CHAPTER XXIV

CONCLUSION

It sometimes happens that we are punished for our faults by incidents,

in the causation of which these faults had no share: and this I have

always felt the severest punishment. The wound indeed is of the same

dimensions; but the edges are jagged, and there is a dull underpain

that survives the smart which it had aggravated. For there is always a

consolatory feeling that accompanies the sense of a proportion between

antecedents and consequents. The sense of Before and After becomes both

intelligible and intellectual when, and only when, we contemplate the

succession in the relations of Cause and Effect, which, like the two

poles of the magnet manifest the being and unity of the one power by

relative opposites, and give, as it were, a substratum of permanence, of

identity, and therefore of reality, to the shadowy flux of Time. It is

Eternity revealing itself in the phaenomena of Time: and the perception

and acknowledgment of the proportionality and appropriateness of the

Present to the Past, prove to the afflicted Soul, that it has not yet

been deprived of the sight of God, that it can still recognise the

effective presence of a Father, though through a darkened glass and a

turbid atmosphere, though of a Father that is chastising it. And for

this cause, doubtless, are we so framed in mind, and even so organized

in brain and nerve, that all confusion is painful. It is within the

experience of many medical practitioners, that a patient, with strange

and unusual symptoms of disease, has been more distressed in mind, more

wretched, from the fact of being unintelligible to himself and others,

than from the pain or danger of the disease: nay, that the patient

has received the most solid comfort, and resumed a genial and enduring

cheerfulness, from some new symptom or product, that had at once

determined the name and nature of his complaint, and rendered it an

intelligible effect of an intelligible cause: even though the discovery

did at the same moment preclude all hope of restoration. Hence the

mystic theologians, whose delusions we may more confidently hope to

separate from their actual intuitions, when we condescend to read their

works without the presumption that whatever our fancy, (always the ape,

and too often the adulterator and counterfeit of our memory,) has not

made or cannot make a picture of, must be nonsense,--hence, I say, the

Mystics have joined in representing the state of the reprobate spirits

as a dreadful dream in which there is no sense of reality, not even of

the pangs they are enduring--an eternity without time, and as it were

below it--God present without manifestation of his presence. But these

are depths, which we dare not linger over. Let us turn to an instance

more on a level with the ordinary sympathies of mankind. Here then, and

in this same healing influence of Light and distinct Beholding, we may

detect the final cause of that instinct which, in the great majority of

instances, leads, and almost compels the Afflicted to communicate their

sorrows. Hence too flows the alleviation that results from “opening out

our griefs:” which are thus presented in distinguishable forms instead

of the mist, through which whatever is shapeless becomes magnified and

(literally) enormous. Casimir, in the fifth Ode of his third Book, has

happily [85] expressed this thought.

Me longus silendi

Edit amor, facilesque luctus

Hausit medullas. Fugerit ocyus,

Simul negantem visere jusseris

Aures amicorum, et loquacem

Questibus evacuaris iram.

Olim querendo desinimus queri,

Ipsoque fletu lacryma perditur

Nec fortis [86] aeque, si per omnes

Cura volat residetque ramos.

Vires amicis perdit in auribus,

Minorque semper dividitur dolor,

Per multa permissus vagari

Pectora.--

I shall not make this an excuse, however, for troubling my readers with

any complaints or explanations, with which, as readers, they have little

or no concern. It may suffice, (for the present at least,) to declare,

that the causes that have delayed the publication of these volumes for

so long a period after they had been printed off, were not connected

with any neglect of my own; and that they would form an instructive

comment on the chapter concerning authorship as a trade, addressed to

young men of genius in the first volume of this work. I remember

the ludicrous effect produced on my mind by the fast sentence of

an auto-biography, which, happily for the writer, was as meagre in

incidents as it is well possible for the life of an individual to

be--“The eventful life which I am about to record, from the hour

in which I rose into existence on this planet, etc.” Yet when,

notwithstanding this warning example of self-importance before me, I

review my own life, I cannot refrain from applying the same epithet to

it, and with more than ordinary emphasis--and no private feeling, that

affected myself only, should prevent me from publishing the same, (for

write it I assuredly shall, should life and leisure be granted me,)

if continued reflection should strengthen my present belief, that my

history would add its contingent to the enforcement of one important

truth, to wit, that we must not only love our neighbours as ourselves,

but ourselves likewise as our neighbours; and that we can do neither

unless we love God above both.

Who lives, that’s not

Depraved or depraves? Who dies, that bears

Not one spurn to the grave of their friends’ gift?

Strange as the delusion may appear, yet it is most true, that three

years ago I did not know or believe that I had an enemy in the world:

and now even my strongest sensations of gratitude are mingled with fear,

and I reproach myself for being too often disposed to ask,--Have I one

friend?--During the many years which intervened between the composition

and the publication of the CHRISTABEL, it became almost as well known

among literary men as if it had been on common sale; the same references

were made to it, and the same liberties taken with it, even to the very

names of the imaginary persons in the poem. From almost all of our

most celebrated poets, and from some with whom I had no personal

acquaintance, I either received or heard of expressions of admiration

that, (I can truly say,) appeared to myself utterly disproportionate

to a work, that pretended to be nothing more than a common Faery Tale.

Many, who had allowed no merit to my other poems, whether printed or

manuscript, and who have frankly told me as much, uniformly made an

exception in favour of the CHRISTABEL and the poem entitled LOVE. Year

after year, and in societies of the most different kinds, I had been

entreated to recite it and the result was still the same in all, and

altogether different in this respect from the effect produced by the

occasional recitation of any other poems I had composed.--This before

the publication. And since then, with very few exceptions, I have heard

nothing but abuse, and this too in a spirit of bitterness at least as

disproportionate to the pretensions of the poem, had it been the most

pitiably below mediocrity, as the previous eulogies, and far more

inexplicable.--This may serve as a warning to authors, that in their

calculations on the probable reception of a poem, they must subtract

to a large amount from the panegyric, which may have encouraged them to

publish it, however unsuspicious and however various the sources of this

panegyric may have been. And, first, allowances must be made for private

enmity, of the very existence of which they had perhaps entertained no

suspicion--for personal enmity behind the mask of anonymous criticism:

secondly for the necessity of a certain proportion of abuse and ridicule

in a Review, in order to make it saleable, in consequence of which, if

they have no friends behind the scenes, the chance must needs be against

them; but lastly and chiefly, for the excitement and temporary sympathy

of feeling, which the recitation of the poem by an admirer, especially

if he be at once a warm admirer and a man of acknowledged celebrity,

calls forth in the audience. For this is really a species of animal

magnetism, in which the enkindling reciter, by perpetual comment of

looks and tones, lends his own will and apprehensive faculty to his

auditors. They live for the time within the dilated sphere of his

intellectual being. It is equally possible, though not equally common,

that a reader left to himself should sink below the poem, as that

the poem left to itself should flag beneath the feelings of the

reader.--But, in my own instance, I had the additional misfortune of

having been gossiped about, as devoted to metaphysics, and worse than

all, to a system incomparably nearer to the visionary flights of Plato,

and even to the jargon of the Mystics, than to the established tenets

of Locke. Whatever therefore appeared with my name was condemned

beforehand, as predestined metaphysics. In a dramatic poem, which had

been submitted by me to a gentleman of great influence in the theatrical

world, occurred the following passage:--

“O we are querulous creatures! Little less

Than all things can suffice to make us happy:

And little more than nothing is enough

To make us wretched.”

Aye, here now! (exclaimed the critic) here come Coleridge’s metaphysics!

And the very same motive (that is, not that the lines were unfit for the

present state of our immense theatres; but that they were metaphysics

[87]) was assigned elsewhere for the rejection of the two following

passages. The first is spoken in answer to a usurper, who had rested his

plea on the circumstance, that he had been chosen by the acclamations of

the people.--

“What people? How convened? or, if convened,

Must not the magic power that charms together

Millions of men in council, needs have power

To win or wield them? Rather, O far rather

Shout forth thy titles to yon circling mountains,

And with a thousand-fold reverberation

Make the rocks flatter thee, and the volleying air,

Unbribed, shout back to thee, King Emerick!

By wholesome laws to embank the sovereign power,

To deepen by restraint, and by prevention

Of lawless will to amass and guide the flood

In its majestic channel, is man’s task

And the true patriot’s glory! In all else

Men safelier trust to Heaven, than to themselves

When least themselves: even in those whirling crowds

Where folly is contagious, and too oft

Even wise men leave their better sense at home,

To chide and wonder at them, when returned.”

The second passage is in the mouth of an old and experienced courtier,

betrayed by the man in whom he had most trusted.

“And yet Sarolta, simple, inexperienced,

Could see him as he was, and often warned me.

Whence learned she this?--O she was innocent!

And to be innocent is Nature’s wisdom!

The fledge-dove knows the prowlers of the air,

Feared soon as seen, and flutters back to shelter.

And the young steed recoils upon his haunches,

The never-yet-seen adder’s hiss first heard.

O surer than suspicion’s hundred eyes

Is that fine sense, which to the pure in heart,

By mere oppugnancy of their own goodness,

Reveals the approach of evil.”

As therefore my character as a writer could not easily be more injured

by an overt act than it was already in consequence of the report, I

published a work, a large portion of which was professedly metaphysical.

A long delay occurred between its first annunciation and its appearance;

it was reviewed therefore by anticipation with a malignity, so avowedly

and exclusively personal, as is, I believe, unprecedented even in the

present contempt of all common humanity that disgraces and endangers the

liberty of the press. After its appearance, the author of this lampoon

undertook to review it in the Edinburgh Review; and under the single

condition, that he should have written what he himself really thought,

and have criticised the work as he would have done had its author been

indifferent to him, I should have chosen that man myself, both from

the vigour and the originality of his mind, and from his particular

acuteness in speculative reasoning, before all others.--I remembered

Catullus’s lines.

Desine de quoquam quicquam bene velle mereri,

Aut aliquem fieri posse putare pium.

Omnia sunt ingrata: nihil fecisse benigne est:

Immo, etiam taedet, taedet obestque magis;

Ut mihi, quem nemo gravius nec acerbius urget,

Quam modo qui me unum atque unicum amicum habuit.

But I can truly say, that the grief with which I read this rhapsody of

predetermined insult, had the rhapsodist himself for its whole and sole

object.

* * * * * *

I refer to this review at present, in consequence of information having

been given me, that the inuendo of my “potential infidelity,” grounded

on one passage of my first Lay Sermon, has been received and propagated

with a degree of credence, of which I can safely acquit the originator

of the calumny. I give the sentences, as they stand in the sermon,

premising only that I was speaking exclusively of miracles worked for

the outward senses of men. “It was only to overthrow the usurpation

exercised in and through the senses, that the senses were miraculously

appealed to. REASON AND RELIGION ARE THEIR OWN EVIDENCE. The natural sun

is in this respect a symbol of the spiritual. Ere he is fully arisen,

and while his glories are still under veil, he calls up the breeze to

chase away the usurping vapours of the night-season, and thus converts

the air itself into the minister of its own purification: not surely

in proof or elucidation of the light from heaven, but to prevent its

interception.”

“Wherever, therefore, similar circumstances co-exist with the same

moral causes, the principles revealed, and the examples recorded, in

the inspired writings, render miracles superfluous: and if we neglect

to apply truths in expectation of wonders, or under pretext of the

cessation of the latter, we tempt God, and merit the same reply which

our Lord gave to the Pharisees on a like occasion.”

In the sermon and the notes both the historical truth and the necessity

of the miracles are strongly and frequently asserted. “The testimony

of books of history (that is, relatively to the signs and wonders,

with which Christ came) is one of the strong and stately pillars of the

church: but it is not the foundation!” Instead, therefore, of defending

myself, which I could easily effect by a series of passages, expressing

the same opinion, from the Fathers and the most eminent Protestant

Divines, from the Reformation to the Revolution, I shall merely state

what my belief is, concerning the true evidences of Christianity. 1.

Its consistency with right Reason, I consider as the outer court of the

temple--the common area, within which it stands. 2. The miracles, with

and through which the Religion was first revealed and attested, I regard

as the steps, the vestibule, and the portal of the temple. 3. The

sense, the inward feeling, in the soul of each believer of its exceeding

desirableness--the experience, that he needs something, joined with the

strong foretokening, that the redemption and the graces propounded to

us in Christ are what he needs--this I hold to be the true foundation of

the spiritual edifice. With the strong a priori probability that flows

in from 1 and 3 on the correspondent historical evidence of 2, no man

can refuse or neglect to make the experiment without guilt. But, 4, it

is the experience derived from a practical conformity to the conditions

of the Gospel--it is the opening eye; the dawning light: the terrors and

the promises of spiritual growth; the blessedness of loving God as

God, the nascent sense of sin hated as sin, and of the incapability of

attaining to either without Christ; it is the sorrow that still rises

up from beneath and the consolation that meets it from above; the

bosom treacheries of the principal in the warfare and the exceeding

faithfulness and long-suffering of the uninteresting ally;--in a word,

it is the actual trial of the faith in Christ, with its accompaniments

and results, that must form the arched roof, and the faith itself is the

completing key-stone. In order to an efficient belief in Christianity,

a man must have been a Christian, and this is the seeming argumentum

in circulo, incident to all spiritual Truths, to every subject not

presentable under the forms of Time and Space, as long as we attempt to

master by the reflex acts of the Understanding what we can only know by

the act of becoming. Do the will of my Father, and ye shall know whether

I am of God. These four evidences I believe to have been and still to

be, for the world, for the whole Church, all necessary, all equally

necessary: but at present, and for the majority of Christians born in

Christian countries, I believe the third and the fourth evidences to

be the most operative, not as superseding but as involving a glad

undoubting faith in the two former. Credidi, ideoque intellexi, appears

to me the dictate equally of Philosophy and Religion, even as I

believe Redemption to be the antecedent of Sanctification, and not its

consequent. All spiritual predicates may be construed indifferently as

modes of Action or as states of Being, Thus Holiness and Blessedness

are the same idea, now seen in relation to act and now to existence.

The ready belief which has been yielded to the slander of my “potential

infidelity,” I attribute in part to the openness with which I have

avowed my doubts, whether the heavy interdict, under which the name of

Benedict Spinoza lies, is merited on the whole or to the whole extent.

Be this as it may, I wish, however, that I could find in the books of

philosophy, theoretical or moral, which are alone recommended to the

present students of theology in our established schools, a few passages

as thoroughly Pauline, as completely accordant with the doctrines of the

Established Church, as the following sentences in the concluding page

of Spinoza’s Ethics. Deinde quo mens hoc amore divino, seu beatitudine

magis gaudet, eo plus intelligit, hoc est, eo majorem in affectus habet

potentiam, et eo minus ab affectibus, qui mali sunt, patitur; atque adeo

ex eo, quod mens hoc amore divino, seu beatitudine gaudet, potestatem

habet libidines coercendi; et quia humana potentia ad coercendos

affectus in solo intellectu consistit; ergo nemo beatitudine gaudet,

quia affectus coercuit, sed contra potestas libidines coercendi ex ipsa

beatitudine oritur.

With regard to the Unitarians, it has been shamelessly asserted, that

I have denied them to be Christians. God forbid! For how should I know,

what the piety of the heart may be, or what quantum of error in the

understanding may consist with a saving faith in the intentions and

actual dispositions of the whole moral being in any one individual?

Never will God reject a soul that sincerely loves him: be his

speculative opinions what they may: and whether in any given instance

certain opinions, be they unbelief, or misbelief, are compatible with a

sincere love of God, God can only know.--But this I have said, and shall

continue to say: that if the doctrines, the sum of which I believe to

constitute the truth in Christ, be Christianity, then Unitarianism

is not, and vice versa: and that, in speaking theologically and

impersonally, i.e. of Psilanthropism and Theanthropism as schemes of

belief, without reference to individuals, who profess either the one or

the other, it will be absurd to use a different language as long as it

is the dictate of common sense, that two opposites cannot properly be

called by the same name. I should feel no offence if a Unitarian applied

the same to me, any more than if he were to say, that two and two being

four, four and four must be eight.

alla broton

ton men keneophrones auchai

ex agathon ebalon;

ton d’ au katamemphthent’ agan

ischun oikeion paresphalen kalon,

cheiros elkon opisso, thumos atolmos eon.

This has been my object, and this alone can be my defence--and O! that

with this my personal as well as my LITERARY LIFE might conclude!--the

unquenched desire I mean, not without the consciousness of having

earnestly endeavoured to kindle young minds, and to guard them against

the temptations of scorners, by showing that the scheme of Christianity,

as taught in the liturgy and homilies of our Church, though not

discoverable by human reason, is yet in accordance with it; that link

follows link by necessary consequence; that Religion passes out of the

ken of Reason only where the eye of Reason has reached its own horizon;

and that Faith is then but its continuation: even as the day softens

away into the sweet twilight, and twilight, hushed and breathless,

steals into the darkness. It is night, sacred night! the upraised eye

views only the starry heaven which manifests itself alone: and the

outward beholding is fixed on the sparks twinkling in the awful depth,

though suns of other worlds, only to preserve the soul steady and

collected in its pure act of inward adoration to the great I AM, and to

the filial WORD that re-affirmeth it from eternity to eternity, whose

choral echo is the universe.

THEO, MONO, DOXA.

FOOTNOTES

[Footnote 1: The authority of Milton and Shakespeare may be usefully pointed out

to young authors. In the Comus and other early poems of Milton there

is a superfluity of double epithets; while in the Paradise Lost we find

very few, in the Paradise Regained scarce any. The same remark holds

almost equally true of the Love’s Labour Lost, Romeo and Juliet, Venus

and Adonis, and Lucrece, compared with the Lear, Macbeth, Othello, and

Hamlet of our great Dramatist. The rule for the admission of double

epithets seems to be this: either that they should be already

denizens of our language, such as blood-stained, terror-stricken,

self-applauding: or when a new epithet, or one found in books only, is

hazarded, that it, at least, be one word, not two words made one by mere

virtue of the printers hyphen. A language which, like the English,

is almost without cases, is indeed in its very genius unfitted for

compounds. If a writer, every time a compounded word suggests itself to

him, would seek for some other mode of expressing the same sense, the

chances are always greatly in favour of his finding a better word.

Ut tanquam scopulum sic fugias insolens verbum, is the wise advice of

Caesar to the Roman Orators, and the precept applies with double force

to the writers in our own language. But it must not be forgotten,

that the same Caesar wrote a Treatise for the purpose of reforming

the ordinary language by bringing it to a greater accordance with the

principles of logic or universal grammar.]

[Footnote 2: See the criticisms on the Ancient Mariner, in the Monthly and

Critical Reviews of the first volume of the Lyrical Ballads.]

[Footnote 3: This is worthy of ranking as a maxim, (regula maxima,) of

criticism. Whatever is translatable in other and simpler words of the

same language, without loss of sense or dignity, is bad. N.B.--By

dignity I mean the absence of ludicrous and debasing associations.]

[Footnote 4: The Christ’s Hospital phrase, not for holidays altogether,

but for those on which the boys are permitted to go beyond the

precincts of the school.]

[Footnote 5: I remember a ludicrous instance in the poem of a young

tradesman:

“No more will I endure love’s pleasing pain,

Or round my heart’s leg tie his galling chain.”]

[Footnote 6: Cowper’s Task was published some time before the Sonnets

of Mr. Bowles; but I was not familiar with it till many years

afterwards. The vein of satire which runs through that excellent poem,

together with the sombre hue of its religious opinions, would probably,

at that time, have prevented its laying any strong hold on my

affections. The love of nature seems to have led Thomson to a cheerful

religion; and a gloomy religion to have led Cowper to a love of nature.

The one would carry his fellow-men along with him into nature; the

other flies to nature from his fellow-men. In chastity of diction

however, and the harmony of blank verse, Cowper leaves Thomson

immeasurably below him; yet still I feel the latter to have been the

born poet.]

[Footnote 7: SONNET I

Pensive at eve, on the hard world I mused,

And m poor heart was sad; so at the Moon

I gazed and sighed, and sighed; for ah how soon

Eve saddens into night! mine eyes perused

With tearful vacancy the dampy grass

That wept and glitter’d in the paly ray

And I did pause me on my lonely way

And mused me on the wretched ones that pass

O’er the bleak heath of sorrow. But alas!

Most of myself I thought! when it befel,

That the soothe spirit of the breezy wood

Breath’d in mine ear: “All this is very well,

But much of one thing, is for no thing good.”

Oh my poor heart’s inexplicable swell!

SONNET II

Oh I do love thee, meek Simplicity!

For of thy lays the lulling simpleness

Goes to my heart, and soothes each small distress,

Distress the small, yet haply great to me.

’Tis true on Lady Fortune’s gentlest pad

I amble on; and yet I know not why

So sad I am! but should a friend and I

Frown, pout and part, then I am very sad.

And then with sonnets and with sympathy

My dreamy bosom’s mystic woes I pall:

Now of my false friend plaining plaintively,

Now raving at mankind in general;

But whether sad or fierce, ’tis simple all,

All very simple, meek Simplicity!

SONNET III

And this reft house is that, the which he built,

Lamented Jack! and here his malt he pil’d,

Cautious in vain! these rats, that squeak so wild,

Squeak not unconscious of their father’s guilt.

Did he not see her gleaming thro’ the glade!

Belike ’twas she, the maiden all forlorn.

What the she milk no cow with crumpled horn,

Yet, aye she haunts the dale where erst she stray’d:

And aye, beside her stalks her amorous knight

Still on his thighs their wonted brogues are worn,

And thro’ those brogues, still tatter’d and betorn,

His hindward charms gleam an unearthly white.

Ah! thus thro’ broken clouds at night’s high noon

Peeps to fair fragments forth the full-orb’d harvest-moon!

The following anecdote will not be wholly out of place here, and may

perhaps amuse the reader. An amateur performer in verse expressed to a

common friend a strong desire to be introduced to me, but hesitated in

accepting my friend’s immediate offer, on the score that “he was, he

must acknowledge, the author of a confounded severe epigram on my

Ancient Mariner, which had given me great pain.” I assured my friend

that, if the epigram was a good one, it would only increase my desire

to become acquainted with the author, and begged to hear it recited:

when, to my no less surprise than amusement, it proved to be one which

I had myself some time before written and inserted in the “Morning

Post,” to wit--

To the Author of the Ancient Mariner.

Your poem must eternal be,

Dear sir! it cannot fail,

For ’tis incomprehensible,

And without head or tail.]

[Footnote 8: --

Of old things all are over old,

Of good things none are good enough;--

We’ll show that we can help to frame

A world of other stuff.

I too will have my kings, that take

From me the sign of life and death:

Kingdoms shall shift about, like clouds,

Obedient to my breath.

Wordsworth’s Rob Roy.--Poet. Works, vol. III. p. 127.]

[Footnote 9: Pope was under the common error of his age, an error far

from being sufficiently exploded even at the present day. It consists

(as I explained at large, and proved in detail in my public lectures,)

in mistaking for the essentials of the Greek stage certain rules, which

the wise poets imposed upon themselves, in order to render all the

remaining parts of the drama consistent with those, that had been

forced upon them by circumstances independent of their will; out of

which circumstances the drama itself arose. The circumstances in the

time of Shakespeare, which it was equally out of his power to alter,

were different, and such as, in my opinion, allowed a far wider sphere,

and a deeper and more human interest. Critics are too apt to forget,

that rules are but means to an end; consequently, where the ends are

different, the rules must be likewise so. We must have ascertained what

the end is, before we can determine what the rules ought to be. Judging

under this impression, I did not hestitate to declare my full

conviction, that the consummate judgment of Shakespeare, not only in

the general construction, but in all the details, of his dramas,

impressed me with greater wonder, than even the might of his genius, or

the depth of his philosophy. The substance of these lectures I hope

soon to publish; and it is but a debt of justice to myself and my

friends to notice, that the first course of lectures, which differed

from the following courses only, by occasionally varying the

illustrations of the same thoughts, was addressed to very numerous, and

I need not add, respectable audiences at the Royal institution, before

Mr. Schlegel gave his lectures on the same subjects at Vienna.]

[Footnote 10: In the course of one of my Lectures, I had occasion to

point out the almost faultless position and choice of words, in Pope’s

original compositions, particularly in his Satires and moral Essays,

for the purpose of comparing them with his translation of Homer, which,

I do not stand alone in regarding, as the main source of our

pseudo-poetic diction. And this, by the bye, is an additional

confirmation of a remark made, I believe, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, that

next to the man who forms and elevates the taste of the public, he that

corrupts it, is commonly the greatest genius. Among other passages, I

analyzed sentence by sentence, and almost word by word, the popular

lines,

As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night, etc.

(Iliad. B. viii.)

much in the same way as has been since done, in an excellent article on

Chalmers’s British Poets in the Quarterly Review. The impression on the

audience in general was sudden and evident: and a number of enlightened

and highly educated persons, who at different times afterwards addressed

me on the subject, expressed their wonder, that truth so obvious should

not have struck them before; but at the same time acknowledged--(so much

had they been accustomed, in reading poetry, to receive pleasure from

the separate images and phrases successively, without asking themselves

whether the collective meaning was sense or nonsense)--that they might

in all probability have read the same passage again twenty times with

undiminished admiration, and without once reflecting, that

astra phaeinaen amphi selaenaen

phainet aritretea--

(that is, the stars around, or near the full moon, shine pre-eminently

bright) conveys a just and happy image of a moonlight sky: while it is

difficult to determine whether, in the lines,

Around her throne the vivid planets roll,

And stars unnumber’d gild the glowing pole,

the sense or the diction be the more absurd. My answer was; that, though

I had derived peculiar advantages from my school discipline, and

though my general theory of poetry was the same then as now, I had yet

experienced the same sensations myself, and felt almost as if I had

been newly couched, when, by Mr. Wordsworth’s conversation, I had been

induced to re-examine with impartial strictness Gray’s celebrated Elegy.

I had long before detected the defects in The Bard; but the Elegy I had

considered as proof against all fair attacks; and to this day I cannot

read either without delight, and a portion of enthusiasm. At all events,

whatever pleasure I may have lost by the clearer perception of the

faults in certain passages, has been more than repaid to me by the

additional delight with which I read the remainder.

Another instance in confirmation of these remarks occurs to me in the

Faithful Shepherdess. Seward first traces Fletcher’s lines;

More foul diseases than e’er yet the hot

Sun bred thro’ his burnings, while the dog

Pursues the raging lion, throwing the fog

And deadly vapour from his angry breath,

Filling the lower world with plague and death,

to Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar,

The rampant lion hunts he fast

With dogs of noisome breath;

Whose baleful barking brings, in haste,

Pine, plagues, and dreary death!

He then takes occasion to introduce Homer’s simile of the appearance of

Achilles’ mail to Priam compared with the Dog Star; literally thus--

“For this indeed is most splendid, but it was made an evil sign, and

brings many a consuming disease to wretched mortals.” Nothing can be

more simple as a description, or more accurate as a simile; which, (says

Seward,) is thus finely translated by Mr. Pope

Terrific Glory! for his burning breath

Taints the red air with fevers, plagues, and death!

Now here--(not to mention the tremendous bombast)--the Dog Star, so

called, is turned into a real dog, a very odd dog, a fire, fever,

plague, and death-breathing, red, air-tainting dog: and the whole

visual likeness is lost, while the likeness in the effects is rendered

absurd by the exaggeration. In Spenser and Fletcher the thought is

justifiable; for the images are at least consistent, and it was the

intention of the writers to mark the seasons by this allegory of

visualized puns.]

[Footnote 11: Especially in this age of personality, this age of

literary and political gossiping, when the meanest insects are

worshipped with a sort of Egyptian superstition, if only the brainless

head be atoned for by the sting of personal malignity in the

tail;--when the most vapid satires have become the objects of a keen

public interest, purely from the number of contemporary characters

named in the patch-work notes, (which possess, however, the comparative

merit of being more poetical than the text,) and because, to increase

the stimulus, the author has sagaciously left his own name for whispers

and conjectures.]

[Footnote 12: If it were worth while to mix together, as ingredients,

half the anecdotes which I either myself know to be true, or which I

have received from men incapable of intentional falsehood, concerning

the characters, qualifications, and motives of our anonymous critics,

whose decisions are oracles for our reading public; I might safely

borrow the words of the apocryphal Daniel; “Give me leave, O SOVEREIGN

PUBLIC, and I shall slay this dragon without sward or staff.” For the

compound would be as the “pitch, and fat, and hair, which Daniel took,

and did seethe them together, and made lumps thereof; this he put in

the dragon’s mouth, and so the dragon burst in sunder; and Daniel said,

LO, THESE ARE THE GODS YE WORSHIP.”]

[Footnote 13: This is one instance among many of deception, by the

telling the half of a fact, and omitting the other half, when it is

from their mutual counteraction and neutralization, that the whole

truth arises, as a tertium aliquid different from either. Thus in

Dryden’s famous line

Great wit (meaning genius) to madness sure is near allied.

Now if the profound sensibility, which is doubtless one of the

components of genius, were alone considered, single and unbalanced, it

might be fairly described as exposing the individual to a greater

chance of mental derangement; but then a more than usual rapidity of

association, a more than usual power of passing from thought to

thought, and image to image, is a component equally essential; and to

the due modification of each by the other the genius itself consists;

so that it would be just as fair to describe the earth, as in imminent

danger of exorbitating, or of falling into the sun, according as the

assertor of the absurdity confined his attention either to the

projectile or to the attractive force exclusively.]

[Footnote 14: For as to the devotees of the circulating libraries, I

dare not compliment their pass-time, or rather kill-time, with the name

of reading. Call it rather a sort of beggarly day-dreaming, during

which the mind of the dreamer furnishes for itself nothing but

laziness, and a little mawkish sensibility; while the whole materiel

and imagery of the doze is supplied ab extra by a sort of mental camera

obscura manufactured at the printing office, which pro tempore fixes,

reflects, and transmits the moving phantasms of one mans delirium, so

as to people the barrenness of a hundred other brains afflicted with

the same trance or suspension of all common sense and all definite

purpose. We should therefore transfer this species of amusement--(if

indeed those can be said to retire a musis, who were never in their

company, or relaxation be attributable to those, whose bows are never

bent)--from the genus, reading, to that comprebensive class

characterized by the power of reconciling the two contrary yet

coexisting propensities of human nature, namely, indulgence of sloth,

and hatred of vacancy. In addition to novels and tales of chivalry to

prose or rhyme, (by which last I mean neither rhythm nor metre) this

genus comprises as its species, gaming, swinging, or swaying on a chair

or gate; spitting over a bridge; smoking; snuff-taking; tete-a-tete

quarrels after dinner between husband and wife; conning word by word

all the advertisements of a daily newspaper in a public house on a

rainy day, etc. etc. etc.]

[Footnote 15: Ex. gr. Pediculos e capillis excerptos in arenam jacere

incontusos; eating of unripe fruit; gazing on the clouds, and (in

genere) on movable things suspended in the air; riding among a

multitude of camels; frequent laughter; listening to a series of jests

and humorous anecdotes,--as when (so to modernize the learned Saracen’s

meaning) one man’s droll story of an Irishman inevitably occasions

another’s droll story of a Scotchman, which again, by the same sort of

conjunction disjunctive, leads to some etourderie of a Welshman, and

that again to some sly hit of a Yorkshireman;--the habit of reading

tomb-stones in church-yards, etc. By the bye, this catalogue, strange

as it may appear, is not insusceptible of a sound psychological

commentary.]

[Footnote 16: I have ventured to call it unique; not only because I

know no work of the kind in our language, (if we except a few chapters

of the old translation of Froissart)--none, which uniting the charms of

romance and history, keeps the imagination so constantly on the wing,

and yet leaves so much for after reflection; but likewise, and chiefly,

because it is a compilation, which, in the various excellencies of

translation, selection, and arrangement, required and proves greater

genius in the compiler, as living in the present state of society, than

in the original composers.]

[Footnote 17: It is not easy to estimate the effects which the example

of a young man as highly distinguished for strict purity of disposition

and conduct, as for intellectual power and literary acquirements, may

produce on those of the same age with himself, especially on those of

similar pursuits and congenial minds. For many years, my opportunities

of intercourse with Mr. Southey have been rare, and at long intervals;

but I dwell with unabated pleasure on the strong and sudden, yet I

trust not fleeting, influence, which my moral being underwent on my

acquaintance with him at Oxford, whither I had gone at the commencement

of our Cambridge vacation on a visit to an old school-fellow. Not

indeed on my moral or religious principles, for they had never been

contaminated; but in awakening the sense of the duty and dignity of

making my actions accord with those principles, both in word and deed.

The irregularities only not universal among the young men of my

standing, which I always knew to be wrong, I then learned to feel as

degrading; learned to know that an opposite conduct, which was at that

time considered by us as the easy virtue of cold and selfish prudence,

might originate in the noblest emotions, in views the most

disinterested and imaginative. It is not however from grateful

recollections only, that I have been impelled thus to leave these my

deliberate sentiments on record; but in some sense as a debt of justice

to the man, whose name has been so often connected with mine for evil

to which he is a stranger. As a specimen I subjoin part of a note, from

The Beauties of the Anti-jacobin, in which, having previously informed

the public that I had been dishonoured at Cambridge for preaching

Deism, at a time when, for my youthful ardour in defence of

Christianity, I was decried as a bigot by the proselytes of French

phi-(or to speak more truly psi-)-losophy, the writer concludes with

these words; “since this time he has left his native country, commenced

citizen of the world, left his poor children fatherless, and his wife

destitute. Ex his disce his friends, LAMB and SOUTHEY.” With severest

truth it may be asserted, that it would not be easy to select two men

more exemplary in their domestic affections than those whose names were

thus printed at full length as in the same rank of morals with a

denounced infidel and fugitive, who had left his children fatherless

and his wife destitute! Is it surprising, that many good men remained

longer than perhaps they otherwise would have done adverse to a party,

which encouraged and openly rewarded the authors of such atrocious

calumnies? Qualis es, nescio; sed per quales agis, scio et doleo.]

[Footnote 18: In opinions of long continuance, and in which we have

never before been molested by a single doubt, to be suddenly convinced

of an error, is almost like being convicted of a fault. There is a

state of mind, which is the direct antithesis of that, which takes

place when we make a bull. The bull namely consists in the bringing her

two incompatible thoughts, with the sensation, but without the sense,

of their connection. The psychological condition, or that which

constitutes the possibility, of this state, being such disproportionate

vividness of two distant thoughts, as extinguishes or obscures the

consciousness of the intermediate images or conceptions, or wholly

abstracts the attention from them. Thus in the well known bull, “I was

a fine child, but they changed me:” the first conception expressed in

the word “I,” is that of personal identity--Ego contemplans: the second

expressed in the word “me,” is the visual image or object by which the

mind represents to itself its past condition, or rather, its personal

identity under the form in which it imagined itself previously to have

existed,--Ego contemplatus. Now the change of one visual image for

another involves in itself no absurdity, and becomes absurd only by its

immediate juxta-position with the fast thought, which is rendered

possible by the whole attention being successively absorbed to each

singly, so as not to notice the interjacent notion, changed, which by

its incongruity, with the first thought, I, constitutes the bull. Add

only, that this process is facilitated by the circumstance of the words

I, and me, being sometimes equivalent, and sometimes having a distinct

meaning; sometimes, namely, signifying the act of self-consciousness,

sometimes the external image in and by which the mind represents that

act to itself, the result and symbol of its individuality. Now suppose

the direct contrary state, and you will have a distinct sense of the

connection between two conceptions, without that sensation of such

connection which is supplied by habit. The man feels as if he were

standing on his head though he cannot but see that he is truly standing

on his feet. This, as a painful sensation, will of course have a

tendency to associate itself with him who occasions it; even as

persons, who have been by painful means restored from derangement, are

known to feel an involuntary dislike towards their physician.]

[Footnote 19: Without however the apprehensions attributed to the Pagan

reformer of the poetic republic. If we may judge from the preface to

the recent collection of his poems, Mr. W. would have answered with

Xanthias--

su d’ ouk edeisas ton huophon ton rhaematon,

kai tas apeilas; XAN, ou ma Di’, oud’ ephrontisa.--Ranae, 492-3.

And here let me hint to the authors of the numerous parodies, and

pretended imitations of Mr. Wordsworth’s style, that at once to conceal

and convey wit and wisdom in the semblance of folly and dulness, as is

done in the Clowns and Fools, nay even in the Dogberry, of our

Shakespeare, is doubtless a proof of genius, or at all events of

satiric talent; but that the attempt to ridicule a silly and childish

poem, by writing another still sillier and still more childish, can

only prove (if it prove any thing at all) that the parodist is a still

greater blockhead than the original writer, and, what is far worse, a

malignant coxcomb to boot. The talent for mimicry seems strongest where

the human race are most degraded. The poor, naked half human savages of

New Holland were found excellent mimics: and, in civilized society,

minds of the very lowest stamp alone satirize by copying. At least the

difference which must blend with and balance the likeness, in order to

constitute a just imitation, existing here merely in caricature,

detracts from the libeller’s heart, without adding an iota to the

credit of his understanding.]

[Footnote 20: --

The Butterfly the ancient Grecians made

The soul’s fair emblem, and its only name--

But of the soul, escaped the slavish trade

Of mortal life! For to this earthly frame

Ours is the reptile’s lot, much toil, much blame,

Manifold motions making little speed,

And to deform and kill the things whereon we feed.]

[Footnote 21: Mr. Wordsworth, even in his two earliest poems, The

Evening Walk and the Descriptive Sketches, is more free from this

latter defect than most of the young poets his contemporaries. It may

however be exemplified, together with the harsh and obscure

construction, in which he more often offended, in the following

lines:--

“’Mid stormy vapours ever driving by,

Where ospreys, cormorants, and herons cry;

Where hardly given the hopeless waste to cheer,

Denied the bread of life the foodful ear,

Dwindles the pear on autumn’s latest spray,

And apple sickens pale in summer’s ray;

Ev’n here content has fixed her smiling reign

With independence, child of high disdain.”

I hope, I need not say, that I have quoted these lines for no other

purpose than to make my meaning fully understood. It is to be regretted

that Mr. Wordsworth has not republished these two poems entire.]

[Footnote 22: This is effected either by giving to the one word a

general, and to the other an exclusive use; as “to put on the back” and

“to indorse;” or by an actual distinction of meanings, as “naturalist,”

and “physician;” or by difference of relation, as “I” and “Me” (each of

which the rustics of our different provinces still use in all the cases

singular of the first personal pronoun). Even the mere difference, or

corruption, in the pronunciation of the same word, if it have become

general, will produce a new word with a distinct signification; thus

“property” and “propriety;” the latter of which, even to the time of

Charles II was the written word for all the senses of both. There is a

sort of minim immortal among the animalcula infusoria, which has not

naturally either birth, or death, absolute beginning, or absolute end:

for at a certain period a small point appears on its back, which

deepens and lengthens till the creature divides into two, and the same

process recommences in each of the halves now become integral. This may

be a fanciful, but it is by no means a bad emblem of the formation of

words, and may facilitate the conception, how immense a nomenclature

may be organized from a few simple sounds by rational beings in a

social state. For each new application, or excitement of the same

sound, will call forth a different sensation, which cannot but affect

the pronunciation. The after recollections of the sound, without the

same vivid sensation, will modify it still further till at length all

trace of the original likeness is worn away.]

[Footnote 23: I ought to have added, with the exception of a single

sheet which I accidentally met with at the printer’s. Even from this

scanty specimen, I found it impossible to doubt the talent, or not to

admire the ingenuity, of the author. That his distinctions were for the

greater part unsatisfactory to my mind, proves nothing against their

accuracy; but it may possibly be serviceable to him, in case of a

second edition, if I take this opportunity of suggesting the query;

whether he may not have been occasionally misled, by having assumed, as

to me he appears to have done, the non-existence of any absolute

synonymes in our language? Now I cannot but think, that there are many

which remain for our posterity to distinguish and appropriate, and

which I regard as so much reversionary wealth in our mother tongue.

When two distinct meanings are confounded under one or more

words,--(and such must be the case, as sure as our knowledge is

progressive and of course imperfect)--erroneous consequences will be

drawn, and what is true in one sense of the word will be affirmed as

true in toto. Men of research, startled by the consequences, seek in

the things themselves--(whether in or out of the mind)--for a knowledge

of the fact, and having discovered the difference, remove the

equivocation either by the substitution of a new word, or by the

appropriation of one of the two or more words, which had before been

used promiscuously. When this distinction has been so naturalized and

of such general currency that the language does as it were think for

us--(like the sliding rule which is the mechanic’s safe substitute for

arithmetical knowledge)--we then say, that it is evident to common

sense. Common sense, therefore, differs in different ages. What was

born and christened in the Schools passes by degrees into the world at

large, and becomes the property of the market and the tea-table. At

least I can discover no other meaning of the term, common sense, if it

is to convey any specific difference from sense and judgment in genere,

and where it is not used scholastically for the universal reason. Thus

in the reign of Charles II the philosophic world was called to arms by

the moral sophisms of Hobbes, and the ablest writers exerted themselves

in the detection of an error, which a school-boy would now be able to

confute by the mere recollection, that compulsion and obligation

conveyed two ideas perfectly disparate, and that what appertained to

the one, had been falsely transferred to the other by a mere confusion

of terms.]

[Footnote 24: I here use the word idea in Mr. Hume’s sense on account

of its general currency amongst the English metaphysicians; though

against my own judgment, for I believe that the vague use of this word

has been the cause of much error and more confusion. The word, idea, in

its original sense as used by Pindar, Aristophanes, and in the Gospel

of St. Matthew, represented the visual abstraction of a distant object,

when we see the whole without distinguishing its parts. Plato adopted

it as a technical term, and as the antithesis to eidolon, or sensuous

image; the transient and perishable emblem, or mental word, of the

idea. Ideas themselves he considered as mysterious powers, living,

seminal, formative, and exempt from time. In this sense the word Idea

became the property of the Platonic school; and it seldom occurs in

Aristotle, without some such phrase annexed to it, as according to

Plato, or as Plato says. Our English writers to the end of the reign of

Charles II or somewhat later, employed it either in the original sense,

or Platonically, or in a sense nearly correspondent to our present use

of the substantive, Ideal; always however opposing it, more or less to

image, whether of present or absent objects. The reader will not be

displeased with the following interesting exemplification from Bishop

Jeremy Taylor. “St. Lewis the King sent Ivo Bishop of Chartres on an

embassy, and he told, that he met a grave and stately matron on the way

with a censer of fire in one band, and a vessel of water in the other;

and observing her to have a melancholy, religious, and phantastic

deportment and look, he asked her what those symbols meant, and what

she meant to do with her fire and water; she answered, My purpose is

with the fire to burn paradise, and with my water to quench the flames

of hell, that men may serve God purely for the love of God. But we

rarely meet with such spirits which love virtue so metaphysically as to

abstract her from all sensible compositions, and love the purity of the

idea.” Des Cartes having introduced into his philosophy the fanciful

hypothesis of material ideas, or certain configurations of the brain,

which were as so many moulds to the influxes of the external

world,--Locke adopted the term, but extended its signification to

whatever is the immediate object of the mind’s attention or

consciousness. Hume, distinguishing those representations which are

accompanied with a sense of a present object from those reproduced by

the mind itself, designated the former by impressions, and confined the

word idea to the latter.]

[Footnote 25: I am aware, that this word occurs neither in Johnson’s

Dictionary nor in any classical writer. But the word, to intend, which

Newton and others before him employ in this sense, is now so completely

appropriated to another meaning, that I could not use it without

ambiguity: while to paraphrase the sense, as by render intense, would

often break up the sentence and destroy that harmony of the position of

the words with the logical position of the thoughts, which is a beauty

in all composition, and more especially desirable in a close

philosophical investigation. I have therefore hazarded the word,

intensify: though, I confess, it sounds uncouth to my own ear.]

[Footnote 26: And Coxcombs vanquish Berkeley by a grin.]

[Footnote 27: Videlicet; Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Mode, each

consisting of three subdivisions. See Kritik der reinen Vernunft. See

too the judicious remarks on Locke and Hume.]

[Footnote 28: St. Luke x. 21.]

[Footnote 29: An American Indian with little variety of images, and a

still scantier stock of language, is obliged to turn his few words to

many purposes, by likenesses so clear and analogies so remote as to

give his language the semblance and character of lyric poetry

interspersed with grotesques. Something not unlike this was the case of

such men as Behmen and Fox with regard to the Bible. It was their sole

armoury of expressions, their only organ of thought.]

[Footnote 30: The following burlesque on the Fichtean Egoisnsus may,

perhaps, be amusing to the few who have studied the system, and to

those who are unacquainted with it, may convey as tolerable a likeness

of Fichte’s idealism as can be expected from an avowed caricature.

The Categorical Imperative, or the annunciation of the new Teutonic God,

EGOENKAIPAN: a dithyrambic ode, by QUERKOPF VON KLUBSTICK, Grammarian,

and Subrector in Gymmasic.

Eu! Dei vices gerens, ipse Divus,

(Speak English, Friend!) the God Imperativus,

Here on this market-cross aloud I cry:

I, I, I! I itself I!

The form and the substance, the what and the why,

The when and the where, and the low and the high,

The inside and outside, the earth and the sky,

I, you and he, and he, you and I,

All souls and all bodies are I itself I!

All I itself I!

(Fools! a truce with this starting!)

All my I! all my I!

He’s a heretic dog who but adds Betty Martin!

Thus cried the God with high imperial tone;

In robe of stiffest state, that scoffed at beauty,

A pronoun-verb imperative he shone--

Then substantive and plural-singular grown

He thus spake on! Behold in I alone

(For ethics boast a syntax of their own)

Or if in ye, yet as I doth depute ye,

In O! I, you, the vocative of duty!

I of the world’s whole Lexicon the root!

Of the whole universe of touch, sound, sight

The genitive and ablative to boot:

The accusative of wrong, the nominative of right,

And in all cases the case absolute!

Self-construed, I all other moods decline:

Imperative, from nothing we derive us;

Yet as a super-postulate of mine,

Unconstrued antecedence I assign

To X, Y, Z, the God Infinitivus!]

[Footnote 31: It would be an act of high and almost criminal injustice

to pass over in silence the name of Mr. Richard Saumarez, a gentleman

equally well known as a medical man and as a philanthropist, but who

demands notice on the present occasion as the author of “A new System

of Physiology” in two volumes octavo, published 1797; and in 1812 of

“An Examination of the natural and artificial Systems of Philosophy

which now prevail” in one volume octavo, entitled, “The Principles of

physiological and physical Science.” The latter work is not quite equal

to the former in style or arrangement; and there is a greater necessity

of distinguishing the principles of the author’s philosophy from his

conjectures concerning colour, the atmospheric matter, comets, etc.

which, whether just or erroneous, are by no means necessary

consequences of that philosophy. Yet even in this department of this

volume, which I regard as comparatively the inferior work, the

reasonings by which Mr. Saumarez invalidates the immanence of an

infinite power in any finite substance are the offspring of no common

mind; and the experiment on the expansibility of the air is at least

plausible and highly ingenious. But the merit, which will secure both

to the book and to the writer a high and honourable name with

posterity, consists in the masterly force of reasoning, and the

copiousness of induction, with which he has assailed, and (in my

opinion) subverted the tyranny of the mechanic system in physiology;

established not only the existence of final causes, but their necessity

and efficiency to every system that merits the name of philosophical;

and, substituting life and progressive power for the contradictory

inert force, has a right to be known and remembered as the first

instaurator of the dynamic philosophy in England. The author’s views,

as far as concerns himself, are unborrowed and completely his own, as

he neither possessed nor do his writings discover, the least

acquaintance with the works of Kant, in which the germs of the

philosophy exist: and his volumes were published many years before the

full development of these germs by Schelling. Mr. Saumarez’s detection

of the Braunonian system was no light or ordinary service at the time;

and I scarcely remember in any work on any subject a confutation so

thoroughly satisfactory. It is sufficient at this time to have stated

the fact; as in the preface to the work, which I have already announced

on the Logos, I have exhibited in detail the merits of this writer, and

genuine philosopher, who needed only have taken his foundation somewhat

deeper and wider to have superseded a considerable part of my labours.]

[Footnote 32: But for sundry notes on Shakespeare, and other pieces

which have fallen in my way, I should have deemed it unnecessary to

observe; that discourse here, or elsewhere does not mean what we now

call discoursing; but the discursion of the mind, the processes of

generalization and subsumption, of deduction and conclusion. Thus,

Philosophy has hitherto been discursive; while Geometry is always and

essentially intuitive.]

[Footnote 33: Revelation xx. 3.]

[Footnote 34: See Laing’s History of Scotland.--Walter Scott’s bards,

ballads, etc.]

[Footnote 35: Thus organization, and motion are regarded as from God,

not in God.]

[Footnote 36: Job, chap. xxviii.]

[Footnote 37: Wherever A=B, and A is not=B, are equally demonstrable,

the premise in each undeniable, the induction evident, and the

conclusion legitimate--the result must be, either that contraries can

both be true, (which is absurd,) or that the faculty and forms of

reasoning employed are inapplicable to the subject--i.e. that there is

a metabasis eis allo genos. Thus, the attributes of Space and time

applied to Spirit are heterogeneous--and the proof of this is, that by

admitting them explicite or implicite contraries may be demonstrated

true--i.e. that the same, taken in the same sense, is true and not

true.--That the world had a beginning in Time and a bound in Space; and

That the world had not a beginning and has no limit;--That a self

originating act is, and is not possible, are instances.]

[Footnote 38: To those, who design to acquire the language of a country

in the country itself, it may be useful, if I mention the incalculable

advantage which I derived from learning all the words, that could

possibly be so learned, with the objects before me, and without the

intermediation of the English terms. It was a regular part of my

morning studies for the first six weeks of my residence at Ratzeburg,

to accompany the good and kind old pastor, with whom I lived, from the

cellar to the roof, through gardens, farmyard, etc. and to call every,

the minutest, thing by its German name. Advertisements, farces, jest

books, and the conversation of children while I was at play with them,

contributed their share to a more home-like acquaintance with the

language than I could have acquired from works of polite literature

alone, or even from polite society. There is a passage of hearty sound

sense in Luther’s German Letter on interpretation, to the translation

of which I shall prefix, for the sake of those who read the German, yet

are not likely to have dipped often in the massive folios of this

heroic reformer, the simple, sinewy, idiomatic words of the original.

“Denn man muss nicht die Buchstaben in der Lateinischen Sprache fragen

wie man soll Deutsch reden: sondern man muss die Mutter in Hause, die

Kinder auf den Gassen, den gemeinen Mann auf dem Markte, darum fragen:

und denselbigen auf das Maul sehen wie sie reden, und darnach

dolmetschen. So verstehen sie es denn, und merken dass man Deutsch mit

ihnen redet.”

TRANSLATION:

For one must not ask the letters in the Latin tongue, how one ought to

speak German; but one must ask the mother in the house, the children in

the lanes and alleys, the common man in the market, concerning this;

yea, and look at the moves of their mouths while they are talking, and

thereafter interpret. They understand you then, and mark that one talks

German with them.]

[Footnote 39: This paraphrase, written about the time of Charlemagne,

is by no means deficient in occasional passages of considerable poetic

merit. There is a flow, and a tender enthusiasm in the following lines

(at the conclusion of Chapter XI.) which, even in the translation will

not, I flatter myself, fail to interest the reader. Ottfried is

describing the circumstances immediately following the birth of our

Lord.

She gave with joy her virgin breast;

She hid it not, she bared the breast,

Which suckled that divinest babe!

Blessed, blessed were the breasts

Which the Saviour infant kiss’d;

And blessed, blessed was the mother

Who wrapp’d his limbs in swaddling clothes,

Singing placed him on her lap,

Hung o’er him with her looks of love,

And sooth’d him with a lulling motion.

Blessed; for she shelter’d him

From the damp and chilling air;

Blessed, blessed! for she lay

With such a babe in one blest bed,

Close as babes and mothers lie!

Blessed, blessed evermore,

With her virgin lips she kiss’d,

With her arms, and to her breast

She embraced the babe divine,

Her babe divine the virgin mother!

There lives not on this ring of earth

A mortal, that can sing her praise.

Mighty mother, virgin pure,

In the darkness and the night

For us she bore the heavenly Lord!

Most interesting is it to consider the effect, when the feelings are

wrought above the natural pitch by the belief of something mysterious,

while all the images are purely natural. Then it is, that religion and

poetry strike deepest.]

[Footnote 40: Lord Grenville has lately re-asserted (in the House of

Lords) the imminent danger of a revolution in the earlier part of the

war against France. I doubt not, that his Lordship is sincere; and it

must be flattering to his feelings to believe it. But where are the

evidences of the danger, to which a future historian can appeal? Or

must he rest on an assertion? Let me be permitted to extract a passage

on the subject from The Friend. “I have said that to withstand the

arguments of the lawless, the anti-Jacobins proposed to suspend the

law, and by the interposition of a particular statute to eclipse the

blessed light of the universal sun, that spies and informers might

tyrannize and escape in the ominous darkness. Oh! if these mistaken

men, intoxicated with alarm and bewildered by that panic of property,

which they themselves were the chief agents in exciting, had ever lived

in a country where there really existed a general disposition to change

and rebellion! Had they ever travelled through Sicily; or through

France at the first coming on of the revolution; or even alas! through

too many of the provinces of a sister island; they could not but have

shrunk from their own declarations concerning the state of feeling and

opinion at that time predominant throughout Great Britain. There was a

time--(Heaven grant that that time may have passed by!)--when by

crossing a narrow strait, they might have learned the true symptoms of

approaching danger, and have secured themselves from mistaking the

meetings and idle rant of such sedition, as shrank appalled from the

sight of a constable, for the dire murmuring and strange consternation

which precedes the storm or earthquake of national discord. Not only in

coffee-houses and public theatres, but even at the tables of the

wealthy, they would have heard the advocates of existing Government

defend their cause in the language and with the tone of men, who are

conscious that they are in a minority. But in England, when the alarm

was at its highest, there was not a city, no, not a town or village, in

which a man suspected of holding democratic principles could move

abroad without receiving some unpleasant proof of the hatred in which

his supposed opinions were held by the great majority of the people;

and the only instances of popular excess and indignation were on the

side of the government and the established church. But why need I

appeal to these invidious facts? Turn over the pages of history and

seek for a single instance of a revolution having been effected without

the concurrence of either the nobles, or the ecclesiastics, or the

monied classes, in any country, in which the influences of property had

ever been predominant, and where the interests of the proprietors were

interlinked! Examine the revolution of the Belgic provinces under

Philip II; the civil wars of France in the preceding generation; the

history of the American revolution, or the yet more recent events in

Sweden and in Spain; and it will be scarcely possible not to perceive

that in England from 1791 to the peace of Amiens there were neither

tendencies to confederacy nor actual confederacies, against which the

existing laws had not provided both sufficient safeguards and an ample

punishment. But alas! the panic of property had been struck in the

first instance for party purposes; and when it became general, its

propagators caught it themselves and ended in believing their own lie;

even as our bulls to Borrowdale sometimes run mad with the echo of

their own bellowing. The consequences were most injurious. Our

attention was concentrated on a monster, which could not survive the

convulsions, in which it had been brought forth,--even the enlightened

Burke himself too often talking and reasoning, as if a perpetual and

organized anarchy had been a possible thing! Thus while we were warring

against French doctrines, we took little heed whether the means by

which we attempted to overthrow them, were not likely to aid and

augment the far more formidable evil of French ambition. Like children

we ran away from the yelping of a cur, and took shelter at the heels of

a vicious war horse.” (Vol. II. Essay i. p. 21, 4th edit.)]

[Footnote 41: I seldom think of the murder of this illustrious Prince

without recollecting the lines of Valerius Flaccus:

------super ipsius ingens

Instat fama viri, virtusque haud laeta tyranno;

Ergo anteire metus, juvenemque exstinguere pergit.

Argonaut, I. 29.]

[Footnote 42: --

Theara de kai ton chaena kai taen dorkada,

Kai ton lagoon, kai to ton tauron genos.

Manuel Phile, De Animal. Proprietat. sect. I. i. 12.]

[Footnote 43: Paradise Regained. Book IV. I. 261.]

[Footnote 44: Vita e Costumi di Dante.]

[Footnote 45: TRANSLATION: “With the greatest possible solicitude avoid

authorship. Too early or immoderately employed, it makes the head waste

and the heart empty; even were there no other worse consequences. A

person, who reads only to print, to all probability reads amiss; and

he, who sends away through the pen and the press every thought, the

moment it occurs to him, will in a short time have sent all away, and

will become a mere journeyman of the printing-office, a compositor.”

To which I may add from myself, that what medical physiologists affirm

of certain secretions applies equally to our thoughts; they too must be

taken up again into the circulation, and be again and again re-secreted

to order to ensure a healthful vigour, both to the mind and to its

intellectual offspring.]

[Footnote 46: This distinction between transcendental and transcendent

is observed by our elder divines and philosophers, whenever they

express themselves scholastically. Dr. Johnson indeed has confounded

the two words; but his own authorities do not bear him out. Of this

celebrated dictionary I will venture to remark once for all, that I

should suspect the man of a morose disposition who should speak of it

without respect and gratitude as a most instructive and entertaining

book, and hitherto, unfortunately, an indispensable book; but I

confess, that I should be surprised at hearing from a philosophic and

thorough scholar any but very qualified praises of it, as a dictionary.

I am not now alluding to the number of genuine words omitted; for this

is (and perhaps to a greater extent) true, as Mr. Wakefield has

noticed, of our best Greek Lexicons, and this too after the successive

labours of so many giants in learning. I refer at present both to

omissions and commissions of a more important nature. What these are,

me saltem judice, will be stated at full in The Friend, re-published

and completed.

I had never heard of the correspondence between Wakefield and Fox till

I saw the account of it this morning (16th September 1815) in the

Monthly Review. I was not a little gratified at finding, that Mr.

Wakefield had proposed to himself nearly the same plan for a Greek and

English Dictionary, which I had formed, and began to execute, now ten

years ago. But far, far more grieved am I, that he did not live to

complete it. I cannot but think it a subject of most serious regret,

that the same heavy expenditure, which is now employing in the

republication of STEPHANUS augmented, had not been applied to a new

Lexicon on a more philosophical plan, with the English, German, and

French synonymes as well as the Latin. In almost every instance the

precise individual meaning might be given in an English or German word;

whereas in Latin we must too often be contented with a mere general and

inclusive term. How indeed can it be otherwise, when we attempt to

render the most copious language of the world, the most admirable for

the fineness of its distinctions, into one of the poorest and most

vague languages? Especially when we reflect on the comparative number

of the works, still extant, written while the Greek and Latin were

living languages. Were I asked what I deemed the greatest and most

unmixed benefit, which a wealthy individual, or an association of

wealthy individuals could bestow on their country and on mankind, I

should not hesitate to answer, “a philosophical English dictionary;

with the Greek, Latin, German, French, Spanish, and Italian synonymes,

and with correspondent indexes.” That the learned languages might

thereby be acquired, better, in half the time, is but a part, and not

the most important part, of the advantages which would accrue from such

a work. O! if it should be permitted by Providence, that without

detriment to freedom and independence our government might be enabled

to become more than a committee for war and revenue! There was a time,

when every thing was to be done by Government. Have we not flown off to

the contrary extreme?]

[Footnote 47: April, 1825. If I did not see it with my own eyes, I

should not believe that I had been guilty of so many hydrostatic Bulls

as bellow in this unhappy allegory or string of metaphors! How a river

was to travel up hill from a vale far inward, over the intervening

mountains, Morpheus, the Dream weaver, can alone unriddle. I am ashamed

and humbled. S. T. Coleridge.]

[Footnote 48: Ennead, III. 8. 3. The force of the Greek sunienai is

imperfectly expressed by “understand;” our own idiomatic phrase “to go

along with me” comes nearest to it. The passage, that follows, full of

profound sense, appears to me evidently corrupt; and in fact no writer

more wants, better deserves, or is less likely to obtain, a new and

more correct edition-ti oun sunienai; oti to genomenon esti theama

emon, siopaesis (mallem, theama, emon sioposaes,) kai physei genomenon

theoraema, kai moi genomenae ek theorias taes odi, taen physin echein

philotheamona uparkei. (mallem, kai moi hae genomenae ek theorias

autaes odis). “What then are we to understand? That whatever is

produced is an intuition, I silent; and that, which is thus generated,

is by its nature a theorem, or form of contemplation; and the birth;

which results to me from this contemplation, attains to have a

contemplative nature.” So Synesius:

‘Odis hiera

‘Arraeta gona

The after comparison of the process of the natura naturans with that of

the geometrician is drawn from the very heart of philosophy.]

[Footnote 49: This is happily effected in three lines by Synesius, in

his THIRD HYMN:

‘En kai Pan’ta--(taken by itself) is Spinozism.

‘En d’ ’Apan’ton--a mere Anima Mundi.

‘En te pro panton--is mechanical Theism.

But unite all three, and the result is the Theism of Saint Paul and

Christianity. Synesius was censured for his doctrine of the

pre-existence of the soul; but never, that I can find, arraigned or

deemed heretical for his Pantheism, though neither Giordano Bruno, nor

Jacob Behmen ever avowed it more broadly.

Mystas de Noos,

Ta te kai ta legei,

Buthon arraeton

Amphichoreuon.

Su to tikton ephus,

Su to tiktomenon;

Su to photizon,

Su to lampomenon;

Su to phainomenon,

Su to kryptomenon

Idiais augais.

‘En kai panta,

‘En kath’ heauto,

Kai dia panton.

Pantheism is therefore not necessarily irreligious or heretical; though

it may be taught atheistically. Thus Spinoza would agree with Synesius

in calling God Physis en Noerois, the Nature in Intelligences; but he

could not subscribe to the preceding Nous kai noeros, i.e. Himself

Intelligence and intelligent.

In this biographical sketch of my literary life I may be excused, if I

mention here, that I had translated the eight Hymns of Synesius from

the Greek into English Anacreontics before my fifteenth year.]

[Footnote 50: See Schell. Abhandl. zur Erlaeuter. des Id. der

Wissenschafslehre.]

[Footnote 51: Des Cartes, Diss. de Methodo.]

[Footnote 52: The impossibility of an absolute thing (substantia unica)

as neither genus, species, nor individuum: as well as its utter

unfitness for the fundamental position of a philosophic system, will be

demonstrated in the critique on Spinozism in the fifth treatise of my

Logosophia.]

[Footnote 53: It is most worthy of notice, that in the first revelation

of himself, not confined to individuals; indeed in the very first

revelation of his absolute being, Jehovah at the same time revealed the

fundamental truth of all philosophy, which must either commence with

the absolute, or have no fixed commencement; that is, cease to be

philosophy. I cannot but express my regret, that in the equivocal use

of the word that, for in that, or because, our admirable version has

rendered the passage susceptible of a degraded interpretation in the

mind of common readers or hearers, as if it were a mere reproof to an

impertinent question, I am what I am, which might be equally affirmed

of himself by any existent being.

The Cartesian Cogito ergo sum is objectionable, because either the

Cogito is used extra gradum, and then it is involved to the sum and is

tautological; or it is taken as a particular mode or dignity, and then

it is subordinated to the sum as the species to the genus, or rather as

a particular modification to the subject modified; and not pre-

ordinated as the arguments seem to require. For Cogito is Sum Cogitans.

This is clear by the inevidence of the converse. Cogitat, ergo est is

true, because it is a mere application of the logical rule: Quicquid in

genere est, est et in specie. Est (cogitans), ergo est. It is a cherry

tree; therefore it is a tree. But, est ergo cogitat, is illogical: for

quod est in specie, non NBCESSARIO in genere est. It may be true. I

hold it to be true, that quicquid vere est, est per veram sui

affirmationem; but it is a derivative, not an immediate truth. Here

then we have, by anticipation, the distinction between the conditional

finite! (which, as known in distinct consciousness by occasion of

experience, is called by Kant’s followers the empirical!) and the

absolute I AM, and likewise the dependence or rather the inherence of

the former in the latter; in whom “we live, and move, and have our

being,” as St. Paul divinely asserts, differing widely from the Theists

of the mechanic school (as Sir J. Newton, Locke, and others) who must

say from whom we had our being, and with it life and the powers of

life.]

[Footnote 54: TRANSLATION. “Hence it is clear, from what cause many

reject the notion of the continuous and the infinite. They take,

namely, the words irrepresentable and impossible in one and the same

meaning; and, according to the forms of sensuous evidence, the notion

of the continuous and the infinite is doubtless impossible. I am not

now pleading the cause of these laws, which not a few schools have

thought proper to explode, especially the former (the law of

continuity). But it is of the highest importance to admonish the

reader, that those, who adopt so perverted a mode of reasoning, are

under a grievous error. Whatever opposes the formal principles of the

understanding and the reason is confessedly impossible; but not

therefore that, which is therefore not amenable to the forms of

sensuous evidence, because it is exclusively an object of pure

intellect. For this non-coincidence of the sensuous and the

intellectual (the nature of which I shall presently lay open) proves

nothing more, but that the mind cannot always adequately represent to

the concrete, and transform into distinct images, abstract notions

derived from the pure intellect. But this contradiction, which is in

itself merely subjective (i.e. an incapacity in the nature of man), too

often passes for an incongruity or impossibility in the object (i.e.

the notions themselves), and seduces the incautious to mistake the

limitations of the human faculties for the limits of things, as they

really exist.”

I take this occasion to observe, that here and elsewhere Kant uses the

term intuition, and the verb active (intueri Germanice anschauen) for

which we have unfortunately no correspondent word, exclusively for that

which can be represented in space and time. He therefore consistently

and rightly denies the possibility of intellectual intuitions. But as I

see no adequate reason for this exclusive sense of the term, I have

reverted to its wider signification, authorized by our elder

theologians and metaphysicians, according to whom the term comprehends

all truths known to us without a medium.

From Kant’s Treatise De mundi sensibilis et intelligibilis forma et

principiis. 1770.]

[Footnote 55: Franc. Baconis de Verulam, NOVUM ORGANUM.]

[Footnote 56: This phrase, a priori, is in common, most grossly

misunderstood, and as absurdity burdened on it, which it does not

deserve. By knowledge a priori, we do not mean, that we can know

anything previously to experience, which would be a contradiction in

terms; but that having once known it by occasion of experience (that

is, something acting upon us from without) we then know, that it must

have existed, or the experience itself would have been impossible. By

experience only now, that I have eyes; but then my reason convinces me,

that I must have had eyes in order to the experience.]

[Footnote 57: Jer. Taylor’s Via Pacis.]

[Footnote 58: Par. Lost. Book V. I. 469.]

[Footnote 59: Leibnitz. Op. T. II. P. II. p. 53.--T. III. p. 321.]

[Footnote 60: Synesii Episcop. Hymn. III. I. 231]

[Footnote 61: ‘Anaer morionous, a phrase which I have borrowed from a

Greek monk, who applies it to a Patriarch of Constantinople. I might

have said, that I have reclaimed, rather than borrowed, it: for it

seems to belong to Shakespeare, de jure singulari, et ex privilegio

naturae.]

[Footnote 62: First published in 1803.]

[Footnote 63: These thoughts were suggested to me during the perusal of

the Madrigals of Giovambatista Strozzi published in Florence in May,

1593, by his sons Lorenzo and Filippo Strozzi, with a dedication to

their paternal uncle, Signor Leone Strozzi, Generale delle battaglie di

Santa Chiesa. As I do not remember to have seen either the poems or

their author mentioned in any English work, or to have found them in

any of the common collections of Italian poetry; and as the little work

is of rare occurrence; I will transcribe a few specimens. I have seldom

met with compositions that possessed, to my feelings, more of that

satisfying entireness, that complete adequateness of the manner to the

matter which so charms us in Anacreon, joined with the tenderness, and

more than the delicacy of Catullus. Trifles as they are, they were

probably elaborated with great care; yet to the perusal we refer them

to a spontaneous energy rather than to voluntary effort. To a

cultivated taste there is a delight in perfection for its own sake,

independently of the material in which it is manifested, that none but

a cultivated taste can understand or appreciate.

After what I have advanced, it would appear presumption to offer a

translation; even if the attempt were not discouraged by the different

genius of the English mind and language, which demands a denser body of

thought as the condition of a high polish, than the Italian. I cannot

but deem it likewise an advantage in the Italian tongue, in many other

respects inferior to our own, that the language of poetry is more

distinct from that of prose than with us. From the earlier appearance

and established primacy of the Tuscan poets, concurring with the number

of independent states, and the diversity of written dialects, the

Italians have gained a poetic idiom, as the Greeks before them had

obtained from the same causes with greater and more various

discriminations, for example, the Ionic for their heroic verses; the

Attic for their iambic; and the two modes of the Doric for the lyric or

sacerdotal, and the pastoral, the distinctions of which were doubtless

more obvious to the Greeks themselves than they are to us.

I will venture to add one other observation before I proceed to the

transcription. I am aware that the sentiments which I have avowed

concerning the points of difference between the poetry of the present

age, and that of the period between 1500 and 1650, are the reverse of

the opinion commonly entertained. I was conversing on this subject with

a friend, when the servant, a worthy and sensible woman, coming in, I

placed before her two engravings, the one a pinky-coloured plate of the

day, the other a masterly etching by Salvator Rosa from one of his own

pictures. On pressing her to tell us, which she preferred, after a

little blushing and flutter of feeling, she replied “Why, that, Sir, to

be sure! (pointing to the ware from the Fleet-street print

shops);--it’s so neat and elegant. T’other is such a scratchy slovenly

thing.” An artist, whose writings are scarcely less valuable than his

pictures, and to whose authority more deference will be willingly paid,

than I could even wish should be shown to mine, has told us, and from

his own experience too, that good taste must be acquired, and like all

other good things, is the result of thought and the submissive study of

the best models. If it be asked, “But what shall I deem such?”--the

answer is; presume those to be the best, the reputation of which has

been matured into fame by the consent of ages. For wisdom always has a

final majority, if not by conviction, yet by acquiescence. In addition

to Sir J. Reynolds I may mention Harris of Salisbury; who in one of his

philosophical disquisitions has written on the means of acquiring a

just taste with the precision of Aristotle, and the elegance of

Quinctilian.

MADRIGALI.

Gelido suo ruscel chiaro, e tranquillo

M’insegno Amor di state a mezzo’l giorno;

Ardean le solve, ardean le piagge, e i colli.

Ond’ io, ch’ al piu gran gielo ardo e sfavillo,

Subito corsi; ma si puro adorno

Girsene il vidi, che turbar no’l volli:

Sol mi specchiava, e’n dolce ombrosa sponda

Mi stava intento al mormorar dell’ onda.

Aure dell’ angoscioso viver mio

Refrigerio soave,

E dolce si, che piu non mi par grave

Ne’l ardor, ne’l morir, anz’ il desio;

Deh voil ghiaccio, e le nubi, e’l tempo rio

Discacciatene omai, che londa chiara,

E l’ombra non men cara

A scherzare, a cantar per suoi boschetti,

E prati festa et allegrezza alletti.

Pacifiche, ma spesso in amorosa

Guerra co’fiori, e l’erba

Alla stagione acerba

Verdi insegne del giglio e della rosa,

Movete, Aure, pian pian; che tregua o posa,

Se non pace, io ritrove;

E so ben dove:--Oh vago, a mansueto

Sguardo, oh labbra d’ambrosia, oh rider, lieto!

Hor come un scoglio stassi,

Hor come un rio se’n fugge,

Ed hor crud’ orsa rugge,

Hor canta angelo pio: ma che non fassi!

E che non fammi, O sassi,

O rivi, o belue, o Dii, questa mia vaga

Non so, se ninfa, o magna,

Non so, se donna, o Dea,

Non so, se dolce o rea?

Piangendo mi baciaste,

E ridendo il negaste:

In doglia hebbivi pin,

In festa hebbivi ria:

Nacque gioia di pianti,

Dolor di riso: O amanti

Miseri, habbiate insieme

Ognor paura e speme.

Bel Fior, tu mi rimembri

La rugiadosa guancia del bet viso;

E si vera l’assembri,

Che’n te sovente, come in lei m’affiso:

Et hor del vago riso,

Hor del serene sguardo

Io pur cieco riguardo. Ma qual fugge,

O Rosa, il mattin lieve!

E chi te, come neve,

E’l mio cor teco, e la mia vita strugge!

Anna mia, Anna dolce, oh sempre nuovo

E piu chiaro concento,

Quanta dolcezza sento

In sol Anna dicendo? Io mi pur pruovo,

Ne qui tra noi ritruovo,

Ne tra cieli armonia,

Che del bel nome suo piu dolce sia:

Altro il Cielo, altro Amore,

Altro non suona l’Ecco del mio core.

Hor che’l prato, e la selva si scoiora,

Al tuo serena ombroso

Muovine, alto Riposo,

Deh ch’io riposi una sol notte, un hora:

Han le fere, e git augelli, ognun talora

Ha qualche pace; io quando,

Lasso! non vonne errando,

E non piango, e non grido? e qual pur forte?

Ma poiche, non sent’ egli, odine, Morte.

Risi e piansi d’Amor; ne pero mai

Se non in fiamma, o’n onda, o’n vento scrissi

Spesso msrce trovai

Crudel; sempre in me morto, in altri vissi:

Hor da’ piu scuri Abissi al ciel m’aizai,

Hor ne pur caddi giuso;

Stance al fin qui son chiuso.

[Footnote 64: --

“I’ve measured it from side to side;

’Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.”]

[Footnote 65: --

“Nay, rack your brain--’tis all in vain,

I’ll tell you every thing I know;

But to the Thorn, and to the Pond

Which is a little step beyond,

I wish that you would go:

Perhaps, when you are at the place,

You something of her tale may trace.

I’ll give you the best help I can

Before you up the mountain go,

Up to the dreary mountain-top,

I’ll tell you all I know.

’Tis now some two-and-twenty years

Since she (her name is Martha Ray)

Gave, with a maiden’s true good will,

Her company to Stephen Hill;

And she was blithe and gay,

And she was happy, happy still

Whene’er she thought of Stephen Hill.

And they had fixed the wedding-day,

The morning that must wed them both

But Stephen to another maid

Had sworn another oath;

And, with this other maid, to church

Unthinking Stephen went--

Poor Martha! on that woeful day

A pang of pitiless dismay

Into her soul was sent;

A fire was kindled in her breast,

Which might not burn itself to rest.

They say, full six months after this,

While yet the summer leaves were green,

She to the mountain-top would go,

And there was often seen;

’Tis said a child was in her womb,

As now to any eye was plain;

She was with child, and she was mad;

Yet often she was sober sad

From her exceeding pain.

Oh me! ten thousand times I’d rather

That he had died, that cruel father!

* * * *

* * * *

* * * *

* * * *

Last Christmas when they talked of this,

Old Farmer Simpson did maintain,

That in her womb the infant wrought

About its mother’s heart, and brought

Her senses back again:

And, when at last her time drew near,

Her looks were calm, her senses clear.

No more I know, I wish I did,

And I would tell it all to you

For what became of this poor child

There’s none that ever knew

And if a child was born or no,

There’s no one that could ever tell;

And if ’twas born alive or dead,

There’s no one knows, as I have said:

But some remember well,

That Martha Ray about this time

Would up the mountain often climb.”]

[Footnote 66: It is no less an error in teachers, than a torment to the

poor children, to enforce the necessity of reading as they would talk.

In order to cure them of singing as it is called, that is, of too great

a difference, the child is made to repeat the words with his eyes from

off the book; and then, indeed, his tones resemble talking, as far as

his fears, tears and trembling will permit. But as soon as the eye is

again directed to the printed page, the spell begins anew; for an

instinctive sense tells the child’s feelings, that to utter its own

momentary thoughts, and to recite the written thoughts of another, as

of another, and a far wiser than himself, are two widely different

things; and as the two acts are accompanied with widely different

feelings, so must they justify different modes of enunciation. Joseph

Lancaster, among his other sophistications of the excellent Dr. Bell’s

invaluable system, cures this fault of singing, by hanging fetters and

chains on the child, to the music of which one of his school-fellows,

who walks before, dolefully chants out the child’s last speech and

confession, birth, parentage, and education. And this soul-benumbing

ignominy, this unholy and heart-hardening burlesque on the last fearful

infliction of outraged law, in pronouncing the sentence to which the

stern and familiarized judge not seldom bursts into tears, has been

extolled as a happy and ingenious method of remedying--what? and

how?--why, one extreme in order to introduce another, scarce less

distant from good sense, and certainly likely to have worse moral

effects, by enforcing a semblance of petulant ease and

self-sufficiency, in repression and possible after-perversion of the

natural feelings. I have to beg Dr. Bell’s pardon for this connection

of the two names, but he knows that contrast is no less powerful a

cause of association than likeness.]

[Footnote 67: Altered from the description of Night-Mair in the

REMORSE.

“Oh Heaven! ’twas frightful! Now ran down and stared at

By hideous shapes that cannot be remembered;

Now seeing nothing and imagining nothing;

But only being afraid--stifled with fear!

While every goodly or familiar form

Had a strange power of spreading terror round me!”

N.B.--Though Shakespeare has, for his own all justifying purposes,

introduced the Night-Mare with her own foals, yet Mair means a Sister,

or perhaps a Hag.]

[Footnote 68: But still more by the mechanical system of philosophy

which has needlessly infected our theological opinions, and teaching us

to consider the world in its relation to god, as of a building to its

mason, leaves the idea of omnipresence a mere abstract notion in the

stateroom of our reason.]

[Footnote 69: As the ingenious gentleman under the influence of the

Tragic Muse contrived to dislocate, “I wish you a good morning, Sir!

Thank you, Sir, and I wish you the same,” into two blank-verse

heroics:--

To you a morning good, good Sir! I wish.

You, Sir! I thank: to you the same wish I.

In those parts of Mr. Wordsworth’s works which I have thoroughly

studied, I find fewer instances in which this would be practicable than

I have met to many poems, where an approximation of prose has been

sedulously and on system guarded against. Indeed excepting the stanzas

already quoted from THE SAILOR’S MOTHER, I can recollect but one

instance: that is to say, a short passage of four or five lines in THE

BROTHERS, that model of English pastoral, which I never yet read with

unclouded eye.--“James, pointing to its summit, over which they had all

purposed to return together, informed them that he would wait for them

there. They parted, and his comrades passed that way some two hours

after, but they did not find him at the appointed place, _a

circumstance of which they took no heed:_ but one of them, going by

chance into the house, which at this time was James’s house, learnt

_there,_ that nobody had seen him all that day.” The only change which

has been made is in the position of the little word there in two

instances, the position in the original being clearly such as is not

adopted in ordinary conversation. The other words printed in italics

were so marked because, though good and genuine English, they are not

the phraseology of common conversation either in the word put in

apposition, or in the connection by the genitive pronoun. Men in

general would have said, “but that was a circumstance they paid no

attention to, or took no notice of;” and the language is, on the theory

of the preface, justified only by the narrator’s being the Vicar. Yet

if any ear could suspect, that these sentences were ever printed as

metre, on those very words alone could the suspicion have been

grounded.]

[Footnote 70: I had in my mind the striking but untranslatable epithet,

which the celebrated Mendelssohn applied to the great founder of the

Critical Philosophy “Der alleszermalmende KANT,” that is, the

all-becrushing, or rather the all-to-nothing-crushing Kant. In the

facility and force of compound epithets, the German from the number of

its cases and inflections approaches to the Greek, that language so

“Bless’d in the happy marriage of sweet words.”

It is in the woful harshness of its sounds alone that the German need

shrink from the comparison.]

[Footnote 71: Sammlung einiger Abhandlungen von Christian Garve.]

[Footnote 72: Sonnet IX.]

[Footnote 73: Mr. Wordsworth’s having judiciously adopted “concourse

wild” in this passage for “a wild scene” as it stood to the former

edition, encourages me to hazard a remark, which I certainly should not

have made in the works of a poet less austerely accurate in the use of

words, than he is, to his own great honour. It respects the propriety

of the word, “scene,” even in the sentence in which it is retained.

Dryden, and he only in his more careless verses, was the first, as far

as my researches have discovered, who for the convenience of rhyme used

this word in the vague sense, which has been since too current even in

our best writers, and which (unfortunately, I think) is given as its

first explanation in Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary and therefore would be

taken by an incautious reader as its proper sense. In Shakespeare and

Milton the word is never used without some clear reference, proper or

metaphorical, to the theatre. Thus Milton:

“Cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm

A sylvan scene; and, as the ranks ascend

Shade above shade, a woody theatre

Of stateliest view.”

I object to any extension of its meaning, because the word is already

more equivocal than might be wished; inasmuch as to the limited use,

which I recommend, it may still signify two different things; namely,

the scenery, and the characters and actions presented on the stage

during the presence of particular scenes. It can therefore be preserved

from obscurity only by keeping the original signification full in the

mind. Thus Milton again,

------“Prepare thee for another scene.”]

[Footnote 74: --

Which Copland scarce had spoke, but quickly every hill,

Upon her verge that stands, the neighbouring vallies fill;

Helvillon from his height, it through the mountains threw,

From whom as soon again, the sound Dunbalrase drew,

From whose stone-trophied head, it on the Windross went,

Which tow’rds the sea again, resounded it to Dent.

That Brodwater, therewith within her banks astound,

In sailing to the sea, told it to Egremound,

Whose buildings, walks, and streets, with echoes loud and long,

Did mightily commend old Copland for her song.

Drayton’s POLYOLBION: Song XXX.]

[Footnote 75: Translation. It behoves me to side with my friends, but only

as far as the gods.]

[Footnote 76: “Slender. I bruised my shin with playing with sword and

dagger for a dish of stewed prunes, and by my troth I cannot abide the

smell of hot meat since.”--So again, Evans. “I will make an end of my

dinner: there’s pippins and cheese to come.”]

[Footnote 77: This was accidentally confirmed to me by an old German

gentleman at Helmstadt, who had been Klopstock’s school and bed-fellow.

Among other boyish anecdotes, he related that the young poet set a

particular value on a translation of the PARADISE LOST, and always

slept with it under his pillow.]

[Footnote 78: Klopstock’s observation was partly true and partly

erroneous. In the literal sense of his words, and, if we confine the

comparison to the average of space required for the expression of the

same thought in the two languages, it is erroneous. I have translated

some German hexameters into English hexameter; and find, that on the

average three English lines will express four lines German. The reason

is evident: our language abounds in monosyllables and dissyllables. The

German, not less than the Greek, is a polysyllable language. But in

another point of view the remark was not without foundation. For the

German possessing the same unlimited privilege of forming compounds,

both with prepositions and with epithets, as the Greek, it can express

the richest single Greek word in a single German one, and is thus freed

from the necessity of weak or ungraceful paraphrases. I will content

myself with one at present, viz. the use of the prefixed participles

ver, zer, ent, and weg: thus reissen to rend, verreissen to rend away,

zerreissen to rend to pieces, entreissen to rend off or out of a thing,

in the active sense: or schmelzen to melt--ver, zer, ent,

schmelzen--and in like manner through all the verbs neuter and active.

If you consider only how much we should feel the loss of the prefix be,

as in bedropt, besprinkle, besot, especially in our poetical language,

and then think that this same mode of composition is carved through all

their simple and compound prepositions, and many of their adverbs; and

that with most of these the Germans have the same privilege as we have

of dividing them from the verb and placing them at the end of the

sentence; you will have no difficulty in comprehending the reality and

the cause of this superior power in the German of condensing meaning,

in which its great poet exulted. It is impossible to read half a dozen

pages of Wieland without perceiving that in this respect the German has

no rival but the Greek. And yet I feel, that concentration or

condensation is not the happiest mode of expressing this excellence,

which seems to consist not so much in the less time required for

conveying an impression, as in the unity and simultaneousness with

which the impression is conveyed. It tends to make their language more

picturesque: it depictures images better. We have obtained this power

in part by our compound verbs derived from the Latin: and the sense of

its great effect no doubt induced our Milton both to the use and the

abuse of Latin derivatives. But still these prefixed particles,

conveying no separate or separable meaning to the mere English reader,

cannot possibly act on the mind with the force or liveliness of an

original and homogeneous language such as the German is, and besides

are confined to certain words.]

[Footnote 79: Praecludere calumniam, in the original.]

[Footnote 80: Better thus: Forma specifica per formam individualem

translucens: or better yet--Species individualisata, sive Individuum

cuilibet Speciei determinatae in omni parte correspondens et quasi

versione quadam eam interpretans et repetens.]

[Footnote 81: --

------“The big round tears

Cours’d one another down his innocent nose

In piteous chase,”

says Shakespeare of a wounded stag hanging its head over a stream:

naturally, from the position of the head, and most beautifully, from

the association of the preceding image, of the chase, in which “the

poor sequester’d stag from the hunter’s aim had ta’en a hurt.” In the

supposed position of Bertram, the metaphor, if not false, loses all the

propriety of the original.]

[Footnote 82: Among a number of other instances of words chosen without

reason, Imogine in the first act declares, that thunder-storms were not

able to intercept her prayers for “the desperate man, in desperate ways

who dealt”----

“Yea, when the launched bolt did sear her sense,

Her soul’s deep orisons were breathed for him;”

that is, when a red-hot bolt, launched at her from a thunder-cloud, had

cauterized her sense, to plain English, burnt her eyes out of her head,

she kept still praying on.

“Was not this love? Yea, thus doth woman love!”]

[Footnote 83: This sort of repetition is one of this writers

peculiarities, and there is scarce a page which does not furnish one or

more instances--Ex. gr. in the first page or two. Act I, line 7th, “and

deemed that I might sleep.”--Line 10, “Did rock and quiver in the

bickering glare.”--Lines 14, 15, 16, “But by the momently gleams of

sheeted blue, Did the pale marbles dare so sternly on me, I almost

deemed they lived.”--Line 37, “The glare of Hell.”--Line 35, “O holy

Prior, this is no earthly storm.”--Line 38, “This is no earthly

storm.”--Line 42, “Dealing with us.”--Line 43, “Deal thus

sternly:”--Line 44, “Speak! thou hast something seen?”--“A fearful

sight!”--Line 45, “What hast thou seen! A piteous, fearful

sight.”--Line 48, “quivering gleams.”--Line 50, “In the hollow pauses

of the storm.”--Line 61, “The pauses of the storm, etc.”]

[Footnote 84: The child is an important personage, for I see not by

what possible means the author could have ended the second and third

acts but for its timely appearance. How ungrateful then not further to

notice its fate!]

[Footnote 85: Classically too, as far as consists with the allegorizing

fancy of the modern, that still striving to project the inward,

contradistinguishes itself from the seeming ease with which the poetry

of the ancients reflects the world without. Casimir affords, perhaps,

the most striking instance of this characteristic difference.--For his

style and diction are really classical: while Cowley, who resembles

Casimir in many respects, completely barbarizes his Latinity, and even

his metre, by the heterogeneous nature of his thoughts. That Dr.

Johnson should have passed a contrary judgment, and have even preferred

Cowley’s Latin Poems to Milton’s, is a caprice that has, if I mistake

not, excited the surprise of all scholars. I was much amused last

summer with the laughable affright, with which an Italian poet perused

a page of Cowley’s Davideis, contrasted with the enthusiasm with which

he first ran through, and then read aloud, Milton’s Mansus and Ad

Patrem.]

[Footnote 86: Flectit, or if the metre had allowed, premit would have

supported the metaphor better.]

[Footnote 87: Poor unlucky Metaphysicks! and what are they? A single

sentence expresses the object and thereby the contents of this science.

Gnothi seauton:

Nosce te ipsum,

Tuque Deum, quantum licet, inque Deo omnia noscas.]

Know thyself: and so shalt thou know God, as far as is permitted to

a creature, and in God all things.--Surely, there is a strange--nay,

rather too natural--aversion to many to know themselves.]