_1808-1809_
Yea, oft alone,
Piercing the long-neglected holy cave
The haunt obscure of old Philosophy,
He bade with lifted torch its starry walls
Sparkle, as erst they sparkled to the flame
Of odorous lamps tended by Saint and Sage.
S. T. C.
[Sidenote: INOPEM ME COPIA FECIT]
If one thought leads to another, so often does it blot out another. This
I find when having lain musing on my sofa, a number of interesting
thoughts having suggested themselves, I conquer my bodily indolence, and
rise to record them in these books, alas! my only confidants. The first
thought leads me on indeed to new ones; but nothing but the faint memory
of having had these remains of the other, which had been even more
interesting to me. I do not know whether this be an idiosyncrasy, a
peculiar disease, of _my_ particular memory--but so it is with _me_--my
thoughts crowd each other to death.
[Sidenote: A NEUTRAL PRONOUN]
Quære--whether we may not, _nay_ ought not, to use a neutral pronoun
relative, or representative, to the word "Person," where it hath been
used in the sense of _homo_, _mensch_, or noun of the common gender, in
order to avoid particularising man or woman, or in order to express
either sex indifferently? If this be incorrect in syntax, the whole use
of the word Person is lost in a number of instances, or only retained by
some stiff and strange position of words, as--"not letting the _person_
be aware, _wherein offence has been given_"--instead of--"wherein he or
she has offended." In my [judgment] both the specific intention and
general _etymon_ of "Person" in such sentences, fully authorise the use
of _it_ and _which_ instead of he, she, him, her, who, whom.
[Sidenote: THE HUMBLE COMPLAINT OF THE LOVER]
If love be the genial sun of human nature, unkindly has he divided his
rays [in acting] on me and my beloved! On her hath he poured all his
light and splendour, and my being doth he permeate with his invisible
rays of heat alone. She shines and is cold like the tropic fire-fly--I,
dark and uncomely, would better resemble the cricket in hot ashes. My
soul, at least, might be considered as a cricket eradiating the heat
which gradually cinerising the heart produces the embers and ashes from
among which it chirps out of its hiding-place.
N.B.--This put in simple and elegant verse, [would pass] as an imitation
of Marini, and of too large a part of the madrigals of Guarini himself.
[Sidenote: TRUTH]
Truth _per se_ is like unto quicksilver, bright, agile, harmless.
Swallow a pound and it will run through unaltered and only, perhaps, by
its weight force down impurities from out the system. But mix and
comminute it by the mineral acid of spite and bigotry, and even truth
becomes a deadly poison--medicinal only when some other, yet deadlier,
lurks in the bones.
[Sidenote: LOVE THE INEFFABLE]
O! many, many are the seeings, hearings, of pure love that have a being
of their own, and to call them by the names of things unsouled and
debased below even their own lowest nature by associations accidental,
and of vicious accidents, is _blasphemy_. What seest thou yonder? The
lovely countenance of a lovely maiden, fervid yet awe-suffering with
devotion--her face resigned to bliss or bale; or a _bit_ of _flesh_; or,
rather, that which cannot be seen unless by him whose very seeing is
more than an act of mere sight--that which refuses all words, because
words being, perforce, generalities do not awake, but really involve
associations of other words as well as other thoughts--but that which I
see, must be felt, be possessed, in and by its sole self! What! shall
the _statuary_ Pygmalion of necessity feel this for every part of the
insensate marble, and shall the lover Pygmalion in contemplating the
living statue, the heart-adored maiden, breathing forth in every look,
every movement, the genial life imbreathed of God, grovel in the mire
and grunt the language of the swinish slaves of the Circe, of vulgar
generality and still more vulgar association? The Polyclete that created
the Aphrodite [Greek: kallipygos], thought in acts, not words--energy
divinely languageless--[Greek: dia ton Logon, ou syn epesi], through
_the_ Word, not with _words_. And what though it met with Imp-fathers
and Imp-mothers and Fiendsips at its christening in its parents'
absence!
[Sidenote: THE MANUFACTURE OF PROPHESY]
One of the causes of superstition, and also of enthusiasm, and, indeed,
of all errors in matters of fact, is the great power with which the
effect acts upon and modifies the remembrance of its cause, at times
even transforming it in the mind. Let _A_ have said a few words to _B_,
which (by some change and accommodation of them to the event in the mind
of _B_) have been remarkably fulfilled; and let _B_ remind _A_ of these
words which he (_A_) had spoken, _A_ will instantly forget all his mood,
motive, and meaning, at the time of speaking them, nay, remember words
he had never spoken, and throw back upon them, from the immediate event,
an imagined fulfillment, a prophetic grandeur--himself, in his own
faith, a seer of no small inspiration. We yet want the growth of a
prophet and self-deceived wonder-worker _step by step_, through all the
stages; and, yet, what ample materials exist for a true and nobly-minded
psychologist! For, in order to make fit use of these materials, he must
love and honour as well as understand human nature--rather, he must love
in order to understand it.
[Sidenote: THE CAPTIVE BIRD May 16th, 1808]
O that sweet bird! where is it? It is encaged somewhere out of sight;
but from my bedroom at the _Courier_ office, from the windows of which I
look out on the walls of the Lyceum, I hear it at early dawn, often,
alas! lulling me to late sleep--again when I awake and all day long. It
is in prison, all its instincts ungratified, yet it feels the influence
of spring, and calls with unceasing melody to the Loves that dwell in
field and greenwood bowers, unconscious, perhaps, that it calls in vain.
O are they the songs of a happy, enduring day-dream? Has the bird hope?
or does it abandon itself to the joy of its frame, a living harp of
Eolus? O that I could do so!
Assuredly a thrush or blackbird encaged in London is a far less shocking
spectacle, its encagement a more venial defect of just feeling, than
(which yet one so often sees) a bird in a gay cage in the heart of the
country--yea, as if at once to mock both the poor prisoner and its kind
mother, Nature--in a cage hung up in a tree, where the free birds after
a while, when the gaudy dungeon is no longer a scare, crowd to it, perch
on the wires, drink the water, and peck up the seeds. But of all birds I
most detest to see the nightingale encaged, and the swallow, and the
cuckoo. Motiveless! monstrous! But the robin! O woes' woe! woe!--he,
sweet cock-my-head-and-eye, pert-bashful darling, that makes our kitchen
its chosen cage.
[Sidenote: ARCHITECTURE AND CLIMATE]
If we take into consideration the effect of the climates of the North,
_Gothic_, in contra-distinction to Greek and Græco-Roman architecture,
is rightly so named. Take, for instance, a rainy, windy day, or sleet,
or a fall of snow, or an icicle-hanging frost, and then compare the
total effect of the South European roundnesses and smooth perpendicular
surface with the ever-varying angles and meeting-lines of the
North-European or Gothic styles.
[The above is probably a dropped sentence from the report of the First
or Second Lecture of the 1818 series. See _Coleridge's Works_ (Harper
and Brothers, 1853), iv. 232-239.]
[Sidenote: NEITHER BOND NOR FREE]
The demagogues address the lower orders as if they were negroes--as if
each individual were an inseparable part of the order, always to remain,
_nolens volens_, poor and ignorant. How different from Christianity,
which for ever calls on us to detach ourselves spiritually not merely
from our rank, but even from our body, and from the whole world of
sense!
[Sidenote: THE MAIDEN'S PRIMER]
The one mighty main defect of female education is that everything is
taught but reason and the means of retaining affection. This--this--O!
it is worth all the rest told ten thousand times:--how to greet a
husband, how to receive him, how never to recriminate--in short, the
power of pleasurable thoughts and feelings, and the mischief of giving
pain, or (as often happens when a husband comes home from a party of old
friends, joyous and full of heart) the love-killing effect of cold, dry,
uninterested looks and manners.
[Sidenote: THE HALFWAY HOUSE Wednesday night, May 18th, 1808]
Let me record the following important remark of Stuart, with whom I
never converse but to receive some distinct and rememberable improvement
(and if it be not remembered, it is the defect of my memory--which,
alas! grows weaker daily--or a fault from my indolence in not noting it
down, as I do this)--that there is a period in a man's life, varying in
various men, from thirty-five to forty-five, and operating most strongly
in bachelors, widowers, or those worst and miserablest widowers, unhappy
husbands, in which a man finds himself at the _top of the hill_, and
having attained, perhaps, what he wishes, begins to ask himself, What is
all this for?--begins to feel the vanity of his pursuits, becomes
half-melancholy, gives in to wild dissipation or self-regardless
drinking; and some, not content with these (not _slow_) poisons, destroy
themselves, and leave their ingenious female or female-minded friends to
fish out some _motive_ for an act which proceeded from a _motive-making_
impulse, which would have acted even without a motive (even as the
terror[E] in nightmare is a bodily sensation, and though it most often
calls up consonant images, yet, as I know by experience, can take
effect equally without any); or, if not so, yet like gunpowder in a
smithy, though it will not go off without a spark, is _sure_ to receive
one, if not this hour, yet the next. I had _felt_ this truth, but never
saw it before clearly: it came upon me at Malta under the melancholy,
dreadful feeling of finding myself to be _man_, by a distinct division
from boyhood, youth, and "young man." Dreadful was the feeling--till
then life had flown so that I had always been a boy, as it were; and
this sensation had blended in all my conduct, my willing acknowledgment
of superiority, and, in truth, my meeting every person as a superior at
the first moment. Yet if men survive this period, they commonly become
cheerful again. That is a comfort for mankind, _not for me_!
[Sidenote: HIS OWN GENIUS]
My inner mind does not justify the thought that I possess a genius, my
_strength_ is so very small in proportion to my power. I believe that I
first, from internal feeling, made or gave light and impulse to this
important distinction between strength and power, the oak and the tropic
annual, or biennial, which grows nearly as high and spreads as large as
the oak, but in which the _wood_, the _heart_ is wanting--the vital
works vehemently, but the immortal is not with it. And yet, I think, I
must have some analogue of genius; because, among other things, when I
am in company with Mr. Sharp, Sir J. Mackintosh, R. and Sydney Smith,
Mr. Scarlett, &c. &c., I feel like a child, nay, rather like an
inhabitant of another planet. Their very faces all act upon me,
sometimes, as if they were ghosts, but more often as if I were a ghost
among them--at all times as if we were not consubstantial.
[Sidenote: NAME IT AND YOU BREAK IT]
"The class that ought to be kept separate from all others"--and this
said by one of themselves! O what a confession that it is no longer
separated! Who would have said this even fifty years ago? It is the
howling of ice during a thaw. When there is any just reason for saying
this, it ought not to be said, it is already too late. And though it may
receive the assent of the people of "the squares and places," yet what
does that do, if it be the ridicule of all other classes?
[Sidenote: THE DANGER OF OVER-BLAMING]
The general experience, or rather supposed experience, prevails over the
particular knowledge. So many causes oppose man to man, that he _begins_
by thinking of other men worse than they deserve, and receives his
punishment by at last thinking worse of himself than the truth is.
[Sidenote: EXCESS OF SELF-ESTEEM]
Expressions of honest self-esteem, in which _self_ was only a diagram of
the _genus_, will excite sympathy at the minute, and yet, even among
persons who love and esteem you, be remembered and quoted as ludicrous
instances of strange self-involution.
[Sidenote: DEFECT OF SELF-ESTEEM. May 23, 1808]
Those who think lowliest of themselves, perhaps with a _feeling_
stronger than rational comparison would justify, are apt to feel and
express undue asperity for the faults and defects of those whom they
habitually have looked up to as to their superiors. For placing
themselves very low, perhaps too low, wherever a series of experiences,
struggled against for a while, have at length convinced the mind that in
such and such a moral habit the long-idolised superior is far below even
itself, the grief and anger will be in proportion. "If even _I_ could
never have done this, O anguish, that _he_, so much my superior, should
do it! If even _I_ with all my infirmities have not this defect, this
selfishness, that _he_ should have it!" This is the course of thought.
Men are bad enough; and yet they often think themselves worse than they
are, among other causes by a reaction from their own uncharitable
thoughts. The poisoned chalice is brought back to our own lips.
[Sidenote: A PRACTICAL MAN]
He was grown, and solid from his infancy, like that most _useful_ of
domesticated animals, that never runs but with some prudent motive to
the mast or the wash-tub and, at no time a slave to the present moment,
never even grunts over the acorns before him without a scheming squint
and the segment, at least, of its wise little eye cast toward those on
one side, which his neighbour is or may be about to enjoy.
[Sidenote: LUCUS A NON LUCENDO]
Quære, whether the high and mighty Edinburghers, &c., have not been
elevated into guardians and overseers of taste and poetry for much the
same reason as St. Cecilia was chosen as the guardian goddess of music,
because, forsooth, so far from being able to compose or play herself,
she could never endure any other instrument than the jew's-harp or
Scotch bag-pipe? No! too eager recensent! you are mistaken, there is no
anachronism in this. We are informed by various antique bas-reliefs that
the bag-pipe was well known to the Romans, and probably, therefore, that
the Picts and Scots were even then fond of seeking their fortune in
other countries.
[Sidenote: LOVE AND MUSIC]
"Love is the spirit of life and music the life of the spirit."
Q. What is music? A. Poetry in its grand sense! Passion and order at
once! Imperative power in obedience!
Q. What is the first and divinest strain of music? A.--In the
intellect--"Be able to will that thy maxims (rules of individual
conduct) should be the law of all intelligent being!"
In the heart, or practical reason, "Do unto others as thou wouldst be
done by." This in the widest extent involves the test, "Love thy
neighbour as thyself, and God above all things." For, conceive thy being
to be all-including, that is, God--thou knowest that _thou_ wouldest
command thyself to be beloved above all things.
[For the motto at the head of this note see the lines "Ad Vilmum
Axiologum." _P. W._, 1893, p. 138.]
[Sidenote: CONSCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY]
From what reasons do I believe in _continuous_ and ever-continuable
consciousness? From conscience! Not for myself, but for my conscience,
that is, my affections and duties towards others, I should have no
self--for self is definition, but all boundary implies neighbourhood and
is knowable only by neighbourhood or relations. Does the understanding
say nothing in favour of immortality? It says nothing for or against;
but its silence gives consent, and is better than a thousand arguments
such as mere understanding could afford. But miracles! "Do you speak of
them as proofs or as natural consequences of revelation, whose presence
is proof only by precluding the disproof that would arise from their
absence?" "Nay, I speak of them as of positive fundamental proofs."
Then I dare answer you "Miracles in that sense are blasphemies in
morality, contradictions in reason. God the Truth, the actuality of
logic, the very _logos_--He deceive his creatures and demonstrate the
properties of a triangle by the confusion of all properties! If a
miracle merely means an event before inexperienced, it proves only
itself, and the inexperience of mankind. Whatever other definition be
given of it, or rather attempted (for no other not involving direct
contradiction can be given), it is blasphemy. It calls darkness light,
and makes Ignorance the mother of Malignity, the appointed nurse of
religion--which is knowledge as opposed to mere calculating and
conjectural understanding. Seven years ago, but oh! in what happier
times--I wrote thus--
O ye hopes! that stir within me!
Health comes with you from above!
God is _with_ me! God is _in_ me!
I _cannot_ die: for life is love!
And now, that I am alone and utterly hopeless for myself, yet still I
love--and more strongly than ever feel that conscience or the duty of
love is the proof of continuing, as it is the cause and condition of
existing consciousness. How beautiful the harmony! Whence could the
proof come, so appropriately, so conformly with all nature, in which the
cause and condition of each thing is its revealing and infallible
prophecy!
And for what reason, say, rather, for what cause, do you believe
immortality? Because I _ought_, therefore I _must_!
[The lines "On revisiting the sea-shore," of which the last stanza is
quoted, were written in August, 1801. [_P.W._, 1893, p. 159.] If the
note was written exactly seven years after the date of that poem, it
must belong to the summer of 1808, when Coleridge was living over the
_Courier_ office in the Strand.]
[Sidenote: THE CAP OF LIBERTY]
Truly, I hope not irreverently, may we apply to the French nation the
Scripture text, "From him that hath nothing shall be taken that which he
hath"--that is, their pretences to being free, which are the same as
nothing. They, the illuminators, the discoverers and sole possessors of
the true philosopher's stone! Alas! it proved both for them and Europe
the _Lapis Infernalis_.
[Sidenote: VAIN GLORY]
Lord of light and fire? What is the universal of man in all, but
especially in savage states? Fantastic ornament and, in general, the
most frightful deformities--slits in the ears and nose, for instance.
What is the solution? Man will not be a mere thing of nature: he will
be and shew himself a power of himself. Hence these violent disruptions
of himself from all other creatures! What they are made, that they
remain--they are Nature's, and wholly Nature's.
[Sidenote: CHILDREN OF A LARGER GROWTH]
Try to contemplate mankind as children. These we love tenderly, because
they are beautiful and happy; we know that a sweet-meat or a top will
transfer their little love for a moment, and that we shall be repelled
with a grimace. Yet we are not offended.
[Sidenote: CHYMICAL ANALOGIES]
I am persuaded that the chymical technology, as far as it was borrowed
from life and intelligence, half-metaphorically, half-mystically, may be
brought back again (as when a man borrows of another a sum which the
latter had previously borrowed of him, because he is too polite to
remind him of a debt) to the use of psychology in many instances, and,
above all, [may be re-adapted to] the philosophy of language, which
ought to be experimentative and analytic of the elements of
meaning--their double, triple, and quadruple combinations, of simple
aggregation or of composition by balance of opposition.
Thus innocence is distinguished from virtue, and _vice versâ_. In both
of them there is a positive, but in each opposite. A decomposition must
take place in the first instance, and then a new composition, in order
for innocence to become virtue. It loses a positive, and then the base
attracts another different positive, by the higher affinity of the same
base under a different temperature for the latter.
I stated the legal use of the innocent as opposed to mere _not guilty_
(he was not only acquitted, but was proved innocent), only to shew the
existence of a _positive_ in the former--by no means as confounding this
use of the word with the moral pleasurable feeling connected with it
when used of little children, maidens, and those who in mature age
preserve this sweet fragrance of vernal life, this mother's gift and
so-seldom-kept keepsake to her child, as she sends him forth into the
world. The distinction is obvious. Law agnizes actions alone, and
character only as presumptive or illustrative of particular action as to
its guilt or non-guilt, or to the commission or non-commission. But our
moral feelings are never pleasurably excited except as they refer to a
state of being--and the most glorious actions do not delight us as
separate acts, or, rather, facts, but as representatives of the being of
the agent--mental stenographs which bring an indeterminate extension
within the field of easy and simultaneous vision, diffused being
rendered visible by condensation. Only for the hero's sake do we exult
in the heroic act, or, rather, the act abstracted from the hero would no
longer appear to us heroic. Not, therefore, solely from the advantage of
poets and historians do the deeds of ancient Greece and Rome strike us
into admiration, while we relate the very same deeds of barbarians as
matters of curiosity, but because in the former we refer the deed to the
individual exaltation of the agent, in the latter only to the physical
result of a given state of society. Compare the [heroism of that] Swiss
patriot, with his bundle of spears turned towards his breast, in order
to break the Austrian pikemen, and that of the Mameluke, related to me
by Sir Alexander Ball, who, when his horse refused to plunge in on the
French line, turned round and _backed_ it on them, with a certainty of
death, in order to effect the same purpose. In the former, the state of
mind arose from reason, morals, liberty, the sense of the duty owing to
the independence of his country, and its continuing in a state
compatible with the highest perfection and development; while the latter
was predicative only of mere animal habit, ferocity, and unreasoned
antipathy to strangers of a different dress and religion.
[Sidenote: BOOKS IN THE AIR]
If, contrary to my expectations--alas! almost, I fear, to my wishes--I
should live, it is my intention to make a catalogue of the Greek and
Latin Classics, and of those who, like the author of the _Argenis_
[William Barclay, 1546-1605], and Euphormio, Fracastorius, Flaminius,
etc., deserve that name though moderns--and every year to apply all my
book-money to the gradual completion of the collection, and buy no other
books except German, if the continent should be opened again, except
Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Jonson. The two last I have, I
believe, but imperfect--indeed, B. and F. worthless, the best plays
omitted. It would be a pleasing employment, had I health, to translate
the Hymns of Homer, with a disquisitional attempt to settle the question
concerning the _personality_ of Homer. Such a thing in two volumes,
_well done_, by philosophical notes on the mythology of the Greeks,
distinguishing the sacerdotal from the poetical, and both from the
philosophical or allegorical, fairly grown into two octavos, might go a
good way, if not all the way, to the Bipontine Latin and Greek Classics.
[Sidenote: A TURTLE-SHELL FOR HOUSE-HOLD TUB]
I almost fear that the alteration would excite surprise and uneasy
contempt in Verbidigno's mind (towards one less loved, at least); but
had I written the sweet tale of the "Blind Highland Boy," I would have
substituted for the washing-tub, and the awkward stanza in which it is
specified, the images suggested in the following lines from Dampier's
Travels, vol. i. pp. 105-6:--"I heard of a monstrous green turtle once
taken at the Port Royal, in the Bay of Campeachy, that was four feet
deep from the back to the belly, and the belly six feet broad. Captain
Rock's son, of about nine or ten years of age, went in it as in a boat,
on board his father's ship, about a quarter of a mile from the shore."
And a few lines before--"The green turtle are so called because their
shell is greener than any other. It is very thin and clear, and better
clouded than the Hawksbill, but 'tis used only for _inlays_, being
_extraordinary_ thin." Why might not some mariners have left this shell
on the shore of Loch Leven for a while, about to have transported it
inland for a curiosity, and the blind boy have found it? Would not the
incident be in equal keeping with that of the child, as well as the
image and tone of romantic uncommonness?
["In deference to the opinion of a friend," this substitution took
place. A promise made to Sara Coleridge to re-instate the washing-tub
was, alas! never fulfilled. See _Poetical Works_ of W. Wordsworth, 1859,
pp. 197, and 200 _footnote_.]
[Sidenote: THE TENDER MERCIES OF THE GOOD]
Tremendous as a Mexican god is a strong sense of duty--separate from an
enlarged and discriminating mind, and gigantic ally disproportionate to
the size of the understanding; and, if combined with obstinacy of
self-opinion and indocility, it is the parent of tyranny, a promoter of
inquisitorial persecution in public life, and of inconceivable misery in
private families. Nay, the very virtue of the person, and the
consciousness that _it_ is sacrificing its own happiness, increases the
obduracy, and selects those whom it best loves for its objects. _Eoque
immitior quia ipse tolerat_ (not _toleraverat_) is its inspiration and
watchword.
[Sidenote: HINTS FOR "THE FRIEND"]
A nation of reformers looks like a scourer of silver-plate--black all
over and dingy, with making things white and brilliant.
A joint combination of authors leagued together to declaim for or
against liberty may be compared to Buffon's collection of smooth mirrors
in a vast fan arranged to form one focus. May there not be gunpowder as
well as corn set before it, and the latter will not thrive, but become
cinders?
A good conscience and hope combined are like fine weather that
reconciles travel with delight.
Great exploits and the thirst of honour which they inspire, enlarge
states by enlarging hearts.
The rejection of the love of glory without the admission of Christianity
is, truly, human darkness lacking human light.
Heaven preserve me from the modern epidemic of a proud ignorance!
Hypocrisy, the deadly crime which, like Judas, kisses Hell at the lips
of Redemption.
Is't then a mystery so great, what God and the man, and the world is?
No, but we hate to hear! Hence a mystery it remains.
The massy misery so prettily hidden with the gold and silver
leaf--_bracteata felicitas_.
[Sidenote: CONCERNING BELLS]
If I have leisure, I may, perhaps, write a wild rhyme on the _Bell_,
from the mine to the belfry, and take for my motto and Chapter of
Contents, the two distichs, but especially the latter--
Laudo Deum verum, plebem voco, congrego clerum:
Defunctos ploro, pestem fugo, festa decoro.
Funera plango, fulgura frango, sabbata pango:
Excito lentos, dissipo ventos, paco cruentos.
The waggon-horse _celsâ cervice eminens clarumque jactans
tintinnabulum_. Item, the cattle on the river, and valley of dark pines
and firs in the Hartz.
The army of Clotharius besieging Sens were frightened away by the bells
of St. Stephen's, rung by the contrivance of Lupus, Bishop of Orleans.
For ringing the largest bell, as a Passing-bell, a high price was wont
to be paid, because being heard afar it both kept the evil spirits at a
greater distance, and gave the chance of the greater number of prayers
_pro mortuo_, from the pious who heard it.
Names of saints were given to bells that it might appear the voice of
the Saint himself calling to prayer. Man will humanise all things.
[It is strange that Coleridge should make no mention of Schiller's "Song
of the Bell," of which he must, at any rate, have heard the title.
Possibly the idea remained though its source was forgotten. The Latin
distichs were introduced by Longfellow in his "Golden Legend."
Of the cow-bells in the Hartz he gives the following account in an
unpublished letter to his wife. April-May, 1799. "But low down in the
valley and in little companies on each bank of the river a multitude of
green conical fir-trees, with herds of cattle wandering about almost
every one with a cylindrical bell around its neck, of no inconsiderable
size. And as they moved, scattered over the narrow vale, and up among
the trees of the hill, the noise was like that of a great city in the
stillness of the Sabbath morning, where all the steeples, all at once
are ringing for Church. The whole was a melancholy scene and quite new
to me."]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote E:
[O heaven, 'twas frightful! now run down and stared at
By shapes more ugly than can be remembered--
Now seeing nothing and imagining nothing,
But only being afraid--stifled with Fear!
And every goodly, each familiar form
Had a strange somewhat that breathed terrors on me!
(_From my MS. tragedy_ [S. T. C.]) _Remorse_, iv. 69-74--but the passage
is omitted from _Osorio_, act iv. 53 _sq. P. W._, pp. 386-499]].