and appealed to Lamb: “You have heard me preach, I think?” “I have never
heard you do anything else,” was the urbane reply.
(John Sterling said) Coleridge is best described in his own words:
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread.
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.[47]
Madame de Staël was by no means pleased with her intercourse with him,
saying spitefully and feelingly, “M. Coleridge a un grand talent pour le
monologue” (“Mr. Coleridge has a great talent for monologue”).
CAROLINE FOX’S JOURNALS.
Here we have different views of Coleridge’s monologues. Mme. de
Staël objected to his monopolizing the conversation, but his
friends loved to hear him. Lamb, of course, had to have his
joke.
* * * * *
Where is the use of the lip’s red charm,
The heaven of hair, the pride of the brow,
And the blood that blues the inside arm—
Unless we turn, as the soul knows how,
The earthly gift to an end divine?
A lady of clay is as good, I trow.
R. BROWNING.
* * * * *
What things have we seen
Done at the Mermaid! heard words that have been
So nimble and so full of subtle flame,
As if that every one from whence they came
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,
And had resolved to live a fool the rest
Of his dull life.
FRANCIS BEAUMONT (_Epistle to Ben Jonson_).
What would one not give to have been present at the Mermaid
Tavern with the wonderful Elizabethans who met there? Among
them were Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Sir Walter Raleigh,
Beaumont, Fletcher, Donne, Carew, and John Selden. One is
reminded of the _Symposium_ of Plato.
The poem of Keats is well known:
Souls of Poets dead and gone,
What Elysium have ye known,
Happy field or mossy cavern,
Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?
* * * * *
On a day like this, when the sun is hid,
And you and your heart are housed together,
If memories come to you all unbid,
And something suddenly wets your lid,
Like a gust of the out-door weather,
Why, who is in fault but the dim old day,
Too dark for labour, too dull for play?
AUTHOR NOT TRACED.
* * * * *
A man can never do anything at variance with his own nature. He carries
with him the germ of his most exceptional actions; and, if we wise people
make fools of ourselves on any particular occasion, we must endure the
legitimate conclusion that we carry a few grains of folly to our ounce of
wisdom.
GEORGE ELIOT.
* * * * *
I understand those women who say they don’t want the ballot. They purpose
to hold the real power, while we go through the mockery of making laws.
They want the power without the responsibility.
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER (_My Summer in a Garden_).
* * * * *
If we cannot find God in your house or in mine; upon the roadside or the
margin of the sea; in the bursting seed or opening flower; in the day
duty or the night musing; in the general laugh and the secret grief; in
the procession of life, ever entering afresh, and solemnly passing by
and dropping off; I do not think we should discern Him any more on the
grass of Eden, or beneath the moonlight of Gethsemane. Depend upon it,
it is not the want of greater miracles, but of the soul to perceive such
as are allowed us still, that makes us push all the sanctities into the
far spaces we cannot reach. The devout feel that wherever God’s hand is,
_there_ is miracle; and it is simply undevoutness which imagines that
only where miracle is, can there be the real hand of God. The customs of
Heaven ought to be more sacred in our eyes than its anomalies; the dear
old ways, of which the Most High is never tired, than the strange things
which He does not love well enough ever to repeat. And he who will but
discern beneath the sun, as he rises any morning, the supporting finger
of the Almighty, may recover the sweet and reverent surprise with which
Adam gazed on the first dawn in Paradise.
JAMES MARTINEAU (_Endeavours after the Christian Life_).
* * * * *
Advice, like snow, the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon and the
deeper it sinks into the mind.
S. T. COLERIDGE.
* * * * *
My burden bows me to the knee;
O Lord, ’tis more than I can bear.
Didst Thou not come our load to share?
My burden bows me to the knee:
Dear Jesus, let me lean on Thee!...
Far off, so far, the Heavens be,
With their wide arms! and I would prove
The close, warm-beating heart of Love.
But so far-off the Heavens be:
Dear Jesus, let me lean on Thee!
GERALD MASSEY (_Out of the Depths_).
This poem is omitted from _My Lyrical Life_, Massey’s collected
poems.
* * * * *
Night dreams of day, and winter seems
In sleep to breathe the balm of May,
Their dreams are true anon; but they,
The dreamers, then, alas, are dreams.
Thus, while our days the dreams renew
Of some forgotten sleeper, we,
The dreamers of futurity,
Shall vanish when our own are true.
J. B. TABB.
* * * * *
THE MOTHER WHO DIED TOO
She was so little—little in her grave,
The wide earth all around so hard and cold—
She was so little! therefore did I crave
My arms might still her tender form enfold.
She was so little, and her cry so weak
When she among the heavenly children came—
She was so little—I alone might speak
For her who knew no word nor her own name.
EDITH MATILDA THOMAS.
* * * * *
The economy of Heaven is dark;
And wisest clerks have miss’d the mark,
Why human buds, like this, should fall,
More brief than fly ephemeral
That has his day; while shrivell’d crones
Stiffen with age to stocks and stones;
And crabbed use the conscience sears
In sinners of an hundred years.
CHARLES LAMB (_On an infant dying as soon as
born_).
* * * * *
Oh dreadful thought, if all our sires and we
Are but foundations of a race to be,—
Stones which one thrusts in earth, and builds thereon
A write delight, a Parian Parthenon,
And thither, long thereafter, youth and maid
Seek with glad brows the alabaster shade.
And in processions’ pomp together bent
Still interchange their sweet words innocent,—
Not caring that those mighty columns rest
Each on the ruin of a human breast,—
That to the shrine the victor’s chariot rolls
Across the anguish of ten thousand souls!
“Well was it that our fathers suffered thus,”
I hear them say, “that all might end in us;
Well was it here and there a bard should feel
Pains premature and hurt that none could heal;
These were their preludes, thus the race began;
So hard a matter was the birth of Man.”
And yet these too shall pass and fade and flee,
And in their death shall be as vile as we,
Nor much shall profit with their perfect powers
To have lived a so much sweeter life than ours,
When at the last, with all their bliss gone by,
Like us those glorious creatures come to die,
With far worse woe, far more rebellious strife
Those mighty spirits drink the dregs of life.
F. W. H. MYERS (_The Implicit Promise of
Immortality_).
It will be observed that Myers, like Swinburne, handled the
old heroic couplet in a masterly manner, undreamt of by Pope,
Dryden, and their generation.
* * * * *
God’s works—paint any one, and count it crime
To let a truth slip. Don’t object, “His works
Are here already; nature is complete:
Suppose you reproduce her (which you can’t)
There’s no advantage! You must beat her then.”
For, don’t you mark? we’re made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;
And so they are better, _painted_—better to us
Which is the same thing. Art was given for that;
God uses us to help each other so,
Lending our minds out.
R. BROWNING (_Fra Lippo Lippi_).
* * * * *
For the folk through the fretful hours are hurled
On the ruthless rush of the wondrous world,
And none has leisure to lie and cull
The blossoms, that made life beautiful
In that old season when men could sing
For dear delight in the risen Spring
And Summer ripening fruit and flower.
Now carefulness cankers every hour;
We are too weary and sad to sing;
Our pastime’s poisoned with thought-taking.
JOHN PAYNE (_Tournesol_).
* * * * *
I am much engaged, an old man and out of health, and I cannot spare
time to answer your questions fully,—nor indeed can they be answered.
Science has nothing to do with Christ, except in so far as the habit
of scientific research makes a man cautious in admitting evidence. For
myself, I do not believe that there ever has been any Revelation. As for
a future life every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague
probabilities. Wishing you happiness, I remain, &c.
CHARLES DARWIN (_Letter to von Müller, June 5, 1879_).
This letter is reproduced in the _Life and Letters_, but
evidently Francis Darwin did not know that the “German youth”
to whom he says it was written was Baron Ferdinand von Müller,
K.C.M.G. (1825-1896), then fifty-three years of age! Von Müller
was director of the Melbourne Botanical Gardens from 1857 to
1873, and died in Melbourne in 1896. He did important work in
Australian botany.
As regards Darwin’s letter, it seems to me that a sufficient
reason why a great and lovable man, who was at first a
convinced believer in the immortality of the soul, became an
agnostic is given in the next quotation. The higher aesthetic
part of his brain had become atrophied.
Darwin himself thought that he had not given sufficient
consideration to religious questions and was exceedingly
anxious that his own agnostic views should not influence others,
* * * * *
I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last
twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry
of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth,
Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a school-boy
I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical
plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and
music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read
a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare and found it so
intolerably dull that it nauseates me. I have also almost lost my taste
for pictures or music.... My mind seems to have become a kind of machine
for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this
should have caused the atrophy of that (aesthetic) part of the brain
alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive.... The loss
of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to
the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling
the emotional part of our nature.
CHARLES DARWIN.
This is from autobiographical notes made by Darwin for his
children, and not intended for publication.
* * * * *
God be thanked, the meanest of his creatures
Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with,
One to show a woman when he loves her!
R. BROWNING (_One Word More_).
* * * * *
CHILDREN’S HYMN ON THE COAST OF BRITTANY.
At length has come the twilight dim.
The sun has set, the day has died;
And now we sing Thy holy hymn,
O Mary maid, at eventide.
To Jewry, to that far-off land,
Erstwhile there came a little Child;
You led Him softly by the hand,
He was so very small and mild.
Like us, He could not find his way,
Although He was Our Lord, the King;
And so we beg we may not stray,
Nor do a sad or foolish thing.
Teach us the prayer that Jesus said,
The words you sang and murmured low,
When He was in His tiny bed,
And all the earth was dark and slow.
Hushed are the trees, and the small wise bees,
Our fathers are on the deep,—
Little Mother, be good to us, please!
It is time to go asleep.
VINCENT O’SULLIVAN.
* * * * *
WESLEY’S MEDICAL PRESCRIPTIONS
For an Ague:—Make six middling pills of cobwebs. Take one a little before
the cold fit; two a little before the next fit (suppose the next day);
the other three, if need be, a little before the third fit. This seldom
fails.
A Cut:—Bind on toasted cheese. This will cure a deep cut.
A Fistula:—Grind an ounce of sublimate mercury as fine as possible....
(Two quarts of water to be added, then half a spoonful with two spoonfuls
of water to be taken fasting every other day), ... In forty days this
will also cure any cancer, any old sore or King’s evil.
_The Iliac Passion_:—Hold a live puppy constantly on the belly.
JOHN WESLEY (_Primitive Physic._ Ed. 1780).
The iliac passion, now known as _ileus_, is a severe colic due
to intestinal obstruction.
It seems strange that so eminent a man should have believed
in these absurd prescriptions, but as a matter of fact the
book generally is much more sane and sound than one would
expect from the habits and state of knowledge of the time. For
example, in his rules of health Wesley strongly advises the
practice of _cold bathing_, cleanliness, open-air exercise,
moderation of food, etc. Also these prescriptions are chosen
for their absurdity—in each case other more sensible remedies
are offered. But Wesley in his preface says that he has
omitted altogether from his book Cinchona bark, because it
is “extremely dangerous.” This means that in regard to ague
he omitted the only efficient remedy—which was much more
unfortunate than his prescribing cobweb pills.
This book went to _thirty-six_ editions between 1747 and 1840.
* * * * *
“When shall our prayers end?”
I tell thee, priest, when shoemakers make shoes,
That are well sewed, with never a stitch amiss,
And use no craft in uttering of the same;
When tinkers make no more holes than they found,
When thatchers think their wages worth their work,
When Davie Diker digs and dallies not,
When horsecorsers beguile no friends with jades,
When printers pass no errors in their books,
When pewterers infect no tin with lead,
When silver sticks not on the Teller’s fingers,
When sycophants can find no place in Court, ...
When Laïs lives not like a lady’s peer
Nor useth art in dyeing of her hair....
GEORGE GASCOIGNE (1525?-1577) (_The Steele
Glas_).
* * * * *
All our life is a meeting of cross-roads, where the choice of directions
is perilous.
VICTOR HUGO.
* * * * *
Rose-cheeked Laura, come;
Sing thou smoothly with thy beauty’s
Silent music, either other
Sweetly gracing.
Lovely forms do flow
From concent divinely framed;
Heaven is music, and thy beauty’s
Birth is heavenly.
These dull notes we sing
Discords need for helps to grace them,
Only beauty purely loving
Knows no discord,
But still moves delight,
Like clear springs renewed by flowing,
Ever perfect, ever in them-
Selves eternal.
THOMAS CAMPION (died 1619).
Richard Lovelace (1618-1655) subsequently wrote (_Orpheus to
Beasts_):
O, could you view the melodie
Of ev’ry grace,
And musick of her face,
You’d drop a teare,
Seeing more harmonie
In her bright eye,
Then now you heare.
Then = _than_. See next quotation.
* * * * *
I think the deep love he had for that sweet, rounded blossom-like
dark-eyed Hetty, of whose inward self he was really very ignorant, came
out of the very strength of his nature, and not out of any inconsistent
weakness. Is it any weakness, pray, to be wrought on by exquisite
music?—to feel its wondrous harmonies searching the subtlest windings of
your soul, the delicate fibres of life where no memory can penetrate, and
binding together your whole being past and present in one unspeakable
vibration; melting you in one moment with all the tenderness, all the
love that has been scattered through the toilsome years; concentrating in
one emotion of heroic courage or resignation all the hard-learnt lessons
of self-renouncing sympathy; blending your present joy with past sorrow,
and your present sorrow with all your past joy? If not, then neither is
it a weakness to be so wrought upon by the exquisite curves of a woman’s
cheek and neck and arms, by the liquid depths of her beseeching eyes, or
the sweet childish pout of her lips. For the beauty of a lovely woman is
like music: what can one say more? Beauty has an expression beyond and
far above the one woman’s soul that it clothes, as the words of genius
have a wider meaning than the thought that prompted them; it is more than
a woman’s love that moves us in a woman’s eyes—it seems to be a far-off
mighty love that has come near to us, and made speech for itself there;
the rounded neck, the dimpled arm, move us by something more than their
prettiness—by their close kinship with all we have known of tenderness
and peace. The noblest nature sees the most of this _impersonal_
expression in beauty, and for this reason, the noblest nature is often
the most blinded to the character of the woman’s soul that the beauty
clothes. Whence, I fear, the tragedy of human life is likely to continue
for a long time to come in spite of mental philosophers who are ready
with the best receipts for avoiding all mistakes of the kind.
GEORGE ELIOT (_Adam Bede_).
George Eliot would not know the preceding poem by Campion,
whose lyrics had been forgotten until A. H. Bullen revived them
in 1889; and most probably also she did not know Lovelace’s
poem, as it is not one of the two or three lyrics by which
alone he is remembered.
* * * * *
Alas, how soon the hours are over
Counted us out to play the lover!
And how much narrower is the stage
Allotted us to play the sage!
But when we play the fool, how wide
The theatre expands! beside,
How long the audience sits before us!
How many prompters! What a chorus!
W. S. LANDOR.
* * * * *
The degree of vision that dwells in a man is a correct measure of the
man. If called to define Shakespeare’s faculty, I should say superiority
of Intellect, and think I had included all under that. What indeed
are faculties? We talk of faculties as if they were distinct, things
separable; as if a man had intellect, imagination, fancy, &c., as he has
hands, feet, and arms. That is a capital error. Then again, we hear of
a man’s “intellectual nature,” and of his “moral nature,” as if these
again were divisible and existed apart.... We ought to know, and to
keep forever in mind, that these divisions are at bottom but _names_;
that man’s spiritual nature, the vital Force which dwells in him, is
essentially one and indivisible; that what we call imagination, fancy,
understanding, and so forth, are but different figures of the same Power
of Insight, all indissolubly connected with each other, physiognomically
related; that if we knew one of them, we might know all of them. Morality
itself, what we call the moral quality of a man, what is this but another
_side_ of the one vital Force whereby he is and works?.... Without hands
a man might have feet, and could still walk: but, consider it,—without
morality, intellect were impossible for him; a thoroughly _immoral_
man could not know anything at all! To know a thing, what we can call
knowing, a man must first _love_ the thing, sympathize with it; that is,
be _virtuously_ related to it.... Nature, with her truth, remains to the
bad, to the selfish and the pusillanimous forever a sealed book: what
such can know of Nature is mean, superficial, small.
CARLYLE (_Heroes and Hero Worship, III_).
* * * * *
A little I will speak. I love thee then
Not only for thy body packed with sweet
Of all this world....
Not for this only do I love thee, but
Because Infinity upon thee broods;
And thou art full of whispers and of shadows.
Thou meanest what the sea has striven to say
So long, and yearnèd up the cliffs to tell;
Thou art what all the winds have uttered not,
What the still night suggesteth to the heart.
Thy voice is like to music heard ere birth,
Some spirit lute touched on a spirit sea;
Thy face remembered is from other worlds,
It has been died for, though I know not when,
It has been sung of, though I know not where.
STEPHEN PHILLIPS (_Marpessa_).
* * * * *
Sometimes thou seem’st not as thyself alone,
But as the meaning of all things that are.
D. G. ROSSETTI (_Heart’s Compass_)
* * * * *
“IMBUTA”
The new wine, the new wine,
It tasteth like the old,
The heart is all athirst again,
The drops are all of gold;
We thought the cup was broken,
And we thought the tale was told,
But the new wine, the new wine,
It tasteth like the old!
The flower of life had faded,
The leaf was in its fall,
The winter seemed so early
To have reached us, once for all;
But now the buds are breaking,
There is grass above the mould,
And the new wine, the new wine.
It tasteth like the old!
The earth had grown so dreary,
The sky so dull and grey;
One was weeping in the darkness,
One was sorrowing through the day:
But a light from heaven gleams again,
On water, wood, and wold,
And the new wine, the new wine,
It tasteth like the old!
For the loving lips are laughing,
And the loving face is fair,
Though a phantom hand is on the board,
And phantom eyes are there;
The phantom eyes are soft and sad,
The phantom hand is cold,
But the new wine, the new wine,
It tasteth like the old!
We dare not look, we turn away,
The precious draught to drain,
’Twere worse than madness, surely now,
To lose it all again;
To quivering lip, with clinging grasp,
The fatal cup we hold,
For the new wine, the new wine,
It tasteth like the old!
And life is short, and love is life,
And so the tale is told,
Though the new wine, the new wine,
It tasteth like the old.
G. J. WHYTE-MELVILLE.
The title evidently refers to _Horace_ Ep. 1, 2, 69, 70, Quo
semel est _Imbuta_ recens servabit odorem testa diu. “The scent
which once has flavoured the fresh jar will be preserved in it
for many a day.” Moore no doubt had the same passage in his
mind when, speaking of the memories of past joys, he wrote:
You may break, you may ruin the vase if you will,
But the scent of the roses will hang round it still.
So Whyte-Melville says that when love is poured again into the
heart of a man who has lost his first love, “The new wine, the
new wine, It tasteth like the old.”
* * * * *
I strove with none, for none was worth my strife,
Nature I loved and, next to Nature, Art:
I warm’d both hands before the fire of Life;
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
W. S. LANDOR.
* * * * *
The Toucan has an enormous bill, makes a noise like a puppy dog, and lays
his eggs in hollow trees. How astonishing are the freaks and fancies of
nature! To what purpose, we say, is a bird placed in the woods of Cayenne
with a bill a yard long, making a noise like a puppy dog, and laying eggs
in hollow trees? The Toucans, to be sure, might retort, to what purpose
were gentlemen in Bond Street created? To what purpose were certain
foolish prating Members of Parliament created?—pestering the House of
Commons with their ignorance and folly, and impeding the business of the
country? There is no end of such questions. So we will not enter into the
metaphysics of the Toucan.
SYDNEY SMITH (_Review of “Waterton’s Travels in South America”_).
* * * * *