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Anima Poetæ

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge · English · Gutenberg #41705 · 452,458 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Anima Poetæ

Author: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Editor: Ernest Hartley Coleridge


        
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Language: English

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Transcriber's note


Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Printer
errors have been changed and are listed at the end. All other
inconsistencies are as in the original.

Characters that could not be displayed directly in Latin-1 are
transcribed as follows:

    _ - Italic
   ^ - superscript
   {_C} - subscript C
   [cir] - circle
   [py] - pyramid
   [rec] - rectangle
   [scir] - small circle
   [sq] - square
   [V] - slant




ANIMA POETÆ

    FROM THE UNPUBLISHED
    NOTE-BOOKS OF
    SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE


    EDITED BY
    ERNEST HARTLEY COLERIDGE


    LONDON
    WILLIAM HEINEMANN
    MDCCCXCV

    _All rights reserved_

    _Entered at Stationers' Hall_

    _Entered at the Library of Congress, Washington_

    _Copyright_, 1895




When shall I find time and ease to reduce my pocket-books and
memorandums to an _Index_ or _Memoriæ Memorandorum_? If--aye! and alas!
if I could see the last sheet of my _Assertio Fidei Christianæ, et
eterni temporizantis_, having previously beheld my elements of
Discourse, Logic, Dialectic, and Noetic, or Canon, Criterion, and
Organon, with the philosophic Glossary--in one printed volume, and the
Exercises in Reasoning as another--if--what then? Why, then I would
publish all that remained unused, Travels and all, under the title of
Excursions Abroad and at Home, what I have seen and what I have thought
with a little of what I have felt, in the words in which I told and
talked them to my pocket-books, the confidants who have _not_ betrayed
me, the friends whose silence was _not_ detraction, and the inmates
before whom I was not ashamed to complain, to yearn, to weep, or even to
pray! To which are added marginal notes from many old books and one or
two new ones, sifted through the Mogul Sieve of Duty towards my
Neighbour--by [Greek: 'Estêse].

_21 June, 1823._




PREFACE


_Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge_, which the
poet's nephew and son-in-law, Henry Nelson Coleridge, published in 1835,
was a popular book from the first, and has won the approval of two
generations of readers. Unlike the _Biographia Literaria_, or the
original and revised versions of _The Friend_, which never had their day
at all, or the _Aids to Reflection_, which passed through many editions,
but now seems to have delivered its message, the _Table Talk_ is still
well known and widely read, and that not only by students of literature.
The task which the editor set himself was a difficult one, but it lay
within the powers of an attentive listener, possessed of a good memory
and those rarer gifts of a refined and scholarly taste, a sound and
luminous common sense. He does not attempt to reproduce Coleridge's
conversation or monologue or impassioned harangue, but he preserves and
notes down the detached fragments of knowledge and wisdom which fell
from time to time from the master's lips. Here are "the balmy sunny
islets of the blest and the intelligible," an unvexed and _harbourous_
archipelago. Very sparingly, if at all, have those pithy "sentences" and
weighty paragraphs been trimmed or pruned by the pious solicitude of the
memorialist, but it must be borne in mind that the unities are more or
less consciously observed, alike in the matter of the discourse and the
artistic presentation to the reader. There is, in short, not merely a
"mechanic" but an "organic regularity" in the composition of the work as
a whole. A "myriad-minded" sage, who has seen men and cities, who has
read widely and shaped his thoughts in a peculiar mould, is pouring out
his stores of knowledge, the garnered fruit of a life of study and
meditation, for the benefit of an apt learner, a discreet and
appreciative disciple. A day comes when the marvellous lips are
constrained to an endless silence, and it becomes the duty and privilege
of the beloved and honoured pupil to "snatch from forgetfulness" and to
hand down to posterity the great tradition of his master's eloquence. A
labour of love so useful and so fascinating was accomplished by the
gifted editor of the _Table Talk_, and it was accomplished once for all.
The compilation of a new _Table Talk_, if it were possible, would be a
mistake and an impertinence.

The present collection of hitherto unpublished aphorisms, reflections,
confessions and soliloquies, which for want of a better name I have
entitled _Anima Poetæ_, does not in any way challenge comparison with
the _Table Talk_. It is, indeed, essentially different, not only in the
sources from which it has been compiled but in constitution and in aim.

"Since I left you," writes Coleridge in a letter to Wordsworth of May
12, 1812, "my pocket-books have been my sole confidants." Doubtless, in
earlier and happier days, he had been eager not merely to record but to
communicate to the few who would listen or might understand the
ceaseless and curious workings of his ever-shaping imagination, but from
youth to age note-books and pocket-books were his silent confidants, his
"never-failing friends" by night and day.

More than fifty of these remarkable documents are extant. The earliest
of the series, which dates from 1795 and which is known as the "Gutch
Memorandum Book," was purchased in 1868 by the trustees of the British
Museum, and is now exhibited in the King's Library. It consists, for the
most part, of fragments of prose and verse thrown off at the moment,
and stored up for future use in poem or lecture or sermon. A few of
these fragments were printed in the _Literary Remains_ (4 vols.
1836-39), and others are to be found (pp. 103, 5, 6, 9 _et passim_) in
Herr Brandl's _Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the English Romantic School_.
The poetical fragments are printed _in extenso_ in Coleridge's _Poetical
Works_ (Macmillan, 1893), pp. 453-58. A few specimens of the prose
fragments have been included in the first chapter of this work. One of
the latest note-books, an unfinished folio, contains the Autobiographic
Note of 1832, portions of which were printed in Gillman's _Life of
Coleridge_, pp. 9-33, and a mass of unpublished matter, consisting
mainly of religious exercises and biblical criticism.

Of the intervening collection of pocket-books, note-books, copy-books,
of all shapes, sizes and bindings, a detailed description would be
tedious and out of place. Their contents may be roughly divided into
diaries of tours in Germany, the Lake District, Scotland, Sicily and
Italy; notes for projected and accomplished works, rough drafts of
poems, schemes of metre and metrical experiments; notes for lectures on
Shakspere and other dramatists; quotations from books of travel, from
Greek, Latin, German and Italian classics, with and without critical
comments; innumerable fragments of metaphysical and theological
speculation; and commingled with this unassorted medley of facts and
thoughts and fancies, an occasional and intermitted record of personal
feeling, of love and friendship, of disappointment and regret, of
penitence and resolve, of faith and hope in the Unseen.

Hitherto, but little use has been made of this life-long accumulation of
literary material. A few specimens, "Curiosities of Literature" they
might have been called, were contributed by Coleridge himself to
Southey's _Omniana_ of 1812, and a further selection of some fifty
fragments, gleaned from note-books 21-1/2 and 22, and from a third
unnumbered MS. book now in my possession, were printed by H. N.
Coleridge in the first volume of the _Literary Remains_ under the
heading _Omniana 1809-1816_. The _Omniana_ of 1812 were, in many
instances, re-written by Coleridge before they were included in
Southey's volumes, and in the later issue, here and there, the editor
has given shape and articulation to an unfinished or half-formed
sentence. The earlier and later _Omniana_, together with the fragments
which were published by Allsop in his _Letters, Conversations and
Recollections of S. T. Coleridge_, in 1836, were included by the late
Thomas Ashe in his reprint of the _Table Talk_, Bell & Co., 1884.

Some fourteen or fifteen notes of singular interest and beauty, which
belong to the years 1804, 1812, 1826, 1829, etc., were printed by James
Gillman in his unfinished "Life of Coleridge," and it is evident that he
contemplated a more extended use of the note-books in the construction
of his second volume, or, possibly, the publication of a supplementary
volume of notes or _Omniana_. Transcripts which were made for this
purpose are extant, and have been placed at my disposal by the kindness
of Mrs. Henry Watson, who inherited them from her grandmother, Mrs.
Gillman.

I may add that a few quotations from diaries of tours in the Lake
Country and on the Continent are to be found in the foot-notes appended
to the two volumes of _Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge_ which were
issued in the spring of the present year.

To publish the note-books _in extenso_ would be impracticable, if even
after the lapse of sixty years since the death of the writer it were
permissible. They are private memoranda-books, and rightly and properly
have been regarded as a sacred trust by their several custodians. But it
is none the less certain that in disburthening himself of the ideas and
imaginations which pressed upon his consciousness, in committing them to
writing and carefully preserving them through all his wanderings,
Coleridge had no mind that they should perish utterly. The invisible
pageantry of thought and passion which for ever floated into his
spiritual ken, the perpetual hope, the half-belief that the veil of the
senses would be rent in twain, and that he and not another would be the
first to lay bare the mysteries of being, and to solve the problem of
the ages--of these was the breath of his soul. It was his fate to
wrestle from night to morn with the Angel of the Vision, and of that
unequal combat he has left, by way of warning or encouragement, a broken
but an inspired and inspiring record. "Hints and first thoughts" he bade
us regard the contents of his memorandum-books--"_cogitabilia_ rather
than _cogitata_ a me, not fixed opinions," and yet acts of obedience to
the apostolic command of "Try all things: hold fast that which is
good"--say, rather, acts of obedience to the compulsion of his own
genius to "take a pen and write in a book all the words of the vision."

The aim of the present work, however imperfectly accomplished, has been
to present in a compendious shape a collection of unpublished aphorisms
and sentences, and at the same time to enable the reader to form some
estimate of those strange self-communings to which Coleridge devoted so
much of his intellectual energies, and by means of which he hoped to
pass through the mists and shadows of words and thoughts to a steadier
contemplation, to the apprehension if not the comprehension of the
mysteries of Truth and Being.

The various excerpts which I have selected for publication are arranged,
as far as possible, in chronological order. They begin with the
beginning of Coleridge's literary career, and are carried down to the
summer of 1828, when he accompanied Wordsworth and his daughter Dora on
a six months' tour on the Continent. The series of note-books which
belong to the remaining years of his life (1828-1834) were devoted for
the most part to a commentary on the Old and New Testament, to
theological controversy, and to metaphysical disquisition. Whatever
interest they may have possessed, or still possess, appeals to the
student, not to the general reader. With his inveterate love of humorous
or facetious titles, Coleridge was pleased to designate these serious
and abstruse dissertations as "The Flycatchers."

My especial thanks are due to Amy, Lady Coleridge, who, in accordance
with the known wishes of the late Lord Coleridge, has afforded me every
facility for collating my own transcripts of the note-books, and those
which were made by my father and other members of my family, with the
original MSS. now in her possession.

I have to also thank Miss Edith Coleridge for valuable assistance in the
preparation of the present work for the press.

The death of my friend, Mr. James Dykes Campbell, has deprived me of aid
which he alone could give.

It was due to his suggestion and encouragement that I began to compile
these pages, and only a few days before his death he promised me (it was
all he could undertake) to "run through the proofs with my pencil in my
hand." He has passed away _multis flebilis_, but he lived to accomplish
his own work both as critic and biographer, and to leave to all who
follow in his footsteps a type and example of honest workmanship and of
literary excellence.

    ERNEST HARTLEY COLERIDGE.




ANIMA POETÆ




CHAPTER I

_1797-1801_

    "O Youth! for years so many and sweet,
    'Tis known, that Thou and I were one."

                                    S. T. C.


[Sidenote: PAST AND PRESENT]

"We should judge of absent things by the absent. Objects which are
present are apt to produce perceptions too strong to be impartially
compared with those recalled only by the memory." SIR J. STEWART.

True! and O how often the very opposite is true likewise, namely, that
the objects of memory are, often, so dear and vivid, that present things
are injured by being compared with them, vivid from dearness!


[Sidenote: LOVE]

Love, a myrtle wand, is transformed by the Aaron touch of jealousy into
a serpent so vast as to swallow up every other stinging woe, and makes
us mourn the exchange.


Love that soothes misfortune and buoys up to virtue--the pillow of
sorrows, the wings of virtue.


Disappointed love not uncommonly causes misogyny, even as extreme thirst
is supposed to be the cause of hydrophobia.


Love transforms the soul into a conformity with the object loved.


[Sidenote: DUTY AND EXPERIENCE]

From the narrow path of virtue Pleasure leads us to more flowery fields,
and there Pain meets and chides our wandering. Of how many pleasures, of
what lasting happiness, is Pain the parent and Woe the womb!


Real pain can alone cure us of imaginary ills. We feel a thousand
miseries till we are lucky enough to feel misery.


Misfortunes prepare the heart for the enjoyment of happiness in a better
state. The life of a religious benevolent man is an April day. His pains
and sorrows [what are they but] the fertilising rain? The sunshine
blends with every shower, and look! how full and lovely it lies on
yonder hill!


Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like
playthings by the bedside of a child deadly sick.


Human happiness, like the aloe, is a flower of slow growth.


What we must do let us love to do. It is a noble chymistry that turns
necessity into pleasure.


[Sidenote: INFANCY AND INFANTS]

1. The first smile--what kind of _reason_ it displays. The first smile
after sickness.

2. Asleep with the polyanthus held fast in its hand, its bells dropping
over the rosy face.

3. Stretching after the stars.

4. Seen asleep by the light of glowworms.

5. Sports of infants; their excessive activity, the means being the end.
Nature, how lovely a school-mistress!... Children at houses of industry.

6. Infant beholding its new-born sister.

7. Kissing itself in the looking-glass.

8. The Lapland infant seeing the sun.

9. An infant's prayer on its mother's lap. Mother directing a baby's
hand. (Hartley's "love to Papa," scrawls pothooks and reads what he
meant by them.)

10. The infants of kings and nobles. ("Princess unkissed and foully
husbanded!")

11. The souls of infants, a vision (_vide Swedenborg_).

12. Some tales of an infant.

13. [Greek: Storgê]. The absurdity of the Darwinian system (instanced
by) birds and alligators.

14. The wisdom and graciousness of God in the infancy of the human
species--its beauty, long continuance, etc. (Children in the wind--hair
floating, tossing, a miniature of the agitated trees below which they
played. The elder whirling for joy the one in petticoats, a fat baby
eddying half-willingly, half by the force of the gust, driven backward,
struggling forward--both drunk with the pleasure, both shouting their
hymn of joy.) [_Letters of S. T. C._, 1895, i. 408.]

15. Poor William seeking his mother, in love with her picture, and
having that union of beauty and filial affection that the Virgin Mary
may be supposed to give.


[Sidenote: POETRY]

Poetry, like schoolboys, by too frequent and severe correction, may be
cowed into dullness!


Peculiar, not far-fetched; natural, but not obvious; delicate, not
affected; dignified, not swelling; fiery, but not mad; rich in imagery,
but not loaded with it--in short, a union of harmony and good sense, of
perspicuity and conciseness. Thought is the body of such an ode,
enthusiasm the soul, and imagery the drapery.


Dr. Darwin's poetry is nothing but a succession of landscapes or
paintings. It arrests the attention too often, and so prevents the
rapidity necessary to pathos.


The elder languages were fitter for poetry because they expressed only
prominent ideas with clearness, the others but darkly.... Poetry gives
most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood. It was
so by me with Gray's "Bard" and Collins' Odes. The "Bard" once
intoxicated me, and now I read it without pleasure. From this cause it
is that what I call metaphysical poetry gives me so much delight.

[Compare _Lecture_ vi. 1811-12, Bell & Co., p. 70; and _Table Talk_,
Oct. 23, 1833, Bell & Co., p. 264.]


[Sidenote: COMPARISONS AND CONTRASTS]

Poetry which excites us to artificial feelings makes us callous to real
ones.


The whale is followed by waves. I would glide down the rivulet of quiet
life, a trout.


Australis [Southey] may be compared to an ostrich. He cannot fly, but he
has such other qualities that he needs it not.


Mackintosh _intertrudes_ not introduces his beauties.


Snails of intellect who see only by their feelers.


Pygmy minds, measuring others by their own standard, cry What a
_monster_, when they view a man!


Our constitution is to some like cheese--the rotten parts they like the
best.


Her eyes sparkled as if they had been cut out of a diamond-quarry in
some Golconda of Fairyland, and cast such meaning glances as would have
vitrified the flint in a murderer's blunderbuss.


[A task] as difficult as to separate two dew-drops blended together on a
bosom of a new-blown rose.


I discovered unprovoked malice in his hard heart, like a huge toad in
the centre of a marble rock.


Men anxious for this world are like owls that wake all night to catch
mice.


At Genoa the word _Liberty_ is engraved on the chains of the galley
slaves and the doors of prisons.


Gratitude, worse than witchcraft, conjures up the pale, meagre ghosts of
dead forgotten kindnesses to haunt and trouble [his memory].


The sot, rolling on his sofa, stretching and yawning, exclaimed,
"_Utinam hoc esset laborare._"


Truth still more than Justice [is] blind, and needs Wisdom for her
guide.


[Sidenote: OF THINGS VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE]

[A Proof of] the severity of the winter--the kingfisher [by] its slow,
short flight permitting you to observe all its colours, almost as if it
had been a flower.


Little daisy--very late Spring, March. Quid si vivat? Do all things in
faith. _Never pluck a flower again!_ Mem.


[Sidenote: May 20, 1799]

The nightingales in a cluster or little wood of blossomed trees, and a
bat wheeling incessantly round and round! The noise of the frogs was
not unpleasant, like the humming of spinning wheels in a large
manufactory--now and then a distinct sound, sometimes like a duck, and,
sometimes, like the shrill notes of sea-fowl.

[This note was written one day later than S. T. C.'s last letter from
Germany, May 19, 1799.]


O Heavens! when I think how perishable things, how imperishable thoughts
seem to be! For what is forgetfulness? Renew the state of affection or
bodily feeling [so as to be the] same or similar, sometimes dimly
similar, and, instantly, the trains of forgotten thoughts rise from
their living catacombs!


[Sidenote:[Sockburn] October 1799]

Few moments in life are so interesting as those of our affectionate
reception from a stranger who is the dear friend of your dear friend!
How often you have been the subject of conversation, and how
affectionately!

[The note commemorates his first introduction to Mary and Sarah
Hutchinson.]


[Sidenote: Friday evening, Nov, 27, 1799]

The immoveableness of all things through which so many men were
moving--a harsh contrast compared with the universal motion, the
harmonious system of motions in the country, and everywhere in Nature.
In the dim light London appeared to be a huge place of sepulchres
through which hosts of spirits were gliding.


Ridicule the rage for quotations by quoting from "My Baby's
Handkerchief." Analyse the causes that the ludicrous weakens memory, and
laughter, mechanically, makes it difficult to remember a good story.


Sara sent twice for the measure of George's[A] neck. He wondered that
Sara should be such a fool, as she might have measured William's or
Coleridge's--as "all poets' throttles were of one size."


Hazlitt, the painter, told me that a picture never looked so well as
when the pallet was by the side of it. Association, with the glow of
production.


Mr. J. Cairns, in the _Gentleman's Diary_ for 1800, supposes that the
Nazarites, who, under the law of Moses, had their heads [shaved] must
have used some sort of wigs!


Slanting pillars of misty light moved along under the sun hid by
clouds.


Leaves of trees upturned by the stirring wind in twilight--an image of
paleness, wan affright.


A child scolding a flower in the words in which he had been himself
scolded and whipped, is poetry--passion past with pleasure.


[Sidenote: July 20, 1800]

Poor fellow at a distance--idle? in this hay-time when wages are so
high? [We] come near [and] then [see that he is] pale, can scarce speak
or throw out his fishing rod.

[This incident is fully described by Wordsworth in the last of the four
poems on "Naming of Places."

--_Poetical Works of W. Wordsworth_, 1889, p. 144.]


[Sidenote: September 1, [1800]]

The beards of thistle and dandelions flying about the lonely mountains
like life--and I saw them through the trees skimming the lake like
swallows.

            ["And, in our vacant mood,
    Not seldom did we stop to watch some tuft
    Of dandelion seed or thistle's beard,
    That skimmed the surface of the dead calm lake,
    Suddenly halting now--a lifeless stand!
    And starting off again with freak as sudden;
    In all its sportive wanderings, all the while,
    Making report of an invisible breeze
    That was its wings, its chariot and its horse,
    Its playmate, rather say, its moving soul."

    _Ibid._ p. 143.]


Luther--a hero, fettered, indeed, with prejudices--but with those very
fetters he would knock out the brains of a modern _Fort Esprit_.


_Comment._ Frightening by his prejudices, as a spirit does by clanking
his chains.

Not only words, as far as relates to speaking, but the knowledge of
words as distinct component parts, which we learn by learning to
read--what an immense effect it must have on our reasoning faculties!
Logical in opposition to real.


[Sidenote: 1797-1801]

Children, in making new words, always do it analogously. Explain this.


Hot-headed men confuse, your cool-headed gentry jumble. The man of warm
feelings only produces order and true connection. In what a jumble M.
and H. write, every third paragraph beginning with "Let us now return,"
or "We come now to the consideration of such a thing"--that is, what _I
said_ I _would_ come to in the contents prefixed to the chapter.


[Sidenote: Dec. 19, 1800]

The thin scattered rain-clouds were scudding along the sky; above them,
with a visible interspace, the crescent moon hung, and partook not of
the motion; her own hazy light filled up the concave, as if it had been
painted and the colours had run.


"He to whom all things are one, who draweth all things to one, and seeth
all things in one, may enjoy true peace of mind and rest of
spirit."--JEREMY TAYLOR'S _Via Pacis_.


To each reproach that thunders from without may remorse groan an echo.


A prison without ransom, anguish without patience, a sick bed in the
house of contempt.


To _think_ of a thing is different from to _perceive_ it, as "to walk"
is from to "feel the ground under you;" perhaps in the same way
too--namely, a succession of perceptions accompanied by a sense of
_nisus_ and purpose.


Space, is it merely another word for the perception of a capability of
additional magnitude, or does this very perception presuppose the idea
of space? The latter is Kant's opinion.


A babe who had never known greater cruelty than that of being snatched
away by its mother for half a moment from the breast in order to be
kissed.


To attempt to subordinate the idea of time to that of likeness.


Every man asks _how_? This power to instruct is the true substratum of
philosophy.


Godwin's philosophy is contained in these words: _Rationem defectus esse
defectum rationis_.--HOBBES.


Hartley just able to speak a few words, making a fire-place of stones,
with stones for fire--four stones for the fire-place, two for the
fire--seems to illustrate a theory of language, the use of arbitrary
symbols in imagination. Hartley walked remarkably soon and, therefore,
learnt to talk remarkably late.


Anti-optimism! Praised be our Maker, and to the honour of human nature
is it, that we may truly call this an inhuman opinion. Man strives after
good.


Materialists unwilling to admit the mysterious element of our nature
make it all mysterious--nothing mysterious in nerves, eyes, &c., but
that nerves think, etc.! Stir up the sediment into the transparent
water, and so make all opaque.


[Sidenote: 1797-1801]

As we recede from anthropomorphism we must go either to the Trinity or
Pantheism. The Fathers who were Unitarians were anthropomorphites.


[Sidenote: EGOTISM January 1801]

Empirics are boastful and egotists because they introduce real or
apparent novelty, which excites great opposition, [while] personal
opposition creates re-action (which is of course a consciousness of
power) associated with the person re-acting. Paracelsus was a boaster,
it is true; so were the French Jacobins, and Wolff, though not a
boaster, was persecuted into a habit of egotism in his philosophical
writings; so Dr. John Brown, and Milton in his prose works; and those,
in similar circumstances, who, from prudence, abstain from egotism in
their writings are still egotists among their friends. It would be
unnatural effort not to be so, and egotism in such cases is by no means
offensive to a kind and discerning man.

Some flatter themselves that they abhor egotism, and do not suffer it to
appear _primâ facie_, either in their writings or conversation, however
much and however personally they or their opinions have been opposed.
What now? Observe, watch those men; their habits of feeling and thinking
are made up of _contempt_, which is the concentrated vinegar of
egotism--it is _lætitia mixta cum odio_, a notion of the weakness of
another conjoined with a notion of our own comparative strength, though
that weakness is still strong enough to be troublesome to us, though not
formidable.

          "--and the deep power of Joy
    We see into the Life of Things."


[Sidenote: THE EGO]

By deep feeling we make our _ideas dim_, and this is what we mean by our
life, ourselves. I think of the wall--it is before me a distinct image.
Here I necessarily think of the _idea_ and the thinking _I_ as two
distinct and opposite things. Now let me think of _myself_, of the
thinking being. The idea becomes dim, whatever it be--so dim that I know
not what it is; but the feeling is deep and steady, and this I call
_I_--identifying the percipient and the perceived.

    "O Thou! whose fancies from afar are brought."


[Sidenote: March 17, 1801, Tuesday]

[Sidenote: 1797-1801]

Hartley, looking out of my study window, fixed his eyes steadily and for
some time on the opposite prospect and said, "Will yon mountains
_always_ be?" I shewed him the whole magnificent prospect in a
looking-glass, and held it up, so that the whole was like a canopy or
ceiling over his head, and he struggled to express himself concerning
the difference between the thing and the image almost with convulsive
effort. I never before saw such an abstract of _thinking_ as a pure act
and energy--of thinking as distinguished from thought.


[Sidenote: GIORDANO BRUNO]

Monday, April 1801, and Tuesday, read two works of Giordano Bruno, with
one title-page: _Jordani Bruni Nolani de Monade, Numero et Figurâ liber
consequens. Quinque de Minimo, Magno et Mensurâ. Item. De
Innumerabilibus Immenso, et Infigurabili seu de Universo et Mundis libri
octo. Francofurti, Apud Joan. Wechelum et Petrum Fischerum consortes_,
1591.

Then follows the dedication, then the index of contents of the whole
volume, at the end of which index is a Latin ode, conceived with great
dignity and grandeur of thought. Then the work _De Monade, Numero et
Figurâ, secretioris nempe Physicæ, Mathematicæ, et Metaphysicæ elementa_
commences, which, as well as the eight books _De Innumerabili_, &c., is
a poem in Latin hexameters, divided (each book) into chapters, and to
each chapter is affixed a prose commentary. If the five books _de
Minimo_, &c., to which this book is consequent are of the same
character, I lost nothing in not having it. As to the work _De Monade_,
it was far too numerical, lineal and Pythagorean for my comprehension.
It read very much like Thomas Taylor and Proclus, &c. I by no means
think it certain that there is no meaning in these works. Nor do I
presume even to suppose that the meaning is of no value (till I
understand a man's ignorance I presume myself ignorant of his
understanding), but it is for others, at present, not for me. Sir P.
Sidney and Fulk Greville shut the doors at their philosophical
conferences with Bruno. If his conversation resembled this book, I
should have thought he would have talked with a trumpet.

The poems and commentaries, in the _De Immenso et Innumerabili_ are of a
different character. The commentary is a very sublime enunciation of the
dignity of the human soul, according to the principles of Plato.

[Here follows the passage, "_Anima Sapiens ----ubique totus_," quoted in
_The Friend_ (_Coleridge's Works_, ii. 109), together with a brief
_résumé_ of Bruno's other works. See, too, _Biographia Literaria_,
chapter ix. (_Coleridge's Works_, iii. 249).]


[Sidenote: OBSERVATIONS AND REFLECTIONS]

The spring with the little tiny cone of loose sand ever rising and
sinking at the bottom, but its surface without a wrinkle.


[Sidenote: Monday, September 14, 1801]

Northern lights remarkably fine--chiefly a purple-blue--in shooting
pyramids, moved from over Bassenthwaite behind Skiddaw. Derwent's
birthday, one year old.


[Sidenote: September 15, 1801]

Observed the great half moon setting behind the mountain ridge, and
watched the shapes its various segments presented as it slowly
sunk--first the foot of a boot, all but the heel--then a little pyramid
[py]--then a star of the first magnitude--indeed, it was not
distinguishable from the evening star at its largest--then rapidly a
smaller, a small, a very small star--and, as it diminished in size, so
it grew paler in tint. And now where is it? Unseen--but a little fleecy
cloud hangs above the mountain ridge, and is rich in amber light.


I do not wish you to act from those truths. No! still and always act
from your feelings; but only meditate often on these truths, that
sometime or other they may become your feelings.


The state should be to the religions under its protection as a
well-drawn picture, equally eyeing all in the room.


Quære, whether or no too great definiteness of terms in any language may
not consume too much of the vital and idea-creating force in distinct,
clear, full-made images, and so prevent originality. For original might
be distinguished from positive thought.


The thing that causes _in_stability in a particular state, of itself
causes stability. For instance, wet soap slips off the ledge--detain it
till it dries a little, and it _sticks_.


Is there anything in the idea that citizens are fonder of good eating
and rustics of strong drink--the one from the rarity of all such things,
the other from the uniformity of his life?


[Sidenote: October 19, 1801]

[Sidenote: 1797-1801]

On the Greta, over the bridge by Mr. Edmundson's father-in-law, the
ashes--their leaves of that light yellow which autumn gives them, cast a
reflection on the river like a painter's sunshine.


[Sidenote: October 20, 1801]

My birthday. The snow fell on Skiddaw and Grysdale Pike for the first
time.

[A life-long mistake. He was born October 21, 1772.]


[Sidenote: Tuesday evening, 1/2 past 6, October 22, 1801]

All the mountains black and tremendously obscure, except Swinside. At
this time I saw, one after the other, nearly in the same place, two
perfect moon-rainbows, the one foot in the field below my garden, the
other in the field nearest but two to the church. It was
grey-moonlight-mist-colour. Friday morning, Mary Hutchinson arrives.


The art in a great man, and of evidently superior faculties, to be often
_obliged_ to people, often his inferiors--in this way the enthusiasm of
affection may be excited. Pity where we can help and our help is
accepted with gratitude, conjoined with admiration, breeds an
enthusiastic affection. The same pity conjoined with admiration, where
neither our help is accepted nor efficient, breeds dyspathy and fear.


_Nota bene_ to make a detailed comparison, in the manner of Jeremy
Taylor, between the searching for the first cause of a thing and the
seeking the fountains of the Nile--so many streams, each with its
particular fountain--and, at last, it all comes to a name!


The soul a mummy embalmed by Hope in the catacombs.


To write a _series_ of love poems truly Sapphic, save that they shall
have a large interfusion of moral sentiment and calm imagery--love in
all the moods of mind, philosophic, fantastic--in moods of high
enthusiasm, of simple feeling, of mysticism, of religion--comprise in it
all the practice and all the philosophy of love!


[Greek: Ho myrionous]--hyperbole from Naucratius' panegyric of Theodoras
Chersites. Shakspere, _item_, [Greek: ho pollostos kai polyeidês tê
poikilostrophô sophia. Ho megalophrônotatos tês alêtheias kêryx.]--LORD
BACON.

[Compare _Biographia Literaria_, cap. xv., "our myriad-minded Shakspere"
and _footnote_. [Greek: Anêr myrionous] a phrase which I have borrowed
from a Greek monk, who applies it to a Patriarch of Constantinople. I
might have said that I have reclaimed rather than borrowed it; for it
seems to belong to Shakspere, _de jure singulari, et ex privilegio
naturæ. Coleridge's Works_, iii. 375.]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote A: Presumably George Dyer.]




CHAPTER II

_1802-1803_


    "In a half sleep, he dreams of better worlds,
    And dreaming hears thee still, O singing lark,
    That singest like an angel in the clouds!"

                                           S. T .C.


[Sidenote: THOUGHTS AND FANCIES]

No one can leap over his own shadow, but poets leap over death.


The old world begins a new year. That is _ours_, but this is from God.


We may think of time as threefold. Slowly comes the Future, swift the
Present passes by, but the Past is unmoveable. No impatience will
quicken the loiterer, no terror, no delight rein in the flyer, and no
regret set in motion the stationary. Wouldst be happy, take the delayer
for thy counsellor; do not choose the flyer for thy friend, nor the
ever-remainer for thine enemy.


[Sidenote: LIMBO]

Vastum, incultum, solitudo mera, et incrinitissima nuditas.

[_Crinitus_, covered with hair, is to be found in Cicero, _nuditas_ in
Quintilian, but _incrinitissima_ is, probably, Coleridgian Latinity.]


[An old man gloating over his past vices may be compared to the] devil
at the very end of hell, warming himself at the reflection of the fire
in the ice.


Dimness of vision, mist, &c., magnify the powers of sight, numbness adds
to those of touch. A numb limb seems twice its real size.


Take away from sounds the sense of outness, and what a horrible disease
would every minute become! A drive over a pavement would be exquisite
torture. What, then, is sympathy if the feelings be not disclosed? An
inward reverberation of the stifled cry of distress.


Metaphysics make all one's thoughts equally corrosive on the body, by
inducing a habit of making momently and common thought the subject of
uncommon interest and intellectual energy.


A kind-hearted man who is obliged to give a refusal or the like which
will inflict great pain, finds a relief in doing it roughly and
fiercely. Explain this and use it in Christabel.


The unspeakable comfort to a good man's mind, nay, even to a criminal,
to be _understood_--to have some one that understands one--and who does
not feel that, on earth, no one does? The hope of this, always more or
less disappointed, gives the passion to friendship.


[Sidenote: October,1802]

Hartley, at Mr. Clarkson's, sent for a candle. The _seems_ made him
miserable. "What do you mean, my love?" "The seems, the seems. What
seems to be and is not, men and faces, and I do not [know] what, ugly,
and sometimes pretty, and these turn ugly, and they seem when my eyes
are open and worse when they are shut--and the candle cures the
_seems_."


Great injury has resulted from the supposed incompatibility of one
talent with another, judgment with imagination and taste, good sense
with strong feeling, &c. If it be false, as assuredly it is, the opinion
has deprived us of a test which every man might apply. [Hence] Locke's
opinions of Blackmore, Hume's of Milton and Shakspere.


[Sidenote: October 25, 1802]

I began to look through Swift's works. First volume, containing "Tale of
a Tub," wanting. Second volume--the sermon on the Trinity, rank
Socinianism, _purus putus Socinianism_, while the author rails against
the Socinians for monsters.


The first sight of green fields with the numberless nodding gold cups,
and the winding river with alders on its banks, affected me, coming out
of a city confinement, with the sweetness and power of a sudden strain
of music.


Mem. to end my preface with "in short, speaking to the poets of the age,
'_Primus vestrûm non sum, neque imus_.' I am none of the best, I am none
of the meanest of you."--BURTON.


"Et pour moi, le bonheur n'a commencé que lorsque je l'ai eu perdu. Je
mettrais volontiers sur la porte du Paradis le vers que le Dante a mis
sur celle de l'Enfer.

'Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch' entrate.'"


Were I Achilles, I would have had my leg cut off, and have got rid of my
vulnerable heel.


In natural objects we feel ourselves, or think of ourselves, only by
_likenesses_--among men, too often by _differences_. Hence the soothing,
love-kindling effect of rural nature--the bad passions of human
societies. And why is difference linked with hatred?


[Sidenote: TRANSCRIPTS FROM MY VELVET-PAPER POCKET-BOOKS]

Regular post--its influence on the general literature of the country;
turns two-thirds of the nation into writers.


Socinianism, moonlight; methodism, a stove. O for some sun to unite heat
and light!


[Sidenote: Nov. 25, 1802]

I intend to examine minutely the nature, cause, birth and growth of the
verbal imagination, in the possession of which Barrow excels almost
every other writer of prose.


[Sidenote: Sunday, December 19]

Remember the pear trees in the lovely vale of Teme. Every season Nature
converts me from some unloving heresy, and will make a Catholic of me at
last.


A fine and apposite quotation, or a good story, so far from promoting,
are wont to _damp_ the easy commerce of sensible chit-chat.


We imagine ourselves discoverers, and that we have struck a light, when,
in reality, at most, we have but snuffed a candle.


A thief in the candle, consuming in a blaze the tallow belonging to the
wick which has sunk out of sight, is an apt simile for a plagiarist from
a dead author.


An author with a new play which has been hissed off the stage is not
unlike a boy who has launched on a pond a ship of his own making, and
tries to prove to his schoolfellows that it _ought_ to have sailed.


Repose after agitation is like the pool under a waterfall, which the
waterfall has made.


Something inherently mean in action! Even the creation of the universe
disturbs my idea of the Almighty's greatness--would do so but that I
perceive that thought with Him creates.


The great federal republic of the universe.


T. Wedgwood's objection to my "Things and Thoughts," because "thought
always implies an act or _nisus_ of mind" is not well founded. A thought
and thoughts are quite different words from Thought, as a fancy from
Fancy, a work from Work, a life from Life, a force and forces from
Force, a feeling, a writing [from Feelings, Writings.]


[Sidenote: May 10, 1803]

To _fall_ asleep. Is not a real _event_ in the body well represented by
this phrase? Is it in _excess_ when on first _dropping_ asleep we
_fall_ down precipices, or sink down, all things sinking beneath us, or
drop down? Is there not a disease from deficiency of this critical
sensation when people imagine that they have been awake all night, and
actually lie dreaming, expecting and wishing for the critical sensation?

[Compare the phrase, "precipices of distempered sleep," in the sonnet,
"No more my visionary soul shall dwell," attributed by Southey to
Favell.--_Life and Corresp._ of R. SOUTHEY, i. 224.]


[Sidenote: A TREACHEROUS KNAVE]

[He] drew out the secrets from men's hearts as the Egyptian enchanters
by particular strains of music draw out serpents from their
lurking-places.


[Sidenote: COUNTRY AND TOWN]

The rocks and stones put on a vital resemblance and life itself seemed,
thereby, to forego its restlessness, to anticipate in its own nature an
infinite repose, and to become, as it were, compatible with
immoveability.


Bright reflections, in the canal, of the blue and green vitriol bottles
in the druggists' shops in London.


A curious, and more than curious, fact, that when the country does not
benefit, it depraves. Hence the violent, vindictive passions and the
outrageous and dark and wild cruelties of very many country folk. [On
the other hand] the continual sight of human faces and human houses, as
in China, emasculates [and degrades.]


[Sidenote: Monday night, June 8, 1803]

"He who cannot wait for his reward has, in reality, not earned it."
These words I uttered in a dream, in which a lecture I was giving--a
very profound one, as I thought--was not listened to, but I was quizzed.


[Sidenote: Tuesday night, July 19, 1803]

Intensely hot day; left off a waistcoat and for yarn wore silk
stockings. Before nine o'clock, had unpleasant chillness; heard a noise
which I thought Derwent's in sleep, listened, and found it was a calf
bellowing. Instantly came on my mind that night I slept out at Ottery,
and the calf in the field across the river whose lowing so deeply
impressed me. Chill + child and calf-lowing--probably the Rivers Greta
and Otter. [_Letters of S.T.C._, 1895, i. 14, _note_.]


[Sidenote: October, 1803]

A smile, as foreign or alien to, as detached from the gloom of the
countenance, as I have seen a small spot of light travel slowly and
sadly along the mountain's breast, when all beside has been dark with
the storm.


[Sidenote: A PRINCIPLE OF CRITICISM.]

Never to lose an opportunity of reasoning against the head-dimming,
heart-damping principle of judging a work by its defects, not its
beauties. Every work must have the former--we know it _a priori_--but
every work has not the latter, and he, therefore, who discovers them,
tells you something that you could not with certainty, or even with
probability, have anticipated.


[Sidenote: WORDSWORTH AND THE PRELUDE]

I am sincerely glad that he has bidden farewell to all small poems, and
is devoting himself to his great work, grandly imprisoning, while it
deifies, his attention and feelings within the sacred circle and
temple-walls of great objects and elevated conceptions. In those little
poems, his own corrections coming of necessity so often--at the end of
every fourteen or twenty lines, or whatever the poem might chance to
be--wore him out; difference of opinion with his best friends irritated
him, and he wrote, at times, too much with a sectarian spirit, in a sort
of bravado. But now he is at the helm of a noble bark; now he sails
right onward; it is all open ocean and a steady breeze, and he drives
before it, unfretted by short tacks, reefing and unreefing the sails,
hauling and disentangling the ropes. His only disease is the having been
out of his element; his return to it is food to famine; it is both the
specific remedy and the condition of health.


[Sidenote: THE INCOMMUNICABLE]

Without drawing, I feel myself but half invested with language. Music,
too, is wanting to me. But yet, though one should unite poetry,
draftsman's skill, and music, the greater and, perhaps, nobler,
certainly _all_ the subtler, parts of one's nature must be _solitary_.
Man exists herein to himself and to God alone--yea! in how much only to
God! how much lies _below_ his own consciousness!


The tree or sea-weed like appearance of the side of the mountain, all
white with snow, made by little bits of snow loosened. Introduce this
and the stones leaping rabbit-like down on my sopha of sods. [_Vide_ p.
60.]


The sunny mist, the luminous gloom of Plato.


[Sidenote: TIME AN ELEMENT OF GRIEF]

Nothing affects me much at the moment it happens. It either stupefies
me, and I, perhaps, look at a merry-make and dance-the-hay of flies, or
listen entirely to the loud click of the great clock, or I am simply
indifferent, not without some sense of philosophical self-complacency.
For a thing at the moment is but a thing of the moment; it must be taken
up into the mind, diffuse itself through the whole multitude of shapes
and thoughts, not one of which it leaves untinged, between [not one of]
which and it some new thought is not engendered. Now this is a work of
time, but the body feels it quicker with me.


[Sidenote: THE POET AND THE SPIDER]

On St. Herbert's Island, I saw a large spider with most beautiful legs,
floating in the air on his back by a single thread which he was spinning
out, and still, as he spun, heaving on the air, as if the air beneath
was a pavement elastic to his strokes. From the top of a very high tree
he had spun his line; at length reached the bottom, tied his thread
round a piece of grass, and reascended to spin another--a net to hang,
as a fisherman's sea-net hangs, in the sun and wind to dry.


[Sidenote: THE COMMUNICABLE]

One excellent use of communication of sorrow to a friend is this, that
in relating what ails us, we ourselves first know exactly what the real
grief is, and see it for itself in its own form and limits. Unspoken
grief is a misty medley of which the real affliction only plays the
first fiddle, blows the horn to a scattered mob of obscure feelings.
Perhaps, at certain moments, a single, almost insignificant sorrow may,
by association, bring together all the little relicts of pain and
discomfort, bodily and mental, that we have endured even from infancy.


[Sidenote: NOSCITUR A SOCIIS]

One may best judge of men by their pleasures. Who has not known men who
have passed the day in honourable toil with honour and ability, and at
night sought the vilest pleasure in the vilest society? This is the
man's self. The other is a trick learnt by heart (for we may even learn
the power of extemporaneous elocution and instant action as an automatic
trick); but a man's pleasures--children, books, friends, nature, the
Muse--O these deceive not.


[Sidenote: TEMPERAMENT AND MORALS October, 1803]

Even among good and sensible men, how common it is that one attaches
himself scrupulously to the rigid performance of some minor virtue or
makes a point of carrying some virtue into all its minutiæ, and is just
as lax in a similar point, _professedly_ lax. What this is depends,
seemingly, on temperament. _A_ makes no conscience of a little flattery
in cases where he is certain that he is not acting from base or
interested motives--in short, whenever his only motives are the
amusement, the momentary pleasure given, &c., a medley of good nature,
diseased proneness to sympathy, and a habit of _being wiser_ behind the
curtain than his own actions before it. _B_ would die rather than
deviate from truth and sincerity in this instance, but permits himself
to utter, nay, publish the harshest censure of men as moralists and as
literati, and that, too, on his simple _ipse dixit_, without assigning
any reason, and often without having any, save that he himself
_believes_ it--believes it because he _dislikes_ the man, and dislikes
him probably for his looks, or, at best, for some one fault without any
collation of the sum total of the man's qualities. Yet _A_ and _B_ are
both good men, as the world goes. They do not act from conscious
self-love, and are amenable to principles in their own minds.


[Sidenote: BRIGHT OCTOBER October 21, 1803, Friday morning]

A drizzling rain. Heavy masses of shapeless vapour upon the mountains (O
the perpetual forms of Borrowdale!) yet it is no unbroken tale of dull
sadness. Slanting pillars travel across the lake at long intervals, the
vaporous mass whitens in large stains of light--on the lakeward ridge of
that huge arm-chair of Lodore fell a gleam of softest light, that
brought out the rich hues of the late autumn. The woody Castle Crag
between me and Lodore is a rich flower-garden of colours--the brightest
yellows with the deepest crimsons and the infinite shades of brown and
green, the _infinite_ diversity of which blends the whole, so that the
brighter colours seem to be colours upon a ground, not coloured things.
Little woolpacks of white bright vapour rest on different summits and
declivities. The vale is narrowed by the mist and cloud, yet through the
wall of mist you can see into a bower of sunny light, in Borrowdale; the
birds are singing in the tender rain, as if it were the rain of April,
and the decaying foliage were flowers and blossoms. The pillar of smoke
from the chimney rises up in the mist, and is just distinguishable from
it, and the mountain forms in the gorge of Borrowdale consubstantiate
with the mist and cloud, even as the pillar'd smoke--a shade deeper and
a determinate form.


[Sidenote: TELEOLOGY AND NATURE WORSHIP A PROTEST October 26, 1803]

A most unpleasant dispute with Wordsworth and Hazlitt. I spoke, I fear,
too contemptuously; but they spoke so irreverently, so malignantly of
the Divine Wisdom that it overset me. Hazlitt, how easily raised to rage
and hatred self-projected! but who shall find the force that can drag
him up out of the depth into one expression of kindness, into the
showing of one gleam of the light of love on his countenance. Peace be
with him! But _thou_, dearest Wordsworth--and what if Ray, Durham, Paley
have carried the observation of the aptitude of things too far, too
habitually into pedantry? O how many worse pedantries! how few so
harmless, with so much efficient good! Dear William, pardon pedantry in
others, and avoid it in yourself, instead of scoffing and reviling at
pedantry in good men and a good cause and _becoming_ a pedant yourself
in a bad cause--even by that very act becoming one. But, surely, always
to look at the superficies of objects for the purpose of taking delight
in their beauty, and sympathy with their real or imagined life, is as
deleterious to the health and manhood of intellect as, always to be
peering and unravelling contrivance may be to the simplicity of the
affection and the grandeur and unity of the imagination. O dearest
William! would Ray or Durham have spoken of God as you spoke of Nature?


[Sidenote: W. H.]

Hazlitt to the feelings of anger and hatred, phosphorus--it is but to
open the cork and it flames--but to love and serviceable friendship, let
them, like Nebuchadnezzar, heat the furnace with a sevenfold heat, this
triune, Shadrach, Meshach, Abed-nego, will shiver in the midst of it.


[Sidenote: THE ORIGIN OF EVIL Thursday October 27, 1803]

I sate for my picture [to Hazlitt]--heard from Southey the "Institution
of the Jesuits," during which some interesting idea occurred to me, and
has escaped. I made out, however, the whole business of the origin of
evil satisfactorily to my own mind, and forced H. to confess that the
metaphysical argument reduced itself to this, Why did not infinite Power
_always exclusively_ produce such beings as in each moment of their
duration were infinite? why, in short, did not the Almighty create an
absolutely infinite number of Almighties? The hollowness and impiety of
the argument will be felt by considering that, suppose a universal
happiness, a perfection of the moral as well as natural world, still the
whole objection applies just as forcibly as at this moment. The
malignity of the Deity (I shudder even at the assumption of this
affrightful and Satanic language) is manifested in the creation of
archangels and cherubs and the whole company of pure Intelligences
burning in their unquenchable felicity, equally as in the creation of
Neros and Tiberiuses, of stone and leprosy. Suppose yourself perfectly
happy, yet, according to this argument, you _ought_ to charge God with
malignity for having created you--your own life and all its comforts are
in the indictment against the Creator--for surely even a child would be
ashamed to answer, "No! I should still exist, only in that case, instead
of being a man, I should be an infinite being." As if the word _I_ here
had even the remotest semblance of a meaning. Infinitely more absurd
than if I should write the fraction 1/1000 on a slate, then rub it out
with my sponge, and write in the same place the integral number
555,666,879, and then observe that the former figure was _greatly_
improved by the measure, that _it_ was grown a far finer
figure!--conceiting a _change_ where there had been positive
substitution. Thus, then, it appears that the sole justification of
those who, offended by the vice and misery of the created world, as far
as we know it, impeach the power and goodness of the Almighty, making
the proper cause of such vice and misery to have been a defect either of
power or goodness--it appears, I say, that their sole justification
rests on an argument which has nothing to do with vice and misery, as
vice and misery--on an argument which would hold equally good in heaven
as in hell--on an argument which it might be demonstrated no human being
in a state of happiness could ever have conceived--an argument which a
millennium would annihilate, and which yet would hold equally good then
as now! But even in point of metaphysic the whole rests at last on the
conceivable. Now, I appeal to every man's internal consciousness, if he
will but sincerely and in brotherly simplicity silence the bustle of
argument in his mind and the ungenial feelings that mingle with and fill
up the mob, and then ask his own intellect whether, supposing he could
conceive the creation of positively infinite and co-equal beings, and
whether, supposing this not only possible but real, this has exhausted
his notion of _creatability_? whether the intellect, by an unborn and
original law of its essence, does not demand of infinite power more than
merely infinity of number, infinity of sorts and orders? Let him have
created this infinity of infinites, still there is space in the
imagination for the creation of finites; but instead of these, let him
again create infinites; yet still the same space is left, it is no way
filled up. I feel, too, that the whole rests on a miserable sophism of
applying to an Almighty Being such words as _all_. Why were not _all_
Gods? But there is no _all_ in creation. It is composed of infinites,
and the imagination, bewildered by heaping infinites on infinites and
wearying of demanding increase of number to a number which it conceives
already infinite, deserted by images and mocked by words, whose sole
substance is the inward sense of difficulty that accompanies all our
notions of infinity applied to numbers--turns with delight to distinct
images and clear ideas, contemplates a _world_, an harmonious system,
where an infinity of kinds subsist each in a multitude of individuals
apportionate to its kind in conformity to laws existing in the divine
nature, and therefore in the nature of things. We cannot, indeed,
_prove_ this in any other way than by finding it as impossible to deny
omniform, as eternal, agency to God--by finding it impossible to
conceive that an omniscient Being should not have a distinct idea of
finite beings, or that distinct ideas in the mind of God should be
without the perfection of real existence, that is, imperfect. But this
is a proof subtle indeed, yet not more so than the difficulty. The
intellect that can start the one can understand the other, if his vices
do not prevent him. Admit for a moment that "conceive" is equivalent to
creation in the divine nature, synonymous with "to beget" (a feeling of
which has given to marriage a mysterious sanctity and sacramental
significance in the mind of many great and good men)--admit this, and
all difficulty ceases, all tumult is hushed, all is clear and beautiful.
We sit in the dark, but each by the side of his little fire, in his own
group, and lo! the summit of the distant mountain is smitten with light.
All night long it has dwelt there, and we look at it and know that the
sun is not extinguished, that he is elsewhere bright and vivifying, that
he is coming to us, to make our fires needless; yet, even now, that our
cold and darkness are so called only in comparison with the heat and
light of the coming day, never wholly deserted of the rays.

This I wrote on Friday morning, forty minutes past three o'clock, the
sky covered with one cloud that yet lies in dark and light shades, and
though one smooth cloud, by the dark colour, it appears to be _steppy_.


[Sidenote: A DREAM AND A PARENTHESIS Friday morning, 5 o'clock]

Dozing, dreamt of Hartley as at his christening--how, as he was asked
who redeemed him, and was to say, "God the Son," he went on humming and
hawing in one hum and haw (like a boy who knows a thing and will not
make the effort to recollect) so as to irritate me greatly. Awakening
gradually, I was able completely to detect that it was the ticking of my
watch, which lay in the pen-place in my desk, on the round table close
by my ear, and which, in the diseased state of my nerves, had fretted
on my ears. I caught the fact while Hartley's face and moving lips were
yet before my eyes, and his hum and haw and the ticking of the watch
were each the other, as often happens in the passing off of sleep--that
curious modification of ideas by each other which is the element of
_bulls_. I arose instantly and wrote it down. It is now ten minutes past
five.


To return to the question of evil--woe to the man to whom it is an
uninteresting question, though many a mind over-wearied by it may shun
it with dread. And here--N.B.--scourge with deserved and lofty scorn
those critics who laugh at the discussion of old questions: God, right
and wrong, necessity and arbitrement, evil, &c. No! forsooth, the
question must be _new, spicy hot_ gingerbread, from a French
constitution to a balloon, change of ministry, or, Which had the best of
it in the parliamentary duel, Wyndham or Sheridan? or, at the best, a
chymical thing [or] whether the new celestial bodies shall be called
planets or asteroids--something new [it must be], something out of
themselves--for whatever is _in_ them is deep within them--must be old
as elementary nature [but] to find no contradiction in the union of old
and novel--to contemplate the Ancient of Days with feelings new as if
they _then_ sprang forth at His own Fiat--this marks the mind that feels
the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it. But to return to
the question. The whole rests on the sophism of imaginary change in a
case of positive substitution. This, I fully believe, settles the
question. The assertion that there is in the essence of the divine
nature a necessity of omniform harmonious action, and that order and
system (not number--in itself base, disorderly and irrational) define
the creative energy, determine and employ it, and that number is
subservient to order, regulated, organised, made beautiful and rational,
an object both of imagination and intellect by order--this is no mere
assertion, it is strictly in harmony with the fact. For the world
appears so, and it is proved by whatever proves the being of God.
Indeed, it is involved in the idea of God.


[Sidenote: THE AIM OF HIS METAPHYSIC]

What is it that I employ my metaphysics on? To perplex our clearest
notions and living moral instincts? To extinguish the light of love and
of conscience, to put out the life of arbitrement, to make myself and
others _worthless, soulless, Godless_? No, to expose the folly and the
legerdemain of those who have thus abused the blessed organ of language,
to support all old and venerable truths, to support, to kindle, to
project, to make the reason spread light over our feelings, to make our
feelings diffuse vital warmth through our reason--these are my objects
and these my subjects. Is this the metaphysic that bad spirits in hell
delight in?


[Sidenote: IN THE VISIONS OF THE NIGHT Nov. 2, 1803, Wednesday morning,
20 minutes past 2 o'clock]

The voice of the Greta and the cock-crowing. The voice seems to grow
like a flower on or about the water beyond the bridge, while the
cock-crowing is nowhere particular--it is at any place I imagine and do
not distinctly see. A most remarkable sky! the moon, now waned to a
perfect ostrich egg, hangs over our house almost, only so much beyond
it, garden-ward, that I can see it, holding my head out of the smaller
study window. The sky is covered with whitish and with dingy cloudage,
thin dingiest scud close under the moon, and one side of it moving, all
else moveless; but there are two great breaks of blue sky, the one
stretches over our house and away toward Castlerigg, and this is
speckled and blotched with white cloud; the other hangs over the road,
in the line of the road, in the shape of an ellipse or shuttle, I do not
know what to call it--this is unspeckled, all blue, three stars in
it--more in the former break, all unmoving. The water leaden-white, even
as the grey gleam of water is in latest twilight. Now while I have been
writing this and gazing between-whiles (it is forty minutes past two),
the break over the road is swallowed up, and the stars gone; the break
over the house is narrowed into a rude circle, and on the edge of its
circumference one very bright star. See! already the white mass,
thinning at its edge, _fights_ with its brilliance. See! it has bedimmed
it, and now it is gone, and the moon is gone. The cock-crowing too has
ceased. The Greta sounds on for ever. But I hear only the ticking of my
watch in the pen-place of my writing-desk and the far lower note of the
noise of the fire, perpetual, yet seeming uncertain. It is the low voice
of quiet change, of destruction doing its work by little and little.


[Sidenote: AURI SACRA FAMES]

O! The impudence of those who dare hold property to be the great
binder-up of the affections of the young to the old, &c., and Godwin's
folly in his book! Two brothers in this country fought in the mourning
coach, and stood with black eyes and their black clothes all blood over
their father's grave.


[Sidenote: EARLY DEATH November 1803]

Poor Miss Dacre! born with a spinal deformity, that prophesied the early
death it occasioned. Such are generally gentle and innocent beings. God
seems to stamp on their foreheads the seal of death, in sign of
appropriation. No evil dares approach the sacred hieroglyphic on this
seal of redemption; we on earth interpret early death, but the heavenly
spirits, that minister around us, read in it "Abiding innocence."


Something to me delicious in the thought that one who dies a baby
presents to the glorified Saviour and Redeemer that same sweet face of
infancy which He blessed when on earth, and sanctified with a kiss, and
solemnly pronounced to be the type and sacrament of regeneration.


[Sidenote: THE NIGHT SIDE OF NATURE November 9, Wednesday night, 45 min.
past 6]

The town, with lighted windows and noise of the _clogged_ passengers in
the streets--sound of the unseen river. Mountains scarcely perceivable
except by eyes long used to them, and supported by the images of memory
flowing in on the impulses of immediate impression. On the sky, black
clouds; two or three dim, untwinkling stars, like full stops on damp
paper, and large stains and spreads of sullen white, like a tunic of
white wool seen here and there through a torn and tattered cloak of
black. Whence do these stains of white proceed all over the sky, so long
after sunset, and from their indifference of place in the sky, seemingly
unaffected by the west?


[Sidenote: November 10, 1/2 past 2 o'clock, morning]

Awoke, after long struggles, from a persecuting dream. The tale of the
dream began in two _images_, in two sons of a nobleman, desperately fond
of shooting, brought out by the footman to resign their property, and to
be made believe that they had none. They were far too cunning for that,
and as they struggled and resisted their cruel wrongers, and my interest
for them, I suppose, increased, I became they--the duality
vanished--Boyer and Christ's Hospital became concerned; yet, still, the
former story was kept up, and I was conjuring him, as he met me in the
street, to have pity on a nobleman's orphan, when I was carried up to
bed, and was struggling up against some unknown impediment--when a noise
of one of the doors awoke me. Drizzle; the sky uncouthly marbled with
white vapours and large black clouds, their surface of a fine woolly
grain, but in the height and key-stone of the arch a round space of sky
with dim watery stars, like a friar's crown; the seven stars in the
central seen through white vapour that, entirely shapeless, gave a
whiteness to the circle of the sky, but stained with exceedingly thin
and subtle flakes of black vapour, might be happily said in language of
Boccace (describing Demogorgon, in his _Genealogia De Gli Dei_) to be
_vestito d'una pallidezza affumicata_.

[Sidenote: Tuesday night, 1/4 after 7]

The sky covered with stars, the wind up--right opposite my window, over
Brandelhow, as its centre, and extending from the gorge to Whinlatter,
an enormous black cloud, exactly in the shape of an egg--this, the only
cloud in all the sky, impressed me with a demoniacal grandeur. O for
change of weather!

[Sidenote: Sunday morning, Nov. 13, 1/2 past 2]

The sky, in upon Grysdale Pike and onward to the Withop Fells, floored
with flat, smooth, dark or dingy clouds, elsewhere starry. Though seven
stars and all the rest in the height of the heaven be dimmed, those in
the descent bright and frosty. The river has a loud voice,
self-biographer of to-day's rain and thunder-showers. The owls are
silent; they have been very musical. All weathers on Saturday the
twelfth, storm and frost, sunshine, lightning and what not! God be
praised, though sleepless, am marvellously bettered, and I take it for
granted that the barometer has risen. I have been reading Barrow's
treatise "On the Pope's Supremacy," and have made a note on the
_L'Estrangeism_ of his style whenever his thoughts rendered it possible
for the words to be pert, frisky and vulgar--which, luckily, could not
be often, from the gravity of his subjects, the solidity and
appropriateness of his thoughts, and that habitual geometrical
_precision_ of mind which demanded the most _appropriate_ words. He
seems to me below South in dignity; at least, South never sinks so low
as B. sometimes.


[Sidenote: AN OPTICAL ILLUSION]

A pretty optical fact occurred this morning. As I was returning from
Fletcher's, up the back lane and just in sight of the river, I saw,
floating high in the air, somewhere over Mr. Banks', a noble kite. I
continued gazing at it for some time, when, turning suddenly round, I
saw at an equi-distance on my right, that is, over the middle of our
field, a pair of kites floating about. I looked at them for some
seconds, when it occurred to me that I had never before seen two kites
together, and instantly the vision disappeared. It was neither more nor
less than two pair of leaves, each pair on a separate stalk, on a young
fruit tree that grew on the other side of the wall, not two yards from
my eye. The leaves being alternate, did, when I looked at them as
leaves, strikingly resemble wings, and they were the only leaves on the
tree. The magnitude was given by the imagined distance, that distance by
the former adjustment of the eye, which _remained_ in consequence of the
deep impression, the length of time I had been looking at the kite, the
pleasure, &c., and [the fact that] a new object [had] impressed itself
on the eye.


[Sidenote: THE INWARD LIGHT]

In Plotinus the system of the Quakers is most beautifully expressed in
the fifth book of the Fifth Ennead (he is speaking of "the inward
light"): "It is not lawful to enquire from whence it originated, for it
neither approached hither, nor again departs from hence to some other
place, but it either appears to us, or does not appear. So that we ought
not to pursue it as if with a view of discerning its latent original,
but to abide in quiet till it suddenly shines upon us, preparing
ourselves for the blessed spectacle, like the eye waiting for the rising
sun."


[Sidenote: PARS ALTERA MEI]

My nature requires another nature for its support, and reposes only in
another from the necessary indigence of its being. Intensely similar yet
not the same [must that other be]; or, may I venture to say, the same
indeed, but dissimilar, as the same breath sent with the same force, the
same pauses, and the same melody pre-imaged in the mind, into the flute
and the clarion shall be the same _soul diversely incarnate_.


[Sidenote: NOT THE BEAUTIFUL BUT THE GOOD]

"ALL things desire that which is first from a necessity of nature,
prophesying, as it were, that they cannot subsist without the energies
of that first nature. But beauty is not first, it happens only to
intellect, and creates restlessness and seeking; but good, which is
present from the beginning and unceasingly to our innate appetite,
abides with us even in sleep, and never seizes the mind with
astonishment, and requires no peculiar reminiscence to convince us of
its presence."--PLOTINUS.

This is just and profound, yet perfect beauty being an abstract of good,
in and for that particular form excites in me no passion but that of an
admiration so quiet as scarcely to admit of the name _passion_, but one
that, participating in the same root of soul, does yet spring up with
excellences that I have not. To this I am driven by a desire of
self-completion with a restless and inextinguishable love. God is not
all things, for in this case He would be indigent of all; but all things
are God, and eternally indigent of God. And in the original meaning of
the word _essence_ as predicable of that concerning which you can say,
This is he, or That is he (this or that rather than any other), in this
sense of the word essence, I perfectly coincide with the Platonists and
Plotinists that, if we add to the nature of God either essence or
intellect or beauty, we deprive Him of being the Good himself, the only
One, the purely and absolutely One.


[Sidenote: A MOON-SET Friday, Nov. 25, 1803, morning 45 minutes past]

After a night of storm and rain, the sky calm and white, by blue vapour
thinning into formlessness instead of clouds, the mountains of height
covered with snow, the secondary mountains black. The moon descending
aslant the [V]^A, through the midst of which the great road
winds, set exactly behind Whinlatter Point, marked A. She being an egg,
somewhat uncouthly shaped, perhaps, but an ostrich's egg rather than any
other (she is two nights more than a half-moon), she set behind the
black point, fitted herself on to it like a cap of fire, then became a
crescent, then a mountain of fire in the distance, then the peak itself
on fire, one steady flame; then stars of the first, second and third
magnitude, and vanishing, upboiled a swell of light, and in the next
second the whole sky, which had been _sable blue_ around the yellow
moon, whitened and brightened for as large a space as would take the
moon half an hour to descend through.


[Sidenote: THE DEATH OF ADAM A DREAM Dec. 6, 1803]

Adam travelling in his old age came to a set of the descendants of Cain,
ignorant of the origin of the world, and treating him as a madman,
killed him. A sort of dream which I had this night.


[Sidenote: A MAN'S A MAN FOR ALL THAT]

We ought to suspect reasoning founded wholly on the difference of man
from man, not on their commonnesses, which are infinitely greater. So I
doubt the wisdom of the treatment of sailors and criminals, because it
is wholly grounded on their vices, as if the vices formed the whole or
major part of their being.


[Sidenote: A DEFENCE OF METAPHYSIC]

Abstruse reasoning is to the inductions of common sense what reaping is
to delving. But the implements with which we reap, how are they gained?
by delving. Besides, what is common sense now was abstract reasoning
with earlier ages.


[Sidenote: A SUNSET]

A beautiful sunset, the sun setting behind Newlands across the foot of
the lake. The sky is cloudless, save that there is a cloud on Skiddaw,
one on the highest mountains in Borrowdale, some on Helvellyn, and that
the sun sets in a glorious cloud. These clouds are of various shapes,
various colours, and belong to their mountains and have nothing to do
with the sky. N.B.--There is something metallic, silver playfully and
imperfectly gilt and highly polished, or, rather, something
mother-of-pearlish, in the sun-gleams on ice, thin ice.


[Sidenote: EXTREMES MEET]

I have repeatedly said that I could make a volume if only I had noted
down, as they occurred to my recollection, the instances of the proverb
"Extremes Meet." This night, Sunday, December 11, 1803, half-past
eleven, I have determined to devote the last nine pages of my
pocket-book to a collection of the same.

     1.                          The parching air
     Burns frore and cold performs the effect of fire.

                                 _Paradise Lost_, ii. 594.

     2. Insects by their smallness, the mammoth by its hugeness,
     terrible.

     3. In the foam-islands in a fiercely boiling pool, at the
     bottom of a waterfall, there is sameness from infinite change.

     4. The excess of humanity and disinterestedness in polite
     society, the desire not to give pain, for example, not to talk
     of your own diseases and misfortunes, and to introduce nothing
     but what will give pleasure, destroy all humanity and
     disinterestedness, by making it intolerable, through desuetude,
     to listen to the complaints of our equals, or of any, where the
     listening does not gratify or excite some vicious pride and
     sense of superiority.

     5. It is difficult to say whether a perfectly unheard-of
     subject or a _crambe bis cocta_, if chosen by a man of genius,
     would excite in the higher degree the sense of novelty. Take,
     as an instance of the latter, the "Orestes" of Sotheby.

     6. Dark with excess of light.

     7. Self-absorption and worldly-mindedness (N.B.--The latter a
     most philosophical word).

     8. The dim intellect sees an absolute oneness, the perfectly
     clear intellect _knowingly perceives_ it. Distinction and
     plurality lie in the betwixt.

     9. The naked savage and the gymnosophist.

     10. Nothing and intensest absolute being.

     11. Despotism and ochlocracy.


[Sidenote: ABSTRUSE RESEARCH]

A dirty business! "How," said I, with a great effort to conquer my
laziness and a great wish to rest in the generality, "what do you
include under the words 'dirty business'"? I note this in order to
remember the reluctance the mind has in general to analysis.


The soul within the body--can I, any way, compare this to the reflection
of the fire seen through my window on the solid wall, seeming, of
course, within the solid wall, as deep within as the distance of the
fire from the wall. I fear I can make nothing out of it; but why do I
always hurry away from any interesting thought to do something
uninteresting? As, for instance, when this thought struck me, I turned
off my attention suddenly and went to look for the copy of Wolff which I
had missed. Is it a cowardice of all deep feeling, even though
pleasurable? or is it laziness? or is it something less obvious than
either? Is it connected with my epistolary embarrassments?

["The window of my library at Keswick is opposite to the fireplace. At
the coming on of evening, it was my frequent amusement to watch the
image or reflection of the fire that seemed burning in the bushes or
between the trees in different parts of the garden."--_The Friend._
_Coleridge's Works_, ii. 135.]


As I was sitting at the foot of my bed, reading with my face downwards,
I saw a phantom of my face upon the nightcap which lay just on the
middle of my pillow--it was indistinct but of bright colours, and came
only as my head bent low. Was it the action of the rays of my face upon
my eyes? that is, did my eyes see my face, and from the sidelong and
faint action of the rays place the image in that situation? But I moved
the nightcap and I lost it.


[Sidenote: Dec. 19, 1803, morning]

I have only to shut my eyes to feel how ignorant I am whence these forms
and coloured forms, and colours distinguishable beyond what I can
distinguish, derive their birth. These varying and infinite co-present
colours, what are they? I ask, to what do they belong in my waking
remembrance? and almost never receive an answer. Only I perceive and
know that whatever I change, in any part of me, produces some change in
these eye-spectra; as, for instance, if I press my legs or change sides.


[Sidenote: OF STREAMY ASSOCIATION]

I will at least make the attempt to explain to myself the origin of
moral evil from the streamy nature of association, which thinking curbs
and rudders. Do not the bad passions in dreams throw light and show of
proof upon this hypothesis? If I can but explain those passions I shall
gain light, I am sure. A clue! a clue! a Hecatomb à la Pythagoras, if it
unlabyrinth me.


[Sidenote: December 28, 1803, 11 o'clock]

I note the beautiful luminous shadow of my pencil-point which follows it
from the candle, or rather goes before it and illuminates the word I am
writing. But, to resume, take in the blessedness of innocent children,
the blessedness of sweet sleep, do they or do they not contradict the
argument of evil from streamy associations? I hope not, but all is to be
thought over and _into_. And what is the height and ideal of mere
association? Delirium. But how far is this state produced by pain and
denaturalisation? And what are these? In short, as far as I can see
anything in this total mist, vice is imperfect yet existing volition,
giving diseased currents of association, because it yields on all sides
and yet _is_--so, too, think of madness!


[Sidenote: A DOUBTFUL EXPERIMENT]

December 30th, half-past one o'clock, or, rather, Saturday morning,
December 31st, put rolled bits of paper, many tiny bits of wick, some
tallow, and the soap together. The whole flame, equal in size to
half-a-dozen candles, did not give the light of one, and the letters of
the book looked by the unsteady flare just as through tears or in
dizziness--every line of every letter dislocated into angles, or like
the mica in crumbly stones.


[Sidenote: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MOTION]

The experiment over leaf illustrates my idea of motion, namely, that it
is a presence and absence rapidly alternating, so that the fits of
_absence_ exist continuously in the feeling, and the fits of presence
_vice versâ_ continuedly in the eye. Of course I am speaking of motion
psychologically, not physically, what it is in us, not what the
supposed mundane cause may be. I believe that what we call _motion_ is
our consciousness of motion arising from the interruption of motion, the
action of the soul in suffering resistance. Free unresisted action, the
going forth of the soul, life without consciousness, is, properly,
infinite, that is unlimited. For whatever resists limits, and whatever
is unresisted is unlimited. This, psychologically speaking, is space,
while the sense of resistance or limitation is time, and motion is a
synthesis of the two. The closest approach of time to space forms
co-existent multitude.


[Sidenote: RECOLLECTION AND REMEMBRANCE]

There is an important distinction between the memory or reminiscent
faculty of sensation which young children seem to possess in so small a
degree, from their perpetual desire to have a tale repeated to them, and
the memory of words and images which the very same children manifestly
possess in an unusual degree, even to sealing-wax accuracy of retention
and representation.


[Sidenote: THE ETHICS OF SPINOZA]

If Spinoza had left the doctrine of miracles untouched, and had not
written so powerfully in support of universal toleration, his ethics
would never have brought on him the charge of Atheism. His doctrine, in
this respect, is truly and severely orthodox, in the reformed Church;
neither do I know that the Church of Rome has authoritatively decided
between the Spinosists and Scotists in their great controversy on the
nature of the being which creatures possess.


[Sidenote: A UNITARIAN SCHOOLMAN]

Creation is explained by Joannes Scotus Erigena as only a manifestation
of the unity of God in forms--_et fit et facit, et creat et creatur_.
Lib. 4. p. 7.

P. 8. A curious and highly-philosophical account of the Trinity, and
completely Unitarian. God is, is wise, and is living. The essence we
call Father, the wisdom Son, the life the Holy Spirit. And he
positively affirms that these three exist only as distinguishable
relations--_habitudines_; and he states the whole doctrine to be an
invention and condescension of Theology to the intellect of man, which
must _define_, and consequently _personify_, in order to understand, and
must have some phantom of understanding in order to keep alive in the
heart the substantial faith. They are _fuel_ to the sacred fire--in the
empyrean it may burn without fuel, and they who do so are seraphs.


[Sidenote: A CROWD OF THOUGHTS]

A fine epitheton of man would be "Lord of fire and light." All other
creatures whose existence we perceive are mere alms-receivers of both.


A company of children driving a hungry, hard-skinned ass out of a
corn-field. The ass cannot by such weaklings be driven so hard but he
will feed as he goes.


Such light as lovers love, when the waxing moon steals in behind a
black, black cloud, emerging soon enough to make the blush visible which
the long kiss had kindled.


All notions [remain] hushed in the phantasms of place and time that
still escape the finest sieve and most searching winnow of our reason
and abstraction.


A rosemary tree, large as a timber tree, is a sweet sign of the
antiquity and antique manners of the house against which it groweth.
"Rosemary" (says Parkinson, _Theatrum Botanicum_ [London, 1640] p. 76)
"is a herb of as great use with us in these days as any whatsoever, not
only for physical but civil purposes--the civil uses, as all know, are
at weddings, funerals, &c., to bestow on friends."


Great harm is done by bad poets in trivialising beautiful expressions
and images and associating disgust and indifference with the technical
forms of poetry.


Advantage of public schools. [They teach men to be] content with school
praise when they publish. Apply this to Cottle and J. Jennings.


Religious slang operates better on women than on men. N.B.--Why? I will
give over--it is not _tanti_!


Poem. Ghost of a mountain--the forms, seizing my body as I passed,
became realities--I a ghost, till I had reconquered my substance.


The sopha of sods. Lack-wit and the clock find him at last in the
Yorkshire cave, where the waterfall is.

[The reference is, no doubt, to Wordsworth's "Idiot Boy," which was
composed at Nether Stowey, in 1798. In a letter addressed to John Wilson
of June 5, 1802, Wordsworth discusses and discards the use of the word
"lackwit" as an equivalent to "idiot." The "Sopha of Sods" was on
Latrigg. In her journal for August, 1800, Dorothy Wordsworth records the
making of a seat on Windybrow, a part of Latrigg. Possibly this was the
"Sopha of Sods."--_Life of W. Wordsworth_, 1889, i. 268, 403.]


The old stump of the tree, with briar-roses and bramble leaves wreathed
round and round--a bramble arch--a foxglove in the centre.


The palm, still faithful to forsaken deserts, an emblem of hope.


The stedfast rainbow in the fast-moving, fast-hurrying hail-mist! What a
congregation of images and feelings, of fantastic permanence amidst the
rapid change of tempest--quietness the daughter of storm.


[Sidenote: "POEM ON SPIRIT, OR ON SPINOZA"]

I would make a pilgrimage to the deserts of Arabia to find the man who
could make me understand how the _one can be many_. Eternal, universal
mystery! It seems as if it were impossible, yet it _is_, and it is
everywhere! It is indeed a contradiction in _terms_, and only in terms.
It is the co-presence of feeling and life, limitless by their very
essence, with form by its very essence limited, determinable, definite.


[Sidenote: TRANS-SUBSTANTIATION]

Meditate on trans-substantiation! What a conception of a miracle! Were
one a Catholic, what a sublime oration might one not make of it?
Perpetual, [Greek: pan]topical, yet offering no violence to the sense,
exercising no domination over the free-will--a miracle always existing,
yet perceived only by an act of the free-will--the beautiful fuel of the
fire of faith--the fire must be pre-existent or it is not fuel, yet it
feeds and supports and is necessary to feed and support the fire that
converts it into his own nature.


[Sidenote: THE DANGER OF THE MEAN]

Errors beget opposite errors, for it is our imperfect nature to run into
extremes. But this trite, because ever-recurring, truth is not the
whole. Alas! those are endangered who have avoided the extremes, as if
among the Tartars, in opposition to a faction that had unnaturally
lengthened their noses into monstrosity, there should arise another who
had cut off theirs flat to the face, Socinians in physiognomy. The few
who retained their noses as nature made them and reason dictated would
assuredly be persecuted by the noseless party as adherents of the
rhinocerotists or monster-nosed men, which is the case of those [Greek:
archaspistai] [braves] of the English Church, called Evangelicals.
Excess of Calvinism produced Arminianism, and those not in excess must
therefore be Calvinists!


[Sidenote: ALAS! THEY HAD BEEN FRIENDS IN YOUTH]

To a former friend who pleaded how near he formerly had been, how near
and close a friend! Yes! you were, indeed, near to my heart and native
to my soul--a part of my being and its natural, even as the chaff to
corn. But since that time, through whose fault I will be mute, I have
been thrashed out by the flail of experience. Because you have been,
therefore, never more can you be a part of the grain.


[Sidenote: Oct. 31, 1803 AVE PH[OE]BE IMPERATOR]

The full moon glided behind a black cloud. And what then? and who cared?
It was past seven o'clock in the morning. There is a small cloud in the
east, not larger than the moon and ten times brighter than she! So
passes night, and all her favours vanish in our minds ungrateful!


[Sidenote: THE ONE AND THE GOOD]

In the chapter on abstract ideas I might introduce the subject by
quoting the eighth Proposition of Proclus' "Elements of Theology." The
whole of religion seems to me to rest on and in the question: The One
and The Good--are these words or realities? I long to read the schoolmen
on the subject.


[Sidenote: A MORTAL AGONY OF THOUGHT]

There are thoughts that seem to give me a power over my own life. I
could kill myself by persevering in the thought. Mem., to describe as
accurately as may be the approximating symptoms. I met something very
like this observation where I should least have expected such a
coincidence of sentiment, such sympathy with so wild a feeling of
mine--in p. 71 of Blount's translation of "The Spanish Rogue," 1623.




CHAPTER III

_1804_

    "Home-sickness is no baby-pang."--S. T. C.


[Sidenote: THE UNDISCIPLINED WILL]

This evening, and indeed all this day, I ought to have been reading and
filling the margins of Malthus. ["An Essay on the Principles of
Population, &c., London," 1803, 4to. The copy annotated by Coleridge is
now in the British Museum.]

I had begun and found it pleasant. Why did I neglect it? Because I ought
not to have done this. The same applies to the reading and writing of
letters, essays, etc. Surely this is well worth a serious analysis,
that, by understanding, I may attempt to heal it. For it is a deep and
wide disease in my moral nature, at once elm-and-oak-rooted. Is it love
of liberty, of spontaneity or what? These all express, but do not
explain the fact.

[Sidenote: Tuesday morning, January 10, 1804]

After I had got into bed last night I said to myself that I had been
pompously enunciating as a difficulty, a problem of easy and common
solution--viz., that it was the effect of association. From infancy up
to manhood, under parents, schoolmasters, inspectors, etc., our
pleasures and pleasant self-chosen pursuits (self-chosen because
pleasant, and not originally pleasant because self-chosen) have been
forcibly interrupted, and dull, unintelligible rudiments, or painful
tasks imposed upon us instead. Now all duty is felt as a _command_, and
every command is of the nature of an offence. Duty, therefore, by the
law of association being felt as a command from without, would naturally
call up the sensation of the pain roused from the commands of parents
and schoolmasters. But I awoke this morning at half-past one, and as
soon as disease permitted me to think at all, the shallowness and
sophistry of this solution flashed upon me at once. I saw that the
phenomenon occurred far, far too early: I have observed it in infants of
two or three months old, and in Hartley I have seen it turned up and
layed bare to the unarmed eye of the merest common sense. The fact is
that interruption of itself is painful, because and as far as it acts as
_disruption_. And thus without any reference to or distinct recollection
of my former theory I saw great reason to attribute the effect, wholly,
to the streamy nature of the associative faculty, and the more, as it is
evident that they labour under this defect who are most reverie-ish and
streamy--Hartley, for instance, and myself. This seems to me no common
corroboration of my former thought or the origin of moral evil in
general.


[Sidenote: COGITARE EST LABORARE]

A time will come when passiveness will attain the dignity of worthy
activity, when men shall be as proud within themselves of having
remained in a state of deep tranquil emotion, whether in reading or in
hearing or in looking, as they now are in having figured away for an
hour. Oh! how few can transmute activity of mind into emotion! Yet there
are as active as the stirring tempest and playful as the may-blossom in
a breeze of May, who can yet for hours together remain with _hearts_
broad awake, and the _understanding_ asleep in all but its retentiveness
and _receptivity_. Yea, and (in) the latter (state of mind) evince as
great genius as in the former.


[Sidenote: A SHEAF OF ANECDOTES, Sunday morning, Feb. 5, 1804]

I called on Charles Lamb fully expecting him to be out, and intending
all the way, to write to him. I found him at home, and while sitting and
talking to him, took the pen and note-paper and began to write.


As soon as Holcroft heard that Mary Wollstonecraft was dead, he took a
chaise and came with incredible speed to "have Mrs. Godwin opened for a
remarkable woman!"


[Sidenote: Sunday morning, Feb. 13, 1804]

Lady Beaumont told me that when she was a child, previously to her
saying her prayers, she endeavoured to think of a mountain or great
river, or something great, in order to raise up her soul and kindle it.


Rickman has a tale about George Dyer and his "Ode to the Hero Race."
"Your Aunt, Sir," said George to the Man of Figures, "your Aunt is a
very sensible woman. Why I read Sir, my Ode to her and she said that it
was a very pretty Thing. There are very few women, Sir! that possess
that fine discrimination, Sir!"


The huge Organ Pipe at Exeter, larger than the largest at Haarlem, at
first was dumb. Green determined to make it speak, and tried all means
in vain, till at last he made a second pipe precisely alike, and placed
it at its side. _Then_ it spoke.


Sir George Beaumont found great advantage in learning to draw from
Nature through gauze spectacles.


At Göttingen, at Blumenbach's lectures on Psychology, when some
anatomical preparations were being handed round, there came in and
seated himself by us Englishmen a _Hospitator_, one, that is, who
attends one or two lectures unbidden and unforbidden and gratis, as a
stranger, and on a claim, as it were, of hospitality. This _Hospes_ was
the uncouthest, strangest fish, pretending to human which I ever beheld.
I turned to Greenough and "Who broke his bottle?" I whispered.


Godwin and Holcroft went together to Underwood's chambers. "Little Mr.
Underwood," said they, "we are perfectly acquainted with the subject of
your studies, only ignorant of the particulars. What is the difference
between a thermometer and a barometer?"


[Sidenote: THE ADOLESCENCE OF LOVE]

It is a pleasure to me to perceive the buddings of virtuous loves, to
know their minutes of increase, their stealth and silent growings--

A pretty idea, that of a good soul watching the progress of an
attachment from the first glance to the time when the lover himself
becomes conscious of it. A poem for my "Soother of Absence."


[Sidenote: THE RAGE FOR MONITION]

    To J. Tobin, Esq., April 10, 1804.

Men who habitually enjoy robust health have, too generally, the trick,
and a very cruel one it is, of imagining that they discover the secret
of all their acquaintances' ill health in some malpractice or other;
and, sometimes, by gravely asserting this, here there and everywhere (as
who likes his penetration [hid] under a bushel?), they not only do all
they can, without intending it, to deprive the poor sufferer of that
sympathy which is always a comfort and, in some degree, a support to
human nature, but, likewise, too often implant serious alarm and
uneasiness in the minds of the person's relatives and his nearest and
dearest connections. Indeed (but that I have known its inutility, that I
should be ridiculously sinning against my own law which I was
propounding, and that those who are most fond of advising are the least
able to hear advice from others, as the passion to command makes men
disobedient) I should often have been on the point of advising you
against the two-fold rage of advising and of discussing character, both
the one and the other of which infallibly generates presumption and
blindness to our own faults. Nay! more particularly where, from whatever
cause, there exists a slowness to understand or an aptitude to mishear
and consequently misunderstand what has been said, it too often renders
an otherwise truly good man a mischief-maker to an extent of which he is
but little aware. Our friends' reputation should be a religion to us,
and when it is lightly sacrificed to what self-adulation calls a love of
telling the truth (in reality a lust of talking something seasoned with
the cayenne and capsicum of personality), depend upon it, something in
the heart is warped or warping, more or less according to the greater or
lesser power of the counteracting causes. I confess to you, that being
exceedingly low and heart-fallen, I should have almost sunk under the
operation of reproof and admonition (the whole too, in my conviction,
grounded on utter mistake) at the moment I was quitting, perhaps for
ever! my dear country and all that makes it so dear--but the high esteem
I cherish towards you, and my sense of your integrity and the reality of
your attachment and concern blows upon me refreshingly as the sea-breeze
on the tropic islander. Show me anyone made better by blunt advice, and
I may abate of my dislike to it, but I have experienced the good effects
of the contrary in Wordsworth's conduct to me; and, in Poole and others,
have witnessed enough of its ill effects to be convinced that it does
little else but harm both to the adviser and the advisee.

[See _Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge_, Letter cli., ii. 474, 475.]


[Sidenote: PLACES AND PERSONS, Thursday, April 19, 1804]

This is Spain! That is Africa! Now, then, I have seen Africa! &c., &c.
O! the power of names to give interest. When I first sate down, with
Europe on my left and Africa on my right, both distinctly visible, I
felt a quickening of the movements in the blood, but still it felt as a
pleasure of _amusement_ rather than of thought or elevation; and at the
same time, and gradually winning on the other, the nameless silent forms
of nature were working in me, like a tender thought in a man who is
hailed merrily by some acquaintance in his work, and answers it in the
same tone. This is Africa! That is Europe! There is _division_, sharp
boundary, abrupt change! and what are they in nature? Two mountain banks
that make a noble river of the interfluent sea, not existing and acting
with distinctness and manifoldness indeed, but at once and as one--no
division, no change, no antithesis! Of all men I ever knew, Wordsworth
himself not excepted, I have the faintest pleasure in things contingent
and transitory. I never, except as a forced courtesy of conversation,
ask in a stage-coach, Whose house is that? nor receive the least
additional pleasure when I receive the answer. Nay, it goes to a disease
in me. As I was gazing at a wall in Caernarvon Castle, I wished the
guide fifty miles off that was telling me, In this chamber the Black
Prince was born (or whoever it was). I am not certain whether I should
have seen with any emotion the mulberry-tree of Shakspere. If it were a
tree of no notice in itself, I am sure that I should feel by an
effort--with self-reproach at the dimness of the feeling; if a striking
tree, I fear that the pleasure would be diminished rather than
increased, that I should have no unity of feeling, and find in the
constant association of Shakspere having planted it an intrusion that
prevented me from wholly (as a whole man) losing myself in the flexures
of its branches and intertwining of its roots. No doubt there are times
and conceivable circumstances in which the contrary would be true, in
which the thought that under this rock by the sea-shore I know that
Giordano Bruno hid himself from the pursuit of the enraged priesthood,
and overcome with the power and sublimity of the truths for which they
sought his life, thought his life therefore given him that he might bear
witness to the truths, and _morti ultra occurrens_, returned and
surrendered himself! So, here, on this bank Milton used to lie, in late
May, when a young man, and familiar with all its primroses, made them
yet dearer than their dear selves, by that sweetest line in the Lycidas,
"And the rathe primrose that forsaken dies:" or from this spot the
immortal deer-stealer, on his escape from Warwickshire, had the first
view of London, and asked himself, And what am I to do there? At certain
times, uncalled and sudden, subject to no bidding of my own or others,
these thoughts would come upon me like a storm, and fill the place with
something more than nature. But these are not contingent or transitory,
they are nature, even as the elements are nature--yea, more to the
human mind, for the mind has the power of abstracting all agency from
the former and considering [them] as mere effects and instruments. But a
Shakspere, a Milton, a Bruno, exist in the mind as pure _action_,
defecated of all that is material and passive. And the great moments
that formed them--it is a kind of impiety against a voice within us, not
to regard them as predestined, and therefore things of now, for ever,
and which were always. But it degrades the sacred feeling, and is to it
what stupid superstition is to enthusiastic religion, when a man makes a
pilgrimage to see a great man's shin-bone found unmouldered in his
coffin. Perhaps the matter stands thus. I could feel amused by these
things, and should be, if there had not been connected with the great
name upon which the amusement wholly depends a higher and deeper
pleasure, that will [not] endure the co-presence of so mean a companion;
while the mass of mankind, whether from nature or (as I fervently hope)
from error of rearing and the worldliness of their after-pursuits, are
rarely susceptible of any other pleasures than those of _amusement_,
gratification of curiosity, novelty, surprise, wonderment, from the
glaring, the harshly-contrasted, the odd, the accidental, and find the
reading of the _Paradise Lost_ a task somewhat alleviated by a few
entertaining incidents, such as the pandemonium and self-endwarfment of
the devils, the fool's paradise and the transformation of the infernal
court into serpents and of their intended applauses into hisses.

["Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself were exact, but harmonious opposites
in this--that every old ruin, hill, river or tree called up in his mind
a host of historical or biographical associations; whereas, for myself,
I believe I should walk over the plain of Marathon without taking more
interest in it than in any other plain of similar features."--_Table
Talk_, August 4, 1833, Bell & Co., 1834, p. 242.]


[Sidenote: THE INTOLERANCE OF CONVERTS]

Why do we so very, very often see men pass from one extreme to the
other? [Greek: stodkardia] [Stoddart, for instance]. Alas! they
sought not the truth, but praise, self-importance, and above all [the
sense of] something doing! Disappointed, they hate and persecute their
former opinion, which no man will do who by meditation had adopted it,
and in the course of unfeigned meditation gradually enlarged the circle
and so get out of it. For in the perception of its falsehood he will
form a perception of certain truths which had made the falsehood
plausible, and can never cease to venerate his own sincerity of
intention and Philalethie. For, perhaps, we never _hate_ any opinion, or
can do so, till we have _impersonated_ it. We hate the persons because
they oppose us, symbolise that opposition under the form and words of
the opinion and then hate the person for the opinion and the opinion for
the person.

[For some weeks after his arrival at Valetta Coleridge remained as the
guest of Dr. John (afterwards Sir John) Stoddart, at that time H.M.
Advocate at Malta.]


[Sidenote: FACTS AND FICTION]

Facts! Never be weary of discussing and exposing the hollowness of
these. [For, in the first place,] every man [is] an accomplice on one
side or the other, [and, secondly, there is] _human testimony_. "You
were in fault, I hear," said B to C, and B had heard it from A. [Now] A
had said, "And C, God bless her, was perhaps the innocent occasion"! But
what a trifle this to the generality of blunders!


[Sidenote: CANDOUR ANOTHER NAME FOR CANT]

[I have no pity or patience for that], blindness which comes from
putting out your own eyes and in mock humility refusing to form an
opinion on the right and the wrong of a question. "If we say so of the
Sicilians, why may not Buonaparte say this of the Swiss?" and so forth.
As if England and France, Swiss and Sicilian were the x y z of Algebra,
naked names of unknown quantities. [What is this but] to fix morals
without morality, and [to allow] general rules to supersede all
particular thought? And though it be never acted on in reality, yet the
opinion is pernicious. It kills public spirit and deadens national
effort.


[Sidenote: A SIMILE]

The little point, or, sometimes, minim globe of flame remains on the
[newly] lighted taper for three minutes or more unaltered. But, see, it
is given over, and then, at once, the flame darts or plunges down into
the wick, then up again, and all is bright--a fair cone of flame, with
its black column in it, and minor cone, shadow-coloured, resting upon
the blue flame the common base of the two cones, that is, of the whole
flame. A pretty detailed simile in the manner of J. Taylor might be made
of this, applying it to slow learners, to opportunities of grace
manifestly neglected and seemingly lost and useless.


[Sidenote: O STAR BENIGN]

Monday evening, July 9, 1804, about 8 o'clock. The glorious evening star
coasted the moon, and at length absolutely crested its upper tip.... It
was the most singular and at the same time beautiful sight I ever
beheld. Oh, that it could have appeared the same in England, at
Grasmere!


[Sidenote: NEFAS EST AB HOSTE DOCERI]

In the Jacobinism of anti-jacobins, note the dreariest feature of
Jacobins, a contempt for the institutions of our ancestors and of past
wisdom, which has generated Cobbetts and contempt of the liberty of the
press and of liberty itself. Men are not wholly unmodified by the
opinion of their fellow-men, even when they happen to be enemies or
(still worse) of the opposite faction.


[Sidenote: THE MANY AND THE ONE]

I saw in early youth, as in a dream, the birth of the planets; and my
eyes beheld as _one_ what the understanding afterwards divided into (1)
the origin of the masses, (2) the origin of their motions, and (3) the
site or position of their circles and ellipses. All the deviations, too,
were seen as one intuition of one the self-same necessity, and this
necessity was a law of spirit, and all was spirit. And in matter all
beheld the past activity of others or their own--and this reflection,
this echo is matter--its only essence, if essence it be. And of this,
too, I saw the necessity and understood it, but I understood not how
infinite multitude and manifoldness could be one; only I saw and
understood that it was yet more out of my power to comprehend how it
could be otherwise--and in this unity I worshipped in the depth of
knowledge that passes all understanding the Being of all things--and in
Being their sole goodness--and I saw that God is the One, the
Good--possesses it not, but _is it_.


[Sidenote: THE WINDMILL AND ITS SHADOW]

The visibility of motion at a great distance is increased by all that
increases the the distinct visibility of the moving object. This
Saturday, August 3, 1804, in the room immediately under the tower in St.
Antonio, as I was musing on the difference, whether ultimate or only of
degree, between _auffassen_ and _erkennen_ (an idea received and an idea
acquired) I saw on the top of the distant hills a shadow on the sunny
ground moving very fast and wave-like, yet always in the same place,
which I should have attributed to the windmill close by, but the
windmill (which I saw distinctly too) appeared at rest. On steady
gazing, however, (and most plainly with my spy-glass) I found that it
was not at rest, but that this was its shadow. The windmill itself was
white in the sunshine, and there were sunny white clouds at its back,
the shadow black on the white ground.


[Sidenote: SYRACUSE Thursday night at the Opera, September 27, 1804]

In reflecting on the cause of the "meeting soul" in music, the seeming
recognisance etc., etc., the whole explanation of _memory_ as in the
nature of _accord_ struck upon me; accord produces a phantom of memory,
because memory is always in accord.


[Sidenote: Oct. 5, 1804]

Philosophy to a few, religion with many, is the friend of poetry, as
producing the two conditions of pleasure arising from poetry, namely
tranquillity and the attachment of the affections to _generalisations_.
God, soul, Heaven, the Gospel miracles, etc., are a sort of _poetry_
compared with Lombard Street and Change Alley speculations.


[Sidenote: A SERIOUS MEMORANDUM Syracuse, Saturday, Oct. 5, 1804]

In company, indeed, with all except a very chosen few, never dissent
from anyone as to the _merits_ of another, especially in your own
supposed department, but content yourself with praising, in your turn;
the really good praises of the unworthy are felt by a good man, and man
of genius as detractions from the worthy, and robberies--so the _flashy_
moderns seem to _rob_ the ancients of the honours due to them, and Bacon
and Harrington are _not_ read because Hume and Condillac _are_. This is
an evil; but oppose it, if at all, in books in which you can evolve the
whole of your reasons and feeling, not in conversation when it will be
inevitably attributed to envy. Besides, they who praise the unworthy
must be the injudicious: and the eulogies of critics without taste or
judgment are the natural pay of authors without feeling or genius--and
why rob them? _Sint unicuique sua præmia._ Coleridge! Coleridge! will
you never learn to appropriate your conversation to your company! Is it
not desecration, indelicacy, and a proof of great weakness and even
vanity to talk to, etc. etc., as if you [were talking to] Wordsworth or
Sir G. Beaumont?


[Sidenote: "CAST NOT YOUR PEARLS BEFORE SWINE"]

[Sidenote: Oct. 11, Syracuse, Lecky's, midnight]

O young man, who hast seen, felt and known the truth, to whom reality is
a phantom and virtue and mind the sole actual and permanent being, do
not degrade the truth in thee by disputing. Avoid it! do not by any
persuasion be tempted to it! Surely not by vanity or the weakness of the
pleasure of communicating thy thoughts and awaking sympathy, but not
even by the always mixed hope of producing conviction. This is not the
mode, this is not the time, not the place. [Truth will be better served]
by modestly and most truly saying, "Your arguments are all consequent,
if the foundation be admitted. I do not admit the foundation. But this
will be a business for moments of thought, for a Sabbath-day of your
existence. Then, perhaps, a voice from within will say to you, better,
because [in a manner] more adapted to you, all I can say. But if I felt
this to _be_ that day or that moment, a sacred sympathy would at once
compel and inspire me to the task of uttering the very truth. Till then
I am right willing to bear the character of a mystic, a visionary, or
self-important juggler, who nods his head and says, 'I could if I
would.' But I cannot, I _may_ not, bear the reproach of profaning the
truth which is my life in moments when all passions heterogeneous to it
are eclipsing it to the exclusion of its dimmest ray. I might lose my
tranquillity, and in acquiring the _passion_ of proselytism lose the
_sense_ of conviction. I might become _positive_! Now I am _certain_! I
might have the heat and fermentation, now I have the warmth of life."


[Sidenote: THE YEARNING OF THE FINITE FOR THE INFINITE: Oct. 13, 1804,
Saturday, Syracuse]

Each man having a spark (to use the old metaphor) of the Divinity, yet a
whole fire-grate of humanity--each, therefore, will legislate for the
whole, and spite of the _De gustibus non est disputandum_, even in
trifles--and, till corrected by experience, at least, in this endless
struggle of presumption, really occasioned by the ever-working spark of
the Universal, in the disappointments and baffled attempts of each, all
are disposed to [admit] the _jus extrinsecum_ of Spinoza, and recognise
that reason as the highest which may not be understood as the best, but
of which the concrete possession is felt to be the strongest. Then come
society, habit, education, misery, intrigue, oppression, then
_revolution_, and the circle begins anew. Each man will universalise his
notions, and, yet, each is variously finite. To _reconcile_, therefore,
is truly the work of the inspired! This is the true _Atonement_--that
is, to reconcile the struggles of the infinitely various finite with the
_permanent_.


[Sidenote: A MEASURE IN SELF-REPROOF]

Do not be too much discouraged, if any virtue _should_ be mixed, in your
consciousness, with affectation and imperfect sincerity, and some
vanity. Disapprove of this, and continue the practice of the good
feeling, even though mixed, and it will _gradually_ purify itself.
_Probatum est_. Disapprove, be _ashamed_ of the thought, of its always
continuing thus, but do not harshly quarrel with your present self, for
all virtue subsists in and by pleasure. S. T. C. Sunday evening, October
14, 1804.

But a great deal of this is constitutional. That constitution which
predisposes to certain virtues, the [Greek: Dôron Theôn], has this
[Greek: temenos Nemeseôs] in it. It is the dregs of sympathy, and while
we are _weak_ and dependent on each other, and each is forced to think
often for himself, sympathy will have its dregs, and the strongest, who
have least of these, have the dregs of other virtues to strain off.


[Sidenote: THE OPERA]

All the objections to the opera are equally applicable to tragedy and
comedy without music, and all proceed on the false principle that
theatrical representations are _copies_ of nature, whereas they are
imitations.


[Sidenote: A SALVE FOR WOUNDED VANITY]

When you are harassed, disquieted, and have little dreams of resentment,
and mock triumphs in consequence of the clearest perceptions of unkind
treatment and strange misconceptions and illogicalities, palpably from
bad passion, in any person connected with you, suspect a sympathy in
yourself with some of these bad passions--vanity, for instance. Though a
sense of wounded justice is possible, nay, probably, forms a part of
your uneasy feelings, yet this of itself would yield, at the first
moment of reflection, to pity for the wretched state of a man too
untranquil and perpetually selfish to love anything for itself or
without some end of vanity or ambition--who detests all poetry, tosses
about in the impotence of desires disproportionate to his powers, and
whose whole history of his whole life is a tale of disappointment in
circumstances where the hope and pretension was always unwise, often
presumptuous and insolent. Surely an intuition of this restless and
no-end-having mood of mind would at once fill a hearer having no
sympathy with these passions with tender melancholy, virtuously mixed
with grateful unpharisaic self-complacency. But a patient _almost_, but
not quite, recovered from madness, yet on its confines, finds in the
notions of madness that which irritates and haunts and makes unhappy.


[Sidenote: OFFICIAL DISTRUST]

Malta, Friday, Nov. 23, 1804.

One of the heart-depressing habits and temptations of men in power, as
governors, &c., is to make _instruments_ of their fellow-creatures, and
the moment they find a man of honour and talents, instead of loving and
esteeming him, they wish to _use him_. Hence that self-betraying
side-and-down look of cunning; and they justify and inveterate the habit
by believing that every individual who approaches has selfish designs on
them.


[Sidenote: FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE"]

Days and weeks and months pass on, and now a year--and the sea, the sea,
and the breeze have their influences on me, and [so, too, has the
association with] good and sensible men. I feel a pleasure upon me, and
I am, to the outward view, cheerful, and have myself no distinct
consciousness of the contrary, for I use my faculties, not, indeed, at
once, but freely. But, oh! I am never happy, never deeply gladdened. I
know not--I have forgotten--what the _joy_ is of which the heart is
full, as of a deep and quiet fountain overflowing insensibly, or the
gladness of joy, when the fountain overflows ebullient.


The most common appearance in wintry weather is that of the sun under a
sharp, defined level line of a stormy cloud, that stretches one-third or
half round the circle of the horizon, thrice the height of the space
that intervenes between it and the horizon, which last is about half
again as broad as the sun. [At length] out comes the sun, a mass of
brassy light, himself lost and diffused in his [own] strong splendour.
Compare this with the beautiful summer _set_ of colours without cloud.


Even in the most tranquil dreams, one is much less a mere spectator
[than in reveries or day-dreams]. One seems always about to do, [to be]
suffering, or thinking or talking. I do not recollect [in dreams] that
state of feeling, so common when awake, of thinking on one subject and
looking at another; or [of looking] at a whole prospect, till at last,
perhaps, or by intervals, at least, you only look passively at the
prospect.


[Sidenote: MULTUM IN PARVO]

At Dresden there is a cherry-stone engraved with eighty-five portraits.
Christ and the Twelve Apostles form one group, the table and supper all
drawn by the letters of the text--at once portraits and language. This
is a universal particular language--Roman Catholic language with a
vengeance.


The beautifully _white_ sails of the Mediterranean, so carefully, when
in port, put up into clean bags; and the interesting circumstance of the
Spéronara's sailing without a compass--by an obscure sense of time.


[Sidenote: THROUGH DOUBT TO FAITH]

So far from deeming it, in a religious point of view, criminal to spread
doubts of God, immortality and virtue (that 3 = 1) in the minds of
individuals, I seem to see in it a duty--lest men by taking the _words_
for granted never attain the feeling or the true _faith_. They only
forbear, that is, even to suspect that the idea is erroneous or the
communicators deceivers, but do not _believe_ the idea itself. Whereas
to _doubt_ has more of faith, nay even to disbelieve, than that blank
negation of all such thoughts and feelings which is the lot of the herd
of church-and-meeting-trotters.


[Sidenote: AN APOLOGY FOR COTTLE]

The Holy Ghost, say the harmonists, left all the solecisms, Hebraisms,
and low Judaic prejudices as evidences of the credibility of the
Apostles. So, too, the Theophneusty left Cottle his Bristolisms, not to
take away the credit from him and give it to the Muses.


[Sidenote: FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE"]

His fine mind met vice and vicious thoughts by accident only, as a poet
running through terminations in the heat of composing a rhyme-poem on
the purest and best subjects, startles and half-vexedly turns away from
a foul or impure word.


The gracious promises and sweetnesses and aids of religion are alarming
and distressful to a trifling, light, fluttering gay child of fashion
and vanity, as its threats and reproaches and warnings--as a little bird
which fears as much when you come to give it food as when you come with
a desire to kill or imprison it.


That is a striking legend of Caracciolo and his floating corse, that
came to ask the King of Naples' pardon.


Final causes answer to why? not to how? and who ever supposed that they
did?


O those crinkled, ever-varying circles which the moonlight makes in the
not calm, yet not wavy sea! Quarantine, Malta, Saturday, Nov. 10, 1804.


[Sidenote: THE CREATIVE POWER OF WORDS AND IMAGES]

Hard to express that sense of the analogy or likeness of a thing which
enables a symbol to represent it so that we think of the thing itself,
yet knowing that the thing is not present to us. Surely on this
universal fact of words and images depends, by more or less mediations,
the imitation, instead of the _copy_ which is illustrated, in very
nature Shaksperianised--that Proteus essence that could assume the very
form, but yet known and felt not to be the thing by that difference of
the substance which made every atom of the form another thing, that
likeness not identity--an exact web, every line of direction
miraculously the same, but the one worsted, the other silk.


[Sidenote: SHAKSPERE AND MALONE]

Rival editors have recourse to necromancy to know from Shakspere himself
who of them is the fittest to edit and illustrate him. Describe the
meeting, the ceremonies of conjuration, the appearance of the spirit,
the effect on the rival invokers. When they have resumed courage, the
arbiter appointed by them asks the question. They listen, Malone leaps
up while the rest lay their heads at the same instant that the arbiter
re-echoes the words of the spirit, "Let Malone!" The spirit shudders,
then exclaims in the dread and angry utterance of the dead, "No! no! Let
me alone, I said, inexorable boobies!"

O that eternal bricker-up of Shakspere! Registers, memorandum-books--and
that Bill, Jack and Harry, Tom, Walter and Gregory, Charles, Dick and
Jim, lived at that house, but that nothing more is known of them. But,
oh! the importance when half-a-dozen players'-bills can be made to
stretch through half-a-hundred or more of pages, though there is not one
word in them that by any force can be made either to illustrate the
times or life or writings of Shakspere, or, indeed, of any time. And,
yet, no edition but this gentleman's name _burs_ upon it--_burglossa_
with a vengeance. Like the genitive plural of a Greek adjective, it is
Malone, Malone, Malone, [Greek: Malôn, Malôn, Malôn].

[Edmund Malone's _Variorum_ edition of Shakspere was published in 1790.]


[Sidenote: OF THE FROWARDNESS OF WOMAN December 11, 1804]

It is a remark that I have made many times, and many times, I guess,
shall repeat, that women are infinitely fonder of clinging to and
beating about, hanging upon and keeping up, and reluctantly letting fall
any doleful or painful or unpleasant subject, than men of the same class
and rank.


[Sidenote: NE QUID NIMIS]

A young man newly arrived in the West Indies, who happened to be sitting
next to a certain Captain Reignia, observed by way of introducing a
conversation, "It is a very fine day, sir!" "Yes, sir," was the abrupt
reply, "and be damned to it; it is never otherwise in this damned
rascally climate."


[Sidenote: WE ASK NOT WHENCE BUT WHAT AND WHITHER]

I addressed a butterfly on a pea-blossom thus, "Beautiful Psyche, soul
of a blossom, that art visiting and hovering o'er thy former friends
whom thou hast left!" Had I forgot the caterpillar? or did I dream like
a mad metaphysician that the caterpillar's hunger for plants was
self-love, recollection, and a lust that in its next state refined
itself into love? Dec. 12, 1804.


[Sidenote: ANALOGY]

Different means to the same end seem to constitute analogy. Seeing and
touching are analogous senses with respect to magnitude, figure,
&c.--they would, and to a certain extent do, supply each other's place.
The air-vessels of fish and of insects are analogous to lungs--the end
the same, however different the means. No one would say, "Lungs are
analogous to lungs," and it seems to me either inaccurate or involving
some true conception obscurely, when we speak of planets by analogy of
ours--for here, knowing nothing but likeness, we presume the difference
from the remoteness and difficulty, in the vulgar apprehension, of
considering those pin-points as worlds. So, likewise, instead of the
phrase "analogy of the past," applied to historical reasoning, nine
times out of ten I should say, "by the example of the past." This may
appear verbal trifling, but "_animadverte quam sit ab improprietate
verborum pronum hominibus prolabi in errores circa res_." In short,
analogy always implies a difference in kind and not merely in degree.
There is an analogy between dimness and numbness and a certain state of
the sense of hearing correspondent to these, which produces confusion
with _magnification_, for which we have no name. But between light green
and dark green, between a mole and a lynceus, there is a gradation, no
analogy.

[Sidenote: COROLLARY]

Between beasts and men, when the same actions are performed by both, are
the means analogous or different only in degree? That is the question!
The sameness of the end and the equal fitness of the means prove no
identity of means. I can only read, but understand no arithmetic. Yet,
by Napier's tables or the _House-keepers' Almanack_, I may even arrive
at the conclusion quicker than a tolerably expert mathematician. Yet,
still, reading and reckoning are utterly different things.


[Sidenote: THOMAS WEDGWOOD AND REIMARUS]

In Reimarus on _The Instincts of Animals_, Tom Wedgwood's
ground-principle of the influx of memory on perception is fully and
beautifully detailed.

["Observations Moral and Philosophical on the Instinct of Animals, their
Industry and their Manners," by Herman Samuel Reimarus, was published in
1770. See _Biographia Literaria_, chapter vi. and _Note_, by Mrs. H. N.
Coleridge in the Appendix, _Coleridge's Works_, Harper & Brothers, iii.
225, 717.]


[Sidenote: HINC ILLA MARGINALIA]

It is often said that books are companions. They are so, dear, very dear
companions! But I often, when I read a book that delights me on the
whole, feel a pang that the author is not present, that I cannot
_object_ to him this and that, express my sympathy and gratitude for
this part and mention some facts that self-evidently overset a second,
start a doubt about a third, or confirm and carry [on] a fourth thought.
At times I become restless, for my nature is very social.


[Sidenote: CORRUPTIO OPTIMI PESSIMA]

"Well" (says Lady Ball), "the Catholic religion is better than none."
Why, to be sure, it is called a religion, but the question is, Is it a
religion? Sugar of lead! better than no sugar! Put oil of vitriol into
my salad--well, better than no oil at all! Or a fellow vends a poison
under the name of James' powders--well, we must get the best we
can--better that than none! So did not our noble ancestors reason or
feel, or we should now be slaves and even as the Sicilians are at this
day, or worse, for even they have been made less foolish, in spite of
themselves, by others' wisdom.


[Sidenote: REIMARUS AND THE "INSTINCTS OF ANIMALS"]

I have read with wonder and delight that passage of Reimarus in which he
speaks of the immense multitude of plants, and the curious, regular
_choice_ of different herbivorous animals with respect to them, and the
following pages in which he treats of the pairing of insects and the
equally wonderful processes of egg-laying and so forth. All in motion!
the sea-fish to the shores and rivers--the land crab to the sea-shore! I
would fain describe all the creation thus agitated by the one or other
of the three instincts--self-preservation, childing, and
child-preservation. Set this by Darwin's theory of the maternal
instinct--O mercy! the blindness of the man! and it is imagination,
forsooth! that misled him--too much poetry in his philosophy! this
abject deadness of all that sense of the obscure and indefinite, this
superstitious fetish-worship of lazy or fascinated fancy! O this,
indeed, deserves to be dwelt on.


Think of all this as an absolute revelation, a real presence of Deity,
and compare it with historical traditionary religion. There are two
revelations--the material and the moral--and the former is not to be
seen but by the latter. As St. Paul has so well observed: "By worldly
wisdom no man ever arrived at God;" but having seen Him by the moral
sense, then we _understand_ the outward world. Even as with books, no
book of itself teaches a language in the first instance; but having by
sympathy of soul learnt it, we then understand the book--that is, the
_Deus minor_ in His work.


The _hirschkäfer_ (stag-beetle) in its worm state makes its bed-chamber,
prior to its metamorphosis, half as long as itself. Why? There was a
stiff horn turned under its belly, which in the fly state must project
and harden, and this required exactly that length.


The sea-snail creeps out of its house, which, thus hollowed, lifts him
aloft, and is his boat and cork jacket; the Nautilus, additionally,
spreads a thin skin as a sail.


All creatures obey the great game-laws of Nature, and fish with nets of
such meshes as permit many to escape, and preclude the taking of many.
So two races are saved, the one by taking part, and the other by part
not being taken.


[Sidenote: ENTOMOLOGY VERSUS ONTOLOGY]

Wonderful, perplexing divisibility of life! It is related by D. Unzer,
an authority wholly to be relied on, that an _ohrwurm_ (earwig) cut in
half ate its own hinder part! Will it be the reverse with Great Britain
and America? The head of the rattlesnake severed from the body bit it
and squirted out its poison, as is related by Beverley in his History of
Virginia. Lyonnet in his Insect. Theol. tells us that he tore a wasp in
half and, three days after, the fore-half bit whatever was presented to
it of its former food, and the hind-half darted out its sting at being
touched. Stranger still, a turtle has been known to live six months with
his head off, and to wander about, yea, six hours after its heart and
intestines (all but the lungs) were taken out! How shall we think of
this compatibly with the monad soul? If I say, what has spirit to do
with space?--what odd dreams it would suggest! or is every animal a
republic _in se_? or is there one Breeze of Life, "at once the soul of
each, and God of all?" Is it not strictly analogous to generation, and
no more contrary to unity than it? But IT? Aye! there's the twist in the
logic. Is not the reproduction of the lizard a complete generation? O it
is easy to dream, and, surely, better of these things than of a £20,000
prize in the lottery, or of a place at Court. Dec. 13, 1804.


[Sidenote: FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE"]

To trace the if not absolute birth, yet the growth and endurancy of
language, from the mother talking to the child at her breast. O what a
subject for some happy moment of deep feeling and strong imagination!


Of the Quintetta in the Syracuse opera and the pleasure of the
voices--one and not one, they leave, seek, pursue, oppose, fight with,
strengthen, annihilate each other, awake, enliven, soothe, flatter and
embrace each other again, till at length they die away in one tone.
There is no sweeter image of wayward yet fond lovers, of seeking and
finding, of the love-quarrel, and the making-up, of the losing and the
yearning regret, of the doubtful, the complete recognition, and of the
total melting union. Words are not interpreters, but fellow-combatants.


Title for a Medical Romance:--The adventures, rivalry, warfare and final
union and partnership of Dr. Hocus and Dr. Pocus.


Idly talk they who speak of poets as mere indulgers of fancy,
imagination, superstition, etc. They are the bridlers by delight, the
purifiers; they that combine all these with reason and order--the true
protoplasts--Gods of Love who tame the chaos.


To deduce instincts from obscure recollections of a pre-existing
state--I have often thought of it. "Ey!" I have said, when I have seen
certain tempers and actions in Hartley, "that is I in my future state."
So I think, oftentimes, that my children are my soul--that multitude and
division are not [O mystery!] necessarily subversive of unity. I am sure
that two very different meanings, if not more, lurk in the word One.


The drollest explanation of instinct is that of Mylius, who attributes
every act to pain, and all the wonderful webs and envelopes of spiders,
caterpillars, etc., absolutely to fits of colic or paroxysms of dry
belly-ache!


This Tarantula-dance of repetitions and vertiginous argumentation _in
circulo_, begun in imposture and self-consummated in madness!


While the whole planet (_quoad_ its Lord or, at least, Lord-Lieutenancy)
is in stir and bustle, why should not I keep in time with the tune, and,
like old Diogenes, roll my tub about?


I cannot too often remember that to be deeply interested and to be
highly satisfied are not always commensurate. Apply this to the
affecting and yet unnatural passages of the _Stranger_ or of _John
Bull_, and to the finest passages in Shakspere, such as the death of
Cleopatra or Hamlet.


[Sidenote: A SUNDOG Dec. 15, 1804]

Saw the limb of a rainbow footing itself on the sea at a small apparent
distance from the shore, a thing of itself--no substrate cloud or even
mist visible--but the distance glimmered through it as through a thin
semi-transparent hoop.


[Sidenote: THE SQUARE, THE CIRCLE, THE PYRAMID]

To be and to act, two in Intellect (that mother of orderly multitude,
and half-sister of Wisdom and Madness) but one in essence = to rest, and
to move = [sq] and a [cir]! and out of the infinite combinations of
these, from the more and the less, now of one now of the other, all
pleasing figures and the sources of all pleasure arise. But the pyramid,
that base of stedfastness that rises, yet never deserts itself nor can,
approaches to the [cir]. Sunday. Midnight. Malta. December 16th, 1804.


[Sidenote: THE PYRAMID IN ART]

I can make out no other affinity [in the pyramid] to the circle but by
taking its evanescence as the central point, and so, having thus gained
a melting of the radii in the circumference [by proceeding to] _look_ it
into the object. Extravagance! Why? Does not everyone do this in looking
at any conspicuous three stars together? does not every one see by the
inner vision, a triangle? However, this is in art; but the prototype in
nature is, indeed, loveliness. In Nature there are no straight lines, or
[such straight lines as there are] have the soul of curves, from
activity and positive rapid energy. Or, whether the line seem curve or
straight, yet _here_, in nature, is motion--motion in its most
significant form. It is motion in that form which has been chosen to
express motion in general, hieroglyphical from pre-eminence, [and by
this very pre-eminence, in the particular instance, made significant of
motion in its totality]. Hence, though it chance that a line in nature
should be perfectly straight, there is no need here of any curve whose
effect is that of embleming motion and counteracting actual solidity by
that emblem. For here the line [in contra-distinction to the line in
art] is actual motion, and therefore a balancing _Figurite_ of rest and
solidity. But I will study the wood-fire this evening in the Palace.


[Sidenote: Wednesday Night, 11 o'clock, December 19]

I see now that the eye refuses to decide whether it be surface or
convexity, for the exquisite oneness of the flame makes even its angles
so different from the angles of tangible substances. Its exceeding
oneness added to its very subsistence in motion is the very _soul_ of
the loveliest curve--it does not need its body as it were. Its sharpest
point is, however, rounded, and besides it is cased within its own
penumbra.


[Sidenote: FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE" Friday Morning, Dec. 21, 8
o'clock]

How beautiful a circumstance, the improvement of the flower, from the
root up to that crown of its life and labours, that bridal-chamber of
its beauty and its two-fold love, the nuptial and the parental--the
womb, the cradle, and the nursery of the garden!


_Quisque sui faber_--a pretty simile this would make to a young lady
producing beauty by moral feeling.


Nature may be personified as the [Greek: polymêchanos erganê], an ever
industrious Penelope, for ever unravelling what she has woven, for ever
weaving what she has unravelled.


[Sidenote: THE MEDITERRANEAN]

Oh, said I, as I looked at the blue, yellow, green and purple-green sea,
with all its hollows and swells, and cut-glass surfaces--oh, what an
_ocean_ of lovely forms! And I was vexed, teased that the sentence
sounded like a play of words! _That_ it was not--the mind within me was
struggling to express the marvellous distinctness and unconfounded
personality of each of the million millions of forms, and yet the
individual unity in which they subsisted.


A brisk gale and the foam that peopled the _alive_ sea, most
interestingly combined with the number of white sea-gulls, that,
repeatedly, it seemed as if the foam-spit had taken life and wing and
had flown up--the white precisely-same-colour birds rose up so close by
the ever-perishing white-water wavehead, that the eye was unable to
detect the illusion which the mind delighted to indulge in. O that sky,
that soft, blue, mighty arch resting on the mountain or solid sea-like
plain--what an awful omneity in unity! I know no other perfect union of
the sublime with the beautiful, so that they should be felt, that is,
at the same minute, though by different faculties, and yet, each faculty
be predisposed, by itself, to receive the specific modifications from
the other. To the eye it is an inverted goblet, the inside of a sapphire
basin, perfect beauty in shape and colour. To the mind, it is immensity;
but even the eye feels as if it were [able] to look through with [a] dim
sense of the non-resistance--it is not exactly the feeling given to the
organ by solid and limited things, [but] the eye feels that the
limitation is in its own power, not in the object. But [hereafter] to
pursue this in the manner of the old Hamburg poet [Klopstock].


[Sidenote: I WILL LIFT UP MINE EYES TO THE HILLS]

One travels along with the lines of a mountain. Years ago I wanted to
make Wordsworth sensible of this. How fine is Keswick vale! Would I
repose, my soul lies and is quiet upon the broad level vale. Would it
act? it darts up into the mountain-top like a kite, and like a
chamois-goat runs along the ridge--or like a boy that makes a sport on
the road of running along a wall or narrow fence!


[Sidenote: FORM AND FEELING]

One of the most noticeable and fruitful facts in psychology is the
modification of the same feeling by difference of form. The Heaven lifts
up my soul, the sight of the ocean seems to widen it. We feel the same
force at work, but the difference, whether in mind or body that we
should feel in actual travelling horizontally or in direct ascent,
_that_ we feel in fancy. For what are our feelings of this kind but a
motion imagined, [together] with the feelings that would accompany that
motion, [but] less distinguished, more blended, more rapid, more
confused, and, thereby, co-adunated? Just as white is the very emblem of
one in being the confusion of all.


[Sidenote: VERBUM SAPIENTIBUS]

Mem.--Not to hastily abandon and kick away the means after the end is or
seems to be accomplished. So have I, in blowing out the paper or match
with which I have lit a candle, blown out the candle at the same
instant.


[Sidenote: THE CONTINUITY OF SENSATIONS]

How opposite to nature and the fact to talk of the "one moment" of Hume,
of our whole being an aggregate of successive single sensations! Who
ever felt a single sensation? Is not every one at the same moment
conscious that there co-exist a thousand others, a darker shade, or less
light, even as when I fix my attention on a white house or a grey bare
hill or rather long ridge that runs out of sight each way (how often I
want the German _unübersekbar_!) [untranslatable]--the pretended
sight-sensation, is it anything more than the light-point in every
picture either of nature or of a good painter? and, again,
subordinately, in every component part of the picture? And what is a
moment? Succession with interspace? Absurdity! It is evidently only the
_icht-punct_ in the indivisible undivided duration.


See yonder rainbow strangely preserving its form on broken clouds, with
here a bit out, here a bit in, yet still a rainbow--even as you might
place bits of coloured ribbon at distances, so as to preserve the form
of a bow to the mind. Dec. 25, 1804.


[Sidenote: HIS CONVERSATION, A NIMIETY OF IDEAS, NOT OF WORDS]

There are two sorts of talkative fellows whom it would be injurious to
confound, and I, S. T. Coleridge, am the latter. The first sort is of
those who use five hundred words more than needs to express an
idea--that is not my case. Few men, I will be bold to say, put more
meaning into their words than I, or choose them more deliberately and
discriminately. The second sort is of those who use five hundred more
ideas, images, reasons, &c., than there is any need of to arrive at
their object, till the only object arrived at is that the mind's eye of
the bystander is dazzled with colours succeeding so rapidly as to leave
one vague impression that there has been a great blaze of colours all
about something. Now this is my case, and a grievous fault it is. My
illustrations swallow up my thesis. I feel too intensely the
omnipresence of all in each, platonically speaking; or, psychologically,
my brain-fibres, or the spiritual light which abides in the
brain-marrow, as visible light appears to do in sundry rotten mackerel
and other _smashy_ matters, is of too general an affinity with all
things, and though it perceives the _difference_ of things, yet is
eternally pursuing the likenesses, or, rather, that which is common
[between them]. Bring me two things that seem the very same, and then I
am quick enough [not only] to show the difference, even to
hair-splitting, but to go on from circle to circle till I break against
the shore of my hearers' patience, or have my concentricals dashed to
nothing by a snore. That is my ordinary mishap. At Malta, however, no
one can charge me with one or the other. I have earned the general
character of being a quiet well-meaning man, rather dull indeed! and who
would have thought that he had been a _poet_! "O, a very wretched
poetaster, ma'am! As to the reviews, 'tis well known he half-ruined
himself in paying cleverer fellows than himself to write them," &c.


[Sidenote: THE EMBRYONIC SOUL]

How far might one imagine all the theory of association out of a system
of growth, by applying to the brain and soul what we know of an embryo?
One tiny particle combines with another its like, and, so, lengthens and
thickens, and this is, at once, memory and increasing vividness of
impression. One might make a very amusing allegory of an embryo soul up
to birth! Try! it is promising! You have not above three hundred volumes
to write before you come to it, and as you write, perhaps, a volume once
in ten years, you have ample time.

My dear fellow! never be ashamed of scheming--you can't think of living
less than 4000 years, and that would nearly suffice for your present
schemes. To be sure, if they go on in the same ratio to the performance,
then a small difficulty arises; but never mind! look at the bright side
always and die in a dream! Oh!


[Sidenote: OF A NEW HYPOTHESIS]

The evil effect of a new hypothesis or even of a new nomenclature is,
that many minds which had familiarised themselves to the old one, and
were riding on the road of discovery accustomed to their horse, if put
on a new animal, lose time in learning how to sit him; while the others,
looking too stedfastly at a few facts which the jeweller Hypothesis had
set in a perfectly beautiful whole, forget to dig for more, though
inhabitants of a Golconda. However, it has its advantages too, and these
have been ably pointed out. It excites contradiction, and is thence a
stimulus to new experiments to _support_, and to a more severe
repetition of these experiments and of other new ones to _confute_
[arguments pro and con]. And, besides, one must alloy severe truth with
a little fancy, in order to mint it into common coin.


[Sidenote: HIS INDEBTEDNESS TO GERMAN PHILOSOPHY]

In the preface of my metaphysical works, I should say--"Once for all,
read Kant, Fichte, &c., and then you will trace, or, if you are on the
hunt, track me." Why, then, not acknowledge your obligations step by
step? Because I could not do so in a multitude of glaring resemblances
without a lie, for they had been mine, formed and full-formed, before I
had ever heard of these writers, because to have fixed on the particular
instances in which I have really been indebted to these writers would
have been hard, if possible, to me who read for truth and
self-satisfaction, and not to make a book, and who always rejoiced and
was jubilant when I found my own ideas well expressed by others--and,
lastly, let me say, because (I am proud, perhaps, but) I seem to know
that much of the _matter_ remains my own, and that the _soul_ is mine. I
fear not him for a critic who can confound a fellow-thinker with a
compiler.


[Sidenote: THE METAPHYSICIAN AT BAY]

Good heavens! that there should be anything at all, and not nothing. Ask
the bluntest faculty that pretends to reason, and, if indeed he have
felt and reasoned, he must feel that something is to be sought after out
of the vulgar track of Change-Alley speculation.

If my researches are shadowy, what, in the name of reason, are you? or
do you resign all pretence to reason, and consider yourself--nay, even
that in a contradiction--as a passive [cir] among Nothings?


[Sidenote: MEANS TO ENDS]

How flat and common-place! O that it were in my heart, nerves, and
muscles! O that it were the _prudential_ soul of all I love, of all who
deserve to be loved, in every proposed action to ask yourself, To what
end is this? and how is this the means? and not the means to something
else foreign to or abhorrent from my purpose? _Distinct means to
distinct ends!_ With friends and beloved ones follow the heart. Better
be deceived twenty times than suspect one-twentieth of once; but with
strangers, or enemies, or in a quarrel, whether in the world's
squabbles, as Dr. Stoddart's and Dr. Sorel in the Admiralty Court at
Malta; or in moral businesses, as mine with Southey or Lloyd (O pardon
me, dear and honoured Southey, that I put such a name by the side of
yours....)--in all those cases, write your letter, disburthen yourself,
and when you have done it--even as when you have pared, sliced,
vinegared, oiled, peppered and salted your plate of cucumber, you are
directed to smell it, and then throw it out of the window--so, dear
friend, vinegar, pepper and salt your letter--your cucumber argument,
that is, cool reasoning previously sauced with passion and
sharpness--then read it, eat it, drink it, smell it, with eyes and ears
(a small catachresis but never mind), and then throw it into the
fire--unless you can put down in three or four sentences (I cannot allow
more than one side of a sheet of paper) the _distinct end_ for which you
conceive this letter (or whatever it be) to be the _distinct means_! How
trivial! Would to God it were only _habitual_! O what is sadder than
that the _crambe bis cocta_ of the understanding should be and remain a
foreign dish to the efficient _will_--that the best and loftiest
precepts of wisdom should be trivial, and the worst and lowest modes of
folly habitual.


[Sidenote: VERBAL CONCEITS]

I have learnt, sometimes not _at all_, and seldom _harshly_, to chide
those conceits of words which are analogous to sudden fleeting
affinities of mind. Even, as in a dance, you touch and join and off
again, and rejoin your partner that leads down with you the dance, in
spite of these occasional off-starts--for they, too, not merely conform
to, but are of and in and help to form the delicious harmony. Shakspere
is not a thousandth part so faulty as the [scir][scir][scir]
believe him. "Thus him that over-rul'd I over-sway'd," etc., etc. I
noticed this to that bubbling ice-spring of cold-hearted, mad-headed
fanaticism, the late Dr. Geddes, in the "_Heri vidi fragilem frangi,
hodie mortalem mori_."

[Dr. Alexander Geddes, 1737-1802, was, _inter alia_, author of a revised
translation of the Scriptures.]


[Sidenote: THE BRIGHT BLUE SEA]

How often I have occasion to notice with pure delight the depth of the
exceeding blueness of the Mediterranean from my window! It is often,
indeed, purple; but I am speaking of its blueness--a perfect blue, so
very pure an one. The sea is like a night-sky; and but for its
_planities_, it were as if the night-sky were a thing that turned round
and lay in the day-time under the paler Heaven. And it is on this
expanse that the vessels have the fine white dazzling cotton sails.


[Sidenote: THE BIRTH OF THE IDEA]

Centuries before their mortal incarnation, Jove was wont to manifest to
the gods the several creations as they emerged from the divine ideal.
Now it was reported in heaven that an unusually fair creation of a woman
was emerging, and Venus, fearful that her son should become enamoured as
of yore with Psyche (what time he wandered alone, his bow unslung, and
using his darts only to cut out her name on rocks and trees, or, at
best, to shoot hummingbirds and birds of Paradise to make
feather-chaplets for her hair, and the world, meanwhile, grown loveless,
hardened into the Iron Age), entreats Jove to secrete this form [of
perilous beauty]. But Cupid, who had heard the report, and fondly
expected a re-manifestation of Psyche, hid himself in the hollow of the
sacred oak beneath which the Father of Gods had withdrawn as to an
unapproachable adytum, and beheld the Idea emerging in its _First
Glory_. Forthwith the wanton was struck blind by the splendour ere yet
the blaze had defined itself with form, and now his arrows strike but
vaguely.


[Sidenote: THE CONVERSION OF CERES]

I have somewhere read, or I have dreamt, a wild tale of Ceres' loss of
Proserpine, and her final recovery of her daughter by means of Christ
when He descended into hell, at which time she met Him and abjured all
worship for the future.

It were a quaint mythological conceit to feign that the gods of Greece
and Rome were some of the _best_ of the fallen spirits, and that of
their number _Apollo_, Mars, and the Muses were converted to
Christianity, and became different saints.


[Sidenote: AS THE SPARKS FLY UPWARD]

The ribbed flame--its snatches of impatience, that half-seem, and only
_seem_ that half, to baffle its upward rush--the eternal unity of
individualities whose essence is in their distinguishableness, even as
thought and _fancies_ in the mind; the points of so many cherubic swords
snatched back, but never discouraged, still fountaining upwards:--flames
self-snatched up heavenward, if earth supply the fuel, heaven the dry
light air--themselves still making the current that will fan and spread
them--yet all their force in vain, if of itself--and light dry air,
heaped fuel, fanning breeze as idle, if no inward spark lurks there, or
lurks unkindled. Such a spark, O man! is thy Free Will--the star whose
beams are Virtue!




CHAPTER IV

_1805_

    Alone, alone, all, all alone,
      Alone on a wide, wide sea!
    And never a saint took pity on
      My soul in agony.

                                S. T. C.


[Sidenote: THE SENSE OF MAGNITUDE Tuesday, Jan. 15, 1805]

This evening there was the most perfect and the brightest halo circling
the roundest and brightest moon I ever beheld. So bright was the halo,
so compact, so entire a circle, that it gave the whole of its area, the
moon itself included, the appearance of a solid opaque body, an enormous
planet. It was as if this planet had a circular trough of some
light-reflecting fluid for its rim (that is the halo) and its centre
(that is the moon) a small circular basin of some fluid that still more
copiously reflected, or that even emitted light; and as if the
interspatial area were somewhat equally substantial but sullen. Thence I
have found occasion to meditate on the nature of the sense of magnitude
and its absolute dependence on the idea of _substance_; the consequent
difference between magnitude and spaciousness, the dependence of the
idea on double-touch, and thence to evolve all our feelings and ideas of
magnitude, magnitudinal sublimity, &c., from a scale of our own bodies.
For why, if form constituted the sense, that is, if it were pure vision,
as a perceptive sense abstracted from _feeling_ in the organ of vision,
why do I seek for mountains, when in the flattest countries the clouds
present so many and so much more romantic and _spacious_ forms, and the
coal-fire so many, so much more varied and lovely forms? And whence
arises the pleasure from musing on the latter? Do I not, more or less
consciously, fancy myself a Lilliputian to whom these would be
mountains, and so, by this factitious scale, make them mountains, my
pleasure being consequently playful, a voluntary poem in hieroglyphics
or picture-writing--"_phantoms_ of sublimity," which I continue to know
to be _phantoms_? And form itself, is not its main agency exerted in
individualising the thing, making it _this_ and _that_, and thereby
facilitating the shadowy measurement of it by the scale of my own body?

Yon long, not unvaried, ridge of hills, that runs out of sight each way,
it is _spacious_, and the pleasure derivable from it is from its
_running_, its _motion_, its assimilation to action; and here the scale
is taken from my life and soul, and not from my body. Space is the
Hebrew name for God, and it is the most perfect image of _soul, pure
soul_, being to us nothing but unresisted action. Whenever action is
resisted, limitation begins--and limitation is the first constituent of
body--the more omnipresent it is in a given space, the more that space
is _body_ or matter--and thus all body necessarily presupposes soul,
inasmuch as all resistance presupposes action. Magnitude, therefore, is
the intimate blending, the most perfect union, through its whole sphere,
in every minutest part of it, of action and resistance to action. It is
spaciousness in which space is filled up--that is, as we well say,
transmitted by incorporate accession, not destroyed. In all limited
things, that is, in _all forms_, it is at least fantastically stopped,
and, thus, from the positive _grasp_ to the mountain, from the mountain
to the cloud, from the cloud to the blue depth of sky, which, as on the
top of Etna, in a serene atmosphere, seems to go _behind_ the sun, all
is _graduation_, that precludes division, indeed, but not distinction;
and he who endeavours to overturn a distinction by showing that there is
no chasm, by the old sophism of the _cumulus_ or the horse's tail, is
still diseased with the _formication_,[B] the (what is the nosological
name of it? the hairs or dancing infinites of black specks seeming
always to be before the eye), the araneosis of corpuscular
materialism.--S. T. C.


[Sidenote: STRAY THOUGHTS FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE"]

The least things, how they evidence the superiority of English artisans!
Even the Maltese wafers, for instance, that stick to your mouth and
fingers almost so as to make it impossible to get them off without
squeezing them into a little pellet, and yet will not stick to the
paper.


Everyone of tolerable education feels the _imitability_ of Dr. Johnson's
and other-such's style, the inimitability of Shakspere's, &c. Hence, I
believe, arises the partiality of thousands for Johnson. They can
imagine _themselves_ doing the same. Vanity is at the bottom of it. The
number of imitators proves this in some measure.


Of the feelings of the English at the sight of a convoy from England.
Man cannot be selfish--that part of me (my beloved) which is distant, in
space, excites the same feeling as the "ich"[C] distant from me in
time. My friends are indeed my soul!


[Sidenote: Jan. 22, 1805.]

I had not moved from my seat, and wanted the stick of sealing-wax,
nearly a whole one, for another letter. I could not find it, it was not
on the table--had it dropped on the ground? I searched and searched
everywhere, my pockets, my fobs, impossible places--literally it had
vanished, and where was it? It had stuck to my _elbow_, I having leaned
upon it ere it had grown cold! A curious accident, and in no way similar
to that of the butcher and his steel in his mouth which he was seeking
for. Mine was true accident.


The maxims which govern the Courts of Admiralty, their "betwixt and
between" of positive law and the dictates of right reason, resemble the
half-way _inter jus et æquitatem_ of Roman jurisprudence. It were worth
while to examine the advantages of this as far as it is a real
_modification_, its disadvantages as far as it appears a _jumble_.


Seeing a nice bed of glowing embers with one junk of firewood well
placed, like the remains of an old edifice, and another well-nigh
mouldered one corresponding to it, I felt an impulse to put on three
pieces of wood that exactly completed the perishable architecture,
though it was eleven o'clock, though I was that instant going to bed,
and there could be, in common ideas, no possible use in it. Hence I seem
(for I write not having yet gone to bed) to suspect that this disease of
totalising, of perfecting, may be the bottom impulse of many, many
actions, in which it never is brought forward as an avowed or even
agnised as a conscious motive.

Mem.--to collect facts for a comparison between a _wood_ and a _coal_
fire, as to sights and sounds and bodily feeling.


I have read somewhere of a sailor who dreamt that an encounter with the
enemy was about to take place, and that he should discover cowardice
during action. Accordingly he awakes his brother the Captain, and bids
him prepare for an engagement. At daybreak a ship is discovered on the
horizon and the sailor, mindful of his dream, procures himself to be
tied to a post. At the close of the day he is released unwounded but
dead from fright. Apply this incident to Miss Edgeworth's Tales, and all
similar attempts to cure faults by detailed forewarnings, which leave on
the similarly faulty an impression of fatality that extinguishes hope.


What precedes to the voice follows to the eye, as 000.1 and 100. A, B,
C--were they men, you would say that "C" went first, but being letters,
things of voice and ear in their original, we say that "A" goes first.


There are many men who, following, made 1 = 1000, being placed at head,
become useless cyphers, mere finery for form's sake.


[Sidenote: Feb. 1, 1805, Friday, Malta]

Of the millions that use the pen, how many (query) understand the story
of this machine, the action of the slit, eh? I confess, ridiculous as it
must appear to those who do understand it, that I have not been able to
answer the question off-hand to myself, having only this moment thought
of it.


[Sidenote: Feb. 3, 1805]

The gentlest form of Death, a Sylphid Death, passed by, beheld a
sleeping baby--became, Narcissus-like, enamoured of its own self in the
sweet counterfeit, seized it and carried it off as a mirror close by the
green Paradise--but the reviving air awakened the babe, and 'twas death
that died at the sudden loss.


[Sidenote: THE FRENCH LANGUAGE AND POETRY Feb. 4, 1805]

I cannot admit that any language can be unfit for poetry, or that there
is any language in which a divinely inspired architect may not sustain
the lofty edifice of verse on its two pillars of sublimity and pathos.
Yet I have heard Frenchmen, nay, even Englishmen, assert that of the
German, which contains perhaps an hundred passages equal to the--

    Und ein Gott ist, ein heiliger Wille lebt,
      Wie auch der menschliche wanke;--

and I have heard both German and Englishmen (and these, too, men of true
feeling and genius, and so many of them that such company of my betters
makes me not ashamed to the having myself been guilty of this injustice)
assert that the French language is insusceptible of poetry in its higher
and purer sense, of poetry which excites emotion not merely creates
amusement, which demands continuous admiration, not regular recurrence
of conscious surprise, and the effect of which is love and joy.
Unfortunately the manners, religion and government of France, and the
circumstances of its emergence from the polyarchy of feudal barony, have
given a bad taste to the Parisians--so bad a one as doubtless to have
mildewed many an opening blossom. I cannot say that I know and can name
any one French writer that can be placed among the greater poets, but
when I read the inscription over the Chartreuse--

    C'est ici que la Mort et la Verité
      Elevent leurs flambeaux terribles;
    C'est de cette demeure au monde inaccessible
      Que l'on passe à l'Eternité

I seem to feel that if France had been for ages a Protestant nation, and
a Milton had been born in it, the French language would not have
precluded the production of a "Paradise Lost," though it might, perhaps,
that of a Hamlet or a Lear.


[Sidenote: THE ABSTRACT SELF On Friday night, Feb. 8, 1805]

On Friday Night, 8th Feb. 1805, my feeling, in sleep, of exceeding great
love for my infant, seen by me in the dream!--yet so as it might be
Sara, Derwent, or Berkley, and still it was an individual babe and mine.

    "All look or likeness caught from earth,
    All accident of kin or birth,
    Had pass'd away. There seem'd no trace
    Of aught upon her brighten'd face,
    Upraised beneath the rifted stone,
    Save of one spirit all her own;
    She, she herself, and only she,
    Shone through her body visibly."

    _Poetical Works_, 1893, p. 172.

This abstract self is, indeed, in its nature a Universal personified, as
Life, Soul, Spirit, etc. Will not this _prove_ it to be a _deeper_
feeling, and of such intimate affinity with ideas, so as to modify them
and become one with them; whereas the appetites and the feelings of
revenge and anger co-exist with the ideas, not combine with them, and
alter the apparent effect of this form, not the forms themselves?
Certain modifications of fear seem to approach nearest to this
love-sense in its manner of acting.


Those whispers just as you have fallen asleep--what are they, and
whence?


[Sidenote: LITERA SCRIPTA MANET Monday, Feb 11, 1805]

I must own to a superstitious dread of the destruction of paper worthy
of a Mahometan. But I am also ashamed to confess to myself what pulling
back of heart I feel whenever I wish to light a candle or kindle a fire
with a Hospital or Harbour Report, and what a cumulus lies on my table,
I not able to conjecture of what use they can ever be, and yet trembling
lest what I then destroyed might be of some use in the way of knowledge.
This seems to be the excess of a good feeling, but it is ridiculous.


[Sidenote: COWPER'S "LINES TO MRS. UNWIN"]

It is not without a certain sense of self-reproof, as well as
self-distrust, that I ask, or, rather, that my understanding suggests to
me the query, whether this divine poem (in so original a strain of
thought and feeling honourable to human nature) would not have been more
perfect if the third, fourth, and fifth stanzas had been omitted, and
the tenth and eleventh transposed so as to stand as the third and
fourth. It is not, perhaps not at all, but, certainly, not principally
that I feel any meanness in the "needles;" but, not to mention that the
words "once a shining store" is a speck in the diamond (in a less dear
poem I might, perhaps, have called it more harshly a _rhyme-botch_), and
that the word "restless" is rather too strong an impersonation for the
serious tone, the _real_ness of the poem, and seems to tread too closely
on the mock-heroic; but that it seems not true to poetic feeling to
introduce the affecting circumstance of dimness of sight from decay of
nature on an occasion so remote from the [Greek: to katholou], and that
the fifth stanza, graceful and even affecting as the spirit of the
playfulness is or would be, at least, in a poem having less depth of
feeling, breaks in painfully here--the age and afflicting infirmities
both of the writer and his subject seem abhorrent from such trifling
of--scarcely fancy, for I fear, if it were analysed, that the whole
effect would be found to depend on phrases hackneyed, and taken from the
alms-house of the Muses. The test would be this: read the poem to a
well-educated but natural woman, an unaffected, gentle being, endued
with sense and sensibility--substituting the tenth and eleventh stanzas
for those three, and some days after shew her the poem as it now stands.
I seem to be sure that she would be shocked--an alien would have
intruded himself, and be found sitting in a circle of dear friends whom
she expected to have found _all to themselves_.


[Sidenote: ETYMOLOGY]

To say that etymology is a science--is to use this word in its laxest
and improper sense. But our language, except, at least, in poetry, has
dropped the word "lore"--the _lehre_ of the Germans, the _logos_ of the
Greek. Either we should have retained the word and ventured on
_Root-lore_, _verse-lore_, etc., or have adopted the Greek as a single
word as well as a word in combination. All novelties appear or are
rather felt as ridiculous in language; but, if it had been once adopted,
it would have been no stranger to have said that etymo_logy_ is a _logy_
which perishes from a plethora of probability, than that the _art_ of
war is an _art_ apparently for the destruction and subjugation of
particular states, but really for the lessening of bloodshed and the
preservation of the liberties of mankind. Art and Science are both too
much appropriated--our language wants terms of comprehensive generality,
implying the kind, not the degree or species, as in that good and
necessary word _sensuous_, which we have likewise dropped, opposed to
sensual, sensitive, sensible, etc., etc. Chymistry has felt this
difficulty, and found the necessity of having one word for the supposed
cause, another for the effect, as in caloric or calorific, opposed to
heat; and psychology has still more need of the reformation.


[Sidenote: SENTIMENT, AN ANTIDOTE TO CASUISTRY]

The Queen-bee in the hive of Popish Error, the great mother of the
swarm, seems to me their tenet concerning Faith and Works, placing the
former wholly in the rectitude, nay, in the rightness of intellectual
conviction, and the latter in the definite and, most often, the material
action, and, consequently, the assertion of the dividuous nature and
self-existence of works. Hence the doctrine of damnation out of the
Church of Rome--of the one visible Church--of the absolute efficiency
_in se_ of all the Sacraments and the absolute merit of ceremonial
observances. Consider the incalculable advantage of chiefly dwelling on
the virtues of the heart, of habits of feeling and harmonious action,
the music of the adjusted string at the impulse of the breeze, and, on
the other hand, the evils of books concerning particular actions, minute
cases of conscience, hair-splitting directions and decisions, O how
illustrated by the detestable character of most of the Roman Catholic
casuists! No actions should be distinctly described but such as
manifestly tend to awaken the heart to efficient feeling, whether of
fear or of love--actions that, falling back on the fountain, keep it
full, or clear out the mud from its pipes, and make it play in its
abundance, shining in that purity in which, at once, the purity and the
light is each the cause of the other, the light purifying, and the
purified receiving and reflecting the light, sending it off to others;
not, like the polished mirror, by reflection from itself, but by
transmission through itself.


[Sidenote: THE EMPYREAN]

Friday + Saturday, 12-1 o'clock [March 2, 1805.]

What a sky! the not yet orbed moon, the spotted oval, blue at one edge
from the deep utter blue of the sky--a MASS of _pearl_-white cloud
below, distant, and travelling to the horizon, but all the upper part of
the ascent and all the height such _profound_ blue, deep as a deep
river, and deep in colour, and those two depths so entirely _one_, _as_
to give the meaning and explanation of the two different significations
of the epithet. Here, so far from _divided_, they were scarcely
_distinct_, scattered over with thin pearl-white cloudlets--hands and
fingers--the largest not larger than a floating veil! Unconsciously I
stretched forth my arms as to embrace the sky, and in a trance I had
worshipped God in the moon--the spirit, not the form. I felt in how
innocent a feeling Sabeism might have begun. Oh! not only the moon, but
the depths of the sky! The moon was the _idea_; but deep sky is, of all
visual impressions, the nearest akin to a feeling. It is more a feeling
than a sight, or, rather, it is the melting away and entire union of
feeling and sight!


[Sidenote: DISTEMPER'S WORST CALAMITY]

Monday morning, which I ought not to have known not to be Sunday night,
2 o'clock, March 4, 1805.

My dreams to-night were interfused with struggle and fear, though, till
the very last, not victors; but the very last, which awoke me, was a
completed night-mare, as it gave the _idea_ and _sensation_ of actual
grasp or touch contrary to _my_ will and in apparent consequence of the
malignant will of the external form, whether actually appearing or, as
sometimes happened, believed to exist--in which latter case I have two
or three times felt a horrid touch of hatred, a grasp, or a weight of
hate and horror abstracted from all [conscious] form or supposal of
form, an _abstract touch_, an _abstract_ grasp, an _abstract_ weight!
_Quam nihil ad genium Papiliane tuum!_ or, in other words, _This
Mackintosh would prove to be nonsense by a Scotch smile._ The last
[dream], that woke me, though a true night-mare, was, however, a mild
one. I cried out early, like a scarcely-hurt child who knows himself
within hearing of his mother. But, anterior to this, I had been playing
with children, especially with one most lovely child, about two years or
two and a half, and had repeated to her, in my dream, "The dews were
falling fast," &c., and I was sorely frightened by the sneering and
fiendish malignity of the beautiful creature, but from the beginning
there had been a terror about it and proceeding from it. I shall
hereafter, read the Vision in "Macbeth" with increased admiration.

["_Quam nihil ad genium Papiniane tuum_," was the motto of _The Lyrical
Ballads_.]


That deep intuition of our _one_ness, is it not at the bottom of many of
our faults as well as virtues? the dislike that a bad man should have
any virtues, a good man any faults? And yet, too, a something noble and
incentive is in this.


[Sidenote: THE OMNISCIENT THE COMFORTER]

What comfort in the silent eye upraised to God! "_Thou_ knowest." O!
what a thought! Never to be friendless, never to be unintelligible! The
omnipresence has been generally represented as a spy, a sort of
Bentham's Panopticon.[D] O to feel what the pain is to be utterly
unintelligible and then--"O God, thou understandest!"


[Sidenote: POETS AS CRITICS OF POETS]

The question should be fairly stated, how far a man can be an adequate,
or even a good (as far as he goes) though inadequate critic of poetry
who is not a poet, at least, _in posse_? Can he be an adequate, can he
be a good critic, though not commensurate [with the poet criticised]?
But there is yet another distinction. Supposing he is not only not a
poet, but is a bad poet! What then?


[Sidenote: IMMATURE CRITICS March 16, 1805]

[The] cause of the offence or disgust received by the _mean_ in good
poems when we are young, and its diminution and occasional evanescence
when we are older in true taste [is] that, at first, we are from various
causes delighted with _generalities_ of nature which can all be
expressed in dignified words; but, afterwards, becoming more intimately
acquainted with Nature in her detail, we are delighted with _distinct_,
vivid ideas, and with vivid ideas most when made distinct, and can most
often forgive and sometimes be delighted with even a low image from art
or low life when it gives you the very thing by an illustration, as, for
instance, Cowper's stream "inlaying" the level vale as with silver, and
even Shakspere's "shrill-tongued Tapster's answering shallow wits"
applied to echoes in an _echofull_ place.


[Sidenote: ATTENTION AND SENSATION March 17, 1805]

Of the not being able to know whether you are smoking in the dark or
when your eyes are shut: item, of the ignorance in that state of the
difference of beef, veal, &c.--it is all attention. Your ideas being
shut, other images arise which you must _attend to_, it being the habit
of a _seeing_ man to attend chiefly to _sight_. So close your eyes,
(and) you attend to the ideal images, and, attending to them, you
abstract your _attention_. It is the same when deeply thinking in a
reverie, you no longer hear distinct sound made to you. But what a
strange inference that there were no sounds!


[Sidenote: ST. COLUMBA]

I love St. Combe or Columba and he shall be my saint. For he is not in
the Catalogue of Romish Saints, having never been canonised at Rome, and
because this Apostle of the Picts lived and gave his name to an island
on the Hebrides, and from him Switzerland was christianised.


[Sidenote: EXPERIENCE AND BOOK KNOWLEDGE Midnight, April 5, 1805]

"I will write," I said, "as truly as I can from experience, actual
individual experience, not from book-knowledge." But yet it is wonderful
how exactly the knowledge from good books coincides with the experience
of men of the world. How often, when I was younger, have I noticed the
deep delight of men of the world who have taken late in life to
literature, on coming across a passage the force of which had either
escaped me altogether, or which I knew to be true from books only and at
second hand! Experience is necessary, no doubt, if only to give a light
and shade in the mind, to give to some one idea a greater vividness than
to others, and thereby to make it a _Thing_ of _Time_ and actual
reality. For all ideas being equally vivid, the whole becomes a dream.
But, notwithstanding this and other reasons, I yet believe that the saws
against book-knowledge are handed down to us from times when books
conveyed only abstract science or abstract morality and religion.
Whereas, in the present day, what is there of real life, in all its
goings on, trades, manufactures, high life, low life, animate and
inanimate that is not to be found in books? In these days books are
conversation. And this, I know, is for evil as well as good, but for
good, too, as well as evil.


[Sidenote: DUTY AND SELF INTEREST Sunday morning 4 o'clock, April 7,
1805]

How feebly, how unlike an English cock, that cock crows and the other
answers! Did I not particularly notice the _un_likeness on my first
arrival at Malta? Well, to-day I will disburthen my mind. Yet one thing
strikes me, the difference I find in myself during the past year or two.
My enthusiasm for the happiness of mankind in particular places and
countries, and my eagerness to promote it, seems to decrease, and my
sense of duty, my hauntings of conscience, from any stain of thought or
action to increase in the same ratio. I remember having written a
strong letter to my most dear and honoured Wordsworth in consequence of
his "Ode to Duty," and in that letter explained this as the effect of
selfness in a mind incapable of gross self-interest--I mean, the
decrease of hope and joy, the soul in its round and round flight forming
narrower circles, till at every gyre its wings beat against the
_personal self_. But let me examine this more accurately. It may be that
the phenomena will come out more honourable to our nature.


[Sidenote: EVIL PRODUCES EVIL]

It is as trite as it is mournful (but yet most instructive), and by the
genius that can produce the strongest impressions of novelty by rescuing
the stalest and most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the
very circumstance of their universal admission--admitted so instantly as
never to be _reflected_ on, never by that sole key of reflection
admitted into the effective, legislative chamber of the heart--so true
that they lose all the privileges of Truth, and, as extremes meet by
being _truisms_, correspond in utter inefficiency with universally
acknowledged errors (in Algebraic symbols Truisms = Falsehoodisms =
[scir][scir])--by that genius, I say, might good be worked in
considering the old, old Methusalem saw that "evil produces evil." One
error almost compels another. Tell one lie, tell a hundred. Oh, to show
this, _a priori_, by bottoming it in all our faculties and by
experience of touching examples!


[Sidenote: JOHN WORDSWORTH Monday, April 8, 1805]

The favourite object of all Oriental tales, and that which, whist it
inspired their authors in the East, still inspires their readers
everywhere, is the impossibility of baffling Destiny--the perception
that what we considered as the means of one thing becomes, in a strange
manner, the direct means of the reverse. O dear John Wordsworth! what
joy at Grasmere that you were made Captain of the Abergavenny, and so
young too! Now it was next to certain that you would in a few years
settle in your native hills and be verily one of the _Concern_! Then
came your share in the brilliant action with Linois. (I was at Grasmere
in spirit only, but in spirit I was one of the rejoicers--as joyful as
any, and, perhaps, more joyous!) This, doubtless, not only enabled you
to lay in a larger and more advantageous cargo, but procured you a
voyage to India instead of China, and in this circumstance a next to
certainty of independence--and all these were decoys of Death! Well, but
a nobler feeling than these vain regrets would become the friend of the
man whose last words were: "I have done my duty! let her go!" Let us do
our _duty_! all else is a dream, life and death alike a dream. This
short sentence would comprise, I believe, the sum of all profound
philosophy, of ethics and metaphysics conjointly, from Plato to Fichte!

[_Vide Letters of S. T. C._, 1895, ii. 495, _note_.]


[Sidenote: LOVE THE DIVINE ESSENCE]

The best, the truly lovely in each and all, is God. Therefore the truly
beloved is _the symbol of God_ to whomever it is truly beloved by, but
it may become perfect and maintained love by the function of the two.
The lover worships in his beloved that final consummation of itself
which is produced in his own soul by the action of the soul of the
beloved upon it, and that final perception of the soul of the beloved
which is in part the consequence of the reaction of his (so ameliorated
and regenerated) soul upon the soul of his beloved, till each
contemplates the soul of the other as involving his own, both in its
givings and its receivings, and thus, still keeping alive its _outness_,
its _self-oblivion_ united with self-warmth, still approximates to God!
Where shall I find an image for this sublime symbol which, ever
involving the presence of Deity, yet tends towards it ever? Shall it be
in the attractive powers of the different surfaces of the earth? each
attraction the vicegerent and representative of the central attraction,
and yet being no other than that attraction itself? By some such feeling
as this I can easily believe the mind of Fénelon and Madame Guyon to
have coloured its faith in the worship of saints, but that was most
dangerous. It was not idolatry in _them_, but it encouraged idolatry in
others. Now, the pure love of a good man for a good woman does not
involve this evil, but it multiplies, intensifies the good.


[Sidenote: ORDER IN DREAMS]

Dreamt that I was saying or reading, or that it was read to me, "Varrius
thus prophesied vinegar at his door by damned frigid tremblings." Just
after, I woke. I fell to sleep again, having in the previous doze
meditated on the possibility of making dreams regular; and just as I had
passed on the other side of the confine of dozing, I afforded this
specimen: "I should have thought it Vossius rather than Varrius, though,
Varrius being a great poet, the idea would have been more suitable to
him, only that all his writings were unfortunately lost in the _Arrow_."
Again I awoke. _N.B._--The _Arrow_, Captain Vincent's frigate, from
which our Malta letters and dispatches had been previously thrown
overboard, was taken by the French, in February 1805. This _illustrates
the connection of dreams_.


[Sidenote: ORANGE BLOSSOM April 8, 1805]

I never had a more lovely twig of orange-blossoms, with four old last
year's leaves with their steady green well-placed among them, than
to-day, and with a rose-twig of three roses [it] made a very striking
nosegay to an Englishman, The Orange Twig was so very full of blossoms
that one-fourth of the number becoming fruit of the natural size would
have broken the twig off. Is there, then, disproportion here? or waste?
O no! no! In the first place, here is a prodigality of beauty; and what
harm do they do by existing? And is not man a being capable of Beauty
even as of Hunger and Thirst? And if the latter be fit objects of a
final cause, why not the former? But secondly [Nature] hereby multiplies
manifold the chances of a proper number becoming fruit--in this twig,
for instance, for one set of accidents that would have been fatal to the
year's growth if only as many blossoms had been on it as it was designed
to bear fruit, there may now be three sets of accidents--and no harm
done. And, thirdly and lastly, for _me_ at _least_--or, at least, at
present, for in nature doubtless there are many additional reasons, and
possibly for _me_ at some future hour of reflection, after some new
influx of information from books or observance-and, thirdly, these
blossoms are Fruit, fruit to the winged insect, fruit to man--yea! and
of more solid value, perhaps, than the orange itself! O how the Bees
be-throng and be-murmur it! O how the honey tells the tale of its
birthplace to the sense of sight and odour! and to how many minute and
uneyeable insects beside! So, I cannot but think, ought I to be talking
to Hartley, and sometimes to detail all the insects that have arts or
implements resembling human--the sea-snails, with the nautilus at their
head; the wheel-insect, the galvanic eel, etc.

[This note was printed in the _Illustrated London News_, June 10, 1893.]


[Sidenote: ANTICIPATIONS IN NATURE AND IN THOUGHT Saturday night, April
14, 1805]

In looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon
dim-glimmering through the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be
seeking, as it were _asking_ for, a symbolical language for something
within me that already and for ever exists, than observing anything new.
Even when that latter is the case, yet still I have always an obscure
feeling as if that new phenomena were the dim awaking of a forgotten or
hidden truth of my inner nature. It is still interesting as a word--a
symbol. It is [Greek: Logos] the Creator, and the Evolver! [Now] what is
the right, the virtuous feeling, and consequent action when a man having
long meditated on and perceived a certain truth, finds another, a
foreign writer, who has handled the same with an approximation to the
truth as he had previously conceived it? Joy! Let Truth make her voice
audible! While I was preparing the pen to write this remark, I lost the
train of thought which had led me to it. I meant to have asked something
else now forgotten. For the above answers itself. It needed no answer,
I trust, in my heart.

[Printed in _Life of S. T. C._, by James Gillman, 1838, p. 311.]


[Sidenote: THE HOPE OF HUMANITY, Easter Sunday, 1805]

That beautiful passage in dear and honoured W. Wordsworth's "Michael,"
respecting the forward-looking Hope inspired pre-eminently by the birth
of a child, was brought to my mind most forcibly by my own independent
though, in part, anticipated reflections on the importance of young
children to the keeping up the stock of Hope in the human species. They
seem to be the immediate and secreting organ of Hope in the great
organised body of the whole human race, in _all men_ considered as the
component atoms of _Man_--as young leaves are the organs of supplying
vital air to the atmosphere.

    Thus living on through such a length of years,
    The Shepherd, if he loved himself, must needs
    Have loved his Helpmate; but to Michael's heart
    This son of his old age was yet more dear--
    Less from instinctive tenderness, the same
    Fond spirit that blindly works in the blood of all--
    Than that a child, more than all other gifts
    That earth can offer to declining man,
    Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts,
    And stirrings of inquietude, when they
    By tendency of nature needs must fail.

    --_Poetical Works of_ W. WORDSWORTH, p. 133.


[Sidenote: THE NORTHERN EASTER Easter Sunday, 1805]

The English and German climates and that of northern France possess,
among many others, this one little beauty of uniting the mysteries of
positive with those of natural religion--in celebrating the symbolical
resurrection of the human soul in that of the Crucified, at the time of
the actual resurrection of the "living life" of nature.


[Sidenote: SPIRITUAL RELIGION]

Religion consists in truth and virtue, that is, the permanent, the
_forma efformans_, in the flux of things without, of feelings and images
within. Well, therefore, does the Scripture speak of the Spirit as
praying to the Spirit, "The Lord said to my Lord." God is the essence as
well as the object of religion.


[Sidenote: A SUPPOSITION Wednesday, April 17, 1805]

I would not willingly kill even a flower, but were I at the head of an
army, or a revolutionary kingdom, I would do my duty; and though it
should be the ordering of the military execution of a city, yet,
supposing it to be my duty, I would give the order--and then, in awe,
listen to the uproar, even as to a thunderstorm--the awe as tranquil,
the submission to the inevitable, to the unconnected with myself, as
profound. It should be as if the lightning of heaven passed along my
sword and destroyed a man.


[Sidenote: ENTHUSIASM]

Does the sober judgement previously measure out the banks between which
the stream of enthusiasm shall rush with its torrent-sound? Far rather
does the stream itself plough up its own channel and find its banks in
the adamant rocks of nature!


[Sidenote: ADHÆSIT PAVIMENTO COR]

There are times when my thoughts--how like music! O that these times
were more frequent! But how can they be, I being so hopeless, and for
months past so incessantly employed in official tasks, subscribing,
examining, administering oaths, auditing, and so forth?


[Sidenote: THE REALISATION OF DEATH]

John Tobin dead, and just after the success of his play! and Robert
Allen dead suddenly!

O when we are young we lament for death only by sympathy, or with the
general feeling with which we grieve for misfortunes in general, but
there comes a time (and this year is the time that has come to me) when
we lament for death as death, when it is felt for itself, and as itself,
aloof from all its consequences. Then comes the grave-stone into the
heart with all its mournful names, then the bell-man's or clerk's verses
subjoined to the bills of mortality are no longer common-place.

[John Tobin the dramatist died December 7, 1804. His play entitled "The
Honeymoon" was published in 1805.

Robert Allen, Coleridge's contemporary and school-friend, held the post
of deputy-surgeon to the 2nd Royals, then on service in Portugal. He was
a friend of Dr. (afterwards Sir J.) Stoddart, with whom Coleridge stayed
on his first arrival at Malta. See _Letters of Charles Lamb_, Macmillan,
1888, i. 188.]


[Sidenote: LOVE AND DUTY]

Würde, worthiness, VIRTUE, consist in the mastery over the sensuous and
sensual impulses; but love requires INNOCENCE. Let the lover ask his
heart whether he can endure that his mistress should have _struggled_
with a sensual impulse for another man, though she overcame it from a
sense of duty to him. Women are LESS offended with men, in part, from
the vicious habits of men, and, in part, from the difference of bodily
constitution. Yet, still, to a pure and truly loving woman this must be
a painful thought. That he should struggle with and overcome ambition,
desire of fortune, superior beauty, &c., or with objectless desire of
any kind, is pleasing, but _not_ that he has struggled with positive,
appropriated desire, that is, desire _with_ an object. Love, in short,
requires an absolute peace and harmony between all parts of human
nature, such as it is; and it is offended by any _war_, though the
battle should be decided in favour of the worthier. This is, perhaps,
the final cause of the _rarity_ of true love, and the efficient and
immediate cause of its difficulty. Ours is a life of probation. We are
to contemplate and obey _duty_ for its own sake, and in order to do
this, we, in our present imperfect state of being, must see it not
merely abstracted from but in direct opposition to the _wish_, the
_inclination_. Having perfected this, the highest possibility of human
nature, man may then with safety harmonise _all_ his being with this--he
may _love_. To perform duties absolutely from the sense of duty is the
_ideal_, which, perhaps, no human being ever can arrive at, but which
every human being ought to try to draw near unto. This is, in the only
wise, and, verily, in a most sublime sense, to see God face to face,
which, alas! it seems too true that no man can do and _live_, that is, a
_human_ life. It would become incompatible with his organization, or
rather, it would _transmute_ it, and the process of that transmutation,
to the senses of other men, would be called death. Even as to the
caterpillar, in all probability, the caterpillar dies, and he either,
which is most probable, does not see (or, at all events, does not see
the connection between the caterpillar and) the butterfly, the beautiful
Psyche of the Greeks.


[Sidenote: HAPPINESS MADE PERFECT]

Those who in this life love in perfection, if such there be, in
proportion as their love has no struggles, see God darkly and through a
veil. For when duty and pleasure are absolutely co-incident, the very
nature of our organisation necessitates that duty will be contemplated
as the symbol of pleasure, instead of pleasure being (as in a future
life we have faith it will be) the symbol of duty. For herein lies the
distinction between human and angelic happiness. Humanly happy I call
him who in enjoyment _finds_ his duty; angelically happy he, who seeks
and finds his duty in enjoyment.

Happiness in general may be defined, not the aggregate of pleasurable
sensations--for this is either a dangerous error and the creed of
sensualists, or else a mere translation or wordy paraphrase--but the
state of that person who, in order to enjoy his nature in the highest
manifestation of conscious _feeling_, has no need of doing wrong, and
who, in order to do right, is under no necessity of abstaining from
enjoyment.

[_Vide Life of S. T. C._, by James Gillman, 1838, pp. 176-78.]


[Sidenote: THOUGHT AND THINGS]

Thought and reality are, as it were, two distinct corresponding sounds,
of which no man can say positively which is the voice and which the
echo.

Oh, the beautiful fountain or natural well at Upper Stowey! The images
of the weeds which hung down from its sides appear as plants growing up,
straight and upright, among the water-weeds that really grow from the
bottom of the well, and so vivid was the image, that for some moments,
and not till after I had disturbed the water, did I perceive that their
roots were not neighbours, and they side-by-side companions. So ever,
then I said, so are the happy man's thoughts and things, [or in the
language of the modern philosophers] his ideas and impressions.


[Sidenote: SUPERSTITION]

The two characteristics which I have most observed in Roman Catholic
mummery processions, baptisms, etc., are, first, the immense _noise_ and
jingle-jingle as if to frighten away the dæmon common-sense; and,
secondly, the unmoved, stupid, uninterested faces of the conjurers. I
have noticed no exception. Is not the very nature of superstition in
general, as being utterly sensuous, _cold_ except where it is _sensual_?
Hence the older form of idolatry, as displayed in the Greek mythology,
was, in some sense, even preferable to the Popish. For whatever life
did and could exist in superstition it brought forward and sanctified in
its rites of Bacchus, Venus, etc. The papist by pretence of suppression
warps and denaturalises. In the pagan [ritual, superstition] burnt with
a bright flame, in the popish it consumes the soul with a smothered fire
that stinks in darkness and smoulders like gum that burns but is
incapable of light.


[Sidenote: ILLUSION Sunday Midnight, May 12, 1805]

At the Treasury, La Valetta, Malta, in the room the windows of which
directly face the piazzas and vast saloon built for the archives and
Library and now used as the Garrison Ball-room, sitting at one corner of
a large parallelogram table well-littered with books, in a red
arm-chair, at the other corner of which (diagonally) {_C}[rec]^D Mr.
Dennison had been sitting--he and I having conversed for a long time, he
bade me good night, and retired--I meaning to retire too, however sunk
for five minutes or so into a doze and on suddenly awaking up I saw him
as distinctly sitting in the chair, as I had, really, some ten minutes
before. I was startled, and thinking of it, sunk into a second doze, out
of which awaking as before I saw again the same appearance; not more
distinct indeed, but more of his form--for at the first time I had seen
only his face and bust--but now I saw as much as I could have seen if
he had been really there. The appearance was very nearly that of a
person seen through thin smoke distinct indeed, but yet a sort of
distinct _shape_ and _colour_, with a diminished sense of
_substantiality_--like a face in a clear stream. My nerves had been
violently agitated yesterday morning by the attack of three dogs as I
was mounting the steps of Captain Pasley's door--two of them savage
Bedouins, who wounded me in the calf of my left leg. I have noted this
down, not three minutes having intervened since the illusion took place.
Often and often I have had similar experiences and, therefore, resolved
to write down the particulars whenever any new instance should occur, as
a weapon against superstition, and an explanation of ghosts--Banquo in
"Macbeth" the very same thing. I once told a lady the reason why I did
not believe in the existence of ghosts, etc., was that I had seen too
many of them myself. N.B. There were on the table a common black
wine-bottle, a decanter of water, and, between these, one of the
half-gallon glass flasks which Sir G. Beaumont had given me (four of
these full of port), the cork in, covered with leather, and having a
white plated ring on the top. I mention this because since I wrote the
former pages, on blinking a bit a third time, and opening my eyes, I
clearly _detected_ that this high-shouldered hypochondriacal bottle-man
had a great share in producing the effect. The metamorphosis was
clearly beginning, though I snapped the spell before it had assumed a
recognisable form. The red-leather arm-chair was so placed at the corner
that the flask was exactly between me and it--and the lamp being close
to my corner of the large table, and not giving much light, the chair
was rather obscure, and the brass nails where the leather was fastened
to the outward wooden rim reflecting the light more copiously were seen
almost for themselves. What if instead of immediately checking the
sight, and then pleased with it as a philosophical _case_, I had been
frightened and encouraged it, and my understanding had joined _its vote_
to that of my senses?

My own shadow, too, on the wall not far from Mr. D.'s chair--the white
paper, the sheet of Harbour Reports lying spread out on the table on the
other side of the bottles--influence of mere colour, influence of
shape--wonderful coalescence of scattered colours at distances, and,
then, all going to some one shape, and the modification! Likewise I am
more convinced by repeated observation that, perhaps, always in a very
minute degree but assuredly in certain states and postures of the eye,
as in drowsiness, in the state of the brain and nerves after distress or
agitation, especially if it had been accompanied by weeping, and in
many others, we see our own faces, and project them according to the
distance given them by the degree of indistinctness--that this may
occasion in the highest degree the Wraith (_vide_ a hundred Scotch
stories, but better than all, Wordsworth's most wonderful and admirable
poem, Peter Bell, when he sees his own figure), and, still oftener, that
it facilitates the formation of a human face out of some really present
object, and from the alteration of the distance among other causes never
suspected as the occasion and substratum.

                                           S. T. C.

N.B.--This is a valuable note, re-read by me, Tuesday morning, May 14.

[Compare _Table Talk_ for January 3 and May 1, 1823, Bell & Co., 1884,
pp. 20, 31-33. See, too, _The Friend_, First Landing Place Essay, iii.,
_Coleridge's Works_, Harper & Brothers, 1853, ii. 134-137.]


[Sidenote: FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE"]

Mem. always to bear in mind that profound sentence of Leibnitz that
men's intellectual errors consist chiefly in _denying_. What they
_affirm_ with _feeling_ is, for the most part, right--if it be a real
affirmation, and not affirmative in form, negative in reality. As, for
instance, when a man praises the French stage, meaning and implying his
dislike of Shakspere [and the Elizabethan dramatists].


"Facts--stubborn facts! None of your theory!" A most entertaining and
instructive essay might be written on this text, and the sooner the
better. Trace it from the most absurd credulity--_e.g._, in
Fracastorius' _De Sympathiâ_, cap. i. and the Alchemy Book--even to that
of your modern agriculturists, relating their own facts and swearing
against each other like ships' crews. O! it is the relation of the
facts--not the facts, friend!


Speculative men are wont to be condemned by the general. But who more
speculative then Sir Walter Raleigh, and _he_, even he, brought the
potato to Europe. Good heavens! let me never eat a roasted potato
without dwelling on it, and detailing its train of consequences.
Likewise, too, _dubious_ to the philosopher, but to be clapped chorally
by the commercial world, he, this mere wild speculatist, introduced
tobacco.


For a nation to make peace only because it is tired of war, and, as it
were, in order just to take breath, is in direct subversion of the end
and object of the war which was its sole justification. 'Tis like a poor
way-sore foot traveller getting up behind a coach that is going the
contrary way to his.


The eye hath a two-fold power. It is, verily, a window through which you
not only look _out_ of the house, but can look into it too. A statesman
and diplomatist should for this reason always wear spectacles.


Worldly men ga

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