Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself were exact, but harmonious, opposites in
this;--that every old ruin, hill, river, or tree called up in his mind a
host of historical or biographical associations,--just as a bright pan of
brass, when beaten, is said to attract the swarming bees;--whereas, for
myself, notwithstanding Dr. Johnson, I believe I should walk over the plain
of Marathon without taking more interest in it than in any other plain of
similar features. Yet I receive as much pleasure in reading the account of
the battle, in Herodotus, as any one can. Charles Lamb wrote an essay [1]
on a man who lived in past time:--I thought of adding another to it on one
who lived not in time at all, past, present, or future,--but beside or
collaterally.
[Footnote 1:
I know not when or where; but are not all the writings of this exquisite
genius the effusions of one whose spirit lived in past time? The place
which Lamb holds, and will continue to hold, in English literature, seems
less liable to interruption than that of any other writer of our day.--ED.]
August 10. 1833.
NERVOUS WEAKNESS.----HOOKER AND BULL.-----FAITH.----A POET'S NEED OF
PRAISE.
A PERSON, nervously weak, has a sensation of weakness which is as bad to
him as muscular weakness. The only difference lies in the better chance of
removal.
* * * * *
The fact, that Hooker and Bull, in their two palmary works respectively,
are read in the Jesuit Colleges, is a curious instance of the power of mind
over the most profound of all prejudices.
There are permitted moments of exultation through faith, when we cease to
feel our own emptiness save as a capacity for our Redeemer's fulness.
* * * * *
There is a species of applause scarcely less genial to a poet, than the
vernal warmth to the feathered songsters during their nest-breeding or
incubation; a sympathy, an expressed hope, that is the open air in which
the poet breathes, and without which the sense of power sinks back on
itself, like a sigh heaved up from the tightened chest of a sick man.
_August_ 14. 1833.