, vol. I.
+
+    "'Tis gone forgotten, let me do
+     My best. There was a smile or two--
+     I can remember them, I see
+     The smiles worth all the world to me.
+     Dear Baby! I must lay thee down:
+     Thou troublest me with strange alarms;
+     Smiles hast thou, sweet ones of thine own;
+     I cannot keep thee in my arms;
+     For they confound me: as it is,
+     I have forgot those smiles of his!"
+
+Or page 269, vol. I.
+
+    "Thou hast a nest, for thy love and thy rest
+     And though little troubled with sloth
+     Drunken lark! thou would'st be loth
+     To be such a traveller as I.
+         Happy, happy liver!
+     _With a soul as strong as a mountain river
+     Pouring out praise to th' Almighty giver,_
+     Joy and jollity be with us both!
+     Hearing thee or else some other,
+         As merry a brother
+     I on the earth will go plodding on
+     By myself cheerfully till the day is done."
+
+The incongruity, which I appear to find in this passage, is that of the
+two noble lines in italics with the preceding and following. So vol. II.
+page 30.
+
+    "Close by a Pond, upon the further side,
+     He stood alone; a minute's space I guess,
+     I watch'd him, he continuing motionless
+     To the Pool's further margin then I drew;
+     He being all the while before me full in view."
+
+Compare this with the repetition of the same image, the next stanza but
+two.
+
+    "And, still as I drew near with gentle pace,
+     Beside the little pond or moorish flood
+     Motionless as a Cloud the Old Man stood,
+     That heareth not the loud winds when they call;
+     And moveth altogether, if it move at all."
+
+Or lastly, the second of the three following stanzas, compared both with
+the first and the third.
+
+    "My former thoughts returned; the fear that kills;
+     And hope that is unwilling to be fed;
+     Cold, pain, and labour, and all fleshly ills;
+     And mighty Poets in their misery dead.
+     But now, perplex'd by what the Old Man had said,
+     My question eagerly did I renew,
+     'How is it that you live, and what is it you do?'
+
+    "He with a smile did then his words repeat;
+     And said, that gathering Leeches far and wide
+     He travell'd; stirring thus about his feet
+     The waters of the Ponds where they abide.
+     `Once I could meet with them on every side;
+     'But they have dwindled long by slow decay;
+     'Yet still I persevere, and find them where I may.'
+
+     While he was talking thus, the lonely place,
+     The Old Man's shape, and speech, all troubled me
+     In my mind's eye I seemed to see him pace
+     About the weary moors continually,
+     Wandering about alone and silently."
+
+Indeed this fine poem is especially characteristic of the author. There
+is scarce a defect or excellence in his writings of which it would
+not present a specimen. But it would be unjust not to repeat that this
+defect is only occasional. From a careful reperusal of the two volumes
+of poems, I doubt whether the objectionable passages would amount in the
+whole to one hundred lines; not the eighth part of the number of pages.
+In THE EXCURSION the feeling of incongruity is seldom excited by
+the diction of any passage considered in itself, but by the sudden
+superiority of some other passage forming the context.
+
+The second defect I can generalize with tolerable accuracy, if the
+reader will pardon an uncouth and new-coined word. There is, I should
+say, not seldom a matter-of-factness in certain poems. This may
+be divided into, first, a laborious minuteness and fidelity in the
+representation of objects, and their positions, as they appeared to the
+poet himself; secondly, the insertion of accidental circumstances,
+in order to the full explanation of his living characters, their
+dispositions and actions; which circumstances might be necessary to
+establish the probability of a statement in real life, where nothing is
+taken for granted by the hearer; but appear superfluous in poetry, where
+the reader is willing to believe for his own sake. To this actidentality
+I object, as contravening the essence of poetry, which Aristotle
+pronounces to be spoudaiotaton kai philosophotaton genos, the most
+intense, weighty and philosophical product of human art; adding, as the
+reason, that it is the most catholic and abstract. The following passage
+from Davenant's prefatory letter to Hobbes well expresses this truth.
+"When I considered the actions which I meant to describe; (those
+inferring the persons), I was again persuaded rather to choose those
+of a former age, than the present; and in a century so far removed, as
+might preserve me from their improper examinations, who know not the
+requisites of a poem, nor how much pleasure they lose, (and even the
+pleasures of heroic poesy are not unprofitable), who take away the
+liberty of a poet, and fetter his feet in the shackles of an historian.
+For why should a poet doubt in story to mend the intrigues of fortune
+by more delightful conveyances of probable fictions, because austere
+historians have entered into bond to truth? An obligation, which were
+in poets as foolish and unnecessary, as is the bondage of false martyrs,
+who lie in chains for a mistaken opinion. But by this I would imply,
+that truth, narrative and past, is the idol of historians, (who worship
+a dead thing), and truth operative, and by effects continually alive,
+is the mistress of poets, who hath not her existence in matter, but in
+reason."
+
+For this minute accuracy in the painting of local imagery, the lines in
+THE EXCURSION, pp. 96, 97, and 98, may be taken, if not as a striking
+instance, yet as an illustration of my meaning. It must be some strong
+motive--(as, for instance, that the description was necessary to the
+intelligibility of the tale)--which could induce me to describe in
+a number of verses what a draughtsman could present to the eye with
+incomparably greater satisfaction by half a dozen strokes of his pencil,
+or the painter with as many touches of his brush. Such descriptions too
+often occasion in the mind of a reader, who is determined to understand
+his author, a feeling of labour, not very dissimilar to that, with
+which he would construct a diagram, line by line, for a long geometrical
+proposition. It seems to be like taking the pieces of a dissected map
+out of its box. We first look at one part, and then at another, then
+join and dove-tail them; and when the successive acts of attention have
+been completed, there is a retrogressive effort of mind to behold it as
+a whole. The poet should paint to the imagination, not to the fancy; and
+I know no happier case to exemplify the distinction between these two
+faculties. Master-pieces of the former mode of poetic painting abound
+in the writings of Milton, for example:
+
+    "The fig-tree; not that kind for fruit renown'd,
+    "But such as at this day, to Indians known,
+    "In Malabar or Decan spreads her arms
+    "Branching so broad and long, that in the ground
+    "The bended twigs take root, and daughters grow
+    "About the mother tree, a pillar'd shade
+    "High over-arch'd and ECHOING WALKS BETWEEN;
+    "There oft the Indian herdsman, shunning heat,
+    "Shelters in cool, and tends his pasturing herds
+    "At hoop-holes cut through thickest shade."
+
+This is creation rather than painting, or if painting, yet such, and
+with such co-presence of the whole picture flashed at once upon the
+eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura. But the poet must likewise
+understand and command what Bacon calls the vestigia communia of the
+senses, the latency of all in each, and more especially as by a magical
+penny duplex, the excitement of vision by sound and the exponents of
+sound. Thus, "The echoing walks between," may be almost said to reverse
+the fable in tradition of the head of Memnon, in the Egyptian statue.
+Such may be deservedly entitled the creative words in the world of
+imagination.
+
+The second division respects an apparent minute adherence to matter-
+of-fact in character and Incidents; a biographical attention to
+probability, and an anxiety of explanation and retrospect. Under this
+head I shall deliver, with no feigned diffidence, the results of my best
+reflection on the great point of controversy between Mr. Wordsworth and
+his objectors; namely, on the choice of his characters. I have already
+declared, and, I trust justified, my utter dissent from the mode of
+argument which his critics have hitherto employed. To their question,
+"Why did you choose such a character, or a character from such a rank
+of life?"--the poet might in my opinion fairly retort: why with the
+conception of my character did you make wilful choice of mean or
+ludicrous associations not furnished by me, but supplied from your own
+sickly and fastidious feelings? How was it, indeed, probable, that
+such arguments could have any weight with an author, whose plan, whose
+guiding principle, and main object it was to attack and subdue that
+state of association, which leads us to place the chief value on those
+things on which man differs from man, and to forget or disregard the
+high dignities, which belong to Human Nature, the sense and the feeling,
+which may be, and ought to be, found in all ranks? The feelings with
+which, as Christians, we contemplate a mixed congregation rising
+or kneeling before their common Maker, Mr. Wordsworth would have us
+entertain at all times, as men, and as readers; and by the excitement of
+this lofty, yet prideless impartiality in poetry, he might hope to have
+encouraged its continuance in real life. The praise of good men be his!
+In real life, and, I trust, even in my imagination, I honour a virtuous
+and wise man, without reference to the presence or absence of artificial
+advantages. Whether in the person of an armed baron, a laurelled bard,
+or of an old Pedlar, or still older Leech-gatherer, the same qualities
+of head and heart must claim the same reverence. And even in poetry I am
+not conscious, that I have ever suffered my feelings to be disturbed
+or offended by any thoughts or images, which the poet himself has not
+presented.
+
+But yet I object, nevertheless, and for the following reasons. First,
+because the object in view, as an immediate object, belongs to the moral
+philosopher, and would be pursued, not only more appropriately, but in
+my opinion with far greater probability of success, in sermons or moral
+essays, than in an elevated poem. It seems, indeed, to destroy the main
+fundamental distinction, not only between a poem and prose, but even
+between philosophy and works of fiction, inasmuch as it proposes truth
+for its immediate object, instead of pleasure. Now till the blessed time
+shall come, when truth itself shall be pleasure, and both shall be so
+united, as to be distinguishable in words only, not in feeling, it will
+remain the poet's office to proceed upon that state of association,
+which actually exists as general; instead of attempting first to make
+it what it ought to be, and then to let the pleasure follow. But here
+is unfortunately a small hysteron-proteron. For the communication of
+pleasure is the introductory means by which alone the poet must expect
+to moralize his readers. Secondly: though I were to admit, for a moment,
+this argument to be groundless: yet how is the moral effect to be
+produced, by merely attaching the name of some low profession to powers
+which are least likely, and to qualities which are assuredly not more
+likely, to be found in it? The Poet, speaking in his own person, may
+at once delight and improve us by sentiments, which teach us the
+independence of goodness, of wisdom, and even of genius, on the favours
+of fortune. And having made a due reverence before the throne of
+Antonine, he may bow with equal awe before Epictetus among his
+fellow-slaves
+
+                      ------"and rejoice
+    In the plain presence of his dignity."
+
+Who is not at once delighted and improved, when the Poet Wordsworth
+himself exclaims,
+
+    "Oh! many are the Poets that are sown
+     By Nature; men endowed with highest gifts
+     The vision and the faculty divine,
+     Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse,
+     Nor having e'er, as life advanced, been led
+     By circumstance to take unto the height
+     The measure of themselves, these favoured Beings,
+     All but a scattered few, live out their time,
+     Husbanding that which they possess within,
+     And go to the grave, unthought of. Strongest minds
+     Are often those of whom the noisy world
+     Hears least."
+
+To use a colloquial phrase, such sentiments, in such language, do one's
+heart good; though I for my part, have not the fullest faith in the
+truth of the observation. On the contrary I believe the instances to
+be exceedingly rare; and should feel almost as strong an objection to
+introduce such a character in a poetic fiction, as a pair of black swans
+on a lake, in a fancy landscape. When I think how many, and how much
+better books than Homer, or even than Herodotus, Pindar or Aeschylus,
+could have read, are in the power of almost every man, in a country
+where almost every man is instructed to read and write; and how
+restless, how difficultly hidden, the powers of genius are; and yet find
+even in situations the most favourable, according to Mr. Wordsworth, for
+the formation of a pure and poetic language; in situations which ensure
+familiarity with the grandest objects of the imagination; but one Burns,
+among the shepherds of Scotland, and not a single poet of humble life
+among those of English lakes and mountains; I conclude, that Poetic
+Genius is not only a very delicate but a very rare plant.
+
+But be this as it may, the feelings with which,
+
+    "I think of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy,
+     The sleepless Soul, that perished in his pride;
+     Of Burns, who walk'd in glory and in joy
+     Behind his plough, upon the mountain-side"--
+
+are widely different from those with which I should read a poem,
+where the author, having occasion for the character of a poet and a
+philosopher in the fable of his narration, had chosen to make him a
+chimney-sweeper; and then, in order to remove all doubts on the subject,
+had invented an account of his birth, parentage and education, with all
+the strange and fortunate accidents which had concurred in making him at
+once poet, philosopher, and sweep! Nothing, but biography, can justify
+this. If it be admissible even in a novel, it must be one in the manner
+of De Foe's, that were meant to pass for histories, not in the manner of
+Fielding's: In THE LIFE OF MOLL FLANDERS, Or COLONEL JACK, not in a TOM
+JONES, or even a JOSEPH ANDREWS. Much less then can it be legitimately
+introduced in a poem, the characters of which, amid the strongest
+individualization, must still remain representative. The precepts of
+Horace, on this point, are grounded on the nature both of poetry and of
+the human mind. They are not more peremptory, than wise and prudent.
+For in the first place a deviation from them perplexes the reader's
+feelings, and all the circumstances which are feigned in order to make
+such accidents less improbable, divide and disquiet his faith, rather
+than aid and support it. Spite of all attempts, the fiction will appear,
+and unfortunately not as fictitious but as false. The reader not only
+knows, that the sentiments and language are the poet's own, and his
+own too in his artificial character, as poet; but by the fruitless
+endeavours to make him think the contrary, he is not even suffered to
+forget it. The effect is similar to that produced by an Epic Poet, when
+the fable and the characters are derived from Scripture history, as in
+THE MESSIAH of Klopstock, or in CUMBERLAND'S CALVARY; and not merely
+suggested by it as in the PARADISE LOST of Milton. That illusion,
+contradistinguished from delusion, that negative faith, which simply
+permits the images presented to work by their own force, without either
+denial or affirmation of their real existence by the judgment, is
+rendered impossible by their immediate neighbourhood to words and facts
+of known and absolute truth. A faith, which transcends even historic
+belief, must absolutely put out this mere poetic analogon of faith, as
+the summer sun is said to extinguish our household fires, when it shines
+full upon them. What would otherwise have been yielded to as pleasing
+fiction, is repelled as revolting falsehood. The effect produced in
+this latter case by the solemn belief of the reader, is in a less degree
+brought about in the instances, to which I have been objecting, by the
+balked attempts of the author to make him believe.
+
+Add to all the foregoing the seeming uselessness both of the project and
+of the anecdotes from which it is to derive support. Is there one word,
+for instance, attributed to the pedlar in THE EXCURSION, characteristic
+of a Pedlar? One sentiment, that might not more plausibly, even without
+the aid of any previous explanation, have proceeded from any wise and
+beneficent old man, of a rank or profession in which the language of
+learning and refinement are natural and to be expected? Need the
+rank have been at all particularized, where nothing follows which the
+knowledge of that rank is to explain or illustrate? When on the contrary
+this information renders the man's language, feelings, sentiments,
+and information a riddle, which must itself be solved by episodes
+of anecdote? Finally when this, and this alone, could have induced a
+genuine Poet to inweave in a poem of the loftiest style, and on subjects
+the loftiest and of most universal interest, such minute matters of
+fact, (not unlike those furnished for the obituary of a magazine by the
+friends of some obscure "ornament of society lately deceased" in some
+obscure town,) as
+
+    "Among the hills of Athol he was born
+     There, on a small hereditary Farm,
+     An unproductive slip of rugged ground,
+     His Father dwelt; and died in poverty;
+     While He, whose lowly fortune I retrace,
+     The youngest of three sons, was yet a babe,
+     A little One--unconscious of their loss.
+     But ere he had outgrown his infant days
+     His widowed Mother, for a second Mate,
+     Espoused the teacher of the Village School;
+     Who on her offspring zealously bestowed
+     Needful instruction."
+
+    "From his sixth year, the Boy of whom I speak,
+     In summer tended cattle on the Hills;
+     But, through the inclement and the perilous days
+     Of long-continuing winter, he repaired
+     To his Step-father's School,"-etc.
+
+For all the admirable passages interposed in this narration, might, with
+trifling alterations, have been far more appropriately, and with far
+greater verisimilitude, told of a poet in the character of a poet;
+and without incurring another defect which I shall now mention, and a
+sufficient illustration of which will have been here anticipated.
+
+Third; an undue predilection for the dramatic form in certain poems,
+from which one or other of two evils result. Either the thoughts and
+diction are different from that of the poet, and then there arises an
+incongruity of style; or they are the same and indistinguishable, and
+then it presents a species of ventriloquism, where two are represented
+as talking, while in truth one man only speaks.
+
+The fourth class of defects is closely connected with the former;
+but yet are such as arise likewise from an intensity of feeling
+disproportionate to such knowledge and value of the objects described,
+as can be fairly anticipated of men in general, even of the most
+cultivated classes; and with which therefore few only, and those few
+particularly circumstanced, can be supposed to sympathize: In this
+class, I comprise occasional prolixity, repetition, and an eddying,
+instead of progression, of thought. As instances, see pages 27, 28, and
+62 of the Poems, vol. I. and the first eighty lines of the VIth Book of
+THE EXCURSION.
+
+Fifth and last; thoughts and images too great for the subject. This
+is an approximation to what might be called mental bombast,
+as distinguished from verbal: for, as in the latter there is a
+disproportion of the expressions to the thoughts so in this there is a
+disproportion of thought to the circumstance and occasion. This, by the
+bye, is a fault of which none but a man of genius is capable. It is the
+awkwardness and strength of Hercules with the distaff of Omphale.
+
+It is a well-known fact, that bright colours in motion both make and
+leave the strongest impressions on the eye. Nothing is more likely too,
+than that a vivid image or visual spectrum, thus originated, may become
+the link of association in recalling the feelings and images that had
+accompanied the original impression. But if we describe this in such
+lines, as
+
+    "They flash upon that inward eye,
+     Which is the bliss of solitude!"
+
+in what words shall we describe the joy of retrospection, when the
+images and virtuous actions of a whole well-spent life, pass before that
+conscience which is indeed the inward eye: which is indeed "the bliss
+of solitude?" Assuredly we seem to sink most abruptly, not to say
+burlesquely, and almost as in a medley, from this couplet to--
+
+    "And then my heart with pleasure fills,
+     And dances with the daffodils."    Vol. I. p. 328.
+
+The second instance is from vol. II. page 12, where the poet having gone
+out for a day's tour of pleasure, meets early in the morning with a knot
+of Gipsies, who had pitched their blanket-tents and straw-beds, together
+with their children and asses, in some field by the road-side. At the
+close of the day on his return our tourist found them in the same place.
+"Twelve hours," says he,
+
+    "Twelve hours, twelve bounteous hours are gone, while I
+     Have been a traveller under open sky,
+     Much witnessing of change and cheer,
+     Yet as I left I find them here!"
+
+Whereat the poet, without seeming to reflect that the poor tawny
+wanderers might probably have been tramping for weeks together through
+road and lane, over moor and mountain, and consequently must have been
+right glad to rest themselves, their children and cattle, for one whole
+day; and overlooking the obvious truth, that such repose might be quite
+as necessary for them, as a walk of the same continuance was pleasing
+or healthful for the more fortunate poet; expresses his indignation in a
+series of lines, the diction and imagery of which would have been rather
+above, than below the mark, had they been applied to the immense empire
+of China improgressive for thirty centuries:
+
+    "The weary Sun betook himself to rest:--
+     --Then issued Vesper from the fulgent west,
+     Outshining, like a visible God,
+     The glorious path in which he trod.
+     And now, ascending, after one dark hour,
+     And one night's diminution of her power,
+     Behold the mighty Moon! this way
+     She looks, as if at them--but they
+     Regard not her:--oh, better wrong and strife,
+     Better vain deeds or evil than such life!
+     The silent Heavens have goings on
+     The stars have tasks!--but these have none!"
+
+The last instance of this defect,(for I know no other than these already
+cited) is from the Ode, page 351, vol. II., where, speaking of a child,
+"a six years' Darling of a pigmy size," he thus addresses him:
+
+    "Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep
+     Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,
+     That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,
+     Haunted for ever by the Eternal Mind,--
+     Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
+     On whom those truths do rest,
+     Which we are toiling all our lives to find!
+     Thou, over whom thy Immortality
+     Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave,
+     A Present which is not to be put by!"
+
+Now here, not to stop at the daring spirit of metaphor which connects
+the epithets "deaf and silent," with the apostrophized eye: or (if we
+are to refer it to the preceding word, "Philosopher"), the faulty and
+equivocal syntax of the passage; and without examining the propriety of
+making a "Master brood o'er a Slave," or "the Day" brood at all; we will
+merely ask, what does all this mean? In what sense is a child of that
+age a Philosopher? In what sense does he read "the eternal deep?" In
+what sense is he declared to be "for ever haunted" by the Supreme Being?
+or so inspired as to deserve the splendid titles of a Mighty Prophet, a
+blessed Seer? By reflection? by knowledge? by conscious intuition? or
+by any form or modification of consciousness? These would be tidings
+indeed; but such as would pre-suppose an immediate revelation to
+the inspired communicator, and require miracles to authenticate his
+inspiration. Children at this age give us no such information of
+themselves; and at what time were we dipped in the Lethe, which has
+produced such utter oblivion of a state so godlike? There are many of us
+that still possess some remembrances, more or less distinct, respecting
+themselves at six years old; pity that the worthless straws only should
+float, while treasures, compared with which all the mines of Golconda
+and Mexico were but straws, should be absorbed by some unknown gulf into
+some unknown abyss.
+
+But if this be too wild and exorbitant to be suspected as having
+been the poet's meaning; if these mysterious gifts, faculties, and
+operations, are not accompanied with consciousness; who else is
+conscious of them? or how can it be called the child, if it be no part
+of the child's conscious being? For aught I know, the thinking Spirit
+within me may be substantially one with the principle of life, and of
+vital operation. For aught I know, it might be employed as a secondary
+agent in the marvellous organization and organic movements of my body.
+But, surely, it would be strange language to say, that I construct my
+heart! or that I propel the finer influences through my nerves! or that
+I compress my brain, and draw the curtains of sleep round my own eyes!
+Spinoza and Behmen were, on different systems, both Pantheists; and
+among the ancients there were philosophers, teachers of the EN KAI PAN,
+who not only taught that God was All, but that this All constituted God.
+Yet not even these would confound the part, as a part, with the
+whole, as the whole. Nay, in no system is the distinction between
+the individual and God, between the Modification, and the one only
+Substance, more sharply drawn, than in that of Spinoza. Jacobi indeed
+relates of Lessing, that, after a conversation with him at the house of
+the Poet, Gleim, (the Tyrtaeus and Anacreon of the German Parnassus,) in
+which conversation Lessing had avowed privately to Jacobi his reluctance
+to admit any personal existence of the Supreme Being, or the possibility
+of personality except in a finite Intellect, and while they were sitting
+at table, a shower of rain came on unexpectedly. Gleim expressed his
+regret at the circumstance, because they had meant to drink their
+wine in the garden: upon which Lessing in one of his half-earnest,
+half-joking moods, nodded to Jacobi, and said, "It is I, perhaps, that
+am doing that," i.e. raining!--and Jacobi answered, "or perhaps I;"
+Gleim contented himself with staring at them both, without asking for
+any explanation.
+
+So with regard to this passage. In what sense can the magnificent
+attributes, above quoted, be appropriated to a child, which would not
+make them equally suitable to a bee, or a dog, or afield of corn: or
+even to a ship, or to the wind and waves that propel it? The omnipresent
+Spirit works equally in them, as in the child; and the child is equally
+unconscious of it as they. It cannot surely be, that the four lines,
+immediately following, are to contain the explanation?
+
+        "To whom the grave
+    Is but a lonely bed without the sense or sight
+        Of day or the warm light,
+    A place of thought where we in waiting lie;"--
+
+Surely, it cannot be that this wonder-rousing apostrophe is but a
+comment on the little poem, "We are Seven?"--that the whole meaning of
+the passage is reducible to the assertion, that a child, who by the bye
+at six years old would have been better instructed in most Christian
+families, has no other notion of death than that of lying in a dark,
+cold place? And still, I hope, not as in a place of thought! not the
+frightful notion of lying awake in his grave! The analogy between death
+and sleep is too simple, too natural, to render so horrid a belief
+possible for children; even had they not been in the habit, as all
+Christian children are, of hearing the latter term used to express the
+former. But if the child's belief be only, that "he is not dead, but
+sleepeth:" wherein does it differ from that of his father and mother,
+or any other adult and instructed person? To form an idea of a thing's
+becoming nothing; or of nothing becoming a thing; is impossible to
+all finite beings alike, of whatever age, and however educated or
+uneducated. Thus it is with splendid paradoxes in general. If the words
+are taken in the common sense, they convey an absurdity; and if, in
+contempt of dictionaries and custom, they are so interpreted as to avoid
+the absurdity, the meaning dwindles into some bald truism. Thus you must
+at once understand the words contrary to their common import, in order
+to arrive at any sense; and according to their common import, if you are
+to receive from them any feeling of sublimity or admiration.
+
+Though the instances of this defect in Mr. Wordsworth's poems are so
+few, that for themselves it would have been scarcely just to attract the
+reader's attention toward them; yet I have dwelt on it, and perhaps the
+more for this very reason. For being so very few, they cannot sensibly
+detract from the reputation of an author, who is even characterized
+by the number of profound truths in his writings, which will stand
+the severest analysis; and yet few as they are, they are exactly those
+passages which his blind admirers would be most likely, and best able,
+to imitate. But Wordsworth, where he is indeed Wordsworth, may be
+mimicked by copyists, he may be plundered by plagiarists; but he cannot
+be imitated, except by those who are not born to be imitators. For
+without his depth of feeling and his imaginative power his sense would
+want its vital warmth and peculiarity; and without his strong sense, his
+mysticism would become sickly--mere fog, and dimness!
+
+To these defects which, as appears by the extracts, are only occasional,
+I may oppose, with far less fear of encountering the dissent of
+any candid and intelligent reader, the following (for the most part
+correspondent) excellencies. First, an austere purity of language both
+grammatically and logically; in short a perfect appropriateness of
+the words to the meaning. Of how high value I deem this, and how
+particularly estimable I hold the example at the present day, has been
+already stated: and in part too the reasons on which I ground both the
+moral and intellectual importance of habituating ourselves to a strict
+accuracy of expression. It is noticeable, how limited an acquaintance
+with the masterpieces of art will suffice to form a correct and even
+a sensitive taste, where none but master-pieces have been seen and
+admired: while on the other hand, the most correct notions, and the
+widest acquaintance with the works of excellence of all ages and
+countries, will not perfectly secure us against the contagious
+familiarity with the far more numerous offspring of tastelessness or of
+a perverted taste. If this be the case, as it notoriously is, with the
+arts of music and painting, much more difficult will it be, to avoid the
+infection of multiplied and daily examples in the practice of an art,
+which uses words, and words only, as its instruments. In poetry, in
+which every line, every phrase, may pass the ordeal of deliberation and
+deliberate choice, it is possible, and barely possible, to attain that
+ultimatum which I have ventured to propose as the infallible test of
+a blameless style; namely: its untranslatableness in words of the same
+language without injury to the meaning. Be it observed, however, that I
+include in the meaning of a word not only its correspondent object, but
+likewise all the associations which it recalls. For language is framed
+to convey not the object alone but likewise the character, mood and
+intentions of the person who is representing it. In poetry it is
+practicable to preserve the diction uncorrupted by the affectations
+and misappropriations, which promiscuous authorship, and reading not
+promiscuous only because it is disproportionally most conversant with
+the compositions of the day, have rendered general. Yet even to the
+poet, composing in his own province, it is an arduous work: and as
+the result and pledge of a watchful good sense of fine and luminous
+distinction, and of complete self-possession, may justly claim all the
+honour which belongs to an attainment equally difficult and valuable,
+and the more valuable for being rare. It is at all times the proper food
+of the understanding; but in an age of corrupt eloquence it is both food
+and antidote.
+
+In prose I doubt whether it be even possible to preserve our style
+wholly unalloyed by the vicious phraseology which meets us everywhere,
+from the sermon to the newspaper, from the harangue of the legislator
+to the speech from the convivial chair, announcing a toast or sentiment.
+Our chains rattle, even while we are complaining of them. The poems of
+Boetius rise high in our estimation when we compare them with those of
+his contemporaries, as Sidonius Apollinaris, and others. They might even
+be referred to a purer age, but that the prose, in which they are
+set, as jewels in a crown of lead or iron, betrays the true age of the
+writer. Much however may be effected by education. I believe not only
+from grounds of reason, but from having in great measure assured myself
+of the fact by actual though limited experience, that, to a youth led
+from his first boyhood to investigate the meaning of every word and
+the reason of its choice and position, logic presents itself as an old
+acquaintance under new names.
+
+On some future occasion, more especially demanding such disquisition, I
+shall attempt to prove the close connection between veracity and habits
+of mental accuracy; the beneficial after-effects of verbal precision in
+the preclusion of fanaticism, which masters the feelings more especially
+by indistinct watch-words; and to display the advantages which language
+alone, at least which language with incomparably greater ease and
+certainty than any other means, presents to the instructor of impressing
+modes of intellectual energy so constantly, so imperceptibly, and as it
+were by such elements and atoms, as to secure in due time the formation
+of a second nature. When we reflect, that the cultivation of the
+judgment is a positive command of the moral law, since the reason can
+give the principle alone, and the conscience bears witness only to the
+motive, while the application and effects must depend on the judgment
+when we consider, that the greater part of our success and comfort in
+life depends on distinguishing the similar from the same, that which is
+peculiar in each thing from that which it has in common with others, so
+as still to select the most probable, instead of the merely possible or
+positively unfit, we shall learn to value earnestly and with a practical
+seriousness a mean, already prepared for us by nature and society,
+of teaching the young mind to think well and wisely by the same
+unremembered process and with the same never forgotten results, as those
+by which it is taught to speak and converse. Now how much warmer
+the interest is, how much more genial the feelings of reality and
+practicability, and thence how much stronger the impulses to imitation
+are, which a contemporary writer, and especially a contemporary poet,
+excites in youth and commencing manhood, has been treated of in the
+earlier pages of these sketches. I have only to add, that all the
+praise which is due to the exertion of such influence for a purpose so
+important, joined with that which must be claimed for the infrequency of
+the same excellence in the same perfection, belongs in full right to
+Mr. Wordsworth. I am far however from denying that we have poets whose
+general style possesses the same excellence, as Mr. Moore, Lord
+Byron, Mr. Bowles, and, in all his later and more important works, our
+laurel-honouring Laureate. But there are none, in whose works I do not
+appear to myself to find more exceptions, than in those of Wordsworth.
+Quotations or specimens would here be wholly out of place, and must be
+left for the critic who doubts and would invalidate the justice of this
+eulogy so applied.
+
+The second characteristic excellence of Mr. Wordsworth's work is: a
+correspondent weight and sanity of the Thoughts and Sentiments,--won,
+not from books; but--from the poet's own meditative observation. They
+are fresh and have the dew upon them. His muse, at least when in her
+strength of wing, and when she hovers aloft in her proper element,
+
+    Makes audible a linked lay of truth,
+    Of truth profound a sweet continuous lay,
+    Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes!
+
+Even throughout his smaller poems there is scarcely one, which is not
+rendered valuable by some just and original reflection.
+
+See page 25, vol. II.: or the two following passages in one of his
+humblest compositions.
+
+    "O Reader! had you in your mind
+     Such stores as silent thought can bring,
+     O gentle Reader! you would find
+     A tale in every thing;"
+
+and
+
+    "I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds
+     With coldness still returning;
+     Alas! the gratitude of men
+     Has oftener left me mourning;"
+
+or in a still higher strain the six beautiful quatrains, page 134.
+
+    "Thus fares it still in our decay:
+     And yet the wiser mind
+     Mourns less for what age takes away
+     Than what it leaves behind.
+
+     The Blackbird in the summer trees,
+     The Lark upon the hill,
+     Let loose their carols when they please,
+     Are quiet when they will.
+
+     With Nature never do they wage
+     A foolish strife; they see
+     A happy youth, and their old age
+     Is beautiful and free!
+
+     But we are pressed by heavy laws;
+     And often glad no more,
+     We wear a face of joy, because
+     We have been glad of yore.
+
+     If there is one, who need bemoan
+     His kindred laid in earth,
+     The household hearts that were his own,
+     It is the man of mirth.
+
+     My days, my Friend, are almost gone,
+     My life has been approved,
+     And many love me; but by none
+     Am I enough beloved;"
+
+or the sonnet on Buonaparte, page 202, vol. II. or finally (for a volume
+would scarce suffice to exhaust the instances,) the last stanza of the
+poem on the withered Celandine, vol. II. p. 312.
+
+    "To be a Prodigal's Favorite--then, worse truth,
+     A Miser's Pensioner--behold our lot!
+     O Man! That from thy fair and shining youth
+     Age might but take the things Youth needed not."
+
+Both in respect of this and of the former excellence, Mr. Wordsworth
+strikingly resembles Samuel Daniel, one of the golden writers of our
+golden Elizabethan age, now most causelessly neglected: Samuel Daniel,
+whose diction bears no mark of time, no distinction of age which
+has been, and as long as our language shall last, will be so far the
+language of the to-day and for ever, as that it is more intelligible to
+us, than the transitory fashions of our own particular age. A similar
+praise is due to his sentiments. No frequency of perusal can deprive
+them of their freshness. For though they are brought into the full
+day-light of every reader's comprehension; yet are they drawn up from
+depths which few in any age are privileged to visit, into which few in
+any age have courage or inclination to descend. If Mr. Wordsworth is
+not equally with Daniel alike intelligible to all readers of average
+understanding in all passages of his works, the comparative difficulty
+does not arise from the greater impurity of the ore, but from the nature
+and uses of the metal. A poem is not necessarily obscure, because it
+does not aim to be popular. It is enough, if a work be perspicuous to
+those for whom it is written, and
+
+    "Fit audience find, though few."
+
+To the "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of
+early Childhood" the poet might have prefixed the lines which Dante
+addresses to one of his own Canzoni--
+
+    "Canzone, i' credo, che saranno radi
+     Color, che tua ragione intendan bene,
+     Tanto lor sei faticoso ed alto."
+
+    "O lyric song, there will be few, I think,
+     Who may thy import understand aright:
+     Thou art for them so arduous and so high!"
+
+But the ode was intended for such readers only as had been accustomed
+to watch the flux and reflux of their inmost nature, to venture at times
+into the twilight realms of consciousness, and to feel a deep interest
+in modes of inmost being, to which they know that the attributes of time
+and space are inapplicable and alien, but which yet can not be conveyed,
+save in symbols of time and space. For such readers the sense is
+sufficiently plain, and they will be as little disposed to charge Mr.
+Wordsworth with believing the Platonic pre-existence in the ordinary
+interpretation of the words, as I am to believe, that Plato himself ever
+meant or taught it.
+
+    Polla oi ut' anko-
+    nos okea belae
+    endon enti pharetras
+    phonanta synetoisin; es
+    de to pan hermaeneon
+    chatizei; sophos o pol-
+    la eidos phua;
+    mathontes de labroi
+    panglossia, korakes os,
+    akranta garueton
+    Dios pros ornicha theion.
+
+Third (and wherein he soars far above Daniel) the sinewy strength
+and originality of single lines and paragraphs: the frequent curiosa
+felicitas of his diction, of which I need not here give specimens,
+having anticipated them in a preceding page. This beauty, and as
+eminently characteristic of Wordsworth's poetry, his rudest assailants
+have felt themselves compelled to acknowledge and admire.
+
+Fourth; the perfect truth of nature in his images and descriptions as
+taken immediately from nature, and proving a long and genial intimacy
+with the very spirit which gives the physiognomic expression to all the
+works of nature. Like a green field reflected in a calm and perfectly
+transparent lake, the image is distinguished from the reality only by
+its greater softness and lustre. Like the moisture or the polish on a
+pebble, genius neither distorts nor false-colours its objects; but on
+the contrary brings out many a vein and many a tint, which escape the
+eye of common observation, thus raising to the rank of gems what had
+been often kicked away by the hurrying foot of the traveller on the
+dusty high road of custom.
+
+Let me refer to the whole description of skating, vol. I. page 42 to 47,
+especially to the lines
+
+    "So through the darkness and the cold we flew,
+     And not a voice was idle. with the din
+     Meanwhile the precipices rang aloud;
+     The leafless trees and every icy crag
+     Tinkled like iron; while the distant hills
+     Into the tumult sent an alien sound
+     Of melancholy, not unnoticed, while the stars,
+     Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west
+     The orange sky of evening died away."
+
+Or to the poem on THE GREEN LINNET, vol. I. page 244. What can be more
+accurate yet more lovely than the two concluding stanzas?
+
+    "Upon yon tuft of hazel trees,
+     That twinkle to the gusty breeze,
+     Behold him perched in ecstasies,
+         Yet seeming still to hover;
+     There! where the flutter of his wings
+     Upon his back and body flings
+     Shadows and sunny glimmerings,
+         That cover him all over.
+
+     While thus before my eyes he gleams,
+     A Brother of the Leaves he seems;
+     When in a moment forth he teems
+         His little song in gushes
+     As if it pleased him to disdain
+     And mock the Form which he did feign
+     While he was dancing with the train
+         Of Leaves among the bushes."
+
+Or the description of the blue-cap, and of the noontide silence, page
+284; or the poem to the cuckoo, page 299; or, lastly, though I might
+multiply the references to ten times the number, to the poem, so
+completely Wordsworth's, commencing
+
+    "Three years she grew in sun and shower"--
+
+Fifth: a meditative pathos, a union of deep and subtle thought with
+sensibility; a sympathy with man as man; the sympathy indeed of a
+contemplator, rather than a fellow-sufferer or co-mate, (spectator, haud
+particeps) but of a contemplator, from whose view no difference of rank
+conceals the sameness of the nature; no injuries of wind or weather, or
+toil, or even of ignorance, wholly disguise the human face divine. The
+superscription and the image of the Creator still remain legible to
+him under the dark lines, with which guilt or calamity had cancelled or
+cross-barred it. Here the Man and the Poet lose and find themselves in
+each other, the one as glorified, the latter as substantiated. In this
+mild and philosophic pathos, Wordsworth appears to me without a compeer.
+Such as he is: so he writes. See vol. I. page 134 to 136, or that most
+affecting composition, THE AFFLICTION OF MARGARET ---- OF ----, page 165
+to 168, which no mother, and, if I may judge by my own experience, no
+parent can read without a tear. Or turn to that genuine lyric, in the
+former edition, entitled, THE MAD MOTHER, page 174 to 178, of which I
+cannot refrain from quoting two of the stanzas, both of them for their
+pathos, and the former for the fine transition in the two concluding
+lines of the stanza, so expressive of that deranged state, in which,
+from the increased sensibility, the sufferer's attention is abruptly
+drawn off by every trifle, and in the same instant plucked back again by
+the one despotic thought, bringing home with it, by the blending, fusing
+power of Imagination and Passion, the alien object to which it had been
+so abruptly diverted, no longer an alien but an ally and an inmate.
+
+    "Suck, little babe, oh suck again!
+     It cools my blood; it cools my brain;
+     Thy lips, I feel them, baby! They
+     Draw from my heart the pain away.
+     Oh! press me with thy little hand;
+     It loosens something at my chest
+     About that tight and deadly band
+     I feel thy little fingers prest.
+     The breeze I see is in the tree!
+     It comes to cool my babe and me."
+
+    "Thy father cares not for my breast,
+     'Tis thine, sweet baby, there to rest;
+     'Tis all thine own!--and if its hue
+     Be changed, that was so fair to view,
+     'Tis fair enough for thee, my dove!
+     My beauty, little child, is flown,
+     But thou wilt live with me in love;
+     And what if my poor cheek be brown?
+     'Tis well for me, thou canst not see
+     How pale and wan it else would be."
+
+Last, and pre-eminently, I challenge for this poet the gift of
+Imagination in the highest and strictest sense of the word. In the
+play of fancy, Wordsworth, to my feelings, is not always graceful,
+and sometimes recondite. The likeness is occasionally too strange, or
+demands too peculiar a point of view, or is such as appears the creature
+of predetermined research, rather than spontaneous presentation. Indeed
+his fancy seldom displays itself, as mere and unmodified fancy. But
+in imaginative power, he stands nearest of all modern writers to
+Shakespeare and Milton; and yet in a kind perfectly unborrowed and
+his own. To employ his own words, which are at once an instance and an
+illustration, he does indeed to all thoughts and to all objects--
+
+                       "------add the gleam,
+     The light that never was, on sea or land,
+     The consecration, and the Poet's dream."
+
+I shall select a few examples as most obviously manifesting this
+faculty; but if I should ever be fortunate enough to render my analysis
+of Imagination, its origin and characters, thoroughly intelligible to
+the reader, he will scarcely open on a page of this poet's works without
+recognising, more or less, the presence and the influences of this
+faculty. From the poem on the YEW TREES, vol. I. page 303, 304.
+
+        "But worthier still of note
+    Are those fraternal Four of Borrowdale,
+    Joined in one solemn and capacious grove;
+    Huge trunks!--and each particular trunk a growth
+    Of intertwisted fibres serpentine
+    Up-coiling, and inveterately convolved;
+    Not uninformed with phantasy, and looks
+    That threaten the profane;--a pillared shade,
+    Upon whose grassless floor of red-brown hue,
+    By sheddings from the pinal umbrage tinged
+    Perennially--beneath whose sable roof
+    Of boughs, as if for festal purpose, decked
+    With unrejoicing berries--ghostly shapes
+    May meet at noontide; FEAR and trembling HOPE,
+    SILENCE and FORESIGHT; DEATH, the Skeleton,
+    And TIME, the Shadow; there to celebrate,
+    As in a natural temple scattered o'er
+    With altars undisturbed of mossy stone,
+    United worship; or in mute repose
+    To lie, and listen to the mountain flood
+    Murmuring from Glazamara's inmost caves."
+
+The effect of the old man's figure in the poem of RESOLUTION AND
+INDEPENDENCE, vol. II. page 33.
+
+    "While he was talking thus, the lonely place,
+     The Old Man's shape, and speech, all troubled me
+     In my mind's eye I seemed to see him pace
+     About the weary moors continually,
+     Wandering about alone and silently."
+
+Or the 8th, 9th, 19th, 26th, 31st, and 33rd, in the collection of
+miscellaneous sonnets--the sonnet on the subjugation of Switzerland,
+page 210, or the last ode, from which I especially select the two
+following stanzas or paragraphs, page 349 to 350.
+
+    "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
+     The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
+     Hath had elsewhere its setting,
+         And cometh from afar.
+     Not in entire forgetfulness,
+     And not in utter nakedness,
+     But trailing clouds of glory do we come
+     From God, who is our home:
+     Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
+     Shades of the prison-house begin to close
+         Upon the growing Boy;
+     But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
+         He sees it in his joy!
+     The Youth who daily further from the East
+     Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
+         And by the vision splendid
+         Is on his way attended;
+     At length the Man perceives it die away,
+     And fade into the light of common day."
+
+And page 352 to 354 of the same ode.
+
+    "O joy! that in our embers
+     Is something that doth live,
+     That nature yet remembers
+     What was so fugitive!
+     The thought of our past years in me doth breed
+     Perpetual benedictions: not indeed
+     For that which is most worthy to be blest;
+     Delight and liberty, the simple creed
+     Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,
+     With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:--
+     Not for these I raise
+     The song of thanks and praise;
+     But for those obstinate questionings
+     Of sense and outward things,
+     Fallings from us, vanishings;
+     Blank misgivings of a Creature
+     Moving about in worlds not realized,
+     High instincts, before which our mortal Nature
+     Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised!
+     But for those first affections,
+     Those shadowy recollections,
+     Which, be they what they may,
+     Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
+     Are yet a master light of all our seeing;
+     Uphold us--cherish--and have power to make
+     Our noisy years seem moments in the being
+     Of the eternal Silence; truths that wake
+         To perish never;
+     Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
+     Nor Man nor Boy,
+     Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
+     Can utterly abolish or destroy!
+     Hence, in a season of calm weather,
+     Though inland far we be,
+     Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
+     Which brought us hither;
+     Can in a moment travel thither,--
+     And see the children sport upon the shore,
+     And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore."
+
+And since it would be unfair to conclude with an extract, which, though
+highly characteristic, must yet, from the nature of the thoughts and the
+subject, be interesting or perhaps intelligible, to but a limited number
+of readers; I will add, from the poet's last published work, a passage
+equally Wordsworthian; of the beauty of which, and of the imaginative
+power displayed therein, there can be but one opinion, and one feeling.
+See White Doe, page 5.
+
+    "Fast the church-yard fills;--anon
+     Look again and they all are gone;
+     The cluster round the porch, and the folk
+     Who sate in the shade of the Prior's Oak!
+     And scarcely have they disappeared
+     Ere the prelusive hymn is heard;--
+     With one consent the people rejoice,
+     Filling the church with a lofty voice!
+     They sing a service which they feel:
+     For 'tis the sun-rise now of zeal;
+     And faith and hope are in their prime
+     In great Eliza's golden time."
+
+    "A moment ends the fervent din,
+     And all is hushed, without and within;
+     For though the priest, more tranquilly,
+     Recites the holy liturgy,
+     The only voice which you can hear
+     Is the river murmuring near.
+     --When soft!--the dusky trees between,
+     And down the path through the open green,
+     Where is no living thing to be seen;
+     And through yon gateway, where is found,
+     Beneath the arch with ivy bound,
+     Free entrance to the church-yard ground--
+     And right across the verdant sod,
+     Towards the very house of God;
+     Comes gliding in with lovely gleam,
+     Comes gliding in serene and slow,
+     Soft and silent as a dream.
+     A solitary Doe!
+     White she is as lily of June,
+     And beauteous as the silver moon
+     When out of sight the clouds are driven
+     And she is left alone in heaven!
+     Or like a ship some gentle day
+     In sunshine sailing far away
+     A glittering ship that hath the plain
+     Of ocean for her own domain."
+
+        *     *     *     *     *     *
+
+    "What harmonious pensive changes
+     Wait upon her as she ranges
+     Round and through this Pile of state
+     Overthrown and desolate!
+     Now a step or two her way
+     Is through space of open day,
+     Where the enamoured sunny light
+     Brightens her that was so bright;
+     Now doth a delicate shadow fall,
+     Falls upon her like a breath,
+     From some lofty arch or wall,
+     As she passes underneath."
+
+The following analogy will, I am apprehensive, appear dim and fantastic,
+but in reading Bartram's Travels I could not help transcribing the
+following lines as a sort of allegory, or connected simile and metaphor
+of Wordsworth's intellect and genius.--"The soil is a deep, rich, dark
+mould, on a deep stratum of tenacious clay; and that on a foundation of
+rocks, which often break through both strata, lifting their backs above
+the surface. The trees which chiefly grow here are the gigantic, black
+oak; magnolia grandi-flora; fraximus excelsior; platane; and a few
+stately tulip trees." What Mr. Wordsworth will produce, it is not for me
+to prophesy but I could pronounce with the liveliest convictions what he
+is capable of producing. It is the FIRST GENUINE PHILOSOPHIC POEM.
+
+The preceding criticism will not, I am aware, avail to overcome the
+prejudices of those, who have made it a business to attack and ridicule
+Mr. Wordsworth's compositions.
+
+Truth and prudence might be imaged as concentric circles. The poet may
+perhaps have passed beyond the latter, but he has confined himself far
+within the bounds of the former, in designating these critics, as "too
+petulant to be passive to a genuine poet, and too feeble to grapple with
+him;----men of palsied imaginations, in whose minds all healthy action
+is languid;----who, therefore, feed as the many direct them, or with the
+many are greedy after vicious provocatives."
+
+So much for the detractors from Wordsworth's merits. On the other hand,
+much as I might wish for their fuller sympathy, I dare not flatter
+myself, that the freedom with which I have declared my opinions
+concerning both his theory and his defects, most of which are more
+or less connected with his theory, either as cause or effect, will be
+satisfactory or pleasing to all the poet's admirers and advocates.
+More indiscriminate than mine their admiration may be: deeper and more
+sincere it cannot be. But I have advanced no opinion either for praise
+or censure, other than as texts introductory to the reasons which compel
+me to form it. Above all, I was fully convinced that such a criticism
+was not only wanted; but that, if executed with adequate ability, it
+must conduce, in no mean degree, to Mr. Wordsworth's reputation.
+His fame belongs to another age, and can neither be accelerated nor
+retarded. How small the proportion of the defects are to the beauties,
+I have repeatedly declared; and that no one of them originates in
+deficiency of poetic genius. Had they been more and greater, I should
+still, as a friend to his literary character in the present age,
+consider an analytic display of them as pure gain; if only it removed,
+as surely to all reflecting minds even the foregoing analysis must have
+removed, the strange mistake, so slightly grounded, yet so widely and
+industriously propagated, of Mr. Wordsworth's turn for simplicity! I
+am not half as much irritated by hearing his enemies abuse him for
+vulgarity of style, subject, and conception, as I am disgusted with the
+gilded side of the same meaning, as displayed by some affected admirers,
+with whom he is, forsooth, a "sweet, simple poet!" and so natural, that
+little master Charles and his younger sister are so charmed with them,
+that they play at "Goody Blake," or at "Johnny and Betty Foy!"
+
+Were the collection of poems, published with these biographical
+sketches, important enough, (which I am not vain enough to believe,)
+to deserve such a distinction; even as I have done, so would I be done
+unto.
+
+For more than eighteen months have the volume of Poems, entitled
+SIBYLLINE LEAVES, and the present volume, up to this page, been printed,
+and ready for publication. But, ere I speak of myself in the tones,
+which are alone natural to me under the circumstances of late years, I
+would fain present myself to the Reader as I was in the first dawn of my
+literary life:
+
+    When Hope grew round me, like the climbing vine,
+    And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seem'd mine!
+
+For this purpose I have selected from the letters, which I wrote home
+from Germany, those which appeared likely to be most interesting, and at
+the same time most pertinent to the title of this work.
+
+
+
+
+SATYRANE'S LETTERS
+
+
+
+LETTER I
+
+
+On Sunday morning, September 16, 1798, the Hamburg packet set sail from
+Yarmouth; and I, for the first time in my life, beheld my native land
+retiring from me. At the moment of its disappearance--in all the kirks,
+churches, chapels, and meeting-houses, in which the greater number, I
+hope, of my countrymen were at that time assembled, I will dare question
+whether there was one more ardent prayer offered up to heaven, than
+that which I then preferred for my country. "Now then," (said I to a
+gentleman who was standing near me,) "we are out of our country." "Not
+yet, not yet!" he replied, and pointed to the sea; "This, too, is a
+Briton's country." This bon mot gave a fillip to my spirits, I rose and
+looked round on my fellow-passengers, who were all on the deck. We
+were eighteen in number, videlicet, five Englishmen, an English lady,
+a French gentleman and his servant, an Hanoverian and his servant, a
+Prussian, a Swede, two Danes, and a Mulatto boy, a German tailor and his
+wife, (the smallest couple I ever beheld,) and a Jew. We were all on the
+deck; but in a short time I observed marks of dismay. The lady retired
+to the cabin in some confusion, and many of the faces round me assumed a
+very doleful and frog-coloured appearance; and within an hour the number
+of those on deck was lessened by one half. I was giddy, but not sick,
+and the giddiness soon went away, but left a feverishness and want of
+appetite, which I attributed, in great measure, to the saeva Mephitis of
+the bilge-water; and it was certainly not decreased by the exportations
+from the cabin. However, I was well enough to join the able-bodied
+passengers, one of whom observed not inaptly, that Momus might have
+discovered an easier way to see a man's inside, than by placing a
+window in his breast. He needed only have taken a saltwater trip in a
+packet-boat.
+
+I am inclined to believe, that a packet is far superior to a stage-
+coach, as a means of making men open out to each other. In the latter
+the uniformity of posture disposes to dozing, and the definitiveness of
+the period, at which the company will separate, makes each individual
+think more of those to whom he is going, than of those with whom he is
+going. But at sea, more curiosity is excited, if only on this account,
+that the pleasant or unpleasant qualities of your companions are of
+greater importance to you, from the uncertainty how long you may be
+obliged to house with them. Besides, if you are countrymen, that now
+begins to form a distinction and a bond of brotherhood; and if of
+different countries, there are new incitements of conversation, more to
+ask and more to communicate. I found that I had interested the Danes
+in no common degree. I had crept into the boat on the deck and fallen
+asleep; but was awakened by one of them, about three o'clock in the
+afternoon, who told me that they had been seeking me in every hole and
+corner, and insisted that I should join their party and drink with them.
+He talked English with such fluency, as left me wholly unable to account
+for the singular and even ludicrous incorrectness with which he spoke
+it. I went, and found some excellent wines and a dessert of grapes with
+a pine-apple. The Danes had christened me Doctor Teology, and dressed
+as I was all in black, with large shoes and black worsted stockings,
+I might certainly have passed very well for a Methodist missionary.
+However I disclaimed my title. What then may you be? A man of fortune?
+No!--A merchant? No!--A merchant's traveller? No!--A clerk? No!--Un
+Philosophe, perhaps? It was at that time in my life, in which of all
+possible names and characters I had the greatest disgust to that of "un
+Philosophe." But I was weary of being questioned, and rather than be
+nothing, or at best only the abstract idea of a man, I submitted by a
+bow, even to the aspersion implied in the word "un Philosophe."--The
+Dane then informed me, that all in the present party were Philosophers
+likewise. Certes we were not of the Stoick school. For we drank and
+talked and sung, till we talked and sung all together; and then we rose
+and danced on the deck a set of dances, which in one sense of the word
+at least, were very intelligibly and appropriately entitled reels.
+The passengers, who lay in the cabin below in all the agonies of sea-
+sickness, must have found our bacchanalian merriment
+
+                                      ------a tune
+    Harsh and of dissonant mood from their complaint.
+
+I thought so at the time; and, (by way, I suppose, of supporting my
+newly assumed philosophical character,) I thought too, how closely the
+greater number of our virtues are connected with the fear of death, and
+how little sympathy we bestow on pain, where there is no danger.
+
+The two Danes were brothers. The one was a man with a clear white
+complexion, white hair, and white eyebrows; looked silly, and nothing
+that he uttered gave the lie to his looks. The other, whom, by way of
+eminence I have called the Dane, had likewise white hair, but was much
+shorter than his brother, with slender limbs, and a very thin face
+slightly pockfretten. This man convinced me of the justice of an old
+remark, that many a faithful portrait in our novels and farces has been
+rashly censured for an outrageous caricature, or perhaps nonentity. I
+had retired to my station in the boat--he came and seated himself by my
+side, and appeared not a little tipsy. He commenced the conversation in
+the most magnific style, and, as a sort of pioneering to his own vanity,
+he flattered me with such grossness! The parasites of the old comedy
+were modest in the comparison. His language and accentuation were so
+exceedingly singular, that I determined for once in my life to take
+notes of a conversation. Here it follows, somewhat abridged, indeed, but
+in all other respects as accurately as my memory permitted.
+
+THE DANE. Vat imagination! vat language! vat vast science! and vat eyes!
+vat a milk-vite forehead! O my heafen! vy, you're a Got!
+
+ANSWER. You do me too much honour, Sir.
+
+THE DANE. O me! if you should dink I is flattering you!--No, no, no! I
+haf ten tousand a year--yes, ten tousand a year--yes, ten tousand pound
+a year! Vel--and vat is dhat? a mere trifle! I 'ouldn't gif my sincere
+heart for ten times dhe money. Yes, you're a Got! I a mere man! But, my
+dear friend! dhink of me, as a man! Is, is--I mean to ask you now, my
+dear friend--is I not very eloquent? Is I not speak English very fine?
+
+ANSWER. Most admirably! Believe me, Sir! I have seldom heard even a
+native talk so fluently.
+
+THE DANE. (Squeezing my hand with great vehemence.) My dear friend! vat
+an affection and fidelity ve have for each odher! But tell me, do tell
+me,--Is I not, now and den, speak some fault? Is I not in some wrong?
+
+ANSWER. Why, Sir! perhaps it might be observed by nice critics in the
+English language, that you occasionally use the word "is" instead of
+"am." In our best companies we generally say I am, and not I is or I'se.
+Excuse me, Sir! it is a mere trifle.
+
+THE DANE. O!--is, is, am, am, am. Yes, yes--I know, I know.
+
+ANSWER. I am, thou art, he is, we are, ye are, they are.
+
+THE DANE. Yes, yes,--I know, I know--Am, am, am, is dhe praesens, and is
+is dhe perfectum--yes, yes--and are is dhe plusquam perfectum.
+
+ANSWER. And art, Sir! is--?
+
+THE DANE. My dear friend! it is dhe plusquam perfectum, no, no--dhat
+is a great lie; are is dhe plusquam perfectum--and art is dhe plasquam
+plue-perfectum--(then swinging my hand to and fro, and cocking his
+little bright hazel eyes at me, that danced with vanity and wine)--You
+see, my dear friend that I too have some lehrning?
+
+ANSWER. Learning, Sir? Who dares suspect it? Who can listen to you for a
+minute, who can even look at you, without perceiving the extent of it?
+
+THE DANE. My dear friend!--(then with a would-be humble look, and in a
+tone of voice as if he was reasoning) I could not talk so of prawns and
+imperfectum, and futurum and plusquamplue perfectum, and all dhat, my
+dear friend! without some lehrning?
+
+ANSWER. Sir! a man like you cannot talk on any subject without
+discovering the depth of his information.
+
+THE DANE. Dhe grammatic Greek, my friend; ha! ha! Ha! (laughing, and
+swinging my hand to and fro--then with a sudden transition to great
+solemnity) Now I will tell you, my dear friend! Dhere did happen about
+me vat de whole historia of Denmark record no instance about nobody
+else. Dhe bishop did ask me all dhe questions about all dhe religion in
+dhe Latin grammar.
+
+ANSWER. The grammar, Sir? The language, I presume--
+
+THE DANE. (A little offended.) Grammar is language, and language is
+grammar--
+
+ANSWER. Ten thousand pardons!
+
+THE DANE. Vell, and I was only fourteen years--
+
+ANSWER. Only fourteen years old?
+
+THE DANE. No more. I vas fourteen years old--and he asked me all
+questions, religion and philosophy, and all in dhe Latin language--and I
+answered him all every one, my dear friend! all in dhe Latin language.
+
+ANSWER. A prodigy! an absolute prodigy!
+
+THE DANE. No, no, no! he was a bishop, a great superintendent.
+
+ANSWER. Yes! a bishop.
+
+THE DANE. A bishop--not a mere predicant, not a prediger.
+
+ANSWER. My dear Sir! we have misunderstood each other. I said that your
+answering in Latin at so early an age was a prodigy, that is, a thing
+that is wonderful; that does not often happen.
+
+THE DANE. Often! Dhere is not von instance recorded in dhe whole
+historia of Denmark.
+
+ANSWER. And since then, Sir--?
+
+THE DANE. I was sent ofer to dhe Vest Indies--to our Island, and dhere I
+had no more to do vid books. No! no! I put my genius anodher way--and
+I haf made ten tousand pound a year. Is not dhat ghenius, my dear
+friend?--But vat is money?--I dhink dhe poorest man alive my equal.
+Yes, my dear friend; my little fortune is pleasant to my generous heart,
+because I can do good--no man with so little a fortune ever did so much
+generosity--no person--no man person, no woman person ever denies it.
+But we are all Got's children.
+
+Here the Hanoverian interrupted him, and the other Dane, the Swede, and
+the Prussian, joined us, together with a young Englishman who spoke the
+German fluently, and interpreted to me many of the Prussian's jokes. The
+Prussian was a travelling merchant, turned of threescore, a hale
+man, tall, strong, and stout, full of stories, gesticulations, and
+buffoonery, with the soul as well as the look of a mountebank, who,
+while he is making you laugh, picks your pocket. Amid all his droll
+looks and droll gestures, there remained one look untouched by laughter;
+and that one look was the true face, the others were but its mask. The
+Hanoverian was a pale, fat, bloated young man, whose father had made a
+large fortune in London, as an army-contractor. He seemed to emulate
+the manners of young Englishmen of fortune. He was a good-natured
+fellow, not without information or literature; but a most egregious
+coxcomb. He had been in the habit of attending the House of Commons, and
+had once spoken, as he informed me, with great applause in a debating
+society. For this he appeared to have qualified himself with laudable
+industry: for he was perfect in Walker's Pronouncing Dictionary, and
+with an accent, which forcibly reminded me of the Scotchman in Roderic
+Random, who professed to teach the English pronunciation, he was
+constantly deferring to my superior judgment, whether or no I had
+pronounced this or that word with propriety, or "the true delicacy."
+When he spoke, though it were only half a dozen sentences, he always
+rose: for which I could detect no other motive, than his partiality
+to that elegant phrase so liberally introduced in the orations of
+our British legislators, "While I am on my legs." The Swede, whom
+for reasons that will soon appear, I shall distinguish by the name
+of Nobility, was a strong-featured, scurvy-faced man, his complexion
+resembling in colour, a red hot poker beginning to cool. He appeared
+miserably dependent on the Dane; but was, however, incomparably the
+best informed and most rational of the party. Indeed his manners
+and conversation discovered him to be both a man of the world and a
+gentleman. The Jew was in the hold: the French gentleman was lying on
+the deck so ill, that I could observe nothing concerning him, except the
+affectionate attentions of his servant to him. The poor fellow was very
+sick himself, and every now and then ran to the side of the vessel,
+still keeping his eye on his master, but returned in a moment and seated
+himself again by him, now supporting his head, now wiping his forehead
+and talking to him all the while in the most soothing tones. There
+had been a matrimonial squabble of a very ludicrous kind in the cabin,
+between the little German tailor and his little wife. He had secured two
+beds, one for himself and one for her. This had struck the little woman
+as a very cruel action; she insisted upon their having but one, and
+assured the mate in the most piteous tones, that she was his lawful
+wife. The mate and the cabin boy decided in her favour, abused the
+little man for his want of tenderness with much humour, and hoisted
+him into the same compartment with his sea-sick wife. This quarrel was
+interesting to me, as it procured me a bed, which I otherwise should not
+have had.
+
+In the evening, at seven o'clock, the sea rolled higher, and the Dane,
+by means of the greater agitation, eliminated enough of what he had been
+swallowing to make room for a great deal more. His favourite potation
+was sugar and brandy, i.e. a very little warm water with a large
+quantity of brandy, sugar, and nutmeg His servant boy, a black-eyed
+Mulatto, had a good-natured round face, exactly the colour of the skin
+of the walnut-kernel. The Dane and I were again seated, tete-a-tete,
+in the ship's boat. The conversation, which was now indeed rather an
+oration than a dialogue, became extravagant beyond all that I ever
+heard. He told me that he had made a large fortune in the island of
+Santa Cruz, and was now returning to Denmark to enjoy it. He expatiated
+on the style in which he meant to live, and the great undertakings which
+he proposed to himself to commence, till, the brandy aiding his vanity,
+and his vanity and garrulity aiding the brandy, he talked like a
+madman--entreated me to accompany him to Denmark--there I should see his
+influence with the government, and he would introduce me to the king,
+etc., etc. Thus he went on dreaming aloud, and then passing with a very
+lyrical transition to the subject of general politics, he declaimed,
+like a member of the Corresponding Society, about, (not concerning,)
+the Rights of Man, and assured me that, notwithstanding his fortune, he
+thought the poorest man alive his equal. "All are equal, my dear friend!
+all are equal! Ve are all Got's children. The poorest man haf the same
+rights with me. Jack! Jack! some more sugar and brandy. Dhere is dhat
+fellow now! He is a Mulatto--but he is my equal.--That's right, Jack!
+(taking the sugar and brandy.) Here you Sir! shake hands with dhis
+gentleman! Shake hands with me, you dog! Dhere, dhere!--We are all equal
+my dear friend! Do I not speak like Socrates, and Plato, and Cato--they
+were all philosophers, my dear philosophe! all very great men!--and so
+was Homer and Virgil--but they were poets. Yes, yes! I know all about
+it!--But what can anybody say more than this? We are all equal, all
+Got's children. I haf ten tousand a year, but I am no more dhan de
+meanest man alive. I haf no pride; and yet, my dear friend! I can
+say, do! and it is done. Ha! ha! ha! my dear friend! Now dhere is dhat
+gentleman (pointing to Nobility) he is a Swedish baron--you shall see.
+Ho! (calling to the Swede) get me, will you, a bottle of wine from the
+cabin. SWEDE.--Here, Jack! go and get your master a bottle of wine from
+the cabin. DANE. No, no, no! do you go now--you go yourself you go now!
+SWEDE. Pah!--DANE. Now go! Go, I pray you." And the Swede went!!
+
+After this the Dane commenced an harangue on religion, and mistaking
+me for un philosophe in the continental sense of the word, he talked of
+Deity in a declamatory style, very much resembling the devotional rants
+of that rude blunderer, Mr. Thomas Paine, in his Age of Reason, and
+whispered in my ear, what damned hypocrism all Jesus Christ's business
+was. I dare aver, that few men have less reason to charge themselves
+with indulging in persiflage than myself. I should hate it, if it were
+only that it is a Frenchman's vice, and feel a pride in avoiding it,
+because our own language is too honest to have a word to express it by.
+But in this instance the temptation had been too powerful, and I have
+placed it on the list of my offences. Pericles answered one of his
+dearest friends, who had solicited him on a case of life and death, to
+take an equivocal oath for his preservation: Debeo amicis opitulari, sed
+usque ad Deos [75]. Friendship herself must place her last and boldest
+step on this side the altar. What Pericles would not do to save a
+friend's life, you may be assured, I would not hazard merely to mill the
+chocolate-pot of a drunken fool's vanity till it frothed over. Assuming
+a serious look, I professed myself a believer, and sunk at once an
+hundred fathoms in his good graces. He retired to his cabin, and I
+wrapped myself up in my great coat, and looked at the water. A beautiful
+white cloud of foam at momently intervals coursed by the side of the
+vessel with a roar, and little stars of flame danced and sparkled and
+went out in it: and every now and then light detachments of this white
+cloud-like foam darted off from the vessel's side, each with its own
+small constellation, over the sea, and scoured out of sight like a
+Tartar troop over a wilderness.
+
+It was cold, the cabin was at open war with my olfactories, and I found
+reason to rejoice in my great coat, a weighty high-caped, respectable
+rug, the collar of which turned over, and played the part of a night-cap
+very passably. In looking up at two or three bright stars, which
+oscillated with the motion of the sails, I fell asleep, but was awakened
+at one o'clock, Monday morning, by a shower of rain. I found myself
+compelled to go down into the cabin, where I slept very soundly, and
+awoke with a very good appetite at breakfast time, my nostrils, the most
+placable of all the senses, reconciled to, or indeed insensible of the
+mephitis.
+
+Monday, September 17th, I had a long conversation with the Swede, who
+spoke with the most poignant contempt of the Dane, whom he described as
+a fool, purse-mad; but he confirmed the boasts of the Dane respecting
+the largeness of his fortune, which he had acquired in the first
+instance as an advocate, and afterwards as a planter. From the Dane and
+from himself I collected that he was indeed a Swedish nobleman, who had
+squandered a fortune, that was never very large, and had made over his
+property to the Dane, on whom he was now utterly dependent. He seemed
+to suffer very little pain from the Dane's insolence. He was in a high
+degree humane and attentive to the English lady, who suffered most
+fearfully, and for whom he performed many little offices with a
+tenderness and delicacy which seemed to prove real goodness of heart.
+Indeed his general manners and conversation were not only pleasing,
+but even interesting; and I struggled to believe his insensibility
+respecting the Dane philosophical fortitude. For though the Dane was
+now quite sober, his character oozed out of him at every pore. And after
+dinner, when he was again flushed with wine, every quarter of an hour or
+perhaps oftener he would shout out to the Swede, "Ho! Nobility, go--do
+such a thing! Mr. Nobility!--tell the gentlemen such a story, and
+so forth;" with an insolence which must have excited disgust and
+detestation, if his vulgar rants on the sacred rights of equality,
+joined to his wild havoc of general grammar no less than of the English
+language, had not rendered it so irresistibly laughable.
+
+At four o'clock I observed a wild duck swimming on the waves, a single
+solitary wild duck. It is not easy to conceive, how interesting a thing
+it looked in that round objectless desert of waters. I had associated
+such a feeling of immensity with the ocean, that I felt exceedingly
+disappointed, when I was out of sight of all land, at the narrowness and
+nearness, as it were, of the circle of the horizon. So little are images
+capable of satisfying the obscure feelings connected with words. In the
+evening the sails were lowered, lest we should run foul of the land,
+which can be seen only at a small distance. And at four o'clock, on
+Tuesday morning, I was awakened by the cry of "land! land!" It was an
+ugly island rock at a distance on our left, called Heiligeland, well
+known to many passengers from Yarmouth to Hamburg, who have been obliged
+by stormy weather to pass weeks and weeks in weary captivity on it,
+stripped of all their money by the exorbitant demands of the wretches
+who inhabit it. So at least the sailors informed me.--About nine o'clock
+we saw the main land, which seemed scarcely able to hold its head above
+water, low, flat, and dreary, with lighthouses and land-marks which
+seemed to give a character and language to the dreariness. We entered
+the mouth of the Elbe, passing Neu-werk; though as yet the right bank
+only of the river was visible to us. On this I saw a church, and thanked
+God for my safe voyage, not without affectionate thoughts of those I
+had left in England. At eleven o'clock on the same morning we arrived
+at Cuxhaven, the ship dropped anchor, and the boat was hoisted out, to
+carry the Hanoverian and a few others on shore. The captain agreed to
+take us, who remained, to Hamburg for ten guineas, to which the Dane
+contributed so largely, that the other passengers paid but half a guinea
+each. Accordingly we hauled anchor, and passed gently up the river. At
+Cuxhaven both sides of the river may be seen in clear weather; we could
+now see the right bank only. We passed a multitude of English traders
+that had been waiting many weeks for a wind. In a short time both banks
+became visible, both flat and evidencing the labour of human hands by
+their extreme neatness. On the left bank I saw a church or two in
+the distance; on the right bank we passed by steeple and windmill and
+cottage, and windmill and single house, windmill and windmill, and neat
+single house, and steeple. These were the objects and in the succession.
+The shores were very green and planted with trees not inelegantly.
+Thirty-five miles from Cuxhaven the night came on us, and, as the
+navigation of the Elbe is perilous, we dropped anchor.
+
+Over what place, thought I, does the moon hang to your eye, my dearest
+friend? To me it hung over the left bank of the Elbe. Close above the
+moon was a huge volume of deep black cloud, while a very thin fillet
+crossed the middle of the orb, as narrow and thin and black as a ribbon
+of crape. The long trembling road of moonlight, which lay on the water
+and reached to the stern of our vessel, glimmered dimly and obscurely.
+We saw two or three lights from the right bank, probably from bed-rooms.
+I felt the striking contrast between the silence of this majestic
+stream, whose banks are populous with men and women and children, and
+flocks and herds--between the silence by night of this peopled river,
+and the ceaseless noise, and uproar, and loud agitations of the desolate
+solitude of the ocean. The passengers below had all retired to their
+beds; and I felt the interest of this quiet scene the more deeply from
+the circumstance of having just quitted them. For the Prussian had
+during the whole of the evening displayed all his talents to captivate
+the Dane, who had admitted him into the train of his dependents. The
+young Englishman continued to interpret the Prussian's jokes to me. They
+were all without exception profane and abominable, but some sufficiently
+witty, and a few incidents, which he related in his own person, were
+valuable as illustrating the manners of the countries in which they had
+taken place.
+
+Five o'clock on Wednesday morning we hauled the anchor, but were soon
+obliged to drop it again in consequence of a thick fog, which our
+captain feared would continue the whole day; but about nine it cleared
+off, and we sailed slowly along, close by the shore of a very beautiful
+island, forty miles from Cuxhaven, the wind continuing slack. This
+holm or island is about a mile and a half in length, wedge-shaped,
+well wooded, with glades of the liveliest green, and rendered more
+interesting by the remarkably neat farm-house on it. It seemed made for
+retirement without solitude--a place that would allure one's friends,
+while it precluded the impertinent calls of mere visitors. The shores of
+the Elbe now became more beautiful, with rich meadows and trees running
+like a low wall along the river's edge; and peering over them,
+neat houses and, (especially on the right bank,) a profusion of
+steeple-spires, white, black, or red. An instinctive taste teaches men
+to build their churches in flat countries with spire-steeples, which,
+as they cannot be referred to any other object, point, as with silent
+finger, to the sky and stars, and sometimes, when they reflect the
+brazen light of a rich though rainy sun-set, appear like a pyramid of
+flame burning heavenward. I remember once, and once only, to have seen
+a spire in a narrow valley of a mountainous country. The effect was
+not only mean but ludicrous, and reminded me against my will of an
+extinguisher; the close neighbourhood of the high mountain, at the foot
+of which it stood, had so completely dwarfed it, and deprived it of
+all connection with the sky or clouds. Forty-six English miles from
+Cuxhaven, and sixteen from Hamburg, the Danish village Veder ornaments
+the left bank with its black steeple, and close by it is the wild and
+pastoral hamlet of Schulau. Hitherto both the right and left bank, green
+to the very brink, and level with the river, resembled the shores of a
+park canal. The trees and houses were alike low, sometimes the low trees
+over-topping the yet lower houses, sometimes the low houses rising
+above the yet lower trees. But at Schulau the left bank rises at once
+forty or fifty feet, and stares on the river with its perpendicular
+facade of sand, thinly patched with tufts of green. The Elbe continued
+to present a more and more lively spectacle from the multitude of
+fishing boats and the flocks of sea gulls wheeling round them, the
+clamorous rivals and companions of the fishermen; till we came to
+Blankaness, a most interesting village scattered amid scattered trees,
+over three hills in three divisions. Each of the three hills stares upon
+the river, with faces of bare sand, with which the boats with their
+bare poles, standing in files along the banks, made a sort of fantastic
+harmony. Between each facade lies a green and woody dell, each deeper
+than the other. In short it is a large village made up of individual
+cottages, each cottage in the centre of its own little wood or orchard,
+and each with its own separate path: a village with a labyrinth of
+paths, or rather a neighbourhood of houses! It is inhabited by fishermen
+and boat-makers, the Blankanese boats being in great request through the
+whole navigation of the Elbe. Here first we saw the spires of Hamburg,
+and from hence, as far as Altona, the left bank of the Elbe is
+uncommonly pleasing, considered as the vicinity of an industrious and
+republican city--in that style of beauty, or rather prettiness, that
+might tempt the citizen into the country, and yet gratify the taste
+which he had acquired in the town. Summer-houses and Chinese show-work
+are everywhere scattered along the high and green banks; the boards
+of the farm-houses left unplastered and gaily painted with green and
+yellow; and scarcely a tree not cut into shapes and made to remind the
+human being of his own power and intelligence instead of the wisdom of
+nature. Still, however, these are links of connection between town and
+country, and far better than the affectation of tastes and enjoyments
+for which men's habits have disqualified them. Pass them by on Saturdays
+and Sundays with the burghers of Hamburg smoking their pipes, the women
+and children feasting in the alcoves of box and yew, and it becomes a
+nature of its own. On Wednesday, four o'clock, we left the vessel, and
+passing with trouble through the huge masses of shipping that seemed to
+choke the wide Elbe from Altona upward, we were at length landed at the
+Boom House, Hamburg.
+
+
+
+LETTER II
+
+To a lady.
+
+RATZEBURG.
+
+Meine liebe Freundinn,
+
+See how natural the German comes from me, though I have not yet
+been six weeks in the country!--almost as fluently as English from my
+neighbour the Amtsschreiber, (or public secretary,) who as often as
+we meet, though it should be half a dozen times in the same day,
+never fails to greet me with--"---ddam your ploot unt eyes, my
+dearest Englander! vhee goes it!"--which is certainly a proof of great
+generosity on his part, these words being his whole stock of English.
+I had, however, a better reason than the desire of displaying my
+proficiency: for I wished to put you in good humour with a language,
+from the acquirement of which I have promised myself much edification
+and the means too of communicating a new pleasure to you and your
+sister, during our winter readings. And how can I do this better than
+by pointing out its gallant attention to the ladies? Our English affix,
+ess, is, I believe, confined either to words derived from the Latin, as
+actress, directress, etc., or from the French, as mistress, duchess, and
+the like. But the German, inn, enables us to designate the sex in
+every possible relation of life. Thus the Amtmann's lady is the Frau
+Amtmanninn--the secretary's wife, (by the bye, the handsomest
+woman I have yet seen in Germany,) is die allerliebste Frau
+Amtsschreiberinn--the colonel's lady, die Frau Obristinn or
+Colonellinn--and even the parson's wife, die Frau Pastorinn. But I am
+especially pleased with their Freundinn, which, unlike the amica of the
+Romans, is seldom used but in its best and purest sense. Now, I know
+it will be said, that a friend is already something more than a friend,
+when a man feels an anxiety to express to himself that this friend is a
+female; but this I deny--in that sense at least in which the objection
+will be made. I would hazard the impeachment of heresy, rather than
+abandon my belief that there is a sex in our souls as well as in their
+perishable garments; and he who does not feel it, never truly loved a
+sister--nay, is not capable even of loving a wife as she deserves to be
+loved, if she indeed be worthy of that holy name.
+
+Now I know, my gentle friend, what you are murmuring to yourself--"This
+is so like him! running away after the first bubble, that chance has
+blown off from the surface of his fancy; when one is anxious to learn
+where he is and what he has seen." Well then! that I am settled at
+Ratzeburg, with my motives and the particulars of my journey hither,
+will inform you. My first letter to him, with which doubtless he has
+edified your whole fireside, left me safely landed at Hamburg on the
+Elbe Stairs, at the Boom House. While standing on the stairs, I was
+amused by the contents of the passage-boat which crosses the river once
+or twice a day from Hamburg to Haarburg. It was stowed close with all
+people of all nations, in all sorts of dresses; the men all with pipes
+in their mouths, and these pipes of all shapes and fancies--straight
+and wreathed, simple and complex, long and short, cane, clay, porcelain,
+wood, tin, silver, and ivory; most of them with silver chains and silver
+bole-covers. Pipes and boots are the first universal characteristic of
+the male Hamburgers that would strike the eye of a raw traveller. But
+I forget my promise of journalizing as much as possible.--Therefore,
+Septr. 19th Afternoon. My companion, who, you recollect, speaks
+the French language with unusual propriety, had formed a kind of
+confidential acquaintance with the emigrant, who appeared to be a man
+of sense, and whose manners were those of a perfect gentleman. He seemed
+about fifty or rather more. Whatever is unpleasant in French manners
+from excess in the degree, had been softened down by age or affliction;
+and all that is delightful in the kind, alacrity and delicacy in little
+attentions, etc., remained, and without bustle, gesticulation,
+or disproportionate eagerness. His demeanour exhibited the minute
+philanthropy of a polished Frenchman, tempered by the sobriety of
+the English character disunited from its reserve. There is something
+strangely attractive in the character of a gentleman when you apply the
+word emphatically, and yet in that sense of the term which it is more
+easy to feel than to define. It neither includes the possession of high
+moral excellence, nor of necessity even the ornamental graces of manner.
+I have now in my mind's eye a person whose life would scarcely stand
+scrutiny even in the court of honour, much less in that of conscience;
+and his manners, if nicely observed, would of the two excite an idea
+of awkwardness rather than of elegance: and yet every one who conversed
+with him felt and acknowledged the gentleman. The secret of the matter,
+I believe to be this--we feel the gentlemanly character present to us,
+whenever, under all the circumstances of social intercourse, the trivial
+not less than the important, through the whole detail of his manners
+and deportment, and with the ease of a habit, a person shows respect to
+others in such a way, as at the same time implies in his own feelings
+an habitual and assured anticipation of reciprocal respect from them to
+himself. In short, the gentlemanly character arises out of the feeling
+of Equality acting, as a Habit, yet flexible to the varieties of
+Rank, and modified without being disturbed or superseded by them. This
+description will perhaps explain to you the ground of one of your own
+remarks, as I was englishing to you the interesting dialogue concerning
+the causes of the corruption of eloquence. "What perfect gentlemen these
+old Romans must have been! I was impressed, I remember, with the
+same feeling at the time I was reading a translation of Cicero's
+philosophical dialogues and of his epistolary correspondence: while in
+Pliny's Letters I seemed to have a different feeling--he gave me the
+notion of a very fine gentleman." You uttered the words as if you had
+felt that the adjunct had injured the substance and the increased degree
+altered the kind. Pliny was the courtier of an absolute monarch--Cicero
+an aristocratic republican. For this reason the character of gentleman,
+in the sense to which I have confined it, is frequent in England, rare
+in France, and found, where it is found, in age or the latest period
+of manhood; while in Germany the character is almost unknown. But
+the proper antipode of a gentleman is to be sought for among the
+Anglo-American democrats.
+
+I owe this digression, as an act of justice to this amiable Frenchman,
+and of humiliation for myself. For in a little controversy between us
+on the subject of French poetry, he made me feel my own ill behaviour by
+the silent reproof of contrast, and when I afterwards apologized to him
+for the warmth of my language, he answered me with a cheerful expression
+of surprise, and an immediate compliment, which a gentleman might both
+make with dignity and receive with pleasure. I was pleased therefore to
+find it agreed on, that we should, if possible, take up our quarters in
+the same house. My friend went with him in search of an hotel, and I to
+deliver my letters of recommendation.
+
+I walked onward at a brisk pace, enlivened not so much by anything I
+actually saw, as by the confused sense that I was for the first time
+in my life on the continent of our planet. I seemed to myself like a
+liberated bird that had been hatched in an aviary, who now, after his
+first soar of freedom, poises himself in the upper air. Very naturally I
+began to wonder at all things, some for being so like and some for being
+so unlike the things in England--Dutch women with large umbrella hats
+shooting out half a yard before them, with a prodigal plumpness of
+petticoat behind--the women of Hamburg with caps plaited on the caul
+with silver, or gold, or both, bordered round with stiffened lace, which
+stood out before their eyes, but not lower, so that the eyes sparkled
+through it--the Hanoverian with the fore part of the head bare, then a
+stiff lace standing up like a wall perpendicular on the cap, and the cap
+behind tailed with an enormous quantity of ribbon which lies or tosses
+on the back:
+
+    "Their visnomies seem'd like a goodly banner
+     Spread in defiance of all enemies."
+
+The ladies all in English dresses, all rouged, and all with bad teeth:
+which you notice instantly from their contrast to the almost animal, too
+glossy mother-of-pearl whiteness and the regularity of the teeth of the
+laughing, loud-talking country-women and servant-girls, who with their
+clean white stockings and with slippers without heel quarters, tripped
+along the dirty streets, as if they were secured by a charm from
+the dirt: with a lightness too, which surprised me, who had always
+considered it as one of the annoyances of sleeping in an Inn, that I
+had to clatter up stairs in a pair of them. The streets narrow; to my
+English nose sufficiently offensive, and explaining at first sight
+the universal use of boots; without any appropriate path for the
+foot-passengers; the gable ends of the houses all towards the street,
+some in the ordinary triangular form and entire as the botanists say;
+but the greater number notched and scolloped with more than Chinese
+grotesqueness. Above all, I was struck with the profusion of windows,
+so large and so many, that the houses look all glass. Mr. Pitt's window
+tax, with its pretty little additionals sprouting out from it like young
+toadlets on the back of a Surinam toad, would certainly improve the
+appearance of the Hamburg houses, which have a slight summer look, not
+in keeping with their size, incongruous with the climate, and precluding
+that feeling of retirement and self-content, which one wishes to
+associate with a house in a noisy city. But a conflagration would, I
+fear, be the previous requisite to the production of any architectural
+beauty in Hamburg: for verily it is a filthy town. I moved on and
+crossed a multitude of ugly bridges, with huge black deformities of
+water wheels close by them. The water intersects the city everywhere,
+and would have furnished to the genius of Italy the capabilities of all
+that is most beautiful and magnificent in architecture. It might have
+been the rival of Venice, and it is huddle and ugliness, stench and
+stagnation. The Jungfer Stieg, (that is, Young Ladies' Walk), to which
+my letters directed me, made an exception. It was a walk or promenade
+planted with treble rows of elm trees, which, being yearly pruned and
+cropped, remain slim and dwarf-like. This walk occupies one side of a
+square piece of water, with many swans on it perfectly tame, and, moving
+among the swans, shewy pleasure-boats with ladies in them, rowed by
+their husbands or lovers.------
+
+(Some paragraphs have been here omitted.)------thus embarrassed by sad
+and solemn politeness still more than by broken English, it sounded like
+the voice of an old friend when I heard the emigrant's servant inquiring
+after me. He had come for the purpose of guiding me to our hotel.
+Through streets and streets I pressed on as happy as a child, and, I
+doubt not, with a childish expression of wonderment in my busy eyes,
+amused by the wicker waggons with movable benches across them, one
+behind the other, (these were the hackney coaches;) amused by the
+sign-boards of the shops, on which all the articles sold within are
+painted, and that too very exactly, though in a grotesque confusion, (a
+useful substitute for language in this great mart of nations;) amused
+with the incessant tinkling of the shop and house door bells, the
+bell hanging over each door and struck with a small iron rod at every
+entrance and exit;--and finally, amused by looking in at the windows,
+as I passed along; the ladies and gentlemen drinking coffee or playing
+cards, and the gentlemen all smoking. I wished myself a painter, that I
+might have sent you a sketch of one of the card parties. The long pipe
+of one gentleman rested on the table, its bole half a yard from his
+mouth, fuming like a censer by the fish-pool--the other gentleman, who
+was dealing the cards, and of course had both hands employed, held his
+pipe in his teeth, which hanging down between his knees, smoked beside
+his ancles. Hogarth himself never drew a more ludicrous distortion both
+of attitude and physiognomy, than this effort occasioned nor was there
+wanting beside it one of those beautiful female faces which the same
+Hogarth, in whom the satirist never extinguished that love of beauty
+which belonged to him as a poet, so often and so gladly introduces, as
+the central figure, in a crowd of humorous deformities, which figures,
+(such is the power of true genius!) neither acts, nor is meant to act
+as a contrast; but diffuses through all, and over each of the group,
+a spirit of reconciliation and human kindness; and, even when the
+attention is no longer consciously directed to the cause of this
+feeling, still blends its tenderness with our laughter: and thus
+prevents the instructive merriment at the whims of nature or the foibles
+or humours of our fellow-men from degenerating into the heart-poison of
+contempt or hatred.
+
+Our hotel DIE WILDE MAN, (the sign of which was no bad likeness of the
+landlord, who had ingrafted on a very grim face a restless grin, that
+was at every man's service, and which indeed, like an actor rehearsing
+to himself, he kept playing in expectation of an occasion for
+it)--neither our hotel, I say, nor its landlord were of the genteelest
+class. But it has one great advantage for a stranger, by being in the
+market place, and the next neighbour of the huge church of St. Nicholas:
+a church with shops and houses built up against it, out of which wens
+and warts its high massy steeple rises, necklaced near the top with a
+round of large gilt balls. A better pole-star could scarcely be desired.
+Long shall I retain the impression made on my mind by the awful echo,
+so loud and long and tremulous, of the deep-toned clock within this
+church, which awoke me at two in the morning from a distressful dream,
+occasioned, I believe, by the feather bed, which is used here instead
+of bed-clothes. I will rather carry my blanket about with me like a wild
+Indian, than submit to this abominable custom. Our emigrant acquaintance
+was, we found, an intimate friend of the celebrated Abbe de Lisle:
+and from the large fortune which he possessed under the monarchy, had
+rescued sufficient not only for independence, but for respectability. He
+had offended some of his fellow-emigrants in London, whom he had obliged
+with considerable sums, by a refusal to make further advances, and
+in consequence of their intrigues had received an order to quit the
+kingdom. I thought it one proof of his innocence, that he attached no
+blame either to the alien act, or to the minister who had exerted it
+against him; and a still greater, that he spoke of London with rapture,
+and of his favourite niece, who had married and settled in England, with
+all the fervour and all the pride of a fond parent. A man sent by force
+out of a country, obliged to sell out of the stocks at a great loss, and
+exiled from those pleasures and that style of society which habit had
+rendered essential to his happiness, whose predominant feelings were yet
+all of a private nature, resentment for friendship outraged, and anguish
+for domestic affections interrupted--such a man, I think, I could dare
+warrant guiltless of espionnage in any service, most of all in that of
+the present French Directory. He spoke with ecstasy of Paris under the
+Monarchy: and yet the particular facts, which made up his description,
+left as deep a conviction on my mind, of French worthlessness, as his
+own tale had done of emigrant ingratitude. Since my arrival in
+Germany, I have not met a single person, even among those who abhor
+the Revolution, that spoke with favour, or even charity of the French
+emigrants. Though the belief of their influence in the organization
+of this disastrous war (from the horrors of which, North Germany deems
+itself only reprieved, not secured,) may have some share in the general
+aversion with which they are regarded: yet I am deeply persuaded
+that the far greater part is owing to their own profligacy, to their
+treachery and hardheartedness to each other, and the domestic misery or
+corrupt principles which so many of them have carried into the families
+of their protectors. My heart dilated with honest pride, as I recalled
+to mind the stern yet amiable characters of the English patriots, who
+sought refuge on the Continent at the Restoration! O let not our civil
+war under the first Charles be paralleled with the French Revolution!
+In the former, the character overflowed from excess of principle; in the
+latter from the fermentation of the dregs! The former, was a civil war
+between the virtues and virtuous prejudices of the two parties; the
+latter, between the vices. The Venetian glass of the French monarchy
+shivered and flew asunder with the working of a double poison.
+
+Sept. 20th. I was introduced to Mr. Klopstock, the brother of the poet,
+who again introduced me to Professor Ebeling, an intelligent and lively
+man, though deaf: so deaf, indeed, that it was a painful effort to talk
+with him, as we were obliged to drop our pearls into a huge ear-trumpet.
+From this courteous and kind-hearted man of letters, (I hope, the
+German literati in general may resemble this first specimen), I heard a
+tolerable Italian pun, and an interesting anecdote. When Buonaparte was
+in Italy, having been irritated by some instance of perfidy, he said in
+a loud and vehement tone, in a public company--"'tis a true proverb, gli
+Italiani tutti ladroni"--(that is, the Italians all plunderers.) A lady
+had the courage to reply, "Non tutti; ma BUONA PARTE," (not all, but a
+good part, or Buonaparte.) This, I confess, sounded to my ears, as one
+of the many good things that might have been said. The anecdote is more
+valuable; for it instances the ways and means of French insinuation.
+Hoche had received much information concerning the face of the country
+from a map of unusual fulness and accuracy, the maker of which, he
+heard, resided at Duesseldorf. At the storming of Duesseldorf by the
+French army, Hoche previously ordered, that the house and property of
+this man should be preserved, and intrusted the performance of the order
+to an officer on whose troop he could rely. Finding afterwards, that the
+man had escaped before the storming commenced, Hoche exclaimed, "HE had
+no reason to flee! It is for such men, not against them, that the French
+nation makes war, and consents to shed the blood of its children." You
+remember Milton's sonnet--
+
+    "The great Emathian conqueror bid spare
+     The house of Pindarus when temple and tower
+     Went to the ground"------
+
+Now though the Duesseldorf map-maker may stand in the same relation to
+the Theban bard, as the snail, that marks its path by lines of film on
+the wall it creeps over, to the eagle that soars sunward and beats the
+tempest with its wings; it does not therefore follow, that the Jacobin
+of France may not be as valiant a general and as good a politician, as
+the madman of Macedon.
+
+From Professor Ebeling's Mr. Klopstock accompanied my friend and me
+to his own house, where I saw a fine bust of his brother. There was a
+solemn and heavy greatness in his countenance, which corresponded to my
+preconceptions of his style and genius.--I saw there, likewise, a very
+fine portrait of Lessing, whose works are at present the chief object of
+my admiration. His eyes were uncommonly like mine, if anything, rather
+larger and more prominent. But the lower part of his face and his
+nose--O what an exquisite expression of elegance and sensibility!--There
+appeared no depth, weight, or comprehensiveness in the forehead.--The
+whole face seemed to say, that Lessing was a man of quick and voluptuous
+feelings; of an active but light fancy; acute; yet acute not in the
+observation of actual life, but in the arrangements and management of
+the ideal world, that is, in taste, and in metaphysics. I assure you,
+that I wrote these very words in my memorandum-book with the portrait
+before my eyes, and when I knew nothing of Lessing but his name, and
+that he was a German writer of eminence.
+
+We consumed two hours and more over a bad dinner, at the table d'hote.
+"Patience at a German ordinary, smiling at time." The Germans are the
+worst cooks in Europe. There is placed for every two persons a bottle
+of common wine--Rhenish and Claret alternately; but in the houses of the
+opulent, during the many and long intervals of the dinner, the servants
+hand round glasses of richer wines. At the Lord of Culpin's they came
+in this order. Burgundy--Madeira--Port--Frontiniac--Pacchiaretti--Old
+Hock--Mountain--Champagne--Hock again--Bishop, and lastly, Punch. A
+tolerable quantum, methinks! The last dish at the ordinary, viz. slices
+of roast pork, (for all the larger dishes are brought in, cut up, and
+first handed round and then set on the table,) with stewed prunes and
+other sweet fruits, and this followed by cheese and butter, with plates
+of apples, reminded me of Shakespeare [76], and Shakespeare put it in my
+head to go to the French comedy.
+
+Bless me! why it is worse than our modern English plays! The first act
+informed me, that a court martial is to be held on a Count Vatron, who
+had drawn his sword on the Colonel, his brother-in-law. The officers
+plead in his behalf--in vain! His wife, the Colonel's sister, pleads
+with most tempestuous agonies--in vain! She falls into hysterics and
+faints away, to the dropping of the inner curtain! In the second act
+sentence of death is passed on the Count--his wife, as frantic and
+hysterical as before: more so (good industrious creature!) she could
+not be. The third and last act, the wife still frantic, very frantic
+indeed!--the soldiers just about to fire, the handkerchief actually
+dropped; when reprieve! reprieve! is heard from behind the scenes:
+and in comes Prince Somebody, pardons the Count, and the wife is still
+frantic, only with joy; that was all!
+
+O dear lady! this is one of the cases, in which laughter is followed
+by melancholy: for such is the kind of drama, which is now substituted
+every where for Shakespeare and Racine. You well know, that I offer
+violence to my own feelings in joining these names. But however meanly
+I may think of the French serious drama, even in its most perfect
+specimens; and with whatever right I may complain of its perpetual
+falsification of the language, and of the connections and transitions
+of thought, which Nature has appropriated to states of passion; still,
+however, the French tragedies are consistent works of art, and the
+offspring of great intellectual power. Preserving a fitness in the
+parts, and a harmony in the whole, they form a nature of their own,
+though a false nature. Still they excite the minds of the spectators to
+active thought, to a striving after ideal excellence. The soul is not
+stupefied into mere sensations by a worthless sympathy with our
+own ordinary sufferings, or an empty curiosity for the surprising,
+undignified by the language or the situations which awe and delight the
+imagination. What, (I would ask of the crowd, that press forward to
+the pantomimic tragedies and weeping comedies of Kotzebue and his
+imitators), what are you seeking? Is it comedy? But in the comedy of
+Shakespeare and Moliere the more accurate my knowledge, and the more
+profoundly I think, the greater is the satisfaction that mingles with
+my laughter. For though the qualities which these writers pourtray are
+ludicrous indeed, either from the kind or the excess, and exquisitely
+ludicrous, yet are they the natural growth of the human mind and such
+as, with more or less change in the drapery, I can apply to my own
+heart, or at least to whole classes of my fellow-creatures. How often
+are not the moralist and the metaphysician obliged for the happiest
+illustrations of general truths and the subordinate laws of human
+thought and action to quotations, not only from the tragic characters,
+but equally from the Jaques, Falstaff, and even from the fools and
+clowns of Shakespeare, or from the Miser, Hypochondriast, and Hypocrite,
+of Moliere! Say not, that I am recommending abstractions: for these
+class-characteristics, which constitute the instructiveness of a
+character, are so modified and particularized in each person of the
+Shakesperian Drama, that life itself does not excite more distinctly
+that sense of individuality which belongs to real existence. Paradoxical
+as it may sound, one of the essential properties of geometry is not
+less essential to dramatic excellence, and, (if I may mention his name
+without pedantry to a lady,) Aristotle has accordingly required of
+the poet an involution of the universal in the individual. The chief
+differences are, that in geometry it is the universal truth itself,
+which is uppermost in the consciousness, in poetry the individual form
+in which the truth is clothed. With the ancients, and not less with the
+elder dramatists of England and France, both comedy and tragedy were
+considered as kinds of poetry. They neither sought in comedy to make
+us laugh merely, much less to make us laugh by wry faces, accidents of
+jargon, slang phrases for the day, or the clothing of commonplace morals
+in metaphors drawn from the shops or mechanic occupations of their
+characters; nor did they condescend in tragedy to wheedle away the
+applause of the spectators, by representing before them fac-similes
+of their own mean selves in all their existing meanness, or to work on
+their sluggish sympathies by a pathos not a whit more respectable than
+the maudlin tears of drunkenness. Their tragic scenes were meant to
+affect us indeed, but within the bounds of pleasure, and in union with
+the activity both of our understanding and imagination. They wished to
+transport the mind to a sense of its possible greatness, and to implant
+the germs of that greatness during the temporary oblivion of the
+worthless "thing, we are" and of the peculiar state, in which each man
+happens to be; suspending our individual recollections and lulling them
+to sleep amid the music of nobler thoughts.
+
+Hold!--(methinks I hear the spokesman of the crowd reply, and we will
+listen to him. I am the plaintiff, and he the defendant.)
+
+DEFENDANT. Hold! are not our modern sentimental plays filled with the
+best Christian morality?
+
+PLAINTIFF. Yes! just as much of it, and just that part of it, which
+you can exercise without a single Christian virtue--without a single
+sacrifice that is really painful to you!--just as much as flatters you,
+sends you away pleased with your own hearts, and quite reconciled to
+your vices, which can never be thought very ill of, when they keep
+such good company, and walk hand in hand with so much compassion and
+generosity; adulation so loathsome, that you would spit in the man's
+face who dared offer it to you in a private company, unless you
+interpreted it as insulting irony, you appropriate with infinite
+satisfaction, when you share the garbage with the whole stye, and gobble
+it out of a common trough. No Caesar must pace your boards--no Antony,
+no royal Dane, no Orestes, no Andromache!
+
+D. No: or as few of them as possible. What has a plain citizen of
+London, or Hamburg, to do with your kings and queens, and your old
+school-boy Pagan heroes? Besides, every body knows the stories; and what
+curiosity can we feel----
+
+P. What, Sir, not for the manner?--not for the delightful language
+of the poet?--not for the situations, the action and reaction of the
+passions?
+
+D. You are hasty, Sir! the only curiosity, we feel, is in the story: and
+how can we be anxious concerning the end of a play, or be surprised by
+it, when we know how it will turn out?
+
+P. Your pardon, for having interrupted you! we now understand each
+other. You seek then, in a tragedy, which wise men of old held for the
+highest effort of human genius, the same gratification, as that you
+receive from a new novel, the last German romance, and other dainties of
+the day, which can be enjoyed but once. If you carry these feelings to
+the sister art of Painting, Michael Angelo's Sixtine Chapel, and the
+Scripture Gallery of Raphael can expect no favour from you. You know
+all about them beforehand; and are, doubtless, more familiar with the
+subjects of those paintings, than with the tragic tales of the historic
+or heroic ages. There is a consistency, therefore, in your preference of
+contemporary writers: for the great men of former times, those at least
+who were deemed great by our ancestors, sought so little to gratify this
+kind of curiosity, that they seemed to have regarded the story in a not
+much higher light, than the painter regards his canvass: as that on, not
+by, which they were to display their appropriate excellence. No work,
+resembling a tale or romance, can well show less variety of invention
+in the incidents, or less anxiety in weaving them together, than the DON
+QUIXOTE of Cervantes. Its admirers feel the disposition to go back and
+re-peruse some preceding chapter, at least ten times for once that they
+find any eagerness to hurry forwards: or open the book on those parts
+which they best recollect, even as we visit those friends oftenest whom
+we love most, and with whose characters and actions we are the most
+intimately acquainted. In the divine Ariosto, (as his countrymen call
+this, their darling poet,) I question whether there be a single tale of
+his own invention, or the elements of which, were not familiar to the
+readers of "old romance." I will pass by the ancient Greeks, who thought
+it even necessary to the fable of a tragedy, that its substance should
+be previously known. That there had been at least fifty tragedies with
+the same title, would be one of the motives which determined Sophocles
+and Euripides, in the choice of Electra as a subject. But Milton--
+
+D. Aye Milton, indeed!--but do not Dr. Johnson and other great men tell
+us, that nobody now reads Milton but as a task?
+
+P. So much the worse for them, of whom this can be truly said! But why
+then do you pretend to admire Shakespeare? The greater part, if not
+all, of his dramas were, as far as the names and the main incidents are
+concerned, already stock plays. All the stories, at least, on which they
+are built, pre-existed in the chronicles, ballads, or translations of
+contemporary or preceding English writers. Why, I repeat, do you pretend
+to admire Shakespeare? Is it, perhaps, that you only pretend to admire
+him? However, as once for all, you have dismissed the well-known events
+and personages of history, or the epic muse, what have you taken in
+their stead? Whom has your tragic muse armed with her bowl and dagger?
+the sentimental muse I should have said, whom you have seated in the
+throne of tragedy? What heroes has she reared on her buskins?
+
+D. O! our good friends and next-door neighbours--honest tradesmen,
+valiant tars, high-spirited half-pay officers, philanthropic Jews,
+virtuous courtezans, tender-hearted braziers, and sentimental rat-
+catchers!--(a little bluff or so, but all our very generous, tender-
+hearted characters are a little rude or misanthropic, and all our
+misanthropes very tender-hearted.)
+
+P. But I pray you, friend, in what actions great or interesting, can
+such men be engaged?
+
+D. They give away a great deal of money; find rich dowries for young
+men and maidens who have all other good qualities; they brow-beat
+lords, baronets, and justices of the peace, (for they are as bold as
+Hector!)--they rescue stage coaches at the instant they are falling down
+precipices; carry away infants in the sight of opposing armies; and some
+of our performers act a muscular able-bodied man to such perfection,
+that our dramatic poets, who always have the actors in their eye, seldom
+fail to make their favourite male character as strong as Samson. And
+then they take such prodigious leaps!! And what is done on the stage is
+more striking even than what is acted. I once remember such a deafening
+explosion, that I could not hear a word of the play for half an act
+after it: and a little real gunpowder being set fire to at the same
+time, and smelt by all the spectators, the naturalness of the scene was
+quite astonishing!
+
+P. But how can you connect with such men and such actions that
+dependence of thousands on the fate of one, which gives so lofty an
+interest to the personages of Shakespeare, and the Greek Tragedians? How
+can you connect with them that sublimest of all feelings, the power of
+destiny and the controlling might of heaven, which seems to elevate the
+characters which sink beneath its irresistible blow?
+
+D. O mere fancies! We seek and find on the present stage our own wants
+and passions, our own vexations, losses, and embarrassments.
+
+P. It is your own poor pettifogging nature then, which you desire to
+have represented before you?--not human nature in its height and vigour?
+But surely you might find the former with all its joys and sorrows, more
+conveniently in your own houses and parishes.
+
+D. True! but here comes a difference. Fortune is blind, but the poet has
+his eyes open, and is besides as complaisant as fortune is capricious.
+He makes every thing turn out exactly as we would wish it. He gratifies
+us by representing those as hateful or contemptible whom we hate and
+wish to despise.
+
+P. (aside.) That is, he gratifies your envy by libelling your superiors.
+
+D. He makes all those precise moralists, who affect to be better than
+their neighbours, turn out at last abject hypocrites, traitors, and
+hard-hearted villains; and your men of spirit, who take their girl and
+their glass with equal freedom, prove the true men of honour, and, (that
+no part of the audience may remain unsatisfied,) reform in the last
+scene, and leave no doubt in the minds of the ladies, that they will
+make most faithful and excellent husbands: though it does seem a pity,
+that they should be obliged to get rid of qualities which had made them
+so interesting! Besides, the poor become rich all at once; and in the
+final matrimonial choice the opulent and high-born themselves are made
+to confess; that VIRTUE IS THE ONLY TRUE NOBILITY, AND THAT A LOVELY
+WOMAN IS A DOWRY OF HERSELF!!
+
+P. Excellent! But you have forgotten those brilliant flashes of loyalty,
+those patriotic praises of the King and Old England, which, especially
+if conveyed in a metaphor from the ship or the shop, so often solicit
+and so unfailingly receive the public plaudit! I give your prudence
+credit for the omission. For the whole system of your drama is a moral
+and intellectual Jacobinism of the most dangerous kind, and those
+common-place rants of loyalty are no better than hypocrisy in your
+playwrights, and your own sympathy with them a gross self-delusion.
+For the whole secret of dramatic popularity consists with you in the
+confusion and subversion of the natural order of things, their causes
+and their effects; in the excitement of surprise, by representing the
+qualities of liberality, refined feeling, and a nice sense of honour,
+(those things rather which pass among you for such), in persons and in
+classes of life where experience teaches us least to expect them; and
+in rewarding with all the sympathies, that are the dues of virtue, those
+criminals whom law, reason, and religion have excommunicated from our
+esteem!
+
+And now--good night! Truly! I might have written this last sheet without
+having gone to Germany; but I fancied myself talking to you by your own
+fireside, and can you think it a small pleasure to me to forget now and
+then, that I am not there? Besides, you and my other good friends have
+made up your minds to me as I am, and from whatever place I write you
+will expect that part of my "Travels" will consist of excursions in my
+own mind.
+
+
+
+LETTER III
+
+
+RATZEBURG.
+No little fish thrown back again into the water, no fly unimprisoned
+from a child's hand, could more buoyantly enjoy its element, than I this
+clean and peaceful house, with this lovely view of the town, groves,
+and lake of Ratzeburg, from the window at which I am writing. My spirits
+certainly, and my health I fancied, were beginning to sink under the
+noise, dirt, and unwholesome air of our Hamburg hotel. I left it
+on Sunday, Sept. 23rd, with a letter of introduction from the poet
+Klopstock, to the Amtmann of Ratzeburg. The Amtmann received me with
+kindness, and introduced me to the worthy pastor, who agreed to board
+and lodge me for any length of time not less than a month. The vehicle,
+in which I took my place, was considerably larger than an English
+stage-coach, to which it bore much the same proportion and rude
+resemblance, that an elephant's ear does to the human. Its top was
+composed of naked boards of different colours, and seeming to have been
+parts of different wainscots. Instead of windows there were leathern
+curtains with a little eye of glass in each: they perfectly answered
+the purpose of keeping out the prospect and letting in the cold. I
+could observe little therefore, but the inns and farmhouses at which
+we stopped. They were all alike, except in size: one great room, like
+a barn, with a hay-loft over it, the straw and hay dangling in tufts
+through the boards which formed the ceiling of the room, and the floor
+of the loft. From this room, which is paved like a street, sometimes
+one, sometimes two smaller ones, are enclosed at one end. These are
+commonly floored. In the large room the cattle, pigs, poultry, men,
+women, and children, live in amicable community; yet there was an
+appearance of cleanliness and rustic comfort. One of these houses I
+measured. It was an hundred feet in length. The apartments were taken
+off from one corner. Between these and the stalls there was a small
+interspace, and here the breadth was forty-eight feet, but thirty-two
+where the stalls were; of course, the stalls were on each side eight
+feet in depth. The faces of the cows, etc. were turned towards the room;
+indeed they were in it, so that they had at least the comfort of seeing
+each other's faces. Stall-feeding is universal in this part of Germany,
+a practice concerning which the agriculturist and the poet are likely
+to entertain opposite opinions--or at least, to have very different
+feelings. The woodwork of these buildings on the outside is left
+unplastered, as in old houses among us, and, being painted red and
+green, it cuts and tesselates the buildings very gaily. From within
+three miles of Hamburg almost to Molln, which is thirty miles from it,
+the country, as far as I could see it, was a dead flat, only varied by
+woods. At Molln it became more beautiful. I observed a small lake nearly
+surrounded with groves, and a palace in view belonging to the King of
+Great Britain, and inhabited by the Inspector of the Forests. We were
+nearly the same time in travelling the thirty-five miles from Hamburg to
+Ratzeburg, as we had been in going from London to Yarmouth, one hundred
+and twenty-six miles.
+
+The lake of Ratzeburg runs from south to north, about nine miles in
+length, and varying in breadth from three miles to half a mile. About a
+mile from the southernmost point it is divided into two, of course very
+unequal, parts by an island, which, being connected by a bridge and a
+narrow slip of land with the one shore, and by another bridge of immense
+length with the other shore, forms a complete isthmus. On this island
+the town of Ratzeburg is built. The pastor's house or vicarage, together
+with the Amtmann's Amtsschreiber's, and the church, stands near the
+summit of a hill, which slopes down to the slip of land and the little
+bridge, from which, through a superb military gate, you step into
+the island-town of Ratzeburg. This again is itself a little hill, by
+ascending and descending which, you arrive at the long bridge, and so to
+the other shore. The water to the south of the town is called the Little
+Lake, which however almost engrosses the beauties of the whole the
+shores being just often enough green and bare to give the proper
+effect to the magnificent groves which occupy the greater part of their
+circumference. From the turnings, windings, and indentations of the
+shore, the views vary almost every ten steps, and the whole has a sort
+of majestic beauty, a feminine grandeur. At the north of the Great Lake,
+and peeping over it, I see the seven church towers of Luebec, at the
+distance of twelve or thirteen miles, yet as distinctly as if they
+were not three. The only defect in the view is, that Ratzeburg is built
+entirely of red bricks, and all the houses roofed with red tiles. To the
+eye, therefore, it presents a clump of brick-dust red. Yet this evening,
+Oct. 10th, twenty minutes past five, I saw the town perfectly beautiful,
+and the whole softened down into complete keeping, if I may borrow a
+term from the painters. The sky over Ratzeburg and all the east was a
+pure evening blue, while over the west it was covered with light sandy
+clouds. Hence a deep red light spread over the whole prospect, in
+undisturbed harmony with the red town, the brown-red woods, and the
+yellow-red reeds on the skirts of the lake. Two or three boats, with
+single persons paddling them, floated up and down in the rich light,
+which not only was itself in harmony with all, but brought all into
+harmony.
+
+I should have told you that I went back to Hamburg on Thursday (Sept.
+27th) to take leave of my friend, who travels southward, and returned
+hither on the Monday following. From Empfelde, a village half way from
+Ratzeburg, I walked to Hamburg through deep sandy roads and a dreary
+flat: the soil everywhere white, hungry, and excessively pulverised; but
+the approach to the city is pleasing. Light cool country houses, which
+you can look through and see the gardens behind them, with arbours and
+trellis work, and thick vegetable walls, and trees in cloisters and
+piazzas, each house with neat rails before it, and green seats within
+the rails. Every object, whether the growth of nature or the work of
+man, was neat and artificial. It pleased me far better, than if the
+houses and gardens, and pleasure fields, had been in a nobler taste:
+for this nobler taste would have been mere apery. The busy, anxious,
+money-loving merchant of Hamburg could only have adopted, he could not
+have enjoyed the simplicity of nature. The mind begins to love nature by
+imitating human conveniences in nature; but this is a step in intellect,
+though a low one--and were it not so, yet all around me spoke
+of innocent enjoyment and sensitive comforts, and I entered with
+unscrupulous sympathy into the enjoyments and comforts even of the
+busy, anxious, money-loving merchants of Hamburg. In this charitable and
+catholic mood I reached the vast ramparts of the city. These are huge
+green cushions, one rising above the other, with trees growing in the
+interspaces, pledges and symbols of a long peace. Of my return I have
+nothing worth communicating, except that I took extra post, which
+answers to posting in England. These north German post chaises are
+uncovered wicker carts. An English dust-cart is a piece of finery, a
+chef d'auvre of mechanism, compared with them and the horses!--a savage
+might use their ribs instead of his fingers for a numeration table.
+Wherever we stopped, the postilion fed his cattle with the brown rye
+bread of which he eat himself, all breakfasting together; only the
+horses had no gin to their water, and the postilion no water to his gin.
+Now and henceforward for subjects of more interest to you, and to
+the objects in search of which I left you: namely, the literati and
+literature of Germany.
+
+Believe me, I walked with an impression of awe on my spirits, as
+W----and myself accompanied Mr. Klopstock to the house of his brother,
+the poet, which stands about a quarter of a mile from the city gate.
+It is one of a row of little common-place summer-houses, (for so they
+looked,) with four or five rows of young meagre elm trees before the
+windows, beyond which is a green, and then a dead flat intersected with
+several roads. Whatever beauty, (thought I,) may be before the poet's
+eyes at present, it must certainly be purely of his own creation. We
+waited a few minutes in a neat little parlour, ornamented with the
+figures of two of the Muses and with prints, the subjects of which were
+from Klopstock's odes. The poet entered. I was much disappointed in his
+countenance, and recognised in it no likeness to the bust. There was
+no comprehension in the forehead, no weight over the eye-brows, no
+expression of peculiarity, moral or intellectual, on the eyes, no
+massiveness in the general countenance. He is, if anything, rather below
+the middle size. He wore very large half-boots, which his legs filled,
+so fearfully were they swollen. However, though neither W---- nor
+myself could discover any indications of sublimity or enthusiasm in his
+physiognomy, we were both equally impressed with his liveliness, and his
+kind and ready courtesy. He talked in French with my friend, and with
+difficulty spoke a few sentences to me in English. His enunciation was
+not in the least affected by the entire want of his upper teeth. The
+conversation began on his part by the expression of his rapture at the
+surrender of the detachment of French troops under General Humbert.
+Their proceedings in Ireland with regard to the committee which they
+had appointed, with the rest of their organizing system, seemed to have
+given the poet great entertainment. He then declared his sanguine belief
+in Nelson's victory, and anticipated its confirmation with a keen and
+triumphant pleasure. His words, tones, looks, implied the most vehement
+Anti-Gallicanism. The subject changed to literature, and I inquired
+in Latin concerning the history of German poetry and the elder German
+poets. To my great astonishment he confessed, that he knew very little
+on the subject. He had indeed occasionally read one or two of their
+elder writers, but not so as to enable him to speak of their merits.
+Professor Ebeling, he said, would probably give me every information of
+this kind: the subject had not particularly excited his curiosity.
+He then talked of Milton and Glover, and thought Glover's blank verse
+superior to Milton's. W---- and myself expressed our surprise: and
+my friend gave his definition and notion of harmonious verse, that
+it consisted, (the English iambic blank verse above all,) in the apt
+arrangement of pauses and cadences, and the sweep of whole paragraphs,
+
+    "with many a winding bout
+     Of linked sweetness long drawn out,"
+
+and not in the even flow, much less in the prominence of antithetic
+vigour, of single lines, which were indeed injurious to the total
+effect, except where they were introduced for some specific purpose.
+Klopstock assented, and said that he meant to confine Glover's
+superiority to single lines. He told us that he had read Milton, in
+a prose translation, when he was fourteen [77]. I understood him thus
+myself, and W---- interpreted Klopstock's French as I had already
+construed it. He appeared to know very little of Milton or indeed of our
+poets in general. He spoke with great indignation of the English prose
+translation of his MESSIAH. All the translations had been bad, very
+bad--but the English was no translation--there were pages on pages
+not in the original--and half the original was not to be found in the
+translation. W---- told him that I intended to translate a few of his
+odes as specimens of German lyrics--he then said to me in English, "I
+wish you would render into English some select passages of THE MESSIAH,
+and revenge me of your countryman!". It was the liveliest thing which he
+produced in the whole conversation. He told us, that his first ode was
+fifty years older than his last. I looked at him with much emotion--I
+considered him as the venerable father of German poetry; as a good man;
+as a Christian; seventy-four years old; with legs enormously swollen;
+yet active, lively, cheerful, and kind, and communicative. My eyes felt
+as if a tear were swelling into them. In the portrait of Lessing
+there was a toupee periwig, which enormously injured the effect of his
+physiognomy--Klopstock wore the same, powdered and frizzled. By the
+bye, old men ought never to wear powder--the contrast between a large
+snow-white wig and the colour of an old man's skin is disgusting, and
+wrinkles in such a neighbourhood appear only channels for dirt. It is
+an honour to poets and great men, that you think of them as parts of
+nature; and anything of trick and fashion wounds you in them, as much as
+when you see venerable yews clipped into miserable peacocks.--The author
+of THE MESSIAH should have worn his own grey hair.--His powder and
+periwig were to the eye what Mr. Virgil would be to the ear.
+
+Klopstock dwelt much on the superior power which the German language
+possessed of concentrating meaning. He said, he had often translated
+parts of Homer and Virgil, line by line, and a German line proved always
+sufficient for a Greek or Latin one. In English you cannot do this. I
+answered, that in English we could commonly render one Greek heroic line
+in a line and a half of our common heroic metre, and I conjectured that
+this line and a half would be found to contain no more syllables than
+one German or Greek hexameter. He did not understand me [78]: and I, who
+wished to hear his opinions, not to correct them, was glad that he did
+not.
+
+We now took our leave. At the beginning of the French Revolution
+Klopstock wrote odes of congratulation. He received some honorary
+presents from the French Republic, (a golden crown I believe), and,
+like our Priestley, was invited to a seat in the legislature, which he
+declined. But when French liberty metamorphosed herself into a fury, he
+sent back these presents with a palinodia, declaring his abhorrence of
+their proceedings: and since then he has been perhaps more than enough
+an Anti-Gallican. I mean, that in his just contempt and detestation
+of the crimes and follies of the Revolutionists, he suffers himself to
+forget that the revolution itself is a process of the Divine Providence;
+and that as the folly of men is the wisdom of God, so are their
+iniquities instruments of his goodness. From Klopstock's house we walked
+to the ramparts, discoursing together on the poet and his conversation,
+till our attention was diverted to the beauty and singularity of the
+sunset and its effects on the objects around us. There were woods in the
+distance. A rich sandy light, (nay, of a much deeper colour than sandy,)
+lay over these woods that blackened in the blaze. Over that part of
+the woods which lay immediately under the intenser light, a brassy mist
+floated. The trees on the ramparts, and the people moving to and fro
+between them, were cut or divided into equal segments of deep shade and
+brassy light. Had the trees, and the bodies of the men and women, been
+divided into equal segments by a rule or pair of compasses, the portions
+could not have been more regular. All else was obscure. It was a
+fairy scene!--and to increase its romantic character, among the moving
+objects, thus divided into alternate shade and brightness, was a
+beautiful child, dressed with the elegant simplicity of an English
+child, riding on a stately goat, the saddle, bridle, and other
+accoutrements of which were in a high degree costly and splendid. Before
+I quit the subject of Hamburg, let me say, that I remained a day or two
+longer than I otherwise should have done, in order to be present at the
+feast of St. Michael, the patron saint of Hamburg, expecting to see
+the civic pomp of this commercial Republic. I was however disappointed.
+There were no processions, two or three sermons were preached to two
+or three old women in two or three churches, and St. Michael and
+his patronage wished elsewhere by the higher classes, all places of
+entertainment, theatre, etc. being shut up on this day. In Hamburg,
+there seems to be no religion at all; in Luebec it is confined to the
+women. The men seemed determined to be divorced from their wives in the
+other world, if they cannot in this. You will not easily conceive a more
+singular sight, than is presented by the vast aisle of the principal
+church at Luebec, seen from the organ loft: for being filled with female
+servants and persons in the same class of life, and all their caps
+having gold and silver cauls, it appears like a rich pavement of gold
+and silver.
+
+I will conclude this letter with the mere transcription of notes, which
+my friend W---- made of his conversations with Klopstock, during the
+interviews that took place after my departure. On these I shall make but
+one remark at present, and that will appear a presumptuous one, namely,
+that Klopstock's remarks on the venerable sage of Koenigsburg are to my
+own knowledge injurious and mistaken; and so far is it from being true,
+that his system is now given up, that throughout the Universities of
+Germany there is not a single professor who is not either a Kantean or
+a disciple of Fichte, whose system is built on the Kantean, and
+presupposes its truth; or lastly who, though an antagonist of Kant, as
+to his theoretical work, has not embraced wholly or in part his moral
+system, and adopted part of his nomenclature. "Klopstock having wished
+to see the CALVARY of Cumberland, and asked what was thought of it in
+England, I went to Remnant's (the English bookseller) where I procured
+the Analytical Review, in which is contained the review of Cumberland's
+CALVARY. I remembered to have read there some specimens of a blank verse
+translation of THE MESSIAH. I had mentioned this to Klopstock, and he
+had a great desire to see them. I walked over to his house and put the
+book into his hands. On adverting to his own poem, he told me he began
+THE MESSIAH when he was seventeen; he devoted three entire years to the
+plan without composing a single line. He was greatly at a loss in
+what manner to execute his work. There were no successful specimens of
+versification in the German language before this time. The first three
+cantos he wrote in a species of measured or numerous prose. This, though
+done with much labour and some success, was far from satisfying him. He
+had composed hexameters both Latin and Greek as a school exercise, and
+there had been also in the German language attempts in that style of
+versification. These were only of very moderate merit.--One day he was
+struck with the idea of what could be done in this way--he kept his
+room a whole day, even went without his dinner, and found that in the
+evening he had written twenty-three hexameters, versifying a part of
+what he had before written in prose. From that time, pleased with his
+efforts, he composed no more in prose. Today he informed me that he
+had finished his plan before he read Milton. He was enchanted to see an
+author who before him had trod the same path. This is a contradiction
+of what he said before. He did not wish to speak of his poem to any one
+till it was finished: but some of his friends who had seen what he had
+finished, tormented him till he had consented to publish a few books in
+a journal. He was then, I believe, very young, about twenty-five.
+The rest was printed at different periods, four books at a time. The
+reception given to the first specimens was highly flattering. He was
+nearly thirty years in finishing the whole poem, but of these thirty
+years not more than two were employed in the composition. He only
+composed in favourable moments; besides he had other occupations. He
+values himself upon the plan of his odes, and accuses the modern lyrical
+writers of gross deficiency in this respect. I laid the same accusation
+against Horace: he would not hear of it--but waived the discussion.
+He called Rousseau's ODE TO FORTUNE a moral dissertation in stanzas.
+I spoke of Dryden's ST. CECILIA; but he did not seem familiar with our
+writers. He wished to know the distinctions between our dramatic and
+epic blank verse. He recommended me to read his HERMANN before I read
+either THE MESSIAH or the odes. He flattered himself that some time or
+other his dramatic poems would be known in England. He had not heard of
+Cowper. He thought that Voss in his translation of THE ILIAD had done
+violence to the idiom of the Germans, and had sacrificed it to the
+Greeks, not remembering sufficiently that each language has its
+particular spirit and genius. He said Lessing was the first of their
+dramatic writers. I complained of NATHAN as tedious. He said there was
+not enough of action in it; but that Lessing was the most chaste of
+their writers. He spoke favourably of Goethe; but said that his SORROWS
+OF WERTER was his best work, better than any of his dramas: he preferred
+the first written to the rest of Goethe's dramas. Schiller's ROBBERS he
+found so extravagant, that he could not read it. I spoke of the scene of
+the setting sun. He did not know it. He said Schiller could not live.
+He thought DON CARLOS the best of his dramas; but said that the plot
+was inextricable.--It was evident he knew little of Schiller's works:
+indeed, he said, he could not read them. Buerger, he said, was a true
+poet, and would live; that Schiller, on the contrary, must soon be
+forgotten; that he gave himself up to the imitation of Shakespeare, who
+often was extravagant, but that Schiller was ten thousand times more so.
+He spoke very slightingly of Kotzebue, as an immoral author in the first
+place, and next, as deficient in power. At Vienna, said he, they are
+transported with him; but we do not reckon the people of Vienna either
+the wisest or the wittiest people of Germany. He said Wieland was a
+charming author, and a sovereign master of his own language: that in
+this respect Goethe could not be compared to him, nor indeed could any
+body else. He said that his fault was to be fertile to exuberance. I
+told him the OBERON had just been translated into English. He asked me
+if I was not delighted with the poem. I answered, that I thought the
+story began to flag about the seventh or eighth book; and observed, that
+it was unworthy of a man of genius to make the interest of a long poem
+turn entirely upon animal gratification. He seemed at first disposed to
+excuse this by saying, that there are different subjects for poetry, and
+that poets are not willing to be restricted in their choice. I answered,
+that I thought the passion of love as well suited to the purposes of
+poetry as any other passion; but that it was a cheap way of pleasing
+to fix the attention of the reader through a long poem on the mere
+appetite. Well! but, said he, you see, that such poems please every
+body. I answered, that it was the province of a great poet to raise
+people up to his own level, not to descend to theirs. He agreed, and
+confessed, that on no account whatsoever would he have written a work
+like the OBERON. He spoke in raptures of Wieland's style, and pointed
+out the passage where Retzia is delivered of her child, as exquisitely
+beautiful. I said that I did not perceive any very striking passages;
+but that I made allowance for the imperfections of a translation. Of the
+thefts of Wieland, he said, they were so exquisitely managed, that the
+greatest writers might be proud to steal as he did. He considered the
+books and fables of old romance writers in the light of the ancient
+mythology, as a sort of common property, from which a man was free to
+take whatever he could make a good use of. An Englishman had presented
+him with the odes of Collins, which he had read with pleasure. He
+knew little or nothing of Gray, except his ELEGY written in a country
+CHURCH-YARD. He complained of the fool in LEAR. I observed that he
+seemed to give a terrible wildness to the distress; but still he
+complained. He asked whether it was not allowed, that Pope had written
+rhymed poetry with more skill than any of our writers--I said I
+preferred Dryden, because his couplets had greater variety in their
+movement. He thought my reason a good one; but asked whether the rhyme
+of Pope were not more exact. This question I understood as applying to
+the final terminations, and observed to him that I believed it was the
+case; but that I thought it was easy to excuse some inaccuracy in the
+final sounds, if the general sweep of the verse was superior. I told him
+that we were not so exact with regard to the final endings of the lines
+as the French. He did not seem to know that we made no distinction
+between masculine and feminine (i.e. single or double,) rhymes: at
+least he put inquiries to me on this subject. He seemed to think that
+no language could be so far formed as that it might not be enriched by
+idioms borrowed from another tongue. I said this was a very dangerous
+practice; and added, that I thought Milton had often injured both his
+prose and verse by taking this liberty too frequently. I recommended to
+him the prose works of Dryden as models of pure and native English. I
+was treading upon tender ground, as I have reason to suppose that he has
+himself liberally indulged in the practice."
+
+The same day I dined at Mr. Klopstock's, where I had the pleasure of a
+third interview with the poet. We talked principally about indifferent
+things. I asked him what he thought of Kant. He said that his reputation
+was much on the decline in Germany. That for his own part he was not
+surprised to find it so, as the works of Kant were to him utterly
+incomprehensible--that he had often been pestered by the Kanteans;
+but was rarely in the practice of arguing with them. His custom was to
+produce the book, open it and point to a passage, and beg they would
+explain it. This they ordinarily attempted to do by substituting their
+own ideas. I do not want, I say, an explanation of your own ideas, but
+of the passage which is before us. In this way I generally bring the
+dispute to an immediate conclusion. He spoke of Wolfe as the first
+Metaphysician they had in Germany. Wolfe had followers; but they could
+hardly be called a sect, and luckily till the appearance of Kant,
+about fifteen years ago, Germany had not been pestered by any sect of
+philosophers whatsoever; but that each man had separately pursued his
+inquiries uncontrolled by the dogmas of a master. Kant had appeared
+ambitious to be the founder of a sect; that he had succeeded: but that
+the Germans were now coming to their senses again. That Nicolai and
+Engel had in different ways contributed to disenchant the nation; but
+above all the incomprehensibility of the philosopher and his philosophy.
+He seemed pleased to hear, that as yet Kant's doctrines had not met with
+many admirers in England--did not doubt but that we had too much wisdom
+to be duped by a writer who set at defiance the common sense and common
+understandings of men. We talked of tragedy. He seemed to rate highly
+the power of exciting tears--I said that nothing was more easy than to
+deluge an audience, that it was done every day by the meanest writers.
+
+I must remind you, my friend, first, that these notes are not intended
+as specimens of Klopstock's intellectual power, or even "colloquial
+prowess," to judge of which by an accidental conversation, and this with
+strangers, and those too foreigners, would be not only unreasonable, but
+calumnious. Secondly, I attribute little other interest to the remarks
+than what is derived from the celebrity of the person who made them.
+Lastly, if you ask me, whether I have read THE MESSIAH, and what I
+think of it? I answer--as yet the first four books only: and as to my
+opinion--(the reasons of which hereafter)--you may guess it from what
+I could not help muttering to myself, when the good pastor this morning
+told me, that Klopstock was the German Milton--"a very German Milton
+indeed!!!"
+
+Heaven preserve you, and S. T. COLERIDGE.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+Quid quod praefatione praemunierim libellum, qua conor omnem offendiculi
+ansam praecidere? [79] Neque quicquam addubito, quin ea candidis omnibus
+faciat satis. Quid autem facias istis, qui vel ob ingenii pertinaciam
+sibi satisfieri nolint, vel stupidiores sint, quam ut satisfactionem
+intelligant? Nam quemadmodum Simonides dixit, Thessalos hebetiores esse,
+quam ut possint a se decipi, ita quosdam videas stupidiores, quam ut
+placari queant. Adhaec, non mirum est invenire quod calumnietur,
+qui nihil aliud quaerit, nisi quod calumnietur. ERASMUS ad Dorpium,
+Theologum.
+
+
+In the rifacimento of THE FRIEND, I have inserted extracts from the
+CONCIONES AD POPULUM, printed, though scarcely published, in the year
+1795, in the very heat and height of my anti-ministerial enthusiasm:
+these in proof that my principles of politics have sustained no
+change.--In the present chapter, I have annexed to my Letters
+from Germany, with particular reference to that, which contains a
+disquisition on the modern drama, a critique on the Tragedy of BERTRAM,
+written within the last twelve months: in proof, that I have been as
+falsely charged with any fickleness in my principles of taste.--The
+letter was written to a friend: and the apparent abruptness with which
+it begins, is owing to the omission of the introductory sentences.
+
+You remember, my dear Sir, that Mr. Whitbread, shortly before his death,
+proposed to the assembled subscribers of Drury Lane Theatre, that the
+concern should be farmed to some responsible individual under certain
+conditions and limitations: and that his proposal was rejected,
+not without indignation, as subversive of the main object, for the
+attainment of which the enlightened and patriotic assemblage of
+philodramatists had been induced to risk their subscriptions. Now this
+object was avowed to be no less than the redemption of the British stage
+not only from horses, dogs, elephants, and the like zoological rarities,
+but also from the more pernicious barbarisms and Kotzebuisms in morals
+and taste. Drury Lane was to be restored to its former classical renown;
+Shakespeare, Jonson, and Otway, with the expurgated muses of Vanbrugh,
+Congreve, and Wycherley, were to be reinaugurated in their rightful
+dominion over British audiences; and the Herculean process was to
+commence, by exterminating the speaking monsters imported from the banks
+of the Danube, compared with which their mute relations, the emigrants
+from Exeter 'Change, and Polito (late Pidcock's) show-carts, were tame
+and inoffensive. Could an heroic project, at once so refined and so
+arduous, be consistently entrusted to, could its success be rationally
+expected from, a mercenary manager, at whose critical quarantine the
+lucri bonus odor would conciliate a bill of health to the plague in
+person? No! As the work proposed, such must be the work-masters. Rank,
+fortune, liberal education, and (their natural accompaniments, or
+consequences) critical discernment, delicate tact, disinterestedness,
+unsuspected morals, notorious patriotism, and tried Maecenasship, these
+were the recommendations that influenced the votes of the proprietary
+subscribers of Drury Lane Theatre, these the motives that occasioned the
+election of its Supreme Committee of Management. This circumstance alone
+would have excited a strong interest in the public mind, respecting the
+first production of the Tragic Muse which had been announced under such
+auspices, and had passed the ordeal of such judgments: and the tragedy,
+on which you have requested my judgment, was the work on which the great
+expectations, justified by so many causes, were doomed at length to
+settle.
+
+But before I enter on the examination of BERTRAM, or THE CASTLE OF ST.
+ALDOBRAND, I shall interpose a few words, on the phrase German Drama,
+which I hold to be altogether a misnomer. At the time of Lessing, the
+German stage, such as it was, appears to have been a flat and servile
+copy of the French. It was Lessing who first introduced the name and the
+works of Shakespeare to the admiration of the Germans; and I should not
+perhaps go too far, if I add, that it was Lessing who first proved to
+all thinking men, even to Shakespeare's own countrymen, the true nature
+of his apparent irregularities. These, he demonstrated, were deviations
+only from the accidents of the Greek tragedy; and from such accidents as
+hung a heavy weight on the wings of the Greek poets, and narrowed
+their flight within the limits of what we may call the heroic opera. He
+proved, that, in all the essentials of art, no less than in the truth of
+nature, the Plays of Shakespeare were incomparably more coincident
+with the principles of Aristotle, than the productions of Corneille
+and Racine, notwithstanding the boasted regularity of the latter. Under
+these convictions were Lessing's own dramatic works composed. Their
+deficiency is in depth and imagination: their excellence is in the
+construction of the plot; the good sense of the sentiments; the sobriety
+of the morals; and the high polish of the diction and dialogue. In
+short, his dramas are the very antipodes of all those which it has been
+the fashion of late years at once to abuse and enjoy, under the name of
+the German drama. Of this latter, Schiller's ROBBERS was the earliest
+specimen; the first fruits of his youth, (I had almost said of his
+boyhood), and as such, the pledge, and promise of no ordinary genius.
+Only as such, did the maturer judgment of the author tolerate the Play.
+During his whole life he expressed himself concerning this production
+with more than needful asperity, as a monster not less offensive to good
+taste, than to sound morals; and, in his latter years, his indignation
+at the unwonted popularity of the ROBBERS seduced him into the contrary
+extremes, viz. a studied feebleness of interest, (as far as the interest
+was to be derived from incidents and the excitement of curiosity);
+a diction elaborately metrical; the affectation of rhymes; and the
+pedantry of the chorus.
+
+But to understand the true character of the ROBBERS, and of the
+countless imitations which were its spawn, I must inform you, or at
+least call to your recollection, that, about that time, and for some
+years before it, three of the most popular books in the German language
+were, the translations Of YOUNG'S NIGHT THOUGHTS, HERVEY'S MEDITATIONS,
+and RICHARDSON'S CLARISSA HARLOW. Now we have only to combine the
+bloated style and peculiar rhythm of Hervey, which is poetic only on
+account of its utter unfitness for prose, and might as appropriately
+be called prosaic, from its utter unfitness for poetry; we have only,
+I repeat, to combine these Herveyisms with the strained thoughts, the
+figurative metaphysics and solemn epigrams of Young on the one hand; and
+with the loaded sensibility, the minute detail, the morbid consciousness
+of every thought and feeling in the whole flux and reflux of the mind,
+in short the self-involution and dreamlike continuity of Richardson on
+the other hand; and then to add the horrific incidents, and mysterious
+villains, (geniuses of supernatural intellect, if you will take the
+authors' words for it, but on a level with the meanest ruffians of
+the condemned cells, if we are to judge by their actions and
+contrivances)--to add the ruined castles, the dungeons, the trap-doors,
+the skeletons, the flesh-and-blood ghosts, and the perpetual moonshine
+of a modern author, (themselves the literary brood of the CASTLE OF
+OTRANTO, the translations of which, with the imitations and improvements
+aforesaid, were about that time beginning to make as much noise in
+Germany as their originals were making in England),--and as the compound
+of these ingredients duly mixed, you will recognize the so-called German
+drama. The olla podrida thus cooked up, was denounced, by the best
+critics in Germany, as the mere cramps of weakness, and orgasms of a
+sickly imagination on the part of the author, and the lowest provocation
+of torpid feeling on that of the readers. The old blunder, however,
+concerning the irregularity and wildness of Shakespeare, in which the
+German did but echo the French, who again were but the echoes of our own
+critics, was still in vogue, and Shakespeare was quoted as authority for
+the most anti-Shakespearean drama. We have indeed two poets who wrote as
+one, near the age of Shakespeare, to whom, (as the worst characteristic
+of their writings), the Coryphaeus of the present drama may challenge
+the honour of being a poor relation, or impoverished descendant. For
+if we would charitably consent to forget the comic humour, the wit, the
+felicities of style, in other words, all the poetry, and nine-tenths of
+all the genius of Beaumont and Fletcher, that which would remain becomes
+a Kotzebue.
+
+The so-called German drama, therefore, is English in its origin, English
+in its materials, and English by re-adoption; and till we can prove that
+Kotzebue, or any of the whole breed of Kotzebues, whether dramatists or
+romantic writers, or writers of romantic dramas, were ever admitted
+to any other shelf in the libraries of well-educated Germans than were
+occupied by their originals, and apes' apes in their mother country,
+we should submit to carry our own brat on our own shoulders; or rather
+consider it as a lack-grace returned from transportation with such
+improvements only in growth and manners as young transported convicts
+usually come home with.
+
+I know nothing that contributes more to a clearer insight into the true
+nature of any literary phaenomenon, than the comparison of it with some
+elder production, the likeness of which is striking, yet only apparent,
+while the difference is real. In the present case this opportunity is
+furnished us, by the old Spanish play, entitled Atheista Fulminato,
+formerly, and perhaps still, acted in the churches and monasteries of
+Spain, and which, under various names (Don Juan, the Libertine,
+etc.) has had its day of favour in every country throughout Europe. A
+popularity so extensive, and of a work so grotesque and extravagant,
+claims and merits philosophical attention and investigation. The first
+point to be noticed is, that the play is throughout imaginative.
+Nothing of it belongs to the real world, but the names of the places and
+persons. The comic parts, equally with the tragic; the living, equally
+with the defunct characters, are creatures of the brain; as little
+amenable to the rules of ordinary probability, as the Satan Of PARADISE
+LOST, or the Caliban of THE TEMPEST, and therefore to be understood
+and judged of as impersonated abstractions. Rank, fortune, wit, talent,
+acquired knowledge, and liberal accomplishments, with beauty of person,
+vigorous health, and constitutional hardihood,--all these advantages,
+elevated by the habits and sympathies of noble birth and national
+character, are supposed to have combined in Don Juan, so as to give him
+the means of carrying into all its practical consequences the doctrine
+of a godless nature, as the sole ground and efficient cause not only of
+all things, events, and appearances, but likewise of all our thoughts,
+sensations, impulses and actions. Obedience to nature is the only
+virtue: the gratification of the passions and appetites her only
+dictate: each individual's self-will the sole organ through which nature
+utters her commands, and
+
+    "Self-contradiction is the only wrong!
+     For, by the laws of spirit, in the right
+     Is every individual character
+     That acts in strict consistence with itself."
+
+That speculative opinions, however impious and daring they may be, are
+not always followed by correspondent conduct, is most true, as well as
+that they can scarcely in any instance be systematically realized, on
+account of their unsuitableness to human nature and to the institutions
+of society. It can be hell, only where it is all hell: and a separate
+world of devils is necessary for the existence of any one complete
+devil. But on the other hand it is no less clear, nor, with the
+biography of Carrier and his fellow atheists before us, can it be denied
+without wilful blindness, that the (so called) system of nature (that
+is, materialism, with the utter rejection of moral responsibility, of
+a present Providence, and of both present and future retribution)
+may influence the characters and actions of individuals, and even of
+communities, to a degree that almost does away the distinction between
+men and devils, and will make the page of the future historian resemble
+the narration of a madman's dreams. It is not the wickedness of Don
+Juan, therefore, which constitutes the character an abstraction, and
+removes it from the rules of probability; but the rapid succession of
+the correspondent acts and incidents, his intellectual superiority,
+and the splendid accumulation of his gifts and desirable qualities, as
+co-existent with entire wickedness in one and the same person. But this
+likewise is the very circumstance which gives to this strange play its
+charm and universal interest. Don Juan is, from beginning to end, an
+intelligible character: as much so as the Satan of Milton. The poet asks
+only of the reader, what, as a poet, he is privileged to ask: namely,
+that sort of negative faith in the existence of such a being, which we
+willingly give to productions professedly ideal, and a disposition
+to the same state of feeling, as that with which we contemplate the
+idealized figures of the Apollo Belvidere, and the Farnese Hercules.
+What the Hercules is to the eye in corporeal strength, Don Juan is
+to the mind in strength of character. The ideal consists in the happy
+balance of the generic with the individual. The former makes the
+character representative and symbolical, therefore instructive; because,
+mutatis mutandis, it is applicable to whole classes of men. The latter
+gives it living interest; for nothing lives or is real, but as definite
+and individual. To understand this completely, the reader need only
+recollect the specific state of his feelings, when in looking at a
+picture of the historic (more properly of the poetic or heroic) class,
+he objects to a particular figure as being too much of a portrait;
+and this interruption of his complacency he feels without the least
+reference to, or the least acquaintance with, any person in real life
+whom he might recognise in this figure. It is enough that such a figure
+is not ideal: and therefore not ideal, because one of the two factors
+or elements of the ideal is in excess. A similar and more powerful
+objection he would feel towards a set of figures which were mere
+abstractions, like those of Cipriani, and what have been called Greek
+forms and faces, that is, outlines drawn according to a recipe. These
+again are not ideal; because in these the other element is in excess.
+"Forma formans per formam formatam translucens," [80] is the definition
+and perfection of ideal art.
+
+This excellence is so happily achieved in the Don Juan, that it is
+capable of interesting without poetry, nay, even without words, as in
+our pantomime of that name. We see clearly how the character is formed;
+and the very extravagance of the incidents, and the super-human
+entireness of Don Juan's agency, prevents the wickedness from shocking
+our minds to any painful degree. We do not believe it enough for this
+effect; no, not even with that kind of temporary and negative belief or
+acquiescence which I have described above. Meantime the qualities of his
+character are too desirable, too flattering to our pride and our wishes,
+not to make up on this side as much additional faith as was lost on
+the other. There is no danger (thinks the spectator or reader) of my
+becoming such a monster of iniquity as Don Juan! I never shall be an
+atheist! I shall never disallow all distinction between right and wrong!
+I have not the least inclination to be so outrageous a drawcansir in my
+love affairs! But to possess such a power of captivating and enchanting
+the affections of the other sex!--to be capable of inspiring in a
+charming and even a virtuous woman, a love so deep, and so entirely
+personal to me!--that even my worst vices, (if I were vicious), even
+my cruelty and perfidy, (if I were cruel and perfidious), could not
+eradicate the passion!--to be so loved for my own self, that even with a
+distinct knowledge of my character, she yet died to save me!--this, sir,
+takes hold of two sides of our nature, the better and the worse. For the
+heroic disinterestedness, to which love can transport a woman, can
+not be contemplated without an honourable emotion of reverence towards
+womanhood: and, on the other hand, it is among the miseries, and abides
+in the dark ground-work of our nature, to crave an outward confirmation
+of that something within us, which is our very self, that something,
+not made up of our qualities and relations, but itself the supporter and
+substantial basis of all these. Love me, and not my qualities, may be
+a vicious and an insane wish, but it is not a wish wholly without a
+meaning.
+
+Without power, virtue would be insufficient and incapable of revealing
+its being. It would resemble the magic transformation of Tasso's heroine
+into a tree, in which she could only groan and bleed. Hence power is
+necessarily an object of our desire and of our admiration. But of all
+power, that of the mind is, on every account, the grand desideratum of
+human ambition. We shall be as Gods in knowledge, was and must have been
+the first temptation: and the coexistence of great intellectual lordship
+with guilt has never been adequately represented without exciting
+the strongest interest, and for this reason, that in this bad and
+heterogeneous co-ordination we can contemplate the intellect of man more
+exclusively as a separate self-subsistence, than in its proper state
+of subordination to his own conscience, or to the will of an infinitely
+superior being.
+
+This is the sacred charm of Shakespeare's male characters in general.
+They are all cast in the mould of Shakespeare's own gigantic intellect;
+and this is the open attraction of his Richard, Iago, Edmund, and others
+in particular. But again; of all intellectual power, that of superiority
+to the fear of the invisible world is the most dazzling. Its influence
+is abundantly proved by the one circumstance, that it can bribe us into
+a voluntary submission of our better knowledge, into suspension of all
+our judgment derived from constant experience, and enable us to peruse
+with the liveliest interest the wildest tales of ghosts, wizards,
+genii, and secret talismans. On this propensity, so deeply rooted in our
+nature, a specific dramatic probability may be raised by a true poet, if
+the whole of his work be in harmony: a dramatic probability, sufficient
+for dramatic pleasure, even when the component characters and incidents
+border on impossibility. The poet does not require us to be awake and
+believe; he solicits us only to yield ourselves to a dream; and this
+too with our eyes open, and with our judgment perdue behind the curtain,
+ready to awaken us at the first motion of our will: and meantime,
+only, not to disbelieve. And in such a state of mind, who but must be
+impressed with the cool intrepidity of Don john on the appearance of his
+father's ghost:
+
+ "GHOST.--Monster! behold these wounds!
+
+ "D. JOHN.--I do! They were well meant and well performed, I see.
+
+ "GHOST.------Repent, repent of all thy villanies.
+  My clamorous blood to heaven for vengeance cries,
+  Heaven will pour out his judgments on you all.
+  Hell gapes for you, for you each fiend doth call,
+  And hourly waits your unrepenting fall.
+  You with eternal horrors they'll torment,
+  Except of all your crimes you suddenly repent. (Ghost sinks.)
+
+ "D. JOHN.--Farewell, thou art a foolish ghost. Repent, quoth he!
+  what could this mean? Our senses are all in a mist sure.
+
+ "D. ANTONIO.--(one of D. Juan's reprobate companions.) They are not!
+  'Twas a ghost.
+
+ "D. LOPEZ.--(another reprobate.) I ne'er believed those foolish tales
+  before.
+
+ "D. JOHN.--Come! 'Tis no matter. Let it be what it will, it must be
+  natural.
+
+ "D. ANT.--And nature is unalterable in us too.
+
+ "D. JOHN.--'Tis true! The nature of a ghost can not change our's."
+
+Who also can deny a portion of sublimity to the tremendous consistency
+with which he stands out the last fearful trial, like a second
+Prometheus?
+
+                  "Chorus of Devils.
+
+ "STATUE-GHOST.--Will you not relent and feel remorse?
+
+ "D. JOHN.--Could'st thou bestow another heart on me I might. But
+  with this heart I have, I can not.
+
+ "D. LOPEZ.--These things are prodigious.
+
+ "D. ANTON.--I have a sort of grudging to relent, but something holds
+  me back.
+
+ "D. LOP.--If we could, 'tis now too late. I will not.
+
+ "D. ANT.--We defy thee!
+
+ "GHOST.--Perish ye impious wretches, go and find the punishments laid
+  up in store for you!
+
+  (Thunder and lightning. D. Lop. and D. Ant. are swallowed up.)
+
+ "GHOST To D. JOHN.--Behold their dreadful fates, and know that thy
+  last moment's come!
+
+ "D. JOHN.--Think not to fright me, foolish ghost; I'll break your
+  marble body in pieces and pull down your horse.
+          (Thunder and lightning--chorus of devils, etc.)
+
+ "D. JOHN.--These things I see with wonder, but no fear.
+  Were all the elements to be confounded,
+  And shuffled all into their former chaos;
+  Were seas of sulphur flaming round about me,
+  And all mankind roaring within those fires,
+  I could not fear, or feel the least remorse.
+  To the last instant I would dare thy power.
+  Here I stand firm, and all thy threats contemn.
+  Thy murderer (to the ghost of one whom he had murdered)
+  Stands here! Now do thy worst!"
+          (He is swallowed up in a cloud of fire.)
+
+In fine the character of Don John consists in the union of every thing
+desirable to human nature, as means, and which therefore by the well
+known law of association becomes at length desirable on their own
+account. On their own account, and, in their own dignity, they are here
+displayed, as being employed to ends so unhuman, that in the effect,
+they appear almost as means without an end. The ingredients too are
+mixed in the happiest proportion, so as to uphold and relieve each
+other--more especially in that constant interpoise of wit, gaiety,
+and social generosity, which prevents the criminal, even in his most
+atrocious moments, from sinking into the mere ruffian, as far at least,
+as our imagination sits in judgment. Above all, the fine suffusion
+through the whole, with the characteristic manners and feelings, of a
+highly bred gentleman gives life to the drama. Thus having invited the
+statue-ghost of the governor, whom he had murdered, to supper, which
+invitation the marble ghost accepted by a nod of the head, Don John has
+prepared a banquet.
+
+ "D. JOHN.--Some wine, sirrah! Here's to Don Pedro's ghost--he should
+  have been welcome.
+
+ "D. LOP.--The rascal is afraid of you after death.
+                                   (One knocks hard at the door.)
+
+ "D. JOHN.--(to the servant)--Rise and do your duty.
+
+ "SERV.--Oh the devil, the devil!  (Marble ghost enters.)
+
+ "D. JOHN.--Ha! 'tis the ghost! Let's rise and receive him! Come,
+  Governour, you are welcome, sit there; if we had thought you would
+  have come, we would have staid for you.
+
+     *     *     *     *     *     *
+
+  Here, Governour, your health! Friends, put it about! Here's
+  excellent meat, taste of this ragout. Come, I'll help you, come
+  eat, and let old quarrels be forgotten.  (The ghost threatens him
+  with vengeance.)
+
+ "D. JOHN.--We are too much confirmed--curse on this dry discourse.
+  Come, here's to your mistress, you had one when you were living:
+  not forgetting your sweet sister.                (devils enter.)
+
+ "D. JOHN.--Are these some of your retinue? Devils, say you? I'm
+  sorry I have no burnt brandy to treat 'em with, that's drink fit
+  for devils," etc.
+
+Nor is the scene from which we quote interesting, in dramatic
+probability alone; it is susceptible likewise of a sound moral; of a
+moral that has more than common claims on the notice of a too numerous
+class, who are ready to receive the qualities of gentlemanly courage,
+and scrupulous honour, (in all the recognised laws of honour,) as the
+substitutes of virtue, instead of its ornaments. This, indeed, is the
+moral value of the play at large, and that which places it at a world's
+distance from the spirit of modern jacobinism. The latter introduces
+to us clumsy copies of these showy instrumental qualities, in order to
+reconcile us to vice and want of principle; while the Atheista Fulminato
+presents an exquisite portraiture of the same qualities, in all their
+gloss and glow, but presents them for the sole purpose of displaying
+their hollowness, and in order to put us on our guard by demonstrating
+their utter indifference to vice and virtue, whenever these and the like
+accomplishments are contemplated for themselves alone.
+
+Eighteen years ago I observed, that the whole secret of the modern
+jacobinical drama, (which, and not the German, is its appropriate
+designation,) and of all its popularity, consists in the confusion and
+subversion of the natural order of things in their causes and effects:
+namely, in the excitement of surprise by representing the qualities of
+liberality, refined feeling, and a nice sense of honour (those things
+rather which pass amongst us for such) in persons and in classes where
+experience teaches us least to expect them; and by rewarding with all
+the sympathies which are the due of virtue, those criminals whom law,
+reason, and religion have excommunicated from our esteem.
+
+This of itself would lead me back to BERTRAM, or the CASTLE OF ST.
+ALDOBRAND; but, in my own mind, this tragedy was brought into connection
+with THE LIBERTINE, (Shadwell's adaptation of the Atheista Fulminato to
+the English stage in the reign of Charles the Second,) by the fact, that
+our modern drama is taken, in the substance of it, from the first scene
+of the third act of THE LIBERTINE. But with what palpable superiority of
+judgment in the original! Earth and hell, men and spirits are up in arms
+against Don John; the two former acts of the play have not only prepared
+us for the supernatural, but accustomed us to the prodigious. It is,
+therefore, neither more nor less than we anticipate when the Captain
+exclaims: "In all the dangers I have been, such horrors I never knew.
+I am quite unmanned:" and when the Hermit says, that he had "beheld the
+ocean in wildest rage, yet ne'er before saw a storm so dreadful, such
+horrid flashes of lightning, and such claps of thunder, were never in
+my remembrance." And Don John's burst of startling impiety is equally
+intelligible in its motive, as dramatic in its effect.
+
+But what is there to account for the prodigy of the tempest at Bertram's
+shipwreck? It is a mere supernatural effect, without even a hint of any
+supernatural agency; a prodigy, without any circumstance mentioned that
+is prodigious; and a miracle introduced without a ground, and ending
+without a result. Every event and every scene of the play might have
+taken place as well if Bertram and his vessel had been driven in by a
+common hard gale, or from want of provisions. The first act would have
+indeed lost its greatest and most sonorous picture; a scene for the sake
+of a scene, without a word spoken; as such, therefore, (a rarity without
+a precedent), we must take it, and be thankful! In the opinion of not a
+few, it was, in every sense of the word, the best scene in the play.
+I am quite certain it was the most innocent: and the steady, quiet
+uprightness of the flame of the wax-candles, which the monks held
+over the roaring billows amid the storm of wind and rain, was really
+miraculous.
+
+The Sicilian sea coast: a convent of monks: night: a most portentous,
+unearthly storm: a vessel is wrecked contrary to all human expectation,
+one man saves himself by his prodigious powers as a swimmer, aided by
+the peculiarity of his destination--
+
+ "PRIOR.------All, all did perish
+
+  FIRST MONK.--Change, change those drenched weeds--
+
+  PRIOR.--I wist not of them--every soul did perish--
+                       Enter third Monk hastily.
+
+ "THIRD MONK.--No, there was one did battle with the storm
+  With careless desperate force; full many times
+  His life was won and lost, as tho' he recked not--
+  No hand did aid him, and he aided none--
+  Alone he breasted the broad wave, alone
+  That man was saved."
+
+Well! This man is led in by the monks, supposed dripping wet, and to
+very natural inquiries he either remains silent, or gives most brief and
+surly answers, and after three or four of these half-line courtesies,
+"dashing off the monks" who had saved him, he exclaims in the true
+sublimity of our modern misanthropic heroism--
+
+ "Off! ye are men--there's poison in your touch.
+  But I must yield, for this" (what?) "hath left me strengthless."
+
+So end the three first scenes. In the next (the Castle of St.
+Aldobrand,) we find the servants there equally frightened with this
+unearthly storm, though wherein it differed from other violent storms we
+are not told, except that Hugo informs us, page 9--
+
+ "PIET.--Hugo, well met. Does e'en thy age bear
+  Memory of so terrible a storm?
+
+  HUGO.--They have been frequent lately.
+
+  PIET.--They are ever so in Sicily.
+
+  HUGO.--So it is said. But storms when I was young
+  Would still pass o'er like Nature's fitful fevers,
+  And rendered all more wholesome. Now their rage,
+  Sent thus unseasonable and profitless,
+  Speaks like the threats of heaven."
+
+A most perplexing theory of Sicilian storms is this of old Hugo! and
+what is very remarkable, not apparently founded on any great familiarity
+of his own with this troublesome article. For when Pietro asserts the
+"ever more frequency" of tempests in Sicily, the old man professes to
+know nothing more of the fact, but by hearsay. "So it is said."--But why
+he assumed this storm to be unseasonable, and on what he grounded
+his prophecy, (for the storm is still in full fury), that it would be
+profitless, and without the physical powers common to all other violent
+sea-winds in purifying the atmosphere, we are left in the dark; as
+well concerning the particular points in which he knew it, during its
+continuance, to differ from those that he had been acquainted with in
+his youth. We are at length introduced to the Lady Imogine, who,
+we learn, had not rested "through" the night; not on account of the
+tempest, for
+
+    "Long ere the storm arose, her restless gestures
+     Forbade all hope to see her blest with sleep."
+
+Sitting at a table, and looking at a portrait, she informs us--First,
+that portrait-painters may make a portrait from memory,
+
+    "The limner's art may trace the absent feature."
+
+For surely these words could never mean, that a painter may have a
+person sit to him who afterwards may leave the room or perhaps the
+country? Secondly, that a portrait-painter can enable a mourning lady
+to possess a good likeness of her absent lover, but that the portrait-
+painter cannot, and who shall--
+
+    "Restore the scenes in which they met and parted?"
+
+The natural answer would have been--Why the scene-painter to be sure!
+But this unreasonable lady requires in addition sundry things to be
+painted that have neither lines nor colours--
+
+    "The thoughts, the recollections, sweet and bitter,
+     Or the Elysian dreams of lovers when they loved."
+
+Which last sentence must be supposed to mean; when they were present,
+and making love to each other.--Then, if this portrait could speak, it
+would "acquit the faith of womankind." How? Had she remained constant?
+No, she has been married to another man, whose wife she now is. How
+then? Why, that, in spite of her marriage vow, she had continued to
+yearn and crave for her former lover--
+
+    "This has her body, that her mind:
+     Which has the better bargain?"
+
+The lover, however, was not contented with this precious arrangement, as
+we shall soon find. The lady proceeds to inform us that during the many
+years of their separation, there have happened in the different parts of
+the world, a number of "such things;" even such, as in a course of
+years always have, and till the Millennium, doubtless always will happen
+somewhere or other. Yet this passage, both in language and in metre, is
+perhaps amongst the best parts of the play. The lady's love companion
+and most esteemed attendant, Clotilda, now enters and explains this love
+and esteem by proving herself a most passive and dispassionate listener,
+as well as a brief and lucky querist, who asks by chance, questions that
+we should have thought made for the very sake of the answers. In short,
+she very much reminds us of those puppet-heroines, for whom the
+showman contrives to dialogue without any skill in ventriloquism. This,
+notwithstanding, is the best scene in the Play, and though crowded with
+solecisms, corrupt diction, and offences against metre, would possess
+merits sufficient to out-weigh them, if we could suspend the moral
+sense during the perusal. It tells well and passionately the preliminary
+circumstances, and thus overcomes the main difficulty of most first
+acts, to wit, that of retrospective narration. It tells us of her having
+been honourably addressed by a noble youth, of rank and fortune vastly
+superior to her own: of their mutual love, heightened on her part
+by gratitude; of his loss of his sovereign's favour; his disgrace;
+attainder; and flight; that he (thus degraded) sank into a vile ruffian,
+the chieftain of a murderous banditti; and that from the habitual
+indulgence of the most reprobate habits and ferocious passions, he had
+become so changed, even in appearance, and features,
+
+    "That she who bore him had recoiled from him,
+     Nor known the alien visage of her child,
+     Yet still she (Imogine) lov'd him."
+
+She is compelled by the silent entreaties of a father, perishing with
+"bitter shameful want on the cold earth," to give her hand, with a heart
+thus irrecoverably pre-engaged, to Lord Aldobrand, the enemy of her
+lover, even to the very man who had baffled his ambitious schemes, and
+was, at the present time, entrusted with the execution of the sentence
+of death which had been passed on Bertram. Now, the proof of "woman's
+love," so industriously held forth for the sympathy, if not for the
+esteem of the audience, consists in this, that, though Bertram had
+become a robber and a murderer by trade, a ruffian in manners, yea, with
+form and features at which his own mother could not but "recoil," yet
+she (Lady Imogine) "the wife of a most noble, honoured Lord," estimable
+as a man, exemplary and affectionate as a husband, and the fond father
+of her only child--that she, notwithstanding all this, striking her
+heart, dares to say to it--
+
+    "But thou art Bertram's still, and Bertram's ever."
+
+A Monk now enters, and entreats in his Prior's name for the wonted
+hospitality, and "free noble usage" of the Castle of St. Aldobrand for
+some wretched shipwrecked souls, and from this we learn, for the
+first time, to our infinite surprise, that notwithstanding the
+supernaturalness of the storm aforesaid, not only Bertram, but the whole
+of his gang, had been saved, by what means we are left to conjecture,
+and can only conclude that they had all the same desperate swimming
+powers, and the same saving destiny as the hero, Bertram himself. So
+ends the first act, and with it the tale of the events, both those with
+which the tragedy begins, and those which had occurred previous to
+the date of its commencement. The second displays Bertram in disturbed
+sleep, which the Prior, who hangs over him, prefers calling a "starting
+trance," and with a strained voice, that would have awakened one of the
+seven sleepers, observes to the audience--
+
+    "How the lip works! How the bare teeth do grind!
+     And beaded drops course [81] down his writhen brow!"
+
+The dramatic effect of which passage we not only concede to the admirers
+of this tragedy, but acknowledge the further advantages of preparing the
+audience for the most surprising series of wry faces, proflated mouths,
+and lunatic gestures that were ever "launched" on an audience to "sear
+the sense." [82]
+
+ "PRIOR.--I will awake him from this horrid trance. This is no
+  natural sleep! Ho, wake thee, stranger!"
+
+This is rather a whimsical application of the verb reflex we must
+confess, though we remember a similar transfer of the agent to the
+patient in a manuscript tragedy, in which the Bertram of the piece,
+prostrating a man with a single blow of his fist, exclaims--"Knock me
+thee down, then ask thee if thou liv'st." Well; the stranger obeys, and
+whatever his sleep might have been, his waking was perfectly natural;
+for lethargy itself could not withstand the scolding Stentorship of
+Mr. Holland, the Prior. We next learn from the best authority, his own
+confession, that the misanthropic hero, whose destiny was incompatible
+with drowning, is Count Bertram, who not only reveals his past fortunes,
+but avows with open atrocity, his Satanic hatred of Imogine's lord, and
+his frantick thirst of revenge; and so the raving character raves, and
+the scolding character scolds--and what else? Does not the Prior act?
+Does he not send for a posse of constables or thief-takers to handcuff
+the villain, or take him either to Bedlam or Newgate? Nothing of the
+kind; the author preserves the unity of character, and the scolding
+Prior from first to last does nothing but scold, with the exception
+indeed of the last scene of the last act, in which, with a most
+surprising revolution, he whines, weeps, and kneels to the condemned
+blaspheming assassin out of pure affection to the high-hearted man, the
+sublimity of whose angel-sin rivals the star-bright apostate, (that
+is, who was as proud as Lucifer, and as wicked as the Devil), and, "had
+thrilled him," (Prior Holland aforesaid), with wild admiration.
+
+Accordingly in the very next scene, we have this tragic Macheath, with
+his whole gang, in the Castle of St. Aldobrand, without any attempt
+on the Prior's part either to prevent him, or to put the mistress and
+servants of the Castle on their guard against their new inmates; though
+he (the Prior) knew, and confesses that he knew, that Bertram's "fearful
+mates" were assassins so habituated and naturalized to guilt, that--
+
+    "When their drenched hold forsook both gold and gear,
+     They griped their daggers with a murderer's instinct;"
+
+and though he also knew, that Bertram was the leader of a band whose
+trade was blood. To the Castle however he goes, thus with the holy
+Prior's consent, if not with his assistance; and thither let us follow
+him.
+
+No sooner is our hero safely housed in the Castle of St. Aldobrand, than
+he attracts the notice of the lady and her confidante, by his "wild and
+terrible dark eyes," "muffled form," "fearful form," [83] "darkly wild,"
+"proudly stern," and the like common-place indefinites, seasoned by
+merely verbal antitheses, and at best, copied with very slight change,
+from the Conrade of Southey's JOAN OF ARC. The lady Imogine, who has
+been, (as is the case, she tells us, with all soft and solemn spirits,)
+worshipping the moon on a terrace or rampart within view of the Castle,
+insists on having an interview with our hero, and this too tete-a-tete.
+Would the reader learn why and wherefore the confidante is excluded, who
+very properly remonstrates against such "conference, alone, at night,
+with one who bears such fearful form;" the reason follows--"why,
+therefore send him!" I say, follows, because the next line, "all things
+of fear have lost their power over me," is separated from the former
+by a break or pause, and besides that it is a very poor answer to the
+danger, is no answer at all to the gross indelicacy of this wilful
+exposure. We must therefore regard it as a mere after-thought, that a
+little softens the rudeness, but adds nothing to the weight, of that
+exquisite woman's reason aforesaid. And so exit Clotilda and enter
+Bertram, who "stands without looking at her," that is, with his lower
+limbs forked, his arms akimbo, his side to the lady's front, the whole
+figure resembling an inverted Y. He is soon however roused from the
+state surly to the state frantick, and then follow raving, yelling,
+cursing, she fainting, he relenting, in runs Imogine's child, squeaks
+"mother!" He snatches it up, and with a "God bless thee, child! Bertram
+has kissed thy child,"--the curtain drops. The third act is short, and
+short be our account of it. It introduces Lord St. Aldobrand on his road
+homeward, and next Imogine in the convent, confessing the foulness of
+her heart to the Prior, who first indulges his old humour with a fit
+of senseless scolding, then leaves her alone with her ruffian paramour,
+with whom she makes at once an infamous appointment, and the curtain
+drops, that it may be carried into act and consummation.
+
+I want words to describe the mingled horror and disgust with which I
+witnessed the opening of the fourth act, considering it as a melancholy
+proof of the depravation of the public mind. The shocking spirit of
+jacobinism seemed no longer confined to politics. The familiarity with
+atrocious events and characters appeared to have poisoned the taste,
+even where it had not directly disorganized the moral principles, and
+left the feelings callous to all the mild appeals, and craving alone for
+the grossest and most outrageous stimulants. The very fact then present
+to our senses, that a British audience could remain passive under such
+an insult to common decency, nay, receive with a thunder of applause, a
+human being supposed to have come reeking from the consummation of this
+complex foulness and baseness, these and the like reflections so pressed
+as with the weight of lead upon my heart, that actor, author, and
+tragedy would have been forgotten, had it not been for a plain elderly
+man sitting beside me, who, with a very serious face, that at once
+expressed surprise and aversion, touched my elbow, and, pointing to
+the actor, said to me in a half-whisper--"Do you see that little fellow
+there? he has just been committing adultery!" Somewhat relieved by the
+laugh which this droll address occasioned, I forced back my attention
+to the stage sufficiently to learn, that Bertram is recovered from a
+transient fit of remorse by the information, that St. Aldobrand was
+commissioned (to do, what every honest man must have done without
+commission, if he did his duty) to seize him and deliver him to the
+just vengeance of the law; an information which, (as he had long known
+himself to be an attainted traitor and proclaimed outlaw, and not only
+a trader in blood himself, but notoriously the Captain of a gang of
+thieves, pirates, and assassins), assuredly could not have been new to
+him. It is this, however, which alone and instantly restores him to
+his accustomed state of raving, blasphemy, and nonsense. Next follows
+Imogine's constrained interview with her injured husband, and his sudden
+departure again, all in love and kindness, in order to attend the feast
+of St. Anselm at the convent. This was, it must be owned, a very strange
+engagement for so tender a husband to make within a few minutes after so
+long an absence. But first his lady has told him that she has "a vow
+on her," and wishes "that black perdition may gulf her perjured
+soul,"--(Note: she is lying at the very time)--if she ascends his bed,
+till her penance is accomplished. How, therefore, is the poor husband to
+amuse himself in this interval of her penance? But do not be distressed,
+reader, on account of the St. Aldobrand's absence! As the author has
+contrived to send him out of the house, when a husband would be in his,
+and the lover's way, so he will doubtless not be at a loss to bring him
+back again as soon as he is wanted. Well! the husband gone in on the one
+side, out pops the lover from the other, and for the fiendish purpose of
+harrowing up the soul of his wretched accomplice in guilt, by announcing
+to her, with most brutal and blasphemous execrations, his fixed and
+deliberate resolve to assassinate her husband; all this too is for no
+discoverable purpose on the part of the author, but that of introducing
+a series of super-tragic starts, pauses, screams, struggling,
+dagger-throwing, falling on the ground, starting up again wildly,
+swearing, outcries for help, falling again on the ground, rising again,
+faintly tottering towards the door, and, to end the scene, a most
+convenient fainting fit of our lady's, just in time to give Bertram an
+opportunity of seeking the object of his hatred, before she alarms the
+house, which indeed she has had full time to have done before, but that
+the author rather chose she should amuse herself and the audience by the
+above-described ravings and startings. She recovers slowly, and to her
+enter, Clotilda, the confidante and mother confessor; then commences,
+what in theatrical language is called the madness, but which the author
+more accurately entitles, delirium, it appearing indeed a sort of
+intermittent fever with fits of lightheadedness off and on, whenever
+occasion and stage effect happen to call for it. A convenient return
+of the storm, (we told the reader before-hand how it would be), had
+changed--
+
+    "The rivulet, that bathed the convent walls,
+     Into a foaming flood: upon its brink
+     The Lord and his small train do stand appalled.
+     With torch and bell from their high battlements
+     The monks do summon to the pass in vain;
+     He must return to-night."
+
+Talk of the Devil, and his horns appear, says the proverb and sure
+enough, within ten lines of the exit of the messenger, sent to stop him,
+the arrival of Lord St. Aldobrand is announced. Bertram's ruffian band
+now enter, and range themselves across the stage, giving fresh cause for
+Imogine's screams and madness. St. Aldobrand, having received his mortal
+wound behind the scenes, totters in to welter in his blood, and to die
+at the feet of this double-damned adultress.
+
+Of her, as far as she is concerned in this fourth act, we have two
+additional points to notice: first, the low cunning and Jesuitical trick
+with which she deludes her husband into words of forgiveness, which he
+himself does not understand; and secondly, that everywhere she is made
+the object of interest and sympathy, and it is not the author's fault,
+if, at any moment, she excites feelings less gentle, than those we are
+accustomed to associate with the self-accusations of a sincere religious
+penitent. And did a British audience endure all this?--They received
+it with plaudits, which, but for the rivalry of the carts and hackney
+coaches, might have disturbed the evening-prayers of the scanty week
+day congregation at St. Paul's cathedral.
+
+    Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.
+
+Of the fifth act, the only thing noticeable, (for rant and nonsense,
+though abundant as ever, have long before the last act become things of
+course,) is the profane representation of the high altar in a chapel,
+with all the vessels and other preparations for the holy sacrament. A
+hymn is actually sung on the stage by the chorister boys! For the
+rest, Imogine, who now and then talks deliriously, but who is always
+light-headed as far as her gown and hair can make her so, wanders about
+in dark woods with cavern-rocks and precipices in the back-scene; and a
+number of mute dramatis personae move in and out continually, for
+whose presence, there is always at least this reason, that they afford
+something to be seen, by that very large part of a Drury Lane audience
+who have small chance of hearing a word. She had, it appears, taken her
+child with her, but what becomes of the child, whether she murdered
+it or not, nobody can tell, nobody can learn; it was a riddle at the
+representation, and after a most attentive perusal of the Play, a riddle
+it remains.
+
+    "No more I know, I wish I did,
+     And I would tell it all to you;
+     For what became of this poor child
+     There's none that ever knew."
+
+Our whole information [84] is derived from the following words--
+
+ "PRIOR.--Where is thy child?
+
+  CLOTIL.--(Pointing to the cavern into which she has looked)
+  Oh he lies cold within his cavern-tomb!
+  Why dost thou urge her with the horrid theme?
+
+  PRIOR.--(who will not, the reader may observe, be disappointed of
+  his dose of scolding)
+  It was to make (query wake) one living cord o' th' heart,
+  And I will try, tho' my own breaks at it.
+  Where is thy child?
+
+  IMOG.--(with a frantic laugh) The forest fiend hath snatched him--
+  He (who? the fiend or the child?) rides the night-mare thro' the
+  wizard woods."
+
+Now these two lines consist in a senseless plagiarism from the
+counterfeited madness of Edgar in Lear, who, in imitation of the
+gypsy incantations, puns on the old word mair, a hag; and the no less
+senseless adoption of Dryden's forest fiend, and the wisard stream by
+which Milton, in his Lycidas, so finely characterizes the spreading
+Deva, fabulosus amnis. Observe too these images stand unique in the
+speeches of Imogine, without the slightest resemblance to anything she
+says before or after. But we are weary. The characters in this act
+frisk about, here, there, and every where, as teasingly as the Jack
+o' Lantern-lights which mischievous boys, from across a narrow street,
+throw with a looking-glass on the faces of their opposite neighbours.
+Bertram disarmed, outheroding Charles de Moor in the Robbers, befaces
+the collected knights of St. Anselm, (all in complete armour) and so, by
+pure dint of black looks, he outdares them into passive poltroons. The
+sudden revolution in the Prior's manners we have before noticed, and
+it is indeed so outre, that a number of the audience imagined a great
+secret was to come out, viz.: that the Prior was one of the many
+instances of a youthful sinner metamorphosed into an old scold, and that
+this Bertram would appear at last to be his son. Imogine re-appears at
+the convent, and dies of her own accord. Bertram stabs himself, and dies
+by her side, and that the play may conclude as it began, to wit, in
+a superfetation of blasphemy upon nonsense, because he had snatched
+a sword from a despicable coward, who retreats in terror when it is
+pointed towards him in sport; this felo de se, and thief-captain--this
+loathsome and leprous confluence of robbery, adultery, murder, and
+cowardly assassination,--this monster, whose best deed is, the having
+saved his betters from the degradation of hanging him, by turning Jack
+Ketch to himself; first recommends the charitable Monks and holy Prior
+to pray for his soul, and then has the folly and impudence to exclaim--
+
+               "I die no felon's death,
+     A warriour's weapon freed a warriour's soul!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+
+It sometimes happens that we are punished for our faults by incidents,
+in the causation of which these faults had no share: and this I have
+always felt the severest punishment. The wound indeed is of the same
+dimensions; but the edges are jagged, and there is a dull underpain
+that survives the smart which it had aggravated. For there is always a
+consolatory feeling that accompanies the sense of a proportion between
+antecedents and consequents. The sense of Before and After becomes both
+intelligible and intellectual when, and only when, we contemplate the
+succession in the relations of Cause and Effect, which, like the two
+poles of the magnet manifest the being and unity of the one power by
+relative opposites, and give, as it were, a substratum of permanence, of
+identity, and therefore of reality, to the shadowy flux of Time. It is
+Eternity revealing itself in the phaenomena of Time: and the perception
+and acknowledgment of the proportionality and appropriateness of the
+Present to the Past, prove to the afflicted Soul, that it has not yet
+been deprived of the sight of God, that it can still recognise the
+effective presence of a Father, though through a darkened glass and a
+turbid atmosphere, though of a Father that is chastising it. And for
+this cause, doubtless, are we so framed in mind, and even so organized
+in brain and nerve, that all confusion is painful. It is within the
+experience of many medical practitioners, that a patient, with strange
+and unusual symptoms of disease, has been more distressed in mind, more
+wretched, from the fact of being unintelligible to himself and others,
+than from the pain or danger of the disease: nay, that the patient
+has received the most solid comfort, and resumed a genial and enduring
+cheerfulness, from some new symptom or product, that had at once
+determined the name and nature of his complaint, and rendered it an
+intelligible effect of an intelligible cause: even though the discovery
+did at the same moment preclude all hope of restoration. Hence the
+mystic theologians, whose delusions we may more confidently hope to
+separate from their actual intuitions, when we condescend to read their
+works without the presumption that whatever our fancy, (always the ape,
+and too often the adulterator and counterfeit of our memory,) has not
+made or cannot make a picture of, must be nonsense,--hence, I say, the
+Mystics have joined in representing the state of the reprobate spirits
+as a dreadful dream in which there is no sense of reality, not even of
+the pangs they are enduring--an eternity without time, and as it were
+below it--God present without manifestation of his presence. But these
+are depths, which we dare not linger over. Let us turn to an instance
+more on a level with the ordinary sympathies of mankind. Here then, and
+in this same healing influence of Light and distinct Beholding, we may
+detect the final cause of that instinct which, in the great majority of
+instances, leads, and almost compels the Afflicted to communicate their
+sorrows. Hence too flows the alleviation that results from "opening out
+our griefs:" which are thus presented in distinguishable forms instead
+of the mist, through which whatever is shapeless becomes magnified and
+(literally) enormous. Casimir, in the fifth Ode of his third Book, has
+happily [85] expressed this thought.
+
+                  Me longus silendi
+      Edit amor, facilesque luctus
+    Hausit medullas. Fugerit ocyus,
+    Simul negantem visere jusseris
+      Aures amicorum, et loquacem
+        Questibus evacuaris iram.
+
+    Olim querendo desinimus queri,
+    Ipsoque fletu lacryma perditur
+      Nec fortis [86] aeque, si per omnes
+        Cura volat residetque ramos.
+
+    Vires amicis perdit in auribus,
+    Minorque semper dividitur dolor,
+      Per multa permissus vagari
+        Pectora.--
+
+I shall not make this an excuse, however, for troubling my readers with
+any complaints or explanations, with which, as readers, they have little
+or no concern. It may suffice, (for the present at least,) to declare,
+that the causes that have delayed the publication of these volumes for
+so long a period after they had been printed off, were not connected
+with any neglect of my own; and that they would form an instructive
+comment on the chapter concerning authorship as a trade, addressed to
+young men of genius in the first volume of this work. I remember
+the ludicrous effect produced on my mind by the fast sentence of
+an auto-biography, which, happily for the writer, was as meagre in
+incidents as it is well possible for the life of an individual to
+be--"The eventful life which I am about to record, from the hour
+in which I rose into existence on this planet, etc." Yet when,
+notwithstanding this warning example of self-importance before me, I
+review my own life, I cannot refrain from applying the same epithet to
+it, and with more than ordinary emphasis--and no private feeling, that
+affected myself only, should prevent me from publishing the same, (for
+write it I assuredly shall, should life and leisure be granted me,)
+if continued reflection should strengthen my present belief, that my
+history would add its contingent to the enforcement of one important
+truth, to wit, that we must not only love our neighbours as ourselves,
+but ourselves likewise as our neighbours; and that we can do neither
+unless we love God above both.
+
+                     Who lives, that's not
+    Depraved or depraves? Who dies, that bears
+    Not one spurn to the grave of their friends' gift?
+
+Strange as the delusion may appear, yet it is most true, that three
+years ago I did not know or believe that I had an enemy in the world:
+and now even my strongest sensations of gratitude are mingled with fear,
+and I reproach myself for being too often disposed to ask,--Have I one
+friend?--During the many years which intervened between the composition
+and the publication of the CHRISTABEL, it became almost as well known
+among literary men as if it had been on common sale; the same references
+were made to it, and the same liberties taken with it, even to the very
+names of the imaginary persons in the poem. From almost all of our
+most celebrated poets, and from some with whom I had no personal
+acquaintance, I either received or heard of expressions of admiration
+that, (I can truly say,) appeared to myself utterly disproportionate
+to a work, that pretended to be nothing more than a common Faery Tale.
+Many, who had allowed no merit to my other poems, whether printed or
+manuscript, and who have frankly told me as much, uniformly made an
+exception in favour of the CHRISTABEL and the poem entitled LOVE. Year
+after year, and in societies of the most different kinds, I had been
+entreated to recite it and the result was still the same in all, and
+altogether different in this respect from the effect produced by the
+occasional recitation of any other poems I had composed.--This before
+the publication. And since then, with very few exceptions, I have heard
+nothing but abuse, and this too in a spirit of bitterness at least as
+disproportionate to the pretensions of the poem, had it been the most
+pitiably below mediocrity, as the previous eulogies, and far more
+inexplicable.--This may serve as a warning to authors, that in their
+calculations on the probable reception of a poem, they must subtract
+to a large amount from the panegyric, which may have encouraged them to
+publish it, however unsuspicious and however various the sources of this
+panegyric may have been. And, first, allowances must be made for private
+enmity, of the very existence of which they had perhaps entertained no
+suspicion--for personal enmity behind the mask of anonymous criticism:
+secondly for the necessity of a certain proportion of abuse and ridicule
+in a Review, in order to make it saleable, in consequence of which, if
+they have no friends behind the scenes, the chance must needs be against
+them; but lastly and chiefly, for the excitement and temporary sympathy
+of feeling, which the recitation of the poem by an admirer, especially
+if he be at once a warm admirer and a man of acknowledged celebrity,
+calls forth in the audience. For this is really a species of animal
+magnetism, in which the enkindling reciter, by perpetual comment of
+looks and tones, lends his own will and apprehensive faculty to his
+auditors. They live for the time within the dilated sphere of his
+intellectual being. It is equally possible, though not equally common,
+that a reader left to himself should sink below the poem, as that
+the poem left to itself should flag beneath the feelings of the
+reader.--But, in my own instance, I had the additional misfortune of
+having been gossiped about, as devoted to metaphysics, and worse than
+all, to a system incomparably nearer to the visionary flights of Plato,
+and even to the jargon of the Mystics, than to the established tenets
+of Locke. Whatever therefore appeared with my name was condemned
+beforehand, as predestined metaphysics. In a dramatic poem, which had
+been submitted by me to a gentleman of great influence in the theatrical
+world, occurred the following passage:--
+
+    "O we are querulous creatures! Little less
+     Than all things can suffice to make us happy:
+     And little more than nothing is enough
+     To make us wretched."
+
+Aye, here now! (exclaimed the critic) here come Coleridge's metaphysics!
+And the very same motive (that is, not that the lines were unfit for the
+present state of our immense theatres; but that they were metaphysics
+[87]) was assigned elsewhere for the rejection of the two following
+passages. The first is spoken in answer to a usurper, who had rested his
+plea on the circumstance, that he had been chosen by the acclamations of
+the people.--
+
+    "What people? How convened? or, if convened,
+     Must not the magic power that charms together
+     Millions of men in council, needs have power
+     To win or wield them? Rather, O far rather
+     Shout forth thy titles to yon circling mountains,
+     And with a thousand-fold reverberation
+     Make the rocks flatter thee, and the volleying air,
+     Unbribed, shout back to thee, King Emerick!
+     By wholesome laws to embank the sovereign power,
+     To deepen by restraint, and by prevention
+     Of lawless will to amass and guide the flood
+     In its majestic channel, is man's task
+     And the true patriot's glory! In all else
+     Men safelier trust to Heaven, than to themselves
+     When least themselves: even in those whirling crowds
+     Where folly is contagious, and too oft
+     Even wise men leave their better sense at home,
+     To chide and wonder at them, when returned."
+
+The second passage is in the mouth of an old and experienced courtier,
+betrayed by the man in whom he had most trusted.
+
+    "And yet Sarolta, simple, inexperienced,
+     Could see him as he was, and often warned me.
+     Whence learned she this?--O she was innocent!
+     And to be innocent is Nature's wisdom!
+     The fledge-dove knows the prowlers of the air,
+     Feared soon as seen, and flutters back to shelter.
+     And the young steed recoils upon his haunches,
+     The never-yet-seen adder's hiss first heard.
+     O surer than suspicion's hundred eyes
+     Is that fine sense, which to the pure in heart,
+     By mere oppugnancy of their own goodness,
+     Reveals the approach of evil."
+
+As therefore my character as a writer could not easily be more injured
+by an overt act than it was already in consequence of the report, I
+published a work, a large portion of which was professedly metaphysical.
+A long delay occurred between its first annunciation and its appearance;
+it was reviewed therefore by anticipation with a malignity, so avowedly
+and exclusively personal, as is, I believe, unprecedented even in the
+present contempt of all common humanity that disgraces and endangers the
+liberty of the press. After its appearance, the author of this lampoon
+undertook to review it in the Edinburgh Review; and under the single
+condition, that he should have written what he himself really thought,
+and have criticised the work as he would have done had its author been
+indifferent to him, I should have chosen that man myself, both from
+the vigour and the originality of his mind, and from his particular
+acuteness in speculative reasoning, before all others.--I remembered
+Catullus's lines.
+
+    Desine de quoquam quicquam bene velle mereri,
+      Aut aliquem fieri posse putare pium.
+    Omnia sunt ingrata: nihil fecisse benigne est:
+      Immo, etiam taedet, taedet obestque magis;
+    Ut mihi, quem nemo gravius nec acerbius urget,
+      Quam modo qui me unum atque unicum amicum habuit.
+
+But I can truly say, that the grief with which I read this rhapsody of
+predetermined insult, had the rhapsodist himself for its whole and sole
+object.
+
+     *     *     *     *     *     *
+
+I refer to this review at present, in consequence of information having
+been given me, that the inuendo of my "potential infidelity," grounded
+on one passage of my first Lay Sermon, has been received and propagated
+with a degree of credence, of which I can safely acquit the originator
+of the calumny. I give the sentences, as they stand in the sermon,
+premising only that I was speaking exclusively of miracles worked for
+the outward senses of men. "It was only to overthrow the usurpation
+exercised in and through the senses, that the senses were miraculously
+appealed to. REASON AND RELIGION ARE THEIR OWN EVIDENCE. The natural sun
+is in this respect a symbol of the spiritual. Ere he is fully arisen,
+and while his glories are still under veil, he calls up the breeze to
+chase away the usurping vapours of the night-season, and thus converts
+the air itself into the minister of its own purification: not surely
+in proof or elucidation of the light from heaven, but to prevent its
+interception."
+
+"Wherever, therefore, similar circumstances co-exist with the same
+moral causes, the principles revealed, and the examples recorded, in
+the inspired writings, render miracles superfluous: and if we neglect
+to apply truths in expectation of wonders, or under pretext of the
+cessation of the latter, we tempt God, and merit the same reply which
+our Lord gave to the Pharisees on a like occasion."
+
+In the sermon and the notes both the historical truth and the necessity
+of the miracles are strongly and frequently asserted. "The testimony
+of books of history (that is, relatively to the signs and wonders,
+with which Christ came) is one of the strong and stately pillars of the
+church: but it is not the foundation!" Instead, therefore, of defending
+myself, which I could easily effect by a series of passages, expressing
+the same opinion, from the Fathers and the most eminent Protestant
+Divines, from the Reformation to the Revolution, I shall merely state
+what my belief is, concerning the true evidences of Christianity. 1.
+Its consistency with right Reason, I consider as the outer court of the
+temple--the common area, within which it stands. 2. The miracles, with
+and through which the Religion was first revealed and attested, I regard
+as the steps, the vestibule, and the portal of the temple. 3. The
+sense, the inward feeling, in the soul of each believer of its exceeding
+desirableness--the experience, that he needs something, joined with the
+strong foretokening, that the redemption and the graces propounded to
+us in Christ are what he needs--this I hold to be the true foundation of
+the spiritual edifice. With the strong a priori probability that flows
+in from 1 and 3 on the correspondent historical evidence of 2, no man
+can refuse or neglect to make the experiment without guilt. But, 4, it
+is the experience derived from a practical conformity to the conditions
+of the Gospel--it is the opening eye; the dawning light: the terrors and
+the promises of spiritual growth; the blessedness of loving God as
+God, the nascent sense of sin hated as sin, and of the incapability of
+attaining to either without Christ; it is the sorrow that still rises
+up from beneath and the consolation that meets it from above; the
+bosom treacheries of the principal in the warfare and the exceeding
+faithfulness and long-suffering of the uninteresting ally;--in a word,
+it is the actual trial of the faith in Christ, with its accompaniments
+and results, that must form the arched roof, and the faith itself is the
+completing key-stone. In order to an efficient belief in Christianity,
+a man must have been a Christian, and this is the seeming argumentum
+in circulo, incident to all spiritual Truths, to every subject not
+presentable under the forms of Time and Space, as long as we attempt to
+master by the reflex acts of the Understanding what we can only know by
+the act of becoming. Do the will of my Father, and ye shall know whether
+I am of God. These four evidences I believe to have been and still to
+be, for the world, for the whole Church, all necessary, all equally
+necessary: but at present, and for the majority of Christians born in
+Christian countries, I believe the third and the fourth evidences to
+be the most operative, not as superseding but as involving a glad
+undoubting faith in the two former. Credidi, ideoque intellexi, appears
+to me the dictate equally of Philosophy and Religion, even as I
+believe Redemption to be the antecedent of Sanctification, and not its
+consequent. All spiritual predicates may be construed indifferently as
+modes of Action or as states of Being, Thus Holiness and Blessedness
+are the same idea, now seen in relation to act and now to existence.
+The ready belief which has been yielded to the slander of my "potential
+infidelity," I attribute in part to the openness with which I have
+avowed my doubts, whether the heavy interdict, under which the name of
+Benedict Spinoza lies, is merited on the whole or to the whole extent.
+Be this as it may, I wish, however, that I could find in the books of
+philosophy, theoretical or moral, which are alone recommended to the
+present students of theology in our established schools, a few passages
+as thoroughly Pauline, as completely accordant with the doctrines of the
+Established Church, as the following sentences in the concluding page
+of Spinoza's Ethics. Deinde quo mens hoc amore divino, seu beatitudine
+magis gaudet, eo plus intelligit, hoc est, eo majorem in affectus habet
+potentiam, et eo minus ab affectibus, qui mali sunt, patitur; atque adeo
+ex eo, quod mens hoc amore divino, seu beatitudine gaudet, potestatem
+habet libidines coercendi; et quia humana potentia ad coercendos
+affectus in solo intellectu consistit; ergo nemo beatitudine gaudet,
+quia affectus coercuit, sed contra potestas libidines coercendi ex ipsa
+beatitudine oritur.
+
+With regard to the Unitarians, it has been shamelessly asserted, that
+I have denied them to be Christians. God forbid! For how should I know,
+what the piety of the heart may be, or what quantum of error in the
+understanding may consist with a saving faith in the intentions and
+actual dispositions of the whole moral being in any one individual?
+Never will God reject a soul that sincerely loves him: be his
+speculative opinions what they may: and whether in any given instance
+certain opinions, be they unbelief, or misbelief, are compatible with a
+sincere love of God, God can only know.--But this I have said, and shall
+continue to say: that if the doctrines, the sum of which I believe to
+constitute the truth in Christ, be Christianity, then Unitarianism
+is not, and vice versa: and that, in speaking theologically and
+impersonally, i.e. of Psilanthropism and Theanthropism as schemes of
+belief, without reference to individuals, who profess either the one or
+the other, it will be absurd to use a different language as long as it
+is the dictate of common sense, that two opposites cannot properly be
+called by the same name. I should feel no offence if a Unitarian applied
+the same to me, any more than if he were to say, that two and two being
+four, four and four must be eight.
+
+        alla broton
+    ton men keneophrones auchai
+        ex agathon ebalon;
+    ton d' au katamemphthent' agan
+    ischun oikeion paresphalen kalon,
+    cheiros elkon opisso, thumos atolmos eon.
+
+This has been my object, and this alone can be my defence--and O! that
+with this my personal as well as my LITERARY LIFE might conclude!--the
+unquenched desire I mean, not without the consciousness of having
+earnestly endeavoured to kindle young minds, and to guard them against
+the temptations of scorners, by showing that the scheme of Christianity,
+as taught in the liturgy and homilies of our Church, though not
+discoverable by human reason, is yet in accordance with it; that link
+follows link by necessary consequence; that Religion passes out of the
+ken of Reason only where the eye of Reason has reached its own horizon;
+and that Faith is then but its continuation: even as the day softens
+away into the sweet twilight, and twilight, hushed and breathless,
+steals into the darkness. It is night, sacred night! the upraised eye
+views only the starry heaven which manifests itself alone: and the
+outward beholding is fixed on the sparks twinkling in the awful depth,
+though suns of other worlds, only to preserve the soul steady and
+collected in its pure act of inward adoration to the great I AM, and to
+the filial WORD that re-affirmeth it from eternity to eternity, whose
+choral echo is the universe.
+
+
+    THEO, MONO, DOXA.
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES
+
+
+[Footnote 1: The authority of Milton and Shakespeare may be usefully pointed out
+to young authors. In the Comus and other early poems of Milton there
+is a superfluity of double epithets; while in the Paradise Lost we find
+very few, in the Paradise Regained scarce any. The same remark holds
+almost equally true of the Love's Labour Lost, Romeo and Juliet, Venus
+and Adonis, and Lucrece, compared with the Lear, Macbeth, Othello, and
+Hamlet of our great Dramatist. The rule for the admission of double
+epithets seems to be this: either that they should be already
+denizens of our language, such as blood-stained, terror-stricken,
+self-applauding: or when a new epithet, or one found in books only, is
+hazarded, that it, at least, be one word, not two words made one by mere
+virtue of the printers hyphen. A language which, like the English,
+is almost without cases, is indeed in its very genius unfitted for
+compounds. If a writer, every time a compounded word suggests itself to
+him, would seek for some other mode of expressing the same sense, the
+chances are always greatly in favour of his finding a better word.
+Ut tanquam scopulum sic fugias insolens verbum, is the wise advice of
+Caesar to the Roman Orators, and the precept applies with double force
+to the writers in our own language. But it must not be forgotten,
+that the same Caesar wrote a Treatise for the purpose of reforming
+the ordinary language by bringing it to a greater accordance with the
+principles of logic or universal grammar.]
+
+[Footnote 2: See the criticisms on the Ancient Mariner, in the Monthly and
+Critical Reviews of the first volume of the Lyrical Ballads.]
+
+[Footnote 3: This is worthy of ranking as a maxim, (regula maxima,) of criticism.
+Whatever is translatable in other and simpler words of the same
+language, without loss of sense or dignity, is bad. N.B.--By dignity I
+mean the absence of ludicrous and debasing associations.]
+
+[Footnote 4: The Christ's Hospital phrase, not for holidays altogether, but for
+those on which the boys are permitted to go beyond the precincts of the
+school.]
+
+[Footnote 5: I remember a ludicrous instance in the poem of a young tradesman:
+
+    "No more will I endure love's pleasing pain,
+     Or round my heart's leg tie his galling chain."]
+
+[Footnote 6: Cowper's Task was published some time before the Sonnets of Mr.
+Bowles; but I was not familiar with it till many years afterwards. The
+vein of satire which runs through that excellent poem, together with the
+sombre hue of its religious opinions, would probably, at that time,
+have prevented its laying any strong hold on my affections. The love of
+nature seems to have led Thomson to a cheerful religion; and a gloomy
+religion to have led Cowper to a love of nature. The one would carry his
+fellow-men along with him into nature; the other flies to nature from
+his fellow-men. In chastity of diction however, and the harmony of blank
+verse, Cowper leaves Thomson immeasurably below him; yet still I feel
+the latter to have been the born poet.]
+
+[Footnote 7: SONNET I
+
+    Pensive at eve, on the hard world I mused,
+    And m poor heart was sad; so at the Moon
+    I gazed and sighed, and sighed; for ah how soon
+    Eve saddens into night! mine eyes perused
+    With tearful vacancy the dampy grass
+    That wept and glitter'd in the paly ray
+    And I did pause me on my lonely way
+    And mused me on the wretched ones that pass
+    O'er the bleak heath of sorrow. But alas!
+    Most of myself I thought! when it befel,
+    That the soothe spirit of the breezy wood
+    Breath'd in mine ear: "All this is very well,
+    But much of one thing, is for no thing good."
+    Oh my poor heart's inexplicable swell!
+
+    SONNET II
+
+    Oh I do love thee, meek Simplicity!
+    For of thy lays the lulling simpleness
+    Goes to my heart, and soothes each small distress,
+    Distress the small, yet haply great to me.
+    'Tis true on Lady Fortune's gentlest pad
+    I amble on; and yet I know not why
+    So sad I am! but should a friend and I
+    Frown, pout and part, then I am very sad.
+    And then with sonnets and with sympathy
+    My dreamy bosom's mystic woes I pall:
+    Now of my false friend plaining plaintively,
+    Now raving at mankind in general;
+    But whether sad or fierce, 'tis simple all,
+    All very simple, meek Simplicity!
+
+    SONNET III
+
+    And this reft house is that, the which he built,
+    Lamented Jack! and here his malt he pil'd,
+    Cautious in vain! these rats, that squeak so wild,
+    Squeak not unconscious of their father's guilt.
+    Did he not see her gleaming thro' the glade!
+    Belike 'twas she, the maiden all forlorn.
+    What the she milk no cow with crumpled horn,
+    Yet, aye she haunts the dale where erst she stray'd:
+    And aye, beside her stalks her amorous knight
+    Still on his thighs their wonted brogues are worn,
+    And thro' those brogues, still tatter'd and betorn,
+    His hindward charms gleam an unearthly white.
+    Ah! thus thro' broken clouds at night's high noon
+    Peeps to fair fragments forth the full-orb'd harvest-moon!
+
+The following anecdote will not be wholly out of place here, and may
+perhaps amuse the reader. An amateur performer in verse expressed to a
+common friend a strong desire to be introduced to me, but hesitated in
+accepting my friend's immediate offer, on the score that "he was,
+he must acknowledge, the author of a confounded severe epigram on my
+Ancient Mariner, which had given me great pain." I assured my friend
+that, if the epigram was a good one, it would only increase my desire to
+become acquainted with the author, and begged to hear it recited: when,
+to my no less surprise than amusement, it proved to be one which I had
+myself some time before written and inserted in the "Morning Post," to
+wit--
+
+    To the Author of the Ancient Mariner.
+
+        Your poem must eternal be,
+        Dear sir! it cannot fail,
+        For 'tis incomprehensible,
+        And without head or tail.]
+
+[Footnote 8: --
+
+    Of old things all are over old,
+    Of good things none are good enough;--
+    We'll show that we can help to frame
+    A world of other stuff.
+
+    I too will have my kings, that take
+    From me the sign of life and death:
+    Kingdoms shall shift about, like clouds,
+    Obedient to my breath.
+      Wordsworth's Rob Roy.--Poet. Works, vol. III. p. 127.]
+
+[Footnote 9: Pope was under the common error of his age, an error far from
+being sufficiently exploded even at the present day. It consists (as
+I explained at large, and proved in detail in my public lectures,) in
+mistaking for the essentials of the Greek stage certain rules, which the
+wise poets imposed upon themselves, in order to render all the remaining
+parts of the drama consistent with those, that had been forced upon them
+by circumstances independent of their will; out of which circumstances
+the drama itself arose. The circumstances in the time of Shakespeare,
+which it was equally out of his power to alter, were different, and such
+as, in my opinion, allowed a far wider sphere, and a deeper and more
+human interest. Critics are too apt to forget, that rules are but means
+to an end; consequently, where the ends are different, the rules must
+be likewise so. We must have ascertained what the end is, before we can
+determine what the rules ought to be. Judging under this impression,
+I did not hestitate to declare my full conviction, that the consummate
+judgment of Shakespeare, not only in the general construction, but in
+all the details, of his dramas, impressed me with greater wonder,
+than even the might of his genius, or the depth of his philosophy. The
+substance of these lectures I hope soon to publish; and it is but a debt
+of justice to myself and my friends to notice, that the first course
+of lectures, which differed from the following courses only, by
+occasionally varying the illustrations of the same thoughts, was
+addressed to very numerous, and I need not add, respectable audiences at
+the Royal institution, before Mr. Schlegel gave his lectures on the same
+subjects at Vienna.]
+
+[Footnote 10: In the course of one of my Lectures, I had occasion to point out
+the almost faultless position and choice of words, in Pope's original
+compositions, particularly in his Satires and moral Essays, for the
+purpose of comparing them with his translation of Homer, which, I do
+not stand alone in regarding, as the main source of our pseudo-poetic
+diction. And this, by the bye, is an additional confirmation of a remark
+made, I believe, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, that next to the man who forms
+and elevates the taste of the public, he that corrupts it, is commonly
+the greatest genius. Among other passages, I analyzed sentence by
+sentence, and almost word by word, the popular lines,
+
+    As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night, etc.
+                                                (Iliad. B. viii.)
+
+much in the same way as has been since done, in an excellent article on
+Chalmers's British Poets in the Quarterly Review. The impression on the
+audience in general was sudden and evident: and a number of enlightened
+and highly educated persons, who at different times afterwards addressed
+me on the subject, expressed their wonder, that truth so obvious should
+not have struck them before; but at the same time acknowledged--(so much
+had they been accustomed, in reading poetry, to receive pleasure from
+the separate images and phrases successively, without asking themselves
+whether the collective meaning was sense or nonsense)--that they might
+in all probability have read the same passage again twenty times with
+undiminished admiration, and without once reflecting, that
+
+          astra phaeinaen amphi selaenaen
+    phainet aritretea--
+
+(that is, the stars around, or near the full moon, shine pre-eminently
+bright) conveys a just and happy image of a moonlight sky: while it is
+difficult to determine whether, in the lines,
+
+    Around her throne the vivid planets roll,
+    And stars unnumber'd gild the glowing pole,
+
+the sense or the diction be the more absurd. My answer was; that, though
+I had derived peculiar advantages from my school discipline, and
+though my general theory of poetry was the same then as now, I had yet
+experienced the same sensations myself, and felt almost as if I bad
+been newly couched, when, by Mr. Wordsworth's conversation, I had been
+induced to re-examine with impartial strictness Gray's celebrated Elegy.
+I had long before detected the defects in The Bard; but the Elegy I had
+considered as proof against all fair attacks; and to this day I cannot
+read either without delight, and a portion of enthusiasm. At all events,
+whatever pleasure I may have lost by the clearer perception of the
+faults in certain passages, has been more than repaid to me by the
+additional delight with which I read the remainder.
+
+Another instance in confirmation of these remarks occurs to me in the
+Faithful Shepherdess. Seward first traces Fletcher's lines;
+
+    More foul diseases than e'er yet the hot
+    Sun bred thro' his burnings, while the dog
+    Pursues the raging lion, throwing the fog
+    And deadly vapour from his angry breath,
+    Filling the lower world with plague and death,
+
+to Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar,
+
+    The rampant lion hunts he fast
+      With dogs of noisome breath;
+    Whose baleful barking brings, in haste,
+      Pine, plagues, and dreary death!
+
+He then takes occasion to introduce Homer's simile of the appearance of
+Achilles' mail to Priam compared with the Dog Star; literally thus--
+
+"For this indeed is most splendid, but it was made an evil sign, and
+brings many a consuming disease to wretched mortals." Nothing can be
+more simple as a description, or more accurate as a simile; which, (says
+Seward,) is thus finely translated by Mr. Pope
+
+    Terrific Glory! for his burning breath
+    Taints the red air with fevers, plagues, and death!
+
+Now here--(not to mention the tremendous bombast)--the Dog Star, so
+called, is turned into a real dog, a very odd dog, a fire, fever,
+plague, and death-breathing, red, air-tainting dog: and the whole visual
+likeness is lost, while the likeness in the effects is rendered absurd
+by the exaggeration. In Spenser and Fletcher the thought is justifiable;
+for the images are at least consistent, and it was the intention of the
+writers to mark the seasons by this allegory of visualized puns.]
+
+[Footnote 11: Especially in this age of personality, this age of literary and
+political gossiping, when the meanest insects are worshipped with a sort
+of Egyptian superstition, if only the brainless head be atoned for
+by the sting of personal malignity in the tail;--when the most vapid
+satires have become the objects of a keen public interest, purely from
+the number of contemporary characters named in the patch-work notes,
+(which possess, however, the comparative merit of being more poetical
+than the text,) and because, to increase the stimulus, the author has
+sagaciously left his own name for whispers and conjectures.]
+
+[Footnote 12: If it were worth while to mix together, as ingredients, half
+the anecdotes which I either myself know to be true, or which I have
+received from men incapable of intentional falsehood, concerning the
+characters, qualifications, and motives of our anonymous critics, whose
+decisions are oracles for our reading public; I might safely borrow the
+words of the apocryphal Daniel; "Give me leave, O SOVEREIGN PUBLIC, and
+I shall slay this dragon without sward or staff." For the compound would
+be as the "pitch, and fat, and hair, which Daniel took, and did seethe
+them together, and made lumps thereof; this he put in the dragon's
+mouth, and so the dragon burst in sunder; and Daniel said, LO, THESE ARE
+THE GODS YE WORSHIP."]
+
+[Footnote 13: This is one instance among many of deception, by the telling the
+half of a fact, and omitting the other half, when it is from their
+mutual counteraction and neutralization, that the whole truth arises, as
+a tertium aliquid different from either. Thus in Dryden's famous line
+
+    Great wit (meaning genius) to madness sure is near allied.
+
+Now if the profound sensibility, which is doubtless one of the
+components of genius, were alone considered, single and unbalanced, it
+might be fairly described as exposing the individual to a greater
+chance of mental derangement; but then a more than usual rapidity of
+association, a more than usual power of passing from thought to thought,
+and image to image, is a component equally essential; and to the due
+modification of each by the other the genius itself consists; so that
+it would be just as fair to describe the earth, as in imminent danger of
+exorbitating, or of falling into the sun, according as the assertor of
+the absurdity confined his attention either to the projectile or to the
+attractive force exclusively.]
+
+[Footnote 14: For as to the devotees of the circulating libraries, I dare not
+compliment their pass-time, or rather kill-time, with the name of
+reading. Call it rather a sort of beggarly day-dreaming, during which
+the mind of the dreamer furnishes for itself nothing but laziness, and a
+little mawkish sensibility; while the whole materiel and imagery of
+the doze is supplied ab extra by a sort of mental camera obscura
+manufactured at the printing office, which pro tempore fixes, reflects,
+and transmits the moving phantasms of one mans delirium, so as to people
+the barrenness of a hundred other brains afflicted with the same trance
+or suspension of all common sense and all definite purpose. We should
+therefore transfer this species of amusement--(if indeed those can be
+said to retire a musis, who were never in their company, or relaxation
+be attributable to those, whose bows are never bent)--from the genus,
+reading, to that comprebensive class characterized by the power of
+reconciling the two contrary yet coexisting propensities of human
+nature, namely, indulgence of sloth, and hatred of vacancy. In addition
+to novels and tales of chivalry to prose or rhyme, (by which last I mean
+neither rhythm nor metre) this genus comprises as its species, gaming,
+swinging, or swaying on a chair or gate; spitting over a bridge;
+smoking; snuff-taking; tete-a-tete quarrels after dinner between
+husband and wife; conning word by word all the advertisements of a daily
+newspaper in a public house on a rainy day, etc. etc. etc.]
+
+[Footnote 15: Ex. gr. Pediculos e capillis excerptos in arenam jacere incontusos;
+eating of unripe fruit; gazing on the clouds, and (in genere) on
+movable things suspended in the air; riding among a multitude of
+camels; frequent laughter; listening to a series of jests and humorous
+anecdotes,--as when (so to modernize the learned Saracen's meaning) one
+man's droll story of an Irishman inevitably occasions another's droll
+story of a Scotchman, which again, by the same sort of conjunction
+disjunctive, leads to some etourderie of a Welshman, and that again to
+some sly hit of a Yorkshireman;--the habit of reading tomb-stones in
+church-yards, etc. By the bye, this catalogue, strange as it may appear,
+is not insusceptible of a sound psychological commentary.]
+
+[Footnote 16: I have ventured to call it unique; not only because I know no work
+of the kind in our language, (if we except a few chapters of the old
+translation of Froissart)--none, which uniting the charms of romance and
+history, keeps the imagination so constantly on the wing, and yet leaves
+so much for after reflection; but likewise, and chiefly, because it is
+a compilation, which, in the various excellencies of translation,
+selection, and arrangement, required and proves greater genius in
+the compiler, as living in the present state of society, than in the
+original composers.]
+
+[Footnote 17: It is not easy to estimate the effects which the example of a
+young man as highly distinguished for strict purity of disposition
+and conduct, as for intellectual power and literary acquirements, may
+produce on those of the same age with himself, especially on those of
+similar pursuits and congenial minds. For many years, my opportunities
+of intercourse with Mr. Southey have been rare, and at long intervals;
+but I dwell with unabated pleasure on the strong and sudden, yet I
+trust not fleeting, influence, which my moral being underwent on my
+acquaintance with him at Oxford, whither I had gone at the commencement
+of our Cambridge vacation on a visit to an old school-fellow. Not
+indeed on my moral or religious principles, for they had never been
+contaminated; but in awakening the sense of the duty and dignity of
+making my actions accord with those principles, both in word and
+deed. The irregularities only not universal among the young men of my
+standing, which I always knew to be wrong, I then learned to feel as
+degrading; learned to know that an opposite conduct, which was at that
+time considered by us as the easy virtue of cold and selfish prudence,
+might originate in the noblest emotions, in views the most disinterested
+and imaginative. It is not however from grateful recollections only,
+that I have been impelled thus to leave these my deliberate sentiments
+on record; but in some sense as a debt of justice to the man, whose
+name has been so often connected with mine for evil to which he is a
+stranger. As a specimen I subjoin part of a note, from The Beauties of
+the Anti-jacobin, in which, having previously informed the public that
+I had been dishonoured at Cambridge for preaching Deism, at a time when,
+for my youthful ardour in defence of Christianity, I was decried as
+a bigot by the proselytes of French phi-(or to speak more truly
+psi-)-losophy, the writer concludes with these words; "since this time
+he has left his native country, commenced citizen of the world, left
+his poor children fatherless, and his wife destitute. Ex his disce his
+friends, LAMB and SOUTHEY." With severest truth it may be asserted, that
+it would not be easy to select two men more exemplary in their domestic
+affections than those whose names were thus printed at full length as in
+the same rank of morals with a denounced infidel and fugitive, who had
+left his children fatherless and his wife destitute! Is it surprising,
+that many good men remained longer than perhaps they otherwise would
+have done adverse to a party, which encouraged and openly rewarded the
+authors of such atrocious calumnies? Qualis es, nescio; sed per quales
+agis, scio et doleo.]
+
+[Footnote 18: In opinions of long continuance, and in which we have never before
+been molested by a single doubt, to be suddenly convinced of an error,
+is almost like being convicted of a fault. There is a state of mind,
+which is the direct antithesis of that, which takes place when we make
+a bull. The bull namely consists in the bringing her two incompatible
+thoughts, with the sensation, but without the sense, of their
+connection. The psychological condition, or that which constitutes the
+possibility, of this state, being such disproportionate vividness of two
+distant thoughts, as extinguishes or obscures the consciousness of the
+intermediate images or conceptions, or wholly abstracts the attention
+from them. Thus in the well known bull, "I was a fine child, but they
+changed me:" the first conception expressed in the word "I," is that
+of personal identity--Ego contemplans: the second expressed in the word
+"me," is the visual image or object by which the mind represents to
+itself its past condition, or rather, its personal identity under
+the form in which it imagined itself previously to have existed,--Ego
+contemplatus. Now the change of one visual image for another involves
+in itself no absurdity, and becomes absurd only by its immediate
+juxta-position with the fast thought, which is rendered possible by the
+whole attention being successively absorbed to each singly, so as not to
+notice the interjacent notion, changed, which by its incongruity, with
+the first thought, I, constitutes the bull. Add only, that this process
+is facilitated by the circumstance of the words I, and me, being
+sometimes equivalent, and sometimes having a distinct meaning;
+sometimes, namely, signifying the act of self-consciousness, sometimes
+the external image in and by which the mind represents that act to
+itself, the result and symbol of its individuality. Now suppose the
+direct contrary state, and you will have a distinct sense of the
+connection between two conceptions, without that sensation of such
+connection which is supplied by habit. The man feels as if he were
+standing on his head though he cannot but see that he is truly standing
+on his feet. This, as a painful sensation, will of course have a
+tendency to associate itself with him who occasions it; even as persons,
+who have been by painful means restored from derangement, are known to
+feel an involuntary dislike towards their physician.]
+
+[Footnote 19: Without however the apprehensions attributed to the Pagan reformer
+of the poetic republic. If we may judge from the preface to the recent
+collection of his poems, Mr. W. would have answered with Xanthias--
+
+    su d' ouk edeisas ton huophon ton rhaematon,
+    kai tas apeilas; XAN, ou ma Di', oud' ephrontisa.--Ranae, 492-3.
+
+And here let me hint to the authors of the numerous parodies, and
+pretended imitations of Mr. Wordsworth's style, that at once to conceal
+and convey wit and wisdom in the semblance of folly and dulness, as
+is done in the Clowns and Fools, nay even in the Dogberry, of our
+Shakespeare, is doubtless a proof of genius, or at all events of satiric
+talent; but that the attempt to ridicule a silly and childish poem, by
+writing another still sillier and still more childish, can only prove
+(if it prove any thing at all) that the parodist is a still greater
+blockhead than the original writer, and, what is far worse, a malignant
+coxcomb to boot. The talent for mimicry seems strongest where the
+human race are most degraded. The poor, naked half human savages of New
+Holland were found excellent mimics: and, in civilized society, minds of
+the very lowest stamp alone satirize by copying. At least the difference
+which must blend with and balance the likeness, in order to constitute
+a just imitation, existing here merely in caricature, detracts from
+the libeller's heart, without adding an iota to the credit of his
+understanding.]
+
+[Footnote 20: --
+
+     The Butterfly the ancient Grecians made
+     The soul's fair emblem, and its only name--
+     But of the soul, escaped the slavish trade
+     Of mortal life! For to this earthly frame
+     Ours is the reptile's lot, much toil, much blame,
+     Manifold motions making little speed,
+     And to deform and kill the things whereon we feed.]
+
+[Footnote 21: Mr. Wordsworth, even in his two earliest poems, The Evening Walk
+and the Descriptive Sketches, is more free from this latter defect
+than most of the young poets his contemporaries. It may however be
+exemplified, together with the harsh and obscure construction, in which
+he more often offended, in the following lines:--
+
+    "'Mid stormy vapours ever driving by,
+     Where ospreys, cormorants, and herons cry;
+     Where hardly given the hopeless waste to cheer,
+     Denied the bread of life the foodful ear,
+     Dwindles the pear on autumn's latest spray,
+     And apple sickens pale in summer's ray;
+     Ev'n here content has fixed her smiling reign
+     With independence, child of high disdain."
+
+I hope, I need not say, that I have quoted these lines for no other
+purpose than to make my meaning fully understood. It is to be regretted
+that Mr. Wordsworth has not republished these two poems entire.]
+
+[Footnote 22: This is effected either by giving to the one word a general, and to
+the other an exclusive use; as "to put on the back" and "to indorse;" or
+by an actual distinction of meanings, as "naturalist," and "physician;"
+or by difference of relation, as "I" and "Me" (each of which the rustics
+of our different provinces still use in all the cases singular of the
+first personal pronoun). Even the mere difference, or corruption, in the
+pronunciation of the same word, if it have become general, will
+produce a new word with a distinct signification; thus "property" and
+"propriety;" the latter of which, even to the time of Charles II was
+the written word for all the senses of both. There is a sort of minim
+immortal among the animalcula infusoria, which has not naturally either
+birth, or death, absolute beginning, or absolute end: for at a certain
+period a small point appears on its back, which deepens and lengthens
+till the creature divides into two, and the same process recommences in
+each of the halves now become integral. This may be a fanciful, but
+it is by no means a bad emblem of the formation of words, and may
+facilitate the conception, how immense a nomenclature may be organized
+from a few simple sounds by rational beings in a social state. For each
+new application, or excitement of the same sound, will call forth a
+different sensation, which cannot but affect the pronunciation. The
+after recollections of the sound, without the same vivid sensation,
+will modify it still further till at length all trace of the original
+likeness is worn away.]
+
+[Footnote 23: I ought to have added, with the exception of a single sheet which I
+accidentally met with at the printer's. Even from this scanty specimen,
+I found it impossible to doubt the talent, or not to admire the
+ingenuity, of the author. That his distinctions were for the greater
+part unsatisfactory to my mind, proves nothing against their accuracy;
+but it may possibly be serviceable to him, in case of a second edition,
+if I take this opportunity of suggesting the query; whether he may not
+have been occasionally misled, by having assumed, as to me he appears to
+have done, the non-existence of any absolute synonymes in our language?
+Now I cannot but think, that there are many which remain for our
+posterity to distinguish and appropriate, and which I regard as so much
+reversionary wealth in our mother tongue. When two distinct meanings are
+confounded under one or more words,--(and such must be the case, as
+sure as our knowledge is progressive and of course imperfect)--erroneous
+consequences will be drawn, and what is true in one sense of the word
+will be affirmed as true in toto. Men of research, startled by the
+consequences, seek in the things themselves--(whether in or out of
+the mind)--for a knowledge of the fact, and having discovered the
+difference, remove the equivocation either by the substitution of a new
+word, or by the appropriation of one of the two or more words, which
+had before been used promiscuously. When this distinction has been so
+naturalized and of such general currency that the language does as it
+were think for us--(like the sliding rule which is the mechanic's safe
+substitute for arithmetical knowledge)--we then say, that it is evident
+to common sense. Common sense, therefore, differs in different ages.
+What was born and christened in the Schools passes by degrees into
+the world at large, and becomes the property of the market and the
+tea-table. At least I can discover no other meaning of the term,
+common sense, if it is to convey any specific difference from sense
+and judgment in genere, and where it is not used scholastically for the
+universal reason. Thus in the reign of Charles II the philosophic world
+was called to arms by the moral sophisms of Hobbes, and the ablest
+writers exerted themselves in the detection of an error, which a
+school-boy would now be able to confute by the mere recollection, that
+compulsion and obligation conveyed two ideas perfectly disparate, and
+that what appertained to the one, had been falsely transferred to the
+other by a mere confusion of terms.]
+
+[Footnote 24: I here use the word idea in Mr. Hume's sense on account of its
+general currency amongst the English metaphysicians; though against my
+own judgment, for I believe that the vague use of this word has been the
+cause of much error and more confusion. The word, idea, in its original
+sense as used by Pindar, Aristophanes, and in the Gospel of St. Matthew,
+represented the visual abstraction of a distant object, when we see the
+whole without distinguishing its parts. Plato adopted it as a technical
+term, and as the antithesis to eidolon, or sensuous image; the transient
+and perishable emblem, or mental word, of the idea. Ideas themselves he
+considered as mysterious powers, living, seminal, formative, and exempt
+from time. In this sense the word Idea became the property of the
+Platonic school; and it seldom occurs in Aristotle, without some such
+phrase annexed to it, as according to Plato, or as Plato says. Our
+English writers to the end of the reign of Charles II or somewhat later,
+employed it either in the original sense, or Platonically, or in a
+sense nearly correspondent to our present use of the substantive, Ideal;
+always however opposing it, more or less to image, whether of present
+or absent objects. The reader will not be displeased with the following
+interesting exemplification from Bishop Jeremy Taylor. "St. Lewis the
+King sent Ivo Bishop of Chartres on an embassy, and he told, that he met
+a grave and stately matron on the way with a censer of fire in one
+band, and a vessel of water in the other; and observing her to have a
+melancholy, religious, and phantastic deportment and look, he asked her
+what those symbols meant, and what she meant to do with her fire and
+water; she answered, My purpose is with the fire to burn paradise,
+and with my water to quench the flames of hell, that men may serve God
+purely for the love of God. But we rarely meet with such spirits which
+love virtue so metaphysically as to abstract her from all sensible
+compositions, and love the purity of the idea." Des Cartes having
+introduced into his philosophy the fanciful hypothesis of material
+ideas, or certain configurations of the brain, which were as so many
+moulds to the influxes of the external world,--Locke adopted the term,
+but extended its signification to whatever is the immediate object
+of the mind's attention or consciousness. Hume, distinguishing those
+representations which are accompanied with a sense of a present object
+from those reproduced by the mind itself, designated the former by
+impressions, and confined the word idea to the latter.]
+
+[Footnote 25: I am aware, that this word occurs neither in Johnson's Dictionary
+nor in any classical writer. But the word, to intend, which Newton
+and others before him employ in this sense, is now so completely
+appropriated to another meaning, that I could not use it without
+ambiguity: while to paraphrase the sense, as by render intense, would
+often break up the sentence and destroy that harmony of the position of
+the words with the logical position of the thoughts, which is a
+beauty in all composition, and more especially desirable in a close
+philosophical investigation. I have therefore hazarded the word,
+intensify: though, I confess, it sounds uncouth to my own ear.]
+
+[Footnote 26: And Coxcombs vanquish Berkeley by a grin.]
+
+[Footnote 27: Videlicet; Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Mode, each consisting
+of three subdivisions. See Kritik der reinen Vernunft. See too the
+judicious remarks on Locke and Hume.]
+
+[Footnote 28: St. Luke x. 21.]
+
+[Footnote 29: An American Indian with little variety of images, and a still
+scantier stock of language, is obliged to turn his few words to many
+purposes, by likenesses so clear and analogies so remote as to give his
+language the semblance and character of lyric poetry interspersed with
+grotesques. Something not unlike this was the case of such men as
+Behmen and Fox with regard to the Bible. It was their sole armoury of
+expressions, their only organ of thought.]
+
+[Footnote 30: The following burlesque on the Fichtean Egoisnsus may, perhaps,
+be amusing to the few who have studied the system, and to those who are
+unacquainted with it, may convey as tolerable a likeness of Fichte's
+idealism as can be expected from an avowed caricature.
+
+The Categorical Imperative, or the annunciation of the new Teutonic God,
+EGOENKAIPAN: a dithyrambic ode, by QUERKOPF VON KLUBSTICK, Grammarian,
+and Subrector in Gymmasic.
+
+    Eu! Dei vices gerens, ipse Divus,
+    (Speak English, Friend!) the God Imperativus,
+    Here on this market-cross aloud I cry:
+    I, I, I! I itself I!
+    The form and the substance, the what and the why,
+    The when and the where, and the low and the high,
+    The inside and outside, the earth and the sky,
+    I, you and he, and he, you and I,
+    All souls and all bodies are I itself I!
+                  All I itself I!
+                  (Fools! a truce with this starting!)
+                  All my I! all my I!
+    He's a heretic dog who but adds Betty Martin!
+    Thus cried the God with high imperial tone;
+    In robe of stiffest state, that scoffed at beauty,
+    A pronoun-verb imperative he shone--
+    Then substantive and plural-singular grown
+    He thus spake on! Behold in I alone
+    (For ethics boast a syntax of their own)
+    Or if in ye, yet as I doth depute ye,
+    In O! I, you, the vocative of duty!
+    I of the world's whole Lexicon the root!
+    Of the whole universe of touch, sound, sight
+    The genitive and ablative to boot:
+    The accusative of wrong, the nominative of right,
+    And in all cases the case absolute!
+    Self-construed, I all other moods decline:
+    Imperative, from nothing we derive us;
+    Yet as a super-postulate of mine,
+    Unconstrued antecedence I assign
+    To X, Y, Z, the God Infinitivus!]
+
+[Footnote 31: It would be an act of high and almost criminal injustice to pass
+over in silence the name of Mr. Richard Saumarez, a gentleman equally
+well known as a medical man and as a philanthropist, but who demands
+notice on the present occasion as the author of "A new System of
+Physiology" in two volumes octavo, published 1797; and in 1812 of "An
+Examination of the natural and artificial Systems of Philosophy
+which now prevail" in one volume octavo, entitled, "The Principles of
+physiological and physical Science." The latter work is not quite equal
+to the former in style or arrangement; and there is a greater necessity
+of distinguishing the principles of the author's philosophy from his
+conjectures concerning colour, the atmospheric matter, comets, etc.
+which, whether just or erroneous, are by no means necessary consequences
+of that philosophy. Yet even in this department of this volume, which I
+regard as comparatively the inferior work, the reasonings by which Mr.
+Saumarez invalidates the immanence of an infinite power in any finite
+substance are the offspring of no common mind; and the experiment on the
+expansibility of the air is at least plausible and highly ingenious. But
+the merit, which will secure both to the book and to the writer a high
+and honourable name with posterity, consists in the masterly force of
+reasoning, and the copiousness of induction, with which he has assailed,
+and (in my opinion) subverted the tyranny of the mechanic system in
+physiology; established not only the existence of final causes, but
+their necessity and efficiency to every system that merits the name
+of philosophical; and, substituting life and progressive power for the
+contradictory inert force, has a right to be known and remembered as
+the first instaurator of the dynamic philosophy in England. The author's
+views, as far as concerns himself, are unborrowed and completely his
+own, as he neither possessed nor do his writings discover, the
+least acquaintance with the works of Kant, in which the germs of the
+philosophy exist: and his volumes were published many years before the
+full development of these germs by Schelling. Mr. Saumarez's detection
+of the Braunonian system was no light or ordinary service at the time;
+and I scarcely remember in any work on any subject a confutation so
+thoroughly satisfactory. It is sufficient at this time to have stated
+the fact; as in the preface to the work, which I have already announced
+on the Logos, I have exhibited in detail the merits of this writer, and
+genuine philosopher, who needed only have taken his foundation somewhat
+deeper and wider to have superseded a considerable part of my labours.]
+
+[Footnote 32: But for sundry notes on Shakespeare, and other pieces which have
+fallen in my way, I should have deemed it unnecessary to observe; that
+discourse here, or elsewhere does not mean what we now call discoursing;
+but the discursion of the mind, the processes of generalization and
+subsumption, of deduction and conclusion. Thus, Philosophy has hitherto
+been discursive; while Geometry is always and essentially intuitive.]
+
+[Footnote 33: Revelation xx. 3.]
+
+[Footnote 34: See Laing's History of Scotland.--Walter Scott's bards, ballads,
+etc.]
+
+[Footnote 35: Thus organization, and motion are regarded as from God, not in God.]
+
+[Footnote 36: Job, chap. xxviii.]
+
+[Footnote 37: Wherever A=B, and A is not=B, are equally demonstrable, the
+premise in each undeniable, the induction evident, and the conclusion
+legitimate--the result must be, either that contraries can both be true,
+(which is absurd,) or that the faculty and forms of reasoning employed
+are inapplicable to the subject--i.e. that there is a metabasis eis
+allo genos. Thus, the attributes of Space and time applied to Spirit
+are heterogeneous--and the proof of this is, that by admitting them
+explicite or implicite contraries may be demonstrated true--i.e. that
+the same, taken in the same sense, is true and not true.--That the world
+had a beginning in Time and a bound in Space; and That the world had not
+a beginning and has no limit;--That a self originating act is, and is
+not possible, are instances.]
+
+[Footnote 38: To those, who design to acquire the language of a country in
+the country itself, it may be useful, if I mention the incalculable
+advantage which I derived from learning all the words, that could
+possibly be so learned, with the objects before me, and without the
+intermediation of the English terms. It was a regular part of my
+morning studies for the first six weeks of my residence at Ratzeburg,
+to accompany the good and kind old pastor, with whom I lived, from the
+cellar to the roof, through gardens, farmyard, etc. and to call every,
+the minutest, thing by its German name. Advertisements, farces, jest
+books, and the conversation of children while I was at play with them,
+contributed their share to a more home-like acquaintance with the
+language than I could have acquired from works of polite literature
+alone, or even from polite society. There is a passage of hearty sound
+sense in Luther's German Letter on interpretation, to the translation of
+which I shall prefix, for the sake of those who read the German, yet
+are not likely to have dipped often in the massive folios of this heroic
+reformer, the simple, sinewy, idiomatic words of the original. "Denn
+man muss nicht die Buchstaben in der Lateinischen Sprache fragen wie man
+soll Deutsch reden: sondern man muss die Mutter in Hause, die Kinder
+auf den Gassen, den gemeinen Mann auf dem Markte, darum fragen: und
+denselbigen auf das Maul sehen wie sie reden, und darnach dolmetschen.
+So verstehen sie es denn, und merken dass man Deutsch mit ihnen redet."
+
+TRANSLATION:
+
+For one must not ask the letters in the Latin tongue, how one ought to
+speak German; but one must ask the mother in the house, the children
+in the lanes and alleys, the common man in the market, concerning this;
+yea, and look at the moves of their mouths while they are talking, and
+thereafter interpret. They understand you then, and mark that one talks
+German with them.]
+
+[Footnote 39: This paraphrase, written about the time of Charlemagne, is by no
+means deficient in occasional passages of considerable poetic merit.
+There is a flow, and a tender enthusiasm in the following lines (at the
+conclusion of Chapter XI.) which, even in the translation will not, I
+flatter myself, fail to interest the reader. Ottfried is describing the
+circumstances immediately following the birth of our Lord.
+
+    She gave with joy her virgin breast;
+    She hid it not, she bared the breast,
+    Which suckled that divinest babe!
+    Blessed, blessed were the breasts
+    Which the Saviour infant kiss'd;
+    And blessed, blessed was the mother
+    Who wrapp'd his limbs in swaddling clothes,
+    Singing placed him on her lap,
+    Hung o'er him with her looks of love,
+    And sooth'd him with a lulling motion.
+    Blessed; for she shelter'd him
+    From the damp and chilling air;
+    Blessed, blessed! for she lay
+    With such a babe in one blest bed,
+    Close as babes and mothers lie!
+    Blessed, blessed evermore,
+    With her virgin lips she kiss'd,
+    With her arms, and to her breast
+    She embraced the babe divine,
+    Her babe divine the virgin mother!
+    There lives not on this ring of earth
+    A mortal, that can sing her praise.
+    Mighty mother, virgin pure,
+    In the darkness and the night
+    For us she bore the heavenly Lord!
+
+Most interesting is it to consider the effect, when the feelings are
+wrought above the natural pitch by the belief of something mysterious,
+while all the images are purely natural. Then it is, that religion and
+poetry strike deepest.]
+
+[Footnote 40: Lord Grenville has lately re-asserted (in the House of Lords) the
+imminent danger of a revolution in the earlier part of the war against
+France. I doubt not, that his Lordship is sincere; and it must be
+flattering to his feelings to believe it. But where are the evidences of
+the danger, to which a future historian can appeal? Or must he rest on
+an assertion? Let me be permitted to extract a passage on the subject
+from The Friend. "I have said that to withstand the arguments of the
+lawless, the anti-Jacobins proposed to suspend the law, and by the
+interposition of a particular statute to eclipse the blessed light of
+the universal sun, that spies and informers might tyrannize and escape
+in the ominous darkness. Oh! if these mistaken men, intoxicated with
+alarm and bewildered by that panic of property, which they themselves
+were the chief agents in exciting, had ever lived in a country where
+there really existed a general disposition to change and rebellion!
+Had they ever travelled through Sicily; or through France at the first
+coming on of the revolution; or even alas! through too many of the
+provinces of a sister island; they could not but have shrunk from their
+own declarations concerning the state of feeling and opinion at that
+time predominant throughout Great Britain. There was a time--(Heaven
+grant that that time may have passed by!)--when by crossing a narrow
+strait, they might have learned the true symptoms of approaching danger,
+and have secured themselves from mistaking the meetings and idle rant of
+such sedition, as shrank appalled from the sight of a constable, for
+the dire murmuring and strange consternation which precedes the storm
+or earthquake of national discord. Not only in coffee-houses and public
+theatres, but even at the tables of the wealthy, they would have heard
+the advocates of existing Government defend their cause in the language
+and with the tone of men, who are conscious that they are in a minority.
+But in England, when the alarm was at its highest, there was not a
+city, no, not a town or village, in which a man suspected of holding
+democratic principles could move abroad without receiving some
+unpleasant proof of the hatred in which his supposed opinions were held
+by the great majority of the people; and the only instances of popular
+excess and indignation were on the side of the government and the
+established church. But why need I appeal to these invidious facts? Turn
+over the pages of history and seek for a single instance of a revolution
+having been effected without the concurrence of either the nobles, or
+the ecclesiastics, or the monied classes, in any country, in which
+the influences of property had ever been predominant, and where the
+interests of the proprietors were interlinked! Examine the revolution
+of the Belgic provinces under Philip II; the civil wars of France in the
+preceding generation; the history of the American revolution, or the
+yet more recent events in Sweden and in Spain; and it will be scarcely
+possible not to perceive that in England from 1791 to the peace
+of Amiens there were neither tendencies to confederacy nor actual
+confederacies, against which the existing laws had not provided both
+sufficient safeguards and an ample punishment. But alas! the panic of
+property had been struck in the first instance for party purposes; and
+when it became general, its propagators caught it themselves and ended
+in believing their own lie; even as our bulls to Borrowdale sometimes
+run mad with the echo of their own bellowing. The consequences were most
+injurious. Our attention was concentrated on a monster, which could not
+survive the convulsions, in which it had been brought forth,--even
+the enlightened Burke himself too often talking and reasoning, as if a
+perpetual and organized anarchy had been a possible thing! Thus while we
+were warring against French doctrines, we took little heed whether the
+means by which we attempted to overthrow them, were not likely to
+aid and augment the far more formidable evil of French ambition. Like
+children we ran away from the yelping of a cur, and took shelter at the
+heels of a vicious war horse." (Vol. II. Essay i. p. 21, 4th edit.)]
+
+[Footnote 41: I seldom think of the murder of this illustrious Prince without
+recollecting the lines of Valerius Flaccus:
+
+    ------super ipsius ingens
+    Instat fama viri, virtusque haud laeta tyranno;
+    Ergo anteire metus, juvenemque exstinguere pergit.
+                                           Argonaut, I. 29.]
+
+[Footnote 42: --
+
+     Theara de kai ton chaena kai taen dorkada,
+     Kai ton lagoon, kai to ton tauron genos.
+            Manuel Phile, De Animal. Proprietat. sect. I. i. 12.]
+
+[Footnote 43: Paradise Regained. Book IV. I. 261.]
+
+[Footnote 44: Vita e Costumi di Dante.]
+
+[Footnote 45: TRANSLATION: "With the greatest possible solicitude avoid
+authorship. Too early or immoderately employed, it makes the head waste
+and the heart empty; even were there no other worse consequences. A
+person, who reads only to print, to all probability reads amiss; and he,
+who sends away through the pen and the press every thought, the moment
+it occurs to him, will in a short time have sent all away, and will
+become a mere journeyman of the printing-office, a compositor."
+
+To which I may add from myself, that what medical physiologists affirm
+of certain secretions applies equally to our thoughts; they too must be
+taken up again into the circulation, and be again and again re-secreted
+to order to ensure a healthful vigour, both to the mind and to its
+intellectual offspring.]
+
+[Footnote 46: This distinction between transcendental and transcendent is
+observed by our elder divines and philosophers, whenever they express
+themselves scholastically. Dr. Johnson indeed has confounded the two
+words; but his own authorities do not bear him out. Of this celebrated
+dictionary I will venture to remark once for all, that I should suspect
+the man of a morose disposition who should speak of it without respect
+and gratitude as a most instructive and entertaining book, and hitherto,
+unfortunately, an indispensable book; but I confess, that I should be
+surprised at hearing from a philosophic and thorough scholar any but
+very qualified praises of it, as a dictionary. I am not now alluding
+to the number of genuine words omitted; for this is (and perhaps to a
+greater extent) true, as Mr. Wakefield has noticed, of our best Greek
+Lexicons, and this too after the successive labours of so many giants in
+learning. I refer at present both to omissions and commissions of a more
+important nature. What these are, me saltem judice, will be stated at
+full in The Friend, re-published and completed.
+
+I had never heard of the correspondence between Wakefield and Fox till I
+saw the account of it this morning (16th September 1815) in the Monthly
+Review. I was not a little gratified at finding, that Mr. Wakefield
+had proposed to himself nearly the same plan for a Greek and English
+Dictionary, which I had formed, and began to execute, now ten years ago.
+But far, far more grieved am I, that he did not live to complete it.
+I cannot but think it a subject of most serious regret, that the same
+heavy expenditure, which is now employing in the republication of
+STEPHANUS augmented, had not been applied to a new Lexicon on a more
+philosophical plan, with the English, German, and French synonymes
+as well as the Latin. In almost every instance the precise individual
+meaning might be given in an English or German word; whereas in Latin we
+must too often be contented with a mere general and inclusive term. How
+indeed can it be otherwise, when we attempt to render the most copious
+language of the world, the most admirable for the fineness of its
+distinctions, into one of the poorest and most vague languages?
+Especially when we reflect on the comparative number of the works, still
+extant, written while the Greek and Latin were living languages. Were
+I asked what I deemed the greatest and most unmixed benefit, which
+a wealthy individual, or an association of wealthy individuals could
+bestow on their country and on mankind, I should not hesitate to answer,
+"a philosophical English dictionary; with the Greek, Latin, German,
+French, Spanish, and Italian synonymes, and with correspondent indexes."
+That the learned languages might thereby be acquired, better, in
+half the time, is but a part, and not the most important part, of the
+advantages which would accrue from such a work. O! if it should
+be permitted by Providence, that without detriment to freedom and
+independence our government might be enabled to become more than a
+committee for war and revenue! There was a time, when every thing was to
+be done by Government. Have we not flown off to the contrary extreme?]
+
+[Footnote 47: April, 1825. If I did not see it with my own eyes, I should not
+believe that I had been guilty of so many hydrostatic Bulls as bellow in
+this unhappy allegory or string of metaphors! How a river was to
+travel up hill from a vale far inward, over the intervening mountains,
+Morpheus, the Dream weaver, can alone unriddle. I am ashamed and
+humbled. S. T. Coleridge.]
+
+[Footnote 48: Ennead, III. 8. 3. The force of the Greek sunienai is imperfectly
+expressed by "understand;" our own idiomatic phrase "to go along with
+me" comes nearest to it. The passage, that follows, full of profound
+sense, appears to me evidently corrupt; and in fact no writer more
+wants, better deserves, or is less likely to obtain, a new and more
+correct edition-ti oun sunienai; oti to genomenon esti theama emon,
+siopaesis (mallem, theama, emon sioposaes,) kai physei genomenon
+theoraema, kai moi genomenae ek theorias taes odi, taen physin echein
+philotheamona uparkei. (mallem, kai moi hae genomenae ek theorias autaes
+odis). "What then are we to understand? That whatever is produced is an
+intuition, I silent; and that, which is thus generated, is by its nature
+a theorem, or form of contemplation; and the birth; which results to
+me from this contemplation, attains to have a contemplative nature." So
+Synesius:
+
+    'Odis hiera
+    'Arraeta gona
+
+The after comparison of the process of the natura naturans with that of
+the geometrician is drawn from the very heart of philosophy.]
+
+[Footnote 49: This is happily effected in three lines by Synesius, in his THIRD
+HYMN:
+
+    'En kai Pan'ta--(taken by itself) is Spinozism.
+    'En d' 'Apan'ton--a mere Anima Mundi.
+    'En te pro panton--is mechanical Theism.
+
+But unite all three, and the result is the Theism of Saint Paul and
+Christianity. Synesius was censured for his doctrine of the pre-
+existence of the soul; but never, that I can find, arraigned or deemed
+heretical for his Pantheism, though neither Giordano Bruno, nor Jacob
+Behmen ever avowed it more broadly.
+
+    Mystas de Noos,
+    Ta te kai ta legei,
+    Buthon arraeton
+    Amphichoreuon.
+    Su to tikton ephus,
+    Su to tiktomenon;
+    Su to photizon,
+    Su to lampomenon;
+    Su to phainomenon,
+    Su to kryptomenon
+    Idiais augais.
+    'En kai panta,
+    'En kath' heauto,
+    Kai dia panton.
+
+Pantheism is therefore not necessarily irreligious or heretical; though
+it may be taught atheistically. Thus Spinoza would agree with Synesius
+in calling God Physis en Noerois, the Nature in Intelligences; but
+he could not subscribe to the preceding Nous kai noeros, i.e. Himself
+Intelligence and intelligent.
+
+In this biographical sketch of my literary life I may be excused, if I
+mention here, that I had translated the eight Hymns of Synesius from the
+Greek into English Anacreontics before my fifteenth year.]
+
+[Footnote 50: See Schell. Abhandl. zur Erlaeuter. des Id. der Wissenschafslehre.]
+
+[Footnote 51: Des Cartes, Diss. de Methodo.]
+
+[Footnote 52: The impossibility of an absolute thing (substantia unica) as
+neither genus, species, nor individuum: as well as its utter unfitness
+for the fundamental position of a philosophic system, will be
+demonstrated in the critique on Spinozism in the fifth treatise of my
+Logosophia.]
+
+[Footnote 53: It is most worthy of notice, that in the first revelation
+of himself, not confined to individuals; indeed in the very first
+revelation of his absolute being, Jehovah at the same time revealed the
+fundamental truth of all philosophy, which must either commence with
+the absolute, or have no fixed commencement; that is, cease to be
+philosophy. I cannot but express my regret, that in the equivocal use
+of the word that, for in that, or because, our admirable version has
+rendered the passage susceptible of a degraded interpretation in the
+mind of common readers or hearers, as if it were a mere reproof to an
+impertinent question, I am what I am, which might be equally affirmed of
+himself by any existent being.
+
+The Cartesian Cogito ergo sum is objectionable, because either the
+Cogito is used extra gradum, and then it is involved to the sum and is
+tautological; or it is taken as a particular mode or dignity, and then
+it is subordinated to the sum as the species to the genus, or rather
+as a particular modification to the subject modified; and not pre-
+ordinated as the arguments seem to require. For Cogito is Sum Cogitans.
+This is clear by the inevidence of the converse. Cogitat, ergo est is
+true, because it is a mere application of the logical rule: Quicquid in
+genere est, est et in specie. Est (cogitans), ergo est. It is a cherry
+tree; therefore it is a tree. But, est ergo cogitat, is illogical: for
+quod est in specie, non NBCESSARIO in genere est. It may be true. I hold
+it to be true, that quicquid vere est, est per veram sui affirmationem;
+but it is a derivative, not an immediate truth. Here then we have, by
+anticipation, the distinction between the conditional finite! (which, as
+known in distinct consciousness by occasion of experience, is called by
+Kant's followers the empirical!) and the absolute I AM, and likewise the
+dependence or rather the inherence of the former in the latter; in whom
+"we live, and move, and have our being," as St. Paul divinely asserts,
+differing widely from the Theists of the mechanic school (as Sir J.
+Newton, Locke, and others) who must say from whom we had our being, and
+with it life and the powers of life.]
+
+[Footnote 54: TRANSLATION. "Hence it is clear, from what cause many
+reject the notion of the continuous and the infinite. They take, namely,
+the words irrepresentable and impossible in one and the same meaning;
+and, according to the forms of sensuous evidence, the notion of the
+continuous and the infinite is doubtless impossible. I am not now
+pleading the cause of these laws, which not a few schools have thought
+proper to explode, especially the former (the law of continuity). But it
+is of the highest importance to admonish the reader, that those, who
+adopt so perverted a mode of reasoning, are under a grievous error.
+Whatever opposes the formal principles of the understanding and the
+reason is confessedly impossible; but not therefore that, which is
+therefore not amenable to the forms of sensuous evidence, because it is
+exclusively an object of pure intellect. For this non-coincidence of the
+sensuous and the intellectual (the nature of which I shall presently lay
+open) proves nothing more, but that the mind cannot always adequately
+represent to the concrete, and transform into distinct images, abstract
+notions derived from the pure intellect. But this contradiction, which
+is in itself merely subjective (i.e. an incapacity in the nature of
+man), too often passes for an incongruity or impossibility in the object
+(i.e. the notions themselves), and seduces the incautious to mistake the
+limitations of the human faculties for the limits of things, as they
+really exist."
+
+I take this occasion to observe, that here and elsewhere Kant uses the
+term intuition, and the verb active (intueri Germanice anschauen) for
+which we have unfortunately no correspondent word, exclusively for that
+which can be represented in space and time. He therefore consistently
+and rightly denies the possibility of intellectual intuitions. But as
+I see no adequate reason for this exclusive sense of the term, I have
+reverted to its wider signification, authorized by our elder theologians
+and metaphysicians, according to whom the term comprehends all truths
+known to us without a medium.
+
+From Kant's Treatise De mundi sensibilis et intelligibilis forma et
+principiis. 1770.]
+
+[Footnote 55: Franc. Baconis de Verulam, NOVUM ORGANUM.]
+
+[Footnote 56: This phrase, a priori, is in common, most grossly misunderstood,
+and as absurdity burdened on it, which it does not deserve. By knowledge
+a priori, we do not mean, that we can know anything previously to
+experience, which would be a contradiction in terms; but that having
+once known it by occasion of experience (that is, something acting
+upon us from without) we then know, that it must have existed, or the
+experience itself would have been impossible. By experience only now,
+that I have eyes; but then my reason convinces me, that I must have had
+eyes in order to the experience.]
+
+[Footnote 57: Jer. Taylor's Via Pacis.]
+
+[Footnote 58: Par. Lost. Book V. I. 469.]
+
+[Footnote 59: Leibnitz. Op. T. II. P. II. p. 53.--T. III. p. 321.]
+
+[Footnote 60: Synesii Episcop. Hymn. III. I. 231]
+
+[Footnote 61: 'Anaer morionous, 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
+Shakespeare, de jure singulari, et ex privilegio naturae.]
+
+[Footnote 62: First published in 1803.]
+
+[Footnote 63: These thoughts were suggested to me during the perusal of the
+Madrigals of Giovambatista Strozzi published in Florence in May, 1593,
+by his sons Lorenzo and Filippo Strozzi, with a dedication to their
+paternal uncle, Signor Leone Strozzi, Generale delle battaglie di Santa
+Chiesa. As I do not remember to have seen either the poems or their
+author mentioned in any English work, or to have found them in any of
+the common collections of Italian poetry; and as the little work is of
+rare occurrence; I will transcribe a few specimens. I have seldom
+met with compositions that possessed, to my feelings, more of that
+satisfying entireness, that complete adequateness of the manner to the
+matter which so charms us in Anacreon, joined with the tenderness,
+and more than the delicacy of Catullus. Trifles as they are, they were
+probably elaborated with great care; yet to the perusal we refer them
+to a spontaneous energy rather than to voluntary effort. To a cultivated
+taste there is a delight in perfection for its own sake, independently
+of the material in which it is manifested, that none but a cultivated
+taste can understand or appreciate.
+
+After what I have advanced, it would appear presumption to offer a
+translation; even if the attempt were not discouraged by the different
+genius of the English mind and language, which demands a denser body of
+thought as the condition of a high polish, than the Italian. I cannot
+but deem it likewise an advantage in the Italian tongue, in many other
+respects inferior to our own, that the language of poetry is more
+distinct from that of prose than with us. From the earlier appearance
+and established primacy of the Tuscan poets, concurring with the
+number of independent states, and the diversity of written dialects,
+the Italians have gained a poetic idiom, as the Greeks before them
+had obtained from the same causes with greater and more various
+discriminations, for example, the Ionic for their heroic verses; the
+Attic for their iambic; and the two modes of the Doric for the lyric or
+sacerdotal, and the pastoral, the distinctions of which were doubtless
+more obvious to the Greeks themselves than they are to us.
+
+I will venture to add one other observation before I proceed to the
+transcription. I am aware that the sentiments which I have avowed
+concerning the points of difference between the poetry of the present
+age, and that of the period between 1500 and 1650, are the reverse of
+the opinion commonly entertained. I was conversing on this subject with
+a friend, when the servant, a worthy and sensible woman, coming in, I
+placed before her two engravings, the one a pinky-coloured plate of the
+day, the other a masterly etching by Salvator Rosa from one of his
+own pictures. On pressing her to tell us, which she preferred, after a
+little blushing and flutter of feeling, she replied "Why, that, Sir, to
+be sure! (pointing to the ware from the Fleet-street print shops);--it's
+so neat and elegant. T'other is such a scratchy slovenly thing." An
+artist, whose writings are scarcely less valuable than his pictures, and
+to whose authority more deference will be willingly paid, than I
+could even wish should be shown to mine, has told us, and from his own
+experience too, that good taste must be acquired, and like all other
+good things, is the result of thought and the submissive study of the
+best models. If it be asked, "But what shall I deem such?"--the answer
+is; presume those to be the best, the reputation of which has been
+matured into fame by the consent of ages. For wisdom always has a final
+majority, if not by conviction, yet by acquiescence. In addition to
+Sir J. Reynolds I may mention Harris of Salisbury; who in one of his
+philosophical disquisitions has written on the means of acquiring a just
+taste with the precision of Aristotle, and the elegance of Quinctilian.
+
+    MADRIGALI.
+
+    Gelido suo ruscel chiaro, e tranquillo
+    M'insegno Amor di state a mezzo'l giorno;
+    Ardean le solve, ardean le piagge, e i colli.
+    Ond' io, ch' al piu gran gielo ardo e sfavillo,
+    Subito corsi; ma si puro adorno
+    Girsene il vidi, che turbar no'l volli:
+    Sol mi specchiava, e'n dolce ombrosa sponda
+    Mi stava intento al mormorar dell' onda.
+
+    Aure dell' angoscioso viver mio
+    Refrigerio soave,
+    E dolce si, che piu non mi par grave
+    Ne'l ardor, ne'l morir, anz' il desio;
+    Deh voil ghiaccio, e le nubi, e'l tempo rio
+    Discacciatene omai, che londa chiara,
+    E l'ombra non men cara
+    A scherzare, a cantar per suoi boschetti,
+    E prati festa et allegrezza alletti.
+
+    Pacifiche, ma spesso in amorosa
+    Guerra co'fiori, e l'erba
+    Alla stagione acerba
+    Verdi insegne del giglio e della rosa,
+    Movete, Aure, pian pian; che tregua o posa,
+    Se non pace, io ritrove;
+    E so ben dove:--Oh vago, a mansueto
+    Sguardo, oh labbra d'ambrosia, oh rider, lieto!
+
+    Hor come un scoglio stassi,
+    Hor come un rio se'n fugge,
+    Ed hor crud' orsa rugge,
+    Hor canta angelo pio: ma che non fassi!
+    E che non fammi, O sassi,
+    O rivi, o belue, o Dii, questa mia vaga
+    Non so, se ninfa, o magna,
+    Non so, se donna, o Dea,
+    Non so, se dolce o rea?
+
+    Piangendo mi baciaste,
+    E ridendo il negaste:
+    In doglia hebbivi pin,
+    In festa hebbivi ria:
+    Nacque gioia di pianti,
+    Dolor di riso: O amanti
+    Miseri, habbiate insieme
+    Ognor paura e speme.
+
+    Bel Fior, tu mi rimembri
+    La rugiadosa guancia del bet viso;
+    E si vera l'assembri,
+    Che'n te sovente, come in lei m'affiso:
+    Et hor del vago riso,
+    Hor del serene sguardo
+    Io pur cieco riguardo. Ma qual fugge,
+    O Rosa, il mattin lieve!
+    E chi te, come neve,
+    E'l mio cor teco, e la mia vita strugge!
+
+    Anna mia, Anna dolce, oh sempre nuovo
+    E piu chiaro concento,
+    Quanta dolcezza sento
+    In sol Anna dicendo? Io mi pur pruovo,
+    Ne qui tra noi ritruovo,
+    Ne tra cieli armonia,
+    Che del bel nome suo piu dolce sia:
+    Altro il Cielo, altro Amore,
+    Altro non suona l'Ecco del mio core.
+
+    Hor che'l prato, e la selva si scoiora,
+    Al tuo serena ombroso
+    Muovine, alto Riposo,
+    Deh ch'io riposi una sol notte, un hora:
+    Han le fere, e git augelli, ognun talora
+    Ha qualche pace; io quando,
+    Lasso! non vonne errando,
+    E non piango, e non grido? e qual pur forte?
+    Ma poiche, non sent' egli, odine, Morte.
+
+    Risi e piansi d'Amor; ne pero mai
+    Se non in fiamma, o'n onda, o'n vento scrissi
+    Spesso msrce trovai
+    Crudel; sempre in me morto, in altri vissi:
+    Hor da' piu scuri Abissi al ciel m'aizai,
+    Hor ne pur caddi giuso;
+    Stance al fin qui son chiuso.
+
+[Footnote 64: --
+
+      "I've measured it from side to side;
+      'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide."]
+
+[Footnote 65: --
+
+      "Nay, rack your brain--'tis all in vain,
+      I'll tell you every thing I know;
+      But to the Thorn, and to the Pond
+      Which is a little step beyond,
+      I wish that you would go:
+      Perhaps, when you are at the place,
+      You something of her tale may trace.
+
+      I'll give you the best help I can
+      Before you up the mountain go,
+      Up to the dreary mountain-top,
+      I'll tell you all I know.
+      'Tis now some two-and-twenty years
+      Since she (her name is Martha Ray)
+      Gave, with a maiden's true good will,
+      Her company to Stephen Hill;
+      And she was blithe and gay,
+      And she was happy, happy still
+      Whene'er she thought of Stephen Hill.
+
+      And they had fixed the wedding-day,
+      The morning that must wed them both
+      But Stephen to another maid
+      Had sworn another oath;
+      And, with this other maid, to church
+      Unthinking Stephen went--
+      Poor Martha! on that woeful day
+      A pang of pitiless dismay
+      Into her soul was sent;
+      A fire was kindled in her breast,
+      Which might not burn itself to rest.
+
+      They say, full six months after this,
+      While yet the summer leaves were green,
+      She to the mountain-top would go,
+      And there was often seen;
+      'Tis said a child was in her womb,
+      As now to any eye was plain;
+      She was with child, and she was mad;
+      Yet often she was sober sad
+      From her exceeding pain.
+      Oh me! ten thousand times I'd rather
+      That he had died, that cruel father!
+
+           *     *     *     *
+           *     *     *     *
+           *     *     *     *
+           *     *     *     *
+
+      Last Christmas when they talked of this,
+      Old Farmer Simpson did maintain,
+      That in her womb the infant wrought
+      About its mother's heart, and brought
+      Her senses back again:
+      And, when at last her time drew near,
+      Her looks were calm, her senses clear.
+
+      No more I know, I wish I did,
+      And I would tell it all to you
+      For what became of this poor child
+      There's none that ever knew
+      And if a child was born or no,
+      There's no one that could ever tell;
+      And if 'twas born alive or dead,
+      There's no one knows, as I have said:
+      But some remember well,
+      That Martha Ray about this time
+      Would up the mountain often climb."]
+
+[Footnote 66: It is no less an error in teachers, than a torment to the poor
+children, to enforce the necessity of reading as they would talk. In
+order to cure them of singing as it is called, that is, of too great a
+difference, the child is made to repeat the words with his eyes from off
+the book; and then, indeed, his tones resemble talking, as far as his
+fears, tears and trembling will permit. But as soon as the eye is again
+directed to the printed page, the spell begins anew; for an instinctive
+sense tells the child's feelings, that to utter its own momentary
+thoughts, and to recite the written thoughts of another, as of another,
+and a far wiser than himself, are two widely different things; and as
+the two acts are accompanied with widely different feelings, so must
+they justify different modes of enunciation. Joseph Lancaster, among
+his other sophistications of the excellent Dr. Bell's invaluable system,
+cures this fault of singing, by hanging fetters and chains on the child,
+to the music of which one of his school-fellows, who walks before,
+dolefully chants out the child's last speech and confession, birth,
+parentage, and education. And this soul-benumbing ignominy, this unholy
+and heart-hardening burlesque on the last fearful infliction of outraged
+law, in pronouncing the sentence to which the stern and familiarized
+judge not seldom bursts into tears, has been extolled as a happy and
+ingenious method of remedying--what? and how?--why, one extreme in order
+to introduce another, scarce less distant from good sense, and certainly
+likely to have worse moral effects, by enforcing a semblance of petulant
+ease and self-sufficiency, in repression and possible after-perversion
+of the natural feelings. I have to beg Dr. Bell's pardon for this
+connection of the two names, but he knows that contrast is no less
+powerful a cause of association than likeness.]
+
+[Footnote 67: Altered from the description of Night-Mair in the REMORSE.
+
+    "Oh Heaven! 'twas frightful! Now ran down and stared at
+     By hideous shapes that cannot be remembered;
+     Now seeing nothing and imagining nothing;
+     But only being afraid--stifled with fear!
+     While every goodly or familiar form
+     Had a strange power of spreading terror round me!"
+
+N.B.--Though Shakespeare has, for his own all justifying purposes,
+introduced the Night-Mare with her own foals, yet Mair means a Sister,
+or perhaps a Hag.]
+
+[Footnote 68: But still more by the mechanical system of philosophy which
+has needlessly infected our theological opinions, and teaching us to
+consider the world in its relation to god, as of a building to its
+mason, leaves the idea of omnipresence a mere abstract notion in the
+stateroom of our reason.]
+
+[Footnote 69: As the ingenious gentleman under the influence of the Tragic Muse
+contrived to dislocate, "I wish you a good morning, Sir! Thank you, Sir,
+and I wish you the same," into two blank-verse heroics:--
+
+    To you a morning good, good Sir! I wish.
+    You, Sir! I thank: to you the same wish I.
+
+In those parts of Mr. Wordsworth's works which I have thoroughly
+studied, I find fewer instances in which this would be practicable
+than I have met to many poems, where an approximation of prose has been
+sedulously and on system guarded against. Indeed excepting the stanzas
+already quoted from THE SAILOR'S MOTHER, I can recollect but one
+instance: that is to say, a short passage of four or five lines in THE
+BROTHERS, that model of English pastoral, which I never yet read with
+unclouded eye.--"James, pointing to its summit, over which they had all
+purposed to return together, informed them that he would wait for them
+there. They parted, and his comrades passed that way some two hours
+after, but they did not find him at the appointed place, _a circumstance
+of which they took no heed:_ but one of them, going by chance into the
+house, which at this time was James's house, learnt _there,_ that nobody
+had seen him all that day." The only change which has been made is in
+the position of the little word there in two instances, the position
+in the original being clearly such as is not adopted in ordinary
+conversation. The other words printed in italics were so marked because,
+though good and genuine English, they are not the phraseology of common
+conversation either in the word put in apposition, or in the connection
+by the genitive pronoun. Men in general would have said, "but that was
+a circumstance they paid no attention to, or took no notice of;" and
+the language is, on the theory of the preface, justified only by the
+narrator's being the Vicar. Yet if any ear could suspect, that these
+sentences were ever printed as metre, on those very words alone could
+the suspicion have been grounded.]
+
+[Footnote 70: I had in my mind the striking but untranslatable epithet, which
+the celebrated Mendelssohn applied to the great founder of the Critical
+Philosophy "Der alleszermalmende KANT," that is, the all-becrushing,
+or rather the all-to-nothing-crushing Kant. In the facility and force
+of compound epithets, the German from the number of its cases and
+inflections approaches to the Greek, that language so
+
+    "Bless'd in the happy marriage of sweet words."
+
+It is in the woful harshness of its sounds alone that the German need
+shrink from the comparison.]
+
+[Footnote 71: Sammlung einiger Abhandlungen von Christian Garve.]
+
+[Footnote 72: Sonnet IX.]
+
+[Footnote 73: Mr. Wordsworth's having judiciously adopted "concourse wild" in
+this passage for "a wild scene" as it stood to the former edition,
+encourages me to hazard a remark, which I certainly should not have made
+in the works of a poet less austerely accurate in the use of words, than
+he is, to his own great honour. It respects the propriety of the word,
+"scene," even in the sentence in which it is retained. Dryden, and he
+only in his more careless verses, was the first, as far as my researches
+have discovered, who for the convenience of rhyme used this word in the
+vague sense, which has been since too current even in our best writers,
+and which (unfortunately, I think) is given as its first explanation in
+Dr. Johnson's Dictionary and therefore would be taken by an incautious
+reader as its proper sense. In Shakespeare and Milton the word is
+never used without some clear reference, proper or metaphorical, to the
+theatre. Thus Milton:
+
+    "Cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm
+     A sylvan scene; and, as the ranks ascend
+     Shade above shade, a woody theatre
+     Of stateliest view."
+
+I object to any extension of its meaning, because the word is already
+more equivocal than might be wished; inasmuch as to the limited use,
+which I recommend, it may still signify two different things; namely,
+the scenery, and the characters and actions presented on the stage
+during the presence of particular scenes. It can therefore be preserved
+from obscurity only by keeping the original signification full in the
+mind. Thus Milton again,
+
+    ------"Prepare thee for another scene."]
+
+[Footnote 74: --
+
+     Which Copland scarce had spoke, but quickly every hill,
+     Upon her verge that stands, the neighbouring vallies fill;
+     Helvillon from his height, it through the mountains threw,
+     From whom as soon again, the sound Dunbalrase drew,
+     From whose stone-trophied head, it on the Windross went,
+     Which tow'rds the sea again, resounded it to Dent.
+     That Brodwater, therewith within her banks astound,
+     In sailing to the sea, told it to Egremound,
+     Whose buildings, walks, and streets, with echoes loud and long,
+     Did mightily commend old Copland for her song.
+                                     Drayton's POLYOLBION: Song XXX.]
+
+[Footnote 75: Translation. It behoves me to side with my friends, but only as far
+as the gods.]
+
+[Footnote 76: "Slender. I bruised my shin with playing with sword and dagger for
+a dish of stewed prunes, and by my troth I cannot abide the smell of hot
+meat since."--So again, Evans. "I will make an end of my dinner: there's
+pippins and cheese to come."]
+
+[Footnote 77: This was accidentally confirmed to me by an old German gentleman at
+Helmstadt, who had been Klopstock's school and bed-fellow. Among other
+boyish anecdotes, he related that the young poet set a particular value
+on a translation of the PARADISE LOST, and always slept with it under
+his pillow.]
+
+[Footnote 78: Klopstock's observation was partly true and partly erroneous. In
+the literal sense of his words, and, if we confine the comparison to the
+average of space required for the expression of the same thought in the
+two languages, it is erroneous. I have translated some German hexameters
+into English hexameter; and find, that on the average three English
+lines will express four lines German. The reason is evident: our
+language abounds in monosyllables and dissyllables. The German, not less
+than the Greek, is a polysyllable language. But in another point of view
+the remark was not without foundation. For the German possessing the
+same unlimited privilege of forming compounds, both with prepositions
+and with epithets, as the Greek, it can express the richest single Greek
+word in a single German one, and is thus freed from the necessity
+of weak or ungraceful paraphrases. I will content myself with one at
+present, viz. the use of the prefixed participles ver, zer, ent, and
+weg: thus reissen to rend, verreissen to rend away, zerreissen to rend
+to pieces, entreissen to rend off or out of a thing, in the active
+sense: or schmelzen to melt--ver, zer, ent, schmelzen--and in like
+manner through all the verbs neuter and active. If you consider only
+how much we should feel the loss of the prefix be, as in bedropt,
+besprinkle, besot, especially in our poetical language, and then think
+that this same mode of composition is carved through all their simple
+and compound prepositions, and many of their adverbs; and that with most
+of these the Germans have the same privilege as we have of dividing them
+from the verb and placing them at the end of the sentence; you will
+have no difficulty in comprehending the reality and the cause of this
+superior power in the German of condensing meaning, in which its great
+poet exulted. It is impossible to read half a dozen pages of Wieland
+without perceiving that in this respect the German has no rival but the
+Greek. And yet I feel, that concentration or condensation is not the
+happiest mode of expressing this excellence, which seems to consist not
+so much in the less time required for conveying an impression, as in
+the unity and simultaneousness with which the impression is conveyed.
+It tends to make their language more picturesque: it depictures images
+better. We have obtained this power in part by our compound verbs
+derived from the Latin: and the sense of its great effect no doubt
+induced our Milton both to the use and the abuse of Latin derivatives.
+But still these prefixed particles, conveying no separate or separable
+meaning to the mere English reader, cannot possibly act on the mind with
+the force or liveliness of an original and homogeneous language such as
+the German is, and besides are confined to certain words.]
+
+[Footnote 79: Praecludere calumniam, in the original.]
+
+[Footnote 80: Better thus: Forma specifica per formam individualem translucens:
+or better yet--Species individualisata, sive Individuum cuilibet Speciei
+determinatae in omni parte correspondens et quasi versione quadam eam
+interpretans et repetens.]
+
+[Footnote 81: --
+
+     ------"The big round tears
+     Cours'd one another down his innocent nose
+     In piteous chase,"
+
+says Shakespeare of a wounded stag hanging its head over a stream:
+naturally, from the position of the head, and most beautifully, from
+the association of the preceding image, of the chase, in which "the
+poor sequester'd stag from the hunter's aim had ta'en a hurt." In the
+supposed position of Bertram, the metaphor, if not false, loses all the
+propriety of the original.]
+
+[Footnote 82: Among a number of other instances of words chosen without reason,
+Imogine in the first act declares, that thunder-storms were not able
+to intercept her prayers for "the desperate man, in desperate ways who
+dealt"----
+
+    "Yea, when the launched bolt did sear her sense,
+     Her soul's deep orisons were breathed for him;"
+
+that is, when a red-hot bolt, launched at her from a thunder-cloud, had
+cauterized her sense, to plain English, burnt her eyes out of her head,
+she kept still praying on.
+
+    "Was not this love? Yea, thus doth woman love!"]
+
+[Footnote 83: This sort of repetition is one of this writers peculiarities, and
+there is scarce a page which does not furnish one or more instances--Ex.
+gr. in the first page or two. Act I, line 7th, "and deemed that I might
+sleep."--Line 10, "Did rock and quiver in the bickering glare."--Lines
+14, 15, 16, "But by the momently gleams of sheeted blue, Did the pale
+marbles dare so sternly on me, I almost deemed they lived."--Line
+37, "The glare of Hell."--Line 35, "O holy Prior, this is no earthly
+storm."--Line 38, "This is no earthly storm."--Line 42, "Dealing
+with us."--Line 43, "Deal thus sternly:"--Line 44, "Speak! thou hast
+something seen?"--"A fearful sight!"--Line 45, "What hast thou seen! A
+piteous, fearful sight."--Line 48, "quivering gleams."--Line 50, "In the
+hollow pauses of the storm."--Line 61, "The pauses of the storm, etc."]
+
+[Footnote 84: The child is an important personage, for I see not by what possible
+means the author could have ended the second and third acts but for its
+timely appearance. How ungrateful then not further to notice its fate!]
+
+[Footnote 85: Classically too, as far as consists with the allegorizing fancy
+of the modern, that still striving to project the inward,
+contradistinguishes itself from the seeming ease with which the poetry
+of the ancients reflects the world without. Casimir affords, perhaps,
+the most striking instance of this characteristic difference.--For his
+style and diction are really classical: while Cowley, who resembles
+Casimir in many respects, completely barbarizes his Latinity, and even
+his metre, by the heterogeneous nature of his thoughts. That Dr. Johnson
+should have passed a contrary judgment, and have even preferred Cowley's
+Latin Poems to Milton's, is a caprice that has, if I mistake not,
+excited the surprise of all scholars. I was much amused last summer with
+the laughable affright, with which an Italian poet perused a page of
+Cowley's Davideis, contrasted with the enthusiasm with which he first
+ran through, and then read aloud, Milton's Mansus and Ad Patrem.]
+
+[Footnote 86: Flectit, or if the metre had allowed, premit would have supported
+the metaphor better.]
+
+[Footnote 87: Poor unlucky Metaphysicks! and what are they? A single sentence
+expresses the object and thereby the contents of this science. Gnothi
+seauton:
+
+                                     Nosce te ipsum,
+    Tuque Deum, quantum licet, inque Deo omnia noscas.]
+
+Know thyself: and so shalt thou know God, as far as is permitted to
+a creature, and in God all things.--Surely, there is a strange--nay,
+rather too natural--aversion to many to know themselves.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Biographia Literaria, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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