_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.