_1811-1812_
From all that meets or eye or ear,
There falls a genial holy fear,
Which, like the heavy dew of morn,
Refreshes while it bows the heart forlorn!
S. T. C.
[Sidenote: TIME REAL AND IMAGINARY]
How marked the contrast between troubled manhood, and joyously-active
youth in the sense of time! To the former, time like the sun in an empty
sky is never seen to move, but only to have _moved_. There, there it
was, and now 'tis here, now distant! yet all a blank between. To the
latter it is as the full moon in a fine breezy October night, driving on
amid clouds of all shapes and hues, and kindling shifting colours, like
an ostrich in its speed, and yet seems not to have moved at all. This I
feel to be a just image of time real and time as felt, in two different
states of being. The title of the poem therefore (for poem it ought to
be) should be time real and time felt (in the sense of time) in active
youth, or activity with hope and fullness of aim in any period, and in
despondent, objectless manhood--time objective and subjective.
[The riddle is hard to read, but the underlying thought seems to be that
in youth the sense of time is like the apparent motion of the moon
through clouds, ever driving on, but ever seeming to stand still;
whereas the sense of time in manhood is like the sun, which seems to be
stationary, and yet, at short intervals, is seen to have moved. This is
time _felt_ in two different states of being. Time real is, as it were,
sun or moon which move independently of our perceptions of their
movements. The note (1811), no doubt, contains the germ of "Time Real
and Imaginary" first published in "Sibylline Leaves" in 1817, which
Coleridge in his Preface describes as a "school-boy poem," and
interprets thus: "By imaginary time I meant the state of a schoolboy's
mind when, on his return to school, he projects his being in his
day-dreams, and lives in his next holidays, six months hence!" The
explanation was probably an afterthought. "The two lovely children" who
"run an endless race" may have haunted his schoolboy dreams, may perhaps
have returned to the dreams of his troubled manhood, bringing with them
the sense rather than the memory of youth, intermingled with a
consciousness that youth was gone for ever, but the composition of the
poem dates from 1811, or possibly 1815, when the preparation of the
poems for the press would persuade him once more to express his thoughts
in verse.]
[Sidenote: TIME REAL AND IMAGINARY; AN ALLEGORY]
On the wide level of a mountain's head,
(I knew not where, but 'twas some faery place)
Their pinions, ostrich-like, for sails outspread,
Two lovely children run an endless race,
A sister and a brother!
This far outstript the other;
Yet ever runs she with reverted face,
And looks and listens for the boy behind:
For he, alas! is blind!
O'er rough and smooth with even step he passed,
And knows not whether he be first or last.
[_P. W._, 1893, p. 187. See, too, Editor's _Note_, p. 638.]
[Sidenote: THE HAG NIGHTMARE]
Elucidation of my _all-zermalming_, [that is, all-crushing] argument on
the subject of ghosts, apparitions, &c.
Night-mare is, I think, always, even when it occurs in the midst of
sleep, and not as it more commonly does after a waking interval, a state
not of sleep, but of stupor of the outward organs of sense--not in
words, indeed, but yet in fact distinguishable from the suspended power
of the senses in true sleep, while the volitions of reason, that is the
faculty of comparison, &c., are awake though disturbed. This stupor
seems to be occasioned by some painful sensations of unknown locality
(most often, I believe, in the lower bowel) which, withdrawing the
attention to itself from the sense of other realities present, makes us
asleep to them, indeed, but otherwise awake. And, whenever the
derangement occasions an interruption in the circulation, aided,
perhaps, by pressure, awkward position, &c., the part deadened, as the
hand, the arm, or the foot and leg, or the side, transmits double touch
as single touch, to which the imagination, therefore, the true inward
creatrix, instantly out of the chaos of elements or shattered fragments
of memory, puts together some form to fit it. And this [_imaginatio_]
derives an over-mastering sense of reality from the circumstance that
the power of reason, being in good measure awake, most generally
presents to us all the accompanying images very nearly as they existed
the moment before, when we fell out of anxious wakefulness into this
reverie. For example, the bed, the curtain, the room and its furniture,
the knowledge of who lives in the next room, and so forth contribute to
the illusion.... In short, the night-mare is not, properly, a dream, but
a species of reverie, akin to somnambulism, during which the
understanding and moral sense are awake, though more or less confused,
and over the terrors of which the reason can exert no influence,
because it is not true _terror_, that is, apprehension of danger, but is
itself a specific sensation = _terror corporeus sive materialis_. The
explanation and classification of these strange sensations, the organic
material analogous (_ideas materiales intermedias_, as the Cartesians
say) of Fear, Hope, Rage, Shame, and (strangest of all) Remorse, form at
present the most difficult, and at the same time the most interesting
problem of psychology, and are intimately connected with prudential
morals, the science, that is, of morals not as the ground and law of
duty, but in their relation to the empirical hindrances and focillations
in the realising of the law by human beings. The solution of this
problem would, perhaps, throw great doubt on the present [notion] that
the forms and feelings of sleep are always the reflections and confused
echoes of our waking thoughts and experiences.
[Sidenote: A MOMENT AND A MAGIC MIRROR]
What a swarm of thoughts and feelings, endlessly minute fragments, and,
as it were, representations of all preceding and embryos of all future
thought, lie compact in any one moment! So, in a single drop of water,
the microscope discovers what motions, what tumult, what wars, what
pursuits, what stratagems, what a circle-dance of death and life,
death-hunting life, and life renewed and invigorated by death! The whole
world seems here in a many-meaning cypher. What if our existence was
but that moment? What an unintelligible, affrightful riddle, what a
chaos of limbs and trunk, tailless, headless, nothing begun and nothing
ended, would it not be? And yet scarcely more than that other moment of
fifty or sixty years, were that our all? Each part throughout infinite
diminution adapted to some other, and yet the whole a means to
nothing--ends everywhere, and yet an end nowhere.
[Compare the three last lines of "What is Life?"
Is very life by consciousness unbounded?
And all the thoughts, pains, joys of mortal breath,
A war-embrace of wrestling life and death?
_P. W._, 1893, p. 173.]
[Sidenote: THAT INWARD EYE, THE BLISS OF SOLITUDE]
The love of Nature is ever returned double to us, not only the delighter
in our delight, but by linking our sweetest, but of themselves
perishable feelings to distinct and vivid images, which we ourselves, at
times, and which a thousand casual recollections, recall to our memory.
She is the preserver, the treasurer of our joys. Even in sickness and
nervous diseases, she has peopled our imagination with lovely forms
which have sometimes overpowered the inward pain and brought with them
their old sensations. And even when all men have seemed to desert us
and the friend of our heart has passed on, with one glance from his
"cold disliking eye"--yet even then the blue heaven spreads it out and
bends over us, and the little tree still shelters us under its plumage
as a second cope, a domestic firmament, and the low creeping gale will
sigh in the heath-plant and soothe us by sound of sympathy till the
lulled grief lose itself in fixed gaze on the purple heath-blossom, till
the present beauty becomes a vision of memory.
[Sidenote: HESPERUS]
I have never seen the evening star set behind the mountains, but it was
as if I had lost a hope out of my soul, as if a love were gone, and a
sad memory only remained. O it was my earliest affection, the evening
star! One of my first utterances in verse was an address to it as I was
returning from the New River, and it looked newly bathed as well as I. I
remember that the substance of the sonnet was that the woman whom I
could ever love would surely have been emblemed in the pensive serene
brightness of that planet, that we were both constellated to it, and
would after death return thither.
[Sidenote: TO THE EVENING STAR]
TO THE EVENING STAR
O meek attendant of Sol's setting blaze,
I hail, sweet star, thy chaste effulgent glow;
On thee full oft with fixed eye I gaze,
Till I methinks, all spirit seem to grow.
O first and fairest of the starry choir,
O loveliest 'mid the daughters of the night,
Must not the maid I love like thee inspire
_Pure_ joy and _calm_ delight?
Must she not be, as is thy placid sphere,
Serenely brilliant? Whilst to gaze awhile
Be all my wish 'mid Fancy's high career
E'en till she quit this scene of earthly toil;
Then Hope perchance might fondly sigh to join
Her image in thy kindred orb, O star benign!
[First printed from MS. _Poetical and Dramatic Works_, 1877-80;
_Poetical Works_, 1893, p. 11.]
[Sidenote: HEALTH, INDEPENDENCE, FRIENDSHIP]
Where health is--at least, though pain be no stranger, yet when the
breath can rise, and turn round like a comet at its perihelion in its
ellipse, and again descend, instead of being a Sisiphus's stone; and the
chest can expand as by its own volition and the head sits firm yet
mobile aloft, like the vane of a tower on a hill shining in the blue
air, and appropriating sunshine and moonlight whatever weight of clouds
brood below--O when health and hope, and if not competence yet a
debtless _unwealth, libera et læta paupertas_, is his, a man may have
and love many friends, but yet, if indeed they be friends, he lives with
each a several and individual life.
[Sidenote: SELF-ABSORPTION AND SELFISHNESS]
One source of calumny (I say _source_, because _allophoby_ from
_hëautopithygmy_ is the only proper _cause_) may be found in this--every
man's life exhibits two sorts of selfishness, those which are and those
which are not objects of his own consciousness. _A_ is thinking,
perhaps, of some plan in which he may benefit another, and during this
absorption consults his own little bodily comforts blindly--occupies the
best place at the fire-side, or asks at once, "Where am I to sit?"
instead of first inquiring after the health of another. Now the error
lies here, that _B_, in complaining of _A_, first takes for granted
either that these are acts of conscious selfishness in _A_, or, if he
allows the truth, yet considers them just as bad (and so perhaps they
may be in a certain sense), but _forgets_ that his own life presents the
same, judges of his own life exclusively by his own consciousness, that
of another by conscious and unconscious in a lump. A monkey's
anthropomorph attitudes we take for anthropic.
[Sidenote: SELF-ADVERTISING PHILANTHROPY]
Try not to become disgusted with active benevolence, or despondent
because there is a _philanthropy-trade_. It is a sort of benefit-club of
virtue, supported by the contributions of paupers in virtue, founded by
genuine enthusiasts who gain a reputation for the thing--then slip in
successors who know how to avail themselves of the influence and
connections derived thereby--quite gratuitous, however, and
bustling-active--but yet _bribe high_ to become the unpaid physicians of
the dispensary at St. Luke's Hospital, and bow and scrape and intrigue,
Carlyleise and Knappise for it. And such is the [case with regard to]
the slave trade. The first abolitionists were the good men who laboured
when the thing seemed desperate--it was virtue for its own sake. Then
the quakers, Granville Sharp, etc.--then the restless spirits who are
under the action of tyrannical oppression from images, and, gradually,
mixed vanity and love of power with it--the politicians + saints =
Wilberforce. Last come the Scotchmen--and Brougham is now canvassing
more successfully for the seat of Wilberforce, who retires with great
honour and regret, from infirmities of age and _enoughness_. It is just
as with the great original benefactors and founders of useful plans,
Raleigh, Sir Hugh Middleton, etc.--men of genius succeeded by sharpers,
but who often can better carry on what they never could have first
conceived--and this, too, by their very want of those qualities and
virtues which were necessary to the discovery.
[Sidenote: "BUT LOVE IS INDESTRUCTIBLE"]
All mere passions, like spirits and apparitions, have their hour of
cock-crow, in which they must vanish. But pure love is, therefore, no
_mere_ passion; and it is a test of its being love, that no reason can
be assigned _why_ it should disappear. Shall we not always, in this life
at least, remain _animæ dimidiatæ_?--must not the moral reason always
hold out the perfecting of each by union of both as good and lovely?
With reason, therefore, and conscience let love vanish, but let these
vanish only with our being.
[Sidenote: THE FEINT OF THE SLEEPLESS]
The sick and sleepless man, after the dawn of the fresh day, is fain to
watch the smoke now from this and then from the other chimney of the
town from his bed-chamber, as if willing to borrow from others that
sense of a new day, of a discontinuity between the yesterday and the
to-day which his own sensations had not afforded. [Compare Wordsworth's
"Blessed Barrier Between Day and Day," Wordsworth's Third Sonnet to
Sleep, _Poetical Works_, 1889, 354.]
[Sidenote: FIRST THOUGHTS AND FRIENDSHIP]
O what wisdom could I _talk_ to a YOUTH of genius and
genial-heartedness! O how little could I teach! and yet, though
despairing of success, I would attempt to enforce:--"Whenever you meet
with a person of undoubted talents, more especially if a woman, and of
apparent goodness, and yet you feel uncomfortable, and urged against
your nature, and, therefore, probably in vain, to be on your guard--then
take yourself to task and enquire what strong reason, moral or
prudential, you have to form any intimacy or even familiarity with that
person. If you after this (or moreover) detect any falsehood, or, what
amounts to the same, proneness and quickness to look into, to analyse,
to find out and represent evil or weakness in others (however this may
be disguised even from the person's own mind by _candour_, [in] pointing
out the good at the same time, by affectation of speculative truth, as
psychologists, or of telling you all their thoughts as open-hearted
friends), then let no reason but a strong and coercive one suffice to
make you any other than as formal and distant acquaintance as
circumstances will permit." And am I not now suffering, in part, for
forcing my feelings into slavery to my notions, and intellectual
admiration for a whole year and more with regard to ---- ? [So the MS.]
If I played the hypocrite to myself, can I blame my fate that he has, at
length, played the deceiver to me? Yet, God knows! I did it most
virtuously!--not only without vanity or any self-interest of however
subtle a nature, but from humility and a true delight in finding
excellence of any kind, and a disposition to fall prostrate before it.
[Sidenote: MILTON'S BLANK VERSE]
To understand fully the mechanism, in order fully to feel the
incomparable excellence of Milton's metre, we must make four tables, or
a fourfold compartment, the first for the feet, single and composite,
for which the whole twenty-six feet of the ancients will be found
necessary; the second to note the construction of the feet, whether from
different or from single words--for who does not perceive the difference
to the ear between--
"Inextricable disobedience" and
"To love or not: in this we stand or fall"--
yet both lines are composed of five iambics? The third, of the strength
and position, the concentration or diffusion of the _emphasis_. Fourth,
the length and position of the pauses. Then compare his narrative with
the harangues. I have not noticed the ellipses, because they either do
not affect the rhythm, or are not ellipses, but are comprehended in the
feet.
[Sidenote: APHORISMS OR PITHY SENTENCES]
Shall I compare man to a clockwork Catamaran, destined to float on in a
meaner element for so many moments or hours, and then to explode,
scattering its _involucrum_ and itself to ascend into its proper
element?
I am persuaded that we love what is above us more than what is under
us.
Money--paper money--peace, war. How comes it that all men in all
companies are talking of the depreciation, etc. etc.--and yet that a
discourse on transubstantiation would not be a more withering sirocco
than the attempt to explain philosophically the true cure and causes of
that which interests all so vehemently?
All convalescence is a resurrection, a palingenesy of our youth--"and
loves the earth and all that live thereon with a new heart." But oh! the
anguish to have the aching freshness of yearning and no answering
object--only remembrances of faithless change--and unmerited alienation!
The sun at evening holds up her fingers of both hands before her face
that mortals may have one steady gaze--her transparent crimson fingers
as when a lovely woman looks at the fire through her slender palms.
O that perilous moment [for such there is] of a half-reconciliation,
when the coldness and the resentment have been sustained too long. Each
is drawing toward the other, but like glass in the mid-state between
fusion and compaction a single sand will splinter it.
Sometimes when I earnestly look at a beautiful object or landscape, it
seems as if I were on the _brink_ of a fruition still denied--as if
Vision were an _appetite_; even as a man would feel who, having put
forth all his muscular strength in an act of prosilience, is at the very
moment _held back_--he leaps and yet moves not from his place.
Philosophy in general, but a plummet to so short a line that it can
sound no deeper than the sounder's eyes can reach--and yet--in certain
waters it may teach the exact depth and prevent a drowning.
The midnight wild beasts staring at the hunter's torch, or when the
hunter sees the tiger's eye glaring on the red light of his own torch.
A summer-sailing on a still peninsulating river, and sweet as the delays
of parting lovers.
Sir F[rancis] B[urdett], like a Lapland witch drowned in a storm of her
own raising. Mr. Cobbett, who, for a dollar, can raise what, offer him
ten thousand dollars, he could not allay.
[Sidenote: August, 1811]
Why do you make a book? Because my hands can extend but a few score
inches from my body; because my poverty keeps those hands empty when my
heart aches to empty them; because my life is short, and [by reason of]
my infirmities; and because a book, if it extends but to one edition,
will probably benefit three or four score on whom I could not otherwise
have acted, and, should it live and deserve to live, will make ample
compensation for all the aforestated infirmities. O, but think only of
the thoughts, feelings, radical impulses that have been implanted in how
many thousands by the little ballad of the "Children in the Wood"! The
sphere of Alexander the Great's agency is trifling compared with it.
[Sidenote: PRESENTIMENTS]
One of the strangest and most painful peculiarities of my nature (unless
others have the same, and, like me, hide it, from the same inexplicable
feeling of causeless shame and sense of a sort of guilt, joined with the
apprehension of being feared and shrunk from as a something
transnatural) I will here record--and my motive, or, rather, impulse, to
do this seems an effort to eloign and abalienate it from the dark adyt
of my own being by a visual outness, and not the wish for others to see
it. It consists in a sudden second sight of some hidden vice, past,
present or to come, of the person or persons with whom I am about to
form a close intimacy--which never deters me, but rather (as all these
transnaturals) urges me on, just like the feeling of an eddy-torrent to
a swimmer. I see it as a vision, feel it as a prophecy, not as one
_given_ me by any other being, but as an act of my own spirit, of the
absolute _noumenon_, which, in so doing, seems to have offended against
some law of its being, and to have acted the traitor by a commune with
full consciousness independent of the tenure or inflected state of
association, cause and effect, &c.
[Sidenote: THE FIXED STARS OF TRUTH]
As the most far-sighted eye, even aided by the most powerful telescope,
will not make a fixed star appear larger than it does to an ordinary and
unaided sight, even so there are heights of knowledge and truth sublime
which all men in possession of the ordinary human understanding may
comprehend as much and as well as the profoundest philosopher and the
most learned theologian. Such are the truths relating to the _logos_ and
its oneness with the self-existent Deity, and of the humanity of Christ
and its union with the _logos_. It is idle, therefore, to refrain from
preaching on these subjects, provided only such preparations have been
made as no man can be a Christian without. The misfortune is that the
majority are Christians only in name, and by birth only. Let them but
once, according to St. James, have looked down steadfastly into the
_law_ of liberty or freedom in their own souls (the will and the
conscience), and they are capable of whatever God has chosen to reveal.
[Sidenote: C'EST MAGNIFIQUE, MAIS CE N'EST PAS LA POÉSIE]
A long line of (!!) marks of admiration would be its aptest symbol! It
has given me the eye-ache with dazzlement, the brain-ache with
wonderment, the stomach and all-ache with the shock and after-eddy
of contradictory feelings. Splendour is there, splendour
everywhere--distinct the figures as vivid--skill in construction of
events--beauties numberless of form and thought. But there is not
anywhere the "one low piping note more sweet than all"--there is not the
divine vision of the poet, which gives the full fruition of sight
without the effort--and where the feelings of the heart are struck, they
are awakened only to complain of and recoil from the occasion. O! it is
mournful to see and wonder at such a marvel of labour, erudition and
talent concentered into such a burning-glass of factitious power, and
yet to know that it is all in vain--like the Pyramids, it shows what can
be done, and, like them, leaves in painful and almost scornful
perplexity, why it was done, for what or whom.
[Sidenote: SILENCE IS GOLDEN September 29th, 1812]
Grand rule in case of quarrels between friends or lovers--never to say,
hint, or do _anything_ in a moment of anger or indignation or sense of
ill-treatment, but to be passive--and even if the fit should recur the
next morning, still to delay it--in short, however plausible the motive
may be, yet if you have loved the persons concerned, not to say it till
their love has returned toward you, and your feelings are the same as
they were before. And for this plain reason--you knew this before, and
yet because you were in kindness, you never felt an impulse to speak of
it--then, surely, not now when you may perpetuate what would otherwise
be fugitive.
[Sidenote: THE DEVIL: A RECANTATION]
"That not one of the _peculiarities_ of Christianity, no one point in
which, being clearly different from other religions or philosophies, it
would have, at least, the _possibility_ of being superior to all, is
retained by the modern Unitarians." This remark is occasioned by my
reflections on the fact that Christianity _exclusively_ has asserted the
_positive_ being of evil or sin, "of sin the exceeding sinfulness"--and
thence exclusively the _freedom_ of the creature, as that, the clear
intuition of which is, both, the result and the accompaniment of
redemption. The nearest philosophy to Christianity is the Platonic, and
it is observable that this is the mere antipodes of the
Hartleio-Lockian held by the Unitarians; but the true honours of
Christianity would be most easily manifested by a comparison even with
that "_nec pari nec secundo_," but yet "_omnibus aliis propriore_," the
Platonic! With what contempt, even in later years, have I not
contemplated the doctrine of a devil! but now I see the intimate
connection, if not as existent _person_, yet as essence and symbol with
Christianity--and that so far from being identical with Manicheism, it
is the surest antidote (that is, rightly understood).