151	----	THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER IN SEVEN PARTS By Samuel Taylor Coleridge PART THE FIRST. It is an ancient Mariner, And he stoppeth one of three. "By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp'st thou me? "The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide, And I am next of kin; The guests are met, the feast is set: May'st hear the merry din." He holds him with his skinny hand, "There was a ship," quoth he. "Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!" Eftsoons his hand dropt he. He holds him with his glittering eye-- The Wedding-Guest stood still, And listens like a three years child: The Mariner hath his will. The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone: He cannot chuse but hear; And thus spake on that ancient man, The bright-eyed Mariner. The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared, Merrily did we drop Below the kirk, below the hill, Below the light-house top. The Sun came up upon the left, Out of the sea came he! And he shone bright, and on the right Went down into the sea. Higher and higher every day, Till over the mast at noon-- The Wedding-Guest here beat his breast, For he heard the loud bassoon. The bride hath paced into the hall, Red as a rose is she; Nodding their heads before her goes The merry minstrelsy. The Wedding-Guest he beat his breast, Yet he cannot chuse but hear; And thus spake on that ancient man, The bright-eyed Mariner. And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he Was tyrannous and strong: He struck with his o'ertaking wings, And chased south along. With sloping masts and dipping prow, As who pursued with yell and blow Still treads the shadow of his foe And forward bends his head, The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast, And southward aye we fled. And now there came both mist and snow, And it grew wondrous cold: And ice, mast-high, came floating by, As green as emerald. And through the drifts the snowy clifts Did send a dismal sheen: Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken-- The ice was all between. The ice was here, the ice was there, The ice was all around: It cracked and growled, and roared and howled, Like noises in a swound! At length did cross an Albatross: Thorough the fog it came; As if it had been a Christian soul, We hailed it in God's name. It ate the food it ne'er had eat, And round and round it flew. The ice did split with a thunder-fit; The helmsman steered us through! And a good south wind sprung up behind; The Albatross did follow, And every day, for food or play, Came to the mariners' hollo! In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud, It perched for vespers nine; Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white, Glimmered the white Moon-shine. "God save thee, ancient Mariner! From the fiends, that plague thee thus!-- Why look'st thou so?"--With my cross-bow I shot the ALBATROSS. PART THE SECOND. The Sun now rose upon the right: Out of the sea came he, Still hid in mist, and on the left Went down into the sea. And the good south wind still blew behind But no sweet bird did follow, Nor any day for food or play Came to the mariners' hollo! And I had done an hellish thing, And it would work 'em woe: For all averred, I had killed the bird That made the breeze to blow. Ah wretch! said they, the bird to slay That made the breeze to blow! Nor dim nor red, like God's own head, The glorious Sun uprist: Then all averred, I had killed the bird That brought the fog and mist. 'Twas right, said they, such birds to slay, That bring the fog and mist. The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, The furrow followed free: We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea. Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down, 'Twas sad as sad could be; And we did speak only to break The silence of the sea! All in a hot and copper sky, The bloody Sun, at noon, Right up above the mast did stand, No bigger than the Moon. Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean. Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink. The very deep did rot: O Christ! That ever this should be! Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs Upon the slimy sea. About, about, in reel and rout The death-fires danced at night; The water, like a witch's oils, Burnt green, and blue and white. And some in dreams assured were Of the spirit that plagued us so: Nine fathom deep he had followed us From the land of mist and snow. And every tongue, through utter drought, Was withered at the root; We could not speak, no more than if We had been choked with soot. Ah! well a-day! what evil looks Had I from old and young! Instead of the cross, the Albatross About my neck was hung. PART THE THIRD. There passed a weary time. Each throat Was parched, and glazed each eye. A weary time! a weary time! How glazed each weary eye, When looking westward, I beheld A something in the sky. At first it seemed a little speck, And then it seemed a mist: It moved and moved, and took at last A certain shape, I wist. A speck, a mist, a shape, I wist! And still it neared and neared: As if it dodged a water-sprite, It plunged and tacked and veered. With throats unslaked, with black lips baked, We could not laugh nor wail; Through utter drought all dumb we stood! I bit my arm, I sucked the blood, And cried, A sail! a sail! With throats unslaked, with black lips baked, Agape they heard me call: Gramercy! they for joy did grin, And all at once their breath drew in, As they were drinking all. See! see! (I cried) she tacks no more! Hither to work us weal; Without a breeze, without a tide, She steadies with upright keel! The western wave was all a-flame The day was well nigh done! Almost upon the western wave Rested the broad bright Sun; When that strange shape drove suddenly Betwixt us and the Sun. And straight the Sun was flecked with bars, (Heaven's Mother send us grace!) As if through a dungeon-grate he peered, With broad and burning face. Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud) How fast she nears and nears! Are those her sails that glance in the Sun, Like restless gossameres! Are those her ribs through which the Sun Did peer, as through a grate? And is that Woman all her crew? Is that a DEATH? and are there two? Is DEATH that woman's mate? Her lips were red, her looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was as white as leprosy, The Night-Mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she, Who thicks man's blood with cold. The naked hulk alongside came, And the twain were casting dice; "The game is done! I've won! I've won!" Quoth she, and whistles thrice. The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out: At one stride comes the dark; With far-heard whisper, o'er the sea. Off shot the spectre-bark. We listened and looked sideways up! Fear at my heart, as at a cup, My life-blood seemed to sip! The stars were dim, and thick the night, The steersman's face by his lamp gleamed white; From the sails the dew did drip-- Till clombe above the eastern bar The horned Moon, with one bright star Within the nether tip. One after one, by the star-dogged Moon Too quick for groan or sigh, Each turned his face with a ghastly pang, And cursed me with his eye. Four times fifty living men, (And I heard nor sigh nor groan) With heavy thump, a lifeless lump, They dropped down one by one. The souls did from their bodies fly,-- They fled to bliss or woe! And every soul, it passed me by, Like the whizz of my CROSS-BOW! PART THE FOURTH. "I fear thee, ancient Mariner! I fear thy skinny hand! And thou art long, and lank, and brown, As is the ribbed sea-sand. "I fear thee and thy glittering eye, And thy skinny hand, so brown."-- Fear not, fear not, thou Wedding-Guest! This body dropt not down. Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea! And never a saint took pity on My soul in agony. The many men, so beautiful! And they all dead did lie: And a thousand thousand slimy things Lived on; and so did I. I looked upon the rotting sea, And drew my eyes away; I looked upon the rotting deck, And there the dead men lay. I looked to Heaven, and tried to pray: But or ever a prayer had gusht, A wicked whisper came, and made my heart as dry as dust. I closed my lids, and kept them close, And the balls like pulses beat; For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky Lay like a load on my weary eye, And the dead were at my feet. The cold sweat melted from their limbs, Nor rot nor reek did they: The look with which they looked on me Had never passed away. An orphan's curse would drag to Hell A spirit from on high; But oh! more horrible than that Is a curse in a dead man's eye! Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse, And yet I could not die. The moving Moon went up the sky, And no where did abide: Softly she was going up, And a star or two beside. Her beams bemocked the sultry main, Like April hoar-frost spread; But where the ship's huge shadow lay, The charmed water burnt alway A still and awful red. Beyond the shadow of the ship, I watched the water-snakes: They moved in tracks of shining white, And when they reared, the elfish light Fell off in hoary flakes. Within the shadow of the ship I watched their rich attire: Blue, glossy green, and velvet black, They coiled and swam; and every track Was a flash of golden fire. O happy living things! no tongue Their beauty might declare: A spring of love gushed from my heart, And I blessed them unaware: Sure my kind saint took pity on me, And I blessed them unaware. The self same moment I could pray; And from my neck so free The Albatross fell off, and sank Like lead into the sea. PART THE FIFTH. Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing, Beloved from pole to pole! To Mary Queen the praise be given! She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven, That slid into my soul. The silly buckets on the deck, That had so long remained, I dreamt that they were filled with dew; And when I awoke, it rained. My lips were wet, my throat was cold, My garments all were dank; Sure I had drunken in my dreams, And still my body drank. I moved, and could not feel my limbs: I was so light--almost I thought that I had died in sleep, And was a blessed ghost. And soon I heard a roaring wind: It did not come anear; But with its sound it shook the sails, That were so thin and sere. The upper air burst into life! And a hundred fire-flags sheen, To and fro they were hurried about! And to and fro, and in and out, The wan stars danced between. And the coming wind did roar more loud, And the sails did sigh like sedge; And the rain poured down from one black cloud; The Moon was at its edge. The thick black cloud was cleft, and still The Moon was at its side: Like waters shot from some high crag, The lightning fell with never a jag, A river steep and wide. The loud wind never reached the ship, Yet now the ship moved on! Beneath the lightning and the Moon The dead men gave a groan. They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose, Nor spake, nor moved their eyes; It had been strange, even in a dream, To have seen those dead men rise. The helmsman steered, the ship moved on; Yet never a breeze up blew; The mariners all 'gan work the ropes, Where they were wont to do: They raised their limbs like lifeless tools-- We were a ghastly crew. The body of my brother's son, Stood by me, knee to knee: The body and I pulled at one rope, But he said nought to me. "I fear thee, ancient Mariner!" Be calm, thou Wedding-Guest! 'Twas not those souls that fled in pain, Which to their corses came again, But a troop of spirits blest: For when it dawned--they dropped their arms, And clustered round the mast; Sweet sounds rose slowly through their mouths, And from their bodies passed. Around, around, flew each sweet sound, Then darted to the Sun; Slowly the sounds came back again, Now mixed, now one by one. Sometimes a-dropping from the sky I heard the sky-lark sing; Sometimes all little birds that are, How they seemed to fill the sea and air With their sweet jargoning! And now 'twas like all instruments, Now like a lonely flute; And now it is an angel's song, That makes the Heavens be mute. It ceased; yet still the sails made on A pleasant noise till noon, A noise like of a hidden brook In the leafy month of June, That to the sleeping woods all night Singeth a quiet tune. Till noon we quietly sailed on, Yet never a breeze did breathe: Slowly and smoothly went the ship, Moved onward from beneath. Under the keel nine fathom deep, From the land of mist and snow, The spirit slid: and it was he That made the ship to go. The sails at noon left off their tune, And the ship stood still also. The Sun, right up above the mast, Had fixed her to the ocean: But in a minute she 'gan stir, With a short uneasy motion-- Backwards and forwards half her length With a short uneasy motion. Then like a pawing horse let go, She made a sudden bound: It flung the blood into my head, And I fell down in a swound. How long in that same fit I lay, I have not to declare; But ere my living life returned, I heard and in my soul discerned Two VOICES in the air. "Is it he?" quoth one, "Is this the man? By him who died on cross, With his cruel bow he laid full low, The harmless Albatross. "The spirit who bideth by himself In the land of mist and snow, He loved the bird that loved the man Who shot him with his bow." The other was a softer voice, As soft as honey-dew: Quoth he, "The man hath penance done, And penance more will do." PART THE SIXTH. FIRST VOICE. But tell me, tell me! speak again, Thy soft response renewing-- What makes that ship drive on so fast? What is the OCEAN doing? SECOND VOICE. Still as a slave before his lord, The OCEAN hath no blast; His great bright eye most silently Up to the Moon is cast-- If he may know which way to go; For she guides him smooth or grim See, brother, see! how graciously She looketh down on him. FIRST VOICE. But why drives on that ship so fast, Without or wave or wind? SECOND VOICE. The air is cut away before, And closes from behind. Fly, brother, fly! more high, more high Or we shall be belated: For slow and slow that ship will go, When the Mariner's trance is abated. I woke, and we were sailing on As in a gentle weather: 'Twas night, calm night, the Moon was high; The dead men stood together. All stood together on the deck, For a charnel-dungeon fitter: All fixed on me their stony eyes, That in the Moon did glitter. The pang, the curse, with which they died, Had never passed away: I could not draw my eyes from theirs, Nor turn them up to pray. And now this spell was snapt: once more I viewed the ocean green. And looked far forth, yet little saw Of what had else been seen-- Like one that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows, a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread. But soon there breathed a wind on me, Nor sound nor motion made: Its path was not upon the sea, In ripple or in shade. It raised my hair, it fanned my cheek Like a meadow-gale of spring-- It mingled strangely with my fears, Yet it felt like a welcoming. Swiftly, swiftly flew the ship, Yet she sailed softly too: Sweetly, sweetly blew the breeze-- On me alone it blew. Oh! dream of joy! is this indeed The light-house top I see? Is this the hill? is this the kirk? Is this mine own countree! We drifted o'er the harbour-bar, And I with sobs did pray-- O let me be awake, my God! Or let me sleep alway. The harbour-bay was clear as glass, So smoothly it was strewn! And on the bay the moonlight lay, And the shadow of the moon. The rock shone bright, the kirk no less, That stands above the rock: The moonlight steeped in silentness The steady weathercock. And the bay was white with silent light, Till rising from the same, Full many shapes, that shadows were, In crimson colours came. A little distance from the prow Those crimson shadows were: I turned my eyes upon the deck-- Oh, Christ! what saw I there! Each corse lay flat, lifeless and flat, And, by the holy rood! A man all light, a seraph-man, On every corse there stood. This seraph band, each waved his hand: It was a heavenly sight! They stood as signals to the land, Each one a lovely light: This seraph-band, each waved his hand, No voice did they impart-- No voice; but oh! the silence sank Like music on my heart. But soon I heard the dash of oars; I heard the Pilot's cheer; My head was turned perforce away, And I saw a boat appear. The Pilot, and the Pilot's boy, I heard them coming fast: Dear Lord in Heaven! it was a joy The dead men could not blast. I saw a third--I heard his voice: It is the Hermit good! He singeth loud his godly hymns That he makes in the wood. He'll shrieve my soul, he'll wash away The Albatross's blood. PART THE SEVENTH. This Hermit good lives in that wood Which slopes down to the sea. How loudly his sweet voice he rears! He loves to talk with marineres That come from a far countree. He kneels at morn and noon and eve-- He hath a cushion plump: It is the moss that wholly hides The rotted old oak-stump. The skiff-boat neared: I heard them talk, "Why this is strange, I trow! Where are those lights so many and fair, That signal made but now?" "Strange, by my faith!" the Hermit said-- "And they answered not our cheer! The planks looked warped! and see those sails, How thin they are and sere! I never saw aught like to them, Unless perchance it were "Brown skeletons of leaves that lag My forest-brook along; When the ivy-tod is heavy with snow, And the owlet whoops to the wolf below, That eats the she-wolf's young." "Dear Lord! it hath a fiendish look-- (The Pilot made reply) I am a-feared"--"Push on, push on!" Said the Hermit cheerily. The boat came closer to the ship, But I nor spake nor stirred; The boat came close beneath the ship, And straight a sound was heard. Under the water it rumbled on, Still louder and more dread: It reached the ship, it split the bay; The ship went down like lead. Stunned by that loud and dreadful sound, Which sky and ocean smote, Like one that hath been seven days drowned My body lay afloat; But swift as dreams, myself I found Within the Pilot's boat. Upon the whirl, where sank the ship, The boat spun round and round; And all was still, save that the hill Was telling of the sound. I moved my lips--the Pilot shrieked And fell down in a fit; The holy Hermit raised his eyes, And prayed where he did sit. I took the oars: the Pilot's boy, Who now doth crazy go, Laughed loud and long, and all the while His eyes went to and fro. "Ha! ha!" quoth he, "full plain I see, The Devil knows how to row." And now, all in my own countree, I stood on the firm land! The Hermit stepped forth from the boat, And scarcely he could stand. "O shrieve me, shrieve me, holy man!" The Hermit crossed his brow. "Say quick," quoth he, "I bid thee say-- What manner of man art thou?" Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched With a woeful agony, Which forced me to begin my tale; And then it left me free. Since then, at an uncertain hour, That agony returns; And till my ghastly tale is told, This heart within me burns. I pass, like night, from land to land; I have strange power of speech; That moment that his face I see, I know the man that must hear me: To him my tale I teach. What loud uproar bursts from that door! The wedding-guests are there: But in the garden-bower the bride And bride-maids singing are: And hark the little vesper bell, Which biddeth me to prayer! O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been Alone on a wide wide sea: So lonely 'twas, that God himself Scarce seemed there to be. O sweeter than the marriage-feast, 'Tis sweeter far to me, To walk together to the kirk With a goodly company!-- To walk together to the kirk, And all together pray, While each to his great Father bends, Old men, and babes, and loving friends, And youths and maidens gay! Farewell, farewell! but this I tell To thee, thou Wedding-Guest! He prayeth well, who loveth well Both man and bird and beast. He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us He made and loveth all. The Mariner, whose eye is bright, Whose beard with age is hoar, Is gone: and now the Wedding-Guest Turned from the bridegroom's door. He went like one that hath been stunned, And is of sense forlorn: A sadder and a wiser man, He rose the morrow morn. 
11101	----	Distributed Proofreaders The Scribner English Classics EDITED BY FREDERICK H. SYKES, PH.D. TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY COLERIDGE'S ANCIENT MARINER AND SELECT POEMS 1908 PREFATORY NOTE The text of the poems in this volume is that of J. Dykes Campbell in the Globe edition of Coleridge's poems. For the introduction I have depended also largely upon his Memoir of Coleridge, and upon the two volumes of the "Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge," edited by the poet's grandson, Mr. E.H. Coleridge. In the Notes, as will be seen, I am indebted particularly to the general editor of this series, Dr. F.H. Sykes, to Dr. Lane Cooper of Cornell University, and again to Mr. Coleridge, through whose kindness I have been able to get a reproduction of the Marshmills crayon, undoubtedly the most satisfactory portrait of the poet in existence, for the frontispiece. H.M.B. CONTENTS BIBLIOGRAPHY INTRODUCTION: I. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE II. COLERIDGE'S POEMS TEXT: THE ANCIENT MARINER CHRISTABEL KUBLA KHAN LOVE FRANCE: AN ODE DEJECTION: AN ODE YOUTH AND AGE WORK WITHOUT HOPE EPITAPH NOTES *SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY* EDITIONS: Globe Edition. Edited by J. Dykes Campbell. 1 vol. Muses' Library. Edited by Richard Garnett. LIFE AND CRITICISM: Stephen, Leslie, Article "Coleridge" in "The Dictionary of National Biography." H.D. Traill, "Coleridge" ("English Men of Letters Series"). Caine, T.H., "Coleridge" ("Great Writers Series"). Coleridge, S.T., "Biographia Literaria" ("Everyman's Library"). De Quincey, T., "Lake Poets." Hazlitt, W., "First Acquaintance with Poets." Cottle, J., "Reminiscences of Coleridge and Southey." Pater, W., "Appreciations." Shairp, J.C., "Studies in Poetry and Philosophy." Sarrazin, Gabriel, "La Renaissance de la Poésie Anglaise, 1798-1889." Brandl, Alois, "S.T. Coleridge and the English Romantic School." BIBLIOGRAPHY: Haney, J.L., "A Bibliography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge." INTRODUCTION I. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE I. THE BEGINNINGS Coleridge lived in what may safely be called the most momentous period of modern history. In the year following his birth Warren Hastings was appointed first governor-general of India, where he maintained English empire during years of war with rival nations, and where he committed those acts of cruelty and tyranny which called forth the greatest eloquence of the greatest of English orators, in the famous impeachment trial at Westminster, when Coleridge was a sixteen-year-old schoolboy in London. A few years before his birth the liberal philosophy of France had found a popular voice in the writings of Rousseau, which became the gospel of revolution throughout Europe in Coleridge's youth and early manhood. "The New Héloise" in the field of sentiment and of the relation of the sexes, "The Social Contract" In political theory, and "Émile" in matters of education, were books whose influence upon Coleridge's generation it would be hard to estimate. When Coleridge was four years old the English colonies in America declared their independence and founded a new nation upon the natural rights of man,--a nation that has grown to be the mightiest and most beneficent on the globe. Coleridge was seventeen when the French Revolution broke out; he was forty-three when Napoleon was sent to St. Helena. He saw the whole career of the greatest political upheaval and of the greatest military genius of the modern world. Fox, Pitt, and Burke,--the greatest Liberal orator, the greatest Parliamentary leader, and the greatest philosophic statesman that England has produced--were at the height of their glory when Coleridge went up to Cambridge in 1791. In literature--naturally, since literature is but an interpretation of life--the age was not less remarkable. Dr. Johnson was still alive when Coleridge came up to school at Christ's Hospital, Goldsmith had died eight years before. But a new spirit was abroad in the younger generation. Macpherson's "Fingal," alleged to be a translation from the ancient Gaelic poet Ossian, had appeared in 1760; Thomas Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry," a collection of folk-ballads and rude verse-romances such as the common people cherished but critics had long refused to consider as poetry, was published in 1765. These two books were of prime importance in fostering a new taste in literature,--a love of natural beauty, of simplicity, and of rude strength. The new taste hailed with delight the appearance of a native lyric genius in Burns, whose first volume of poems was printed in 1786. It welcomed also the homely, simple sweetness, what Coleridge and Lamb called the "divine chit-chat," of Cowper, whose "Task" appeared in the preceding year. But it was in Coleridge himself and his close contemporaries and followers that the splendor of the new poetry showed itself. He was two years younger than Wordsworth, a year younger than Scott; he was sixteen at the birth of Byron, twenty at that of Shelley, twenty-four at that of Keats; and he outlived all of them except Wordsworth. His genius blossomed early. "The Ancient Mariner," his greatest poem, was published some years before Wordsworth's "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" was written, or Scott's "Lay of the Last Minstrel." He was in the prime of life, or what should have been the prime of life--forty years old--when Byron burst into sudden fame with the first two cantos of "Childe Harold" in 1812; he was forty-six when Keats published "Endymion"; he was fifty-one when Shelley was drowned. And of all this gifted company Coleridge, though not the strongest character or the most prolific poet, was the profoundest intellect and the _most originative poetic spirit_. There was little hint, however, of future greatness or of fellowship with great names in his birth and early circumstances. His father was a country clergyman and schoolmaster in the village of Ottery St. Mary, in Devonshire, a simple-hearted unworldly man, full of curious learning and not very attentive to practical affairs. His mother managed the household and brought up the children. Both his parents were of simple West-country stock; but his father, having a natural turn for study and having done well in his early manhood as a schoolmaster, went at the age of thirty-one as a sizar, or poor student, to Sidney-Sussex College, Cambridge, took orders, and was afterwards given the living of Ottery St. Mary. Here he continued his beloved work of teaching, in addition to his pastoral duties, and by means of this combination won the humble livelihood which, through his wife's careful economy, sufficed for rearing his large family. Coleridge tells us that his father "had so little of parental ambition in him that he had destined his children to be blacksmiths, etc." (though he had "resolved that I should be a parson"), "and had accomplished his intention but for my mother's pride and spirit of aggrandizing her family." Several of the children rewarded their mother's care by distinguishing themselves in a modest way in the army or in the church, but the only one about whom the world is curious now was the youngest of the ten, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was born at Ottery St. Mary, October 21, 1772. The essential traits of his later character appeared in his early childhood. Almost from infancy he lived in his imagination rather than in the world of reality. "The schoolboys drove me from play, and were always tormenting me, and hence I took no pleasure in boyish sports, but read incessantly.... I became a _dreamer_, and acquired an indisposition to all bodily activity; and I was fretful, and inordinately passionate." "Sensibility, imagination, vanity, sloth," were "prominent and manifest" in his character before he was eight years old. Such is his own account of his childhood, written to his friend Poole in 1797; and it is an accurate description, as far as it goes, of the grown man. But of the religious temper, too, the love of freedom and of virtue, the hatred of injustice, cruelty, and falsehood that guided his uneven steps through all the pitiful struggle of his middle life, of the conscience that made his weakness hell to him--of these, too, we may be sure that the beginnings were to be seen in the boy at Ottery St. Mary, as indeed they were before his eyes in the person of his father, who, if not a first-rate genius, was, says his son, "a first-rate Christian." The good vicar died in 1781; and the next year, a "presentation" to Christ's Hospital having been secured for him, little Samuel, not yet eleven years old, went up to London to enter the famous old city school. Here, "In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim," where he "Saw nought lovely but the sky and stars," one of some seven hundred Blue-Coat boys, Coleridge lived for nine years. Most of the boys at Christ's Hospital, then as now, were given a "commercial" education (which none the less included a very thorough training in Latin); but a few of the most promising students were each year selected by the masters for a classical training in preparation for the universities, whence they were known as Grecians. Coleridge was elected a Grecian in 1788. The famous Boyer--famous for his enthusiasm alike in teaching the classics and in wielding the birch--laid the foundation of Coleridge's later scholarship. Here, too, Coleridge did a great amount of reading not laid down in the curriculum,--Latin and Greek poetry and philosophy, mediaeval science and metaphysics--and won the approval of his teachers by the excellence of his verses in Greek and Latin, such as boys at school and students at the universities were expected to write in those days. In the great city school, as in the Devonshire vicarage, he lived in the imagination, inert of body and rapacious of intellect; but he was solitary no longer, having found his tongue and among his more intellectual schoolfellows an interested audience. While yet a boy, he would hold an audience spellbound by his eloquent declamation or the fervor of his argument till, as Lamb, who was one of his hearers, tells us, "the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed to the accents of the _inspired charity boy_!" That is the way his conversation,--or monologue, as it often was,--affected not boys only, but men, and especially young men, to his dying day. He cast a spell upon men by his speech; upon his schoolfellows, upon young men at the universities in the Pantisocracy days, upon Lloyd and Poole at Nether Stowey, upon earnest young thinkers in his last days at Highgate; so that even if he had never written "The Ancient Mariner" and the _Biographia, Literaria_ he would still be remembered for the inspiration of his talk. Further details of the life at Christ's Hospital must be sought in Lamb's two essays, especially that on "Christ's Hospital Five-and-Thirty Years Ago." In 1791, having secured a Christ's Hospital "exhibition," he entered Jesus College, Cambridge. His university life extended over three years, from October, 1791, to December, 1794. It was an unhappy time for him and an uneasy time for his respectable relatives, for reasons that were partly in his own nature and partly in the temper of the times. Even Boyer's severe training, while it had made him a hard student and an unusual scholar for his years, had failed to give him what he most needed as a balance to his intellect and imagination, stability of character. There is evidence that after the first few months, during which the habits of his hard school life had not yet broken, the new liberty of university life led him into extravagance, if not dissipation. Work he doubtless did (he won the Browne medal for a Greek ode on the slave-trade in 1792), but fitfully, giving less and less attention to his regular studies and more to conviviality and, above all, to dreams of literary fame. He wrote verses after various models, sentimental, fanciful, or gallant; he was enthusiastic in praise of a contemporary sonneteer, the Rev. William Bowles, whose "divine sensibility" seemed to him the height of poetic feeling; and in connection with Wordsworth's younger brother Christopher, who entered Cambridge in 1793, he formed a literary society that discussed, among other things, Wordsworth's volume of early poetry, "Descriptive Sketches," published in that year. Wordsworth himself was a Cambridge man, but had taken his degree in 1791 and gone abroad, so that the two men whose personal friendship was to mean so much in English poetry did not meet until 1796. Already in 1793, however, Coleridge had developed political theories, or rather sympathies, which were preparing him for fellowship with Wordsworth. The French Revolution, which, after years of preparation, took concrete shape in 1789, did not look to young Englishmen in 1791-4 as it looks to us now, nor even as it was to look to those same Englishmen in 1800. In those first years warm-hearted young enthusiasts at the universities saw in the violence of their fellow-men across the Channel only the struggles of the beautiful Spirit of Liberty bursting the chains of age-long tyranny and corruption and calling men up to the heights to breathe diviner air. "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very Heaven!" wrote Wordsworth afterwards; and in the glow of his young idealism he had gone over to France in the autumn of 1791 and was on the point of throwing in his lot with the revolutionists, when his parents compelled his return by cutting off his supplies. And many who, like Coleridge, merely watched from afar shared his faith that a new order of things was to be established, wherein Love should be Law and man's inhumanity to man become but a memory of things outworn. Less generous men, with a selfish interest in established privileges; timid men, who looked with terror upon any prospect of change; older and wiser men, who better understood the foundations of social order and the nature of man--all these looked with distrust upon the revolutionary idealism that was spreading from France through the younger generation of Englishmen. The new notions of liberty, it was felt, threatened not only the vested rights of property and the prescriptions of rank, but the Church, too, and religion. Some of the would-be reformers were avowed atheists; some (Coleridge and his friends, for instance, in the Pantisocracy period) were communists. In general, they ascribed all the evils of society to "institutions," and wanted them abolished. Just how far Coleridge had gone in this direction by the autumn of 1793 we do not know; far enough at least to disturb his view of the future, to worry his elder brother George, a clergyman and school-teacher, who had in some measure filled a father's place to the young genius, and, most important of all, to alarm and distress a gentle girl in London. For before he left Christ's Hospital for Cambridge he had become intimate at the house of a Mrs. Evans, and most of the letters preserved from his first two years at the University were addressed to her or to one of her two daughters, Anne and Mary. With the latter Coleridge was in love; and that she had some regard for him is apparent from a letter she sent him in 1794. Before that, however, Coleridge had taken a step that seemed likely to close at once his college career and his prospects of literary fame. The reasons have not been recorded: probably pecuniary embarrassment, the yeasty state of his religious and political ideas, and impatience or despondency over his love-affair with Mary Evans, combined to precipitate his flight; what we know is that he ran away from Cambridge and in December, 1793, enlisted as a dragoon in the army. Coleridge had hardly taken the step before he repented of it. His letters to his brother George, who with other friends bestirred himself for Coleridge's release as soon as his whereabouts was discovered, are rather distressing in their self-abasement. The efforts of his friends were successful and in April he returned to the University, where a public admonition was the extent of his punishment, and he continued in receipt of his Christ's Hospital exhibition. But Coleridge's college days were practically over. He was now nearly twenty-two years old, and the revolutionary unrest which had doubtless contributed to his first escapade soon resulted in the formation of schemes that took him away from Cambridge for good and all. In June, 1794, he made a visit to an old schoolfellow at Oxford. Here he met Robert Southey of Balliol College. A friendship sprang up between them out of which, before the end of the summer, grew the Utopian scheme of Pantisocracy. A company of gentlemen and ladies were to emigrate to America, take up lands in the Susquehanna valley, and there establish an ideal community in which all should bear rule equally and find happiness in a life of justice, labor, and love. The education of the young in the principles of ideal humanity was an important part of the scheme. We are reminded of the Brook Farm experiment in New England a generation later, which bears a daughter's likeness to Pantisocracy, the chief difference being that the New England enthusiasts were mature men and women and really put the idea into practice, whereas the Pantisocrats were for the most part collegians and never got beyond the stage of talking and writing about their plans. The scheme was further elaborated at Bristol, where Coleridge, returning from a vacation tour in Wales, again met Southey, and at Bath, the home of Southey and of Southey's betrothed and her sister, Edith and Sarah Fricker--"two sisters, milliners of Bath," as Byron contemptuously called them. To the other sister, Sarah, Coleridge rather precipitately engaged himself. His love for Mary Evans was not dead, but he seems to have despaired of winning her and to have determined, by uniting himself domestically with Southey and his friends, to make retreat from their communistic scheme impossible. A few weeks later he is back at Cambridge, tortured apparently between his old love and his new engagement. Mary Evans has written to him deploring his wild notions and the mad plan of Pantisocracy, yet confident that he has "too much sensibility to be an infidel." Southey has reproved him rather sharply for failing to write to his betrothed at Bath. Our next glimpse of him is at London, discussing poetry and philosophy with Lamb at the "Salutation and Cat" tavern and perhaps trying to get a sight of Mary Evans. In December he is again at Bristol, in lively correspondence with Southey about democracy, Pantisocracy, and poetry, but at the same time he addresses a last appeal to Miss Evans. Her answer is kind, but final; that chapter is closed, and Coleridge writes to Southey that he will "do his duty," by which he means apparently that he will be faithful to Pantisocracy and marry Sarah Fricker. The Pantisocracy scheme could not in the nature of things be long-lived. As a matter of fact it lasted little more than a year, ending in a rupture between the two leading spirits just when they became brothers-in-law. Coleridge spent the summer of 1795 in Bristol in company with Southey, writing and lecturing. In October he was married to Sarah Fricker in "St. Mary's Redcliff, poor Chatterton's church." In November Southey married Edith Fricker and set sail for Lisbon, where his uncle was the English chaplain; and Pantisocracy was dead. The break with Southey was the natural result of attempting to force through a scheme impracticable in itself and doubly impracticable for the men who conceived it. Its collapse did not altogether sever their literary relations. The collaboration begun in "The Fall of Robespierre" (Cambridge, 1794) was continued in Southey's "Joan of Arc" (1796), to which Coleridge contributed the part afterwards printed (with some additions) as "The Destiny of Nations," and in Coleridge's first volume of "Poems" (Bristol, 1796). A more important contributor to this volume, however, was Charles Lamb, whose initials were appended to four of the pieces. A second edition appeared in June, 1797, with eleven additions from Coleridge besides verses by Lamb and Charles Lloyd, all under the title: "Poems by S.T. Coleridge. Second Edition. To which are added Poems by Charles Lamb, and Charles Lloyd." The publisher of both editions was Joseph Cottle, a bookseller of Bristol, who played the part of provincial Murray to the young poets in these years. Meanwhile Coleridge, after a period of lecturing and projecting, had as we have seen married Sarah Fricker, with whom he was now very much in love, and had begun housekeeping in a cottage at Clevedon near the Bristol Channel. The beauty of the place and his happiness there are celebrated in "The Aeolian Harp" and "Reflections on Leaving a Place of Retirement" (better known by its opening words, "Low was our pretty cot"). His next residence was in Bristol--rather a base of operations than a home, for Coleridge was on the road much of the time, lecturing, preaching, soliciting subscriptions for his political and philosophical paper "The Watchman" (which ran from March to May, 1796), and trying in various other ways to provide for his family, which was increased by the birth of a son in September, 1796. At last in December he secured the little cottage at Nether Stowey in the Quantock Hills (south of the Bristol Channel, in Somerset), close to the house of his beloved friend, Thomas Poole, where he lived until his departure for Germany in September, 1798. II. AT NETHER STOWEY The Stowey period was the blossoming time of Coleridge's genius. All the poems in this volume except the last four, and besides these "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," "Frost at Midnight," and "Fears in Solitude"--the bulk of his achievement in poetry--were either written or begun in 1797 and 1798. It will be proper, then, to dwell a little on his circumstances, his friends, and his ideas during these two years. The means of livelihood for himself and his family when he went to Stowey were a subscription of about £40 that Poole and some friends got together for him, £20 that Cottle paid for the second edition of the "Poems," the promise of £80 from the father of Charles Lloyd, who was to live with him and study under his direction, and such money as he could earn by reviews and magazine articles, which he estimated at £40 a year; not a munificent provision for a household of three adults and a child. But the theories of the simple life that had made Pantisocracy seem a feasible project still inspired him with confidence. "Sixteen shillings," he wrote to Poole, "would cover all the weekly expenses of my wife, infant, and myself. This I say from my wife's own calculations." Further, he will support himself by the labor of his hands. "If you can instruct me to manage an acre and a half of land, and to raise in it, with my own hands, all kinds of vegetables and grain, enough for myself and my wife and sufficient to feed a pig or two with the refuse, I hope that you will have served me _most_ effectually by placing me out of the necessity of being served." This was in December, just before he moved to Stowey. In February he wrote from his new home to another friend: "From seven till half past eight I work in my garden; from breakfast till twelve I read and compose, then read again, feed the pigs, poultry, etc., till two o'clock; after dinner work again till tea; from tea till supper, _review_. So jogs the day, and I am happy.... I raise potatoes and all manner of vegetables, have an orchard, and shall raise corn with the spade, enough for my family. We have two pigs, and ducks and geese. A cow would not answer the keep: we have whatever milk we want from T. Poole." There is a suspicious regularity about this schedule. Lamb wrote from London in January: "Is it a farm that you have got? And what does your worship know about farming?" His agricultural activity, in the month of February, must have been chiefly prospective; and we may safely assume that Poole supplied other things besides milk, and that the poet spent more time reading, dreaming, and talking than he did raising potatoes. A good deal of time must have been spent in the actual composition of his poetry, including his play "Osorio," which was written in 1797, and in studying the landscape beauties of the Quantocks. After the coming of the Wordsworths to Alfoxden he spent much of the time walking between Alfoxden and Stowey, or further afield with Wordsworth and his sister. "My walks," he wrote afterwards, "were almost daily on the top of Quantock, and among its sloping coombs. With my pencil and memorandum-book in my hand, I was making studies, as the artists call them, and often moulding them into verse with the objects and imagery immediately before my eyes." This does not sound much like "raising corn with the spade." On Sundays he would sometimes preach before such Unitarian congregations, within walking distance, as cared to hear him. But as he would take no pay for his services his preaching contributed nothing toward the support of his family. Lloyd, who was epileptic and subject to moody variation in his attachments, was but an irregular housemate after the first few months, and his contribution to the household expenses was correspondingly uncertain. The future looked so dark in October, 1797, that in spite of misgivings and former scruples he had concluded that he "must become a Unitarian minister, as a less evil than starvation." Accordingly he was in Shrewsbury in January, 1798, preaching in the Unitarian church and on the point of accepting the pastorate at a salary of £150 a year, when the sky brightened in another quarter. Thomas and Josiah Wedgwood, sons of the famous potter and friends of Thomas Poole, offered him an equal sum annually as a free gift. They were wealthy men, well able to afford it; they attached no condition to the gift except that he should devote himself entirely to the study of poetry and philosophy, which was precisely what he wanted to do; and he was not long in determining to accept the offer. "I accepted it," he wrote to Wordsworth while still at Shrewsbury, "on the presumption that I had talents, honesty, and propensities to perseverant effort." The propensities, alas, remained propensities, never acquiring the force of habit. The pension, however, continued to be paid in full until 1812, when Josiah Wedgwood withdrew his half of it. The other half, upon the death of Thomas Wedgwood in 1805, had been secured to Coleridge for life; and this annuity must have constituted the chief reliance of Mrs. Coleridge for many years. If Coleridge did not prosper financially, he was at least fortunate in his friends; and a man's friends are after all the best testimony to the character of his mind and heart. When he went to Stowey in December, 1796, he was again on good terms with Southey, though the enthusiasm of their first fellowship was gone. The friendship with Lamb, begun in their school-days and renewed at the "Salutation and Cat" in 1794, was maintained by an eager correspondence and by Lamb's visit to Stowey in July, 1797; and although Lloyd's vagaries led to a coolness between the old friends in the following year, the breach was soon healed, and the friendship continued till death. Another with whom Coleridge maintained a voluminous correspondence in 1796-7 was John Thelwall, theoretical democrat, atheist, and admirer of Godwin, whose visit to Coleridge and Wordsworth in the summer of 1797 so shocked the good conservatives of the neighborhood that Wordsworth had to leave Alfoxden in consequence of it. But without doubt the dearest and most influential friend Coleridge had before the Wordsworths came into his life was Thomas Poole. It was in order to be in daily intercourse with Poole that he moved to Stowey; and Poole's hesitation about securing the cottage for him, arising, Coleridge seemed to fear, from imperfect confidence and friendship, was a source of agonized apprehension to the sensitive poet. When we consider that Poole was a self-educated man, a Somersetshire tanner with no claim to literary genius or philosophical acquirements, Coleridge's devotion to him and dependence on him bring out in a strong light the substantial, elemental character of the man. "O Poole!" Coleridge wrote to him from Germany afterwards, "you are a noble heart as ever God made!" Poole had indeed in a marked degree the genius for friendship. Strength of character, sympathy, and self-effacing devotion, combined with prudence and sincerity, made this man a tower of refuge for the unstable spirit of the poet. No other single relation, however, can compare in importance, for Coleridge's poetic development, with that which sprang up in the summer of 1797 between him and William Wordsworth. Just when they first met is not recorded. We have seen that Coleridge was acquainted with Wordsworth's younger brother in his college days, and discussed with him Wordsworth's first published poems. In January, 1797, he told Cottle that he wished to submit his "Visions of the Maid of Arc" to Wordsworth for criticism. The earliest definite record of their personal acquaintance is a letter Coleridge wrote to Cottle while on a visit to Wordsworth at Racedown (just over the Somerset border in Dorsetshire) early in June. About the beginning of July he is again at Racedown; and when he returns he brings Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy with him for a visit. On the 7th Lamb arrived for his long-planned reunion with Coleridge. The second week of July, 1797, was thus a rich and long-remembered time for all of them, despite the fact that Mrs. Coleridge "accidentally emptied a skillet of boiling milk" on her husband's foot, which confined him "during the whole time of Charles Lamb's stay." The others took long walks in the neighborhood, amid such scenery as is described in "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," a poem that admirably voices the happiness, of those days of spiritual fellowship. The Wordsworths did not return to Racedown. "By a combination of curious circumstances a gentleman's seat, with a park and woods, elegantly and completely furnished,... in the most beautiful and romantic situation by the seaside, four miles from Stowey--this we have got for Wordsworth at the _rent of twenty-three pounds a year, taxes included_!" Coleridge triumphantly announced to Southey; and in this house, the Manor of Alfoxden, the Wordsworths remained for a year, in daily companionship with Coleridge and surrounded by scenes of natural beauty that have left a lasting mark on the work of both poets. What the friendship with Coleridge meant to Wordsworth may best be seen in "The Prelude: or, Growth of a Poet's Mind," Wordsworth's greatest long poem, written some years afterwards and addressed throughout to Coleridge. "There is no grief, no sorrow, no despair, No languor, no dejection, no dismay, No absence scarcely can there be, for those Who love as we do." What Wordsworth was to Coleridge is more important for us here. The admiration which the brilliant child of genius felt for the great preacher-poet is chiefly, one feels, an admiration for his character. As a matter of fact, Wordsworth had written nothing, up to his coming to Alfoxden, that would have preserved his name as a poet, nothing so noteworthy or promising as what Coleridge had already written. But Coleridge felt in this lean and thoughtful young man a strength of mind, a depth and sureness of heart that compelled his allegiance and even imparted, for the time, some of that resolution in which he was by nature so sadly deficient. The character of their friendship is to be seen not only in the published work of the two poets from this time on (notably in "Dejection"), but perhaps even more clearly in Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal and in Coleridge's letters. "I speak with heart-felt sincerity," he wrote to Cottle in June, 1797, "and (I think) unblinded judgment, when I tell you that I feel myself _a little man by his side_, and yet do not think myself the less man than I formerly thought myself.... T. Poole's opinion of Wordsworth is that he is the greatest man he ever knew; I coincide." Wordsworth's influence is evident in a letter from Coleridge to his brother George in April, 1798: "I love fields and woods and mountains with almost a visionary fondness. And because I have found benevolence and quietness growing within me as that fondness has increased, therefore I should wish to be the means of implanting it in others, and to destroy the bad passions not by combating them but by keeping them in inaction." Under the calming and clarifying influence of the stronger Northern spirit the fever of his revolutionary dreams abated, he found happiness in the conscious exercise of his poetic powers, and for one year in his troubled existence his genius showed itself in all its splendor. The immediate poetic result of their friendship was the "Lyrical Ballads," published by Cottle in September, 1798. The origin of the work has been described both by Wordsworth (in a prefatory note to "We Are Seven") and by Coleridge (in the _Biographia Literaria_, chap. xiv.). At first, they were to collaborate in writing a poem the proceeds of which should pay the expenses of a little tour they were making when the plan was thought of, in November, 1797; and thus "The Ancient Mariner" was begun. As this poem grew under Coleridge's "shaping-spirit of imagination" Wordsworth saw that he "could only be a clog" upon its progress, and it was resigned to Coleridge. The plan was then enlarged to include a volume illustrating "two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination." Wordsworth was to illustrate the former principle, Coleridge the latter, and the proceeds of the book were to go toward the expenses of a trip to Germany, decided on in the spring of 1798. The bulk of the volume was Wordsworth's, and was typically Wordsworthian, ranging from such simple ballads of humble incident as "Goody Blake" and "The Idiot Boy" to the magnificent blank verse of "Tintern Abbey"; Coleridge's share consisted of a brief poem called "The Nightingale," two short extracts from "Osorio," and "The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere." Apart from the "Lyrical Ballads" Coleridge conceived and finished between June, 1797, and the departure for Germany in 1798, and published in the latter year, "Fire, Famine, and Slaughter," "Frost at Midnight," "Fears in Solitude," and "France." He conceived and partly executed, but did not then publish, "Christabel," "Kubla Khan," "Love," "The Ballad of the Dark Ladie," and "The Three Graves." Thus, all Coleridge's best poetry, with the exception of those three saddest of voices out of a broken life, "Dejection" (1802), the lines to Wordsworth on hearing him read "The Prelude" (1807), and "Youth and Age" (1823-32), belongs either wholly or in its inception to the year of his fellowship with the Wordsworths in the Quantock Hills. Of his political, religious, and literary opinions at this time he has left a fairly adequate account in his published writings and his correspondence, especially in the _Biographia Literaria_ and in the letter to the Rev. George Coleridge referred to above. The first year of his married life saw him still, in spite of the failure of Pantisocracy, an eager visionary reformer upborne by generous enthusiasm and ardent religious feeling. "O! never can I remember those days," he wrote in the _Biographia_, "with either shame or regret. For I was most sincere, most disinterested! My opinions were indeed in many and most important points erroneous; but my heart was single. Wealth, rank, life itself, then seemed cheap to me, compared with the interest of (what I believed to be) the truth, and the will of my Maker." However much he may have consorted with unbelievers like Thelwall and distressed his good brother George by his heterodoxy, he was by nature deeply religious. He tried in his letters to recover Thelwall from his "atheism," though he heartily approved a sentiment expressed by the latter: "He who thinks and _feels_ will be virtuous; and he who is absorbed in self will be vicious, whatever may be his speculative opinions." Godwin's system of "Justice," with its soulless logic, he abhorred. He preached often in Unitarian churches. To young Hazlitt, who heard him preach in January, 1798, from the text "And He went up into the mountain to pray, _Himself, alone_," it seemed "as if the sounds had echoed from the bottom of the human heart, and as if that prayer might have floated in solemn silence through the universe." In politics he was, when he went to Stowey, "almost equidistant from all the three prominent parties, the Pittites, the Foxites, and the Democrats"; he was "a vehement anti-ministerialist, but after the invasion of Switzerland, a more vehement anti-Gallican [see the last two stanzas of "France"], and still more intensely an anti-Jacobin." Under Wordsworth's influence his thoughts turned in great measure from contemporary politics to more fundamental matters. Always his poetry had been the utterance of his essential being. "I feel strongly and I think strongly," he wrote to Thelwall in 1796, "but I seldom feel without thinking or think without feeling. Hence, though my poetry has in general a hue of tenderness or passion over it, yet it seldom exhibits unmixed and simple tenderness and passion. My philosophical opinions are blended with or deduced from my feelings." Wordsworth gave his feelings a new object and his philosophy a higher aim. In April of the second year at Stowey, in the letter to his brother already quoted, Coleridge wrote: "I have for some time past withdrawn myself totally from the consideration of _immediate causes_, which are infinitely complex and uncertain, to muse on fundamental and general causes, the 'causae causarum.' I devote myself to such works as encroach not on the anti-social passions--in poetry, to elevate the imagination and set the affections in right tune by the beauty of the inanimate impregnated as with a living soul by the presence of life--in prose to the seeking with patience and a slow, very slow mind, 'Quid sumus, et quidnam victuri gignimus,'--what our faculties are and what they are capable of becoming." This last sentence is a sort of half-prophetic summary of his life's work; but the poetry soon gave way to the prose, and he never again so nearly realized his poetical ideal as he had already done in "The Ancient Mariner." Of his person and the impression he made upon people at this time there are various contemporary accounts. To Thelwall, in November, 1796, he sent the following description of himself: "... my face, unless when animated by immediate eloquence, expresses great sloth, and great, indeed almost idiotic good-nature. 'Tis a mere carcass of a face; fat, flabby, and expressive chiefly of inexpression. Yet I am told that my eyes, eyebrows, and forehead are physiognomically good; but of this the deponent knoweth not. As to my shape, 'tis a good shape enough if measured, but my gait is awkward, and the walk of the whole man indicates _indolence capable of energies_.... I cannot breathe through my nose, so my mouth, with sensual thick lips, is almost always open. In conversation I am impassioned, and oppose what I deem error with an eagerness which is often mistaken for personal asperity; but I am ever so swallowed up in the _thing_ said that I forget my _opponent_. Such am I." The Rev. Leapidge Smith, in his "Reminiscences of an Octogenarian," remembered him as "a tall, dark, handsome young man, with long, black, flowing hair; eyes not merely dark, but black, and keenly penetrating; a fine forehead, a deep-toned, harmonious voice; a manner never to be forgotten, full of life, vivacity, and kindness; dignified in person and, added to all these, exhibiting the elements of his future greatness."[1] Hazlitt, in "My First Acquaintance with Poets" (a paper that every student of Coleridge's life and poetry should read), describing him as he appeared on his visit to Hazlitt's father at Wem in 1798, says: "His complexion was at that time clear, and even bright. His forehead was broad and high, light as if built of ivory, with large projecting eyebrows, and his eyes rolling beneath them like a sea with darkened lustre.... His mouth was gross, voluptuous, open, eloquent; his chin good-humored and round, but his nose, the rudder of the face, the index of the will, was small, feeble, nothing--like what he has done." And Dorothy Wordsworth (to close with a contemporary and sympathetic impression) set him down in her journal after their first meeting at Racedown thus: "He is a wonderful man. His conversation teems with soul, mind, and spirit.... At first I thought him very plain, that is for about three minutes: he is pale, thin, has a wide mouth, thick lips, and not very good teeth, longish, loose-growing, half-curling, rough black hair. But if you hear him speak for five minutes you think no more of them. His eye is large and full, and not very dark, but grey[2]--such an eye as would receive from a heavy soul the dullest expression; but it speaks every emotion of his animated mind; it has more of 'the poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling' than I ever witnessed. He has fine dark eyebrows, and an overhanging forehead." The friendly and keen-sighted woman gives a more sympathetic picture than the others; but there must have been truth, too, in the view of the equally keen-sighted and less friendly Hazlitt, whose description accords well with Coleridge's self-portraiture, and in the last sarcastic item, too well, with the remainder of the poet's career. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: "Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge," ed. by E.H. Coleridge, Vol. I., p. 180, note.] [Footnote 2: The uncertainty as to the color of his eyes is a tribute to their expressiveness. Carlyle described him in 1824 as having "a pair of strange brown, timid, yet earnest-looking eyes." Emerson visited him in 1833 and found him "with bright blue eyes and fine clear complexion."] III. THE REST OF THE STORY Coleridge lived for thirty-six years after he left Stowey for Germany in 1798. His fame as a poet grew as the world became acquainted with and learned to feel the peculiar charm of his poetry, and he was even more famous, for a while, as a literary critic and a moral philosopher. But they were years of weak-willed wandering, of vast hazy plans and feeble performance, lighted only here and there by glimpses of fragmentary accomplishment, and that seldom in poetry. Keats died at twenty-six, leaving behind him a body of poetry hardly less wonderful than Coleridge had fashioned at the same age; and another poet sang of him: "The bloom, whose petals, nipt before they blew, Died on the promise of the fruit, is waste." In Coleridge the poet died at nearly the same age, almost as completely as if the man himself had passed "within the twilight chamber ... of white Death"; and "Dejection" is that poet's dirge. The remaining years need therefore but few words. Coleridge had taken opium, perhaps as early as his school-days, for relief from neuralgia. He had recourse to it in March, 1796, for sleeplessness; in the following November, for relief from violent nervous pains; and near the close of the Stowey period, in May, 1798, when the vagaries of Lloyd, the estrangement from Lamb, domestic anxiety, and physical suffering had reduced him to a state of extreme nervous wretchedness, he again took refuge in opiates, of which "Kubla Khan" is partly the result. He returned from Germany in 1799, worked for a while on a newspaper in London and on a translation of Schiller's "Wallenstein," and in the summer of 1800 removed to Keswick in Cumberland, in the Lake Country, where the Wordsworths had already established themselves. Here, in the autumn of 1800, he strove to finish "Christabel," and did finish the second part. In the winter and spring he suffered from a complicated illness, in which he again had recourse to laudanum; and from the spring of 1801 he was confirmed in the opium habit, sinking often to pitiful depths of moral and physical misery. He was in the Mediterranean, chiefly at Malta, from 1804 to 1806. His wife and children remained at Keswick, where Southey and his family had become co-tenants with them of Greta Hall. Southey, it might almost be said, took care of Coleridge's family henceforth; for Coleridge had begun to find his own fireside an intolerable place as early as 1802, lived little at home, and made a formal separation from his wife in 1808,--though they saw each other occasionally after that and the Wedgwood annuity continued to be paid to Mrs. Coleridge. In 1809 he was living with the Wordsworths at Grasmere, where he wrote several numbers of a politico-philosophical paper called "The Friend." About the close of 1810 he was taken in hand by a Mr. and Mrs. Morgan of Hammersmith, near London, under whose care he kept the opium in check sufficiently to give his famous lectures on the "Principles of Poetry" in the winter of 1811-12, and another series in the early summer on Shakespeare. In the winter following, his play of "Remorse," a recast of the "Osorio" of 1797, was acted in London with some success. In the winter of 1813-14 he lectured, in a "conversational" fashion, at Bristol. He also wrote irregularly for the London papers during these years. But his studies, since his return from Germany, had been directed to metaphysics, and especially to the philosophical bases of poetry and theology; and the last twenty years of his life, at least, were occupied with plans for a great philosophical work covering these two fields of thought. One of the fragments of the great work that actually came to light, the _Biographia Literaria_, seems to have been sent to the printers in 1815. A collected edition of his poetry was also begun while he was under the Morgans' care. From 1816 till his death in 1834 he lived in comparative peace, if not in happiness, with a Mr. Gilman of Highgate near London, an apothecary. Gilman and his wife were able so far to wean him from the drug, or to regulate his use of it, that he brought to the birth something of his vast plans in criticism and philosophy, notably the _Biographia Literaria_ (1817) and the "Aids to Reflection" (1825). The beginning of his stay with Gilman was also marked by the publication of "Christabel" and "Kubla Khan" (1816), and of a collected edition of his other poems (including "The Ancient Mariner," considerably revised) under the title "Sibylline Leaves" (1817). But the poems that were not finished in the first great period at Stowey remained unfinished. He talked divinely ("an archangel a little damaged," Lamb said), and both by his talk and his metaphysical writings profoundly influenced the literature and philosophy of the century, both in England and America; but the poet in him was dead. "Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain, And genius given, and knowledge won in vain; And all which I had culled in woodwalks wild, And all which patient toil had reared, and all Commune with _thee_ had opened out--but flowers Strewed on my corse, and borne upon my bier, In the same coffin, for the self-same grave!"[1] It would be a mistake to ascribe the paralysis of Coleridge's powers of constructive imagination exclusively to laudanum. Rather the resort to narcotics and the inability to control his creative faculty are alike symptoms of a temperamental malady which had its roots in his nature close to the seat of that special faculty. Under a favorable conjunction of outward circumstance and inward state, imagination came; it possessed him, and he labored in it, happily. Afterwards he could revise what he had shaped, analyze it philosophically, perfect some details of it, but he could not proceed in the creative act after the inspiration had left him. His own description of his nature--"_indolence capable of energies_"--is accurate as far as it goes. The opium, resorted to often, no doubt, to quicken the dreams in his brain as well as to relieve his bodily suffering, helped to enfeeble his will; but the "indolence" was in him before he became addicted to opium, and he was never "capable of energies" at the call of duty, but only at the call of his "shaping spirit," over whose coming and going he had no control. Poetically it is perhaps as well. Had he been like his friend Wordsworth in strength and steadiness of purpose--which is to suppose him another nature than he was--his life would have been happier and more edifying, but he would hardly have given us anything better than "Christabel" and "The Ancient Mariner." Romantic poetry of the higher type is essentially the creature of mood. Even Wordsworth's long and conscientious labors produced but a small bulk of poetry of this character, amid dreary reaches of uninspired preaching. Coleridge waited--in despondency often, in self-upbraidings, in the temporary deception of opium dreams with their consequent misery--for the return of the spirit; and it did not come. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: From the lines addressed to Wordsworth after hearing him read "The Prelude," in 1807.] II. COLERIDGE'S POEMS. "THE ANCIENT MARINER" "The Ancient Mariner" was first printed in the first edition of "Lyrical Ballads," 1798, again with considerable changes in the second edition, 1800, and without further significant change in the editions of 1802 and 1805. Its fifth appearance was in "Sibylline Leaves," 1817, again with some important changes, and the addition of the Latin motto and the marginal gloss. In the "Poetical Works," 1828, and again in the "Poetical Works," 1829, the poem appeared in its final form as we now have it,--differing very little from the form it had in "Sibylline Leaves." One or two significant minor changes will be mentioned in the notes. Coleridge's own account of the genesis of the poem, given in the _Biographia Literaria_ nearly twenty years later, is interesting. "During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm, which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset, diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its vicinity where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them when they present themselves. "In this idea originated the 'Lyrical Ballads'; in which it was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the wonders and loveliness of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand. "With this view I wrote 'The Ancient Mariner,' and was preparing, among other poems, 'The Dark Ladie,' and the 'Christabel,' in which I should have more nearly realized my ideal than I had done in my first attempt. But Mr. Wordsworth's industry had proved so much more successful, and the number of his poems so much greater, that my compositions, instead of forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous matter. Mr. Wordsworth added two or three poems written in his own character, in the impassioned, lofty, and sustained diction which is characteristic of his genius [among them the "Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey"]. In this form the 'Lyrical Ballads' were published." Lyrical they hardly were, in any current meaning of that word; they were narrative. But they were ballads as the word was then understood. The two cardinal points of poetry that Coleridge says they had in view in this partnership production were both believed to be special marks of the ballad; the charm of homeliness and simplicity, and the spell of the supernatural and romantic. Bishop Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry," 1765, had created a taste for the traditional poetry of humble folk. Spreading to Germany and uniting there with the sentimental sensationalism of the eighteenth century, this taste found expression in Burger's "Lenore," which in turn had a powerful influence in England, five distinct translations of it appearing in 1796. Of the distinction so much insisted on by later analysts of the true popular ballad--its communal origin, its impersonality, its freedom from adornment, its lack of conscious art--the Englishman of Coleridge's time took no account. "The Ancient Mariner" is not a ballad in the sense in which "Sir Patrick Spens" or "Young Waters" is a ballad. It is in the highest degree a work of conscious and individual art. It is rather to be classed, like "Christabel," as a romance. But it was conceived and written under the influence of the "ballad revival," and bears many marks of that influence both in its general structure and in its details of workmanship. Much of the archaic diction and antique spelling, as well as the ruder grotesquerie, that in the first edition proclaimed its relation to the pseudo-balladry of the time disappeared in the later editions. But the archaisms, the "unpoetical" diction, and especially the disregard of tense coherence in the poem as we now have it, contribute greatly to the atmosphere of romance--as of a story removed alike from the commonplace experience of every day and from familiar literary conventions--which it was Coleridge's intention to produce. By a few devotional ejaculations--"Heaven's Mother send us grace!" "To Mary Queen the praise be given!"--we are made to feel that the Ancient Mariner lived before the Reformation, in the ages of wonder and faith. Repetition, as in many stanzas of Part IV., is a device caught from the folk-ballad and modified to produce the effect of a spell, which is so strong a mark of the poem. The abrupt opening, the unannounced transitions in dialogue, the omission of all but the vital incidents of the story, all belong to the ballad style. The verse form is what is known as the ballad stanza (stanza of four lines--a line of four accents followed by one of three, the second and fourth lines riming) variously extended and modified to suit the mood of the passage. The prose summary in the form of a marginal gloss, first added in the edition of 1817, is a practice taken from early printed books, but not from balladry, which is normally oral. Of the literary qualities of the poem much might be said, but I call attention here to but two: the organic structure of the story and the character of the imagery, two important aspects of creative imagination. The seven parts are seven stages of the narrative, each, except the last, closing with a reference to the Mariner's sin. The story proceeds like the successive acts of a play. In Part I. the deed is committed; in Part II. the punishment begins; in Part III. the punishment reaches its climax. Part IV. brings the "turn"; in the crisis of his sufferings comes the consciousness of fellowship with other creatures and repentance for his cruelty. Parts V. and VI. relate his penance begun, and his return by supernatural agencies to the world of human fellowship; and Part VII. brings us back to the opening scene, closing the whole with a moral. The moral is so plainly set forth that one wonders how Mrs. Barbauld could ever have complained, as Coleridge tells us she did, that the poem "had no moral." His reply is worth recording: "I told her that in my opinion the poem had too much; and that the only, or chief fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader as a principle or cause of action in a work of such pure imagination. It ought to have had no more moral than the Arabian Nights' tale of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well, and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a genie starts up, and says he _must_ kill the aforesaid merchant, because one of the date shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie's son." But the poet of 1798 knew better than the metaphysician of 1830. The moral is as essential a part of the whole poem as moral consciousness is of man; without it the poem would be without the coherence of human interest which alone can secure for "these shadows of imagination" "poetic faith." The moral, really, is suffused throughout the work, is the blood of its being; that it should be formulated at the close is quite in accord with the simplicity which marked the whole conception of the "Lyrical Ballads," and is moreover perfectly harmonious with the spirit of the poem itself. There have been poets who seemed to be without the moral sense, and who have written poetry quite free from any moral, like Poe and his landscape visions, but wonderful as they are, they are abnormal, and are less great as they are less completely human. It may be that Wordsworth, as one infers from recollections of the composition of the poem, suggested the moral plot; but if so it entered at once and completely into Coleridge's imagination and governed the shaping of the poem from the start. In all the very considerable changes and omissions that the poem underwent after it was first printed, there was none that either retrenched from or added to the moral interpretation of the tale. Of its imagery the most evident characteristic is what may be called the anthropomorphic treatment of nature. This, although in accord with modern conceptions of primitive culture, is not at all a mark of the popular ballad. Sun, and moon, and storm-wind, and ocean are in folk-song sun and moon and wind and water and nothing more; but in "The Ancient Mariner" they are living beings. "And now the Storm-blast came, and he Was tyrannous and strong: He struck with his o'ertaking wings, And chased us south along." "And straight the Sun was flecked with bars, (Heaven's Mother send us grace!) As if through a dungeon-grate he peered With broad and burning face." "Still as a slave before his lord, The ocean hath no blast; His great bright eye most silently Up to the Moon is cast-- "If he may know which way to go; For she guides him smooth or grim. See, brother, see! how graciously She looketh down on him." This is the most noticeable of the "modifying colours of imagination" in "The Ancient Mariner." The practice might be classed as a sort of personification; but how utterly different in its effect from the conventional "literary" personifications of the eighteenth century--of Gray in the "Elegy," for instance! Grandeur, and Envy, and Honour, in that admirable poem, are not real persons to the imagination; the abstraction remains an abstraction. But in Coleridge's poem all nature is alive with the life of men. Other elements of "that synthetic and magical power to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination," and which blends "the idea with the image" and "the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects" will be felt as the poem is studied. Wordsworth related in after years that the suggestion for the poem came from a dream of a phantom ship told to Coleridge by a friend, and that he (Wordsworth) proposed the shooting of the albatross, the revenge of the "tutelary spirits," and the "navigation of the ship by the dead men," and contributed the fourth stanza of the poem and the last two lines of the first stanza of Part IV. He had been reading Shelvocke's "Voyages," a book in which he had found a description of albatrosses as they are seen in far southern waters. Other reading that may have suggested some of the scenery is described in the "Notes" to the Globe edition of Coleridge's poems. There are also passages and situations in the last two acts of Wordsworth's play, "The Borderers," which Coleridge read with great admiration in the summer of 1797, that have evident kinship with "The Ancient Mariner," and Wordsworth's "Peter Bell" (composed at Alfoxden, but printed many years later) suggests what the story might have become if Coleridge instead of Wordsworth had withdrawn from collaboration. "CHRISTABEL" AND "KUBLA KHAN" "Christabel" and "Kubla Khan" were first printed in 1816, in a pamphlet along with "The Pains of Sleep," a sort of contrast to "Kubla Khan" composed in 1803. In the Preface to this pamphlet Coleridge informs us that the first part of "Christabel" was written at Stowey in 1797 and the second part at Keswick, Cumberland, in 1800. The poem was intended originally for the "Lyrical Ballads," and it was with the hope of finishing it for the second edition that Coleridge took it up again in the fall of 1800. There is a good deal of uncertainty as to just how much of the work was done at that time. In two letters of that period he speaks of it as "running up to 1300 lines," and "swelled into a poem of 1400 lines," so that it is no longer suitable for the "Lyrical Ballads"; but hardly half of this amount was printed in the 1816 pamphlet or has ever been found since. One suspects that already in 1800 dreams and projects had begun to be confounded with performance. In the latter of the two letters mentioned above he relates how his "verse-making faculties returned" to him, after long and unsuccessful struggles with "barrenness" and deep "dejection," as the result of drinking, "at the house of a neighbouring clergyman, ... so much wine, that I found some effort and dexterity requisite to balance myself on the hither edge of sobriety." On the whole, it seems probable that "Christabel" owes little to the forced efforts of his first year in the Lake country. Like most of the other poems in this volume, it is a product of the great year at Stowey. He himself told a friend in later years: "I had the whole of the two cantos in my mind before I began it," adding very truly, "certainly the first canto is more perfect, has more of the true wild weird spirit than the last." Down to the close of his life he dreamed of finishing this work. He amused his listeners at Highgate with a continuation of the plot; and in 1833 he declared that if he "were perfectly free from vexation and were in the _ad libitum_ hearing of fine music" he could yet finish "Christabel," "for I have, as I always had, the whole plan entire from beginning to end in my mind; but I fear I could not carry on with equal success the execution of the idea." Wordsworth had a different recollection. He told Coleridge's nephew in 1836 that he did not think Coleridge "had ever conceived, in his own mind, any definite plan for it; that the poem had been composed while they were in habits of daily intercourse, and almost in his presence, and when there was the most unreserved intercourse between them as to all their literary projects and productions, and he had never heard from him any plan for finishing it"; and added, what is fully borne out by a study of Coleridge's life: "schemes of this sort passed rapidly and vividly through his mind, and so impressed him, that he often fancied he had arranged things, which really, and upon trial, proved to be mere embryos." "The unfinished window in Aladdin's tower Unfinished must remain," wrote Longfellow, alluding to "The Dolliver Romance" that Hawthorne left incomplete at his death. There is strong kinship, moral and artistic, between Coleridge and Hawthorne; both believed that the heart is more than the head, and neither could force his imagination to work under unfavorable conditions. But Hawthorne's failure of imagination came at the end of a fruitful and consistent career, and his life failed with it; in Coleridge the poet died half a lifetime before the man, and left the man--the preacher and philosopher--to lament his loss. Whether or not Coleridge had the story complete in his mind, what we have is a fragment, and does not enable us to divine, as some broken statues do, the plan of the whole. What it gives us is the romantic mood, the sense of "witchery by daylight," and this it does more hauntingly than anything else in the English language. It is a series of magical and unforgetable pictures. It owes a good deal to the old verse romances and ballads that so impressed the imagination in those days of the mediaeval revival, but it was itself a far stronger influence. It operated as an original force, both by its form and by its spirit, upon the poetic imagination of the first half of the nineteenth century more widely and deeply than the work of any other man, Burns and Keats not excepted. Scott heard it read from manuscript, and the "Lay of the Last Minstrel," with the series of verse romances that followed, may almost be called a result of that reading; the verse form of Scott's romances certainly is. Poe's poetry is as far as the poles removed from Scott's; yet a close study of Poe's work shows the influence of "Christabel" to be even deeper here than in the "Lay of the Last Minstrel." Coleridge was fully aware of a special power, both of imagination and of verse-music, in the poem. His attempts to complete it in 1800 brought persistently to his mind the project of a philosophy of poetry, and especially of this poem, as we may infer from a letter to Poole in March, 1801: "I shall ... immediately publish my 'Christabel,' with two essays annexed to it, on the 'Preternatural' and on 'Metre.'" When the two cantos were at last printed in 1816, Coleridge wrote in the Preface: "The metre of the 'Christabel' is not, properly speaking, irregular, though it may seem so from its being founded on a new principle: namely, that of counting in each line the accents, not the syllables. Though the latter may vary from seven to twelve, yet in each line the accents will be found to be only four. Nevertheless this occasional variation in number of syllables is not introduced wantonly, or for the mere ends of convenience, but in correspondence with some transition, in the nature of the imagery or passion." This is not to be taken quite literally. The accentual principle was assuredly nothing new in English verse, and syllable-counting, though introduced by Chaucer, had to be reintroduced by the Renaissance poets and did not become an unquestioned convention till the latter part of the seventeenth century. But the return to free accentual verse in the "Christabel" was an innovation at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It is to be noted, too, that there are lines of three and even of two accents in Part I. In chap. XV. of the _Biographia Literaria_, in a list of the "specific symptoms of poetic power" in Shakespeare's early work, Coleridge places first "the perfect sweetness of the versification; its adaptation to the subject; and the power displayed in varying the march of the words.... The sense of musical delight, with the power of producing it, is a gift of imagination; and this, together with the power of reducing multitude into unity of effect, and modifying a series of thoughts by some one predominant thought or feeling, may be cultivated and improved, but can never be learnt. It is in these that _Poeta nascitur non fit_." "Kubla Khan" is the remembered fragment of a dream. All that we know about it is contained in the note Coleridge prefixed to it in the pamphlet of 1816. In the summer of 1798 (Coleridge says 1797, but this seems to have been a slip of his memory[1]) "the author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in 'Purchas's Pilgrimage': 'Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.' The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as _things_, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!" Opinion will ever vary as to its poetic worth. Coleridge himself professed to consider it "rather as a psychological curiosity" than as a thing "of any supposed _poetic_ merits"; to Lamb he repeated it "so enchantingly that it irradiates and brings heaven and elysian bowers into any parlour when he sings or says it," and it has been a sort of touchstone of romantic taste ever since. It supremely illustrates that "sense of musical delight, with the power of producing it," which the poet declared to be a gift of the imagination that can never be learnt. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: See notes to this poem in the Globe edition, and E.H. Coleridge's "Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge," Vol. I, p. 245, note.] "FRANCE: AN ODE" This ode was written in February, 1798, and first printed in the "Morning Post" for April 16 of that year, under the significant title of "Recantation." In the autumn it was printed with its present title in a pamphlet together with "Fears in Solitude," another political poem, and "Frost at Midnight," a poem on his infant child. In October, 1802, it was reprinted in the "Post" with a prose "Argument" (see notes), less necessary for the readers of that time than it may be now. Coleridge, like Wordsworth, had welcomed the French Revolution as ushering in an era of light and love in human society; both, though Wordsworth more profoundly, had been depressed by the excesses of 1793-4, and by the lust of conquest which became more and more evident under the Directory; and when at last in February, 1798, the French armies invaded Switzerland, the ancient sacred home of liberty in Europe, Coleridge "recanted" in this ode. Political poetry is likely to lose its power with the passing of the events and passions that give it birth; it retains its power just in proportion as it is built on lasting and universal interests of the heart of man. That "France" has retained its position as one of the great odes of the English language is due not only to the loftiness of its thought and the splendor of its imagery, but even more to the fact that it turns from the political excitement of the hour to the grandeur and beauty of nature and to those aspirations and ideals whose home is "in the heart of man." "LOVE" From the second edition of "Lyrical Ballads," 1800. It was planned by Coleridge as an introduction to the ballad of "The Dark Ladie," which was never completed, but of which some fifteen stanzas were printed in the 1834 edition of his "Poetical Works." Its composition cannot be accurately dated. It is conceived in the general spirit of the ballads but is simpler, more purely a poem of sentiment, than either "Christabel" or "The Ancient Mariner," and makes no use of the supernatural. Its simplicity and absolute purity of tone are, however, something more than a negative virtue. Coleridge himself declared of it and "The Ancient Mariner" that they might be excelled, but could not be imitated. "DEJECTION: AN ODE" This ode was written in April, 1802, at a time when, after sickness, opium, domestic unhappiness and the consequent paralysis of his poetic faculty had driven him to seek distraction in the study of metaphysics, he made a visit to Wordsworth at Dove Cottage and in that vitalizing presence experienced a brief return of his powers--enough to give wonderful expression to perhaps the saddest thoughts that ever visited ungoverned genius. The earliest known form of the poem, preserved in a letter to W. Sotheby of July 19, 1802, shows (what is apparent enough to one familiar with the relations existing between the two poets) that it was conceived as a letter to Wordsworth, who is addressed in this earliest version as "Dearest Poet," "Wordsworth," and "William." It was first printed in the "Morning Post" for October 4, 1802, with "Edmund" for Wordsworth's name and with some omissions, but with the strong personal feeling undiminished; and in its present form (that is, with the parts omitted in the 1802 print restored, but with the substitution of "Lady" for "Edmund" and with numerous other omissions and changes, notably in the last stanza, all tending to depersonalize the poem) in "Sibylline Leaves," 1816. In 1810 a hint given by Wordsworth, with the best intentions, to a third person concerning the real nature of Coleridge's troubles, was reported, or rather misreported, to Coleridge, and an estrangement fraught with deep grief to both ensued. The breach was healed, as much as such wounds may be, by the mediation of a common friend in 1812; but the old glad and fruitful fellowship could never be restored. Coleridge wrote to Poole, February 13, 1813: "A reconciliation has taken place, but the _feeling_, which I had previous to that moment, ... that, I fear, never can return. All outward actions, all inward wishes, all thoughts and admirations will be the same--_are_ the same, but--aye, there remains an immedicable _But_." "Dejection" is distinguished from the other poems in this volume by containing, along with its wonderful interpretation of outward nature into harmony with his own else unutterable sadness, Coleridge's--and perhaps all poets'--essential philosophy of poetry. It was natural that the metaphysics in which he had been immersed should color his thought; but literature affords few if any instances of metaphysics so transformed into poetry in the crucible of feeling as is afforded by stanza V. of this ode. "YOUTH AND AGE" AND "WORK WITHOUT HOPE" In these two poems Coleridge has left a record of the sadness of a life lived "In darkness, with the light of youth gone out," or returning only in glimpses that showed what he had lost. In these latter years he was busy enough in an incoherent, visionary fashion, and did even write and publish (though in characteristically fragmentary form) a work that made a great impression on young men in the second quarter of the century, his "Aids to Reflection"; but his activity was philosophical and theological, not poetic, and even in that field the product fell far short of his plans and promises. The inner and real life of the man is revealed, now as always, in his poetry; and amidst what profound dejection it glimmers on, these two brief poems show. "Youth and Age" was written in 1823--"an _air_ that whizzed ... right across the diameter of my brain ... over the summit of Quantock at earliest dawn just between the nightingale that I stopt to hear in the copse at the foot of Quantock, and the first sky-lark that was a song-fountain, dashing up and sparkling to the ear's eye, ... out of sight, over the cornfields on the descent of the mountain on the other side--out of sight, tho' twice I beheld its mute shoot downward in the sunshine like a falling star of silver"--so he described the conception of the poem in the original MS., printed by Mr. Campbell in the Notes to the Globe edition. It was a flash of poignant memory of the old days at Stowey. The first thirty-eight lines were printed in 1828, and the whole poem (including the last six lines, which were not in the original draft) in 1834. "Work Without Hope" was written, Coleridge says, "on the 21st February, 1827," and was first printed in 1828. THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER IN SEVEN PARTS Facile credo, plures esse Naturas invisibiles quam visibiles in rerum universitate. Sed horum omnium familiam quis nobis enarrabit? et gradus et cognationes et discrimina et singulorum munera? Quid agunt? quae loca habitant? Harum rerum notitiam semper ambivit ingenium humanum, nunquam attigit. Juvat, interea, non diffiteor, quandoque in animo, tanquam in tabulâ, majoris et melioris mundi imaginem contemplari: ne mens assuefacta hodiernae vitae minutiis se contrahat nimis, et tota subsidat in pusillas cogitationes. Sed veritati interea invigilandum est, modusque servandus, ut certa ab incertis, diem a nocte, distinguamus--T. BURNET, _Archaeol. Phil_, p. 68. PART I [Sidenote: An ancient Mariner meeteth three Gallants bidden to a wedding-feast, and detaineth one.] It is an ancient Mariner, And he stoppeth one of three. "By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp'st thou me? The bridegroom's doors are opened wide, 5 And I am next of kin; The guests are met, the feast is set: May'st hear the merry din." He holds him with his skinny hand, "There was a ship," quoth he. 10 "Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!" Eftsoons his hand dropt he. [Sidenote: The Wedding-Guest is spellbound by the eye of the old seafaring man, and constrained to hear his tale.] He holds him with his glittering eye-- The Wedding-Guest stood still, And listens like a three years' child: 15 The Mariner hath his will. The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone: He cannot choose but hear; And thus spake on that ancient man, The bright-eyed Mariner. 20 "The ship was cheered, the harbor cleared, Merrily did we drop Below the kirk, below the hill, Below the lighthouse top. [Sidenote: The Mariner tells how the ship sailed southward with a good wind and fair weather, till it reached the Line.] The sun came up upon the left, 25 Out of the sea came he! And he shone bright, and on the right Went down into the sea. Higher and higher every day, Till over the mast at noon--" 30 The Wedding-Guest here beat his breast, For he heard the loud bassoon. [Sidenote: The Wedding-Guest heareth the bridal music; but the Mariner continueth his tale.] The bride hath paced into the hall, Red as a rose is she; Nodding their heads before her goes 35 The merry minstrelsy. The Wedding-Guest he beat his breast, Yet he cannot choose but hear; And thus spake on that ancient man, The bright-eyed Mariner. 40 [Sidenote: The ship driven by a storm toward the south pole.] "And now the Storm-blast came, and he Was tyrannous and strong: He struck with his o'ertaking wings, And chased us south along. With sloping masts and dipping prow, 45 As who pursued with yell and blow Still treads the shadow of his foe, And forward bends his head, The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast, And southward aye we fled. 50 And now there came both mist and snow, And it grew wondrous cold: And ice, mast-high, came floating by, As green as emerald. [Sidenote: The land of ice, and of fearful sounds where no living thing was to be seen.] And through the drifts the snowy clifts 55 Did send a dismal sheen: Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken-- The ice was all between. The ice was here, the ice was there, The ice was all around: 60 It cracked and growled, and roared and howled, Like noises in a swound! [Sidenote: Till a great sea-bird, called the Albatross, came through the snow-fog, and was received with great joy and hospitality.] At length did cross an Albatross, Thorough the fog it came; As if it had been a Christian soul, 65 We hailed it in God's name. It ate the food it ne'er had eat, And round and round it flew. The ice did split with a thunder-fit; The helmsman steered us through! 70 [Sidenote: And lo! the Albatross proveth a bird of good omen, and followeth the ship as it returned northward through fog and floating ice.] And a good south wind sprung up behind; The Albatross did follow, And every day, for food or play, Came to the mariners' hollo! In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud, 75 It perched for vespers nine; Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white, Glimmered the white moon-shine." [Sidenote: The ancient Mariner inhospitably killeth the pious bird of good omen.] "God save thee, ancient Mariner! From the fiends, that plague thee thus!-- 80 Why look'st thou so?"--"With my cross-bow I shot the Albatross. PART II The Sun now rose upon the right: Out of the sea came he, Still hid in mist, and on the left 85 Went down into the sea. And the good south wind still blew behind, But no sweet bird did follow, Nor any day for food or play Came to the mariners' hollo! 90 [Sidenote: His shipmates cry out against the ancient Mariner, for killing the bird of good luck.] And I had done a hellish thing, And it would work 'em woe: For all averred, I had killed the bird That made the breeze to blow. Ah wretch! said they, the bird to slay, 95 That made the breeze to blow! [Sidenote: But when the fog cleared off, they justify the same, and thus make themselves accomplices in the crime.] Nor dim nor red, like God's own head, The glorious Sun uprist: Then all averred, I had killed the bird That brought the fog and mist. 100 'T was right, said they, such birds to slay, That bring the fog and mist. [Sidenote: The fair breeze continues; the ship enters the Pacific Ocean, and sails northward, even till it reaches the Line.] The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, The furrow followed free; We were the first that ever burst 105 Into that silent sea. [Sidenote: The ship hath been suddenly becalmed.] Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down, 'T was sad as sad could be; And we did speak only to break The silence of the sea! 110 All in a hot and copper sky, The bloody Sun, at noon, Right up above the mast did stand, No bigger than the Moon. Day after day, day after day, 115 We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean. [Sidenote: And the Albatross begins to be avenged.] Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; 120 Water, water, every where Nor any drop to drink. The very deep did rot: O Christ! That ever this should be! Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs 125 Upon the slimy sea. About, about, in reel and rout The death-fires danced at night; The water, like a witch's oils, Burnt green, and blue and white. 130 [Sidenote: A Spirit had followed them: one of the invisible inhabitants of this planet, neither departed souls nor angels, concerning whom the learned Jew, Josephus, and the Platonic Constantinopolitan, Michael Psellus, may be consulted. They are very numerous, and there is no climate or element without one or more.] And some in dreams assured were Of the Spirit that plagued us so; Nine fathom deep he had followed us From the land of mist and snow. And every tongue, through utter drought, 135 Was withered at the root; We could not speak, no more than if We had been choked with soot. [Sidenote: The shipmates, in their sore distress, would fain throw the whole guilt on the ancient Mariner: in sign whereof they hang the dead sea-bird round his neck.] Ah! well-a-day! what evil looks Had I from old and young! 140 Instead of the cross, the Albatross About my neck was hung. PART III [Sidenote: The ancient Mariner beholdeth a sign in the element afar off.] There passed a weary time. Each throat Was parched, and glazed each eye. A weary time! a weary time! 145 How glazed each weary eye, When looking westward, I beheld A something in the sky. At first it seemed a little speck, And then it seemed a mist; 150 It moved and moved, and took at last A certain shape, I wist. A speck, a mist, a shape, I wist! And still it neared and neared: As if it dodged a water-sprite, 155 It plunged and tacked and veered. [Sidenote: At its nearer approach, it seemeth him to be a ship; and at a dear ransom he freeth his speech from the bonds of thirst.] With throats unslaked, with black lips baked, We could nor laugh nor wail; Through utter drought all dumb we stood! I bit my arm, I sucked the blood, 160 And cried, A sail! a sail! With throats unslaked, with black lips baked, Agape they heard me call: [Sidenote: A flash of joy;] [Sidenote: And horror follows. For can it be a ship that comes onward without wind or tide?] Gramercy! they for joy did grin, And all at once their breath drew in, 165 As they were drinking all. See! see! (I cried) she tacks no more! Hither to work us weal; Without a breeze, without a tide, She steadies with upright keel! 170 The western wave was all a-flame. The day was well nigh done! Almost upon the western wave Rested the broad bright Sun; When that strange shape drove suddenly 175 Betwixt us and the Sun; [Sidenote: It seemeth him but the skeleton of a ship.] And straight the Sun was flecked with bars, (Heaven's Mother send us grace!) As if through a dungeon-grate he peered With broad and burning face. 180 Alas (thought I, and my heart beat loud) How fast she nears and nears! Are those her sails that glance in the Sun, Like restless gossameres? [Sidenote: And its ribs are seen as bars on the face of the setting Sun. The Spectre-Woman and her Deathmate, and no other on board the skeleton-ship.] Are those her ribs through which the Sun 185 Did peer, as through a grate? And is that Woman all her crew? Is that a Death? and are there two? Is Death that woman's mate? [Sidenote: Like vessel, like crew!] Her lips were red, her looks were free, 190 Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was as white as leprosy, The Night-mare Life-in-Death was she, Who thicks man's blood with cold. [Sidenote: Death and Life-in-Death have diced for the ship's crew, and she (the latter) winneth the ancient Mariner.] The naked hulk alongside came, 195 And the twain were casting dice; 'The game is done! I've won! I've won!' Quoth she, and whistles thrice. [Sidenote: No twilight within the courts of the Sun.] The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out; At one stride comes the dark; 200 With far-heard whisper, o'er the sea, Off shot the spectre-bark. [Sidenote: At the rising of the moon.] We listened and looked sideways up! Fear at my heart, as at a cup, My life-blood seemed to sip! 205 The stars were dim, and thick the night, The steersman's face by his lamp gleamed white; From the sails the dew did drip-- Till clomb above the eastern bar The horned Moon, with one bright star 210 Within the nether tip. [Sidenote: One after another,] One after one, by the star-dogged Moon, Too quick for groan or sigh, Each turned his face with a ghastly pang, And cursed me with his eye. 215 [Sidenote: His shipmates drop down dead.] Four times fifty living men, (And I heard nor sigh nor groan) With heavy thump, a lifeless lump, They dropped down one by one. [Sidenote: But Life-in-Death begins her work on the ancient Mariner.] The souls did from their bodies fly,-- 220 They fled to bliss or woe! And every soul, it passed me by, Like the whizz of my cross-bow!" PART IV [Sidenote: The Wedding-Guest feareth that a Spirit is talking to him;] "I Fear thee, ancient Mariner! I fear thy skinny hand! 225 And thou art long, and lank, and brown, As is the ribbed sea-sand. I fear thee and thy glittering eye, And thy skinny hand, so brown."-- "Fear me not, fear not, thou wedding-guest! 230 This body dropt not down. [Sidenote: But the ancient Mariner assureth him of his bodily life, and proceedeth to relate his horrible penance.] Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on the wide, wide sea! And never a saint took pity on My soul in agony. 235 [Sidenote: He despiseth the creatures of the calm.] The many men, so beautiful! And they all dead did lie: And a thousand thousand slimy things Lived on; and so did I. [Sidenote: And envieth that they should live, and so many lie dead.] I looked upon the rotting sea, 240 And drew my eyes away; I looked upon the rotting deck, And there the dead men lay. I looked to heaven, and tried to pray; But or ever a prayer had gusht, 245 A wicked whisper came, and made My heart as dry as dust. I closed my lids, and kept them close, And the balls like pulses beat; For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky 250 Lay like a load on my weary eye, And the dead were at my feet. [Sidenote: But the curse liveth for him in the eye of the dead men.] The cold sweat melted from their limbs, Nor rot nor reek did they: The look with which they looked on me Had never passed away. An orphan's curse would drag to hell A spirit from on high; But oh! more horrible than that Is a curse in a dead man's eye! Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse, And yet I could not die. [Sidenote: In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and every where the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.] The moving Moon went up the sky, And nowhere did abide: Softly she was going up, And a star or two beside-- Her beams bemocked the sultry main, Like April hoar-frost spread; But where the ship's huge shadow lay, The charmed water burnt alway A still and awful red. [Sidenote: By the light of the Moon he beholdeth God's creatures of the great calm.] Beyond the shadow of the ship, I watched the water-snakes: They moved in tracks of shining white, And when they reared, the elfish light Fell off in hoary flakes. Within the shadow of the ship I watched their rich attire: Blue, glossy green, and velvet black, They coiled and swam; and every track 280 Was a flash of golden fire. [Sidenote: Their beauty and their happiness.] [Sidenote: He blesseth them in his heart.] O happy living things! no tongue Their beauty might declare: A spring of love gushed from my heart, And I blessed them unaware: 285 Sure my kind saint took pity on me, And I blessed them unaware. [Sidenote: The spell begins to break.] The selfsame moment I could pray; And from my neck so free The Albatross fell off, and sank 290 Like lead into the sea. PART V Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing, Beloved from pole to pole! To Mary Queen the praise be given! She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven, 295 That slid into my soul. [Sidenote: By grace of the holy Mother, the ancient Mariner is refreshed with rain.] The silly buckets on the deck, That had so long remained, I dreamt that they were filled with dew; And when I awoke, it rained. 300 My lips were wet, my throat was cold, My garments all were dank; Sure I had drunken in my dreams, And still my body drank. I moved, and could not feel my limbs: 305 I was so light--almost I thought that I had died in sleep, And was a blessed ghost. [Sidenote: He heareth sounds and seeth strange sights and commotions in the sky and the element.] And soon I heard a roaring wind: It did not come anear; 310 But with its sound it shook the sails, That were so thin and sere. The upper air burst into life! And a hundred fire-flags sheen, To and fro they were hurried about! 315 And to and fro, and in and out, The wan stars danced between. And the coming wind did roar more loud, And the sails did sigh like sedge; And the rain poured down from one black cloud; 320 The Moon was at its edge. The thick black cloud was cleft, and still The Moon was at its side. Like waters shot from some high crag, The lightning fell with never a jag, 325 A river steep and wide. [Sidenote: The bodies of the ship's crew are inspired, and the ship moves on;] The loud wind never reached the ship, Yet now the ship moved on! Beneath the lightning and the Moon The dead men gave a groan. 330 They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose, Nor spake, nor moved their eyes; It had been strange, even in a dream, To have seen those dead men rise. The helmsman steered, the ship moved on; 335 Yet never a breeze up blew; The mariners all 'gan work the ropes, Where they were wont to do; They raised their limbs like lifeless tools-- We were a ghastly crew. 340 The body of my brother's son Stood by me, knee to knee: The body and I pulled at one rope, But he said nought to me." [Sidenote: But not by the souls of the men, nor by daemons of earth or middle air, but by a blessed troop of angelic spirits, sent down by the invocation of the guardian saint.] "I fear thee, ancient Mariner!" 345 "Be calm, thou Wedding-Guest! 'T was not those souls that fled in pain, Which to their corses came again, But a troop of spirits blest: For when it dawned--they dropped their arms, And clustered round the mast; 350 Sweet sounds rose slowly through their mouths, And from their bodies passed. Around, around, flew each sweet sound, Then darted to the Sun; 355 Slowly the sounds came back again, Now mixed, now one by one. Sometimes a-dropping from the sky I heard the sky-lark sing; Sometimes all little birds that are, 350 How they seemed to fill the sea and air With their sweet jargoning! And now 't was like all instruments, Now like a lonely flute; And now it is an angel's song, 365 That makes the heavens be mute. It ceased; yet still the sails made on A pleasant noise till noon, A noise like of a hidden brook In the leafy month of June, 370 That to the sleeping woods all night Singeth a quiet tune. Till noon we quietly sailed on, Yet never a breeze did breathe: Slowly and smoothly went the ship, 375 Moved onward from beneath. [Sidenote: The lonesome Spirit from the south-pole carries on the ship as far as the Line, in obedience to the angelic troop, but still requireth vengeance.] Under' the keel nine fathom deep, From the land of mist and snow, The spirit slid: and it was he That made the ship to go. 380 The sails at noon left off their tune, And the ship stood still also. The Sun, right up above the mast, Had fixed her to the ocean: But in a minute she 'gan stir, 385 With a short uneasy motion-- Backwards and forwards half her length With a short uneasy motion. Then like a pawing horse let go, She made a sudden bound: 390 It flung the blood into my head, And I fell down in a swound. [Sidenote: The Polar Spirit's fellow-daemons, the invisible inhabitants of the element, take part in his wrong; and two of them relate, one to the other, that penance long and heavy for the ancient Mariner hath been accorded to the Polar Spirit, who returneth southward.] How long in that same fit I lay, I have not to declare; But ere my living life returned, 395 I heard and in my soul discerned Two voices in the air. 'Is it he?' quoth one, 'Is this the man? By him who died on cross, With his cruel bow he laid full low 400 The harmless Albatross. The spirit who bideth by himself In the land of mist and snow, He loved the bird that loved the man Who shot him with his bow?' 405 The other was a softer voice, As soft as honey-dew: Quoth he, 'The man hath penance done, And penance more will do.' PART VI FIRST VOICE 'But tell me, tell me! speak again, 410 Thy soft response renewing-- What makes that ship drive on so fast? What is the ocean doing?' SECOND VOICE 'Still as a slave before his lord, The ocean hath no blast; 415 His great bright eye most silently Up to the Moon is cast-- If he may know which way to go; For she guides him smooth or grim. See, brother, see! how graciously 420 She looketh down on him.' FIRST VOICE [Sidenote: The Mariner hath been cast into a trance; for the angelic power causeth the vessel to drive northward faster than human life could endure.] 'But why drives on that ship so fast? Without or wave or wind?' SECOND VOICE 'The air is cut away before, And closes from behind. 425 Fly, brother, fly! more high, more high! Or we shall be belated: For slow and slow that ship will go, When the Mariner's trance is abated. [Sidenote: The supernatural motion is retarded; the Mariner awakes, and his penance begins anew.] I woke, and we were sailing on 430 As in a gentle weather: 'T was night, calm night, the moon was high, The dead men stood together. All stood together on the deck, For a charnel-dungeon fitter: 435 All fixed on me their stony eyes, That in the Moon did glitter. The pang, the curse, with which they died, Had never passed away: I could not draw my eyes from theirs, 440 Nor turn them up to pray. [Sidenote: The curse is finally expiated.] And now this spell was snapt: once more I viewed the ocean green, And looked far forth, yet little saw Of what had else been seen-- 445 Like one, that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows, a frightful fiend 450 Doth close behind him tread. But soon there breathed a wind on me, Nor sound nor motion made: Its path was not upon the sea, In ripple or in shade. 455 It raised my hair, it fanned my cheek Like a meadow-gale of spring-- It mingled strangely with my fears, Yet it felt like a welcoming. Swiftly, swiftly flew the ship, 460 Yet she sailed softly too: Sweetly, sweetly blew the breeze-- On me alone it blew. [Sidenote: And the ancient Mariner beholdeth his native country.] Oh! dream of joy! is this indeed The light-house top I see? 465 Is this the hill? is this the kirk? Is this mine own countree? We drifted o'er the harbor-bar, And I with sobs did pray-- O let me be awake, my God! 470 Or let me sleep alway. The harbor-bay was clear as glass, So smoothly it was strewn! And on the bay the moonlight lay, And the shadow of the Moon. 475 The rock shone bright, the kirk no less, That stands above the rock: The moonlight steeped in silentness The steady weathercock. And the bay was white with silent light 480 Till rising from the same, [Sidenote: The angelic spirits leave the dead bodies,] Full many shapes, that shadows were, In crimson colors came. [Sidenote: And appear in their own forms of light.] A little distance from the prow Those crimson shadows were: 485 I turned my eyes upon the deck-- Oh, Christ! what saw I there! Each corse lay flat, lifeless and flat, And, by the holy rood! A man all light, a seraph-man, 490 On every corse there stood. This seraph-band, each waved his hand: It was a heavenly sight! They stood as signals to the land, Each one a lovely light; 495 This seraph-band, each waved his hand, No voice did they impart-- No voice; but oh! the silence sank Like music on my heart. But soon I heard the dash of oars, 500 I heard the Pilot's cheer; My head was turned perforce away, And I saw a boat appear. The Pilot and the Pilot's boy, I heard them coming fast: 505 Dear Lord in Heaven! it was a joy The dead men could not blast. I saw a third--I heard his voice: It is the Hermit good! He singeth loud his godly hymns 510 That he makes in the wood. He'll shrieve my soul, he'll wash away The Albatross's blood. PART VII [Sidenote: The Hermit of the Wood,] This Hermit good lives in that wood Which slopes down to the sea. 515 How loudly his sweet voice he rears! He loves to talk with marineres That come from a far countree. He kneels at morn, and noon, and eve-- He hath a cushion plump: 520 It is the moss that wholly hides The rotted old oak-stump. The skiff-boat neared: I heard them talk, 'Why, this is strange, I trow! Where are those lights, so many and fair, 525 That signal made but now?' [Sidenote: Approacheth the ship with wonder.] 'Strange, by my faith!' the Hermit said-- 'And they answered not our cheer! The planks looked warped! and see those sails, How thin they are and sere! 530 I never saw aught like to them, Unless perchance it were Brown skeletons of leaves that lag My forest-brook along; When the ivy-tod is heavy with snow, 535 And the owlet whoops to the wolf below, That eats the she-wolf's young.' 'Dear Lord! it hath a fiendish look-- (The Pilot made reply) I am a-feared'--'Push on, push on!' 540 Said the Hermit cheerily. The boat came closer to the ship, But I nor spake nor stirred; The boat came close beneath the ship, And straight a sound was heard. 545 [Sidenote: The ship suddenly sinketh.] Under the water it rumbled on, Still louder and more dread: It reached the ship, it split the bay; The ship went down like lead. [Sidenote: The ancient Mariner is saved in the Pilot's boat.] Stunned by that loud and dreadful sound, 550 Which sky and ocean smote, Like one that hath been seven days drowned My body lay afloat; But swift as dreams, myself I found Within the Pilot's boat. 555 Upon the whirl, where sank the ship, The boat spun round and round; And all was still, save that the hill Was telling of the sound. I moved my lips--the Pilot shrieked 560 And fell down in a fit; The holy Hermit raised his eyes, And prayed where he did sit. I took the oars: the Pilot's boy, Who now doth crazy go, 565 Laughed loud and long, and all the while His eyes went to and fro. 'Ha! ha!' quoth he, 'full plain I see, The Devil knows how to row.' And now, all in my own countree, 570 I stood on the firm land! The Hermit stepped forth from the boat, And scarcely he could stand. [Sidenote: The ancient Mariner earnestly entreateth the Hermit to shrieve him; and the penance of life falls on him.] 'O shrieve me, shrieve me, holy man!' The Hermit crossed his brow. 575 'Say quick,' quoth he, 'I bid thee say-- What manner of man art thou?' Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched With a woful agony, Which forced me to begin my tale; 580 And then it left me free. [Sidenote: And ever and anon throughout his future life an agony constraineth him to travel from land to land,] Since then, at an uncertain hour, That agony returns: And till my ghastly tale is told, This heart within me burns. 585 I pass, like night, from land to land; I have strange power of speech; That moment that his face I see, I know the man that must hear me: To him my tale I teach. 590 What loud uproar bursts from that door! The wedding-guests are there: But in the garden-bower the bride And bride-maids singing are: And hark the little vesper bell, 595 Which biddeth me to prayer! O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been Alone on a wide, wide sea: So lonely 't was, that God himself Scarce seemed there to be. 600 O sweeter than the marriage-feast, 'T is sweeter far to me, To walk together to the kirk With a goodly company!-- To walk together to the kirk, 605 And all together pray, While each to his great Father bends, Old men, and babes, and loving friends And youths and maidens gay! [Sidenote: And to teach, by his own example, love and reverence to all things that God made and loveth.] Farewell, farewell! but this I tell 610 To thee, thou Wedding-Guest! He prayeth well, who loveth well Both man and bird and beast. He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; 615 For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all." The Mariner, whose eye is bright, Whose beard with age is hoar, Is gone: and now the Wedding-Guest 620 Turned from the bridegroom's door. He went like one that hath been stunned, And is of sense forlorn: A sadder and a wiser man, He rose the morrow morn. 625 CHRISTABEL PART THE FIRST 'Tis the middle of night by the castle clock, And the owls have awakened the crowing cock. Tu--whit!----Tu--whoo! And hark, again! the crowing cock, How drowsily it crew. 5 Sir Leoline, the Baron rich, Hath a toothless mastiff, which From her kennel beneath the rock Maketh answer to the clock, Four for the quarters, and twelve for the hour; 10 Ever and aye, by shine and shower, Sixteen short howls, not over loud; Some say, she sees my lady's shroud. Is the night chilly and dark? The night is chilly, but not dark. 15 The thin gray cloud is spread on high, It covers but not hides the sky. The moon is behind, and at the full; And yet she looks both small and dull. The night is chill, the cloud is gray: 20 'T is a month before the month of May, And the Spring comes slowly up this way. The lovely lady, Christabel, Whom her father loves so well, What makes her in the wood so late, 25 A furlong from the castle gate? She had dreams all yesternight Of her own betrothed knight; And she in the midnight wood will pray For the weal of her lover that's far away. 30 She stole along, she nothing spoke, The sighs she heaved were soft and low, And naught was green upon the oak But moss and rarest mistletoe: She kneels beneath the huge oak tree, 35 And in silence prayeth she. The lady sprang up suddenly, The lovely lady, Christabel! It moaned as near, as near can be, But what it is she cannot tell.-- 40 On the other side it seems to be, Of the huge, broad-breasted, old oak tree. The night is chill; the forest bare; Is it the wind that moaneth bleak? There is not wind enough in the air 45 To move away the ringlet curl From the lovely lady's cheek-- There is not wind enough to twirl The one red leaf, the last of its clan, That dances as often as dance it can, 50 Hanging so light, and hanging so high, On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky. Hush, beating heart of Christabel! Jesu, Maria, shield her well! She folded her arms beneath her cloak, 55 And stole to the other side of the oak. What sees she there? There she sees a damsel bright, Drest in a silken robe of white, That shadowy in the moonlight shone: 60 The neck that made that white robe wan, Her stately neck, and arms were bare; Her blue-veined feet unsandal'd were, And wildly glittered here and there The gems entangled in her hair. 65 I guess, 'twas frightful there to see A lady so richly clad as she-- Beautiful exceedingly! "Mary mother, save me now!" Said Christabel, "And who art thou?" 70 The lady strange made answer meet, And her voice was faint and sweet:-- "Have pity on my sore distress, I scarce can speak for weariness: Stretch forth thy hand, and have no fear!" 75 Said Christabel, "How camest thou here?" And the lady, whose voice was faint and sweet, Did thus pursue her answer meet:-- "My sire is of a noble line, And my name is Geraldine: 80 Five warriors seized me yestermorn, Me, even me, a maid forlorn: They choked my cries with force and fright, And tied me on a palfrey white. The palfrey was as fleet as wind, 85 And they rode furiously behind. They spurred amain, their steeds were white: And once we crossed the shade of night. As sure as Heaven shall rescue me, I have no thought what men they be; 90 Nor do I know how long it is (For I have lain entranced I wis) Since one, the tallest of the five, Took me from the palfrey's back, A weary woman, scarce alive. 95 Some muttered words his comrades spoke: He placed me underneath this oak; He swore they would return with haste; Whither they went I cannot tell-- I thought I heard, some minutes past, 100 Sounds as of a castle bell. Stretch forth thy hand," thus ended she, "And help a wretched maid to flee." Then Christabel stretched forth her hand, And comforted fair Geraldine: 105 "O well, bright dame! may you command The service of Sir Leoline; And gladly our stout chivalry Will he send forth and friends withal To guide and guard you safe and free 110 Home to your noble father's hall." She rose: and forth with steps they passed That strove to be, and were not, fast. Her gracious stars the lady blest, And thus spake on sweet Christabel: 115 "All our household are at rest, The hall as silent as the cell; Sir Leoline is weak in health, And may not well awakened be, But we will move as if in stealth, 120 And I beseech your courtesy, This night, to share your couch with me." They crossed the moat, and Christabel Took the key that fitted well; A little door she opened straight, 125 All in the middle of the gate; The gate that was ironed within and without, Where an army in battle array had marched out. The lady sank, belike through pain, And Christabel with might and main 130 Lifted her up, a weary weight, Over the threshold of the gate: Then the lady rose again, And moved, as she were not in pain. So free from danger, free from fear, 135 They crossed the court: right glad they were. And Christabel devoutly cried To the lady by her side, "Praise we the Virgin all divine Who hath rescued thee from thy distress!" 140 "Alas, alas!" said Geraldine, "I cannot speak for weariness." So free from danger, free from fear, They crossed the court: right glad they were. Outside her kennel, the mastiff old 145 Lay fast asleep, in moonshine cold. The mastiff old did not awake, Yet she an angry moan did make! And what can ail the mastiff bitch? Never till now she uttered yell 150 Beneath the eye of Christabel. Perhaps it is the owlet's scritch: For what can ail the mastiff bitch? They passed the hall, that echoes still, Pass as lightly as you will! 155 The brands were flat, the brands were dying, Amid their own white ashes lying; But when the lady passed, there came A tongue of light, a fit of flame; And Christabel saw the lady's eye, 160 And nothing else saw she thereby, Save the boss of the shield of Sir Leoline tall, Which hung in a murky old niche in the wall. "O softly tread," said Christabel, "My father seldom sleepeth well." 165 Sweet Christabel her feet doth bare, And jealous of the listening air They steal their way from stair to stair, Now in glimmer, and now in gloom, And now they pass the Baron's room, 170 As still as death, with stifled breath And now have reached her chamber door; And now doth Geraldine press down The rushes of the chamber floor. The moon shines dim in the open air, 175 And not a moonbeam enters here. But they without its light can see The chamber carved so curiously, Carved with figures strange and sweet, All made out of the carver's brain, 180 For a lady's chamber meet: The lamp with twofold silver chain Is fastened to an angel's feet. The silver lamp burns dead and dim; But Christabel the lamp will trim. 185 She trimmed the lamp, and made it bright, And left it swinging to and fro, While Geraldine, in wretched plight, Sank down upon the floor below. "O weary lady, Geraldine, 190 I pray you, drink this cordial wine! It is a wine of virtuous powers; My mother made it of wild flowers." "And will your mother pity me, Who am a maiden most forlorn? 195 Christabel answered--"Woe is me! She died the hour that I was born. I have heard the gray-haired friar tell How on her death-bed she did say, That she should hear the castle-bell 200 Strike twelve upon my wedding-day. O mother dear! that thou wert here!" "I would," said Geraldine, "she were!" But soon with altered voice, said she-- "Off, wandering mother! Peak and pine! 205 I have power to bid thee flee." Alas! what ails poor Geraldine? Why stares she with unsettled eye? Can she the bodiless dead espy? And why with hollow voice cries she, 210 "Off, woman, off! this hour is mine-- Though thou her guardian spirit be, Off, woman, off! 'tis given to me." Then Christabel knelt by the lady's side, And raised to heaven her eyes so blue-- 215 "Alas!" said she, "this ghastly ride-- Dear lady! it hath wildered you!" The lady wiped her moist cold brow, And faintly said, "'Tis over now!" Again the wild-flower wine she drank: 220 Her fair large eyes 'gan glitter bright, And from the floor whereon she sank, The lofty lady stood upright: She was most beautiful to see, Like a lady of a far countree. 225 And thus the lofty lady spake-- "All they who live in the upper sky, Do love you, holy Christabel! And you love them, and for their sake And for the good which me befell, 230 Even I in my degree will try, Fair maiden, to requite you well. But now unrobe yourself; for I Must pray, ere yet in bed I lie." Quoth Christabel, "So let it be!" 235 And as the lady bade, did she. Her gentle limbs did she undress, And lay down in her loveliness. But through her brain of weal and woe So many thoughts moved to and fro, 240 That vain it were her lids to close; So half-way from the bed she rose, And on her elbow did recline To look at the Lady Geraldine. Beneath the lamp the lady bowed, 245 And slowly rolled her eyes around; Then drawing in her breath aloud, Like one that shuddered, she unbound The cincture from beneath her breast: Her silken robe, and inner vest, 250 Dropt to her feet, and full in view, Behold! her bosom and half her side-- A sight to dream of, not to tell! O shield her! shield sweet Christabel! Yet Geraldine nor speaks nor stirs; 255 Ah! what a stricken look was hers! Deep from within she seems half-way To lift some weight with sick assay, And eyes the maid and seeks delay; Then suddenly, as one defied, 260 Collects herself in scorn and pride, And lay down by the Maiden's side!-- And in her arms the maid she took, Ah wel-a-day! And with low voice and doleful look 265 These words did say: "In the touch of this bosom there worketh a spell, Which is lord of thy utterance, Christabel! Thou knowest to-night, and wilt know to-morrow, This mark of my shame, this seal of my sorrow; 270 But vainly thou warrest, For this is alone in Thy power to declare, That in the dim forest Thou heard'st a low moaning, 275 And found'st a bright lady, surpassingly fair; And didst bring her home with thee in love and in charity, To shield her and shelter her from the damp air." THE CONCLUSION TO PART THE FIRST It was a lovely sight to see The lady Christabel, when she 280 Was praying at the old oak tree. Amid the jagged shadows Of mossy leafless boughs, Kneeling in the moonlight, To make her gentle vows; 285 Her slender palms together prest, Heaving sometimes on her breast; Her face resigned to bliss or bale-- Her face, oh call it fair not pale, And both blue eyes more bright than clear, 290 Each about to have a tear. With open eyes (ah woe is me!) Asleep, and dreaming fearfully, Fearfully dreaming, yet, I wis, Dreaming that alone, which is-- 295 O sorrow and shame! Can this be she, The lady, who knelt at the old oak tree? And lo! the worker of these harms, That holds the maiden in her arms, Seems to slumber still and mild, 300 As a mother with her child. A star hath set, a star hath risen, O Geraldine! since arms of thine Have been the lovely lady's prison. O Geraldine! one hour was thine-- 305 Thou 'st had thy will! By tairn and rill, The night-birds all that hour were still. But now they are jubilant anew, From cliff and tower, tu--whoo! tu--whoo! Tu--whoo! tu--whoo! from wood and fell! 310 And see! the lady Christabel Gathers herself from out her trance; Her limbs relax, her countenance Grows sad and soft; the smooth thin lids Close o'er her eyes; and tears she sheds-- 315 Large tears that leave the lashes bright! And oft the while she seems to smile As infants at a sudden light! Yea, she doth smile, and she doth weep, Like a youthful hermitess, 320 Beauteous in a wilderness, Who, praying always, prays in sleep. And, if she move unquietly, Perchance, 'tis but the blood so free Comes back and tingles in her feet. 325 No doubt, she hath a vision sweet. What if her guardian spirit 'twere, What if she knew her mother near? But this she knows, in joys and woes, That saints will aid if men will call: 330 For the blue sky bends over all! PART THE SECOND "Each matin bell," the Baron saith, "Knells us back to a world of death." These words Sir Leoline first said, When he rose and found his lady dead: 335 These words Sir Leoline will say Many a morn to his dying day! And hence the custom and law began That still at dawn the sacristan, Who duly pulls the heavy bell, 340 Five and forty beads must tell Between each stroke--a warning knell, Which not a soul can choose but hear From Bratha Head to Wyndermere. Saith Bracy the bard, "So let it knell! 345 And let the drowsy sacristan Still count as slowly as he can! There is no lack of such, I ween, As well fill up the space between. In Langdale Pike and Witch's Lair, 350 And Dungeon-ghyll so foully rent, With ropes of rock and bells of air Three sinful sextons' ghosts are pent, Who all give back, one after t' other, The death-note to their living brother; 355 And oft too, by the knell offended, Just as their one! two! three! is ended, The devil mocks the doleful tale With a merry peal from Borrowdale." The air is still! through mist and cloud 360 That merry peal comes ringing loud; And Geraldine shakes off her dread, And rises lightly from the bed; Puts on her silken vestments white, And tricks her hair in lovely plight, 365 And nothing doubting of her spell Awakens the lady Christabel. "Sleep you, sweet lady Christabel? I trust that you have rested well." And Christabel awoke and spied 370 The same who lay down by her side-- O rather say, the same whom she Raised up beneath the old oak tree! Nay, fairer yet! and yet more fair! For she belike hath drunken deep 375 Of all the blessedness of sleep! And while she spake, her looks, her air, Such gentle thankfulness declare, That (so it seemed) her girded vests Grew tight beneath her heaving breasts. 380 "Sure I have sinn'd!" said Christabel, "Now heaven be praised if all be well!" And in low faltering tones, yet sweet, Did she the lofty lady greet With such perplexity of mind 385 As dreams too lively leave behind. So quickly she rose, and quickly arrayed Her maiden limbs, and having prayed That He, who on the cross did groan, Might wash away her sins unknown, 390 She forthwith led fair Geraldine To meet her sire, Sir Leoline. The lovely maid and the lady tall Are pacing both into the hall, And pacing on through page and groom, 395 Enter the Baron's presence-room. The Baron rose, and while he prest His gentle daughter to his breast, With cheerful wonder in his eyes The lady Geraldine espies, 400 And gave such welcome to the same, As might beseem so bright a dame! But when he heard the lady's tale, And when she told her father's name, Why waxed Sir Leoline so pale, 405 Murmuring o'er the name again, Lord Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine? Alas! they had been friends in youth; But whispering tongues can poison truth; And constancy lives in realms above; 410 And life is thorny; and youth is vain; And to be wroth with one we love Doth work like madness in the brain. And thus it chanced, as I divine, With Roland and Sir Leoline. 415 Each spake words of high disdain And insult to his heart's best brother: They parted--ne'er to meet again! But never either found another To free the hollow heart from paining-- 420 They stood aloof, the scars remaining, Like cliffs which had been rent asunder; A dreary sea now flows between. But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder, Shall wholly do away, I ween, 425 The marks of that which once hath been. Sir Leoline, a moment's space, Stood gazing on the damsel's face: And the youthful Lord of Tryermaine Came back upon his heart again. 430 O then the Baron forgot his age, His noble heart swelled high with rage; He swore by the wounds in Jesu's side He would proclaim it far and wide, With trump and solemn heraldry, 435 That they, who thus had wronged the dame Were base as spotted infamy! "And if they dare deny the same, My herald shall appoint a week, And let the recreant traitors seek 440 My tourney court--that there and then I may dislodge their reptile souls From the bodies and forms of men!" He spake: his eye in lightning rolls! For the lady was ruthlessly seized; and he kenned 445 In the beautiful lady the child of his friend! And now the tears were on his face, And fondly in his arms he took Fair Geraldine, who met the embrace, Prolonging it with joyous look. 450 Which when she viewed, a vision fell Upon the soul of Christabel, The vision of fear, the touch and pain! She shrunk and shuddered, and saw again-- (Ah, woe is me! Was it for thee, 455 Thou gentle maid! such sights to see?) Again she saw that bosom old, Again she felt that bosom cold, And drew in her breath with a hissing sound: Whereat the Knight turned wildly round, 460 And nothing saw, but his own sweet maid With eyes upraised, as one that prayed. The touch, the sight, had passed away, And in its stead that vision blest, Which comforted her after-rest, 465 While in the lady's arms she lay, Had put a rapture in her breast, And on her lips and o'er her eyes Spread smiles like light! With new surprise, "What ails then my beloved child?" 470 The Baron said--His daughter mild Made answer, "All will yet be well!" I ween, she had no power to tell Aught else: so mighty was the spell. Yet he, who saw this Geraldine, 475 Had deemed her sure a thing divine. Such sorrow with such grace she blended, As if she feared she had offended Sweet Christabel, that gentle maid! And with such lowly tones she prayed 480 She might be sent without delay Home to her father's mansion. "Nay! Nay, by my soul!" said Leoline. "Ho! Bracy the bard, the charge be thine! Go thou, with music sweet and loud, 485 And take two steeds with trappings proud, And take the youth whom thou lov'st best To bear thy harp, and learn thy song, And clothe you both in solemn vest, And over the mountains haste along, 490 Lest wandering folk, that are abroad, Detain you on the valley road. "And when he has crossed the Irthing flood, My merry bard! he hastes, he hastes Up Knorren Moor, through Halegarth Wood, 495 And reaches soon that castle good Which stands and threatens Scotland's wastes. "Bard Bracy! bard Bracy! your horses are fleet, Ye must ride up the hall, your music so sweet, More loud than your horses' echoing feet! 500 And loud and loud to Lord Roland call, 'Thy daughter is safe in Langdale hall! Thy beautiful daughter is safe and free-- Sir Leoline greets thee thus through me. He bids thee come without delay 505 With all thy numerous array And take thy lovely daughter home: And he will meet thee on the way With all his numerous array White with their panting palfreys' foam': 510 And, by mine honour! I will say, That I repent me of the day When I spake words of fierce disdain To Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine!-- --For since that evil hour hath flown, 515 Many a summer's sun hath shone; Yet ne'er found I a friend again Like Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine." The lady fell, and clasped his knees, Her face upraised, her eyes o'erflowing; 520 And Bracy replied, with faltering voice, His gracious hail on all bestowing; "Thy words, thou sire of Christabel, Are sweeter than my harp can tell; Yet might I gain a boon of thee, 525 This day my journey should not be, So strange a dream hath come to me; That I had vowed with music loud To clear yon wood from thing unblest, Warned by a vision in my rest! 530 For in my sleep I saw that dove, That gentle bird, whom thou dost love, And call'st by thy own daughter's name-- Sir Leoline! I saw the same, Fluttering, and uttering fearful moan, 535 Among the green herbs in the forest alone. Which when I saw and when I heard, I wondered what might ail the bird; For nothing near it could I see, Save the grass and green herbs underneath the old tree. 540 "And in my dream, methought, I went To search out what might there be found; And what the sweet bird's trouble meant, That thus lay fluttering on the ground. I went and peered, and could descry 545 No cause for her distressful cry; But yet for her dear lady's sake I stooped, methought, the dove to take, When lo! I saw a bright green snake Coiled around its wings and neck. 550 Green as the herbs on which it couched, Close by the dove's its head it crouched; And with the dove it heaves and stirs, Swelling its neck as she swelled hers! I woke; it was the midnight hour, 555 The clock was echoing in the tower; But though my slumber was gone by, This dream it would not pass away-- It seems to live upon my eye! And thence I vowed this self-same day 560 With music strong and saintly song To wander through the forest bare, Lest aught unholy loiter there." Thus Bracy said: the Baron, the while, Half-listening heard him with a smile; 565 Then turned to Lady Geraldine, His eyes made up of wonder and love; And said in courtly accents fine, "Sweet maid, Lord Roland's beauteous dove, With arms more strong than harp or song, 570 Thy sire and I will crush the snake!" He kissed her forehead as he spake, And Geraldine in maiden wise Casting down her large bright eyes, With blushing cheek and courtesy fine 575 She turned her from Sir Leoline; Softly gathering up her train, That o'er her right arm fell again; And folded her arms across her chest, And couched her head upon her breast, 580 And looked askance at Christabel-- Jesu, Maria, shield her well! A snake's small eye blinks dull and shy, And the lady's eyes they shrunk in her head, Each shrunk up to a serpent's eye, 585 And with somewhat of malice, and more of dread, At Christabel she looked askance!-- One moment--and the sight was fled! But Christabel in dizzy trance Stumbling on the unsteady ground 590 Shuddered aloud, with a hissing sound; And Geraldine again turned round, And like a thing, that sought relief, Full of wonder and full of grief, She rolled her large bright eyes divine 595 Wildly on Sir Leoline. The maid, alas! her thoughts are gone, She nothing sees--no sight but one! The maid, devoid of guile and sin, I know not how, in fearful wise, 600 So deeply had she drunken in That look, those shrunken serpent eyes, That all her features were resigned To this sole image in her mind: And passively did imitate 605 That look of dull and treacherous hate! And thus she stood, in dizzy trance, Still picturing that look askance With forced unconscious sympathy Full before her father's view-- 610 As far as such a look could be In eyes so innocent and blue! And when the trance was o'er, the maid Paused awhile, and inly prayed: Then falling at the Baron's feet, 615 "By my mother's soul, do I entreat That thou this woman send away!" She said: and more she could not say: For what she knew she could not tell, O'er-mastered by the mighty spell. 620 Why is thy cheek so wan and wild, Sir Leoline? Thy only child Lies at thy feet, thy joy, thy pride, So fair, so innocent, so mild; The same, for whom thy lady died! 625 O, by the pangs of her dear mother Think thou no evil of thy child! For her, and thee, and for no other, She prayed the moment ere she died: Prayed that the babe for whom she died, 630 Might prove her dear lord's joy and pride! That prayer her deadly pangs beguiled, Sir Leoline! And wouldst thou wrong thy only child, Her child and thine? 635 Within the Baron's heart and brain If thoughts, like these, had any share, They only swelled his rage and pain, And did but work confusion there. His heart was cleft with pain and rage, 640 His cheeks they quivered, his eyes were wild, Dishonoured thus in his old age; Dishonour'd by his only child, And all his hospitality To the insulted daughter of his friend 645 By more than woman's jealousy Brought thus to a disgraceful end-- He rolled his eye with stern regard Upon the gentle minstrel bard, And said in tones abrupt, austere-- 650 "Why, Bracy! dost thou loiter here? I bade thee hence!" The bard obeyed; And turning from his own sweet maid, The aged knight, Sir Leoline, Led forth the lady Geraldine! 655 THE CONCLUSION TO PART THE SECOND A little child, a limber elf, Singing, dancing to itself, A fairy thing with red round cheeks, That always finds, and never seeks, Makes such a vision to the sight 660 As fills a father's eyes with light; And pleasures flow in so thick and fast Upon his heart, that he at last Must needs express his love's excess With words of unmeant bitterness. 665 Perhaps 'tis pretty to force together Thoughts so all unlike each other; To mutter and mock a broken charm, To dally with wrong that does no harm. Perhaps 'tis tender too and pretty 670 At each wild word to feel within A sweet recoil of love and pity. And what, if in a world of sin (O sorrow and shame should this be true!) Such giddiness of heart and brain 675 Comes seldom save from rage and pain, So talks as it's most used to do. KUBLA KHAN In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. 5 So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round: And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills, Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; And here were forests ancient as the hills, 10 Enfolding sunny spots of greenery. But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted 15 By woman wailing for her demon-lover! And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, A mighty fountain momently was forced: Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst 20 Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail: And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever It flung up momently the sacred river. Five miles meandering with a mazy motion 25 Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean: And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war! 30 The shadow of the dome of pleasure Floated midway on the waves; Where was heard the mingled measure From the fountain and the caves. It was a miracle of rare device, 35 A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice! A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played, 40 Singing of Mount Abora. Could I revive within me. Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight 'twould win me, That with music loud and long, 45 I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome! those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! 50 Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise. LOVE All thoughts, all passions, all delights, Whatever stirs this mortal frame, All are but ministers of Love, And feed his sacred flame. Oft in my waking dreams do I 5 Live o'er again that happy hour, When midway on the mount I lay, Beside the ruined tower. The moonshine, stealing o'er the scene, Had blended with the lights of eve; 10 And she was there, my hope, my joy, My own dear Genevieve! She leant against the armed man, The statue of the armed knight; She stood and listened to my lay, 15 Amid the lingering light. Few sorrows hath she of her own. My hope! my joy! my Genevieve! She loves me best, whene'er I sing The songs that make her grieve. 20 I played a soft and doleful air, I sang an old and moving story-- An old rude song, that suited well That ruin wild and hoary. She listened with a flitting blush, 25 With downcast eyes and modest grace; For well she knew, I could not choose But gaze upon her face. I told her of the Knight that wore Upon his shield a burning brand; 30 And that for ten long years he wooed The Lady of the Land. I told her how he pined: and ah! The deep, the low, the pleading tone With which I sang another's love, 35 Interpreted my own. She listened with a flitting blush, With downcast eyes, and modest grace And she forgave me, that I gazed Too fondly on her face! 40 But when I told the cruel scorn That crazed that bold and lovely Knight, And that he crossed the mountain-woods, Nor rested day nor night; That sometimes from the savage den, 45 And sometimes from the darksome shade, And sometimes starting up at once In green and sunny glade,-- There came and looked him in the face An angel beautiful and bright; 50 And that he knew it was a Fiend, This miserable Knight! And that unknowing what he did, He leaped amid a murderous band, And saved from outrage worse than death 55 The Lady of the Land! And how she wept, and clasped his knees; And how she tended him in vain-- And ever strove to expiate The scorn that crazed his brain;-- 60 And that she nursed him in a cave; And how his madness went away, When on the yellow forest-leaves A dying man he lay;-- His dying words--but when I reached 65 That tenderest strain of all the ditty, My faltering voice and pausing harp Disturbed her soul with pity! All impulses of soul and sense Had thrilled my guileless Genevieve; 70 The music and the doleful tale, The rich and balmy eve; And hopes, and fears that kindle hope, An undistinguishable throng, And gentle wishes long subdued, 75 Subdued and cherished long! She wept with pity and delight, She blushed with love, and virgin-shame; And like the murmur of a dream, I heard her breathe my name. 80 Her bosom heaved--she stepped aside, As conscious of my look she stepped-- Then suddenly, with timorous eye She fled to me and wept. She half enclosed me with her arms, 85 She pressed me with a meek embrace; And bending back her head, looked up, And gazed upon my face. 'Twas partly love, and partly fear, And partly 'twas a bashful art, 90 That I might rather feel, than see, The swelling of her heart. I calmed her fears, and she was calm, And told her love with virgin pride; And so I won my Genevieve, 95 My bright and beauteous Bride. FRANCE: AN ODE I Ye Clouds! that far above me float and pause, Whose pathless march no mortal may control! Ye Ocean-Waves! that, wheresoe'er ye roll, Yield homage only to eternal laws! Ye Woods! that listen to the night-birds' singing, 5 Midway the smooth and perilous slope reclined, Save when your own imperious branches swinging, Have made a solemn music of the wind! Where, like a man beloved of God, Through glooms, which never woodman trod, 10 How oft, pursuing fancies holy, My moonlight way o'er flowering weeds I wound, Inspired, beyond the guess of folly, By each rude shape and wild unconquerable sound! O ye loud Waves! and O ye Forests high! 15 And O ye Clouds that far above me soared! Thou rising Sun! thou blue rejoicing Sky! Yea, every thing that is and will be free! Bear witness for me, wheresoe'er ye be, With what deep worship I have still adored 20 The spirit of divinest Liberty. II When France in wrath her giant-limbs upreared, And with that oath, which smote air, earth, and sea, Stamped her strong foot and said she would be free, Bear witness for me, how I hoped and feared! 25 With what a joy my lofty gratulation Unawed I sang, amid a slavish band: And when to whelm the disenchanted nation, Like fiends embattled by a wizard's wand, The Monarchs marched in evil day, 30 And Britain joined the dire array; Though dear her shores and circling ocean, Though many friendships, many youthful loves Had swoln the patriot emotion And flung a magic light o'er all her hills and groves; 35 Yet still my voice, unaltered, sang defeat To all that braved the tyrant-quelling lance, And shame too long delayed and vain retreat! For ne'er, O Liberty! with partial aim I dimmed thy light or damped thy holy flame; 40 But blessed the paeans of delivered France, And hung my head and wept at Britain's name. III "And what," I said, "though Blasphemy's loud scream With that sweet music of deliverance strove! Though all the fierce and drunken passions wove 45 A dance more wild than e'er was maniac's dream! Ye storms, that round the dawning east assembled, The Sun was rising, though ye hid his light!" And when, to soothe my soul, that hoped and trembled, The dissonance ceased, and all seemed calm and bright; 50 When France her front deep-scarred and gory Concealed with clustering wreaths of glory; When, insupportably advancing, Her arm made mockery of the warrior's ramp; While timid looks of fury glancing, 55 Domestic treason, crushed beneath her fatal stamp, Writhed like a wounded dragon in his gore; Then I reproached my fears that would not flee; "And soon," I said, "shall Wisdom teach her lore In the low huts of them that toil and groan! 60 And, conquering by her happiness alone, Shall France compel the nations to be free, Till Love and Joy look round, and call the Earth their own." IV Forgive me, Freedom! O forgive those dreams! I hear thy voice, I hear thy loud lament, 65 From bleak Helvetia's icy caverns sent-- I hear thy groans upon her blood-stained streams! Heroes, that for your peaceful country perished, And ye that, fleeing, spot your mountain-snows With bleeding wounds; forgive me, that I cherished 70 One thought that ever blessed your cruel foes! To scatter rage and traitorous guilt Where Peace her jealous home had built; A patriot-race to disinherit Of all that made their stormy wilds so dear; 75 And with inexpiable spirit To taint the bloodless freedom of the mountaineer-- O France, that mockest Heaven, adulterous, blind, And patriot only in pernicious toils! Are these thy boasts, Champion of human kind? 80 To mix with Kings in the low lust of sway, Tell in the hunt, and share the murderous prey; To insult the shrine of Liberty with spoils From freemen torn; to tempt and to betray? V The Sensual and the Dark rebel in vain, 85 Slaves by their own compulsion! In mad game They burst their manacles and wear the name Of Freedom, graven on a heavier chain! O Liberty! with profitless endeavour Have I pursued thee, many a weary hour; 90 But thou nor swell'st the victor's strain, nor ever Didst breathe thy soul in forms of human power. Alike from all, howe'er they praise thee, (Nor prayer, nor boastful name delays thee) Alike from Priestcraft's harpy minions, 95 And factious Blasphemy's obscener slaves, Thou speedest on thy subtle pinions, The guide of homeless winds, and playmate of the waves! And there I felt thee!--on that sea-cliff's verge, Whose pines, scarce travelled by the breeze above, 100 Had made one murmur with the distant surge! Yes, while I stood and gazed, my temples bare, And shot my being through earth, sea and air, Possessing all things with intensest love, O Liberty! my spirit felt thee there. 105 DEJECTION: AN ODE WRITTEN APRIL 4, 1802 Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon, With the old Moon in her arms; And I fear, I fear, my Master dear! We shall have a deadly storm. _Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence._ I Well! If the Bard was weather-wise, who made The grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence, This night, so tranquil now, will not go hence Unroused by winds, that ply a busier trade Than those which mould yon cloud in lazy flakes, 5 Or the dull sobbing draft, that moans and rakes Upon the strings of this Aeolian lute, Which better far were mute. For lo! the New-moon winter-bright! And overspread with phantom light, 10 (With swimming phantom light o'erspread But rimmed and circled by a silver thread) I see the old Moon in her lap, foretelling The coming-on of rain and squally blast. And oh! that even now the gust were swelling, 15 And the slant night-shower driving loud and fast! Those sounds which oft have raised me, whilst they awed, And sent my soul abroad, Might now perhaps their wonted impulse give, Might startle this dull pain, and make it move so and live! 20 II A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief, Which finds no natural outlet, no relief, In word, or sigh, or tear-- O Lady! in this wan and heartless mood, 25 To other thoughts by yonder throstle wooed, All this long eve, so balmy and serene, Have I been gazing on the western sky, And its peculiar tint of yellow green: And still I gaze--and with how blank an eye! 30 And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars, That give away their motion to the stars; Those stars, that glide behind them or between, Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen: Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew 35 In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue; I see them all so excellently fair, I see, not feel, how beautiful they are! III My genial spirits fail; And what can these avail 40 To lift the smothering weight from off my breast? It were a vain endeavour, Though I should gaze for ever On that green light that lingers in the west: I may not hope from outward forms to win 45 The passion and the life, whose fountains are within. IV O Lady! we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does Nature live: Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud! And would we aught behold, of higher worth. 50 Than that inanimate cold world allowed To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd, Ah, from the soul itself must issue forth A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud Enveloping the Earth-- 55 And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, Of all sweet sounds the life and element! V O pure of heart! thou need'st not ask of me What this strong music in the soul may be! 60 What, and wherein it doth exist, This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist, This beautiful and beauty-making power. Joy, virtuous Lady! Joy that ne'er was given, Save to the pure, and in their purest hour, 65 Life, and Life's effluence, cloud at once and shower, Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power, Which wedding Nature to us gives in dower, A new Earth and new Heaven, Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud-- 70 Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud-- We in ourselves rejoice! And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, All melodies the echoes of that voice, All colours a suffusion from that light. 75 VI There was a time when, though my path was rough, This joy within me dallied with distress, And all misfortunes were but as the stuff Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness: For hope grew round me, like the twining vine, 80 And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine. But now afflictions bow me down to earth: Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth; But oh! each visitation Suspends what nature gave me at my birth, 85 My shaping spirit of Imagination. For not to think of what I needs must feel, But to be still and patient, all I can; And haply by abstruse research to steal From my own nature all the natural man-- 90 This was my sole resource, my only plan: Till that which suits a part infects the whole, And now is almost grown the habit of my soul. VII Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind, Reality's dark dream! 95 I turn from you, and listen to the wind, Which long has raved unnoticed. What a scream Of agony by torture lengthened out That lute sent forth! Thou Wind, that rav'st without, Bare crag, or mountain-tairn, or blasted tree, 100 Or pine-grove whither woodman never clomb, Or lonely house, long held the witches' home, Methinks were fitter instruments for thee, Mad Lutanist! who in this month of showers, Of dark-brown gardens, and of peeping flowers, 105 Mak'st Devils' yule, with worse than wintry song, The blossoms, buds, and timorous leaves among. Thou Actor, perfect in all tragic sounds! Thou mighty Poet, even to frenzy bold! What tell'st thou now about? 110 'Tis of the rushing of an host in rout, With groans of trampled men, with smarting wounds-- At once they groan with pain, and shudder with the cold! But hush! there is a pause of deepest silence! And all that noise, as of a rushing crowd, 115 With groans, and tremulous shudderings--all is over-- It tells another tale, with sounds less deep and loud! A tale of less affright, And tempered with delight, As Otway's self had framed the tender lay, 120 'Tis of a little child Upon a lonesome wild, Not far from home, but she hath lost her way: And now moans low in bitter grief and fear, And now screams loud, and hopes to make her mother hear. 125 VIII 'Tis midnight, but small thoughts have I of sleep: Full seldom may my friend such vigils keep! Visit her, gentle Sleep! with wings of healing, And may this storm be but a mountain-birth, May all the stars hang bright above her dwelling, 130 Silent as though they watched the sleeping Earth! With light heart may she rise, Gay fancy, cheerful eyes, Joy lift her spirit, joy attune her voice; To her may all things live, from pole to pole, 135 Their life the eddying of her living soul! O simple spirit, guided from above, Dear Lady! friend devoutest of my choice, Thus mayest thou ever, evermore rejoice. YOUTH AND AGE Verse, a breeze mid blossoms straying, Where Hope clung feeding, like a bee-- Both were mine! Life went a-maying With Nature, Hope, and Poesy, When I was young! 5 _When_ I was young?--Ah, woful When! Ah! for the change 'twixt Now and Then! This breathing house not built with hands, This body that does me grievous wrong, O'er aery cliffs and glittering sands, 10 How lightly _then_ it flashed along:-- Like those trim skiffs, unknown of yore, On winding lakes and rivers wide, That ask no aid of sail or oar, That fear no spite of wind or tide! 15 Nought cared this body for wind or weather When Youth and I lived in 't together. Flowers are lovely; Love is flower-like; Friendship is a sheltering tree; O! the joys, that came down shower-like, 20 Of Friendship, Love, and Liberty, Ere I was old! _Ere_ I was old? Ah woful Ere, Which tells me Youth 's no longer here! O Youth! for years so many and sweet, 25 'Tis known, that thou and I were one, I'll think it but a fond conceit-- It cannot be that thou art gone! Thy vesper-bell hath not yet tolled:-- And thou wert aye a masker bold! 30 What strange disguise hast now put on, To _make believe_, that thou art gone? I see these locks in silvery slips, This drooping gait, this altered size: But Spring-tide blossoms on thy lips, 35 And tears take sunshine from thine eyes! Life is but thought: so think I will That Youth and I are house-mates still. Dew-drops are the gems of morning, But the tears of mournful eve! 40 Where no hope is, life 's a warning That only serves to make us grieve, When we are old: That only serves to make us grieve With oft and tedious taking-leave, 45 Like some poor nigh-related guest, That may not rudely be dismist; Yet hath outstayed his welcome while, And tells the jest without the smile. WORK WITHOUT HOPE LINES COMPOSED 21ST FEBRUARY 1827 All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair-- The bees are stirring--birds are on the wing-- And Winter slumbering in the open air, Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring! And I the while, the sole unbusy thing, 5 Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing. Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow, Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow. Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may, For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away! 10 With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll: And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul? Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve, And Hope without an object cannot live. EPITAPH Stop, Christian passer-by!--Stop, child of God, And read with gentle breast. Beneath this sod A poet lies, or that which once seemed he.-- O, lift one thought in prayer for S.T.C.; That he who many a year with toil of breath 5 Found death in life, may here find life in death! Mercy for praise--to be forgiven for fame He ask'd, and hoped, through Christ. Do thou the same! NOTES THE ANCIENT MARINER The Latin motto is condensed, by omission, from about a page of Thomas Burnet's _Archaeologiae Philosophicae: sive Doctrina Antiqua de Rerum Originibus_, published in London in 1692. Burnet was Master of Charterhouse from 1685 till his death in 1715, and enjoyed considerable reputation as a man of curious learning. In the _Archaeologiae_ he professed to reconcile a former work of his on the origins of the world with the account given in Genesis. The quotation is from chapter VII. of book I., "De Hebraeis, eorumque Cabalâ," and may be translated thus: "I easily believe that the invisible natures in the universe are more in number than the visible. But who shall tell us all the kinds of them? the ranks and relationships, the peculiar qualities and gifts of each? what they do? where they dwell? Man's wit has ever been circling about the knowledge of these things, but has never attained to it. Yet in the meanwhile I will not deny that it is profitable to contemplate from time to time in the mind, as in a picture, the idea of a larger and better world; lest the mind, becoming wonted to the little things of everyday life, grow narrow and settle down altogether to mean businesses. At the same time, however, we must watch for the truth, and observe method, so as to distinguish the certain from the uncertain, day from night." Instead of this motto the first edition had an Argument prefixed, as follows: "How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by storms to the cold Country towards the South Pole; and how from thence she made her course to the tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean; and of the strange things that befell; and in what manner the Ancyent Marinere came back to his own Country." This was somewhat enlarged in the second edition (1800), and dropped thereafter. *Page 3*, LINE 12--*eftsoons*. Anglo-Saxon _eftsona (eft_ afterwards, again, + _sona_ soon), reënforced by the adverbial genitive ending _-s._ Coleridge found the word in Spenser and the old ballads. 4, 23--*kirk*. The Scotch and Northern English form of "church." The old ballads had been preserved chiefly in the North; hence this Northern form came to be looked on as the proper word for church in the ballad style. 41, marginal gloss--*driven*. All editions down to Campbell's had "drawn;" but this he believes to have been a misprint, since the narrative seems to require "driven." 5, 55--*clifts*. This word arose from a confusion of "cliff," a precipice, and "cleft," a fissure. It was "exceedingly common in the 16th-18th cent.," according to the New English Dict., which gives examples from Captain John Smith, Marlowe, and Defoe. 62--*swound*. An archaic form of "swoon," found in Elizabethan English. 64--*thorough*. "Through" and "thorough" are originally the same word, and in Shakespeare's time both forms were used for the preposition. Cf. Puck's song in "Midsummer Night's Dream," "Thorough bush, thorough briar." 67--*eat*. This form (pronounced _et_) is still in use in England and New England for the past tense of the verb, though in America the form "ate" is now preferred. "Eat" as past participle, however, was archaic or rude even in Coleridge's time. 76--*vespers*. Properly a liturgical term, meaning the daily evening service in church; then in a more general way "evening." The Century Dict. gives no examples of its use as a nautical term. Probably Coleridge used it to give a suggestion of ante-Reformation times. The more familiar word for the evening service in the English Church is "even-song," but Coleridge in line 595 prefers "the little vesper bell" for its suggestion of medievalism. 6, 97--*like God's own head*. The comparison is the converse of that in the Bible, Matthew xvii., 2, Revelations I., 16, where the countenance of Christ glorified is said to shine "as the sun" (Sykes). 98--*uprist*. This word was used in Middle English as a noun, and regularly as the 3d pers. sing. pres. ind. of the verb "uprise." In "The Reves Tale" line 329, however, Chaucer uses, it in a context of past tenses, as Coleridge does here, as if it were a weak preterit; and Chaucer uses "rist up" in the same way several times (Sykes). 104--*The furrow followed free*. This was changed in "Sibylline Leaves" to "The furrow streamed off free," because, Coleridge tells us, "from the ship itself the _Wake_ appears like a brook flowing off from the stern." In the case of modern steamboats at least it would be more correct to say that the wake, as seen from the stern of the boat, looks like a brook _following_ the boat. The original reading was restored in the editions of 1828 and 1829. 7, 123--*The very deep did rot*, etc. The ship becalmed in tropic seas, and the slimy things engendered there, were a vision in Coleridge's mind before "The Ancient Mariner" was thought of. In the lines contributed to Southey's "Joan of Arc" in 1796 (published, with additions, as "The Destiny of Nations" in "Sibylline Leaves"), in an allegoric passage on Chaos and Love, he wrote: "As what time, after long and pestful calms, With slimy shapes and miscreated life Poisoning the vast Pacific, the fresh breeze Wakens the merchant sail uprising." The same subject had occupied Wordsworth's imagination before he and Coleridge came together at Stowey; see Wordsworth's "The Borderers," Act iv. 125--*slimy things*. Strange creatures, the spawn of the rotting sea, for which the Mariner has no name. 131, marginal gloss--*Josephus, Michael Psellus*. The only "learned Jew, Josephus," that we know of is the historian of that name who lived in the first century of our era; but little has been found in his works to justify this reference. The "Platonic Constantinopolitan, Michael Psellus," was a Byzantine teacher of the eleventh century who wrote a dialogue in which demons are classified according to the element in which they live (Cooper; Sykes). 8, 152--*I wist*. "Wist" is properly the past tense of an old verb "wit," to know. But Coleridge seems to use "I wist" here as equivalent to "I wis" (see "Christabel," l. 92), which is a form of "iwis," an adverb meaning "certainly." 157--*with throats unslaked*, etc. A remarkable instance of onomatopoeia. 9, 164--*gramercy*. An exclamation, meaning originally "much thanks" (Old French _grand merci_), and so used by Shakespeare ("Merchant of Venice" II., 2, 128, "Richard III" III., 2, 108). But in the ballads it is often a mere exclamation of wonder and surprise, and so Coleridge uses it here,--*grin*. Coleridge says ("Table Talk" May 31, 1830): "I took the thought of 'grinning for joy' from my companion's remark to me, when we had climbed to the top of Plinlimmon [in Wales, in the summer of 1794], and were nearly dead with thirst. We could not speak from the constriction, till we found a little puddle under a stone. He said to me: 'You grinned like an idiot.' He had done the same." To "grin" was originally to snarl and show the teeth as animals do when angry. "They go to and fro in the evening: they grin like a dog, and run about through the city," Ps. LIX., 6, Prayer-Book Version, where the King James Version has "make a noise like a dog." Hence idiots, stupid people, foolish people, all who are or who demean themselves below the dignity of man, _grin_ rather than smile; and so the Mariner's companions, their muscles stiffened by drought, could show their gladness only by the contortions of a grin, not by a natural smile of joy. 169--*Without a breeze, without a tide*. The Phantom Ship is a wide-spread sailor's superstition that has been often used in the romantic literature of the nineteenth century. See Scott's "Rokeby," Canto II. xi; Marryat's "Phantom Ship;" Poe's "MS. Found in a Bottle;" and Longfellow's "Ballad of Carmilhan" (in "Tales of a Wayside Inn," Second Day). It is seen in storms, driving by with all sails set, and is generally held to be an omen of disaster. Coleridge has shaped the legend to his own purposes. The ship appears in a calm, not in a storm, and sailing without, rather than against, wind and tide; and instead of a crew of dead men it carries only Death and Life-in-Death. Possibly he was acquainted with a form of the legend found in Bechstein's _Deutsches Sagenbuch_ (pointed out by Dr. Sykes), in which "Falkenberg, for murder of his brother, is condemned to sail a spectral bark, attended only by his good and his evil spirit, who play dice for his soul." 185--*Are those her ribs*, etc. Instead of this stanza the first edition had these two: "Are those _her_ naked ribs, which fleck'd The sun that did behind them peer? And are those two all, all the crew, That woman and her fleshless Pheere? "His bones are black with many a crack, All black and bare, I ween; Jet-black and bare, save where with rust Of mouldy damps and charnel crust They're patch'd with purple and green" And again after line 198 the first edition had this stanza: "A gust of wind sterte up behind And whistled thro' his bones; Thro' the holes of his eyes and the hole of his mouth Half-whistles and half-groans." But this crude grotesquerie of horror--quite in the taste of that day, the day of "Monk" Lewis and Mrs. Radcliffe--Coleridge's finer poetical judgment soon rejected. 190--*Her lips were red*, etc. Life-in-Death--who wins the Mariner, while Death wins his shipmates--is conceived as a witch, something after the fashion of Geraldine in "Christabel" or Duessa in "The Faerie Queene," but wilder, stranger than either; a thing of startling and evil beauty. Spenser's pages of description, however, give no such vivid image of loathsome loveliness as do the first three lines of this stanza. "Her skin was as white as leprosy" is a feat in suggestion. 10, 199, marginal gloss--*within the courts of the Sun*. Between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. 210--*with one bright star Within the nether tip*. An interesting case of poetical illusion. No one, of course, ever saw a star _within_ the tip of the horned moon. Yet a good many readers, until reminded of their astronomy, think they have seen this phenomenon. Coleridge apparently knew that the human mind would receive it as experience. The phrase is no slip on his part; the earlier editions had instead "almost atween the tips," which is astronomically justifiable, but in "Sibylline Leaves" and later he wrote it as in the text. 222--*And every soul, it passed me by, Like the whizz of my cross-bow!* It was an ancient belief, imaginatively revived by romantic poets, that when a person died his soul could be seen, or heard, or both, as it left the body, Cf. Keats's "Eve of St. Agnes," first stanza; Rossetti's "Sister Helen;" and Kipling's "Danny Deever." 11, 226--*And thou art long*, etc. "For the last two lines of this stanza," runs. Coleridge's note to the passage in "Sibylline Leaves," "I am indebted to Mr. Wordsworth. It was on a delightful walk from Nether Stowey to Dulverton, with him and his sister, in the autumn of 1797, that this poem was planned, and in part composed." Wordsworth in later years declared that he contributed also lines 13-16, "and four or five lines more in different parts of the poem, which I could not now point out." 245--*or ever*. "Or" here is not the adversative conjunction but an entirely different word, an archaic variant of "ere," meaning "before." 250--*For the sky and the sea*, etc. Another instance of the sound fitting the sense. The rocking rhythm of the line is the rhythm of his fevered pulse. The poem is full of this quality. 13, 297--*silly*. This word meant in Old English timely (from _soel_, time, occasion) hence fortunate, blessed. From this was developed, under the influence of medieval religious teaching, the meaning innocent, harmless, simple; and from this again our modern meaning, foolish, simple in a derogatory sense. Chaucer has the word in all these meanings, and also in another, a modification of the second--wretched, pitiable. Another shade of the same meaning appears in Spenser's "silly bark," i.e. _frail_ ship, and in Burns's "To a Mouse": "Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin! Its silly wa's the win's are strewin'!" "The epithet may be due either to the gush of love that has filled the Mariner's heart, or to his noticing the buckets, long useless, frail, now filled with water" (Sykes); very likely to both together. 14, 314--*fire-flags*. The notion of the "fire-flags" "hurried about" was probably suggested to Coleridge by the description of the Northern Lights (_aurora borealis_) in Hearne's "Journey ... to the Northern Ocean," a book printed in 1795 and known to both Wordsworth and Coleridge before 1798. Hearne says: "I can positively affirm that in still nights I have frequently heard them make a rustling and crackling noise, like the waving of a large flag in a fresh gale of wind." See also Wordsworth's "Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman" (Cooper). 15, 358--*Sometimes a-dropping*, etc. The Mariner's sin was that in wanton cruelty he took the life of a friendly fellow-creature; his punishment is to live with dead men round him and the dead bird on his breast, in such solitude that "God himself scarce seemed there to be," until he learns to feel the _sacredness of life_ even in the water-snakes, the "slimy things" that coil in the rotting sea; and the stages of his penance are marked by suggestions of his return to the privilege of human fellowship. The angels' music is like the song of the skylark, the sails ripple like a leaf-hidden brook--recollections of his happy boyhood in. England; and finally comes the actual land breeze, and he is in his "own countree." Observe the marginal gloss to line 442. 17, 407--*honey-dew*. See note on "Kubla Khan," line 53. 416--*His great bright eye*, etc. Dorothy Wordsworth in her Journal, February 27, 1798, describes the look of the sea by moonlight, "big and white, swelled to the very shores, but round and high in the middle." 20, 512--*shrieve*. To hear confession and pronounce absolution, one of the duties of the priesthood in the Catholic church. The word is more often spelled _shrive. Shrift_ is the abstract noun derived from it. 21, 523--*skiff-boat*. A pleonastic compound; a skiff is a boat. Coleridge is fond of such formations. See for example II. 41, 77, 472 of this poem and II. 46, 649 of "Christabel" (Cooper). 535--*ivy-tod*. A clump or bush of ivy. Cf. Spenser's "Shepheards Calender," March, II. 67 ff.: "At length within an Yvie todde (There shrouded was the little God) I heard a busie bustling." 23, 607--*While each to his great Father bends*, etc. Cf. the 148th Psalm (Prayer-Book Version) v. 12: "Young men and maidens, old men and children, praise the name of the Lord: for his name only is excellent, and his praise above heaven and earth." CHRISTABEL 25,6-7--This couplet ran as follows in the first edition: "Sir Leoline, the Baron rich, Hath a toothless mastiff bitch." In the editions of 1828 and 1829 Coleridge changed it to the form printed in the text; "but _bitch_ has been restored in all subsequent editions except Mr. Campbell's" (Garnett). 16--*thin gray cloud*, etc. The "thin gray cloud," as also the dancing leaf of ll. 49-52, was observed at Stowey. They are noted in Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal, January 31 and March 7, 1798. 26, 54--*Jesu*. This form of the word is nearer to the Hebrew original than the more familiar _Jesus_. It is often (though not exclusively) used in ejaculation and prayer, as here, and was perhaps supposed to be the vocative form. 27, 92--*I wis.* This is a misinterpretation of Middle English _iwis_, from Old English _gewis_, "certainly." 29, 129--*The lady sank,* etc. The threshold of a house is, in folk-lore, a sacred place, and evil things cannot cross but have to be carried over it. 142--*I cannot speak,* etc. Geraldine blesses "her gracious stars" (l. 114), but cannot join in praise to the Holy Virgin. 30, 167--*And jealous of the listening air*. This line was not in the first edition, but was added in the edition of 1828. 32, 252--*Behold! her bosom and half her side*, etc. There exist at least three versions of this passage. The text is that of the 1828 edition. The edition of 1816 lacked ll. 255-61, having only these lines between 253 and 262: "And she is to sleep by Christabel. She took two paces, and a stride," etc. The third form is that of a MS. copy of the poem once the property of Wordsworth's sister-in-law, Sarah Hutchinson, and recently published in facsimile by Mr. E.H. Coleridge, which gives this reading for ll. 253-4: "Are lean and old and foul of hue, And she is to sleep by Christabel." Coleridge seems to have tried both ways, that of revealing Geraldine's loathsome secret and that of leaving it an unknown and nameless horror, and finally to have chosen the latter, just as he rejected in later editions the charnel-house particulars in the description of Death in "The Ancient Mariner." Unquestionably he was right. The horror that is merely suggested and left shrouded in mystery for the imagination to work on is more powerful than that which is known. The suppressed line, however, helps us in an age less familiar with notions of the supernatural to understand what Geraldine is. The character is conceived upon the general lines of Duessa in the first book of "The Faerie Queene;" a being of great external loveliness, but within "full of all uncleanness." Observe also that the thought, shrouded here, is half revealed later (l. 457). 35, 344--*Bratha Head, Wyndermere, Langdale Pike*, etc. For the relation of the Second Part of the poem to the Lake country see Introduction. All of the places named in these lines are near the border-line between Cumberland and Westmoreland and within a dozen miles of the Wordsworths' home at Grasmere. Keswick, which was the home of Coleridge from 1800 to 1804, and of his wife and children for many years thereafter, is on Derwent Water, in Cumberland, some ten miles north of Grasmere. The little river Bratha runs into the upper or northern end of Windermere, a larger lake lying about three miles below Grasmere and connected with it by another stream. Langdale Pike (or Pikes, for there are more than one) is the name of the steep hills at the head of Langdale, on the Cumberland border. Dungeon-Ghyll is a ravine in Langdale (see Wordsworth's "The Idle Shepherd Boys; or, Dungeon-Ghyll Force"). Borrowdale lies over the border in Cumberland and slopes the other way, toward Derwent Water. 37, 407--*Lord Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine*. Sir Leoline lives at "Langdale Hall," a supposed castle in the immediate vicinity of the poets' homes; the friend of his youth, whose daughter Geraldine claims to be, is given the name of a real family and an historical estate in eastern Cumberland, Tryermaine in Gilsland, on the River Irthing, which forms part of the boundary between Cumberland and Northumberland. Scott in his notes to "The Bridal of Triermain" quotes as follows from Burns's "Antiquities of Westmoreland and Cumberland": "After the death of Gilmore, Lord of Tryermaine and Torcrossock, Hubert Vaux gave Tryermaine and Torcrossock to his second son, Ranulph Vaux.... Ranulph, being Lord of all Gilsland, gave Gilmore's land to his younger son, named Roland.... And they were named Rolands successively, that were lords thereof, until the reign of Edward the Fourth." 44--*The Conclusion to Part the Second*. Campbell thought it "highly improbable" that these lines were originally composed as a part of "Christabel." In a letter to Southey, May 6, 1801, Coleridge speaks of his eldest boy, Hartley, then in his fifth year: "Dear Hartley! we are at times alarmed by the state of his health, but at present he is well. If I were to lose him, I am afraid it would exceedingly deaden my affection for any other children I may have." Then he writes the lines that we now have as the Conclusion to Part the Second; and adds: "A very metaphysical account of fathers calling their children rogues, rascals, and little varlets, etc." KUBLA KHAN Kubla Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, was a Mongolian conqueror who stretched his empire from European Russia to the eastern shores of China in the thirteenth century. His exploits, like those of his grandfather and those of the Mohammedan Timur in the next century, made a deep impression on the imagination of Western Europe. Compilers of travellers's tales, like Hakluyt and Purchas, caught up eagerly whatever they could find, history or legend, concerning the extent of his domain, the methods of his government, or the splendors of his court. The passage in "Purchas his Pilgrimage" to which Coleridge refers is as follows: "In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately Palace, encompassing sixteene miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile Meddowes, pleasant Springs, delightfull Streames, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the middest thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure" (quoted in the Notes of the Globe edition). Coleridge's poem, however, contains suggestions and reminiscences from another part of Purchas's book, and probably from other books as well. "It reads like an arras of reminiscences from several accounts of natural or enchanted parks, and from various descriptions of that elusive and danger-fraught garden which mystic geographers have studied to locate from Florida to Cathay" (Cooper). The earthly paradise, which was closed to man indeed, but not destroyed, when Adam and Eve were driven from its gates, has exercised the imagination of the Christian world from the early Middle Ages. Lactantius described it in the fourth century; the author of the "Phoenix," probably in the eighth century, translated Lactantius' Latin into Anglo-Saxon verse; Sir John Mandeville, in the fourteenth century, though he did not reach it himself because he "was not worthy," gives an account of it from what he has "heard say of wise Men beyond;" Milton described it enchantingly in "Paradise Lost;" Dr. Johnson used a modification of it in "Rasselas;" and William Morris in our own time made it the framework for a delightful series of world-old tales. The idea, indeed, is not peculiar to Christianity, but is probably to be found in every civilization. Christian Europe has naturally located it in the East; and since the Crusades, which brought Western Europe more in contact with the East, various eastern legends have been attached to or confounded with the original notion. One of these is the Abyssinian legend of the hill Amara (cf. l. 41, where Coleridge's "Mount Abora" seems to stand for Purchas's Amara). Amara in Purchas's account is a hill in a great plain in Ethiopia, used as a prison for the sons of Abyssinian kings. Its level top, twenty leagues in circuit and surrounded by a high wall, is a garden of delight. "Heauen and Earth, Nature and Industrie, have all been corriuals to it, all presenting their best presents, to make it of this so louely presence, some taking this for the place of our Forefathers Paradise." The sides of the hill are of overhanging rock, "bearing out like mushromes, so that it is impossible to ascend it" except by a passageway "cut out within the Rocke, not with staires, but ascending little by little," and closed above and below with gates guarded by soldiers. "Toward the South" of the level top "is a rising hill ... yeelding ... a pleasant spring which passeth through all that Plaine ... and making a Lake, whence issueth a River, which having from these tops espied Nilus, never leaves seeking to find him, whom he cannot leave both to seeke and to finde.... There are no Cities on the top, but palaces, standing by themselves ... spacious, sumptuous, and beautifull, where the Princes of the Royall blood have their abode with their families." This legend looks backward to Mandeville, with whose account of the Terrestrial Paradise it has much in common, and forward to Milton, who used some of its elements in his description of Paradise in the fourth book of "Paradise Lost." (See Professor Cooper's article in "Modern Philology," III., 327 ff., from which this is condensed.) Mr. E.H. Coleridge (the poet's grandson) has recently shown that in the winter of 1797-8 Coleridge read and made notes from a book, "Travels through ... the Cherokee Country," by the American botanist William Bartram. Chapter VII. of Bartram's book contains an account of some natural wonders in the Cherokee country that almost certainly afforded part of the imagery of "Kubla Khan." Bartram, says Mr. Coleridge, "speaks of waters which 'descend by slow degrees through rocky caverns into the bowels of the earth, whence they are carried by subterraneous channels into other receptacles and basons.' He travels for several miles over 'fertile eminences and delightful shady forests.' He is enchanted by a 'view of a dark sublime grove;' of the grand fountain he says that the 'ebullition is astonishing and continual, though its greatest force of fury intermits' (note the word 'intermits') 'regularly for the space of thirty seconds of time: the ebullition is perpendicular upward, from a vast rugged orifice through a bed of rock throwing up small particles of white shells.' He is informed by 'a trader' that when the Great Sink was forming there was heard 'an inexpressible rushing noise like a mighty hurricane or thunderstorm,' that 'the earth was overflowed by torrents of water which came wave after wave rushing down, attended with a terrific noise and tremor of the earth,' that the fountain ceased to flow and 'sank into a huge bason of water;' but, as he saw with his own eyes, 'vast heaps of fragments of rock' (Coleridge writes 'huge fragments'), 'white chalk, stones, and pebbles had been thrown up by the original outbursts and forced aside into the lateral valleys.'" From these and from other like sources Coleridge's mind was no doubt stored with suggestions of tropical wonder and loveliness, which fell together--if his own account of the making of the poem is to be relied on--into the kaleidoscopic beauty of "Kubla Khan." It is not unlikely, too (cf. ll. 12-13), that the ash-tree dell at Stowey, which he had already used for a scene of supernatural terror in "Osorio," bears some part in his avowed dream of Xanadu. 45, 3--*Alph, the sacred river.* This name seems to be of Coleridge's own invention; at least it has not been pointed out where he found it. 16--*demon-lover.* The demon-lover (or more often, with sexes reversed, the fairy mistress) is a favorite theme of romance, taken from folk-lore, where it appears in many forms. Cf. the ballads of "Thomas Rymer," "Tam Lin," and "The Demon Lover," in Child's "English and Scottish Popular Ballads," and Scott's "William and Helen" (a translation of Burger's "Lenore"). 46, 39, 41--*Abyssinian maid, Mount Abora.* See introductory note above. 53--*honey-dew.* A sweet sticky substance found on plants, deposited there by the aphis or plant-louse. It was supposed to be the food of fairies. Not improbably Coleridge was thinking of manna, a saccharine exudation found upon certain plants in the East. Mandeville describes it as found in "the Land of Job:" "This Manna is clept Bread of Angels. And it is a white Thing that is full sweet and right delicious, and more sweet than Honey or Sugar. And it Cometh of the Dew of Heaven that falleth upon the Herbs in that Country. And it congealeth and becometh all white and sweet. And Men put it in Medicines." 53-4--*For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.* Professor Cooper, in the article cited in the introductory note above, points out that this part of the poem contains perhaps reminiscences of the stories told of the Old Man of the Mountain. This was the title popularly given to the head of a fanatical sect of Mohammedans in Syria in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, whose method of getting rid of their enemies has given us the word _assassin_. To quote from Mandeville's "Travels," which has the essentials of the story, though the chief is here called Gatholonabes, and his domain is not in Syria but in the island Mistorak, "in the Lordship of Prester John:" "He had a full fair Castle and a strong in a Mountain, so strong and so noble, that no Man could devise a fairer or a stronger. And he had made wall all the Mountain about with a strong Wall and a fair. And within those Walls he had the fairest Garden that any Man might behold.... "And he had also in that Place, the fairest Damsels that might be found, under the Age of fifteen Years, and the fairest young Striplings that Men might get, of that same Age. And they were all clothed in Cloths of Gold, full richly. And he said that those were Angels. "And he had also made 3 Wells, fair and noble, and all environed with Stone of Jasper, and of Crystal, diapered with Gold, and set with precious Stones and great orient Pearls. And he had made a Conduit under the Earth, so that the 3 Wells, at his List, should run, one Milk, another Wine, and another Honey. And that Place he clept Paradise. "And when that any good Knight, that was hardy and noble, came to see this Royalty, he would lead him into his Paradise, and show him these wonderful Things for his Sport, and the marvellous and delicious Song of divers Birds, and the fair Damsels, and the fair Wells of Milk, Wine and Honey, plenteously running. And he would make divers Instruments of Music to sound in an high Tower, so merrily, that it was Joy to hear; and no Man should see the Craft thereof. And those, he said, were Angels of God, and that Place was Paradise, that God had promised to his Friends, saying, '_Dabo vobis Terram fluentem Lacte et Melle_' ('I shall give thee a Land flowing with Milk and Honey'). And then would he make them to drink of certain Drink [hashish, a narcotic drug, whence their name of Assassins], whereof anon they should be drunk. And then would they think it greater Delight than they had before. And then would he say to them, that if they would die for him and for his Love, that after their Death they should come to his Paradise; and they should be of the Age of the Damsels, and they should play with them, and yet be Maidens. And after that should he put them in a yet fairer Paradise, where that they should see the God of Nature visibly, in His Majesty and in His Bliss. And then would he show them his Intent, and say to them, that if they would go slay such a Lord, or such a Man that was his Enemy or contrarious to his List, that they should not therefore dread to do it and to be slain themselves. For after their Death, he would put them in another Paradise, that was an 100-fold fairer than any of the tother; and there should they dwell with the most fairest Damsels that might be, and play with them ever-more. "And thus went many divers lusty Pachelors to slay great Lords in divers Countries, that were his Enemies, and made themselves to be slain, in Hope to have that Paradise." FRANCE: AN ODE When Coleridge republished this poem in the _Post_ in 1802 he prefixed to it the following ARGUMENT _First Stanza_. An invocation to those objects in Nature the contemplation of which had inspired the Poet with a devotional love of Liberty. _Second Stanza_. The exultation of the Poet at the commencement of the French Revolution, and his unqualified abhorrence of the Alliance against the Republic. _Third Stanza_. The blasphemies and horrors during the domination of the Terrorists regarded by the Poet as a transient storm, and as the natural consequence of the former despotism and of the foul superstition of Popery. Reason, indeed, began to suggest many apprehensions; yet still the Poet struggled to retain the hope that France would make conquests by no other means than by presenting to the observation of Europe a people more happy and better instructed than under other forms of Government. _Fourth Stanza_. Switzerland, and the Poet's recantation. _Fifth Stanza_. An address to Liberty, in which the Poet expresses his conviction that those feelings and that grand _ideal_ of Freedom which the mind attains by its contemplation of its individual nature, and of the sublime surrounding objects (see stanza the first) do not belong to men as a society, nor can possibly be either gratified or realized under any form, of human government; but belong to the individual man, so far as he is pure, and inflamed with the love and adoration of God in Nature. 51, 22--*When France in wrath*, etc. The storming of the Bastile took place July 14, 1789. On the 4th of August feudal and manorial privileges were swept away by the National Assembly; and on the 18th of August the Assembly formally adopted a declaration of "the rights of man." In September 1792 the National Convention abolished royalty and declared France a republic. 52, 26-7--*With what a joy my lofty gratulation Unawed I* sang. Coleridge wrote a poem on the "Destruction of the Bastile," probably in 1789 or soon after (first printed in 1834); and in September, 1792, some lines "To a Young Lady, with a Poem on the French Revolution" (first printed in _The Watchman_ in 1796), in which he tells his emotions-- "When slumbering Freedom roused with high disdain With giant fury burst her triple chain!" 28--*the disenchanted nation*. "Disenchanted" because they found that freedom, peace, and virtue were not to be secured by mere proclamation; and that all Europe was not ready at the call of the revolutionists to abolish prescriptive rights and establish republican forms of society. In January 1793 Louis XVI was beheaded. The act was followed pretty promptly by a coalition of England, Holland, Spain, Naples, and the German states against the Republic. 36--*Yet still my voice*. In "Religious Musings," 1794-6, and more ardently in the parts that he contributed to Southey's "Joan of Arc," 1796. 42--*Britain's name*. England was from the beginning the centre of resistance to the violence and ambition of revolutionary France; and Pitt, who controlled English policy in these years, was looked upon as a cold-blooded agent of tyranny by the French republicans and their English sympathizers. 44--*sweet music of deliverance*. The French were so convinced that their Revolution marked the beginning of a new era in human affairs that they determined to have a new chronology. Accordingly a commission of scientists was appointed to formulate a system, which was adopted in October 1793. The "Era of the Republic" was to be counted from the autumnal equinox, 1792. The year was divided into twelve months, as before, but they were renamed (_Thermidor_ hot month, _Fructidor_ fruit month, _Nivose_ snow month, &c.), and ran in periods of thirty days each from the 22d of September. This left five days undistributed, which were set apart as feast-days in celebration of five virtues or ideals. Each month consisted of three decades, and each tenth day, or _decadis_, was a holiday. The purpose of this was to eradicate the observance of the Christian Sunday. This chronology was in actual use in France until Napoleon put an end to it in 1806. The municipality of Paris in 1793 decreed that on the 10th of November the worship of Reason should be inaugurated at Notre Dame. "On that day the venerable cathedral was profaned by a series of sacrilegious outrages unparalleled in the history of Christendom. A temple dedicated to 'Philosophy' was erected on a platform in the middle of the choir ... the Goddess of Reason, impersonated by Mademoiselle Maillard, a well known figurante of the opera, took her seat upon a grassy throne in front of the temple; ... and the multitude bowed the knee before her in profound admiration.... At the close of this grotesque ceremony the whole cortège proceeded to the hall of the Convention, carrying with them their 'goddess,' who was borne aloft in a chair of state on the shoulders of four men. Having deposited her in front of the president," Chaumette, the spokesman of the procession, "harangued the Assembly.... He proceeded to demand that the ci-devant metropolitan church should henceforth be the temple of Reason and Liberty; which proposition was immediately adopted. The 'goddess' was then conducted to the president, and he and other officers of the House saluted her with the 'fraternal kiss,' amid thunders of applause. After this, upon the motion of Thuriot, the Convention in a body joined the mass of the people, and marched in their company to the temple of Reason, to witness a repetition of the impieties above described.... At St. Gervais a ball was given in the chapel of the Virgin. In other churches theatrical spectacles took place.... On Sunday, the 17th of November, all the parish churches of Paris were closed by authority, with three exceptions.... Religion was proscribed, churches closed, Christian ordinances interdicted; the dreary gloom of atheistical despotism overspread the land."--Jervis, "The Gallican Church and the Revolution," quoted in Larned's "History for Ready Reference," p. 1300. The next year, however, Robespierre had a decree passed of which the first article was: "The French people acknowledge the existence of the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul;" and thereupon the inscriptions _To Reason_ that had been placed upon the French churches were replaced by others reading _To the Supreme Being_. 50--*calm and bright*. After the downfall of Robespierre in 1794 France gradually worked back to a less hysterical mood. In October 1795 a new form of government known as the Directory was established, under which the people enjoyed comparative safety at home and developed a remarkable military efficiency against their foreign enemies. Bonaparte's military genius brought him rapidly to the front in the wars of the Directory. It was he that created the Cisalpine and Ligurine "republics," and his policy directed the invasions of Rome and of Switzerland. 53, 66--*Helvetia*. In March, 1798, after having fostered or compelled the formation of republics under French protection in Holland, northern Italy, and Rome, the Directory, under pretence of defending the republican rights of the Vaudois, made a concerted attack upon Switzerland. Berne, the centre of resistance, was taken, despite the heroic defence of the mountaineers who for five centuries had maintained in "bleak Helvetia's icy caverns" a "shrine of liberty" for all Europe. DEJECTION: AN ODE 55, 1 of motto--*yestreen*. Abbreviation of "yester-even," yesterday evening. 58, 82--*But now afflictions*, etc. In March 1801 Coleridge wrote to Godwin: "In my long illness I had compelled into hours of delight many a sleepless, painful hour of darkness by chasing down metaphysical game, and since then I have continued the hunt, until I found myself unaware at the root of pure mathematics.... The poet is dead in me." And years afterward in a letter to an artist friend, W. Collins (December, 1818): "Poetry is out of the question. The attempt would only hurry me into that sphere of acute feelings from which abstruse research, the mother of self-oblivion, presents an asylum." 95--*Reality's dark dream*! In the earlier forms of the poem the lines corresponding to 94-5 stood thus: "Nay, wherefore did I let it haunt my mind, This dark, distressful dream?" He seems to mean, "This loss of joy, of poetic power, is, must be, only an evil dream, and I will shake it from my mind;" but he knows that it is a reality, and so turns to forget it in the sensuous intoxication of the wind's music. Or perhaps--for Coleridge is already a metaphysician--reality is used here in opposition to ideality or imagination; the truth of philosophy (cf. ll. 89-90) and the metaphysic habit of mind that the study of it induces--what we call reality--is a dream that has come between him and the world of the ideal in which he had and used his "shaping spirit of imagination." The passage is obscure. 100--*Bare crag*, etc. The scenery here is that of the Lake country where Coleridge and Wordsworth were then living--the former at Keswick in Cumberland, the latter at Grasmere, Westmoreland. 59, 120--*Otway*. Coleridge wrote originally, "As thou thyself [i.e. Wordsworth--see next note] had'st fram'd the tender lay." This he changed to "Edmund's self" when he first printed the poem in 1802; and finally to "Otway's self." Thomas Otway was a dramatist of the time of Charles II (born 1651, died 1685). He wrote, among other plays, two tragedies of wonderful pathetic power, "The Orphan" and "Venice Preserved." The theme and style of the former of these, especially, no doubt suggested his name to Coleridge here. Otway's own career was pathetic; he died young, neglected, and according to one story, starved. To this story Coleridge alludes in one of his early poems, the "Monody on the Death of Chatterton:" "While, 'mid the pelting of that merciless storm, Sunk to the cold earth Otway's famished form!" 121--*'T is of a little child*, etc. Alluding to Wordsworth's "Lucy Gray," which had been published in the second edition of "Lyrical Ballads," 1800. YOUTH AND AGE 60, 12--*trim skiffs*, etc. Fulton had invented the steamboat in 1807. The first regular steamboat in British waters was built in 1812. 61, 34--*altered size*. Coleridge became very stout in his later years. WORK WITHOUT HOPE 62, 5--*the sole unbusy thing*. Cf. George Herbert's "Employment:" "All things are busie; onely I Neither bring hony with the bees, Nor flowers to make that, nor the husbandrie To water these." "I find more substantial comfort now," wrote Coleridge to his friend Collins in 1818, "in pious George Herbert's 'Temple,' which I used to read to amuse myself with his quaintness, in short, only to laugh at, than in all the poetry since Milton." 
9622	----	LYRICAL BALLADS, WITH A FEW OTHER POEMS. LONDON PRINTED FOR J. & A. ARCH, GRACECHURCH-STREET. 1798 ADVERTISEMENT. It is the honourable characteristic of Poetry that its materials are to be found in every subject which can interest the human mind. The evidence of this fact is to be sought, not in the writings of Critics, but in those of Poets themselves. The majority of the following poems are to be considered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure. Readers accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will perhaps frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and aukwardness: they will look round for poetry, and will be induced to enquire by what species of courtesy these attempts can be permitted to assume that title. It is desirable that such readers, for their own sakes, should not suffer the solitary word Poetry, a word of very disputed meaning, to stand in the way of their gratification; but that, while they are perusing this book, they should ask themselves if it contains a natural delineation of human passions, human characters, and human incidents; and if the answer be favourable to the author's wishes, that they should consent to be pleased in spite of that most dreadful enemy to our pleasures, our own pre-established codes of decision. Readers of superior judgment may disapprove of the style in which many of these pieces are executed it must be expected that many lines and phrases will not exactly suit their taste. It will perhaps appear to them, that wishing to avoid the prevalent fault of the day, the author has sometimes descended too low, and that many of his expressions are too familiar, and not of sufficient dignity. It is apprehended, that the more conversant the reader is with our elder writers, and with those in modern times who have been the most successful in painting manners and passions, the fewer complaints of this kind will he have to make. An accurate taste in poetry, and in all the other arts, Sir Joshua Reynolds has observed, is an acquired talent, which can only be produced by severe thought, and a long continued intercourse with the best models of composition. This is mentioned not with so ridiculous a purpose as to prevent the most inexperienced reader from judging for himself; but merely to temper the rashness of decision, and to suggest that if poetry be a subject on which much time has not been bestowed, the judgment may be erroneous, and that in many cases it necessarily will be so. The tale of Goody Blake and Harry Gill is founded on a well-authenticated fact which happened in Warwickshire. Of the other poems in the collection, it may be proper to say that they are either absolute inventions of the author, or facts which took place within his personal observation or that of his friends. The poem of the Thorn, as the reader will soon discover, is not supposed to be spoken in the author's own person: the character of the loquacious narrator will sufficiently shew itself in the course of the story. The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere was professedly written in imitation of the _style_, as well as of the spirit of the elder poets; but with a few exceptions, the Author believes that the language adopted in it has been equally intelligible for these three last centuries. The lines entitled Expostulation and Reply, and those which follow, arose out of conversation with a friend who was somewhat unreasonably attached to modern books of moral philosophy. CONTENTS. The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere The Foster-Mother's Tale Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree which stands near the Lake of Esthwaite The Nightingale, a Conversational Poem The Female Vagrant Goody Blake and Harry Gill Lines written at a small distance from my House, and sent by my little Boy to the Person to whom they are addressed Simon Lee, the old Huntsman Anecdote for Fathers We are seven Lines written in early spring The Thorn The last of the Flock The Dungeon The Mad Mother The Idiot Boy Lines written near Richmond, upon the Thames, at Evening Expostulation and Reply The Tables turned; an Evening Scene, on the same subject Old Man travelling The Complaint of a forsaken Indian Woman The Convict Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey THE RIME OF THE ANCYENT MARINERE, IN SEVEN PARTS. ARGUMENT. How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by Storms to the cold Country towards the South Pole; and how from thence she made her course to the tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean; and of the strange things that befell; and in what manner the Ancyent Marinere came back to his own Country. I. It is an ancyent Marinere, And he stoppeth one of three: "By thy long grey beard and thy glittering eye "Now wherefore stoppest me? "The Bridegroom's doors are open'd wide "And I am next of kin; "The Guests are met, the Feast is set,-- "May'st hear the merry din.-- But still he holds the wedding-guest-- There was a Ship, quoth he-- "Nay, if thou'st got a laughsome tale, "Marinere! come with me." He holds him with his skinny hand, Quoth he, there was a Ship-- "Now get thee hence, thou grey-beard Loon! "Or my Staff shall make thee skip." He holds him with his glittering eye-- The wedding guest stood still And listens like a three year's child; The Marinere hath his will. The wedding-guest sate on a stone, He cannot chuse but hear: And thus spake on that ancyent man, The bright-eyed Marinere. The Ship was cheer'd, the Harbour clear'd-- Merrily did we drop Below the Kirk, below the Hill, Below the Light-house top. The Sun came up upon the left, Out of the Sea came he: And he shone bright, and on the right Went down into the Sea. Higher and higher every day, Till over the mast at noon-- The wedding-guest here beat his breast, For he heard the loud bassoon. The Bride hath pac'd into the Hall, Red as a rose is she; Nodding their heads before her goes The merry Minstralsy. The wedding-guest he beat his breast, Yet he cannot chuse but hear: And thus spake on that ancyent Man, The bright-eyed Marinere. Listen, Stranger! Storm and Wind, A Wind and Tempest strong! For days and weeks it play'd us freaks-- Like Chaff we drove along. Listen, Stranger! Mist and Snow, And it grew wond'rous cauld: And Ice mast-high came floating by As green as Emerauld. And thro' the drifts the snowy clifts Did send a dismal sheen; Ne shapes of men ne beasts we ken-- The Ice was all between. The Ice was here, the Ice was there, The Ice was all around: It crack'd and growl'd, and roar'd and howl'd-- Like noises of a swound. At length did cross an Albatross, Thorough the Fog it came; And an it were a Christian Soul, We hail'd it in God's name. The Marineres gave it biscuit-worms, And round and round it flew: The Ice did split with a Thunder-fit; The Helmsman steer'd us thro'. And a good south wind sprung up behind, The Albatross did follow; And every day for food or play Came to the Marinere's hollo! In mist or cloud on mast or shroud It perch'd for vespers nine, Whiles all the night thro' fog-smoke white Glimmer'd the white moon-shine. "God save thee, ancyent Marinere! "From the fiends that plague thee thus-- "Why look'st thou so?"--with my cross bow I shot the Albatross. II. The Sun came up upon the right, Out of the Sea came he; And broad as a weft upon the left Went down into the Sea. And the good south wind still blew behind, But no sweet Bird did follow Ne any day for food or play Came to the Marinere's hollo! And I had done an hellish thing And it would work 'em woe: For all averr'd, I had kill'd the Bird That made the Breeze to blow. Ne dim ne red, like God's own head, The glorious Sun uprist: Then all averr'd, I had kill'd the Bird That brought the fog and mist. 'Twas right, said they, such birds to slay That bring the fog and mist. The breezes blew, the white foam flew, The furrow follow'd free: We were the first that ever burst Into that silent Sea. Down dropt the breeze, the Sails dropt down, 'Twas sad as sad could be And we did speak only to break The silence of the Sea. All in a hot and copper sky The bloody sun at noon, Right up above the mast did stand, No bigger than the moon. Day after day, day after day, We stuck, ne breath ne motion, As idle as a painted Ship Upon a painted Ocean. Water, water, every where And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Ne any drop to drink. The very deeps did rot: O Christ! That ever this should be! Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs Upon the slimy Sea. About, about, in reel and rout The Death-fires danc'd at night; The water, like a witch's oils, Burnt green and blue and white. And some in dreams assured were Of the Spirit that plagued us so: Nine fathom deep he had follow'd us From the Land of Mist and Snow. And every tongue thro' utter drouth Was wither'd at the root; We could not speak no more than if We had been choked with soot. Ah wel-a-day! what evil looks Had I from old and young; Instead of the Cross the Albatross About my neck was hung. III. I saw a something in the Sky No bigger than my fist; At first it seem'd a little speck And then it seem'd a mist: It mov'd and mov'd, and took at last A certain shape, I wist. A speck, a mist, a shape, I wist! And still it ner'd and ner'd; And, an it dodg'd a water-sprite, It plung'd and tack'd and veer'd. With throat unslack'd, with black lips bak'd Ne could we laugh, ne wail: Then while thro' drouth all dumb they stood I bit my arm and suck'd the blood And cry'd, A sail! a sail! With throat unslack'd, with black lips bak'd Agape they hear'd me call: Gramercy! they for joy did grin And all at once their breath drew in As they were drinking all. She doth not tack from side to side-- Hither to work us weal Withouten wind, withouten tide She steddies with upright keel. The western wave was all a flame, The day was well nigh done! Almost upon the western wave Rested the broad bright Sun; When that strange shape drove suddenly Betwixt us and the Sun. And strait the Sun was fleck'd with bars (Heaven's mother send us grace) As if thro' a dungeon grate he peer'd With broad and burning face. Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud) How fast she neres and neres! Are those _her_ Sails that glance in the Sun Like restless gossameres? Are these _her_ naked ribs, which fleck'd The sun that did behind them peer? And are these two all, all the crew, That woman and her fleshless Pheere? _His_ bones were black with many a crack, All black and bare, I ween; Jet-black and bare, save where with rust Of mouldy damps and charnel crust They're patch'd with purple and green. _Her_ lips are red, _her_ looks are free, _Her_ locks are yellow as gold: Her skin is as white as leprosy, And she is far liker Death than he; Her flesh makes the still air cold. The naked Hulk alongside came And the Twain were playing dice; "The Game is done! I've won, I've won!" Quoth she, and whistled thrice. A gust of wind sterte up behind And whistled thro' his bones; Thro' the holes of his eyes and the hole of his mouth Half-whistles and half-groans. With never a whisper in the Sea Off darts the Spectre-ship; While clombe above the Eastern bar The horned Moon, with one bright Star Almost atween the tips. One after one by the horned Moon (Listen, O Stranger! to me) Each turn'd his face with a ghastly pang And curs'd me with his ee. Four times fifty living men, With never a sigh or groan, With heavy thump, a lifeless lump They dropp'd down one by one. Their souls did from their bodies fly,-- They fled to bliss or woe; And every soul it pass'd me by, Like the whiz of my Cross-bow. IV. "I fear thee, ancyent Marinere! "I fear thy skinny hand; "And thou art long and lank and brown "As is the ribb'd Sea-sand. "I fear thee and thy glittering eye "And thy skinny hand so brown"-- Fear not, fear not, thou wedding guest! This body dropt not down. Alone, alone, all all alone Alone on the wide wide Sea; And Christ would take no pity on My soul in agony. The many men so beautiful, And they all dead did lie! And a million million slimy things Liv'd on--and so did I. I look'd upon the rotting Sea, And drew my eyes away; I look'd upon the eldritch deck, And there the dead men lay. I look'd to Heaven, and try'd to pray; But or ever a prayer had gusht, A wicked whisper came and made My heart as dry as dust. I clos'd my lids and kept them close, Till the balls like pulses beat; For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky Lay like a load on my weary eye, And the dead were at my feet. The cold sweat melted from their limbs, Ne rot, ne reek did they; The look with which they look'd on me, Had never pass'd away. An orphan's curse would drag to Hell A spirit from on high: But O! more horrible than that Is the curse in a dead man's eye! Seven days, seven nights I saw that curse And yet I could not die. The moving Moon went up the sky And no where did abide: Softly she was going up And a star or two beside-- Her beams bemock'd the sultry main Like morning frosts yspread; But where the ship's huge shadow lay, The charmed water burnt alway A still and awful red. Beyond the shadow of the ship I watch'd the water-snakes: They mov'd in tracks of shining white; And when they rear'd, the elfish light Fell off in hoary flakes. Within the shadow of the ship I watch'd their rich attire: Blue, glossy green, and velvet black They coil'd and swam; and every track Was a flash of golden fire. O happy living things! no tongue Their beauty might declare: A spring of love gusht from my heart, And I bless'd them unaware! Sure my kind saint took pity on me, And I bless'd them unaware. The self-same moment I could pray; And from my neck so free The Albatross fell off, and sank Like lead into the sea. V. O sleep, it is a gentle thing Belov'd from pole to pole! To Mary-queen the praise be yeven She sent the gentle sleep from heaven That slid into my soul. The silly buckets on the deck That had so long remain'd, I dreamt that they were fill'd with dew And when I awoke it rain'd. My lips were wet, my throat was cold, My garments all were dank; Sure I had drunken in my dreams And still my body drank. I mov'd and could not feel my limbs, I was so light, almost I thought that I had died in sleep, And was a blessed Ghost. The roaring wind! it roar'd far off, It did not come anear; But with its sound it shook the sails That were so thin and sere. The upper air bursts into life, And a hundred fire-flags sheen To and fro they are hurried about; And to and fro, and in and out The stars dance on between. The coming wind doth roar more loud; The sails do sigh, like sedge: The rain pours down from one black cloud And the Moon is at its edge. Hark! hark! the thick black cloud is cleft, And the Moon is at its side: Like waters shot from some high crag, The lightning falls with never a jag A river steep and wide. The strong wind reach'd the ship: it roar'd And dropp'd down, like a stone! Beneath the lightning and the moon The dead men gave a groan. They groan'd, they stirr'd, they all uprose, Ne spake, ne mov'd their eyes: It had been strange, even in a dream To have seen those dead men rise. The helmsman steerd, the ship mov'd on; Yet never a breeze up-blew; The Marineres all 'gan work the ropes, Where they were wont to do: They rais'd their limbs like lifeless tools-- We were a ghastly crew. The body of my brother's son Stood by me knee to knee: The body and I pull'd at one rope, But he said nought to me-- And I quak'd to think of my own voice How frightful it would be! The day-light dawn'd--they dropp'd their arms, And cluster'd round the mast: Sweet sounds rose slowly thro' their mouths And from their bodies pass'd. Around, around, flew each sweet sound, Then darted to the sun: Slowly the sounds came back again Now mix'd, now one by one. Sometimes a dropping from the sky I heard the Lavrock sing; Sometimes all little birds that are How they seem'd to fill the sea and air With their sweet jargoning, And now 'twas like all instruments, Now like a lonely flute; And now it is an angel's song That makes the heavens be mute. It ceas'd: yet still the sails made on A pleasant noise till noon, A noise like of a hidden brook In the leafy month of June, That to the sleeping woods all night Singeth a quiet tune. Listen, O listen, thou Wedding-guest! "Marinere! thou hast thy will: "For that, which comes out of thine eye, doth make "My body and soul to be still." Never sadder tale was told To a man of woman born: Sadder and wiser thou wedding-guest! Thou'lt rise to morrow morn. Never sadder tale was heard By a man of woman born: The Marineres all return'd to work As silent as beforne. The Marineres all 'gan pull the ropes, But look at me they n'old: Thought I, I am as thin as air-- They cannot me behold. Till noon we silently sail'd on Yet never a breeze did breathe: Slowly and smoothly went the ship Mov'd onward from beneath. Under the keel nine fathom deep From the land of mist and snow The spirit slid: and it was He That made the Ship to go. The sails at noon left off their tune And the Ship stood still also. The sun right up above the mast Had fix'd her to the ocean: But in a minute she 'gan stir With a short uneasy motion-- Backwards and forwards half her length With a short uneasy motion. Then, like a pawing horse let go, She made a sudden bound: It flung the blood into my head, And I fell into a swound. How long in that same fit I lay, I have not to declare; But ere my living life return'd, I heard and in my soul discern'd Two voices in the air, "Is it he?" quoth one, "Is this the man? "By him who died on cross, "With his cruel bow he lay'd full low "The harmless Albatross. "The spirit who 'bideth by himself "In the land of mist and snow, "He lov'd the bird that lov'd the man "Who shot him with his bow." The other was a softer voice, As soft as honey-dew: Quoth he the man hath penance done, And penance more will do. VI. FIRST VOICE. "But tell me, tell me! speak again, "Thy soft response renewing-- "What makes that ship drive on so fast? "What is the Ocean doing?" SECOND VOICE. "Still as a Slave before his Lord, "The Ocean hath no blast: "His great bright eye most silently "Up to the moon is cast-- "If he may know which way to go, "For she guides him smooth or grim. "See, brother, see! how graciously "She looketh down on him." FIRST VOICE. "But why drives on that ship so fast "Withouten wave or wind?" SECOND VOICE. "The air is cut away before, "And closes from behind. "Fly, brother, fly! more high, more high, "Or we shall be belated: "For slow and slow that ship will go, "When the Marinere's trance is abated." I woke, and we were sailing on As in a gentle weather: 'Twas night, calm night, the moon was high; The dead men stood together. All stood together on the deck, For a charnel-dungeon fitter: All fix'd on me their stony eyes That in the moon did glitter. The pang, the curse, with which they died, Had never pass'd away: I could not draw my een from theirs Ne turn them up to pray. And in its time the spell was snapt, And I could move my een: I look'd far-forth, but little saw Of what might else be seen. Like one, that on a lonely road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turn'd round, walks on And turns no more his head: Because he knows, a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread. But soon there breath'd a wind on me, Ne sound ne motion made: Its path was not upon the sea In ripple or in shade. It rais'd my hair, it fann'd my cheek, Like a meadow-gale of spring-- It mingled strangely with my fears, Yet it felt like a welcoming. Swiftly, swiftly flew the ship, Yet she sail'd softly too: Sweetly, sweetly blew the breeze-- On me alone it blew. O dream of joy! is this indeed The light-house top I see? Is this the Hill? Is this the Kirk? Is this mine own countrée? We drifted o'er the Harbour-bar, And I with sobs did pray-- "O let me be awake, my God! "Or let me sleep alway!" The harbour-bay was clear as glass, So smoothly it was strewn! And on the bay the moon light lay, And the shadow of the moon. The moonlight bay was white all o'er, Till rising from the same, Full many shapes, that shadows were, Like as of torches came. A little distance from the prow Those dark-red shadows were; But soon I saw that my own flesh Was red as in a glare. I turn'd my head in fear and dread, And by the holy rood, The bodies had advanc'd, and now Before the mast they stood. They lifted up their stiff right arms, They held them strait and tight; And each right-arm burnt like a torch, A torch that's borne upright. Their stony eye-balls glitter'd on In the red and smoky light. I pray'd and turn'd my head away Forth looking as before. There was no breeze upon the bay, No wave against the shore. The rock shone bright, the kirk no less That stands above the rock: The moonlight steep'd in silentness The steady weathercock. And the bay was white with silent light, Till rising from the same Full many shapes, that shadows were, In crimson colours came. A little distance from the prow Those crimson shadows were: I turn'd my eyes upon the deck-- O Christ! what saw I there? Each corse lay flat, lifeless and flat; And by the Holy rood A man all light, a seraph-man, On every corse there stood. This seraph-band, each wav'd his hand: It was a heavenly sight: They stood as signals to the land, Each one a lovely light: This seraph-band, each wav'd his hand, No voice did they impart-- No voice; but O! the silence sank, Like music on my heart. Eftsones I heard the dash of oars, I heard the pilot's cheer: My head was turn'd perforce away And I saw a boat appear. Then vanish'd all the lovely lights; The bodies rose anew: With silent pace, each to his place, Came back the ghastly crew. The wind, that shade nor motion made, On me alone it blew. The pilot, and the pilot's boy I heard them coming fast: Dear Lord in Heaven! it was a joy, The dead men could not blast. I saw a third--I heard his voice: It is the Hermit good! He singeth loud his godly hymns That he makes in the wood. He'll shrieve my soul, he'll wash away The Albatross's blood. VII. This Hermit good lives in that wood Which slopes down to the Sea. How loudly his sweet voice he rears! He loves to talk with Marineres That come from a far Contrée. He kneels at morn and noon and eve-- He hath a cushion plump: It is the moss, that wholly hides The rotted old Oak-stump. The Skiff-boat ne'rd: I heard them talk, "Why, this is strange, I trow! "Where are those lights so many and fair "That signal made but now? "Strange, by my faith!" the Hermit said-- "And they answer'd not our cheer. "The planks look warp'd, and see those sails "How thin they are and sere! "I never saw aught like to them "Unless perchance it were "The skeletons of leaves that lag "My forest brook along: "When the Ivy-tod is heavy with snow, "And the Owlet whoops to the wolf below "That eats the she-wolf's young. "Dear Lord! it has a fiendish look"-- (The Pilot made reply) "I am a-fear'd.--"Push on, push on!" Said the Hermit cheerily. The Boat came closer to the Ship, But I ne spake ne stirr'd! The Boat came close beneath the Ship, And strait a sound was heard! Under the water it rumbled on, Still louder and more dread: It reach'd the Ship, it split the bay; The Ship went down like lead. Stunn'd by that loud and dreadful sound, Which sky and ocean smote: Like one that hath been seven days drown'd My body lay afloat: But, swift as dreams, myself I found Within the Pilot's boat. Upon the whirl, where sank the Ship, The boat spun round and round: And all was still, save that the hill Was telling of the sound. I mov'd my lips: the Pilot shriek'd And fell down in a fit. The Holy Hermit rais'd his eyes And pray'd where he did sit. I took the oars: the Pilot's boy, Who now doth crazy go, Laugh'd loud and long, and all the while His eyes went to and fro, "Ha! ha!" quoth he--"full plain I see, "The devil knows how to row." And now all in mine own Countrée I stood on the firm land! The Hermit stepp'd forth from the boat, And scarcely he could stand. "O shrieve me, shrieve me, holy Man!" The Hermit cross'd his brow-- "Say quick," quoth he, "I bid thee say "What manner man art thou?" Forthwith this frame of mine was wrench'd With a woeful agony, Which forc'd me to begin my tale And then it left me free. Since then at an uncertain hour, Now oftimes and now fewer, That anguish comes and makes me tell My ghastly aventure. I pass, like night, from land to land; I have strange power of speech; The moment that his face I see I know the man that must hear me; To him my tale I teach. What loud uproar bursts from that door! The Wedding-guests are there; But in the Garden-bower the Bride And Bride-maids singing are: And hark the little Vesper-bell Which biddeth me to prayer. O Wedding-guest! this soul hath been Alone on a wide wide sea: So lonely 'twas, that God himself Scarce seemed there to be. O sweeter than the Marriage-feast, 'Tis sweeter far to me To walk together to the Kirk With a goodly company. To walk together to the Kirk And all together pray, While each to his great father bends, Old men, and babes, and loving friends, And Youths, and Maidens gay. Farewell, farewell! but this I tell To thee, thou wedding-guest! He prayeth well who loveth well Both man and bird and beast. He prayeth best who loveth best, All things both great and small: For the dear God, who loveth us, He made and loveth all. The Marinere, whose eye is bright, Whose beard with age is hoar, Is gone; and now the wedding-guest Turn'd from the bridegroom's door. He went, like one that hath been stunn'd And is of sense forlorn: A sadder and a wiser man He rose the morrow morn. THE FOSTER-MOTHER'S TALE, A DRAMATIC FRAGMENT. FOSTER-MOTHER. I never saw the man whom you describe. MARIA. 'Tis strange! he spake of you familiarly As mine and Albert's common Foster-mother. FOSTER-MOTHER. Now blessings on the man, whoe'er he be, That joined your names with mine! O my sweet lady, As often as I think of those dear times When you two little ones would stand at eve On each side of my chair, and make me learn All you had learnt in the day; and how to talk In gentle phrase, then bid me sing to you-- 'Tis more like heaven to come than what _has_ been. MARIA. O my dear Mother! this strange man has left me Troubled with wilder fancies, than the moon Breeds in the love-sick maid who gazes at it, Till lost in inward vision, with wet eye She gazes idly!--But that entrance, Mother! FOSTER-MOTHER. Can no one hear? It is a perilous tale! MARIA. No one. FOSTER-MOTHER My husband's father told it me, Poor old Leoni!--Angels rest his soul! He was a woodman, and could fell and saw With lusty arm. You know that huge round beam Which props the hanging wall of the old chapel? Beneath that tree, while yet it was a tree He found a baby wrapt in mosses, lined With thistle-beards, and such small locks of wool As hang on brambles. Well, he brought him home, And reared him at the then Lord Velez' cost. And so the babe grew up a pretty boy, A pretty boy, but most unteachable-- And never learnt a prayer, nor told a bead, But knew the names of birds, and mocked their notes, And whistled, as he were a bird himself: And all the autumn 'twas his only play To get the seeds of wild flowers, and to plant them With earth and water, on the stumps of trees. A Friar, who gathered simples in the wood, A grey-haired man--he loved this little boy, The boy loved him--and, when the Friar taught him, He soon could write with the pen: and from that time, Lived chiefly at the Convent or the Castle. So he became a very learned youth. But Oh! poor wretch!--he read, and read, and read, 'Till his brain turned--and ere his twentieth year, He had unlawful thoughts of many things: And though he prayed, he never loved to pray With holy men, nor in a holy place-- But yet his speech, it was so soft and sweet, The late Lord Velez ne'er was wearied with him. And once, as by the north side of the Chapel They stood together, chained in deep discourse, The earth heaved under them with such a groan, That the wall tottered, and had well-nigh fallen Right on their heads. My Lord was sorely frightened; A fever seized him, and he made confession Of all the heretical and lawless talk Which brought this judgment: so the youth was seized And cast into that hole. My husband's father Sobbed like a child--it almost broke his heart: And once as he was working in the cellar, He heard a voice distinctly; 'twas the youth's, Who sung a doleful song about green fields, How sweet it were on lake or wild savannah, To hunt for food, and be a naked man, And wander up and down at liberty. He always doted on the youth, and now His love grew desperate; and defying death, He made that cunning entrance I described: And the young man escaped. MARIA. 'Tis a sweet tale: Such as would lull a listening child to sleep, His rosy face besoiled with unwiped tears.-- And what became of him? FOSTER-MOTHER. He went on ship-board With those bold voyagers, who made discovery Of golden lands. Leoni's younger brother Went likewise, and when he returned to Spain, He told Leoni, that the poor mad youth, Soon after they arrived in that new world, In spite of his dissuasion, seized a boat, And all alone, set sail by silent moonlight Up a great river, great as any sea, And ne'er was heard of more: but 'tis supposed, He lived and died among the savage men. LINES LEFT UPON A SEAT IN A YEW-TREE WHICH STANDS NEAR THE LAKE OF ESTHWAITE, ON A DESOLATE PART OF THE SHORE, YET COMMANDING A BEAUTIFUL PROSPECT. --Nay, Traveller! rest. This lonely yew-tree stands Far from all human dwelling: what if here No sparkling rivulet spread the verdant herb; What if these barren boughs the bee not loves; Yet, if the wind breathe soft, the curling waves, That break against the shore, shall lull thy mind By one soft impulse saved from vacancy. --Who he was That piled these stones, and with the mossy sod First covered o'er, and taught this aged tree, Now wild, to bend its arms in circling shade, I well remember.--He was one who own'd No common soul. In youth, by genius nurs'd, And big with lofty views, he to the world Went forth, pure in his heart, against the taint Of dissolute tongues, 'gainst jealousy, and hate, And scorn, against all enemies prepared, All but neglect: and so, his spirit damped At once, with rash disdain he turned away, And with the food of pride sustained his soul In solitude.--Stranger! these gloomy boughs Had charms for him; and here he loved to sit, His only visitants a straggling sheep, The stone-chat, or the glancing sand-piper; And on these barren rocks, with juniper, And heath, and thistle, thinly sprinkled o'er, Fixing his downward eye, he many an hour A morbid pleasure nourished, tracing here An emblem of his own unfruitful life: And lifting up his head, he then would gaze On the more distant scene; how lovely 'tis Thou seest, and he would gaze till it became Far lovelier, and his heart could not sustain The beauty still more beauteous. Nor, that time, Would he forget those beings, to whose minds, Warm from the labours of benevolence, The world, and man himself, appeared a scene Of kindred loveliness: then he would sigh With mournful joy, to think that others felt What he must never feel: and so, lost man! On visionary views would fancy feed, Till his eye streamed with tears. In this deep vale He died, this seat his only monument. If thou be one whose heart the holy forms Of young imagination have kept pure, Stranger! henceforth be warned; and know, that pride, Howe'er disguised in its own majesty, Is littleness; that he, who feels contempt For any living thing, hath faculties Which he has never used; that thought with him Is in its infancy. The man, whose eye Is ever on himself, doth look on one, The least of nature's works, one who might move The wise man to that scorn which wisdom holds Unlawful, ever. O, be wiser thou! Instructed that true knowledge leads to love, True dignity abides with him alone Who, in the silent hour of inward thought, Can still suspect, and still revere himself, In lowliness of heart. THE NIGHTINGALE; A CONVERSATIONAL POEM, WRITTEN IN APRIL, 1798. No cloud, no relique of the sunken day Distinguishes the West, no long thin slip Of sullen Light, no obscure trembling hues. Come, we will rest on this old mossy Bridge! You see the glimmer of the stream beneath, But hear no murmuring: it flows silently O'er its soft bed of verdure. All is still, A balmy night! and tho' the stars be dim, Yet let us think upon the vernal showers That gladden the green earth, and we shall find A pleasure in the dimness of the stars. And hark! the Nightingale begins its song, "Most musical, most melancholy"[1] Bird! A melancholy Bird? O idle thought! In nature there is nothing melancholy. --But some night-wandering Man, whose heart was pierc'd With the remembrance of a grievous wrong, Or slow distemper or neglected love, (And so, poor Wretch! fill'd all things with himself And made all gentle sounds tell back the tale Of his own sorrows) he and such as he First nam'd these notes a melancholy strain; And many a poet echoes the conceit, Poet, who hath been building up the rhyme When he had better far have stretch'd his limbs Beside a brook in mossy forest-dell By sun or moonlight, to the influxes Of shapes and sounds and shifting elements Surrendering his whole spirit, of his song And of his fame forgetful! so his fame Should share in nature's immortality, A venerable thing! and so his song Should make all nature lovelier, and itself Be lov'd, like nature!--But 'twill not be so; And youths and maidens most poetical Who lose the deep'ning twilights of the spring In ball-rooms and hot theatres, they still Full of meek sympathy must heave their sighs O'er Philomela's pity-pleading strains. My Friend, and my Friend's Sister! we have learnt A different lore: we may not thus profane Nature's sweet voices always full of love And joyance! 'Tis the merry Nightingale That crowds, and hurries, and precipitates With fast thick warble his delicious notes, As he were fearful, that an April night Would be too short for him to utter forth His love-chant, and disburthen his full soul Of all its music! And I know a grove Of large extent, hard by a castle huge Which the great lord inhabits not: and so This grove is wild with tangling underwood, And the trim walks are broken up, and grass, Thin grass and king-cups grow within the paths. But never elsewhere in one place I knew So many Nightingales: and far and near In wood and thicket over the wide grove They answer and provoke each other's songs-- With skirmish and capricious passagings, And murmurs musical and swift jug jug And one low piping sound more sweet than all-- Stirring the air with such an harmony, That should you close your eyes, you might almost Forget it was not day! On moonlight bushes, Whose dewy leafits are but half disclos'd, You may perchance behold them on the twigs, Their bright, bright eyes, their eyes both bright and full, Glistning, while many a glow-worm in the shade Lights up her love-torch. A most gentle maid Who dwelleth in her hospitable home Hard by the Castle, and at latest eve, (Even like a Lady vow'd and dedicate To something more than nature in the grove) Glides thro' the pathways; she knows all their notes, That gentle Maid! and oft, a moment's space, What time the moon was lost behind a cloud, Hath heard a pause of silence: till the Moon Emerging, hath awaken'd earth and sky With one sensation, and those wakeful Birds Have all burst forth in choral minstrelsy, As if one quick and sudden Gale had swept An hundred airy harps! And she hath watch'd Many a Nightingale perch giddily On blosmy twig still swinging from the breeze, And to that motion tune his wanton song, Like tipsy Joy that reels with tossing head. Farewell, O Warbler! till to-morrow eve, And you, my friends! farewell, a short farewell! We have been loitering long and pleasantly, And now for our dear homes.--That strain again! Full fain it would delay me!--My dear Babe, Who, capable of no articulate sound, Mars all things with his imitative lisp, How he would place his hand beside his ear, His little hand, the small forefinger up, And bid us listen! And I deem it wise To make him Nature's playmate. He knows well The evening star: and once when he awoke In most distressful mood (some inward pain Had made up that strange thing, an infant's dream) I hurried with him to our orchard plot, And he beholds the moon, and hush'd at once Suspends his sobs, and laughs most silently, While his fair eyes that swam with undropt tears Did glitter in the yellow moon-beam! Well-- It is a father's tale. But if that Heaven Should give me life, his childhood shall grow up Familiar with these songs, that with the night He may associate Joy! Once more farewell, Sweet Nightingale! once more, my friends! farewell. [1] "_Most musical, most melancholy_." This passage in Milton possesses an excellence far superior to that of mere description: it is spoken in the character of the melancholy Man, and has therefore a _dramatic_ propriety. The Author makes this remark, to rescue himself from the charge of having alluded with levity to a line in Milton: a charge than which none could be more painful to him, except perhaps that of having ridiculed his Bible. THE FEMALE VAGRANT. By Derwent's side my Father's cottage stood, (The Woman thus her artless story told) One field, a flock, and what the neighbouring flood Supplied, to him were more than mines of gold. Light was my sleep; my days in transport roll'd: With thoughtless joy I stretch'd along the shore My father's nets, or watched, when from the fold High o'er the cliffs I led my fleecy store, A dizzy depth below! his boat and twinkling oar. My father was a good and pious man, An honest man by honest parents bred, And I believe that, soon as I began To lisp, he made me kneel beside my bed, And in his hearing there my prayers I said: And afterwards, by my good father taught, I read, and loved the books in which I read; For books in every neighbouring house I sought, And nothing to my mind a sweeter pleasure brought. Can I forget what charms did once adorn My garden, stored with pease, and mint, and thyme, And rose and lilly for the sabbath morn? The sabbath bells, and their delightful chime; The gambols and wild freaks at shearing time; My hen's rich nest through long grass scarce espied; The cowslip-gathering at May's dewy prime; The swans, that, when I sought the water-side, From far to meet me came, spreading their snowy pride. The staff I yet remember which upbore The bending body of my active sire; His seat beneath the honeyed sycamore When the bees hummed, and chair by winter fire; When market-morning came, the neat attire With which, though bent on haste, myself I deck'd; My watchful dog, whose starts of furious ire, When stranger passed, so often I have check'd; The red-breast known for years, which at my casement peck'd. The suns of twenty summers danced along,-- Ah! little marked, how fast they rolled away: Then rose a mansion proud our woods among, And cottage after cottage owned its sway, No joy to see a neighbouring house, or stray Through pastures not his own, the master took; My Father dared his greedy wish gainsay; He loved his old hereditary nook, And ill could I the thought of such sad parting brook. But, when he had refused the proffered gold, To cruel injuries he became a prey, Sore traversed in whate'er he bought and sold: His troubles grew upon him day by day, Till all his substance fell into decay. His little range of water was denied;[2] All but the bed where his old body lay, All, all was seized, and weeping, side by side, We sought a home where we uninjured might abide. Can I forget that miserable hour, When from the last hill-top, my sire surveyed, Peering above the trees, the steeple tower, That on his marriage-day sweet music made? Till then he hoped his bones might there be laid, Close by my mother in their native bowers: Bidding me trust in God, he stood and prayed,-- I could not pray:--through tears that fell in showers, Glimmer'd our dear-loved home, alas! no longer ours! There was a youth whom I had loved so long, That when I loved him not I cannot say. 'Mid the green mountains many and many a song We two had sung, like little birds in May. When we began to tire of childish play We seemed still more and more to prize each other: We talked of marriage and our marriage day; And I in truth did love him like a brother, For never could I hope to meet with such another. His father said, that to a distant town He must repair, to ply the artist's trade. What tears of bitter grief till then unknown! What tender vows our last sad kiss delayed! To him we turned:--we had no other aid. Like one revived, upon his neck I wept, And her whom he had loved in joy, he said He well could love in grief: his faith he kept; And in a quiet home once more my father slept. Four years each day with daily bread was blest, By constant toil and constant prayer supplied. Three lovely infants lay upon my breast; And often, viewing their sweet smiles, I sighed, And knew not why. My happy father died When sad distress reduced the children's meal: Thrice happy! that from him the grave did hide The empty loom, cold hearth, and silent wheel, And tears that flowed for ills which patience could not heal. 'Twas a hard change, an evil time was come; We had no hope, and no relief could gain. But soon, with proud parade, the noisy drum Beat round, to sweep the streets of want and pain. My husband's arms now only served to strain Me and his children hungering in his view: In such dismay my prayers and tears were vain: To join those miserable men he flew; And now to the sea-coast, with numbers more, we drew. There foul neglect for months and months we bore, Nor yet the crowded fleet its anchor stirred. Green fields before us and our native shore, By fever, from polluted air incurred, Ravage was made, for which no knell was heard. Fondly we wished, and wished away, nor knew, 'Mid that long sickness, and those hopes deferr'd, That happier days we never more must view: The parting signal streamed, at last the land withdrew, But from delay the summer calms were past. On as we drove, the equinoctial deep Ran mountains--high before the howling blaft. We gazed with terror on the gloomy sleep Of them that perished in the whirlwind's sweep, Untaught that soon such anguish must ensue, Our hopes such harvest of affliction reap, That we the mercy of the waves should rue. We reached the western world, a poor, devoted crew. Oh! dreadful price of being to resign All that is dear _in_ being! better far In Want's most lonely cave till death to pine, Unseen, unheard, unwatched by any star; Or in the streets and walks where proud men are, Better our dying bodies to obtrude, Than dog-like, wading at the heels of war, Protract a curst existence, with the brood That lap (their very nourishment!) their brother's blood. The pains and plagues that on our heads came down, Disease and famine, agony and fear, In wood or wilderness, in camp or town, It would thy brain unsettle even to hear. All perished--all, in one remorseless year, Husband and children! one by one, by sword And ravenous plague, all perished: every tear Dried up, despairing, desolate, on board A British ship I waked, as from a trance restored. Peaceful as some immeasurable plain By the first beams of dawning light impress'd, In the calm sunshine slept the glittering main. The very ocean has its hour of rest, That comes not to the human mourner's breast. Remote from man, and storms of mortal care, A heavenly silence did the waves invest; I looked and looked along the silent air, Until it seemed to bring a joy to my despair. Ah! how unlike those late terrific sleeps! And groans, that rage of racking famine spoke, Where looks inhuman dwelt on festering heaps! The breathing pestilence that rose like smoke! The shriek that from the distant battle broke! The mine's dire earthquake, and the pallid host Driven by the bomb's incessant thunder-stroke To loathsome vaults, where heart-sick anguish toss'd, Hope died, and fear itself in agony was lost! Yet does that burst of woe congeal my frame, When the dark streets appeared to heave and gape, While like a sea the storming army came, And Fire from Hell reared his gigantic shape, And Murder, by the ghastly gleam, and Rape Seized their joint prey, the mother and the child! But from these crazing thoughts my brain, escape! --For weeks the balmy air breathed soft and mild, And on the gliding vessel Heaven and Ocean smiled. Some mighty gulph of separation past, I seemed transported to another world:-- A thought resigned with pain, when from the mast The impatient mariner the sail unfurl'd, And whistling, called the wind that hardly curled The silent sea. From the sweet thoughts of home, And from all hope I was forever hurled. For me--farthest from earthly port to roam Was best, could I but shun the spot where man might come. And oft, robb'd of my perfect mind, I thought At last my feet a resting-place had found: Here will I weep in peace, (so fancy wrought,) Roaming the illimitable waters round; Here watch, of every human friend disowned, All day, my ready tomb the ocean-flood-- To break my dream the vessel reached its bound: And homeless near a thousand homes I stood, And near a thousand tables pined, and wanted food. By grief enfeebled was I turned adrift, Helpless as sailor cast on desart rock; Nor morsel to my mouth that day did lift, Nor dared my hand at any door to knock. I lay, where with his drowsy mates, the cock From the cross timber of an out-house hung; How dismal tolled, that night, the city clock! At morn my sick heart hunger scarcely stung, Nor to the beggar's language could I frame my tongue. So passed another day, and so the third: Then did I try, in vain, the crowd's resort, In deep despair by frightful wishes stirr'd, Near the sea-side I reached a ruined fort: There, pains which nature could no more support, With blindness linked, did on my vitals fall; Dizzy my brain, with interruption short Of hideous sense; I sunk, nor step could crawl, And thence was borne away to neighbouring hospital. Recovery came with food: but still, my brain Was weak, nor of the past had memory. I heard my neighbours, in their beds, complain Of many things which never troubled me; Of feet still bustling round with busy glee, Of looks where common kindness had no part, Of service done with careless cruelty, Fretting the fever round the languid heart, And groans, which, as they said, would make a dead man start. These things just served to stir the torpid sense, Nor pain nor pity in my bosom raised. Memory, though slow, returned with strength; and thence Dismissed, again on open day I gazed, At houses, men, and common light, amazed. The lanes I sought, and as the sun retired, Came, where beneath the trees a faggot blazed; The wild brood saw me weep, my fate enquired, And gave me food, and rest, more welcome, more desired. My heart is touched to think that men like these, The rude earth's tenants, were my first relief: How kindly did they paint their vagrant ease! And their long holiday that feared not grief, For all belonged to all, and each was chief. No plough their sinews strained; on grating road No wain they drove, and yet, the yellow sheaf In every vale for their delight was stowed: For them, in nature's meads, the milky udder flowed. Semblance, with straw and pauniered ass, they made Of potters wandering on from door to door: But life of happier sort to me pourtrayed, And other joys my fancy to allure; The bag-pipe dinning on the midnight moor In barn uplighted, and companions boon Well met from far with revelry secure, In depth of forest glade, when jocund June Rolled fast along the sky his warm and genial moon. But ill it suited me, in journey dark O'er moor and mountain, midnight theft to hatch; To charm the surly house-dog's faithful bark. Or hang on tiptoe at the lifted latch; The gloomy lantern, and the dim blue match, The black disguise, the warning whistle shrill, And ear still busy on its nightly watch, Were not for me, brought up in nothing ill; Besides, on griefs so fresh my thoughts were brooding still. What could I do, unaided and unblest? Poor Father! gone was every friend of thine: And kindred of dead husband are at best Small help, and, after marriage such as mine, With little kindness would to me incline. Ill was I then for toil or service fit: With tears whose course no effort could confine, By high-way side forgetful would I sit Whole hours, my idle arms in moping sorrow knit. I lived upon the mercy of the fields, And oft of cruelty the sky accused; On hazard, or what general bounty yields, Now coldly given, now utterly refused, The fields I for my bed have often used: But, what afflicts my peace with keenest ruth Is, that I have my inner self abused, Foregone the home delight of constant truth, And clear and open soul, so prized in fearless youth. Three years a wanderer, often have I view'd, In tears, the sun towards that country tend Where my poor heart lost all its fortitude: And now across this moor my steps I bend-- Oh! tell me whither--for no earthly friend Have I.--She ceased, and weeping turned away, As if because her tale was at an end She wept;--because she had no more to say Of that perpetual weight which on her spirit lay. [2] Several of the Lakes in the north of England are let out to different Fishermen, in parcels marked out by imaginary lines drawn from rock to rock. GOODY BLAKE, AND HARRY GILL, A TRUE STORY. Oh! what's the matter? what's the matter? What is't that ails young Harry Gill? That evermore his teeth they chatter, Chatter, chatter, chatter still. Of waistcoats Harry has no lack, Good duffle grey, and flannel fine; He has a blanket on his back, And coats enough to smother nine. In March, December, and in July, "Tis all the same with Harry Gill; The neighbours tell, and tell you truly, His teeth they chatter, chatter still. At night, at morning, and at noon, 'Tis all the same with Harry Gill; Beneath the sun, beneath the moon, His teeth they chatter, chatter still. Young Harry was a lusty drover, And who so stout of limb as he? His cheeks were red as ruddy clover, His voice was like the voice of three. Auld Goody Blake was old and poor, Ill fedd she was, and thinly clad; And any man who pass'd her door, Might see how poor a hut she had. All day she spun in her poor dwelling, And then her three hours' work at night! Alas! 'twas hardly worth the telling, It would not pay for candle-light. --This woman dwelt in Dorsetshire, Her hut was on a cold hill-side, And in that country coals are dear, For they come far by wind and tide. By the same fire to boil their pottage, Two poor old dames, as I have known, Will often live in one small cottage, But she, poor woman, dwelt alone. 'Twas well enough when summer came, The long, warm, lightsome summer-day, Then at her door the _canty_ dame Would sit, as any linnet gay. But when the ice our streams did fetter, Oh! then how her old bones would shake! You would have said, if you had met her, 'Twas a hard time for Goody Blake. Her evenings then were dull and dead; Sad case it was, as you may think, For very cold to go to bed, And then for cold not sleep a wink. Oh joy for her! when e'er in winter The winds at night had made a rout, And scatter'd many a lusty splinter, And many a rotten bough about. Yet never had she, well or sick, As every man who knew her says, A pile before-hand, wood or stick, Enough to warm her for three days. Now, when the frost was past enduring, And made her poor old bones to ache, Could any thing be more alluring, Than an old hedge to Goody Blake? And now and then, it must be said, When her old bones were cold and chill, She left her fire, or left her bed, To seek the hedge of Harry Gill. Now Harry he had long suspected This trespass of old Goody Blake, And vow'd that she should be detected, And he on her would vengeance take. And oft from his warm fire he'd go, And to the fields his road would take, And there, at night, in frost and snow, He watch'd to seize old Goody Blake. And once, behind a rick of barley, Thus looking out did Harry stand; The moon was full and shining clearly, And crisp with frost the stubble-land. --He hears a noise--he's all awake-- Again?--on tip-toe down the hill He softly creeps--'Tis Goody Blake, She's at the hedge of Harry Gill. Right glad was he when he beheld her: Stick after stick did Goody pull, He stood behind a bush of elder, Till she had filled her apron full. When with her load she turned about, The bye-road back again to take, He started forward with a shout, And sprang upon poor Goody Blake. And fiercely by the arm he took her, And by the arm he held her fast, And fiercely by the arm he shook her, And cried, "I've caught you then at last!" Then Goody, who had nothing said, Her bundle from her lap let fall; And kneeling on the sticks, she pray'd To God that is the judge of all. She pray'd, her wither'd hand uprearing, While Harry held her by the arm-- "God! who art never out of hearing, "O may he never more be warm!" The cold, cold moon above her head, Thus on her knees did Goody pray, Young Harry heard what she had said, And icy-cold he turned away. He went complaining all the morrow That he was cold and very chill: His face was gloom, his heart was sorrow, Alas! that day for Harry Gill! That day he wore a riding-coat, But not a whit the warmer he: Another was on Thursday brought, And ere the Sabbath he had three. 'Twas all in vain, a useless matter, And blankets were about him pinn'd; Yet still his jaws and teeth they clatter, Like a loose casement in the wind. And Harry's flesh it fell away; And all who see him say 'tis plain, That, live as long as live he may, He never will be warm again. No word to any man he utters, A-bed or up, to young or old; But ever to himself he mutters, "Poor Harry Gill is very cold." A-bed or up, by night or day; His teeth they chatter, chatter still. Now think, ye farmers all, I pray, Of Goody Blake and Harry Gill. LINES WRITTEN AT A SMALL DISTANCE FROM MY HOUSE, AND SENT BY MY LITTLE BOY TO THE PERSON TO WHOM THEY ARE ADDRESSED. It is the first mild day of March: Each minute sweeter than before, The red-breast sings from the tall larch That stands beside our door. There is a blessing in the air, Which seems a sense of joy to yield To the bare trees, and mountains bare, And grass in the green field. My Sister! ('tis a wish of mine) Now that our morning meal is done, Make haste, your morning task resign; Come forth and feel the sun. Edward will come with you, and pray, Put on with speed your woodland dress, And bring no book, for this one day We'll give to idleness. No joyless forms shall regulate Our living Calendar: We from to-day, my friend, will date The opening of the year. Love, now an universal birth. From heart to heart is stealing, From earth to man, from man to earth, --It is the hour of feeling. One moment now may give us more Than fifty years of reason; Our minds shall drink at every pore The spirit of the season. Some silent laws our hearts may make, Which they shall long obey; We for the year to come may take Our temper from to-day. And from the blessed power that rolls About, below, above; We'll frame the measure of our souls, They shall be tuned to love. Then come, my sister! come, I pray, With speed put on your woodland dress, And bring no book; for this one day We'll give to idleness. SIMON LEE, THE OLD HUNTSMAN, WITH AN INCIDENT IN WHICH HE WAS CONCERNED. In the sweet shire of Cardigan, Not far from pleasant Ivor-hall, An old man dwells, a little man, I've heard he once was tall. Of years he has upon his back, No doubt, a burthen weighty; He says he is three score and ten, But others say he's eighty. A long blue livery-coat has he, That's fair behind, and fair before; Yet, meet him where you will, you see At once that he is poor. Full five and twenty years he lived A running huntsman merry; And, though he has but one eye left, His cheek is like a cherry. No man like him the horn could sound. And no man was so full of glee; To say the least, four counties round Had heard of Simon Lee; His master's dead, and no one now Dwells in the hall of Ivor; Men, dogs, and horses, all are dead; He is the sole survivor. His hunting feats have him bereft Of his right eye, as you may see: And then, what limbs those feats have left To poor old Simon Lee! He has no son, he has no child, His wife, an aged woman, Lives with him, near the waterfall, Upon the village common. And he is lean and he is sick, His little body's half awry His ancles they are swoln and thick His legs are thin and dry. When he was young he little knew Of husbandry or tillage; And now he's forced to work, though weak, --The weakest in the village. He all the country could outrun, Could leave both man and horse behind; And often, ere the race was done, He reeled and was stone-blind. And still there's something in the world At which his heart rejoices; For when the chiming hounds are out, He dearly loves their voices! Old Ruth works out of doors with him, And does what Simon cannot do; For she, not over stout of limb, Is stouter of the two. And though you with your utmost skill From labour could not wean them, Alas! 'tis very little, all Which they can do between them. Beside their moss-grown hut of clay, Not twenty paces from the door, A scrap of land they have, but they Are poorest of the poor. This scrap of land he from the heath Enclosed when he was stronger; But what avails the land to them, Which they can till no longer? Few months of life has he in store, As he to you will tell, For still, the more he works, the more His poor old ancles swell. My gentle reader, I perceive How patiently you've waited, And I'm afraid that you expect Some tale will be related. O reader! had you in your mind Such stores as silent thought can bring, O gentle reader! you would find A tale in every thing. What more I have to say is short, I hope you'll kindly take it; It is no tale; but should you think, Perhaps a tale you'll make it. One summer-day I chanced to see This old man doing all he could About the root of an old tree, A stump of rotten wood. The mattock totter'd in his hand; So vain was his endeavour That at the root of the old tree He might have worked for ever. "You're overtasked, good Simon Lee, Give me your tool" to him I said; And at the word right gladly he Received my proffer'd aid. I struck, and with a single blow The tangled root I sever'd, At which the poor old man so long And vainly had endeavour'd. The tears into his eyes were brought, And thanks and praises seemed to run So fast out of his heart, I thought They never would have done. --I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds With coldness still returning. Alas! the gratitude of men Has oftner left me mourning. ANECDOTE FOR FATHERS SHEWING HOW THE ART OF LYING MAY BE TAUGHT. I have a boy of five years old, His face is fair and fresh to see; His limbs are cast in beauty's mould, And dearly he loves me. One morn we stroll'd on our dry walk, Our quiet house all full in view, And held such intermitted talk As we are wont to do. My thoughts on former pleasures ran; I thought of Kilve's delightful shore, My pleasant home, when spring began, A long, long year before. A day it was when I could bear To think, and think, and think again; With so much happiness to spare, I could not feel a pain. My boy was by my side, so slim And graceful in his rustic dress! And oftentimes I talked to him, In very idleness. The young lambs ran a pretty race; The morning sun shone bright and warm; "Kilve," said I, "was a pleasant place, "And so is Liswyn farm. "My little boy, which like you more," I said and took him by the arm-- "Our home by Kilve's delightful shore, "Or here at Liswyn farm?" "And tell me, had you rather be," I said and held him by the arm, "At Kilve's smooth shore by the green sea, "Or here at Liswyn farm?" In careless mood he looked at me, While still I held him by the arm, And said, "At Kilve I'd rather be "Than here at Liswyn farm." "Now, little Edward, say why so; My little Edward, tell me why;" "I cannot tell, I do not know," "Why this is strange," said I. "For, here are woods and green-hills warm; "There surely must some reason be "Why you would change sweet Liswyn farm "For Kilve by the green sea." At this, my boy, so fair and slim, Hung down his head, nor made reply; And five times did I say to him, "Why? Edward, tell me why?" His head he raised--there was in sight, It caught his eye, he saw it plain-- Upon the house-top, glittering bright, A broad and gilded vane. Then did the boy his tongue unlock, And thus to me he made reply; "At Kilve there was no weather-cock, "And that's the reason why." Oh dearest, dearest boy! my heart For better lore would seldom yearn, Could I but teach the hundredth part Of what from thee I learn. WE ARE SEVEN. A simple child, dear brother Jim, That lightly draws its breath, And feels its life in every limb, What should it know of death? I met a little cottage girl, She was eight years old, she said; Her hair was thick with many a curl That cluster'd round her head. She had a rustic, woodland air, And she was wildly clad; Her eyes were fair, and very fair, --Her beauty made me glad. "Sisters and brothers, little maid, "How many may you be?" "How many? seven in all," she said, And wondering looked at me. "And where are they, I pray you tell?" She answered, "Seven are we, "And two of us at Conway dwell, "And two are gone to sea. "Two of us in the church-yard lie, "My sister and my brother, "And in the church-yard cottage, I "Dwell near them with my mother." "You say that two at Conway dwell, "And two are gone to sea, "Yet you are seven; I pray you tell "Sweet Maid, how this may be?" Then did the little Maid reply, "Seven boys and girls are we; "Two of us in the church-yard lie, "Beneath the church-yard tree." "You run about, my little maid, "Your limbs they are alive; "If two are in the church-yard laid, "Then ye are only five." "Their graves are green, they may be seen," The little Maid replied, "Twelve steps or more from my mother's door, "And they are side by side. "My stockings there I often knit, "My 'kerchief there I hem; "And there upon the ground I sit-- "I sit and sing to them. "And often after sunset, Sir, "When it is light and fair, "I take my little porringer, "And eat my supper there. "The first that died was little Jane; "In bed she moaning lay, "Till God released her of her pain, "And then she went away. "So in the church-yard she was laid, "And all the summer dry, "Together round her grave we played, "My brother John and I. "And when the ground was white with snow, "And I could run and slide, "My brother John was forced to go, "And he lies by her side." "How many are you then," said I, "If they two are in Heaven?" The little Maiden did reply, "O Master! we are seven." "But they are dead; those two are dead! "Their spirits are in heaven!" 'Twas throwing words away; for still The little Maid would have her will, And said, "Nay, we are seven!" LINES WRITTEN IN EARLY SPRING. I heard a thousand blended notes, While in a grove I sate reclined, In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts Bring sad thoughts to the mind. To her fair works did nature link The human soul that through me ran; And much it griev'd my heart to think What man has made of man. Through primrose-tufts, in that sweet bower, The periwinkle trail'd its wreathes; And 'tis my faith that every flower Enjoys the air it breathes. The birds around me hopp'd and play'd: Their thoughts I cannot measure, But the least motion which they made, It seem'd a thrill of pleasure. The budding twigs spread out their fan, To catch the breezy air; And I must think, do all I can, That there was pleasure there. If I these thoughts may not prevent, If such be of my creed the plan, Have I not reason to lament What man has made of man? THE THORN. I. There is a thorn; it looks so old, In truth you'd find it hard to say, How it could ever have been young, It looks so old and grey. Not higher than a two-years' child, It stands erect this aged thorn; No leaves it has, no thorny points; It is a mass of knotted joints, A wretched thing forlorn. It stands erect, and like a stone With lichens it is overgrown. II. Like rock or stone, it is o'ergrown With lichens to the very top, And hung with heavy tufts of moss, A melancholy crop: Up from the earth these mosses creep, And this poor thorn they clasp it round So close, you'd say that they were bent With plain and manifest intent, To drag it to the ground; And all had joined in one endeavour To bury this poor thorn for ever. III. High on a mountain's highest ridge, Where oft the stormy winter gale Cuts like a scythe, while through the clouds It sweeps from vale to vale; Not five yards from the mountain-path, This thorn you on your left espy; And to the left, three yards beyond, You see a little muddy pond Of water, never dry; I've measured it from side to side: 'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide. IV. And close beside this aged thorn, There is a fresh and lovely sight, A beauteous heap, a hill of moss, Just half a foot in height. All lovely colours there you see, All colours that were ever seen, And mossy network too is there, As if by hand of lady fair The work had woven been, And cups, the darlings of the eye, So deep is their vermilion dye. V. Ah me! what lovely tints are there! Of olive-green and scarlet bright, In spikes, in branches, and in stars, Green, red, and pearly white. This heap of earth o'ergrown with moss Which close beside the thorn you see, So fresh in all its beauteous dyes, Is like an infant's grave in size As like as like can be: But never, never any where, An infant's grave was half so fair. VI. Now would you see this aged thorn, This pond and beauteous hill of moss, You must take care and chuse your time The mountain when to cross. For oft there sits, between the heap That's like an infant's grave in size, And that same pond of which I spoke, A woman in a scarlet cloak, And to herself she cries, "Oh misery! oh misery! "Oh woe is me! oh misery!" VII. At all times of the day and night This wretched woman thither goes, And she is known to every star, And every wind that blows; And there beside the thorn she sits When the blue day-light's in the skies, And when the whirlwind's on the hill, Or frosty air is keen and still, And to herself she cries, "Oh misery! oh misery! "Oh woe is me! oh misery!" VIII. "Now wherefore thus, by day and night, "In rain, in tempest, and in snow, "Thus to the dreary mountain-top "Does this poor woman go? "And why sits she beside the thorn "When the blue day-light's in the sky, "Or when the whirlwind's on the hill, "Or frosty air is keen and still, "And wherefore does she cry?-- "Oh wherefore? wherefore? tell me why "Does she repeat that doleful cry?" IX. I cannot tell; I wish I could; For the true reason no one knows, But if you'd gladly view the spot, The spot to which she goes; The heap that's like an infant's grave, The pond--and thorn, so old and grey, Pass by her door--'tis seldom shut-- And if you see her in her hut, Then to the spot away!-- I never heard of such as dare Approach the spot when she is there. X. "But wherefore to the mountain-top "Can this unhappy woman go, "Whatever star is in the skies, "Whatever wind may blow?" 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. XI. 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. XII. And they had fix'd 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 woful day A cruel, cruel fire, they say, Into her bones was sent: It dried her body like a cinder, And almost turn'd her brain to tinder. XIII. 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! XIV. Sad case for such a brain to hold Communion with a stirring child! Sad case, as you may think, for one Who had a brain so wild! Last Christmas when we 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. XV. 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. XVI. And all that winter, when at night The wind blew from the mountain-peak, 'Twas worth your while, though in the dark, The church-yard path to seek: For many a time and oft were heard Cries coming from the mountain-head, Some plainly living voices were, And others, I've heard many swear, Were voices of the dead: I cannot think, whate'er they say, They had to do with Martha Ray. XVII. But that she goes to this old thorn, The thorn which I've described to you, And there sits in a scarlet cloak, I will be sworn is true. For one day with my telescope, To view the ocean wide and bright, When to this country first I came, Ere I had heard of Martha's name, I climbed the mountain's height: A storm came on, and I could see No object higher than my knee. XVIII. 'Twas mist and rain, and storm and rain, No screen, no fence could I discover, And then the wind! in faith, it was A wind full ten times over. I looked around, I thought I saw A jutting crag, and oft' I ran, Head-foremost, through the driving rain, The shelter of the crag to gain, And, as I am a man, Instead of jutting crag, I found A woman seated on the ground. XIX. I did not speak--I saw her face, Her face it was enough for me; I turned about and heard her cry, "O misery! O misery!" And there she sits, until the moon Through half the clear blue sky will go, And when the little breezes make The waters of the pond to shake, As all the country know, She shudders and you hear her cry, "Oh misery! oh misery! XX. "But what's the thorn? and what's the pond? "And what's the hill of moss to her? "And what's the creeping breeze that comes "The little pond to stir?" I cannot tell; but some will say She hanged her baby on the tree, Some say she drowned it in the pond, Which is a little step beyond, But all and each agree, The little babe was buried there, Beneath that hill of moss so fair. XXI. I've heard the scarlet moss is red With drops of that poor infant's blood; But kill a new-born infant thus! I do not think she could. Some say, if to the pond you go, And fix on it a steady view, The shadow of a babe you trace, A baby and a baby's face, And that it looks at you; Whene'er you look on it, 'tis plain The baby looks at you again. XXII. And some had sworn an oath that she Should be to public justice brought; And for the little infant's bones With spades they would have sought. But then the beauteous hill of moss Before their eyes began to stir; And for full fifty yards around, The grass it shook upon the ground; But all do still aver The little babe is buried there, Beneath that hill of moss so fair. XXIII. I cannot tell how this may be, But plain it is, the thorn is bound With heavy tufts of moss, that strive To drag it to the ground. And this I know, full many a time, When she was on the mountain high, By day, and in the silent night, When all the stars shone clear and bright, That I have heard her cry, "Oh misery! oh misery! "O woe is me! oh misery!" THE LAST OF THE FLOCK. In distant countries I have been, And yet I have not often seen A healthy man, a man full grown Weep in the public roads alone. But such a one, on English ground, And in the broad high-way, I met; Along the broad high-way he came, His cheeks with tears were wet. Sturdy he seemed, though he was sad; And in his arms a lamb he had. He saw me, and he turned aside, As if he wished himself to hide: Then with his coat he made essay To wipe those briny tears away. I follow'd him, and said, "My friend "What ails you? wherefore weep you so?" --"Shame on me, Sir! this lusty lamb, He makes my tears to flow. To-day I fetched him from the rock; He is the last of all my flock. When I was young, a single man. And after youthful follies ran, Though little given to care and thought, Yet, so it was, a ewe I bought; And other sheep from her I raised, As healthy sheep as you might see, And then I married, and was rich As I could wish to be; Of sheep I number'd a full score, And every year encreas'd my store. Year after year my stock it grew, And from this one, this single ewe, Full fifty comely sheep I raised, As sweet a flock as ever grazed! Upon the mountain did they feed; They throve, and we at home did thrive. --This lusty lamb of all my store Is all that is alive: And now I care not if we die, And perish all of poverty. Ten children, Sir! had I to feed, Hard labour in a time of need! My pride was tamed, and in our grief, I of the parish ask'd relief. They said I was a wealthy man; My sheep upon the mountain fed, And it was fit that thence I took Whereof to buy us bread:" "Do this; how can we give to you," They cried, "what to the poor is due?" I sold a sheep as they had said, And bought my little children bread, And they were healthy with their food; For me it never did me good. A woeful time it was for me, To see the end of all my gains, The pretty flock which I had reared With all my care and pains, To see it melt like snow away! For me it was a woeful day. Another still! and still another! A little lamb, and then its mother! It was a vein that never stopp'd, Like blood-drops from my heart they dropp'd. Till thirty were not left alive They dwindled, dwindled, one by one, And I may say that many a time I wished they all were gone: They dwindled one by one away; For me it was a woeful day. To wicked deeds I was inclined, And wicked fancies cross'd my mind, And every man I chanc'd to see, I thought he knew some ill of me No peace, no comfort could I find, No ease, within doors or without, And crazily, and wearily, I went my work about. Oft-times I thought to run away; For me it was a woeful day. Sir! 'twas a precious flock to me, As dear as my own children be; For daily with my growing store I loved my children more and more. Alas! it was an evil time; God cursed me in my sore distress, I prayed, yet every day I thought I loved my children less; And every week, and every day, My flock, it seemed to melt away. They dwindled, Sir, sad sight to see! From ten to five, from five to three, A lamb, a weather, and a ewe; And then at last, from three to two; And of my fifty, yesterday I had but only one, And here it lies upon my arm, Alas! and I have none; To-day I fetched it from the rock; It is the last of all my flock." THE DUNGEON. And this place our forefathers made for man! This is the process of our love and wisdom, To each poor brother who offends against us-- Most innocent, perhaps--and what if guilty? Is this the only cure? Merciful God? Each pore and natural outlet shrivell'd up By ignorance and parching poverty, His energies roll back upon his heart, And stagnate and corrupt; till changed to poison, They break out on him, like a loathsome plague-spot; Then we call in our pamper'd mountebanks-- And this is their best cure! uncomforted And friendless solitude, groaning and tears, And savage faces, at the clanking hour, Seen through the steams and vapour of his dungeon, By the lamp's dismal twilight! So he lies Circled with evil, till his very soul Unmoulds its essence, hopelessly deformed By sights of ever more deformity! With other ministrations thou, O nature! Healest thy wandering and distempered child: Thou pourest on him thy soft influences, Thy sunny hues, fair forms, and breathing sweets, Thy melodies of woods, and winds, and waters, Till he relent, and can no more endure To be a jarring and a dissonant thing, Amid this general dance and minstrelsy; But, bursting into tears, wins back his way, His angry spirit healed and harmonized By the benignant touch of love and beauty. THE MAD MOTHER. Her eyes are wild, her head is bare, The sun has burnt her coal-black hair, Her eye-brows have a rusty stain, And she came far from over the main. She has a baby on her arm, Or else she were alone; And underneath the hay-stack warm, And on the green-wood stone, She talked and sung the woods among; And it was in the English tongue. "Sweet babe! they say that I am mad, But nay, my heart is far too glad; And I am happy when I sing Full many a sad and doleful thing: Then, lovely baby, do not fear! I pray thee have no fear of me, But, safe as in a cradle, here My lovely baby! thou shalt be, To thee I know too much I owe; I cannot work thee any woe. A fire was once within my brain; And in my head a dull, dull pain; And fiendish faces one, two, three, Hung at my breasts, and pulled at me. But then there came a sight of joy; It came at once to do me good; I waked, and saw my little boy, My little boy of flesh and blood; Oh joy for me that sight to see! For he was here, and only he. Suck, little babe, oh suck again! It cools my blood; it cools my brain; Thy lips I feel them, baby! they Draw from my heart the pain away. Oh! press me with thy little hand; It loosens something at my chest; About that tight and deadly band I feel thy little fingers press'd. The breeze I see is in the tree; It comes to cool my babe and me. Oh! love me, love me, little boy! Thou art thy mother's only joy; And do not dread the waves below, When o'er the sea-rock's edge we go; The high crag cannot work me harm, Nor leaping torrents when they howl; The babe I carry on my arm, He saves for me my precious soul; Then happy lie, for blest am I; Without me my sweet babe would die. Then do not fear, my boy! for thee Bold as a lion I will be; And I will always be thy guide, Through hollow snows and rivers wide. I'll build an Indian bower; I know The leaves that make the softest bed: And if from me thou wilt not go, But still be true 'till I am dead, My pretty thing! then thou shalt sing, As merry as the birds in spring. Thy father cares not for my breast, 'Tis thine, sweet baby, there to rest: 'Tis all thine own! and if its hue Be changed, that was so fair to view, 'Tis fair enough for thee, my dove! My beauty, little child, is flown; But thou wilt live with me in love, And what if my poor cheek be brown? 'Tis well for me; thou canst not see How pale and wan it else would be. Dread not their taunts, my little life! I am thy father's wedded wife; And underneath the spreading tree We two will live in honesty. If his sweet boy he could forsake, With me he never would have stay'd: From him no harm my babe can take, But he, poor man! is wretched made, And every day we two will pray For him that's gone and far away. I'll teach my boy the sweetest things; I'll teach him how the owlet sings. My little babe! thy lips are still, And thou hast almost suck'd thy fill. --Where art thou gone my own dear child? What wicked looks are those I see? Alas! alas! that look so wild, It never, never came from me: If thou art mad, my pretty lad, Then I must be for ever sad. Oh! smile on me, my little lamb! For I thy own dear mother am. My love for thee has well been tried: I've sought thy father far and wide. I know the poisons of the shade, I know the earth-nuts fit for food; Then, pretty dear, be not afraid; We'll find thy father in the wood. Now laugh and be gay, to the woods away! And there, my babe; we'll live for aye. THE IDIOT BOY. Tis eight o'clock,--a clear March night, The moon is up--the sky is blue, The owlet in the moonlight air, He shouts from nobody knows where; He lengthens out his lonely shout, Halloo! halloo! a long halloo! --Why bustle thus about your door, What means this bustle, Betty Foy? Why are you in this mighty fret? And why on horseback have you set Him whom you love, your idiot boy? Beneath the moon that shines so bright, Till she is tired, let Betty Foy With girt and stirrup fiddle-faddle; But wherefore set upon a saddle Him whom she loves, her idiot boy? There's scarce a soul that's out of bed; Good Betty! put him down again; His lips with joy they burr at you, But, Betty! what has he to do With stirrup, saddle, or with rein? The world will say 'tis very idle, Bethink you of the time of night; There's not a mother, no not one, But when she hears what you have done, Oh! Betty she'll be in a fright. But Betty's bent on her intent, For her good neighbour, Susan Gale, Old Susan, she who dwells alone, Is sick, and makes a piteous moan, As if her very life would fail. There's not a house within a mile. No hand to help them in distress: Old Susan lies a bed in pain, And sorely puzzled are the twain, For what she ails they cannot guess. And Betty's husband's at the wood, Where by the week he doth abide, A woodman in the distant vale; There's none to help poor Susan Gale, What must be done? what will betide? And Betty from the lane has fetched Her pony, that is mild and good, Whether he be in joy or pain, Feeding at will along the lane, Or bringing faggots from the wood. And he is all in travelling trim, And by the moonlight, Betty Foy Has up upon the saddle set, The like was never heard of yet, Him whom she loves, her idiot boy. And he must post without delay Across the bridge that's in the dale, And by the church, and o'er the down, To bring a doctor from the town, Or she will die, old Susan Gale. There is no need of boot or spur, There is no need of whip or wand, For Johnny has his holly-bough, And with a hurly-burly now He shakes the green bough in his hand. And Betty o'er and o'er has told The boy who is her best delight, Both what to follow, what to shun, What do, and what to leave undone, How turn to left, and how to right. And Betty's most especial charge, Was, "Johnny! Johnny! mind that you "Come home again, nor stop at all, "Come home again, whate'er befal, "My Johnny do, I pray you do." To this did Johnny answer make, Both with his head, and with his hand, And proudly shook the bridle too, And then! his words were not a few, Which Betty well could understand. And now that Johnny is just going, Though Betty's in a mighty flurry, She gently pats the pony's side, On which her idiot boy must ride, And seems no longer in a hurry. But when the pony moved his legs, Oh! then for the poor idiot boy! For joy he cannot hold the bridle, For joy his head and heels are idle, He's idle all for very joy. And while the pony moves his legs, In Johnny's left-hand you may see, The green bough's motionless and dead; The moon that shines above his head Is not more still and mute than he. His heart it was so full of glee, That till full fifty yards were gone, He quite forgot his holly whip, And all his skill in horsemanship, Oh! happy, happy, happy John. And Betty's standing at the door, And Betty's face with joy o'erflows, Proud of herself, and proud of him, She sees him in his travelling trim; How quietly her Johnny goes. The silence of her idiot boy, What hopes it sends to Betty's heart! He's at the guide-post--he turns right, She watches till he's out of sight, And Betty will not then depart. Burr, burr--now Johnny's lips they burr, As loud as any mill, or near it, Meek as a lamb the pony moves, And Johnny makes the noise he loves, And Betty listens, glad to hear it. Away she hies to Susan Gale: And Johnny's in a merry tune, The owlets hoot, the owlets curr, And Johnny's lips they burr, burr, burr, And on he goes beneath the moon. His steed and he right well agree, For of this pony there's a rumour, That should he lose his eyes and ears, And should he live a thousand years, He never will be out of humour. But then he is a horse that thinks! And when he thinks his pace is slack; Now, though he knows poor Johnny well, Yet for his life he cannot tell What he has got upon his back. So through the moonlight lanes they go, And far into the moonlight dale, And by the church, and o'er the down, To bring a doctor from the town, To comfort poor old Susan Gale. And Betty, now at Susan's side, Is in the middle of her story, What comfort Johnny soon will bring, With many a most diverting thing, Of Johnny's wit and Johnny's glory. And Betty's still at Susan's side: By this time she's not quite so flurried; Demure with porringer and plate She sits, as if in Susan's fate Her life and soul were buried. But Betty, poor good woman! she, You plainly in her face may read it, Could lend out of that moment's store Five years of happiness or more, To any that might need it. But yet I guess that now and then With Betty all was not so well, And to the road she turns her ears, And thence full many a sound she hears, Which she to Susan will not tell. Poor Susan moans, poor Susan groans, "As sure as there's a moon in heaven," Cries Betty, "he'll be back again; "They'll both be here, 'tis almost ten, "They'll both be here before eleven." Poor Susan moans, poor Susan groans, The clock gives warning for eleven; 'Tis on the stroke--"If Johnny's near," Quoth Betty "he will soon be here, "As sure as there's a moon in heaven." The clock is on the stroke of twelve, And Johnny is not yet in sight, The moon's in heaven, as Betty sees, But Betty is not quite at ease; And Susan has a dreadful night. And Betty, half an hour ago, On Johnny vile reflections cast; "A little idle sauntering thing!" With other names, an endless string, But now that time is gone and past. And Betty's drooping at the heart, That happy time all past and gone, "How can it be he is so late? "The doctor he has made him wait, "Susan! they'll both be here anon." And Susan's growing worse and worse, And Betty's in a sad quandary; And then there's nobody to say If she must go or she must stay: --She's in a sad quandary. The clock is on the stroke of one; But neither Doctor nor his guide Appear along the moonlight road, There's neither horse nor man abroad, And Betty's still at Susan's side. And Susan she begins to fear Of sad mischances not a few, That Johnny may perhaps be drown'd, Or lost perhaps, and never found; Which they must both for ever rue. She prefaced half a hint of this With, "God forbid it should be true!" At the first word that Susan said Cried Betty, rising from the bed, "Susan, I'd gladly stay with you. "I must be gone, I must away, "Consider, Johnny's but half-wise; "Susan, we must take care of him, "If he is hurt in life or limb"-- "Oh God forbid!" poor Susan cries. "What can I do?" says Betty, going, "What can I do to ease your pain? "Good Susan tell me, and I'll stay; "I fear you're in a dreadful way, "But I shall soon be back again." "Good Betty go, good Betty go, "There's nothing that can ease my pain." Then off she hies, but with a prayer That God poor Susan's life would spare, Till she comes back again. So, through the moonlight lane she goes, And far into the moonlight dale; And how she ran, and how she walked, And all that to herself she talked, Would surely be a tedious tale. In high and low, above, below, In great and small, in round and square, In tree and tower was Johnny seen, In bush and brake, in black and green, 'Twas Johnny, Johnny, every where. She's past the bridge that's in the dale, And now the thought torments her sore, Johnny perhaps his horse forsook, To hunt the moon that's in the brook, And never will be heard of more. And now she's high upon the down, Alone amid a prospect wide; There's neither Johnny nor his horse, Among the fern or in the gorse; There's neither doctor nor his guide. "Oh saints! what is become of him? "Perhaps he's climbed into an oak, "Where he will stay till he is dead; "Or sadly he has been misled, "And joined the wandering gypsey-folk. "Or him that wicked pony's carried "To the dark cave, the goblins' hall, "Or in the castle he's pursuing, "Among the ghosts, his own undoing; "Or playing with the waterfall." At poor old Susan then she railed, While to the town she posts away; "If Susan had not been so ill, "Alas! I should have had him still, "My Johnny, till my dying day." Poor Betty! in this sad distemper, The doctor's self would hardly spare, Unworthy things she talked and wild, Even he, of cattle the most mild, The pony had his share. And now she's got into the town, And to the doctor's door she hies; Tis silence all on every side; The town so long, the town so wide, Is silent as the skies. And now she's at the doctor's door, She lifts the knocker, rap, rap, rap, The doctor at the casement shews, His glimmering eyes that peep and doze; And one hand rubs his old night-cap. "Oh Doctor! Doctor! where's my Johnny?" "I'm here, what is't you want with me?" "Oh Sir! you know I'm Betty Foy, "And I have lost my poor dear boy, "You know him--him you often see; "He's not so wise as some folks be," "The devil take his wisdom!" said The Doctor, looking somewhat grim, "What, woman! should I know of him?" And, grumbling, he went back to bed. "O woe is me! O woe is me! "Here will I die; here will I die; "I thought to find my Johnny here, "But he is neither far nor near, "Oh! what a wretched mother I!" She stops, she stands, she looks about, Which way to turn she cannot tell. Poor Betty! it would ease her pain If she had heart to knock again; --The clock strikes three--a dismal knell! Then up along the town she hies, No wonder if her senses fail, This piteous news so much it shock'd her, She quite forgot to send the Doctor, To comfort poor old Susan Gale. And now she's high upon the down, And she can see a mile of road, "Oh cruel! I'm almost three-score; "Such night as this was ne'er before, "There's not a single soul abroad." She listens, but she cannot hear The foot of horse, the voice of man; The streams with softest sound are flowing, The grass you almost hear it growing, You hear it now if e'er you can. The owlets through the long blue night Are shouting to each other still: Fond lovers, yet not quite hob nob, They lengthen out the tremulous sob, That echoes far from hill to hill. Poor Betty now has lost all hope, Her thoughts are bent on deadly sin; A green-grown pond she just has pass'd, And from the brink she hurries fast, Lest she should drown herself therein. And now she sits her down and weeps; Such tears she never shed before; "Oh dear, dear pony! my sweet joy! "Oh carry back my idiot boy! "And we will ne'er o'erload thee more." A thought is come into her head; "The pony he is mild and good, "And we have always used him well; "Perhaps he's gone along the dell, "And carried Johnny to the wood." Then up she springs as if on wings; She thinks no more of deadly sin; If Betty fifty ponds should see, The last of all her thoughts would be, To drown herself therein. Oh reader! now that I might tell What Johnny and his horse are doing! What they've been doing all this time, Oh could I put it into rhyme, A most delightful tale pursuing! Perhaps, and no unlikely thought! He with his pony now doth roam The cliffs and peaks so high that are, To lay his hands upon a star, And in his pocket bring it home. Perhaps he's turned himself about, His face unto his horse's tail, And still and mute, in wonder lost, All like a silent horseman-ghost, He travels on along the vale. And now, perhaps, he's hunting sheep, A fierce and dreadful hunter he! Yon valley, that's so trim and green, In five months' time, should he be seen, A desart wilderness will be. Perhaps, with head and heels on fire, And like the very soul of evil, He's galloping away, away, And so he'll gallop on for aye, The bane of all that dread the devil. I to the muses have been bound, These fourteen years, by strong indentures; Oh gentle muses! let me tell But half of what to him befel, For sure he met with strange adventures. Oh gentle muses! is this kind? Why will ye thus my suit repel? Why of your further aid bereave me? And can ye thus unfriended leave me? Ye muses! whom I love so well. Who's yon, that, near the waterfall, Which thunders down with headlong force, Beneath the moon, yet shining fair, As careless as if nothing were, Sits upright on a feeding horse? Unto his horse, that's feeding free, He seems, I think, the rein to give; Of moon or stars he takes no heed; Of such we in romances read, --'Tis Johnny! Johnny! as I live. And that's the very pony too. Where is she, where is Betty Foy? She hardly can sustain her fears; The roaring water-fall she hears, And cannot find her idiot boy. Your pony's worth his weight in gold, Then calm your terrors, Betty Foy! She's coming from among the trees, And now, all full in view, she sees Him whom she loves, her idiot boy. And Betty sees the pony too: Why stand you thus Good Betty Foy? It is no goblin, 'tis no ghost, 'Tis he whom you so long have lost, He whom you love, your idiot boy. She looks again--her arms are up-- She screams--she cannot move for joy; She darts as with a torrent's force, She almost has o'erturned the horse, And fast she holds her idiot boy. And Johnny burrs and laughs aloud, Whether in cunning or in joy, I cannot tell; but while he laughs, Betty a drunken pleasure quaffs, To hear again her idiot boy. And now she's at the pony's tail, And now she's at the pony's head, On that side now, and now on this, And almost stifled with her bliss, A few sad tears does Betty shed. She kisses o'er and o'er again, Him whom she loves, her idiot boy, She's happy here, she's happy there, She is uneasy every where; Her limbs are all alive with joy. She pats the pony, where or when She knows not, happy Betty Foy! The little pony glad may be, But he is milder far than she, You hardly can perceive his joy. "Oh! Johnny, never mind the Doctor; "You've done your best, and that is all." She took the reins, when this was said, And gently turned the pony's head From the loud water-fall. By this the stars were almost gone, The moon was setting on the hill, So pale you scarcely looked at her: The little birds began to stir, Though yet their tongues were still. The pony, Betty, and her boy, Wind slowly through the woody dale: And who is she, be-times abroad, That hobbles up the steep rough road? Who is it, but old Susan Gale? Long Susan lay deep lost in thought, And many dreadful fears beset her, Both for her messenger and nurse; And as her mind grew worse and worse, Her body it grew better. She turned, she toss'd herself in bed, On all sides doubts and terrors met her; Point after point did she discuss; And while her mind was fighting thus, Her body still grew better. "Alas! what is become of them? "These fears can never be endured, "I'll to the wood."--The word scarce said, Did Susan rise up from her bed, As if by magic cured. Away she posts up hill and down, And to the wood at length is come, She spies her friends, she shouts a greeting; Oh me! it is a merry meeting, As ever was in Christendom. The owls have hardly sung their last, While our four travellers homeward wend; The owls have hooted all night long, And with the owls began my song, And with the owls must end. For while they all were travelling home, Cried Betty, "Tell us Johnny, do, "Where all this long night you have been, "What you have heard, what you have seen, "And Johnny, mind you tell us true." Now Johnny all night long had heard The owls in tuneful concert strive; No doubt too he the moon had seen; For in the moonlight he had been From eight o'clock till five. And thus to Betty's question, he Made answer, like a traveller bold, (His very words I give to you,) "The cocks did crow to-whoo, to-whoo, "And the sun did shine so cold." --Thus answered Johnny in his glory, And that was all his travel's story. LINES WRITTEN NEAR RICHMOND, UPON THE THAMES, AT EVENING. How rich the wave, in front, imprest With evening-twilight's summer hues, While, facing thus the crimson west, The boat her silent path pursues! And see how dark the backward stream! A little moment past, so smiling! And still, perhaps, with faithless gleam, Some other loiterer beguiling. Such views the youthful bard allure, But, heedless of the following gloom, He deems their colours shall endure 'Till peace go with him to the tomb. --And let him nurse his fond deceit, And what if he must die in sorrow! Who would not cherish dreams so sweet, Though grief and pain may come to-morrow? Glide gently, thus for ever glide, O Thames! that other bards may see, As lovely visions by thy side As now, fair river! come to me. Oh glide, fair stream! for ever so; Thy quiet soul on all bestowing, 'Till all our minds for ever flow, As thy deep waters now are flowing. Vain thought! yet be as now thou art, That in thy waters may be seen The image of a poet's heart, How bright, how solemn, how serene! Such heart did once the poet bless, Who, pouring here a[3] _later_ ditty, Could find no refuge from distress, But in the milder grief of pity. Remembrance! as we glide along, For him suspend the dashing oar, And pray that never child of Song May know his freezing sorrows more. How calm! how still! the only sound, The dripping of the oar suspended! --The evening darkness gathers round By virtue's holiest powers attended. [3] Collins's Ode on the death of Thomson, the last written, I believe, of the poems which were published during his life-time. This Ode is also alluded to in the next stanza. EXPOSTULATION AND REPLY. "Why William, on that old grey stone, "Thus for the length of half a day, "Why William, sit you thus alone, "And dream your time away? "Where are your books? that light bequeath'd "To beings else forlorn and blind! "Up! Up! and drink the spirit breath'd "From dead men to their kind. "You look round on your mother earth, "As if she for no purpose bore you; "As if you were her first-born birth, "And none had lived before you!" One morning thus, by Esthwaite lake, When life was sweet I knew not why, To me my good friend Matthew spake, And thus I made reply. "The eye it cannot chuse but see, "We cannot bid the ear be still; "Our bodies feel, where'er they be, "Against, or with our will. "Nor less I deem that there are powers, "Which of themselves our minds impress, "That we can feed this mind of ours, "In a wise passiveness. "Think you, mid all this mighty sum "Of things for ever speaking, "That nothing of itself will come, "But we must still be seeking? "--Then ask not wherefore, here, alone, "Conversing as I may, "I sit upon this old grey stone, "And dream my time away." THE TABLES TURNED; AN EVENING SCENE, ON THE SAME SUBJECT. Up! up! my friend, and clear your looks, Why all this toil and trouble? Up! up! my friend, and quit your books, Or surely you'll grow double. The sun above the mountain's head, A freshening lustre mellow, Through all the long green fields has spread, His first sweet evening yellow. Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife, Come, hear the woodland linnet, How sweet his music; on my life There's more of wisdom in it. And hark! how blithe the throstle sings! And he is no mean preacher; Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher. She has a world of ready wealth, Our minds and hearts to bless-- Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health, Truth breathed by chearfulness. One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man; Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can. Sweet is the lore which nature brings; Our meddling intellect Misshapes the beauteous forms of things; --We murder to dissect. Enough of science and of art; Close up these barren leaves; Come forth, and bring with you a heart That watches and receives. OLD MAN TRAVELLING; ANIMAL TRANQUILLITY AND DECAY, A SKETCH. The little hedge-row birds, That peck along the road, regard him not. He travels on, and in his face, his step, His gait, is one expression; every limb, His look and bending figure, all bespeak A man who does not move with pain, but moves With thought--He is insensibly subdued To settled quiet: he is one by whom All effort seems forgotten, one to whom Long patience has such mild composure given, That patience now doth seem a thing, of which He hath no need. He is by nature led To peace so perfect, that the young behold With envy, what the old man hardly feels. --I asked him whither he was bound, and what The object of his journey; he replied "Sir! I am going many miles to take "A last leave of my son, a mariner, "Who from a sea-fight has been brought to Falmouth, And there is dying in an hospital." THE COMPLAINT OF A FORSAKEN INDIAN WOMAN [_When a Northern Indian, from sickness, is unable to continue his journey with his companions; he is left behind, covered over with Deer-skins, and is supplied with water, food, and fuel if the situation of the place will afford it. He is informed of the track which his companions intend to pursue, and if he is unable to follow, or overtake them, he perishes alone in the Desart; unless he should have the good fortune to fall in with some other Tribes of Indians. It is unnecessary to add that the females are equally, or still more, exposed to the same fate. See that very interesting work, _Hearne's Journey from Hudson's Bay to the Northern Ocean_. When the Northern Lights, as the same writer informs us, vary their position in the air, they make a rustling and a crackling noise. This circumstance is alluded to in the first stanza of the following poem._] Before I see another day, Oh let my body die away! In sleep I heard the northern gleams; The stars they were among my dreams; In sleep did I behold the skies, I saw the crackling flashes drive; And yet they are upon my eyes, And yet I am alive. Before I see another day, Oh let my body die away! My fire is dead: it knew no pain; Yet is it dead, and I remain. All stiff with ice the ashes lie; And they are dead, and I will die. When I was well, I wished to live, For clothes, for warmth, for food, and fire; But they to me no joy can give, No pleasure now, and no desire. Then here contented will I lie; Alone I cannot fear to die. Alas! you might have dragged me on Another day, a single one! Too soon despair o'er me prevailed; Too soon my heartless spirit failed; When you were gone my limbs were stronger, And Oh how grievously I rue, That, afterwards, a little longer, My friends, I did not follow you! For strong and without pain I lay, My friends, when you were gone away. My child! they gave thee to another, A woman who was not thy mother. When from my arms my babe they took, On me how strangely did he look! Through his whole body something ran, A most strange something did I see; --As if he strove to be a man, That he might pull the sledge for me. And then he stretched his arms, how wild! Oh mercy! like a little child. My little joy! my little pride! In two days more I must have died. Then do not weep and grieve for me; I feel I must have died with thee. Oh wind that o'er my head art flying, The way my friends their course did bend, I should not feel the pain of dying, Could I with thee a message send. Too soon, my friends, you went away; For I had many things to say. I'll follow you across the snow, You travel heavily and slow: In spite of all my weary pain, I'll look upon your tents again. My fire is dead, and snowy white The water which beside it stood; The wolf has come to me to-night, And he has stolen away my food. For ever left alone am I, Then wherefore should I fear to die? My journey will be shortly run, I shall not see another sun, I cannot lift my limbs to know If they have any life or no. My poor forsaken child! if I For once could have thee close to me, With happy heart I then would die, And my last thoughts would happy be, I feel my body die away, I shall not see another day. THE CONVICT. The glory of evening was spread through the west; --On the slope of a mountain I stood; While the joy that precedes the calm season of rest Rang loud through the meadow and wood. "And must we then part from a dwelling so fair?" In the pain of my spirit I said, And with a deep sadness I turned, to repair To the cell where the convict is laid. The thick-ribbed walls that o'ershadow the gate Resound; and the dungeons unfold: I pause; and at length, through the glimmering grate, That outcast of pity behold. His black matted head on his shoulder is bent, And deep is the sigh of his breath, And with stedfast dejection his eyes are intent On the fetters that link him to death. 'Tis sorrow enough on that visage to gaze. That body dismiss'd from his care; Yet my fancy has pierced to his heart, and pourtrays More terrible images there. His bones are consumed, and his life-blood is dried, With wishes the past to undo; And his crime, through the pains that o'erwhelm him, descried, Still blackens and grows on his view. When from the dark synod, or blood-reeking field, To his chamber the monarch is led, All soothers of sense their soft virtue shall yield, And quietness pillow his head. But if grief, self-consumed, in oblivion would doze, And conscience her tortures appease, 'Mid tumult and uproar this man must repose; In the comfortless vault of disease. When his fetters at night have so press'd on his limbs, That the weight can no longer be borne, If, while a half-slumber his memory bedims, The wretch on his pallet should turn, While the jail-mastiff howls at the dull clanking chain, From the roots of his hair there shall start A thousand sharp punctures of cold-sweating pain, And terror shall leap at his heart. But now he half-raises his deep-sunken eye, And the motion unsettles a tear; The silence of sorrow it seems to supply, And asks of me why I am here. "Poor victim! no idle intruder has stood "With o'erweening complacence our state to compare, "But one, whose first wish is the wish to be good, "Is come as a brother thy sorrows to share. "At thy name though compassion her nature resign, "Though in virtue's proud mouth thy report be a stain, "My care, if the arm of the mighty were mine, "Would plant thee where yet thou might'st blossom again." LINES WRITTEN A FEW MILES ABOVE TINTERN ABBEY, ON REVISITING THE BANKS OF THE WYE DURING A TOUR, July 13, 1798. Five years have passed; five summers, with the length Of five long winters! and again I hear These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs With a sweet inland murmur.[4]--Once again Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, Which on a wild secluded scene impress Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect The landscape with the quiet of the sky. The day is come when I again repose Here, under this dark sycamore, and view These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts, Which, at this season, with their unripe fruits, Among the woods and copses lose themselves, Nor, with their green and simple hue, disturb The wild green landscape. Once again I see These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms Green to the very door; and wreathes of smoke Sent up, in silence, from among the trees, With some uncertain notice, as might seem, Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, Or of some hermit's cave, where by his fire The hermit sits alone. Though absent long, These forms of beauty have not been to me, As is a landscape to a blind man's eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart, And passing even into my purer mind With tranquil restoration:--feelings too Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps, As may have had no trivial influence On that best portion of a good man's life; His little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust, To them I may have owed another gift, Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world Is lighten'd:--that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on, Until, the breath of this corporeal frame, And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. If this Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft, In darkness, and amid the many shapes Of joyless day-light; when the fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, Have hung upon the beatings of my heart, How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee O sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer through the woods, How often has my spirit turned to thee! And now, with gleams of half-extinguish'd thought, With many recognitions dim and faint, And somewhat of a sad perplexity, The picture of the mind revives again: While here I stand, not only with the sense Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts That in this moment there is life and food For future years. And so I dare to hope Though changed, no doubt, from what I was, when first I came among these hills; when like a roe I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, Wherever nature led; more like a man Flying from something that he dreads, than one Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days, And their glad animal movements all gone by,) To me was all in all.--I cannot paint What then I was. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms, were then to me An appetite: a feeling and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, or any interest Unborrowed from the eye.--That time is past, And all its aching joys are now no more, And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur: other gifts Have followed, for such loss, I would believe, Abundant recompence. For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes The still, sad music of humanity, Not harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man, A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye and ear, both what they half-create,[5] And what perceive; well pleased to recognize In nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being. Nor, perchance, If I were not thus taught, should I the more Suffer my genial spirits to decay: For thou art with me, here, upon the banks Of this fair river; thou, my dearest Friend, My dear, dear Friend, and in thy voice I catch The language of my former heart, and read My former pleasures in the shooting lights Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while May I behold in thee what I was once, My dear, dear Sister! And this prayer I make, Knowing that Nature never did betray The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege, Through all the years of this our life, to lead From joy to joy: for she can so inform The mind that is within us, so impress With quietness and beauty, and so feed With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all The dreary intercourse of daily life, Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb Our chearful faith that all which we behold Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon Shine on thee in thy solitary walk; And let the misty mountain winds be free To blow against thee: and in after years, When these wild ecstasies shall be matured Into a sober pleasure, when thy mind Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms, Thy memory be as a dwelling-place For all sweet sounds and harmonies; Oh! then, If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief, Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts Of tender joy wilt thou remember me, And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance, If I should be, where I no more can hear Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams Of past existence, wilt thou then forget That on the banks of this delightful stream We stood together; and that I, so long A worshipper of Nature, hither came, Unwearied in that service: rather say With warmer love, oh! with far deeper zeal Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget, That after many wanderings, many years Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs, And this green pastoral landscape, were to me More dear, both for themselves, and for thy sake. [4] The river is not affected by the tides a few miles above Tintern. [5] This line has a close resemblance to an admirable line of Young, the exact expression of which I cannot recollect. END. 
8208	----	POEMS OF COLERIDGE SELECTED AND ARRANGED WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY ARTHUR SYMONS CONTENTS INTRODUCTION THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER CHRISTABEL KUBLA KHAN LEWTI THE BALLAD OF THE DARK LADIE LOVE THE THREE GRAVES DEJECTION: AN ODE ODE TO TRANQUILLITY FRANCE: AN ODE FEARS IN SOLITUDE THIS LIME-TREE BOWER MY PRISON TO A GENTLEMAN (W. WORDSWORTH) HYMN BEFORE SUN-RISE FROST AT MIDNIGHT THE NIGHTINGALE THE EOLIAN HARP THE PICTURE THE GARDEN OF BOCCACCIO THE TWO FOUNTS A DAY-DREAM SONNET LINES TO W. LINLEY, ESQ. DOMESTIC PEACE SONG FROM _ZAPOLYA_ HUNTING SONG FROM _ZAPOLYA_ WESTPHALIAN SONG YOUTH AND AGE WORK WITHOUT HOPE TIME, REAL AND IMAGINARY LOVE'S APPARITION LOVE, HOPE, AND PATIENCE DUTY SURVIVING SELF-LOVE LOVE'S FIRST HOPE PHANTOM TO NATURE FANCY IN NUBIBUS CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL OBJECT PHANTOM OR FACT? LINES SUGGESTED BY THE LAST WORDS OF BERENGARIUS FORBEARANCE _SANCTI DOMINICI PALLIUM_ ON DONNE'S POETRY ON A BAD SINGER _NE PLUS ULTRA_ HUMAN LIFE THE BUTTERFLY THE PANG MORE SHARP THAN ALL THE VISIONARY HOPE THE PAINS OF SLEEP LOVE'S BURIAL-PLACE LOVE, A SWORD THE KISS NOT AT HOME NAMES (FROM LESSING) To LESBIA (FROM CATULLUS) THE DEATH OF THE STARLING (FROM CATULLUS) ON A CATARACT (FROM STOLBERG) HYMN TO THE EARTH (FROM STOLBERG) THE VISIT OF THE GODS (FROM SCHILLER) TRANSLATION (FROM OTTFRIED) THE VIRGIN'S CRADLE-HYMN EPITAPHS ON AN INFANT AN ODE TO THE RAIN ANSWER TO A CHILD'S QUESTION SOMETHING CHILDISH, BUT VERY NATURAL LINES ON A CHILD THE KNIGHT'S TOMB FIRE, FAMINE, AND SLAUGHTER THE TWO ROUND SPACES ON THE TOMBSTONE THE DEVIL'S THOUGHTS COLOGNE SONNETS ATTEMPTED IN THE MANNER OF CONTEMPORARY WRITERS LIMBO METRICAL FEET THE HOMERIC HEXAMETER (FROM SCHILLER) THE OVIDIAN ELEGIAC METRE (FROM SCHILLER) CATULLIAN HENDECASYLLABLES (FROM MATTHISON) To ---- EPITAPH ON A BAD MAN THE SUICIDE'S ARGUMENT THE GOOD, GREAT MAN INSCRIPTION FOR A FOUNTAIN ON A HEATH INSCRIPTION FOR A TIME-PIECE A TOMBLESS EPITAPH EPITAPH NOTES INTRODUCTION In one of Rossetti's invaluable notes on poetry, he tells us that to him "the leading point about Coleridge's work is its human love." We may remember Coleridge's own words: "To be beloved is all I need, And whom I love, I love indeed." Yet love, though it is the word which he uses of himself, is not really what he himself meant when using it, but rather an affectionate sympathy, in which there seems to have been little element of passion. Writing to his wife, during that first absence in Germany, whose solitude tried him so much, he laments that there is "no one to love." "Love is the vital air of my genius," he tells her, and adds: "I am deeply convinced that if I were to remain a few years among objects for whom I had no affection, I should wholly lose the powers of intellect." With this incessant, passionless sensibility, it was not unnatural that his thirst for friendship was stronger than his need of love; that to him friendship was hardly distinguishable from love. Throughout all his letters there is a series of causeless explosions of emotion, which it is hardly possible to take seriously, but which, far from being insincere, is really, no doubt, the dribbling overflow of choked-up feelings, a sort of moral leakage. It might be said of Coleridge, in the phrase which he used of Nelson, that he was "heart-starved." Tied for life to a woman with whom he had not one essential sympathy, the whole of his nature was put out of focus; and perhaps nothing but "the joy of grief," and the terrible and fettering power of luxuriating over his own sorrows, and tracing them to first principles, outside himself or in the depths of his sub- consciousness, gave him the courage to support that long, everpresent divorce. Both for his good and evil, he had never been able to endure emotion without either diluting or intensifying it with thought, and with always self-conscious thought. He uses identically the same words in writing his last, deeply moved letter to Mary Evans, and in relating the matter to Southey. He cannot get away from words; coming as near to sincerity as he can, words are always between him and his emotion. Hence his over-emphasis, his rhetoric of humility. In 1794 he writes to his brother George: "Mine eyes gush out with tears, my heart is sick and languid with the weight of unmerited kindness." Nine days later he writes to his brother James: "My conduct towards you, and towards my other brothers, has displayed a strange combination of madness, ingratitude, and dishonesty. But you forgive me. May my Maker forgive me! May the time arrive when I shall have forgiven myself!" Here we see both what he calls his "gangrened sensibility" and a complete abandonment to the feelings of the moment. It is always a self- conscious abandonment, during which he watches himself with approval, and seems to be saying: "Now that is truly 'feeling'!" He can never concentrate himself on any emotion; he swims about in floods of his own tears. With so little sense of reality in anything, he has no sense of the reality of direct emotion, but is preoccupied, from the moment of the first shock, in exploring it for its universal principle, and then nourishes it almost in triumph at what he has discovered. This is not insincerity; it is the metaphysical, analytical, and parenthetic mind in action. "I have endeavoured to feel what I ought to feel," he once significantly writes. Coleridge had many friends, to some of whom, as to Lamb, his friendship was the most priceless thing in life; but the friendship which meant most to him, not only as a man, but as a poet, was the friendship with Wordsworth and with Dorothy Wordsworth. "There is a sense of the word Love," he wrote to Wordsworth in 1812, "in which I never felt it but to you and one of your household." After his quarrel in that year he has "an agony of weeping." "After fifteen years of such religious, almost superstitious idolatry and self-sacrifice!" he laments. Now it was during his first, daily companionship with the Wordsworths that he wrote almost all his greatest work. "The Ancient Mariner" and "Christabel" were both written in a kind of rivalry with Wordsworth; and the "Ode on Dejection" was written after four months' absence from him, in the first glow and encouragement of a return to that one inspiring comradeship. Wordsworth was the only poet among his friends whom he wholly admired, and Wordsworth was more exclusively a poet, more wholly absorbed in thinking poetry and thinking about poetry, and in a thoroughly practical way, than almost any poet who has ever lived. It was not only for his solace in life that Coleridge required sympathy; he needed the galvanizing of continual intercourse with a poet, and with one to whom poetry was the only thing of importance. Coleridge, when he was by himself, was never sure of this; there was his _magnum opus_, the revelation of all philosophy; and he sometimes has doubts of the worth of his own poetry. Had Coleridge been able to live uninterruptedly in the company of the Wordsworths, even with the unsympathetic wife at home, the opium in the cupboard, and the _magnum opus_ on the desk, I am convinced that we should have had for our reading to-day all those poems which went down with him into silence. What Coleridge lacked was what theologians call a "saving belief" in Christianity, or else a strenuous intellectual immorality. He imagined himself to believe in Christianity, but his belief never realized itself in effective action, either in the mind or in conduct, while it frequently clogged his energies by weak scruples and restrictions which were but so many internal irritations. He calls upon the religion which he has never firmly apprehended to support him under some misfortune of his own making; it does not support him, but he finds excuses for his weakness in what seem to him its promises of help. Coleridge was not strong enough to be a Christian, and he was not strong enough to rely on the impulses of his own nature, and to turn his failings into a very actual kind of success. When Blake said, "If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise," he expressed a profound truth which Nietzsche and others have done little more than amplify. There is nothing so hopeless as inert or inactive virtue: it is a form of life grown putrid, and it turns into poisonous, decaying matter in the soul. If Coleridge had been more callous towards what he felt to be his duties, if he had not merely neglected them, as he did, but justified himself for neglecting them, on any ground of intellectual or physical necessity, or if he had merely let them slide without thought or regret, he would have been more complete, more effectual, as a man, and he might have achieved more finished work as an artist. To Coleridge there was as much difficulty in belief as in action, for belief is itself an action of the mind. He was always anxious to believe anything that would carry him beyond the limits of time and space, but it was not often that he could give more than a speculative assent to even the most improbable of creeds. Always seeking fixity, his mind was too fluid for any anchor to hold in it. He drifted from speculation to speculation, often seeming to forget his aim by the way, in almost the collector's delight over the curiosities he had found in passing. On one page of his letters he writes earnestly to the atheist Thelwall in defence of Christianity; on another page we find him saying, "My Spinosism (if Spinosism it be, and i' faith 'tis very like it)"; and then comes the solemn assurance: "I am a Berkleyan." Southey, in his rough, uncomprehending way, writes: "Hartley was ousted by Berkeley, Berkeley by Spinoza, and Spinoza by Plato; when last I saw him Jacob Behmen had some chance of coming in. The truth is that he plays with systems"; so it seemed to Southey, who could see no better. To Coleridge all systems were of importance, because in every system there was its own measure of truth. He was always setting his mind to think about itself, and felt that he worked both hard and well if he had gained a clearer glimpse into that dark cavern. "Yet I have not been altogether idle," he writes in December, 180O, "having in my own conceit gained great light into several parts of the human mind which have hitherto remained either wholly unexplained or most falsely explained." In March, 1801, he declares that he has "completely extricated the notions of time and space." "This," he says, "I have _done_; but I trust that I am about to do more--namely, that I shall be able to evolve all the five senses, and to state their growth and the causes of their difference, and in this evolvement to solve the process of life and consciousness." He hopes that before his thirtieth year he will "thoroughly understand the whole of Nature's works." "My opinion is this," he says, defining one part at least of his way of approach to truth, "that deep thinking is attainable only by a man of deep feeling, and that all truth is a species of revelation." On the other hand, he assures us, speaking of that _magnum opus_ which weighed upon him and supported him to the end of his life, "the very object throughout from the first page to the last [is] to reconcile the dictates of common sense with the conclusions of scientific reasoning." This _magnum opus_, "a work which should contain all knowledge and proclaim all philosophy, had," says Mr. Ernest Coleridge, "been Coleridge's dream from the beginning." Only a few months before his death, we find him writing to John Sterling: "Many a fond dream have I amused myself with, of your residing near me, or in the same house, and of preparing, with your and Mr. Green's assistance, my whole system for the press, as far as it exists in any _systematic_ form; that is, beginning with the Propyleum, On the Power and Use of Words, comprising Logic, as the Canons of _Conclusion_, as the criterion of _Premises_, and lastly as the discipline and evolution of Ideas (and then the Methodus et Epochee, or the Disquisition on God, Nature, and Man), the two first grand divisions of which, from the Ens super Ens to the _Fall_, or from God to Hades, and then from Chaos to the commencement of living organization, containing the whole of the Dynamic Philosophy, and the deduction of the Powers and Forces, are complete." Twenty years earlier, he had written to Daniel Stuart that he was keeping his morning hours sacred to his "most important Work, which is printing at Bristol," as he imagined. It was then to be called "Christianity, the one true Philosophy, or Five Treatises on the Logos, or Communicative Intelligence, natural, human, and divine." Of this vast work only fragments remain, mostly unpublished: two large quarto volumes on logic, a volume intended as an introduction, a commentary on the Gospels and some of the Epistles, together with "innumerable fragments of metaphysical and theological speculation." But out of those fragments no system was ever to be constructed, though a fervent disciple, J. H. Green, devoted twenty-eight years to the attempt. "Christabel" unfinished, the _magnum opus_ unachieved: both were but parallel symptoms of a mind "thought-bewildered" to the end, and bewildered by excess of light and by crowding energies always in conflict, always in escape. Coleridge's search, throughout his life, was after the absolute, an absolute not only in thought but in all human relations, in love, friendship, faith in man, faith in God, faith in beauty; and while it was this profound dissatisfaction with less than the perfect form of every art, passion, thought, or circumstance, that set him adrift in life, making him seem untrue to duty, conviction, and himself, it was this also that formed in him the double existence of the poet and the philosopher, each supplementing and interpenetrating the other. The poet and the philosopher are but two aspects of one reality; or rather, the poetic and the philosophic attitudes are but two ways of seeing. The poet who is not also a philosopher is like a flower without a root. Both seek the same infinitude; one apprehending the idea, the other the image. One seeks truth for its beauty; the other finds beauty, an abstract, intellectual beauty, in the innermost home of truth. Poetry and metaphysics are alike a disengaging, for different ends, of the absolute element in things. In Coleridge, metaphysics joined with an unbounded imagination, in equal flight from reality, from the notions of time and space. Each was an equal denial of the reality of what we call real things; the one experimental, searching, reasoning; the other a "shaping spirit of imagination," an embodying force. His sight was always straining into the darkness; and he has himself noted that from earliest childhood his "mind was habituated to the Vast." "I never regarded my senses," he says, "as the criteria of my belief"; and "those who have been led to the same truths step by step, through the constant testimony of their senses, seem to want a sense which I possess." To Coleridge only mind existed, an eternal and an eternally active thought; and it was as a corollary to his philosophical conception of the universe that he set his mind to a conscious rebuilding of the world in space. His magic, that which makes his poetry, was but the final release in art of a winged thought fluttering helplessly among speculations and theories; it was the song of release. De Quincey has said of Coleridge: "I believe it to be notorious that he first began the use of opium, not as a relief from any bodily pains or nervous irritations--for his constitution was strong and excellent--but as a source of luxurious sensations." Hartley Coleridge, in the biographical supplement to the "Biographia Literaria," replies with what we now know to be truth: "If my Father sought more from opium than the mere absence of pain, I feel assured that it was not luxurious sensations or the glowing phantasmagoria of passive dreams; but that the power of the medicine might keep down the agitations of his nervous system, like a strong hand grasping the strings of some shattered lyre." In 1795. that is, at the age of twenty-three, we find him taking laudanum; in 1796, he is taking it in large doses; by the late spring of 1801 he is under the "fearful slavery," as he was to call it, of opium. "My sole sensuality," he says of this time, "was not to be in pain." In a terrible letter addressed to Joseph Cottle in 1814 he declares that he was "seduced to the _accursed_ habit ignorantly"; and he describes "the direful moment, when my pulse began to fluctuate, my heart to palpitate, and such a dreadful falling abroad, as it were, of my whole frame, such intolerable restlessness, and incipient bewilderment ... for my case is a species of madness, only that it is a derangement, an utter impotence of the volition, and not of the intellectual faculties." And, throughout, it is always the pains, never the pleasures, of opium that he registers. Opium took hold of him by what was inert in his animal nature, and not by any active sensuality. His imagination required no wings, but rather fetters; and it is evident that opium was more often a sedative than a spur to his senses. The effect of opium on the normal man is to bring him into something like the state in which Coleridge habitually lived. The world was always a sufficiently unreal thing to him, facts more than remote enough, consequences unrelated to their causes; he lived in a mist, and opium thickened the mist to a dense yellow fog. Opium might have helped to make Southey a poet; it left Coleridge the prisoner of a cobweb-net of dreams. What he wanted was some astringent force in things, to tighten, not to loosen, the always expanding and uncontrollable limits of his mind. Opium did but confirm what the natural habits of his constitution had bred in him: an overwhelming indolence, out of which the energies that still arose intermittently were no longer flames, but the escaping ghosts of flame, mere black smoke. At twenty-four, in a disinterested description of himself for the benefit of a friend whom he had not yet met, he declares, "the walk of the whole man indicates _indolence capable of energies_." It was that walk which Carlyle afterwards described, unable to keep to either side of the garden- path. "The moral obligation is to me so very strong a stimulant," Coleridge writes to Crabb Robinson, "that in nine cases out of ten it acts as a narcotic. The blow that should rouse, _stuns_ me." He plays another variation on the ingenious theme in a letter to his brother: "Anxieties that stimulate others infuse an additional narcotic into my mind.... Like some poor labourer, whose night's sleep has but imperfectly refreshed his overwearied frame, I have sate in drowsy uneasiness, and doing nothing have thought what a deal I have to do." His ideal, which he expressed in 1797 in a letter to Thelwall, and, in 1813, almost word for word, in a poem called" The Night-Scene," was, "like the Indian Vishnu, to float about along an infinite ocean cradled in the flower of the Lotus, and wake once in a million years for a few minutes just to know that I was going to sleep a million years more." Observe the effect of the desire for the absolute, reinforced by constitutional indolence, and only waiting for the illuminating excuse of opium. From these languors, and from their consequences, Coleridge found relief in conversation, for which he was always ready, while he was far from always ready for the more precise mental exertion of writing. "Oh, how I wish to be talking, not writing," he cries in a letter to Southey in 1803, "for my mind is so full, that my thoughts stifle and jam each other." And, in 1816, in his first letter to Gillman, he writes, more significantly, "The stimulus of conversation suspends the terror that haunts my mind; but when I am alone, the horrors that I have suffered from laudanum, the degradation, the blighted utility, almost overwhelm me." It was along one avenue of this continual escape from himself that Coleridge found himself driven (anywhere, away from action) towards what grew to be the main waste of his life. Hartley Coleridge, in the preface to "Table-Talk," has told us eloquently how, "throughout a long-drawn summer's day, would this man talk to you in low, equable, but clear and musical tones, concerning things human and divine"; we know that Carlyle found him "unprofitable, even tedious," and wished "to worship him, and toss him in a blanket"; and we have the vivid reporting of Keats, who tells us that, on his one meeting with Coleridge, "I walked with him, at his alderman-after-dinner pace, for near two miles, I suppose. In those two miles he broached a thousand things. Let me see if I can give you a list--nightingales--poetry--on poetical sensation--metaphysics--different genera and species of dreams-- nightmare--a dream accompanied with a sense of touch--single and double touch--a dream related--first and second consciousness--the difference explained between will and volition--so say metaphysicians from a want of smoking the second consciousness--monsters--the Kraken--mermaids--Southey believes in them--Southey's belief too much diluted--a ghost story--Good- morning--I heard his voice as he came towards me--I heard it as he moved away--I had heard it all the interval--if it may be called so." It may be that we have had no more wonderful talker, and, no doubt, the talk had its reverential listeners, its disciples; but to cultivate or permit disciples is itself a kind of waste, a kind of weakness; it requires a very fixed and energetic indolence to become, as Coleridge became, a vocal utterance, talking for talking's sake. But beside talking, there was lecturing, with Coleridge a scarcely different form of talk; and it is to this consequence of a readiness to speak and a reluctance to write that we owe much of his finest criticism, in the imperfectly recorded "Lectures on Shakespeare." Coleridge as a critic is not easily to be summed up. What may first surprise us, when we begin to look into his critical opinions, is the uncertainty of his judgments in regard to his own work, and to the work of his friends; the curious bias which a feeling or an idea, affection or a philosophical theory, could give to his mind. His admiration for Southey, his consideration for Sotheby, perhaps in a less degree his unconquerable esteem for Bowles, together with something very like adulation of Wordsworth, are all instances of a certain loss of the sense of proportion. He has left us no penetrating criticisms of Byron, of Shelley, or of Keats; and in a very interesting letter about Blake, written in 1818, he is unable to take the poems merely as poems, and chooses among them with a scrupulous care "not for the want of innocence in the poem, but from the too probable want of it in many readers." Lamb, concerned only with individual things, looks straight at them, not through them, seeing them implacably. His notes to the selections from the Elizabethan dramatists are the surest criticisms that we have in English; they go to the roots. Coleridge's critical power was wholly exercised upon elements and first principles; Lamb showed an infinitely keener sense of detail, of the parts of the whole. Lamb was unerring on definite points, and could lay his finger on flaws in Coleridge's work that were invisible to Coleridge; who, however, was unerring in his broad distinctions, in the philosophy of his art. "The ultimate end of criticism," said Coleridge, "is much more to establish the principles of writing than to furnish rules how to pass judgment on what has been written by others." And for this task he had an incomparable foundation: imagination, insight, logic, learning, almost every critical quality united in one; and he was a poet who allowed himself to be a critic. Those pages of the "Biographia Literaria," in which he defines and distinguishes between imagination and fancy, the researches into the abstract entities of poetry in the course of an examination of Wordsworth's theories and of the popular objections to them, all that we have of the lectures on Shakespeare, into which he put an illuminating idolatry, together with notes and jottings preserved in the "Table-Talk," "Anima Poetæ," the "Literary Remains," and on the margins of countless books, contain the most fundamental criticism of literature that has ever been attempted, fragmentary as the attempt remains. "There is not a man in England," said Coleridge, with truth, "whose thoughts, images, words, and erudition have been published in larger quantities than _mine_; though I must admit, not _by_, nor _for_, myself." He claimed, and rightly, as his invention, a "science of reasoning and judging concerning the productions of literature, the characters and measures of public men, and the events of nations, by a systematic subsumption of them, under principles deduced from the nature of man," which, as he says, was unknown before the year 1795. He is the one philosophical critic who is also a poet, and thus he is the one critic who instinctively knows his way through all the intricacies of the creative mind. Most of his best criticism circles around Shakespeare; and he took Shakespeare almost frankly in the place of Nature, or of poetry. He affirms, "Shakespeare knew the human mind, and its most minute and intimate workings, and he never introduces a word, or a thought, in vain or out of place." This granted (and to Coleridge it is essential that it should be granted, for in less than the infinite he cannot find space in which to use his wings freely) he has only to choose and define, to discover and to illuminate. In the "myriad-minded man," in his "oceanic mind," he finds all the material that he needs for the making of a complete aesthetics. Nothing with Coleridge ever came to completion; but we have only to turn over the pages about Shakespeare, to come upon fragments worth more than anyone else's finished work. I find the whole secret of Shakespeare's way of writing in these sentences: "Shakespeare's intellectual action is wholly unlike that of Ben Jonson or Beaumont and Fletcher. The latter see the totality of a sentence or passage, and then project it entire. Shakespeare goes on creating, and evolving B out of A, and C out of B, and so on, just as a serpent moves, which makes a fulcrum of its own body, and seems forever twisting and untwisting its own strength. "And here are a few axioms: 'The grandest efforts of poetry are where the imagination is called forth, not to produce a distinct form, but a strong working of the mind'; or, in other words, "The power of poetry is, by a single word perhaps, to instill that energy into the mind which compels the imagination to produce the picture." "Poetry is the identity of all other knowledges," "the blossom and fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language." "Verse is in itself a music, and the natural symbol of that union of passion with thought and pleasure, which constitutes the essence of all poetry "; "a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order," as he has elsewhere defined it. And, in one of his spoken counsels, he says: "I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose-- words in their best order; poetry--the best words in the best order." Unlike most creative critics, or most critics who were creative artists in another medium, Coleridge, when he was writing criticism, wrote it wholly for its own sake, almost as if it were a science. His prose is rarely of the finest quality as prose writing. Here and there he can strike out a phrase at red-heat, as when he christens Shakespeare "the one Proteus of the fire and flood"; or he can elaborate subtly, as when he notes the judgment of Shakespeare, observable in every scene of the "Tempest," "still preparing, still inviting, and still gratifying, like a finished piece of music"; or he can strike us with the wit of the pure intellect, as when he condemns certain work for being "as trivial in thought and yet enigmatic in expression, as if Echo and the Sphinx had laid their heads together to construct it." But for the most part it is a kind of thinking aloud, and the form is wholly lost in the pursuit of ideas. With his love for the absolute, why is it that he does not seek after an absolute in words considered as style, as well as in words considered as the expression of thought? In his finest verse Coleridge has the finest style perhaps in English; but his prose is never quite reduced to order from its tumultuous amplitude or its snake-like involution. Is it that he values it only as a medium, not as an art? His art is verse, and this he dreads, because of its too mortal closeness to his heart; the prose is a means to an end, not an end in itself. The poetry of Coleridge, though it is closely interwoven with the circumstances of his life, is rarely made directly out of those circumstances. To some extent this is no doubt explained by a fact to which he often refers in his letters, and which, in his own opinion, hindered him not only from writing about himself in verse, but from writing verse at all. "As to myself," he writes in 1802, "all my poetic genius ... is gone," and he attributes it "to my long and exceedingly severe metaphysical investigations, and these partly to ill-health, and partly to private afflictions which rendered any subjects, immediately connected with feeling, a source of pain and disquiet to me." In 1818 he writes: "Poetry is out of the question. The attempt would only hurry me into that sphere of acute feelings from which abstruse research, the mother of self-oblivion, presents an asylum." But theory worked with a natural tendency in keeping him for the most part away from any attempt to put his personal emotions into verse. "A sound promise of genius," he considered, "is the choice of subjects very remote from the private interests and circumstances of the writer himself." With only a few exceptions, the wholly personal poems, those actually written under a shock of emotion, are vague, generalized, turned into a kind of literature. The success of such a poem as the almost distressingly personal "Ode on Dejection" comes from the fact that Coleridge has been able to project his personal feeling into an outward image, which becomes to him the type of dejection; he can look at it as at one of his dreams which become things; he can sympathize with it as he could never sympathize with his own undeserving self. And thus one stanza, perhaps the finest as poetry, becomes the biography of his soul: "There was a time when, though my path was rough, This joy within me dallied with distress, And all misfortunes were but as the stuff Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness: For hope grew round me, like the twining vine, And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine But now afflictions bow me down to earth: Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth; But oh! each visitation Suspends what nature gave me at my birth, My shaping spirit of Imagination. For not to think of what I needs must feel, But to be still and patient all I can, And haply by abstruse research to steal From my own nature all the natural man-- This was my sole resource, my only plan: Till that which suits a part infects the whole, And now is almost grown the habit of my soul." Elsewhere, in personal poems like "Frost at Midnight," and "Fears in Solitude," all the value of the poem comes from the delicate sensations of natural things which mean so much more to us, whether or not they did to him, than the strictly personal part of the matter. You feel that there he is only using the quite awake part of himself, which is not the essential one. He requires, first of all, to be disinterested, or at least not overcome by emotion; to be without passion but that of abstract beauty, in Nature, or in idea; and then to sink into a quiet lucid sleep, in which his genius came to him like some attendant spirit. In the life and art of Coleridge, the hours of sleep seem to have been almost more important than the waking hours. "My dreams became the substance of my life," he writes, just after the composition of that terrible poem on "The Pains of Sleep," which is at once an outcry of agony, and a yet more disturbing vision of the sufferer with his fingers on his own pulse, his eyes fixed on his own hardly awakened eyes in the mirror. In an earlier letter, written at a time when he is trying to solve the problem of the five senses, he notes: "The sleep which I have is made up of ideas so connected, and so little different from the operations of reason, that it does not afford me the due refreshment." To Coleridge, with the help of opium, hardly required, indeed, there was no conscious division between day and night, between not only dreams and intuitions, but dreams and pure reason. And we find him, in almost all his great poems, frankly taking not only his substance but his manner from dreams, as he dramatizes them after a logic and a passion of their own. His technique is the transposition into his waking hours of the unconscious technique of dreams. It is a kind of verified inspiration, something which came and went, and was as little to be relied upon as the inspiration itself. On one side it was an exact science, but on the other a heavenly visitation. Count and balance syllables, work out an addition of the feet in the verse by the foot-rule, and you will seem to have traced every miracle back to its root in a natural product. Only, something, that is, everything, will have escaped you. As well dissect a corpse to find out the principle of life. That elusive something, that spirit, will be what distinguishes Coleridge's finest verse from the verse of, well, perhaps of every conscious artist in our language. For it is not, as in Blake, literally unconscious, and wavering on every breath of that unseen wind on which it floats to us; it is faultless; it is itself the wind which directs it, it steers its way on the wind, like a seagull poised between sky and sea, and turning on its wings as upon shifted sails. This inspiration comes upon Coleridge suddenly, without warning, in the first uncertain sketch of "Lewti," written at twenty-two; and then it leaves him, without warning, until the great year 1797, three years later, when "Christabel" and "The Ancient Mariner" are begun. Before and after, Coleridge is seen trying to write like Bowles, like Wordsworth, like Southey, perhaps, to attain "that impetuosity of transition and that precipitancy of fancy and feeling, which are the _essential_ qualities of the sublimer Ode," and which he fondly fancies that he has attained in the "Ode on the Departing Year," with its one good line, taken out of his note-book. But here, in "Lewti," he has his style, his lucid and liquid melody, his imagery of moving light and the faintly veiled transparency of air, his vague, wildly romantic subject matter, coming from no one knows where, meaning one hardly knows what; but already a magic, an incantation. "Lewti" is a sort of preliminary study for "Kubla Khan"; it, too, has all the imagery of a dream, with a breathlessness and awed hush, as of one not yet accustomed to be at home in dreams. "Kubla Khan," which was literally composed in sleep, comes nearer than any other existing poem to that ideal of lyric poetry which has only lately been systematized by theorists like Mallarmé. It has just enough meaning to give it bodily existence; otherwise it would be disembodied music. It seems to hover in the air, like one of the island enchantments of Prospero. It is music not made with hands, and the words seem, as they literally were, remembered. "All the images," said Coleridge, "rose up before me as _things_, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions." Lamb, who tells us how Coleridge repeated it "so enchantingly that it irradiates and brings heaven and elysian bowers into my parlour when he says or sings it to me," doubted whether it would "bear daylight." It seemed to him that such witchcraft could hardly outlast the night. It has outlasted the century, and may still be used as a touchstone; it will determine the poetic value of any lyric poem which you place beside it. Take as many poems as you please, and let them have all the merits you please, their ultimate merit as poetry will lie in the degree of their approach to the exact, unconscious, inevitable balance of qualities in the poetic art of "Kubla Khan." In "The Ancient Mariner," which it seems probable was composed before, and not after "Kubla Khan," as Coleridge's date would have us suppose, a new supernaturalism comes into poetry, which, for the first time, accepted the whole responsibility of dreams. The impossible, frankly accepted, with its own strict, inverted logic; the creation of a new atmosphere, outside the known world, which becomes as real as the air about us, and yet never loses its strangeness; the shiver that comes to us, as it came to the wedding- guest, from the simple good faith of the teller; here is a whole new creation, in subject, mood, and technique. Here, as in "Kubla Khan," Coleridge saw the images "as _things_"; only a mind so overshadowed by dreams, and so easily able to carry on his sleep awake, could have done so; and, with such a mind, "that willing suspension of disbelief for a moment, which constitutes poetic faith," was literally forced upon him. "The excellence aimed at," says Coleridge, "was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations," those produced by supernatural agency, "supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever sense of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency." To Coleridge, whatever appealed vitally to his imagination was real; and he defended his belief philosophically, disbelieving from conviction in that sharp marking off of real from imaginary which is part of the ordinary attitude of man in the presence of mystery. It must not be forgotten that Coleridge is never fantastic. The fantastic is a playing with the imagination, and Coleridge respects it. His intellect goes always easily as far as his imagination will carry it, and does not stop by the way to play tricks upon its bearer. Hence the conviction which he brings with him when he tells us the impossible. And then his style, in its ardent and luminous simplicity, flexible to every bend of the spirit which it clothes with flesh, helps him in the idiomatic translation of dreams. The visions of Swedenborg are literal translations of the imagination, and need to be retranslated. Coleridge is equally faithful to the thing seen and to the laws of that new world into which he has transposed it. "The Ancient Mariner" is the most sustained piece of imagination in the whole of English poetry; and it has almost every definable merit of imaginative narrative. It is the only poem I know which is all point and yet all poetry; because, I suppose, the point is really a point of mystery. It is full of simple, daily emotion, transported, by an awful power of sight, to which the limits of reality are no barrier, into an unknown sea and air; it is realized throughout the whole of its ghastly and marvellous happenings; and there is in the narrative an ease, a buoyancy almost, which I can only compare with the music of Mozart, extracting its sweetness from the stuff of tragedy; it presents to us the utmost physical and spiritual horror, not only without disgust, but with an alluring beauty. But in "Christabel," in the first part especially, we find a quality which goes almost beyond these definable merits. There is in it a literal spell, not acting along any logical lines, not attacking the nerves, not terrifying, not intoxicating, but like a slow, enveloping mist, which blots out the real world, and leaves us unchilled by any "airs from heaven or blasts from hell," but in the native air of some middle region. In these two or three brief hours of his power out of a lifetime, Coleridge is literally a wizard. People have wanted to know what "Christabel" means, and how it was to have ended, and whether Geraldine was a vampire (as I am inclined to think) or had eyes in her breasts (as Shelley thought). They have wondered that a poem so transparent in every line should be, as a whole, the most enigmatical in English. But does it matter very much whether "Christabel" means this or that, and whether Coleridge himself knew, as he said, how it was to end, or whether, as Wordsworth declared, he had never decided? It seems to me that Coleridge was fundamentally right when he said of the "Ancient Mariner," "It ought to have had no more moral than the Arabian Nights' tale of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well, and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a genie starts up, and says he _must_ kill the aforesaid merchant, because one of the date-shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie's son." The "Ancient Mariner," if we take its moral meaning too seriously, comes near to being an allegory. "Christabel," as it stands, is a piece of pure witchcraft, needing no further explanation than the fact of its existence. Rossetti called Coleridge the Turner of poets, and indeed there is in Coleridge an aërial glitter which we find in no other poet, and in Turner only among painters. With him colour is always melted in atmosphere, which it shines through like fire within a crystal. It is liquid colour, the dew on flowers, or a mist of rain in bright sunshine. His images are for the most part derived from water, sky, the changes of weather, shadows of things rather than things themselves, and usually mental reflections of them. "A poet ought not to pick Nature's pocket," he said, and it is for colour and sound, in their most delicate forms, that he goes to natural things. He hears "the merry nightingale That crowds and hurries and precipitates With fast thick warble his delicious notes;" and an ecstasy comes to him out of that natural music which is almost like that of his own imagination. Only music or strange effects of light can carry him swiftly enough out of himself, in the presence of visible or audible things, for that really poetic ecstasy. Then all his languor drops off from him, like a clogging garment. The first personal merit which appears in his almost wholly valueless early work is a sense of colour. In a poem written at twenty-one he sees Fancy "Bathed in rich amber-glowing floods of light," and next year the same colour reappears, more expressively, in a cloud, "wholly bright, With a rich and amber light." The two women in "The Two Graves," during a momentous pause, are found discussing whether the rays of the sun are green or amber; a valley is "Tinged yellow with the rich departing light;" seen through corn at evening, "The level sunshine glimmers with green light;" and there is the carefully observed "western sky And its peculiar tint of yellow green." "The Ancient Mariner" is full of images of light and luminous colour in sky and sea; Glycine's song in "Zapolya" is the most glittering poem in our language, with a soft glitter like that of light seen through water. And he is continually endeavouring, as later poets have done on a more deliberate theory, to suffuse sound with colour or make colours literally a form of music; as in an early poem "Where melodies round honey-dropping flowers, Footless and wild, like birds of Paradise, Nor pause, nor perch, hovering on untamed wing." With him, as with some of them, there is something pathological in this sensitiveness, and in a letter written in 180O he says: "For the last month I have been trembling on through sands and swamps of evil and bodily grievance. My eyes have been inflamed to a degree that rendered reading scarcely possible; and, strange as it seems, the act of mere composition, as I lay in bed, perceptibly affected them, and my voluntary ideas were every minute passing, more or less transformed into vivid spectra." Side by side with this sensitiveness to colour, or interfused with it, we find a similar, or perhaps a greater, sensitiveness to sound, Coleridge shows a greater sensitiveness to music than any English poet except Milton. The sonnet to Linley records his ecstatic responsiveness to music; Purcell's music, too, which he names with Palestrina's ("some madrigals which he heard at Rome") in the "Table-Talk." "I have the intensest delight in music," he says there, "and can detect good from bad"; a rare thing among poets. In one of his letters he notes: "I hear in my brain ... sensations ... of various degrees of pain, even to a strange sort of uneasy pleasure.... I hear in my brain, and still more in my stomach." There we get the morbid physical basis of a sensitiveness to music which came to mean much to him. In a note referring to "Christabel," and to the reasons why it had never been finished, he says: "I could write as good verse now as ever I did, if I were perfectly free from vexations, and were in the _ad libitum_ hearing of fine music, which has a sensible effect in harmonizing my thoughts, and in animating and, as it were, lubricating my inventive faculty." "Christabel," more than anything of Coleridge, is composed like music; you might set at the side of each section, especially of the opening, _largo, vivacissimo_, and, as the general expression signature, _tempo rubato_. I know no other verse in which the effects of music are so precisely copied in metre. Shelley, you feel, sings like a bird; Blake, like a child or an angel; but Coleridge certainly writes music. The metre of the "Ancient Mariner" is a re-reading of the familiar ballad- metre, in which nothing of the original force, swiftness or directness is lost, while a new subtlety, a wholly new music, has come into it. The metre of "Christabel" is even more of an invention, and it had more immediate consequences. The poem was begun in 1797, and not published till 1816; but in 1801 Scott heard it recited, and in 1805 reproduced what he could of it in "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" and the other metrical romances which, in their turn, led the way to Byron, who himself heard "Christabel" recited in 1811. But the secret of Coleridge's instinct of melody and science of harmony was not discovered. Such ecstasy and such collectedness, a way of writing which seems to aim at nothing but the most precisely expressive simplicity, and yet sets the whole brain dancing to its tune, can hardly be indicated more exactly than in Coleridge's own words in reference to the Italian lyrists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They, attained their aim, he says, "by the avoidance of every word which a gentleman would not use in dignified conversation, and of every word and phrase which none but a learned man would use; by the studied position of words and phrases, so that not only each part should be melodious in itself, but contribute to the harmony of the whole, each note referring and conducing to the melody of all the foregoing and following words of the same period or stanza; and, lastly, with equal labour, the greater because unbetrayed, by the variation and various harmonies of their metrical movement." These qualities we may indeed find in many of Coleridge's songs, part Elizabethan, part eighteenth century, in some of his infantile jingles, his exuberant comic verse (in which, however, there are many words "which a gentleman would not use"), and in a poem like "Love," which has suffered as much indiscriminate praise as Raphael's Madonnas, which it resembles in technique and sentiment, and in its exquisite perfection of commonplace, its _tour de force _of an almost flawless girlishness. But in "Christabel" the technique has an incomparable substance to work upon; substance at once simple and abnormal, which Coleridge required, in order to be at his best. It has been pointed out by the profoundest poetical critic of our time that the perfection of Coleridge's style in poetry comes from an equal balance of the clear, somewhat matter-of-fact qualities of the eighteenth century with the remote, imaginative qualities of the nineteenth century. "To please me," said Coleridge in "Table-Talk," "a poem must be either music or sense." The eighteenth-century manner, with its sense only just coupled with a kind of tame and wingless music, may be seen quite by itself in the early song from "Robespierre": "Tell me, on what holy ground May domestic peace be found?" Here there is both matter and manner, of a kind; in "The Kiss" of the same year, with its one exquisite line, "The gentle violence of joy," there is only the liquid glitter of manner. We get the ultimate union of eighteenth and nineteenth century qualities in "Work without Hope," and in "Youth and Age," which took nine years to bring into its faultless ultimate form. There is always a tendency in Coleridge to fall back on the eighteenth-century manner, with its scrupulous exterior neatness, and its comfortable sense of something definite said definitely, whenever the double inspiration flags, and matter and manner do not come together. "I cannot write without a _body of thought_," he said at a time before he had found himself or his style; and he added: "Hence my poetry is crowded and sweats beneath a heavy burden of ideas and imagery! It has seldom ease." It was an unparalleled ease in the conveying of a "body of thought" that he was finally to attain. In "Youth and Age," think how much is actually said, and with a brevity impossible in prose; things, too, far from easy for poetry to say gracefully, such as the image of the steamer, or the frank reference to "this altered size"; and then see with what an art, as of the very breathing of syllables, it passes into the most flowing of lyric forms. Besides these few miracles of his later years, there are many poems, such as the Flaxman group of "Love, Hope, and Patience supporting Education," in which we get all that can be poetic in the epigram softened by imagination, all that can be given by an ecstatic plain thinking. The rarest magic has gone, and he knows it; philosophy remains, and out of that resisting material he is able, now and again, to weave, in his deftest manner, a few garlands. ARTHUR SYMONS. SELECTIONS FROM THE POEMS OF COLERIDGE THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER IN SEVEN PARTS Facile credo, plures esse Naturas invisibiles quam visibiles in rerum universitate. Sed horum omnium familiam quis nobis enarrabit? et gradus et cognationes et discrimina et singulorum munera? Quid agunt? quæ loca habitant? Harum rerum notitiam semper ambivit ingenium humanum, nunquam attigit. Juvat, interea, non diffiteor, quandoque in animo, tanquam in tabulâ, majoris et melioris mundi imaginem contemplari: ne mens assuefacta hodiernæ vitæ minutiis se contrahat nimis, et tota subsidat in pusillas cogitationes. Sed veritati interea invigilandum est, modusque servandus, ut certa ab incertis, diem a nocte, distinguamus.--T. BURNET, _Archæol. Phil_. p. 68. ARGUMENT How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by storms to the cold Country towards the South Pole; and how from thence she made her course to the tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean; and of the strange things that befell; and in what manner the Ancyent Marinere came back to his own Country. PART I It is an ancient Mariner, And he stoppeth one of three. "By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp'st thou me? "The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide, And I am next of kin; The guests are met, the feast is set: May'st hear the merry din." He holds him with his skinny hand, "There was a ship," quoth he. "Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!" Eftsoons his hand dropt he. He holds him with his glittering eye The Wedding-Guest stood still, And listens like a three years' child: The Mariner hath his will. The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone: He cannot choose but hear; And thus spake on that ancient man, The bright-eyed Mariner. "The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared, Merrily did we drop Below the kirk, below the hill, Below the lighthouse top. The sun came up upon the left, Out of the sea came he! And he shone bright, and on the right Went down into the sea. Higher and higher every day, Till over the mast at noon--" The Wedding-Guest here beat his breast, For he heard the loud bassoon. The bride hath paced into the hall, Red as a rose is she; Nodding their heads before her goes The merry minstrelsy. The Wedding-Guest he beat his breast, Yet he cannot choose but hear; And thus spake on that ancient man, The bright-eyed Mariner. "And now the Storm-blast came, and he Was tyrannous and strong: He struck with his o'ertaking wings And chased us south along. With sloping masts and dipping prow, As who pursued with yell and blow Still treads the shadow of his foe, And forward bends his head, The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast, And southward aye we fled. And now there came both mist and snow, And it grew wondrous cold: And ice, mast-high, came floating by, As green as emerald. And through the drifts the snowy clifts Did send a dismal sheen: Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken-- The ice was all between. The ice was here, the ice was there, The ice was all around: It cracked and growled, and roared and howled, Like noises in a swound! At length did cross an Albatross, Thorough the fog it came; As if it had been a Christian soul, We hailed it in God's name. It ate the food it ne'er had eat, And round and round it flew. The ice did split with a thunder-fit; The helmsman steered us through! And a good south wind sprung up behind; The Albatross did follow, And every day, for food or play, Came to the mariners' hollo! In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud, It perched for vespers nine; Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white, Glimmered the white moon-shine." "God save thee, ancient Mariner! From the fiends, that plague thee thus!-- Why look'st thou so?"--With my cross-bow I shot the Albatross. * * * * * PART II The Sun now rose upon the right: Out of the sea came he, Still hid in mist, and on the left Went down into the sea. And the good south wind still blew behind, But no sweet bird did follow, Nor any day for food or play Came to the mariners' hollo! And I had done a hellish thing, And it would work 'em woe: For all averred, I had killed the bird That made the breeze to blow. Ah wretch! said they, the bird to slay, That made the breeze to blow! Nor, dim nor red, like God's own head, The glorious Sun uprist: Then all averred, I had killed the bird That brought the fog and mist. 'Twas right, said they, such birds to slay, That bring the fog and mist. The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, The furrow followed free; We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea. Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down, 'Twas sad as sad could be; And we did speak only to break The silence of the sea! All in a hot and copper sky, The bloody Sun, at noon, Right up above the mast did stand, No bigger than the Moon. Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean. Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where Nor any drop to drink. The very deep did rot: O Christ! That ever this should be! Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs Upon the slimy sea. About, about, in reel and rout The death-fires danced at night; The water, like a witch's oils, Burnt green, and blue and white. And some in dreams assured were , Of the Spirit that plagued us so; Nine fathom deep he had followed us From the land of mist and snow. And every tongue, through utter drought, Was withered at the root; We could not speak, no more than if We had been choked with soot. Ah! well a-day! what evil looks Had I from old and young! Instead of the cross, the Albatross About my neck was hung. PART III There passed a weary time. Each throat Was parched, and glazed each eye. A weary time! a weary time! How glazed each weary eye, When looking westward, I beheld A something in the sky. At first it seemed a little speck, And then it seemed a mist; It moved and moved, and took at last A certain shape, I wist. A speck, a mist, a shape, I wist! And still it neared and neared: As if it dodged a water-sprite, It plunged and tacked and veered. With throats unslaked, with black lips baked, We could nor laugh nor wail; Through utter drought all dumb we stood! I bit my arm, I sucked the blood, And cried, A sail! a sail! With throats unslaked, with black lips baked, Agape they heard me call: Gramercy! they for joy did grin, And all at once their breath drew in, As they were drinking all. See! see! (I cried) she tacks no more! Hither to work us weal; Without a breeze, without a tide, She steadies with upright keel! The western wave was all a-flame, The day was well nigh done! Almost upon the western wave Rested the broad bright Sun; When that strange shape drove suddenly Betwixt us and the Sun. And straight the Sun was flecked with bars, (Heaven's Mother send us grace!) As if through a dungeon-grate he peered With broad and burning face. Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud) How fast she nears and nears! Are those her sails that glance in the Sun, Like restless gossameres? Are those her ribs through which the Sun Did peer, as through a grate? And is that Woman all her crew? Is that a Death? and are there two? Is Death that Woman's mate? Her lips were red, her looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was as white as leprosy, The Night-mare Life-in-Death was she, Who thicks man's blood with cold. The naked hulk alongside came, And the twain were casting dice; "The game is done! I've won! I've won!" Quoth she, and whistles thrice. The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out: At one stride comes the dark; With far-heard whisper, o'er the sea, Off shot the spectre-bark. We listened and looked sideways up! Fear at my heart, as at a cup, My life-blood seemed to sip! The stars were dim, and thick the night, The steersman's face by his lamp gleamed white; From the sails the dew did drip-- Till clomb above the eastern bar The horned Moon, with one bright star Within the nether tip. One after one, by the star-dogged Moon, Too quick for groan or sigh, Each turned his face with a ghastly pang, And cursed me with his eye. Four times fifty living men, (And I heard nor sigh nor groan) With heavy thump, a lifeless lump, They dropped down one by one. The souls did from their bodies fly,-- They fled to bliss or woe! And every soul, it passed me by, Like the whizz of my cross-bow! PART IV "I fear thee, ancient Mariner! I fear thy skinny hand! And thou art long, and lank, and brown, As is the ribbed sea-sand.[1] I fear thee and thy glittering eye, And thy skinny hand, so brown."-- Fear not, fear not, thou Wedding-Guest! This body dropt not down. Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea! And never a saint took pity on My soul in agony. The many men, so beautiful! And they all dead did lie: And a thousand thousand slimy things Lived on; and so did I. I looked upon the rotting sea, And drew my eyes away; I looked upon the rotting deck, And there the dead men lay. I looked to heaven, and tried to pray; But or ever a prayer had gusht, A wicked whisper came, and made My heart as dry as dust. I closed my lids, and kept them close, And the balls like pulses beat; For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky, Lay like a load on my weary eye, And the dead were at my feet. The cold sweat melted from their limbs, Nor rot nor reek did they: The look with which they looked on me Had never passed away. An orphan's curse would drag to hell A spirit from on high; But oh! more horrible than that Is a curse in a dead man's eye! Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse, And yet I could not die. The moving Moon went up the sky, And no where did abide: Softly she was going up, And a star or two beside-- Her beams bemocked the sultry main, Like April hoar-frost spread; But where the ship's huge shadow lay, The charmed water burnt alway A still and awful red. Beyond the shadow of the ship, I watched the water-snakes: They moved in tracks of shining white, And when they reared, the elfish light Fell off in hoary flakes. Within the shadow of the ship I watched their rich attire: Blue, glossy green, and velvet black, They coiled and swam; and every track Was a flash of golden fire. O happy living things! no tongue Their beauty might declare: A spring of love gushed from my heart, And I blessed them unaware: Sure my kind saint took pity on me, And I blessed them unaware. The selfsame moment I could pray; And from my neck so free The Albatross fell off, and sank Like lead into the sea. PART V Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing, Beloved from pole to pole! To Mary Queen the praise be given! She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven, That slid into my soul. The silly buckets on the deck, That had so long remained, I dreamt that they were filled with dew; And when I awoke, it rained. My lips were wet, my throat was cold, My garments all were dank; Sure I had drunken in my dreams, And still my body drank. I moved, and could not feel my limbs: I was so light--almost I thought that I had died in sleep; And was a blessed ghost. And soon I heard a roaring wind: It did not come anear; But with its sound it shook the sails, That were so thin and sere. The upper air burst into life! And a hundred fire-flags sheen, To and fro they were hurried about! And to and fro, and in and out, The wan stars danced between. And the coming wind did roar more loud, And the sails did sigh like sedge; And the rain poured down from one black cloud; The Moon was at its edge. The thick black cloud was cleft, and still The Moon was at its side: Like waters shot from some high crag, The lightning fell with never a jag, A river steep and wide. The loud wind never reached the ship, Yet now the ship moved on! Beneath the lightning and the Moon The dead men gave a groan. They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose, Nor spake, nor moved their eyes; It had been strange, even in a dream,! To have seen those dead men rise. The helmsman steered, the ship moved on; Yet never a breeze up blew; The mariners all 'gan work the ropes, Where they were wont to do; They raised their limbs like lifeless tools-- We were a ghastly crew. The body of my brother's son Stood by me, knee to knee: The body and I pulled at one rope But he said nought to me. "I fear thee, ancient Mariner!" Be calm, thou Wedding-Guest! 'Twas not those souls that fled in pain, Which to their corses came again, But a troop of spirits blest: For when it dawned--they dropped their arms, And clustered round the mast; Sweet sounds rose slowly through their mouths, And from their bodies passed. Around, around, flew each sweet sound, Then darted to the Sun; Slowly the sounds came back again, Now mixed, now one by one. Sometimes a-dropping from the sky I heard the sky-lark sing; Sometimes all little birds that are, How they seemed to fill the sea and air With their sweet jargoning! And now 'twas like all instruments, Now like a lonely flute; And now it is an angel's song, That makes the heavens be mute. It ceased; yet still the sails made on A pleasant noise till noon, A noise like of a hidden brook In the leafy month of June, That to the sleeping woods all night Singeth a quiet tune. Till noon we quietly sailed on, Yet never a breeze did breathe: Slowly and smoothly went the ship, Moved onward from beneath. Under the keel nine fathom deep, From the land of mist and snow, The spirit slid: and it was he That made the ship to go. The sails at noon left off their tune, And the ship stood still also. The Sun, right up above the mast, Had fixed her to the ocean: But in a minute she 'gan stir, With a short uneasy motion-- Backwards and forwards half her length With a short uneasy motion. Then like a pawing horse let go, She made a sudden bound: It flung the blood into my head, And I fell down in a swound. How long in that same fit I lay, I have not to declare; But ere my living life returned, I heard and in my soul discerned Two voices in the air. "Is it he?" quoth one, "Is this the man? By him who died on cross, With his cruel bow he laid full low The harmless Albatross. The spirit who bideth by himself In the land of mist and snow, He loved the bird that loved the man Who shot him with his bow." The other was a softer voice, As soft as honey-dew: Quoth he, "The man hath penance done, And penance more will do." PART VI FIRST VOICE "But tell me, tell me! speak again, Thy soft response renewing-- What makes that ship drive on so fast? What is the ocean doing?" SECOND VOICE "Still as a slave before his lord, The ocean hath no blast; His great bright eye most silently Up to the Moon is cast-- If he may know which way to go; For she guides him smooth or grim. See, brother, see! how graciously She looketh down on him." FIRST VOICE "But why drives on that ship so fast, Without or wave or wind?" SECOND VOICE "The air is cut away before, And closes from behind. Fly, brother, fly! more high, more high! Or we shall be belated: For slow and slow that ship will go, When the Mariner's trance is abated." I woke, and we were sailing on As in a gentle weather: 'Twas night, calm night, the moon was high, The dead men stood together. All stood together on the deck, For a charnel-dungeon fitter: All fixed on me their stony eyes, That in the Moon did glitter. The pang, the curse, with which they died, Had never passed away: I could not draw my eyes from theirs, Nor turn them up to pray. And now this spell was snapt: once more I viewed the ocean green, And looked far forth, yet little saw Of what had else been seen-- Like one, that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows, a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread. But soon there breathed a wind on me, Nor sound nor motion made: Its path was not upon the sea, In ripple or in shade. It raised my hair, it fanned my cheek Like a meadow-gale of spring-- It mingled strangely with my fears, Yet it felt like a welcoming. Swiftly, swiftly flew the ship, Yet she sailed softly too: Sweetly, sweetly blew the breeze-- On me alone it blew. Oh! dream of joy! is this indeed The light-house top I see? Is this the hill? is this the kirk? Is this mine own countree? We drifted o'er the harbour-bar, And I with sobs did pray-- O let me be awake, my God! Or let me sleep alway. The harbour-bay was clear as glass, So smoothly it was strewn! And on the bay the moonlight lay, And the shadow of the Moon. The rock shone bright, the kirk no less, That stands above the rock: The moonlight steeped in silentness The steady weathercock. And the bay was white with silent light Till rising from the same, Full many shapes, that shadows were, In crimson colours came. A little distance from the prow Those crimson shadows were: I turned my eyes upon the deck-- Oh, Christ! what saw I there! Each corse lay flat, lifeless and flat, And, by the holy rood! A man all light, a seraph-man, On every corse there stood. This seraph-band, each waved his hand: It was a heavenly sight! They stood as signals to the land, Each one a lovely light; This seraph-band, each waved his hand, No voice did they impart-- No voice; but oh! the silence sank Like music on my heart. But soon I heard the dash of oars, I heard the Pilot's cheer; My head was turned perforce away, And I saw a boat appear. The Pilot and the Pilot's boy, I heard them coming fast: Dear Lord in Heaven! it was a joy The dead men could not blast. I saw a third--I heard his voice: It is the Hermit good! He singeth loud his godly hymns That he makes in the wood. He'll shrieve my soul, he'll wash away The Albatross's blood. PART VII This Hermit good lives in that wood Which slopes down to the sea. How loudly his sweet voice he rears! He loves to talk with marineres That come from a far countree. He kneels at morn, and noon, and eve-- He hath a cushion plump: It is the moss that wholly hides The rotted old oak-stump. The skiff-boat neared: I heard them talk,' "Why, this is strange, I trow! Where are those lights so many and fair, That signal made but now?" "Strange, by my faith!" the Hermit said-- "And they answered not our cheer! The planks looked warped! and see those sails, How thin they are and sere! I never saw aught like to them, Unless perchance it were Brown skeletons of leaves that lag My forest-brook along; When the ivy-tod is heavy with snow, And the owlet whoops to the wolf below, That eats the she-wolf's young." "Dear Lord! it hath a fiendish look- (The Pilot made reply) I am a-feared"--"Push on, push on!" Said the Hermit cheerily. The boat came closer to the ship, But I nor spake nor stirred; The boat came close beneath the ship, And straight a sound was heard. Under the water it rumbled on, Still louder and more dread: It reached the ship, it split the bay; The ship went down like lead. Stunned by that loud and dreadful sound, Which sky and ocean smote, Like one that hath been seven days drowned My body lay afloat; But swift as dreams, myself I found Within the Pilot's boat. Upon the whirl, where sank the ship, The boat spun round and round; And all was still, save that the hill Was telling of the sound. I moved my lips--the Pilot shrieked And fell down in a fit; The holy Hermit raised his eyes, And prayed where he did sit. I took the oars: the Pilot's boy, Who now doth crazy go, Laughed loud and long, and all the while His eyes went to and fro. "Ha! ha!" quoth he, "full plain I see, The Devil knows how to row." And now, all in my own countree, I stood on the firm land! The Hermit stepped forth from the boat, And scarcely he could stand. "O shrieve me, shrieve me, holy man!" The Hermit crossed his brow. "Say quick," quoth he, "I bid thee say What manner of man art thou?" Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched With a woful agony, Which forced me to begin my tale; And then it left me free. Since then, at an uncertain hour, That agony returns: And till my ghastly tale is told, This heart within me burns. I pass, like night, from land to land; I have strange power of speech; That moment that his face I see, I know the man that must hear me: To him my tale I teach. What loud uproar bursts from that door! The wedding-guests are there: But in the garden-bower the bride And bride-maids singing are: And hark the little vesper bell, Which biddeth me to prayer! O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been Alone on a wide wide sea: So lonely 'twas, that God himself Scarce seemed there to be. O sweeter than the marriage-feast, Tis sweeter far to me, To walk together to the kirk With a goodly company!-- To walk together to the kirk, And all together pray, While each to his great Father bends, Old men, and babes, and loving friends, And youths and maidens gay! Farewell, farewell! but this I tell To thee, thou Wedding-Guest! He prayeth well, who loveth well Both man and bird and beast. He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all. The Mariner, whose eye is bright, Whose beard with age is hoar, Is gone: and now the Wedding-Guest Turned from the bridegroom's door. He went like one that hath been stunned, And is of sense forlorn: A sadder and a wiser man, He rose the morrow morn. 1797-1798. [Footnote 1: For the last two lines of this stanza, I am indebted to Mr. Wordsworth. It was on a delightful walk from Nether Stowey to Dulverton, with him and his sister, in the autumn of 1797, that this poem was planned, and in part composed. [Note of S. T. C., first printed in _Sibylline Leaves_.]] CHRISTABEL PART THE FIRST 'Tis the middle of night by the castle clock, And the owls have awakened the crowing cock," Tu--whit!--Tu--whoo! And hark, again! the crowing cock, How drowsily it crew. Sir Leoline; the Baron rich, Hath a toothless mastiff, which From her kennel beneath the rock Maketh answer to the clock, Four for the quarters, and twelve for the hour; Ever and aye, by shine and shower, Sixteen short howls, not over loud; Some say, she sees my lady's shroud. Is the night chilly and dark? The night is chilly, but not dark. The thin gray cloud is spread on high, It covers but not hides the sky. The moon is behind, and at the full; And yet she looks both small and dull. The night is chill, the cloud is gray: 'Tis a month before the month of May, And the Spring comes slowly up this way. The lovely lady, Christabel, Whom her father loves so well, What makes her in the wood so late, A furlong from the castle gate? She had dreams all yesternight Of her own betrothed knight; And she in the midnight wood will pray For the weal of her lover that's far away. She stole along, she nothing spoke, The sighs she heaved were soft and low, And naught was green upon the oak But moss and rarest misletoe: She kneels beneath the huge oak tree, And in silence prayeth she. The lady sprang up suddenly, The lovely lady, Christabel! It moaned as near, as near can be, But what it is she cannot tell.-- On the other side it seems to be, Of the huge, broad-breasted, old oak tree. The night is chill; the forest bare; Is it the wind that moaneth bleak? There is not wind enough in the air To move away the ringlet curl From the lovely lady's cheek-- There is not wind enough to twirl The one red leaf, the last of its clan, That dances as often as dance it can, Hanging so light, and hanging so high, On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky. Hush, beating heart of Christabel! Jesu, Maria, shield her well! She folded her arms beneath her cloak, And stole to the other side of the oak. What sees she there? There she sees a damsel bright, Drest in a silken robe of white, That shadowy in the moonlight shone: The neck that made that white robe wan, Her stately neck, and arms were bare; Her blue-veined feet unsandal'd were, And wildly glittered here and there The gems entangled in her hair. I guess, 'twas frightful there to see A lady so richly clad as she-- Beautiful exceedingly! Mary mother, save me now! (Said Christabel,) And who art thou? The lady strange made answer meet, And her voice was faint and sweet:-- Have pity on my sore distress, I scarce can speak for weariness: Stretch forth thy hand, and have no fear! Said Christabel, How camest thou here? And the lady, whose voice was faint and sweet, Did thus pursue her answer meet:-- My sire is of a noble line, And my name is Geraldine: Five warriors seized me yestermorn, Me, even me, a maid forlorn: They choked my cries with force and fright, And tied me on a palfrey white. The palfrey was as fleet as wind, And they rode furiously behind. They spurred amain, their steeds were white: And once we crossed the shade of night. As sure as Heaven shall rescue me, I have no thought what men they be; Nor do I know how long it is (For I have lain entranced I wis) Since one, the tallest of the five, Took me from the palfrey's back, A weary woman, scarce alive. Some muttered words his comrades spoke: He placed me underneath this oak; He swore they would return with haste; Whither they went I cannot tell I thought I heard, some minutes past, Sounds as of a castle bell. Stretch forth thy hand (thus ended she), And help a wretched maid to flee. Then Christabel stretched forth her hand, And comforted fair Geraldine: O well, bright dame! may you command The service of Sir Leoline; And gladly our stout chivalry Will he send forth and friends withal To guide and guard you safe and free Home to your noble father's hall. She rose: and forth with steps they passed That strove to be, and were not, fast. Her gracious stars the lady blest, And thus spake on sweet Christabel: All our household are at rest, The hall as silent as the cell; Sir Leoline is weak in health, And may not well awakened be, But we will move as if in stealth, And I beseech your courtesy, This night, to share your couch with me. They crossed the moat, and Christabel Took the key that fitted well; A little door she opened straight, All in the middle of the gate; The gate that was ironed within and without Where an army in battle array had marched out. The lady sank, belike through pain, And Christabel with might and main Lifted her up, a weary weight, Over the threshold of the gate: Then the lady rose again, And moved, as she were not in pain. So free from danger, free from fear, They crossed the court: right glad they were. And Christabel devoutly cried To the lady by her side, Praise we the Virgin all divine Who hath rescued thee from thy distress! Alas! alas! said Geraldine, I cannot speak for weariness. So free from danger, free from fear, They crossed the court: right glad they were. Outside her kennel, the mastiff old Lay fast asleep, in moonshine cold. The mastiff old did not awake, Yet she an angry moan did make! And what can ail the mastiff bitch? Never till now she uttered yell Beneath the eye of Christabel. Perhaps it is the owlet's scritch: For what can ail the mastiff bitch? They passed the hall, that echoes still, Pass as lightly as you will! The brands were flat, the brands were dying, Amid their own white ashes lying; But when the lady passed, there came A tongue of light, a fit of flame And Christabel saw the lady's eye, And nothing else saw she thereby, Save the boss of the shield of Sir Leoline tall, Which hung in a murky old niche in the wall. O softly tread, said Christabel, My father seldom sleepeth well. Sweet Christabel her feet doth bare, And jealous of the listening air They steal their way from stair to stair, Now in glimmer, and now in gloom, And now they pass the Baron's room, As still as death with stifled breath! And now have reached her chamber door; And now doth Geraldine press down The rushes of the chamber floor. The moon shines dim in the open air, And not a moonbeam enters here. But they without its light can see The chamber carved so curiously, Carved with figures strange and sweet, All made out of the carver's brain, For a lady's chamber meet: The lamp with twofold silver chain Is fastened to an angel's feet. The silver lamp burns dead and dim; But Christabel the lamp will trim. She trimmed the lamp, and made it bright, And left it swinging to and fro, While Geraldine, in wretched plight, Sank down upon the floor below. O weary lady, Geraldine, I pray you, drink this cordial wine! It is a wine of virtuous powers; My mother made it of wild flowers. And will your mother pity me, Who am a maiden most forlorn? Christabel answered--Woe is me! She died the hour that I was born. I have heard the grey-haired friar tell How on her death-bed she did say, That she should hear the castle-bell Strike twelve upon my wedding-day. O mother dear! that thou wert here! I would, said Geraldine, she were! But soon with altered voice, said she-- "Off, wandering mother! Peak and pine! I have power to bid thee flee." Alas! what ails poor Geraldine? Why stares she with unsettled eye? Can she the bodiless dead espy? And why with hollow voice cries she, "Off, woman, off! this hour is mine-- Though thou her guardian spirit be, Off, woman, off! 'tis given to me." Then Christabel knelt by the lady's side, And raised to heaven her eyes so blue--, Alas! said she, this ghastly ride-- Dear lady! it hath wildered you! The lady wiped her moist cold brow, And faintly said, "'tis over now!" Again the wild-flower wine she drank: Her fair large eyes 'gan glitter bright, And from the floor whereon she sank, The lofty lady stood upright: She was most beautiful to see, Like a lady of a far countrée. And thus the lofty lady spake-- "All they who live in the upper sky, Do love you, holy Christabel! And you love them, and for their sake And for the good which me befel, Even I in my degree will try, Fair maiden, to requite you well. But now unrobe yourself; for I Must pray, ere yet in bed I lie." Quoth Christabel, So let it be! And as the lady bade, did she. Her gentle limbs did she undress, And lay down in her loveliness. But through her brain of weal and woe So many thoughts moved to and fro, That vain it were her lids to close; So half-way from the bed she rose, And on her elbow did recline To look at the lady Geraldine. Beneath the lamp the lady bowed, And slowly rolled her eyes around Then drawing in her breath aloud, Like one that shuddered, she unbound The cincture from beneath her breast: Her silken robe, and inner vest, Dropt to her feet, and full in view, Behold! her bosom and half her side------ A sight to dream of, not to tell! O shield her! shield sweet Christabel! Yet Geraldine nor speaks nor stirs; Ah! what a stricken look was hers! Deep from within she seems half-way To lift some weight with sick assay, And eyes the maid and seeks delay; Then suddenly, as one defied, Collects herself in scorn and pride, And lay down by the Maiden's side!-- And in her arms the maid she took, Ah wel-a-day! And with low voice and doleful look These words did say: In the touch of this bosom there worketh a spell, Which is lord of thy utterance, Christabel! Thou knowest to-night, and wilt know to-morrow, This mark of my shame, this seal of my sorrow; But vainly thou warrest, For his is alone in Thy power to declare, That in the dim forest Thou heard'st a low moaning, And found'st a bright lady, surpassingly fair; And didst bring her home with thee in love and in charity, To shield her and shelter her from the damp air." THE CONCLUSION TO PART THE FIRST It was a lovely sight to see The lady Christabel, when she Was praying at the old oak tree. Amid the jagged shadows Of mossy leafless boughs, Kneeling in the moonlight, To make her gentle vows; Her slender palms together prest, Heaving sometimes on her breast; Her face resigned to bliss or bale-- Her face, oh call it fair not pale, And both blue eyes more, bright than clear, Each about to have a tear. With open eyes (ah woe is me!) Asleep, and dreaming fearfully, Fearfully dreaming, yet, I wis,. Dreaming that alone, which is-- O sorrow and shame! Can this be she, The lady, who knelt at the old oak tree? And lo! the worker of these harms, That holds the maiden in her arms, Seems to slumber still and mild, As a mother with her child. A star hath set, a star hath risen, O Geraldine! since arms of thine Have been the lovely lady's prison. O Geraldine! one hour was thine Thou'st had thy will! By tairn and rill, The night-birds all that hour were still. But now they are jubilant anew, From cliff and tower, tu-whoo! tu-whoo! Tu-whoo! tu-whoo! from wood and fell! And see! the lady Christabel Gathers herself from out her trance; Her limbs relax, her countenance Grows sad and soft; the smooth thin lids Close o'er her eyes; and tears she sheds Large tears that leave the lashes bright! And oft the while she seems to smile As infants at a sudden light! Yea, she doth smile, and she doth weep, Like a youthful hermitess, Beauteous in a wilderness, Who, praying always, prays in sleep. And, if she move unquietly, Perchance,'tis but the blood so free Comes back and tingles in her feet. No doubt, she hath a vision sweet. What if her guardian spirit 'twere, What if she knew her mother near? But this she knows, in joys and woes, That saints will aid if men will call: For the blue sky bends over all! 1797. PART THE SECOND Each matin bell, the Baron saith, Knells us back to a world of death. These words Sir Leoline first said, When he rose and found his lady dead: These words Sir Leoline will say Many a morn to his dying day! And hence the custom and law began That still at dawn the sacristan, Who duly pulls the heavy bell, Five and forty beads must tell Between each stroke--a warning knell, Which not a soul can choose but hear From Bratha Head to Wyndermere. Saith Bracy the bard, So let it knell! And let the drowsy sacristan Still count as slowly as he can! There is no lack of such, I ween, As well fill up the space between. In Langdale Pike and Witch's Lair, And Dungeon-ghyll so foully rent, With ropes of rock and bells of air Three sinful sextons' ghosts are pent, Who all give back, one after t'other, The death-note to their living brother; And oft too, by the knell offended, Just as their one! two! three! is ended, The devil mocks the doleful tale With a merry peal from Borrowdale. The air is still! through mist and cloud That merry peal comes ringing loud; And Geraldine shakes off her dread, And rises lightly from the bed; Puts on her silken vestments white, And tricks her hair in lovely plight, And nothing doubting of her spell Awakens the lady Christabel "Sleep you, sweet lady Christabel? I trust that you have rested well." And Christabel awoke and spied The same who lay down by her side-- O rather say, the same whom she Raised up beneath the old oak tree! Nay, fairer yet! and yet more fair! For she belike hath drunken deep Of all the blessedness of sleep! And while she spake, her looks, her air, Such gentle thankfulness declare, That (so it seemed) her girded vests Grew tight beneath her heaving breasts. "Sure I have sinn'd!" said Christabel, "Now heaven be praised if all be well!" And in low faltering tones, yet sweet, Did she the lofty lady greet With such perplexity of mind As dreams too lively leave behind. So quickly she rose, and quickly arrayed Her maiden limbs, and having prayed That He, who on the cross did groan, Might wash away her sins unknown, She forthwith led fair Geraldine To meet her sire, Sir Leoline. The lovely maid and the lady tall Are pacing both into the hall, And pacing on through page and groom, Enter the Baron's presence-room. The Baron rose, and while he prest His gentle daughter to his breast, With cheerful wonder in his eyes The lady Geraldine espies, And gave such welcome to the same, As might beseem so bright a dame! But when he heard the lady's tale, And when she told her father's name, Why waxed Sir Leoline so pale, Murmuring o'er the name again, Lord Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine? Alas! they had been friends in youth; But whispering tongues can poison truth; And constancy lives in realms above; And life is thorny; and youth is vain; And to be wroth with one we love Doth work like madness in the brain. And thus it chanced, as I divine, With Roland and Sir Leoline. Each spake words of high disdain And insult to his heart's best brother: They parted--ne'er to meet again! But never either found another To free the hollow heart from paining-- They stood aloof, the scars remaining, Like cliffs which had been rent asunder; A dreary sea now flows between. But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder, Shall wholly do away, I ween, The marks of that which once hath been. Sir Leoline, a moment's space, Stood gazing on the damsel's face: And the youthful Lord of Tryermaine Came back upon his heart again. O then the Baron forgot his age, His noble heart swelled high with rage; He swore by the wounds in Jesu's side He would proclaim it far and wide, With trump and solemn heraldry, That they, who thus had wronged the dame Were base as spotted infamy! "And if they dare deny the same, My herald shall appoint a week, And let the recreant traitors seek My tourney court--that there and then I may dislodge their reptile souls From the bodies and forms of men!" He spake: his eye in lightning rolls! For the lady was ruthlessly seized; and he kenned In the beautiful lady the child of his friend! And now the tears were on his face, And fondly in his arms he took Fair Geraldine, who met the embrace, Prolonging it with joyous look. Which when she viewed, a vision fell Upon the soul of Christabel, The vision of fear, the touch and pain! She shrunk and shuddered, and saw again-- (Ah, woe is me! Was it for thee, Thou gentle maid! such sights to see?) Again she saw that bosom old, Again she felt that bosom cold, And drew in her breath with a hissing sound: Whereat the Knight turned wildly round, And nothing saw, but his own sweet maid With eyes upraised, as one that prayed. The touch, the sight, had passed away, And in its stead that vision blest, Which comforted her after-rest, While in the lady's arms she lay, Had put a rapture in her breast, And on her lips and o'er her eyes Spread smiles like light! With new surprise, "What ails then my beloved child?" The Baron said--His daughter mild Made answer, "All will yet be well!" I ween, she had no power to tell Aught else: so mighty was the spell. Yet he, who saw this Geraldine, Had deemed her sure a thing divine. Such sorrow with such grace she blended, As if she feared she had offended Sweet Christabel, that gentle maid! And with such lowly tones she prayed She might be sent without delay Home to her father's mansion. "Nay! Nay, by my soul!" said Leoline. "Ho! Bracy the bard, the charge be thine! Go thou, with music sweet and loud, And take two steeds with trappings proud, And take the youth whom thou lov'st best To bear thy harp, and learn thy song, And clothe you both in solemn vest, And over the mountains haste along, Lest wandering folk, that are abroad, Detain you on the valley road. "And when he has crossed the Irthing flood, My merry bard! he hastes, he hastes Up Knorren Moor, through Halegarth Wood, And reaches soon that castle good Which stands and threatens Scotland's wastes. "Bard Bracy! bard Bracy! your horses are fleet, Ye must ride up the hall, your music so sweet, More loud than your horses' echoing feet! And loud and loud to Lord Roland call, Thy daughter is safe in Langdale hall! Thy beautiful daughter is safe and free-- Sir Leoline greets thee thus through me. He bids thee come without delay With all thy numerous array; And take thy lovely daughter home: And he will meet thee on the way With all his numerous array White with their panting palfreys' foam: And, by mine honour! I will say, That I repent me of the day When I spake words of fierce disdain To Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine!-- --For since that evil hour hath flown, Many a summer's sun hath shone; Yet ne'er found I a friend again Like Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine." The lady fell, and clasped his knees, Her face upraised, her eyes o'erflowing; And Bracy replied, with faltering voice, His gracious hail on all bestowing; "Thy words, thou sire of Christabel, Are sweeter than my harp can tell; Yet might I gain a boon of thee, This day my journey should not be, So strange a dream hath come to me; That I had vowed with music loud To clear yon wood from thing unblest, Warn'd by a vision in my rest! For in my sleep I saw that dove, That gentle bird, whom thou dost love, And call'st by thy own daughter's name-- Sir Leoline! I saw the same, Fluttering, and uttering fearful moan, Among the green herbs in the forest alone. Which when I saw and when I heard, I wonder'd what might ail the bird; For nothing near it could I see, Save the grass and green herbs underneath the old tree. "And in my dream, methought, I went To search out what might there be found; And what the sweet bird's trouble meant, That thus lay fluttering on the ground. I went and peered, and could descry No cause for her distressful cry; But yet for her dear lady's sake I stooped, methought, the dove to take, When lo! I saw a bright green snake Coiled around its wings and neck. Green as the herbs on which it couched, Close by the dove's its head it crouched; And with the dove it heaves and stirs, Swelling its neck as she swelled hers! I woke; it was the midnight hour, The clock was echoing in the tower; But though my slumber was gone by, This dream it would not pass away-- It seems to live upon my eye! And thence I vowed this self-same day With music strong and saintly song To wander through the forest bare, Lest aught unholy loiter there." Thus Bracy said: the Baron, the while, Half-listening heard him with a smile; Then turned to Lady Geraldine, His eyes made up of wonder and love; And said in courtly accents fine, "Sweet maid, Lord Roland's beauteous dove, With arms more strong than harp or song, Thy sire and I will crush the snake!" He kissed her forehead as he spake, And Geraldine in maiden wise Casting down her large bright eyes, With blushing cheek and courtesy fine She turned her from Sir Leoline; Softly gathering up her train, That o'er her right arm fell again; And folded her arms across her chest, And couched her head upon her breast, And looked askance at Christabel-- Jesu, Maria, shield her well! A snake's small eye blinks dull and shy, And the lady's eyes they shrunk in her head, Each shrunk up to a serpent's eye, And with somewhat of malice, and more of dread, At Christabel she look'd askance!-- One moment--and the sight was fled! But Christabel in dizzy trance Stumbling on the unsteady ground Shuddered aloud, with a hissing sound; And Geraldine again turned round, And like a thing, that sought relief, Full of wonder and full of grief, She rolled her large bright eyes divine Wildly on Sir Leoline. The maid, alas! her thoughts are gone, She nothing sees--no sight but one! The maid, devoid of guile and sin, I know not how, in fearful wise, So deeply had she drunken in That look, those shrunken serpent eyes, That all her features were resigned To this sole image in her mind: And passively did imitate That look of dull and treacherous hate! And thus she stood, in dizzy trance, Still picturing that look askance With forced unconscious sympathy Full before her father's view-- As far as such a look could be In eyes so innocent and blue! And when the trance was o'er, the maid Paused awhile, and inly prayed: Then falling at the Baron's feet, "By my mother's soul do I entreat That thou this woman send away!" She said: and more she could not say: For what she knew she could not tell, O'er-mastered by the mighty spell. Why is thy cheek so wan and wild, Sir Leoline? Thy only child Lies at thy feet, thy joy, thy pride, So fair, so innocent, so mild; The same, for whom thy lady died! O, by the pangs of her dear mother Think thou no evil of thy child! For her, and thee, and for no other, She prayed the moment ere she died: Prayed that the babe for whom she died, Might prove her dear lord's joy and pride! That prayer her deadly pangs beguiled, Sir Leoline! And wouldst thou wrong thy only child, Her child and thine? Within the Baron's heart and brain If thoughts, like these, had any share, They only swelled his rage and pain, And did but work confusion there. His heart was cleft with pain and rage, His cheeks they quivered, his eyes were wild, Dishonour'd thus in his old age; Dishonour'd by his only child, And all his hospitality To the insulted daughter of his friend By more than woman's jealousy Brought thus to a disgraceful end-- He rolled his eye with stern regard Upon the gentle minstrel bard, And said in tones abrupt, austere-- "Why, Bracy! dost thou loiter here? I bade thee hence!" The bard obeyed; And turning from his own sweet maid, The aged knight, Sir Leoline, Led forth the lady Geraldine! 1801. THE CONCLUSION TO PART THE SECOND A little child, a limber elf, Singing, dancing to itself, A fairy thing with red round cheeks, That always finds, and never seeks, Makes such a vision to the sight As fills a father's eyes with light; And pleasures flow in so thick and fast Upon his heart, that he at last Must needs express his love's excess With words of unmeant bitterness. Perhaps 'tis pretty to force together Thoughts so all unlike each other; To mutter and mock a broken charm, To dally with wrong that does no harm. Perhaps 'tis tender too and pretty At each wild word to feel within A sweet recoil of love and pity. And what, if in a world of sin (O sorrow and shame should this be true!) Such giddiness of heart and brain Comes seldom save from rage and pain, So talks as it's most used to do. ?1801. KUBLA KHAN In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round: And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills, Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery. But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover! And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, A mighty fountain momently was forced: Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail: And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever It flung up momently the sacred river. Five miles meandering with a mazy motion Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean: And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war! The shadow of the dome of pleasure Floated midway on the waves; Where was heard the mingled measure From the fountain and the caves. It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice! A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid; And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora. Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight 'twould win me, That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome! those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise. 1798. LEWTI OR THE CIRCASSIAN LOVE-CHAUNT At midnight by the stream I roved, To forget the form I loved. Image of Lewti! from my mind Depart; for Lewti is not kind. The Moon was high, the moonlight gleam And the shadow of a star Heaved upon Tamaha's stream; But the rock shone brighter far, The rock half sheltered from my view By pendent boughs of tressy yew.-- So shines my Lewti's forehead fair, Gleaming through her sable hair, Image of Lewti! from my mind Depart; for Lewti is not kind. I saw a cloud of palest hue, Onward to the moon it passed; Still brighter and more bright it grew, With floating colours not a few, Till it reach'd the moon at last: Then the cloud was wholly bright, With a rich and amber light! And so with many a hope I seek And with such joy I find my Lewti; And even so my pale wan cheek Drinks in as deep a flush of beauty! Nay, treacherous image! leave my mind, If Lewti never will be kind. The little cloud-it floats away, Away it goes; away so soon? Alas! it has no power to stay: Its hues are dim, its hues are grey-- Away it passes from the moon! How mournfully it seems to fly, Ever fading more and more, To joyless regions of the sky-- And now 'tis whiter than before! As white as my poor cheek will be, When, Lewti! on my couch I lie, A dying man for love of thee. Nay, treacherous image! leave my mind-- And yet, thou didst not look unkind. I saw a vapour in the sky, Thin, and white, and very high; I ne'er beheld so thin a cloud: Perhaps the breezes that can fly Now below and now above, Have snatched aloft the lawny shroud Of Lady fair--that died for love. For maids, as well as youths, have perished From fruitless love too fondly cherished. Nay, treacherous image! leave my mind-- For Lewti never will be kind. Hush! my heedless feet from under Slip the crumbling banks for ever: Like echoes to a distant thunder, They plunge into the gentle river. The river-swans have heard my tread, And startle from their reedy bed. O beauteous birds! methinks ye measure Your movements to some heavenly tune! O beauteous birds! 'tis such a pleasure To see you move beneath the moon, I would it were your true delight To sleep by day and wake all night. I know the place where Lewti lies When silent night has closed her eyes: It is a breezy jasmine-bower, The nightingale sings o'er her head: Voice of the Night! had I the power That leafy labyrinth to thread, And creep, like thee, with soundless tread, I then might view her bosom white Heaving lovely to my sight, As these two swans together heave On the gently-swelling wave. Oh! that she saw me in a dream, And dreamt that I had died for care; All pale and wasted I would seem Yet fair withal, as spirits are! I'd die indeed, if I might see Her bosom heave, and heave for me! Soothe, gentle image! soothe my mind! To-morrow Lewti may be kind. 1794. THE BALLAD OF THE DARK LADIE A FRAGMENT Beneath yon birch with silver bark, And boughs so pendulous and fair, The brook falls scatter'd down the rock: And all is mossy there! And there upon the moss she sits, The Dark Ladié in silent pain; The heavy tear is in her eye, And drops and swells again. Three times she sends her little page Up the castled mountain's breast, If he might find the Knight that wears The Griffin for his crest. The sun was sloping down the sky, And she had linger'd there all day, Counting moments, dreaming fears-- Oh wherefore can he stay? She hears a rustling o'er the brook, She sees far off a swinging bough! "'Tis He! 'Tis my betrothed Knight! Lord Falkland, it is Thou!" She springs, she clasps him round the neck, She sobs a thousand hopes and fears, Her kisses glowing on his cheeks She quenches with her tears. * * * * * "My friends with rude ungentle words They scoff and bid me fly to thee! O give me shelter in thy breast! O shield and shelter me! "My Henry, I have given thee much, I gave what I can ne'er recall, I gave my heart, I gave my peace, O Heaven! I gave thee all." The Knight made answer to the Maid, While to his heart he held her hand, "Nine castles hath my noble sire, None statelier in the land. "The fairest one shall be my love's, The fairest castle of the nine! Wait only till the stars peep out, The fairest shall be thine: "Wait only till the hand of eve Hath wholly closed yon western bars, And through the dark we two will steal Beneath the twinkling stars!"-- "The dark? the dark? No! not the dark? The twinkling stars? How, Henry? How? O God! 'twas in the eye of noon He pledged his sacred vow! "And in the eye of noon my love Shall lead me from my mother's door, Sweet boys and girls all clothed in white Strewing flowers before: "But first the nodding minstrels go With music meet for lordly bowers, The children next in snow-white vests, Strewing buds and flowers! "And then my love and I shall pace, My jet black hair in pearly braids, Between our comely bachelors And blushing bridal maids." * * * * * 1798. LOVE All thoughts, all passions, all delights, Whatever stirs this mortal frame, All are but ministers of Love, And feed his sacred flame. Oft in my waking dreams do I Live o'er again that happy hour, When midway on the mount I lay, Beside the ruined tower. The moonshine, stealing o'er the scene Had blended with the lights of eve; And she was there, my hope, my joy, My own dear Genevieve! She leant against the armed man, The statue of the armed knight; She stood and listened to my lay, Amid the lingering light. Few sorrows hath she of her own. My hope! my joy! my Genevieve! She loves me best, whene'er I sing The songs that make her grieve. I played a soft and doleful air, I sang an old and moving story-- An old rude song, that suited well That ruin wild and hoary. She listened with a flitting blush, With downcast eyes and modest grace; For well she knew, I could not choose But gaze upon her face. I told her of the Knight that wore Upon his shield a burning brand; And that for ten long years he wooed The Lady of the Land. I told her how he pined: and ah! The deep, the low, the pleading tone With which I sang another's love, Interpreted my own. She listened with a flitting blush, With downcast eyes, and modest grace; And she forgave me, that I gazed Too fondly on her face! But when I told the cruel scorn That crazed that bold and lovely Knight, And that he crossed the mountain-woods, Nor rested day nor night; That sometimes from the savage den, And sometimes from the darksome shade, And sometimes starting up at once In green and sunny glade,-- There came and looked him in the face An angel beautiful and bright; And that he knew it was a Fiend, This miserable Knight! And that unknowing what he did, He leaped amid a murderous band, And saved from outrage worse than death The Lady of the Land! And how she wept, and clasped his knees; And how she tended him in vain-- And ever strove to expiate The scorn that crazed his brain;-- And that she nursed him in a cave; And how his madness went away, When on the yellow forest-leaves A dying man he lay;-- His dying words-but when I reached That tenderest strain of all the ditty, My faltering voice and pausing harp Disturbed her soul with pity! All impulses of soul and sense Had thrilled my guileless Genevieve; The music and the doleful tale, The rich and balmy eve; And hopes, and fears that kindle hope, An undistinguishable throng, And gentle wishes long subdued, Subdued and cherished long! She wept with pity and delight, She blushed with love, and virgin-shame; And like the murmur of a dream, I heard her breathe my name. Her bosom heaved--she stepped aside, As conscious of my look she stepped-- Then suddenly, with timorous eye She fled to me and wept. She half enclosed me with her arms, She pressed me with a meek embrace; And bending back her head, looked up, And gazed upon my face. 'Twas partly love, and partly fear, And partly 'twas a bashful art, That I might rather feel, than see, The swelling of her heart. I calmed her fears, and she was calm, And told her love with virgin pride; And so I won my Genevieve, My bright and beauteous Bride. 1798-1799. THE THREE GRAVES A FRAGMENT OF A SEXTON'S TALE PART I The grapes upon the Vicar's wall Were ripe as ripe could be; And yellow leaves in sun and wind Were falling from the tree. On the hedge-elms in the narrow lane Still swung the spikes of corn: Dear Lord! it seems but yesterday-- Young Edward's marriage-morn. Up through that wood behind the church, There leads from Edward's door A mossy track, all over boughed, For half a mile or more. And from their house-door by that track The bride and bridegroom went; Sweet Mary, though she was not gay, Seemed cheerful and content. But when they to the church-yard came, I've heard poor Mary say, As soon as she stepped into the sun, Her heart it died away. And when the Vicar join'd their hands, Her limbs did creep and freeze; But when they prayed, she thought she saw Her mother on her knees. And o'er the church-path they returned-- I saw poor Mary's back, Just as she stepped beneath the boughs Into the mossy track. Her feet upon the mossy track The married maiden set: That moment--I have heard her say-- She wished she could forget. The shade o'er-flushed her limbs with heat-- Then came a chill like death: And when the merry bells rang out, They seemed to stop her breath. Beneath the foulest mother's curse No child could ever thrive: A mother is a mother still, The holiest thing alive. So five months passed: the mother still Would never heal the strife; But Edward was a loving man, And Mary a fond wife. "My sister may not visit us, My mother says her nay: O Edward! you are all to me, I wish for your sake I could be More lifesome and more gay. "I'm dull and sad! indeed, indeed I know I have no reason! Perhaps I am not well in health, And 'tis a gloomy season." 'Twas a drizzly time--no ice, no snow! And on the few fine days She stirred not out, lest she might meet Her mother in the ways. But Ellen, spite of miry ways And weather dark and dreary, Trudged every day to Edward's house, And made them all more cheery. Oh! Ellen was a faithful friend, More dear than any sister! As cheerful too as singing lark; And she ne'er left them till 'twas dark, And then they always missed her. And now Ash-Wednesday came-that day But few to church repair: For on that day you know we read The Commination prayer. Our late old Vicar, a kind man, Once, Sir, he said to me, He wished that service was clean out Of our good Liturgy. The mother walked into the church- To Ellen's seat she went: Though Ellen always kept her church All church-days during Lent. And gentle Ellen welcomed her With courteous looks and mild: Thought she, "What if her heart should melt, And all be reconciled!" The day was scarcely like a day-- The clouds were black outright: And many a night, with half a moon, I've seen the church more light. The wind was wild; against the glass The rain did beat and bicker; The church-tower swinging over head, You scarce could hear the Vicar! And then and there the mother knelt, And audibly she cried- "Oh! may a clinging curse consume This woman by my side! "O hear me, hear me, Lord in Heaven, Although you take my life-- O curse this woman, at whose house Young Edward woo'd his wife. "By night and day, in bed and bower, O let her cursed be!!! " So having prayed, steady and slow, She rose up from her knee! And left the church, nor e'er again The church-door entered she. I saw poor Ellen kneeling still, So pale! I guessed not why: When she stood up, there plainly was A trouble in her eye. And when the prayers were done, we all Came round and asked her why: Giddy she seemed, and sure, there was A trouble in her eye. But ere she from the church-door stepped She smiled and told us why: "It was a wicked woman's curse," Quoth she, "and what care I?" She smiled, and smiled, and passed it off Ere from the door she stept-- But all agree it would have been Much better had she wept. And if her heart was not at ease, This was her constant cry-- "It was a wicked woman's curse-- God's good, and what care I?" There was a hurry in her looks, Her struggles she redoubled: "It was a wicked woman's curse, And why should I be troubled?" These tears will come--I dandled her When 'twas the merest fairy-- Good creature! and she hid it all: She told it not to Mary. But Mary heard the tale: her arms Round Ellen's neck she threw; "O Ellen, Ellen, she cursed me, And now she hath cursed you!" I saw young Edward by himself Stalk fast adown the lee, He snatched a stick from every fence, A twig from every tree. He snapped them still with hand or knee, And then away they flew! As if with his uneasy limbs He knew not what to do! You see, good Sir! that single hill? His farm lies underneath: He heard it there, he heard it all, And only gnashed his teeth. Now Ellen was a darling love In all his joys and cares: And Ellen's name and Mary's name Fast-linked they both together came, Whene'er he said his prayers. And in the moment of his prayers He loved them both alike: Yea, both sweet names with one sweet joy Upon his heart did strike! He reach'd his home, and by his looks They saw his inward strife: And they clung round him with their arms, Both Ellen and his wife. And Mary could not check her tears, So on his breast she bowed; Then frenzy melted into grief, And Edward wept aloud. Dear Ellen did not weep at all, But closelier did she cling, And turned her face and looked as if She saw some frightful thing. PART II To see a man tread over graves I hold it no good mark; 'Tis wicked in the sun and moon, And bad luck in the dark! You see that grave? The Lord he gives, The Lord, he takes away: O Sir! the child of my old age Lies there as cold as clay. Except that grave, you scarce see one That was not dug by me; I'd rather dance upon 'em all Than tread upon these three! "Aye, Sexton!'tis a touching tale." You, Sir! are but a lad; This month I'm in my seventieth year, And still it makes me sad. And Mary's sister told it me, For three good hours and more; Though I had heard it, in the main, From Edward's self, before. Well! it passed off! the gentle Ellen Did well nigh dote on Mary; And she went oftener than before, And Mary loved her more and more: She managed all the dairy. To market she on market-days, To church on Sundays came; All seemed the same: all seemed so, Sir! But all was not the same! Had Ellen lost her mirth? Oh! no! But she was seldom cheerful; And Edward look'd as if he thought That Ellen's mirth was fearful. When by herself, she to herself Must sing some merry rhyme; She could not now be glad for hours, Yet silent all the time. And when she soothed her friend, through all Her soothing words 'twas plain She had a sore grief of her own, A haunting in her brain. And oft she said, I'm not grown thin! And then her wrist she spanned; And once when Mary was down-cast, She took her by the hand, And gazed upon her, and at first She gently pressed her hand; Then harder, till her grasp at length Did gripe like a convulsion! "Alas!" said she, "we ne'er can be Made happy by compulsion!" And once her both arms suddenly Round Mary's neck she flung, And her heart panted, and she felt The words upon her tongue. She felt them coming, but no power Had she the words to smother; And with a kind of shriek she cried, "Oh Christ! you're like your mother!" So gentle Ellen now no more Could make this sad house cheery; And Mary's melancholy ways Drove Edward wild and weary. Lingering he raised his latch at eve, Though tired in heart and limb: He loved no other place, and yet Home was no home to him. One evening he took up a book, And nothing in it read; Then flung it down, and groaning cried, "O! Heaven! that I were dead." Mary looked up into his face, And nothing to him said; She tried to smile, and on his arm Mournfully leaned her head. And he burst into tears, and fell Upon his knees in prayer: "Her heart is broke! O God! my grief, It is too great to bear!" 'Twas such a foggy time as makes Old sextons, Sir! like me, Rest on their spades to cough; the spring Was late uncommonly. And then the hot days, all at once, They came, we knew not how: You looked about for shade, when scarce A leaf was on a bough. It happened then ('twas in the bower, A furlong up the wood: Perhaps you know the place, and yet I scarce know how you should,) No path leads thither, 'tis not nigh To any pasture-plot; But clustered near the chattering brook, Lone hollies marked the spot. Those hollies of themselves a shape As of an arbour took, A close, round arbour; and it stands Not three strides from a brook. Within this arbour, which was still With scarlet berries hung, Were these three friends, one Sunday morn, Just as the first bell rung. 'Tis sweet to hear a brook, 'tis sweet To hear the Sabbath-bell, 'Tis sweet to hear them both at once, Deep in a woody dell. His limbs along the moss, his head Upon a mossy heap, With shut-up senses, Edward lay: That brook e'en on a working day Might chatter one to sleep. And he had passed a restless night, And was not well in health; The women sat down by his side, And talked as 'twere by stealth. "The Sun peeps through the close thick leaves, See, dearest Ellen! see! 'Tis in the leaves, a little sun, No bigger than your ee; "A tiny sun, and it has got A perfect glory too; Ten thousand threads and hairs of light, Make up a glory gay and bright Round that small orb, so blue." And then they argued of those rays, What colour they might be; Says this, "They're mostly green"; says that, "They're amber-like to me." So they sat chatting, while bad thoughts Were troubling Edward's rest; But soon they heard his hard quick pants, And the thumping in his breast. "A mother too!" these self-same words Did Edward mutter plain; His face was drawn back on itself, With horror and huge pain. Both groan'd at once, for both knew well What thoughts were in his mind; When he waked up, and stared like one That hath been just struck blind. He sat upright; and ere the dream Had had time to depart, "O God, forgive me!" (he exclaimed) "I have torn out her heart." Then Ellen shrieked, and forthwith burst Into ungentle laughter; And Mary shivered, where she sat, And never she smiled after. 1797-1809. _Carmen reliquum in futurum tempus relegatum._ To-morrow! and To-morrow! and To-morrow!----[Note of S.T.C.--l8l5.] DEJECTION: AN ODE Late, late yestreen I saw the new Moon, With the old Moon in her arms; And I fear, I fear, my Master dear! We shall have a deadly storm. _Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence._ I Well! If the Bard was weather-wise, who made The grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence, This night, so tranquil now, will not go hence Unroused by winds, that ply a busier trade Than those which mould yon cloud in lazy flakes, Or the dull sobbing drafty that moans and rakes Upon the strings of this �olian lute, Which better far were mute. For lo! the New-moon winter-bright! And overspread with phantom light, (With swimming phantom light o'erspread But rimmed and circled by a silver thread) I see the old Moon in her lap, foretelling The, coming-on of rain and squally blast. And oh that even now the gust were swelling, And the slant night-shower driving loud and fast! Those sounds which oft have raised me, whilst they awed, And sent my soul abroad, Might now perhaps their wonted impulse give, Might startle this dull pain, and make it move and live! II A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief, Which finds no natural outlet, no relief, In word, or sigh, or tear-- O Lady! in this wan and heartless mood, To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo'd, All this long eve, so balmy and serene, Have I been gazing on the western sky, And its peculiar tint of yellow green: And still I gaze--and with how blank an eye And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars, That give away their motion to the stars; Those stars, that glide behind them or between, Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue; I see them all so excellently fair, I see, not feel, how beautiful they are! III My genial spirits fail; And what can these avail To lift the smothering weight from off my breast? It were a vain endeavour, Though I should gaze for ever On that green light that lingers in the west: I may not hope from outward forms to win The passion and the life, whose fountains are within. IV O Lady! we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does Nature live: Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud! And would we aught behold, of higher worth, Than that inanimate cold world allowed To the poor loveless, ever-anxious crowd, Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud-- Enveloping the Earth-- And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, Of all sweet sounds the life and element! V O pure of heart! thou need'st not ask of me What this strong music in the soul may be! What, and wherein it doth exist, This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist, This beautiful and beauty-making power. Joy, virtuous Lady! Joy that ne'er was given, Save to the pure, and in their purest hour, Life, and Life's effluence, cloud at once and shower, Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power, Which wedding Nature to us gives in dower, A new Earth and new Heaven, Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud-- Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud-- We in ourselves rejoice! And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, All melodies the echoes of that voice, All colours a suffusion from that light. VI There was a time when, though my path was rough, This joy within me dallied with distress, And all misfortunes were but as the stuff Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness: For hope grew round me, like the twining vine, And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seemed mine. But now afflictions bow me down to earth: Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth But oh! each visitation Suspends what nature gave me at my birth, My shaping spirit of Imagination. For not to think of what I needs must feel, But to be still and patient, all I can; And haply by abstruse research to steal From my own nature all the natural man-- This was my sole resource, my only plan: Till that which suits a part infects the whole, And now is almost grown the habit of my soul. VII Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind, Reality's dark dream! I turn from you, and listen to the wind, Which long has raved unnoticed. What a scream Of agony by torture lengthened out That lute sent forth! Thou Wind, that rav'st without, Bare crag, or mountain-tairn, or blasted tree, Or pine-grove whither woodman never clomb, Or lonely house, long held the witches' home, Methinks were fitter instruments for thee, Mad Lutanist! who in this month of showers, Of dark-brown gardens, and of peeping flowers, Mak'st Devils' yule, with worse than wintry song, The blossoms, buds, and timorous leaves among. Thou Actor, perfect in all tragic sounds! Thou mighty Poet, even to frenzy bold! What tell'st thou now about? 'Tis of the rushing of an host in rout, With groans of trampled men, with smarting wounds-- At once they groan with pain, and shudder with the cold! But hush! there is a pause of deepest silence! And all that noise, as of a rushing crowd, With groans, and tremulous shudderings-all is over-- It tells another tale, with sounds less deep and loud! A tale of less affright, And tempered with delight, As Otway's self had framed the tender lay, 'Tis of a little child Upon a lonesome wild, Not far from home, but she hath lost her way: And now moans low in bitter grief and fear, And now screams loud, and hopes to make her mother hear. VIII Tis midnight, but small thoughts have I of sleep: Full seldom may my friend such vigils keep! Visit her, gentle Sleep! with wings of healing, And may this storm be but a mountain-birth, May all the stars hang bright above her dwelling, Silent as though they watched the sleeping Earth! With light heart may she rise, Gay fancy, cheerful eyes, Joy lift her spirit, joy attune her voice; To her may all things live, from pole to pole, Their life the eddying of her living soul! O simple spirit, guided from above, Dear Lady! friend devoutest of my choice, Thus mayest thou ever, evermore rejoice. 1802. ODE TO TRANQUILLITY Tranquility! thou better name Than all the family of Fame! Thou ne'er wilt leave my riper age To low intrigue, or factious rage; For oh! dear child of thoughtful Truth, To thee I gave my early youth, And left the bark, and blest the steadfast shore, Ere yet the tempest rose and scared me with its roar. Who late and lingering seeks thy shrine, On him but seldom, Power divine, Thy spirit rests! Satiety And Sloth, poor counterfeits of thee, Mock the tired worldling. Idle Hope And dire Remembrance interlope, To vex the feverish slumbers of the mind: The bubble floats before, the spectre stalks behind. But me thy gentle hand will lead At morning through the accustomed mead; And in the sultry summer's heat Will build me up a mossy seat; And when the gust of Autumn crowds, And breaks the busy moonlight clouds, Thou best the thought canst raise, the heart attune, Light as the busy clouds, calm as the gliding moon. The feeling heart, the searching soul, To thee I dedicate the whole! And while within myself I trace The greatness of some future race, Aloof with hermit-eye I scan The present works of present man-- A wild and dream-like trade of blood and guile, Too foolish for a tear, too wicked for a smile! 1801. FRANCE: AN ODE I Ye Clouds! that far above me float and pause, Whose pathless march no mortal may controul! Ye Ocean-Waves! that, wheresoe'er ye roll, Yield homage only to eternal laws! Ye Woods! that listen to the night-birds' singing, Midway the smooth and perilous slope reclined, Save when your own imperious branches swinging, Have made a solemn music of the wind! Where, like a man beloved of God, Through glooms, which never woodman trod, How oft, pursuing fancies holy, My moonlight way o'er flowering weeds I wound, Inspired, beyond the guess of folly, By each rude shape and wild unconquerable sound! O ye loud Waves! and O ye Forests high! And O ye Clouds that far above me soared! Thou rising Sun! thou blue rejoicing Sky! Yea, every thing that is and will be free! Bear witness for me, wheresoe'er ye be, With what deep worship I have still adored The spirit of divinest Liberty. II When France in wrath her giant-limbs upreared, And with that oath, which smote air, earth, and sea, Stamped her strong foot and said she would be free, Bear witness for me, how I hoped and feared! With what a joy my lofty gratulation Unawed I sang, amid a slavish band: And when to whelm the disenchanted nation, Like fiends embattled by a wizard's wand, The Monarchs marched in evil day, And Britain join'd the dire array; Though dear her shores and circling ocean, Though many friendships, many youthful loves Had swoln the patriot emotion And flung a magic light o'er all her hills and groves; Yet still my voice, unaltered, sang defeat To all that braved the tyrant-quelling lance, And shame too long delay'd and vain retreat! For ne'er, O Liberty! with partial aim I dimmed thy light or damped thy holy flame; But blessed the paeans of delivered France, And hung my head and wept at Britain's name. III "And what," I said, "though Blasphemy's loud scream With that sweet music of deliverance strove! Though all the fierce and drunken passions wove A dance more wild than e'er was maniac's dream! Ye storms, that round the dawning east assembled, The Sun was rising, though ye hid his light!" And when, to soothe my soul, that hoped and trembled, The dissonance ceased, and all seemed calm and bright; When France her front deep-scarr'd and gory Concealed with clustering wreaths of glory; When, insupportably advancing, Her arm made mockery of the warrior's ramp; While timid looks of fury glancing, Domestic treason, crushed beneath her fatal stamp, Writhed like a wounded dragon in his gore; Then I reproached my fears that would not flee; "And soon," I said, "shall Wisdom teach her lore In the low huts of them that toil and groan! And, conquering by her happiness alone, Shall France compel the nations to be free, Till Love and Joy look round, and call the Earth their own." IV Forgive me, Freedom! O forgive those dreams! I hear thy voice, I hear thy loud lament, From bleak Helvetia's icy caverns sent-- I hear thy groans upon her blood-stained streams! Heroes, that for your peaceful country perished, And ye that, fleeing, spot your mountain-snows With bleeding wounds; forgive me, that I cherished One thought that ever blessed your cruel foes! To scatter rage and traitorous guilt Where Peace her jealous home had built; A patriot-race to disinherit Of all that made their stormy wilds so dear; And with inexpiable spirit To taint the bloodless freedom of the mountaineer-- O France, that mockest Heaven, adulterous, blind, And patriot only in pernicious toils! Are these thy boasts, Champion of human kind? To mix with Kings in the low lust of sway, Yell in the hunt, and share the murderous prey; To insult the shrine of Liberty with spoils From freemen torn; to tempt and to betray? V The Sensual and the Dark rebel in vain, Slaves by their own compulsion! In mad game They burst their manacles and wear the name Of Freedom, graven on a heavier chain! O Liberty! with profitless endeavour Have I pursued thee, many a weary hour; But thou nor swell'st the victor's strain, nor ever Didst breathe thy soul in forms of human power. Alike from all, howe'er they praise thee, (Nor prayer, nor boastful name delays thee) Alike from Priestcraft's harpy minions, And factious Blasphemy's obscener slaves, Thou speedest on thy subtle pinions, The guide of homeless winds, and playmate of the waves! And there I felt thee!--on that sea-cliff's verge, Whose pines, scarce travelled by the breeze above, Had made one murmur with the distant surge! Yes, while I stood and gazed, my temples bare, And shot my being through earth, sea and air, Possessing all things with intensest love, O Liberty! my spirit felt thee there. _February_ 1798. FEARS IN SOLITUDE WRITTEN IN APRIL 1798, DURING THE ALARM OF AN INVASION A Green and silent spot, amid the hills, A small and silent dell! O'er stiller place No singing sky-lark ever poised himself. The hills are heathy, save that swelling slope, Which hath a gay and gorgeous covering on, All golden with the never-bloomless furze, Which now blooms most profusely: but the dell, Bathed by the mist, is fresh and delicate As vernal corn-field, or the unripe flax, When, through its half-transparent stalks, at eve, The level sunshine glimmers with green light. Oh! 'tis a quiet spirit-healing nook! Which all, methinks, would love; but chiefly he, The humble man, who, in his youthful years, Knew just so much of folly, as had made His early manhood more securely wise! Here he might lie on fern or withered heath, While from the singing lark (that sings unseen The minstrelsy that solitude loves best), And from the sun, and from the breezy air, Sweet influences trembled o'er his frame; And he, with many feelings, many thoughts, Made up a meditative joy, and found Religious meanings in the forms of Nature! And so, his senses gradually wrapt In a half sleep, he dreams of better worlds, And dreaming hears thee still, O singing lark; That singest like an angel in the clouds! My God! it is a melancholy thing For such a man, who would full fain preserve His soul in calmness, yet perforce must feel For all his human brethren--O my God! It weighs upon the heart, that he must think What uproar and what strife may now be stirring This way or that way o'er these silent hills-- Invasion, and the thunder and the shout, And all the crash of onset; fear and rage, And undetermined conflict--even now, Even now, perchance, and in his native isle: Carnage and groans beneath this blessed sun! We have offended, Oh! my countrymen! We have offended very grievously, And been most tyrannous. From east to west A groan of accusation pierces Heaven! The wretched plead against us; multitudes Countless and vehement, the sons of God, Our brethren! Like a cloud that travels on, Steam'd up from Cairo's swamps of pestilence, Even so, my countrymen! have we gone forth And borne to distant tribes slavery and pangs, And, deadlier far, our vices, whose deep taint With slow perdition murders the whole man, His body and his soul! Meanwhile, at home, All individual dignity and power Engulf'd in Courts, Committees, Institutions, Associations and Societies, A vain, speech-mouthing, speech-reporting Guild, One Benefit-Club for mutual flattery, We have drunk up, demure as at a grace, Pollutions from the brimming cup of wealth; Contemptuous of all honourable rule, Yet bartering freedom and the poor man's life For gold, as at a market! The sweet words Of Christian promise, words that even yet Might stem destruction, were they wisely preached, Are muttered o'er by men, whose tones proclaim How flat and wearisome they feel their trade: Rank scoffers some, but most too indolent To deem them falsehoods or to know their truth. Oh! blasphemous! the book of life is made A superstitious instrument, on which We gabble o'er the oaths we mean to break; For all must swear--all and in every place, College and wharf, council and justice-court; All, all must swear, the briber and the bribed, Merchant and lawyer, senator and priest, The rich, the poor, the old man and the young; All, all make up one scheme of perjury, That faith doth reel; the very name of God Sounds like a juggler's charm; and, bold with joy, Forth from his dark and lonely hiding-place, (Portentous sight!) the owlet Atheism, Sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon, Drops his blue-fringed lids, and holds them close, And hooting at the glorious sun in Heaven, Cries out, "Where is it?" Thankless too for peace, (Peace long preserved by fleets and perilous seas) Secure from actual warfare, we have loved To swell the war-whoop, passionate for war! Alas! for ages ignorant of all Its ghastlier workings, (famine or blue plague, Battle, or siege, or flight through wintry snows,) We, this whole people, have been clamorous For war and bloodshed; animating sports, The which we pay for as a thing to talk of, Spectators and not combatants! No guess Anticipative of a wrong unfelt, No speculation on contingency, However dim and vague, too vague and dim To yield a justifying cause; and forth, (Stuffed out with big preamble, holy names, And adjurations of the God in Heaven,) We send our mandates for the certain death Of thousands and ten thousands! Boys and girls, And women, that would groan to see a child Pull off an insect's leg, all read of war, The best amusement for our morning meal! The poor wretch, who has learnt his only prayers From curses, who knows scarcely words enough To ask a blessing from his Heavenly Father, Becomes a fluent phraseman, absolute And technical in victories and defeats, And all our dainty terms for fratricide; Terms which we trundle smoothly o'er our tongues Like mere abstractions, empty sounds to which We join no feeling and attach no form! As if the soldier died without a wound; As if the fibres of this godlike frame Were gored without a pang; as if the wretch, Who fell in battle, doing bloody deeds, Passed off to Heaven, translated and not killed; As though he had no wife to pine for him, No God to judge him! Therefore, evil days Are coming on us, O my countrymen! And what if all-avenging Providence, Strong and retributive, should make us know The meaning of our words, force us to feel The desolation and the agony Of our fierce doings? Spare us yet awhile, Father and God! O! spare us yet awhile! Oh! let not English women drag their flight Fainting beneath the burthen of their babes, Of the sweet infants, that but yesterday Laughed at the breast! Sons, brothers, husbands, all Who ever gazed with fondness on the forms Which grew up with you round the same fire-side, And all who ever heard the sabbath-bells Without the infidel's scorn, make yourselves pure! Stand forth! be men! repel an impious foe, Impious and false, a light yet cruel race, Who laugh away all virtue, mingling mirth With deeds of murder; and still promising Freedom, themselves too sensual to be free, Poison life's amities, and cheat the heart Of faith and quiet hope, and all that soothes And all that lifts the spirit! Stand we forth; Render them back upon the insulted ocean, And let them toss as idly on its waves As the vile sea-weed, which some mountain-blast Swept from our shores! And oh! may we return Not with a drunken triumph, but with fear, Repenting of the wrongs with which we stung So fierce a foe to frenzy! I have told, O Britons! O my brethren! I have told Most bitter truth, but without bitterness. Nor deem my zeal or factious or mistimed; For never can true courage dwell with them, Who, playing tricks with conscience, dare not look At their own vices. We have been too long Dupes of a deep delusion! Some, belike, Groaning with restless enmity, expect All change from change of constituted power; As if a Government had been a robe, On which our vice and wretchedness were tagged Like fancy-points and fringes, with the robe Pulled off at pleasure. Fondly these attach A radical causation to a few Poor drudges of chastising Providence, Who borrow all their hues and qualities From our own folly and rank wickedness, Which gave them birth and nursed them. Others, meanwhile, Dote with a mad idolatry; and all Who will not fall before their images. And yield them worship, they are enemies Even of their country! Such have I been deemed.-- But, O dear Britain! O my Mother Isle! Needs must thou prove a name most dear and holy To me, a son, a brother, and a friend, A husband, and a father! who revere All bonds of natural love, and find them all Within the limits of thy rocky shores. O native Britain! O my Mother Isle! How shouldst thou prove aught else but dear and holy To me, who from thy lakes and mountain-hills, Thy clouds, thy quiet dales, thy rocks and seas, Have drunk in all my intellectual life, All sweet sensations, all ennobling thoughts, All adoration of the God in nature, All lovely and all honourable things, Whatever makes this mortal spirit feel The joy and greatness of its future being? There lives nor form nor feeling in my soul Unborrowed from my country! O divine And beauteous island! thou hast been my sole And most magnificent temple, in the which I walk with awe, and sing my stately songs, Loving the God that made me!-- May my fears, My filial fears, be vain! and may the vaunts And menace of the vengeful enemy Pass like the gust, that roared and died away In the distant tree: which heard, and only heard In this low dell, bow'd not the delicate grass. But now the gentle dew-fall sends abroad The fruit-like perfume of the golden furze: The light has left the summit of the hill, Though still a sunny gleam lies beautiful, Aslant the ivied beacon. Now farewell, Farewell, awhile, O soft and silent spot! On the green sheep-track, up the heathy hill, Homeward I wind my way; and lo! recalled From bodings that have well-nigh wearied me, I find myself upon the brow, and pause Startled! And after lonely sojourning In such a quiet and surrounded nook, This burst of prospect, here the shadowy main, Dim-tinted, there the mighty majesty Of that huge amphitheatre of rich And elmy fields, seems like society-- Conversing with the mind, and giving it A livelier impulse and a dance of thought! And now, beloved Stowey! I behold Thy church-tower, and, methinks, the four huge elms Clustering, which mark the mansion of my friend; And close behind them, hidden from my view, Is my own lowly cottage, where my babe And my babe's mother dwell in peace! With light And quickened footsteps thitherward I tend, Remembering thee, O green and silent dell! And grateful, that by nature's quietness And solitary musings, all my heart Is soften'd, and made worthy to indulge Love, and the thoughts that yearn for human kind. NETHER STOWEY, _April 2Oth_, 1798. THIS LIME-TREE BOWER MY PRISON ADDRESSED TO CHARLES LAMB, OF THE INDIA HOUSE, LONDON In the June of 1797 some long-expected friends paid a visit to the author's cottage; and on the morning of their arrival, he met with an accident, which disabled him from walking during the whole time of their stay. One evening, when they had left him for a few hours, he composed the following lines in the garden-bower. Well, they are gone, and here must I remain, This lime-tree bower my prison! I have lost Beauties and feelings, such as would have been Most sweet to my remembrance even when age Had dimmed mine eyes to blindness! They, meanwhile, Friends, whom I never more may meet again, On springy heath, along the hill-top edge, Wander in gladness, and wind down, perchance, To that still roaring dell, of which I told; The roaring dell, o'erwooded, narrow, deep, And only speckled by the mid-day sun; Where its slim trunk the ash from rock to rock Flings arching like a bridge--that branchless ash, Unsunned and damp, whose few poor yellow-leaves Ne'er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still, Fanned by the water-fall! and there my friends Behold the dark green file of long lank weeds, That all at once (a most fantastic sight!) Still nod and drip beneath the dripping edge Of the blue clay-stone. Now, my friends emerge Beneath the wide wide Heaven--and view again The many-steepled tract magnificent Of hilly fields and meadows, and the sea, With some fair bark, perhaps, whose sails light up The slip of smooth clear blue betwixt two Isles Of purple shadow! Yes! they wander on In gladness all; but thou, me thinks, most glad, My gentle-hearted Charles! for thou hast pined And hungered after Nature, many a year, In the great City pent, winning thy way With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain And strange calamity! Ah! slowly sink Behind the western ridge, thou glorious Sun! Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb, Ye purple heath-flowers! richlier burn, ye clouds Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves! And kindle, thou blue Ocean! So my friend Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood, Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem Less gross than bodily; and of such hues As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes Spirits perceive his presence. A delight Comes sudden on my heart, and I am glad As I myself were there! Nor in this bower, This little lime-tree bower, have I not marked Much that has soothed me. Pale beneath the blaze Hung the transparent foliage; and I watched Some broad and sunny leaf, and loved to see The shadow of the leaf and stem above, Dappling its sunshine! And that walnut-tree Was richly tinged, and a deep radiance lay Full on the ancient ivy, which usurps Those fronting elms, and now, with blackest mass-- Makes their dark branches gleam a lighter hue Through the late twilight: and though now the bat Wheels silent by, and not a swallow twitters, Yet still the solitary humble-bee Sings in the bean-flower! Henceforth I shall know That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure; No plot so narrow, be but Nature there, No waste so vacant, but. may well employ Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart. Awake to Love and Beauty! and sometimes 'Tis well to be bereft of promised good, That we may lift the soul, and contemplate With lively joy the joys we cannot share. My gentle-hearted Charles! when the last rook Beat its straight path along the dusky air Homewards, I blest it! deeming, its black wing (Now a dim speck, now vanishing in light) Had cross'd the mighty orb's dilated glory, While thou stood'st gazing; or when all was still, Flew creeking o'er thy head, and had a charm For thee, my gentle-hearted Charles, to whom No sound is dissonant which tells of Life. 1797. TO A GENTLEMAN [WILLIAM WORDSWORTH] COMPOSED ON THE NIGHT AFTER HIS RECITATION OF A POEM ON THE GROWTH OF AN INDIVIDUAL MIND. Friend of the wise! and Teacher of the Good! Into my heart have I received that Lay More than historic, that prophetic Lay Wherein (high theme by thee first sung aright) Of the foundations and the building up Of a Human Spirit thou hast dared to tell What may be told, to the understanding mind Revealable; and what within the mind By vital breathings secret as the soul Of vernal growth, oft quickens in the heart Thoughts all too deep for words!-- Theme hard as high! Of smiles spontaneous, and mysterious fears (The first-born they of Reason and twin-birth), Of tides obedient to external force, And currents self-determined, as might seem, Or by some inner Power; of moments awful, Now in thy inner life, and now abroad, When power streamed from thee, and thy soul received The light reflected, as a light bestowed-- Of fancies fair, and milder hours of youth, Hyblean murmurs of poetic thought Industrious in its joy, in vales and glens Native or outland, lakes and famous hills! Or on the lonely high-road, when the stars Were rising; or by secret mountain-streams, The guides and the companions of thy way! Of more than Fancy, of the Social Sense Distending wide, and man beloved as man, Where France in all her towns lay vibrating Like some becalmed bark beneath the burst Of Heaven's immediate thunder, when no cloud Is visible, or shadow on the main. For thou wert there, thine own brows garlanded, Amid the tremor of a realm aglow, Amid a mighty nation jubilant, When from the general heart of human kind Hope sprang forth like a full-born Deity! --Of that dear Hope afflicted and struck down, So summoned homeward, thenceforth calm and sure From the dread watch-tower of man's absolute self, With light unwaning on her eyes, to look Far on-herself a glory to behold, The Angel of the vision! Then (last strain) Of Duty, chosen Laws controlling choice, Action and joy!--An orphic song indeed, A song divine of high and passionate thoughts To their own music chaunted! O great Bard! Ere yet that last strain dying awed the air, With steadfast eye I viewed thee in the choir Of ever-enduring men. The truly great Have all one age, and from one visible space Shed influence! They, both in power and act, Are permanent, and Time is not with _them_, Save as it worketh _for_ them, they _in_ it. Nor less a sacred Roll, than those of old, And to be placed, as they, with gradual fame Among the archives of mankind, thy work Makes audible a linked lay of Truth, Of Truth profound a sweet continuous lay, Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes Ah! as I listen'd with a heart forlorn, The pulses of my being beat anew: And even as life retains upon the drowned, Life's joy rekindling roused a throng of pains-- Keen pangs of Love, awakening as a babe Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart; And fears self-willed, that shunned the eye of hope; And hope that scarce would know itself from fear; Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain, And genius given, and knowledge won in vain; And all which I had culled in wood-walks wild, And all which patient toil had reared, and all, Commune with _thee_ had opened out--but flowers Strewed on my corse, and borne upon my bier, In the same coffin, for the self-same grave! That way no more! and ill beseems it me, Who came a welcomer in herald's guise, Singing of glory, and futurity, To wander back on such unhealthful road, Plucking the poisons of self-harm! And ill Such intertwine beseems triumphal wreaths Strew'd before _thy_ advancing! Nor do thou, Sage Bard! impair the memory of that hour Of thy communion with my nobler mind By pity or grief, already felt too long! Nor let my words import more blame than needs. The tumult rose and ceased: for Peace is nigh Where wisdom's voice has found a listening heart. Amid the howl of more than wintry storms, The halcyon hears the voice of vernal hours Already on the wing. Eve following eve, Dear tranquil time, when the sweet sense of Home Is sweetest! moments for their own sake hailed And more desired, more precious, for thy song, In silence listening like a devout child, My soul lay passive, by thy various strain Driven as in surges now beneath the stars, With momentary stars of my own birth, Fair constellated foam, still darting off Into the darkness; now a tranquil sea, Outspread and bright, yet swelling to the moon. And when--O Friend! my comforter and guide! Strong in thyself, and powerful to give strength!-- Thy long sustained Song finally closed, And thy deep voice had ceased--yet thou thyself Wert still before my eyes, and round us both That happy vision of beloved faces-- Scarce conscious, and yet conscious of its close I sate, my being blended in one thought (Thought was it? or aspiration? or resolve?) Absorbed, yet hanging still upon the sound-- And when I rose, I found myself in prayer. _January_ 1807. HYMN BEFORE SUN-RISE, IN THE VALE OF CHAMOUNI Besides the Rivers, Arve and Arveiron, which have their sources in the foot of Mont Blanc, five conspicuous torrents rush down its sides; and within a few paces of the Glaciers, the Gentiana Major grows in immense numbers, with its "flowers of loveliest blue." Hast thou a charm to stay the morning-star In his steep course? So long he seems to pause On thy bald awful head, O sovran BLANC! The Arve and Arveiron at thy base Rave ceaselessly; but thou, most awful Form! Risest from forth thy silent sea of pines, How silently! Around thee and above Deep is the air and dark, substantial, black, An ebon mass: methinks thou piercest it, As with a wedge! But when I look again, It is thine own calm home, thy crystal shrine, Thy habitation from eternity! O dread and silent Mount! I gazed upon thee, Till thou, still present to the bodily sense, Didst vanish from my thought: entranced in prayer I worshipped the Invisible alone. Yet, like some sweet beguiling melody, So sweet, we know not we are listening to it, Thou, the meanwhile, wast blending with my Thought, Yea, with my Life and Life's own secret joy: Till the dilating Soul, enrapt, transfused, Into the mighty vision passing--there As in her natural form, swelled vast to Heaven! Awake, my soul! not only passive praise Thou owest! not alone these swelling tears, Mute thanks and secret ecstasy! Awake, Voice of sweet song! Awake, my heart, awake! Green vales and icy cliffs, all join my Hymn. Thou first and chief, sole sovereign of the Vale! O struggling with the darkness all the night, And visited all night by troops of stars, Or when they climb the sky or when they sink: Companion of the morning-star at dawn, Thyself Earth's rosy star, and of the dawn Co-herald: wake, O wake, and utter praise! Who sank thy sunless pillars deep in Earth? Who fill'd thy countenance with rosy light? Who made thee parent of perpetual streams? And you, ye five wild torrents fiercely glad! Who called you forth from night and utter death, From dark and icy caverns called you forth, Down those precipitous, black, jagged rocks, For ever shattered and the same for ever? Who gave you your invulnerable life, Your strength, your speed, your fury, and your joy. Unceasing thunder and eternal foam? And who commanded (and the silence came), Here let the billows stiffen, and have rest? Ye Ice-falls! ye that from the mountain's brow Adown enormous ravines slope amain-- Torrents, methinks, that heard a mighty voice, And stopped at once amid their maddest plunge! Motionless torrents! silent cataracts! Who made you glorious as the Gates of Heaven Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun Clothe you with rainbows? Who, with living flowers Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet?-- GOD! let the torrents, like a shout of nations, Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, GOD! GOD! sing ye meadow-streams with gladsome voice! Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds! And they too have a voice, yon piles of snow, And in their perilous fall shall thunder, GOD! Ye living flowers that skirt the eternal frost! Ye wild goats sporting round the eagle's nest! Ye eagles, play-mates of the mountain-storm! Ye lightnings, the dread arrows of the clouds! Ye signs and wonders of the element! Utter forth GOD, and fill the hills with praise! Thou too; hoar Mount! with thy sky-pointing peaks, Oft from whose feet the avalanche, unheard, Shoots downward, glittering through the pure serene Into the depth of clouds, that veil thy breast-- Thou too again, stupendous Mountain! thou That as I raise my head, awhile bowed low In adoration, upward from thy base Slow travelling with dim eyes suffused with tears, Solemnly seemest, like a vapoury cloud, To rise before me--Rise, O ever rise, Rise like a cloud of incense from the Earth! Thou kingly Spirit throned among the hills, Thou dread ambassador from Earth to Heaven, Great Hierarch! tell thou the silent sky, And tell the stars, and tell yon rising sun, Earth, with her thousand voices, praises GOD. 1802 FROST AT MIDNIGHT The Frost performs its secret ministry, Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry Came loud--and hark, again! loud as before. The inmates of my cottage, all at rest, Have left me to that solitude, which suits Abstruser musings: save that at my side My cradled infant slumbers peacefully. 'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs And vexes meditation with its strange And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood, This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood, With all the numberless goings-on of life, Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not; Only that film, which fluttered on the grate, Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing. Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature Gives it dim sympathies with me who live, Making it a companionable form, Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit By its own moods interprets, every where Echo or mirror seeking of itself, And makes a toy of Thought. But O! how oft, How oft, at school, with most believing mind, Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars, To watch that fluttering stranger! and as oft With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower, Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day, So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear Most like articulate sounds of things to come! So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt, Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams! And so I brooded all the following morn, Awed by the stern preceptor's face, mine eye Fixed with mock study on my swimming book: Save if the door half opened, and I snatched A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up, For still I hoped to see the _stranger's_ face, Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved, My play-mate when we both were clothed alike! Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side, Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm, Fill up the interspersed vacancies And momentary pauses of the thought! My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart With tender gladness, thus to look at thee, And think that thou shalt learn far other lore, And in far other scenes! For I was reared In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim, And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars. But _thou_, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds, Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible Of that eternal language, which thy God Utters, who from eternity doth teach Himself in all, and all things in himself. Great universal Teacher! he shall mould Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask. Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee, Whether the summer clothe the general earth With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall Heard only in the trances of the blast, Or if the secret ministry of frost Shall hang them up in silent icicles, Quietly shining to the quiet Moon. _February_ 1798. THE NIGHTINGALE A CONVERSATION POEM, WRITTEN IN APRIL 1798 No cloud, no relique of the sunken day Distinguishes the West, no long thin slip Of sullen light, no obscure trembling hues. Come, we will rest on this old mossy bridge! You see the glimmer of the stream beneath, Bur* hear no murmuring: it flows silently, O'er its soft bed of verdure. All is still, A balmy night! and though the stars be dim, Yet let us think upon the vernal showers That gladden the green earth, and we shall find A pleasure in the dimness of the stars. And hark! the Nightingale begins its song, "Most musical, most melancholy" bird! A melancholy bird? Oh! idle thought! In Nature there is nothing melancholy. But some night-wandering man whose heart was pierced With the remembrance of a grievous wrong, Or slow distemper, or neglected love, (And so, poor wretch! fill'd all things with himself, And made all gentle sounds tell back the tale Of his own sorrow) he, and such as he, First named these notes a melancholy strain. And many a poet echoes the conceit; Poet who hath been building up the rhyme When he had better far have stretched his limbs Beside a brook in mossy forest-dell, By sun or moon-light, to the influxes Of shapes and sounds and shifting elements Surrendering his whole spirit, of his song And of his fame forgetful! so his fame Should share in Nature's immortality, A venerable thing! and so his song Should make all Nature lovelier, and itself Be loved like Nature! But 'twill not be so; And youths and maidens most poetical, Who lose the deepening twilights of the spring In ball-rooms and hot theatres, they still Full of meek sympathy must heave their sighs O'er Philomela's pity-pleading strains. My Friend, and thou, our Sister! we have learnt A different lore: we may not thus profane Nature's sweet voices, always full of love And joyance! 'Tis the merry Nightingale That crowds, and hurries, and precipitates With fast thick warble his delicious notes, As he were fearful that an April night Would be too short for him to utter forth His love-chant, and disburthen his full soul Of all its music! And I know a grove Of large extent, hard by a castle huge, Which the great lord inhabits not; and so This grove is wild with tangling underwood, And the trim walks are broken up, and grass, Thin grass and king-cups grow within the paths. But never elsewhere in one place I knew So many nightingales; and far and near, In wood and thicket, over the wide grove, They answer and provoke each other's songs, With skirmish and capricious passagings, And murmurs musical and swift jug jug, And one low piping sound more sweet than all-- Stirring the air with such an harmony, That should you close your eyes, you might almost Forget it was not day! On moonlight bushes, Whose dewy leaflets are but half-disclosed, You may perchance behold them on the twigs, Their bright, bright eyes, their eyes both bright and full, Glistening, while many a glow-worm in the shade Lights up her love-torch. A most gentle Maid, Who dwelleth in her hospitable home Hard by the castle, and at latest eve (Even like a Lady vowed and dedicate To something more than Nature in the grove) Glides through the pathways; she knows all their notes, That gentle Maid! and oft, a moment's space, What time the moon was lost behind a cloud, Hath heard a pause of silence; till the moon Emerging, hath awakened earth and sky With one sensation, and those wakeful birds Have all burst forth in choral minstrelsy, As if some sudden gale had swept at once A hundred airy harps! And she hath watched Many a nightingale perch giddily On blossomy twig still swinging from the breeze, And to that motion tune his wanton song Like tipsy joy that reels with tossing head. Farewell, O Warbler! till to-morrow eve, And you, my friends! farewell, a short farewell! We have been loitering long and pleasantly, And now for our dear homes.--That strain again! Full fain it would delay me! My dear babe, Who, capable of no articulate sound, Mars all things with his imitative lisp, How he would place his hand beside his ear, His little hand, the small forefinger up, And bid us listen! And I deem it wise To make him Nature's play-mate. He knows well The evening-star; and once, when he awoke In most distressful mood (some inward pain Had made up that strange thing, an infant's dream), I hurried with him to our orchard-plot, And he beheld the moon, and, hushed at once, Suspends his sobs, and laughs most silently, While his fair eyes, that swam with undropped tears, Did glitter in the yellow moon-beam! Well!-- It is a father's tale: But if that Heaven Should give me life, his childhood shall grow up Familiar with these songs, that with the night He may associate joy.--Once more, farewell, Sweet Nightingale! once more, my friends! farewell. THE EOLIAN HARP COMPOSED AT CLEVEDON, SOMERSETSHIRE My pensive Sara! thy soft cheek reclined Thus on mine arm, most soothing sweet it is To sit beside our cot, our cot o'ergrown With white-flowered Jasmin, and the broad-leaved Myrtle, (Meet emblems they of Innocence and Love!), And watch the clouds, that late were rich with light, Slow saddening round, and mark the star of eve Serenely brilliant (such should wisdom be) Shine opposite! How exquisite the scents Snatched from yon bean-field! and the world so hushed! The stilly murmur of the distant sea Tells us of silence. And that simplest lute, Placed length-ways in the clasping casement, hark! How by the desultory breeze caressed, Like some coy maid half yielding to her lover, It pours such sweet upbraiding, as must needs Tempt to repeat the wrong! And now, its strings Boldlier swept, the long sequacious notes Over delicious surges sink and rise, Such a soft floating witchery of sound As twilight Elfins make, when they at eve Voyage on gentle gales from Fairy-Land, Where Melodies round honey-dropping flowers, Footless and wild, like birds of Paradise, Nor pause, nor perch, hovering on untamed wing! O! the one life within us and abroad, Which meets all motion and becomes its soul, A light in sound, a sound-like power in light Rhythm in all thought, and joyance every where-- Methinks, it should have been impossible Not to love all things in a world so filled; Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still air In Music slumbering on her instrument. And thus, my love! as on the midway slope Of yonder hill I stretch my limbs at noon, Whilst through my half-closed eye-lids I behold The sunbeams dance, like diamonds, on the main, And tranquil muse upon tranquillity; Full many a thought uncalled and undetained, And many idle flitting phantasies, Traverse my indolent and passive brain, As wild and various as the random gales That swell and flutter on this subject lute! And what if all of animated nature Be but organic harps diversely framed, That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of all? But thy more serious eye a mild reproof Darts, O beloved woman! nor such thoughts Dim and unhallowed dost thou not reject, And biddest me walk humbly with my God. Meek daughter in the family of Christ! Well hast thou said and holily dispraised These shapings of the unregenerate mind; Bubbles that glitter as they rise and break On vain Philosophy's aye-babbling spring. For never guiltless may I speak of him, The Incomprehensible! save when with awe I praise him, and with Faith that inly feels; Who with his saving mercies healed me, A sinful and most miserable man, Wildered and dark, and gave me to possess Peace, and this cot, and thee, dear honoured Maid! 1795. THE PICTURE OR THE LOVER'S RESOLUTION Through weeds and thorns, and matted underwood I force my way; now climb, and now descend O'er rocks, or bare or mossy, with wild foot Crushing the purple whorts;[1] while oft unseen, Hurrying along the drifted forest-leaves, The scared snake rustles. Onward still I toil, I know not, ask not whither! A new joy, Lovely as light, sudden as summer gust, And gladsome as the first-born of the spring, Beckons me on, or follows from behind, Playmate, or guide! The master-passion quelled, I feel that I am free. With dun-red bark The fir-trees, and the unfrequent slender oak, Forth from this tangle wild of bush and brake Soar up, and form a melancholy vault High o'er me, murmuring like a distant sea. Here Wisdom might resort, and here Remorse; Here too the love-lorn man, who, sick in soul, And of this busy human heart aweary, Worships the spirit of unconscious life In tree or wild-flower.--Gentle lunatic! If so he might not wholly cease to be, He would far rather not be that he is; But would be something that he knows not of, In winds or waters, or among the rocks! But hence, fond wretch! breathe not contagion here! No myrtle-walks are these: these are no groves Where Love dare loiter! If in sullen mood He should stray hither, the low stumps shall gore His dainty feet, the briar and the thorn Make his plumes haggard. Like a wounded bird Easily caught, ensnare him, O ye Nymphs, Ye Oreads chaste, ye dusky Dryades! And you, ye Earth-winds! you that make at morn The dew-drops quiver on the spiders' webs! You, O ye wingless Airs! that creep between The rigid stems of heath and bitten furze, Within whose scanty shade, at summer-noon, The mother-sheep hath worn a hollow bed-- Ye, that now cool her fleece with dropless damp, Now pant and murmur with her feeding lamb. Chase, chase him, all ye Fays, and elfin Gnomes! With prickles sharper than his darts bemock His little Godship, making him perforce Creep through a thorn-bush on yon hedgehog's back. This is my hour of triumph! I can now With my own fancies play the merry fool, And laugh away worse folly, being free. Here will I seat myself, beside this old, Hollow, and weedy oak, which ivy-twine Clothes as with net-work: here will couch my limbs, Close by this river, in this silent shade, As safe and sacred from the step of man As an invisible world--unheard, unseen, And listening only to the pebbly brook That murmurs with a dead, yet tinkling sound; Or to the bees, that in the neighbouring trunk Make honey-hoards. The breeze, that visits me, Was never Love's accomplice, never raised The tendril ringlets from the maiden's brow, And the blue, delicate veins above her cheek; Ne'er played the wanton--never half disclosed The maiden's snowy bosom, scattering thence Eye-poisons for some love-distempered youth, Who ne'er henceforth may see an aspen-grove Shiver in sunshine, but his feeble heart Shall flow away like a dissolving thing. Sweet breeze! thou only, if I guess aright, Liftest the feathers of the robin's breast, That swells its little breast, so full of song, Singing above me, on the mountain-ash. And thou too, desert stream! no pool of thine, Though clear as lake in latest summer-eve, Did e'er reflect the stately virgin's robe, The face, the form divine, the downcast look Contemplative! Behold! her open palm Presses her cheek and brow! her elbow rests On the bare branch of half-uprooted tree, That leans towards its mirror! Who erewhile Had from her countenance turned, or looked by stealth (For fear is true-love's cruel nurse), he now With steadfast gaze and unoffending eye, Worships the watery idol, dreaming hopes Delicious to the soul, but fleeting, vain, E'en as that phantom-world on which he gazed, But not unheeded gazed: for see, ah! see, The sportive tyrant with her left hand plucks The heads of tall flowers that behind her grow, Lychnis, and willow-herb, and fox-glove bells: And suddenly, as one that toys with time, Scatters them on the pool! Then all the charm Is broken--all that phantom world so fair Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread, And each mis-shapes the other. Stay awhile, Poor youth, who scarcely dar'st lift up thine eyes! The stream will soon renew its smoothness, soon The visions will return! And lo! he stays: And soon the fragments dim of lovely forms Come trembling back, unite, and now once more The pool becomes a mirror; and behold Each wildflower on the marge inverted there, And there the half-uprooted tree--but where, O where the virgin's snowy arm, that leaned On its bare branch? He turns, and she is gone! Homeward she steals through many a woodland maze Which he shall seek in vain. Ill-fated youth! Go, day by day, and waste thy manly prime In mad love-yearning by the vacant brook, Till sickly thoughts bewitch thine eyes, and thou Behold'st her shadow still abiding there, The Naiad of the mirror! Not to thee, O wild and desert stream! belongs this tale: Gloomy and dark art thou-the crowded firs Spire from thy shores, and stretch across thy bed, Making thee doleful as a cavern-well: Save when the shy king-fishers build their nest On thy steep banks, no loves hast thou, wild stream! This be my chosen haunt--emancipate From passion's dreams, a freeman, and alone, I rise and trace its devious course. O lead, Lead me to deeper shades and lonelier glooms. Lo! stealing through the canopy of firs, How fair the sunshine spots that mossy rock, Isle of the river, whose disparted waves Dart off asunder with an angry sound, How soon to re-unite! And see! they meet, Each in the other lost and found: and see Placeless, as spirits, one soft water-sun Throbbing within them, heart at once and eye! With its soft neighbourhood of filmy clouds, The stains and shadings of forgotten tears, Dimness o'erswum with lustre! Such the hour Of deep enjoyment, following love's brief feuds; And hark, the noise of a near waterfall! I pass forth into light--I find myself Beneath a weeping birch (most beautiful Of forest trees, the Lady of the Woods), Hard by the brink of a tall weedy rock That overbrows the cataract. How burst? The landscape on my sight! Two crescent hills Fold in behind each other, and so make A circular vale, and land-locked, as might seem, With brook and bridge, and grey stone cottages, Half hid by rocks and fruit-trees. At my feet, The whortle-berries are bedewed with spray, Dashed upwards by the furious waterfall. How solemnly the pendent ivy-mass Swings in its winnow: All the air is calm. The smoke from cottage-chimneys, tinged with light, Rises in columns; from this house alone, Close by the waterfall, the column slants, And feels its ceaseless breeze. But what is this? That cottage, with its slanting chimney-smoke, And close beside its porch a sleeping child, His dear head pillow'd on a sleeping dog-- One arm between its fore-legs, and the hand Holds loosely its small handful of wildflowers, Unfilletted, and of unequal lengths. A curious picture, with a master's haste Sketched on a strip of pinky-silver skin, Peeled from the birchen bark! Divinest maid! Yon bark her canvas, and those purple berries Her pencil! See, the juice is scarcely dried On the fine skin! She has been newly here; And lo! yon patch of heath has been her couch-- The pressure still remains! O blessed couch! For this may'st thou flower early, and the sun, Slanting at eve, rest bright, and linger long Upon thy purple bells! O Isabel! Daughter of genius! stateliest of our maids! More beautiful than whom Alcæus wooed, The Lesbian woman of immortal song! O child of genius! stately, beautiful, And full of love to all, save only me, And not ungentle e'en to me! My heart, Why beats it thus? Through yonder coppicewood Needs must the pathway turn, that leads straightway On to her father's house. She is alone! The night draws on-such ways are hard to hit-- And fit it is I should restore this sketch, Dropt unawares no doubt. Why should I yearn To keep the relique? 'twill but idly feed The passion that consumes me. Let me haste! The picture in my hand which she has left; She cannot blame me that I follow'd her: And I may be her guide the long wood through. 1802. [Footnote 1: _Vaccinium Myrtillus_ known by the different names of Whorts, Whortle-berries, Bilberries; and in the North of England, Blea-berries and Bloom-berries. [Note by S. T. C. 1802.]] THE GARDEN OF BOCCACCIO Of late, in one of those most weary hours, When life seems emptied of all genial powers, A dreary mood, which he who ne'er has known May bless his happy lot, I sate alone; And, from the numbing spell to win relief, Call'd on the Past for thought of glee or grief. In vain! bereft alike of grief and glee, I sate and cow'r'd o'er my own vacancy! And as I watch'd the dull continuous ache, Which, all else slum'bring, seem'd alone to wake; O Friend! long wont to notice yet conceal, And soothe by silence what words cannot heal, I but half saw that quiet hand of thine Place on my desk this exquisite design. Boccaccio's Garden and its faery, The love, the joyaunce, and the gallantry! An Idyll, with Boccaccio's spirit warm, Framed in the silent poesy of form. Like flocks adown a newly-bathed steep Emerging from a mist: or like a stream Of music soft that not dispels the sleep, But casts in happier moulds the slumberer's dream, Gazed by an idle eye with silent might The picture stole upon my inward sight. A tremulous warmth crept gradual o'er my chest, As though an infant's finger touch'd my breast. And one by one (I know not whence) were brought All spirits of power that most had stirr'd my thought In selfless boyhood, on a new world tost Of wonder, and in its own fancies lost; Or charm'd my youth, that, kindled from above, Loved ere it loved, and sought a form for love; Or lent a lustre to the earnest scan Of manhood, musing what and whence is man! Wild strain of Scalds, that in the sea-worn caves Rehearsed their war-spell to the winds and waves; Or fateful hymn of those prophetic maids, That call'd on Hertha in deep forest glades; Or minstrel lay, that cheer'd the baron's feast; Or rhyme of city pomp, of monk and priest, Judge, mayor, and many a guild in long array, To high-church pacing on the great saint's day. And many a verse which to myself I sang, That woke the tear yet stole away the pang, Of hopes which in lamenting I renew'd. And last, a matron now, of sober mien, Yet radiant still and with no earthly sheen, Whom as a faery child my childhood woo'd Even in my dawn of thought--Philosophy; Though then unconscious of herself, pardie, She bore no other name than Poesy; And, like a gift from heaven, in lifeful glee, That had but newly left a mother's knee, Prattled and play'd with bird and flower, and stone, As if with elfin playfellows well known, And life reveal'd to innocence alone. Thanks, gentle artist! now I can descry Thy fair creation with a mastering eye, And _all_ awake! And now in fix'd gaze stand, Now wander through the Eden of thy hand; Praise the green arches, on the fountain clear See fragment shadows of the crossing deer; And with that serviceable nymph I stoop The crystal from its restless pool to scoop. I see no longer! I myself am there, Sit on the ground-sward, and the banquet share. 'Tis I, that sweep that lute's love-echoing strings, And gaze upon the maid who gazing sings; Or pause and listen to the tinkling bells From the high tower, and think that there she dwells. With old Boccaccio's soul I stand possest, And breathe an air like life, that swells my chest. The brightness of the world, O thou once free, And always fair, rare land of courtesy! O Florence! with the Tuscan fields and hills And famous Arno, fed with all their rills; Thou brightest star of star-bright Italy! Rich, ornate, populous, all treasures thine, The golden corn, the olive, and the vine. Fair cities, gallant mansions, castles old, And forests, where beside his leafy hold The sullen boar hath heard the distant horn, And whets his tusks against the gnarled thorn; Palladian palace with its storied halls; Fountains, where Love lies listening to their falls; Gardens, where flings the bridge its airy span, And Nature makes her happy home with man; Where many a gorgeous flower is duly fed With its own rill, on its own spangled bed, And wreathes the marble urn, or leans its head, A mimic mourner, that with veil withdrawn Weeps liquid gems, the presents of the dawn;-- Thine all delights, and every muse is thine; And more than all, the embrace and intertwine Of all with all in gay and twinkling dance! Mid gods of Greece and warriors of romance, See! Boccace sits, unfolding on his knees The new-found roll of old Maeonides; But from his mantle's fold, and near the heart, Peers Ovid's Holy Book of Love's sweet smart! O all-enjoying and all-blending sage, Long be it mine to con thy mazy page, Where, half conceal'd, the eye of fancy views Fauns, nymphs, and winged saints, all gracious to thy muse! Still in thy garden let me watch their pranks, And see in Dian's vest between the ranks Of the trim vines, some maid that half believes The _vestal_ fires, of which her lover grieves, With that sly satyr peeping through the leaves! 1828. THE TWO FOUNTS STANZAS ADDRESSED TO A LADY [MRS. ADERS] ON HER RECOVERY WITH UNBLEMISHED LOOKS, FROM A SEVERE ATTACK OF PAIN 'T was my last waking thought, how it could be That thou, sweet friend, such anguish should'st endure; When straight from Dreamland came a Dwarf, and he Could tell the cause, forsooth, and knew the cure. Methought he fronted me with peering look Fix'd on my heart; and read aloud in game The loves and griefs therein, as from a book: And uttered praise like one who wished to blame. In every heart (quoth he) since Adam's sin Two Founts there are, of Suffering and of Cheer! _That_ to let forth, and _this_ to keep within! But she, whose aspect I find imaged here, Of Pleasure only will to all dispense, _That_ Fount alone unlock, by no distress Choked or turned inward, but still issue thence Unconquered cheer, persistent loveliness. As on the driving cloud the shiny bow, That gracious thing made up of tears and light, Mid the wild rack and rain that slants below Stands smiling forth, unmoved and freshly bright: As though the spirits of all lovely flowers, Inweaving each its wreath and dewy crown, Or ere they sank to earth in vernal showers, Had built a bridge to tempt the angels down. Even so, Eliza! on that face of thine, On that benignant face, whose look alone (The soul's translucence thro' her crystal shrine!) Has power to soothe all anguish but thine own, A beauty hovers still, and ne'er takes wing, But with a silent charm compels the stern And tort'ring Genius of the bitter spring, To shrink aback, and cower upon his urn. Who then needs wonder, if (no outlet found In passion, spleen, or strife) the Fount of Pain O'erflowing beats against its lovely mound, And in wild flashes shoots from heart to brain? Sleep, and the Dwarf with that unsteady gleam On his raised lip, that aped a critic smile, Had passed: yet I, my sad thoughts to beguile, Lay weaving on the tissue of my dream; Till audibly at length I cried, as though Thou hadst indeed been present to my eyes, O sweet, sweet sufferer; if the case be so, I pray thee, be _less_ good, _less_ sweet, _less_ wise! In every look a barbed arrow send, On those soft lips let scorn and anger live! Do _any_ thing, rather than thus, sweet friend! Hoard for thyself the pain, thou wilt not give! 1826. A DAY-DREAM My eyes make pictures, when they are shut: I see a fountain, large and fair, A willow and a ruined hut, And thee, and me and Mary there. O Mary! make thy gentle lap our pillow! Bend o'er us, like a bower, my beautiful green willow! A wild-rose roofs the ruined shed, And that and summer well agree: And lo! where Mary leans her head, Two dear names carved upon the tree! And Mary's tears, they are not tears of sorrow: Our sister and our friend will both be here tomorrow. 'Twas day! but now few, large, and bright, The stars are round the crescent moon! And now it is a dark warm night, The balmiest of the month of June! A glow-worm fall'n, and on the marge remounting Shines, and its shadow shines, fit stars for our sweet fountain. O ever--ever be thou blest! For dearly, Asra! love I thee! This brooding warmth across my breast, This depth of tranquil bliss--ah, me! Fount, tree and shed are gone, I know not whither, But in one quiet room we three are still together. The shadows dance upon the wall, By the still dancing fire-flames made; And now they slumber moveless all! And now they melt to one deep shade! But not from me shall this mild darkness steal thee; I dream thee with mine eyes, and at my heart I feel thee! Thine eyelash on my cheek doth play-- 'Tis Mary's hand upon my brow! But let me check this tender lay Which none may hear but she and thou! Like the still hive at quiet midnight humming, Murmur it to yourselves, ye two beloved women! ?1807. SONNET TO A FRIEND WHO ASKED, HOW I FELT WHEN THE NURSE FIRST PRESENTED MY INFANT TO ME Charles! my slow heart was only sad, when first I scanned that face of feeble infancy: For dimly on my thoughtful spirit burst All I had been, and all my child might be! But when I saw it on its mother's arm, And hanging at her bosom (she the while Bent o'er its features with a tearful smile) Then I was thrilled and melted, and most warm Impressed a father's kiss: and all beguiled Of dark remembrance and presageful fear, I seemed to see an angel-form appear-- 'Twas even thine, beloved woman mild! So for the mother's sake the child was dear, And dearer was the mother for the child. 1796. LINES TO W. LINLEY, ESQ. WHILE HE SANG A SONG TO PURCELL'S MUSIC While my young cheek retains its healthful hues, And I have many friends who hold me dear, Linley! methinks, I would not often hear Such melodies as thine, lest I should lose All memory of the wrongs and sore distress For which my miserable brethren weep! But should uncomforted misfortunes steep My daily bread in tears and bitterness; And if at death's dread moment I should lie With no beloved face at my bed-side, To fix the last glance of my closing eye, Methinks such strains, breathed by my angel-guide, Would make me pass the cup of anguish by, Mix with the blest, nor know that I had died! 1797. DOMESTIC PEACE [FROM THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE, ACT I.] Tell me, on what holy ground May Domestic Peace be found? Halcyon daughter of the skies, Far on fearful wings she flies, From the pomp of Sceptered State, From the Rebel's noisy hate. In a cottaged vale She dwells, Listening to the Sabbath bells! Still around her steps are seen Spotless Honour's meeker mien, Love, the sire of pleasing fears, Sorrow smiling through her tears, And conscious of the past employ Memory, bosom-spring of joy. 1794. SONG SUNG BY GLYCINE IN _ZAPOLYA_, ACT II. SCENE 2. A Sunny shaft did I behold, From sky to earth it slanted: And poised therein a bird so bold-- Sweet bird, thou wert enchanted! He sunk, he rose, he twinkled, he trolled Within that shaft of sunny mist; His eyes of fire, his beak of gold, All else of amethyst! And thus he sang: "Adieu! adieu! Love's dreams prove seldom true. The blossoms they make no delay: The sparkling dew-drops will not stay. Sweet month of May, We must away; Far, far away! To-day! to-day!" 1815. HUNTING SONG [_ZAPOLYA_, ACT IV. SCENE 2] Up, up! ye dames, and lasses gay! To the meadows trip away. 'Tis you must tend the flocks this morn, And scare the small birds from the corn. Not a soul at home may stay: For the shepherds must go With lance and bow To hunt the wolf in the woods to-day. Leave the hearth and leave the house To the cricket and the mouse: Find grannam out a sunny seat, With babe and lambkin at her feet. Not a soul at home may stay: For the shepherds must go With lance and bow To hunt the wolf in the woods to-day. 1815. WESTPHALIAN SONG [The following is an almost literal translation of a very old and very favourite song among the Westphalian Boors. The turn at the end is the same with one of Mr. Dibdin's excellent songs, and the air to which it is sung by the Boors is remarkably sweet and lively.] When thou to my true-love com'st Greet her from me kindly; When she asks thee how I fare? Say, folks in Heaven fare finely. When she asks, "What! Is he sick?" Say, dead!--and when for sorrow She begins to sob and cry, Say, I come to-morrow. ?1799. YOUTH AND AGE Verse, a breeze mid blossoms straying, Where Hope clung feeding, like a bee-- Both were mine! Life went a-maying With Nature, Hope, and Poesy, When I was young! _When_ I was young?--Ah, woeful When! Ah! for the change 'twixt Now and Then! This breathing house not built with hands, This body that does me grievous wrong, O'er aery cliffs and glittering sands, How lightly _then_ it flashed along:-- Like those trim skiffs, unknown of yore, On winding lakes and rivers wide, That ask no aid of sail or oar, That fear no spite of wind or tide! Nought cared this body for wind or weather When Youth and I lived in't together. Flowers are lovely; Love is flower-like; Friendship is a sheltering tree; O! the joys, that came down shower-like, Of Friendship, Love, and Liberty, Ere I was old! _Ere_ I was old? Ah woeful Ere, Which tells me, Youth's no longer here! O Youth! for years so many and sweet, 'Tis known, that Thou and I were one, I'll think it but a fond conceit-- It cannot be that Thou art gone! Thy vesper-bell hath not yet toll'd:- And thou wert aye a masker bold! What strange disguise hast now put on, To _make believe_, that thou art gone? I see these locks in silvery slips, This drooping gait, this altered size: But Spring-tide blossoms on thy lips, And tears take sunshine from thine eyes! Life is but thought: so think I will That Youth and I are house-mates still. Dew-drops are the gems of morning, But the tears of mournful eve! Where no hope is, life's a warning That only serves to make us grieve, When we are old: That only serves to make us grieve With oft and tedious taking-leave, Like some poor nigh-related guest, That may not rudely be dismist; Yet hath outstay'd his welcome while, And tells the jest without the smile. 1823-1832. WORK WITHOUT HOPE LINES COMPOSED 2IST FEBRUARY 1827 All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair-- The bees are stirring--birds are on the wing-- And Winter, slumbering in the open air, Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring! And I the while, the sole unbusy thing, Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing. Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow, Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow. Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may, For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away! With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll: And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul? Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve, And Hope without an object cannot live. 1827. TIME, REAL AND IMAGINARY AN ALLEGORY On the wide level of a mountain's head, (I knew not where, but 'twas some faery place) Their pinions, ostrich-like, for sails outspread, Two lovely children run an endless race, A sister and a brother! This far outstript the other; Yet ever runs she with reverted face, And looks and listens for the boy behind: For he, alas! is blind! O'er rough and smooth with even step he passed, And knows not whether he be first or last. 1815. LOVE'S APPARITION AND EVANISHMENT AN ALLEGORIC ROMANCE Like a lone Arab, old and blind, Some caravan had left behind, Who sits beside a ruin'd well, Where the shy sand-asps bask and swell; And now he hangs his aged head aslant, And listens for a human sound--in vain! And now the aid, which Heaven alone can grant, Upturns his eyeless face from Heaven to gain;-- Even thus, in vacant mood, one sultry hour, Resting my eye upon a drooping plant, With brow low-bent, within my garden-bower, I sate upon the couch of camomile; And--whether 'twas a transient sleep, perchance, Flitted across the idle brain, the while I watch'd the sickly calm with aimless scope, In my own heart; or that, indeed a trance, Turn'd my eye inward--thee, O genial Hope, Love's elder sister! thee did I behold, Drest as a bridesmaid, but all pale and cold, With roseless cheek, all pale and cold and dim, Lie lifeless at my feet! And then came Love, a sylph in bridal trim, And stood beside my seat; She bent, and kiss'd her sister's lips, As she was wont to do;-- Alas! 'twas but a chilling breath Woke just enough of life in death To make Hope die anew. L'ENVOY In vain we supplicate the Powers above; There is no resurrection for the Love That, nursed in tenderest care, yet fades away In the chill'd heart by gradual self-decay. 1833. LOVE, HOPE, AND PATIENCE IN EDUCATION O'er wayward childhood would'st thou hold firm rule, And sun thee in the light of happy faces; Love, Hope, and Patience, these must be thy graces, And in thine own heart let them first keep school. For as old Atlas on his broad neck places Heaven's starry globe, and there sustains it;--so Do these upbear the little world below Of Education,--Patience, Love, and Hope. Methinks, I see them group'd in seemly show, The straiten'd arms upraised, the palms aslope, And robes that touching as adown they flow, Distinctly blend, like snow emboss'd in snow. O part them never! If Hope prostrate lie, Love too will sink and die. But Love is subtle, and doth proof derive From her own life that Hope is yet alive; And bending o'er, with soul-transfusing eyes, And the soft murmurs of the mother dove, Wooes back the fleeting spirit, and half supplies;-- Thus Love repays to Hope what Hope first gave to Love. Yet haply there will come a weary day, When overtask'd at length Both Love and Hope beneath the load give way. Then with a statue's smile, a statue's strength, Stands the mute sister, Patience, nothing loth, And both supporting does the work of both. 1829. DUTY SURVIVING SELF-LOVE THE ONLY SURE FRIEND OF DECLINING LIFE A SOLILOQUY Unchanged within, to see all changed without, Is a blank lot and hard to bear, no doubt. Yet why at others' wanings should'st thou fret? Then only might'st thou feel a just regret, Hadst thou withheld thy love or hid thy light In selfish forethought of neglect and slight. O wiselier then, from feeble yearnings freed, _While_, and _on whom_, thou may'st--shine on! nor heed Whether the object by reflected light Return thy radiance or absorb it quite: And though thou notest from thy safe recess Old friends burn dim, like lamps in noisome air, Love them for what they _are_; nor love them less, Because to _thee_ they are not what they _were_. 1826. LOVE'S FIRST HOPE O Fair is Love's first hope to gentle mind! As Eve's first star thro' fleecy cloudlet peeping; And sweeter than the gentle south-west wind, O'er willowy meads, and shadow'd waters creeping, And Ceres' golden fields;--the sultry hind Meets it with brow uplift, and stays his reaping. ?1824. PHANTOM All look and likeness caught from earth, All accident of kin and birth, Had pass'd away. There was no trace Of aught on that illumined face, Upraised beneath the rifted stone, But of one spirit all her own;-- She, she herself, and only she, Shone through her body visibly. 1804. TO NATURE It may indeed be phantasy: when I Essay to draw from all created things Deep, heartfelt, inward joy that closely clings; And trace in leaves and flowers that round me lie Lessons of love and earnest piety. So let it be; and if the wide world rings In mock of this belief, it brings Nor fear, nor grief, nor vain, perplexity. So will I build my altar in the fields, And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be, And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields Shall be the incense I will yield to Thee, Thee only God! and thou shalt not despise Even me, the priest of this poor sacrifice. ?182O. FANCY IN NUBIBUS OR THE POET IN THE CLOUDS O! It is pleasant, with a heart at ease, Just after sunset, or by moonlight skies, To make the shifting clouds be what you please, Or let the easily persuaded eyes Own each quaint likeness issuing from the mould Of a friend's fancy; or with head bent low And cheek aslant see rivers flow of gold 'Twixt crimson banks; and then, a traveller, go From mount to mount through Cloudland, gorgeous land! Or list'ning to the tide, with closed sight, Be that blind bard, who on the Chian strand By those deep sounds possessed with inward light, Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssee Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea. 1819. CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL OBJECT Since all that beat about in Nature's range, Or veer or vanish; why should'st thou remain The only constant in a world of change, O yearning Thought! that liv'st but in the brain? Call to the Hours, that in the distance play, The faery people of the future day-- Fond Thought! not one of all that shining swarm Will breathe on _thee_ with life-enkindling breath, Till when, like strangers shelt'ring from a storm, Hope and Despair meet in the porch of Death! Yet still thou haunt'st me; and though well I see, She is not thou, and only thou art she, Still, still as though some dear _embodied_ Good, Some _living_ Love before my eyes there stood With answering look a ready ear to lend, I mourn to thee and say--"Ah! loveliest friend! That this the meed of all my toils might be, To have a home, an English home, and thee!" Vain repetition! Home and Thou are one. The peacefull'st cot, the moon shall shine upon, Lulled by the thrush and wakened by the lark, Without thee were but a becalmed bark, Whose helmsman on an ocean waste and wide Sits mute and pale his mouldering helm beside. And art thou nothing? Such thou art, as when The woodman winding westward up the glen At wintry dawn, where o'er the sheep-track's maze The viewless snow-mist weaves a glist'ning haze, Sees full before him, gliding without tread, An image with a glory round its head; The enamoured rustic worships its fair hues, Nor knows he _makes_ the shadow, he pursues! ?1805. PHANTOM OR FACT A DIALOGUE IN VERSE AUTHOR A Lovely form there sate beside my bed, And such a feeding calm its presence shed, A tender love so pure from earthly leaven, That I unnethe the fancy might control, 'Twas my own spirit newly come from heaven, Wooing its gentle way into my soul! But ah! the change--It had not stirr'd, and yet-- Alas! that change how fain would I forget! That shrinking back, like one that had mistook! That weary, wandering, disavowing look! 'Twas all another, feature, look, and frame, And still, methought, I knew, it was the same! FRIEND This riddling tale, to what does it belong? Is't history? vision? or an idle song? Or rather say at once, within what space Of time this wild disastrous change took place? AUTHOR Call it a _moment's_ work (and such it seems) This tale's a fragment from the life of dreams; But say, that years matur'd the silent strife, And 'tis a record from the dream of life. ?183O. LINES SUGGESTED BY THE LAST WORDS OF BERENGARIUS OB. ANNO DOM. 1O88 No more 'twixt conscience staggering and the Pope Soon shall I now before my God appear, By him to be acquitted, as I hope; By him to be condemned, as I fear.-- REFLECTION ON THE ABOVE Lynx amid moles! had I stood by thy bed, Be of good cheer, meek soul! I would have said: I see a hope spring from that humble fear. All are not strong alike through storms to steer Right onward. What though dread of threatened death And dungeon torture made thy hand and breath Inconstant to the truth within thy heart? That truth, from which, through fear, thou twice didst start, Fear haply told thee, was a learned strife, Or not so vital as to claim thy life: And myriads had reached Heaven, who never knew Where lay the difference 'twixt the false and true! Ye, who secure 'mid trophies not your own, Judge him who won them when he stood alone, And proudly talk of _recreant_ Berengare-- O first the age, and then the man compare! That age how dark! congenial minds how rare! No host of friends with kindred zeal did burn! No throbbing hearts awaited his return! Prostrate alike when prince and peasant fell, He only disenchanted from the spell, Like the weak worm that gems the starless night, Moved in the scanty circlet of his light: And was it strange if he withdrew the ray That did but guide the night-birds to their prey? The ascending day-star with a bolder eye Hath lit each dew-drop on our trimmer lawn! Yet not for this, if wise, will we decry The spots and struggles of the timid Dawn; Lest so we tempt the approaching Noon to scorn The mists and painted vapours of our Morn. ?1826. FORBEARANCE Beareth all things.--2 COR. xiii.7. Gently I took that which ungently came, And without scorn forgave:--Do thou the same. A wrong done to thee think a cat's-eye spark Thou wouldst not see, were not thine own heart dark Thine own keen sense of wrong that thirsts for sin, Fear that--the spark self-kindled from within, Which blown upon will blind thee with its glare, Or smother'd stifle thee with noisome air. Clap on the extinguisher, pull up the blinds, And soon the ventilated spirit finds Its natural daylight. If a foe have kenn'd, Or worse than foe, an alienated friend, A rib of dry rot in thy ship's stout side, Think it God's message, and in humble pride With heart of oak replace it;--thine the gains-- Give him the rotten timber for his pains! 1832. _SANCTI DOMINICI PALLIUM_ A DIALOGUE BETWEEN POET AND FRIEND FOUND WRITTEN ON THE BLANK LEAF AT THE BEGINNING OF BUTLER'S "BOOK OF THE CHURCH" (1825) POET I note the moods and feelings men betray, And heed them more than aught they do or say; The lingering ghosts of many a secret deed Still-born or haply strangled in its birth; These best reveal the smooth man's inward creed! These mark the spot where lies the treasure Worth! Butler made up of impudence and trick, With cloven tongue prepared to hiss and lick, Rome's brazen serpent--boldly dares discuss The roasting of thy heart, O brave John Huss! And with grim triumph and a truculent glee Absolves anew the Pope-wrought perfidy, That made an empire's plighted faith a lie, And fix'd a broad stare on the Devil's eye-- (Pleased with the guilt, yet envy-stung at heart To stand outmaster'd in his own black art!) Yet Butler- FRIEND Enough of Butler! we're agreed, Who now defends would then have done the deed. But who not feels persuasion's gentle sway, Who but must meet the proffer'd hand half way When courteous Butler-- POET (_aside_) (Rome's smooth go-between!) FRIEND Laments the advice that sour'd a milky queen-- (For "bloody" all enlighten'd men confess An antiquated error of the press:) Who, rapt by zeal beyond her sex's bounds, With actual cautery staunch'd the Church's wounds! And tho' he deems, that with too broad a blur We damn the French and Irish massacre, Yet blames them both--and thinks the Pope might err! What think you now? Boots it with spear and shield Against such gentle foes to take the field Whose beckoning hands the mild Caduceus wield? POET What think I now? Even what I thought before;-- What Butler boasts though Butler may deplore, Still I repeat, words lead me not astray When the shown feeling points a different way. Smooth Butler can say grace at slander's feast, And bless each haut-gout cook'd by monk or priest; Leaves the full lie on Butler's gong to swell, Content with half-truths that do just as well; But duly decks his mitred comrade's flanks, And with him shares the Irish nation's thanks! So much for you, my friend! who own a Church, And would not leave your mother in the lurch! But when a Liberal asks me what I think-- Scared by the blood and soot of Cobbett's ink, And Jeffrey's glairy phlegm and Connor's foam, In search of some safe parable I roam-- An emblem sometimes may comprise a tome! Disclaimant of his uncaught grandsire's mood, I see a tiger lapping kitten's food: And who shall blame him that he purs applause, When brother Brindle pleads the good old cause; And frisks his pretty tail, and half unsheathes his claws! Yet not the less, for modern lights unapt, I trust the bolts and cross-bars of the laws More than the Protestant milk all newly lapt, Impearling a tame wild-cat's whisker'd jaws! 1825, or 1826. ON DONNE'S POETRY With Donne, whose muse on dromedary trots, Wreathe iron pokers into true-love knots; Rhyme's sturdy cripple, fancy's maze and clue, Wit's forge and fire-blast, meaning's press and screw. ?1818. ON A BAD SINGER Swans sing before they die--'twere no bad thing Should certain persons die before they sing. NE PLUS ULTRA Sole Positive of Night! Antipathist of Light! Fate's only essence! primal scorpion rod-- The one permitted opposite of God!-- Condensed blackness and abysmal storm Compacted to one sceptre Arms the Grasp enorm-- The Interceptor-- The Substance that still casts the shadow Death!-- The Dragon foul and fell-- The unrevealable, And hidden one, whose breath Gives wind and fuel to the fires of Hell!-- Ah! sole despair Of both the eternities in Heaven! Sole interdict of all-bedewing prayer, The all-compassionate! Save to the Lampads Seven Reveal'd to none of all the Angelic State, Save to the Lampads Seven, That watch the throne of Heaven! ?1826. HUMAN LIFE ON THE DENIAL OF IMMORTALITY If dead, we cease to be; if total gloom Swallow up life's brief flash for aye, we fare As summer-gusts, of sudden birth and doom, Whose sound and motion not alone declare, But _are_ their _whole_ of being! If the breath Be Life itself, and not its task and tent, If even a soul like Milton's can know death; O Man! thou vessel purposeless, unmeant, Yet drone-hive strange of phantom purposes! Surplus of Nature's dread activity, Which, as she gazed on some nigh-finished vase, Retreating slow, with meditative pause, She formed with restless hands unconsciously. Blank accident! nothing's anomaly! If rootless thus, thus substanceless thy state, Go, weigh thy dreams, and be thy hopes, thy fears, The counter-weights!--Thy laughter and thy tears Mean but themselves, each fittest to create And to repay each other! Why rejoices Thy heart with hollow joy for hollow good? Why cowl thy face beneath the mourner's hood, Why waste thy sighs, and thy lamenting voices, Image of Image, Ghost of Ghostly Elf, That such a thing as thou feel'st warm or cold? Yet what and whence thy gain, if thou withhold These costless shadows of thy shadowy self? Be sad! be glad! be neither! seek, or shun! Thou hast no reason why! Thou canst have none; Thy being's being is contradiction. ?1815. THE BUTTERFLY The Butterfly the ancient Grecians made The soul's fair emblem, and its only name-- But of the soul, escaped the slavish trade Of earthly life!--For in this mortal frame Our's is the reptile's lot, much toil, much blame, Manifold motions making little speed, And to deform and kill the things whereon we feed. ?1815. THE PANG MORE SHARP THAN ALL AN ALLEGORY I He too has flitted from his secret nest, Hope's last and dearest child without a name!-- Has flitted from me, like the warmthless flame, That makes false promise of a place of rest To the tired Pilgrim's still believing mind;-- Or like some Elfin Knight in kingly court, Who having won all guerdons in his sport, Glides out of view, and whither none can find! II Yes! he hath flitted from me--with what aim, Or why, I know not! 'Twas a home of bliss, And he was innocent, as the pretty shame Of babe, that tempts and shuns the menaced kiss, From its twy-cluster'd hiding place of snow! Pure as the babe, I ween, and all aglow As the dear hopes, that swell the mother's breast-- Her eyes down gazing o'er her clasped charge;-- Yet gay as that twice happy father's kiss, That well might glance aside, yet never miss, Where the sweet mark emboss'd so sweet a targe-- Twice wretched he who hath been doubly blest! III Like a loose blossom on a gusty night He flitted from me--and has left behind (As if to them his faith he ne'er did plight) Of either sex and answerable mind Two playmates, twin-births of his foster-dame:-- The one a steady lad (Esteem he hight) And Kindness is the gentler sister's name. Dim likeness now, though fair she be and good, Of that bright boy who hath us all forsook;-- But in his full-eyed aspect when she stood, And while her face reflected every look, And in reflection kindled--she became So like him, that almost she seem'd the same! IV Ah! he is gone, and yet will not depart!-- Is with me still, yet I from him exiled! For still there lives within my secret heart The magic image of the magic Child, Which there he made up-grow by his strong art, As in that crystal orb--wise Merlin's feat,-- The wondrous "World of Glass," wherein inisled All long'd for things their beings did repeat;-- And there he left it, like a Sylph beguiled, To live and yearn and languish incomplete! V Can wit of man a heavier grief reveal? Can sharper pang from hate or scorn arise?-- Yes! one more sharp there is that deeper lies, Which fond Esteem but mocks when he would heal. Yet neither scorn nor hate did it devise, But sad compassion and atoning zeal! One pang more blighting-keen than hope betray'd! And this it is my woeful hap to feel, When, at her Brother's hest, the twin-born Maid With face averted and unsteady eyes, Her truant playmate's faded robe puts on; And inly shrinking from her own disguise Enacts the faery Boy that's lost and gone. O worse than all! O pang all pangs above Is Kindness counterfeiting absent Love! ?1811 THE VISIONARY HOPE Sad lot, to have no Hope! Though lowly kneeling He fain would frame a prayer within his breast, Would fain entreat for some sweet breath of healing, That his sick body might have ease and rest; He strove in vain! the dull sighs from his chest Against his will the stifling load revealing, Though Nature forced; though like some captive guest, Some royal prisoner at his conqueror's feast, An alien's restless mood but half concealing, The sternness on his gentle brow confessed, Sickness within and miserable feeling: Though obscure pangs made curses of his dreams, And dreaded sleep, each night repelled in vain, Each night was scattered by its own loud screams: Yet never could his heart command, though fain, One deep full wish to be no more in pain. That Hope, which was his inward bliss and boast, Which waned and died, yet ever near him stood, Though changed in nature, wander where he would-- For Love's Despair is but Hope's pining Ghost! For this one hope he makes his hourly moan, He wishes and _can_ wish for this alone! Pierced, as with light from Heaven, before its gleams (So the love-stricken visionary deems) Disease would vanish, like a summer shower, Whose dews fling sunshine from the noon-tide bower! Or let it stay! yet this one Hope should give Such strength that he would bless his pains and live. ?1807 ?181O. THE PAINS OF SLEEP Ere on my bed my limbs I lay, It hath not been my use to pray With moving lips or bended knees; But silently, by slow degrees, My spirit I to Love compose, In humble trust mine eye-lids close, With reverential resignation, No wish conceived, no thought exprest, Only a _sense_ of supplication; A sense o'er all my soul imprest That I am weak, yet not unblest, Since in me, round me, everywhere Eternal Strength and Wisdom are. But yester-night I pray'd aloud In anguish and in agony, Up-starting from the fiendish crowd Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me: A lurid light, a trampling throng, Sense of intolerable wrong, And whom I scorned, those only strong! Thirst of revenge, the powerless will Still baffled, and yet burning still! Desire with loathing strangely mixed On wild or hateful objects fixed. Fantastic passions! maddening brawl! And shame and terror over all! Deeds to be hid which were not hid, Which all confused I could not know Whether I suffered, or I did: For all seem'd guilt, remorse or woe, My own or others still the same Life-stifling fear, soul-stifling shame! So two nights passed: the night's dismay Saddened and stunned the coming day. Sleep, the wide blessing, seemed to me Distemper's worst calamity. The third night, when my own loud scream Had waked me from the fiendish dream, O'ercome with sufferings strange and wild, I wept as I had been a child; And having thus by tears subdued My anguish to a milder mood, Such punishments, I said, were due To natures deepliest stained with sin: For aye entempesting anew The unfathomable hell within The horror of their deeds to view, To know and loathe, yet wish and do! Such griefs with such men well agree, But wherefore, wherefore fall on me? To be beloved is all I need, And whom I love, I love indeed. 1803. LOVE'S BURIAL-PLACE _Lady_. If Love be dead-- _Poet_. And I aver it! _Lady_. Tell me, Bard! where Love lies buried _Poet_. Love lies buried where 'twas born: Oh, gentle dame! think it no scorn If, in my fancy, I presume To call thy bosom poor Love's Tomb. And on that tomb to read the line:-- "Here lies a Love that once seem'd mine. But took a chill, as I divine, And died at length of a decline." 1833. LOVE, A SWORD Though veiled in spires of myrtle-wreath, Love is a sword which cuts its sheath, And through the clefts itself has made, We spy the flashes of the blade! But through the clefts itself has made, We likewise see Love's flashing blade By rust consumed, or snapt in twain: And only hilt and stump remain. ?1825. THE KISS One kiss, dear Maid! I said and sighed-- Your scorn the little boon denied. Ah why refuse the blameless bliss? Can danger lurk within a kiss? Yon viewless wanderer of the vale, The Spirit of the Western Gale, At Morning's break, at Evening's close Inhales the sweetness of the Rose, And hovers o'er the uninjured bloom Sighing back the soft perfume. Vigour to the Zephyr's wing Her nectar-breathing kisses fling; And He the glitter of the Dew Scatters on the Rose's hue. Bashful lo! she bends her head, And darts a blush of deeper Red! Too well those lovely lips disclose The triumphs of the opening Rose; O fair! O graceful! bid them prove As passive to the breath of Love. In tender accents, faint and low, Well-pleased I hear the whispered "No!" The whispered "No"--how little meant! Sweet Falsehood that endears Consent! For on those lovely lips the while Dawns the soft relenting smile, And tempts with feigned dissuasion coy The gentle violence of Joy. ?1794. NOT AT HOME That Jealousy may rule a mind Where Love could never be I know; but ne'er expect to find Love without Jealousy. She has a strange cast in her ee, A swart sour-visaged maid-- But yet Love's own twin-sister she, His house-mate and his shade. Ask for her and she'll be denied:-- What then? they only mean Their mistress has lain down to sleep, And can't just then be seen. ?183O. NAMES [FROM LESSING] I ask'd my fair one happy day, What I should call her in my lay; By what sweet name from Rome or Greece; Lalage, Nesera, Chloris, Sappho, Lesbia, or Doris, Arethusa or Lucrece. "Ah!" replied my gentle fair, "Beloved, what are names but air? Choose thou whatever suits the line; Call me Sappho, call me Chloris, Call me Lalage or Doris, Only, only call me Thine." _Morning Post_, August 27,1799. TO LESBIA Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus.--CATULLUS. My Lesbia, let us love and live, And to the winds, my Lesbia, give Each cold restraint, each boding fear Of age and all her saws severe. Yon sun now posting to the main Will set,--but 'tis to rise again;-- But we, when once our mortal light Is set, must sleep in endless night. Then come, with whom alone I'll live, A thousand kisses take and give! Another thousand!--to the store Add hundreds--then a thousand more! And when they to a million mount, Let confusion take the account,-- That you, the number never knowing, May continue still bestowing-- That I for joys may never pine, Which never can again be mine! _Morning Post_, April 11, 1798. THE DEATH OF THE STARLING Lugete, O Veneres, Cupidinesque.--CATULLUS. Pity! mourn in plaintive tone The lovely starling dead and gone! Pity mourns in plaintive tone The lovely starling dead and gone. Weep, ye Loves! and Venus! weep The lovely starling fall'n asleep! Venus sees with tearful eyes-- In her lap the starling lies! While the Loves all in a ring Softly stroke the stiffen'd wing. ?1794. ON A CATARACT FROM A CAVERN NEAR THE SUMMIT OF A MOUNTAIN PRECIPICE [AFTER STOLBERG'S _UNSTERBLICHER J�NGLING_] STROPHE Unperishing youth! Thou leapest from forth The cell of thy hidden nativity; Never mortal saw The cradle of the strong one; Never mortal heard The gathering of his voices; The deep-murmur'd charm of the son of the rock, That is lisp'd evermore at his slumberless fountain. There's a cloud at the portal, a spray-woven veil At the shrine of his ceaseless renewing; It embosoms the roses of dawn, It entangles the shafts of the noon, And into the bed of its stillness The moonshine sinks down as in slumber, That the son of the rock, that the nursling of heaven May be born in a holy twilight! ANTISTROPHE The wild goat in awe Looks up and beholds Above thee the cliff inaccessible;-- Thou at once full-born Madd'nest in thy joyance, Whirlest, shatter'st, splitt'st, Life invulnerable. ?1799. HYMN TO THE EARTH [IMITATED FROM STOLBERG'S _HYMNE AN DIE EKDE_] HEXAMETERS Earth! thou mother of numberless children, the nurse and the mother, Hail! O Goddess, thrice hail! Blest be thou! and, blessing, I hymn thee! Forth, ye sweet sounds! from my harp, and my voice shall float on your surges-- Soar thou aloft, O my soul! and bear up my song on thy pinions. Travelling the vale with mine eyes--green meadows and lake with green island, Dark in its basin of rock, and the bare stream flowing in brightness, Thrill'd with thy beauty and love in the wooded slope of the mountain, Here, great mother, I lie, thy child, with his head on thy bosom! Playful the spirits of noon, that rushing soft through thy tresses, Green-hair'd goddess! refresh me; and hark! as they hurry or linger, Fill the pause of my harp, or sustain it with musical murmurs. Into my being thou murmurest joy, and tenderest sadness Shedd'st thou, like dew, on my heart, till the joy and the heavenly sadness Pour themselves forth from my heart in tears, and the hymn of thanksgiving. Earth! thou mother of numberless children, the nurse and the mother, Sister thou of the stars, and beloved by the Sun, the rejoicer! Guardian and friend of the moon, O Earth, whom the comets forget not, Yea, in the measureless distance wheel round and again they behold thee! Fadeless and young (and what if the latest birth of creation?) Bride and consort of Heaven, that looks down upon thee enamour'd! Say, mysterious Earth! O say, great mother and goddess, Was it not well with thee then, when first thy lap was ungirdled, Thy lap to the genial Heaven, the day that he woo'd thee and won thee! Fair was thy blush, the fairest and first of the blushes of morning! Deep was the shudder, O Earth! the throe of thy self-retention: Inly thou strovest to flee, and didst seek thyself at thy centre! Mightier far was the joy of thy sudden resilience; and forthwith Myriad myriads of lives teem'd forth from the mighty embracement. Thousand-fold tribes of dwellers, impell'd by thousand-fold instincts, Fill'd, as a dream, the wide waters; the rivers sang on their channels; Laugh'd on their shores the hoarse seas; the yearning ocean swell'd upward; Young life low'd through the meadows, the woods, and the echoing mountains, Wander'd bleating in valleys, and warbled on blossoming branches. ?1799. THE VISIT OF THE GODS IMITATED FROM SCHILLER Never, believe me, Appear the Immortals, Never alone: Scarce had I welcomed the Sorrow-beguiler, Iacchus! but in came Boy Cupid the Smiler; Lo! Phoebus the Glorious descends from his throne! They advance, they float in, the Olympians all! With Divinities fills my Terrestrial hall! How shall I yield you Due entertainment, Celestial quire? Me rather, bright guests! with your wings of upbuoyance Bear aloft to your homes, to your banquets of joyance, That the roofs of Olympus may echo my lyre! Hah! we mount! on their pinions they waft up my soul! O give me the nectar! O fill me the bowl! Give him the nectar! Pour out for the poet, Hebe! pour free! Quicken his eyes with celestial dew, That Styx the detested no more he may view, And like one of us Gods may conceit him to be! Thanks, Hebe! I quaff it! Io Pæan, I cry! The wine of the Immortals Forbids me to die! ? 1799. TRANSLATION OF A PASSAGE IN OTTFRIED'S METRICAL PARAPHRASE OF THE GOSPEL 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 soothed 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 bade 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! ? 1799. THE VIRGIN'S CRADLE-HYMN COPIED FROM A PRINT OF THE VIRGIN IN A CATHOLIC VILLAGE IN GERMANY Dormi, Jesu! Mater ridet Quæ tarn dulcem somnum videt, Dormi, Jesu! blandule! Si non dormis, Mater plorat, Inter fila cantans orat, Blande, veni, somnule. ENGLISH Sleep, sweet babe! my cares beguiling: Mother sits beside thee smiling; Sleep, my darling, tenderly! If thou sleep not, mother mourneth, Singing as her wheel she turneth: Come, soft slumber, balmily! 1811. EPITAPH ON AN INFANT Ere Sin could blight or Sorrow fade, Death came with friendly care; The opening bud to Heaven conveyed, And bade it blossom there. 1794. ON AN INFANT WHICH DIED BEFORE BAPTISM "Be, rather than be call'd, a child of God," Death whisper'd!--with assenting nod, Its head upon its mother's breast, The Baby bow'd, without demur-- Of the kingdom of the Blest Possessor, not inheritor. _April 8th_, 1799. EPITAPH ON AN INFANT Its balmy lips the infant blest Relaxing from its mother's breast, How sweet it heaves the happy sigh Of innocent satiety! And such my infant's latest sigh! Oh tell, rude stone! the passer by, That here the pretty babe doth lie, Death sang to sleep with Lullaby. 1799. AN ODE TO THE RAIN COMPOSED BEFORE DAYLIGHT, ON THE MORNING APPOINTED FOR THE DEPARTURE OF A VERY WORTHY, BUT NOT VERY PLEASANT VISITOR, WHOM IT WAS FEARED THE RAIN MIGHT DETAIN. I I know it is dark; and though I have lain, Awake, as I guess, an hour or twain, I have not once open'd the lids of my eyes, But I lie in the dark, as a blind man lies. O Rain! that I lie listening to, You're but a doleful sound at best: I owe you little thanks,'tis true, For breaking thus my needful rest! Yet if, as soon as it is light, O Rain! you will but take your flight, I'll neither rail, nor malice keep, Though sick and sore for want of sleep. But only now, for this one day, Do go, dear Rain! do go away! II O Rain! with your dull two-fold sound, The clash hard by, and the murmur all round! You know, if you know aught, that we, Both night and day, but ill agree: For days and months, and almost years, Have limp'd on through this vale of tears, Since body of mine, and rainy weather, Have lived on easy terms together. Yet if, as soon as it is light, O Rain! you will but take your flight, Though you should come again to-morrow, And bring with you both pain and sorrow; Though stomach should sicken and knees should swell-- I'll nothing speak of you but well. But only now for this one day, Do go, dear Rain! do go away! III Dear Rain! I ne'er refused to say You're a good creature in your way; Nay, I could write a book myself, Would fit a parson's lower shelf, Showing how very good you are. -- What then? sometimes it must be fair! And if sometimes, why not to-day? Do go, dear Rain! do go away! IV Dear Rain! if I've been cold and shy, Take no offence! I'll tell you why. A dear old Friend e'en now is here, And with him came my sister dear; After long absence now first met, Long months by pain and grief beset-- We three dear friends! in truth, we groan Impatiently to be alone. We three, you mark! and not one more! The strong wish makes my spirit sore. We have so much to talk about, So many sad things to let out; So many tears in our eye-corners, Sitting like little Jacky Homers-- In short, as soon as it is day, Do go, dear Rain! do go away! V And this I'll swear to you, dear Rain! Whenever you shall come again, Be you as dull as e'er you could (And by the bye 'tis understood, You're not so pleasant as you're good), Yet, knowing well your worth and place, I'll welcome you with cheerful face; And though you stay'd a week or more, Were ten times duller than before; Yet with kind heart, and right good will, I'll sit and listen to you still; Nor should you go away, dear Rain! Uninvited to remain. But only now, for this one day, Do go, dear Rain! do go away! 1802. ANSWER TO A CHILD'S QUESTION Do you ask what the birds say? The Sparrow, the Dove, The Linnet and Thrush say, "I love and I love!" In the winter they're silent--the wind is so strong; What it says, I don't know, but it sings a loud song. But green leaves, and blossoms, and sunny warm weather, And singing, and loving-all come back together. But the Lark is so brimful of gladness and love, The green fields below him, the blue sky above, That he sings, and he sings; and for ever sings he-- "I love my Love, and my Love loves me!" 1802. SOMETHING CHILDISH, BUT VERY NATURAL WRITTEN IN GERMANY If I had but two little wings And were a little feathery bird, To you I'd fly, my dear! But thoughts like these are idle things, And I stay here. But in my sleep to you I fly: I'm always with you in my sleep! The world is all one's own. But then one wakes, and where am I? All, all alone. Sleep stays not, though a monarch bids: So I love to wake ere break of day: For though my sleep be gone, Yet while 'tis dark, one shuts one's lids, And still dreams on. _April 23, 1799_. LINES ON A CHILD Encinctured with a twine of leaves, That leafy twine his only dress! A lovely Boy was plucking fruits, By moonlight, in a wilderness. The moon was bright, the air was free, And fruits and flowers together grew, On many a shrub and many a tree: And all put on a gentle hue, Hanging in the shadowy air Like a picture rich and rare. It was a climate where, they say, The night is more belov'd than day. But who that beauteous Boy beguil'd, That beauteous Boy to linger here? Alone, by night, a little child, In place so silent and so wild- Has he no friend, no loving mother near? 1798. THE KNIGHT'S TOMB Where is the grave of Sir Arthur O'Kellyn? Where may the grave of that good man be?-- By the side of a spring, on the breast of Helvellyn, Under the twigs of a young birch tree! The oak that in summer was sweet to hear, And rustled its leaves in the fall of the year, And whistled and roar'd in the winter alone, Is gone,--and the birch in its stead is grown.-- The Knight's bones are dust, And his good sword rust;-- His soul is with the saints, I trust. ? 1817. FIRE, FAMINE, AND SLAUGHTER A WAR ECLOGUE _The Scene a desolated Tract in La Vendée. _FAMINE_ _is discovered lying on the ground; to her enter_ FIRE _and_ SLAUGHTER. _Fam._ Sisters! sisters! who sent you here? _Slau._ [to Fire]. I will whisper it in her ear. _Fire._ No! no! no! Spirits hear what spirits tell: 'Twill make an holiday in Hell. No! no! no! Myself, I named him once below, And all the souls, that damned be, Leaped up at once in anarchy, Clapped their hands and danced for glee. They no longer heeded me; But laughed to hear Hell's burning rafters Unwillingly re-echo laughters! No! no! no! Spirits hear what spirits tell: 'Twill make an holiday in Hell! _Fam._ Whisper it, sister! so and so! In the dark hint, soft and slow. _Slau._ Letters four do form his name- And who sent you? _Both._ The same! the same! _Slau._ He came by stealth, and unlocked my den, And I have drunk the blood since then Of thrice three hundred thousand men. _Both._ Who bade you do't? _Slau._ The same! the same! Letters four do form his name. He let me loose, and cried Halloo! To him alone the praise is due. _Fam._ Thanks, sister, thanks! the men have bled, Their wives and their children faint for bread. I stood in a swampy field of battle; With bones and skulls I made a rattle, To frighten the wolf and carrion-crow And the homeless dog--but they would not go. So off I flew: for how could I bear To see them gorge their dainty fare? I heard a groan and a peevish squall, And through the chink of a cottage-wall-- Can you guess what I saw there? _Both_. Whisper it, sister! in our ear. _Fam_. A baby beat its dying mother: I had starved the one and was starving the other! _Both_. Who bade you do't? _Fam_. The same! the same! Letters four do form his name. He let me loose, and cried Halloo! To him alone the praise is due. _Fire_. Sisters! I from Ireland came! Hedge and corn-fields all on flame, I triumph'd o'er the setting sun! And all the while the work was done, On as I strode with my huge strides, I flung back my head and I held my sides, It was so rare a piece of fun To see the sweltered cattle run With uncouth gallop through the night, Scared by the red and noisy light! By the light of his own blazing cot Was many a naked Rebel shot: The house-stream met the flame and hissed, While crash! fell in the roof, I wist, On some of those old bed-rid nurses, That deal in discontent and curses. _Both._ Who bade you do't? _Fire._ The same! the same! Letters four do form his name. He let me loose, and cried Halloo! To him alone the praise is due. _All._ He let us loose, and cried Halloo! How shall we yield him honour due? _Fam._ Wisdom comes with lack of food. I'll gnaw, I'll gnaw the multitude, Till the cup of rage o'erbrim: They shall seize him and his brood-- _Slau._ They shall tear him limb from limb! _Fire._ O thankless beldames and untrue! And is this all that you can do For him, who did so much for you? Ninety months he, by my troth! Hath richly catered for you both; And in an hour would you repay An eight years' work?--Away! away! I alone am faithful! I Cling to him everlastingly. 1797. THE TWO ROUND SPACES ON THE TOMBSTONE The Devil believes that the Lord will come, Stealing a march without beat of drum, About the same time that he came last On an old Christmas-day in a snowy blast: Till he bids the trump sound neither body nor soul stirs For the dead men's heads have slipt under their bolsters. Ho! ho! brother Bard, in our churchyard Both beds and bolsters are soft and green; Save one alone, and that's of stone, And under it lies a Counsellor keen. This tomb would be square, if it were not too long; And 'tis rail'd round with iron, tall, spear-like, and strong. This fellow from Aberdeen hither did skip With a waxy face and a blubber lip, And a black tooth in front to show in part What was the colour of his whole heart. This Counsellor sweet, This Scotchman complete (The Devil scotch him for a snake!), I trust he lies in his grave awake. On the sixth of January, When all around is white with snow As a Cheshire yeoman's dairy, Brother Bard, ho! ho! believe it, or no, On that stone tomb to you I'll show After sunset, and before cock-crow, Two round spaces clear of snow. I swear by our Knight and his forefathers' souls, That in size and shape they are just like the holes In the large house of privity Of that ancient family. On those two places clear of snow There have sat in the night for an hour or so, Before sunrise, and after cock-crow (He hicking his heels, she cursing her corns, All to the tune of the wind in their horns), The Devil and his Grannam, With the snow-drift to fan 'em; Expecting and hoping the trumpet to blow; For they are cock-sure of the fellow below! 180O. THE DEVIL'S THOUGHTS From his brimstone bed at break of day A walking the DEVIL is gone, To visit his little snug farm of the earth And see how his stock went on. Over the hill and over the dale, And he went over the plain, And backward and forward he swished his long tail As a gentleman swishes his cane. And how then was the Devil drest? Oh! he was in his Sunday's best: His jacket was red and his breeches were blue, And there was a hole where the tail came through. He saw a LAWYER killing a Viper On a dung heap beside his stable, And the Devil smiled, for it put him in mind Of Cain and _his_ brother, Abel. A POTHECARY on a white horse Rode by on his vocations, And the Devil thought of his old Friend DEATH in the Revelations. He saw a cottage with a double coach-house, A cottage of gentility! And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin Is pride that apes humility. He went into a rich bookseller's shop, Quoth he! we are both of one college, For I myself sate like a cormorant once Fast by the tree of knowledge. Down the river there plied, with wind and tide, A pig with vast celerity; And the Devil look'd wise as he saw how the while, It cut its own throat. "There!" quoth he with a smile, "Goes 'England's commercial prosperity.'" As he went through Cold-Bath Fields he saw A solitary cell; And the Devil was pleased, for it gave him a hint For improving his prisons in Hell. * * * * * * General ----------- burning face He saw with consternation, And back to hell his way did he take, For the Devil thought by a slight mistake It was general conflagration. 1799. COLOGNE In Kohln, a town of monks and bones, And pavements fang'd with murderous stones, And rags, and hags, and hideous wenches; I counted two and seventy stenches, All well denned, and several stinks! Ye Nymphs that reign o'er sewers and sinks, The river Rhine, it is well known, Doth wash your city of Cologne; But tell me, Nymphs! what power divine Shall henceforth wash the river Rhine? SONNETS ATTEMPTED IN THE MANNER OF CONTEMPORARY WRITERS [SIGNED "NEHEMIAH HIGGINGBOTTOM"] I Pensive at eve on the hard world I mus'd, And my poor heart was sad: so at the moon I gaz'd-and sigh'd, and sigh'd!--for, ah! how soon Eve darkens into night. Mine eye perus'd With tearful vacancy the _dampy_ grass Which wept and glitter'd in the paly ray; And I did pause me on my lonely way, And mused me on those wretched ones who pass O'er the black heath of Sorrow. But, alas! Most of Myself I thought: when it befell That the sooth 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." Ah! my poor heart's inexplicable swell! II TO SIMPLICITY O! I do love thee, meek _Simplicity_! For of thy lays the lulling simpleness Goes to my heart and soothes each small distress, Distress though small, yet haply great to me! 'Tis true on Lady Fortune's gentlest pad I amble on; yet, though I know not why, So sad I am!--but should a friend and I Grow cool and _miff_, O! 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! III ON A RUINED HOUSE IN A ROMANTIC COUNTRY 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 ye not see her gleaming thro' the glade? Belike, 'twas she, the maiden all forlorn. What though 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; As when thro' broken clouds at night's high noon Peeps in fair fragments forth the full--orb'd harvest-moon! 1797. LIMBO Tis a strange place, this Limbo!--not a Place, Yet name it so;--where Time and weary Space Fettered from flight, with night-mare sense of fleeing, Strive for their last crepuscular half-being;-- Lank Space, and scytheless Time with branny hands Barren and soundless as the measuring sands, Not mark'd by flit of Shades,--unmeaning they As moonlight on the dial of the day! But that is lovely--looks like human Time,-- An old man with a steady look sublime, That stops his earthly task to watch the skies; But he is blind--a statue hath such eyes;-- Yet having moonward turn'd his face by chance, Gazes the orb with moon-like countenance, With scant white hairs, with fore top bald and high, He gazes still,--his eyeless face all eye;-- As 'twere an organ full of silent sight, His whole face seemeth to rejoice in light! Lip touching lip, all moveless, bust and limb-- He seems to gaze at that which seems to gaze on him! No such sweet sights doth Limbo den immure, Wall'd round, and made a spirit-jail secure, By the mere horror of blank Naught-at-all, Whose circumambience doth these ghosts enthral. A lurid thought is growthless, dull Privation, Yet that is but a Purgatory curse; Hell knows a fear far worse, A fear--a future state;--'tis positive Negation! 1817. METRICAL FEET LESSON FOR A BOY [** Macron and breve accent marks have been left off, see the note in the Forum.] Trochee trips from long to short; From long to long in solemn sort Slow Spondee stalks; strong foot! yea ill able Ever to come up with Dactyl trisyllable. Iambics march from short to long;-- With a leap and a bound the swift Anapaests throng; One syllable long, with one short at each side, Amphibrachys hastes with a stately stride;-- First and last being long, middle short, Amphimacer Strikes his thundering hoofs like a proud highbred Racer. If Derwent be innocent, steady, and wise, And delight in the things of earth, water, and skies; Tender warmth at his heart, with these metres to show it, With sound sense in his brains, may make Derwent a poet,-- May crown him with fame, and must win him the love Of his father on earth and his Father above. My dear, dear child! Could you stand upon Skiddaw, you would not from its whole ridge See a man who so loves you as your fond S. T. COLERIDGE. 1803. THE HOMERIC HEXAMETER DESCRIBED AND EXEMPLIFIED [FROM SCHILLER] Strongly it bears us along in swelling and limitless billows, Nothing before and nothing behind but the sky and the ocean. ? 1799. THE OVIDIAN ELEGIAC METRE DESCRIBED AND EXEMPLIFIED [FROM SCHILLER] In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column; In the pentameter aye falling in melody back. ?1799. CATULLIAN HENDECASYLLABLES [FROM MATTHISON] Hear, my beloved, an old Milesian story!-- High, and embosom'd in congregated laurels, Glimmer'd a temple upon a breezy headland; In the dim distance amid the skiey billows Rose a fair island; the god of flocks had blest it. From the far shores of the bleat-resounding island Oft by the moonlight a little boat came floating, Came to the sea-cave beneath the breezy headland, Where amid myrtles a pathway stole in mazes Up to the groves of the high embosom'd temple. There in a thicket of dedicated roses, Oft did a priestess, as lovely as a vision, Pouring her soul to the son of Cytherea, Pray him to hover around the slight canoe-boat, And with invisible pilotage to guide it Over the dusk wave, until the nightly sailor Shivering with ecstasy sank upon her bosom. ? 1799. TO ---- I mix in life, and labour to seem free, With common persons pleased and common things, While every thought and action tends to thee, And every impulse from thy influence springs. ? 1796. EPITAPH ON A BAD MAN Under this stone does Walter Harcourt lie, Who valued nought that God or man could give; He lived as if he never thought to die; He died as if he dared not hope to live! 1801. THE SUICIDE'S ARGUMENT Ere the birth of my life, if I wish'd it or no, No question was asked me--it could not be so! If the life was the question, a thing sent to try, And to live on be Yes; what can No be? to die. NATURE'S ANSWER Is't returned, as 'twas sent? Is't no worse for the wear? Think first, what you are! Call to mind what you were! I gave you innocence, I gave you hope, Gave health, and genius, and an ample scope. Return you me guilt, lethargy, despair? Make out the invent'ry; inspect, compare! Then die--if die you dare! 1811. THE GOOD, GREAT MAN "How seldom, friend! a good great man inherits Honour or wealth with all his worth and pains! It sounds like stories from the land of spirits If any man obtain that which he merits Or any merit that which he obtains." REPLY TO THE ABOVE For shame, dear friend, renounce this canting strain! What would'st thou have a good great man obtain? Place? titles? salary? a gilded chain? Or throne of corses which his sword had slain? Greatness and goodness are not _means_, but _ends_! Hath he not always treasures, always friends, The good great man? _three_ treasures, LOVE, and LIGHT, And CALM THOUGHTS, regular as infant's breath: And three firm friends, more sure than day and night, HIMSELF, his MAKER, and the ANGEL DEATH! Morning Post, Sept. 23,1802. INSCRIPTION FOR A FOUNTAIN ON A HEATH This Sycamore, oft musical with bees,-- Such tents the Patriarchs loved! O long unharmed May all its aged boughs o'er-canopy The small round basin, which this jutting stone Keeps pure from falling leaves! Long may the Spring, Quietly as a sleeping infant's breath, Send up cold waters to the traveller With soft and even pulse! Nor ever cease Yon tiny cone of sand its soundless dance, Which at the bottom, like a Fairy's Page, As merry and no taller, dances still, Nor wrinkles the smooth surface of the Fount. Here twilight is and coolness: here is moss, A soft seat, and a deep and ample shade. Thou may'st toil far and find no second tree. Drink, Pilgrim, here! Here rest! and if thy heart Be innocent, here too shalt thou refresh Thy spirit, listening to some gentle sound, Or passing gale or hum of murmuring bees! 1802. INSCRIPTION FOR A TIME-PIECE Now! it is gone.--Our brief hours travel post, Each with its thought or deed, its Why or How:-- But know, each parting hour gives up a ghost To dwell within thee-an eternal NOW! ? 183O. A TOMBLESS EPITAPH 'Tis true, Idoloclastes Satyrane! (So call him, for so mingling blame with praise And smiles with anxious looks, his earliest friends, Masking his birth-name, wont to character His wild-wood fancy and impetuous zeal) 'Tis true that, passionate for ancient truths, And honouring with religious love the Great Of older times, he hated to excess, With an unquiet and intolerant scorn, The hollow puppets of an hollow age, Ever idolatrous, and changing ever Its worthless idols! Learning, power, and time, (Too much of all) thus wasting in vain war Of fervid colloquy. Sickness, 'tis true, Whole years of weary days, besieged him close, Even to the gates and inlets of his life! But it is true, no less, that strenuous, firm, And with a natural gladness, he maintained The citadel unconquered, and in joy Was strong to follow the delightful Muse. For not a hidden path, that to the shades Of the beloved Parnassian forest leads, Lurked undiscovered by him; not a rill There issues from the fount of Hippocrene, But he had traced it upward to its source, Through open glade, dark glen, and secret dell, Knew the gay wild flowers on its banks, and culled Its med'cinable herbs. Yea, oft alone, Piercing the long-neglected holy cave, The haunt obscure of old Philosophy, He bade with lifted torch its starry walls Sparkle, as erst they sparkled to the flame Of odorous lamps tended by Saint and Sage. O framed for calmer times and nobler hearts! O studious Poet, eloquent for truth! Philosopher! contemning wealth and death, Yet docile, childlike, full of Life and Love! Here, rather than on monumental stone, This record of thy worth thy Friend inscribes, Thoughtful, with quiet tears upon his cheek. ? 1809. EPITAPH Stop, Christian passer-by!--Stop, child of God, And read with gentle breast. Beneath this sod A poet lies, or that which once seem'd he.-- O, lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C.; That he who many a year with toil of breath Found death in life, may here find life in death! Mercy for praise--to be forgiven for fame He ask'd, and hoped, through Christ. Do thou the same! _9th November 1833_. NOTES I am indebted to Mr. Heinemann, the owner of the copyright of Dykes Campbell's edition of Coleridge's Poetical Works (Macmillan & Co., 1893) for permission to use that text (one of the most carefully edited texts of any English poet) in this volume of selections. My aim, in making these selections, has been to give every poem of Coleridge's that seems to me really good, and nothing else. Not every poem, none perhaps of those in blank verse, is equal throughout; but I think readers of Coleridge will be surprised to find how few of the poems contained in this volume are not of almost flawless workmanship, as well of incomparable poetic genius. Scarcely any English poet gains so much as Coleridge by not being read in a complete edition. The gulf between his best and his worst work is as wide as the gulf between good and evil. Even Wordsworth, even Byron, is not so intolerable to read in a complete edition. But Coleridge, much more easily than Byron or Wordsworth, can be extricated from his own lumber-heaps; it is rare in his work to find a poem which is really good in parts and not really good as a whole. I have taken every poem on its own merits as poetry, its own technical merits as verse; and thus have included equally the frigid eighteenth-century conceits of "The Kiss" and the modern burlesque license of the comic fragments. But I have excluded everything which has an interest merely personal, or indeed any other interest than that of poetry; and I have thus omitted the famous "Ode on the Departing Year," in spite of the esteem in which Coleridge held it, and in spite of its one exquisite line-- "God's image, sister of the Seraphim"-- and I have omitted it because as a whole it is untempered rhetoric, shapeless in form; and I have also omitted confession pieces such as that early one which contains, among its otherwise too emphatic utterances, the most delicate and precise picture which Coleridge ever drew of himself: "To me hath Heaven with bounteous hand assigned Energic Reason and a shaping mind, The daring ken of Truth, the Patriot's part, And Pity's sigh, that breathes the gentle heart-- Sloth-jaundiced all! and from my graspless hand Drop Friendship's precious pearls, like hour-glass sand. I weep, yet stoop not! the faint anguish flows, A dreamy pang in Morning's feverish doze." Every poem that I have given I have given in full, and, without exception, in the form in which Coleridge left it. The dates given after the poems are Dykes Campbell's; occasionally I have corrected the date given in the text of his edition by his own correction in the notes. p. I. _The Ancient Mariner_. The marginal analysis which Coleridge added in reprinting the poem (from the _Lyrical Ballads_) in _Sibylline Leaves_, has been transferred to this place, where it can be read without interrupting the narrative in verse. PART I An ancient Mariner meeteth three Gallants bidden to a wedding-feast, and detaineth one. The Wedding-Guest is spell-bound by the eye of the old sea-faring man, and constrained to hear his tale. The Mariner tells how the ship sailed southward with a good wind and fair weather, till it reached the Line. The Wedding-Guest heareth the bridal music; but the Mariner continueth his tale. The ship driven by a storm toward the south pole. The land of ice, and of fearful sounds where no living thing was to be seen. Till a great sea-bird, called the Albatross, came through the snow-fog, and was received with great joy and hospitality. And lo! the Albatross proveth a bird of good omen, and followeth the ship as it returned northward through fog and floating ice. The ancient Mariner inhospitably killeth the pious bird of good omen. PART II His shipmates cry out against the ancient Mariner, for killing the bird of good luck. But when the fog cleared off, they justify the same, and thus make themselves accomplices in the crime. The fair breeze continues; the ship enters the Pacific Ocean, and sails northward, even till it reaches the Line. The ship hath been suddenly becalmed. And the Albatross begins to be avenged. A Spirit had followed them; one of the invisible inhabitants of this planet, neither departed souls nor angels; concerning whom the learned Jew, Josephus, and the Platonic Constantinopolitan, Michael Psellus, may be consulted. They are very numerous, and there is no climate or element without one or more. The shipmates, in their sore distress, would fain throw the whole guilt on the ancient Mariner: In sign whereof they hang the dead sea-bird round his neck. PART III The ancient Mariner beholdeth a sign in the element afar off. At its nearer approach, it seemeth him to be a ship; and at a dear ransom he freeth his speech from the bonds of thirst. A flash of joy; And horror follows. For can it be a ship that comes onward without wind or tide? It seemeth him but the skeleton of a ship. And its ribs are seen as bars on the face of the setting Sun. The Spectre-Woman and her Death-mate, and no other on board the skeleton- ship. Like vessel, like crew! Death and Life-in-Death have diced for the ship's crew, and she (the latter) winneth the ancient Mariner. No twilight within the courts of the Sun. At the rising of the Moon, One after another, His shipmates drop down dead. But Life-in-Death begins her work on the ancient Mariner. PART IV The Wedding-Guest feareth that a Spirit is talking to him; But the ancient Mariner assureth him of his bodily life, and proceedeth to relate his horrible penance. He despiseth the creatures of the calm. And envieth that they should live, and so many lie dead. But the curse liveth for him in the eye of the dead men. In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and everywhere the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival. By the light of the Moon he beholdeth God's creatures of the great calm. Their beauty and their happiness. He blesseth them in his heart. The spell begins to break. PART V By grace of the holy Mother, the ancient Mariner is refreshed with rain. He heareth sounds and seeth strange sights and commotions in the sky and the element. The bodies of the ship's crew are inspired, and the ship moves on; But not by the souls of the men, nor by dæmons of earth or middle air, but by a blessed troop of angelic spirits, sent down by the invocation of the guardian saint. The lonesome Spirit from the south-pole carries on the ship as far as the Line, in obedience to the angelic troop, but still requireth vengeance. The Polar Spirit's fellow-dæmons, the invisible inhabitants of the element, take part in his wrong; and two of them relate, one to the other, that penance long and heavy for the ancient Mariner hath been accorded to the Polar Spirit, who returneth southward. PART VI The Mariner hath been cast into a trance; for the angelic power causeth the vessel to drive northward faster than human life could endure. The supernatural motion is retarded; the Mariner awakes, and his penance begins anew. The curse is finally expiated. And the ancient Mariner beholdeth his native country. The angelic spirits leave the dead bodies, And appear in their own forms of light. PART VII The Hermit of the Wood, Approacheth the ship with wonder. The ship suddenly sinketh. The ancient Mariner is saved in the Pilot's boat. The ancient Mariner earnestly entreateth the Hermit to shrieve him; and the penance of life falls on him. And ever and anon throughout his future life an agony constraineth him to travel from land to land, And to teach, by his own example, love and reverence to all things that God made and loveth. p. 27. _Christabel_. Coleridge at his best represents the imaginative temper in its essence, pure gold, with only just enough alloy to give it firm bodily substance. "Christabel" is not, like "Kubla Khan," a disembodied ecstasy, but a coherent effort of the imagination. Yet, when we come to the second part, the magic is already half gone out of it. Rossetti says, in a printed letter, with admirable truth: "The conception, and partly the execution, of the passage in which Christabel repeats by fascination the serpent-glance of Geraldine, is magnificent; but that is the only good narrative passage in part two. The rest seems to have reached a fatal facility of jingling, at the heels whereof followed Scott." A few of the lines seem to sink almost lower than Scott, and suggest a Gilbert parody: "He bids thee come without delay With all thy numerous array. * * * * * And he will meet thee on the way With all his numerous array." But in the conclusion, which has nothing whatever to do with the poem, Coleridge is his finest self again: a magical psychologist. It is interesting to know that Crashaw was the main influence upon Coleridge while writing "Christabel," and that the "Hymn to the Name and Honour of the admirable S. Teresa" was "ever present to his mind while writing the second part." p. 61. _Love_. This poem was originally published, in the _Morning Post_ of December 21, 1799, as part of an "Introduction to the Tale of the Dark Ladié." This introduction begins: "O leave the lily on its stem; O leave the rose upon the spray; O leave the elder-bloom, fair maids! And listen to my lay. A cypress and a myrtle bough This morn around my harp you twined, Because it fashion'd mournfully Its murmurs in the wind. And now a tale of love and woe, A woeful tale of love I sing; Hark, gentle maidens! hark, it sighs And trembles on the string." p. 65. _The Three Graves_. Coleridge only published what he calls "the following humble fragment" of what was to have been a poem in six parts; but he wrote an imperfect sketch of the first two parts, which was published from the original MS. by Dykes Campbell in his edition. The poem as Coleridge left it is sufficiently complete, and I have ventured to divide it into Part I. and Part II., instead of the usual Part III. and Part IV. It is Coleridge's one attempt to compete with Wordsworth on what Wordsworth considered his own ground, and it was first published by Coleridge in _The Friend_ of September 21, 1809, on the advice of Wordsworth and Southey. "The language," we are told in an introductory note, "was intended to be dramatic; that is, suited to the narrator; and the metre corresponds to the homeliness of the diction. It is therefore presented as the fragment, not of a poem, but of a common Ballad-tale. Whether this is sufficient to justify the adoption of such a style, in any metrical composition not professedly ludicrous, the Author is himself in some doubt. At all events, it is not presented as poetry, and it is in no way connected with the Author's judgment concerning poetic diction. Its merits, if any, are exclusively psychological." Exclusively, it would be unjust to say; but to a degree beyond those of any similar poem of Wordsworth, certainly. p. 78. _Dejection_. This ode was originally addressed to Wordsworth, but before it was published in its first form, the "William" of the still existing MS. was changed to "Edmund"; in later editions "Edmund" was changed to "Lady," except in the seventh stanza, where "Otway" is substituted. The reference in this stanza is to Wordsworth's "Lucy Gray," and the germ of the passage occurs in a letter of Coleridge to Poole, printed by Dykes Campbell in the notes to his edition: "Greta Hall, Feb. 1, 1801.--O my dear, dear Friend! that you were with me by the fireside of my study here, that I might talk it over with you to the tune of this night- wind that pipes its thin, doleful, climbing, sinking notes, like a child that has lost its way, and is crying aloud, half in grief, and half in the hope to be heard by its mother." p. 9O. _Fears in Solitude_. Coleridge, who was so often his own best critic, especially when the criticism was to remain inactive, wrote on an autograph copy of this poem now belonging to Professor Dowden: "N.B.--The above is perhaps not Poetry,--but rather a sort of middle thing between Poetry and Oratory--_sermoni propriora_.--Some parts are, I am conscious, too tame even for animated prose." It is difficult to say whether, in such poems as this, Coleridge is overtaken by his besetting indolence, or whether he is deliberately writing down to the theories of Wordsworth. Another criticism of his own on his early blank verse, where he speaks of "the utter want of all rhythm in the verse, the monotony and dead _plumb down_ of the pauses, and the absence of all bone, muscle and sinew in the single lines," applies only too well to the larger part of his work in this difficult metre, so apt to go to sleep by the way. p. 1O7. _Hymn before Sun-rise_. Coleridge was never at Chamouni, and the suggestion of his poem is to be found in a poem of twenty lines by a German poetess, Frederike Brun. Some of the rhetoric of his poem Coleridge got from the German poetess; the imagination is all his own. It is perhaps a consequence of its origin that the imagination and the rhetoric never get quite clear of one another, and that, in spite of some magical lines (wholly Coleridge's) like: "O struggling with the darkness all the night, And visited all night by troops of stars:" the poem remains somewhat external, a somewhat deliberate heaping up of hosannas. p. 114. _The Nightingale_. The persons supposed to take part in this "conversation poem" are of course William and Dorothy Wordsworth. p. 134. _A Day-Dream_. "There cannot be any doubt, I think, that the 'Asra' of this poem is Miss Sarah Hutchinson; 'Mary,' her sister (Mrs. Wordsworth); 'our sister and our friend,' Dorothy and William Wordsworth." (DYKES CAMPBELL.) p. 142. _Work without Hope_. "What could be left to hope for when the man could already do such work?" asks Mr. Swinburne. With this exquisite poem, in which Coleridge's style is seen in its most faultless union of his finest qualities, compare this passage from a letter to Lady Beaumont, about a year earlier: "Though I am at present sadly below even _my_ par of health, or rather unhealth, and am the more depressed thereby from the consciousness that in this yearly resurrection of Nature from her winter sleep, amid young leaves and blooms and twittering nest-building birds, the sun so gladsome, the breezes with such healing on their wings, all good and lovely things are beneath me, above me, and everywhere around me, and all from God, while my incapability of enjoying, or, at best, languor in receiving them, is directly or indirectly from myself, from past procrastination, and cowardly impatience of pain." It was always upon some not less solid foundation that Coleridge built these delicate structures. p. 147. _Phantom_. This, almost Coleridge's loveliest fragment of verse, was composed in sleep, like "Kubla Khan," "Constancy to an Ideal Object," and "Phantom or Fact?" There is a quality, in this and some other poems of Coleridge, which he himself has exquisitely rendered in the passage on Ariel in the lectures on Shakespeare: "In air he lives, from air he derives his being, in air he acts; and all his colours and properties seem to have been obtained from the rainbow and the skies. There is nothing about Ariel that cannot be conceived to exist either at sunrise or sunset: hence all that belongs to Ariel belongs to the delight the mind is capable of receiving from the most lovely external appearances. "Coleridge is the Ariel of English Poetry: glittering in the song from "Zapolya," translucent in the "Phantom," infantine, with a note of happy infancy almost like that of Blake, in "Something Childish, but very Natural." In these poems, and in the "Ode to the Rain," and the "Inscription for a Fountain on a Heath," there is a unique way of feeling, which he can render to us on those rare occasions when his sensations are uninterrupted; by thought, which clouds them, or by emotion, which disturbs them. He reveals mysterious intimacies with natural things, the "flapping" flame or a child's scarcely more articulate moods. And in some of them, which are experiments in form, he seems to compete gaily with the Elizabethan lyrists, doing wonderful things in jest, like one who is for once happy and disengaged, and able to play with his tormentor, verse. p. 153. _Forbearance_. "Gently I took that which urgently came" is from Spenser's "Shepherds' Calendar": "But gently tooke that ungently came." p. 154. _Sancti Dominici Pallium_. The "friend," as Dykes Campbell points out, was Southey, whose "Book of the Church" had been attacked by Charles Butler. This is one of Coleridge's most masterly experiments in dealing with material hardly possible to turn into poetry. What exquisite verse, and what variety of handling! The eighteenth-century smooth force and pungency of the main part of it ends in an anticipation of the burlesque energy of some of Mr. George Meredith's most characteristic verse. Anyone coming upon the lines: "More than the Protestant milk all newly lapt, Impearling a tame wild-cat's whiskered jaws," would have assigned them without hesitation to the writer of "A Certain People" and other sonnets in the "Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth." p. 158. _Ne plus ultra_. This mysterious fragment is one of the most original experiments which Coleridge ever made, both in metre and in language (abstract terms becoming concrete through intellectual passion) and may seem to anticipate "The Unknown Eros." p. 164. _The Pains of Sleep_. In a letter to Sir George and Lady Beaumont, dated September 22, 1803, Coleridge wrote, describing his journey to Scotland: "With the night my horrors commence. During the whole of my journey three nights out of four I have fallen asleep struggling and resolving to lie awake, and, awaking, have blest the scream which delivered me from the reluctant sleep.... These dreams, with all their mockery of guilt, rage, unworthy desires, remorse, shame, and terror, formed at the time the subject of some Verses, which I had forgotten till the return of my complaint, and which I will send you in my next as a curiosity." p. 169. _Names_. Coleridge was as careless as the Elizabethans in acknowledging the originals of the poems which he translated, whether, as in this case, he was almost literal, or, as in the case of the Chamouni poem, he used his material freely. The lines "On a Cataract" are said to be "improved from Stolberg" in the edition of 1848, edited by Mrs. H. N. Coleridge; and the title may suit the whole of them. p. 182. Answer to a Child's Question. I have omitted the four lines, printed in brackets in Campbell's edition, which were omitted, I think rightly, by Coleridge in reprinting the poem from the _Morning Post_ of October 16, 1802. p. 183. _Lines on a Child_. This exquisite fragment is printed in Coleridge's works in a prefatory note to the prose "Wanderings of Cain." It was written, he tells us, "for the purpose of procuring a friend's judgment on the metre, as a specimen" of what was to have been a long poem, in imitation of "The Death of Abel," written in collaboration with Wordsworth. "The Ancient Mariner was written instead." p. 188. _The two Round Spaces on the Tombstone_. This poem was printed in the _Morning Post_ of December 4, 180O, under the title: "The two Round Spaces: a Skeltoniad;" and it is this text which is here given, from Campbell's edition. The "fellow from Aberdeen" was Sir James Mackintosh. Coleridge apologised for reprinting the verses, "with the hope that they will be taken, as assuredly they were composed, in mere sport." No apology was needed; they are the most rich, ripe, and Rabelaisian comic verses he ever wrote, full-bodied and exultant in their exuberance of wayward and good-humoured satire. p. 192. _Sonnets Attempted in the Manner of Contemporary Writers_. Dykes Campbell quotes a letter of Coleridge to Cottle, which he attributes to the year 1797, in which Coleridge says: "I sent to the _Monthly Magazine_ three mock sonnets in ridicule of my own Poems, and Charles Lloyd's, and Charles Lamb's, etc. etc., exposing that affectation of unaffectedness, of jumping and misplaced accent, in commonplace epithets, flat lines forced into poetry by italics (signifying how well and mouthishly the author would read them), puny pathos, etc. etc. The instances were all taken from myself and Lloyd and Lamb. I signed them 'Nehemiah Higginbottom.' I think they may do good to our young Bards." Coleridge's humour, which begins as early as 1794, with the lines on "Parliamentary Oscillators," is one of the outlets of an oppressively ingenious mind, over-packed with ideas, which he cannot be content to express in prose. He delights, as in an intellectual exercise, in the grapple with difficult technique, the victorious wrestle with grotesque rhymes. All the comic poems are unusually rich and fine in rhythm, which seems to exult in its mastery over material so foreign to it. Yet he has not always or wholly command of this humour. The famous "Lines to a Young Ass" were first written as a joke, and there is some burlesque strength in such lines as: "Where Toil shall wed young Health, that charming Lass! And use his sleek cows for a looking-glass." But the mood went, the jest was so far forgotten as to be taken seriously by himself, and turned into the sober earnest which it remains; a kind of timidity of the original impression crept in, and we are left to laugh rather at than with the poet. 
41705	----	Transcriber's note Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Printer errors have been changed and are listed at the end. All other inconsistencies are as in the original. Characters that could not be displayed directly in Latin-1 are transcribed as follows: _ - Italic ^ - superscript {_C} - subscript C [cir] - circle [py] - pyramid [rec] - rectangle [scir] - small circle [sq] - square [V] - slant ANIMA POETÆ FROM THE UNPUBLISHED NOTE-BOOKS OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE EDITED BY ERNEST HARTLEY COLERIDGE LONDON WILLIAM HEINEMANN MDCCCXCV _All rights reserved_ _Entered at Stationers' Hall_ _Entered at the Library of Congress, Washington_ _Copyright_, 1895 When shall I find time and ease to reduce my pocket-books and memorandums to an _Index_ or _Memoriæ Memorandorum_? If--aye! and alas! if I could see the last sheet of my _Assertio Fidei Christianæ, et eterni temporizantis_, having previously beheld my elements of Discourse, Logic, Dialectic, and Noetic, or Canon, Criterion, and Organon, with the philosophic Glossary--in one printed volume, and the Exercises in Reasoning as another--if--what then? Why, then I would publish all that remained unused, Travels and all, under the title of Excursions Abroad and at Home, what I have seen and what I have thought with a little of what I have felt, in the words in which I told and talked them to my pocket-books, the confidants who have _not_ betrayed me, the friends whose silence was _not_ detraction, and the inmates before whom I was not ashamed to complain, to yearn, to weep, or even to pray! To which are added marginal notes from many old books and one or two new ones, sifted through the Mogul Sieve of Duty towards my Neighbour--by [Greek: 'Estêse]. _21 June, 1823._ PREFACE _Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge_, which the poet's nephew and son-in-law, Henry Nelson Coleridge, published in 1835, was a popular book from the first, and has won the approval of two generations of readers. Unlike the _Biographia Literaria_, or the original and revised versions of _The Friend_, which never had their day at all, or the _Aids to Reflection_, which passed through many editions, but now seems to have delivered its message, the _Table Talk_ is still well known and widely read, and that not only by students of literature. The task which the editor set himself was a difficult one, but it lay within the powers of an attentive listener, possessed of a good memory and those rarer gifts of a refined and scholarly taste, a sound and luminous common sense. He does not attempt to reproduce Coleridge's conversation or monologue or impassioned harangue, but he preserves and notes down the detached fragments of knowledge and wisdom which fell from time to time from the master's lips. Here are "the balmy sunny islets of the blest and the intelligible," an unvexed and _harbourous_ archipelago. Very sparingly, if at all, have those pithy "sentences" and weighty paragraphs been trimmed or pruned by the pious solicitude of the memorialist, but it must be borne in mind that the unities are more or less consciously observed, alike in the matter of the discourse and the artistic presentation to the reader. There is, in short, not merely a "mechanic" but an "organic regularity" in the composition of the work as a whole. A "myriad-minded" sage, who has seen men and cities, who has read widely and shaped his thoughts in a peculiar mould, is pouring out his stores of knowledge, the garnered fruit of a life of study and meditation, for the benefit of an apt learner, a discreet and appreciative disciple. A day comes when the marvellous lips are constrained to an endless silence, and it becomes the duty and privilege of the beloved and honoured pupil to "snatch from forgetfulness" and to hand down to posterity the great tradition of his master's eloquence. A labour of love so useful and so fascinating was accomplished by the gifted editor of the _Table Talk_, and it was accomplished once for all. The compilation of a new _Table Talk_, if it were possible, would be a mistake and an impertinence. The present collection of hitherto unpublished aphorisms, reflections, confessions and soliloquies, which for want of a better name I have entitled _Anima Poetæ_, does not in any way challenge comparison with the _Table Talk_. It is, indeed, essentially different, not only in the sources from which it has been compiled but in constitution and in aim. "Since I left you," writes Coleridge in a letter to Wordsworth of May 12, 1812, "my pocket-books have been my sole confidants." Doubtless, in earlier and happier days, he had been eager not merely to record but to communicate to the few who would listen or might understand the ceaseless and curious workings of his ever-shaping imagination, but from youth to age note-books and pocket-books were his silent confidants, his "never-failing friends" by night and day. More than fifty of these remarkable documents are extant. The earliest of the series, which dates from 1795 and which is known as the "Gutch Memorandum Book," was purchased in 1868 by the trustees of the British Museum, and is now exhibited in the King's Library. It consists, for the most part, of fragments of prose and verse thrown off at the moment, and stored up for future use in poem or lecture or sermon. A few of these fragments were printed in the _Literary Remains_ (4 vols. 1836-39), and others are to be found (pp. 103, 5, 6, 9 _et passim_) in Herr Brandl's _Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the English Romantic School_. The poetical fragments are printed _in extenso_ in Coleridge's _Poetical Works_ (Macmillan, 1893), pp. 453-58. A few specimens of the prose fragments have been included in the first chapter of this work. One of the latest note-books, an unfinished folio, contains the Autobiographic Note of 1832, portions of which were printed in Gillman's _Life of Coleridge_, pp. 9-33, and a mass of unpublished matter, consisting mainly of religious exercises and biblical criticism. Of the intervening collection of pocket-books, note-books, copy-books, of all shapes, sizes and bindings, a detailed description would be tedious and out of place. Their contents may be roughly divided into diaries of tours in Germany, the Lake District, Scotland, Sicily and Italy; notes for projected and accomplished works, rough drafts of poems, schemes of metre and metrical experiments; notes for lectures on Shakspere and other dramatists; quotations from books of travel, from Greek, Latin, German and Italian classics, with and without critical comments; innumerable fragments of metaphysical and theological speculation; and commingled with this unassorted medley of facts and thoughts and fancies, an occasional and intermitted record of personal feeling, of love and friendship, of disappointment and regret, of penitence and resolve, of faith and hope in the Unseen. Hitherto, but little use has been made of this life-long accumulation of literary material. A few specimens, "Curiosities of Literature" they might have been called, were contributed by Coleridge himself to Southey's _Omniana_ of 1812, and a further selection of some fifty fragments, gleaned from note-books 21-1/2 and 22, and from a third unnumbered MS. book now in my possession, were printed by H. N. Coleridge in the first volume of the _Literary Remains_ under the heading _Omniana 1809-1816_. The _Omniana_ of 1812 were, in many instances, re-written by Coleridge before they were included in Southey's volumes, and in the later issue, here and there, the editor has given shape and articulation to an unfinished or half-formed sentence. The earlier and later _Omniana_, together with the fragments which were published by Allsop in his _Letters, Conversations and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge_, in 1836, were included by the late Thomas Ashe in his reprint of the _Table Talk_, Bell & Co., 1884. Some fourteen or fifteen notes of singular interest and beauty, which belong to the years 1804, 1812, 1826, 1829, etc., were printed by James Gillman in his unfinished "Life of Coleridge," and it is evident that he contemplated a more extended use of the note-books in the construction of his second volume, or, possibly, the publication of a supplementary volume of notes or _Omniana_. Transcripts which were made for this purpose are extant, and have been placed at my disposal by the kindness of Mrs. Henry Watson, who inherited them from her grandmother, Mrs. Gillman. I may add that a few quotations from diaries of tours in the Lake Country and on the Continent are to be found in the foot-notes appended to the two volumes of _Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge_ which were issued in the spring of the present year. To publish the note-books _in extenso_ would be impracticable, if even after the lapse of sixty years since the death of the writer it were permissible. They are private memoranda-books, and rightly and properly have been regarded as a sacred trust by their several custodians. But it is none the less certain that in disburthening himself of the ideas and imaginations which pressed upon his consciousness, in committing them to writing and carefully preserving them through all his wanderings, Coleridge had no mind that they should perish utterly. The invisible pageantry of thought and passion which for ever floated into his spiritual ken, the perpetual hope, the half-belief that the veil of the senses would be rent in twain, and that he and not another would be the first to lay bare the mysteries of being, and to solve the problem of the ages--of these was the breath of his soul. It was his fate to wrestle from night to morn with the Angel of the Vision, and of that unequal combat he has left, by way of warning or encouragement, a broken but an inspired and inspiring record. "Hints and first thoughts" he bade us regard the contents of his memorandum-books--"_cogitabilia_ rather than _cogitata_ a me, not fixed opinions," and yet acts of obedience to the apostolic command of "Try all things: hold fast that which is good"--say, rather, acts of obedience to the compulsion of his own genius to "take a pen and write in a book all the words of the vision." The aim of the present work, however imperfectly accomplished, has been to present in a compendious shape a collection of unpublished aphorisms and sentences, and at the same time to enable the reader to form some estimate of those strange self-communings to which Coleridge devoted so much of his intellectual energies, and by means of which he hoped to pass through the mists and shadows of words and thoughts to a steadier contemplation, to the apprehension if not the comprehension of the mysteries of Truth and Being. The various excerpts which I have selected for publication are arranged, as far as possible, in chronological order. They begin with the beginning of Coleridge's literary career, and are carried down to the summer of 1828, when he accompanied Wordsworth and his daughter Dora on a six months' tour on the Continent. The series of note-books which belong to the remaining years of his life (1828-1834) were devoted for the most part to a commentary on the Old and New Testament, to theological controversy, and to metaphysical disquisition. Whatever interest they may have possessed, or still possess, appeals to the student, not to the general reader. With his inveterate love of humorous or facetious titles, Coleridge was pleased to designate these serious and abstruse dissertations as "The Flycatchers." My especial thanks are due to Amy, Lady Coleridge, who, in accordance with the known wishes of the late Lord Coleridge, has afforded me every facility for collating my own transcripts of the note-books, and those which were made by my father and other members of my family, with the original MSS. now in her possession. I have to also thank Miss Edith Coleridge for valuable assistance in the preparation of the present work for the press. The death of my friend, Mr. James Dykes Campbell, has deprived me of aid which he alone could give. It was due to his suggestion and encouragement that I began to compile these pages, and only a few days before his death he promised me (it was all he could undertake) to "run through the proofs with my pencil in my hand." He has passed away _multis flebilis_, but he lived to accomplish his own work both as critic and biographer, and to leave to all who follow in his footsteps a type and example of honest workmanship and of literary excellence. ERNEST HARTLEY COLERIDGE. ANIMA POETÆ CHAPTER I _1797-1801_ "O Youth! for years so many and sweet, 'Tis known, that Thou and I were one." S. T. C. [Sidenote: PAST AND PRESENT] "We should judge of absent things by the absent. Objects which are present are apt to produce perceptions too strong to be impartially compared with those recalled only by the memory." SIR J. STEWART. True! and O how often the very opposite is true likewise, namely, that the objects of memory are, often, so dear and vivid, that present things are injured by being compared with them, vivid from dearness! [Sidenote: LOVE] Love, a myrtle wand, is transformed by the Aaron touch of jealousy into a serpent so vast as to swallow up every other stinging woe, and makes us mourn the exchange. Love that soothes misfortune and buoys up to virtue--the pillow of sorrows, the wings of virtue. Disappointed love not uncommonly causes misogyny, even as extreme thirst is supposed to be the cause of hydrophobia. Love transforms the soul into a conformity with the object loved. [Sidenote: DUTY AND EXPERIENCE] From the narrow path of virtue Pleasure leads us to more flowery fields, and there Pain meets and chides our wandering. Of how many pleasures, of what lasting happiness, is Pain the parent and Woe the womb! Real pain can alone cure us of imaginary ills. We feel a thousand miseries till we are lucky enough to feel misery. Misfortunes prepare the heart for the enjoyment of happiness in a better state. The life of a religious benevolent man is an April day. His pains and sorrows [what are they but] the fertilising rain? The sunshine blends with every shower, and look! how full and lovely it lies on yonder hill! Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like playthings by the bedside of a child deadly sick. Human happiness, like the aloe, is a flower of slow growth. What we must do let us love to do. It is a noble chymistry that turns necessity into pleasure. [Sidenote: INFANCY AND INFANTS] 1. The first smile--what kind of _reason_ it displays. The first smile after sickness. 2. Asleep with the polyanthus held fast in its hand, its bells dropping over the rosy face. 3. Stretching after the stars. 4. Seen asleep by the light of glowworms. 5. Sports of infants; their excessive activity, the means being the end. Nature, how lovely a school-mistress!... Children at houses of industry. 6. Infant beholding its new-born sister. 7. Kissing itself in the looking-glass. 8. The Lapland infant seeing the sun. 9. An infant's prayer on its mother's lap. Mother directing a baby's hand. (Hartley's "love to Papa," scrawls pothooks and reads what he meant by them.) 10. The infants of kings and nobles. ("Princess unkissed and foully husbanded!") 11. The souls of infants, a vision (_vide Swedenborg_). 12. Some tales of an infant. 13. [Greek: Storgê]. The absurdity of the Darwinian system (instanced by) birds and alligators. 14. The wisdom and graciousness of God in the infancy of the human species--its beauty, long continuance, etc. (Children in the wind--hair floating, tossing, a miniature of the agitated trees below which they played. The elder whirling for joy the one in petticoats, a fat baby eddying half-willingly, half by the force of the gust, driven backward, struggling forward--both drunk with the pleasure, both shouting their hymn of joy.) [_Letters of S. T. C._, 1895, i. 408.] 15. Poor William seeking his mother, in love with her picture, and having that union of beauty and filial affection that the Virgin Mary may be supposed to give. [Sidenote: POETRY] Poetry, like schoolboys, by too frequent and severe correction, may be cowed into dullness! Peculiar, not far-fetched; natural, but not obvious; delicate, not affected; dignified, not swelling; fiery, but not mad; rich in imagery, but not loaded with it--in short, a union of harmony and good sense, of perspicuity and conciseness. Thought is the body of such an ode, enthusiasm the soul, and imagery the drapery. Dr. Darwin's poetry is nothing but a succession of landscapes or paintings. It arrests the attention too often, and so prevents the rapidity necessary to pathos. The elder languages were fitter for poetry because they expressed only prominent ideas with clearness, the others but darkly.... Poetry gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood. It was so by me with Gray's "Bard" and Collins' Odes. The "Bard" once intoxicated me, and now I read it without pleasure. From this cause it is that what I call metaphysical poetry gives me so much delight. [Compare _Lecture_ vi. 1811-12, Bell & Co., p. 70; and _Table Talk_, Oct. 23, 1833, Bell & Co., p. 264.] [Sidenote: COMPARISONS AND CONTRASTS] Poetry which excites us to artificial feelings makes us callous to real ones. The whale is followed by waves. I would glide down the rivulet of quiet life, a trout. Australis [Southey] may be compared to an ostrich. He cannot fly, but he has such other qualities that he needs it not. Mackintosh _intertrudes_ not introduces his beauties. Snails of intellect who see only by their feelers. Pygmy minds, measuring others by their own standard, cry What a _monster_, when they view a man! Our constitution is to some like cheese--the rotten parts they like the best. Her eyes sparkled as if they had been cut out of a diamond-quarry in some Golconda of Fairyland, and cast such meaning glances as would have vitrified the flint in a murderer's blunderbuss. [A task] as difficult as to separate two dew-drops blended together on a bosom of a new-blown rose. I discovered unprovoked malice in his hard heart, like a huge toad in the centre of a marble rock. Men anxious for this world are like owls that wake all night to catch mice. At Genoa the word _Liberty_ is engraved on the chains of the galley slaves and the doors of prisons. Gratitude, worse than witchcraft, conjures up the pale, meagre ghosts of dead forgotten kindnesses to haunt and trouble [his memory]. The sot, rolling on his sofa, stretching and yawning, exclaimed, "_Utinam hoc esset laborare._" Truth still more than Justice [is] blind, and needs Wisdom for her guide. [Sidenote: OF THINGS VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE] [A Proof of] the severity of the winter--the kingfisher [by] its slow, short flight permitting you to observe all its colours, almost as if it had been a flower. Little daisy--very late Spring, March. Quid si vivat? Do all things in faith. _Never pluck a flower again!_ Mem. [Sidenote: May 20, 1799] The nightingales in a cluster or little wood of blossomed trees, and a bat wheeling incessantly round and round! The noise of the frogs was not unpleasant, like the humming of spinning wheels in a large manufactory--now and then a distinct sound, sometimes like a duck, and, sometimes, like the shrill notes of sea-fowl. [This note was written one day later than S. T. C.'s last letter from Germany, May 19, 1799.] O Heavens! when I think how perishable things, how imperishable thoughts seem to be! For what is forgetfulness? Renew the state of affection or bodily feeling [so as to be the] same or similar, sometimes dimly similar, and, instantly, the trains of forgotten thoughts rise from their living catacombs! [Sidenote:[Sockburn] October 1799] Few moments in life are so interesting as those of our affectionate reception from a stranger who is the dear friend of your dear friend! How often you have been the subject of conversation, and how affectionately! [The note commemorates his first introduction to Mary and Sarah Hutchinson.] [Sidenote: Friday evening, Nov, 27, 1799] The immoveableness of all things through which so many men were moving--a harsh contrast compared with the universal motion, the harmonious system of motions in the country, and everywhere in Nature. In the dim light London appeared to be a huge place of sepulchres through which hosts of spirits were gliding. Ridicule the rage for quotations by quoting from "My Baby's Handkerchief." Analyse the causes that the ludicrous weakens memory, and laughter, mechanically, makes it difficult to remember a good story. Sara sent twice for the measure of George's[A] neck. He wondered that Sara should be such a fool, as she might have measured William's or Coleridge's--as "all poets' throttles were of one size." Hazlitt, the painter, told me that a picture never looked so well as when the pallet was by the side of it. Association, with the glow of production. Mr. J. Cairns, in the _Gentleman's Diary_ for 1800, supposes that the Nazarites, who, under the law of Moses, had their heads [shaved] must have used some sort of wigs! Slanting pillars of misty light moved along under the sun hid by clouds. Leaves of trees upturned by the stirring wind in twilight--an image of paleness, wan affright. A child scolding a flower in the words in which he had been himself scolded and whipped, is poetry--passion past with pleasure. [Sidenote: July 20, 1800] Poor fellow at a distance--idle? in this hay-time when wages are so high? [We] come near [and] then [see that he is] pale, can scarce speak or throw out his fishing rod. [This incident is fully described by Wordsworth in the last of the four poems on "Naming of Places." --_Poetical Works of W. Wordsworth_, 1889, p. 144.] [Sidenote: September 1, [1800]] The beards of thistle and dandelions flying about the lonely mountains like life--and I saw them through the trees skimming the lake like swallows. ["And, in our vacant mood, Not seldom did we stop to watch some tuft Of dandelion seed or thistle's beard, That skimmed the surface of the dead calm lake, Suddenly halting now--a lifeless stand! And starting off again with freak as sudden; In all its sportive wanderings, all the while, Making report of an invisible breeze That was its wings, its chariot and its horse, Its playmate, rather say, its moving soul." _Ibid._ p. 143.] Luther--a hero, fettered, indeed, with prejudices--but with those very fetters he would knock out the brains of a modern _Fort Esprit_. _Comment._ Frightening by his prejudices, as a spirit does by clanking his chains. Not only words, as far as relates to speaking, but the knowledge of words as distinct component parts, which we learn by learning to read--what an immense effect it must have on our reasoning faculties! Logical in opposition to real. [Sidenote: 1797-1801] Children, in making new words, always do it analogously. Explain this. Hot-headed men confuse, your cool-headed gentry jumble. The man of warm feelings only produces order and true connection. In what a jumble M. and H. write, every third paragraph beginning with "Let us now return," or "We come now to the consideration of such a thing"--that is, what _I said_ I _would_ come to in the contents prefixed to the chapter. [Sidenote: Dec. 19, 1800] The thin scattered rain-clouds were scudding along the sky; above them, with a visible interspace, the crescent moon hung, and partook not of the motion; her own hazy light filled up the concave, as if it had been painted and the colours had run. "He to whom all things are one, who draweth all things to one, and seeth all things in one, may enjoy true peace of mind and rest of spirit."--JEREMY TAYLOR'S _Via Pacis_. To each reproach that thunders from without may remorse groan an echo. A prison without ransom, anguish without patience, a sick bed in the house of contempt. To _think_ of a thing is different from to _perceive_ it, as "to walk" is from to "feel the ground under you;" perhaps in the same way too--namely, a succession of perceptions accompanied by a sense of _nisus_ and purpose. Space, is it merely another word for the perception of a capability of additional magnitude, or does this very perception presuppose the idea of space? The latter is Kant's opinion. A babe who had never known greater cruelty than that of being snatched away by its mother for half a moment from the breast in order to be kissed. To attempt to subordinate the idea of time to that of likeness. Every man asks _how_? This power to instruct is the true substratum of philosophy. Godwin's philosophy is contained in these words: _Rationem defectus esse defectum rationis_.--HOBBES. Hartley just able to speak a few words, making a fire-place of stones, with stones for fire--four stones for the fire-place, two for the fire--seems to illustrate a theory of language, the use of arbitrary symbols in imagination. Hartley walked remarkably soon and, therefore, learnt to talk remarkably late. Anti-optimism! Praised be our Maker, and to the honour of human nature is it, that we may truly call this an inhuman opinion. Man strives after good. Materialists unwilling to admit the mysterious element of our nature make it all mysterious--nothing mysterious in nerves, eyes, &c., but that nerves think, etc.! Stir up the sediment into the transparent water, and so make all opaque. [Sidenote: 1797-1801] As we recede from anthropomorphism we must go either to the Trinity or Pantheism. The Fathers who were Unitarians were anthropomorphites. [Sidenote: EGOTISM January 1801] Empirics are boastful and egotists because they introduce real or apparent novelty, which excites great opposition, [while] personal opposition creates re-action (which is of course a consciousness of power) associated with the person re-acting. Paracelsus was a boaster, it is true; so were the French Jacobins, and Wolff, though not a boaster, was persecuted into a habit of egotism in his philosophical writings; so Dr. John Brown, and Milton in his prose works; and those, in similar circumstances, who, from prudence, abstain from egotism in their writings are still egotists among their friends. It would be unnatural effort not to be so, and egotism in such cases is by no means offensive to a kind and discerning man. Some flatter themselves that they abhor egotism, and do not suffer it to appear _primâ facie_, either in their writings or conversation, however much and however personally they or their opinions have been opposed. What now? Observe, watch those men; their habits of feeling and thinking are made up of _contempt_, which is the concentrated vinegar of egotism--it is _lætitia mixta cum odio_, a notion of the weakness of another conjoined with a notion of our own comparative strength, though that weakness is still strong enough to be troublesome to us, though not formidable. "--and the deep power of Joy We see into the Life of Things." [Sidenote: THE EGO] By deep feeling we make our _ideas dim_, and this is what we mean by our life, ourselves. I think of the wall--it is before me a distinct image. Here I necessarily think of the _idea_ and the thinking _I_ as two distinct and opposite things. Now let me think of _myself_, of the thinking being. The idea becomes dim, whatever it be--so dim that I know not what it is; but the feeling is deep and steady, and this I call _I_--identifying the percipient and the perceived. "O Thou! whose fancies from afar are brought." [Sidenote: March 17, 1801, Tuesday] [Sidenote: 1797-1801] Hartley, looking out of my study window, fixed his eyes steadily and for some time on the opposite prospect and said, "Will yon mountains _always_ be?" I shewed him the whole magnificent prospect in a looking-glass, and held it up, so that the whole was like a canopy or ceiling over his head, and he struggled to express himself concerning the difference between the thing and the image almost with convulsive effort. I never before saw such an abstract of _thinking_ as a pure act and energy--of thinking as distinguished from thought. [Sidenote: GIORDANO BRUNO] Monday, April 1801, and Tuesday, read two works of Giordano Bruno, with one title-page: _Jordani Bruni Nolani de Monade, Numero et Figurâ liber consequens. Quinque de Minimo, Magno et Mensurâ. Item. De Innumerabilibus Immenso, et Infigurabili seu de Universo et Mundis libri octo. Francofurti, Apud Joan. Wechelum et Petrum Fischerum consortes_, 1591. Then follows the dedication, then the index of contents of the whole volume, at the end of which index is a Latin ode, conceived with great dignity and grandeur of thought. Then the work _De Monade, Numero et Figurâ, secretioris nempe Physicæ, Mathematicæ, et Metaphysicæ elementa_ commences, which, as well as the eight books _De Innumerabili_, &c., is a poem in Latin hexameters, divided (each book) into chapters, and to each chapter is affixed a prose commentary. If the five books _de Minimo_, &c., to which this book is consequent are of the same character, I lost nothing in not having it. As to the work _De Monade_, it was far too numerical, lineal and Pythagorean for my comprehension. It read very much like Thomas Taylor and Proclus, &c. I by no means think it certain that there is no meaning in these works. Nor do I presume even to suppose that the meaning is of no value (till I understand a man's ignorance I presume myself ignorant of his understanding), but it is for others, at present, not for me. Sir P. Sidney and Fulk Greville shut the doors at their philosophical conferences with Bruno. If his conversation resembled this book, I should have thought he would have talked with a trumpet. The poems and commentaries, in the _De Immenso et Innumerabili_ are of a different character. The commentary is a very sublime enunciation of the dignity of the human soul, according to the principles of Plato. [Here follows the passage, "_Anima Sapiens ----ubique totus_," quoted in _The Friend_ (_Coleridge's Works_, ii. 109), together with a brief _résumé_ of Bruno's other works. See, too, _Biographia Literaria_, chapter ix. (_Coleridge's Works_, iii. 249).] [Sidenote: OBSERVATIONS AND REFLECTIONS] The spring with the little tiny cone of loose sand ever rising and sinking at the bottom, but its surface without a wrinkle. [Sidenote: Monday, September 14, 1801] Northern lights remarkably fine--chiefly a purple-blue--in shooting pyramids, moved from over Bassenthwaite behind Skiddaw. Derwent's birthday, one year old. [Sidenote: September 15, 1801] Observed the great half moon setting behind the mountain ridge, and watched the shapes its various segments presented as it slowly sunk--first the foot of a boot, all but the heel--then a little pyramid [py]--then a star of the first magnitude--indeed, it was not distinguishable from the evening star at its largest--then rapidly a smaller, a small, a very small star--and, as it diminished in size, so it grew paler in tint. And now where is it? Unseen--but a little fleecy cloud hangs above the mountain ridge, and is rich in amber light. I do not wish you to act from those truths. No! still and always act from your feelings; but only meditate often on these truths, that sometime or other they may become your feelings. The state should be to the religions under its protection as a well-drawn picture, equally eyeing all in the room. Quære, whether or no too great definiteness of terms in any language may not consume too much of the vital and idea-creating force in distinct, clear, full-made images, and so prevent originality. For original might be distinguished from positive thought. The thing that causes _in_stability in a particular state, of itself causes stability. For instance, wet soap slips off the ledge--detain it till it dries a little, and it _sticks_. Is there anything in the idea that citizens are fonder of good eating and rustics of strong drink--the one from the rarity of all such things, the other from the uniformity of his life? [Sidenote: October 19, 1801] [Sidenote: 1797-1801] On the Greta, over the bridge by Mr. Edmundson's father-in-law, the ashes--their leaves of that light yellow which autumn gives them, cast a reflection on the river like a painter's sunshine. [Sidenote: October 20, 1801] My birthday. The snow fell on Skiddaw and Grysdale Pike for the first time. [A life-long mistake. He was born October 21, 1772.] [Sidenote: Tuesday evening, 1/2 past 6, October 22, 1801] All the mountains black and tremendously obscure, except Swinside. At this time I saw, one after the other, nearly in the same place, two perfect moon-rainbows, the one foot in the field below my garden, the other in the field nearest but two to the church. It was grey-moonlight-mist-colour. Friday morning, Mary Hutchinson arrives. The art in a great man, and of evidently superior faculties, to be often _obliged_ to people, often his inferiors--in this way the enthusiasm of affection may be excited. Pity where we can help and our help is accepted with gratitude, conjoined with admiration, breeds an enthusiastic affection. The same pity conjoined with admiration, where neither our help is accepted nor efficient, breeds dyspathy and fear. _Nota bene_ to make a detailed comparison, in the manner of Jeremy Taylor, between the searching for the first cause of a thing and the seeking the fountains of the Nile--so many streams, each with its particular fountain--and, at last, it all comes to a name! The soul a mummy embalmed by Hope in the catacombs. To write a _series_ of love poems truly Sapphic, save that they shall have a large interfusion of moral sentiment and calm imagery--love in all the moods of mind, philosophic, fantastic--in moods of high enthusiasm, of simple feeling, of mysticism, of religion--comprise in it all the practice and all the philosophy of love! [Greek: Ho myrionous]--hyperbole from Naucratius' panegyric of Theodoras Chersites. Shakspere, _item_, [Greek: ho pollostos kai polyeidês tê poikilostrophô sophia. Ho megalophrônotatos tês alêtheias kêryx.]--LORD BACON. [Compare _Biographia Literaria_, cap. xv., "our myriad-minded Shakspere" and _footnote_. [Greek: Anêr myrionous] 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 Shakspere, _de jure singulari, et ex privilegio naturæ. Coleridge's Works_, iii. 375.] FOOTNOTES: [Footnote A: Presumably George Dyer.] CHAPTER II _1802-1803_ "In a half sleep, he dreams of better worlds, And dreaming hears thee still, O singing lark, That singest like an angel in the clouds!" S. T .C. [Sidenote: THOUGHTS AND FANCIES] No one can leap over his own shadow, but poets leap over death. The old world begins a new year. That is _ours_, but this is from God. We may think of time as threefold. Slowly comes the Future, swift the Present passes by, but the Past is unmoveable. No impatience will quicken the loiterer, no terror, no delight rein in the flyer, and no regret set in motion the stationary. Wouldst be happy, take the delayer for thy counsellor; do not choose the flyer for thy friend, nor the ever-remainer for thine enemy. [Sidenote: LIMBO] Vastum, incultum, solitudo mera, et incrinitissima nuditas. [_Crinitus_, covered with hair, is to be found in Cicero, _nuditas_ in Quintilian, but _incrinitissima_ is, probably, Coleridgian Latinity.] [An old man gloating over his past vices may be compared to the] devil at the very end of hell, warming himself at the reflection of the fire in the ice. Dimness of vision, mist, &c., magnify the powers of sight, numbness adds to those of touch. A numb limb seems twice its real size. Take away from sounds the sense of outness, and what a horrible disease would every minute become! A drive over a pavement would be exquisite torture. What, then, is sympathy if the feelings be not disclosed? An inward reverberation of the stifled cry of distress. Metaphysics make all one's thoughts equally corrosive on the body, by inducing a habit of making momently and common thought the subject of uncommon interest and intellectual energy. A kind-hearted man who is obliged to give a refusal or the like which will inflict great pain, finds a relief in doing it roughly and fiercely. Explain this and use it in Christabel. The unspeakable comfort to a good man's mind, nay, even to a criminal, to be _understood_--to have some one that understands one--and who does not feel that, on earth, no one does? The hope of this, always more or less disappointed, gives the passion to friendship. [Sidenote: October,1802] Hartley, at Mr. Clarkson's, sent for a candle. The _seems_ made him miserable. "What do you mean, my love?" "The seems, the seems. What seems to be and is not, men and faces, and I do not [know] what, ugly, and sometimes pretty, and these turn ugly, and they seem when my eyes are open and worse when they are shut--and the candle cures the _seems_." Great injury has resulted from the supposed incompatibility of one talent with another, judgment with imagination and taste, good sense with strong feeling, &c. If it be false, as assuredly it is, the opinion has deprived us of a test which every man might apply. [Hence] Locke's opinions of Blackmore, Hume's of Milton and Shakspere. [Sidenote: October 25, 1802] I began to look through Swift's works. First volume, containing "Tale of a Tub," wanting. Second volume--the sermon on the Trinity, rank Socinianism, _purus putus Socinianism_, while the author rails against the Socinians for monsters. The first sight of green fields with the numberless nodding gold cups, and the winding river with alders on its banks, affected me, coming out of a city confinement, with the sweetness and power of a sudden strain of music. Mem. to end my preface with "in short, speaking to the poets of the age, '_Primus vestrûm non sum, neque imus_.' I am none of the best, I am none of the meanest of you."--BURTON. "Et pour moi, le bonheur n'a commencé que lorsque je l'ai eu perdu. Je mettrais volontiers sur la porte du Paradis le vers que le Dante a mis sur celle de l'Enfer. 'Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch' entrate.'" Were I Achilles, I would have had my leg cut off, and have got rid of my vulnerable heel. In natural objects we feel ourselves, or think of ourselves, only by _likenesses_--among men, too often by _differences_. Hence the soothing, love-kindling effect of rural nature--the bad passions of human societies. And why is difference linked with hatred? [Sidenote: TRANSCRIPTS FROM MY VELVET-PAPER POCKET-BOOKS] Regular post--its influence on the general literature of the country; turns two-thirds of the nation into writers. Socinianism, moonlight; methodism, a stove. O for some sun to unite heat and light! [Sidenote: Nov. 25, 1802] I intend to examine minutely the nature, cause, birth and growth of the verbal imagination, in the possession of which Barrow excels almost every other writer of prose. [Sidenote: Sunday, December 19] Remember the pear trees in the lovely vale of Teme. Every season Nature converts me from some unloving heresy, and will make a Catholic of me at last. A fine and apposite quotation, or a good story, so far from promoting, are wont to _damp_ the easy commerce of sensible chit-chat. We imagine ourselves discoverers, and that we have struck a light, when, in reality, at most, we have but snuffed a candle. A thief in the candle, consuming in a blaze the tallow belonging to the wick which has sunk out of sight, is an apt simile for a plagiarist from a dead author. An author with a new play which has been hissed off the stage is not unlike a boy who has launched on a pond a ship of his own making, and tries to prove to his schoolfellows that it _ought_ to have sailed. Repose after agitation is like the pool under a waterfall, which the waterfall has made. Something inherently mean in action! Even the creation of the universe disturbs my idea of the Almighty's greatness--would do so but that I perceive that thought with Him creates. The great federal republic of the universe. T. Wedgwood's objection to my "Things and Thoughts," because "thought always implies an act or _nisus_ of mind" is not well founded. A thought and thoughts are quite different words from Thought, as a fancy from Fancy, a work from Work, a life from Life, a force and forces from Force, a feeling, a writing [from Feelings, Writings.] [Sidenote: May 10, 1803] To _fall_ asleep. Is not a real _event_ in the body well represented by this phrase? Is it in _excess_ when on first _dropping_ asleep we _fall_ down precipices, or sink down, all things sinking beneath us, or drop down? Is there not a disease from deficiency of this critical sensation when people imagine that they have been awake all night, and actually lie dreaming, expecting and wishing for the critical sensation? [Compare the phrase, "precipices of distempered sleep," in the sonnet, "No more my visionary soul shall dwell," attributed by Southey to Favell.--_Life and Corresp._ of R. SOUTHEY, i. 224.] [Sidenote: A TREACHEROUS KNAVE] [He] drew out the secrets from men's hearts as the Egyptian enchanters by particular strains of music draw out serpents from their lurking-places. [Sidenote: COUNTRY AND TOWN] The rocks and stones put on a vital resemblance and life itself seemed, thereby, to forego its restlessness, to anticipate in its own nature an infinite repose, and to become, as it were, compatible with immoveability. Bright reflections, in the canal, of the blue and green vitriol bottles in the druggists' shops in London. A curious, and more than curious, fact, that when the country does not benefit, it depraves. Hence the violent, vindictive passions and the outrageous and dark and wild cruelties of very many country folk. [On the other hand] the continual sight of human faces and human houses, as in China, emasculates [and degrades.] [Sidenote: Monday night, June 8, 1803] "He who cannot wait for his reward has, in reality, not earned it." These words I uttered in a dream, in which a lecture I was giving--a very profound one, as I thought--was not listened to, but I was quizzed. [Sidenote: Tuesday night, July 19, 1803] Intensely hot day; left off a waistcoat and for yarn wore silk stockings. Before nine o'clock, had unpleasant chillness; heard a noise which I thought Derwent's in sleep, listened, and found it was a calf bellowing. Instantly came on my mind that night I slept out at Ottery, and the calf in the field across the river whose lowing so deeply impressed me. Chill + child and calf-lowing--probably the Rivers Greta and Otter. [_Letters of S.T.C._, 1895, i. 14, _note_.] [Sidenote: October, 1803] A smile, as foreign or alien to, as detached from the gloom of the countenance, as I have seen a small spot of light travel slowly and sadly along the mountain's breast, when all beside has been dark with the storm. [Sidenote: A PRINCIPLE OF CRITICISM.] Never to lose an opportunity of reasoning against the head-dimming, heart-damping principle of judging a work by its defects, not its beauties. Every work must have the former--we know it _a priori_--but every work has not the latter, and he, therefore, who discovers them, tells you something that you could not with certainty, or even with probability, have anticipated. [Sidenote: WORDSWORTH AND THE PRELUDE] I am sincerely glad that he has bidden farewell to all small poems, and is devoting himself to his great work, grandly imprisoning, while it deifies, his attention and feelings within the sacred circle and temple-walls of great objects and elevated conceptions. In those little poems, his own corrections coming of necessity so often--at the end of every fourteen or twenty lines, or whatever the poem might chance to be--wore him out; difference of opinion with his best friends irritated him, and he wrote, at times, too much with a sectarian spirit, in a sort of bravado. But now he is at the helm of a noble bark; now he sails right onward; it is all open ocean and a steady breeze, and he drives before it, unfretted by short tacks, reefing and unreefing the sails, hauling and disentangling the ropes. His only disease is the having been out of his element; his return to it is food to famine; it is both the specific remedy and the condition of health. [Sidenote: THE INCOMMUNICABLE] Without drawing, I feel myself but half invested with language. Music, too, is wanting to me. But yet, though one should unite poetry, draftsman's skill, and music, the greater and, perhaps, nobler, certainly _all_ the subtler, parts of one's nature must be _solitary_. Man exists herein to himself and to God alone--yea! in how much only to God! how much lies _below_ his own consciousness! The tree or sea-weed like appearance of the side of the mountain, all white with snow, made by little bits of snow loosened. Introduce this and the stones leaping rabbit-like down on my sopha of sods. [_Vide_ p. 60.] The sunny mist, the luminous gloom of Plato. [Sidenote: TIME AN ELEMENT OF GRIEF] Nothing affects me much at the moment it happens. It either stupefies me, and I, perhaps, look at a merry-make and dance-the-hay of flies, or listen entirely to the loud click of the great clock, or I am simply indifferent, not without some sense of philosophical self-complacency. For a thing at the moment is but a thing of the moment; it must be taken up into the mind, diffuse itself through the whole multitude of shapes and thoughts, not one of which it leaves untinged, between [not one of] which and it some new thought is not engendered. Now this is a work of time, but the body feels it quicker with me. [Sidenote: THE POET AND THE SPIDER] On St. Herbert's Island, I saw a large spider with most beautiful legs, floating in the air on his back by a single thread which he was spinning out, and still, as he spun, heaving on the air, as if the air beneath was a pavement elastic to his strokes. From the top of a very high tree he had spun his line; at length reached the bottom, tied his thread round a piece of grass, and reascended to spin another--a net to hang, as a fisherman's sea-net hangs, in the sun and wind to dry. [Sidenote: THE COMMUNICABLE] One excellent use of communication of sorrow to a friend is this, that in relating what ails us, we ourselves first know exactly what the real grief is, and see it for itself in its own form and limits. Unspoken grief is a misty medley of which the real affliction only plays the first fiddle, blows the horn to a scattered mob of obscure feelings. Perhaps, at certain moments, a single, almost insignificant sorrow may, by association, bring together all the little relicts of pain and discomfort, bodily and mental, that we have endured even from infancy. [Sidenote: NOSCITUR A SOCIIS] One may best judge of men by their pleasures. Who has not known men who have passed the day in honourable toil with honour and ability, and at night sought the vilest pleasure in the vilest society? This is the man's self. The other is a trick learnt by heart (for we may even learn the power of extemporaneous elocution and instant action as an automatic trick); but a man's pleasures--children, books, friends, nature, the Muse--O these deceive not. [Sidenote: TEMPERAMENT AND MORALS October, 1803] Even among good and sensible men, how common it is that one attaches himself scrupulously to the rigid performance of some minor virtue or makes a point of carrying some virtue into all its minutiæ, and is just as lax in a similar point, _professedly_ lax. What this is depends, seemingly, on temperament. _A_ makes no conscience of a little flattery in cases where he is certain that he is not acting from base or interested motives--in short, whenever his only motives are the amusement, the momentary pleasure given, &c., a medley of good nature, diseased proneness to sympathy, and a habit of _being wiser_ behind the curtain than his own actions before it. _B_ would die rather than deviate from truth and sincerity in this instance, but permits himself to utter, nay, publish the harshest censure of men as moralists and as literati, and that, too, on his simple _ipse dixit_, without assigning any reason, and often without having any, save that he himself _believes_ it--believes it because he _dislikes_ the man, and dislikes him probably for his looks, or, at best, for some one fault without any collation of the sum total of the man's qualities. Yet _A_ and _B_ are both good men, as the world goes. They do not act from conscious self-love, and are amenable to principles in their own minds. [Sidenote: BRIGHT OCTOBER October 21, 1803, Friday morning] A drizzling rain. Heavy masses of shapeless vapour upon the mountains (O the perpetual forms of Borrowdale!) yet it is no unbroken tale of dull sadness. Slanting pillars travel across the lake at long intervals, the vaporous mass whitens in large stains of light--on the lakeward ridge of that huge arm-chair of Lodore fell a gleam of softest light, that brought out the rich hues of the late autumn. The woody Castle Crag between me and Lodore is a rich flower-garden of colours--the brightest yellows with the deepest crimsons and the infinite shades of brown and green, the _infinite_ diversity of which blends the whole, so that the brighter colours seem to be colours upon a ground, not coloured things. Little woolpacks of white bright vapour rest on different summits and declivities. The vale is narrowed by the mist and cloud, yet through the wall of mist you can see into a bower of sunny light, in Borrowdale; the birds are singing in the tender rain, as if it were the rain of April, and the decaying foliage were flowers and blossoms. The pillar of smoke from the chimney rises up in the mist, and is just distinguishable from it, and the mountain forms in the gorge of Borrowdale consubstantiate with the mist and cloud, even as the pillar'd smoke--a shade deeper and a determinate form. [Sidenote: TELEOLOGY AND NATURE WORSHIP A PROTEST October 26, 1803] A most unpleasant dispute with Wordsworth and Hazlitt. I spoke, I fear, too contemptuously; but they spoke so irreverently, so malignantly of the Divine Wisdom that it overset me. Hazlitt, how easily raised to rage and hatred self-projected! but who shall find the force that can drag him up out of the depth into one expression of kindness, into the showing of one gleam of the light of love on his countenance. Peace be with him! But _thou_, dearest Wordsworth--and what if Ray, Durham, Paley have carried the observation of the aptitude of things too far, too habitually into pedantry? O how many worse pedantries! how few so harmless, with so much efficient good! Dear William, pardon pedantry in others, and avoid it in yourself, instead of scoffing and reviling at pedantry in good men and a good cause and _becoming_ a pedant yourself in a bad cause--even by that very act becoming one. But, surely, always to look at the superficies of objects for the purpose of taking delight in their beauty, and sympathy with their real or imagined life, is as deleterious to the health and manhood of intellect as, always to be peering and unravelling contrivance may be to the simplicity of the affection and the grandeur and unity of the imagination. O dearest William! would Ray or Durham have spoken of God as you spoke of Nature? [Sidenote: W. H.] Hazlitt to the feelings of anger and hatred, phosphorus--it is but to open the cork and it flames--but to love and serviceable friendship, let them, like Nebuchadnezzar, heat the furnace with a sevenfold heat, this triune, Shadrach, Meshach, Abed-nego, will shiver in the midst of it. [Sidenote: THE ORIGIN OF EVIL Thursday October 27, 1803] I sate for my picture [to Hazlitt]--heard from Southey the "Institution of the Jesuits," during which some interesting idea occurred to me, and has escaped. I made out, however, the whole business of the origin of evil satisfactorily to my own mind, and forced H. to confess that the metaphysical argument reduced itself to this, Why did not infinite Power _always exclusively_ produce such beings as in each moment of their duration were infinite? why, in short, did not the Almighty create an absolutely infinite number of Almighties? The hollowness and impiety of the argument will be felt by considering that, suppose a universal happiness, a perfection of the moral as well as natural world, still the whole objection applies just as forcibly as at this moment. The malignity of the Deity (I shudder even at the assumption of this affrightful and Satanic language) is manifested in the creation of archangels and cherubs and the whole company of pure Intelligences burning in their unquenchable felicity, equally as in the creation of Neros and Tiberiuses, of stone and leprosy. Suppose yourself perfectly happy, yet, according to this argument, you _ought_ to charge God with malignity for having created you--your own life and all its comforts are in the indictment against the Creator--for surely even a child would be ashamed to answer, "No! I should still exist, only in that case, instead of being a man, I should be an infinite being." As if the word _I_ here had even the remotest semblance of a meaning. Infinitely more absurd than if I should write the fraction 1/1000 on a slate, then rub it out with my sponge, and write in the same place the integral number 555,666,879, and then observe that the former figure was _greatly_ improved by the measure, that _it_ was grown a far finer figure!--conceiting a _change_ where there had been positive substitution. Thus, then, it appears that the sole justification of those who, offended by the vice and misery of the created world, as far as we know it, impeach the power and goodness of the Almighty, making the proper cause of such vice and misery to have been a defect either of power or goodness--it appears, I say, that their sole justification rests on an argument which has nothing to do with vice and misery, as vice and misery--on an argument which would hold equally good in heaven as in hell--on an argument which it might be demonstrated no human being in a state of happiness could ever have conceived--an argument which a millennium would annihilate, and which yet would hold equally good then as now! But even in point of metaphysic the whole rests at last on the conceivable. Now, I appeal to every man's internal consciousness, if he will but sincerely and in brotherly simplicity silence the bustle of argument in his mind and the ungenial feelings that mingle with and fill up the mob, and then ask his own intellect whether, supposing he could conceive the creation of positively infinite and co-equal beings, and whether, supposing this not only possible but real, this has exhausted his notion of _creatability_? whether the intellect, by an unborn and original law of its essence, does not demand of infinite power more than merely infinity of number, infinity of sorts and orders? Let him have created this infinity of infinites, still there is space in the imagination for the creation of finites; but instead of these, let him again create infinites; yet still the same space is left, it is no way filled up. I feel, too, that the whole rests on a miserable sophism of applying to an Almighty Being such words as _all_. Why were not _all_ Gods? But there is no _all_ in creation. It is composed of infinites, and the imagination, bewildered by heaping infinites on infinites and wearying of demanding increase of number to a number which it conceives already infinite, deserted by images and mocked by words, whose sole substance is the inward sense of difficulty that accompanies all our notions of infinity applied to numbers--turns with delight to distinct images and clear ideas, contemplates a _world_, an harmonious system, where an infinity of kinds subsist each in a multitude of individuals apportionate to its kind in conformity to laws existing in the divine nature, and therefore in the nature of things. We cannot, indeed, _prove_ this in any other way than by finding it as impossible to deny omniform, as eternal, agency to God--by finding it impossible to conceive that an omniscient Being should not have a distinct idea of finite beings, or that distinct ideas in the mind of God should be without the perfection of real existence, that is, imperfect. But this is a proof subtle indeed, yet not more so than the difficulty. The intellect that can start the one can understand the other, if his vices do not prevent him. Admit for a moment that "conceive" is equivalent to creation in the divine nature, synonymous with "to beget" (a feeling of which has given to marriage a mysterious sanctity and sacramental significance in the mind of many great and good men)--admit this, and all difficulty ceases, all tumult is hushed, all is clear and beautiful. We sit in the dark, but each by the side of his little fire, in his own group, and lo! the summit of the distant mountain is smitten with light. All night long it has dwelt there, and we look at it and know that the sun is not extinguished, that he is elsewhere bright and vivifying, that he is coming to us, to make our fires needless; yet, even now, that our cold and darkness are so called only in comparison with the heat and light of the coming day, never wholly deserted of the rays. This I wrote on Friday morning, forty minutes past three o'clock, the sky covered with one cloud that yet lies in dark and light shades, and though one smooth cloud, by the dark colour, it appears to be _steppy_. [Sidenote: A DREAM AND A PARENTHESIS Friday morning, 5 o'clock] Dozing, dreamt of Hartley as at his christening--how, as he was asked who redeemed him, and was to say, "God the Son," he went on humming and hawing in one hum and haw (like a boy who knows a thing and will not make the effort to recollect) so as to irritate me greatly. Awakening gradually, I was able completely to detect that it was the ticking of my watch, which lay in the pen-place in my desk, on the round table close by my ear, and which, in the diseased state of my nerves, had fretted on my ears. I caught the fact while Hartley's face and moving lips were yet before my eyes, and his hum and haw and the ticking of the watch were each the other, as often happens in the passing off of sleep--that curious modification of ideas by each other which is the element of _bulls_. I arose instantly and wrote it down. It is now ten minutes past five. To return to the question of evil--woe to the man to whom it is an uninteresting question, though many a mind over-wearied by it may shun it with dread. And here--N.B.--scourge with deserved and lofty scorn those critics who laugh at the discussion of old questions: God, right and wrong, necessity and arbitrement, evil, &c. No! forsooth, the question must be _new, spicy hot_ gingerbread, from a French constitution to a balloon, change of ministry, or, Which had the best of it in the parliamentary duel, Wyndham or Sheridan? or, at the best, a chymical thing [or] whether the new celestial bodies shall be called planets or asteroids--something new [it must be], something out of themselves--for whatever is _in_ them is deep within them--must be old as elementary nature [but] to find no contradiction in the union of old and novel--to contemplate the Ancient of Days with feelings new as if they _then_ sprang forth at His own Fiat--this marks the mind that feels the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it. But to return to the question. The whole rests on the sophism of imaginary change in a case of positive substitution. This, I fully believe, settles the question. The assertion that there is in the essence of the divine nature a necessity of omniform harmonious action, and that order and system (not number--in itself base, disorderly and irrational) define the creative energy, determine and employ it, and that number is subservient to order, regulated, organised, made beautiful and rational, an object both of imagination and intellect by order--this is no mere assertion, it is strictly in harmony with the fact. For the world appears so, and it is proved by whatever proves the being of God. Indeed, it is involved in the idea of God. [Sidenote: THE AIM OF HIS METAPHYSIC] What is it that I employ my metaphysics on? To perplex our clearest notions and living moral instincts? To extinguish the light of love and of conscience, to put out the life of arbitrement, to make myself and others _worthless, soulless, Godless_? No, to expose the folly and the legerdemain of those who have thus abused the blessed organ of language, to support all old and venerable truths, to support, to kindle, to project, to make the reason spread light over our feelings, to make our feelings diffuse vital warmth through our reason--these are my objects and these my subjects. Is this the metaphysic that bad spirits in hell delight in? [Sidenote: IN THE VISIONS OF THE NIGHT Nov. 2, 1803, Wednesday morning, 20 minutes past 2 o'clock] The voice of the Greta and the cock-crowing. The voice seems to grow like a flower on or about the water beyond the bridge, while the cock-crowing is nowhere particular--it is at any place I imagine and do not distinctly see. A most remarkable sky! the moon, now waned to a perfect ostrich egg, hangs over our house almost, only so much beyond it, garden-ward, that I can see it, holding my head out of the smaller study window. The sky is covered with whitish and with dingy cloudage, thin dingiest scud close under the moon, and one side of it moving, all else moveless; but there are two great breaks of blue sky, the one stretches over our house and away toward Castlerigg, and this is speckled and blotched with white cloud; the other hangs over the road, in the line of the road, in the shape of an ellipse or shuttle, I do not know what to call it--this is unspeckled, all blue, three stars in it--more in the former break, all unmoving. The water leaden-white, even as the grey gleam of water is in latest twilight. Now while I have been writing this and gazing between-whiles (it is forty minutes past two), the break over the road is swallowed up, and the stars gone; the break over the house is narrowed into a rude circle, and on the edge of its circumference one very bright star. See! already the white mass, thinning at its edge, _fights_ with its brilliance. See! it has bedimmed it, and now it is gone, and the moon is gone. The cock-crowing too has ceased. The Greta sounds on for ever. But I hear only the ticking of my watch in the pen-place of my writing-desk and the far lower note of the noise of the fire, perpetual, yet seeming uncertain. It is the low voice of quiet change, of destruction doing its work by little and little. [Sidenote: AURI SACRA FAMES] O! The impudence of those who dare hold property to be the great binder-up of the affections of the young to the old, &c., and Godwin's folly in his book! Two brothers in this country fought in the mourning coach, and stood with black eyes and their black clothes all blood over their father's grave. [Sidenote: EARLY DEATH November 1803] Poor Miss Dacre! born with a spinal deformity, that prophesied the early death it occasioned. Such are generally gentle and innocent beings. God seems to stamp on their foreheads the seal of death, in sign of appropriation. No evil dares approach the sacred hieroglyphic on this seal of redemption; we on earth interpret early death, but the heavenly spirits, that minister around us, read in it "Abiding innocence." Something to me delicious in the thought that one who dies a baby presents to the glorified Saviour and Redeemer that same sweet face of infancy which He blessed when on earth, and sanctified with a kiss, and solemnly pronounced to be the type and sacrament of regeneration. [Sidenote: THE NIGHT SIDE OF NATURE November 9, Wednesday night, 45 min. past 6] The town, with lighted windows and noise of the _clogged_ passengers in the streets--sound of the unseen river. Mountains scarcely perceivable except by eyes long used to them, and supported by the images of memory flowing in on the impulses of immediate impression. On the sky, black clouds; two or three dim, untwinkling stars, like full stops on damp paper, and large stains and spreads of sullen white, like a tunic of white wool seen here and there through a torn and tattered cloak of black. Whence do these stains of white proceed all over the sky, so long after sunset, and from their indifference of place in the sky, seemingly unaffected by the west? [Sidenote: November 10, 1/2 past 2 o'clock, morning] Awoke, after long struggles, from a persecuting dream. The tale of the dream began in two _images_, in two sons of a nobleman, desperately fond of shooting, brought out by the footman to resign their property, and to be made believe that they had none. They were far too cunning for that, and as they struggled and resisted their cruel wrongers, and my interest for them, I suppose, increased, I became they--the duality vanished--Boyer and Christ's Hospital became concerned; yet, still, the former story was kept up, and I was conjuring him, as he met me in the street, to have pity on a nobleman's orphan, when I was carried up to bed, and was struggling up against some unknown impediment--when a noise of one of the doors awoke me. Drizzle; the sky uncouthly marbled with white vapours and large black clouds, their surface of a fine woolly grain, but in the height and key-stone of the arch a round space of sky with dim watery stars, like a friar's crown; the seven stars in the central seen through white vapour that, entirely shapeless, gave a whiteness to the circle of the sky, but stained with exceedingly thin and subtle flakes of black vapour, might be happily said in language of Boccace (describing Demogorgon, in his _Genealogia De Gli Dei_) to be _vestito d'una pallidezza affumicata_. [Sidenote: Tuesday night, 1/4 after 7] The sky covered with stars, the wind up--right opposite my window, over Brandelhow, as its centre, and extending from the gorge to Whinlatter, an enormous black cloud, exactly in the shape of an egg--this, the only cloud in all the sky, impressed me with a demoniacal grandeur. O for change of weather! [Sidenote: Sunday morning, Nov. 13, 1/2 past 2] The sky, in upon Grysdale Pike and onward to the Withop Fells, floored with flat, smooth, dark or dingy clouds, elsewhere starry. Though seven stars and all the rest in the height of the heaven be dimmed, those in the descent bright and frosty. The river has a loud voice, self-biographer of to-day's rain and thunder-showers. The owls are silent; they have been very musical. All weathers on Saturday the twelfth, storm and frost, sunshine, lightning and what not! God be praised, though sleepless, am marvellously bettered, and I take it for granted that the barometer has risen. I have been reading Barrow's treatise "On the Pope's Supremacy," and have made a note on the _L'Estrangeism_ of his style whenever his thoughts rendered it possible for the words to be pert, frisky and vulgar--which, luckily, could not be often, from the gravity of his subjects, the solidity and appropriateness of his thoughts, and that habitual geometrical _precision_ of mind which demanded the most _appropriate_ words. He seems to me below South in dignity; at least, South never sinks so low as B. sometimes. [Sidenote: AN OPTICAL ILLUSION] A pretty optical fact occurred this morning. As I was returning from Fletcher's, up the back lane and just in sight of the river, I saw, floating high in the air, somewhere over Mr. Banks', a noble kite. I continued gazing at it for some time, when, turning suddenly round, I saw at an equi-distance on my right, that is, over the middle of our field, a pair of kites floating about. I looked at them for some seconds, when it occurred to me that I had never before seen two kites together, and instantly the vision disappeared. It was neither more nor less than two pair of leaves, each pair on a separate stalk, on a young fruit tree that grew on the other side of the wall, not two yards from my eye. The leaves being alternate, did, when I looked at them as leaves, strikingly resemble wings, and they were the only leaves on the tree. The magnitude was given by the imagined distance, that distance by the former adjustment of the eye, which _remained_ in consequence of the deep impression, the length of time I had been looking at the kite, the pleasure, &c., and [the fact that] a new object [had] impressed itself on the eye. [Sidenote: THE INWARD LIGHT] In Plotinus the system of the Quakers is most beautifully expressed in the fifth book of the Fifth Ennead (he is speaking of "the inward light"): "It is not lawful to enquire from whence it originated, for it neither approached hither, nor again departs from hence to some other place, but it either appears to us, or does not appear. So that we ought not to pursue it as if with a view of discerning its latent original, but to abide in quiet till it suddenly shines upon us, preparing ourselves for the blessed spectacle, like the eye waiting for the rising sun." [Sidenote: PARS ALTERA MEI] My nature requires another nature for its support, and reposes only in another from the necessary indigence of its being. Intensely similar yet not the same [must that other be]; or, may I venture to say, the same indeed, but dissimilar, as the same breath sent with the same force, the same pauses, and the same melody pre-imaged in the mind, into the flute and the clarion shall be the same _soul diversely incarnate_. [Sidenote: NOT THE BEAUTIFUL BUT THE GOOD] "ALL things desire that which is first from a necessity of nature, prophesying, as it were, that they cannot subsist without the energies of that first nature. But beauty is not first, it happens only to intellect, and creates restlessness and seeking; but good, which is present from the beginning and unceasingly to our innate appetite, abides with us even in sleep, and never seizes the mind with astonishment, and requires no peculiar reminiscence to convince us of its presence."--PLOTINUS. This is just and profound, yet perfect beauty being an abstract of good, in and for that particular form excites in me no passion but that of an admiration so quiet as scarcely to admit of the name _passion_, but one that, participating in the same root of soul, does yet spring up with excellences that I have not. To this I am driven by a desire of self-completion with a restless and inextinguishable love. God is not all things, for in this case He would be indigent of all; but all things are God, and eternally indigent of God. And in the original meaning of the word _essence_ as predicable of that concerning which you can say, This is he, or That is he (this or that rather than any other), in this sense of the word essence, I perfectly coincide with the Platonists and Plotinists that, if we add to the nature of God either essence or intellect or beauty, we deprive Him of being the Good himself, the only One, the purely and absolutely One. [Sidenote: A MOON-SET Friday, Nov. 25, 1803, morning 45 minutes past] After a night of storm and rain, the sky calm and white, by blue vapour thinning into formlessness instead of clouds, the mountains of height covered with snow, the secondary mountains black. The moon descending aslant the [V]^A, through the midst of which the great road winds, set exactly behind Whinlatter Point, marked A. She being an egg, somewhat uncouthly shaped, perhaps, but an ostrich's egg rather than any other (she is two nights more than a half-moon), she set behind the black point, fitted herself on to it like a cap of fire, then became a crescent, then a mountain of fire in the distance, then the peak itself on fire, one steady flame; then stars of the first, second and third magnitude, and vanishing, upboiled a swell of light, and in the next second the whole sky, which had been _sable blue_ around the yellow moon, whitened and brightened for as large a space as would take the moon half an hour to descend through. [Sidenote: THE DEATH OF ADAM A DREAM Dec. 6, 1803] Adam travelling in his old age came to a set of the descendants of Cain, ignorant of the origin of the world, and treating him as a madman, killed him. A sort of dream which I had this night. [Sidenote: A MAN'S A MAN FOR ALL THAT] We ought to suspect reasoning founded wholly on the difference of man from man, not on their commonnesses, which are infinitely greater. So I doubt the wisdom of the treatment of sailors and criminals, because it is wholly grounded on their vices, as if the vices formed the whole or major part of their being. [Sidenote: A DEFENCE OF METAPHYSIC] Abstruse reasoning is to the inductions of common sense what reaping is to delving. But the implements with which we reap, how are they gained? by delving. Besides, what is common sense now was abstract reasoning with earlier ages. [Sidenote: A SUNSET] A beautiful sunset, the sun setting behind Newlands across the foot of the lake. The sky is cloudless, save that there is a cloud on Skiddaw, one on the highest mountains in Borrowdale, some on Helvellyn, and that the sun sets in a glorious cloud. These clouds are of various shapes, various colours, and belong to their mountains and have nothing to do with the sky. N.B.--There is something metallic, silver playfully and imperfectly gilt and highly polished, or, rather, something mother-of-pearlish, in the sun-gleams on ice, thin ice. [Sidenote: EXTREMES MEET] I have repeatedly said that I could make a volume if only I had noted down, as they occurred to my recollection, the instances of the proverb "Extremes Meet." This night, Sunday, December 11, 1803, half-past eleven, I have determined to devote the last nine pages of my pocket-book to a collection of the same. 1. The parching air Burns frore and cold performs the effect of fire. _Paradise Lost_, ii. 594. 2. Insects by their smallness, the mammoth by its hugeness, terrible. 3. In the foam-islands in a fiercely boiling pool, at the bottom of a waterfall, there is sameness from infinite change. 4. The excess of humanity and disinterestedness in polite society, the desire not to give pain, for example, not to talk of your own diseases and misfortunes, and to introduce nothing but what will give pleasure, destroy all humanity and disinterestedness, by making it intolerable, through desuetude, to listen to the complaints of our equals, or of any, where the listening does not gratify or excite some vicious pride and sense of superiority. 5. It is difficult to say whether a perfectly unheard-of subject or a _crambe bis cocta_, if chosen by a man of genius, would excite in the higher degree the sense of novelty. Take, as an instance of the latter, the "Orestes" of Sotheby. 6. Dark with excess of light. 7. Self-absorption and worldly-mindedness (N.B.--The latter a most philosophical word). 8. The dim intellect sees an absolute oneness, the perfectly clear intellect _knowingly perceives_ it. Distinction and plurality lie in the betwixt. 9. The naked savage and the gymnosophist. 10. Nothing and intensest absolute being. 11. Despotism and ochlocracy. [Sidenote: ABSTRUSE RESEARCH] A dirty business! "How," said I, with a great effort to conquer my laziness and a great wish to rest in the generality, "what do you include under the words 'dirty business'"? I note this in order to remember the reluctance the mind has in general to analysis. The soul within the body--can I, any way, compare this to the reflection of the fire seen through my window on the solid wall, seeming, of course, within the solid wall, as deep within as the distance of the fire from the wall. I fear I can make nothing out of it; but why do I always hurry away from any interesting thought to do something uninteresting? As, for instance, when this thought struck me, I turned off my attention suddenly and went to look for the copy of Wolff which I had missed. Is it a cowardice of all deep feeling, even though pleasurable? or is it laziness? or is it something less obvious than either? Is it connected with my epistolary embarrassments? ["The window of my library at Keswick is opposite to the fireplace. At the coming on of evening, it was my frequent amusement to watch the image or reflection of the fire that seemed burning in the bushes or between the trees in different parts of the garden."--_The Friend._ _Coleridge's Works_, ii. 135.] As I was sitting at the foot of my bed, reading with my face downwards, I saw a phantom of my face upon the nightcap which lay just on the middle of my pillow--it was indistinct but of bright colours, and came only as my head bent low. Was it the action of the rays of my face upon my eyes? that is, did my eyes see my face, and from the sidelong and faint action of the rays place the image in that situation? But I moved the nightcap and I lost it. [Sidenote: Dec. 19, 1803, morning] I have only to shut my eyes to feel how ignorant I am whence these forms and coloured forms, and colours distinguishable beyond what I can distinguish, derive their birth. These varying and infinite co-present colours, what are they? I ask, to what do they belong in my waking remembrance? and almost never receive an answer. Only I perceive and know that whatever I change, in any part of me, produces some change in these eye-spectra; as, for instance, if I press my legs or change sides. [Sidenote: OF STREAMY ASSOCIATION] I will at least make the attempt to explain to myself the origin of moral evil from the streamy nature of association, which thinking curbs and rudders. Do not the bad passions in dreams throw light and show of proof upon this hypothesis? If I can but explain those passions I shall gain light, I am sure. A clue! a clue! a Hecatomb à la Pythagoras, if it unlabyrinth me. [Sidenote: December 28, 1803, 11 o'clock] I note the beautiful luminous shadow of my pencil-point which follows it from the candle, or rather goes before it and illuminates the word I am writing. But, to resume, take in the blessedness of innocent children, the blessedness of sweet sleep, do they or do they not contradict the argument of evil from streamy associations? I hope not, but all is to be thought over and _into_. And what is the height and ideal of mere association? Delirium. But how far is this state produced by pain and denaturalisation? And what are these? In short, as far as I can see anything in this total mist, vice is imperfect yet existing volition, giving diseased currents of association, because it yields on all sides and yet _is_--so, too, think of madness! [Sidenote: A DOUBTFUL EXPERIMENT] December 30th, half-past one o'clock, or, rather, Saturday morning, December 31st, put rolled bits of paper, many tiny bits of wick, some tallow, and the soap together. The whole flame, equal in size to half-a-dozen candles, did not give the light of one, and the letters of the book looked by the unsteady flare just as through tears or in dizziness--every line of every letter dislocated into angles, or like the mica in crumbly stones. [Sidenote: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MOTION] The experiment over leaf illustrates my idea of motion, namely, that it is a presence and absence rapidly alternating, so that the fits of _absence_ exist continuously in the feeling, and the fits of presence _vice versâ_ continuedly in the eye. Of course I am speaking of motion psychologically, not physically, what it is in us, not what the supposed mundane cause may be. I believe that what we call _motion_ is our consciousness of motion arising from the interruption of motion, the action of the soul in suffering resistance. Free unresisted action, the going forth of the soul, life without consciousness, is, properly, infinite, that is unlimited. For whatever resists limits, and whatever is unresisted is unlimited. This, psychologically speaking, is space, while the sense of resistance or limitation is time, and motion is a synthesis of the two. The closest approach of time to space forms co-existent multitude. [Sidenote: RECOLLECTION AND REMEMBRANCE] There is an important distinction between the memory or reminiscent faculty of sensation which young children seem to possess in so small a degree, from their perpetual desire to have a tale repeated to them, and the memory of words and images which the very same children manifestly possess in an unusual degree, even to sealing-wax accuracy of retention and representation. [Sidenote: THE ETHICS OF SPINOZA] If Spinoza had left the doctrine of miracles untouched, and had not written so powerfully in support of universal toleration, his ethics would never have brought on him the charge of Atheism. His doctrine, in this respect, is truly and severely orthodox, in the reformed Church; neither do I know that the Church of Rome has authoritatively decided between the Spinosists and Scotists in their great controversy on the nature of the being which creatures possess. [Sidenote: A UNITARIAN SCHOOLMAN] Creation is explained by Joannes Scotus Erigena as only a manifestation of the unity of God in forms--_et fit et facit, et creat et creatur_. Lib. 4. p. 7. P. 8. A curious and highly-philosophical account of the Trinity, and completely Unitarian. God is, is wise, and is living. The essence we call Father, the wisdom Son, the life the Holy Spirit. And he positively affirms that these three exist only as distinguishable relations--_habitudines_; and he states the whole doctrine to be an invention and condescension of Theology to the intellect of man, which must _define_, and consequently _personify_, in order to understand, and must have some phantom of understanding in order to keep alive in the heart the substantial faith. They are _fuel_ to the sacred fire--in the empyrean it may burn without fuel, and they who do so are seraphs. [Sidenote: A CROWD OF THOUGHTS] A fine epitheton of man would be "Lord of fire and light." All other creatures whose existence we perceive are mere alms-receivers of both. A company of children driving a hungry, hard-skinned ass out of a corn-field. The ass cannot by such weaklings be driven so hard but he will feed as he goes. Such light as lovers love, when the waxing moon steals in behind a black, black cloud, emerging soon enough to make the blush visible which the long kiss had kindled. All notions [remain] hushed in the phantasms of place and time that still escape the finest sieve and most searching winnow of our reason and abstraction. A rosemary tree, large as a timber tree, is a sweet sign of the antiquity and antique manners of the house against which it groweth. "Rosemary" (says Parkinson, _Theatrum Botanicum_ [London, 1640] p. 76) "is a herb of as great use with us in these days as any whatsoever, not only for physical but civil purposes--the civil uses, as all know, are at weddings, funerals, &c., to bestow on friends." Great harm is done by bad poets in trivialising beautiful expressions and images and associating disgust and indifference with the technical forms of poetry. Advantage of public schools. [They teach men to be] content with school praise when they publish. Apply this to Cottle and J. Jennings. Religious slang operates better on women than on men. N.B.--Why? I will give over--it is not _tanti_! Poem. Ghost of a mountain--the forms, seizing my body as I passed, became realities--I a ghost, till I had reconquered my substance. The sopha of sods. Lack-wit and the clock find him at last in the Yorkshire cave, where the waterfall is. [The reference is, no doubt, to Wordsworth's "Idiot Boy," which was composed at Nether Stowey, in 1798. In a letter addressed to John Wilson of June 5, 1802, Wordsworth discusses and discards the use of the word "lackwit" as an equivalent to "idiot." The "Sopha of Sods" was on Latrigg. In her journal for August, 1800, Dorothy Wordsworth records the making of a seat on Windybrow, a part of Latrigg. Possibly this was the "Sopha of Sods."--_Life of W. Wordsworth_, 1889, i. 268, 403.] The old stump of the tree, with briar-roses and bramble leaves wreathed round and round--a bramble arch--a foxglove in the centre. The palm, still faithful to forsaken deserts, an emblem of hope. The stedfast rainbow in the fast-moving, fast-hurrying hail-mist! What a congregation of images and feelings, of fantastic permanence amidst the rapid change of tempest--quietness the daughter of storm. [Sidenote: "POEM ON SPIRIT, OR ON SPINOZA"] I would make a pilgrimage to the deserts of Arabia to find the man who could make me understand how the _one can be many_. Eternal, universal mystery! It seems as if it were impossible, yet it _is_, and it is everywhere! It is indeed a contradiction in _terms_, and only in terms. It is the co-presence of feeling and life, limitless by their very essence, with form by its very essence limited, determinable, definite. [Sidenote: TRANS-SUBSTANTIATION] Meditate on trans-substantiation! What a conception of a miracle! Were one a Catholic, what a sublime oration might one not make of it? Perpetual, [Greek: pan]topical, yet offering no violence to the sense, exercising no domination over the free-will--a miracle always existing, yet perceived only by an act of the free-will--the beautiful fuel of the fire of faith--the fire must be pre-existent or it is not fuel, yet it feeds and supports and is necessary to feed and support the fire that converts it into his own nature. [Sidenote: THE DANGER OF THE MEAN] Errors beget opposite errors, for it is our imperfect nature to run into extremes. But this trite, because ever-recurring, truth is not the whole. Alas! those are endangered who have avoided the extremes, as if among the Tartars, in opposition to a faction that had unnaturally lengthened their noses into monstrosity, there should arise another who had cut off theirs flat to the face, Socinians in physiognomy. The few who retained their noses as nature made them and reason dictated would assuredly be persecuted by the noseless party as adherents of the rhinocerotists or monster-nosed men, which is the case of those [Greek: archaspistai] [braves] of the English Church, called Evangelicals. Excess of Calvinism produced Arminianism, and those not in excess must therefore be Calvinists! [Sidenote: ALAS! THEY HAD BEEN FRIENDS IN YOUTH] To a former friend who pleaded how near he formerly had been, how near and close a friend! Yes! you were, indeed, near to my heart and native to my soul--a part of my being and its natural, even as the chaff to corn. But since that time, through whose fault I will be mute, I have been thrashed out by the flail of experience. Because you have been, therefore, never more can you be a part of the grain. [Sidenote: Oct. 31, 1803 AVE PH[OE]BE IMPERATOR] The full moon glided behind a black cloud. And what then? and who cared? It was past seven o'clock in the morning. There is a small cloud in the east, not larger than the moon and ten times brighter than she! So passes night, and all her favours vanish in our minds ungrateful! [Sidenote: THE ONE AND THE GOOD] In the chapter on abstract ideas I might introduce the subject by quoting the eighth Proposition of Proclus' "Elements of Theology." The whole of religion seems to me to rest on and in the question: The One and The Good--are these words or realities? I long to read the schoolmen on the subject. [Sidenote: A MORTAL AGONY OF THOUGHT] There are thoughts that seem to give me a power over my own life. I could kill myself by persevering in the thought. Mem., to describe as accurately as may be the approximating symptoms. I met something very like this observation where I should least have expected such a coincidence of sentiment, such sympathy with so wild a feeling of mine--in p. 71 of Blount's translation of "The Spanish Rogue," 1623. CHAPTER III _1804_ "Home-sickness is no baby-pang."--S. T. C. [Sidenote: THE UNDISCIPLINED WILL] This evening, and indeed all this day, I ought to have been reading and filling the margins of Malthus. ["An Essay on the Principles of Population, &c., London," 1803, 4to. The copy annotated by Coleridge is now in the British Museum.] I had begun and found it pleasant. Why did I neglect it? Because I ought not to have done this. The same applies to the reading and writing of letters, essays, etc. Surely this is well worth a serious analysis, that, by understanding, I may attempt to heal it. For it is a deep and wide disease in my moral nature, at once elm-and-oak-rooted. Is it love of liberty, of spontaneity or what? These all express, but do not explain the fact. [Sidenote: Tuesday morning, January 10, 1804] After I had got into bed last night I said to myself that I had been pompously enunciating as a difficulty, a problem of easy and common solution--viz., that it was the effect of association. From infancy up to manhood, under parents, schoolmasters, inspectors, etc., our pleasures and pleasant self-chosen pursuits (self-chosen because pleasant, and not originally pleasant because self-chosen) have been forcibly interrupted, and dull, unintelligible rudiments, or painful tasks imposed upon us instead. Now all duty is felt as a _command_, and every command is of the nature of an offence. Duty, therefore, by the law of association being felt as a command from without, would naturally call up the sensation of the pain roused from the commands of parents and schoolmasters. But I awoke this morning at half-past one, and as soon as disease permitted me to think at all, the shallowness and sophistry of this solution flashed upon me at once. I saw that the phenomenon occurred far, far too early: I have observed it in infants of two or three months old, and in Hartley I have seen it turned up and layed bare to the unarmed eye of the merest common sense. The fact is that interruption of itself is painful, because and as far as it acts as _disruption_. And thus without any reference to or distinct recollection of my former theory I saw great reason to attribute the effect, wholly, to the streamy nature of the associative faculty, and the more, as it is evident that they labour under this defect who are most reverie-ish and streamy--Hartley, for instance, and myself. This seems to me no common corroboration of my former thought or the origin of moral evil in general. [Sidenote: COGITARE EST LABORARE] A time will come when passiveness will attain the dignity of worthy activity, when men shall be as proud within themselves of having remained in a state of deep tranquil emotion, whether in reading or in hearing or in looking, as they now are in having figured away for an hour. Oh! how few can transmute activity of mind into emotion! Yet there are as active as the stirring tempest and playful as the may-blossom in a breeze of May, who can yet for hours together remain with _hearts_ broad awake, and the _understanding_ asleep in all but its retentiveness and _receptivity_. Yea, and (in) the latter (state of mind) evince as great genius as in the former. [Sidenote: A SHEAF OF ANECDOTES, Sunday morning, Feb. 5, 1804] I called on Charles Lamb fully expecting him to be out, and intending all the way, to write to him. I found him at home, and while sitting and talking to him, took the pen and note-paper and began to write. As soon as Holcroft heard that Mary Wollstonecraft was dead, he took a chaise and came with incredible speed to "have Mrs. Godwin opened for a remarkable woman!" [Sidenote: Sunday morning, Feb. 13, 1804] Lady Beaumont told me that when she was a child, previously to her saying her prayers, she endeavoured to think of a mountain or great river, or something great, in order to raise up her soul and kindle it. Rickman has a tale about George Dyer and his "Ode to the Hero Race." "Your Aunt, Sir," said George to the Man of Figures, "your Aunt is a very sensible woman. Why I read Sir, my Ode to her and she said that it was a very pretty Thing. There are very few women, Sir! that possess that fine discrimination, Sir!" The huge Organ Pipe at Exeter, larger than the largest at Haarlem, at first was dumb. Green determined to make it speak, and tried all means in vain, till at last he made a second pipe precisely alike, and placed it at its side. _Then_ it spoke. Sir George Beaumont found great advantage in learning to draw from Nature through gauze spectacles. At Göttingen, at Blumenbach's lectures on Psychology, when some anatomical preparations were being handed round, there came in and seated himself by us Englishmen a _Hospitator_, one, that is, who attends one or two lectures unbidden and unforbidden and gratis, as a stranger, and on a claim, as it were, of hospitality. This _Hospes_ was the uncouthest, strangest fish, pretending to human which I ever beheld. I turned to Greenough and "Who broke his bottle?" I whispered. Godwin and Holcroft went together to Underwood's chambers. "Little Mr. Underwood," said they, "we are perfectly acquainted with the subject of your studies, only ignorant of the particulars. What is the difference between a thermometer and a barometer?" [Sidenote: THE ADOLESCENCE OF LOVE] It is a pleasure to me to perceive the buddings of virtuous loves, to know their minutes of increase, their stealth and silent growings-- A pretty idea, that of a good soul watching the progress of an attachment from the first glance to the time when the lover himself becomes conscious of it. A poem for my "Soother of Absence." [Sidenote: THE RAGE FOR MONITION] To J. Tobin, Esq., April 10, 1804. Men who habitually enjoy robust health have, too generally, the trick, and a very cruel one it is, of imagining that they discover the secret of all their acquaintances' ill health in some malpractice or other; and, sometimes, by gravely asserting this, here there and everywhere (as who likes his penetration [hid] under a bushel?), they not only do all they can, without intending it, to deprive the poor sufferer of that sympathy which is always a comfort and, in some degree, a support to human nature, but, likewise, too often implant serious alarm and uneasiness in the minds of the person's relatives and his nearest and dearest connections. Indeed (but that I have known its inutility, that I should be ridiculously sinning against my own law which I was propounding, and that those who are most fond of advising are the least able to hear advice from others, as the passion to command makes men disobedient) I should often have been on the point of advising you against the two-fold rage of advising and of discussing character, both the one and the other of which infallibly generates presumption and blindness to our own faults. Nay! more particularly where, from whatever cause, there exists a slowness to understand or an aptitude to mishear and consequently misunderstand what has been said, it too often renders an otherwise truly good man a mischief-maker to an extent of which he is but little aware. Our friends' reputation should be a religion to us, and when it is lightly sacrificed to what self-adulation calls a love of telling the truth (in reality a lust of talking something seasoned with the cayenne and capsicum of personality), depend upon it, something in the heart is warped or warping, more or less according to the greater or lesser power of the counteracting causes. I confess to you, that being exceedingly low and heart-fallen, I should have almost sunk under the operation of reproof and admonition (the whole too, in my conviction, grounded on utter mistake) at the moment I was quitting, perhaps for ever! my dear country and all that makes it so dear--but the high esteem I cherish towards you, and my sense of your integrity and the reality of your attachment and concern blows upon me refreshingly as the sea-breeze on the tropic islander. Show me anyone made better by blunt advice, and I may abate of my dislike to it, but I have experienced the good effects of the contrary in Wordsworth's conduct to me; and, in Poole and others, have witnessed enough of its ill effects to be convinced that it does little else but harm both to the adviser and the advisee. [See _Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge_, Letter cli., ii. 474, 475.] [Sidenote: PLACES AND PERSONS, Thursday, April 19, 1804] This is Spain! That is Africa! Now, then, I have seen Africa! &c., &c. O! the power of names to give interest. When I first sate down, with Europe on my left and Africa on my right, both distinctly visible, I felt a quickening of the movements in the blood, but still it felt as a pleasure of _amusement_ rather than of thought or elevation; and at the same time, and gradually winning on the other, the nameless silent forms of nature were working in me, like a tender thought in a man who is hailed merrily by some acquaintance in his work, and answers it in the same tone. This is Africa! That is Europe! There is _division_, sharp boundary, abrupt change! and what are they in nature? Two mountain banks that make a noble river of the interfluent sea, not existing and acting with distinctness and manifoldness indeed, but at once and as one--no division, no change, no antithesis! Of all men I ever knew, Wordsworth himself not excepted, I have the faintest pleasure in things contingent and transitory. I never, except as a forced courtesy of conversation, ask in a stage-coach, Whose house is that? nor receive the least additional pleasure when I receive the answer. Nay, it goes to a disease in me. As I was gazing at a wall in Caernarvon Castle, I wished the guide fifty miles off that was telling me, In this chamber the Black Prince was born (or whoever it was). I am not certain whether I should have seen with any emotion the mulberry-tree of Shakspere. If it were a tree of no notice in itself, I am sure that I should feel by an effort--with self-reproach at the dimness of the feeling; if a striking tree, I fear that the pleasure would be diminished rather than increased, that I should have no unity of feeling, and find in the constant association of Shakspere having planted it an intrusion that prevented me from wholly (as a whole man) losing myself in the flexures of its branches and intertwining of its roots. No doubt there are times and conceivable circumstances in which the contrary would be true, in which the thought that under this rock by the sea-shore I know that Giordano Bruno hid himself from the pursuit of the enraged priesthood, and overcome with the power and sublimity of the truths for which they sought his life, thought his life therefore given him that he might bear witness to the truths, and _morti ultra occurrens_, returned and surrendered himself! So, here, on this bank Milton used to lie, in late May, when a young man, and familiar with all its primroses, made them yet dearer than their dear selves, by that sweetest line in the Lycidas, "And the rathe primrose that forsaken dies:" or from this spot the immortal deer-stealer, on his escape from Warwickshire, had the first view of London, and asked himself, And what am I to do there? At certain times, uncalled and sudden, subject to no bidding of my own or others, these thoughts would come upon me like a storm, and fill the place with something more than nature. But these are not contingent or transitory, they are nature, even as the elements are nature--yea, more to the human mind, for the mind has the power of abstracting all agency from the former and considering [them] as mere effects and instruments. But a Shakspere, a Milton, a Bruno, exist in the mind as pure _action_, defecated of all that is material and passive. And the great moments that formed them--it is a kind of impiety against a voice within us, not to regard them as predestined, and therefore things of now, for ever, and which were always. But it degrades the sacred feeling, and is to it what stupid superstition is to enthusiastic religion, when a man makes a pilgrimage to see a great man's shin-bone found unmouldered in his coffin. Perhaps the matter stands thus. I could feel amused by these things, and should be, if there had not been connected with the great name upon which the amusement wholly depends a higher and deeper pleasure, that will [not] endure the co-presence of so mean a companion; while the mass of mankind, whether from nature or (as I fervently hope) from error of rearing and the worldliness of their after-pursuits, are rarely susceptible of any other pleasures than those of _amusement_, gratification of curiosity, novelty, surprise, wonderment, from the glaring, the harshly-contrasted, the odd, the accidental, and find the reading of the _Paradise Lost_ a task somewhat alleviated by a few entertaining incidents, such as the pandemonium and self-endwarfment of the devils, the fool's paradise and the transformation of the infernal court into serpents and of their intended applauses into hisses. ["Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself were exact, but harmonious opposites in this--that every old ruin, hill, river or tree called up in his mind a host of historical or biographical associations; whereas, for myself, I believe I should walk over the plain of Marathon without taking more interest in it than in any other plain of similar features."--_Table Talk_, August 4, 1833, Bell & Co., 1834, p. 242.] [Sidenote: THE INTOLERANCE OF CONVERTS] Why do we so very, very often see men pass from one extreme to the other? [Greek: stodkardia] [Stoddart, for instance]. Alas! they sought not the truth, but praise, self-importance, and above all [the sense of] something doing! Disappointed, they hate and persecute their former opinion, which no man will do who by meditation had adopted it, and in the course of unfeigned meditation gradually enlarged the circle and so get out of it. For in the perception of its falsehood he will form a perception of certain truths which had made the falsehood plausible, and can never cease to venerate his own sincerity of intention and Philalethie. For, perhaps, we never _hate_ any opinion, or can do so, till we have _impersonated_ it. We hate the persons because they oppose us, symbolise that opposition under the form and words of the opinion and then hate the person for the opinion and the opinion for the person. [For some weeks after his arrival at Valetta Coleridge remained as the guest of Dr. John (afterwards Sir John) Stoddart, at that time H.M. Advocate at Malta.] [Sidenote: FACTS AND FICTION] Facts! Never be weary of discussing and exposing the hollowness of these. [For, in the first place,] every man [is] an accomplice on one side or the other, [and, secondly, there is] _human testimony_. "You were in fault, I hear," said B to C, and B had heard it from A. [Now] A had said, "And C, God bless her, was perhaps the innocent occasion"! But what a trifle this to the generality of blunders! [Sidenote: CANDOUR ANOTHER NAME FOR CANT] [I have no pity or patience for that], blindness which comes from putting out your own eyes and in mock humility refusing to form an opinion on the right and the wrong of a question. "If we say so of the Sicilians, why may not Buonaparte say this of the Swiss?" and so forth. As if England and France, Swiss and Sicilian were the x y z of Algebra, naked names of unknown quantities. [What is this but] to fix morals without morality, and [to allow] general rules to supersede all particular thought? And though it be never acted on in reality, yet the opinion is pernicious. It kills public spirit and deadens national effort. [Sidenote: A SIMILE] The little point, or, sometimes, minim globe of flame remains on the [newly] lighted taper for three minutes or more unaltered. But, see, it is given over, and then, at once, the flame darts or plunges down into the wick, then up again, and all is bright--a fair cone of flame, with its black column in it, and minor cone, shadow-coloured, resting upon the blue flame the common base of the two cones, that is, of the whole flame. A pretty detailed simile in the manner of J. Taylor might be made of this, applying it to slow learners, to opportunities of grace manifestly neglected and seemingly lost and useless. [Sidenote: O STAR BENIGN] Monday evening, July 9, 1804, about 8 o'clock. The glorious evening star coasted the moon, and at length absolutely crested its upper tip.... It was the most singular and at the same time beautiful sight I ever beheld. Oh, that it could have appeared the same in England, at Grasmere! [Sidenote: NEFAS EST AB HOSTE DOCERI] In the Jacobinism of anti-jacobins, note the dreariest feature of Jacobins, a contempt for the institutions of our ancestors and of past wisdom, which has generated Cobbetts and contempt of the liberty of the press and of liberty itself. Men are not wholly unmodified by the opinion of their fellow-men, even when they happen to be enemies or (still worse) of the opposite faction. [Sidenote: THE MANY AND THE ONE] I saw in early youth, as in a dream, the birth of the planets; and my eyes beheld as _one_ what the understanding afterwards divided into (1) the origin of the masses, (2) the origin of their motions, and (3) the site or position of their circles and ellipses. All the deviations, too, were seen as one intuition of one the self-same necessity, and this necessity was a law of spirit, and all was spirit. And in matter all beheld the past activity of others or their own--and this reflection, this echo is matter--its only essence, if essence it be. And of this, too, I saw the necessity and understood it, but I understood not how infinite multitude and manifoldness could be one; only I saw and understood that it was yet more out of my power to comprehend how it could be otherwise--and in this unity I worshipped in the depth of knowledge that passes all understanding the Being of all things--and in Being their sole goodness--and I saw that God is the One, the Good--possesses it not, but _is it_. [Sidenote: THE WINDMILL AND ITS SHADOW] The visibility of motion at a great distance is increased by all that increases the the distinct visibility of the moving object. This Saturday, August 3, 1804, in the room immediately under the tower in St. Antonio, as I was musing on the difference, whether ultimate or only of degree, between _auffassen_ and _erkennen_ (an idea received and an idea acquired) I saw on the top of the distant hills a shadow on the sunny ground moving very fast and wave-like, yet always in the same place, which I should have attributed to the windmill close by, but the windmill (which I saw distinctly too) appeared at rest. On steady gazing, however, (and most plainly with my spy-glass) I found that it was not at rest, but that this was its shadow. The windmill itself was white in the sunshine, and there were sunny white clouds at its back, the shadow black on the white ground. [Sidenote: SYRACUSE Thursday night at the Opera, September 27, 1804] In reflecting on the cause of the "meeting soul" in music, the seeming recognisance etc., etc., the whole explanation of _memory_ as in the nature of _accord_ struck upon me; accord produces a phantom of memory, because memory is always in accord. [Sidenote: Oct. 5, 1804] Philosophy to a few, religion with many, is the friend of poetry, as producing the two conditions of pleasure arising from poetry, namely tranquillity and the attachment of the affections to _generalisations_. God, soul, Heaven, the Gospel miracles, etc., are a sort of _poetry_ compared with Lombard Street and Change Alley speculations. [Sidenote: A SERIOUS MEMORANDUM Syracuse, Saturday, Oct. 5, 1804] In company, indeed, with all except a very chosen few, never dissent from anyone as to the _merits_ of another, especially in your own supposed department, but content yourself with praising, in your turn; the really good praises of the unworthy are felt by a good man, and man of genius as detractions from the worthy, and robberies--so the _flashy_ moderns seem to _rob_ the ancients of the honours due to them, and Bacon and Harrington are _not_ read because Hume and Condillac _are_. This is an evil; but oppose it, if at all, in books in which you can evolve the whole of your reasons and feeling, not in conversation when it will be inevitably attributed to envy. Besides, they who praise the unworthy must be the injudicious: and the eulogies of critics without taste or judgment are the natural pay of authors without feeling or genius--and why rob them? _Sint unicuique sua præmia._ Coleridge! Coleridge! will you never learn to appropriate your conversation to your company! Is it not desecration, indelicacy, and a proof of great weakness and even vanity to talk to, etc. etc., as if you [were talking to] Wordsworth or Sir G. Beaumont? [Sidenote: "CAST NOT YOUR PEARLS BEFORE SWINE"] [Sidenote: Oct. 11, Syracuse, Lecky's, midnight] O young man, who hast seen, felt and known the truth, to whom reality is a phantom and virtue and mind the sole actual and permanent being, do not degrade the truth in thee by disputing. Avoid it! do not by any persuasion be tempted to it! Surely not by vanity or the weakness of the pleasure of communicating thy thoughts and awaking sympathy, but not even by the always mixed hope of producing conviction. This is not the mode, this is not the time, not the place. [Truth will be better served] by modestly and most truly saying, "Your arguments are all consequent, if the foundation be admitted. I do not admit the foundation. But this will be a business for moments of thought, for a Sabbath-day of your existence. Then, perhaps, a voice from within will say to you, better, because [in a manner] more adapted to you, all I can say. But if I felt this to _be_ that day or that moment, a sacred sympathy would at once compel and inspire me to the task of uttering the very truth. Till then I am right willing to bear the character of a mystic, a visionary, or self-important juggler, who nods his head and says, 'I could if I would.' But I cannot, I _may_ not, bear the reproach of profaning the truth which is my life in moments when all passions heterogeneous to it are eclipsing it to the exclusion of its dimmest ray. I might lose my tranquillity, and in acquiring the _passion_ of proselytism lose the _sense_ of conviction. I might become _positive_! Now I am _certain_! I might have the heat and fermentation, now I have the warmth of life." [Sidenote: THE YEARNING OF THE FINITE FOR THE INFINITE: Oct. 13, 1804, Saturday, Syracuse] Each man having a spark (to use the old metaphor) of the Divinity, yet a whole fire-grate of humanity--each, therefore, will legislate for the whole, and spite of the _De gustibus non est disputandum_, even in trifles--and, till corrected by experience, at least, in this endless struggle of presumption, really occasioned by the ever-working spark of the Universal, in the disappointments and baffled attempts of each, all are disposed to [admit] the _jus extrinsecum_ of Spinoza, and recognise that reason as the highest which may not be understood as the best, but of which the concrete possession is felt to be the strongest. Then come society, habit, education, misery, intrigue, oppression, then _revolution_, and the circle begins anew. Each man will universalise his notions, and, yet, each is variously finite. To _reconcile_, therefore, is truly the work of the inspired! This is the true _Atonement_--that is, to reconcile the struggles of the infinitely various finite with the _permanent_. [Sidenote: A MEASURE IN SELF-REPROOF] Do not be too much discouraged, if any virtue _should_ be mixed, in your consciousness, with affectation and imperfect sincerity, and some vanity. Disapprove of this, and continue the practice of the good feeling, even though mixed, and it will _gradually_ purify itself. _Probatum est_. Disapprove, be _ashamed_ of the thought, of its always continuing thus, but do not harshly quarrel with your present self, for all virtue subsists in and by pleasure. S. T. C. Sunday evening, October 14, 1804. But a great deal of this is constitutional. That constitution which predisposes to certain virtues, the [Greek: Dôron Theôn], has this [Greek: temenos Nemeseôs] in it. It is the dregs of sympathy, and while we are _weak_ and dependent on each other, and each is forced to think often for himself, sympathy will have its dregs, and the strongest, who have least of these, have the dregs of other virtues to strain off. [Sidenote: THE OPERA] All the objections to the opera are equally applicable to tragedy and comedy without music, and all proceed on the false principle that theatrical representations are _copies_ of nature, whereas they are imitations. [Sidenote: A SALVE FOR WOUNDED VANITY] When you are harassed, disquieted, and have little dreams of resentment, and mock triumphs in consequence of the clearest perceptions of unkind treatment and strange misconceptions and illogicalities, palpably from bad passion, in any person connected with you, suspect a sympathy in yourself with some of these bad passions--vanity, for instance. Though a sense of wounded justice is possible, nay, probably, forms a part of your uneasy feelings, yet this of itself would yield, at the first moment of reflection, to pity for the wretched state of a man too untranquil and perpetually selfish to love anything for itself or without some end of vanity or ambition--who detests all poetry, tosses about in the impotence of desires disproportionate to his powers, and whose whole history of his whole life is a tale of disappointment in circumstances where the hope and pretension was always unwise, often presumptuous and insolent. Surely an intuition of this restless and no-end-having mood of mind would at once fill a hearer having no sympathy with these passions with tender melancholy, virtuously mixed with grateful unpharisaic self-complacency. But a patient _almost_, but not quite, recovered from madness, yet on its confines, finds in the notions of madness that which irritates and haunts and makes unhappy. [Sidenote: OFFICIAL DISTRUST] Malta, Friday, Nov. 23, 1804. One of the heart-depressing habits and temptations of men in power, as governors, &c., is to make _instruments_ of their fellow-creatures, and the moment they find a man of honour and talents, instead of loving and esteeming him, they wish to _use him_. Hence that self-betraying side-and-down look of cunning; and they justify and inveterate the habit by believing that every individual who approaches has selfish designs on them. [Sidenote: FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE"] Days and weeks and months pass on, and now a year--and the sea, the sea, and the breeze have their influences on me, and [so, too, has the association with] good and sensible men. I feel a pleasure upon me, and I am, to the outward view, cheerful, and have myself no distinct consciousness of the contrary, for I use my faculties, not, indeed, at once, but freely. But, oh! I am never happy, never deeply gladdened. I know not--I have forgotten--what the _joy_ is of which the heart is full, as of a deep and quiet fountain overflowing insensibly, or the gladness of joy, when the fountain overflows ebullient. The most common appearance in wintry weather is that of the sun under a sharp, defined level line of a stormy cloud, that stretches one-third or half round the circle of the horizon, thrice the height of the space that intervenes between it and the horizon, which last is about half again as broad as the sun. [At length] out comes the sun, a mass of brassy light, himself lost and diffused in his [own] strong splendour. Compare this with the beautiful summer _set_ of colours without cloud. Even in the most tranquil dreams, one is much less a mere spectator [than in reveries or day-dreams]. One seems always about to do, [to be] suffering, or thinking or talking. I do not recollect [in dreams] that state of feeling, so common when awake, of thinking on one subject and looking at another; or [of looking] at a whole prospect, till at last, perhaps, or by intervals, at least, you only look passively at the prospect. [Sidenote: MULTUM IN PARVO] At Dresden there is a cherry-stone engraved with eighty-five portraits. Christ and the Twelve Apostles form one group, the table and supper all drawn by the letters of the text--at once portraits and language. This is a universal particular language--Roman Catholic language with a vengeance. The beautifully _white_ sails of the Mediterranean, so carefully, when in port, put up into clean bags; and the interesting circumstance of the Spéronara's sailing without a compass--by an obscure sense of time. [Sidenote: THROUGH DOUBT TO FAITH] So far from deeming it, in a religious point of view, criminal to spread doubts of God, immortality and virtue (that 3 = 1) in the minds of individuals, I seem to see in it a duty--lest men by taking the _words_ for granted never attain the feeling or the true _faith_. They only forbear, that is, even to suspect that the idea is erroneous or the communicators deceivers, but do not _believe_ the idea itself. Whereas to _doubt_ has more of faith, nay even to disbelieve, than that blank negation of all such thoughts and feelings which is the lot of the herd of church-and-meeting-trotters. [Sidenote: AN APOLOGY FOR COTTLE] The Holy Ghost, say the harmonists, left all the solecisms, Hebraisms, and low Judaic prejudices as evidences of the credibility of the Apostles. So, too, the Theophneusty left Cottle his Bristolisms, not to take away the credit from him and give it to the Muses. [Sidenote: FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE"] His fine mind met vice and vicious thoughts by accident only, as a poet running through terminations in the heat of composing a rhyme-poem on the purest and best subjects, startles and half-vexedly turns away from a foul or impure word. The gracious promises and sweetnesses and aids of religion are alarming and distressful to a trifling, light, fluttering gay child of fashion and vanity, as its threats and reproaches and warnings--as a little bird which fears as much when you come to give it food as when you come with a desire to kill or imprison it. That is a striking legend of Caracciolo and his floating corse, that came to ask the King of Naples' pardon. Final causes answer to why? not to how? and who ever supposed that they did? O those crinkled, ever-varying circles which the moonlight makes in the not calm, yet not wavy sea! Quarantine, Malta, Saturday, Nov. 10, 1804. [Sidenote: THE CREATIVE POWER OF WORDS AND IMAGES] Hard to express that sense of the analogy or likeness of a thing which enables a symbol to represent it so that we think of the thing itself, yet knowing that the thing is not present to us. Surely on this universal fact of words and images depends, by more or less mediations, the imitation, instead of the _copy_ which is illustrated, in very nature Shaksperianised--that Proteus essence that could assume the very form, but yet known and felt not to be the thing by that difference of the substance which made every atom of the form another thing, that likeness not identity--an exact web, every line of direction miraculously the same, but the one worsted, the other silk. [Sidenote: SHAKSPERE AND MALONE] Rival editors have recourse to necromancy to know from Shakspere himself who of them is the fittest to edit and illustrate him. Describe the meeting, the ceremonies of conjuration, the appearance of the spirit, the effect on the rival invokers. When they have resumed courage, the arbiter appointed by them asks the question. They listen, Malone leaps up while the rest lay their heads at the same instant that the arbiter re-echoes the words of the spirit, "Let Malone!" The spirit shudders, then exclaims in the dread and angry utterance of the dead, "No! no! Let me alone, I said, inexorable boobies!" O that eternal bricker-up of Shakspere! Registers, memorandum-books--and that Bill, Jack and Harry, Tom, Walter and Gregory, Charles, Dick and Jim, lived at that house, but that nothing more is known of them. But, oh! the importance when half-a-dozen players'-bills can be made to stretch through half-a-hundred or more of pages, though there is not one word in them that by any force can be made either to illustrate the times or life or writings of Shakspere, or, indeed, of any time. And, yet, no edition but this gentleman's name _burs_ upon it--_burglossa_ with a vengeance. Like the genitive plural of a Greek adjective, it is Malone, Malone, Malone, [Greek: Malôn, Malôn, Malôn]. [Edmund Malone's _Variorum_ edition of Shakspere was published in 1790.] [Sidenote: OF THE FROWARDNESS OF WOMAN December 11, 1804] It is a remark that I have made many times, and many times, I guess, shall repeat, that women are infinitely fonder of clinging to and beating about, hanging upon and keeping up, and reluctantly letting fall any doleful or painful or unpleasant subject, than men of the same class and rank. [Sidenote: NE QUID NIMIS] A young man newly arrived in the West Indies, who happened to be sitting next to a certain Captain Reignia, observed by way of introducing a conversation, "It is a very fine day, sir!" "Yes, sir," was the abrupt reply, "and be damned to it; it is never otherwise in this damned rascally climate." [Sidenote: WE ASK NOT WHENCE BUT WHAT AND WHITHER] I addressed a butterfly on a pea-blossom thus, "Beautiful Psyche, soul of a blossom, that art visiting and hovering o'er thy former friends whom thou hast left!" Had I forgot the caterpillar? or did I dream like a mad metaphysician that the caterpillar's hunger for plants was self-love, recollection, and a lust that in its next state refined itself into love? Dec. 12, 1804. [Sidenote: ANALOGY] Different means to the same end seem to constitute analogy. Seeing and touching are analogous senses with respect to magnitude, figure, &c.--they would, and to a certain extent do, supply each other's place. The air-vessels of fish and of insects are analogous to lungs--the end the same, however different the means. No one would say, "Lungs are analogous to lungs," and it seems to me either inaccurate or involving some true conception obscurely, when we speak of planets by analogy of ours--for here, knowing nothing but likeness, we presume the difference from the remoteness and difficulty, in the vulgar apprehension, of considering those pin-points as worlds. So, likewise, instead of the phrase "analogy of the past," applied to historical reasoning, nine times out of ten I should say, "by the example of the past." This may appear verbal trifling, but "_animadverte quam sit ab improprietate verborum pronum hominibus prolabi in errores circa res_." In short, analogy always implies a difference in kind and not merely in degree. There is an analogy between dimness and numbness and a certain state of the sense of hearing correspondent to these, which produces confusion with _magnification_, for which we have no name. But between light green and dark green, between a mole and a lynceus, there is a gradation, no analogy. [Sidenote: COROLLARY] Between beasts and men, when the same actions are performed by both, are the means analogous or different only in degree? That is the question! The sameness of the end and the equal fitness of the means prove no identity of means. I can only read, but understand no arithmetic. Yet, by Napier's tables or the _House-keepers' Almanack_, I may even arrive at the conclusion quicker than a tolerably expert mathematician. Yet, still, reading and reckoning are utterly different things. [Sidenote: THOMAS WEDGWOOD AND REIMARUS] In Reimarus on _The Instincts of Animals_, Tom Wedgwood's ground-principle of the influx of memory on perception is fully and beautifully detailed. ["Observations Moral and Philosophical on the Instinct of Animals, their Industry and their Manners," by Herman Samuel Reimarus, was published in 1770. See _Biographia Literaria_, chapter vi. and _Note_, by Mrs. H. N. Coleridge in the Appendix, _Coleridge's Works_, Harper & Brothers, iii. 225, 717.] [Sidenote: HINC ILLA MARGINALIA] It is often said that books are companions. They are so, dear, very dear companions! But I often, when I read a book that delights me on the whole, feel a pang that the author is not present, that I cannot _object_ to him this and that, express my sympathy and gratitude for this part and mention some facts that self-evidently overset a second, start a doubt about a third, or confirm and carry [on] a fourth thought. At times I become restless, for my nature is very social. [Sidenote: CORRUPTIO OPTIMI PESSIMA] "Well" (says Lady Ball), "the Catholic religion is better than none." Why, to be sure, it is called a religion, but the question is, Is it a religion? Sugar of lead! better than no sugar! Put oil of vitriol into my salad--well, better than no oil at all! Or a fellow vends a poison under the name of James' powders--well, we must get the best we can--better that than none! So did not our noble ancestors reason or feel, or we should now be slaves and even as the Sicilians are at this day, or worse, for even they have been made less foolish, in spite of themselves, by others' wisdom. [Sidenote: REIMARUS AND THE "INSTINCTS OF ANIMALS"] I have read with wonder and delight that passage of Reimarus in which he speaks of the immense multitude of plants, and the curious, regular _choice_ of different herbivorous animals with respect to them, and the following pages in which he treats of the pairing of insects and the equally wonderful processes of egg-laying and so forth. All in motion! the sea-fish to the shores and rivers--the land crab to the sea-shore! I would fain describe all the creation thus agitated by the one or other of the three instincts--self-preservation, childing, and child-preservation. Set this by Darwin's theory of the maternal instinct--O mercy! the blindness of the man! and it is imagination, forsooth! that misled him--too much poetry in his philosophy! this abject deadness of all that sense of the obscure and indefinite, this superstitious fetish-worship of lazy or fascinated fancy! O this, indeed, deserves to be dwelt on. Think of all this as an absolute revelation, a real presence of Deity, and compare it with historical traditionary religion. There are two revelations--the material and the moral--and the former is not to be seen but by the latter. As St. Paul has so well observed: "By worldly wisdom no man ever arrived at God;" but having seen Him by the moral sense, then we _understand_ the outward world. Even as with books, no book of itself teaches a language in the first instance; but having by sympathy of soul learnt it, we then understand the book--that is, the _Deus minor_ in His work. The _hirschkäfer_ (stag-beetle) in its worm state makes its bed-chamber, prior to its metamorphosis, half as long as itself. Why? There was a stiff horn turned under its belly, which in the fly state must project and harden, and this required exactly that length. The sea-snail creeps out of its house, which, thus hollowed, lifts him aloft, and is his boat and cork jacket; the Nautilus, additionally, spreads a thin skin as a sail. All creatures obey the great game-laws of Nature, and fish with nets of such meshes as permit many to escape, and preclude the taking of many. So two races are saved, the one by taking part, and the other by part not being taken. [Sidenote: ENTOMOLOGY VERSUS ONTOLOGY] Wonderful, perplexing divisibility of life! It is related by D. Unzer, an authority wholly to be relied on, that an _ohrwurm_ (earwig) cut in half ate its own hinder part! Will it be the reverse with Great Britain and America? The head of the rattlesnake severed from the body bit it and squirted out its poison, as is related by Beverley in his History of Virginia. Lyonnet in his Insect. Theol. tells us that he tore a wasp in half and, three days after, the fore-half bit whatever was presented to it of its former food, and the hind-half darted out its sting at being touched. Stranger still, a turtle has been known to live six months with his head off, and to wander about, yea, six hours after its heart and intestines (all but the lungs) were taken out! How shall we think of this compatibly with the monad soul? If I say, what has spirit to do with space?--what odd dreams it would suggest! or is every animal a republic _in se_? or is there one Breeze of Life, "at once the soul of each, and God of all?" Is it not strictly analogous to generation, and no more contrary to unity than it? But IT? Aye! there's the twist in the logic. Is not the reproduction of the lizard a complete generation? O it is easy to dream, and, surely, better of these things than of a £20,000 prize in the lottery, or of a place at Court. Dec. 13, 1804. [Sidenote: FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE"] To trace the if not absolute birth, yet the growth and endurancy of language, from the mother talking to the child at her breast. O what a subject for some happy moment of deep feeling and strong imagination! Of the Quintetta in the Syracuse opera and the pleasure of the voices--one and not one, they leave, seek, pursue, oppose, fight with, strengthen, annihilate each other, awake, enliven, soothe, flatter and embrace each other again, till at length they die away in one tone. There is no sweeter image of wayward yet fond lovers, of seeking and finding, of the love-quarrel, and the making-up, of the losing and the yearning regret, of the doubtful, the complete recognition, and of the total melting union. Words are not interpreters, but fellow-combatants. Title for a Medical Romance:--The adventures, rivalry, warfare and final union and partnership of Dr. Hocus and Dr. Pocus. Idly talk they who speak of poets as mere indulgers of fancy, imagination, superstition, etc. They are the bridlers by delight, the purifiers; they that combine all these with reason and order--the true protoplasts--Gods of Love who tame the chaos. To deduce instincts from obscure recollections of a pre-existing state--I have often thought of it. "Ey!" I have said, when I have seen certain tempers and actions in Hartley, "that is I in my future state." So I think, oftentimes, that my children are my soul--that multitude and division are not [O mystery!] necessarily subversive of unity. I am sure that two very different meanings, if not more, lurk in the word One. The drollest explanation of instinct is that of Mylius, who attributes every act to pain, and all the wonderful webs and envelopes of spiders, caterpillars, etc., absolutely to fits of colic or paroxysms of dry belly-ache! This Tarantula-dance of repetitions and vertiginous argumentation _in circulo_, begun in imposture and self-consummated in madness! While the whole planet (_quoad_ its Lord or, at least, Lord-Lieutenancy) is in stir and bustle, why should not I keep in time with the tune, and, like old Diogenes, roll my tub about? I cannot too often remember that to be deeply interested and to be highly satisfied are not always commensurate. Apply this to the affecting and yet unnatural passages of the _Stranger_ or of _John Bull_, and to the finest passages in Shakspere, such as the death of Cleopatra or Hamlet. [Sidenote: A SUNDOG Dec. 15, 1804] Saw the limb of a rainbow footing itself on the sea at a small apparent distance from the shore, a thing of itself--no substrate cloud or even mist visible--but the distance glimmered through it as through a thin semi-transparent hoop. [Sidenote: THE SQUARE, THE CIRCLE, THE PYRAMID] To be and to act, two in Intellect (that mother of orderly multitude, and half-sister of Wisdom and Madness) but one in essence = to rest, and to move = [sq] and a [cir]! and out of the infinite combinations of these, from the more and the less, now of one now of the other, all pleasing figures and the sources of all pleasure arise. But the pyramid, that base of stedfastness that rises, yet never deserts itself nor can, approaches to the [cir]. Sunday. Midnight. Malta. December 16th, 1804. [Sidenote: THE PYRAMID IN ART] I can make out no other affinity [in the pyramid] to the circle but by taking its evanescence as the central point, and so, having thus gained a melting of the radii in the circumference [by proceeding to] _look_ it into the object. Extravagance! Why? Does not everyone do this in looking at any conspicuous three stars together? does not every one see by the inner vision, a triangle? However, this is in art; but the prototype in nature is, indeed, loveliness. In Nature there are no straight lines, or [such straight lines as there are] have the soul of curves, from activity and positive rapid energy. Or, whether the line seem curve or straight, yet _here_, in nature, is motion--motion in its most significant form. It is motion in that form which has been chosen to express motion in general, hieroglyphical from pre-eminence, [and by this very pre-eminence, in the particular instance, made significant of motion in its totality]. Hence, though it chance that a line in nature should be perfectly straight, there is no need here of any curve whose effect is that of embleming motion and counteracting actual solidity by that emblem. For here the line [in contra-distinction to the line in art] is actual motion, and therefore a balancing _Figurite_ of rest and solidity. But I will study the wood-fire this evening in the Palace. [Sidenote: Wednesday Night, 11 o'clock, December 19] I see now that the eye refuses to decide whether it be surface or convexity, for the exquisite oneness of the flame makes even its angles so different from the angles of tangible substances. Its exceeding oneness added to its very subsistence in motion is the very _soul_ of the loveliest curve--it does not need its body as it were. Its sharpest point is, however, rounded, and besides it is cased within its own penumbra. [Sidenote: FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE" Friday Morning, Dec. 21, 8 o'clock] How beautiful a circumstance, the improvement of the flower, from the root up to that crown of its life and labours, that bridal-chamber of its beauty and its two-fold love, the nuptial and the parental--the womb, the cradle, and the nursery of the garden! _Quisque sui faber_--a pretty simile this would make to a young lady producing beauty by moral feeling. Nature may be personified as the [Greek: polymêchanos erganê], an ever industrious Penelope, for ever unravelling what she has woven, for ever weaving what she has unravelled. [Sidenote: THE MEDITERRANEAN] Oh, said I, as I looked at the blue, yellow, green and purple-green sea, with all its hollows and swells, and cut-glass surfaces--oh, what an _ocean_ of lovely forms! And I was vexed, teased that the sentence sounded like a play of words! _That_ it was not--the mind within me was struggling to express the marvellous distinctness and unconfounded personality of each of the million millions of forms, and yet the individual unity in which they subsisted. A brisk gale and the foam that peopled the _alive_ sea, most interestingly combined with the number of white sea-gulls, that, repeatedly, it seemed as if the foam-spit had taken life and wing and had flown up--the white precisely-same-colour birds rose up so close by the ever-perishing white-water wavehead, that the eye was unable to detect the illusion which the mind delighted to indulge in. O that sky, that soft, blue, mighty arch resting on the mountain or solid sea-like plain--what an awful omneity in unity! I know no other perfect union of the sublime with the beautiful, so that they should be felt, that is, at the same minute, though by different faculties, and yet, each faculty be predisposed, by itself, to receive the specific modifications from the other. To the eye it is an inverted goblet, the inside of a sapphire basin, perfect beauty in shape and colour. To the mind, it is immensity; but even the eye feels as if it were [able] to look through with [a] dim sense of the non-resistance--it is not exactly the feeling given to the organ by solid and limited things, [but] the eye feels that the limitation is in its own power, not in the object. But [hereafter] to pursue this in the manner of the old Hamburg poet [Klopstock]. [Sidenote: I WILL LIFT UP MINE EYES TO THE HILLS] One travels along with the lines of a mountain. Years ago I wanted to make Wordsworth sensible of this. How fine is Keswick vale! Would I repose, my soul lies and is quiet upon the broad level vale. Would it act? it darts up into the mountain-top like a kite, and like a chamois-goat runs along the ridge--or like a boy that makes a sport on the road of running along a wall or narrow fence! [Sidenote: FORM AND FEELING] One of the most noticeable and fruitful facts in psychology is the modification of the same feeling by difference of form. The Heaven lifts up my soul, the sight of the ocean seems to widen it. We feel the same force at work, but the difference, whether in mind or body that we should feel in actual travelling horizontally or in direct ascent, _that_ we feel in fancy. For what are our feelings of this kind but a motion imagined, [together] with the feelings that would accompany that motion, [but] less distinguished, more blended, more rapid, more confused, and, thereby, co-adunated? Just as white is the very emblem of one in being the confusion of all. [Sidenote: VERBUM SAPIENTIBUS] Mem.--Not to hastily abandon and kick away the means after the end is or seems to be accomplished. So have I, in blowing out the paper or match with which I have lit a candle, blown out the candle at the same instant. [Sidenote: THE CONTINUITY OF SENSATIONS] How opposite to nature and the fact to talk of the "one moment" of Hume, of our whole being an aggregate of successive single sensations! Who ever felt a single sensation? Is not every one at the same moment conscious that there co-exist a thousand others, a darker shade, or less light, even as when I fix my attention on a white house or a grey bare hill or rather long ridge that runs out of sight each way (how often I want the German _unübersekbar_!) [untranslatable]--the pretended sight-sensation, is it anything more than the light-point in every picture either of nature or of a good painter? and, again, subordinately, in every component part of the picture? And what is a moment? Succession with interspace? Absurdity! It is evidently only the _icht-punct_ in the indivisible undivided duration. See yonder rainbow strangely preserving its form on broken clouds, with here a bit out, here a bit in, yet still a rainbow--even as you might place bits of coloured ribbon at distances, so as to preserve the form of a bow to the mind. Dec. 25, 1804. [Sidenote: HIS CONVERSATION, A NIMIETY OF IDEAS, NOT OF WORDS] There are two sorts of talkative fellows whom it would be injurious to confound, and I, S. T. Coleridge, am the latter. The first sort is of those who use five hundred words more than needs to express an idea--that is not my case. Few men, I will be bold to say, put more meaning into their words than I, or choose them more deliberately and discriminately. The second sort is of those who use five hundred more ideas, images, reasons, &c., than there is any need of to arrive at their object, till the only object arrived at is that the mind's eye of the bystander is dazzled with colours succeeding so rapidly as to leave one vague impression that there has been a great blaze of colours all about something. Now this is my case, and a grievous fault it is. My illustrations swallow up my thesis. I feel too intensely the omnipresence of all in each, platonically speaking; or, psychologically, my brain-fibres, or the spiritual light which abides in the brain-marrow, as visible light appears to do in sundry rotten mackerel and other _smashy_ matters, is of too general an affinity with all things, and though it perceives the _difference_ of things, yet is eternally pursuing the likenesses, or, rather, that which is common [between them]. Bring me two things that seem the very same, and then I am quick enough [not only] to show the difference, even to hair-splitting, but to go on from circle to circle till I break against the shore of my hearers' patience, or have my concentricals dashed to nothing by a snore. That is my ordinary mishap. At Malta, however, no one can charge me with one or the other. I have earned the general character of being a quiet well-meaning man, rather dull indeed! and who would have thought that he had been a _poet_! "O, a very wretched poetaster, ma'am! As to the reviews, 'tis well known he half-ruined himself in paying cleverer fellows than himself to write them," &c. [Sidenote: THE EMBRYONIC SOUL] How far might one imagine all the theory of association out of a system of growth, by applying to the brain and soul what we know of an embryo? One tiny particle combines with another its like, and, so, lengthens and thickens, and this is, at once, memory and increasing vividness of impression. One might make a very amusing allegory of an embryo soul up to birth! Try! it is promising! You have not above three hundred volumes to write before you come to it, and as you write, perhaps, a volume once in ten years, you have ample time. My dear fellow! never be ashamed of scheming--you can't think of living less than 4000 years, and that would nearly suffice for your present schemes. To be sure, if they go on in the same ratio to the performance, then a small difficulty arises; but never mind! look at the bright side always and die in a dream! Oh! [Sidenote: OF A NEW HYPOTHESIS] The evil effect of a new hypothesis or even of a new nomenclature is, that many minds which had familiarised themselves to the old one, and were riding on the road of discovery accustomed to their horse, if put on a new animal, lose time in learning how to sit him; while the others, looking too stedfastly at a few facts which the jeweller Hypothesis had set in a perfectly beautiful whole, forget to dig for more, though inhabitants of a Golconda. However, it has its advantages too, and these have been ably pointed out. It excites contradiction, and is thence a stimulus to new experiments to _support_, and to a more severe repetition of these experiments and of other new ones to _confute_ [arguments pro and con]. And, besides, one must alloy severe truth with a little fancy, in order to mint it into common coin. [Sidenote: HIS INDEBTEDNESS TO GERMAN PHILOSOPHY] In the preface of my metaphysical works, I should say--"Once for all, read Kant, Fichte, &c., and then you will trace, or, if you are on the hunt, track me." Why, then, not acknowledge your obligations step by step? Because I could not do so in a multitude of glaring resemblances without a lie, for they had been mine, formed and full-formed, before I had ever heard of these writers, because to have fixed on the particular instances in which I have really been indebted to these writers would have been hard, if possible, to me who read for truth and self-satisfaction, and not to make a book, and who always rejoiced and was jubilant when I found my own ideas well expressed by others--and, lastly, let me say, because (I am proud, perhaps, but) I seem to know that much of the _matter_ remains my own, and that the _soul_ is mine. I fear not him for a critic who can confound a fellow-thinker with a compiler. [Sidenote: THE METAPHYSICIAN AT BAY] Good heavens! that there should be anything at all, and not nothing. Ask the bluntest faculty that pretends to reason, and, if indeed he have felt and reasoned, he must feel that something is to be sought after out of the vulgar track of Change-Alley speculation. If my researches are shadowy, what, in the name of reason, are you? or do you resign all pretence to reason, and consider yourself--nay, even that in a contradiction--as a passive [cir] among Nothings? [Sidenote: MEANS TO ENDS] How flat and common-place! O that it were in my heart, nerves, and muscles! O that it were the _prudential_ soul of all I love, of all who deserve to be loved, in every proposed action to ask yourself, To what end is this? and how is this the means? and not the means to something else foreign to or abhorrent from my purpose? _Distinct means to distinct ends!_ With friends and beloved ones follow the heart. Better be deceived twenty times than suspect one-twentieth of once; but with strangers, or enemies, or in a quarrel, whether in the world's squabbles, as Dr. Stoddart's and Dr. Sorel in the Admiralty Court at Malta; or in moral businesses, as mine with Southey or Lloyd (O pardon me, dear and honoured Southey, that I put such a name by the side of yours....)--in all those cases, write your letter, disburthen yourself, and when you have done it--even as when you have pared, sliced, vinegared, oiled, peppered and salted your plate of cucumber, you are directed to smell it, and then throw it out of the window--so, dear friend, vinegar, pepper and salt your letter--your cucumber argument, that is, cool reasoning previously sauced with passion and sharpness--then read it, eat it, drink it, smell it, with eyes and ears (a small catachresis but never mind), and then throw it into the fire--unless you can put down in three or four sentences (I cannot allow more than one side of a sheet of paper) the _distinct end_ for which you conceive this letter (or whatever it be) to be the _distinct means_! How trivial! Would to God it were only _habitual_! O what is sadder than that the _crambe bis cocta_ of the understanding should be and remain a foreign dish to the efficient _will_--that the best and loftiest precepts of wisdom should be trivial, and the worst and lowest modes of folly habitual. [Sidenote: VERBAL CONCEITS] I have learnt, sometimes not _at all_, and seldom _harshly_, to chide those conceits of words which are analogous to sudden fleeting affinities of mind. Even, as in a dance, you touch and join and off again, and rejoin your partner that leads down with you the dance, in spite of these occasional off-starts--for they, too, not merely conform to, but are of and in and help to form the delicious harmony. Shakspere is not a thousandth part so faulty as the [scir][scir][scir] believe him. "Thus him that over-rul'd I over-sway'd," etc., etc. I noticed this to that bubbling ice-spring of cold-hearted, mad-headed fanaticism, the late Dr. Geddes, in the "_Heri vidi fragilem frangi, hodie mortalem mori_." [Dr. Alexander Geddes, 1737-1802, was, _inter alia_, author of a revised translation of the Scriptures.] [Sidenote: THE BRIGHT BLUE SEA] How often I have occasion to notice with pure delight the depth of the exceeding blueness of the Mediterranean from my window! It is often, indeed, purple; but I am speaking of its blueness--a perfect blue, so very pure an one. The sea is like a night-sky; and but for its _planities_, it were as if the night-sky were a thing that turned round and lay in the day-time under the paler Heaven. And it is on this expanse that the vessels have the fine white dazzling cotton sails. [Sidenote: THE BIRTH OF THE IDEA] Centuries before their mortal incarnation, Jove was wont to manifest to the gods the several creations as they emerged from the divine ideal. Now it was reported in heaven that an unusually fair creation of a woman was emerging, and Venus, fearful that her son should become enamoured as of yore with Psyche (what time he wandered alone, his bow unslung, and using his darts only to cut out her name on rocks and trees, or, at best, to shoot hummingbirds and birds of Paradise to make feather-chaplets for her hair, and the world, meanwhile, grown loveless, hardened into the Iron Age), entreats Jove to secrete this form [of perilous beauty]. But Cupid, who had heard the report, and fondly expected a re-manifestation of Psyche, hid himself in the hollow of the sacred oak beneath which the Father of Gods had withdrawn as to an unapproachable adytum, and beheld the Idea emerging in its _First Glory_. Forthwith the wanton was struck blind by the splendour ere yet the blaze had defined itself with form, and now his arrows strike but vaguely. [Sidenote: THE CONVERSION OF CERES] I have somewhere read, or I have dreamt, a wild tale of Ceres' loss of Proserpine, and her final recovery of her daughter by means of Christ when He descended into hell, at which time she met Him and abjured all worship for the future. It were a quaint mythological conceit to feign that the gods of Greece and Rome were some of the _best_ of the fallen spirits, and that of their number _Apollo_, Mars, and the Muses were converted to Christianity, and became different saints. [Sidenote: AS THE SPARKS FLY UPWARD] The ribbed flame--its snatches of impatience, that half-seem, and only _seem_ that half, to baffle its upward rush--the eternal unity of individualities whose essence is in their distinguishableness, even as thought and _fancies_ in the mind; the points of so many cherubic swords snatched back, but never discouraged, still fountaining upwards:--flames self-snatched up heavenward, if earth supply the fuel, heaven the dry light air--themselves still making the current that will fan and spread them--yet all their force in vain, if of itself--and light dry air, heaped fuel, fanning breeze as idle, if no inward spark lurks there, or lurks unkindled. Such a spark, O man! is thy Free Will--the star whose beams are Virtue! CHAPTER IV _1805_ Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide, wide sea! And never a saint took pity on My soul in agony. S. T. C. [Sidenote: THE SENSE OF MAGNITUDE Tuesday, Jan. 15, 1805] This evening there was the most perfect and the brightest halo circling the roundest and brightest moon I ever beheld. So bright was the halo, so compact, so entire a circle, that it gave the whole of its area, the moon itself included, the appearance of a solid opaque body, an enormous planet. It was as if this planet had a circular trough of some light-reflecting fluid for its rim (that is the halo) and its centre (that is the moon) a small circular basin of some fluid that still more copiously reflected, or that even emitted light; and as if the interspatial area were somewhat equally substantial but sullen. Thence I have found occasion to meditate on the nature of the sense of magnitude and its absolute dependence on the idea of _substance_; the consequent difference between magnitude and spaciousness, the dependence of the idea on double-touch, and thence to evolve all our feelings and ideas of magnitude, magnitudinal sublimity, &c., from a scale of our own bodies. For why, if form constituted the sense, that is, if it were pure vision, as a perceptive sense abstracted from _feeling_ in the organ of vision, why do I seek for mountains, when in the flattest countries the clouds present so many and so much more romantic and _spacious_ forms, and the coal-fire so many, so much more varied and lovely forms? And whence arises the pleasure from musing on the latter? Do I not, more or less consciously, fancy myself a Lilliputian to whom these would be mountains, and so, by this factitious scale, make them mountains, my pleasure being consequently playful, a voluntary poem in hieroglyphics or picture-writing--"_phantoms_ of sublimity," which I continue to know to be _phantoms_? And form itself, is not its main agency exerted in individualising the thing, making it _this_ and _that_, and thereby facilitating the shadowy measurement of it by the scale of my own body? Yon long, not unvaried, ridge of hills, that runs out of sight each way, it is _spacious_, and the pleasure derivable from it is from its _running_, its _motion_, its assimilation to action; and here the scale is taken from my life and soul, and not from my body. Space is the Hebrew name for God, and it is the most perfect image of _soul, pure soul_, being to us nothing but unresisted action. Whenever action is resisted, limitation begins--and limitation is the first constituent of body--the more omnipresent it is in a given space, the more that space is _body_ or matter--and thus all body necessarily presupposes soul, inasmuch as all resistance presupposes action. Magnitude, therefore, is the intimate blending, the most perfect union, through its whole sphere, in every minutest part of it, of action and resistance to action. It is spaciousness in which space is filled up--that is, as we well say, transmitted by incorporate accession, not destroyed. In all limited things, that is, in _all forms_, it is at least fantastically stopped, and, thus, from the positive _grasp_ to the mountain, from the mountain to the cloud, from the cloud to the blue depth of sky, which, as on the top of Etna, in a serene atmosphere, seems to go _behind_ the sun, all is _graduation_, that precludes division, indeed, but not distinction; and he who endeavours to overturn a distinction by showing that there is no chasm, by the old sophism of the _cumulus_ or the horse's tail, is still diseased with the _formication_,[B] the (what is the nosological name of it? the hairs or dancing infinites of black specks seeming always to be before the eye), the araneosis of corpuscular materialism.--S. T. C. [Sidenote: STRAY THOUGHTS FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE"] The least things, how they evidence the superiority of English artisans! Even the Maltese wafers, for instance, that stick to your mouth and fingers almost so as to make it impossible to get them off without squeezing them into a little pellet, and yet will not stick to the paper. Everyone of tolerable education feels the _imitability_ of Dr. Johnson's and other-such's style, the inimitability of Shakspere's, &c. Hence, I believe, arises the partiality of thousands for Johnson. They can imagine _themselves_ doing the same. Vanity is at the bottom of it. The number of imitators proves this in some measure. Of the feelings of the English at the sight of a convoy from England. Man cannot be selfish--that part of me (my beloved) which is distant, in space, excites the same feeling as the "ich"[C] distant from me in time. My friends are indeed my soul! [Sidenote: Jan. 22, 1805.] I had not moved from my seat, and wanted the stick of sealing-wax, nearly a whole one, for another letter. I could not find it, it was not on the table--had it dropped on the ground? I searched and searched everywhere, my pockets, my fobs, impossible places--literally it had vanished, and where was it? It had stuck to my _elbow_, I having leaned upon it ere it had grown cold! A curious accident, and in no way similar to that of the butcher and his steel in his mouth which he was seeking for. Mine was true accident. The maxims which govern the Courts of Admiralty, their "betwixt and between" of positive law and the dictates of right reason, resemble the half-way _inter jus et æquitatem_ of Roman jurisprudence. It were worth while to examine the advantages of this as far as it is a real _modification_, its disadvantages as far as it appears a _jumble_. Seeing a nice bed of glowing embers with one junk of firewood well placed, like the remains of an old edifice, and another well-nigh mouldered one corresponding to it, I felt an impulse to put on three pieces of wood that exactly completed the perishable architecture, though it was eleven o'clock, though I was that instant going to bed, and there could be, in common ideas, no possible use in it. Hence I seem (for I write not having yet gone to bed) to suspect that this disease of totalising, of perfecting, may be the bottom impulse of many, many actions, in which it never is brought forward as an avowed or even agnised as a conscious motive. Mem.--to collect facts for a comparison between a _wood_ and a _coal_ fire, as to sights and sounds and bodily feeling. I have read somewhere of a sailor who dreamt that an encounter with the enemy was about to take place, and that he should discover cowardice during action. Accordingly he awakes his brother the Captain, and bids him prepare for an engagement. At daybreak a ship is discovered on the horizon and the sailor, mindful of his dream, procures himself to be tied to a post. At the close of the day he is released unwounded but dead from fright. Apply this incident to Miss Edgeworth's Tales, and all similar attempts to cure faults by detailed forewarnings, which leave on the similarly faulty an impression of fatality that extinguishes hope. What precedes to the voice follows to the eye, as 000.1 and 100. A, B, C--were they men, you would say that "C" went first, but being letters, things of voice and ear in their original, we say that "A" goes first. There are many men who, following, made 1 = 1000, being placed at head, become useless cyphers, mere finery for form's sake. [Sidenote: Feb. 1, 1805, Friday, Malta] Of the millions that use the pen, how many (query) understand the story of this machine, the action of the slit, eh? I confess, ridiculous as it must appear to those who do understand it, that I have not been able to answer the question off-hand to myself, having only this moment thought of it. [Sidenote: Feb. 3, 1805] The gentlest form of Death, a Sylphid Death, passed by, beheld a sleeping baby--became, Narcissus-like, enamoured of its own self in the sweet counterfeit, seized it and carried it off as a mirror close by the green Paradise--but the reviving air awakened the babe, and 'twas death that died at the sudden loss. [Sidenote: THE FRENCH LANGUAGE AND POETRY Feb. 4, 1805] I cannot admit that any language can be unfit for poetry, or that there is any language in which a divinely inspired architect may not sustain the lofty edifice of verse on its two pillars of sublimity and pathos. Yet I have heard Frenchmen, nay, even Englishmen, assert that of the German, which contains perhaps an hundred passages equal to the-- Und ein Gott ist, ein heiliger Wille lebt, Wie auch der menschliche wanke;-- and I have heard both German and Englishmen (and these, too, men of true feeling and genius, and so many of them that such company of my betters makes me not ashamed to the having myself been guilty of this injustice) assert that the French language is insusceptible of poetry in its higher and purer sense, of poetry which excites emotion not merely creates amusement, which demands continuous admiration, not regular recurrence of conscious surprise, and the effect of which is love and joy. Unfortunately the manners, religion and government of France, and the circumstances of its emergence from the polyarchy of feudal barony, have given a bad taste to the Parisians--so bad a one as doubtless to have mildewed many an opening blossom. I cannot say that I know and can name any one French writer that can be placed among the greater poets, but when I read the inscription over the Chartreuse-- C'est ici que la Mort et la Verité Elevent leurs flambeaux terribles; C'est de cette demeure au monde inaccessible Que l'on passe à l'Eternité I seem to feel that if France had been for ages a Protestant nation, and a Milton had been born in it, the French language would not have precluded the production of a "Paradise Lost," though it might, perhaps, that of a Hamlet or a Lear. [Sidenote: THE ABSTRACT SELF On Friday night, Feb. 8, 1805] On Friday Night, 8th Feb. 1805, my feeling, in sleep, of exceeding great love for my infant, seen by me in the dream!--yet so as it might be Sara, Derwent, or Berkley, and still it was an individual babe and mine. "All look or likeness caught from earth, All accident of kin or birth, Had pass'd away. There seem'd no trace Of aught upon her brighten'd face, Upraised beneath the rifted stone, Save of one spirit all her own; She, she herself, and only she, Shone through her body visibly." _Poetical Works_, 1893, p. 172. This abstract self is, indeed, in its nature a Universal personified, as Life, Soul, Spirit, etc. Will not this _prove_ it to be a _deeper_ feeling, and of such intimate affinity with ideas, so as to modify them and become one with them; whereas the appetites and the feelings of revenge and anger co-exist with the ideas, not combine with them, and alter the apparent effect of this form, not the forms themselves? Certain modifications of fear seem to approach nearest to this love-sense in its manner of acting. Those whispers just as you have fallen asleep--what are they, and whence? [Sidenote: LITERA SCRIPTA MANET Monday, Feb 11, 1805] I must own to a superstitious dread of the destruction of paper worthy of a Mahometan. But I am also ashamed to confess to myself what pulling back of heart I feel whenever I wish to light a candle or kindle a fire with a Hospital or Harbour Report, and what a cumulus lies on my table, I not able to conjecture of what use they can ever be, and yet trembling lest what I then destroyed might be of some use in the way of knowledge. This seems to be the excess of a good feeling, but it is ridiculous. [Sidenote: COWPER'S "LINES TO MRS. UNWIN"] It is not without a certain sense of self-reproof, as well as self-distrust, that I ask, or, rather, that my understanding suggests to me the query, whether this divine poem (in so original a strain of thought and feeling honourable to human nature) would not have been more perfect if the third, fourth, and fifth stanzas had been omitted, and the tenth and eleventh transposed so as to stand as the third and fourth. It is not, perhaps not at all, but, certainly, not principally that I feel any meanness in the "needles;" but, not to mention that the words "once a shining store" is a speck in the diamond (in a less dear poem I might, perhaps, have called it more harshly a _rhyme-botch_), and that the word "restless" is rather too strong an impersonation for the serious tone, the _real_ness of the poem, and seems to tread too closely on the mock-heroic; but that it seems not true to poetic feeling to introduce the affecting circumstance of dimness of sight from decay of nature on an occasion so remote from the [Greek: to katholou], and that the fifth stanza, graceful and even affecting as the spirit of the playfulness is or would be, at least, in a poem having less depth of feeling, breaks in painfully here--the age and afflicting infirmities both of the writer and his subject seem abhorrent from such trifling of--scarcely fancy, for I fear, if it were analysed, that the whole effect would be found to depend on phrases hackneyed, and taken from the alms-house of the Muses. The test would be this: read the poem to a well-educated but natural woman, an unaffected, gentle being, endued with sense and sensibility--substituting the tenth and eleventh stanzas for those three, and some days after shew her the poem as it now stands. I seem to be sure that she would be shocked--an alien would have intruded himself, and be found sitting in a circle of dear friends whom she expected to have found _all to themselves_. [Sidenote: ETYMOLOGY] To say that etymology is a science--is to use this word in its laxest and improper sense. But our language, except, at least, in poetry, has dropped the word "lore"--the _lehre_ of the Germans, the _logos_ of the Greek. Either we should have retained the word and ventured on _Root-lore_, _verse-lore_, etc., or have adopted the Greek as a single word as well as a word in combination. All novelties appear or are rather felt as ridiculous in language; but, if it had been once adopted, it would have been no stranger to have said that etymo_logy_ is a _logy_ which perishes from a plethora of probability, than that the _art_ of war is an _art_ apparently for the destruction and subjugation of particular states, but really for the lessening of bloodshed and the preservation of the liberties of mankind. Art and Science are both too much appropriated--our language wants terms of comprehensive generality, implying the kind, not the degree or species, as in that good and necessary word _sensuous_, which we have likewise dropped, opposed to sensual, sensitive, sensible, etc., etc. Chymistry has felt this difficulty, and found the necessity of having one word for the supposed cause, another for the effect, as in caloric or calorific, opposed to heat; and psychology has still more need of the reformation. [Sidenote: SENTIMENT, AN ANTIDOTE TO CASUISTRY] The Queen-bee in the hive of Popish Error, the great mother of the swarm, seems to me their tenet concerning Faith and Works, placing the former wholly in the rectitude, nay, in the rightness of intellectual conviction, and the latter in the definite and, most often, the material action, and, consequently, the assertion of the dividuous nature and self-existence of works. Hence the doctrine of damnation out of the Church of Rome--of the one visible Church--of the absolute efficiency _in se_ of all the Sacraments and the absolute merit of ceremonial observances. Consider the incalculable advantage of chiefly dwelling on the virtues of the heart, of habits of feeling and harmonious action, the music of the adjusted string at the impulse of the breeze, and, on the other hand, the evils of books concerning particular actions, minute cases of conscience, hair-splitting directions and decisions, O how illustrated by the detestable character of most of the Roman Catholic casuists! No actions should be distinctly described but such as manifestly tend to awaken the heart to efficient feeling, whether of fear or of love--actions that, falling back on the fountain, keep it full, or clear out the mud from its pipes, and make it play in its abundance, shining in that purity in which, at once, the purity and the light is each the cause of the other, the light purifying, and the purified receiving and reflecting the light, sending it off to others; not, like the polished mirror, by reflection from itself, but by transmission through itself. [Sidenote: THE EMPYREAN] Friday + Saturday, 12-1 o'clock [March 2, 1805.] What a sky! the not yet orbed moon, the spotted oval, blue at one edge from the deep utter blue of the sky--a MASS of _pearl_-white cloud below, distant, and travelling to the horizon, but all the upper part of the ascent and all the height such _profound_ blue, deep as a deep river, and deep in colour, and those two depths so entirely _one_, _as_ to give the meaning and explanation of the two different significations of the epithet. Here, so far from _divided_, they were scarcely _distinct_, scattered over with thin pearl-white cloudlets--hands and fingers--the largest not larger than a floating veil! Unconsciously I stretched forth my arms as to embrace the sky, and in a trance I had worshipped God in the moon--the spirit, not the form. I felt in how innocent a feeling Sabeism might have begun. Oh! not only the moon, but the depths of the sky! The moon was the _idea_; but deep sky is, of all visual impressions, the nearest akin to a feeling. It is more a feeling than a sight, or, rather, it is the melting away and entire union of feeling and sight! [Sidenote: DISTEMPER'S WORST CALAMITY] Monday morning, which I ought not to have known not to be Sunday night, 2 o'clock, March 4, 1805. My dreams to-night were interfused with struggle and fear, though, till the very last, not victors; but the very last, which awoke me, was a completed night-mare, as it gave the _idea_ and _sensation_ of actual grasp or touch contrary to _my_ will and in apparent consequence of the malignant will of the external form, whether actually appearing or, as sometimes happened, believed to exist--in which latter case I have two or three times felt a horrid touch of hatred, a grasp, or a weight of hate and horror abstracted from all [conscious] form or supposal of form, an _abstract touch_, an _abstract_ grasp, an _abstract_ weight! _Quam nihil ad genium Papiliane tuum!_ or, in other words, _This Mackintosh would prove to be nonsense by a Scotch smile._ The last [dream], that woke me, though a true night-mare, was, however, a mild one. I cried out early, like a scarcely-hurt child who knows himself within hearing of his mother. But, anterior to this, I had been playing with children, especially with one most lovely child, about two years or two and a half, and had repeated to her, in my dream, "The dews were falling fast," &c., and I was sorely frightened by the sneering and fiendish malignity of the beautiful creature, but from the beginning there had been a terror about it and proceeding from it. I shall hereafter, read the Vision in "Macbeth" with increased admiration. ["_Quam nihil ad genium Papiniane tuum_," was the motto of _The Lyrical Ballads_.] That deep intuition of our _one_ness, is it not at the bottom of many of our faults as well as virtues? the dislike that a bad man should have any virtues, a good man any faults? And yet, too, a something noble and incentive is in this. [Sidenote: THE OMNISCIENT THE COMFORTER] What comfort in the silent eye upraised to God! "_Thou_ knowest." O! what a thought! Never to be friendless, never to be unintelligible! The omnipresence has been generally represented as a spy, a sort of Bentham's Panopticon.[D] O to feel what the pain is to be utterly unintelligible and then--"O God, thou understandest!" [Sidenote: POETS AS CRITICS OF POETS] The question should be fairly stated, how far a man can be an adequate, or even a good (as far as he goes) though inadequate critic of poetry who is not a poet, at least, _in posse_? Can he be an adequate, can he be a good critic, though not commensurate [with the poet criticised]? But there is yet another distinction. Supposing he is not only not a poet, but is a bad poet! What then? [Sidenote: IMMATURE CRITICS March 16, 1805] [The] cause of the offence or disgust received by the _mean_ in good poems when we are young, and its diminution and occasional evanescence when we are older in true taste [is] that, at first, we are from various causes delighted with _generalities_ of nature which can all be expressed in dignified words; but, afterwards, becoming more intimately acquainted with Nature in her detail, we are delighted with _distinct_, vivid ideas, and with vivid ideas most when made distinct, and can most often forgive and sometimes be delighted with even a low image from art or low life when it gives you the very thing by an illustration, as, for instance, Cowper's stream "inlaying" the level vale as with silver, and even Shakspere's "shrill-tongued Tapster's answering shallow wits" applied to echoes in an _echofull_ place. [Sidenote: ATTENTION AND SENSATION March 17, 1805] Of the not being able to know whether you are smoking in the dark or when your eyes are shut: item, of the ignorance in that state of the difference of beef, veal, &c.--it is all attention. Your ideas being shut, other images arise which you must _attend to_, it being the habit of a _seeing_ man to attend chiefly to _sight_. So close your eyes, (and) you attend to the ideal images, and, attending to them, you abstract your _attention_. It is the same when deeply thinking in a reverie, you no longer hear distinct sound made to you. But what a strange inference that there were no sounds! [Sidenote: ST. COLUMBA] I love St. Combe or Columba and he shall be my saint. For he is not in the Catalogue of Romish Saints, having never been canonised at Rome, and because this Apostle of the Picts lived and gave his name to an island on the Hebrides, and from him Switzerland was christianised. [Sidenote: EXPERIENCE AND BOOK KNOWLEDGE Midnight, April 5, 1805] "I will write," I said, "as truly as I can from experience, actual individual experience, not from book-knowledge." But yet it is wonderful how exactly the knowledge from good books coincides with the experience of men of the world. How often, when I was younger, have I noticed the deep delight of men of the world who have taken late in life to literature, on coming across a passage the force of which had either escaped me altogether, or which I knew to be true from books only and at second hand! Experience is necessary, no doubt, if only to give a light and shade in the mind, to give to some one idea a greater vividness than to others, and thereby to make it a _Thing_ of _Time_ and actual reality. For all ideas being equally vivid, the whole becomes a dream. But, notwithstanding this and other reasons, I yet believe that the saws against book-knowledge are handed down to us from times when books conveyed only abstract science or abstract morality and religion. Whereas, in the present day, what is there of real life, in all its goings on, trades, manufactures, high life, low life, animate and inanimate that is not to be found in books? In these days books are conversation. And this, I know, is for evil as well as good, but for good, too, as well as evil. [Sidenote: DUTY AND SELF INTEREST Sunday morning 4 o'clock, April 7, 1805] How feebly, how unlike an English cock, that cock crows and the other answers! Did I not particularly notice the _un_likeness on my first arrival at Malta? Well, to-day I will disburthen my mind. Yet one thing strikes me, the difference I find in myself during the past year or two. My enthusiasm for the happiness of mankind in particular places and countries, and my eagerness to promote it, seems to decrease, and my sense of duty, my hauntings of conscience, from any stain of thought or action to increase in the same ratio. I remember having written a strong letter to my most dear and honoured Wordsworth in consequence of his "Ode to Duty," and in that letter explained this as the effect of selfness in a mind incapable of gross self-interest--I mean, the decrease of hope and joy, the soul in its round and round flight forming narrower circles, till at every gyre its wings beat against the _personal self_. But let me examine this more accurately. It may be that the phenomena will come out more honourable to our nature. [Sidenote: EVIL PRODUCES EVIL] It is as trite as it is mournful (but yet most instructive), and by the genius that can produce the strongest impressions of novelty by rescuing the stalest and most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission--admitted so instantly as never to be _reflected_ on, never by that sole key of reflection admitted into the effective, legislative chamber of the heart--so true that they lose all the privileges of Truth, and, as extremes meet by being _truisms_, correspond in utter inefficiency with universally acknowledged errors (in Algebraic symbols Truisms = Falsehoodisms = [scir][scir])--by that genius, I say, might good be worked in considering the old, old Methusalem saw that "evil produces evil." One error almost compels another. Tell one lie, tell a hundred. Oh, to show this, _a priori_, by bottoming it in all our faculties and by experience of touching examples! [Sidenote: JOHN WORDSWORTH Monday, April 8, 1805] The favourite object of all Oriental tales, and that which, whist it inspired their authors in the East, still inspires their readers everywhere, is the impossibility of baffling Destiny--the perception that what we considered as the means of one thing becomes, in a strange manner, the direct means of the reverse. O dear John Wordsworth! what joy at Grasmere that you were made Captain of the Abergavenny, and so young too! Now it was next to certain that you would in a few years settle in your native hills and be verily one of the _Concern_! Then came your share in the brilliant action with Linois. (I was at Grasmere in spirit only, but in spirit I was one of the rejoicers--as joyful as any, and, perhaps, more joyous!) This, doubtless, not only enabled you to lay in a larger and more advantageous cargo, but procured you a voyage to India instead of China, and in this circumstance a next to certainty of independence--and all these were decoys of Death! Well, but a nobler feeling than these vain regrets would become the friend of the man whose last words were: "I have done my duty! let her go!" Let us do our _duty_! all else is a dream, life and death alike a dream. This short sentence would comprise, I believe, the sum of all profound philosophy, of ethics and metaphysics conjointly, from Plato to Fichte! [_Vide Letters of S. T. C._, 1895, ii. 495, _note_.] [Sidenote: LOVE THE DIVINE ESSENCE] The best, the truly lovely in each and all, is God. Therefore the truly beloved is _the symbol of God_ to whomever it is truly beloved by, but it may become perfect and maintained love by the function of the two. The lover worships in his beloved that final consummation of itself which is produced in his own soul by the action of the soul of the beloved upon it, and that final perception of the soul of the beloved which is in part the consequence of the reaction of his (so ameliorated and regenerated) soul upon the soul of his beloved, till each contemplates the soul of the other as involving his own, both in its givings and its receivings, and thus, still keeping alive its _outness_, its _self-oblivion_ united with self-warmth, still approximates to God! Where shall I find an image for this sublime symbol which, ever involving the presence of Deity, yet tends towards it ever? Shall it be in the attractive powers of the different surfaces of the earth? each attraction the vicegerent and representative of the central attraction, and yet being no other than that attraction itself? By some such feeling as this I can easily believe the mind of Fénelon and Madame Guyon to have coloured its faith in the worship of saints, but that was most dangerous. It was not idolatry in _them_, but it encouraged idolatry in others. Now, the pure love of a good man for a good woman does not involve this evil, but it multiplies, intensifies the good. [Sidenote: ORDER IN DREAMS] Dreamt that I was saying or reading, or that it was read to me, "Varrius thus prophesied vinegar at his door by damned frigid tremblings." Just after, I woke. I fell to sleep again, having in the previous doze meditated on the possibility of making dreams regular; and just as I had passed on the other side of the confine of dozing, I afforded this specimen: "I should have thought it Vossius rather than Varrius, though, Varrius being a great poet, the idea would have been more suitable to him, only that all his writings were unfortunately lost in the _Arrow_." Again I awoke. _N.B._--The _Arrow_, Captain Vincent's frigate, from which our Malta letters and dispatches had been previously thrown overboard, was taken by the French, in February 1805. This _illustrates the connection of dreams_. [Sidenote: ORANGE BLOSSOM April 8, 1805] I never had a more lovely twig of orange-blossoms, with four old last year's leaves with their steady green well-placed among them, than to-day, and with a rose-twig of three roses [it] made a very striking nosegay to an Englishman, The Orange Twig was so very full of blossoms that one-fourth of the number becoming fruit of the natural size would have broken the twig off. Is there, then, disproportion here? or waste? O no! no! In the first place, here is a prodigality of beauty; and what harm do they do by existing? And is not man a being capable of Beauty even as of Hunger and Thirst? And if the latter be fit objects of a final cause, why not the former? But secondly [Nature] hereby multiplies manifold the chances of a proper number becoming fruit--in this twig, for instance, for one set of accidents that would have been fatal to the year's growth if only as many blossoms had been on it as it was designed to bear fruit, there may now be three sets of accidents--and no harm done. And, thirdly and lastly, for _me_ at _least_--or, at least, at present, for in nature doubtless there are many additional reasons, and possibly for _me_ at some future hour of reflection, after some new influx of information from books or observance-and, thirdly, these blossoms are Fruit, fruit to the winged insect, fruit to man--yea! and of more solid value, perhaps, than the orange itself! O how the Bees be-throng and be-murmur it! O how the honey tells the tale of its birthplace to the sense of sight and odour! and to how many minute and uneyeable insects beside! So, I cannot but think, ought I to be talking to Hartley, and sometimes to detail all the insects that have arts or implements resembling human--the sea-snails, with the nautilus at their head; the wheel-insect, the galvanic eel, etc. [This note was printed in the _Illustrated London News_, June 10, 1893.] [Sidenote: ANTICIPATIONS IN NATURE AND IN THOUGHT Saturday night, April 14, 1805] In looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dim-glimmering through the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were _asking_ for, a symbolical language for something within me that already and for ever exists, than observing anything new. Even when that latter is the case, yet still I have always an obscure feeling as if that new phenomena were the dim awaking of a forgotten or hidden truth of my inner nature. It is still interesting as a word--a symbol. It is [Greek: Logos] the Creator, and the Evolver! [Now] what is the right, the virtuous feeling, and consequent action when a man having long meditated on and perceived a certain truth, finds another, a foreign writer, who has handled the same with an approximation to the truth as he had previously conceived it? Joy! Let Truth make her voice audible! While I was preparing the pen to write this remark, I lost the train of thought which had led me to it. I meant to have asked something else now forgotten. For the above answers itself. It needed no answer, I trust, in my heart. [Printed in _Life of S. T. C._, by James Gillman, 1838, p. 311.] [Sidenote: THE HOPE OF HUMANITY, Easter Sunday, 1805] That beautiful passage in dear and honoured W. Wordsworth's "Michael," respecting the forward-looking Hope inspired pre-eminently by the birth of a child, was brought to my mind most forcibly by my own independent though, in part, anticipated reflections on the importance of young children to the keeping up the stock of Hope in the human species. They seem to be the immediate and secreting organ of Hope in the great organised body of the whole human race, in _all men_ considered as the component atoms of _Man_--as young leaves are the organs of supplying vital air to the atmosphere. Thus living on through such a length of years, The Shepherd, if he loved himself, must needs Have loved his Helpmate; but to Michael's heart This son of his old age was yet more dear-- Less from instinctive tenderness, the same Fond spirit that blindly works in the blood of all-- Than that a child, more than all other gifts That earth can offer to declining man, Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts, And stirrings of inquietude, when they By tendency of nature needs must fail. --_Poetical Works of_ W. WORDSWORTH, p. 133. [Sidenote: THE NORTHERN EASTER Easter Sunday, 1805] The English and German climates and that of northern France possess, among many others, this one little beauty of uniting the mysteries of positive with those of natural religion--in celebrating the symbolical resurrection of the human soul in that of the Crucified, at the time of the actual resurrection of the "living life" of nature. [Sidenote: SPIRITUAL RELIGION] Religion consists in truth and virtue, that is, the permanent, the _forma efformans_, in the flux of things without, of feelings and images within. Well, therefore, does the Scripture speak of the Spirit as praying to the Spirit, "The Lord said to my Lord." God is the essence as well as the object of religion. [Sidenote: A SUPPOSITION Wednesday, April 17, 1805] I would not willingly kill even a flower, but were I at the head of an army, or a revolutionary kingdom, I would do my duty; and though it should be the ordering of the military execution of a city, yet, supposing it to be my duty, I would give the order--and then, in awe, listen to the uproar, even as to a thunderstorm--the awe as tranquil, the submission to the inevitable, to the unconnected with myself, as profound. It should be as if the lightning of heaven passed along my sword and destroyed a man. [Sidenote: ENTHUSIASM] Does the sober judgement previously measure out the banks between which the stream of enthusiasm shall rush with its torrent-sound? Far rather does the stream itself plough up its own channel and find its banks in the adamant rocks of nature! [Sidenote: ADHÆSIT PAVIMENTO COR] There are times when my thoughts--how like music! O that these times were more frequent! But how can they be, I being so hopeless, and for months past so incessantly employed in official tasks, subscribing, examining, administering oaths, auditing, and so forth? [Sidenote: THE REALISATION OF DEATH] John Tobin dead, and just after the success of his play! and Robert Allen dead suddenly! O when we are young we lament for death only by sympathy, or with the general feeling with which we grieve for misfortunes in general, but there comes a time (and this year is the time that has come to me) when we lament for death as death, when it is felt for itself, and as itself, aloof from all its consequences. Then comes the grave-stone into the heart with all its mournful names, then the bell-man's or clerk's verses subjoined to the bills of mortality are no longer common-place. [John Tobin the dramatist died December 7, 1804. His play entitled "The Honeymoon" was published in 1805. Robert Allen, Coleridge's contemporary and school-friend, held the post of deputy-surgeon to the 2nd Royals, then on service in Portugal. He was a friend of Dr. (afterwards Sir J.) Stoddart, with whom Coleridge stayed on his first arrival at Malta. See _Letters of Charles Lamb_, Macmillan, 1888, i. 188.] [Sidenote: LOVE AND DUTY] Würde, worthiness, VIRTUE, consist in the mastery over the sensuous and sensual impulses; but love requires INNOCENCE. Let the lover ask his heart whether he can endure that his mistress should have _struggled_ with a sensual impulse for another man, though she overcame it from a sense of duty to him. Women are LESS offended with men, in part, from the vicious habits of men, and, in part, from the difference of bodily constitution. Yet, still, to a pure and truly loving woman this must be a painful thought. That he should struggle with and overcome ambition, desire of fortune, superior beauty, &c., or with objectless desire of any kind, is pleasing, but _not_ that he has struggled with positive, appropriated desire, that is, desire _with_ an object. Love, in short, requires an absolute peace and harmony between all parts of human nature, such as it is; and it is offended by any _war_, though the battle should be decided in favour of the worthier. This is, perhaps, the final cause of the _rarity_ of true love, and the efficient and immediate cause of its difficulty. Ours is a life of probation. We are to contemplate and obey _duty_ for its own sake, and in order to do this, we, in our present imperfect state of being, must see it not merely abstracted from but in direct opposition to the _wish_, the _inclination_. Having perfected this, the highest possibility of human nature, man may then with safety harmonise _all_ his being with this--he may _love_. To perform duties absolutely from the sense of duty is the _ideal_, which, perhaps, no human being ever can arrive at, but which every human being ought to try to draw near unto. This is, in the only wise, and, verily, in a most sublime sense, to see God face to face, which, alas! it seems too true that no man can do and _live_, that is, a _human_ life. It would become incompatible with his organization, or rather, it would _transmute_ it, and the process of that transmutation, to the senses of other men, would be called death. Even as to the caterpillar, in all probability, the caterpillar dies, and he either, which is most probable, does not see (or, at all events, does not see the connection between the caterpillar and) the butterfly, the beautiful Psyche of the Greeks. [Sidenote: HAPPINESS MADE PERFECT] Those who in this life love in perfection, if such there be, in proportion as their love has no struggles, see God darkly and through a veil. For when duty and pleasure are absolutely co-incident, the very nature of our organisation necessitates that duty will be contemplated as the symbol of pleasure, instead of pleasure being (as in a future life we have faith it will be) the symbol of duty. For herein lies the distinction between human and angelic happiness. Humanly happy I call him who in enjoyment _finds_ his duty; angelically happy he, who seeks and finds his duty in enjoyment. Happiness in general may be defined, not the aggregate of pleasurable sensations--for this is either a dangerous error and the creed of sensualists, or else a mere translation or wordy paraphrase--but the state of that person who, in order to enjoy his nature in the highest manifestation of conscious _feeling_, has no need of doing wrong, and who, in order to do right, is under no necessity of abstaining from enjoyment. [_Vide Life of S. T. C._, by James Gillman, 1838, pp. 176-78.] [Sidenote: THOUGHT AND THINGS] Thought and reality are, as it were, two distinct corresponding sounds, of which no man can say positively which is the voice and which the echo. Oh, the beautiful fountain or natural well at Upper Stowey! The images of the weeds which hung down from its sides appear as plants growing up, straight and upright, among the water-weeds that really grow from the bottom of the well, and so vivid was the image, that for some moments, and not till after I had disturbed the water, did I perceive that their roots were not neighbours, and they side-by-side companions. So ever, then I said, so are the happy man's thoughts and things, [or in the language of the modern philosophers] his ideas and impressions. [Sidenote: SUPERSTITION] The two characteristics which I have most observed in Roman Catholic mummery processions, baptisms, etc., are, first, the immense _noise_ and jingle-jingle as if to frighten away the dæmon common-sense; and, secondly, the unmoved, stupid, uninterested faces of the conjurers. I have noticed no exception. Is not the very nature of superstition in general, as being utterly sensuous, _cold_ except where it is _sensual_? Hence the older form of idolatry, as displayed in the Greek mythology, was, in some sense, even preferable to the Popish. For whatever life did and could exist in superstition it brought forward and sanctified in its rites of Bacchus, Venus, etc. The papist by pretence of suppression warps and denaturalises. In the pagan [ritual, superstition] burnt with a bright flame, in the popish it consumes the soul with a smothered fire that stinks in darkness and smoulders like gum that burns but is incapable of light. [Sidenote: ILLUSION Sunday Midnight, May 12, 1805] At the Treasury, La Valetta, Malta, in the room the windows of which directly face the piazzas and vast saloon built for the archives and Library and now used as the Garrison Ball-room, sitting at one corner of a large parallelogram table well-littered with books, in a red arm-chair, at the other corner of which (diagonally) {_C}[rec]^D Mr. Dennison had been sitting--he and I having conversed for a long time, he bade me good night, and retired--I meaning to retire too, however sunk for five minutes or so into a doze and on suddenly awaking up I saw him as distinctly sitting in the chair, as I had, really, some ten minutes before. I was startled, and thinking of it, sunk into a second doze, out of which awaking as before I saw again the same appearance; not more distinct indeed, but more of his form--for at the first time I had seen only his face and bust--but now I saw as much as I could have seen if he had been really there. The appearance was very nearly that of a person seen through thin smoke distinct indeed, but yet a sort of distinct _shape_ and _colour_, with a diminished sense of _substantiality_--like a face in a clear stream. My nerves had been violently agitated yesterday morning by the attack of three dogs as I was mounting the steps of Captain Pasley's door--two of them savage Bedouins, who wounded me in the calf of my left leg. I have noted this down, not three minutes having intervened since the illusion took place. Often and often I have had similar experiences and, therefore, resolved to write down the particulars whenever any new instance should occur, as a weapon against superstition, and an explanation of ghosts--Banquo in "Macbeth" the very same thing. I once told a lady the reason why I did not believe in the existence of ghosts, etc., was that I had seen too many of them myself. N.B. There were on the table a common black wine-bottle, a decanter of water, and, between these, one of the half-gallon glass flasks which Sir G. Beaumont had given me (four of these full of port), the cork in, covered with leather, and having a white plated ring on the top. I mention this because since I wrote the former pages, on blinking a bit a third time, and opening my eyes, I clearly _detected_ that this high-shouldered hypochondriacal bottle-man had a great share in producing the effect. The metamorphosis was clearly beginning, though I snapped the spell before it had assumed a recognisable form. The red-leather arm-chair was so placed at the corner that the flask was exactly between me and it--and the lamp being close to my corner of the large table, and not giving much light, the chair was rather obscure, and the brass nails where the leather was fastened to the outward wooden rim reflecting the light more copiously were seen almost for themselves. What if instead of immediately checking the sight, and then pleased with it as a philosophical _case_, I had been frightened and encouraged it, and my understanding had joined _its vote_ to that of my senses? My own shadow, too, on the wall not far from Mr. D.'s chair--the white paper, the sheet of Harbour Reports lying spread out on the table on the other side of the bottles--influence of mere colour, influence of shape--wonderful coalescence of scattered colours at distances, and, then, all going to some one shape, and the modification! Likewise I am more convinced by repeated observation that, perhaps, always in a very minute degree but assuredly in certain states and postures of the eye, as in drowsiness, in the state of the brain and nerves after distress or agitation, especially if it had been accompanied by weeping, and in many others, we see our own faces, and project them according to the distance given them by the degree of indistinctness--that this may occasion in the highest degree the Wraith (_vide_ a hundred Scotch stories, but better than all, Wordsworth's most wonderful and admirable poem, Peter Bell, when he sees his own figure), and, still oftener, that it facilitates the formation of a human face out of some really present object, and from the alteration of the distance among other causes never suspected as the occasion and substratum. S. T. C. N.B.--This is a valuable note, re-read by me, Tuesday morning, May 14. [Compare _Table Talk_ for January 3 and May 1, 1823, Bell & Co., 1884, pp. 20, 31-33. See, too, _The Friend_, First Landing Place Essay, iii., _Coleridge's Works_, Harper & Brothers, 1853, ii. 134-137.] [Sidenote: FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE"] Mem. always to bear in mind that profound sentence of Leibnitz that men's intellectual errors consist chiefly in _denying_. What they _affirm_ with _feeling_ is, for the most part, right--if it be a real affirmation, and not affirmative in form, negative in reality. As, for instance, when a man praises the French stage, meaning and implying his dislike of Shakspere [and the Elizabethan dramatists]. "Facts--stubborn facts! None of your theory!" A most entertaining and instructive essay might be written on this text, and the sooner the better. Trace it from the most absurd credulity--_e.g._, in Fracastorius' _De Sympathiâ_, cap. i. and the Alchemy Book--even to that of your modern agriculturists, relating their own facts and swearing against each other like ships' crews. O! it is the relation of the facts--not the facts, friend! Speculative men are wont to be condemned by the general. But who more speculative then Sir Walter Raleigh, and _he_, even he, brought the potato to Europe. Good heavens! let me never eat a roasted potato without dwelling on it, and detailing its train of consequences. Likewise, too, _dubious_ to the philosopher, but to be clapped chorally by the commercial world, he, this mere wild speculatist, introduced tobacco. For a nation to make peace only because it is tired of war, and, as it were, in order just to take breath, is in direct subversion of the end and object of the war which was its sole justification. 'Tis like a poor way-sore foot traveller getting up behind a coach that is going the contrary way to his. The eye hath a two-fold power. It is, verily, a window through which you not only look _out_ of the house, but can look into it too. A statesman and diplomatist should for this reason always wear spectacles. Worldly men gain their purposes with worldly men by that instinctive belief in sincerity. Hence (nothing immediately and passionately contradicting it) the effect of the "with unfeigned esteem," "entire devotion," and the other smooth phrases in letters, all, in short, that sea-officers call _oil_, and of which they, with all their bluntness, well understand the use. The confusion of metaphor with reality is one of the fountains of the many-headed Nile of credulity, which, overflowing its banks, covers the world with miscreations and reptile monsters, and feeds by its many mouths the sea of blood. A ready command of a limited number of words is but a playing cat-cradle dexterously with language. Plain contra-reasoning may be compared with boxing with fists. Controversy with boxing is the cestus, that is, the lead-loaded glove, like the pugilists in the Æneid. But the stiletto! the envenomed stiletto is here. What worse? (a Germanism) Yes! the poisoned Italian glove of mock friendship. The more I reflect, the more exact and close appears to me the analogy between a watch and watches, and the conscience and consciences of men, on the one hand, and that between the sun and motion of the heavenly bodies in general and the reason and goodness of the Supreme on the other. Never goes quite right any one, no two go exactly the same; they derive their dignity and use as being substitutes and exponents of heavenly motions, but still, in a thousand instances, they are and must be our instructors by which we must act, in practice presuming a coincidence while theoretically we are aware of incalculable variations. One lifts up one's eyes to heaven, as if to seek there what one had lost on earth--eyes, Whose half-beholdings through unsteady tears Gave shape, hue, distance to the inward dream. [Sidenote: GREAT MEN THE CRITERION OF NATIONAL WORTH] Schiller, disgusted with Kotzebuisms, deserts from Shakspere! What! cannot we condemn a counterfeit and yet remain admirers of the original? This is a sufficient proof that the first admiration was not sound, or founded on sound distinct perceptions [or, if sprung from], a sound feeling, yet clothed and manifested to the consciousness by false ideas. And now the French stage is to be re-introduced. O Germany! Germany! why this endless rage for novelty? Why this endless looking out of thyself? But stop, let me not fall into the pit against which I was about to warn others. Let me not confound the discriminating character and genius of a nation with the conflux of its individuals in cities and reviews. Let England be Sir Philip Sidney, Shakspere, Milton, Bacon, Harrington, Swift, Wordsworth; and never let the names of Darwin, Johnson, Hume, _fur_ it over. If these, too, must be England let them be another England; or, rather, let the first be old England, the spiritual, Platonic old England, and the second, with Locke at the head of the philosophers and Pope [at the head] of the poets, together with the long list of Priestleys, Paleys, Hayleys, Darwins, Mr. Pitts, Dundasses, &c., &c., be the representatives of commercial Great Britain. These have [indeed] their merits, but are as alien to me as the Mandarin philosophers and poets of China. Even so Leibnitz, Lessing, Voss, Kant, shall be _Germany_ to me, let whatever coxcombs rise up, and _shrill_ it away in the grasshopper vale of reviews. And so shall Dante, Ariosto, Giordano Bruno, be my Italy; Cervantes my Spain; and O! that I could find a France for my love. But spite of Pascal, Madame Guyon and Molière, France is my Babylon, the mother of whoredoms in morality, philosophy and taste. The French themselves feel a foreignness in these writers. How indeed is it possible at once to _love_ Pascal and Voltaire? [Sidenote: AN INTELLECTUAL PURGATORY Tuesday morning, May 14, 1805] With any distinct remembrance of a past life there could be no fear of death as death, no idea even of death! Now, in the next state, to meet with the Luthers, Miltons, Leibnitzs, Bernouillis, Bonnets, Shaksperes, etc., and to live a longer and better life, the good and wise entirely among the good and wise, might serve as a step to break the abruptness of an immediate Heaven? But it must be a human life; and though the faith in a hereafter would be more firm, more undoubting, yet, still, it must not be a sensuous remembrance of a death passed over. No! [it would be] something like a dream that you had not died, but had been taken off; in short, the real events with the obscurity of a dream, accompanied with the notion that you had never died, but that death was yet to come. As a man who, having walked in his sleep, by rapid openings of his eyes--too rapid to be observable by others or rememberable by himself--sees and remembers the whole of his path, mixing it with many fancies _ab intra_, and, awaking, remembers, but yet as a dream. [Sidenote: OF FIRST LOVES] 'Tis one source of mistakes concerning the merits of poems, that to those read in youth men attribute all that praise which is due to poetry in general, merely considered as select language in metre. (Little children should not be taught verses, in my opinion; better not to let them set eyes on verse till they are ten or eleven years old.) Now, poetry produces two kinds of pleasure, one for each of the two master-movements and impulses of man, the gratification of the love of variety, and the gratification of the love of uniformity--and that by a recurrence delightful as a painless and yet exciting act of memory--tiny breezelets of surprise, each one destroying the ripplets which the former had made--yet all together keeping the surface of the mind in a bright dimple-smile. So, too, a hatred of vacancy is reconciled with the love of rest. These and other causes often make [a first acquaintance with] poetry an overpowering delight to a lad of feeling, as I have heard Poole relate of himself respecting Edwin and Angelina. But so it would be with a man bred up in a wilderness by Unseen Beings, who should yet converse and discourse rationally with him--how beautiful would not the first other man appear whom he saw and knew to be a man by the resemblance to his own image seen in the clear stream; and would he not, in like manner, attribute to the man all the divine attributes of humanity, though, haply, he should be a very ordinary, or even a most ugly man, compared with a hundred others? Many of us who have felt this with respect to women have been bred up where few are to be seen; and I acknowledge that, both in persons and in poems, it is well _on the whole_ that we should retain our first love, though, alike in both cases, evils have happened as the consequence. [Sidenote: THE MADDENING RAIN August 1, 1805] The excellent fable of the maddening rain I have found in Drayton's "Moon Calf," most miserably marred in the telling! vastly inferior to Benedict Fay's Latin exposition of it, and that is no great thing. _Vide_ his Lucretian Poem on the Newtonian System. Never was a finer tale for a satire, or, rather, to conclude a long satirical poem of five or six hundred lines. [For excellent use of this fable, see _The Friend_, No. 1, June 9, 1809, _Coleridge's Works_, Harper & Brothers, ii. 21, 22.] [Sidenote: SENTIMENTS BELOW MORALS] Pasley remarked last night (2nd August 1805), and with great precision and originality, that men themselves, in the present age, were not so much degraded as their sentiments. This is most true! almost all men nowadays act and feel more nobly than they think--yet still the vile, cowardly, selfish, calculating ethics of Paley, Priestley, Locke, and other Erastians do woefully influence and determine our course of action. [Sidenote: TIME AND ETERNITY] O the complexities of the ravel produced by time struggling with eternity! _a_ and _b_ are different, and eternity or duration makes them one--this we call modification--the principle of all greatness in finite beings, the principle of all contradiction and absurdity. [Sidenote: THE PASSION FOR THE MOT PROPRE August 3, 1805 Saturday] It is worthy notice (shewn in the phrase "I envy him such and such a thing," meaning only, "I regret I cannot share with him, have the same as he, without depriving him of it, or any part of it,") the instinctive passion in the mind for a _one word_ to express _one act_ of feeling--[one] that is, in which, however complex in reality, the mind is _conscious_ of no discursion and synthesis _a posteriori_. On this instinct rest all the improvements (and, on the habits formed by this instinct and [the] knowledge of these improvements, Vanity rears all the Apuleian, Apollonian, etc., etc., corruptions) of style. Even so with our Johnson. [Sidenote: BULLS OF ACTION] There are _bulls_ of action equally as of thought, [for] (not to allude to the story of the Irish labourer who laid his comrade all his wages that he would not carry him down in his hod from the top to the bottom of a high house, down the ladder) the feeling of vindictive honour in duelling, and the feudal revenges anterior to duelling, formed a true bull; for they were superstitious Christians, knew it was wrong, and yet knew it was right--they would be damned deservedly if they did, and, if they did not, they thought themselves deserving of being damned. [Sidenote: PSEUDO-POETS] The pseudo-poets Campbell, Rogers, etc., both by their writings and moral character tend to bring poetry into disgrace, and, but that men in general are the slaves of the same wretched infirmities, they would [set their seal on this disgrace,] and it would be well. The true poet could not smother the sacred fire ("his heart burnt within him and he spake"), and wisdom would be justified by her children. But the false poet--that is, the no-poet--finding poetry in contempt among the many, of whose praise, whatever he may affirm, he is alone ambitious, would be prevented from scribbling. [Sidenote: LANDING PLACES] The progress of human intellect from earth to heaven is not a Jacob's ladder, but a geometrical staircase with five or more landing-places. That on which we stand enables us to see clearly and count all below us, while that or those above us are so transparent for our eyes that they appear the canopy of heaven. We do not see them, and believe ourselves on the highest. ["Among my earliest impressions I still distinctly remember that of my first entrance into the mansion of a neighbouring baronet, awefully known to me by the name of the Great House [Escot, near Ottery St. Mary, Devon].... Beyond all other objects I was most struck with the magnificent staircase, relieved at well-proportioned intervals by spacious landing-places.... My readers will find no difficulty in translating these forms of the outward senses into their intellectual analogies, so as to understand the purport of _The Friend's_ Landing-Places." _The Friend_, "The Landing-Place," Essay iv. _Coleridge's Works_, Harper & Brothers, 1853, ii. 137, 138.] [Sidenote: WILLIAM BROWNE OF OTTERY] In the _Threnæ_ or funeral songs and elegies of our old poets, I am often impressed with the idea of their resemblance to hired weepers in Rome and among the Irish, where he who howled the loudest and most wildly was the most capital mourner and was at the head of his trade. So [too] see William Browne's elegy on Prince Henry (_Britt. Past. Songs_ v.), whom, perhaps, he never spoke to. Yet he is a dear fellow, and I love him, that W. Browne who died at Ottery, and with whose family my own is united, or, rather, connected and acquainted. [Colonel James Coleridge, the poet's eldest surviving brother and Henry Langford Browne of Combe-Satchfield married sisters, Frances and Dorothy Taylor, whose mother was one of five co-heiresses of Richard Duke of Otterton. It is uncertain whether a William Browne of Ottery St. Mary, who died in 1645, was the author of _The Shepherd's Pipe_ and _Britannia's Pastorals_. Two beautiful inscriptions on a tomb in St. Stephen's Chapel in the collegiate church of St. Mary Ottery, were, in Southey's opinion (doubtless at Coleridge's suggestion), composed by the poet William Browne.] [Sidenote: "ASCEND A STEP IN CHOOSING A FRIEND" TALMUD] God knows! that at times I derive a comfort even from my infirmities, my sins of omission and commission, in the joy of the deep feeling of the opposite virtues in the two or three whom I love in my heart of hearts. Sharp, therefore, is the pain when I find faults in these friends opposite to my virtues. I find no comfort in the notion of average, for I wish to love even more than to be beloved, and am so haunted by the conscience of my many failings that I find an unmixed pleasure in esteeming and admiring, but, as the recipient of esteem or admiration, I feel as a man, whose good dispositions are still alive, feels in the enjoyment of a _darling_ property on a doubtful title. My instincts are so far dog-like that I love beings superior to myself better than my equals. But the notion of inferiority is so painful to me that I never, in common life, feel a man my inferior except by after-reflection. What seems vanity in me is in great part attributable to this feeling. But of this hereafter. I will cross-examine myself. [Sidenote: A CAUTION TO POSTERITY] There are actions which left undone mark the greater man; but to have done them does not imply a bad or mean man. Such, for instance, are Martial's compliments of Domitian. So may we praise Milton without condemning Dryden. By-the-bye, we are all too apt to forget that contemporaries have not the same _wholeness_, and _fixedness_ in their notions of persons' characters, that we their posterity have. They can _hope_ and _fear_ and _believe_ and _disbelieve_. We make up an ideal which, like the fox or lion in the fable, never changes. [Sidenote: FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE"] I have several times seen the stiletto and the rosary come out of the same pocket. A man who marries for love is like a frog who leaps into a well. He has plenty of water but then he cannot get out. [Not until national ruin is imminent will Ministers contemplate the approach of national danger]; as if Judgment were overwhelmed like Belgic towns in the sea, and showed its towers only at dead low water. The superiority of the genus to the particular may be illustrated by music. How infinitely more perfect in passion and its transition than even poetry, and poetry again than painting! And yet how marvellous is genius in all its implements! [Compare _Table Talk_, July 6, 1833. H. N. C. _foot-note_. Bell & Co., 1884, p. 240.] Those only who feel no originality, no consciousness of having received their thoughts and opinions from immediate inspiration are anxious to be thought original. The certainty, the feeling that he is right, is enough for the man of genius, and he rejoices to find his opinions plumed and winged with the authority of several forefathers. The water-lily in the midst of the lake is equally refreshed by the rain, as the sponge on the sandy sea-shore. In the next world the souls of dull good men serve for bodies to the souls of the Shaksperes and Miltons, and in the course of a few centuries, when the soul can do without its vehicle, the bodies will by advantage of good company have refined themselves into souls fit to be clothed with like bodies. How much better it would be, in the House of Commons, to have everything that is, and by the spirit of English freedom must be legal, legal and open! The reporting, for instance, should be done by shorthandists appointed by Government. There are, I see, weighty arguments on the other side, but are they not to be got over? Co-arctation is not a bad phrase for that narrowing in of breadth on both sides as in my interpolation of Schiller. "And soon The narrowing line of day-light that ran after The closing door was gone." _Piccolomini_, ii. sc. 4, _P.W._, p. 257. [Sidenote: THE DEVIL WITH A MEMORY THE FIRST SINNER] In order not to be baffled by the infinite ascent of the heavenly angels, the devil feigned that all (the [Greek: tagathon], that is, God himself included) sprang from nothing. And now he has a pretty task to multiply, without paper or slate, the exact number of all the animalcules, and the eggs and embryos of each planet, by some other, and the product by a third and that product by a fourth, and he is not to stop till he has gone through the planets of half the universe, the number of which being infinite, it is considered by the devils in general a great puzzle. A dream in a doze. [Sidenote: THE SUN OF RIGHTEOUSNESS] A bodily substance, an unborrowed Self--God in God immanent! The Eternal Word! That goes forth yet remains! Crescent and Full and Wane, yet ever entire and one, it dawns, and sets, and crowns the height of heaven. At the same time, the dawning and setting sun, at the same time the zodiac--while each, in its own hour, boasts and beholds the exclusive Presence, a peculiar Orb, each the great Traveller's inn, yet still the unmoving Sun-- Great genial Agent in all finite souls; And by that action puts on finiteness, Absolute Infinite, whose dazzling robe Flows in rich folds, and plays in shooting hues Of infinite finiteness. [Sidenote: FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE." Syracuse, September 26, 1805] I was standing gazing at the starry heaven, and said, "I will go to bed, the next star that shoots." Observe this, in counting fixed numbers previous to doing anything, and deduce from man's own unconscious acknowledgment man's _dependence_ on something more apparently and believedly subject to regular and certain laws than his own will and reason. To Wordsworth in the progression of spirit, once Simonides, or Empedocles, or both in one-- "Oh! that my spirit, purged by death of its weaknesses, which are, alas! my identity, might flow into thine, and live and act in thee and be thine!" Death, first of all, eats of the Tree of Life and becomes immortal. Describe the frightful metamorphosis. He weds the Hamadryad of the Tree [and begets a twy-form] progeny. This in the manner of Dante. Sad drooping children of a wretched parent are those yellowing leaflets of a broken twig, broke ere its June. We are not inert in the grave. St. Paul's corn in the ground proves this scripturally, and the growth of infants in their sleep by natural analogy. What, then, if our spiritual growth be in proportion to the length and depth of the sleep! With what mysterious grandeur does not this thought invest the grave, and how poor compared with this an immediate Paradise! I awake and find my beloved asleep, gaze upon her by the taper that feebly illumines the darkness, then fall asleep by her side; and we both awake together for _good_ and _all_ in the broad daylight of heaven. Forget not to impress as often and as manifoldly as possible the _totus in omni parte_ of Truth, and its consequent interdependence on co-operation and, _vice versâ_, the fragmentary character of action, and its absolute dependence on society, a majority, etc. The blindness to this distinction creates fanaticism on one side, alarm and prosecution on the other. Jacobins or soul-gougers. It is an interesting fact or fable that the stork (the emblem of filial or conjugal piety) never abides in a monarchy. Commend me to the Irish architect who took out the foundation-stone to repair the roof. Knox and the other reformers were _Scopæ viarum_--that is, highway besoms. The Pine Tree blasted at the top was applied by Swift to himself as a prophetic emblem of his own decay. The Chestnut is a fine shady tree, and its wood excellent, were it not that it dies away at the _heart_ first. Alas! poor me! [Sidenote: TASTE, AN ETHICAL QUALITY] Modern poetry is characterised by the poets' _anxiety_ to be always striking. There is the same march in the Greek and Latin poets. Claudian, who had powers to have been anything--observe in him this anxious, craving vanity! Every line, nay, every word, stops, looks full in your face, and asks and _begs_ for praise! As in a Chinese painting, there are no distances, no perspective, but all is in the foreground; and this is nothing but vanity. I am pleased to think that, when a mere stripling, I had formed the opinion that true taste was virtue, and that bad writing was bad feeling. [Sidenote: A PLEA FOR POETIC LICENSE] The desire of carrying things to a greater height of pleasure and admiration than, _omnibus trutinatis_, they are susceptible of, is one great cause of the corruption of poetry. Both to understand my own reasoning and to communicate it, ponder on Catullus' hexameters and pentameters, his "_numine abusum homines_" [Carmen, lxxvi. 4] [and similar harsh expressions]. It is not whether or no the very same ideas expressed with the very same force and the very same naturalness and simplicity in the versification of Ovid and Tibullus, would not be still more delightful (though even that, for any number of poems, may well admit a doubt), but whether it is _possible_ so to express them and whether, in every attempt, the result has not been to substitute manner for matter, and point that will not bear reflection (so fine that it breaks the moment you try it) for genuine sense and true feeling, and, lastly, to confine both the subjects, thoughts, and even words of poetry within a most beggarly cordon. _N.B._--The same criticism applies to Metastasio, and, in Pope, to his quaintness, perversion, unnatural metaphors, and, still more, the cold-blooded use, for artifice or connection, of language justifiable only by enthusiasm and passion. [Sidenote: RICHARDSON] I confess that it has cost, and still costs, my philosophy some exertion not to be vexed that I must admire, aye, greatly admire, Richardson. His mind is so very vile a mind, so oozy, hypocritical, praise-mad, canting, envious, concupiscent! But to understand and draw _him_ would be to produce a work almost equal to his own; and, in order to do this, "_down, proud Heart, down_" (as we teach little children to say to themselves, bless them!), all hatred down! and, instead thereof, charity, calmness, a heart fixed on the good part, though the understanding is surveying all. Richardson felt truly the defect of Fielding, or what was not his excellence, and made that his _defect_--a trick of uncharitableness often played, though not exclusively, by contemporaries. Fielding's talent was observation, not meditation. But Richardson was not philosopher enough to know the difference--say, rather, to understand and develop it. [Sidenote: HIS NEED OF EXTERNAL SOLACE] O there are some natures which under the most cheerless all-threatening nothing-promising circumstances can draw hope from the invisible, as the tropical trees that in the sandy desolation produce their own lidded vessels full of the waters from air and dew! Alas! to my root not a drop trickles down but from the watering-pot of immediate friends. And, even so, it seems much more a sympathy with their feeling rather than hope of my own. So should I feel sorrow, if Allston's mother, whom I have never seen, were to die? [Sidenote: MINUTE CRITICISM] Stoddart passes over a poem as one of those tiniest of tiny night-flies runs over a leaf, casting its shadow, three times as long as itself, yet only just shading one, or at most two letters at a time. [Sidenote: DR. PRICE] A maidservant of Mrs. Clarkson's parents had a great desire to hear Dr. Price, and accordingly attended his congregation. On her return, being asked "Well, what do you think?" &c., "Ai--i," replied she, "there was neither the poor nor the Gospel." Excellent that on the fine _respectable_ attendants of Unitarian chapels, and the moonshine, heartless head-work of the sermons. [Sidenote: A _DOCUMENT HUMAIN_] The mahogany tables, all, but especially the large dining-table, [marked] with the segments of circles (deep according to the passion of the dice-box plunger), chiefly half-circles, O the anger and spite with which many have been thrown! It is truly a written history of the fiendish passion of gambling. Oct. 12, 1806. Newmarket. [Sidenote: PINDAR] The odes of Pindar (with few exceptions, and these chiefly in the shorter ones) seem by intention to die away by soft gradations into a languid interest, like most of the landscapes of the great elder painters. Modern ode-writers have commonly preferred a continued rising of interest. [Sidenote: "ONE MUSIC AS BEFORE, BUT VASTER"] The shattering of long and deep-rooted associations always places the mind in an angry state, and even when our own understandings have effected the revolution, it still holds good, only we apply the feeling to and against our former faith and those who still hold it--[a tendency] shown in modern infidels. Great good, therefore, of such revolution as alters, not by exclusion, but by an enlargement that includes the former, though it places it in a new point of view. [Sidenote: TO ALLSTON] After the formation of a new acquaintance, found, by some weeks' or months' unintermitted communion, worthy of all our esteem, affection and, perhaps, admiration, an intervening absence, whether we meet again or only write, raises it into friendship, and encourages the modesty of our nature, impelling us to assume the language and express all the feelings of an established attachment. [Sidenote: MORBID SENTIMENT] The _thinking_ disease is that in which the feelings, instead of embodying themselves in _acts_, ascend and become materials of general reasoning and intellectual pride. The dreadful consequences of this perversion [may be] instanced in Germany, _e.g._, in Fichte _versus_ Kant, Schelling _versus_ Fichte and in Verbidigno [Wordsworth] _versus_ S. T. C. Ascent where nature meant descent, and thus shortening the process--viz., _feelings_ made the subjects and tangible substance of thought, instead of actions, realizations, _things done_, and as such externalised and remembered. On such meagre diet as feelings, evaporated embryos in their progress to _birth_, no moral being ever becomes healthy. [Sidenote: "PHANTOMS OF SUBLIMITY"] Empires, states, &c., may be beautifully illustrated by a large clump of coal placed on a fire--Russia, for instance--or of small coal moistened, and by the first action of the heat of any government not absolutely lawless, formed into a cake, as the northern nations under Charlemagne--then a slight impulse from the fall of accident, or the hand of patriotic foresight, splits [the one] into many, and makes each [fragment] burn with its own flame, till at length all burning equally, it becomes again one by universal similar action--then burns low, cinerises, and without accession of rude materials goes out. [Sidenote: A MILD WINTER] Winter slumbering soft, seemed to smile at visions of buds and blooms, and dreamt so livelily of spring, that his stern visage had relaxed and softened itself into a dim likeness of his dream. The soul of the vision breathed through and lay like light upon his face. But, heavens! what an outrageous day of winter this is and has been! Terrible weather for the last two months, but this is horrible! Thunder and lightning, floods of rain, and volleys of hail, with such frantic winds. December 1806. [This note was written when S. T. C. was staying with Wordsworth at the Hall Farm, Coleorton.] [Sidenote: MOONLIGHT GLEAMS AND MASSY GLORIES] In the first [entrance to the wood] the spots of moonlight of the wildest outlines, not unfrequently approaching so near to the shape of man and the domestic animals most attached to him as to be easily confused with them by fancy and mistaken by terror, moved and started as the wind stirred the branches, so that it almost seemed like a flight of recent spirits, sylphs and sylphids dancing and capering in a world of shadows. Once, when our path was over-canopied by the meeting boughs, as I halloed to those a stone-throw behind me, a sudden flash of light dashed down, as it were, upon the path close before me, with such rapid and indescribable effect that my life seemed snatched away from me--not by terror but by the whole attention being suddenly and unexpectedly seized hold of--if one could conceive a violent blow given by an unseen hand, yet without pain or local sense of injury, of the weight falling here or there, it might assist in conceiving the feeling. This I found was occasioned by some very large bird, who, scared by my noise, had suddenly flown upward, and by the spring of his feet or body had driven down the branch on which he was aperch. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote B: When instead of the general feeling of the lifeblood in its equable individual motion, and the consequent wholeness of the one feeling of the skin, we feel as if a heap of ants were running over us--_the one_ corrupting into _ten thousand_--so in _araneosis_, instead of the one view of the air, or blue sky, a thousand specks, etc., dance before the eye. The metaphor is as just as, of a metaphor, anyone has a right to claim, but it is clumsily expressed.] [Footnote C: I have the same anxiety for my friend now in England as for myself, that is to be, or may be, two months hence.] [Footnote D: "A prison so constructed that the inspector can see each of the prisoners at all times without being seen by them."] CHAPTER V _September 1806--December 1807_ Alas! for some abiding-place of love, O'er which my spirit, like the mother dove, Might brood with warming wings! S. T. C. [Sidenote: DREAMS AND SHADOWS] I had a confused shadow rather than an image in my recollection, like that from a thin cloud, as if the idea were descending, though still in some measureless height. As when the taper's white cone of flame is seen double, till the eye moving brings them into one space and then they become one--so did the idea in my imagination coadunate with your present form soon after I first gazed upon you. And in life's noisiest hour There whispers still the ceaseless love of thee, The heart's self-solace and soliloquy. You mould my hopes, you fashion me within, And to the leading love-throb in my heart Through all my being, all my pulses beat. You lie in all my many thoughts like light, Like the fair light of dawn, or summer light, On rippling stream, or cloud-reflecting lake-- And looking to the Heaven that beams above you, How do I bless the lot that made me love you! [Sidenote: KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING] In all processes of the understanding the shortest way will be discovered the last and this, perhaps, while it constitutes the great advantage of having a teacher to put us on the shortest road at the first, yet sometimes occasions a difficulty in the comprehension, inasmuch as the longest way is more near to the existing state of the mind, nearer to what if left to myself, on starting the thought, I should have thought next. The shortest way gives me the _knowledge_ best, but the longest makes me more _knowing_. [Sidenote: PARTISANS AND RENEGADES] When a party man talks as if he hated his country, saddens at her prosperous events, exults in her disasters and yet, all the while, is merely hating the opposite party, and would himself feel and talk as a patriot were he in a foreign land [_he_ is a party man]. The true monster is he (and such alas! there are in these monstrous days, "vollendeter Sündhaftigkeit"), who abuses his country when out of his country. [Sidenote: POPULACE AND PEOPLE] Oh the profanation of the sacred word _the People_! Every brutal Burdett-led mob, assembled on some drunken St. Monday of faction, is the People forsooth, and each leprous ragamuffin, like a circle in geometry, is, at once, one and all, and calls its own brutal self, "_us_ the People." And who are the friends of the People? Not those who would wish to elevate each of them, or, at least, the child who is to take his place in the flux of life and death, into something worthy of esteem and capable of freedom, but those who flatter and infuriate them, as they _are_. A contradiction in the very thought! For if, really, they are good and wise, virtuous and well-informed, how weak must be the motives of discontent to a truly moral being--but if the contrary, and the motives for discontent proportionably strong, how without guilt and absurdity appeal to them as judges and arbiters? He alone is entitled to a share in the government of all, who has learnt to govern himself. There is but one possible ground of a right of freedom--viz., to understand and revere its duties. [_Vide Life of S. T. C._, by James Gillman, 1838, p. 223.] [Sidenote: FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE." May 28, 1807 Bristol] How villainously these metallic pencils have degenerated, not only in the length and quantity, but what is far worse, in the _quality_ of the metal! This one appears to have no superiority over the worst sort sold by the Maltese shopkeepers. Blue sky through the glimmering interspaces of the dark elms at twilight rendered a lovely deep yellow-green--all the rest a delicate blue. The hay-field in the close hard by the farm-house--babe, and totterer little more [than a babe]--old cat with her eyes blinking in the sun and little kittens leaping and frisking over the hay-lines. What an admirable subject for an Allston would Tycho Brahe be, listening with religious awe to the oracular gabble of the idiot, whom he kept at his feet, and used to feed with his own hands! The sun-flower ought to be cultivated, the leaves being excellent fodder, the flowers eminently melliferous, and the seeds a capital food for poultry, none nourishing quicker or occasioning them to lay more eggs. Serpentium allapsus timet. Quære--_allapse_ of serpents. _Horace_.--What other word have we? Pity that we dare not Saxonise as boldly as our forefathers, by unfortunate preference, Latinised. Then we should have on-glide, _angleiten_; onlook _anschauen_, etc. I moisten the bread of affliction with the water of adversity. If kings are gods on earth, they are, however, gods of earth. Parisatis poisoned one side of the knife with which he carved, and eat of the same joint the next slice unhurt--a happy illustration of affected self-inclusion in accusation. It is possible to conceive a planet without any general atmosphere, but in which each living body has its peculiar atmosphere. To hear and understand, one man joins his atmosphere to that of another, and, according to the sympathies of their nature, the aberrations of sound will be greater or less, and their thoughts more or less intelligible. A pretty allegory might be made of this. Two faces, each of a confused countenance. In the eyes of the one, muddiness and lustre were blended; and the eyes of the other were the same, but in them there was a red fever that made them appear more fierce. And yet, methought, the former struck a greater trouble, a fear and distress of the mind; and sometimes all the face looked meek and mild, but the eye was ever the same. [Qu. S. T. C. and De Quincey?] Shadow--its being subsists in shaped and definite nonentity. Plain sense, measure, clearness, dignity, grace over all--these made the genius of Greece. Heu! quam miserum ab illo lædi, de quo non possis queri! Eheu! quam miserrimum est ab illo lædi, de quo propter amorem non possis queri! Observation from Bacon after reading Mr. Sheridan's speech on Ireland: "Things will have their first or second agitation; if they be not tossed on the arguments of council, they will be tossed on the waves of fortune." The death of an immortal has been beautifully compared to an Indian fig, which at its full height declines its branches to the earth, and there takes root again. The blast rises and falls, and trembles at its height. A passionate woman may be likened to a wet candle spitting flame. TO LOVE. It is a duty, nay, it is a religion to that power to shew that, though it makes all things--wealth, pleasure, ambition--worthless, yea, noisome for themselves; yet for _it_self can it produce all efforts, even if only to secure its name from scoffs as the child and parent of slothfulness. Works, therefore, of general profit--works of abstruse thought [will be born of love]; activity, and, above all, virtue and chastity [will come forth from his presence]. The moulting peacock, with only two of his long tail-feathers remaining, and those sadly in tatters, yet, proudly as ever, spreads out his ruined fan in the sun and breeze. Yesterday I saw seven or eight water-wagtails following a feeding horse in the pasture, fluttering about and hopping close by his hoofs, under his belly, and even so as often to tickle his nostrils with their pert tails. The horse shortens the grass and they get the insects. Sic accipite, sic credite, ut mereamini intelligere: fides enim debet præcedere intellectum, ut sit intellectus fidei præmium. _S. August. Sermones De Verb. Dom._ Yet should a friend think foully of that wherein the pride of thy spirit's purity is in shrine. O the agony! the agony! Nor Time nor varying Fate, Nor tender Memory, old or late, Nor all his Virtues, great though they be, Nor all his Genius can free His friend's soul from the agony! [So receive, so believe [divine ideas] that ye may earn the right to understand them. For faith should go before understanding, in order that understanding may be the reward of faith.] [Greek: Hote enthousiasmos epineusin tina theian hechein dokei kai tô mantikô genei plêsiazein.] _Strabo Geographicus._ Though Genius, like the fire on the altar, can only be kindled from heaven, yet it will perish unless supplied with appropriate fuel to feed it; or if it meet not with the virtues whose society alone can reconcile it to earth, it will return whence it came, or, at least, lie hid as beneath embers, till some sudden and awakening gust of regenerating Grace, [Greek: anazôpyrei], rekindles and reveals it anew. [Now the inspiration of genius seems to bear the stamp of Divine assent, and to attain to something of prophetic strain.] [Sidenote: FALLINGS FROM US, VANISHINGS] I trust you are very happy in your domestic being--very; because, alas! I know that to a man of sensibility and more emphatically if he be a literary man, there is _no_ medium between that and "the secret pang that eats away the heart." ... Hence, even in dreams of sleep, the soul never _is_, because it either cannot or dare not be any _one_ thing, but lives in _approaches_ touched by the outgoing pre-existent ghosts of many feelings. It feels for ever as a blind man with his protruded staff dimly through the medium of the instrument by which it pushes off, and in the act of repulsion--(O for the eloquence of Shakspere, who alone could feel and yet know how to embody those conceptions with as curious a felicity as the thoughts are subtle!)--as if the finger which I saw with eyes, had, as it were, another finger, invisible, touching me with a ghostly touch, even while I feared the real touch from it. What if, in certain cases, touch acted by itself, co-present with vision, yet not coalescing? Then I should see the finger as at a distance, and yet feel a finger touching which was nothing but it, and yet was not it. The two senses cannot co-exist without a sense of causation. The _touch_ must be the effect of that finger [which] I see, and yet it is not yet near to me, and therefore it is not it, and yet it is it. Why it is is in an imaginary pre-duplication! _N.B._--There is a passage in the second part of Wallenstein expressing, not explaining, the same feeling. "The spirits of great events stride on before the events"--it is in one of the last two or three scenes:-- "As the sun, Ere it is risen, sometimes paints its image In the atmosphere, so often do the spirits Of great events, stride on before the events." [WALLENSTEIN, Part II., act v. sc. 1. _P. W._, 1893, p. 351.] [Sidenote: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CLERICAL ERRORS] It is worth noting and endeavouring to detect the Law of the Mind, by which, in writing earnestly while we are thinking, we omit words necessary to the sense. It will be found, I guess, that we seldom omit the material word, but generally the word by which the mind expresses its modification of the _verbum materiale_. Thus, in the preceding page, 7th line, _medium_ is the _materiale_: that was its own brute, inert sense--but the _no_ is the mind's action, its _use_ of the word. I think this a hint of some value. Thus, _the_ is a word in constant combination with the passive or material words; but _to_ is an act of the mind, and I had written _the_ detect instead of _to_ detect. Again, when my sense demanded "the" to express a distinct modification of some _verbum materiale_, I remember to have often omitted it in writing. The principle is evident--the mind borrows the _materia_ from without, and is passive with regard to it as the mere subject "stoff"--a simple event of memory takes place; but having the other in itself, the inward Having with its sense of security passes for the outward Having--or is all memory an anxious act, and thereby suspended by vivid security? or are both reasons the same? or if not, are they consistent, and capable of being co-or sub-ordinated? It will be lucky if some day, after having written on for two or three sheets rapidly and as a first copy, without correcting, I should by chance glance on this note, not having thought at all about it during or before the time of writing; and then to examine every word omitted. [Sidenote: BIBLIOLOGICAL MEMORANDA] To spend half-an-hour in Cuthill's shop, examining Stephen's _Thesaurus_, in order to form an accurate idea of its utilities above Scapula, and to examine the _Budæo-Tusan-Constantine_, whether it be the same or as good as Constantine, and the comparative merits of Constantine with Scapula. 3. To examine Bosc relatively to Brunck, and to see after the new German _Anthologia_. 4. Before I quit town, to buy Appendix (either No. 1430 or 1431), 8_s._ or 18_s._ What a difference! ten shillings, because the latter, the Parma Anacreon, is on large paper, green morocco; the former is neat in red morocco, but the type the same. 5. To have a long morning's ramble with De Quincey, first to Egerton's, and then to the book haunts. 6. To see if I can find that Arrian with Epictetus which I admired so much at Mr. Leckie's. 7. To find out D'Orville's _Daphnis_, and the price. Is there no other edition? no cheap German? 8. To write out the passage from Strada's _Prolusions_ at Cuthill's. 9. Aristotle's Works, and to hunt for Proclus. 10. In case of my speedy death, it would answer to buy a £100 worth of carefully-chosen books, in order to attract attention to my library and to give accession to the value of books by their co-existing with co-appurtenants--as, for instance, Plato, Aristotle; Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus: Schoolmen, Interscholastic; Bacon, Hobbes; Locke, Berkeley; Leibnitz, Spinoza; Kant and the critical Fichte, and Wissenschaftslehre, Schelling, &c. [The first edition of Robert Constantin's _Lexicon Græco-Lat._ was published at Geneva in 1564. A second ed. _post correctiones_ G. Budæi et J. Tusani, at Basle, in 1584.] [Sidenote: [Greek: panta rhei]] Our mortal existence, what is it but a stoppage in the blood of life, a brief eddy from wind or concourse of currents in the ever-flowing ocean of pure Activity, who beholds pyramids, yea, Alps and Andes, giant pyramids, the work of fire that raiseth monuments, like a generous victor o'er its own conquest, the tombstones of a world destroyed! Yet these, too, float adown the sea of Time, and melt away as mountains of floating ice. [Sidenote: DISTINCTION IN UNION] Has every finite being (or only some) the temptation to become intensely and wholly conscious of its distinctness and, as a result, to be betrayed into the wretchedness of _division_? Grosser natures, wholly swallowed up in selfishness which does not rise to self-love, never even acquire that sense of distinctness, while, to others, love is the first step to re-union. It is a by-word that religious enthusiasm borders on and tends to sensuality--possibly because all our powers work together, and as a consequence of striding too vastly up the ladder of existence, a great _round_ of the ladder is omitted, namely, love to some, _Eine verschiedene_, of our own kind. Then let Religion love, else will it not only partake of, instead of being partaken by, and so co-adunated with, the summit of love, but will necessarily include the nadir of love, that is, appetite. Hence will it tend to dissensualise its nature into fantastic passions, the idolatry of Paphian priestesses. [Sidenote: IN WONDER ALL PHILOSOPHY BEGAN] Time, space, duration, action, active passion passive, activeness, passiveness, reaction, causation, affinity--here assemble all the mysteries known. All is known-unknown, say, rather, _merely_ known. All is unintelligible, and yet Locke and the stupid adorers of that _fetish_ earth-clod take all for granted. By the bye, in poetry as well as metaphysics, that which we first meet with in the dawn of our mind becomes ever after _fetish_, to the many at least. Blessed he who first sees the morning star, if not the sun, or purpling clouds his harbingers. Thence is _fame_ desirable to a great man, and thence subversion of vulgar fetishes becomes a duty. Rest, motion! O ye strange locks of intricate simplicity, who shall find the key? He shall throw wide open the portals of the palace of sensuous or symbolical truth, and the Holy of Holies will be found in the adyta. Rest = enjoyment and death. Motion = enjoyment and life. O the depth of the proverb, "Extremes meet"! [Sidenote: IN A TWINKLING OF THE EYE] The "break of the morning"--and from inaction a nation starts up into motion and wide fellow-consciousness! The trumpet of the Archangel--and a world with all its troops and companies of generations starts up into a hundredfold expansion, power multiplied into itself cubically by the number of all its possible acts--all the potential springing into power. Conceive a bliss from self-conscience, combining with bliss from increase of action; the first dreaming, the latter dead-asleep in a grain of gunpowder--conceive a huge magazine of gunpowder and a flash of lightning awakes the whole at once. What an image of the resurrection, grand from its very inadequacy. Yet again, conceive the living, moving ocean--its bed sinks away from under and the whole world of waters falls in at once on a thousand times vaster mass of intensest fire, and the whole prior orbit of the planet's successive revolutions is possessed by it at once (_Potentia fit actus_) amid the thunder of rapture. [Sidenote: SINE QUÂ NON] Form is factitious being, and thinking is the process; imagination the laboratory in which the thought elaborates essence into existence. A philosopher, that is, a nominal philosopher without imagination, is a _coiner_. Vanity, the _froth_ of the molten mass, is his _stuff_, and verbiage the stamp and impression. This is but a deaf metaphor--better say that he is guilty of forgery. He presents the same sort of _paper_ as the honest barterer, but when you carry it to the bank it is found to be drawn to _Outis_, _Esq._ His words had deposited no forms there, payable at sight--or even at any imaginable _time_ from the date of the draft. [Sidenote: SOLVITUR SUSPICIENDO] The sky, or rather say, the æther at Malta, with the sun apparently suspended in it, the eye seeming to pierce beyond and, as it were, behind it--and, below, the æthereal sea, so blue, so _ein zerflossenes_, the substantial image, and fixed real reflection of the sky! O! I could annihilate in a deep moment all possibility of the needle-point, pin's-head system of the _atomists_ by one submissive gaze! [Sidenote: A GEM OF MORNING] A dewdrop, the pearl of Aurora, is indeed a true _unio_. I would that _unio_ were the word for the dewdrop, and the pearl be called _unio marinus_. _VER_, _ZER_, AND _AL_ O for the power to persuade all the writers of Great Britain to adopt the _ver_, _zer_, and _al_ of the German! Why not verboil, zerboil; verrend, zerrend? I should like the very words _verflossen_, _zerflossen_, to be naturalised: And as I looked now feels my soul creative throes, And now all joy, all sense _zerflows_. I do not know, whether I am in earnest or in sport while I recommend this _ver_ and _zer_; that is, I cannot be sure whether I feel, myself, anything ridiculous in the idea, or whether the feeling that seems to imply this be not the effect of my anticipation of and sympathy with the ridicule of, perhaps, all my readers. [Sidenote: THE LOVER'S HUMILITY] To you there are many like me, yet to me there is none like you, and you are always like yourself. There are groves of night-flowers, yet the night-flower sees only the moon. CHAPTER VI _1808-1809_ Yea, oft alone, Piercing the long-neglected holy cave The haunt obscure of old Philosophy, He bade with lifted torch its starry walls Sparkle, as erst they sparkled to the flame Of odorous lamps tended by Saint and Sage. S. T. C. [Sidenote: INOPEM ME COPIA FECIT] If one thought leads to another, so often does it blot out another. This I find when having lain musing on my sofa, a number of interesting thoughts having suggested themselves, I conquer my bodily indolence, and rise to record them in these books, alas! my only confidants. The first thought leads me on indeed to new ones; but nothing but the faint memory of having had these remains of the other, which had been even more interesting to me. I do not know whether this be an idiosyncrasy, a peculiar disease, of _my_ particular memory--but so it is with _me_--my thoughts crowd each other to death. [Sidenote: A NEUTRAL PRONOUN] Quære--whether we may not, _nay_ ought not, to use a neutral pronoun relative, or representative, to the word "Person," where it hath been used in the sense of _homo_, _mensch_, or noun of the common gender, in order to avoid particularising man or woman, or in order to express either sex indifferently? If this be incorrect in syntax, the whole use of the word Person is lost in a number of instances, or only retained by some stiff and strange position of words, as--"not letting the _person_ be aware, _wherein offence has been given_"--instead of--"wherein he or she has offended." In my [judgment] both the specific intention and general _etymon_ of "Person" in such sentences, fully authorise the use of _it_ and _which_ instead of he, she, him, her, who, whom. [Sidenote: THE HUMBLE COMPLAINT OF THE LOVER] If love be the genial sun of human nature, unkindly has he divided his rays [in acting] on me and my beloved! On her hath he poured all his light and splendour, and my being doth he permeate with his invisible rays of heat alone. She shines and is cold like the tropic fire-fly--I, dark and uncomely, would better resemble the cricket in hot ashes. My soul, at least, might be considered as a cricket eradiating the heat which gradually cinerising the heart produces the embers and ashes from among which it chirps out of its hiding-place. N.B.--This put in simple and elegant verse, [would pass] as an imitation of Marini, and of too large a part of the madrigals of Guarini himself. [Sidenote: TRUTH] Truth _per se_ is like unto quicksilver, bright, agile, harmless. Swallow a pound and it will run through unaltered and only, perhaps, by its weight force down impurities from out the system. But mix and comminute it by the mineral acid of spite and bigotry, and even truth becomes a deadly poison--medicinal only when some other, yet deadlier, lurks in the bones. [Sidenote: LOVE THE INEFFABLE] O! many, many are the seeings, hearings, of pure love that have a being of their own, and to call them by the names of things unsouled and debased below even their own lowest nature by associations accidental, and of vicious accidents, is _blasphemy_. What seest thou yonder? The lovely countenance of a lovely maiden, fervid yet awe-suffering with devotion--her face resigned to bliss or bale; or a _bit_ of _flesh_; or, rather, that which cannot be seen unless by him whose very seeing is more than an act of mere sight--that which refuses all words, because words being, perforce, generalities do not awake, but really involve associations of other words as well as other thoughts--but that which I see, must be felt, be possessed, in and by its sole self! What! shall the _statuary_ Pygmalion of necessity feel this for every part of the insensate marble, and shall the lover Pygmalion in contemplating the living statue, the heart-adored maiden, breathing forth in every look, every movement, the genial life imbreathed of God, grovel in the mire and grunt the language of the swinish slaves of the Circe, of vulgar generality and still more vulgar association? The Polyclete that created the Aphrodite [Greek: kallipygos], thought in acts, not words--energy divinely languageless--[Greek: dia ton Logon, ou syn epesi], through _the_ Word, not with _words_. And what though it met with Imp-fathers and Imp-mothers and Fiendsips at its christening in its parents' absence! [Sidenote: THE MANUFACTURE OF PROPHESY] One of the causes of superstition, and also of enthusiasm, and, indeed, of all errors in matters of fact, is the great power with which the effect acts upon and modifies the remembrance of its cause, at times even transforming it in the mind. Let _A_ have said a few words to _B_, which (by some change and accommodation of them to the event in the mind of _B_) have been remarkably fulfilled; and let _B_ remind _A_ of these words which he (_A_) had spoken, _A_ will instantly forget all his mood, motive, and meaning, at the time of speaking them, nay, remember words he had never spoken, and throw back upon them, from the immediate event, an imagined fulfillment, a prophetic grandeur--himself, in his own faith, a seer of no small inspiration. We yet want the growth of a prophet and self-deceived wonder-worker _step by step_, through all the stages; and, yet, what ample materials exist for a true and nobly-minded psychologist! For, in order to make fit use of these materials, he must love and honour as well as understand human nature--rather, he must love in order to understand it. [Sidenote: THE CAPTIVE BIRD May 16th, 1808] O that sweet bird! where is it? It is encaged somewhere out of sight; but from my bedroom at the _Courier_ office, from the windows of which I look out on the walls of the Lyceum, I hear it at early dawn, often, alas! lulling me to late sleep--again when I awake and all day long. It is in prison, all its instincts ungratified, yet it feels the influence of spring, and calls with unceasing melody to the Loves that dwell in field and greenwood bowers, unconscious, perhaps, that it calls in vain. O are they the songs of a happy, enduring day-dream? Has the bird hope? or does it abandon itself to the joy of its frame, a living harp of Eolus? O that I could do so! Assuredly a thrush or blackbird encaged in London is a far less shocking spectacle, its encagement a more venial defect of just feeling, than (which yet one so often sees) a bird in a gay cage in the heart of the country--yea, as if at once to mock both the poor prisoner and its kind mother, Nature--in a cage hung up in a tree, where the free birds after a while, when the gaudy dungeon is no longer a scare, crowd to it, perch on the wires, drink the water, and peck up the seeds. But of all birds I most detest to see the nightingale encaged, and the swallow, and the cuckoo. Motiveless! monstrous! But the robin! O woes' woe! woe!--he, sweet cock-my-head-and-eye, pert-bashful darling, that makes our kitchen its chosen cage. [Sidenote: ARCHITECTURE AND CLIMATE] If we take into consideration the effect of the climates of the North, _Gothic_, in contra-distinction to Greek and Græco-Roman architecture, is rightly so named. Take, for instance, a rainy, windy day, or sleet, or a fall of snow, or an icicle-hanging frost, and then compare the total effect of the South European roundnesses and smooth perpendicular surface with the ever-varying angles and meeting-lines of the North-European or Gothic styles. [The above is probably a dropped sentence from the report of the First or Second Lecture of the 1818 series. See _Coleridge's Works_ (Harper and Brothers, 1853), iv. 232-239.] [Sidenote: NEITHER BOND NOR FREE] The demagogues address the lower orders as if they were negroes--as if each individual were an inseparable part of the order, always to remain, _nolens volens_, poor and ignorant. How different from Christianity, which for ever calls on us to detach ourselves spiritually not merely from our rank, but even from our body, and from the whole world of sense! [Sidenote: THE MAIDEN'S PRIMER] The one mighty main defect of female education is that everything is taught but reason and the means of retaining affection. This--this--O! it is worth all the rest told ten thousand times:--how to greet a husband, how to receive him, how never to recriminate--in short, the power of pleasurable thoughts and feelings, and the mischief of giving pain, or (as often happens when a husband comes home from a party of old friends, joyous and full of heart) the love-killing effect of cold, dry, uninterested looks and manners. [Sidenote: THE HALFWAY HOUSE Wednesday night, May 18th, 1808] Let me record the following important remark of Stuart, with whom I never converse but to receive some distinct and rememberable improvement (and if it be not remembered, it is the defect of my memory--which, alas! grows weaker daily--or a fault from my indolence in not noting it down, as I do this)--that there is a period in a man's life, varying in various men, from thirty-five to forty-five, and operating most strongly in bachelors, widowers, or those worst and miserablest widowers, unhappy husbands, in which a man finds himself at the _top of the hill_, and having attained, perhaps, what he wishes, begins to ask himself, What is all this for?--begins to feel the vanity of his pursuits, becomes half-melancholy, gives in to wild dissipation or self-regardless drinking; and some, not content with these (not _slow_) poisons, destroy themselves, and leave their ingenious female or female-minded friends to fish out some _motive_ for an act which proceeded from a _motive-making_ impulse, which would have acted even without a motive (even as the terror[E] in nightmare is a bodily sensation, and though it most often calls up consonant images, yet, as I know by experience, can take effect equally without any); or, if not so, yet like gunpowder in a smithy, though it will not go off without a spark, is _sure_ to receive one, if not this hour, yet the next. I had _felt_ this truth, but never saw it before clearly: it came upon me at Malta under the melancholy, dreadful feeling of finding myself to be _man_, by a distinct division from boyhood, youth, and "young man." Dreadful was the feeling--till then life had flown so that I had always been a boy, as it were; and this sensation had blended in all my conduct, my willing acknowledgment of superiority, and, in truth, my meeting every person as a superior at the first moment. Yet if men survive this period, they commonly become cheerful again. That is a comfort for mankind, _not for me_! [Sidenote: HIS OWN GENIUS] My inner mind does not justify the thought that I possess a genius, my _strength_ is so very small in proportion to my power. I believe that I first, from internal feeling, made or gave light and impulse to this important distinction between strength and power, the oak and the tropic annual, or biennial, which grows nearly as high and spreads as large as the oak, but in which the _wood_, the _heart_ is wanting--the vital works vehemently, but the immortal is not with it. And yet, I think, I must have some analogue of genius; because, among other things, when I am in company with Mr. Sharp, Sir J. Mackintosh, R. and Sydney Smith, Mr. Scarlett, &c. &c., I feel like a child, nay, rather like an inhabitant of another planet. Their very faces all act upon me, sometimes, as if they were ghosts, but more often as if I were a ghost among them--at all times as if we were not consubstantial. [Sidenote: NAME IT AND YOU BREAK IT] "The class that ought to be kept separate from all others"--and this said by one of themselves! O what a confession that it is no longer separated! Who would have said this even fifty years ago? It is the howling of ice during a thaw. When there is any just reason for saying this, it ought not to be said, it is already too late. And though it may receive the assent of the people of "the squares and places," yet what does that do, if it be the ridicule of all other classes? [Sidenote: THE DANGER OF OVER-BLAMING] The general experience, or rather supposed experience, prevails over the particular knowledge. So many causes oppose man to man, that he _begins_ by thinking of other men worse than they deserve, and receives his punishment by at last thinking worse of himself than the truth is. [Sidenote: EXCESS OF SELF-ESTEEM] Expressions of honest self-esteem, in which _self_ was only a diagram of the _genus_, will excite sympathy at the minute, and yet, even among persons who love and esteem you, be remembered and quoted as ludicrous instances of strange self-involution. [Sidenote: DEFECT OF SELF-ESTEEM. May 23, 1808] Those who think lowliest of themselves, perhaps with a _feeling_ stronger than rational comparison would justify, are apt to feel and express undue asperity for the faults and defects of those whom they habitually have looked up to as to their superiors. For placing themselves very low, perhaps too low, wherever a series of experiences, struggled against for a while, have at length convinced the mind that in such and such a moral habit the long-idolised superior is far below even itself, the grief and anger will be in proportion. "If even _I_ could never have done this, O anguish, that _he_, so much my superior, should do it! If even _I_ with all my infirmities have not this defect, this selfishness, that _he_ should have it!" This is the course of thought. Men are bad enough; and yet they often think themselves worse than they are, among other causes by a reaction from their own uncharitable thoughts. The poisoned chalice is brought back to our own lips. [Sidenote: A PRACTICAL MAN] He was grown, and solid from his infancy, like that most _useful_ of domesticated animals, that never runs but with some prudent motive to the mast or the wash-tub and, at no time a slave to the present moment, never even grunts over the acorns before him without a scheming squint and the segment, at least, of its wise little eye cast toward those on one side, which his neighbour is or may be about to enjoy. [Sidenote: LUCUS A NON LUCENDO] Quære, whether the high and mighty Edinburghers, &c., have not been elevated into guardians and overseers of taste and poetry for much the same reason as St. Cecilia was chosen as the guardian goddess of music, because, forsooth, so far from being able to compose or play herself, she could never endure any other instrument than the jew's-harp or Scotch bag-pipe? No! too eager recensent! you are mistaken, there is no anachronism in this. We are informed by various antique bas-reliefs that the bag-pipe was well known to the Romans, and probably, therefore, that the Picts and Scots were even then fond of seeking their fortune in other countries. [Sidenote: LOVE AND MUSIC] "Love is the spirit of life and music the life of the spirit." Q. What is music? A. Poetry in its grand sense! Passion and order at once! Imperative power in obedience! Q. What is the first and divinest strain of music? A.--In the intellect--"Be able to will that thy maxims (rules of individual conduct) should be the law of all intelligent being!" In the heart, or practical reason, "Do unto others as thou wouldst be done by." This in the widest extent involves the test, "Love thy neighbour as thyself, and God above all things." For, conceive thy being to be all-including, that is, God--thou knowest that _thou_ wouldest command thyself to be beloved above all things. [For the motto at the head of this note see the lines "Ad Vilmum Axiologum." _P. W._, 1893, p. 138.] [Sidenote: CONSCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY] From what reasons do I believe in _continuous_ and ever-continuable consciousness? From conscience! Not for myself, but for my conscience, that is, my affections and duties towards others, I should have no self--for self is definition, but all boundary implies neighbourhood and is knowable only by neighbourhood or relations. Does the understanding say nothing in favour of immortality? It says nothing for or against; but its silence gives consent, and is better than a thousand arguments such as mere understanding could afford. But miracles! "Do you speak of them as proofs or as natural consequences of revelation, whose presence is proof only by precluding the disproof that would arise from their absence?" "Nay, I speak of them as of positive fundamental proofs." Then I dare answer you "Miracles in that sense are blasphemies in morality, contradictions in reason. God the Truth, the actuality of logic, the very _logos_--He deceive his creatures and demonstrate the properties of a triangle by the confusion of all properties! If a miracle merely means an event before inexperienced, it proves only itself, and the inexperience of mankind. Whatever other definition be given of it, or rather attempted (for no other not involving direct contradiction can be given), it is blasphemy. It calls darkness light, and makes Ignorance the mother of Malignity, the appointed nurse of religion--which is knowledge as opposed to mere calculating and conjectural understanding. Seven years ago, but oh! in what happier times--I wrote thus-- O ye hopes! that stir within me! Health comes with you from above! God is _with_ me! God is _in_ me! I _cannot_ die: for life is love! And now, that I am alone and utterly hopeless for myself, yet still I love--and more strongly than ever feel that conscience or the duty of love is the proof of continuing, as it is the cause and condition of existing consciousness. How beautiful the harmony! Whence could the proof come, so appropriately, so conformly with all nature, in which the cause and condition of each thing is its revealing and infallible prophecy! And for what reason, say, rather, for what cause, do you believe immortality? Because I _ought_, therefore I _must_! [The lines "On revisiting the sea-shore," of which the last stanza is quoted, were written in August, 1801. [_P.W._, 1893, p. 159.] If the note was written exactly seven years after the date of that poem, it must belong to the summer of 1808, when Coleridge was living over the _Courier_ office in the Strand.] [Sidenote: THE CAP OF LIBERTY] Truly, I hope not irreverently, may we apply to the French nation the Scripture text, "From him that hath nothing shall be taken that which he hath"--that is, their pretences to being free, which are the same as nothing. They, the illuminators, the discoverers and sole possessors of the true philosopher's stone! Alas! it proved both for them and Europe the _Lapis Infernalis_. [Sidenote: VAIN GLORY] Lord of light and fire? What is the universal of man in all, but especially in savage states? Fantastic ornament and, in general, the most frightful deformities--slits in the ears and nose, for instance. What is the solution? Man will not be a mere thing of nature: he will be and shew himself a power of himself. Hence these violent disruptions of himself from all other creatures! What they are made, that they remain--they are Nature's, and wholly Nature's. [Sidenote: CHILDREN OF A LARGER GROWTH] Try to contemplate mankind as children. These we love tenderly, because they are beautiful and happy; we know that a sweet-meat or a top will transfer their little love for a moment, and that we shall be repelled with a grimace. Yet we are not offended. [Sidenote: CHYMICAL ANALOGIES] I am persuaded that the chymical technology, as far as it was borrowed from life and intelligence, half-metaphorically, half-mystically, may be brought back again (as when a man borrows of another a sum which the latter had previously borrowed of him, because he is too polite to remind him of a debt) to the use of psychology in many instances, and, above all, [may be re-adapted to] the philosophy of language, which ought to be experimentative and analytic of the elements of meaning--their double, triple, and quadruple combinations, of simple aggregation or of composition by balance of opposition. Thus innocence is distinguished from virtue, and _vice versâ_. In both of them there is a positive, but in each opposite. A decomposition must take place in the first instance, and then a new composition, in order for innocence to become virtue. It loses a positive, and then the base attracts another different positive, by the higher affinity of the same base under a different temperature for the latter. I stated the legal use of the innocent as opposed to mere _not guilty_ (he was not only acquitted, but was proved innocent), only to shew the existence of a _positive_ in the former--by no means as confounding this use of the word with the moral pleasurable feeling connected with it when used of little children, maidens, and those who in mature age preserve this sweet fragrance of vernal life, this mother's gift and so-seldom-kept keepsake to her child, as she sends him forth into the world. The distinction is obvious. Law agnizes actions alone, and character only as presumptive or illustrative of particular action as to its guilt or non-guilt, or to the commission or non-commission. But our moral feelings are never pleasurably excited except as they refer to a state of being--and the most glorious actions do not delight us as separate acts, or, rather, facts, but as representatives of the being of the agent--mental stenographs which bring an indeterminate extension within the field of easy and simultaneous vision, diffused being rendered visible by condensation. Only for the hero's sake do we exult in the heroic act, or, rather, the act abstracted from the hero would no longer appear to us heroic. Not, therefore, solely from the advantage of poets and historians do the deeds of ancient Greece and Rome strike us into admiration, while we relate the very same deeds of barbarians as matters of curiosity, but because in the former we refer the deed to the individual exaltation of the agent, in the latter only to the physical result of a given state of society. Compare the [heroism of that] Swiss patriot, with his bundle of spears turned towards his breast, in order to break the Austrian pikemen, and that of the Mameluke, related to me by Sir Alexander Ball, who, when his horse refused to plunge in on the French line, turned round and _backed_ it on them, with a certainty of death, in order to effect the same purpose. In the former, the state of mind arose from reason, morals, liberty, the sense of the duty owing to the independence of his country, and its continuing in a state compatible with the highest perfection and development; while the latter was predicative only of mere animal habit, ferocity, and unreasoned antipathy to strangers of a different dress and religion. [Sidenote: BOOKS IN THE AIR] If, contrary to my expectations--alas! almost, I fear, to my wishes--I should live, it is my intention to make a catalogue of the Greek and Latin Classics, and of those who, like the author of the _Argenis_ [William Barclay, 1546-1605], and Euphormio, Fracastorius, Flaminius, etc., deserve that name though moderns--and every year to apply all my book-money to the gradual completion of the collection, and buy no other books except German, if the continent should be opened again, except Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Jonson. The two last I have, I believe, but imperfect--indeed, B. and F. worthless, the best plays omitted. It would be a pleasing employment, had I health, to translate the Hymns of Homer, with a disquisitional attempt to settle the question concerning the _personality_ of Homer. Such a thing in two volumes, _well done_, by philosophical notes on the mythology of the Greeks, distinguishing the sacerdotal from the poetical, and both from the philosophical or allegorical, fairly grown into two octavos, might go a good way, if not all the way, to the Bipontine Latin and Greek Classics. [Sidenote: A TURTLE-SHELL FOR HOUSE-HOLD TUB] I almost fear that the alteration would excite surprise and uneasy contempt in Verbidigno's mind (towards one less loved, at least); but had I written the sweet tale of the "Blind Highland Boy," I would have substituted for the washing-tub, and the awkward stanza in which it is specified, the images suggested in the following lines from Dampier's Travels, vol. i. pp. 105-6:--"I heard of a monstrous green turtle once taken at the Port Royal, in the Bay of Campeachy, that was four feet deep from the back to the belly, and the belly six feet broad. Captain Rock's son, of about nine or ten years of age, went in it as in a boat, on board his father's ship, about a quarter of a mile from the shore." And a few lines before--"The green turtle are so called because their shell is greener than any other. It is very thin and clear, and better clouded than the Hawksbill, but 'tis used only for _inlays_, being _extraordinary_ thin." Why might not some mariners have left this shell on the shore of Loch Leven for a while, about to have transported it inland for a curiosity, and the blind boy have found it? Would not the incident be in equal keeping with that of the child, as well as the image and tone of romantic uncommonness? ["In deference to the opinion of a friend," this substitution took place. A promise made to Sara Coleridge to re-instate the washing-tub was, alas! never fulfilled. See _Poetical Works_ of W. Wordsworth, 1859, pp. 197, and 200 _footnote_.] [Sidenote: THE TENDER MERCIES OF THE GOOD] Tremendous as a Mexican god is a strong sense of duty--separate from an enlarged and discriminating mind, and gigantic ally disproportionate to the size of the understanding; and, if combined with obstinacy of self-opinion and indocility, it is the parent of tyranny, a promoter of inquisitorial persecution in public life, and of inconceivable misery in private families. Nay, the very virtue of the person, and the consciousness that _it_ is sacrificing its own happiness, increases the obduracy, and selects those whom it best loves for its objects. _Eoque immitior quia ipse tolerat_ (not _toleraverat_) is its inspiration and watchword. [Sidenote: HINTS FOR "THE FRIEND"] A nation of reformers looks like a scourer of silver-plate--black all over and dingy, with making things white and brilliant. A joint combination of authors leagued together to declaim for or against liberty may be compared to Buffon's collection of smooth mirrors in a vast fan arranged to form one focus. May there not be gunpowder as well as corn set before it, and the latter will not thrive, but become cinders? A good conscience and hope combined are like fine weather that reconciles travel with delight. Great exploits and the thirst of honour which they inspire, enlarge states by enlarging hearts. The rejection of the love of glory without the admission of Christianity is, truly, human darkness lacking human light. Heaven preserve me from the modern epidemic of a proud ignorance! Hypocrisy, the deadly crime which, like Judas, kisses Hell at the lips of Redemption. Is't then a mystery so great, what God and the man, and the world is? No, but we hate to hear! Hence a mystery it remains. The massy misery so prettily hidden with the gold and silver leaf--_bracteata felicitas_. [Sidenote: CONCERNING BELLS] If I have leisure, I may, perhaps, write a wild rhyme on the _Bell_, from the mine to the belfry, and take for my motto and Chapter of Contents, the two distichs, but especially the latter-- Laudo Deum verum, plebem voco, congrego clerum: Defunctos ploro, pestem fugo, festa decoro. Funera plango, fulgura frango, sabbata pango: Excito lentos, dissipo ventos, paco cruentos. The waggon-horse _celsâ cervice eminens clarumque jactans tintinnabulum_. Item, the cattle on the river, and valley of dark pines and firs in the Hartz. The army of Clotharius besieging Sens were frightened away by the bells of St. Stephen's, rung by the contrivance of Lupus, Bishop of Orleans. For ringing the largest bell, as a Passing-bell, a high price was wont to be paid, because being heard afar it both kept the evil spirits at a greater distance, and gave the chance of the greater number of prayers _pro mortuo_, from the pious who heard it. Names of saints were given to bells that it might appear the voice of the Saint himself calling to prayer. Man will humanise all things. [It is strange that Coleridge should make no mention of Schiller's "Song of the Bell," of which he must, at any rate, have heard the title. Possibly the idea remained though its source was forgotten. The Latin distichs were introduced by Longfellow in his "Golden Legend." Of the cow-bells in the Hartz he gives the following account in an unpublished letter to his wife. April-May, 1799. "But low down in the valley and in little companies on each bank of the river a multitude of green conical fir-trees, with herds of cattle wandering about almost every one with a cylindrical bell around its neck, of no inconsiderable size. And as they moved, scattered over the narrow vale, and up among the trees of the hill, the noise was like that of a great city in the stillness of the Sabbath morning, where all the steeples, all at once are ringing for Church. The whole was a melancholy scene and quite new to me."] FOOTNOTES: [Footnote E: [O heaven, 'twas frightful! now run down and stared at By shapes more ugly than can be remembered-- Now seeing nothing and imagining nothing, But only being afraid--stifled with Fear! And every goodly, each familiar form Had a strange somewhat that breathed terrors on me! (_From my MS. tragedy_ [S. T. C.]) _Remorse_, iv. 69-74--but the passage is omitted from _Osorio_, act iv. 53 _sq. P. W._, pp. 386-499]]. CHAPTER VII _1810_ O dare I accuse My earthly lot as guilty of my spleen, Or call my destiny niggard! O no! no! It is her largeness, and her overflow, Which being incomplete, disquieteth me so! S. T. C. [Sidenote: A PIOUS ASPIRATION] My own faculties, cloudy as they may be, will be a sufficient direction to me in plain daylight, but my friend's wish shall be the pillar of fire to guide me darkling in my nightly march through the wilderness. [Sidenote: THOUGHT AND ATTENTION] Thought and attention are very different things. I never expected the former, (viz., _selbst-thätige Erzeugung dessen, wovon meine Rede war_) from the readers of _The Friend_. I did expect the latter, and was disappointed. Jan. 3, 1810. This is a most important distinction, and in the new light afforded by it to my mind, I see more plainly why mathematics cannot be a substitute for logic, much less for metaphysics, that is, transcendental logic, and why, therefore, Cambridge has produced so few men of genius and original power since the time of Newton. Not only it does not call forth the balancing and discriminating power [_that_ I saw long ago] but it requires only _attention,_ not _thought_ or self-production. [Sidenote: LAW AND GOSPEL] "The man who squares his conscience by the law" was, formerly, a phrase for a prudent villain, an unprincipled coward. At present the law takes in everything--the things most incongruous with its nature, as the moral motive, and even the feelings of sensibility resulting from accidents of cultivation, novel-reading for instance. If, therefore, _at all_ times, the law would be found to have a much greater influence on the actions of men than men generally suppose, or the agents were themselves conscious of, this influence we must expect to find augmented at the present time in proportion to the encroachments of the law on religion, the moral sense, and the sympathies engendered by artificial rank. Examine this and begin, for instance, with reviews, and so on through the common legal immoralities of life, in the pursuits and pleasures of the higher half of the middle classes of society in Great Britain. [Sidenote: CATHOLIC REUNION] "Hence (_i.e._, from servile and thrall-like fear) men came to scan the Scriptures by the letter and in the covenant of our redemption magnified the external signs more than the quickening power of the Spirit."--MILTON'S _Review of Church Government_, vol. i. p. 2. It were not an unpleasing fancy, nor one wholly unworthy of a serious and charitable Christianity, to derive a shadow of hope for the conversion and purification of the Roman Apostasy from the conduct and character of St. Peter as shadowing out the history of the Latin Church, whose ruling pastor calls himself the successor of that saint. Thus, by proud _humility_, he hazarded the loss of his heavenly portion in objecting to Christ's taking upon himself a lowly office and character of a servant (hence the pomps and vanities with which Rome has tricked out her bishops, &c.), the eager drawing of the fleshly sword in defence of Christ; the denying of Christ at the cross (in the apostasy); but, finally, his bitter repentance at the third crowing of the cock (perhaps Wickliffe and Huss the first, Luther the second, and the third yet to come-or, perhaps Wickliffe and Luther the first, the second may be the present state of humiliation, and the third yet to come). After this her eyes will be opened to the heavenly vision of the universal acceptance of Christ of all good men of all sects, that is, that faith is a moral, not an intellectual act. [Sidenote: THE IDEAL MARRIAGE] On some delightful day in early spring some of my countrymen hallow the anniversary of their marriage, and with love and fear go over the reckoning of the past and the unknown future. The wife tells with half-renewed modesty all the sweet feelings that she disguised and cherished in the courting-time; the man looks with a tear full in his eye and blesses the hour when for the first time (and oh! let it be the last) he spake deep and solemn to a beloved being--"Thou art mine and I am thine, and henceforward I shield and shelter [thee] against the world, and thy sorrows shall be my sorrows, and though abandoned by all men, we two will abide together in love and duty." In the holy eloquent solitude where the very stars that twinkle seem to be a _voice_ that suits the dream, a voice of a dream, a voice soundless and yet for the _ear_ not the _eye_ of the soul, when the winged soul passes over vale and mountain, sinks into glens, and then climbs with the cloud, and passes from cloud to cloud, and thence from sun to sun--never is she alone. Always one, the dearest, accompanies and even when he melts, diffused in the blue sky, she melts at the same moment into union with the beloved. [Sidenote: A SUPERFLUOUS ENTITY] That our religious faiths, by the instincts which lead us to metaphysical investigation, are founded in a practical necessity, not a mere intellectual craving after knowledge, and systematic conjecture, is evinced by the interest which all men take in the questions of future existence, and the being of God; while even among those who are speculative by profession a few phantasts only have troubled themselves with the questions of pre-existence, or with attempts to demonstrate the _posse_ and _esse_ of a devil. But in the latter case more is involved. Concerning pre-existence men in general have neither care nor belief; but a devil is taken for granted, and, if we might trust words, with the same faith as a Deity--"He neither believes God or devil." And yet, while we are delighted in hearing proofs of the one, we never think of asking a simple question concerning the other. This, too, originates in a practical source. The Deity is not a mere solution of difficulties concerning origination, but a truth which spreads light and joy and hope and certitude through all things--while a devil _is_ a mere solution of an enigma, an assumption to silence our uneasiness. That end answered (and most easily are such ends answered), we have no further concern with it. [Sidenote: PSYCHOLOGY IN YOUTH AND MATURITY] The _great change_--that in youth and early manhood we psychologise and with enthusiasm but all out of ourselves, and so far ourselves only as we descry therein some general law. Our own self is but the diagram, the triangle which represents all triangles. Afterward we pyschologise out of others, and so far as they differ from ourselves. O how hollowly! [Sidenote: HAIL AND FAREWELL!] We have been for many years at a great distance from each other, but that may happen with no real breach of friendship. All intervening nature is the _continuum_ of two good and wise men. We are now separated. You have combined arsenic with your gold, Sir Humphry! You are brittle, and I will rather dine with Duke Humphry than with you. [Sidenote: A GENUINE "ANECDOTE"] Sara Coleridge says, on telling me of the universal sneeze produced on the lasses while shaking my carpet, that she wishes my snuff would _grow_, as I sow it so plentifully! [This points to the summer of 1810, the five months spent at Greta Hall previous to the departure south with Basil Montagu.] [Sidenote: SPIRITUAL RELIGION] A thing cannot be one _and_ three at the same time! True! but _time_ does not apply to God. He is neither one in time nor three in time, for he exists not in time at all--the Eternal! The truly religious man, when he is not conveying his feelings and beliefs to other men, and does not need the medium of words--O! how little does he find in his religious sense either of form or of number--it is _infinite_! Alas! why do we all seek by instinct for a God, a supersensual, but because we feel the insufficiency, the unsubstantiality of all _forms_, and formal being for itself. And shall we explain _a_ by _x_ and then _x_ by _a_--give a soul to the body, and then a body to the soul--_ergo_, a body to the body--feel the weakness of the weak, and call in the strengthener, and then make the very weakness the substratum of the strength? This is worse than the poor Indian! Even he does not make the tortoise support the elephant, and yet put the elephant under the tortoise! But we are too social, we become in a sort idolaters--for the means we are obliged to use to excite notions of truth in the minds of others we by witchcraft of slothful association impose on ourselves for the truths themselves. Our intellectual bank stops payment, and we pass an act by acclamation that hereafter the paper promises shall be the gold and silver itself--and ridicule a man for a dreamer and reviver of antiquated dreams who believes that gold and silver exist. This may do as well in the market, but O! for the universal, for the man himself the difference is woeful. [Sidenote: TRUTH] The immense difference between being glad to find Truth _it_, and to find _it_ TRUTH! O! I am ashamed of those who praise me! For I know that as soon as I tell them my mind on another subject, they will shrink and abhor me. For not because I enforced a truth were they pleased in the first instance, but because I had supported a favourite notion of theirs which they loved for its and their sake, and therefore would be glad to find it true--not that loving Truth they loved this opinion as one of its forms and consequences. The root! the root must be attacked! [Sidenote: A TIME TO CRY OUT] Among the evils that attend a conscientious author who writes in a corrupt age, is the necessity he is under of exposing himself even to plausible charges of envy, mortified vanity, and, above all, of self-conceit before those whose bad passions would make even the most improbable charges plausible. What _can_ he do? Tell the truth, and the whole truth plainly, and with the natural affection which it inspires, and keeping off (difficult task!) all _scorn_ (for to suppress resentment is easy), let him trust the bread to the waters in the firm faith that wisdom shall be justified by her children. Vanity! self-conceit! What vanity, what self-conceit? What say I more than this? Ye who think and feel the same will love and esteem me by the law of sympathy, and _value_ me according to the comparative effect I have made on your intellectual powers, in enabling you better to defend before others, or more clearly to _onlook_ (_anschauen_) in yourselves the truths to which your noblest being bears witness. The rest I leave to the judgment of posterity, utterly unconcerned whether _my name_ be attached to these opinions or (_my_ writings forgotten) another man's. But what can I say, when I have declared my abhorrence of the _Edinburgh Review_? In vain should I tell my critics that were I placed on the rack I could not remember ten lines of my own poems, and that on seeing my own name in their abuse, I regard it only as a symbol of Wordsworth and Southey, and that I am well aware that from utter disregard and oblivion of anything and all things which they can know of me by experience, my name is mentioned only because they have heard that I was Wordsworth's and Southey's friend. [Sidenote: HINTS FOR "THE FRIEND"] The brightest luminaries of earth give names to the dusky spots in the selenography of Helvetius. The intrepidity of a pure conscience and a simple principle [may be] compared to a life-boat, and somewhat in the detail, stemming with a little rudder the tumbling ruins of the sea, rebounding from the rocks and shelves in fury. Duns Scotus affirms that the certainty of faith is the greatest certainty--a dark speech which is explained and proved by the dependence of the theoretic powers on the practical. But Aristotle admits that demonstrated truths are inferior in kind of certainty to the indemonstrable out of which the former are deduced. Faithful, confident reliance on man and on God is the last and hardest virtue! And wherefore? Because we must first have earned a FAITH in ourselves. Let the conscience pronounce: "Trust in thyself!" Let the whole heart be able to say, "I trust in myself," and those whomever we _love_ we shall rely on, in proportion to that love. A testy patriot might be pardoned for saying with Falstaff, when Dame Quickly told him "She came from the two parties, forsooth," "The Devil take one party and his Dam the other." John Bull has suffered more for their sake, more than even the supererogatory cullibility of his disposition is able to bear. Lavater fixed on the simplest physiognomy in his whole congregation, and pitched his sermon to his comprehension. Narcissus either looks at or thinks of his looking glass, for the same wise purpose I presume. Reviewers resemble often the English jury and the Italian conclave, they are incapable of eating till they have condemned or craned. The Pope [may be compared to] an old lark, who, though he leaves off soaring and singing in the height, yet has his spurs grow longer and sharper the older he grows. Let us not, because the foliage waves in necessary obedience to every breeze, fancy that the tree shakes also. Though the slender branch bend, one moment to the East and another to the West, its motion is circumscribed by its connection with the unyielding trunk. [Sidenote: A HINT FOR "CHRISTABEL"] My first cries mingled with my mother's death-groan, and she beheld the vision of glory, ere I the earthly sun. When I first looked up to Heaven consciously, it was to look up after, or for, my mother. [Sidenote: "ALL THOUGHTS ALL PASSIONS ALL DELIGHTS"] The two sweet silences--first in the purpling dawn of love-troth, when the heart of each ripens in the other's looks within the unburst calyx, and fear becomes so sweet that it seems but a fear of losing hope in certainty; the second, when the sun is setting in the calm eve of confident love, and [the lovers] in mute recollection enjoy each other. "I fear to speak, I fear to hear you speak, so deeply do I now enjoy your presence, so totally possess you in myself, myself in you. The very sound would break the union and separate _you-me_ into you and me. We both, and this sweet room, its books, its furniture, and the shadows on the wall slumbering with the low, quiet fire are all _our_ thought, one harmonious imagery of forms distinct on the still substance of one deep feeling, love and joy--a lake, or, if a stream, yet flowing so softly, so unwrinkled, that its flow is life, not change--that state in which all the individuous nature, the distinction without division of a vivid thought, is united with the sense and substance of intensest reality." And what if joy pass quick away? Long is the track of Hope before--long, too, the track of recollection after, as in the Polar spring the sun [is seen in the heavens] sixteen days before it really rises, and in the Polar autumn ten days after it has set; so Nature, with Hope and Recollection, pieces out our short summer. [Sidenote: WORDS AND THINGS] N.B.--In my intended essay in defence of punning (Apology for Paronomasy, _alias_ Punning), to defend those turns of words-- Che l'onda chiara, El'ombra non men cara-- in certain styles of writing, by proving that language itself is formed upon associations of this kind--that possibly the _sensus genericus_ of whole classes of words may be thus deciphered (as has indeed been attempted by Mr. White, of Clare Hall), that words are not mere symbols of things and thoughts, but themselves things, and that any harmony in the things symbolised will perforce be presented to us more easily, as well as with additional beauty, by a correspondent harmony of the symbols with each other. Thus, _heri vidi fragilem frangi, hodie mortalem mori_; Gestern seh ich was gebrechliches brechen, heute was sterbliches sterben, compared with the English. This the beauty of homogeneous languages. So _Veni, vidi, vici_. [This note follows an essay on Giambattista Strozzi's Madrigals, together with a transcription of twenty-seven specimens. The substance of the essay is embodied in the text of Chapter xvi. of the "Biographia Literaria," and a long footnote. The quotation is from the first madrigal, quoted in the note, which is not included in those transcribed in Notebook 17.--_Coleridge's Works_, iii. (Harper & Brothers, 1853), pp. 388-393.] [Sidenote: ASSOCIATION] Important suggestion on 4th March, 1810 (Monday night). The law of association clearly begins in common causality. How continued but by a _causative power_ in the soul? What a proof of _causation_ and _power_ from the very law of mind, and cluster of facts adduced by Hume to overthrow it! [Sidenote: COROLLARY] It is proud ignorance that, as a disease of the mind, alone superinduces the necessity of the _medium_ of metaphysical philosophy. The errors into which a sound, unaffected mind is led by the nature of things (Thing as the substratum of power)--no errors at all, any more than the motion of the sun. "So it _appears_"--and that is most true--but when pride will work up these phenomena into a _system_ of _things in themselves_, then they become most pernicious errors, and it is the duty of true mind to examine these with all the virtues of the intellect--patience, humility, etc. [Sidenote: MOTHER WIT] "By aid of a large portion of mother's wit, Paine, though an unlearned man, saw the absurdity of the Christian religion." Mother's wit, indeed! Wit from his mother the earth--the earthy and material wit of the _flesh_ and its lusts. One ounce of mother-wit may be worth a pound of learning, but a grain of the Father's wisdom is worth a ton of mother-wit--yea! of both together. [Sidenote: OF EDUCATION] "O it is but an infant! 'tis but a child! he will be better as he grows older." "O! she'll grow ashamed of it. This is but waywardness." Grant all this--that _they_ will _out_grow these particular actions, yet with what HABITS of _feeling_ will they arrive at youth and manhood? Especially with regard to obedience, how is it possible that they should struggle against the boiling passions of youth by means of obedience to their own conscience who are to meet the dawn of conscience with the broad meridian of disobedience and habits of self-willedness? Besides, when are the rebukes, the chastisements to commence? Why! about nine or ten, perhaps, when, for the father at least, [the child] is less a plaything--when, therefore, anger is not healed up in its mind, either by its own infant versatility and forgetfulness, or by after caresses--when everything is remembered individually, and sense of injustice felt. For the boy very well remembers the different treatment when he was a child; but what has been so long permitted becomes a right to him. Far better, in such a case, to have them sent off to others--a strict schoolmaster--than to breed that contradiction of feeling toward the same person which subverts the very _principle_ of our impulses. Whereas, in a tender, yet obedience-exacting and improvement-enforcing education, though very gradually, and by small doses at a time, yet always going on--yea! even from a twelvemonth old--at six or seven the child really has outgrown all things that annoy, just at the time when, as the charm of infancy begins to diminish, they would begin really to annoy. [Sidenote: THE DANGERS OF ADAPTING TRUTH TO THE MINDS OF THE VULGAR] There are, in every country, times when the few who know the truth have clothed it for the vulgar, and addressed the vulgar in the vulgar language and modes of conception, in order to convey any part of the truth. This, however, could not be done with safety, even to the _illuminati_ themselves in the first instance; but to their successors, habit gradually turned lie into belief, partial and _stagnate_ truth into ignorance, and the teachers of the vulgar (like the Franciscan friars in the South of Europe) became a part of the vulgar--nay, because the laymen were open to various impulses and influences, which their instructors had built out (compare a brook in open air, liable to rainstreams and rills from new-opened fountains, to the same running through a mill guarded by sluice-gates and back-water), they became the vulgarest of the vulgar, till, finally, resolute not to detach themselves from the mob, the mob at length detaches itself from them, and leaves the mill-race dry, the moveless, rotten wheels as day-dormitories for bats and owls, and the old grindstones for wags and scoffers of the taproom to whet their wits on. [Sidenote: POETRY AND PROSE] When there are few literary men, and the vast 999999/10000000 of the population are ignorant, as was the case of Italy from Dante to Metastasio, _from causes I need not here put down, there will be a poetical language_; but that a poet ever uses a word as poetical--that is, formally--which he, in the same mood and thought, would not use in prose or conversation, Milton's Prose Works will assist us in disproving. But as soon as literature becomes common, and critics numerous in any country, and a large body of men seek to express themselves habitually in the most precise, sensuous, and impassioned words, the difference as to mere words ceases, as, for example, the German prose writers. Produce to me _one_ word out of Klopstock, Wieland, Schiller, Goethe, Voss, &c., which I will not find as frequently used in the most energetic prose writers. The sole difference in style is that poetry demands a severe keeping--it admits nothing that prose may not often admit, but it oftener rejects. In other words, it presupposes a more continuous state of passion. _N.B._--Provincialisms of poets who have become the supreme classics in countries one in language but under various states and governments have aided this false idea, as, in Italy, the Tuscanisms of Dante, Ariosto, and Alfieri, foolishly imitated by Venetians, Romans, and Neapolitans. How much this is against the opinion of Dante, see his admirable treatise on "Lingua Volgare Nobile," the first, I believe, of his prose or _prose and verse_ works; for the "Convito" and "La Vita Nuova" are, one-third, in metre. [Sidenote: WORLDLY WISE] I would strongly recommend Lloyd's "State Worthies" [_The Statesmen and Favourites of England since the Reformation._ By David Lloyd. London, 1665-70] as the manual of every man who would rise in the world. In every twenty pages it recommends contradictions, but he who cannot reconcile them for himself, and discover which suits his plan, can never rise in the world. _N.B._--I have a mind to draw a complete character of a worldly-wise man out of Lloyd. He would be highly-finished, useful, honoured, popular--a man revered by his children, his wife, and so forth. To be sure, he must not expect to be _beloved_ by _one_ proto-friend; and, if there be truth in reason or Christianity, he will go to hell--but, even so, he will doubtless secure himself a most respectable place in the devil's chimney-corner. [Sidenote: HINTS FOR "THE FRIEND"] The falseness of that so very common opinion, "Mathematics, aye, that is something! that has been useful--but metaphysics!" Now fairly compare the two, what each has really done. But [be thou] only concerned to find out truth, which, on what side soever it appears, is always _victory_ to every honest mind. Christianity, too (as well as Platonism and the school of Pythagoras), has its esoteric philosophy, or why are we forbidden to cast pearls before swine? But who are the swine? Are they the poor and despised, the unalphabeted in worldly learning? O, no! the rich whose hearts are steeled by ignorance of misery and habits of receiving slavish obedience--the dropsical learned and the St. Vitus' [bewitched] sciolist. In controversy it is highly useful to know whether you are really addressing yourself to an opponent or only to partisans, with the intention of preserving them firm. Either is well, but they should never be commingled. In her letter to Lord Willoughby Queen Elizabeth hath the word "eloign." There is no exact equivalent in modern use. Neither "withdraw" or "absent" are precisely synonymous. We understand Nature just as if, at a distance, we looked at the image of a person in a looking-glass, plainly and fervently discoursing, yet what he uttered we could decipher only by the motion of the lips or by his mien. I must extract and transcribe from the preface to the works of Paracelsus that eloquent defence of technical new words and of old words used in a new sense. The whole preface is exceedingly lively, and (excepting the mountebank defence of intentional obscurity and the attack on logic, as if it were ever intended to be an organon of discovery of material truth and directly, instead of a formal preliminary assisting the mind indirectly, and showing what cannot be truth, and what has not been proved truth,) very just. The Chinese call the monsoon whirlwind, when more than usually fierce, the elephant. This is a fine image--a mad wounded war-elephant. The poor oppressed Amboynese, who bear with patience the extirpation of their clove and nutmeg trees, in their fields and native woods, and the cruel taxes on sugar, their staff of life, will yet, at once and universally, rise up in rebellion and prepare to destroy in despair all and everything, themselves included, if any attempt is made to destroy any individual's Tatanaman, the clove-tree which each Amboynese plants at the birth of each of his children. Very affecting! [Sidenote: GENIUS] The man of genius places things in a new light. This trivial phrase better expresses the appropriate effects of genius than Pope's celebrated distich-- "What oft was thought but ne'er so well exprest." It has been thought distinctly, but only possessed, as it were, unpacked and unsorted. The poet not only displays what, though often seen in its unfolded mass, had never been opened out, but he likewise adds something, namely, light and relations. Who has not seen a rose, or sprig of jasmine or myrtle? But behold those same flowers in a posy or flower-pot, painted by a man of genius, or assorted by the hand of a woman of fine taste and instinctive sense of beauty! [Sidenote: LOVE] To find our happiness incomplete without the happiness of some other given person or persons is the definition of affection in general, and applies equally to friendship, to the parental and to the conjugal relations. But what is love? Love as it may subsist between two persons of different senses? This--and what more than this? The mutual dependence of their happiness, each on that of the other, each being at once cause and effect. You, therefore, I--I, therefore you. The sense of this reciprocity of well-being, is that which first stamps and legitimates the name of happiness in all the other advantages and favourable accidents of nature, or fortune, without which they would change their essence and become like the curse of Tantalus, insulting remembrances of misery, of that most unquiet of all miseries, means of happiness blasted and transformed by incompleteness, nay, by the loss of the sole organ through which we could enjoy them. Suppose a wide and delightful landscape, and what the eye is to the light, and the light to the eye, that interchangeably is the lover to the beloved. "O best beloved! who lovest _me_ the best!" In strictest propriety of application might he thus address her, if only she with equal truth could echo the same sense in the same feeling. "Light of mine eye! by which alone I not only see all I see, but which makes up more than half the loveliness of the objects seen, yet, still, like the rising sun in the morning, like the moon at night, remainest thyself and for thyself, the dearest, fairest form of all the thousand forms that derive from thee all their visibility, and borrow from thy presence their chiefest beauty!" [Sidenote: COTTLE'S "FREE VERSION OF THE PSALMS"] Diamond + oxygen = charcoal. Even so on the fire-spark of his zeal did Cottle place the King-David diamonds, and caused to pass over them the oxygenous blast of his own inspiration, and lo! the diamond becomes a bit of charcoal. [Sidenote: FRIENDSHIP AND MARRIAGE] "Ich finde alles eher auf der Erde, so gar Wahrheit und Freude, als Freundschaft."--JEAN PAUL.[F] This for the motto--to examine and attest the fact, and then to explain the reason. First, then, there are the extraordinary qualifications demanded for true friendship, arising from the multitude of causes that make men delude themselves and attribute to friendship what is only a similarity of pursuit, or even a mere dislike of feeling oneself alone in anything. But, secondly, supposing the friendship to be as real as human nature ordinarily permits, yet how many causes are at constant war against it, whether in the shape of violent irruptions or unobserved yet constant wearings away by dyspathy, &c. Exemplify this in youth and then in manhood. First, there is the influence of wives, how frequently deadly to friendship, either by direct encroach, or, perhaps, intentional plans of alienation! Secondly, there is the effect of families, by otherwise occupying the heart; and, thirdly, the action of life in general, by the worldly-wise, chilling effects of prudential anxieties. Corollary. These reflections, however, suggest an argument in favour of the existing indissolubility of marriage. To be compelled to make it up, or consent to be miserable and disrespected, is indeed a coarse plaister for the wounds of love, but so it must be while the patients themselves are of coarse make and unhealthy humours. [Sidenote: IMAGINATION] His imagination, if it must be so called, is at all events of the pettiest kind--it is an _imaginunculation_. How excellently the German _Einbildungskraft_ expresses this prime and loftiest faculty, the power of co-adunation, the faculty that forms the many into one--_In-eins-bildung!_ Eisenoplasy, or esenoplastic power, is contradistinguished from fantasy, or the mirrorment, either catoptric or metoptric--repeating simply, or by transposition--and, again, involuntary [fantasy] as in dreams, or by an act of the will. [See _Biog. Lit._, cap. x.; _Coleridge's Works_, iii. 272. See also _Blackwood's Magazine_, March 1840, No. ccxciii., Art. The Plagiarisms of S. T. Coleridge.] [Sidenote: PUBLIC OPINION AND THE SERVICES] Ministers, as in the Admiralty, or War Office, compared to managers of theatres. The numerous absurd claims at length deaden their sense of judgment to real merit, and superinduce in the mind an anticipation of clamorous vanity. Hence the great importance of the public voice, forcing them to be just. This, how illustrated by the life of Nelson--the infamous coldness with which all his claims were received--especially Mr. Wyndham's answer, July 21, 1795. And no wonder! for such is the state of moral feeling even with the English public, that an instance of credulity to an ingenious scheme which has failed in the trial will weigh more heavily on a minister's character than to have stifled in the birth half-a-dozen such men as Nelson or Cochrane, or such schemes as that of a floating army. Nelson's life is a perpetual comment on this. [Sidenote: SERMONS ANCIENT AND MODERN] Of moral discourses and fine moral discussions in the pulpit--"none of your Methodist stuff for me." And, yet, most certain it is, that never were either ministers or congregations so strict in all morality as at the time when nothing but fine _moral_ discourses (that is calculations in self-love) would have driven a preacher from the pulpit--and when the clergy thought it their pulpit-duty to preach Christ and Him crucified, and the why and the wherefore--and that the soberest, law-obeying, most prudent nation in the world would need Him as much as a nation of drunkards, thieves and profligates. How was this? Why, I take it, those old parsons thought, very wisely, that the pulpit was the place for truths that applied to all men, humbled all alike (not mortified one or two, and sent the rest home, scandal-talking with pharisaic "I thank thee, God, I am not as so and so, but I was glad to hear the parson"), comforted all, frightened all, offended all, because they were all _men_--that private vices depend so much on particular circumstances, that without making the pulpit a lampoon shop, (or, even supposing the genius of him who wrote Isaac Jenkins, without particulars not suited to the pulpit) that it would be a cold generality affair--and that, therefore, they considered the pulpit as _one_ part of their duty, but to their whole congregation as _men_, and that the other part of their duty, which they thought equally binding on them, was to each and every member of that congregation as John Harris, or James Tomkins, in private conversation--and, like that of Mr. Longford, sometimes to rebuke and warn, sometimes to comfort, sometimes and oftener to instruct, and render them capable of understanding his sermon. In short they would _preach_ as Luther, and would converse as Mr. Longford to Isaac Jenkins. [_The History of Isaac Jenkins, a Moral Fiction._ By Thomas Beddoes, M.D., 1793]. [Sidenote: HEAVINESS MAY ENDURE FOR A NIGHT] With a loving generous man whose activity of intellect is exerted habitually on truth and events of permanent, or, at least, general interest still warmed and coloured by benevolent enthusiasm self-unconsciously, and whose heart-movements are all the property of the few, whom he dearly loves--with such a man, for the vast majority of the wrongs met with in life, that at all affect him, a one-night's sleep provides the oblivion and the cure--he awakes from his slumbers and his resentment at the same moment. Yesterday is gone and the clouds of yesterday. The sun is born again, and how bright and joyous! and I am born again! But O! there may be wrongs, for which with our best efforts for the most perfect suppression, with the absence, nay, the impossibility of anger or hate, yet, longer, deeper sleep is required for the heart's oblivion, and thence renewal--even the long total sleep of death. To me, I dare avow, even this connects a new soothing with the thought of death, an additional lustre in anticipation to the confidence of resurrection, that such sensations as I have so often had after small wrongs, trifling quarrels, on first awaking in a summer morn after refreshing sleep, I shall experience after death for those few wounds too deep and broad for the _vis medicatrix_ of mortal life to fill wholly up with new flesh--those that, though healed, yet left an unsightly scar which, too often, spite of our best wishes, opened anew at other derangements and indispositions of the mental health, even when they were altogether unconnected with the wound itself or its occasions--even as the scars of the sailor, the relics and remembrances of sword or gun-shot wounds (first of all his bodily frame giving way to ungenial influences from without or from within), ache and throb at the coming in of rain or easterly winds, and open again and bleed anew, at the attack of fever, or injury from deficient or unwholesome food--that even for these I should enjoy the same delightful annihilation of them, as of ordinary wrongs after sleep. I would say to a man who reminded me of a friend's unkind words or deeds which I had forgiven--Smoking is very well while we are all smoking, even though the head is made dizzy by it and the candle of reason burns red, dim and thick; but, for Heaven's sake, don't put an old pipe to my nose just at breakfast time, among dews and flowers and sunshine. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote F: ["I find all things upon earth, even truth and joy, rather than friendship."]] CHAPTER VIII _1811-1812_ From all that meets or eye or ear, There falls a genial holy fear, Which, like the heavy dew of morn, Refreshes while it bows the heart forlorn! S. T. C. [Sidenote: TIME REAL AND IMAGINARY] How marked the contrast between troubled manhood, and joyously-active youth in the sense of time! To the former, time like the sun in an empty sky is never seen to move, but only to have _moved_. There, there it was, and now 'tis here, now distant! yet all a blank between. To the latter it is as the full moon in a fine breezy October night, driving on amid clouds of all shapes and hues, and kindling shifting colours, like an ostrich in its speed, and yet seems not to have moved at all. This I feel to be a just image of time real and time as felt, in two different states of being. The title of the poem therefore (for poem it ought to be) should be time real and time felt (in the sense of time) in active youth, or activity with hope and fullness of aim in any period, and in despondent, objectless manhood--time objective and subjective. [The riddle is hard to read, but the underlying thought seems to be that in youth the sense of time is like the apparent motion of the moon through clouds, ever driving on, but ever seeming to stand still; whereas the sense of time in manhood is like the sun, which seems to be stationary, and yet, at short intervals, is seen to have moved. This is time _felt_ in two different states of being. Time real is, as it were, sun or moon which move independently of our perceptions of their movements. The note (1811), no doubt, contains the germ of "Time Real and Imaginary" first published in "Sibylline Leaves" in 1817, which Coleridge in his Preface describes as a "school-boy poem," and interprets thus: "By imaginary time I meant the state of a schoolboy's mind when, on his return to school, he projects his being in his day-dreams, and lives in his next holidays, six months hence!" The explanation was probably an afterthought. "The two lovely children" who "run an endless race" may have haunted his schoolboy dreams, may perhaps have returned to the dreams of his troubled manhood, bringing with them the sense rather than the memory of youth, intermingled with a consciousness that youth was gone for ever, but the composition of the poem dates from 1811, or possibly 1815, when the preparation of the poems for the press would persuade him once more to express his thoughts in verse.] [Sidenote: TIME REAL AND IMAGINARY; AN ALLEGORY] On the wide level of a mountain's head, (I knew not where, but 'twas some faery place) Their pinions, ostrich-like, for sails outspread, Two lovely children run an endless race, A sister and a brother! This far outstript the other; Yet ever runs she with reverted face, And looks and listens for the boy behind: For he, alas! is blind! O'er rough and smooth with even step he passed, And knows not whether he be first or last. [_P. W._, 1893, p. 187. See, too, Editor's _Note_, p. 638.] [Sidenote: THE HAG NIGHTMARE] Elucidation of my _all-zermalming_, [that is, all-crushing] argument on the subject of ghosts, apparitions, &c. Night-mare is, I think, always, even when it occurs in the midst of sleep, and not as it more commonly does after a waking interval, a state not of sleep, but of stupor of the outward organs of sense--not in words, indeed, but yet in fact distinguishable from the suspended power of the senses in true sleep, while the volitions of reason, that is the faculty of comparison, &c., are awake though disturbed. This stupor seems to be occasioned by some painful sensations of unknown locality (most often, I believe, in the lower bowel) which, withdrawing the attention to itself from the sense of other realities present, makes us asleep to them, indeed, but otherwise awake. And, whenever the derangement occasions an interruption in the circulation, aided, perhaps, by pressure, awkward position, &c., the part deadened, as the hand, the arm, or the foot and leg, or the side, transmits double touch as single touch, to which the imagination, therefore, the true inward creatrix, instantly out of the chaos of elements or shattered fragments of memory, puts together some form to fit it. And this [_imaginatio_] derives an over-mastering sense of reality from the circumstance that the power of reason, being in good measure awake, most generally presents to us all the accompanying images very nearly as they existed the moment before, when we fell out of anxious wakefulness into this reverie. For example, the bed, the curtain, the room and its furniture, the knowledge of who lives in the next room, and so forth contribute to the illusion.... In short, the night-mare is not, properly, a dream, but a species of reverie, akin to somnambulism, during which the understanding and moral sense are awake, though more or less confused, and over the terrors of which the reason can exert no influence, because it is not true _terror_, that is, apprehension of danger, but is itself a specific sensation = _terror corporeus sive materialis_. The explanation and classification of these strange sensations, the organic material analogous (_ideas materiales intermedias_, as the Cartesians say) of Fear, Hope, Rage, Shame, and (strangest of all) Remorse, form at present the most difficult, and at the same time the most interesting problem of psychology, and are intimately connected with prudential morals, the science, that is, of morals not as the ground and law of duty, but in their relation to the empirical hindrances and focillations in the realising of the law by human beings. The solution of this problem would, perhaps, throw great doubt on the present [notion] that the forms and feelings of sleep are always the reflections and confused echoes of our waking thoughts and experiences. [Sidenote: A MOMENT AND A MAGIC MIRROR] What a swarm of thoughts and feelings, endlessly minute fragments, and, as it were, representations of all preceding and embryos of all future thought, lie compact in any one moment! So, in a single drop of water, the microscope discovers what motions, what tumult, what wars, what pursuits, what stratagems, what a circle-dance of death and life, death-hunting life, and life renewed and invigorated by death! The whole world seems here in a many-meaning cypher. What if our existence was but that moment? What an unintelligible, affrightful riddle, what a chaos of limbs and trunk, tailless, headless, nothing begun and nothing ended, would it not be? And yet scarcely more than that other moment of fifty or sixty years, were that our all? Each part throughout infinite diminution adapted to some other, and yet the whole a means to nothing--ends everywhere, and yet an end nowhere. [Compare the three last lines of "What is Life?" Is very life by consciousness unbounded? And all the thoughts, pains, joys of mortal breath, A war-embrace of wrestling life and death? _P. W._, 1893, p. 173.] [Sidenote: THAT INWARD EYE, THE BLISS OF SOLITUDE] The love of Nature is ever returned double to us, not only the delighter in our delight, but by linking our sweetest, but of themselves perishable feelings to distinct and vivid images, which we ourselves, at times, and which a thousand casual recollections, recall to our memory. She is the preserver, the treasurer of our joys. Even in sickness and nervous diseases, she has peopled our imagination with lovely forms which have sometimes overpowered the inward pain and brought with them their old sensations. And even when all men have seemed to desert us and the friend of our heart has passed on, with one glance from his "cold disliking eye"--yet even then the blue heaven spreads it out and bends over us, and the little tree still shelters us under its plumage as a second cope, a domestic firmament, and the low creeping gale will sigh in the heath-plant and soothe us by sound of sympathy till the lulled grief lose itself in fixed gaze on the purple heath-blossom, till the present beauty becomes a vision of memory. [Sidenote: HESPERUS] I have never seen the evening star set behind the mountains, but it was as if I had lost a hope out of my soul, as if a love were gone, and a sad memory only remained. O it was my earliest affection, the evening star! One of my first utterances in verse was an address to it as I was returning from the New River, and it looked newly bathed as well as I. I remember that the substance of the sonnet was that the woman whom I could ever love would surely have been emblemed in the pensive serene brightness of that planet, that we were both constellated to it, and would after death return thither. [Sidenote: TO THE EVENING STAR] TO THE EVENING STAR O meek attendant of Sol's setting blaze, I hail, sweet star, thy chaste effulgent glow; On thee full oft with fixed eye I gaze, Till I methinks, all spirit seem to grow. O first and fairest of the starry choir, O loveliest 'mid the daughters of the night, Must not the maid I love like thee inspire _Pure_ joy and _calm_ delight? Must she not be, as is thy placid sphere, Serenely brilliant? Whilst to gaze awhile Be all my wish 'mid Fancy's high career E'en till she quit this scene of earthly toil; Then Hope perchance might fondly sigh to join Her image in thy kindred orb, O star benign! [First printed from MS. _Poetical and Dramatic Works_, 1877-80; _Poetical Works_, 1893, p. 11.] [Sidenote: HEALTH, INDEPENDENCE, FRIENDSHIP] Where health is--at least, though pain be no stranger, yet when the breath can rise, and turn round like a comet at its perihelion in its ellipse, and again descend, instead of being a Sisiphus's stone; and the chest can expand as by its own volition and the head sits firm yet mobile aloft, like the vane of a tower on a hill shining in the blue air, and appropriating sunshine and moonlight whatever weight of clouds brood below--O when health and hope, and if not competence yet a debtless _unwealth, libera et læta paupertas_, is his, a man may have and love many friends, but yet, if indeed they be friends, he lives with each a several and individual life. [Sidenote: SELF-ABSORPTION AND SELFISHNESS] One source of calumny (I say _source_, because _allophoby_ from _hëautopithygmy_ is the only proper _cause_) may be found in this--every man's life exhibits two sorts of selfishness, those which are and those which are not objects of his own consciousness. _A_ is thinking, perhaps, of some plan in which he may benefit another, and during this absorption consults his own little bodily comforts blindly--occupies the best place at the fire-side, or asks at once, "Where am I to sit?" instead of first inquiring after the health of another. Now the error lies here, that _B_, in complaining of _A_, first takes for granted either that these are acts of conscious selfishness in _A_, or, if he allows the truth, yet considers them just as bad (and so perhaps they may be in a certain sense), but _forgets_ that his own life presents the same, judges of his own life exclusively by his own consciousness, that of another by conscious and unconscious in a lump. A monkey's anthropomorph attitudes we take for anthropic. [Sidenote: SELF-ADVERTISING PHILANTHROPY] Try not to become disgusted with active benevolence, or despondent because there is a _philanthropy-trade_. It is a sort of benefit-club of virtue, supported by the contributions of paupers in virtue, founded by genuine enthusiasts who gain a reputation for the thing--then slip in successors who know how to avail themselves of the influence and connections derived thereby--quite gratuitous, however, and bustling-active--but yet _bribe high_ to become the unpaid physicians of the dispensary at St. Luke's Hospital, and bow and scrape and intrigue, Carlyleise and Knappise for it. And such is the [case with regard to] the slave trade. The first abolitionists were the good men who laboured when the thing seemed desperate--it was virtue for its own sake. Then the quakers, Granville Sharp, etc.--then the restless spirits who are under the action of tyrannical oppression from images, and, gradually, mixed vanity and love of power with it--the politicians + saints = Wilberforce. Last come the Scotchmen--and Brougham is now canvassing more successfully for the seat of Wilberforce, who retires with great honour and regret, from infirmities of age and _enoughness_. It is just as with the great original benefactors and founders of useful plans, Raleigh, Sir Hugh Middleton, etc.--men of genius succeeded by sharpers, but who often can better carry on what they never could have first conceived--and this, too, by their very want of those qualities and virtues which were necessary to the discovery. [Sidenote: "BUT LOVE IS INDESTRUCTIBLE"] All mere passions, like spirits and apparitions, have their hour of cock-crow, in which they must vanish. But pure love is, therefore, no _mere_ passion; and it is a test of its being love, that no reason can be assigned _why_ it should disappear. Shall we not always, in this life at least, remain _animæ dimidiatæ_?--must not the moral reason always hold out the perfecting of each by union of both as good and lovely? With reason, therefore, and conscience let love vanish, but let these vanish only with our being. [Sidenote: THE FEINT OF THE SLEEPLESS] The sick and sleepless man, after the dawn of the fresh day, is fain to watch the smoke now from this and then from the other chimney of the town from his bed-chamber, as if willing to borrow from others that sense of a new day, of a discontinuity between the yesterday and the to-day which his own sensations had not afforded. [Compare Wordsworth's "Blessed Barrier Between Day and Day," Wordsworth's Third Sonnet to Sleep, _Poetical Works_, 1889, 354.] [Sidenote: FIRST THOUGHTS AND FRIENDSHIP] O what wisdom could I _talk_ to a YOUTH of genius and genial-heartedness! O how little could I teach! and yet, though despairing of success, I would attempt to enforce:--"Whenever you meet with a person of undoubted talents, more especially if a woman, and of apparent goodness, and yet you feel uncomfortable, and urged against your nature, and, therefore, probably in vain, to be on your guard--then take yourself to task and enquire what strong reason, moral or prudential, you have to form any intimacy or even familiarity with that person. If you after this (or moreover) detect any falsehood, or, what amounts to the same, proneness and quickness to look into, to analyse, to find out and represent evil or weakness in others (however this may be disguised even from the person's own mind by _candour_, [in] pointing out the good at the same time, by affectation of speculative truth, as psychologists, or of telling you all their thoughts as open-hearted friends), then let no reason but a strong and coercive one suffice to make you any other than as formal and distant acquaintance as circumstances will permit." And am I not now suffering, in part, for forcing my feelings into slavery to my notions, and intellectual admiration for a whole year and more with regard to ---- ? [So the MS.] If I played the hypocrite to myself, can I blame my fate that he has, at length, played the deceiver to me? Yet, God knows! I did it most virtuously!--not only without vanity or any self-interest of however subtle a nature, but from humility and a true delight in finding excellence of any kind, and a disposition to fall prostrate before it. [Sidenote: MILTON'S BLANK VERSE] To understand fully the mechanism, in order fully to feel the incomparable excellence of Milton's metre, we must make four tables, or a fourfold compartment, the first for the feet, single and composite, for which the whole twenty-six feet of the ancients will be found necessary; the second to note the construction of the feet, whether from different or from single words--for who does not perceive the difference to the ear between-- "Inextricable disobedience" and "To love or not: in this we stand or fall"-- yet both lines are composed of five iambics? The third, of the strength and position, the concentration or diffusion of the _emphasis_. Fourth, the length and position of the pauses. Then compare his narrative with the harangues. I have not noticed the ellipses, because they either do not affect the rhythm, or are not ellipses, but are comprehended in the feet. [Sidenote: APHORISMS OR PITHY SENTENCES] Shall I compare man to a clockwork Catamaran, destined to float on in a meaner element for so many moments or hours, and then to explode, scattering its _involucrum_ and itself to ascend into its proper element? I am persuaded that we love what is above us more than what is under us. Money--paper money--peace, war. How comes it that all men in all companies are talking of the depreciation, etc. etc.--and yet that a discourse on transubstantiation would not be a more withering sirocco than the attempt to explain philosophically the true cure and causes of that which interests all so vehemently? All convalescence is a resurrection, a palingenesy of our youth--"and loves the earth and all that live thereon with a new heart." But oh! the anguish to have the aching freshness of yearning and no answering object--only remembrances of faithless change--and unmerited alienation! The sun at evening holds up her fingers of both hands before her face that mortals may have one steady gaze--her transparent crimson fingers as when a lovely woman looks at the fire through her slender palms. O that perilous moment [for such there is] of a half-reconciliation, when the coldness and the resentment have been sustained too long. Each is drawing toward the other, but like glass in the mid-state between fusion and compaction a single sand will splinter it. Sometimes when I earnestly look at a beautiful object or landscape, it seems as if I were on the _brink_ of a fruition still denied--as if Vision were an _appetite_; even as a man would feel who, having put forth all his muscular strength in an act of prosilience, is at the very moment _held back_--he leaps and yet moves not from his place. Philosophy in general, but a plummet to so short a line that it can sound no deeper than the sounder's eyes can reach--and yet--in certain waters it may teach the exact depth and prevent a drowning. The midnight wild beasts staring at the hunter's torch, or when the hunter sees the tiger's eye glaring on the red light of his own torch. A summer-sailing on a still peninsulating river, and sweet as the delays of parting lovers. Sir F[rancis] B[urdett], like a Lapland witch drowned in a storm of her own raising. Mr. Cobbett, who, for a dollar, can raise what, offer him ten thousand dollars, he could not allay. [Sidenote: August, 1811] Why do you make a book? Because my hands can extend but a few score inches from my body; because my poverty keeps those hands empty when my heart aches to empty them; because my life is short, and [by reason of] my infirmities; and because a book, if it extends but to one edition, will probably benefit three or four score on whom I could not otherwise have acted, and, should it live and deserve to live, will make ample compensation for all the aforestated infirmities. O, but think only of the thoughts, feelings, radical impulses that have been implanted in how many thousands by the little ballad of the "Children in the Wood"! The sphere of Alexander the Great's agency is trifling compared with it. [Sidenote: PRESENTIMENTS] One of the strangest and most painful peculiarities of my nature (unless others have the same, and, like me, hide it, from the same inexplicable feeling of causeless shame and sense of a sort of guilt, joined with the apprehension of being feared and shrunk from as a something transnatural) I will here record--and my motive, or, rather, impulse, to do this seems an effort to eloign and abalienate it from the dark adyt of my own being by a visual outness, and not the wish for others to see it. It consists in a sudden second sight of some hidden vice, past, present or to come, of the person or persons with whom I am about to form a close intimacy--which never deters me, but rather (as all these transnaturals) urges me on, just like the feeling of an eddy-torrent to a swimmer. I see it as a vision, feel it as a prophecy, not as one _given_ me by any other being, but as an act of my own spirit, of the absolute _noumenon_, which, in so doing, seems to have offended against some law of its being, and to have acted the traitor by a commune with full consciousness independent of the tenure or inflected state of association, cause and effect, &c. [Sidenote: THE FIXED STARS OF TRUTH] As the most far-sighted eye, even aided by the most powerful telescope, will not make a fixed star appear larger than it does to an ordinary and unaided sight, even so there are heights of knowledge and truth sublime which all men in possession of the ordinary human understanding may comprehend as much and as well as the profoundest philosopher and the most learned theologian. Such are the truths relating to the _logos_ and its oneness with the self-existent Deity, and of the humanity of Christ and its union with the _logos_. It is idle, therefore, to refrain from preaching on these subjects, provided only such preparations have been made as no man can be a Christian without. The misfortune is that the majority are Christians only in name, and by birth only. Let them but once, according to St. James, have looked down steadfastly into the _law_ of liberty or freedom in their own souls (the will and the conscience), and they are capable of whatever God has chosen to reveal. [Sidenote: C'EST MAGNIFIQUE, MAIS CE N'EST PAS LA POÉSIE] A long line of (!!) marks of admiration would be its aptest symbol! It has given me the eye-ache with dazzlement, the brain-ache with wonderment, the stomach and all-ache with the shock and after-eddy of contradictory feelings. Splendour is there, splendour everywhere--distinct the figures as vivid--skill in construction of events--beauties numberless of form and thought. But there is not anywhere the "one low piping note more sweet than all"--there is not the divine vision of the poet, which gives the full fruition of sight without the effort--and where the feelings of the heart are struck, they are awakened only to complain of and recoil from the occasion. O! it is mournful to see and wonder at such a marvel of labour, erudition and talent concentered into such a burning-glass of factitious power, and yet to know that it is all in vain--like the Pyramids, it shows what can be done, and, like them, leaves in painful and almost scornful perplexity, why it was done, for what or whom. [Sidenote: SILENCE IS GOLDEN September 29th, 1812] Grand rule in case of quarrels between friends or lovers--never to say, hint, or do _anything_ in a moment of anger or indignation or sense of ill-treatment, but to be passive--and even if the fit should recur the next morning, still to delay it--in short, however plausible the motive may be, yet if you have loved the persons concerned, not to say it till their love has returned toward you, and your feelings are the same as they were before. And for this plain reason--you knew this before, and yet because you were in kindness, you never felt an impulse to speak of it--then, surely, not now when you may perpetuate what would otherwise be fugitive. [Sidenote: THE DEVIL: A RECANTATION] "That not one of the _peculiarities_ of Christianity, no one point in which, being clearly different from other religions or philosophies, it would have, at least, the _possibility_ of being superior to all, is retained by the modern Unitarians." This remark is occasioned by my reflections on the fact that Christianity _exclusively_ has asserted the _positive_ being of evil or sin, "of sin the exceeding sinfulness"--and thence exclusively the _freedom_ of the creature, as that, the clear intuition of which is, both, the result and the accompaniment of redemption. The nearest philosophy to Christianity is the Platonic, and it is observable that this is the mere antipodes of the Hartleio-Lockian held by the Unitarians; but the true honours of Christianity would be most easily manifested by a comparison even with that "_nec pari nec secundo_," but yet "_omnibus aliis propriore_," the Platonic! With what contempt, even in later years, have I not contemplated the doctrine of a devil! but now I see the intimate connection, if not as existent _person_, yet as essence and symbol with Christianity--and that so far from being identical with Manicheism, it is the surest antidote (that is, rightly understood). CHAPTER IX _1814-1818_ Lynx amid moles! had I stood by thy bed, Be of good cheer, meek soul! I would have said: I see a hope spring from that humble fear. S. T. C. [Sidenote: SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY] The first man of science was he who looked into a thing, not to learn whether it could furnish him with food, or shelter, or weapons, or tools, or ornaments, or _playwiths_, but who sought to know it for the gratification of _knowing_; while he that first sought to _know_ in order to _be_ was the first philosopher. I have read of two rivers passing through the same lake, yet all the way preserving their streams visibly distinct--if I mistake not, the Rhone and the Adar, through the Lake of Geneva. In a far finer distinction, yet in a subtler union, such, for the contemplative mind, are the streams of knowing and being. The lake is formed by the two streams in man and nature as it exists in and for man; and up this lake the philosopher sails on the junction-line of the constituent streams, still pushing upward and sounding as he goes, towards the common fountain-head of both, the mysterious source whose being is knowledge, whose knowledge is being--the adorable I AM IN THAT I AM. [Sidenote: PETRARCH'S EPISTLES] I have culled the following extracts from the First Epistle of the First Book of Petrarch's Epistle, that "Barbato Salmonensi." [Basil, 1554, i. 76.] Vultûs, heu, blanda severi Majestas, placidæque decus pondusque senectæ! Non omnia terræ Obruta! vivit amor, vivit dolor! Ora negatum Dulcia conspicere; at flere et meminisse relictum est. Jamque observatio vitæ Multa dedit--lugere nihil, ferre omnia; jamque Paulatim lacrymas rerum experientia tersit. [Heu! et spem quoque tersit] Pectore nunc gelido calidos miseremur amantes, Jamque arsisse pudet. Veteres tranquilla tumultus Mens horret, relegensque alium putat esse locutum. But, indeed, the whole of this letter deserves to be read and translated. Had Petrarch lived a century later, and, retaining all his _substantiality_ of head and heart, added to it the elegancies and manly politure of Fracastorius, Flaminius, Vida and their corrivals, this letter would have been a classical gem. To a translator of genius, and who possessed the English language as unembarrassed property, the defects of style in the original would present no obstacle; nay, rather an honourable motive in the well-grounded hope of rendering the version a finer poem than the original. [Twelve lines of Petrarch's Ep. _Barbato Salmonensi_ are quoted in the _Biog. Liter._ at the end of chapter x.; and a portion of the same poem was prefixed as a motto to "Love Poems" in the _Sibylline Leaves_, 1817, and the editions of _P. W._, 1828-9. _Coleridge's Works_, Harper & Brother, 1853, iii. 314. See, too, _P. W._, 1893, _Editor's Note_, pp. 614, 634.] [Sidenote: CORRUPTIO OPTIMI PESSIMA] A fine writer of bad principles or a fine poem on a hateful subject, such as the "Alexis" of Virgil or the "Bathyllus" of Anacreon, I compare to the flowers and leaves of the Stramonium. The flowers are remarkable sweet, but such is the fetid odour of the leaves that you start back from the one through disgust at the other. [Sidenote: A BLISS TO BE ALIVE] Zephyrs that captive roam among these boughs, Strive ye in vain to thread the leafy maze? Or have ye lim'd your wings with honey-dew? Unfelt ye murmur restless o'er my head And rock the feeding drone or bustling bees That blend their eager, earnest, happy hum! [Sidenote: WHAT MAN HAS MADE OF MAN] Gravior terras infestat Echidna, Cur sua vipereæ jaculantur toxica linguæ Atque homini sit homo serpens. O prodiga culpæ Germina, naturæque uteri fatalia monstra! Queis nimis innocuo volupe est in sanguine rictus Tingere, fraternasque fibras cognataque per se Viscera, et arrosæ deglubere funera famæ. Quæ morum ista lues! 25th Feb. 1819 Five years since the preceding lines were written on this leaf!! Ah! how yet more intrusively has the hornet scandal since then scared away the bee of poetic thought and silenced its "eager, earnest, happy hum"! [Sidenote: SAVE ME FROM MY FRIENDS] The sore evil now so general, alas! only not universal, of supporting our religion, just as a keen party-man would support his party in Parliament. All must be defended which can give a momentary advantage over any one opponent, no matter how naked it lays the cause open to another, perhaps, more formidable opponent--no matter how incompatible the two assumptions may be. We rejoice, not because our religion is the truth, but because the truth appears to be our religion. Talk with any dignified orthodoxist in the sober way of farther preferment and he will concrete all the grounds of Socinianism, talk Paley and the Resurrection as a proof and as the only proper _proof_ of our immortality, will give to external evidence and miracles the same self-grounded force, the same fundamentality. Even so the old Puritans felt towards the Papists. Because so much was wrong, everything was wrong, and by denying all reverence to the fathers and to the constant tradition of the Catholic Churches, they undermined the wall of the city in order that it might fall on the heads of the Romanists--thoughtless that by this very act they made a Breach for the Arian and Socinian to enter. [Sidenote: DRIP DRIP DRIP DRIP] The ear-deceiving imitation of a steady soaking rain, while the sky is in full uncurtainment of sprinkled stars and milky stream and dark blue interspace. The rain had held up for two hours or more, but so deep was the silence of the night that the _drip_ from the leaves of the garden trees _copied_ a steady shower. [Sidenote: REMEDIUM AMORIS] So intense are my affections, and so despotically am I governed by them (not indeed so much as I once was, but still far, far too much) that I should be the most wretched of men if my love outlived my esteem. But this, thank Heaven! is the antidote. The bitterer the tear of anguish at the clear detection of misapplied attachment, the calmer I am afterwards. It is a funeral tear for an object no more. [Sidenote: THE CONCLUSION OF THE WHOLE MATTER] February 23, 1816. I thought I expressed my thoughts well when I said, "There is no superstition but what has a religion as its base [or radical], and religion is only reason, seen perspectively by a finite intellect." [Sidenote: THE POWER OF WORDS] It is a common remark, in medical books for instance, that there are certain niceties which words, from their always abstract and so far general nature, cannot convey. Now this I am disposed to deny, that is, in any comparative sense. In my opinion there is nothing which, being equally known as any other thing, may not be conveyed by words with equal clearness. But the question of the source of the remark is, to whom? If I say that in jaundice the skin looks yellow, my words have no meaning for a man who has no sense of colours. Words are but remembrances, though remembrance may be so excited, as by the _a priori_ powers of the mind to produce a _tertium aliquid_. The utmost, therefore that should be said is that every additament of perception requires a new word, which (like all other words) will be intelligible to all who have seen the subject recalled by it, and who have learnt that such a word or phrase was appropriated to it; and this may be attained either by a new word, as _platinum_, _titanium_, _osmium_, etc., for the new metals, or an epithet peculiarising the application of an old word. For instance, no one can have attended to the brightness of the eyes in a healthy person in high spirits and particularly delighted by some occurrence, and that of the eye of a person deranged or predisposed to derangement, without observing the difference; and, in this case, the phrase "a maniacal glitter of the eye" conveys as clear a notion as that jaundice is marked by yellow. There is, doubtless, a difference, but no other than that of the _commencement_ of particular knowledge by the application of universal knowledge (that is to all who have the senses and common faculties of men), and the next step of knowledge when it particularises itself. But the defect is not in words, but in the imperfect knowledge of those to whom they are addressed. Then proof is obvious. Desire a physician or metaphysician, or a lawyer to mention the most perspicuous book in their several knowledges. Then bid them read that book to a sensible carpenter or shoemaker, and a great part will be as unintelligible as a technical treatise on carpentering to the lawyer or physician, who had not been brought up in a carpenter's shop or looked at his tools. I have dwelt on this for more reasons than one: first, because a remark that seems at first sight the same, namely, that "everything clearly perceived may be conveyed in simple common language," without taking in the "to whom?" is the disease of the age--an arrogant pusillanimity, a hatred of all information that cannot be obtained without thinking; and, secondly, because the pretended imperfection of language is often a disguise of muddy thoughts; and, thirdly, because to the mind itself it is made an excuse for indolence in determining what the fact or truth is which is the premise. For whether there does or does not exist a term in our present store of words significant thereof--if not, a word must be made--and, indeed, all wise men have so acted from Moses to Aristotle and from Theophrastus to Linnæus. The sum, therefore, is this. The conveyal of knowledge by words is in direct proportion to the stores and faculties of observation (internal or external) of the person who hears or reads them. And this holds equally whether I distinguish the green grass from the white lily and the yellow crocus, which all who have eyes understand, because all are equal to me in the knowledge of the facts signified--or of the difference between the apprehensive, perceptive, conceptive, and conclusive powers which I might [try to enunciate to] Doctors of Divinity and they would translate the words by _Abra Ca Dabra_. [Sidenote: FLOWERS OF SPEECH Sunday, April 30, 1816] Reflections on my four gaudy flower-pots, compared with the former flower-poems. After a certain period, crowded with counterfeiters of poetry, and illustrious with true poets, there is formed for common use a vast _garden_ of language, all the showy and all the odorous words and clusters of words are brought together, and to be plucked by mere mechanic and passive memory. In such a state, any man of common poetical reading, having a strong desire (to be?--O no! but--) to be thought a poet will present a flower-pot gay and gaudy, but the _composition_! That is wanting. We carry on judgment of times and circumstances into our pleasures. A flower-pot which would have enchanted us before flower gardens were common, for the very beauty of the component flowers, will be rightly condemned as common-place, out of place (for such is a common-place poet)--it involves a contradiction both in terms and thought. So Homer's Juno, Minerva, etc., are read with delight--but Blackmore? This is the reason why the judgment of those who are newlings in poetic reading is not to be relied on. The positive, which belongs to all, is taken as the comparative, which is the individual's praise. A good ear which had never heard music--with what raptures would it praise one of Shield's or Arne's Pasticcios and Centos! But it is the human mind it praises, not the individual. Hence it may happen (I believe has happened) that fashionableness may produce popularity. "The Beggar's Petition" is a fair instance, and what if I dared to add Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard"? [Sidenote: SPIRITUAL BLINDNESS] Men who direct what they call their understanding or common-sense by rules abstracted from sensuous experience in moral and super-sensuous truths remind one of the zemmi (mus [Greek: typhlos] or _typhlus_), "a kind of rat in which the skin (conjunctiva) is not even transparent over the eye, but is there covered with hairs as in the rest of the body. The eye (= the understanding), which is scarcely the size of the poppy-seed, is perfectly useless." An eel (_muroena coecilia_) and the myxine (_gastobranchus coecus_) are blind in the same manner, through the opacity of the conjunctiva. [Sidenote: INSECTS] Sir G. Staunton asserts that, in the forests of Java, spiders' webs are found of so strong a texture as to require a sharp-cutting instrument to make way through them. Pity that he did not procure a specimen and bring it home with him. It would be a pleasure to see a sailing-boat rigged with them--twisting the larger threads into ropes and weaving the smaller into a sort of silk canvas resembling the indestructible white cloth of the arindy or _palma Christi_ silkworm. The _Libellulidæ_ fly all ways without needing to turn their bodies--onward, backward, right and left--with more than swallow-rivalling rapidity of wing, readiness of evolution, and indefatigable continuance. The merry little gnats (_Tipulidæ minimæ_) I have myself often watched in an April shower, evidently "dancing the hayes" in and out between the falling drops, unwetted, or, rather, un-down-dashed by rocks of water many times larger than their whole bodies. [Sidenote: OF STYLE Sunday, January 25, 1817] A valuable remark has just struck me on reading Milton's beautiful passage on true eloquence, his apology for Smectymnuus. "For me, reader, though I cannot say," etc.--first, to shew the vastly greater numbers of admirable passages, in our elder writers, that may be gotten by heart as the most exquisite poems; and to point out the great intellectual advantage of this reading, over the gliding smoothly on through a whole volume of equability. But still, it will be said, there is an antiquity, an oddness in the style. Granted; but hear this same passage from the Smectymnuus, or this, or this. Every one would know at first hearing that they were not written by Gibbon, Hume, Johnson, or Robertson. But why? Are they not pure English? Aye! incomparably more so! Are not the words precisely appropriate, so that you cannot change them without changing the force and meaning? Aye! But are they not even now intelligible to man, woman, and child? Aye! there is no riddle-my-ree in them. What, then, is it? The unnatural, false, affected style of the moderns that makes sense and simplicity _oddness_. [Sidenote: OBDUCTÂ FRONTE SENECTUS] Even to a sense of shrinking, I felt in this man's face and figure what a shape comes to view when age has dried away the mask from a bad, depraved man, and flesh and colour no longer conceal or palliate the traits of the countenance. Then shows itself the indurated nerve; stiff and rigid in all its ugliness the inflexible muscle; then quiver the naked lips, the cold, the loveless; then blinks the turbid eye, whose glance no longer pliant _fixes_, abides in its evil expression. Then lie on the powerless forehead the wrinkles of suspicion and fear, and conscience-stung watchfulness. Contrast this with the countenance of Mrs. Gillman's mother as she once described it to me. This for "Puff and Slander,"[G] Highgate, 1817. [Sidenote: A "KINGDOM-OF-HEAVENITE"] When the little creature has slept out its sleep and stilled its hunger at the mother's bosom (that very hunger a mode of love all made up of kisses), and coos, and wantons with pleasure, and laughs, and plays bob-cherry with his mother, that is all, all to it. It understands not either itself or its mother, but it clings to her, and has an undeniable right to cling to her, seeks her, thanks her, loves her without forethought and without an afterthought. [Sidenote: A DIVINE EPIGRAM] _Nec mihi, Christe, tua sufficiunt sine te, nec tibi placent mea sine me_, exclaims St. Bernard. _Nota Bene._--This single epigram is worth (shall I say--O far rather--is a sufficient antidote to) a waggon-load of Paleyan moral and political philosophies. [Sidenote: SERIORES ROSÆ] We all look up to the blue sky for comfort, but nothing appears there, nothing comforts, nothing answers us, and so we die. Lie with the ear upon a dear friend's grave. On the same man, as in a vineyard, grow far different grapes--on the sunny south nectar, and on the bleak north verjuice. The blossom gives not only future fruit, but present honey. We may take the one, the other nothing injured. Like some spendthrift Lord, after we have disposed of nature's great masterpiece and [priceless] heirloom, the wisdom of innocence, we hang up as a poor copy our [own base] cunning. [Sidenote: A PLEA FOR SCHOLASTIC TERMS] The revival of classical literature, like all other revolutions, was not an unmixed good. One evil was the passion for pure Latinity, and a consequent contempt for the barbarism of the scholastic style and terminology. For awhile the schoolmen made head against their assailants; but, alas! all the genius and eloquence of the world was against them, and by an additional misfortune the scholastic logic was professed by those who had no other attainments, namely, the monks, and these, from monkishness, were the enemies of all genius and liberal knowledge. They were, of course, laughed out of the field as soon as they lost the power of aiding their logic by the post-predicaments of dungeon, fire, and faggot. Henceforward speculative philosophy must be written classically, that is, without technical terms--therefore popularly--and the inevitable consequence was that those sciences only were progressive which were permitted by the apparent as well as real necessity of the case to have a scientific terminology--as mathesis, geometry, astronomy and so forth--while metaphysic sank and died, and an empirical highly superficial psychology took its place. And so it has remained in England to the present day. A man must have felt the pain of being compelled to express himself either laxly or paraphrastically (which latter is almost as great an impediment in intellectual construction as the translation of letters and symbols into the thought they represent would be in Algebra), in order to understand how much a metaphysician suffers from not daring to adopt the _ivitates_ and _eitates_ of the schoolmen as objectivity, subjectivity, negativity, positivity. April 29, 1817, Tuesday night. [Sidenote: THE BODY OF THIS DEATH] The sentimental _cantilena_ respecting the benignity and loveliness of nature--how does it not sink before the contemplation of the pravity of nature, on whose reluctance and inaptness a form is forced (the mere reflex of that form which is itself absolute substance!) and which it struggles against, bears but for a while and then sinks with the alacrity of self-seeking into dust or _sanies_, which falls abroad into endless nothings or creeps and cowers in poison or explodes in havock! What is the beginning? what the end? And how evident an alien is the supernatural in the brief interval! [Sidenote: SPIRITUALISM AND MYSTICISM] There are many, alas! too many, either born or who have become deaf and dumb. So there are too many who have perverted the religion of the spirit into the superstition of spirits that mutter and mock and mow, like deaf and dumb idiots. Plans of teaching the deaf and dumb have been invented. For these the deaf and dumb owe thanks, and we for their sakes. _Homines sumus et nihil humani a nobis alienum._ But does it follow, therefore, that in _all_ schools these plans of teaching should be followed? Yet in the other case this is insisted on--and the Holy Ghost must not be our guide because mysticism and ghosts may come in under this name. Why? Because the deaf and dumb have been promoted to superintendents of education at large for all! [Sidenote: IDEALISM AND SUPERSTITION] Save only in that in which I have a right to demand of every man that he should be able to understand me, the experience or inward witnessing of the conscience, and in respect of which every man in real life (even the very disputant who affects doubt or denial in the moment of metaphysical arguing) would hold himself insulted by the supposition that he did not understand it--save in this only, and in that which if it be at all must be _unique_, and therefore cannot be supported by an analogue, and which, if it be at all, must be first, and therefore cannot have an antecedent, and therefore may be _monstrated_, but cannot be _de_monstrated.--I am no ghost-seer, I am no believer in apparitions. I do not contend for indescribable sensations, nor refer to, much less ground my convictions on, blind feelings or incommunicable experiences, but far rather contend against these superstitions in the mechanic sect, and impeach you as guilty, habitually and systematically guilty, of the same. Guilty, I say, of superstitions, which at worst are but exceptions and _fits_ in the poor self-misapprehending pietists, with whom, under the name mystics, you would fain confound and discredit _all_ who receive and worship God in spirit and in truth, and in the former as the only possible mode of the latter. According to your own account, your own scheme, you know nothing but your own sensations, indescribable inasmuch as they are sensations--for the appropriate expression even of which we must fly not merely to the indeclinables in the lowest parts of speech, but to human articulations that only (like musical notes) _stand for_ inarticulate sounds--the [Greek: oi, oi, papai] of the Greek tragedies, or, rather, Greek oratorios. You see nothing, but only by a sensation that conjures up an image in your own brain, or optic nerve (as in a nightmare), have an apparition, in consequence of which, as again in the nightmare, you are _forced_ to believe for the moment, and are _inclined_ to infer the existence of a corresponding reality out of your brain, but by what intermediation you cannot even form an intelligible conjecture. During the years of ill-health from disturbed digestion, I saw a host of apparitions, and heard them too--but I attributed them to an act in my brain. You, according to your own showing, see and hear nothing but apparitions in your brain, and strangely attribute them to things that _are_ outside your skull. Which of the two notions is most like the philosopher, which the superstitionist? The philosopher who makes my apparitions nothing but apparitions--a brain-image nothing more than a brain-image--and affirm _nihil super stare_--or you and yours who vehemently contend that it is but a brain-image, and yet cry, "_ast superstitit aliquid. Est super stitio alicujus quod in externo, id est, in apparenti non apparet_." What is outness, external and the like, but either the generalisation of apparence or the result of a given degree, a comparative intensity of the same? "I see it in my mind's eye," exclaims Hamlet, when his thoughts were in his own purview the same phantom, yea! in a higher intensity, became his father's ghost and marched along the platform. I quoted your own exposition, and dare you with these opinions charge others with superstition? You who deny aught permanent in our being, you with whom the soul, yea, the soul of the soul, our conscience and morality, are but the _tune_ from a fragile barrel-organ played by air and water, and whose life, therefore, must of course be a _pointing_ to--as of a Marcellus or a Hamlet--"Tis here! 'Tis gone!" Were it possible that I could actually believe such a system, I should not be scared from striking it, from its being so _majestical_! [Sidenote: THE GREATER DAMNATION] The old law of England punishes those who dig up the bones of the dead for superstitious or magical purposes, that is, in order to injure the living. What then are they guilty of who uncover the dormitories of the departed, and throw their souls into hell, in order to cast odium on a living truth? [Sidenote: DARWIN'S BOTANICAL GARDEN] Darwin possesses the _epidermis_ of poetry but not the _cutis_; the _cortex_ without the _liber_, _alburnum_, _lignum_, or _medulla_. And no wonder! for the inner bark or _liber_, alburnum, and wood are one and the same substance, in different periods of existence. [Sidenote: SEVENTEEN HUNDRED AND SIXTY YARDS NOT EXACTLY A MILE] "It is a mile and a half in height." "How much is that in yards or feet?" The mind rests satisfied in producing a correspondency in its own thoughts, and in the exponents of those thoughts. This seems to be a matter purely analytic, not yet properly synthetic. It is rather an interchange of equivalent acts, but not the same acts. In the yard I am prospective; in the mile I seem to be retrospective. Come, a hundred strides more, and we shall have come a mile. This, if true, may be a subtlety, but is it necessarily a trifle? May not many common but false conclusions originate in the neglect of this distinction--in the confounding of objective and subjective logic? [Sidenote: OF A TOO WITTY BOOK] I like salt to my meat so well that I can scarce say grace over meat without salt. But salt to one's salt! Ay! a sparkling, dazzling, lit-up saloon or subterranean minster in a vast mine of rock-salt--what of it?--full of white pillars and aisles and altars of eye-dazzling salt. Well, what of it?--'twere an uncomfortable lodging or boarding-house--in short, _all my eye_. Now, I am content with a work if it be but my eye and Betty Martin, because, having never heard any charge against the author of the adage, candour obliges me to conclude that Eliza Martin is "sense for certain." In short, never was a metaphor more lucky, apt, ramescent, and fructiferous--a hundred branches, and each hung with a different graft-fruit--than salt as typical of wit--the uses of both being the same, not to nourish, but to season and preserve nourishment. Yea! even when there is plenty of good substantial meat to incorporate with, stout aitch-bone and buttock, still there may be too much; and they who confine themselves to such meals will contract a scorbutic habit of intellect (_i.e._, a scurvy taste), and, with loose teeth and tender gums, become incapable of chewing and digesting hard matters of mere plain thinking. [Sidenote: SPOOKS] It is thus that the Glanvillians reason. First, they assume the facts as objectively as if the question related to the experimentable of our senses. Secondly, they take the imaginative possibility--that is, that the [assumed] facts involve no contradiction, [as if it were] a scientific possibility. And, lastly, they [advocate] them as proofs of a spiritual world and our own immortality. This last [I hold to] be the greatest insult to conscience and the greatest incongruity with the objects of religion. N.B.--It is amusing, in all ghost stories, etc., that the recorders are "the farthest in the world from being credulous," or "as far from believing such things as any man." If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke--Aye! and what then? The more exquisite and delicate a flower of joy, the tenderer must be the hand that plucks it. Floods and general inundations render for the time even the purest springs turbid. For compassion a human heart suffices; but for full, adequate sympathy with joy, an angel's. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote G: A projected satire, of which, perhaps, the lines headed "A Character" were an instalment. See _P. W._, 1893, pp. 195-642. _Letters of S. T. C._, 1895, ii. 631.] CHAPTER X _1819-1828_ Where'er I find the Good, the True, the Fair, I ask no names--God's spirit dwelleth there! The unconfounded, undivided Three, Each for itself, and all in each, to see In man and Nature, is Philosophy. S. T. C. [Sidenote: THE MOON'S HALO AN EMBLEM OF HOPE] The moon, rushing onward through the coursing clouds, advances like an indignant warrior through a fleeing army; but the amber halo in which she moves--O! it is a circle of Hope. For what she leaves behind her has not lost its radiance as it is melting away into oblivion, while, still, the other semi-circle catches the rich light at her approach, and heralds her ongress. [Sidenote: A COMPLEX VEXATION] It is by strength of mind that we are to untwist the tie or copula of the besom of affliction, which not nature but the strength of imagination had twisted round it, and thus resolve it into its component twigs, and conquer in detail "one down and t'other come on"! _Dividendo diminuitur_--which forms the true ground of the advantage accruing from communicating our griefs to another. We enable ourselves to see them each in its true magnitude. [Sidenote: THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF ENGLAND] After re-perusal of my inefficient, yet not feeble efforts in behalf of the poor little white slaves in the cotton-factories, I ask myself, "But still are we not better than the other nations of Christendom?" Yes--Perhaps. I don't know. I dare not affirm it. Better than the French certainly! Mammon _versus_ Moloch and Belial. But Sweden, Norway, Germany, the Tyrol? No. [Sidenote: THE MEED OF PRAISE] There is a species of applause scarcely less genial to a poet, whether bard, musician, or artist, than the vernal warmth to the feathered songsters during their nest-building or incubation--a sympathy, an expressed hope, that is the open air in which the poet breathes, and without which the sense of power sinks back on itself like a sigh heaved up from the tightened chest of a sick man. Alas! alas! alas! [Sidenote: THE GREAT UNKNOWN] Anonymity is now an artifice to acquire celebrity, as a black veil is worn to make a pair of bright eyes more conspicuous. [Sidenote: BOOK-LEARNING FOR LEGISLATORS] For the same reasons that we cannot now act by impulses, but must think, so now must every legislator be a man of sound book-learning, because he cannot, if he would, think or act from the simple dictates of unimproved but undepraved common sense. Newspapers, reviews, and the conversation of men who derive their opinions from newspapers and reviews will secure for him artificial opinions, if he does not secure them for himself from purer and more authentic sources. There is now no such being as a country gentleman. Like their relation, the Dodo, the race is extinct, or if by accident one has escaped, it belongs to the Museum, not to active life, or the purposes of active life. [Sidenote: THEISM AND ATHEISM] The more I read and reflect on the arguments of the truly philosophical theists and atheists, the more I feel convinced that the ultimate difference is a moral rather than an intellectual one, that the result is an x y z, an acknowledged insufficiency of the known to account for itself, and, therefore, a something unknown--that to which, while the atheist leaves it a blank in the understanding, the theist dedicates his noblest feelings of love and awe, and with which, by a moral syllogism, he connects and unites his conscience and actions. For the words goodness and wisdom are clearly only reflexes of the effect, just as when we call the unknown cause of cold and heat by the name of its effects, and _know_ nothing further. For if we mean that a Being like man, with human goodness and intellect, only magnified, is the cause, that is, that the First Cause is an immense man (as according to Swedenborg and Zinzendorf), then come the insoluble difficulties of the incongruity of qualities whose very essence implies finiteness, with a Being _ex hypothesi_ infinite. [Sidenote: THE MIND'S EYE] An excellent instance of the abstraction [from objects of the sense] that results from the attention converging to any one object, is furnished by the oily rags, broken saucers, greasy phials, dabs, crusts, and smears of paints in the laboratory of a Raphael, or a Claude Lorraine, or a Van Huysum, or any other great master of the beautiful and becoming. In like manner, the mud and clay in the modelling hand of a Chantrey--what are they to him whose total soul is awake, in his eye as a subject, and before his eye as some ideal of beauty _objectively_? The various objects of the senses are as little the objects of _his_ senses, as the ink with which the "Lear" was written, existed in the consciousness of a Shakspere. [Sidenote: A LAND OF BLISS] The humming-moth with its glimmer-mist of rapid unceasing motion before the humble-bee within the flowering bells and cups--and the eagle _level_ with the clouds, himself a cloudy speck, surveys the vale from mount to mount. From the cataract flung on the vale, the broadest fleeces of the snowy foam light on the bank flowers or the water-lilies in the stiller pool below. [Sidenote: TIME AND ETERNITY] The defect of Archbishop Leighton's reasoning is the taking eternity for a sort of time, a _baro major_, a baron of beef or quarter of lamb, out of which and off which time is cut, as a brisket or shoulder--while, even in common discourse, without any design of sounding the depth of the truth or of weighing the words expressing it in the hair-balance of metaphysics, it would be more convenient to consider eternity the _simul et totum_ as the _antitheton_ of time. [Sidenote: THE LITERARY STERILITY OF ISLAMISM] The extraordinary florency of letters under the Spanish Caliphate in connection with the character and capabilities of Mohammedanism has never yet been treated as its importance requires. Halim II, founder of the University of Cordova, and of numerous colleges and libraries throughout Spain, is said to have possessed a library of six hundred thousand MSS., the catalogue filling forty-four volumes. Nor were his successors behind him in zeal and munificence. That the prime article of Islamism, the uni-personality of God, is one cause of the downfall, say rather of the merely meteoric existence of their literary age, I am persuaded, but the exclusive scene (in Spain) suggests many interesting views. With a learned class Mohammedanism could not but pass into Deism, and Deism never did, never can, establish itself as a religion. It is the doctrine of the tri-unity that connects Christianity with philosophy, gives a positive religion a specific interest to the philosopher, and that of redemption to the moralist and psychologist. Predestination, in the plenitude, in which it is equivalent to fatalism, was the necessary alternative and _succedaneum_ of Redemption, and the Incarnation the only preservative against pantheism on one side, and anthropomorphism on the other. The Persian (Europeans in Asia) form of Mohammedanism is very striking in this point of view. [Sidenote: THE SPIRIT OF A PEOPLE] It is not by individual character that an individual can derive just conclusions respecting a community or an age. Conclusions so drawn are the excuse of selfish, narrow and pusillanimous statesmen, who, by dwelling on the kindred baseness or folly of the persons with whom they come in immediate contact, lose all faith in human nature, ignorant that even in these a spark is latent which would light up and consume the worthless overlay in a national moment. The spirit of a race is the character of a people, the sleep or the awakening of which depends on a few minds, pre-ordained for this purpose, and sometimes by the mere removal of the dead weight of a degenerate Court or nobility pressing on the spring. So I doubt not would it be with the Turks, were the Porte and its seraglio conquered by Russia. But the spirit of a race ought never to be supposed extinct, but on the other hand no more or other ought to be expected than the race contains in itself. The true cause of the irrecoverable fall of Rome is to be found in the fact, that Rome was a city, a handful of men that multiplied its subjects incomparably faster than its citizens, so that the latter were soon dilute and lost in the former. On a similar principle colonists in modern times degenerate by _excision_ from their race (the ancient colonies were _buds_). This, I think, applies to the Neapolitans and most of the Italian States. A nest of republics keep each other alive; but a patchwork of principalities has the effect of excision by insulation, or rather by compressure. How long did the life of Germany doze under these ligatures! Yet did we not _despair wrongfully_ of the people? The spirit of the race survived, of which literature was a part. Hence I dare not despair of Greece, because it has been barbarised and enslaved, but not split up into puny independent governments under Princes of their own race. The Neapolitans have always been a conquered people, and degenerates in the original sense of the word, _de genere_--they have lost their race, though what it was is uncertain. Lastly, the individual in all things is the prerogative of the divine knowledge. What it is, our eyes can see only by what it has in common, and this can only be seen in communities where neither excision, nor ligature, nor commixture exists. Despotism and superstition will not extinguish the character of a race, as Russia testifies. But again, take care to understand that character, and expect no other fruit than the root contains in its nature. [Sidenote: THE FLIGHT OF MOHAMMED] Had I proceeded, in concert with R. Southey, with the "Flight and Return of Mohammed," [1799] I had intended to introduce a disputation between Mahomet, as the representative of unipersonal Theism with the Judaico-Christian machinery of angels, genii, and prophets, an idolater with his gods, heroes, and spirits of the departed mighty, and a fetish-worshipper who adored the invisible alone, and held no religion common to all men or any number of men other than as they chanced at the same moment to be acted on by the same influence--even as when a hundred ant-hills are in motion under the same burst of sunshine. And, still, chiefly for the sake of the last scheme, I should like to do something of the kind. My enlightened fetish-divine would have been an Okenist, a zoo-magnetist and (a priest of) the night-side of Nature. [For the fragment entitled "Mahomet," see _P. W._, 1893, p. 139, and editor's _Note_, p. 615.] [Sidenote: PRUDENCE _VERSUS_ FRIENDSHIP] Among the countless arguments against the Paleyans state, this too--Can a wise moral legislator have made _prudence_ the true principle-ground, and guide of moral conduct, where in almost all cases in which there is contemplation to act wrong the first appearances of prudence are in favour of immorality, and, in order to ground the contrary on a principle of prudence, it is necessary to refine, to calculate, to look far onward into an uncertain future? Is this a guide, or primary guide, that for ever requires a guide against itself? Is it not a strange system which sets prudence against prudence? Compare this with the Law of Conscience--Is it not its specific character to be immediate, positive, unalterable? In short, _a priori_, state the requisites of a moral guide, and apply them first to prudence, and then to the law of pure reason or conscience, and ask if we need fear the result if the Judge is pure from all bribes and prejudices. What then are the real dictates of prudence as drawn from every man's experience in late manhood, and so lured from the intoxication of youth, hope, and love? How cold, how dead'ning, what a dire vacuum they would leave in the soul, if the high and supreme sense of duty did not form a root out of which new prospects budded. What, I say, is the clear dictate of prudence in the matter of friendship? Assuredly to _like_ only, and never to be so attached as to be stripped naked by the loss. A friend may be a great-coat, a beloved a couch, but never, never our necessary clothing, our only means of quiet heart-repose! And, yet, with this the mind of a generous man would be so miserable, that prudence itself would fight against prudence, and advise him to drink off the draught of Hope, spite of the horrid and bitter dregs of disappointment, with which the draught will assuredly finish. Though I have said that duty is a consolation, I have not affirmed that the scar of the wound of disappointed love and insulted, betrayed fidelity would be removed in _this_ life. No! it will not--nay, the very duty must for ever keep alive feelings the appropriate objects of which are indeed in another world; but yet our human nature cannot avoid at times the connection of those feelings with their original or their first forms and objects; and so far, therefore, from removing the scar, will often and often make the wound open and bleed afresh. But, still, we know that the feeling is not objectless, that the counterfeit has a correspondent genuine, and this is the comfort. [Sidenote: A POET ON POETRY] _Canzone XVIII. fra le Rime di Dante_ is a poem of wild and interesting images, intended as an enigma, and to me an enigma it remains, spite of all my efforts. Yet it deserves transcription and translation. A.D. 1806 [? 1807]. "Tre donne intorno al cuor mi son venute," &c. [After the four first lines the handwriting is that of my old, dear, and honoured friend, Mr. Wade, of Bristol.--S. T. C.] _Ramsgate, Sept. 2nd, 1819._--I _begin_ to understand the above poem, after an interval from 1805, during which no year passed in which I did not reperuse, I might say construe, parse, and spell it, twelve times at least--such a fascination had it, spite of its obscurity! It affords a good instance, by the bye, of that soul of _universal_ significance in a true poet's composition, in addition to the specific meaning. [Sidenote: GREAT AND LITTLE MINDS] Great minds can and do create the taste of the age, and one of the contingent causes which warp the taste of nations and ages is, that men of genius in part yield to it, and in part are acted on by the taste of the age. Common minds may be compared to the component drops of the stream of life--men of genius to the large and small bubbles. What if they break? they are still as good as the rest--drops of water. [Sidenote: SUBJECT AND OBJECT] In youth our happiness is hope; in age the recollection of the hopes of youth. What else can there be?--for the substantial mind, for the _I_, what else can there be? Pleasure? Fruition? Filter hope and memory from pleasure, and the more entire the fruition the more is it the death of the _I_. A neutral product results that may exist for others, but no longer for itself--a coke or a slag. To make the object one with us, we must become one with the object--_ergo, an_ object. _Ergo_, the object must be itself a subject--partially a favourite dog, principally a friend, wholly God, _the_ Friend. God is Love--that is, an object that is absolutely subject (God is a spirit), but a subject that for ever condescends to become the object for those that meet Him subjectively. [As in the] Eucharist, [He is] verily and truly present to the Faithful, neither [by a] _trans_ nor _con_, but [by] _substantiation_. [Sidenote: THE THREE ESTATES OF BEING] We might as well attempt to conceive more than three dimensions of space, as to imagine more than three kinds of living existence--God, man, and beast. And even of these the last (division) is obscure, and scarce endures a fixed contemplation without passing into an unripe or degenerated humanity. [Sidenote: A LIFE-LONG ERROR] My mother told my wife that I was a year younger, and that there was a blunder made either in the baptismal register itself or in the transcript sent for my admission into Christ's Hospital; and Mrs. C., who is older than myself, believes me only 48. Be this as it may, in _life_, if not in years, I am, alas! nearer to 68. [S. T. C. was born on October 21, 1772. Consequently, on October 20, 1819, he was not yet forty-seven. He entered his forty-eighth year October 21, 1819.] [Sidenote: AN UNWRITTEN SONNET] N.B.--A sonnet on the child collecting shells and pebbles on the sea-shore or lake-side, and carrying each with a fresh shout of delight and admiration to the mother's apron, who smiles and assents to each "This is pretty!" "Is not that a nice one?" and then when the prattler is tired of its _conchozetetic_ labours lifts up her apron and throws them out on her apron. Such are our first discoveries both in science and philosophy.--S. T. Coleridge, Oct. 21, 1819. [Sidenote: MILTON AND SHAKSPERE] Found Mr. G. with Hartley in the garden, attempting to explain to himself and to Hartley a feeling of a something not present in Milton's works, that is, in "Paradise Lost," "Paradise Regained," and "Samson Agonistes," which he _did_ feel delightedly in the "Lycidas," and (as I added afterwards) in the Italian sonnets compared with the English. And this appeared to me to be the _poet_ appearing and wishing to appear as the poet, and, likewise, as the man, as much as, though more rare than, the father, the brother, the preacher, and the patriot. Compare with Milton, Chaucer's "Fall of the Leaf" and Spenser throughout, and you cannot but _feel_ what Gillman meant to convey. What is the solution? This, I believe--but I must premise that there is a _synthesis_ of intellectual insight including the mental object, the organ of the correspondent being indivisible, and this (O deep truth!) because the objectivity consists in the universality of its subjectiveness--as when it _sees_, and millions _see_ even so, and the seeing of the millions is what constitutes to _A_ and to each of the millions the _objectivity_ of the sight, the equivalent to a common object--a synthesis of _this_, I say, and of proper external object which we call _fact_. Now, this it is which we find in religion. It is more than philosophical truth--it is other and more than historical fact; it is not made up by the addition of the one to the other, but it is the _identity_ of both, the co-inherence. Now, this being understood, I proceed to say, using the term objectivity (arbitrarily, I grant), for this identity of truth and fact, that Milton hid the poetry in or transformed (not trans-substantiated) the poetry into this objectivity, while Shakspere, in all things, the divine opposite or antithetic correspondent of the divine Milton, transformed the objectivity into poetry. Mr. G. observed as peculiar to the Hamlet, that it alone, of all Shakspere's plays, presented to him a moving along _before_ him; while in others it was a moving, indeed, but with which he himself moved equally in all and with all, and without any external something by which the motion was manifested, even as a man would move in a balloon--a sensation of motion, but not a sight of moving and having been moved. And why is this? Because of all the characters of Shakspere's plays Hamlet is the only character with which, by contra-distinction from the rest of the _dramatis personæ_, the fit and capable reader identifies himself as the representation of his own contemplative and strictly proper and very own being (action, etc., belongs to others, the moment we call it our own)--hence the events of the play, with all the characters, move because you stand still. In the other plays, your identity is equally diffused over all. Of no parts can you say, as in Hamlet, they are moving. But ever it is _we_, or that period and portion of human action, which is unified into a dream, even as in a dream the personal unity is diffused and severalised (divided to the sight though united in the dim feeling) into a sort of reality. Even so [it is with] the styles of Milton and Shakspere--the same weight of effect from the exceeding _felicity_ (subjectively) of Shakspere, and the exceeding _propriety_ (_extra arbitrium_) of Milton. [Sidenote: A ROYAL ROAD TO KNOWLEDGE] The best plan, I think, for a man who would wish his mind to continue growing is to find, in the first place, some means of ascertaining for himself whether it does or no; and I can think of no better than early in life, say after three-and-twenty, to procure gradually the works of some two or three great writers--say, for instance, Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, and Kant, with the _De Republicâ_, _De Legibus_, the _Sophistes_ and _Politicus_ of Plato, and the _Poetics_, _Rhetorics_, and _Politics_ of Aristotle--and amidst all other reading, to make a point of reperusing some one, or some weighty part of some one of these every four or five years, having from the beginning a separate note-book for each of these writers, in which your impressions, suggestions, conjectures, doubts and judgments are to be recorded with date of each, and so worded as to represent most sincerely the exact state of your convictions at the time, such as they would be if you did not (which this plan will assuredly make you do sooner or later) anticipate a change in them from increase of knowledge. "It is possible that I am in the wrong, but so it now appears to me, after my best attempts; and I must therefore put it down in order that I may find myself so, if so I am." It would make a little volume to give in detail all the various moral as well as intellectual advantages that would result from the systematic observation of the plan. Diffidence and hope would reciprocally balance and excite each other. A continuity would be given to your being, and its progressiveness ensured. All your knowledge otherwise obtained, whether from books or conversation or experience, would find centres round which it would organise itself. And, lastly, the habit of confuting your past self, and detecting the causes and occasions of your having mistaken or overlooked the truth, will give you both a quickness and a winning kindness, resulting from sympathy, in exposing the errors of others, as if you were an _alter ego_, of his mistake. And such, indeed, will your antagonist appear to you, another past self--in all points in which the falsity is not too plainly a derivation from a corrupt heart and the predominance of bad passion or worldly interests overlaying the love of truth as truth. And even in this case the liveliness with which you will so often have expressed yourself in your private note-books, in which the words, unsought for and untrimmed because intended for your own eye, exclusively, were the first-born of your first impressions, when you were either enkindled by admiration of your writer, or excited by a humble disputing with him reimpersonated in his book, will be of no mean rhetorical advantage to you, especially in public and extemporary debate or animated conversation. [Sidenote: THE IDEA OF GOD] Did you deduce your own being? Even that is less absurd than the conceit of deducing the Divine being? Never would you have had the notion, had you not had the idea--rather, had not the idea worked in you like the memory of a name which we cannot recollect and yet feel that we have and which reveals its existence in the mind only by a restless anticipation and proves its _a priori_ actuality by the almost explosive instantaneity with which it is welcomed and recognised on its re-emersion out of the cloud, or its re-ascent from the horizon of consciousness. [Sidenote: APHORISMS AND ADAGES] I should like to know whether or how far the delight I feel, and have always felt, in adages or aphorisms of universal or very extensive application is a general or common feeling with men, or a peculiarity of my own mind. I cannot describe how much pleasure I have derived from "Extremes meet," for instance, or "Treat everything according to its nature," and, the last, "Be"! In the last I bring all inward rectitude to its test, in the former all outward morality to its rule, and in the first all problematic results to their solution, and reduce apparent contraries to correspondent opposites. How many hostile tenets has it enabled me to contemplate as fragments of truth, false only by negation and mutual exclusion? [Sidenote: IGNORE THYSELF July 12, 1822] I have myself too often of late used the phrase "rational self-love" the same as "enlightened self-love." O no more of this! What have love, reason or light to do with _self_, except as the dark and evil spirit which it is given to them to overcome! _Soul-love_, if you please. O there is more stuff of thought in our simple and pious fore-elders' adjuration, "Take pity of your poor soul!" than in all the volumes of Paley, Rochefoucauld, and Helvetius! [Sidenote: RUGIT LEO] N.B.--The injurious manner in which men of genius are treated, not only as authors, but even when they are in social company. _A_ is believed to be, or talked of as, a man of unusual talent. People are anxious to meet him. If he says little or nothing, they wonder at the report, never considering whether they themselves were fit either to excite, or if self-excited to receive and comprehend him. But with the simplicity of genius he attributes more to them than they have, and they put questions that cannot be answered but by a return to first principles, and then they complain of him as not conversing, but lecturing. "He is quite intolerable," "Might as well be hearing a sermon." In short, in answer to some objection, _A_ replies, "Sir, this rests on the distinction between an _idea_ and an _image_, and, likewise, its difference from a perfect _conception_." "Pray, sir, explain." Because he does not and cannot [state the case as concisely as if he had been appealed to about a hand at] whist, 'tis "Lord! how long he talks," and they never ask themselves, Did this man force himself into your company? Was he not dragged into it? What is the practical result? That the man of genius should live as much as possible with beings that simply love him, from relationship or old association, or with those that have the same feelings with himself; but in all other company he will do well to cease to be the man of genius, and make up his mind to appear dull or commonplace as a companion, to be the most silent except upon the most trivial subjects of any in the company, to turn off questions with a joke or a pun as not suiting a wine-table, and to trust only to his writings. [Sidenote: A BROKEN HEART] Few die of a _broken heart_, and these few (the surgeons tell us) know nothing of it, and, dying suddenly, leave to the dissector the first discovery. O this is but the shallow remark of a hard and unthinking prosperity! Have you never seen a stick broken in the middle, and yet cohering by the rind? The fibres, half of them actually broken and the rest sprained and, though tough, unsustaining? O many, many are the broken-hearted for those who know what the moral and practical heart of the man is! [Sidenote: VOX HIEMALIS Thursday, Sept. 30, 1824] Now the breeze through the stiff and brittle-becoming foliage of the trees counterfeits the sound of a rushing stream or water-flood suddenly sweeping by. The sigh, the modulated continuousness of the murmur is exchanged for the confusion of overtaking sounds--the self-evolution of the One, for the clash or stroke of ever-commencing contact of the multitudinous, without interspace, by confusion. The short gusts rustle and the ear feels the unlithesome dryness, before the eye detects the coarser, duller, though deeper green, deadened and not [yet] awakened into the hues of decay--echoes of spring from the sepulchral vault of winter. The aged year, conversant with the forms of its youth and forgetting all the intervals, feebly reproduces them [as it were, from], memory. [Sidenote: CONSTANCY Friday, June 9, 1826] "Constancy lives in realms above." This exclusion of constancy from the list of earthly virtues may be a poet's exaggeration, but, certainly, it is of far rarer occurrence in _all_ relations of life than the young and warm-hearted are willing to believe, but in cases of _exclusive_ attachment (that is, in Love, properly so-called, and yet distinct from Friendship), and in the _highest_ form of the Virtue, it is _so_ rare that I cannot help doubting whether an instance of _mutual_ constancy in effect ever existed. For there are two sorts of constancy, the one negative, where there is no _transfer_ of affection, where the bond of attachment is not broken though it may be attenuated to a thread--this may be met with, not so seldom, and, where there is goodness of heart, it may be expected--but the other sort, or _positive_ constancy, where the affection endures in the same intensity with the same or increased tenderness and _nearness_, of this it is that I doubt whether once in an age an instance occurs where _A_ feels it toward _B_, and _B_ feels it towards _A_, and _vice versâ_. [Sidenote: FLOWERS AND LIGHT April 18, 1826] Spring flowers, I have observed, look best in the day, and by sunshine: but summer and autumnal flower-pots by lamp or candle-light. I have now before me a flower-pot of cherry-blossoms, polyanthuses, double violets, periwinkles, wall-flowers, but how dim and dusky they look! The scarlet anemone is an exception, and three or four of them with all the rest of the flower-glass sprays of white blossoms, and one or two periwinkles for the sake of the dark green leaves, green stems, and flexible elegant form, make a lovely group both by sun and by candle-light. Grove, Highgate. [Sidenote: THE BREATH OF SPRING Feb. 28, 1827] What an interval! Heard the singing birds this morning in our garden for the first time this year, though it rained and blew fiercely; but the long frost has broken up, and the wind, though fierce, was warm and westerly. [Sidenote: THE IDEA OF LIFE May 5, 1827] To the right understanding of the most awfully _concerning_ declaration of Holy Writ there has been no greater obstacle than the want of insight into the nature of Life--what it is and what it is not. But in order to this, the mind must have been raised to the contemplation of the _Idea_--the life celestial, to wit--or the distinctive essence and character of the Holy Spirit. Here Life is _Love_--communicative, outpouring love. _Ergo_, the terrestrial or the Life of Nature ever the shadow and opposite of the Divine is appropriative, absorbing _appetence_. But the great mistake is, that the soul cannot continue without life; for, if so, with what propriety can the portion of the reprobate soul be called Death? What if the natural life have two possible terminations--true Being and the falling back into the dark Will? [Sidenote: A COMPREHENSIVE FORMULA] The painter-parson, Rev. Mr. Judkin, is about to show off a Romish priest converted to the Protestant belief, on Sunday next at his church, and asked of me (this day, at Mr. Gray's, Friday, 27th July, 1827) whether I knew of any form of recantation but that of Archbishop Tenison. I knew nothing of Tenison's or any other, but expressed my opinion that no other recantation ought to be required than a declaration that he admitted no outward authority superior to, or co-ordinate with, the canonical Scriptures, and no interpreter that superseded or stood in the place of the Holy Spirit, enlightening the mind of each true believer, according to his individual needs. I can conceive a person holding all the articles that distinguish the Romish from the Protestant conception, with this one exception; and, yet, if he did make this exception, and professed to believe them, because he thought they were contained in, or to be fairly inferred from, right reason and the Scriptures, I should consider him as true a Protestant as Luther, Knox, or Calvin, and a far better than Laud and his compeers, however meanly I might think of him as a philosopher and theologian. The laying so great a stress on transubstantiation I have long regarded as the great calamity or error of the Reformation--if not constrained by circumstances, the great _error_--or, if constrained, the great _calamity_. [Sidenote: THE NIGHT IS AT HAND August 1, 1828] The sweet prattle of the chimes--counsellors pleading in the court of Love--then the clock, the solemn sentence of the mighty Judge--long pause between each pregnant, inappellable word, too deeply weighed to be reversed in the High-Justice-Court of Time and Fate. A more richly solemn sound than this eleven o'clock at Antwerp I never heard--dead enough to be opaque as central gold, yet clear enough to be the mountain air. INDEX OF PROPER NAMES _Abergavenny, The_, 132 Achilles, 25 Adam, 51 Adar River, 261 Africa, 70, 71 Alexander the Great, 256 Alfieri, 230 Allen, Robert, 139, 140 _n_ Allston, Washington, 167, 175 Anacreon, 183, 263 Antonio, St., 78 Antwerp, 307 Aphrodite, 192 Apollo, 110 Ariosto, 151, 230 Aristotle, 183, 222, 268, 298 Arne, 270 Arrian, 183 Augustine, St., 179 Bacon, F. (Lord Verulam), 21, 79, 151, 177, 183, 298 Ball, Sir Alexander, 206 Ball, Lady, 92 Barrow, J., 26, 47 Bassenthwaite, 18 Barclay, W. ("Argenis"), 207 Beaumont, Francis, 207 Beaumont, Sir George, 67, 79, 145 Beaumont, Lady, 67 Beddoes, Thomas, M.D., 239 _n_ Bentham, 127 Berkeley, Bishop, 183 Bernard, Saint, 273 Bernouilli, 152 Beverley, 94 Blackmore, 24, 270 Blount, Sir Edward, 63 Blumenbach, 67 Boccaccio, 46 Bonnet, 152 Borrowdale, 34, 35, 52 Bosch, 182 Boyer, J., 14 Brandelhow, 46 Bristol, 293 _n_ Brunck, 182 Brougham, Lord, 250 Brown, Dr. J., 14 Browne, William, 158 and _n_ Bruno, Giordano, 16, 17 _n_, 72, 73, 151 Buffon, 209 Buonaparte, 75 Burdett, Sir F., 174, 255 Burton, Robert, 25 Cain, 51 Cairns, M. J., 9 Calvin, 307 Cambridge, 214 Campbell, T., 156 Campeachy, Bay of, 208 Caracciolo, 87 Caernarvon Castle, 71 Castle Crag, 34 Castlerigg, 43 Catullus, 165 Cecilia, St., 200 Ceres, 110 Cervantes, 152 Chantrey, 286 Charlemagne, 170 Chartreuse, 119 Chaucer, 296 Chersites, Theodoras, 21 China, 29, 132, 151 Christ's Hospital, 46, 295 Cicero, 23 _n_ Circe, 192 Clarkson, Thomas, 24 Clarkson, Mrs., 167 Claudian, 165 Clotharius, 211 Cobbett, W., 76, 255 Cochrane (Earl of Dundonald). 237 Coleorton, 171 _n_ Coleridge, Berkeley, 120 Coleridge, Derwent, 18, 29, 120 Coleridge, Hartley, 3, 13, 15, 24, 40, 41, 65, 66, 96, 135, 296 Coleridge, Colonel James, 158 _n_. Coleridge, S. T., 9, 23 _n_, 64 _n_, 75 _n_, 103, 140 _n_, 157 and _n_, 158 _n_, 169, 177 _n_, 195 _n_, 196 _n_, 203 _n_, 211 _n_, 225 _n_, 236 _n_, 242 _n_, 246 _n_, 248 _n_, 263 _n_, 273 _n_, 293 _n_, 295 and _n_ Coleridge, Sara (Mrs. S. T.), 9, 218, 295 Coleridge, Sara (Mrs. H. N. Coleridge), 120, 208 _n_. Collins, 5 Combe, S., 129 Combe Satchfield, 158 _n_. Condillac, 79 Constantine, Budæo-Tusan, 182 Cordova, 287 Cottle, Joseph, 60, 86, 235 _Courier_ Office, 193, 203 _n_ Cowper, William, 121, 128 Cuthill, Mr., 182, 183 Dampier, Travels of, 208 Dante, 25, 151, 229, 230, 293 Daphnis, D'Orvilles, 183 Darwin, Dr., 5, 92, 151, 280 David, King, 235 Davy, Sir H., 218 Dennison, Mr., 144, 146 De Quincey, 177 _n_, 183 Diogenes, 97 Domitian, 159 Drayton, 154 Dresden, 85 Dryden, 159 Duke Richard, 158 _n_ Dundas (Lord Melville), 151 Durham, 35, 36 Dyer, George, 9 _n_, 67 Edgeworth, Miss, 117 Elizabeth, Queen, 231 Empedocles, 163 Eolus, 193 Epictetus, 183 Erigena, Joannes Scotus, 58 Escot, 157 _n_ Etna, 114 Euphormio, 207 Exeter, 67 Favell, 28 _n_ Fay, Benedict, 154 Fénelon, 133 Fichte, 106, 133, 169, 183 Fielding, 166, 167 Flaminius, 207, 263 Fletcher, John, 207 Fracastorius, 148, 207, 263 France, 75, 119, 120, 152 Geddes, Dr. Alexander, 109 _n_ Geneva, Lake of, 261 Genoa, 7 Germany, 8 _n_, 151, 169, 284, 289 Gibbon, 272 Gillman, James, 296, 297 Gillman, Mrs., 273 Glanvillians, The, 281 Godwin, W., 13, 66, 68 Goethe, 229 Göttingen, 67 Grasmere, 76, 132 Gray, Thomas, 5, 270 Greece, 110, 177, 206, 289 Greenough, 68 Greta River, 19, 29, 43, 44 Greta Hall, 218 _n_ Greville, Fulk, 17 Grysdale Pike, 19, 46 Guarini, 191 Guyon, Madame, 133, 152 Haarlem, 67 Halim II., 287 Hamburg, 101 Harrington, J., 79, 151 Hartz, 211 and _n_ Hayley, 151 Hazlitt, W., 9, 35, 36 Hebrides, 129 Helvellyn, 52 Helvetius, 301 Henry, Prince, 158 Herbert's, St., Island, 32 Hobbes, 13, 183 Holcroft, 66, 68 Homer, 207, 270 Horace, 176 Hume, David, 24, 79, 102, 151, 272 Huss, 215 Hutchinson, Mary (Mrs. Wordsworth), 8 _n_, 20 Hutchinson, Sarah, 8 _n_ India, 132 Ireland, 177 Italy, 152, 229 Java, 271 Jennings, J., 60 Johnson, Dr., 115, 151, 155, 272 Jonson, Ben, 207 Judkin, Rev. Mr., 306 Kant, 12, 106, 151, 169, 183 Keswick, 54 _n_, 101 Klopstock, 101, 229 Knox, John, 164, 307 Lamb, Charles, 66, 140 _n_. Latrigg, 60 _n_ Laud, 307 Lavater, 223 Leckie, 183 Leibnitz, 147, 151, 152, 183 Leighton, 287 Lessing, 151 Linnæus, 268 Lloyd, Charles, 107 Lloyd, David, 230 Locke, 24, 151, 155, 183, 185 Loch Leven, 208 Lodore, 34 London, 9, 28, 194 Lorraine, Claude, 286 Lupus, 211 Luther, 11, 152, 215, 239, 307 Lyceum, 193 Lyonnet, 94 Mackintosh, Sir J., 6, 126, 198 Malone, E., 88, 89 _n_ Malta, 75 _n_, 83, 87, 98, 104, 107, 130, 140 _n_, 144, 187, 197 Malthus, Rev. J., 64 Marathon, 74 _n_ Marini, G. B., 191 Martial, 159 Massinger, 207 Mediterranean, 85, 109 Metastasio, 166, 229 Middleton, Sir Hugh, 250 Milton, 14, 24, 72, 73, 120, 151, 152, 159, 161, 215 _n_, 229, 253, 271, 296, 297, 298 Mohammed, 290, 291 _n_. Molière, 152 Montagu, Basil, 218 _n_. Moses, 9, 268 Mylius, Johann Christoph., 96 Naples, King of, 87 Naucratius, 21 Nelson, Lord, 237 Newlands, 52 Newmarket, 168 New River, 168 Newton, Sir Isaac, 214 Nile, 20 Norway, 284 Okenist, An, 291 Orleans, 211 Otter River, 29 Otterton, 158 _n_ Ottery St. Mary, 29, 157 _n_, 158 _n_ Ovid, 165 Paine, Tom, 226 Paley, Archdeacon, 35, 151, 155, 265, 301 Paracelsus, 14, 232 Parisatis, 176 Parkinson (_Theatrum Botanicum_), 59 Pascal, 152 Pasley, Captain, 145, 154 Paul, Jean (Richter), 235 Paul, St., 93, 163 Penelope, Nature a, 100 Peter, St., 215 Petrarch, 262, 263 _n_ Picts, The, 129 Pindar, 168 Pitt, 151 Plato, 31, 133, 183, 298 Plotinus, 48, 49, 183 Polyclete, 192 Poole, T., 70, 153 Pope, 151, 166, 233 Porphyry, 183 Port Royal, 208 Porte, The, 289 Portugal, 140 _n_ Price, Dr., 167 Priestley, Dr., 151, 155 Prince, The Black, 71 Proclus, 17, 63, 183 Proserpine, 110 Psyche, 89, 109, 142 Pygmalion, 192 Pyramids, The, 258 Pythagoras, 55, 231 Quintilian, 23 _n_ Raleigh, Sir W., 148, 250 Raphael, 286 Ray (or Wray), John, 35, 36 Reignia, Captain, 89 Reimarus, Herman Samuel, 91 _n_, 92 Rhone River, 261 Richardson, Samuel, 166, 167 Rickman, J., 67 Robertson, William, 272 Rochefoucauld, 301 Rock, Captain (son of), 208 Rogers, Samuel, 156 Rome, Church of, 58, 124, 215 Rome, 110, 129, 206, 289 Russia, 170, 289 Scapula, 182 Scarlett (James Lord Abinger), 198 Schelling, 169, 183 Schiller, 150, 161, 181, 211 _n_, 229 Scott, Sir Walter, 74 _n_ Scotus, Duns, 222 Sens, 211 Shakspere, 21, 24, 71, 72, 73, 88, 89 _n_, 97, 108, 115, 127, 128, 145, 147, 150, 151, 152, 161, 180, 286, 297, 298 Sharp, Grenville, 250 Sharp, Richard, 158, 198 Sheridan, R. B., 41, 177 Shield, 270 Sidney, Sir Philip, 17, 151 Simonides, 163 Skiddaw, 18, 19, 52 Smith, Robert, 198 Smith, Sydney, 198 Sorel, Dr., 107 Sotheby, William, 53 South, 47 Southey, 6, 28 _n_, 36, 107, 158 _n_, 221, 290 Spain, 70, 152, 287 Spenser, 296 Spinoza, 57, 81, 183 Staunton, Sir G., 271 Stephen's, St., 211 Stephen's Thesaurus, 182 Stewart, Sir James, 1 Stoddart (Dr. afterwards Sir J.), 74, 75 _n_, 107, 140 _n_, 167 Stowey, Upper, 143 Stowey, Nether, 60 _n_ Strabo, Geographicus, 179 Strada, Prolusions of, 183 Strozzi, Giambatista, 225 Stuart, Daniel, 195 Sweden, 284 Swedenborg, 286 Swift, Dean, 24, 151, 164 Swinside, 19 Switzerland, 129 Syracuse, 95 Tantalus, 234 Taylor, Dorothy, 158 _n_ Taylor, Frances, 158 _n_ Taylor, Jeremy, 12, 20, 76, 298 Taylor, Thomas, 17 Teme, Valley of, 26 Tenison, Archbishop, 306 Theophrastus, 268 Tiberius, 37 Tibullus, 165 Tobin, J., 68, 139, 140 _n_ Tyrol, The, 284 Underwood, Mr., 68 Unzer, D., 94 Valetta, 75 _n_, 144 Van Huysum, 286 Varrius, 134 Vida, 263 Vincent, Captain, 134 Virgil, 263 Virginia, 94 Voltaire, 152 Voss, 151, 229 Vossius, 134 Wade, Mr., 293 _n_ Wedgwood, T., 27, 91 Whinlatter, 46, 50 White, Mr. (of Clare Hall, Camb.), 225 Wickliffe, 215 Wieland, 229 Wilberforce, 250 Willoughby, Lord, 231 Wilson, John, 60 _n_ Windybrow, 60 _n_ Withop Fells, 47 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 66 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 60 _n_ Wordsworth, John, 132 Wordsworth, William, 4, 10 _n_, 30, 35, 36, 60 _n_, 70, 71, 79, 101, 131, 137, 138 _n_, 147, 151, 163, 169, 171 _n_, 201 _n_, 207, 208 _n_, 221, 251 _n_ Wyndham, 41, 237 Zinzendorf, 286 INDEX OF TITLES NOTE.--_Brief paragraphs and sentences to which no title has been given, in the text will be found indexed under the following headings._ Abstruse Research, 53-56 Anecdotes, A Sheaf of, 66-68 Aphorisms and Pithy Sentences, 253-256 Comparisons and Contrasts, 5-7 Country and Town, 28-29 Dreams and Shadows, 172-173 Duty and Experience, 2-3 For the _Soother in Absence_, 84-85; 86-87; 95-97; 99-100; 115-118; 147-150; 159-161; 162-165; 175-180 Hints for _The Friend_, 209, 210; 221-223; 230-233 Observations and Reflections, 17-21 _Seriores Rosæ_, 274 Things Visible and Invisible, 7-14 Thoughts, a Crowd of, 58-61 Thoughts and Fancies, 22-25 Transcripts from my Velvet Pocket Books, 26-28 INDEX _Abstruse Research_, 53-55 Face, the phantom of, 54 Eye-spectra, 55 Reluctance of mind to analyse, 53 Soul within the body. Window at Keswick, 54 A bliss, &c., 264 Adam's death, 51 Alas! they had been friends, &c., 62 Allston, To, 169 All thoughts, all passions, &c., 224 A man's a man, &c., 51 Analogy, 89-91 Anecdote, a genuine, 218 _Anecdotes, a Sheaf of_, 66-68 Beaumont, Sir G., and gauze spectacles, 67 Beaumont, Lady, her prayers, 67 Göttingen and the _hospes_, 67 Godwin, Holcroft, and Underwood, 68 Holcroft and M. Wollstonecraft, 66 Exeter, the organ pipe, 67 Lamb, Charles, a call upon, 66 Rickman and George Dyer, 67 Anticipations in Nature, &c., 136 Aphorisms and Adages, 300-301 _Aphorisms and Pithy Sentences_, 253-256 Bookmaking, 256 Burdett, Sir Francis, 255 Catamaran, man compared with, 253 Convalescence without love, 254 Half-reconciliation, 254 Hunter, the light of his torch, 255 Love, inspired by superiority, 253 Money, the depreciation of, 254 Peninsulating river, 255 Philosophy, its plummet-line, 255 Sun, the rosy fingers of, 254 Vision and appetite, 255 Architecture and Climate, 194 Art, the pyramid in, 98 An afterthought, 99 As the sparks fly upward, 110 Ascend a step, etc., 158-159 Aspiration, a pious, 213 Association, 226 Association, of streamy, 55 A time to cry out, 220-221 Attention and sensation, 128 _Auri sacra fames_, 44 Ave Phoebe Imperator, 63 Being, the three estates of, 294 Bells, concerning, 210-212 Clotharius, 211 Latin distichs, 210 Names of bells, 211 Passing bells, 211 Waggon-horse, &c., in the Hartz, 211 Note on Schiller's 'Song of the Bell,' &c., 211 Bibliological memoranda, 182-183 Bird, the captive, 193 Birds caged, especially the robin, 194 Bliss, a land of, 286-287 Book-knowledge and experience, 129 Book-learning for legislators, 285 Books in the air, 206-207 Bright October, 34 Browne, William, of Ottery and Note, 157-158 Bruno, Giordano, 16, 17 Bulls in action, 156 But love is indestructible, 250 Candour another name for cant, 75 Catholic reunion, 215 Cast not your pearls, &c., 80-81 Ceres, the conversion of, 110 _C'est magnifique_, etc., 258 Children of a larger growth, 204 Christabel, a hint for, 223 Chymical analogies, 204-206 Clerical errors, the psychology of, 181-182 _Cogitare est laborare_, 66 Communicable, the, 32 _Comparisons and Contrasts_, 5-7 Constitution, the, and rotten cheese, 6 Eyes, meaning glances from, 6 Genoa, "Liberty" on prisons of, 7 Gratitude, the curse of, 7 Intellect, snails of, 6 Mackintosh, the style of, 6 Malice, 6 Minds, pygmy, 6 Poetry, the effect of, 5 Sot, the prayer of, 7 Southey, an ostrich, 6 Trout, his likeness to, 5 Truth, the blindness of, 7 Two dew-drops, 6 Worldly-minded men, like owls, 7 Columba, St., 129 Conceits, verbal, 108 Conscience and immortality, 201-3 Constancy, etc., 304 Conversation, his, a nimiety, &c., 103-104 Converts, the intolerance of, 74 _Corruptio optimi pessima_, 92, 263 Cottle, an apology for, 86 Cottle, free version of the Psalms, 235 _Country and Town_, 28-29 Calf-lowing, a reminiscence of Ottery, 29 Coloured bottles, reflections of, 28 Country, depraving effect of, 25 Lecture, dream concerning a, 29 Smiles on men and mountains, 29 Stones like life, and life motionless as stones, 28 Critics, immature, 128 Criticism, a principle of, 30 Criticism, minute, 167 Darwin's "Botanical Garden," 280 Death, the realisation of, 139-140 Delusion, an optical, 47 Devil, the, with a memory, 161-162 Devil, the, a recantation, 259-260 Distemper's worst calamity, 126-127 Distinction in union, 184 _Document humain_, 168 Dream, a, and a parenthesis, 40 Dreams, order in, 134 _Dreams and Shadows_, 172-173 Idea, the descent of, 172 Taper's cone of flame, a simile, 172 "As in life's noisiest hour," etc., 172 "You mould my thoughts," etc., 173 Drip, drip, drip, drip, 165 _Duty and Experience_, 2, 3 Human happiness, 3 Chymistry, a noble, 3 Metaphysical opinion in anguish, 3 Misfortunes a fertilising rain, 2 Pleasure and pain, 2 Real pain a panacea, 2 Duty and self-interest, 130-131 Early death, 44, 45 Easter, the Northern, 138 Education, of, 227-228 Ego, the, 15 Egotism, 14 Empyrean, the, 125 England, the righteousness of, 284 Enthusiasm, 139 Entity, a superfluous, 217 Entomology _v._ ontology, 94 Epigram, a divine, 273 Error, a life-long (his age), 295 Etymology, 123-124 Evil, the origin of, 36-42 Evil produces evil, 131 Experience and book knowledge, 129-130 Experiment, a doubtful, 56 Extremes meet, 52, 53 Facts and Fiction, 75 Fallings from us vanishings, 180-181 "Floods and general inundations," 282 First thoughts and friendship, 251, 252 Flowers and light, 304, 305 Flowers of speech, 269, 270 Form and feeling, 101 Formula, a comprehensive, 306-307 "For compassion a human heart," 282 _For the soother in absence_, 84-85 Dreams and reveries, 85 Dresden, the engraved cherry-stone, 85 Mediterranean, the white sails on, 85 Outwardly happy but no joy within, 84 Sunset in winter, and summer-set, 84 _For the soother in absence_, 86-87 Caracciolo and his floating corse, 87 Final causes, 87 Moonlight, crinkled circles on the sea, 87 Religion repels the gay, 86 Vicious thoughts and rhyme-terminations, 86 Diogenes, why not? 97 Interest and satisfaction, 97 _For the soother in absence_, 95-97 Language, its growth, etc., 95 Medical romance--a title, 96 Mylius, 96 Poets the bridlers of delight, 96 Quintetta, the, in the Syracuse Opera, 95 Recollections of pre-existent state, 96 Tarantula dance of argumentation, 97 _For the soother in absence_, 99-100 _Quisque sui faber_, 99 Nature a Penelope, 100 Root to the crown--growth of the flower, 99 _For the soother in absence_, 115-118 Admiralty Court maxims, 116 Convoy from England, 115 Cyphers, 118 Death and the sleeping baby, 118 Faults and forewarnings, Miss Edgeworth, 117 Johnson, Dr., and Shakspere, 115 Pen-slit, the action of, 118 Sealing-wax--where was it? 116 Totalising, disease of, 116 Voice and eye--precedence and sequence, 118 Wafers, Maltese, 115 _For the soother in absence_, 147-150 Conscience and watches, 150 Contra-reasoning and controversy, 149 Earthly losses and heaven, 150 Eye, the twofold power of, 149 Facts and the relation of them, 148 Metaphor and reality, 149 Negation begets errors, 147 Speculative men not unpractical, 148 War, the weariness of, no excuse for peace, 148 Word-play a cat's cradle, 149 Worldly men, their belief in sincerity, 149 _For the soother in absence_, 159-161 _Co-arctation_, 161 Dull souls may become great poet's bodies, 161 Judgment compared to Belgic towns, 160 Lover married, a frog in a well, 160 Music and the genus and particular, 160 Originality not claimed by the original, 160 Shorthandists for the House of Commons, 161 Stiletto and the rosary, 159 Water-lily and the sponge, 160 _For the Soother in Absence_, 162-164 Death and the tree of life, 163 Grave, our growth in, 163 Irish architect, 164 _Scopæ viarum_, 164 Shooting stars and bedtime, 162 Sleep, the lovers', 164 Swift and the pine-tree, 164 Truth and action, 164 Wordsworth, an aspiration, 163 Yellowing leaflets, 163 _For the Soother in Absence_, 175-180 Affliction and adversity, 176 _Allapse_ of serpents, 176 Atmosphere, every man his own, 176 Augustine, St., and a friend's misjudgment, 179 Blast, the, 178 Blue sky, yellow green at twilight, 175 Greece, the genius of, 177 Hayfield and still life, 175 _Heu! quam miserum_, 177 Indian fig and death of an immortal, 177 Kings, what kind of gods? 176 Love, the mighty works of, 178 Metallic pencils, 175 Parisatis, and the poisoned knife, 176 Peacock moulting, 178 Shadow, 177 Sheridan, and Bacon, 177 Sunflowers, 175 Strabo Geographicus on genius, 179 Two faces, etc., 176-177 Tycho Brahe, a subject for Allston, 175 Water-wagtails, 178 Woman, a passionate, a simile, 178 French language and poetry, 118-120 Friendship and marriage, 235-236 Genius, 233 Genius, his own, 197-198 German philosophy, his indebtedness to, 106 God, the idea of, 300 Great and little minds, 293 Great men and national worth, 150-152 Hail and farewell, 218 Halfway house, the, 195-197 Happiness made perfect, 142 Hazlitt, W., 36 Health, independence, and friendship, 248 Heart, a broken, 303 Heaviness, may endure, &c., 239, 240 Hesperus, 247, 248 _Hinc illa marginalia_, 91-92 _Hints for the Friend_, 209, 210 Authors and Buffon's fan, 209 Conscience good, and fine weather, 209 Great deeds, great hearts, and great states, 209 Hypocrisy, 210 Massy misery, 210 Mystery from wilful deafness, 210 No glory and no Christianity, a total eclipse, 210 Proud ignorance, 210 Reformers like scourers of silver plate, 209 _Hints for the Friend_, 221-223 Conscience, a pure, like a life-boat, 221 Dame Quickly on parties, 222 Duns Scotus on faith, 222 Foliage, not the trunk, 223 Helvetius, his selenography, 221 Lavater and Narcissus, 223 Pope, the, a simile, 233 Reliance on God and man, 222 Reviewers like jurymen, 223 _Hints for the Friend_, 230-233 Amboynese, and their clove trees, 232 Eloign, a word of Queen Elizabeth's, 231 Esoteric Christianity, 231 Mathematics and metaphysics, 230 Monsoon, the Chinese elephant, 232 Nature, the perception of, a comparison, 232 Paracelsus, on new words, 232 Partisans or opponents, how to address them, 231 Hope, the moon's halo an emblem of, 238 Humanity, the hope of, 137, 138 Humility, the lover's, 188 Hypothesis, of a new, 105 I will lift up, etc., 101 Idea, the birth of, 109 Idealist, the, at bay, 277-279 "If a man could pass through paradise," 282 Ignore thyself, 301 Illusion (Mr. Dennison and the "bottle man"), 144-147 Imagination 'eisenoplasy,' 236 In a twinkling of an eye, 185-186 In wonder all philosophy began, 185 Incommunicable, the, 31 Infancy and infants, 3, 4 Infinite, the, and the finite, 81 _Inopem me copia fecit_, 189 Insects, 271 _Spiders' webs in Java_, 271 _Libellulidæ_, 271 _Tipulidæ minimæ_, 271 Islamism, 287, 288 "Kingdom of Heavenite," a, 273 Knave, a treacherous, 28 Knowledge, a royal road to, 298-300 Knowledge and Understanding, 173 Landing places, 157 Law and gospel, 214 Liberty, the cap of, 203 Life, the idea of, 305 Light, the inward, 48 _Litera scripta manet_, 121 Love, 1-2 Affected by jealousy, 1 soother of misfortune, 2 Disappointed, 2 The transformer, 2 Love, 233-235 Love, the adolescence of, 68 Love, the divine essence, 133-134 Love and duty, 140-142 Love, the ineffable, 191-192 Love and music, 200-201 Lover, the humble complaint of, 190 Loves, of first, 153-154 _Lucus a non lucendo_, 200 Magnitude, the sense of, 112-115 Maiden's primer, 195 Marriage, the ideal, 216 Mean, the danger of, 62 Means to ends, 107 Mediterranean, the, 100 "A brisk gale and the foam," 100 Memorandum, a serious, 79 Metaphysic, a defence of, 42 Metaphysician, the, at bay, 106 Metaphysic, the aim of his, 42 Milton's blank verse, 253 Milton and Shakspere, 296-8 Mohammed, the flight of, 290-291 Moment, a, and a magic mirror, 245-246 Monition, the rage for, 68-70 Moonlight gleams and massy glories, 171 Moonset, a, 50 Morning, a gem of, 187 _Mot propre_, the passion for, 155 Mother wit, 226 Motion, the psychology of, 56-57 _Multum in parvo_, 85 Name it and you break it, 198 Nature, the night side of, 45-47 _Ne quid nimis_, 89 _Nefas est ab hoste doceri_, 76 Neither bond nor free, 195 Neutral pronoun, a, 190 Night, in the visions of, 43, 44 Nightmare, the hag, 243-245 _Noscitur a sociis_, 32 Not the beautiful, etc., 49-50 _Obductâ fronte senectus_, 272-273 _Observations and Reflections_, 17-21 Ashes in autumn, 19 Citizens eat, rustics drink, 19 Definition hostile to images, 19 First cause and source of the Nile, 20 Love poems, a scheme of, 20 Moon, the setting, 18 My birthday, 19 Northern Lights, Derwent's birthday, 18 Shakspere and Naucratius, 21 Soul the mummy, an emblem, 20 Spring with cone of sand, 17 Stability and Instability, the cause of, 19 State, the eye of, 18 Superiors and inferiors, 20 Truths and feelings, 18 Two moon-rainbows, 19 Of a too witty book, 280-281 Official distrust, 83 O star benign! 76 O thou whose fancies, etc., 15-16 Omniscient, the comforter, 127 One music as before, etc. 168 One, the, and the good, 63 One, the many and the, 77 Opera, the, 82 Orange blossom, 134-136 Over-blaming, the danger of, 198 [Greek: PANTA RHEI], 183-184 _Pars altera mei_, 49 Partisans and renegades, 173-174 Past and present, 1 People, the spirit of a, 288-290 Petrarch's epistles, 262, 263 Phantoms of sublimity, 170 Philanthropy and self-advertisement, 249, 250 Philosophy the friend of poetry, 78 Pindar, 168 Places and persons, 70-74 Poet, a, on poetry, 294 Poet, the, and the spider, 32 Poetic licence, a plea for, 165-166 Poetry, 4 Correction of, 4 Dr. Darwin, 5 Elder languages, the fitter for, 5 Ode, definition of, 4 Poetry and prose, 229-230 Poets as critics of poets, 127-128 Populace and people, 174 Posterity, a caution to, 159 Practical man, a, 199-200 Praise, the meed of, 284 Presentiments, 256-257 Price, Dr., 167-168 Prophecy, the manufacture of, 192-193 Prudence _versus_ friendship, 291-293 Pseudo-poets, 156 Psychology in youth and maturity, 218 Public opinion and the services, 237 Purgatory, an intellectual, 152-153 Rain, the maddening, 154 Recollection and remembrance, 57 Reimarus and the instinct of animals, 92-95 Religion, spiritual, 138, 218-219 _Remedium amoris_, 266 Richardson, 166-167 Righteousness, the sun of, 162 _Rugit leo_, 301-303 Save me from my friends, 264-265 Science and philosophy, 261-262 Scholastic terms, a plea for, 274-275 Schoolman, a Unitarian, 58 Sea, the bright blue, 109 Self, the abstract, 120 Self-absorption and selfishness, 249 Self-esteem, excess of, 198, 199 Self-esteem, defect of, 199 Self-reproof, a measure in, 81-82 Sensations, the continuity of, 102, 103 Sentiment an antidote to casuistry, 124-125 Sentiment, morbid, 169-170 Sentiments below morals, 154 _Seriores Rosæ_, 274 "Lie with the ear," 274 "Like some spendthrift lord," 274 "On the same man as in a vineyard," 274 "The blossom gives not only," 274 "We all look up," 274 Sermons, ancient and modern, 237-239 Seventeen hundred and sixty yards, etc., 280 Shakspere and Malone, 88 Subject and object, 294 Silence is golden, 259 Simile, a, 76 _Sine qua non_, 186 Sleepless, the feint of the, 251 Solace, external, his need of, 167 _Solvitur suspiciendo_, 187 Sonnet, an unwritten, 295 Soul, the embryonic, 104 Spinoza, a poem on spirit or on, 61 Spinoza, the ethics of, 57 Spiritual blindness, 270 Spiritualism and mysticism, 276-277 Spooks, 281 Spring, the breath of, 305 Square, the, the circle, the pyramid, 97 Star, to the evening, 247 Style of Milton, Smectymnuus, etc., 271 Subject and object, 294 Sundog, a, 97 Sunset, a, 52 Superstition, 143-144 Supposition, a, 138 Syracuse, 78 Taste, an ethical quality, 165 Teleology and nature worship, 35 Temperament and morals, 33 That inward eye, etc., 246, 247 The body of this death, 276 The conclusion of the whole matter, 266 The greater damnation, 279 The mind's eye, 286 "The more exquisite," etc., 282 The night is at hand, 307 "The sunny mist," etc., 31 The tender mercies of the good, 208-209 "The tree or sea-weed like," etc., 31 Theism and Atheism, 285-286 _Things Visible and Invisible_, 7-14 Anthropomorphism and the Trinity, 14 Anti-optimism, 13 Babe, its sole notion of cruelty, 13 Cairns, J., on the Nazarites, 9 Child scolding a flower, 10 Children's words, analogous, 11 Dandelions, beards of, note, 10 Dyer, George, and poets' throttles, 9 Fisherman, the idle, note, 10 Friends' friends, reception by, note, 8 Godwin, a definition of, 13 Hartley's fire-place of stones, 13 Hazlitt's theory of picture and palette, 9 "Hot-headed men confuse," 11 "How," the substratum of philosophy, 13 Kingfishers' flight, 7 "Little Daisy," etc., 7 London and Nature, 8 Luther, his prejudices, 11 Comment, 11 Materialists and mystery, 14 Nightingale and frogs in Germany, note, 7 Quotations, rage for, 9 Reproaches and remorse, 12 Sickbed and prison, 12 "Slanting pillars of misty light," 9 Space a perception of additional magnitude, 12 Taylor, Jeremy, quotation from _Via Pacis_, 12 "The thin scattered rain-clouds," 12 Things perishable, thoughts imperishable, 8 Thinking and perceiving, 12 Time and likeness, 13 Upturned leaves, 10 _Thoughts, a Crowd of_, 58-61 Children and hard-skinned ass, 59 Ghost of a mountain, 60 Light as lovers love, 59 Man, epitheton of, 58 Palm, the, 61 Place and time, 59 Poets' bad and beautiful expressions, 59 Public schools, advantage of, 60 Rainbows stedfast in mist, 61 Rosemary tree, a, 59 Slang, religious, 60 Sopha of sods, note, 60 Stump of a tree, 61 Thought, a mortal agony of, 63 Thought and attention, 213-214 _Thoughts and Fancies_, 22-25 Achilles and his heel, 25 Devil at the very end of hell, 23 Dimness and numbness, 23 Friendship and comprehension, 24 Green fields after the city, 25 Happiness and paradise, 25 Hartley and the "seems," 24 Kind-hearted men refuse roughly, 23 Limbo, 22 Metaphysics, their effect on the thoughts, 23 Nature for likeness, men for difference, 25 Old world, the, and the new year, 22 Opposite talents not incompatible, 24 Poets and death, 22 Poets, his rank among, 25 Sounds and outness, 23 Swift and Socinianism, 24 Time as threefold, 22 Thought and things, 143 Thoughts-how like music at times! 139 Through doubt to faith, 85 Time an element of grief, 31 Time and eternity, 155 Time, real and imaginary, note, 241-243 _Transcripts from my velvet pocket-books_, 26-28 Action, the meanness of, 27 Barrow and the verbal imagination, 26 Candle-snuffers not discoverers, 26 Falling asleep, 27 New play compared to toy ship, 27 Plagiarist, a thief in the candle, 26 Post, its influence, 26 Quotation and conversation, 26 Repose after agitation, 27 Socinianism and methodism, 26 Teme, the valley of, 26 Universe, the federal republic of, 27 Wedgwood, T., and thoughts and things, 27 Transubstantiation, 61-62 Truth, 191, 220 Truth, the danger of adapting, &c., 228 Truth, the fixed stars of, 257 Turtle-shell, a, for household tub, 207-208 Unwin, Mrs., Cowper's lines to, 121-123 Unknown, the great, 284 Vain Glory, 203-204 _Verbum sapientibus_, 102 _Ver, zer, and al_, 187 Vexation, a complex, 283 _Vox hiemalis_, 303-304 We ask not whence, etc., 89 Wedgwood, T., and Reimarus, 91 What man has made of man, 264-265 Will, the undisciplined, 64-66 Windmill and its shadow, 77-78 Winter, a mild, 170 Woman's frowardness, 89 Words and things, 225 Words, creative power of, and images, 87 Words, the power of, 266-269 Wordsworth and _The Prelude_, 30 Wordsworth, John, 132 Worldly wise, 230 Wounded vanity, a salve for, 82-83 Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO. London & Edinburgh * * * * * Transcriber's note The following changes have been made to the text: Page ix: "ceasless" changed to ceaseless". Page 73: "wordliness" changed to "worldliness". Page 173: "PARTIZANS" changed to "PARTISANS". Page 218: "pyschologise" changed to "psychologise". Page 253: "strenghth" changed to "strength". Page 320: "lifelong" changed to "life-long". Page 320: "Caraccioli" changed to "Caracciolo". Page 323: "philososhy" changed to "philosophy". Page 324: "Partizans" changed to "Partisans". Page 327: "Righteousnesss" changed to "Righteousness". Page 330: "rainclouds" changed to "rain-clouds'. Page 330: "hardskinned" changed to "hard-skinned". 
8488	----	THE LITERARY REMAINS OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE COLLECTED AND EDITED BY HENRY NELSON COLERIDGE, ESQ. M. A. TO JOSEPH HENRY GREEN, ESQ. MEMBER OF THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF SURGEONS, THE APPROVED FRIEND OF COLERIDGE THESE VOLUMES ARE GRATEFULLY INSCRIBED. PREFACE Mr. Coleridge by his will, dated in September, 1829, authorized his executor, if he should think it expedient, to publish any of the notes or writing made by him (Mr. C.) in his books, or any other of his manuscripts or writings, or any letters which should thereafter be collected from, or supplied by, his friends or correspondents. Agreeably to this authority, an arrangement was made, under the superintendence of Mr. Green, for the collection of Coleridge's literary remains; and at the same time the preparation for the press of such part of the materials as should consist of criticism and general literature, was entrusted to the care of the present Editor. The volumes now offered to the public are the first results of that arrangement. They must in any case stand in need of much indulgence from the ingenuous reader;--'multa sunt condonanda in opere postumo'; but a short statement of the difficulties attending the compilation may serve to explain some apparent anomalies, and to preclude some unnecessary censure. The materials were fragmentary in the extreme--Sibylline leaves;--notes of the lecturer, memoranda of the investigator, out-pourings of the solitary and self-communing student. The fear of the press was not in them. Numerous as they were, too, they came to light, or were communicated, at different times, before and after the printing was commenced; and the dates, the occasions, and the references, in most instances remained to be discovered or conjectured. To give to such materials method and continuity, as far as might be,--to set them forth in the least disadvantageous manner which the circumstances would permit,--was a delicate and perplexing task; and the Editor is painfully sensible that he could bring few qualifications for the undertaking, but such as were involved in a many years' intercourse with the author himself, a patient study of his writings, a reverential admiration of his genius, and an affectionate desire to help in extending its beneficial influence. The contents of these volumes are drawn from a portion only of the manuscripts entrusted to the Editor: the remainder of the collection, which, under favourable circumstances, he hopes may hereafter see the light, is at least of equal value with what is now presented to the reader as a sample. In perusing the following pages, the reader will, in a few instances, meet with disquisitions of a transcendental character, which, as a general rule, have been avoided: the truth is, that they were sometimes found so indissolubly intertwined with the more popular matter which preceded and followed, as to make separation impracticable. There are very many to whom no apology will be necessary in this respect; and the Editor only adverts to it for the purpose of obviating, as far as may be, the possible complaint of the more general reader. But there is another point to which, taught by past experience, he attaches more importance, and as to which, therefore, he ventures to put in a more express and particular caution. In many of the books and papers, which have been used in the compilation of these volumes, passages from other writers, noted down by Mr. Coleridge as in some way remarkable, were mixed up with his own comments on such passages, or with his reflections on other subjects, in a manner very embarrassing to the eye of a third person undertaking to select the original matter, after the lapse of several years. The Editor need not say that he has not knowingly admitted any thing that was not genuine without an express declaration, as in Vol. I. p. 1; and in another instance, Vol. II. p. 379, he has intimated his own suspicion: but, besides these, it is possible that some cases of mistake in this respect may have occurred. There may be one or two passages--they cannot well be more--printed in these volumes, which belong to other writers; and if such there be, the Editor can only plead in excuse, that the work has been prepared by him amidst many distractions, and hope that, in this instance at least, no ungenerous use will be made of such a circumstance to the disadvantage of the author, and that persons of greater reading or more retentive memories than the Editor, who may discover any such passages, will do him the favour to communicate the fact. The Editor's motive in publishing the few poems and fragments included in these volumes, was to make a supplement to the collected edition of Coleridge's poetical works. In these fragments the reader will see the germs of several passages in the already published poems of the author, but which the Editor has not thought it necessary to notice more particularly. 'The Fall of Robespierre', a joint composition, has been so long in print in the French edition of Coleridge's poems, that, independently of such merit as it may possess, it seemed natural to adopt it upon the present occasion, and to declare the true state of the authorship. To those who have been kind enough to communicate books and manuscripts for the purpose of the present publication, the Editor and, through him, Mr. Coleridge's executor return their grateful thanks. In most cases a specific acknowledgement has been made. But, above and independently of all others, it is to Mr. and Mrs. Gillman, and to Mr. Green himself, that the public are indebted for the preservation and use of the principal part of the contents of these volumes. The claims of those respected individuals on the gratitude of the friends and admirers of Coleridge and his works are already well known, and in due season those claims will receive additional confirmation. With these remarks, sincerely conscious of his own inadequate execution of the task assigned to him, yet confident withal of the general worth of the contents of the following pages--the Editor commits the reliques of a great man to the indulgent consideration of the Public. Lincoln's Inn, August 11, 1836. L'ENVOY. He was one who with long and large arm still collected precious armfulls in whatever direction he pressed forward, yet still took up so much more than he could keep together, that those who followed him gleaned more from his continual droppings than he himself brought home;--nay, made stately corn-ricks therewith, while the reaper himself was still seen only with a strutting armful of newly-cut sheaves. But I should misinform you grossly if I left you to infer that his collections were a heap of incoherent 'miscellanea'. No! the very contrary. Their variety, conjoined with the too great coherency, the too great both desire and power of referring them in systematic, nay, genetic subordination, was that which rendered his schemes gigantic and impracticable, as an author, and his conversation less instructive as a man. 'Auditorem inopem ipsa copia fecit'.--Too much was given, all so weighty and brilliant as to preclude a chance of its being all received,--so that it not seldom passed over the hearer's mind like a roar of many waters. CONTENTS THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE POEMS. "Julia was blest with beauty, wit, and grace" "------------I yet remain" To the Rev. W. J. Hort To Charles Lamb To the Nightingale To Sara To Joseph Cottle Casimir Darwiniana "The early year's fast-flying vapours stray" Count Rumford's Essays Epigrams. On a late Marriage between an Old Maid and a French Petit Maître On an Amorous Doctor "There comes from old Avaro's grave" "Last Monday all the papers said" To a Primrose, (the first seen in the season) On the Christening of a Friend's Child Epigram, "Hoarse Maevius reads his hobbling verse" Inscription by the Rev. W. L. Bowles, in Nether Stowey Church Translation Introduction to the Tale of the Dark Ladie Epilogue to the Rash Conjuror Psyche Complaint Reproof An Ode to the Rain Translation of a Passage in Ottfried's Metrical Paraphrase of the Gospel Israel's Lament on the Death of the Princess Charlotte of Wales Sentimental The Alternative The Exchange What is Life? Inscription for a Time-piece A COURSE OF LECTURES. Prospectus Lecture I. General character of the Gothic Mind in the Middle Ages II. General Character of the Gothic Literature and Art III. The Troubadours--Boccaccio--Petrarch--Pulci--Chaucer--Spenser IV-VI. Shakspeare (not included in the original text) VII. Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger VIII. 'Don Quixote'. Cervantes IX. On the Distinctions of the Witty, the Droll, the Odd, and the Humorous; the Nature and Constituents of Humour; Rabelais, Swift, Sterne X. Donne, Dante, Milton, 'Paradise Lost' XI. Asiatic and Greek Mythologies, Robinson Crusoe, Use of Works of Imagination in Education XII. Dreams, Apparitions, Alchemists, Personality of the Evil Being, Bodily Identity XIII. On Poesy or Art XIV. On Style Notes on Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici Notes on Junius Notes on Barclay's 'Argenis' Note in Casaubon's 'Persius' Notes on Chapman's Homer Note in Baxter's 'Life of Himself' Fragment of an Essay on Taste Fragment of an Essay on Beauty Poems and Poetical Fragments OMNIANA. The French Decade Ride and Tie Jeremy Taylor Criticism Public Instruction Picturesque Words Toleration War Parodies M. Dupuis Origin of the Worship of Hymen Egotism Cap of Liberty Bulls Wise Ignorance Rouge Hasty Words Motives and Impulses Inward Blindness The Vices of Slaves no excuse for Slavery Circulation of the Blood 'Peritura Parcere Chartae' To have and to be Party Passion Goodness of Heart Indispensable to a Man of Genius Milton and Ben Jonson Statistics Magnanimity Negroes and Narcissuses An Anecdote The Pharos at Alexandria Sense and Common Sense Toleration Hint for a New Species of History Text Sparring Pelagianism The Soul and its Organs of Sense Sir George Etherege, &c. Evidence Force of Habit Phoenix Memory and Recollection 'Aliquid ex Nihilo' Brevity of the Greek and English compared The Will and the Deed The Will for the Deed Sincerity Truth and Falsehood Religious Ceremonies Association Curiosity New Truths Vicious Pleasures Meriting Heaven Dust to Dust Human Countenance Lie useful to Truth Science in Roman Catholic States Voluntary Belief Amanda Hymen's Torch Youth and Age December Morning Archbishop Leighton Christian Honesty Inscription on a Clock in Cheapside Rationalism is not Reason Inconsistency Hope in Humanity Self-love in Religion Limitation of Love of Poetry Humility of the Amiable Temper in Argument Patriarchal Government Callous self-conceit A Librarian Trimming Death Love an Act of the Will Wedded Union Difference between Hobbes and Spinosa The End may justify the Means Negative Thought Man's return to Heaven Young Prodigies Welch names German Language The Universe Harberous An Admonition To Thee Cherubim and Seraphim continually do cry Definition of Miracle Death, and grounds of belief in a Future State Hatred of Injustice Religion The Apostles' Creed A Good Heart Evidences of Christianity 'Confessio Fidei THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE AND OTHER POEMS. TO H. MARTIN, ESQ. OF JESUS COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. DEAR SIR, Accept, as a small testimony of my grateful attachment, the following Dramatic Poem, in which I have endeavoured to detail, in an interesting form, the fall of a man, whose great bad actions have cast a disastrous lustre on his name. In the execution of the work, as intricacy of plot could not have been attempted without a gross violation of recent facts, it has been my sole aim to imitate the impassioned and highly figurative language of the French Orators, and to develope the characters of the chief actors on a vast stage of horrors. Yours fraternally, S. T. COLERIDGE. Jesus College, September 22, 1794. THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE. AN HISTORIC DRAMA. 1794. [1] [Footnote 1: The origin and authorship of "The Fall of Robespierre" will be best explained by the following extract from a letter from Mr. Southey to the Editor: "This is the history of The Fall of Robespierre. It originated in sportive conversation at poor Lovell's, and we agreed each to produce an act by the next evening;--S. T. C. the first, I the second, and Lovell the third. S. T. C. brought part of his, I and Lovell the whole of ours; but L.'s was not in keeping, and therefore I undertook to supply the third also by the following day. By that time, S. T. C. had filled up his. A dedication to Mrs. Hannah More was concocted, and the notable performance was offered for sale to a bookseller in Bristol, who was too wise to buy it. Your Uncle took the MSS. with him to Cambridge, and there rewrote the first act at leisure, and published it. My portion I never saw from the time it was written till the whole was before the world. It was written with newspapers before me, as fast as newspaper could be put into blank verse. I have no desire to claim it now, or hereafter; but neither am I ashamed of it; and if you think proper to print the whole, so be it."-- "The Fall of Robespierre, a tragedy, of which the first act was written by S. T. Coleridge." Mr. C.'s note in the Conciones ad Populum, 1795. Ed.] ACT I. SCENE--'The Tuilleries'. BARRERE. The tempest gathers--be it mine to seek A friendly shelter, ere it bursts upon him. But where? and how? I fear the tyrant's soul-- Sudden in action, fertile in resource, And rising awful 'mid impending ruins; In splendour gloomy, as the midnight meteor, That fearless thwarts the elemental war. When last in secret conference we met, He scowl'd upon me with suspicious rage, Making his eye the inmate of my bosom. I know he scorns me--and I feel, I hate him-- Yet there is in him that which makes me tremble! [Exit.] [Enter TALLIEN and LEGENDRE.] TALLIEN. It was Barrere, Legendre! didst thou mark him? Abrupt he turn'd, yet linger'd as he went, And tow'rds us cast a look of doubtful meaning. LEGENDRE. I mark'd him well. I met his eye's last glance; It menac'd not so proudly as of yore. Methought he would have spoke--but that he dar'd not-- Such agitation darken'd on his brow. TALLIEN. 'Twas all-distrusting guilt that kept from bursting Th'imprison'd secret struggling in the face: E'en as the sudden breeze upstarting onwards Hurries the thunder cloud, that pois'd awhile Hung in mid air, red with its mutinous burthen. LEGENDRE. Perfidious traitor!--still afraid to bask In the full blaze of power, the rustling serpent Lurks in the thicket of the tyrant's greatness, Ever prepar'd to sting who shelters him. Each thought, each action in himself converges; And love and friendship on his coward heart Shine like the powerless sun on polar ice: To all attach'd, by turns deserting all, Cunning and dark--a necessary villain! TALLIEN. Yet much depends upon him--well you know With plausible harangue 'tis his to paint Defeat like victory--and blind the mob With truth-mix'd falsehood. They, led on by him, And wild of head to work their own destruction, Support with uproar what he plans in darkness. LEGENDRE. O what a precious name is liberty To scare or cheat the simple into slaves! Yes--we must gain him over: by dark hints We'll show enough to rouse his watchful fears, Till the cold coward blaze a patriot. O Danton! murder'd friend! assist my counsels-- Hover around me on sad memory's wings, And pour thy daring vengeance in my heart. Tallien! if but to-morrow's fateful sun Beholds the tyrant living--we are dead! TALLIEN. Yet his keen eye that flashes mighty meanings-- LEGENDRE. Fear not--or rather fear th'alternative, And seek for courage e'en in cowardice-- But see--hither he comes--let us away! His brother with him, and the bloody Couthon, And, high of haughty spirit, young St. Just. [Exeunt.] [Enter ROBESPIERRE, COUTHON, ST. JUST, and ROBESPIERRE Junior.] ROBESPIERRE. What! did La Fayette fall before my power-- And did I conquer Roland's spotless virtues-- The fervent eloquence of Vergniaud's tongue, And Brissot's thoughtful soul unbribed and bold! Did zealot armies haste in vain to save them! What! did th' assassin's dagger aim its point Vain, as a dream of murder, at my bosom; And shall I dread the soft luxurious Tallien? Th' Adonis Tallien,--banquet-hunting Tallien,-- Him, whose heart flutters at the dice-box! Him, Who ever on the harlots' downy pillow Resigns his head impure to feverish slumbers! ST. JUST. I cannot fear him--yet we must not scorn him. Was it not Antony that conquer'd Brutus, Th' Adonis, banquet-hunting Antony? The state is not yet purified: and though The stream runs clear, yet at the bottom lies The thick black sediment of all the factions-- It needs no magic hand to stir it up! COUTHON. O, we did wrong to spare them--fatal error! Why lived Legendre, when that Danton died, And Collot d'Herbois dangerous in crimes? I've fear'd him, since his iron heart endured To make of Lyons one vast human shambles, Compar'd with which the sun-scorch'd wilderness Of Zara were a smiling paradise. ST. JUST. Rightly thou judgest, Couthon! He is one, Who flies from silent solitary anguish, Seeking forgetful peace amid the jar Of elements. The howl of maniac uproar Lulls to sad sleep the memory of himself. A calm is fatal to him--then he feels The dire upboilings of the storm within him. A tiger mad with inward wounds!--I dread The fierce and restless turbulence of guilt. ROBESPIERRE. Is not the Commune ours? the stern Tribunal? Dumas? and Vivier? Fleuriot? and Louvet? And Henriot? We'll denounce a hundred, nor Shall they behold to-morrow's sun roll westward. ROBESPIERRE JUNIOR. Nay--I am sick of blood! my aching heart Reviews the long, long train of hideous horrors That still have gloom'd the rise of the Republic. I should have died before Toulon, when war Became the patriot! ROBESPIERRE. Most unworthy wish! He, whose heart sickens at the blood of traitors Would be himself a traitor, were he not A coward! 'Tis congenial souls alone Shed tears of sorrow for each other's fate. O, thou art brave, my brother! and thine eye Full firmly shines amid the groaning battle-- Yet in thine heart the woman-form of pity Asserts too large a share, an ill-timed guest! There is unsoundness in the state--to-morrow Shall see it cleansed by wholesome massacre! ROBESPIERRE JUNIOR. Beware! already do the Sections murmur-- "O the great glorious patriot, Robespierre-- The tyrant guardian of the country's freedom!" COUTHON. 'Twere folly sure to work great deeds by halves! Much I suspect the darksome fickle heart Of cold Barrere! ROBESPIERRE. I see the villain in him! ROBESPIERRE JUNIOR. If he--if all forsake thee--what remains? ROBESPIERRE. Myself! the steel-strong rectitude of soul And poverty sublime 'mid circling virtues! The giant victories, my counsels form'd, Shall stalk around me with sun-glittering plumes, Bidding the darts of calumny fall pointless. [Exeunt. Manet Couthon.] COUTHON. So we deceive ourselves! What goodly virtues Bloom on the poisonous branches of ambition! Still, Robespierre! thou'l't guard thy country's freedom To despotize in all the patriot's pomp. While conscience, 'mid the mob's applauding clamours, Sleeps in thine ear, nor whispers--blood-stain'd tyrant! Yet what is conscience? superstition's dream Making such deep impression on our sleep-- That long th' awaken'd breast retains its horrors! But he returns--and with him comes Barrere. [Exit Couthon.] [Enter ROBESPIERRE and BARRERE.] ROBESPIERRE. There is no danger but in cowardice.-- Barrere! we make the danger, when we fear it. We have such force without, as will suspend The cold and trembling treachery of these members. BARRERE. Twill be a pause of terror.-- ROBESPIERRE. But to whom? Rather the short-lived slumber of the tempest, Gathering its strength anew. The dastard traitors! Moles, that would undermine the rooted oak! A pause!--a moment's pause!--'Tis all their life. BARRERE. Yet much they talk--and plausible their speech. Couthon's decree has given such powers, that-- ROBESPIERRE. That what? BARRERE. The freedom of debate-- ROBESPIERRE. Transparent mask! They wish to clog the wheels of government, Forcing the hand that guides the vast machine To bribe them to their duty.--English patriots! Are not the congregated clouds of war Black all around us? In our very vitals Works not the king-bred poison of rebellion? Say, what shall counteract the selfish plottings Of wretches, cold of heart, nor awed by fears Of him, whose power directs th' eternal justice? Terror? or secret-sapping gold? The first. Heavy, but transient as the ills that cause it; And to the virtuous patriot render'd light By the necessities that gave it birth: The other fouls the fount of the Republic, Making it flow polluted to all ages; Inoculates the state with a slow venom, That once imbibed, must be continued ever. Myself incorruptible I ne'er could bribe them-- Therefore they hate me. BARRERE. Are the Sections friendly? ROBESPIERRE. There are who wish my ruin--but I'll make them Blush for the crime in blood! BARRERE. Nay--but I tell thee, Thou art too fond of slaughter--and the right (If right it be) workest by most foul means! ROBESPIERRE. Self-centering Fear! how well thou canst ape Mercy! Too fond of slaughter!--matchless hypocrite! Thought Barrere so, when Brissot, Danton died? Thought Barrere so, when through the streaming streets Of Paris red-eyed Massacre, o'er wearied, Reel'd heavily, intoxicate with blood? And when (O heavens!) in Lyons' death-red square Sick fancy groan'd o'er putrid hills of slain, Didst thou not fiercely laugh, and bless the day? Why, thou hast been the mouth-piece of all horrors, And, like a blood-hound, crouch'd for murder! Now Aloof thou standest from the tottering pillar, Or, like a frighted child behind its mother, Hidest thy pale face in the skirts of--Mercy! BARRERE. O prodigality of eloquent anger! Why now I see thou'rt weak--thy case is desperate! The cool ferocious Robespierre turn'd scolder! ROBESPIERRE. Who from a bad man's bosom wards the blow, Reserves the whetted dagger for his own. Denounced twice--and twice I sav'd his life! [Exit.] BARRERE. The Sections will support them--there's the point! No! he can never weather out the storm-- Yet he is sudden in revenge--No more! I must away to Tallien. [Exit.] [SCENE changes to the House of Adelaide. ADELAIDE enters, speaking to a Servant.] ADELAIDE. Didst thou present the letter that I gave thee? Did Tallien answer, he would soon return? SERVANT. He is in the Tuilleries--with him, Legendre-- In deep discourse they seem'd: as I approach'd He waved his hand, as bidding me retire: I did not interrupt him. [Returns the letter.] ADELAIDE. Thou didst rightly. [Exit Servant.] O this new freedom! at how dear a price We've bought the seeming good! The peaceful virtues And every blandishment of private life, The father's cares, the mother's fond endearment, All sacrificed to liberty's wild riot. The winged hours, that scatter'd roses round me, Languid and sad drag their slow course along, And shake big gall-drops from their heavy wings. But I will steal away these anxious thoughts By the soft languishment of warbled airs, If haply melodies may lull the sense Of sorrow for a while. [Soft Music.] [Enter TALLIEN.] TALLIEN. Music, my love? O breathe again that air! Soft nurse of pain, it soothes the weary soul Of care, sweet as the whisper'd breeze of evening That plays around the sick man's throbbing temples. SONG. Tell me, on what holy ground May domestic peace be found? Halcyon daughter of the skies, Far on fearful wing she flies, From the pomp of sceptred state, From the rebel's noisy hate. In a cottag'd vale she dwells, List'ning to the Sabbath bells! Still around her steps are seen Spotless honour's meeker mien, Love, the sire of pleasing fears, Sorrow smiling through her tears, And conscious of the past employ, Memory, bosom-spring of joy. TALLIEN. I thank thee, Adelaide! 'twas sweet, though mournful. But why thy brow o'ercast, thy cheek so wan? Thou look'st as a lorn maid beside some stream, That sighs away the soul in fond despairing, While sorrow sad, like the dank willow near her, Hangs o'er the troubled fountain of her eye. ADELAIDE. Ah! rather let me ask what mystery lowers On Tallien's darken'd brow. Thou dost me wrong-- Thy soul distemper'd, can my heart be tranquil? TALLIEN. Tell me, by whom thy brother's blood was spilt? Asks he not vengeance on these patriot murderers? It has been borne too tamely. Fears and curses Groan on our midnight beds, and e'en our dreams Threaten the assassin hand of Robespierre. He dies!--nor has the plot escaped his fears. ADELAIDE. Yet--yet--be cautious! much I fear the Commune-- The tyrant's creatures, and their fate with his Fast link'd in close indissoluble union. The pale Convention-- TALLIEN. Hate him as they fear him, Impatient of the chain, resolved and ready. ADELAIDE. Th' enthusiast mob, confusion's lawless sons-- TALLIEN. They are aweary of his stern morality, The fair-mask'd offspring of ferocious pride. The Sections too support the delegates: All--all is ours! e'en now the vital air Of Liberty, condens'd awhile, is bursting (Force irresistible!) from its compressure-- To shatter the arch chemist in the explosion! [Enter BILLAUD VARENNES and BOURDON L'OISE.] [Adelaide retires.] BOURDON L'OISE. Tallien! was this a time for amorous conference? Henriot, the tyrant's most devoted creature, Marshals the force of Paris: The fierce club, With Vivier at their head, in loud acclaim Have sworn to make the guillotine in blood Float on the scaffold.--But who comes here? [Enter BARRERE abruptly.] BARRERE. Say, are ye friends to freedom? I am hers! Let us, forgetful of all common feuds, Rally around her shrine! E'en now the tyrant Concerts a plan of instant massacre! BILLAUD VARENNES. Away to the Convention! with that voice So oft the herald of glad victory, Rouse their fallen spirits, thunder in their ears The names of tyrant, plunderer, assassin! The violent workings of my soul within Anticipate the monster's blood! [Cry from the street of --No tyrant! Down with the tyrant!] TALLIEN. Hear ye that outcry?--If the trembling members Even for a moment hold his fate suspended, I swear by the holy poniard, that stabbed Caesar, This dagger probes his heart! [Exeunt omnes.] ACT II. SCENE--The Convention. [ROBESPIERRE mounts the Tribune.] ROBESPIERRE. Once more befits it that the voice of truth, Fearless in innocence, though leaguer'd round By envy and her hateful brood of hell, Be heard amid this hall; once more befits The patriot, whose prophetic eye so oft Has pierc'd thro' faction's veil, to flash on crimes Of deadliest import. Mouldering in the grave Sleeps Capet's caitiff corse; my daring hand Levell'd to earth his blood-cemented throne, My voice declared his guilt, and stirr'd up France To call for vengeance. I too dug the grave Where sleep the Girondists, detested band! Long with the show of freedom they abused Her ardent sons. Long time the well-turn'd phrase, The high fraught sentence, and the lofty tone Of declamation thunder'd in this hall, Till reason, midst a labyrinth of words, Perplex'd, in silence seem'd to yield assent. I durst oppose. Soul of my honour'd friend, Spirit of Marat, upon thee I call-- Thou know'st me faithful, know'st with what warm zeal I urged the cause of justice, stripp'd the mask From faction's deadly visage, and destroy'd Her traitor brood. Whose patriot arm hurl'd down Hebert and Rousin, and the villain friends Of Danton, foul apostate! those, who long Mask'd treason's form in liberty's fair garb, Long deluged France with blood, and durst defy Omnipotence! but I, it seems, am false! I am a traitor too! I--Robespierre! I--at whose name the dastard despot brood Look pale with fear, and call on saints to help them Who dares accuse me? who shall dare belie My spotless name? Speak, ye accomplice band, Of what am I accused? of what strange crime Is Maximilian Robespierre accused, That through this hall the buzz of discontent Should murmur? who shall speak? BILLAUD VARENNES. O patriot tongue, Belying the foul heart! Who was it urged Friendly to tyrants that accurst decree, Whose influence brooding o'er this hallow'd hall, Has chill'd each tongue to silence. Who destroy'd The freedom of debate, and carried through The fatal law, that doom'd the delegates, Unheard before their equals, to the bar Where cruelty sat throned, and murder reign'd With her Dumas coequal? Say--thou man Of mighty eloquence, whose law was that? COUTHON. That law was mine. I urged it--I proposed-- The voice of France assembled in her sons Assented, though the tame and timid voice Of traitors murmur'd. I advised that law-- I justify it. It was wise and good. BARRERE. Oh, wondrous wise, and most convenient too! I have long mark'd thee, Robespierre--and now Proclaim thee traitor--tyrant! [Loud applauses.] ROBESPIERRE. It is well;--I am a traitor! oh, that I had fallen When Regnault lifted high the murderous knife; Regnault, the instrument, belike of those Who now themselves would fain assassinate, And legalize their murders. I stand here An isolated patriot--hemm'd around By faction's noisy pack; beset and bay'd By the foul hell-hounds who know no escape From justice' outstretch'd arm, but by the force That pierces through her breast. [Murmurs, and shouts of --Down with the tyrant!] ROBESPIERRE. Nay, but I will be heard. There was a time When Robespierre began, the loud applauses Of honest patriots drown'd the honest sound. But times are changed, and villany prevails. COLLOT D'HERBOIS. No--villany shall fall. France could not brook A monarch's sway;--sounds the dictator's name More soothing to her ear? BOURDON L'OISE. Rattle her chains More musically now than when the hand Of Brissot forged her fetters; or the crew Of Hebert thunder'd out their blasphemies, And Danton talk'd of virtue? ROBESPIERRE. Oh, that Brissot Were here again to thunder in this hall,-- That Hebert lived, and Danton's giant form Scowl'd once again defiance! so my soul Might cope with worthy foes. People of France, Hear me! Beneath the vengeance of the law Traitors have perish'd countless; more survive: The hydra-headed faction lifts anew Her daring front, and fruitful from her wounds, Cautious from past defects, contrives new wiles Against the sons of Freedom. TALLIEN. Freedom lives! Oppression falls--for France has felt her chains, Has burst them too. Who, traitor-like, stept forth Amid the hall of Jacobins to save Camille Desmoulins, and the venal wretch D'Eglantine? ROBESPIERRE. I did--for I thought them honest. And Heaven forefend that vengeance e'er should strike, Ere justice doom'd the blow. BARRERE. Traitor, thou didst. Yes, the accomplice of their dark designs, Awhile didst thou defend them, when the storm Lour'd at safe distance. When the clouds frown'd darker, Fear'd for yourself, and left them to their fate. Oh, I have mark'd thee long, and through the veil Seen thy foul projects. Yes, ambitious man, Self-will'd dictator o'er the realm of France, The vengeance thou hast plann'd for patriots, Falls on thy head. Look how thy brother's deeds Dishonour thine! He, the firm patriot; Thou, the foul parricide of Liberty! ROBESPIERRE JUNIOR. Barrere--attempt not meanly to divide Me from my brother. I partake his guilt, For I partake his virtue. ROBESPIERRE. Brother, by my soul, More dear I hold thee to my heart, that thus With me thou dar'st to tread the dangerous path Of virtue, than that nature twined her cords Of kindred round us. BARRERE. Yes, allied in guilt, Even as in blood ye are. Oh, thou worst wretch, Thou worse than Sylla! hast thou not proscrib'd, Yea, in most foul anticipation slaughter'd Each patriot representative of France? BOURDON L'OISE. Was not the younger Caesar too to reign O'er all our valiant armies in the south, And still continue there his merchant wiles? ROBESPIERRE JUNIOR. His merchant wiles! Oh, grant me patience, heaven! Was it by merchant wiles I gain'd you back Toulon, when proudly on her captive towers Wav'd high the English flag? or fought I then With merchant wiles, when sword in hand I led Your troops to conquest? fought I merchant-like, Or barter'd I for victory, when death Strode o'er the reeking streets with giant stride, And shook his ebon plumes, and sternly smil'd Amid the bloody banquet? when appall'd The hireling sons of England spread the sail Of safety, fought I like a merchant then? Oh, patience! patience! BOURDON L'OISE. How this younger tyrant Mouths out defiance to us! even so He had led on the armies of the south, Till once again the plains of France were drench'd With her best blood. COLLOT D'HERBOIS. Till once again display'd Lyons' sad tragedy had call'd me forth The minister of wrath, whilst slaughter by Had bathed in human blood. DUBOIS CRANCE. No wonder, friend, That we are traitors--that our heads must fall Beneath the axe of death! when Caesar-like Reigns Robespierre, 'tis wisely done to doom The fall of Brutus. Tell me, bloody man, Hast thou not parcell'd out deluded France As it had been some province won in fight Between your curst triumvirate. You, Couthon, Go with my brother to the southern plains; St. Just, be yours the army of the north; Meantime I rule at Paris. ROBESPIERRE. Matchless knave! What--not one blush of conscience on thy cheek-- Not one poor blush of truth! most likely tale! That I, who ruin'd Brissot's towering hopes, I, who discover'd Hebert's impious wiles, And sharp'd for Danton's recreant neck the axe, Should now be traitor! had I been so minded, Think ye I had destroy'd the very men Whose plots resembled mine? bring forth your proofs Of this deep treason. Tell me in whose breast Found ye the fatal scroll? or tell me rather Who forged the shameless falsehood? COLLOT D'HERBOIS. Ask you proofs? Robespierre, what proofs were ask'd when Brissot died? LEGENDRE. What proofs adduced you when the Danton died? When at the imminent peril of my life I rose, and, fearless of thy frowning brow, Proclaim'd him guiltless? ROBESPIERRE. I remember well The fatal day. I do repent me much That I kill'd Caesar and spared Antony. But I have been too lenient. I have spared The stream of blood, and now my own must flow To fill the current. [Loud Applauses.] Triumph not too soon, Justice may yet be victor. [Enter ST. JUST, and mounts the Tribune.] ST. JUST. I come from the committee--charged to speak Of matters of high import. I omit Their orders. Representatives of France, Boldly in his own person speaks St. Just What his own heart shall dictate. TALLIEN. Hear ye this, Insulted delegates of France? St. Just From your committee comes--comes charged to speak Of matters of high import--yet omits Their orders! Representatives of France, That bold man I denounce, who disobeys The nation's orders.--I denounce St. Just. [Loud Applauses.] ST. JUST. Hear me! [Violent Murmurs.] ROBESPIERRE. He shall be heard! BURDON L'OISE. Must we contaminate this sacred hall With the foul breath of treason? COLLOT D'HERBOIS. Drag him away! Hence with him to the bar. COUTHON. Oh, just proceedings! Robespierre prevented liberty of speech-- And Robespierre is a tyrant! Tallien reigns, He dreads to hear the voice of innocence-- And St. Just must be silent! LEGENDRE. Heed we well That justice guide our actions. No light import Attends this day. I move St. Just be heard. FRERON. Inviolate be the sacred right of man, The freedom of debate. [Violent Applauses.] ST. JUST. I may be heard then! much the times are changed, When St. Just thanks this hall for hearing him. Robespierre is call'd a tyrant. Men of France, Judge not too soon. By popular discontent Was Aristides driven into exile, Was Phocion murder'd! Ere ye dare pronounce Robespierre is guilty, it befits ye well, Consider who accuse him. Tallien, Bourdon of Oise--the very men denounced, For that their dark intrigues disturb'd the plan Of government. Legendre, the sworn friend Of Danton fall'n apostate. Dubois Crance, He who at Lyons spared the royalists-- Collot d'Herbois-- BOURDON L'OISE. What--shall the traitor rear His head amid our tribune, and blaspheme Each patriot? shall the hireling slave of faction-- ST. JUST. I am of no one faction. I contend Against all factions. TALLIEN. I espouse the cause Of truth. Robespierre on yester morn pronounced Upon his own authority a report. To-day St. Just comes down. St. Just neglects What the committee orders, and harangues From his own will. O citizens of France, I weep for you--I weep for my poor country-- I tremble for the cause of Liberty, When individuals shall assume the sway, And with more insolence than kingly pride Rule the Republic. BILLAUD VARENNES. Shudder, ye representatives of France, Shudder with horror. Henriot commands The marshall'd force of Paris. Henriot, Foul parricide--the sworn ally of Hebert Denounced by all--upheld by Robespierre. Who spared La Valette? who promoted him, Stain'd with the deep die of nobility? Who to an ex-peer gave the high command? Who screen'd from justice the rapacious thief? Who cast in chains the friends of Liberty? Robespierre, the self-styled patriot, Robespierre-- Robespierre, allied with villain Daubignè-- Robespierre, the foul arch tyrant, Robespierre. BOURDON L'OISE. He talks of virtue--of morality-- Consistent patriot! he Daubignè's friend! Henriot's supporter virtuous! preach of virtue, Yet league with villains, for with Robespierre Villains alone ally. Thou art a tyrant! I style thee tyrant, Robespierre! [Loud Applauses.] ROBESPIERRE. Take back the name. Ye citizens of France-- [Violent Clamour. Cries of --Down with the tyrant!] TALLlEN. Oppression falls. The traitor stands appall'd-- Guilt's iron fangs engrasp his shrinking soul-- He hears assembled France denounce his crimes! He sees the mask torn from his secret sins-- He trembles on the precipice of fate. Fall'n guilty tyrant! murder'd by thy rage, How many an innocent victim's blood has stain'd Fair freedom's altar! Sylla-like thy hand Mark'd down the virtues, that, thy foes removed, Perpetual Dictator thou might'st reign, And tyrannize o'er France, and call it freedom! Long time in timid guilt the traitor plann'd His fearful wiles--success embolden'd sin-- And his stretch'd arm had grasp'd the diadem Ere now, but that the coward's heart recoil'd, Lest France awaked, should rouse her from her dream, And call aloud for vengeance. He, like Caesar, With rapid step urged on his bold career, Even to the summit of ambitious power, And deem'd the name of King alone was wanting. Was it for this we hurl'd proud Capet down? Is it for this we wage eternal war Against the tyrant horde of murderers, The crowned cockatrices whose foul venom Infects all Europe? was it then for this We swore to guard our liberty with life, That Robespierre should reign? the spirit of freedom Is not yet sunk so low. The glowing flame That animates each honest Frenchman's heart Not yet extinguish'd. I invoke thy shade, Immortal Brutus! I too wear a dagger; And if the representatives of France Through fear or favour should delay the sword Of justice, Tallien emulates thy virtues; Tallien, like Brutus, lifts the avenging arm; Tallien shall save his country. [Violent Applauses.] BILLAUD VARENNES. I demand The arrest of all the traitors. Memorable Will be this day for France. ROBESPIERRE. Yes! Memorable This day will be for France--for villains triumph. LEBAS. I will not share in this day's damning guilt. Condemn me too. [Great cry --Down with the tyrants! The two Robespierres, Couthon, St. Just, and Lebas are led off.] ACT III. SCENE continues. COLLOT D'HERBOIS. Caesar is fallen! The baneful tree of Java, Whose death-distilling boughs dropt poisonous dew, Is rooted from its base. This worse than Cromwell, The austere, the self-denying Robespierre, Even in this hall, where once with terror mute We listen'd to the hypocrite's harangues, Has heard his doom. BILLAUD VARENNES. Yet must we not suppose The tyrant will fall tamely. His sworn hireling Henriot, the daring desperate Henriot Commands the force of Paris. I denounce him. FRERON. I denounce Fleuriot too, the mayor of Paris. [Enter DUBOIS CRANCE.] DUBOIS CRANCE. Robespierre is rescued. Henriot, at the head Of the arm'd force, has rescued the fierce tyrant. COLLOT D'HERBOIS. Ring the tocsin--call all the citizens To save their country--never yet has Paris Forsook the representatives of France. TALLIEN. It is the hour of danger. I propose This sitting be made permanent. [Loud Applauses.] COLLOT D'HERBOIS. The national Convention shall remain Firm at its post. [Enter a MESSENGER.] MESSENGER. Robespierre has reach'd the Commune. They espouse The tyrant's cause. St. Just is up in arms! St. Just--the young, ambitious, bold St. Just Harangues the mob. The sanguinary Couthon Thirsts for your blood. [Tocsin rings.] TALLIEN. These tyrants are in arms against the law: Outlaw the rebels. [Enter MERLIN OF DOUAY.] MERLIN. Health to the representatives of France! I pass'd this moment through the armed force-- They ask'd my name--and when they heard a delegate, Swore I was not the friend of France. COLLOT D'HERBOIS. The tyrants threaten us as when they turn'd The cannon's mouth on Brissot. [Enter another MESSENGER.] SECOND MESSENGER. Vivier harangues the Jacobins--the club Espouse the cause of Robespierre. [Enter another MESSENGER.] THIRD MESSENGER. All's lost--the tyrant triumphs. Henriot leads The soldiers to his aid.--Already I hear The rattling cannon destin'd to surround This sacred hall. TALLIEN. Why, we will die like men then. The representatives of France dare death, When duty steels their bosoms. [Loud Applauses.] TALLIEN [addressing the galleries.] Citizens! France is insulted in her delegates-- The majesty of the Republic is insulted-- Tyrants are up in arms. An armed force Threats the Convention. The Convention swears To die, or save the country! [Violent Applauses from the galleries.] CITIZEN [from above.] We too swear To die, or save the country. Follow me. [All the men quit the galleries.] [Enter another MESSENGER.] FOURTH MESSENGER. Henriot is taken!-- [Loud Applauses.] Henriot is taken. Three of your brave soldiers Swore they would seize the rebel slave of tyrants, Or perish in the attempt. As he patroll'd The streets of Paris, stirring up the mob, They seized him. [Applauses.] BILLAUD VARENNES. Let the names of these brave men Live to the future day. [Enter BOURDON L'OISE, sword in hand.] BOURDON L'OISE. I have clear'd the Commune. [Applauses.] Through the throng I rush'd, Brandishing my good sword to drench its blade Deep in the tyrant's heart. The timid rebels Gave way. I met the soldiery--I spake Of the dictator's crimes--of patriots chain'd In dark deep dungeons by his lawless rage-- Of knaves secure beneath his fostering power. I spake of Liberty. Their honest hearts Caught the warm flame. The general shout burst forth, "Live the Convention--Down with Robespierre!" [Applauses. Shouts from without --Down with the tyrant!] TALLIEN. I hear, I hear the soul-inspiring sounds, France shall be saved! her generous sons attach'd To principles, not persons, spurn the idol They worshipp'd once. Yes, Robespierre shall fall As Capet fell! Oh! never let us deem That France shall crouch beneath a tyrant's throne, That the almighty people who have broke On their oppressors' heads the oppressive chain, Will court again their fetters! easier were it To hurl the cloud-capt mountain from its base, Than force the bonds of slavery upon men Determined to be free! [Applauses.] [Enter LEGENDRE, a Pistol in one hand, Keys in the other.] LEGENDRE, [flinging down the Keys.] So--let the mutinous Jacobins meet now In the open air. [Loud Applauses.] A factious, turbulent party, Lording it o'er the state since Danton died, And with him the Cordeliers.--A hireling band Of loud-tongued orators controll'd the club, And bade them bow the knee to Robespierre. Vivier has 'scap'd me. Curse his coward heart-- This fate-fraught tube of Justice in my hand, I rush'd into the hall. He mark'd mine eye, That beam'd its patriot anger, and flash'd full With death-denouncing meaning. 'Mid the throng He mingled. I pursued--but staid my hand, Lest haply I might shed the innocent blood. [Applauses.] FRERON. They took from me my ticket of admission-- Expell'd me from their sittings.--Now, forsooth, Humbled and trembling re-insert my name. But Freron enters not the club again Till it be purged of guilt--till, purified Of tyrants and of traitors, honest men May breathe the air in safety. [Shouts from without.] BARRERE. What means this uproar! if the tyrant band Should gain the people once again to rise-- We are as dead! TALLIEN. And wherefore fear we death? Did Brutus fear it? or the Grecian friends Who buried in Hipparchus' breast the sword, And died triumphant? Caesar should fear death, Brutus must scorn the bugbear. [Shouts from without: Live the Convention--Down with the tyrants!] TALLIEN. Hark! again The sounds of honest Freedom! [Enter DEPUTIES from the SECTIONS.] CITIZEN. Citizens! representatives of France! Hold on your steady course. The men of Paris Espouse your cause. The men of Paris swear They will defend the delegates of Freedom. TALLIEN. Hear ye this, colleagues? hear ye this, my brethren? And does no thrill of joy pervade your breasts? My bosom bounds to rapture. I have seen The sons of France shake off the tyrant yoke; I have, as much as lies in mine own arm, Hurl'd down the usurper.--Come death when it will, I have lived long enough. [Shouts without.] BARRERE. Hark! how the noise increases! through the gloom Of the still evening--harbinger of death Rings the tocsin! the dreadful generale Thunders through Paris-- [Cry without --Down with the tyrant!] [Enter LECOINTRE.] LECOINTRE. So may eternal justice blast the foes Of France! so perish all the tyrant brood, As Robespierre has perish'd! Citizens, Caesar is taken. [Loud and repeated Applauses.] I marvel not, that, with such fearless front, He braved our vengeance, and with angry eye Scowl'd round the hall defiance. He relied On Henriot's aid--the Commune's villain friendship, And Henriot's boughten succours. Ye have heard How Henriot rescued him--how with open arms The Commune welcomed in the rebel tyrant-- How Fleuriot aided, and seditious Vivier Stirr'd up the Jacobins. All had been lost-- The representatives of France had perish'd-- Freedom had sunk beneath the tyrant arm Of this foul parricide, but that her spirit Inspired the men of Paris. Henriot call'd "To arms" in vain, whilst Bourdon's patriot voice Breathed eloquence, and o'er the Jacobins Legendre frown'd dismay. The tyrants fled-- They reach'd the Hotel. We gather'd round--we call'd For vengeance! Long time, obstinate in despair, With knives they hack'd around them. Till foreboding The sentence of the law, the clamorous cry Of joyful thousands hailing their destruction, Each sought by suicide to escape the dread Of death. Lebas succeeded. From the window Leap'd the younger Robespierre; but his fractur'd limb Forbade to escape. The self-will'd dictator Plung'd often the keen knife in his dark breast, Yet impotent to die. He lives, all mangled By his own tremulous hand! All gash'd and gored, He lives to taste the bitterness of death. Even now they meet their doom. The bloody Couthon, The fierce St. Just, even now attend their tyrant To fall beneath the axe. I saw the torches Flash on their visages a dreadful light-- I saw them whilst the black blood roll'd adown Each stern face, even then with dauntless eye Scowl round contemptuous, dying as they lived, Fearless of fate! [Loud and repeated Applauses.] BARRERE [mounts the Tribune.] For ever hallow'd be this glorious day, When Freedom, bursting her oppressive chain, Tramples on the oppressor. When the tyrant, Hurl'd from his blood-cemented throne by the arm Of the almighty people, meets the death He plann'd for thousands. Oh! my sickening heart Has sunk within me, when the various woes Of my brave country crowded o'er my brain In ghastly numbers--when assembled hordes, Dragg'd from their hovels by despotic power, Rush'd o'er her frontiers, plunder'd her fair hamlets, And sack'd her populous towns, and drench'd with blood The reeking fields of Flanders.--When within, Upon her vitals prey'd the rankling tooth Of treason; and oppression, giant form, Trampling on freedom, left the alternative Of slavery, or of death. Even from that day, When, on the guilty Capet, I pronounced The doom of injured France, has faction rear'd Her hated head amongst us. Roland preach'd Of mercy--the uxorious, dotard Roland, The woman-govern'd Roland durst aspire To govern France; and Petion talk'd of virtue, And Vergniaud's eloquence, like the honey'd tongue Of some soft Syren wooed us to destruction. We triumph'd over these. On the same scaffold Where the last Louis pour'd his guilty blood, Fell Brissot's head, the womb of darksome treasons, And Orleans, villain kinsman of the Capet, And Hebert's atheist crew, whose maddening hand Hurl'd down the altars of the living God, With all the infidel's intolerance. The last worst traitor triumph'd--triumph'd long, Secured by matchless villany. By turns Defending and deserting each accomplice As interest prompted. In the goodly soil Of Freedom, the foul tree of treason struck Its deep-fix'd roots, and dropt the dews of death On all who slumber'd in its specious shade. He wove the web of treachery. He caught The listening crowd by his wild eloquence, His cool ferocity that persuaded murder, Even whilst it spake of mercy!--never, never Shall this regenerated country wear The despot yoke. Though myriads round assail, And with worse fury urge this new crusade Than savages have known; though the leagued despots Depopulate all Europe, so to pour The accumulated mass upon our coasts, Sublime amid the storm shall France arise, And like the rock amid surrounding waves Repel the rushing ocean.--She shall wield The thunder-bolt of vengeance--she shall blast The despot's pride, and liberate the world! POEMS --medio de fonte leporum Surgit amari aliquid.--- LUCRET. "JULIA WAS BLEST WITH BEAUTY, WIT AND GRACE..." Julia was blest with beauty, wit, and grace: Small poets loved to sing her blooming face. Before her altars, lo! a numerous train Preferr'd their vows; yet all preferr'd in vain: Till charming Florio, born to conquer, came, And touch'd the fair one with an equal flame. The flame she felt, and ill could she conceal What every look and action would reveal. With boldness then, which seldom fails to move, He pleads the cause of marriage and of love; The course of hymeneal joys he rounds, The fair one's eyes dance pleasure at the sounds. Nought now remain'd but "Noes"--how little meant-- And the sweet coyness that endears consent. The youth upon his knees enraptur'd fell:-- The strange misfortune, oh! what words can tell? Tell! ye neglected sylphs! who lap-dogs guard, Why snatch'd ye not away your precious ward? Why suffer'd ye the lover's weight to fall On the ill-fated neck of much-loved Ball? The favourite on his mistress cast his eyes, Gives a short melancholy howl, and--dies! Sacred his ashes lie, and long his rest! Anger and grief divide poor Julia's breast. Her eyes she fix'd on guilty Florio first, On him the storm of angry grief must burst. That storm he fled:--he wooes a kinder fair, Whose fond affections no dear puppies share. 'Twere vain to tell how Julia pined away;-- Unhappy fair, that in one luckless day (From future almanacks the day be crost!) At once her lover and her lap-dog lost! 1789. [1] [Footnote 1: This copy of verses was written at Christ's Hospital, and transcribed, 'honoris causa', into the book kept by the head-master, Mr. Bowyer, for that purpose. They are printed by Mr. Trollope in p. 192 of his 'History of the Hospital', published in 1834. Ed.] "I YET REMAIN..." --I yet remain To mourn the hours of youth (yet mourn in vain) That fled neglected: wisely thou hast trod The better path--and that high meed which God Assign'd to virtue, tow'ring from the dust, Shall wait thy rising, Spirit pure and just. O God! how sweet it were to think, that all Who silent mourn around this gloomy ball Might hear the voice of joy;--but 'tis the will Of man's great Author, that through good and ill Calm he should hold his course, and so sustain His varied lot of pleasure, toil, and pain! 1793. [1] [Footnote 1: These lines were found in Mr. Coleridge's hand-writing in one of the Prayer Books in the chapel of Jesus College, Cambridge. Ed.] TO THE REV. W. J. HORT. [1] Hush! ye clamorous cares, be mute! Again, dear harmonist! again Through the hollow of thy flute Breathe that passion-warbled strain; Till memory back each form shall bring The loveliest of her shadowy throng, And hope, that soars on sky-lark wing, Shall carol forth her gladdest song! O skill'd with magic spell to roll The thrilling tones that concentrate the soul! Breathe through thy flute those tender notes again, While near thee sits the chaste-eyed maiden mild; And bid her raise the poet's kindred strain In soft impassion'd voice, correctly wild. In freedom's undivided dell, Where toil and health with mellow'd love shall dwell-- Far from folly, far from men, In the rude romantic glen, Up the cliff, and through the glade, Wand'ring with the dear-loved maid, I shall listen to the lay, And ponder on thee far away;-- Still as she bids those thrilling notes aspire (Making my fond attuned heart her lyre), Thy honour'd form, my friend! shall reappear, And I will thank thee with a raptured tear! 1794. [Footnote 1: Mr. Hort was a Unitarian clergyman, and in 1794 second master in Mr. (afterwards Dr.) Estlin's school on St. Michael's Hill, Bristol. Ed.] TO CHARLES LAMB, WITH AN UNFINISHED POEM. Thus far my scanty brain hath built the rhyme Elaborate and swelling;--yet the heart Not owns it. From thy spirit-breathing powers I ask not now, my friend! the aiding verse Tedious to thee, and from thy anxious thought Of dissonant mood. In fancy (well I know) From business wand'ring far and local cares, Thou creepest round a dear-loved sister's bed With noiseless step, and watchest the faint look, Soothing each pang with fond solicitude, And tenderest tones medicinal of love. I, too, a sister had, an only sister--[1] She loved me dearly, and I doted on her; To her I pour'd forth all my puny sorrows; (As a sick patient in a nurse's arms,) And of the heart those hidden maladies-- That e'en from friendship's eye will shrink ashamed. O! I have waked at midnight, and have wept Because she was not!--Cheerily, dear Charles! Thou thy best friend shalt cherish many a year; Such warm presages feel I of high hope! For not uninterested the dear maid I've view'd--her soul affectionate yet wise, Her polish'd wit as mild as lambent glories That play around a sainted infant's head. He knows (the Spirit that in secret sees, Of whose omniscient and all-spreading love Aught to implore were impotence of mind!) [2] That my mute thoughts are sad before his throne,-- Prepared, when He his healing ray vouchsafes, Thanksgiving to pour forth with lifted heart, And praise him gracious with a brother's joy! 1794. [Footnote 1: This line and the six and a half which follow are printed, by mistake, as a fragment in the first volume of the 'Poetical Works', 1834, p. 35. Ed.] [Footnote 2: "I utterly recant the sentiment contained in the line Of whose omniscient and all-spreading love Aught to 'implore' were impotence of mind,-- it being written in Scripture, 'Ask,' and it shall be given you! and my human reason being, moreover, convinced of the propriety of offering 'petitions' as well as thanksgivings to Deity." S. T. C. 1797. "I will add, at the risk of appearing to dwell too long on religious topics, that on this my first introduction to Coleridge, he reverted with strong compunction to a sentiment which he had expressed in earlier days upon prayer. In one of his youthful poems, speaking of God, he had said,-- --'Of whose all-seeing eye Aught to demand were impotence of mind.' This sentiment he now so utterly condemned, that, on the contrary, he told me, as his own peculiar opinion, that the act of praying was the highest energy of which the human heart was capable--praying, that is, with the total concentration of the faculties; and the great mass of worldly men and of learned men he pronounced absolutely incapable of praying." 'Mr. De Quincey in Tait's Magazine, September, 1834, p.515.' "Mr. Coleridge, within two years of his death, very solemnly declared to me his conviction upon the same subject. I was sitting by his bed-side one afternoon, and he fell--an unusual thing for him--into a long account of many passages of his past life, lamenting some things, condemning others, but complaining withal, though very gently, of the way in which many of his most innocent acts had been cruelly misrepresented. 'But I have no difficulty,' said he, 'in forgiveness; indeed, I know not how to say with sincerity the clause in the Lord's Prayer, which asks forgiveness 'as we forgive'. I feel nothing answering to it in my heart. Neither do I find, or reckon, the most solemn faith in God as a real object, the most arduous act of the reason and will;--O no! my dear, it is 'to pray', to pray as God would have us; this is what at times makes me turn cold to my soul. Believe me, to pray with all your heart and strength, with the reason and the will, to believe vividly that God will listen to your voice through Christ, and verily do the thing he pleaseth thereupon--this is the last, the greatest achievement of the Christian's warfare on earth. 'Teach' us to pray, O Lord!' And then he burst into a flood of tears, and begged me to pray for him. O what a sight was there!" 'Table Talk,' vol. i. p. 162. Ed.] TO THE NIGHTINGALE. Sister of lovelorn poets, Philomel! How many bards in city garret spent, While at their window they with downward eye Mark the faint lamp-beam on the kennell'd mud, And listen to the drowsy cry of watchmen, (Those hoarse, unfeather'd nightingales of time!) How many wretched bards address thy name, And hers, the full-orb'd queen, that shines above. But I do hear thee, and the high bough mark, Within whose mild moou-mellow'd foliage hid, Thou warblest sad thy pity-pleading strains. O I have listen'd, till my working soul, Waked by those strains to thousand phantasies, Absorb'd, hath ceas'd to listen! Therefore oft I hymn thy name; and with a proud delight Oft will I tell thee, minstrel of the moon, Most musical, most melancholy bird! That all thy soft diversities of tone, Though sweeter far than the delicious airs That vibrate from a white-arm'd lady's harp, What time the languishment of lonely love Melts in her eye, and heaves her breast of snow, Are not so sweet, as is the voice of her, My Sara--best beloved of human kind! When breathing the pure soul of tenderness, She thrills me with the husband's promised name! 1794. TO SARA. The stream with languid murmur creeps In Lumin's flowery vale; Beneath the dew the lily weeps, Slow waving to the gale. "Cease, restless gale," it seems to say, "Nor wake me with thy sighing: The honours of my vernal day On rapid wings are flying. "To-morrow shall the traveller come, That erst beheld me blooming, His searching eye shall vainly roam The dreary vale of Lumin." With eager gaze and wetted cheek My wonted haunts along, Thus, lovely maiden, thou shalt seek The youth of simplest song. But I along the breeze will roll The voice of feeble power, And dwell, the moon-beam of thy soul, In slumber's nightly hour. 1794 TO JOSEPH COTTLE, Unboastful Bard! whose verse concise, yet clear, Tunes to smooth melody unconquer'd sense, May your fame fadeless live, as never-sere The ivy wreathes yon oak, whose broad defence Embowers me from noon's sultry influence! For, like that nameless rivulet stealing by, Your modest verse to musing quiet dear, Is rich with tints heaven-borrow'd;--the charm'd eye Shall gaze undazzled there, and love the soften'd sky. Circling the base of the poetic mount, A stream there is, which rolls in lazy flow Its coal-black waters from oblivion's fount: The vapour-poison'd birds, that fly too low, Fall with dead swoop, and to the bottom go. Escaped that heavy stream on pinion fleet Beneath the mountain's lofty-frowning brow, Ere aught of perilous ascent you meet, A mead of mildest charm delays th' unlabouring feet. Not there the cloud-climb'd rock, sublime and vast, That, like some giant king, o'er-glooms the hill; Nor there the pine-grove to the midnight blast Makes solemn music! but th' unceasing rill To the soft wren or lark's descending trill, Murmurs sweet undersong mid jasmine bowers. In this same pleasant meadow, at your will, I ween, you wander'd--there collecting flowers Of sober tint, and herbs of med'cinable powers! There for the monarch-murder'd soldier's tomb You wove th' unfinish'd wreath of saddest hues; And to that holier chaplet added bloom, Besprinkling it with Jordan's cleansing dews. But lo! your Henderson awakes the Muse-- His spirit beckon'd from the mountain's height! You left the plain, and soar'd mid richer views. So Nature mourn'd, when sank the first day's light, With stars, unseen before, spangling her robe of night! Still soar, my friend! those richer views among, Strong, rapid, fervent, flashing fancy's beam! Virtue and truth shall love your gentler song; But poesy demands th' impassion'd theme. Wak'd by heaven's silent dews at eve's mild gleam, What balmy sweets Pomona breathes around! But if the vext air rush a stormy stream, Or autumn's shrill gust moan in plaintive sound, With fruits and flowers she loads the tempest-honour'd ground! 1795. CASIMIR. If we except Lucretius and Statius, I know no Latin poet, ancient or modern, who has equalled Casimir in boldness of conception, opulence of fancy, or beauty of versification. The Odes of this illustrious Jesuit were translated into English about 150 years ago, by a G. Hils, I think. [1] I never saw the translation. A few of the Odes have been translated in a very animated manner by Watts. I have subjoined the third Ode of the second Book, which, with the exception of the first line, is an effusion of exquisite elegance. In the imitation attempted, I am sensible that I have destroyed the effect of suddenness, by translating into two stanzas what is one in the original. 1796. AD LYRAM. Sonora buxi filia sutilis, Pendebis alta, barbite, populo, Dum ridet aer, et supinas Solicitat levis aura frondes. Te sibilantis lenior halitus Perflabit Euri: me juvet interim Collum reclinasse, et virenti Sic temere [2] jacuisse ripa. Eheu! serenum quæ nebulæ tegunt Repente cælum! quis sonus imbrium! Surgamus--heu semper fugaci Gaudia præteritura passu! IMITATION. The solemn-breathing air is ended-- Cease, O Lyre! thy kindred lay! From the poplar branch suspended, Glitter to the eye of day! On thy wires, hov'ring, dying, Softly sighs the summer wind: I will slumber, careless lying, By yon waterfall reclin'd. In the forest hollow-roaring, Hark! I hear a deep'ning sound-- Clouds rise thick with heavy low'ring! See! th' horizon blackens round! Parent of the soothing measure, Let me seize thy wetted string! Swiftly flies the flatterer, pleasure, Headlong, ever on the wing! [Footnote 1: The Odes of Casimire translated by G.H. [G. Hils.] London, 1646. 12mo. Ed.] [Footnote 2: Had Casimir any better authority for this quantity than Tertullian's line,-- Immemor ille Dei temere committere tale--? In the classic poets the last syllable is, I believe, uniformly cut off. Ed.] DARWINIANA. THE HOUR WHEN WE SHALL MEET AGAIN. (COMPOSED DURING ILLNESS AND IN ABSENCE.) Dim Hour! that sleep'st on pillowing clouds afar, O rise, and yoke the turtles to thy car! Bend o'er the traces, blame each lingering dove, And give me to the bosom of my love! My gentle love! caressing and carest, With heaving heart shall cradle me to rest; Shed the warm tear-drop from her smiling eyes, Lull with fond woe, and med'cine me with sighs; While finely-flushing float her kisses meek, Like melted rubies, o'er my pallid cheek. Chill'd by the night, the drooping rose of May Mourns the long absence of the lovely day: Young Day returning at her promised hour, Weeps o'er the sorrows of the fav'rite flower,-- Weeps the soft dew, the balmy gale she sighs, And darts a trembling lustre from her eyes. New life and joy th' expanding flow'ret feels: His pitying mistress mourns, and mourning heals! 1796. In my calmer moments I have the firmest faith that all things work together for good. But, alas! it seems a long and a dark process:-- "THE EARLY YEAR'S FAST-FLYING VAPOURS STRAY..." The early year's fast-flying vapours stray In shadowing trains across the orb of day; And we, poor insects of a few short hours, Deem it a world of gloom. Were it not better hope, a nobler doom, Proud to believe, that with more active powers On rapid many-colour'd wing, We thro' one bright perpetual spring Shall hover round the fruits and flowers, Screen'd by those clouds, and cherish'd by those showers! 1796. COUNT RUMFORB'S ESSAYS. These, Virtue, are thy triumphs, that adorn Fitliest our nature, and bespeak us born For loftiest action;--not to gaze and run From clime to clime; or batten in the sun, Dragging a drony flight from flower to flower, Like summer insects in a gaudy hour; Nor yet o'er lovesick tales with fancy range, And cry, ''Tis pitiful,'tis passing strange!' But on life's varied views to look around, And raise expiring sorrow from the ground:-- And he--who thus hath borne his part assign'd In the sad fellowship of human kind, Or for a moment soothed the bitter pain Of a poor brother--has not lived in vain. 1796 EPIGRAMS. ON A LATE MARRIAGE BETWEEN AN OLD MAID AND A FRENCH PETIT MAîTRE. Tho' Miss----'s match is a subject of mirth She consider'd the matter full well, And wisely preferr'd leading one ape on earth To perhaps a whole dozen in hell. 1796. ON AN AMOROUS DOCTOR. From Rufa's eye sly Cupid shot his dart, And left it sticking in Sangrado's heart. No quiet from that moment has he known, And peaceful sleep has from his eyelids flown; And opium's force, and what is more, alack! His own orations cannot bring it back. In short, unless she pities his afflictions, Despair will make him take his own prescriptions. 1796. "THERE COMES FROM OLD AVARO'S GRAVE..." There comes from old Avaro's grave A deadly stench;--why, sure, they have Immured his soul within his grave! 1796. "LAST MONDAY ALL THE PAPERS SAID..." Last Monday all the papers said That Mr.---- was dead; Why, then, what said the city? The tenth part sadly shook their head, And shaking sigh'd, and sighing said, "Pity, indeed, 'tis pity!" But when the said report was found A rumour wholly without ground, Why, then, what said the city? The other nine parts shook their head, Repeating what the tenth had said, "Pity, indeed, 'tis pity!" 1796. TO A PRIMROSE, (THE FIRST SEEN IN THE SEASON.) --nitens, et roboris expers Turget et insolida est: at spe delectat. (Ovid). Thy smiles I note, sweet early flower, That peeping from thy rustic bower, The festive news to earth dost bring, A fragrant messenger of spring! But tender blossom, why so pale? Dost hear stern winter in the gale? And didst them tempt th' ungentle sky To catch one vernal glance and die? Such the wan lustre sickness wears, When health's first feeble beam appears; So languid are the smiles that seek To settle on the care-worn cheek, When timorous hope the head uprears, Still drooping and still moist with tears, If, through dispersing grief, be seen Of bliss the heavenly spark serene. 1796. ON THE CHRISTENING OF A FRIEND'S CHILD. This day among the faithful placed, And fed with fontal manna, O with maternal title graced Dear Anna's dearest Anna!-- While others wish thee wise and fair, A maid of spotless fame, I'll breathe this more compendious prayer-- May'st thou deserve thy name! Thy mother's name--a potent spell, That bids the virtues hie From mystic grove and living cell Confess'd to fancy's eye;-- Meek quietness without offence; Content in homespun kirtle; True love; and true love's innocence, White blossom of the myrtle! Associates of thy name, sweet child! These virtues may'st thou win; With face as eloquently mild To say, they lodge within. So, when her tale of days all flown, Thy mother shall be mist here; When Heaven at length shall claim its own, And angels snatch their sister; Some hoary-headed friend, perchance, May gaze with stifled breath; And oft, in momentary trance, Forget the waste of death. Ev'n thus a lovely rose I view'd, In summer-swelling pride; Nor mark'd the bud, that green and rude Peep'd at the rose's side. It chanced, I pass'd again that way In autumn's latest hour, And wond'ring saw the selfsame spray Rich with the selfsame flower. Ah, fond deceit! the rude green bud Alike in shape, place, name, Had bloom'd, where bloom'd its parent stud, Another and the same! 1796. EPIGRAM. Hoarse Maevius reads his hobbling verse To all, and at all times; And finds them both divinely smooth, His voice, as well as rhymes. Yet folks say--"Maevius is no ass:"-- But Maevius makes it clear, That he's a monster of an ass, An ass without an ear. 1797. INSCRIPTION BY THE REV. W. L. BOWLES IN NETHER STOWEY CHURCH. Lætus abi! mundi strepitu curisque remotus; Lætus abi! cæli qua vocat alma quies. Ipsa Fides loquitur, lacrymamque incusat inanem, Quae cadit in vestros, care pater, cineres. Heu! tantum liceat meritos hos solvere ritus, Et longum tremula dicere voce, Vale! TRANSLATION. Depart in joy from this world's noise and strife To the deep quiet of celestial life! Depart!--Affection's self reproves the tear Which falls, O honour'd Parent! on thy bier;-- Yet Nature will be heard, the heart will swell, And the voice tremble with a last Farewell! INTRODUCTION TO THE TALE OF THE DARK LADIE. The following poem is intended as the introduction to a somewhat longer one. The use of the old ballad word 'Ladie' for Lady, is the only piece of obsoleteness in it; and as it is professedly a tale of ancient times, I trust that the affectionate lovers of venerable antiquity, as Camden says, will grant me their pardon, and perhaps may be induced to admit a force and propriety in it. A heavier objection may be adduced against the author, that in these times of fear and expectation, when novelties explode around us in all directions, he should presume to offer to the public a silly tale of old-fashioned love: and five years ago, I own I should have allowed and felt the force of this objection. But alas! explosion has succeeded explosion so rapidly, that novelty itself ceases to appear new; and it is possible that now, even a simple story, wholly uninspired with politics or personality, may find some attention amid the hubbub of revolutions, as to those who have remained a long time by the falls of Niagara, the lowest whispering becomes distinctly audible. 1799. O leave the lily on its stem; O leave the rose upon the spray; O leave the elder-bloom, fair maids! And listen to my lay. A cypress and a myrtle-bough This morn around my harp you twin'd, Because it fashion'd mournfully Its murmurs in the wind. And now a tale of love and woe, A woful tale of love I sing; Hark, gentle maidens, hark! it sighs And trembles on the string. But most, my own dear Genevieve, It sighs and trembles most for thee! O come and hear the cruel wrongs Befell the Dark Ladie! [1] ... And now once more a tale of woe, A woful tale of love I sing; For thee, my Genevieve! it sighs, And trembles on the string. When last I sang the cruel scorn That craz'd this bold and lovely knight, And how he roam'd the mountain-woods, Nor rested day or night; I promised thee a sister tale Of man's perfidious cruelty; Come, then, and hear what cruel wrong Befell the Dark Ladie. [Footnote 1: Here followed the stanzas, afterwards published separately under the title "Love." (Poet. Works, vol. i. p. 145. Pickering, 1834.) and after them came the other three stanzas printed above; the whole forming the introduction to the intended Dark Ladie, of which all that exists is to be found ibid. p. 150. Ed.] EPILOGUE TO THE RASH CONJUROR. AN UNCOMPOSED POEM. We ask and urge--(here ends the story!) All Christian Papishes to pray That this unhappy Conjuror may, Instead of Hell, be but in Purgatory,-- For then there's hope;--Long live the Pope! 1805. PSYCHE The butterfly the ancient Grecians made The soul's fair emblem, and its only name-- But of the soul, escap'd the slavish trade Of mortal life!--For in 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. 1808. COMPLAINT How seldom, Friend! a good great man inherits Honour or wealth, with all his worth and pains! It sounds like stories from the land of spirits, If any man obtain that which he merits, Or any merit that which he obtains. REPROOF. For shame, dear Friend! renounce this canting strain! What would'st thou have a good great man obtain? Place--titles--salary--a gilded chain-- Or throne of corses which his sword hath slain?-- Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends! Hath he not always treasures, always friends, The good great man?--three treasures, love and light, And calm thoughts, regular as infants' breath;-- And three firm friends, more sure than day and night-- Himself, his Maker, and the angel Death. 1809. AN ODE TO THE RAIN Composed Before Day-Light on the Morning Appointed for the Departure of a Very Worthy, But Not Very Pleasant Visitor, Whom It Was Feared The Rain Might Detain. I know it is dark; and though I have lain Awake, as I guess, an hour or twain, I have not once open'd the lids of my eyes, But I lie in the dark, as a blind man lies. O Rain! that I lie listening to, You're but a doleful sound at best: I owe you little thanks, 'tis true, For breaking thus my needful rest! Yet if, as soon as it is light, O Rain! you will but take your flight, I'll neither rail, nor malice keep, Though sick and sore for want of sleep. But only now, for this one day, Do go, dear Rain! do go away! O Rain! with your dull two-fold sound, The clash hard by, and the murmur all round! You know, if you know aught, that we, Both night and day, but ill agree: For days, and months, and almost years, Have limped on through this vale of tears, Since body of mine, and rainy weather, Have lived on easy terms together. Yet if, as soon as it is light, O Rain! you will but take your flight, Though you should come again to-morrow, And bring with you both pain and sorrow; Though stomach should sicken, and knees should swell-- I'll nothing speak of you but well. But only now for this one day, Do go, dear Rain! do go away! Dear Rain! I ne'er refused to say You're a good creature in your way. Nay, I could write a book myself, Would fit a parson's lower shelf, Showing, how very good you are.-- What then? sometimes it must be fair! And if sometimes, why not to-day? Do go, dear Rain! do go away! Dear Rain! if I've been cold and shy, Take no offence! I'll tell you why. A dear old Friend e'en now is here, And with him came my sister dear; After long absence now first met, Long months by pain and grief beset-- With three dear friends! in truth, we groan Impatiently to be alone. We three, you mark! and not one more! The strong wish makes my spirit sore. We have so much to talk about, So many sad things to let out; So many tears in our eye-corners, Sitting like little Jacky Horners-- In short, as soon as it is day, Do go, dear Rain! do go away. And this I'll swear to you, dear Rain! Whenever you shall come again, Be you as dull as e'er you could; (And by the bye 'tis understood, You're not so pleasant, as you're good;) Yet, knowing well your worth and place, I'll welcome you with cheerful face; And though you stay'd a week or more, Were ten times duller than before; Yet with kind heart, and right good will, I'll sit and listen to you still; Nor should you go away, dear Rain! Uninvited to remain. But only now, for this one day, Do go, dear Rain! do go away. 1809. TRANSLATION Of a Passage in Ottfried's Metrical Paraphrase of the Gospels. "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 V.), 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."--'Biog. Lit.' vol. i. p. 203. 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 soothed 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. 1810 "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."--'Biog. Lit.' vol. i. p. 204. ISRAEL'S LAMENT ON THE DEATH OF THE PRINCESS CHARLOTTE OF WALES. FROM THE HEBREW OF HYMAN HURWITZ. Mourn, Israel! Sons of Israel, mourn! Give utterance to the inward throe, As wails of her first love forlorn The virgin clad in robes of woe! Mourn the young mother snatch'd away From light and life's ascending sun! Mourn for the babe, death's voiceless prey, Earn'd by long pangs, and lost ere won! Mourn the bright rose that bloom'd and went, Ere half disclosed its vernal hue! Mourn the green bud, so rudely rent, It brake the stem on which it grew! Mourn for the universal woe, With solemn dirge and falt'ring tongue; For England's Lady is laid low, So dear, so lovely, and so young! The blossoms on her tree of life Shone with the dews of recent bliss;-- Translated in that deadly strife She plucks its fruit in Paradise. Mourn for the prince, who rose at morn To seek and bless the firstling bud Of his own rose, and found the thorn, Its point bedew'd with tears of blood. Mourn for Britannia's hopes decay'd;-- Her daughters wail their dear defence, Their fair example, prostrate laid, Chaste love, and fervid innocence! O Thou! who mark'st the monarch's path, To sad Jeshurun's sons attend! Amid the lightnings of thy wrath The showers of consolation send! Jehovah frowns!--The Islands bow, And prince and people kiss the rod! Their dread chastising judge wert Thou-- Be Thou their comforter, O God! 1817. SENTIMENTAL. The rose that blushes like the morn Bedecks the valleys low; And so dost thou, sweet infant corn, My Angelina's toe. But on the rose there grows a thorn That breeds disastrous woe; And so dost thou, remorseless corn, On Angelina's toe. 1825. THE ALTERNATIVE. This way or that, ye Powers above me! I of my grief were rid-- Did Enna either really love me, Or cease to think she did. 1826. THE EXCHANGE. We pledged our hearts, my love and I,-- I in my arms the maiden clasping; I could not tell the reason why, But, oh! I trembled like an aspen. Her father's love she bade me gain; I went, and shook like any reed! I strove to act the man--in vain! We had exchanged our hearts indeed. 1826 WHAT IS LIFE? Resembles life what once was deem'd of light, Too ample in itself for human sight? An absolute self--an element ungrounded-- All that we see, all colours of all shade By encroach of darkness made?-- Is very life by consciousness unbounded? And all the thoughts, pains, joys of mortal breath, A war-embrace of wrestling life and death? 1829. INSCRIPTION FOR A TIME-PIECE. Now! It is gone.--Our brief hours travel post, Each with its thought or deed, its Why or How:-- But know, each parting hour gives up a ghost To dwell within thee--an eternal Now! 1830. EPITAPHION AUTOGRAPHTON Quae linquam, aut nihil, aut nihili, aut vix sunt mea;-- Do Morti;--reddo caetera, Christe! tibi. [sordes.] A COURSE OF LECTURES PROSPECTUS. There are few families, at present, in the higher and middle classes of English society, in which literary topics and the productions of the Fine Arts, in some one or other of their various forms, do not occasionally take their turn in contributing to the entertainment of the social board, and the amusement of the circle at the fire side. The acquisitions and attainments of the intellect ought, indeed, to hold a very inferior rank in our estimation, opposed to moral worth, or even to professional and specific skill, prudence, and industry. But why should they be opposed, when they may be made subservient merely by being subordinated? It can rarely happen, that a man of social disposition, altogether a stranger to subjects of taste, (almost the only ones on which persons of both sexes can converse with a common interest) should pass through the world without at times feeling dissatisfied with himself. The best proof of this is to be found in the marked anxiety which men, who have succeeded in life without the aid of these accomplishments, shew in securing them to their children. A young man of ingenuous mind will not wilfully deprive himself of any species of respect. He will wish to feel himself on a level with the average of the society in which he lives, though he may be ambitious of distinguishing himself only in his own immediate pursuit or occupation. Under this conviction, the following Course of Lectures was planned. The several titles will best explain the particular subjects and purposes of each: but the main objects proposed, as the result of all, are the two following. 1. To convey, in a form best fitted to render them impressive at the time, and remembered afterwards, rules and principles of sound judgment, with a kind and degree of connected information, such as the hearers cannot generally be supposed likely to form, collect, and arrange for themselves, by their own unassisted studies. It might be presumption to say, that any important part of these Lectures could not be derived from books; but none, I trust, in supposing, that the same information could not be so surely or conveniently acquired from such books as are of commonest occurrence, or with that quantity of time and attention which can be reasonably expected, or even wisely desired, of men engaged in business and the active duties of the world. 2. Under a strong persuasion that little of real value is derived by persons in general from a wide and various reading; but still more deeply convinced as to the actual mischief of unconnected and promiscuous reading, and that it is sure, in a greater or less degree, to enervate even where it does not likewise inflate; I hope to satisfy many an ingenuous mind, seriously interested in its own development and cultivation, how moderate a number of volumes, if only they be judiciously chosen, will suffice for the attainment of every wise and desirable purpose; that is, in addition to those which he studies for specific and professional purposes. It is saying less than the truth to affirm, that an excellent book (and the remark holds almost equally good of a Raphael as of a Milton) is like a well chosen and well tended fruit tree. Its fruits are not of one season only. With the due and natural intervals, we may recur to it year after year, and it will supply the same nourishment and the same gratification, if only we ourselves return to it with the same healthful appetite. The subjects of the Lectures are indeed very different, but not (in the strict sense of the term) diverse; they are various, rather than miscellaneous. There is this bond of connexion common to them all,--that the mental pleasure which they are calculated to excite is not dependent on accidents of fashion, place, or age, or the events or the customs of the day; but commensurate with the good sense, taste, and feeling, to the cultivation of which they themselves so largely contribute, as being all in kind, though not all in the same degree, productions of genius. What it would be arrogant to promise, I may yet be permitted to hope,--that the execution will prove correspondent and adequate to the plan. Assuredly, my best efforts have not been wanting so to select and prepare the materials, that, at the conclusion of the Lectures, an attentive auditor, who should consent to aid his future recollection by a few notes taken either during each Lecture or soon after, would rarely feel himself, for the time to come, excluded, from taking an intelligent interest in any general conversation likely to occur in mixed society. 'Syllabus of the Course'. I. January 27, 1818.--On the manners, morals, literature, philosophy, religion, and the state of society in general, in European Christendom, from the eighth to the fifteenth century, (that is from A.D. 700, to A.D. 1400), more particularly in reference to England, France, Italy and Germany; in other words, a portrait of the so called dark ages of Europe. II. January 30.--On the tales and metrical romances common, for the most part, to England, Germany, and the north of France, and on the English songs and ballads, continued to the reign of Charles I. A few selections will be made from the Swedish, Danish, and German languages, translated for the purpose by the Lecturer. III. February 3.--Chaucer and Spenser; of Petrarch; of Ariosto, Pulci, and Boiardo. IV. V. VI. February 6, 10, l3.--On the dramatic works of Shakspeare. In these Lectures will be comprised the substance of Mr. Coleridge's former courses on the same subject, enlarged and varied by subsequent study and reflection. VII. February l7.--On Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger; with the probable causes of the cessation of dramatic poetry in England with Shirley and Otway, soon after the restoration of Charles II. VIII. February 20.--Of the life and all the works of Cervantes, but chiefly of his Don Quixote. The ridicule of knight errantry shewn to have been but a secondary object in the mind of the author, and not the principal cause of the delight which the work continues to give to all nations, and under all the revolutions of manners and opinions. IX. February 24.--On Rabelais, Swift, and Sterne: on the nature and constituents of genuine Humour, and on the distinctions of the Humorous from the Witty, the Fanciful, the Droll, and the Odd. X. February 27.--Of Donne, Dante, and Milton. XI. March 3.--On the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, and on the romantic use of the supernatural in poetry, and in works of fiction not poetical. On the conditions and regulations under which such books may be employed advantageously in the earlier periods of education. XII. March 6.--On tales of witches, apparitions, &c. as distinguished from the magic and magicians of Asiatic origin. The probable sources of the former, and of the belief in them in certain ages and classes of men. Criteria by which mistaken and exaggerated facts may be distinguished from absolute falsehood and imposture. Lastly, the causes of the terror and interest which stories of ghosts and witches inspire, in early life at least, whether believed or not. XIII. March 10.--On colour, sound, and form in Nature, as connected with poesy: the word "Poesy" used as the generic or class term, including poetry, music, painting, statuary, and ideal architecture, as its species. The reciprocal relations of poetry and philosophy to each other; and of both to religion, and the moral sense. XIV. March 13.--On the corruptions of the English language since the reign of Queen Ann, in our style of writing prose. A few easy rules for the attainment of a manly, unaffected and pure language, in our genuine mother tongue, whether for the purpose of writing, oratory, or conversation. LECTURE I. [1] GENERAL CHARACTER OF THE GOTHIC MIND IN THE MIDDLE AGES. Mr. Coleridge began by treating of the races of mankind as descended from Shem, Ham, and Japhet, and therein of the early condition of man in his antique form. He then dwelt on the pre-eminence of the Greeks in Art and Philosophy, and noticed the suitableness of polytheism to small insulated states, in which patriotism acted as a substitute for religion, in destroying or suspending self. Afterwards, in consequence of the extension of the Roman empire, some universal or common spirit became necessary for the conservation of the vast body, and this common spirit was, in fact, produced in Christianity. The causes of the decline of the Roman empire were in operation long before the time of the actual overthrow; that overthrow had been foreseen by many eminent Romans, especially by Seneca. In fact, there was under the empire an Italian and a German party in Rome, and in the end the latter prevailed. He then proceeded to describe the generic character of the Northern nations, and defined it as an independence of the whole in the freedom of the individual, noticing their respect for women, and their consequent chivalrous spirit in war; and how evidently the participation in the general council laid the foundation of the representative form of government, the only rational mode of preserving individual liberty in opposition to the licentious democracy of the ancient republics. He called our attention to the peculiarity of their art, and showed how it entirely depended on a symbolical expression of the infinite,--which is not vastness, nor immensity, nor perfection, but whatever cannot be circumscribed within the limits of actual sensuous being. In the ancient art, on the contrary, every thing was finite and material. Accordingly, sculpture was not attempted by the Gothic races till the ancient specimens were discovered, whilst painting and architecture were of native growth amongst them. In the earliest specimens of the paintings of modern ages, as in those of Giotto and his associates in the cemetery at Pisa, this complexity, variety, and symbolical character are evident, and are more fully developed in the mightier works of Michel Angelo and Raffael. The contemplation of the works of antique art excites a feeling of elevated beauty, and exalted notions of the human self; but the Gothic architecture impresses the beholder with a sense of self-annihilation; he becomes, as it were, a part of the work contemplated. An endless complexity and variety are united into one whole, the plan of which is not distinct from the execution. A Gothic cathedral is the petrefaction of our religion. The only work of truly modern sculpture is the Moses of Michel Angelo. The Northern nations were prepared by their own previous religion for Christianity; they, for the most part, received it gladly, and it took root as in a native soil. The deference to woman, characteristic of the Gothic races, combined itself with devotion in the idea of the Virgin Mother, and gave rise to many beautiful associations. Mr. C. remarked how Gothic an instrument in origin and character the organ was. He also enlarged on the influence of female character on our education, the first impressions of our childhood being derived from women. Amongst oriental nations, he said, the only distinction was between lord and slave. With the antique Greeks, the will of every one conflicting with the will of all, produced licentiousness; with the modern descendants from the northern stocks, both these extremes were shut out, to reappear mixed and condensed into this principle or temper;--submission, but with free choice,--illustrated in chivalrous devotion to women as such, in attachment to the sovereign, &c. [Footnote 1: From Mr. Green's note taken at the delivery. Ed.] LECTURE II. [1] GENERAL CHARACTER OP THE GOTHIC LITERATURE AND ART. In my last lecture I stated that the descendants of Japhet and Shem peopled Europe and Asia, fulfilling in their distribution the prophecies of Scripture, while the descendants of Ham passed into Africa, there also actually verifying the interdiction pronounced against them. The Keltic and Teutonic nations occupied that part of Europe, which is now France, Britain, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, &c. They were in general a hardy race, possessing great fortitude, and capable of great endurance. The Romans slowly conquered the more southerly portion of their tribes, and succeeded only by their superior arts, their policy, and better discipline. After a time, when the Goths,--to use the name of the noblest and most historical of the Teutonic tribes,--had acquired some knowledge of these arts from mixing with their conquerors, they invaded the Roman territories. The hardy habits, the steady perseverance, the better faith of the enduring Goth rendered him too formidable an enemy for the corrupt Roman, who was more inclined to purchase the subjection of his enemy, than to go through the suffering necessary to secure it. The conquest of the Romans gave to the Goths the Christian religion as it was then existing in Italy; and the light and graceful building of Grecian, or Roman-Greek order, became singularly combined with the massy architecture of the Goths, as wild and varied as the forest vegetation which it resembled. The Greek art is beautiful. When I enter a Greek church, my eye is charmed, and my mind elated; I feel exalted, and proud that I am a man. But the Gothic art is sublime. On entering a cathedral, I am filled with devotion and with awe; I am lost to the actualities that surround me, and my whole being expands into the infinite; earth and air, nature and art, all swell up into eternity, and the only sensible impression left, is, 'that I am nothing!' This religion, while it tended to soften the manners of the Northern tribes, was at the same time highly congenial to their nature. The Goths are free from the stain of hero worship. Gazing on their rugged mountains, surrounded by impassable forests, accustomed to gloomy seasons, they lived in the bosom of nature, and worshipped an invisible and unknown deity. Firm in his faith, domestic in his habits, the life of the Goth was simple and dignified, yet tender and affectionate. The Greeks were remarkable for complacency and completion; they delighted in whatever pleased the eye; to them it was not enough to have merely the idea of a divinity, they must have it placed before them, shaped in the most perfect symmetry, and presented with the nicest judgment; and if we look upon any Greek production of art, the beauty of its parts, and the harmony of their union, the complete and complacent effect of the whole, are the striking characteristics. It is the same in their poetry. In Homer you have a poem perfect in its form, whether originally so, or from the labour of after critics, I know not; his descriptions are pictures brought vividly before you, and as far as the eye and understanding are concerned, I am indeed gratified. But if I wish my feelings to be affected, if I wish my heart to be touched, if I wish to melt into sentiment and tenderness, I must turn to the heroic songs of the Goths, to the poetry of the middle ages. The worship of statues in Greece had, in a civil sense, its advantage, and disadvantage; advantage, in promoting statuary and the arts; disadvantage, in bringing their gods too much on a level with human beings, and thence depriving them of their dignity, and gradually giving rise to scepticism and ridicule. But no statue, no artificial emblem, could satisfy the Northman's mind; the dark wild imagery of nature, which surrounded him, and the freedom of his life, gave his mind a tendency to the infinite, so that he found rest in that which presented no end, and derived satisfaction from that which was indistinct. We have few and uncertain vestiges of Gothic literature till the time of Theodoric, who encouraged his subjects to write, and who made a collection of their poems. These consisted chiefly of heroic songs, sung at the Court; for at that time this was the custom. Charlemagne, in the beginning of the ninth century, greatly encouraged letters, and made a further collection of the poems of his time, among which were several epic poems of great merit; or rather in strictness there was a vast cycle of heroic poems, or minstrelsies, from and out of which separate poems were composed. The form of poetry was, however, for the most part, the metrical romance and heroic tale. Charlemagne's army, or a large division of it, was utterly destroyed in the Pyrenees, when returning from a successful attack on the Arabs of Navarre and Arragon; yet the name of Roncesvalles became famous in the songs of the Gothic poets. The Greeks and Romans would not have done this; they would not have recorded in heroic verse the death and defeat of their fellow-countrymen. But the Goths, firm in their faith, with a constancy not to be shaken, celebrated those brave men who died for their religion and their country! What, though they had been defeated, they died without fear, as they had lived without reproach; they left no stain on their names, for they fell fighting for their God, their liberty, and their rights; and the song that sang that day's reverse animated them to future victory and certain vengeance. I must now turn to our great monarch, Alfred, one of the most august characters that any age has ever produced; and when I picture him after the toils of government and the dangers of battle, seated by a solitary lamp, translating the holy scriptures into the Saxon tongue,--when I reflect on his moderation in success, on his fortitude and perseverance in difficulty and defeat, and on the wisdom and extensive nature of his legislation, I am really at a loss which part of this great man's character most to admire. Yet above all, I see the grandeur, the freedom, the mildness, the domestic unity, the universal character of the middle ages condensed into Alfred's glorious institution of the trial by jury. I gaze upon it as the immortal symbol of that age;--an age called indeed dark;--but how could that age be considered dark, which solved the difficult problem of universal liberty, freed man from the shackles of tyranny, and subjected his actions to the decision of twelve of his fellow countrymen? The liberty of the Greeks was a phenomenon, a meteor, which blazed for a short time, and then sank into eternal darkness. It was a combination of most opposite materials, slavery and liberty. Such can neither be happy nor lasting. The Goths on the other hand said, You shall be our Emperor; but we must be Princes on our own estates, and over them you shall have no power! The Vassals said to their Prince, We will serve you in your wars, and defend your castle; but we must have liberty in our own circle, our cottage, our cattle, our proportion of land. The Cities said, We acknowledge you for our Emperor; but we must have our walls and our strong holds, and be governed by our own laws. Thus all combined, yet all were separate; all served, yet all were free. Such a government could not exist in a dark age. Our ancestors may not indeed have been deep in the metaphysics of the schools; they may not have shone in the fine arts; but much knowledge of human nature, much practical wisdom must have existed amongst them, when this admirable constitution was formed; and I believe it is a decided truth, though certainly an awful lesson, that nations are not the most happy at the time when literature and the arts flourish the most among them. The translations I had promised in my syllabus I shall defer to the end of the course, when I shall give a single lecture of recitations illustrative of the different ages of poetry. There is one Northern tale I will relate, as it is one from which Shakspeare derived that strongly marked and extraordinary scene between Richard III. and the Lady Anne. It may not be equal to that in strength and genius, but it is, undoubtedly, superior in decorum and delicacy. A Knight had slain a Prince, the lord of a strong castle, in combat. He afterwards contrived to get into the castle, where he obtained an interview with the Princess's attendant, whose life he had saved in some encounter; he told her of his love for her mistress, and won her to his interest. She then slowly and gradually worked on her mistress's mind, spoke of the beauty of his person, the fire of his eyes, the sweetness of his voice, his valour in the field, his gentleness in the court; in short, by watching her opportunities, she at last filled the Princess's soul with this one image; she became restless; sleep forsook her; her curiosity to see this Knight became strong; but her maid still deferred the interview, till at length she confessed she was in love with him;--the Knight is then introduced, and the nuptials are quickly celebrated. In this age there was a tendency in writers to the droll and the grotesque, and in the little dramas which at that time existed, there were singular instances of these. It was the disease of the age. It is a remarkable fact that Luther and Melancthon, the great religious reformers of that day, should have strongly recommended for the education of children, dramas, which at present would be considered highly indecorous, if not bordering on a deeper sin. From one which they particularly recommended, I will give a few extracts; more I should not think it right to do. The play opens with: Adam and Eve washing and dressing their children to appear before the Lord, who is coming from heaven to hear them repeat the Lord's Prayer, Belief, &c. In the next scene the Lord appears seated like a schoolmaster, with the children standing round, when Cain, who is behind hand, and a sad pickle, comes running in with a bloody nose and his hat on. Adam says, "What, with your hat on!" Cain then goes up to shake hands with the Almighty, when Adam says (giving him a cuff), "Ah, would you give your left hand to the Lord?" At length Cain takes his place in the class, and it becomes his turn to say the Lord's Prayer. At this time the Devil (a constant attendant at that time) makes his appearance, and getting behind Cain, whispers in his ear; instead of the Lord's Prayer, Cain gives it so changed by the transposition of the words, that the meaning is reversed; yet this is so artfully done by the author, that it is exactly as an obstinate child would answer, who knows his lesson, yet does not choose to say it. In the last scene, horses in rich trappings and carriages covered with gold are introduced, and the good children are to ride in them and be Lord Mayors, Lords, &c.; Cain and the bad ones are to be made cobblers and tinkers, and only to associate with such. This, with numberless others, was written by Hans Sachs. Our simple ancestors, firm in their faith, and pure in their morals, were only amused by these pleasantries, as they seemed to them, and neither they nor the reformers feared their having any influence hostile to religion. When I was many years back in the north of Germany, there were several innocent superstitions in practice. Among others at Christmas, presents used to be given to the children by the parents, and they were delivered on Christmas day by a person who personated, and was supposed by the children to be, Christ: early on Christmas morning he called, knocking loudly at the door, and (having received his instructions) left presents for the good and a rod for the bad. Those who have since been in Germany have found this custom relinquished; it was considered profane and irrational. Yet they have not found the children better, nor the mothers more careful of their offspring; they have not found their devotion more fervent, their faith more strong, nor their morality more pure. [2] [Footnote 1: From Mr. William Hammond's note taken at the delivery. Ed.] [Footnote 2: See this custom of Knecht Rupert more minutely described in Mr. Coleridge's own letter from Germany, published in the 2nd vol. of the 'Friend', p. 320. Ed.; also in the 1st vol. of the 'Bibliographia Epistolaris', currently also available in .txt and .html form, free for download from Project Gutenberg http://promo.net/pg, (text Ed.)] LECTURE III. THE TROUBADOURS--BOCCACCIO--PETRARCH--PULC--CHAUCER--SPENSER. The last Lecture was allotted to an investigation into the origin and character of a species of poetry, the least influenced of any by the literature of Greece and Rome,--that in which the portion contributed by the Gothic conquerors, the predilections and general tone or habit of thought and feeling, brought by our remote ancestors with them from the forests of Germany, or the deep dells and rocky mountains of Norway, are the most prominent. In the present Lecture I must introduce you to a species of poetry, which had its birth-place near the centre of Roman glory, and in which, as might be anticipated, the influences of the Greek and Roman muse are far more conspicuous,--as great, indeed, as the efforts of intentional imitation on the part of the poets themselves could render them. But happily for us and for their own fame, the intention of the writers as men is often at complete variance with the genius of the same men as poets. To the force of their intention we owe their mythological ornaments, and the greater definiteness of their imagery; and their passion for the beautiful, the voluptuous, and the artificial, we must in part attribute to the same intention, but in part likewise to their natural dispositions and tastes. For the same climate and many of the same circumstances were acting on them, which had acted on the great classics, whom they were endeavouring to imitate. But the love of the marvellous, the deeper sensibility, the higher reverence for womanhood, the characteristic spirit of sentiment and courtesy,--these were the heir-looms of nature, which still regained the ascendant, whenever the use of the living mother-language enabled the inspired poet to appear instead of the toilsome scholar. From this same union, in which the soul (if I may dare so express myself) was Gothic, while the outward forms and a majority of the words themselves, were the reliques of the Roman, arose the Romance, or romantic language, in which the Troubadours or Love-singers of Provence sang and wrote, and the different dialects of which have been modified into the modern Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese; while the language of the Trouveurs, Trouveres, or Norman-French poets, forms the intermediate link between the Romance or modified Roman, and the Teutonic, including the Dutch, Danish, Swedish, and the upper and lower German, as being the modified Gothic. And as the northernmost extreme of the Norman-French, or that part of the link in which it formed on the Teutonic, we must take the Norman-English minstrels and metrical romances, from the greater predominance of the Anglo-Saxon Gothic in the derivation of the words. I mean, that the language of the English metrical romance is less romanized, and has fewer words, not originally of a northern origin, than the same romances in the Norman-French; which is the more striking, because the former were for the most part translated from the latter; the authors of which seem to have eminently merited their name of Trouveres, or inventors. Thus then we have a chain with two rings or staples:--at the southern end there is the Roman, or Latin; at the northern end the Keltic, Teutonic, or Gothic; and the links beginning with the southern end, are the Romance, including the Provençal, the Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, with their different dialects, then the Norman-French, and lastly the English. My object in adverting to the Italian poets, is not so much for their own sakes, in which point of view Dante and Ariosto alone would have required separate Lectures, but for the elucidation of the merits of our countrymen, as to what extent we must consider them as fortunate imitators of their Italian predecessors, and in what points they have the higher claims of original genius. Of Dante, I am to speak elsewhere. Of Boccaccio, who has little interest as a metrical poet in any respect, and none for my present purpose, except, perhaps, as the reputed inventor or introducer of the octave stanza in his 'Teseide', it will be sufficient to say, that we owe to him the subjects of numerous poems taken from his famous tales, the happy art of narration, and the still greater merit of a depth and fineness in the workings of the passions, in which last excellence, as likewise in the wild and imaginative character of the situations, his almost neglected romances appear to me greatly to excel his far famed 'Decameron'. To him, too, we owe the more doubtful merit of having introduced into the Italian prose, and by the authority of his name and the influence of his example, more or less throughout Europe, the long interwoven periods, and architectural structure which arose from the very nature of their language in the Greek writers, but which already in the Latin orators and historians, had betrayed a species of effort, a foreign something, which had been superinduced on the language, instead of growing out of it; and which was far too alien from that individualizing and confederating, yet not blending, character of the North, to become permanent, although its magnificence and stateliness were objects of admiration and occasional imitation. This style diminished the control of the writer over the inner feelings of men, and created too great a charm between the body and the life; and hence especially it was abandoned by Luther. But lastly, to Boccaccio's sanction we must trace a large portion of the mythological pedantry and incongruous paganisms, which for so long a period deformed the poetry, even of the truest poets. To such an extravagance did Boccaccio himself carry this folly, that in a romance of chivalry, he has uniformly styled God the Father Jupiter, our Saviour Apollo, and the Evil Being Pluto. But for this there might be some excuse pleaded. I dare make none for the gross and disgusting licentiousness, the daring profaneness, which rendered the 'Decameron' of Boccaccio the parent of a hundred worse children, fit to be classed among the enemies of the human race; which poisons 'Ariosto'--(for that I may not speak oftener than necessary of so odious a subject, I mention it here once for all)--which interposes a painful mixture in the humour of Chaucer, and which has once or twice seduced even our pure-minded Spenser into a grossness, as heterogeneous from the spirit of his great poem, as it was alien to the delicacy of his morals. PETRARCH. Born at Arezzo, 1304.--Died 1374. Petrarch was the final blossom and perfection of the Troubadours. See Biog. Lit. vol. ii. p.27, &c. NOTES ON PETRARCH'S [1] SONNETS, CANZONES, &c. VOL. I. Good: SONNET. 1. Voi, ch' ascoltate, &c. 7. La gola, e 'l sonno, &c. 11. Se la mia vita, &c. 12. Quando fra l'altre, &c. 18. Vergognando talor, &c. 25. Quanto più m' avvicino, &c. 28. Solo e pensoso, &c. 29. S' io credessi, &c. CANZ. 14. Sì è debile il filo, &c. Pleasing: BALL. 1. Lassare il velo, &c. CANZ. 1. Nel dolce tempo, &c. This poem was imitated by our old Herbert; [2] it is ridiculous in the thoughts, but simple and sweet in diction. Dignified: CANZ. 2. O aspettata in ciel, &c. 9. Gentil mia Donna, &c. The first half of this ninth canzone is exquisite; and in Canzone 8, the nine lines beginning: O poggi, o valli, &c. to 'cura', are expressed with vigour and chastity. CANZ. 9. Daquel dì innanzi a me medesmo piacqui, Empiendo d'un pensier' alto, e soave Quel core, "ond' hanno i begli occhi la chiave." Note. O that the Pope would take these eternal keys, which so for ever turn the bolts on the finest passages of true passion! VOL. II. CANZ. 1. Che debb' io far? &c. Very good; but not equal, I think, to Canzone 2, Amor, se vuoi ch' i' torni, &c. though less faulty. With the omission of half-a-dozen conceits and Petrarchisms of 'hooks, baits, flames,' and 'torches', this second canzone is a bold and impassioned lyric, and leaves no doubt in my mind of Petrarch's having possessed a true poetic genius. 'Utinam deleri possint sequentia':-- L. 17-19. --e la soave fiamma Ch' ancor, lasso! m' infiamma Essendo spenta, or che fea dunque ardendo? L. 54-56. --ov' erano a tutt' ore Disposti gli ami ov' io fui preso, e l'esca Ch' i' bramo sempre. L. 76-79. --onde l' accese Saette uscivan d' invisibil foco, E ragion temean poco; Chè contra 'l ciel non val difesa umana. And the lines 86, 87. Poser' in dubbio, a cui Devesse il pregio di più laude darsi --are rather flatly worded. [Footnote 1: These notes, by Mr. C., are written in a Petrarch in my possession, and are of some date before 1812. It is hoped that they will not seem ill placed here. Ed.] [Footnote 2: If George Herbert is meant, I can find nothing like an imitation of this canzone in his poems. Ed.] LUIGI PULCI. Born at Florence, 1431.--Died about 1487. Pulci was of one of the noblest families in Florence, reported to be one of the Frankish stocks which remained in that city after the departure of Charlemagne:-- Pulcia Gallorum soboles descendit in urbem, Clara quidem bello, sacris nec inhospita Musis. Verino 'De illustrat. Cort. Flor.' III. v. 118. Members of this family were five times elected to the Priorate, one of the highest honours of the republic. Pulci had two brothers, and one of their wives, Antonia, who were all poets:-- Carminibus patriis notissima Pulcia proles; Quis non hanc urbem Musarum dicat arnicam, Si tres producat fratres domus una poetas? 'Ib.' II. v. 241. Luigi married Lucrezia di Uberto, of the Albizzi family, and was intimate with the great men of his time, but more especially with Angelo Politian, and Lorenzo the Magnificent. His Morgante has been attributed, in part at least,[1] to the assistance of Marsilius Ficinus, and by others the whole has been attributed to Politian. The first conjecture is utterly improbable; the last is possible, indeed, on account of the licentiousness of the poem; but there are no direct grounds for believing it. The 'Morgante Maggiore' [2] is the first proper romance; although, perhaps, Pulci had the 'Teseide' before him. The story is taken from the fabulous history of Turpin; and if the author had any distinct object, it seems to have been that of making himself merry with the absurdities of the old romancers. The 'Morgante' sometimes makes you think of Rabelais. It contains the most remarkable guess or allusion upon the subject of America that can be found in any book published before the discovery. [3] The well known passage in the tragic Seneca is not to be compared with it. The 'copia verborum' of the mother Florentine tongue, and the easiness of his style, afterwards brought to perfection by Berni, are the chief merits of Pulci; his chief demerit is his heartless spirit of jest and buffoonery, by which sovereigns and their courtiers were flattered by the degradation of nature, and the 'impossibilification' of a pretended virtue. [Footnote: 1 Meaning the 25th canto. Ed.] [Footnote 2: The 'Morgante' was printed in 1488. Ed.] [Footnote 3: The reference is, of course, to the following stanzas:-- Disse Astarotte: un error lungo e fioco Per molti secol non ben conosciuto, Fa che si dice d' Ercol le colonne, E che più là molti periti sonne. Sappi che questa opinione è vana; Perchè più oltre navicar si puote, Però che l' acqua in ogni parte è piana, Benchè la terra abbi forma di ruote: Era più grossa allor la gente humana; Falche potrebbe arrosirne le gote Ercule ancor d' aver posti que' segni, Perchè più oltre passeranno i legni. E puossi andar giù ne l' altro emisperio, Però che al centro ogni cosa reprime; Sì che la terra per divin misterio Sospesa sta fra le stelle sublime, E là giù son città, castella, e imperio; Ma nol cognobbon quelle genti prime: Vedi che il sol di camminar s' affretta, Dove io ti dico che là giù s' aspetta. E come un segno surge in Oriente, Un altro cade con mirabil arte, Come si vede qua ne l' Occidente, Però che il ciel giustamente comparte; Antipodi appellata è quella gente; Adora il sole e Jupiterre e Marte, E piante e animal come voi hanno, E spesso insieme gran battaglie fanno. C. XXV. st. 228, &c.] CHAUCER. Born in London, 1328.--Died 1400. [1] Chaucer must be read with an eye to the Norman-French Trouveres, of whom he is the best representative in English. He had great powers of invention. As in Shakspeare, his characters represent classes, but in a different manner; Shakspeare's characters are the representatives of the interior nature of humanity, in which some element has become so predominant as to destroy the health of the mind; whereas Chaucer's are rather representatives of classes of manners. He is therefore more led to individualize in a mere personal sense. Observe Chaucer's love of nature; and how happily the subject of his main work is chosen. When you reflect that the company in the Decameron have retired to a place of safety from the raging of a pestilence, their mirth provokes a sense of their unfeelingness; whereas in Chaucer nothing of this sort occurs, and the scheme of a party on a pilgrimage, with different ends and occupations, aptly allows of the greatest variety of expression in the tales. ... [Footnote 1: From Mr. Green's note. Ed.] SPENSER. Born in London, 1553.--Died 1599. There is this difference, among many others, between Shakspeare and Spenser:--Shakspeare is never coloured by the customs of his age; what appears of contemporary character in him is merely negative; it is just not something else. He has none of the fictitious realities of the classics, none of the grotesquenesses of chivalry, none of the allegory of the middle ages; there is no sectarianism either of politics or religion, no miser, no witch,--no common witch,--no astrology--nothing impermanent of however long duration; but he stands like the yew tree in Lorton vale, which has known so many ages that it belongs to none in particular; a living image of endless self-reproduction, like the immortal tree of Malabar. In Spenser the spirit of chivalry is entirely predominant, although with a much greater infusion of the poet's own individual self into it than is found in any other writer. He has the wit of the southern with the deeper inwardness of the northern genius. No one can appreciate Spenser without some reflection on the nature of allegorical writing. The mere etymological meaning of the word, allegory,--to talk of one thing and thereby convey another,--is too wide. The true sense is this,--the employment of one set of agents and images to convey in disguise a moral meaning, with a likeness to the imagination, but with a difference to the understanding,--those agents and images being so combined as to form a homogeneous whole. This distinguishes it from metaphor, which is part of an allegory. But allegory is not properly distinguishable from fable, otherwise than as the first includes the second, as a genus its species; for in a fable there must be nothing but what is universally known and acknowledged, but in an allegory there may be that which is new and not previously admitted. The pictures of the great masters, especially of the Italian schools, are genuine allegories. Amongst the classics, the multitude of their gods either precluded allegory altogether, or else made every thing allegory, as in the Hesiodic Theogonia; for you can scarcely distinguish between power and the personification of power. The 'Cupid and Psyche' of, or found in, Apuleius, is a phenomenon. It is the Platonic mode of accounting for the fall of man. The 'Battle of the Soul' [1] by Prudentius is an early instance of Christian allegory. Narrative allegory is distinguished from mythology as reality from symbol; it is, in short, the proper intermedium between person and personification. Where it is too strongly individualized, it ceases to be allegory; this is often felt in the 'Pilgrim's Progress', where the characters are real persons with nick names. Perhaps one of the most curious warnings against another attempt at narrative allegory on a great scale, may be found in Tasso's account of what he himself intended in and by his 'Jerusalem Delivered'. As characteristic of Spenser, I would call your particular attention in the first place to the indescribable sweetness and fluent projection of his verse, very clearly distinguishable from the deeper and more inwoven harmonies of Shakspeare and Milton. This stanza is a good instance of what I mean:-- Yet she, most faithfull ladie, all this while Forsaken, wofull, solitarie mayd, Far from all peoples preace, as in exile, In wildernesse and wastfull deserts strayd To seeke her knight; who, subtily betrayd Through that late vision which th' enchaunter wrought, Had her abandond; she, of nought affrayd, Through woods and wastnes wide him daily sought, Yet wished tydinges none of him unto her brought. F. Qu. B. I. c. 3. st. 3. 2. Combined with this sweetness and fluency, the scientific construction of the metre of the 'Faery Queene' is very noticeable. One of Spenser's arts is that of alliteration, and he uses it with great effect in doubling the impression of an image:-- In _w_ildernesse and _w_astful deserts,-- Through _w_oods and _w_astnes _w_ilde,-- They passe the bitter _w_aves of Acheron, Where many soules sit _w_ailing _w_oefully, And come to _fi_ery _fl_ood of _Ph_legeton, Whereas the damned ghosts in torments _f_ry, And with _sh_arp _sh_rilling _sh_rieks doth bootlesse cry,--&c. He is particularly given to an alternate alliteration, which is, perhaps, when well used, a great secret in melody:-- A _r_amping lyon _r_ushed suddenly,-- And _s_ad to _s_ee her _s_orrowful constraint,-- And on the grasse her _d_aintie _l_imbes _d_id _l_ay,--&c. You cannot read a page of the Faery Queene, if you read for that purpose, without perceiving the intentional alliterativeness of the words; and yet so skilfully is this managed, that it never strikes any unwarned ear as artificial, or other than the result of the necessary movement of the verse. 3. Spenser displays great skill in harmonizing his descriptions of external nature and actual incidents with the allegorical character and epic activity of the poem. Take these two beautiful passages as illustrations of what I mean:-- By this the northerne wagoner had set His sevenfol teme behind the stedfast starre That was in ocean waves yet never wet, But firme is fixt, and sendeth light from farre To all that in the wide deepe wandring arre; And chearefull chaunticlere with his note shrill Had warned once, that Phoebus' fiery carre In hast was climbing up the easterne hill, Full envious that Night so long his roome did fill; _When_ those accursed messengers of hell, That feigning dreame, and that faire-forged spright Came, &c. B. I. c. 2. st. 1. ... At last, the golden orientall gate Of greatest Heaven gan to open fayre; And Phoebus, fresh as brydegrome to his mate, Came dauncing forth, shaking his deawie hayre; And hurld his glistring beams through gloomy ayre. Which when the wakeful Elfe perceiv'd, streightway He started up, and did him selfe prepayre In sunbright armes and battailons array; For with that Pagan proud he combat will that day. Ib. c. 5. st. 2. Observe also the exceeding vividness of Spenser's descriptions. They are not, in the true sense of the word, picturesque; but are composed of a wondrous series of images, as in our dreams. Compare the following passage with any thing you may remember 'in pari materia' in Milton or Shakspeare:-- His haughtie helmet, horrid all with gold, Both glorious brightnesse and great terrour bredd For all the crest a dragon did enfold With greedie pawes, and over all did spredd His golden winges; his dreadfull hideous hedd, Close couched on the bever, seemd to throw From flaming mouth bright sparkles fiery redd, That suddeine horrour to faint hartes did show; And scaly tayle was stretcht adowne his back full low. Upon the top of all his loftie crest A bounch of haires discolourd diversly, With sprinkled pearle and gold full richly drest, Did shake, and seemd to daunce for jollitie; Like to an almond tree ymounted hye On top of greene Selinis all alone, With blossoms brave bedecked daintily, Whose tender locks do tremble every one At everie little breath that under heaven is blowne. Ib. c. 7. st. 31-2. 4. You will take especial note of the marvellous independence and true imaginative absence of all particular space or time in the Faery Queene. It is in the domains neither of history or geography; it is ignorant of all artificial boundary, all material obstacles; it is truly in land of Faery, that is, of mental space. The poet has placed you in a dream, a charmed sleep, and you neither wish, nor have the power, to inquire where you are, or how you got there. It reminds me of some lines of my own:-- Oh! would to Alla! The raven or the sea-mew were appointed To bring me food!--or rather that my soul Might draw in life from the universal air! It were a lot divine in some small skiff Along some ocean's boundless solitude To float for ever with a careless course And think myself the only being alive! Remorse, Act iv. sc. 3. Indeed Spenser himself, in the conduct of his great poem, may be represented under the same image, his symbolizing purpose being his mariner's compass:-- As pilot well expert in perilous wave, That to a stedfast starre his course hath bent, When foggy mistes or cloudy tempests have The faithfull light of that faire lampe yblent, And coverd Heaven with hideous dreriment; Upon his card and compas firmes his eye, The maysters of his long experiment, And to them does the steddy helme apply, Bidding his winged vessell fairely forward fly. B. II. c. 7. st. 1. So the poet through the realms of allegory. 5. You should note the quintessential character of Christian chivalry in all his characters, but more especially in his women. The Greeks, except, perhaps, in Homer, seem to have had no way of making their women interesting, but by unsexing them, as in the instances of the tragic Medea, Electra, &c. Contrast such characters with Spenser's Una, who exhibits no prominent feature, has no particularization, but produces the same feeling that a statue does, when contemplated at a distance:-- From her fayre head her fillet she undight, And layd her stole aside: her angels face, As the great eye of Heaven, shyned bright, And made a sunshine in the shady place; Did never mortal eye behold such heavenly grace. B. I. c. 3. st. 4. 6. In Spenser we see the brightest and purest form of that nationality which was so common a characteristic of our elder poets. There is nothing unamiable, nothing contemptuous of others, in it. To glorify their country--to elevate England into a queen, an empress of the heart--this was their passion and object; and how dear and important an object it was or may be, let Spain, in the recollection of her Cid, declare! There is a great magic in national names. What a damper to all interest is a list of native East Indian merchants! Unknown names are non-conductors; they stop all sympathy. No one of our poets has touched this string more exquisitely than Spenser; especially in his chronicle of the British Kings (B. II. c. 10.), and the marriage of the Thames with the Medway (B. IV. c. 11.), in both which passages the mere names constitute half the pleasure we receive. To the same feeling we must in particular attribute Spenser's sweet reference to Ireland:-- Ne thence the Irishe rivers absent were; Sith no lesse famous than the rest they be, &c. Ib. ... And Mulla mine, whose waves I whilom taught to weep. Ib. And there is a beautiful passage of the same sort in the Colin Clout's 'Come Home Again':-- "One day," quoth he, "I sat, as was my trade, Under the foot of Mole," &c. Lastly, the great and prevailing character of Spenser's mind is fancy under the conditions of imagination, as an ever present but not always active power. He has an imaginative fancy, but he has not imagination, in kind or degree, as Shakspeare and Milton have; the boldest effort of his powers in this way is the character of Talus.[2] Add to this a feminine tenderness and almost maidenly purity of feeling, and above all, a deep moral earnestness which produces a believing sympathy and acquiescence in the reader, and you have a tolerably adequate view of Spenser's intellectual being. [Footnote 1: 'Psychomachia'. Ed.] [Footnote 2: B. 5. 'Legend of Artegall'. Ed.] LECTURE VII. BEN JONSON, BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, AND MASSINGER. A contemporary is rather an ambiguous term, when applied to authors. It may simply mean that one man lived and wrote while another was yet alive, however deeply the former may have been indebted to the latter as his model. There have been instances in the literary world that might remind a botanist of a singular sort of parasite plant, which rises above ground, independent and unsupported, an apparent original; but trace its roots, and you will find the fibres all terminating in the root of another plant at an unsuspected distance, which, perhaps, from want of sun and genial soil, and the loss of sap, has scarcely been able to peep above the ground.--Or the word may mean those whose compositions were contemporaneous in such a sense as to preclude all likelihood of the one having borrowed from the other. In the latter sense I should call Ben Jonson a contemporary of Shakspeare, though he long survived him; while I should prefer the phrase of immediate successors for Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger, though they too were Shakspeare's contemporaries in the former sense. BEN JONSON. [1] Born, 1574.--Died, 1637. Ben Jonson is original; he is, indeed, the only one of the great dramatists of that day who was not either directly produced, or very greatly modified, by Shakspeare. In truth, he differs from our great master in every thing--in form and in substance--and betrays no tokens of his proximity. He is not original in the same way as Shakspeare is original; but after a fashion of his own, Ben Jonson is most truly original. The characters in his plays are, in the strictest sense of the term, abstractions. Some very prominent feature is taken from the whole man, and that single feature or humour is made the basis upon which the entire character is built up. Ben Jonson's 'dramatis personae' are almost as fixed as the masks of the ancient actors; you know from the first scene--sometimes from the list of names--exactly what every one of them is to be. He was a very accurately observing man; but he cared only to observe what was external or open to, and likely to impress, the senses. He individualizes, not so much, if at all, by the exhibition of moral or intellectual differences, as by the varieties and contrasts of manners, modes of speech and tricks of temper; as in such characters as Puntarvolo, Bobadill, &c. I believe there is not one whim or affectation in common life noted in any memoir of that age which may not be found drawn and framed in some corner or other of Ben Jonson's dramas; and they have this merit, in common with Hogarth's prints, that not a single circumstance is introduced in them which does not play upon, and help to bring out, the dominant humour or humours of the piece. Indeed I ought very particularly to call your attention to the extraordinary skill shown by Ben Jonson in contriving situations for the display of his characters. In fact, his care and anxiety in this matter led him to do what scarcely any of the dramatists of that age did--that is, invent his plots. It is not a first perusal that suffices for the full perception of the elaborate artifice of the plots of the Alchemist and the Silent Woman;--that of the former is absolute perfection for a necessary entanglement, and an unexpected, yet natural, evolution. Ben Jonson exhibits a sterling English diction, and he has with great skill contrived varieties of construction; but his style is rarely sweet or harmonious, in consequence of his labour at point and strength being so evident. In all his works, in verse or prose, there is an extraordinary opulence of thought; but it is the produce of an amassing power in the author, and not of a growth from within. Indeed a large proportion of Ben Jonson's thoughts may be traced to classic or obscure modern writers, by those who are learned and curious enough to follow the steps of this robust, surly, and observing dramatist. [Footnote: 1: From Mr. Green's note. 'Ed.'] Beaumont. Born, 1586.--Died, 1616. Fletcher. Born, 1576.--Died, 1625. Mr. Weber, to whose taste, industry, and appropriate erudition we owe, I will not say the best, (for that would be saying little,) but a good, edition of Beaumont and Fletcher, has complimented the Philaster, which he himself describes as inferior to the Maid's Tragedy by the same writers, as but little below the noblest of Shakspeare's plays, Lear, Macbeth, Othello, &c. and consequently implying the equality, at least, of the Maid's Tragedy;--and an eminent living critic,--who in the manly wit, strong sterling sense, and robust style of his original works, had presented the best possible credentials of office as 'chargé d'affaires' of literature in general,--and who by his edition of Massinger--a work in which there was more for an editor to do, and in which more was actually well done, than in any similar work within my knowledge--has proved an especial right of authority in the appreciation of dramatic poetry, and hath potentially a double voice with the public in his own right and in that of the critical synod, where, as 'princeps senatus', he possesses it by his prerogative,--has affirmed that Shakspeare's superiority to his contemporaries rests on his superior wit alone, while in all the other, and, as I should deem, higher excellencies of the drama, character, pathos, depth of thought, &c. he is equalled by Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson, and Massinger! [1] Of wit I am engaged to treat in another Lecture. It is a genus of many species; and at present I shall only say, that the species which is predominant in Shakspeare, is so completely Shakspearian, and in its essence so interwoven with all his other characteristic excellencies, that I am equally incapable of comprehending, both how it can be detached from his other powers, and how, being disparate in kind from the wit of contemporary dramatists, it can be compared with theirs in degree. And again--the detachment and the practicability of the comparison being granted--I should, I confess, be rather inclined to concede the contrary;--and in the most common species of wit, and in the ordinary application of the term, to yield this particular palm to Beaumont and Fletcher, whom here and hereafter I take as one poet with two names,--leaving undivided what a rare love and still rarer congeniality have united. At least, I have never been able to distinguish the presence of Fletcher during the life of Beaumont, nor the absence of Beaumont during the survival of Fletcher. But waiving, or rather deferring, this question, I protest against the remainder of the position in 'toto'. And indeed, whilst I can never, I trust, show myself blind to the various merits of Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger, or insensible to the greatness of the merits which they possess in common, or to the specific excellencies which give to each of the three a worth of his own,--I confess, that one main object of this Lecture was to prove that Shakspeare's eminence is his own, and not that of his age;--even as the pine-apple, the melon, and the gourd may grow on the same bed;--yea, the same circumstances of warmth and soil may be necessary to their full development, yet do not account for the golden hue, the ambrosial flavour, the perfect shape of the pine-apple, or the tufted crown on its head. Would that those, who seek to twist it off, could but promise us in this instance to make it the germ of an equal successor! What had a grammatical and logical consistency for the ear,--what could be put together and represented to the eye--these poets took from the ear and eye, unchecked by any intuition of an inward impossibility;-- just as a man might put together a quarter of an orange, a quarter of an apple, and the like of a lemon and a pomegranate, and make it look like one round diverse-coloured fruit. But nature, which works from within by evolution and assimilation according to a law, cannot do so, nor could Shakspeare; for he too worked in the spirit of nature, by evolving the germ from within by the imaginative power according to an idea. For as the power of seeing is to light, so is an idea in mind to a law in nature. They are correlatives, which suppose each other. The plays of Beaumont and Fletcher are mere aggregations without unity; in the Shakspearian drama there is a vitality which grows and evolves itself from within,--a key note which guides and controls the harmonies throughout. What is Lear?--It is storm and tempest--the thunder at first grumbling in the far horizon, then gathering around us, and at length bursting in fury over our heads,--succeeded by a breaking of the clouds for a while, a last flash of lightning, the closing in of night, and the single hope of darkness! And Romeo and Juliet?--It is a spring day, gusty and beautiful in the morn, and closing like an April evening with the song of the nightingale;--whilst Macbeth is deep and earthy,--composed to the subterranean music of a troubled conscience, which converts every thing into the wild and fearful! Doubtless from mere observation, or from the occasional similarity of the writer's own character, more or less in Beaumont and Fletcher, and other such writers will happen to be in correspondence with nature, and still more in apparent compatibility with it. But yet the false source is always discoverable, first by the gross contradictions to nature in so many other parts, and secondly, by the want of the impression which Shakspeare makes, that the thing said not only might have been said, but that nothing else could be substituted, so as to excite the same sense of its exquisite propriety. I have always thought the conduct and expressions of Othello and Iago in the last scene, when Iago is brought in prisoner, a wonderful instance of Shakspeare's consummate judgment:-- 'Oth.' I look down towards his feet;--but that's a fable. If that thou be'st a devil, I cannot kill thee. 'Iago.' I bleed, Sir; but not kill'd. 'Oth.' I am not sorry neither. Think what a volley of execrations and defiances Beaumont and Fletcher would have poured forth here! Indeed Massinger and Ben Jonson are both more perfect in their kind than Beaumont and Fletcher; the former in the story and affecting incidents; the latter in the exhibition of manners and peculiarities, whims in language, and vanities of appearance. There is, however, a diversity of the most dangerous kind here. Shakspeare shaped his characters out of the nature within; but we cannot so safely say, out of his own nature as an individual person. No! this latter is itself but a 'natura naturata',--an effect, a product, not a power. It was Shakspeare's prerogative to have the universal, which is potentially in each particular, opened out to him, the 'homo generalis', not as an abstraction from observation of a variety of men, but as the substance capable of endless modifications, of which his own personal existence was but one, and to use this one as the eye that beheld the other, and as the tongue that could convey the discovery. There is no greater or more common vice in dramatic writers than to draw out of themselves. How I--alone and in the self-sufficiency of my study, as all men are apt to be proud in their dreams--should like to be talking 'king'! Shakspeare, in composing, had no 'I', but the 'I' representative. In Beaumont and Fletcher you have descriptions of characters by the poet rather than the characters themselves; we are told, and impressively told, of their being; but we rarely or never feel that they actually are. Beaumont and Fletcher are the most lyrical of our dramatists. I think their comedies the best part of their works, although there are scenes of very deep tragic interest in some of their plays. I particularly recommend Monsieur Thomas for good pure comic humor. There is, occasionally, considerable license in their dramas; and this opens a subject much needing vindication and sound exposition, but which is beset with such difficulties for a Lecturer, that I must pass it by. Only as far as Shakspeare is concerned, I own, I can with less pain admit a fault in him than beg an excuse for it. I will not, therefore, attempt to palliate the grossness that actually exists in his plays by the customs of his age, or by the far greater coarseness of all his contemporaries, excepting Spenser, who is himself not wholly blameless, though nearly so;--for I place Shakspeare's merit on being of no age. But I would clear away what is, in my judgment, not his, as that scene of the Porter [2] in Macbeth, and many other such passages, and abstract what is coarse in manners only, and all that which from the frequency of our own vices, we associate with his words. If this were truly done, little that could be justly reprehensible would remain. Compare the vile comments, offensive and defensive, on Pope's Lust thro' some gentle strainers, &c. with the worst thing in Shakspeare, or even in Beaumont and Fletcher; and then consider how unfair the attack is on our old dramatists; especially because it is an attack that cannot be properly answered in that presence in which an answer would be most desirable, from the painful nature of one part of the position; but this very pain is almost a demonstration of its falsehood! [Footnote 1: See Mr. Gifford's introduction to his edition of Massinger. Ed.] [Footnote 2: Act ii. sc. 3.] MASSINGER. Born at Salisbury, 1584.--Died, 1640. With regard to Massinger, observe, 1. The vein of satire on the times; but this is not as in Shakspeare, where the natures evolve themselves according to their incidental disproportions, from excess, deficiency, or mislocation, of one or more of the component elements; but is merely satire on what is attributed to them by others. 2. His excellent metre--a better model for dramatists in general to imitate than Shakspeare's,--even if a dramatic taste existed in the frequenters of the stage, and could be gratified in the present size and management, or rather mismanagement, of the two patent theatres. I do not mean that Massinger's verse is superior to Shakspeare's or equal to it. Far from it; but it is much more easily constructed and may be more successfully adopted by writers in the present day. It is the nearest approach to the language of real life at all compatible with a fixed metre. In Massinger, as in all our poets before Dryden, in order to make harmonious verse in the reading, it is absolutely necessary that the meaning should be understood;--when the meaning is once seen, then the harmony is perfect. Whereas in Pope and in most of the writers who followed in his school, it is the mechanical metre which determines the sense. 3. The impropriety, and indecorum of demeanour in his favourite characters, as in Bertoldo in the Maid of Honour, who is a swaggerer, talking to his sovereign what no sovereign could endure, and to gentlemen what no gentleman would answer without pulling his nose. 4. Shakspeare's Ague-cheek, Osric, &c. are displayed through others, in the course of social intercourse, by the mode of their performing some office in which they are employed; but Massinger's 'Sylli' come forward to declare themselves fools 'ad arbitrium auctoris,' and so the diction always needs the 'subintelligitur' ('the man looks as if he thought so and so,') expressed in the language of the satirist, and not in that of the man himself:-- 'Sylli.' You may, madam, Perhaps, believe that I in this use art To make you dote upon me, by exposing My more than most rare features to your view; But I, as I have ever done, deal simply, A mark of sweet simplicity, ever noted In the family of the Syllis. Therefore, lady, Look not with too much contemplation on me; If you do, you are in the suds. 'Maid of Honour', act i. sc. 2. The author mixes his own feelings and judgments concerning the presumed fool; but the man himself, till mad, fights up against them, and betrays, by his attempts to modify them, that he is no fool at all, but one gifted with activity and copiousness of thought, image and expression, which belong not to a fool, but to a man of wit making himself merry with his own character. 5. There is an utter want of preparation in the decisive acts of Massinger's characters, as in Camiola and Aurelia in the Maid of Honour. Why? Because the 'dramatis personae' were all planned each by itself. Whereas in Shakspeare, the play is 'syngenesia;' each character has, indeed, a life of its own, and is an 'individuum' of itself, but yet an organ of the whole, as the heart in the human body. Shakspeare was a great comparative anatomist. Hence Massinger and all, indeed, but Shakspeare, take a dislike to their own characters, and spite themselves upon them by making them talk like fools or monsters; as Fulgentio in his visit to Camiola, (Act ii. sc. 2.) Hence too, in Massinger, the continued flings at kings, courtiers, and all the favourites of fortune, like one who had enough of intellect to see injustice in his own inferiority in the share of the good things of life, but not genius enough to rise above it, and forget himself. Beaumont and Fletcher have the same vice in the opposite pole, a servility of sentiment and a spirit of partizanship with the monarchical faction. 6. From the want of a guiding point in Massinger's characters, you never know what they are about. In fact they have no character. 7. Note the faultiness of his soliloquies, with connectives and arrangements, that have no other motive but the fear lest the audience should not understand him. 8. A play of Massinger's produces no one single effect, whether arising from the spirit of the whole, as in the As You Like It; or from any one indisputably prominent character as Hamlet. It is just "which you like best, gentlemen!" 9. The unnaturally irrational passions and strange whims of feeling which Massinger delights to draw, deprive the reader of all sound interest in the characters;--as in Mathias in the Picture, and in other instances. 10. The comic scenes in Massinger not only do not harmonize with the tragic, not only interrupt the feeling, but degrade the characters that are to form any part in the action of the piece, so as to render them unfit for any tragic interest. At least, they do not concern, or act upon, or modify, the principal characters. As when a gentleman is insulted by a mere blackguard,--it is the same as if any other accident of nature had occurred, a pig run under his legs, or his horse thrown him. There is no dramatic interest in it. I like Massinger's comedies better than his tragedies, although where the situation requires it, he often rises into the truly tragic and pathetic. He excells in narration, and for the most part displays his mere story with skill. But he is not a poet of high imagination; he is like a Flemish painter, in whose delineations objects appear as they do in nature, have the same force and truth, and produce the same effect upon the spectator. But Shakspeare is beyond this;--he always by metaphors and figures involves in the thing considered a universe of past and possible experiences; he mingles earth, sea and air, gives a soul to every thing, and at the same time that he inspires human feelings, adds a dignity in his images to human nature itself:-- Full many a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye; Kissing with golden face the meadows green, Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchymy, &c. (33rd Sonnet.) 'Note.'--Have I not over-rated Gifford's edition of Massinger?--Not,--if I have, as but just is, main reference to the restitution of the text; but yes, perhaps, if I were talking of the notes. These are more often wrong than right. In the Maid of Honour, Act i. sc. 5. Astutio describes Fulgentio as "A gentleman, yet no lord." Gifford supposes a transposition of the press for "No gentleman, yet a lord." But this would have no connection with what follows; and we have only to recollect that "lord" means a lord of lands, to see that the after lines are explanatory. He is a man of high birth, but no landed property;--as to the former, he is a distant branch of the blood royal;--as to the latter, his whole rent lies in a narrow compass, the king's ear! In the same scene the text stands: 'Bert'. No! they are useful For your 'imitation;'--I remember you, &c.;-- and Gifford condemns Mason's conjecture of 'initiation' as void of meaning and harmony. Now my ear deceives me if 'initiation' be not the right word. In fact,'imitation' is utterly impertinent to all that follows. Bertoldo tells Antonio that he had been initiated in the manners suited to the court by two or three sacred beauties, and that a similar experience would be equally useful for his initiation into the camp. Not a word of his imitation. Besides, I say the rhythm requires 'initiation,' and is lame as the verse now stands. LECTURE VIII. 'DON QUIXOTE'. CERVANTES. Born at Madrid, 1547;-Shakspeare, 1564; both put off mortality on the same day, the 23rd of April, 1616,--the one in the sixty-ninth, the other in the fifty-second, year of his life. The resemblance in their physiognomies is striking, but with a predominance of acuteness in Cervantes, and of reflection in Shakspeare, which is the specific difference between the Spanish and English characters of mind. I. The nature and eminence of Symbolical writing;-- II. Madness, and its different sorts, (considered without pretension to medical science);-- To each of these, or at least to my own notions respecting them, I must devote a few words of explanation, in order to render the after critique on Don Quixote, the master work of Cervantes' and his country's genius easily and throughout intelligible. This is not the least valuable, though it may most often be felt by us both as the heaviest and least entertaining portion of these critical disquisitions: for without it, I must have foregone one at least of the two appropriate objects of a Lecture, that of interesting you during its delivery, and of leaving behind in your minds the germs of after-thought, and the materials for future enjoyment. To have been assured by several of my intelligent auditors that they have reperused Hamlet or Othello with increased satisfaction in consequence of the new points of view in which I had placed those characters--is the highest compliment I could receive or desire; and should the address of this evening open out a new source of pleasure, or enlarge the former in your perusal of Don Quixote, it will compensate for the failure of any personal or temporary object. I. The Symbolical cannot, perhaps, be better defined in distinction from the Allegorical, than that it is always itself a part of that, of the whole of which it is the representative.--"Here comes a sail,"--(that is, a ship) is a symbolical expression. "Behold our lion!" when we speak of some gallant soldier, is allegorical. Of most importance to our present subject is this point, that the latter (the allegory) cannot be other than spoken consciously;--whereas in the former (the symbol) it is very possible that the general truth represented may be working unconsciously in the writer's mind during the construction of the symbol;--and it proves itself by being produced out of his own mind,--as the Don Quixote out of the perfectly sane mind of Cervantes, and not by outward observation, or historically. The advantage of symbolical writing over allegory is, that it presumes no disjunction of faculties, but simple predominance. II. Madness may be divided as-- 1. hypochondriasis; or, the man is out of his senses. 2. derangement of the understanding; or, the man is out of his wits. 3. loss of reason. 4. frenzy, or derangement of the sensations. Cervantes's own preface to Don Quixote is a perfect model of the gentle, every where intelligible, irony in the best essays of the Tatler and the Spectator. Equally natural and easy, Cervantes is more spirited than Addison; whilst he blends with the terseness of Swift, an exquisite flow and music of style, and above all, contrasts with the latter by the sweet temper of a superior mind, which saw the follies of mankind, and was even at the moment suffering severely under hard mistreatment;[1] and yet seems every where to have but one thought as the undersong-- "Brethren! with all your faults I love you still!"--or as a mother that chides the child she loves, with one hand holds up the rod, and with the other wipes off each tear as it drops! Don Quixote was neither fettered to the earth by want, nor holden in its embraces by wealth;--of which, with the temperance natural to his country, as a Spaniard, he had both far too little, and somewhat too much, to be under any necessity of thinking about it. His age too, fifty, may be well supposed to prevent his mind from being tempted out of itself by any of the lower passions;--while his habits, as a very early riser and a keen sportsman, were such as kept his spare body in serviceable subjection to his will, and yet by the play of hope that accompanies pursuit, not only permitted, but assisted, his fancy in shaping what it would. Nor must we omit his meagerness and entire featureliness, face and frame, which Cervantes gives us at once: "It is said that his surname was 'Quixada' or 'Quesada,'" &c.--even in this trifle showing an exquisite judgment;--just once insinuating the association of 'lantern-jaws' into the reader's mind, yet not retaining it obtrusively like the names in old farces and in the Pilgrim's Progress,--but taking for the regular appellative one which had the no meaning of a proper name in real life, and which yet was capable of recalling a number of very different, but all pertinent, recollections, as old armour, the precious metals hidden in the ore, &c. Don Quixote's leanness and featureliness are happy exponents of the excess of the formative or imaginative in him, contrasted with Sancho's plump rotundity, and recipiency of external impression. He has no knowledge of the sciences or scientific arts which give to the meanest portions of matter an intellectual interest, and which enable the mind to decypher in the world of the senses the invisible agency--that alone, of which the world's phenomena are the effects and manifestations,--and thus, as in a mirror, to contemplate its own reflex, its life in the powers, its imagination in the symbolic forms, its moral instincts in the final causes, and its reason in the laws of material nature: but--estranged from all the motives to observation from self-interest--the persons that surround him too few and too familiar to enter into any connection with his thoughts, or to require any adaptation of his conduct to their particular characters or relations to himself--his judgment lies fallow, with nothing to excite, nothing to employ it. Yet,--and here is the point, where genius even of the most perfect kind, allotted but to few in the course of many ages, does not preclude the necessity in part, and in part counterbalance the craving by sanity of judgment, without which genius either cannot be, or cannot at least manifest itself,--the dependency of our nature asks for some confirmation from without, though it be only from the shadows of other men's fictions. Too uninformed, and with too narrow a sphere of power and opportunity to rise into the scientific artist, or to be himself a patron of art, and with too deep a principle and too much innocence to become a mere projector, Don Quixote has recourse to romances:-- His curiosity and extravagant fondness herein arrived at that pitch, that he sold many acres of arable land to purchase books of knight-errantry, and carried home all he could lay hands on of that kind! (C.I.) The more remote these romances were from the language of common life, the more akin on that very account were they to the shapeless dreams and strivings of his own mind;--a mind, which possessed not the highest order of genius which lives in an atmosphere of power over mankind, but that minor kind which, in its restlessness, seeks for a vivid representative of its own wishes, and substitutes the movements of that objective puppet for an exercise of actual power in and by itself. The more wild and improbable these romances were, the more were they akin to his will, which had been in the habit of acting as an unlimited monarch over the creations of his fancy! Hence observe how the startling of the remaining common sense, like a glimmering before its death, in the notice of the impossible-improbable of Don Belianis, is dismissed by Don Quixote as impertinent:-- 'He had some doubt' [2] as to the dreadful wounds which Don Belianis gave and received: for he imagined, that notwithstanding the most expert surgeons had cured him, his face and whole body must still be full of seams and scars. 'Nevertheless' [3] he commended in his author the concluding his book with a promise of that unfinishable adventure! C. 1. Hence also his first intention to turn author; but who, with such a restless struggle within him, could content himself with writing in a remote village among apathists and ignorants? During his colloquies with the village priest and the barber surgeon, in which the fervour of critical controversy feeds the passion and gives reality to its object--what more natural than that the mental striving should become an eddy?--madness may perhaps be denned as the circling in a stream which should be progressive and adaptive: Don Quixote grows at length to be a man out of his wits; his understanding is deranged; and hence without the least deviation from the truth of nature, without losing the least trait of personal individuality, he becomes a substantial living allegory, or personification of the reason and the moral sense, divested of the judgment and the understanding. Sancho is the converse. He is the common sense without reason or imagination; and Cervantes not only shows the excellence and power of reason in, Don Quixote, but in both him and Sancho the mischiefs resulting from a severance of the two main constituents of sound intellectual and moral action. Put him and his master together, and they form a perfect intellect; but they are separated and without cement; and hence each having a need of the other for its own completeness, each has at times a mastery over the other. For the common sense, although it may see the practical inapplicability of the dictates of the imagination or abstract reason, yet cannot help submitting to them. These two characters possess the world, alternately and interchangeably the cheater and the cheated. To impersonate them, and to combine the permanent with the individual, is one of the highest creations of genius, and has been achieved by Cervantes and Shakspeare, almost alone. Observations on particular passages, (B. I. c. 1.) But not altogether approving of his having broken it to pieces with so much ease, to secure himself from the like danger for the future, he made it over again, fencing it with small bars of iron within, in such a manner, 'that he rested satisfied of its strength; and without caring to make a fresh experiment on it, he approved and looked upon it as a most excellent helmet.' His not trying his improved scull-cap is an exquisite trait of human character, founded on the oppugnancy of the soul in such a state to any disturbance by doubt of its own broodings. Even the long deliberation about his horse's name is full of meaning;--for in these day-dreams the greater part of the history passes and is carried on in words, which look forward to other words as what will be said of them. (Ib.) Near the place where he lived, there dwelt a very comely country lass, with whom he had formerly been in love; though, as it is supposed, she never knew it, nor troubled herself about it. The nascent love for the country lass, but without any attempt at utterance, or an opportunity of knowing her, except as the hint--the [Greek (transliterated): oti esti]--of the inward imagination, is happily conceived in both parts;--first, as confirmative of the shrinking back of the mind on itself, and its dread of having a cherished image destroyed by its own judgment; and secondly, as showing how necessarily love is the passion of novels. Novels are to love as fairy tales to dreams. I never knew but two men of taste and feeling who could not understand why I was delighted with the Arabian Nights' Tales, and they were likewise the only persons in my knowledge who scarcely remembered having ever dreamed. Magic and war--itself a magic--are the day-dreams of childhood; love is the day-dream of youth and early manhood. (C. 2.) "Scarcely had ruddy Phoebus spread the golden tresses of his beauteous hair over the face of the wide and spacious earth; and scarcely had the little painted birds, with the sweet and mellifluous harmony of their forked tongues, saluted the approach of rosy Aurora, who, quitting the soft couch of her jealous husband, disclosed herself to mortals through the gates of the Mauchegan horizon; when the renowned Don Quixote," &c. How happily already is the abstraction from the senses, from observation, and the consequent confusion of the judgment, marked in this description! The knight is describing objects immediate to his senses and sensations without borrowing a single trait from either. Would it be difficult to find parallel descriptions in Dryden's plays and in those of his successors? (C. 3.) The host is here happily conceived as one who from his past life as a sharper, was capable of entering into and humouring the knight, and so perfectly in character, that he precludes a considerable source of improbability in the future narrative, by enforcing upon Don Quixote the necessity of taking money with him. (C. 3.) "Ho, there, whoever thou art, rash knight, that approachest to touch the arms of the most valorous adventurer that ever girded sword," &c. Don Quixote's high eulogiums on himself--"the most valorous adventurer!"--but it is not himself that he has before him, but the idol of his imagination, the imaginary being whom he is acting. And this, that it is entirely a third person, excuses his heart from the otherwise inevitable charge of selfish vanity; and so by madness itself he preserves our esteem, and renders those actions natural by which he, the first person, deserves it. (C. 4.) Andres and his master. The manner in which Don Quixote redressed this wrong, is a picture of the true revolutionary passion in its first honest state, while it is yet only a bewilderment of the understanding. You have a benevolence limitless in its prayers, which are in fact aspirations towards omnipotence; but between it and beneficence the bridge of judgment--that is, of measurement of personal power--intervenes, and must be passed. Otherwise you will be bruised by the leap into the chasm, or be drowned in the revolutionary river, and drag others with you to the same fate. (C. 4.) Merchants of Toledo. When they were come so near as to be seen and heard, Don Quixote raised his voice, and with arrogant air cried out: "Let the whole world stand; if the whole world does not confess that there is not in the whole world a damsel more beautiful than," &c. Now mark the presumption which follows the self-complacency of the last act! That was an honest attempt to redress a real wrong; this is an arbitrary determination to enforce a Brissotine or Rousseau's ideal on all his fellow creatures. Let the whole world stand! 'If there had been any experience in proof of the excellence of our code, where would be our superiority in this enlightened age?' "No! the business is that without seeing her, you believe, confess, affirm, swear, and maintain it; _and if not, I challenge you all to battle_." [4] Next see the persecution and fury excited by opposition however moderate! The only words listened to are those, that without their context and their conditionals, and transformed into positive assertions, might give some shadow of excuse for the violence shown! This rich story ends, to the compassion of the men in their senses, in a sound rib-roasting of the idealist by the muleteer, the mob. And happy for thee, poor knight! that the mob were against thee! For had they been with thee, by the change of the moon and of them, thy head would have been off. (C. 5.) first part--The idealist recollects the causes that had been accessary to the reverse and attempts to remove them--too late. He is beaten and disgraced. (C. 6.) This chapter on Don Quixote's library proves that the author did not wish to destroy the romances, but to cause them to be read as romances--that is, for their merits as poetry. (C. 7.) Among other things, Don Quixote told him, he should dispose himself to go with him willingly;--for some time or other such an adventure might present, that an island might be won, in the turn of a hand, and he be left governor thereof. At length the promises of the imaginative reason begin to act on the plump, sensual, honest common sense accomplice,--but unhappily not in the same person, and without the 'copula' of the judgment,--in hopes of the substantial good things, of which the former contemplated only the glory and the colours. (C. 7.) Sancho Panza went riding upon his ass, like any patriarch, with his wallet and leathern bottle, and with a vehement desire to find himself governor of the island which his master had promised him. The first relief from regular labour is so pleasant to poor Sancho! (C. 8.) "I no gentleman! I swear by the great God, thou liest, as I am a Christian. Biscainer by land, gentleman by sea, gentleman for the devil, and thou liest: look then if thou hast any thing else to say." This Biscainer is an excellent image of the prejudices and bigotry provoked by the idealism of a speculator. This story happily detects the trick which our imagination plays in the description of single combats: only change the preconception of the magnificence of the combatants, and all is gone. (B. II. c. 2.) "Be pleased, my lord Don Quixote, to bestow upon me the government of that island," &c. Sancho's eagerness for his government, the nascent lust of actual democracy, or isocracy! (C. 2.) "But tell me, on your life, have you ever seen a more valorous knight than I, upon the whole face of the known earth? Have you read in story of any other, who has, or ever had, more bravery in assailing, more breath in holding out, more dexterity in wounding, or more address in giving a fall?"--"The truth is," answered Sancho, "that I never read any history at all; for I can neither read nor write; but what I dare affirm is, that I never served a bolder master," &c. This appeal to Sancho, and Sancho's answer are exquisitely humorous. It is impossible not to think of the French bulletins and proclamations. Remark the necessity under which we are of being sympathized with, fly as high into abstraction as we may, and how constantly the imagination is recalled to the ground of our common humanity! And note a little further on, the knight's easy vaunting of his balsam, and his quietly deferring the making and application of it. (C. 3.) The speech before the goatherds: "Happy times and happy ages," &c. [5] Note the rhythm of this, and the admirable beauty and wisdom of the thoughts in themselves, but the total want of judgment in Don Quixote's addressing them to such an audience. (B. III. c. 3.) Don Quixote's balsam, and the vomiting and consequent relief; an excellent hit at 'panacea nostrums', which cure the patient by his being himself cured of the medicine by revolting nature. (C. 4.) "Peace! and have patience; the day will come," &c. The perpetual promises of the imagination! (Ib.) "Your Worship," said Sancho, "would make a better preacher than knight errant!" Exactly so. This is the true moral. (C. 6.) The uncommon beauty of the description in the commencement of this chapter. In truth, the whole of it seems to put all nature in its heights and its humiliations, before us. (Ib.) Sancho's story of the goats: "Make account, he carried them all over," said Don Quixote, "and do not be going and coming in this manner; for at this rate, you will not have done carrying them over in a twelvemonth." "How many are passed already?" said Sancho, &c. Observe the happy contrast between the all-generalizing mind of the mad knight, and Sancho's all-particularizing memory. How admirable a symbol of the dependence of all 'copula' on the higher powers of the mind, with the single exception of the succession in time and the accidental relations of space. Men of mere common sense have no theory or means of making one fact more important or prominent than the rest; if they lose one link, all is lost. Compare Mrs. Quickly and the Tapster. [6] And note also Sancho's good heart, when his master is about to leave him. Don Quixote's conduct upon discovering the fulling-hammers, proves he was meant to be in his senses. Nothing can be better conceived than his fit of passion at Sancho's laughing, and his sophism of self-justification by the courage he had shown. Sancho is by this time cured, through experience, as far as his own errors are concerned; yet still is he lured on by the unconquerable awe of his master's superiority, even when he is cheating him. (C. 8.) The adventure of the Galley-slaves. I think this is the only passage of moment in which Cervantes slips the mask of his hero, and speaks for himself. (C. 9.) Don Quixote desired to have it, and bade him take the money, and keep it for himself. Sancho kissed his hands for the favour, &c. Observe Sancho's eagerness to avail himself of the permission of his master, who, in the war sports of knight-errantry, had, without any selfish dishonesty, overlooked the 'meum' and 'tuum.' Sancho's selfishness is modified by his involuntary goodness of heart, and Don Quixote's flighty goodness is debased by the involuntary or unconscious selfishness of his vanity and self-applause. (C. 10.) Cardenio is the madman of passion, who meets and easily overthrows for the moment the madman of imagination. And note the contagion of madness of any kind, upon Don Quixote's interruption of Cardenio's story. (C. 11.) Perhaps the best specimen of Sancho's proverbializing is this: "And I (Don Q.) say again, they lie, and will lie two hundred times more, all who say, or think her so." "I neither say, nor think so," answered Sancho: "let those who say it, eat the lie, and swallow it with their bread: whether they were guilty or no, they have given an account to God before now: I come from my vineyard, I know nothing; I am no friend to inquiring into other men's lives; 'for' he that buys and lies shall find the lie left in his purse behind; 'besides,' naked was I born, and naked I remain; I neither win nor lose; if they were guilty, what is that to me? Many think to find bacon, where there is not so much as a pin to hang it on: 'but' who can hedge in the cuckoo? 'Especially,' do they spare God himself?" (Ib.) "And it is no great matter, if it be in another hand; for by what I remember, Dulcinea can neither write nor read," &c. The wonderful twilight of the mind! and mark Cervantes's courage in daring to present it, and trust to a distant posterity for an appreciation of its truth to nature. (P. II. B. III. c. 9.) Sancho's account of what he had seen on Clavileno is a counterpart in his style to Don Quixote's adventures in the cave of Montesinos. This last is the only impeachment of the knight's moral character; Cervantes just gives one instance of the veracity failing before the strong cravings of the imagination for something real and external; the picture would not have been complete without this; and yet it is so well managed, that the reader has no unpleasant sense of Don Quixote having told a lie. It is evident that he hardly knows whether it was a dream or not; and goes to the enchanter to inquire the real nature of the adventure. [Footnote 1: 'Bien como quien se engendrò en una carcel, donde toda incomodidad tiene su assiento, y todo triste ruido hace su habitacion.' Like one you may suppose born in a prison, where every inconvenience keeps its residence, and every dismal sound its habitation. Pref. Jarvis's Tr. Ed.] [Footnote 2: 'No estaba muy bien con'. Ed.] [Footnote 3: Pero con todo. Ed.] [Footnote 4: 'Donde no, conmigo sois en batalla, gente descomunal!' Ed.] [Footnote 5: 'Dichosa edad y siglos dichosos aquellos, &c.' Ed.] [Footnote 6: See the 'Friend', vol. iii. p. 138. Ed.] SUMMARY ON CERVANTES. A Castilian of refined manners; a gentleman, true to religion, and true to honour. A scholar and a soldier, and fought under the banners of Don John of Austria, at Lepanto, lost his arm and was captured. Endured slavery not only with fortitude, but with mirth; and by the superiority of nature, mastered and overawed his barbarian owner. Finally ransomed, he resumed his native destiny, the awful task of achieving fame; and for that reason died poor and a prisoner, while nobles and kings over their goblets of gold gave relish to their pleasures by the charms of his divine genius. He was the inventor of novels for the Spaniards, and in his Persilis and Sigismunda, the English may find the germ of their Robinson Crusoe. The world was a drama to him. His own thoughts, in spite of poverty and sickness, perpetuated for him the feelings of youth. He painted only what he knew and had looked into, but he knew and had looked into much indeed; and his imagination was ever at hand to adapt and modify the world of his experience. Of delicious love he fabled, yet with stainless virtue. LECTURE IX. ON THE DISTINCTIONS OF THE WITTY, THE DROLL, THE ODD, AND THE HUMOUROUS; THE NATURE AND CONSTITUENTS OF HUMOUR;--RABELAIS--SWIFT--STERNE. I. Perhaps the most important of our intellectual operations are those of detecting the difference in similar, and the identity in dissimilar, things. Out of the latter operation it is that wit arises; and it, generically regarded, consists in presenting thoughts or images in an unusual connection with each other, for the purpose of exciting pleasure by the surprise. This connection may be real; and there is in fact a scientific wit; though where the object, consciously entertained, is truth, and not amusement, we commonly give it some higher name. But in wit popularly understood, the connection may be, and for the most part is, apparent only, and transitory; and this connection may be by thoughts, or by words, or by images. The first is our Butler's especial eminence; the second, Voltaire's; the third, which we oftener call fancy, constitutes the larger and more peculiar part of the wit of Shakspeare. You can scarcely turn to a single speech of Falstaff's without finding instances of it. Nor does wit always cease to deserve the name by being transient, or incapable of analysis. I may add that the wit of thoughts belongs eminently to the Italians, that of words to the French, and that of images to the English. II. Where the laughable is its own end, and neither inference, nor moral is intended, or where at least the writer would wish it so to appear, there arises what we call drollery. The pure, unmixed, ludicrous or laughable belongs exclusively to the understanding, and must be presented under the form of the senses; it lies within the spheres of the eye and the ear, and hence is allied to the fancy. It does not appertain to the reason or the moral sense, and accordingly is alien to the imagination. I think Aristotle has already excellently defined the laughable,[Greek (transliterated): tho geloion], as consisting of, or depending on, what is out of its proper time and place, yet without danger or pain. Here th'impropriety'--[Greek (transliterated): tho ahtopon]--is the positive qualification; the 'dangerlessness'--[Greek (transliterated): tho akindunon]--the negative. Neither the understanding without an object of the senses, as for example, a mere notional error, or idiocy;--nor any external object, unless attributed to the understanding, can produce the poetically laughable. Nay, even in ridiculous positions of the body laughed at by the vulgar, there is a subtle personification always going on, which acts on the, perhaps, unconscious mind of the spectator as a symbol of intellectual character. And hence arises the imperfect and awkward effect of comic stories of animals; because although the understanding is satisfied in them, the senses are not. Hence too, it is, that the true ludicrous is its own end. When serious satire commences, or satire that is felt as serious, however comically drest, free and genuine laughter ceases; it becomes sardonic. This you experience in reading Young, and also not unfrequently in Butler. The true comic is the blossom of the nettle. III. When words or images are placed in unusual juxta-position rather than connection, and are so placed merely because the juxta-position is unusual--we have the odd or the grotesque; the occasional use of which in the minor ornaments of architecture, is an interesting problem for a student in the psychology of the Fine Arts. IV. In the simply laughable there is a mere disproportion between a definite act and a definite purpose or end, or a disproportion of the end itself to the rank or circumstances of the definite person; but humour is of more difficult description. I must try to define it in the first place by its points of diversity from the former species. Humour does not, like the different kinds of wit, which is impersonal, consist wholly in the understanding and the senses. No combination of thoughts, words, or images will of itself constitute humour, unless some peculiarity of individual temperament and character be indicated thereby, as the cause of the same. Compare the comedies of Congreve with the Falstaff in Henry IV. or with Sterne's Corporal Trim, Uncle Toby, and Mr. Shandy, or with some of Steele's charming papers in the Tatler, and you will feel the difference better than I can express it. Thus again, (to take an instance from the different works of the same writer), in Smollett's Strap, his Lieutenant Bowling, his Morgan the honest Welshman, and his Matthew Bramble, we have exquisite humour,--while in his Peregrine Pickle we find an abundance of drollery, which too often degenerates into mere oddity; in short, we feel that a number of things are put together to counterfeit humour, but that there is no growth from within. And this indeed is the origin of the word, derived from the humoral pathology, and excellently described by Ben Jonson: So in every human body, The choler, melancholy, phlegm, and blood, By reason that they flow continually In some one part, and are not continent, Receive the name of humours. Now thus far It may, by metaphor, apply itself Unto the general disposition: As when some one peculiar quality Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw All his effects, his spirits, and his powers, In their confluctions, all to run one way, This may be truly said to be a humour. [1] Hence we may explain the congeniality of humour with pathos, so exquisite in Sterne and Smollett, and hence also the tender feeling which we always have for, and associate with, the humours or hobby-horses of a man. First, we respect a humourist, because absence of interested motive is the ground-work of the character, although the imagination of an interest may exist in the individual himself, as if a remarkably simple-hearted man should pride himself on his knowledge of the world, and how well he can manage it:--and secondly, there always is in a genuine humour an acknowledgement of the hollowness and farce of the world, and its disproportion to the godlike within us. And it follows immediately from this, that whenever particular acts have reference to particular selfish motives, the humourous bursts into the indignant and abhorring; whilst all follies not selfish are pardoned or palliated. The danger of this habit, in respect of pure morality, is strongly exemplified in Sterne. This would be enough, and indeed less than this has passed, for a sufficient account of humour, if we did not recollect that not every predominance of character, even where not precluded by the moral sense, as in criminal dispositions, constitutes what we mean by a humourist, or the presentation of its produce, humour. What then is it? Is it manifold? Or is there some one humorific point common to all that can be called humourous?--I am not prepared to answer this fully, even if my time permitted; but I think there is;--and that it consists in a certain reference to the general and the universal, by which the finite great is brought into identity with the little, or the little with the finite great, so as to make both nothing in comparison with the infinite. The little is made great, and the great little, in order to destroy both; because all is equal in contrast with the infinite. "It is not without reason, brother Toby, that learned men write dialogues on long noses."[2] I would suggest, therefore, that whenever a finite is contemplated in reference to the infinite, whether consciously or unconsciously, humour essentially arises. In the highest humour, at least, there is always a reference to, and a connection with, some general power not finite, in the form of some finite ridiculously disproportionate in our feelings to that of which it is, nevertheless, the representative, or by which it is to be displayed. Humourous writers, therefore, as Sterne in particular, delight, after much preparation, to end in nothing, or in a direct contradiction. That there is some truth in this definition, or origination of humour, is evident; for you cannot conceive a humourous man who does not give some disproportionate generality, or even a universality to his hobby-horse, as is the case with Mr. Shandy; or at least there is an absence of any interest but what arises from the humour itself, as in my Uncle Toby, and it is the idea of the soul, of its undefined capacity and dignity, that gives the sting to any absorption of it by any one pursuit, and this not in respect of the humourist as a mere member of society for a particular, however mistaken, interest, but as a man. The English humour is the most thoughtful, the Spanish the most etherial--the most ideal--of modern literature. Amongst the classic ancients there was little or no humour in the foregoing sense of the term. Socrates, or Plato under his name, gives some notion of humour in the Banquet, when he argues that tragedy and comedy rest upon the same ground. But humour properly took its rise in the middle ages; and the Devil, the Vice of the mysteries, incorporates the modern humour in its elements. It is a spirit measured by disproportionate finites. The Devil is not, indeed, perfectly humourous; but that is only because he is the extreme of all humour. [Footnote 1: Every Man Out Of His Humour. Prologue.] [Footnote 2: Trist. Sh. Vol. iii. c. 37.] RABELAIS. [1] Born at Chinon, 1483-4.--Died 1553. One cannot help regretting that no friend of Rabelais, (and surely friends he must have had), has left an authentic account of him. His buffoonery was not merely Brutus' rough stick, which contained a rod of gold; it was necessary as an amulet against the monks and bigots. Beyond a doubt, he was among the deepest as well as boldest thinkers of his age. Never was a more plausible, and seldom, I am persuaded, a less appropriate line than the thousand times quoted, Rabelais laughing in his easy chair-- of Mr. Pope. The caricature of his filth and zanyism proves how fully he both knew and felt the danger in which he stood. I could write a treatise in proof and praise of the morality and moral elevation of Rabelais' work which would make the church stare and the conventicle groan, and yet should be the truth and nothing but the truth. I class Rabelais with the creative minds of the world, Shakspeare, Dante, Cervantes, &c. All Rabelais' personages are phantasmagoric allegories, but Panurge above all. He is throughout the [Greek (transliterated): panourgia],--the wisdom, that is, the cunning of the human animal,--the understanding, as the faculty of means to purposes without ultimate ends, in the most comprehensive sense, and including art, sensuous fancy, and all the passions of the understanding. It is impossible to read Rabelais without an admiration mixed with wonder at the depth and extent of his learning, his multifarious knowledge, and original observation beyond what books could in that age have supplied him with. (B. III. c. 9.) How Panurge asketh counsel of Pantagruel, whether he should marry, yea or no. Note this incomparable chapter. Pantagruel stands for the reason as contradistinguished from the understanding and choice, that is, from Panurge; and the humour consists in the latter asking advice of the former on a subject in which the reason can only give the inevitable conclusion, the syllogistic 'ergo', from the premisses provided by the understanding itself, which puts each case so as of necessity to predetermine the verdict thereon. This chapter, independently of the allegory, is an exquisite satire on the spirit in which people commonly ask advice. [Footnote 1: No note remains of that part of this Lecture which treated of Rabelais. This seems, therefore, a convenient place for the reception of some remarks written by Mr. C. in Mr. Gillman's copy of Rabelais, about the year 1825. See Table Talk, vol. i. p. 177. Ed.] SWIFT. [1] Born in Dublin, 1667.--Died 1745. In Swift's writings there is a false misanthropy grounded upon an exclusive contemplation of the vices and follies of mankind, and this misanthropic tone is also disfigured or brutalized by his obtrusion of physical dirt and coarseness. I think Gulliver's Travels the great work of Swift. In the voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag he displays the littleness and moral contemptibility of human nature; in that to the Houyhnhnms he represents the disgusting spectacle of man with the understanding only, without the reason or the moral feeling, and in his horse he gives the misanthropic ideal of man--that is, a being virtuous from rule and duty, but untouched by the principle of love. [Footnote 1: From Mr. Green's note. Ed.] STERNE. Born at Clonmel, 1713.--Died 1768. With regard to Sterne, and the charge of licentiousness which presses so seriously upon his character as a writer, I would remark that there is a sort of knowingness, the wit of which depends--1st, on the modesty it gives pain to; or, 2dly, on the innocence and innocent ignorance over which it triumphs; or, 3dly, on a certain oscillation in the individual's own mind between the remaining good and the encroaching evil of his nature--a sort of dallying with the devil--a fluxionary act of combining courage and cowardice, as when a man snuffs a candle with his fingers for the first time, or better still, perhaps, like that trembling daring with which a child touches a hot tea urn, because it has been forbidden; so that the mind has in its own white and black angel the same or similar amusement, as may be supposed to take place between an old debauchee and a prude,--she feeling resentment, on the one hand, from a prudential anxiety to preserve appearances and have a character, and, on the other, an inward sympathy with the enemy. We have only to suppose society innocent, and then nine-tenths of this sort of wit would be like a stone that falls in snow, making no sound because exciting no resistance; the remainder rests on its being an offence against the good manners of human nature itself. This source, unworthy as it is, may doubtless be combined with wit, drollery, fancy, and even humour, and we have only to regret the misalliance; but that the latter are quite distinct from the former, may be made evident by abstracting in our imagination the morality of the characters of Mr. Shandy, my Uncle Toby, and Trim, which are all antagonists to this spurious sort of wit, from the rest of Tristram Shandy, and by supposing, instead of them, the presence of two or three callous debauchees. The result will be pure disgust. Sterne cannot be too severely censured for thus using the best dispositions of our nature as the panders and condiments for the basest. The excellencies of Sterne consist-- 1. In bringing forward into distinct consciousness those minutiae of thought and feeling which appear trifles, yet have an importance for the moment, and which almost every man feels in one way or other. Thus is produced the novelty of an individual peculiarity, together with the interest of a something that belongs to our common nature. In short, Sterne seizes happily on those points, in which every man is more or less a humourist. And, indeed, to be a little more subtle, the propensity to notice these things does itself constitute the humourist, and the superadded power of so presenting them to men in general gives us the man of humour. Hence the difference of the man of humour, the effect of whose portraits does not depend on the felt presence of himself, as a humourist, as in the instances of Cervantes and Shakspeare--nay, of Rabelais too; and of the humourist, the effect of whose works does very much depend on the sense of his own oddity, as in Sterne's case, and perhaps Swift's; though Swift again would require a separate classification. 2. In the traits of human nature, which so easily assume a particular cast and colour from individual character. Hence this excellence and the pathos connected with it quickly pass into humour, and form the ground of it. See particularly the beautiful passage, so well known, of Uncle Toby's catching and liberating the fly: "Go,"--says he, one day at dinner, to an overgrown one which had buzzed about his nose, and tormented him cruelly all dinner-time, and which, after infinite attempts, he had caught at last, as it flew by him;--"I'll not hurt thee," says my Uncle Toby, rising from his chair, and going across the room, with the fly in his hand,--"I'll not hurt a hair of thy head:--Go," says he, lifting up the sash, and opening his hand as he spoke, to let it escape;--"go, poor devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee? This world is surely wide enough to hold both thee and me." (Vol. ii. ch. 12.) Observe in this incident how individual character may be given by the mere delicacy of presentation and elevation in degree of a common good quality, humanity, which in itself would not be characteristic at all. 3. In Mr. Shandy's character,--the essence of which is a craving for sympathy in exact proportion to the oddity and unsympathizability of what he proposes;--this coupled with an instinctive desire to be at least disputed with, or rather both in one, to dispute and yet to agree--and holding as worst of all--to acquiesce without either resistance or sympathy. This is charmingly, indeed, profoundly conceived, and is psychologically and ethically true of all Mr. Shandies. Note, too, how the contrasts of character, which are always either balanced or remedied, increase the love between the brothers. 4. No writer is so happy as Sterne in the unexaggerated and truly natural representation of that species of slander, which consists in gossiping about our neighbours, as whetstones of our moral discrimination; as if they were conscience-blocks which we used in our apprenticeship, in order not to waste such precious materials as our own consciences in the trimming and shaping of ourselves by self-examination:-- Alas o'day!--had Mrs. Shandy (poor gentlewoman!) had but her wish in going up to town just to lie in and come down again; which, they say, she begged and prayed for upon her bare knees, and which, in my opinion, considering the fortune which Mr. Shandy got with her, was no such mighty matter to have complied with, the lady and her babe might both of them have been alive at this hour. (Vol. i. c. 18.) 5. When you have secured a man's likings and prejudices in your favour, you may then safely appeal to his impartial judgment. In the following passage not only is acute sense shrouded in wit, but a life and a character are added which exalt the whole into the dramatic:-- "I see plainly, Sir, by your looks" (or as the case happened) my father would say--"that you do not heartily subscribe to this opinion of mine--which, to those," he would add, "who have not carefully sifted it to the bottom,--I own has an air more of fancy than of solid reasoning in it; and yet, my dear Sir, if I may presume to know your character, I am morally assured, I should hazard little in stating a case to you, not as a party in the dispute, but as a judge, and trusting my appeal upon it to your good sense and candid disquisition in this matter; you are a person free from as many narrow prejudices of education as most men; and, if I may presume to penetrate farther into you, of a liberality of genius above bearing down an opinion, merely because it wants friends. Your son,--your dear son,--from whose sweet and open temper you have so much to expect,--your Billy, Sir!-- would you, for the world, have called him JUDAS? Would you, my dear Sir," he would say, laying his hand upon your breast, with the genteelest address,--and in that soft and irresistible 'piano' of voice which the nature of the 'argumentum ad hominem' absolutely requires,--"Would you, Sir, if a 'Jew' of a godfather had proposed the name for your child, and offered you his purse along with it, would you have consented to such a desecration of him? O my God!" he would say, looking up, "if I know your temper rightly, Sir, you are incapable of it;--you would have trampled upon the offer;--you would have thrown the temptation at the tempter's head with abhorrence. Your greatness of mind in this action, which I admire, with that generous contempt of money, which you show me in the whole transaction, is really noble;--and what renders it more so, is the principle of it;--the workings of a parent's love upon the truth and conviction of this very hypothesis, namely, that were your son called Judas,--the sordid and treacherous idea, so inseparable from the name, would have accompanied him through life like his shadow, and in the end made a miser and a rascal of him, in spite, Sir, of your example." (Vol. i. c. 19.) 6. There is great physiognomic tact in Sterne. See it particularly displayed in his description of Dr. Slop, accompanied with all that happiest use of drapery and attitude, which at once give reality by individualizing and vividness by unusual, yet probable, combinations:-- Imagine to yourself a little squat, uncourtly figure of a Doctor Slop, of about four feet and a half perpendicular height, with a breadth of back, and a sesquipedality of belly, which might have done honour to a serjeant in the horseguards. ... Imagine such a one;--for such I say, were the outlines of Dr. Slop's figure, coming slowly along, foot by foot, waddling through the dirt upon the 'vertebræ' of a little diminutive pony, of a pretty colour--but of strength,--alack! scarce able to have made an amble of it, under such a fardel, had the roads been in an ambling condition;--they were not. Imagine to yourself Obadiah mounted upon a strong monster of a coach-horse, pricked into a full gallop, and making all practicable speed the adverse way. (Vol. ii. c. 9.) 7. I think there is more humour in the single remark, which I have quoted before--"Learned men, brother Toby, don't write dialogues upon long noses for nothing!"--than in the whole Slawkenburghian tale that follows, which is mere oddity interspersed with drollery. 8. Note Sterne's assertion of, and faith in, a moral good in the characters of Trim, Toby, &c. as contrasted with the cold scepticism of motives which is the stamp of the Jacobin spirit. Vol. v. c. 9. 9. You must bear in mind, in order to do justice to Rabelais and Sterne, that by right of humoristic universality each part is essentially a whole in itself. Hence the digressive spirit is not mere wantonness, but in fact the very form and vehicle of their genius. The connection, such as was needed, is given by the continuity of the characters. Instances of different forms of wit, taken largely: 1. "Why are you reading romances at your age?"--"Why, I used to be fond of history, but I have given it up,--it was so grossly improbable." 2. "Pray, sir, do it!--although you have promised me." 3. The Spartan mother's-- "Return with, or on, thy shield." "My sword is too short!"--"Take a step forwarder." 4. The Gasconade:-- "I believe you, Sir! but you will excuse my repeating it on account of my provincial accent." 5. Pasquil on Pope Urban, who had employed a committee to rip up the old errors of his predecessors. Some one placed a pair of spurs on the heels of the statue of St. Peter, and a label from the opposite statue of St. Paul, on the same bridge;-- 'St. Paul.' "Whither then are you bound?" 'St. Peter.' "I apprehend danger here;-they'll soon call me in question for denying my Master." 'St. Paul.' "Nay, then, I had better be off too; for they'll question me for having persecuted the Christians, before my conversion." 6. Speaking of the small German potentates, I dictated the phrase,--'officious for equivalents.' This my amanuensis wrote,--'fishing for elephants;'--which, as I observed at the time, was a sort of Noah's angling, that could hardly have occurred, except at the commencement of the Deluge. LECTURE X. DONNE--DANTE--MILTON--PARADISE LOST. DONNE.[1] Born in London, 1573.--Died, 1631. I. With Donne, whose muse on dromedary trots, Wreathe iron pokers into true-love knots; Rhyme's sturdy cripple, fancy's maze and clue, Wit's forge and fire-blast, meaning's press and screw. II See lewdness and theology combin'd,-- A cynic and a sycophantic mind; A fancy shar'd party per pale between Death's heads and skeletons and Aretine!-- Not his peculiar defect or crime, But the true current mintage of the time. Such were the establish'd signs and tokens given To mark a loyal churchman, sound and even, Free from papistic and fanatic leaven. The wit of Donne, the wit of Butler, the wit of Pope, the wit of Congreve, the wit of Sheridan--how many disparate things are here expressed by one and the same word, Wit!--Wonder-exciting vigour, intenseness and peculiarity of thought, using at will the almost boundless stores of a capacious memory, and exercised on subjects, where we have no right to expect it--this is the wit of Donne! The four others I am just in the mood to describe and inter-distinguish;--what a pity that the marginal space will not let me! My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears, And true plain hearts do in the faces rest; Where can we--find two fitter hemispheres Without sharp north, without declining west? 'Good-Morrow', v. 15, &c. The sense is;--Our mutual loves may in many respects be fitly compared to corresponding hemispheres; but as no simile squares ('nihil simile est idem'), so here the simile fails, for there is nothing in our loves that corresponds to the cold north, or the declining west, which in two hemispheres must necessarily be supposed. But an ellipse of such length will scarcely rescue the line from the charge of nonsense or a bull. 'January,' 1829. Woman's constancy. A misnomer. The title ought to be-- Mutual Inconstancy. Whether both th' Indias of spice and 'mine', &c. 'Sun Rising', v. 17. And see at night thy western land of 'mine', &c. 'Progress of the Soul', 1 Song, 2. st. This use of the word mine specifically for mines of gold, silver, or precious stones, is, I believe, peculiar to Donne. [Footnote 1: Nothing remains of what was said on Donne in this Lecture. Here, therefore, as in previous like instances, the gap is filled up with some notes written by Mr. Coleridge in a volume of Chalmers's 'Poets', belonging to Mr. Gillman. Ed.] [Footnote 2: The verses were added in pencil to the collection of commendatory lines; No. I. is Mr. C.'s; the publication of No. II. I trust the all-accomplished author will, under the circumstances, pardon. Numerous and elaborate notes by Mr. Coleridge on Donne's Sermons are in existence, and will be published hereafter. Ed.] DANTE. Born at Florence, 1265.--Died, 1321. As I remarked in a former Lecture on a different subject (for subjects the most diverse in literature have still their tangents), the Gothic character, and its good and evil fruits, appeared less in Italy than in any other part of European Christendom. There was accordingly much less romance, as that word is commonly understood; or, perhaps, more truly stated, there was romance instead of chivalry. In Italy, an earlier imitation of, and a more evident and intentional blending with, the Latin literature took place than elsewhere. The operation of the feudal system, too, was incalculably weaker, of that singular chain of independent interdependents, the principle of which was a confederacy for the preservation of individual, consistently with general, freedom. In short, Italy, in the time of Dante, was an afterbirth of eldest Greece, a renewal or a reflex of the old Italy under its kings and first Roman consuls, a net-work of free little republics, with the same domestic feuds, civil wars, and party spirit,--the same vices and virtues produced on a similarly narrow theatre,--the existing state of things being, as in all small democracies, under the working and direction of certain individuals, to whose will even the laws were swayed;--whilst at the same time the singular spectacle was exhibited amidst all this confusion of the flourishing of commerce, and the protection and encouragement of letters and arts. Never was the commercial spirit so well reconciled to the nobler principles of social polity as in Florence. It tended there to union and permanence and elevation,--not as the overbalance of it in England is now doing, to dislocation, change and moral degradation. The intensest patriotism reigned in these communities, but confined and attached exclusively to the small locality of the patriot's birth and residence; whereas in the true Gothic feudalism, country was nothing but the preservation of personal independence. But then, on the other hand, as a counterbalance to these disuniting elements, there was in Dante's Italy, as in Greece, a much greater uniformity of religion common to all than amongst the northern nations. Upon these hints the history of the republican aeras of ancient Greece and modern Italy ought to be written. There are three kinds or stages of historic narrative: 1. that of the annalist or chronicler, who deals merely in facts and events arranged in order of time, having no principle of selection, no plan of arrangement, and whose work properly constitutes a supplement to the poetical writings of romance or heroic legends: 2. that of the writer who takes his stand on some moral point, and selects a series of events for the express purpose of illustrating it, and in whose hands the narrative of the selected events is modified by the principle of selection;--as Thucydides, whose object was to describe the evils of democratic and aristocratic partizanships;--or Polybius, whose design was to show the social benefits resulting from the triumph and grandeur of Rome, in public institutions and military discipline;--or Tacitus, whose secret aim was to exhibit the pressure and corruptions of despotism;--in all which writers and others like them, the ground-object of the historian colours with artificial lights the facts which he relates: 3. and which in idea is the grandest-the most truly, founded in philosophy--there is the Herodotean history, which is not composed with reference to any particular causes, but attempts to describe human nature itself on a great scale as a portion of the drama of providence, the free will of man resisting the destiny of events,--for the individuals often succeeding against it, but for the race always yielding to it, and in the resistance itself invariably affording means towards the completion of the ultimate result. Mitford's history is a good and useful work; but in his zeal against democratic government, Mitford forgot, or never saw, that ancient Greece was not, nor ought ever to be considered, a permanent thing, but that it existed, in the disposition of providence, as a proclaimer of ideal truths, and that everlasting proclamation being made, that its functions were naturally at an end. However, in the height of such a state of society in Italy, Dante was born and flourished; and was himself eminently a picture of the age in which he lived. But of more importance even than this, to a right understanding of Dante, is the consideration that the scholastic philosophy was then at its acme even in itself; but more especially in Italy, where it never prevailed so exclusively as northward of the Alps. It is impossible to understand the genius of Dante, and difficult to understand his poem, without some knowledge of the characters, studies, and writings of the schoolmen of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries. For Dante was the living link between religion and philosophy; he philosophized the religion and christianized the philosophy of Italy; and, in this poetic union of religion and philosophy, he became the ground of transition into the mixed Platonism and Aristotelianism of the Schools, under which, by numerous minute articles of faith and ceremony, Christianity became a craft of hair-splitting, and was ultimately degraded into a complete 'fetisch' worship, divorced from philosophy, and made up of a faith without thought, and a credulity directed by passion. Afterwards, indeed, philosophy revived under condition of defending this very superstition; and, in so doing, it necessarily led the way to its subversion, and that in exact proportion to the influence of the philosophic schools. Hence it did its work most completely in Germany, then in England, next in France, then in Spain, least of all in Italy. We must, therefore, take the poetry of Dante as christianized, but without the further Gothic accession of proper chivalry. It was at a somewhat later period, that the importations from the East, through the Venetian commerce and the crusading armaments, exercised a peculiarly strong influence on Italy. In studying Dante, therefore, we must consider carefully the differences produced, first, by allegory being substituted for polytheism; and secondly and mainly, by the opposition of Christianity to the spirit of pagan Greece, which receiving the very names of its gods from Egypt, soon deprived them of all that was universal. The Greeks changed the ideas into finites, and these finites into 'anthropomorphi,' or forms of men. Hence their religion, their poetry, nay, their very pictures, became statuesque. With them the form was the end. The reverse of this was the natural effect of Christianity; in which finites, even the human form, must, in order to satisfy the mind, be brought into connexion with, and be in fact symbolical of, the infinite; and must be considered in some enduring, however shadowy and indistinct, point of view, as the vehicle or representative of moral truth. Hence resulted two great effects; a combination of poetry with doctrine, and, by turning the mind inward on its own essence instead of letting it act only on its outward circumstances and communities, a combination of poetry with sentiment. And it is this inwardness or subjectivity, which principally and most fundamentally distinguishes all the classic from all the modern poetry. Compare the passage in the 'Iliad' (Z. vi. 119-236.) in which Diomed and Glaucus change arms,-- [Greek (transliterated): Cheiras t'allilon labetin kai pistosanto] They took each other by the hand, and pledged friendship-- with the scene in 'Ariosto' (Orlando Furioso, c. i. st. 20-22.), where Rinaldo and Ferrauto fight and afterwards make it up:-- Al Pagan la proposta non dispiacque: Così fu differita la tenzone; E tal tregua tra lor subito nacque, Sì l' odio e l' ira va in oblivïone, Che 'l Pagano al partir dalle fresche acque Non lasciò a piede il buon figliuol d' Amone: Con preghi invita, e al fin lo toglie in groppa, E per l' orme d' Angelica galoppa. Here Homer would have left it. But the Christian poet has his own feelings to express, and goes on:-- Oh gran bontà de' cavalieri antiqui! Eran rivali, eran di fè diversi, E si sentían degli aspri colpi iniqui Per tutta la persona anco dolersi; E pur per selve oscure e calli obbliqui Insieme van senza sospetto aversi! And here you will observe, that the reaction of Ariosto's own feelings on the image or act is more fore-grounded (to use a painter's phrase) than the image or act itself. The two different modes in which the imagination is acted on by the ancient and modern poetry, may be illustrated by the parallel effects caused by the contemplation of the Greek or Roman-Greek architecture, compared with the Gothic. In the Pantheon, the whole is perceived in a perceived harmony with the parts which compose it; and generally you will remember that where the parts preserve any distinct individuality, there simple beauty, or beauty simply, arises; but where the parts melt undistinguished into the whole, there majestic beauty, or majesty, is the result. In York Minster, the parts, the grotesques, are in themselves very sharply distinct and separate, and this distinction and separation of the parts is counterbalanced only by the multitude and variety of those parts, by which the attention is bewildered;--whilst the whole, or that there is a whole produced, is altogether a feeling in which the several thousand distinct impressions lose themselves as in a universal solvent. Hence in a Gothic cathedral, as in a prospect from a mountain's top, there is, indeed, a unity, an awful oneness;--but it is, because all distinction evades the eye. And just such is the distinction between the 'Antigone' of Sophocles and the 'Hamlet' of Shakespeare. The 'Divina Commedia' is a system of moral, political, and theological truths, with arbitrary personal exemplifications, which are not, in my opinion, allegorical. I do not even feel convinced that the punishments in the Inferno are strictly allegorical. I rather take them to have been in Dante's mind 'quasi'-allegorical, or conceived in analogy to pure allegory. I have said, that a combination of poetry with doctrines, is one of the characteristics of the Christian muse; but I think Dante has not succeeded in effecting this combination nearly so well as Milton. This comparative failure of Dante, as also some other peculiarities of his mind, in 'malam partem', must be immediately attributed to the state of North Italy in his time, which is vividly represented in Dante's life; a state of intense democratical partizanship, in which an exaggerated importance was attached to individuals, and which whilst it afforded a vast field for the intellect, opened also a boundless arena for the passions, and in which envy, jealousy, hatred, and other malignant feelings, could and did assume the form of patriotism, even to the individual's own conscience. All this common, and, as it were, natural partizanship, was aggravated arid coloured by the Guelf and Ghibelline factions; and, in part explanation of Dante's adherence to the latter, you must particularly remark, that the Pope had recently territorialized his authority to a great extent, and that this increase of territorial power in the church, was by no means the same beneficial movement for the citizens of free republics, as the parallel advance in other countries was for those who groaned as vassals under the oppression of the circumjacent baronial castles. [1] By way of preparation to a satisfactory perusal of the 'Divina Commedia', I will now proceed to state what I consider to be Dante's chief excellences as a poet. And I begin with: I. Style--the vividness, logical connexion, strength and energy of which cannot be surpassed. In this I think Dante superior to Milton; and his style is accordingly more imitable than Milton's, and does to this day exercise a greater influence on the literature of his country. You cannot read Dante without feeling a gush of manliness of thought within you. Dante was very sensible of his own excellence in this particular, and speaks of poets as guardians of the vast armory of language, which is the intermediate something between matter and spirit:-- Or se' tu quel Virgilio, e quella fonte, Che spande di parlar sì largo fiume? Risposi lui con vergognosa fronte. O degli altri poeti onore e lume, Vagliami 'l lungo studio e 'l grande amore, Che m' han fatto cercar lo tuo volume. Tu se' lo mio maestro, e 'l mio autore: _Tu se' solo colui, da cu' io tolsi Lo bello stile, che m' ha fatto onore._ ('Inf'. c. 1. v. 79.) "And art thou then that Virgil, that well-spring, From which such copious floods of eloquence Have issued?" I, with front abash'd, replied: "Glory and light of all the tuneful train! May it avail me, that I long with zeal Have sought thy volume, and with love immense Have conn'd it o'er. My master, thou, and guide! 'Thou he from whom I have alone deriv'd That style, which for its beauty into fame Exalts me.'" (Cary. [his translation--text Ed.]) Indeed there was a passion and a miracle of words in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, after the long slumber of language in barbarism, which gave an almost romantic character, a virtuous quality and power, to what was read in a book, independently of the thoughts or images contained in it. This feeling is very often perceptible in Dante. II. The Images in Dante are not only taken from obvious nature, and are all intelligible to all, but are ever conjoined with the universal feeling received from nature, and therefore affect the general feelings of all men. And in this respect, Dante's excellence is very great, and may be contrasted with the idiosyncracies of some meritorious modern poets, who attempt an eruditeness, the result of particular feelings. Consider the simplicity, I may say plainness, of the following simile, and how differently we should in all probability deal with it at the present day: Quale i fioretti dal notturno gelo Chinati e chiusi, poi che 'l sol gl' imbianca, Si drizzan tutti aperti in loro stelo,-- Fal mi fec' io di mia virtute stanca; ('Inf.' c. 2. v. 127.) As florets, by the frosty air of night Bent down and clos'd, when day has blanch'd their leaves, Rise all unfolded on their spiry stems,-- So was my fainting vigour new restor'd. (Cary. [2]) III. Consider the wonderful profoundness of the whole third canto of the 'Inferno'; and especially of the inscription over Hell gate: Per me si va, &c.-- which can only be explained by a meditation on the true nature of religion; that is,--reason 'plus' the understanding. I say profoundness rather than sublimity; for Dante does not so much elevate your thoughts as send them down deeper. In this canto all the images are distinct, and even vividly distinct; but there is a total impression of infinity; the wholeness is not in vision or conception, but in an inner feeling of totality, and absolute being. IV. In picturesqueness, Dante is beyond all other poets, modern or ancient, and more in the stern style of Pindar, than of any other. Michel Angelo is said to have made a design for every page of the 'Divina Commedia'. As superexcellent in this respect, I would note the conclusion of the third canto of the 'Inferno': Ed ecco verso noi venir per nave Un vecchio bianco per antico pelo Gridando: guai a voi anime prave: &c. ... (Ver. 82. &c.) And lo! toward us in a bark Comes on an old man, hoary white with eld, Crying, "Woe to you wicked spirits!" ... (CARY.) Caron dimonio con occhi di bragia Loro accennando, tutte le raccoglie: Batte col remo qualunque s' adagia. Come d' autunno si levan le foglie L' una appresso dell altra, infin che 'l ramo Rende alia terra tutte le sue spoglie; Similemente il mal seme d' Adamo, Gittansi di quel lito ad una ad una Per cenni, com' augel per suo richiamo. (Ver. 100, &c.) --Charon, demoniac form, With eyes of burning coal, collects them all, Beck'ning, and each that lingers, with his oar Strikes. As fall off the light autumnal leaves, One still another following, till the bough Strews all its honours on the earth beneath;-- E'en in like manner Adam's evil brood Cast themselves one by one down from the shore Each at a beck, as falcon at his call. (CARY.) And this passage, which I think admirably picturesque: Ma poco valse, che l' ale al sospetto Non potero avanzar: quegli andò sotto, E quei drizzò, volando, suso il petto. Non altrimenti l' anitra di botto, Quando 'l falcon s' appressa, giù s' attuffa, Ed ei ritorna su crucciato e rotto. Irato Calcabrina della buffa, Volando dietro gli tenne, invaghito, Che quei campasse, per aver la zuffa: E come 'l barattier fu disparito, Cosi volse gli artigli al suo compagno, E fu con lui sovra 'l fosso ghermito. Ma l' altro fu bene sparvier grifagno Ad artigliar ben lui, e amedue Cadder nel mezzo del bollente stagno. Lo caldo sghermidor subito fue: Ma però di levarsi era niente, Si aveano inviscate l' ale sue. ('Infer.' c. xxii. ver. 127, &c.) But little it avail'd: terror outstripp'd His following flight: the other plung'd beneath, And he with upward pinion rais'd his breast: E'en thus the water-fowl, when she perceives The falcon near, dives instant down, while he Enrag'd and spent retires. That mockery In Calcabrina fury stirr'd, who flew After him, with desire of strife inflam'd; And, for the barterer had 'scap'd, so turn'd His talons on his comrade. O'er the dyke In grapple close they join'd; but th' other prov'd A goshawk, able to rend well his foe; And in the boiling lake both fell. The heat Was umpire soon between them, but in vain To lift themselves they strove, so fast were glued Their pennons. (CARY.) V. Very closely connected with this picturesqueness, is the topographic reality of Dante's journey through Hell. You should note and dwell on this as one of his great charms, and which gives a striking peculiarity to his poetic power. He thus takes the thousand delusive forms of a nature worse than chaos, having no reality but from the passions which they excite, and compels them into the service of the permanent. Observe the exceeding truth of these lines: Noi ricidemmo 'l cerchio all' altra riva, Sovr' una fonte che bolle, e riversa, Per un fossato che da lei diriva. L' acqua era buja molto più che persa: E noi in compagnia dell' onde bige Entrammo giù per una via diversa. Una palude fa, ch' ha nome Stige, Questo tristo ruscel, quando è disceso Al piè delle maligne piagge grige. Ed io che di mirar mi stava inteso,-- Vidi genti fangose in quel pantano Ignude tutte, e con sembiante offeso. Questi si percotean non pur con mano, Ma con la testa, e col petto, e co' piedi, Troncandosi co' denti a brano a brano. ... Così girammo della lorda pozza Grand' arco tra la ripa secca e 'l mezzo, Con gli occhi volti a chi del fango ingozza: 'Venimmo appi� d' una torre al dassezzo'. (C. vii. ver. 100 and 127.) --We the circle cross'd To the next steep, arriving at a well, That boiling pours itself down to a foss Sluic'd from its source. Far murkier was the wave Than sablest grain: and we in company Of th' inky waters, journeying by their side, Enter'd, though by a different track, beneath. Into a lake, the Stygian nam'd, expands The dismal stream, when it hath reach'd the foot Of the grey wither'd cliffs. Intent I stood To gaze, and in the marish sunk, descried A miry tribe, all naked, and with looks Betok'ning rage. They with their hands alone Struck not, but with the head, the breast, the feet, Cutting each other piecemeal with their fangs. ... --Our route Thus compass'd, we a segment widely stretch'd Between the dry embankment and the cove Of the loath'd pool, turning meanwhile our eyes Downward on those who gulp'd its muddy lees; _Nor stopp'd, till to a tower's low base we came._ (CARY.) VI. For Dante's power,--his absolute mastery over, although rare exhibition of, the pathetic, I can do no more than refer to the passages on Francesca di Rimini (Infer. C. v. ver. 73 to the end.) and on Ugolino, (Infer. C. xxxiii. ver. 1. to 75.) They are so well known, and rightly so admired, that it would be pedantry to analyze their composition; but you will note that the first is the pathos of passion, the second that of affection; and yet even in the first, you seem to perceive that the lovers have sacrificed their passion to the cherishing of a deep and rememberable impression. VII. As to going into the endless subtle beauties of Dante, that is impossible; but I cannot help citing the first triplet of the 29th canto of the Inferno: La molta gente e le diverse piaghe Avean le luci m 'e s' inebriate, Che dello stare a piangere eran vaghe. So were mine eyes inebriate with the view Of the vast multitude, whom various wounds Disfigur'd, that they long'd to stay and weep. CARY. Nor have I now room for any specific comparison of Dante with Milton. But if I had, I would institute it upon the ground of the last canto of the Inferno from the 1st to the 69th line, and from the 106th to the end. And in this comparison I should notice Dante's occasional fault of becoming grotesque from being too graphic without imagination; as in his Lucifer compared with Milton's Satan. Indeed he is sometimes horrible rather than terrible,--falling into the [Greek (transliteration): misaeton] instead of the [Greek (transliteration): deinon] of Longinus;[3] in other words, many of his images excite bodily disgust, and not moral fear. But here, as in other cases, you may perceive that the faults of great authors are generally excellencies carried to an excess. [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge here notes: "I will, if I can, here make an historical movement, and pay a proper compliment to Mr. Hallam." Ed.] [Footnote 2: Mr. Coleridge here notes: "Here to speak of Mr. Cary's translation."--Ed.] [Footnote 3: 'De Subl.' 1. ix.] MILTON. Born in London, 1608.--Died, 1674. If we divide the period from the accession of Elizabeth to the Protectorate of Cromwell into two unequal portions, the first ending with the death of James I. the other comprehending the reign of Charles and the brief glories of the Republic, we are forcibly struck with a difference in the character of the illustrious actors, by whom each period is rendered severally memorable. Or rather, the difference in the characters of the great men in each period, leads us to make this division. Eminent as the intellectual powers were that were displayed in both; yet in the number of great men, in the various sorts of excellence, and not merely in the variety but almost diversity of talents united in the same individual, the age of Charles falls short of its predecessor; and the stars of the Parliament, keen as their radiance was, in fulness and richness of lustre, yield to the constellation at the court of Elizabeth;--which can only be paralleled by Greece in her brightest moment, when the titles of the poet, the philosopher, the historian, the statesman and the general not seldom formed a garland round the same head, as in the instances of our Sidneys and Raleighs. But then, on the other hand, there was a vehemence of will, an enthusiasm of principle, a depth and an earnestness of spirit, which the charms of individual fame and personal aggrandisement could not pacify,--an aspiration after reality, permanence, and general good,--in short, a moral grandeur in the latter period, with which the low intrigues, Machiavellic maxims, and selfish and servile ambition of the former, stand in painful contrast. The causes of this it belongs not to the present occasion to detail at length; but a mere allusion to the quick succession of revolutions in religion, breeding a political indifference in the mass of men to religion itself, the enormous increase of the royal power in consequence of the humiliation of the nobility and the clergy--the transference of the papal authority to the crown,--the unfixed state of Elizabeth's own opinions, whose inclinations were as popish as her interests were protestant--the controversial extravagance and practical imbecility of her successor--will help to explain the former period; and the persecutions that had given a life and soul-interest to the disputes so imprudently fostered by James,--the ardour of a conscious increase of power in the commons, and the greater austerity of manners and maxims, the natural product and most formidable weapon of religious disputation, not merely in conjunction, but in closest combination, with newly awakened political and republican zeal, these perhaps account for the character of the latter aera. In the close of the former period, and during the bloom of the latter, the poet Milton was educated and formed; and he survived the latter, and all the fond hopes and aspirations which had been its life; and so in evil days, standing as the representative of the combined excellence of both periods, he produced the 'Paradise Lost as by an after-throe of nature. "There are some persons (observes a divine, a contemporary of Milton's) of whom the grace of God takes early hold, and the good spirit inhabiting them, carries them on in an even constancy through innocence into virtue, their Christianity bearing equal date with their manhood, and reason and religion, like warp and woof, running together, make up one web of a wise and exemplary life. This (he adds) is a most happy case, wherever it happens; for, besides that there is no sweeter or more lovely thing on earth than the early buds of piety, which drew from our Saviour signal affection to the beloved disciple, it is better to have no wound than to experience the most sovereign balsam, which, if it work a cure, yet usually leaves a scar behind." Although it was and is my intention to defer the consideration of Milton's own character to the conclusion of this Lecture, yet I could not prevail on myself to approach the Paradise Lost without impressing on your minds the conditions under which such a work was in fact producible at all, the original genius having been assumed as the immediate agent and efficient cause; and these conditions I find in the character of the times and in his own character. The age in which the foundations of his mind were laid, was congenial to it as one golden era of profound erudition and individual genius;--that in which the superstructure was carried up, was no less favourable to it by a sternness of discipline and a show of self-control, highly flattering to the imaginative dignity of an heir of fame, and which won Milton over from the dear-loved delights of academic groves and cathedral aisles to the anti-prelatic party. It acted on him, too, no doubt, and modified his studies by a characteristic controversial spirit, (his presentation of God is tinted with it)--a spirit not less busy indeed in political than in theological and ecclesiastical dispute, but carrying on the former almost always, more or less, in the guise of the latter. And so far as Pope's censure [1] of our poet,--that he makes God the Father a school divine--is just, we must attribute it to the character of his age, from which the men of genius, who escaped, escaped by a worse disease, the licentious indifference of a Frenchified court. Such was the 'nidus' or soil, which constituted, in the strict sense of the word, the circumstances of Milton's mind. In his mind itself there were purity and piety absolute; an imagination to which neither the past nor the present were interesting, except as far as they called forth and enlivened the great ideal, in which and for which he lived; a keen love of truth, which, after many weary pursuits, found a harbour in a sublime listening to the still voice in his own spirit, and as keen a love of his country, which, after a disappointment still more depressive, expanded and soared into a love of man as a probationer of immortality. These were, these alone could be, the conditions under which such a work as the Paradise Lost could be conceived and accomplished. By a life-long study Milton had known-- What was of use to know, What best to say could say, to do had done. His actions to his words agreed, his words To his large heart gave utterance due, his heart Contain'd of good, wise, fair, the perfect shape; and he left the imperishable total, as a bequest to the ages coming, in the 'Paradise Lost'. [2] Difficult as I shall find it to turn over these leaves without catching some passage, which would tempt me to stop, I propose to consider, 1st, the general plan and arrangement of the work; 2ndly, the subject with its difficulties and advantages; 3rdly, the poet's object, the spirit in the letter, the [Greek (transliterated): enthumion en muthps], the true school-divinity; and lastly, the characteristic excellencies of the poem, in what they consist, and by what means they were produced. 1. As to the plan and ordonnance of the Poem. Compare it with the 'Iliad', many of the books of which might change places without any injury to the thread of the story. Indeed, I doubt the original existence of the 'Iliad' as one poem; it seems more probable that it was put together about the time of the Pisistratidae. The 'Iliad'--and, more or less, all epic poems, the subjects of which are taken from history--have no rounded conclusion; they remain, after all, but single chapters from the volume of history, although they are ornamental chapters. Consider the exquisite simplicity of the Paradise Lost. It and it alone really possesses a beginning, a middle, and an end; it has the totality of the poem as distinguished from the 'ab ovo' birth and parentage, or straight line, of history. 2. As to the subject. In Homer, the supposed importance of the subject, as the first effort of confederated Greece, is an after-thought of the critics; and the interest, such as it is, derived from the events themselves, as distinguished from the manner of representing them, is very languid to all but Greeks. It is a Greek poem. The superiority of the 'Paradise Lost' is obvious in this respect, that the interest transcends the limits of a nation. But we do not generally dwell on this excellence of the 'Paradise Lost', because it seems attributable to Christianity itself;--yet in fact the interest is wider than Christendom, and comprehends the Jewish and Mohammedan worlds;--nay, still further, inasmuch as it represents the origin of evil, and the combat of evil and good, it contains matter of deep interest to all mankind, as forming the basis of all religion, and the true occasion of all philosophy whatsoever. The FALL of Man is the subject; Satan is the cause; man's blissful state the immediate object of his enmity and attack; man is warned by an angel who gives him an account of all that was requisite to be known, to make the warning at once intelligible and awful; then the temptation ensues, and the Fall; then the immediate sensible consequence; then the consolation, wherein an angel presents a vision of the history of men with the ultimate triumph of the Redeemer. Nothing is touched in this vision but what is of general interest in religion; any thing else would have been improper. The inferiority of Klopstock's 'Messiah' is inexpressible. I admit the prerogative of poetic feeling, and poetic faith; but I cannot suspend the judgment even for a moment. A poem may in one sense be a dream, but it must be a waking dream. In Milton you have a religious faith combined with the moral nature; it is an efflux; you go along with it. In Klopstock there is a wilfulness; he makes things so and so. The feigned speeches and events in the 'Messiah' shock us like falsehoods; but nothing of that sort is felt in the 'Paradise Lost', in which no particulars, at least very few indeed, are touched which can come into collision or juxta-position with recorded matter. But notwithstanding the advantages in Milton's subject, there were concomitant insuperable difficulties, and Milton has exhibited marvellous skill in keeping most of them out of sight. High poetry is the translation of reality into the ideal under the predicament of succession of time only. The poet is an historian, upon condition of moral power being the only force in the universe. The very grandeur of his subject ministered a difficulty to Milton. The statement of a being of high intellect, warring against the supreme Being, seems to contradict the idea of a supreme Being. Milton precludes our feeling this, as much as possible, by keeping the peculiar attributes of divinity less in sight, making them to a certain extent allegorical only. Again, poetry implies the language of excitement; yet how to reconcile such language with God? Hence Milton confines the poetic passion in God's speeches to the language of scripture; and once only allows the 'passio vera', or 'quasi-humana' to appear, in the passage, where the Father contemplates his own likeness in the Son before the battle:-- Go then, thou Mightiest, in thy Father's might, Ascend my chariot, guide the rapid wheels That shake Heaven's basis, bring forth all my war, My bow and thunder; my almighty arms Gird on, and sword upon thy puissant thigh; Pursue these sons of darkness, drive them out From all Heaven's bounds into the utter deep: There let them learn, as likes them, to despise God and Messiah his anointed king. (B. VI. v. 710.) 3. As to Milton's object:-- It was to justify the ways of God to man! The controversial spirit observable in many parts of the poem, especially in God's speeches, is immediately attributable to the great controversy of that age, the origination of evil. The Arminians considered it a mere calamity. The Calvinists took away all human will. Milton asserted the will, but declared for the enslavement of the will out of an act of the will itself. There are three powers in us, which distinguish us from the beasts that perish;--1, reason; 2, the power of viewing universal truth; and 3, the power of contracting universal truth into particulars. Religion is the will in the reason, and love in the will. The character of Satan is pride and sensual indulgence, finding in self the sole motive of action. It is the character so often seen 'in little' on the political stage. It exhibits all the restlessness, temerity, and cunning which have marked the mighty hunters of mankind from Nimrod to Napoleon. The common fascination of men is, that these great men, as they are called, must act from some great motive. Milton has carefully marked in his Satan the intense selfishness, the alcohol of egotism, which would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven. To place this lust of self in opposition to denial of self or duty, and to show what exertions it would make, and what pains endure to accomplish its end, is Milton's particular object in the character of Satan. But around this character he has thrown a singularity of daring, a grandeur of sufferance, and a ruined splendour, which constitute the very height of poetic sublimity. Lastly, as to the execution:-- The language and versification of the 'Paradise Lost' are peculiar in being so much more necessarily correspondent to each than those in any other poem or poet. The connexion of the sentences and the position of the words are exquisitely artificial; but the position is rather according to the logic of passion or universal logic, than to the logic of grammar. Milton attempted to make the English language obey the logic of passion as perfectly as the Greek and Latin. Hence the occasional harshness in the construction. Sublimity is the pre-eminent characteristic of the Paradise Lost. It is not an arithmetical sublime like Klopstock's, whose rule always is to treat what we might think large as contemptibly small. Klopstock mistakes bigness for greatness. There is a greatness arising from images of effort and daring, and also from those of moral endurance; in Milton both are united. The fallen angels are human passions, invested with a dramatic reality. The apostrophe to light at the commencement of the third book is particularly beautiful as an intermediate link between Hell and Heaven; and observe, how the second and third book support the subjective character of the poem. In all modern poetry in Christendom there is an under consciousness of a sinful nature, a fleeting away of external things, the mind or subject greater than the object, the reflective character predominant. In the 'Paradise Lost' the sublimest parts are the revelations of Milton's own mind, producing itself and evolving its own greatness; and this is so truly so, that when that which is merely entertaining for its objective beauty is introduced, it at first seems a discord. In the description of Paradise itself you have Milton's sunny side as a man; here his descriptive powers are exercised to the utmost, and he draws deep upon his Italian resources. In the description of Eve, and throughout this part of the poem, the poet is predominant over the theologian. Dress is the symbol of the Fall, but the mark of intellect; and the metaphysics of dress are, the hiding what is not symbolic and displaying by discrimination what is. The love of Adam and Eve in Paradise is of the highest merit--not phantomatic, and yet removed from every thing degrading. It is the sentiment of one rational being towards another made tender by a specific difference in that which is essentially the same in both; it is a union of opposites, a giving and receiving mutually of the permanent in either, a completion of each in the other. Milton is not a picturesque, but a musical, poet; although he has this merit that the object chosen by him for any particular foreground always remains prominent to the end, enriched, but not incumbered, by the opulence of descriptive details furnished by an exhaustless imagination. I wish the Paradise Lost were more carefully read and studied than I can see any ground for believing it is, especially those parts which, from the habit of always looking for a story in poetry, are scarcely read at all,--as for example, Adam's vision of future events in the 11th and 12th books. No one can rise from the perusal of this immortal poem without a deep sense of the grandeur and the purity of Milton's soul, or without feeling how susceptible of domestic enjoyments he really was, notwithstanding the discomforts which actually resulted from an apparently unhappy choice in marriage. He was, as every truly great poet has ever been, a good man; but finding it impossible to realize his own aspirations, either in religion, or politics, or society, he gave up his heart to the living spirit and light within him, and avenged himself on the world by enriching it with this record of his own transcendant ideal. [Footnote 1: Table Talk, vol. ii. p. 264.] [Footnote 2: Here Mr. C. notes: "Not perhaps here, but towards, or as, the conclusion, to chastise the fashionable notion that poetry is a relaxation or amusement, one of the superfluous toys and luxuries of the intellect! To contrast the permanence of poems with the transiency and fleeting moral effects of empires, and what are called, great events." Ed.] NOTES ON MILTON. 1807. [1] (Hayley quotes the following passage:--) "Time serves not now, and, perhaps, I might seem too profuse to give any certain account of what the mind at home, in the spacious circuits of her musing, hath liberty to propose to herself, though of highest hope and hardest attempting; whether that epic form, whereof the two poems of Homer, and those other two of Virgil and Tasso, are a diffuse, and the Book of Job' a brief, model," p. 69. These latter words deserve particular notice. I do not doubt that Milton intended his 'Paradise Lost' as an epic of the first class, and that the poetic dialogue of the 'Book of Job' was his model for the general scheme of his 'Paradise Regained'. Readers would not be disappointed in this latter poem, if they proceeded to a perusal of it with a proper preconception of the kind of interest intended to be excited in that admirable work. In its kind it is the most perfect poem extant, though its kind may be inferior in interest--being in its essence didactic--to that other sort, in which instruction is conveyed more effectively, because less directly, in connection with stronger and more pleasurable emotions, and thereby in a closer affinity with action. But might we not as rationally object to an accomplished woman's conversing, however agreeably, because it has happened that we have received a keener pleasure from her singing to the harp? 'Si genus sit probo et sapienti viro hand indignum, et si poema sit in suo genere perfectum, satis est. Quod si hoc auctor idem altioribus numeris et carmini diviniori ipsum per se divinum superaddiderit, mehercule satis est, et plusquam satis'. [2] I cannot, however, but wish that the answer of Jesus to Satan in the 4th book, (v. 285.)-- Think not but that I know these things; Or think I know them not, Not therefore am I short Of knowing what I ought, &c. had breathed the spirit of Hayley's noble quotation rather than the narrow bigotry of Gregory the Great. The passage is, indeed, excellent, and is partially true; but partial truth is the worst mode of conveying falsehood. Hayley, p. 75. "The sincerest friends of Milton may here agree with Johnson, who speaks of 'his controversial merriment as disgusting'." The man who reads a work meant for immediate effect on one age with the notions and feelings of another, may be a refined gentleman, but must be a sorry critic. He who possesses imagination enough to live with his forefathers, and, leaving comparative reflection for an after moment, to give himself up during the first perusal to the feelings of a contemporary, if not a partizan, will, I dare aver, rarely find any part of Milton's prose works disgusting. (Hayley, p. 104. Hayley is speaking of the passage in Milton's Answer to Icon Basilice, in which he accuses Charles of taking his Prayer in captivity from Pamela's prayer in the 3rd book of Sidney's Arcadia. The passage begins,-- "But this king, not content with that which, although in a thing holy, is no holy theft, to attribute to his own making other men's whole prayers, &c." Symmons' ed. 1806, p. 407.) Assuredly, I regret that Milton should have written this passage; and yet the adoption of a prayer from a romance on such an occasion does not evince a delicate or deeply sincere mind. We are the creatures of association. There are some excellent moral and even serious lines in Hudibras; but what if a clergyman should adorn his sermon with a quotation from that poem! Would the abstract propriety of the verses leave him "honourably acquitted?" The Christian baptism of a line in Virgil is so far from being a parallel, that it is ridiculously inappropriate,--an absurdity as glaring as that of the bigotted Puritans, who objected to some of the noblest and most scriptural prayers ever dictated by wisdom and piety, simply because the Roman Catholics had used them. (Hayley, p. 107.) "The ambition of Milton," &c. I do not approve the so frequent use of this word relatively to Milton. Indeed the fondness for ingrafting a good sense on the word "ambition," is not a Christian impulse in general. (Hayley, p. 110.) "Milton himself seems to have thought it allowable in literary contention to vilify, &c. the character of an opponent; but surely this doctrine is unworthy," &c. If ever it were allowable, in this ease it was especially so. But these general observations, without meditation on the particular times and the genius of the times, are most often as unjust as they are always superficial. (Hayley, p. 133. Hayley is speaking of Milton's panegyric on Cromwell's government:-) Besides, however Milton might and did regret the immediate necessity, yet what alternative was there? Was it not better that Cromwell should usurp power, to protect religious freedom at least, than that the Presbyterians should usurp it to introduce a religious persecution,--extending the notion of spiritual concerns so far as to leave no freedom even to a man's bedchamber? (Hayley, p. 250. Hayley's conjectures on the origin of the 'Paradise Lost':--) If Milton borrowed a hint from any writer, it was more probably from Strada's Prolusions, in which the Fall of the Angels is pointed out as the noblest subject for a Christian poet.[1] The more dissimilar the detailed images are, the more likely it is that a great genius should catch the general idea. (Hayl. p. 294. Extracts from the 'Adamo' of Andreini:) "Lucifero. Che dal mio centre oscuro Mi chiama a rimirar cotanta luce?" "Who from my dark abyss Calls me to gaze on this 'excess of light?'" The words in italics (single quotation marks: text Ed.) are an unfair translation. They may suggest that Milton really had read and did imitate this drama. The original is 'in so great light.' Indeed the whole version is affectedly and inaccurately Miltonic. (p Ib. v. 11.) Che di fango opre festi-- Forming thy works of 'dust' (no, dirt.--) (Ib. v. 17.) Tessa pur stella a stella V'aggiungo e luna, e sole.-- Let him unite above Star upon star, moon, sun. Let him weave star to star, Then join both moon and sun! (Ib. v. 21.) Ch'al fin con biasmo e scorno Vana l'opra sara, vano il sudore! Since in the end division Shall prove his works and all his efforts vain. Since finally with censure and disdain Vain shall the work be, and his toil be vain! 1796. [3] The reader of Milton must be always on his duty: he is surrounded with sense; it rises in every line; every word is to the purpose. There are no lazy intervals; all has been considered, and demands and merits observation. If this be called obscurity, let it be remembered that it is such an obscurity as is a compliment to the reader; not that vicious obscurity, which proceeds from a muddled head. [Footnote 1: These notes were written by Mr. Coleridge in a copy of Hayley's Life of Milton, (4to. 1796), belonging to Mr. Poole. By him they were communicated, and this seems the fittest place for their publication. Ed. ] [Footnote 2: The reference seems generally to be to the 5th Prolusion of the 1st Book. 'Hic arcus ac tela, quibus olim in magno illo Superum tumultu princeps armorum Michael confixit auctorem proditionis; hic fulmina humanae mentis terror. In nubibus armatas bello legiones instruam, atque inde pro re nata auxiliares ad terram copias evocabo. Hic mihi Caelites, quos esse ferunt elementorum tutelares, prima ilia corpora miscebunt'. (sect. 4.) Ed. ] [Footnote 3: From a common-place book of Mr. C.'s, communicated by Mr. J. M. Gutch. Ed.] LECTURE XI. [1] ASIATIC AND GREEK MYTHOLOGIES--ROBINSON CRUSOE--USE OF WORKS OF IMAGINATION IN EDUCATION. A confounding of God with Nature, and an incapacity of finding unity in the manifold and infinity in the individual,--these are the origin of polytheism. The most perfect instance of this kind of theism is that of early Greece; other nations seem to have either transcended, or come short of, the old Hellenic standard,--a mythology in itself fundamentally allegorical, and typical of the powers and functions of nature, but subsequently mixed up with a deification of great men and hero-worship,--so that finally the original idea became inextricably combined with the form and attributes of some legendary individual. In Asia, probably from the greater unity of the government and the still surviving influence of patriarchal tradition, the idea of the unity of God, in a distorted reflection of the Mosaic scheme, was much more generally preserved; and accordingly all other super or ultra-human beings could only be represented as ministers of, or rebels against, his will. The Asiatic genii and fairies are, therefore, always endowed with moral qualities, and distinguishable as malignant or benevolent to man. It is this uniform attribution of fixed moral qualities to the supernatural agents of eastern mythology that particularly separates them from the divinities of old Greece. Yet it is not altogether improbable that in the Samothracian or Cabeiric mysteries the link between the Asiatic and Greek popular schemes of mythology lay concealed. Of these mysteries there are conflicting accounts, and, perhaps, there were variations of doctrine in the lapse of ages and intercourse with other systems. But, upon a review of all that is left to us on this subject in the writings of the ancients, we may, I think, make out thus much of an interesting fact,--that 'Cabiri', impliedly at least, meant 'socii, complices,' having a hypostatic or fundamental union with, or relation to, each other; that these mysterious divinities were, ultimately at least, divided into a higher and lower triad; that the lower triad, 'primi quia infimi,' consisted of the old Titanic deities or powers of nature, under the obscure names of 'Axieros, Axiokersos,' and 'Axiokersa,' representing symbolically different modifications of animal desire or material action, such as hunger, thirst, and fire, without consciousness; that the higher triad, 'ultimi quia superiores,' consisted of Jupiter, (Pallas, or Apollo, or Bacchus, or Mercury, mystically called 'Cadmilos') and Venus, representing, as before, the [Greek (transliterated): nous] or reason, the [Greek: logos] or word or communicative power, and the [Greek: eros] or love;-that the 'Cadmilos' or Mercury, the manifested, communicated, or sent, appeared not only in his proper person as second of the higher triad, but also as a mediator between the higher and lower triad, and so there were seven divinities; and, indeed, according to some authorities, it might seem that the 'Cadmilos' acted once as a mediator of the higher, and once of the lower, triad, and that so there were eight Cabeiric divinities. The lower or Titanic powers being subdued, chaos ceased, and creation began in the reign of the divinities of mind and love; but the chaotic gods still existed in the abyss, and the notion of evoking them was the origin, the idea, of the Greek necromancy. These mysteries, like all the others, were certainly in connection with either the Phoenician or Egyptian systems, perhaps with both. Hence the old Cabeiric powers were soon made to answer to the corresponding popular divinities; and the lower triad was called by the uninitiated, Ceres, Vulcan or Pluto, and Proserpine, and the 'Cadmilos' became Mercury. It is not without ground that I direct your attention, under these circumstances, to the probable derivation of some portion of this most remarkable system from patriarchal tradition, and to the connection of the Cabeiri with the Kabbala. The Samothracian mysteries continued in celebrity till some time after the commencement of the Christian era. [2] But they gradually sank with the rest of the ancient system of mythology, to which, in fact, they did not properly belong. The peculiar doctrines, however, were preserved in the memories of the initiated, and handed down by individuals. No doubt they were propagated in Europe, and it is not improbable that Paracelsus received many of his opinions from such persons, and I think a connection may be traced between him and Jacob Behmen. The Asiatic supernatural beings are all produced by imagining an excessive magnitude, or an excessive smallness combined with great power; and the broken associations, which must have given rise to such conceptions, are the sources of the interest which they inspire, as exhibiting, through the working of the imagination, the idea of power in the will. This is delightfully exemplified in the 'Arabian Nights' Entertainments', and indeed, more or less, in other works of the same kind. In all these there is the same activity of mind as in dreaming, that is--an exertion of the fancy in the combination and recombination of familiar objects so as to produce novel and wonderful imagery. To this must be added that these tales cause no deep feeling of a moral kind--whether of religion or love; but an impulse of motion is communicated to the mind without excitement, and this is the reason of their being so generally read and admired. I think it not unlikely that the 'Milesian Tales' contained the germs of many of those now in the Arabian Nights; indeed it is scarcely possible to doubt that the Greek empire must have left deep impression on the Persian intellect. So also many of the Roman Catholic legends are taken from Apuleius. In that exquisite story of Cupid and Psyche, the allegory is of no injury to the dramatic vividness of the tale. It is evidently a philosophic attempt to parry Christianity with a 'quasi'-Platonic account of the fall and redemption of the soul. The charm of De Foe's works, especially of 'Robinson Crusoe', is founded on the same principle. It always interests, never agitates. Crusoe himself is merely a representative of humanity in general; neither his intellectual nor his moral qualities set him above the middle degree of mankind; his only prominent characteristic is the spirit of enterprise and wandering, which is, nevertheless, a very common disposition. You will observe that all that is wonderful in this tale is the result of external circumstances--of things which fortune brings to Crusoe's hand. [Footnote 1: Partly from Mr. Green's note. 'Ed.'] [Footnote 2: In the reign of Tiberius, A. D. 18, Germanicus attempted to visit Samothrace;--'illum in regressu sacra Samothracum visere nitentem obvii aquilones depulere.' Tacit. 'Ann.' II. e. 54. Ed.] NOTES ON ROBINSON CRUSOE. [1] (Vol. i. p. 17.) But my ill fate pushed me on now with an obstinacy that nothing could resist; and though I had several times loud calls from my reason, and my more composed judgment to go home, yet I had no power to do it. I know not what to call this, nor will I urge that it is a secret overruling decree that hurries us on to be the instruments of our own destruction, even though it be before us, and that we rush upon it with our eyes open. The wise only possess ideas; the greater part of mankind are possessed by them. Robinson Crusoe was not conscious of the master impulse, even because it was his master, and had taken, as he says, full possession of him. When once the mind, in despite of the remonstrating conscience, has abandoned its free power to a haunting impulse or idea, then whatever tends to give depth and vividness to this idea or indefinite imagination, increases its despotism, and in the same proportion renders the reason and free will ineffectual. Now, fearful calamities, sufferings, horrors, and hair-breadth escapes will have this effect, far more than even sensual pleasure and prosperous incidents. Hence the evil consequences of sin in such cases, instead of retracting or deterring the sinner, goad him on to his destruction. This is the moral of Shakspeare's 'Macbeth', and the true solution of this paragraph,--not any overruling decree of divine wrath, but the tyranny of the sinner's own evil imagination, which he has voluntarily chosen as his master. Compare the contemptuous Swift with the contemned De Foe, and how superior will the latter be found! But by what test?--Even by this; that the writer who makes me sympathize with his presentations with the whole of my being, is more estimable than he who calls forth, and appeals but to, a part of my being--my sense of the ludicrous, for instance. De Foe's excellence it is, to make me forget my specific class, character, and circumstances, and to raise me while I read him, into the universal man. (P. 80.) I smiled to myself at the sight of this money: "O drug!" said I aloud, &c. 'However, upon second thoughts, I took it away'; and wrapping all this in a piece of canvass, &c. Worthy of Shakspeare!--and yet the simple semicolon after it, the instant passing on without the least pause of reflex consciousness, is more exquisite and masterlike than the touch itself. A meaner writer, a Marmontel, would have put an (!) after 'away,' and have commenced a fresh paragraph. 30th July, 1830. (P. 111.) And I must confess, my religious thankfulness to God's providence began to abate too, upon the discovering that all this was nothing but what was common; though I ought to have been as thankful for so strange and unforeseen a providence, as if it had been miraculous. To make men feel the truth of this is one characteristic object of the miracles worked by Moses;-in them the providence is miraculous, the miracles providential. (1 P. 126.) The growing up of the corn, as is hinted in my Journal, had, at first, some little influence upon me, and began to affect me with seriousness, as long as I thought it had something miraculous in it, &c. By far the ablest vindication of miracles which I have met with. It is indeed the true ground, the proper purpose and intention of a miracle. (P. 141.) To think that this was all my own, that I was king and lord of all this country indefeasibly, &c. By the by, what is the law of England respecting this? Suppose I had discovered, or been wrecked on an uninhabited island, would it be mine or the king's? (P. 223.) I considered--that as I could not foresee what the ends of divine wisdom might be in all this, so I was not to dispute his sovereignty, who, as I was his creature, had an undoubted right, by creation, to govern and dispose of me absolutely as he thought fit, &c. I could never understand this reasoning, grounded on a complete misapprehension of St. Paul's image of the potter, Rom. ix., or rather I do fully understand the absurdity of it. The susceptibility of pain and pleasure, of good and evil, constitutes a right in every creature endowed therewith in relation to every rational and moral being,--a' fortiori', therefore, to the Supreme Reason, to the absolutely good Being. Remember Davenant's verses;-- Doth it our reason's mutinies appease To say, the potter may his own clay mould To every use, or in what shape he please, At first not counsell'd, nor at last controll'd? Power's hand can neither easy be, nor strict To lifeless clay, which ease nor torment knows, And where it cannot favour or afflict, It neither justice or injustice shows. But souls have life, and life eternal too: Therefore, if doom'd before they can offend, It seems to show what heavenly power can do, But does not in that deed that power commend. (Death of Astragon. st. 88, &c. P. 232-3.) And this I must observe with grief too, that the discomposure of my mind had too great impressions also upon the religious parts of my thoughts,--praying to God being properly an act of the mind, not of the body. As justly conceived as it is beautifully expressed. And a mighty motive for habitual prayer; for this cannot but greatly facilitate the performance of rational prayer even in moments of urgent distress. (P. 244.) That this would justify the conduct of the Spaniards in all their barbarities practised in America. De Foe was a true philanthropist, who had risen above the antipathies of nationality; but he was evidently partial to the Spanish character, which, however, it is not, I fear, possible to acquit of cruelty. Witness the Netherlands, the Inquisition, the late Guerilla warfare, &c. (P. 249.) That I shall not discuss, and perhaps cannot account for; but certainly they are a proof of the converse of spirits, &c. This reminds me of a conversation I once over heard. "How a statement so injurious to Mr. A. and so contrary to the truth, should have been made to you by Mr. B. I do not pretend to account for;--only I know of my own knowledge that B. is an inveterate liar, and has long borne malice against Mr. A.; and I can prove that he has repeatedly declared that in some way or other he would do Mr. A. a mischief." (P. 254.) The place I was in was a most delightful cavity or grotto of its kind, as could be expected, though perfectly dark; the floor was dry and level, and had a sort of small loose gravel on it, &c. How accurate an observer of nature De Foe was! The reader will at once recognize Professor Buckland's caves and the diluvial gravel. (P. 308.) I entered into a long discourse with him about the devil, the original of him, his rebellion against God, his enmity to man, the reason of it, his setting himself up in the dark parts of the world to be worshipped instead of God, &c. I presume that Milton's 'Paradise Lost' must have been bound up with one of Crusoe's Bibles; otherwise I should be puzzled to know where he found all this history of the Old Gentleman. Not a word of it in the Bible itself, I am quite sure. But to be serious. De Foe did not reflect that all these difficulties are attached to a mere fiction, or, at the best, an allegory, supported by a few popular phrases and figures of speech used incidentally or dramatically by the Evangelists,--and that the existence of a personal, intelligent, evil being, the counterpart and antagonist of God, is in direct contradiction to the most express declarations of Holy Writ. '"Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it?"' Amos, iii. 6. '"I make peace and create evil."' Isa. xlv. 7. This is the deep mystery of the abyss of God. (Vol. ii. p. 3.) I have often heard persons of good judgment say, ... that there is no such thing as a spirit appearing, a ghost walking, and the like, &c. I cannot conceive a better definition of Body than "spirit appearing," or of a flesh-and-blood man than a rational spirit apparent. But a spirit 'per se' appearing is tantamount to a spirit appearing without its appearances. And as for ghosts, it is enough for a man of common sense to observe, that a ghost and a shadow are concluded in the same definition, that is, visibility without tangibility. (P. 9.) She was, in a few words the stay of all my affairs, the centre of all my enterprises, &c. The stay of his affairs, the centre of his interests, the regulator of his schemes and movements, whom it soothed his pride to submit to, and in complying with whose wishes the conscious sensation of his acting will increased the impulse, while it disguised the coercion, of duty!--the clinging dependent, yet the strong supporter--the comforter, the comfort, and the soul's living home! This is De Foe's comprehensive character of the wife, as she should be; and, to the honour of womanhood be it spoken, there are few neighbourhoods in which one name at least might not be found for the portrait. The exquisite paragraphs in this and the next page, in addition to others scattered, though with a sparing hand, through his novels, afford sufficient proof that De Foe was a first-rate master of periodic style; but with sound judgment, and the fine tact of genius, he has avoided it as adverse to, nay, incompatible with, the every-day matter of fact realness, which forms the charm and the character of all his romances. The Robinson Crusoe is like the vision of a happy night-mair, such as a denizen of Elysium might be supposed to have from a little excess in his nectar and ambrosia supper. Our imagination is kept in full play, excited to the highest; yet all the while we are touching, or touched by, common flesh and blood. (P. 67.) The ungrateful creatures began to be as insolent and troublesome as before, &c. How should it be otherwise? They were idle; and when we will not sow corn, the devil will be sure to sow weeds, night-shade, henbane, and devil's-bit. (P. 82.) That hardened villain was so far from denying it, that he said it was true, and ---- him they would do it still before they had done with them. Observe when a man has once abandoned himself to wickedness, he cannot stop, and does not join the devils till he has become a devil himself. Rebelling against his conscience he becomes the slave of his own furious will. One excellence of De Foe, amongst many, is his sacrifice of lesser interest to the greater because more universal. Had he (as without any improbability he might have done) given his Robinson Crusoe any of the turn for natural history, which forms so striking and delightful a feature in the equally uneducated Dampier;--had he made him find out qualities and uses in the before (to him) unknown plants of the island, discover, for instance, a substitute for hops, or describe birds, &c.--many delightful pages and incidents might have enriched the book;--but then Crusoe would have ceased to be the universal representative, the person, for whom every reader could substitute himself. But now nothing is done, thought, suffered, or desired, but what every man can imagine himself doing, thinking, feeling, or wishing for. Even so very easy a problem as that of finding a substitute for ink, is with exquisite judgment made to baffle Crusoe's inventive faculties. And in what he does, he arrives at no excellence; he does not make basket work like Will Atkins; the carpentering, tailoring, pottery, &c. are all just what will answer his purposes, and those are confined to needs that all men have, and comforts that all men desire. Crusoe rises only to the point to which all men may be made to feel that they might, and that they ought to, rise in religion,--to resignation, dependence on, and thankful acknowledgement of, the divine mercy and goodness. In the education of children, love is first to be instilled, and out of love obedience is to be educed. Then impulse and power should be given to the intellect, and the ends of a moral being be exhibited. For this object thus much is effected by works of imagination;--that they carry the mind out of self, and show the possible of the good and the great in the human character. The height, whatever it may be, of the imaginative standard will do no harm; we are commanded to imitate one who is inimitable. We should address ourselves to those faculties in a child's mind, which are first awakened by nature, and consequently first admit of cultivation, that is to say, the memory and the imagination. The comparing power, the judgment, is not at that age active, and ought not to be forcibly excited, as is too frequently and mistakenly done in the modern systems of education, which can only lead to selfish views, debtor and creditor principles of virtue, and an inflated sense of merit. In the imagination of man exist the seeds of all moral and scientific improvement; chemistry was first alchemy, and out of astrology sprang astronomy. In the childhood of those sciences the imagination opened a way, and furnished materials, on which the ratiocinative powers in a maturer state operated with success. The imagination is the distinguishing characteristic of man as a progressive being; and I repeat that it ought to be carefully guided and strengthened as the indispensable means and instrument of continued amelioration and refinement. Men of genius and goodness are generally restless in their minds in the present, and this, because they are by a law of their nature unremittingly regarding themselves in the future, and contemplating the possible of moral and intellectual advance towards perfection. Thus we live by hope and faith; thus we are for the most part able to realize what we will, and thus we accomplish the end of our being. The contemplation of futurity inspires humility of soul in our judgment of the present. I think the memory of children cannot, in reason, be too much stored with the objects and facts of natural history. God opens the images of nature, like the leaves of a book, before the eyes of his creature, Man--and teaches him all that is grand and beautiful in the foaming cataract, the glassy lake, and the floating mist. The common modern novel, in which there is no imagination, but a miserable struggle to excite and gratify mere curiosity, ought, in my judgment, to be wholly forbidden to children. Novel-reading of this sort is especially injurious to the growth of the imagination, the judgment, and the morals, especially to the latter, because it excites mere feelings without at the same time ministering an impulse to action. Women are good novelists, but indifferent poets; and this because they rarely or never thoroughly distinguish between fact and fiction. In the jumble of the two lies the secret of the modern novel, which is the 'medium aliquid' between them, having just so much of fiction as to obscure the fact, and so much of fact as to render the fiction insipid. The perusal of a fashionable lady's novel is to me very much like looking at the scenery and decorations of a theatre by broad daylight. The source of the common fondness for novels of this sort rests in that dislike of vacancy and that love of sloth, which are inherent in the human mind; they afford excitement without producing reaction. By reaction I mean an activity of the intellectual faculties, which shows itself in consequent reasoning and observation, and originates action and conduct according to a principle. Thus, the act of thinking presents two sides for contemplation,--that of external causality, in which the train of thought may be considered as the result of outward impressions, of accidental combinations, of fancy, or the associations of the memory,--and on the other hand, that of internal causality, or of the energy of the will on the mind itself. Thought, therefore, might thus be regarded as passive or active; and the same faculties may in a popular sense be expressed as perception or observation, fancy or imagination, memory or recollection. [Footnote 1: These notes were written by Mr. C. in Mr. Gillman's copy of Robinson Crusoe, in the summer of 1830. The references in the text are to Major's edition, 1831. Ed.] LECTURE XII. DREAMS--APPARITIONS--ALCHEMISTS--PERSONALITY OF THE EVIL BEING--BODILY IDENTITY. It is a general, but, as it appears to me, a mistaken opinion, that in our ordinary dreams we judge the objects to be real. I say our ordinary dreams;--because as to the night-mair the opinion is to a considerable extent just. But the night-mair is not a mere dream, but takes place when the waking state of the brain is recommencing, and most often during a rapid alternation, a twinkling, as it were, of sleeping and waking;--while either from pressure on, or from some derangement in, the stomach or other digestive organs acting on the external skin (which is still in sympathy with the stomach and bowels,) and benumbing it, the sensations sent up to the brain by double touch (that is, when my own hand touches my side or breast,) are so faint as to be merely equivalent to the sensation given by single touch, as when another person's hand touches me. The mind, therefore, which at all times, with and without our distinct consciousness, seeks for, and assumes, some outward cause for every impression from without, and which in sleep, by aid of the imaginative faculty, converts its judgments respecting the cause into a personal image as being the cause,--the mind, I say, in this case, deceived by past experience, attributes the painful sensation received to a correspondent agent,--an assassin, for instance, stabbing at the side, or a goblin sitting on the breast. Add too that the impressions of the bed, curtains, room, &c. received by the eyes in the half-moments of their opening, blend with, and give vividness and appropriate distance to, the dream image which returns when they close again; and thus we unite the actual perceptions, or their immediate reliques, with the phantoms of the inward sense; and in this manner so confound the half-waking, half-sleeping, reasoning power, that we actually do pass a positive judgment on the reality of what we see and hear, though often accompanied by doubt and self-questioning, which, as I have myself experienced, will at times become strong enough, even before we awake, to convince us that it is what it is--namely, the night-mair. In ordinary dreams we do not judge the objects to be real;--we simply do not determine that they are unreal. The sensations which they seem to produce, are in truth the causes and occasions of the images; of which there are two obvious proofs: first, that in dreams the strangest and most sudden metamorphoses do not create any sensation of surprise: and the second, that as to the most dreadful images, which during the dream were accompanied with agonies of terror, we merely awake, or turn round on the other side, and off fly both image and agony, which would be impossible if the sensations were produced by the images. This has always appeared to me an absolute demonstration of the true nature of ghosts and apparitions--such I mean of the tribe as were not pure inventions. Fifty years ago, (and to this day in the ruder parts of Great Britain and Ireland, in almost every kitchen and in too many parlours it is nearly the same,) you might meet persons who would assure you in the most solemn manner, so that you could not doubt their veracity at least, that they had seen an apparition of such and such a person,--in many cases, that the apparition had spoken to them; and they would describe themselves as having been in an agony of terror. They would tell you the story in perfect health. Now take the other class of facts, in which real ghosts have appeared;--I mean, where figures have been dressed up for the purpose of passing for apparitions:--in every instance I have known or heard of (and I have collected very many) the consequence has been either sudden death, or fits, or idiocy, or mania, or a brain fever. Whence comes the difference? evidently from this,--that in the one case the whole of the nervous system has been by slight internal causes gradually and all together brought into a certain state, the sensation of which is extravagantly exaggerated during sleep, and of which the images are the mere effects and exponents, as the motions of the weathercock are of the wind;--while in the other case, the image rushing through the senses upon a nervous system, wholly unprepared, actually causes the sensation, which is sometimes powerful enough to produce a total check, and almost always a lesion or inflammation. Who has not witnessed the difference in shock when we have leaped down half-a-dozen steps intentionally, and that of having missed a single stair. How comparatively severe the latter is! The fact really is, as to apparitions, that the terror produces the image instead of the contrary; for 'in omnem actum perceptionis influit imaginatio,' as says Wolfe. O, strange is the self-power of the imagination--when painful sensations have made it their interpreter, or returning gladsomeness or convalescence has made its chilled and evanished figures and landscape bud, blossom, and live in scarlet, green, and snowy white (like the fire-screen inscribed with the nitrate and muriate of cobalt,)--strange is the power to represent the events and circumstances, even to the anguish or the triumph of the 'quasi'-credent soul, while the necessary conditions, the only possible causes of such contingencies, are known to be in fact quite hopeless;--yea, when the pure mind would recoil from the eve-lengthened shadow of an approaching hope, as from a crime;-and yet the effect shall have place, and substance, and living energy, and, on a blue islet of ether, in a whole sky of blackest cloudage, shine like a firstling of creation! To return, however to apparitions, and by way of an amusing illustration of the nature and value of even contemporary testimony upon such subjects, I will present you with a passage, literally translated by my friend, Mr. Southey, from the well known work of Bernal Dias, one of the companions of Cortes, in the conquest of Mexico: Here it is that Gomara says, that Francisco de Morla rode forward on a dappled grey horse, before Cortes and the cavalry came up, and that the apostle St. Iago, or St. Peter, was there. I must say that all our works and victories are by the hand of our Lord Jesus Christ, and that in this battle there were for each of us so many Indians, that they could have covered us with handfuls of earth, if it had not been that the great mercy of God helped us in every thing. And it may be that he of whom Gomara speaks, was the glorious Santiago or San Pedro, and I, as a sinner, was not worthy to see him; but he whom I saw there and knew, was Francisco de Morla on a chestnut horse, who came up with Cortes. And it seems to me that now while I am writing this, the whole war is represented before these sinful eyes, just in the manner as we then went through it. And though I, as an unworthy sinner, might not deserve to see either of these glorious apostles, there were in our company above four hundred soldiers, and Cortes, and many other knights; and it would have been talked of and testified, and they would have made a church, when they peopled the town, which would have been called Santiago de la Vittoria, or San Pedro de la Vittoria, as it is now called, Santa Maria de la Vittoria. And if it was, as Gomara says, bad Christians must we have been, when our Lord God sent us his holy apostles, not to acknowledge his great mercy, and venerate his church daily. And would to God, it had been, as the Chronicler says!--but till I read his Chronicle, I never heard such a thing from any of the conquerors who were there. Now, what if the odd accident of such a man as Bernal Dias' writing a history had not taken place! Gomara's account, the account of a contemporary, which yet must have been read by scores who were present, would have remained uncontradicted. I remember the story of a man, whom the devil met and talked with, but left at a particular lane;--the man followed him with his eyes, and when the devil got to the turning or bend of the lane, he vanished! The devil was upon this occasion drest in a blue coat, plush waistcoat, leather breeches and boots, and talked and looked just like a common man, except as to a particular lock of hair which he had. "And how do you know then that it was the devil?"--"How do I know," replied the fellow,--"why, if it had not been the devil, being drest as he was, and looking as he did, why should I have been sore stricken with fright, when I first saw him? and why should I be in such a tremble all the while he talked? And, moreover, he had a particular sort of a kind of a lock, and when I groaned and said, upon every question he asked me, Lord have mercy upon me! or, Christ have mercy upon me! it was plain enough that he did not like it, and so he left me!"--The man was quite sober when he related this story; but as it happened to him on his return from market, it is probable that he was then muddled. As for myself, I was actually seen in Newgate in the winter of 1798;--the person who saw me there, said he had asked my name of Mr. A. B. a known acquaintance of mine, who told him that it was young Coleridge, who had married the eldest Miss----. "Will you go to Newgate, Sir?" said my friend; "for I assure you that Mr. C. is now in Germany." "Very willingly," replied the other, and away they went to Newgate, and sent for A. B. "Coleridge," cried he, "in Newgate! God forbid!" I said, "young Col ---- who married the eldest Miss ----." The names were something similar. And yet this person had himself really seen me at one of my lectures. I remember, upon the occasion of my inhaling the nitrous oxide at the Royal Institution, about five minutes afterwards, a gentleman came from the other side of the theatre and said to me,--"Was it not ravishingly delightful, Sir?"--"It was highly pleasurable, no doubt."--"Was it not very like sweet music?"--"I cannot say I perceived any analogy to it."--"Did you not say it was very like Mrs. Billington singing by your ear?"--"No, Sir, I said that while I was breathing the gas, there was a singing in my ears." To return, however, to dreams, I not only believe, for the reasons given, but have more than once actually experienced that the most fearful forms, when produced simply by association, instead of causing fear, operate no other effect than the same would do if they had passed through my mind as thoughts, while I was composing a faery tale; the whole depending on the wise and gracious law in our nature, that the actual bodily sensations, called forth according to the law of association by thoughts and images of the mind, never greatly transcend the limits of pleasurable feeling in a tolerably healthy frame, unless where an act of the judgment supervenes and interprets them as purporting instant danger to ourselves. [1] There have been very strange and incredible stories told of and by the alchemists. Perhaps in some of them there may have been a specific form of mania, originating in the constant intension of the mind on an imaginary end, associated with an immense variety of means, all of them substances not familiar to men in general, and in forms strange and unlike to those of ordinary nature. Sometimes, it seems as if the alchemists wrote like the Pythagoreans on music, imagining a metaphysical and inaudible music as the basis of the audible. It is clear that by sulphur they meant the solar rays or light, and by mercury the principle of ponderability, so that their theory was the same with that of the Heraclitic physics, or the modern German 'Naturphilosophie', which deduces all things from light and gravitation, each being bipolar; gravitation=north and south, or attraction and repulsion; light=east and west, or contraction and dilation; and gold being the tetrad, or interpenetration of both, as water was the dyad of light, and iron the dyad of gravitation. It is, probably, unjust to accuse the alchemists generally of dabbling with attempts at magic in the common sense of the term. The supposed exercise of magical power always involved some moral guilt, directly or indirectly, as in stealing a piece of meat to lay on warts, touching humours with the hand of an executed person, &c. Rites of this sort and other practices of sorcery have always been regarded with trembling abhorrence by all nations, even the most ignorant, as by the Africans, the Hudson's Bay people and others. The alchemists were, no doubt, often considered as dealers in art magic, and many of them were not unwilling that such a belief should be prevalent; and the more earnest among them evidently looked at their association of substances, fumigations, and other chemical operations as merely ceremonial, and seem, therefore, to have had a deeper meaning, that of evoking a latent power. It would be profitable to make a collection of all the cases of cures by magical charms and incantations; much useful information might, probably, be derived from it; for it is to be observed that such rites are the form in which medical knowledge would be preserved amongst a barbarous and ignorant people. [Footnote 1: From Mr. Green's note. Ed.] Note. [1] June, 1827. The apocryphal book of Tobit consists of a very simple, but beautiful and interesting, family-memoir, into which some later Jewish poet or fabulist of Alexandria wove the ridiculous and frigid machinery, borrowed from the popular superstitions of the Greeks (though, probably, of Egyptian origin), and accommodated, clumsily enough, to the purer monotheism of the Mosaic law. The Rape of the Lock is another instance of a simple tale thus enlarged at a later period, though in this case by the same author, and with a very different result. Now unless Mr. Hillhouse is Romanist enough to receive this nursery-tale garnish of a domestic incident as grave history and holy writ, (for which, even from learned Roman Catholics, he would gain more credit as a very obedient child of the Church than as a biblical critic), he will find it no easy matter to support this assertion of his by the passages of Scripture here referred to, consistently with any sane interpretation of their import and purpose. I. The Fallen Spirits. This is the mythological form, or, if you will, the symbolical representation, of a profound idea necessary as the 'prae-suppositum' of the Christian scheme, or a postulate of reason, indispensable, if we would render the existence of a world of finites compatible with the assumption of a super-mundane God, not one with the world. In short, this idea is the condition under which alone the reason of man can retain the doctrine of an infinite and absolute Being, and yet keep clear of pantheism as exhibited by Benedict Spinosa. II. The Egyptian Magicians. This whole narrative is probably a relic of the old diplomatic 'lingua-arcana,' or state-symbolique--in which the prediction of events is expressed as the immediate causing of them. Thus the prophet is said to destroy the city, the destruction of which he predicts. The word which our version renders by '"enchantments"' signifies "flames or burnings," by which it is probable that the Egyptians were able to deceive the spectators, and substitute serpents for staves. See Parkhurst 'in voce.' And with regard to the possessions in the Gospels, bear in mind first of all, that spirits are not necessarily souls or 'I's' ('ich-heiten' or 'self-consciousnesses'), and that the most ludicrous absurdities would follow from taking them as such in the Gospel instances; and secondly, that the Evangelist, who has recorded the most of these incidents, himself speaks of one of these possessed persons as a lunatic;-- [Greek (transliterated): selaeniazetai--epsaelthen ap auton to daimonion.] Matt. xvii. 15.18. while St. John names them not at all, but seems to include them under the description of diseased or deranged persons. That madness may result from spiritual causes, and not only or principally from physical ailments, may readily be admitted. Is not our will itself a spiritual power? Is it not the spirit of the man? The mind of a rational and responsible being (that is, of a free-agent) is a spirit, though it does not follow that all spirits are minds. Who shall dare determine what spiritual influences may not arise out of the collective evil wills of wicked men? Even the bestial life, sinless in animals and their nature, may when awakened in the man and by his own act admitted into his will, become a spiritual influence. He receives a nature into his will, which by this very act becomes a corrupt will; and 'vice versa,' this will becomes his nature, and thus a corrupt nature. This may be conceded; and this is all that the recorded words of our Saviour absolutely require in order to receive an appropriate sense; but this is altogether different from making spirits to be devils, and devils self-conscious individuals. [Footnote 1: Written in a copy of Mr. Hillhouse's 'Hadad'. 'Ed.'] NOTES. [1] March, 1824. 'A Christian's conflicts and conquests', p. 459. By the devil we are to understand that apostate spirit which fell from God, and is always designing to hale down others from God also. The Old Dragon (mentioned in the Revelation) with his tail drew down the third part of the stars of heaven and cast them to the earth. How much is it to be regretted, that so enlightened and able a divine as Smith, had not philosophically and scripturally enucleated this so difficult yet important question,--respecting the personal existence of the evil principle; that is, whether as [Greek (transliterated): to theion] of paganism is [Greek: o theos] in Christianity, so the [Greek: to ponaeron] is to be [Greek: o ponaeros],--and whether this is an express doctrine of Christ, and not merely a Jewish dogma left undisturbed to fade away under the increasing light of the Gospel, instead of assuming the former, and confirming the position by a verse from a poetic tissue of visual symbols,--a verse alien from the subject, and by which the Apocalypt enigmatized the Neronian persecutions and the apostacy through fear occasioned by it in a large number of converts. (Ib. p. 463.) When we say, the devil is continually busy with us, I mean not only some apostate spirit as one particular being, but that spirit of apostacy which is lodged in all men's natures; and this may seem particularly to be aimed at in this place, if we observe the context:--as the scripture speaks of Christ not only as a particular person, but as a divine principle in holy souls. Indeed the devil is not only the name of one particular thing, but a nature. May I not venture to suspect that this was Smith's own belief and judgment? and that his conversion of the Satan, that is, 'circuitor', or minister of police (what our Sterne calls the accusing angel) in the prologue to Job into the devil was a mere condescension to the prevailing prejudice? Here, however, he speaks like himself, and like a true religious philosopher, who felt that the personality of evil spirits is a trifling question, compared with the personality of the evil principle. This is indeed most momentous. [Footnote 1: Written in a copy of "Select Discourses by John Smith, of Queen's College, Cambridge, 1660," and communicated by the Rev. Edward Coleridge. Ed.] NOTE ON A PASSAGE IN THE LIFE OF HENRY EARL OF MORLAND. 20th June, 1827. The defect of this and all similar theories that I am acquainted with, or rather, let me say, the desideratum, is the neglect of a previous definition of the term "body." What do you mean by it? The immediate grounds of a man's size, visibility, tangibility, &c?--But these are in a continual flux even as a column of smoke. The material particles of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, lime, phosphorus, sulphur, soda, iron, that constitute the ponderable organism in May, 1827, at the moment of Pollio's death in his 70th year, have no better claim to be called his "body," than the numerical particles of the same names that constituted the ponderable mass in May, 1787, in Pollio's prime of manhood in his 30th year;--the latter no less than the former go into the grave, that is, suffer dissolution, the one in a series, the other simultaneously. The result to the particles is precisely the same in both, and of both therefore we must say with holy Paul,--'"Thou fool! that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be,"' &c. Neither this nor that is the body that abideth. Abideth, I say; for that which riseth again must have remained, though perhaps in an inert state.--It is not dead, but sleepeth;--that is, it is not dissolved any more than the exterior or phenomenal organism appears to us dissolved when it lieth in apparent inactivity during our sleep. Sound reasoning this, to the best of my judgment, as far as it goes. But how are we to explain the reaction of this fluxional body on the animal? In each moment the particles by the informing force of the living principle constitute an organ not only of motion and sense, but of consciousness. The organ plays on the organist. How is this conceivable? The solution requires a depth, stillness, and subtlety of spirit not only for its discovery, but even for the understanding of it when discovered, and in the most appropriate words enunciated. I can merely give a hint. The particles themselves must have an interior and gravitative being, and the multeity must be a removable or at least suspensible accident. LECTURE XIII. ON POESY OR ART. Man communicates by articulation of sounds, and paramountly by the memory in the ear; nature by the impression of bounds and surfaces on the eye, and through the eye it gives significance and appropriation, and thus the conditions of memory, or the capability of being remembered, to sounds, smells, &c. Now Art, used collectively for painting, sculpture, architecture and music, is the mediatress between, and reconciler of, nature and man. It is, therefore, the power of humanizing nature, of infusing the thoughts and passions of man into every thing which is the object of his contemplation; colour, form, motion and sound are the elements which it combines, and it stamps them into unity in the mould of a moral idea. The primary art is writing;--primary, if we regard the purpose abstracted from the different modes of realizing it, those steps of progression of which the instances are still visible in the lower degrees of civilization. First, there is mere gesticulation; then rosaries or 'wampun'; then picture-language; then hieroglyphics, and finally alphabetic letters. These all consist of a translation of man into nature, of a substitution of the visible for the audible. The so called music of savage tribes as little deserves the name of art for the understanding as the ear warrants it for music. Its lowest state is a mere expression of passion by sounds which the passion itself necessitates;--the highest amounts to no more than a voluntary reproduction of these sounds in the absence of the occasioning causes, so as to give the pleasure of contrast,--for example, by the various outcries of battle in the song of security and triumph. Poetry also is purely human; for all its materials are from the mind, and all its products are for the mind. But it is the apotheosis of the former state, in which by excitement of the associative power passion itself imitates order, and the order resulting produces a pleasurable passion, and thus it elevates the mind by making its feelings the object of its reflexion. So likewise, whilst it recalls the sights and sounds that had accompanied the occasions of the original passions, poetry impregnates them with an interest not their own by means of the passions, and yet tempers the passion by the calming power which all distinct images exert on the human soul. In this way poetry is the preparation for art, inasmuch as it avails itself of the forms of nature to recall, to express, and to modify the thoughts and feelings of the mind. Still, however, poetry can only act through the intervention of articulate speech, which is so peculiarly human, that in all languages it constitutes the ordinary phrase by which man and nature are contradistinguished. It is the original force of the word 'brute,' and even 'mute,' and 'dumb' do not convey the absence of sound, but the absence of articulated sounds. As soon as the human mind is intelligibly addressed by an outward image exclusively of articulate speech, so soon does art commence. But please to observe that I have laid particular stress on the words 'human mind,'--meaning to exclude thereby all results common to man and all other sentient creatures, and consequently confining myself to the effect produced by the congruity of the animal impression with the reflective powers of the mind; so that not the thing presented, but that which is re-presented by the thing shall be the source of the pleasure. In this sense nature itself is to a religious observer the art of God; and for the same cause art itself might be defined as of a middle quality between a thought and a thing, or as I said before, the union and reconciliation of that which is nature with that which is exclusively human. It is the figured language of thought, and is distinguished from nature by the unity of all the parts in one thought or idea. Hence nature itself would give us the impression of a work of art if we could see the thought which is present at once in the whole and in every part; and a work of art will be just in proportion as it adequately conveys the thought, and rich in proportion to the variety of parts which it holds in unity. If, therefore, the term 'mute' be taken as opposed not to sound but to articulate speech, the old definition of painting will in fact be the true and best definition of the Fine Arts in general, that is, 'muta poesis', mute poesy, and so of course poesy. And, as all languages perfect themselves by a gradual process of desynonymizing words originally equivalent, I have cherished the wish to use the word 'poesy' as the generic or common term, and to distinguish that species of poesy which is not 'muta poesis' by its usual name 'poetry;' while of all the other species which collectively form the Fine Arts, there would remain this as the common definition,--that they all, like poetry, are to express intellectual purposes, thoughts, conceptions, and sentiments which have their origin in the human mind,--not, however, as poetry does, by means of articulate speech, but as nature or the divine art does, by form, colour, magnitude, proportion, or by sound, that is, silently or musically. Well! it may be said--but who has ever thought otherwise? We all know that art is the imitatress of nature. And, doubtless, the truths which I hope to convey would be barren truisms, if all men meant the same by the words 'imitate' and 'nature.' But it would be flattering mankind at large, to presume that such is the fact. First, to imitate. The impression on the wax is not an imitation, but a copy, of the seal; the seal itself is an imitation. But, further, in order to form a philosophic conception, we must seek for the kind, as the heat in ice, invisible light, &c. whilst, for practical purposes, we must have reference to the degree. It is sufficient that philosophically we understand that in all imitation two elements must coexist, and not only coexist, but must be perceived as coexisting. These two constituent elements are likeness and unlikeness, or sameness and difference, and in all genuine creations of art there must be a union of these disparates. The artist may take his point of view where he pleases, provided that the desired effect be perceptibly produced,--that there be likeness in the difference, difference in the likeness, and a reconcilement of both in one. If there be likeness to nature without any check of difference, the result is disgusting, and the more complete the delusion, the more loathsome the effect. Why are such simulations of nature, as wax-work figures of men and women, so disagreeable? Because, not finding the motion and the life which we expected, we are shocked as by a falsehood, every circumstance of detail, which before induced us to be interested, making the distance from truth more palpable. You set out with a supposed reality and are disappointed and disgusted with the deception; whilst, in respect to a work of genuine imitation, you begin with an acknowledged total difference, and then every touch of nature gives you the pleasure of an approximation to truth. The fundamental principle of all this is undoubtedly the horror of falsehood and the love of truth inherent in the human breast. The Greek tragic dance rested on these principles, and I can deeply sympathize in imagination with the Greeks in this favourite part of their theatrical exhibitions, when I call to mind the pleasure I felt in beholding the combat of the Horatii and Curiatii most exquisitely danced in Italy to the music of Cimarosa. Secondly, as to nature. We must imitate nature! yes, but what in nature,--all and every thing? No, the beautiful in nature. And what then is the beautiful? What is beauty? It is, in the abstract, the unity of the manifold, the coalescence of the diverse; in the concrete, it is the union of the shapely ('formosum') with the vital. In the dead organic it depends on regularity of form, the first and lowest species of which is the triangle with all its modifications, as in crystals, architecture, &c.; in the living organic it is not mere regularity of form, which would produce a sense of formality; neither is it subservient to any thing beside itself. It may be present in a disagreeable object, in which the proportion of the parts constitutes a whole; it does not arise from association, as the agreeable does, but sometimes lies in the rupture of association; it is not different to different individuals and nations, as has been said, nor is it connected with the ideas of the good, or the fit, or the useful. The sense of beauty is intuitive, and beauty itself is all that inspires pleasure without, and aloof from, and even contrarily to, interest. If the artist copies the mere nature, the 'natura naturata', what idle rivalry? If he proceeds only from a given form, which is supposed to answer to the notion of beauty, what an emptiness, what an unreality there always is in his productions, as in Cipriani's pictures! Believe me, you must master the essence, the 'natura naturans', which presupposes a bond between nature in the higher sense and the soul of man. The wisdom in nature is distinguished from that in man by the co-instantaneity of the plan and the execution; the thought and the product are one, or are given at once; but there is no reflex act, and hence there is no moral responsibility. In man there is reflexion, freedom, and choice; he is, therefore, the head of the visible creation. In the objects of nature are presented, as in a mirror, all the possible elements, steps, and processes of intellect antecedent to consciousness, and therefore to the full development of the intelligential act; and man's mind is the very focus of all the rays of intellect which are scattered throughout the images of nature. Now so to place these images, totalized, and fitted to the limits of the human mind, as to elicit from, and to superinduce upon, the forms themselves the moral reflexions to which they approximate, to make the external internal, the internal external, to make nature thought, and thought nature,--this is the mystery of genius in the Fine Arts. Dare I add that the genius must act on the feeling, that body is but a striving to become mind,--that it is mind in its essence! In every work of art there is a reconcilement of the external with the internal; the conscious is so impressed on the unconscious as to appear in it; as compare mere letters inscribed on a tomb with figures themselves constituting the tomb. He who combines the two is the man of genius; and for that reason he must partake of both. Hence there is in genius itself an unconscious activity; nay, that is the genius in the man of genius. And this is the true exposition of the rule that the artist must first eloign himself from nature in order to return to her with full effect. Why this? Because if he were to begin by mere painful copying, he would produce masks only, not forms breathing life. He must out of his own mind create forms according to the severe laws of the intellect, in order to generate in himself that co-ordination of freedom and law, that involution of obedience in the prescript, and of the prescript in the impulse to obey, which assimilates him to nature, and enables him to understand her. He merely absents himself for a season from her, that his own spirit, which has the same ground with nature, may learn her unspoken language in its main radicals, before he approaches to her endless compositions of them. Yes, not to acquire cold notions--lifeless technical rules--but living and life-producing ideas, which shall contain their own evidence, the certainty that they are essentially one with the germinal causes in nature--his consciousness being the focus and mirror of both,--for this does the artist for a time abandon the external real in order to return to it with a complete sympathy with its internal and actual. For of all we see, hear, feel and touch the substance is and must be in ourselves; and therefore there is no alternative in reason between the dreary (and thank heaven! almost impossible) belief that every thing around us is but a phantom, or that the life which is in us is in them likewise; and that to know is to resemble, when we speak of objects out of ourselves, even as within ourselves to learn is, according to Plato, only to recollect;--the only effective answer to which, that I have been fortunate to meet with, is that which Pope has consecrated for future use in the line-- And coxcombs vanquish Berkeley with a grin! The artist must imitate that which is within the thing, that which is active through form and figure, and discourses to us by symbols--the 'Natur-geist', or spirit of nature, as we unconsciously imitate those whom we love; for so only can he hope to produce any work truly natural in the object and truly human in the effect. The idea which puts the form together cannot itself be the form. It is above form, and is its essence, the universal in the individual, or the individuality itself,--the glance and the exponent of the indwelling power. Each thing that lives has its moment of self-exposition, and so has each period of each thing, if we remove the disturbing forces of accident. To do this is the business of ideal art, whether in images of childhood, youth, or age, in man or in woman. Hence a good portrait is the abstract of the personal; it is not the likeness for actual comparison, but for recollection. This explains why the likeness of a very good portrait is not always recognized; because some persons never abstract, and amongst these are especially to be numbered the near relations and friends of the subject, in consequence of the constant pressure and check exercised on their minds by the actual presence of the original. And each thing that only appears to live has also its possible position of relation to life, as nature herself testifies, who, where she cannot be, prophecies her being in the crystallized metal, or the inhaling plant. The charm, the indispensable requisite, of sculpture is unity of effect. But painting rests in a material remoter from nature, and its compass is therefore greater. Light and shade give external, as well internal, being even with all its accidents, whilst sculpture is confined to the latter. And here I may observe that the subjects chosen for works of art, whether in sculpture or painting, should be such as really are capable of being expressed and conveyed within the limits of those arts. Moreover they ought to be such as will affect the spectator by their truth, their beauty, or their sublimity, and therefore they may be addressed to the judgment, the senses, or the reason. The peculiarity of the impression which they may make, may be derived either from colour and form, or from proportion and fitness, or from the excitement of the moral feelings; or all these maybe combined. Such works as do combine these sources of effect must have the preference in dignity. Imitation of the antique may be too exclusive, and may produce an injurious effect on modern sculpture;--1st, generally, because such an imitation cannot fail to have a tendency to keep the attention fixed on externals rather than on the thought within;--2ndly, because, accordingly, it leads the artist to rest satisfied with that which is always imperfect, namely, bodily form, and circumscribes his views of mental expression to the ideas of power and grandeur only;--3rdly, because it induces an effort to combine together two incongruous things, that is to say, modern feelings in antique forms;--4thly, because it speaks in a language, as it were, learned and dead, the tones of which, being unfamiliar, leave the common spectator cold and unimpressed;--and lastly, because it necessarily causes a neglect of thoughts, emotions and images of profounder interest and more exalted dignity, as motherly, sisterly, and brotherly love, piety, devotion, the divine become human,--the Virgin, the Apostle, the Christ. The artist's principle in the statue of a great man should be the illustration of departed merit; and I cannot but think that a skilful adoption of modern habiliments would, in many instances, give a variety and force of effect which a bigotted adherence to Greek or Roman costume precludes. It is, I believe, from artists finding Greek models unfit for several important modern purposes, that we see so many allegorical figures on monuments and elsewhere. Painting was, as it were, a new art, and being unshackled by old models it chose its own subjects, and took an eagle's flight. And a new field seems opened for modern sculpture in the symbolical expression of the ends of life, as in Guy's monument, Chantrey's children in Worcester Cathedral, &c. Architecture exhibits the greatest extent of the difference from nature which may exist in works of art. It involves all the powers of design, and is sculpture and painting inclusively. It shews the greatness of man, and should at the same time teach him humility. Music is the most entirely human of the fine arts, and has the fewest 'analoga' in nature. Its first delightfulness is simple accordance with the ear; but it is an associated thing, and recalls the deep emotions of the past with an intellectual sense of proportion. Every human feeling is greater and larger than the exciting cause,--a proof, I think, that man is designed for a higher state of existence; and this is deeply implied in music in which there is always something more and beyond the immediate expression. With regard to works in all the branches of the fine arts, I may remark that the pleasure arising from novelty must of course be allowed its due place and weight. This pleasure consists in the identity of two opposite elements, that is to say--sameness and variety. If in the midst of the variety there be not some fixed object for the attention, the unceasing succession of the variety will prevent the mind from observing the difference of the individual objects; and the only thing remaining will be the succession, which will then produce precisely the same effect as sameness. This we experience when we let the trees or hedges pass before the fixed eye during a rapid movement in a carriage, or on the other hand, when we suffer a file of soldiers or ranks of men in procession to go on before us without resting the eye on any one in particular. In order to derive pleasure from the occupation of the mind, the principle of unity must always be present, so that in the midst of the multeity the centripetal force be never suspended, nor the sense be fatigued by the predominance of the centrifugal force. This unity in multeity I have elsewhere stated as the principle of beauty. It is equally the source of pleasure in variety, and in fact a higher term including both. What is the seclusive or distinguishing term between them? Remember that there is a difference between form as proceeding, and shape as superinduced;--the latter is either the death or the imprisonment of the thing;--the former is its self-witnessing and self-effected sphere of agency. Art would or should be the abridgment of nature. Now the fulness of nature is without character, as water is purest when without taste, smell, or colour; but this is the highest, the apex only,--it is not the whole. The object of art is to give the whole 'ad hominem'; hence each step of nature hath its ideal, and hence the possibility of a climax up to the perfect form of a harmonized chaos. To the idea of life victory or strife is necessary; as virtue consists not simply in the absence of vices, but in the overcoming of them. So it is in beauty. The sight of what is subordinated and conquered heightens the strength and the pleasure; and this should be exhibited by the artist either inclusively in his figure, or else out of it and beside it to act by way of supplement and contrast. And with a view to this, remark the seeming identity of body and mind in infants, and thence the loveliness of the former; the commencing separation in boyhood, and the struggle of equilibrium in youth: thence onward the body is first simply indifferent; then demanding the translucency of the mind not to be worse than indifferent; and finally all that presents the body as body becoming almost of an excremental nature. LECTURE XIV. ON STYLE. I have, I believe, formerly observed with regard to the character of the governments of the East, that their tendency was despotic, that is, towards unity; whilst that of the Greek governments, on the other hand, leaned to the manifold and the popular, the unity in them being purely ideal, namely of all as an identification of the whole. In the northern or Gothic nations the aim and purpose of the government were the preservation of the rights and interests of the individual in conjunction with those of the whole. The individual interest was sacred. In the character and tendency of the Greek and Gothic languages there is precisely the same relative difference. In Greek the sentences are long, and the structure architectural, so that each part or clause is insignificant when compared with the whole. The result is every thing, the steps and processes nothing. But in the Gothic and, generally, in what we call the modern, languages, the structure is short, simple, and complete in each part, and the connexion of the parts with the sum total of the discourse is maintained by the sequency of the logic, or the community of feelings excited between the writer and his readers. As an instance equally delightful and complete, of what may be called the Gothic structure as contra-distinguished from that of the Greeks, let me cite a part of our famous Chaucer's character of a parish priest as he should be. Can it ever be quoted too often? A good man thér was of religiöun That was a pouré Parsone of a toun, But riche he was of holy thought and werk; He was alsó a lerned man, a clerk, That Cristés gospel trewély wolde preche; His párishens [1] devoutly wolde he teche; Benigne he was, and wonder [2] diligent, And in adversite ful patient, And swiche [3] he was ypreved [4] often sithes [5]; Ful loth were him to cursen for his tithes, But rather wolde he yeven [6] out of doute Unto his pouré párishens aboute Of hís offríng, and eke of his substánce; He coude in litel thing have suffisance: Wide was his parish, and houses fer asonder, But he ne [7] left nought for no rain ne [8] thonder, In sikenesse and in mischief to visíte The ferrest [9] in his parish moche and lite [10] Upon his fete, and in his hand a staf: This noble ensample to his shepe he yaf, [11] That first he wrought, and afterward he taught, Out of the gospel he the wordés caught, And this figúre he added yet thereto, That if gold rusté, what should iren do. He setté not his benefice to hire, And lette [12] his shepe accombred [13] in the mire, And ran untó Londón untó Seint Poules, To seken him a chantérie for soules, Or with a brotherhede to be withold, But dwelt at home, and kepté wel his fold, So that the wolf ne made it not miscarie: He was a shepherd and no mercenarie; And though he holy were and vertuous, He was to sinful men not dispitous, [14] Ne of his speché dangerous ne digne, [15] But in his teching discrete and benigne, To drawen folk to heven with fairénesse, By good ensample was his besinesse; But it were any persone obstinat, What so he were of high or low estat, Him wolde he snibben [16] sharply for the nones: A better preest I trowe that no wher non is; He waited after no pompe ne reverence, He maked him no spiced conscience, But Cristés love and his apostles' twelve He taught, but first he folwed it himselve. [17] [Footnote 1: Parishioners.] [Footnote 2: Wondrous.] [Footnote 3: Such.] [Footnote 4: Proved.] [Footnote 5: Times.] [Footnote 6: Give or have given.] [Footnote 7: Not.] [Footnote 8: Nor.] [Footnote 9: Farthest.] [Footnote 10: Great and small.] [Footnote 11: Gave.] [Footnote 12: Left.] [Footnote 13: Encumbered.] [Footnote 14: Despiteous.] [Footnote 15: Proud.] [Footnote 16: Reprove.] [Footnote: Prologue to Canterbury Tales.] Such change as really took place in the style of our literature after Chaucer's time is with difficulty perceptible, on account of the dearth of writers, during the civil wars of the 15th century. But the transition was not very great; and accordingly we find in Latimer and our other venerable authors about the time of Edward VI. as in Luther, the general characteristics of the earliest manner;--that is, every part popular, and the discourse addressed to all degrees of intellect;--the sentences short, the tone vehement, and the connexion of the whole produced by honesty and singleness of purpose, intensity of passion, and pervading importance of the subject. Another and a very different species of style is that which was derived from, and founded on, the admiration and cultivation of the classical writers, and which was more exclusively addressed to the learned class in society. I have previously mentioned Boccaccio as the original Italian introducer of this manner, and the great models of it in English are Hooker, Bacon, Milton, and Taylor, although it may be traced in many other authors of that age. In all these the language is dignified but plain, genuine English, although elevated and brightened by superiority of intellect in the writer. Individual words themselves are always used by them in their precise meaning, without either affectation or slipslop. The letters and state papers of Sir Francis Walsingham are remarkable for excellence in style of this description. In Jeremy Taylor the sentences are often extremely long, and yet are generally so perspicuous in consequence of their logical structure, that they require no reperusal to be understood; and it is for the most part the same in Milton and Hooker. Take the following sentence as a specimen of the sort of style to which I have been alluding:-- Concerning Faith, the principal object whereof is that eternal verity which hath discovered the treasures of hidden wisdom in Christ; concerning Hope, the highest object whereof is that everlasting goodness which in Christ doth quicken the dead; concerning Charity, the final object whereof is that incomprehensible beauty which shineth in the countenance of Christ, the Son of the living God: concerning these virtues, the first of which beginning here with a weak apprehension of things not seen, endeth with the intuitive vision of God in the world to come; the second beginning here with a trembling expectation of things far removed, and as yet but only heard of, endeth with real and actual fruition of that which no tongue can express; the third beginning here with a weak inclination of heart towards him unto whom we are not able to approach, endeth with endless union, the mystery whereof is higher than the reach of the thoughts of men; concerning that Faith, Hope, and Charity, without which there can be no salvation, was there ever any mention made saving only in that Law which God himself hath from Heaven revealed? There is not in the world a syllable muttered with certain truth concerning any of these three, more than hath been supernaturally received from the mouth of the eternal God. Eccles. 'Pol.' I. s. 11. The unity in these writers is produced by the unity of the subject, and the perpetual growth and evolution of the thoughts, one generating, and explaining, and justifying, the place of another, not, as it is in Seneca, where the thoughts, striking as they are, are merely strung together like beads, without any causation or progression. The words are selected because they are the most appropriate, regard being had to the dignity of the total impression, and no merely big phrases are used where plain ones would have sufficed, even in the most learned of their works. There is some truth in a remark, which I believe was made by Sir Joshua Reynolds, that the greatest man is he who forms the taste of a nation, and that the next greatest is he who corrupts it. The true classical style of Hooker and his fellows was easily open to corruption; and Sir Thomas Brown it was, who, though a writer of great genius, first effectually injured the literary taste of the nation by his introduction of learned words, merely because they were learned. It would be difficult to describe Brown adequately; exuberant in conception and conceit, dignified, hyperlatinistic, a quiet and sublime enthusiast; yet a fantast, a humourist, a brain with a twist; egotistic like Montaigne, yet with a feeling heart and an active curiosity, which, however, too often degenerates into a hunting after oddities. In his 'Hydriotaphia' and, indeed, almost all his works the entireness of his mental action is very observable; he metamorphoses every thing, be it what it may, into the subject under consideration. But Sir Thomas Brown with all his faults had a genuine idiom; and it is the existence of an individual idiom in each, that makes the principal writers before the Restoration the great patterns or integers of English style. In them the precise intended meaning of a word can never be mistaken; whereas in the later writers, as especially in Pope, the use of words is for the most part purely arbitrary, so that the context will rarely show the true specific sense, but only that something of the sort is designed. A perusal of the authorities cited by Johnson in his dictionary under any leading word, will give you a lively sense of this declension in etymological truth of expression in the writers after the Restoration, or perhaps, strictly, after the middle of the reign of Charles II. The general characteristic of the style of our literature down to the period which I have just mentioned, was gravity, and in Milton and some other writers of his day there are perceptible traces of the sternness of republicanism. Soon after the Restoration a material change took place, and the cause of royalism was graced, sometimes disgraced, by every shade of lightness of manner. A free and easy style was considered as a test of loyalty, or at all events, as a badge of the cavalier party; you may detect it occasionally even in Barrow, who is, however, in general remarkable for dignity and logical sequency of expression; but in L'Estrange, Collyer, and the writers of that class, this easy manner was carried out to the utmost extreme of slang and ribaldry. Yet still the works, even of these last authors, have considerable merit in one point of view; their language is level to the understandings of all men; it is an actual transcript of the colloquialism of the day, and is accordingly full of life and reality. Roger North's life of his brother the Lord Keeper, is the most valuable specimen of this class of our literature; it is delightful, and much beyond any other of the writings of his contemporaries. From the common opinion that the English style attained its greatest perfection in and about Queen Ann's reign I altogether dissent; not only because it is in one species alone in which it can be pretended that the writers of that age excelled their predecessors, but also because the specimens themselves are not equal, upon sound principles of judgment, to much that had been produced before. The classical structure of Hooker--the impetuous, thought-agglomerating, flood of Taylor--to these there is no pretence of a parallel; and for mere ease and grace, is Cowley inferior to Addison, being as he is so much more thoughtful and full of fancy? Cowley, with the omission of a quaintness here and there, is probably the best model of style for modern imitation in general. Taylor's periods have been frequently attempted by his admirers; you may, perhaps, just catch the turn of a simile or single image, but to write in the real manner of Jeremy Taylor would require as mighty a mind as his. Many parts of Algernon Sidney's treatises afford excellent exemplars of a good modern practical style; and Dryden in his prose works, is a still better model, if you add a stricter and purer grammar. It is, indeed, worthy of remark that all our great poets have been good prose writers, as Chaucer, Spenser, Milton; and this probably arose from their just sense of metre. For a true poet will never confound verse and prose; whereas it is almost characteristic of indifferent prose writers that they should be constantly slipping into scraps of metre. Swift's style is, in its line, perfect; the manner is a complete expression of the matter, the terms appropriate, and the artifice concealed. It is simplicity in the true sense of the word. After the Revolution, the spirit of the nation became much more commercial, than it had been before; a learned body, or clerisy, as such, gradually disappeared, and literature in general began to be addressed to the common miscellaneous public. That public had become accustomed to, and required, a strong stimulus; and to meet the requisitions of the public taste, a style was produced which by combining triteness of thought with singularity and excess of manner of expression, was calculated at once to soothe ignorance and to flatter vanity. The thought was carefully kept down to the immediate apprehension of the commonest understanding, and the dress was as anxiously arranged for the purpose of making the thought appear something very profound. The essence of this style consisted in a mock antithesis, that is, an opposition of mere sounds, in a rage for personification, the abstract made animate, far-fetched metaphors, strange phrases, metrical scraps, in every thing, in short, but genuine prose. Style is, of course, nothing else but the art of conveying the meaning appropriately and with perspicuity, whatever that meaning may be, and one criterion of style is that it shall not be translateable without injury to the meaning. Johnson's style has pleased many from the very fault of being perpetually translateable; he creates an impression of cleverness by never saying any thing in a common way. The best specimen of this manner is in Junius, because his antithesis is less merely verbal than Johnson's. Gibbon's manner is the worst of all; it has every fault of which this peculiar style is capable. Tacitus is an example of it in Latin; in coming from Cicero you feel the 'falsetto' immediately. In order to form a good style, the primary rule and condition is, not to attempt to express ourselves in language before we thoroughly know our own meaning;--when a man perfectly understands himself, appropriate diction will generally be at his command either in writing or speaking. In such cases the thoughts and the words are associated. In the next place preciseness in the use of terms is required, and the test is whether you can translate the phrase adequately into simpler terms, regard being had to the feeling of the whole passage. Try this upon Shakspeare, or Milton, and see if you can substitute other simpler words in any given passage without a violation of the meaning or tone. The source of bad writing is the desire to be something more than a man of sense,--the straining to be thought a genius; and it is just the same in speech making. If men would only say what they have to say in plain terms, how much more eloquent they would be! Another rule is to avoid converting mere abstractions into persons. I believe you will very rarely find in any great writer before the Revolution the possessive case of an inanimate noun used in prose instead of the dependent case, as 'the watch's hand,' for 'the hand of the watch.' The possessive or Saxon genitive was confined to persons, or at least to animated subjects. And I cannot conclude this Lecture without insisting on the importance of accuracy of style as being near akin to veracity and truthful habits of mind; he who thinks loosely will write loosely, and, perhaps, there is some moral inconvenience in the common forms of our grammars which give children so many obscure terms for material distinctions. Let me also exhort you to careful examination of what you read, if it be worth any perusal at all; such examination will be a safeguard from fanaticism, the universal origin of which is in the contemplation of phenomena without investigation into their causes. NOTES ON SIR THOMAS BROWN'S 'RELIGIO MEDICI'. 1802. [1] Strong feeling and an active intellect conjoined, lead almost necessarily, in the first stage of philosophising, to Spinosism. Sir T. Brown was a Spinosist without knowing it. If I have not quite all the faith that the author of the 'Religio Medici' possessed, I have all the inclination to it; it gives me pleasure to believe. The postscript at the very end of the book is well worth reading. Sir K. Digby's observations, however, are those of a pedant in his own system and opinion. He ought to have considered the R. M. in a dramatic, and not in a metaphysical, view, as a sweet exhibition of character and passion, and not as an expression, or investigation, of positive truth. The R. M. is a fine portrait of a handsome man in his best clothes; it is much of what he was at all times, a good deal of what he was only in his best moments. I have never read a book in which I felt greater similarity to my own make of mind--active in inquiry, and yet with an appetite to believe--in short an affectionate visionary! But then I should tell a different tale of my own heart; for I would not only endeavour to tell the truth, (which I doubt not Sir T. B. has done), but likewise to tell the whole truth, which most assuredly he has not done. However, it is a most delicious book. His own character was a fine mixture of humourist, genius, and pedant. A library was a living world to him, and every book a man, absolute flesh and blood! and the gravity with which he records contradictory opinions is exquisite. (Part 1. sect. 9.) Now contrarily, I bless myself, and am thankful that I lived not in the days of miracles, that I never saw Christ nor his disciples, &c. So say I. (S. 15.) I could never content my contemplation with those general pieces of wonder, the flux and reflux of the sea, the increase of Nile, the conversion of the needle to the north; and have studied to match and parallel those in the more obvious and neglected pieces of nature; which without further travel I can do in the cosmography of myself; we carry with us the wonders we seek without us. There is all Africa and her prodigies in us; we are that bold and adventurous piece of nature, which he that studies wisely learns in a 'compendium' what others labour at in a divided piece and endless volume. This is the true characteristic of genius; our destiny and instinct is to unriddle the world, and he is the man of genius who feels this instinct fresh and strong in his nature; who perceiving the riddle and the mystery of all things even the commonest, needs no strange and out-of-the-way tales or images to stimulate him into wonder and a deep interest. (S. 16, 17.) All this is very fine philosophy, and the best and most ingenious defence of revelation. Moreover, I do hold and believe that a toad is a comely animal; but nevertheless a toad is called ugly by almost all men, and it is the business of a philosopher to explain the reason of this. S. 19. This is exceedingly striking. Had Sir T. B. lived now-a-days, he would probably have been a very ingenious and bold infidel in his real opinions, though the kindness of his nature would have kept him aloof from vulgar prating obtrusive infidelity. S. 35. An excellent burlesque on parts of the Schoolmen, though I believe an unintentional one. S. 36. Truly sublime--and in Sir T. B.'s very best manner. S. 39. This is a most admirable passage. Yes,--the history of a man for the nine months preceding his birth, would, probably, be far more interesting, and contain events of greater moment than all the three score and ten years that follow it. (S. 48.) This is made good by experience, which can from the ashes of a plant revive the plant, and from its cinders recall it into its stalks and leaves again. Stuff. This was, I believe, some lying boast of Paracelsus, which the good Sir T. B. has swallowed for a fact. (Part II. s. 2.) I give no alms to satisfy the hunger of my brother, but to fulfil and accomplish the will and command of my God. We ought not to relieve a poor man merely because our own feelings impel us, but because these feelings are just and proper feelings. My feelings might impel me to revenge with the same force with which they urge me to charity. I must therefore have some rule by which I may judge my feelings,--and this rule is God's will. (S. 5, 6.) I never yet cast a true affection on a woman; but I have loved my friend as I do virtue, my soul, my God. We cannot love a friend as a woman; but we may love a woman as a friend. Friendship satisfies the highest parts of our nature; but a wife, who is capable of friendship, satisfies all. The great business of real unostentatious virtue is--not to eradicate any genuine instinct or appetite of human nature; but--to establish a concord and unity betwixt all parts of our nature, to give a feeling and a passion to our purer intellect, and to intellectualize our feelings and passions. This a happy marriage, blest with children, effectuates in the highest degree, of which our nature is capable, and is therefore chosen by St. Paul as the symbol of the union of the church with Christ; that is, of the souls of all good men with God. "I scarcely distinguish," said once a good old man, "the wife of my old age from the wife of my youth; for when we were both young, and she was beautiful, for once that I caressed her with a meaner passion, I caressed her a thousand times with love--and these caresses still remain to us." Besides, there is another reason why friendship is of somewhat less value than love, which includes friendship, it is this--we may love many persons, all very dearly; but we cannot love many persons all equally dearly. There will be differences, there will be gradations. But our nature imperiously asks a summit, a resting-place; it is with the affections in love as with the reason in religion, we cannot diffuse and equalize; we must have a supreme, a one, the highest. What is more common than to say of a man in love, 'he idolizes her,' 'he makes a god of her?' Now, in order that a person should continue to love another better than all others, it seems necessary, that this feeling should be reciprocal. For if it be not so, sympathy is broken off in the very highest point. A. (we will say by way of illustration) loves B. above all others, in the best and fullest sense of the word, love, but B. loves C. above all others. Either, therefore, A. does not sympathize with B. in this most important feeling; and then his love must necessarily be incomplete, and accompanied with a craving after something that is not, and yet might be; or he does sympathize with B. in loving C. above all others--and then, of course, he loves C. better than B. Now it is selfishness, at least it seems so to me, to desire that your friend should love you better than all others--but not to wish that a wife should. (S. 6.) Another misery there is in affection, that whom we truly love like ourselves, we forget their looks, nor can our memory retain the idea of their faces; and it is no wonder: for they are ourselves, and our affection makes their looks our own. A thought I have often had, and once expressed it in almost the same language. The fact is certain, but the explanation here given is very unsatisfactory. For why do we never have an image of our own faces--an image of fancy, I mean? (S. 7.) I can hold there is no such thing as injury; that if there be, there is no such injury as revenge, and no such revenge as the contempt of an injury; that to hate another, is to malign himself, and that the truest way to love another is to despise ourselves. I thank God that I can, with a full and unfeigning heart, utter Amen to this passage. (S. 10.) In brief, there can be nothing truly alone, and by itself, which is not truly one; and such is only God. Reciprocity is that which alone gives stability to love. It is not mere selfishness that impels all kind natures to desire that there should be some one human being, to whom they are most dear. It is because they wish some one being to exist, who shall be the resting place and summit of their love; and this in human nature is not possible, unless the two affections coincide. The reason is, that the object of the highest love will not otherwise be the same in both parties. (S. 11.) I thank God for my happy dreams, &c. I am quite different from Sir T. B. in this; for all, or almost all, the painful and fearful thoughts that I know, are in my dreams;--so much so, that when I am wounded by a friend, or receive an unpleasant letter, it throws me into a state very nearly resembling that of a dream. (S. 13.) Statists that labour to contrive a commonwealth without any poverty, take away the object of our charity, not only not understanding the commonwealth of a Christian, but forgetting the prophecies of Christ. O, for shame! for shame! Is there no fit object of charity but abject poverty? And what sort of a charity must that be which wishes misery in order that it may have the credit of relieving a small part of it,--pulling down the comfortable cottages of independent industry to build alms-houses out of the ruins! This book paints certain parts of my moral and intellectual being, (the best parts, no doubt,) better than any other book I have ever met with;--and the style is throughout delicious. [Footnote 1: Communicated by Mr. Wordsworth. Ed.] NOTES ON JUNIUS. 1807. 'Stat nominis umbra'. As he never dropped the mask, so he too often used the poisoned dagger of an assassin. 'Dedication to the English nation'. The whole of this dedication reads like a string of aphorisms arranged in chapters, and classified by a resemblance of subject, or a cento of points. (Ib.) If an honest, and I may truly affirm a laborious, zeal for the public service has given me any weight in your esteem, let me exhort and conjure you never to suffer an invasion of your political constitution, however minute the instance may appear, to pass by, without a determined persevering resistance. A longer sentence and proportionately inelegant. (Ib.) If you reflect that in the changes of administration which have marked and disgraced the present reign, although your warmest patriots have, in their turn, been invested with the lawful and unlawful authority of the crown, and though other reliefs or improvements have been held forth to the people, yet that no one man in office has ever promoted or encouraged a bill for shortening the duration of parliaments, but that (whoever was minister) the opposition to this measure, ever since the septennial act passed, has been constant and uniform on the part of government. Long, and as usual, inelegant. Junius cannot manage a long sentence; it has all the 'ins' and 'outs' of a snappish figure-dance. Preface. An excellent preface, and the sentences not so snipt as in the dedication. The paragraph near the conclusion beginning with "some opinion may now be expected," &c. and ending with "relation between guilt and punishment," deserves to be quoted as a master-piece of rhetorical ratiocination in a series of questions that permit no answer; or (as Junius says) carry their own answer along with them. The great art of Junius is never to say too much, and to avoid with equal anxiety a commonplace manner, and matter that is not commonplace. If ever he deviates into any originality of thought, he takes care that it shall be such as excites surprise for its acuteness, rather than admiration for its profundity. He takes care? say rather, that nature took care for him. It is impossible to detract from the merit of these Letters: they are suited to their purpose, and perfect in their kind. They impel to action, not thought. Had they been profound or subtle in thought, or majestic and sweeping in composition, they would have been adapted for the closet of a Sidney, or for a House of Lords such as it was in the time of Lord Bacon; but they are plain and sensible whenever the author is in the right, and whether right or wrong, always shrewd and epigrammatic, and fitted for the coffee-house, the exchange, the lobby of the House of Commons, and to be read aloud at a public meeting. When connected, dropping the forms of connection, desultory without abruptness or appearance of disconnection, epigrammatic and antithetical to excess, sententious and personal, regardless of right or wrong, yet well-skilled to act the part of an honest warm-hearted man, and even when he is in the right, saying the truth but never proving it, much less attempting to bottom it,--this is the character of Junius;--and on this character, and in the mould of these writings must every man cast himself, who would wish in factious times to be the important and long remembered agent of a faction. I believe that I could do all that Junius has done, and surpass him by doing many things which he has not done: for example,--by an occasional induction of startling facts, in the manner of Tom Paine, and lively illustrations and witty applications of good stories and appropriate anecdotes in the manner of Horne Tooke. I believe I could do it if it were in my nature to aim at this sort of excellence, or to be enamoured of the fame, and immediate influence, which would be its consequence and reward. But it is not in my nature. I not only love truth, but I have a passion for the legitimate investigation of truth. The love of truth conjoined with a keen delight in a strict and skillful yet impassioned argumentation, is my master-passion, and to it are subordinated even the love of liberty and all my public feelings--and to it whatever I labour under of vanity, ambition, and all my inward impulses. Letter I. From this Letter all the faults and excellencies of Junius may be exemplified. The moral and political aphorisms are just and sensible, the irony in which his personal satire is conveyed is fine, yet always intelligible; but it approaches too nearly to the nature of a sneer; the sentences are cautiously constructed without the forms of connection; the 'he' and 'it' everywhere substituted for the 'who' and 'which'; the sentences are short, laboriously balanced, and the antitheses stand the test of analysis much better than Johnson's. These are all excellencies in their kind;--where is the defect? In this;--there is too much of each, and there is a defect of many things, the presence of which would have been not only valuable for their own sakes, but for the relief and variety which they would have given. It is observable too that every Letter adds to the faults of these Letters, while it weakens the effect of their beauties. L. III. A capital letter, addressed to a private person, and intended as a sharp reproof for intrusion. Its short sentences, its witty perversions and deductions, its questions and omissions of connectives, all in their proper places, are dramatically good. (L. V.) For my own part, I willingly leave it to the public to determine whether your vindication of your friend has been as able and judicious as it was certainly well intended; and you, I think, may be satisfied with the warm acknowledgements he already owes you for making him the principal figure in a piece in which, but for your amicable assistance, he might have passed without particular notice or distinction. A long sentence and, as usual, inelegant and cumbrous. This Letter is a faultless composition with exception of the one long sentence. (L. VII.) These are the gloomy companions of a disturbed 'imagination'; the melancholy madness of poetry, without the 'inspiration'. The rhyme is a fault. 'Fancy' had been better; though but for the rhyme, imagination is the fitter word. (Ib.) Such a question might perhaps discompose the gravity of his muscles, but I believe it would little affect the tranquillity of his conscience. A false antithesis, a mere verbal balance; there are far, far too many of these. However, with these few exceptions, this Letter is a blameless composition. Junius may be safely studied as a model for letters where he truly writes letters. Those to the Duke of Grafton and others, are small pamphlets in the form of letters. (L. VIII.) To do justice to your Grace's humanity, you felt for Mac Quick as you ought to do; and, if you had been contented to assist him indirectly, without a notorious denial of justice, or openly insulting the sense of the nation, you might have satisfied every duty of political friendship, without committing the honour of your sovereign, or hazarding the reputation of his government. An inelegant cluster of 'withouts'. Junius asks questions incomparably well;--but 'ne quid nimis'. L. IX. Perhaps the fair way of considering these Letters would be as a kind of satirical poems; the short, and for ever balanced, sentences constitute a true metre; and the connection is that of satiric poetry, a witty logic, an association of thoughts by amusing semblances of cause and effect, the sophistry of which the reader has an interest in not stopping to detect, for it flatters his love of mischief, and makes the sport. L. XII. One of Junius's arts, and which gives me a high notion of his genius, as a poet and satirist, is this:--he takes for granted the existence of a character that never did and never can exist, and then employs his wit, and surprises and amuses his readers with analyzing its incompatibilities. L. XIV. Continual sneer, continual irony, all excellent, if it were not for the 'all;'--but a countenance, with a malignant smile in statuary fixure on it, becomes at length an object of aversion, however beautiful the face, and however beautiful the smile. We are relieved, in some measure, from this by frequent just and well expressed moral aphorisms; but then the preceding and following irony gives them the appearance of proceeding from the head, not from the heart. This objection would be less felt, when the Letters were first published at considerable intervals; but Junius wrote for posterity. L. XXIII. Sneer and irony continued with such gross violation of good sense, as to be perfectly nonsense. The man who can address another on his most detestable vices in a strain of cold continual irony, is himself a wretch. (L. XXXV.) To honour them with a determined predilection and confidence in exclusion of your English subjects, who placed your family, and, in spite of treachery and rebellion, have supported it upon the throne, is a mistake too gross even for the unsuspecting generosity of youth. The words 'upon the throne', stand unfortunately for the harmonious effect of the balance of 'placed' and 'supported.' This address to the king is almost faultless in composition, and has been evidently tormented with the file. But it has fewer beauties than any other long letter of Junius; and it is utterly undramatic. There is nothing in the style, the transitions, or the sentiments, which represents the passions of a man emboldening himself to address his sovereign personally. Like a Presbyterian's prayer, you may substitute almost every where the third for the second person without injury. The newspaper, his closet, and his own person were alone present to the author's intention and imagination. This makes the composition vapid. It possesses an Isocratic correctness, when it should have had the force and drama of an oration of Demosthenes. From this, however, the paragraph beginning with the words "As to the Scotch," and also the last two paragraphs must be honourably excepted. They are, perhaps, the finest passages in the whole collection. NOTES ON BARCLAY'S 'ARGENIS'. 1803. [1] Heaven forbid that this work should not exist in its present form and language! Yet I cannot avoid the wish that it had, during the reign of James I., been moulded into an heroic poem in English octave stanza, or epic blank verse;--which, however, at that time had not been invented, and which, alas! still remains the sole property of the inventor, as if the Muses had given him an unevadible patent for it. Of dramatic blank verse we have many and various specimens;--for example, Shakspeare's as compared with Massinger's, both excellent in their kind:--of lyric, and of what may be called Orphic, or philosophic, blank verse, perfect models may be found in Wordsworth: of colloquial blank verse there are excellent, though not perfect, examples in Cowper;--but of epic blank verse, since Milton, there is not one. It absolutely distresses me when I reflect that this work, admired as it has been by great men of all ages, and lately, I hear, by the poet Cowper, should be only not unknown to general readers. It has been translated into English two or three times--how, I know not, wretchedly, I doubt not. It affords matter for thought that the last translation (or rather, in all probability, miserable and faithless abridgment of some former one) was given under another name. What a mournful proof of the incelebrity of this great and amazing work among both the public and the people! For as Wordsworth, the greater of the two great men of this age,--(at least, except Davy and him, I have known, read of, heard of, no others)--for as Wordsworth did me the honour of once observing to me, the people and the public are two distinct classes, and, as things go, the former is likely to retain a better taste, the less it is acted out by the latter. Yet Telemachus is in every mouth, in every school-boy's and school-girl's hand! It is awful to say of a work, like the Argenis, the style and Latinity of which, judged (not according to classical pedantry, which pronounces every sentence right which can be found in any book prior to Boetius, however vicious the age, or affected the author, and every sentence wrong, however natural and beautiful, which has been of the author's own combination),--but, according to the universal logic of thought as modified by feeling, is equal to that of Tacitus in energy and genuine conciseness, and is as perspicuous as that of Livy, whilst it is free from the affectations, obscurities, and lust to surprise of the former, and seems a sort of antithesis to the slowness and prolixity of the latter;--(this remark does not, however, impeach even the classicality of the language, which, when the freedom and originality, the easy motion and perfect command of the thoughts, are considered, is truly wonderful:--of such a work it is awful to say, that it would have been well if it had been written in English or Italian verse! Yet the event seems to justify the notion. Alas! it is now too late. What modern work, even of the size of the 'Paradise Lost'--much less of the 'Faery Queene'--would be read in the present day, or even bought or be likely to be bought, unless it were an instructive work, as the phrase is, like Roscoe's quartos of Leo X., or entertaining like Boswell's three of Dr. Johnson's conversations. It may be fairly objected--what work of surpassing merit has given the proof?--Certainly, none. Yet still there are ominous facts, sufficient, I fear, to afford a certain prophecy of its reception, if such were produced. [Footnote 1: Communicated by the Rev. Derwent Coleridge. Ed.] NOTE IN CASAUBON'S 'PERSIUS'. 1807. There are six hundred and sixteen pages in this volume, of which twenty-two are text; and five hundred and ninety-four commentary and introductory matter. Yet when I recollect, that I have the whole works of Cicero, Livy, and Quinctilian, with many others,--the whole works of each in a single volume, either thick quarto with thin paper and small yet distinct print, or thick octavo or duodecimo of the same character, and that they cost me in the proportion of a shilling to a guinea for the same quantity of worse matter in modern books, or editions,--I a poor man, yet one whom [Greek (transliterated): Biblion ktaeseos ek paidariou deinos ekrataese pothos] feel the liveliest gratitude for the age, which produced such editions, and for the education, which by enabling me to understand and taste the Greek and Latin writers, has thus put it in my power to collect on my own shelves, for my actual use, almost all the best books in spite of my small income. Somewhat too I am indebted to the ostentation of expense among the rich, which has occasioned these cheap editions to become so disproportionately cheap. NOTES ON CHAPMAN'S HOMER. EXTRACT OF A LETTER SENT WITH THE VOLUME. [1] 1807. Chapman I have sent in order that you might read the 'Odyssey'; the 'Iliad' is fine, but less equal in the translation, as well as less interesting in itself. What is stupidly said of Shakspeare, is really true and appropriate of Chapman; mighty faults counterpoised by mighty beauties. Excepting his quaint epithets which he affects to render literally from the Greek, a language above all others blest in the happy marriage of sweet words, and which in our language are mere printer's compound epithets--such as quaffed divine 'joy-in-the-heart-of-man-infusing' wine, (the undermarked is to be one word, because one sweet mellifluous word expresses it in Homer);--excepting this, it has no look, no air, of a translation. It is as truly an original poem as the 'Faery Queene';--it will give you small idea of Homer, though a far truer one than Pope's epigrams, or Cowper's cumbersome most anti-Homeric Miltonism. For Chapman writes and feels as a poet,--as Homer might have written had he lived in England in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. In short, it is an exquisite poem, in spite of its frequent and perverse quaintnesses and harshnesses, which are, however, amply repaid by almost unexampled sweetness and beauty of language, all over spirit and feeling. In the main it is an English heroic poem, the tale of which is borrowed from the Greek. The dedication to the 'Iliad' is a noble copy of verses, especially those sublime lines beginning,-- O!'tis wondrous much (Though nothing prisde) that the right vertuous touch Of a well written soule, to vertue moves. Nor haue we soules to purpose, if their loves Of fitting objects be not so inflam'd. How much then, were this kingdome's maine soule maim'd, To want this great inflamer of all powers That move in humane soules! All realmes but yours, Are honor'd with him; and hold blest that state That have his workes to reade and contemplate. In which, humanitie to her height is raisde; Which all the world (yet, none enough) hath praisde. Seas, earth, and heaven, he did in verse comprize; Out sung the Muses, and did equalise Their king Apollo; being so farre from cause Of princes light thoughts, that their gravest lawes May finde stuffe to be fashiond by his lines. Through all the pompe of kingdomes still he shines And graceth all his gracers. Then let lie Your lutes, and viols, and more loftily Make the heroiques of your Homer sung, To drums and trumpets set his Angels tongue: And with the princely sports of haukes you use, Behold the kingly flight of his high Muse: And see how like the Phöenix she renues Her age, and starrie feathers in your sunne; Thousands of yeares attending; everie one Blowing the holy fire, and throwing in Their seasons, kingdomes, nations that have bin Subverted in them; lawes, religions, all Offerd to change, and greedie funerall; Yet still your Homer lasting, living, raigning.-- and likewise the 1st, the 11th, and last but one, of the prefatory sonnets to the 'Odyssey'. Could I have foreseen any other speedy opportunity, I should have begged your acceptance of the volume in a somewhat handsomer coat; but as it is, it will better represent the sender,--to quote from myself-- A man disherited, in form and face, By nature and mishap, of outward grace. [2] Chapman in his moral heroic verse, as in this dedication and the prefatory sonnets to his 'Odyssey', stands above Ben Jonson; there is more dignity, more lustre, and equal strength; but not midway quite between him and the sonnets of Milton. I do not know whether I give him the higher praise, in that he reminds me of Ben Jonson with a sense of his superior excellence, or that he brings Milton to memory notwithstanding his inferiority. His moral poems are not quite out of books like Jonson's, nor yet do the sentiments so wholly grow up out of his own natural habit and grandeur of thought, as in Milton. The sentiments have been attracted to him by a natural affinity of his intellect, and so combined;-but Jonson has taken them by individual and successive acts of choice. [3] All this and the preceding is well felt and vigorously, though harshly, expressed, respecting sublime poetry 'in genere'; but in reading Homer I look about me, and ask how does all this apply here. For surely never was there plainer writing; there are a thousand charms of sun and moonbeam, ripple, and wave, and stormy billow, but all on the surface. Had Chapman read Proclus and Porphyry?--and did he really believe them,--or even that they believed themselves? They felt the immense power of a Bible, a Shaster, a Koran. There was none in Greece or Rome, and they tried therefore by subtle allegorical accommodations to conjure the poem of Homer into the [Greek (transliterated): biblon theoparadoton] of Greek faith. [4] Chapman's identification of his fate with Homer's, and his complete forgetfulness of the distinction between Christianity and idolatry, under the general feeling of some religion, is very interesting. It is amusing to observe, how familiar Chapman's fancy has become with Homer, his life and its circumstances, though the very existence of any such individual, at l east with regard to the 'Iliad' and the 'Hymns', is more than problematic. N. B. The rude engraving in the page was designed by no vulgar hand. It is full of spirit and passion. [5] I am so dull, that neither in the original nor in any translation could I ever find any wit or wise purpose in this poem. The whole humour seems to lie in the names. The frogs and mice are not frogs or mice, but men, and yet they do nothing that conveys any satire. In the Greek there is much beauty of language, but the joke is very flat. This is always the case in rude ages;--their serious vein is inimitable,--their comic low and low indeed. The psychological cause is easily stated, and copiously exemplifiable. [Footnote 1: Communicated through Mr. Wordsworth. Ed.] [Footnote 2: Dedication to Prince Henry.] [Footnote 3: 'Epistle Dedicatorie to the Odyssey'.] [Footnote 4: 'Epistle Dedicatorie to the Batrachomyomachia'.] [Footnote 5: End of the 'Batrachomyomachia'.] NOTE IN BAXTER'S 'LIFE OF HIMSELF'. 1820. Among the grounds for recommending the perusal of our elder writers--Hooker--Taylor--Baxter--in short almost any of the folios composed from Edward VI. to Charles II. I note: 1. The overcoming the habit of deriving your whole pleasure passively from the book itself, which can only be effected by excitement of curiosity or of some passion. Force yourself to reflect on what you read paragraph by paragraph, and in a short time you will derive your pleasure, an ample portion of it, at least, from the activity of your own mind. All else is picture sunshine. 2. The conquest of party and sectarian prejudices, when you have on the same table before you the works of a Hammond and a Baxter, and reflect how many and how momentous their points of agreement, how few and almost childish the differences, which estranged and irritated these good men. Let us but imagine what their blessed spirits now feel at the retrospect of their earthly frailties, and can we do other than strive to feel as they now feel, not as they once felt? So will it be with the disputes between good men of the present day; and if you have no other reason to doubt your opponent's goodness than the point in dispute, think of Baxter and Hammond, of Milton and Taylor, and let it be no reason at all. 3. It will secure you from the narrow idolatry of the present times and fashions, and create the noblest kind of imaginative power in your soul, that of living in past ages;--wholly devoid of which power, a man can neither anticipate the future, nor ever live a truly human life, a life of reason in the present. 4. In this particular work we may derive a most instructive lesson, that in certain points, as of religion in relation to law, the 'medio tutis--simus ibis', is inapplicable. There is no 'medium' possible; and all the attempts as those of Baxter, though no more were required than 'I believe in God through Christ,' prove only the mildness of the proposer's temper, but as a rule would be either equal to nothing, at least exclude only the two or three in a century that make it a matter of religion to declare themselves atheists, or else be just as fruitful a rule for a persecutor as the most complete set of articles that could be framed by a Spanish Inquisition. For to 'believe' must mean to believe aright--and 'God' must mean the true God--and 'Christ' the Christ in the sense and with the attributes understood by Christians who are truly Christians. An established church with a liturgy is the sufficient solution of the problem 'de jure magistratus'. Articles of faith are in this point of view superfluous; for is it not too absurd for a man to hesitate at subscribing his name to doctrines which yet in the more awful duty of prayer and profession he dares affirm before his Maker! They are therefore, in this sense, merely superfluous;--not worth re-enacting, had they ever been done away with;--not worth removing now that they exist. 5. The characteristic contra-distinction between the speculative reasoners of the age before the Revolution, and those since, is this:--the former cultivated metaphysics without, or neglecting empirical, psychology:--the latter cultivate a mechanical psychology to the neglect and contempt of metaphysics. Both, therefore, are almost equi-distant from true philosophy. Hence the belief in ghosts, witches, sensible replies to prayer, &c. in Baxter and in a hundred others. See also Luther's 'Table Talk'. 6. The earlier part of this volume is interesting as materials for medical history. The state of medical science in the reign of Charles I. was almost incredibly low. FRAGMENT OF AN ESSAY ON TASTE. 1810. The same arguments that decide the question, whether taste has any fixed principles, may probably lead to a determination of what those principles are. First then, what is taste in its metaphorical sense, or, which will be the easiest mode of arriving at the same solution, what is there in the primary sense of the word, which may give to its metaphorical meaning an import different from that of sight or hearing, on the one hand, and of touch or smell on the other? And this question seems the more natural, because in correct language we confine beauty, the main subject of taste, to objects of sight and combinations of sounds, and never, except sportively or by abuse of words, speak of a beautiful flavour or a beautiful scent. Now the analysis of our senses in the commonest books of anthropology has drawn our attention to the distinction between the perfectly organic, and the mixed senses;--the first presenting objects, as distinct from the perception;--the last as blending the perception with the sense of the object. Our eyes and ears--(I am not now considering what is or is not the case really, but only that of which we are regularly conscious as appearances,) our eyes most often appear to us perfect organs of the sentient principle, and wholly in action, and our hearing so much more so than the three other senses, and in all the ordinary exertions of that sense, perhaps, equally so with the sight, that all languages place them in one class, and express their different modifications by nearly the same metaphors. The three remaining senses appear in part passive, and combine with the perception of the outward object a distinct sense of our own life. Taste, therefore, as opposed to vision and sound, will teach us to expect in its metaphorical use a certain reference of any given object to our own being, and not merely a distinct notion of the object as in itself, or in its independent properties. From the sense of touch, on the other hand, it is distinguishable by adding to this reference to our vital being some degree of enjoyment, or the contrary,--some perceptible impulse from pleasure or pain to complacency or dislike. The sense of smell, indeed, might perhaps have furnished a metaphor of the same import with that of taste; but the latter was naturally chosen by the majority of civilized nations on account of the greater frequency, importance, and dignity of its employment or exertion in human nature. By taste, therefore, as applied to the fine arts, we must be supposed to mean an intellectual perception of any object blended with a distinct reference to our own sensibility of pain or pleasure, or, 'vice versa', a sense of enjoyment or dislike co-instantaneously combined with, and appearing to proceed from, some intellectual perception of the object;--intellectual perception, I say; for otherwise it would be a definition of taste in its primary rather than in its metaphorical sense. Briefly, taste is a metaphor taken from one of our mixed senses, and applied to objects of the more purely organic senses, and of our moral sense, when we would imply the co-existence of immediate personal dislike or complacency. In this definition of taste, therefore, is involved the definition of fine arts, namely, as being such the chief and discriminative purpose of which it is to gratify the taste,--that is, not merely to connect, but to combine and unite, a sense of immediate pleasure in ourselves, with the perception of external arrangement. The great question, therefore, whether taste in any one of the fine arts has any fixed principle or ideal, will find its solution in the ascertainment of two facts:--first, whether in every determination of the taste concerning any work of the fine arts, the individual does not, with or even against the approbation of his general judgment, involuntarily claim that all other minds ought to think and feel the same; whether the common expressions, 'I dare say I may be wrong, but that is my particular taste;'--are uttered as an offering of courtesy, as a sacrifice to the undoubted fact of our individual fallibility, or are spoken with perfect sincerity, not only of the reason but of the whole feeling, with the same entireness of mind and heart, with which we concede a right to every person to differ from another in his preference of bodily tastes and flavours. If we should find ourselves compelled to deny this, and to admit that, notwithstanding the consciousness of our liability to error, and in spite of all those many individual experiences which may have strengthened the consciousness, each man does at the moment so far legislate for all men, as to believe of necessity that he is either right or wrong, and that if it be right for him, it is universally right,--we must then proceed to ascertain:--secondly, whether the source of these phenomena is at all to be found in those parts of our nature, in which each intellect is representative of all,--and whether wholly, or partially. No person of common reflection demands even in feeling, that what tastes pleasant to him ought to produce the same effect on all living beings; but every man does and must expect and demand the universal acquiescence of all intelligent beings in every conviction of his understanding. ... FRAGMENT OF AN ESSAY ON BEAUTY. 1818. The only necessary, but this the absolutely necessary, pre-requisite to a full insight into the grounds of the beauty in the objects of sight, is--the directing of the attention to the action of those thoughts in our own mind which are not consciously distinguished. Every man may understand this, if he will but recall the state of his feelings in endeavouring to recollect a name, which he is quite sure that he remembers, though he cannot force it back into consciousness. This region of unconscious thoughts, oftentimes the more working the more indistinct they are, may, in reference to this subject, be conceived as forming an ascending scale from the most universal associations of motion with the functions and passions of life,--as when, on passing out of a crowded city into the fields on a day in June, we describe the grass and king-cups as nodding their heads and dancing in the breeze,--up to the half perceived, yet not fixable, resemblance of a form to some particular object of a diverse class, which resemblance we need only increase but a little, to destroy, or at least injure, its beauty-enhancing effect, and to make it a fantastic intrusion of the accidental and the arbitrary, and consequently a disturbance of the beautiful. This might be abundantly exemplified and illustrated from the paintings of Salvator Rosa. I am now using the term beauty in its most comprehensive sense, as including expression and artistic interest,--that is, I consider not only the living balance, but likewise all the accompaniments that even by disturbing are necessary to the renewal and continuance of the balance. And in this sense I proceed to show, that the beautiful in the object may be referred to two elements,--lines and colours; the first belonging to the shapely ('forma, formalis, formosus'), and in this, to the law, and the reason; and the second, to the lively, the free, the spontaneous, and the self-justifying. As to lines, the rectilineal are in themselves the lifeless, the determined 'ab extra', but still in immediate union with the cycloidal, which are expressive of function. The curve line is a modification of the force from without by the force from within, or the spontaneous. These are not arbitrary symbols, but the language of nature, universal and intuitive, by virtue of the law by which man is impelled to explain visible motions by imaginary causative powers analogous to his own acts, as the Dryads, Hamadryads, Naiads, &c. The better way of applying these principles will be by a brief and rapid sketch of the history of the fine arts,--in which it will be found, that the beautiful in nature has been appropriated to the works of man, just in proportion as the state of the mind in the artists themselves approached to the subjective beauty. Determine what predominance in the minds of the men is preventive of the living balance of excited faculties, and you will discover the exact counterpart in the outward products. Egypt is an illustration of this. Shapeliness is intellect without freedom; but colours are significant. The introduction of the arch is not less an epoch in the fine than in the useful arts. Order is beautiful arrangement without any purpose 'ad extra';--therefore there is a beauty of order, or order may be contemplated exclusively as beauty. The form given in every empirical intuition,--the stuff, that is, the quality of the stuff, determines the agreeable: but when a thing excites us to receive it in such and such a mould, so that its exact correspondence to that mould is what occupies the mind,--this is taste or the sense of beauty. Whether dishes full of painted wood or exquisite viands were laid out on a table in the same arrangement, would be indifferent to the taste, as in ladies' patterns; but surely the one is far more agreeable than the other. Hence observe the disinterestedness of all taste; and hence also a sensual perfection with intellect is occasionally possible without moral feeling. So it may be in music and painting, but not in poetry. How far it is a real preference of the refined to the gross pleasures, is another question, upon the supposition that pleasure, in some form or other, is that alone which determines men to the objects of the former;--whether experience does not show that if the latter were equally in our power, occasioned no more trouble to enjoy, and caused no more exhaustion of the power of enjoying them by the enjoyment itself, we should in real practice prefer the grosser pleasure. It is not, therefore, any excellence in the quality of the refined pleasures themselves, but the advantages and facilities in the means of enjoying them, that give them the pre-eminence. This is, of course, on the supposition of the absence of all moral feeling. Suppose its presence, and then there will accrue an excellence even to the quality of the pleasures themselves; not only, however, of the refined, but also of the grosser kinds,--inasmuch as a larger sweep of thoughts will be associated with each enjoyment, and with each thought will be associated a number of sensations; and so, consequently, each pleasure will become more the pleasure of the whole being. This is one of the earthly rewards of our being what we ought to be, but which would be annihilated, if we attempted to be it for the sake of this increased enjoyment. Indeed it is a contradiction to suppose it. Yet this is the common 'argumentum in circulo', in which the eudsemonists flee and pursue. ... POEMS AND POETICAL FRAGMENTS. 'Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus'. CATULLUS. My Lesbia, let us love and live, And to the winds, my Lesbia, give Each cold restraint, each boding fear Of age, and all its saws severe! Yon sun now posting to the main Will set,--but 'tis to rise again;-- But we, when once our little light Is set, must sleep in endless night. Then come, with whom alone I'll live, A thousand kisses take and give! Another thousand!--to the store Add hundreds--then a thousand more! And when they to a million mount, Let confusion take the account,-- That you, the number never knowing, May continue still bestowing-- That I for joys may never pine, Which never can again be mine! [1] 'Lugete, O Veneres, Cupidinesque.' CATULLUS. Pity, mourn in plaintive tone The lovely starling dead and gone! Weep, ye Loves! and Venus, weep The lovely starling fall'n asleep! Venus see with tearful eyes-- In her lap the starling lies, While the Loves all in a ring Softly stroke the stiffen'd wing. 'Moriens superstiti'. "The hour-bell sounds, and I must go; Death waits--again I hear him calling;-- No cowardly desires have I, Nor will I shun his face appalling. I die in faith and honour rich-- But ah! I leave behind my treasure In widowhood and lonely pain;-- To live were surely then a pleasure! "My lifeless eyes upon thy face Shall never open more to-morrow; To-morrow shall thy beauteous eyes Be closed to love, and drown'd in sorrow; To-morrow death shall freeze this hand, And on thy breast, my wedded treasure, I never, never more shall live;-- Alas! I quit a life of pleasure." 'Morienti superstes.' "Yet art thou happier far than she Who feels the widow's love for thee! For while her days are days of weeping, Thou, in peace, in silence sleeping, In some still world, unknown, remote, The mighty parent's care hast found, Without whose tender guardian thought No sparrow falleth to the ground." [Footnote 1: This and the following poems and fragments, with the exception of those marked with an asterisk, were communicated by Mr. Gutch. Ed.] THE STRIPLING'S WAR SONG. IMITATED FROM STOLBERG. My noble old warrior! this heart has beat high, Since you told of the deeds that our countrymen wrought; Ah! give me the sabre which hung by thy thigh, And I too will fight as my forefathers fought! O, despise not my youth! for my spirit is steel'd, And I know there is strength in the grasp of my hand; Yea, as firm as thyself would I move to the field, And as proudly would die for my dear father-land. In the sports of my childhood I mimick'd the fight,-- The shrill of a trumpet suspended my breath; And my fancy still wander'd by day and by night Amid tumult and perils,'mid conquest and death. My own eager shout in the heat of my trance, How oft it awakes me from dreams full of glory, When I meant to have leap'd on the hero of France, And have dash'd him to earth pale and deathless and gory! As late through the city with bannerets streaming, And the music of trumpets the warriors flew by,-- With helmet and scymetar naked and gleaming On their proud trampling thunder-hoof'd steeds did they fly,-- I sped to yon heath which is lonely and bare-- For each nerve was unquiet, each pulse in alarm,-- I hurl'd my mock lance through the objectless air, And in open-eyed dream prov'd the strength of my arm. Yes, noble old warrior! this heart has beat high, Since you told of thedeeds that our countrymen wrought; Ah! give me the falchion that hung by thy thigh, And I too will fight as my forefathers fought! [*] His own fair countenance, his kingly forehead, His tender smiles, love's day-dawn on his lips, The sense, and spirit, and the light divine, At the same moment in his steadfast eye Were virtue's native crest, th' immortal soul's Unconscious meek self-heraldry,--to man Genial, and pleasant to his guardian angel. He suffer'd, nor complain'd;--tho' oft with tears He mourn'd th' oppression of his helpless brethren,-- Yea, with a deeper and yet holier grief Mourn'd for the oppressor. In those sabbath hours His solemn grief, like the slow cloud at sunset, Was but the veil of purest meditation Pierced thro' and saturate with the rays of mind. 'Twas sweet to know it only possible! Some wishes cross'd my mind and dimly cheer'd it, And one or two poor melancholy pleasures, Each in the pale unwarming light of hope Silvering its flimsy wing, flew silent by-- Moths in the moonbeam!-- --Behind the thin Grey cloud that cover'd, but not hid, the sky, The round full moon look'd small. The subtle snow in every passing breeze Rose curling from the grove like shafts of smoke. --On the broad mountain top The neighing wild colt races with the wind O'er fern and heath-flowers. --Like a mighty giantess Seized in sore travail and prodigious birth, Sick nature struggled: long and strange her pangs, Her groans were horrible;--but O, most fair The twins she bore, Equality and Peace. --Terrible and loud As the strong voice that from the thunder-cloud Speaks to the startled midnight. Such fierce vivacity as fires the eye Of genius fancy-craz'd. The mild despairing of a heart resign'd. FOR THE HYMN ON THE SUN. --The sun (for now his orb 'Gan slowly sink)-- Shot half his rays aslant the heath, whose flow'rs Purpled the mountain's broad and level top. Rich was his bed of clouds, and wide beneath FOR THE HYMN ON THE MOON. In a cave in the mountains of Cashmeer there is an image of ice, which makes its appearance thus: Two days before the new moon there appears a bubble of ice, which increases in size every day till the fifteenth, by which time it is an ell or more in height;--then as the moon wanes, the image decreases till it vanishes away. In darkness I remain'd;-the neighb'ring clock Told me that now the rising sun at dawn Shone lovely on my garden. These be staggerers that, made drunk by power, Forget thirst's eager promise, and presume, Dark dreamers! that the world forgets it too! --Perish warmth, Unfaithful to its seeming! Old age, 'the shape and messenger of death,' His wither'd fist still knocking at death's door. --God no distance knows All of the whole possessing. With skill that never alchemist yet told, Made drossy lead as ductile as pure gold. Guess at the wound and heal with secret hand. The broad-breasted rock Glasses his rugged forehead in the sea. I mix in life, and labour to seem free, With common persons pleas'd and common things, While every thought and action tends to thee, And every impulse from thy influence springs. FAREWELL TO LOVE. [*] Farewell, sweet Love! yet blame you not my truth; More fondly ne'er did mother eye her child Than I your form: your's were my hopes of youth, And as you shaped my thoughts, I sigh'd or smil'd. While most were wooing wealth, or gaily swerving To pleasure's secret haunt, and some apart Stood strong in pride, self-conscious of deserving, To you I gave my whole weak wishing heart; And when I met the maid that realized Your fair creations, and had won her kindness, Say but for her if aught on earth I prized! Your dreams alone I dreamt and caught your blindness. O grief!--but farewell, Love! I will go play me With thoughts that please me less, and less betray me. [*] Within these circling hollies, woodbine-clad-- Beneath this small blue roof of vernal sky-- How warm, how still! Tho' tears should dim mine eye, Yet will my heart for days continue glad, For here, my love, thou art, and here am I! Each crime that once estranges from the virtues Doth make the memory of their features daily More dim and vague, till each coarse counterfeit Can have the passport to our confidence Sign'd by ourselves. And fitly are they punish'd, Who prize and seek the honest man but as A safer lock to guard dishonest treasures. Grant me a patron, gracious Heaven! whene'er My unwash'd follies call for penance drear: But when more hideous guilt this heart infects, Instead of fiery coals upon my pate, O let a titled patron be my fate;-- That fierce compendium of Egyptian pests! Right reverend dean, right honourable squire, Lord, marquis, earl, duke, prince,--or if aught higher, However proudly nicknamed, he shall be Anathema Maránatha to me! A SOBER STATEMENT OF HUMAN LIFE, OR THE TRUE MEDIUM. [*] A chance may win what by mischance was lost; The net that holds not great, takes little fish: In somethings all, in all things none are crost; Few all they need, but none have all they wish: Unmingled joys to no one here befall; Who least, hath some; who most, hath never all! OMNIANA. 1812 THE FRENCH DECADE. I have nothing to say in defence of the French revolutionists, as far as they are personally concerned in this substitution of every tenth for the seventh day as a day of rest. It was not only a senseless outrage on an ancient observance, around which a thousand good and gentle feelings had clustered; it not only tended to weaken the bond of brotherhood between France and the other members of Christendom; but it was dishonest, and robbed the labourer of fifteen days of restorative and humanizing repose in every year, and extended the wrong to all the friends and fellow labourers of man in the brute creation. Yet when I hear Protestants, and even those of the Lutheran persuasion, and members of the church of England, inveigh against this change as a blasphemous contempt of the fourth commandment, I pause, and before I can assent to the verdict of condemnation, I must prepare my mind to include in the same sentence, at least as far as theory goes, the names of several among the most revered reformers of Christianity. Without referring to Luther, I will begin with Master Frith, a founder and martyr of the church of England, having witnessed his faith amid the flames in the year 1533. This meek and enlightened, no less than zealous and orthodox, divine, in his "Declaration of Baptism" thus expresses himself: Our forefathers, which were in the beginning of the Church, did abrogate the sabbath, to the intent that men might have an example of Christian liberty. Howbeit, because it was necessary that a day should be reserved in which the people should come together to hear the word of God, they ordained instead of the Sabbath, which was Saturday, the next following which is Sunday. And although they might have kept the Saturday with the Jew as a thing indifferent, yet they did much better. Some three years after the martyrdom of Frith, in 1536, being the 27th of Henry VIII. suffered Master Tindal in the same glorious cause, and this illustrious martyr and translator of the word of life, likewise, in his "Answer to Sir Thomas More," hath similarly resolved this point: As for the Sabbath, we be lords of the Sabbath, and may yet change it into Monday, or any other day, as we see need; or we may make every tenth day holy day only, if we see cause why. Neither was there any cause to change it from the Saturday, save only to put a difference between us and the Jews; neither need we any holy day at all, if the people might be taught without it. This great man believed that if Christian nations should ever become Christians indeed, there would every day be so many hours taken from the labour for the perishable body, to the service of the souls and the understandings of mankind, both masters and servants, as to supersede the necessity of a particular day. At present our Sunday may be considered as so much Holy Land, rescued from the sea of oppression and vain luxury, and embanked against the fury of their billows. RIDE AND TIE. "On a scheme of perfect retribution in the moral world"--observed Empeiristes, and paused to look at, and wipe his spectacles. "Frogs," interposed Musaello, "must have been experimental philosophers, and experimental philosophers must all transmigrate into frogs." "The scheme will not be yet perfect," added Gelon, "unless our friend Empeiristes, is specially privileged to become an elect frog twenty times successively, before he reascends into a galvanic philosopher." "Well, well," replied Empeiristes, with a benignant smile, "I give my consent, if only our little Mary's fits do not recur." Little Mary was Gelon's only child, and the darling and god-daughter of Empeiristes. By the application of galvanic influence Empeiristes had removed a nervous affection of her right leg, accompanied with symptomatic epilepsy. The tear started in Gelon's eye, and he pressed the hand of his friend, while Musaello, half suppressing, half indulging, a similar sense of shame, sportively exclaimed, "Hang it, Gelon! somehow or other these philosopher fellows always have the better of us wits, in the long run!" JEREMY TAYLOR. The writings of Bishop Jeremy Taylor are a perpetual feast to me. His hospitable board groans under the weight and multitude of viands. Yet I seldom rise from the perusal of his works without repeating or recollecting the excellent observation of Minucius Felix. 'Fabulas et errores ab imperitis parentibus discimus; et quod est gravius, ipsis studiis et disciplinis elaboramus'. CRITICISM. Many of our modern criticisms on the works of our elder writers remind me of the connoisseur, who, taking up a small cabinet picture, railed most eloquently at the absurd caprice of the artist in painting a horse sprawling. "Excuse me, Sir," replied the owner of the piece, "you hold it the wrong way: it is a horse galloping." PUBLIC INSTRUCTION. Our statesmen, who survey with jealous dread all plans for the education of the lower orders, may be thought to proceed on the system of antagonist muscles; and in the belief, that the closer a nation shuts its eyes, the wider it will open its hands. Or do they act on the principle, that the 'status belli' is the natural relation between the people and the government, and that it is prudent to secure the result of the contest by gouging the adversary in the first instance? Alas! the policy of the maxim is on a level with its honesty. The Philistines had put out the eyes of Samson, and thus, as they thought, fitted him to drudge and grind Among the slaves and asses, his comrades, As good for nothing else, no better service:-- But his darkness added to his fury without diminishing his strength, and the very pillars of the temple of oppression-- With horrible convulsion, to and fro, He tugged, he shook, till down they came, and drew The whole roof after them with burst of thunder, Upon the heads of all who sat beneath; Lords, ladies, captains, counsellors, and priests, Their choice nobility. The error might be less unpardonable with a statesman of the continent;--but with Englishmen, who have Ireland in one direction, and Scotland in another; the one in ignorance, sloth, and rebellion,--in the other general information, industry, and loyalty, verily it is not error merely, but infatuation. PICTURESQUE WORDS. Who is ignorant of Homer's [Greek (transliterated): Paelion einosiphullon] Yet in some Greek manuscript hexameters I have met with a compound epithet, which may compare with it for the prize of excellence in flashing on the mental eye a complete image. It is an epithet of the brutified archangel, and forms the latter half of the verse,-- [Greek: Kerkokeronucha Satan] Ye youthful bards! compare this word with its literal translation, "tail-horn-hoofed Satan," and be shy of compound epithets, the components of which are indebted for their union exclusively to the printer's hyphen. Henry More, indeed, would have naturalized the word without hesitation, and 'cercoceronychous' would have shared the astonishment of the English reader in the glossary to his 'Song of the Soul' with Achronycul, Anaisthaesie, &c. &c. TOLERATION. The state, with respect to the different sects of religion under its protection, should resemble a well drawn portrait. Let there be half a score individuals looking at it, every one sees its eyes and its benignant smile directed towards himself. The framer of preventive laws, no less than private tutors and school-masters, should remember, that the readiest way to make either mind or body grow awry, is by lacing it too tight. WAR. It would have proved a striking part of a vision presented to Adam the day after the death of Abel, to have brought before his eyes half a million of men crowded together in the space of a square mile. When the first father had exhausted his wonder on the multitude of his offspring, he would then naturally inquire of his angelic instructor, for what purposes so vast a multitude had assembled? what is the common end? Alas! to murder each other,--all Cains, and yet no Abels! PARODIES. Parodies on new poems are read as satires; on old ones,--the soliloquy of Hamlet for instance--as compliments. A man of genius may securely laugh at a mode of attack by which his reviler, in half a century or less, becomes his encomiast. M. DUPUIS. Among the extravagancies of faith which have characterized many infidel writers, who would swallow a whale to avoid believing that a whale swallowed Jonas,--a high rank should be given to Dupuis, who, at the commencement of the French Revolution, published a work in twelve volumes, octavo, in order to prove that Jesus Christ was the sun, and all Christians, worshippers of Mithra. His arguments, if arguments they can be called, consist chiefly of metaphors quoted from the Fathers. What irresistible conviction would not the following passage from South's sermons (vol. v. p. 165.) have flashed on his fancy, had it occurred in the writings of Origen or Tertullian! and how complete a confutation of all his grounds does not the passage afford to those humble souls, who, gifted with common sense alone, can boast of no additional light received through a crack in their upper apartments:-- Christ the great sun of righteousness and saviour of the world, having by a glorious rising, after a red and bloody setting, proclaimed his deity to men and angels; and by a complete triumph over the two grand enemies of mankind, sin and death, set up the everlasting gospel in the room of all false religions, has now changed the Persian superstition into the Christian doctrine, and without the least approach to the idolatry of the former, made it henceforward the duty of all nations, Jews and Gentiles, to worship the rising sun. This one passage outblazes the whole host of Dupuis' evidences and extracts. In the same sermon, the reader will meet with Hume's argument against miracles anticipated, and put in Thomas's mouth. ORIGIN OF THE WORSHIP OF HYMEN. The origin of the worship of Hymen is thus related by Lactantius. The story would furnish matter for an excellent pantomime. Hymen was a beautiful youth of Athens, who for the love of a young virgin disguised himself, and assisted at the Eleusinian rites: and at this time he, together with his beloved, and divers other young ladies of that city, was surprized and carried off by pirates, who supposing him to be what he appeared, lodged him with his mistress. In the dead of the night when the robbers were all asleep, he arose and cut their throats. Thence making hasty way back to Athens, he bargained with the parents that he would restore to them their daughter and all her companions, if they would consent to her marriage with him. They did so, and this marriage proving remarkably happy, it became the custom to invoke the name of Hymen at all nuptials. EGOTISM. It is hard and uncandid to censure the great reformers in philosophy and religion for their egotism and boastfulness. It is scarcely possible for a man to meet with continued personal abuse, on account of his superior talents, without associating more and more the sense of the value of his discoveries or detections with his own person. The necessity of repelling unjust contempt, forces the most modest man into a feeling of pride and self-consciousness. How can a tall man help thinking of his size, when dwarfs are constantly on tiptoe beside him?--Paracelsus was a braggart and a quack; so was Cardan; but it was their merits, and not their follies, which drew upon them that torrent of detraction and calumny, which compelled them so frequently to think and write concerning themselves, that at length it became a habit to do so. Wolff too, though not a boaster, was yet persecuted into a habit of egotism both in his prefaces and in his ordinary conversation, and the same holds good of the founder of the Brunonian system, and of his great namesake Giordano Bruno. The more decorous manners of the present age have attached a disproportionate opprobrium to this foible, and many therefore abstain with cautious prudence from all displays of what they feel. Nay, some do actually flatter themselves, that they abhor all egotism, and never betray it either in their writings or discourse. But watch these men narrowly; and in the greater number of cases you will find their thoughts, feelings, and mode of expression, saturated with the passion of contempt, which is the concentrated vinegar of egotism. Your very humble men in company, if they produce any thing, are in that thing of the most exquisite irritability and vanity. When a man is attempting to describe another person's character, he may be right or he may be wrong; but in one thing he will always succeed, that is, in describing himself. If, for example, he expresses simple approbation, he praises from a consciousness of possessing similar qualities;--if he approves with admiration, it is from a consciousness of deficiency. A. "Ay! he is a sober man." B. "Ah! Sir, what a blessing is sobriety!" Here A. is a man conscious of sobriety, who egotizes in 'tuism';--B. is one who, feeling the ill effects of a contrary habit, contemplates sobriety with blameless envy. Again:--A. "Yes, he is a warm man, a moneyed fellow; you may rely upon him." B. "Yes, yes, Sir, no wonder! he has the blessing of being well in the world." This reflection might be introduced in defence of plaintive egotism, and by way of preface to an examination of all the charges against it, and from what feelings they proceed. 1800.[1] Contempt is egotism in ill humour. Appetite without moral affection, social sympathy, and even without passion and imagination--(in plain English, mere lust,)--is the basest form of egotism,--and being 'infra' human, or below humanity, should be pronounced with the harsh breathing, as 'he-goat-ism'. 1820. [Footnote 1: From Mr. Gulch's commonplace book. Ed] CAP OF LIBERTY. Those who hoped proudly of human nature, and admitted no distinction between Christians and Frenchmen, regarded the first constitution as a colossal statue of Corinthian brass, formed by the fusion and commixture of all metals in the conflagration of the state. But there is a common fungus, which so exactly represents the pole and cap of liberty, that it seems offered by nature herself as the appropriate emblem of Gallic republicanism,--mushroom patriots, with a mushroom cap of liberty. BULLS. 'Novi ego aliquem qui dormitabundus aliquando pulsari horam quartam audiverit, et sic numeravit, una, una, una, una; ac tum præ rei absurditate, quam anima concipiebat, exclamavit, Næ! delirat horologium! Quater pulsavit horam unam'. I knew a person, who, during imperfect sleep, or dozing, as we say, listened to the clock as it was striking four, and as it struck, he counted the four, one, one, one, one; and then exclaimed, "Why, the clock is out of its wits; it has struck one four times over!" This is a good exemplification of the nature of 'Bulls', which will be found always to contain in them a confusion of what the schoolmen would have called--objectivity with subjectivity;--in plain English, the impression of a thing as it exists in itself, and extrinsically, with the image which the mind abstracts from the impression. Thus, number, or the total of a series, is a generalization of the mind, an 'ens rationis' not an 'ens reale'. I have read many attempts at a definition of a 'Bull', and lately in the Edinburgh Review; but it then appeared to me that the definers had fallen into the same fault with Miss Edgeworth, in her delightful essay on 'Bulls', and given the definition of the genus, 'Blunder', for that of the particular species. I will venture, therefore, to propose the following: a 'Bull' consists in a mental juxta-position of incongruous images or thoughts with the sensation, but without the sense, of connection. The psychological conditions of the possibility of a 'Bull', it would not be difficult to determine; but it would require a larger space than can be afforded here, at least more attention than my readers would be likely to afford. There is a sort of spurious 'Bull' which consists wholly in mistake of language, and which the closest thinker may make, if speaking in a language of which he is not master. WISE IGNORANCE. It is impossible to become either an eminently great, or truly pious man, without the courage to remain ignorant of many things. This important truth is most happily expressed by the elder Scaliger in prose, and by the younger in verse; the latter extract has an additional claim from the exquisite terseness of its diction, and the purity of its Latinity. I particularly recommend its perusal to the commentators on the Apocalypse. 'Quare ulterior disquisitio morosi atque satagentis animi est; humanae enim sapientiae pars est, quaedam aequo animo nescire velle'. J. C, Scalig. Ex. 307. s. 29. 'Ne curiosus quaere causas omnium, Quaecunque libris vis prophetarum indidit, Afflata caelo, plena veraci Deo; Nec operta sacri supparo silentii Irrumpere aude; sed prudenter praeteri! Nescire velle quae magister optimus Docere non vult, erudita inscitia est'. Josep. Scalig. ROUGE. Triumphant generals in Rome wore rouge. The ladies of France, and their fair sisters and imitators in Britain, conceive themselves always in the chair of triumph, and of course entitled to the same distinction. The custom originated, perhaps, in the humility of the conquerors that they might seem to blush continually at their own praises. Mr. Gilpin frequently speaks of a "picturesque eye:" with something less of solecism, I may affirm that our fair ever blushing triumphants have secured to themselves the charm of picturesque cheeks, every face being its own portrait. [Greek: Epea pteroenta.] HASTY WORDS. I crave mercy (at least of my contemporaries: for if these Omniana should outlive the present generation, the opinion will not need it) but I could not help writing in the blank page of a very celebrated work [1] the following passage from Picus Mirandula:- 'Movent mihi stomachum grammatistae quidam, qui cum duas tenuerint vocabulorum origines, ita se ostentant, ita venditant, ita circumferunt jactabundi, ut prae ipsis pro nihilo habendos philosophos arbitrentur'. Epist. ad Hermol. Barb. [Footnote 1: Diversions of Purley. Ed.] MOTIVES AND IMPULSES. It is a matter of infinite difficulty, but fortunately of comparative indifference to determine what a man's motive may have been for this or that particular action. Rather seek to learn what his objects in general are. What does he habitually wish, habitually pursue? and thence deduce his impulses which are commonly the true efficient causes of men's conduct; and without which the motive itself would not have become a motive. Let a haunch of venison represent the motive, and the keen appetite of health, and exercise the impulse: then place the same or some more favourite dish before the same man, sick, dyspeptic, and stomach-worn, and we may then weigh the comparative influences of motives and impulses. Without the perception of this truth, it is impossible to understand the character of lago, who is represented as now assigning one, and then another, and again a third motive for his conduct, all alike the mere fictions of his own restless nature, distempered by a keen sense of his intellectual superiority, and haunted by the love of exerting power on those especially who are his superiors in practical and moral excellence. Yet how many among our modern critics have attributed to the profound author this the appropriate inconsistency of the character itself. A second illustration:--Did Curio, the 'quondam' patriot, reformer, and semi-revolutionist, abjure his opinion, and yell the foremost in the hunt of persecution against his old friends and fellow-philosophists, with a cold clear predetermination, formed at one moment, of making £5000 a year by his apostacy?--I neither know nor care. Probably not. But this I know, that to be thought a man of consequence by his contemporaries, to be admitted into the society of his superiors in artificial rank, to excite the admiration of lords, to live in splendour and sensual luxury, have been the objects of his habitual wishes. A flash of lightning has turned at once the polarity of the compass needle: and so, perhaps, now and then, but as rarely, a violent motive may revolutionize a man's opinions and professions. But more frequently his honesty dies away imperceptibly from evening into twilight, and from twilight into utter darkness. He turns hypocrite so gradually, and by such tiny atoms of motion, that by the time he has arrived at a given point, he forgets his own hypocrisy in the imperceptible degrees of his conversion. The difference between such a man and a bolder liar, is merely that between the hour hand, and that which tells the seconds, on a watch. Of the former you can see only the past motion; of the latter both the past motion and the present moving. Yet there is, perhaps, more hope of the latter rogue: for he has lied to mankind only and not to himself--the former lies to his own heart, as well as to the public. INWARD BLINDNESS. Talk to a blind man--he knows he wants the sense of sight, and willingly makes the proper allowances. But there are certain internal senses, which a man may want, and yet be wholly ignorant that he wants them. It is most unpleasant to converse with such persons on subjects of taste, philosophy, or religion. Of course there is no reasoning with them: for they do not possess the facts, on which the reasoning must be grounded. Nothing is possible, but a naked dissent, which implies a sort of unsocial contempt; or, what a man of kind dispositions is very likely to fall into, a heartless tacit acquiescence, which borders too nearly on duplicity. THE VICES OF SLAVES NO EXCUSE FOR SLAVERY. It often happens, that the slave himself has neither the power nor the wish to be free. He is then brutified; but this apathy is the dire effect of slavery, and so far from being a justifying cause, that it contains the grounds of its bitterest condemnation. The Carlovingian race bred up the Merovingi as beasts; and then assigned their unworthiness as the satisfactory reason for their dethronement. Alas! the human being is more easily weaned from the habit of commanding than from that of abject obedience. The slave loses his soul when he loses his master; even as the dog that has lost himself in the street, howls and whines till he has found the house again, where he had been kicked and cudgelled, and half starved to boot. As we, however, or our ancestors must have inoculated our fellow-creature with this wasting disease of the soul, it becomes our duty to cure him; and though we cannot immediately make him free, yet we can, and ought to, put him in the way of becoming so at some future time, if not in his own person, yet in that of his children. The French, you will say, are not capable of freedom. Grant this;--but does this fact justify the ungrateful traitor, whose every measure has been to make them still more incapable of it? CIRCULATION OF THE BLOOD. The ancients attributed to the blood the same motion of ascent and descent which really takes place in the sap of trees. Servetus discovered the minor circulation from the heart to the lungs. Do not the following passages of Giordano Bruno (published in 1591) seem to imply more? I put the question, 'pauperis forma', with unfeigned diffidence. '"De Immenso et Innumerabili,"' lib. vi. cap. 8. 'Ut in nostro corpore sanguis per totum circumcursat et recursat, sic in toto mundo, astro, tellure. Quare non aliter quam nostro in corpore sanguis Hinc meat, hinc remeat, neque ad inferiora fluit vi Majore, ad supera a pedibus quam deinde recedat:--' and still more plainly, in the ninth chapter of the same book, 'Quid esset Quodam ni gyro naturae cuncta redirent Ortus ad proprios rursum; si sorbeat omnes Pontus aquas, totum non restituatque perenni Ordine; qua possit rerum consistere vita? Tanquam si totus concurrat sanguis in unam, In qua consistat, partem, nec prima revisat Ordia, et antiquos cursus non inde resumat.' It is affirmed in the "Supplement to the Scotch Encyclopædia Britannica," that Des Cartes was the first who in defiance of Aristotle and the Schools, attributed infinity to the universe. The very title of Bruno's poem proves, that this honour belongs to him. Feyjoo lays claim to a knowledge of the circulation of the blood for Francisco de la Reyna, a farrier, who published a work upon his own art at Burgos, in 1564. The passage which he quotes is perfectly clear. 'Por manera, que la sangre anda en torno, y en rueda por todos los miembros, excluye toda duda.' Whether Reyna himself claimed any discovery, Feyjoo does not mention;--but, these words seem to refer to some preceding demonstration of the fact. I am inclined to think that this, like many other things, was known before it was discovered; just as the preventive powers of the vaccine disease, the existence of adipocire in graves, and certain principles in grammar and in population, upon which bulky books have been written and great reputations raised in our days. PERITURAE PARCERE CHARTAE. What scholar but must at times have a feeling of splenetic regret, when he looks at the list of novels, in two, three, or four volumes each, published monthly by Messrs. Lane, &c. and then reflects that there are valuable works of Cudworth, prepared by himself for the press, yet still unpublished by the University which possesses them, and which ought to glory in the name of their great author! and that there is extant in manuscript a folio volume of unprinted sermons by Jeremy Taylor. Surely, surely, the patronage of our many literary societies might be employed more beneficially to the literature and to the actual 'literati' of the country, if they would publish the valuable manuscripts that lurk in our different public libraries, and make it worth the while of men of learning to correct and annotate the copies, instead of----, but it is treading on hot embers! TO HAVE AND TO BE. The distinction is marked in a beautiful sentiment of a German poet: Hast thou any thing? share it with me and I will pay thee the worth of it. Art thou any thing? O then let us exchange souls! The following is offered as a mere playful illustration: "Women have no souls," says prophet Mahomet. Nay, dearest Anna! why so grave? I said you had no soul,'tis true: For what you are, you cannot have-- 'Tis I, that have one, since I first had you. PARTY PASSION. "Well, Sir!" exclaimed a lady, the vehement and impassionate partizan of Mr. Wilkes, in the day of his glory, and during the broad blaze of his patriotism, "Well, Sir! and will you dare deny that Mr. Wilkes is a great man, and an eloquent man?"--"Oh! by no means, Madam! I have not a doubt respecting Mr. Wilkes's talents!"--"Well, but, Sir! and is he not a fine man, too, and a handsome man?"--"Why, Madam! he squints, doesn't he?"--"Squints! yes to be sure he does, Sir! but not a bit more than a gentleman and a man of sense ought to squint!" GOODNESS OF HEART INDISPENSABLE TO A MAN OF GENIUS. 'If men will impartially, and not asquint, look toward the offices and function of a poet, they will easily conclude to themselves the impossibility of any man's being the good poet without being first a good man. (Dedication to 'the Fox').' Ben Jonson has borrowed this just and noble sentiment from Strabo. [Greek (transliterated): 'h de (haretae) poiaetou sunezeuktai tae tou anthropou kai ouch oionte agathhon genesthai, poiaetaen, mae proteron genaethenta andra agathon.] ( Lib. I. p. 33. folio.) MILTON AND BEN JONSON. Those who have more faith in parallelism than myself, may trace Satan's address to the sun in 'Paradise Lost' to the first lines of Ben Jonson's Poetaster: "Light! I salute thee, but with wounded nerves, Wishing thy golden splendour pitchy darkness!" But even if Milton had the above in his mind, his own verses would be more fitly entitled an apotheosis of Jonson's lines than an imitation. STATISTICS. We all remember Burke's curious assertion that there were 80,000 incorrigible jacobins in England. Mr. Colquhoun is equally precise in the number of beggars, prostitutes, and thieves in the City of London. Mercetinus, who wrote under Lewis XV. seems to have afforded the precedent; he assures his readers, that by an accurate calculation there were 50,000 incorrigible atheists in the City of Paris! Atheism then may have been a co-cause of the French revolution; but it should not be burthened on it, as its monster-child. MAGNANIMITY. The following ode was written by Giordano Bruno, under prospect of that martyrdom which he soon after suffered at Rome, for atheism: that is, as is proved by all his works, for a lofty and enlightened piety, which was of course unintelligible to bigots and dangerous to an apostate hierarchy. If the human mind be, as it assuredly is, the sublimest object which nature affords to our contemplation, these lines which portray the human mind under the action of its most elevated affections, have a fair claim to the praise of sublimity. The work from which they are extracted is exceedingly rare (as are, indeed, all the works of the Nolan philosopher), and I have never seen them quoted:-- 'Daedaleas vacuis plumas nectere humeris Concupiant alii; aut vi suspendi nubium Alis, ventorumve appetant remigium; Aut orbitae flammantis raptari alveo; Bellerophontisve alitem Nos vero illo donati sumus genio, Ut fatum intrepedi objectasque umbras cernimus, Ne caeci ad lumen solis, ad perspicuas Naturae voces surdi, ad Divum munera Ingrato adsimus pectore. Non curamus stultorum quid opinio De nobis ferat, aut queis dignetur sedibus. Alis ascendimus sursum melioribus! Quid nubes ultra, ventorum ultra est semita, Vidimus, quantum satis est. Illuc conscendent plurimi, nobis ducibus, Per scalam proprio erectam et firmam in pectore, Quam Deus, et vegeti sors dabit ingeni; Non manes, pluma, ignis, ventus, nubes, spiritus, Divinantum phantasmata. Non sensus vegetans, non me ratio arguet, Non indoles exculti clara ingenii; Sed perfidi sycophantae supercilium Absque lance, statera, trutina, oculo, Miraculum armati segete. Versificantis grammatistae encomium, Buglossae Graecissantum, et epistolia Lectorem libri salutantum a limine, Latrantum adversum Zoilos, Momos, mastiges, Hinc absint testimonia! Procedat nudus, quern non ornant nubila, Sol! Non conveniunt quadrupedum phalerae Humano dorso! Porra veri species Quaesita, inventa, et patefacta me efferat! Etsi nullus intelligat, Si cum natura sapio, et sub numine, Id vere plus quam satis est.' The conclusion alludes to a charge of impenetrable obscurity, in which Bruno shares one and the same fate with Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and in truth with every great discoverer and benefactor of the human race; excepting only when the discoveries have been capable of being rendered palpable to the outward senses, and have therefore come under the cognizance of our "sober judicious critics," the men of "sound common sense;" that is, of those snails in intellect, who wear their eyes at the tips of their feelers, and cannot even see unless they at the same time touch. When these finger-philosophers affirm that Plato, Bruno, &c. must have been "out of their senses," the just and proper retort is,--"Gentlemen! it is still worse with you! you have lost your reason!" By the by, Addison in the Spectator has grossly misrepresented the design and tendency of Bruno's 'Bestia Triomphante'; the object of which was to show of all the theologies and theogonies which have been conceived for the mere purpose of solving problems in the material universe, that as they originate in fancy, so they all end in delusion, and act to the hindrance or prevention of sound knowledge and actual discovery. But the principal and most important truth taught in this allegory is, that in the concerns of morality all pretended knowledge of the will of Heaven which is not revealed to man through his conscience; that all commands which do not consist in the unconditional obedience of the will to the pure reason, without tampering with consequences (which are in God's power, not in ours); in short, that all motives of hope and fear from invisible powers, which are not immediately derived from, and absolutely coincident with, the reverence due to the supreme reason of the universe, are all alike dangerous superstitions. The worship founded on them, whether offered by the Catholic to St. Francis, or by the poor African to his Fetish differ in form only, not in substance. Herein Bruno speaks not only as a philosopher, but as an enlightened Christian;--the Evangelists and Apostles every where representing their moral precepts not as doctrines then first revealed, but as truths implanted in the hearts of men, which their vices only could have obscured. NEGROS AND NARCISSUSES. There are certain tribes of Negros who take for the deity of the day the first thing they see or meet with in the morning. Many of our fine ladies, and some of our very fine gentlemen, are followers of the same sect; though by aid of the looking-glass they secure a constancy as to the object of their devotion. AN ANECDOTE. We here in England received a very high character of Lord ---- during his stay abroad. "Not unlikely, Sir," replied the traveller; "a dead dog at a distance is said to smell like musk." THE PHAROS AT ALEXANDRIA. Certain full and highly-wrought dissuasives from sensual indulgencies, in the works of theologians as well as of satirists and story-writers, may, not unaptly, remind one of the Pharos; the many lights of which appeared at a distance as one, and this as a polar star, so as more often to occasion wrecks than prevent them. At the base of the Pharos the name of the reigning monarch was engraved, on a composition, which the artist well knew would last no longer than the king's life. Under this, and cut deep in the marble itself, was his own name and dedication: "Sostratos of Gyndos, son of Dexiteles to the Gods, protectors of sailors!"--So will it be with the 'Georgium Sidus' the 'Ferdinandia', &c. &c.--Flattery's plaister of Paris will crumble away, and under it we shall read the names of Herschel, Piozzi, and their compeers. SENSE AND COMMON SENSE. I have noticed two main evils in philosophizing. The first is, the absurdity of demanding proof for the very facts which constitute the nature of him who demands it,--a proof for those primary and unceasing revelations of self-consciousness, which every possible proof must pre-suppose; reasoning, for instance, 'pro' and 'con', concerning the existence of the power of reasoning. Other truths may be ascertained; but these are certainty itself (all at least which we mean by the word), and are the measure of every thing else which we deem certain. The second evil is, that of mistaking for such facts mere general prejudices, and those opinions that, having been habitually taken for granted, are dignified with the name of common sense. Of these, the first is the more injurious to the reputation, the latter more detrimental to the progress of philosophy. In the affairs of common life we very properly appeal to common sense; but it is absurd to reject the results of the microscope from the negative testimony of the naked eye. Knives are sufficient for the table and the market;--but for the purposes of science we must dissect with the lancet. As an instance of the latter evil, take that truly powerful and active intellect, Sir Thomas Brown, who, though he had written a large volume in detection of vulgar errors, yet peremptorily pronounces the motion of the earth round the sun, and consequently the whole of the Copernican system unworthy of any serious confutation, as being manifestly repugnant to common sense; which said common sense, like a miller's scales, used to weigh gold or gasses, may, and often does, become very gross, though unfortunately not very uncommon, nonsense. And as for the former, which may be called 'Logica Praepostera', I have read in metaphysical essays of no small fame, arguments drawn 'ab extra' in proof and disproof of personal identity, which, ingenious as they may be, were clearly anticipated by the little old woman's appeal to her little dog, for the solution of the very same doubts, occasioned by her petticoats having been cut round about:-- If it is not me, he'll bark and he'll rail, But if I be I, he'll wag his little tail. TOLERATION. I dare confess that Mr. Locke's treatise on Toleration appeared to me far from being a full and satisfactory answer to the subtle and oft-times plausible arguments of Bellarmin, and other Romanists. On the whole, I was more pleased with the celebrated W. Penn's tracts on the same subject. The following extract from his excellent letter to the king of Poland appeals to the heart rather than to the head, to the Christian rather than to the philosopher; and, besides, overlooks the ostensible object of religious penalties, which is not so much to convert the heretic, as to prevent the spread of heresy. The thoughts, however, are so just in themselves, and expressed with so much life and simplicity, that it well deserves a place in these Omniana:-- Now, O Prince! give a poor Christian leave to expostulate with thee. Did Christ Jesus or his holy followers endeavour, by precept or example, to set up their religion with a carnal sword? Called he any troops of men or angels to defend him? Did he encourage Peter to dispute his right with the sword? But did he not say, 'Put it up'? Or did he countenance his over-zealous disciples, when they would have had fire from heaven to destroy those that were not of their mind? No! But did not Christ rebuke them, saying, 'Ye know not what spirit ye are of?' And if it was neither Christ's spirit, nor their own spirit that would have fire from heaven--Oh! what is that spirit that would kindle fire on earth to destroy such as peaceably dissent upon the account of conscience! O King! when did the true religion persecute? When did the true church offer violence for religion? Were not her weapons prayers, tears, and patience? did not Jesus conquer by these weapons, and vanquish cruelty by suffering? can clubs, and staves, and swords, and prisons, and banishments reach the soul, convert the heart, or convince the understanding of man? When did violence ever make a true convert, or bodily punishment, a sincere Christian? This maketh void the end of Christ's coming. Yea, it robbeth God's spirit of its office, which is to convince the world. That is the sword by which the ancient Christians overcame. The theory of persecution seems to rest on the following assumptions. 1. A duty implies a right. We have a right to do whatever it is our duty to do. 2. It is the duty and consequently the right of the supreme power in a state to promote the greatest possible sum of well-being in that state. 3. This is impossible without morality. 4. But morality can neither be produced or preserved in a people at large without true religion. 5. Relative to the duties of the legislature or governors, that is the true religion which they conscientiously believe to be so. 6. As there can be but one true religion, at the same time, this one it is their duty and right to authorize and protect. 7. But the established religion cannot be protected and secured except by the imposition of restraints or the influence of penalties on those, who profess and propagate hostility to it. 8. True religion, consisting of precepts, counsels, commandments, doctrines, and historical narratives, cannot be effectually proved or defended, but by a comprehensive view of the whole as a system. Now this cannot be hoped for from the mass of mankind. But it may be attacked, and the faith of ignorant men subverted by particular objections, by the statement of difficulties without any counter-statement of the greater difficulties which would result from the rejection of the former, and by all the other stratagems used in the desultory warfare of sectaries and infidels. This is, however, manifestly dishonest and dangerous, and there must exist, therefore, a power in the state to prevent, suppress, and punish it. 9. The advocates of toleration have never been able to agree among themselves concerning the limits to their own claims; have never established any clear rules, as to what shall and what shall not be admitted under the name of religion and conscience. Treason and the grossest indecencies not only may be, but have been, called by these names: as among the earlier Anabaptists. 10. And last, it is a 'petitio principii', or begging the question, to take for granted that a state has no power except in case of overt acts. It is its duty to prevent a present evil, as much at least as to punish the perpetrators of it. Besides, preaching and publishing are overt acts. Nor has it yet been proved, though often asserted, that a Christian sovereign has nothing to do with the eternal happiness or misery of the fellow creatures entrusted to his charge. HINT FOR A NEW SPECIES OF HISTORY. "The very knowledge of the opinions and customs of so considerable a part of mankind as the Jews now are, and especially have been heretofore, is valuable both for pleasure and use. It is a very good piece of history, and that of the best kind, namely, of human nature, and of that part of it which is most different from us, and commonly the least known to us. And, indeed, the principal advantage which is to be made by the wiser sort of men of most writings, is rather to see what men think and are, than to be informed of the natures and truth of things; to observe what thoughts and passions have occupied men's minds, what opinions and manners they are of. In this view it becomes of no mean importance to notice and record the strangest ignorance, the most putid fables, impertinent, trifling, ridiculous disputes, and more ridiculous pugnacity in the defence and retention of the subjects disputed." (Publisher's preface to the reader in Lightfoot's 'Works', vol. i.) In the thick volume of title pages and chapters of contents (composed) of large and small works correspondent to each (proposed) by a certain 'omni'-pregnant, 'nihili'-parturient genius of my acquaintance, not the least promising is,--"A History of the morals and (as connected therewith) of the manners of the English Nation from the Conquest to the present time." From the chapter of contents it appears, that my friend is a steady believer in the uninterrupted progression of his fellow countrymen; that there has been a constant growth of wealth and well-being among us, and with these an increase of knowledge, and with increasing knowledge an increase and diffusion of practical goodness. The degrees of acceleration, indeed, have been different at different periods. The moral being has sometimes crawled, sometimes strolled, sometimes walked, sometimes run; but it has at all times been moving onward. If in any one point it has gone backward, it has been only in order to leap forward in some other. The work was to commence with a numeration table, or catalogue, of those virtues or qualities which make a man happy in himself, and which conduce to the happiness of those about him, in a greater or lesser sphere of agency. The degree and the frequency in which each of these virtues manifested themselves, in the successive reigns from William the Conqueror inclusively, were to be illustrated by apposite quotations from the works of contemporary writers, not only of historians and chroniclers, but of the poets, romance writers, and theologians, not omitting the correspondence between literary men, the laws and regulations, civil and ecclesiastical, and whatever records the industry of antiquarians has brought to light in their provincial, municipal, and monastic histories:--tall tomes and huge! undegenerate sons of Anak, which look down from a dizzy height on the dwarfish progeny of contemporary wit, and can find no associates in size at a less distance than two centuries; and in arranging which the puzzled librarian must commit an anachronism in order to avoid an anatopism. Such of these illustrations as most amused or impressed me, when I heard them (for alas! even his very title pages and contents my friend composes only in air!) I shall probably attempt to preserve in different parts of these 'Omniana'. At present I shall cite one article only which I found wafered on a blank leaf of his memorandum book, superscribed: "Flattering news for 'Anno Domini' 2000, whenever it shall institute a comparison between itself and the 17th and 18th centuries." It consists of an extract, say rather, an exsection from the Kingston Mercantile Advertiser, from Saturday, August the 15th, to Tuesday, August 18th, 1801. This paper which contained at least twenty more advertisements of the very same kind, was found by accident among the wrapping-papers in the trunk of an officer just returned from the West India station. They stand here exactly as in the original, from which they are reprinted:-- Kingston, July 30, 1801. Ran away, about three weeks ago, from a penn near Halfway Tree, a negro wench, named Nancy, of the Chamba country, strong made, an ulcer on her left leg, marked D. C. diamond between. She is supposed to be harboured by her husband, Dublin, who has the direction of a wherry working between this town and Port Royal, and is the property of Mr. Fishley, of that place; the said negro man having concealed a boy in his wherry before. Half a joe will be paid to any person apprehending the above described wench, and delivering to Mr. Archibald M' Lea, East end; and if found secreted by any person, the law will be put in force. Kingston, August 13, 1801. Strayed on Monday evening last, a negro boy of the Moco country, named Joe, the property of Mr. Thomas Williams, planter, in St. John's, who had sent him to town under the charge of a negro man, with a cart for provisions. The said boy is, perhaps, from 15 to 18 years of age, about twelve months in the country, no mark, speaks little English, but can tell his owner's name; had on a long Oznaburg frock. It is supposed he might have gone out to vend some pears and lemon-grass, and have lost himself in the street. One pistole will be paid to any person apprehending and bringing him to this office. Kingston, July 1, 1801. Forty Shillings Reward. Strayed on Friday evening last, (and was seen going up West Street the following morning), a small bay HORSE, the left ear lapped, flat rump, much scored from the saddle on his back, and marked on the near side F. M. with a diamond between. Whoever will take up the said horse, and deliver him to W. Balantine, butcher, back of West Street, will receive the above reward. Kingston, July 4, 1801. Strayed on Sunday morning last, from the subscriber's house, in East Street, a bright dun He-Mule, the mane lately cropped, a large chafe slightly skinned over on the near buttock, and otherwise chafed from the action of the harness in his recent breaking. Half a joe will be paid to any person taking up and bringing this mule to the subscriber's house, or to the Store in Harbour Street. JOHN WALSH. Kingston, July 2, 1801. Ten pounds Reward, Ran away About two years ago from the subscriber, a Negro woman named DORAH, purchased from Alexander M'Kean, Esq. She is about 20 years of age, and 5 feet 6 or 7 inches high; has a mark on one of her shoulders, about the size of a quarter dollar, occasioned, she says, by the yaws; of a coal black complexion, very artful, and most probably passes about the country with false papers and under another name; if that is not the case, it must be presumed she is harboured about Green pond, where she has a mother and other connexions. What a history! horses and negros! negros and horses! It makes me tremble at my own nature. Surely, every religious and conscientious Briton is equally a debtor in gratitude to Thomas Clarkson and his fellow labourers with every African: for on the soul of every individual among us did a portion of guilt rest, as long as the Slave Trade remained legal. A few years back the public was satiated with accounts of the happy condition of the slaves in our colonies, and the great encouragements and facilities afforded to such of them, as by industry and foresight laboured to better their situation. With what truth this is stated as the general tone of feeling among our planters, and their agents, may be conjectured from the following sentences, which made part of what in England we call the leading paragraph of the same newspaper:-- Strange as it may appear, we are assured as a fact, that a number of slaves in this town have purchased lots of land, and are absolutely in possession of the fee simple of lands and tenements. Neither is it uncommon for the men slaves to purchase or manumize their wives, and 'vice versa', the wives their husbands. To account for this, we need only look to the depredations daily committed, and the impositions practised to the distress of the community and ruin of the fair trader. Negro yards too, under such direction, will necessarily prove the asylum of runaways from the country. TEXT SPARRING. When I hear (as who now can travel twenty miles in a stage coach without the probability of hearing) an ignorant religionist quote an unconnected sentence of half a dozen words from any part of the Old or New Testament, and resting on the literal sense of these words the eternal misery of all who reject, nay, even of all those countless myriads, who have never had the opportunity of accepting this, and sundry other articles of faith conjured up by the same textual magic; I ask myself what idea these persons form of the Bible, that they should use it in a way in which they themselves use no other book? They deem the whole written by inspiration. Well! but is the very essence of rational discourse, that is, connection and dependency done away, because the discourse is infallibly rational? The mysteries, which these spiritual lynxes detect in the simplest texts, remind me of the 500 nondescripts, each as large as his own black cat, which Dr. Katterfelto, by aid of his solar microscope, discovered in a drop of transparent water. But to a contemporary who has not thrown his lot in the same helmet with them, these fanatics think it a crime to listen. Let them then, or far rather, let those who are in danger of infection from them, attend to the golden aphorisms of the old and orthodox divines. "Sentences in scripture (says Dr. Donne) like hairs in horses' tails, concur in one root of beauty and strength; but being plucked out, one by one, serve only for springes and snares." The second I transcribe from the preface to Lightfoot's works. "Inspired writings are an inestimable treasure to mankind; for so many sentences, so many truths. But then the true sense of them must be known: otherwise, so many sentences, so many authorized falsehoods." PELAGIANISM. Our modern latitudinarians will find it difficult to suppose, that anything could have been said in the defence of Pelagianism equally absurd with the facts and arguments which have been adduced in favour of original sin, (sin being taken as guilt; that is, observes a Socinian wit, the crime of being born). But in the comment of Rabbi Akibah on Ecclesiastes xii. 1. we have a story of a mother, who must have been a most determined believer in the uninheritability of sin. For having a sickly and deformed child, and resolved that it should not be thought to have been punished for any fault of its parents or ancestors, and yet having nothing else for which to blame the child, she seriously and earnestly accused it before the judge of having kicked her unmercifully during her pregnancy. I am firmly persuaded that no doctrine was ever widely diffused among various nations through successive ages and under different religions, (such as is the doctrine of original sin, and redemption, those fundamental articles of every known religion professing to be revealed,) which is not founded either in the nature of things or in the necessities of our nature. In the language of the schools, it carries with it presumptive evidence that it is either objectively or subjectively true. And the more strange and contradictory such a doctrine may appear to the understanding, or discursive faculty, the stronger is the presumption in its favour. For whatever satirists may say, and sciolists imagine, the human mind has no predilection for absurdity. I do not, however, mean that such a doctrine shall be always the best possible representation of the truth on which it is founded; for the same body casts strangely different shadows in different places, and different degrees of light, but that it always does shadow out some such truth, and derive its influence over our faith from our obscure perception of that truth. Yea, even where the person himself attributes his belief of it to the miracles, with which it was announced by the founder of his religion. THE SOUL AND ITS ORGANS OF SENSE. It is a strong presumptive proof against materialism, that there does not exist a language on earth, from the rudest to the most refined, in which a materialist can talk for five minutes together, without involving some contradiction in terms to his own system. 'Objection'. Will not this apply equally to the astronomer? Newton, no doubt, talked of the sun's rising and setting, just like other men. What should we think of the coxcomb who should have objected to him, that he contradicted his own system? 'Answer'--No! it does not apply equally; say rather, it is utterly inapplicable to the astronomer and natural philosopher. For his philosophic, and his ordinary language speak of two quite different things, both of which are equally true. In his ordinary language he refers to a fact of appearance, to a phenomenon common and necessary to all persons in a given situation; in his scientific language he determines that one position or figure, which being supposed, the appearance in question would be the necessary result, and all appearances in all situations maybe demonstrably foretold. Let a body be suspended in the air, and strongly illuminated. What figure is here? A triangle. But what here? A trapezium;--and so on. The same question put to twenty men, in twenty different positions and distances, would receive twenty different answers: each would be a true answer. But what is that one figure which, being so placed, all these facts of appearance must result according to the law of perspective?--Ay! this is a different question, this is a new subject. The words which answer this would be absurd if used in reply to the former. [1] Thus, the language of the scripture on natural objects is as strictly philosophical as that of the Newtonian system. Perhaps more so. For it is not only equally true, but it is universal among mankind, and unchangeable. It describes facts of appearance. And what other language would have been consistent with the divine wisdom? The inspired writers must have borrowed their terminology, either from the crude and mistaken philosophy of their own times, and so have sanctified and perpetuated falsehood, unintelligible meantime to all but one in ten thousand; or they must have anticipated the terminology of the true system, without any revelation of the system itself, and so have become unintelligible to all men; or lastly, they must have revealed the system itself, and thus have left nothing for the exercise, developement, or reward of the human understanding, instead of teaching that moral knowledge, and enforcing those social and civic virtues, out of which the arts and sciences will spring up in due time and of their own accord. But nothing of this applies to the materialist; he refers to the very same facts, of which the common language of mankind speaks: and these too are facts that have their sole and entire being in our own consciousness; facts, as to which 'esse' and 'conscire' are identical. Now, whatever is common to all languages, in all climates, at all times, and in all stages of civilization, must be the exponent and consequent of the common consciousness of man as man. Whatever contradicts this universal language, therefore, contradicts the universal consciousness, and the facts in question subsisting exclusively in consciousness, whatever contradicts the consciousness contradicts the fact. I have been seduced into a dry discussion where I had intended only a few amusing facts, in proof, that the mind makes the sense far more than the senses make the mind. If I have life, and health, and leisure, I purpose to compile from the works, memoirs, and transactions of the different philosophical societies in Europe, from magazines, and the rich store of medical and psychological publications, furnished by the English, French, and German press, all the essays and cases that relate to the human faculties under unusual circumstances, (for pathology is the crucible of physiology), excluding such only as are not intelligible without the symbols or terminology of science. These I would arrange under the different senses and powers: as the eye, the ear, the touch, &c.; the imitative power, voluntary and automatic; the imagination, or shaping and modifying power; the fancy or the aggregative and associative power; the understanding, or the regulative, substantiating, and realizing power; the speculative reason, 'vis theoretica et scientifica', or the power, by which we produce, or aim to produce, unity, necessity, and a universality in all our knowledge by means of principles, [2]'a priori'; the will or practical reason; the faculty of choice, ('Willkühr'), and (distinct both from the moral will, and the choice), the sensation of volition which I have found reason to include under the head of single and double touch. Thence I propose to make a new arrangement of madness, whether as defect, or as excess, of any of these senses or faculties; and thus by appropriate cases to shew the difference between;-- 1. a man having lost his reason but not his senses or understanding--that is, when he sees things as other men see them,--adapts means to ends as other men would adapt them, and not seldom, with more sagacity,--but his final end is altogether irrational: 2. his having lost his wits, that is, his understanding or judicial power; but not his reason or the use of his senses,--(such was Don Quixote; and, therefore, we love and reverence him, while we despise Hudibras): 3. his being out of his senses, as in the case of a hypochondriac, to whom his limbs appear to be of glass, although all his conduct is both rational, or moral, and prudent: 4. Or the case may be a combination of all three, though I doubt the existence of such a case, or of any two of them: 5. And lastly, it may be merely such an excess of sensation, as overpowers and suspends all, which is frenzy or raving madness. A diseased state of an organ of sense, or of the inner organs connected with it, will perpetually tamper with the understanding, and unless there be an energetic and watchful counter-action of the judgment (of which I have known more than one instance, in which the comparing and reflecting judgment has obstinately, though painfully, rejected the full testimony of the senses,) will finally overpower it. But when the organ is obliterated, or totally suspended, then the mind applies some other organ to a double use. Passing through Temple Sowerby, in Westmorland, some ten years back, I was shewn a man perfectly blind; and blind from his infancy. Fowell was his name. This man's chief amusement was fishing on the wild and uneven banks of the River Eden, and up the different streams and tarns among the mountains. He had an intimate friend, likewise stone blind, a dexterous card player, who knows every gate and stile far and near throughout the country. These two often coursed together, and the people here, as every where, fond of the marvellous, affirm that they were the best beaters up of game in the whole country. The every way amiable and estimable John Gough of Kendal is not only an excellent mathematician, but an infallible botanist and zoologist. He has frequently at the first feel corrected the mistakes of the most experienced sportsman with regard to the birds or vermin which they had killed, when it chanced to be a variety or rare species so completely resembling the common one, that it required great steadiness of observation to detect the difference, even after it had been pointed out. As to plants and flowers, the rapidity of his touch appears fully equal to that of sight; and the accuracy greater. Good heavens! it needs only to look at him! Why his face sees all over! It is all one eye! I almost envied him; for the purity and excellence of his own nature, never broken in upon by those evil looks, (or features, which are looks become fixtures), with which low cunning, habitual cupidity, presumptuous sciolism, and heart-hardening vanity, coarsen the human face,--it is the mere stamp, the undisturbed 'ectypon' of his own soul! Add to this that he is a Quaker, with all the blest negatives, without any of the silly and factious positives, of that sect, which, with all its bogs and hollows, is still the prime sun-shine spot of Christendom in the eye of the true philosopher. When I was in Germany in the year 1798, I read at Hanover, and met with two respectable persons, one a clergyman, the other a physician, who confirmed to me, the account of the upper-stall master at Hanover, written by himself, and countersigned by all his medical attendants. As far as I recollect, he had fallen from his horse on his head, and in consequence of the blow lost both his sight and hearing for nearly three years, and continued for the greater part of this period in a state of nervous fever. His understanding, however, remained unimpaired and unaffected, and his entire consciousness, as to outward impressions, being confined to the sense of touch, he at length became capable of reading any book (if printed, as most German books are, on coarse paper) with his fingers, in much the same manner in which the 'piano-forte' is played, and latterly with an almost incredible rapidity. Likewise by placing his hand with the fingers all extended, at a small distance from the lips of any person that spoke slowly and distinctly to him, he learned to recognize each letter by its different effects on his nerves, and thus spelt the words as they were uttered. It was particularly noticed both by himself from his sensations, and by his medical attendants from observation, that the letter R, if pronounced full and strong, and recurring once or more in the same word, produced a small spasm, or twitch in his hand and fingers. At the end of three years he recovered both his health and senses, and with the necessity soon lost the power, which he had thus acquired. [Footnote 1: See Church and State. Appendix, p. 231. Ed.] [Footnote 2: This phrase, 'a priori', is, in common, most grossly misunderstood, and an absurdity burthened on it which it does not deserve. By knowledge 'a priori', we do not mean that we can know any thing previously to experience, which would be a contradiction in terms; but having once known it by occasion of experience (that is, something acting upon us from without) we then know, that it must have pre-existed, or the experience itself would have been impossible. By experience only I know, that I have eyes; but then my reason convinces me, that I must have had eyes in order to the experience.] SIR GEORGE ETHEREGE, ETC. Often and often had I read Gay's 'Beggar's Opera', and always delighted with its poignant wit and original satire, and if not without noticing its immorality, yet without any offence from it. Some years ago, I for the first time saw it represented in one of the London theatres; and such were the horror and disgust with which it impressed me, so grossly did it outrage all the best feelings of my nature, that even the angelic voice, and perfect science of Mrs. Billington, lost half their charms, or rather increased my aversion to the piece by an additional sense of incongruity. Then I learned the immense difference between reading and seeing a play;--and no wonder, indeed; for who has not passed over with his eye a hundred passages without offence, which he yet could not have even read aloud, or have heard so read by another person, without an inward struggle?--In mere passive silent reading the thoughts remain mere thoughts, and these too not our own,--phantoms with no attribute of place, no sense of appropriation, that flit over the consciousness as shadows over the grass or young corn in an April day. But even the sound of our own or another's voice takes them out of that lifeless, twilight, realm of thought, which is the confine, the 'intermundium', as it were, of existence and non-existence. Merely that the thoughts have become audible by blending with them a sense of outness gives them a sort of reality. What then,--when by every contrivance of scenery, appropriate dresses, according and auxiliary looks and gestures, and the variety of persons on the stage, realities are employed to carry the imitation of reality as near as possible to perfect delusion? If a manly modesty shrinks from uttering an indecent phrase before a wife or sister in a private room, what must be the effect when a repetition of such treasons (for all gross and libidinous allusions are emphatically treasons against the very foundations of human society, against all its endearing charities, and all the mother virtues,) is hazarded before a mixed multitude in a public theatre? When every innocent woman must blush at once with pain at the thoughts she rejects, and with indignant shame at those, which the foul hearts of others may attribute to her! Thus too with regard to the comedies of Wycherly, Vanburgh, and Etherege, I used to please myself with the flattering comparison of the manners universal at present among all classes above the lowest with those of our ancestors even of the highest ranks. But if for a moment I think of those comedies as having been acted, I lose all sense of comparison in the shame, that human nature could at any time have endured such outrages to its dignity; and if conjugal affection and the sweet name of sister were too weak, that yet filial piety, the gratitude for a mother's holy love, should not have risen and hissed into infancy these traitors to their own natural gifts, who lampooned the noblest passions of humanity, in order to pander for its lowest appetites. As far, however, as one bad thing can be palliated by comparison with a worse, this may be said, in extenuation of these writers; that the mischief, which they can do even on the stage, is trifling compared with that stile of writing which began in the pest-house of French literature, and has of late been imported by the 'Littles' of the age, which consists in a perpetual tampering with the morals without offending the decencies. And yet the admirers of these publications, nay, the authors themselves have the assurance to complain of Shakspeare (for I will not refer to one yet far deeper blasphemy)--Shakspeare, whose most objectionable passages are but grossnesses against lust, and these written in a gross age; while three fourths of their whole works are delicacies for its support and sustenance. Lastly, that I may leave the reader in better humour with the name at the head of this article, I shall quote one scene from Etherege's 'Love in a Tub', which for exquisite, genuine, original humour, is worth all the rest of his plays, though two or three of his witty contemporaries were thrown in among them, as a make weight. The scene might be entitled, the different ways in which the very same story may be told without any variation in matter of fact; for the least attentive reader will perceive the perfect identity of the footboy's account with the Frenchman's own statement in contradiction to it. SCENE IV. [Scene--Sir Frederick's Lodging.] [Enter DUFOY and CLARK.] CLARK. I wonder Sir Frederick stays out so late. DUFOY. Dis is noting; six, seven o'clock in the morning is ver good hour. CLARK. I hope he does not use these hours often. DUFOY. Some six, seven time a veek; no oftiner. CLARK. My Lord commanded me to wait his coming. DUFOY. Matré Clark, to divertise you, I vill tell you, how I did get be acquainted vid dis Bedlam Matré. About two, tree year ago me had for my convenience discharge myself from attending [Enter a footboy] as Matré D'ostel to a person of condition in Parie; it hapen after de dispatch of my little affairé. FOOTBOY. That is, after h'ad spent his money, Sir. DUFOY. Jan foutréde lacque; me vil have vip and de belle vor your breeck, rogue. FOOTBOY. Sir, in a word, he was a Jack-pudding to a mountebank, and turned off for want of wit: my master picked him up before a puppet-show, mumbling a half-penny custard, to send him with a letter to the post. DUFOY. Morbleu, see, see de insolence of de foot boy English, bogre, rascale, you lie, begar I vill cutté your troaté. [Exit FOOTBOY.] CLARK. He's a rogue; on with your story, Monsieur. DUFOY. Matré Clark, I am your ver humble serviteur; but begar me have no patience to be abusé. As I did say, after de dispatché of my affairé, von day being idele, vich does producé the mellanchollique, I did valké over de new bridge in Parie, and to divertise de time, and my more serious toughté, me did look to see de marrioneté, and de jack-pudding, vich did play hundred pretty trické; time de collation vas come; and vor I had no company, I vas unvilling to go to de Cabareté, but did buy a darriolé, littel custardé vich did satisfie my appetite ver vel: in dis time young Monsieur de Grandvil (a jentelman of ver great quality, van dat vas my ver good friendé, and has done me ver great and insignal faveure) come by in his caroche vid dis Sir Frolick, who did pention at the same academy, to learn, de language, de bon mine, de great horse, and many oder trické. Monsieur seeing me did make de bowe and did becken me to come to him: he did telle me dat de Englis jentelman had de lettre vor de poste, and did entreaté me (if I had de opportunity) to see de lettre deliveré: he did telle me too, it void be ver great obligation: de memory of de faveurs I had received from his famelyé, beside de inclination I naturally have to serve de strangeré, made me returné de complemen vid ver great civility, and so I did take de lettre and see it deliveré. Sir Frollick perceiving (by de management of dis affair�) dat I vas man d'esprit, and of vitté, did entreaté me to be his serviteur; me did take d'affection to his personé, and was contenté to live vid him, to counsel and advise him. You see now de lie of de bougre de lacque Englishe, morbleu. EVIDENCE. When I was at Malta, 1805, there happened a drunken squabble on the road from Valette to St. Antonio, between a party of soldiers and another of sailors. They were brought before me the next morning, and the great effect which their intoxication had produced on their memory, and the little or no effect on their courage in giving evidence, may be seen by the following specimen. The soldiers swore that the sailors were the first aggressors, and had assaulted them with the following words: "----your eyes! who stops the line of march there?" The sailors with equal vehemence and unanimity averred, that the soldiers were the first aggressors, and had burst in on them calling out--"Heave to, you lubbers! or we'll run you down." FORCE OF HABIT. An Emir had bought a left eye of a glass eye-maker, supposing that he would be able to see with it. The man begged him to give it a little time: he could not expect that it would see all at once as well as the right eye, which had been for so many years in the habit of it. PHOENIX. The Phoenix lives a thousand years, a secular bird of ages; and there is never more than one at a time in the world. Yet Plutarch very gravely informs us, that the brain of the Phoenix is a pleasant bit, but apt to occasion the head ache. By the by, there are few styles that are not fit for something. I have often wished to see Claudian's splendid poem on the Phoenix translated into English verse in the elaborate rhyme and gorgeous diction of Darwin. Indeed Claudian throughout would bear translation better than any of the ancients. MEMORY AND RECOLLECTION. Beasts and babies remember, that is, recognize: man alone recollects. This distinction was made by Aristotle. 'Aliquid ex Nihilo.' In answer to the 'nihil e nihilo' of the atheists, and their near relations, the 'anima-mundi' men, a humourist pointed to a white blank in a rude wood-cut, which very ingeniously served for the head of hair in one of the figures. BREVITY OF THE GREEK AND ENGLISH COMPARED. As an instance of compression and brevity in narration, unattainable in any language but the Greek, the following distich was quoted: [Greek (transliterated): Chruson anaer euron, helipe brochon autar o chruson, hon lipen, ouk ehuron, haephen, hon ehure, brochon.] This was denied by one of the company, who instantly rendered the lines in English, contending with reason that the indefinite article in English, together with the pronoun "his," &c. should be considered as one word with the noun following, and more than counterbalanced by the greater number of syllables in the Greek words, the terminations of which are in truth only little words glued on to them. The English distich follows, and the reader will recollect that it is a mere trial of comparative brevity, wit and poetry quite out of the question: Jack finding gold left a rope on the ground; Bill missing his gold used the rope, which he found. 1809--1816. THE WILL AND THE DEED. The will to the deed,--the inward principle to the outward act,--is as the kernel to the shell; but yet, in the first place, the shell is necessary for the kernel, and that by which it is commonly known;--and, in the next place, as the shell comes first, and the kernel grows gradually and hardens within it, so is it with the moral principle in man. Legality precedes morality in every individual, even as the Jewish dispensation preceded the Christian in the education of the world at large. THE WILL FOR THE DEED. When may the will be taken for the deed?--Then when the will is the obedience of the whole man;--when the will is in fact the deed, that is, all the deed in our power. In every other case, it is bending the bow without shooting the arrow. The bird of Paradise gleams on the lofty branch, and the man takes aim, and draws the tough yew into a crescent with might and main,--and lo! there is never an arrow on the string. SINCERITY. The first great requisite is absolute sincerity. Falsehood and disguise are miseries and misery-makers, under whatever strength of sympathy, or desire to prolong happy thoughts in others for their sake or your own only as sympathizing with theirs, it may originate. All sympathy, not consistent with acknowledged virtue, is but disguised selfishness. TRUTH AND FALSEHOOD. The pre-eminence of truth over falsehood, even when occasioned by that truth, is as a gentle fountain breathing from forth its air-let into the snow piled over and around it, which it turns into its own substance, and flows with greater murmur; and though it be again arrested, still it is but for a time,--it awaits only the change of the wind to awake and roll onwards its ever increasing stream:-- I semplici pastori Sul Vesolo nevoso, Fatti curvi e canuti, D'alto stupor son muti, Mirando al fonte ombroso Il Po con pochi umori; Poscia udendo gl' onori Dell'urna angusta e stretta, Che'l Adda, che'l Tesino Soverchia il suo cammino, Che ampio al mar s'affretta, Che si spuma, e si suona, Che gli si dà corona! (Chiabrera, Rime, xxviii.) But falsehood is fire in stubble;--it likewise turns all the light stuff around it into its own substance for a moment, one crackling blazing moment,--and then dies; and all its converts are scattered in the wind, without place or evidence of their existence, as viewless as the wind which scatters them. RELIGIOUS CEREMONIES. A man may look at glass, or through it, or both. Let all earthly things be unto thee as glass to see heaven through! Religious ceremonies should be pure glass, not dyed in the gorgeous crimsons and purple blues and greens of the drapery of saints and saintesses. ASSOCIATION. Many a star, which we behold as single, the astronomer resolves into two, each, perhaps, the centre of a separate system. Oft are the flowers of the bind-weed mistaken for the growth of the plant, which it chokes with its intertwine. And many are the unsuspected double stars, and frequent are the parasite weeds, which the philosopher detects in the received opinions of men:--so strong is the tendency of the imagination to identify what it has long consociated. Things that have habitually, though, perhaps, accidentally and arbitrarily, been thought of in connection with each other, we are prone to regard as inseparable. The fatal brand is cast into the fire, and therefore Meleager must consume in the flames. To these conjunctions of custom and association--(the associative power of the mind which holds the mid place between memory and sense,)--we may best apply Sir Thomas Brown's remark, that many things coagulate on commixture, the separate natures of which promise no concretion. CURIOSITY. The curiosity of an honourable mind willingly rests there, where the love of truth does not urge it farther onward, and the love of its neighbour bids it stop;--in other words, it willingly stops at the point, where the interests of truth do not beckon it onward, and charity cries, Halt! NEW TRUTHS. To all new truths, or renovation of old truths, it must be as in the ark between the destroyed and the about-to-be renovated world. The raven must be sent out before the dove, and ominous controversy must precede peace and the olive-wreath. VICIOUS PLEASURES. Centries, or wooden frames, are put under the arches of a bridge, to remain no longer than till the latter are consolidated. Even so pleasures are the devil's scaffolding to build a habit upon;--that formed and steady, the pleasures are sent for fire-wood, and the hell begins in this life. MERITING HEAVEN. Virtue makes us not worthy, but only worthier, of happiness. Existence itself gives a claim to joy. Virtue and happiness are incommensurate quantities. How much virtue must I have, before I have paid off the old debt of my happiness in infancy and childhood! O! We all outrun the constable with heaven's justice! We have to earn the earth, before we can think of earning heaven. DUST TO DUST. We were indeed,-- [Greek (transliterated): panta konis, kai panta gel_os, kai panta to maeden] if we did not feel that we were so. HUMAN COUNTENANCE. There is in every human countenance either a history or a prophecy, which must sadden, or at least soften, every reflecting observer. LIE USEFUL TO TRUTH. A lie accidentally useful to the cause of an oppressed truth: Thus was the tongue of a dog made medicinal to a feeble and sickly Lazarus. SCIENCE IN ROMAN CATHOLIC STATES. In Roman Catholic states, where science has forced its way, and some light must follow, the devil himself cunningly sets up a shop for common sense at the sign of the Infidel. VOLUNTARY BELIEF. "It is possible," says Jeremy Taylor, "for a man to bring himself to believe any thing he hath a mind to." But what is this belief?--Analyse it into its constituents;--is it more than certain passions or feelings converging into the sensation of positiveness as their focus, and then associated with certain sounds or images?--'Nemo enim', says Augustin, 'huic evidentiae contradicet, nisi quem plus defensare delectat, quod sentit, quam, quid sentiendum sit, invenire.' AMANDA. Lovely and pure--no bird of Paradise, to feed on dew and flower-fragrance, and never to alight on earth, till shot by death with pointless shaft; but a rose, to fix its roots in the genial earth, thence to suck up nutriment and bloom strong and healthy,--not to droop and fade amid sunshine and zephyrs on a soilless rock! Her marriage was no meagre prose comment on the glowing and gorgeous poetry of her wooing;--nor did the surly over-browing rock of reality ever cast the dusky shadow of this earth on the soft moonlight of her love's first phantasies. HYMEN'S TORCH. The torch of love may be blown out wholly, but not that of Hymen. Whom the flame and its cheering light and genial warmth no longer bless, him the smoke stifles; for the spark is inextinguishable, save by death:-- 'nigro circumvelatus amictu Maeret Hymen, fumantque atrae sine lumine taedae'. YOUTH AND AGE. Youth beholds happiness gleaming in the prospect. Age looks back on the happiness of youth; and instead of hopes, seeks its enjoyment in the recollections of hope. DECEMBER MORNING. The giant shadows sleeping amid the wan yellow light of the December morning, looked like wrecks and scattered ruins of the long, long night. ARCHBISHOP LEIGHTON. Next to the inspired Scriptures,--yea, and as the vibration of that once struck hour remaining on the air, stands Leighton's Commentary on the first Epistle of Peter. CHRISTIAN HONESTY. "O! that God," says Carey in his Journal in Hindostan, "would make the Gospel successful among them! That would undoubtedly make them honest men, and I fear nothing else ever will." Now this is a fact,--spite of infidels and psilosophizing Christians, a fact. A perfect explanation of it would require and would show the psychology of faith,--the difference between the whole soul's modifying an action, and an action enforced by modifications of the soul amid prudential motives or favouring impulses. Let me here remind myself of the absolute necessity of having my whole faculties awake and imaginative, in order to illustrate this and similar truths;--otherwise my writings will be no other than pages of algebra. INSCRIPTION ON A CLOCK IN CHEAPSIDE. What now thou do'st, or art about to do, Will help to give thee peace, or make thee rue; When hov'ring o'er the line this hand will tell The last dread moment--'twill be heaven or hell. Read for the last two lines-- When wav'ring o'er the dot, this hand shall tell The moment that secures thee heaven or hell! RATIONALISM IS NOT REASON. "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord". An awful text! Now because vengeance is most wisely and lovingly forbidden to us, hence we have by degrees, under false generalizations and puny sensibilities, taken up the notion that vengeance is no where. In short, the abuse of figurative interpretation is endless;--instead of being applied, as it ought to be, to those things which are the most comprehensible, that is, sensuous, and which therefore are the parts likely to be figurative, because such language is a condescension to our weakness,--it is applied to rot away the very pillars, yea, to fret away and dissolve the very corner stones of the temple of religion. O, holy Paul! O, beloved John! full of light and love, whose books are full of intuitions, as those of Paul are books of energies,--the one uttering to sympathizing angels what the other toils to convey to weak-sighted yet docile men:--O Luther! Calvin! Fox, with Penn and Barclay! O Zinzendorf! and ye too, whose outward garments only have been singed and dishonoured in the heathenish furnace of Roman apostacy, Francis of Sales, Fenelon;--yea, even Aquinas and Scotus!--With what astoundment would ye, if ye were alive with your merely human perfections, listen to the creed of our, so called, rational religionists! Rational!--They, who in the very outset deny all reason, and leave us nothing but degrees to distinguish us from brutes;--a greater degree of memory, dearly purchased by the greater solicitudes of fear which convert that memory into foresight. O! place before your eyes the island of Britain in the reign of Alfred, its unpierced woods, its wide morasses and dreary heaths, its blood-stained and desolated shores, its untaught and scanty population; behold the monarch listening now to Bede, and now to John Erigena; and then see the same realm, a mighty empire, full of motion, full of books, where the cotter's son, twelve years old, has read more than archbishops of yore, and possesses the opportunity of reading more than our Alfred himself;--and then finally behold this mighty nation, its rulers and its wise men listening to----Paley and to----Malthus! It is mournful, mournful. INCONSISTENCY. How strange and sad is the laxity with which men in these days suffer the most inconsistent opinions to lie jumbled lazily together in their minds,--holding the antimoralism of Paley and the hypophysics of Locke, and yet gravely, and with a mock faith, talking of God as a pure spirit, of passing out of time into eternity, of a peace which passes all understanding, of loving our neighbour as ourselves, and God above all, and so forth!--Blank contradictions!--What are these men's minds but a huge lumber-room of 'bully', that is, of incompatible notions brought together by a feeling without a sense of connection? HOPE IN HUMANITY. Consider the state of a rich man perfectly 'Adam Smithed', yet with a naturally good heart;--then suppose him suddenly convinced, vitally convinced, of the truth of the blessed system of hope and confidence in reason and humanity! Contrast his new and old views and reflections, the feelings with which he would begin to receive his rents, and to contemplate his increase of power by wealth, the study to relieve the labour of man from all mere annoy and disgust, the preclusion in his own mind of all cooling down from the experience of individual ingratitude, and his conviction that the true cause of all his disappointments was, that his plans were too narrow, too short, too selfish! 'Wenn das Elend viel ist auf der Erde, so beruhet der grund davon, nach Abzug des theils ertraglichen, theils verbesserlichen, theils eingebildeten Uebels der Naturwelt, ganz allein in den moralischen Handlungen der Menschen.' [1] O my God! What a great, inspiriting, heroic thought! Were only a hundred men to combine even my clearness of conviction of this, with a Clarkson and Bell's perseverance, what might not be done! How awful a duty does not hope become! What a nurse, yea, mother of all other the fairest virtues! We despair of others' goodness, and thence are ourselves bad. O! let me live to show the errors of the most of those who have hitherto attempted this work,--how they have too often put the intellectual and the moral, yea, the moral and the religious, faculties at strife with each other, and how they ought to act with an equal eye to all, to feel that all is involved in the perfection of each! This is the fundamental position. [Footnote 1: Although the misery on the earth is great indeed, yet the foundation of it rests, after deduction of the partly bearable, partly removable, and partly imaginary, evil of the natural world, entirely and alone on the moral dealings of men. Ed.] SELF-LOVE IN RELIGION. The unselfishness of self-love in the hopes and fears of religion consists;--first,--in the previous necessity of a moral energy, in order so far to subjugate the sensual, which is indeed and properly the selfish, part of our nature, as to believe in a state after death, on the grounds of the Christian religion:--secondly,--in the abstract and, as it were, unindividual nature of the idea, self, or soul, when conceived apart from our present living body and the world of the senses. In my religious meditations of hope and fear, the reflection that this course of action will purchase heaven for me, for my soul, involves a thought of and for all men who pursue the same course. In worldly blessings, such as those promised in the Old Law, each man might make up to himself his own favourite scheme of happiness. "I will be strictly just, and observe all the laws and ceremonies of my religion, that God may grant me such a woman for my wife, or wealth and honour, with which I will purchase such and such an estate," &c. But the reward of heaven admits no day-dreams; its hopes and its fears are too vast to endure an outline. "I will endeavour to abstain from vice, and force myself to do such and such acts of duty, in order that I may make myself capable of that freedom of moral being, without which heaven would be no heaven to me." Now this very thought tends to annihilate self. For what is a self not distinguished from any other self, but like an individual circle in geometry, uncoloured, and the representative of all other circles. The circle is differenced, indeed, from a triangle or square; so is a virtuous soul from a vicious soul, a soul in bliss from a soul in misery, but no wise distinguished from other souls under the same predicament. That selfishness which includes, of necessity, the selves of all my fellow-creatures, is assuredly a social and generous principle. I speak, as before observed, of the objective or reflex self;--for as to the subjective self, it is merely synonymous with consciousness, and obtains equally whether I think of me or of him;--in both cases it is I thinking. Still, however, I freely admit that there neither is, nor can be, any such self-oblivion in these hopes and fears when practically reflected on, as often takes place in love and acts of loving kindness, and the habit of which constitutes a sweet and loving nature. And this leads me to the third, and most important reflection, namely, that the soul's infinite capacity of pain and of joy, through an infinite duration, does really, on the most high-flying notions of love and justice, make my own soul and the most anxious care for the character of its future fate, an object of emphatic duty. What can be the object of human virtue but the happiness of sentient, still more of moral, beings? But an infinite duration of faculties, infinite in progression, even of one soul, is so vast, so boundless an idea, that we are unable to distinguish it from the idea of the whole race of mankind. If to seek the temporal welfare of all mankind be disinterested virtue, much more must the eternal welfare of my own soul be so;--for the temporal welfare of all mankind is included within a finite space and finite number, and my imagination makes it easy by sympathies and visions of outward resemblance; but myself in eternity, as the object of my contemplation, differs unimaginably from my present self. Do but try to think of yourself in eternal misery!--you will find that you are stricken with horror for it, even as for a third person; conceive it in hazard thereof, and you will feel commiseration for it, and pray for it with an anguish of sympathy very different from the outcry of an immediate self-suffering. Blessed be God! that which makes us capable of vicious self-interestedness, capacitates us also for disinterestedness. That I am capable of preferring a smaller advantage of my own to a far greater good of another man,--this, the power of comparing the notions of "him and me" objectively, enables me likewise to prefer--at least furnishes the condition of my preferring--a greater good of another to a lesser good of my own;--nay, a pleasure of his, or external advantage, to an equal one of my own. And thus too, that I am capable of loving my neighbour as myself, empowers me to love myself as my neighbour,--not only as much, but in the same way and with the very same feeling. This is the great privilege of pure religion. By diverting self-love to our self under those relations, in which alone it is worthy of our anxiety, it annihilates self, as a notion of diversity. Extremes meet. These reflections supply a forcible, and, I believe, quite new argument against the purgatory, both of the Romanists, and of the modern Millennarians, and final Salvationists. Their motives do, indeed, destroy the essence of virtue. The doctors of self-love are misled by a wrong use of the words,--"We love ourselves!" Now this is impossible for a finite and created being in the absolute meaning of self; and in its secondary and figurative meaning, self signifies only a less degree of distance, a narrowness of moral view, and a determination of value by measurement. Hence the body is in this sense our self, because the sensations have been habitually appropriated to it in too great a proportion; but this is not a necessity of our nature. There is a state possible even in this life, in which we may truly say, "My self loves,"--freely constituting its secondary or objective love in what it wills to love, commands what it wills, and wills what it commands. The difference between self-love, and self that loves, consists in the objects of the former as given to it according to the law of the senses, while the latter determines the objects according to the law in the spirit. The first loves because it must; the second, because it ought; and the result of the first is not in any objective, imaginable, comprehensible, action, but in that action by which it abandoned its power of true agency, and willed its own fall. This is, indeed, a mystery. How can it be otherwise?--For if the will be unconditional, it must be inexplicable, the understanding of a thing being an insight into its conditions and causes. But whatever is in the will is the will, and must therefore be equally inexplicable. In a word, the difference of an unselfish from a selfish love, even in this life, consists in this, that the latter depends on our transferring our present passion or appetite, or rather on our dilating and stretching it out in imagination, as the covetous man does;--while in the former we carry ourselves forward under a very different state from the present, as the young man, who restrains his appetites in respect of his future self as a tranquil and healthy old man. This last requires as great an effort of disinterestedness as, if not a greater than, to give up a present enjoyment to another person who is present to us. The alienation from distance in time and from diversity of circumstance, is greater in the one case than in the other. And let it be remembered, that a Christian may exert all the virtues and virtuous charities of humanity in any state; yea, in the pangs of a wounded conscience, he may feel for the future periods of his own lost spirit, just as Adam for all his posterity. O magical, sympathetic, 'anima! principium hylarchicum! rationes spermaticae!' [Greek: logoi poiaetikoi!] O formidable words! And O man! thou marvellous beast-angel! thou ambitious beggar! How pompously dost thou trick out thy very ignorance with such glorious disguises, that thou mayest seem to hide it in order only to worship it! LIMITATION OF LOVE OF POETRY. A man may be, perhaps, exclusively a poet, a poet most exquisite in his kind, though the kind must needs be of inferior worth; I say, may be; for I cannot recollect any one instance in which I have a right to suppose it. But, surely, to have an exclusive pleasure in poetry, not being yourself a poet;--to turn away from all effort, and to dwell wholly on the images of another's vision,--is an unworthy and effeminate thing. A jeweller may devote his whole time to jewels unblamed; but the mere amateur, who grounds his taste on no chemical or geological idea, cannot claim the same exemption from despect. How shall he fully enjoy Wordsworth, who has never meditated on the truths which Wordsworth has wedded to immortal verse? HUMILITY OF THE AMIABLE. It is well ordered by nature, that the amiable and estimable have a fainter perception of their own qualities than their friends have;--otherwise they would love themselves. And though they may fear flattery, yet if not justified in suspecting intentional deceit, they cannot but love and esteem those who love and esteem them, only as lovely and estimable, and give them proof of their having done well, where they have meant to do well. TEMPER IN ARGUMENT. "All reasoners ought to be perfectly dispassionate, and ready to allow all the force of the arguments, they are to confute. But more especially those, who are to argue in behalf of Christianity, ought carefully to preserve the spirit of it in their manner of expressing themselves. I have so much honour for the Christian clergy, that I had much rather hear them railed at, than hear them rail; and I must say, that I am often grievously offended with the generality of them for their method of treating all who differ from them in opinion." (MRS. CHAPONE.) Besides, what is the use of violence? None. What is the harm? Great, very great;--chiefly, in the confirmation of error, to which nothing so much tends, as to find your opinions attacked with weak arguments and unworthy feelings. A generous mind becomes more attached to principles so treated, even as it would to an old friend, after he had been grossly calumniated. We are eager to make compensation. PATRIARCHAL GOVERNMENT. The smooth words used by all factions, and their wide influence, may be exemplified in all the extreme systems, as for instance in the patriarchal government of Filmer. Take it in one relation, and it imports love, tender anxiety, longer experience, and superior wisdom, bordering on revelation, especially to Jews and Christians, who are in the life-long habit of attaching to patriarchs an intimacy with the Supreme Being. Take it on the other side, and it imports, that a whole people are to be treated and governed as children by a man not so old as very many, not older than very many, and in all probability not wiser than the many, and by his very situation precluded from the same experience. CALLOUS SELF-CONCEIT. The most hateful form of self-conceit is the callous form, when it boasts and swells up on the score of its own ignorance, as implying exemption from a folly. "We profess not to understand;"--"We are so unhappy as to be quite in the dark as to the meaning of this writer;"--"All this may be very fine, but we are not ashamed to confess that to us it is quite unintelligible:"--then quote a passage without the context, and appeal to the PUBLIC, whether they understand it or not!--Wretches! Such books were not written for your public. If it be a work on inward religion, appeal to the inwardly religious, and ask them!--If it be of true love and its anguish and its yearnings, appeal to the true lover! What have the public to do with this? A LIBRARIAN. He was like a cork, flexible, floating, full of pores and openings, and yet he could neither return nor transmit the waters of Helicon, much less the light of Apollo. The poet, by his side, was like a diamond, transmitting to all around, yet retaining for himself alone, the rays of the god of day. TRIMMING. An upright shoe may fit both feet; but never saw I a glove that would fit both hands. It is a man for a mean or mechanic office, that can be employed equally well under either of two opposite parties. DEATH. Death but supplies the oil for the inextinguishable lamp of life. LOVE AN ACT OF THE WILL. Love, however sudden, as when we fall in love at first sight, (which is, perhaps, always the case of love in its highest sense,) is yet an act of the will, and that too one of its primary, and therefore ineffable acts. This is most important; for if it be not true, either love itself is all a romantic 'hum', a mere connection of desire with a form appropriated to excite and gratify it, or the mere repetition of a daydream;--or if it be granted that love has a real, distinct, and excellent being, I know not how we could attach blame and immorality to inconstancy, when confined to the affections and a sense of preference. Either, therefore, we must brutalize our notions with Pope:-- Lust, thro' some certain strainers well refin'd, Is gentle love and charms all woman-kind: or we must dissolve and thaw away all bonds of morality by the irresistible shocks of an irresistible sensibility with Sterne. WEDDED UNION. The well-spring of all sensible communion is the natural delight and need, which undepraved man hath to transfuse from himself into others, and to receive from others into himself, those things, wherein the excellency of his kind doth most consist; and the eminence of love or marriage communion is, that this mutual transfusion can take place more perfectly and totally in this, than in any other mode. Prefer person before money, good-temper with good sense before person; and let all, wealth, easy temper, strong understanding and beauty, be as nothing to thee, unless accompanied by virtue in principle and in habit. Suppose competence, health, and honesty; then a happy marriage depends on four things:--1. An understanding proportionate to thine, that is, a recipiency at least of thine:--2. natural sensibility and lively sympathy in general:--3. steadiness in attaching and retaining sensibility to its proper objects in its proper proportions:--4. mutual liking; including person and all the thousand obscure sympathies that determine conjugal liking, that is, love and desire to A. rather than to B. This seems very obvious and almost trivial: and yet all unhappy marriages arise from the not honestly putting, and sincerely answering each of these four questions: any one of them negatived, marriage is imperfect, and in hazard of discontent. DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HOBBES AND SPINOSA. In the most similar and nearest points there is a difference, but for the most part there is an absolute contrast, between Hobbes and Spinosa. Thus Hobbes makes a state of war the natural state of man from the essential and ever continuing nature of man, as not a moral, but only a frightenable, being:--Spinosa makes the same state a necessity of man out of society, because he must then be an undeveloped man, and his moral being dormant; and so on through the whole. THE END MAY JUSTIFY THE MEANS. Whatever act is necessary to an end, and ascertained to be necessary and proportionate both to the end and the agent, takes its nature from that end. This premised, the proposition is innocent that ends may justify means. Remember, however, the important distinction:--'Unius facti diversi fines esse possunt: unius actionis non possunt'. I have somewhere read this remark:--'Omne meritum est voluntarium, aut voluntate originis, aut origine voluntatis'. Quaintly as this is expressed, it is well worth consideration, and gives the true meaning of Baxter's famous saying,--"Hell is paved with good intentions." NEGATIVE THOUGHT. On this calm morning of the 13th of November, 1809, it occurs to me, that it is by a negation and voluntary act of no thinking that we think of earth, air, water, &c. as dead. It is necessary for our limited powers of consciousness, that we should be brought to this negative state, and that this state should pass into custom; but it is likewise necessary that at times we should awake and step forward; and this is effected by those extenders of our consciousness--sorrow, sickness, poetry, and religion. The truth is, we stop in the sense of life just when we are not forced to go on, and then adopt a permission of our feelings for a precept of our reason. MAN'S RETURN TO HEAVEN. Heaven bestows light and influence on this lower world, which reflects the blessed rays, though it cannot recompense them. So man may make a return to God, but no requital. YOUNG PRODIGIES. Fair criticism on young prodigies and Rosciuses in verse, or on the stage, is arraigned,-- as the envious sneaping frost That bites the first-born infants of the spring. If there were no better answer, the following a good heart would scarcely admit;--but where nine-tenths of the applause have been mere wonderment and miracle-lust ('Wundursucht') these verses are an excellent accompaniment to other arguments:-- Well, say it be!--Yet why of summer boast, Before the birds have natural cause to sing? Why should we joy in an abortive birth? At Christmas I no more desire a rose, Than wish a snow in May's new budding shows; But like of each thing that in reason grows. 'Love's Labours Lost'. [1] [Footnote 1: Slightly altered. Ed.] WELCH NAMES. The small number of surnames, and those Christian names and patronymics, not derived from trades, &c. is one mark of a country either not yet, or only recently, unfeudalized. Hence in Scotland the Mackintoshes, Macaulays, and so on. But the most remarkable show of this I ever saw, is the list of subscribers to Owen's Welch Dictionary. In letter D. there are 31 names, 21 of which are 'Davis' or 'Davies', and the other three are not Welchmen. In E. there are 30; 16 'Evans'; 6 'Edwards'; 1 'Edmonds'; I 'Egan', and the remainder 'Ellis'. In G. two-thirds are 'Griffiths'. In H. all are 'Hughes' and 'Howell'. In I. there are 66; all 'Jonesses'. In L. 3 or 4 'Lewises'; 1 'Lewellyn'; all the rest 'Lloyds'. M. four-fifths 'Morgans'. O. entirely 'Owen'. R. all 'Roberts' or 'Richards'. T. all 'Thomases'. V. all 'Vaughans';--and W. 64 names, 56 of them 'Williams'. GERMAN LANGUAGE. The real value of melody in a language is considerable as subadditive; but when not jutting out into consciousness under the friction of comparison, the absence or inferiority of it is, as privative of pleasure, of little consequence. For example, when I read Voss's translation of the Georgics, I am, as it were, reading the original poem, until something particularly well expressed occasions me to revert to the Latin; and then I find the superiority, or at least the powers, of the German in all other respects, but am made feelingly alive, at the same time, to its unsmooth mixture of the vocal and the organic, the fluid and the substance, of language. The fluid seems to have been poured in on the corpuscles all at once, and the whole has, therefore, curdled, and collected itself into a lumpy soup full of knots of curds inisled by interjacent whey at irregular distances, and the curd lumpets of various sizes. It is always a question how far the apparent defects of a language arise from itself or from the false taste of the nation speaking it. Is the practical inferiority of the English to the Italian in the power of passing from grave to light subjects, in the manner of Ariosto, the fault of the language itself? Wieland in his Oberon, broke successfully through equal difficulties. It is grievous to think how much less careful the English have been to preserve than to acquire. Why have we lost, or all but lost, the 'ver' or 'for' as a prefix,--'fordone', 'forwearied', &c.; and the 'zer' or 'to',-'zerreissen', to rend, &c. 'Jugend', 'Jüngling': 'youth', 'youngling'; why is that last word now lost to common use, and confined to sheep and other animals? [Greek: En to phronein maedhen aedistos bios.] Soph. His life was playful from infancy to death, like the snow which in a calm day falls, but scarce seems to fall, and plays and dances in and out till the very moment that it gently reaches the earth. THE UNIVERSE. It surely is not impossible that to some infinitely superior being the whole universe may be as one plain, the distance between planet and planet being only as the pores in a grain of sand, and the spaces between system and system no greater than the intervals between one grain and the grain adjacent. HARBEROUS. 'Harberous', that is, harbourous, is the old version of St. Paul's 'philoxenos', and a beautiful word it is. 'Kosmis' should be rendered a gentleman in dress and address, in appearance and demeanour, a man of the world in an innocent sense. The Latin 'mundus' has the same double force in it; only that to the rude early Romans, to have a clean pair of hands and a clean dress, was to be drest; just as we say to boys, "Put on your clean clothes!" The different meanings attached to the same word or phrase in different sentences, will, of course, be accompanied with a different feeling in the mind; this will affect the pronunciation, and hence arises a new word. We should vainly try to produce the same feeling in our minds by 'and he' as by 'who'; for the different use of the latter, and its feeling having now coalesced. Yet 'who' is properly the same word and pronunciation, as 'ho' with the digammate prefix, and as 'qui' kai ho. AN ADMONITION. There are two sides to every question. If thou hast genius and poverty to thy lot, dwell on the foolish, perplexing, imprudent, dangerous, and even immoral, conduct of promise-breach in small things, of want of punctuality, of procrastination in all its shapes and disguises. Force men to reverence the dignity of thy moral strength in and for itself,--seeking no excuses or palliations from fortune, or sickness, or a too full mind that, in opulence of conception, overrated its powers of application. But if thy fate should be different, shouldest thou possess competence, health and ease of mind, and then be thyself called upon to judge such faults in another so gifted,--O! then, upon the other view of the question, say, Am I in ease and comfort, and dare I wonder that he, poor fellow, acted so and so? Dare I accuse him? Ought I not to shadow forth to myself that, glad and luxuriating in a short escape from anxiety, his mind over-promised for itself; that, want combating with his eager desire to produce things worthy of fame, he dreamed of the nobler, when he should have been producing the meaner, and so had the meaner obtruded on his moral being, when the nobler was making full way on his intellectual? Think of the manifoldness of his accumulated petty calls! Think, in short, on all that should be like a voice from heaven to warn thyself against this and this, and call it all up for pity and for palliation; and then draw the balance. Take him in his whole,--his head, his heart, his wishes, his innocence of all selfish crime, and a hundred years hence, what will be the result? The good,--were it but a single volume that made truth more visible, and goodness more lovely, and pleasure at once more akin to virtue and, self-doubled, more pleasurable! and the evil,--while he lived, it injured none but himself; and where is it now? in his grave. Follow it not thither. TO THEE CHERUBIM AND SERAPHIM CONTINUALLY DO CRY. The mighty kingdoms angelical, like the thin clouds at dawn, receiving and hailing the first radiance, and singing and sounding forth their blessedness, increase the rising joy in the heart of God, spread wide and utter forth the joy arisen, and in innumerable finite glories interpret all they can of infinite bliss. DEFINITION OF MIRACLE. A phaenomenon in no connection with any other phaenomenon, as its immediate cause, is a miracle; and what is believed to have been such, is miraculous for the person so believing When it is strange and surprising, that is, with out any analogy in our former experience--it is called a miracle. The kind defines the thing:--the circumstances the word. To stretch out my arm is a miracle, unless the materialists should be more cunning than they have proved themselves hitherto. To reanimate a dead man by an act of the will, no intermediate agency employed, not only is, but is called, a miracle. A scripture miracle, therefore, must be so defined, as to express, not only its miracular essence, but likewise the condition of its appearing miraculous; add therefore to the preceding, the words 'praeter omnem prior em experientiam'. It might be defined likewise an effect, not having its cause in any thing congenerous. That thought calls up thought is no more miraculous than that a billiard ball moves a billiard ball; but that a billiard ball should excite a thought, that is, be perceived, is a miracle, and, were it strange, would be called such. For take the converse, that a thought should call up a billiard ball! Yet where is the difference, but that the one is a common experience, the other never yet experienced? It is not strictly accurate to affirm, that every thing would appear a miracle, if we were wholly uninfluenced by custom, and saw things as they are:--for then the very ground of all miracles would probably vanish, namely, the heterogeneity of spirit and matter. For the 'quid ulterius?' of wonder, we should have the 'ne plus ultra' of adoration. Again--the word miracle has an objective, a subjective, and a popular meaning;--as objective,--the essence of a miracle consists in the heterogeneity of the consequent and its causative antecedent;--as subjective,--in the assumption of the heterogeneity. Add the wonder and surprise excited, when the consequent is out of the course of experience, and we know the popular sense and ordinary use of the word. DEATH, AND GROUNDS OF BELIEF IN A FUTURE STATE. It is an important thought, that death, judged of by corporeal analogies, certainly implies discerption or dissolution of parts; but pain and pleasure do not; nay, they seem inconceivable except under the idea of concentration. Therefore the influence of the body on the soul will not prove the common destiny of both. I feel myself not the slave of nature (nature used here as the 'mundus sensibilis') in the sense in which animals are. Not only my thoughts and affections extend to objects trans-natural, as truth, virtue, God; not only do my powers extend vastly beyond all those, which I could have derived from the instruments and organs, with which nature has furnished me; but I can do what nature 'per se' cannot. I ingraft, I raise heavy bodies above the clouds, and guide my course over ocean and through air. I alone am lord of fire and light; other creatures are but their alms-folk, and of all the so called elements, water, earth, air, and all their compounds (to speak in the ever-enduring language of the senses, to which nothing can be revealed, but as compact, or fluid, or aerial), I not merely subserve myself of them, but I employ them. 'Ergo', there is in me, or rather I am, a præter-natural, that is, a super-sensuous thing: but what is not nature, why should it perish with nature? why lose the faculty of vision, because my spectacles are broken? Now to this it will be objected, and very forcibly too;--that the soul or self is acted upon by nature through the body, and water or caloric, diffused through or collected in the brain, will derange the faculties of the soul by deranging the organization of the brain; the sword cannot touch the soul; but by rending the flesh, it will rend the feelings. Therefore the violence of nature may, in destroying the body, mediately destroy the soul! It is to this objection that my first sentence applies; and is an important, and, I believe, a new and the only satisfactory reply I have ever heard. The one great and binding ground of the belief of God and a hereafter, is the law of conscience: but as the aptitudes, and beauty, and grandeur, of the world, are a sweet and beneficent inducement to this belief, a constant fuel to our faith, so here we seek these arguments, not as dissatisfied with the one main ground, not as of 'little faith', but because, believing it to be, it is natural we should expect to find traces of it, and as a noble way of employing and developing, and enlarging the faculties of the soul, and this, not by way of motive, but of assimilation, producing virtue. 2d April, 1811. HATRED OF INJUSTICE. It is the mark of a noble nature to be more shocked with the unjust condemnation of a bad man than of a virtuous one; as in the instance of Strafford. For in such cases the love of justice, and the hatred of the contrary, are felt more nakedly, and constitute a strong passion 'per se', not only unaided by, but in conquest of, the softer self-repaying sympathies. A wise foresight too inspires jealousy, that so may principles be most easily overthrown. This is the virtue of a wise man, which a mob never possesses, even as a mob never, perhaps, has the malignant 'finis ultimus', which is the vice of a man. RELIGION. Amongst the great truths are these:-- I. That religion has no speculative dogmas; that all is practical, all appealing to the will, and therefore all imperative. 'I am the Lord thy God: Thou shall have none other gods but me.' II. That, therefore, miracles are not the proofs, but the necessary results, of revelation. They are not the key of the arch and roof of evidence, though they may be a compacting stone in it, which gives while it receives strength. Hence, to make the intellectual faith a fair analogon or unison of the vital faith, it ought to be stamped in the mind by all the evidences duly co-ordinated, and not designed by single pen-strokes, beginning either here or there. III. That, according to No. I., Christ is not described primarily and characteristically as a teacher, but as a doer; a light indeed, but an effective light, the sun which causes what it shows, as well as shows what it first causes. IV. That a certain degree of morality is presupposed in the reception of Christianity; it is the 'substratum' of the moral interest which substantiates the evidence of miracles. The instance of a profligate suddenly converted, if properly sifted, will be found but an apparent exception. V. That the being of a God, and the immortality of man, are every where assumed by Christ. VI. That Socinianism is not a religion, but a theory, and that, too, a very pernicious, or a very unsatisfactory, theory. Pernicious,--for it excludes all our deep and awful ideas of the perfect holiness of God, his justice and his mercy, and thereby makes the voice of conscience a delusion, as having no correspondent in the character of the legislator; regarding God as merely a good-natured pleasure-giver, so happiness be produced, indifferent as to the means:--Unsatisfactory, for it promises forgiveness without any solution of the difficulty of the compatibility of this with the justice of God; in no way explains the fallen condition of man, nor offers any means for his regeneration. "If you will be good, you will be happy," it says: that may be, but my will is weak; I sink in the struggle. VII. That Socinianism never did and never can subsist as a general religion. For 1. It neither states the disease, on account of which the human being hungers for revelation, nor prepares any remedy in general, nor ministers any hope to the individual. 2. In order to make itself endurable on scriptural grounds, it must so weaken the texts and authority of scripture, as to leave in scripture no binding ground of proof of any thing. 3. Take a pious Jew, one of the Maccabees, and compare his faith and its grounds with Priestley's; and then, for what did Christ come? VIII. That Socinianism involves the shocking thought that man will not, and ought not to be expected to, do his duty as man, unless he first makes a bargain with his Maker, and his Maker with him. Give me, the individual me, a positive proof that I shall be in a state of pleasure after my death, if I do so and so, and then I will do it, not else! And the proof asked is not one dependent on, or flowing from, his moral nature and moral feelings, but wholly 'extra'-moral, namely, by his outward senses, the subjugation of which to faith, that is, the passive to the actional and self-created belief, is the great object of all religion! IX. That Socinianism involves the dreadful reflection, that it can establish its probability (its certainty being wholly out of the question and impossible, Priestley himself declaring that his own continuance as a Christian depended on a contingency,) only on the destruction of all the arguments furnished for our permanent and essential distinction from brutes; that it must prove that we have no grounds to obey, but, on the contrary, that in wisdom we ought to reject and declare utterly null, all the commands of conscience, and all that is implied in those commands, reckless of the confusion introduced into our notions of means and ends by the denial of truth, goodness, justice, mercy, and the other fundamental ideas in the idea of God; and all this in order to conduct us to a Mahomet's bridge of a knife's edge, or the breadth of a spear, to salvation. And, should we discover any new documents, or should an acuter logician make plain the sophistry of the deductions drawn from the present documents (and surely a man who has passed from orthodoxy to the loosest Arminianism, and thence to Arianism, and thence to direct Humanism, has no right from his experience to deny the probability of this)--then to fall off into the hopeless abyss of atheism. For the present life, we know, is governed by fixed laws, which the atheist acknowledges as well as the theist; and if there be no spiritual world, and no spiritual life in a spiritual world, what possible bearing can the admission or rejection of this hypothesis have on our practice or feelings? Lastly, the Mosaic dispensation was a scheme of national education; the Christian is a world-religion; and the former was susceptible of evidence and probabilities which do not, and cannot, apply to the latter. A savage people forced, as it were, into a school of circumstances, and gradually in the course of generations taught the unity of God, first and for centuries merely as a practical abstinence from the worship of any other,--how can the principles of such a system apply to Christianity, which goes into all nations and to all men, the most enlightened, even by preference? Writing several years later than the date of the preceding paragraphs, I commend the modern Unitarians for their candour in giving up the possible worshipability of Christ, if not very God,--a proof that truth will ultimately prevail. The Arians, then existing, against whom Waterland wrote, were not converted; but in the next generation the arguments made their way. This is fame 'versus' reputation. THE APOSTLES' CREED. Is it not probable from what is found in the writings of Cyril, Eusebius, Cyprian, Marcellus of Ancyra and others, that our present Apostles' Creed is not the very 'Symbolum Fidei', which was not to be written, but was always repeated at baptism? For this latter certainly contained the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Logos; and, therefore, it seems likely that the present Apostles' creed was an introductory, and, as it were, alphabetical, creed for young catechumens in their first elementation. Is it to be believed that the 'Symbolum Fidei' contained nothing but the mere history of Jesus, without any of the peculiar doctrines, or that, if it did not contain something more, the great and vehement defenders of the Trinity would speak of it so magnificently as they do, even preferring its authority to that of the scriptures?--Besides, does not Austin positively say that our present Apostles' creed was gathered out of the scriptures? Whereas the 'Symbolum Fidei' was elder than the Gospels, and probably contained only the three doctrines of the Trinity, the Redemption, and the Unity of the Church. May it not have happened, when baptism was administered so early, and at last even to infants, that the old 'Symbolum Fidei' became gradually 'inusitatum', as being appropriated to adult proselytes from Judaism or Paganism? This seems to me even more than probable; for in proportion to the majority of born over converted Christians must the creed of instruction have been more frequent than that of doctrinal profession. A GOOD HEART. There is in Abbt's Essays an attempt to determine the true sense of this phrase, at least to unfold ('auseinandersetzen') what is meant and felt by it. I was much pleased with the remarks, I remember, and with the counterposition of Tom Jones and Sir Charles Grandisori. Might not Luther and Calvin serve? But it is made less noticeable in these last by its co-existence with, and sometimes real, more often apparent, subordination to fixed conscious principles, and is thus less naturally characteristic. Parson Adams contrasted with Dr. Harrison in Fielding's Amelia would do. Then there is the suppression of the good heart and the substitution of principles or motives for the good heart, as in Laud, and the whole race of conscientious persecutors. Such principles constitute the virtues of the Inquisition. A good heart contrasts with the Pharisaic righteousness. This last contemplation of the Pharisees, the dogmatists, and the rigorists 'in toto genere', serves to reconcile me to the fewness of the men who act on fixed principles. For unless there exist intellectual power to determine aright what are the 'principia jam fixa et formata', and unless there be the wisdom of love preceding the love of wisdom, and unless to this be added a graciousness of nature, a loving kindness,--these rigorists are but bigots often to errors, and active, yea, remorseless in preventing or staying the rise and progress of truth. And even when bigotted adherents to true principles, yet they render truth unamiable, and forbid little children to come thereunto. As human nature now is, it is well, perhaps, that the number should be few, seeing that of the few, the greater part are pre-maturities. The number of those who act from good hearted impulses, a kindly and cheerful mood, and the play of minute sympathies, continuous in their discontinuity, like the sand-thread of the hour-glass, and from their minuteness and transiency not calculated to stiffen or inflate the individual, and thus remaining unendangered by egotism, and its unhandsome vizard contempt, is far larger: and though these temperamental 'pro'-virtues will too often fail, and are not built to stand the storms of strong temptation; yet on the whole they carry on the benignant scheme of social nature, like the other instincts that rule the animal creation. But of all the most numerous are the men, who have ever more their own dearliest beloved self, as the only or main goal or butt of their endeavours straight and steady before their eyes, and whose whole inner world turns on the great axis of self-interest. These form the majority, if not of mankind, yet of those by whom the business of life is carried on; and most expedient it is, that so it should be; nor can we imagine any thing better contrived for the advantage of society. For these are the most industrious, orderly, and circumspect portion of society, and the actions governed by this principle with the results, are the only materials on which either the statesman, or individuals can safely calculate. There is, indeed, another sort, (a class they can scarcely be called), who are below self-interest; who live under the mastery of their senses and appetites; and whose selfishness is an animal instinct, a goad 'a tergo', not an attraction, 'a re prospecta', or (so to speak) from a projected self. In fact, such individuals cannot so properly be said to have a self, as to be machines for the self of nature: and are as little capable of loving themselves as of loving their neighbours. Such there are. Nay, (if we were to count only without weighing) the aggregate of such persons might possibly form a larger number than the class preceding. But they may safely be taken up into the latter, for the main ends of society, as being or sure to become its materials and tools. Their folly is the stuff in which the sound sense of the worldly-wise is at once manifested and remunerated; their idleness of thought, with the passions, appetites, likings and fancies, which are its natural growth, though weeds, give direction and employment to the industry of the other. The accidents of inheritance by birth, of accumulation of property in partial masses, are thus counteracted,--and the aneurisms in the circulating system prevented or rendered fewer and less obstinate,--whilst animal want, the sure general result of idleness and its accompanying vices, tames at length the selfish host, into the laborious slaves and mechanic implements of the self-interested. Thus, without public spirit, nay, by the predominance of the opposite quality, the latter are the public benefactors: and, giving steadfastness and compactness to the whole, lay in the ground of the canvass, on which minds of finer texture may impress beauty and harmony. Lastly, there is in the heart of all men a working principle,--call it ambition, or vanity, or desire of distinction, the inseparable adjunct of our individuality and personal nature, and flowing from the same source as language--the instinct and necessity in each man of declaring his particular existence, and thus of singling or singularizing himself. In some this principle is far stronger than in others, while in others its comparative dimness may pass for its non-existence. But in thoughts at least, and secret fancies there is in all men (idiocy of course excepted) a wish to remain the same and yet to be something else, and something more, or to exhibit what they are, or imagine they might be, somewhere else and to other spectators. Now, though this desire of distinction, when it is disproportionate to the powers and qualities by which the individual is indeed distinguished, or when it is the governing passion, or taken as the rule of conduct, is but a "knavish sprite," yet as an attendant and subaltern spirit, it has its good purposes and beneficial effects: and is not seldom --sent with broom before, To sweep the dust behind the door. Though selfish in its origin, it yet tends to elevate the individual from selfishness into self-love, under a softer and perhaps better form than that of self-interest, the form of self-respect. Whatever other objects the man may be pursuing, and with whatever other inclinations, he is still by this principle impelled and almost compelled to pass out of himself in imagination, and to survey himself at a sufficient distance, in order to judge what figure he is likely to make in the eyes of his fellow men. But in thus taking his station as at the apex of a triangle, while the self is at one angle of the base, he makes it possible at least that the image of his neighbour may appear at the other, whether by spontaneous association, or placed there for the purposes of comparison; and so both be contemplated at equal distance. But this is the first step towards disinterestedness; and though it should never be reached, the advantage of the appearance is soon learnt, and the necessity of avoiding the appearance of the contrary. But appearances cannot be long sustained without some touch of the reality. At all events there results a control over our actions; some good may be produced, and many a poisonous or offensive fruit will be prevented. Courtesy, urbanity, gallantry, munificence; the outward influence of the law shall I call it, or rather fashion of honour--these are the handsome hypocrisies that spring from the desire of distinction. I ask not the genius of a Machiavel, a Tacitus, or a Swift;--it needs only a worldly experience and an observing mind, to convince a man of forty that there is no medium between the creed of misanthropy and that of the gospel. A pagan might be as orthodox as Paul on the doctrine of works. First,--set aside the large portion of them that have their source in the constitutional temperament,--the merit of which, if any, belongs to nature, not to the individual agent; and of the remaining number of good works, nine are derived from vices for one that has its origin in virtue. I have often in looking at the water-works, and complex machinery of our manufactories, indulged a humorous mood by fancying that the hammers, cogs, fly-wheels, &c. were each actuated by some appetite, or passion--hate, rage, revenge, vanity, cupidity, &c. while the general result was most benignant, and the machine, taken as a whole, the product of power, knowledge, and benevolence! Such a machine does the moral world, the world of human nature, appear--and to those who seem ever more to place the comparison and the alternative between hell and earth, and quite overlook the opposition between earth and heaven, I recommend this meditation. EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY. [1] I. MIRACLES--as precluding the contrary evidence of no miracles. II. The material of Christianity, its existence and history. III. The doctrines of Christianity, and the correspondence of human nature to those doctrines,--illustrated, 1st, historically--as the actual production of a new world, and the dependence of the fate of the planet upon it;-- 2nd, individually--from its appeal for its truth to an asserted fact,--which, whether it be real or not, every man possessing reason has an equal power of ascertaining within himself;--namely, a will which has more or less lost its freedom, though not the consciousness that it ought to be and may become free;--the conviction that this cannot be achieved without the operation of a principle connatural with itself;--the evident rationality of an entire confidence in that principle, being the condition and means of its operation;--the experience in his own nature of the truth of the process described by Scripture as far as he can place himself within the process, aided by the confident assurances of others as to the effects experienced by them, and which he is striving to arrive at. All these form a practical Christian. Add, however, a gradual opening out of the intellect to more and more clear perceptions of the strict coincidence of the doctrines of Christianity, with the truths evolved by the mind, from reflections on its own nature. To such a man one main test of the objectivity, the entity, the objective truth of his faith, is its accompaniment by an increase of insight into the moral beauty and necessity of the process which it comprises, and the dependence of that proof on the causes asserted. Believe, and if thy belief be right, that insight which gradually transmutes faith into knowledge will be the reward of that belief. The Christian, to whom, after a long profession of Christianity, the mysteries remain as much mysteries as before, is in the same state as a schoolboy with regard to his arithmetic to whom the _facit_ at the end of the examples in his cyphering book is the whole ground for his assuming that such and such figures amount to so and so. 3rd. In the above I include the increasing discoveries in the correspondence of the history, the doctrines and the promises of Christianity, with the past, present, and probable future of human nature; and in this state a fair comparison of the religion as a divine philosophy, with all other religions which have pretended to revelations and all other systems of philosophy; both with regard to the totality of its truth and its identification with the manifest march of affairs. I should conclude that, if we suppose a man to have convinced himself that not only the doctrines of Christianity, which may be conceived independently of history or time, as the Trinity, spiritual influences, &c. are coincident with the truths which his reason, thus strengthened, has evolved from its own sources, but that the historical dogmas, namely, of the incarnation of the creative Logos, and his becoming a personal agent, are themselves founded in philosophical necessity; then it seems irrational, that such a man should reject the belief of the actual appearance of a religion strictly correspondent therewith, at a given time recorded, even as much as that he should reject Caesar's account of his wars in Gaul, after he has convinced himself 'a priori of their probability. As the result of these convictions he will not scruple to receive the particular miracles recorded, inasmuch as it would be miraculous that an incarnate God should not work what must to mere men appear as miracles; inasmuch as it is strictly accordant with the ends and benevolent nature of such a being, to commence the elevation of man above his mere senses by attracting and enforcing attention, first through an appeal to those senses. But with equal reason will he expect that no other or greater force should be laid on these miracles as such; that they should not be spoken of as good in themselves, much less as the adequate and ultimate proof of that religion; and likewise he will receive additional satisfaction, should he find these miracles so wrought, and on such occasions, as to give them a personal value as symbols of important truths when their miraculousness was no longer needful or efficacious. [Footnote 1: Dictated to, and communicated by, Dr. Brabant of Devizes. Ed.] CONFESSIO FIDEI Nov. 3, 1816. I. I. I believe that I am a free-agent, inasmuch as, and so far as, I have a will, which renders me justly responsible for my actions, omissive as well as commissive. Likewise that I possess reason, or a law of right and wrong, which, uniting with my sense of moral responsibility, constitutes the voice of conscience. II. Hence it becomes my absolute duty to believe, and I do believe, that there is a God, that is, a Being, in whom supreme reason and a most holy will are one with an infinite power; and that all holy will is coincident with the will of God, and therefore secure in its ultimate consequences by His omnipotence;--having, if such similitude be not unlawful, such a relation to the goodness of the Almighty, as a perfect time-piece will have to the sun. COROLLARY. The wonderful works of God in the sensible world are a perpetual discourse, reminding me of his existence, and shadowing out to me his perfections. But as all language presupposes in the intelligent hearer or reader those primary notions, which it symbolizes; as well as the power of making those combinations of these primary notions, which it represents and excites us to combine,--even so I believe, that the notion of God is essential to the human mind; that it is called forth into distinct consciousness principally by the conscience, and auxiliarly by the manifest adaptation of means to ends in the outward creation. It is, therefore, evident to my reason, that the existence of God is absolutely and necessarily insusceptible of a scientific demonstration, and that Scripture has so represented it. For it commands us to believe in one God. 'I am the Lord thy God: thou shalt have none other gods but me'. Now all commandment necessarily relates to the will; whereas all scientific demonstration is independent of the will, and is apodictic or demonstrative only as far as it is compulsory on the mind, 'volentem, nolentem'. III. My conscience forbids me to propose to myself the pains and pleasures of this life, as the primary motive, or ultimate end, of my actions;--on the contrary, it makes me perceive an utter disproportionateness and heterogeneity between the acts of the spirit, as virtue and vice, and the things of the sense, such as all earthly rewards and punishments must be. Its hopes and fears, therefore, refer me to a different and spiritual state of being: and I believe in the life to come, not through arguments acquired by my understanding or discursive faculty, but chiefly and effectively, because so to believe is my duty, and in obedience to the commands of my conscience. Here ends the first table of my creed, which would have been my creed, had I been born with Adam; and which, therefore, constitutes what may in this sense be called natural religion, that is, the religion of all finite rational beings. The second table contains the creed of revealed religion, my belief as a Christian. IV. I believe, and hold it as the fundamental article of Christianity, that I am a fallen creature; that I am of myself capable of moral evil, but not of myself capable of moral good, and that an evil ground existed in my will, previously to any given act, or assignable moment of time, in my consciousness. I am born a child of wrath. This fearful mystery I pretend not to understand. I cannot even conceive the possibility of it,--but I know that it is so. My conscience, the sole fountain of certainty, commands me to believe it, and would itself be a contradiction, were it not so--and what is real must be possible. V. I receive with full and grateful faith the assurance of revelation, that the Word, which is from all eternity with God, and is God, assumed our human nature in order to redeem me, and all mankind from this our connate corruption. My reason convinces me, that no other mode of redemption is conceivable, and, as did Socrates, would have yearned after the Redeemer, though it would not dare expect so wonderful an act of divine love, except only as an effort of my mind to conceive the utmost of the infinite greatness of that love. VI. I believe, that this assumption of humanity by the Son of God, was revealed and realized to vis by the Word made flesh, and manifested to us in Christ Jesus; and that his miraculous birth, his agony, his crucifixion, death, resurrection, and ascension, were all both symbols of our redemption [Greek (transliterated): phainomena ton noumenon] and necessary parts of the awful process. VII. I believe in the descent and sending of the Holy Spirit, by whose free grace obtained for me by the merits of my Redeemer, I can alone be sanctified and restored from my natural inheritance of sin and condemnation, be a child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of God. COROLLARY. The Trinity of persons in the Unity of the God would have been a necessary idea of my speculative reason, deduced from the necessary postulate of an intelligent creator, whose ideas being anterior to the things, must be more actual than those things, even as those things are more actual than our images derived from them; and who, as intelligent, must have had co-eternally an adequate idea of himself, in and through which he created all things both in heaven and earth. But this would only have been a speculative idea, like those of circles and other mathematical figures, to which we are not authorized by the practical reason to attribute reality. Solely in consequence of our Redemption does the Trinity become a doctrine, the belief of which as real is commanded by our conscience. But to Christians it is commanded, and it is false candour in a Christian, believing in original sin and redemption therefrom, to admit that any man denying the divinity of Christ can be a Christian. The true language of a Christian, which reconciles humility with truth would be;--God and not man is the judge of man: which of the two is the Christian, he will determine; but this is evident, that if the theanthropist is a Christian, the psilanthropist cannot be so; and 'vice versa'. Suppose, that two tribes used the same written characters, but attached different and opposite meanings to them, so that 'niger', for instance, was used by one tribe to convey the notion 'black', by the other, 'white';--could they, without absurdity, be said to have the same language? Even so, in the instance of the crucifixion, the same image is present to the theanthropist and to the psilanthropist or Socinian--but to the latter it represents a mere man, a good man indeed and divinely inspired, but still a mere man, even as Moses or Paul, dying in attestation of the truth of his preaching, and in order by his resurrection to give a proof of his mission, and inclusively of the resurrection of all men:--to the former it represents God incarnate taking upon himself the sins of the world, and himself thereby redeeming us, and giving us life everlasting, not merely teaching it. The same difference, that exists between God and man, between giving and the declaration of a gift, exists between the Trinitarian and the Unitarian. This might be proved in a few moments, if we would only conceive a Greek or Roman, to whom two persons relate their belief, each calling Christ by a different name. It would be impossible for the Greek even to guess, that they both meant the same person, or referred to the same facts. END OF VOLUME 1. 
10801	----	Proofreading Team! THE LITERARY REMAINS OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE COLLECTED AND EDITED BY HENRY NELSON COLERIDGE, ESQ. M.A. VOLUME THE FOURTH ALBI DISCIP ANGLVS LONDON WILLIAM PICKERING 1839 CONTENTS ADVERTISEMENT Notes on Luther Notes on St Theresa Notes on Bedell Notes on Baxter Notes on Leighton Notes on Sherlock Notes on Waterland Notes on Skelton Notes on Andrew Fuller Notes on Whitaker Notes on Oxlee Notes on A Barrister's Hints Notes on Davison Notes on Irving Notes on Noble Essay on Faith * * * * * ADVERTISEMENT. For some remarks on the character of this publication, the Editor begs to refer the Reader to the Preface to the third volume of these Remains. That volume and the present are expressly connected together as one work. The various materials arranged in the following pages were preserved, and kindly placed in the Editor's hands, by Mr. Southey, Mr. Green, Mr. Gillman, Mr. Alfred Elwyn of Philadelphia, United States, Mr. Money, Mr. Hartley Coleridge, and the Rev. Edward Coleridge; and to those gentlemen the Editor's best acknowledgments are due. Lincoln's Inn, 9th May, 1839. * * * * * LITERARY REMAINS. * * * * * NOTES ON LUTHER'S TABLE TALK [1] I cannot meditate too often, too deeply, or too devotionally on the personeity of God, and his personality in the Word, [Greek: Gío to monogenei], and thence on the individuity of the responsible creature;--that it is a perfection which, not indeed in my intellect, but yet in my habit of feeling, I have too much confounded with that 'complexus' of visual images, cycles or customs of sensations, and fellow-travelling circumstances (as the ship to the mariner), which make up our empirical self: thence to bring myself to apprehend livelily the exceeding mercifulness and love of the act of the Son of God, in descending to seek after the prodigal children, and to house with them in the sty. Likewise by the relation of my own understanding to the light of reason, and (the most important of all the truths that have been vouchsafed to me!) to the will which is the reason,--will in the form of reason--I can form a sufficient gleam of the possibility of the subsistence of the human soul in Jesus to the Eternal Word, and how it might perfect itself so as to merit glorification and abiding union with the Divinity; and how this gave a humanity to our Lord's righteousness no less than to his sufferings. Doubtless, as God, as the absolute Alterity of the Absolute, he could not suffer; but that he could not lay aside the absolute, and by union with the creaturely become affectible, and a second, but spiritual Adam, and so as afterwards to be partaker of the absolute in the Absolute, even as the Absolute had partaken of passion ([Greek: tou páschein]) and infirmity in it, that is, the finite and fallen creature;--this can be asserted only by one who (unconsciously perhaps), has accustomed himself to think of God as a thing,--having a necessity of constitution, that wills, or rather tends and inclines to this or that, because it is this or that, not as being that, which is that which it wills to be. Such a necessity is truly compulsion; nor is it in the least altered in its nature by being assumed to be eternal, in virtue of an endless remotion or retrusion of the constituent cause, which being manifested by the understanding becomes a foreseen despair of a cause. Sunday 11th February, 1826. One argument strikes me in favour of the tenet of Apostolic succession, in the ordination of Bishops and Presbyters, as taught by the Church of Rome, and by the larger part of the earlier divines of the Church of England, which I have not seen in any of the books on this subject; namely, that in strict analogy with other parts of Christian history, the miracle itself contained a check upon the inconvenient consequences necessarily attached to all miracles, as miracles, narrowing the possible claims to any rights not proveable at the bar of universal reason and experience. Every man among the Sectaries, however ignorant, may justify himself in scattering stones and fire squibs by an alleged unction of the Spirit. The miracle becomes perpetual, still beginning, never ending. Now on the Church doctrine, the original miracle provides for the future recurrence to the ordinary and calculable laws of the human understanding and moral sense; instead of leaving every man a judge of his own gifts, and of his right to act publicly on that judgment. The initiative alone is supernatural; but all beginning is necessarily miraculous, that is, hath either no antecedent, or one [Greek: hetérou genous], which therefore is not its, but merely an, antecedent,--or an incausative alien co-incident in time; as if, for instance, Jack's shout were followed by a flash of lightning, which should strike and precipitate the ball on St. Paul's cathedral. This would be a miracle as long as no causative 'nexus' was conceivable between the antecedent, the noise of the shout, and the consequent, the atmospheric discharge. The Epistle Dedicatory. But this will be your glory and inexpugnable, if you cleave in truth and practice to God's holy service, worship and religion: that religion and faith of the Lord Jesus Christ, which is pure and undefiled before God even the Father, which is to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep yourselves unspotted from the world. James i. 27. Few mistranslations (unless indeed the word used by the translator of St. James meant differently from its present meaning), have led astray more than this rendering of [Greek: Thraeskeía.] (outward or ceremonial worship, 'cultus', divine service,) by the English 'religion'. St. James sublimely says: What the 'ceremonies' of the law were to morality, 'that' morality itself is to the faith in Christ, that is, its outward symbol, not the substance itself. Chap. I. p. 1, 2. That the Bible is the word of God (said Luther) the same I prove as followeth: All things that have been and now are in the world; also how it now goeth and standeth in the world, the same was written altogether particularly at the beginning, in the first book of Moses concerning the creation. And even as God made and created it, even so it was, even so it is, and even so doth it stand to this present day. And although King Alexander the Great, the kingdom of Egypt, the Empire of Babel, the Persian, Grecian and Roman monarchs; the Emperors Julius and Augustus most fiercely did rage and swell against this Book, utterly to suppress and destroy the same; yet notwithstanding they could prevail nothing, they are all gone and vanished; but this Book from time to time hath remained, and will remain unremoved in full and ample manner as it was written at the first. A proof worthy of the manly mind of Luther, and compared with which the Grotian pretended demonstrations, from Grotius himself to Paley, are mischievous underminings of the Faith, pleadings fitter for an Old Bailey thieves' counsellor than for a Christian divine. The true evidence of the Bible is the Bible,--of Christianity the living fact of Christianity itself, as the manifest 'archeus' or predominant of the life of the planet. Ib. p. 4. The art of the School divines (said Luther) with their speculations in the Holy Scriptures, are merely vain and human cogitations, spun out of their own natural wit and understanding. They talk much of the union of the will and understanding, but all is mere fantasy and fondness. The right and true speculation (said Luther) is this, Believe in Christ; do what thou oughtest to do in thy vocation, &c. This is the only practice in divinity. Also, 'Mystica Theologia Dionysii' is a mere fable, and a lie, like to Plato's fables. 'Omnia sunt non ens, et omnia sunt ens'; all is something, and all is nothing, and so he leaveth all hanging in frivolous and idle sort. Still, however, 'du theure Mann Gottes, mein verehrter Luther'! reason, will, understanding are words, to which real entities correspond; and we may in a sound and good sense say that reason is the ray, the projected disk or image, from the Sun of Righteousness, an echo from the Eternal Word--'the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world'; and that when the will placeth itself in a right line with the reason, there ariseth the spirit, through which the will of God floweth into and actuates the will of man, so that it willeth the things of God, and the understanding is enlivened, and thenceforward useth the materials supplied to it by the senses symbolically; that is, with an insight into the true substance thereof. Ib. p. 9. The Pope usurpeth and taketh to himself the power to expound and to construe the Scriptures according to his pleasure. What he saith, must stand and be spoken as from heaven. Therefore let us love and preciously value the divine word, that thereby we may be able to resist the Devil and his swarm. As often as I use in prayer the 16th verse of the 71st Psalm, (in our Prayer-book version), my thoughts especially revert to the subject of the right appreciation of the Scriptures, and in what sense the Bible may be called the word of God, and how and under what conditions the unity of the Spirit is translucent through the letter, which, read as the letter merely, is the word of this and that pious but fallible and imperfect man. Alas for the superstition, where the words themselves are made to be the Spirit! O might I live but to utter all my meditations on this most concerning point! Ib. p. 12. Bullinger said once in my hearing (said Luther) that he was earnest against the Anabaptists, as contemners of God's word, and also against those which attributed too much to the literal word, for (said he) such do sin against God and his almighty power; as the Jews did in naming the ark, God. But, (said he) whoso holdeth a mean between both, the same is taught what is the right use of the word and sacraments. Whereupon (said Luther) I answered him and said; Bullinger, you err, you know neither yourself, nor what you hold; I mark well your tricks and fallacies: Zuinglius and OEcolampadius likewise proceeded too far in the ungodly meaning: but when Brentius withstood them, they then lessened their opinions, alleging, they did not reject the literal word, but only condemned certain gross abuses. By this your error you cut in sunder and separate the word and the spirit, &c. In my present state of mind, and with what light I now enjoy,--(may God increase it, and cleanse it from the dark mist into the 'lumen siccum' of sincere knowledge!)--I cannot persuade myself that this vehemence of our dear man of God against Bullinger, Zuinglius and OEcolampadius on this point could have had other origin, than his misconception of what they intended. But Luther spoke often (I like him and love him all the better therefor,) in his moods and according to the mood. Was not that a different mood, in which he called St. James's Epistle a 'Jack-Straw poppet'; and even in this work selects one verse as the best in the whole letter,--evidently meaning, the only verse of any great value? Besides he accustomed himself to use the term, 'the word,' in a very wide sense when the narrower would have cramped him. When he was on the point of rejecting the Apocalypse, then 'the word' meant the spirit of the Scriptures collectively. Ib. p. 21. I, (said Luther), do not hold that children are without faith when they are baptized; for inasmuch as they are brought to Christ by his command, and that the Church prayeth for them; therefore, without all doubt, faith is given unto them, although with our natural sense and reason we neither see nor understand it. Nay, but dear honoured Luther! is this fair? If Christ or Scripture had said in one place, 'Believe, and thou mayest be baptized'; and in another place, 'Baptize infants'; then we might perhaps be allowed to reconcile the two seemingly jarring texts, by such words as "faith is given to them, although, &c." But when no such text, as the latter, is to be found, nor any one instance as a substitute, then your conclusion seems arbitrary. Ib. p. 25. This argument (said Luther), concludeth so much as nothing; for, although they had been angels from heaven, yet that troubleth me nothing at all; we are now dealing about God's word, and with the truth of the Gospel, that is a matter of far greater weight to have the same kept and preserved pure and clear; therefore we (said Luther), neither care nor trouble ourselves for, and about, the greatness of Saint Peter and the other Apostles, or how many and great miracles they wrought: the thing which we strive for is, that the truth of the Holy Gospel may stand; for God regardeth not men's reputations nor persons. Oh, that the dear man Luther had but told us here what he meant by the term, Gospel! That St. Paul had seen even St. Luke's, is but a conjecture, grounded on a conjectural interpretation of a single text, doubly equivocal; namely, that the Luke mentioned was the same with the Evangelist Luke; and that the 'evangelium' signified a book; the latter, of itself improbable, derives its probability from the undoubtedly very strong probability of the former. If then not any book, much less the four books, now called the four Gospels, were meant by Paul, but the contents of those books, as far as they are veracious, and whatever else was known on equal authority at that time, though not contained in those books; if, in short, the whole sum of Christ's acts and discourses be what Paul meant by the Gospel; then the argument is circuitous, and returns to the first point,--What 'is' the Gospel? Shall we believe you, and not rather the companions of Christ, the eye and ear witnesses of his doings and sayings? Now I should require strong inducements to make me believe that St. Paul had been guilty of such palpably false logic; and I therefore feel myself compelled to infer, that by the Gospel Paul intended the eternal truths known ideally from the beginning, and historically realized in the manifestation of the Word in Christ Jesus; and that he used the ideal immutable truth as the canon and criterion of the oral traditions. For example, a Greek mathematician, standing in the same relation of time and country to Euclid as that in which St. Paul stood to Jesus Christ, might have exclaimed in the same spirit: "What do you talk to me of this, that, and the other intimate acquaintance of Euclid's? My object is to convey the sublime system of geometry which he realized, and by that must I decide." "I," says St. Paul, "have been taught by the spirit of Christ, a teaching susceptible of no addition, and for which no personal anecdotes, however reverendly attested, can be a substitute." But dearest Luther was a translator; he could not, must not, see this. Ib. p. 32. That God's word, and the Christian Church, is preserved against the raging of the world. The Papists have lost the cause; with God's word they are not able to resist or withstand us. * * * 'The kings of the earth stand up, and the rulers take counsel together, &c'. God will deal well enough with these angry gentlemen, and will give them but small thanks for their labor, in going about to suppress his word and servants; he hath sat in counsel above these five thousand five hundred years, hath ruled and made laws. Good Sirs! be not so choleric; go further from the wall, lest you knock your pates against it. 'Kiss the Son lest he be angry, &c'. That is, take hold on Christ, or the Devil will take hold on you, &c. The second Psalm (said Luther), is a proud Psalm against those fellows. It begins mild and simply, but it endeth stately and rattling. * * * I have now angered the Pope about his images of idolatry. O! how the sow raiseth her bristles! * * The Lord saith: 'Ego suscitabo vos in novissimo die': and then he will call and say: ho! Martin Luther, Philip Melancthon, Justus Jonas, John Calvin, &c. Arise, come up, * * * Well on, (said Luther), let us be of good comfort. A delicious paragraph. How our fine preachers would turn up their Tom-tit beaks and flirt with their tails at it! But this is the way in which the man of life, the man of power, sets the dry bones in motion. Chap. II. p. 37. This is the thanks that God hath for his grace, for creating, for redeeming, sanctifying, nourishing, and for preserving us: such a seed, fruit, and godly child is the world. O, woe be to it! Too true. Ib. p. 54. That out of the best comes the worst. Out of the Patriarchs and holy Fathers came the Jews that crucified Christ; out of the Apostles came Judas the traitor; out of the city Alexandria (where a fair illustrious and famous school was, and from whence proceeded many upright and godly learned men), came Arius and Origenes. Poor Origen! Surely Luther was put to it for an instance, and had never read the works of that very best of the old Fathers, and eminently upright and godly learned man. Ib. The sparrows are the least birds, and yet they are very hurtful, and have the best nourishment. 'Ergo digni sunt omni persecutione'. Poor little Philip Sparrows! Luther did not know that they more than earn their good wages by destroying grubs and other small vermin. Ib. p. 61. He that without danger will know God, and will speculate of him, let him look first into the manger, that is, let him begin below, and let him first learn to know the Son of the Virgin Mary, born at Bethlehem, that lies and sucks in his mother's bosom; or let one look upon him hanging on the Cross. ** But take good heed in any case of high climbing cogitations, to clamber up to heaven without this ladder, namely, the Lord Christ in his humanity. To know God as God ([Greek: tòn Zaena], the living God) we must assume his personality: otherwise what were it but an ether, a gravitation? --but to assume his personality, we must begin with his humanity, and this is impossible but in history; for man is an historical--not an eternal being. 'Ergo'. Christianity is of necessity historical and not philosophical only. Ib. p. 62. 'What is that to thee'? said Christ to Peter. 'Follow thou me'--me, follow me, and not thy questions, or cogitations. Lord! keep us looking to, and humbly following, thee! Chap. VI. p. 103. The philosophers and learned heathen (said Luther) have described God, that he is as a circle, the point whereof in the midst is every where; but the circumference, which on the outside goeth round about, is no where: herewith they would shew that God is all, and yet is nothing. What a huge difference the absence of a blank space, which is nothing, or next to nothing, may make! The words here should have been printed, "God is all, and yet is no thing;" For what does 'thing' mean? Itself, that is, the 'ing', or inclosure, that which is contained within an outline, or circumscribed. So likewise to 'think' is to inclose, to determine, confine and define. To think an infinite is a contradiction in terms equal to a boundless bound. So in German 'Ding, denken'; in Latin 'res, reor'. Chap. VII. p. 113. Helvidius alleged the mother of Christ was not a virgin; so that according to his wicked allegation, Christ was born in original sin. O, what a tangle of impure whimsies has this notion of an immaculate conception, an Ebionite tradition, as I think, brought into the Christian Church! I have sometimes suspected that the Apostle John had a particular view to this point, in the first half of the first chapter of his Gospel. Not that I suppose our present Matthew then in existence, or that, if John had seen the Gospel according to Luke, the 'Christopædia' had been already prefixed to it. But the rumor might have been whispered about, and as the purport was to give a psilanthropic explanation and solution of the phrases, Son of God and Son of Man,--so Saint John met it by the true solution, namely, the eternal Filiation of the Word. Ib. p. 120. Of Christ's riding into Jerusalem. But I hold (said Luther) that Christ himself did not mention that prophecy of Zechariah, but rather, that the Apostles and Evangelists did use it for a witness. Worth remembering for the purpose of applying it to the text in which our Lord is represented in the first (or Matthew's) Gospel, and by that alone, as citing Daniel by name. It was this text that so sorely, but I think very unnecessarily, perplexed and gravelled Bentley, who was too profound a scholar and too acute a critic to admit the genuineness of the whole of that book. Ib. The Prophets (said Luther) did set, speak, and preach of the second coming of Christ in manner as we now do. I regret that Mr. Irving should have blended such extravagancies and presumptuous prophesyings with his support and vindication of the Millennium, and the return of Jesus in his corporeal individuality, --because these have furnished divines in general, both Churchmen and Dissenting, with a pretext for treating his doctrine with silent contempt. Had he followed the example of his own Ben Ezra, and argued temperately and learnedly, the controversy must have forced the momentous question on our Clergy:--Are Christians bound to believe whatever an Apostle believed,--and in the same way and sense? I think Saint Paul himself lived to doubt the solidity of his own literal interpretation of our Lord's words. The whole passage in which our Lord describes his coming is so evidently, and so intentionally expressed in the diction and images of the Prophets, that nothing but the carnal literality common to the Jews at that time and most strongly marked in the disciples, who were among the least educated of their countrymen, could have prevented the symbolic import and character of the words from being seen. The whole Gospel and the Epistles of John, are a virtual confutation of this reigning error--and no less is the Apocalypse whether written by, or under the authority of, the Evangelist. The unhappy effect which St. Paul's (may I not say) incautious language respecting Christ's return produced on the Thessalonians, led him to reflect on the subject, and he instantly in the second epistle to them qualified the doctrine, and never afterwards resumed it; but on the contrary, in the first Epistle to the Corinthians, c. 15, substitutes the doctrine of immortality in a celestial state and a spiritual body. On the nature of our Lord's future epiphany or phenomenal person, I am not ashamed to acknowledge, that my views approach very nearly to those of Emanuel Swedenborg. Ib. p. 121. Doctor Jacob Schenck never preacheth out of his book, but I do, (said Luther), though not of necessity, but I do it for example's sake to others. As many notes, 'memoranda', cues of connection and transition as the preacher may find expedient or serviceable to him; well and good. But to read in a manuscript book, as our Clergy now do, is not to preach at all. Preach out of a book, if you must; but do not read in it, or even from it. A read sermon of twenty minutes will seem longer to the hearers than a free discourse of an hour. Ib. My simple opinion is (said Luther) and I do believe that Christ for us descended into hell, to the end he might break and destroy the same, as in Psalm xvi, and Acts ii, is shewed and proved. Could Luther have been ignorant, that this clause was not inserted into the Apostle's Creed till the sixth century after Christ? I believe the original intention of the clause was no more than 'vere mortuus est'--in contradiction to the hypothesis of a trance or state of suspended animation. Chap. VII. p. 122. When Christ (said Luther) forbiddeth to spread abroad or to make known his works of wonder; there he speaketh as being sent from the Father, and doth well and right therein in forbidding them, to the end that thereby he might leave us an example, not to seek our own praise and honor in that wherein we do good; but we ought to seek only and alone the honor of God. Not satisfactory. Doubtless, the command was in connection with the silence enjoined respecting his Messiahship. Chap. VIII. p. 147. Doctor Hennage said to Luther, Sir, where you say that the Holy Spirit is the certainty in the word towards God, that is, that a man is certain of his own mind and opinion; then it must needs follow that all sects have the Holy Ghost, for they will needs be most certain of their doctrine and religion. Luther might have answered, "positive, you mean, not certain." Chap. IX. p. 160. But who hath power to forgive or to detain sins? Answer; the Apostles and all Church servants, and (in case of necessity) every Christian. Christ giveth them not power over money, wealth, kingdoms, &c; but over sins and the consciences of human creatures, over the power of the Devil, and the throat of Hell. Few passages in the Sacred Writings have occasioned so much mischief, abject slavishness, bloated pride, tyrannous usurpation, bloody persecution, with kings even against their will the drudges, false soul-destroying quiet of conscience, as this text, 'John' xx. 23. misinterpreted. It is really a tremendous proof of what the misunderstanding of a few words can do. That even Luther partook of the delusion, this paragraph gives proof. But that a delusion it is; that the commission given to the Seventy whom Christ sent out to proclaim and offer the kingdom of God, and afterwards to the Apostles, refers either to the power of making rules and ordinances in the Church, or otherwise to the gifts of miraculous healing, which our Lord at that time conferred on them; and that 'per figuram causce pro effecto', 'sins' here mean diseases, seems to me more than probable. At all events, the text surely does not mean that the salvation of a repentant and believing Christian depends upon the will of a priest in absolution. Ib. p. 161. And again, they are able to absolve and make a human creature free and loose from all his sins, if in case he repenteth and believeth in Christ; and on the contrary, they are able to detain all his sina, if he doth not repent and believeth not in Christ. In like manner if he sincerely repent and believe, his sins are forgiven, whether the minister absolve him or not. Now if M + 5 =5, and 5-M = 5, M = O. If he be impenitent and unbelieving, his sins are detained, no doubt, whether the minister do or do not detain them. Ib. p. 163. Adam was created of God in such sort righteous, as that he became of a righteous an unrighteous person; as Paul himself argueth, and withall instructeth himself, where he saith, The law is not given for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient. This follows from the very definition or idea of righteousness;-it is itself the law;--[Greek: pas gàr díkais autonomos.] Ib. The Scripture saith, God maketh the ungodly righteous; there he calleth us all, one with another, despairing and wicked wretches; for what will an ungodly creature not dare to accomplish, if he may but have occasion, place, and opportunity? That is with a lust within correspondent to the temptation from without. A Christian's conscience, methinks, ought to be a 'Janus bifrons',--a Gospel-face retrospective, and smiling through penitent tears on the sins of the past, and a Moses-face looking forward in frown and menace, frightening the harlot will into a holy abortion of sins conceived but not yet born, perchance not yet quickened. The fanatic Antinomian reverses this; for the past he requires all the horrors of remorse and despair, till the moment of assurance; thenceforward, he may do what he likes, for he cannot sin. Ib. p. 165. All natural inclinations (said Luther) are either against or without God; therefore none are good. We see that no man is so honest as to marry a wife, only thereby to have children, to love and to bring them up in the fear of God. This is a very weak instance. If a man had been commanded to marry by God, being so formed as that no sensual delight accompanied, and refused to do so, unless this appetite and gratification were added,--then indeed! Chap. X. p. 168, 9. Ah Lord God (said Luther), why should we any way boast of our free-will, as if it were able to do anything in divine and spiritual matters were they never so small? * * * I confess that mankind hath a free-will, but it is to milk kine, to build houses, &c., and no further: for so long as a man sitteth well and in safety, and sticketh in no want, so long he thinketh he hath a free-will which is able to do something; but, when want and need appeareth, that there is neither to eat nor to drink, neither money nor provision, where is then the free will? It is utterly lost, and cannot stand when it cometh to the pinch. But faith only standeth fast and sure, and seeketh Christ. Luther confounds free-will with efficient power, which neither does nor can exist save where the finite will is one with the absolute Will. That Luther was practically on the right side in this famous controversy, and that he was driving at the truth, I see abundant reason to believe. But it is no less evident that he saw it in a mist, or rather as a mist with dissolving outline; and as he saw the thing as a mist, so he ever and anon mistakes a mist for the thing. But Erasmus and Saavedra were equally indistinct; and shallow and unsubstantial to boot. In fact, till the appearance of Kant's 'Kritiques' of the pure and of the practical Reason the problem had never been accurately or adequately stated, much less solved. 26 June, 1826. Ib. p. 174. Loving friends, (said Luther) our doctrine that free-will is dead and nothing at all is grounded powerfully in Holy Scripture. It is of vital importance for a theological student to understand clearly the utter diversity of the Lutheran, which is likewise the Calvinistic, denial of free-will in the unregenerate, and the doctrine of the modern Necessitarians and ('proh pudor!') of the later Calvinists, which denies the proper existence of will altogether. The former is sound, Scriptural, compatible with the divine justice, a new, yea, a mighty motive to morality, and, finally, the dictate of common sense grounded on common experience. The latter the very contrary of all these. Chap. xii. p. 187. This is now (said Luther), the first instruction concerning the law; namely, that the same must be used to hinder the ungodly from their wicked and mischievous intentions. For the Devil, who is an Abbot and a Prince of this world, driveth and allureth people to work all manner of sin and wickedness; for which cause God hath ordained magistrates, elders, schoolmasters, laws, and statutes, to the end, if they cannot do more, yet at least that they may bind the claws of the Devil, and to hinder him from raging and swelling so powerfully (in those which are his) according to his will and pleasure. And (said Luther), although thou hadst not committed this or that sin, yet nevertheless, thou art an ungodly creature, &c. but what is done cannot he undone, he that hath stolen, let him henceforward steal no more. Secondly, we use the law spiritually, which is done in this manner; that it maketh the transgressions greater, as Saint Paul saith; that is, that it may reveal and discover to people their sins, blindness, misery, and ungodly doings wherein they were conceived and born; namely, that they are ignorant of God, and are his enemies, and therefore have justly deserved death, hell, God's judgments, his everlasting wrath and indignation. Saint Paul, (said Luther), expoundeth such spiritual offices and works of the law with many words. Rom. vii. Nothing can be more sound or more philosophic than the contents of these two paragraphs. They afford a sufficient answer to the pretence of the Romanists and Arminians, that by the law St. Paul meant only the ceremonial law. Ib. p. 189. And if Moses had not cashiered and put himself out of his office, and had not taken it away with these words, (where he saith, 'The Lord thy God will raise up unto thee another prophet out of thy brethren; Him shall thou hear'. (Deut. xviii.)) who then at any time would or could have believed the Gospel, and forsaken Moses? If I could be persuaded that this passage (Deut. xviii. 15-19.) primarily referred to Christ, and that Christ, not Joshua and his successors, was the prophet here promised; I must either become a Unitarian psilanthrophist, and join Priestley and Belsham,--or abandon to the Jews their own Messiah as yet to come, and cling to the religion of John and Paul, without further reference to Moses than to Lycurgus, Solon and Numa; all of whom in their different spheres no less prepared the way for the coming of the Lord, 'the desire of the nations'. Ib. p. 190. It is therefore most evident (said Luther), that the law can but only help us to know our sins, and to make us afraid of death. Now sins and death are such things as belong to the world, and which are therein. Both in Paul and Luther, (names which I can never separate),--not indeed peculiar to these, for it is the same in the Psalms, Ezekiel, and throughout the Scriptures, but which I feel most in Paul and Luther, --there is one fearful blank, the wisdom or necessity of which I do not doubt, yet cannot help groping and straining after like one that stares in the dark; and this is Death. The law makes us afraid of death. What is death?--an unhappy life? Who does not feel the insufficiency of this answer? What analogy does immortal suffering bear to the only death which is known to us? Since I wrote the above, God has, I humbly trust, given me a clearer light as to the true nature of the 'death' so often mentioned in the Scriptures. Ib. It is (said Luther), a very hard matter: yea, an impossible thing for thy human strength, whosoever thou art (without God's assistance) that (at such a time when Moses setteth upon thee with his law, and fearfully affrighteth thee, accuseth and condemneth thee, threateneth thee with God's wrath and death) thou shouldest as then be of such a mind; namely, as if no law nor sin had ever been at any time:--I say, it is in a manner a thing impossible, that a human creature should carry himself in such a sort, when he is and feeleth himself assaulted with trials and temptations, and when the conscience hath to do with God, as then to think no otherwise, than that from everlasting nothing hath been, but only and alone Christ, altogether grace and deliverance. Yea, verily, Amen and Amen! For this short heroic paragraph contains the sum and substance, the heighth and the depth of all true philosophy. Most assuredly right difficult it is for us, while we are yet in the narrow chamber of death, with our faces to the dusky falsifying looking-glass that covers the scant end-side of the blind passage from floor to ceiling,--right difficult for us, so wedged between its walls that we cannot turn round, nor have other escape possible but by walking backward, to understand that all we behold or have any memory of having ever beholden, yea, our very selves as seen by us, are but shadows, and when the forms that we loved vanish, impossible not to feel as if they were real. Ib. p. 197. Nothing that is good proceedeth out of the works of the law, except grace be present; for what we are forced to do, the same goeth not from the heart, neither is acceptable. A law supposes a law-giver, and implies an actuator and executor, and consequently rewards and punishments publicly announced, and distinctly assigned to the deeds enjoined or forbidden; and correlatively in the subjects of the law, there are supposed, first, assurance of the being, the power, the veracity and seeingness of the law-giver, in whom I here comprise the legislative, judicial and executive functions; and secondly, self-interest, desire, hope and fear. Now from this view, it is evident that the deeds or works of the Law are themselves null and dead, deriving their whole significance from their attachment or alligation to the rewards and punishments, even as this diversely shaped and ink colored paper has its value wholly from the words or meanings, which have been arbitrarily connected therewith; or as a ladder, or flight of stairs, of a provision-loft, or treasury. If the architect or master of the house had chosen to place the store-room or treasury on the ground floor, the ladder or steps would have been useless. The life is divided between the rewards and punishments on the one hand, and the hope and fear on the other: namely, the active life or excitancy belongs to the former, the passive life or excitability to the latter. Call the former the afficients, the latter the affections, the deeds being merely the signs or impresses of the former, as the seal, on the latter as the wax. Equally evident is it, that the affections are wholly formed by the deeds, which are themselves but the lifeless unsubstantial shapes of the actual forms ('formæ formantes'), namely, the rewards and punishments. Now contrast with this the process of the Gospel. There the affections are formed in the first instance, not by any reference to works or deeds, but by an unmerited rescue from death, liberation from slavish task-work; by faith, gratitude, love, and affectionate contemplation of the exceeding goodness and loveliness of the Saviour, Redeemer, Benefactor: from the affections flow the deeds, or rather the affections overflow in the deeds, and the rewards are but a continuance and continued increase of the free grace in the state of the soul and in the growth and gradual perfecting of that state, which are themselves gifts of the same free grace, and one with the rewards; for in the kingdom of Christ which is the realm of love and inter-community, the joy and grace of each regenerated spirit becomes double, and thereby augments the joys and the graces of the others, and the joys and graces of all unite in each;--Christ, the head, and by his Spirit the bond, or unitive 'copula' of all, being the spiritual sun whose entire image is reflected in every individual of the myriads of dew-drops. While under the Law, the all was but an aggregate of subjects, each striving after a reward for himself, --not as included in and resulting from the state,--but as the stipulated wages of the task-work, as a loaf of bread may be the pay or bounty promised for the hewing of wood or the breaking of stones! Ib. He (said Luther), that will dispute with the Devil, &c. Queries. I. Abstractedly from, and independently of, all sensible substances, and the bodies, wills, faculties, and affections of men, has the Devil, or would the Devil have, a personal self-subsistence? Does he, or can he, exist as a conscious individual agent or person? Should the answer to this query be in the negative: then-- II. Do there exist finite and personal beings, whether with composite and decomponible bodies, that is, embodied, or with simple and indecomponible bodies, (which is all that can be meant by disembodied as applied to finite creatures), so eminently wicked, or wicked and mischievous in so peculiar a kind, as to constitute a distinct 'genus' of beings under the name of devils? III. Is this second 'hypothesis' compatible with the acts and functions attributed to the Devil in Scripture? O! to have had these three questions put by Melancthon to Luther, and to have heard his reply! Ib. p. 200. If (said Luther) God should give unto us a strong and an unwavering faith, then we should he proud, yea also, we should at last contemn Him. Again, if he should give us the right knowledge of the law, then we should be dismayed and fainthearted, we should not know which way to wind ourselves. The main reason is, because in this instance, the change in the relation constitutes the difference of the things. A. considered as acting 'ab extra' on the selfish fears and desires of men is the Law: the same A: acting 'ab intra' as a new nature infused by grace, as the mind of Christ prompting to all obedience, is the Gospel. Yet what Luther says is likewise very true. Could we reduce the great spiritual truths or ideas of our faith to comprehensible conceptions, or (for the thing itself is impossible) fancy we had done so, we should inevitably be 'proud vain asses.' Ib. p. 203. And as to know his works and actions, is not yet rightly to know the Gospel, (for thereby we know not as yet that he hath overcome sin death and the Devil); even so likewise, it is not as yet to know the Gospel, when we know such doctrine and commandments, but when the voice soundeth, which saith, Christ is thine own with life, with doctrine, with works, death, resurrection, and with all that he hath, doth and may do. Most true. Ib. p. 205. The ancient Fathers said: 'Distingue tempora et concordabis Scripturas'; distinguish the times; then may we easily reconcile the Scriptures together. Yea! and not only so, but we shall reconcile truths, that seem to repeal this or that passage of Scripture, with the Scriptures. For Christ is with his Church even to the end. Ib. I verily believe, (said Luther) it (the abolition of the Law) vexed to the heart the beloved St. Paul himself before his conversion. How dearly Martin Luther loved St. Paul! How dearly would St. Paul have loved Martin Luther! And how impossible, that either should not have done so! Ib. In this case, touching the distinguishing the Law from the Gospel, we must utterly expel all human and natural wisdom, reason, and understanding. All reason is above nature. Therefore by reason in Luther, or rather in his translator, you must understand the reasoning faculty:--that is, the logical intellect, or the intellectual understanding. For the understanding is in all respects a medial and mediate faculty, and has therefore two extremities or poles, the sensual, in which form it is St. Paul's [Greek: phrónaema sarkòs]; and the intellectual pole, or the hemisphere (as it were) turned towards the reason. Now the reason ('lux idealis seu spiritualis') shines down into the understanding, which recognizes the light, 'id est, lumen a luce spirituali quasi alienigenum aliquid', which it can only comprehend or describe to itself by attributes opposite to its own essential properties. Now these latter being contingency, and (for though the immediate objects of the understanding are 'genera et species', still they are particular 'genera et species') particularity, it distinguishes the formal light ('lumen') (not the substantial light, 'lux') of reason by the attributes of the necessary and the universal; and by irradiation of this 'lumen' or 'shine' the understanding becomes a conclusive or logical faculty. As such it is [Greek: Lógos anthrôpinos]. Ib. 206. When Satan saith in thy heart, God will not pardon thy sins, nor be gracious unto thee, I pray (said Luther) how wilt thou then, as a poor sinner, raise up and comfort thyself, especially when other signs of God's wrath besides do beat upon thee, as sickness, poverty, &c. And that thy heart beginneth to preach and say, Behold, here thou livest in sickness, thou art poor and forsaken of every one, &c. Oh! how true, how affectingly true is this! And when too Satan, the tempter, becomes Satan the accuser, saying in thy heart:--"This sickness is the consequence of sin, or sinful infirmity, and thou hast brought thyself into a fearful dilemma; thou canst not hope for salvation as long as thou continuest in any sinful practice, and yet thou canst not abandon thy daily dose of this or that poison without suicide. For the sin of thy soul has become the necessity of thy body, daily tormenting thee, without yielding thee any the least pleasurable sensation, but goading thee on by terror without hope. Under such evidence of God's wrath how canst thou expect to be saved?" Well may the heart cry out, "Who shall deliver me from the 'body of this death',--from this death that lives and tyrannizes in my body?" But the Gospel answers--"There is a redemption from the body promised; only cling to Christ. Call on him continually with all thy heart, and all thy soul, to give thee strength, and be strong in thy weakness; and what Christ doth not see good to relieve thee from, suffer in hope. It may be better for thee to be kept humble and in self-abasement. The thorn in the flesh may remain and yet the grace of God through Christ prove sufficient for thee. Only cling to Christ, and do thy best. In all love and well-doing gird thyself up to improve and use aright what remains free in thee, and if thou doest ought aright, say and thankfully believe that Christ hath done it for thee." O what a miserable despairing wretch should I become, if I believed the doctrines of Bishop Jeremy Taylor in his Treatise on Repentance, or those I heard preached by Dr.----; if I gave up the faith, that the life of Christ would precipitate the remaining dregs of sin in the crisis of death, and that I shall rise in purer capacity of Christ; blind to be irradiated by his light, empty to be possessed by his fullness, naked of merit to be clothed with his righteousness! Ib. p. 207. The nobility, the gentry, citizens, and farmers, &c. are now become so haughty and ungodly, that they regard no ministers nor preachers; and (said Luther) if we were not holpen somewhat by great princes and persons, we could not long subsist: therefore Isaiah saith well, 'And kings shall be their nurses', &c. Corpulent nurses too often, that overlay the babe; distempered nurses, that convey poison in their milk! Chap. XIII. p. 208. Philip Melancthon said to Luther, The opinion of St. Austin of justification (as it seemeth) was more pertinent, fit and convenient when he disputed not, than it was when he used to speak and dispute; for thus he saith, We ought to censure and hold that we are justified by faith, that is by our regeneration, or by being made new creatures. Now if it be so, then we are not justified only by faith, but by all the gifts and virtues of God given unto us. Now what is your opinion Sir? Do you hold that a man is justified by this regeneration, as is St. Austin's opinion? Luther answered and said, I hold this, and am certain, that the true meaning of the Gospel and of the Apostle is, that we are justified before God 'gratis', for nothing, only by God's mere mercy, wherewith and by reason whereof, he imputeth righteousness unto us in Christ. True; but is it more than a dispute about words? Is not the regeneration likewise 'gratis', only by God's mere mercy? We, according to the necessity of our imperfect understandings, must divide and distinguish. But surely justification and sanctification are one act of God, and only different perspectives of redemption by and through and for Christ. They are one and the same plant, justification the root, sanctification the flower; and (may I not venture to add?) transubstantiation into Christ the celestial fruit. Ib. p. 210-11. Melancthon's sixth reply. Sir! you say Paul was justified, that is, was received to everlasting life, only for mercy's sake. Against which, I say, if the piece-meal or partial cause, namely our obedience, followeth not; then we are not saved, according to these words, 'Woe is me if I preach not the Gospel'. 1. Cor. ix. Luther's answer. No piecing or partial cause (said Luther) approacheth thereupto: for faith is powerful continually without ceasing; otherwise, it is no faith. Therefore what the works are, or of what value, the same they are through the honor and power of faith, which undeniably is the sun or sun-beam of this shining. This is indeed a difficult question; and one, I am disposed to think, which can receive its solution only by the idea, or the act and fact of justification by faith self-reflected. But, humanly considered, this position of Luther's provokes the mind to ask, is there no receptivity of faith, considered as a free gift of God, prerequisite in the individual? Does faith commence by generating the receptivity of itself? If so, there is no difference either in kind or in degree between the receivers and the rejectors of the word, at the moment preceeding this reception or rejection; and a stone is a subject as capable of faith as a man. How can obedience exist, where disobedience was not possible? Surely two or three texts from St. Paul, detached from the total 'organismus' of his reasoning, ought not to out-weigh the plain fact, that the contrary position is implied in, or is an immediate consequent of, our Lord's own invitations and assurances. Every where a something is attributed to the will. [2] Chap. XIII. p. 211. To conclude, a faithful person is a new creature, a new tree. Therefore all these speeches, which in the law are usual, belong not to this case; as to say 'A faithful' person must do good works. Neither were it rightly spoken, to say the sun shall shine: a good tree shall bring forth good fruit, &c. For the sun 'shall' not shine, but it doth shine by nature unbidden, it is thereunto created. This important paragraph is obscure by the translator's ignorance of the true import of the German 'soll', which does not answer to our 'shall;' but rather to our 'ought', that is, 'should' do this or that,--is under an obligation to do it. Ib. p. 213. And I, my loving Brentius, to the end I may better understand this case, do use to think in this manner, namely, as if in my heart were no quality or virtue at all, which is called faith, and love, (as the Sophists do speak and dream thereof), but I set all on Christ, and say, my 'formalis justitia', that is, my sure, my constant and complete righteousness (in which is no want nor failing, but is, as before God it ought to be) is Christ my Lord and Saviour. Aye! this, this is indeed to the purpose. In this doctrine my soul can find rest. I hope to be saved by faith, not by my faith, but by the faith of Christ in me. Ib. p. 214. The Scripture nameth the faithful a people of God's saints. But here one may say; the sins which daily we commit, do offend and anger God; how then can we be holy? 'Answer'. A mother's love to her child is much stronger than are the excrements and scurf thereof. Even so God's love towards us is far stronger than our filthiness and uncleanness. Yea, one may say again, we sin without ceasing, and where sin is, there the holy Spirit is not: therefore we are not holy, because the holy Spirit is not in us, who maketh holy. 'Answer'. (John xvi. 14.) Now where Christ is, there is the holy Spirit. The text saith plainly, 'The holy Ghost shall glorify me, &c.' Now Christ is in the faithful (although they have and feel sins, do confess the same, and with sorrow of heart do complain thereover); therefore sins do not separate Christ from those that believe. All in this page is true, and necessary to be preached. But O! what need is there of holy prudence to preach it aright, that is, at right times to the right ears! Now this is when the doctrine is necessary and thence comfortable; but where it is not necessary, but only very comfortable, in such cases it would be a narcotic poison, killing the soul by infusing a stupor or counterfeit peace of conscience. Where there are no sinkings of self-abasement, no griping sense of sin and worthlessness, but perhaps the contrary, reckless confidence and self-valuing for good qualities supposed an overbalance for the sins,--there it is not necessary. In short, these are not the truths, that can be preached [Greek: eukaírôs akaírôs], _in season and out of season_. In declining life, or at any time in the hour of sincere humiliation, these truths may be applied in reference to past sins collectively; but a Christian must not, a true however infirm Christian will not, cannot, administer them to himself immediately after sinning; least of all immediately before. We ought fervently to pray thus:--"Most holy and most merciful God! by the grace of thy holy Spirit make these promises profitable to me, to preserve me from despairing of thy forgiveness through Christ my Saviour! But O! save me from presumptuously perverting them into a pillow for a stupified conscience! Give me grace so to contrast my sin with thy transcendant goodness and long-suffering love, as to hate it with an unfeigned hatred for its own exceeding sinfulness." Ib. p. 219-20. Faith is, and consisteth in, a person's understanding, but hope consisteth in the will. * * Faith inditeth, distinguisheth and teacheth, and it is the knowledge and acknowledgment. * * Faith fighteth against error and heresies, it proveth, censureth and judgeth the spirits and doctrines. * * Faith in divinity is the wisdom and providence, and belongeth to the doctrine. * * Faith is the 'dialectica', for it is altogether wit and wisdom. Luther in his Postills discourseth far better and more genially of faith than in these paragraphs. Unfortunately, the Germans have but one word for faith and belief--'Glaube', and what Luther here says, is spoken of belief. Of faith he speaks in the next article but one. Ib. p. 226. "That regeneration only maketh God's children. "The article of our justification before God (said Luther) is, as it useth to be with a son which is born an heir of all his father's goods, and cometh not thereunto by deserts." I will here record my experience. Ever when I meet with the doctrine of regeneration and faith and free grace simply announced--"So it is!"--then I believe; my heart leaps forth to welcome it. But as soon as an explanation nation or reason is added, such explanations, namely, and reasonings as I have any where met with, then my heart leaps back again, recoils, and I exclaim, Nay! Nay! but not so. 25th of September, 1819. Ib. p. 227. "Doctor Carlestad (said Luther) argueth thus: True it is that faith justifieth, but faith is a work of the first commandment; therefore it justifieth as a work. Moreover all that the Law commandeth, the same is a work of the Law. Now faith is commanded, therefore faith is a work of the Law. Again, what God will have the same is commanded: God will have faith, therefore faith is commanded." "St. Paul (said Luther) speaketh in such sort of the law, that he separateth it from the promise, which is far another thing than the law. The law is terrestrial, but the promise is celestial. "God giveth the law to the end we may thereby be roused up and made pliant; for the commandments do go and proceed against the proud and haughty, which contemn God's gifts; now a gift or present cannot be a commandment." "Therefore we must answer according to this rule, 'Verba sunt accipienda secundum subjectam materiam.' * * St. Paul calleth that the work of the law, which is done and acted through the knowledge of the law by a constrained will without the holy Spirit; so that the same is a work of the law, which the law earnestly requireth and strictly will have done; it is not a voluntary work, but a forced work of the rod." And wherein did Carlestad and Luther differ? Not at all, or essentially and irreconcilably, according as the feeling of Carlestad was. If he meant the particular deed, the latter; if the total act, the agent included, then the former. Chap. XIV. p. 230. "The love towards the neighbour (said Luther) must be like a pure chaste love between bride and bridegroom, where all faults are connived at, covered and borne with, and only the virtues regarded." In how many little escapes and corner-holes does the sensibility, the fineness, (that of which refinement is but a counterfeit, at best but a reflex,) the geniality of nature appear in this 'son of thunder!' O for a Luther in the present age! Why, Charles! [3] with the very handcuffs of his prejudices he would knock out the brains (nay, that is impossible, but,) he would split the skulls of our 'Cristo-galli', translate the word as you like:--French Christians, or coxcombs! Ib. p. 231-2. "Let Witzell know, (said Luther) that David's wars and battles, which he fought, were more pleasing to God than the fastings and prayings of the best, of the honestest, and of the holiest monks and friars; much more than the works of our new ridiculous and superstitious friars." A cordial, rich and juicy speech, such as shaped itself into, and lived anew in, the Gustavus Adolphuses. Chap. XV. p. 233-4. "God most certainly heareth them that pray in faith, and granteth when and how he pleaseth, and knoweth most profitable for them. We must also know, that when our prayers tend to the sanctifying of his name, and to the increase and honor of his kingdom (also that we pray according to his will) then most certainly he heareth. But when we pray contrary to these points, then we are not heard; for God doth nothing against his Name, his kingdom, and his will." Then (saith the understanding, [Greek: Tò phrónaema sarkòs]) what doth prayer effect? If A--prayer = B., and A + prayer = B, prayer = O. The attempt to answer this argument by admitting its invalidity relatively to God, but asserting the efficacy of prayer relatively to the pray-er or precant himself, is merely staving off the objection a single step. For this effect on the devout soul is produced by an act of God. The true answer is, prayer is an idea, and 'ens spirituale', out of the cognizance of the understanding. The spiritual mind receives the answer in the contemplation of the idea, life as 'deitas diffusa'. We can set the life in efficient motion, but not contrary to the form or type. The errors and false theories of great men sometimes, perhaps most often, arise out of true ideas falsified by degenerating into conceptions; or the mind excited to action by an inworking idea, the understanding works in the same direction according to its kind, and produces a counterfeit, in which the mind rests. This I believe to be the case with the scheme of emanation in Plotinus. God is made a first and consequently a comparative intensity, and matter the last; the whole thence finite; and thence its conceivability. But we must admit a gradation of intensities in reality. Chap. XVI. p. 247. "When governors and rulers are enemies to God's word, then our duty is to depart, to sell and forsake all we have, to fly from one place to another, as Christ commandeth; we must make and prepare no uproars nor tumults by reason of the Gospel, but we must suffer all things." Right. But then it must be the lawful rulers; those in whom the sovereign or supreme power is lodged by the known laws and constitution of the country. Where the laws and constitutional liberties of the nation are trampled on, the subjects do not lose, and are not in conscience bound to forego, their right of resistance, because they are Christians, or because it happens to be a matter of religion, in which their rights are violated. And this was Luther's opinion. Whether, if a Popish Czar shall act as our James II. acted, the Russian Greekists would be justified in doing with him what the English Protestants justifiably did with regard to James, is a knot which I shall not attempt to cut; though I guess the Russians would, by cutting their Czar's throat. Ib. 'But no man will do this, except he be so sure of his doctrine and religion, as that, although I myself should play the fool, and should recant and deny this my doctrine and religion (which God forbid), he notwithstanding therefore would not yield, but say, "If Luther, or an angel from heaven, should teach otherwise, _Let him be accursed_."' Well and nobly said, thou rare black swan! This, this is the Church. Where this is found, there is the Church of Christ, though but twenty in the whole of the congregation; and were twenty such in two hundred different places, the Church would be entire in each. Without this no Church. Ib. p. 248. "And he sent for one of his chiefest privy councillors, named Lord John _Von Minkwitz_, and said unto him; 'You have heard my father say, (running with him at tilt) that to sit upright on horseback maketh a good tilter. If therefore it be good and laudable in temporal tilting to sit upright; how much more is it now praiseworthy in God's cause to sit, to stand, and to go uprightly and just!'" Princely. So Shakspeare would have made a Prince Elector talk. The metaphor is so grandly in character. Chap. XVII. p. 249. "_Signa sunt subinde facta, minora; res autem et facta subinde creverunt_." A valuable remark. As the substance waxed, that is, became more evident, the ceremonial sign waned, till at length in the Eucharist the 'signum' united itself with the 'significatum', and became consubstantial. The ceremonial sign, namely, the eating the bread and drinking the wine, became a symbol, that is, a solemn instance and exemplification of the class of mysterious acts, which we are, or as Christians should be, performing daily and hourly in every social duty and recreation. This is indeed to re-create the man in and by Christ. Sublimely did the Fathers call the Eucharist the extension of the Incarnation: only I should have preferred the perpetuation and application of the Incarnation. Ib. A bare writing without a seal is of no force. Metaphors are sorry logic, especially metaphors from human and those too conventional usages to the ordinances of eternal wisdom. Ib. p. 250. Luther said, "No. A Christian is wholly and altogether sanctified. * * We must take sure hold on Baptism by faith, as then we shall be, yea, already are, sanctified. In this sort David nameth himself holy." A deep thought. Strong meat for men. It must not be offered for milk. Chap. XXI. p. 276. Then I will declare him openly to the Church, and in this manner I will say: "Loving friends, I declare unto you, how that N. N. hath been admonished: first, by myself in private, afterwards also by two chaplains, thirdly, by two aldermen and churchwardens, and those of the assembly: yet notwithstanding he will not desist from his sinful kind of life. Wherefore I earnestly desire you to assist and aid me, to kneel down with me, and let us pray against him, and deliver him over to the Devil." Luther did not mean that this should be done all at once; but that a day should be appointed for the congregation to meet for joint consultation, and according to the resolutions passed to choose and commission such and such persons to wait on the offender, and to exhort, persuade and threaten him in the name of the congregation: then, if after due time allowed, this proved fruitless, to kneel down with the minister, &c. Surely, were it only feasible, nothing could be more desirable. But alas! it is not compatible with a Church national, the congregations of which are therefore not gathered nor elected, or with a Church established by law; for law and discipline are mutually destructive of each other, being the same as involuntary and voluntary penance. Chap. xxii. p. 290. Wicliffe and Huss opposed and assaulted the manner of life and conversation in Popedom. But I chiefly do oppose and resist their doctrine; I affirm roundly and plainly that they teach not aright. Thereto am I called. I take the goose by the neck, and set the knife to the throat. When I can maintain that the Pope's doctrine is false, (which I have proved and maintained), then I will easily prove and maintain that their manner of life is evil. This is a remark of deep insight: 'verum vere Lutheranum'. Ib. p. 291. Ambition and pride (said Luther), are the rankest poison in the Church when they are possessed by preachers. Zuinglius thereby was misled, who did what pleased himself * * * He wrote, "Ye honorable and good princes must pardon me, in that I give you not your titles; for the glass windows are as well illustrious as ye." One might fancy, in the Vision-of-Mirza style, that all the angry, contemptuous, haughty expressions of good and zealous men, gallant staff-officers in the army of Christ, formed a rick of straw and stubble, which at the last day is to be divided into more or fewer haycocks, according to the number of kind and unfeignedly humble and charitable thoughts and speeches that had intervened, and that these were placed in a pile, leap-frog fashion, in the narrow road to the gate of Paradise; and burst into flame as the zeal of the individual approached,--so that he must leap over and through them. Now I cannot help thinking, that this dear man of God, heroic Luther, will find more opportunities of showing his agility, and reach the gate in a greater sweat and with more blisters 'a parte post' than his brother hero, Zuinglius. I guess that the comments of the latter on the Prophets will be found almost sterile in these tiger-lilies and brimstone flowers of polemic rhetoric, compared with the controversy of the former with our Henry VIII., his replies to the Pope's Bulls, and the like. By the by, the joke of the 'glass windows' is lost in the translation. The German for illustrious is 'durchlauchtig', that is, transparent or translucent. Ib. When we leave to God his name, his kingdom and will, then will he also give unto us our daily bread, and will remit our sins, and deliver us from the devil and all evil. Only his honor he will have to himself. A brief but most excellent comment on the Lord's Prayer. Ib. p. 297. There was never any that understood the Old Testament so well as St. Paul, except only John the Baptist. I cannot conjecture what Luther had in his mind when he made this exception. Chap. XXVII. p. 335. I could wish (said Luther) that the Princes and States of the Empire would make an assembly, and hold a council and a union both in doctrine and ceremonies, so that every one might not break in and run on with such insolency and presumption according to his own brains, as already is begun, whereby many good hearts are offended. Strange heart of man! Would Luther have given up the doctrine of justification by faith alone, had the majority of the Council decided in favor of the Arminian scheme? If not, by what right could he expect OEcolampadius or Zuinglius to recant their convictions respecting the Eucharist, or the Baptists theirs on Infant Baptism, to the same authority? In fact, the wish expressed in this passage must be considered as a mere flying thought shot out by the mood and feeling of the moment, a sort of conversational flying-fish that dropped as soon as the moisture of the fins had evaporated. The paragraph in p. 336, of what Councils ought to order, should be considered Luther's genuine opinion. Ib. p. 337. The council of Nice, held after the Apostles' time, (said Luther) was the very best and purest; but soon after in the time of the Emperor Constantine, it was weakened by the Arians. What Arius himself meant, I do not know: what the modern Arians teach, I utterly condemn; but that the great council of Ariminum was either Arian or heretical I could never discover, or descry any essential difference between its decisions and the Nicene; though I seem to find a serious difference of the pseudo-Athanasian Creed from both. If there be a difference between the Councils of Nicea and Ariminum, it perhaps consists in this;--that the Nicene was the more anxious to assert the equal Divinity in the Filial subordination; the Ariminian to maintain the Filial subordination in the equal Divinity. In both there are three self-subsistent and only one self-originated:--which is the substance of the idea of the Trinity, as faithfully worded as is compatible with the necessary inadequacy of words to the expression of ideas, that is, spiritual truths that can only be spiritually discerned. [4] 18th August, 1826. Chap. XXVIII. p. 347. God's word a Lord of all Lords. Luther every where identifies the living Word of God with the written word, and rages against Bullinger, who contended that the latter is the word of God only as far as and for whom it is the vehicle of the former. To this Luther replies: "My voice, the vehicle of my words, does not cease to be my voice, because it is ignorantly or maliciously misunderstood." Yea! (might Bullinger have rejoined) the instance were applicable and the argument valid, if we were previously assured that all and every part of the Old and New Testament is the voice of the divine Word. But, except by the Spirit, whence are we to ascertain this? Not from the books themselves; for not one of them makes the pretension for itself, and the two or three texts, which seem to assert it, refer only to the Law and the Prophets, and no where enumerate the books that were given by inspiration: and how obscure the history of the formation of the Canon, and how great the difference of opinion respecting its different parts, what scholar is ignorant? Chap. XXIX. p. 349. 'Patres, quamquam sæpe errant, tamen venerandi propter testimonium fidei.' Although I learn from all this chapter, that Luther was no great Patrician, (indeed he was better employed), yet I am nearly, if not wholly of his mind respecting the works of the Fathers. Those which appear to me of any great value are valuable chiefly for those articles of Christian Faith which are, as it were, 'ante Christum' JESUM, namely, the Trinity, and the primal Incarnation spoken of by John i, 10. But in the main I should perhaps go even farther than Luther; for I cannot conceive any thing more likely than that a young man of strong and active intellect, who has no fears, or suffers no fears of worldly prudence to cry, Halt! to him in his career of consequential logic, and who has been 'innutritus et juratus' in the Grotio-Paleyan scheme of Christian evidence, and who has been taught by the men and books, which he has been bred up to regard as authority, to consider all inward experiences as fanatical delusions;--I say, I can scarcely conceive such a young man to make a serious study of the Fathers of the first four or five centuries without becoming either a Romanist or a Deist. Let him only read Petavius and the different Patristic and Ecclesiastico -historical tracts of Semler, and have no better philosophy than that of Locke, no better theology than that of Arminius and Bishop Jeremy Taylor, and I should tremble for his belief. Yet why tremble for a belief which is the very antipode of faith? Better for such a man to precipitate himself on to the utmost goal: for then perhaps he may in the repose of intellectual activity feel the nothingness of his prize, or the wretchedness of it; and then perhaps the inward yearning after a religion may make him ask;--"Have I not mistaken the road at the outset? Am I sure that the Reformers, Luther and the rest collectively, were fanatics?" Ib. p. 351. 'Take no care what ye shall eat'. As though that commandment did not hinder the carping and caring for the daily bread. For 'caring,' read, 'anxiety!' 'Sit tibi curæ, non autem solicitudini, panis quotidianus'. Ib. p. 351. Even so it was with Ambrose: he wrote indeed well and purely, was more serious in writing than Austin, who was amiable and mild. * * * Fulgentius is the best poet, and far above Horace both with sentences, fair speeches and good actions; he is well worthy to be ranked and numbered with and among the poets. 'Der Teufel'! Surely the epithets should be reversed. Austin's mildness--the 'durus pater infantum'! And the 'super'-Horatian effulgence of Master Foolgentius! O Swan! thy critical cygnets are but goslings. N.B. I have, however, since I wrote the above, heard Mr. J. Hookham Frere speak highly of Fulgentius. Ib. p. 352. For the Fathers were but men, and to speak the truth, their reputes and authorities did undervalue and suppress the books and writings of the sacred Apostles of Christ. We doubtless find in the writings of the Fathers of the second century, and still more strongly in those of the third, passages concerning the Scriptures that seem to say the same as we Protestants now do. But then we find the very same phrases used of writings not Apostolic, or with no other difference than what the greater name of the authors would naturally produce; just as a Platonist would speak of Speusippus's books, were they extant, compared with those of later teachers of Platonism;--'He was Plato's nephew-had seen Plato--was his appointed successor, &c.' But in inspiration the early Christians, as far as I can judge, made no generic difference, let Lardner say what he will. Can he disprove that it was declared heretical by the Church in the second century to believe the written words of a dead Apostle in opposition to the words of a living Bishop, seeing that the same spirit which guided the Apostles dwells in and guides the Bishops of the Church? This at least is certain, that the later the age of the writer, the stronger the expression of comparative superiority of the Scriptures; the earlier, on the other hand, the more we hear of the 'Symbolum', the 'Regula Fidei', the Creed. Chap. XXXII. p. 362. The history of the Prophet Jonas is so great that it is almost incredible; yea, it soundeth more strange than any of the poets' fables, and (said Luther) if it stood not in the Bible, I should take it for a lie. It is quite wonderful that Luther, who could see so plainly that the book of Judith was an allegoric poem, should have been blind to the book of Jonas being an apologue, in which Jonah means the Israelitish nation. Ib. p. 364. For they entered into the garden about the hour at noon day, and having appetites to eat, she took delight in the apple; then about two of the clock, according to our account, was the fall. Milton has adopted this notion in the Paradise Lost--not improbably from this book. Ib. p. 365. David made a Psalm of two and twenty parts, in each of which are eight verses, and yet in all is but one kind of meaning, namely, he will only say, Thy law or word is good. I have conjectured that the 119th Psalm might have been a form of ordination, in which a series of candidates made their prayers and profession in the open Temple before they went to the several synagogues in the country. Ib. But (said Luther) I say, he did well and right thereon: for the office of a magistrate is to punish the guilty and wicked malefactors. He made a vow, indeed, not to punish him, but that is to be understood, so long as David lived. O Luther! Luther! ask your own heart if this is not Jesuit morality. Chap. XXXIII. v. 367. I believe (said Luther) the words of our Christian belief were in such sort ordained by the Apostles, who were together, and made this sweet 'Symbolum' so briefly and comfortable. It is difficult not to regret that Luther had so superficial a knowledge of Ecclesiastical antiquities: for example, his belief in this fable of the Creed having been a 'picnic' contribution of the twelve Apostles, each giving a sentence. Whereas nothing is more certain than that it was the gradual product of three or four centuries. Chap. XXXIV. p. 369. An angel (said Luther) is a spiritual creature created by God without a body for the service of Christendom, especially in the office of the Church. What did Luther mean by a body? For to me the word seemeth capable of two senses, universal and special:--first, a form indicating to A. B. C. &c., the existence and finiteness of some one other being 'demonstrative' as 'hic', and 'disjunctive' as 'hic et non ille'; and in this sense God alone can be without body: secondly, that which is not merely 'hic distinctive', but 'divisive'; yea, a product divisible from the producent as a snake from its skin, a precipitate and death of living power; and in this sense the body is proper to mortality, and to be denied of spirits made perfect as well as of the spirits that never fell from perfection, and perhaps of those who fell below mortality, namely, the devils. But I am inclined to hold that the Devil has no one body, nay, no body of his own; but ceaselessly usurps or counterfeits bodies; for he is an everlasting liar, yea, the lie which is the colored shadow of the substance that intercepts the truth. Ib. p. 370. The devils are in woods, in waters, in wildernesses, and in dark pooly places, ready to hurt and prejudice people, &c. "The angel's like a flea, The devil is a bore;--" No matter for that! quoth S.T.C. I love him the better therefore. Yes! heroic Swan, I love thee even when thou gabbiest like a goose; for thy geese helped to save the Capitol. Ib. p. 371. I do verily believe (said Luther) that the day of judgment draweth near, and that the angels prepare themselves for the fight and combat, and that within the space of a few hundred years they will strike down both Turk and Pope into the bottomless pit of hell. Yea! two or three more such angels as thyself, Martin Luther, and thy prediction would be, or perhaps would now have been, accomplished. Chap. XXXV. p. 388. Cogitations of the understanding do produce no melancholy, but the cogitations of the will cause sadness; as, when one is grieved at a thing, or when one doth sigh and complain, there are melancholy and sad cogitations, but the understanding is not melancholy. Even in Luther's lowest imbecilities what gleams of vigorous good sense! Had he understood the nature and symptoms of indigestion together with the detail of subjective seeing and hearing, and the existence of mid-states of the brain between sleeping and waking, Luther would have been a greater philosopher; but would he have been so great a hero? I doubt it. Praised be God whose mercy is over all his works; who bringeth good out of evil, and manifesteth his wisdom even in the follies of his servants, his strength in their weakness! Ib. p. 389. Whoso prayeth a Psalm shall be made thoroughly warm. 'Expertus credo'. 19th Aug. 1826. I have learnt to interpret for myself the imprecating verses of the Psalms of my inward and spiritual enemies, the old Adam and all his corrupt menials; and thus I am no longer, as I used to be, stopped or scandalized by such passages as vindictive and anti-Christian. Ib. The Devil (said Luther) oftentimes objected and argued against me the whole cause which, through God's grace, I lead. He objecteth also against Christ. But better it were that the Temple brake in pieces than that Christ should therein remain obscure and hid. Sublime! Ib. In Job are two chapters concerning 'Behemoth' the whale, that by reason of him no man is in safety. * * These are colored words and figures whereby the Devil is signified and showed. A slight mistake of brother Martin's. The 'Behemoth' of Job is beyond a doubt neither whale nor devil, but, I think, the hippopotamus; who is indeed as ugly as the devil, and will occasionally play the devil among the rice-grounds; but though in this respect a devil of a fellow, yet on the whole he is too honest a monster to be a fellow of devils. 'Vindiciæ Behemoticæ'. Chap. XXXVI. p. 390. 'Of Witchcraft'. It often presses on my mind as a weighty argument in proof of at least a negative inspiration, an especial restraining grace, in the composition of the Canonical books, that though the writers individually did (the greater number at least) most probably believe in the objective reality of witchcraft, yet no such direct assertions as these of Luther's, which would with the vast majority of Christians have raised it into an article of faith, are to be found in either Testament. That the 'Ob' and 'Oboth' of Moses are no authorities for this absurd superstition, has been unanswerably shewn by Webster. [5] Chap. XXXVII. p. 398. To conclude, (said Luther), I never yet knew a troubled and perplexed man, that was right in his own wits. A sound observation of great practical utility. Edward Irving should be aware of this in dealing with conscience-troubled (but in fact fancy-vexed) women. Ib. It was not a thorn in the flesh touching the unchaste love he bore towards Tecla, as the Papists dream. I should like to know how high this strange legend can be traced. The other tradition that St. Paul was subject to epileptic fits, has a less legendary character. The phrase 'thorn in the flesh' is scarcely reconcilable with Luther's hypothesis, otherwise than as doubts of the objectivity of his vision, and of his after revelations may have been consequences of the disease, whatever that might be. Ib. p. 399. Our Lord God doth like a printer, who setteth the letters backwards; we see and feel well his setting, but we shall see the print yonder in the life to come. A beautiful simile. Add that even in this world the lives, especially the autobiographies, of eminent servants of Christ, are like the looking-glass or mirror, which, reversing the types, renders them legible to us. Ib. p. 403. 'Indignus sum, sed dignus fui--creari a Deo', &c. Although I am unworthy, yet nevertheless 'I have been' worthy, 'in that I am' created of God, &c. The translation does not give the true sense of the Latin. It should be 'was' and 'to be'. The 'dignus fui' has here the sense of 'dignum me habuit Deus'. See Herbert's little poem in the Temple: Sweetest Saviour, if my soul Were but worth the having, Quickly should I then control Any thought of waving; But when all my care and pains Cannot give the name of gains To thy wretch so full of stains, What delight or hope remains? Ib. p. 404. The chiefest physic for that disease (but very hard and difficult it is to be done) is, that they firmly hold such cogitations not to be theirs, but that most sure and certain they come of the Devil. More and more I understand the immense difference between the Faith-article of 'the Devil' ([Greek: tou Ponaeroù]) and the superstitious fancy of devils: 'animus objectivus dominationem in' [Greek: tòn Eimì] 'affectans'; [Greek: oútos tò méga órganon Diabólou hypárchei]. Chap. XLIV. p. 431. I truly advise all those (said Luther) who earnestly do affect the honor of Christ and the Gospel, that they would be enemies to Erasmus Roterodamus, for he is a devaster of religion. Do but read only his dialogue 'De Peregrinatione', where you will see how he derideth and flouteth the whole religion, and at last concludeth out of single abominations, that he rejecteth religion, &c. Religion here means the vows and habits of the religious or those bound to a particular life;--the monks, friars, nuns, in short, the regulars in contradistinction from the laity and the secular Clergy. Ib. p. 432. Erasmus can do nothing but cavil and flout, he cannot confute. If (said Luther) I were a Papist, so could I easily overcome and beat him. For although he flouteth the Pope with his ceremonies, yet he neither hath confuted nor overcome him; no enemy is beaten nor overcome with mocking, jeering, and flouting. Most true; but it is an excellent pioneer and an excellent 'corps de reserve', cavalry for pursuit, and for clearing the field of battle, and in the first use Luther was greatly obliged to Erasmus. But such utter unlikes cannot but end in dislikes, and so it proved between Erasmus and Luther. Erasmus, might the Protestants say, wished no good to the Church of Rome, and still less to our party: it was with him 'Rot her and Dam us'! Chap. XLVIII. p. 442. David's example is full of offences, that so holy a man, chosen of God, should fall into such great abominable sins and blasphemies; when as before he was very fortunate and happy, of whom all the bordering kingdoms were afraid, for God was with him. If any part of the Old Testament be typical, the whole life and character of David, from his birth to his death, are eminently so. And accordingly the history of David and his Psalms, which form a most interesting part of his history, occupies as large a portion of the Old Testament as all the others. The type is two-fold-now of the Messiah, now of the Church, and of the Church in all its relations, persecuted, victorious, backsliding, penitent. N.B. I do not find David charged with any vices, though with heavy crimes. So it is with the Church. Vices destroy its essence. Ib. The same was a strange kind of offence (said Luther) that the world was offended at him who raised the dead, who made the blind to see, and the deaf to hear, &c. Our Lord alluded to the verse that immediately follows and completes his quotations from Isaiah. [6] I, Jehovah, will come and do this. That he implicitly declared himself the Jehovah, the Word,--this was the offence. Chap. XLIX. p. 443. God wills, may one say, that we should serve him freewillingly, but he that serveth God out of fear of punishment of hell, or out of a hope and love of recompence, the same serveth and honoreth God not freely; therefore such a one serveth God not uprightly nor truly. _Answer_. This argument (said Luther) is Stoical, &c. A truly wise paragraph. Pity it was not expounded. God will accept our imperfections, where their face is turned toward him, on the road to the glorious liberty of the Gospel. Chap. L. p. 446. It is the highest grace and gift of God to have an honest, a God-fearing, housewifely consort, &c. But God thrusteth many into the state of matrimony before they be aware and rightly bethink themselves. The state of matrimony (said Luther) is the chiefest state in the world after religion, &c. Alas! alas! this is the misery of it, that so many wed and so few are Christianly married! But even in this the analogy of matrimony to the religion of Christ holds good: for even such is the proportion of nominal to actual Christians;--all _christened_, how few baptized! But in true matrimony it is beautiful to consider, how peculiarly the marriage state harmonizes with the doctrine of justification by free grace through faith alone. The little quarrels, the imperfections on both sides, the occasional frailties, yield to the one thought,--there is love at the bottom. If sickness or other sorer calamity visit me, how would the love then blaze forth! The faults are there, but they are not imprinted. The prickles, the acrid rind, the bitterness or sourness, are transformed into the ripe fruit, and the foreknowledge of this gives the name and virtue of the ripe fruit to the fruit yet green on the bough. Ib. p. 447. The causers and founders of matrimony are chiefly God's commandments, &c. It is a state instituted by God himself, visited by Christ in person, and presented with a glorious present; for God said, 'It is not good that the man should be alone': therefore the wife should be a help to the husband, to the end that human generations may be increased, and children nurtured to God's honour, and to the profit of people and countries; also to keep our bodies in sanctification. (Add) and in mutual reverence, our spirits in a state of love and tenderness; and our imaginations pure and tranquil. In a word, matrimony not only preserveth human generations so that the same remain continually, but it preserveth the generations human. Ib. p. 450. In the synod at Leipzig the lawyers concluded that secret contractors should be punished with banishment and be disinherited. Whereupon (said Luther) I sent them word that I would not allow thereof, it were too gross a proceeding, &c. But nevertheless I hold it fitting, that those which in such sort do secretly contract themselves, ought sharply to be reproved, yea, also in some measure severely punished. What a sweet union of prudence and kind nature! Scold them sharply, and perhaps let them smart a while for their indiscretion and disobedience; and then kiss and make it up, remembering that young folks will be young folks, and that love has its own law and logic. Chap. LIX. p. 481. The presumption and boldness of the sophists and School-divines is a very ungodly thing, which some of the Fathers also approved of and extolled; namely of spiritual significations in the Holy Scripture, whereby she is pitifully tattered and torn in pieces. It is an apish work in such sort to juggle with Holy Scripture: it is no otherwise than if I should discourse of physic in this manner: the fever is a sickness, rhubarb is the physic. The fever signified! the sins --rhubarb is Jesus Christ, &c. Who seeth not here (said Luther) that such significations are mere juggling tricks? _Even so_ and after the same manner are they deceived that say, Children ought to be baptized again, because they had not faith. For the life of me, I cannot find the 'even so' in this sentence. The watchman cries, 'half-past three o'clock.' Even so, and after the same manner, the great Cham of Tartary has a carbuncle on his nose. Chap. LX. p. 483. George in the Greek tongue, is called a 'builder', that buildeth countries and people with justice and righteousness, &c. A mistake for a tiller or boor, from 'Bauer', 'bauen'. The latter hath two senses, to build and to bring into cultivation. Chap. LXX. p. 503. I am now advertised (said Luther) that a new astrologer is risen, who presumeth to prove that the earth moveth and goeth about, not the firmament, the sun and moon, nor the stars; like as when one who sitteth in a coach or in a ship and is moved, thinketh he sitteth still and resteth, but the earth and the trees go, run, and move themselves. Therefore thus it goeth, when we give up ourselves to our own foolish fancies and conceits. This fool will turn the whole art of astronomy upside-down, but the Scripture sheweth and teacheth him another lesson, when Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth. There is a similar, but still more intolerant and contemptuous anathema of the Copernican system in Sir Thomas Brown, almost two centuries later than Luther. Though the problem is of no difficult solution for reflecting minds, yet for the reading many it would be a serviceable work, to bring together and exemplify the causes of the extreme and universal credulity that characterizes sundry periods of history (for example, from A.D. 1400 to A.D. 1650): and credulity involves lying and delusion--for by a seeming paradox liars are always credulous, though credulous persons are not always liars; although they most often are. It would be worth while to make a collection of the judgments of eminent men in their generation respecting the Copernican or Pythagorean scheme. One writer (I forget the name) inveighs against it as Popery, and a Popish stratagem to reconcile the minds of men to Transubstantiation and the Mass. For if we may contradict the evidence of our senses in a matter of natural philosophy, 'a fortiori', or much more, may we be expected to do so in a matter of faith. In my Noetic, or Doctrine and Discipline of Ideas = 'logice, Organon'--I purpose to select some four, five or more instances of the sad effects of the absence of ideas in the use of words and in the understanding of truths, in the different departments of life; for example, the word 'body', in connection with resurrection-men, &c.--and the last instances, will (please God!) be the sad effects on the whole system of Christian divinity. I must remember Asgill's book. [7] Religion necessarily, as to its main and proper doctrines, consists of ideas, that is, spiritual truths that can only be spiritually discerned, and to the expression of which words are necessarily inadequate, and must be used by accommodation. Hence the absolute indispensability of a Christian life, with its conflicts and inward experiences, which alone can make a man to answer to an opponent, who charges one doctrine as contradictory to another,--"Yes! it is a contradiction in terms; but nevertheless so it is, and both are true, nay, parts of the same truth."--But alas! besides other evils there is this,--that the Gospel is preached in fragments, and what the hearer can recollect of the sum total of these is to be his Christian knowledge and belief. This is a grievous error. First, labour to enlighten the hearer as to the essence of the Christian dispensation, the grounding and pervading idea, and then set it forth in its manifold perspective, its various stages and modes of manifestation. In this as in almost all other qualities of a preacher of Christ, Luther after Paul and John is the great master. None saw more clearly than he, that the same proposition, which, addressed to a Christian in his first awakening out of the death of sin was a most wholesome, nay, a necessary, truth, would be a most condemnable Antinomian falsehood, if addressed to a secure Christian boasting and trusting in 'his' faith--yes, in 'his' own faith, instead of the faith of Christ communicated to him. I cannot utter how dear and precious to me are the contents of pages 197-199, to line 17, of this work, more particularly the section headed: How we ought to carry ourselves towards the Law's accusations. Add to these the last two sections of p. 201. [8] the last touching St. Austin's opinion [9] especially. Likewise, the first half of p. 202. [10] But indeed the whole of the 12th chapter 'Of the Law and the Gospel' is of inestimable value to a serious and earnest minister of the Gospel. Here he may learn both the orthodox faith, and a holy prudence in the time and manner of preaching the same. July, 1829. [Footnote 1: 'Doctoris Martini Lutheri Colloquia Mensalia:' or Dr. Martin Luther's Divine Discourses at his Table, &c. Collected first together by Dr. Antonius Lauterbach, and afterwards disposed into certain common-places by John Aurifaber, Doctor in Divinity. Translated by Capt. Henry Bell. 'Folio' London, 1652.] [Footnote 2: N. B. I should not have written the above note in my present state of light;--not that I find it false, but that it may have the effect of falsehood by not going deep enough. July, 1829.] [Footnote 3: Charles Lamb.--Ed.] [Footnote 4: "Out of the number of 400, there were but 80 Arians at the utmost. The other 320 and more were really orthodox men, induced by artifices to subscribe a Creed which they understood in a good sense, but which, being worded in general terms, was capable of being perverted to a bad one." 'Waterland, Vindication', &c., c. vi.--'Ed'.] [Footnote 5: The Displaying of supposed Witchcraft, &c. London. 'folio'. 1677. 'Ed'.] [Footnote 6: Isaiah xxxv. 4. lxi 1. Ed. Luke iv. 18, 19.] [Footnote 7: "An argument proving that, according to the covenant of eternal life, revealed in the Scriptures, man may be translated from hence, without passing through death, although the human nature of Christ himself could not be thus translated, till he had passed through death." See 'Table Talk. 2nd Edit'. p. 127. 'Ed'.] [Footnote 8: We must preach the Law (said Luther) for the sakes of the evil and wicked, &c.] [Footnote 9: The opinion of St. Austin is (said Luther) that the Law which through human strength, natural understanding and wisdom is fulfilled, justifieth not, &c.] [Footnote 10: Whether we should preach only of God's grace and mercy or not. From "Philip Melancthon demanded of Luther"--to "yet we must press through, and not suffer ourselves to recoil."] * * * * * NOTES ON THE LIFE OF ST. TERESA. 1812. [1] Pref. Part I. p. 51. Letter of Father Avila to Mother Teresa de Jesu. Persons ought to beseech our Lord not to conduct them by the way of seeing; but that the happy sight of him and of his saints be reserved for heaven; and that, here he would conduct them in the plain, beaten road, &c. * * But if, doing all this, the visions continue, and the soul reaps profit thereby, &c. In what other language could a young woman check while she soothed her espoused lover, in his too eager demonstrations of his passion? And yet the art of the Roman priests,--to keep up the delusion as serviceable, yet keep off those forms of it most liable to detection, by medical commentary! Life, Part I. Chap. IV. p. 15. But our Lord began to regale me so much by this way, that he vouchsafed me the favor to give me quiet prayer; and sometimes it came so far as to arrive at union; though I understood neither the one nor the other, nor how much they both deserve to be prized. But I believe it would have been a great deal of happiness for me to have understood them. True it is, that this union rested with me for so short a time, that perhaps it might arrive to be but as of an 'Ave Maria'; yet I remained with so very great effects thereof, that with not being then so much as twenty years old, methought I found the whole world under my feet. Dreams, the soul herself forsaking; Fearful raptures; childlike mirth. Silent adorations, making A blessed shadow of this earth! Ib. Chap. V. p. 24. I received also the blessed Sacrament with many tears; though yet, in my opinion, they were not shed with that sense and grief, for only my having offended God, which might have served to save my soul; if the error into which I was brought by them who told me that some things were not mortal sins, (which afterward I saw plainly that they were) might not somewhat bestead me. *** Methinks, that without doubt my soul might have run a hazard of not being saved, if I had died then. Can we wonder that some poor hypochondriasts and epileptics have believed themselves possessed by, or rather to be the Devil himself, and so spoke in this imagined character, when this poor afflicted spotless innocent could be so pierced through with fanatic pre-conceptions, as to talk in this manner of her mortal sins, and their probable eternal punishment;--and this too, under the most fervent sense of God's love and mercy! Ib. p. 43. True it is, that I am both the most weak, and the most wicked of any living. What is the meaning of these words, that occur so often in the works of great saints? Do they believe them literally? Or is it a specific suspension of the comparing power and the memory, vouchsafed them as a gift of grace?--a gift of telling a lie without breach of veracity--a gift of humility indemnifying pride. Ib. Chap. VIII. p. 44. I have not without cause been considering and reflecting upon this life of mine so long, for I discern well enough that nobody will have gust to look upon a thing so very wicked. Again! Can this first sentence be other than madness or a lie? For observe, the question is not, whether Teresa was or was not positively very wicked; but whether according to her own scale of virtue she was most and very wicked comparatively. See post Chap. X. p. 57-8. That relatively to the command 'Be ye perfect even as your Father in Heaven is perfect', and before the eye of his own pure reason, the best of men may deem himself mere folly and imperfection, I can easily conceive; but this is not the case in question. It is here a comparison of one man with all others of whom he has known or heard;--'ergo', a matter of experience; and in this sense it is impossible, without loss of memory and judgment on the one hand, or of veracity and simplicity on the other. Besides, of what use is it? To draw off our conscience from the relation between ourselves and the perfect ideal appointed for our imitation, to the vain comparison of one individual self with other men! Will their sins lessen mine, though they were greater? Does not every man stand or fall to his own Maker according to his own being? Ib. p. 45. I see not what one thing there is of so many as are to be found in the whole world, wherein there is need of a greater courage than to treat of committing treason against a king, and to know that he knows it well, and yet never to go out of his presence. For howsoever it be very true that we are always in the presence of God; yet methinks that they who converse with him in prayer are in his presence after a more particular manner; for they are seeing then that he sees them; whereas others may, perhaps, remain some days in his presence, yet without remembering that he looks upon them. A very pretty and sweet remark: truth in new feminine beauty! 'In fine'. How incomparably educated was Teresa for a mystic saint, a mother of transports and fusions of spirit! 1. A woman; 2. Of rank, and reared delicately; 3. A Spanish lady; 4. With very pious parents and sisters; 5. Accustomed in early childhood to read "with most believing heart" all the legends of saints, martyrs, Spanish martyrs, who fought against the Moors; 6. In the habit of privately (without the knowledge of the superstitious Father) reading books of chivalry to her mother, and then all night to herself. 7. Then her Spanish sweet-hearting, doubtless in the true Oroondates style--and with perfect innocence, as far as appears; and this giving of audience to a dying swain through a grated window, on having received a lover's messages of flames and despair, with her aversion at fifteen or sixteen years of age to shut herself up for ever in a strict nunnery, appear to have been those mortal sins, of which she accuses herself, added, perhaps to a few warm fancies of earthly love; 8. A frame of exquisite sensibility by nature, rendered more so by a burning fever, which no doubt had some effect upon her brain, as she was from that time subject to frequent fainting fits and 'deliquia': 9. Frightened at her Uncle's, by reading to him Dante's books of Hell and Judgment, she confesses that she at length resolved on nunhood because she thought it could not be much worse than Purgatory--and that purgatory here was a cheap expiation for Hell for ever; 10. Combine these (and I have proceeded no further than the eleventh page of her life) and think, how impossible it was, but that such a creature, so innocent, and of an imagination so heated, and so well peopled should often mistake the first not painful, and in such a frame, often pleasurable approaches to 'deliquium' for divine raptures; and join the instincts of nature acting in the body of a mind unconscious of them, in the keenly sensitive body of a mind so loving and so innocent, and what remains to be solved which the stupidity of most and the roguery of a few would not simply explain? 11. One source it is almost criminal to have forgotten, and which p. 12. of the first Part brought back to my recollection; I mean, the effects--so super-sensual that they may easily and most venially pass for supernatural, so very glorious to human nature that, though in truth they are humanity itself in the contradistinguishing sense of that awful word, it is yet no wonder that, conscious of the sore weaknesses united in one person with this one nobler nature we attribute them to a divinity out of us, (a mistake of the sensuous imagination in its misapplication of space and place, rather than a misnomer of the thing itself, for it is verily [Greek: ho theòs en haemin ho oikeios theós],) the effects, I mean, of the moral force after conquest, the state of the whole being after the victorious struggle, in which the will has preserved its perfect freedom by a vehement energy of perfect obedience to the pure or practical reason, or conscience. Thence flows in upon and fills the soul 'that peace which passeth understanding', a state affronted and degraded by the name of pleasure, injured and mis-represented even by that of happiness, the very corner stone of that morality which cannot even in thought be distinguished from religion, and which seems to mean religion as long as the instinctive craving, dim and dark though it may be, of the moral sense after this unknown state (known only by the bitterness where it is not) shall remain in human nature! Under all forms of positive or philosophic religion, it has developed itself, too glorious an attribute of man to be confined to any name or sect; but which, it is but truth and historical fact to say, is more especially fostered and favoured by Christianity; and its frequent appearance even under the most selfish and unchristian forms of Christianity is a stronger evidence of the divinity of that religion, than all the miracles of Brahma and Veeshnou could afford, even though they were supported with tenfold the judicial evidence of the Gospel miracles. [2] [Footnote 1: The works of the Holy Mother St. Teresa of Jesus Foundress of the Reformation of the Discalced Carmelites. Divided into two parts. Translated into English. MDCLXXV. Ed.] [Footnote 2: London 1685.] * * * * * NOTES ON BURNET'S LIFE OF BISHOP BEDELL. [1] 1810. P. 12.-14. Here I must add a passage, concerning which I am in doubt whether it reflected more on the sincerity, or on the understanding of the English Ambassador. The breach between the Pope and the Republic was brought very near a crisis, &c. These pages contain a weak and unhandsome attack on Wotton, who doubtless had discovered that the presentation of the Premonition previously to the reconciliation as publicly completed, but after it had been privately agreed on, between the Court of Rome and the Senate of Venice, would embarrass the latter: whereas, delivered as it was, it shewed the King's and his minister's zeal for Protestantism, and yet supplied the Venetians with an answer not disrespectful to the king. Besides, what is there in Wotton's whole life (a man so disinterested, and who retired from all his embassies so poor) to justify the remotest suspicion of his insincerity? What can this word mean less or other than that Sir H. W. was either a crypt-Papist, or had received a bribe from the Romish party? Horrid accusations!--Burnet was notoriously rash and credulous; but I remember no other instance in which his zeal for the Reformation joined with his credulity has misled him into so gross a calumny. It is not to be believed, that Bedell gave any authority to such an aspersion of his old and faithful friend and patron, further than that he had related the fact, and that he and the minister differed in opinion as to the prudence of the measure recommended. How laxly too the story is narrated! The exact date of the recommendation by Father Paul and the divines should have been given;--then the date of the public annunciation of the reconciliation between the Pope and Venetian Republic; and lastly the day on which Wotton did present the book;--for even this Burnet leaves uncertain. P. 26. It is true he never returned and changed his religion himself, but his son came from Spain into Ireland, when Bedell was promoted to the Bishopric of Kilmore there, and told him, that his father commanded him to thank him for the pains he was at in writing it. He said, it was almost always lying open before him, and that he had heard him say, "He was resolved to save one." And it seems he instructed his son in the true religion, for he declared himself a Protestant on his coming over. Southey has given me a bad character of this son of the unhappy convert to the Romish Church. He became, it seems, a spy on the Roman Catholics, availing himself of his father's character among them, a crime which would indeed render his testimony null and more than null; it would be a presumption of the contrary. It is clear from his letters to Bedell that the convert was a very weak man. I owe to him, however, a complete confirmation of my old persuasion concerning Bishop Hall, whom from my first perusal of his works I have always considered as one of the blots (alas! there are too many) of the biography of the Church of England; a self-conceited, coarse-minded, persecuting, vulgar priest, and (by way of 'anti-climax') one of the first corrupters of and epigrammatizers of our English prose style. It is not true, that Sir Thomas Brown was the prototype of Dr. Johnson, who imitated him only as far as Sir T. B. resembles the majority of his predecessors; that is, in the pedantic preference of Latin derivations to Saxon words of the very same force. In the balance and construction of his periods Dr. Johnson has followed Hall, as any intelligent reader will discover by an attentive comparison. P. 158. Yea, will some man say, "But that which marreth all is the opinion of merit and satisfaction." Indeed that is the School doctrine, but the conscience enlightened to know itself, will easily act that part of the Publican, 'who smote his breast, and said, God be merciful to me a sinner'. Alas! so far from this being the case with ninety nine out of one hundred in Spain, Italy, Sicily, and Roman Catholic Germany, it is the Gospel tenets that are the true School doctrine, that is confined to books and closets of the learned among them. P. 161. And the like may be conceived here, since, especially, the idolatry practised under the obedience of mystical Babylon is rather in false and will-worship of the true God, and rather commended as profitable than enjoined as absolutely necessary, and the corruptions there maintained are rather in a superfluous addition than retraction in any thing necessary to salvation. This good man's charity jarring with his love and tender recollections of Father Paul, Fulgentio, and the Venetian divines, has led him to a far, far too palliative statement of Roman idolatry. Not what the Pope has yet ventured to thunder forth from his Anti-Sinai, but what he and his satellites, the Regulars, enforce to the preclusion of all true worship, in the actual practice, life-long, of an immense majority in Spain, Italy, Bavaria, Austria, &c. &c.--this must determine the point. What they are themselves,--not what they would persuade Protestants is their essentials or Faith,--this is the main thing. P. 164. I answer, under correction of better judgments, they have the ministry of reconciliation by the communion which is given at their Ordination, being the same which our Saviour left in his Church:--'whose sins ye remit, they are remitted, whose sins ye retain, they are retained'. Could Bishop Bedell believe that the mere will of a priest could have any effect on the everlasting weal or woe of a Christian! Even to the immediate disciples and Apostles could the text (if indeed it have reference to sins in our sense at all,) mean more than this,--Whenever you discover, by the spirit of knowledge which I will send unto you, repentance and faith, you shall declare remission of sins; and the sins shall be remitted;-and where the contrary exists, your declaration of exclusion from bliss shall be fulfilled? Did Christ say, that true repentance and actual faith would not save a soul, unless the priest's verbal remission was superadded? 'In fine.' If it were in my power I would have this book printed in a convenient form, and distributed through every house, at least, through every village and parish throughout the kingdom. A volume of thought and of moral feelings, the offspring of thought, crowd upon me, as I review the different parts of this admirable man's life and creed. Only compare his conduct to James Wadsworth (probably some ancestral relative of my honoured friend, William Wordsworth: for the same name in Yorkshire, from whence his father came, is pronounced Wadsworth) with that of the far, far too highly rated, Bishop Hall; his letter to Hall tenderly blaming his (Hall's) bitterness to an old friend mistaken, and then his letter to that friend defending Hall! What a picture of goodness! I confess, in all Ecclesiastical History I have read of no man so spotless, though of hundreds in which the biographers have painted them as masters of perfection: but the moral tact soon feels the truth. [Footnote 1: In one of the volumes of this work used by the Editor for ascertaining the references, the following note is written by a former owner. "October 12, 1788. Begged of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary to take my salvation on herself, and obtain it for Saint Hyacinthe's sake; to whom she has promised to grant any thing, or never to refuse any thing begged for his sake." It would be very interesting to know how far the feeling expressed in this artless effusion coexisted with a faith in the atonement and mediation of the one Lord Jesus Christ.--Ed.] * * * * * NOTES ON BAXTER'S LIFE OF HIMSELF. 1820. [1] Among the grounds for recommending the perusal of our elder writers, Hooker--Taylor--Baxter--in short almost any of the folios composed from Edward VI. to Charles II. I note: 1. The overcoming the habit of deriving your whole pleasure passively from the book itself, which can only be effected by excitement of curiosity or of some passion. Force yourself to reflect on what you read paragraph by paragraph, and in a short time you will derive your pleasure, an ample portion of it, at least, from the activity of your own mind. All else is picture sunshine. 2. The conquest of party and sectarian prejudices, when you have on the same table before you the works of a Hammond and a Baxter, and reflect how many and momentous their points of agreement, how few and almost childish the differences, which estranged and irritated these good men. Let us but imagine what their blessed spirits now feel at the retrospect of their earthly frailties, and can we do other than strive to feel as they now feel, not as they once felt? So will it be with the disputes between good men of the present day; and if you have no other reason to doubt your opponent's goodness than the point in dispute, think of Baxter and Hammond, of Milton and Taylor, and let it be no reason at all. 3. It will secure you from the idolatry of the present times and fashions, and create the noblest kind of imaginative power in your soul, that of living in past ages; wholly devoid of which power, a man can neither anticipate the future, nor even live a truly human life, a life of reason in the present. 4. In this particular work we may derive a most instructive lesson, that in certain points, as of religion in relation to law, the 'medio tutissimus ibis' is inapplicable. There is no 'medium' possible; and all the attempts, as those of Baxter, though no more required than "I believe in God through Christ," prove only the mildness of the proposer's temper, but as a rule would be equal to nothing, at least exclude only the two or three in a century that make it a matter of religion to declare themselves Atheists, or else be just as fruitful a rule for a persecutor as the most complete set of articles that could be framed by a Spanish Inquisition. For to 'believe,' must mean to believe aright--and 'God' must mean the true God--and 'Christ' the Christ in the sense and with the attributes understood by Christians who are truly Christians. An established Church with a Liturgy is a sufficient solution of the problem 'de jure magistratus'. Articles of faith are in this point of view superfluous; for is it not too absurd for a man to hesitate at subscribing his name to doctrines which yet in the more awful duty of prayer and profession he dares affirm before his Maker! They are therefore in this sense merely superfluous;--not worth re-enacting, had they ever been done away with;--not worth removing now that they exist. 5. The characteristic contradistinction between the speculative reasoners of the age before the Revolution, and those since, is this: --the former cultivated metaphysics, without, or neglecting, empirical psychology the latter cultivate a mechanical psychology to the neglect and contempt of metaphysics. Both therefore are almost equi-distant from pure philosophy. Hence the belief in ghosts, witches, sensible replies to prayer, and the like, in Baxter and in a hundred others. See also Luther's Table Talk. 6. The earlier part of this volume is interesting as materials for medical history. The state of medical science in the reign of Charles I. was almost incredibly low. The saddest error of the theologians of this age is, [Greek: hos émoige dokei], the disposition to urge the histories of the miraculous actions and incidents, in and by which Christ attested his Messiahship to the Jewish eye-witnesses, in fulfilment of prophecies, which the Jewish Church had previously understood and interpreted as marks of the Messiah, before they have shewn what and how excellent the religion itself is including the miracles as for us an harmonious part of the internal or self-evidence of the religion. Alas! and even when our divines do proceed to the religion itself as to a something which no man could be expected to receive except by a compulsion of the senses, which by force of logic only is propagated from the eye witnesses to the readers of the narratives in 1820--(which logic, namely, that the evidence of a miracle is not diminished by lapse of ages, though this includes loss of documents and the like; which logic, I say, whether it be legitimate or not, God forbid that the truth of Christianity should depend on the decision!)--even when our divines do proceed to the religion itself, on what do they chiefly dwell? On the doctrines peculiar to the religion? No! these on the contrary are either evaded or explained away into metaphors, or resigned in despair to the next world where faith is to be swallowed up in certainty. But the worst product of this epidemic error is, the fashion of either denying or undervaluing the evidence of a future state and the survival of individual consciousness, derived from the conscience, and the holy instinct of the whole human race. Dreadful is this:--for the main force of the reasoning by which this scepticism is vindicated consists in reducing all legitimate conviction to objective proof: whereas in the very essence of religion and even of morality the evidence, and the preparation for its reception, must be subjective;--'Blessed are they that have not seen and yet believe'. And dreadful it appears to me especially, who in the impossibility of not looking forward to consciousness after the dissolution of the body ('corpus phoenomenon',) have through life found it (next to divine grace.) the strongest and indeed only efficient support against the still recurring temptation of adopting, nay, wishing the truth of Spinoza's notion, that the survival of consciousness is the highest prize and consequence of the highest virtue, and that of all below this mark the lot after death is self-oblivion and the cessation of individual being. Indeed, how a Separatist or one of any other sect of Calvinists, who confines Redemption to the comparatively small number of the elect, can reject this opinion, and yet not run mad at the horrid thought of an innumerable multitude of imperishable self-conscious spirits everlastingly excluded from God, is to me inconceivable. Deeply am I persuaded of Luther's position, that no man can worthily estimate, or feel in the depth of his being, the Incarnation and Crucifixion of the Son of God who is a stranger to the terror of immortality as ingenerate in man, while it is yet unquelled by the faith in God as the Almighty Father. Book I. Part I. p. 2. But though my conscience would trouble me when I sinned, yet divers sins I was addicted to, and oft committed against my conscience; which for the warning of others I will confess here to my shame. 1. I was much addicted when I feared correction to lie, that I might scape. 2. I was much addicted to the excessive gluttonous eating of apples and pears, &c. 3. To this end, and to concur with naughty boys that gloried in evil, I have oft gone into other men's orchards, and stolen their fruit, when I had enough at home, &c. There is a childlike simplicity in this account of his sins of his childhood which is very pleasing. Ib. p. 5, 6. And the use that God made of books, above ministers, to the benefit of my soul made me somewhat excessively in love with good books; so that I thought I had never enough, but scraped up as great a treasure of them as I could. * * * It made the world seem to me as a carcase that had neither life nor loveliness; and it destroyed those ambitious desires after literate fame which were the sin of my childhood. * * * And for the mathematics, I was an utter stranger to them, and never could find in my heart to divert any studies that way. But in order to the knowledge of divinity, my inclination was most to logic and metaphysics, with that part of physics which treateth of the soul, contenting myself at first with a slighter study of the rest: and there had my labour and delight. What a picture of myself! Ib. p. 22. In the storm of this temptation I questioned awhile whether I were indeed a Christian or an Infidel, and whether faith could consist with such doubts as I was conscious of. One of the instances of the evils arising from the equivoque between faith and intellectual satisfaction or insight. The root of faith is in the will. Faith is an oak that may be a pollard, and yet live. Ib. The being and attributes of God were so clear to me, that he was to my intellect what the sun is to my eye, by which I see itself and all things. Even so with me;--but, whether God was existentially as well as essentially intelligent, this was for a long time a sore combat between the speculative and the moral man. Ib. p. 23. Mere Deism, which is the most plausible competitor with Christianity, is so turned out of almost all the whole world, as if Nature made its own confession, that without a Mediator it cannot come to God. Excellent. Ib. All these assistances were at hand before I came to the immediate evidences of credibility in the sacred oracles themselves. This is as it should be; that is, the evidence 'a priori', securing the rational probability; and then the historical proofs of its reality. Pity that Baxter's chapters in 'The Saints' Rest' should have been one and the earliest occasion of the inversion of this process, the fruit of which is the Grotio-Paleyan religion, or 'minimum' of faith; the maxim being, 'quanto minus tanto melius'. Ib. p. 24. And once all the ignorant rout were raging mad against me for preaching the doctrine of Original Sin to them, and telling them that infants, before regeneration, had so much guilt and corruption as made them loathsome in the eyes of God. No wonder;--because the babe would perish without the mother's milk, is it therefore loathsome to the mother? Surely the little ones that Christ embraced had not been baptized. And yet 'of such is the Kingdom of Heaven'. Ib. p. 25. Some thought that the King should not at all be displeased and provoked, and that they were not bound to do any other justice, or attempt any other reformation but what they could procure the King to be willing to. And these said, when you have displeased and provoked him to the utmost, he will be your King still. * * * The more you offend him, the less you can trust him; and when mutual confidence is gone, a war is beginning. * * * And if you conquer him, what the better are you? He will still be King. You can but force him to an agreement; and how quickly will he have power and advantage to violate that which he is forced to, and to be avenged on you all for the displeasure you have done him! He is ignorant of the advantages of a King that cannot foresee this. This paragraph goes to make out a case in justification of the Regicides which Baxter would have found it difficult to answer. Certainly a more complete exposure of the inconsistency of Baxter's own party cannot be. For observe, that in case of an agreement with Charles all those classes, which afterwards formed the main strength of the Parliament and ultimately decided the contest in its favour, would have been politically inert, with little influence and no actual power,--I mean the Yeomanry, and the Citizens of London: while a vast majority of the Nobles and landed Gentry, who sooner or later must have become the majority in Parliament, went over to the King at once. Add to these the whole systematized force of the High Church Clergy and all the rude ignorant vulgar in high and low life, who detested every attempt at moral reform,--and it is obvious that the King could not want opportunities to retract and undo all that he had conceded under compulsion. But that neither the will was wanting, nor his conscience at all in the way, his own advocate Clarendon and others have supplied damning proofs. Ib. p. 27. And though Parliaments may draw up Bills for repealing laws, yet hath the King his negative voice, and without his consent they cannot do it; which though they acknowledge, yet did they too easily admit of petitions against the Episcopacy and Liturgy, and connived at all the clamors and papers which were against them. How so? If they admitted the King's right to deny, they must admit the subject's right to entreat. Ib. Had they endeavoured the ejection of lay-chancellors, and the reducing of the dioceses to a narrower compass, or the setting up of a subordinate discipline, and only the correcting and reforming of the Liturgy, perhaps it might have been borne more patiently. Did Baxter find it so himself--and when too he had the formal and recorded promise of Charles II. for it? Ib. But when the same men (Ussher, Williams, Morton, &c.) saw that greater things were aimed at, and episcopacy itself in danger, or _their grandeur and riches at least_, most of them turned against the Parliament. This, and in this place, is unworthy of Baxter. Even he, good man, could not wholly escape the jaundice of party. Ib. p. 34. They said to this;--that as all the courts of justice do execute their sentences in the King's name, and this by his own law, and therefore by his authority, so much more might his Parliament do. A very sound argument is here disguised in a false analogy, an inapplicable precedent, and a sophistical form. Courts of justice administer the total of the supreme power retrospectively, involved in the name of the most dignified part. But here a part, as a part, acts as the whole, where the whole is absolutely requisite,--that is, in passing laws; and again as B. and C. usurp a power belonging to A. by the determination of A. B. and C. The only valid argument is, that Charles had by acts of his own ceased to be a lawful King. Ib. p. 40. And that the authority and person of the King were inviolable, out of the reach of just accusation, judgment, or execution by law; as having no superior, and so no judge. But according to Grotius, a king waging war against the lawful copartners of the 'summa potestas' ceases to be their king, and if conquered forfeits to them his former share. And surely if Charles had been victor, he would have taken the Parliament's share to himself. If it had been the Parliament, and not a mere faction with the army, that tried and beheaded Charles, I do not see how any one could doubt the lawfulness of the act, except upon very technical grounds. Ib. p. 41. For if once legislation, the chief act of government, be denied to any part of government at all, and affirmed to belong to the people as such, who are no governors, all government will hereby be overthrown. Here Baxter falls short of the subject, and does not see the full consequents of his own prior, most judicious, positions. Legislation in its high and most proper sense belongs to God only. A people declares that such and such they hold to be laws, that is, God's will. Ib. p. 47. In Cornwall Sir Richard Grenvill, having taken many soldiers of the Earl of Essex's army, sentenced about a dozen to be hanged. When they had hanged two or three, the rope broke which should have hanged the next. And they sent for new ropes so oft to hang him, and all of them still broke, that they durst go no further, but saved all the rest. The soldiers, doubtless, contrived this from the aversion natural to Englishmen of killing an enemy in cold blood; and because they foresaw that there would be Tit for Tat. Ib. p. 59. It is easy to see from Baxter's own account, that his party ruined their own cause and that of the kingdom by their tenets concerning the right and duty of the civil magistrate to use the sword against such as were not of the same religion with themselves. Ib. p. 62. They seem not to me to have answered satisfactorily to the main argument fetched from the Apostle's own government, with which Saravia had inclined me to some Episcopacy before: though miracles and infallibility were Apostolical temporary privileges, yet Church government is an ordinary thing to be continued. And therefore as the Apostles had successors as they were preachers, I see not but that they must have successors as Church governors. Was not Peter's sentence against Ananias an act of Church government? Therefore though Church government is an ordinary thing in some form or other, it does not follow that one particular form is an ordinary thing. For the time being the Apostles, as heads of the Church, did what they thought best; but whatever was binding on the Church universal and in all times they delivered as commands from Christ. Now no other command was delivered but that all things should conduce to order and edification. Ib. p. 66. And therefore how they could refuse to receive the King, till he consented to take the Covenant, I know not, unless the taking of the Covenant had been a condition on which he was to receive his crown by the laws or fundamental constitutions of the kingdom, which none pretendeth. Nor know I by what power they can add anything to the Coronation Oath or Covenant, which by his ancestors was to be taken, without his own consent. And pray, how and by whom were the Coronation Oaths first imposed? The Scottish nation in 1650 had the same right to make a bargain with the claimant of their throne as their ancestors had. It is strange that Baxter should not have seen that his objections would apply to our 'Magna Charta'. So he talks of the "fundamental constitutions," just as if these had been aboriginal or rather 'sans' origin, and not as indeed they were extorted and bargained for by the people. But throughout it is plain that Baxter repeated, but never appropriated, the distinction between the King as the executive power, and as the individual functionary. What obligation lay on the Scottish Parliament and Church to consult the man Charles Stuart's personal likes and dislikes? The Oath was to be taken by him as their King. Doubtless, he equally disliked the whole Protestant interest; and if the Tories and Church of England Jacobites of a later day had recalled James II., would Baxter have thought them culpable for imposing on him an Oath to preserve the Protestant Church of England and to inflict severe penalties on his own Church-fellows? Ib. p. 71. And some men thought it a very hard question, whether they should rather wish the continuance of a usurper that will do good, or the restoration of a rightful governor whose followers will do hurt. And who shall dare unconditionally condemn those who judged the former to be the better alternative? Especially those who did not adopt Baxter's notion of a 'jus divinum' personal and hereditary in the individual, whose father had broken the compact on which the claim rested. Ib. p. 75. One Mrs. Dyer, a chief person of the Sect, did first bring forth a monster, which had the parts of almost all sorts of living creatures, some parts like man, but most ugly and misplaced, and some like beasts, birds and fishes, having horns, fins and claws; and at the birth of it the bed shook, and the women present fell a vomiting, and were fain to go forth of the room. This babe of Mrs. Dyer's is no bad emblem of Richard Baxter's own credulity. It is almost an argument on his side, that nothing he believed is more strange and inexplicable than his own belief of them. Ib. p. 76. The third sect were the Ranters. These also made it their business, as the former, to set up the light of nature under the name of Christ in men, and to dishonour and cry down the Church, &c. But why does Baxter every where assert the identity of the new light with the light of nature? Or what does he mean exclusively by the latter? The source must be the same in all lights as far as it is light. Ib. p. 77. And that was the fourth sect, the Quakers; who were but the Ranters turned from horrid profaneness and blasphemy to a life of extreme austerity on the other side. Observe the _but_. Ib. Their doctrine is to be seen in Jacob Behmen's books by him that hath nothing else to do, than to bestow a great deal of time to understand him that was not willing to be easily understood, and to know that his bombasted words do signify nothing more than before was easily known by common familiar terms. This is not in all its parts true. It is true that the first principles of Behmen are to be found in the writings of the Neo-Platonists after Plotinus, and (but mixed with gross impieties) in Paracelsus;--but it is not true that they are easily known, and still less so that they are communicable in common familiar terms. But least of all is it true that there is nothing original in Behmen. Ib. The chiefest of these in England are Dr. Pordage and his family. It is curious that Lessing in the Review, which he, Nicolai, and Mendelssohn conducted under the form of Letters to a wounded Officer, joins the name of Pordage with that of Behmen. Was Pordage's work translated into German? Ib. p. 79. Also the Socinians made some increase by the ministry of one Mr. Biddle, sometimes schoolmaster in Gloucester; who wrote against the Godhead of the Holy Ghost, and afterwards of Christ; whose followers inclined much to mere Deism. For the Socinians till Biddle retained much of the Christian religion, for example, Redemption by the Cross, and the omnipresence of Christ as to this planet even as the Romanists with their Saints. Luther's obstinate adherence to the ubiquity of the Body of Christ and his or rather its real presence in and with the bread was a sad furtherance to the advocates of Popish idolatry and hierolatry. Ib. p. 80. Many a time have I been brought very low, and received the sentence of death in myself, when my poor, honest, praying neighbours have met, and upon their fasting and earnest prayers I have been recovered. Once when I had continued weak three weeks, and was unable to go abroad, the very day that they prayed for me, being Good Friday, I recovered, and was able to preach, and administer the Sacrament the next Lord's Day, and was better after it, &c. Strange that the common manuals of school logic should not have secured Baxter from the repeated blunder of 'Cum hoc, ergo, propter hoc'; but still more strange that his piety should not have revolted against degrading prayer into medical quackery. Before the Revolution of 1688, metaphysics ruled without experimental psychology, and in these curious paragraphs of Baxter we see the effect: since the Revolution experimental psychology without metaphysics has in like manner prevailed, and we now feel the result. In like manner from Plotinus to Proclus, that is, from A. D. 250 to A. D. 450, philosophy was set up as a substitute for religion: during the dark ages religion superseded philosophy, and the consequences are equally instructive. The great maxim of legislation, intellectual or political, is 'Subordinate, not exclude'. Nature in her ascent leaves nothing behind, but at each step subordinates and glorifies:--mass, crystal, organ, sensation, sentience, reflection. Ib. p. 82. Another time, as I sat in my study, the weight of my greatest folio books brake down three or four of the highest shelves, when I sat close under them, and they fell down every side me, and not one of them hit me, save one upon the arm; whereas the place, the weight, the greatness of the books was such, and my head just under them, that it was a wonder they had not beaten out my brains, &c. [Greek: Méga biblíon méga kakón.] Ib. p. 84. For all the pains that my infirmities ever brought upon me were never half so grievous an affliction to me, as the unavoidable loss of my time, which they occasioned. I could not bear, through the weakness of my stomach, to rise before seven o'clock in the morning, &c. Alas! in how many respects does my lot resemble Baxter's; but how much less have my bodily evils been; and yet how very much greater an impediment have I suffered them to be! But verily Baxter's labours seem miracles of supporting grace. Ought I not therefore to retract the note p. 80? I waver. Ib. p. 87. For my part, I bless God, who gave me even under a Usurper, whom I opposed, such liberty and advantage to preach his Gospel with success, which I cannot have under a King to whom I have sworn and performed true subjection and obedience; yea, which no age since the Gospel came into this land did before possess, as far as I can learn from history. Sure I am that when it became a matter of reputation and honour to be godly, it abundantly furthered the successes of the ministry. Yea, and I shall add this much more for the sake of posterity, that as much as I have said and written against licentiousness in religion, and for the magistrate's power in it, and though I think that land most happy, whose rulers use their authority for Christ as well as for the civil peace; yet in comparison of the rest of the world, I shall think that land happy that hath but bare liberty to be as good as they are willing to be; and if countenance and maintenance be but added to liberty, and tolerated errors and sects be but forced to keep the peace, and not to oppose the substantials of Christianity, I shall not hereafter much fear such toleration, nor despair that truth will bear down adversaries. What a valuable and citable paragraph! Likewise it is a happy instance of the force of a cherished prejudice in an honest mind--practically yielding to the truth, but yet with a speculative, "Though I still think, &c." Ib. p. 128. Among truths certain in themselves, all are not equally certain unto me; and even of the mysteries of the Gospel I must needs say, with Mr. Richard Hooker, that whatever some may pretend, the subjective certainty cannot go beyond the objective evidence. * * * Therefore I do more of late than ever discern the necessity of a methodical procedure in maintaining the doctrine of Christianity. * * * My certainty that I am a man is before my certainty that there is a God. * * * My certainty that there is a God is greater than my certainty that he requireth love and holiness of his creature, &c. There is a confusion in this paragraph, which asks more than a marginal note to disentangle. Briefly, the process of acquirement is confounded with the order of the truths when acquired. A tinder spark gives light to an Argand's lamp: is it therefore more luminous? Ib. p. 129. And when I have studied hard to understand some abstruse admired book, as 'de Scientia Dei, de Providentia circa malum, de Decretis, de Prædeterminatione, de Libertate creaturæ', &c. I have but attained the knowledge of human imperfection, and to see that the author is but a man as well as I. On these points I have come to a resting place. Let such articles, as are either to be recognized as facts, for example, sin or evil having its origination in a will; and the reality of a responsible and (in whatever sense freedom is presupposed in responsibility,) of a free will in man;--or acknowledged as laws, for example, the unconditional bindingness of the practical reason;--or to be freely affirmed as necessary through their moral interest, their indispensableness to our spiritual humanity, for example, the personeity, holiness, and moral government and providence of God;--let these be vindicated from absurdity, from self-contradiction, and contradiction to the pure reason, and restored to simple incomprehensibility. He who seeks for more, knows not what he is talking of; he who will not seek even this is either indifferent to the truth of what he professes to believe, or he mistakes a general determination not to disbelieve for a positive and especial faith, which is only our faith as far as we can assign a reason for it. O! how impossible it is to move an inch to the right or the left in any point of spiritual and moral concernment, without seeing the damage caused by the confusion of reason with the understanding. Ib. p. 181. My soul is much more afflicted with the thoughts of the miserable world, and more drawn out in desire of their conversion than heretofore. I was wont to look but little further than England in my prayers, as not considering the state of the rest of the world;--or if I prayed for the conversion of the Jews, that was almost all. But now as I better understand the care of the world, and the method of the Lord's Prayer, so there is nothing in the world that lieth so heavy upon my heart, as the thought of the miserable nations of the earth. I dare not not condemn myself for the languid or dormant state of my feelings respecting the Mohammedan and Heathen nations; yet know not in what degree to condemn. The less culpable grounds of this languor are, first, my utter ignorance of God's purposes with respect to the Heathens; and second, the strong conviction, I have that the conversion of a single province of Christendom to true practical Christianity would do more toward the conversion of Heathendom than an army of Missionaries. Romanism and despotic government in the larger part of Christendom, and the prevalence of Epicurean principles in the remainder;--these do indeed lie heavy on my heart. Ib. p. 135. Therefore I confess I give but halting credit to most histories that are written, not only against the Albigenses and Waldenses, but against most of the ancient heretics, who have left us none of their own writings, in which they speak for themselves; and I heartily lament that the historical writings of the ancient schismatics and heretics, as they were called, perished, and that partiality suffered them not to survive, that we might have had more light in the Church affairs of those times, and been better able to judge between the Fathers and them. It is greatly to the credit of Baxter that he has here anticipated those merits which so long after gave deserved celebrity to the name and writings of Beausobre and Lardner, and still more recently in this respect of Eichhorn, Paulus and other Neologists. Ib. p. 136. And therefore having myself now written this history of myself, notwithstanding my protestation that I have not in anything wilfully gone against the truth, I expect no more credit from the reader than the self-evidencing light of the matter, with concurrent rational advantages from persons, and things, and other witnesses, shall constrain him to. I may not unfrequently doubt Baxter's memory, or even his competence, in consequence of his particular modes of thinking; but I could almost as soon doubt the Gospel verity as his veracity. Book I. Part II. p.139. The following Book of this Work is interesting and most instructive as an instance of Syncretism, and its Epicurean 'clinamen', even when it has been undertaken from the purest and most laudable motives, and from impulses the most Christian, and yet its utter failure in its object, that of tending to a common centre. The experience of eighteen centuries seems to prove that there is no practicable 'medium' between a Church comprehensive (which is the only meaning of a Catholic Church visible) in which A. in the North or East is allowed to advance officially no doctrine different from what is allowed to B. in the South or West;--and a co-existence of independent Churches, in none of which any further unity is required but that between the minister and his congregation, while this again is secured by the election and continuance of the former depending wholly on the will of the latter. Perhaps the best state possible, though not the best possible state, is where both are found, the one established by maintenance, the other by permission; in short that which we now enjoy. In such a state no minister of the former can have a right to complain, for it was at his own option to have taken the latter; 'et volenti nulla fit injuria'. For an individual to demand the freedom of the independent single Church when he receives £500 a year for submitting to the necessary restrictions of the Church General, is impudence and Mammonolatry to boot. Ib. p. 141. They (the Erastians) misunderstood and injured their brethren, supposing and affirming them to claim as from God a coercive power over the bodies or purses of men, and so setting up 'imperium in imperio'; whereas all temperate Christians (at least except Papists) confess that the Church hath no power of force, but only to manage God's word unto men's consciences. But are not the receivers as bad as the thief? Is it not a poor evasion to say:--"It is true I send you to a dungeon there to rot, because you do not think as I do concerning some point of faith;--but this only as a civil officer. As a divine I only tenderly entreat and persuade you!" Can there be fouler hypocrisy in the Spanish Inquisition than this? Ib. p. 142. That hereby they (the Diocesan party) altered the ancient species of Presbyters, to whose office the spiritual government of their proper folks as truly belonged, as the power of preaching and worshiping God did. I could never rightly understand this objection of Richard Baxter's. What power not possessed by the Rector of a parish, would he have wished a parochial Bishop to have exerted? What could have been given by the Legislature to the latter which might not be given to the former? In short Baxter's plan seems to do away Archbishops--[Greek: koinoì epískopoi]--but for the rest to name our present Rectors and Vicars Bishops. I cannot see what is gained by his plan. The true difficulty is that Church discipline is attached to an Establishment by this world's law, not to the form itself established: and his objections from paragraph 5 to paragraph 10 relate to particular abuses, not to Episcopacy itself. Ib. p. 143. But above all I disliked that most of them (the Independents) made the people by majority of votes to be Church governors in excommunications, absolutions, &c., which Christ hath made an act of office; and so they governed their governors and themselves. Is not this the case with the Houses of Legislature? The members taken individually are subjects; collectively governors. Ib. p. 177. The extraordinary gifts of the Apostles, and the privilege of being eye and ear witnesses to Christ, were abilities which they had for the infallible discharge of their function, but they were not the ground of their power and authority to govern the Church. * * * 'Potestas clavium' was committed to them only, not to the Seventy. I wish for a proof, that all the Apostles had any extraordinary gifts which none of the LXX. had. Nay as an Episcopalian of the Church of England, I hold it an unsafe and imprudent concession, tending to weaken the governing right of the Bishops. But I fear that as the law and right of patronage in England now are, the question had better not be stirred; lest it should be found that the true power of the keys is not, as with the Papists, in hands to which it is doubtful whether Christ committed them exclusively; but in hands to which it is certain that Christ did not commit them at all. Ib. p. 179. It followeth not a mere Bishop may have a multitude of Churches, because an Archbishop may, who hath many Bishops under him. What then does Baxter quarrel about? That our Bishops take a humbler title than they have a right to claim;--that being in fact Archbishops, they are for the most part content to be styled as one of the brethren! Ib. p. 185. I say again, No Church, no Christ; for no body, no head; and if no Christ then, there is no Christ now. Baxter here forgets his own mystical regenerated Church. If he mean this, it is nothing to the argument in question; if not, then he must assert the monstrous absurdity of, No unregenerate Church, no Christ. Ib. p. 188. Or if they would not yield to this at all, we might have communion with them as Christians, without acknowledging them for Pastors. Observe the inconsistency of Baxter. No Pastor, no Church; no Church, no Christ; and yet he will receive them as Christians: much to his honor as a Christian, but not much to his credit as a logician. Ib. p. 189. We are agreed that as some discovery of consent on both parts (the pastors and people) is necessary to the being of the members of a political particular Church: so that the most express declaration of that consent is the most plain and satisfactory dealing, and most obliging, and likest to attain the ends. In our Churches, especially in good livings, there is such an overflowing fullness of consent on the part of the Pastor as supplies that of the people altogether; nay, to nullify their declared dissent. Ib. p. 194. By the establishment of what is contained in these twelve propositions or articles following, the Churches in these nations may have a holy communion, peace and concord, without any wrong to the consciences or liberties of Presbyterians, Congregational, Episcopal, or any other Christians. Painfully instructive are these proposals from so wise and peaceable a divine as Baxter. How mighty must be the force of an old prejudice when so generally acute a logician was blinded by it to such palpable inconsistencies! On what ground of right could a magistrate inflict a penalty, whereby to compel a man to hear what he might believe dangerous to his soul, on which the right of burning the refractory individual might not be defended as well? Ib. p. 198. To which ends * * I think that this is all that should be required of any Church or member ordinarily to be professed: In general I do believe all that is contained in the sacred canonical Scriptures, and particularly I believe all explicitly contained in the ancient Creed, &c. To a man of sense, but unstudied in the context of human nature, and from having confined his reading to the writers of the present and the last generation unused to live in former ages, it must seem strange that Baxter should not have seen that this test is either all or nothing. And the Creed! Is it certain that the so called Apostles' Creed was more than the mere catechism of the Catechumens? Was it the Baptismal Creed of the Eastern or Western Church, especially the former? The only test really necessary, in my opinion, is an established Liturgy. Ib. p. 201. As reverend Bishop Ussher hath manifested that the Western Creed, now called the Apostles' (wanting two or three clauses that now are in it) was not only before the Nicene Creed, but of much further antiquity, that no beginning of it below the Apostles' days can be found. Remove these two or three clauses, and doubtless the substance of the remainder must have been little short of the Apostolic age. But so is one at least of the writings of Clement. The great question is: Was this the Baptismal Symbol, the 'Regula Fidei', which it was forbidden to put in writing;--or was it not the Christian A. B. C. of the 'Catechumeni' previously to their Baptismal initiation into the higher mysteries, to the 'strong meat' which was not for babes'? [2] Ib. p. 203. Not so much for my own sake as others; lest it should offend the Parliament, and open the mouths of our adversaries, that we cannot ourselves agree in fundamentals; and lest it prove an occasion for others to sue for a universal toleration. That this apprehension so constantly haunted, so powerfully actuated, even the mild and really tolerant Baxter, is a strong proof of my old opinion,--that the dogma of the right and duty of the civil magistrate to restrain and punish religious avowals by him deemed heretical, universal among the Presbyterians and Parliamentary Churchmen, joined with the persecuting spirit of the Presbyterians,--was the main cause of Cromwell's despair and consequent unfaithfulness concerning a Parliamentary Commonwealth. Ib. p. 222. I tried, when I was last with you, to revive your reason by proposing to you the infallibility of the common senses of all the world; and I could not prevail though you had nothing to answer that was not against common sense. And it is impossible any thing controverted can be brought nearer you, or made plainer than to be brought to your eyes and taste and feeling; and not yours only, but all men's else. Sense goes before faith. Faith is no faith but upon supposition of sense and understanding: if therefore common sense be fallible, faith must needs be so. This is one of those two-edged arguments, which not indeed began, but began to be fashionable, just before and after the Restoration. I was half converted to Transubstantiation by Tillotson's common senses against it; seeing clearly that the same grounds 'totidem verbis et syllabis' would serve the Socinian against all the mysteries of Christianity. If the Roman Catholics had pretended that the phenomenal bread and wine were changed into the phenomenal flesh and blood, this objection would have been legitimate and irresistible; but as it is, it is mere sensual babble. The whole of Popery lies in the assumption of a Church, as a numerical unit, infallible in the highest degree, inasmuch as both which is Scripture, and what Scripture teaches, is infallible by derivation only from an infallible decision of the Church. Fairly undermine or blow up this: and all the remaining peculiar tenets of Romanism fall with it, or stand by their own right as opinions of individual Doctors. An antagonist of a complex bad system,--a system, however, notwithstanding--and such is Popery,--should take heed above all things not to disperse himself. Let him keep to the sticking place. But the majority of our Protestant polemics seem to have taken for granted that they could not attack Romanism in too many places, or on too many points;--forgetting that in some they will be less strong than in others, and that if in any one or two they are repelled from the assault, the feeling of this will extend itself over the whole. Besides, what is the use of alleging thirteen reasons for a witness's not appearing in Court, when the first is that the man had died since his 'subpoena'? It is as if a party employed to root up a tree were to set one or two at that work, while others were hacking the branches, and others sawing the trunk at different heights from the ground. N. B. The point of attack suggested above in disputes with the Romanists is of special expediency in the present day: because a number of pious and reasonable Roman Catholics are not aware of the dependency of their other tenets on this of the infallibility of their Church decisions, as they call them, but are themselves shaken and disposed to explain it away. This once fixed, the Scriptures rise uppermost, and the man is already a Protestant, rather a genuine Catholic, though his opinions should remain nearer to the Roman than the Reformed Church. Ib. _But methinks yet I should have hope of reviving your charity. You cannot be a Papist indeed, but you must believe that out of their Church (that is out of the Pope's dominions) there is no salvation; and consequently no justification and charity, or saving grace. And is it possible you can so easily believe your religious father to be in hell; your prudent, pious mother to be void of the love of God, and in a state of damnation, &c._ This argument 'ad affectum' is beautifully and forcibly stated; but yet defective by the omission of the point;--not for unbelief or misbelief of any article of faith, but simply for not being a member of this particular part of the Church of Christ. For it is possible that a Christian might agree in all the articles of faith with the Roman doctors against those of the Reformation, and yet if he did not acknowledge the Pope as Christ's vicar, and held salvation possible in any other Church, he is himself excluded from salvation! Without this great distinction Lady Ann Lindsey might have replied to Baxter:--"So might a Pagan orator have said to a convert from Paganism in the first ages of Christianity; so indeed the advocates of the old religion did argue. What! can you bear to believe that Numa, Camillus, Fabricius, the Scipios, the Catos, that Cicero, Seneca, that Titus and the Antonini, are in the flames of Hell, the accursed objects of the divine hatred? Now whatever you dare hope of these as heathens, we dare hope of you as heretics." Ib. p. 224. _But this is not the worst. You consequently anathematize_ all Papists by your sentence: for heresies by your own sentence cut off men from heaven: but Popery is a bundle of heresies: therefore it cuts off men from heaven. The minor I prove, &c. This introduction of syllogistic form in a letter to a young Lady is whimsically characteristic. Ib. p. 225. You say, the Scripture admits of no private interpretation. But you abuse yourself and the text with a false interpretation of it in these words. An interpretation is called private either as to the subject person, or as to the interpreter. You take the text to speak of the latter, when the context plainly sheweth you that it speaks of the former. The Apostle directing them to understand the prophecies of the Old Testament, gives them this caution;--that none of these Scriptures that are spoken of Christ the public person must be interpreted as spoken of David or other private person only, of whom they were mentioned but as types of Christ, &c. It is strange that this sound and irrefragable argument has not been enforced by the Church divines in their controversies with the modern Unitarians, as Capp, Belsham and others, who refer all the prophetic texts of the Old Testament to historical personages of their time, exclusively of all double sense. Ib. p. 226. As to what you say of Apostles still placed in the Church:--when any shew us an immediate mission by their communion, and by miracles, 'tongues', and a spirit of revelation and infallibility prove themselves Apostles, we shall believe them. This is another of those two-edged arguments which Baxter and Jeremy Taylor imported from Grotius, and which have since become the universal fashion among Protestants. I fear, however, that it will do us more hurt by exposing a weak part to the learned Infidels than service in our combat with the Romanists. I venture to assert most unequivocally that the New Testament contains not the least proof of the 'linguipotence' of the Apostles, but the clearest proofs of the contrary: and I doubt whether we have even as decisive a victory over the Romanists in our Middletonian, Farmerian, and Douglasian dispute concerning the miracles of the first two centuries and their assumed contrast 'in genere' with those of the Apostles and the Apostolic age, as we have in most other of our Protestant controversies. N.B. These opinions of Middleton and his more cautious followers are no part of our real Church doctrine. This passion for law Court evidence began with Grotius. Ib. p. 246. We conceived there needs no more to be said for justifying the imposition of the ceremonies by law established than what is contained in the beginning--of this Section.... Inasmuch as lawful authority hath already determined the ceremonies in question to be decent and orderly, and to serve to edification: and consequently to be agreeable to the general rules of the Word. To a self-convinced and disinterested lover of the Church of England, it gives an indescribable horror to observe the frequency, with which the Prelatic party after the Restoration appeal to the laws as of equal authority with the express words of Scripture;--as if the laws, by them appealed to, were other than the vindictive determinations of their own furious partizans;--as if the same appeals might not have been made by Bonner and Gardiner under Philip and Mary! Why should I speak of the inhuman sophism that, because it is silly in my neighbour to break his egg at the broad end when the Squire and the Vicar have declared their predilection for the narrow end, therefore it is right for the Squire and the Vicar to hang and quarter him for his silliness:--for it comes to that. Ib. p. 248. To you it is indifferent before your imposition: and therefore you may without any regret of your own consciences forbear the imposition, or persuade the law makers to forbear it. But to many of those that dissent from you, they are sinful, &c. But what is all this, good worthy Baxter, but saying and unsaying? If they are not indifferent, why did you previously concede them to be such? In short nothing can be more pitiably weak than the conduct of the Presbyterian party from the first capture of Charles I. Common sense required, either a bold denial that the Church had power in ceremonies more than in doctrines, or that the Parliament was the Church, since it is the Parliament that enacts all these things;--or if they admitted the authority lawful and the ceremonies only, in their mind, inexpedient, good God! can self-will more plainly put on the cracked mask of tender conscience than by refusal of obedience? What intolerable presumption, to disqualify as ungodly and reduce to null the majority of the country, who preferred the Liturgy, in order to force the long winded vanities of bustling God-orators on those who would fain hear prayers, not spouting! Ib. p. 249. The great controversies between the hypocrite and the true Christian, whether we should be serious in the practice of the religion which we commonly profess, hath troubled England more than any other;--none being more hated and divided as Puritans than those that will make religion their business, &c. Had not the Governors had bitter proofs that there are other and more cruel vices than swearing and careless living;--and that these were predominant chiefly among such as made their religion their business? Ib. And whereas you speak of opening a gap to Sectaries for private conventicles, and the evil consequents to the state, we only desire you to avoid also the cherishing of ignorance and profaneness, and _suppress all Sectaries_, and spare not, in a way that will not suppress the means of knowledge and godliness. The present company, that is, our own dear selves, always excepted. Ib. p. 250. Otherwise the poor undone Churches of Christ will no more believe you in such professions than we believed that those men intended the King's just power and greatness, who took away his life. Or who, like Baxter, joined the armies that were showering cannon balls and bullets around his inviolable person! Whenever by reading the Prelatical writings and histories, I have had an over dose of anti-Prelatism in my feelings, I then correct it by dipping into the works of the Presbyterians, and their fellows, and so bring myself to more charitable thoughts respecting the Prelatists, and fully subscribe to Milton's assertion, that "Presbyter was but Old Priest writ large." Ib. p. 254. The apocryphal matter of your lessons in Tobit, Judith, Bel and the Dragon, &c., is scarce agreeable to the word of God. Does not Jude refer to an apocryphal book? Ib. Our experience unresistibly convinceth us that a continued prayer doth more to help most of the people, and carry on their desires, than turning almost every petition into a distinct prayer; and making prefaces and conclusions to be near half the prayers. This now is the very point I most admire in our excellent Liturgy. To any particular petition offered to the Omniscient, there may be a sinking of faith, a sense of its superfluity; but to the lifting up of the soul to the Invisible and there fixing it on his attributes, there can be no scruple. Ib. p. 257. The not abating of the impositions is the carting off of many hundreds of your brethren out of the ministry, and of many thousand Christians out of your communion; but the abating of the impositions will so offend you as to silence or excommunicate none of you at all. For example, we think it a sin to subscribe, or swear canonical obedience, or use the transient image of the Cross in Baptism, and therefore these must cast us out, &c. As long as independent single Churches, or voluntarily synodical were forbidden and punishable by penal law, this argument remained irrefragable. The imposition of such trifles under such fearful threats was the very bitterness of spiritual pride and vindictiveness;--after the law passed by which things became as they now are, it was a mere question of expediency for the National Church to determine in relation to its own comparative interests. If the Church chose unluckily, the injury has been to itself alone. It seems strange that such men as Baxter should not see that the use of the ring, the surplice and the like, are indifferent according to his own confession, yea, mere trifles, in comparison with the peace of the Church; but that it is no trifle, that men should refuse obedience to lawful authority in matters indifferent, and prefer the sin of schism to offending their taste and fancy. The Church did not, upon the whole, contend for a trifle, nor for an indifferent matter, but for a principle on which all order in society must depend. Still this is true only, provided the Church enacts no ordinances that are not necessary or at least plainly conducive to order or (generally) to the ends for which it is a Church. Besides, the point which the King had required them to consider was not what ordinances it was right to obey, but what it was expedient to enact or not to enact. Ib. p. 269. That the Pastors of the respective parishes may be allowed not only publicly to preach, but personally to catechize or otherwise instruct the several families, admitting none to the Lord's Table that have not personally owned their Baptismal covenant by a credible profession of faith and obedience; and to admonish and exhort the scandalous, in order to their repentance: to hear the witnesses and the accused party, and to appoint fit times and places for these things, and to deny such persons the communion of the Church in the holy Eucharist, that remain impenitent, or that wilfully refuse to come to their Pastors to be instructed, or to answer such probable accusations; and to continue such exclusion of them till they have made a credible profession of repentance, and then to receive them again to the communion of the Church;--provided there be place for due appeals to superior power. Suppose only such men Pastors as are now most improperly, whether as boast or as sneer, called Evangelical, what an insufferable tyranny would this introduce! Who would not rather live in Algiers? This alone would make this minute history of the ecclesiastic factions invaluable, that it must convince all sober lovers of independence and moral self-government, how dearly we ought to prize our present Church Establishment with all its faults. Ib. p. 272. Therefore we humbly crave that your Majesty will here declare, that it is your Majesty's pleasure that none be punished or troubled for not using the Book of Common Prayer, till it be effectually reformed by divines of both persuasions equally deputed thereunto. The dispensing power of the Crown not only acknowledged, but earnestly invoked! Cruel as the conduct of Laud and that of Sheldon to the Dissentients was, yet God's justice stands clear towards them; for they demanded that from others, which they themselves would not grant. They were to be allowed at their own fancies to denounce the ring in marriage, and yet impowered to endungeon, through the magistrate, the honest and peaceable Quaker for rejecting the outward ceremony of water in Baptism, as seducing men to take it as a substitute for the spiritual reality;--though the Quakers, no less than themselves, appealed to Scripture authority--the Baptist's own contrast of Christ's with the water Baptism. Ib. p. 273. We are sure that kneeling in any adoration at all, in any worship, on any Lord's Day in the year, or any week day between Easter and Pentecost, was not only disused, but forbidden by General Councils, &c.--and therefore that kneeling in the act of receiving is a novelty contrary to the decrees and practice of the Church for many hundred years after the Apostles. Was not this because kneeling was the agreed sign of sorrow and personal contrition, which was not to be introduced into the public worship on the great day and the solemn seasons of the Church's joy and thanksgiving? If so, Baxter's appeal to this usage is a gross sophism, a mere pun. Ib. p. 308. Baxter's Exceptions to the Common Prayer Book. 1. Order requireth that we begin with reverent prayer to God for his acceptance and assistance, which is not done. Enunciation of God's invitations, and promises in God's own words, as in the Common Prayer Book, much better. 2. That the Creed and Decalogue containing the faith, in which we profess to assemble for God's worship, and the law which we have broken by our sins, should go before the confession and Absolution; or at least before the praises of the Church; which they do not. Might have deserved consideration, if the people or the larger number consisted of uninstructed 'catechumeni', or mere candidates for Church-membership. But the object being, not the first teaching of the Creed and Decalogue, but the lively reimpressing of the same, it is much better as it is. 3. The Confession omitteth not only original sin, but all actual sin as specified by the particular commandments violated, and almost all the aggravations of those sins.... Whereas confession, being the expression of repentance, should be more particular, as repentance itself should be. Grounded, on one of the grand errors of the whole Dissenting party, namely, the confusion of public common prayer, praise, and instruction, with domestic and even with private devotion. Our Confession is a perfect model for Christian communities. 4. When we have craved help for God's prayers, before we come to them, we abruptly put in the petition for speedy deliverance--('O God, make speed to save us: O Lord make haste to help us',) without any intimation of the danger that we desire deliverance from, and without any other petition conjoined. 5. It is disorderly in the manner, to sing the Scripture in a plain tune after the manner of reading. 6. ('The Lord be with you. And with thy spirit',) being petitions for divine assistance, come in abruptly in the midst or near the end of morning prayer: And ('Let us pray'.) is adjoined when we were before in prayer. Mouse-like squeak and nibble. 7. ('Lord have mercy upon us: Christ have mercy upon us: Lord have mercy upon us'.) seemeth an affected tautology without any special cause or order here; and the Lord's Prayer is annexed that was before recited, and yet the next words are again but a repetition of the aforesaid oft repeated general ('O Lord, shew thy mercy upon us'.) Still worse. The spirit in which this and similar complaints originated has turned the prayers of Dissenting ministers into irreverent preachments, forgetting that tautology in words and thoughts implies no tautology in the music of the heart to which the words are, as it were, set, and that it is the heart that lifts itself up to God. Our words and thoughts are but parts of the enginery which remains with ourselves; and logic, the rustling dry leaves of the lifeless reflex faculty, does not merit even the name of a pulley or lever of devotion. 8. The prayer for the King ('O Lord, save the King'.) is without any order put between the foresaid petition and another general request only for audience. ('And mercifully hear us when we call upon thee'). A trifle, but just. 9. The second Collect is intituled ('For Peace'.) and hath not a word in it of petition for peace, but only 'for defence in assaults of enemies', and that we 'may not fear their power'. And the prefaces ('in knowledge of whom standeth', &c. and 'whose service', &c.) have no more evident respect to a petition for peace than to any other. And the prayer itself comes in disorderly, while many prayers or petitions are omitted, which according both to the method of the Lord's Prayer, and the nature of the things, should go before. 10. The third Collect intituled ('For Grace'.) is disorderly, &c.... And thus the main parts of prayer, according to the rule of the Lord's Prayer and our common necessities, are omitted. Not wholly unfounded: but the objection proceeds on an arbitrary and (I think) false assumption, that the Lord's Prayer was universally prescriptive in form and arrangement. 12. The Litany ... omitteth very many particulars, ... and it is exceeding disorderly, following no just rules of method. Having begged pardon of our sins, and deprecated vengeance, it proceedeth to evil in general, and some few sins in particular, and thence to a more particular enumeration of judgments; and thence to a recitation of the parts of that work of our redemption, and thence to the deprecation of judgments again, and thence to prayers for the King and magistrates, and then for all nations, and then for love and obedience, &c. The very points here objected to as faults I should have selected as excellencies. For do not the duties and temptations occur in real life even so intermingled? The imperfection of thought much more of language, so singly successive, allows no better representation of the close neighbourhood, nay the co-inherence of duty in duty, desire in desire. Every want of the heart pointing Godward is a chili agon that touches at a thousand points. From these remarks I except the last paragraph of s. 12: (As to the prayer for Bishops and Curates and the position of the General Thanksgiving, &c.) which are defects so palpable and so easily removed, that nothing but antipathy to the objectors could have retained them. 13. The like defectiveness and disorder is in the Communion Collects for the day.... There is no more reason why it should be appropriate to that day than another, or rather be a common petition for all days, &c. I do not see how these supposed improprieties, for want of appropriateness to the day, could be avoided without risk of the far greater evil of too great appropriation to particular Saints and days as in Popery. I am so far a Puritan that I think nothing would have been lost, if Christmas day and Good Friday had been the only week days made holy days, and Easter the only Lord's day especially distinguished. I should also have added Whitsunday; but that it has become unmeaning since our Clergy have, as I grieve to think, become generally Arminian, and interpreting the descent of the Spirit as the gift of miracles and of miraculous infallibility by inspiration have rendered it of course of little or no application to Christians at present. Yet how can Arminians pray our Church prayers collectively on any day? Answer. See a 'boa constrictor' with an ox or deer. What they do swallow, proves so astounding a dilatability of gullet, that it would be unconscionable strictness to complain of the horns, antlers, or other indigestible non-essentials being suffered to rot off at the confines, [Greek: hérkos hodóntôn]. But to write seriously on so serious a subject, it is mournful to reflect that the influence of the systematic theology then in fashion with the anti-Prelatic divines, whether Episcopalians or Presbyterians, had quenched all fineness of mind, all flow of heart, all grandeur of imagination in them; while the victorious party, the Prelatic Arminians, enriched as they were with all learning and highly gifted with taste and judgment, had emptied revelation of all the doctrines that can properly be said to have been revealed, and thus equally caused the extinction of the imagination, and quenched the life in the light by withholding the appropriate fuel and the supporters of the sacred flame. So that, between both parties, our transcendant Liturgy remains like an ancient Greek temple, a monumental proof of the architectural genius of an age long departed, when there were giants in the land. Ib. p. 337. As I was proceeding, Bishop Morley interrupted me according to his manner, with vehemency crying out * * The Bishop interrupted me again * * I attempted to speak, and still he interrupted me * * Bishop Morley went on, talking louder than I, &c. The Bishops appear to have behaved insolently enough. Safe in their knowledge of Charles's inclinations, they laughed in their sleeves at his commission. Their best answer would have been to have pressed the anti-impositionists with their utter forgetfulness of the possible, nay, very probable differences of opinion between the ministers and their congregations. A vain minister might disgust a sober congregation with his 'extempore' prayers, or his open contempt of their kneeling at the Sacrament, and the like. Yet by what right if he acts only as an individual? And then what an endless source of disputes and preferences of this minister or of that! Ib. p. 341. The paper offered by Bishop Cosins. 1. That the question may be put to the managers of the division, Whether there be anything in the doctrine, or discipline, or the Common Prayer, or ceremonies, contrary to the word of God; and if they can make any such appear; let them be satisfied. 2. If not, let them propose what they desire in point of expediency, and acknowledge it to be no more. This was proposed, doubtless, by one of your sensible men; it is so plain, so plausible, shallow, 'nihili, nauci, pili, flocci-cal'. Why, the very phrase "contrary to the word of God" would take a month to define, and neither party agree at last. One party says: The Church has power from God's word to order all matters of order so as shall appear to them to conduce to decency and edification: but ceremonies respect the orderly performance of divine service: ergo, the Church has power to ordain ceremonies: but the Cross in baptizing is a ceremony; ergo, the Church has power to prescribe the crossing in Baptism. What is rightfully ordered cannot be rightfully withstood:--but the crossing, &c., is rightfully ordered:--'ergo', the crossing cannot be rightfully omitted. To this, how easily would the other party reply; 1. That a small number of Bishops could not be called the Church: 2. That no one Church had power or pretence from God's word to prescribe concerning mere matters of outward decency and convenience to other Churches or assemblies of Christian people: 3. That the blending an unnecessary and suspicious, if not superstitious, motion of the hand with a necessary and essential act doth in no wise respect order or propriety: Lastly, that to forbid a man to obey a direct command of God because he will not join with it an admitted mere tradition of men, is contrary to common sense, no less than to God's word, expressly and by breach of charity, which is the great end and purpose of God's word. Besides; might not the Pope and his shavelings have made the same proposition to the Reformers in the reign of Edward VI., in respect to the greater part of the idle superfluities which were rejected by the Reformers, only as idle and superfluous, and for that reason contrary to the spirit of the Gospel, though few, if any, were in the direct teeth of a positive prohibition? Above all, an honest policy dictates that the end in view being fully determined, as here for instance, the preclusion of disturbance and indecorum in Christian assemblies, every addition to means, already adequate to the securing of that end, tends to frustrate the end, and is therefore evidently excluded from the prerogatives of the Church, (however that word may be interpreted) inasmuch as its power is confined to such ceremonies and regulations as conduce to order and general edification. In short it grieves me to think that the Heads of the most Apostolical Church in Christendom should have insisted on three or four trifles, the abolition of which could have given offence to none but such as from the baleful superstition that alone could attach importance to them effectually, it was charity to offend;-when all the rest of Baxter's objections might have been answered so triumphantly. Ib. p. 343. Answer to the foresaid paper. 8. That none may be a preacher, that dare not subscribe that there is nothing in the Common Prayer Book, the Book of Ordination, and the 39 Articles, that is contrary to the word of God. I think this might have been left out as well as the other two articles mentioned by Baxter. For as by the words "contrary to the word of God" in Cosins's paper, it was not meant to declare the Common Prayer Book free from all error, the sense must have been, that there is not anything in it in such a way or degree contrary to God's word, as to oblige us to assign sin to those who have overlooked it, or who think the same compatible with God's word, or who, though individually disapproving the particular thing, yet regard that acquiescence as an allowed sacrifice of individual opinion to modesty, charity, and zeal for the peace of the Church. For observe that this eighth instance is additional to, and therefore not inclusive of, the preceding seven: otherwise it must have been placed as the first, or rather as the whole, the seven following being motives and instances in support and explanation of the point. Ib. p. 368. Let me mediate here between Baxter and the Bishops: Baxter had taken for granted that the King had a right to promise a revision of the Liturgy, Canons and regiment of the Church, and that the Bishops ought to have met him and his friends as diplomatists on even ground. The Bishops could not with discretion openly avow all they meant; and it would be bigotry to deny that the spirit of compromise had no indwelling in their feelings or intents. But nevertheless it is true that they thought more in the spirit of the English Constitution than Baxter and his friends.--"This," thought they, "is the law of the land, 'quam nolumus mutari'; and it must be the King with and by the advice of his Parliament, that can authorize any part of his subjects to take the question of its repeal into consideration. Under other circumstances a King might bring the Bishops and the Heads of the Romish party together to plot against the law of the land. No! we would have no other secret Committees but of Parliamentary appointment. We are but so many individuals. It is in the Legislature that the congregations, the party most interested in this cause, meet collectively by their representatives."--Lastly, let it not be overlooked, that the root of the bitterness was common to both parties,--namely, the conviction of the vital importance of uniformity;--and this admitted, surely an undoubted majority in favor of what is already law must decide whose uniformity it is to be. Ib. p. 368. We must needs believe that when your Majesty took our consent to a Liturgy to be a foundation that would infer our concord, you meant not that we should have no concord but by consenting to this Liturgy without any considerable alteration. This is forcible reasoning, but which the Bishops could fairly leave for the King to answer;--the contract tacit or expressed, being between him and the anti-Prelatic Presbytero-Episcopalian party, to which neither the Bishops nor the Legislature had acceded or assented. If Baxter and Calamy were so little imbued with the spirit of the Constitution as to consider Charles II. as the breath of their nostrils, and this dread sovereign Breath in its passage gave a snort or a snuffle, or having led them to expect a snuffle surprised them with a snort, let the reproach be shared between the Breath's fetid conscience and the nostrils' nasoductility. The traitors to the liberty of their country who were swarming and intriguing for favor at Breda when they should have been at their post in Parliament or in the Lobby preparing terms and conditions!--Had all the ministers that were afterwards ejected and the Presbyterian party generally exerted themselves, heart and soul, with Monk's soldiers, and in collecting those whom Monk had displaced, and, instead of carrying on treasons against the Government 'de facto' by mendicant negociations with Charles, had taken open measures to confer the sceptre on him as the Scotch did,--whose stern and truly loyal conduct has been most unjustly condemned,--the schism in the Church might have been prevented and the Revolution of 1688 superseded. N.B. In the above I speak of the Bishops as men interested in a litigated estate. God forbid, I should seek to justify them as Christians. Ib. p. 369. 'Quære'. Whether in the 20th Article these words are not inserted;--'Habet Ecclesia auctoritatem in controversiis fidei'. Strange, that the evident antithesis between power in respect of ceremonies, and authority in points of faith, should have been overlooked! Ib. Some have published, That there is a proper sacrifice in the Lord's Supper, to exhibit Christ's death in the 'post-fact', as there was a sacrifice to prefigure it in the Old Law in the 'ante-fact', and therefore that we have a true altar, and not only metaphorically so called. Doubtless a gross error, yet pardonable, for to errors nearly as gross it was opposed. Ib. Some have maintained that the Lord's Day is kept merely by ecclesiastical constitution, and that the day is changeable. Where shall we find the proof of the contrary?--at least, if the position had been worded thus: The moral and spiritual obligation of keeping the Lord's Day is grounded on its manifest necessity, and the evidence of its benignant effects in connection with those conditions of the world of which even in Christianized countries there is no reason to expect a change, and is therefore commanded by implication in the New Testament, so clearly and by so immediate a consequence, as to be no less binding on the conscience than an explicit command. A., having lawful authority, expressly commands me to go to London from Bristol. There is at present but one safe road: this therefore is commanded by A.; and would be so, even though A. had spoken of another road which at that time was open. Ib. p. 370. Some have broached out of Socinus a most uncomfortable and desperate doctrine, that late repentance, that is, upon the last bed of sickness, is unfruitful, at least to reconcile the penitent to God. This no doubt refers to Jeremy Taylor's work on Repentance, and is but too faithful a description of its character. Ib. p. 373. A little after the King was beheaded, Mr. Atkins met this priest in London, and going into a tavern with him, said to him in his familiar way, "What business have you here? I warrant you come about some roguery or other." Whereupon the priest told it him as a great secret, that there were thirty of them here in London, who by instructions from Cardinal Mazarine, did take care of such affairs, and had sat in council, and debated the question, whether the King should be put to death or not;--and that it was carried in the affirmative, and there were but two voices for the negative, which was his own and another's; and that for his part, he could not concur with them, as foreseeing what misery this would bring upon his country. Mr. Atkins stood to the truth of this, but thought it a violation of the laws of friendship to name the man. Richard Baxter was too thoroughly good for any experience to make him worldly wise; else, how could he have been simple enough to suppose, that Mazarine would leave such a question to be voted 'pro' and 'con', and decided by thirty emissaries in London! And, how could he have reconciled Mazarine's having any share in Charles's death with his own masterly account, pp. 98, 99, 100? Even Cromwell, though he might have prevented, could not have effected, the sentence. The regicidal judges were not his creatures. Consult the Life of Colonel Hutchinson upon this. Ib. p. 374. Since this, Dr. Peter Moulin hath, in his Answer to 'Philanax Anglicus', declared that he is ready to prove, when authority will Call him to it, that the King's death, and the change of the government, was first proposed both to the Sorbonne, and to the Pope with his Conclave, and consented to and concluded for by both. The Pope in his Conclave had about the same influence in Charles's fate as the Pope's eye in a leg of mutton. The letter intercepted by Cromwell was Charles's death-warrant. Charles knew his power; and Cromwell and Ireton knew it likewise, and knew that it was the power of a man who was within a yard's length of a talisman, only not within an arm's length, but which in that state of the public mind, could he but have once grasped it, would have enabled him to blow up Presbyterian and Independent both. If ever a lawless act was defensible on the principle of self-preservation, the murder of Charles might be defended. I suspect that the fatal delay in the publication of the 'Icon Basilike' is susceptible of no other satisfactory explanation. In short it is absurd to burthen this act on Cromwell and his party, in any special sense. The guilt, if guilt it was, was consummated at the gates of Hull; that is, the first moment that Charles was treated as an individual, man against man. Whatever right Hampden had to defend his life against the King in battle, Cromwell and Ireton had in yet more imminent danger against the King's plotting. Milton's reasoning on this point is unanswerable: and what a wretched hand does Baxter make of it! Ib. p. 375. But if the laws of the land appoint the nobles, as next the King, to assist him in doing right, and withhold him from doing wrong, then be they licensed by man's law, and so not prohibited by God's, to interpose themselves for the safety of equity and innocency, and by all lawful and needful means to procure the Prince to be reformed, but in no case deprived, where the sceptre is inherited! So far Bishop Bilson. Excellent! O, by all means preserve for him the benefit of his rightful heir-loom, the regal sceptre; only lay it about his shoulders, till he promises to handle it, as he ought! But what if he breaks his promise and your head? or what if he will not promise? How much honester would it be to say, that extreme cases are 'ipso nomine' not generalizable, --therefore not the subjects of a law, which is the conclusion 'per genus singuli in genere inclusi'. Every extreme case must be judged by and for itself under all the peculiar circumstances. Now as these are not foreknowable, the case itself cannot be predeterminable. Harmodius and Aristogiton did not justify Brutus and Cassius: but neither do Brutus and Cassius criminate Harmodius and Aristogiton. The rule applies till an extreme case occurs; and how can this be proved? I answer, the only proof is success and good event; for these afford the best presumption, first, of the extremity, and secondly, of its remediable nature--the two elements of its justification. To every individual it is forbidden. He who attempts it, therefore, must do so on the presumption that the will of the nation is in his will: whether he is mad or in his senses, the event can alone determine. Ib. p. 398. The governing power and obligation over the flock is essential to the office of a Pastor or Presbyter as instituted by Christ. There is, [Greek: hôs émoige dokei], one flaw in Baxter's plea for his Presbyterian form of Church government, that he uses a metaphor, which, inasmuch as it is but a metaphor, agrees with the thing meant in some points only, as if it were commensurate 'in toto', and virtually identical. Thus, the Presbyter is a shepherd as far as the watchfulness, tenderness, and care, are to be the same in both; but it does not follow that the Presbyter has the same sole power and exclusive right of guidance; and for this reason,--that his flock are not sheep, but men; not of a natural, generic, or even constant inferiority of judgment; but Christians, co-heirs of the promises, and therein of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and of the interpretation of the Holy Scriptures. How then can they be excluded from a share in Church Government? The words of Christ, if they may be transferred from their immediate application to the Jewish Synagogue, suppose the contrary;--and that highest act of government, the election of the officers and ministers of the Church, was confessedly exercised by the congregations including the Presbyters and Arch-presbyter or Bishop, in the primitive Church. The question, therefore, is:--Is a national Church, established by law, compatible with Christianity? If so, as Baxter held, the representatives (King, Lords, and Commons,) are or may be representatives of the whole people as Christians as well as civil subjects;--and their voice will then be the voice of the Church, which every individual, as an individual, themselves as individuals, and, 'a fortiori', the officers and administrators appointed by them, are bound to obey at the risk of excommunication, against which there would be no appeal, but to the heavenly Cæsar, the Lord and Head of the universal Church. But whether as the accredited representatives and plenipotentiaries of the national Church, they can avail themselves of their conjoint but distinct character, as temporal legislators, to superadd corporal or civil penalties to the spiritual sentence in points peculiar to Christianity, as heretical opinions, Church ceremonies, and the like, thus destroying 'discipline', even as wood is destroyed by combination with fire;--this is a new and difficult question, which yet Baxter and the Presbyterian divines, and the Puritans of that age in general, not only answered affirmatively, but most zealously, not to say furiously, affirmed with anathemas to the assertors of the negative, and spiritual threats to the magistrates neglecting to interpose the temporal sword. In this respect the present Dissenters have the advantage over their earlier predecessors; but on the other hand they utterly evacuate the Scriptural commands against schism; take away all sense and significance from the article respecting the Catholic Church; and in consequence degrade the discipline itself into mere club-regulations or the by-laws of different lodges;--that very discipline, the capability of exercising which in its own specific nature without superinduction of a destructive and transmutual opposite, is the fairest and firmest support of their cause. 20th October, 1829. Ib. p. 401. That sententially it must be done by the Pastor or Governor of that particular Church, which the person is to be admitted into, or cast out of. This most arbitrary appropriation of the words of Christ, and of the apostles, John and Paul, by the Clergy to themselves exclusively, is the [Greek: prôton pseudos], the fatal error which has practically excluded Church discipline from among Protestants in all free countries. That it is retained, and an efficient power, among the Quakers, and only in that Sect, who act collectively as a Church,--who not only have no proper Clergy, but will not allow a division of majority and minority, nor a temporary president,--seems to supply an unanswerable confirmation of this my assertion, and a strong presumption for the validity of my argument. The Wesleyan Methodists have, I know, a discipline, and the power is in their consistory,--a general conclave of priests cardinal since the death of Pope Wesley. But what divisions and secessions this has given rise to; what discontents and heart-burnings it still occasions in their labouring inferior ministers, and in the classes, is no less notorious, and may authorize a belief that as the Sect increases, it will be less and less effective; nay, that it has decreased; and after all, what is it compared with the discipline of the Quakers?--Baxter's inconsistency on this subject would be inexplicable, did we not know his zealotry against Harrington, the Deists and the Mystics;--so that, like an electrified pith-ball, he is for ever attracted towards their tenets concerning the pretended perfecting of spiritual sentences by the civil magistrate, but he touches only to fly off again. "Toleration! dainty word for soul-murder! God grant that my eye may never see a toleration!" he exclaims in his book against Harrington's Oceana. Ib. p. 405. As for the democratical conceit of them that say that the Parliament hath their governing power, as they are the people's representatives, and so have the members of the convocation, though those represented have no governing power themselves, it is so palpably self-contradicting, that I need not confute it. Self-contradicting according to Baxter's sense of the words "represent" and "govern." But every rational adult has a governing power: namely, that of governing himself. Ib. p. 412. That though a subject ought to take an oath in the sense of his rulers who impose it, as far as he can understand it; yet a man that taketh an oath from a robber to save his life is not always bound to take it in the imposer's sense, if he take it not against the proper sense of the words. This is a point, on which I have never been able to satisfy myself.--The only safe conclusion I have been able to draw, being the folly, mischief, and immorality of all oaths but judicial ones,--and those no farther excepted than as they are means of securing a deliberate consciousness of the presence of the Omniscient Judge. The inclination of my mind is at this moment, to the principle that an oath may deepen the guilt of an act sinful in itself, but cannot be detached from the act; it being understood that a perfectly voluntary and self-imposed oath is itself a sin. The man who compels me to take an oath by putting a pistol to my ear has in my mind clearly forfeited all his right to be treated as a moral agent. Nay, it seems to be a sin to act so as to induce him to suppose himself such. Contingent consequences must be excluded; but would, I am persuaded, weigh in favour of annulling on principle an oath sinfully extorted. But I hate casuistry so utterly, that I could not without great violence to my feelings put the case in all its bearings. For example:--it is sinful to enlarge the power of wicked agents; but to allow them to have the power of binding the conscience of those, whom they have injured, is to enlarge the power, &c. Again: no oath can bind to the perpetration of a sin; but to transfer a sum of money from its rightful owner to a villain is a sin, &c. and twenty other such. But the robber may kill the next man! Possibly: but still more probably, many, who would be robbers if they could obtain their ends without murder, would resist the temptation if no extenuations of guilt were contemplated;--and one murder is more effective in rousing the public mind to preventive measures, and by the horror it strikes, is made more directly preventive of the tendency, than fifty civil robberies by contract. Ib. p. 435. That the minister be not bound to read the Liturgy himself, if another, by whomsoever, be procured to do it; so be it he preach not against it. Wonderful, that so good and wise a man as Baxter should not have seen that in this the Church would have given up the best, perhaps the only efficient, preservative of her Faith. But for our blessed and truly Apostolic and Scriptural Liturgy, our churches' pews would long ago have been filled by Arians and Socinians, as too many of their desks and pulpits already are. Part III. p. 59. As also to make us take such a poor suffering as this for a sign of true grace, instead of faith, hope, love, mortification, and a heavenly mind; and that the loss of one grain of love was worse than a long imprisonment. Here Baxter confounds his own particular case, which very many would have coveted, with the sufferings of other prisoners on the same score;--sufferings nominally the same, but with few, if any, of Baxter's almost flattering supports. Ib. p. 60. It would trouble the reader for me to reckon up the many diseases and dangers for these ten years past, in or from which God hath delivered me; though it be my duty not to forget to be thankful. Seven months together I was lame with a strange pain in one foot, twice delivered from a bloody flux; a spurious cataract in my eye, with incessant webs and networks before it, hath continued these eight years, * * * so that I have rarely one hour's or quarter of an hour's ease. Yet through God's mercy I was never one hour melancholy, &c. The power of the soul, by its own act of will, is, I admit, great for any one occasion or for a definite time, yea, it is marvellous. But of such exertions and such an even frame of spirit, as Baxter's were, under such unremitting and almost unheard-of bodily derangements and pains as his, and during so long a life, 1 do not believe a human soul capable, unless substantiated and successively potentiated by an especial divine grace. Ib. p. 65. The reasons why I make no larger a profession necessary than the Creed and Scriptures, are, because if we depart from this old sufficient Catholic rule, we narrow the Church, and depart from the old Catholicism. Why then any Creed? This is the difficulty. If you put the Creed as in fact, and not by courtesy, Apostolic, and on a parity with Scripture, having, namely, its authority in itself, and a direct inspiration of the framers, inspired 'ad id tempus et ad eam rem', on what ground is this to be done, without admitting the binding power of tradition in the very sense of the term in which the Church of Rome uses it, and the Protestant Churches reject it? That it is the sum total made by Apostolic contributions, each Apostle casting, as into a helmet, a several article as his [Greek: symbolon], is the tradition; and this is holden as a mere legendary tale by the great majority of learned divines. That it is simply the Creed of the Western Church is affirmed by many Protestant divines, and some of these divines of our Church. Its comparative simplicity these divines explain by the freedom from heresies enjoyed by the Western Church, when the Eastern Church had been long troubled therewith. Others, again, and not unplausibly, contend that it was the Creed of the Catechumens preparatory to the Baptismal profession of faith, which other was a fuller comment on the union of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, into whose name (or power) they were baptised. That the Apostles' Creed received additions after the Apostolic age, seems almost certain; not to mention the perplexing circumstance that so many of the Latin Fathers, who give almost the words of the Apostolic Creed, declare it forbidden absolutely to write or by any material form to transmit the 'Canon Fidei', or 'Symbolum' or 'Regula Fidei', the Creed [Greek: kat' hexocháen], by analogy of which the question whether such a book was Scripture or not, was to be tried. With such doubts how can the Apostles' Creed be preferred to the Nicene by a consistent member of the Reformed Catholic Church? Ib. p. 67. They think while you (the Independents) seem to be for a stricter discipline than others, that your way or usual practice tendeth to extirpate godliness out of the land, by taking a very few that can talk more than the rest, and making them the Church, &c. Had Baxter had as judicious advisers among his theological, as he had among his legal, friends; and had he allowed them equal influence with him; he would not, I suspect, have written this irritating and too egometical paragraph. But Baxter would have disbelieved a prophet who had foretold that almost the whole orthodoxy of the Non-conformists would he retained and preserved by the Independent congregations in England, after the Presbyterian had almost without exception become, first, Arian, then Socinian, and finally Unitarian: that is, the 'demi-semi-quaver' of Christianity, Arminianism being taken for the 'semi-breve'. Ib. p. 69. After this I waited on him (Dr. John Owen) at London again, and he came once to me to my lodgings, when I was in town near him. And he told me that he received my chiding letter and perceived that I suspected his reality in the business; but he was so hearty in it that I should see that he really meant as he spoke, concluding in these words, "You shall see it, and my practice shall reproach your diffidence" * * *. About a month after I went to him again, and he had done nothing, but was still hearty for the work. And to be short, I thus waited on him time after time, till my papers had been near a year and a quarter in his hand, and then I advised him to return them to me, which he did, with these words, "I am still a well-wisher to those mathematics;"--without any other words about them, or ever giving me any more exception against them. And this was the issue of my third attempt for union with the Independents. Dr. Owen was a man of no ordinary intellect. It would be interesting to have his conduct in this point, seemingly so strange, in some measure explained: The words "those mathematics" look like an innuendo, that Baxter's scheme of union, by which all the parties opposed to the Prelatic Church were to form a rival Church, was, like the mathematics, true indeed, but true only in the idea, that is, abstracted from the subject matter. Still there appears a very chilling want of open-heartedness on the part of Owen, produced perhaps by the somewhat overly and certainly most ungracious resentments of Baxter. It was odd at least to propose concord in the tone and on the alleged ground of an old grudge. Ib. I have been twenty-six years convinced that dichotomizing will not do it, but that the divine Trinity in Unity hath expressed itself in the whole frame of nature and morality * * *. But he, Mr. George Lawson, had not hit on the true method of the 'vestigia Trinitatis', &c. Among Baxter's philosophical merits, we ought not to overlook, that the substitution of Trichotomy for the old and still general plan of Dichotomy in the method and disposition of Logic, which forms so prominent and substantial an excellence in Kant's Critique of the Pure Reason, of the Judgment, and the rest of his works, belongs originally to Richard Baxter, a century before Kant;--and this not as a hint, but as a fully evolved and systematically applied principle. Nay, more than this:--Baxter grounded it on an absolute idea presupposed in all intelligential acts: whereas Kant takes it only as a fact in which he seems to anticipate or suspect some yet deeper truth latent, and hereafter to be discovered. On recollection, however, I am disposed to consider 'this' alone as Baxter's peculiar claim, I have not indeed any distinct memory of Giordano Bruno's 'Logice Venatrix Veritatis'; but doubtless the principle of Trichotomy is necessarily involved in the Polar Logic, which again is the same with the Pythagorean 'Tetractys', that is, the eternal fountain or source of nature; and this being sacred to contemplations of identity, and prior in order of thought to all division, is so far from interfering with Trichotomy as the universal form of division (more correctly of distinctive distribution in logic) that it implies it. 'Prothesis' being by the very term anterior to 'Thesis' can be no part of it. Thus in 'Prothesis' 'Thesis' 'Antithesis' 'Synthesis' we have the Tetrad indeed in the intellectual and intuitive contemplation, but a Triad in discursive arrangement, and a Tri-unity in result. [3] Ib. p. 144. Seeing the great difficulties that lie in the way of increasing charities so as to meet the increase of population, or even so as to follow it, and the manifold desirableness of parish Churches, with the material dignity that in a right state of Christian order would attach to them, as compared with meeting-houses, chapels, and the like--all more or less 'privati juris', I have often felt disposed to wish that the large majestic Church, central to each given parish, might have been appropriated to Public Prayer, to the mysteries of Baptism and the Lord's Supper, and to the 'quasi sacramenta', Marriage, Penance, Confirmation, Ordination, and to the continued reading aloud, or occasional chanting, of the Scriptures during the intervals of the different Services, which ought to be so often performed as to suffice successively for the whole population; and that on the other hand the chapels and the like should be entirely devoted to teaching and expounding. Ib. p. 153. And I proved to him that Christianity was proved true many years before any of the New Testament was written, and that so it may be still proved by one that doubted of some words of the Scripture; and therefore the true order is, to try the truth of the Christian religion first, and the perfect verity of the Scriptures afterwards. With more than Dominican virulence did Goeze, Head Pastor of the Lutheran Church at Hamburg, assail the celebrated Lessing for making and supporting the same position as the pious Baxter here advances. This controversy with Goeze was in 1778, nearly a hundred years after Baxter's writing this. Ib. p. 155. And within a few days Mr. Barnett riding the circuit was cast by his horse, and died in the very fall. And Sir John Medlicote and his brother, a few weeks after, lay both dead in his house together. This interpreting of accidents and coincidences into judgments is a breach of charity and humility, only not universal among all sects and parties of this period, and common to the best and gentlest men in all; we should not therefore bring it in charge against any one in particular. But what excuse shall be made for the revival of this presumptuous encroachment on the divine prerogative in our days? Ib. p. 180. Near this time my book called A Key for Catholics, was to be reprinted. In the preface to the first impression I had mentioned with praise the Earl of Lauderdale. * * * I thought best to prefix an epistle to the Duke, in which I said not a word of him but truth. * * * But the indignation that men had against the Duke made some blame me, as keeping up the reputation of one whom multitudes thought very ill of; whereas I owned none of his faults, and did nothing that I could well avoid for the aforesaid reasons. Long after this he professed his kindness to me, and told me I should never want while he was able, and humbly entreated me to accept twenty guineas from him, which I did. This would be a curious proof of the slow and imperfect intercourse of communication between Scotland and London, if Baxter had not been particularly informed of Lauderdale's horrible cruelties to the Scotch Covenanters:--and if Baxter did know them, he surely ran into a greater inconsistency to avoid the appearance of a less. And the twenty guineas! they must have smelt, I should think, of more than the earthly brimstone that might naturally enough have been expected in gold or silver, from his palm. I would as soon have plucked an ingot from the cleft of the Devil's hoof. [Greek: Taut' élegon períthumos egô gàr mísei en ísô Laudérdalon échô kaì kerkokerônucha Satan.] Ib. p. 181. About that time I had finished a book called Catholic Thoughts; in which I undertake to prove that besides things unrevealed, known to none, and ambiguous words, there is no considerable difference between the Arminians and Calvinists, except some very tolerable difference in the point of perseverance. What Arminians? what Calvinists?--It is possible that the guarded language and positions of Arminius himself may be interpreted into a "very tolerable" compatibility with the principles of the milder Calvinists, such as Archbishop Leighton, that true Father of the Church of Christ. But I more than doubt the possibility of even approximating the principles of Bishop Jeremy Taylor to the fundamental doctrines of Leighton, much more to those of Cartwright, Twiss, or Owen. Ib. p. 186. Bishop Barlow told my friend that got my papers for him, that he could hear of nothing that we judged to be sin, but mere inconveniences. When as above seventeen years ago, we publicly endeavoured to prove the sinfulness even of many of the old impositions. Clearly an undeterminable controversy; inasmuch as there is no centra-definition possible of sin and inconvenience in religion: while the exact point, at which an inconvenience, becoming intolerable, passes into sin, must depend on the state and the degree of light, of the individual consciences to which it appears or becomes intolerable. Besides, a thing may not be only indifferent in itself, but may be declared such by Scripture, and on this indifference the Scripture may have rested a prohibition to Christians to judge each other on the point. If yet a Pope or Archbishop should force this on the consciences of others, for example, to eat or not to eat animal food, would he not sin in so doing? And does Scripture permit me to subscribe to an ordinance made in direct contempt of a command of Scripture? If it were said,--In all matters indifferent and so not sinful you must comply with lawful authority:--must I not reply, But you have yourself removed the indifferency by your injunction? Look in Popish countries for the hideous consequences of the unnatural doctrine--that the Priest may go to Hell for sinfully commanding, and his parishioners go with him for not obeying that command. Ib. p. 191. About this time died my dear friend Mr. Thomas Gouge, of whose life you may see a little in Mr. Clark's last book of Lives:--a wonder of sincere industry in works of charity. It would make a volume to recite at large the charity he used to his poor parishioners at Sepulchre's, before he was ejected and silenced for non-conformity, &c. I cannot express how much it grieves me, that our Clergy should still think it fit and expedient to defend the measures of the High Churchmen from Laud to Sheldon, and to speak of the ejected ministers, Calamy, Baxter, Gouge, Howe, and others, as schismatics, factionists, fanatics, or Pharisees:--thus to flatter some half-dozen dead Bishops, wantonly depriving our present Church of the authority of perhaps the largest collective number of learned and zealous, discreet and holy, ministers that one age and one Church was ever blest with; and whose authority in every considerable point is in favor of our Church, and against the present Dissenters from it. And this seems the more impolitic, when it must be clear to every student of the history of these times, that the unmanly cruelties inflicted on Baxter and others were, as Bishops Ward, Stillingfleet, and others saw at the time, part of the Popish scheme of the Cabal, to trick the Bishops and dignified Clergy into rendering themselves and the established Church odious to the public by laws, the execution of which the King, the Duke, Arlington, and the Popish priests directed towards the very last man that the Bishops themselves (the great majority at least) would have molested. Appendix II. p. 37. If I can prove that it hath been the universal practice of the Church 'in nudum apertum caput manus imponere', doth it follow that this is essential, and the contrary null? How likewise can it be proved that the imposition of hands in Ordination did not stand on the same ground as the imposition of hands in sickness; that is, the miraculous gifts of the first preachers of the Gospel? All Protestants admit that the Church retained several forms so originated, after the cessation of the originating powers, which were the substance of these forms. Ib. If you think not only imposition to be essential, but also that nothing else is essential, or that all are true ministers that are ordained by a lawful Bishop per 'manuum impositionem', then do you egregiously 'tibi ipsi imponere'. Baxter, like most scholastic logicians, had a sneaking affection for puns. The cause is,--the necessity of attending to the primary sense of words, that is, the visual image or general relation expressed, and which remains common to all the after senses, however widely or even incongruously differing from each other in other respects. For the same reason, schoolmasters are commonly punsters. "I have indorsed your Bill, Sir," said a pedagogue to a merchant, meaning he had flogged his son William.--My old master the Rev. James Bowyer, the 'Hercules furens' of the phlogistic sect, but else an incomparable teacher,--used to translate, 'Nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu',--first reciting the Latin words, and observing that they were the fundamental article of the Peripatetic school,--"You must flog a boy, before you can make him understand;"--or, "You must lay it in at the tail before you can get it into the head." Ib. p. 45. Then, that the will must follow the practical intellect whether right or wrong,--that is no precept, but the nature of the soul in its acting, because that the will is 'potentia cæca, non nata ad intelligendum, sed ad volendum vel nolendum intellectum'. This is the main fault in Baxter's metaphysics, that he so often substantiates distinctions into dividuous self-subsistents. As here;--for a will not intelligent is no will. Appendix. III. p. 55. And for many ages no other ordinarily baptised but infants. If Christ had no Church then, where was his wisdom, his love, and his power? What was become of the glory of his redemption, and his Catholic Church, that was to continue to the end? But the Antipoedo-Baptists would deny any such consequences as applicable to them, who are to act according to the circumstances, in which God, who ordains his successive manifestations in due correspondence with other lights and states of things, has placed them. He does not exclude from the Church of Christ (say they) those whom we do not accept into the communion of our particular Society, any more than the House of Lords excludes Commoners from being Members of Parliament. And we do this because--we think that such promiscuous admission would prolong an error which would be deadly to us, though not to you who interpret the Scriptures otherwise. 'In fine.' There are two senses in which the words, 'Church of England,' may be used;--first, with reference to the idea of the Church as an estate of this Christian Realm, protesting against the Papal usurpation, comprising, first, the interests of a permanent learned class, that is, the Clergy;--secondly, those of the proper, that is, the infirm poor, from age or sickness;--and thirdly, the adequate proportional instruction of all in all classes by public prayer, recitation of the Scriptures, by expounding, preaching, catechizing, and schooling, and last, not least, by the example and influence of a pastor and a schoolmaster placed as a germ of civilization and cultivation in every parish throughout the land. To this idea, the Reformed Church of England with its marriable and married Clergy would have approximated, if the revenues of the Church, as they existed at the death of Henry VII., had been rightly transferred by his successor;--transferred, I mean, from reservoirs, which had by degeneracy on the one hand, and progressive improvement on the other, fallen into ruin, and in which those revenues had stagnated into contagion or uselessness,--transferred from what had become public evils to their original and inherent purpose of public benefits, instead of being sacrilegiously alienated by a transfer to private proprietors. That this was impracticable, is historically true; but no less true is it philosophically, that this impracticability, arising wholly from moral causes, (namely, the loose manners and corrupt principles of a great majority in all classes during the dynasty of the Tudors,) does not prevent this wholesale sacrilege, from deserving the character of the "first and deadliest wound inflicted on the Constitution of the kingdom; which term, in the body politic, as in bodies natural, expresses not only what is and has been evolved, but likewise whatever is potentially contained in the seminal principle of the particular body, and which would in its due time have appeared but for emasculation in its infancy. This, however, is the first sense of the words, Church of England. [4] The second is the Church of England as now by law established, and by practice of the law actually existing. That in the first sense it is the object of my admiration and the earthly 'ne plus ultra' of my religious aspirations, it were superfluous to say: but I may be allowed to express my conviction, that on our recurring to the same ends and objects, (the restoration of a national and circulating property in counterpoise of individual possession, disposable and heritable) though in other forms and by other means perhaps, the decline or progress of this country depends. In the second sense of the words I can sincerely profess, that I love and honour the Church of England, comparatively, beyond any other Church established or unestablished now existing in Christendom; and it is wholly in consequence of this deliberate and most affectionate filial preference, that I have read this work, and Calamy's historical writings, with so deep and so melancholy an interest. And I dare avow that I cannot but regard as an ignorant bigot every man who (especially since the publicity and authentication of the contents of the Stuart Papers, Memoirs and Life of James II. &c.) can place the far later furious High Church compilations and stories of Walker and others in competition with the veracity and general verity of Baxter and Calamy; or can forget that the great body of Non-conformists to whom these great and good men belonged, were not dissenters from the established Church willingly, but an orthodox and numerous portion of the Church. Omitting then the wound received by religion generally under Henry VIII., and the shameless secularizations clandestinely effected during the reigns of Elizabeth and the first James, I am disposed to consider the three following as the grand evil epochs of our present Church. First, The introduction and after-predominance of Latitudinarianism under the name of Arminianism, and the spirit of a conjoint Romanism and Socinianism at the latter half or towards the close of the reign of James I. in the persons of Montague, Laud, and their confederates. Second, The ejection of the two thousand ministers after the Restoration, with the other violences in which the Churchmen made themselves the dupes of Charles, James, the Jesuits, and the French Court. (See the Stuart Papers 'passim'). It was this that gave consistence and enduring strength to Schism in this country, prevented the pacation of Ireland, and prepared for the separation of America at a far too early period for the true interest of either country. Third, The surrender by the Clergy of the right of taxing themselves, and the Jacobitical follies that combined with the former to put it in the power of the Whig party to deprive the Church of her Convocation,--a bitter disgrace and wrong, to which most unhappily the people were rendered indifferent by the increasing contrast of the sermons of the Clergy with the Articles and Homilies of the Church itself,--but a wrong nevertheless which already has avenged, and will sooner or later be seen to avenge, itself on the State and the governing classes that continue this boast of a short-sighted policy; the same policy which in our own days would have funded the property of the Church, and, by converting the Clergy into salaried dependents on the Government 'pro tempore', have deprived the Establishment of its fairest honor, that of being neither enslaved to the court, nor to the congregations; the same policy, alas! which even now pays and patronizes a Board of Agriculture to undermine all landed property by a succession of false, shallow, and inflammatory libels against tithes. These are my weighed sentiments: and fervently desiring, as I do, the perpetuity and prosperity of the established Church, zealous for its rights and dignity, preferring its forms, believing its Articles of Faith, and holding its Book of Common Prayer and its translation of the Scriptures among my highest privileges as a Christian and an Englishman, I trust that I may both entertain and avow these sentiments without forfeiting any part of my claim to the name of a faithful member of the Church of England. June 1820. N. B. As to Warburton's Alliance of the Church and State, I object to the title (Alliance), and to the matter and mode of the reasoning. But the inter-dependence of the Church and the State appears to me a truth of the highest practical importance. Let but the temporal powers protect the subjects in their just rights as subjects merely: and I do not know of any one point in which the Church has the right or the necessity to call in the temporal power as its ally for any purpose exclusively ecclesiastic. The right of a firm to dissolve its partnership with any one partner, breach of contract having been proved, and publicly to announce the same, is common to all men as social beings. I spoke above of "Romanism." But call it, if you like, Laudism, or Lambethism in temporalities and ceremonials, and of Socinianism in doctrine, that is, a retaining of the word but a rejecting or interpreting away of the sense and substance of the Scriptural Mysteries. This spirit has not indeed manifested itself in the article of the Trinity, since Waterland gave the deathblow to Arianism, and so left no alternative to the Clergy, but the actual divinity or mere humanity of our Lord; and the latter would be too impudent an avowal for a public reader of our Church Liturgy: but in the articles of original sin, the necessity of regeneration, the necessity of redemption in order to the possibility of regeneration, of justification by faith, and of prevenient and auxiliary grace,--all I can say with sincerity is, that our orthodoxy seems so far in an improving state, that I can hope for the time when Churchmen will use the term Arminianism to express a habit of belief opposed not to Calvinism, or the works of Calvin, but to the Articles of our own Church, and to the doctrine in which all the first Reformers agreed. Note--that by Latitudinarianism, I do not mean the particular tenets of the divines so called, such as Dr. H. More, Cudworth and their compeers, relative to toleration, comprehension, and the general belief that in the greater number of points then most controverted, the pious of all parties were far more nearly of the same mind than their own imperfections, and the imperfection of language allowed them to see: I mean the disposition to explain away the articles of the Church on the pretext of their inconsistency with right reason;--when in fact it was only an incongruity with a wrong understanding, the faculty which St. Paul calls [Greek: phrónaema sarkòs], the rules of which having been all abstracted from objects of sense, (finite in time and space,) are logically applicable to objects of the sense alone. This I have elsewhere called the spirit of Socinianism, which may work in many whose tenets are anti-Socinian. Law is--'conclusio per regulam generis singulorum in genere isto inclusorum'. Now the extremes 'et inclusa' are contradictory terms. Therefore extreme cases are not capable subjects of law 'a priori', but must proceed on knowledge of the past, and anticipation of the future, and the fulfilment of the anticipation is the proof, because the only possible determination, of the accuracy of the knowledge. In other words the agents may be condemned or honored according to their intentions, and the apparent source of their motives; so we honor Brutus, but the extreme case itself is tried by the event. [Footnote 1: 'Relliquiæ Baxterianæ': or Mr. Richard Baxter's Narrative of the most memorable passages of his life and times. Published from his manuscript, by Matthew Sylvester.--London, 'folio'. 1699.] [Footnote 2: See Hooker E. P. V. xviii. 3. Vol. II. p. 80. Keble. Ed.] [Footnote 3: See Table Talk, p. 162. 2nd edit. Ed.] [Footnote 4: See the Church and State, p. 73, 3rd edit.--Ed.] * * * * * NOTES ON LEIGHTON. [1] Surely if ever work not in the sacred Canon might suggest a belief of inspiration,--of something more than human,--this it is. When Mr. Elwyn made this assertion, I took it as the hyperbole of affection: but now I subscribe to it seriously, and bless the hour that introduced me to the knowledge of the evangelical, apostolical Archbishop Leighton. April 1814. Next to the inspired Scriptures--yea, and as the vibration of that once struck hour remaining on the air, stands Leighton's Commentary on the 1st Epistle of St. Peter. Comment Vol. I. p. 2. --their redemption and salvation by Christ Jesus; that inheritance of immortality bought by his blood for them, and the evidence and stability of their right and title to it. By the blood of Christ I mean this. I contemplate the Christ, 1;--As 'Christus agens', the Jehovah Christ, the Word: 2;--As 'Christus patiens', The God Incarnate. In the former he is 'relative ad intellectum humanum, lux lucifica, sol intelligibilis: relative ad existentiam humanam, anima animans, calor fovens'. In the latter he is 'vita vivificans, principium spiritualis, id est, veræ reproductionis in vitam veram'. Now this principle, or 'vis vitæ vitam vivificans', considered in 'forma passiva, assimilationem patiens', at the same time that it excites the soul to the vital act of assimilating--this is the Blood of Christ, really present through faith to, and actually partaken by, the faithful. Of this the body is the continual product, that is, a good life-the merits of Christ acting on the soul, redemptive. Ib. pp. 13-15. Of their sanctification: 'elect unto obedience', &c. That the doctrines asserted in this and the two or three following pages cannot be denied or explained away, without removing (as the modern Unitarians), or (as the Arminians) unsettling and undermining, the foundations of the Faith, I am fully convinced; and equally so, that nothing is gained by the change, the very same logical consequences being deducible from the tenets of the Church Arminians;--scarcely more so, indeed, from those which they still hold in common with Luther, Zuinglius, Calvin, Knox, and Cranmer and the other Fathers of the Reformation in England, and which are therefore most unfairly entitled Calvinism--than from those which they have attempted to substitute in their place. Nay, the shock given to the moral sense by these consequences is, to my feelings, aggravated in the Arminian doctrine by the thin yet dishonest disguise. Meantime the consequences appear to me, in point of logic, legitimately concluded from the terms of the premisses. What shall we say then? Where lies the fault? In the original doctrines expressed in the premisses? God forbid. In the particular deductions, logically considered? But these we have found legitimate. Where then? I answer in deducing any consequences by such a process, and according to such rules. The rules are alien and inapplicable; the process presumptuous, yea, preposterous. The error, [Greek: to prôton pseudos], lies in the false assumption of a logical deducibility at all, in this instance. First:--because the terms from which the conclusion must be drawn-('termini in majore præmissi, a quibus scientialiter et scientifice demonstrandum erat') are accommodations and not scientific--that is, proper and adequate, not 'per idem', but 'per quam maxime simile', or rather 'quam maxime dissimile': Secondly;--because the truths in question are transcendant, and have their evidence, if any, in the ideas themselves, and for the reason; and do not and cannot derive it from the conceptions of the understanding, which cannot comprehend the truths, but is to be comprehended in and by them, ('John' i. 5.): Lastly, and chiefly;--because these truths, as they do not originate in the intellective faculty of man, so neither are they addressed primarily to our intellect; but are substantiated for us by their correspondence to the wants, cravings, and interests of the moral being, for which they were given, and without which they would be devoid of all meaning,--'vox et præterea nihil'. The only conclusions, therefore, that can be drawn from them, must be such as are implied in the origin and purpose of their revelation; and the legitimacy of all conclusions must be tried by their consistency with those moral interests, those spiritual necessities, which are the proper final cause of the truths and of our faith therein. For some of the faithful these truths have, I doubt not, an evidence of reason; but for the whole household of faith their certainty is in their working. Now it is this, by which, in all cases, we know and determine existence in the first instance. That which works in us or on us exists for us. The shapes and forms that follow the working as its results or products, whether the shapes cognizable by sense or the forms distinguished by the intellect, are after all but the particularizations of this working; its proper names, as it were, as John, James, Peter, in respect of human nature. They are all derived from the relations in which finite beings stand to each other; and are therefore heterogeneous and, except by accommodation, devoid of meaning and purpose when applied to the working in and by which God makes his existence known to us, and (we may presume to say) especially exists for the soul in whom he thus works. On these grounds, therefore, I hold the doctrines of original sin, the redemption therefrom by the Cross of Christ, and change of heart as the consequent; without adopting the additions to the doctrines inferred by one set of divines, the modern Calvinists, or acknowledging the consequences burdened on the doctrines by their antagonists. Nor is this my faith fairly liable to any inconvenience, if only it be remembered that it is a spiritual working, of which I speak, and a spiritual knowledge,--not through the 'medium' of image, the seeking after which is superstition; nor yet by any sensation, the watching for which is enthusiasm, and the conceit of its presence fanatical distemperature. "Do the will of the Father, and ye shall 'know' it." We must distinguish the life and the soul; though there is a certain sense in which the life may be called the soul; that is, the life is the soul of the body. But the soul is the life of the man, and Christ is the life of the soul. Now the spirit of man, the spirit subsistent, is deeper than both, not only deeper than the body and its life, but deeper than the soul; and the Spirit descendent and supersistent is higher than both. In the regenerated man the height and the depth become one--the Spirit communeth with the spirit--and the soul is the 'inter-ens', or 'ens inter-medium' between the life and the spirit;--the 'participium', not as a compound, however, but as a 'medium indifferens'--in the same sense in which heat may be designated as the indifference between light and gravity. And what is the Reason?--The spirit in its presence to the understanding abstractedly from its presence in the will,--nay, in many, during the negation of the latter. The spirit present to man, but not appropriated by him, is the reason of man:--the reason in the process of its identification with the will is the spirit. Ib. pp. 63-4. Can we deny that it is unbelief of those things that causeth this neglect and forgetting of them? The discourse, the tongue of men and angels cannot beget divine belief of the happiness to come; only He that gives it, gives faith likewise to apprehend it, and lay hold upon it, and upon our believing to be filled with joy in the hopes of it. Most true, most true! Ib. p. 68. In spiritual trials that are the sharpest and most fiery of all, when the furnace is within a man, when God doth not only shut up his loving-kindness from its feeling, but seems to shut it up in hot displeasure, when he writes bitter things against it; yet then to depend upon him, and wait for his salvation, this is not only a true, but a strong and very refined faith indeed, and the more he smites, the more to cleave to him. * * * Though I saw, as it were, his hand lifted up to destroy me, yet from that same hand would I expect salvation. Bless God, O my soul, for this sweet and strong comforter! It is the honey in the lion. Ib. p. 75. This natural men may discourse of, and that very knowingly, and give a kind of natural credit to it as to a history that may be true; but firmly to believe that there is divine truth in all these things, and to have a persuasion of it stronger than of the very things we see with our eyes; such an assent as this is the peculiar work of the Spirit of God, and is certainly saving faith. 'Lord I believe: help thou my unbelief!' My reason acquiesces, and I believe enough to fear. O, grant me the belief that brings sweet hope! Ib. p. 76. Faith * * causes the soul to find all that is spoken of him in the word, and his beauty there represented, to be abundantly true, makes it really taste of his sweetness, and by that possesses the heart more strongly with his love, persuading it of the truth of those things, not by reasons and arguments, but by an inexpressible kind of evidence, that they only know that have it. Either this is true, or religion is not religion; that is, it adds nothing to our human reason; 'non religat'. Grant it, grant it me, O Lord! Ib. pp. 104-5. This sweet stream of their doctrine did, as the rivers, make its own banks fertile and pleasant as it ran by, and flowed still forward to after ages, and by the confluence of more such prophecies grew greater as it went, till it fell in with the main current of the Gospel in the New Testament, both acted and preached by the great Prophet himself, whom they foretold to come, and recorded by his Apostles and Evangelists, and thus united into one river, clear as crystal. This doctrine of salvation in the Scriptures hath still refreshed the city of God, his Church under the Gospel, and still shall do so, till it empty itself into the ocean of eternity. In the whole course of my studies I do not remember to have read so beautiful an allegory as this; so various and detailed, and yet so just and natural. Ib. p. 121. There is a truth in it, that all sin arises from some kind of ignorance * * *. For were the true visage of sin seen at a full light, undressed and unpainted, it were impossible, while it so appeared, that any one soul could be in love with it, but would rather flee from it as hideous and abominable. This is the only (defect, shall I say? No, but the only) omission I have felt in this divine Writer--for him we understand by feeling, experimentally--that he doth not notice the horrible tyranny of habit. What the Archbishop says, is most true of beginners in sin; but this is the foretaste of hell, to see and loathe the deformity of the wedded vice, and yet still to embrace and nourish it. Ib. p. 122. He calls those times wherein Christ was unknown to them, 'the times of their ignorance'. Though the stars shine never so bright, and the moon with them in its full, yet they do not, altogether, make it day: still it is night till the sun appear. How beautiful, and yet how simple, and as it were unconscious of its own beauty! Ib. p. 124. You were running to destruction in the way of sin, and there was a voice, together with the Gospel preaching to your ear, that spake into your heart, and called you back from that path of death to the way of holiness, which is the only way of life. He hath severed you from the mass of the profane world, and picked you out to be jewels for himself. O, how divine! Surely, nothing less than the Spirit of Christ could have inspired such thoughts in such language. Other divines,--Donne and Jeremy Taylor for instance,--have converted their worldly gifts, and applied them to holy ends; but here the gifts themselves seem unearthly. Ib. p. 138. As in religion, so in the course and practice of men's lives, the stream of sin runs from one age to another, and every age makes it greater, adding somewhat to what it receives, as rivers grow in their course by the accession of brooks that fall into them; and every man when he is born, falls like a drop into this main current of corruption, and so is carried down it, and this by reason of its strength, and his own nature, which willingly dissolves into it, and runs along with it. In this single period we have religion, the spirit,--philosophy, the soul,--and poetry, the body and drapery united;--Plato glorified by St. Paul; and yet coming as unostentatiously as any speech from an innocent girl of fifteen. Ib. p. 158. The chief point of obedience is believing; the proper obedience to truth is to give credit to it. This is not quite so perspicuous and single-sensed as Archbishop Leighton's sentences in general are. This effect is occasioned by the omission of the word "this," or "divine," or the truth "in Christ." For truth in the ordinary and scientific sense is received by a spontaneous, rather than chosen by a voluntary, act; and the apprehension of the same (belief) supposes a position of congruity rather than an act of obedience. Far otherwise is it with the truth that is the object of Christian faith: and it is this truth of which Leighton is speaking. Belief indeed is a living part of this faith; but only as long as it is a living part. In other words, belief is implied in faith; but faith is not necessarily implied in belief. 'The devils believe.' Ib. p. 166. Hence learn that true conversion is not so slight a work as we commonly account it. It is not the outward change of some bad customs, which gains the name of a reformed man in the ordinary dialect; it is new birth and being, and elsewhere called 'a new creation. Though it be but a change in qualities', yet it is such a one, and the qualities so far distant from what they before were, &c. I dare not affirm that this is erroneously said; but it is one of the comparatively few passages that are of service as reminding me that it is not the Scripture that I am reading. Not the qualities merely, but the root of the qualities is trans-created. How else could it be a birth,--a creation? Ib. p. 170. This natural life is compared, even by natural men, to the vainest things, and scarce find they things light enough to express it vain; and as it is here called grass, so they compare the generations of men to the leaves of trees. * * * 'Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower and is cut down. Job' xiv. 1, 2. Psalm xc. 12; xxxix. 4. It is the fashion to decry scholastic distinctions as useless subtleties, or mere phantoms--'entia logica, vel etiam verbalia solum'. And yet in order to secure a safe and Christian interpretation to these and numerous other passages of like phrase and import in the Old Testament, it is of highest concernment that we should distinguish the personeity or spirit, as the source and principle of personality, from the person itself as the particular product at any one period, and as that which cannot be evolved or sustained but by the co-agency of the system and circumstances in which the individuals are placed. In this latter sense it is that 'man' is used in the Psalms, in Job, and elsewhere--and the term made synonymous with flesh. That which constitutes the spirit in man, both for others and itself, is the real man; and to this the elements and elementary powers contribute its bulk ([Greek: tò] 'videri et tangi') wholly, and its phenomenal form in part, both as co-efficients, and as conditions. Now as these are under a law of vanity and incessant change,--[Greek: tà màe ónta, all' aèi ginómena],--so must all be, to the production and continuance of which they are indispensable. On this hangs the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, as an essential part of the doctrine of immortality;--on this the Scriptural (and only true and philosophical) sense of the soul, 'psyche' or life, as resulting from the continual assurgency of the spirit through the body;--and on this the begetting of a new life, a regenerate soul, by the descent of the divine Spirit on the spirit of man. When the spirit by sanctification is fitted for an incorruptible body, then shall it be raised into a world of incorruption, and a celestial body shall burgeon forth thereto, the germ of which had been implanted by the redeeming and creative Word in this world. Truly hath it been said of the elect:--They fall asleep in earth, but awake in heaven. So St. Paul expressly teaches: and as the passage (1. 'Cor'. xv. 35--54,) was written for the express purpose of rectifying the notions of the converts concerning the Resurrection, all other passages in the New Testament must be interpreted in harmony with it. But John, likewise,--describing the same great event, as subsequent to, and contra-distinguished from, the partial or millennary Resurrection--which (whether we are to understand the Apostle symbolically or literally) is to take place in the present world,--beholds 'a new earth' and 'a new heaven' as antecedent to, or coincident with, the appearance of the New Jerusalem,--that is, the state of glory, and the resurrection to life everlasting. The old earth and its heaven had passed away from the face of Him on the throne, at the moment that it gave up the dead. 'Rev'. xx.-xxi. Ib. pp. 174-5. 'But the word of the Lord endureth for ever.' And with respect to those learned men that apply the text to God, I remember not that this 'abiding for ever' is used to express God's eternity in himself. No; nor is it here used for that purpose; but yet I cannot doubt but that either the Word, [Greek: Ho Lógos en archae], or the Divine promises in and through the incarnate Word, with the gracious influences proceeding from him, are here meant--and not the written [Greek: rháemata] or Scriptures. Ib. p. 194. If any one's head or tongue should grow apace, and all the rest stand at a stay, it would certainly make him a monster; and they are no other that are knowing and discovering Christians, and grow daily in that, but not at all in holiness of heart and life, which is the proper growth of the children of God. Father in heaven, have mercy on me! Christ, Lamb of God, have mercy on me! Save me, Lord, or I perish! Alas! I am perishing. Ib. p. 200. A well-furnished table may please a man, while he hath health and appetite; but offer it to him in the height of a fever, how unpleasant it would be then! Though never so richly decked, it is then not only useless, but hateful to him. But the kindness and love of God is then as seasonable and refreshing to him, as in health, and possibly more. To the regenerate;--but to the conscious sinner a source of terrors insupportable. Ib. p. 211. These things hold likewise in the other stones of this building, chosen before time: all that should be of this building are fore-ordained in God's purpose, all written in that book beforehand, and then in due time they are chosen, by actual calling, according to that purpose, hewed out and severed by God's own hand from the quarry of corrupt nature;--dead stones in themselves, as the rest, but made living by his bringing them to Christ, and so made truly precious', and accounted precious by him that hath made them so. Though this is not only true, but a most important truth, it would yet have been well to have obviated the apparent carnal consequences. Ib. p. 216. All sacrifice is not taken away; but it is changed from the offering of those things formerly in use, to spiritual sacrifices. Now these are every way preferable; they are easier and cheaper to us, and yet more precious and acceptable to God. Still understand,--to the regenerate. To others, they are not only not easy and cheap, but unpurchaseable and impossible too. O God have mercy upon me! Ib. p. 229. Though I be beset on all hands, be accused by the Law, and mine own conscience, and by Satan, and have nothing to answer for myself; yet here I will stay, for I am sure in him there is salvation, and no where else. "Here I _will_ stay." But alas! the poor sinner has forfeited the powers of willing; miserable wishing is all he can command. O, the dreadful injury of an irreligious education! To be taught our prayers, and the awful truths of religion, in the same tone in which we are taught the Latin Grammar,--and too often inspiring the same sensations of weariness and disgust! Vol. II. p. 242. And thus are reproaches mentioned amongst the sufferings of Christ in the Gospel, and not as the least; the railings and mockings that were darted at him, and fixed to the Cross, are mentioned more than the very nails that fixed him. And ('Heb'. xii. 2,) the 'shame' of the Cross, though he was above it, and despised it, yet that shame added much to the burden of it. I understand Leighton thus: that though our Lord felt it not as 'shame', nor was wounded by the revilings of the people in the way of any correspondent resentment or sting, which yet we may be without blame, yet he suffered from the same as sin, and as an addition to the guilt of his persecutors, which could not but aggravate the burden which he had taken on himself, as being sin in its most devilish form. Ib. p. 293. This therefore is mainly to be studied, that the seat of humility be the heart. Although it will be seen in the carriage yet as little as it can * * *. And this I would recommend as a safe way: ever let thy thoughts concerning thyself be below what thou utterest; and what thou seest needful or fitting to say to thy own abasement, be not only content (which most are not) to be taken at thy word, and believed to be such by them that hear thee, but be desirous of it; and let that be the end of thy speech, to persuade them, and gain it of them, that they really take thee for as worthless a man as thou dost express thyself. Alas! this is a most delicate and difficult subject: and the safest way, and the only safe general rule is the silence that accompanies the inward act of looking at the contrast in all that is of our own doing and impulse! So may praises be made their own antidote. Vol. III. p. 20. Serm. I. 'They shall see God'. What this is we cannot tell you, nor can you conceive it: but walk heavenwards in purity, and long to be there, where you shall know what it means: 'for you shall know him as he is'. We say; "Now I see the full meaning, force and beauty of a passage,--we see them through the words." Is not Christ the Word--the substantial, consubstantial Word, [Greek: ho ôn eis tòn kólpon tou patrós],--not as our words, arbitrary; nor even as the words of Nature phenomenal merely? If even through the words a powerful and perspicuous author--(as in the next to inspired Commentary of Archbishop Leighton,--for whom God be praised!)--I identify myself with the excellent writer, and his thoughts become my thoughts: what must not the blessing be to be thus identified first with the Filial Word, and then with the Father in and through Him? Ib. p. 63. Serm. V. In this elementary world, light being (as we hear,) the first visible, all things are seen by it, and it by itself. Thus is Christ, among spiritual things, in the elect world of his Church; all things are 'made manifest by the light', says the Apostle, 'Eph'. v. 13, speaking of Christ as the following verse doth evidently testify. It is in his word that he shines, and makes it a directing and convincing light, to discover all things that concern his Church and himself, to be known by its own brightness. How impertinent then is that question so much tossed by the Romish Church, "How know you the Scriptures (say they) to be the word of God, without the testimony of the Church?" I would ask one of them again, How they can know that it is daylight, except some light a candle to let them see it? They are little versed in Scripture that know not that it is frequently called light; and they are senseless that know not that light is seen and known by itself. 'If our Gospel be hid', says the Apostle, 'it is hid to them that perish': the god of this world having blinded their minds against the light of the glorious Gospel, no wonder if such stand in need of a testimony. A blind man knows not that it is light at noon-day, but by report: but to those that have eyes, light is seen by itself. On the true test of the Scriptures. Oh! were it not for my manifold infirmities, whereby I am so all unlike the white-robed Leighton, I could almost conceit that my soul had been an emanation from his! So many and so remarkable are the coincidences, and these in parts of his works that I could not have seen--and so uniform the congruity of the whole. As I read, I seem to myself to be only thinking my own thoughts over again, now in the same and now in a different order. Ib. p. 68. The Author of the Epistle to the Hebrews calls him (Christ) [Greek: apaúgasma], 'the brightness of his Father's glory, and the character of his person', (i. 3.) And under these expressions lies that remarkable mystery of the Son's eternal relation to the Father, which is rather humbly to be adored, than boldly to be explained, either by God's perfect understanding of his own essence, or by any other notion. Certainly not by a transfer of a notion, and this too a notion of a faculty itself but notional and limitary, to the Supreme Reality. But there are ideas which are of higher origin than the notions of the understanding, and by the irradiation of which the understanding itself becomes a human understanding. Of such 'veritates verificæ' Leighton himself in other words speaks often. Surely, there must have been an intelligible propriety in the terms, 'Logos', Word, 'Begotten before all creation',--an adequate idea or 'icon', or the Evangelists and Apostolic penmen would not have adopted them. They did not invent the terms; but took them and used them as they were taken and applied by Philo and both the Greek and Oriental sages. Nay, the precise and orthodox, yet frequent, use of these terms by Philo, and by the Jewish authors of that traditionalæ wisdom,--degraded in after times, but which in its purest parts existed long before the Christian æra,--is the strongest extrinsic argument against the Arians, Socinians, and Unitarians, in proof that St. John must have meant to deceive his readers, if he did not use them in the known and received sense. To a Materialist indeed, or to those who deny all knowledges not resolvable into notices from the five senses, these terms as applied to spiritual beings must appear inexplicable or senseless. But so must spirit. To me, (why do I say to me?) to Bull, to Waterland, to Gregory Nazianzen, Basil, Athanasius, Augustine, the terms, Word and generation, have appeared admirably, yea, most awfully pregnant and appropriate;--but still as the language of those who know that they are placed with their backs to substances--and which therefore they can name only from the correspondent shadows--yet not (God forbid!) as if the substances were the same as the shadows;--which yet Leighton supposed in this his censure,--for if he did not, he then censures himself and a number of his most beautiful passages. These, and two or three other sentences,--slips of human infirmity,--are useful in reminding me that Leighton's works are not inspired Scripture. 'Postscript'. On a second consideration of this passage, and a revisal of my marginal animadversion--yet how dare I apply such a word to a passage written by a minister of Christ so clearly under the especial light of the divine grace as was Archbishop Leighton?--I am inclined to think that Leighton confined his censure to the attempts to "explain" the Trinity,--and this by "notions,"--and not to the assertion of the adorable acts implied in the terms both of the Evangelists and Apostles, and of the Church before as well as after Christ's ascension; nor to the assent of the pure reason to the truths, and more than assent to, the affirmation of the ideas. Ib. p. 73. This fifth Sermon, excellent in parts, is yet on the whole the least excellent of Leighton's works,--and breathes less of either his own character as a man, or the character of his religious philosophy. The style too is in many places below Leighton's ordinary style--in some places even turbid, operose, and catechrestic;--for example,--"to trample on smilings with one foot and on frownings with the other." Ib. p. 77. Serm. VI. Leighton, I presume, was acquainted with the Hebrew Language, but he does not appear to have studied it much. His observation on the 'heart', as used in the Old Testament, shews that he did not know that the ancient Hebrews supposed the heart to be the seat of intellect, and therefore used it exactly as we use the head. Ib. p. 104. Serm. VII. This seventh Sermon is admirable throughout, Leighton throughout. O what a contrast might be presented by publishing some discourse of some Court divine, (South for instance,) preached under the same state of affairs, and printing the two in columns! Ib. p. 107. Serm. VIII. In all love three things are necessary; some goodness in the object, either true and real, or apparent and seeming to be so; for the soul, be it ever so evil, can affect nothing but which it takes in some way to be good. This assertion in these words has been so often made, from Plato's times to ours, that even wise men repeat it without perhaps much examination whether it be not equivocal--or rather (I suspect) true only in that sense in which it would amount to nothing--nothing to the purpose at least. This is to be regretted--for it is a mischievous equivoque, to make 'good' a synonyme of 'pleasant,' or even the 'genus' of which pleasure is a 'species'. It is a grievous mistake to say, that bad men seek pleasure because it is good. No! like children they call it good because it is pleasant. Even the useful must derive its meaning from the good, not 'vice versa'. Postscript. The lines in p. 107, noted by me, are one of a myriad instances to prove how rash it is to quote single sentences or assertions from the correctest writers, without collating them with the known system or express convictions of the author. It would be easy to cite fifty passages from Archbishop Leighton's works in direct contradiction to the sentence in question--which he had learnt in the schools when a lad, and afterwards had heard and met with so often that he was not aware that he had never sifted its real purport. This eighth Sermon is another most admirable discourse. Ib. Serm. IX. p. 12. The reasonable creature, it is true, hath more liberty in its actions, freely choosing one thing and rejecting another; yet it cannot be denied, that in acting of that liberty, their choice and refusal [A] follow the sway of their nature and condition. [A] I would fain substitute for 'follow,' the words, 'are most often determined, and always affected, by.' I do not deny that the will follows the nature; but then the nature itself is a will. Ib. As the angels and glorified souls, (their nature being perfectly holy and unalterably such,) they cannot sin; they can delight in nothing but obeying and praising that God, in the enjoyment of whom their happiness consisteth. If angels be other than spirits made perfect, or, as Leighton writes, "glorified souls,"--the "unalterable by nature" seems to me rashly asserted. Ib. The mind, [Greek: phrónaema]. Some render it the prudence or wisdom of the flesh. Here you have it, the carnal mind; but the word signifies, indeed, an act of the mind, rather than either the faculty itself, or the habit of prudence in it, so as it discovers what is the frame of both those. I doubt. [Greek: Phrónaema] signifies an act: and so far I agree with Leighton. But [Greek: phrónaema sarkòs] is 'the flesh' (that is, the natural man,) in the act or habitude of minding--but those acts, taken collectively, are the faculty--the understanding. How often have I found reason to regret, that Leighton had not clearly made out to himself the diversity of reason and the understanding! Ib. Serm. XV. p. 196. A narrow enthralled heart, fettered with the love of lower things, and cleaving to some particular sins, or but some one, and that secret, may keep foot a while in the way of God's commandments, in some steps of them; but it must give up quickly, is not able to run on to the end of the goal. One of the blessed privileges of the spiritual man (and such Leighton was,) is a piercing insight into the diseases of which he himself is clear. [Greek: Eléaeson Kyrie!] Ib. Serm. XVI. p. 204. Know you not that the redeemed of Christ and He are one? They live one life, Christ lives in them, and if 'any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his', as the Apostle declares in this chapter. So then this we are plainly to tell you, and consider it; you that will not let go your sins to lay hold on Christ, have as yet no share in him. But on the other side: the truth is, that when souls are once set upon this search, they commonly wind the notion too high, and subtilize too much in the dispute, and so entangle and perplex themselves, and drive themselves further off from that comfort that they are seeking after; such measures and marks they set to themselves for their rule and standard; and unless they find those without all controversy in themselves, they will not believe that they have an interest in Christ, and this blessed and safe estate in him. To such I would only say, Are you in a willing league with any known sin? &c. An admirable antidote for such as, too sober and sincere to pass off feverous sensations for spiritualities, have been perplexed by Wesley's assertions--that a certainty of having been elected is an indispensable mark of election. Whitfield's ultra-Calvinism is Gospel gentleness and Pauline sobriety compared with Wesley's Arminianism in the outset of his career. But the main and most noticeable difference between Leighton and the modern Methodists is to be found in the uniform selfishness of the latter. Not "Do you wish to love God?" "Do you love your neighbour?" "Do you think, 'O how dear and lovely must Christ be!'"--but--"Are you certain that Christ has saved 'you'; that he died for 'you--you--you --yourself'?" on to the end of the chapter. This is Wesley's doctrine. Lecture IX. vol. IV. p. 96. For that this was his fixed purpose, Lucretius not only vows, but also boasts of it, and loads him (Epicurus) with ill-advised praises, for endeavouring through the whole course of his philosophy to free the minds of men from all the bonds and ties of religion. But surely in this passage 'religio' must be rendered superstition, the most effectual means for the removal of which Epicurus supposed himself to have found in the exclusion of the 'gods many and lords many', from their imagined agency in all the 'phænomena' of nature and the events of history, substituting for these the belief in fixed laws, having in themselves their evidence and necessity. On this account, in this passage at least, Lucretius praises his master. Ib. p. 105. They always seemed to me to act a very ridiculous part, who contend, that the effect of the divine decree is absolutely irreconcilable with human liberty; because the natural and necessary liberty of a rational creature is to act or choose from a rational motive, or spontaneously, and of purpose: but who sees not, that, on the supposition of the most absolute decree, this liberty is not taken away, but rather established and confirmed? For the decree is, 'that such an one shall make choice of, or do some particular thing freely. And whoever pretends to deny, that whatever is done or chosen, whether good or indifferent, is so done or chosen, or, at least, may be so, espouses an absurdity.' I fear, I fear, that this is a sophism not worthy of Archbishop Leighton. It seems to me tantamount to saying--"I force that man to do so or so without my forcing him." But however that may be, the following sentences are more precious than diamonds. They are divine. Ib. Lect. XI. p. 113. For that this world, compounded of so many and such heterogeneous parts, should proceed, by way of natural and necessary emanation, from that one first, present, and most simple nature, nobody, I imagine, could believe, or in the least suspect * * *. But if he produced all these things freely, * * how much more consistent is it to believe, that this was done in time, than to imagine it was from eternity! It is inconceivable how any thing can be created in time; and production is incompatible with interspace. Ib. Lect. XV. p. 152. The Platonists divide the world into two, the sensible and intellectual world * * *. According to this hypothesis, those parables and metaphors, which are often taken from natural things to illustrate such as are divine, will not be similitudes taken entirely at pleasure; but are often, in a great measure, founded in nature, and the things themselves. I have asserted the same thing, and more fully shown wherein the difference consists of symbolic and metaphorical, in my first Lay Sermon; and the substantial correspondence of the genuine Platonic doctrine and logic with those of Lord Bacon, in my Essays on Method, in the Friend. [2] Ib. Lect. XIX. p. 201. Even the philosophers give their testimony to this truth, and their sentiments on the subject are not altogether to be rejected; for they almost unanimously are agreed, that felicity, so far as it can be enjoyed in this life, consists solely, or at least principally, in virtue: but as to their assertion, that this virtue is perfect in a perfect life, it is rather expressing what were to be wished, than describing things as they are. And why are the philosophers to be judged according to a different rule? On what ground can it be asserted that the Stoics believed in the actual existence of their God-like perfection in any individual? or that they meant more than this--"To no man can the name of the Wise be given in its absolute sense, who is not perfect even as his Father in heaven is perfect!" Ib. Lect. XXI. p. 225. In like manner, if we suppose God to be the first of all beings, we must, unavoidably, therefrom conclude his unity. As to the ineffable Trinity subsisting in this Unity, a mystery discovered only by the Sacred Scriptures, especially in the New Testament, where it is more clearly revealed than in the Old, let others boldly pry into it, if they please, while we receive it with our humble faith, and think it sufficient for us to admire and adore. But surely it having been revealed to us, we may venture to say,--that a positive unity, so far from excluding, implies plurality, and that the Godhead is a fulness, [Greek: plaeroma]. Ib. Lect. XXIV. p. 245. Ask yourselves, therefore, 'what you would be at', and with what dispositions you come to this most sacred table? In an age of colloquial idioms, when to write in a loose slang had become a mark of loyalty, this is the only L'Estrange vulgarism I have met with in Leighton. Ib. Exhortation to the Students, p. 252. Study to acquire such a philosophy as is not barren and babbling, but solid and true; not such a one as floats upon the surface of endless verbal controversies, but one that enters into the nature of things; for he spoke good sense that said, "The philosophy of the Greeks was a mere jargon, and noise of words." If so, then so is all philosophy: for what system is there, the elements and outlines of which are not to be found in the Greek schools? Here Leighton followed too incautiously the Fathers. [Footnote 1: Works of Leighton, 4 vols. 8vo. London 1819. Ed.] [Footnote 2: 'Statesman's Manual', p. 230. 2nd edit. Friend, III. 3d edit. Ed.] * * * * * NOTES ON SHERLOCK'S VINDICATION OF THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY. [1] Sect. I. p. 3. Some new philosophers will tell you that the notion of a spirit or an immaterial substance is a contradiction; for by substance they understand nothing but matter, and then an immaterial substance is immaterial matter, that is, matter and no matter, which is a contradiction; but yet this does not prove an immaterial substance to be a contradiction, unless they could first prove that there is no substance but matter; and that they cannot conceive any other substance but matter, does not prove that there is no other. Certainly not: but if not only they, but Dr. Sherlock himself and all mankind, are incapable of attaching any sense to the term substance, but that of matter,--then for us it would be a contradiction, or a groundless assertion. Thus: By 'substance' I do not mean the only notion we can attach to the word; but a somewhat, I know not what, may, for aught I know, not be contradictory to spirit! Why should we use the equivocal word, 'substance' (after all but an 'ens logicum'), instead of the definite term 'self-subsistent?' We are equally conscious of mind, and of that which we call 'body;' and the only possible philosophical questions are these three: 1. Are they co-ordinate as agent and re-agent; 2. Or is the one subordinate to the other, as effect to cause, and which is the cause or ground, which the effect or product; 3. Or are they co-ordinate, but not inter-dependent, that is, 'per harmonium præstabilitam'. Ib. p. 4. Now so far as we understand the nature of any being, we can certainly tell what is contrary and contradictious to its nature; as that accidents should subsist without 'their subject', &c. That accidents should subsist (rather, exist) without a subject, may be a contradiction, but not that they exist without this or that subject. The words 'their subject' are 'a petitio principii'. Ib. These and such like are the manifest absurdities and contradictions of Transubstantiation; and we know that they are so, because we know the nature of a body, &c. Indeed! Were I either Romanist or Unitarian, I should desire no better than the admission of body having an 'esse' not in the 'percipi', and really subsisting, ([Greek: autò tò chraema]) as the supporter of its accidents. At all events, the Romanist, declaring the accidents to be those ordinarily impressed on the senses ([Greek: tà phaínomena kaì aísthaeta]) by bread and wine, does at the same time declare the flesh and blood not to be the [Greek: phaínomena kaì aísthaeta] so called, but the [Greek: noúmena kaì autà tà chráemata]. There is therefore no contradiction in the terms, however reasonless the doctrine may be, and however unnecessary the interpretation on which it is pretended. I confess, had I been in Luther's place, I would not have rested so much of my quarrel with the Papists on this point; nor can I agree with our Arminian divines in their ridicule of Transubstantiation. The most rational doctrine is perhaps, for some purposes, at least, the 'rem credimus, modum nescimus'; next to that, the doctrine of the Sacramentaries, that it is 'signum sub rei nomine', as when we call a portrait of Caius, Caius. But of all the remainder, Impanation, Consubstantiation, and the like, I confess that I should prefer the Transubstantiation of the Pontifical doctors. Ib. p. 6. The proof of this comes to this one point, that we may have sufficient evidence of the being of a thing whose nature we cannot conceive and comprehend: he who will not own this, contradicts the sense and experience of mankind; and he who confesses this, and yet rejects the belief of that which he has good evidence for, merely because he cannot conceive it, is a very absurd and senseless infidel. Here again, though a zealous believer of the truth asserted, I must object to the Bishop's logic. None but the weakest men have objected to the Tri-unity merely because the 'modus' is above their comprehension: for so is the influence of thought on muscular motion; so is life itself; so in short is every first truth of necessity; for to comprehend a thing, is to know its antecedent and consequent. But they affirm that it is against their reason. Besides, there seems an equivocation in the use of 'comprehend' and 'conceive' in the same meaning. When a man tells me, that his will can lift his arm, I conceive his meaning; though I do not comprehend the fact, I understand 'him'. But the Socinians say;--We do not understand 'you'. We cannot attach to the word 'God,' more than three possible meanings; either, 1. A person, or self-conscious being; 2. Or a thing; 3. Or a quality, property, or attribute. If you take the first, then you admit the contradiction; if either of the latter two, you have not three Persons and one God, but three Persons having equal shares in one thing, or three with the same attributes, that is, three Gods. Sherlock does not meet this. Let me repeat the difficulty, if possible, more clearly. The argument of the philosophic Unitarians, as Wissowatius, who, mistaken as they were, are not to be confounded with their degenerate successors, the Priestleyans and Belshamites, may be thus expressed. By the term, God, we can only conceive you to suppose one or other of three meanings. 1. Either you understand by it a person, in the common sense of an intelligent or self-conscious being;--or, 2. a thing with its qualities and properties;--or, 3. certain powers and attributes, comprised under the word nature. If we suppose the first, the contradiction is manifest, and you yourselves admit it, and therefore forbid us so to interpret your words. For if by God you mean Person, then three Persons and one God, would be the same as three Persons and one Person. If we take the second as your meaning, as an infinite thing is an absurdity, we have three finite Gods, like Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto, who shared the universe between them. If the latter, we have three Persons with the same attributes; --and if a Person with infinite attributes be what we mean by God, then we have either three Gods, or involve the contradiction above mentioned. It is unphilosophic, by admission of all philosophers, they add, to multiply causes beyond the necessity. Now if there are three Persons of infinite and the same attributes, dismiss two, and you lose nothing but a numerical phantom." The answer to this must commence by a denial of the premisses 'in toto': and this both Bull and Waterland have done most successfully. But I very much doubt, whether Sherlock on his principles could have evaded the Unitarian logic. In fact it is scarcely possible to acquit him altogether of a 'quasi-Tritheism'. Sect. II. p. 13. 'For like as we are compelled by the Christian verity to acknowledge every Person by himself to be God and Lord';-- (That is, by especial revelation.) 'So are we forbidden by the Catholic religion to say, There are three Gods, or three Lords.' That is, by the religion contained in, and given in accompaniment with, the universal reason, 'the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world'. Ib. p. 14. This Creed (Athanasian) does not pretend to explain how there are three Persons, each of which is God, and yet but One God, (of which more hereafter,) but only asserts the thing, that thus it is, and thus it must be if we believe a Trinity in Unity; which should make all men, who would be thought neither Arians nor Socinians, more cautious how they express the least dislike of the Athanasian Creed, which must either argue, that they condemn it, before they understand it, or that they have some secret dislike to the doctrine of the Trinity. The dislike commonly felt is not of the doctrine of the Trinity, but of the positive anathematic assertion of the everlasting perdition of all and of each who doubt the same;--an assertion deduced from Scripture only by a train of captious consequences, and equivocations. Thus, A.: "I honour and admire Caius for his great learning." B.: "The knowledge of the Sanscrit is an important article in Caius's learning." A.: "I have been often in his company, and have found no reason for believing this." B.: "O! then you deny his learning, are envious, and Caius's enemy." A.: "God forbid! I love and admire him. I know him for a transcendant linguist in the Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and modern European languages;--and with or without the Sanscrit, I look up to him, and rely on his erudition in all cases, in which I am concerned. And it is this perfect trust, this unfeigned respect, that is the appointed criterion of Caius's friends and disciples, and not their full acquaintance with each and all particulars of his superiority." Thus without Christ, or in any other power but that of Christ, and (subjectively) of faith in Christ, no man can be saved; but does it follow, that no man can have Christian faith who is ignorant or erroneous as to any one point of Christian theology? Will a soul be condemned to everlasting perdition for want of logical 'acumen' in the perception of consequences?--If he verily embrace Christ as his Redeemer, and unfeignedly feel in himself the necessity of Redemption, he implicitly holds the Divinity of Christ, whatever from want or defect of logic may be his notion 'explicite'. Ib. p. 18. 'But the whole three Persons are co-eternal, and co-equal'. And yet this we must acknowledge to be true, if we acknowledge all three Persons to be eternal, for in eternity there can be no 'afore, or after other'. It must, however, be considered as a serious defect in a Creed, if excluding subordination, without mentioning any particular form, it gives no hint of any other form in which it admits it. The only 'minus' admitted by the Athanasian Creed is the inferiority of Christ's Humanity to the Divinity generally; but both Scripture and the Nicene Creed teach a subordination of the Son to the Father, independent of the Incarnation of the Son. Now this is not inserted, and therefore the denial in the assertion 'none is greater or less than another', is universal, and a plain contradiction of Christ speaking of Himself as the co-eternal Son; 'My Father is greater than I'. Speaking of himself as the co-eternal Son, I say;--for how superfluous would it have been, a truism how unworthy of our Lord, to have said in effect, that "a creature is less than God!" And after all, Creeds assuredly are not to be imposed 'ad libitum'--a new Creed, or at least a new form and choice of articles and expressions, at the pleasure of individuals. Now where is the authority of the Athanasian Creed? In what consists its necessity? If it be the same as the Nicene, why not be content with the Nicene? If it differs, how dare we retain both? [2] If the Athanasian does not say more or different, but only differs by omission of a necessary article, then to impose it, is as absurd as to force a mutilated copy on one who has already the perfect original. Lastly, it is not enough that an abstract contains nothing which may not by a chain of consequences be deduced from the books of the Evangelists and Apostles, in order for it to be a Creed for the whole Christian Church. For a Creed is or ought to be a 'syllepsis' of those primary fundamental truths that are, as it were, the starting-post, from which the Christian must commence his progression. The full-grown Christian needs no other Creed than the Scriptures themselves. Highly valuable is the Nicene Creed; but it has its chief value as an historical document, proving that the same texts in Scripture received the same interpretation, while the Greek was a living language, as now. Sect. III. p. 23. If what he says is true: 'He that errs in a question of faith, after having used reasonable diligence to be rightly informed, is in no fault at all'; how comes an atheist, or an infidel, a Turk, or a Jew, to be in any fault? Does our author think that no atheist or infidel, no unbelieving Jew or heathen, ever used reasonable diligence to be rightly informed? * * * If you say, he confines this to such points as have always been controverted in the churches of God, I desire to know a reason why he thus confines it? For does not his reason equally extend to the Christian Faith itself, as to those points which have been controverted in Christian Churches? And the Notary might ask in his turn: "Do you believe that the Christians either of the Greek or of the Western Church will be damned, according as the truth may be respecting the procession of the Holy Ghost? or that either the Sacramentary or the Lutheran? or again, the Consubstantiationist, or the Transubstantiationist? If not, why do you stop here? Whence this sudden palsy in the limbs of your charity? Again, does this eternal damnation of the individual depend on the supposed importance of the article denied? Or on the moral state of the individual, on the inward source of this denial? And lastly, who authorized either you, or the pseudo-Athanasius, to interpret Catholic faith by belief, arising out of the apparent predominance of the grounds for, over those against, the truth of the positions asserted; much more, by belief as a mere passive acquiescence of the understanding? Were all damned who died during the period when 'totus fere mundus factus est Arianus', as one of the Fathers admits? Alas! alas! how long will it be ere Christians take the plain middle road between intolerance and indifference, by adopting the literal sense and Scriptural import of heresy, that is, wilful error, or belief originating in some perversion of the will; and of heretics, (for such there are, nay, even orthodox heretics), that is, men wilfully unconscious of their own wilfulness, in their limpet-like adhesion to a favourite tenet?" Ib. p. 26. All Christians must confess, that there is no other name given under heaven whereby men can be saved, but only the name of Christ. Now this is a most awful question, on which depends whether Christ was more than Socrates; for to bring God from heaven to reproclaim the Ten Commandments, is 'too too' ridiculous. Need I say I incline to Sherlock? But yet I cannot give to faith the meaning he does, though I give it all, and more than all, the power. But if that Name, as power, saved the Jewish Church before they knew the Name, as name, how much more now, if only the will be not guiltily averse? Any miracle does in kind as truly bring God from heaven as the Incarnation, which the Socinians wholly forget, as in other points. They receive without scruple what they have learned without examination, and then transfer to the first article which they do look into, all the difficulties that belong equally to the former: as the Simonidean doubts concerning God to the Trinity, and the like. Ib. p. 27. The Eclectic Neo-Platonists (Sallustius and others,) justified their Polytheism on much the same pretext as is in fact involved in the language of this page; [Greek: polloì mèn en dè mia theótaeti]. This indeed seems to me decisive in favour of Waterland's scheme against this of Sherlock's;--namely, that in the latter we find no sufficient reason why in the nature of things this intermutual consciousness might not be possessed by thirty instead of three. It seems a strange confounding [Greek: hetéron genéôn] to answer, "True; but the latter only happens to be the fact!"--just as if we were speaking of the number of persons in the Privy Council. Ib. p. 28. 'Notes'. By keeping this faith 'whole and undefiled', must be meant that a man should believe and profess it without adding to it or taking from it. * * * First, for adding. What if an honest plain man, because he is a Christian and a Protestant, should think it necessary to add this article to the Athanasian Creed;--'I believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be a divine, infallible and complete rule both for faith and manners'. I hope no Protestant would think a man damned for such addition; and if so, then this Creed of Athanasius is at least an unnecessary rule of faith. 'Answer'. That is to say, it is an addition to the Catholic Faith to own the Scriptures to be the rule of faith; as if it were an addition to the laws of England to own the original records of them in the Tower. This Notary manages his cause most weakly, and Sherlock 'fibs' him like a scientific pugilist. But he himself exposes weak parts, as in p. 27. The objection to the Athanasian Creed urged by better men than the Notary, yea, by divines not less orthodox than Sherlock himself, is this: not that this Creed adds to the Scriptures, but that it adds to the original 'Symbolum Fidei', the 'Regula', the 'Canon', by which, according to the greater number of the 'ante'-Nicene Fathers, the books of the New Testament were themselves tried and determined to be Scripture. Now this 'Symbolum' was to bring together all that must be believed, even by the babes in faith, or to what purpose was it made? Now, say they, the Nicene Creed is really nothing more than a verbal explication of the common Creed, but the clause in the Athanasian ('which faith', &c.), however fairly deduced from Scripture, is not contained in the Creed, or selection of certain articles of Faith from the Scriptures, or not at least from those preachings and narrations, of which the New Testament Scriptures are the repository. Might not a Papist plead equally in support of the Creed of Pope Pius: "The new articles are deduced from Scripture; that is, in our opinion, and that most expressly in our Lord's several and solemn addresses to St. Peter." So again Sherlock's answer to this paragraph from the Notes is evasive,--for it is very possible, nay, it is, and has been the case, that a man may believe in the facts and doctrines contained in the New Testament, and yet not believe the Holy Scripture to be either divine, infallible, or complete. Sect. IV. p. 50. We know not what the substance of an infinite mind is, nor how such substances as have no parts or extension can touch each other, or be thus externally united; but we know the unity of a mind or spirit reaches as far as its self-consciousness does, for that is one spirit, which knows and feels itself, and its own thoughts and motions, and if we mean this by 'circum-incession', three persons thus intimate to each other are numerically one. The question still returns; have these three infinite minds, at once self-conscious and conscious of each other's consciousness, always the very same thoughts? If so, this mutual consciousness is unmeaning, or derivative; and the three do not cease to be three because they are three sames. If not, then there is Tritheism evidently. Ib. p. 64. St. Paul tells us, 1 Cor. ii. 10. 'That the Spirit searcheth all things, yea the deep things of God'. So that the Holy Spirit knows all that is in God, even his most deep and secret counsels, which is an argument that he is very intimate with him; but this is not all: it is the manner of knowing, which must prove this consciousness of which I speak: and that the Apostle adds in the next verse, that the Spirit of God knows all that is in God, just as the spirit of a man knows all that is in man: that is, not by external revelation or communication of this knowledge, but by self-consciousness, by an internal sensation, which is owing to an essential unity. 'For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of a man which is in him; even so the things of God knoweth no man but the Spirit of God.' It would be interesting, if it were feasible, to point out the epoch at which the text mode of arguing in polemic controversy became predominant; I mean by single texts without any modification by the context. I suspect that it commenced, or rather that it first became the fashion, under the Dort or systematic theologians, and during the so called Quinquarticular Controversy. This quotation from St. Paul is a striking instance:--for St. Paul is speaking of the holy spirit of which true spiritual Christians are partakers, and by which or in which those Christians are enabled to search all things, even the deep things of God. No person is here spoken of, but reference is made to the philosophic principle, that can only act immediately, that is, interpenetratively, as two globules of quicksilver, and co-adunatively. Now, perceiving and knowing were considered as immediate acts relatively to the objects perceived and known:--'ergo', the 'principium sciendi' must be one (that is, homogeneous or consubstantial) with the 'principium essendi quoad objectum cognitum'. In order therefore for a man to understand, or even to know of, God, he must have a god-like spirit communicated to him, wherewith, as with an inward eye, which is both eye and light, he sees the spiritual truths. Now I have no objection to his calling this spirit a 'person,' if only the term 'person' be so understood as to permit of its being partaken of by all spiritual creatures, as light and the power of vision are partaken of by all seeing ones. But it is too evident that Sherlock supposes the Father, as Father, to possess a spirit, that is, an intellective faculty, by which he knows the Spirit, that is, the third co-equal Person; and that this Spirit, the Person, has a spirit, that is, an intellective faculty, by which he knows the Father; and the 'Logos' in like manner relatively to both. So too, the Father has a 'logos' with which he distinguishes the 'Logos';--and the 'Logos' has a 'logos', and so on: that is to say, there are three several though not severed triune Gods, each being the same position three times 'realiter positum', as three guineas from the same mint, supposing them to differ no more than they appear to us to differ;--but whether a difference wholly and exclusively numerical is a conceivable notion, except under the predicament of space and time; whether it be not absurd to affirm it, where interspace and interval cannot be affirmed without absurdity--this is the question; or rather it is no question. Ib. p. 68. Nor do we divide the substance, but unite these three Persons in one numerical essence: for we know nothing of the unity of the mind, but self-consciousness, as I showed before; and therefore as the self-consciousness of every Person to itself makes them distinct Persons, so the mutual consciousness of all three divine Persons to each other makes them all but one infinite God: as far as consciousness reaches, so far the unity of a spirit extends, for we know no other unity of a mind or spirit, but consciousness. But this contradicts the preceding paragraph, in which the Father is self-conscious that he is the Father and not the Son, and the Son that he is not the Father, and that the Father is not he. Now how can the Son's being conscious that the Father is conscious that he is not the Son, constitute a numerical unity? And wherein can such a consciousness as that attributed to the Son differ from absolute certainty? Is not God conscious of every thought of man;--and would Sherlock allow me to deduce the unity of the divine consciousness with the human? Sherlock's is doubtless a very plain and intelligible account of three Gods in the most absolute intimacy with each other, so that they are all as one; but by no means of three persons that are one God. I do not wonder that Waterland and the other followers of Bull were alarmed. Ib. p. 72. Even among men it is only knowledge that is power. Human power, and human knowledge, as that signifies a knowledge how to do anything, are commensurate; whatever human skill extends to, human power can effect: nay, every man can do what he knows how to do, if he has proper instruments and materials to do it with. This proves that perfect knowledge supposes perfect power: and that they are one and the same. "If he have proper instruments:"--does not this show that the means are supposed co-present with the knowledge, not the same with it? Ib. For it is nothing but thought which moves our bodies, and all the members of them, which are the immediate instruments of all human force and power: excepting mechanical motions which do not depend upon our wills, such as the motion of the heart, the circulation of the blood, the concoction of our meat and the like. All voluntary motions are not only directed but caused by thought: and so indeed it must be, or there could be no motion in the world; for matter cannot move itself, and therefore some mind must be the first mover, which makes it very plain, that infinite truth and wisdom is infinite and almighty power. Even this, though not ill-conceived, is inaccurately expressed. Ib. p. 81. There is no contradiction that three infinite minds should be absolutely perfect in wisdom, goodness, justice and power; for these are perfections which may be in more than one, as three men may all know the same things, and be equally just and good: but three such minds cannot be absolutely perfect without being mutually conscious to each other, as they are to themselves. Will any man in his senses affirm, that my knowledge is increased by saying "all" three times following? Is it not mere repetition in time? If the Son has thoughts which the Father, as the Father, could not have but for his interpenetration of the Son's consciousness, then I can understand it; but then these are not three Absolutes, but three modes of perfection constituting one Absolute; and by what right Sherlock could call the one Father, more than the other, I cannot see. Ib. p. 88. And yet if we consider these three divine Persons as containing each other in themselves, and essentially one by a mutual consciousness, this pretended contradiction vanishes: for then the Father is the one true God, because the Father has the Son and the Holy Spirit in himself: and the Son may he called the one true God, because the Son has the Father and the Holy Ghost in himself, &c. Nay, this is to my understanding three Gods, and Sherlock seems to have brought in the material phantom of a thing or substance. Ib. p. 97. But if these three distinct Persons are not separated, but essentially united unto one, each of them may be God, and all three but one God: for if these three Persons,--each of whom [Greek: monadikôs], as it is in the Creed, singly by himself, not separately from the other divine Persons, is God and Lord, are essentially united into one, there can be but one God and one Lord; and how each of these persons is God, and all of them but one God, by their mutual consciousness, I have already explained. --"That is,--if the three Persons are not three;"--so might the Arian answer, unless Sherlock had shown the difference of separate and distinct relatively to mind. "For what other separation can be conceived in mind but distinction? Distinction may be joined with imperfection, as ignorance, or forgetfulness; and so it is in men:--and if this be called separation by a metaphor from bodies, then the conclusion would be that in the Supreme Mind there is distinction without imperfection; and then the question is, whence comes plurality of Persons? Can it be conceived other than as the result of imperfection, that is, finiteness? Ib. p. 98. Thus each Divine Person is God, and all of them but the same one God; as I explained it before. O no! asserted it. Ib. p. 98-9. This one supreme God is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, a Trinity in Unity, three Persons and one God. Now Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, with all their divine attributes and perfections (excepting their personal properties, which the Schools call the 'modi subsistendi', that one is the Father, the other the Son, and the other the Holy Ghost, which cannot be communicated to each other) are whole and entire in each Person by a mutual consciousness; each feels the other Persons in himself, all their essential wisdom, power, goodness, justice, as he feels himself, and this makes them essentially one, as I have proved at large. Will not the Arian object, "You admit the 'modus subsistendi' to be a divine perfection, and you affirm that it is incommunicable. Does it not follow therefore, that there are perfections which the All-perfect does not possess?" This would not apply to Bishop Bull or Waterland. Sect. V. p. 102. St. Austin in his sixth book of the Trinity takes notice of a common argument used by the orthodox fathers against the Arians, to prove the co-eternity of the Son with the Father, that if the Son be the Wisdom and Power of God, as St. Paul teaches (1 'Cor'. i.) and God was never without his Wisdom and Power, the Son must he co-eternal with the Father. * * * But this acute Father discovers a great inconvenience in this argument, for it forces us to say that the Father is not wise, but by that Wisdom which he begot, not being himself Wisdom as the Father: and then we must consider whether the Son himself, as he is God of God, and Light of Light, may be said to be Wisdom of Wisdom, if God the Father be not Wisdom, but only begets Wisdom. The proper answer to Augustine is, that the Son and Holy Ghost are necessary and essential, not contingent: and that 'his' argument has a still greater inconvenience, as shewn in note p. 98. Ib. pp. 110-113. But what makes St. Gregory dispute thus nicely, and oppose the common and ordinary forms of speech? Did he in good earnest believe that there is but one man in the world? No, no! he acknowledged as many men as we do; a great multitude who had the same human nature, and that every one who had a human nature was an individual man, distinguished and divided from all other individuals of the same nature. What makes him so zealous then against saying, that Peter, James and John are three men? Only this; that he says man is the name of nature, and therefore to say there are three men is the same as to say, there are three human natures of a different kind; for if there are three human natures, they must differ from each other, or they cannot be three; and so you deny Peter, James, and John to be [Greek: homooúsioi], or of the same nature; and for the same reason we must say that though the Father be God, the Son God, and the Holy Ghost God, yet there are not three Gods, but [Greek: mía theótaes], one Godhead and Divinity. Sherlock struggles in vain, in my opinion at least, to clear these Fathers of egregious logomachy, whatever may have been the soundness of their faith, spite of the quibbles by which they endeavoured to evince its rationality. The very change of the terms is suspicious. "Yes! we might say three Gods" (it would be answered,) "as we say and ought to say three men: for man and humanity, [Greek: ánthropôs] and [Greek: ánthrôpótaes] are not the same terms;--so if the Father be God, the Son God, and the Holy Ghost God, there would be three Gods, though not [Greek: treis theótaetes],--that is, three Godheads." Ib. p. 115-16. Gregory Nyssen tells us that [Greek: theòs] is [Greek: theatàes] and [Greek: éphoros], the inspector and governor of the world, that is, it is a name of energy, operation and power; and if this virtue, energy, and operation be the very same in all the Persons of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, then they are but one God, but one power and energy. * * * The Father does nothing by himself, nor the Son by himself, nor the Holy Ghost by himself; but the whole energy and operation of the Deity relating to creatures begins with the Father, passes to the Son, and from Father and Son to the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit does not act anything separately; there are not three distinct operations, as there are three Persons, [Greek: allà mìa tìs gínetai agathou Bouláematos kínaesis kaì diakósmaesis];--but one motion and disposition of the good will, which passes through the whole Trinity from Father to Son, and to the Holy Ghost, and this is done [Greek: achrónos kaì adiarétôs], without any distance of time, or propagating the motion from one to the other, but by one thought, as it is in one numerical mind and spirit, and therefore, though they are three Persons, they are but one numerical power and energy. But this is either Tritheism or Sabellianism; it is hard to say which. Either the [Greek: Boúlaema] subsists in the Son, and in the Holy Ghost, and not merely passes through them, and then there would be three numerical [Greek: Bouláemata], as well as three numerical Persons: 'ergo', [Greek: treis theoì àe theataí] (according to Gregory Nyssen's shallow and disprovable etymology), which would be Tritheism: or [Greek: hén ti gínetai Boúlaema], and then the Son and Holy Ghost are but terms of relation, which is Sabellianism. But in fact this Gregory and the others were Tritheists in the mode of their conception, though they did not wish to be so, and refused even to believe themselves such. Gregory Nyssen, Cyril of Alexandria, Maximus and Damascen were charged with "a kind of Tritheism" by Petavius and Dr. Cudworth, who, according to Sherlock, have "mistaken their meaning." See pp. 106-9, of this "Vindication." Ib. p. 117. For I leave any man to judge, whether this [Greek: mía kínaesis Bouláematos], this one single motion of will, which is in the same instant in Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, can signify anything else but a mutual consciousness, which makes them numerically one, and as intimate to each other, as every man is to himself, as I have already explained it. Is not God conscious to all my thoughts, though I am not conscious of God's? Would Sherlock endure that I should infer: 'ergo', God is numerically one with me, though I am not numerically one with God? I have never seen, but greatly wish to see, Waterland's controversial tracts against Sherlock. Again: according to Sherlock's conception, it would seem to follow that we ought to make a triad of triads, or an ennead. 1. Father--Son--Holy Ghost. 2. Son--Father--Holy Ghost. 3. Holy Ghost--Son--Father. Else there is an 'x' in the Father which is not in the Son, a 'y' in the Son which is not in the Father, and a 'z' in the Holy Ghost which is in neither: that is, each by himself is not total God. Ib. p. 120. But however he might be mistaken in his philosophy, he was not in his divinity; for he asserts a numerical unity of the divine nature, not a mere specific unity, which is nothing but a logical notion, nor a collective unity, which is nothing but a company who are naturally many: but a true subsisting numerical unity of nature; and if the difficulty of explaining this, and his zeal to defend it, forced him upon some unintelligible niceties, to prove that the same numerical human nature too is but one in all men, it is hard to charge him with teaching, that there are three independent and co-ordinate Gods, because we think he has not proved that Peter, James, and John, are but one man. This will make very foul work with the Fathers, if we charge them with all those erroneous conceits about the Trinity, which we can fancy in their inconvenient ways of explaining that venerable mystery, especially when they compare that mysterious unity with any natural unions. So that after all this obscuration of the obscure, Sherlock ends by fairly throwing up his briefs, and yet calls out, "Not guilty! 'Victoria'!" And what is this but to say: These Fathers did indeed involve Tritheism in their mode of defending the Tri-personality; but they were not Tritheists:--though it would be far more accurate to say, that they were Tritheists, but not so as to make any practical breach of the Unity;--as if, for instance, Peter, James, and John had three silver tickets, by shewing one of which either or all three would have the same thing as if they had shewn all three tickets, and 'vice versa', all three tickets could produce no more than each one; each corresponding to the whole. Ib. I am sure St. Gregory was so far from suspecting that he should be charged with Tritheism upon this account, that he fences against another charge of mixing and confounding the 'Hypostases' or Persons, by denying any difference or diversity of nature, [Greek: hôs ek tou màe déchesthai tàen katà physin diaphoràn, míxin tina tôn hypostáseôn kaì anakúklaesin kataskeúzonta], which argues that he thought he had so fully asserted the unity of the divine essence, that some might suspect he had left but one Person, as well as one nature in God. This is just what I have said, p. 116. Whether Sabellianism or Tritheism, I observed is hard to determine. Extremes meet. Ib. p. 121. Secondly, to this 'homo-ousiotes' the Fathers added a numerical unity of the divine essence. This Petavius has proved at large by numerous testimonies, even from those very Fathers, whom he before accused for making God only collectively one, as three men are one man; such as Gregory Nyssen, St. Cyril, Maximus, Damascen; which is a demonstration, that however 'he might mistake' their explication of it, from the unity of human nature, they were far enough from Tritheism, or one collective God. This is most uncandid. Sherlock, even to be consistent with his own confession, § 1. p. 120, ought to have said, "However he might mistake their 'intention', in consequence of their inconvenient and unphilosophical explication;" which mistake, in fact, consisted in taking them at their word. Ib. Petavius greatly commends Boethius's explication of this mystery, which is the very same he had before condemned in Gregory Nyssen, and those other Fathers.--That Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are one God, not three Gods: 'hujus conjunctionis ratio est indifferentia': that is, such a sameness of nature as admits of no difference or variety, or an exact 'homo-ousiotes', as he explains it. * * Those make a difference, who augment and diminish, as the Arians do; who distinguish the Trinity into different natures, as well as Persons, of different worth and excellency, and thus divide and multiply the Trinity into a plurality of Gods. 'Principium enim pluralitatis alteritas est. Præter alteritatem enim nec pluralitas quid sit intelligi potest'. Then if so, what becomes of the Persons? Have the Persons attributes distinct from their nature;--or does not their common nature constitute their common attributes? 'Principium enim, &c.' Ib. p. 124. That the Fathers universally acknowledged that the operation of the whole Trinity, 'ad extra', is but one, Petavius has proved beyond all contradiction; and hence they conclude the unity of the divine nature and essence; for every nature has a virtue and energy of its own; for nature is a principle of action, and if the energy and operation be but one, there can be but one nature; and if there be two distinct and divided operations, if either of them can act alone without the other, there must be two divided natures. Then it was not the Son but the whole Trinity that was crucified: for surely this was an operation 'ad extra'. Ib. p. 126. But to do St. Austin right, though he do not name this consciousness, yet he explains this Trinity in Unity by examples of mutual consciousness. I named one of his similitudes before, of the unity of our understanding, memory, and will, 'which' are all conscious to each other; that we remember what we understand and will; we understand what we remember and will; and what we will we remember and understand; and therefore all these three faculties do penetrate and comprehend each other. 'Which'! The 'man' is self-conscious alike when he remembers, wills, and understands; but in what sense is the generic term "memory" conscious to the generic word "will?" This is mere nonsense. Are memory, understanding, and volition persons,--self-subsistents? If not, what are they to the purpose? Who doubts that Jehovah is consciously powerful, consciously wise, consciously good; and that it is the same Jehovah, who in being omnipotent, is good and wise; in being wise, omnipotent and good; in being good, is wise and omnipotent? But what has all this to do with a distinction of Persons? Instead of one Tri-unity we might have a mille-unity. The fact is, that Sherlock, and (for aught I know) Gregory Nyssen, had not the clear idea of the Trinity, positively; but only a negative Arianism. Ib. p. 127. He proceeds to shew that this unity is without all manner of confusion and mixture, * * for the mind that loves, is in the love. * * * And the knowledge of the mind which knows and loves itself, is in the mind, and in its love, because it loves itself, knowing, and knows itself loving: and thus also two are in each, for the mind which knows and loves itself, with its knowledge is in love, and with its love is in knowledge. Then why do we make tri-personality in unity peculiar to God? The doctrine of the Trinity (the foundation of all rational theology, no less than the precondition and ground of the rational possibility of the Christian Faith, that is, the Incarnation and Redemption), rests securely on the position,--that in man 'omni actioni præit sua propria passio; Deus autem est actus purissimus sine ulla potentialitate'. As the tune produced between the breeze and Eolian harp is not a self-subsistent, so neither memory, nor understanding, nor even love in man: for he is a passive as well as active being: he is a patible agent. But in God this is not so. Whatever is necessarily of him, (God of God, Light of Light), is necessarily all act; therefore necessarily self-subsistent, though not necessarily self-originated. This then is the true mystery, because the true unique; that the Son of God has origination without passion, that is, without ceasing to be a pure act: while a created entity is, as far as it is merely creaturely and distinguishable from the Creator, a mere 'passio' or recipient. This unicity we strive, not to 'express', for that is impossible; but to designate, by the nearest, though inadequate, analogy,--'Begotten'. Ib. p. 133. As for the Holy Ghost, whose nature is represented to be love, I do not indeed find in Scripture that it is any where said, that the Holy Ghost is that mutual love, wherewith Father and Son love each other: but this we know, that there is a mutual love between Father and Son: 'the Father loveth the Son, and hath given all things into his hands'.--John iii. 35. 'And the Father loveth the Son, and sheweth him all things that himself doeth'.-John v. 20; and our Saviour himself tells us, 'I love the Father'.--John xiv. 31. And I shewed before, that love is a distinct act, 'and therefore in God must be a person: for there are no accidents nor faculties in God.' This most important, nay, fundamental truth, so familiar to the elder philosophy, and so strongly and distinctly enunciated by Philo Judæus, the senior and contemporary of the Evangelists, is to our modern divines darkness and a sound. Sect. VI. pp. 147-8. Yes; you'll say, that there should be three Persons, each of which is God, and yet but one God, is a contradiction: but what principle of natural reason does it contradict? Surely never did argument vertiginate more! I had just acceded to Sherlock's exposition of the Trinity, as the Supreme Being, his reflex act of self-consciousness and his love, all forming one supreme mind; and now he tells me, that each is the whole Supreme Mind, and denies that three, each 'per se' the whole God, are not the same as three Gods! I grant that division and separation are terms inapplicable, yet surely three distinct though undivided Gods, are three Gods. That the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, are the one true God, I fully believe; but not Sherlock's exposition of the doctrine. Nay, I think it would have been far better to have worded the mystery thus:--The Father together with his Son and Spirit, is the one true God. "Each 'per se' God." This is the [Greek: prôton méga pseudos] of Sherlock's scheme. Each of the three is whole God, because neither is, or can be 'per se'; the Father himself being 'a se', but not 'per se'. Ib. p. 149. For it is demonstrable that if there be three Persons and one God, each Person must be God, and yet there cannot be three distinct Gods, but one. For if each Person be not God, all three cannot be God, unless the Godhead have Persons in it which are not God. Three persons having the same nature are three persons;--and if to possess without limitation the divine nature, as opposed to the human, is what we mean by God, why then three such persons are three Gods, and will bethought so, till Gregory Nyssen can persuade us that John, James, and Peter, each possessing the human nature, are not three men. John is a man, James is a man, and Peter is a man: but they are not three men, but one man! Ib. p. 150. I affirm, that natural reason is not the rule and measure of expounding Scripture, no more than it is of expounding any other writing. The true and only way to interpret any writing, even the Scriptures themselves, is to examine the use and propriety of words and phrases, the connexion, scope, and design of the text, its allusion to ancient customs and usages, or disputes. For there is no other good reason to be given for any exposition, but that the words signify so, and the circumstances of the place, and the apparent scope of the writer require it. This and the following paragraph are excellent. 'O si sic omnia'! Ib. p. 153. Reconcile men to the doctrine (of the Trinity), and the Scripture is plain without any farther comment. This I have now endeavoured; and I believe our adversaries will talk more sparingly of absurdities and contradictions for the future, and they will lose the best argument they have against the orthodox expositions of Scripture. Good doctor! you sadly over-rated both your own powers, and the docility of your adversaries. If so clear a head and so zealous a Trinitarian as Dr. Waterland could not digest your exposition, or acquit it of Tritheism, little hope is there of finding the Unitarians more persuadable. Ib. p. 154. Though Christ be God himself, yet if there be three Persons in the Godhead, the equality and sameness of nature does not destroy the subordination of Persons: a Son is equal to his Father by nature, but inferior to him as his Son: if the Father, as I have explained it, be original mind and wisdom, the Son a personal, subsisting, but reflex image of his Father's wisdom, though their eternal wisdom be equal and the same, yet the original is superior to the image, the Father to the Son. But why? We men deem it so, because the image is but a shadow, and not equal to the original; but if it were the same in all perfections, how could that, which is exactly the same, be less? Again, God is all Being:--consequently there can nothing be added to the idea, except what implies a negation or diminution of it. If one and the same Being is equal to the Father, as touching his Godhead, but inferior as man; then it is + 'm-x', which is not = + 'm'. But of two men I may say, that they are equal to each other. A. = + courage-wisdom. B. = + wisdom-courage. Both wise and courageous; but A. inferior in wisdom, B. in courage. But God is all-perfect. Ib. p. 156. So born before all creatures, as [Greek: prôtótokos] also signifies, 'that by him were all things created'. 'All things were created by him, and for him, and he is before all things', (which is the explication of [Greek: pôrtótokos pásaes ktíseos], begotten before the whole creation', and therefore no part of the creation himself.) This is quite right. Our version should here be corrected. [Greek: Prôto] or [Greek: prótaton] is here an intense comparative,--'infinitely before'. Ib. p. 159. That he 'being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God', &c.--Phil. ii. 8, 9. I should be inclined to adopt an interpretation of the unusual phrase [Greek: hárpagmon] somewhat different both from the Socinian and the Church version:--"who being in the form of God did not 'think equality with God a thing to be seized with violence', but made, &c." Ib. p. 160. Is a mere creature a fit lieutenant or representative of God in personal or prerogative acts of government and power? Must not every being be represented by one of his own kind, a man by a man, an angel by an angel, in such acts as are proper to their natures? and must not God then be represented by one who is God? Is any creature capable of the government of the world? Does not this require infinite wisdom and infinite power? And can God communicate infinite wisdom and infinite power to a creature or a finite nature? That is, can a creature be made a true and essential God? This is sound reasoning. It is to be regretted that Sherlock had not confined himself to logical comments on the Scripture, instead of attempting metaphysical solutions. Ib. pp. 161-3. I find little or nothing to 'object to' in this exposition, from pp. 161-163 inclusively, of 'Phil'. ii. 8, 9. And yet I seem to feel, as if a something that should have been prefixed, and to which all these considerations would have been excellent seconds, were missing. To explain the Cross by the necessity of sacrificial blood, and the sacrificial blood as a type and 'ante'-delegate or pre-substitute of the Cross, is too like an 'argumentum in circulo'. Ib. p. 164. And though Christ be the eternal Son of God, and the natural Lord and heir of all things, yet 'God hath' in this 'highly exalted him' and given 'him a name which is above every name, that at' (or in [Greek: en]) 'the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven', &c.--Phil. ii. 9, 10, 11. Never was a sublime passage more debased than by this rendering of [Greek: en] by 'at', instead of 'in';--'at' the 'phenomenon', instead of 'in' the 'noumenon'. For such is the force of 'nomen', name, in this and similar passages, namely, 'in vera et substantiali potestate Jesu': that is, [Greek: en lógô kaì dià lógou], the true 'noumenon' or 'ens intelligibile' of Christ. To bow at hearing the 'cognomen' may become a universal, but it is still only a non-essential, consequence of the former. But the debasement of the idea is not the worst evil of this false rendering;--it has afforded the pretext and authority for un-Christian intolerance. Ib. p. 168. 'The Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment to the Son'.--John v. 22. Should the Father judge the world he 'must' judge as the maker and sovereign of the world, by the strict rules of righteousness and justice, and then how could any sinner be saved? (Why? Is mercy incompatible with righteousness? How then can the Son be righteous?) But he has committed judgment to the Son, as a mediatory king, who judges by the equity and chancery of the Gospel. This article required exposition incomparably more than the simple doctrine of the Trinity, plain and evident 'simplici intuitu', and rendered obscure only by diverting the mental vision by terms drawn from matter and multitude. In the Trinity all the 'Hows'? may and should be answered by 'Look'! just as a wise tutor would do in stating the fact of a double or treble motion, as of a ball rolling north ward on the deck of a ship sailing south, while the earth is turning from west to east. And in like manner, that is, 'per intuitum intellectualem', must all the mysteries of faith be contemplated;--they are intelligible 'per se', not discursively and 'per analogiam'. For the truths are unique, and may have shadows and types, but no analogies. At this moment I have no intuition, no intellectual diagram, of this article of the commission of all judgment to the Son, and therefore a multitude of plausible objections present themselves, which I cannot solve--nor do I expect to solve them till by faith I see the thing itself.--Is not mercy an attribute of the Deity, as Deity, and not exclusively of the Person of the Son? And is not the authorizing another to judge by equity and mercy the same as judging so ourselves? If the Father can do the former, why not the latter? Ib. p. 171. And therefore now it is given him to have life in himself, as the Father hath life in himself, as the original fountain of all life, by whom the Son himself lives: all life is derived from God, either by eternal generation, or procession, or creation; and thus Christ hath life in himself also; to the new creation he is the fountain of life: 'he quickeneth whom he will'. The truths which hitherto had been metaphysical, then began to be historical. The Eternal was to be manifested in time. Hence Christ came with signs and wonders; that is, the absolute, or the anterior to cause and effect, manifested itself as a 'phenomenon' in time, but with the predicates of eternity;--and this is the only possible definition of a miracle 'in re ipsa', and not merely 'ad hominem', or 'ad ignorantiam'. Ib. p. 177. His next argument consists in applying such things to the divinity of our Saviour as belong to his humanity; 'that he increased in wisdom, &c.:--that he knows not the day of judgment';--which he evidently speaks of himself as man: as all the ancient Fathers confess. In St. Mark it is said, 'But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels that are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father'. St. Matthew does not mention the Son: 'Of that day and hour knoweth no man, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only'. How much more politic, as well as ingenuous, it had been to have acknowledged the difficulty of this text. So far from its being evident, the evidence would be on the Arian side, were it not that so many express texts determine us to the contrary. Ib. Which shows that the Son in St. Matthew is included in the [Greek: oudeìs] none, or no man, and therefore concerns him only as a man: for the Father 'includes the whole Trinity', and therefore includes the Son, who seeth whatever his Father doth. This is an 'argumentum in circulo', and 'petitio rei sub lite'. Why is he called the Son in 'antithesis' to the Father, if it meant, "no not the Christ, except in his character of the co-eternal Son, included in the Father?" If it "concerned him only as a man," why is he placed after the angels? Why called the 'Son' simply, instead of the Son of Man, or the Messiah? Ib. [Greek: Oudeìs] is not [Greek: oudeìs anthrôpôn], but, 'no one': as in John i. 18. 'No one hath seen God at any time'; that is, he is by essence invisible. This most difficult text I have not seen explained satisfactorily. I have thought that the [Greek: ággeloi] must here be taken in the primary sense of the word, namely, as messengers, or missionary Prophets: Of this day knoweth no one, not the messengers or revealers of God's purposes now in heaven, no, not the Son, the greatest of Prophets,--that is, he in that character promised to declare all that in that character it was given to him to know. Ib. p. 186. When St. Paul calls the Father the One God, he expressly opposes it to the many gods of the heathens. 'For though there be that are called gods, &c. but to us, there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him': where the 'one God' and 'one Lord and Mediator' is opposed to the many gods and many lords or mediators which were worshipped by the heathens. But surely the 'one Lord' is as much distinguished from the 'one God', as both are contradistinguished from the 'gods many and lords many' of the heathens. Besides 'the Father' is not the term used in that age in distinction from the gods that are no gods; but [Greek: Ho epì pántôn theós]. Ib. p. 222. 'The Word was with God'; that is, it was not yet in the world, or not yet made flesh; but with God.--'John' i. 1. So that to be 'with God', signifies nothing but not to be in the world. _'The Word was with God.'_ Grotius does say, that this was opposed to the Word's being made flesh, and appearing in the world: but he was far enough from thinking that these words have only a negative sense: * * * for he tells us what the positive sense is, that with God is [Greek: parà tô patrí], with the Father, * * and explains it by what Wisdom says, 'Prov'. vii. 30. 'Then I was by him, &c.' which he does not think a 'prosopopoeia', but spoken of a subsisting person. But even this is scarcely tenable even as Greek. Had this been St. John's meaning, surely he would have said, [Greek: en theô], not [Greek: pròs tòn theón], in the nearest proximity that is not confusion. But it is strange, that Sherlock should not have seen that Grotius had a hankering toward Socinianism, but, like a 'shy cock', and a man of the world, was always ready to unsay what he had said. [Footnote 1: A Vindication of the Doctrine of the Holy and ever Blessed Trinity and the Incarnation of the Son of God, occasioned by the Brief Notes on the Creed of St Athanasius, and the Brief History of the Unitarians, or Socinians. and containing an answer to both. By Wm. Sherlock, London. 8vo. 1690.] [Footnote 2: The third General Council, that at Ephesus in 431, decreed "that it should not be lawful for any man to publish or compose another Faith or Creed than that which was defined by the Nicene Council." Ed.] * * * * * NOTES ON WATERLAND'S VINDICATION OF CHRIST'S DIVINITY. [1] 'In initio'. It would be no easy matter to find a tolerably competent individual who more venerates the writings of Waterland than I do, and long have done. But still in how many pages do I not see reason to regret, that the total idea of the 4=3=1,--of the adorable Tetractys, eternally self-manifested in the Triad, Father, Son, and Spirit,--was never in its cloudless unity present to him. Hence both he and Bishop Bull too often treat it as a peculiarity of positive religion, which is to be cleared of all contradiction to reason, and then, thus negatively qualified, to be actually received by an act of the mere will; 'sit pro ratione voluntas'. Now, on the other hand, I affirm, that the article of the Trinity is religion, is reason, and its universal 'formula'; and that there neither is, nor can be, any religion, any reason, but what is, or is an expansion of the truth of the Trinity; in short, that all other pretended religions, pagan or 'pseudo'-Christian (for example, Sabellian, Arian, Socinian), are in themselves Atheism; though God forbid, that I should call or even think the men so denominated Atheists. I affirm a heresy often, but never dare denounce the holder a heretic. On this ground only can it be made comprehensible, how any honest and commonly intelligent man can withstand the proofs and sound logic of Bull and Waterland, that they failed in the first place to present the idea itself of the great doctrine which they so ably advocated. Take my self, S.T.C. as a humble instance. I was never so befooled as to think that the author of the fourth Gospel, or that St. Paul, ever taught the Priestleyan Psilanthropism, or that Unitarianisn (presumptuously, nay, absurdly so called), was the doctrine of the New Testament generally. But during the sixteen months of my aberration from the Catholic Faith, I presumed that the tenets of the divinity of Christ, the Redemption, and the like, were irrational, and that what was contradictory to reason could not have been revealed by the Supreme Reason. As soon as I discovered that these doctrines were not only consistent with reason, but themselves very reason, I returned at once to the literal interpretation of the Scriptures, and to the Faith. As to Dr. Samuel Clarke, the fact is, every generation has its one or more over-rated men. Clarke was such in the reign of George I.; Dr. Johnson eminently so in that of George III.; Lord Byron being the star now in the ascendant. In every religious and moral use of the word, God, taken absolutely, that is, not as a God, or the God, but as God, a relativity, a distinction in kind 'ab omni quod non est Deus', is so essentially implied, that it is a matter of perfect indifference, whether we assert a world without God, or make God the world. The one is as truly Atheism as the other. In fact, for all moral and practical purposes they are the same position differently expressed; for whether I say, God is the world, or the world is God, the inevitable conclusion, the sense and import is, that there is no other God than the world, that is, there is no other meaning to the term God. Whatever you may mean by, or choose to believe of, the world, that and that alone you mean by, and believe of, God. Now I very much question whether in any other sense Atheism, that is, speculative Atheism, is possible. For even in the Lucretian, the coarsest and crudest scheme of the Epicurean doctrine, a hylozism, a potential life, is clearly implied, as also in the celebrated 'lene clinamen' becoming actual. Desperadoes articulating breath into a blasphemy of nonsense, to which they themselves attach no connected meaning, and the wickedness of which is alone intelligible, there may be; but a La Place, or a La Grand, would, and with justice, resent and repel the imputation of a belief in chance, or of a denial of law, order, and self-balancing life and power in the world. Their error is, that they make them the proper and underived attributes of the world. It follows then, that Pantheism is equivalent to Atheism, and that there is no other Atheism actually existing, or speculatively conceivable, but Pantheism. Now I hold it demonstrable that a consistent Socinianism, following its own consequences, must come to Pantheism, and in ungodding the Saviour must deify cats and dogs, fleas and frogs. There is, there can be, no 'medium' between the Catholic Faith of Trinal Unity, and Atheism disguised in the self-contradicting term, Pantheism;--for every thing God, and no God, are identical positions. Query I. p. 1. 'The Word was God'.--John i. 1. 'I am the Lord, and there is none else; there is no God besides me'.--Is. xiv. 5, &c. In all these texts the 'was', or 'is', ought to be rendered positively, or objectively, and not as a mere connective: 'The Word Is God', and saith, 'I Am the Lord; there is no God besides me', the Supreme Being, 'Deitas objectiva'. The Father saith, 'I Am in that I am,--Deitas subjectiva'. Ib. p. 2. Whether all other beings, besides the one Supreme God, be not excluded by the texts of Isaiah (to which many more might be added), and consequently, whether Christ can be God at all, unless He be the same with the Supreme God? The sum of your answer to this query is, that the texts cited from Isaiah, are spoken of one Person only, the Person of the Father, &c. O most unhappy mistranslation of 'Hypostasis' by Person! The Word is properly the only Person. Ib. p. 3. Now, upon your hypothesis, we must add; that even the Son of God himself, however divine he may be thought, is really no God at all in any just and proper sense. He is no more than a nominal God, and stands excluded with the rest. All worship of him, and reliance upon him, will be idolatry, as much as the worship of angels, or men, or of the gods of the heathen would be. God the Father he is God, and he only, and 'him only shall thou serve'. This I take to be a clear consequence from your principles, and unavoidable. Waterland's argument is absolutely unanswerable by a worshipper of Christ. The modern 'ultra'-Socinian cuts the knot. Query II. p. 43. And therefore he might as justly bear the style and title of 'Lord God, God of Abraham', &c. while he acted in that capacity, as he did that of 'Mediator, Messiah, Son of the Father', &c. after that he condescended to act in another, and to discover his personal relation. And why, then, did not Dr. Waterland,--why did not his great predecessor in this glorious controversy, Bishop Bull,--contend for a revisal of our established version of the Bible, but especially of the New Testament? Either the unanimous belief and testimony of the first five or six centuries, grounded on the reiterated declarations of John and Paul, and the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, were erroneous, or at best doubtful;--and then why not wipe them off; why these references to them?--or else they were, as I believe, and both Bull and Waterland believed, the very truth; and then why continue the translation of the Hebrew into English at second-hand through the 'medium' of the Septuagint? Have we not adopted the Hebrew word, Jehovah,? Is not the [Greek: Kyrios], or Lord, of the LXX. a Greek substitute, in countless instances, for the Hebrew Jehovah? Why not then restore the original word, and in the Old Testament religiously render Jehovah by Jehovah, and every text of the New Testament, referring to the Old, by the Hebrew word in the text referred to? Had this been done, Socinianism would have been scarcely possible in England. Why was not this done?--I will tell you why. Because that great truth, in which are contained all treasures of all possible knowledge, was still opaque even to Bull and Waterland;--because the Idea itself--that 'Idea Idearum', the one substrative truth which is the form, manner, and involvent of all truths,--was never present to either of them in its entireness, unity, and transparency. They most ably vindicated the doctrine of the Trinity, negatively, against the charge of positive irrationality. With equal ability they shewed the contradictions, nay, the absurdities, involved in the rejection of the same by a professed Christian. They demonstrated the utterly un-Scriptural and contra-Scriptural nature of Arianism, and Sabellianism, and Socinianism. But the self-evidence of the great Truth, as a universal of the reason,--as the reason itself--as a light which revealed itself by its own essence as light--this they had not had vouchsafed to them. Query XV. p. 225-6. The pretence is, that we equivocate in talking of eternal generation. All generation is necessarily [Greek: ánarchón ti], without dividuous beginning, and herein contradistinguished from creation. Ib. p. 226. True, it is not the same with human generation. Not the same 'eodem modo', certainly; but it is so essentially the same that the generation of the Son of God is the transcendent, which gives to human generation its right to be so called. It is in the most proper, that is, the fontal, sense of the term, generation. Ib. You have not proved that all generation implies beginning; and what is more, cannot. It would be difficult to disprove the contrary. Generation with a beginning is not generation, but creation. Hence we may see how necessary it is that in all important controversies we should predefine the terms negatively, that is, exclude and preclude all that is not meant by them; and then the positive meaning, that is, what is meant by them, will be the easy result,--the post-definition, which is at once the real definition and impletion, the circumference and the area. Ib. p. 227-8. It is a usual thing with many, (moralists may account for it), when they meet with a difficulty which they cannot readily answer, immediately to conclude that the doctrine is false, and to run directly into the opposite persuasion;--not considering that they may meet with much more weighty objections there than before; or that they may have reason sufficient to maintain and believe many things in philosophy and divinity, though they cannot answer every question which may be started, or every difficulty which may be raised against them. O, if Bull and Waterland had been first philosophers, and then divines, instead of being first, manacled, or say articled clerks of a guild;--if the clear free intuition of the truth had led them to the Article, and not the Article to the defence of it as not having been proved to be false,--how different would have been the result! Now we feel only the inconsistency of Arianism, not the truth of the doctrine attacked. Arianism is confuted, and in such a manner, that I will not reject the Catholic Faith upon the Arian's grounds. It may, I allow, be still true. But that it is true, because the Arians have hitherto failed to prove its falsehood, is no logical conclusion. The Unitarian may have better luck; or if he fail, the Deist. Query XVI. p. 234. But God's 'thoughts are not our thoughts'. That is, as I would interpret the text;--the ideas in and by which God reveals himself to man are not the same with, and are not to be judged by, the conceptions which the human understanding generalizes from the notices of the senses, common to man and to irrational animals, dogs, elephants, beavers, and the like, endowed with the same senses. Therefore I regard this paragraph, p. 223-4, as a specimen of admirable special pleading 'ad hominem' in the Court of eristic Logic; but I condemn it as a wilful resignation or temporary self-deposition of the reason. I will not suppose what my reason declares to be no position at all, and therefore an impossible sub-position. Ib. p. 235. Let us keep to the terms we began with; lest by the changing of words we make a change of ideas, and alter the very state of the question. This misuse, or rather this 'omnium-gatherum' expansion and consequent extenuation of the word, Idea and Ideas, may be regarded as a calamity inflicted by Mr. Locke on the reigns of William III. Queen Anne, and the first two Georges. Ib. p. 237. Sacrifice was one instance of worship required under the Law; and it is said;--'He that sacrificeth unto any God, save unto the Lord only, he shall be utterly destroyed' (Exod. xxii. 20.) Now suppose any person, considering with himself that only absolute and sovereign sacrifice was appropriated to God by this law, should have gone and sacrificed to other Gods, and have been convicted of it before the judges. The apology he must have made for it, I suppose, must have run thus: "Gentlemen, though I have sacrificed to other Gods, yet I hope you'll observe, that I did it not absolutely: I meant not any absolute or supreme sacrifice (which is all that the Law forbids), but relative and inferior only. I regulated my intentions with all imaginable care, and my esteem with the most critical exactness. I considered the other Gods, whom I sacrificed to, as inferior only and infinitely so; reserving all sovereign sacrifice to the supreme God of Israel." This, or the like apology must, I presume, have brought off the criminal with some applause for his acuteness, if your principles be true. Either you must allow this, or you must be content to say, that not only absolute supreme sacrifice (if there be any sense in that phrase), but all sacrifice was by the Law appropriate to God only, &c. &c. How was it possible for an Arian to answer this? But it was impossible; and Arianism was extinguished by Waterland, but in order to the increase of Socinianism; and this, I doubt not, Waterland foresaw. He was too wise a man to suppose that the exposure of the folly and falsehood of one form of Infidelism would cure or prevent Infidelity. Enough, that he made it more bare-faced--I might say, bare-breeched; for modern Unitarianism is verily the 'sans-culotterie' of religion. Ib. p. 239. You imagine that acts of religious worship are to derive their signification and quality from the intention and meaning of the worshippers: whereas the very reverse of it is the truth. Truly excellent. Let the Church of England praise God for her Saints--a more glorious Kalendar than Rome can show! Ib. p. 251. The sum then of the case is this: If the Son could be included as being uncreated, and very God; as Creator, Sustainer, Preserver of all things, and one with the Father; then he might be worshipped upon their (the Ante-Nicene Fathers') principles, but otherwise could not. Every where in this invaluable writer I have to regret the absence of all distinct idea of the I Am as the proper attribute of the Father; and hence, the ignorance of the proper Jehovaism of the Son; and hence, that while we worship the Son together with the Father, we nevertheless pray to the Father only through the Son. Query XVII. And we may never be able perfectly to comprehend the relations of the three persons, 'ad intra', amongst themselves; the ineffable order and economy of the ever-blessed co-eternal Trinity. "Comprehend!" No. For how can any spiritual truth be comprehended? Who can comprehend his own will; or his own personeity, that is, his I-ship (Ichheit'); or his own mind, that is, his person; or his own life? But we can distinctly apprehend them. In strictness, the Idea, God, like all other ideas rightly so called, and as contradistinguished from conception, is not so properly above, as alien from, comprehension. It is like smelling a sound. Query XVIII. p. 269. From what hath been observed, it may appear sufficiently that the divine [Greek: Lógos] was our King and our God long before; that he had the same claim and title to religious worship that the Father himself had--'only not so distinctly revealed'. Here I differ 'toto orbe' from Waterland, and say with Luther and Zinzendorf, that before the Baptism of John the 'Logos' alone had been distinctly revealed, and that first in Christ he declared himself a Son, namely, the co-eternal only-begotten Son, and thus revealed the Father. Indeed the want of the Idea of the 1=3 could alone have prevented Waterland from inferring this from his own query II. and the texts cited by him pp. 28-38. The Father cannot be revealed except in and through the Son, his eternal 'exegesis'. The contrary position is an absurdity. The Supreme Will, indeed, the Absolute Good, knoweth himself as the Father: but the act of self-affirmation, the I Am in that I Am, is not a manifestation 'ad extra', not an 'exegesis'. Ib. p. 274. This point being settled, I might allow you that, in some sense, distinct worship commenced with the distinct title of Son or Redeemer: that is, our blessed Lord was then first worshipped, or commanded to be worshipped by us, under that distinct title or character; having before had no other title or character peculiar and proper to himself, but only what was common to the Father and him too. Rather shall I say that the Son and the Spirit, the Word and the Wisdom, were alone worshipped, because alone revealed under the Law. See Proverbs, i. ii. The passage quoted from Bishop Bull is very plausible and very eloquent; but only 'cum multis granis salis sumend'. Query XIX. p. 279. That the Father, whose honour had been sufficiently secured under the Jewish dispensation, and could not but be so under the Christian also, &c. Here again! This contradiction of Waterland to his own principles is continually recurring;--yea, and in one place he involves the very Tritheism, of which he was so victorious an antagonist, namely, that the Father is Jehovah, the Son Jehovah, and the Spirit Jehovah;--thus making Jehovah either a mere synonyme of God--whereas he himself rightly renders it [Greek: Ho Ôn], which St. John every where, and St. Paul no less, makes the peculiar name of the Son, [Greek: monogenàes uhiòs, ho ôn eis tòn kólpon tou patrós]--; or he affirms the same absurdity, as if had said: The Father is the Son, and the Son is the Son, and the Holy Ghost is the Son, and yet there are not three Sons but one Son. N. B. [Greek: Ho òn] is the verbal noun of [Greek: hos esti], not of [Greek: egô eimí]. It is strange how little use has been made of that profound and most pregnant text, 'John' i. 18! Query XX. p. 302. The [Greek: homooúsion] itself might have been spared, at least out of the Creeds, had not a fraudulent abuse of good words brought matters to that pass, that the Catholic Faith was in danger of being lost even under Catholic language. Most assuredly the very 'disputable' rendering of [Greek: homoousion] by consubstantial, or of one substance with, not only might have been spared, but should have been superseded. Why not--as is felt to be for the interest of science in all the physical sciences--retain the same term in all languages? Why not 'usia' and homoüsial, as well as 'hypostasis', hypostatic, homogeneous, heterogeneous, and the like;--or as Baptism, Eucharist, Liturgy, Epiphany and the rest? Query XXI. p. 303. The Doctor's insinuating from the 300 texts, which style the Father God absolutely, or the one God, that the Son is not strictly and essentially God, not one God with the Father, is a strained and remote inference of his own. Waterland has weakened his argument by seeming to admit that in all these 300 texts the Father, 'distinctive', is meant. Ib. p. 316-17. The simplicity of God is another mystery. * * When we come to inquire whether all extension, or all plurality, diversity, composition of substance and accident, and the like, be consistent with it, then it is we discover how confused and inadequate our ideas are. * * To this head belongs that perplexing question (beset with difficulties on all sides), whether the divine substance be extended or no. Surely, the far larger part of these assumed difficulties rests on a misapplication either of the senses to the sense, or of the sense to the understanding, or of the understanding to the reason;--in short, on an asking for images where only theorems can be, or requiring theorems for thoughts, that is, conceptions or notions, or lastly, conceptions for ideas. Query XXIII. p. 351. But taking advantage of the ambiguity of the word 'hypostasis', sometimes used to signify substance, and sometimes person, you contrive a fallacy. And why did not Waterland lift up his voice against this mischievous abuse of the term 'hypostasis', and the perversion of its Latin rendering, 'substantia' as being equivalent to [Greek: ousía]? Why [Greek: ousía] should not have been rendered by 'essentia', I cannot conceive. 'Est' seems a contraction of 'esset', and 'ens' of 'essens': [Greek: ôn, ousa, ousía] = 'essens, essentis, essentia'. Ib. p. 354. Let me desire you not to give so great a loose to your fancy in divine things: you seem to consider every thing under the notion of extension and sensible images. Very true. The whole delusion of the Anti-Trinitarians arises out of this, that they apply the property of imaginable matter--in which A. is, that is, can only be imagined, by exclusion of B. as the universal predicate of all substantial being. Ib. p. 357. And our English Unitarians * * have been still refining upon the Socinian scheme, * * and have brought it still nearer to Sabellianism. The Sabellian and the Unitarian seem to differ only in this;--that what the Sabellian calls union with, the Unitarian calls full inspiration by, the Divinity. Ib. p. 359. It is obvious, at first sight, that the true Arian or Semi-Arian scheme (which you would be thought to come up to at least) can never tolerably support itself without taking in the Catholic principle of a human soul to join with the Word. Here comes one of the consequences of the Cartesian Dualism: as if [Greek: sàrx], the living body, could be or exist without a soul, or a human living body without a human soul! [Greek: Sàrx] is not Greek for carrion, nor [Greek: sôma] for carcase. Query XXIV. p. 371. Necessary existence is an essential character, and belongs equally to Father and Son. Subsistent in themselves are Father, Son and Spirit: the Father only has origin in himself. Query XXVI. p. 412. The words [Greek: ouch hôs genómenon] he construes thus: "not as eternally generated," as if he had read [Greek: gennômenon], supplying [Greek: aïdíôs] by imagination. The sense and meaning of the word [Greek: genómenon], signifying made, or created, is so fixed and certain in this author, &c. This is but one of fifty instances in which the true Englishing of [Greek: genómenos, egéneto], &c. would have prevented all mistake. It is not 'made', but 'became'. Thus here:--begotten eternally, and not as one that became; that is, as not having been before. The only-begotten Son never 'became'; but all things 'became' through him. Ib. 412. 'Et nos etiam Sermoni atque Rationi, itemque Virtuti, per quæ omnia molitum Deum ediximus, propriam substantiam Spiritum inscribimus; cui et Sermo insit prænuntianti, et Ratio adsit disponenti, et Virtus perficienti. Hunc ex Deo prolatum didicimus, et prolatione generatum, et idcirco Filium Dei et Deum dictum ex unitate substantiæ'.--Tertull. Apol. c. 21. How strange and crude the realism of the Christian Faith appears in Tertullian's rugged Latin! Ib. p. 414. He represents Tertullian as making the Son, in his highest capacity, ignorant of the day of judgment. Of the true sense of the text, Mark xiii. 32., I still remain in doubt; but, though as zealous and stedfast a Homoüsian as Bull and Waterland themselves, I am inclined to understand it of the Son in his highest capacity; but I would avoid the inferiorizing consequences by a stricter rendering of the [Greek: ei màe ho Patáer]. The [Greek: monon] of St. Matthew xxiv. 36. is here omitted. I think Waterland's a very unsatisfying solution of this text. Ib. p. 415. 'Exclamans quod se Deus reliquisset, &c. Habes ipsum exclamantem in passione, Deus meus, Deus meus, ut quid me dereliquisti? Sed hæc vox carnis et animæ, id est, hominis; nec Sermonis, nec Spiritus', &c.--Tertull. Adv. Prax. c. 26. c. 30. The ignorance of the Fathers, and, Origen excepted, of the Ante-Nicene Fathers in particular, in all that respects Hebrew learning and the New Testament references to the Old Testament, is shown in this so early fantastic misinterpretation grounded on the fact of our Lord's reminding, and as it were giving out aloud to John and Mary the twenty-second Psalm, the prediction of his present sufferings and after glory. But the entire passage in Tertullian, though no proof of his Arianism, is full of proofs of his want of insight into the true sense of the Scripture texts. Indeed without detracting from the inestimable services of the Fathers from Tertullian to Augustine respecting the fundamental article of the Christian Faith, yet commencing from the fifth century, I dare claim for the Reformed Church of England the honorable name of [Greek: archaspistàes] of Trinitarianism, and the foremost rank among the Churches, Roman or Protestant: the learned Romanist divines themselves admit this, and make a merit of the reluctance with which they nevertheless admit it, in respect of Bishop Bull. [2] Ib. p. 421. It seems to me that if there be not reasons of conscience obliging a good man to speak out, there are always reasons of prudence which should make a wise man hold his tongue. True, and as happily expressed. To this, however, the honest Anti-Trinitarian must come at last: "Well, well, I admit that John and Paul thought differently; but this remains my opinion." Query XXVII. p. 427. [Greek: Ton alaethinòn kaì óntôs ónta Theòn, tòn tou Christou patéra]. --Athanas. Cont. Gent. The just and literal rendering of the passage is this: 'The true God who in reality is such, namely, the Father of Christ.' The passage admits of a somewhat different interpretation from this of Waterland's, and of equal, if not greater, force against the Arian notion: namely, taking [Greek: tòn óntôs ónta] distinctively from [Greek: ho ôn]--the 'Ens omnis entitatis, etiam suæ', that is, the I Am the Father, in distinction from the 'Ens Supremum', the Son. It cannot, however, be denied that in changing the 'formula' of the 'Tetractys' into the 'Trias', by merging the 'Prothesis' in the 'Thesis', the Identity in the Ipseity, the Christian Fathers subjected their exposition to many inconveniences. Ib. p. 432. [Greek: Ouch ho poiaetàes tôn hólôn éstai Theòs ho tô Môsei eipôn autòn einai Theòn Abraàm, kaì Theòn Isaàk, kaì Theòn Iakôb].--Justin Mart. Dial. p. 180. The meaning is, that that divine Person, who called himself God, and was God, was not the Person of the Father, whose ordinary character is that of maker of all things, but another divine Person, namely, God the Son. * * It was Justin's business to shew that there was a divine Person, one who was God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and was not the Father; and therefore there were two divine Persons. At all events, it was a very incautious expression on the part of Justin, though his meaning was, doubtless, that which Waterland gives. The same most improper, or at best, most inconvenient because equivocal phrase, has been, as I think, interpolated into our Apostles' Creed. Ib. p. 436. [Greek: Taeroito d' àn, hôs ho emòs lógos, ehis mèn Theòs, eis hèn aítion kaì Ghiou kaì Pneúmatos anapheroménôn. k.t.l.]--Greg. Naz. Orat. 29. We may, as I conceive, preserve (the doctrine of) one God, by referring both the Son and Holy Ghost to one cause, &c. Another instance of the inconvenience of the Trias compared with the Tetractys. [Footnote 1: A Vindication of Christ's Divinity: being a defence of some queries relating to Dr. Clarke's scheme of the Holy Trinity, &c. By Daniel Waterland. 2nd edit. Cambridge, 1719. Ed.] [Footnote 2: 'Y sino ahí está el Doctor Jorge Bull Profesor de Teología, y Presbitero de la Iglesia Anglicana, que murió Obispo de San David el año de 1716, cuyas obras teologico--escolasticas, en folio, nada deben á las mas alambicadas que se han estampado en Salamanca y en Coimbra; y como los puntos que por la mayor parte trató en ellas son sobre los misterios capitales de nuestra Santa Fé, conviene á saber, sobre el misterio de la Trinidad, y sobre el de la Divinidad de Cristo, en los cuales su Pseudaiglesia Anglicana no se desvia de la Catolica, en verdad, que los manejó con tanto nervio y con tanta delicadeza, que los teologos ortodojos mas escolastizados, como si dijéramos electrizados, hacen grande estimacion de dichas obras. Y aun en los dos Tratados que escribió acerca de la Justification, que es punto mas resvaladizo, en los principios que abrazó, no se separó de los teologos Catolicos; pero en algunas consecuencias que infirio, ya dió bastantemente á entender la mala leche que habia mamado.' Fray. Gerundio. ii. 7. Ed.] * * * * * NOTES ON WATERLAND'S IMPORTANCE OF THE DOCTRINE OF THE HOLY TRINITY.[1] Chap. I. p. 18. It is the property of the Divine Being to be unsearchable; and if he were not so, he would not be divine. Must we therefore reject the most certain truths concerning the Deity, only because they are incomprehensible, &c.? It is strange that so sound, so admirable a logician as Waterland, should have thought 'unsearchable' and 'incomprehensible' synonymous, or at least equivalent terms:--and this, though St. Paul hath made it the privilege of the full-grown Christian, 'to search out the deep things of God himself'. Chap. IV. p. 111. 'The delivering over unto Satan' seems to have been a form of excommunication, declaring the person reduced to the state of a heathen; and in the Apostolical age it was accompanied with supernatural or miraculous effects upon the bodies of the persons so delivered. Unless the passage, ('Acts' v. 1-11.) be an authority, I must doubt the truth of this assertion, as tending to destroy the essential spirituality of Christian motives, and, in my judgment, as irreconcilable with our Lord's declaration, that his kingdom was 'not of this world'. Let me be once convinced that St. Paul, with the elders of an Apostolic Church, knowingly and intentionally appended a palsy or a consumption to the sentence of excommunication, and I shall be obliged to reconsider my old opinion as to the anti-Christian principle of the Romish Inquisition. Ib. p. 114. 'A man that is a heretic, after the first and second admonition, reject; knowing that he that is such, is subverted, and sinneth, being condemned of himself'.--Tit. iii. 10, 11. This text would be among my minor arguments for doubting the Paulinity of the Epistle to Titus. It seems to me to breathe the spirit of a later age, and a more established Church power. Ib. Not every one that mistakes in judgment, though in matters of great importance, in points fundamental, but he that openly espouses such fundamental error. * * Dr. Whitby adds to the definition, the espousing it out of disgust, pride, envy, or some worldly principle, and against his conscience. Whitby went too far; Waterland not far enough. Every schismatic is not necessarily a heretic; but every heretic is virtually a schismatic. As to the meaning of [Greek: autokatákritos], Waterland surely makes too much of a very plain matter. What was the sentence passed on a heretic? A public declaration that he was no longer a member of--that is, of one faith with--the Church. This the man himself, after two public notices, admits and involves in the very act of persisting. However confident as to the truth of the doctrine he has set up, he cannot, after two public admonitions, be ignorant that it is a doctrine contrary to the articles of his communion with the Church that has admitted him; and in regard of his alienation from that communion, he is necessarily [Greek: autokatákritos],--though in his pride of heart he might say with the man of old, "And I banish you." Ib. p. 123. --as soon as the miraculous gifts, or gift of discerning spirits, ceased. No one point in the New Testament perplexes me so much as these (so called) miraculous gifts. I feel a moral repugnance to the reduction of them to natural and acquired talents, ennobled and made energic by the life and convergency of faith;--and yet on no other scheme can I reconcile them with the idea of Christianity, or the particular supposed, with the general known, facts. But, thank God! it is a question which does not in the least degree affect our faith or practice. I mean, if God permit, to go through the Middletonian controversy, as soon as I can procure the loan of the books, or have health enough to become a reader in the British Museum. Ib. p. 126. And what if, after all, spiritual censures (for of such only I am speaking,) should happen to fall upon such a person, he may be in some measure hurt in his reputation by it, and that is all. And possibly hereupon his errors, before invincible through ignorance, may be removed by wholesome instruction and admonition, and so he is befriended in it, &c. Waterland is quite in the right so far;--but the penal laws, the temporal inflictions--would he have called for the repeal of these? Milton saw this subject with a mastering eye,--saw that the awful power of excommunication was degraded and weakened even to impotence by any the least connection with the law of the State. Ib. p. 127. --who are hereby forbidden to receive such heretics into their houses, or to pay them so much as common civilities. This precept of the Apostle may he further illustrated by his own practice, recorded by Irenaeus, who had the information at second-hand from Polycarp, a disciple of St. John's, that St. John, once meeting with Cerinthus at the bath, retired instantly without bathing, for fear lest the bath should fall by reason of Cerinthus being there, the enemy to truth. Psha! The 'bidding him God speed',--[Greek: légôn autô chaírein],--(2 'John', 11,) is a spirituality, not a mere civility. If St. John knew or suspected that Cerinthus had a cutaneous disease, there would have been some sense in the refusal, or rather, as I correct myself, some probability of truth in this gossip of Irenaeus. Ib. p. 128. They corrupted the faith of Christ, and in effect subverted the Gospel. That was enough to render them detestable in the eyes of all men who sincerely loved and valued sound faith. O, no, no, not 'them!' 'Error quidem, non tamen homo errans, abominandus': or, to pun a little, 'abhominandus'. Be bold in denouncing the heresy, but slow and timorous in denouncing the erring brother as a heretic. The unmistakable passions of a factionary and a schismatic, the ostentatious display, the ambition and dishonest arts of a sect-founder, must be superinduced on the false doctrine, before the heresy makes the man a heretic. Ib. p. 129. --the doctrine of the Nicolaitans. Were the Nicolaitans a sect, properly so called? The word is the Greek rendering of 'the children of Balaam;' that is, men of grossly immoral and disorderly lives. Ib. p. 130. For if he who 'shall break one of the least moral commandments, and shall teach men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven', (Mat. v. 19,) it must be a very dangerous experiment, &c. A sad misinterpretation of our Lord's words, which from the context most evidently had no reference to any moral, that is, universal commandment as such, but to the national institutions of the Jewish state, as long as that state should be in existence; that is to say, until 'the Heaven' or the Government, and 'the Earth' or the People or the Governed, as one 'corpus politicum', or nation, had 'passed away'. Till that time,--which was fulfilled under Titus, and more thoroughly under Hadrian,--no Jew was relieved from his duties as a citizen and subject by his having become a Christian. The text, together with the command implied in the miracle of the tribute-money in the fish's mouth, might be fairly and powerfully adduced against the Quakers, in respect of their refusal to pay their tithes, or whatever tax they please to consider as having an un-Christian destination. But are they excluded from the kingdom of heaven, that is, the Christian Church? No;--but they must be regarded as weak and injudicious members of it. Chap. V. p. 140. Accordingly it may be observed, how the unbelievers caress and compliment those complying gentlemen who meet them half way, while they are perpetually inveighing against the stiff divines, as they call them, whom they can make no advantage of. Lessing, an honest and frank-hearted Infidel, expresses the same sentiment. As long as a German Protestant divine keeps himself stiff and stedfast to the Augsburg Confession, to the full Creed of Melancthon, he is impregnable, and may bid defiance to sceptic and philosopher. But let him quit the citadel, and the Cossacs are upon him. Ib. p. 187. And therefore it is infallibly certain, as Mr. Chillingworth well argues with respect to Christianity in general, that we ought firmly to believe it; because wisdom and reason require that we should believe those things which are by many degrees more credible and probable than the contrary. Yes, where there are but two positions, one of which must be true. When A. is presented to my mind with probability=5, and B. with probability=15, I must think that B. is three times more probable than A. And yet it is very possible that a C. may be found which will supersede both. Chap. VI. p. 230. The Creed of Jerusalem, preserved by Cyril, (the most ancient perhaps of any now extant,) is very express for the divinity of God the Son, in these words: "And in our Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God; true God, begotten of the Father before all ages, by whom all things were made" * *. [Greek: Kaì eis henà Kyrion Iaesoun Christòn, tòn uhiòn tou Theou monogenae, tòn ek tou patròs gennaethénta, Theòn alaethinòn, prò pántôn tôn aiônôn, di' ohu tà pánta egéneto]. I regard this, both from its antiquity and from the peculiar character of the Church of Jerusalem, so far removed from the influence of the Pythagoreo-Platonic sects of Paganism, as the most important and convincing mere fact of evidence in the Trinitarian controversy. Ib. p. 233. --true Son of the Father, 'invisible' of invisible, &c. How is this reconcilable with 'John' i. 18--('no one hath seen God at any time: the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him',--) or with the 'express image', asserted above. 'Invisible,' I suppose, must be taken in the narrowest sense, that is, to bodily eyes. But then the one 'invisible' would not mean the same as the other. Ib. p. 236. 'Symbola certe Ecclesiæ ex ipso Ecclesiæ sensu, non ex hæreticorum cerebello, exponenda sunt'.--Bull. Judic. Eccl. v. The truth of a Creed must be tried by the Holy Scriptures; but the sense of the Creed by the known sentiments and inferred intention of its compilers. Ib. p. 238. The very name of Father, applied in the Creed to the first Person, intimates the relation he bears to a Son, &c. No doubt: but the most probable solution of the apparent want of distinctness of explication on this article, in my humble judgment, is--that the so-called Apostles' Creed was at first the preparatory confession of the catechumens, the admission-ticket, as it were ('symbolum ad Baptismum'), at the gate of the Church, and gradually augmented as heresies started up. The latest of these seems to have consisted in the doubt respecting the entire death of Jesus on the Cross, as distinguished from suspended animation. Hence in the fifth or sixth century the clause--"and he descended into Hades," was inserted;--that is, the indissoluble principle of the man Jesus, was separated from, and left, the dissoluble, and subsisted apart in 'Scheol', or the abode of separated souls;--but really meaning no more than 'vere mortuus est'. Jesus was taken from the Cross dead in the very same sense in which the Baptist was dead after his beheading. Nevertheless, well adapted as this Creed was to its purposes, I cannot but regret the high place and precedence which by means of its title, and the fable to which that title gave rise, it has usurped. It has, as it appears to me, indirectly favoured Arianism and Socinianism. Ib. p. 250. That St. John wrote his Gospel with a view to confute Cerinthus, among other false teachers, is attested first by Irenæus, who was a disciple of Polycarp, and who flourished within less than a century of St. John's time. I have little trust and no faith in the gossip and hearsay-anecdotes of the early Fathers, Irenæus not excepted. "Within less than a century of St. John's time." Alas! a century in the paucity of writers and of men of education in the age succeeding the Apostolic, must be reckoned more than equal to five centuries since the use of printing. Suppose, however, the truth of the Irenæan tradition;--that the Creed of Cerinthus was what Irenæus states it to have been; and that John, at the instance of the Asiatic Bishops, wrote his Gospel as an antidote to the Cerinthian heresy;--does there not thence arise, in his utter silence, an almost overwhelming argument against the Apostolicity of the 'Christopædia', both that prefixed to Luke, and that concorporated with Matthew? Ib. p. 257. 'In him was life, and the life was the light of men'. The same Word was life, the [Greek: logos and zôáe], both one. There was no occasion therefore for subtilly distinguishing the Word and Life into two Sons, as some did. I will not deny the possibility of this interpretation. It may be,--nay, it is,--fairly deducible from the words of the great Evangelist: but I cannot help thinking that, taken as the primary intention, it degrades this most divine chapter, which unites in itself the three characters of sublime, profound, and pregnant, and alloys its universality by a mixture of time and accident. Ib. 'And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness cometh not upon it.' So I render the verse, conformable to the rendering of the same Greek verb, [Greek: katalambánô], by our translators in another place of this same Gospel. The Apostle, as I conceive, in this 5th verse of his 1st chapter, alludes to the prevailing error of the Gentiles, &c. O sad, sad! How must the philosopher have been eclipsed by the shadow of antiquarian erudition, in order that a mind like Waterland's could have sacrificed the profound universal import of 'comprehend' to an allusion to a worthless dream of heretical nonsense, the mushroom of the day! Had Waterland ever thought of the relation of his own understanding to his reason? But alas! the identification of these two diversities--of how many errors has it been ground and occasion! Ib. p. 259. 'And the Word was made flesh'--became personally united with the man Jesus; 'and dwelt among us',--resided constantly in the human nature so assumed. Waterland himself did but dimly see the awful import of [Greek: egéneto sàrx],--the mystery of the alien ground--and the truth, that as the ground such must be the life. He caused himself to 'become flesh', and therein assumed a mortal life into his own person and unity, in order himself to transubstantiate the corruptible into the incorruptible. Waterland's anxiety to show the anti-heretical force of St. John's Gospel and Epistles, has caused him to overlook their Catholicity--their applicability to all countries and all times--their truth, independently of all temporary accidents and errors;--which Catholicity alone it is that constitutes their claim to Canonicity, that is, to be Canonical inspired writings. Ib. p. 266. Hereupon therefore the Apostle, in defence of Christ's real humanity, says, 'This is he that came by water and blood'. 'Water and blood,' that is 'serum' and 'crassamentum', mean simply 'blood,' the blood of the animal or carnal life, which, saith Moses, 'is the life'. Hence 'flesh' is often taken as, and indeed is a form of, the blood,--blood formed or organized. Thus 'blood' often includes 'flesh,' and 'flesh' includes 'blood.' 'Flesh and blood' is equivalent to blood in its twofold form, or rather as formed and formless. 'Water and blood' has, therefore, two meanings in St. John, but which 'in idem coincidunt': 1. true animal human blood, and no celestial ichor or phantom: 2. the whole sentiently vital body, fixed or flowing, the pipe and the stream. For the ancients, and especially the Jews, had no distinct apprehension of the use or action of the nerves: in the Old Testament 'heart' is used as we use 'head.' 'The fool hath said in his heart'--is in English: "the worthless fellow ('vaurien') hath taken it into his head," &c. Ib. p. 268. The Apostle having said that the Spirit is truth, or essential truth, (which was giving him a title common to God the Father and to Christ,) &c. Is it clear that the distinct 'hypostasis' of the Holy Spirit, in the same sense as the only-begotten Son is hypostatically distinguished from the Father, was a truth that formed an immediate object or intention of St. John? That it is a truth implied in, and fairly deducible from, many texts, both in his Gospel and Epistles, I do not, indeed I cannot, doubt;--but only whether this article of our faith he was commissioned to declare explicitly? It grieves me to think that such giant 'archaspistæ' of the Catholic Faith, as Bull and Waterland, should have clung to the intruded gloss (1 'John' v. 7), which, in the opulence and continuity of the evidences, as displayed by their own master-minds, would have been superfluous, had it not been worse than superfluous, that is, senseless in itself, and interruptive of the profound sense of the Apostle. Ib. p. 272. He is come, come in the flesh, and not merely to reside for a time, or occasionally, and to fly off again, but to abide and dwell with man, clothed with humanity. Incautiously worded at best. Compare our Lord's own declaration to his disciples, that he had dwelt a brief while 'with' or 'among' them, in order to dwell 'in' them permanently. Ib. p. 286. It is very observable, that the Ebionites rejected three of the Gospels, receiving only St. Matthew's (or what they called so), and that curtailed. They rejected likewise all St. Paul's writings, reproaching him as an apostate. How unlikely is it that Justin should own such reprobates as those were for fellow-Christians! I dare avow my belief--or rather I dare not withhold my avowal--that both Bull and Waterland are here hunting on the trail of an old blunder or figment, concocted by the gross ignorance of the Gentile Christians and their Fathers in all that respected Hebrew literature and the Palestine Christians. I persist in the belief that, though a refuse of the persecuted and from neglect degenerating Jew-Christians may have sunk into the mean and carnal notions of their unconverted brethren respecting the Messiah, no proper sect of Ebionites ever existed, but those to whom St. Paul travelled with the contributions of the churches, nor any such man as Ebion; unless indeed it was St. Barnabas, who in his humility may have so named himself, while soliciting relief for the distressed Palestine Christians;--"I am Barnabas the beggar." But I will go further, and confess my belief that the (so-called) Ebionites of the first and second centuries, who rejected the 'Christopædia', and whose Gospel commenced with the baptism by John, were orthodox Apostolic Christians, who received Christ as the Lord, that is, as Jehovah 'manifested in the flesh'. As to their rejection of the other Gospels and of Paul's writings, I might ask:--"Could they read them?" But the whole notion seems to rest on an anachronical misconception of the 'Evangelia'. Every great mother Church, at first, had its own Gospel. Ib. p. 288. To say nothing here of the truer reading ("men of your nation"), there is no consequence in the argument. The Ebionites were Christians in a large sense, men of Christian profession, nominal Christians, as Justin allowed the worst of heretics to be. And this is all he could mean by allowing the Ebionites to be Christians. I agree with Bull in holding [Greek: apò tou hymetérou génous] the most probable reading in the passage cited from Justin, and am by no means convinced that the celebrated passage in Josephus is an interpolation. But I do not believe that such men, as are here described, ever professed themselves Christians, or were, or could have been, baptized. Ib. p. 292. Le Clerc would appear to doubt, whether the persons pointed to in Justin really denied Christ's divine nature or no. It is as plain as possible that they did. Le Clerc is no favourite of mine, and Waterland is a prime favourite. Nevertheless, in this instance, I too doubt with Le Clerc, and more than doubt. Ib. p. 338. [Greek: Phúsei dè taes phthoras prosgenoménaes, anagkaion aen hóti sôsai Boulómenos áe tàen phthoropoiòn ousían aphanísas touto dè ouk aen hetérôs genésthai ei máeper hae katà phúsin zôàe proseplákae tô tàen phthoràn dexaménô, aphanizousa mèn tàen phthoràn, athanatòn dè tou loipou tò dexamenon diataerousa. k.t.l.]--Just. M. Here Justin asserts that it was necessary for essential life, or life by nature, to be united with human nature, in order to save it. Waterland has not mastered the full force of [Greek: hàe katà phúsin zôáe]. If indeed he had taken in the full force of the whole of this invaluable fragment, he would never have complimented the following extract from Irenæus, as saying the same thing "in fuller and stronger words." Compared with the fragment from Justin, it is but the flat common-place logic of analogy, so common in the early Fathers. Ib. p. 340. 'Qui nude tantum hominem eum dicunt ex Joseph generatum * * moriuntur.' 'Non nude hominem'--not a mere man do I hold Jesus to have been and to be; but a perfect man and, by personal union with the Logos, perfect God. That his having an earthly father might be requisite to his being a perfect man I can readily suppose; but why the having an earthly father should be more incompatible with his perfect divinity, than his having an earthly mother, I cannot comprehend. All that John and Paul believed, God forbid that I should not! Chap. VII. p. 389. It is a sufficient reason for not receiving either them ('Arian doctrines'), or the interpretations brought to support them, that the ancients, in the best and purest times, either knew nothing of them, or if they did, condemned them. As excellent means of raising a presumption in the mind of the falsehood of Arianism and Socinianism, and thus of preparing the mind for a docile reception of the great idea itself--I admit and value the testimonies from the writings of the early Fathers. But alas! the increasing dimness, ending in the final want of the idea of this all-truths- including truth of the Tetractys eternally manifested in the Triad; --this, this is the ground and cause of all the main heresies from Semi-Arianism, recalled by Dr. Samuel Clarke, to the last setting ray of departing faith in the necessitarian Psilanthropism of Dr. Priestley. Ib. p. 41-2, &c. I cannot but think that Waterland's defence of the Fathers in these pages against Barbeyrac, is below his great powers and characteristic vigour of judgment. It is enough that they, the Fathers of the first three centuries, were the lights of their age, and worthy of all reverence for their good gifts. But it appears to me impossible to deny their credulity; their ignorance, with one or two exceptions, in the interpretation of the Old Testament; or their hardihood in asserting the truth of whatever they thought it for the interest of the Church, and for the good of souls, to have believed as true. A whale swallowed Jonah; but a believer in all the assertions and narrations of Tertullian and Irenæus would be more wonder-working than Jonah; for such a one must have swallowed whales. [Footnote 1: The Importance of the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity asserted, in reply to some late pamphlets. 2nd edit. Lond. 1734.] * * * * * NOTES ON SKELTON.[1] 1825. Burdy's Life of Skelton, p. 22. She lived until she was a hundred and five. The omission of his prayers on the morning it happened, he supposed ever after to be the cause of this unhappy accident. So early was his mind impressed with a lively sense of religious duty. In anecdotes of this kind, and in the instances of eminently good men, it is that my head and heart have their most obstinate falls out. The question is:--To what extent the undoubted subjective truth may legitimately influence our judgment as to the possibility of the objective. Ib. p. 67. The Bishop then gave him the living of Pettigo in a wild part of the county of Donegal, having made many removals on purpose to put him in that savage place, among mountains, rocks, and heath, * * *. When he got this living he had been eighteen years curate of Monaghan, and two of Newtown-Butler, during which time he saw, as he told me, many illiterate boys put over his head, and highly preferred in the Church without having served a cure. Though I have heard of one or two exceptions stated in proof that nepotism is not yet extinct among our Prelates, yet it is impossible to compare the present condition of the Church, and the disposal of its dignities and emoluments with the facts recorded in this Life, without an honest exultation. Ib. p. 106. He once declared to me that he would resign his living, if the Athanasian Creed were removed from the Prayer Book; and I am sure he would have done so. Surely there was more zeal than wisdom in this declaration. Does the Athanasian or rather the 'pseudo'-Athanasian Creed differ from the Nicene, or not? If not, it must be dispensable at least, if not superfluous. If it does differ, which of the two am I to follow;--the profession of an anonymous individual, or the solemn decision of upwards of three hundred Bishops convened from all parts of the Christian world? Vol. I. p. 177-180. No problem more difficult or of more delicate treatment than the 'criteria' of miracles; yet none on which young divines are fonder of displaying their gifts. Nor is this the worst. Their charity too often goes to wreck from the error of identifying the faith in Christ with the arguments by which they think it is to be supported. But surely if two believers meet at the same goal of faith, it is a very secondary question whether they travelled thither by the same road of argument. In this and other passages of Skelton, I recognize and reverence a vigorous and robust intellect; but I complain of a turbidness in his reasoning, a huddle in his sequence, and here and there a semblance of arguing in a circle--from the miracle to the doctrine, and from the doctrine to the miracle. Add to this a too little advertency to the distinction between the evidence of a miracle for A, an eye-witness, and for B, for whom it is the relation of a miracle by an asserted eye-witness; and again between B, and X, Y, Z, for whom it is a fact of history. The result of my own meditations is, that the evidence of the Gospel, taken as a total, is as great for the Christians of the nineteenth century, as for those of the Apostolic age. I should not be startled if I were told it was greater. But it does not follow, that this equally holds good of each component part. An evidence of the most cogent clearness, unknown to the primitive Christians, may compensate for the evanescence of some evidence, which they enjoyed. Evidences comparatively dim have waxed into noon-day splendour; and the comparative wane of others, once effulgent, is more than indemnified by the 'synopsis' [Greek: tou pántos], which we enjoy, and by the standing miracle of a Christendom commensurate and almost synonymous with the civilized world. I make this remark for the purpose of warning the divinity student against the disposition to overstrain particular proofs, or rest the credibility of the Gospel too exclusively on some one favourite point. I confess, that I cannot peruse page 179 without fancying that I am reading some Romish Doctor's work, dated from a community where miracles are the ordinary news of the day. P. S. By the by, the Rev. Philip Skelton is of the true Irish breed; that is, a brave fellow, but a bit of a bully. "Arrah, by St. Pathrick! but I shall make cold mutton of you, Misther Arian." Ib. p. 182. If in this he appears to deal fairly by us, proving such things as admit of it, by reason; and such as do not, by the authority of his miracles, &c. Are 'we' likely to have miracles performed or pretended before our eyes? If not, what may all this mean? If Skelton takes for granted the veracity of the Evangelists, and the precise verity of the Gospels, the truth and genuineness of the miracles is included:--and if not, what does he prove? The exact accordance of the miracles related with the ideal of a true miracle in the reason, does indeed furnish an argument for the probable truth of the relation. But this does not seem to be Skelton's intention. Ib. p. 185. But to remedy this evil, as far as the nature of the thing will permit, a genuine record of the true religion must be kept up, that its articles may not be in danger of total corruption in such a sink of opinions. Anything rather than seek a remedy in that which Scripture itself declares the only one. Alas! these bewilderments (the Romanists urge) have taken place especially through and by the misuse of the Scriptures. Whatever God has given, we ought to think necessary;--the Scriptures, the Church, the Spirit. Why disjoin them? Ib. p. 186. Now a perpetual miracle, considered as the evidence of any thing, is nonsense; because were it at first ever so apparently contrary to the known course of nature, it must in time be taken for the natural effect of some unknown cause, as all physical 'phænomena', if far enough traced, always are; and consequently must fall into a level, as to a capacity of proving any thing, with the most ordinary appearances of nature, which, though all of them miracles, as to the primary cause of their production, can never be applied to the proof of an inspiration, because ordinary and common. I doubt this, though I have no doubt that it would be pernicious. The yearly blossoming of Aaron's rod is against Skelton, who confounds single facts with classes of 'phænomena', and he draws his conclusion from an arbitrary and, as seems to me, senseless definition of a miracle. Ib. p. 214. End of Discourse II. Skelton appears to have confounded two errors very different in kind and in magnitude;--that of the Infidel, against whom his arguments are with few exceptions irrefragable; and that of the Christian, who, sincerely believing the Law, the Prophecies, the miracles and the doctrines, all in short which in the Scriptures themselves is declared to have been revealed, does not attribute the same immediate divinity to all and every part of the remainder. It would doubtless be more Christian-like to substitute the views expressed in the next Discourse (III.); but still the latter error is not as the former. Ib. p. 234. But why should not the conclusion be given up, since it is possible Christ may have had two natures in him, so as to have been less than the Father in respect to the one, and equal to him in respect to the other. I understand these words ('My Father is greater than I') of the divinity--and of the Filial subordination, which does not in the least encroach on the equality necessary to the unity of Father, Son, and Spirit. Bishop Bull does the same. See too Skelton's own remarks in Discourse V. p. 265. Ib. p. 251. This was necessary, because their Law was ordained by angels. Now this is an instance of what I cannot help regarding as a superstitious excess of reverence for single texts. We know that long before the Epistle to the Hebrews was written, the Alexandrian Church, which by its intercourse with Greek philosophers, chiefly Platonists, had become ashamed of the humanities of the Hebrew Scriptures, in defiance of those Scriptures had pretended, that it was not the Supreme Being who gave the Law in person to Moses, but some of his angels. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, arguing 'ad homines', avails himself of this, in order to prove that on their own grounds the Mosaic was of dignity inferior to the Christian dispensation. To get rid of this no-difficulty in a single verse or two in the Epistles, Skelton throws an insurmountable difficulty on the whole Mosaic history. Ib. p. 265. Therefore, he saith, 'I' (as a man) 'can of myself do nothing'. Even of this text I do not see the necessity of Skelton's parenthesis (as a man). Nay it appears to me (I confess) to turn a sublime and most instructive truth into a truism. "But if not as the Son of God, therefore 'a fortiori' not as the Son of man, and more especially, as such, in all that refers to the redemption of mankind." Ib. p. 267. To this glory Christ, as God, was entitled from all eternity; but did not acquire a right to it as man, till he had paid the purchase by his blood. I too hold this for a most important truth; but yet could wish it to have been somewhat differently expressed; as thus:--"but did not acquire it as man till the means had been provided and perfected by his blood." Ib. p. 268. If Christ in one place, ('John' xiv. 28,) says, 'My Father is greater than I'; he must be understood of his relation to the Father as his Son, born of a woman. I do not see the necessity of this: does not Christ say, 'My Father and I will come and we will dwell in you?' Nay, I dare confidently affirm that in no one passage of St. John's Gospel is our Lord declared in any special sense the Son of the First Person of the Trinity in reference to his birth from a woman. And remember it is from St. John's Gospel that the words are cited. So too the answer to Philip ought to be interpreted by ch. i. 18. of the same Gospel. Ib. p. 276. I confess I do not agree with Skelton's interpretation of any of these texts entirely. Because I hold the Nicene Faith, and revere the doctrine of the Trinity as the fundamental article of Christianity, I apply to Christ as the Second Person, almost all the texts which Skelton explains of his humanity. At all events 1 consider 'the first-born of every creature' as a false version of the words, which (as the argument and following verse prove) should be rendered 'begotten before', (or rather 'superlatively before'), 'all that was created or made; for by him' they were made. Ib. 'Of that day, and that hour knoweth no man, no not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.' I cannot explain myself here; but I have long thought that our Saviour meant in these words [Greek: ainíttein tàen théotaeta ahutou]--and that like the problem proposed by him to the Scribes, they were intended to prepare the minds of the disciples for this awful mystery--[Greek: ei màe ho patáer]--"unless, or if not, as the Father knows it;" while in St. Matthew the equivalent sense is given by the omission of the [Greek: oud' ho uhíos], and its inclusion in the Father. 'As the Father knoweth me, so know I the Father'. It would have been against the general rule of Scripture prophecies, and the intention of the revelation in Christ, that the first Christians should have been so influenced in their measures and particular actions, as they could not but have been by a particular foreknowledge of the express and precise time at which Jerusalem was to be destroyed. To reconcile them to this uncertainty, our Lord first teaches them to consider this destruction the close of one great epoch, or [Greek: aiôn], as the type of the final close of the whole world of time, that is, of all temporal things; and then reasons with them thus:--"Wonder not that I should leave you ignorant of the former, when even the highest order of heavenly intelligences know not the latter, [Greek: oud' ho uhíos, ei màe ho patáer]; nor should I myself, but that the Father knows it, all whose will is essentially known to me as the Eternal Son. But even to me it is not revealably communicated." Such seems to me the true sense of this controverted passage in Mark, and that it is borne out by many parallel texts in St. John, and that the correspondent text in Matthew, which omits the [Greek: oud' ho huíos], conveys the same sense in equivalent terms, the word [Greek: emou] including the Son in the [Greek: patàer mónos]. For to his only-begotten Son before all time the Father showeth all things. Ib. p. 279. But whether we can reconcile these words to our belief of Christ's prescience and divinity, or not, matters little to the debate about his divinity itself; since we can so fully prove it by innumerable passages of Scripture, too direct, express, and positive, to be balanced by one obscure passage, from 'whence the Arian is to draw the consequence himself, which may possibly be wrong'. Very good. Ib. p. 280. 'We know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding that we may know him that is true; and we are in him that is true, even in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life.'--l John v. 20. The whole connection evidently shows the words to be spoken of Christ. That the words comprehend Christ is most evident. All that can be fairly concluded from 1 Cor. viii. 6, is this:--that the Apostles, Paul and John, speak of the Father as including and comprehending the Son and the Holy Ghost, as his Word and his Spirit; but of these as inferring or supposing the Father, not comprehending him. Whenever, therefore, respecting the Godhead itself, containing both deity and dominion, the term God is distinctively used, it is applied to the Father, and Lord to the Son. Ib. p. 281. But, farther, it is objected that Christ cannot be God, since God calls him 'his servant' more than once, particularly 'Isaiah' xlii. 1. The Prophets often speak of the anti-type, or person typified, in language appropriate to, and suggested by, the type itself. So, perhaps, in this passage, if, as I suppose, Hezekiah was the type immediately present to Isaiah's imagination. However, Skelton's answer is quite sufficient. Ib. p. 287. Hence it appears, that in the passage objected, (1 'Cor'. xv. 24, &c.) Christ is spoken of purely as that Man whom 'God had highly exalted, and to whom he had given a name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow.' (Phil. ii. 9, 10.) I must confess that this exposition does not quite satisfy me. I cannot help thinking that something more and deeper was meant by the Apostle; and this must be sought for in the mystery of the Trinity itself, 'in which' (mystery) 'all treasures of knowledge are hidden'. Ib. p. 318. Hence, perhaps, may be best explained what St. Peter says in the second Epistle, after pleading a miracle. 'We have also a more sure word of prophecy, whereunto you do well that you take heed.' I believe that St. Peter neither said it, nor meant this; but that [Greek: Bebaióteron] follows 'the prophetic word'. We have also the word of prophecy more firm;--that is; we have, in addition to the evidence of the miracles themselves, this further confirmation, that they are the fulfilment of known prophecies. Ib. p. 327. Agreeable to these passages of the Prophet, St. Peter tells us ('Acts' x. 38), 'God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and power'. I have often to complain that too little attention is paid by commentators to the history and particular period in which certain speeches were delivered, or words written. Could St. Peter with propriety have introduced the truth to a prejudiced audience with its deepest mysteries? Must he not have begun with the most evident facts? Ib. Disc. VIII. The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity vindicated. Were I a Clergyman, the paragraphs from p. 366 to p. 370, both inclusive, of this Discourse should form the conclusion of my Sermon on Trinity Sunday,--whether I preached at St. James's, or in a country village. Ib. pp. 374-378. As a reason why we should doubt our own judgment, it is quite fair to remind the objector, that the same difficulty occurs in the scheme of God's ordinary providence. But that a difficulty in a supposed article of revealed truth is solved by the occurrence of the same or of an equivalent difficulty in the common course of human affairs--this I find it hard to conceive. How was the religious, as distinguished from the moral, sense first awakened? What made the human soul feel the necessity of a faith in God, but the apparent incongruity of certain dispensations in this world with the idea of God, with the law written in the heart? Is not the reconciling of these facts or 'phænomena' with the divine attributes, one of the purposes of a revealed religion? But even this is not a full statement of the defect complained of in this solution. A difficulty which may be only apparent (like that other of the prosperity of the wicked) is solved by the declaration of its reality! A difficulty grounded on the fact of temporal and outward privations and sufferings, is solved by being infinitely increased, that is, by the assertion of the same principle on the determination of our inward and everlasting weal and woe. That there is nothing in the Christian Faith or in the Canonical Scriptures, when rightly interpreted, that requires such an argument, or sanctions the recourse to it, I believe myself to have proved in the Aids to Reflection. For observe that "to solve" has a scientific, and again a religious sense, and that in the latter, a difficulty is satisfactorily solved, as soon as its insolvibility for the human mind is proved and accounted for. Ib. (Disc. XIV. pp. 500-502.) Christianity proved by Miracles. I cannot see and never could, the purpose, or 'cui bono', of this reasoning. To whom is it addressed? To a man who denies a God, or that God can reveal his will to mankind? If such a man be not below talking to, he must first be convinced of his miserable blindness respecting these truths; for these are clearly presupposed in every proof of miracles generally. Again, does he admit the authenticity of the Gospels, and the veracity of the Evangelists? Does he credit the facts there related, and as related? If not, these points must be proved; for these are clearly presupposed in all reasoning on the particular miracles of the Christian dispensation. If he does, can he deny that many acts of Christ were wonderful;--that reanimating a dead body in which putrefaction had already commenced,--and feeding four thousand men with a few loaves and fishes, so that the fragments left greatly exceeded the original total quantity,--were wonderful events? Should such a man, 'compos mentis', exist, (which I more than doubt,) what could a wise man do but stare--and leave him? Christ wrought many wonderful works, implying admirable power, and directed to the most merciful and beneficent ends; and these acts were such signs of his divine mission, as rendered inattention or obstinate averseness to the truths and doctrines which he promulgated, inexcusable, and indeed on any hypothesis but that of immoral dispositions and prejudices, utterly inconceivable. In what respect, I pray, can this statement be strengthened by any reasoning about the nature and distinctive essence of miracles 'in abstracto'? What purpose can be answered by any pretended definition of a miracle? If I met with a disputatious word-catcher, or logomachist, who sought to justify his unbelief on this ground, I should not hesitate to say--"Never mind whether it is a miracle or no. Call it what you will;--but do you believe the fact? Do you believe that Christ did by force of his will and word multiply instantaneously twelve loaves and a few small fishes, into sufficient food for a hungering multitude of four thousand men and women?" When I meet with, or from credible authority hear of, a man who believes this fact, and yet thinks it no sign of Christ's mission; when I can even conceive of a man in his right senses who, believing all the facts and events related in the New Testament, and as there related, does yet remain a Deist, I may think it time to enter into a disquisition respecting the right definition of a miracle; and meantime, I humbly trust that believing with my whole heart and soul in the wonderful works of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, I shall not forfeit my title of Christian, though I should not subscribe to this or that divine's right definition of his 'idea' of a miracle; which word is with me no 'idea' at all, but a general term; the common surname, as it were, of the wonderful works wrought by the messengers of God to man in the Patriarchal, Mosaic, and Christian dispensations. It is to these notions and general definitions, far more than to the facts themselves, that the arguments of Infidels apply; and from which they derive their plausibility. Nor is this all. The Infidel imitates the divine, and adopts the same mode of arguing, namely, by this substantiation of mere general or collective terms. For instance, Hume's argument (stated, by the by, before he was born, and far more forcibly, by Dr. South, who places it in the mouth of Thomas,) [2]--reduce it to the particular facts in question, and its whole speciousness vanishes. I am speaking of the particular facts and actions of the Gospel; of those, and those only. Now that I should be deceived, or the eye-witnesses have been deceived, under all the circumstances of those miracles, with all antecedents, accompaniments, and consequents, is quite as contrary to, that is, unparalleled in my experience, as the return to life of a dead man. So again in the second paragraph of page 502, [3] the position is true or false according to the definition of a miracle. In the narrower sense of the term, miracle,--that is, a consequent presented to the outward senses without an adequate antecedent, ejusdem generis,--it is not only false but detractory from the Christian religion. It is a main, nay, an indispensable evidence; but it is not the only, no, nor if comparison be at all allowable, the highest and most efficient; unless, indeed, the term evidence is itself confined to grounds of conviction offered to the senses, but then the position is a mere truism. There is yet another way of reasoning, which I utterly dislike; namely, by putting imaginary cases of imaginary miracles, as Paley has done. "If a dozen different individuals, all men of known sense and integrity, should each independently of the other pledge their everlasting weal on the truth, that they saw a man beheaded and quartered, and that on a certain person's prayer or bidding, the quarters reunited, and then a new head grew on and from out of the stump of the neck: and should the man himself assure you of the same, shew you the junctures, and identify himself to you by some indelible mark, with which you had been previously acquainted,--could you withstand this evidence?" What could a judicious man reply but--"When such an event takes place, I will tell you; but what has this to do with the reasons for our belief in the truth of the written records of the Old and New Testament? Why do you fly off from the facts to a gigantic fiction,--when the possibility of the 'If' with respect to a much less startling narration is the point in dispute between us?" Such and so peculiar, and to an honest mind so unmistakeable, is the character of veracity and simplicity on the very countenance, as it were, of the Gospel, that every remove of the inquirer's attention from the facts themselves is a remove of his conversion. It is your business to keep him from wandering, not to set him the example. Never, surely, was there a more unequal writer than Skelton;--in the discourses on the Trinity, the compeer of Bull and Waterland; and yet the writer of these pages, 500-501! Natural magic! a stroke of art! for example, converting the Nile into blood! And then his definition of a miracle. Suspension of the laws of nature! suspension--laws--nature! Bless me! a chapter would be required for the explanation of each several word of this definition, and little less than omniscience for its application in any one instance. An effect presented to the senses without any adequate antecedent, 'ejusdem generis', is a miracle in the philosophic sense. Thus: the corporeal ponderable hand and arm raised with no other known causative antecedent, but a thought, a pure act of an immaterial essentially invisible imponderable will, is a miracle for a reflecting mind. Add the words, 'præter experientiam': and we have the definition of a miracle in the popular, practical, and appropriated sense. Vol. III. That all our thoughts and views respecting our Faith should be consistent with each other, and with the attributes of God, is most highly desirable: but when the great diversities of men's understandings, and the unavoidable influence of circumstances on the mind, are considered, we may hope from the Divine mercy, that the agreement in the result will suffice; and that he who sincerely and efficiently believes that Christ left the glory which he had with the Father before all worlds, to become man and die for our salvation,--that by him we may, and by him alone we can, be saved,--will be held a true believer,--whether he interprets the words 'sacrifice,' 'purchase,' 'bargain,' 'satisfaction,' of the creditor by full payment of the 'debt,' and the like as proper and literal expressions of the redeeming act and the cause of our salvation, as Skelton seems to have done;--or (as I do) as figurative language truly designating the effects and consequences of this adorable act and process. Ib. p. 393. But were the prospect of a better parish, in case of greater diligence, set before him by his Bishop, on the music of such a promise, like one bit by a 'tarantula', we should probably soon see him in motion, and serving God, (O shameful!) for the sake of Mammon, as if his torpid body had been animated anew by a returning soul. Without any high-flying in Christian morality, I cannot keep shrinking from the wish here expressed; at all events, I cannot sympathize with, or participate in, the expectation of "an infinite advancement" from men so motived. Ib. p. 394. Yet excommunication, the inherent discipline of the Church, which it exercised under persecution, which it is still permitted to exercise under the present establishment. Rarely I suspect, without exposing the Clergyman to the risk of an action for damages, or some abuse. There are few subjects that more need investigation, yet require more vigour and soundness of judgment to be rightly handled, than this of Christian discipline in a Church established by law. It is indeed a most difficult and delicate problem, and supplied Baxter with a most plausible and to me the only perplexing of his numerous objections to our Ecclesiastical Constitution. On the other hand, I saw clearly that he was requiring an impossibility; and that his argument carried on to its proper consequences concluded against all Church Establishment, not more against the National Church of which he complained, than the one of his own clipping and shaping which he would have substituted; consequently, every proof (and I saw many and satisfactory proofs) of the moral and political necessity of an Established Church, was at the same time a pledge that a deeper insight would detect some flaw in the reasoning of the Disciplinarians. For if A. be right and requisite, B., which is incompatible with A., cannot be rightly required. And this it was, that first led me to the distinction between the 'Ecclesia' and an 'Enclesia', concerning which see my Essay on Establishment and Dissent, in which I have met the objection to my position, that Christian discipline is incompatible with a Church established by law, from the fact of the discipline of the Church of Scotland. [4] Who denies that it is in the power of a legislature to punish certain offences by ignominy, and to make the clergy magistrates in reference to these? The question is, whether it is wise or expedient, which it may be, or rather may have been, in Scotland, and the contrary in England? Wise or unwise, this is not discipline, not Christian discipline, enforced only by spiritual motives, enacted by spiritual authority, and submitted to for conscience' sake. Ib. p. 446. Be this as it may, the foreknowledge and the decree were both eternal. Here now it is a clear point that the moral actions of all accountable agents were, with certainty, fore-known, and their doom unalterably fixed, long before any one of them existed. Strange that so great a man as Skelton should first affirm eternity of both, yet in the next sentence talk of "long before." These Reflections [5] are excellent, but here Skelton offends against his own canons. I should feel no reluctance, moral or speculative, in accepting the apparent necessity of both propositions, as a sufficient reason for believing both; and the transcendancy of the subject as a sufficient solution of their apparent incompatibility. But yet I think that another view of the subject, not less congruous with universal reason and more agreeable to the light of reason in the human understanding, might be defended, without detracting from any perfection of the Divine Being. Nay, I think that Skelton needed but one step more to have seen it. Ib. p. 478. 'In fine.' To what purpose were these Reflections, taken as a whole, written? I cannot answer. To dissuade men from reasoning on a subject beyond our faculties? Then why all this reasoning? Vol. IV. p. 28. Deism Revealed. 'Shepherd'. Were you ever at Constantinople, Sir? 'Dechaine'. Never. 'Shep.' Yet I believe you have no more doubt there is such a city, than that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right ones. 'Temp.' I am sure 1 have not. 'Dech.' Nor I; but what then? 'Shep.' Pray, Mr. Dechaine, did you see Julius Cæsar assassinated in the Capitol? 'Dech.' A pretty question! No indeed, Sir. 'Shep.' Have you any doubts about the truth of what is told us by the historians concerning that memorable transaction? 'Dech.' Not the least. 'Shep.' Pray, is it either self-evident or demonstrable to you, at this time and place, that there is any such city as Constantinople, or that there ever was such a man as Cæsar? 'Dech.' By no means. 'Shep.' And you have all you know concerning the being of either the city, or the man, merely from the report of others, who had it from others, and so on, through many links of tradition? 'Dech.' I have. 'Shep.' You see then, that there are certain cases, in which the evidence of things not seen nor either sensibly or demonstrably perceived, can justly challenge so entire an assent, that he who should pretend to refuse it in the fullest measure of acquiescence, would be deservedly esteemed the most stupid or perverse of mankind. That there is a sophism here, every one must feel in the very fact of being 'non-plus'd' without being convinced. The sophism consists in the instance being 'haud ejusdem generis' ([Greek: élegchos metabáseôs eis állo génos]); and what the allogeneity is between the assurance of the being of Madrid or Constantinople, and the belief of the fact of the resurrection of Christ, I have shown elsewhere. The universal belief of the 'tyrannicidium' of Julius Cæsar is doubtless a fairer instance, but the whole mode of argument is unsound and unsatisfying. Why run off from the fact in question, or the class at least to which it belongs? The victory can be but accidental--a victory obtained by the unguarded logic, or want of logical foresight of the antagonist, who needs only narrow his positions to narrations of facts and events, in our judgment of which we are not aided by the analogy of previous and succeeding experience, to deprive you of the opportunity of skirmishing thus on No Man's land. But this is Skelton's ruling passion, sometimes his strength--too often his weakness. He must force the reader to believe: or rather he has an antagonist, a wilful infidel or heretic always and exclusively before his imagination; or if he thinks of the reader at all, it is as of a partizan enjoying every hard thump, and smashing 'fister' he gives the adversary, whom Skelton hates too cordially to endure to obtain any thing from him with his own liking. No! It must be against his will, and in spite of it. No thanks to him--the dog could not help himself! How much more effectual would he have found it to have commenced by placing himself in a state of sympathy with the supposed sceptic or unbeliever;--to have stated to him his own feelings, and the real grounds on which they rested;--to have shown himself the difference between the historical facts which the sceptic takes for granted and believes spontaneously, as it were,--and those, which are to be the subject of discussion; and this brings the question at once to the proof. And here, after all, lies the strength of Skelton's reasoning, which would have worked far more powerfully, had it come first and single, and with the whole attention directed towards it. Ib. p. 35. 'Templeton.' Surely the resurrection of Christ, or any other man, cannot be a thing impossible with God. It is neither above his power, nor, when employed for a sufficient purpose, inconsistent with his majesty, wisdom, and goodness. This is the ever open and vulnerable part of Deism. The Deist, as a Deist, believes, 'implicite' at least, so many and stupendous miracles as to render his disbelief of lesser miracles, simply because they are miraculous, gross inconsistencies. To have the battle fairly fought out, Spinoza, or a Bhuddist, or a Burmese Gymnosoph, should be challenged. Then, I am deeply persuaded, would the truth appear in full evidence, that no Christ, no God,--and, conversely, if the Father, then the Son. I can never too often repeat, that revealed religion is a pleonasm. --Religion is revelation, and revelation the only religion. Ib. p. 37. 'Shep.' Those believers, whose faith is to rely on the truth of the Christian history, rest their assent on a written report made by eye-witnesses; which report the various Churches and sects, jealous of one another, took care to preserve genuine and uncorrupted, at least in all material points, and all the religious writers in every age since have amply attested. A divine of the present day who shall undertake the demonstration of the truth of Christianity by external evidences, or historically, must not content himself with assuming or asserting this. He must either prove it; or prove that such proof is not necessary. I myself should be quite satisfied if I proved the former position in respect to the fourth Gospel, and showed that the evidence of the other three was equivalent to a record by an eye-witness: which would not be at all inconsistent with my contending at the same time for the authenticity of the first Gospel, or rather for the Catholic interpretation of the title-words [Greek: Katà Matthaion], as the more probable opinion, which a sound divine will neither abandon nor overload, neither place it in the foundation, nor on the other hand suffer it to be extruded from the wall. Believe me, there is great, very great, danger in these broad unqualified assertions that Skelton deals in. Even though the balance of evidence should be on his side, yet the inquirer will be unfavourably affected by the numerous doubts and difficulties which an acquaintance with the more modern works of Biblical criticism will pour upon him, and for which his mind is wholly unprepared. To meet with a far weaker evidence than we had taken it for granted we were to find, gives the same shake to the mind, that missing a stair gives to the body. Ib. p. 243. 'Temp.' You, Mr. Dechaine, seem to forget that God is just; and you, Mr. Shepherd, that he is merciful 'Dech.' I insist, that, as God is merciful, he will forgive. 'Shep.' And I insist, that, as he is just, he will punish. 'Temp.' Pray Mr. Dechaine, are you able, upon the Deistical scheme to rid yourself of this difficulty? 'Dech.' I see no difficulty in it at all. God gives us laws only for our good, and will never suffer those laws to become a snare to us, and the occasion of our eternal misery. Here is the 'cardo'! The man of sense asserts that it is necessary for the good of all, that a code of laws should exist, while yet it is impossible that all should at all times be obeyed by each person: but what is impossible cannot be required. Nevertheless, it may be required that no 'iota' of any one of these laws should be wilfully and deliberately transgressed, nor is there any one for the transgression of which the transgressor must not hold himself punishable. "And yet" (says our man of sense,) "what may not be said of any one point, or any one moment, cannot be denied of the collective agency of a whole life, or any considerable section of it. Here we find ourselves constrained by our best feelings to praise or condemn, to reward or punish, according as a great predominance of acts of obedience or disobedience, and a continued love of the better, or the lusting after the worst, manifests the maxim ('regula maxima'), the radical will and proper character of the individual. So parents judge of their children; so schoolmasters of their scholars; so friends of friends, and even so will God judge his creatures, if we are to trust in our common sense, or believe the repeated declarations in the Old Testament." And now I should be glad to hear any satisfactory 'sensible' reply to this, or any answer that does not fly higher than 'sense' can follow, and pierce into "the thick clouds" of decried metaphysics! For no fair reply can be imagined, but one which would find the root of the moral evil, the true [Greek: ponaerón], in this very impossibility. Ib. p. 249. 'Cunningham.' But how does all this discourse about sacrifices and the natural light show that your faith does not ascribe injustice to God in putting an innocent person to death for the transgressions of the guilty? 'Shep.' Was Christ innocent? 'Cunn.' 'He was without sin.' 'Shep.' And he was put to death by the appointment and predetermination of God? 'Cunn.' The Jews put him to death. 'Shep.' Do not evade the question. Was he not 'the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world'? Was he not 'so delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, that the Jews, having taken him, by wicked hands crucified and slew him?' 'Cunn'. And what then? 'Shep'. Nothing; but that you are to answer, as well as I, for saying that God predetermined the death of this only innocent person. I am less pleased with this volume than with any of the preceding. Ask your own heart and conscience whether (for instance,) they are satisfied with this defence 'duri per durius': or whether frightening a modest query into silence by perverting it into an accusation of the Almighty, by virtue of a conclusion borrowed from the Calvinistic theory of Predestination, is not more in the spirit of Job's comforters, than becomes a minister of the Apostolic Church of England and Ireland? Such arguments are but edge-tools at the safest, but more often they may rather be likened to the two-edged blade of Parysatis's knife, the one of which was poisoned. Leave them to Calvin, or those who dare appropriate Calvin's words, that "God's absolute will is the only rule of his justice;"--thus dividing the divine attributes. Yet Calvin himself distinguishes the hidden from the revealed God, even as the Greek Fathers distinguished the [Greek: thélaema Theou], the absolute ground of all being, from the [Greek: Boulàe tou Theou], as the cause and disposing providence of all existence. But I disapprove of the plan and spirit of this work, (Deism Revealed.) The cold-hearted, worldly-minded, cunning Deist, or the coarse sensual Infidel, is of all men the least likely to be converted; and the conscientious, inquiring, though misled and perplexed, Sceptic will throw aside a book at once, as not applicable to his case, which treats every doubt as a crime, and supposes that there is no doubt at all possible but in a bad heart and from wicked wishes. Compare this with St. Paul's language concerning the Jews. So again, pp. 225, &c. of this volume. Do not the plainest intuitions of our moral and rational being confirm the positions here attributed to the Deist, Dechaine? Are they not the same by which Melancthon de-Calvinized, at least de-Augustinized, the heroic Luther;--those which constitute one of the only two essential differences between the Augsburg Confession and the Calvinistic Articles of Faith? And can anything be more flittery and special-pleading than Skelton's objections? And again, p. 507, "and that prayer which he (Tindal) is reported to have used a little before his death, 'If there is a God, I desire he may have mercy on me;'"--was it Christian-like to publish and circulate a blind report--so improbable and disgusting, as to demand the strongest and most unsuspicious testimony for its reception? Ib. p. 268. 'Shep'. Pray, Mr. Dechaine, if a person, whom you knew to be an honest and clear-sighted man, should solemnly assure you he saw a dead man restored to life, what would you think of his testimony? 'Dech'. As I could not possibly have as strong an assurance of his honesty, clear-sightedness, and penetration, as of the great improbability of the fact, I should not believe him. 'Shep'. Well; it is true he might be deceived himself, or intend to impose on you. But in case ten such persons should all, at different times, confirm the same report, how would this affect you? There is one inconvenience, not to say danger, in this argument of Mr. Shepherd's; namely, that of its not standing in the same force, when it comes to be repeated in the particular miraculous facts in support of which it is adduced. Ib. p. 281. No other ancient book can be so well proved to have been the work of the author it is now ascribed to, as every book of the New Testament can be proved to have been written by him whose name it hath all along borne. This is true to the full extent that the defence of the divinity of our religion needs, or perhaps permits, and I see no advantage gained by asserting more. I must lose all power of distinction, before I can affirm that the genuineness of the first Gospel,--that in its present form it was written by Matthew, or is a literal translation of a Gospel written by him,--rests on as strong external evidence as Luke's, or on as strong internal evidence as St. John's. Sufficient that the evidence greatly preponderates in its favor. [Footnote 1: The complete Works of the late Rev. Philip Skelton, Rector of Fintona. 6. vols. 8vo. London, 1824. 'Ed.'] [Footnote 2: See South's Works, vol. iii. p. 500. Clarendon edit. 1823 --Ed.] [Footnote 3: But it will be proper to observe, that it strikes directly at the very root of Revelation, which cannot possibly give any other evidence of itself, as the dictate of God, but what must be drawn from miracles, wrought to prove the divine mission of those who publish it to the world.] [Footnote 4: The Editor is not aware of the existence of the Essay here mentioned. But see for the distinction of the 'Ecclesia' and 'Enclesia', the Church and State, 3rd edit.--Ed.] [Footnote 5: On Predestination, as far as p. 445.] * * * * * NOTES ON ANDREW FULLER'S CALVINISTIC AND SOCINIAN SYSTEMS EXAMINED AND COMPARED. [1] 1807. Letter III. p. 38. They (the Jews) did not deny that to be God's own Son was to be equal with the Father, nor did they allege that such an equality would destroy the divine unity: a thought of this kind never seems to have occurred to their minds. In so truly excellent a book as this is, I regret that this position should rest on an assertion. The equality of Christ would not, indeed, destroy the unity of God the Father, considered as one Person: but, unless we presume the Jews in question acquainted with the great truth of the Tri-unity, we must admit that it would be considered as implying Ditheism. Now that some among the Jews had made very near approaches, though blended with errors, to the doctrine taught in John, c. i., we can prove from the writings of Philo;--and the Socinians can never prove that these Jews did not know at least of the doctrine of their schools concerning the only-begotten Word--[Greek: Lógos monogenáes],--not as an attribute, much less as an abstraction or personification--but as a distinct 'Hypostasis' [Greek: symphysikáe]:-and hence it might be shown that their offence was that the carpenter's son, the Galilean, should call himself the [Greek: Theòs phanerós]. This might have been rendered more than probable by the concluding sentence of Christ's answer to the disciples of John;--'and blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me' (Luke vii. 23.); which appears to have no adequate or even tolerable meaning, unless in reference to the passage in Isaiah, (lxi. 1, 2.) prophesying that Jehovah himself would come among them, and do the things which our Saviour states himself to have done. Thus, too, I regret that the answer of our Lord, (John x. 34-36.) being one of the imagined strong-holds of the Socinians, should not have been more fully cleared up. I doubt not that Fuller's is a true interpretation; and that no other is consistent with our Lord's various other declarations. But the words in and by themselves admit a more plausible misinterpretation than is elsewhere the case of Socinian displanations. In short, I think both passages would have been better deferred to a further part of the work. Let me add that a mighty and comparatively new argument against the Socinians may be most unanswerably deduced from this reply of our Lord's, even were it considered as a mere 'argumentum ad homines': --namely, that it was not his Messiahship that so offended the Jews, but his Sonship; otherwise, our Saviour's language would have neither force, motive, or object. "Even were I no more than the Messiah, in your meanest conceptions of that character, yet after what I have done before your eyes, nothing but malignant hearts could have prevented you from adopting a milder interpretation of my words, when in your own Scriptures there exists a precedent that so much more than merely justifies me." And this I believe to be the meaning of the words as intended to be understood by the Jews in question; though, doubtless, Fuller's sense exists 'implicite'. No candid person would ever call it an evasion, to prove the injustice and malignity of an accuser even from his own grounds:--"You charge me falsely; but even were your charge true, namely, that I am a mere man, and yet call myself the Son of God, still it would not follow that I have been guilty of blasphemy." But as understood by the modern Unicists, it would verily, verily, be an evasive ambiguity, most unworthy of Christian belief concerning his Saviour. Common charity would have demanded of him to have said:--"I am a mere man: I do not pretend to be more; but I used the words in analogy to the words, 'Ye are as Gods'; and I have a right to do so: for though a mere man, I am the great Prophet and Messenger which Moses promised you." Letter V. p. 72. If Dr. Priestley had formed his estimate of human virtue by that great standard which requires love to God with all the heart, soul, mind, and strength, and our neighbour as ourselves,--instead of representing men by nature as having "more virtue than vice,"--he must have acknowledged with the Scripture, that 'the whole world lieth in wickedness--that every thought and imagination of their heart is only evil continually'--and that 'there is none of them that doeth good, no not one'. To this the Unicists would answer, that by 'the whole world' is meant all the worldly-minded;--no matter in how direct opposition to half a score other texts! "One text at a time!" sufficient for the day is the evil thereof!--and in this way they go on pulling out hair by hair from the horse's tail, (say rather, dreaming that they do so,) and then conclude with a shout that the horse never had a tail! For why? This hair is not a tail, nor that, nor the third, and so on to the very last; and how can all do what none of all does?--Ridiculous as this is, it is a fair image of Socinian logic. Thank God, their plucking out is a mere fancy;--and the sole miserable reality is the bare rump which they call their religion;--but that is the ape's own growth. Ib. p. 77. First, that all punishments are designed for the good of the whole, and less or corrective punishments for the good of the offender, is admitted. * * God never inflicts punishment for the sake of punishing. This is not, [Greek: hôs émoige dokei], sufficiently guarded. That all punishments work for the good of the whole, and that the good of the whole is included in God's design, I admit: but that this is the sole cause, and the sole justification of divine punishment, I cannot, I dare not, concede;--because I should thus deny the essential evil of guilt, and its inherent incompatibility with the presence of a Being of infinite holiness. Now, exclusion from God implies the sum and utmost of punishment; and this would follow from the very essence of guilt and holiness, independently of example, consequence, or circumstance. Letter VI. p. 90. (The systems compared as to their tendency to promote morality in general.) I have hitherto made no objection to, no remark on, any one part of this Letter; for I object to the whole--not as Calvinism, but--as what Calvin would have recoiled from. How was it that so good and shrewd a man as Andrew Fuller should not have seen, that the difference between a Calvinist and a Priestleyan Materialist-Necessitarian consists in this:--The former not only believes a will, but that it is equivalent to the 'ego ipse', to the actual self, in every moral agent; though he believes that in human nature it is an enslaved, because a corrupt, will. In denying free will to the unregenerated he no more denies will, than in asserting the poor negroes in the West Indies to be slaves I deny them to be men. Now the latter, the Priestleyan, uses the word will,--not for any real, distinct, correspondent power, but,--for the mere result and aggregate of fibres, motions, and sensations; in short, it is a mere generic term with him, just as when we say, the main current in a river. Now by not adverting to this, and alas! misled by Jonathan Edwards's book, Fuller has hidden from himself and his readers the damnable nature of the doctrine--not of necessity (for that in its highest sense is identical with perfect freedom; they are definitions each of the other); but--of extraneous compulsion. O! even this is not adequate to the monstrosity of the thought. A denial of all agency;--or an assertion of a world of agents that never act, but are always acted upon, and yet without any one being that acts;--this is the hybrid of Death and Sin, which throughout this letter is treated so amicably! Another fearful mistake, and which is the ground of the former, lies in conceding to the Materialist, 'explicite et implicite', that the [Greek: noúmenon], the 'intelligibile', the 'ipseitas super sensibilis', of guilt is in time, and of time, and, consequently, a mechanism of cause and effect;--in other words, in confounding the [Greek: phainómena, tà rhéonta, tà màe óntôs ónta],--all which belong to time, and cannot be even thought of except as effects necessarily predetermined by the precedent causes, (themselves in their turn effects of other causes),--with the transsensual ground or actual power. After such admissions, no other possible defence can be made for Calvinism or any other 'ism' than the wretched recrimination: "Why, yours, Dr. Priestley, is just as bad!"--Yea, and no wonder:--for in essentials both are the same. But there was no reason for Fuller's meddling with the subject at all,--metaphysically, I mean. Ib. p. 95. If the unconditionality of election render it unfriendly to virtue, it must be upon the supposition of that view of things, "which attributes more to God, and less to man," having such ascendancy; which is the very reverse of what Dr. Priestley elsewhere teaches, and that in the same performance. But in both systems, as Fuller has erroneously stated his own, man is annihilated. There is neither more nor less; it is all God; all, all are but 'Deus infinite modificatus':--in brief, both systems are not Spinosism, for no other reason than that the logic and logical consequency of 10 Fullers + 10 X 10 Dr. Priestleys, piled on each other, would not reach the calf of Spinoza's leg. Both systems of necessity lead to Spinosism, nay, to all the horrible consequences attributed to it by Spinoza's enemies. O, why did Andrew Fuller quit the high vantage ground of notorious facts, plain durable common sense, and express Scripture, to delve in the dark in order to countermine mines under a spot, on which he had no business to have wall, tent, temple, or even standing-ground! [Footnote 1: The Calvinistic and Socinian Systems examined and compared, as to their moral tendency; in a series of Letters addressed to the friends of vital and practical religion; especially those amongst Protestant Dissenters. By Andrew Fuller. Market Harborough. 1793.] * * * * * NOTES ON WHITAKER'S ORIGIN OF ARIANISM DISCLOSED. [1] 1810. Chap. I. 4. p. 30. 'Making himself equal with God'. Whoever reads the four verses (John v. 16-19,) attentively, judging of the meaning of each part by the context, must needs, I think, see that the [Greek: íson heautòn poiôn tòn Theô] (18) refers,--not to the [Greek: paterá ídion élege tòn Theòn], (18) or the [Greek: ho patáer mou] (17), but--to the [Greek: ergázetai, kagô ergázomai] (17). The 19th verse, which is directly called Jesus' reply, takes no notice whatever of the [Greek: ho patáer mou] (17), but consists wholly of a justification of the [Greek: kagô ergázomai]. 1803. The above was written many years ago. I still think the remark plausible, though I should not now express myself so positively. I imagined the Jews to mean: "he has evidently used the words [Greek: ho patáer mou]--not in the sense in which all good men may use them, but--in a literal sense, because by the words that followed, [Greek: ergázetai, kagô ergázomai], he makes himself equal to God." To justify these words seemed to me to be the purport of Christ's reply. Chap. II. 1. p. 34. [Greek: (Philôn)--perì mèn oun tà theia kaì pátria matháemata, póson te kaì paelíkon eisenáenektai pónon, érgô pasi daelos kaì perì tà philósopha dè kaì eleuthéria taes éxôthen paideías oiós tis aen, oudèn dei légein hóti kaì málista tàen katà Plátôna kaì Pythagóran ezaelôkôs agôgàen, diénegken ápantas toùs kath' heautòn, historeitai]. Euseb. Hist. II. 4. Philo's acquaintance with the doctrines of the heathens was known only by historical report to Eusebius; while the writings of Philo displayed his knowledge in the religion of the Jews. Strange comment. Might I not, after having spoken of Dun Scotus's works, say;--"he is reported to have surpassed all his contemporaries in subtlety of logic:"--yet still mean no other works than those before mentioned? Are not Philo's works full of, crowded with, Platonic and Pythagorean philosophy? Eusebius knew from his works that he was a great Platonic scholar; but that he was greater than any other man of his age, he could only learn from report or history. That Virgil is a great poet I know from his poems; but that he was the greatest of the Augustan age, I must learn from Quinctilian and others. Ib. p. 35. Philo and the author of the Wisdom of Solomon,--(or rather, perhaps, authors; for the first ten chapters form a complete work of themselves,)--were both Cabalistico-Platonizing Jews of Alexandria. As far as, being such, they must agree, so far they do agree; and as widely as such men could differ, do they differ. Not only the style of the Wisdom of Solomon is generically different from Philo's,--so much so that I should deem it a free translation from a Hebrew original,--but also in all the 'minutiæ' of traditional history and dogma it contradicts Philo. Philo attributes the creation of man to angels; and they infused the evil principle through their own imperfections. In the Book of Wisdom, God created man spotless, and the Devil tempting him occasioned the Fall. So the whole account of the plagues of Egypt differs as widely as possible, even to absolute contradiction. The origin of idolatry is explained altogether differently by Philo, and by the Book of Wisdom. In short, so unsupported is the tradition that many have supposed an elder Philo as the author. That the second and third chapters allude to Christ is a groundless hypothesis. The 'just man' is called 'the son of God', Jehovah, [Greek: pais Kyrión];--but Christ's specific title which was deemed blasphemous by the Jews, was 'Ben Elohim', [Greek: uhiòs tou Theou];--and the fancy that Philo was a Christian in heart, but dared not openly profess himself such, is too absurd. Why no traces in his latest work, or those of his middle age? Why not the least variation in his religious or philosophical creeds in his latter works, written long after the resurrection, from those composed by him before, or a few years after, Christ's birth? Some of Philo's earlier works must have been written when our Lord was in his infancy, or at least boyhood. In short, just take all those passages of Philo which most closely resemble others in the Wisdom of Solomon, and contain the same or nearly the same thoughts, and write them in opposite columns, and no doubt will remain that Philo was not the composer of the Book of Wisdom. Philo subtle, and with long involved periods knit together by logical connectives: the Book of Wisdom sententious, full of parallelisms, assertory and Hebraistic throughout. It was either composed by a man who tried to Hebraize the Greek, or, if a translator, by one who tried to Greecise the Hebraisms of his original--not to disguise or hide them--but only so as to prevent them from repelling or misleading the Greek reader. The different use of the Greek particles in the Wisdom of Solomon, and in the works of Philo, is sufficient to confute the hypothesis of Philo being the author. As little could it have been written by a Christian. For it could not have been a Christian of Palestine, from the overflowing Alexandrine Platonism;--nor a Christian at all; for it contradicts the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, and in no wise connects any redemptory or sacrificial virtue with the death of his 'just man';--denies original sin in the Christian sense, and explains the vice and virtue of mankind by the actions of the souls of men in a state of pre-existence. No signs or miracles are referred to in the account of 'the just man'; and that it was intended as a generalization is evident from the change of the singular into the plural number in the third chapter. The result is, in my judgment, that this Book was composed by an unknown Jew of Alexandria, either sometime before, or at the same time with, Christ. I do not think St. Paul's parallel passages amount to any proof of quotation or allusion;--they contain the common doctrine of the spiritualized Judaism in the Cabala;--and yet the work could scarcely have been written long before Christ, or it would certainly have been quoted or mentioned by Philo, and most probably by Josephus. And this, too, is an answer to the splendid and well-supported hypothesis of its being a translation from a Chaldaic original, composed by Jerubbabel. The variations of the Syriac translation,--which are so easily explained by translating the passage into the Chaldaic, when the cause of the mistake in the Greek or of the variation in the Syriac, is seen at once,--are certainly startling; but they are too free; and how could the Fathers, Jerome for example, remain ignorant of the existence of this Chaldaic original? My own opinion is, as I said before, that the Book was written in Greek by an Alexandrian Jew, who had formed his style on that of the LXX., and was led still further to an imitation of the Old Testament manner by the nature of his fiction, and as a dramatic propriety, and yet deviated from it partly on account of the very remoteness of his Platonic conceptions from the simplicity and poverty of the Hebrew; and partly because of the wordy rhetoric epidemic in Alexandria: and that it was written before the death, if not the birth, of Christ, I am induced to believe, because I do not think it probable that a book composed by a Jew, who had confessed Christ after the resurrection, would so soon have been received by the Christians, and so early placed in the very next rank to works of full inspiration. Taken, therefore, as a work 'ante', or at least 'extra, Christum', it is most valuable as ascertaining the opinions of the learned Jews on many subjects, and the general belief concerning immortality, and a day of judgment. On this ground Whitaker might have erected a most formidable battery, that would have played on the very camp and battle-array of the Socinians, that is, of those who consider Christ only as a teacher of important truths. In referring to the Cabala, I am not ignorant of the date of the oldest Rabbinical writings which contain or refer to this philosophy, but I coincide with Eichorn, and very many before Eichorn, that the foundations of the Cabala were laid and well known long before Christ, though not all the fanciful superstructure. I am persuaded that new light might be thrown on the Apocalypse by a careful study of the Book Sohar, and of whatever else there may be of that kind. The introduction (i. 4,) is clearly Cabala:--the [Greek: ho ôn, kaì ho aen, kaì ho erchómenos]= 3, and the 'seven spirits' = 10 'Sephiroth', constituting together the 'Adam Kadmon', the second Adam of St. Paul, the incarnate one in the Messiah. Were it not for the silence of Philo and Josephus, which I am unable to explain if the Wisdom of Solomon was written so long before Christ, I might perhaps incline to believe it composed shortly after, if not during, the persecution of the Jews in Egypt under Ptolemy Philopator. This hypothesis would give a particular point to the bitter exposure of idolatry, to the comparison between the sufferings of the Jews, and those of idolatrous nations, to the long rehearsal and rhetorical declaration of the plagues of Egypt, and to the reward of 'the just man' after a death of martyrdom; and would besides help to explain the putting together of the first ten chapters, and the fragment contained in the remaining chapters. They were works written at the same time, and by the same author: nay, I do not think it absurd to suppose, that the chapters after the tenth were annexed by the writer himself, as a long explanatory appendix; or, possibly, if they were once a separate work, these nine concluding chapters were parts of a book composed during the persecution in Egypt, the introduction and termination of which, being personal and of local application, were afterwards omitted or expunged in order not to give offence to the other Egyptians,--perhaps, to spare the shame of such Jews as had apostatized through fear, and in general not to revive heart-burnings. In modern language I should call these chapters in their present state a Note on c. x. 15-19. On a reperusal of this Book, I rather believe that these latter chapters never formed part of any other work, but were composed as a sort of long explanatory Postscript, with particular bearing on certain existing circumstances, to which this part of the Jewish history was especially applicable. Nay, I begin to find the silence of Philo and Josephus less inexplicable, and to imagine that I discover the solution of this problem in the very title of the Book. No one expects to find any but works of authenticity enumerated in these writers; but to this a work, calling itself the Wisdom of Solomon, both being a fiction and never meant to pass for anything else, could make no pretensions. To have approximated it to the Holy Books of the nation would have injured the dignity of the Jewish Canon, and brought suspicion on the genuine works of Solomon, while it would have exposed to a charge of forgery a composition which was in itself only an innocent dramatic monologue. N. B. This hypothesis possesses all the advantages, and involves none of the absurdity of that which would attribute the 'Ecclesiasticus' to the infamous Jason, the High Priest. More than one commentator, I find, has suspected that the Wisdom of Solomon and the second book of Maccabees were by the same author. I think this nothing. Ib. p. 36. Philo throws out a number of declarations, that shew his own and the Jewish belief in a secondary sort of God, a God subordinate in origin to the Father of all, yet most intimately united with him, and sharing his most unquestionable honours. The belief of the Alexandrian Jews who had acquired Greek philosophy, no doubt;--but of the Palestine Jews? Ib. 2. p. 48. St. John also is witnessed by a heathen (Amelius,) and by one who put him down for a barbarian, to have represented the Logos as "the Maker of all things," as "with 'God'," and as "God." And St. John is attested to have declared this, "not even as shaded over, but on the contrary as placed in full view." Stranger still. Whitaker could scarcely have read the Greek. Amelius says, that these truths, if stripped of their allegorical dress, ([Greek: metapephrasména ek taes tou Barbárou theologías]) would be plain;--that is, that John in an allegory, as of one particular man, had shadowed out the creation of all things by the Logos, and the after union of the Logos with human nature,--that is, with all men. That this is his meaning, consult Plotinus. Ib. 9. p. 107. "Seest thou not," adds Philo, in the same spirit of subtilizing being into power, and dividing the Logos into two. Who that had even rested but in the porch of the Alexandrian philosophy, would not rather say, 'of substantiating powers and attributes into being?' What is the whole system from Philo to Plotinus, and thence to Proclus inclusively, but one fanciful process of hypostasizing logical conceptions and generic terms? In Proclus it is Logolatry run mad. Chap. III. 1. p. 131-2. Such would be the evidence for that divinity, to accompany the Book of Wisdom, if we considered it to be as old as Solomon, or only as the Son of Sirach. But I consider it to be much later than either, and actually a work of Philo's. * * The language is very similar to Philo's; flowing, lively and happy. How is it possible to have read the short Hebraistic sentences of the Book of Wisdom, and the long involved periods that characterize the style of all Philo's known writings, and yet attribute both to one writer? But indeed I know no instance of assertions made so audaciously, or of passages misrepresented and even mistranslated so grossly, as in this work of Whitaker. His system is absolute naked Tritheism. Ib. The righteous man is shadowed out by the author with a plain reference to our Saviour himself. "'Let us lie in wait for the righteous'," &c. How then could Philo have remained a Jew? Ib. 2. p. 195. In all effects that are voluntary, the cause must be prior to the effect, as the father is to the son in human generation. But in all that are necessary, the effect must be coeval with the cause; as the stream is with the fountain, and light with the sun. Had the sun been eternal in its duration, light would have been co-eternal with it. A just remark; but it cuts two ways. For these necessary effects are not really but only logically different or distinct from the cause:--the rays of the sun are only the sun diffused, and the whole rests on the sensitive form of material space. Take away the notion of material space, and the whole distinction perishes. Chap. IV. 1. p. 266. Justin accordingly sets himself to shew, that in the beginning, before all creatures, God generated a certain rational power out of himself. Is it not monstrous that the Jews having, according to Whitaker, fully believed a Trinity, one and all, but half a century or less before Trypho, Justin should never refer to this general faith, never reproach Trypho with the present opposition to it as a heresy from their own forefathers, even those who rejected Christ, or rather Jesus as Christ?--But no!--not a single objection ever strikes Mr. Whitaker, or appears worthy of an answer. The stupidest become authentic--the most fantastic abstractions of the Alexandrine dreamers substantial realities! I confess this book has satisfied me how little erudition will gain a man now-a-days the reputation of vast learning, if it be only accompanied with dash and insolence. It seems to me impossible, that Whitaker can have written well on the subject of Mary, Queen of Scots, his powers of judgment being apparently so abject. For instance, he says that the grossest moral improbability is swept away by positive evidence:--as if positive evidence (that is, the belief I am to yield to A. or B.) were not itself grounded on moral probabilities. Upon my word Whitaker would have been a choice judge for Charles II. and Titus Oates. Ib. p. 267. Justin therefore proceeds to demonstrate it, (the pre-existence of Christ,) asserting Joshua to have given only a temporary inheritance to the Jews, &c. A precious beginning of a precious demonstration! It is well for me that my faith in the Trinity is already well grounded by the Scriptures, by Bishop Bull, and the best parts of Plotinus, or this man would certainly have made me either a Socinian or a Deist. Ib. 2. p. 270. The general mode of commencing and concluding the Epistles of St. Paul, is a prayer of supplication for the parties, to whom they were addressed; in which he says, 'Grace to you and peace from God our Father, and'--from whom besides?--'the Lord Jesus Christ'; in which our Saviour is at times invoked alone, as 'the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all'; and is even 'invoked' the first at times as, 'the Grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all'; shews us plainly, &c. Invoked! Surely a pious wish is not an invocation. "May good angels attend you!" is no invocation or worship of angels. The essence of religions adoration consists in the attributing, by an act of prayer or praise, a necessary presence to an object--which not being distinguishable, if the object be sensuously present, we may safely define adoration as an acknowledgement of the actual and necessary presence of an intelligent being not present to our senses. "May lucky stars shoot influence on you!" would be a very foolish superstition, --but to say in earnest! "O ye stars, I pray to you, shoot influences on me," would be idolatry. Christ was visually present to Stephen; his invocation therefore was not perforce an act of religious adoration, an acknowledgment of Christ's deity. [Footnote 1: The Origin of Arianism Disclosed. By John Whitaker, B.D. London, 1791.] * * * * * NOTES ON OXLEE ON THE TRINITY AND INCARNATION. [1] 1827 Strange--yet from the date of the book of the Celestial Hierarchies of the pretended Dionysius the Areopagite to that of its translation by Joannes Scotus Erigena, the contemporary of Alfred, and from Scotus to the Rev. John Oxlee in 1815, not unfrequent--delusion of mistaking Pantheism, disguised in a fancy dress of pious phrases, for a more spiritual and philosophic form of Christian Faith! Nay, stranger still:--to imagine with Scotus and Mr. Oxlee that in a scheme which more directly than even the grosser species of Atheism, precludes all moral responsibility and subverts all essential difference of right and wrong, they have found the means of proving and explaining, "the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation," that is, the great and only sufficient antidotes of the right faith against this insidious poison. For Pantheism--trick it up as you will--is but a painted Atheism. A mask of perverted Scriptures may hide its ugly face, but cannot change a single feature. Introduction, p. 4. In the infancy of the Christian Church, and immediately after the general dispersion which necessarily followed the sacking of Jerusalem and Bither, the Greek and Latin Fathers had the fairest opportunity of disputing with the Jews, and of evincing the truth of the Gospel dispensation; but unfortunately for the success of so noble a design, they were totally ignorant of the Hebrew Scriptures, and so wanted in every argument that stamp of authority, which was equally necessary to sanction the principles of Christianity, and to command the respect of their Jewish antagonists. For the confirmation of this remark I may appeal to the Fathers themselves, but especially to Barnabas, Justin, and Irenæus, who in their several attempts at Hebrew learning betray such portentous signs of ignorance and stupidity, that we are covered with shame at the sight of their criticisms. Mr. Oxlee would be delighted in reading Jacob Rhenferd's Disquisition on the Ebionites and other supposed heretics among the Jewish Christians. And I cannot help thinking that Rhenferd, who has so ably anticipated Mr. Oxlee on this point, and in Jortin's best manner displayed the gross ignorance of the Gentile Fathers in all matters relating to Hebrew learning, and the ludicrous yet mischievous results thereof, has formed a juster though very much lower opinion of these Fathers, with a few exceptions, than Mr. Oxlee. I confess that till the light of the twofoldness of the Christian Church dawned on my mind, the study of the history and literature of the Church during the first three or four centuries infected me with a spirit of doubt and disgust which required a frequent recurrence to the writings of John and Paul to preserve me whole in the Faith. Prop. I. ch. i. p. 16. The truth of the doctrine is vehemently insisted on, in a variety of places, by the great R. Moses ben Maimon; who founds upon it the unity of the Godhead, and ranks it among the fundamental articles of the Jewish religion. Thus in his celebrated Letter to the Jews of Marseilles he observes, &c. But what is obtained by quotations from Maimonides more than from Alexander Hales, or any other Schoolman of the same age? The metaphysics of the learned Jew are derived from the same source, namely, Aristotle; and his object was the same, as that of the Christian Schoolmen, namely, to systematize the religion he professed on the form and in the principles of the Aristotelian philosophy. By the by, it is a serious defect in Mr. Oxlee's work, that he does not give the age of the writers whom he cites. He cannot have expected all his readers to be as learned as himself. Ib. ch. iii. p. 26. Mr. Oxlee seems too much inclined to identify the Rabbinical interpretations of Scripture texts with their true sense; when in reality the Rabbis themselves not seldom used those interpretations as a convenient and popular mode of conveying their own philosophic opinions. Neither have I been able to admire the logic so general among the divines of both Churches, according to which if one, two, or perhaps three sentences in any one of the Canonical books appear to declare a given doctrine, all assertions of a different character must have been meant to be taken metaphorically. Ib. p. 26-7. The Prophet Isaiah, too, clearly inculcates the spirituality of the Godhead in the following declaration: 'But Egypt is man, and not God: and their horses flesh, and not spirit'. (c. xxxi. 3.) * * *. In the former member the Prophet declares that Egypt was man, and not God; and then in terms of strict opposition enforces the sentiment by adding, that their cavalry was flesh, and not spirit; which is just as if he had said: 'But Egypt, which has horses in war, is only a man, that is, flesh, and not God, who is spirit'. Assuredly this is a false interpretation, and utterly unpoetical. It is even doubtful whether [Hebrew: unable to transliterate. txt Ed.] ('ruach') in this place means 'spirit' in contradistinction to 'matter' at all, and not rather air or wind. At all events, the poetic decorum, the proportion, and the antithetic parallelism, demand a somewhat as much below God, as the horse is below man. The opposition of 'flesh' and 'spirit' in the Gospel of St. John, who thought in Hebrew, though he wrote in Greek, favours our common version,--'flesh and not spirit': but the place in which this passage stands, namely, in one of the first forty chapters of Isaiah, and therefore written long before the Captivity, together with the majestic simplicity characteristic of Isaiah's name gives perhaps a greater probability to the other: 'Egypt is man, and not God; and her horses flesh, and not wind'. If Mr. Oxlee renders the fourth verse of Psalm civ.--'He maketh spirits his messengers', (for our version--'He maketh his angels spirits'--is without a violent inversion senseless), this is a case in point for the use of the word, 'spirits', in the sense of incorporeal beings. (Mr. Oxlee will hardly, I apprehend, attribute the opinion of some later Rabbis, that God alone and exclusively is a Spirit, to the Sacred Writers, easy as it would be to quote a score of texts in proof of the contrary.) I, however, cannot doubt that the true rendering of the above-mentioned verse in the Psalms is;--'He maketh the winds his angels or messengers, and the lightnings his ministrant servants'. As to Mr. Oxlee's 'abstract intelligences,' I cannot but think 'abstract' for 'pure,' and even pure intelligences for incorporeal, a lax use of terms. With regard to the point in question, the truth seems to be this. The ancient Hebrews certainly distinguished the principle or ground of life, understanding, and will from ponderable, visible, matter. The former they considered and called 'spirit', and believed it to be an emission from the Almighty Father of Spirits: the latter they called 'body'; and in this sense they doubtless believed in the existence of incorporeal beings. But that they had any notion of immaterial beings in the sense of Des Cartes, is contrary to all we know of them, and of every other people in the same degree of cultivation. Air, fire, light, express the degrees of ascending refinement. In the infancy of thought the life, soul, mind, are supposed to be air--'anima, animus', that is, [Greek: ánemos], spiritus, [Greek: pneuma]. In the childhood, they are fire, 'mens ignea, ignicula', and God himself [Greek: pur noeròn, pur aeízôon]. Lastly, in the youth of thought, they are refined into light; and that light is capable of subsisting in a latent state, the experience of the stricken flint, of lightning from the clouds, and the like, served to prove, or at least, it supplied a popular answer to the objection;--"If the soul be light, why is it not visible?" That the purest light is invisible to our gross sense, and that visible light is a compound of light and shadow, were answers of a later and more refined period. Observe, however, that the Hebrew Legislator precluded all unfit applications of the materializing fancy by forbidding the people to 'imagine' at all concerning God. For the ear alone, to the exclusion of all other bodily sense, was he to be designated, that is, by the Name. All else was for the mind--by power, truth, wisdom, holiness, mercy. Prop. II. ch. ii. p. 36. I fear I must surrender my hope that Mr. Oxlee was an exception to the rule, that the study of Rabbinical literature either finds a man 'whimmy', or makes him so. If neither the demands of poetic taste, nor the peculiar character of oracles, were of avail, yet morality and piety might seem enough to convince any one that this vision of Micaiah, (2 'Chron'. c. xviii. 18, &c.) was the poetic form, the veil, of the Prophet's meaning. And a most sublime meaning it was. Mr. Oxlee should recollect that the forms and personages of visions are all and always symbolical. Ib. pp. 39-40. It will not avail us much, however, to have established their incorporeity or spirituality, if what R. Moses affirms be true * * *. This impious paradox * *. Swayed, however, by the authority of so great a man, even R. David Kimchi has dilapsed into the same error, &c. To what purpose then are the crude metaphysics of these later Rabbis brought forward, differing as they do in no other respect from the theological 'dicta' of the Schoolmen, but that they are written in a sort of Hebrew. I am far from denying that an interpreter of the Scriptures may derive important aids from the Jewish commentators: Aben Ezra, (about 1150) especially, was a truly great man. But of this I am certain, that he only will be benefited who can look down upon their works, whilst studying them;--that is, he must thoroughly understand their weaknesses, superstitions, and rabid appetite for the marvellous and the monstrous; and then read them as an enlightened chemist of the present day would read the writings of the old alchemists, or as a Linnæus might peruse the works of Pliny and Aldrovandus. If he can do this, well;--if not, he will line his skull with cobwebs. Ib. pp. 40, 41. But how, I would ask, is this position to be defended? Surely not by contradicting almost every part of the inspired volumes, in which such frequent mention occurs of different and distinct angels appearing to the Patriarchs and Prophets, sometimes in groups, and sometimes in limited numbers * *. It is, indeed, so wholly repugnant to the general tenor of the Sacred Writings, and so abhorrent from the piety of both Jew and Christian, that the learned author himself, either forgetting what he had before advanced, or else postponing his philosophy to his religion, has absolutely maintained the contrary in his explication of the Cherubim, &c. I am so far from agreeing with Mr. Oxlee on these points, that I not only doubt whether before the Captivity any fair proof of the existence of Angels, in the present sense, can be produced from the inspired Scriptures,--but think also that a strong argument for the divinity of Christ, and for his presence to the Patriarchs and under the Law, rests on the contrary, namely, that the Seraphim were images no less symbolical than the Cherubim. Surely it is not presuming too much of a Clergyman of the Church of England to expect that he would measure the importance of a theological tenet by its bearings on our moral and spiritual duties, by its practical tendencies. What is it to us whether Angels are the spirits of just men made perfect, or a distinct class of moral and rational creatures? Augustine has well and wisely observed that reason recognizes only three essential kinds;--God, man, beast. Try as long as you will, you can never make an Angel anything but a man with wings on his shoulders. Ib. ch. III. p. 58. But this deficiency in the Mosaic account of the creation is amply supplied by early tradition, which inculcates not only that the angels were created, but that they were created, either on the second day, according to R. Jochanan, or on the fifth, according to R. Chanania. Inspired Scripture amply supplied by the Talmudic and Rabbinical traditions!--This from a Clergyman of the Church of England! I am, I confess, greatly disappointed. I had expected, I scarce know why, to have had some light thrown on the existence of the Cabala in its present form, from Ezekiel to Paul and John. But Mr. Oxlee takes it as he finds it, and gravely ascribes this patch-work of corrupt Platonism or Plotinism, with Chaldean, Persian, and Judaic fables and fancies, to the Jewish Doctors, as an original, profound, and pious philosophy in its fountain-head! The indispensable requisite not only to a profitable but even to a safe study of the Cabala is a familiar knowledge of the docimastic philosophy, that is, a philosophy, which has for its object the trial and testing of the weights and measures themselves, the first principles, definitions, postulates, axioms of logic and metaphysics. But this is in no other way possible but by our enumeration of the mental faculties, and an investigation of the constitution, function, limits, and applicability 'ad quas res', of each. The application to this subject of the rules and forms of the understanding, or discursive logic, or even of the intuitions of the reason itself, if reason be assumed as the first and highest, has Pantheism for its necessary result. But this the Cabalists did: and consequently the Cabalistic theosophy is Pantheistic, and Pantheism, in whatever drapery of pious phrases disguised, is (where it forms the whole of a system) Atheism, and precludes moral responsibility, and the essential difference of right and wrong. One of the two contra-distinctions of the Hebrew Revelation is the doctrine of positive creation. This, if not the only, is the easiest and surest criterion between the idea of God and the notion of a 'mens agitans molem'. But this the Cabalists evaded by their double meaning of the term, 'nothing', namely as nought = 0, and as no 'thing'; and by their use of the term, as designating God. Thus in words and to the ear they taught that the world was made out of nothing; but in fact they meant and inculcated, that the world was God himself expanded. It is not, therefore, half a dozen passages respecting the first three 'proprietates'[2] in the Sephiroth, that will lead a wise man to expect the true doctrine of the Trinity in the Cabalistic scheme: for he knows that the scholastic value, the theological necessity, of this doctrine consists in its exhibiting an idea of God, which rescues our faith from both extremes, Cabalo-Pantheism, and Anthropomorphism. It is, I say, to prevent the necessity of the Cabalistic inferences that the full and distinct developement of the doctrine of the Trinity becomes necessary in every scheme of dogmatic theology. If the first three 'proprietates' are God, so are the next seven, and so are all ten. God according to the Cabalists is all in each and one in all. I do not say that there is not a great deal of truth in this; but I say that it is not, as the Cabalists represent it, the whole truth. Spinoza himself describes his own philosophy as in substance the same with that of the ancient Hebrew Doctors, the Cabalists--only unswathed from the Biblical dress. Ib. p. 61. Similar to this is the declaration of R. Moses ben Maimon. "For that influence, which flows from the Deity to the actual production of abstract intelligences flows also from the intelligences to their production from each other in succession," &c. How much trouble would Mr. Oxlee have saved himself, had he in sober earnest asked his own mind, what he meant by emanation; and whether he could attach any intelligible meaning to the term at all as applied to spirit. Ib. p. 65. Thus having, by variety of proofs, demonstrated the fecundity of the Godhead, in that all spiritualities, of whatever gradation, have originated essentially and substantially from it, like streams from their fountain; I avail myself of this as another sound argument, that in the sameness of the divine essence subsists a plurality of Persons. A plurality with a vengeance! Why, this is the very scoff of a late Unitarian writer,--only that he inverts the order. Mr. Oxlee proves ten trillions of trillions in the Deity, in order to deduce 'a fortiori' the rationality of three: the Unitarian from the Three pretends to deduce the equal rationality of as many thousands. Ib. p. 66. So, if without detriment to piety great things may be compared with small, I would contend, that every intelligency, descending by way of emanation or impartition from the Godhead, must needs be a personality of that Godhead, from which it has descended, only so vastly unequal to it in personal perfection, that it can form no part of its proper existency. Is not this to all intents and purposes ascribing partibility to God? Indeed it is the necessary consequence of the emanation scheme?--Unequal!--Aye, various 'wicked' personalities of the Godhead?--How does this rhyme?--Even as a metaphor, emanation is an ill-chosen term; for it applies only to fluids. 'Ramenta', unravellings, threads, would be more germane. [Footnote 1: The Christian Doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation considered and maintained on the principles of Judaism. By the Rev. John Oxlee. London, 1815.] [Footnote 2: That is, Intelligence or the Crown, Knowledge, Wisdom. Ed.] * * * * * NOTES ON A BARRISTER'S HINTS ON EVANGELICAL PREACHING. 1810. [1] For only that man understands in deed Who well remembers what he well can do; The faith lives only where the faith doth breed Obedience to the works it binds us to. And as the Life of Wisdom hath exprest-- 'If this ye know, then do it and be blest'. LORD BROOK. 'In initio'. There is one misconception running through the whole of this Pamphlet, the rock on which, and the quarry out of which, the whole reasoning, is built;--an error therefore which will not indeed destroy its efficacy as a [Greek: mísaetron] or anti-philtre to inflame the scorn of the enemies of Methodism, but which must utterly incapacitate it for the better purpose of convincing the consciences or allaying the fanaticism of the Methodists themselves; this is the uniform and gross mis-statement of the one great point in dispute, by which the Methodists are represented as holding the compatibility of an impure life with a saving faith: whereas they only assert that the works of righteousness are the consequence, not the price, of Redemption, a gift included in the great gift of salvation;--and therefore not of merit but of imputation through the free love of the Saviour. Part I. p. 49. It is enough, it seems, that all the disorderly classes of mankind, prompted as they are by their worst passions to trample on the public welfare, should 'know' that they are, what every one else is convinced they are, the pests of society, and the evil is remedied. They are not to be exhorted to honesty, sobriety, or the observance of any laws, human or divine--they must not even be entreated to do their best. "Just as 'absurd' would it be," we are told, "in a physician to send away his patient, when labouring under some desperate disease, with a recommendation to do his utmost towards his own cure, and then to come to him to finish it, as it is in the minister of the 'Gospel' to propose to the sinner 'to do his best', by way of healing the disease of the soul--and then to come to the Lord Jesus to perfect his recovery. The 'only' previous qualification is to 'know' our misery, and the remedy is prepared." See Dr. Hawker's Works, vol. vi. p. 117. For "know," let the Barrister substitute "feel;" that is, we know it as we know our life; and then ask himself whether the production of such a state of mind in a sinner would or would not be of greater promise as to his reformation than the repetition of the Ten Commandments with paraphrases on the same.--But why not both? The Barrister is at least as wrong in the undervaluing of the one as the pseudo-Evangelists in the exclusion of the other. Ib. p. 51. Whatever these new Evangelists may teach to the contrary, the present state of public morals and of public happiness would assume a very different appearance if the thieves, swindlers, and highway robbers, would 'do their best' towards maintaining themselves by honest labour, instead of perpetually planning new systems of fraud, and new schemes of depredation. That is, if these thieves had a different will--not a mere wish, however anxious:--for this wish "the libertine" doubtless has, as described in p. 50,--but an effective will. Well, and who doubts this? The point in dispute is, as to the means of producing this reformation in the will; which, whatever the Barrister may think, Christ at least thought so difficult as to speak of it, not once or twice, but uniformly, as little less than miraculous, as tantamount to a re-creation. This Barrister may be likened to an ignorant but well-meaning Galenist, who writing against some infamous quack, who lived by puffing and vending pills of mercurial sublimate for all cases of a certain description, should have no stronger argument than to extol 'sarsaparilla', and 'lignum vitæ', or 'senna' in contempt of all mercurial preparations. Ib. p. 56. Not for the revenues of an Archbishop would he exhort them to a duty 'unknown in Scripture', of adding their five talents to the five they have received, &c. All this is mere calumny and wilful misstatement of the tenets of Wesley, who never doubted that we are bound to improve our 'talents', or, on the other hand, that we are equally bound, having done so, to be equally thankful to the Giver of all things for the power and the will by which we improved the talents, as for the original capital which is the object of the improvement. The question is not whether Christ will say, 'Well done thou good and faithful servant', &c.;--but whether the servant is to say it of himself. Now Christ has delivered as positive a precept against our doing this as the promise can be that he will impute it to us, if we do not impute it to our own merits. Ib. p. 60. The complaints of the profligacy of servants of every class, and of the depravity of the times are in every body's hearing:--and these Evangelical tutors--the dear Mr. Lovegoods of the day--deserve the best attention of the public for thus instructing the ignorant multitude, who are always ready enough to neglect their moral duties, to despise and insult those by whom they are taught. All this is no better than infamous slander, unless the Barrister can prove that these depraved servants and thieves are Methodists, or have been wicked in proportion as they were proselyted to Methodism. O folly! This is indeed to secure the triumph of these enthusiasts. Ib. It must afford him (Rowland Hill) great consolation, amidst the increasing immorality * * * that when their village Curate exhorts them, if they have 'faith' in the doctrine of a world to come, to add to it those 'good works' in which the sum and substance of religion consist, he has led them to ridicule him, as 'chopping a new-fashioned' logic. That this is either false or nugatory, see proved in The Friend. Ib. p. 68. Tom Payne himself never laboured harder to root all virtue out of society.--Mandeville nor Voltaire never even laboured so much. Indeed! Ib. They were content with declaring their disbelief of a future state. In what part of their works? Can any wise man read Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, and not see that it is a keen satire on the inconsistency of Christians, and so intended. Ib. p. 71. When the populace shall be once brought to a conviction that the Gospel, as they are told, has neither terms nor conditions * * *, that no sins can be too great, no life too impure, 'no offences too many or too aggravated', to disqualify the perpetrators of them for --salvation, &c. Merely insert the words "sincere repentance and amendment of heart and life, and therefore for" salvation,--and is not this truth, and Gospel truth? And is it not the meaning of the preacher? Did any Methodist ever teach that salvation may be attained without sanctification? This Barrister for ever forgets that the whole point in dispute is not concerning the possibility of an immoral Christian being saved, which the Methodist would deny as strenuously as himself, and perhaps give an austerer sense to the word immoral; but whether morality, or as the Methodists would call it, sanctification, be the price which we pay for the purchase of our salvation with our own money, or a part of the same free gift. God knows, I am no advocate for Methodism; but for fair statement I am, and most zealously--even for the love of logic, putting honesty out of sight. Ib. p. 72. "In every age," says the moral divine (Blair), "the practice has prevailed of substituting certain appearances of piety in the place of the great 'duties' of humanity and mercy," &c. Will the Barrister rest the decision of the controversy on a comparison of the lives of the Methodists and non-Methodists? Unless he knows that their "morality has declined, as their piety has become more ardent," is not his quotation mere labouring--nay, absolute pioneering--for the triumphal chariot of his enemies? Ib. pp. 75-79. It is but fair to select a specimen of Evangelical preaching from one of its most celebrated and popular champions * *. He will preface it with the solemn and woful communication of the Evangelist John, in order to show how exactly they accord, how clearly the doctrines of the one are deduced from the Revelation of the other, and how justly, therefore, it assumes the exclusive title of evangelical. 'And I saw the dead * * * and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. And the sea gave up the dead * * and they were judged every man according to his works'. Rev. xx. 12, 13. Let us recall to mind the urgent caution conveyed in the writings of Paul * * 'Be not deceived; God is not mocked; for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap'. And let us further add * * the confirmation * * of the Saviour himself:--'When the Son of Man shall come in his glory, * * * but the righteous into life eternal'. Matt. xxv. 31, 'ad finem'. Let us now attend to the Evangelical preacher, (Toplady). "The Religion of Jesus Christ stands eminently distinguished, and essentially differenced, from every other religion that was ever proposed to human reception, by this remarkable peculiarity; that, look abroad in the world, and you will find that every religion, 'except one', puts you upon 'doing something', in order to recommend yourself to God. A Mahometan * * A Papist * * * It is only the religion of Jesus Christ that runs counter to all the rest, by affirming--that we are 'saved' and called with a holy calling, 'not' according to our works, but according to the Father's own purpose and grace, which was 'not' sold to us 'on certain conditions to be fulfilled by ourselves', but was given us in Christ before the world began." Toplady's Works: Sermon on James ii. 18. 'Si sic omnia'! All this is just and forcible; and surely nothing can be easier than to confute the Methodist by shewing that his very 'no-doing', when he comes to explain it, is not only an act, a work, but even a very severe and perseverant energy of the will. He is therefore to be arraigned of nonsense and abuse of words rather than of immoral doctrines. Ib. p. 84. The sacred volume of Holy Writ declares that 'true' (pure?) 'religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widow in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world'. James i. 27 This is now at least, whatever might have been the meaning of the word 'religion' in the time of the Translators, a false version. St. James is speaking of persons eminently zealous in those public or private acts of worship, which we call divine service, [Greek: thraeskeía]. It should be rendered, 'True worship', &c. The passage is a fine burst of rhetoric, and not a mere truism; just as when we say;--"A cheerful heart is a perpetual thanksgiving, and a state of love and resignation the truest utterance of the Lord's Prayer." St. James opposes Christianity to the outward signs and ceremonial observances of the Jewish and Pagan religions. But these are the only sure signs, these are the most significant ceremonial observances by which your Christianity is to be made known,--'to visit the fatherless', &c. True religion does not consist 'quoad essentiam' in these acts, but in that habitual state of the whole moral being, which manifests itself by these acts--and which acts are to the religion of Christ that which ablutions, sacrifices and Temple-going were to the Mosaic religion, namely, its genuine [Greek: thraeskeía]. That which was the religion of Moses is the ceremonial or cult of the religion of Christ. Moses commanded all good works, even those stated by St. James, as the means of temporal felicity; and this was the Mosaic religion; and to these he added a multitude of symbolical observances; and these formed the Mosaic cult, ('cultus religionis', [Greek: thraeskeía]). Christ commands holiness out of perfect love, that is, Christian religion; and adds to this no other ceremony or symbol than a pure life and active beneficence; which (says St. James) are the 'true cult'. [2] Ib. p. 86. There is no one whose writings are better calculated to do good, (than those of Paley) by inculcating the essential duties of common life, and the sound truths of practical Christianity. Indeed! Paley's whole system is reducible to this one precept:--"Obey God, and benefit your neighbour, because you love yourself above all." Christ has himself comprised his system in--"Love your neighbour as yourself, and God above all." These "sound truths of practical Christianity" consist in a total subversion, not only of Christianity, but of all morality;--the very words virtue and vice being but lazy synonymes of prudence and miscalculation,--and which ought to be expunged from our vocabularies, together with Abraxas and Abracadabra, as charms abused by superstitious or mystic enthusiasts. Ib. p. 94. Eventually the whole direction of the popular mind, in the affairs of religion, will be gained into the hands of a set of ignorant fanatics of such low origin and vulgar habits as can only serve to degrade religion in the eyes of those to whom its influence is most wanted. Will such persons venerate or respect it in the hands of a sect composed in the far greater part of bigotted, coarse, illiterate, and low-bred enthusiasts? Men who have abandoned their lawful callings, in which by industry they might have been useful members of society, to take upon themselves concerns the most sacred, with which nothing but their vanity and their ignorance could have excited them to meddle. It is not the buffoonery of the reverend joker of the Edinburgh Review; not the convulsed grin of mortification which, sprawling prostrate in the dirt from "the whiff and wind" of the masterly disquisition in the Quarterly Review, the itinerant preacher would pass oft' for the broad grin of triumph; no, nor even the over-valued distinction of miracles, --which will prevent him from seeing and shewing the equal applicability of all this to the Apostles and primitive Christians. We know that Trajan, Pliny, Tacitus, the Antonines, Celsus, Lucian and the like,--much more the ten thousand philosophers and joke-smiths of Rome,--did both feel and apply all this to the Galilean Sect; and yet--'Vicisti, O Galilæe'! Ib. p. 95. They never fail to refer to the proud Pharisee, whom they term self-'righteous'; and thus, having greatly misrepresented his character, they proceed to declaim on the arrogance of founding any expectation of reward from the performance of our 'moral duties':--whereas the plain truth is that the Pharisee was 'not righteous', but merely arrogated to himself that character; he had neglected all the 'moral duties' of life. Who told the Barrister this? Not the Gospel, I am sure. The Evangelical has only to translate these sentences into the true statement of his opinions, in order to baffle this angry and impotent attack; the self-righteousness of all who expect to claim salvation on the plea of their own personal merit. "Pay to A. B. at sight--value received by me."--To Messrs. Stone and Co. Bankers, Heaven-Gate. It is a short step from this to the Popish. "Pay to A. B. 'or order'." Once assume merits, and I defy you to keep out supererogation and the old 'Monte di Pietà'. Ib. p. 97. --and from thence occasion is taken to defame all those who strive to prepare themselves, during this their state of trial, for that judgment which they must undergo at that day, when they will receive either reward or punishment, according as they shall be found to have 'merited' the one, or 'deserved' the other. Can the Barrister have read the New Testament? Or does he know it only by quotations? Ib. --a swarm of new Evangelists who are every where teaching the people that no reliance is to be placed on holiness of life as a ground of future acceptance. I am weary of repeating that this is false. It is only denied that mere acts, not proceeding from faith, are or can be holiness. As surely (would the Methodist say) as the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Son, so surely does sanctification from redemption, and not vice versa,--much less from self-sanctifiedness, that ostrich with its head in the sand, and the plucked rump of its merits staring on the divine [Greek: Átae] 'venatrix'! Ib. p. 102. 'He that doeth righteousness is righteous'. Since then it is plain that each must 'himself' be righteous, if he be so at all, what do they mean who thus inveigh against 'self'-righteousness, since Christ himself declares there is no other? Here again the whole dispute lies in the word "himself." In the outward and visible sense both parties agree; but the Methodist calls it "the will in us," given by grace; the Barrister calls it "our own will," or "we ourselves." But why does not the Barrister reserve a part of his wrath for Dr. Priestley, according to whom a villain has superior claims on the divine justice as an innocent martyr to the grand machinery of Providence;--for Dr. Priestley, who turns the whole dictionary of human nature into verbs impersonal with a perpetual 'subauditur' of 'Deus' for their common nominative case;--which said 'Deus', however, is but another 'automaton', self-worked indeed, but yet worked, not properly working, for he admits no more freedom or will to God than to man? The Lutheran leaves the free will whining with a broken back in the ditch; and Dr. Priestley puts the poor animal out of his misery!--But seriously, is it fair or even decent to appeal to the Legislature against the Methodists for holding the doctrine of the Atonement? Do we not pray by Act of Parliament twenty times every Sunday 'through the only merits of Jesus Christ'? Is it not the very nose which (of flesh or wax) this very Legislature insists on as an indispensable qualification for every Christian face? Is not the lack thereof a felonious deformity, yea, the grimmest feature of the 'lues confirmata' of statute heresy? What says the reverend critic to this? Will he not rise in wrath against the Barrister,--he the Pamphagus of Homilitic, Liturgic, and Articular orthodoxy,--the Garagantua, whose ravenous maw leaves not a single word, syllable, letter, no, not one 'iota' unswallowed, if we are to believe his own recent and voluntary manifesto? [3] What says he to this Barrister, and his Hints to the Legislature? Ib. p. 105. If the new faith be the only true one, let us embrace it; but let not those who vend these 'new articles' expect that we should choose them with our eyes shut. Let any man read the Homilies of the Church of England, and if he does not call this either blunt impudence or blank ignorance, I will plead guilty to both! New articles!! Would to Heaven some of them at least were! Why, Wesley himself was scandalized at Luther's Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, and cried off from the Moravians (the strictest Lutherans) on that account. Ib. p. 114. The catalogue of authors, which this Rev. Gentleman has pleased to specify and recommend, begins with Homer, Hesiod, the Argonautics, Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Pindar, Theognis, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Diodorus Siculus. * * *. 'This catalogue,' says he, 'might be considerably extended, but I study brevity. It is only necessary for me to add that the recommendation of these books is not to be considered as expressive of my approbation of every particular sentiment they contain.' It would indeed be grievous injustice if this writer's reputation should be injured by the occasional unsoundness of opinion in writers whom it is more than probable he may never have read, and for whose sentiments he ought no more to be made answerable than the compiler of Lackington's Catalogue, from which it is not unlikely that his own was abridged. Very good. Ib. p. 115-16. These high-strained pretenders to godliness, who deny the power of the sinner to help himself, take good care always to attribute his 'saving change' to the blessed effect of some sermon preached by some one or other of 'their' Evangelical fraternity. They always hold 'themselves' up to the multitude as the instruments producing all those marvellous conversions which they relate. No instance is recorded in their Saints' Calendar of any sinner resolving, in consequence of a reflective and serious perusal of the Scriptures, to lead a new life. No instance of a daily perusal of the Bible producing a daily progress in virtuous habits. No, the 'Gospel' has no such effect.--It is always the 'Gospel Preacher' who works the miracle, &c. Excellent and just. In this way are the Methodists to be attacked:--even as the Papists were by Baxter, not from their doctrines, but from their practices, and the spirit of their Sect. There is a fine passage in Lord Bacon concerning a heresy of manner being not less pernicious than heresy of matter. Ib. p. 118. But their Saints, who would stop their ears if you should mention with admiration the name of a Garrick or a Siddons;--who think it a sin to support such an 'infamous profession' as that through the medium of which a Milton, a Johnson, an Addison, and a Young have laboured to mend the heart, &c. Whoo! See Milton's Preface to the Samson Agonistes. Ib. p. 133. In the Evangelical Magazine is the following article: "At----in Yorkshire, after a handsome collection (for the Missionary Society) a poor man, whose wages are about 28s. per week, brought a donation of 20 guineas. Our friends hesitated to receive it * * when he answered * *--'Before I knew the grace of our Lord I was a poor drunkard: I never could save a shilling. My family were in beggary and rags; but since it has pleased God to renew me by his grace, we have been industrious and frugal: we have not spent many idle shillings; and we have been enabled to put something into the Bank; and this I freely offer to the blessed cause of our Lord and Saviour.' This is the second donation of this same poor man to the same amount!" Whatever these Evangelists may think of such conduct, they ought to be ashamed of thus basely taking advantage of this poor ignorant enthusiast, &c. Is it possible to read this affecting story without finding in it a complete answer to the charge of demoralizing the lower classes? Does the Barrister really think, that this generous and grateful enthusiast is as likely to be unprovided and poverty-stricken in his old age, as he was prior to his conversion? Except indeed that at that time his old age was as improbable as his distresses were certain if he did live so long. This is singing 'Io Pæan'! for the enemy with a vengeance. Part II. p. 14. It behoved him (Dr. Hawker in his Letter to the Barrister) to show in what manner a covenant can exist without terms or conditions. According to the Methodists there is a condition,--that of faith in the power and promise of Christ, and the virtue of the Cross. And were it otherwise, the objection is scarcely appropriate except at the Old Bailey, or in the Court of King's Bench. The Barrister might have framed a second law-syllogism, as acute as his former. The laws of England allow no binding covenant in a transfer of goods or chattels without value received. But there can be no value received by God:--'Ergo', there can be no covenant between God and man. And if Jehovah should be as courteous as the House of Commons, and acknowledge the jurisdiction of the Courts at Westminster, the pleading might hold perhaps, and the Pentateuch be quashed after an argument before the judges. Besides, how childish to puff up the empty bladder of an old metaphysical foot-ball on the 'modus operandi interior' of Justification into a shew of practical substance; as if it were no less solid than a cannon ball! Why, drive it with all the vehemence that five toes can exert, it would not kill a louse on the head of Methodism. Repentance, godly sorrow, abhorrence of sin as sin, and not merely dread from forecast of the consequences, these the Arminian would call means of obtaining salvation, while the Methodist (more philosophically perhaps) names them signs of the work of free grace commencing and the dawning of the sun of redemption. And pray where is the practical difference? Ib. p. 26. Jesus answered him thus--'Verily, I say unto you, unless a man be born of water and of the spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God'.--The true sense of which is obviously this:--Except a man be initiated into my religion by Baptism, (which 'at that time' was always 'preceded by a confession of faith') and unless he manifest his sincere reception of it, by leading that upright and 'spiritual' life which it enjoins, 'he cannot enter the kingdom of heaven', or be a partaker of that happiness which it belongs to me to confer on those who believe in my name and keep my sayings. Upon my faith as a Christian, if no more is meant by being born again than this, the speaker must have had the strongest taste in metaphors of any teacher in verse or prose on record, Jacob Behmen himself not excepted. The very Alchemists lag behind. Pity, however, that our Barrister has not shown us how this plain and obvious business of Baptism agrees with ver. 8. of the same chapter: 'The wind bloweth where it listeth', &c. Now if this does not express a visitation of the mind by a somewhat not in the own power or fore-thought of the mind itself, what are words meant for? Ib. p. 29. The true meaning of being 'born again', in the sense in which our Saviour uses the phrase, implies nothing more or less, in plain terms, than this:--to repent; to lead for the future a religious life instead of a life of disobedience; to believe the Holy Scriptures, and to pray for grace and assistance to persevere in our obedience to the end. All this any man of common sense might explain in a few words. Pray, then, (for I will take the Barrister's own commentary,) what does the man of common sense mean by grace? If he will explain grace in any other way than as the circumstances 'ab extra' (which would be mere mockery and in direct contradiction to a score of texts), and yet without mystery, I will undertake for Dr. Hawker and Co. to make the new birth itself as plain as a pikestaff, or a whale's foal, or Sarah Robarts's rabbits. Ib. p. 30. So that they go on in their sin waiting for a new birth, &c. "So that they go on in their sin!"--Who would not suppose it notorious that every Methodist meeting-house was a cage of Newgate larks making up their minds to die game? Ib. The following account is extracted from the Methodist Magazine for 1798: "The Lord astonished 'Sarah Roberts' with his mercy, by 'setting her at liberty, while employed' in the necessary business of 'washing' for her family, &c. N. B. Not the famous rabbit-woman.--She was Robarts. Ib. p. 31. A washerwoman has 'all her sins blotted out' in the twinkling of an eye, and while reeking with suds is received in the family of the Redeemer's kingdom. Surely this is a most abominable profanation of all that is serious, &c. And where pray is the absurdity of this? Has Christ declared any antipathy to washerwomen, or the Holy Ghost to warm suds? Why does not the Barrister try his hand at the "abominable profanation," in a story of a certain woman with an issue of blood who was made free by touching the hem of a garment, without the previous knowledge of the wearer? 'Rode, caper, vitem: tamen hinc cum stabis ad aras, In tua quod fundi cornua possit, erit'. Ib. p. 32. The leading design of John the Baptist * * was * this:--to prepare the minds of men for the reception of that pure system of moral truth which the Saviour, by divine authority, was speedily to inculcate, and of those sublime doctrines of a resurrection and a future judgment, which, as powerful motives to the practice of holiness, he was soon to reveal. What then? Did not John the Baptist himself teach a pure system of moral truth? Was John so much more ignorant than Paul before his conversion, and the whole Jewish nation, except a few rich freethinkers, as to be ignorant of the "sublime doctrines of a resurrection and a future judgment?" This, I well know, is the strong-hold of Socinianism; but surely one single unprejudiced perusal of the New Testament,--not to suppose an acquaintance with Kidder or Lightfoot--would blow it down, like a house of cards! Ib. p. 33. --their faiths in the efficacy of their own rites, and creeds, and ceremonies, and their whole train of 'substitutions' for 'moral duty', was so entire, and in their opinion was such a 'saving faith', that they could not at all interpret any language that seemed to dispute their value, or deny their importance. Poor strange Jews! They had, doubtless, what Darwin would call a specific 'paralysis' of the auditory nerves to the writings of their own Prophets, which yet were read Sabbath after Sabbath in their public Synagogues. For neither John nor Christ himself ever did, or indeed could, speak in language more contemptuous of the folly of considering rites as substitutions for moral duty, or in severer words denounce the blasphemy of such an opinion. Why need I refer to Isaiah or Micah? Ib. p. 34. Thus it was that this moral preacher explained and enforced the duty of repentance, and thus it was that he prepared the way for the greatest and best of teachers, &c. Well then, if all this was but a preparation for the doctrines of Christ, those doctrines themselves must surely have been something different, and more difficult? Oh no! John's preparation consisted in a complete rehearsal of the 'Drama didacticum', which Christ and the Apostles were to exhibit to a full audience!--Nay, prithee, good Barrister! do not be too rash in charging the Methodists with a monstrous burlesque of the Gospel! Ib. p. 37. --the logic of the new Evangelists will convince him that it is a contradiction in terms even to 'suppose' himself 'capable of doing any thing' to help 'or bringing any thing to recommend himself to the Divine favour'. Now, suppose the wisdom of these endless attacks on an old abstruse metaphysical notion to be allowed, yet why in the name of common candour does not the Barrister ring the same 'tocsin' against his friend Dr. Priestley's scheme of Necessity;--or against his idolized Paley, who explained the will as a sensation, produced by the action of the intellect on the muscles, and the intellect itself as a catenation of ideas, and ideas as configurations of the organized brain? Would not every syllable apply, yea, and more strongly, more indisputably? And would his fellow-sectaries thank him, or admit the consequences? Or has any late Socinian divine discovered, that Do as ye would be done unto, is an interpolated precept? Ib. p. 39. "Even repentance and faith," (says Dr. Hawker,) "those most essential qualifications of the mind, for the participation and enjoyment of the blessings of the Gospel, (and which all real disciples of the Lord Jesus cannot but possess,) are 'never supposed as a condition which the sinner performs to entitle him to mercy', but merely as evidences that he is brought and has obtained mercy. 'They cannot be the conditions' of obtaining salvation." Ought not this single quotation to have satisfied the Barrister, that no practical difference is deducible from these doctrines? "Essential qualifications," says the Methodist:--"terms and conditions," says the spiritual higgler. But if a man begins to reflect on his past life, is he to withstand the inclination? God forbid! exclaim both. If he feels a commencing shame and sorrow, is he to check the feeling? God forbid! cry both in one breath! But should not remembrancers be thrown in the way of sinners, and the voice of warning sound through every street and every wilderness? Doubtless, quoth the Rationalist. We do it, we do it, shout the Methodists. In every corner of every lane, in the high road, and in the waste, we send forth the voice--Come to Christ, and repent, and be cleansed! Aye, quoth the Rationalist, but I say Repent, and become clean, and go to Christ--Now is not Mr. Rationalist as great a bigot as the Methodists, as he is, 'me judice', a worse psychologist? Part II. p. 40. The former authorities on this subject I had quoted from the Gospel according to St. Luke: that Gospel most positively and most solemnly declares the 'repentance' of sinners to be the 'condition' on which 'alone' salvation can be obtained. But the doctors of the new divinity 'deny' this: they tell us distinctly 'it cannot' be. For the future, the Gospel according to Calvin must be received as the truth. Sinners will certainly prefer it as the more comfortable of the two beyond all comparison. Mercy! but only to read Calvin's account of that repentance, without which there is no sign of election, and to call it "the more comfortable of the two?" The very term by which the German New-Birthites express it is enough to give one goose-flesh--'das Herzknirschen'--the very heart crashed between the teeth of a lock-jaw'd agony! Ib. What is 'faith'? Is it not a conviction produced in the mind by adequate testimony? No! that is not the meaning of faith in the Gospel, nor indeed anywhere else. Were it so, the stronger the testimony, the more adequate the faith. Yet who says, I have faith in the existence of George II., as his present Majesty's antecessor and grandfather?--If testimony, then evidence too;--and who has faith that the two sides of all triangles are greater than the third? In truth, faith, even in common language, always implies some effort, something of evidence which is not universally adequate or communicable at will to others. "Well! to be sure he has behaved badly hitherto, but I have faith in him." If it were otherwise, how could it be imputed as righteousness? Can morality exist without choice;--nay, strengthen in proportion as it becomes more independent of the will? "A very meritorious man! he has faith in every proposition of Euclid, which he understands." Ib. p. 41. "I could as easily create a world (says Dr. Hawker) as create either faith or repentance in my own heart." Surely this is a most monstrous confession. What! is not the Christian religion a 'revealed' religion, and have we not the most miraculous attestation of its truth? Just look at the answer of Christ himself to Nicodemus, 'John' iii. 2, 3. Nicodemus professed a full belief in Christ's divine mission. Why? It was attested by his miracles. What answered Christ? "Well said, O believer?" No, not a word of this; but the proof of the folly of such a supposition. 'Verily, verily, I say unto thee; except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God',--that is, he cannot have faith in me. Ib. p. 42. How can this evangelical preacher declaim on the necessity of seriously searching into the truth of revelation, for the purpose either of producing or confirming our belief of it, when he has already pronounced it to be just as possible to arrive at conviction as to create a world? Did Dr. Hawker say that it was impossible to produce an assent to the historic credibility of the facts related in the Gospel? Did he say that it was impossible to become a Socinian by the weighing of outward evidences? No! but Dr. Hawker says,--and I say,--that this is not, cannot be, what Christ means by faith, which, to the misfortune of the Socinians, he always demands as the condition of a miracle, instead of looking forward to it as the natural effect of a miracle. How came it that Peter saw miracles countless, and yet was without faith till the Holy Ghost descended on him? Besides, miracles may or may not be adequate evidence for Socinianism; but how could miracles prove the doctrine of Redemption, or the divinity of Christ? But this is the creed of the Church of England. It is wearisome to be under the necessity, or at least the constant temptation, of attacking Socinianism, in reviewing a work professedly written against Methodism. Surely such a work ought to treat of those points of doctrine and practice, which are peculiar to Methodism. But to publish a 'diatribe' against the substance of the Articles and Catechism of the English Church, nay, of the whole Christian world, excepting the Socinians, and to call it "Hints concerning the dangerous and abominable absurdities of Methodism," is too bad. Ib. p. 43. But this Calvinistic Evangelist tells us, by way of accounting for the utter impossibility of producing in himself either faith or repentance, that both are of divine origin, and like the light, and the rain, and the dew of heaven, which tarrieth not for man, neither waiteth for the sons of men, are from above, and come down from the Father of lights, from whom alone cometh every good and perfect gift! Is the Barrister--are the Socinian divines--inspired, or infallibly sure that it is a crime for a Christian to understand the words of Christ in their plain and literal sense, when a Socinian chooses to give his paraphrase,--often, too, as strongly remote from the words, as the old spiritual paraphrases on the Song of Solomon? Ib. p. 46. According to that Gospel which hath hitherto been the pillar of the Christian world, we are taught that whosoever endeavours to the best of his ability to reform his manners, and amend his life, will have pardon and acceptance. As interpreted by whom? By the Socini, or the Barrister?--Or by Origen, Chrysostom, Jerome, the Gregories, Eusebius, Athanasius?--By Thomas Aquinas, Bernard, Thomas-a-Kempis?--By Luther, Melancthon, Zuinglius, Calvin?--By the Reformers and martyrs of the English Church?--By Cartwright and the learned Puritans?--By Knox?--By George Fox?--With regard to this point, that mere external evidence is inadequate to the production of a saving faith, and in the majority of other opinions, all these agree with Wesley. So they all understood the Gospel. But it is not so! 'Ergo', the Barrister is infallible. Ib. p. 47. 'When the wicked man turneth away from the wickedness which he hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive'. This gracious declaration the old moral divines of our Church have placed in the front of its Liturgy. In the name of patience, over and over again, who has ever denied this? The question is, by what power, his own, or by the free grace of God through Christ, the wicked man is enabled to turn from his wickedness. And again and again I ask:--Were not these "old moral divines" the authors and compilers of the Homilies? If the Barrister does not know this, he is an ignorant man; if knowing it, he has yet never examined the Homilies, he is an unjust man; but if he have, he is a slanderer and a sycophant. Is it not intolerable to take up three bulky pamphlets against a recent Sect, denounced as most dangerous, and which we all know to be most powerful and of rapid increase, and to find little more than a weak declamatory abuse of certain metaphysical dogmas concerning free will, or free will forfeited, 'de libero vel servo arbitrio'--of grace, predestination, and the like;--dogmas on which, according to Milton, God and the Logos conversed, as soon as man was in existence, they in heaven, and Adam in paradise, and the devils in hell;--dogmas common to all religions, and to all ages and sects of the Christian religion;--concerning which Brahmin disputes with Brahmin, Mahometan with Mahometan, and Priestley with Price;--and all this to be laid on the shoulders of the Methodists collectively: though it is a notorious fact, that a radical difference on this abstruse subject is the ground of the schism between the Whitfieldite and Wesleyan Methodists; and that the latter coincide in opinion with Erasmus and Arminius, by which latter name they distinguish themselves; and the former with Luther, Calvin, and their great guide, St. Augustine? This I say is intolerable,--yea, a crime against sense, candour, and white paper. Ib. p. 50. "For so very peculiarly directed to the sinner, and to him only (says the evangelical preacher) is the blessed Gospel of the Lord Jesus, that unless you are a sinner, you are not interested in its saving truths." Does not Christ himself say the same in the plainest and most unmistakable words? 'I come not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick'. Can he, who has no share in the danger, be interested in the saving? Pleased from benevolence he may be; but interested he cannot be. 'Estne aliquid inter salvum et salutem; inter liberum et libertatem? Salus est pereuntis, vel saltem periditantis: redemptio, quasi pons divinus, inter servum et libertatem,--amissam, ideoque optatam'. Ib. p. 52. It was reserved for these days of 'new discovery' to announce to mankind that, unless they are sinners, they are excluded from the promised blessings of the Gospel. Merely read 'that unless they are sick they are precluded from the offered remedies of the Gospel;' and is not this the dictate of common sense, as well as of Methodism? But does not Methodism cry aloud that all men are sick--sick to the very heart? 'If we say we are without sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us'. This shallow-pated Barrister makes me downright piggish, and without the stratagem of that famed philosopher in pig-nature almost drives me into the Charon's hoy of Methodism by his rude and stupid tail-hauling me back from it. Ib. p. 53. I can assure these gentlemen that I regard with a reverence as pure and awful as can enter into the human mind, that blood which was shed upon the Cross. That is, in the Barrister's creed, that mysterious flint, which with the subordinate aids of mutton, barley, salt, turnips, and potherbs, makes most wonderful fine flint broth. Suppose Christ had never shed his blood, yet if he had worked his miracles, raised Lazarus, and taught the same doctrines, would not the result have been the same?--Or if Christ had never appeared on earth, yet did not Daniel work miracles as stupendous, which surely must give all the authority to his doctrines that miracles can give? And did he not announce by the Holy Spirit the resurrection to judgment, of glory or of punishment? Ib. p. 54. Let them not attempt to escape it by quoting a few disconnected phrases in the Epistles, but let them adhere solely and steadfastly to that Gospel of which they affect to be the exclusive preachers. And whence has the Barrister learnt that the Epistles are not equally binding on Christians as the four Gospels? Surely, of St. Paul's at least, the authenticity is incomparably clearer than that of the first three Gospels; and if he give up, as doubtless he does, the plenary inspiration of the Gospels, the personal authority of the writers of all the Epistles is greater than two at least of the four Evangelists. Secondly, the Gospel of John and all the Epistles were purposely written to teach the Christian Faith; whereas the first three Gospels are as evidently intended only as 'memorabilia' of the history of the Christian Revelation, as far as the process of Redemption was carried on in the life, death, and resurrection of the divine Founder. This is the blank, brazen, blushless, or only brass-blushing, impudence of an Old Bailey Barrister, attempting to browbeat out of Court the better and more authentic half of the witnesses against him. If I wished to understand the laws of England, shall I consult Hume or Blackstone--him who has written his volumes expressly as comments on those laws, or the historian who mentions them only as far as the laws were connected with the events and characters which he relates or describes? Nay, it is far worse than this; far Christ himself repeatedly defers the publication of his doctrines till after his death, and gives the reason too, that till he had sent the Holy Ghost, his disciples were not capable of comprehending them. Does he not attribute to an immediate influence of especial inspiration even Peter's acknowledgment of his Filiation to God, or Messiahship?--Was it from the Gospels that Paul learned to know Christ?--Was the Church sixty years without the awful truths taught exclusively in John's Gospel? Part III. p. 5. The 'nostrum' of the mountebank will he preferred to the prescription of the regular practitioner. Why is this? Because there is something in the authoritative arrogance of the pretender, by which ignorance is overawed. This is something; and true as far as it goes; that is, however, but a very little way. The great power of both spiritual and physical mountebanks rests on that irremovable property of human nature, in force of which indefinite instincts and sufferings find no echo, no resting-place, in the definite and comprehensible. Ignorance unnecessarily enlarges the sphere of these: but a sphere there is,--facts of mind and cravings of the soul there are,--in which the wisest man seeks help from the indefinite, because it is nearer and more like the infinite, of which he is made the image:--for even we are infinite, even in our finiteness infinite, as the Father in his infinity. In many caterpillars there is a large empty space in the head, the destined room for the pushing forth of the 'antennæ' of its next state of being. Ib. p. 12. But the anti-moralists aver * * that they are quoted unfairly;--that although they disavow, it is true, the necessity, and deny the value, of practical morality and personal holiness, and declare them to be totally irrelevant to our future salvation, yet that * * I might have found occasional recommendations of moral duty which I have neglected to notice. The same 'crambe bis decies cocta' of one self-same charge grounded on one gross and stupid misconception and mis-statement: and to which there needs no other answer than this simple fact. Let the Barrister name any one gross offence against the moral law, for which he would shun a man's acquaintance, and for that same vice the Methodist would inevitably be excluded publicly from their society; and I am inclined to think that a fair list of the Barrister's friends and acquaintances would prove that the Calvinistic Methodists are the austerer and more watchful censors of the two. If this be the truth, as it notoriously is, what but the cataract of stupidity uncouched, or the thickest film of bigot-slime, can prevent a man from seeing that this tenet of justification by faith alone is exclusively a matter between the Calvinist's own heart and his Maker, who alone knows the true source of his words and actions; but that to his neighbours and fellow-creedsmen, his spotless life and good works are demanded, not, indeed, as the prime efficient causes of his salvation, but as the necessary and only possible signs of that faith, which is the means of that salvation of which Christ's free grace is the cause, and the sanctifying Spirit the perfecter. But I fall into the same fault I am arraigning, by so often exposing and confuting the same blunder, which has no claim even at its first enunciation to the compliment of a philosophical answer. But why, in the name of common sense, all this endless whoop and hubbub against the Calvinistic Methodists? I had understood that the Arminian Methodists, or Wesleyans, are the more numerous body by far. Has there been any union lately? Have the followers of Wesley abjured the doctrines of their founder on this head? Ib. p. 16. We are told by our new spiritual teachers, that reason is not to be applied to the inquiry into the truth or falsehood of their doctrines; they are spiritually discerned, and carnal reason has no concern with them. Even under this aversion to reason, as applied to religious grounds, a very important truth lurks: and the mistake (a very dangerous one I admit,) lies in the confounding two very different faculties of the mind under one and the same name;--the pure reason or 'vis scientifica'; and the discourse, or prudential power, the proper objects of which are the 'phænomena' of sensuous experience. The greatest loss which modern philosophy has through wilful scorn sustained, is the grand distinction of the ancient philosophers between the [Greek: noúmena], and [Greek: phainómena]. This gives the true sense of Pliny--'venerare Deos' (that is, their statues, and the like,) 'et numina Deorum', that is, those spiritual influences which are represented by the images and persons of Apollo, Minerva, and the rest. Ib. p. 17. Religion has for its object the moral care and the moral cultivation of man. Its beauty is not to be sought in the regions of mystery, or in the flights of abstraction. What ignorance! Is there a single moral precept of the Gospels not to be found in the Old Testament? Not one. A new edition of White's 'Diatessaron', with a running comment the Hebrew, Greek, and Roman writers before Christ, and those after him who, it is morally certain, drew no aids from the New Testament, is a grand 'desideratum'; and if anything could open the eyes of Socinians, this would do it. Ib. p. 24. The masculine strength and moral firmness which once distinguished the great mass of the British people is daily fading away. Methodism with all its cant, &c. Well! but in God's name can Methodism be at once the effect and the cause of this loss of masculine strength and moral firmness?--Did Whitfield and Wesley blow them out at the first puff--these grand virtues of masculine strength and moral firmness? Admire, I pray you, the happy antithesis. Yet "feminine" would be an improvement, as then the sense too would be antithetic. However, the sound is sufficient, and modern rhetoric possesses the virtue of economy. Ib. p. 27. So with the Tinker; I would give him the care of kettles, but I would not give him 'the cure of souls'. So long as he attended to the management and mending of his pots and pans, I would wish success to his ministry: but when he came to declare 'himself' a "chosen vessel," and demand permission to take the souls of the people into his holy keeping, I should think that, instead of a 'licence', it would be more humane and more prudent to give him a passport to St. Luke's. Depend upon it, such men were never sent by Providence to rule or to regulate mankind. Whoo! Bounteous Providence that always looks at the body clothes and the parents' equipage before it picks out the proper soul for the baby! Ho! the Duchess of Manchester is in labour:--quick, Raphael, or Uriel, bring a soul out of the Numa bin, a young Lycurgus. Or the Archbishop's lady:--ho! a soul from the Chrysostom or Athanasian locker.--But poor Moll Crispin is in the throes with twins:--well! there are plenty of cobblers' and tinkers' souls in the hold--John Bunyan!! Why, thou miserable Barrister, it would take an angel an eternity to tinker thee into a skull of half his capacity! Ib. p. 30, 31. "A 'truly' awakened conscience," (these anti-moral editors of the Pilgrim's Progress assure us,) "can never find relief from the law: (that is, the 'moral law'.) The more he looks for peace 'this way, his guilt', like a heavy burden, becomes more intolerable; when he becomes 'dead' to the 'law',--as to 'any dependence upon it for salvation',--by the body of Christ, and married to him, who was raised from the dead, then, and not till then, his heart is set at liberty, to run the way of God's commandments." Here we are taught that the 'conscience' can never find relief from obedience to the law of the Gospel. False. We are told by Bunyan and his editors that the conscience can never find relief for its disobedience to the Law in the Law itself;--and this is as true of the moral as of the Mosaic Law. I am not defending Calvinism or Bunyan's theology; but if victory, not truth, were my object, I could desire no easier task than to defend it against our doughty Barrister. Well, but I repent--that is, regret it!--Yes! and so you doubtless regret the loss of an eye or arm:--will that make it grow again?--Think you this nonsense as applied to morality? Be it so! But yet nonsense most tremendously suited to human nature it is, as the Barrister may find in the arguments of the Pagan philosophers against Christianity, who attributed a large portion of its success to its holding out an expiation, which no other religion did. Read but that most affecting and instructive anecdote selected from the Hindostan Missionary Account by the Quarterly Review. [4] Again let me say I am not giving my own opinion on this very difficult point; but of one thing I am convinced, that the 'I am sorry for it, that's enough'--men mean nothing but regret when they talk of repentance, and have consciences either so pure or so callous, as not to know what a direful and strange thing remorse is, and how absolutely a fact 'sui generis'! I have often remarked, and it cannot be too often remarked (vain as this may sound), that this essential heterogeneity of regret and remorse is of itself a sufficient and the best proof of free will and reason, the co-existence of which in man we call conscience, and on this rests the whole superstructure of human religion--God, immortality, guilt, judgment, redemption. Whether another and different superstructure may be raised on the same foundation, or whether the same edifice is susceptible of important alteration, is another question. But such is the edifice at present, and this its foundation: and the Barrister might as rationally expect to blow up Windsor Castle by discharging a popgun in one of its cellars, as hope to demolish Calvinism by such arguments as his. Ib. p. 35, 36. "And behold a certain lawyer stood up and tempted him, saying, Master, what shall I do 'to inherit eternal life'?" "He said unto him, 'What is written in the law? How readest thou?'" "And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with 'all thy strength', and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself." "And he said unto him, Thou 'hast answered right. This do, and thou shall live.'" Luke x. 25-28. So would Bunyan, and so would Calvin have preached;--would both of them in the name of Christ have made this assurance to the Barrister--'This do, and thou shalt live.' But what if he has not done it, but the very contrary? And what if the Querist should be a staunch disciple of Dr. Paley: and hold himself "morally obliged" not to hate or injure his fellow-man, not because he is compelled by conscience to see the exceeding sinfulness of sin, and to abhor sin as sin, even as he eschews pain as pain,--no, not even because God has forbidden it;--but ultimately because the great Legislator is able and has threatened to put him to unspeakable torture if he disobeys, and to give him all kind of pleasure if he does not? [5] Why, verily, in this case, I do foresee that both the Tinker and the Divine would wax warm, and rebuke the said Querist for vile hypocrisy, and a most nefarious abuse of God's good gift, intelligible language. What! do you call this 'loving the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and all your mind,--and your neighbour as yourself'? Whereas in truth you love nothing, not even your own soul; but only set a superlative value on whatever will gratify your selfish lust of enjoyment, and insure you from hell-fire at a thousand times the true value of the dirty property. If you have the impudence to persevere in mis-naming this "love," supply any one instance in which you use the word in this sense? If your son did not spit in your face, because he believed that you would disinherit him if he did, and this were his main moral obligation, would you allow that your son loved you--and with all his heart, and mind, and strength, and soul?--Shame! Shame! Now the power of loving God, of willing good as good, (not of desiring the agreeable, and of preferring a larger though distant delight to an infinitely smaller immediate qualification, which is mere selfish prudence,) Bunyan considers supernatural, and seeks its source in the free grace of the Creator through Christ the Redeemer:--this the Kantean also avers to be supersensual indeed, but not supernatural, but in the original and essence of human nature, and forming its grand and awful characteristic. Hence he calls it 'die Menschheit'--the principle of humanity;--but yet no less than Calvin or the Tinker declares it a principle most mysterious, the undoubted object of religious awe, a perpetual witness of that God, whose image ([Greek: eikôn]) it is; a principle utterly incomprehensible by the discursive intellect;--and moreover teaches us, that the surest plan for stifling and paralyzing this divine birth in the soul (a phrase of Plato's as well as of the Tinker's) is by attempting to evoke it by, or to substitute for it, the hopes and fears, the motives and calculations, of prudence; which is an excellent and in truth indispensable servant, but considered as master and primate of the moral diocese precludes the possibility of virtue (in Bunyan's phrase, holiness of spirit) by introducing legality; which is no cant phrase of Methodism, but of authenticated standing in the ethics of the profoundest philosophers--even those who rejected Christianity, as a miraculous event, and revelation itself as far as anything supernatural is implied in it. I must not mention Plato, I suppose,--he was a mystic; nor Zeno,--he and his were visionaries:--but Aristotle, the cold and dry Aristotle, has in a very remarkable passage in his lesser tract of Ethics asserted the same thing; and called it "a divine principle, lying deeper than those things which can be explained or enunciated discursively." Ib. p. 45, 46. Sure I am that no father of a family that can at all estimate the importance of keeping from the infant mind whatever might raise impure ideas or excite improper inquiries will ever commend the Pilgrim's Progress to their perusal. And in the same spirit and for the same cogent reasons that the holy monk Lewis prohibited the Bible in all decent families;--or if they must have something of that kind, would propose in preference Tirante the White! O how I abhor this abominable heart-haunting impurity in the envelope of modesty! Merciful Heaven! is it not a direct consequence from this system, that we all purchase our existence at the price of our mother's purity of mind? See what Milton has written on this subject in the passage quoted in the Friend in the essays on the communication of truth. [6] Ib. p. 47. Let us ask whether the female mind is likely to be trained to purity by studying this manual of piety, and by expressing its devotional desires after the following example. "Mercy being a _young_ and _breeding_ woman _longed_ for something," &c. Out upon the fellow! I could find it in my heart to suspect him of any vice that the worst of men could commit! Ib. pp. 55, 56. 'As by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous'. The interpretation of this text is simply this:--As by following the fatal example of one man's disobedience many were made sinners; so by that pattern of perfect obedience which Christ has set before us shall many be made righteous. What may not be explained thus? And into what may not any thing be thus explained? It comes out little better than nonsense in any other than the literal sense. For let any man of sincere mind and without any system to support look round on all his Christian neighbours, and will he say or will they say that the origin of their well-doing was an attempt to imitate what they all believe to be inimitable, Christ's perfection in virtue, his absolute sinlessness? No--but yet perhaps some particular virtues; for instance, his patriotism in weeping over Jerusalem, his active benevolence in curing the sick and preaching to the poor, his divine forgiveness in praying for his enemies?--I grant all this. But then how is this peculiar to Christ? Is it not the effect of all illustrious examples, of those probably most which we last read of, or which made the deepest impression on our feelings? Were there no good men before Christ, as there were no bad men before Adam? Is it not a notorious fact that those who most frequently refer to Christ's conduct for their own actions, are those who believe him the incarnate Deity--consequently, the best possible guide, but in no strict sense an example;--while those who regard him as a mere man, the chief of the Jewish Prophets, both in the pulpit and from the press ground their moral persuasions chiefly on arguments drawn from the propriety and seemliness--or the contrary--of the action itself, or from the will of God known by the light of reason? To make St. Paul prophesy that all Christians will owe their holiness to their exclusive and conscious imitation of Christ's actions, is to make St. Paul a false prophet;--and what in such case becomes of the boasted influence of miracles? Even as false would it be to ascribe the vices of the Chinese, or even our own, to the influence of Adam's bad example. As well might we say of a poor scrofulous innocent: "See the effect of the bad example of his father on him!" I blame no man for disbelieving, or for opposing with might and main, the dogma of Original Sin; but I confess that I neither respect the understanding nor have confidence in the sincerity of him, who declares that he has carefully read the writings of St. Paul, and finds in them no consequence attributed to the fall of Adam but that of his bad example, and none to the Cross of Christ but the good example of dying a martyr to a good cause. I would undertake from the writings of the later English Socinians to collect paraphrases on the New Testament texts that could only be paralleled by the spiritual paraphrase on Solomon's Song to be found in the recent volume of "A Dictionary of the Holy Bible, by John Brown, Minister of the Gospel at Haddington:" third edition, in the Article, Song. Ib. p. 63, 64. Call forth the robber from his cavern, and the midnight murderer from his den; summon the seducer from his couch, and beckon the adulterer from his embrace; cite the swindler to appear; assemble from every quarter all the various miscreants whose vices deprave, and whose villainies distress, mankind; and when they are thus thronged round in a circle, assure them--not that there is a God that judgeth the earth--not that punishment in the great day of retribution will await their crimes, &c. &c.--Let every sinner in the throng be told that they will stand 'justified' before God; that the 'righteousness' of 'Christ' will be imputed to 'them', &c. Well, do so.--Nay, nay! it has been done; the effect has been tried; and slander itself cannot deny that the effect has been the conversion of thousands of those very sinners whom the Barrister's fancy thus convokes. O shallow man! not to see that here lies the main strength of the cause he is attacking; that, to repeat my former illustration, he draws the attention to patients in that worst state of disease which perhaps alone requires and justifies the use of the white pill, as a mode of exposing the frantic quack who vends it promiscuously! He fixes on the empiric's cures to prove his murders!--not to forget what ought to conclude every paragraph in answer to the Barrister's Hints; "and were the case as alleged, what does this prove against the present Methodists as Methodists?" Is not the tenet of imputed righteousness the faith of all the Scotch Clergy, who are not false to their declarations at their public assumption of the ministry? Till within the last sixty or seventy years, was not the tenet preached Sunday after Sunday in every nook of Scotland; and has the Barrister heard that the morals of the Scotch peasants and artizans have been improved within the last thirty or forty years, since the exceptions have become more and more common?--Was it by want of strict morals that the Puritans were distinguished to their disadvantage from the rest of Englishmen during the reigns of Elizabeth, James I. Charles I. and II.? And that very period, which the Barrister affirms to have been distinguished by the moral vigor of the great mass of Britons,--was it not likewise the period when this very doctrine was preached by the Clergy fifty times for once that it is heard from the same pulpits in the present and preceding generation? Never, never can the Methodists be successfully assailed, if not honestly, and never honestly or with any chance of success, except as Methodists;--for their practices, their alarming theocracy, their stupid, mad, and mad-driving superstitions. These are their property 'in peculio'; their doctrines are those of the Church of England, with no other difference than that in the Church Liturgy, and Articles, and Homilies, Calvinism and Lutheranism are joined like the two hands of the Union Fire Office:-the Methodists have unclasped them, and one is Whitfield and the other Wesley. Ib. p. 75. "For the same reason that a book written in bad language should never be put into the hands of a child that speaks correctly, a book exhibiting instances of vice should never be given to a child that thinks and acts properly." (Practical Education. By Maria and R.L. Edgeworth.) How mortifying that one is never lucky enough to meet with any of these 'virtuosissimos', fifteen or twenty years of age. But perhaps they are such rare jewels, that they are always kept in cotton! The Kilcrops! I would not exchange the heart, which I myself had when a boy, while reading the life of Colonel Jack, or the Newgate Calendar, for a waggon-load of these brilliants. Ib. p. 78. "When a man turns his back on this world, and is in good earnest resolved for everlasting life, his carnal friends, and ungodly neighbours, will pursue him with hue and cry; but death is at his heels, and he cannot stop short of the city of Refuge." (Notes to the Pilgrim's Progress by Hawker, Burder, &c.) This representation of the state of real Christians is as mischievous as it is false. Yet Christ's assertion on this head is positive, and universal; and I believe it from my inmost soul, and am convinced that it is just as true A.D. 1810, as A.D. 33. Ib. p. 82. The spirit with which all their merciless treatment is to be borne is next pointed out. * * "'Patient bearing of injuries' is true Christian fortitude, and will always be more effectual to 'disarm our enemies', and to bring others to the knowledge of the truth, than all 'arguments' whatever." Is this Barrister a Christian of any sort or sect, and is he not ashamed, if not afraid, to ridicule such passages as these? If they are not true, the four Gospels are false. Ib. p. 86. It is impossible to give them credit for integrity when we behold the obstinacy and the artifice with which they defend their system against the strongest argument, and against the clearest evidence. Modest gentleman! I wonder he finds time to write bulky pamphlets: for surely modesty, like his, must secure success and clientage at the bar. Doubtless he means his own arguments, the evidence he himself has adduced:--I say doubtless, for what are these pamphlets but a long series of attacks on the doctrines of the strict Lutherans and Calvinists, (for the doctrines he attacks are common to both,) and if he knew stronger arguments, clearer evidence, he would certainly have given them;--and then what obstinate rogues must our Bishops be, to have suffered these Hints to pass into a third edition, and yet not have brought a bill into Parliament for a new set of Articles? I have not heard that they have even the grace to intend it. Ib. p. 88. On this subject I will quote the just and striking observations of an excellent modern writer. "In whatever village," says he, "the fanatics get a footing, drunkenness and swearing,--sins which, being more exposed to the eye of the world, would be ruinous to their great pretensions to superior sanctity--will, perhaps, be found to decline; but I am convinced, from personal observation, that every species of fraud and falsehood--sins which are not so readily detected, but which seem more closely connected with worldly advantage--will be found invariably to increase." (Religion without Cant; by R. Fellowes, A.M. of St. Mary's Hall, Oxford.) In answer to this let me make a "very just observation," by some other man of my opinion, to be hereafter quoted "from an excellent modern writer;"--and it is this, that from the birth of Christ to the present hour, no sect or body of men were zealous in the reformation of manners in society, without having been charged with the same vices in the same words. When I hate a man, and see nothing bad in him, what remains possible but to accuse him of crimes which I cannot see, and which cannot be disproved, because they cannot be proved? Surely, if Christian charity did not preclude these charges, the shame of convicted parrotry ought to prevent a man from repeating and republishing them. The very same thoughts, almost the words, are to be found of the early Christians; of the poor Quakers; of the Republicans; of the first Reformers.--Why need I say this? Does not every one know, that a jovial pot-companion can never believe a water-drinker not to be a sneaking cheating knave who is afraid of his thoughts; that every libertine swears that those who pretend to be chaste, either have their mistress in secret, or far worse, and so on? Ib. p. 89. The same religious abstinence from all appearance of recreation on the Lord's day; and the same neglect of the weightier matters of the moral law, in the course of the week, &c. This sentence thus smuggled in at the bottom of the chest ought not to pass unnoticed; for the whole force of the former depends on it. It is a true trick, and deserves reprobation. Ib. p. 97. Note. It was procured, Mr. Collyer informs us, by the merit of his "Lectures on Scripture facts." It should have been "Lectures on 'Scriptural' Facts." What should we think of the grammarian, who, instead of 'Historical', should present us with "Lectures on 'History' Facts?" But Law Tracts? And is not 'Scripture' as often used semi-adjectively? Ib. p. 98. "Do you really believe," says Dr. Hawker, "that, because man by his apostacy hath lost his power and ability to obey, God hath lost his right to command? Put the case that you were called upon, as a barrister, to recover a debt due from one man to another, and you knew the debtor had not the ability to pay the 'creditor', would you tell your client that his debtor was under no legal or moral obligation to pay what he had no power to do? And would you tell him that the very expectation of his just right 'was as foolish as it was tyrannical'?" * * * I will give my reply to these questions distinctly and without hesitation. * * * Suppose A. to have lent B. a thousand pounds, as a capital to commence trade, and that, when he purchased his stock to this amount, and lodged it in his warehouse, a fire were to break out in the next dwelling, and, extending itself to 'his' warehouse, were to consume the whole of his property, and reduce him to a state of utter ruin. If A., my client, were to ask my opinion as to his right to recover from B., I should tell him that this his right would exist should B. ever be in a condition to repay the sum borrowed; * * * but that to attempt to recover a thousand pounds from a man thus reduced by accident to utter ruin, and who had not a shilling left in the world, would be 'as foolish as it was tyrannical'. But this is rank sophistry. The question is:--Does a thief (and a fraudulent debtor is no better) acquire a claim to impunity by not possessing the power of restoring the goods? Every moral act derives its character (says a Schoolman with an unusual combination of profundity with quaintness) 'aut voluntate originis aut origine voluntatis'. Now the very essence of guilt, its dire and incommunicable character, consists in its tendency to destroy the free will;--but when thus destroyed, are the habits of vice thenceforward innocent? Does the law excuse the murder because the perpetrator was drunk? Dr. Hawker put his objection laxly and weakly enough; but a manly opponent would have been ashamed to seize an hour's victory from what a move of the pen would render impregnable. Ib. p. 102, 3. When at this solemn tribunal the sinner shall be called upon to answer for the transgression of those 'moral' laws, on obedience to which salvation was made to depend, will it be sufficient that he declares himself to have been taught to believe that the Gospel 'had neither terms nor conditions', and that his salvation was secured by a covenant which procured him pardon and peace, 'from all eternity': a covenant, the effects of which no folly or 'after-act whatever' could possibly destroy?--Who could anticipate the sentence of condemnation, and not weep in agony over the deluded victim of ignorance and misfortune who was thus taught a doctrine so fatally false? What then! God is represented as a tyrant when he claims the penalty of disobedience from the servant, who has wilfully incapacitated himself for obeying,--and yet just and merciful in condemning to indefinite misery a poor "deluded victim of ignorance and imposture," even though the Barrister, spite of his antipathy to Methodists, would "weep in agony" over him! But before the Barrister draws bills of imagination on his tender feelings, would it not have been as well to adduce some last dying speech and confession, in which the culprit attributed his crimes--not to Sabbath-breaking and loose company,--but to sermon-hearing on the 'modus operandi' of the divine goodness in the work of redemption? How the Ebenezerites would stare to find the Socinians and themselves in one flock on the sheep-side of the judgment-seat,--and their cousins, and fellow Methodists, the Tabernaclers, all caprifled--goats every man:--and why? They held, that repentance is in the power of every man, with the aid of grace; while the goats held that without grace no man is able even to repent. A. makes grace the cause, and B. makes it only a necessary auxiliary. And does the Socinian extricate himself a whit more clearly? Without a due concurrence of circumstances no mind can improve itself into a state susceptible of spiritual happiness: and is not the disposition and pre-arrangement of circumstances as dependent on the divine will as those spiritual influences which the Methodist holds to be meant by the word grace? Will not the Socinian find it as difficult to reconcile with mercy and justice the condemnation to hell-fire of poor wretches born and bred in the thieves' nests of St. Giles, as the Methodists the condemnation of those who have been less favoured by grace? I have one other question to ask, though it should have been asked before. Suppose Christ taught nothing more than a future state of retribution and the necessity and sufficiency of good morals, how are we to explain his forbidding these truths to be taught to any but Jews till after his resurrection? Did the Jews reject those doctrines? Except perhaps a handful of rich men, called Sadducees, they all believed them, and would have died a thousand deaths rather than have renounced their faith. Besides, what is there in doctrines common to the creed of all religions, and enforced by all the schools of philosophy, except the Epicurean, which should have prevented their being taught to all at the same time? I perceive, that this difficulty does not press on Socinians exclusively: but yet it presses on them with far greater force than on others. For they make Christianity a mere philosophy, the same in substance with the Stoical, only purer from errors and accompanied with clearer evidence:--while others think of it as part of a covenant made up with Abraham, the fulfilment of which was in good faith to be first offered to his posterity. I ask this only because the Barrister professes to find every thing in the four Gospels so plain and easy. Ib. p. 106. The Reformers by whom those articles were framed were educated in the Church of Rome, and opposed themselves rather to the perversion of its power than the errors of its doctrine. An outrageous blunder. Ib. p. 107. Lord Bacon was the first who dedicated his profound and penetrating genius to the cultivation of sound philosophy, &c. This very same Lord Bacon has given us his 'Confessio Fidei' at great length, with full particularity. Now I will answer for the Methodists' unhesitating assent and consent to it; but would the Barrister subscribe it? Ib. p. 108. We look back to that era of our history when superstition threw her victim on the pile, and bigotry tied the martyr to his stake:--but we take our eyes from the retrospect and turn them in thankful admiration to that Being who has opened the minds of many, and is daily opening the minds of more amongst us to the reception of these most important of all truths, that there is no true faith but in practical goodness, and that the worst of errors is the error of the 'life'. Such is the conviction of the most enlightened of our Clergy: the conviction, I trust, of the far greater part * * *. They deem it better to inculcate the moral duties of Christianity in the pure simplicity and clearness with which they are revealed, than to go aside in search of 'doctrinal mysteries'. For as mysteries cannot be made manifest, they, of course, cannot be understood; and that which cannot be understood cannot be believed, and can, consequently, make no part of any system of faith: since no one, till he understands a doctrine, can tell whether it be true or false; till then, therefore, he can have no faith in it, for no one can rationally affirm that he believes that doctrine to be true which he does not know to be so; and he cannot know it to be true if he does not understand it. In the religion of a true Christian, therefore, there can be nothing unintelligible; and if the preachers of that religion do not make mysteries, they will never find any. Who? the Bishops, or the dignified Clergy? Have they at length exploded all "doctrinal mysteries?" Was Horsley "the one red leaf, the last of its clan," that held the doctrines of the Trinity, the corruption of the human Will, and the Redemption by the Cross of Christ? Verily, this is the most impudent attempt to impose a naked Socinianism on the public, as the general religion of the nation, admitted by all but a dunghill of mushroom fanatics, that ever insulted common sense or common modesty! And will "the far greater part" of the English Clergy remain silent under so atrocious a libel as is contained in this page? Do they indeed solemnly pray to their Maker weekly, before God and man, in the words of a Liturgy, which, they know, "cannot be believed?" For heaven's sake, my dear Southey, do quote this page and compare it with the introduction to and petitions of the Liturgy, and with the Collects on the Advent, &c. Ib. p. 110. We shall discover upon an attentive examination of the subject, that all those laws which lay the basis of our constitutional liberties, are no other than the rules of religion transcribed into the judicial system, and enforced by the sanction of civil authority. What! Compare these laws, first, with Tacitus's account of the constitutional laws of our German ancestors, Pagans; and then with the Pandects and 'Novellæ' of the most Christian Justinian, aided by all his Bishops. Observe, the Barrister is asserting a fact of the historical origination of our laws,--and not what no man would deny, that as far as they are humane and just, they coincide with the precepts of the Gospel. No, they were "transcribed." Ib. p. 113. Where a man holds a certain system of doctrines, the State is bound to tolerate, though it may not approve, them; but when he demands a 'license to teach' this system to the rest of the community, he demands that which ought not to be granted incautiously and without grave consideration. This discretionary power is delegated in trust for the common good, &c. All this, dear Southey, I leave to the lash of your indignation. It would be oppression to do--what the Legislature could not do if it would--prevent a man's thoughts; but if he speaks them aloud, and asks either for instruction and confutation, if he be in error, or assent and honor, if he be in the right, then it is no oppression to throw him into a dungeon! But the Barrister would only withhold a license! Nonsense. What if he preaches and publishes without it, will the Legislature dungeon him or not? If not, what use is either the granting or the withholding? And this too from a Socinian, who by this very book has, I believe, made himself obnoxious to imprisonment and the pillory--and against men, whose opinions are authorized by the most solemn acts of Parliament, and recorded in a Book, of which there must be one, by law, in every parish, and of which there is in fact one in almost every house and hovel! Part IV. p. 1. The religion of genuine Christianity is a revelation so distinct and specific in its design, and so clear and intelligible in its rules, that a man of philosophic and retired thought is apt to wonder by what means the endless systems of error and hostility which divide the world were ever introduced into it. What means this hollow cant--this fifty times warmed-up bubble and squeak? That such parts are intelligible as the Barrister understands? That such parts as it possesses in common with all systems of religion and morality are plain and obvious? In other words that ABC are so legible that they are legible to every one that has learnt to read? If the Barrister mean other or more than this, if he really mean the whole religion and revelation of Christ, even as it is found in the original records, the Gospels and Epistles, he escapes from the silliness of a truism by throwing himself into the arms of a broad brazenfaced untruth. What! Is the sixth chapter of St. John's Gospel so distinct and specific in its design, that any modest man can wonder that the best and most learned men of every age since Christ have deemed it mysterious? Are the many passages concerning the Devil and demoniacs so very easy? Has this writer himself thrown the least light on, or himself received one ray of light from, the meaning of the word Faith;--or the reason of Christ's paramount declarations respecting its omnific power, its absolutely indispensable necessity? If the word mean only what the Barrister supposes, a persuasion that in the present state of our knowledge the evidences for the historical truth of the miracles of the Gospel outweigh the arguments of the Sceptics, will he condescend to give us such a comment on the assertion, that had we but a grain of mustard seed of it, we might control all material nature, without making Christ himself the most extravagant hyperbolist that ever mis-used language? But it is impossible to make that man blush, who can seriously call the words of Christ as recorded by St. John, plain, easy, common sense, out of which prejudice, artifice, and selfish interest alone can compose any difficulty. The Barrister has just as much right to call his religion Christianity, as to call flour and water plum pudding:--yet we all admit that in plum pudding both flour and water do exist. Ib. p. 7. Socinus can have no claim upon my veneration: I have never concerned myself with what he believed nor with what he taught &c. The Scripture is my authority, and on no other authority will I ever, knowingly, lay the foundation of my faith. Utterly untrue. It is not the Scripture, but such passages of Scripture as appear to him to accord with his Procrustean bed of so called reason, and a forcing of the blankest contradictions into the same meaning, by explanations to which I defy him to furnish one single analogy as allowed by mankind with regard to any other writings but the Old and New Testament. It is a gross and impudent delusion to call a Book his authority, which he receives only so far as it is an echo of his own convictions. I defy him to adduce one single article of his whole faith, (creed rather) which he really derives from the Scripture. Even the arguments for the Resurrection are and must be extraneous: for the very proofs of the facts are (as every 'tyro' in theology must know) the proofs of the authenticity of the Books in which they are contained. This question I would press upon him:--Suppose we possessed the Fathers only with the Ecclesiastical and Pagan historians, and that not a page remained of the New Testament,--what article of his creed would it alter? Ib. p. 10. If the creed of Calvinistic Methodism is really more productive of conversions than the religion of Christianity, let them openly and at once say so. But Calvinistic Methodism? Why Calvinistic Methodism? Not one in a hundred of the Methodists are Calvinists. Not to mention the impudence of this crow in his abuse of black feathers! Is it worse in a Methodist to oppose Socinianism to Christianity, that is, to the doctrines of Wesley or even Whitfield, which are the same as those of all the Reformed Churches of Christendom, and differ only wherein the most celebrated divines of the same churches have differed with each other,--than for the Barrister to oppose Methodism to Christianity (his Christianity)--that is, to Socinianism, which in every peculiar doctrine of Christianity differs from all divines of all Churches of all ages? For the one tenet in which the Calvinist differs from the majority of Christians, are there not ten in which the Socinian differs from all? To what purpose then this windy declamation about John Calvin? How many Methodists, does the Barrister think, ever saw, much less read, a work of Calvin's? If he scorns the name of Socinus as his authority, and appeals to Scripture, do not the Methodists the same? When do they refer to Calvin? In what work do they quote him? This page is therefore mere dust in the eyes of the public. And his abuse of Calvin displays only his own vulgar ignorance both of the man, and of his writings. For he seems not to know that the humane Melancthon, and not only he, but almost every Church, Lutheran or Reformed, throughout Europe, sent letters to Geneva, extolling the execution of Servetus, and returning their thanks. Yet it was a murder not the less: Yes! a damned murder: but the guilt of it is not peculiar to Calvin, but common to all the theologians of that age; and, 'Nota bene,' Mr. Barrister, the Socini not excepted, who were prepared to inflict the very same punishment on F. Davidi for denying the adorability of Christ. If to wish, will, resolve, and attempt to realize, be morally to commit, an action, then must Socinus and Calvin hunt in the same collar. But, O mercy! if every human being were to be held up to detestation, who in that age would have thought it his duty to have passed sentence 'de comburendo heretico' on a man, who had publicly styled the Trinity "a Cerberus," and "a three-headed monster of hell," what would the history of the Reformation be but a list of criminals? With what face indeed can we congratulate ourselves on being born in a more enlightened age, if we so bitterly abuse not the practice but the agents? Do we not admit by this very phrase "enlightened," that we owe our exemption to our intellectual advantages, not primarily to our moral superiority? It will be time enough to boast, when to our own tolerance we have added their zeal, learning, and indefatigable industry. [7] Ib. p. 13, 14. If religion consists in listening to long prayers, and attending long sermons, in keeping up an outside appearance of devotion, and interlarding the most common discourse with phrases of Gospel usage:--if this is religion, then are the disciples of Methodism pious beyond compare. But in real humility of heart, in mildness of temper, in liberality of mind, in purity of thought, in openness and uprightness of conduct in private life, in those practical virtues which are the vital substance of Christianity,--in these are they superior? No. Public observation is against the fact, and the conclusion to which such observation leads is rarely incorrect. * * The very name of the sect carries with it an impression of meanness and hypocrisy. Scarce an individual that has had any dealings with those belonging to it, but has good cause to remember it from some circumstance of low deception or of shuffling fraud. Its very members trust each other with caution and reluctance. The more wealthy among them are drained and dried by the leeches that perpetually fasten upon them. The leaders, ignorant and bigoted--I speak of them collectively --present us with no counter-qualities that can conciliate respect. They have all the craft of monks without their courtesy, and all the subtlety of Jesuits without their learning. In the whole 'Bibliotlieca theologica' I remember no instance of calumny so gross, so impudent, so unchristian. Even as a single robber, I mean he who robs one man, gets hanged, while the robber of a million is a great man, so it seems to be with calumny. This worthy Barrister will be extolled for this audacious slander of thousands, for which, if applied to any one individual, he would be in danger of the pillory. This paragraph should be quoted: for were the charge true, it is nevertheless impossible that the Barrister should know it to be true. He positively asserts as a truth known to him what it is impossible he should know:--he is therefore doubly a slanderer; for first, the charge is a gross calumny; and were it otherwise, he would still be a slanderer, for he could have no proof, no ground for such a charge. Ib. p. 15. Amidst all this spirit of research we find nothing--comparatively nothing--of improvement in that science of all others the most important in its influence * * *. Religion, except from the emancipating energy of a few superior minds, which have dared to snap asunder the cords which bound them to the rock of error * * * has been suffered to remain in its principles and in its doctrines, just what it was when the craft of Catholic superstition first corrupted its simplicity. So, so. Here it comes out at last! It is not the Methodists; no; it is all and each of all Europe, Infidels and Socinians excepted! O impudence! And then the exquisite self-conceit of the blunderer! Ib. p. 29. --If of 'different denominations', how were they thus conciliated to a society of this ominous nature, from which they must themselves of necessity be excluded by that indispensable condition of admittance, "'a union' of religious sentiment in the 'great doctrines':" which very want of union it is that creates these 'different denominations'? No, Barrister! they mean that men of different denominations may yet all believe in the corruption of the human will, the redemption by Christ, the divinity of Christ as consubstantial with the Father, the necessity of the Holy Spirit, or grace (meaning more than the disposition of circumstances), and the necessity of faith in Christ superadded to a belief of his actions and doctrines,--and yet differ in many other points. The points enumerated are called the great points, because all Christians agree in them excepting the Arians and Socinians, who for that reason are not deemed Christians by the rest. The Roman Catholic, the Lutheran, the Calvinist, the Arminian, the Greek, with all their sub-divisions, do yet all accord in these articles:--the booksellers might have said, all who repeat the Nicene Creed. N. B. I do not approve, or defend, nay, I dislike, these "United Theological Booksellers": but this utter Barrister is their best friend by attacking them so as to secure to them victory, and all the advantages of being known to have been wickedly slandered;--the best shield a faulty cause can protend against the javelin of fair opposition. Ib. p. 56. Our Saviour never in any single instance reprobated the exercise of reason: on the contrary, he reprehends severely those who did not exercise it. Carnal reason is not a phrase to be found in his Gospel; he appealed to the understanding in all he said, and in all he taught. He never required 'faith' in his disciples, without first furnishing sufficient 'evidence' to justify it. He reasoned thus: If I have done what no 'human power' could do, you must admit that my power is 'from above', &c. Good heavens! did he not uniformly require faith as the condition of obtaining the "evidence," as this Barrister calls it--that is, the miracle? What a shameless perversion of the fact! He never did reason thus. In one instance only, and then upbraiding the base sensuality of the Jews, he said: "If ye are so base as not to believe what I say from the moral evidence in your own consciences, yet pay some attention to it even for my works' sake." And this, an 'argumentum ad hominem,' a bitter reproach (just as if a great chemist should say;--Though you do not care for my science, or the important truths it presents, yet, even as an amusement superior to that of your jugglers to whom you willingly crowd, pay some attention to me)--this is to be set up against twenty plain texts and the whole spirit of the whole Gospel! Besides, Christ could not reason so; for he knew that the Jews admitted both natural and demoniacal miracles, and their faith in the latter he never attacked; though by an 'argumentum ad hominem' (for it is no argument in itself) he denied its applicability to his own works. If Christ had reasoned so, why did not the Barrister quote his words, instead of putting imaginary words in his mouth? Ib. 60, 61. Religion is a system of 'revealed' truth; and to affirm of any revealed truth, that we 'cannot understand' it, is, in effect, either to deny that it has been revealed, or--which is the same thing--to admit that it has been revealed in vain. It is too worthless! I cannot go on. Merciful God! hast thou not revealed to us the being of a conscience, and of reason, and of will;--and does this Barrister tell us, that he "understands" them? Let him know that he does not even understand the very word understanding. He does not seem to be aware of the school-boy distinction between the [Greek: hóti esti] and the [Greek: dióti]? But to all these silly objections religion must for ever remain exposed as long as the word Revelation is applied to any thing that can be 'bona fide' given to the mind 'ab extra', through the senses of eye, ear, or touch. No! all revelation is and must be 'ab intra'; the external 'phænomena' can only awake, recall evidence, but never reveal. This is capable of strict demonstration. Afterwards the Barrister quotes from Thomas Watson respecting things above comprehension in the study of nature: "in these cases, the 'fact' is evident, the cause lies in obscurity, deeply removed from all the knowledge and penetration of man." Then what can we believe respecting these causes? And if we can believe nothing respecting them, what becomes of them as arguments in support of the proposition that we ought, in religion, to believe what we cannot understand? Are there not facts in religion, the causes and constitution of which are mysteries? [Footnote 1: Hints to the Public and the Legislature on the nature and effect of Evangelical Preaching. By a Barrister. Fourth Edition, 1808.] [Footnote 2: See Aids to Reflection, p. 14, 4th edition.--Ed.] [Footnote 3: Quart. Review, vol. ii. p. 187.--Ed.] [Footnote 4: See vol. i., p. 217.--Ed.] [Footnote 5: "And from this account of obligation it follows, that we can he obliged to nothing but what we ourselves are to gain or lose something by; for nothing else can be a violent motive to us. As we should not be obliged to obey the laws, or the magistrate, unless rewards or punishments, pleasure or pain, somehow or other depended upon our obedience; so neither should we, without the same reason, be obliged to do what is right, to practise virtue, or to obey the commands of God." 'Paley's Moral and Polit. Philosophy', B. II. c. 2. "The difference, and the only difference, ('between prudence and duty',) is this; that in the one case we consider what we shall gain or lose in the present world; in the other case, we consider also what we shall gain or lose in the world to come." Ib. c. 3.--Ed.] [Footnote 6: Friend, Vol. I. Essays X. and XI. 3rd edition--Ed.] [Footnote 7: See Table Talk, pp. 282 and 304. 2d edit.--Ed.] * * * * * NOTES ON DAVISON'S DISCOURSES ON PROPHECY. 1825. [1] Disc. IV. Pt. I. p. 140. As to systems of religion alien from Christianity, if any of them have taught the doctrine of eternal life, the reward of obedience, as a dogma of belief, that doctrine is not their boast, but their burden and difficulty; inasmuch as they could never defend it. They could never justify it on independent grounds of deduction, nor produce their warrant and authority to teach it. In such precarious and unauthenticated principles it may pass for a conjecture, or pious fraud, or a splendid phantom: it cannot wear the dignity of truth. Ah, why did not Mr. Davison adhere to the manly, the glorious, strain of thinking from p. 134 ('Since Prophecy', &c.) to p. 139. ('that mercy') of this discourse? A fact is no subject of scientific demonstration speculatively: we can only bring analogies, and these Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato, and others did bring; but their main argument remains to this day the main argument--namely, that none but a wicked man dares doubt it. When it is not in the light of promise, it is in the law of fear, at all times a part of the conscience, and presupposed in all spiritual conviction. Ib. p. 160. Some indeed have sought the 'star' and the 'sceptre' of Balaam's prophecy, where they cannot well be found, in the reign of David; for though a sceptre might be there, the star properly is not. Surely this is a very weak reason. A far better is, I think, suggested by the words, 'I shall see him--I shall behold him';--which in no intelligible sense could be true of Balaam relatively to David. Ib. p. 162. The Israelites could not endure the voice and fire of Mount Sinai. They asked an intermediate messenger between God and them, who should temper the awfulness of his voice, and impart to them his will in a milder way. 'Deut'. xviii. 15. Is the following argument worthy our consideration? If, as the learned Eichhorn, Paulus of Jena, and others of their school, have asserted, Moses waited forty days for a tempest, and then, by the assistance of the natural magic he had learned in the temple of Isis, 'initiated' the law, all our experience and knowledge of the way in which large bodies of men are affected would lead us to suppose that the Hebrew people would have been keenly excited, interested, and elevated by a spectacle so grand and so flattering to their national pride. But if the voices and appearances were indeed divine and supernatural, well must we assume that there was a distinctive, though verbally inexpressible, terror and disproportion to the mind, the senses, the whole 'organismus' of the human beholders and hearers, which might both account for, and even in the sight of God justify, the trembling prayer which deprecated a repetition. Ib. p. 164. To justify its application to Christ, the resemblance between him and Moses has often been deduced at large, and drawn into a variety of particulars, among which several points have been taken minute and precarious, or having so little of dignity or clearness of representation in them, that it would be wise to discard them from the prophetic evidence. With our present knowledge we are both enabled and disposed thus to evolve the full contents of the word 'like'; but I cannot help thinking that the contemporaries of Moses (if not otherwise orally instructed,) must have understood it in the first and historical sense, at least, of Joshua. Ib. p. 168. A distinguished commentator on the laws of Moses, Michaelis, vindicates their temporal sanctions on the ground of the Mosaic Code being of the nature of a civil system, to the statutes of which the rewards of a future state would be incongruous and unsuitable. I never read either of Michaelis's Works, but the same view came before me whenever I reflected on the Mosaic Code. Who expects in realities of any kind the sharp outline and exclusive character of scientific classification? It is the predominance of the characterizing constituent that gives the name and class. Do not even our own statute laws, though co-existing with a separate religious Code, contain many 'formulæ' of words which have no sense but for the conscience? Davison's stress on the word 'covet', in the tenth commandment, is, I think, beyond what so ancient a Code warrants;--and for the other instances, Michaelis would remind him that the Mosaic constitution was a strict theocracy, and that Jehovah, the God of all, was their 'king'. I do not know the particular mode in which Michaelis propounds and supports this position; but the position itself, as I have presented it to my own mind, seems to me among the strongest proofs of the divine origin of the Law, and an essential in the harmony of the total scheme of Revelation. Disc. IV. Pt. II. p. 180. But the first law meets him on his own terms; it stood upon a present retribution; the execution of its sentence is matter of history, and the argument resulting from it is to be answered, before the question is carried to another world. This is rendered a very powerful argument by the consideration, that though so vast a mind as that of Moses, though perhaps even a Lycurgus, might have distinctly foreseen the ruin and captivity of the Hebrew people as a necessary result of the loss of nationality, and the abandonment of the law and religion which were their only point of union, their centre of gravity,--yet no human intellect could have foreseen the perpetuity of such a people as a distinct race under all the aggravated curses of the law weighing on them; or that the obstinacy of their adherence to their dividuating institutes in persecution, dispersion, and shame, should be in direct proportion to the wantonness of their apostasy from the same in union and prosperity. Disc. V. Pt. II. p. 234. Except under the dictate of a constraining inspiration, it is not easy to conceive how the master of such a work, at the time when he had brought it to perfection, and beheld it in its lustre, the labour of so much opulent magnificence and curious art, and designed to be 'exceeding magnifical, of fame, and of glory throughout all countries', should be occupied with the prospect of its utter ruin and dilapidation, and that too under the 'opprobrium' of God's vindictive judgment upon it, nor to imagine how that strain of sinister prophecy, that forebodes of malediction, should be ascribed to him, if he had no such vision revealed. Here I think Mr. Davison should have crushed the objection of the Infidel grounded on Solomon's subsequent idolatrous impieties. The Infidel argues, that these are not conceivable of a man distinctly conscious of a prior and supernatural inspiration, accompanied with supernatural manifestations of the divine presence. Disc. VI. Pt. I. p. 283. In order to evade this conclusion, nothing is left but to deny that Isaiah, or any person of his age, wrote the book ascribed to him. This too is my conclusion, but (if I do not delude myself) from more evident, though not perhaps more certain, premisses. The age of the Cyrus prophecies is the great object of attack by Eichhorn and his compilers; and I dare not say, that in a controversy with these men Davison's arguments would appear sufficient. But this was not the intended subject of these Discourses. Disc. VI. Pt. II. p. 289. But how does he express that promise? In the images of the resurrection and an immortal state. Consequently, there is implied in the delineation of the lower subject the truth of the greater. This reminds me of a remark, I have elsewhere made respecting the expediency of separating the arguments addressed to, and valid for, a believer, from the proofs and vindications of Scripture intended to form the belief, or to convict the Infidel. Disc. VI. Pt. IV. p. 325. When Cyrus became master of Babylon, the prophecies of Isaiah were shewn or communicated to him, wherein were described his victory, and the use he was appointed to make of it in the restoration of the Hebrew people. ('Ezra' i. 1, 2.) This I had been taught to regard as one of Josephus's legends; but upon this passage who would not infer that it had Ezra for its authority,--who yet does not expressly say that even the prophecy of the far later Jeremiah was known or made known to Cyrus, who (Ezra tells us) fulfilled it? If Ezra had meant the prediction of Isaiah by the words, 'he hath charged me', &c., why should he not have referred to it together with, or even instead of, Jeremiah? Is it not more probable that a living prophet had delivered the charge to Cyrus? See 'Ezra' vi. 14.--Again, Davison makes Cyrus speak like a Christian, by omitting the affix 'of Heaven to the Lord God' in the original. Cyrus speaks as a Cyrus might be supposed to do,--namely, of a most powerful but yet national deity, of a God, not of God. I have seen in so many instances the injurious effect of weak or overstrained arguments in defence of religion, that I am perhaps more jealous than I need be in the choice of evidences. I can never think myself the worse Christian for any opinion I may have formed, respecting the price of this or that argument, of this or that divine, in support of the truth. For every one that I reject, I could supply two, and these [Greek: anékdota]. Ib. p. 336. Meanwhile this long repose and obscurity of Zerubbabel's family, and of the whole house of David, during so many generations prior to the Gospel, was one of the preparations made whereby to manifest more distinctly the proper glory of it, in the birth of the Messiah. In whichever way I take this, whether addressed to a believer for the purpose of enlightening, or to an inquirer for the purpose of establishing, his faith in prophecy, this argument appears to me equally perplexing and obscure. It seems, 'prima facie', almost tantamount to a right of inferring the fulfilment of a prophecy in B., which it does not mention, from its entire failure and falsification in A., which, and which alone, it does mention. Ib. p. 370. 'Behold I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and dreadful day of the Lord.' Almost every page of this volume makes me feel my own ignorance respecting the interpretation of the language of the Hebrew Prophets, and the want of the one idea which would supply the key. Suppose an Infidel to ask me, how the Jews were to ascertain that John the Baptist was Elijah the Prophet;--am I to assert the pre-existence of John's personal identity as Elijah? If not, why Elijah rather than any other Prophet? One answer is obvious enough, that the contemporaries of John held Elijah as the common representative of the Prophets; but did Malachi do so? Ib. p. 373. I cannot conceive a more beautiful synopsis of a work on the Prophecies of the Old Testament, than is given in this Recapitulation. Would that its truth had been equally well substantiated! That it can be, that it will be, I have the liveliest faith;--and that Mr. Davison has contributed as much as we ought to expect, and more than any contemporary divine, I acknowledge, and honor him accordingly. But much, very much, remains to be done, before these three pages merit the name of a Recapitulation. Disc. VII. p. 375. If I needed proof of the immense importance of the doctrine of Ideas, and how little it is understood, the following discourse would supply it. The whole discussion on Prescience and Freewill, with exception of the page or two borrowed from Skelton, displays an unacquaintance with the deeper philosophy, and a helplessness in the management of the particular question, which I know not how to reconcile with the steadiness and clearness of insight evinced in the earlier Discourses. I neither do nor ever could see any other difficulty on the subject, than what is contained and anticipated in the idea of eternity. By Ideas I mean intuitions not sensuous, which can be expressed only by contradictory conceptions, or, to speak more accurately, are in themselves necessarily both inexpressible and inconceivable, but are suggested by two contradictory positions. This is the essential character of all ideas, consequently of eternity, in which the attributes of omniscience and omnipotence are included. Now prescience and freewill are in fact nothing more than the two contradictory positions by which the human understanding struggles to express successively the idea of eternity. Not eternity in the negative sense as the mere absence of succession, much less eternity in the senseless sense of an infinite time; but eternity,--the Eternal; as Deity, as God. Our theologians forget that the objection applies equally to the possibility of the divine will; but if they reply that prescience applied to an eternal, 'Entis absoluti tota et simultanea fruitio', is but an anthropomorphism, or term of accommodation, the same answer serves in respect of the human will; for the epithet human does not enter into the syllogism. As to contingency, whence did Mr. Davison learn that it is a necessary accompaniment of freedom, or of free action? My philosophy teaches me the very contrary. Ib. p. 392. He contends, without reserve, that the free actions of men are not within the divine prescience; resting his doctrine partly on the assumption that there are no strict and absolute predictions in Scripture of those actions in which men are represented as free and responsible; and partly on the abstract reason, that such actions are in their nature impossible to be certainly foreknown. I utterly deny contingency except in relation to the limited and imperfect knowledge of man. But the misery is, that men write about freewill without a single meditation on will absolutely; on the idea [Greek: katt' exochàen] without any idea; and so bewilder themselves in the jungle of alien conceptions; and to understand the truth they overlay their reason. Disc. VIII. p. 416. It would not be easy to calculate the good which a man like Mr. Davison might effect, under God, by a work on the Messianic Prophecies, specially intended for and addressed to the present race of Jews,--if only he would make himself acquainted with their objections and ways of understanding Scripture. For instance, a learned Jew would perhaps contend that this prophecy of Isaiah (c. ii. 2-4,) cannot fairly be interpreted of a mere local origination of a religion historically; as the drama might be described as going forth from Athens, and philosophy from Academus and the Painted Porch, but must refer to an established and continuing seat of worship, 'a house of the God of Jacob'. The answer to this is provided in the preceding verse, 'in the top of the mountains'; which irrefragably proves the figurative character of the whole prediction. Ib. p. 431. One point, however, is certain and equally important, namely, that the Christian Church, when it comes to recognize more truly the obligation imposed upon it by the original command of its Founder, 'Go teach all nations', &c. That the duty here recommended is deducible from this text is quite clear to my mind; but whether it is the direct sense and primary intention of the words; whether the first meaning is not negative,--('Have no respect to what nation a man is of, but teach it to all indifferently whom you have an opportunity of addressing',)--this is not so clear. The larger sense is not without its difficulties, nor is this narrower sense without its practical advantages. Disc. IX. p. 453, 4. The striking inferiority of several of these latter Discourses in point of style, as compared with the first 150 pages of this volume, perplexes me. It seems more than mere carelessness, or the occasional 'infausta tempora scribendi', can account for. I question whether from any modern work of a tenth part of the merit of these Discourses, either in matter or in force and felicity of diction and composition, as many uncouth and awkward sentences could be extracted. The paragraph in page 453 and 454, is not a specimen of the worst. In a volume which ought to be, and which probably will be, in every young Clergyman's library, these 'maculæ' are subjects of just regret. The utility of the work, no less than its great comparative excellence, render its revision a duty on the part of the author; specks are no trifles in diamonds. Disc. XII. p. 519. Four such ruling kingdoms did arise. The first, the Babylonian, was in being when the prophecy is represented to have been given. It was followed by the Persian; the Persian gave way to the Grecian; the Roman closed the series. This is stoutly denied by Eichhorn, who contends that the Mede or Medo-Persian is the second--if I recollect aright. But it always struck me that Eichhorn, like other learned Infidels, is caught in his own snares. For if the prophecies are of the age of the first Empire, and actually delivered by Daniel, there is no reason why the Roman Empire should not have been predicted;--for superhuman predictions, the last two at least must have been. But if the book was a forgery, or a political poem like Gray's Bard or Lycophron's Cassandra, and later than Antiochus Epiphanes, it is strange and most improbable that the Roman should have escaped notice. In both cases the omission of the last and most important Empire is inexplicable. Ib. p. 521. Yet we have it on authority of Josephus, that Daniel's prophecies were read publicly among the Jews in their worship, as well as their other received Scriptures. It is but fair, however, to remember that the Jewish Church ranked the book of Daniel in the third class only, among the Hagiographic --passionately almost as the Jews before and at the time of our Saviour were attached to it. Ib. p. 522-3. But to a Jewish eye, or to any eye placed in the same position of view in the age of Antiochus Epiphanes, it is utterly impossible to admit that this superior strength of the Roman power to reduce and destroy, this heavier arm of subjugation, could have revealed itself so plainly, as to warrant the express deliberate description of it. 'Quære'. See Polybius. Ib. We shall yet have to inquire how it could be foreseen that this fourth, this yet unestablished empire, should be the last in the line. This is a sound and weighty argument, which the preceding does not, I confess, strike me as being. On the contrary, the admission that by a writer of the Maccabaic æra the Roman power could scarcely have been overlooked, greatly strengthens this second argument, as naturally suggesting expectations of change, and wave-like succession of empires, rather than the idea of a last. In the age of Augustus this might possibly have occurred to a profound thinker; but the age of Antiochus was too late to permit the Roman power to escape notice; and not late enough to suggest its exclusive establishment so as to leave no source of succession. [Footnote 1: Discourses on Prophecy, in which are considered its structure, use and inspiration, being the substance of twelve Sermons preached in the Chapel of Lincoln's Inn in the Lecture founded by the Right Rev. William Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester. By John Davison, B.D. 2nd edit. London, 1825.] * * * * * NOTES ON IRVING'S BEN-EZRA. [1] 1827. Christ the WORD. | The Scriptures--The Spirit--The Church. | The Preacher. Such seemeth to me to be the scheme of the Faith in Christ. The written Word, the Spirit and the Church, are co-ordinate, the indispensable conditions and the working causes of the perpetuity and continued re-nascence and spiritual life of Christ still militant. The Eternal Word, Christ from everlasting, is the 'prothesis' or identity;--the Scriptures and the Church are the two poles, or the 'thesis' and 'antithesis'; the Preacher in direct line under the Spirit, but likewise the point of junction of the written Word and the Church, being the 'synthesis'. And here is another proof of a principle elsewhere by me asserted and exemplified, that divine truths are ever a 'tetractys', or a triad equal to a 'tetractys': 4=1 or 3=4=1. But the entire scheme is a pentad--God's hand in the world. [2] It may be not amiss that I should leave a record in my own hand, how far, in what sense, and under what conditions, I agree with my friend, Edward Irving, respecting the second coming of the Son of Man. I. How far? First, instead of the full and entire conviction, the positive assurance, which Mr. Irving entertains, I--even in those points in which my judgment most coincides with his,--profess only to regard them as probable, and to vindicate them as nowise inconsistent with orthodoxy. They may be believed, and they may be doubted, 'salva Catholica fide'. Further, from these points I exclude all prognostications of time and event; the mode, the persons, the places, of the accomplishment; and I decisively protest against all parts of Mr. Irving's and of Lacunza's scheme grounded on the books of Daniel or the Apocalypse, interpreted as either of the two, Irving or Lacunza, understands them. Again, I protest against all identification of the coming with the Apocalyptic Millennium, which in my belief began under Constantine. II. In what sense? In this and no other, that the objects of the Christian Redemption will be perfected on this earth;--that the kingdom of God and his Word, the latter as the Son of Man, in which the divine will shall 'be done on earth as it is in heaven', will 'come';--and that the whole march of nature and history, from the first impregnation of Chaos by the Spirit, converges toward this kingdom as the final cause of the world. Life begins in detachment from Nature, and ends in union with God. III. Under what conditions? That I retain my former convictions respecting St. Michael, and the ex-saint Lucifer, and the Genie Prince of Persia, and the re-institution of bestial sacrifices in the Temple at Jerusalem, and the rest of this class. All these appear to me so many pimples on the face of my friend's faith from inward heats, leaving it indeed a fine handsome intelligent face, but certainly not adding to its comeliness. Such are the convictions of S. T. Coleridge, May, 1827. P.S. I fully agree with Mr. Irving as to the literal fulfilment of all the prophecies which respect the restoration of the Jews. ('Deuteron.' xxv. 1-8.) It may be long before Edward Irving sees what I seem at least to see so clearly,--and yet, I doubt not, the time will come when he too will see with the same evidentness,--how much grander a front his system would have presented to judicious beholders; on how much more defensible a position he would have placed it,--and the remark applies equally to Ben Ezra (that is, Emanuel Lacunza)--had he trusted the proof to Scriptures of undisputed catholicity, to the spirit of the whole Bible, to the consonance of the doctrine with the reason, its fitness to the needs and capacities of mankind, and its harmony with the general plan of the divine dealings with the world,--and had left the Apocalypse in the back ground. But alas! instead of this he has given it such prominence, such prosiliency of relief, that he has made the main strength of his hope appear to rest on a vision, so obscure that his own author and faith's-mate claims a meaning for its contents only on the supposition that the meaning is yet to come! Preliminary Discourse, p. lxxx. Now of these three, the office of Christ, as our prophet, is the means used by the Holy Spirit for working the redemption of the understanding of men; that faculty by which we acquire the knowledge on which proceed both our inward principles of conduct and our outward acts of power. I cannot forbear expressing my regret that Mr. Irving has not adhered to the clear and distinct exposition of the understanding, 'genere et gradu', given in the Aids to Reflection. [3] What can be plainer than to say: the understanding is the medial faculty or faculty of means, as reason on the other hand is the source of ideas or ultimate ends. By reason we determine the ultimate end: by the understanding we are enabled to select and adapt the appropriate means for the attainment of, or approximation to, this end, according to circumstances. But an ultimate end must of necessity be an idea, that is, that which is not representable by the sense, and has no entire correspondent in nature, or the world of the senses. For in nature there can be neither a first nor a last:--all that we can see, smell, taste, touch, are means, and only in a qualified sense, and by the defect of our language, entitled ends. They are only relatively ends in a chain of motives. B. is the end to A.; but it is itself a mean to C., and in like manner C. is a mean to D., and so on. Thus words are the means by which we reduce appearances, or things presented through the senses, to their several kinds, or 'genera'; that is, we generalize, and thus think and judge. Hence the understanding, considered specially as an intellective power, is the source and faculty of words;--and on this account the understanding is justly defined, both by Archbishop Leighton, and by Immanuel Kant, the faculty that judges by, or according to, sense. However, practical or intellectual, it is one and the same understanding, and the definition, the medial faculty, expresses its true character in both directions alike. I am urgent on this point, because on the right conception of the same, namely, that understanding and sense (to which the sensibility supplies the material of outness, 'materiam objectivam',) constitute the natural mind of man, depends the comprehension of St. Paul's whole theological system. And this natural mind, which is named the mind of the flesh, [Greek: phrónaema sarkòs], as likewise [Greek: psychikàe synesis], the intellectual power of the living or animal soul, St. Paul everywhere contradistinguishes from the spirit, that is, the power resulting from the union and co-inherence of the will and the reason;--and this spirit both the Christian and elder Jewish Church named, 'sophia', or wisdom. Ben-Ezra. Part I. c. v. p. 67. Eusebius and St. Epiphanius name Cerinthusas the inventor of many corruptions. That heresiarch being given up to the belly and the palate, placed therein the happiness of man. And so taught his disciples, that after the Resurrection, * * *. And what appeared most important, each would be master of an entire seraglio, like a Sultan, &c. I find very great difficulty in crediting these black charges on Cerinthus, and know not how to reconcile them with the fact that the Apocalypse itself was by many attributed to Cerinthus. But Mr. Hunt is not more famous for blacking than some of the Fathers. Ib. pp. 73, 4. Against whom a very eloquent man, Dionysius Alexandrinus, a Father of the Church, wrote an elegant work, to ridicule the Millennarian fable, the golden and gemmed Jerusalem on the earth, the renewal of the Temple, the blood of victims. If the book of St. Dionysius had contained nothing but the derision and confutation of all we have just read, it is certain that he doth in no way concern himself with the harmless Millennarians, but with the Jews and Judaizers. It is to be clearly seen that Dionysius had nothing in his eye, but the ridiculous excesses of Nepos, and his peculiar tenets upon circumcision, &c. Lacunza, I suspect, was ignorant of Greek: and seems not to have known that the object of Dionysius was to demonstrate that the Apocalypse was neither authentic nor a canonical book. Ib. p. 85. The ruin of Antichrist, with all that is comprehended under that name, being entirely consummated, and the King of kings remaining master of the field, St. John immediately continues in the 20th chapter, which thus commenceth: 'And I saw an angel come down from heaven, &c. And I saw thrones, &c. And when a thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison.' It is only necessary to know that the whole book from the first verse to the last is written in symbols, to be satisfied that the true meaning of this passage is simply, that only the great Confessors and Martyrs will be had in remembrance and honour in the Church after the establishment of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire. And observe, it is the souls that the Seer beholds:--there is not a word of the resurrection of the body;--for this would indeed have been the appropriate symbol of a resurrection in a real and personal sense. Ib. c. vi. p. 108. Now this very thing St. John likewise declareth * * to wit, 'that they who have been beheaded for the testimony of Jesus, and for the word of God, and they who have not worshipped the beast', these shall live, 'or be raised' at the coming of the Lord, 'which is the first resurrection.' Aye! but by what authority is this synonimizing "or" asserted? The Seer not only does not speak of any resurrection, but by the word [Greek: psychás], souls, expressly asserts the contrary. In no sense of the word can souls, which descended in Christ's train ('chorus sacer animarum et Christi comitatus') from Heaven, be said 'resurgere'. Resurrection is always and exclusively resurrection in the body;--not indeed a rising of the 'corpus' [Greek: phantastikón], that is, the few ounces of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and phosphate of lime, the 'copula' of which that gave the form no longer exists,--and of which Paul exclaims;--'Thou fool! not this', &c.--but the 'corpus' [Greek: hypostatikòn, àe noúmenon]. But there is yet another and worse wresting of the text. Who that reads Lacunza, p. 108, last line but twelve, would not understand that the Apocalypt had asserted this enthronement of the souls of the Gentile and Judæo-Christian Martyrs which he beheld in the train or suite of the descending Messiah; and that he had first seen them in the descent, and afterward saw thrones assigned to them? Whereas the sentence precedes, and has positively no connection with these souls. The literal interpretation of the symbols c. xx. v. 4, is, "I then beheld the Christian religion the established religion of the state throughout the Roman empire;--emperors, kings, magistrates, and the like, all Christians, and administering laws in the name of Christ, that is, receiving the Scriptures as the supreme and paramount law. Then in all the temples the name of Jesus was invoked as the King of glory, and together with him the old afflicted and tormented fellow-laborers with Christ were revived in high and reverential commemoration," &c. But that the whole Vision from first to last, in every sentence, yea, every word, is symbolical, and in the boldest, largest style of symbolic language; and secondly, that it is a work of disputed canonicity, and at no known period of the Church could truly lay claim to catholicity;--but for this, I think this verse would be worth a cartload of the texts which the Romanist divines and catechists ordinarily cite as sanctioning the invocation of Saints. Ib. p. 110. You will say nevertheless, that even the wicked will be raised incorruptible to inherit incorruption, because being once raised, their bodies will no more change or be dissolved, but must continue entire, for ever united with their sad and miserable souls. Well, and would you call this corruption or incorruptibility? Certainly this is not the sense of the Apostle, when he formally assures us, yea, even threatens us, that corruption cannot inherit incorruption. 'Neither doth corruption inherit incorruption'. What then may this singular expression mean? This is what it manifestly means;--that no person, whoever he may be, without any exception, who possesseth a corrupt heart and corrupt actions, and therein persevereth unto death, shall have reason to expect in the resurrection a pure, subtile, active and impassible body. This is actually dangerous tampering with the written letter. Without touching on the question whether St. Paul in this celebrated chapter (1 'Cor'. xv.) speaks of a partial or of the general resurrection, or even conceding to Lacunza that the former opinion is the more probable; I must still vehemently object to this Jesuitical interpretation of corruption, as used in a moral sense, and distinctive of the wicked souls. St. Paul nowhere speaks dogmatically or preceptively (not popularly and incidentally,) of a soul as the proper 'I'. It is always 'we', or the man. How could a regenerate saint put off corruption at the sound of the trump, if up to that hour it did not in some sense or other appertain to him? But what need of many words? It flashes on every reader whose imagination supplies an unpreoccupied, unrefracting, 'medium' to the Apostolic assertion, that corruption in this passage is a descriptive synonyme of the material sensuous organism common to saint and sinner,--standing in precisely the same relation to the man that the testaceous offensive and defensive armour does to the crab and tortoise. These slightly combined and easily decomponible stuffs are as incapable of subsisting under the altered conditions of the earth as an hydatid in the blaze of a tropical sun. They would be no longer 'media' of communion between the man and his circumstances. A heavy difficulty presses, as it appears to me, on Lacunza's system, as soon as we come to consider the general resurrection. Our Lord (in books of indubitable and never doubted catholicity) speaks of some who rise to bliss and glory, others who at the same time rise to shame and condemnation. Now if the former class live not during the whole interval from their death to the general resurrection, including the Millennium, or 'Dies Messiæ',--how should they, whose imperfect or insufficient merits excluded them from the kingdom of the Messiah on earth, be all at once fitted for the kingdom of heaven? Ib. ch. vii. p. 118. It appears to me that this sentence, being looked to attentively, means in good language this only, that the word 'quick', which the Apostles, full of the Holy Spirit, set down, is a word altogether useless, which might without loss have been omitted, and that it were enough to have set down the word 'dead': for by that word alone is the whole expressed, and with much more clearness and brevity. The narrow outline within which the Jesuits confined the theological reading of their 'alumni' is strongly marked in this (in so many respects) excellent work: for example, the "most believing mind," with which Lacunza takes for granted the exploded fable of the Catechumens' ('vulgo' Apostles') Creed having been the quotient of an Apostolic 'pic-nic', to which each of the twelve contributed his several 'symbolum'. Ib. ch. ix. p. 127. The Apostle, St. Peter, speaking of the day of the Lord, says, that that day will come suddenly, &c. (2 Pet. iii. 10.) There are serious difficulties besetting the authenticity of the Catholic Epistles under the name of Peter; though there exist no grounds for doubting that they are of the Apostolic age. A large portion too of the difficulties would be removed by the easy and nowise improbable supposition, that Peter, no great scholar or grammarian, had dictated the substance, the matter, and left the diction and style to his 'amanuensis', who had been an auditor of St. Paul. The tradition which connects, not only Mark, but Luke the Evangelist, the friend and biographer of Paul, with Peter, as a secretary, is in favour of this hypothesis. But what is of much greater importance, especially for the point in discussion, is the character of these and other similar descriptions of the 'Dies Messiæ', the 'Dies ultima', and the like. Are we bound to receive them as articles of faith? Is there sufficient reason to assert them to have been direct revelations immediately vouchsafed to the sacred writers? I cannot satisfy my judgment that there is;--first, because I find no account of any such events having been revealed to the Patriarchs, or to Moses, or to the Prophets; and because I do find these events asserted, and (for aught I have been able to discover,) for the first time, in the Jewish Church by uninspired Rabbis, in nearly or altogether the same words as those of the Apostles, and know that before and in the Apostolic age, these anticipations had become popular, and generally received notions; and lastly, because they were borrowed by the Jews from the Greek philosophy, and like several other notions, taken from less respectable quarters, adapted to their ancient and national religious belief. Now I know of no revealed truth that did not originate in Revelation, and find it hard to reconcile my mind to the belief that any Christian truth, any essential article of faith, should have been first made known by the father of lies, or the guess-work of the human understanding blinded by Paganism, or at best without the knowledge of the true God. Of course I would not apply this to any assertion of any New Testament writer, which was the final aim and primary intention of the whole passage; but only to sentences 'in ordine ad' some other doctrine or precept, 'illustrandi causa', or 'ad hominem', or 'more suasorio sive ad ornaturam, et rhetorice'. Ib. Part II. p. 145. Second characteristic. 'The kingdom shall be divided.'--Third characteristic. 'The kingdom shall be partly strong and partly brittle.'--Fourth characteristic. 'They shall mingle themselves with the seed of men: but they shall not cleave one to another.' How exactly do these characters apply to the Greek Empire under the successors of Alexander,--when the Greeks were dispersed over the civilized world, as artists, rhetoricians, 'grammatici', secretaries, private tutors, parasites, physicians, and the like! Ib. p. 153. 'For to them he thus speaketh in the Gospel: And then shall they see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh.' I cannot deny that there is great force and an imposing verisimilitude in this and the preceding chapter, and much that demands silent thought and respectful attention. But still the great question presses on me:--'coming in a cloud'! What is the true import of this phrase? Has not God himself expounded it? To the Son of Man, the great Apostle assures us, all power is given in heaven and on earth. He became Providence,--that is, a Divine Power behind the cloudy veil of human agency and worldly events and incidents, controlling, disposing, and directing acts and events to the gradual unfolding and final consummation of the great scheme of Redemption; the casting forth of the evil and alien nature from man, and thus effecting the union of the creature with the Creator, of man with God, in and through the Son of Man, even the Son of God made manifest. Now can it be doubted by the attentive and unprejudiced reader of St. Matthew, c. xxiv, that the Son of Man, in fact, came in the utter destruction and devastation of the Jewish Temple and State, during the period from Vespasian to Hadrian, both included; and is it a sufficient reason for our rejecting the teaching of Christ himself, of Christ glorified and in his kingly character, that his Apostles, who disclaim all certain knowledge of the awful event, had understood his words otherwise, and in a sense more commensurate with their previous notions and the prejudices of their education? They communicated their conjectures, but as conjectures, and these too guarded by the avowal, that they had no revelation, no revealed commentary on their Master's words, upon this occasion, the great apocalypse of Jesus Christ while yet in the flesh. For by this title was this great prophecy known among the Christians of the Apostolic age. Ib. p. 253. Never, Oh! our Lady! never, Oh! our Mother! shalt thou fall again into the crime of idolatry. Was ever blindness like unto this blindness? I can imagine but one way of making it seem possible, namely, that this round square or rectilineal curve--this honest Jesuit, I mean--had confined his conception of idolatry to the worship of false gods;--whereas his saints are genuine godlings, and his 'Magna Mater' a goddess in her own right;--and that thus he overlooked the meaning of the word. Ib. p. 254. The entire text of the Apostle is as follows:--'Now we beseech you, brethren, by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by our gathering together unto him, that ye be not soon shaken in mind', &c. (2 Thess. ii. 1-10.) O Edward Irving! Edward Irving! by what fascination could your spirit be drawn away from passages like this, to guess and dream over the rhapsodies of the Apocalypse? For rhapsody, according to your interpretation, the Poem undeniably is;--though, rightly expounded, it is a well knit and highly poetical evolution of a part of this and our Lord's more comprehensive prediction, 'Luke' xvii. Ib. p. 297. On the ordinary ideas of the coming of Christ in glory and majesty, it will doubtless appear an extravagance to name the Jews, or to take them into consideration; for, according to those ideas, they should hardly have the least particle of our attention. In comparing this with the preceding chapter I could not help exclaiming; What an excellent book would this Jesuit have written, if Daniel and the Apocalypse had not existed, or had been unknown to, or rejected by, him! You may divide Lacunza's points of belief into two parallel columns;--the first would be found to contain much that is demanded by, much that is consonant to, and nothing that is not compatible with, reason, the harmony of Holy Writ, and the idea of Christian faith. The second would consist of puerilities and anilities, some impossible, most incredible; and all so silly, so sensual, as to befit a dreaming Talmudist, not a Scriptural Christian. And this latter column would be found grounded on Daniel and the Apocalypse! [Footnote 1: The Coming of Messiah in Glory and Majesty. By Juan Josafat Ben-Ezra, a converted Jew. Translated from the Spanish, with a preliminary Discourse. By the Rev. Edward Irving, A.M. London, 1827.] [Footnote 2: See 'supra', vol. iii. p. 93.--Ed.] [Footnote 3: P. 157, 4th edit.--Ed.] * * * * * NOTES ON NOBLE'S APPEAL. 1827. [1] How natural it is to mistake the weakness of an adversary's arguments for the strength of our own cause! This is especially applicable to Mr. Noble's Appeal. Assuredly as far as Mr. Beaumont's Notes are concerned, his victory is complete. Sect. IV. p. 210. The intellectual spirit is moving upon the chaos of minds, which ignorance and necessity have thrown into collision and confusion; and the result will be a new creation. "Nature" (to use the nervous language of an-old writer,) "will be melted down and recoined; and all will be bright and beautiful." Alas! if this be possible now, or at any time henceforward, whence came the dross? If nature be bullion that can be melted and thus purified by the conjoint action of heat and elective attraction, I pray Mr. Noble to tell me to what name or 'genus' he refers the dross? Will he tell me, to the Devil? Whence came the Devil? And how was the pure bullion so thoughtlessly made as to have an elective affinity for this Devil? Sect. V. p. 286. The next anecdote that I shall adduce is similar in its nature to the last * * *. The relater is Dr. Stilling, Counsellor at the Court of the Duke of Baden, in a work entitled 'Die Theorie der Geister-Kunde', printed in 1808. Mr. Noble is a man of too much English good sense to have relied on Sung's ('alias' Dr. Stilling's) testimony, had he ever read the work in which this passage is found. I happen to possess the work; and a more anile, credulous, solemn fop never existed since the days of old Audley. It is strange that Mr. Noble should not have heard, that these three anecdotes were first related by Immanuel Kant, and still exist in his miscellaneous writings. Ib. p. 315. "Can he be a sane man who records the subsequent reverie as matter of fact? The Baron informs us, that on a certain night a man appeared to him in the midst of a strong shining light, and said, 'I am God the Lord, the Creator and Redeemer; I have chosen thee to explain to men the interior and spiritual sense of the Sacred Writings: I will dictate to thee what thou oughtest to write?' From this period, the Baron relates he was so illumined, as to behold, in the clearest manner, what passed in the spiritual world, and that he could converse with angels and spirits as with men," &c. I remember no such passage as this in Swedenborg's works. Indeed it is virtually contradicted by their whole tenor. Swedenborg asserts himself to relate 'visa et audita',--his own experience, as a traveller and visitor of the spiritual world,--not the words of another as a mere 'amanuensis'. But altogether this Gulielmus must be a silly Billy. Ib. p. 321. The Apostolic canon in such cases is, 'Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they be of God'. (1 John iv. 1.) And the touchstone to which they are to be brought is pointed out by the Prophet: 'To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no truth in them.' (Is. viii. 20.) But instead of this canon you offer another * * *. It is simply this: Whoever professes to be the bearer of divine communications, is insane. To bring Swedenborg within the operation of this rule, you quote, as if from his own works, a passage which is nowhere to be found in them, but which you seem to have taken from some biographical dictionary or cyclopædia; few or none of which give anything like a fair account of the matter. Aye! my memory did not fail me, I find. As to insanity in the sense intended by Gulielmus, namely, as 'mania',--I should as little think of charging Swedenborg with it, as of calling a friend mad who laboured under an 'acyanoblepsia'. Ib. p. 323. Did you never read of one who says, in words very like your version of the Baron's reverie: 'It came to pass, that, as I took my journey, and was come nigh unto Damascus, about noon, suddenly there shone from heaven a great light round about me: and I fell on the ground, and heard a voice saying unto me, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?' In the short space of four years the newspapers contained three several cases, two of which I cut out, and still have among my ocean of papers, and which, as stated, were as nearly parallel, in external accompaniments, to St. Paul's as cases can well be:--struck with lightning,--heard the thunder as an articulate voice,--blind for a few days, and suddenly recovered their sight. But then there was no Ananias, no confirming revelation to another. This it was that justified St. Paul as a wise man in regarding the incident as supernatural, or as more than a providential omen. N. B. Not every revelation requires a sensible miracle as the credential; but every revelation of a new series of 'credenda'. The prophets appealed to records of acknowledged authority, and to their obvious sense literally interpreted. The Baptist needed no miracle to attest his right of calling sinners to repentance. See 'Exodus' iv. 10. Ib. pp. 346, 7. This sentiment, that miracles are not the proper evidences of doctrinal truth, is, assuredly, the decision of the Truth itself; as is obvious from many passages in Scripture. We have seen that the design of the miracles of Moses, as external performances, was not to instruct the Israelites in spiritual subjects, but to make them obedient subjects of a peculiar species of political state. And though the miracles of Jesus Christ collaterally served as testimonies to his character, he repeatedly intimates that this was not their main design. * * * At another time more plainly still, he says, that it is 'a wicked and adulterous generation' (that) 'seeketh after a sign'; on which occasion, according to Mark, 'he sighed deeply in his spirit'. How characteristic is that touch of the Apostle, 'The Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom!' (where by wisdom he means the elegance and refinement of Grecian literature.) Agreeing, as in the main I do, with the sentiments here expressed by this eloquent writer, I must notice that he has, however, mistaken the sense of the [Greek: saemeion], which the Jews would have tempted our Saviour to shew,--namely, the signal for revolt by openly declaring himself their king, and leading them against the Romans. The foreknowledge that this superstition would shortly hurry them into utter ruin caused the deep sigh,--as on another occasion, the bitter tears. Again, by the [Greek: sophía] of the Greeks their disputatious [Greek: sophistikàe] is meant. The sophists pretended to teach wisdom as an art: and 'sophistæ' may be literally rendered, wisdom-mongers, as we say, iron-mongers. Ib. p. 350. Some probably will say, "What argument can induce us to believe a man in a concern of this nature who gives no visible credentials to his authority?" * * * But let us ask in return, "Is it worthy of a being wearing the figure of a man to require such proofs as these to determine his judgment?" * * * "The beasts act from the impulse of their bodily senses, but are utterly incapable of seeing from reason why they should so act: and it might easily be shewn, that while a man thinks and acts under the influence of a miracle, he is as much incapable of perceiving from any rational ground why he should thus think and act, as a beast is." "What!" our opponents will perhaps reply, * * * "Was it not by miracles that the prophets (some of them) testified their authority? Do you not believe these facts?" Yes, my friends, I do most entirely believe them, &c. There is so much of truth in all this reasoning on miracles, that I feel pain in the thought that the result is false,--because it was not the whole truth. But this is the grounding, and at the same time pervading, error of the Swedenborgians;--that they overlook the distinction between congruity with reason, truth of consistency, or internal possibility of this or that being objectively real, and the objective reality as fact. Miracles, 'quoad' miracles, can never supply the place of subjective evidence, that is, of insight. But neither can subjective insight supply the place of objective sight. The certainty of the truth of a mathematical arch can never prove the fact of its existence. I anticipate the answers; but know that they likewise proceed from the want of distinguishing between ideas, such as God, Eternity, the responsible Will, the Good, and the like,--the actuality of which is absolutely subjective, and includes both the relatively subjective and the relatively objective as higher or transcendant realities, which alone are the proper objects of faith, the great postulates of reason in order to its own admission of its own being,--the not distinguishing, I say, between these, and those positions which must be either matters of fact or fictions. For such latter positions it is that miracles are required in lieu of experience. A.'s testimony of experience supplies the want of the same experience for B. C. D., &c. For example, how many thousands believe the existence of red snow on the testimony of Captain Parry! But who can expect more than hints in a marginal note? Sect. VI. pp. 378, 9; 380, 1. In the general views, then, which are presented in the writings of Swedenborg on the subject of Heaven and Hell, as the abodes, respectively, of happiness and of misery, while there certainly is not anything which is not in the highest degree agreeable both to reason and Scripture, there also seems nothing which could be deemed inconsistent with the usual conceptions of the Christian world. What tends to render thinking readers a little sceptical, is the want of a distinct boundary between the deductions from reason, and the articles, the truth of which is to rest on the Baron's personal testimony, his 'visa et audita'. Nor is the Baron himself (as it appears to me) quite consistent on this point. Ib. p. 434. Witness, again, the poet Milton, who introduces active sports among the recreations which he deemed worthy of angels, and (strange indeed for a Puritan!) included even dancing among the number. How could a man of Noble's sense and sensibility bring himself thus to profane the awful name of Milton, by associating it with the epithet "Puritan?" I have often thought of writing a work to be entitled 'Vindiciæ Heterodoxæ, sive celebrium virorum [Greek: paradogmatizóntôn] defensio'; that is, Vindication of Great Men unjustly branded; and at such times the names prominent to my mind's eye have been Giordano Bruno, Jacob Behmen, Benedict Spinoza, and Emanuel Swedenborg. Grant, that the origin of the Swedenborgian theology is a problem; yet on which ever of the three possible hypotheses--(possible I mean for gentlemen, scholars and Christians)--it may be solved---namely: 1. Swedenborg's own assertion and constant belief in the hypothesis of a supernatural illumination; or, 2. that the great and excellent man was led into this belief by becoming the subject of a very rare, but not (it is said) altogether unique, conjunction of the somniative faculty (by which the products of the understanding, that is to say, words, conceptions and the like, are rendered instantaneously into forms of sense) with the voluntary and other powers of the waking state; or, 3. the modest suggestion that the first and second may not be so incompatible as they appear--still it ought never to be forgotten that the merit and value of Swedenborg's system do only in a very secondary degree depend on any one of the three. For even though the first were adopted, the conviction and conversion of such a believer must, according to a fundamental principle of the New Church, have been wrought by an insight into the intrinsic truth and goodness of the doctrines, severally and collectively, and their entire consonance with the light of the written and of the eternal word, that is, with the Scriptures and with the sciential and the practical reason. Or say that the second hypothesis were preferred, and that by some hitherto unexplained affections of Swedenborg's brain and nervous system, he from the year 1743, thought and reasoned through the 'medium' and instrumentality of a series of appropriate and symbolic visual and auditual images, spontaneously rising before him, and these so clear and so distinct, as at length to overpower perhaps his first suspicions of their subjective nature, and to become objective for him, that is, in his own belief of their kind and origin,--still the thoughts, the reasonings, the grounds, the deductions, the facts illustrative, or in proof, and the conclusions, remain the same; and the reader might derive the same benefit from them as from the sublime and impressive truths conveyed in the Vision of Mirza or the Tablet of Cebes. So much even from a very partial acquaintance with the works of Swedenborg, I can venture to assert; that as a moralist Swedenborg is above all praise; and that as a naturalist, psychologist, and theologian, he has strong and varied claims on the gratitude and admiration of the professional and philosophical student.--April 1827. P. S. Notwithstanding all that Mr. Noble says in justification of his arrangement, it is greatly to be regretted that the contents of this work are so confusedly tossed together. It is, however, a work of great merit. [Footnote 1: An Appeal in behalf of the views of the eternal world and state, and the doctrines of faith and life, held by the body of Christians who believe that a New Church is signified (in the Revelation, c. xxi.) by the New Jerusalem, including Answers to objections, particularly those of the Rev. G. Beaumont, in his work entitled "The Anti-Swedenborg." Addressed to the reflecting of all denominations. By Samuel Noble, Minister of Hanover Street Chapel, London. London, 1826. Ed.] * * * * * ESSAY ON FAITH. Faith may be defined, as fidelity to our own being--so far as such being is not and cannot become an object of the senses; and hence, by clear inference or implication, to being generally, as far as the same is not the object of the senses: and again to whatever is affirmed or understood as the condition, or concomitant, or consequence of the same. This will be best explained by an instance or example. That I am conscious of something within me peremptorily commanding me to do unto others as I would they should do unto me;--in other words, a categorical (that is, primary and unconditional) imperative;--that the maxim ('regula maxima' or supreme rule) of my actions, both inward and outward, should be such as I could, without any contradiction arising therefrom, will to be the law of all moral and rational beings;--this, I say, is a fact of which I am no less conscious (though in a different way), nor less assured, than I am of any appearance presented by my outward senses. Nor is this all; but in the very act of being conscious of this in my own nature, I know that it is a fact of which all men either are or ought to be conscious;--a fact, the ignorance of which constitutes either the non-personality of the ignorant, or the guilt, in which latter case the ignorance is equivalent to knowledge wilfully darkened. I know that I possess this consciousness as a man, and not as Samuel Taylor Coleridge; hence knowing that consciousness of this fact is the root of all other consciousness, and the only practical contradistinction of man from the brutes, we name it the conscience; by the natural absence or presumed presence of which, the law, both divine and human, determines whether X Y Z be a thing or a person:--the conscience being that which never to have had places the objects in the same order of things as the brutes, for example, idiots; and to have lost which implies either insanity or apostasy. Well--this we have affirmed is a fact of which every honest man is as fully assured as of his seeing, hearing or smelling. But though the former assurance does not differ from the latter in the degree, it is altogether diverse in the kind; the senses being morally passive, while the conscience is essentially connected with the will, though not always, nor indeed in any case, except after frequent attempts and aversions of will, dependent on the choice. Thence we call the presentations of the senses impressions, those of the conscience commands or dictates. In the senses we find our receptivity, and as far as our personal being is concerned, we are passive;--but in the fact of the conscience we are not only agents, but it is by this alone, that we know ourselves to be such; nay, that our very passiveness in this latter is an act of passiveness, and that we are patient ('patientes')--not, as in the other case, 'simply' passive. The result is, the consciousness of responsibility; and the proof is afforded by the inward experience of the diversity between regret and remorse. If I have sound ears, and my companion speaks to me with a due proportion of voice, I may persuade him that I did not hear, but cannot deceive myself. But when my conscience speaks to me, I can, by repeated efforts, render myself finally insensible; to which add this other difference in the case of conscience, namely, that to make myself deaf is one and the same thing with making my conscience dumb, till at length I become unconscious of my conscience. Frequent are the instances in which it is suspended, and as it were drowned, in the inundation of the appetites, passions and imaginations, to which I have resigned myself, making use of my will in order to abandon my free-will; and there are not, I fear, examples wanting of the conscience being utterly destroyed, or of the passage of wickedness into madness;--that species of madness, namely, in which the reason is lost. For so long as the reason continues, so long must the conscience exist either as a good conscience, or as a bad conscience. It appears then, that even the very first step, that the initiation of the process, the becoming conscious of a conscience, partakes of the nature of an act. It is an act, in and by which we take upon ourselves an allegiance, and consequently the obligation of fealty; and this fealty or fidelity implying the power of being unfaithful, it is the first and fundamental sense of Faith. It is likewise the commencement of experience, and the result of all other experience. In other words, conscience, in this its simplest form, must be supposed in order to consciousness, that is, to human consciousness. Brutes may be, and are scions, but those beings only, who have an I, 'scire possunt hoc vel illud una cum seipsis'; that is, 'conscire vel scire aliquid mecum', or to know a thing in relation to myself, and in the act of knowing myself as acted upon by that something. Now the third person could never have been distinguished from the first but by means of the second. There can be no He without a previous Thou. Much less could an I exist for us, except as it exists during the suspension of the will, as in dreams; and the nature of brutes may be best understood, by conceiving them as somnambulists. This is a deep meditation, though the position is capable of the strictest proof,--namely, that there can be no I without a Thou, and that a Thou is only possible by an equation in which I is taken as equal to Thou, and yet not the same. And this again is only possible by putting them in opposition as correspondent opposites, or correlatives. In order to this, a something must be affirmed in the one, which is rejected in the other, and this something is the will. I do not will to consider myself as equal to myself, for in the very act of constituting myself 'I', I take it as the same, and therefore as incapable of comparison, that is, of any application of the will. If then, I 'minus' the will be the 'thesis'; [2] Thou 'plus' will must be the 'antithesis', but the equation of Thou with I, by means of a free act, negativing the sameness in order to establish the equality, is the true definition of conscience. But as without a Thou there can be no You, so without a You no They, These or Those; and as all these conjointly form the materials and subjects of consciousness, and the conditions of experience, it is evident that the con-science is the root of all consciousness,--'a fortiori', the precondition of all experience,--and that the conscience cannot have been in its first revelation deduced from experience. Soon, however, experience comes into play. We learn that there are other impulses beside the dictates of conscience; that there are powers within us and without us ready to usurp the throne of conscience, and busy in tempting us to transfer our allegiance. We learn that there are many things contrary to conscience, and therefore to be rejected, and utterly excluded, and many that can coexist with its supremacy only by being subjugated, as beasts of burthen; and others again, as, for instance, the social tendernesses and affections, and the faculties and excitations of the intellect, which must be at least subordinated. The preservation of our loyalty and fealty under these trials and against these rivals constitutes the second sense of Faith; and we shall need but one more point of view to complete its full import. This is the consideration of what is presupposed in the human conscience. The answer is ready. As in the equation of the correlative I and Thou, one of the twin constituents is to be taken as 'plus' will, the other as 'minus' will, so is it here: and it is obvious that the reason or 'super'-individual of each man, whereby he is man, is the factor we are to take as 'minus' will; and that the individual will or personalizing principle of free agency (arbitrement is Milton's word) is the factor marked 'plus' will;--and again, that as the identity or coinherence of the absolute will and the reason, is the peculiar character of God; so is the 'synthesis' of the individual will and the common reason, by the subordination of the former to the latter, the only possible likeness or image of the 'prothesis', or identity, and therefore the required proper character of man. Conscience, then, is a witness respecting the identity of the will and the reason effected by the self-subordination of the will, or self, to the reason, as equal to, or representing, the will of God. But the personal will is a factor in other moral 'syntheses'; for example, appetite 'plus' personal will=sensuality; lust of power, 'plus' personal will,=ambition, and so on, equally as in the 'synthesis', on which the conscience is grounded. Not this therefore, but the other 'synthesis', must supply the specific character of the conscience; and we must enter into an analysis of reason. Such as the nature and objects of the reason are, such must be the functions and objects of the conscience. And the former we shall best learn by recapitulating those constituents of the total man which are either contrary to, or disparate from, the reason. I. Reason, and the proper objects of reason, are wholly alien from sensation. Reason is supersensual, and its antagonist is appetite, and the objects of appetite the lust of the flesh. II. Reason and its objects do not appertain to the world of the senses inward or outward; that is, they partake not of sense or fancy. Reason is super-sensuous, and here its antagonist is the lust of the eye. III. Reason and its objects are not things of reflection, association, discursion, discourse in the old sense of the word as opposed to intuition; "discursive or intuitive," as Milton has it. Reason does not indeed necessarily exclude the finite, either in time or in space, but it includes them 'eminenter'. Thus the prime mover of the material universe is affirmed to contain all motion as its cause, but not to be, or to suffer, motion in itself. Reason is not the faculty of the finite. But here I must premise the following. The faculty of the finite is that which reduces the confused impressions of sense to their essential forms,--quantity, quality, relation, and in these action and reaction, cause and effect, and the like; thus raises the materials furnished by the senses and sensations into objects of reflection, and so makes experience possible. Without it, man's representative powers would be a delirium, a chaos, a scudding cloudage of shapes; and it is therefore most appropriately called the understanding, or substantiative faculty. Our elder metaphysicians, down to Hobbes inclusively, called this likewise discourse, 'discursus, discursio,' from its mode of action as not staying at any one object, but running as it were to and fro to abstract, generalize, and classify. Now when this faculty is employed in the service of the pure reason, it brings out the necessary and universal truths contained in the infinite into distinct contemplation by the pure act of the sensuous imagination, that is, in the production of the forms of space and time abstracted from all corporeity, and likewise of the inherent forms of the understanding itself abstractedly from the consideration of particulars, as in the case of geometry, numeral mathematics, universal logic, and pure metaphysics. The discursive faculty then becomes what our Shakspeare with happy precision calls "discourse of reason." We will now take up our reasoning again from the words "motion in itself." It is evident then, that the reason, as the irradiative power, and the representative of the infinite, judges the understanding as the faculty of the finite, and cannot without error be judged by it. When this is attempted, or when the understanding in its 'synthesis' with the personal will, usurps the supremacy of the reason, or affects to supersede the reason, it is then what St. Paul calls the mind of the flesh ([Greek: phrónaema sarkòs]) or the wisdom of this world. The result is, that the reason is super-finite; and in this relation, its antagonist is the insubordinate understanding, or mind of the flesh. IV. Reason, as one with the absolute will, ('In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God',) and therefore for man the certain representative of the will of God, is above the will of man as an individual will. We have seen in III. that it stands in antagonism to all mere particulars; but here it stands in antagonism to all mere individual interests as so many selves, to the personal will as seeking its objects in the manifestation of itself for itself--'sit pro ratione voluntas';--whether this be realized with adjuncts, as in the lust of the flesh, and in the lust of the eye; or without adjuncts, as in the thirst and pride of power, despotism, egoistic ambition. The fourth antagonist, then, of reason is the lust of the will. Corollary. Unlike a million of tigers, a million of men is very different from a million times one man. Each man in a numerous society is not only coexistent with, but virtually organized into, the multitude of which he is an integral part. His 'idem' is modified by the 'alter'. And there arise impulses and objects from this 'synthesis' of the 'alter et idem', myself and my neighbour. This, again, is strictly analogous to what takes place in the vital organization of the individual man. The cerebral system of nerves has its correspondent 'antithesis' in the abdominal system: but hence arises a 'synthesis' of the two in the pectoral system as the intermediate, and, like a drawbridge, at once conductor and boundary. In the latter as objectized by the former arise the emotions, affections, and in one word, the passions, as distinguished from the cognitions and appetites. Now the reason has been shown to be super-individual, generally, and therefore not less so when the form of an individualization subsists in the 'alter', than when it is confined to the 'idem'; not less when the emotions have their conscious or believed object in another, than when their subject is the individual personal self. For though these emotions, affections, attachments, and the like, are the prepared ladder by which the lower nature is taken up into, and made to partake of, the highest room,--as we are taught to give a feeling of reality to the higher 'per medium commune' with the lower, and thus gradually to see the reality of the higher (namely, the objects of reason) and finally to know that the latter are indeed and pre-eminently real, as if you love your earthly parents whom you see, by these means you will learn to love your Heavenly Father who is invisible;--yet this holds good only so far as the reason is the president, and its objects the ultimate aim; and cases may arise in which the Christ as the Logos or Redemptive Reason declares, 'He that loves father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me'; nay, he that can permit his emotions to rise to an equality with the universal reason, is in enmity with that reason. Here then reason appears as the love of God; and its antagonist is the attachment to individuals wherever it exists in diminution of, or in competition with, the love which is reason. In these five paragraphs I have enumerated and explained the several powers or forces belonging or incidental to human nature, which in all matters of reason the man is bound either to subjugate or subordinate to reason. The application to Faith follows of its own accord. The first or most indefinite sense of faith is fidelity: then fidelity under previous contract or particular moral obligation. In this sense faith is fealty to a rightful superior: faith is the duty of a faithful subject to a rightful governor. Then it is allegiance in active service; fidelity to the liege lord under circumstances, and amid the temptations, of usurpation, rebellion, and intestine discord. Next we seek for that rightful superior on our duties to whom all our duties to all other superiors, on our faithfulness to whom all our bounden relations to all other objects of fidelity, are founded. We must inquire after that duty in which all others find their several degrees and dignities, and from which they derive their obligative force. We are to find a superior, whose rights, including our duties, are presented to the mind in the very idea of that Supreme Being, whose sovereign prerogatives are predicates implied in the subjects, as the essential properties of a circle are co-assumed in the first assumption of a circle, consequently underived, unconditional, and as rationally insusceptible, so probably prohibitive, of all further question. In this sense then faith is fidelity, fealty, allegiance of the moral nature to God, in opposition to all usurpation, and in resistance to all temptation to the placing any other claim above or equal with our fidelity to God. The will of God is the last ground and final aim of all our duties, and to that the whole man is to be harmonized by subordination, subjugation, or suppression alike in commission and omission. But the will of God, which is one with the supreme intelligence, is revealed to man through the conscience. But the conscience, which consists in an inappellable bearing-witness to the truth and reality of our reason, may legitimately be construed with the term reason, so far as the conscience is prescriptive; while as approving or condemning, it is the consciousness of the subordination or insubordination, the harmony or discord, of the personal will of man to and with the representative of the will of God. This brings me to the last and fullest sense of Faith, that is, as the obedience of the individual will to the reason, in the lust of the flesh as opposed to the supersensual; in the lust of the eye as opposed to the supersensuous; in the pride of the understanding as opposed to the infinite, in the [Greek: phronaema sarkos] in contrariety to the spiritual truth; in the lust of the personal will as opposed to the absolute and universal; and in the love of the creature, as far as it is opposed to the love which is one with the reason, namely, the love of God. Thus then to conclude. Faith subsists in the 'synthesis' of the reason and the individual will. By virtue of the latter therefore it must be an energy, and inasmuch as it relates to the whole moral man, it must be exerted in each and all of his constituents or incidents, faculties and tendencies;--it must be a total, not a partial; a continuous, not a desultory or occasional energy. And by virtue of the former, that is, reason, faith must be a light, a form of knowing, a beholding of truth. In the incomparable words of the Evangelist, therefore--'faith must be a light originating in the Logos, or the substantial reason, which is coeternal and one with the Holy Will, and which light is at the same time the life of men'. Now as life is here the sum or collective of all moral and spiritual acts, in suffering, doing, and being, so is faith the source and the sum, the energy and the principle of the fidelity of man to God, by the subordination of his human will, in all provinces of his nature to his reason, as the sum of spiritual truth, representing and manifesting the will Divine. END OF VOL. IV. (The Final Volume in this series.) 
8210	----	Samuel Taylor Coleridge's BIBLIOGRAPHIA EPISTOLARIS comprising 33 letters and being the Biographical Supplement of Coleridge's BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA with additional letters etc., edited by A. TURNBULL Vol. 1. "On the whole this was surely the mightiest genius since Milton. In poetry there is not his like, when he rose to his full power; he was a philosopher, the immensity of whose mind cannot be gauged by anything he has left behind; a critic, the subtlest and most profound of his time. Yet these vast and varied powers flowed away in the shifting sands of talk; and what remains is but what the few land-locked pools are to the receding ocean which has left them casually behind without sensible diminution of its waters." Academy, 3d October, 1903. PREFACE The work known as the Biographical Supplement of the Biographia Literaria of S. T. Coleridge, and published with the latter in 1847, was begun by Henry Nelson Coleridge, and finished after his death by his widow, Sara Coleridge. The first part, concluding with a letter dated 5th November 1796, is the more valuable portion of the Biographical Supplement. What follows, written by Sara Coleridge, is more controversial than biographical and does not continue, like the first part, to make Coleridge tell his own life by inserting letters in the narrative. Of 33 letters quoted in the whole work, 30 are contained in the section written by Henry Nelson Coleridge. Of these 11 were drawn from Cottle's Early Recollections, seven being letters to Josiah Wade, four to Joseph Cottle, and the remainder are sixteen letters to Poole, one to Benjamin Flower, one to Charles E Heath, and one to Henry Martin. From this I think it is evident that Henry Nelson Coleridge intended what was published as a Supplement to the Biographia Literaria to be a Life of Coleridge, either supplementary to the Biographia Literaria or as an independent narrative, in which most of the letters published by Cottle in 1837 and unpublished letters to Poole and other correspondents were to form the chief material. Sara Coleridge, in finishing the fragment, did not attempt to carry out the original intention of her husband. A few letters in Cottle were perhaps not acceptable to her taste, and in rejecting them she perhaps resolved to reject all remaining letters in Cottle. She thus finished the fragmentary Life of Coleridge left by her husband in her own way. But Henry Nelson Coleridge had begun to build on another plan. His intention was simply to string all Coleridge's letters available on a slim biographical thread and thus produce a work in which the poet would have been made to tell his own life. His beginning with the five Biographical Letters to Thomas Poole is a proof of this. He took these as his starting point; and, as far as he went, his "Life of Coleridge" thus constructed is the most reliable of all the early biographies of Coleridge. This edition of the Biographical Supplement is meant to carry out as far as possible the original project of its author. The whole of his narrative has been retained, and also what Sara Coleridge added to his writing; and all the non-copyright letters of Coleridge available from other sources have been inserted into the narrative, and additional biographical matter, explanatory of the letters, has been given. [1] By this retention of authentic sources I have produced as faithful a picture of the Poet-Philosopher Coleridge as can be got anywhere, for Coleridge always paints his own character in his letters. Those desirous of a fuller picture may peruse, along with this work, the letters published in the Collection of 1895, the place of which in the narrative is indicated in footnotes. [Footnote: What has been added is enclosed in square brackets.] The letters are drawn from the following sources: "Biographical Supplement", 1847 ............................................ 33 Cottle's "Reminiscences", 1847 ............................................. 78 The original "Friend", 1809 ................................................. 5 "The Watchman", 1796 ........................................................ 1 Gillman's "Life of Coleridge", 1838 ......................................... 7 Allsop's "Letters, Conversations, etc., of S. T. C"., 1836 (1864) .......... 45 "Essays on his Own Times", 1850 ............................................. 1 "Life and Correspondence of R. Southey", 1850 ............................... 7 Editorials of Poems, etc .................................................... 8 "Literary Remains of S. T. C., 1836, etc" ................................... 3 "Blackwood's Magazine", October, 1821 ....................................... 1 "Fragmentary Remains of Humphry Davy", 1858 ................................ 15 "Macmillan's Magazine", 1864 (Letters to W. Godwin) ......................... 9 Southey's "Life of Andrew Bell", 3 vols., 1844 .............................. 2 "Charles Lamb and the Lloyds", by E. V. Lucas ............................... 3 "Anima Poetae", by E. H. Coleridge, 1895 .................................... 1 The letters of Coleridge have slowly come to light. Coleridge was always fond of letter-writing, and at several periods of his career he was more active in letter-writing than at others. He commenced the publication of his letters himself. The epistolary form was as dear to him in prose as the ballad or odic form in verse. From his earliest publications we can see he loved to launch a poem with "A letter to the Editor," or to the recipient, as preface. The "Mathematical Problem", one of his juvenile facetiae in rhyme, was thus heralded with a letter addressed to his brother George explaining the import of the doggerel. His first printed poem, "To Fortune" (Dykes Campbell's Edition of the "Poems", p. 27), was also prefaced by a short letter to the editor of the "Morning Chronicle". Among Coleridge's letters are several of this sort, and each affords a glimpse into his character. Those with the "Raven" and "Talleyrand to Lord Grenville" are characteristic specimens of his drollery and irony. Coleridge's greatest triumphs in letter-writing were gained in the field of politics. His two letters to Fox, his letters on the Spaniards, and those to Judge Fletcher, are his highest specimens of epistolary eloquence, and constitute him the rival of Rousseau as an advocate of some great truth in a letter addressed to a public personage. In clearness of thought and virile precision of language they surpass the most of anything that Coleridge has written. They never wander from the point at issue; the evolution of their ideas is perfect, their idiom the purest mother-English written since the refined vocabulary of Hooker, Jeremy Taylor, and Harrington was coined. Besides the political letters, Coleridge published during his lifetime four important letters of great length written during his sojourn in Germany. Three of these appeared in the "Friend" of 1809, and indeed were the finest part of that periodical; and one was first made public in the "Amulet" of 1829. Six letters published in "Blackwood's Magazine" of 1820-21, and a few others of less importance, brought up the number of letters published by Coleridge to 46. The following is a list of them: 7th Nov. 1793, "To Fortune," Ed. "Morning Chronicle" ................ 1 22nd Sept. 1794, Dedication to "Robespierre," to H. Martin ........... 1 1st April 1796, Letter to "Caius Gracchus," "The Watchman" ........... 1 26th Dec. 1796, Dedication to the "Ode to the Departing Year," to T. Poole ........... 1 1798, Ed. "Monthly Magazine, re Monody on Chatterton"................. 1 1799, Ed. "Morning Post," with the "Raven" ........................... 1 21 Dec. 1799, Ed. "Morning Post," with "Love" ........................ 1 10th Jan. 1800, Ed. "Morning Post, Talleyrand to Lord Grenville" ..... 1 18th Nov. 1800, "Monthly Review," on "Wallenstein" ................... 1 1834, To George Coleridge, with "Mathematical Problem" ............... 1 Political Letters to the "Morning Post" and "Courier" ................ 21 1809, Letters of Satyrane, etc., in the "Friend" ..................... 8 1820-21, Letters to "Blackwood's Magazine" ........................... 6 1829, "The Amulet," "Over the Brocken" .............................. 1 -- 46 The "Literary Remains," published in 1836, added ..................... 4 Allsop, in his "Letters, Conversations, etc.", gave to the world ..... 46 Cottle followed in 1837, with his "Early Recollections", in which .... 84 letters or fragments of letters made their appearance Gillman in 1838 published 11 letters or fragments, 4 of which had already appeared in the works of Allsop and Cottle and in the "Friend", leaving a contribution of ................................. 7 The "Gentleman's Magazine" followed in 1838 with letters to Daniel Stuart ........................................17 Cottle, in 1847, re-cast his "Early Recollections", and called his work "Reminiscences of Coleridge and Southey", and added the splendid Wedgwood series of 19 letters, and a few others of less importance, in all ...................................................25 The "Biographical Supplement" to the 1847 edition of the "Biographia Literaria" contained 33 letters, 11 of which were from Cottle; leaving a contribution of ............................................22 In 1850, Coleridge's "Essays on his Own Times", consisting of his magazine and newspaper articles, contained in the Preface (p. 91), a fragment of a letter to Poole .......................................1 Making ..............................................................252 published up to 1850 by Coleridge himself and his three early biographers; and these continued to be quoted and alluded to by writers on Coleridge until 1895, when Mr. E. H. Coleridge gave to the world a collection of 260 letters. Meantime, numerous biographies, memoirs, and magazines continued to throw in a contribution now and then. The following, as far as I have been able to ascertain, is the number of letters or fragments of letters contributed by the various works enumerated: 1836-8, Lockhart's "Life of Sir Walter Scott" 1 1841, "Life of Charles Mathews" 1 " "The Mirror", Letter to George Dyer 1 1844, Southey's "Life of Dr. Andrew Bell" 5 1847, "Memoir of Carey" (Translator of Dante) 1 1848, "Memoir of William Collins, R.A." 1 1849, "Life and Correspondence of R. Southey" 7 1851, "Memoirs of W. Wordsworth" 8 1858, "Fragmentary Remains of Sir H. Davy" 15 1860, "Autobiography of C. R. Leslie" 1 1864, "Macmillan's Magazine" (Letters to Win. Godwin) 9 1869, "H. Crabb Robinson's Diary" 5 1870, "Westminster Review" (Letters to Dr. Brabant) 11 1871, Meteyard's "Group of Englishmen" 2 1873, Sara Coleridge's "Memoirs" 1 1874, "Lippincott's Magazine" 10 1876, "Life of William Godwin", by C. Regan Paul (16, less 7 of those which appeared in "Macmillan's Magazine", 1864) 9 1878, "Fraser's Magazine" (letters to Matilda Betham) 5 1880, Macmillan's Edition of "Coleridge's Poems" 1 1882, "Journals of Caroline Fox" 1 1884, "Life of Alaric Watts" 5 1886, Brandl's "Life of Coleridge" 10 1887, "Memorials of Coleorton" 20 1888, "Thomas Poole and his Friends" (Mrs. Sandford) 75 1889, Professor Knight's "Life of Wordsworth" 12 1889, "Rogers and his Contemporaries" 1 1890, "Memoir of John Murray" 4 1891, "De Quincey Memorials" 4 1893, "Life of Washington Allston" (Flagg) 4 " "Friends' Quarterly Magazine" 1 " "Illustrated London News" 19 1893, J. Dykes Campbell's Edition of "Coleridge's Poems" 8 1894, " " " Life of Coleridge" (fragments) 36 1894, "The Athenaeum" (3 letters to Wrangham) 3 1895, "Letters" of S. T. Coleridge (edited by E. H. Coleridge) 174 " "Anima Poetae" (E. H. C.), Letter to J. Tobin. 1 " "The Gillmans of Highgate" (A. W. Gillman) 3 " "Athenaeum" of 18 May, 1895 1 1897, "William Blackwood and his Sons", by Mrs. Oliphant 6 1898, "Charles Lamb and the Lloyds" (E. V. Lucas) 3 1899, "J. H. Frere and his Friends" 7 1903, "Tom Wedgwood", by R. B. Litchfield 1 1907, "Christabel", edited by E. H. Coleridge 1 1910, "The Bookman", May 1 Total 747 Besides these there are privately printed letters and letters not yet published to be taken account of. The chief collection of these is "Letters from the Lake Poets" (edited by E. H. Coleridge), containing 87 letters to Daniel Stuart, some of which are republished in the "Letters", 1895. The remainder of letters not published, from the information given by Mr. E. H. Coleridge in his Preface, I make out to be about 300. Nor does this exhaust the list of letters written by Coleridge. In Ainger's Collection of the Letters of Charles Lamb are 62 letters by Lamb to Coleridge, most of which are in answer to letters received. We may therefore estimate the letters of Coleridge to Lamb at not less than 62. In Dorothy Wordsworth's "Grasmere Journal" there are no less than 32 letters to the Wordsworths[1] mentioned as having been received during the period 1800-1803, not represented among the letters in Professor Knight's "Life of Wordsworth". The total number of letters known to have been written by Coleridge is therefore between 1,100 and 1,200. Other correspondents of Coleridge not appearing among the recipients of letters in publications are probably as follows: V. Le Grice. Sam. Le Grice. T. F. Middleton. Robert Allen. Robert Lovell. Ch. Lloyd, Jr. John Cruickshank. Dr. Beddoes. Edmund Irving. Mr. Clarkson. Mrs. Clarkson (except one small fragment in "Diary of H. C. Robinson"). [Footnote 1: The letters to Lamb and Miss Wordsworth do not now exist.] The letters of Coleridge, taken as a whole, are one of the most important contributions to English Letter-writing. They are gradually coming to light, and with every letter or group of letters put forth, the character and intellectual development of Coleridge is becoming clearer. His poems and prose works, great as these are, are not comprehensible without a study of his letters, which join together the "insulated fragments" of that grand scheme of truth which he called his "System" ("Table Talk", 12th Sept. 1831, and 26th June 1834). Coleridge, in his letters, has written his own life, for his life, after all, was a life of thought, and his finest thoughts and his most ambitious aspirations are given expression to in his letters to his numerous friends; and the true biography of Coleridge is that in which his letters are made the main source of the narrative. A Biographia Epistolaris is what we want of such a man. Coleridge's letters are often bizarre in construction and quite regardless of the conventions of style, and abound in the most curious freaks of emphasis and imagery. They resemble the letters of Cowper in that they were not written for publication; and, like Cowper's, they have a character of their own. But they far surpass the epistles of the poet of Olney in spiritual vision and intellectuality. The eighteenth century, from Pope and Swift down to Cowper, is extremely rich in letter-writing. Bolingbroke, Lord Chesterfield, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Gray, Mason, Johnson, Beattie, Burns, and Gibbon, among literary personages, have contributed to the great Epistolick Art, as Dr. Johnson called it; and this list does not include the letters of the politicians, Horace Walpole, Junius, and others. The eighteenth century, in fact, was a letter-writing age; and while the bulk of the poetry of its 300 poets, with the exception of a few masterpieces of monumental quality, has gradually gone out of fashion, its letters have risen into greater repute. Even among the poets whose verse is still read there is a hesitation in public opinion as to whether the verses or letters are superior. There are readers not a few who would not scruple to place Cowper's letters above his poems, who believe that Gray's letters are much more akin to the modern spirit than the "Elegy" and the "Ode to Eton College", and who think that Swift's fly-leaves to his friends will outlive the fame of "Gulliver" and the "Tale of a Tub". Coleridge, who stands between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, was, like the poets of the former age, a multiform letter-writer. He was often seized with letter-writing when unable to write poetry or execute those unpublished masterpieces in the composition of some of which he was engaged. Coleridge's letters are of the utmost importance as a part of the literature of the opening of the nineteenth century. It is in the letters that we see better than elsewhere the germs of the speculations which afterwards came to fruition between 1817 and 1850, when the poetical and critical principles of the Lake School gradually took the place of the Classicism of the eighteenth century, and the theology of Broad Churchism began to displace the old theology, and the school of Paley in Evidences and Locke in Philosophy gave way before the inroad of Transcendentalism. As the record of the phases of an intellectual development the letters of Coleridge stand very high; and, indeed, I do not know anything equal to them except it be the "Journal of Amiel". The resemblance between Coleridge and Amiel is very striking. Both valetudinarians and barely understood by the friends with whom they came into contact, they took refuge in the inner shrine of introspection, and clothed the most abstruse ideas in the most beautiful forms of language and imagery that is only not poetry because it is not verse. While one wrote the story of his own intellectual development in secret and retained the record of it hidden from all eyes, the other scattered his to the winds in the shape of letters, which thus, widely distributed, kept his secret until they were gathered together by later hands. The letters of Coleridge as a collection is one of the most engaging psychological studies of the history of an individual mind. The text of the letters in the present volume is reproduced from the original sources, the "Biographical Supplement", Cottle, Gillman, Allsop, and the "Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey". Fuller texts of some of the letters will be found in "Letters of S. T. C." of 1895, Litchfield's "Tom Wedgwood", and other recent publications. One of the objects of the present work is to preserve the text of the letters as presented in these authentic sources of the life of Coleridge. Letters Nos. 44, 45, and 46, from "Charles Lamb and the Lloyds", by Mr. E. V. Lucas (Smith, Elder and Co.); No. 130 from "Anima Poetae" (W. Heinemann), are printed here by arrangement with the poet's grandson, Ernest Hartley Coleridge, Esq., to whom my sincere thanks are also due for his kindness in reading the proofs. Mr. Coleridge, of course, is not responsible for any of the opinions expressed in this work; but he has taken great pains in putting me right regarding certain views of others who had written on Coleridge, and also on some of the mistakes made by Henry Nelson Coleridge and Sara Coleridge, who had insufficient data on the matters on which they wrote, and definite information on which, indeed, could not be ascertainable in 1847. Coming from Mr. Coleridge--the chief living authority on the life, letters, and published and unpublished writings of S. T. Coleridge--the corrections in the footnotes and elsewhere may be taken as authoritative; and I have to acknowledge my indebtedness to him accordingly, ARTHUR TURNBULL. KIRKCALDY, 31st January, 1911. WORKS RELATING TO COLERIDGE "Early Years and Late Reflections". By Clement Carlyon, M.D. 4 vols. 1836-1858. "Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge". With a Preface by the Editor. Moxon, 1836. 2 vols. Second Edition. By Thomas Allsop. 1858. Third Edition, 1864. "Early Recollections, chiefly relating to the late S. T. Coleridge during his long residence in Bristol". By Joseph Cottle. 2 vols. 1837. "The Letters of Charles Lamb with a Sketch of his Life". By Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd, 1837; and "Final Memorials", 1848. "Reminiscences of S. T. Coleridge and Robert Southey". By Joseph Cottle. 1847. 1 vol. "Biographia Literaria, or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions". By S. T. Coleridge. Second Edition, prepared for publication in part by the late H. N. Coleridge: completed and published by his widow. 2 vols. 1847. "The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey". 6 vols. 1849-1850. "Essays on his own Times". By Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by his daughter. London: William Pickering. 3 vols. 1850. "Memoirs of William Wordsworth". By Christopher Wordsworth, D.D. 2 vols. 1851. "The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge". New York: Harper and Brothers. 7 vols. 1853. "Oxford and Cambridge Essays". Professor Hort on Coleridge. 1856. "Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey". 4 vols. 1856. "Fragmentary Remains, literary and scientific, of Sir Humphry Davy, Bart." Edited by his brother, John Davy, M.D. 1858. "Dissertations and Discussions". John Stuart Mill. 4 vols. 1859-1875. "Autobiographical Recollections by the late Charles Robert Leslie, R.A." Edited by Tom Taylor. 2 vols. 1860. "Beaten Paths". By T. Colley Grattan 2 vols. 1862. "Studies in Poetry and Philosophy". By J. C. Shairp. 1868. "Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson". Selected and Edited by Thomas Sadler, Ph.D. 3 vols. 1869. "A Group of Englishmen (1795-1815) being records of the younger Wedgwoods and their Friends". By Eliza Meteyard, 1 vol. 1871. "Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge", 1 vol. 1873. "Life of William Godwin". By C. Kegan Paul. 2 vols. 1876. "Journals and Letters of Caroline Fox". 2 vols. 1884. "Life and Works of William Wordsworth". By William Knight, LL.D. 11 vols. 1882-1889. "Prose Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge". Bohn Library. 6 vols. (various dates). "Memorials of Coleorton". Edited by William Knight, University of St. Andrews. 2 vols. 1887. "The Letters of Charles Lamb". Edited by Alfred Ainger. 2 vols. 1888. "Thomas Poole and his Friends". By Mrs. Henry Sandford. 2 vols. 1888. "Appreciations". By Walter Pater. 1889. "De Quincey Memorials". Edited by Alexander H. Japp, LL.D., F.R.S.E. 2 vols. 1891. "Posthumous Works of De Quincey". Edited by Alexander H. Japp, LL.D., F.R.S.E. Vol. II. 1893. "The Life of Washington Allston". By Jared B. Flagg. 1893. "The Works of Thomas De Quincey". Edited by Professor Masson. Vols. I-III. 1896. "Illustrated London News", 1893. Letters of S. T. C. edited by E. H. Coleridge. "Anima Poetae: From the unpublished note-books of Samuel Taylor Coleridge". Edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge. 1895. "The Gillmans of Highgate". By Alexander W. Gillman. 1895. "Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge". Edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge. 2 vols. 1895. (Referred to in present volume as "Letters".} "The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth". Edited by William Knight. 2 vols. 1897. "The Early Life of William Wordsworth", 1770-1798, "A Study of the Prelude". By Emile Legouis; translated by J. W. Matthews. 1897. "Charles Lamb and the Lloyds". Edited by E. V. Lucas. 1898. "Bibliography of S. T. Coleridge". R. Heine Shepherd and Colonel Prideaux. 1900. "The German Influence on Coleridge". By John Louis Haney. 1902. "A Bibliography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge". By John Louis Haney. 1903. "Tom Wedgwood, the First Photographer". By R. B. Litchfield. 1903. "Christabel, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge; illustrated by a Facsimile of the Manuscript and by Textual and other notes". By Ernest Hartley Coleridge, Hon. F.R.S.L. Published under the direction of the Royal Society of Literature: London, Henry Frowde. 1907. (The Facsimile is that of the MS. presented by Coleridge to Sarah Hutchinson.) BIOGRAPHIES OF COLERIDGE John Thomas Cox. Memoir prefixed to Edition of the Poems of S. T. Coleridge. 1836. Life of Coleridge prefixed to Edition of the Poems by Milner and Sowerby. (No date.) James Gillman. "Life of S. T. Coleridge". Vol. I. 1838. Biographical Supplement to the Second Edition of the "Biographia Literaria". By Henry Nelson Coleridge and Sara Coleridge. 1847. F. Freiligrath. Memoir to the "Tauchnitz Edition" of the Poems of S. T. Coleridge. 1860. E. H. Norton. Poetical and Dramatic Works, with Life of the Author. 3 vols. Boston, 1864. Derwent Coleridge, Introductory Essay to Poems of S. T. C. Moxon and Sons. 1870. W. M. Rossetti. Critical Memoir to the Edition of Poems of S. T. C. in Moxon's "Popular Poets." 1872. William Bell Scott. Introduction to Edition of the Poems in "Routledge's Poets." Memoir prefixed to the Edition of the Poems of S. T. C. in "Lansdown" Poets. F. Warne and Co. 1878. R. Herne Shepherd. Life of S. T. C. prefixed to Macmillan's Edition of the Poems of S. T. C. 4 vols. 1877-1880. Memoir prefixed to the "Landscape Edition" of the Poems of S. T. Coleridge. Edinburgh, 1881. "Life of S. T. Coleridge". By H. Traill, "English Men of Letters Series." 1884. Thomas Ashe. "Life of S. T. Coleridge" prefixed to the "Aldine Edition" of the Poems of S. T. C. 2 vols. 1885. Professor Alois Brandl, Prague. "Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the English Romantic School". English Edition by Lady Eastlake. 1887. "The Life of S. T. Coleridge". By Hall Caine. "Great Writers Series." 1887. Introductory Memoir by J. Dykes Campbell, prefixed to "Poetical Works of S. T. C." Macmillan. 1893. "Samuel Taylor Coleridge". A narrative of the events of his Life. By James Dykes Campbell. 1894. "Coleridge". Bell's "Miniature Series of Great Writers." By Richard Garnett. 1904. "La Vie d'un Poete--Coleridge". Par Joseph Aynard. Paris, 1907. INTRODUCTIONS TO SELECTIONS OF THE POEMS OF S. T. C., 1869-1908 Algernon C. Swinburne. "Christabel and the Lyrical and Imaginative Poems of S. T. Coleridge" (Sampson Low, and Co.). 1869. Joseph Skipsey. Prefatory Notice to the "Canterbury Edition" of Coleridge's Poems (Walter Scott). Stopford A. Brooke. Introduction to the Golden Book of Coleridge (Dent and Co.). Andrew Lang. Introduction to Poems of S. T. C. (Longmans). Richard Garnett. "The Poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge". The "Muses" Library (Lawrence and Bullen, now Routledge). 1888. "Coleridge's Select Poems". Edited by Andrew J. George, M. A. (Heath, publisher.) "Poems". Edited by E. H. Coleridge (Heinemann). "Poems". Edited by Alice Meynell. "Red Letter Library" (Blackie). "Poems of S. T. C." Edited by Professor Knight (Newnes). "Poems of Coleridge", selected and arranged. Edited by Arthur Symons (Methuen and Co.). "The Poems of Coleridge". Illustrated by Gerald Metcalfe. With an Introduction by E. Hartley Coleridge (John Lane). 1907. "The Poems of S. T. Coleridge". "The World's Classics" (Frowde). Edited by T. Quiller-Couch. 1908. "Poems of Coleridge". "The Golden Poets." With an Introduction by Professor Edward Dowden, LL.D. (Caxton Publishing Company). BIOGRAPHICAL APPRECIATIONS 1865. Article in the "North British Review" for December of this year. 1903. "From Ottery to Highgate, the story of the childhood and later years of Samuel Taylor Coleridge". By Wilfred Brown (Coleberd and Co., Ltd., Ottery St. Mary). CONTENTS PART I.--POETRY Page CHAPTER I. EARLY YEARS I, 3 Letter 1. To Thomas Poole. -- Feby. 1797 5 2. " -- Mch. 1797 7 3. " 9 Oct. 1797 11 4. " 16 Oct. 1797 15 5. " 19 Feby. 1798 19 CHAPTER II. CAMBRIDGE AND PANTISOCRACY 29 Letter 6. To George Coleridge. 31 Mch. 1791 29 7. Robert Southey. 6 July, 1794 34 8. Henry Martin. 22 July, 1794 35 9. Southey. 6 Sept. 1794 42 10. " 18 Sept. 1794 43 11. Charles Heath. -- -- 1794 44 12. Henry Martin. 22 Sept. 1794 46 13. Southey. -- Dec. 1794 47 CHAPTER III. "THE WATCHMAN" 50 Letter 14. To Thomas Poole. 7 Oct. 1795 50 15. Joseph Cottle. -- Dec. 1795 52 16. " 1 Jany. 1796 52 17. Josiah Wade. -- Jany. 1796 55 18. " -- -- 1796 55 19. " -- -- 1796 56 20. " -- -- 1796 58 21. " 7 Jany. 1796 59 22. " -- Jany. 1796 60 23. Cottle. -- Feby. 1796 62 24. " -- -- 1796 62 25. " 22 Feby. 1796 63 26. Poole. 30 Mch. 1796 65 27. Benjamin Flower. 1 April, 1796 28. Caius Gracchus. 1 April, 1796 29. Poole. 11 April, 1796 30. Cottle. 15 April, 1796 31. " -- April, 1796 32. " -- April, 1796 33. Poole. 6 May, 1796 34. " 12 May, 1796 35. " 29 May, 1796 36. " 4 July, 1796 37. " -- Aug. 1796 38. Wade. -- Sept. 1796 39. Poole. 24 Sept. 1796 40. Charles Lamb. 29 Sept. 1796 41. Cottle. 18 Oct. 1796 42. Poole. 1 Nov. 1796 43. " 5 Nov. 1796 44. Charles Lloyd, Senr. 15 Oct. 1796 45. " 14 Nov. 1796 46. " 4 Dec. 1796 47. Poole. 26 Dec. 1796 CHAPTER IV. CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS OF COLERIDGE CHAPTER V. STOWEY Letter 48. To Cottle. Jany. 1797 49. " 3 Jany. 1797 50. " 10 Jany. 1797 51. " Jany. 1797 52. " Jany. -- 53. " Jany. -- 54. " Feby. or Mch. 1797 55. " May, 1797 56. " -- -- 57. " -- -- 58. Wade. -- -- 59. Cottle. -- -- 60. " -- June, 1797 61. " 8 June, 1797 62. " 29 -- -- 63. " 3-17 July, 1797 64. Wade. 17-20 July, 1797 Letter 65. To Cottle. --Sept. 1797 66. " 3 Sept. 1797 67. " 10-15 Sept. 1797 68. " 28 Nov. 1797 69. " 2 Dec. 1797 70. " --Jany. 1798 71. Wedgwood. --Jany. 1798 72. Cottle. 24 Jany. 1798 73. the Editor, "Monthly Mag." --Jany. 1798 CHAPTER VI. THE LYRICAL BALLADS AND GERMANY Letter 74. To Cottle. 18 Feb. 1798 75. the Editor, "Morning Post." 10 Mch. 1798 76. Cottle. 8 Mch. 1798 77. Wade. 21 Mch. 1798 78. Cottle. Mch. or Apl. 1798 79. " 14 April, 1798 80. " --April, 1798 81. " --May, 1798 82. Mrs. Coleridge. 14 Jany. 1799 83. " 23 April, 1799 CHAPTER VII. THE RELIGION OF THE PINEWOODS Letter 84. To Mrs. Coleridge. 17 May, 1799 CHAPTER VIII. RETURN TO ENGLAND, "WALLENSTEIN", AND THE "MORNING POST" Letter 85. To Josiah Wedgwood. 21 May, 1799 86. "the Editor, Morning Post." 21 Dec. 1799 87. " 10 Jany. 1800 88. Thomas Wedgwood. --Jany. 1800 89. Josiah Wedgwood. --Feby. 1800 90. Thomas Poole. --Mch. 1800 CHAPTER IX KESWICK Letter 91. To William Godwin. 21 May, 1800 92. Humphry Davy. --June, 1800 93. Josiah Wedgwood. 24 July, 1800 94. Davy. 25 July, 1800 95. Godwin. 22 Sept. 1800 96. Davy. 9 Oct. 1800 97. Godwin. 13 Oct. 1800 98. Davy. 18 Oct. 1800 99. Josiah Wedgwood. 1 Nov. 1800 100. " 12 Nov. 1800 101. the Editor, "Monthly Review."18 Nov. 1800 102. Davy. 2 Dec. 1800 103. " 3 Feby. 1801 104. Wade. 6 March, 1801 105. Godwin. 25 March, 1801 PART II.--THE PERMANENT CHAPTER X. ILL HEALTH; SOUTHEY COMES TO KESWICK Letter 106. To Southey. 13 April, 1801 107. Davy. 4 May, 1801 108. " 20 May, 1801 109. Godwin. 23 June, 1801 110. Davy. 31 Oct. 1801 111. Thos. Wedgwood. 20 Oct. 1802 112. " 3 Nov. 1802 113. " 9 Jany. l803 114. " 14 Jany. 1803 115. " 10 Feby. 1803 116. " 10 Feby. 1803 117. " 17 Feby. 1803 118. " 17 Feby. 1803 119. Godwin. 4 June, 1803 120. " 10 July, 1803 121. Southey. -- July, 1803 122. Thos. Wedgwood. 16 Sept. 1803 123. Miss Cruikshank. -- -- 1803 124. Thos. Wedgwood. -- Jany. 1804 125. " 28 Jany. 1804 126. Davy. 6 Mch. 1804 127. Sarah Hutchinson. 10 March, 1804 128. Wedgwood. 24 March, 1804 129. Davy. 25 March, 1804 PART I POETRY BIOGRAPHIA EPISTOLARIS CHAPTER I EARLY YEARS [1772 to 1791] While here, thou fed'st upon etherial beams, As if thou had'st not a terrestrial birth;-- Beyond material objects was thy sight; In the clouds woven was thy lucid robe! "Ah! who can tell how little for this sphere That frame was fitted of empyreal fire!" [1] Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the youngest child of the Reverend John Coleridge, Chaplain-Priest and Vicar of the parish of Ottery St. Mary, in the county of Devon, and Master of the Free Grammar, or King's School, as it is called, founded by Henry VIII in that town. His mother's maiden name was Ann Bowdon. He was born at Ottery on the 21st of October 1772, "about eleven o'clock in the forenoon," as his father, the Vicar, has, with rather unusual particularity, entered it in the register. John Coleridge, who was born in 1719, and finished his education at Sidney-Sussex College, Cambridge,[2] was a country clergyman and schoolmaster of no ordinary kind. He was a good Greek and Latin scholar, a profound Hebraist, and, according to the measure of his day, an accomplished mathematician. He was on terms of literary friendship with Samuel Badcock, and, by his knowledge of Hebrew, rendered material assistance to Dr. Kennicott, in his well known critical works. Some curious papers on theological and antiquarian subjects appear with his signature in the early numbers of "The Gentleman's Magazine", between the years 1745 and 1780; almost all of which have been inserted in the interesting volumes of Selections made several years ago from that work. In 1768 he published miscellaneous Dissertations arising from the 17th and 18th chapters of the Book of Judges; in which a very learned and ingenious attempt is made to relieve the character of Micah from the charge of idolatry ordinarily brought against it; and in 1772 appeared a "Critical Latin Grammar", which his son called "his best work," and which is not wholly unknown even now to the inquisitive by the proposed substitution of the terms "prior, possessive, attributive, posterior, interjective, and quale-quare-quidditive," for the vulgar names of the cases. This little Grammar, however, deserves a philologer's perusal, and is indeed in many respects a very valuable work in its kind. He also published a Latin Exercise book, and a Sermon. His school was celebrated, and most of the country gentlemen of that generation, belonging to the south and east parts of Devon, had been his pupils. Judge Buller was one. The amiable character and personal eccentricities of this excellent man are not yet forgotten amongst some of the elders of the parish and neighbourhood, and the latter, as is usual in such cases, have been greatly exaggerated. He died suddenly in the month of October 1781, after riding to Ottery from Plymouth, to which latter place he had gone for the purpose of embarking his son Francis, as a midshipman, for India. Many years afterwards, in 1797, S. T. Coleridge commenced a series of Letters to his friend Thomas Poole, of Nether Stowey, in the county of Somerset, in which he proposed to give an account of his life up to that time. Five only were written, and unfortunately they stop short of his residence at Cambridge. This series will properly find a place here. [Footnote 1: From a Sonnet To Coleridge by Sir Egerton Brydges--written 16th Feb. 1837. S. C.] [Footnote 2: He was matriculated at Sidney a sizar on the 18th of March 1748, but does not appear to have taken any degree at the University. S. C.] LETTER 1. TO MR. POOLE My Dear Poole, I could inform the dullest author how he might write an interesting book. Let him relate the events of his own life with honesty, not disguising the feelings that accompanied them. I never yet read even a Methodist's "Experience" in the Gospel Magazine without receiving instruction and amusement; and I should almost despair of that man who could peruse the Life of John Woolman without an amelioration of heart. As to my Life, it has all the charms of variety,--high life and low life, vices and virtues, great folly and some wisdom. However, what I am depends on what I have been; and you, my best friend, have a right to the narration. To me the task will be a useful one. It will renew and deepen my reflections on the past; and it will perhaps make you behold with no unforgiving or impatient eye those weaknesses and defects in my character, which so many untoward circumstances have concurred in planting there. My family on my Mother's side can be traced up, I know not how far. The Bowdons inherited a good farm and house thereon in the Exmoor country, in the reign of Elizabeth, as I have been told; and to my knowledge they have inherited nothing better since that time. My Grandfather was in the reign of George I a considerable woollen trader in Southmolton; so that I suppose, when the time comes, I shall be allowed to pass as a "Sans-culotte" without much opposition. My Father received a better education than the rest of his family in consequence of his own exertions, not of his superiour advantages. When he was not quite sixteen years of age, my grandfather, by a series of misfortunes, was reduced to great distress. My Father received the half of his last crown and his blessing, and walked off to seek his fortune. After he had proceeded a few miles, he sate him down on the side of the road, so overwhelmed with painful thoughts that he wept audibly. A gentleman passed by who knew him, and, inquiring into his sorrow, took him home and gave him the means of maintaining himself by placing him in a school. At this time he commenced being a severe and ardent student. He married his first wife, by whom he had three daughters, all now alive. While his first wife lived, having scraped up money enough, he at the age of twenty walked to Cambridge, entered himself at Sidney College, distinguished himself in Hebrew and Mathematics, and might have had a fellowship if he had not been married. He returned and settled as a schoolmaster in Southmolton where his wife died. In 1760 he was appointed Chaplain-Priest and Master of the School at Ottery St. Mary, and removed to that place; and in August, 1760, Mr. Buller, the father of the present Judge, procured for him the living from Lord Chancellor Bathurst. By my Mother, his second wife, he had ten children, of whom I am the youngest, born October 20th,[1] 1772. These facts I received from my Mother; but I am utterly unable to fill them up by any further particulars of times, or places, or names. Here I shall conclude my first Letter, because I cannot pledge myself for the accuracy of the accounts, and I will not therefore mingle it with that for the truth of which, in the minutest parts, I shall hold myself responsible. You must regard this Letter as a first chapter devoted to dim traditions of times too remote to be pierced by the eye of investigation. Yours affectionately, S. T. COLERIDGE. Feb. 1797. Monday. [Footnote 1: A mistake, should be October 21st.] LETTER 2. To MR. POOLE My Dear Poole, My Father (Vicar of, and Schoolmaster at, Ottery St. Mary, Devon) was a good mathematician, and well versed in the Greek, Latin, and Hebrew languages. He published, or rather attempted to publish, several works;--1st, Miscellaneous Dissertations arising from the 17th and 18th chapters of the Book of Judges; 2d, "Sententiae Excerptcae" for the use of his own School; and 3d, his best work, a Critical Latin Grammar, in the Preface to which he proposes a bold innovation in the names of the cases. My Father's new nomenclature was not likely to become popular, although it must be allowed to be both sonorous and expressive. "Exempli gratia", he calls the ablative case "the quare-quale-quidditive case!" He made the world his confidant with respect to his learning and ingenuity, and the world seems to have kept the secret very faithfully. His various works, uncut, unthumbed, were preserved free from all pollution in the family archives, where they may still be for anything that I know. This piece of good luck promises to be hereditary; for all "my" compositions have the same amiable home-staying propensity. The truth is, my Father was not a first-rate genius; he was, however, a first-rate Christian, which is much better. I need not detain you with his character. In learning, goodheartedness, absentness of mind, and excessive ignorance of the world, he was a perfect Parson Adams. My Mother was an admirable economist, and managed exclusively. My eldest brother's name was John. He was a Captain in the East India Company's service; a successful officer and a brave one, as I have heard. He died in India in 1786. My second brother William went to Pembroke College, Oxford. He died a clergyman in 1780, just on the eve of his intended marriage. My brother James has been in the army since the age of fifteen, and has married a woman of fortune, one of the old Duke family of Otterton in Devon. Edward, the wit of the family, went to Pembroke College, and is now a clergyman. George also went to Pembroke. He is in orders likewise, and now has the same School, a very flourishing one, which my Father had. He is a man of reflective mind and elegant talent. He possesses learning in a greater degree than any of the family, excepting myself. His manners are grave, and hued over with a tender sadness. In his moral character he approaches every way nearer to perfection than any man I ever yet knew. He is worth us all. Luke Herman was a surgeon, a severe student, and a good man. He died in 1790, leaving one child, a lovely boy still alive. [1] My only sister, Ann, died at twenty-one, a little after my brother Luke:-- Rest, gentle Shade! and wait thy Maker's will; Then rise unchang'd, and be an angel still! Francis Syndercombe went out to India as a midshipman under Admiral Graves. He accidentally met his brother John on board ship abroad, who took him ashore, and procured him a commission in the Company's army. He died in 1792, aged twenty-one, a Lieutenant, in consequence of a fever brought on by excessive fatigue at and after the siege of Seringapatam, and the storming of a hill fort, during all which his conduct had been so gallant that his Commanding Officer particularly noticed him, and presented him with a gold watch, which my Mother now has. All my brothers are remarkably handsome; but they were as inferiour to Francis as I am to them. He went by the name of "the handsome Coleridge." The tenth and last child was Samuel Taylor, the subject and author of these Epistles. From October 1772 to October 1773. Baptized Samuel Taylor, my Godfather's name being Samuel Taylor, Esquire. I had another called Evans, and two Godmothers, both named Munday. From October 1773 to October 1774. In this year I was carelessly left by my nurse, ran to the fire, and pulled out a live coal, and burned myself dreadfully. While my hand was being drest by Mr. Young, I spoke for the first time, (so my Mother informs me) and said, "nasty Dr. Young!" The snatching at fire, and the circumstance of my first words expressing hatred to professional men--are they at all ominous? This year I went to school. My Schoolmistress, the very image of Shenstone's, was named Old Dame Key. She was nearly related to Sir Joshua Reynolds. From October 1774 to 1775. I was inoculated; which I mention, because I distinctly remember it, and that my eyes were bound; at which I manifested so much obstinate indignation, that at last they removed the bandage, and unaffrighted I looked at the lancet, and suffered the scratch. At the close of this year I could read a chapter in the Bible. Here I shall end, because the remaining years of my life all assisted to form my particular mind;--the first three years had nothing in them that seems to relate to it. God bless you and your sincere S. T. COLERIDGE. Sunday, March, 1797. [Footnote 1: William Hart Coleridge, Bishop of Barbadoes and the Leeward Islands. (He was appointed to that See in 1824, retired from it in 1842; and afterwards accepted the Wardenship of St. Augustine's College, Canterbury. S. C.) [He died in 1849.] ] A letter from Francis S. Coleridge to his sister has been preserved in the family, in which a particular account is given of the chance meeting of the two brothers in India, mentioned shortly in the preceding Letter. There is something so touching and romantic in the incident that the Reader will, it is hoped, pardon the insertion of the original narrative here. Dear Nancy, You are very right, I have neglected my absent friends, but do not think I have forgot them, and indeed it would be ungrateful in me if I did not write to them. You may be sure, Nancy, I thank Providence for bringing about that meeting, which has been the cause of all my good fortune and happiness, which I now in fulness enjoy. It was an affectionate meeting, and I will inform you of the particulars. There was in our ship one Captain Mordaunt, who had been in India before, when we came to Bombay. Finding a number of his friends there he went often ashore. The day before the Fleet sailed he desired one Captain Welsh to go aboard with him, who was an intimate friend of your brother's. "I will," said Welsh, "and will write a note to Coleridge to go with us." Upon this Captain Mordaunt, recollecting me, said there was a young midshipman, a favourite of Captain Hicks, of that name on board. Upon that they agreed to inform my brother of it, which they did soon after, and all three came on board. I was then in the lower deck, and, though you won't believe it, I was sitting upon a gun and thinking of my brother, that is, whether I should ever see or hear anything of him; when seeing a Lieutenant, who had been sent to inform me of my brother's being on board, I got up off the gun: but instead of telling me about my brother, he told me that Captain Hicks was very angry with me and wanted to see me. Captain Hicks had always been a Father to me, and loved me as if I had been his own child. I therefore went up shaking like an aspen leaf to the Lieutenant's apartments, when a Gentleman took hold of my hand. I did not mind him at first, but looked round for the Captain; but the Gentleman still holding my hand, I looked, and what was my surprise, when I saw him too full to speak and his eyes full of tears. Whether crying is catching I know not, but I began a crying too, though I did not know the reason, till he caught me in his arms, and told me he was my brother, and then I found I was paying nature her tribute, for I believe I never cried so much in my life. There is a saying in Robinson Crusoe, I remember very well, viz.--sudden joy like grief confounds at first. We directly went ashore having got my discharge, and having took a most affectionate leave of Captain Hicks, I left the ship for good and all. My situation in the army is that I am one of the oldest Ensigns, and before you get this must in all probability be a Lieutenant. How many changes there have been in my life, and what lucky ones they have been, and how young I am still! I must be seven years older before I can properly style myself a man, and what a number of officers do I command, who are old enough to be my Father already! LETTER 3. To MR. POOLE October 9th, 1797. My Dearest Poole, From March to October--a long silence! But it is possible that I may have been preparing materials for future Letters, and the time cannot be considered as altogether subtracted from you. From October 1775 to October 1778. These three years I continued at the Reading School, because I was too little to be trusted among my Father's schoolboys. After break-fast I had a halfpenny given me, with which I bought three cakes at the baker's shop close by the school of my old mistress; and these were my dinner every day except Saturday and Sunday, when I used to dine at home, and wallowed in a beef and pudding dinner. I am remarkably fond of beans and bacon: and this fondness I attribute to my Father's giving me a penny for having eaten a large quantity of beans on Saturday. For the other boys did not like them, and, as it was an economic food, my Father thought my attachment to it ought to be encouraged. He was very fond of me, and I was my Mother's darling: in consequence whereof I was very miserable. For Molly, who had nursed my brother Francis, and was immoderately fond of him, hated me because my Mother took more notice of me than of Frank; and Frank hated me because my Mother gave me now and then a bit of cake when he had none,--quite forgetting that for one bit of cake which I had and he had not, he had twenty sops in the pan, and pieces of bread and butter with sugar on them from Molly, from whom I received only thumps and ill names. So I became fretful, and timorous, and a tell-tale; and the schoolboys drove me from play, and were always tormenting me. And hence I took no pleasure in boyish sports, but read incessantly. I read through all gilt-cover little books that could be had at that time, and likewise all the uncovered tales of Tom Hickathrift, Jack the Giant Killer, and the like. And I used to lie by the wall, and mope; and my spirits used to come upon me suddenly, and in a flood;--and then I was accustomed to run up and down the churchyard, and act over again all I had been reading on the docks, the nettles, and the rank grass. At six years of age I remember to have read Belisarius, Robinson Crusoe, and Philip Quarles; and then I found the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, one tale of which, (the tale of a man who was compelled to seek for a pure virgin,) made so deep an impression on me, (I had read it in the evening while my mother was at her needle,) that I was haunted by spectres, whenever I was in the dark: and I distinctly recollect the anxious and fearful eagerness, with which I used to watch the window where the book lay, and when the sun came upon it, I would seize it, carry it by the wall, and bask, and read. My father found out the effect which these books had produced, and burned them. So I became a dreamer, and acquired an indisposition to all bodily activity; and I was fretful, and inordinately passionate; and as I could not play at anything, and was slothful, I was despised and hated by the boys: and because I could read and spell, and had, I may truly say, a memory and understanding forced into almost unnatural ripeness, I was flattered and wondered at by all the old women. And so I became very vain, and despised most of the boys that were at all near my own age, and before I was eight years old I was a "character". Sensibility, imagination, vanity, sloth, and feelings of deep and bitter contempt for almost all who traversed the orbit of my understanding, were even then prominent and manifest. From October 1778 to 1779. That which I began to be from three to six, I continued to be from six to nine. In this year I was admitted into the Grammar School, and soon outstripped all of my age. I had a dangerous putrid fever this year. My brother George lay ill of the same fever in the next room. My poor brother, Francis, I remember, stole up in spite of orders to the contrary, and sat by my bedside, and read Pope's Homer to me. Frank had a violent love of beating me; but whenever that was superseded by any humour or circumstances, he was always very fond of me, and used to regard me with a strange mixture of admiration and contempt. Strange it was not, for he hated books, and loved climbing, fighting, playing, and robbing orchards, to distraction. My Mother relates a story of me, which I repeat here, because it must be reckoned as my first piece of wit.--During my fever, I asked why Lady Northcote, our neighbour, did not come and see me. My Mother said she was afraid of catching the fever. I was piqued, and answered, "Ah! Mamma! the four Angels round my bed a'n't afraid of catching it!" I suppose you know the old prayer:-- Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Bless the bed that I lie on!-- Four good Angels round me spread, Two at my feet and two at my head. This "prayer" I said nightly, and most firmly believed the truth of it. Frequently have I, (half-awake and half-asleep; my body diseased, and fevered by my imagination,)--seen armies of ugly things bursting in upon me, and these four Angels keeping them off. In my next I shall carry on my life to my Father's death. God bless you, my dear Poole, And your affectionate, S.T. COLERIDGE. In a note written in after life Mr. Coleridge speaks of this period of his life in the following terms: "Being the youngest child, I possibly inherited the weakly state of health of my Father, who died, at the age of sixty-two, before I had reached my ninth year; and from certain jealousies of old Molly, my brother Frank's dotingly fond nurse--and if ever child by beauty and loveliness deserved to be doted on, my brother Francis was that child--and by the infusion of her jealousies into my brother's mind, I was in earliest childhood huffed away from the enjoyments of muscular activity in play, to take refuge at my Mother's side on my little stool, to read my little book, and to listen to the talk of my elders. I was driven from life in motion to life in thought and sensation. I never played except by myself, and then only acted over what I had been reading or fancying, or half one, half the other, with a stick cutting down weeds and nettles, as one of the "Seven Champions of Christendom." Alas! I had all the simplicity, all the docility of the little child, but none of the child's habits. I never thought as a child, never had the language of a child." [1] [Footnote 1: Gillman's "Life of Coleridge", p. 10.] LETTER 4. TO MR. POOLE Dear Poole, From October 1779 to 1781. I had asked my Mother one evening to cut my cheese entire, so that I might toast it. This was no easy matter, it being a "crumbly" cheese. My Mother however did it. I went into the garden for something or other, and in the mean time my brother Frank minced my cheese, to "disappoint the favourite." I returned, saw the exploit, and in an agony of passion flew at Frank. He pretended to have been seriously hurt by my blow, flung himself on the ground, and there lay with outstretched limbs. I hung over him mourning and in a great fright; he leaped up, and with a horse-laugh gave me a severe blow in the face. I seized a knife, and was running at him, when my Mother came in and took me by the arm. I expected a flogging, and, struggling from her, I ran away to a little hill or slope, at the bottom of which the Otter flows, about a mile from Ottery. There I staid; my rage died away, but my obstinacy vanquished my fears, and taking out a shilling book, which had at the end morning and evening prayers, I very devoutly repeated them--thinking at the same time with a gloomy inward satisfaction--how miserable my Mother must be! I distinctly remember my feelings, when I saw a Mr. Vaughan pass over the bridge at about a furlong's distance, and how I watched the calves in the fields beyond the river. It grew dark, and I fell asleep. It was towards the end of October, and it proved a stormy night. I felt the cold in my sleep, and dreamed that I was pulling the blanket over me, and actually pulled over me a dry thorn-bush which lay on the ground near me. In my sleep I had rolled from the top of the hill till within three yards of the river, which flowed by the unfenced edge of the bottom. I awoke several times, and finding myself wet, and cold, and stiff, closed my eyes again that I might forget it. In the meantime my Mother waited about half an hour, expecting my return when the "sulks" had evaporated. I not returning, she sent into the churchyard, and round the town. Not found! Several men and all the boys were sent out to ramble about and seek me. In vain! My Mother was almost distracted; and at ten o'clock at night I was 'cried' by the crier in Ottery, and in two villages near it, with a reward offered for me. No one went to bed;--indeed I believe half the town were up all the night. To return to myself. About five in the morning, or a little after, I was broad awake, and attempted to get up, and walk; but I could not move. I saw the shepherds and workmen at a distance, and cried, but so faintly, that it was impossible to hear me thirty yards off. And there I might have lain and died;--for I was now almost given over, the ponds and even the river, near which I was lying, having been dragged. But providentially Sir Stafford Northcote, who had been out all night, resolved to make one other trial, and came so near that he heard me crying. He carried me in his arms for nearly a quarter of a mile, when we met my father and Sir Stafford Northcote's servants. I remember, and never shall forget, my Father's face as he looked upon me while I lay in the servant's arms--so calm, and the tears stealing down his face; for I was the child of his old age. My Mother, as you, may suppose, was outrageous with joy. Meantime in rushed a young lady, crying out--"I hope you'll whip him, Mrs. Coleridge." This woman still lives at Ottery; and neither philosophy nor religion has been able to conquer the antipathy which I feel towards her, whenever I see her. I was put to bed, and recovered in a day or so. But I was certainly injured; for I was weakly and subject to ague for many years after. My Father--who had so little parental ambition in him, that, but for my Mother's pride and spirit, he would certainly have brought up his other sons to trades--had nevertheless resolved that I should be a parson. I read every book that came in my way without distinction; and my Father was fond of me, and used to take me on his knee, and hold long conversations with me. I remember, when eight years old, walking with him one winter evening from a farmer's house, a mile from Ottery; and he then told me the names of the stars, and how Jupiter was a thousand times larger than our world, and that the other twinkling stars were suns that had worlds rolling round them; and when I came home, he showed me how they rolled round. I heard him with a profound delight and admiration, but without the least mixture of wonder or incredulity. For from my early reading of fairy tales and about genii, and the like, my mind had been habituated "to the Vast"; and I never regarded "my senses" in any way as the "criteria" of my belief. I regulated all my creeds by my conceptions, not by my sight, even at that age. Ought children to be permitted to read romances, and stories of giants, magicians, and genii? I know all that has been said against it; but I have formed my faith in the affirmative. I know no other way of giving the mind a love of the Great and the Whole. Those who have been led to the same truths step by step, through the constant testimony of their senses, seem to me to want a sense which I possess. They contemplate nothing but parts, and all parts are necessarily little, and the universe to them is but a mass of little things. It is true, the mind may become credulous and prone to superstition by the former method;--but are not the experimentalists credulous even to madness in believing any absurdity, rather than believe the grandest truths, if they have not the testimony of their own senses in their favour? I have known some who have been rationally educated, as it is styled. They were marked by a microscopic acuteness; but when they looked at great things, all became a blank, and they saw nothing, and denied that anything could be seen, and uniformly put the negative of a power for the possession of a power, and called the want of imagination, judgment, and the never being moved to rapture, philosophy. Towards the latter end of September 1781, my Father went to Plymouth with my brother Francis, who was to go out as midshipman under Admiral Graves, who was a friend of my Father's. He settled Frank as he wished, and returned on the 4th of October, 1781. He arrived at Exeter about six o'clock, and was pressed to take a bed there by the friendly family of the Harts; but he refused; and to avoid their entreaties he told them that he had never been superstitious, but that the night before he had had a dream, which had made a deep impression on him. He dreamed that Death had appeared to him, as he is commonly painted, and had touched him with his dart. Well, he returned home; and all his family, I excepted, were up. He told my Mother his dream; but he was in high health and good spirits; and there was a bowl of punch made, and my Father gave a long and particular account of his travel, and that he had placed Frank under a religious Captain, and so forth. At length he went to bed, very well and in high spirits. A short time after he had lain down, he complained of a pain in his bowels, to which he was subject, from wind. My Mother got him some peppermint water, which he took, and after a pause, he said, "I am much better now, my dear!"--and lay down again. In a minute my Mother heard a noise in his throat, and spoke to him, but he did not answer; and she spoke repeatedly in vain. Her shriek awaked me, and I said--"Papa is dead!" I did not know my Father's return; but I knew that he was expected. How I came to think of his death, I cannot tell; but so it was. Dead he was. Some said it was gout in the heart;--probably it was a fit of apoplexy. He was an Israelite without guile, simple, generous, and, taking some Scripture texts in their literal sense, he was conscientiously indifferent to the good and the evil of this world. God love you and S.T. COLERIDGE. He was buried at Ottery on the 10th of October 1781. "O! that I might so pass away," said Coleridge, thirty years afterwards, "if, like him, I were an Israelite without guile! The image of my Father, very reverend, kind, learned, simple-hearted Father is a religion to me." At his Father's death Coleridge was nearly nine years old. He continued with his Mother at Ottery till the spring of 1782, when he was sent to London to wait the appointed time for admission into Christ's Hospital, to which a presentation had been procured from Mr. John Way through the influence of his father's old pupil Sir Francis Buller. Ten weeks he lived in London with an Uncle, and was entered in the books on the 8th of July 1782. LETTER 5. TO MR. POOLE From October 1781 to October 1782. After the death of my Father, we, of course, changed houses, and I remained with my Mother till the spring of 1782, and was a day scholar to Parson Warren, my Father's successor. He was not very deep, I believe; and I used to delight my poor Mother by relating little instances of his deficiency in grammar knowledge--every detraction from his merits seeming an oblation to the memory of my Father, especially as Warren did certainly "pulpitize" much better. Somewhere I think about April 1782, Judge Buller, who had been educated by my Father, sent for me, having procured a Christ's Hospital presentation. I accordingly went to London, and was received and entertained by my Mother's brother, Mr. Bowdon. He was generous as the air, and a man of very considerable talents, but he was fond, as others have been, of his bottle. He received me with great affection, and I staid ten weeks at his house, during which I went occasionally to Judge Buller's. My Uncle was very proud of me, and used to carry me from coffee-house to coffee-house, and tavern to tavern, where I drank, and talked, and disputed as if I had been a man. Nothing was more common than for a large party to exclaim in my hearing, that I was a prodigy, and so forth; so that while I remained at my Uncle's, I was most completely spoilt and pampered, both mind and body. At length the time came, and I donned the blue coat and yellow stockings, and was sent down to Hertford, a town twenty miles from London, where there are about three hundred of the younger Blue-coat boys. At Hertford I was very happy on the whole, for I had plenty to eat and drink, and we had pudding and vegetables almost every day. I remained there six weeks, and then was drafted up to the great school in London, where I arrived in September, 1782, and was placed in the second ward, then called Jefferies' Ward, and in the Under Grammar School. There are twelve wards, or dormitories, of unequal sizes, beside the sick ward, in the great school; and they contained altogether seven hundred boys, of whom I think nearly one-third were the sons of clergymen. There are five schools,--mathematical, grammar, drawing, reading, and writing--all very large buildings. When a boy is admitted, if he reads very badly, he is either sent to Hertford, or to the reading school. Boys are admissible from seven to twelve years of age. If he learns to read tolerably well before nine, he is drafted into the Lower Grammar School, if not, into the Writing School, as having given proof of unfitness for classical studies. If, before he is eleven, he climbs up to the first form of the Lower Grammar School, he is drafted into the Head Grammar School. If not, at eleven years of age, he is sent into the Writing School, where he continues till fourteen or fifteen, and is then either apprenticed or articled as a clerk, or whatever else his turn of mind or of fortune shall have provided for him. Two or three times a year the Mathematical Master beats up for recruits for the King's boys, as they are called; and all who like the navy are drafted into the Mathematical and Drawing Schools, where they continue till sixteen or seventeen years of age, and go out as midshipmen, and schoolmasters in the Navy. The boys who are drafted into the Head Grammar School, remain there till thirteen; and then, if not chosen for the University, go into the Writing School. Each dormitory has a nurse or matron, and there is a head matron to superintend all these nurses. The boys were, when I was admitted, under excessive subordination to each other according to rank in school; and every ward was governed by four Monitors,--appointed by the Steward, who was the supreme governor out of school--our temporal lord,--and by four Markers, who wore silver medals, and were appointed by the Head Grammar Master, who was our supreme spiritual lord. The same boys were commonly both Monitors and Markers. We read in classes on Sundays to our Markers, and were catechised by them, and under their sole authority during prayers, etc. All other authority was in the Monitors; but, as I said, the same boys were ordinarily both the one and the other. Our diet was very scanty. Every morning a bit of dry bread and some bad small beer. Every evening a larger piece of bread, and cheese or butter, whichever we liked. For dinner,--on Sunday, boiled beef and broth; Monday, bread and butter, and milk and water; Tuesday, roast mutton; Wednesday, bread and butter, and rice milk; Thursday, boiled beef and broth; Friday, boiled mutton and broth; Saturday, bread and butter, and pease-porridge. Our food was portioned; and, excepting on Wednesdays, I never had a belly full. Our appetites were damped, never satisfied; and we had no vegetables. [1] [Footnote 1: The above five letters are I-V of Mr. E. H. Coleridge's "Letters of S. T. C". Letter VI is dated 1785; Letter VII of "Letters" is dated "before 1790."] S. T. COLERIDGE. "O! what a change!" he writes in another note; "depressed, moping, friendless, poor orphan, half starved; at that time the portion of food to the Blue-coats was cruelly insufficient for those who had no friends to supply them." And he afterwards says:--"When I was first plucked up and transplanted from my birth-place and family, at the death of my dear Father, whose revered image has ever survived in my mind to make me know what the emotions and affections of a son are, and how ill a father's place is likely to be supplied by any other relation, Providence, (it has often occurred to me,) gave me the first intimation that it was my lot, and that it was best for me, to make or find my way of life a detached individual, a "terrae filius", who was to ask love or service of no one on any more specific relation than that of being a man, and as such to take my chance for the free charities of humanity." Coleridge continued eight years at Christ's Hospital. It was a very curious and important part of his life, giving him Bowyer for his teacher, and Lamb for his friend. [1] [Footnote 1: A few particulars of this "most remarkable and amiable man," the well-known author of "Essays of Elia, Rosamund Gray, Poems", and other works, will interest most readers of the "Biographia". He was born on the 18th of February, 1775, in the Inner Temple; died 27th December, 1834, about five months after his friend Coleridge, who continued in habits of intimacy with him from their first acquaintance till his death in July of the same year. In "one of the most exquisite of all the Essays of Elia," "The Old Benchers of the Middle Temple" ("Works", vol. ii, p. 188), Lamb has given the characters of his father, and of his father's master, Samuel Salt. The few touches descriptive of this gentleman's "unrelenting bachelorhood"--which appears in the sequel to have been a persistent mourner-hood--and the forty years' hopeless passion of mild Susan P.--which very permanence redeems and almost dignifies, is in the author's sweetest vein of mingled humour and pathos, wherein the latter, as the stronger ingredient, predominates. Mr. Lamb never married, for, as is recorded in the Memoir, "on the death of his parents, he felt himself called upon by duty to repay to his sister [a] the solicitude with which she had watched over his infancy. To her, from the age of twenty-one he devoted his existence, seeking thenceforth no connection which could interfere with her supremacy in his affections, or impair his ability to sustain and to comfort her." [[Sub-footnote a: "A word Timidly uttered, for she "lives", the meek, The self-restraining, the ever kind." From Mr. Wordsworth's memorial poem to her brother. P. W. V. P. 333.]] Mr. Coleridge speaks of Miss Lamb, to whom he continued greatly attached, in these verses, addressed to her brother: "Cheerily, dear Charles! Thou thy best friend shall cherish many a year; Such warm presages feel I of high hope! For not uninterested the dear maid I've viewed--her soul affectionate yet wise, Her polished wit as mild as lambent glories That play around a sainted infant's head." (See the single volume of Coleridge's Poems, p. 28.) Mr. Lamb has himself described his dear and only sister, whose proper name is Mary Anne, under the title of "Cousin Bridget," in the Essay called "Mackery End", a continuation of that entitled "My Relations", in which he has drawn the portrait of his elder brother. "Bridget Elia," so he commences the former, "has been my housekeeper for many a long year. I have obligations to Bridget, extending beyond the period of memory. We house together, old bachelor and maid, in a sort of double singleness; with such tolerable comfort upon the whole, that I, for one, find in myself no sort of disposition to go out upon the mountains, with the rash king's offspring, to bewail my celibacy."--("Works", vol. ii, p. 171.) He describes her intellectual tastes in this essay, but does not refer to her literary abilities. She wrote "Mrs. Leicester's School", which Mr. C. used warmly to praise for delicacy of taste and tenderness of feeling. Miss Lamb still survives, in the words of Mr. Talfourd, "to mourn the severance of a life-long association, as free from every alloy of selfishness, as remarkable for moral beauty, as this world ever witnessed in brother and sister. "I have felt desirous to place in relief, as far as might be, such an interesting union--to show how blest a fraternal marriage may be, and what sufficient helpmates a brother and sister have been to each other. Marriages of this kind would perhaps be more frequent but for the want of some pledge or solid warranty of continuance equivalent to that which rivets wedlock between husband and wife. Without the vow and the bond, formal or virtual, no society, from the least to the greatest, will hold together. Many persons are so constituted that they cannot feel rest or satisfaction of spirit without a single supreme object of tender affection, in whose heart they are conscious of holding a like supremacy,--who has common hopes, loves, and interests with themselves. Without this the breezes do not refresh nor the sunbeams gladden them. A "share" in ever so many kind hearts does not suffice to their happiness; they must have the whole of one, as no one else has any part of it, whatever love of another kind that heart may still reserve for others. There is no reason why a brother and sister might not be to each other this second-self--this dearer half--though such an attachment is beyond mere fraternal love, and must have something in it "of choice and election," superadded to the natural tie: but it is seldom found to exist, because the durable cement is wanting--the sense of security and permanence, without which the body of affection cannot be consolidated, nor the heart commit itself to its whole capacity of emotion. I believe that many a brother and sister spend their days in uncongenial wedlock, or in a restless faintly expectant-singlehood, who might form a "comfortable couple" could they but make up their minds early to take each other for better for worse. Two other poems of Mr. C. besides the one in which his sister is mentioned, are addressed to Mr. Lamb--"This Lime-tree-bower my Prison", and the lines "To a Friend, who had declared his intention of writing no more Poetry".--("Poetical Works", i, p. 201 and p. 205.) In a letter to the author ("Ainger", i, p. 121), Lamb inveighs against the soft epithet applied to him in the first of these. He hoped his ""virtues" had done "sucking""--and declared such praise fit only to be a "cordial to some greensick sonnetteer." "Yes! they wander on In gladness all; but thou, methinks, most glad, My "gentle-hearted" Charles! for thou hast pined And hungered after nature, many a year, In the great city pent, winning thy way With sad yet patient soul through evil and pain And strange calamity." In the next poem he is called "wild-eyed boy." The two epithets, "wild-eyed" and "gentle-hearted," will recall Charles Lamb to the minds of all who knew him personally. Mr. Talfourd seems to think that the special delight in the country, ascribed to him by my father, was a distinction scarcely merited. I rather imagine that his indifference to it was a sort of "mock apparel" in which it was his humour at times to invest himself. I have been told that, when visiting the Lakes, he took as much delight in the natural beauties of the region as might be expected from a man of his taste and sensibility. [b] [[Sub-footnote b: "Thou wert a scorner of the field, my Friend, But more in show than truth." From Mr. W.'s poem "To a good man of most dear memory", quoted in p. 323.]] Mr. Coleridge's expression, recorded in the "Table Talk", that he "looked on the degraded men and things around him like moonshine on a dunghill, that shines and takes no pollution," partly alludes to that tolerance of moral evil, both in men and books, which was so much remarked in Charles Lamb, and was, in so good a man, really remarkable. His toleration of it in books is conspicuous in the view he takes of the writings of Congreve and Wycherley, in his essay on the artificial comedy of the last century ("Works", vol. ii, p. 322), and in many of his other literary criticisms. His toleration of it in men--at least his faculty of merging some kinds and degrees of it in concomitant good, or even beholding certain errors rather as objects of interest, or of a meditative pity and tenderness, than of pure aversion and condemnation, Mr. Talfourd has feelingly described in his "Memoir" (vol. ii, p. 326-9), "Not only to opposite opinions," he says, "and devious habits of thought was Lamb indulgent; he discovered the soul of goodness in things evil so vividly, that the surrounding evil disappeared from his mental vision." This characteristic of his mind is not to be identified with the idolizing propensity common to many ardent and imaginative spirits. He "not only loved his friends in spite of their errors," as Mr. Talfourd observes, "but loved them, "errors and all";" which implies that he was not unconscious of their existence. He saw the failings as plainly as any one else, nay, fixed his gentle but discerning eye upon them; whereas the idolizers behold certain objects in a bedarkening blaze of light, or rather of light-confounding brightness, the multiplied and heightened reflection of whatever is best in them, to the obscurity or transmutation of all their defects. Whence it necessarily follows that the world presents itself to their eyes divided, like a chess-board, into black and white compartments--a moral and intellectual chequer-work; not that they love to make darkness, but that they luxuriate too eagerly in light: and their "over-muchness" toward some men involves an over-littleness towards others, whom they involuntarily contrast, in all their poor and peccant reality, with gorgeous idealisms. The larger half of mankind is exiled for them into a hemisphere of shadow, as dim, cold, and negative as the unlit portion of the crescent moon. Lamb's general tendency, though he too could warmly admire, was in a different direction; he was ever introducing streaks and gleams of light into darkness, rather than drowning certain objects in floods of it; and this, I think, proceeded in him from indulgence toward human nature rather than from indifference to evil. To his friend the disposition to exalt and glorify co-existed, in a very remarkable manner, with a power of severe analysis of character and poignant exhibition of it,--a power which few possess without exercising it some time or other to their own sorrow and injury. The consequence to Mr. Coleridge was that he sometimes seemed untrue to himself, when he had but brought forward, one after another, perfectly real and sincere moods of his mind. In his fine poem commemorating the deaths of several poets, Mr. Wordsworth thus joins my father's name with that of his almost life-long friend: "Nor has the rolling year twice measured, From sign to sign, its steadfast course, Since every mortal power of Coleridge Was frozen at its marvellous source; The rapt One of the godlike forehead, The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth; And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle, Has vanished from his lonely hearth." S. C. Footnote 1 ends: main text resumes:] Numerous retrospective notices by himself and others exist of this period; but none of his really boyish letters have been preserved. The exquisite Essay intitled, "Christ's Hospital five and thirty years ago", by Lamb, is principally founded on that delightful writer's recollections of the boy Coleridge, and that boy's own subsequent descriptions of his school days. Coleridge is Lamb's "poor friendless boy."--"My parents and those who should care for me, were far away. Those few acquaintances of theirs, which they could reckon upon being kind to me in the great city, after a little forced notice, which they had the grace to take of me on my first arrival in town, soon grew tired of my holiday visits. They seemed to them to recur too often, though I thought them few enough; and, one after another, they all failed me, and I felt myself alone among six hundred playmates. O the cruelty of separating a poor lad from his early homestead! The yearnings which I used to have toward it in those unfledged years! How, in my dreams would my native town, far in the west, come back with its church, its trees, and faces! How I would wake weeping, and in the anguish of my heart exclaim upon sweet "Calne in Wiltshire!"" Yet it must not be supposed that Coleridge was an unhappy boy. He was naturally of a joyous temperament, and in one amusement, swimming, he excelled and took singular delight. Indeed he believed, and probably with truth, that his health was seriously injured by his excess in bathing, coupled with such tricks as swimming across the New River in his clothes, and drying them on his back, and the like. But reading was a perpetual feast to him. "From eight to fourteen," he writes, "I was a playless day-dreamer, a "helluo librorum", my appetite for which was indulged by a singular incident: a stranger, who was struck by my conversation, made me free of a circulating library in King Street, Cheapside."--"Here," he proceeds, "I read through the catalogue, folios and all, whether I understood them, or did not understand them, running all risks in skulking out to get the two volumes which I was entitled to have daily. Conceive what I must have been at fourteen; I was in a continual low fever. My whole being was, with eyes closed to every object of present sense, to crumple myself up in a sunny comer, and read, read, read,--fancy myself on Robinson Crusoe's island, finding a mountain of plum-cake, and eating a room for myself, and then eating it into the shapes of tables and chairs--hunger and fancy!"--"My talents and superiority," he continues, "made me for ever at the head in my routine of study, though utterly without the desire to be so; without a spark of ambition; and as to emulation, it had no meaning for me; but the difference between me and my form-fellows, in our lessons and exercises, bore no proportion to the measureless difference between me and them in the wide, wild, wilderness of useless, unarranged book knowledge and book thoughts. Thank Heaven! it was not the age for getting up prodigies; but at twelve or fourteen I should have made as pretty a juvenile prodigy as was ever emasculated and ruined by fond and idle wonderment. Thank Heaven! I was flogged instead of being flattered. However, as I climbed up the school, my lot was somewhat alleviated." CHAPTER II CAMBRIDGE AND PANTISOCRACY (1791 to 1795) Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the day-spring of thy fancies, with Hope like a fiery column before thee--the dark pillar not yet turned--Samuel Taylor Coleridge--Logician, Metaphysician, Bard!-- S. T. Coleridge entered at Jesus College, Cambridge, the 5th of February, 1791. [He did not go into residence till October 1791.] The poems he wrote about this time and during his first vacation at College are rather conventional, and give few indications of his future deft handling of verse. His "Mathematical Problem" sent to his brother George, is a piece of droll nonsense, but the letter accompanying it is much better than the verse. It reads as follows: LETTER 6. TO GEORGE COLERIDGE, WITH A POEM ENTITLED "A MATHEMATICAL PROBLEM" Dear Brother, I have often been surprised that Mathematics, the quintessence of Truth, should have found admirers so few and so languid. Frequent consideration and minute scrutiny have at length unravelled the cause; viz. that though Reason is feasted, Imagination is starved; whilst Reason is luxuriating in its proper Paradise, Imagination is wearily travelling on a dreary desert. To assist Reason by the stimulus of Imagination is the design of the following production. In the execution of it much may be objectionable. The verse (particularly in the introduction of the ode) may be accused of unwarrantable liberties, but they are liberties equally homogeneal with the exactness of Mathematical disquisition, and the boldness of Pindaric daring. I have three strong champions to defend me against the attacks of Criticism: the Novelty, the Difficulty, and the Utility of the work. I may justly plume myself that I first have drawn the nymph Mathesis from the visionary caves of abstracted idea, and caused her to unite with Harmony. The first-born of this Union I now present to you; with interested motives indeed--as I expect to receive in return the more valuable offspring of your Muse. Thine ever S. T. C. Christ's Hospital, March 31, 1791. [1] [Footnote 1: Letters VIII-XXXI follow No. 6 of our collection.] The piece of doggerel, to which this epistle is a preface, will be found in vol. ii, p. 386, of the Aldine Edition of Coleridge's Poems. Coleridge's brother George also wrote verses, and "Mathematical Problem" is just one of the cantrips in verse that passed between the brothers.] He gained Sir William Browne's gold medal for the Greek Ode in the summer of that year. It was on the Slave Trade. The poetic force and originality of this Ode were, as he said himself, much beyond the language in which they were conveyed. In the winter of 1792-3 he stood for the University (Craven) Scholarship with Dr. Keate, the late head-master of Eton, Mr. Bethell (of Yorkshire) and Bishop Butler, who was the successful candidate. In 1793 he wrote without success for the Greek Ode on Astronomy, the prize for which was gained by Dr. Keate. The original is not known to exist, but the reader may see what is probably a very free version of it by Mr. Southey in his Minor Poems. ("Poetical Works", vol. ii, p. 170.) "Coleridge"--says a schoolfellow [1] of his who followed him to Cambridge in 1792, "was very studious, but his reading was desultory and capricious. He took little exercise merely for the sake of exercise: but he was ready at any time to unbend his mind in conversation; and, for the sake of this, his room, (the ground-floor room on the right hand of the staircase facing the great gate,) was a constant rendezvous of conversation-loving friends. I will not call them loungers, for they did not call to kill time, but to enjoy it. What evenings have I spent in those rooms! What little suppers, or "sizings", as they were called, have I enjoyed; when Aeschylus, and Plato, and Thucydides were pushed aside, with a pile of lexicons and the like, to discuss the pamphlets of the day. Ever and anon a pamphlet issued from the pen of Burke. There was no need of having the book before us;--Coleridge had read it in the morning, and in the evening he would repeat whole pages "verbatim"."--"College Reminiscences, Gentleman's Mag"., Dec. 1834. [Footnote 1: C. V. Le Grice.] In May and June, 1793, Frend's trial took place in the Vice- Chancellor's Court, and in the Court of Delegates, at Cambridge. Frend was a Fellow of Jesus, and a slight acquaintance had existed between him and Coleridge, who however soon became his partizan. Mr. C. used to relate a remarkable incident, which is thus preserved by Mr. Gillman:--"The trial was observed by Coleridge to be going against Frend, when some observation or speech was made in his favour;--a dying hope thrown out, as it appeared, to Coleridge, who in the midst of the Senate House, whilst sitting on one of the benches, extended his hands and clapped them. The Proctor in a loud voice demanded who had committed this indecorum. Silence ensued. The Proctor, in an elevated tone, said to a young man sitting near Coleridge, "Twas you, Sir!' The reply was as prompt as the accusation; for, immediately holding out the stump of his right arm, it appeared that he had lost his hand;--'I would, Sir,' said he, 'that I had the power!' That no innocent person should incur blame, Coleridge went directly afterwards to the Proctor, who told him that he saw him clap his hands, but fixed on this person, who he knew had not the power. 'You have had,' said he, 'a narrow escape.'"--"Life of S. T. C"., i, p. 55. Coleridge passed the summer of 1793 at Ottery, and whilst there wrote his "Songs of the Pixies" ("Poetical Works", i, p. 13), and some other little pieces. He returned to Cambridge in October, but, in the following month, in a moment of despondency and vexation of spirit, occasioned principally by some debts not amounting to £100 he suddenly left his college and went to London. In a few days he was reduced to want, and observing a recruiting advertisement he resolved to get bread and overcome a prejudice at the same time by becoming a soldier. He accordingly applied to the sergeant, and after some delay was marched down to Reading, where he regularly enlisted as a private in the 15th Light Dragoons on the 3d of December, 1793. He kept his initials under the names of Silas Tomkyn Comberbacke. "I sometimes," he writes in a letter, "compare my own life with that of Steele, (yet O! how unlike!)--led to this from having myself also for a brief time borne arms, and written 'private' after my name, or rather another name; for, being at a loss when suddenly asked my name, I answered "Cumberback", and verily my habits were so little equestrian, that my horse, I doubt not, was of that opinion." Coleridge continued four months a light dragoon, during which time he saw and suffered much. He rode his horse ill, and groomed him worse; but he made amends by nursing the sick, and writing letters for the sound. His education was detected by one of his officers, Captain Nathaniel Ogle, who observed the words,--"Eheu! quam infortunii miserrimum est fuisse felicem!"--freshly written in pencil on the stable-wall or door, and ascertained that Comberbacke was the writer. But the termination of his military career was brought about by a chance recognition in the street: his family was apprized of his situation, and after some difficulty he was duly discharged on the both of April, 1794, at Hounslow. Coleridge now returned to Cambridge, and remained there till the commencement of the summer vacation. But the adventures of the preceding six months had broken the continuity of his academic life, and given birth to new views of future exertion. His acquaintance with Frend had materially contributed to his adoption of the system called Unitarianism, which he now openly professed, and this alone made it imperative on his conscience to decline availing himself of any advantages dependent on his entering into holy orders, or subscribing the Articles of the English Church. He lived, nevertheless, to see and renounce his error, and to leave on record his deep and solemn faith in the catholic doctrine of Trinal Unity, and the Redemption of man through the sacrifice of Christ, both God and Man. Indeed his Unitarianism, such as it was, was not of the ordinary quality. "I can truly say"--were Coleridge's words in after life--"that I never falsified the Scripture. I always told the Unitarians that their interpretations of the Scripture were intolerable upon any principles of sound criticism; and that if they were to offer to construe the will of a neighbour as they did that of their Maker, they would be scouted out of society. I said then plainly and openly that it was clear enough that John and Paul were not Unitarians. But at that time I had a strong sense of the repugnancy of the doctrine of vicarious atonement to the moral being, and I thought nothing could counterbalance that. 'What care I,' I said, 'for the Platonisms of John, or the Rabbinisms of Paul?--My conscience revolts!' That was the ground of my Unitarianism."--"Table Talk", Bohn Library edition, p. 290. At the commencement of the Long Vacation, in June, 1794, Coleridge went to Oxford on a visit to an old school-fellow, intending probably to proceed afterwards to his mother at Ottery. But an accidental introduction to Robert Southey, then an under-graduate at Balliol College, first delayed, and ultimately prevented, the completion of this design, and became, in its consequences, the hinge on which a large part of Coleridge's after life was destined to turn. The first letter to Southey was written from Gloucester on 6th July 1794, and it shows the degree of intimacy on which the two undergraduates stood at this time. They had met only about a month before, for Southey writes on 12th June to his friend Grosvenor Bedford: "Allen is with us daily and his friend from Cambridge, Coleridge, whose poems you will oblige me by subscribing to, either at Hookam's or Edward's. He is of most uncommon merit, of the strongest genius, the clearest judgment, the best heart. My friend he already is, and must hereafter be yours," ("Life and Correspondence of Southey", i, 210). The poems mentioned were a projected volume of "Imitations from Modern Latin Poets", of which an ode after Casimir is the only relic. Coleridge's first letter to Southey reads as follows: LETTER 7. TO SOUTHEY 6 July 1794. You are averse to gratitudinarian flourishes, else would I talk about hospitality, attention, &c. &c.; however, as I must not thank you, I will thank my stars. Verily, Southey, I like not Oxford, nor the inhabitants of it. I would say thou art a nightingale among owls; but thou art so songless and heavy towards night that I will rather liken thee to the matin lark, thy "nest" is in a blighted cornfield, where the sleepy poppy nods its red-cowled head, and the weak-eyed mole plies his dark work; but thy soaring is even unto heaven. Or let me add (for my appetite for similes is truly canine at this moment), that as the Italian nobles their new-fashioned doors, so thou dost make the adamantine gate of Democracy turn on its golden hinges to most sweet music. [1] [Footnote 1: Letter XXXII gives the full text of No. 7. Letter XXXIII is dated 15 July, 1794.] For the next fifteen months Coleridge and Southey were close companions, Coleridge being the elder by two years. Upon the present occasion, however, he left Oxford with an acquaintance, Mr. Hucks, for a pedestrian tour in Wales. [2] Two other friends, Brookes and Berdmore, joined them in the course of their ramble; and at Caernarvon Mr. Coleridge wrote the following letter to Mr. Martin, of Jesus College. [Footnote 2: It is to this tour that he refers in the "Table Talk", p. 88.--"I took the thought of "grinning for joy" in that poem ("The Ancient Mariner") from my companion (Berdmore's) remark to me, when we had climbed to the top of Penmaenmaur, and were nearly dead with thirst. We could not speak from the constriction, till we found a little puddle under a stone. He said to me,--'You grinned like an idiot.' He had done the same."] LETTER 8. To HENRY MARTIN [1] July 22d, 1794. Dear Martin, From Oxford to Gloucester,+ to Ross,+ to Hereford, to Leominster, to Bishop's Castle,+ to Montgomery, to Welshpool, Llanvelling,+ Llangunnog, Bala,+ Druid House,+ Llangollin, Wrexham,++ Ruthin, Denbigh,+ St. Asaph, Holywell,+ Rudland, Abergeley,+ Aberconway,+ Abber,+ over a ferry to Beaumaris+ (Anglesea), Amlock,+ Copper Mines, Gwindu, Moeldon, over a ferry to Caernarvon, have I journeyed, now philosophizing with Hucks, 1 now melancholizing by myself, or else indulging those daydreams of fancy, that make realities more gloomy. To whatever place I have affixed the mark +, there we slept. The first part of our tour was intensely hot--the roads, white and dazzling, seemed to undulate with heat--and the country, bare and unhedged, presenting nothing but stone fences, dreary to the eye and scorching to the touch. At Ross we took up our quarters at the King's Arms, once the house of Mr. Kyrle, the celebrated Man of Ross. I gave the window-shutter a few verses, Which I shall add to the end of the letter. The walk from Llangunnog to Bala over the mountains was most wild and romantic; there are immense and rugged clefts in the mountains, which in winter must form cataracts most tremendous; now there is just enough sun-glittering water dashed down over them to soothe, not disturb the ear. I climbed up a precipice on which was a large thorn-tree, and slept by the side of one of them near two hours. At Bala I was apprehensive that I had caught the itch from a Welsh democrat, who was charmed with my sentiments; he bruised my hand with a grasp of ardour, and I trembled lest some discontented citizens of the "animalcular" republic might have emigrated. Shortly after, in came a clergyman well dressed, and with him four other gentlemen. I was asked for a public character; I gave Dr. Priestley. The clergyman whispered his neighbour, who it seems is the apothecary of the parish--"Republicans!" Accordingly when the doctor, as they call apothecaries, was to have given a name, "I gives a sentiment, gemmen! may all republicans be "gull"oteened!" Up starts the democrat; "May all fools be gulloteened, and then you will be the first!" Fool, rogue, traitor, liar, &c. flew in each other's faces in hailstorms of vociferation. This is nothing in Wales--they make if necessary vent-holes for the sulphureous fumes of their temper! I endeavoured to calm the tempest by observing that however different our political opinions might be, the appearance of a clergyman assured me that we were all Christians, though I found it rather difficult to reconcile the last sentiment with the spirit of Christianity! "Pho!" quoth the clergyman; "Christianity! Why we a'nt at "church" now, are we? The gentleman's sentiment was a very good one, because it shows him to be sincere in his principles." Welsh politics, however, could not prevail over Welsh hospitality; they all shook hands with me (except the parson), and said I was an open-speaking, honest-hearted fellow, though I was a bit of a democrat. On our road from Bala to Druid House, we met Brookes and Berdmore. Our rival pedestrians, a "Gemini" of Powells, were vigorously marching onward, in a postchaise! Berdmore had been ill. We were not a little glad to see each other. Llangollen is a village most romantically situated; but the weather was so intensely hot that we saw only what was to be admired--we could not admire. At Wrexham the tower is most magnificent; and in the church is a white marble monument of Lady Middleton, superior, "mea quidem sententia", to anything in Westminster Abbey. It had entirely escaped my memory, that Wrexham was the residence of a Miss E. Evans, a young lady with whom in happier days I had been in habits of fraternal correspondence; she lives with her grandmother. As I was standing at the window of the inn, she passed by, and with her, to my utter astonishment, her sister, Mary Evans, "quam afflictim et perdite amabam",--yea, even to anguish. They both started, and gave a short cry, almost a faint shriek; I sickened, and well nigh fainted, but instantly retired. Had I appeared to recognise her, my fortitude would not have supported me: Vivit, sed mihi non vivit--nova forte marita. Ah, dolor! alterius nunc a cervice pependit. Vos, malefida valete accensae insomnia mentis, Littora amata valete; vale ah! formosa Maria. Hucks informed me that the two sisters walked by the window four or five times, as if anxiously. Doubtless they think themselves deceived by some face strikingly like me. God bless her! Her image is in the sanctuary of my bosom, and never can it be torn from thence, but by the strings that grapple my heart to life! This circumstance made me quite ill. I had been wandering among the wild-wood scenery and terrible graces of the Welsh mountains to wear away, not to revive, the images of the past;--but love is a local anguish; I am fifty miles distant, and am not half so miserable. At Denbigh is the finest ruined castle in the kingdom; it surpassed everything I could have conceived. I wandered there two hours in a still evening, feeding upon melancholy. Two well dressed young men were roaming there. "I will play my flute here," said the first; "it will have a romantic effect." "Bless thee, man of genius and sensibility," I silently exclaimed. He sate down amid the most awful part of the ruins; the moon just began to make her rays pre-dominant over the lingering daylight; I preattuned my feelings to emotion;--and the romantic youth instantly struck up the sadly pleasing tunes of "Miss Carey"--"The British Lion is my sign--A roaring trade I drive on", &c. Three miles from Denbigh, on the road to St. Asaph, is a fine bridge with one arch of great, great grandeur. Stand at a little distance, and through it you see the woods waving on the hill-bank of the river in a most lovely point of view. A "beautiful" prospect is always more picturesque when seen at some little distance through an arch. I have frequently thought of Michael Taylor's way of viewing a landscape between his thighs. Under the arch was the most perfect echo I ever heard. Hucks sang "Sweet Echo" with great effect. At Holywell I bathed in the famous St. Winifred's Well. It is an excellent cold bath. At Rudland is a fine ruined castle. Abergeley is a large village on the sea-coast. Walking on the sea sands I was surprised to see a number of fine women bathing promiscuously with men and boys perfectly naked. Doubtless the citadels of their chastity are so impregnably strong, that they need not the ornamental bulwarks of modesty; but, seriously speaking, where sexual distinctions are least observed, men and women live together in the greatest purity. Concealment sets the imagination a-working, and as it were, "cantharadizes" our desires. Just before I quitted Cambridge, I met a countryman with a strange walking-stick, five feet in length. I eagerly bought it, and a most faithful servant it has proved to me. My sudden affection for it has mellowed into settled friendship. On the morning of our leaving Abergeley, just before our final departure, I looked for my stick in the place in which I had left it over night. It was gone. I alarmed the house; no one knew any thing of it. In the flurry of anxiety I sent for the Crier of the town, and gave him the following to cry about the town and the beach, which he did with a gravity for which I am indebted to his stupidity. "Missing from the Bee Inn, Abergeley, a curious walking-stick. On one side it displays the head of an eagle, the eyes of which represent rising suns, and the ears Turkish crescents; on the other side is the portrait of the owner in wood-work. Beneath the head of the eagle is a Welsh wig, and around the neck of the stick is a Queen Elizabeth's ruff in tin. All down it waves the line of beauty in very ugly carving. If any gentleman (or lady) has fallen in love with the above described stick, and secretly carried off the same, he (or she) is hereby earnestly admonished to conquer a passion, the continuance of which must prove fatal to his (or her) honesty. And if the said stick has slipped into such gentleman's (or lady's) hand through inadvertence, he (or she) is required to rectify the mistake with all convenient speed. God save the king." Abergeley is a fashionable Welsh watering place, and so singular a proclamation excited no small crowd on the beach, among the rest a lame old gentleman, in whose hands was descried my dear stick. The old gentleman, who lodged at our inn, felt great confusion, and walked homewards, the solemn Crier before him, and a various cavalcade behind him. I kept the muscles of my face in tolerable subjection. He made his lameness an apology for borrowing my stick, supposed he should have returned before I had wanted it, &c. &c. Thus it ended, except that a very handsome young lady put her head out of a coach-window, and begged my permission to have the bill which I had delivered to the Crier. I acceded to the request with a compliment, that lighted up a blush on her cheek, and a smile on her lip. We passed over a ferry to Aberconway. We had scarcely left the boat ere we descried Brookes and Berdmore, with whom we have joined parties, nor do we mean to separate. Our tour through Anglesea to Caernarvon has been repaid by scarcely one object worth seeing. To-morrow we visit Snowdon. Brookes, Berdmore, and myself, at the imminent hazard of our lives, scaled the very summit of Penmaenmaur. It was a most dreadful expedition. I will give you the account in some future letter. I sent for Bowles's Works while at Oxford. How was I shocked! Every omission and every alteration disgusted taste, and mangled sensibility. Surely some Oxford toad had been squatting at the poet's ear, and spitting into it the cold venom of dulness. It is not Bowles; he is still the same, (the added poems will prove it) descriptive, dignified, tender, sublime. The sonnets added are exquisite. Abba Thule has marked beauties, and the little poem at Southampton is a diamond; in whatever light you place it, it reflects beauty and splendour. The "Shakespeare" is sadly unequal to the rest. Yet in whose poems, except those of Bowles, would it not have been excellent? Direct to me, to be left at the Post Office, Bristol, and tell me everything about yourself, how you have spent the vacation, &c. Believe me, with gratitude and fraternal friendship, Your obliged S. T. COLERIDGE. [Footnote 1: Long portions of this letter appear in a letter to Southey of 15 September 1794. See "Letters", p. 74.] [Footnote 2: Hucks published, in 1795, an account of the holiday entitled "Tour in North Wales".] On his return from this excursion Coleridge went, by appointment, to Bristol for the purpose of meeting Southey, whose person and conversation had excited in him the most lively admiration. This was at the end of August or beginning of September. Southey, whose mother then lived at Bath, came over to Bristol accordingly to receive his new friend, who had left as deep an impression on him, and in that city introduced Coleridge to Robert Lovell, a young Quaker, then recently married to Mary Fricker, and residing in the Old Market. After a short stay at Bristol, where he first saw Sarah Fricker, Mrs. Lovell's elder sister, Coleridge accompanied Southey on his return to Bath. There he remained for some weeks, principally engaged in making love, and in maturing, with his friend, the plan, which he had for some time cherished, of a social community to be established in America upon what he termed a pantisocratical basis. Much discussion has taken place regarding the origin of Pantisocracy, most writers on the subject attributing the scheme to Coleridge. A perusal of the letters of Southey, however, leads to a different conclusion. Southey was enamoured during his stay at Oxford with Plato, and especially with the "Republic" of the Greek philosopher; and he frequently quotes from the work or refers to its principles in his correspondence with Grosvenor and Horace W. Bedford between 11th November 1793 and 12th June 1794. Before his meeting with Southey no trace of ideal Republicanism appears in the letters of Coleridge. His leaning notwithstanding this was already towards Republicanism, and the friendship struck up between him and Southey was a natural consequence of flint coming into contact with steel. The next two letters, to Southey, indicate the fiery nature of the young Republicans. LETTER 9. To SOUTHEY 6 Sept. 1794. The day after my arrival I finished the first act: I transcribed it. The next morning Franklin (of Pembroke Coll. Cam., a "ci-devant Grecian" of our school--so we call the first boys) called on me, and persuaded me to go with him and breakfast with Dyer, author of "The Complaints of the Poor, A Subscription", &c. &c. I went; explained our system. He was enraptured; pronounced it impregnable. He is intimate with Dr. Priestley, and doubts not that the Doctor will join us. He showed me some poetry, and I showed him part of the first act, which I happened to have about me. He liked it hugely; it was "a nail that would drive...." Every night I meet a most intelligent young man, who has spent the last five years of his life in America, and is lately come from thence as an agent to sell land. He was of our school. I had been kind to him: he remembers it, and comes regularly every evening to "benefit by conversation," he says. He says £2,000 will do; that he doubts not we can contract for our passage under £400; that we shall buy the land a great deal cheaper when we arrive at America than we could do in England; "or why," he adds, "am I sent over here?" That twelve men may "easily" clear 300 acres in four or five months; and that, for 600 dollars, a thousand acres may be cleared, and houses built on them. He recommends the Susquehanna, from its excessive beauty and its security from hostile Indians. Every possible assistance will be given us; we may get credit for the land for ten years or more, as we settle upon. That literary characters make "money" there: &c. &c. He never saw a "bison" in his life, but has heard of them: they are quite backwards. The mosquitos are not so bad as our gnats; and, after you have been there a little while, they don't trouble you much. LETTER 10. TO SOUTHEY 18 Sept. 1794. Since I quitted this room what and how important events have been evolved! America! Southey! Miss Fricker!... Pantisocracy! Oh! I shall have such a scheme of it! My head, my heart, are all alive. I have drawn up my arguments in battle array: they shall have the "tactician" excellence of the mathematician, with the enthusiasm of the poet. The head shall be the mass; the heart, the fiery spirit that fills, informs and agitates the whole. SHAD GOES WITH US: HE IS MY BROTHER!! I am longing to be with you: make Edith my sister. Surely, Southey, we shall be frendotatoi meta frendous--most friendly where all are friends. She must, therefore, be more emphatically my sister.... C----, the most excellent, the most Pantisocratic of aristocrats, has been laughing at me. Up I arose, terrible is reasoning. He fled from me, because "he would not answer for his own sanity, sitting so near a madman of genius." He told me that the strength of my imagination had intoxicated my reason, and that the acuteness of my reason had given a directing influ-* *ence to my imagination. Four months ago the remark would not have been more elegant than just: now it is nothing. [1] [Footnote 1: This letter is given in full in "Letters", No. XXXIV.] These letters show that Pantisocracy was now the all absorbing topic. The following letter written at this time by Coleridge to Mr. Charles Heath, of Monmouth, is a curious evidence of his earnestness upon this subject: LETTER 11. To CHARLES HEATH OF MONMOUTH [1] (----1794). Sir, Your brother has introduced my name to you; I shall therefore offer no apology for this letter. A small but liberalized party have formed a scheme of emigration on the principles of an abolition of individual property. Of their political creed, and the arguments by which they support and elucidate it they are preparing a few copies--not as meaning to publish them, but for private distribution. In this work they will have endeavoured to prove the exclusive justice of the system and its practicability; nor will they have omitted to sketch out the code of contracts necessary for the internal regulation of the Society; all of which will of course be submitted to the improvements and approbation of each component member. As soon as the work is printed, one or more copies shall be transmitted to you. Of the characters of the individuals who compose the party I find it embarrassing to speak; yet, vanity apart, I may assert with truth that they have each a sufficient strength of head to make the virtues of the heart respectable, and that they are all highly charged with that enthusiasm which results from strong perceptions of moral rectitude, called into life and action by ardent feelings. With regard to pecuniary matters it is found necessary, if twelve men with their families emigrate on this system, that £2,000 should be the aggregate of their contributions--but infer not from hence that each man's "quota" is to be settled with the littleness of arithmetical accuracy. No; all will strain every nerve; and then, I trust, the surplus money of some will supply the deficiencies of others. The "minutiae" of topographical information we are daily endeavouring to acquire; at present our plan is, to settle at a distance, but at a convenient distance, from Cooper's Town on the banks of the Susquehanna. This, however, will be the object of future investigation. For the time of emigration we have fixed on next March. In the course of the winter those of us whose bodies, from habits of sedentary study or academic indolence, have not acquired their full tone and strength, intend to learn the theory and practice of agriculture and carpentry, according as situation and circumstances make one or the other convenient. Your fellow Citizen, S. T. COLERIDGE. [Footnote: Letter XXXV is dated 19 Sept. 1794.] [Footnote 1: One of the Pantisocrats.] The members of the society at that time were Coleridge himself, Southey, Lovell, and George Burnett, a Somersetshire youth and fellow collegian with Southey. Toward the beginning of September, Coleridge left Bath and went, for the last time, as a student, to Cambridge, apparently with the view of taking his degree of B.A. after the ensuing Christmas. Here he published "The Fall of Robespierre" ("Lit. Remains", i, p. 1), of which the first act was written by himself, and the second and third by Mr. Southey, and the particulars of the origin and authorship of which may be found stated in an extract from a letter of Mr. Southey's there printed. The dedication to Mr. Martin is dated at Jesus College, 22nd of September 1794. [The following is the Dedication:] LETTER 12. To HENRY MARTIN, ESQ., OF JESUS COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. DEDICATORY LETTER TO THE "FALL OF ROBESPIERRE," A DRAMA IN THREE ACTS BY COLERIDGE AND SOUTHEY. Dear Sir, Accept as a small testimony of my grateful attachment, the following Dramatic Poem, in which I have endeavoured to detail, in an interesting form, the fall of a man whose great bad actions have cast a disastrous lustre on his name. In the execution of the work, as intricacy of plot could not have been attempted without a gross violation of recent facts, it has been my sole aim to imitate the impassioned and highly figurative language of the French Orators, and to develop the characters of the chief actors on a vast stage of horrors. Yours fraternally, S. T. COLERIDGE. Jesus College, September 22, 1794. [Note: Letters XXXVI-XLII follow No. 12.] This dedicatory letter is no doubt an apology for a play destitute of dramatic art. The declamatory speeches may be an intentional imitation of the harangues of the Revolutionaries, but they are more likely to be the product of the inflation of youth. The redeeming feature of the play is the beautiful little lyric, "Domestic Peace", which is in rhythm an imitation of Collins' "How Sleep the Brave". The scheme of Pantisocracy was not much further forward at the close of 1794 than it had been in the summer; and Southey had been advised to try it in Wales instead of on the banks of the Susquehanna. Coleridge writes in December: LETTER 13. TO SOUTHEY --Dec. 1794. For God's sake, my dear fellow, tell me what we are to gain by taking a Welsh farm? Remember the principles and proposed consequences of Pantisocracy, and reflect in what degree they are attainable by Coleridge, Southey, Lovell, Burnett, and Co., some five men _going partners_ together! In the next place, supposing that we have found the preponderating utility of our aspheterising in Wales, let us by our speedy and united inquiries discover the sum of money necessary. Whether such a farm with so very large a house is to be procured without launching our frail and unpiloted bark on a rough sea of anxieties? How much money will be necessary for "furnishing" so large a house? How much necessary for the maintenance of so large a family--eighteen people--for a year at least?] [Note: Letters XLIII gives the full text of this Letter 13. Letters XLIV-L follow 13.] In January 1795, he was to return--and then with Spring breezes to repair to the banks of the Susquehanna! But his fate withstood;--he took no degree, nor ever crossed the Atlantic. Michaelmas Term, 1794, was the last he kept at Cambridge; the vacation following was passed in London with Charles Lamb, and in the beginning of 1795 he returned with Southey to Bristol, and there commenced man. The whole spring and summer of this year he devoted to public Lectures at Bristol, making in the intervals several excursions in Somersetshire, one memorial of which remains in the "Lines composed while climbing Brockley Combe". It was in one of these excursions that Mr. Coleridge and Mr.Wordsworth first met at the house of Mr. Pinney. [1] The first six of those Lectures constituted a course presenting a comparative view of the Civil War under Charles I and the French Revolution. Three of them, or probably the substance of four or five, were published at Bristol in the latter end of 1795, the first two together, with the title of "Conciones ad Populum", and the third with that of "The Plot Discovered". The eloquent passage in conclusion of the first of these Addresses was written by Mr. Southey. The tone throughout them all is vehemently hostile to the policy of the great minister of that day; but it is equally opposed to the spirit and maxims of Jacobinism. It was late in life that, after a reperusal of these "Conciones", Coleridge wrote on a blank page of one of them the following words:--"Except the two or three pages involving the doctrine of philosophical necessity and Unitarianism, I see little or nothing in these outbursts of my youthful zeal to retract; and with the exception of some flame-coloured epithets applied to persons, as to Mr. Pitt and others, or rather to personifications--(for such they really were to me)--as little to regret." Another course of six Lectures followed, "On Revealed Religion, its corruptions, and its political views". The Prospectus states--"that these Lectures are intended for two classes of men, Christians and Infidels;--the former, that they may be able to "give a reason for the hope that is in them";--the latter, that they may not determine against Christianity from arguments applicable to its corruptions only." Nothing remains of these Addresses, nor of two detached Lectures on the Slave Trade and the Hair Powder Tax, which were delivered in the interval between the two principal courses. They were all very popular amongst the opponents of the Governments; and those on religion in particular were highly applauded by his Unitarian auditors, amongst whom Dr. and Mrs. Estlin and Mr. Hort were always remembered by Coleridge with regard and esteem. The Transatlantic scheme, though still a favourite subject of conversation, was now in effect abandoned by these young Pantisocrats. Mr. C. was married at St. Mary Redcliff Church to Sarah Fricker on the 4th of October, 1795, and went to reside in a cottage at Clevedon on the Bristol Channel; and six weeks afterwards Mr. Southey was also married to Edith Fricker, and left Bristol on the same day on his route to Portugal. At Clevedon Mr. and Mrs. Coleridge resided with one of Mrs. C.'s unmarried sisters and Burnett until the beginning of December. [Footnote 1: This statement of H. N. Coleridge, and a remark by Wordsworth in a letter to Wrangham of November 20th, 1795, are the only evidence on which rests the belief that Coleridge and Wordsworth met before 1797. The letter is quoted in the "Athenaeum" of December 8th, 1894. See also Letter LXXXI, to Estlin, May 1798.] CHAPTER III THE WATCHMAN (1795 to 1796) Ah! quiet dell! dear cot, and mount sublime! I was constrained to quit you. Was it right, While my unnumbered brethren toiled and bled, That I should dream away th' entrusted hours On rose-leaf beds pampering the coward heart With feelings all too delicate for use? * * * * * I therefore go, and join head, heart and hand Active and firm, to fight the bloodless fight Of science, freedom, and the truth in Christ. Coleridge had in the course of the summer of 1795 become acquainted with that excellent and remarkable man, the late Thomas Poole of Nether Stowey, Somerset. In a letter written to him on the 7th of October, C. speaks of the prospect from his cottage, and of his future plans in the following way: LETTER 14. To THOMAS POOLE My Dear Sir, God bless you-or rather God be praised for that he has blessed you! On Sunday morning I was married at St. Mary's, Redcliff--from Chatterton's church. The thought gave a tinge of melancholy to the solemn joy which I felt, united to the woman, whom I love best of all created beings. We are settled, nay, quite domesticated, at Clevedon,--our comfortable cot! * * * The prospect around is perhaps more various than any in the kingdom: mine eye gluttonizes. The sea, the distant islands, the opposite coast!--I shall assuredly write rhymes, let the nine Muses prevent it if they can. * * * I have given up all thoughts of the Magazine for various reasons. It is a thing of monthly anxiety and quotidian bustle. To publish a Magazine for one year would be nonsense, and, if I pursue what I mean to pursue, my school-plan, I could not publish it for more than one year. In the course of half a year I mean to return to Cambridge--having previously taken my name off from the University's control--and, hiring lodgings there for myself and wife, finish my great work of "Imitations" in two volumes. My former works may, I hope, prove somewhat of genius and of erudition; this will be better; it will show great industry and manly consistency. At the end of it I shall publish proposals for a School. * * * My next letter will be long and full of something;--this is inanity and egotism. * * Believe me, dear Poole, your affectionate and mindful--friend, shall I so soon have to say? Believe me my heart prompts it. [1] S. T. COLERIDGE! In spite of this letter Coleridge had not abandoned the project of starting a magazine. His school-plan, as well as a project to become tutor to the sons of the Earl of Buchan at Edinburgh (see Letter to George Dyer, "Bookman" for May 1910), came to nothing. A meeting was held among his chief friends "one evening," says Cottle, "at the Rummer Tavern, to determine on the size, price, and time of publishing, with all other preliminaries essential to the launching this first-rate vessel on the mighty deep. Having heard of the circumstance the next day, I rather wondered at not having also been requested to attend, and while ruminating on the subject, I received from Mr. C. the following communication." [Footnote 1: Letter LI is our No. 14. LII is dated 13 November 1795.] LETTER 15. To COTTLE (--Dec. 1795). My dear Friend, I am fearful that you felt hurt at my not mentioning to you the proposed "Watchman", and from my not requesting you to attend the meeting. My dear friend, my reasons were these. All who met were expected to become subscribers to a fund; I knew there would be enough without you, and I knew, and felt, how much money had been drawn from you lately. God Almighty love you! S. T. C. "It is unknown," says Cottle, "when the following letter was received (although quite certain that it was not the evening in which Mr. Coleridge wrote his "Ode to the Departing Year"), and it is printed in this place at something of an uncertainty." The probable date is 1 January 1796. LETTER 16. To COTTLE January 1st (1796). My dear Cottle, I have been forced to disappoint not only you, but Dr. Beddoes, on an affair of some importance. Last night I was induced by strong and joint solicitation, to go to a cardclub to which Mr. Morgan belongs, and, after the playing was over, to sup, and spend the remainder of the night: having made a previous compact, that I should not drink; however just on the verge of twelve, I was desired to drink only one wine glass of punch, in honour of the departing year; and, after twelve, one other in honour of the new year. Though the glasses were very small, yet such was the effect produced during my sleep, that I awoke unwell, and in about twenty minutes after had a relapse of my bilious complaint. I am just now recovered, and with care, I doubt not, shall be as well as ever to-morrow. If I do not see you then, it will be from some relapse, which I have no reason, thank heaven, to anticipate. Yours affectionately, S. T. COLERIDGE. [The Mr. Morgan referred to in the above letter was John James Morgan with whom Coleridge afterwards lived in London, at Hammersmith, and at Calne. Dr. Beddoes was the founder of the Pneumatic Institution, and the friend of the Wedgwoods and Humphry Davy; and it was he who was instrumental in introducing Coleridge to these acquaintances.] The monthly anxiety of a Magazine justly alarmed Coleridge on the 7th of October; yet in the December following he courageously engaged to conduct a weekly political Miscellany. This was _The Watchman_, of which the following Prospectus was in that month printed and circulated. "To supply at once the places of a Review, Newspaper, and Annual Register. "On Tuesday, the ist of March, 1796, will be published No. 1. price fourpence, of a Miscellany, to be continued every eighth day, under the name of "The Watchman", by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This Miscellany will be comprised in two sheets, or thirty-two pages, closely printed in 8vo; the type, long primer. Its contents, 1:--A history of the domestic and foreign policy of the preceding days. 2:--The speeches in both Houses of Parliament; and, during the recess, select parliamentary speeches from the commencement of the reign of Charles I. to the present æra, with notes historical and biographical. 3:--Original essays and poetry. 4:--Review of interesting and important publications. Its advantages, 1. There being no advertisements, a greater quantity of original matter will be given, and the speeches in Parliament will be less abridged. 2. From its form it may be bound up at the end of a year, and become an Annual Register. 3. This last circumstance may induce men of letters to prefer this Miscellany to more perishable publications as the vehicle of their effusions. 4. Whenever the Ministerial and Opposition prints differ in their accounts of occurrences, etc. such difference will always be faithfully stated." Mr. C. went to Bristol in the beginning of December for the purpose of arranging the preliminaries of this undertaking, and at the close of the month he set off upon the tour mentioned in Chapter X of the "Biographia Literaria", to collect subscribers. It will be remembered that he was at this time a professed Unitarian; and the project of becoming a minister of that persuasion seems to have passed through his head. He had previously preached, for the first time, two sermons at Mr. Jardine's Chapel in Bath, the subjects being the Corn Laws and the Hair Powder Tax. He appeared in the pulpit in a blue coat and white waistcoat, and, according to Mr. Cottle's testimony, who was present, Coleridge delivered himself languidly, and disappointed every one. But there is no doubt that he subsequently preached upon many occasions with very remarkable effect. The following extracts are from letters written by Mr. C. in the month of January, 1796, during his tour to his early and lasting friend, Mr. Josiah Wade of Bristol, and may serve as a commentary on parts of the accounts given of the same tour in the Biographia Literaria. LETTER 17. To JOSIAH WADE Worcester, January, 1796. My dear Wade, We were five in number, and twenty-five in quantity. The moment I entered the coach, I stumbled on a huge projection, which might be called a belly with the same propriety that you might name Mount Atlas a mole-hill. Heavens! that a man should be unconscionable enough to enter a stage coach, who would want elbow room if he were walking on Salisbury Plain. The said citizen was a most violent aristocrat, but a pleasant humorous fellow in other respects, and remarkably well informed in agricultural science; so that the time passed pleasantly enough. We arrived at Worcester at half-past two: I, of course, dined at the inn, where I met Mr. Stevens. After dinner I christianized myself, that is, washed and changed, and marched in finery and clean linen to High Street. With regard to business, there is no chance of doing anything at Worcester. The aristocrats are so numerous, and the influence of the clergy is so extensive, that Mr. Barr thinks no bookseller will venture to publish "The Watchman". *** S. T. COLERIDGE. P.S.--I hope and trust the young citizeness is well, and also Mrs. Wade. Give my love to the latter, and a kiss for me to Miss Bratinella. LETTER 18 Birmingham, January, 1796. My dear Friend, *** My exertions here have been incessant, for in whatever company I go, I am obliged to be the figurante of the circle. Yesterday I preached twice, and, indeed, performed the whole service, morning and afternoon. There were about 1,400 persons present, and my sermons, (great part extempore,) were preciously peppered with politics. I have here at least double the number of subscribers I had expected. * * * [It was at Birmingham that Coleridge met the Tallow Chandler whom he has immortalized in his "Biographia Literaria". The sketch of the "taperman of lights" is one of the masterpieces of English humour.] LETTER 19. To JOSIAH WADE Nottingham, January, 1796. My dear Friend, You will perceive by this letter I have changed my route. From Birmingham on Friday last (four o'clock in the morning), I proceeded to Derby, stayed there till Monday morning, and am now at Nottingham. From Nottingham I go to Sheffield; from Sheffield to Manchester; from Manchester to Liverpool; from Liverpool to London; from London to Bristol. Ah, what a weary way! My poor crazy ark has been tossed to and fro on an ocean of business, and I long for the Mount Ararat on which it is to rest. At Birmingham I was extremely unwell; a violent cold in my head and limbs confined me for two days. Business succeeded very well;--about a hundred subscribers I think. At Derby, also, I succeeded tolerably well. Mr. (Joseph) Strutt, the successor of Sir Richard Arkwright, tells me I may count on forty or fifty in Derby. Derby is full of curiosities;--the cotton and silk mills; Wright the painter, and Dr. Darwin,[l] the every thing but Christian. Dr. Darwin possesses, perhaps, a greater range of knowledge than any other man in Europe, and is the most inventive of philosophical men. He thinks in a new train on all subjects but religion. He bantered me on the subject of religion. I heard all his arguments, and told him it was infinitely consoling to me, to find that the arguments of so great a man, adduced against the existence of a God, and the evidences of revealed religion, were such as had startled me at fifteen, but had become the objects of my smile at twenty. Not one new objection--not even an ingenious one! He boasted "that he had never read one book in favour of such stuff, but that he had read all the works of Infidels!" What would you think, Mr. Wade, of a man who, having abused and ridiculed you, should openly declare that he had heard all that your enemies had to say against you, but had scorned to inquire the truth from any one of your friends? Would you think him an honest man? I am sure you would not. Yet such are all the Infidels whom I have known. They talk of a subject, yet are proud to confess themselves profoundly ignorant of it. Dr. Darwin would have been ashamed to reject Hutton's theory of the Earth without having minutely examined it;--yet what is it to us, how the earth was made, a thing impossible to be known? This system the Doctor did not reject without having severely studied it; but all at once he makes up his mind on such important subjects, as whether we be the outcasts of a blind idiot called Nature,[2] or the children of an All wise and Infinitely Good God!--whether we spend a few miserable years on this earth, and then sink into a clod of the valley; or endure the anxieties of mortal life, only to fit us for the enjoyment of immortal happiness! These subjects are unworthy a philosopher's investigation! He deems that there is a certain self- evidence in Infidelity, and becomes an Atheist by intuition. Well did St. Paul say, "ye have an evil heart of unbelief". * * * What lovely children Mr. Barr of Worcester has! After church, in the evening, they sat round and sang hymns so sweetly that they overpowered me. It was with great difficulty that I abstained from weeping aloud; and the infant in Mrs. B.'s arms leaned forward, and stretched his little arms, and stared, and smiled. It seemed a picture of heaven, where the different Orders of the blessed join different voices in one melodious hallelujah; and the babe looked like a young spirit just that moment arrived in heaven, startled at the seraphic songs, and seized at once with wonder and rapture. * * * From your affectionate friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. [Footnote 1: Erasmus Darwin, 1731-1802.] [Footnote 2: See poem, "Human Life", written about 1815.] LETTER 20 Sheffield, January, 1796. My very dear Friend, I arrived at this place late last night by the mail from Nottingham, where I have been treated with kindness and friendship, of which I can give you but a faint idea. I preached a charity sermon there last Sunday. I preached in coloured clothes. With regard to the gown at Birmingham (of which you inquire), I suffered myself to be over-persuaded. First of all, my sermon being of so political a tendency, had I worn my blue coat, it would have impugned Edwards. They would have said, he had stuck a political lecturer in his pulpit. Secondly, the society is of all sorts,--Socinians, Arians, Trinitarians, etc., and I must have shocked a multitude of prejudices. And thirdly, there is a difference between an inn and a place of residence. In the first, your example is of little consequence; in a single instance only, it ceases to operate as example; and my refusal would have been imputed to affectation, or an unaccommodating spirit. Assuredly I would not do it in a place where I intended to preach often. And even in the vestry at Birmingham, when they at last persuaded me, I told them I was acting against my better knowledge, and should possibly feel uneasy afterwards. So these accounts of the matter you must consider as reasons and palliations, concluding, "I plead guilty, my Lord!" Indeed I want firmness; I perceive I do. I have that within me which makes it difficult to say, No, repeatedly to a number of persons who seem uneasy and anxious. * * * My kind remembrances to Mrs. Wade. God bless her and you, and (like a bad shilling slipped in between two guineas), your faithful and affectionate friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. [Note 1: Letter LIII is our 19.] LETTER 21 Manchester, January 7, 1796. My dear Friend, I arrived at Manchester last night from Sheffield, to which place I shall only send about thirty numbers. I might have succeeded there, at least equally well with the former towns, but I should injure the sale of the "Iris", the editor of which paper, (a very amiable and ingenious young man of the name of James Montgomery)[1] is now in prison for a libel on a bloody-minded magistrate there. Of course I declined publicly advertising or disposing of "The Watch man" in that town. This morning I called on Mr. -------- with H.'s letter. Mr. --------- received me as a rider, and treated me with insolence that was really amusing from its novelty. "Overstocked with these articles. "---------" People always setting up some new thing or other. "---------" I read the "Star" and another paper: what could I want with this paper, which is nothing more?"--"Well, well, I'll consider of it." To these entertaining "bons mots" I returned the following repartee--"Good morning, Sir." * * * God bless you, S. T. C. [Footnote 1: The Poet, 1771-1854.] Mr. C. went to Liverpool and was as successful there as elsewhere generally in procuring subscribers to "The Watchman". The late Dr. Crompton found him out, and became his friend and patron. His exertions, however, at Liverpool were suddenly stopped by news of the critical state of Mrs. C.'s health, and a pressing request that he would immediately return to Bristol, whither Mrs. C. had now gone from Clevedon. Coleridge accordingly gave up his plan of visiting London, and left Liverpool on his homeward trip. From Lichfield he wrote to Mr. Wade the following letter: LETTER 22 Lichfield, January, 1796. My dear Friend, * * * I have succeeded very well here at Lichfield. Belcher, bookseller, Birmingham; Sutton, Nottingham; Pritchard, Derby; and Thomson, Manchester; are the publishers. In every number of "The Watchman" there will be printed these words, "Published in Bristol by the Author, S. T. Coleridge, and sold, etc." I verily believe no poor fellow's idea-pot ever bubbled up so vehemently with fears, doubts, and difficulties, as mine does at present. Heaven grant it may not boil over, and put out the fire! I am almost heartless. My past life seems to me like a dream, a feverish dream--all one gloomy huddle of strange actions and dim-discovered motives;--friendships lost by indolence, and happiness murdered by mismanaged sensibility. The present hour I seem in a quick-set hedge of embarrassments. For shame! I ought not to mistrust God; but, indeed, to hope is far more difficult than to fear. Bulls have horns, lions have talons: The fox and statesman subtle wiles ensure, The cit and polecat stink and are secure; Toads with their venom, doctors with their drug, The priest and hedgehog in their robes are snug. Oh, Nature! cruel step-mother and hard To thy poor naked, fenceless child, the bard! No horns but those by luckless Hymen worn, And those, alas! not Amalthaea's horn! With naked feelings, and with aching pride, He bears the unbroken blast on every side; Vampire booksellers drain him to the heart, And scorpion critics cureless venom dart. S. T. C. Coleridge on his return to Bristol resided for a short time on Redcliff Hill, in a house occupied by Mrs. C.'s mother. He had procured upwards of a thousand subscribers' names to "The Watchman", and had certainly some ground for confidence in his future success. His tour had been a triumph; and the impression made by his personal demeanour and extraordinary eloquence was unprecedented, and such as was never effaced from the recollection of those who met with him at this period. He seems to have employed the interval between his arrival in Bristol and the 1st of March--the day fixed for the appearance of "The Watchman"--in preparing for that work, and also in getting ready the materials of his first volume of poems, the copyright of which was purchased by Mr. Cottle for thirty guineas. Coleridge was a student all his life; he was very rarely indeed idle in the common sense of the term; but he was constitutionally indolent, averse from continuous exertion externally directed, and consequently the victim of a procrastinating habit, the occasion of innumerable distresses to himself and of endless solicitude to his friends, and which materially impaired, though it could not destroy, the operation and influence of his wonderful abilities. Hence, also, the fits of deep melancholy which from time to time seized his whole soul, during which he seemed an imprisoned man without hope of liberty. In February, 1796, whilst his volume was in the press, he wrote the following letter to Mr. Cottle: LETTER 23 My dear Cottle, I have this night and to-morrow for you, being alone, and my spirits calm. I shall consult my poetic honour, and of course your interest, more by staying at home than by drinking tea with you. I should be happy to see my poems out even by next week, and I shall continue in stirrups, that is, shall not dismount my Pegasus, till Monday morning, at which time you will have to thank God for having done with your affectionate friend always, but author evanescent, S. T. C. [The last letter is one of many short notes to Cottle explaining why he was not making progress with the proposed volume of Poems. The next is the concluding letter of the series, still apologizing for the delay. LETTER 24. To COTTLE. Stowey, (--Feb. 1796.) My dear Cottle, I feel it much, and very uncomfortable, that, loving you as a brother, and feeling pleasure in pouring out my heart to you, I should so seldom be able to write a letter to you, unconnected with business, and uncontaminated with excuses and apologies. I give every moment I can spare from my garden and the Reviews (i.e.) from my potatoes and meat to the poem ("Religious Musings"), but I go on slowly, for I torture the poem and myself with corrections; and what I write in an hour, I sometimes take two or three days in correcting. You may depend on it, the poem and prefaces will take up exactly the number of pages I mentioned, and I am extremely anxious to have the work as perfect as possible, and which I cannot do, if it be finished immediately. The "Religious Musings" I have altered monstrously, since I read them to you and received your criticisms. I shall send them to you in my next. The Sonnets I will send you with the "Musings". God love you! From your affectionate friend, S. T. COLERIDGE.] Shortly afterwards, mistaking the object of a message from Mr. Cottle for an application for "copy" for the press, Coleridge wrote the following letter with reference to the painful subject: LETTER 25 Redcliff Hill, February 22, 1796. My dear Sir, It is my duty and business to thank God for all his dispensations, and to believe them the best possible; but, indeed, I think I should have been more thankful, if He had made me a journeyman shoemaker, instead of an author by trade. I have left my friends; I have left plenty; I have left that ease which would have secured a literary immortality, and have enabled me to give to the public works conceived in moments of inspiration, and polished with leisurely solicitude; and, alas! for what have I left them? For--who deserted me in the hour of distress, and for a scheme of virtue impracticable and romantic! So I am forced to write for bread--write the flights of poetic enthusiasm, when every minute I am hearing a groan from my wife! Groans, and complaints, and sickness! The present hour I am in a quick-set hedge of embarrassment, and, whichever way I turn, a thorn runs into me. The future is cloud and thick darkness. Poverty, perhaps, and the thin faces of them that want bread looking up to me! Nor is this all. My happiest moments for composition are broken in upon by the reflection that I must make haste. "I am too late." "I am already months behind." "I have received my pay beforehand."----O wayward and desultory spirit of Genius, ill can'st thou brook a taskmaster! The tenderest touch from the hand of obligation wounds thee like a scourge of scorpions! I have been composing in the fields this morning, and came home to write down the first rude sheet of my Preface, when I heard that your man had brought a note from you. I have not seen it, but I guess its contents. I am writing as fast as I can. Depend on it, you shall not be out of pocket for me. I feel what I owe you, and, independently of this, I love you as a friend,--indeed so much that I regret, seriously regret, that you have been my copyholder. If I have written petulantly, forgive me. God knows I am sore all over. God bless you! and believe me that, setting gratitude aside, I love and esteem you, and have your interest at heart full as much as my own. S. T. COLERIDGE. [1] On the 1st of March, 1796, "The Watchman" was published; it ended with the tenth number on the 13th of May following. In March Mr. C. removed to a house in Oxford Street in Kingsdown, and thence wrote the following letter to Mr. Poole: [1: Letter LIV is our 25.] LETTER 26 30th March, 1796. My dear Poole, For the neglect in the transmission of "The Watchman", you must blame George Burnett, who undertook the business. I however will myself see it sent this week with the preceding Numbers. I am greatly obliged to you for your communication--(on the Slave Trade in No. V);--it appears in this Number. I am anxious to receive more from you, and likewise to know what you dislike in "The Watchman", and what you like, but particularly the former. You have not given me your opinion of "The Plot Discovered". Since you last saw me, I have been well nigh distracted. The repeated and most injurious blunders of my printer out of doors, and Mrs. Coleridge's danger at home--added to the gloomy prospect of so many mouths to open and shut, like puppets, as I move the string in the eating and drinking way;--but why complain to you? Misery is an article with which every market is so glutted that it can answer no one's purpose to export it. I have received many abusive letters, post-paid, thanks to the friendly malignants! But I am perfectly callous to disapprobation, except when it tends to lessen profit. Then indeed I am all one tremble of sensibility, marriage having taught me the wonderful uses of that vulgar commodity, yclept Bread. "The Watchman" succeeds so as to yield a "bread-and-cheesish" profit. Mrs. Coleridge is recovering apace, and deeply regrets that she was deprived of the pleasure of seeing you. We are in our new house, where there is a bed at your service whenever you will please to delight us with a visit. Surely in Spring you might force a few days into a sojourning with us. Dear Poole, you have borne yourself towards me most kindly with respect to my epistolary ingratitude. But I know that you forbade yourself to feel resentment towards me, because you had previously made my neglect ingratitude. A generous temper endures a great deal from one whom it has obliged deeply. My poems are finished. I will send you two copies the moment they are published. In No. III of "The Watchman" there are a few lines entitled, "The Hour when we shall meet again" ("Dim Hour! that sleep'st on pillowing clouds afar"), which I think you will like. I have received two or three letters from different "Anonymi", requesting me to give more poetry. One of them writes thus:-- "Sir, I detest your principles; your prose I think very so so; but your poetry is so beautiful that I take in your "Watchman" solely on account of it. In justice therefore to me and some others of my stamp, I entreat you to give us more verse, and less democratic scurrility. Your Admirer,--not Esteemer." Have you read over Dr. Lardner on the Logos? It is I think, scarcely possible to read it, and not be convinced. I find that "The Watchman" comes more easy to me, so that I shall begin about my Christian Lectures (meaning a publication of the course given in the preceding year). I will immediately order for you, unless you immediately countermand it, Count Rumford's Essays; in No. V of "The Watchman" you will see why. (That number contained a critique on the Essays.) I have enclosed Dr. Beddoes's late pamphlets; neither of them as yet published. The Doctor sent them to me.... My dutiful love to your excellent Mother, whom, believe me, I think of frequently and with a pang of affection. God bless you. I'll try and contrive to scribble a line and half every time the man goes with "The Watchman" to you. N.B. The Essay on Fasting I am ashamed of--(in No. II of "The Watchman");--but it is one of my misfortunes that I am obliged to publish ex tempore as well as compose. God bless you. S. T. COLERIDGE.[1] [Footnote 1: Letter LV is our 26.] Two days afterwards Mr. Coleridge wrote to Mr. B. Flower, then the editor of the "Cambridge Intelligencer", with whom he had been acquainted at the University: LETTER 27 April 1, 1796. Dear Sir, I transmitted to you by Mr. B---- a copy of my "Conciones ad Populum", and of an Address against the Bills (meaning "The Plot Discovered"). I have taken the liberty of enclosing ten of each, carriage paid, which you may perhaps have an opportunity of disposing of for me;--if not, give them away. The one is an eighteen-penny affair;--the other ninepence. I have likewise enclosed the Numbers which have been hitherto published of "The Watchman";--some of the Poetry may perhaps be serviceable to you in your paper. That sonnet on the rejection of Mr. Wilberforce's Bill in your Chronicle the week before last was written by Southey, author of "Joan of Arc", a year and a half ago, and sent to me per letter;-how it appeared with the late signature, let the plagiarist answer.... I have sent a copy of my Poems--(they were not yet published):--will you send them to Lunn and Deighton, and ask of them whether they would choose to have their names on the title page as publishers; and would you permit me to have yours? Robinson and, I believe, Cadell, will be the London publishers. Be so kind as to send an immediate answer. Please to present one of each of my pamphlets to Mr. Hall--(the late Robert Hall, the Baptist). I wish I could reach the perfection of his style. I think his style the best in the English language; if he have a rival, it is Mrs. Barbauld. You have, of course, seen Bishop Watson's Apology for the Bible. It is a complete confutation of Paine; but that was no difficult matter. The most formidable Infidel is Lessing, the author of "Emilia Galotti";--I ought to have written, "was", for he is dead. His book is not yet translated, and is entitled, in German, "Fragments of an Anonymous Author". It unites the wit of Voltaire with the subtlety of Hume and the profound erudition of "our" Lardner. I had some thoughts of translating it with an Answer, but gave it up, lest men, whose tempers and hearts incline them to disbelief, should get hold of it; and, though the answers are satisfactory to my own mind, they may not be equally so to the minds of others. I suppose you have heard that I am married. I was married on the 4th of October. I rest all my poetical credit on the "Religious Musings". Farewell; with high esteem, yours sincerely, S. T. COLERIDGE. Benjamin Flower, the editor of the "Cambridge Intelligencer", printed the first published version of the "Monody on Chatterton" in his Edition of the Rowley Poems, 1794. He was also to have been the publisher of the "Imitations of the Latin Poets", of which Coleridge spoke so often at this time. Our next letter is from "The Watchman" of 1 April, in answer to a correspondent. Godwin, whom Coleridge had hailed in one of his sonnets in the "Morning Chronicle" (10 January, 1795) as one formed to "illume a sunless world" by his "Political Justice" (1793), is here attacked with some virulence. In after years Coleridge held a better opinion of Godwin and wrote some of his finest letters to him. LETTER 28. TO CAIUS GRACCHUS. You have attacked me because I ventured to disapprove of Mr. Godwin's Works: I notice your attack because it affords me an opportunity of expressing more fully my sentiments respecting those principles.--I must not however wholly pass over the former part of your letter. The sentence "implicating them with party and calumniating opinions," is so inaccurately worded, that I must "guess" at your meaning. In my first essay I stated that literary works were generally reviewed by personal friends or private enemies of the Authors. This I "know" to be fact; and does the spirit of meekness forbid us to tell the truth? The passage in my Review of Mr. Burke's late pamphlet, you have wilfully misquoted: "with respect to the work in question," is an addition of your own. That work in question I myself considered as mere declamation; and "therefore" deemed it wofully inferior to the former production of the venerable Fanatic.--In what manner I could add to my numerous "ideal" trophies by quoting a beautiful passage from the pages which I was reviewing, I am ignorant. Perhaps the spirit of vanity lurked in the use of the word ""I""--"ere "I" begin the task of blame." It is pleasant to observe with what absurd anxiety this little monosyllable is avoided. Sometimes "the present writer" appears as its substitute: sometimes the modest author adopts the style of royalty, swelling and multiplying himself into "We"; and sometimes to escape the egotistic phrases of "in my opinion," or, "as I think," he utters dogmas, and positively asserts--"exempli gratia": ""It is" a work, which, etc." You deem me inconsistent, because, having written in praise of the metaphysician, I afterwards appear to condemn the essay on political justice. Would an eulogist of medical men be inconsistent, if he should write against vendors of (what he deemed) poisons? Without even the formality of a "since" or a "for" or a "because," you make an unqualified assertion, that this essay will be allowed by all, except the prejudiced, to be a deep, metaphysical work, though abstruse, etc. etc. Caius Gracchus must have been little accustomed to abstruse disquisitions, if he deem Mr. Godwin's work abstruse:--A chief (and certainly not a small) merit is its perspicuous and "popular" language. My chapter on modern patriotism is that which has irritated you. You condemn me as prejudiced--O this enlightened age! when it can be seriously charged against an essayist, that he is prejudiced in favour of gratitude, conjugal fidelity, filial affection, and the belief of God and a hereafter!! Of smart pretty fellows in Bristol are numbers, some Who so modish are grown, that they think plain sense cumbersome; And lest they should seem to be queer or ridiculous, They affect to believe neither God nor "old Nicholas"![1] I do consider Mr. Godwin's principles as vicious; and his book as a pander to sensuality. Once I thought otherwise--nay, even addressed a complimentary sonnet to the author, in the "Morning Chronicle", of which I confess with much moral and poetical contrition, that the lines and the subject were equally bad. I have since "studied" his work; and long before you had sent me your contemptuous challenge, had been preparing an examination of it, which will shortly appear in "The Watchman" in a series of essays. You deem me an "enthusiast"--an enthusiast, I presume, because I am not quite convinced with yourself and Mr. Godwin that mind will be omnipotent over matter, that a plough will go into the field and perform its labour without the presence of the agriculturist, that man may be immortal in this life, and that death is an act of the will!!!--You conclude with wishing that "The Watchman" "for the future may be conducted with less prejudice and greater liberality:"--I ought to be considered in two characters--as editor of the Miscellany, and as a frequent contributor. In the latter I contribute what I believe to be the truth; let him who thinks it error, contribute likewise, that where the poison is, there the antidote may be. In my former, that is, as the editor, I leave to the public the business of canvassing the nature of the principles, and assume to myself the power of admitting or rejecting any communications according to my best judgment of their style and ingenuity. The Miscellany is open to all "ingenious" men whatever their opinions may be, whether they be the disciples of Filmer, of Locke, of Paley, or of Godwin. One word more of "the spirit of meekness." I meant by this profession to declare my intention of attacking things without expressing malignity to persons. I am young; and may occasionally write with the intemperance of a young man's zeal. Let me borrow an apology from the great and excellent Dr. Hartley, who of all men least needed it. "I can truly say, that my free and unreserved manner of speaking has flowed from the sincerity and earnestness of my heart." But I will not undertake to justify all that I have said. Some things may be too hasty and censorious; or however, be unbecoming my age and station. I heartily wish that I could have observed the true medium. For want of candour is not less an offence against the Gospel of Christ, than false shame and want of courage in his cause. S. T. COLERIDGE. [Footnote 1: The lines are by Coleridge.] LETTER 29. TO MR. POOLE. 11th April, 1796. My dear, very dear Friend, I have sent the 5th, 6th, and part of the 7th Number--all as yet printed. Your censures are all right: I wish your praises were equally so. The Essay on Fasts I am ashamed of. It was conceived in the spirit, and clothed in the harsh scoffing, of an Infidel. You wish to have one long essay;--so should I wish; but so do not my subscribers wish. I feel the perplexities of my undertaking increase daily. In London and Bristol "The Watchman" is read for its original matter,--the news and debates barely tolerated. The people of Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham, etc., take it as a newspaper, and regard the essays and poems as intruders unwished for and unwelcome. In short, each subscriber, instead of regarding himself as a point in the circumference entitled to some one diverging ray, considers me as the circumference, and himself as the centre to which all the rays ought to converge. To tell you the truth, I do not think "The Watchman" will succeed. Hitherto I have scarcely sold enough to pay the expenses;--no wonder, when I tell you that on the 200 which Parsons in Paternoster Row sells weekly, he gains eight shillings more than I do. Nay, I am convinced that at the end of the half year he will have cleared considerably more by his 200 than I by the proprietorship of the whole work. Colson has been indefatigable in my service, and writes with such zeal for my interests, and such warmth of sorrow for my sufferings, as if he wrote with fire and tears. God bless him! I wish above all things to realize a school. I could be well content to plod from morning to night, if only I could secure a secure competence; but to toil incessantly for uncertain bread weighs me down to earth. Your Night-dream has been greatly admired. Dr. Beddoes spoke in high commendation of it. Your thoughts on Elections I will insert whenever Parliament is dissolved. I will insert them as the opinions of a sensible correspondent, entering my individual protest against giving a vote in any way or for any person. If you had an estate in the swamps of Essex, you could not prudently send an aguish man there to be your manager,--he would be unfit for it;--you could not honestly send a hale hearty man there, for the situation would to a moral certainty give him the ague. So with the Parliament:--I will not send a rogue there; and I would not send an honest man, for it is twenty to one that he will become a rogue. Count Rumford's "Essays" you shall have by the next parcel. I thank you for your kind permission with respect to books. I have sent down to you "Elegiac Stanzas" by Bowles; they were given to me, but are altogether unworthy of Bowles. I have sent you Beddoes's Essay on the merits of William Pitt; you may either keep it, and I will get another for myself on your account, or if you see nothing in it to library-ize it, send it me back next Thursday, or whenever you have read it. My own "Poems" you will welcome. I pin all my poetical credit on the "Religious Musings". In the poem you so much admired in "The Watchman", for "Now life and joy," read "New life and joy." (From "The Hour when we shall meet again".) "Chatterton" shall appear modernized. Dr. Beddoes intends, I believe, to give a course of Chemistry in a most "elementary" manner,--the price, two guineas. I wish, ardently wish, you could possibly attend them, and live with me. My house is most beautifully situated; an excellent room and bed are at your service. If you had any scruple about putting me to additional expense, you should pay me seven shillings a week, and I should gain by you. Mrs. Coleridge is remarkably well, and sends her kind love. Pray, my dear, dear Poole, do not neglect to write to me every week. Your critique on "Joan of Arc" and the "Religious Musings" I expect. Your dear mother I long to see. Tell her I love her with filial respectfulness. Excellent woman! Farewell; God bless you and your grateful and affectionate S. T. COLERIDGE. Mr. C.'s first volume of poems was published by Mr. Cottle in the beginning of April, 1796, and his sense of the kind conduct of the latter to him throughout the whole affair was expressed in the following manner on a blank leaf in a copy of the work: LETTER 30. Dear Cottle, On the blank leaf of my Poems I can most appropriately write my acknowledgments to you for your too disinterested conduct in the purchase of them. Indeed, if ever they should acquire a name and character, it might be truly said the world owed them to you. Had it not been for you, none perhaps of them would have been published, and some not written. Your obliged and affectionate friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. Bristol, April 15, 1796. [Another project of Coleridge to earn a small sum to tide over financial difficulties was to "Rumfordise" the cities of England. Coleridge reviewed Rumford's Essays in "The Watchman" of 2nd April. Count Rumford (Count of the Holy Roman Empire), had cleared certain cities of Austria of beggars and vagabonds, and had established garden cities for the soldiery practising agricultural pursuits and engaging in remunerative occupations during their non-attendance at drill. What part of the "Rumfordising" Coleridge proposed to apply to his native country does not appear from the letter.] LETTER 31. TO COTTLE (Apl. 1796.) My ever dear Cottle, Since I last conversed with you on the subject, I have been thinking over again the plan I suggested to you, concerning the application of Count Rumford's plan to the city of Bristol. I have arranged in my mind the manner, and matter of the Pamphlet, which would be three sheets, and might be priced at one shilling. Considerations Addressed to the Inhabitants of Bristol, on a subject of importance, (unconnected with Politics.) BY S. T. C. Now I have by me the history of Birmingham, and the history of Manchester. By observing the names, revenues, and expenditures of their different charities, I could easily alter the calculations of the "Bristol Address", and, at a trifling expense, and a few variations, the same work might be sent to Manchester and Birmingham. "Considerations addressed to the inhabitants of Birmingham", etc. I could so order it, that by writing to a particular friend, at both places, the pamphlet should be thought to have been written at each place, as it certainly would be "for" each place. I think therefore 750 might be printed in all. Now will you undertake this? either to print it and divide the profits, or (which indeed I should prefer) would you give me three guineas, for the copyright? I would give you the first sheet on Thursday, the second on the Monday following, the third on the Thursday following. To each pamphlet I would annex the alterations to be made, when the press was stopped at 250. God love you! S. T. C. Cottle says regarding this project, "I presented Mr. C. with the three guineas, but forbore the publication."] LETTER 32. TO MR. COTTLE (April) 1796. My ever dear Cottle, I will wait on you this evening at nine o'clock, till which hour I am on "Watch." Your Wednesday's invitation I of course accept, but I am rather sorry that you should add this expense to former liberalities. Two editions of my "Poems" would barely repay you. Is it not possible to get 25 or 30 of the "Poems" ready by to-morrow, as Parsons, of Paternoster Row, has written to me pressingly about them? "People are perpetually asking after them. All admire the poetry in the "Watchman"," he says. I can send them with 100 of the first number, which he has written for. I think if you were to send half a dozen "Joans of Arc" (4to £1 1s. 0d.) on sale or return, it would not be amiss. To all the places in the North we will send my "Poems", my "Conciones", and the "Joans of Arc" together, "per" waggon. You shall pay the carriage for the London and Birmingham parcels; I for the Sheffield, Derby, Nottingham, Manchester, and Liverpool. With regard to the "Poems" I mean to give away, I wish to make it a common interest; that is, I will give away a sheet full of Sonnets. One to Mrs. Barbauld; one to Wakefield; one to Dr. Beddoes; one to Wrangham--a college acquaintance of mine,--an admirer of me, and a pitier of my principles;--one to George Augustus Pollen, Esq.; one to C. Lamb; one to Wordsworth; one to my brother George, and one to Dr. Parr. These Sonnets I mean to write on the blank leaf, respectively, of each copy. * * * * God bless you, and S. T. COLERIDGE. "The Sonnets," says Mr. Cottle, "never arrived." [But a pamphlet of 16 pages, containing 28 Sonnets, was printed, the only extant copy of which is in the Dyce Collection. "Poems", 1893, p. 544.] LETTER 33. TO MR. POOLE 6th May, 1796. My very dear Friend, The heart is a little relieved, when vexation converts itself into anger. But from this privilege I am utterly precluded by my own epistolary sins and negligences. Yet in very troth thou must be a hard-hearted fellow to let me trot for four weeks together every Thursday to the Bear Inn--to receive no letter. I have sometimes thought that Milton the carrier did not deliver my last parcel, but he assures me he did. This morning I received a truly fraternal letter from your brother Richard of Sherborne, containing good and acceptable advice. He deems my "Religious Musings" "too metaphysical for common readers." I answer--the poem was not written for common readers. In so miscellaneous a collection as I have presented to the Public, "singula cuique" should be the motto. There are, however, instances of vicious affectation in the phraseology of that poem;--"unshudder'd, unaghasted", for example. ("Not in the poem now".) Good writing is produced more effectually by rapidly glancing the language as it already exists than by a hasty recourse to the mint of invention. The "Religious Musings" has more mind than the Introduction of B. II. of "Joan of Arc", ("Destiny of Nations", Poet. W. I. p. 98) but its versification is not equally rich. It has more passages of sublimity, but it has not that diffused air of severe dignity which characterizes my epic slice. Have I estimated my own performances rightly? ... With regard to my own affairs they are as bad as the most rampant philo-despot could wish in the moment of cursing. After No. XII I shall cease to cry the state of the political atmosphere. It is not pleasant, Thomas Poole, to have worked fourteen weeks for nothing--for nothing; nay, to have given to the Public in addition to that toil, £45. When I began the Watchman I had £40 worth of paper given to me; yet with this I shall not have received a farthing at the end of the quarter. To be sure I have been somewhat fleeced and over-reached by my London publisher. In short, my tradesmen's bills for "The Watchman", including what paper I have bought since the seventh number, the printing, etc., amount exactly to £5 more than the whole of my receipts. "O Watchman, thou hast watched in vain!"--said the Prophet Ezekiel, when, I suppose, he was taking a prophetic glimpse of my sorrow-sallowed cheeks. My plans are reduced to two;--the first unpracticable,--the second not likely to succeed. Plan 1. I am studying German, and in about six weeks shall be able to read that language with tolerable fluency. Now I have some thoughts of making a proposal to Robinson, the great London bookseller, of translating all the works of Schiller, which would make a portly quarto, on condition that he should pay my journey and my wife's to and from Jena, a cheap German University where Schiller resides, and allow me two guineas each quarto sheet, which would maintain me. If I could realize this scheme, I should there study chemistry and anatomy, and bring over with me all the works of Semler and Michaelis, the German theologians, and of Kant, the great German metaphysician. On my return I would commence a school for either young men at £105 each, proposing to perfect them in the following studies in this order:--1. Man as an Animal;--including the complete knowledge of anatomy, chemistry, mechanics, and optics:--2. Man as an intellectual Being;--including the ancient metaphysics, the system of Locke and Hartley--of the Scotch philosophers--and the new Kantean system:--3. Man as a Religious Being;--including an historic summary of all religions, and of the arguments for and against natural and revealed religion. Then proceeding from the individual to the aggregate of individuals, and disregarding all chronology, except that of mind, I should perfect them: 1--in the history of savage tribes; 2--of semi-barbarous nations; 3--of nations emerging from semi-barbarism; 4--of civilized states; 5--of luxurious states; 6--of revolutionary states; 7--of colonies. During these studies I should intermix the knowledge of languages, and instruct my scholars in "belles lettres", and the principles of composition. Now, seriously, do you think that one of my scholars, thus perfected, would make a better senator than perhaps any one member in either of our Houses?--Bright bubbles of the age--ebullient brain! Gracious Heaven! that a scheme so big with advantage to this kingdom--therefore to Europe--therefore to the world--should be demolishable by one monosyllable from a bookseller's mouth! My second plan is to become a Dissenting Minister, and adjure politics and casual literature. Preaching for hire is not right; because it must prove a strong temptation to continue to profess what I may have ceased to believe, "if ever" maturer judgment with wider and deeper reading should lessen or destroy my faith in Christianity. But though not right in itself, it may become right by the greater wrongness of the only alternative--the remaining in neediness and uncertainty. That in the one case I should be exposed to temptation is a mere contingency; that under necessitous circumstances I am exposed to great and frequent temptations is a melancholy certainty. Write, my dear Poole! or I will crimp all the rampant Billingsgate of Burke to abuse you. Count Rumford is being reprinted. God bless you and S. T. COLERIDGE. On Friday, the 13th of May, 1796, the tenth and last number of "The Watchman" appeared--the Author having wisely accelerated the termination of a hopeless undertaking, the plan of which was as injudicious as the execution of it by him for any length of time impracticable. Of the 324 pages, of which "The Watchman" consists, not more than a hundred contain original matter by Coleridge, and this is perhaps more remarkable as a test of the marvellous spring of his mind almost immediately afterwards than for any very striking merit of its own. Still, however, the nascent philosopher may be discovered in parts; and the Essay on the Slave Trade, in the fourth number, may be justly distinguished as comprising a perfect summary of the arguments applicable on either side of that question. In the meantime Mr. Poole had been engaged in circulating a proposal amongst a few common friends for purchasing a small annuity and presenting it to Mr. Coleridge. The plan was not in fact carried into execution;[1] but it was communicated to Mr. C. by Mr. Poole, and the following letter refers to it:-- [Footnote 1: An error. A subscription annuity of £35 or £40 was collected and paid to Coleridge in 1796 and 1797.] LETTER 34. TO MR. POOLE 12th May, 1796. Poole! The Spirit, who counts the throbbings of the solitary heart, knows that what my feelings ought to be, such they are. If it were in my power to give you anything, which I have not already given, I should be oppressed by the letter now before me. But no! I feel myself rich in being poor; and because I have nothing to bestow, I know how much I have bestowed. Perhaps I shall not make myself intelligible; but the strong and unmixed affection which I bear to you seems to exclude all emotions of gratitude, and renders even the principle of esteem latent and inert. Its presence is not perceptible, though its absence could not be endured. Concerning the scheme itself I am undetermined. Not that I am ashamed to receive;--God forbid! I will make every possible exertion; my industry shall be at least commensurate with my learning and talents;--if these do not procure for me and mine the necessary comforts of life, I can receive as I would bestow, and, in either case--receiving or bestowing--be equally grateful to my Almighty Benefactor. I am undetermined therefore--not because I receive with pain and reluctance, but--because I suspect that you attribute to others your own enthusiasm of benevolence; as if the sun should say--"With how rich a purple those opposite windows are burning!" But with God's permission I shall talk with you on this subject. By the last page of No. X, you will perceive that I have this day dropped "The Watchman". On Monday morning I will go "per" caravan to Bridgewater, where, if you have a horse of tolerable meekness unemployed, you will let him meet me. I should blame you for the exaggerated terms in which you have spoken of me in the Proposal, did I not perceive the motive. You wished to make it appear an offering--not a favour--and in excess of delicacy have, I fear, fallen into some grossness of flattery. God bless you, my dear, very dear Friend. The widow is calm, and amused with her beautiful infant. [1] We are all become more religious than we were. God be ever praised for all things! Mrs. Coleridge begs her kind love to you. To your dear Mother my filial respects. S. T. COLERIDGE. [2] [Footnote 1: Mrs. Robert Lovell, whose husband had been carried off by a fever, about two years after his marriage with my Aunt. S. C.] [Footnote 2: Letter LVI is our 34. LVII is dated 13 May, 1796.] The visit to Mr. Poole at Stowey was paid, and Mr. C. returned to Bristol on the 20th of May, 1796. On his way back he wrote the following letter to Mr. Poole from Bridgewater:-- LETTER 35 29th May, 1796. My dear Poole, This said caravan does not leave Bridgewater till nine. In the market-place stand the hustings. I mounted, and pacing the boards, mused on bribery, false swearing, and other foibles of election times. I have wandered too by the river Parret, which looks as filthy as if all the parrots in the House of Commons had been washing their consciences therein. Dear Gutter of Stowey! Were I transported to Italian plains, and lying by the side of a streamlet which murmured through an orange grove, I would think of thee, dear Gutter of Stowey, and wish that I were poring on thee! So much by way of rant. I have eaten three eggs, swallowed sundries of tea and bread and butter, purely for the purpose of amusing myself, and I have seen the horse fed. When at Cross, where I shall dine, I shall think of your happy dinner celebrated under the auspices of humble independence, supported by brotherly love. I am writing, you understand, for no worldly purpose but that of avoiding anxious thoughts. Apropos of honey-pie:--Caligula or Heliogabalus,[1] (I forget which,) had a dish of nightingales' tongues served up. What think you of the stings of bees? God bless you. My filial love to your mother, and fraternity to your sister. Tell Ellen Cruikshanks, that in my next parcel to you I will send my Haleswood Poem to her. Heaven protect her, and you, and Sara, and your Mother, and--like a bad shilling passed off in a handful of guineas--your affectionate friend and brother, S. T. COLERIDGE. P.S. Don't forget to send by Milton my old clothes and linen that once was clean--a pretty "periphrasis" that![2] [Footnote 1: Elagabalus.] [Footnote 2: Letter LVIII is our 35. LIX is dated 22 June 1796.] The month of June, 1796, was spent in Bristol, and some negotiation took place as to Mr. C.'s settling in Nottingham, the particulars of which the Editor is unable to state. On the 4th of July Mr. Coleridge writes to Mr. Poole. LETTER 36. TO MR. POOLE 4th July, 1796. My very dear Poole, Do not attribute it to indolence that I have not written to you. Suspense has been the real cause of my silence. Day after day I have confidently expected some decisive letter, and as often have been disappointed. "Certainly I shall have one to-morrow noon, and then I will write." Thus I contemplated the time of my silence in its small component parts, forgetful into what a sum total they were swelling. As I have heard nothing from Nottingham notwithstanding I have written a pressing letter, I have, by the advice of Cottle and Dr. Beddoes, accepted a proposal of Mr. Perry's, the editor of the "Morning Chronicle",--accepted it with a heavy and reluctant heart. On Thursday Perry was at Bristol for a few hours, just time enough to attend the dying moments of his associate in the editorship, Mr. Grey, whom Dr. Beddoes attended. Perry desired Dr. B. to inform me that, if I would come up to London and write for him, he would make me a regular compensation adequate to the maintenance of myself and Mrs. Coleridge, and requested an immediate answer by the post. Mr. Estlin, and Charles Danvers, and Mr. Wade are or were all out of town;--I had no one to advise with except Dr. Beddoes and Cottle. Dr. B. thinks it a good opening on account of Grey's death; but I rather think that the intention is to employ me as a mere hackney without any share of the profits. However, as I am doing nothing, and in the prospect of doing nothing settled, I was afraid to give way to the "omenings" of my heart; and accordingly I accepted his proposal in general terms, requesting a line from him expressing the particulars both of my proposed occupation and stipend. This I shall receive to-morrow, I suppose; and if I do, I think of hiring a horse for a couple of days, and galloping down to you to have all your advice, which indeed, if it should be for rejecting the proposals, I might receive by post; but if for finally accepting them, we could not interchange letters in a time sufficiently short for Perry's needs, and so he might procure another person possibly. At all events I should not like to leave this part of England--perhaps for ever--without seeing you once more. I am very sad about it, for I love Bristol, and I do not love London; and besides, local and temporary politics have become my aversion. They narrow the understanding, and at least acidulate the heart; but those two giants, yclept Bread and Cheese, bend me into compliance. I must do something. If I go, farewell, Philosophy! farewell, the Muse! farewell, my literary Fame! My "Poems" have been reviewed. The "Monthly" has cataracted panegyric on me; the "Critical" cascaded it, and the "Analytical" dribbled it with civility. As to the "British Critic", they durst not condemn, and they would not praise--so contented themselves with commending me as a "poet", and allowed me "tenderness of sentiment and elegance of fiction." I am so anxious and uneasy that I really cannot write any further. My kind and fraternal love to your Sister, and my filial respects to your dear Mother, and believe me to be in my head, heart, and soul, yours most sincerely. S. T. COLERIDGE. The Editor can find no further trace of the proposed connection with the "Morning Chronicle"; but almost immediately after the date of the preceding letter, Mr. Coleridge received an invitation from Mrs. Evans, then of Barley, near Derby, to visit her with a view to his undertaking the education of her sons. He and Mrs. C. accordingly went to Barley, where the matter was arranged to the satisfaction of both parties; and Mr. C. returned to Bristol alone with the intention of visiting his Mother and Brother at Ottery before leaving the south of England for what promised to be a long absence. But this project, like others, ended in nothing. The other guardians of Mrs. E.'s sons considered a public education proper for them, and the announcement of this resolution to Mr. C. at Bristol stopped his further progress, and recalled him to Darley. After a stay of some ten days, he left Darley with Mrs. C., and visited Mr. Thomas Hawkes at Mosely, near Birmingham, and thence he wrote to Mr. Poole-- LETTER 37. TO MR. POOLE August, 1796. My beloved Friend, I was at Matlock, the place monodized by Bowles, when your letter arrived at Darley, and I did not receive it till near a week afterwards. My very dear Poole, I wrote to you the whole truth. After the first moment I was perfectly composed, and from that moment to the present have continued calm and lighthearted. I had just quitted you, and I felt myself rich in your love and esteem; and you do not know how rich I feel myself. O ever found the same, and trusted and beloved! The last sentences of your letter affected me more than I can well describe. Words and phrases which might perhaps have adequately expressed my feelings, the cold-blooded children of this world have anticipated and exhausted in their unmeaning gabble of flattery. I use common expressions, but they do not convey common feelings. My heart has thanked you. I preached on Faith yesterday. I said that Faith was infinitely better than Good Works, as the cause is greater than the effect,--as a fruitful tree is better than its fruits, and as a friendly heart is of far higher value than the kindnesses which it naturally and necessarily prompts. It is for that friendly heart that I now have thanked you, and which I so eagerly accept; for with regard to settlement, I am likely to be better off now than before, as I shall proceed to tell you. I arrived at Darley on the Sunday.... Monday I spent at Darley. On the Tuesday Mrs. Coleridge, Miss Willett, and I went in Mrs. Evans's carriage to Matlock, where we stayed till Saturday.... Sunday we spent at Darley, and on Monday Sara, Mrs. Evans, and myself visited Oakover, a seat famous for a few first-rates of Raffael and Titian; thence to Ilam, a quiet vale hung round with wood, beautiful beyond expression, and thence to Dovedale, a place beyond expression tremendously sublime. Here, in a cavern at the head of a divine little fountain, we dined on cold meat, and returned to Darley, quite worn out with the succession of sweet sensations. On Tuesday we were employed in packing up, and on Wednesday we were to have set off.... But on the Wednesday Dr. Crompton, who had just returned from Liverpool, called on me, and made me the following proposal:--that if I would take a house in Derby and open a day-school, confining my number to twelve scholars, he would send three of his children on these terms--till my number should be completed, he would allow me £100 a year for them;--when the number should be complete, he would give £21 a year for each of them:--the children to be with me from nine to twelve, and from two to five--the last two hours to be employed with their writing or drawing-master, who would be paid by the parents. He has no doubt but that I shall complete my number almost instantly. Now 12 x 20 guineas = £252, and my mornings and evenings at my own disposal = good things. So I accepted the offer, it being understood that if anything better offered, I should accept it. There was not a house to be got in Derby; but I engaged with a man for a house now building, and which is to be completed by the 8th of October, for £12 a year, and the landlord to pay all the taxes except the Poor Rates. The landlord is rather an intelligent fellow, and has promised me to Rumfordize the chimneys. The plan is to commence in November; the intermediate time I spend at Bristol, at which place I shall arrive, by the blessing of God, on Monday night next. This week I spend with Mr. Hawkes, at Mosely, near Birmingham; in whose shrubbery I now write. I arrived here on Friday, having left Derby on Friday. I preached here yesterday. If Sara will let me, I shall see you for a few days in the course of a month. Direct your next letter to S. T. C., Oxford Street, Bristol. My love to your dear Mother and Sister, and believe me affectionately your ever faithful friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. I shall write to my Mother and Brothers to-morrow. At the same time Mr. C. wrote to Mr. Wade in terms similar to the above, adding that at Matlock the time was completely filled up with seeing the country, eating, concerts, etc. LETTER 38 (--Sept. 1796.) "I was the first fiddle;--not in the concerts--but every where else, and the company would not spare me twenty minutes together. Sunday I dedicated to the drawing up my sketch of education, which I meant to publish, to try to get a school!" He speaks of "the thrice lovely valley of Ilam; a vale hung with beautiful woods all round, except just at its entrance, where, as you stand at the other end of the valley, you see a bare bleak mountain standing as it were to guard the entrance. It is without exception the most beautiful place I ever visited." ... He concludes:--"I have seen a letter from Mr. William Roscoe, author of the "Life of Lorenzo the Magnificent"; a work in two 4to volumes (of which the whole first edition sold in a month); it was addressed to Mr. Edwards, the minister here, and entirely related to me. Of me and my compositions he writes in terms of high admiration, and concludes by desiring Mr. Edwards to let him know my situation and prospects, and saying that if I would come and settle at Liverpool, he thought a comfortable situation might be procured for me. This day Edwards will write to him." Whilst at Birmingham, on "The Watchman" tour, Mr. C. had been introduced to Mr. Charles Lloyd, the eldest son of Mr. Lloyd, an eminent banker of that place. At Mosely they met again, and the result of an intercourse for a few days together was an ardent desire on the part of Lloyd to domesticate himself permanently with a man whose conversation was to him a revelation from Heaven. Nothing, however, was settled on this occasion, and Mr. and Mrs. C. returned to Bristol in the beginning of September. On the 24th of September he writes to Mr. Poole:-- LETTER 39. TO MR. POOLE 24th September, 1796. My dear, very dear Poole, The heart thoroughly penetrated with the flame of virtuous friendship is in a state of glory; but lest it should be exalted above measure, there is given to it a thorn in the flesh. I mean that where the friendship of any person forms an essential part of a man's happiness, he will at times be pestered with the little jealousies and solicitudes of imbecile humanity. Since we last parted I have been gloomily dreaming that you did not leave me so affectionately as you were wont to do. Pardon this littleness of heart, and do not think the worse of me for it. Indeed my soul seems so mantled and wrapped round with your love and esteem, that even a dream of losing but the smallest fragment of it makes me shiver, as if some tender part of my nature were left uncovered and in nakedness. Last week I received a letter from Lloyd, informing me that his parents had given their joyful concurrence to his residence with me, but that, if it were possible that I could be absent from home for three or four days, his father wished particularly to see me. I consulted Mrs. Coleridge, who advised me to go.... Accordingly on Saturday night I went by the mail to Birmingham, and was introduced to the father, who is a mild man, very liberal in his ideas, and in religion an allegorizing Quaker.[1] I mean that all the apparently irrational parts of his sect he allegorizes into significations, which for the most part you or I might assent to. We became well acquainted, and he expressed himself thankful to Heaven, "that his son was about to be with me." He said he would write to me concerning money matters, after his son had been some time under my roof. On Tuesday morning I was surprised by a letter from Mr. Maurice, our medical attendant, informing me that Mrs. C. was delivered on Monday, 19th September, 1796, half-past two in the morning, of a son, and that both she and the child were uncommonly well. I was quite annihilated with the suddenness of the information, and retired to my room to address myself to my Maker, but I could only offer up to Him the silence of stupified feelings. I hastened home, and Charles Lloyd returned with me. When I first saw the child, I did not feel that thrill and overflowing of affection which I expected. I looked on it with a melancholy gaze; my mind was intensely contemplative, and my heart only sad. But when two hours after, I saw it at the bosom of its mother--on her arm--and her eye tearful and watching its little features--then I was thrilled and melted, and gave it the kiss of a Father. * * * * The baby seems strong, and the old nurse has over-persuaded my wife to discover a likeness to me in its face,--no great compliment to me; for in truth I have seen handsomer babies in my lifetime. Its name is David Hartley Coleridge. I hope that ere he be a man, if God destines him for continuance in this life, his head will be convinced of, and his heart saturated with, the truths so ably supported by that great master of Christian Philosophy. Charles Lloyd wins upon me hourly; his heart is uncommonly pure, his affections delicate, and his benevolence enlivened, but not sicklied, by sensibility. He is assuredly a man of great genius; but it must be in a "tete-a-tete" with one whom he loves and esteems that his colloquial powers open:--and this arises not from reserve or want of simplicity, but from having been placed in situations, where for years together he met with no congenial minds, and where the contrariety of his thoughts and notions to the thoughts and notions of those around him induced the necessity of habitually suppressing his feelings. His joy and gratitude to Heaven for the circumstance of his domestication with me, I can scarcely describe to you; and I believe his fixed plans are of being always with me. His father told me, that if he saw that his son had formed habits of severe economy, he should not insist upon his adopting any profession; as then his fair share of his (the father's) wealth would be sufficient for him. My dearest Poole, can you conveniently receive Lloyd and me in the course of a week? I have much, very much, to say to you, and to consult with you about; for my heart is heavy respecting Derby; and my feelings are so dim and huddled, that though I can, I am sure, communicate them to you by my looks and broken sentences, I scarcely know how to convey them in a letter. C. Lloyd also wishes much to know you personally. I shall write on the other side of the paper two of his sonnets, composed by him in one evening at Birmingham. The latter of them alludes to the conviction of the truth of Christianity, which he had received from me. Let me hear from you by post immediately, and give my kind love to your sister and dear mother, and likewise my love to that young man with the soul-beaming face, which I recollect much better than I do his name. ("Mr. Thomas Ward of Over Stowey".) God bless you, my dear friend, and believe me with deep affection yours, S. T. COLERIDGE.[2] [Footnote 1: The relationship of Coleridge and the Lloyds is told fully in "Charles Lamb and the Lloyds", by E. V. Lucas, 1898.] [Footnote 2: Letter LX is our 39.] The reader of Coleridge's Poems will remember the beautiful lines "To a young friend, on his proposing to domesticate with the Author". They were written at this time and addressed to Lloyd; and it may be easily conceived what a deep impression of delight they would make on a mind and temperament so refined and enthusiastic as his. The Sonnet "To a Friend who asked how I felt when the Nurse first presented my infant to me"--is the metrical version of a passage in the foregoing letter. A short time before the birth of little Hartley C., Mr. Southey had returned to Bristol from Portugal, and was in lodgings nearly opposite to Mr. Coleridge's house in Oxford Street. There had been a quarrel between them on the occasion of the abandonment of the American scheme, which was first announced by Mr. Southey, and he and Coleridge had ceased to have any intercourse. But a year's absence had dissipated all angry feelings, and after Mr. C.'s return from Birmingham in the end of September, Southey took the first step, and sent over a slip of paper with a word or two of conciliation.[1] This was immediately followed by an interview, and in an hour's time these two extraordinary youths were arm in arm again. They were indeed of essentially opposite tempers, powers, and habits; yet each well knew and appreciated the other,--perhaps even the more deeply from the contrast between them. Circumstances separated them in after life; but Mr. Coleridge recorded his testimony to Southey's character in the "Biographia Literaria", and in his Will referred to it as expressive of his latest convictions. [In Ainger's "Letters of Charles Lamb" will be found a series of letters by Lamb to Coleridge on various matters, literary and domestic, which affords a good insight into the doings of Coleridge at this time. The following beautiful letter by Coleridge was written on the occasion of the death of Lamb's mother. [Footnote 1: The paper contained a sentence in English from Schiller's Conspiracy of Fiesco at Genoa. "Fiesko! Fiesko! du Sumst einen Platz in meiner Brust, den das Menschengeschlecht, dreifach genommen, nicht mehr besetzen wird". "Fiesco! Fiesco! thou leavest a void in my bosom, which the human race, thrice told, will never fill up." Act V, Sc. 16. S. C.] LETTER 40. TO CHARLES LAMB[1] (29 Sept. 1796.) Your letter, my friend, struck me with a mighty horror. It rushed upon me and stupified my feelings. You bid me write you a religious letter; I am not a man who would attempt to insult the greatness of your anguish by any other consolation. Heaven knows that in the easiest fortunes there is much dissatisfaction and weariness of spirit; much that calls for the exercise of patience and resignation; but in storms, like these, that shake the dwelling and make the heart tremble, there is no middle way between despair and the yielding up of the whole spirit unto the guidance of faith. And surely it is a matter of joy, that your faith in Jesus has been preserved; the Comforter that should relieve you is not far from you. But as you are a Christian, in the name of that Saviour, who was filled with bitterness and made drunken with wormwood, I conjure you to have recourse in frequent prayer to "his God and your God," [2] the God of mercies, and father of all comfort. Your poor father is, I hope, almost senseless of the calamity; the unconscious instrument of Divine Providence knows it not, and your mother is in heaven. It is sweet to be roused from a frightful dream by the song of birds, and the gladsome rays of the morning. Ah, how infinitely more sweet to be awakened from the blackness and amazement of a sudden horror, by the glories of God manifest, and the hallelujahs of angels. As to what regards yourself, I approve altogether of your abandoning what you justly call vanities. I look upon you as a man, called by sorrow and anguish and a strange desolation of hopes into quietness, and a soul set apart and made peculiar to God; we cannot arrive at any portion of heavenly bliss without in some measure imitating Christ. And they arrive at the largest inheritance who imitate the most difficult parts of his character, and bowed down and crushed under foot, cry in fulness of faith, "Father, thy will be done." I wish above measure to have you for a little while here--no visitants shall blow on the nakedness of your feelings--you shall be quiet, and your spirit may be healed. I see no possible objection, unless your father's helplessness prevent you, and unless you are necessary to him. If this be not the case, I charge you write me that you will come. I charge you, my dearest friend, not to dare to encourage gloom or despair--you are a temporary sharer in human miseries, that you may be an eternal partaker of the Divine Nature. I charge you, if by any means it be possible, come to me. I remain, your affectionate, S. T. COLERIDGE.[3] Of the next letter Cottle says:--"A second edition of Mr. Coleridge's poems being demanded, I was under no obligation, the copyright being mine, in publishing a second edition, to make Mr. Coleridge any payment, alterations or additions being optional with him; but in his circumstances, and to show that my desire was to consider Mr. C. even more than myself, I promised him, on the sale of the second edition of 500, twenty guineas. The following was his reply: (not viewing the subject quite in the right light; but this was of little consequence)." [Footnote 1: The letter to which this is an answer is No. VIII of Canon Ainger's "Letters of Lamb".] [Footnote 2: "Vide" St. John, ch. xx, ver. 17.] [Footnote 3: Letter LXI is our 40.] LETTER 41. TO COTTLE Stowey, Oct. 18th, 1796. My dear Cottle, I have no mercenary feelings, I verily believe; but I hate bartering at any time, and with any person; with you it is absolutely intolerable. I clearly perceive that by giving me twenty guineas, on the sale of the second edition, you will get little or nothing by the additional poems, unless they should be sufficiently popular to reach a third edition, which soars above our[1] wildest expectations. The only advantage you can derive therefore from the purchase of them on such terms, is, simply, that my poetry is more likely to sell when the whole may be had in one volume, price 5 shillings., than when it is scattered in two volumes; the one 4 shillings., the other possibly 3 shillings. In short, you will get nothing directly, but only indirectly, from the probable circumstance, that these additional poems added to the former, will give a more rapid sale to the second edition than could otherwise be expected, and cause it possibly to be reviewed at large. Add to this, that by omitting every thing political, I widen the sphere of my readers. So much for you. Now for myself. You must see, Cottle, that whatever money I should receive from you, would result from the circumstances that would give me the same, or more--if I published them on my own account. I mean the sale of the poems. I can therefore have no motive to make such conditions with you, except the wish to omit poems unworthy of me, and the circumstance that our separate properties would aid each other by the union; and whatever advantage this might be to me, it would, of course, be equally so to you. The only difference between my publishing the poems on my own account, and yielding them up to you; the only difference, I say, independent of the above stated differences, is, that, in one case, I retain the property for ever, in the other case, I lose it after two editions. However, I am not solicitous to have any thing omitted, except the sonnet to Lord Stanhope and the ludicrous poem;[1] only I should like to publish the best pieces together, and those of secondary splendour, at the end of the volume, and think this is the best quietus of the whole affair. Yours affectionately, S. T. COLERIDGE.] [Footnote 1: "my" in "Early Recollections".] [Footnote 2: "Written before Supper".] On the 1st of November, 1796, Coleridge wrote the following letter to his friend: LETTER 42 November 1, 1796. My beloved Poole, Many "causes" have concurred to prevent my writing to you, but all together they do not amount to a "reason". I have seen a narrow-necked bottle, so full of water, that when turned up side down not a drop has fallen out--something like this has been the case with me. My heart has been full, yea, crammed with anxieties about my residence near you. I so ardently desire it, that any disappointment would chill all my faculties, like the fingers of death. And entertaining wishes so irrationally strong, I necessarily have "day"-mair dreams that something will prevent it--so that since I quitted you, I have been gloomy as the month which even now has begun to lower and rave on us. I verily believe, or rather I have no doubt that I should have written to you within the period of my promise, if I had not pledged myself for a certain gift of my Muse to poor Tommy: and alas! she has been too "sunk on the ground in dimmest heaviness" to permit me to trifle. Yet intending it hourly I deferred my letter "a la mode" the procrastinator! Ah! me, I wonder not that the hours fly so sweetly by me--for they pass unfreighted with the duties which they came to demand! * * * I wrote a long letter to Dr. Crompton, and received from him a very kind letter, which I will send you in the parcel I am about to convey by Milton. My "Poems" are come to a second edition, that is the first edition is sold. I shall alter the lines of the "Joan of Arc", and make "one" poem entitled "Progress of European Liberty, a Vision";--the first line "Auspicious Reverence! hush all meaner song," etc. and begin the volume with it. Then the "Chatterton,--Pixies' Parlour,--Effusions 27 and 28--To a young Ass--Tell me on what holy ground--The Sigh--Epitaph on an Infant--The Man of Ross--Spring in a Village--Edmund--Lines with a poem on the French Revolution"--Seven Sonnets, namely, those at pp. 45, 59, 60, 61, 64, 65, 66--"Shurton Bars--My pensive Sara--Low was our pretty Cot--Religious Musings";--these in the order I have placed them. Then another title-page with "Juvenilia" on it, and an advertisement signifying that the Poems were retained by the desire of some friends, but that they are to be considered as being in the Author's own opinion of very inferiour merit. In this sheet will be "Absence--La Fayette--Genevieve--Kosciusko--Autumnal Moon--To the Nightingale--Imitation of Spenser--A Poem written in early youth". All the others will be finally and totally omitted. It is strange that in the "Sonnet to Schiller" I should have written--"that hour I would have wished to 'die'--Lest--aught more mean might stamp me 'mortal';"--the bull never struck me till Charles Lloyd mentioned it. The sense is evident enough, but the word is ridiculously ambiguous. Lloyd is a very good fellow, and most certainly a young man of great genius. He desires his kindest love to you. I will write again by Milton, for I really can write no more now--I am so depressed. But I will fill up the letter with poetry of mine, or Lloyd's, or Southey's. Is your Sister married? May the Almighty bless her!--may he enable her to make all her new friends as pure, and mild, and amiable as herself!--I pray in the fervency of my soul. Is your dear Mother well? My filial respects to her. Remember me to Ward. David Hartley Coleridge is stout, healthy, and handsome. He is the very miniature of me. Your grateful and affectionate friend and brother, S. T. COLERIDGE. Speaking of lines by Mr. Southey, called "Inscription for the Cenotaph at Ermenonville",[1] written in his letter, Mr. C. says, "This is beautiful, but instead of Ermenonville and Rousseau put Valchiusa and Petrarch. I do not particularly admire Rousseau. Bishop Taylor, old Baxter, David Hartley, and the Bishop of Cloyne are my men." The following Sonnet, transcribed in the foregoing Letter, has not been printed. "It puts in," he says, "no claim to poetry, but it is a most faithful picture of my feelings on a very interesting event." See the Letter to Mr. Poole of 24th September, 1796. This Sonnet shows in a remarkable way how little the Unitarianism, which Mr. C. professed at this time, operated on his fundamental "feelings" as a catholic Christian. "On receiving a Letter informing me of the birth of a Son." When they did greet me Father, sudden awe Weigh'd down my spirit: I retir'd and knelt Seeking the throne of grace, but inly felt No heavenly visitation upwards draw My feeble mind, nor cheering ray impart. Ah me! before the Eternal Sire I brought Th' unquiet silence of confused thought And hopeless feelings: my o'erwhelmed heart Trembled, and vacant tears stream'd down my face. And now once more, O Lord! to thee I bend, Lover of souls! and groan for future grace, That, ere my babe youth's perilous maze have trod, Thy overshadowing Spirit may descend, And he be born again, a child of God! It was not till the summer of 1797 that the second edition Of Mr. C.'s Poems actually appeared, before which time he had seen occasion to make many alterations in the proposed arrangement of, and had added some of his most beautiful compositions to, the collection. It is curious, however, that he never varied the diction of the Sonnet to Schiller in the particular to which he refers in the preceding Letter. [2] [Footnote 1: Afterwards included among the "Minor Poems" of Mr. S.--S. C.] [Footnote 2: See Dykes-Campbell's edition of Coleridge's "Poems", p. 572.] LETTER 43. To MR. POOLE 5, November, 1796. Thanks, my heart's warm thanks to you, my beloved Friend, for your tender letter! Indeed I did not deserve so kind a one; but by this time you have received my last. To live in a beautiful country, and to enure myself as much as possible to the labours of the field, have been for this year past my dream of the day, my sigh at midnight. But to enjoy these blessings near you, to see you daily, to tell you all my thoughts in their first birth, and to hear yours, to be mingling identities with you, as it were!--the vision-weaving Fancy has indeed often pictured such things, but Hope never dared whisper a promise. Disappointment! Disappointment! dash not from my trembling hand this bowl, which almost touches my lips. Envy me not this immortal draught, and I will forgive thee all thy persecutions! Forgive thee! Impious! I will bless thee, black-vested minister of Optimism, stern pioneer of happiness! Thou hast been the cloud before me from the day that I left the flesh-pots of Egypt, and was led through the way of a wilderness--the cloud that had been guiding me to a land flowing with milk and honey--the milk of innocence, the honey of friendship! I wanted such a letter as yours, for I am very unwell. On Wednesday night I was seized with an intolerable pain from my right temple to the tip of my right shoulder, including my right eye, cheek, jaw, and that side of the throat. I was nearly frantic, and ran about the house almost naked, endeavouring by every means to excite sensation in different parts of my body, and so to weaken the enemy by creating a division. It continued from one in the morning till half-past five, and left me pale and fainty. It came on fitfully, but not so violently, several times on Thursday, and began severer threats towards night; but I took between 60 and 70 drops of laudanum, and sopped the Cerberus just as his mouth began to open. On Friday it only niggled, as if the Chief had departed, as from a conquered place, and merely left a small garrison behind, or as if he had evacuated the Corsica, and a few straggling pains only remained. But this morning he returned in full force, and his name is Legion. Giant-Fiend of a hundred hands, with a shower of arrowy death-pangs he transpierced me, and then he became a Wolf and lay gnawing my bones!--I am not mad, most noble Festus! but in sober sadness I have suffered this day more bodily pain than I had before a conception of. My right cheek has certainly been placed with admirable exactness under the focus of some invisible burning-glass, which concentrated all the rays of a Tartarean sun. My medical attendant decides it to be altogether nervous, and that it originates either in severe application, or excessive anxiety. My beloved Poole, in excessive anxiety I believe it might originate. I have a blister under my right ear, and I take 25 drops of laudanum every five hours, the ease and spirits gained by which have enabled me to write to you this flighty, but not exaggerating, account. With a gloomy wantonness of imagination I had been coquetting with the hideous possibles of disappointment. I drank fears like wormwood--yea--made myself drunken with bitterness; for my ever-shaping and distrustful mind still mingled gall-drops, till out of the cup of Hope I almost poisoned myself with Despair. Your letter is dated 2. November; I wrote to you on the 1st. Your Sister was married on that day; and on that day I several times felt my heart overflowed with such tendernesses for her, as made me repeatedly ejaculate prayers in her behalf. Such things are strange. It may be superstition to think about such correspondences; but it is a superstition which softens the heart and leads to no evil. We will call on your dear Sister as soon as I am quite well, and in the mean time I will write a few lines to her. I am anxious beyond measure to be in the country as soon as possible. I would it were possible to get a temporary residence till Adscombe is ready for us. I wish we could have three rooms in William Poole's large house for the winter. Will you try to look out for a fit servant for us,--simple of heart, physiognomically handsome, and scientific in vaccimulgence. That last word is a new one, but soft in sound, and full of expression. Vaccimulgence! I am pleased with the word. Write to me all things about yourself; where I cannot advise, I can console; and communication, which doubles joy, halves sorrow. Tell me whether you think it at all possible to make any terms with ----.[1] You know, I would not wish to touch with the edge of the nail of my great toe the line which should be but half a barley-corn out of the circle of the most trembling delicacy! I will write to Cruikshank tomorrow, if God permit me. God bless and protect you Friend! Brother! Beloved! Sara's best love and Lloyd's. David Hartley is well. My filial love to your dear Mother. Love to Ward. Little Tommy! I often think of thee! S. T. COLERIDGE.[2] [Footnote 1: William Poole.] [Footnote 2: Letter LXII is our 43. Letters LXIII-LXX follow.] Charles Lloyd, spoken of in a letter of my father's in the last chapter as "a young man of great genius," was born Feb. 12th, 1775, died at Versailles Jan. 15th, 1839. He published sonnets and other poems in conjunction with my Father and Mr. Lamb, in 1797, and these and Mr. Lamb's were published together, apart from my Father's, the year afterwards. "While Lamb," says Sergeant Talfourd, "was enjoying habits of the closest intimacy with Coleridge in London, he was introduced by him to a young poet whose name has often been associated with his-- Charles Lloyd--the son of a wealthy banker at Birmingham, who had recently cast off the trammels of the Society of Friends, and, smitten with the love of poetry, had become a student at the University of Cambridge. There he had been attracted to Coleridge by the fascination of his discourse; and, having been admitted to his regard, was introduced by him to Lamb. Lloyd was endeared both to Lamb and Coleridge by a very amiable disposition and a pensive cast of thought; but his intellect had little resemblance to that of either. He wrote, indeed, pleasing verses and with great facility,--a facility fatal to excellence; but his mind was chiefly remarkable for the fine power of analysis which distinguishes his "London", and other of his later compositions. In this power of discriminating and distinguishing-- carried to a pitch almost of painfulness--Lloyd has scarcely ever been equalled, and his poems, though rugged in point of versification, will be found by those who will read them with the calm attention they require, replete with critical and moral suggestions of the highest value." Besides three or four volumes of poetry Mr. Lloyd wrote novels:--"Edmund Oliver", published soon after he became acquainted with my Father, and "Isabel" of later date. After his marriage he settled at the lakes. "At Brathay," (the beautiful river Brathay near Ambleside,) says Mr. De Quincey, "lived Charles Lloyd, and he could not in candour be considered a common man. He was somewhat too Rousseauish, but he had in conversation very extraordinary powers for analysis of a certain kind, applied to the philosophy of manners, and the most delicate 'nuances' of social life; and his Translations of Alfieri together with his own poems, shew him to have been an accomplished scholar." My Mother has often told me how amiable Mr. Lloyd was as a youth; how kind to her little Hartley; how well content with cottage accommodation; how painfully sensitive in all that related to the affections. I remember him myself, as he was in middle life, when he and his excellent wife were most friendly to my brothers, who were school-fellows with their sons. I did not at that time fully appreciate Mr. Lloyd's intellectual character, but was deeply impressed by the exceeding refinement and sensibility marked in his countenance and manners,--(for he was a gentleman of the old school without its formality,)--by the fluent elegance of his discourse, and, above all, by the eloquent pathos, with which he described his painful mental experiences and wild waking dreams, caused by a deranged state of the nervous system. _Le ciel nous vend toujours les biens qu'il nous prodigue_. Nervous derangement is a dear price to pay even for genius and sensibility. Too often, even if not the direct effect of these privileges, it is the accompanying drawback; hypochondria may almost be called the intellectual man's malady. "The Duke D'Ormond", which was written 24 years before its publication in 1822, that is in 1798, soon after Mr, Lloyd's residence at Stowey, has great merit as a dramatic poem, in the delineation of character and states of mind; the plot is forced and unnatural; not only that, but what is worse, in point of effect, it is tediously subjective; and we feel the actions of the piece to be improbable while the feelings are true to nature; yet there is tragic effect in the scenes of the 'denouement'. I understand what it was in Mr. Lloyd's mind which Mr. De Quincey calls 'Rousseauish'. He dwelt a good deal on the temptations to which human nature is subject, when passions, not in themselves unworthy, become, from circumstances, sins if indulged, and the source of sin and misery; but the effect of this piece is altogether favourable to virtue, and to the parent and nurse of virtue, a pious conviction of the moral government of the world. The play contains an 'anatomy' of passion, not a 'picture' of it in a concrete form, such as the works of Richardson and of Rousseau present, a picture fitted to excite 'feelings' of baneful effect upon the mind, rather than to awaken 'thought', which counteracts all such mischief. Indeed I think no man would have sought my Father's daily society who was not predominantly given to reflection. What is very striking in this play is the character of the heroine, whose earnest and scrupulous devotion to her mother occasions the partial estrangement of her lover, d'Ormond, and, in its consequences, an overwhelming misery, which overturns her reason and causes her death, and thus, through remorse, works the conversion of those guilty persons of the drama, who have been slaves to passion, but are not all "enslaved, nor wholly vile." Strong is the contrast which this play presents, in its exhibition of the female character, with that of the celebrated French and German writers, who have treated similar subjects. Men write,--I have heard a painter say, men even paint,--as they feel and as they are. Goethe's Margaret has been thought equal to Shakespeare's Ophelia and Desdemona; in some respects it is so; but it is like a pot of sweet ointment into which some tainting matter has fallen. I think no Englishman of Goethe's genius and sensibility would have described a maiden, whom it was his intention to represent, though frail on one point, yet lovely and gentle-hearted, as capable of being induced to give her poor old mother a sleeping potion. "It will do her no harm." But the risk!--affection gives the wisdom of the serpent where there would else be but the simplicity of the dove. A true Englishman would have felt that such an act, so bold and undaughterly, blighted at once the lily flower, making it "put on darkness" and "fall into the portion of weeds and out-worn faces." In Mr. Lloyd's youthful drama even the dissipated Marchioness, who tempts and yields to temptation, is made to play a noble part in the end, won back from sin by generous feeling and strong sense: and the description of Julia Villeneuve's tender care of her mother is so characteristic of the author, that I cannot help quoting a part of it here, though it is not among the powerful parts of the play. Describing how her aged parent's extreme infirmity rendered her incapable, without a sacrifice, of leaving the small dwelling to which she had been accustomed, and how this had prevented her even from hinting her lover's proposal for their union, Julia says, "Though blind She loved this little spot. A happy wife There lived she with her lord. It was a home In which an only brother, long since dead, And I, were educated: 'twas to her As the whole world. Its scanty garden plot, The hum of bees hived there, which still she heard On a warm summer's day, the scent of flowers, The honey-suckle which trailed around its porch, Its orchard, field, and trees, her universe!-- I knew she could not long be spared to me. Her sufferings, when alleviated best, Were most acute: and I could best perform That sacred task. I wished to lengthen out,-- By consecrating to her every moment,-- Her being to myself! etc." "Could I leave her?-- I might have seen her,--such was D'Ormond's plea-- Each day. But who her evening hours could cheer? Her long and solitary evening hours?-- Talk her, or haply sing her, to her sleep? Read to her? Smooth her pillow? Lastly make Morning seem morning with a daughter's welcome? For morning's light ne'er visited her eyes!-- Well! I refused to quit her! D'Ormond grew Absent, reserved, nay splenetic and petulant! He left the Province, nor has he once sent A kind enquiry so t' alleviate His heavy absence." "Beritola" is Italian in form, as much as Wieland's "Oberon", but the spirit is that of the Englishman, Charles Lloyd; it contains the same vivid descriptions of mental suffering, the same reflective display of the lover's passion, the same sentiments of deep domestic tenderness, uttered as from the heart and with a special air of reality, as "The Duke D'Ormond" and the author's productions in general. The versification is rather better than that of his earlier poems, but the want of ease and harmony in the flow of the verse is a prevailing defect in Mr. Lloyd's poetry, and often makes it appear prosaic, even where the thought is not so. This pathetic sonnet is one of a very interesting set, on the death of Priscilla Farmer, the author's maternal grandmother, included in the joint volume: "Oh, She was almost speechless! nor could hold Awakening converse with me! (I shall bless No more the modulated tenderness Of that dear voice!) Alas, 'twas shrunk and cold Her honour'd face! yet, when I sought to speak, Through her half-open'd eyelids She did send Faint looks, that said, 'I would be yet thy friend!' And (O my chok'd breast!) e'en on that shrunk cheek I saw one slow tear roll! my hand She took, Placing it on her heart--I heard her sigh 'Tis too, too much!' 'Twas Love's last agony! I tore me from Her! 'Twas her latest look, Her latest accents--Oh my heart, retain That look, those accents, till we meet again!" S. C. Meantime Coleridge had written to Charles Lloyd's father three letters about his son, highly interesting as glimpses of his own character. These letters were first published in "Charles Lamb and the Lloyds", by E. V. Lucas. They are as follows: LETTER 44. To CHARLES LLOYD, SEN. Dear Sir, As the father of Charles Lloyd you are of course in some measure interested in any alteration of my schemes of life; and I feel it a kind of Duty to give you my reasons for any such alteration. I have declined my Derby connection, and determined to retire once for all and utterly from cities and towns: and am about to take a cottage and half a dozen acres of land in an enchanting Situation about eight miles from Bridgewater. My reasons are--that I have cause to believe my Health would be materially impaired by residing in a town, and by the close confinement and anxieties incident to the education of children; that as my days would be dedicated to Dr. Crompton's children, and my evenings to a course of study with my admirable young friend, I should have scarcely a snatch of time for literary occupation; and, above all, because I am anxious that my children should be bred up from earliest infancy in the simplicity of peasants, their food, dress, and habits completely rustic. I never shall, and I never will, have any fortune to leave them: I will leave them therefore hearts that desire little, heads that know how little is to be desired, and hands and arms accustomed to earn that little. I am peculiarly delighted with the 2ist verse of the 4th chapter of Tobit, "And fear not, my son! that we are made poor: for thou hast much wealth, if thou fear God, and depart from all sin and do that which is pleasing in His sight." Indeed, if I live in cities, my children (if it please the All-good to preserve the one I have, and to give me more), my children, I say, will necessarily become acquainted with politicians and politics--a set of men and a kind of study which I deem highly unfavourable to all Christian graces. I have myself erred greatly in this respect; but, I trust, I have now seen my error. I have accordingly snapped my squeaking baby-trumpet of sedition, and have hung up its fragments in the chamber of Penitences. Your son and I are happy in our connection--our opinions and feelings are as nearly alike as we can expect: and I rely upon the goodness of the All-good that we shall proceed to make each other better and wiser. Charles Lloyd is greatly averse from the common run of society--and so am I--but in a city I could scarcely avoid it. And this, too, has aided my decision in favour of my rustic scheme. We shall reside near a very dear friend of mine, a man versed from childhood in the toils of the Garden and the Field, and from whom I shall receive every addition to my comfort which an earthly friend and adviser can give. My Wife requests to be remembered to you, if the word "remember" can be properly used. You will mention my respects to your Wife and your children, and believe that I am with no mean esteem and regard Your Friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. Saturday, 15th Oct., 1796. LETTER 45. To CHARLES LLOYD, SEN. Dear Sir, I received your letter, and thank you for that interest which you take in my welfare. The reasons which you urge against my present plan are mostly well-founded; but they would apply equally against any other scheme of life which 'my' Conscience would permit me to adopt. I might have a situation as a Unitarian minister, I might have lucrative offices as an active Politician; but on both of these the Voice within puts a firm and unwavering negative. Nothing remains for me but schoolmastership in a large town or my present plan. To the success of both, and indeed even to my 'subsisting' in either, health and the possession of my faculties are necessary Requisites. While I possess these Requisites, 'I know', I can maintain myself and family in the COUNTRY; the task of educating children suits not the activity of my mind, and the anxieties and confinement incident to it, added to the living in a town or city, would to a moral certainty ruin that Health and those faculties which, as I said before, are necessary to my gaining my livelihood in 'any' way. Undoubtedly, without fortune, or trade, or profession it is 'impossible' that I should be in any situation in which I must not be dependent on my own health and exertions for the bread of my family. I do not regret it--it will make me 'feel' my dependence on the Almighty, and it will prevent my affections from being made earthly altogether. I praise God in all things, and feel that to His grace alone it is owing that I am 'enabled' to praise Him in all things. You think my scheme 'monastic rather than Christian'. Can he be deemed monastic who is married, and employed in rearing his children?--who 'personally' preaches the truth to his friends and neighbours, and who endeavours to instruct tho' Absent by the Press? In what line of Life could I be more 'actively' employed? and what titles, that are dear and venerable, are there which I shall not possess, God permit my present resolutions to be realised? Shall I not be an Agriculturist, an Husband, a Father, and a 'Priest' after the order of 'Peace'? an 'hireless' Priest? "Christianity teaches us to let our lights shine before men." It does so--but it likewise bids us say, Our Father, lead us not [into] temptation! which how can he say with a safe conscience who voluntarily places himself in those circumstances in which, if he believe Christ, he must acknowledge that it would be easier for a Camel to go thro' the eye of a needle than for HIM to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven? Does not that man 'mock' God who daily prays against temptations, yet daily places himself in the midst of the most formidable? I meant to have written a few lines only respecting myself, because I have much and weighty matter to write concerning my friend, Charles Lloyd; but I have been seduced into many words from the importance of the general truths on which I build my conduct. While your Son remains with me, he will, of course, be acquiring that knowledge and those powers of Intellect which are necessary as the 'foundation' of excellence in all professions, rather than the immediate science of 'any'. 'Languages' will engross one or two hours in every day: the 'elements' of Chemistry, Geometry, Mechanics, and Optics the remaining hours of study. After tolerable proficiency in these, we shall proceed to the study of 'Man' and of 'Men'--I mean, Metaphysics and History--and finally, to a thorough examination of the Jewish and Christian Dispensations, their doctrines and evidences: an examination necessary for all men, but peculiarly so to your son, if he be destined for a medical man. A Physician who should be even a Theist, still more a 'Christian', would be a rarity indeed. I do not know 'one'--and I know a 'great many' Physicians. They are 'shallow' Animals: having always employed their minds about Body and Gut, they imagine that in the whole system of things there is nothing but Gut and Body. * * * I hope your Health is confirmed, and that your Wife and children are well. Present my well-wishes. You are blessed with children who are 'pure in Heart'--add to this Health, Competence, Social Affections, and Employment, and you have a complete idea of Human Happiness. Believe me, With esteem and friendly-heartedness, Your obliged S. T. COLERIDGE. Monday, November 14th (1796). LETTER 46. To CHARLES LLOYD, SEN. Dear Sir, I think it my duty to acquaint you with the nature of my connection with your Son. If he be to stay with me, I can neither be his tutor or fellow-student, nor in any way impart a regular system of knowledge. My 'days' I shall devote to the acquirement of 'practical' husbandry and horticulture, that as "to beg I am ashamed," I may at least be able "to dig": and my evenings will be fully employed in fulfilling my engagements with the 'Critical Review' and 'New Monthly Magazine'. If, therefore, your Son occupy a room in my cottage, he will be there merely as a Lodger and Friend; and the only money I shall 'receive' from him will be the sum which his 'board' and 'lodging' will cost 'me', and which, by an accurate calculation, I find will amount to half a guinea a week, 'exclusive' of his washing, porter, cyder, spirits, in short any potation beyond table-beer--these he must provide himself with. I shall keep no servant. I must add that Charles Lloyd must 'furnish' his own bed-room. It is not in my power to do it myself without running into debt; from which may heaven amid its most angry dispensations preserve me! When I mentioned the circumstances which rendered my literary engagement impracticable, when, I say, I first mentioned them to Charles Lloyd, and described the severe process of simplification which I had determined to adopt, I never dreamt that he would have desired to continue with me: and when at length he did manifest such a desire, I dissuaded him from it. But his feelings became vehement, and in the present state of his health it would have been as little prudent as humane in me to have given an absolute refusal. Will you permit me, Sir! to write of Charles Lloyd with freedom? I do not think he ever will endure, whatever might be the consequences, to practise as a physician, or to undertake any commercial employment. What weight your authority might have, I know not: I doubt not he would struggle to submit to it--but would he 'succeed' in any attempt to which his temper, feelings, and principles are inimical? * * * What then remains? I know of nothing but agriculture. If his attachment to it 'should' prove permanent, and he really acquired the steady dispositions of a practical farmer, I think you could wish nothing better for him than to see him married, and settled 'near you' as a farmer. I love him, and do not think he will be well or happy till he is married and settled. I have written plainly and decisively, my dear Sir! I wish to avoid not only evil, but the 'appearances' of evil. This is a world of calumnies! Yea! there is an imposthume in the large tongue of this world ever ready to break, and it is well to prevent the contents from being sputtered into one's face. My Wife thanks you for your kind inquiries respecting her. She and our Infant are well--only the latter has met with a little accident--a burn, which is doing well. To Mrs. Lloyd and all your children present my remembrances, and believe me in all esteem and friendliness, Yours sincerely, S. T. COLERIDGE. [1] Sunday, December 4, 1796. [Footnote 1: To this letter Mr. Lloyd seems to have returned the question, How could Coleridge live without companions? The answer came quickly, as we learn from a letter from Coleridge to Poole {'Letters', I, p. 186}, in which he mentions Mr. Lloyd's query and quotes his own characteristic reply: "I shall have six companions: My Sara, my babe, my own shaping and disquisitive mind, my books, my beloved friend Thomas Poole, and lastly, Nature looking at me with a thousand looks of beauty, and speaking to me in a thousand melodies of love. If I were capable of being tired with all these, I should then detect a vice in my nature, and would fly to habitual solitude to eradicate it." Coleridge's letter to Mr. Lloyd, containing this passage, seems to have been lost. Note by E. V. Lucas.] The 'Ode to the Departing Year,' Coleridge tells us, was written on 24th, 25th, and 26th December, 1796. It was first printed in the 'Cambridge Intelligencer' of 31st December, and then republished, along with the 'Lines to a Young Man who abandoned himself to a Causeless Melancholy' (probably Charles Lloyd), in quarto form of 16 pages. It was then prefaced by the following letter: LETTER 47. TO THOMAS POOLE, OF STOWEY. DEDICATION TO THE "ODE TO THE DEPARTING YEAR." My dear Friend, Soon after the commencement of this month, the editor of the 'Cambridge Intelligencer' (a newspaper conducted with so much ability, and such unmixed and fearless zeal for the interests of piety and freedom, that I cannot but think my poetry honoured by being permitted to appear in it) requested me, by letter, to furnish him with some lines for the last day of this year. I promised him that I would make the attempt; but almost immediately after, a rheumatic complaint seized on my head, and continued to prevent the possibility of poetic composition till within the last three days. So in the course of the last three days the following Ode was produced. In general, when an author informs the public that his production was struck off in a great hurry, he offers an insult, not an excuse. But I trust that the present case is an exception, and that the peculiar circumstances which obliged me to write with such unusual rapidity give a propriety to my professions of it: "nec nunc eam apud te jacto, sed et ceteris indico; ne quis asperiore limae carmen examinet, et a confuso scriptum et quod frigidum erat ni statim traderem." (I avail myself of the words of Statius, and hope that I shall likewise be able to say of any weightier publication, what 'he' has declared of his Thebaid, that it had been tortured with a laborious polish.) For me to discuss the 'literary' merits of this hasty composition were idle and presumptuous. If it be found to possess that impetuosity of transition, and that precipitation of fancy and feeling, which are the 'essential' excellencies of the sublimer Ode, its deficiency in less important respects will be easily pardoned by those from whom alone praise could give me pleasure: and whose minuter criticisms will be disarmed by the reflection, that these lines were conceived "not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of Academic Groves, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow."[1] I am more anxious lest the 'moral' spirit of the Ode should be mistaken. You, I am sure, will not fail to recollect that among the ancients, the Bard and the Prophet were one and the same character; and you 'know' that although I prophesy curses, I pray fervently for blessings. Farewell, Brother of my Soul! --O ever found the same And trusted and beloved! Never without an emotion of honest pride do I subscribe myself Your grateful and affectionate friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. [Bristol, December 26, 1796.] [Footnote 1: From the Preface to the first Edition of Johnson's _Dictionary of the English Language._] CHAPTER IV CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS OF COLERIDGE (From Mr. Wordsworth's Stanzas written in my Pocket-copy of Thomson's 'Castle of Indolence'.) With him there often walked in friendly guise, Or lay upon the moss by brook or tree, A noticeable Man with large grey eyes, And a pale face that seemed undoubtedly As if a blooming face it ought to be; Heavy his low-hung lip did oft appear, Deprest by weight of musing Phantasy; Profound his forehead was, though not severe; Yet some did think that he had little business here: Sweet heaven forefend! his was a lawful right: Noisy he was, and gamesome as a boy; His limbs would toss about him with delight, Like branches when strong winds the trees annoy. Nor lacked his calmer hours device or toy To banish listlessness and irksome care; He would have taught you how you might employ Yourself; and many did to him repair,-- And certes not in vain; he had inventions rare. For Josiah Wade, the gentleman to whom the letters, placed at the beginning of the last chapter, were written, the fine portrait of Mr. Coleridge by Allston, (nearly full length, in oils,) was painted at Rome in 1806,[1]--I believe in the spring of that year. Mr. Allston himself spoke of it, as in his opinion faithfully representing his friend's features and expression, such as they commonly appeared. His countenance, he added, in his high poetic mood, was quite beyond the painter's art: "it was indeed "spirit made visible"." Mr. Coleridge was thirty-three years old when this portrait was painted, but it would be taken for that of a man of forty. The youthful, even boyish look, which the original retained for some years after boyhood, must rather suddenly have given place, to a premature appearance, first of middle-agedness, then of old age, at least in his general aspect, though in some points of personal appearance,--his fair smooth skin and "large grey eyes," "at once the clearest and the deepest"--so a friend lately described them to me,--"that I ever saw," he grew not old to the last. Sergeant Talfourd thus speaks of what he was at three or four and forty. "Lamb used to say that he was inferior to what he had been in his youth; but I can scarcely believe it; at least there is nothing in his early writing which gives any idea of the richness of his mind so lavishly poured out at this time in his happiest moods. Although he looked much older than he was, his hair being silvered all over, and his person tending to corpulency, there was about him no trace of bodily sickness or mental decay, but rather an air of voluptuous repose. His benignity of manner placed his auditors entirely at their ease; and inclined them to listen delighted to the sweet low tone in which he began to discourse on some high theme. At first his tones were conversational: he seemed to dally with the shallows of the subject and with fantastic images which bordered it: but gradually the thought grew deeper, and the voice deepened with the thought; the stream gathering strength, seemed to bear along with it all things which opposed its progress, and blended them with its current; and stretching away among regions tinted with etherial colours, was lost at airy distance in the horizon of fancy. Coleridge was sometimes induced to repeat portions of 'Christabel', then enshrined in manuscript from eyes profane, and gave a bewitching effect to its wizard lines. But more peculiar in its beauty than this was his recitation of 'Kubla Khan'. As he repeated the passage-- A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played Singing of Mount Abora! --his voice seemed to mount and melt into air, as the images grew more visionary, and the suggested associations more remote."[2] Mr. De Quincey thus describes him at thirty-four, in the summer season of 1807, about a year and a half after the date of Mr. Allston's portrait. "I had received directions for finding out the house where Coleridge was visiting; and in riding down a main street of Bridgewater, I noticed a gateway corresponding to the description given me. Under this was standing, and gazing about him, a man whom I shall describe. In height he might seem to be above five feet eight: (he was in reality about an inch and a half taller;) his person was broad and full, and tended even to corpulence: his complexion was fair, though not what painters technically style fair, because it was associated with black hair: his eyes were large and soft in their expression: and it was from the peculiar appearance of haze or dreaminess, which mixed with their light, that I recognised my object. This was Coleridge. I examined him steadfastly for a minute or more: and it struck me that he saw neither myself nor any object in the street. He was in a deep reverie, for I had dismounted, made two or three trifling arrangements at an inn door, and advanced close to him, before he had apparently become conscious of my presence. The sound of my voice, announcing my own name, first awoke him; he started, and for a moment, seemed at a loss to understand my purpose or his own situation; for he repeated rapidly a number of words which had no relation to either of us. There was no 'mauvaise honte' in his manner, but simple perplexity, and an apparent difficulty in recovering his position among daylight realities. This little scene over, he received me with a kindness of manner so marked that it might be called gracious. Coleridge led me to a drawing room and rang the bell for refreshments, and omitted no point of a courteous reception. He told me that there would be a very large dinner party on that day, which perhaps might be disagreeable to a perfect stranger; but, if not, he could assure me of a most hospitable welcome from the family. I was too anxious to see him, under all aspects, to think of declining this invitation. And these little points of business being settled, Coleridge, like some great river, the Orellana, or the St. Lawrence, that had been checked and fretted by rocks or thwarting islands, and suddenly recovers its volume of waters, and its mighty music, swept, at once, as if returning to his natural business, into a continuous strain of eloquent dissertation, certainly the most novel, the most finely illustrated, and traversing the most spacious fields of thought, by transitions, the most just and logical, that it was possible to conceive." I will now present him as he appeared to William Hazlitt in the February of 1798, when he was little more than five and twenty. "It was in January, 1798, that I rose one morning before daylight, to walk ten miles in the mud, to hear this celebrated person preach. Never, the longest day I have to live, shall I have such another walk as this cold, raw, comfortless one, in the winter of the year 1798. 'Il y a des impressions que ni le temps ni les circonstances peuvent effacer. Dusse-je vivre des siecles entiers, le doux temps de majeunesse ne pent renatre pour moi, ni s'effacer jamais dans ma memoire.' When I got there, the organ was playing the hundredth psalm, and when it was done, Mr. Coleridge rose and gave out his text. "He departed again into a mountain 'himself alone'." As he gave out this text his voice 'rose like a stream of rich distilled perfumes;' and when he came to the two last words, which he pronounced loud, deep, and distinct, it seemed to me, who was then young, as if the sounds had echoed from the bottom of the human heart, and as if that prayer might have floated in solemn silence through the universe. The idea of St. John came into my mind, of one crying in the wilderness, who had his loins girt about, and whose food was locusts, and wild honey. The preacher then launched into his subject, like an eagle dallying with the wind. The sermon was upon peace and war--upon church and state--not their alliance, but their separation--on the spirit of the world, and the spirit of Christianity, not as the same, but as opposed to one another. He talked of those who had inscribed the cross of Christ on banners dripping with human gore. He made a poetical and pastoral excursion,--and to shew the fatal effects of war, drew a striking contrast between the simple shepherd boy, driving his team afield, or sitting under the hawthorn, piping to his flock, as though he should never be old, and the same poor country lad, crimped, kidnapped, brought into town, made drunk at an alehouse, turned into a wretched drummer-boy, with his hair sticking on end with powder and pomatum, a long cue at his back, and tricked out in the finery of the profession of blood. Such were the notes our once loved poet sung: and for myself, I could not have been more delighted if I had heard the music of the spheres. Poetry and Philosophy had met together, Truth and Genius had embraced, under the eye and with the sanction of Religion. This was even beyond my hopes. I returned home well satisfied. The sun that was still labouring pale and wan through the sky, obscured by thick mists, seemed an emblem of the 'good cause'; and the cold dank drops of dew, that hung half melted on the beard of the thistle, had something genial and refreshing in them." [3] A glowing dawn was his, but noon's full blaze Of 'perfect day' ne'er fill'd his heav'n with radiance. Scarce were the flow'rets on their stems upraised When sudden shadows cast an evening gloom O'er those bright skies!--yet still those skies were lovely; The roses of the morn yet lingered there When stars began to peep,--nor yet exhaled Fresh dew-drops glittered near the glowworm's lamp, And many a snatch of lark-like melody Birds of the shade trilled forth'mid plaintive warbling. The principal portraits of Coleridge are, besides the one by Allston referred to by Sara Coleridge, engraved by Samuel Cousins, one by Peter Vandyke, painted in 1795; one by Hancock, drawn in 1796; another by Allston, unfinished, painted in Rome; one by C. R. Leslie, taken before 1819, one by T. Phillips, belonging to Mr. John Murray, engraved for the frontispiece of Murray's edition of the 'Table Talk'; another by Phillips, in the possession of William Rennell Coleridge, of Salston, Ottery St. Mary; and a crayon sketch by George Dawe, now at The Chanter's House. These portraits have often been engraved for biographies and editions of Coleridge's 'Poems'. Vandyke's portrait appears in Brandl's Life and Dykes-Campbell's edition of the 'Poems'; Hancock's in the Aldine edition of the 'Poems'; and Leslie's in the Bohn Library 'Friend' and in E. H. Coleridge's 'Letters of S. T. C'. Allston's portrait of 1814 is given in Flagg's 'Life of Allston'. The two best reproductions of Vandyke's and Hancock's portraits are to be found in Cottle's 'Early Recollections'. A small portrait in oils (three replicas), taken by a Bristol artist, 'circ.' 1798, engraved for Moxon's edition of 1863. A portrait in oils by James Northcote, taken in 1804 for Sir G. Beaumont, engraved in mezzotint by William Say. A portrait in oils taken at the Argyll Baths, 'circ.' 1828 (see 'Letters', 1895, ii, 758). A pencil sketch of S. T. C., et. 61, by J. Kayser (see 'Letters', ii, frontispiece). [Bust by Spurzheim. Bust by Hamo Thornycroft, Westminster Abbey.] [Footnote 1: An error of Sara Coleridge. This portrait was painted for Wade in Bristol, 1814: and is now in the National Portrait Gallery (Flagg's 'Life of Allston', pp. 105-7). The portrait of 1806 was given to Allston's niece, Miss R. Charlotte Dana, Boston.] [Footnote 2: Talfourd's full description is found in "Final Memorials of Ch. Lamb", last chapter.] [Footnote 3: Hazlitt's full description is found in 'Essays of William Hazlitt', Camelot Series, pp. 18-38.] CHAPTER V STOWEY Learning, power, and time, (Too much of all) thus wasting in vain war Of fervid colloquy. "Sickness,'tis true, 'Whole years of weary days, besieged him close, Even to the gates and inlets of his life!' But it is true, no less, that strenuous, firm, And with a natural gladness, he maintained The citadel unconquered, and in joy Was strong to follow the delightful Muse." With the letter of Nov. 5, [1] the biographical sketch left by Mr. Coleridge's late Editor comes to an end, and at the present time I can carry it no further than to add, that in January, 1797, my Father removed with his wife and child, the latter then four months' old, to a cottage at Stowey, which was his home for three years; that from that home, in company with Mr. and Miss Wordsworth, he went, in September, 1798, to Germany, and that he spent fourteen months in that country, during which period the Letters called Satyrane's were written. [Footnote 1: No. 43. Sara Coleridge now continues the narrative for ten lines.] Cottle, in his 'Reminiscences', says Mr. Coleridge sent him the following letter from Stowey: LETTER 48 (January, 1797.) Dear Cottle, I write under great agony of mind, Charles Lloyd being very ill. He has been seized with his fits three times in the space of seven days: and just as I was in bed last night, I was called up again; and from twelve o'clock at night, to five this morning, he remained in one continued state of agonized delirium. What with bodily toil, exerted in repressing his frantic struggles, and what with the feelings of agony for his sufferings, you may suppose that I have forced myself from bed, with aching temples, and a feeble frame.* * * We offer petitions, not as supposing we influence the Immutable; but because to petition the Supreme Being, is the way most suited to our nature, to stir up the benevolent affections in our hearts. Christ positively commands it, and in St. Paul you will find unnumbered instances of prayer for individual blessings; for kings, rulers, etc. etc. We indeed should all join to our petitions: "But thy will be done, Omniscient, All-loving Immortal God!" Believe [1] me to have towards you, the inward and spiritual gratitude and affection, though I am not always an adept in the outward and visible signs. God bless you, S. T. C. [Footnote 1: "My respects to your good mother, and to your father and believe me," etc.--"Early Recollections".] The next letter refers to the second edition of the poems, and must have been written early in January, 1797. LETTER 49 (3 January, 1797.) My dear Cottle, If you delay the press it will give me the opportunity I so much wish, of sending my "Visions of the Maid of Arc" to Wordsworth, who lives [1] not above twenty miles from this place; and to Charles Lamb, whose taste and judgment, I see reason to think more correct and philosophical than my own, which yet I place pretty high. * * * We arrived safe. Our house is set to rights. We are all--wife, bratling, and self, remarkably well. Mrs. Coleridge likes Stowey, and loves Thomas Poole and his mother, who love her. A communication has been made from our orchard into T. Poole's garden, and from thence to Cruikshank's, a friend of mine, and a young married man, whose wife is very amiable, and she and Sara are already on the most cordial terms; from all this you will conclude we are happy. By-the-bye, what a delightful poem, is Southey's "Musings on a Landscape of Caspar Poussin". I love it almost better than his "Hymn to the Penates". In his volume of poems, the following, namely, "The Six Sonnets on the Slave Trade.--The Ode to the Genius of Africa.--To my own Miniature Picture.--The Eight Inscriptions.--Elinor, Botany-bay Eclogue.--Frederick", ditto.--"The Ten Sonnets". (pp. 107-116.) "On the death of an Old Spaniel.--The Soldier's Wife, Dactylics,--The Widow, Sapphics.--The Chapel Bell.--The Race of Banco.--"Rudiger". All these Poems are worthy the Author of "Joan of Arc". And "The Musings on a Landscape", etc. and "The Hymn to the Penates", deserve to have been published after "Joan of Arc", as proofs of progressive genius. God bless you, S. T. C. [Footnote 1: Mr. Wordsworth lived at Racedown, before he removed to Allfoxden. (Cottle.)] [The dates of Letters 49 and 50 are determined by that of a letter from Lamb to Coleridge of 5th January 1797 ("Ainger", i, 57). Letter 49 implies that Coleridge was now acquainted with Wordsworth. A letter from Mrs. Wordsworth to Sara Coleridge of 7th Nov. 1845 (Knight's "Life of Wordsworth", i, iii) gives the date of the first meeting of the poets as "about the year 1795." Professor Knight thinks this should be 1796. In the letter of Wordsworth to Wrangham, referred to in Note to Letter 13, Wordsworth does not say that he knew Coleridge personally. Letter 49 is the only trustworthy "contemporary" evidence on the subject.] After receiving Lamb's answer of 5th January, in which Lamb criticises unfavourably the "Joan of Arc" lines ("Ainger", i, 57), Coleridge writes: LETTER 50. TO COTTLE (10 January 1797). My dear Cottle, The lines which I added to my lines in the "Joan of Arc", have been so little approved by Charles Lamb, to whom I sent them, that although I differ from him in opinion, I have not heart to finish the poem. "Mr. Coleridge in the same letter," says Cottle, "thus refers to his "Ode to the Departing Year"." * * * So much for an "Ode", which some people think superior to the "Bard" of Gray, and which others think a rant of turgid obscurity; and the latter are the more numerous class. It is not obscure. My "Religious Musings" I know are, but not this "Ode". Coleridge, in 1797, as in 1796, was invariably behind time with his "copy" for the second edition. He thus writes Cottle: LETTER 51. TO COTTLE (Jany 1797). My dear Cottle, * * * On Thursday morning, by Milton, the Stowey carrier, I shall send you a parcel, containing the book of my Poems interleaved, with the alterations, and likewise the prefaces, which I shall send to you, for your criticisms. * * * LETTER 52. TO COTTLE Stowey, Friday Morning (1797). My dear Cottle. * * * If you do not like the following verses, or if you do not think them worthy of an edition in which I profess to give nothing but my choicest fish, picked, gutted, and cleaned, please to get some one to write them out and send them, with my compliments to the editor of the "New Monthly Magazine". But if you think as well of them as I do (most probably from parental dotage for my last born) let them immediately follow "The Kiss". God love you, S. T. C. TO AN UNFORTUNATE YOUNG WOMAN. WHOM I HAD KNOWN IN THE DAYS OF HER INNOCENCE. Maiden! that with sullen brow, Sitt'st behind those virgins gay; Like a scorched, and mildew'd bough, Leafless mid the blooms of May. Inly gnawing, thy distresses Mock those starts of wanton glee; And thy inmost soul confesses Chaste Affection's majesty. Loathing thy polluted lot, Hie thee, Maiden! hie thee hence! Seek thy weeping mother's cot, With a wiser innocence! Mute the Lavrac [1] and forlorn While she moults those firstling plumes That had skimm'd the tender corn, Or the bean-field's od'rous blooms; Soon with renovating wing, Shall she dare a loftier flight, Upwards to the day-star sing, And embathe in heavenly light. ALLEGORICAL LINES ON THE SAME SUBJECT. Myrtle Leaf, that, ill besped, Pinest in the gladsome ray, Soiled beneath the common tread, Far from thy protecting spray; When the scythes-man o'er his sheaf, Caroll'd in the yellow vale, Sad, I saw thee, heedless leaf, Love the dalliance of the gale. Lightly didst thou, poor fond thing! Heave and flutter to his sighs While the flatterer on his wing, Woo'd, and whisper'd thee to rise. Gaily from thy mother stalk Wert thou danced and wafted high; Soon on this unsheltered walk, Flung to fade, and rot, and die! [Footnote 1: The Skylark.] Cottle subjected the two poems to severe criticism, and Coleridge replied: LETTER 53. TO COTTLE Wednesday morning, 10 o'clock. (January, 1797.) My dearest Cottle, * * * "Ill besped" is indeed a sad blotch; but after having tried at least a hundred ways, before I sent the Poem to you, and often since, I find it incurable. This first Poem is but a so so composition. I wonder I could have been so blinded by the ardour of recent composition, as to see anything in it. Your remarks are "perfectly just" on the "Allegorical lines", except that, in this district, corn is as often cut with a scythe, as with a hook. However, for ""Scythes-man"" read "Rustic". For ""poor fond thing"," read "foolish thing", and for ""flung to fade, and rot, and die"," read "flung to wither and to die". * * * * * Milton (the carrier) waits impatiently. S. T. C. [1] [Footnote 1: Letters LXXI-LXXII follow Letter 53.] Only the second poem was included in the second edition. The next letter, which contains an unrealized prophecy regarding Southey, speaks of the joint partnership of the volume of 1797. LETTER 54. TO COTTLE Stowey,--(Feby. or Mch. 1797.) My dear Cottle, * * * Public affairs are in strange confusion. I am afraid that I shall prove, at least, as good a Prophet as Bard. Oh, doom'd to fall, my country! enslaved and vile! But may God make me a foreboder of evils never to come! I have heard from Sheridan, desiring me to write a tragedy. I have no genius that way; Robert Southey has. I think highly of his "Joan of Arc", and cannot help prophesying that he will be known to posterity, as Shakspeare's great grandson. I think he will write a tragedy or tragedies. Charles Lloyd has given me his Poems, which I give to you, on condition that you print them in this Volume, after Charles Lamb's Poems; the title page, "Poems, by S. T. Coleridge. Second Edition: to which are added Poems, by C. Lamb, and C. Lloyd". C. Lamb's poems will occupy about forty pages; C. Lloyd's at least one hundred, although only his choice fish. P.S. I like your "Lines on Savage". God bless you, S. T. COLERIDGE." During his stay at Stowey, Coleridge remained a subscriber to Catcott's Library, Bristol; and the following letter to the librarian is worth preserving. LETTER 55. TO COTTLE Stowey, May, 1797. My dear Cottle, I have sent a curious letter to George Catcott. He has altogether made me pay five shillings! for postage, by his letters sent all the way to Stowey, requiring me to return books to the Bristol Library. * * * * "Mr. Catcott, "I beg your acceptance of all the enclosed letters. You must not think lightly of the present, as they cost me, who am a very poor man, five shillings. "With respect to the "Bruck. Hist. Crit." although by accident they were registered on the 23d of March, yet they were not removed from the Library for a fortnight after; and when I received your first letter, I had had the books just three weeks. Our learned and ingenious Committee may read through two quartos, that is, one thousand and four hundred pages of close printed Latin and Greek, in three weeks, for aught I know to the contrary. I pretend to no such intenseness of application, or rapidity of genius. "I must beg you to inform me, by Mr. Cottle, what length of time is allowed by the rules and customs of our institution for each book. Whether their contents, as well as their size, are consulted, in apportioning the time; or whether, customarily, any time at all is apportioned, except when the Committee, in individual cases, choose to deem it proper. I subscribe to your library, Mr. Catcott, not to read novels, or books of quick reading and easy digestion, but to get books which I cannot get elsewhere,--books of massy knowledge; and as I have few books of my own, I read with a common-place book, so that if I be not allowed a longer period of time for the perusal of such books, I must contrive to get rid of my subscription, which would be a thing perfectly useless, except so far as it gives me an opportunity of reading your little expensive notes and letters. "Yours in Christian fellowship, "S. T. COLERIDGE." Whether Coleridge had given Southey the opportunity to try his skill at the drama or not does not appear; but the following letter to Cottle shows that he had addressed himself to the task of composing a tragedy, evidently "Osorio". LETTER 56. TO COTTLE Stowey, May, 1797. My dearest Cottle, I love and respect you as a brother, and my memory deceives me woefully, if I have not evidenced, by the animated tone of my conversation when we have been tete-a-tete, how much your conversation interested me. But when last in Bristol, the day I meant to devote to you, was such a day of sadness, I could do nothing. On the Saturday, the Sunday, and ten days after my arrival at Stowey, I felt a depression too dreadful to be described. So much I felt my genial spirits droop, My hopes all flat; Nature within me seemed In all her functions, weary of herself, Wordsworth's [1] conversation aroused me somewhat, but even now I am not the man I have been, and I think I never shall. A sort of calm hopelessness diffuses itself over my heart. Indeed every mode of life which has promised me bread and cheese, has been, one after another, torn away from me, but God remains. I have no immediate pecuniary distress, having received ten pounds from Lloyd. I employ myself now on a book of morals in answer to Godwin, and on my tragedy... There are some poets who write too much at their ease, from the facility with which they please themselves. They do not often enough Feel their burdened breast Heaving beneath incumbent Deity. So that to posterity their wreaths will look unseemly. Here, perhaps, an everlasting Amaranth, and, close by its side, some weed of an hour, sere, yellow, and shapeless. Their very beauties will lose half their effect, from the bad company they keep. They rely too much on story and event, to the neglect of those lofty imaginings that are peculiar to, and definite of the Poet. The story of Milton might be told in two pages. It is this which distinguishes an epic poem from a romance in metre. Observe the march of Milton; his severe application; his laborious polish; his deep metaphysical researches; his prayer to God before he began his great work; all that could lift and swell his intellect, became his daily food. I should not think of devoting less than twenty years to an epic poem. Ten years to collect materials and warm my mind with universal science. I would be a tolerable Mathematician. I would thoroughly understand Mechanics; Hydrostatics; Optics and Astronomy; Botany; Metallurgy; Fossilism; Chemistry; Geology; Anatomy; Medicine; then the mind of man; then the minds of men, in all Travels, Voyages, and Histories. So I would spend ten years; the next five in the composition of the poem, and the five last in the correction of it. So would I write, haply not unhearing of that divine and nightly-whispering voice, which speaks to mighty minds, of predestinated garlands, starry and unwithering. God love you. S. T. COLERIDGE. P.S. David Hartley is well and grows. Sara is well, and desires a sister's love to you. [Footnote 1: Mr. Wordsworth at this time resided at Allfoxden House, two or three miles from Stowey.--[Note by Cottle.]] "The following letter of Mr. C," says Cottle, "was in answer to a request for some long-promised copy, and for which the printer importuned." LETTER 57. TO COTTLE Stowey (May), 1797. My dear, dear Cottle, Have patience, and everything shall be done. I think now entirely of your brother:[1] in two days I will think entirely for you. By Wednesday next you shall have Lloyd's other Poems, with all Lamb's, etc. etc. * * * S. T. C. "A little before this time," says Cottle, "a singular occurrence happened to Mr. C. during a pedestrian excursion into Somersetshire, as detailed in the following letter to Mr. Wade." [Footnote 1: My brother, when at Cambridge, had written a Latin poem for the prize: the subject, "Italia, Vastata," and sent it to Mr. Coleridge, with whom he was on friendly terms, in MS. requesting the favour of his remarks; and this he did about six weeks before it was necessary to deliver it in. Mr. C. in an immediate letter, expressed his approbation of the Poem, and cheerfully undertook the task; but with a little of his procrastination, he returned the MS. with his remarks, just one day after it was too late to deliver the poem in!--[Note by Cottle.]] LETTER 58. TO WADE (May, 1797.) My dear friend, I am here after a most tiresome journey; in the course of which, a woman asked me if I knew one Coleridge, of Bristol. I answered, I had heard of him. "Do you know, (quoth she) that that vile jacobin villain drew away a young man of our parish, one Burnett," etc. and in this strain did the woman continue for near an hour; heaping on me every name of abuse that the parish of Billingsgate could supply. I listened very particularly; appeared to approve all she said, exclaiming, "dear me!" two or three times, and, in fine, so completely won the woman's heart by my civilities, that I had not courage enough to undeceive her. * * * S. T. COLERIDGE. P.S. You are a good prophet. Oh, into what a state have the scoundrels brought this devoted kingdom. If the House of Commons would but melt down their faces, it would greatly assist the copper currency--we should have brass enough. Coleridge, like all the Return-to-Nature poets of the eighteenth century, Thomson, Cowper, Burns, and others, was given to that humanitarian regard for the lower creatures which brought forth such poems as Burns's "Address to a Mouse" and Coleridge's own lines to a "Young Ass". The following letter to Cottle is an amusing sample of that humanitarianism. George Burnett, one of the pantisocrats, occasionally resided with Coleridge, and during the latter's temporary absence from Stowey had taken ill. On reaching Stowey, Coleridge wrote to Cottle. LETTER 59. TO COTTLE Stowey (May, 1797). My dear friend, I found George Burnett ill enough, heaven knows, Yellow Jaundice--the introductory symptoms very violent. I return to Bristol on Thursday, and shall not leave till "all be done". Remind Mrs. Coleridge of the kittens, and tell her that George's brandy is just what smuggled spirits might be expected to be, execrable! The smack of it remains in my mouth, and I believe will keep me most horribly temperate for half a century. He (Burnett) was bit, but I caught the Brandiphobia.[1] (obliterations * * * * * * * --scratched out, well knowing that you never allow such things to pass, uncensured. A good joke, and it slipped out most impromptu--ishly.) The mice play the very devil with us. It irks me to set a trap. By all the whiskers of all the pussies that have mewed plaintively, or amorously, since the days of Whittington, it is not fair. 'Tis telling a lie. 'Tis as if you said, "Here is a bit of toasted cheese; come little mice! I invite you!" when, oh, foul breach of the rites of hospitality! I mean to assassinate my too credulous guests! No, I cannot set a trap, but I should vastly like to make a Pitt--fall. (Smoke the Pun!) But concerning the mice, advise thou, lest there be famine in the land. Such a year of scarcity! Inconsiderate mice! Well, well, so the world wags. Farewell, S. T. C. P.S. A mad dog ran through our village, and bit several dogs. I have desired the farmers to be attentive, and tomorrow shall give them, in writing, the first symptoms of madness in a dog. I wish my pockets were as yellow as George's Phiz! [Footnote 1: It appears that Mr. Burnett had been prevailed upon by smugglers to buy some prime cheap brandy, but which Mr. Coleridge affirmed to be a compound of Hellebore, kitchen grease, and Assafoetida! or something as bad.--[Cottle's note.]] The next letter must belong to the end of May or beginning of June. Cottle's note shows that the second edition of the poems was now published. LETTER 60. TO COTTLE Stowey (June), 1797. My dear Cottle, I deeply regret, that my anxieties and my slothfulness, acting in a combined ratio, prevented me from finishing my "Progress of Liberty, or Visions of the Maid of Orleans", with that Poem at the head of the volume, with the "Ode" in the middle, and the "Religious Musings" at the end. * * * In the "Lines on the Man of Ross", immediately after these lines, He heard the widow's heaven-breathed prayer of praise, He mark'd the shelter'd orphan's tearful gaze. Please to add these two lines. And o'er the portion'd maiden's snowy cheek, Bade bridal love suffuse its blushes meek. And for the line, Beneath this roof, if thy cheer'd moments pass. I should be glad to substitute this, If near this roof thy wine-cheer'd moments pass. "These emendations," Cottle adds, "came too late for admission in the second edition; nor have they appeared in the last edition. They will remain therefore for insertion in any future edition of Mr. Coleridge's Poems." The exact date on which Coleridge and Wordsworth met in the year 1796 has not been ascertained; but Coleridge speaks in the next letter as if he was now well acquainted with Wordsworth. Coleridge had been at Taunton early in June ('Letters, 220). On the 8th of June he wrote to Cottle. LETTER 61. TO COTTLE (8th) June, 1797. My dear Cottle, I am sojourning for a few days at Racedown, Dorset, the mansion of our friend Wordsworth; who presents his kindest respects to you. * * * Wordsworth admires my tragedy, which gives me great hopes. Wordsworth has written a tragedy himself. I speak with heartfelt sincerity, and I think, unblinded judgment, when I tell you that I feel myself a little man by his side, and yet I do not think myself a less man than I formerly thought myself. His drama is absolutely wonderful. You know I do not commonly speak in such abrupt and unmingled phrases, and therefore will the more readily believe me. There are, in the piece, those profound touches of the human heart, which I find three or four times in the 'Robbers' of Schiller, and often in Shakespeare, but in Wordsworth there are no inequalities. * * * God bless you, and eke [1] S. T. COLERIDGE. [2] [Footnote 1: The reader will have observed a peculiarity in most of Mr. Coleridge's conclusions to his letters. He generally says, "God bless you, and, or eke, S. T. C." so as to involve a compound blessing.--[Cottle.]] [Footnote 2: Letter LXXIII is our 61.] Shakespeare evidently occupied an important place in Coleridge's mind even at this early date. His discovery of rivals to the prince of English dramatists in his friends Southey and Wordsworth only indicates how largely Shakespeare already bulked in his view of the dramatic art. The next letter to Cottle is of a milder type, and leads up to an interesting meeting, famous in the lives of Lamb, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. LETTER 62. TO COTTLE Stowey, June 29th, 1797. My very dear Cottle, ***Charles Lamb will probably be here in about a fortnight. Could you not contrive to put yourself in a Bridgwater coach, and T. Poole would fetch you in a one-horse chaise to Stowey. What delight would it not give us. *** Still more interesting is the often quoted letter describing Dorothy Wordsworth. LETTER 63. TO COTTLE Stowey (3-17 July), 1797. My dear Cottle, Wordsworth and his exquisite sister are with me. She is a woman indeed! in mind I mean, and heart; for her person is such, that if you expected to see a pretty woman, you would think her rather ordinary; if you expected to see an ordinary woman, you would think her pretty! but her manners are simple, ardent, impressive. In every motion, her most innocent soul outbeams so brightly, that who saw would say, Guilt was a thing impossible in her. Her information various. Her eye watchful in minutest observation of nature; and her taste, a perfect electrometer. It bends, protrudes, and draws in, at subtlest beauties, and most recondite faults. She and W. desire their kindest respects to you. Give my love to your brother Amos. I condole with him in the loss of the prize, but it is the fortune of war. The finest Greek Poem I ever wrote lost the prize, and that which gained it was contemptible. An Ode may sometimes be too bad for the prize, but very often too good. Your ever affectionate friend. S. T. C.[1] [Footnote 1: Letter LXXIV follows 63.] Dorothy Wordsworth's description of Coleridge whom she met now for the first time is as follows: "You had a great loss," she wrote to a friend, "in not seeing Coleridge. He is a wonderful man. His conversation teems with soul, mind, and spirit. Then he is so benevolent, so good tempered and cheerful, and, like William, interests himself so much about every little trifle. At first I thought him very plain, that is, for about three minutes. He is pale, thin, has a wide mouth, thick lips, and not very good teeth, longish, loose-growing, half curling, rough, black hair. But if you hear him speak for five minutes you think no more of them. His eye is large and full, and not very dark, but grey, such an eye as would receive from a heavy soul the dullest expression; but it speaks every emotion of his animated mind: it has more of 'the poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling' than I ever witnessed. He has fine dark eyebrows, and an overhanging forehead. "The first thing that was read after he came was William's new poem, "The Ruined Cottage", with which he was much delighted; and after tea he repeated to us two acts and a half of his tragedy, "Osorio". The next morning William read his tragedy, "The Borderers"." (Knight's "Life of Wordsworth", i, 111-112.) The line Coleridge quotes in his description of Dorothy: Guilt is a thing impossible in her occurs in the additional verses Coleridge had written to the "Joan of Arc" lines sent to Lamb. John Thelwall, one of the sturdy democrats of the time who had made no small commotion with his Revolutionary principles, had also visited Coleridge at Stowey in the summer of 1797. Coleridge had corresponded with him before knowing him personally ("Letters", 202), chiefly about politics, religion and books. Coleridge thus describes Thelwall to Wade. LETTER 64. TO WADE Stowey (17-20 July), 1797. My very dear friend, * * * John Thelwall is a very warm-hearted, honest man; and disagreeing as we do, on almost every point of religion, of morals, of politics, and philosophy, we like each other uncommonly well. He is a great favorite with Sara. Energetic activity of mind and of heart, is his master feature. He is prompt to conceive, and still prompter to execute; but I think he is deficient in that patience of mind which can look intensely and frequently at the same subject. He believes and disbelieves with impassioned confidence. I wish to see him doubting, and doubting. He is intrepid, eloquent, and honest. Perhaps, the only acting democrat that is honest, for the patriots are ragged cattle; a most execrable herd. Arrogant because they are ignorant, and boastful of the strength of reason, because they have never tried it enough to know its weakness. Oh! my poor country! The clouds cover thee. There is not one spot of clear blue in the whole heaven! My love to all whom you love, and believe me, with brotherly affection, with esteem and gratitude, and every warm emotion of the heart, Your faithful S. T. COLERIDGE. The next letter closes the visit of Thelwall. LETTER 65. TO COTTLE Stowey, Sept. 1797. My very dear Cottle, Your illness afflicts me, and unless I receive a full account of you by Milton, I shall be very uneasy, so do not fail to write. Herbert Croft is in Exeter gaol! This is unlucky. Poor devil! He must now be unpeppered. We are all well. Wordsworth is well. Hartley sends a grin to you? He has another tooth! In the wagon, there was brought from Bath, a trunk, in order to be forwarded to Stowey, directed, "S. T. Coleridge, Stowey, near Bridgwater." This, we suppose, arrived in Bristol on Tuesday or Wednesday, last week. It belonged to Thelwall. If it be not forwarded to Stowey, let it be stopped, and not sent. Give my kind love to your brother Robert, and "ax" him to put on his hat, and run, without delay to the inn, or place, by whatever bird, beast, fish, or man distinguished, where Parson's Bath wagon sets up. From your truly affectionate friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. In the beginning of September Coleridge was meditating a visit to his favourite Bowles, whom, in spite of his youthful admiration, he had not seen since he first saw him in Salisbury when a mere boy. ("Letters", 211.) LETTER 66. TO COTTLE (3 Sept., 1797.) I shall now stick close to my tragedy (called "Osorio"), and when I have finished it, shall walk to Shaftesbury to spend a few days with Bowles. From thence I go to Salisbury, and thence to Christchurch, to see Southey. "This letter," Cottle says, "as was usual, has no date, but a letter from Wordsworth determines about the time when Mr. C. had nearly finished his Tragedy." September 13, 1797. "* * * Coleridge is gone over to Bowles with his Tragedy, which he has finished to the middle of the 5th Act. He set off a week ago." J. Dykes Campbell in his Life of Coleridge asserts that the Tragedy of "Osorio" was sent to Drury Lane "without much hope that it would be accepted."[1] This, however, is inaccurate. The play was not sent; Coleridge went to London with it, for he writes to Cottle in the beginning of September: [Footnote 1: "Life", p. 78.] LETTER 67. TO COTTLE London (10-15 Sept.) 1797. Dear Cottle, If Mrs. Coleridge be in Bristol, pray desire her to write to me immediately, and I beg you, the moment you receive this letter, to send to No. 17, Newfoundland Street, to know whether she be there. I have written to Stowey, but if she be in Bristol, beg her to write to me of it by return of post, that I may immediately send down some cash for her travelling expenses, etc. We shall reside in London for the next four months. God bless you, Cottle, I love you, S. T. COLERIDGE. P. S. The volume (second edition, Coleridge, Lloyd, and Lamb) is a most beautiful one. You have determined that the three Bards shall walk up Parnassus, in their best bib and tucker. [l] Coleridge's beautiful Sonnet to W. Linley, Sheridan's brother-in-law and secretary, is dated 12 September, 1797, and Coleridge must have been in London from about that date to 3 December, with perhaps an interval of return between. The sonnet is dated from Donhead, in Wilts, whither Coleridge had probably gone on a visit from London. Wordsworth's play was presented to Covent Garden. An undated letter of Coleridge to Cottle, which must have been written about the end of November, informs us that it was through Coleridge the play was tried at Covent Garden. [Footnote 1: Letters LXXV-LXXVII follow 67.] LETTER 68. TO COTTLE (28 Nov. 1797.) I have procured for Wordsworth's tragedy, an introduction to Harris, the manager of Covent Garden, who has promised to read it attentively, and give his answer immediately; and if he accepts it, to put it in preparation without an hour's delay. A letter by Dorothy Wordsworth of 20th November[1] confirms the fact that "The Borderers" was sent to Covent Garden. Both plays were rejected, that of Coleridge on account of the obscurity of the last three acts; and Coleridge wrote to Cottle his feelings on the occasion. [Footnote 1: Knight's "Life of Wordsworth", i, 127.] LETTER 69. To COTTLE (2 Dec. 1797.) Dear Cottle, I have heard nothing of my Tragedy, except some silly remarks of Kemble's, to whom a friend showed it; it does not appear to me that there is a shadow of probability that it will be accepted. It gave me no pain, and great pleasure, in finding that it gave me no pain. I had rather hoped than believed that I was possessed of so much philosophical capability. Sheridan most certainly has not used me with common justice. The proposal came from himself, and although this circumstance did not bind him to accept the tragedy, it certainly bound him to every, and that the earliest, attention to it. I suppose it is snugly in his green bag, if it have not emigrated to the kitchen. I sent to the "Monthly Magazine" (1797), three mock Sonnets, in ridicule of my own Poems, and Charles Lloyd's, and Lamb's, etc. etc. exposing that affectation of unaffectedness, of jumping and misplaced accent, in common-place epithets, flat lines forced into poetry by italics, (signifying how well and mouthishly the author would read them) puny pathos, etc. etc. The instances were almost all taken from myself, and Lloyd, and Lamb. I signed them 'Nehemiah Higginbotham.' I think they may do good to our young Bards. God love you, S. T. C. P. S. I am translating the "Oberon" of Wieland; it is a difficult language, and I can translate at least as fast as I can construe. I have made also a very considerable proficiency in the French language, and study it daily, and daily study the German; so that I am not, and have not been idle. * * * Coleridge had been introduced through Poole to the Wedgwoods; and hearing that Coleridge was in need of funds, Tom Wedgwood offered Coleridge £100, sending an order for the amount. Coleridge was now meditating entering the Unitarian ministry, and was perplexed whether to remain with Poetry or enter the pulpit. He writes to Cottle on the occasion: LETTER 70. TO COTTLE Stowey (January, 1798.) My very dear friend, This last fortnight has been very eventful. I received one hundred pounds from Josiah Wedgwood, in order to prevent the necessity of my going into the ministry. I have received an invitation from Shrewsbury, to be minister there; and after fluctuations of mind, which have for nights together robbed me of sleep, and I am afraid of health, I have at length returned the order to Mr. Wedgwood, with a long letter, explanatory of my conduct, and accepted the Shrewsbury invitation. * * The next letter Cottle says refers to the Wedgwood Pension, but may be about the rejection of the £100.[l] [Footnote 1: See Litchfield's "Tom Wedgwood", pp. 54-56.] LETTER 71. TO THOMAS WEDGWOOD[1] Shrewsbury, Friday night, (--January), 1798. My dear sir, I have this moment received your letter, and have scarcely more than a moment to answer it by return of post. If kindly feeling can be repaid by kindly feeling, I am not your debtor. I would wish to express the same thing which is big at my heart, but I know not how to do it without indelicacy. As much abstracted from personal feeling as possible, I honor and esteem you for that which you have done. I must of necessity stay here till the close of Sunday next. On Monday morning I shall leave it, and on Tuesday will be with you at Cote-House. Very affectionately yours, S. T. COLERIDGE. T. Wedgwood, Esq. [Footnote 1: Not in "Early Recollections".] The next letter refers to the offer of the Pension of £150 a year, which the Wedgwoods conferred on Coleridge. LETTER 72. TO COTTLE (24 January, 1798). My very dear Cottle, The moment I received Mr. T. Wedgwood's letter, I accepted his offer. How a contrary report could arise, I cannot guess.... I hope to see you at the close of next week. I have been respectfully and kindly treated at Shrewsbury. I am well, and now, and ever, Your grateful and affectionate friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. [1] [Footnote 1: Letter LXXVIII follows 72.] The next letter is an amusing one coming from Coleridge. It is an apology for the "Monody on the Death of Chatterton", which he wished to discard from the second edition of his poems, but which Cottle insisted on retaining among the poet's "choice fish, picked, gutted, and cleaned." LETTER 73. TO THE EDITOR OF THE "MONTHLY MAGAZINE" January 1798. Sir, I hope this letter may arrive time enough to answer its purpose. I cannot help considering myself as having been placed in a very ridiculous light by the gentlemen who have remarked, answered, and rejoined concerning my "Monody on Chatterton". I have not seen the compositions of my competitors (unless indeed the exquisite poem of Warton's, entitled "The Suicide", refer to this subject), but this I know, that my own is a very poor one. It was a school exercise, somewhat altered; and it would have been omitted in the last edition of my poems but for the request of my friend Mr. Cottle, whose property those poems are. If it be not in your intention to exhibit my name on any future month, you will accept my best thanks, and not publish this letter. But if Crito and the Alphabet-men should continue to communicate on this subject, and you should think it proper for reasons best known to yourself to publish their communications, then I depend on your kindness for the insertion of my letter; by which it is possible those your correspondents may be induced to expend their remarks, whether panegyrical or vituperative, on nobler game than on a poem which was, in truth, the first effort of a young man, all whose poems a candid critic will only consider as first efforts. Yours, with due respect, S. T. COLERIDGE. Shrewsbury. Coleridge, even at this date, shows signs of a Catholicism in literary taste beyond the average man of his time; but it is an Intellectual Hospitality to all sorts and conditions of minds and men rather than a wide or deep enlightenment. He already manifested a tendency to read the most abstruse and out-of-the-way books. He commissioned Thelwall to purchase for him Iamblichus, Proclus, Sidonius Apollinaris, Plotinus, Ficino; and he read Dupuis' huge "Origine de tous les Cultes", a fantastic work tracing the genesis of all religions to the worship of the stars ("Letters", 181-2). This love of recondite lore remained with him through life; but it was his meeting with William and Dorothy Wordsworth that helped most at this juncture to develop the possibilities within him. Wordsworth was one of those who are lofty rather than wide, but who, by their self concentration, act as a healthy corrective to the over-diffusiveness of the Shakespearian type of mind.) CHAPTER VI THE LYRICAL BALLADS; GERMANY Cottle's acquaintance with Coleridge led to his making friends with Wordsworth, and in his "Early Recollections" and "Reminiscences", the Bristol bookseller tells a few amusing tales about the poets. The following is the best: "A visit to Mr. Coleridge, at Stowey, in the year 1797, had been the means of my introduction to Mr. Wordsworth. Soon after our acquaintance had commenced, Mr. W. happened to be in Bristol, and asked me to spend a day or two with him at Allfoxden. I consented, and drove him down in a gig. We called for Mr. Coleridge, Miss Wordsworth, and the servant, at Stowey, and they walked, while we rode on to Mr. W.'s house at Allfoxden, distant two or three miles, where we purposed to dine. A London alderman would smile at our prepation, or bill of fare. It consisted of philosophers' viands; namely, a bottle of brandy, a noble loaf, and a stout piece of cheese; and as there were plenty of lettuces in the garden, with all these comforts we calculated on doing very well. "Our fond hopes, however, were somewhat damped, by finding, that our 'stout piece of cheese' had vanished! A sturdy "rat" of a beggar, whom we had relieved on the road, with his olfactories all alive, no doubt, "smelt" our cheese, and while we were gazing at the magnificent clouds, contrived to abstract our treasure! Cruel tramp! An ill return for our pence! We both wished the rind might not choke him! The mournful fact was ascertained a little before we drove into the courtyard of the house. Mr. Coleridge bore the loss with great fortitude, observing, that we should never starve with a loaf of bread and a bottle of brandy. He now, with the dexterity of an adept, admired by his friends around, unbuckled the horse, and, putting down the shafts with a jerk, as a triumphant conclusion of his work, lo! the bottle of brandy that had been placed most carefully behind us on the seat, from the force of gravity, suddenly rolled down, and before we could arrest this spirituous avalanche, pitching right on the stones, was dashed to pieces. We all beheld the spectacle, silent and petrified! We might have collected the broken fragments of glass, but the brandy; that was gone! clean gone! "One little untoward thing often follows another, and while the rest stood musing, chained to the place, regaling themselves with the Cognac effluvium, and all miserably chagrined, I led the horse to the stable, when a fresh perplexity arose. I removed the harness without difficulty, but after many strenuous attempts, I could not get off the collar. In despair, I called for assistance, when aid soon drew near. Mr. Wordsworth first brought his ingenuity into exercise, but after several unsuccessful efforts, he relinquished the achievement, as a thing altogether impracticable. Mr. Coleridge now tried his hand, but showed no more grooming skill than his predecessors; for after twisting the poor horse's neck almost to strangulation, and to the great danger of his eyes, he gave up the useless task, pronouncing that the horse's head must have grown, (gout or dropsy!) since the collar was put on! 'for,' he said 'It was a downright impossibility for such a huge Os Frontis to pass through so narrow a collar!' Just at this instant the servant girl came near, and understanding the cause of our consternation, 'La, Master,' said she, 'you do not go about the work in the right way. You should do like as this,' when turning the collar completely upside down, she slipped it off in a moment, to our great humiliation and wonderment; each satisfied, afresh, that there were heights of knowledge in the world, to which we had not yet attained. "We were now summoned to dinner, and a dinner it was, such as every "blind" and starving man in the three kingdoms would have rejoiced to "behold". At the top of the table stood a superb brown loaf. The centre dish presented a pile of the true coss lettuces, and at the bottom appeared an empty plate, where the 'stout piece of cheese' "ought" to have stood! (cruel mendicant!) and though the brandy was 'clean gone,' yet its place was well, if not "better" supplied by an abundance of fine sparkling Castalian champagne! A happy thought at this time started into one of our minds, that some condiment would render the lettuces a little more palatable, when an individual in the company, recollected a question, once propounded by the most patient of men, 'How can that which is unsavoury be eaten without "salt"?' and asked for a little of that valuable culinary article. 'Indeed, sir,' Betty replied, 'I quite forgot to buy salt.' A general laugh followed the announcement, in which our host heartily joined. This was nothing. We had plenty of other good things, and while crunching our succulents, and munching our crusts, we pitied the far worse condition of those, perchance as hungry as ourselves, who were forced to dine, off aether alone. For our next meal, the mile-off village furnished all that could be desired, and these trifling incidents present the sum and the result of half the little passing disasters of life. "The "Lyrical Ballads" were published about Midsummer, 1798. In September of the same year, Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Wordsworth left England for Germany, and I quitted the business of a bookseller. Had I not once been such, this book would never have appeared." The reference in the following letter to a ballad of 340 lines has never been explained by any biographer of Coleridge. The "Ancient Mariner" in its first form extended to 658 lines. Some have surmised that the "Three Graves" is meant; but this poem was 318 lines as published in 1809-1817. LETTER 74. TO COTTLE Feb. 18, 1798. My dear Cottle, I have finished my Ballad, it is 340 lines; I am going on with my "Visions": altogether (for I shall print two scenes of my Tragedy, as fragments) I can add 1500 lines; now what do you advise? Shall I add my Tragedy, and so make a second volume? or shall I pursue my first intention of inserting 1500 in the third edition? If you should advise a second volume, should you wish, "i.e.", find it convenient, to be the purchaser? I ask this question, because I wish you to know the true state of my present circumstances. I have received nothing yet from the Wedgwoods, and my money is utterly expended. A friend of mine wanted five guineas for a little while, which I borrowed of Poole, as for myself, I do not like therefore to apply to him. Mr. Estlin has some little money I believe in his hands, but I received from him before I went to Shrewsbury, fifteen pounds, and I believe that this was an anticipation of the five guinea presents, which my friends would have made in March. But (this affair of the Messrs. Wedgwoods turning out) the money in Mr. Estlin's hand must go towards repaying him that sum which he suffered me to anticipate. Meantime I owe Biggs £5, which is heavy on my thoughts, and Mrs. F. has not been paid her last quarter which is still heavier. As to myself, I can continue to go on here, but this £10 I must pay somehow, that is £5 to Biggs, and £5 to Mrs. F.... God bless you, S. T. COLERIDGE. P.S. This week I purpose offering myself to the Bridgwater Socinian congregation, as assistant minister, without any salary, directly, or indirectly; but of this say not a word to any one, unless you see Mr. Estlin. Coleridge sent his poem of the "Raven" to the "Morning Post" at this time with the following curious letter to the Editor. The poem appeared in the paper of 10th March. LETTER 75. TO THE EDITOR OF THE "MORNING POST", WITH THE "RAVEN", A POEM. 10 March, 1798. Sir, I am not absolutely certain that the following poem was written by Edmund Spenser, and found by an angler buried in a fishing-box: Under the foot of Mole, that Mountain hoar, Mid the green alders, by the Mulla's shore; but a learned Antiquarian of my acquaintance has given it as his opinion that it resembles Spenser's minor poems as nearly as "Vortigern" and "Rowena" the Tragedies of William Shakespeare. This poem must be read in recitative, in the same manner as the "AEgloga Secunda" of the "Shepherd's Calendar". CUDDY. "The Latin motto," Cottle says, "prefixed to the second edition of Mr. C.'s poems, puzzled everybody to know from what author it was derived. One and another inquired of me, to no purpose, and expressed a wish that Mr. C. had been clearer in his citation, as 'no one could understand it.' On my naming this to Mr. Coleridge, he laughed heartily, and said, "It was all a hoax. Not meeting," said he, "with a suitable motto, I invented one, and with references purposely obscure, as will be explained in the next letter." LETTER 76. TO COTTLE March 8th, 1798. My dear Cottle, I have been confined to my bed for some days, through a fever occasioned by the stump of a tooth, which baffled chirurgical efforts to eject, and which, by affecting my eye, affected my stomach, and through that my whole frame. I am better, but still weak, in consequence of such long sleeplessness and wearying pains; weak, very weak. I thank you, my dear friend, for your late kindness, and in a few weeks will either repay you in money, or by verses, as you like. With regard to Lloyd's verses, it is curious that I should be applied to, "to be persuaded to resign," and in hopes that I might "consent to give up" (unknown by whom) a number of poems which were published at the earnest request of the author, who assured me, that the circumstance was of "no trivial import to his happiness!" Times change and people change; but let us keep our souls in quietness! I have no objection to any disposal of Lloyd's poems except that of their being republished with mine. The motto which I had prefixed--"Duplex, etc." from Groscollias, has placed me in a ridiculous situation, but it was a foolish and presumptuous start of affectionateness, and I am not unwilling to incur the punishment due to my folly. By past experiences we build up our moral being. The Giant Wordsworth--God love him! When I speak in the terms of admiration due to his intellect, I fear lest these terms should keep out of sight the amiableness of his manners. He has written near twelve hundred lines of a blank verse, [1] superior, I hesitate not to aver, to anything in our language which any way resembles it. God bless you, S. T. COLERIDGE. [2] [Footnote 1: "The Ruined Cottage", or "Tale of Margaret", afterwards incorporated in the "Excursion".] [Footnote 2: Letter LXXIX is our 76, which see for full text.] LETTER 77. TO WADE March 21st, 1798. My very dear friend, I have even now returned from a little excursion that I have taken for the confirmation of my health, which had suffered a rude assault from the anguish of the stump of a tooth which had baffled the attempts of our surgeon here, and which confined me to my bed. I suffered much from the disease, and more from the doctor; rather than again put my mouth into his hands, I would put my hands into a lion's mouth. I am happy to hear of, and should be most happy to see, the plumpness and progression of your dear boy; but--yes, my dear Wade, it must be a but, much as I hate the word but. Well,--but I cannot attend the chemical lectures. I have many reasons, but the greatest, or at least the most ostensible reason, is, that I cannot leave Mrs. C. at that time; our house is an uncomfortable one; our surgeon may be, for aught I know, a lineal descendant of Esculapius himself, but if so, in the repeated transfusion of life from father to son, through so many generations, the wit and knowledge, being subtle spirits, have evaporated.... Ever your grateful and affectionate friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. LETTER 78. TO COTTLE (Mch. or Apl. 1798.) My dear Cottle, I regret that aught should have disturbed our tranquillity; respecting Lloyd, I am willing to believe myself in part mistaken, and so let all things be as before. I have no wish respecting these poems, either for or against re-publication with mine. As to the third edition, if there be occasion for it immediately, it must be published with some alterations, but no additions or omissions. The "Pixies", "Chatterton", and some dozen others, shall be printed at the end of the volume, under the title of Juvenile Poems, and in this case I will send you the volume immediately. But if there be no occasion for the volume to go to press for ten weeks, at the expiration of that time, I would make it a volume worthy of me, and omit utterly near one-half of the present volume--a sacrifice to pitch black oblivion. Whichever be the case, I will repay you the money you have paid for me, in money, and in a few weeks; or if you should prefer the latter proposal, "i.e.", the not sending me to the press for ten weeks, I should insist on considering the additions, however large, as my payment to you for the omissions, which, indeed, would be but strict justice. I am requested by Wordsworth, to put to you the following questions. What could you, conveniently and prudently, and what would you give for--first, our two Tragedies, with small prefaces, containing an analysis of our principal characters? Exclusive of the prefaces, the tragedies are, together, five thousand lines; which, in printing, from the dialogue form, and directions respecting actors and scenery, are at least equal to six thousand. To be delivered to you within a week of the date of your answer to this letter; and the money which you offer, to be paid to us at the end of four months from the same date; none to be paid before, all to be paid then. Second.--Wordsworth's "Salisbury Plain", and "Tale of a Woman"; which two poems, with a few others which he will add, and the notes, will make a volume. This to be delivered to you within three weeks of the date of your answer, and the money to be paid as before, at the end of four months from the present date. Do not, my dearest Cottle, harass yourself about the imagined great merit of the compositions, or be reluctant to offer what you can prudently offer, from an idea that the poems are worth more. But calculate what you can do, with reference simply to yourself, and answer as speedily as you can; and believe me your sincere, grateful, and affectionate friend and brother, S. T. COLERIDGE. Cottle offered thirty guineas each to Wordsworth and Coleridge for their tragedies; but this offer, says Cottle, "after some hesitation was declined from the hope of introducing one or both on the stage." Cottle received the following letter soon after: LETTER 79. TO COTTLE (14 Apl., 1798.) My dear Cottle, I never involved you in bickering, and never suspected you, in any one action of your life, of practising guile against any human being, except yourself. Your letter supplied only one in a link of circumstances, that informed me of some things, and perhaps deceived me in others. I shall write to-day to Lloyd. I do not think I shall come to Bristol for these lectures of which you speak.[1] I ardently wish for the knowledge, but Mrs. Coleridge is within a month of her confinement, and I cannot, I ought not to leave her; especially as her surgeon is not a John Hunter, nor my house likely to perish from a plethora of comforts. Besides, there are other things that might disturb that evenness of benevolent feeling, which I wish to cultivate. I am much better, and at present at Allfoxden, and my new and tender health is all over me like a voluptuous feeling. God bless you, S. T. COLERIDGE. [Footnote 1: "Chemical Lectures," by Dr. Beddoes, delivered at the Red Lodge [Cottle].] The origin of the volume of lyrical ballads is best told in Cottle's own words. "Wordsworth," says Cottle, on his introduction by Coleridge at Stowey, "read me many of his Lyrical Pieces, when I immediately perceived in them extraordinary merit, and advised him to publish them, expressing a belief that they would be well received. I further said he should be at no risk; that I would give him the same sum which I had given to Mr. Coleridge and to Mr. Southey, and that it would be a gratifying circumstance to me, to have been the publisher of the first volumes of three such poets as Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth; such a distinction might never again occur to a Provincial bookseller. "To the idea of publishing he expressed a strong objection, and after several interviews, I left him, with an earnest wish that he would reconsider his determination. "Soon after Mr. Wordsworth sent me the following letter. 'Allfoxden, 12th April, 1798. 'My dear Cottle, '...You will be pleased to hear that I have gone on very rapidly adding to my stock of poetry. Do come and let me read it to you, under the old trees in the park. We have a little more than two months to stay in this place. Within these four days the season has advanced with greater rapidity than I ever remember, and the country becomes almost every hour more lovely. God bless you, 'Your affectionate friend, 'W. WORDSWORTH.' "A little time after, I received an invitation from Mr. Coleridge to pay himself and Mr. Wordsworth another visit. At about the same time, I received the following corroborative invitation from Mr. Wordsworth. 'Dear Cottle, 'We look for you with great impatience. We will never forgive you if you do not come. I say nothing of the "Salisbury Plain" till I see you. I am determined to finish it, and equally so that you shall publish. 'I have lately been busy about another plan, which I do not wish to mention till I see you; let this be very, very soon, and stay a week if possible; as much longer as you can. God bless you, dear Cottle, 'Yours sincerely, 'W. WORDSWORTH. 'Allfoxden, 9th May, 1798.' "The following letter also on this subject, was received from Mr. Coleridge. LETTER 80. TO COTTLE (April, 1798.) My dear Cottle, Neither Wordsworth nor myself could have been otherwise than uncomfortable, if any but yourself had received from us the first offer of our Tragedies, and of the volume of Wordsworth's Poems. At the same time, we did not expect that you could with prudence and propriety, advance such a sum as we should want at the time we specified. In short, we both regard the publication of our Tragedies as an evil. It is not impossible but that in happier times, they may be brought on the stage: and to throw away this chance for a mere trifle, would be to make the present moment act fraudulently and usuriously towards the future time. My Tragedy employed and strained all my thoughts and faculties for six or seven months; Wordsworth consumed far more time, and far more thought, and far more genius. We consider the publication of them an evil on any terms; but our thoughts were bent on a plan for the accomplishment of which, a certain sum of money was necessary, (the whole) at that particular time, and in order to this we resolved, although reluctantly, to part with our Tragedies: that is, if we could obtain thirty guineas for each, and at less than thirty guineas Wordsworth will not part with the copyright of his volume of Poems. We shall offer the Tragedies to no one, for we have determined to procure the money some other way. If you choose the volume of Poems, at the price mentioned, to be paid at the time specified, "i.e." thirty guineas, to be paid sometime in the last fortnight of July, you may have them; but remember, my dear fellow! I write to you now merely as a bookseller, and intreat you, in your answer, to consider yourself only; as to us, although money is necessary to our plan, (that of visiting Germany) yet the plan is not necessary to our happiness; and if it were, W. could sell his Poems for that sum to someone else, or we could procure the money without selling the Poems. So I entreat you, again and again, in your answer, which must be immediate, consider yourself only. Wordsworth has been caballed against "so long and so loudly", that he has found it impossible to prevail on the tenant of the Allfoxden estate, to let him the house, after their first agreement is expired, so he must quit it at Midsummer. Whether we shall be able to procure him a house and furniture near Stowey, we know not, and yet we must: for the hills, and the woods, and the streams, and the sea, and the shores would break forth into reproaches against us, if we did not strain every nerve, to keep their poet among them. Without joking, and in serious sadness, Poole and I cannot endure to think of losing him. At all events, come down, Cottle, as soon as you can, but before Midsummer, and we will procure a horse easy as thy own soul, and we will go on a roam to Linton and Linmouth, which, if thou comest in May, will be in all their pride of woods and waterfalls, not to speak of its august cliffs, and the green ocean, and the vast Valley of Stones, all which live disdainful of the seasons, or accept new honours only from the winter's snow. At all events come down, and cease not to believe me much and affectionately your friend. S. T. COLERIDGE. [1] [Footnote 1: Letters LXXX-LXXXV follow letter 80.] "In consequence of these conjoint invitations, I spent a week with Mr. C. and Mr. W. at Allfoxden house, and during this time, (beside the reading of MS. poems) they took me to Linmouth, and Linton, and the Valley of Stones.... "At this interview it was determined, that the volume should be published under the title of "Lyrical Ballads" on the terms stipulated in a former letter: that this volume should not contain the poem of "Salisbury Plain", but only an extract from it; that it should not contain the poem of "Peter Bell", but consist rather of sundry shorter poems, and, for the most part, of pieces more recently written. I had recommended two volumes, but one was fixed on, and that to be published anonymously. It was to be begun immediately, and with the "Ancient Mariner"; which poem I brought with me to Bristol. A day or two after I received the following:" LETTER 81. TO COTTLE (May, 1798.) My dear Cottle, You know what I think of a letter, how impossible it is to argue in it. You must therefore take simple statements, and in a week or two, I shall see you, and endeavour to reason with you. Wordsworth and I have duly weighed your proposal, and this is an answer. He would not object to the publishing of "Peter Bell" or the "Salisbury Plain", singly; but to the publishing of his poems in two volumes, he is decisively repugnant and oppugnant. He deems that they would want variety, etc., etc. If this apply in his case, it applies with ten-fold more force to mine. We deem that the volumes offered to you, are, to a certain degree, one work in kind, though not in degree, as an ode is one work; and that our different poems are, as stanzas, good, relatively rather than absolutely: mark you, I say in kind, though not in degree. As to the Tragedy, when I consider it in reference to Shakespeare's, and to "one" other Tragedy, it seems a poor thing, and I care little what becomes of it. When I consider it in comparison with modern dramatists, it rises: and I think it too bad to be published, too good to be squandered. I think of breaking it up; the planks are sound, and I will build a new ship of the old materials. The dedication to the Wedgwoods, which you recommend, would be indelicate and unmeaning. If, after four or five years, I shall have finished some work of importance, which could not have been written, but in an unanxious seclusion, to them I will dedicate it; for the public will have owed the work to them who gave me the power of that unanxious seclusion. As to anonymous publications, depend on it, you are deceived. Wordsworth's name is nothing to a large number of persons; mine stinks. The "Essay on Man", the "Botanic Garden", the "Pleasures of Memory", and many other most popular works, were published anonymously. However, I waive all reasoning, and simply state it as an unaltered opinion, that you should proceed as before, with the "Ancient Mariner". The picture shall be sent.[1] For your love gifts and bookloans accept our hearty love. The "Joan of Arc" is a divine book; it opens lovelily. I hope that you will take off some half dozen of our "Poems" on great paper, even as the "Joan of Arc". Cottle, my dear Cottle, I meant to have written you an Essay on the Metaphysics of Typography, but I have not time. Take a few hints, without the abstruse reasons for them, with which I mean to favour you. 18 lines in a page, the line closely printed, certainly more closely printed than those of the "Joan";[2] ("Oh, by all means, closer, "W. Wordsworth"") equal ink, and large margins; that is beauty; it may even, under your immediate care, mingle the sublime! And now, my dear Cottle, may God love you and me, who am, with most unauthorish feelings, Your true friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. P.S.--I walked to Linton the day after you left us, and returned on Saturday. I walked in one day, and returned in one.[3] [Footnote 1: A portrait of Mr. Wordsworth, correctly and beautifully executed, by an artist then at Stowey; now in my possession. [Cottle's note.]] [Footnote 2: "Joan of Arc", 4to first edition, had twenty lines in a page. [Cottle.]] [Footnote 3: Letters LXXXVI-XCII follow 81.] Coleridge has given his account of the origin of the "Lyrical Ballads" in the fourteenth chapter of the "Biographia Literaria", and Wordsworth's account is found in the Fenwick Note to "We are Seven". An estrangement with Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd at this time took place which has been the subject of many surmises as to its origin among the biographers of Coleridge. The coldness with Lamb passed off by the beginning of 1800 when Charles wrote to Coleridge in his customary humorous vein; but Lloyd was not so soon taken back to favour. Southey joined the cabal against Coleridge and encouraged the estrangement; but he too was on friendly terms with Coleridge in the autumn of 1799. On the l4th May Coleridge's second child was born, named Berkeley, after the idealist philosopher who had now displaced Hartley, who had been in the ascendant when the first child was born. With the adoption of Berkeley as his pet philosopher, we can understand Coleridge's determination to visit Germany. He had heard rumours of the Kantean Philosophy, and wished to acquire thoroughly a knowledge of the language of the Germans principally to be able to read Kant in the original. This project Coleridge speaks of as early as 6th May, 1796 (Letter 33); but it was only now when he enjoyed the support of the Wedgwoods that he could afford to put it into execution. The volume of "Lyrical Ballads" was published in the early part of the autumn of 1798; and along with William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge set sail from Yarmouth. John Chester, a resident of Stowey, also accompanied them. Coleridge arrived at Cuxhaven on 19th September, from which place he wrote Mrs. Coleridge an account of the voyage and his first impressions of Germany. This account is more fully given in the "Letters of Satyrane" in the "Biographia Literaria". He took up his quarters at Ratzeburg, staying with the pastor of that town; while Wordsworth and his sister went to Goslar. From Ratzeburg Coleridge repaired to G�ttingen on 12th February, 1799, to attend lectures at the University. He worked hard while in Göttingen to acquire a knowledge of the literature of Germany, and made himself proficient in the dialects as well as of classical German. He met two of the Parrys, brothers of the Arctic explorer, at G�ttingen; and, later, Clement Carlyon, an Englishman from Pembroke College, joined the group. Carlyon afterwards in later life, in his "Early Years and Late Reflections", depicted Coleridge as the life and soul of the party, incessantly talking, discussing, and philosophizing, and diving into his pocket German Dictionary for the right word. Carlyon devotes 270 pages of the first volume of his book to Coleridge. Berkeley Coleridge died in February, and the news depressed Coleridge and threw his studies for some time into disorder; but the Wordsworths visited him at G�ttingen, and they had some talk about the future place of their abode in England. The Wordsworths were desirous of staying in the North of England; but Coleridge at this time had resolved to remain at Stowey, to be near Poole, in whom he felt his "anchor", as he expressed it. (J. Dykes-Campbell's "Life", chap, v.) Coleridge during his stay in Germany wrote a good many letters to his wife, to Poole, and the Wedgwoods. We can quote only two fragments from those to his wife, and the long one, "Over the Brocken". LETTER 82. TO MRS. COLERIDGE 14 Jany., 1799. The whole Lake of Ratzeburg is one mass of thick transparent ice--a spotless Mirror of nine miles in extent! The lowness of the Hills, which rise from the shores of the Lake, preclude the awful sublimity of Alpine scenery, yet compensate for the want of it by beauties, of which this very lowness is a necessary condition. Yester-morning I saw the lesser Lake completely hidden by Mist; but the moment the Sun peeped over the Hill, the mist broke in the middle, and in a few seconds stood divided, leaving a broad road all across the Lake; and between these two Walls of mist the sunlight "burnt" upon the ice, forming a road of golden fire, intolerably bright! and the mist-walls themselves partook of the blaze in a multitude of shining colours. This is our second Frost. About a month ago, before the Thaw came on, there was a storm of wind; during the whole night, such were the thunders and howlings of the breaking ice, that they have left a conviction on my mind, that there are Sounds more sublime than any Sight "can" be, more absolutely suspending the power of comparison, and more utterly absorbing the mind's self-consciousness in its total attention to the object working upon it. Part of the ice which the vehemence of the wind had shattered, was driven shore-ward and froze anew. On the evening of the next day, at sun-set, the shattered ice thus frozen, appeared of a deep blue, and in shape like an agitated sea; beyond this, the water, that ran up between the great Islands of ice which had preserved their masses entire and smooth, shone of a yellow green; but all these scattered Ice-islands, themselves, were of an intensely bright blood colour--they seemed blood and light in union! On some of the largest of these Islands, the Fishermen stood pulling out their immense Nets through the holes made in the ice for this purpose, and the Men, their Net-Poles, and their huge Nets, were a part of the glory; say rather, it appeared as if the rich crimson light had shaped itself into these forms, figures, and attitudes, to make a glorious vision in mockery of earthly things. The lower Lake is now all alive with Skaters, and with Ladies driven onward by them in their ice cars. Mercury, surely, was the first maker of Skates, and the wings at his feet are symbols of the invention. In skating there are three pleasing circumstances: the infinitely subtle particles of Ice, which the Skate cuts up, and which creep and run before the Skate like a low mist, and in sun-rise or sun-set become coloured; second, the shadow of the Skater in the water seen through the transparent Ice; and third, the melancholy undulating sound from the Skate, not without variety; and when very many are skating together, the sounds and the noises give an impulse to the icy Trees, and the woods all round the Lake "tinkle"![1] [Footnote 1: Letter XCIII repeats 82, XCIV-XCVI follow.] LETTER 83. TO MRS. COLERIDGE Ratzeburg, 23 April, 1799. There is a Christmas custom here which pleased and interested me.--The Children make little presents to their Parents, and to each other; and the Parents to the Children. For three or four months before Christmas the Girls are all busy, and the Boys save up their pocket-money, to make or purchase these presents. What the Present is to be is cautiously kept secret, and the Girls have a world of contrivances to conceal it--such as working when they are out on visits and the others are not with them; getting up in the morning before day-light, etc. Then on the evening before Christmas day one of the Parlours is lighted up by the Children, into which the Parents must not go: a great yew bough is fastened on the Table at a little distance from the wall, a multitude of little Tapers are fastened in the bough, but not so as to burn it till they are nearly burnt out, and coloured paper, etc. hangs and flutters from the twigs.--Under this Bough the Children lay out in great order the presents they mean for their Parents, still concealing in their pockets what they intend for each other. Then the Parents are introduced--and each presents his little Gift--and then bring out the rest one by one from their pockets, and present them with kisses and embraces.--Where I witnessed this scene, there were eight or nine Children, and the eldest Daughter and the Mother wept aloud for joy and tenderness; and the tears ran down the face of the Father, and he clasped all his Children so tight to his breast--it seemed as if he did it to stifle the sob that was rising within him.--I was very much affected.--The Shadow of the Bough and its appendages on the wall, and arching over on the Ceiling, made a pretty Picture--and then the raptures of the "very" little Ones, when at last the twigs and their needles began to take fire and "snap"--O it was a delight for them!--On the next day, in the great Parlour, the Parents lay out on the table the Presents for the Children: a scene of more sober joy succeeds, as on this day, after an old custom, the Mother says privately to each of her Daughters, and the Father to his Sons, that which he has observed most praise-worthy and that which was most faulty in their conduct.--Formerly, and still in all the smaller Towns and Villages throughout North Germany, these Presents were sent by all the Parents to some one Fellow who in high Buskins, a white Robe, a Mask, and an enormous flax Wig, personates Knecht Rupert, i.e. the Servant Rupert. On Christmas Night he goes round to every House and says, that Jesus Christ, his Master, sent him thither--the Parents and elder Children receive him with great pomp of reverence, while the little ones are most terribly frightened--He then enquires for the Children, and according to the character which he hears from the Parent, he gives them the intended Present, as if they came out of Heaven from Jesus Christ.--Or, if they should have been bad Children, he gives the Parents a Rod, and in the name of his Master, recommends them to use it frequently.--About seven or eight years old the Children are let into the secret, and it is curious how faithfully they keep it![1] ["Over the Brocken" must occupy a chapter of itself.] [Footnote 1: Letter XCVII repeats 83, XCVIII follows.] CHAPTER VII THE RELIGION OF THE PINEWOODS Coleridge called the letters from Germany which he published in "The Friend" of 1809 the "Letters of Satyrane". He was fond of masquerading under the name of this allegorical personage of the "Faery Queen"; and in his "Tombless Epitaph" he described himself as Idolocrastes Satyrane. Under this disguise he looked upon himself as the spokesman of the Idea of the Omnipresence of the Deity. In order to appreciate the following beautiful letter, one of the finest Coleridge ever wrote, the reader should peruse Coleridge's "Aeolian Harp", "Lines written on leaving a Place of Retirement", "The Lime-Tree Bower", and Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey". Wordsworth's sonnet, "It is a beauteous evening", and Coleridge's own "Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni", also belong to the same feeling for the God of Nature, but they were composed after the letter "Over the Brocken". Clement Carlyon, who is the chief authority for the life of Coleridge during his stay at G�ttingen, gives a lively account of the ascent of the Brocken, which took place on Whit Sunday, 12th May 1799. The party visited the "magic circle of stones where the fairies assembled," and halted for the first time at the village of Satzfeld, a romantic village, "a bright moonlight at night, and the nightingale heard." Coleridge was in high spirits, and kept talking all the way, discoursing on his favourite topics. Sublimity was defined as a "suspension of the powers of comparison"; "no animal but man can be struck with wonder"; Shakespeare owed his success largely to the cheering breath of popular applause, the enthusiastic gale of admiration. The English Divines were applauded by Coleridge, Jeremy Taylor prominently; and a play by Hans Sachs was preferred to a play of Kotzebue; from which he launched into a discourse on Miracle plays. Coleridge's conversation was peppered with puns, some of which Carlyon quotes. Carlyon also notices that their course up the mountain was impeded by stunted firs; and he describes the dancing party of peasants with whom Coleridge was so much taken. The party returned to Gottingen on 18th May. Coleridge had written the day before to his wife. LETTER 84. TO MRS. COLERIDGE Clausthal, 17 May 1799. Through roads no way rememberable, we came to Gieloldshausen, over a bridge, on which was a mitred statue with a great crucifix in its arms. The village, long and ugly; but the church, like most Catholic churches, interesting; and this being Whitsun Eve, all were crowding to it, with their mass-books and rosaries, the little babies commonly with coral crosses hanging on the breast. Here we took a guide, left the village, ascended a hill, and now the woods rose up before us in a verdure which surprised us like a sorcery. The spring had burst forth with the suddenness of a Russian summer. As we left Gottingen there were buds, and here and there a tree half green; but here were woods in full foliage, distinguished from summer only by the exquisite freshness of their tender green. We entered the wood through a beautiful mossy path; the moon above us blending with the evening light, and every now and then a nightingale would invite the others to sing, and some or other commonly answered, and said, as we suppose, "It is yet somewhat too early!" for the song was not continued. We came to a square piece of greenery, completely walled on all four sides by the beeches; again entered the wood, and having travelled about a mile, emerged from it into a grand plain--mountains in the distance, but ever by our road the skirts of the green woods. A very rapid river ran by our side; and now the nightingales were all singing, and the tender verdure grew paler in the moonlight, only the smooth parts of the river were still deeply purpled with the reflections from the fiery light in the west. So surrounded and so impressed, we arrived at Prele, a dear little cluster of houses in the middle of a semicircle of woody hills; the area of the semicircle scarcely broader than the breadth of the village. * * * * * We afterwards ascended another hill, from the top of which a large plain opened before us with villages. A little village, Neuhoff, lay at the foot of it: we reached it, and then turned up through a valley on the left hand. The hills on both sides the valley were prettily wooded, and a rapid lively river ran through it. So we went for about two miles, and almost at the end of the valley, or rather of its first turning, we found the village of Lauterberg. Just at the entrance of the village, two streams come out from two deep and woody coombs, close by each other, meet, and run into a third deep woody coomb opposite; before you a wild hill, which seems the end and barrier of the valley; on the right hand, low hills, now green with corn, and now wooded; and on the left a most majestic hill indeed--the effect of whose simple outline painting could not give, and how poor a thing are words! We pass through this neat little town--the majestic hill on the left hand soaring over the houses, and at every interspace you see the whole of it--its beeches, its firs, its rocks, its scattered cottages, and the one neat little pastor's house at the foot, embosomed in fruit-trees all in blossom, the noisy coomb-brook dashing close by it. We leave the valley, or rather, the first turning on the left, following a stream; and so the vale winds on, the river still at the foot of the woody hills, with every now and then other smaller valleys on right and left crossing our vale, and ever before you the woody hills running like groves one into another. We turned and turned, and entering the fourth curve of the vale, we found all at once that we had been ascending. The verdure vanished! All the beech trees were leafless, and so were the silver birches, whose boughs always, winter and summer, hang so elegantly. But low down in the valley, and in little companies on each bank of the river, a multitude of green conical fir trees, with herds of cattle wandering about, almost every one with a cylindrical bell around its neck, of no inconsiderable size, and as they moved--scattered over the narrow vale, and up among the trees on the hill--the noise was like that of a great city in the stillness of a sabbath morning, when the bells all at once are ringing for church. The whole was a melancholy and romantic scene, that was quite new to me. Again we turned, passed three smelting houses, which we visited; a scene of terrible beauty is a furnace of boiling metal, darting, every moment blue, green, and scarlet lightning, like serpents' tongues!--and now we ascended a steep hill, on the top of which was St. Andrias Berg, a town built wholly of wood. We descended again, to ascend far higher; and now we came to a most beautiful road, which winded on the breast of the hill, from whence we looked down into a deep valley, or huge basin, full of pines and firs; the opposite hills full of pines and frs; and the hill above us, on whose breast we were winding, likewise full of pines and firs. The valley, or basin, on our right hand, into which we looked down, is called the Wald Rauschenbach, that is, the Valley of the Roaring Brook; and roar it did, indeed, most solemnly! The road on which we walked was weedy with infant fir-trees, an inch or two high; and now, on our left hand, came before us a most tremendous precipice of yellow and black rock, called the Rehberg, that is, the Mountain of the Roe. Now again is nothing but firs and pines above, below, around us! How awful is the deep unison of their undividable murmur; what a one thing it is--it is a sound that impresses the dim notion of the Omnipresent! In various parts of the deep vale below us, we beheld little dancing waterfalls gleaming through the branches, and now, on our left hand, from the very summit of the hill above us, a powerful stream flung itself down, leaping and foaming, and now concealed, and now not concealed, and now half concealed by the fir-trees, till, towards the road, it became a visible sheet of water, within whose immediate neighbourhood no pine could have permanent abiding place. The snow lay every where on the sides of the roads, and glimmered in company with the waterfall foam, snow patches and waterbreaks glimmering through the branches in the hill above, the deep basin below, and the hill opposite. Over the high opposite hills, so dark in their pine forests, a far higher round barren stony mountain looked in upon the prospect from a distant country. Through this scenery we passed on, till our road was crossed by a second waterfall, or rather, aggregation of little dancing waterfalls, one by the side of the other for a considerable breadth, and all came at once out of the dark wood above, and rolled over the mossy rock fragments, little firs, growing in islets, scattered among them. The same scenery continued till we came to the Oder Seich, a lake, half made by man, and half by nature. It is two miles in length, and but a few hundred yards in breadth, and winds between banks, or rather through walls, of pine trees. It has the appearance of a most calm and majestic river. It crosses the road, goes into a wood, and there at once plunges itself down into a most magnificent cascade, and runs into the vale, to which it gives the name of the "Vale of the Roaring Brook." We descended into the vale, and stood at the bottom of the cascade, and climbed up again by its side. The rocks over which it plunged were unusually wild in their shape, giving fantastic resemblances of men and animals, and the fir-boughs by the side were kept almost in a swing, which unruly motion contrasted well with the stern quietness of the huge forest-sea every where else. * * * * * In nature all things are individual, but a word is but an arbitrary character for a whole class of things; so that the same description may in almost all cases be applied to twenty different appearances; and in addition to the difficulty of the thing itself, I neither am, nor ever was, a good hand at description. I see what I write, but, alas! I cannot write what I see. From the Oder Seich we entered a second wood; and now the snow met us in large masses, and we walked for two miles knee-deep in it, with an inexpressible fatigue, till we came to the mount called Little Brocken; here even the firs deserted us, or only now and then a patch of them, wind-shorn, no higher than one's knee, matted and cowering to the ground, like our thorn bushes on the highest sea-hills. The soil was plashy and boggy; we descended and came to the foot of the Great Brocken without a river--the highest mountain in all the north of Germany, and the seat of innumerable superstitions. On the first of May all the witches dance here at midnight; and those who go may see their own ghosts walking up and down, with a little billet on the back, giving the names of those who had wished them there; for "I wish you on the top of the Brocken," is a common curse throughout the whole empire. Well, we ascended--the soil boggy--and at last reached the height, which is 573 toises [1] above the level of the sea. We visited the Blocksberg, a sort of bowling-green, enclosed by huge stones, something like those at Stonehenge, and this is the witches' ball-room; thence proceeded to the house on the hill, where we dined; and now we descended. In the evening about seven we arrived at Elbingerode. At the inn they brought us an album, or stammbuch, requesting that we would write our names, and something or other as a remembrance that we had been there. I wrote the following lines, which contain a true account of my journey from the Brocken to Elbingerode. I stood on Brocken's sovran height, and saw Woods crowding upon woods, hills over hills; A surging scene, and only limited By the blue distance. Wearily my way Downward I dragged, through fir groves evermore Where bright green moss moved in sepulchral forms, Speckled with sunshine; and, but seldom heard, The sweet bird's song become a hollow sound; And the gale murmuring indivisibly, Reserved its solemn murmur, more distinct From many a note of many a waterbreak, And the brook's chatter; on whose islet stones The dingy kidling, with its tinkling bell, Leapt frolicksome, or old romantic goat Sat, his white beard slow waving. I moved on With low and languid thought, for I had found That grandest scenes have but imperfect charms Where the eye vainly wanders, nor beholds One spot with which the heart associates Holy remembrances of child or friend, Or gentle maid, our first and early love, Or father, or the venerable name Of our adored country. O thou Queen, Thou delegated Deity of Earth, O "dear, dear" England! how my longing eyes Turned westward, shaping in the steady clouds Thy sands and high white cliffs! Sweet native isle, This heart was proud, yea, mine eyes swam with tears To think of thee; and all the goodly view From sovran Brocken, woods and woody hills Floated away, like a departing dream, Feeble and dim. Stranger, these impulses Blame thou not lightly; nor will I profane, With hasty judgment or injurious doubt, That man's sublimer spirit, who can feel That God is every where, the God who framed Mankind to be one mighty brotherhood, Himself our Father, and the world our home. We left Elbingerode, May 14th, and travelled for half a mile through a wild country, of bleak stony hills by our side, with several caverns, or rather mouths of caverns, visible in their breasts; and now we came to Rubilland,--Oh, it was a lovely scene! Our road was at the foot of low hills, and here were a few neat cottages; behind us were high hills, with a few scattered firs, and flocks of goats visible on the topmost crags. On our right hand a fine shallow river about thirty yards broad, and beyond the river a crescent hill clothed with firs, that rise one above another, like spectators in an amphitheatre. We advanced a little farther,--the crags behind us ceased to be visible, and now the whole was one and complete. All that could be seen was the cottages at the foot of the low green hill, (cottages embosomed in fruit trees in blossom,) the stream, and the little crescent of firs. I lingered here, and unwillingly lost sight of it for a little while. The firs were so beautiful, and the masses of rocks, walls, and obelisks started up among them in the very places where, if they had not been, a painter with a poet's feeling would have imagined them. Crossed the river (its name Bodi), entered the sweet wood, and came to the mouth of the cavern, with the man who shews it. It was a huge place, eight hundred feet in length, and more in depth, of many different apartments; and the only thing that distinguished it from other caverns was, that the guide, who was really a character, had the talent of finding out and seeing uncommon likenesses in the different forms of the stalactite. Here was a nun;--this was Solomon's temple;--that was a Roman Catholic Chapel;--here was a lion's claw, nothing but flesh and blood wanting to make it completely a claw! This was an organ, and had all the notes of an organ, etc. etc. etc.; but, alas! with all possible straining of my eyes, ears, and imagination, I could see nothing but common stalactite, and heard nothing but the dull ding of common cavern stones. One thing was really striking;--a huge cone of stalactite hung from the roof of the largest apartment, and, on being struck, gave perfectly the sound of a death-bell. I was behind, and heard it repeatedly at some distance, and the effect was very much in the fairy kind,--gnomes, and things unseen, that toll mock death-bells for mock funerals. After this, a little clear well and a black stream pleased me the most; and multiplied by fifty, and coloured ad libitum, might be well enough to read of in a novel or poem. We returned, and now before the inn, on the green plat around the Maypole, the villagers were celebrating Whit-Tuesday. This Maypole is hung as usual with garlands on the top, and, in these garlands, spoons, and other little valuables, are placed. The high smooth round pole is then well greased; and now he who can climb up to the top may have what he can get,--a very laughable scene as you may suppose, of awkwardness and agility, and failures on the very brink of success. Now began a dance. The women danced very well, and, in general, I have observed throughout Germany that the women in the lower ranks degenerate far less from the ideal of a woman, than the men from that of man. The dances were reels and waltzes; but chiefly the latter. This dance is, in the higher circles, sufficiently voluptuous; but here the emotions of it were far more faithful interpreters of the passion, which, doubtless, the dance was intended to shadow; yet, ever after the giddy round and round is over, they walked to music, the woman laying her arm, with confident affection, on the man's shoulders, or around his neck. The first couple at the waltzing was a very fine tall girl, of two or three and twenty, in the full bloom and growth of limb and feature, and a fellow with huge whiskers, a long tail, and woollen night-cap; he was a soldier, and from the more than usual glances of the girl, I presumed was her lover. He was, beyond compare, the gallant and the dancer of the party. Next came two boors: one of whom, in the whole contour of his face and person, and, above all, in the laughably would-be frolicksome kick out of his heel, irresistibly reminded me of Shakespeare's Slender, and the other of his Dogberry. Oh! two such faces, and two such postures! O that I were an Hogarth! What an enviable gift it is to have a genius in painting! Their partners were pretty lasses, not so tall as the former, and danced uncommonly light and airy. The fourth couple was a sweet girl of about seventeen, delicately slender, and very prettily dressed, with a full-blown rose in the white ribbon that went round her head, and confined her reddish-brown hair; and her partner waltzed with a pipe in his mouth, smoking all the while; and during the whole of this voluptuous dance, his countenance was a fair personification of true German phlegm. After these, but, I suppose, not actually belonging to the party, a little ragged girl and ragged boy, with his stockings about his heels, waltzed and danced;--waltzing and dancing in the rear most entertainingly. But what most pleased me, was a little girl of about three or four years old, certainly not more than four, who had been put to watch a little babe, of not more than a year old (for one of our party had asked), and who was just beginning to run away, the girl teaching him to walk, and who was so animated by the music, that she began to waltz with him, and the two babes whirled round and round, hugging and kissing each other, as if the music had made them mad. There were two fiddles and a bass viol. The fiddlers,--above all, the bass violer,--most Hogarthian phizzes! God love them! I felt far more affection for them than towards any other set of human beings I have met with since I have been in Germany, I suppose because they looked so happy! [Footnote 1: marked with an asterisk in the proofing (not the original text), but not explained further.] CHAPTER VIII RETURN TO ENGLAND; "WALLENSTEIN", AND THE "MORNING POST" On the 21st May, Coleridge wrote the following letter in which he informs Josiah Wedgwood what he had done in Germany, and what he expected to do with the knowledge which he had acquired there. LETTER 85. TO JOSIAH WEDGWOOD May 21st, 1799. Gottingen. My dear sir, I have lying by my side six huge letters, with your name on each of them, and all, excepting one, have been written for these three months. About this time Mr. Hamilton, by whom I send this and the little parcel for my wife, was, as it were, setting off for England; and I seized the opportunity of sending them by him, as without any mock-modesty I really thought that the expense of the postage to me and to you would be more than their worth. Day after day, and week after week, was Hamilton going, and still delayed. And now that it is absolutely settled that he goes to-morrow, it is likewise absolutely settled that I shall go this day three weeks, and I have therefore sent only this and the picture by him, but the letters I will now take myself, for I should not like them to be lost, as they comprise the only subject on which I have had an opportunity of making myself thoroughly informed, and if I carry them myself, I can carry them without danger of their being seized at Yarmouth, as all my letters were, yours to ---- excepted, which were, luckily, not sealed. Before I left England, I had read the book of which you speak. [1] I must confess that it appeared to me exceedingly illogical. Godwin's and Condorcet's extravagancies were not worth confuting; and yet I thought that the Essay on "Population" had not confuted them. Professor Wallace, Derham, and a number of German statistic and physico-theological writers had taken the same ground, namely, that population increases in a geometrical, but the accessional nutriment only in arithmetical ratio--and that vice and misery, the natural consequences of this order of things, were intended by providence as the counterpoise. I have here no means of procuring so obscure a book, as Rudgard's; but to the best of my recollection, at the time that the Fifth Monarchy enthusiasts created so great a sensation in England, under the Protectorate, and the beginning of Charles the Second's reign, Rudgard, or Rutgard (I am not positive even of the name) wrote an Essay to the same purpose, in which he asserted, that if war, pestilence, vice, and poverty, were wholly removed, the world could not exist two hundred years, etc. Seiffmilts, [2] in his great work concerning the divine order and regularity in the destiny of the human race, has a chapter entitled a confutation of this idea; I read it with great eagerness, and found therein that this idea militated against the glory and goodness of God, and must therefore be false,--but further confutation found I none!--This book of Seiffmilts has a prodigious character throughout Germany; and never methinks did a work less deserve it. It is in three huge octavos, and wholly on the general laws that regulate the population of the human species--but is throughout most unphilosophical, and the tables, which he has collected with great industry, prove nothing. My objections to the Essay on Population you will find in my sixth letter at large--but do not, my dear sir, suppose that because unconvinced by this essay, I am therefore convinced of the contrary. No, God knows, I am sufficiently sceptical, and in truth more than sceptical, concerning the possibility of universal plenty and wisdom; but my doubts rest on other grounds. I had some conversation with you before I left England, on this subject; and from that time I had purposed to myself to examine as thoroughly as it was possible for me, the important question. Is the march of the human race progressive, or in cycles? But more of this when we meet. What have I done in Germany? I have learned the language, both high and low German, I can read both, and speak the former so fluently, that it must be a fortune for a German to be in my company, that is, I have words enough and phrases enough, and I arrange them tolerably; but my pronunciation is hideous. 2ndly, I can read the oldest German, the Frankish, and the Swabian. 3rdly. I have attended the lectures on Physiology, Anatomy, and Natural History, with regularity, and have endeavoured to understand these subjects. 4thly, I have read and made collections for a history of the "Belles Lettres," in Germany, before the time of Lessing: and 5thly, very large collections for a "Life of Lessing"; to which I was led by the miserably bad and unsatisfactory biographies that have been hitherto given, and by my personal acquaintance with two of Lessing's friends. Soon after I came into Germany, I made up my mind fully not to publish anything concerning my Travels, as people call them; yet I soon perceived that with all possible economy, my expenses would be greater than I could justify, unless I did something that would to a moral certainty repay them. I chose the "Life of Lessing" for the reasons above assigned, and because it would give me an opportunity of conveying under a better name than my own ever will be, opinions which I deem of the highest importance. Accordingly, my main business at Gottingen has been to read all the numerous controversies in which Lessing was engaged, and the works of all those German poets before the time of Lessing, which I could not afford to buy. For these last four months, with the exception of last week, in which I visited the Hartz, I have worked harder than I trust in God Almighty I shall ever have occasion to work again: this endless transcription is such a body-and-soul-wearying purgatory. I shall have bought thirty pounds' worth of books, chiefly metaphysics, and with a view to the one work, to which I hope to dedicate in silence, the prime of my life; but I believe and indeed doubt not, that before Christmas I shall have repaid myself. [3] I never, to the best of my recollection, felt the fear of death but once; that was yesterday when I delivered the picture to Hamilton. I felt, and shivered as I felt it, that I should not like to die by land or water before I see my wife and the little one; that I hope yet remains to me. But it was an idle sort of feeling, and I should not like to have it again. Poole half mentioned, in a hasty way, a circumstance that depressed my spirits for many days:--that you and Thomas were on the point of settling near Stowey, but had abandoned it. "God Almighty! what a dream of happiness it held out to me!" writes Poole. I felt disappointment without having had hope. In about a month I hope to see you. Till then may heaven bless and preserve us! Believe me, my dear sir, with every feeling of love, esteem, and gratitude, Your affectionate friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. (Josiah Wedgwood, Esq.) [4] [Footnote l: Malthas on Population, 1798.] [Footnote 2: Should be Syssmilch.] [Footnote 3: Cottle here omits a part of this letter about pecuniary matters.] [Footnote 4: Letters XCIX-CIII follow Letter 85.] It is interesting to compare this letter with that to Poole of 6th May 1796; it will be seen that Coleridge thus carried out his project of three years before. He had been able to convince the Wedgwoods of the desirability of introducing a knowledge of the German philosophy into England to refute the philosophy of Hume and expose the shallowness of the metaphysics of Locke and the Paley School of Theology. Tom Wedgwood was himself a philosopher, and saw in Coleridge the champion of a new basis of faith, and hence the friendship between them, and the support of the Wedgwoods to Coleridge in carrying out his self-education. Coleridge returned to England about a month after the Wordsworths, in July, 1799, and he reached Stowey before the 29th, when he wrote to Southey, and the two worked in concert for the publication of an annual started as the 'Annual Anthology', of which two volumes appeared, one in 1799 and one in 1800, Coleridge contributing some of his poems to the latter. 'The Devil's Thoughts', a conjoint squib which caused some sensation was sent to the 'Morning Post' on 6th September. Coleridge spent a part of the Autumn of 1799 at Ottery St. Mary visiting his mother and brothers. Coleridge then went to Southey at Exeter, and they visited the ash dells round about Dartmoor together ('Letters', 305). Coleridge also saw Josiah Wedgwood at his seat of Upcott on his way home; and on 15th October we find him back at Stowey ('Letters', 307). Still later he went north to see Wordsworth who was staying at Sockburn on the Tees with the Hutchinsons. Cottle accompanied them as far as Greta Bridge, where John Wordsworth joined their company. Coleridge and William and John Wordsworth then went on tour to the Lake District, visiting Grasmere, when Wordsworth made arrangements to take a house at Townend (now known as Dove Cottage), and came back to Sockburn (Knight's 'Life of Wordsworth', chap. xii). It was at Sockburn that Coleridge first met Sarah Hutchinson; and here it is conjectured he wrote his beautiful poem 'Love', which appeared in its first form in the 'Morning Post', on 21st December 1799, prefaced with the following letter. LETTER 86. TO THE EDITOR OF THE 'MORNING POST' WITH THE POEM 'LOVE', FIRST PUBLISHED AS 'INTRODUCTION TO THE TALE OF THE DARK LADIE'. 21 December, 1799. Sir, The following poem is the introduction to a somewhat longer one, for which I shall solicit insertion on your next open day. The use of the old ballad word 'Ladie' for Lady, is the only piece of obsoleteness in it; and as it is professedly a tale of ancient times, I trust that "the affectionate lovers of venerable antiquity," (as Cambden says) will grant me their pardon, and perhaps may be induced to admit a force and propriety in it. A heavier objection may be adduced against the Author, that in these times of fear and expectation, when novelties 'explode' around us in all directions, he should presume to offer to the public a silly tale of old-fashioned love; and five years ago, I own, I should have allowed and felt the force of this objection. But, alas! explosion has succeeded explosion so rapidly that novelty itself ceases to appear new; and it is possible that now, even a simple story wholly unspiced with politics or personality, may find some attention amid the hubbub of Revolutions, as to those who have remained a long time by the falls of Niagara, the lowest whispering becomes distinctly audible. S. T. COLERIDGE.[1] [Footnote 1: Letter CIV follows 86.] This was followed on 10th January 1800 by the political verses 'Talleyrand to Lord Grenville', heralded by a letter as good as, if not better than, the verses. LETTER 87. TO THE EDITOR OF THE 'MORNING POST'. WITH 'TALLEYRAND TO LORD GRENVILLE', A METRICAL EPISTLE. 10 January, 1800. Mr. Editor, An unmetrical letter from Talleyrand to Lord Grenville has already appeared, and from an authority too high to be questioned: otherwise I could adduce some arguments for the exclusive authenticity of the following metrical epistle. The very epithet which the wise ancients used, "'aurea carmina'" might have been supposed likely to have determined the choice of the French minister in favour of verse; and the rather when we recollect that this phrase of "golden verses" is applied emphatically to the works of that philosopher who imposed 'silence' on all with whom he had to deal. Besides, is it not somewhat improbable that Talleyrand should have preferred prose to rhyme, when the latter alone 'has got the chink'? Is it not likewise curious that in our official answer no notice whatever is taken of the Chief Consul, Bonaparte, as if there had been no such person existing; notwithstanding that his existence is pretty generally admitted, nay that some have been so rash as to believe that he has created as great a sensation in the world as Lord Grenville, or even the Duke of Portland? But the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Talleyrand, 'is' acknowledged, which, in our opinion, could not have happened had he written only that insignificant prose letter, which seems to precede Bonaparte's, as in old romances a dwarf always ran before to proclaim the advent or arrival of knight or giant. That Talleyrand's character and practices more resemble those of some 'regular' Governments than Bonaparte's I admit; but this of itself does not appear a satisfactory explanation. However, let the letter speak for itself. The second line is supererogative in syllables, whether from the oscitancy of the transcriber, or from the trepidation which might have overpowered the modest Frenchman, on finding himself in the act of writing to so 'great' a man, I shall not dare to determine. A few notes are added by, Your servant, GNOME. P.S.--As mottoes are now fashionable, especially if taken from out of the way books, you may prefix, if you please, the following lines from Sidonius Apollinaris: Saxa, et robora, corneasque fibras Mollit dulciloquiâ canorus arte! Coleridge had arrived in London in the end of November (Dyke-Campbell's 'Life', 105); and Mrs. Coleridge and Hartley were also at 21, Buckingham Street, Strand, on 9th December ('Letters', 318). He was now a regular contributor to the 'Morning Post', Stuart, the proprietor paying all expenses ('Letters', 310),[1] Coleridge, too, had made the acquaintance of Godwin ('Letters', p. 316), whom he had castigated in the 'Watchman', and who, he says, "is no great things in intellects; but in heart and manner he is all the better for having been the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft" ('Letters', 316). He began a correspondence with Godwin, and of the eighteen letters by Coleridge to him we are enabled to give nine. Lamb was the means of drawing Coleridge and Godwin together, and in Lamb's letters of this period ('Ainger', i, 111, 113, 115), we find glimpses of Coleridge while engaged on his translation of 'Wallenstein'. While in London Coleridge did not neglect his friends elsewhere; we have interesting letters to the Wedgwoods, Poole, and Southey. The next three letters are from London. [Footnote 1: For an account of Coleridge as a journalist see Mr. H. D. Traill's 'Life of Coleridge', p. 79.] LETTER 88. TO THOMAS WEDGWOOD 21, Buckingham Street, Strand, January, 1800. My dear sir, I am sitting by a fire in a rug great coat. Your room is doubtless to a greater degree air tight than mine, or your notions of Tartarus would veer round to the Greenlander's creed. It is most barbarously cold, and you, I fear, can shield yourself from it, only by perpetual imprisonment. If any place in the southern climates were in a state of real quiet, and likely to continue so, should you feel no inclination to migrate? Poor Southey, from over great industry, as I suspect, the industry too of solitary composition, has reduced himself to a terrible state of weakness, and is determined to leave this country as soon as he has finished the poem on which he is now employed. 'Tis a melancholy thing that so young a man, and one whose life has ever been so simple and self-denying * * * O, for a peace, and the south of France! I could almost wish for a Bourbon king, if it were only that Sieyes and Buonaparte might finish their career in the old orthodox way of hanging. Thank God, "I have my health perfectly", and I am working hard; yet the present state of human affairs presses on me for days together, so as to deprive me of all my cheerfulness. It is probable that a man's private and personal connexions and interests ought to be uppermost in his daily and hourly thoughts, and that the dedication of much hope and fear to subjects which are perhaps disproportionate to our faculties and powers, is a disease. But I have had this disease so long, and my early education was so undomestic, that I know not how to get rid of it; or even to wish to get rid of it. Life were so flat a thing without enthusiasm, that if for a moment it leaves me, I have a sort of stomach sensation attached to all my thoughts, "like those which succeed to the pleasurable operations of a dose of opium". Now I make up my mind to a sort of heroism in believing the progressiveness of all nature, during the present melancholy state of humanity, and on this subject "I am now writing"; and no work on which I ever employed myself makes me so happy while I am writing. I shall remain in London till April. The expenses of my last year made it necessary for me to exert my industry, and many other good ends are answered at the same time. Where I next settle I shall continue, and that must be in a state of retirement and rustication. It is therefore good for me to have a run of society, and that various and consisting of marked characters. Likewise, by being obliged to write without much elaboration, I shall greatly improve myself in naturalness and facility of style, and the particular subjects on which I write for money are nearly connected with my future schemes. My mornings I give to compilations which I am sure cannot be wholly useless, and for which, by the beginning of April I shall have earned nearly £150. My evenings to the "Theatres", as I am to conduct a sort of Dramaturgy or series of Essays on the Drama, both its general principles, and likewise in reference to the present state of the English Theatres. This I shall publish in the "Morning Post". My attendance on the theatres costs me nothing, and Stuart, the Editor, covers my expenses in London. Two mornings, and one whole day, I dedicate to these Essays on the possible progressiveness of man, and on the principles of population. In April I retire to my greater works,--"The Life of Lessing". My German chests are arrived, but I have them not yet, but expect them from Stowey daily; when they come I shall send a letter. I have seen a good deal of Godwin, who has just published a Novel. I like him for thinking so well of Davy. He talks of him every where as the most extraordinary of human beings he had ever met with. I cannot say that, for I know "one" whom I feel to be the superior, but I never met with so extraordinary a "young man". I have likewise dined with Horne Tooke. He is a clear-headed old man, as every man must needs be who attends to the real import of words, but there is a sort of charlatanry in his manner that did not please me. He makes such a mystery out of plain and palpable things, and never tells you any thing without first exciting, and detaining your curiosity. But it were a bad heart that could not pardon worse faults than these in the author of "The Diversions of Purley". Believe me, my dear sir, with much affection Yours, S. T. COLERIDGE. [1] Thomas Wedgwood, Esq. [Footnote 1: Letter CV follows our No. 88.] LETTER 89. TO JOSIAH WEDGWOOD 21, Buckingham Street, Feb. 1800. My dear sir, Your brother's health (Mr. Thomas Wedgwood) outweighs all other considerations. Beyond a doubt he has made himself acquainted with the degree of heat which he is to experience there (the West Indies). The only objections that I see are so obvious, that it is idle in me to mention them: the total want of men with whose pursuits your brother can have a fellow feeling: the length and difficulty of the return, in case of a disappointment; and the necessity of sea-voyages to almost every change of scenery. I will not think of the yellow fever; that I hope is quite out of all probability. Believe me, my dear friend, I have some difficulty in suppressing all that is within me of affection and grief. God knows my heart, wherever your brother is, I shall follow him in spirit; follow him with my thoughts and most affectionate wishes. I read your letter, and did as you desired me. ---- [1] is very cool to me. Whether I have still any of the leaven of the "Citizen," and visionary about me--too much for his present zeal, or whether he is incapable of attending * * * * As to his views, he is now gone to Cambridge to canvass for a Fellowship in Trinity Hall. Mackintosh has kindly written to Dr. Lawrence, who is very intimate with the Master, and he has other interest. He is also trying hard, and in expectation of a Commissionership of Bankruptcy, and means to pursue the law with all ardour and steadiness. As to the state of his mind, it is that which it was and will be. God love him! He has a most incurable forehead. ---- [2] called on him and looking on his table, saw by accident a letter directed to himself. Said he, "Why ---- [3] what letter is this for me? and from ----." [4] "Yes I have had it some time." "Why did you not give it me?" "Oh, it wants some explanation first. You must not read it now, for I can't give you the explanation now." And ----,[5] who you know is a right easy-natured man, has not been able to get his own letter from him to this hour! Of his success at Cambridge, Caldwell, is doubtful, or more than doubtful. * * * So much of ----.[6] All that I know, and all I suspect that is to be known. A kind, gentlemanly, affectionate hearted man, possessed of an absolute talent for industry. Would to God, he had never heard of Philosophy! I have been three times to the House of Commons; each time earlier than the former; and each time hideously crowded. The two first days the debate was put off. Yesterday I went at a quarter before eight, and remained till three this morning, and then sat writing and correcting other men's writing till eight--a good twenty four hours of unpleasant activity! I have not felt myself sleepy yet. Pitt and Fox completely answered my pre-formed ideas of them. The elegance and high finish of Pitt's periods, even in the most sudden replies, is "curious," but that is all. He argues but so so, and does not reason at all. Nothing is rememberable of what he says. Fox possesses all the full and overflowing eloquence of a man of clear head, clear heart, and impetuous feelings. He is to my mind a great orator; all the rest that spoke were mere creatures. I could make a better speech myself than any that I heard, except Pitt and Fox. I reported that part of Pitt's which I have enclosed in brackets, not that I report ex-officio, but my curiosity having led me there, I did Stuart a service by taking a few notes. I work from morning to night, but in a few weeks I shall have completed my purpose, and then adieu to London for ever. We newspaper scribes are true galley-slaves. When the high winds of events blow loud and frequent then the sails are hoisted, or the ship drives on of itself. When all is calm and sunshine then to our oars. Yet it is not unflattering to a man's vanity to reflect that what he writes at twelve at night, will before twelve hours are over, have perhaps, five or six thousand readers! To trace a happy phrase, good image, or new argument, running through the town and sliding into all the papers. Few wine merchants can boast of creating more sensation. Then to hear a favourite and often-urged argument, repeated almost in your own particular phrases, in the House of Commons; and, quietly in the silent self-complacence of your own heart, chuckle over the plagiarism, as if you were monopolist of all good reasons. But seriously, considering that I have newspapered it merely as means of subsistence, while I was doing other things, I have been very lucky. "The New Constitution; The Proposal for Peace; The Irish Union;" etc. etc.; they are important in themselves, and excellent vehicles for general truths. I am not ashamed of what I have written. I desired Poole to send you all the papers antecedent to your own; I think you will like the different analyses of the French constitution. I have attended Mackintosh's lectures regularly; he was so kind as to send me a ticket, and I have not failed to profit by it. I remain, with grateful and most affectionate esteem, Your faithful friend S. T. COLERIDGE. Josiah Wedgwood, Esq.[7] [Footnote 1: Basil Montagu.] [Footnote 2: John Pinney.] [Footnote 3: Montagu.] [Footnote 4: Wordsworth.] [Footnote 5: Pinney.] [Footnote 6: Montagu.] [Footnote 7: Letters CVI-CIX follow 89.] LETTER 90. TO POOLE March, 1800. If I had the least love of money I could make almost sure of £2,000 a year, for Stuart has offered me half shares in the two papers, the "Morning Post" and "Courier", if I would devote myself with him to them. But I told him that I would not give up the country, and the lazy reading of old folios for two thousand times two thousand pound--in short that beyond £250 a year I considered money as a real evil.-- I think there are but two good ways of writing--one for immediate and wide impression, though transitory--the other for permanence. Newspapers are the first--the best one can do is the second. That middle class of translating books is neither the one nor the other. When I have settled myself "clear", I shall write nothing for money but for the newspaper. You of course will not hint a word of Stuart's offer to me. He has behaved with abundant honour and generosity. CHAPTER IX KESWICK Coleridge had determined not to live in London; his engagement with Stuart he regarded as only a temporary shift to clear off some debt which he had incurred in his visit to Germany. After a short stay with Lamb ("Ainger", i, 113), and a tour to the North to see Wordsworth (J. Dykes Campbell's "Life", 113), he returned to Stowey, writing to Godwin on 21st May. LETTER 91. TO GODWIN Wednesday, May 21, 1800. Dear Godwin, I received your letter this morning, and had I not, still I am almost confident that I should have written to you before the end of the week. Hitherto the translation of the "Wallenstein" has prevented me, not that it engrossed my time, but that it wasted and depressed my spirits, and left a sense of wearisomeness and disgust which unfitted me for anything but sleeping or immediate society. I say this because I ought to have written to you first; yet, as I am not behind you in affectionate esteem, so I would not be thought to lag in those outward and visible signs that both show and verify the inward spiritual grace. Believe me, you recur to my thoughts frequently, and never without pleasure, never without my making out of the past a little day-dream for the future. I left Wordsworth on the 4th of this month; if I cannot procure a suitable house at Stowey I return to Cumberland and settle at Keswick, in a house of such prospect that if, according to you and Hume, impressions constitute our being, I shall have a tendency to become a god, so sublime and beautiful will be the series of my visual existence. But, whether I continue here or migrate thither, I shall be in a beautiful country, and have house-room and heart-room for you, and you must come and write your next work at my house. My dear Godwin! I remember you with so much pleasure, and our conversations so distinctly, that, I doubt not, we have been mutually benefited; but as to your poetic and physiopathic feelings, I more than suspect that dear little Fanny and Mary have had more to do in that business than I. Hartley sends his love to Mary. [1] "What, and not to Fanny?" "Yes, and to Fanny, but I'll 'have' Mary." He often talks about them. My poor Lamb, how cruelly afflictions crowd upon him! I am glad that you think of him as I think: he has an affectionate heart, a mind "sui generis"; his taste acts so as to appear like the unmechanic simplicity of an instinct; in brief, he is worth an hundred men of mere talents. Conversation with the latter tribe is like the use of leaden bells--one wearies by exercise. Lamb every now and then "irradiates", and the beam, though single and fine as a hair, yet is rich with colours, and I both see and feel it. In Bristol I was much with Davy, almost all day. He always talks of you with great affection, and defends you with a friendly zeal. If I settle at Keswick he will be with me in the fall of the year, and so must you: and let me tell you, Godwin, that four such men as you, I, Davy, and Wordsworth, do not meet together in one house every day in the year--I mean four men so distinct with so many sympathies. I received yesterday a letter from Southey. He arrived at Lisbon after a prosperous voyage, on the last day of April; his letter to me is dated May-Day. He girds up his loins for a great history of Portugal, which will be translated into Portuguese in the first year of the Lusitanian Republic. Have you seen Mrs. Robinson [2] lately--how is she? Remember me in the kindest and most respectful phrases to her. I wish I knew the particulars of her complaint; for Davy has discovered a perfectly new acid by which he has restored the use of limbs to persons who had lost it for many years (one woman nine years), in cases of supposed rheumatism. At all events, Davy says, it can do no harm in Mrs. Robinson's case, and, if she will try it, he will make up a little parcel and write her a letter of instructions, etc. Tell her, and it is the truth, that Davy is exceedingly delighted with the two poems in the "Anthology". N.B. Did you get my attempt at a tragedy from Mrs. Robinson? To Mrs. Smith I am about to write a letter, with a book; be so kind as to inform me of her direction. Mrs. Inchbald I do not like at all; every time I recollect her I like her less. That segment of a look at the corner of her eye--O God in heaven! it is so cold and cunning. Through worlds of wildernesses I would run away from that look, that "heart-picking" look! 'Tis marvellous to me that you can like that woman. I shall remain here about ten days for certain. If you have leisure and inclination in that time, write; if not, I will write to you where I am going, or at all events whither I am gone. God bless you, and Your sincerely affectionate S. T. COLERIDGE. Mr. T. Poole's, N[ether] Stowey, Bridgwater. Sara desires to be remembered kindly to you, and sends a kiss to Fanny, and "dear meek little Mary." [Footnote 1: Mrs. Shelley.] [Footnote 2: The celebrated Perdita. She died in the following December.] Next month Coleridge wrote to Davy. LETTER 92. TO HUMPHRY DAVY Saturday Morning, Mr. T. Poole's, Nether Stowey, Somerset. My dear Davy, I received a very kind letter from Godwin, in which he says that he never thinks of you but with a brother's feeling of love and expectation. Indeed, I am sure he does not. I think of translating Blumenbach's Manual of Natural History: it is very well written, and would, I think, be useful both to students, as an admirable direction to their studies, and to others it would supply a general knowledge of the subject. I will state the contents of the book: 1. Of the naturalia in general, and their divisions into three kingdoms. 2. Of organised bodies in general. 3. Of animals in general. 4. Of the mammalia. 5. Birds. 6. Amphibious. 7. Fishes. 8. Insects. 9. Worms. 10. Plants. 11. Of minerals in general. 12. Of stones and earthy fossils. 13. Of mineral salts. 14. Combustible minerals. 15. Of metals. 16. Petrifactions. At the end there is an alphabetical index, so that it is at once a natural history and a dictionary of natural history. To each animal, etc., all the European names are given, with of course the scientific characteristics. I have the last edition, "i.e.", that of April, 1799. Now, I wish to know from you, whether there is in English already any work of one volume (this would make 800 pages), that renders this useless. In short, should I be right in advising Longman to undertake it? Answer me as soon as you conveniently can. Blumenbach has been no very great discoverer, though he has done some respectable things in that way, but he is a man of enormous knowledge, and has an "arranging" head. Ask Beddoes, if you do not know. When you have leisure, you would do me a great service, if you would briefly state your metaphysical system of impressions, ideas, pleasures, and pains, the laws that govern them, and the reasons which induce you to consider them as essentially distinct from each other. My motive for this request is the following:--As soon as I "settle", I shall read Spinoza and Leibnitz, and I particularly wish to know wherein they agree with, and wherein differ from you. If you will do this, I promise you to send you the result, and with it my own creed. God bless you! S. T. COLERIDGE. Blumenbach's book contains references to all the best writers on each subject. My friend, T. Poole, begs me to ask what, in your opinion, are the parts or properties in the oak which tan skins? and is cold water a complete menstruum for these parts or properties? I understand from Poole that nothing is so little understood as the chemical theory of tan, though nothing is of more importance in the circle of manufactures; in other words, does oak bark give out to cold water all those of its parts which tan? Coleridge and his family at last settled down at Greta Hall in July, 1800, and he thus writes to Josiah Wedgwood of the event. LETTER 93. To JOSIAH WEDGWOOD July 24, 1800. My dear sir, I find your letter on my arrival at Grasmere, namely, dated on the 29th of June, since which time to the present, with the exception of the last few days, I have been more unwell than I have ever been since I left school. For many days I was forced to keep my bed, and when released from that incarceration, I suffered most grievously from a brace of swollen eyelids, and a head into which, on the least agitation, the blood was felt as rushing in and flowing back again, like the raking of the tide on a coast of loose stones. However, thank God, I am now coming about again. That Tom receives such pleasure from natural scenery strikes me as it does you. The total incapability which I have found in myself to associate any but the most languid feelings, with the God-like objects which have surrounded me, and the nauseous efforts to impress my admiration into the service of nature, has given me a sympathy with his former state of health, which I never before could have had. I wish, from the bottom of my soul, that he may be enjoying similar pleasures with those which I am now enjoying with all that newness of sensation; that voluptuous correspondence of the blood and flesh about me with breeze and sun-heat, which makes convalescence more than repay one for disease. I parted from Poole with pain and dejection, for him, and for myself in him. I should have given Stowey a decided preference for a residence. It was likewise so conveniently situated, that I was in the way of almost all whom I love and esteem. But there was no suitable house, and no prospect of a suitable house. * * * These things would have weighed as nothing, could I have remained at Stowey, but now they come upon me to diminish my regret. Add to this, Poole's determination to spend a year or two on the continent, in case of a peace and his mother's death. God in heaven bless her! I am sure she will not live long. This is the first day of my arrival at Keswick. My house is roomy, situated on an eminence, a furlong from the town; before it an enormous garden, more than two-thirds of which is rented as a garden for sale articles; but the walks are ours. Completely behind the house are shrubberies, and a declivity planted with flourishing trees of ten or fifteen years' growth, at the bottom of which is a most delightful shaded walk, by the river Greta, a quarter of a mile in length. The room in which I sit commands from one window the Bassenthwaite lake, woods, and mountains. From the opposite, the Derwentwater and fantastic mountains of Borrowdale. Straight before is a wilderness of mountains, catching and streaming lights and shadows at all times. Behind the house, and entering into all our views, is Skiddaw. My acquaintances here are pleasant, and at some distance is Sir Guilfred Lawson's seat, with a very large and expensive library, to which I have every reason to hope that I shall have free access. But when I have been settled here a few days longer, I will write you a minute account of my situation. Wordsworth lives twelve miles distant. In about a year's time he will probably settle at Keswick likewise. It is no small advantage here, that for two-thirds of the year we are in complete retirement. The other third is alive and swarms with tourists of all shapes, and sizes, and characters. It is the very place I would recommend to a novelist or farce writer. Besides, at that time of the year there is always hope that a friend may be among the number and miscellaneous crowd, whom this place attracts. So much for Keswick. Have you seen my translation of "Wallenstein". It is a dull heavy play, but I entertain hopes that you will think the language for the greater part, natural, and good common sense English; to which excellence, if I can lay fair claim in any work of poetry or prose, I shall be a very singular writer, at least. I am now working at my "Introduction of the Life of Lessing", which I trust will be in the press before Christmas, that is, the "Introduction", which will be published first. God bless you, S. T. COLERIDGE. Josiah Wedgwood, Esq. To Davy Coleridge wrote on the succeeding day. LETTER 94. TO DAVY Keswick, Friday Evening, July 25, 1800. My dear Davy Work hard, and if success do not dance up like the bubbles in the salt (with the spirit lamp under it), may the Devil and his dam take success! My dear fellow! from the window before me there is a great "camp" of mountains. Giants seem to have pitched their tents there. Each mountain is a giant's tent, and how the light streams from them. Davy! I "ache" for you to be with us. W. Wordsworth is such a lazy fellow, that I bemire myself by making promises for him: the moment I received your letter, I wrote to him. He will, I hope, write immediately to Biggs and Cottle. At all events, those poems must not as yet be delivered up to them, because that beautiful poem, "The Brothers", which I read to you in Paul Street, I neglected to deliver to you, and that must begin the volume. I trust, however, that I have invoked the sleeping bard with a spell so potent, that he will awake and deliver up that sword of Argantyr, which is to rive the enchanter "Gaudyverse" from his crown to his foot. What did you think of that case I translated for you from the German? That I was a well-meaning sutor who had ultra-crepidated[1] with more zeal than wisdom!! I give myself credit for that word "ultra- crepidated," it started up in my brain like a creation. I write to Tobin by this post. Godwin is gone Irelandward, on a visit to Curran, says the "Morning Post"; to Grattan, writes C. Lamb. We drank tea the night before I left Grasmere, on the island in that lovely lake; our kettle swung over the fire, hanging from the branch of a fir-tree, and I lay and saw the woods, and mountains, and lake all trembling, and as it were idealized through the suble smoke, which rose up from the clear, red embers of the fir-apples which we had collected: afterwards we made a glorious bonfire on the margin, by some elder bushes, whose twigs heaved and sobbed in the uprushing column of smoke, and the image of the bonfire, and of us that danced round it, ruddy, laughing faces in the twilight; the image of this in a lake, smooth as that sea, to whose waves the Son of God had said, "Peace!" May God, and all his sons, love you as I do. S. T. COLERIDGE. Sara desires her kind remembrances. Hartley is a spirit that dances on an aspen leaf; the air that yonder sallowfaced and yawning tourist is breathing, is to my babe a perpetual nitrous oxide. Never was more joyous creature born. Pain with him is so wholly transubstantiated by the joys that had rolled on before, and rushed on after, that oftentimes five minutes after his mother has whipt him, he has gone up and asked her to whip him again.[2] [Footnote 1: "Ne sutor ultra crepidam."] [Footnote 2: Letter CX follows No. 94.] Coleridge was now as enamoured of the Lake District as he had been of Stowey. On 22nd September he wrote to Godwin. LETTER 95. TO GODWIN Monday, Sept. 22, 1800. Dear Godwin, I received your letter, and with it the enclosed note,[1] which shall be punctually re-delivered to you on the first of October. Your tragedy [2] to be exhibited at Christmas! I have, indeed, merely read through your letter; so it is not strange that my heart continues beating out of time. Indeed, indeed Godwin, such a stream of hope and fear rushed in on me, as I read the sentence, as you would not permit yourself to feel! If there be anything yet undreamt of in our philosophy; if it be, or if it be possible, that thought can impel thought out of the usual limit of a man's own skull and heart; if the cluster of ideas which constitute an identity, do ever connect and unite into a greater whole; if feelings could ever propagate themselves without the servile ministrations of undulating air or reflected light; I seem to feel within myself a strength and a power of desire that might dart a modifying, commanding impulse on a whole theatre. What does all this mean? Alas! that sober sense should know no other way to construe all this, than by the tame phrase, I wish you success! That which Lamb informed you is founded on truth. Mr. Sheridan sent, through the medium of Stuart, a request to Wordsworth to present a tragedy to his stage; and to me a declaration, that the failure of my piece was owing to my obstinacy in refusing any alteration. I laughed and Wordsworth smiled; but my tragedy will remain at Keswick, and Wordsworth's is not likely to emigrate from Grasmere. Wordsworth's drama is, in its present state, not fit for the stage, and he is not well enough to submit to the drudgery of making it so. Mine is fit for nothing, except to excite in the minds of good men the hope "that the young man is likely to do better." In the first moments I thought of re-writing it, and sent to Lamb for the copy with this intent. I read an Act, and altered my opinion, and with it my wish. Your feelings respecting Baptism are, I suppose, much like mine! At times I dwell on Man with such reverence, resolve all his follies into such grand primary laws of intellect, and in such wise so contemplate them as ever-varying incarnations of the Eternal Life--that the Llama's dung-pellet, or the cow-tail which the dying Brahmin clutches convulsively, become sanctified and sublime by the feelings which cluster round them. In that mood I exclaim, my boys shall be christened! But then another fit of moody philosophy attacks me. I look at my doted-on Hartley--he moves, he lives, he finds impulses from within and from without, he is the darling of the sun and of the breeze. Nature seems to bless him as a thing of her own. He looks at the clouds, the mountains, the living beings of the earth, and vaults and jubilates! Solemn looks and solemn words have been hitherto connected in his mind with great and magnificent objects only: with lightning, with thunder, with the waterfall blazing in the sunset. Then I say, shall I suffer him to see grave countenances and hear grave accents, while his face is sprinkled? Shall I be grave myself, and tell a lie to him? Or shall I laugh, and teach him to insult the feelings of his fellow men? Besides, are we not all in this present hour, fainting beneath the duty of Hope? From such thoughts I stand up, and vow a book of severe analysis, in which I shall tell "all" I believe to be truth in the nakedest language in which it can be told. My wife is now quite comfortable. Surely you might come and spend the very next four weeks, not without advantage to both of us. The very glory of the place is coming on; the local genius is just arraying himself in his higher attributes. But, above all, I press it because my mind has been busied with speculations that are closely connected with those pursuits that have hitherto constituted your utility and importance: and, ardently as I wish you success on the stage, I yet cannot frame myself to the thought that you should cease to appear as a bold moral thinker. I wish you to write a book on the power of words, and the processes by which human feelings form affinities with them--in short, I wish you to "philosophize" Horne Tooke's system, and to solve the great questions--whether there be reason to hold that an action bearing the semblance of predesigning consciousness may yet be simply organic, and whether a series of such actions are possible--and close on the heels of this question would follow the old, "Is logic the essence of thinking?"--in other words, "Is thinking possible without arbitrary signs? or how far is the word arbitrary a misnomer? are not words, etc., parts and germinations of the plant, and what is the law of their growth?" In something of this order I would endeavour to destroy the old antithesis of Words and Things, elevating, as it were, Words into Things, and living things too. All the nonsense of vibrations, etc., you would, of course, dismiss. If what I have here written appear nonsense to you, or common sense in a harlequinade of "outre" expressions, suspend your judgment till we see each other. Yours sincerely, S. T. COLERIDGE. I was in the country when "Wallenstein" was published. Longman sent me down half-a-dozen--the carriage back the book was not worth. [Footnote 1: A loan often pounds.] [Footnote 2: "Antonio."] Coleridge had asked Godwin to stand godfather to his child, which compliment Godwin declined. Hence the passage in the above letter on Baptism. Davy now occupied a large part of Coleridge's attention. On 9th October he wrote: LETTER 96. To DAVY Thursday night, October 9, 1800. My dear Davy, I was right glad, glad with a "stagger" of the heart, to see your writing again. Many a moment have I had all my France and England curiosity suspended and lost, looking in the advertisement front column of the "Morning Post Gazetteer", for "Mr. Davy's Galvanic habitudes of charcoal. ..." Upon my soul, I believe there is not a letter in those words round which a world of imagery does not circumvolve; your room, the garden, the cold bath, the moonlight rocks, Barristed, Moore, and simple-looking Frere, and dreams of wonderful things attached to your name--and Skiddaw, and Glaramara, and Eagle Crag, and you, and Wordsworth, and me, on the top of them! I pray you do write to me immediately, and tell me what you mean by the possibility of your assuming a new occupation; [1] have you been successful to the extent of your expectations in your late chemical inquiries? In your poem,[2] "impressive" is used for "impressible" or passive, is it not? If so, it is not English; life "diffusive" likewise is not English. The last stanza introduces "confusion" into my mind, and despondency--and has besides been so often said by the materialists, etc., that it is not worth repeating. If the poem had ended more originally, in short, but for the last stanza, I will venture to affirm that there were never so many lines which so uninterruptedly combined natural and beautiful words with strict philosophic truths, "i.e.", scientifically philosophic. Of the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh stanzas, I am doubtful which is the most beautiful. Do not imagine that I cling to a fond love of future identity, but the thought which you have expressed in the last stanzas might be more grandly, and therefore more consolingly exemplified. I had forgot to say that sameness and identity are words too etymologically the same to be placed so close to each other. As to myself, I am doing little worthy the relation. I write for Stuart in the "Morning Post", and I am compelled by the god Pecunia, which was one name of the supreme Jupiter, to give a volume of letters from Germany, which will be a decent "lounge" book, and not an atom more. The "Christabel" was running up to 1,300 lines, and was so much admired by Wordsworth, that he thought it indelicate to print two volumes with his name, in which so much of another man's was included; and which was of more consequence, the poem was in direct opposition to the very purpose for which the lyrical ballads were published, viz., an experiment to see how far those passions which alone give any value to extraordinary incidents were capable of interesting in and for themselves in the incidents of common life. We mean to publish the "Christabel", therefore, with a long blank-verse poem of Wordsworth's, entitled "The Pedlar".[3] I assure you I think very differently of "Christabel". I would rather have written "Ruth", and "Nature's Lady",[4] than a million such poems. But why do I calumniate my own spirit by saying I would rather? God knows it is as delightful to me that they "are" written. I "know" that at present, and I "hope" that it "will" be so; my mind has "disciplined" itself into a willing exertion of its powers, without any reference to their comparative value. I cannot speak favourably of W.'s health, but indeed he has not done common justice to Dr. Beddoes's kind prescriptions. I saw his countenance darken, and all his hopes vanish, when he saw the "prescriptions"--his "scepticism" concerning medicines! nay, it is not enough "scepticism"! Yet, now that peas and beans are over, I have hopes that he will in good earnest make a fair and full trial. I rejoice with sincere joy at Beddoes's recovery. Wordsworth is fearful you have been much teazed by the printers on his account, but you can sympathise with him. The works which I gird myself up to attack as soon as money concerns will permit me, are the "Life of Lessing", and the "Essay on Poetry". The latter is still more at my heart than the former: its title would be an essay on the elements of poetry--it would in reality be a "disguised" system of morals and politics. When you write, and do write soon, tell me how I can get your essay on the nitrous oxide. If you desired Johnson to have one sent to Lackington's, to be placed in Mr. Crosthwaite's monthly parcel for Keswick, I should receive it. Are your galvanic discoveries important? What do they lead to? All this is "ultra crepidation", but would to heaven I had as much knowledge as I have sympathy! My wife and children are well; the baby was dying some weeks ago, so the good people would have it baptized; his name is Derwent Coleridge, so called from the river, for fronting our house the Greta runs into the Derwent. Had it been a girl, the name should have been Greta. By the by, Greta, or rather Grieta, is exactly the Cocytus of the Greeks; the word, literally rendered in modern English, is, "The loud Lamenter;" to griet, in the Cambrian dialect, signifying to roar aloud for grief or pain, and it does "roar" with a vengeance! I will say nothing about Spring--a thirsty man tries to think of anything but the stream when he knows it to be ten miles off! God bless you! Your most affectionate S. T. COLERIDGE.[5] Another letter to Godwin at this time indicates that Coleridge was still expecting to be able to finish "Christabel", which as a completed poem, Coleridge, as we have already seen, calculated would run up to 1,300 lines. [Footnote 1: No doubt the leaving of the Pneumatic for the Royal Institution.] [Footnote 2: That entitled, "Written after Recovery from a Dangerous Illness." It is to be found in the "Memoirs of his Life", vol. i, p. 390. Coleridge's critical remarks apply to it as it was first written; the words objected to are not to be found in it in its corrected printed state.] [Footnote 1: A name changed to "The Excursion".] [Footnote 2: "Three years she grew in sun and shower."] [Footnote 5: Letter CXI is our 96.] LETTER 97. TO GODWIN Monday, Oct. 13, 1800. Dear Godwin, I have been myself too frequently a grievous delinquent in the article of letter-writing to feel any inclination to reproach my friends when, peradventure, they have been long silent. But, this out of the question, I did not expect a speedier answer; for I had anticipated the circumstances which you assign as the causes of your delay. An attempt to finish a poem of mine for insertion in the second volume of the "Lyrical Ballads", has thrown me so fearfully back in my bread and beef occupations, that I shall scarcely be able to justify myself in putting you to the expense of the few lines which I may be able to scrawl in the present paper--but some parts in your letter interested me deeply, and I wished to tell you so. First, then, you know Kemble, and I do not. But my conjectural judgments concerning his character lead me to persuade an absolute passive obedience to his opinion, and this, too, because I would leave to every man his own trade. "Your" trade has been, in the present instance, "first" to furnish a wise pleasure to your fellow-beings in general, and, "secondly", to give Mr. Kemble and his associates the power of delighting that part of your fellow-beings assembled in a theatre. As to what relates to the first point, I should be sorry indeed if greater men than Mr. Kemble could induce you to alter a "but" to a "yet" contrary to your own convictions. Above all things, an author ought to be sincere to the public; and, when William Godwin stands in the title-page, it implies that W. G. approves that which follows. Besides, the mind and finer feelings are blunted by such obsequiousness. But in the theatre it is Godwin and Co. "ex professo". I should regard it in almost the same light as if I had written a song for Haydn to compose and Mara to sing; I know, indeed, what is poetry, but I do not know so well as he and she what will suit his notes or her voice. That actors and managers are often wrong is true, but still their trade is "their" trade, and the presumption is in favour of their being right. For the press, I should wish you to be solicitously nice; because you are to exhibit before a larger and more respectable multitude than a theatre presents to you, and in a new part, that of a poet employing his philosophical knowledge practically. If it be possible, come, therefore, and let us discuss every page and every line. Now for something which, I would fain believe, is still more important, namely, the propriety of your future philosophical speculations. Your second objection, derived from the present "ebb" of opinion, will be best answered by the fact that Mackintosh and his followers have the "flow". This is greatly in your favour, for mankind are at present gross reasoners. They reason in a perpetual antithesis; Mackintosh is an oracle, and Godwin therefore a fool. Now it is morally impossible that Mackintosh and the sophists of his school can retain this opinion. You may well exclaim with Job, "O that my adversary would write a book!" When he publishes, it will be all over with him, and then the minds of men will incline strongly to those who would point out in intellectual perceptions a source of moral progressiveness. Every man in his heart is in favour of your general principles. A party of dough-baked democrats of fortune were weary of being dissevered from their fellow rich men. They want to say something in defence of turning round. Mackintosh puts that something into their mouths, and for awhile they will admire and be-praise him. In a little while these men will have fallen back into the ranks from which they had stepped out, and life is too melancholy a thing for men in general for the doctrine of unprogressiveness to remain popular. Men cannot long retain their faith in the Heaven "above" the blue sky, but a Heaven they will have, and he who reasons best on the side of the universal wish will be the most popular philosopher. As to your first objection, that you are a logician, let me say that your habits are analytic, but that you have not read enough of travels, voyages, and biography--especially men's lives of themselves--and you have too soon submitted your notions to other men's censures in conversation. A man should nurse his opinions in privacy and self-fondness for a long time, and seek for sympathy and love, not for detection or censure. Dismiss, my dear fellow, your theory of Collision of Ideas, and take up that of Mutual Propulsion. I wish to write more, and state to you a lucrative job, which would, I think, be eminently serviceable to your own mind, and which you would have every opportunity of doing here. I now express a serious wish that you would come and look out for a house. Did Stuart remit you £10. on my account? S. T. COLERIDGE. I would gladly write any verses, but to a prologue or epilogue I am absolutely incompetent. Coleridge was a tremendous walker and hill climber. The following letter narrates a curious adventure in a storm among the mountains. LETTER 98. TO DAVY October 18, 1800. My dear Davy, Our mountains northward end in the mountain Carrock--one huge, steep, enormous bulk of stones, desolately variegated with the heath plant; at its foot runs the river Calder, and a narrow vale between it and the mountain Bowscale, so narrow, that in its greatest width it is not more than a furlong. But that narrow vale is "so" green, "so" beautiful, there are moods in which a man might weep to look at it, On this mountain Carrock, at the summit of which are the remains of a vast Druid circle of stones, I was wandering, when a thick cloud came on, and wrapped me in such darkness, that I could not see ten yards before me, and with the cloud a storm of wind and hail, the like of which I had never before seen and felt. At the very summit is a cone of stones, built by the shepherds, and called the Carrock Man. Such cones are on the tops of almost all our mountains, and they are all called "men". At the bottom of the Carrock Man I seated myself for shelter, but the wind became so fearful and tyrannous, that I was apprehensive some of the stones might topple down upon me, so I groped my way farther down and came to three rocks, placed on this wise 1/3\2*** each one supported by the other like a child's house of cards, and in the hollow and screen which they made, I sate for a long while sheltered, as if I had been in my own study in which I am now writing: there I sate with a total feeling worshipping the power and "eternal link" of energy. The darkness vanished as by enchantment; far off, far, far off to the south, the mountains of Glaramara and Great Gable and their family appeared distinct, in deepest, sablest "blue". I rose, and behind me was a rainbow bright as the brightest. I descended by the side of a torrent, and passed, or rather crawled (for I was forced to descend on all fours), by many a naked waterfall, till fatigued and hungry (and with a finger almost broken, and which remains swelled to the size of two fingers), I reached the narrow vale, and the single house nestled in ash and sycamores. I entered to claim the universal hospitality of this country; but instead of the life and comfort usual in these lonely houses, I saw dirt, and every appearance of misery--a pale woman sitting by a peat fire. I asked her for bread and milk, and she sent a small child to fetch it, but did not rise herself. I ate very heartily of the black, sour bread, and drank a bowl of milk, and asked her to permit me to pay her. "Nay," says she, "we are not so scant as that--you are right welcome; but do you know any help for the rheumatics, for I have been so long ailing that I am almost fain to die?" So I advised her to eat a great deal of mustard, having seen in an advertisement something about essence of mustard curing the most obstinate cases of rheumatism. But do write me, and tell me some cure for the rheumatism; it is in her shoulders, and the small of her back chiefly. I wish much to go off with some bottles of stuff to the poor creature. I should walk the ten miles as ten yards. With love and honour, My dear Davy, yours, S. T. COLERIDGE. [1] [Footnote 1: Letter CXII is our 98.] The next letter relates how Coleridge wrote the Second Part of "Christabel", which had been composed before 4th October (Dorothy Wordsworth's "Journals", i, 51). LETTER 99. TO JOSIAH WEDGWOOD Keswick, Nov. 1, 1800. My dear Sir, I would fain believe that the experiment which your brother has made in the West Indies is not wholly a discouraging one. If a warm climate did nothing but only prevented him from getting worse, it surely evidenced some power; and perhaps a climate equally favourable in a country of more various interest, Italy, or the South of France, may tempt your brother to make a longer trial. If (disciplining myself into silent cheerfulness) I could be of any comfort to him by being his companion and attendant, for two or three months, on the supposition that he should wish to travel, and was at a loss for a companion more fit, I would go with him with a willing affection. You will easily see, my dear friend, that I say this only to increase the range of your brother's choice--for even in choosing there is some pleasure. There happen frequently little odd coincidences in time, that recall momentary faith in the notion of sympathies acting in absence. I heard of your brother's return, for the first time, on Monday last, the day on which your letter is dated, from Stoddart. Had it rained on my naked skin I could not have felt more strangely. The 300 or 400 miles that are between us seemed converted into a moral distance; and I knew that the whole of this silence I was myself accountable for; for I ended my last letter by promising to follow it with a second and longer one, before you could answer the first. But immediately on my arrival in this country I undertook to finish a poem which I had begun, entitled "Christabel", for a second volume of the "Lyrical Ballads". I tried to perform my promise, but the deep unutterable disgust which I had suffered in the translation of the accursed "Wallenstein", seemed to have stricken me with barrenness; for I tried and tried, and nothing would come of it. I desisted with a deeper dejection than I am willing to remember. The wind from the Skiddaw and Borrowdale was often as loud as wind need be, and many a walk in the clouds in the mountains did I take; but all would not do, till one day I dined out at the house of a neighbouring clergyman, and some how or other drank so much wine, that I found some effort and dexterity requisite to balance myself on the hither edge of sobriety. The next day my verse-making faculties returned to me, and I proceeded successfully, till my poem grew so long, and in Wordsworth's opinion so impressive, that he rejected it from his volume, as disproportionate both in size and merit, and as discordant in its character. In the mean time I had gotten myself entangled in the old sorites of the old sophist,--procrastination. I had suffered my necessary businesses to accumulate so terribly, that I neglected to write to any one, till the pain I suffered from not writing made me waste as many hours in dreaming about it as would have sufficed for the letter writing of half a life. But there is something beside time requisite for the writing of a letter--at least with me. My situation here is indeed a delightful situation; but I feel what I have lost--feel it deeply--it recurs more often and more painfully than I had anticipated, indeed so much so, that I scarcely ever feel myself impelled, that is to say, pleasurably impelled to write to Poole. I used to feel myself more at home in his great windy parlour than in my own cottage. We were well suited to each other--my animal spirits corrected his inclination to melancholy; and there was something both in his understanding and in his affections, so healthy and manly, that my mind freshened in his company, and my ideas and habits of thinking acquired day after day more of substance and reality. Indeed, indeed, my dear, sir, with tears in my eyes, and with all my heart and soul, I wish it were as easy for us all to meet as it was when you lived at Upcott. Yet when I revise the step I have taken, I know not how I could have acted otherwise than I did act. Everything I promised myself in this country has answered far beyond my expectation. The room in which I write commands six distinct landscapes--the two lakes, the vale, the river and mountains, and mists, and clouds and sunshine, make endless combinations, as if heaven and earth were for ever talking to each other. Often when in a deep study, I have walked to the window and remained there looking without seeing; all at once the lake of Keswick and the fantastic mountains of Borrowdale, at the head of it, have entered into my mind, with a suddenness as if I had been snatched out of Cheapside and placed for the first time, in the spot where I stood--and that is a delightful feeling--these fits and trances of novelty received from a long known object. The river Greta flows behind our house, roaring like an untamed son of the hills, then winds round and glides away in the front, so that we live in a peninsula. But besides this etherial eye-feeding we have very substantial conveniences. We are close to the town, where we have respectable and neighbourly acquaintance, and a most sensible and truly excellent medical man. Our garden is part of a large nursery garden, which is the same to us and as private as if the whole had been our own, and thus too we have delightful walks without passing our garden gates. My landlord who lives in the sister house, for the two houses are built so as to look like one great one, is a modest and kind man, of a singular character. By the severest economy he raised himself from a carrier into the possession of a comfortable independence. He was always very fond of reading, and has collected nearly 500 volumes, of our most esteemed modern writers, such as Gibbon, Hume, Johnson, etc. etc. His habits of economy and simplicity, remain with him, and yet so very disinterested a man I scarcely ever knew. Lately, when I wished to settle with him about the rent of our house, he appeared much affected, told me that my living near him, and the having so much of Hartley's company were great comforts to him and his housekeeper, that he had no children to provide for, and did not mean to marry; and in short, that he did not want any rent at all from me. This of course I laughed him out of; but he absolutely refused to receive any rent for the first half-year, under the pretext that the house was not completely furnished. Hartley quite lives at the house, and it is as you may suppose, no small joy to my wife to have a good affectionate motherly woman divided from her only by a wall. Eighteen miles from our house lives Sir Guilfred Lawson, who has a princely library, chiefly of natural history--a kind and generous, but weak and ostentatious sort of man, who has been abundantly civil to me. Among other raree shows, he keeps a wild beast or two, with some eagles, etc. The master of the beasts at the Exeter 'Change, sent him down a large bear,--with it a long letter of directions, concerning the food, etc. of the animal, and many solicitations respecting other agreeable quadrupeds which he was desirous to send to the baronet, at a moderate price, and concluding in this manner: "and remain your honour's most devoted humble servant, J.P. Permit me, sir Guilfred, to send you a buffalo and a rhinoceros." As neat a postscript as I ever heard--the tradesmanlike coolness with which these pretty little animals occurred to him just at the finishing of his letter! You will in three weeks see the letters on the 'Rise and Condition of the German Boors'. I found it convenient to make up a volume out of my journey, etc. in North Germany--and the letters (your name of course erased) are in the printer's hands. I was so weary of transcribing and composing, that when I found those more carefully written than the rest, I even sent them off as they were. * * * * * My littlest one is a very stout boy indeed. He is christened by the name of "Derwent,"--a sort of sneaking affection you see for the poetical and novellish, which I disguised to myself under the show, that my brothers had so many children Johns, Jameses, Georges, etc. etc., that a handsome Christian-like name was not to be had except by encroaching on the names of my little nephews. If you are at Gunville at Christmas, I hold out hopes to myself that I shall be able to pass a week with you there. I mentioned to you at Upcott a kind of comedy that I had committed to writing in part. This is in the wind. Wordsworth's second vol. of the 'Lyrical Ballads' will, I hope, and almost believe, afford you as unmingled pleasure as is in the nature of a collection of very various poems to afford to one individual mind. Sheridan has sent to him too--requests him to write a tragedy for Drury Lane. But W. will not be diverted by anything from the prosecution of his great work. Southey's 'Thalaba', in twelve books, is going to the press. Remember me with great affection to your brother, and present my kindest respects to Mrs. Wedgwood. Your late governess wanted one thing, which where there is health is I think indispensable in the moral character of a young person--a light and cheerful heart. She interested me a good deal. She appears to me to have been injured by going out of the common way without any of that imagination, which if it be a Jack o' Lanthorn to lead us out of our way, is however, at the same time a torch to light us whither we are going. A whole essay might be written on the danger of thinking without images. God bless you, my dear sir, and him who is with grateful and affectionate esteem, Yours ever, S. T. COLERIDGE Josiah Wedgwood. Coleridge was still in money difficulties, and the following letter is chiefly about his indebtedness to the Wedgwoods. LETTER 100. TO JOSIAH WEDGWOOD November 12, 1800. My dear sir, I received your kind letter, with the £20. My eyes are in such a state of inflammation that I might as well write blindfold, they are so blood-red. I have had leeches twice, and have now a blister behind my right ear. How I caught the cold, in the first instance, I can scarcely guess; but I improved it to its present glorious state, by taking long walks all the mornings, spite of the wind, and writing late at night, while my eyes were weak. I have made some rather curious observations on the rising up of spectra in the eye, in its inflamed state, and their influence on ideas, etc., but I cannot see to make myself intelligible to you. Present my kindest remembrance to Mrs. W. and your brother. Pray did you ever pay any particular attention to the first time of your little ones smiling and laughing? Both I and Mrs. C. have carefully watched our little one, and noticed down all the circumstances, under which he smiled, and under which he laughed, for the first six times, nor have we remitted our attention; but I have not been able to derive the least confirmation of Hartley's or Darwin's Theory. You say most truly, my dear sir, that a pursuit is necessary. Pursuit, for even praiseworthy employment, merely for good, or general good, is not sufficient for happiness, nor fit for man. I have not at present made out how I stand in pecuniary ways, but I believe that I have anticipated on the next year to the amount of Thirty or Forty pounds, probably more. God bless you, my dear sir, and your sincerely Affectionate friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. Josiah Wedgwood, Esq. The publication of the "Wallenstein" had brought on Coleridge the odium of being an advocate of the German Theatre, at this time identified with the melo-dramatic sentimentalism of Kotzbue and his school. English opinion did not then discriminate between a Schiller and a Kotzebue. The following curious disclaimer appeared in the "Monthly Review" on 18th November 1800. LETTER 101. TO THE EDITOR OF THE "MONTHLY REVIEW". Greta Hall, Keswick, Nov. 18, 1800. In the review of my translation of Schiller's "Wallenstein" ("Rev". for October), I am numbered among the partisans of the German theatre. As I am confident there is no passage in my preface or notes from which such an opinion can be legitimately formed, and as the truth would not have been exceeded if the direct contrary had been affirmed, I claim it of your justice that in your Answers to Correspondents you would remove this misrepresentation. The mere circumstance of translating a manuscript play is not even evidence that I admired that one play, much less that I am a general admirer of the plays in that language. I remain, etc., S. T. COLERIDGE. During the latter half of 1800 Dorothy Wordsworth's "Journal" contains many entries showing that Coleridge and the Wordsworths were in frequent communication with each other. Coleridge thought nothing of traversing the dozen miles between Keswick and Dove Cottage by the highway, or over the hill passes. Wordsworth and Dorothy, too, went often to Keswick, and occasionally stayed with the Coleridges ("Grasmere Journals", i, 43-60). Amid these literary and poetic meetings between the poets and their families, other correspondents were not forgotten by Coleridge. The following two letters to Davy indicate that the poets were taking some interest in science. LETTER 102. TO DAVY Greta Hall, Tuesday night, December 2, 1800. My dear Davy, By an accident I did not receive your letter till this evening. I would that you had added to the account of your indisposition the probable causes of it. It has left me anxious whether or no you have not exposed yourself to unwholesome influences in your chemical pursuits. There are "few" beings both of hope and performance, but few who combine the "are" and the "will be." For God's sake, therefore, my dear fellow, do not rip open the bird that lays the golden eggs. I have not received your book. I read yesterday a sort of medical review about it. I suppose Longman will send it to me when he sends down the "Lyrical Ballads" to Wordsworth. I am solicitous to read the latter part. Did there appear to you any remote analogy between the case I translated from the German Magazine and the effects produced by your gas? Did Carlisle[1] ever communicate to you, or has he in any way published his facts concerning "pain", which he mentioned when we were with him? It is a subject which "exceedingly interests" me. I want to read something by somebody expressly on "pain", if only to give an "arrangement" to my own thoughts, though if it were well treated, I have little doubt it would revolutionize them. For the last month I have been trembling on through sands and swamps of evil and bodily grievance. My eyes have been inflamed to a degree that rendered reading and writing scarcely possible; and strange as it seems, the act of metre composition, as I lay in bed, perceptibly affected them, and my voluntary ideas were every minute passing, more or less transformed into vivid spectra. I had leeches repeatedly applied to my temples, and a blister behind my ear--and my eyes are now my own, but in the place where the blister was, six small but excruciating boils have appeared, and harass me almost beyond endurance. In the meantime my darling Hartley has been taken with a stomach illness, which has ended in the yellow jaundice; and this greatly alarms me. So much for the doleful! Amid all these changes, and humiliations, and fears, the sense of the Eternal abides in me, and preserves unsubdued my cheerful faith, that all I endure is full of blessings! At times, indeed, I would fain be somewhat of a more tangible utility than I am; but so I suppose it is with all of us--one while cheerful, stirring, feeling in resistance nothing but a joy and a stimulus; another while drowsy, self-distrusting, prone to rest, loathing our own self-promises, withering our own hopes--our hopes, the vitality and cohesion of our being! I purpose to have 'Christabel' published by itself--this I publish with confidence--but my travels in Germany come from me now with mortal pangs. Nothing but the most pressing necessity could have induced me--and even now I hesitate and tremble. Be so good as to have all that is printed of 'Christabel' sent to me per post. Wordsworth has nearly finished the concluding poem. It is of a mild, unimposing character, but full of beauties to those short-necked men who have their hearts sufficiently near their heads--the relative distance of which (according to citizen Tourder, the French translator of Spallanzani) determines the sagacity or stupidity of all bipeds and quadrupeds. There is a deep blue cloud over the heavens; the lake, and the vale, and the mountains, are all in darkness; only the 'summits' of all the mountains in long ridges, covered with snow, are bright to a dazzling excess. A glorious scene! Hartley was in my arms the other evening, looking at the sky; he saw the moon glide into a large cloud. Shortly after, at another part of the cloud, several stars sailed in. Says he, "Pretty creatures! they are going in to see after their mother moon." Remember me kindly to King. Write as often as you can; but above all things, my loved and honoured dear fellow, do not give up the idea of letting me and Skiddaw see you. God love you! S. T. COLERIDGE. Tobin writes me that Thompson [2] has made some lucrative discovery. Do you know aught about it? Have you seen T. Wedgwood since his return? [3] [Footnote 1: Afterwards Sir Antony, a distinguished surgeon.] [Footnote 2: The late Mr. James Thompson, of Clitheroe.] [Footnote 3: Letter CXIII is our 102; CXIV follows 102] LETTER 103. TO DAVY February 3, 1801. My dear Davy-- I can scarcely reconcile it to my conscience to make you pay postage for another letter. O, what a fine unveiling of modern politics it would be if there were published a minute detail of all the sums received by Government from the Post establishment, and of all the outlets in which the sums so received flowed out again; and, on the other hand, all the domestic affections that had been stifled, all the intellectual progress that would have been, but is not, on account of the heavy tax, etc., etc. The letters of a nation ought to be paid for as an article of national expense. Well! but I did not take up this paper to flourish away in splenetic politics. A gentleman resident here, his name Calvert, an idle, good-hearted, and ingenious man, has a great desire to commence fellow-student with me and Wordsworth in chemistry. He is an intimate friend of Wordsworth's, and he has proposed to W. to take a house which he (Calvert) has nearly built, called Windy Brow, in a delicious situation, scarce half a mile from Greta Hall, the residence of S. T. Coleridge, Esq., and so for him (Calvert) to live with them, 'i.e.', Wordsworth and his sister. In this case he means to build a little laboratory, etc. Wordsworth has not quite decided, but is strongly inclined to adopt the scheme, because he and his sister have before lived with Calvert on the same footing, and are much attached to him: because my health is so precarious and so much injured by wet, and his health, too, is like little potatoes, no great things, and therefore Grasmere ("thirteen" miles from Keswick) is too great a distance for us to enjoy each other's society, without inconvenience, as much as it would be profitable for us both: and likewise because he feels it more necessary for him to have some intellectual pursuit less closely connected with deep passion than poetry, and is of course desirous, too, not to be so wholly ignorant of knowledge so exceedingly important. However, whether Wordsworth come or no, Calvert and I have determined to begin and go on. Calvert is a man of sense and some originality, and is besides what is well called a handy man. He is a good practical mechanic, etc., and is desirous to lay out any sum of money that is necessary. You know how long, how ardently I have wished to initiate myself in Chemical science, both for its own sake, and in no small degree likewise, my beloved friend, that I may be able to sympathize with all that you do and think. Sympathize blindly with it all I do even "now", God knows! from the very middle of my heart's heart, but I would fain sympathize with you in the light of knowledge. This opportunity is exceedingly precious to me, as on my own account I could not afford the least additional expense, having been already, by long and successive illnesses, thrown behindhand, so much, that for the next four or five months, I fear, let me work as hard as I can, I shall not be able to do what my heart within me "burns" to do, that is, to "concenter" my free mind to the affinities of the feelings with words and ideas under the title of "Concerning Poetry, and the nature of the Pleasures derived from it". I have faith that I do understand the subject, and I am sure that if I write what I ought to do on it, the work would supersede all the books of metaphysics, and all the books of morals too. To whom shall a young man utter "his pride", if not to a young man whom he loves? I beg you, therefore, my dear Davy, to write to me a long letter when you are at leisure, informing me:--Firstly, What books it will be well for me and Calvert to purchase. Secondly, Directions for a convenient little laboratory. Thirdly, To what amount apparatus would run in expense, and whether or no you would be so good as to superintend its making at Bristol. Fourthly, Give me your advice how to "begin". And, fifthly, and lastly, and mostly, do send a "drop" of hope to my parched tongue, that you will, if you can, come and visit me in the spring. Indeed, indeed, you ought to see this country, this beautiful country, and then the joy you would send into me! The shape of this paper will convince you with what eagerness I began this letter; I really did not see that it was not a sheet. I have been 'thinking' vigorously during my illness, so that I cannot say that my long, long wakeful nights have been all lost to me. The subject of my meditations has been the relations of thoughts to things--in the language of Hume, of ideas to impressions. I may be truly described in the words of Descartes: I have been "res cogitans, id est, dubitans, affirmans, negans, pauca intelligens, multa ignorans, volens, nolens, imaginans etiam, et sentiens." I please myself with believing that you will receive no small pleasure from the result of these broodings, although I expect in you (in some points) a determined opponent, but I say of my mind in this respect: "Manet imperterritus ille hostem magnanimum opperiens, et mole sua stat." Every poor fellow has his proud hour sometimes, and this I suppose is mine. I am better in every respect than I was, but am still 'very feeble'. The weather has been woefully against me for the last fortnight, having rained here almost incessantly. I take quantities of bark, but the effect is (to express myself with the dignity of science) "x" = 0000000, and I shall not gather strength, or that little suffusion of bloom which belongs to my healthy state, till I can walk out. God bless you, my dear Davy! and Your ever affectionate friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. P.S.--An electrical machine, and a number of little nicknacks connected with it, Mr. Calvert has.--"Write".[1] [Footnote l: Letter CXV is our 103.] Josiah Wade, the early Bristol friend of Coleridge, who probably was one of the three friends who assisted him with funds to start 'The Watchman', was now intending to travel in Germany. He applied to Coleridge for advice regarding the mode of travelling, and Coleridge tendered his counsel in the following characteristic epistle. LETTER 104. To JOSIAH WADE March 6, 1801. My very dear friend, I have even now received your letter. My habits of thinking and feeling, have not hitherto inclined me to personify commerce in any such shape, so as to tempt me to turn pagan, and offer vows to the goddess of our isle. But when I read that sentence in your letter, "The time will come I trust, when I shall be able to pitch my tent in your neighbourhood," I was most potently commanded [1] to a breach of the second commandment, and on my knees, to entreat the said goddess to touch your bank notes and guineas with her magical multiplying wand. I could offer such a prayer for you, with a better conscience than for most men, because I know that you have never lost that healthy common sense, which regards money only as the means of independence, and that you would sooner than most men cry out, enough! enough! To see one's children secured against want, is doubtless a delightful thing; but to wish to see them begin the world as rich men, is unwise to ourselves, for it permits no close of our labours, and is pernicious to them; for it leaves no motive to their exertions, none of those sympathies with the industrious and the poor, which form at once the true relish and proper antidote of wealth. * * * Is not March rather a perilous month for the voyage from Yarmouth to Hamburg? Danger there is very little, in the packets, but I know what inconvenience rough weather brings with it; not from my own feelings, for I am never sea-sick, but always in exceeding high spirits on board ship, but from what I see in others. But you are an old sailor. At Hamburg I have not a shadow of acquaintance. My letters of introduction produced for me, with one exception, viz., Klopstock, the brother of the poet, no real service, but merely distant and ostentatious civility. And Klopstock will by this time have forgotten my name, which indeed he never properly knew, for I could speak only English and Latin, and he only French and German. At Ratzeburg, 35 English miles N.E. from Hamburg, on the road to Lubec, I resided four months; and I should hope, was not unbeloved by more than one family, but this is out of your route. At Gottingen I stayed near five months, but here I knew only students, who will have left the place by this time, and the high learned professors, only one of whom could speak English; and they are so wholly engaged in their academical occupations, that they would be of no service to you. Other acquaintance in Germany I have none, and connexion I never had any. For though I was much entreated by some of the Literati to correspond with them, yet my natural laziness, with the little value I attach to literary men, as literary men, and with my aversion from those letters which are to be made up of studied sense, and unfelt compliments, combined to prevent me from availing myself of the offer. Herein, and in similar instances, with English authors of repute, I have ill consulted the growth of my reputation and fame. But I have cheerful and confident hopes of myself. If I can hereafter do good to my fellow-creatures as a poet, and as a metaphysician, they will know it; and any other fame than this, I consider as a serious evil, that would only take me from out the number and sympathy of ordinary men, to make a coxcomb of me. As to the inns or hotels at Hamburg, I should recommend you to some German inn. Wordsworth and I were at the "Der Wilde Man," and dirty as it was, I could not find any inn in Germany very much cleaner, except at Lubec. But if you go to an English inn, for heaven's sake, avoid the "Shakspeare," at Altona, and the "King of England," at Hamburg. They are houses of plunder rather than entertainment. "The Duke of York" hotel, kept by Seaman, has a better reputation, and thither I would advise you to repair; and I advise you to pay your bill every morning at breakfast time: it is the only way to escape imposition. What the Hamburg merchants may be I know not, but the tradesmen are knaves. Scoundrels, with yellow-white phizzes, that bring disgrace on the complexion of a bad tallow candle. Now as to carriage, I know scarcely what to advise; only make up your mind to the very worst vehicles, with the very worst horses, drawn by the very worst postillions, over the very worst roads, and halting two hours at each time they change horses, at the very worst inns; and you have a fair, unexaggerated picture of travelling in North Germany. The cheapest way is the best; go by the common post wagons, or stage coaches. What are called extraordinaries, or post-chaises, are little wicker carts, uncovered, with moveable benches or forms in them, execrable in every respect. And if you buy a vehicle at Hamburg, you can get none decent under thirty or forty guineas, and very probably it will break to pieces on the infernal roads. The canal boats are delightful, but the porters everywhere in the United Provinces, are an impudent, abominable, and dishonest race. You must carry as little luggage as you well can with you, in the canal boats, and when you land, get recommended to an inn beforehand, and bargain with the porters first of all, and never lose sight of them, or you may never see your portmanteau or baggage again. My Sarah desires her love to you and yours. God bless your dear little ones! Make haste and get rich, dear friend! and bring up the little creatures to be playfellows and school-fellows with my little ones! Again and again, sea serve you, wind speed you, all things turn out good to you! God bless you, S. T. COLERIDGE. [2] John Stoddart, a friend of Coleridge, visited him while at Keswick in the month of October, 1800, and saw the Wordsworths at Grasmere (Dorothy Wordsworth's 'Journal', i, 55)--It was then that Stoddart obtained a copy of 'Christabel', and read it shortly afterwards [3] to Sir Walter Scott, then busy with his 'Border Minstrelsy'. The beauty of 'Christabel' touched Sir Walter's romantic imagination, and echoes of the poem are discernible in the 'Lay of the Last Minstrel' and the 'Bridal of Tryermain'. But Coleridge, in spite of many attempts, could not complete the piece, and had to give up the endeavour. In a letter to Godwin of 25th March 1801, Coleridge thus laments what was practically the end of his career as a poet: [Footnote 1: "Tempted," E.R., ii, 18.] [Footnote 2: Letters CXVI-CXVII follow 104.] [Footnote 3: In 1802.] LETTER 105. To GODWIN. Wednesday, March 25, 1801. Dear Godwin, I fear your tragedy [1] will find me in a very unfit state of mind to sit in judgment on it. I have been during the last three months undergoing a process of intellectual exsiccation. During my long illness I had compelled into hours of delight many a sleepless painful hour of darkness by chasing down metaphysical game, and since then I have continued the hunt, till I found myself, unaware, at the root of pure mathematics, and up that tall smooth tree, whose few poor branches are all at the very summit, am I climbing by pure adhesive strength of arms and thighs, still slipping down, still renewing my ascent. You would not know me! All sounds of similitude keep at such a distance from each other in my mind, that I have forgotten how to make a rhyme. I look at the mountains (that visible God Almighty that looks in at all my windows)--I look at the mountains only for the curves of their outlines; the stars, as I behold them, form themselves into triangles; and my hands are scarred with scratches from a cat, whose back I was rubbing in the dark in order to see whether the sparks from it were refrangible by a prism. The Poet is dead in me; my imagination (or rather the Somewhat that had been imaginative) lies like a cold snuff on the circular rim of a brass candlestick, without even a stink of tallow to remind you that it was once clothed and mitred with flame. That is past by. I was once a volume of gold leaf, rising and riding on every breath of Fancy, but I have beaten myself back into weight and density, and now I sink in quicksilver and remain squat and square on the earth amid the hurricane that makes oaks and straws join in one dance, fifty yards high in the element. However I will do what I can. Taste and feeling have I none, but what I have, give I unto thee. But I repeat that I am unfit to decide on any but works of severe logic. I write now to beg that, if you have not sent your tragedy, you may remember to send 'Antonio' with it, which I have not yet seen, and likewise my Campbell's 'Pleasures of Hope', which Wordsworth wishes to see. Have you seen the second volume of the 'Lyrical Ballads', and the preface prefixed to the first? I should judge of a man's heart and intellect precisely according to the degree and intensity of the admiration with which he read these poems. Perhaps, instead of heart I should have said Taste; but, when I think of 'The Brothers', of 'Ruth', and of 'Michael', I recur to the expression and am enforced to say heart. If I die, and the booksellers will give you anything for ray life, be sure to say, "Wordsworth descended on him like the [Greek: Gnothi seauton] from heaven; by showing to him what true poetry was, he made him know that he himself was no Poet." In your next letter you will, perhaps, give me some hints respecting your prose plans. God bless you, and S. T. COLERIDGE. Greta Hall, Keswick. P.S.--What is a fair price--what might an author of reputation fairly ask from a bookseller, for one edition, of a thousand copies, of a five-shilling book? [I congratulate you on the settlement of Davy in London. I hope that his enchanting manners will not draw too many idlers about him, to harass and vex his mornings.] [Footnote: 1 This tragedy was entitled Abbas.] PART II THE PERMANENT I will write for "The Permanent", or not at all." (Letter to Sir G. Beaumont, "Coleorton Memorials", ii, 162.) "Woe is me! that at 46 I am under the necessity of appearing as a lecturer, and obliged to regard every hour given to "The Permanent", whether as poet or philosopher, an hour stolen from others as well as from my own maintenance." (Letter to Mudford, Brandl's "Life of Coleridge", p. 359.) * * * * * The conventional view of Coleridge that opium killed the poet in him does not commend itself to the scientific consciousness. Opium has the tendency to stimulate rather than to deaden the poetic imagination, as the history of De Quincey can testify; and one of Coleridge's most imaginative pieces, "Kubla Khan", is said to have been occasioned by an overdose of the drug. The poet in Coleridge was extinguished by a very different thing than opium. Coleridge's poetic faculty was suspended by the loss of hope and also by the growth of his intellect, by the development of his reasoning and philosophic powers, and by the multiplication of the interests which appealed to him, and the many problems which presented themselves for his solution. He was, constitutionally, the most comprehensive mind of a new age, and just because he was its greatest thinker he was perplexed and attracted by the majority of the problems which arose around him, and which he himself helped to raise. Poetry, the poetry of the Romantic Movement, in which he far excelled all his contemporaries, was no longer capable of grappling with the philosophic, theological, political and social questions now on the horizon or which Coleridge felt would soon, by the development of international affinities, be on the horizon of the English mind. Hence Coleridge's thirst for the new lore of the German philosophy, which seemed to him to supply a want in the Intellectualism of his native country. In spite of this, Coleridge knew that in being deserted by the poetic spirit, he was leaving a high artistic realm for one of lesser glory; and hence his letter to Godwin of 25th March 1801, and, later on, his dirge over himself in "Dejection". Coleridge, in choosing to follow Wordsworth to the Lake District in preference to remaining at Nether Stowey with Poole, had experienced some contrition, for Poole, after all, was a more profound appreciator of his many-sidedness and the Cervantean vein of his character than Wordsworth, who appreciated Coleridge only from that side of him which resembled himself. Tom Poole regretted, like others, that Coleridge had no permanent calling, or could not fix upon an undertaking worthy of his powers. Poole looked upon Coleridge's devotion to journalism while he was engaged upon the "Morning Post" as a "turning aside of his powers from higher ends" ("T. Poole and his Friends", ii, 2), and wished him to give himself up to something more "permanently" useful to society ("T. Poole and his Friends", ii, 3). The correspondence of Coleridge and Poole from 1800 onwards, often turns upon the subject ("T. Poole and his Friends", ii, 66, 68, 122, 177, 187, 205, 226, 247); and Coleridge admitted a "distracting manifoldness" in his objects and attainments ("T. Poole and his Friends", ii, 122). "You," said Coleridge, "are nobly employed--most worthy of you. "You" are made to endear yourself to mankind as an immediate benefactor: I must throw my bread on the waters" ("T. Poole and his Friends", ii, 122). While engaged in these argumentations with his best friend, Coleridge was striving to think out in his deep philosophic and musing mind many problems of the time; and there arose in his imagination the Idea of the Permanent. He was henceforth no longer the Poet of Romanticism, whose significance he had exhausted, but the philosopher of the Permanent, which presented itself as a splendid possibility in all departments of human knowledge and activity. In his prose works and letters we find a continual reference to what Coleridge now calls "The Permanent"--the permanent principles of Morals, Philosophy, and Religion, and of the permanent principles of criticism as applied to Poetry and the Fine Arts. Everything is now adjusted by Coleridge to this idea. Art, morals, religion, and politics are tried by its standard, to find if they are founded in the permanent principles of human nature. It is in the light of this Idea, the ideal of Coleridge's later life, that we must judge Coleridge and weigh him. To continue to see in opium the sole or even the principal cause of his failure, is to misjudge him altogether. To compare him with others of different powers who accomplished more in one direction in the matter of literary output, with Sir Walter Scott or Byron, for instance, is misleading. It is the man of profound genius, who in his own time, is feeling on all sides into the Future, who is least likely to give forth "finished productions," as they are called, in which the subjects of which they treat are often exhausted, and please the ear of the Present. Coleridge is such a man of genius; nearly all his works are fragmentary, unfinished, suggestive rather than "complete," just because they verge upon that Transcendentalism which he was the first to make audible to English ears in his day. Ill health, and opium in conjunction with ill health, contributed no doubt to enfeeble his utterance; but to assert that opium was the cause or the main cause of Coleridge's inability to do what he wanted himself to do, or what his friends and contemporaries expected him to do, is a gross perversion of the facts of the case. Coleridge's inability arose from his multiplicity of motive, his visionary faculty of seeing in the light of a new principle a host of problems rise up on all sides, all claiming recognition and solution. "That is the disease of my mind--it is comprehensive in its conceptions, and wastes itself in the contemplations of the many things which it might do." (Letter to Poole, 4th January 1799, "Letters", p. 270). A greater than Coleridge had felt this tendency before him, and created as its embodiment "Hamlet"; and Coleridge has been called the Hamlet of literature. CHAPTER X ILL HEALTH; SOUTHEY COMES TO KESWICK On 13th April 1801 Coleridge wrote to Southey the following letter, and Southey replied in cordial terms, from which it will be gathered a reconciliation had been made since the Lloyd and Lamb quarrel. [1] [Footnote 1: See "Letters", vol. i, 304.] LETTER 106. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY, ESQ. Greta Hall, Keswick; April 13. 1801. My dear Southey, I received your kind letter on the evening before last, and I trust that this will arrive at Bristol just in time to rejoice with them that rejoice. Alas! you will have found the dear old place sadly "minus"ed by the removal of Davy. It is one of the evils of long silence, that when one recommences the correspondence, one has so much to say that one can say nothing. I have enough, with what I have seen, and with what I have done, and with what I have suffered, and with what I have heard, exclusive of all that I hope and all that I intend--I have enough to pass away a great deal of time with, were you on a desert isle, and I your "Friday". But at present I purpose to speak only of myself relatively to Keswick and to you. Our house stands on a low hill, the whole front of which is one field and an enormous garden, nine-tenths of which is a nursery garden. Behind the house is an orchard, and a small wood on a steep slope, at the foot of which flows the river Greta, which winds round and catches the evening lights in the front of the house. In front we have a giant's camp--an encamped army of tent-like mountains, which by an inverted arch gives a view of another vale. On our right the lovely vale and the wedge-shaped lake of Bassenthwaite; and on our left Derwentwater and Lodore full in view, and the fantastic mountains of Borrodale. Behind us the massy Skiddaw, smooth, green, high, with two chasms and a tentlike ridge in the larger. A fairer scene you have not seen in all your wanderings. Without going from our own grounds we have all that can please a human being. As to books, my landlord, who dwells next door,[1] has a very respectable library, which he has put with mine; histories, encyclopaedias, and all the modern gentry. But then I can have, when I choose, free access to the princely library of Sir Guilfred Lawson, which contains the noblest collection of travels and natural history of, perhaps, any private library in England; besides this, there is the Cathedral library of Carlisle, from whence I can have any books sent to me that I wish; in short, I may truly say that I command all the libraries in the county. ... Our neighbour is a truly good and affectionate man, a father to my children, and a friend to me. He was offered fifty guineas for the house in which we are to live, but he preferred me for a tenant at twenty-five; and yet the whole of his income does not exceed, I believe, £200 a year. A more truly disinterested man I never met with; severely frugal, yet almost carelessly generous; and yet he got all his money as a common carrier[2], by hard labour, and by pennies. He is one instance among many in this country of the salutary effect of the love of knowledge--he was from a boy a lover of learning. The house is full twice as large as we want; it hath more rooms in it than Allfoxden; you might have a bed-room, parlour, study, etc., etc., and there would always be rooms to spare for your or my visitors. In short, for situation and convenience,--and when I mention the name of Wordsworth, for society of men of intellect,--I know no place in which you and Edith would find yourselves so well suited. S. T. C. [Footnote 1: Greta Hall was at this time divided into two houses, which were afterwards thrown together.] [Footnote 2: This person, whose name was Jackson, was the "master" in Wordsworth's poem of 'The Waggoner', the circumstances of which are accurately correct.] The remainder of this letter, as well as another of later date, was filled with a most gloomy account of his own health, to which Southey refers in the commencement of his reply. SOUTHEY TO COLERIDGE Bristol, July 11, 1801. Yesterday I arrived, and found your letters; they did depress me, but I have since reasoned or dreamt myself into more cheerful anticipations. I have persuaded myself that your complaint is gouty; that good living is necessary, and a good climate. I also move to the south; at least so it appears: and if my present prospects ripen, we may yet live under one roof. ... You may have seen a translation of "Persius", by Drummond, an M.P. This man is going ambassador, first to Palermo and then to Constantinople: if a married man can go as his secretary, it is probable that I shall accompany him. I daily expect to know. It is a scheme of Wynn's to settle me in the south, and I am returned to look about me. My salary will be small--a very trifle; but after a few years I look on to something better, and have fixed my mind on a consulship. Now, if we go, you must join us as soon as we are housed, and it will be marvellous if we regret England. I shall have so little to do, that my time may be considered as wholly my own: our joint amusements will easily supply us with all expenses. So no more of the Azores; for we will see the Great Turk, and visit Greece, and walk up the Pyramids, and ride camels in Arabia. I have dreamt of nothing else these five weeks. As yet every thing is so uncertain, for I have received no letter since we landed, that nothing can be said of our intermediate movements. If we are not embarked too soon, we will set off as early as possible for Cumberland, unless you should think, as we do, that Mahomet had better come to the mountain; that change of all externals may benefit you; and that bad as Bristol weather is, it is yet infinitely preferable to northern cold and damp. Meet we must, and will. You know your old Poems are a third time in the press; why not set forth a second volume? * * * Your "Christabel", your "Three Graces",[1] which I remember as the very consummation of poetry. I must spur you to something, to the assertion of your supremacy; if you have not enough to muster, I will aid you in any way--manufacture skeletons that you may clothe with flesh, blood, and beauty; write my best, or what shall be bad enough to be popular;--we will even make plays "a-la-mode" Robespierre. * * * Drop all task-work, it is ever unprofitable; the same time, and one twentieth part of the labour, would produce treble emolument. For "Thalaba" I received £115; it was just twelve months' "intermitting" work, and the after-editions are my own. ... I feel here as a stranger; somewhat of Leonard's feeling. God bless Wordsworth for that poem![2] What tie have I to England? My London friends? There, indeed, I have friends. But if you and yours were with me, eating dates in a garden at Constantinople, you might assert that we were in the best of all possible places; and I should answer, Amen: and if our wives rebelled, we would send for the chief of the black eunuchs, and sell them to the Seraglio. Then should Moses [3] learn Arabic, and we would know whether there was anything in the language or not. We would drink Cyprus wine and Mocha coffee, and smoke more tranquilly than ever we did in the Ship in Small Street. Time and absence make strange work with our affections; but mine are ever returning to rest upon you. I have other and dear friends, but none with whom the whole of my being is intimate--with whom every thought and feeling can amalgamate. Oh! I have yet such dreams! Is it quite clear that you and I were not meant for some better star, and dropped, by mistake, into this world of pounds, shillings, and pence? ... God bless you! ROBERT SOUTHEY. [Footnote 1: "The Three Graves".] [Footnote 2: "The Brothers" is the title of this poem.] [Footnote 3: Hartley Coleridge.] SOUTHEY TO COLERIDGE July 25. In about ten days we shall be ready to set forward for Keswick; where, if it were not for the rains, and the fogs, and the frosts, I should, probably, be content to winter; but the climate deters me. It is uncertain when I may be sent abroad, or where, except that the south of Europe is my choice. The appointment hardly doubtful, and the probable destination Palermo or Naples. We will talk of the future, and dream of it, on the lake side. * * * I may calculate upon the next six months at my own disposal; so we will climb Skiddaw this year, and scale Etna the next; and Sicilian air will keep us alive till Davy has found out the immortalising elixir, or till we are very well satisfied to do without it, and be immortalised after the manner of our fathers. My pocket-book contains more plans than will ever be filled up; but whatever becomes of those plans, this, at least, is feasible. * * * Poor H----, he has literally killed himself by the law: which, I believe, kills more than any disease that takes its place in the bills of mortality. Blackstone is a needful book, and my Coke is a borrowed one; but I have one law book whereof to make an auto-da-fe; and burnt he shall be: but whether to perform that ceremony, with fitting libations, at home, or fling him down the crater of Etna directly to the Devil, is worth considering at leisure. I must work at Keswick; the more willingly, because with the hope, hereafter, the necessity will cease. My Portuguese materials must lie dead, and this embarrasses me. It is impossible to publish any thing about that country now, because I must one day return there,--to their libraries and archives; otherwise I have excellent stuff for a little volume; and could soon set forth a first vol. of my History, either civil or literary. In these labours I have incurred a heavy and serious expense. I shall write to Hamilton, and review again, if he chooses to employ me. * * * It was Cottle who told me that your Poems were reprint"ing" in a "third" edition: this cannot allude to the "Lyrical Ballads", because of the number and the participle present. * * * I am bitterly angry to see one new poem [1] smuggled into the world in the "Lyrical Ballads", where the 750 purchasers of the first can never get at it. At Falmouth I bought Thomas Dermody's "Poems", for old acquaintance sake; alas! the boy wrote better than the man! * * * Pye's "Alfred" (to distinguish him from Alfred the pious [2]) I have not yet inspected; nor the wilful murder of Bonaparte, by Anna Matilda; nor the high treason committed by Sir James Bland Burgess, Baronet, against our lion-hearted Richard. Davy is fallen stark mad with a play, called the "Conspiracy of Gowrie", which is by Rough; an imitation of "Gebir", with some poetry; but miserably and hopelessly deficient in all else: every character reasoning, and metaphorising, and metaphysicking the reader most nauseously. By the by, there is a great analogy between hock, laver, pork pie, and the "Lyrical Ballads",--all have a "flavour", not beloved by those who require a taste, and utterly unpleasant to dram-drinkers, whose diseased palates can only feel pepper and brandy. I know not whether Wordsworth will forgive the stimulant tale of "Thalaba",--'tis a turtle soup, highly seasoned, but with a flavour of its own predominant. His are sparagrass (it ought to be spelt so) and artichokes, good with plain butter, and wholesome. I look on "Madoc" with hopeful displeasure; probably it must be corrected, and published now; this coming into the world at seven months is a bad way; with a Doctor Slop of a printer's devil standing ready for the forced birth, and frightening one into an abortion. * * * Is there an emigrant at Keswick, who may make me talk and write French? And I must sit at my almost forgotten Italian, and read German with you; and we must read Tasso together. God bless you! Yours, R. S. [Footnote 1: Coleridge's poem of "Love".] [Footnote 2: This alludes to Mr. Cottle's "Alfred".] The next two letters to Davy indicate that Coleridge's health was now of the worst, and that he was thinking seriously of emigrating for some time. LETTER 107. TO DAVY Monday, May 4, 1801. My dear Davy, I heard from Tobin the day before yesterday--nay, it was Friday. From him I learn that you are giving lectures on galvanism. Would to God I were one of your auditors! My motive muscles tingled and contracted at the news, as if you had bared them, and were 'zincifying' their life-mocking fibres. When you have leisure and impulse--perfect leisure and a complete impulse--write to me, but only then. For though there does not exist a man on earth who yields me greater pleasure by writing to me, yet I have neither pain nor disquietude from your silence. I have a deep faith in the guardianship of Nature over you--of the Great Being whom you are manifesting. Heaven bless you, my dear Davy! I have been rendered uneasy by an account of the Lisbon packet's non-arrival, lest Southey should have been on board it. Have you heard from him lately? It would seem affectation to write to you and say nothing of my health; but in truth I am weary of giving useless pain. Yesterday I should have been incapable of writing you this scrawl, and to-morrow I may be as bad. "'Sinking, sinking, sinking!' I feel that I am 'sinking'." My medical attendant says that it is irregular gout, with nephritic symptoms. 'Gout', in a young man of twenty-nine!! Swollen knees, and knotty fingers, a loathing stomach, and a dizzy head. Trust me, friend, I am at times an object of moral disgust to my own mind! But that this long illness has impoverished me, I should immediately go to St. Miguels, one of the Azores--the baths and the delicious climate might restore me--and if it were possible, I would afterwards send over for my wife and children, and settle there for a few years; it is exceedingly cheap. On this supposition Wordsworth and his sister have with generous friendship offered to settle there with me--and happily our dear Southey would come too. But of this I pray you, my dear fellow, do not say a syllable to any human being, for the scheme, from the present state of my circumstances, is rather the thing of a "wish" than of a "hope". If you write to me, pray in a couple of sentences tell me whether Herschell's thermometric "spectrum" (in the "Philos. Trans.") will lead to any revolution in the chemical philosophy. As far as "words" go, I have become a formidable chemist--having got by heart a prodigious quantity of terms, etc., to which I attach "some" ideas, very scanty in number, I assure you, and right meagre in their individual persons. That which must discourage me in it is, that I find all "power" of vital attributes to depend on modes of "arrangement", and that chemistry throws not even a distant rushlight glimmer upon this subject. The "reasoning", likewise, is always unsatisfactory to me. I am perpetually saying, probably there are many agents hitherto undiscovered. This cannot be reasoning: we must have a deep conviction that all the "terms" have been exhausted. This is saying no more than that (with Dr. Beddoes's leave) chemistry can never possess the same kind of certainty with the mathematics--in truth, it is saying nothing. I grow, however, exceedingly interested in the subject. God love you, my dear friend! From Tobin's account, I fear that I must give up a very sweet vision--that of seeing you this summer. The summer after, my ghost perhaps may be a gas. Yours affectionately, S. T. COLERIDGE. [1] [Footnote 1: Letter CXVIII follows No. 107.] LETTER 108. TO DAVY Greta Hall, Keswick, May 20, 1801. My dear Davy, Though we of the north must forego you, yet I shall rejoice when I receive a letter from you from Cornwall. I must believe that you have made some important discoveries in galvanism, and connected the facts with other more interesting ones, or I should be puzzled to conceive how that subject could furnish matter for more than one lecture. If I recollect aright, you have identified it with electricity, and that indeed is a wide field. I shall dismiss my 'British Critic' and take in 'Nicholson's Journal', and then I shall know something about you. I am sometimes apprehensive that my passion for science is scarcely true and genuine--it is but 'Davyism'! that is, I fear that I am more delighted at 'your' having discovered facts than at the facts having been discovered. My health is better. I am indeed eager to believe that I am really beginning to recover, though I have had so many short recoveries followed by severe relapses, that I am at times almost afraid to hope. But cheerful thoughts come with genial sensations; and hope is itself no mean medicine. I am anxious respecting Robert Southey. Why is he not in England? Remember me kindly to Tobin. As soon as I have anything to communicate I will write to him. But, alas! sickness turns large districts of time into dreary uniformity of sandy desolation. Alas, for Egypt--and Menou! However, I trust the 'English' will keep it, if they take it, and something will be gained to the cause of human nature. Heaven bless you! S. T. COLERIDGE. The next letter to Godwin renews his complaints about health. LETTER 109. To GODWIN Greta Hall, Keswick. Dear Godwin, I have had, during the last three weeks, such numerous interruptions of my "uninterrupted rural retirement," such a succession of visitors, both indigenous and exotic, that verily I wanted both the time and composure necessary to answer your letter of the first of June--at present I am writing to you from my bed. For, in consequence of a very sudden change in the weather from intense heat to a raw and scathing chillness, my bodily health has suffered a relapse as severe as it was unexpected.... I have not yet received either "Antonio", or your pamphlet, in answer to Dr. Parr and the Scotch gentleman [1] (who is to be professor of morals to the young nabobs at Calcutta, with an establishment of £3,000 a year!). Stuart was so kind as to send me Fenwick's review of it in a paper called the "Albion", and Mr. Longman has informed me that, by your orders, the pamphlet itself has been left for me at his house. The extracts which I saw pleased me much, with the exception of the introduction, which is incorrectly and clumsily worded. But, indeed, I have often observed that, whatever you write, the first page is always the worst in the book. I wish that instead of six days you had employed six months, and instead of a half-crown pamphlet, had given us a good half-guinea octavo. But you may yet do this. It strikes me, that both in this work, and in the second edition of the "Political Justice", your retractations have been more injudicious than the assertions or dogmas retracted. But this is no fit subject for a mere letter. If I had time, which I have not, I would write two or three sheets for your sole inspection, entitled "History of the Errors and Blunders of the Literary Life of William Godwin". To the world it would appear a paradox to say that you are at all too persuadable, but you yourself know it to be the truth. I shall send back your manuscript on Friday, with my criticisms. You say in your last, "How I wish you were here!" When I see how little I have written of what I could have talked, I feel with you that a letter is but "a mockery" to a full and ardent mind. In truth I feel this so forcibly that, if I could be certain that I should remain in this country, I should press you to come down, and finish the whole in my house. But, if I can by any means raise the moneys, I shall go in the first vessel that leaves Liverpool for the Azores (St. Michael's, to wit), and these sail at the end of July. Unless I can escape one English winter and spring I have not any rational prospect of recovery. You "cannot help regarding uninterrupted rural retirement as a principal cause" of my ill health. My ill health commenced at Liverpool, in the shape of blood-shot eyes and swollen eyelids, while I was in the daily habit of visiting the Liverpool literati--these, on my settling at Keswick, were followed by large boils in my neck and shoulders; these, by a violent rheumatic fever; this, by a distressing and tedious hydrocele; and, since then, by irregular gout, which promises at this moment to ripen into a legitimate fit. What uninterrupted rural retirement can have had to do in the production of these outward and visible evils, I cannot guess; what share it has had in consoling me under them, I know with a tranquil mind and feel with a grateful heart. O that you had now before your eyes the delicious picture of lake, and river, and bridge, and cottage, and spacious field with its pathway, and woody hill with its spring verdure, and mountain with the snow yet lingering in fantastic patches upon it, even the same which I had from my sick bed, even without raising my head from the pillow! O God! all but dear and lovely things seemed to be known to my imagination only as words; even the forms which struck terror into me in my fever-dreams were still forms of beauty. Before my last seizure I bent down to pick something from the ground, and when I raised my head, I said to Miss Wordsworth, "I am sure, Rotha, that I am going to be ill;" for as I bent my head there came a distinct, vivid spectrum upon my eyes; it was one little picture--a rock, with birches and ferns on it, a cottage backed by it, and a small stream. Were I a painter I would give an outward existence to this, but it will always live in my memory. By-the-bye, our rural retirement has been honoured by the company of Mr. Sharp, and the poet Rogers; the latter, though not a man of very vigorous intellect, won a good deal both on myself and Wordsworth, for what he said evidently came from his own feelings, and was the result of his own observation. My love to your dear little one. I begin to feel my knee preparing to make ready for the reception of the Lady Arthritis. God bless you and S. T. COLERIDGE. Tuesday Evening, June 23, 1801. [2] [Footnote 1: Mackintosh] [Footnote 2: Letters CXIX-CXXII follow No. 109.] Coleridge, for want of funds, was unable for the present to carry out his project of going abroad, and the next letter to Davy tells us that he had resolved to go to London instead, and write for the daily papers again. LETTER 110. To DAVY Greta Hall, Keswick, Cumberland, October 31, 1801. My dear Davy, I do not know by what fatality it has happened, but so it is; that I have thought more often of you, and I may say, "yearned" after your society more for the last three months than I ever before did, and yet I have not written to you. But you know that I honour you, and that I love whom I honour. Love and esteem with me have no dividual being; and wherever this is not the case, I suspect there must be some lurking moral superstition which nature gets the better of; and that the real meaning of the phrase "I love him though I cannot esteem him," is--I esteem him, but not according to my system of esteem. But you, my dear fellow, 'all' men love and esteem--which is the only suspicious part of your character--at least according to the 5th chapter of St. Matthew.--God bless you. And now for the business of this letter. 'If I can', I leave this place so as to be in London on Wednesday, the 11th of next month; in London I shall stay a fortnight; but as I am in feeble health, and have a perfect 'phobia' of inns and coffee-houses, I should rejoice if you or Southey should be able to offer me a bed-room for the fortnight aforesaid. From London I move southward. Now for the italicized words 'if I can'. The cryptical and implicit import of which is--I have a damned thorn in my leg, which the surgeon has not been yet able to extract--and but that I have metaphysicized most successfully on 'Pain', in consequence of the accident, by the Great Scatterer of Thoughts, I should have been half mad. But as it is I have borne it 'like a woman', which, I believe, to be two or three degrees at least beyond a 'stoic'. A suppuration is going on, and I endure in hope. I have redirected some of Southey's letters to you, taking it for granted that you will see him immediately on his arrival in town; he left us yesterday afternoon. Let me hear from you, if it be only to say what I know already, that you will be glad to see me. O, dear friend, thou one of the two human beings of whom I dare hope with a hope, that elevates my own heart. O bless you! S.T. COLERIDGE. [1] [Footnote 1: Letters CXXIII-CXXXI follow No. 110.] Sir Humphry Davy's description of Coleridge at this date is well known, and we must quote it; "Coleridge has left London for Keswick. During his stay in town I saw him seldomer than usual; when I did see him, it was generally in the midst of large companies, where he is the image of power and activity. His eloquence is unimpaired: perhaps it is softer and stronger. His will is less than ever commensurate with his ability. Brilliant images of greatness float upon his mind, like images of the morning clouds on the waters. Their forms are changed by the motions of the waves, they are agitated by every breeze, and modified by every sunbeam. He talked in the course of an hour of beginning three works; he recited the poem of 'Christabel' unfinished, and as I had before heard it. What talent does he not waste in forming visions, sublime, but unconnected with the real world! I have looked to his efforts, as to the efforts of a creating being; but as yet he has not laid the foundation for the new world of intellectual forms" ('Fragmentary Remains', p. 74). Southey had now returned from Portugal, and was also in London ('Southey's Letters', i, 183). It was not till September, 1803, that Southey came to Keswick ('Southey's Letters', i, 229-31). During the interval Coleridge had written various things for the 'Morning Post', the most outstanding contributions being the two powerful letters to Fox of 4th and 9th November 1802, written on the occasion of that statesman going to Paris and paying court to Napoleon. The next eight letters to Thomas Wedgwood give the best impression of Coleridge between October 1802 and February 1803. Letter 111 To Thomas Wedgwood Keswick, Oct. 20, 1802. My dear sir, This is my birthday, my thirtieth. It will not appear wonderful to you, when I tell you, that before the arrival of your letter, I had been thinking with a great weight of different feelings, concerning you, and your dear brother, for I have good reason to believe, that I should not now have been alive, if in addition to other miseries, I had had immediate poverty pressing upon me. I will never again remain silent so long. It has not been altogether indolence, or my habit of procrastination which have [1] kept me from writing, but an eager wish,--I may truly say, a thirst of spirit, to have something honourable to tell you of myself. At present I must be content to tell you something cheerful. My health is very much better. I am stronger in every respect, and am not injured by study, or the act of sitting at my writing desk; but my eyes suffer if at any time I have been intemperate in the use of candle-light. This account supposes another, namely, that my mind is calm, and more at ease. My dear sir, when I was last with you at Stowey, my heart was often full, and I could scarcely keep from communicating to you the tale of my distresses, but could I add to your depression, when you were low? or how interrupt, or cast a shade on your good spirits, that were so rare, and so precious to you? ... I found no comfort but in the driest speculations;--in the 'Ode to Dejection', which you were pleased with. These lines, in the original, followed the line "My shaping spirit of imagination,"-- For not to think of what I needs must feel, But to be still and patient, all I can, And haply by abstruse research to steal From my own nature all the natural man; This was my sole resource, my only plan And that which suits a part infests the whole, And now is almost grown the temper [2] of my soul. I give you these lines for the spirit, and not for the poetry. ... But better days are arrived, and are still to come, I have had Visitations of Hope--that I may yet be something of which those who love me may be proud. I cannot write that without recalling dear Poole. I have heard twice, and written twice, and I fear by a strange fatality, one of the letters will have missed him. Leslie [3] was here some time ago. I was very much pleased with him. And now I will tell you what I am doing. I dedicate three days in the week to the 'Morning Post', and shall hereafter write, for the far greater part, such things as will be of as permanent interest as any thing I can hope to write; and you will shortly see a little essay of mine, justifying the writing in a newspaper. My comparison of the French with the Roman Empire was very favourably received. The poetry which I have sent is merely the emptying out of my desk. The epigrams are wretched indeed, but they answered Stuart's purpose, better than better things. I ought not to have given any signature to them whatsoever. I never dreamt of acknowledging either them, or the 'Ode to the Rain'. As to feeble expressions, and unpolished lines--there is the rub! Indeed, my dear sir, I do value your opinion very highly. I think your judgment on the sentiment, the imagery, the flow of a poem, decisive; at least, if it differed from my own, and if after frequent consideration mine remained different, it would leave me at least perplexed. For you are a perfect electrometer in these things--but in point of poetic diction, I am not so well satisfied that you do not require a certain aloofness from the language of real life, which I think deadly to poetry. Very soon however I shall present you from the press with my opinions full on the subject of style, both in prose and verse; and I am confident of one thing, that I shall convince you that I have thought much and patiently on the subject, and that I understand the whole strength of my antagonist's cause. For I am now busy on the subject, and shall in a very few weeks go to press with a volume on the prose writings of Hall, Milton, and Taylor; and shall immediately follow it up with an essay on the writings of Dr. Johnson and Gibbon, and in these two volumes I flatter myself I shall present a fair history of English Prose. If my life and health remain, and I do but write half as much, and as regularly as I have done during the last six weeks, this will be finished by January next; and I shall then put together my memorandum-book on the subject of Poetry. In both I have endeavoured sedulously to state the facts and the differences clearly and accurately; and my reasons for the preference of one style to another are secondary to this. Of this be assured, that I will never give any thing to the world in 'propria persona' in my own name which I have not tormented with the file. I sometimes suspect that my foul copy would often appear to general readers more polished than my fair copy. Many of the feeble and colloquial expressions have been industriously substituted for others which struck me as artificial, and not standing the test; as being neither the language of passion, nor distinct conceptions. Dear sir, indulge me with looking still further on in my literary life. I have, since my twentieth year, meditated an heroic poem on the 'Siege of Jerusalem', by Titus. This is the pride and the stronghold of my hope, but I never think of it except in my best moods. The work to which I dedicate the ensuing years of my life, is one which highly pleased Leslie, in prospective, and my paper will not let me prattle to you about it. I have written what you more wished me to write, all about myself. Our climate (in the north) is inclement, and our houses not as compact as they might be, but it is a stirring climate, and the worse the weather, the more unceasingly entertaining are my study windows, and the month that is to come is the glory of the year with us. A very warm bed-room I can promise you, and one at the same time which commands the finest lake and mountain view. If Leslie could not go abroad with you, and I could in any way mould my manners and habits to suit you, I should of all things like to be your companion. Good nature, an affectionate disposition, and so thorough a sympathy with the nature of your complaint, that I should feel no pain, not the most momentary, at being told by you what your feelings require at the time in which they required it; this I should bring with me. But I need not say that you may say to me,--"You don't suit me," without inflicting the least mortification. Of course this letter is for your brother, as for you; but I shall write to him soon. God bless you, S. T. COLERIDGE. Thomas Wedgwood, Esq. [Footnote 1: 'Sic.'] [Footnote 2: Cottle prints "temple," an error.] [Footnote 3: The eminent Edinburg Professor. For three years the private tutor of Mr. T. Wedgwood (Cottle). [For further information regarding John, aftwards Sir John, Leslie (1766-1832) see 'Tom Wedgwood' by Lichfield.]] LETTER 112. TO THOMAS WEDGWOOD Keswick, November 3, 1802. Dear Wedgwood, It is now two hours since I received your letter; and after the necessary consultation, Mrs. Coleridge herself is fully of opinion that to lose time is merely to lose spirits. Accordingly I have resolved not to look the children in the face, (the parting from whom is the downright bitter in the thing) but to go to London by to-morrow's mail. Of course I shall be in London, God permitting, on Saturday morning. I shall rest that day, and the next, and proceed to Bristol by the Monday night's mail. At Bristol I will go to "Cote-House"[1] At all events, barring serious illness, serious fractures, and the et cetera of serious unforeseens, I shall be at Bristol, Tuesday noon, November 9. You are aware that my whole knowledge of French does not extend beyond the power of limping slowly, not without a dictionary crutch, through an easy French book: and that as to pronunciation, all my organs of speech, from the bottom of the Larynx to the edge of my lips, are utterly and naturally anti-Gallican. If only I shall have been any comfort, any alleviation to you I shall feel myself at ease--and whether you go abroad or no, while I remain with you, it will greatly contribute to my comfort, if I know you will have no hesitation, nor pain, in telling me what you wish me to do, or not to do. I regard it among the blessings of my life, that I have never lived among men whom I regarded as my artificial superiors: that all the respect I have at any time paid, has been wholly to supposed goodness, or talent. The consequence has been that I have no alarms of pride; no "cheval de frise" of independence. I have always lived among equals. It never occurs to me, even for a moment, that I am otherwise. If I have quarrelled with men, it has been as brothers or as school-fellows quarrel. How little any man can give me, or take from me, save in matters of kindness and esteem, is not so much a thought or conviction with me, or even a distinct feeling, as it is my very nature. Much as I dislike all formal declarations of this kind, I have deemed it well to say this. I have as strong feelings of gratitude as any man. Shame upon me if in the sickness and the sorrow which I have had, and which have been kept unaggravated and supportable by your kindness, and your brother's (Mr. Josiah Wedgwood) shame upon me if I did not feel a kindness, not unmixed with reverence towards you both. But yet I never should have had my present impulses to be with you, and this confidence, that I may become an occasional comfort to you, if, independently of all gratitude, I did not thoroughly esteem you; and if I did not appear to myself to understand the nature of your sufferings; and within the last year, in some slight degree to have felt myself, something of the same. Forgive me, my dear sir, if I have said too much. It is better to write it than to say it, and I am anxious in the event of our travelling together that you should yourself be at ease with me, even as you would with a younger brother, to whom, from his childhood you had been in the habit of saying, "Do this Col." or "don't do that." All good be with you. S. T. COLERIDGE. Thomas Wedgwood, Esq.[2] [Footnote: 1 Westbury, near Bristol, the then residence of Mr. John Wedgwood.] [Footnote 2: Letters CXXXII-CXXXIV follow 112.] LETTER 113. To THOMAS WEDGWOOD Keswick, January 9, 1803. My dear Wedgwood, I send you two letters, one from your dear sister, the second from Sharp, by which you will see at what short notice I must be off, if I go to the "Canaries", If your last plan continue in full force, I have not even the phantom of a wish thitherward struggling, but if aught have happened to you, in the things without, or in the world within, to induce you to change the place, or the plan, relatively to me, I think I could raise the money. But I would a thousand-fold rather go with you whithersoever you go. I shall be anxious to hear how you have gone on since I left you. You should decide in favour of a better climate somewhere or other. The best scheme I can think of, is to go to some part of Italy or Sicily, which we both liked. I would look out for two houses. Wordsworth and his family would take the one, and I the other, and then you might have a home either with me, or if you thought of Mr. and Mrs. Luff, under this modification, one of your own; and in either case you would have neighbours, and so return to England when the home sickness pressed heavy upon you, and back to Italy when it was abated, and the climate of England began to poison your comforts. So you would have abroad in a genial climate, certain comforts of society among simple and enlightened men and women; and I should be an alleviation of the pang which you will necessarily feel, as often as you quit your own family. I know no better plan: for travelling in search of objects is at best a dreary business, and whatever excitement it might have had, you must have exhausted it. God bless you, my dear friend. I write with dim eyes, for indeed, indeed, my heart is very full of affectionate sorrowful thoughts toward you. I write with difficulty, with all the fingers but one of my right hand very much swollen. Before I was half up the "Kirkstone" mountain, the storm had wetted me through and through, and before I reached the top it was so wild and outrageous, that it would have been unmanly to have suffered the poor woman (guide) to continue pushing on, up against such a torrent of wind and rain: so I dismounted and sent her home with the storm in her back. I am no novice in mountain mischiefs, but such a storm as this was, I never witnessed, combining the intensity of the cold, with the violence of the wind and rain. The rain drops were pelted or slung against my face by the gusts, just like splinters of flint, and I felt as if every drop cut my flesh. My hands were all shrivelled up like a washer-woman's, and so benumbed that I was obliged to carry my stick under my arm. O, it was a wild business! Such hurry skurry of clouds, such volleys of sound! In spite of the wet and the cold, I should have had some pleasure in it, but for two vexations; first, an almost intolerable pain came into my right eye, a smarting and burning pain; and secondly, in consequence of riding with such cold water under my seat, extremely uneasy and burthensome feelings attacked my groin, so that, what with the pain from the one, and the alarm from the other, I had "no enjoyment at all"! Just at the brow of the hill I met a man dismounted, who could not sit on horse-back. He seemed quite scared by the uproar, and said to me, with much feeling, "O sir, it is a perilous buffeting, but it is worse for you than for me, for I have it at my back." However I got safely over, and immediately all was calm and breathless, as if it was some mighty fountain put on the summit of Kirkstone, that shot forth its volcano of air, and precipitated huge streams of invisible lava down the road to Patterdale. I went on to Grasmere. [1] I was not at all unwell, when I arrived there, though wet of course to the skin. My right eye had nothing the matter with it, either to the sight of others, or to my own feelings, but I had a bad night, with distressful dreams, chiefly about my eye; and waking often in the dark I thought it was the effect of mere recollection, but it appeared in the morning that my right eye was blood-shot, and the lid swollen. That morning however I walked home, and before I reached Keswick, my eye was quite well, but "I felt unwell all over". Yesterday I continued unusually unwell all over me till eight o'clock in the evening. I took no "laudanum or opium", but at eight o'clock, unable to bear the stomach uneasiness and achings of my limbs, I took two large tea-spoons full of Ether in a wine glass of camphorated gum-water, and a third teaspoon full at ten o'clock, and I received complete relief; my body calmed; my sleep placid; but when I awoke in the morning, my right hand, with three of the fingers, was swollen and inflamed. The swelling in the hand is gone down, and of two of the fingers somewhat abated, but the middle finger is still twice its natural size, so that I write with difficulty. This has been a very rough attack, but though I am much weakened by it, and look sickly and haggard, yet I am not out of heart. Such a 'bout'; such a "periless buffetting," was enough to have hurt the health of a strong man. Few constitutions can bear to be long wet through in intense cold. I fear it will tire you to death to read this prolix scrawled story. Affectionately dear Friend, Yours ever, S. T. COLERIDGE.[2] [Footnote 1: The then residence of Mr. Wordsworth. [Cottle.]] [Footnote 2: Letter CXXXV is our No. 110.] LETTER 114. TO THOMAS WEDGWOOD Friday night, Jan. 14, 1803 Dear Friend, I was glad at heart to receive your letter, and still more gladdened by the reading of it. The exceeding kindness which it breathed was literally medicinal to me, and I firmly believe, cured me of a nervous rheumatic affection, the acid and the oil, very completely at Patterdale; but by the time it came to Keswick, the oil was all atop. You ask me, "Why, in the name of goodness, I did not return when I saw the state of the weather?" The true reason is simple, though it may be somewhat strange. The thought never once entered my head. The cause of this I suppose to be, that (I do not remember it at least) I never once in my whole life turned back in fear of the weather. Prudence is a plant, of which I no doubt possess some valuable specimens, but they are always in my hothouse, never out of the glasses, and least of all things would endure the climate of the mountains. In simple earnestness, I never find myself alone, within the embracement of rocks and hills, a traveller up an alpine road, but my spirit careers, drives, and eddies, like a leaf in autumn; a wild activity of thoughts, imaginations, feelings, and impulses of motion rises up from within me; a sort of bottom wind, that blows to no point of the compass, comes from I know not whence, but agitates the whole of me; my whole being is filled with waves that roll and stumble, one this way, and one that way, like things that have no common master. I think that my soul must have pre-existed in the body of a chamois chaser. The simple image of the old object has been obliterated, but the feelings, and impulsive habits, and incipient actions, are in me, and the old scenery awakens them. The further I ascend from animated nature, from men, and cattle, and the common birds of the woods and fields, the greater becomes in me the intensity of the feeling of life. Life seems to me then an universal spirit, that neither has, nor can have an opposite. "God is everywhere," I have exclaimed, and works everywhere, and where is there room for death? In these moments it has been my creed, that death exists only because ideas exist; that life is limitless sensation; that death is a child of the organic senses, chiefly of the sight; that feelings die by flowing into the mould of the intellect becoming ideas, and that ideas passing forth into action, reinstate themselves again in the world of life. And I do believe that truth lies in these loose generalizations. I do not think it possible that any bodily pains could eat out the love of joy, that is so substantially part of me, towards hills, and rocks, and steep waters; and I have had some trial. On Monday night I had an attack in my stomach and right side, which in pain, and the length of its continuance appeared to me by far the severest I ever had. About one o'clock the pain passed out of my stomach, like lightning from a cloud, into the extremities of my right foot. My toe swelled and throbbed, and I was in a state of delicious ease, which the pain in my toe did not seem at all to interfere with. On Tuesday I was uncommonly well all the morning, and ate an excellent dinner; but playing too long and too rompingly with Hartley and Derwent, I was very unwell that evening. On Wednesday I was well, and after dinner wrapped myself up warm, and walked with Sarah Hutchinson, to Lodore. I never beheld anything more impressive than the wild outline of the black masses of mountain over Lodore, and so on to the gorge of Borrowdale. Even through the bare twigs of a grove of birch trees, through which the road passes; and on emerging from the grove a red planet, so very red that I never saw a star so red, being clear and bright at the same time. It seemed to have sky behind it. It started, as it were from the heavens, like an eye-ball of fire. I wished aloud at that moment that you had been with me. The walk appears to have done me good, but I had a wretched night; shocking pains in my head, occiput, and teeth, and found in the morning that I had two blood-shot eyes. But almost immediately after the receipt and perusal of your letter the pains left me, and I am bettered to this hour; and am now indeed as well as usual saving that my left eye is very much blood-shot. It is a sort of duty with me, to be particular respecting facts that relate to my health. I have retained a good sound appetite through the whole of it, without any craving after exhilarants or narcotics, and I have got well as in a moment. Rapid recovery is constitutional with me; but the former circumstances, I can with certainty refer to the system of diet, abstinence from vegetables, wine, spirits, and beer, which I have adopted by your advice. I have no dread or anxiety respecting any fatigue which either of us is likely to undergo, even in continental travelling. Many a healthy man would have been laid up with such a bout of thorough wet, and intense cold at the same time, as I had at Kirkstone. Would to God that also for your sake I were a stronger man, but I have strong wishes to be with you. I love your society, and receiving much comfort from you, and believing likewise that I receive much improvement, I find a delight very great, my dear friend! indeed it is, when I have reason to imagine that I am in return an alleviation to your destinies, and a comfort to you. I have no fears and am ready to leave home at a two days' warning. For myself I should say two hours, but bustle and hurry might disorder Mrs. Coleridge. She and the three children are quite well.[1] I grieve that there is a lowering in politics. The 'Moniteur' contains almost daily some bitter abuse of our minister and parliament, and in London there is great anxiety and omening. I have dreaded war from the time that the disastrous fortunes of the expedition to Saint Domingo, under Le Clerc, was known in France. Write me one or two lines, as few as you like. I remain, my dear Wedgwood, with most affectionate esteem, and grateful attachment, Your sincere friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. Thomas Wedgwood, Esq. [Footnote 1: Sara had been born 23rd December 1802.] LETTER 115. TO THOMAS WEDGWOOD Nether Stowey, Feb. 10, 1803. Dear Wedgwood, Last night Poole and I fully expected a few lines from you. When the newspaper came in, without your letter, we felt as if a dull neighbour had been ushered in after a knock at the door which had made us rise up and start forward to welcome some long absent friend. Indeed in Poole's case, this simile is less over-swollen than in mine, for in contempt of my convictions and assurance to the contrary, Poole, passing off the Brummagem coin of his wishes for sterling reasons, had persuaded himself fully that he should see you in 'propria persona'. The truth is, we had no right to expect a letter from you, and I should have attributed your not writing to your having nothing to write, to your bodily dislike of writing, or, though with reluctance, to low spirits, but that I have been haunted with the fear that your sister is worse, and that you are at Cote-House, in the mournful office of comforter to your brother. God keep us from idle dreams. Life has enough of real pains. I wrote to Captain Wordsworth to get me some Bang. The captain in an affectionate letter answers me: "The Bang if possible shall be sent. If any country ship arrives I shall certainly get it. We have not got anything of the kind in our China ships." If you would rather wait till it can be brought by Captain Wordsworth himself from China, give me a line that I may write and tell him. We shall hope for a letter from you to-night. I need not say, dear Wedgwood, how anxious I am to hear the particulars of your health and spirits. Poole's account of his conversations, etc., in France, are very interesting and instructive. If your inclination lead you hither you would be very comfortable here. But I am ready at an hour's warning; ready in heart and mind, as well as in body and moveables. I am, dear Wedgwood, most truly yours, S. T. COLERIDGE. Thomas Wedgwood, Esq. LETTER 116. TO THOMAS WEDGWOOD. Stowey, Feb. 10, 1803. My dear Wedgwood, With regard to myself and my accompanying you, let me say thus much. My health is not worse than it was in the North; indeed it is much better. I have no fears. But if you fear that, my health being what you know it to be, the inconveniences of my being with you will be greater than the advantages; (I feel no reluctance in telling you so) [1] it is so entirely an affair of spirits and feeling that the conclusion must be made by you, not in your reason, but purely in your spirit and feeling. Sorry indeed should I be to know that you had gone abroad with one, to whom you were comparatively indifferent. Sorry if there should be no one with you, who could with fellow-feeling and general like-mindedness, yield you sympathy in your sunshiny moments. Dear Wedgwood, my heart swells within me as it were. I have no other wish to accompany you than what arises immediately from my personal attachment, and a deep sense in my own heart, that let us be as dejected as we will, a week together cannot pass in which a mind like yours would not feel the want of affection, or be wholly torpid to its pleasurable influences. I cannot bear to think of your going abroad with a mere travelling companion; with one at all influenced by salary, or personal conveniences. You will not suspect me of flattering you, but indeed dear Wedgwood, you are too good and too valuable a man to deserve to receive attendance from a hireling, even for a month together, in your present state. If I do not go with you, I shall stay in England only such time as may be necessary for me to raise the travelling money, and go immediately to the south of France. I shall probably cross the Pyrenees to Bilboa, see the country of Biscay, and cross the north of Spain to Perpignan, and so on to the north of Italy, and pass my next winter at Nice. I have every reason to believe that I can live, even as a traveller, as cheap as I can in England. God bless you. I will repeat no professions, even in the superscription of a letter. You know me, and that it is my serious, simple wish, that in everything respecting me, you would think altogether of yourself, and nothing of me, and be assured that no resolve of yours, however suddenly adopted, or however nakedly communicated, will give me any pain, any at least arising from my own bearings. Yours ever, S. T. COLERIDGE. Thomas Wedgwood, Esq. P. S. Perhaps Leslie will go with you. [Footnote 1: Should be "Feel no reluctance in telling me so."] LETTER 117. TO THOMAS WEDGWOOD. Poole's, Feb. 17, 1803. My dear Wedgwood, I do not know that I have anything to say that justifies me in troubling you with the postage and perusal of this scrawl. I received a short and kind letter from Josiah last night. He is named the sheriff. Poole, who has received a very kind invitation from your brother John, in a letter of last Monday, and which was repeated in last night's letter, goes with me, I hope in the full persuasion that you will be there (at Cote-House) before he be under the necessity of returning home. Poole is a very, very good man, I like even his incorrigibility in little faults and deficiencies. It looks like a wise determination of nature to let well alone. Are you not laying out a scheme which will throw your travelling in Italy, into an unpleasant and unwholesome part of the year? From all I can gather, you ought to leave this country at the first of April at the latest. But no doubt you know these things better than I. If I do not go with you, it is very probable we shall meet somewhere or other. At all events you will know where I am, and I can come to you if you wish it. And if I go with you, there will be this advantage, that you may drop me where you like, if you should meet any Frenchman, Italian, or Swiss, whom you liked, and who would be pleasant and profitable to you. But this we can discuss at Gunville. As to ----,[1] I never doubted that he means to fulfil his engagements with you, but he is one of those weak moralled men, with whom the meaning to do a thing means nothing. He promises with ninety parts out of a hundred of his whole heart, but there is always a speck of cold at the core that transubstantiates the whole resolve into a lie. I remain in comfortable health,--warm rooms, an old friend, and tranquillity, are specifics for my complaints. With all my ups and downs I have a deal of joyous feeling, and I would with gladness give a good part of it to you, my dear friend. God grant that spring may come to you with healing on her wings. God bless you, my dear Wedgwood. I remain with most affectionate esteem, and regular attachment, and good wishes. Yours ever, S. T. COLERIDGE. Thomas Wedgwood, Esq. P. S. If Southey should send a couple of bottles, one of the red sulphate, and one of the compound acids for me, will you be so good as to bring them with you? [Footnote 1: Mackintosh.] LETTER 118. TO THOMAS WEDGWOOD. Stowey, Feb. 17, 1803. My dear Wedgwood, Last night I received a four ounce parcel letter, by the post, which Poole and I concluded was the mistake or carelessness of the servant, who had put the letter into the post office, instead of the coach office. I should have been indignant, if dear Poole had not set me laughing. On opening it, it contained my letter from Gunville, and a small parcel of "Bang," from Purkis. I will transcribe the parts of his letter which relate to it. Brentford, Feb. 7, 1803. My dear Coleridge, I thank you for your letter, and am happy to be the means of obliging you. Immediately on the receipt of yours, I wrote to Sir Joseph Banks, who I verily believe is one of the most excellent and useful men of this country, requesting a small quantity of Bang, and saying it was for the use of Mr. T. Wedgwood. I yesterday received the parcel which I now send, accompanied with a very kind letter, and as part of it will be interesting to you and your friend, I will transcribe it. "The Bang you ask for is the powder of the leaves of a kind of hemp that grows in the hot climates. It is prepared, and I believe used, in all parts of the east, from Morocco to China. In Europe it is found to act very differently on different constitutions. Some it elevates in the extreme; others it renders torpid, and scarcely observant of any evil that may befal them. In Barbary it is always taken, if it can be procured, by criminals condemned to suffer amputation, and it is said, to enable those miserables to bear the rough operations of an unfeeling executioner, more than we Europeans can the keen knife of our most skilful chirurgeons. This it may be necessary to have said to my friend Mr. T. Wedgwood, whom I respect much, as his virtues deserve, and I know them well. I send a small quantity only as I possess but little. If however, it is found to agree, I will instantly forward the whole of my stock, and write without delay to Barbary, from whence it came, for more." Sir Joseph adds, in a postscript: "It seems almost beyond a doubt, that the Nepenthe was a preparation of the Bang, known to the Ancients." Now I had better take the small parcel with me to Gunville; if I send it by the post, besides the heavy expense, I cannot rely on the Stowey carriers, who are a brace of as careless and dishonest rogues as ever had claims on that article of the hemp and timber trade, called the gallows. Indeed I verily believe that if all Stowey, Ward excepted, does not go to hell, it will be by the supererogation of Poole's sense of honesty.--Charitable! We will have a fair trial of Bang. Do bring down some of the Hyoscyamine pills, and I will give a fair trial of Opium, Henbane, and Nepenthe. By-the-bye I always considered Homer's account of the Nepenthe as a 'Banging' lie. God bless you, my dear friend, and S.T. COLERIDGE. [1] [Footnote 1: Letter CXXXVI follows 118.] The last four letters were written from Stowey, whither Coleridge had gone on a visit to Poole. During the same period some events had taken place which changed the aspect of things. He had become acquainted with William Sotheby, the poet, translator of Homer and Wieland, to whom he communicated in long letters his views on Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction, indicating a widening divergence from his brother poet. He had also made for the satisfaction of Sotheby a translation in blank verse of Gessner's 'Erste Schiffer', which has been lost ('Letters', 369-401). He had likewise paraphrased one of Gessner's Idylls, published as the 'Picture of The Lover's Resolution', in the 'Morning Post' of 6th September 1802. 'Dejection, an Ode', the 'Hymn before Sunrise', and the beautiful dramatic fragment, the 'Night Scene', are the last products of Coleridge's chilled poetic imagination. A third edition (1803) of the Early Poems was issued under the superintendence of Lamb ('Ainger', i, 199-206). He had made a second tour in Wales in company with Tom Wedgwood in November and December 1802 ('Letters', 410-417) returning to find that Sara had been born on 23rd December 1802. In August 1803 Coleridge went on tour to Scotland with the Wordsworths ('Letters', 451, and Dorothy Wordsworth's 'Journal'). It is impossible for us to give all the correspondence of this busy, mental period, but on 4th June 1803, Coleridge writes to Godwin. LETTER 119. To GODWIN Saturday Night, June 4, 1803. Greta Hall, Keswick. My dear Godwin, I trust that my dear friend, C. Lamb, will have informed you how seriously ill I have been. I arrived at Keswick on Good Friday, caught the influenza, have struggled on in a series of convalescence and relapse, the disease still assuming new shapes and symptoms; and, though I am certainly better than at any former period of the disease, and more steadily convalescent, yet it is not mere 'low spirits' that makes me doubt whether I shall ever wholly surmount the effects of it. I owe, then, explanation to you, for I quitted town, with strong feelings of affectionate esteem towards you, and a firm resolution to write to you within a short time after my arrival at my home. During my illness I was exceedingly affected by the thought that month had glided away after month, and year after year, and still had found and left me only 'preparing' for the experiments which are to ascertain whether the hopes of those who have hoped proudly of me have been auspicious omens or mere delusions; and the anxiety to realize something, and finish something, has, no doubt, in some measure retarded my recovery. I am now, however, ready to go to the press with a work which I consider as introductory to a 'system', though to the public it will appear altogether a thing by itself. I write now to ask your advice respecting the time and manner of its publication, and the choice of a publisher, I entitle it 'Organum Vera Organum, or an Instrument of Practical Reasoning in the Business of Real Life'; [1] to which will be prefixed, 1. A familiar introduction to the common system of Logic, namely, that of Aristotle and the Schools. 2. A concise and simple, yet full statement of the Aristotelian Logic, with reference annexed to the authors, and the name and page of the work to which each part may be traced, so that it may be at once seen what is Aristotle's, what Porphyry's, what the addition of the Greek Commentators, and what of the Schoolmen. 3. An outline of the History of Logic in general, 1st Chapter. The Origin of Philosophy in general, and of Logic 'speciatim'. 2d Chap. Of the Eleatic and Megaric Logic. 3d Chap. of the Platonic Logic. 4th Chap, of Aristotle, containing a fair account of the "*[Greek: Orhganon]--of which Dr. Reid, in 'Kaimes' Sketches of Man', has given a most false, and not only erroneous, but calumnious statement--in as far as the account had not been anticipated in the second part of my work, namely, the concise and simple, yet full, etc. etc. 5th Chap. A philosophical examination of the truth and of the value of the Aristotelian System of Logic, including all the after-additions to it. 6th Chap. On the characteristic merits and demerits of Aristotle and Plato as philosophers in general, and an attempt to explain the fact of the vast influence of the former during so many ages; and of the influence of Plato's works on the restoration of the Belles Lettres, and on the Reformation. 7th Chap. Raymund Lully. 8th Chap. Peter Ramus. 9th Chap. Lord Bacon, or the Verulamian Logic. both Chap. Examination of the same, and comparison of it with the Logic of Plato (in which I attempt to make it probable that, though considered by Bacon himself as the antithesis and the antidote of Plato, it is 'bona fide' the same, and that Plato has been misunderstood).[2] 10th Chap. Descartes, 11th Chap. Condillac, and a philosophical examination of 'his' logic, 'i.e.' the logic which he basely purloined from Hartley. Then follows my own 'Organum Vera Organum', which consists of a *[Greek: Eustaema] of all 'possible' modes of true, probable, and false reasoning, arranged philosophically, 'i.e.' on a strict analysis of those operations and passions of the mind in which they originate, or by which they act; with one or more striking instances annexed to each, from authors of high estimation, and to each instance of false reasoning, the manner in which the sophistry is to be detected, and the words in which it may be exposed. The whole will conclude with considerations of the value of the work, or its practical utility in scientific investigations (especially the first part, which contains the strictly demonstrative reasonings, and the analysis of all the acts and passions of the mind which may be employed to the discovery of truth) in the arts of healing, especially in those parts that contain a catalogue, etc. of probable reasoning; lastly, to the senate, the pulpit, and our law courts, to whom the whole--but especially the latter three-fourths of the work, on the probable and the false--will be useful, and finally instructive, how to form a commonplace book by the aid of this Instrument, so as to read with practical advantage, and (supposing average talents) to 'ensure' a facility and rapidity in proving and in computing. I have thus amply detailed the contents of my work, which has not been the labour of one year or of two, but the result of many years' meditations, and of very various reading. The size of the work will, printed at thirty lines a page, form one volume octavo, 500 pages to the volume; and I shall be ready with the first half of the work for the printer at a fortnight's notice. Now, my dear friend, give me your thoughts on the subject: would you have me to offer it to the booksellers, or, by the assistance of my friends, print and publish on my own account? If the former, would you advise me to sell the copyright at once, or only one or more editions? Can you give me a general notion what terms I have a right to insist on in either case? And, lastly, to whom would you advise me to apply? Phillips is a pushing man, and a book is sure to have fair play if it be his 'property'; and it could not be other than pleasant to me to have the same publisher with yourself, 'but'----. Now if there be anything of impatience, that whether truth and justice ought to follow that "'but'" you will inform me. It is not my habit to go to work so seriously about matters of pecuniary business; but my ill health makes my life more than ordinarily uncertain, and I have a wife and three little ones. If your judgment leads you to advise me to offer it to Phillips, would you take the trouble of talking with him on the subject, and give him your real opinion, whatever it may be, of the work and of the powers of the author? When this book is fairly off my hands, I shall, if I live and have sufficient health, set seriously to work in arranging what I have already written, and in pushing forward my studies and my investigations relative to the 'omne scibile' of human nature--'what' we are, and 'how we become' what we are; so as to solve the two grand problems--how, being acted upon, we shall act; how, acting, we shall be acted upon. But between me and this work there may be death. I hope your wife and little ones are well. I have had a sick family. At one time every individual--master, mistress, children, and servants--were all laid up in bed, and we were waited on by persons hired from the town for the week. But now all are well, I only excepted. If you find my paper smell, or my style savour of scholastic quiddity, you must attribute it to the infectious quality of the folio on which I am writing--namely, 'Scotus Erigena de Divisione Naturae', the forerunner, by some centuries, of the schoolmen. I cherish all kinds of honourable feelings towards you; and I am, dear Godwin, Yours most sincerely, S. T. COLERIDGE. [Footnote 1 Extant in MS. See 'Athenaeum', 26th October 1895.] [Footnote 2: See the 'Friend', Bohn Library, pp. 319-345.] You know the high character and present scarcity of 'Tuckers Light of Nature'. "I have found in this writer" (says Paley, in his preface to his 'Moral and Political Philosophy') "more original thinking and observation upon the several subjects he has taken in hand than in any other, not to say in all others put together". His talent also for illustration is unrivalled. But his thoughts are diffused through a long, various, and irregular work. And a friend of mine, every way calculated by his taste and private studies for such a work,[1] is willing to abridge and systematize that work from eight to two volumes--in the words of Paley, "to dispose into method, to collect into heads and articles, and to exhibit in more compact and tangible masses, what in that otherwise excellent performance is spread over too much surface." I would prefix to it an essay containing the whole substance of the first volume of Hartley; entirely defecated from all the corpuscular hypothesis, with more illustrations. I give my name to the essay. Likewise I will revise every sheet of the abridgment. I should think the character of the work, and the above quotations from so high an authority (with the present public, I mean) as Paley, would ensure its success. If you will read or transcribe, and send this to Mr. Phillips, or to any other publisher (Longman and Rees excepted) you would greatly oblige me; that is to say, my dear Godwin, you would essentially serve a young man of profound genius and original mind, who wishes to get his 'Sabine' subsistence by some employment from the booksellers, while he is employing the remainder of his time in nursing up his genius for the destiny which he believes appurtenant to it. "Qui cito facit, bis facit." Impose any task on me in return. [2] [Footnote 1: Hazlitt. The abridgment was made, and published in 1807.] [Footnote 2: Letter CXXXVII follows 119.] Godwin published his 'Life of Chaucer' in 1803. The next letter refers to this work. LETTER 120. TO GODWIN Friday, July 10, 1803. Greta Hall. My dear Godwin, Your letter has this moment reached me, and found me writing for Stuart, to whom I am under a positive engagement to produce three essays by the beginning of next week. To promise, therefore, to do what I could not do would be worse than idle; and to attempt to do what I could not do well, from distraction of mind, would be trifling with my time and your patience. If I could convey to you any tolerably distinct notion of the state of my spirits of late, and the train or the sort of my ideas consequent on that state, you would feel instantly that my non-performance of the promise is matter of 'regret' with me indeed, but not of 'compunction'. It was my full intention to have prepared immediately a second volume of poems for the press; but, though the poems are all either written or composed, excepting only the conclusion of one poem (equal to four days' common work) and a few corrections, and though I had the most pressing motives for sending them off, yet after many attempts I was obliged to give up the very hope--the attempts acted so perniciously on my disorder. Wordsworth, too, wished, and in a very particular manner expressed the wish, that I should write to him at large on a poetic subject, which he has at present 'sub malleo ardentem et ignitum'. I made the attempt, but I could not command my recollections. It seemed a dream that I had ever 'thought' on poetry, or had ever written it, so remote were my trains of ideas from composition or criticism on composition. These two instances will, in some manner, explain my non-performance; but, indeed, I have been very ill, and that I have done anything in any way is a subject of wonder to myself, and of no causeless self-complacency. Yet I am anxious to do something which may convince you of my sincerity by zeal: and, if you think that it will be of any service to you, I will send down for the work; I will instantly give it a perusal 'con amore'; and partly by my reverential love of Chaucer, and partly from my affectionate esteem for his biographer (the summer, too, bringing increase of health with it), I doubt not that my old mind will recur to me; and I will forthwith write a series of letters, containing a critique on Chaucer, and on the 'Life of Chaucer', by W. Godwin, and publish them, with my name, either at once in a small volume, or in the 'Morning Post' in the first instance, and republish them afterwards. The great thing to be done is to present Chaucer stripped of all his adventitious matter, his translations, etc.; to analyse his own real productions, to deduce his province and his rank; then to compare him with his contemporaries, or with immediate prede- and suc- cessors, first as an Englishman, and secondly as a European; then with Spenser and with Shakespeare, between whom he seems to stand mid-way, with, however, a manner of his own which belongs to neither, with a manner and an excellence; lastly, to compare Dante and Chaucer, and inclusively Spenser and Shakespere, with the ancients, to abstract the characteristic differences, and to develop the causes of such differences. (For instance, in all the writings of the ancients I recollect nothing that, strictly examined, can be called humour; yet Chaucer abounds with it, and Dante, too, though in a very different way. Thus, too, the passion for personifications and, "me judice", strong, sharp, practical good sense, which I feel to constitute a strikingly characteristic difference in favour of the "feudal" poets.) As to information, I could give you a critical sketch of poems, written by contemporaries of Chaucer, in Germany; an epic to compare with his "Palamon", and tales with his Tales, descriptive and fanciful poems with those of the same kind in our own poet. In short, a Life of Chaucer ought, in the work itself, and in the appendices of the work, to make the poet explain his age, and to make the age both explain the poet, and evince the superiority of the poet over his age. I think that the publication of such a work would do "your" work some little service, in more ways than one. It would occasion, necessarily, a double review of it in all the Reviews; and there is a large class of fashionable men who have been pleased of late to take me into high favour, and among whom even my name might have some influence, and my praises of you weight. But let me hear from you on the subject. Now for my own business. As soon as you possibly can do something respecting the abridgment of Tucker,[1] do so; you will, on my honour, be doing "good", in the best sense of the word! Of course I cannot wish you to do anything till after the 24th, unless it should be "put" in your way to read that part of the letter to Phillips. As to my own work, let me correct one or two conceptions of yours respecting it. I could, no doubt, induce my friends to publish the work for me, but I am possessed of facts that deter me. I know that the booksellers not only do not encourage, but that they use unjustifiable artifices to injure works published on the authors' own account. It never answered, as far as I can find, in any instance. And even the sale of a first edition is not without objections on this score--to this, however, I should certainly adhere, and it is my resolution. But I must do something immediately. Now, if I knew that any bookseller would purchase the first edition of this work, as numerous as he pleased, I should put the work out of hand at once, "totus in illo". But it was never my intention to send one single sheet to the press till the whole was "bona fide" ready for the printer--that is, both written, and fairly written. The work is half written "out", and the materials of the other half are all in paper, or rather on papers. I should not expect one farthing till the work was delivered entire; and I would deliver it at once, if it were wished. But, if I cannot engage with a bookseller for this, I must do something else "first", which I should be sorry for. Your division of the sorts of works acceptable to booksellers is just, and what has been always my own notion or rather knowledge; but, though I detailed the whole of the contents of my work so fully to you, I did not mean to lay any stress with the bookseller on the first half, but simply state it as preceded by a familiar introduction, and critical history of logic. On the work itself I meant to lay all the stress, as a work really in request, and non-existent, either well or ill-done, and to put the work in the "same class" with "Guthrie" and books of practical instruction--for the universities, classes of scholars, lawyers, etc. etc. Its profitable sale will greatly depend on the pushing of the booksellers, and on its being considered as a "practical" book, "Organum vere Organum", a book by which the reader is to acquire not only knowledge, but likewise "power". I fear that it may extend to seven hundred pages; and would it be better to publish the Introduction of History separately, either after or before? God bless you, and all belonging to you, and your Chaucer. All happiness to you and your wife. Ever yours, S. T. C. P.S. If you read to Phillips any part of my letter respecting my own work, or rather detailed it to him, you would lay all the stress on the "practical". [Footnote 1: Godwin exerted himself actively in the matter, as appears by the correspondence of Charles Lamb.] The ambitious scheme of the letters to Godwin did not exhaust Coleridge's projects at this season. To Southey he wrote: LETTER 121. To SOUTHEY [1] Keswick, July, 1803. My dear Southey, ... I write now to propose a scheme, or rather a rude outline of a scheme, of your grand work. What harm can a proposal do? If it be no pain to you to reject it, it will be none to me to have it rejected. I would have the work entitled "Bibliotheca Britannica", or an History of British Literature, bibliographical, biographical, and critical. The two "last" volumes I would have to be a chronological catalogue of all noticeable or extant books; the others, be the number six or eight, to consist entirely of separate treatises, each giving a critical biblio-biographical history of some one subject. I will, with great pleasure, join you in learning Welsh and Erse: and you, I, Turner, and Owen, might dedicate ourselves for the first half year to a complete history of all Welsh, Saxon, and Erse books that are not translations, that are the native growth of Britain. If the Spanish neutrality continues, I will go in October or November to Biscay, and throw light on the Basque. Let the next volume contain the history of "English" poetry and poets, in which I would include all prose truly poetical. The first half of the second volume should be dedicated to great single names, Chaucer and Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton and Taylor, Dryden and Pope; the poetry of witty logic,--Swift, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne: I write "par hasard", but I mean to say all great names as have either formed epochs in our taste, or such, at least, as are representative; and the great object to be in each instance to determine, first, the true merits and demerits of the "books"; secondly, what of these belong to the age--what to the author "quasi peculium". The second half of the second volume should be a history of poetry and romances, everywhere interspersed with biography, but more flowing, more consecutive, more bibliographical, chronological, and complete. The third volume I would have dedicated to English prose, considered as to style, as to eloquence, as to general impressiveness; a history of styles and manners, their causes, their birth-places and parentage, their analysis. These three volumes would be so generally interesting, so exceedingly entertaining, that you might bid fair for a sale of the work at large. Then let the fourth volume take up the history of metaphysics, theology, medicine, alchemy, common, canon, and Roman law, from Alfred to Henry VII.; in other words, a history of the dark ages in Great Britain. The fifth volume--carry on metaphysics and ethics to the present day in the first half; the second half, comprise the theology of all the reformers. In the fourth volume there would be a grand article on the philosophy of the theology of the Roman Catholic religion. In this (fifth volume), under different names,--Hooker, Baxter, Biddle, and Fox,--the spirit of the theology of all the other parts of Christianity. The sixth and seventh volumes must comprise all the articles you can get, on all the separate arts and sciences that have been treated of in books since the Reformation; and, by this time, the book, if it answered at all, would have gained so high a reputation, that you need not fear having whom you liked to write the different articles--medicine, surgery, chemistry, etc., etc., navigation, travellers, voyagers, etc., etc. If I go into Scotland, shall I engage Walter Scott to write the history of Scottish poets? Tell me, however, what you think of the plan. It would have one prodigious advantage: whatever accident stopped the work, would only prevent the future good, not mar the past; each volume would be a great and valuable work "per se". Then each volume would awaken a new interest, a new set of readers, who would buy the past volumes of course; then it would allow you ample time and opportunities for the slavery of the catalogue volumes, which should be at the same time an index to the work, which would be, in very truth, a pandect of knowledge, alive and swarming with human life, feeling, incident. By the bye, what a strange abuse has been made of the word encyclopaedia! It signifies, properly, grammar, logic, rhetoric, and ethics and metaphysics, which last, explaining the ultimate principles of grammar--log., rhet., and eth.--formed a circle of knowledge. * * * To call a huge unconnected miscellany of the "omne scibile", in an arrangement determined by the accident of initial letters, an encyclopaedia, is the impudent ignorance of your Presbyterian bookmakers. Good night! God bless you! S. T. C. [Footnote 1: Southey's biographer says regarding this scheme: "Soon after the date of the letter, my father paid a short visit to London, the chief purpose of which was to negotiate with Messrs. Longman and Rees respecting 'the management of a "Bibliotheca Britannica" upon a very extensive scale, to be arranged chronologically, and made a readable book by biography, criticism, and connecting chapters, to be published like the Cyclopaedia in parts.'"] SOUTHEY TO S. T. COLERIDGE, ESQ. Bristol, Aug. 3, 1803. Dear Coleridge, I meant to have written sooner; but those little units of interruption and preventions, which sum up to as ugly an aggregate as the items in a lawyer's bill, have come in the way. ... Your plan is too good, too gigantic, quite beyond my powers. If you had my tolerable state of health, and that love of steady and productive employment which is now grown into a necessary habit with me, if you were to execute and would execute it, it would be, beyond all doubt, the most valuable work of any age or any country; but I cannot fill up such an outline. No man can better feel where he fails than I do; and to rely upon you for whole quartos! Dear Coleridge, the smile that comes with that thought is a very melancholy one; and if Edith saw me now, she would think my eyes were weak again, when, in truth, the humour that covers them springs from another cause. For my own comfort, and credit, and peace of mind, I must have a plan which I know myself strong enough to execute. I can take author by author as they come in their series, and give his life and an account of his works quite as well as ever it has yet been done. I can write connecting paragraphs and chapters shortly and pertinently, in my way; and in this way the labour of all my associates can be more easily arranged. ... And, after all, this is really nearer the actual design of what I purport by a bibliotheca than yours would be,--a book of reference, a work in which it may be seen what has been written upon every subject in the British language: this has elsewhere been done in the dictionary form; whatever we get better than that form--"ponemus lucro". [1] [Footnote 1: Letter CXXXVIII is our 121. CXXXIX-CXLII follow 121.] To Thomas Wedgwood Coleridge, on his return from the Scotch tour, wrote: LETTER 122. To THOMAS WEDGWOOD Keswick, September 16, 1803. My dear Wedgwood, I reached home on yesterday noon. William Hazlitt, is a thinking, observant, original man; of great power as a painter of character-portraits, and far more in the manner of the old painters than any living artist, but the objects must be before him. He has no imaginative memory; so much for his intellectuals. His manners are to ninety-nine in one hundred singularly repulsive; brow-hanging; shoe-contemplating--strange. Sharp seemed to like him, but Sharp saw him only for half an hour, and that walking. He is, I verily believe, kindly-natured: is very fond of, attentive to, and patient with children, but he is jealous, gloomy, and of an irritable pride. With all this there is much good in him. He is disinterested; an enthusiastic lover of the great men who have been before us. He says things that are his own, in a way of his own: and though from habitual shyness, and the outside of bear skin, at least of misanthropy, he is strangely confused and dark in his conversation, and delivers himself of almost all his conceptions with a "Forceps", yet he "says" more than any man I ever knew (you yourself only excepted) of that which is his own, in a way of his own; and often times when he has warmed his mind, and the juice is come out, and spread over his spirits, he will gallop for half an hour together, with real eloquence. He sends well-feathered thoughts straight forward to the mark with a twang of the bow-string. If you could recommend him as a portrait painter, I should be glad. To be your companion, he is, in my opinion utterly unfit. His own health is fitful. I have written as I ought to do: to you most freely. You know me, both head and heart, and I will make what deductions your reasons may dictate to me. I can think of no other person (for your travelling companion)--what wonder? For the last years, I have been shy of all new acquaintance. To live beloved is all I need, And when I love, I love indeed. I never had any ambition, and now, I trust I have almost as little vanity. For five months past my mind has been strangely shut up. I have taken the paper with the intention to write to you many times, but it has been one blank feeling;--one blank idealess feeling. I had nothing to say;--could say nothing. How dearly I love you, my very dreams make known to me. I will not trouble you with the gloomy tale of my health. When I am awake, by patience, employment, effort of mind, and walking, I can keep the Fiend at arm's length, but the night is my Hell!--sleep my tormenting Angel. Three nights out of four, I fall asleep, struggling to lie awake, and my frequent night-screams have almost made me a nuisance in my own house. Dreams with me are no shadows, but the very calamities of my life. * * * In the hope of drawing the gout, if gout it should be, into my feet, I walked previously to my getting into the coach at Perth, 263 miles, in eight days, with no unpleasant fatigue; and if I could do you any service by coming to town, and there were no coaches, I would undertake to be with you, on foot in seven days. I must have strength somewhere. My head is indefatigably strong: my limbs too are strong: but acid or not acid, gout or not gout, something there is in my stomach. * * * To diversify this dusky letter, I will write an "Epitaph", which I composed in my sleep for myself while dreaming that I was dying. To the best of my recollection I have not altered a word. Here sleeps at length poor Col. and without screaming Who died, as he had always lived, a dreaming: Shot dead, while sleeping, by the gout within, Alone, and all unknown, at E'nbro' in an Inn. It was Tuesday night last, at the Black Bull, Edinburgh. Yours, dear Wedgwood, gratefully, and Most affectionately, S. T. COLERIDGE. Thomas Wedgwood, Esq. The character of Hazlitt in this letter is as good as anything in La Bruyere. The next letter (without date in Cottle's "Reminiscences", but which must be 1803) is to Miss Cruikshank, of Nether Stowey. The Penelope referred to is Penelope Poole, the cousin of Tom Poole. LETTER 123. To MISS CRUIKSHANK (No date, supposed to be 1803.[1]) My dear Miss Cruikshank, With the kindest intentions, I fear you have done me some little disservice, in borrowing the first edition of my poems from Miss B--. I never held any principles indeed, of which, considering my age, I have reason to be ashamed. The whole of my public life may be comprised in eight or nine months of my 22nd year; and the whole of my political sins during that time, consisted in forming a plan of taking a large farm in common, in America, with other young men of my age. A wild notion indeed, but very harmless. As to my principles, they were, at all times, decidedly anti-jacobin and anti-revolutionary, and my American scheme is a proof of this. Indeed at that time, I seriously held the doctrine of passive obedience, though a violent enemy of the first war. Afterwards, and for the last ten years of my life, I have been fighting incessantly in the good cause, against French ambition, and French principles; and I had Mr. Addington's suffrage, as to the good produced by my Essays, written in the "Morning Post", in the interval of the peace of Amiens, and the second war, together with my two letters to Mr. Fox. [2] Of my former errors, I should be no more ashamed, than of my change of body, natural to increase of age; but in that first edition, there was inserted (without my consent!) a Sonnet to Lord Stanhope, in direct contradiction, equally, to my "then", as to my present principles. A Sonnet written by me in ridicule and mockery of the bloated style of French jacobinical declamation, and inserted by Biggs, (the fool of a printer,) in order forsooth, that he might send the book, and a letter to Earl Stanhope; who, to prove that he was not mad in all things, treated both book and letter with silent contempt. I have therefore sent Mr. Poole's second edition, and if it be in your power, I could wish you to read the "dedication to my brother," at the beginning, to Lady E. Perceval, to obtain whose esteem, so far at least as not to be confounded with the herd of vulgar mob flatterers, I am not ashamed to confess myself solicitous. I would I could be with you, and your visitors. Penelope, you know, is very high in my esteem. With true warmth of heart, she joins more strength of understanding; and, to steady principle, more variety of accomplishments, than it has often been my lot to meet with among the fairer sex. When I praise one woman to another I always mean a compliment to both. My tenderest regards to your dear mother, whom I really long to spend a few hours with, and believe me with sincere good wishes, Yours, etc., S. T. COLERIDGE [3] [Footnote 1: Dated "1807" in "Early Recollections".] [Footnote 2: It appears from Sir James Macintosh's Life, published by his son, that a diminution of respect towards Sir James was entertained by Mr. Fox, arising from the above two letters of Mr. Coleridge, which appeared in the "Morning Post". Some enemy of Sir James had informed Mr. Fox that these two letters were written by Macintosh, and which exceedingly wounded his mind. Before the error could be corrected, Mr. Fox died. This occurrence was deplored by Sir James, in a way that showed his deep feeling of regret, but which, as might be supposed, did not prevent him from bearing the amplest testimony to the social worth and surpassing talents of that great statesman. Mr. Coleridge's Bristol friends will remember that once Mr. Fox was idolized by him as the paragon of political excellence; and Mr. Pitt depressed in the same proportion. [Note by Cottle.]] [Footnote 3: Letter CXLIII follows 123.] In the beginning of 1804 we find Coleridge in London, whither Poole, too, had gone to superintend the compilation of an Abstract on the condition of the Poor Laws. LETTER 124. TO THOMAS WEDGWOOD 16, Abingdon Street, Westminster, Jan. 1804. My dear friend, Some divines hold, that with God to think, and to create, are one and the same act. If to think, and even to compose had been the same as to write with me, I should have written as much too much as I have written too little. The whole truth of the matter is, that I have been very, very ill. Your letter remained four days unread, I was so ill. What effect it had upon me I cannot express by words. It lay under my pillow day after day. I should have written forty times, but as it often and often happens with me, my heart was too full, and I had so much to say that I said nothing. I never received a delight that lasted longer upon me--"Brooded on my mind and made it pregnant," than (from) the six last sentences of your last letter,--which I cannot apologize for not having answered, for I should be casting calumnies against myself; for, for the last six or seven weeks, I have both thought and felt more concerning you, and relating to you, than of all other men put together. Somehow or other, whatever plan I determined to adopt, my fancy, good-natured pander of our wishes, always linked you on to it; or I made it your plan, and linked myself on. I left my home, December 20, 1803, intending to stay a day and a half at Grasmere, and then to walk to Kendal, whither I had sent all my clothes and viatica; from thence to go to London, and to see whether or no I could arrange my pecuniary matters, so as leaving Mrs. Coleridge all that was necessary to her comforts, to go myself to Madeira, having a persuasion, strong as the life within me, that one winter spent in a really warm, genial climate, would completely restore me. Wordsworth had, as I may truly say, forced on me a hundred pounds, in the event of my going to Madeira; and Stuart had kindly offered to befriend me. During the days and affrightful nights of my disease, when my limbs were swollen, and my stomach refused to retain the food--taken in in sorrow, then I looked with pleasure on the scheme: but as soon as dry frosty weather came, or the rains and damps passed off, and I was filled with elastic health, from crown to sole, then the thought of the weight of pecuniary obligation from so many people reconciled me; but I have broken off my story. I stayed at Grasmere (Mr. Wordsworth's) a month; three fourths of the time bed-ridden;--and deeply do I feel the enthusiastic kindness of Wordsworth's wife and sister, who sat up by me, one or the other, in order to awaken me at the first symptoms of distressful feeling; and even when they went to rest, continued often and often to weep and watch for me even in their dreams. I left them January the 14th, and have spent a very pleasant week at Dr. Crompton's, at Liverpool, and arrived in London, at Poole's lodgings, last night at eight o'clock. Though my right hand is so much swollen that I can scarcely keep my pen steady between my thumb and finger, yet my stomach is easy, and my breathing comfortable, and I am eager to hope all good things of my health. That gained, I have a cheering, and I trust prideless confidence that I shall make an active, and perseverant use of the faculties and requirements that have been entrusted to my keeping, and a fair trial of their height, depth, and width. Indeed I look back on the last four months with honest pride, seeing how much I have done, with what steady attachment of mind to the same subject, and under what vexations and sorrows, from without, and amid what incessant sufferings. So much of myself. When I know more, I will tell you more. I find you are still at Cote-house. Poole tells me you talk of Jamaica as a summer excursion. If it were not for the voyage, I would that you would go to Madeira, for from the hour I get on board the vessel, to the time that I once more feel England beneath my feet, I am as certain as past and present experience can make me, that I shall be in health, in high health; and then I am sure, not only that I should be a comfort to you, but that I should be so without diminution of my activity, or professional usefulness. Briefly, dear Wedgwood! I truly and at heart love you, and of course it must add to my deeper and moral happiness to be with you, if I can be either assistance or alleviation. If I find myself so well that I defer my Madeira plan, I shall then go forthwith to Devonshire to see my aged mother, once more before she dies, and stay two or three months with my brothers. But, wherever I am, I never suffer a day, (except when I am travelling) to pass without doing something. Poole made me promise that I would leave one side for him. God bless him! He looks so worshipful in his office, among his clerks, that it would give you a few minutes' good spirits to look in upon him. Pray you as soon as you can command your pen, give me half a score lines, and now that I am loose, say whether or no I can be any good to you. S. T. COLERIDGE. [1] [Footnote 1: Letters CXLIV-CXLVI follow 124.] LETTER 125. TO THOMAS WEDGWOOD 16, Abingdon Street, Westminster, Jan. 28, 1804. My dear friend, It is idle for me to say to you, that my heart and very soul ache with the dull pain of one struck down and stunned. I write to you, for my letter cannot give you unmixed pain, and I would fain say a few words to dissuade you. What good can possibly come of your plan? Will not the very chairs and furniture of your room be shortly more, far more intolerable to you than new and changing objects! more insufferable reflectors of pain and weariness of spirit? Oh, most certainly they will! You must hope, my dearest Wedgwood; you must act as if you hoped. Despair itself has but that advice to give you. Have you ever thought of trying large doses of opium, a hot climate, keeping your body open by grapes, and the fruits of the climate? Is it possible that by drinking freely, you might at last produce the gout, and that a violent pain and inflammation in the extremities might produce new trains of motion and feeling in your stomach, and the organs connected with the stomach, known and unknown? Worse than what you have decreed for yourself cannot well happen. Say but a word and I will come to you, will be with you, will go with you to Malta, to Madeira, to Jamaica, or (if the climate, of which, and its strange effects, I have heard wonders, true or not) to Egypt. At all events, and at the worst even, if you do attempt to realize the scheme of going to and remaining at Gunville, for God's sake, my dear dear friend, do keep up a correspondence with one or more; or if it were possible for you, with several. I know by a little what your sufferings are, and that to shut the eyes, and stop up the ears, is to give one's self up to storm and darkness, and the lurid forms and horrors of a dream. I scarce know why it is; a feeling I have, and which I can hardly understand. I could not endure to live if I had not a firm faith that the life within you will pass forth out of the furnace, for that you have borne what you have borne, and so acted beneath such pressure--constitutes you an awful moral being. I am not ashamed to pray aloud for you. Your most affectionate friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. [1] [Footnote 1: Letters CXLVII-CXLIX follow 125.] These letters on the Pains of Sleep are followed by one to Davy on the non-sympathy of the well with the sick. LETTER 126. TO DAVY Tuesday morning, 7, Barnard's Inn, Holborn. [1] My dear Davy, I trusted my cause last Sunday, I fear, to an unsympathizing agent. To Mr. Tuffin I can scarcely think myself bound to make a direct apology, as my promise was wholly conditional. This I did, not only from general foresight, but from the possibility of hearing from you, that you had not been able to untie your former engagement. To you, therefore, I owe the apology: and on you I expressly and earnestly desired Tobin to call and to explain for me, that I had been in an utterly incompatible state of bodily feeling the whole evening at Mr. Renny's; that I was much hurt by the walk home through the wet; instantly on my return here had an attack in my bowels; that this had not wholly left me, and therefore that I could not come, unless the weather altered. By which I did not mean merely its 'holding up' (though even this it did not do at four o'clock at Barnard's Inn, the sleety rain was still falling, though slightly), but the drying up of the rawness and dampness, which would infallibly have diseased me, before I had reached the Institution--not to mention the effect of sitting a long evening in damp clothes and shoes on an invalid, scarcely recovered from a diarrhoea. I have thought it fit to explain at large, both as a mark of respect to you, and because I have very unjustly acquired a character for breaking engagements, entirely from the non-sympathy of the well with the sick, the robust with the weakly. It must be difficult for most men to conceive the extreme reluctance with which I go at all into 'company', and the unceasing depression which I am struggling up against during the whole time I am in it, which too often makes me drink more 'during dinner' than I ought to do, and as often forces me into efforts of almost obtrusive conversation, 'acting' the opposite of my real state of mind in order to arrive at a medium, as we roll paper the opposite way in order to smoothe it. Be so good as to tell me what hour you expect Mr. Sotheby on Thursday. I am, my dear Davy, with sincere and affectionate esteem, yours ever, S. T. COLERIDGE. [Footnote 1: The twopenny post-mark is that of 6th March, 1804.] Amid these letters, complaining of ill health and full of apologies for broken engagements, Coleridge could write genuine literary criticisms of the first order. The following letter addressed to Sarah Hutchinson is his opinion of Sir Thomas Browne. He had presented her with a copy of 'Religio Medici' with copious annotations (see 'Athenaeum', 30 May 1896, p. 714). LETTER 127. TO SARAH HUTCHINSON March 10th, 1804, Sat. night, 12 o'clock. My dear---- Sir Thomas Browne is among my first favorites, rich in various knowledge, exuberant in conceptions and conceits, contemplative, imaginative; often truly great and magnificent in his style and diction, though doubtless too often big, stiff, and hyperlatinistic: thus I might without admixture of falsehood, describe Sir T. Browne and my description would have only this fault, that it would be equally, or almost equally, applicable to half a dozen other writers, from the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth to the end of Charles II. He is indeed all this; and what he has more than all this peculiar to himself, I seem to convey to my own mind in some measure by saying,--that he is a quiet and sublime enthusiast with a strong tinge of the fantast,--the humourist constantly mingling with, and flashing across, the philosopher, as the darting colours in shot silk play upon the main dye. In short, he has brains in his head which is all the more interesting for a little twist in the brains. He sometimes reminds the reader of Montaigne, but from no other than the general circumstances of an egotism common to both; which in Montaigne is too often a mere amusing gossip, a chit-chat story of whims and peculiarities that lead to nothing,--but which in Sir Thomas Browne is always the result of a feeling heart conjoined with a mind of active curiosity,--the natural and becoming egotism of a man, who, loving other men as himself, gains the habit, and the privilege of talking about himself as familiarly as about other men. Fond of the curious, and a hunter of oddities and strangenesses, while he conceived himself, with quaint and humourous gravity a useful inquirer into physical truth and fundamental science,--he loved to contemplate and discuss his own thoughts and feelings, because he found by comparison with other men's, that they too were curiosities, and so with a perfectly graceful and interesting ease he put them too into his museum and cabinet of varieties. In very truth he was not mistaken:--so completely does he see every thing in a light of his own, reading nature neither by sun, moon, nor candle light, but by the light of the faery glory around his own head; so that you might say that nature had granted to him in perpetuity a patent and monopoly for all his thoughts. Read his "Hydriotaphia" above all:--and in addition to the peculiarity, the exclusive Sir-Thomas-Browne-ness of all the fancies and modes of illustration, wonder at and admire his entireness in every subject, which is before him--he is "totus in illo"; he follows it; he never wanders from it,--and he has no occasion to wander;--for whatever happens to be his subject, he metamorphoses all nature into it. In that "Hydriotaphia" or Treatise on some Urns dug up in Norfolk--how earthy, how redolent of graves and sepulchres is every line! You have now dark mould, now a thigh-bone, now a scull, then a bit of mouldered coffin! a fragment of an old tombstone with moss in its "hic jacet";--a ghost or a winding sheet--or the echo of a funeral psalm wafted on a November wind! and the gayest thing you shall meet with shall be a silver nail or gilt "Anno Domini" from a perished coffin top. The very same remark applies in the same force to the interesting, though the far less interesting, Treatise on the Quincuncial Plantations of the Ancients. There is the same attention to oddities, to the remotenesses and "minutiae" of vegetable terms,--the same entireness of subject. You have quincunxes in heaven above, quincunxes in earth below, and quincunxes in the water beneath the earth; quincunxes in deity, quincunxes in the mind of man, quincunxes in bones, in the optic nerves, in roots of trees, in leaves, in petals, in every thing. In short, first turn to the last leaf of this volume, and read out aloud to yourself the last seven paragraphs of Chap. V. beginning with the words "More considerables," etc. But it is time for me to be in bed, in the words of Sir Thomas, which will serve you, my dear, as a fair specimen of his manner.--"But the quincunx of heaven--(the Hyades or five stars about the horizon at midnight at that time)--runs low, and 'tis time we close the five ports of knowledge: we are unwilling to spin out our waking thoughts into the phantasmes of sleep, which often continueth precogitations,--making tables of cobwebbes, and wildernesses of handsome groves. To keep our eyes open longer were but to act our Antipodes. The huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia." Think you, my dear Friend, that there ever was such a reason given before for going to bed at midnight;--to wit, that if we did not, we should be acting the part of our Antipodes! And then "the huntsmen are up in America."--What life, what fancy!--Does the whimsical knight give us thus a dish of strong green tea, and call it an opiate! I trust that you are quietly asleep-- And that all the stars hang bright above your dwelling, Silent as tho' they watched the sleeping earth! [1] S. T. COLERIDGE. [Footnote 1: From 'Dejection: An Ode', the "Lady" of the later version of which was Sarah Hutchinson. See Knight's 'Life of Wordsworth', ii. 86.] Coleridge now wrote to Tom Wedgwood of his determination to go to Malta. Stoddart, his old friend, had invited him thither. LETTER 128. TO THOMAS WEDGWOOD (24) March, 1804. My dear friend, Though fearful of breaking in upon you after what you have written to me, I could not have left England without having written both to you and your brother, at the very moment I received a note from Sharp, informing me that I must instantly secure a place in the Portsmouth mail for Tuesday, and if I could not, that I must do so in the light coach for Tuesday's early coach. I am agitated by many things, and only write now because you desired an answer by return of post. I have been dangerously ill, but the illness is going about, and not connected with my immediate ill health, however it may be with my general constitution. It was the cholera-morbus. But for a series of the merest accidents I should have been seized in the streets, in a bitter east wind, with cold rain; at all events have walked through it struggling. It was Sunday-night. I have suffered it at Tobin's; Tobin sleeping out at Woolwich. No fire, no wine or spirits, or medicine of any kind, and no person being within call, but luckily, perhaps the occasion would better suit the word providentially, Tuffin, calling, took me home with him. * * * I tremble at every loud sound I myself utter. But this is rather a history of the past than of the present. I have only enough for memento, and already on Wednesday I consider myself in clear sunshine, without the shadow of the wings of the destroying angel. What else relates to myself, I will write on Monday. Would to heaven you were going with me to Malta, if it were but for the voyage! With all other things I could make the passage with an unwavering mind. But without cheerings of hope. Let me mention one thing; Lord Cadogan was brought to absolute despair, and hatred of life, by a stomach complaint, being now an old man. The symptoms, as stated to me, were strikingly like yours, excepting the nervous difference of the two characters; the flittering fever, etc. He was advised to reduce lean beef to a pure jelly, by Papin's digester, with as little water as could secure it from burning, and of this to take half a wine glass 10 or 14 times a day. This and nothing else. He did so. Sir George Beaumont saw, within a few weeks a letter from himself to Lord St. Asaph, in which he relates the circumstance of his perseverence in it, and rapid amelioration, and final recovery. "I am now," he says, "in real good health; as good, and in as cheerful spirits as I ever was when a young man." May God bless you, even here, S. T. COLERIDGE. Before Coleridge left for Malta, Humphry Davy wrote the following beautiful letter to Coleridge, and Coleridge replied in a letter equally beautiful in its self-portraiture. Royal Institution, Twelve o'clock, Monday. My dear Coleridge, My mind is disturbed, and my body harassed by many labours; yet I cannot suffer you to depart, without endeavouring to express to you some of the unbroken and higher feelings of my spirit, which have you at once for their cause and object. Years have passed since we first met; and your presence, and recollections in regard to you, have afforded me continued sources of enjoyment. Some of the better feelings of my nature have been elevated by your converse; and thoughts which you have nursed, have been to me an eternal source of consolation. In whatever part of the world you are, you will often live with me, not as a fleeting idea, but as a recollection possessed of creative energy,--as an imagination winged with fire, inspiring and rejoicing. You must not live much longer without giving to all men the proof of power, which those who know you feel in admiration. Perhaps at a distance from the applauding and censuring murmurs of the world, you will be best able to execute those great works which are justly expected from you: you are to be the historian of the philosophy of feeling. Do not in any way dissipate your noble nature! Do not give up your birthright! May you soon recover perfect health--the health of strength and happiness! May you soon return to us, confirmed in all the powers essential to the exertion of genius. You were born for your country, and your native land must be the scene of your activity. I shall expect the time when your spirit, bursting through the clouds of ill health, will appear to all men, not as an uncertain and brilliant flame, but as a fair and permanent light, fixed, though constantly in motion,--as a sun which gives its fire, not only to its attendant planets, but which sends beams from all its parts into all worlds. May blessings attend you, my dear friend! Do not forget me: we live for different ends, and with different habits and pursuits; but our feelings with regard to each other have, I believe, never altered. They must continue; they can have no natural death; and, I trust, they can never be destroyed by fortune, chance, or accident. H. DAVY. LETTER 129. TO DAVY Sunday, March 25, 1804. My dear Davy, I returned from Mr. Northcote's, having been diseased by the change of weather too grievously to permit me to continue sitting, for in those moods of body brisk motion alone can prevent me from falling into distempered sleep. I came in meditating a letter to you, or rather the writing of the letter, which I had meditated yesterday, even while you were yet sitting with us. But it would be the merest confusion of my mind to force it into activity at present. Yours of this morning must have sunken down first, and must have found its abiding resting-place. O, dear friend! blessed are the moments, and if not moments of "humility", yet as distant from whatever is opposite to humility, as humility itself, when I am able to hope of myself as you have dared hope of and for me. Alas! they are neither many nor of quick recurrence. There "is" a something, an essential something, wanting in me. I feel it, I "know" it--though what it is, I can but guess. I have read somewhere, that in the tropical climates there are annuals as lofty and of as an ample girth as forest trees:--So by a very dim likeness I seem to myself to distinguish Power from Strength--and to have only the former. But of this I will speak again: for if it be no reality, if it be no more than a disease of my mind, it is yet deeply rooted and of long standing, and requires help from one who loves me in the light of knowledge. I have written these lines with a compelled understanding, my feelings otherwhere at work--and I fear, unwell as I am, to indulge my [1] deep emotion, however ennobled or endeared. Dear Davy! I have always loved, always honoured, always had faith in you, in every part of my being that lies below the surface; and whatever changes may have now and then "rippled" even upon the surface, have been only jealousies concerning you in behalf of all men, and fears from exceeding great hope. I cannot be prevented from uttering and manifesting the strongest convictions and best feelings of my nature by the incident, that they of whom I think so highly, esteem me in return, and entertain reciprocal hopes. No! I would to God, I thought it myself even as you think of me, but.... So far had I written, my dear Davy, yesterday afternoon, with all my faculties beclouded, writing mostly about myself--but, Heaven knows! thinking wholly about you. I am too sad, too much dejected to write what I could wish. Of course I shall see you this evening here at a quarter after nine. When I mentioned it to Sir George, "Too late," said he; "no, if it were twelve o'clock, it would be better than his not coming." They are really kind and good [Sir George and Lady Beaumont]. Sir George is a remarkably 'sensible' man, which I mention, because it 'is' somewhat REMARKABLE in a painter of genius, who is at the same time a man of rank and an exceedingly amusing companion. I am still but very indifferent--but that is so old a story that it affects me but little. To see 'you' look so very unwell on Saturday, was a new thing to me, and I want a word something short of affright, and a little beyond anxiety, to express the feeling that haunted me in consequence. I trust that I shall have time, and the greater spirit, to write to you from Portsmouth, a part at least of what is in and upon me in my more genial moments. But always I am and shall be, my dear Davy, with hope, and esteem, and affection, the aggregate of many Davys, Your sincere friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. [2] [Footnote 1: Perhaps "any" is the right word here.] [Footnote 2: Letter CL follows, 129.] 
8533	----	THE LITERARY REMAINS OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE COLLECTED AND EDITED BY HENRY NELSON COLERIDGE, ESQ. M.A. VOLUME THE SECOND CONTENTS VOL. II. LITERARY REMAINS. Extract from a Letter written by Mr. Coleridge, in February, 1818, to a Gentleman who attended the Course of Lectures given in the Spring of that Year. Extract from a Letter to J. Britton, Esq. SHAKSPEARE, WITH INTRODUCTORY MATTER ON POETRY, THE DRAMA, AND THE STAGE Definition of Poetry Greek Drama Progress of the Drama The Drama generally, and Public Taste Shakspeare, a Poet generally Shakspeare's Judgment equal to his Genius Recapitulation, and Summary of the Characteristics of Shakspeare's Dramas Order of Shakspeare's Plays Notes on the Tempest Love's Labour's Lost Midsummer Night's Dream Comedy of Errors As You Like It Twelfth Night All's Well that Ends Well Merry Wives of Windsor Measure for Measure Cymbeline Titus Andronicus Troilus and Cressida Coriolanus Julius Cæsar Antony and Cleopatra Timon of Athens Romeo and Juliet Shakspeare's English Historical Plays King John Richard II. Henry IV. Part I. Henry IV. Part II. Henry V. Henry VI. Part I. Richard III. Lear Hamlet Notes on Macbeth Notes on the Winter's Tale Notes on Othello NOTES ON BEN JONSON Whalley's Preface Whalley's Life of Jonson Every Man out of His Humour Poetaster Fall of Sejanus Volpone Epicène The Alchemist Catiline's Conspiracy Bartholomew Fair The Devil is an Ass The Staple of News The New Inn NOTES ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER Harris's Commendatory Poem on Fletcher Life of Fletcher in Stockdale's Edition. 1811 Maid's Tragedy A King and no King The Scornful Lady The Custom of the Country The Elder Brother The Spanish Curate Wit Without Money The Humorous Lieutenant The Mad Lover The Loyal Subject Rule a Wife and have a Wife The Laws of Candy The Little French Lawyer Valentinian Rollo The Wildgoose Chase A Wife for a Month The Pilgrim The Queen of Corinth The Noble Gentleman The Coronation Wit at Several Weapons The Fair Maid of the Inn The Two Noble Kinsmen The Woman Hater On the 'Prometheus' of Æschylus Note on Chalmers's 'Life of Daniel' Bishop Corbet Notes on Selden's 'Table Talk' Note on Theological Lectures of Benjamin Wheeler, D.D. Note on a Sermon on the Prevalence of Infidelity and Enthusiasm, by Walter Birch, B. D. Fénélon on Charity Change of the Climates Wonderfulness of Prose Notes on Tom Jones Jonathan Wild Barry Cornwall The Primitive Christian's Address to the Cross Fuller's Holy State Fuller's Profane State Fuller's Appeal of Injured Innocence Fuller's Church History Asgill's Argument Introduction to Asgill's Defence upon his Expulsion from the House of Commons. Notes on Sir Thomas Browne's 'Religio Medici' Notes on Sir Thomas Browne's Garden of Cyrus Notes on Sir Thomas Browne's Vulgar Errors LITERARY REMAINS Extract from a Letter written by Mr. Coleridge, in February, 1818, to a gentleman who attended the course of Lectures given in the spring of that year. See the 'Canterbury Magazine', September, 1834. Ed. My next Friday's lecture will, if I do not grossly flatter-blind myself, be interesting, and the points of view not only original, but new to the audience. I make this distinction, because sixteen or rather seventeen years ago, I delivered eighteen lectures on Shakspeare, at the Royal Institution; three-fourths of which appeared at that time startling paradoxes, although they have since been adopted even by men, who then made use of them as proofs of my flighty and paradoxical turn of mind; all tending to prove that Shakspeare's judgment was, if possible, still more wonderful than his genius; or rather, that the contradistinction itself between judgment and genius rested on an utterly false theory. This, and its proofs and grounds have been--I should not have said adopted, but produced as their own legitimate children by some, and by others the merit of them attributed to a foreign writer, whose lectures were not given orally till two years after mine, rather than to their countryman; though I dare appeal to the most adequate judges, as Sir George Beaumont, the Bishop of Durham, Mr. Sotheby, and afterwards to Mr. Rogers and Lord Byron, whether there is one single principle in Schlegel's work (which is not an admitted drawback from its merits), that was not established and applied in detail by me. Plutarch tells us, that egotism is a venial fault in the unfortunate, and justifiable in the calumniated, &c. ... Extract from a Letter to J. Britton, Esq. 28th Feb., 1819, Highgate. Dear Sir, --First permit me to remove a very natural, indeed almost inevitable, mistake, relative to my lectures; namely, that I 'have' them, or that the lectures of one place or season are in any way repeated in another. So far from it, that on any point that I had ever studied (and on no other should I dare discourse--I mean, that I would not lecture on any subject for which I had to 'acquire' the main knowledge, even though a month's or three months' previous time were allowed me; on no subject that had not employed my thoughts for a large portion of my life since earliest manhood, free of all outward and particular purpose)--on any point within my habit of thought, I should greatly prefer a subject I had never lectured on, to one which I had repeatedly given; and those who have attended me for any two seasons successively will bear witness, that the lecture given at the London Philosophical Society, on the 'Romeo and Juliet', for instance, was as different from that given at the Crown and Anchor, as if they had been by two individuals who, without any communication with each other, had only mastered the same principles of philosophic criticism. This was most strikingly evidenced in the coincidence between my lectures and those of Schlegel; such, and so close, that it was fortunate for my moral reputation that I had not only from five to seven hundred ear witnesses that the passages had been given by me at the Royal Institution two years before Schlegel commenced his lectures at Vienna, but that notes had been taken of these by several men and ladies of high rank. The fact is this; during a course of lectures, I faithfully employ all the intervening days in collecting and digesting the materials, whether I have or have not lectured on the same subject before, making no difference. The day of the lecture, till the hour of commencement, I devote to the consideration, what of the mass before me is best fitted to answer the purposes of a lecture, that is, to keep the audience awake and interested during the delivery, and to leave a sting behind, that is, a disposition to study the subject anew, under the light of a new principle. Several times, however, partly from apprehension respecting my health and animal spirits, partly from the wish to possess copies that might afterwards be marketable among the publishers, I have previously written the lecture; but before I had proceeded twenty minutes, I have been obliged to push the MS. away, and give the subject a new turn. Nay, this was so notorious, that many of my auditors used to threaten me, when they saw any number of written papers on my desk, to steal them away; declaring they never felt so secure of a good lecture as when they perceived that I had not a single scrap of writing before me. I take far, far more pains than would go to the set composition of a lecture, both by varied reading and by meditation; but for the words, illustrations, &c., I know almost as little as any one of the audience (that is, those of anything like the same education with myself) what they will be five minutes before the lecture begins. Such is my way, for such is my nature; and in attempting any other, I should only torment myself in order to disappoint my auditors--torment myself during the delivery, I mean; for in all other respects it would be a much shorter and easier task to deliver them from writing. I am anxious to preclude any semblance of affectation; and have therefore troubled you with this lengthy preface before I have the hardihood to assure you, that you might as well ask me what my dreams were in the year 1814, as what my course of lectures was at the Surrey Institution. 'Fuimus Troes.' SHAKSPEARE, WITH INTRODUCTORY MATTER ON POETRY, THE DRAMA, AND THE STAGE. DEFINITION OF POETRY. Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to metre. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication, of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure. This definition is useful; but as it would include novels and other works of fiction, which yet we do not call poems, there must be some additional character by which poetry is not only divided from opposites, but likewise distinguished from disparate, though similar, modes of composition. Now how is this to be effected? In animated prose, the beauties of nature, and the passions and accidents of human nature, are often expressed in that natural language which the contemplation of them would suggest to a pure and benevolent mind; yet still neither we nor the writers call such a work a poem, though no work could deserve that name which did not include all this, together with something else. What is this? It is that pleasurable emotion, that peculiar state and degree of excitement, which arises in the poet himself in the act of composition;--and in order to understand this, we must combine a more than ordinary sympathy with the objects, emotions, or incidents contemplated by the poet, consequent on a more than common sensibility, with a more than ordinary activity of the mind in respect of the fancy and the imagination. Hence is produced a more vivid reflection of the truths of nature and of the human heart, united with a constant activity modifying and correcting these truths by that sort of pleasurable emotion, which the exertion of all our faculties gives in a certain degree; but which can only be felt in perfection under the full play of those powers of mind, which are spontaneous rather than voluntary, and in which the effort required bears no proportion to the activity enjoyed. This is the state which permits the production of a highly pleasurable whole, of which each part shall also communicate for itself a distinct and conscious pleasure; and hence arises the definition, which I trust is now intelligible, that poetry, or rather a poem, is a species of composition, opposed to science, as having intellectual pleasure for its object, and as attaining its end by the use of language natural to us in a state of excitement,--but distinguished from other species of composition, not excluded by the former criterion, by permitting a pleasure from the whole consistent with a consciousness of pleasure from the component parts;--and the perfection of which is, to communicate from each part the greatest immediate pleasure compatible with the largest sum of pleasure on the whole. This, of course, will vary with the different modes of poetry;--and that splendour of particular lines, which would be worthy of admiration in an impassioned elegy, or a short indignant satire, would be a blemish and proof of vile taste in a tragedy or an epic poem. It is remarkable, by the way, that Milton in three incidental words has implied all which for the purposes of more distinct apprehension, which at first must be slow-paced in order to be distinct, I have endeavoured to develope in a precise and strictly adequate definition. Speaking of poetry, he says, as in a parenthesis, "which is simple, sensuous, passionate." How awful is the power of words!--fearful often in their consequences when merely felt, not understood; but most awful when both felt and understood!--Had these three words only been properly understood by, and present in the minds of, general readers, not only almost a library of false poetry would have been either precluded or still-born, but, what is of more consequence, works truly excellent and capable of enlarging the understanding, warming and purifying the heart, and placing in the centre of the whole being the germs of noble and manlike actions, would have been the common diet of the intellect instead. For the first condition, simplicity,--while, on the one hand, it distinguishes poetry from the arduous processes of science, labouring towards an end not yet arrived at, and supposes a smooth and finished road, on which the reader is to walk onward easily, with streams murmuring by his side, and trees and flowers and human dwellings to make his journey as delightful as the object of it is desirable, instead of having to toil, with the pioneers and painfully make the road on which others are to travel,--precludes, on the other hand, every affectation and morbid peculiarity;--the second condition, sensuousness, insures that framework of objectivity, that definiteness and articulation of imagery, and that modification of the images themselves, without which poetry becomes flattened into mere didactics of practice, or evaporated into a hazy, unthoughtful, daydreaming; and the third condition, passion, provides that neither thought nor imagery shall be simply objective, but that the _passio vera_ of humanity shall warm and animate both. To return, however, to the previous definition, this most general and distinctive character of a poem originates in the poetic genius itself; and though it comprises whatever can with any propriety be called a poem, (unless that word be a mere lazy synonyme for a composition in metre,) it yet becomes a just, and not merely discriminative, but full and adequate, definition of poetry in its highest and most peculiar sense, only so far as the distinction still results from the poetic genius, which sustains and modifies the emotions, thoughts, and vivid representations of the poem by the energy without effort of the poet's own mind,--by the spontaneous activity of his imagination and fancy, and by whatever else with these reveals itself in the balancing and reconciling of opposite or discordant qualities, sameness with difference, a sense of novelty and freshness with old or customary objects, a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order, self-possession and judgment with enthusiasm and vehement feeling,--and which, while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature, the manner to the matter, and our admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the images, passions, characters, and incidents of the poem:-- Doubtless, this could not be, but that she turns Bodies to _spirit_ by sublimation strange, As fire converts to fire the things it burns-- As we our food into our nature change! From their gross matter she abstracts _their_ forms, And draws a kind of quintessence from things, Which to her proper nature she transforms To bear them light on her celestial wings! _Thus_ doth she, when from _individual states_ She doth abstract the universal kinds, _Which then reclothed in diverse names and fates Steal access thro' our senses to our minds._ [1] [Footnote 1: Sir John Davies on the Immortality of the Soul, sect. iv. The words and lines in italics (_between_) are substituted to apply these verses to the poetic genius. The greater part of this latter paragraph may be found adopted, with some alterations, in the 'Biographia Literaria', vol. ii. c. 14; but I have thought it better in this instance and some others, to run the chance of bringing a few passages twice over to the recollection of the reader, than to weaken the force of the original argument by breaking the connection. Ed.] GREEK DRAMA. It is truly singular that Plato,--whose philosophy and religion were but exotic at home, and a mere opposition to the finite in all things, genuine prophet and anticipator as he was of the Protestant Christian aera,--should have given in his Dialogue of the Banquet, a justification of our Shakspeare. For he relates that, when all the other guests had either dispersed or fallen asleep, Socrates only, together with Aristophanes and Agathon, remained awake, and that, while he continued to drink with them out of a large goblet, he compelled them, though most reluctantly, to admit that it was the business of one and the same genius to excel in tragic and comic poetry, or that the tragic poet ought, at the same time, to contain within himself the powers of comedy. [1] Now, as this was directly repugnant to the entire theory of the ancient critics, and contrary to all their experience, it is evident that Plato must have fixed the eye of his contemplation on the innermost essentials of the drama, abstracted from the forms of age or country. In another passage he even adds the reason, namely, that opposites illustrate each other's nature, and in their struggle draw forth the strength of the combatants, and display the conqueror as sovereign even on the territories of the rival power. Nothing can more forcibly exemplify the separative spirit of the Greek arts than their comedy as opposed to their tragedy. But as the immediate struggle of contraries supposes an arena common to both, so both were alike ideal; that is, the comedy of Aristophanes rose to as great a distance above the ludicrous of real life, as the tragedy of Sophocles above its tragic events and passions;--and it is in this one point, of absolute ideality, that the comedy of Shakspeare and the old comedy of Athens coincide. In this also alone did the Greek tragedy and comedy unite; in every thing else they were exactly opposed to each other. Tragedy is poetry in its deepest earnest; comedy is poetry in unlimited jest. Earnestness consists in the direction and convergence of all the powers of the soul to one aim, and in the voluntary restraint of its activity in consequence; the opposite, therefore, lies in the apparent abandonment of all definite aim or end, and in the removal of all bounds in the exercise of the mind,--attaining its real end, as an entire contrast, most perfectly, the greater the display is of intellectual wealth squandered in the wantonness of sport without an object, and the more abundant the life and vivacity in the creations of the arbitrary will. The later comedy, even where it was really comic, was doubtless likewise more comic, the more free it appeared from any fixed aim. Misunderstandings of intention, fruitless struggles of absurd passion, contradictions of temper, and laughable situations there were; but still the form of the representation itself was serious; it proceeded as much according to settled laws, and used as much the same means of art, though to a different purpose, as the regular tragedy itself. But in the old comedy the very form itself is whimsical; the whole work is one great jest, comprehending a world of jests within it, among which each maintains its own place without seeming to concern itself as to the relation in which it may stand to its fellows. In short, in Sophocles, the constitution of tragedy is monarchical, but such as it existed in elder Greece, limited by laws, and therefore the more venerable,--all the parts adapting and submitting themselves to the majesty of the heroic sceptre:--in Aristophanes, comedy, on the contrary, is poetry in its most democratic form, and it is a fundamental principle with it, rather to risk all the confusion of anarchy, than to destroy the independence and privileges of its individual constituents,--place, verse, characters, even single thoughts, conceits, and allusions, each turning on the pivot of its own free will. The tragic poet idealizes his characters by giving to the spiritual part of our nature a more decided preponderance over the animal cravings and impulses, than is met with in real life: the comic poet idealizes his characters by making the animal the governing power, and the intellectual the mere instrument. But as tragedy is not a collection of virtues and perfections, but takes care only that the vices and imperfections shall spring from the passions, errors, and prejudices which arise out of the soul;--so neither is comedy a mere crowd of vices and follies, but whatever qualities it represents, even though they are in a certain sense amiable, it still displays them as having their origin in some dependence on our lower nature, accompanied with a defect in true freedom of spirit and self-subsistence, and subject to that unconnection by contradictions of the inward being, to which all folly is owing. The ideal of earnest poetry consists in the union and harmonious melting down, and fusion of the sensual into the spiritual,--of man as an animal into man as a power of reason and self-government. And this we have represented to us most clearly in the plastic art, or statuary; where the perfection of outward form is a symbol of the perfection of an inward idea; where the body is wholly penetrated by the soul, and spiritualized even to a state of glory, and like a transparent substance, the matter, in its own nature darkness, becomes altogether a vehicle and fixure of light, a mean of developing its beauties, and unfolding its wealth of various colors without disturbing its unity, or causing a division of the parts. The sportive ideal, on the contrary, consists in the perfect harmony and concord of the higher nature with the animal, as with its ruling principle and its acknowledged regent. The understanding and practical reason are represented as the willing slaves of the senses and appetites, and of the passions arising out of them. Hence we may admit the appropriateness to the old comedy, as a work of defined art, of allusions and descriptions, which morality can never justify, and, only with reference to the author himself, and only as being the effect or rather the cause of the circumstances in which he wrote, can consent even to palliate. The old comedy rose to its perfection in Aristophanes, and in him also it died with the freedom of Greece. Then arose a species of drama, more fitly called, dramatic entertainment than comedy, but of which, nevertheless, our modern comedy (Shakspeare's altogether excepted) is the genuine descendant. Euripides had already brought tragedy lower down and by many steps nearer to the real world than his predecessors had ever done, and the passionate admiration which Menander and Philemon expressed for him, and their open avowals that he was their great master, entitle us to consider their dramas as of a middle species, between tragedy and comedy,--not the tragi-comedy, or thing of heterogeneous parts, but a complete whole, founded on principles of its own. Throughout we find the drama of Menander distinguishing itself from tragedy, but not, as the genuine old comedy, contrasting with, and opposing, it. Tragedy, indeed, carried the thoughts into the mythologic world, in order to raise the emotions, the fears, and the hopes, which convince the inmost heart that their final cause is not to be discovered in the limits of mere mortal life, and force us into a presentiment, however dim, of a state in which those struggles of inward free will with outward necessity, which form the true subject of the tragedian, shall be reconciled and solved;--the entertainment or new comedy, on the other hand, remained within the circle of experience. Instead of the tragic destiny, it introduced the power of chance; even in the few fragments of Menander and Philemon now remaining to us, we find many exclamations and reflections concerning chance and fortune, as in the tragic poets concerning destiny. In tragedy, the moral law, either as obeyed or violated, above all consequences--its own maintenance or violation constituting the most important of all consequences--forms the ground; the new comedy, and our modern comedy in general, (Shakspeare excepted as before) lies in prudence or imprudence, enlightened or misled self-love. The whole moral system of the entertainment exactly like that of fable, consists in rules of prudence, with an exquisite conciseness, and at the same time an exhaustive fulness of sense. An old critic said that tragedy was the flight or elevation of life, comedy (that of Menander) its arrangement or ordonnance. Add to these features a portrait-like truth of character,--not so far indeed as that a 'bona fide' individual should be described or imagined, but yet so that the features which give interest and permanence to the class should be individualized. The old tragedy moved in an ideal world,--the old comedy in a fantastic world. As the entertainment, or new comedy, restrained the creative activity both of the fancy and the imagination, it indemnified the understanding in appealing to the judgment for the probability of the scenes represented. The ancients themselves acknowledged the new comedy as an exact copy of real life. The grammarian, Aristophanes, somewhat affectedly exclaimed:--"O Life and Menander! which of you two imitated the other?" In short the form of this species of drama was poetry; the stuff or matter was prose. It was prose rendered delightful by the blandishments and measured motions of the muse. Yet even this was not universal. The mimes of Sophron, so passionately admired by Plato, were written in prose, and were scenes out of real life conducted in dialogue. The exquisite Feast of Adonis ([Greek (transliterated): Surakousiai ae Ad'oniazousai]) in Theocritus, we are told, with some others of his eclogues, were close imitations of certain mimes of Sophron--free translations of the prose into hexameters. It will not be improper, in this place, to make a few remarks on the remarkable character and functions of the chorus in the Greek tragic drama. The chorus entered from below, close by the orchestra, and there, pacing to and fro during the choral odes, performed their solemn measured dance. In the centre of the 'orchestra', directly over against the middle of the 'scene', there stood an elevation with steps in the shape of a large altar, as high as the boards of the 'logeion' or moveable stage. This elevation was named the 'thymele', ([Greek (transliterated): thumelae]) and served to recall the origin and original purpose of the chorus, as an altar-song in honour of the presiding deity. Here, and on these steps, the persons of the chorus sate collectively, when they were not singing; attending to the dialogue as spectators, and acting as (what in truth they were) the ideal representatives of the real audience, and of the poet himself in his own character, assuming the supposed impressions made by the drama, in order to direct and rule them. But when the chorus itself formed part of the dialogue, then the leader of the band, the foreman or 'coryphaeus', ascended, as some think, the level summit of the 'thymele' in order to command the stage, or, perhaps, the whole chorus advanced to the front of the orchestra, and thus put themselves in ideal connection, as it were, with the 'dramatis personæ' there acting. This 'thymele' was in the centre of the whole edifice, all the measurements were calculated, and the semi-circle of the amphitheatre was drawn, from this point. It had a double use, a twofold purpose; it constantly reminded the spectators of the origin of tragedy as a religious service, and declared itself as the ideal representative of the audience by having its place exactly in the point, to which all the radii from the different seats or benches converged. In this double character, as constituent parts, and yet at the same time as spectators, of the drama, the chorus could not but tend to enforce the unity of place;--not on the score of any supposed improbability, which the understanding or common sense might detect in a change of place;--but because the senses themselves put it out of the power of any imagination to conceive a place coming to, and going away from the persons, instead of the persons changing their place. Yet there are instances, in which, during the silence of the chorus, the poets have hazarded this by a change in that part of the scenery which represented the more distant objects to the eye of the spectator--a demonstrative proof, that this alternately extolled and ridiculed unity (as ignorantly ridiculed as extolled) was grounded on no essential principle of reason, but arose out of circumstances which the poet could not remove, and therefore took up into the form of the drama, and co-organized it with all the other parts into a living whole. The Greek tragedy may rather be compared to our serious opera than to the tragedies of Shakspeare; nevertheless, the difference is far greater than the likeness. In the opera all is subordinated to the music, the dresses and the scenery;--the poetry is a mere vehicle for articulation, and as little pleasure is lost by ignorance of the Italian language, so is little gained by the knowledge of it. But in the Greek drama all was but as instruments and accessaries to the poetry; and hence we should form a better notion of the choral music from the solemn hymns and psalms of austere church music than from any species of theatrical singing. A single flute or pipe was the ordinary accompaniment; and it is not to be supposed, that any display of musical power was allowed to obscure the distinct hearing of the words. On the contrary, the evident purpose was to render the words more audible, and to secure by the elevations and pauses greater facility of understanding the poetry. For the choral songs are, and ever must have been, the most difficult part of the tragedy; there occur in them the most involved verbal compounds, the newest expressions, the boldest images, the most recondite allusions. Is it credible that the poets would, one and all, have been thus prodigal of the stores of art and genius, if they had known that in the representation the whole must have been lost to the audience,--at a time too, when the means of after publication were so difficult, and expensive, and the copies of their works so slowly and narrowly circulated? The masks also must be considered--their vast variety and admirable workmanship. Of this we retain proof by the marble masks which represented them; but to this in the real mask we must add the thinness of the substance and the exquisite fitting on to the head of the actor; so that not only were the very eyes painted with a single opening left for the pupil of the actor's eye, but in some instances, even the iris itself was painted, when the colour was a known characteristic of the divine or heroic personage represented. Finally, I will note down those fundamental characteristics which contradistinguish the ancient literature from the modern generally, but which more especially appear in prominence in the tragic drama. The ancient was allied to statuary, the modern refers to painting. In the first there is a predominance of rhythm and melody, in the second of harmony and counterpoint. The Greeks idolized the finite, and therefore were the masters of all grace, elegance, proportion, fancy, dignity, majesty--of whatever, in short, is capable of being definitely conveyed by defined forms or thoughts: the moderns revere the infinite, and affect the indefinite as a vehicle of the infinite;--hence their passions, their obscure hopes and fears, their wandering through the unknown, their grander moral feelings, their more august conception of man as man, their future rather than their past--in a word, their sublimity. [Footnote 1: Greek (transliterated): exegromenos de idein tous men allous katheudontas kai oichomenous, Agath'ona de kai Aristophanaen kai S'okratae eti monous egraegorenai, kai pinein ek phialaes megalaes epidexia ton oun S'okratae autois dialegesthai kai ta men alla ho Aristodaemos ouk ephae memnaesthai ton logon (oute gar ex archaes paragenesthai, uponustazein te) to mentoi kethalaion ethae, prosanagkazein ton S'okratae omologein autous tou autou andros einai k'om'odian kai trag'odian epistasthai poiein, kai ton technae trag'odopoion onta, kai k'om'odopoion einai. Symp. sub fine.] PROGRESS OF THE DRAMA. Let two persons join in the same scheme to ridicule a third, and either take advantage of, or invent, some story for that purpose, and mimicry will have already produced a sort of rude comedy. It becomes an inviting treat to the populace, and gains an additional zest and burlesque by following the already established plan of tragedy; and the first man of genius who seizes the idea, and reduces it into form,--into a work of art,--by metre and music, is the Aristophanes of the country. How just this account is will appear from the fact that in the first or old comedy of the Athenians, most of the 'dramatis personæ' were living characters introduced under their own names; and no doubt, their ordinary dress, manner, person and voice were closely mimicked. In less favourable states of society, as that of England in the middle ages, the beginnings of comedy would be constantly taking place from the mimics and satirical minstrels; but from want of fixed abode, popular government, and the successive attendance of the same auditors, it would still remain in embryo. I shall, perhaps, have occasion to observe that this remark is not without importance in explaining the essential differences of the modern and ancient theatres. Phænomena, similar to those which accompanied the origin of tragedy and comedy among the Greeks, would take place among the Romans much more slowly, and the drama would, in any case, have much longer remained in its first irregular form from the character of the people, their continual engagements in wars of conquest, the nature of their government, and their rapidly increasing empire. But, however this might have been, the conquest of Greece precluded both the process and the necessity of it; and the Roman stage at once presented imitations or translations of the Greek drama. This continued till the perfect establishment of Christianity. Some attempts, indeed, were made to adapt the persons of Scriptural or ecclesiastical history to the drama; and sacred plays, it is probable, were not unknown in Constantinople under the emperors of the East. The first of the kind is, I believe, the only one preserved,--namely, the [Greek (transliterated): Christos Paschon], or "Christ in his sufferings," by Gregory Nazianzen,--possibly written in consequence of the prohibition of profane literature to the Christians by the apostate Julian. [1] In the West, however, the enslaved and debauched Roman world became too barbarous for any theatrical exhibitions more refined than those of pageants and chariot-races; while the spirit of Christianity, which in its most corrupt form still breathed general humanity, whenever controversies of faith were not concerned, had done away the cruel combats of the gladiators, and the loss of the distant provinces prevented the possibility of exhibiting the engagements of wild beasts. I pass, therefore, at once to the feudal ages which soon succeeded, confining my observation to this country; though, indeed, the same remark with very few alterations will apply to all the other states, into which the great empire was broken. Ages of darkness succeeded;--not, indeed, the darkness of Russia or of the barbarous lands unconquered by Rome; for from the time of Honorius to the destruction of Constantinople and the consequent introduction of ancient literature into Europe, there was a continued succession of individual intellects;--the golden chain was never wholly broken, though the connecting links were often of baser metal. A dark cloud, like another sky, covered the entire cope of heaven,--but in this place it thinned away, and white stains of light showed a half eclipsed star behind it,--in that place it was rent asunder, and a star passed across the opening in all its brightness, and then vanished. Such stars exhibited themselves only; surrounding objects did not partake of their light. There were deep wells of knowledge, but no fertilizing rills and rivulets. For the drama, society was altogether a state of chaos, out of which it was, for a while at least, to proceed anew, as if there had been none before it. And yet it is not undelightful to contemplate the eduction of good from evil. The ignorance of the great mass of our countrymen, was the efficient cause of the reproduction of the drama; and the preceding darkness and the returning light were alike necessary in order to the creation of a Shakspeare. The drama re-commenced in England, as it first began in Greece, in religion. The people were not able to read,--the priesthood were unwilling that they should read; and yet their own interest compelled them not to leave the people wholly ignorant of the great events of sacred history. They did that, therefore, by scenic representations, which in after ages it has been attempted to do in Roman Catholic countries by pictures. They presented Mysteries, and often at great expense; and reliques of this system still remain in the south of Europe, and indeed throughout Italy, where at Christmas the convents and the great nobles rival each other in the scenic representation of the birth of Christ and its circumstances. I heard two instances mentioned to me at different times, one in Sicily and the other in Rome, of noble devotees, the ruin of whose fortunes was said to have commenced in the extravagant expense which had been incurred in presenting the 'præsepe' or manger. But these Mysteries, in order to answer their design, must not only be instructive, but entertaining; and as, when they became so, the people began to take pleasure in acting them themselves--in interloping,--(against which the priests seem to have fought hard and yet in vain) the most ludicrous images were mixed with the most awful personations; and whatever the subject might be, however sublime, however pathetic, yet the Vice and the Devil, who are the genuine antecessors of Harlequin and the Clown, were necessary component parts. I have myself a piece of this kind, which I transcribed a few years ago at Helmstadt, in Germany, on the education of Eve's children, in which after the fall and repentance of Adam, the offended Maker, as in proof of his reconciliation, condescends to visit them, and to catechise the children,--who with a noble contempt of chronology are all brought together from Abel to Noah. The good children say the ten Commandments, the Belief and the Lord's Prayer; but Cain and his rout, after he had received a box on the ear for not taking off his hat, and afterwards offering his left hand, is prompted by the devil so to blunder in the Lord's Prayer as to reverse the petitions and say it backward! [2] Unaffectedly I declare I feel pain at repetitions like these, however innocent. As historical documents they are valuable; but I am sensible that what I can read with my eye with perfect innocence, I cannot without inward fear and misgivings pronounce with my tongue. Let me, however, be acquitted of presumption if I say that I cannot agree with Mr. Malone, that our ancestors did not perceive the ludicrous in these things, or that they paid no separate attention to the serious and comic parts. Indeed his own statement contradicts it. For what purpose should the Vice leap upon the Devil's back and belabour him, but to produce this separate attention? The people laughed heartily, no doubt. Nor can I conceive any meaning attached to the words "separate attention," that is not fully answered by one part of an exhibition exciting seriousness or pity, and the other raising mirth and loud laughter. That they felt no impiety in the affair is most true. For it is the very essence of that system of Christian polytheism, which in all its essentials is now fully as gross in Spain, in Sicily and the south of Italy, as it ever was in England in the days of Henry VI.--(nay, more so; for a Wicliffe had then not appeared only, but scattered the good seed widely,) it is an essential part, I say, of that system to draw the mind wholly from its own inward whispers and quiet discriminations, and to habituate the conscience to pronounce sentence in every case according to the established verdicts of the church and the casuists. I have looked through volume after volume of the most approved casuists,--and still I find disquisitions whether this or that act is right, and under what circumstances, to a minuteness that makes reasoning ridiculous, and of a callous and unnatural immodesty, to which none but a monk could harden himself, who has been stripped of all the tender charities of life, yet is goaded on to make war against them by the unsubdued hauntings of our meaner nature, even as dogs are said to get the 'hydrophobia' from excessive thirst. I fully believe that our ancestors laughed as heartily, as their posterity do at Grimaldi;--and not having been told that they would be punished for laughing, they thought it very innocent;--and if their priests had left out murder in the catalogue of their prohibitions (as indeed they did under certain circumstances of heresy,) the greater part of them,--the moral instincts common to all men having been smothered and kept from development,--would have thought as little of murder. However this may be, the necessity of at once instructing and gratifying the people produced the great distinction between the Greek and the English theatres;--for to this we must attribute the origin of tragi-comedy, or a representation of human events more lively, nearer the truth, and permitting a larger field of moral instruction, a more ample exhibition of the recesses of the human heart, under all the trials and circumstances that most concern us, than was known or guessed at by Æschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides;--and at the same time we learn to account for, and--relatively to the author--perceive the necessity of, the Fool or Clown or both, as the substitutes of the Vice and the Devil, which our ancestors had been so accustomed to see in every exhibition of the stage, that they could not feel any performance perfect without them. Even to this day in Italy, every opera--(even Metastasio obeyed the claim throughout)--must have six characters, generally two pairs of cross lovers, a tyrant and a confidant, or a father and two confidants, themselves lovers;--and when a new opera appears, it is the universal fashion to ask--which is the tyrant, which the lover? &c. It is the especial honour of Christianity, that in its worst and most corrupted form it cannot wholly separate itself from morality;--whereas the other religions in their best form (I do not include Mohammedanism, which is only an anomalous corruption of Christianity, like Swedenborgianism,) have no connection with it. The very impersonation of moral evil under the name of Vice, facilitated all other impersonations; and hence we see that the Mysteries were succeeded by Moralities, or dialogues and plots of allegorical personages. Again, some character in real history had become so famous, so proverbial, as Nero for instance, that they were introduced instead of the moral quality, for which they were so noted;--and in this manner the stage was moving on to the absolute production of heroic and comic real characters, when the restoration of literature, followed by the ever-blessed Reformation, let in upon the kingdom not only new knowledge, but new motive. A useful rivalry commenced between the metropolis on the one hand, the residence, independently of the court and nobles, of the most active and stirring spirits who had not been regularly educated, or who, from mischance or otherwise, had forsaken the beaten track of preferment,--and the universities on the other. The latter prided themselves on their closer approximation to the ancient rules and ancient regularity--taking the theatre of Greece, or rather its dim reflection, the rhetorical tragedies of the poet Seneca, as a perfect ideal, without any critical collation of the times, origin, or circumstances;--whilst, in the mean time, the popular writers, who could not and would not abandon what they had found to delight their countrymen sincerely, and not merely from inquiries first put to the recollection of rules, and answered in the affirmative, as if it had been an arithmetical sum, did yet borrow from the scholars whatever they advantageously could, consistently with their own peculiar means of pleasing. And here let me pause for a moment's contemplation of this interesting subject. We call, for we see and feel, the swan and the dove both transcendantly beautiful. As absurd as it would be to institute a comparison between their separate claims to beauty from any abstract rule common to both, without reference to the life and being of the animals themselves,--or as if, having first seen the dove, we abstracted its outlines, gave them a false generalization, called them the principles or ideal of bird-beauty, and then proceeded to criticise the swan or the eagle;--not less absurd is it to pass judgment on the works of a poet on the mere ground that they have been called by the same class-name with the works of other poets in other times and circumstances, or on any ground, indeed, save that of their inappropriateness to their own end and being, their want of significance, as symbols or physiognomy. O! few have there been among critics, who have followed with the eye of the imagination the imperishable yet ever wandering spirit of poetry through its various metempsychoses, and consequent metamorphoses;--or who have rejoiced in the light of clear perception at beholding with each new birth, with each rare 'avatar', the human race frame to itself a new body, by assimilating materials of nourishment out of its new circumstances, and work for itself new organs of power appropriate to the new sphere of its motion and activity! I have before spoken of the Romance, or the language formed out of the decayed Roman and the Northern tongues; and comparing it with the Latin, we find it less perfect in simplicity and relation--the privileges of a language formed by the mere attraction of homogeneous parts;--but yet more rich, more expressive and various, as one formed by more obscure affinities out of a chaos of apparently heterogeneous atoms. As more than a metaphor,--as an analogy of this, I have named the true genuine modern poetry the romantic; and the works of Shakspeare are romantic poetry revealing itself in the drama. If the tragedies of Sophocles are in the strict sense of the word tragedies, and the comedies of Aristophanes comedies, we must emancipate ourselves from a false association arising from misapplied names, and find a new word for the plays of Shakspeare. For they are, in the ancient sense, neither tragedies nor comedies, nor both in one,--but a different 'genus', diverse in kind, and not merely different in degree. They may be called romantic dramas, or dramatic romances. A deviation from the simple forms and unities of the ancient stage is an essential principle, and, of course, an appropriate excellence, of the romantic drama. For these unities were to a great extent the natural form of that which in its elements was homogeneous, and the representation of which was addressed pre-eminently to the outward senses;--and though the fable, the language and the characters appealed to the reason rather than to the mere understanding, inasmuch as they supposed an ideal state rather than referred to an existing reality,--yet it was a reason which was obliged to accommodate itself to the senses, and so far became a sort of more elevated understanding. On the other hand, the romantic poetry--the Shakspearian drama--appealed to the imagination rather than to the senses, and to the reason as contemplating our inward nature, and the workings of the passions in their most retired recesses. But the reason, as reason, is independent of time and space; it has nothing to do with them; and hence the certainties of reason have been called eternal truths. As for example--the endless properties of the circle:--what connection have they with this or that age, with this or that country?--The reason is aloof from time and space;--the imagination is an arbitrary controller over both;--and if only the poet have such power of exciting our internal emotions as to make us present to the scene in imagination chiefly, he acquires the right and privilege of using time and space as they exist in imagination, and obedient only to the laws by which the imagination itself acts. These laws it will be my object and aim to point out as the examples occur, which illustrate them. But here let me remark what can never be too often reflected on by all who would intelligently study the works either of the Athenian dramatists, or of Shakspeare, that the very essence of the former consists in the sternest separation of the diverse in kind and the disparate in the degree, whilst the latter delights in interlacing by a rainbow-like transfusion of hues the one with the other. And here it will be necessary to say a few words on the stage and on stage-illusion. A theatre, in the widest sense of the word, is the general term for all places of amusement through the ear or eye, in which men assemble in order to be amused by some entertainment presented to all at the same time and in common. Thus, an old Puritan divine says:--"Those who attend public worship and sermons only to amuse themselves, make a theatre of the church, and turn God's house into the devil's. 'Theatra ædes diabololatricæ'." The most important and dignified species of this genus is, doubtless, the stage, ('res theatralis histrionica'), which, in addition to the generic definition above given, may be characterized in its idea, or according to what it does, or ought to, aim at, as a combination of several or of all the fine arts in an harmonious whole, having a distinct end of its own, to which the peculiar end of each of the component arts, taken separately, is made subordinate and subservient,--that, namely, of imitating reality--whether external things, actions, or passions--under a semblance of reality. Thus, Claude imitates a landscape at sunset, but only as a picture; while a forest-scene is not presented to the spectators as a picture, but as a forest; and though, in the full sense of the word, we are no more deceived by the one than by the other, yet are our feelings very differently affected; and the pleasure derived from the one is not composed of the same elements as that afforded by the other, even on the supposition that the 'quantum' of both were equal. In the former, a picture, it is a condition of all genuine delight that we should not be deceived; in the latter, stage-scenery, (inasmuch as its principal end is not in or for itself, as is the case in a picture, but to be an assistance and means to an end out of itself) its very purpose is to produce as much illusion as its nature permits. These, and all other stage presentations, are to produce a sort of temporary half-faith, which the spectator encourages in himself and supports by a voluntary contribution on his own part, because he knows that it is at all times in his power to see the thing as it really is. I have often observed that little children are actually deceived by stage-scenery, never by pictures; though even these produce an effect on their impressible minds, which they do not on the minds of adults. The child, if strongly impressed, does not indeed positively think the picture to be the reality; but yet he does not think the contrary. As Sir George Beaumont was shewing me a very fine engraving from Rubens, representing a storm at sea without any vessel or boat introduced, my litte boy, then about five years old, came dancing and singing into the room, and all at once (if I may so say) 'tumbled in' upon the print. He instantly started, stood silent and motionless, with the strongest expression, first of wonder and then of grief in his eyes and countenance, and at length said, "And where is the ship? But that is sunk, and the men are all drowned!" still keeping his eyes fixed on the print. Now what pictures are to little children, stage-illusion is to men, provided they retain any part of the child's sensibility; except, that in the latter instance, the suspension of the act of comparison, which permits this sort of negative belief, is somewhat more assisted by the will, than in that of a child respecting a picture. The true stage-illusion in this and in all other things consists--not in the mind's judging it to be a forest, but, in its remission of the judgment that it is not a forest. And this subject of stage-illusion is so important, and so many practical errors and false criticisms may arise, and indeed have arisen, either from reasoning on it as actual delusion, (the strange notion, on which the French critics built up their theory, and on which the French poets justify the construction of their tragedies), or from denying it altogether, (which seems the end of Dr. Johnson's reasoning, and which, as extremes meet, would lead to the very same consequences, by excluding whatever would not be judged probable by us in our coolest state of feeling, with all our faculties in even balance), that these few remarks will, I hope, be pardoned, if they should serve either to explain or to illustrate the point. For not only are we never absolutely deluded--or any thing like it, but the attempt to cause the highest delusion possible to beings in their senses sitting in a theatre, is a gross fault, incident only to low minds, which, feeling that they cannot affect the heart or head permanently, endeavour to call forth the momentary affections. There ought never to be more pain than is compatible with co-existing pleasure, and to be amply repaid by thought. Shakspeare found the infant stage demanding an intermixture of ludicrous character as imperiously as that of Greece did the chorus, and high language accordant. And there are many advantages in this;--a greater assimilation to nature, a greater scope of power, more truths, and more feelings;-the effects of contrast, as in Lear and the Fool; and especially this, that the true language of passion becomes sufficiently elevated by your having previously heard, in the same piece, the lighter conversation of men under no strong emotion. The very nakedness of the stage, too, was advantageous,--for the drama thence became something between recitation and a re-presentation; and the absence or paucity of scenes allowed a freedom from the laws of unity of place and unity of time, the observance of which must either confine the drama to as few subjects as may be counted on the fingers, or involve gross improbabilities, far more striking than the violation would have caused. Thence, also, was precluded the danger of a false ideal,--of aiming at more than what is possible on the whole. What play of the ancients, with reference to their ideal, does not hold out more glaring absurdities than any in Shakspeare? On the Greek plan a man could more easily be a poet than a dramatist; upon our plan more easily a dramatist than a poet. [Footnote 1: A. D. 363. But I believe the prevailing opinion amongst scholars now is, that the [Greek: Christos Paschon] is not genuine. Ed.] [Footnote 2: See vol. i. p. 76, where this is told more at length and attributed to Hans Sachs. Ed.] THE DRAMA GENERALLY, AND PUBLIC TASTE. Unaccustomed to address such an audience, and having lost by a long interval of confinement the advantages of my former short schooling, I had miscalculated in my last Lecture the proportion of my matter to my time, and by bad economy and unskilful management, the several heads of my discourse failed in making the entire performance correspond with the promise publicly circulated in the weekly annunciation of the subjects, to be treated. It would indeed have been wiser in me, and perhaps better on the whole, if I had caused my Lectures to be announced only as continuations of the main subject. But if I be, as perforce I must be, gratified by the recollection of whatever has appeared to give you pleasure, I am conscious of something better, though less flattering, a sense of unfeigned gratitude for your forbearance with my defects. Like affectionate guardians, you see without disgust the awkwardness, and witness with sympathy the growing pains, of a youthful endeavour, and look forward with a hope, which is its own reward, to the contingent results of practice--to its intellectual maturity. In my last address I defined poetry to be the art, or whatever better term our language may afford, of representing external nature and human thoughts, both relatively to human affections, so as to cause the production of as great immediate pleasure in each part, as is compatible with the largest possible sum of pleasure on the whole. Now this definition applies equally to painting and music as to poetry; and in truth the term poetry is alike applicable to all three. The vehicle alone constitutes the difference; and the term 'poetry' is rightly applied by eminence to measured words, only because the sphere of their action is far wider, the power of giving permanence to them much more certain, and incomparably greater the facility, by which men, not defective by nature or disease, may be enabled to derive habitual pleasure and instruction from them. On my mentioning these considerations to a painter of great genius, who had been, from a most honourable enthusiasm, extolling his own art, he was so struck with their truth, that he exclaimed, "I want no other arguments;--poetry, that is, verbal poetry, must be the greatest; all that proves final causes in the world, proves this; it would be shocking to think otherwise!"--And in truth, deeply, O! far more than words can express, as I venerate the Last Judgment and the Prophets of Michel Angelo Buonaroti,--yet the very pain which I repeatedly felt as I lost myself in gazing upon them, the painful consideration that their having been painted in 'fresco' was the sole cause that they had not been abandoned to all the accidents of a dangerous transportation to a distant capital, and that the same caprice, which made the Neapolitan soldiery destroy all the exquisite master-pieces on the walls of the church of the 'Trinitado Monte', after the retreat of their antagonist barbarians, might as easily have made vanish the rooms and open gallery of Raffael, and the yet more unapproachable wonders of the sublime Florentine in the Sixtine Chapel, forced upon my mind the reflection; How grateful the human race ought to be that the works of Euclid, Newton, Plato, Milton, Shakspeare, are not subjected to similar contingencies,--that they and their fellows, and the great, though inferior, peerage of undying intellect, are secured;--secured even from a second irruption of Goths and Vandals, in addition to many other safeguards, by the vast empire of English language, laws, and religion founded in America, through the overflow of the power and the virtue of my country;-and that now the great and certain works of genuine fame can only cease to act for mankind, when men themselves cease to be men, or when the planet on which they exist, shall have altered its relations, or have ceased to be. Lord Bacon, in the language of the gods, if I may use an Homeric phrase, has expressed a similar thought:-- Lastly, leaving the vulgar arguments, that by learning man excelleth man in that wherein man excelleth beasts; that by learning man ascendeth to the heavens and their motions, where in body he cannot come, and the like; let us conclude with the dignity and excellency of knowledge and learning in that whereunto man's nature doth most aspire, which is, immortality or continuance: for to this tendeth generation, and raising of houses and families; to this tend buildings, foundations, and monuments; to this tendeth the desire of memory, fame, and celebration, and in effect the strength of all other human desires. We see then how far the monuments of wit and learning are more durable than the monuments of power, or of the hands. For have not the verses of Homer continued twenty-five hundred years, or more, without the loss of a syllable or letter; during which time infinite palaces, temples, castles, cities, have been decayed and demolished? It is not possible to have the true pictures or statues of Cyrus, Alexander, Caesar; no, nor of the kings or great personages of much later years; for the originals cannot last, and the copies cannot but lose of the life and truth. But the images of men's wits and knowledges remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time, and capable of perpetual renovation. Neither are they fitly to be called images, because they generate still, and cast their seeds in the minds of others, provoking and causing infinite actions and opinions in succeeding ages: so that, if the invention of the ship was thought so noble, which carrieth riches and commodities from place to place, and consociateth the most remote regions in participation of their fruits; how much more are letters to be magnified, which, as ships pass through the vast seas of time, and make ages so distant to participate of the wisdom, illuminations, and inventions, the one of the other? [1] But let us now consider what the drama should be. And first, it is not a copy, but an imitation, of nature. This is the universal principle of the fine arts. In all well laid out grounds what delight do we feel from that balance and antithesis of feelings and thoughts! How natural! we say;--but the very wonder that caused the exclamation, implies that we perceived art at the same moment. We catch the hint from nature itself. Whenever in mountains or cataracts we discover a likeness to any thing artificial which yet we know is not artificial--what pleasure! And so it is in appearances known to be artificial, which appear to be natural. This applies in due degrees, regulated by steady good sense, from a clump of trees to the Paradise Lost or Othello. It would be easy to apply it to painting and even, though with greater abstraction of thought, and by more subtle yet equally just analogies--to music. But this belongs to others;--suffice it that one great principle is common to all the fine arts,--a principle which probably is the condition of all consciousness, without which we should feel and imagine only by discontinuous moments, and be plants or brute animals instead of men;--I mean that ever-varying balance, or balancing, of images, notions, or feelings, conceived as in opposition to each other;--in short, the perception of identity and contrariety; the least degree of which constitutes likeness, the greatest absolute difference; but the infinite gradations between these two form all the play and all the interest of our intellectual and moral being, till it leads us to a feeling and an object more awful than it seems to me compatible with even the present subject to utter aloud, though I am most desirous to suggest it. For there alone are all things at once different and the same; there alone, as the principle of all things, does distinction exist unaided by division; there are will and reason, succession of time and unmoving eternity, infinite change and ineffable rest!-- Return Alpheus! the dread voice is past Which shrunk thy streams!--Thou honour'd flood, Smooth-'flowing' Avon, crown'd with vocal reeds, That strain I heard, was of a higher mood!-- But now my 'voice' proceeds. We may divide a dramatic poet's characteristics before we enter into the component merits of any one work, and with reference only to those things which are to be the materials of all, into language, passion, and character; always bearing in mind that these must act and react on each other,--the language inspired by the passion, and the language and the passion modified and differenced by the character. To the production of the highest excellencies in these three, there are requisite in the mind of the author;--good sense; talent; sensibility; imagination;--and to the perfection of a work we should add two faculties of lesser importance, yet necessary for the ornaments and foliage of the column and the roof--fancy and a quick sense of beauty. As to language;--it cannot be supposed that the poet should make his characters say all that they would, or that, his whole drama considered, each scene, or paragraph should be such as, on cool examination, we can conceive it likely that men in such situations would say, in that order, or with that perfection. And yet, according to my feelings, it is a very inferior kind of poetry, in which, as in the French tragedies, men are made to talk in a style which few indeed even of the wittiest can be supposed to converse in, and which both is, and on a moment's reflection appears to be, the natural produce of the hot-bed of vanity, namely, the closet of an author, who is actuated originally by a desire to excite surprise and wonderment at his own superiority to other men,--instead of having felt so deeply on certain subjects, or in consequence of certain imaginations, as to make it almost a necessity of his nature to seek for sympathy,--no doubt, with that honorable desire of permanent action which distinguishes genius.--Where then is the difference?--In this that each part should be proportionate, though the whole may be perhaps impossible. At all events, it should be compatible with sound sense and logic in the mind of the poet himself. It is to be lamented that we judge of books by books, instead of referring what we read to our own experience. One great use of books is to make their contents a motive for observation. The German tragedies have in some respects been justly ridiculed. In them the dramatist often becomes a novelist in his directions to the actors, and thus degrades tragedy into pantomime. Yet still the consciousness of the poet's mind must be diffused over that of the reader or spectator; but he himself, according to his genius, elevates us, and by being always in keeping, prevents us from perceiving any strangeness, though we feel great exultation. Many different kinds of style may be admirable, both in different men, and in different parts of the same poem. See the different language which strong feelings may justify in Shylock, and learn from Shakspeare's conduct of that character the terrible force of very plain and calm diction, when known to proceed from a resolved and impassioned man. It is especially with reference to the drama, and its characteristics in any given nation, or at any particular period, that the dependence of genius on the public taste becomes a matter of the deepest importance. I do not mean that taste which springs merely from caprice or fashionable imitation, and which, in fact, genius can, and by degrees will, create for itself; but that which arises out of wide-grasping and heart-enrooted causes, which is epidemic, and in the very air that all breathe. This it is which kills, or withers, or corrupts. Socrates, indeed, might walk arm and arm with Hygeia, whilst pestilence, with a thousand furies running to and fro, and clashing against each other in a complexity and agglomeration of horrors, was shooting her darts of fire and venom all around him. Even such was Milton; yea, and such, in spite of all that has been babbled by his critics in pretended excuse for his damning, because for them too profound, excellencies,--such was Shakspeare. But alas! the exceptions prove the rule. For who will dare to force his way out of the crowd,--not of the mere vulgar,--but of the vain and banded aristocracy of intellect, and presume to join the almost supernatural beings that stand by themselves aloof? Of this diseased epidemic influence there are two forms especially preclusive of tragic worth. The first is the necessary growth of a sense and love of the ludicrous, and a morbid sensibility of the assimilative power,--an inflammation produced by cold and weakness,--which in the boldest bursts of passion will lie in wait for a jeer at any phrase, that may have an accidental coincidence in the mere words with something base or trivial. For instance,--to express woods, not on a plain, but clothing a hill, which overlooks a valley, or dell, or river, or the sea,--the trees rising one above another, as the spectators in an ancient theatre,--I know no other word in our language, (bookish and pedantic terms out of the question,) but 'hanging' woods, the 'sylvæ superimpendentes' of Catullus [2]; yet let some wit call out in a slang tone,--"the gallows!" and a peal of laughter would damn the play. Hence it is that so many dull pieces have had a decent run, only because nothing unusual above, or absurd below, mediocrity furnished an occasion,--a spark for the explosive materials collected behind the orchestra. But it would take a volume of no ordinary size, however laconically the sense were expressed, if it were meant to instance the effects, and unfold all the causes, of this disposition upon the moral, intellectual, and even physical character of a people, with its influences on domestic life and individual deportment. A good document upon this subject would be the history of Paris society and of French, that is, Parisian, literature from the commencement of the latter half of the reign of Louis XIV. to that of Buonaparte, compared with the preceding philosophy and poetry even of Frenchmen themselves. The second form, or more properly, perhaps, another distinct cause, of this diseased disposition is matter of exultation to the philanthropist and philosopher, and of regret to the poet, the painter, and the statuary alone, and to them only as poets, painters, and statuaries;--namely, the security, the comparative equability, and ever increasing sameness of human life. Men are now so seldom thrown into wild circumstances, and violences of excitement, that the language of such states, the laws of association of feeling with thought, the starts and strange far-flights of the assimilative power on the slightest and least obvious likeness presented by thoughts, words, or objects,--these are all judged of by authority, not by actual experience,--by what men have been accustomed to regard as symbols of these states, and not the natural symbols, or self-manifestations of them. Even so it is in the language of man, and in that of nature. The sound 'sun', or the figures 's', 'u', 'n', are purely arbitrary modes of recalling the object, and for visual mere objects they are not only sufficient, but have infinite advantages from their very nothingness 'per se'. But the language of nature is a subordinate 'Logos', that was in the beginning, and was with the thing it represented, and was the thing it represented. Now the language of Shakspeare, in his Lear for instance, is a something intermediate between these two; or rather it is the former blended with the latter,--the arbitrary, not merely recalling the cold notion of the thing, but expressing the reality of it, and, as arbitrary language is an heir-loom of the human race, being itself a part of that which it manifests. What shall I deduce from the preceding positions? Even this,--the appropriate, the never to be too much valued advantage of the theatre, if only the actors were what we know they have been,--a delightful, yet most effectual, remedy for this dead palsy of the public mind. What would appear mad or ludicrous in a book, when presented to the senses under the form of reality, and with the truth of nature, supplies a species of actual experience. This is indeed the special privilege of a great actor over a great poet. No part was ever played in perfection, but nature justified herself in the hearts of all her children, in what state soever they were, short of absolute moral exhaustion, or downright stupidity. There is no time given to ask questions or to pass judgments; we are taken by storm, and, though in the histrionic art many a clumsy counterfeit, by caricature of one or two features, may gain applause as a fine likeness, yet never was the very thing rejected as a counterfeit. O! when I think of the inexhaustible mine of virgin treasure in our Shakspeare, that I have been almost daily reading him since I was ten years old,--that the thirty intervening years have been unintermittingly and not fruitlessly employed in the study of the Greek, Latin, English, Italian, Spanish and German 'belle lettrists', and the last fifteen years in addition, far more intensely in the analysis of the laws of life and reason as they exist in man,--and that upon every step I have made forward in taste, in acquisition of facts from history or my own observation, and in knowledge of the different laws of being and their apparent exceptions, from accidental collision of disturbing forces,--that at every new accession of information, after every successful exercise of meditation, and every fresh presentation of experience, I have unfailingly discovered a proportionate increase of wisdom and intuition in Shakspeare;--when I know this, and know too, that by a conceivable and possible, though hardly to be expected, arrangement of the British theatres, not all, indeed, but a large, a very large, proportion of this indefinite all--(round which no comprehension has yet drawn the line of circumscription, so as to say to itself, 'I have seen the whole')--might be sent into the heads and hearts--into the very souls of the mass of mankind, to whom, except by this living comment and interpretation, it must remain for ever a sealed volume, a deep well without a wheel or a windlass;--it seems to me a pardonable enthusiasm to steal away from sober likelihood, and share in so rich a feast in the faery world of possibility! Yet even in the grave cheerfulness of a circumspect hope, much, very much, might be done; enough, assuredly, to furnish a kind and strenuous nature with ample motives for the attempt to effect what may be effected. [Footnote: 'Advancement of Learning, book 1. 'sub fine.'] [Footnote 2: Confestim Peneos adest, viridantia Tempe, Tempe, quae cingunt sylvae superimpendentes. 'Epith. Pel. et. Th.' 286.] SHAKSPEARE, A POET GENERALLY. Clothed in radiant armour, and authorized by titles sure and manifold, as a poet, Shakspeare came forward to demand the throne of fame, as the dramatic poet of England. His excellencies compelled even his contemporaries to seat him on that throne, although there were giants in those days contending for the same honor. Hereafter I would fain endeavour to make out the title of the English drama as created by, and existing in, Shakspeare, and its right to the supremacy of dramatic excellence in general. But he had shown himself a poet, previously to his appearance as a dramatic poet; and had no Lear, no Othello, no Henry IV., no Twelfth Night ever appeared, we must have admitted that Shakspeare possessed the chief, if not every, requisite of a poet,--deep feeling and exquisite sense of beauty, both as exhibited to the eye in the combinations of form, and to the ear in sweet and appropriate melody; that these feelings were under the command of his own will; that in his very first productions he projected his mind out of his own particular being, and felt, and made others feel, on subjects no way connected with himself, except by force of contemplation and that sublime faculty by which a great mind becomes that, on which it meditates. To this must be added that affectionate love of nature and natural objects, without which no man could have observed so steadily, or painted so truly and passionately, the very minutest beauties of the external world:-- When them hast on foot the purblind hare, Mark the poor wretch; to overshoot his troubles, How he outruns the wind, and with what care, He cranks and crosses with a thousand doubles; The many musits through the which he goes Are like a labyrinth to amaze his foes. Sometimes he runs among the flock of sheep, To make the cunning hounds mistake their smell; And sometime where earth-delving conies keep, To stop the loud pursuers in their yell; And sometime sorteth with a herd of deer: Danger deviseth shifts, wit waits on fear. For there his smell with others' being mingled, The hot scent-snuffing hounds are driven to doubt, Ceasing their clamorous cry, till they have singled, With much ado, the cold fault cleanly out, Then do they spend their mouths; echo replies, As if another chase were in the skies. By this poor Wat far off, upon a hill, Stands on his hinder legs with listening ear, To hearken if his foes pursue him still: Anon their loud alarums he doth hear, And now his grief may be compared well To one sore-sick, that hears the passing bell. Then shalt thou see the dew-bedabbled wretch Turn, and return, indenting with the way: Each envious briar his weary legs doth scratch. Each shadow makes him stop, each murmur stay. For misery is trodden on by many, And being low, never relieved by any. 'Venus and Adonis'. And the preceding description:-- But, lo! from forth a copse that neighbours by, A breeding jennet, lusty, young and proud, &c. is much more admirable, but in parts less fitted for quotation. Moreover Shakspeare had shown that he possessed fancy, considered as the faculty of bringing together images dissimilar in the main by some one point or more of likeness, as in such a passage as this:-- Full gently now she takes him by the hand, A lily prisoned in a jail of snow, Or ivory in an alabaster band: So white a friend ingirts so white a foe! 'Ib.' And still mounting the intellectual ladder, he had as unequivocally proved the indwelling in his mind of imagination, or the power by which one image or feeling is made to modify many others, and by a sort of fusion to force many into one;--that which afterwards showed itself in such might and energy in Lear, where the deep anguish of a father spreads the feeling of ingratitude and cruelty over the very elements of heaven;--and which, combining many circumstances into one moment of consciousness, tends to produce that ultimate end of all human thought and human feeling, unity, and thereby the reduction of the spirit to its principle and fountain, who is alone truly one. Various are the workings of this the greatest faculty of the human mind, both passionate and tranquil. In its tranquil and purely pleasurable operation, it acts chiefly by creating out of many things, as they would have appeared in the description of an ordinary mind, detailed in unimpassioned succession, a oneness, even as nature, the greatest of poets, acts upon us, when we open our eyes upon an extended prospect. Thus the flight of Adonis in the dusk of the evening:-- Look! how a bright star shooteth from the sky; So glides he in the night from Venus' eye! How many images and feelings are here brought together without effort and without discord, in the beauty of Adonis, the rapidity of his flight, the yearning, yet hopelessness, of the enamored gazer, while a shadowy ideal character is thrown over the whole! Or this power acts by impressing the stamp of humanity, and of human feelings, on inanimate or mere natural objects:-- Lo! here the gentle lark, weary of rest, From his moist cabinet mounts up on high, And wakes the morning, from whose silver breast The sun ariseth in his majesty, Who doth the world so gloriously behold, The cedar-tops and hills seem burnish'd gold. Or again, it acts by so carrying on the eye of the reader as to make him almost lose the consciousness of words,--to make him see every thing flashed, as Wordsworth has grandly and appropriately said,-- _Flashed_ upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude;-- and this without exciting any painful or laborious attention, without any anatomy of description, (a fault not uncommon in descriptive poetry)-but with the sweetness and easy movement of nature. This energy is an absolute essential of poetry, and of itself would constitute a poet, though not one of the highest class;--it is, however, a most hopeful symptom, and the Venus and Adonis is one continued specimen of it. In this beautiful poem there is an endless activity of thought in all the possible associations of thought with thought, thought with feeling, or with words, of feelings with feelings, and of words with words. Even as the sun, with purple-colour'd face, Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn, Rose-cheek'd Adonis hied him to the chase: Hunting he loved, but love he laughed to scorn. Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him, And like a bold-faced suitor 'gins to woo him. Remark the humanizing imagery and circumstances of the first two lines, and the activity of thought in the play of words in the fourth line. The whole stanza presents at once the time, the appearance of the morning, and the two persons distinctly characterized, and in six simple verses puts the reader in possession of the whole argument of the poem. Over one arm the lusty courser's rein, Under the other was the tender boy, Who blush'd and pouted in a dull disdain, With leaden appetite, unapt to toy, She red and hot, as coals of glowing fire, He red for shame, but frosty to desire:-- This stanza and the two following afford good instances of that poetic power, which I mentioned above, of making every thing present to the imagination--both the forms, and the passions which modify those forms, either actually, as in the representations of love, or anger, or other human affections; or imaginatively, by the different manner in which inanimate objects, or objects unimpassioned themselves, are caused to be seen by the mind in moments of strong excitement, and according to the kind of the excitement,--whether of jealousy, or rage, or love, in the only appropriate sense of the word, or of the lower impulses of our nature, or finally of the poetic feeling itself. It is, perhaps, chiefly in the power of producing and reproducing the latter that the poet stands distinct. The subject of the Venus and Adonis is unpleasing; but the poem itself is for that very reason the more illustrative of Shakspeare. There are men who can write passages of deepest pathos and even sublimity on circumstances personal to themselves and stimulative of their own passions; but they are not, therefore, on this account poets. Read that magnificent burst of woman's patriotism and exultation, Deborah's song of victory; it is glorious, but nature is the poet there. It is quite another matter to become all things and yet remain the same,--to make the changeful god be felt in the river, the lion and the flame;--this it is, that is the true imagination. Shakspeare writes in this poem, as if he were of another planet, charming you to gaze on the movements of Venus and Adonis, as you would on the twinkling dances of two vernal butterflies. Finally, in this poem and the Rape of Lucrece, Shakspeare gave ample proof of his possession of a most profound, energetic, and philosophical mind, without which he might have pleased, but could not have been a great dramatic poet. Chance and the necessity of his genius combined to lead him to the drama his proper province; in his conquest of which we should consider both the difficulties which opposed him, and the advantages by which he was assisted. SHAKSPEARE'S JUDGMENT EQUAL TO HIS GENIUS. Thus then Shakspeare appears, from his Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece alone, apart from all his great works, to have possessed all the conditions of the true poet. Let me now proceed to destroy, as far as may be in my power, the popular notion that he was a great dramatist by mere instinct, that he grew immortal in his own despite, and sank below men of second or third-rate power, when he attempted aught beside the drama--even as bees construct their cells and manufacture their honey to admirable perfection; but would in vain attempt to build a nest. Now this mode of reconciling a compelled sense of inferiority with a feeling of pride, began in a few pedants, who having read that Sophocles was the great model of tragedy, and Aristotle the infallible dictator of its rules, and finding that the Lear, Hamlet, Othello and other master-pieces were neither in imitation of Sophocles, nor in obedience to Aristotle,--and not having (with one or two exceptions) the courage to affirm, that the delight which their country received from generation to generation, in defiance of the alterations of circumstances and habits, was wholly groundless,--took upon them, as a happy medium and refuge, to talk of Shakspeare as a sort of beautiful 'lusus naturæ', a delightful monster,--wild, indeed, and without taste or judgment, but like the inspired idiots so much venerated in the East, uttering, amid the strangest follies, the sublimest truths. In nine places out of ten in which I find his awful name mentioned, it is with some epithet of 'wild', 'irregular,' 'pure child of nature,' &c. If all this be true, we must submit to it; though to a thinking mind it cannot but be painful to find any excellence, merely human, thrown out of all human analogy, and thereby leaving us neither rules for imitation, nor motives to imitate;--but if false, it is a dangerous falsehood;--for it affords a refuge to secret self-conceit,--enables a vain man at once to escape his reader's indignation by general swoln panegyrics, and merely by his 'ipse dixit' to treat, as contemptible, what he has not intellect enough to comprehend, or soul to feel, without assigning any reason, or referring his opinion to any demonstrative principle;--thus leaving Shakspeare as a sort of grand Lama, adored indeed, arid his very excrements prized as relics, but with no authority or real influence. I grieve that every late voluminous edition of his works would enable me to substantiate the present charge with a variety of facts one tenth of which would of themselves exhaust the time allotted to me. Every critic, who has or has not made a collection of black letter books--in itself a useful and respectable amusement,--puts on the seven-league boots of self-opinion, and strides at once from an illustrator into a supreme judge, and blind and deaf, fills his three-ounce phial at the waters of Niagara; and determines positively the greatness of the cataract to be neither more nor less than his three-ounce phial has been able to receive. I think this a very serious subject. It is my earnest desire--my passionate endeavour,--to enforce at various times and by various arguments and instances the close and reciprocal connexion of just taste with pure morality. Without that acquaintance with the heart of man, or that docility and childlike gladness to be made acquainted with it, which those only can have, who dare look at their own hearts--and that with a steadiness which religion only has the power of reconciling with sincere humility;--without this, and the modesty produced by it, I am deeply convinced that no man, however wide his erudition, however patient his antiquarian researches, can possibly understand, or be worthy of understanding, the writings of Shakspeare. Assuredly that criticism of Shakspeare will alone be genial which is reverential. The Englishman, who without reverence, a proud and affectionate reverence, can utter the name of William Shakspeare, stands disqualified for the office of critic. He wants one at least of the very senses, the language of which he is to employ, and will discourse at best, but as a blind man, while the whole harmonious creation of light and shade with all its subtle interchange of deepening and dissolving colours rises in silence to the silent 'fiat' of the uprising Apollo. However inferior in ability I may be to some who have followed me, I own I am proud that I was the first in time who publicly demonstrated to the full extent of the position, that the supposed irregularity and extravagancies of Shakspeare were the mere dreams of a pedantry that arraigned the eagle because it had not the dimensions of the swan. In all the successive courses of lectures delivered by me, since my first attempt at the Royal Institution, it has been, and it still remains, my object, to prove that in all points from the most important to the most minute, the judgment of Shakspeare is commensurate with his genius,--nay, that his genius reveals itself in his judgment, as in its most exalted form. And the more gladly do I recur to this subject from the clear conviction, that to judge aright, and with distinct consciousness of the grounds of our judgment, concerning the works of Shakspeare, implies the power and the means of judging rightly of all other works of intellect, those of abstract science alone excepted. It is a painful truth that not only individuals, but even whole nations, are ofttimes so enslaved to the habits of their education and immediate circumstances, as not to judge disinterestedly even on those subjects, the very pleasure arising from which consists in its disinterestedness, namely, on subjects of taste and polite literature. Instead of deciding concerning their own modes and customs by any rule of reason, nothing appears rational, becoming, or beautiful to them, but what coincides with the peculiarities of their education. In this narrow circle, individuals may attain to exquisite discrimination, as the French critics have done in their own literature; but a true critic can no more be such without placing himself on some central point, from which he may command the whole, that is, some general rule, which, founded in reason, or the faculties common to all men, must therefore apply to each,--than an astronomer can explain the movements of the solar system without taking his stand in the sun. And let me remark, that this will not tend to produce despotism, but, on the contrary, true tolerance, in the critic. He will, indeed, require, as the spirit and substance of a work, something true in human nature itself, and independent of all circumstances; but in the mode of applying it, he will estimate genius and judgment according to the felicity with which the imperishable soul of intellect shall have adapted itself to the age, the place, and the existing manners. The error he will expose, lies in reversing this, and holding up the mere circumstances as perpetual to the utter neglect of the power which can alone animate them. For art cannot exist without, or apart from, nature; and what has man of his own to give to his fellow-man, but his own thoughts and feelings, and his observations so far as they are modified by his own thoughts or feelings? Let me, then, once more submit this question to minds emancipated alike from national, or party, or sectarian prejudice:--Are the plays of Shakspeare works of rude uncultivated genius, in which the splendour of the parts compensates, if aught can compensate, for the barbarous shapelessness and irregularity of the whole?--Or is the form equally admirable with the matter, and the judgment of the great poet, not less deserving our wonder than his genius?--Or, again, to repeat the question in other words:--Is Shakspeare a great dramatic poet on account only of those beauties and excellencies which he possesses in common with the ancients, but with diminished claims to our love and honour to the full extent of his differences from them?--Or are these very differences additional proofs of poetic wisdom, at once results and symbols of living power as contrasted with lifeless mechanism--of free and rival originality as contradistinguished from servile imitation, or, more accurately, a blind copying of effects, instead of a true imitation of the essential principles?--Imagine not that I am about to oppose genius to rules. No! the comparative value of these rules is the very cause to be tried. The spirit of poetry, like all other living powers, must of necessity circumscribe itself by rules, were it only to unite power with beauty. It must embody in order to reveal itself; but a living body is of necessity an organized one; and what is organization but the connection of parts in and for a whole, so that each part is at once end and means?--This is no discovery of criticism;--it is a necessity of the human mind; and all nations have felt and obeyed it, in the invention of metre, and measured sounds, as the vehicle and 'involucrum' of poetry--itself a fellow-growth from the same life,--even as the bark is to the tree! No work of true genius dares want its appropriate form, neither indeed is there any danger of this. As it must not, so genius cannot, be lawless; for it is even this that constitutes it genius--the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination. How then comes it that not only single 'Zoili', but whole nations have combined in unhesitating condemnation of our great dramatist, as a sort of African nature, rich in beautiful monsters,--as a wild heath where islands of fertility look the greener from the surrounding waste, where the loveliest plants now shine out among unsightly weeds, and now are choked by their parasitic growth, so intertwined that we cannot disentangle the weed without snapping the flower?--In this statement. I have had no reference to the vulgar abuse of Voltaire [1], save as far as his charges are coincident with the decisions of Shakspeare's own commentators and (so they would tell you) almost idolatrous admirers. The true ground of the mistake lies in the confounding mechanical regularity with organic form. The form is mechanic, when on any given material we impress a pre-determined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material;--as when to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes, as it developes, itself from within, and the fulness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form. Such as the life is, such is the form. Nature, the prime genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is equally inexhaustible in forms;--each exterior is the physiognomy of the being within,--its true image reflected and thrown out from the concave mirror;--and even such is the appropriate excellence of her chosen poet, of our own Shakspeare,--himself a nature humanized, a genial understanding directing self-consciously a power and an implicit wisdom deeper even than our consciousness. I greatly dislike beauties and selections in general; but as proof positive of his unrivalled excellence, I should like to try Shakspeare by this criterion. Make out your amplest catalogue of all the human faculties, as reason or the moral law, the will, the feeling of the coincidence of the two (a feeling 'sui generis et demonstratio clemontrationum') called the conscience, the understanding or prudence, wit, fancy, imagination, judgment,--and then of the objects on which these are to be employed, as the beauties, the terrors, and the seeming caprices of nature, the realities and the capabilities, that is, the actual and the ideal, of the human mind, conceived as an individual or as a social being, as in innocence or in guilt, in a play-paradise, or in a war-field of temptation;--and then compare with Shakspeare under each of these heads all or any of the writers in prose and verse that have ever lived! Who, that is competent to judge, doubts the result?--And ask your own hearts,--ask your own common-sense--to conceive the possibility of this man being--I say not, the drunken savage of that wretched sciolist, whom Frenchmen, to their shame, have honoured before their elder and better worthies,--but the anomalous, the wild, the irregular, genius of our daily criticism! What! are we to have miracles in sport?--Or, I speak reverently, does God choose idiots by whom to convey divine truths to man? [Footnote 1: Take a slight specimen of it. Je suis bien loin assurément de justifier en tout la tragédie d'Hamlet; _c'est une pièce grossière et barbare, qui ne serait pas supportée par la plus vile populace de la France et de l'Italie._ Hamlet y devient fou au second acte, et sa maîtresse folle au troisième; le prince tue le père de sa maîtresse, feignant de tuer un rat, et I'heröine se jette dans la rivière. On fait sa fosse sur le théâtre; des fossoyeurs disent des _quolibets_ dignes d'eux, en tenant dans leurs mains des têtes de morts; le prince Hamlet répond à leurs 'grossièretés abominables par des folies non moins dégoûtantes._ Pendant ce temps-là, un des acteurs fait la conquête de la Pologne. _Hamlet, sa mère, et son beau-père boivent ensemble sur le théâtre; on chante à table, on s'y querelle, on se bat, on se tue: on croirait que cet ouvrage est le fruit de I'imagination d'un sauvage ivre._ (Dissertation before Semiramis.) This is not, perhaps, very like Hamlet; but nothing can be more like Voltaire. Ed.] RECAPITULATION, AND SUMMARY OF THE CHARACTERISTICS OF SHAKSPEARE's DRAMAS. [1] In lectures, of which amusement forms a large part of the object, there are some peculiar difficulties. The architect places his foundation out of sight, and the musician tunes his instrument before he makes his appearance; but the lecturer has to try his chords in the presence of the assembly; an operation not likely, indeed, to produce much pleasure, but yet indispensably necessary to a right understanding of the subject to be developed. Poetry in essence is as familiar to barbarous as to civilized nations. The Laplander and the savage Indian are cheered by it as well as the inhabitants of London and Paris;--its spirit takes up and incorporates surrounding materials, as a plant clothes itself with soil and climate, whilst it exhibits the working of a vital principle within independent of all accidental circumstances. And to judge with fairness of an author's works, we ought to distinguish what is inward and essential from what is outward and circumstantial. It is essential to poetry that it be "simple" and appeal to the elements and primary laws of our nature; that it be "sensuous" and by its imagery elicit truth at a flash; that it be "impassioned," and be able to move our feelings and awaken our affections. In comparing different poets with each other, we should inquire which have brought into the fullest play our imagination and our reason, or have created the greatest excitement and produced the completest harmony. If we consider great exquisiteness of language and sweetness of metre alone, it is impossible to deny to Pope the character of a delightful writer; but whether he be a poet, must depend upon our definition of the word; and, doubtless, if every thing that pleases be poetry, Pope's satires and epistles must be poetry. This, I must say, that poetry, as distinguished from other modes of composition, does not rest in metre, and that it is not poetry, if it make no appeal to our passions or our imagination. One character belongs to all true poets, that they write from a principle within, not originating in any thing without; and that the true poet's work in its form, its shapings, and its modifications, is distinguished from all other works that assume to belong to the class of poetry, as a natural from an artificial flower, or as the mimic garden of a child from an enamelled meadow. In the former the flowers are broken from their stems and stuck into the ground; they are beautiful to the eye and fragrant to the sense, but their colours soon fade, and their odour is transient as the smile of the planter;--while the meadow may be visited again and again with renewed delight, its beauty is innate in the soil, and its bloom is of the freshness of nature. The next ground of critical judgment, and point of comparison, will be as to how far a given poet has been influenced by accidental circumstances. As a living poet must surely write, not for the ages past, but for that in which he lives, and those which are to follow, it is, on the one hand, natural that he should not violate, and on the other, necessary that he should not depend on, the mere manners and modes of his day. See how little does Shakspeare leave us to regret that he was born in his particular age! The great aera in modern times was what is called the Restoration of Letters;-the ages preceding it are called the dark ages; but it would be more wise, perhaps, to call them the ages in which we were in the dark. It is usually overlooked that the supposed dark period was not universal, but partial and successive, or alternate; that the dark age of England was not the dark age of Italy, but that one country was in its light and vigour, whilst another was in its gloom and bondage. But no sooner had the Reformation sounded through Europe like the blast of an archangel's trumpet, than from king to peasant there arose an enthusiasm for knowledge; the discovery of a manuscript became the subject of an embassy; Erasmus read by moonlight, because he could not afford a torch, and begged a penny, not for the love of charity, but for the love of learning. The three great points of attention were religion, morals, and taste; men of genius as well as men of learning, who in this age need to be so widely distinguished, then alike became copyists of the ancients; and this, indeed, was the only way by which the taste of mankind could be improved, or their understandings informed. Whilst Dante imagined himself a humble follower of Virgil, and Ariosto of Homer, they were both unconscious of that greater power working within them, which in many points carried them beyond their supposed originals. All great discoveries bear the stamp of the age in which they are made;--hence we perceive the effects of the purer religion of the moderns, visible for the most part in their lives; and in reading their works we should not content ourselves with the mere narratives of events long since passed, but should learn to apply their maxims and conduct to ourselves. Having intimated that times and manners lend their form and pressure to genius, let me once more draw a slight parallel between the ancient and modern stage, the stages of Greece and of England. The Greeks were polytheists; their religion was local; almost the only object of all their knowledge, art and taste, was their gods; and, accordingly, their productions were, if the expression may be allowed, statuesque, whilst those of the moderns are picturesque. The Greeks reared a structure, which in its parts, and as a whole, fitted the mind with the calm and elevated impression of perfect beauty and symmetrical proportion. The moderns also produced a whole, a more striking whole; but it was by blending materials and fusing the parts together. And as the Pantheon is to York Minster or Westminster Abbey, so is Sophocles compared with Shakspeare; in the one a completeness, a satisfaction, an excellence, on which the mind rests with complacency; in the other a multitude of interlaced materials, great and little, magnificent and mean, accompanied, indeed, with the sense of a falling short of perfection, and yet, at the same time, so promising of our social and individual progression, that we would not, if we could, exchange it for that repose of the mind which dwells on the forms of symmetry in the acquiescent admiration of grace. This general characteristic of the ancient and modern drama might be illustrated by a parallel of the ancient and modern music;--the one consisting of melody arising from a succession only of pleasing sounds,--the modern embracing harmony also, the result of combination and the effect of a whole. I have said, and I say it again, that great as was the genius of Shakspeare, his judgment was at least equal to it. Of this any one will be convinced, who attentively considers those points in which the dramas of Greece and England differ, from the dissimilitude of circumstances by which each was modified and influenced. The Greek stage had its origin in the ceremonies of a sacrifice, such as of the goat to Bacchus, whom we most erroneously regard as merely the jolly god of wine;--for among the ancients he was venerable, as the symbol of that power which acts without our consciousness in the vital energies of nature,--the 'vinum mundi',--as Apollo was that of the conscious agency of our intellectual being. The heroes of old under the influence of this Bacchic enthusiasm performed more than human actions;--hence tales of the favorite champions soon passed into dialogue. On the Greek stage the chorus was always before the audience; the curtain was never dropped, as we should say; and change of place being therefore, in general, impossible, the absurd notion of condemning it merely as improbable in itself was never entertained by any one. If we can believe ourselves at Thebes in one act, we may believe ourselves at Athens in the next. If a story lasts twenty-four hours or twenty-four years, it is equally improbable. There seems to be no just boundary but what the feelings prescribe. But on the Greek stage where the same persons were perpetually before the audience, great judgment was necessary in venturing on any such change. The poets never, therefore, attempted to impose on the senses by bringing places to men, but they did bring men to places, as in the well known instance in the 'Eumenides', where during an evident retirement of the chorus from the orchestra, the scene is changed to Athens, and Orestes is first introduced in the temple of Minerva, and the chorus of Furies come in afterwards in pursuit of him. [2] In the Greek drama there were no formal divisions into scenes and acts; there were no means, therefore, of allowing for the necessary lapse of time between one part of the dialogue and another, and unity of time in a strict sense was, of course, impossible. To overcome that difficulty of accounting for time, which is effected on the modern stage by dropping a curtain, the judgment and great genius of the ancients supplied music and measured motion, and with the lyric ode filled up the vacuity. In the story of the Agamemnon of Æschylus, the capture of Troy is supposed to be announced by a fire lighted on the Asiatic shore, and the transmission of the signal by successive beacons to Mycené. The signal is first seen at the 2lst line, and the herald from Troy itself enters at the 486th, and Agamemnon himself at the 783rd line. But the practical absurdity of this was not felt by the audience, who, in imagination stretched minutes into hours, while they listened to the lofty narrative odes of the chorus which almost entirely fill up the interspace. Another fact deserves attention here, namely, that regularly on the Greek stage a drama, or acted story, consisted in reality of three dramas, called together a trilogy, and performed consecutively in the course of one day. Now you may conceive a tragedy of Shakspeare's as a trilogy connected in one single representation. Divide Lear into three parts, and each would be a play with the ancients; or take the three Æschylean dramas of Agamemnon, and divide them into, or call them, as many acts, and they together would be one play. The first act would comprise the usurpation of Ægisthus, and the murder of Agamemnon; the second, the revenge of Orestes, and the murder of his mother; and the third, the penance and absolution of Orestes;--occupying a period of twenty-two years. The stage in Shakspeare's time was a naked room with a blanket for a curtain; but he made it a field for monarchs. That law of unity, which has its foundations, not in the factitious necessity of custom, but in nature itself, the unity of feeling, is every where and at all times observed by Shakspeare in his plays. Read 'Romeo and Juliet';--all is youth and spring;--youth with its follies, its virtues, its precipitancies;--spring with its odours, its flowers, and its transiency; it is one and the same feeling that commences, goes through, and ends the play. The old men, the Capulets and the Montagues, are not common old men; they have an eagerness, a heartiness, a vehemence, the effect of spring; with Romeo, his change of passion, his sudden marriage, and his rash death, are all the effects of youth;--whilst in Juliet love has all that is tender and melancholy in the nightingale, all that is voluptuous in the rose, with whatever is sweet in the freshness of spring; but it ends with a long deep sigh like the last breeze of the Italian evening. This unity of feeling and character pervades every drama of Shakspeare. It seems to me that his plays are distinguished from those of all other dramatic poets by the following characteristics: 1. Expectation in preference to surprise. It is like the true reading of the passage;--'God said, Let there be light, and there was _light_;'--not there _was_ light. As the feeling with which we startle at a shooting star, compared with that of watching the sunrise at the pre-established moment, such and so low is surprise compared with expectation. 2. Signal adherence to the great law of nature, that all opposites tend to attract and temper each other. Passion in Shakspeare generally displays libertinism, but involves morality; and if there are exceptions to this, they are, independently of their intrinsic value, all of them indicative of individual character, and, like the farewell admonitions of a parent, have an end beyond the parental relation. Thus the Countess's beautiful precepts to Bertram, by elevating her character, raise that of Helena her favorite, and soften down the point in her which Shakspeare does not mean us not to see, but to see and to forgive, and at length to justify. And so it is in Polonius, who is the personified memory of wisdom no longer actually possessed. This admirable character is always misrepresented on the stage. Shakspeare never intended to exhibit him as a buffoon; for although it was natural that Hamlet,--a young man of fire and genius, detesting formality, and disliking Polonius on political grounds, as imagining that he had assisted his uncle in his usurpation,--should express himself satirically,--yet this must not be taken as exactly the poet's conception of him. In Polonius a certain induration of character had arisen from long habits of business; but take his advice to Laertes, and Ophelia's reverence for his memory, and we shall see that he was meant to be represented as a statesman somewhat past his faculties,--his recollections of life all full of wisdom, and showing a knowledge of human nature, whilst what immediately takes place before him, and escapes from him, is indicative of weakness. But as in Homer all the deities are in armour, even Venus; so in Shakspeare all the characters are strong. Hence real folly and dullness are made by him the vehicles of wisdom. There is no difficulty for one being a fool to imitate a fool; but to be, remain, and speak like a wise man and a great wit, and yet so as to give a vivid representation of a veritable fool,--'hic labor, hoc opus est'. A drunken constable is not uncommon, nor hard to draw; but see and examine what goes to make up a Dogberry. 3. Keeping at all times in the high road of life. Shakspeare has no innocent adulteries, no interesting incests, no virtuous vice;--he never renders that amiable which religion and reason alike teach us to detest, or clothes impurity in the garb of virtue, like Beaumont and Fletcher, the Kotzebues of the day. Shakspeare's fathers are roused by ingratitude, his husbands stung by unfaithfulness; in him, in short, the affections are wounded in those points in which all may, nay, must, feel. Let the morality of Shakspeare be contrasted with that of the writers of his own, or the succeeding, age, or of those of the present day, who boast their superiority in this respect. No one can dispute that the result of such a comparison is altogether in favour of Shakspeare;--even the letters of women of high rank in his age were often coarser than his writings. If he occasionally disgusts a keen sense of delicacy, he never injures the mind; he neither excites, nor flatters, passion, in order to degrade the subject of it; he does not use the faulty thing for a faulty purpose, nor carries on warfare against virtue, by causing wickedness to appear as no wickedness, through the medium of a morbid sympathy with the unfortunate. In Shakspeare vice never walks as in twilight; nothing is purposely out of its place;--he inverts not the order of nature and propriety,--does not make every magistrate a drunkard or glutton, nor every poor man meek, humane, and temperate; he has no benevolent butchers, nor any sentimental rat-catchers. 4. Independence of the dramatic interest on the plot. The interest in the plot is always in fact on account of the characters, not 'vice versa', as in almost all other writers; the plot is a mere canvass and no more. Hence arises the true justification of the same stratagem being used in regard to Benedict and Beatrice,--the vanity in each being alike. Take away from the Much Ado About Nothing all that which is not indispensable to the plot, either as having little to do with it, or, at best, like Dogberry and his comrades, forced into the service, when any other less ingeniously absurd watchmen and night-constables would have answered the mere necessities of the action;--take away Benedict, Beatrice, Dogberry, and the reaction of the former on the character of Hero,--and what will remain? In other writers the main agent of the plot is always the prominent character; in Shakspeare it is so, or is not so, as the character is in itself calculated, or not calculated, to form the plot. Don John is the main-spring of the plot of this play; but he is merely shown and then withdrawn. 5. Independence of the interest on the story as the ground-work of the plot. Hence Shakspeare never took the trouble of inventing stories. It was enough for him to select from those that had been already invented or recorded such as had one or other, or both, of two recommendations, namely, suitableness to his particular purpose, and their being parts of popular tradition,--names of which we had often heard, and of their fortunes, and as to which all we wanted was, to see the man himself. So it is just the man himself, the Lear, the Shylock, the Richard, that Shakspeare makes us for the first time acquainted with. Omit the first scene in Lear, and yet every thing will remain; so the first and second scenes in the Merchant of Venice. Indeed it is universally true. 6. Interfusion of the lyrical--that which in its very essence is poetical--not only with the dramatic, as in the plays of Metastasio, where at the end of the scene comes the 'aria' as the 'exit' speech of the character, but also in and through the dramatic. Songs in Shakspeare are introduced as songs only, just as songs are in real life, beautifully as some of them are characteristic of the person who has sung or called for them, as Desdemona's 'Willow,' and Ophelia's wild snatches, and the sweet carollings in As You Like It. But the whole of the Midsummer Night's Dream is one continued specimen of the dramatized lyrical. And observe how exquisitely the dramatic of Hotspur;-- Marry, and I'm glad on't with all my heart; I had rather be a kitten and cry--mew, &c. melts away into the lyric of Mortimer;-- I understand thy looks: that pretty Welsh Which thou pourest down from these swelling heavens, I am too perfect in, &c. Henry IV. part i. act iii. sc. i. 7. The characters of the 'dramatis personæ', like those in real life, are to be inferred by the reader;--they are not told to him. And it is well worth remarking that Shakspeare's characters, like those in real life, are very commonly misunderstood, and almost always understood by different persons in different ways. The causes are the same in either case. If you take only what the friends of the character say, you may be deceived, and still more so, if that which his enemies say; nay, even the character himself sees himself through the medium of his character, and not exactly as he is. Take all together, not omitting a shrewd hint from the clown or the fool, and perhaps your impression will be right; and you may know whether you have in fact discovered the poet's own idea, by all the speeches receiving light from it, and attesting its reality by reflecting it. Lastly, in Shakspeare the heterogeneous is united, as it is in nature. You must not suppose a pressure or passion always acting on or in the character;--passion in Shakspeare is that by which the individual is distinguished from others, not that which makes a different kind of him. Shakspeare followed the main march of the human affections. He entered into no analysis of the passions or faiths of men, but assured himself that such and such passions and faiths were grounded in our common nature, and not in the mere accidents of ignorance or disease. This is an important consideration, and constitutes our Shakspeare the morning star, the guide and the pioneer, of true philosophy. [Footnote 1: For the most part communicated by Mr. Justice Coleridge. Ed.] [Footnote 2: Æsch. Eumen. v. 230-239. 'Notandum est, scenam jam Athenas translatam sic institui, ut primo Orestes solus conspiciatur in templo Minerva: supplex ejus simulacrum venerans; paulo post autem eum consequantur Eumenides, &c.' Schiitz's note. The recessions of the chorus were termed 'peravaoraneu'. There is another instance in the Ajax, v. 814. Ed.] ORDER OF SHAKSPEARE'S PLAYS. Various attempts have been made to arrange the plays of Shakspeare, each according to its priority in time, by proofs derived from external documents. How unsuccessful these attempts have been might easily be shown, not only from the widely different results arrived at by men, all deeply versed in the black-letter books, old plays, pamphlets, manuscript records and catalogues of that age, but also from the fallacious and unsatisfactory nature of the facts and assumptions on which the evidence rests. In that age, when the press was chiefly occupied with controversial or practical divinity,--when the law, the church and the state engrossed all honour and respectability,--when a degree of disgrace, 'levior quædam infamiæ macula', was attached to the publication of poetry, and even to have sported with the Muse, as a private relaxation, was supposed to be--a venial fault, indeed, yet--something beneath the gravity of a wise man,--when the professed poets were so poor, that the very expenses of the press demanded the liberality of some wealthy individual, so that two thirds of Spenser's poetic works, and those most highly praised by his learned admirers and friends, remained for many years in manuscript, and in manuscript perished,--when the amateurs of the stage were comparatively few, and therefore for the greater part more or less known to each other,--when we know that the plays of Shakspeare, both during and after his life, were the property of the stage, and published by the players, doubtless according to their notions of acceptability with the visitants of the theatre,--in such an age, and under such circumstances, can an allusion or reference to any drama or poem in the publication of a contemporary be received as conclusive evidence, that such drama or poem had at that time been published? Or, further, can the priority of publication itself prove any thing in favour of actually prior composition. We are tolerably certain, indeed, that the Venus and Adonis, and the Rape of Lucrece, were his two earliest poems, and though not printed until 1593, in the twenty ninth year of his age, yet there can be little doubt that they had remained by him in manuscript many years. For Mr. Malone has made it highly probable, that he had commenced a writer for the stage in 1591, when he was twenty seven years old, and Shakspeare himself assures us that the Venus and Adonis was the first heir of his invention.[1] Baffled, then, in the attempt to derive any satisfaction from outward documents, we may easily stand excused if we turn our researches towards the internal evidences furnished by the writings themselves, with no other positive 'data' than the known facts, that the Venus and Adonis was printed in 1593, the Rape of Lucrece in 1594, and that the Romeo and Juliet had appeared in 1595,--and with no other presumptions than that the poems, his very first productions, were written many years earlier,--(for who can believe that Shakspeare could have remained to his twenty-ninth or thirtieth year without attempting poetic composition of any kind?)--and that between these and Romeo and Juliet there had intervened one or two other dramas, or the chief materials, at least, of them, although they may very possibly have appeared after the success of the Romeo and Juliet and some other circumstances had given the poet an authority with the proprietors, and created a prepossession in his favour with the theatrical audiences. [Footnote 1: But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather, &c. Dedication of the V. and A. to Lord Southampton.] CLASSIFICATION ATTEMPTED, 1802. First Epoch. The London Prodigal. Cromwell. Henry VI., three parts, first edition. The old King John. Edward III. The old Taming of the Shrew. Pericles. All these are transition-works, 'Uebergangs-werke'; not his, yet of him. Second Epoch. All's Well That Ends Well;--but afterwards worked up afresh, (umgearbeitet) especially Parolles. The Two Gentlemen of Verona; a sketch. Romeo and Juliet; first draft of it. Third Epoch rises into the full, although youthful, Shakspeare; it was the negative period of his perfection. Love's Labour's Lost. Twelfth Night. As You Like It. Midsummer Night's Dream. Richard II. Henry IV. and V. Henry VIII.; 'Gelegenheitsgedicht'. Romeo and Juliet, as at present. Merchant of Venice. Fourth Epoch. Much Ado About Nothing. Merry Wives of Windsor; first edition. Henry VI.; 'rifacimento'. Fifth Epoch. The period of beauty was now past; and that of [GREEK (transliterated): deinotaes] and grandeur succeeds. Lear. Macbeth. Hamlet. Timon of Athens; an after vibration of Hamlet. Troilus and Cressida; 'Uebergang in die Ironie'. The Roman Plays. King John, as at present. Merry Wives of Windsor. }'umgearbeitet' Taming of the Shrew. } Measure for Measure. Othello. Tempest. Winter's Tale. Cymbeline. CLASSIFICATION ATTEMPTED, 1810. Shakspeare's earliest dramas I take to be, Love's Labour's Lost. All's Well That Ends Well. Comedy of Errors. Romeo and Juliet. In the second class I reckon Midsummer Night's Dream. As You Like It. Tempest. Twelfth Night. In the third, as indicating a greater energy--not merely of poetry, but--of all the world of thought, yet still with some of the growing pains, and the awkwardness of growth, I place Troilus and Cressida. Cymbeline. Merchant of Venice. Much Ado About Nothing. Taming of the Shrew. In the fourth, I place the plays containing the greatest characters; Macbeth. Lear. Hamlet. Othello. And lastly, the historic dramas, in order to be able to show my reasons for rejecting some whole plays, and very many scenes in others. CLASSIFICATION ATTEMPTED, 1819. I think Shakspeare's earliest dramatic attempt--perhaps even prior in conception to the Venus and Adonis, and planned before he left Stratford--was Love's Labour's Lost. Shortly afterwards I suppose Pericles and certain scenes in Jeronymo to have been produced; and in the same epoch, I place the Winter's Tale and Cymbeline, differing from the Pericles by the entire 'rifacimento' of it, when Shakspeare's celebrity as poet, and his interest, no less than his influence as manager, enabled him to bring forward the laid-by labours of his youth. The example of Titus Andronicus, which, as well as Jeronymo, was most popular in Shakspeare's first epoch, had led the young dramatist to the lawless mixture of dates and manners. In this same epoch I should place the Comedy of Errors, remarkable as being the only specimen of poetical farce in our language, that is, intentionally such; so that all the distinct kinds of drama, which might be educed 'a priori', have their representatives in Shakspeare's works. I say intentionally such; for many of Beaumont and Fletcher's plays, and the greater part of Ben Jonson's comedies are farce-plots. I add All's Well that Ends Well, originally intended as the counterpart of Love's Labour's Lost, Taming of the Shrew, Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, and Romeo and Juliet. Second Epoch. Richard II. King John. Henry VI.,--'rifacimento' only. Richard III. Third Epoch. Henry IV. Henry V. Merry Wives of Windsor. Henry VIII.,--a sort of historical masque, or show play. Fourth Epoch gives all the graces and facilities of a genius in full possession and habitual exercise of power, and peculiarly of the feminine, the _lady's_ character. Tempest. As You Like It. Merchant of Venice. Twelfth Night. and, finally, at its very point of culmination,-- Lear. Hamlet. Macbeth. Othello. Last Epoch, when the energies of intellect in the cycle of genius were, though in a rich and more potentiated form, becoming predominant over passion and creative self-manifestation. Measure for Measure. Timon of Athens. Coriolanus. Julius Cæsar. Antony and Cleopatra. Troilus and Cressida. Merciful, wonder-making Heaven! what a man was this Shakspeare! Myriad-minded, indeed, he was. NOTES ON THE TEMPEST. There is a sort of improbability with which we are shocked in dramatic representation, not less than in a narrative of real life. Consequently, there must be rules respecting it; and as rules are nothing but means to an end previously ascertained--(inattention to which simple truth has been the occasion of all the pedantry of the French school),--we must first determine what the immediate end or object of the drama is. And here, as I have previously remarked, I find two extremes of critical decision;--the French, which evidently presupposes that a perfect delusion is to be aimed at,--an opinion which needs no fresh confutation; and the exact opposite to it, brought forward by Dr. Johnson, who supposes the auditors throughout in the full reflective knowledge of the contrary. In evincing the impossibility of delusion, he makes no sufficient allowance for an intermediate state, which I have before distinguished by the term, illusion, and have attempted to illustrate its quality and character by reference to our mental state, when dreaming. In both cases we simply do not judge the imagery to be unreal; there is a negative reality, and no more. Whatever, therefore, tends to prevent the mind from placing itself, or being placed, gradually in that state in which the images have such negative reality for the auditor, destroys this illusion, and is dramatically improbable. Now the production of this effect--a sense of improbability--will depend on the degree of excitement in which the mind is supposed to be. Many things would be intolerable in the first scene of a play, that would not at all interrupt our enjoyment in the height of the interest, when the narrow cockpit may be made to hold The vasty field of France, or we may cram Within its wooden O, the very casques, That did affright the air at Agincourt. Again, on the other hand, many obvious improbabilities will be endured, as belonging to the ground-work of the story rather than to the drama itself, in the first scenes, which would disturb or disentrance us from all illusion in the acme of our excitement; as for instance, Lear's division of his kingdom, and the banishment of Cordelia. But, although the other excellencies of the drama besides this dramatic probability, as unity of interest, with distinctness and subordination of the characters, and appropriateness of style, are all, so far as they tend to increase the inward excitement, means towards accomplishing the chief end, that of producing and supporting this willing illusion,--yet they do not on that account cease to be ends themselves; and we must remember that, as such, they carry their own justification with them, as long as they do not contravene or interrupt the total illusion. It is not even always, or of necessity, an objection to them, that they prevent the illusion from rising to as great a height as it might otherwise have attained;--it is enough that they are simply compatible with as high a degree of it as is requisite for the purpose. Nay, upon particular occasions, a palpable improbability may be hazarded by a great genius for the express purpose of keeping down the interest of a merely instrumental scene, which would otherwise make too great an impression for the harmony of the entire illusion. Had the panorama been invented in the time of Pope Leo X., Raffael would still, I doubt not, have smiled in contempt at the regret, that the broom-twigs and scrubby bushes at the back of some of his grand pictures were not as probable trees as those in the exhibition. The Tempest is a specimen of the purely romantic drama, in which the interest is not historical, or dependent upon fidelity of portraiture, or the natural connexion of events,--but is a birth of the imagination, and rests only on the coaptation and union of the elements granted to, or assumed by, the poet. It is a species of drama which owes no allegiance to time or space, and in which, therefore, errors of chronology and geography--no mortal sins in any species--are venial faults, and count for nothing. It addresses itself entirely to the imaginative faculty; and although the illusion may be assisted by the effect on the senses of the complicated scenery and decorations of modern times, yet this sort of assistance is dangerous. For the principal and only genuine excitement ought to come from within,--from the moved and sympathetic imagination; whereas, where so much is addressed to the mere external senses of seeing and hearing, the spiritual vision is apt to languish, and the attraction from without will withdraw the mind from the proper and only legitimate interest which is intended to spring from within. The romance opens with a busy scene admirably appropriate to the kind of drama, and giving, as it were, the key-note to the whole harmony. It prepares and initiates the excitement required for the entire piece, and yet does not demand any thing from the spectators, which their previous habits had not fitted them to understand. It is the bustle of a tempest, from which the real horrors are abstracted;--therefore it is poetical, though not in strictness natural--(the distinction to which I have so often alluded)--and is purposely restrained from concentering the interest on itself, but used merely as an induction or tuning for what is to follow. In the second scene, Prospero's speeches, till the entrance of Ariel, contain the finest example, I remember, of retrospective narration for the purpose of exciting immediate interest, and putting the audience in possession of all the information necessary for the understanding of the plot.[1] Observe, too, the perfect probability of the moment chosen by Prospero (the very Shakspeare himself, as it were, of the tempest) to open out the truth to his daughter, his own romantic bearing, and how completely any thing that might have been disagreeable to us in the magician, is reconciled and shaded in the humanity and natural feelings of the father. In the very first speech of Miranda the simplicity and tenderness of her character are at once laid open;--it would have been lost in direct contact with the agitation of the first scene. The opinion once prevailed, but, happily, is now abandoned, that Fletcher alone wrote for women;--the truth is, that with very few, and those partial, exceptions, the female characters in the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher are, when of the light kind, not decent; when heroic, complete viragos. But in Shakspeare all the elements of womanhood are holy, and there is the sweet, yet dignified feeling of all that 'continuates' society, as sense of ancestry and of sex, with a purity unassailable by sophistry, because it rests not in the analytic processes, but in that sane equipoise of the faculties, during which the feelings are representative of all past experience,--not of the individual only, but of all those by whom she has been educated, and their predecessors even up to the first mother that lived. Shakspeare saw that the want of prominence, which Pope notices for sarcasm, was the blessed beauty of the woman's character, and knew that it arose not from any deficiency, but from the more exquisite harmony of all the parts of the moral being constituting one living total of head and heart. He has drawn it, indeed, in all its distinctive energies of faith, patience, constancy, fortitude,--shown in all of them as following the heart, which gives its results by a nice tact and happy intuition, without the intervention of the discursive faculty,--sees all things in and by the light of the affections, and errs, if it ever err, in the exaggerations of love alone. In all the Shakspearian women there is essentially the same foundation and principle; the distinct individuality and variety are merely the result of the modification of circumstances, whether in Miranda the maiden, in Imogen the wife, or in Katharine the queen. But to return. The appearance and characters of the super- or ultra-natural servants are finely contrasted. Ariel has in every thing the airy tint which gives the name; and it is worthy of remark that Miranda is never directly brought into comparison with Ariel, lest the natural and human of the one and the supernatural of the other should tend to neutralize each other; Caliban, on the other hand, is all earth, all condensed and gross in feelings and images; he has the dawnings of understanding without reason or the moral sense, and in him, as in some brute animals, this advance to the intellectual faculties, without the moral sense, is marked by the appearance of vice. For it is in the primacy of the moral being only that man is truly human; in his intellectual powers he is certainly approached by the brutes, and, man's whole system duly considered, those powers cannot be considered other than means to an end, that is, to morality. In this scene, as it proceeds, is displayed the impression made by Ferdinand and Miranda on each other; it is love at first sight;-- at the first sight They have chang'd eyes:-- and it appears to me, that in all cases of real love, it is at one moment that it takes place. That moment may have been prepared by previous esteem, admiration, or even affection,--yet love seems to require a momentary act of volition, by which a tacit bond of devotion is imposed,--a bond not to be thereafter broken without violating what should be sacred in our nature. How finely is the true Shakspearian scene contrasted with Dryden's vulgar alteration of it, in which a mere ludicrous psychological experiment, as it were, is tried--displaying nothing but indelicacy without passion. Prospero's interruption of the courtship has often seemed to me to have no sufficient motive; still his alleged reason-- lest too light winning Make the prize light-- is enough for the ethereal connexions of the romantic imagination, although it would not be so for the historical. [2] The whole courting scene, indeed, in the beginning of the third act, between the lovers is a masterpiece; and the first dawn of disobedience in the mind of Miranda to the command of her father is very finely drawn, so as to seem the working of the Scriptural command, 'Thou shall leave father and mother', &c. O! with what exquisite purity this scene is conceived and executed! Shakspeare may sometimes be gross, but I boldly say that he is always moral and modest. Alas! in this our day decency of manners is preserved at the expense of morality of heart, and delicacies for vice are allowed, whilst grossness against it is hypocritically, or at least morbidly, condemned. In this play are admirably sketched the vices generally accompanying a low degree of civilization; and in the first scene of the second act Shakspeare has, as in many other places, shown the tendency in bad men to indulge in scorn and contemptuous expressions, as a mode of getting rid of their own uneasy feelings of inferiority to the good, and also, by making the good ridiculous, of rendering the transition of others to wickedness easy. Shakspeare never puts habitual scorn into the mouths of other than bad men, as here in the instances of Antonio and Sebastian. The scene of the intended assassination of Alonzo and Gonzalo is an exact counterpart of the scene between Macbeth and his lady, only pitched in a lower key throughout, as designed to be frustrated and concealed, and exhibiting the same profound management in the manner of familiarizing a mind, not immediately recipient, to the suggestion of guilt, by associating the proposed crime with something ludicrous or out of place,--something not habitually matter of reverence. By this kind of sophistry the imagination and fancy are first bribed to contemplate the suggested act, and at length to become acquainted with it. Observe how the effect of this scene is heightened by contrast with another counterpart of it in low life,--that between the conspirators Stephano, Caliban, and Trinculo in the second scene of the third act, in which there are the same essential characteristics. In this play and in this scene of it are also shown the springs of the vulgar in politics,--of that kind of politics which is inwoven with human nature. In his treatment of this subject, wherever it occurs, Shakspeare is quite peculiar. In other writers we find the particular opinions of the individual; in Massinger it is rank republicanism; in Beaumont and Fletcher even 'jure divino' principles are carried to excess;--but Shakspeare never promulgates any party tenets. He is always the philosopher and the moralist, but at the same time with a profound veneration for all the established institutions of society, and for those classes which form the permanent elements of the state--especially never introducing a professional character, as such, otherwise than as respectable. If he must have any name, he should be styled a philosophical aristocrat, delighting in those hereditary institutions which have a tendency to bind one age to another, and in that distinction of ranks, of which, although few may be in possession, all enjoy the advantages. Hence, again, you will observe the good nature with which he seems always to make sport with the passions and follies of a mob, as with an irrational animal. He is never angry with it, but hugely content with holding up its absurdities to its face; and sometimes you may trace a tone of almost affectionate superiority, something like that in which a father speaks of the rogueries of a child. See the good-humoured way in which he describes Stephano passing from the most licentious freedom to absolute despotism over Trinculo and Caliban. The truth is, Shakspeare's characters are all 'genera' intensely individualized; the results of meditation, of which observation supplied the drapery and the colors necessary to combine them with each other. He had virtually surveyed all the great component powers and impulses of human nature,--had seen that their different combinations and subordinations were in fact the individualizers of men, and showed how their harmony was produced by reciprocal disproportions of excess or deficiency. The language in which these truths are expressed was not drawn from any set fashion, but from the profoundest depths of his moral being, and is therefore for all ages. [Footnote 1: 'Pro'. Mark his condition, and th' event; then tell me, If this might be a brother. 'Mira'. I should sin, To think but nobly of my grandmother; Good wombs have bore bad sons. 'Pro'. Now the condition, &c. Theobald has a note upon this passage, and suggests that Shakspeare placed it thus:-- 'Pro'. Good wombs have bore bad sons,--Now the condition. Mr. Coleridge writes in the margin: 'I cannot but believe that Theobald is quite right.'--Ed.] [Footnote 2: 'Fer'. Yes, faith, and all his Lords, the duke of Milan, And his brave son, being twain. Theobald remarks that no body was lost in the wreck; and yet that no such character is introduced in the fable, as the Duke of Milan's son. Mr. C. notes: 'Must not Ferdinand have believed he was lost in the fleet that the tempest scattered?--Ed.] LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST. The characters in this play are either impersonated out of Shakspeare's own multiformity by imaginative self-position, or out of such as a country town and a schoolboy's observation might supply,--the curate, the schoolmaster, the Armado, (who even in my time was not extinct in the cheaper inns of North Wales) and so on. The satire is chiefly on follies of words. Biron and Rosaline are evidently the pre-existent state of Benedict and Beatrice, and so, perhaps, is Boyet of Lafeu, and Costard of the Tapster in Measure for Measure; and the frequency of the rhymes, the sweetness as well as the smoothness of the metre, and the number of acute and fancifully illustrated aphorisms, are all as they ought to be in a poet's youth. True genius begins by generalizing and condensing; it ends in realizing and expanding. It first collects the seeds. Yet if this juvenile drama had been the only one extant of our Shakspeare, and we possessed the tradition only of his riper works, or accounts of them in writers who had not even mentioned this play,--how many of Shakspeare's characteristic features might we not still have discovered in Love's Labour's Lost, though as in a portrait taken of him in his boyhood. I can never sufficiently admire the wonderful activity of thought throughout the whole of the first scene of the play, rendered natural, as it is, by the choice of the characters, and the whimsical determination on which the drama is founded. A whimsical determination certainly;--yet not altogether so very improbable to those who are conversant in the history of the middle ages, with their Courts of Love, and all that lighter drapery of chivalry, which engaged even mighty kings with a sort of serio-comic interest, and may well be supposed to have occupied more completely the smaller princes, at a time when the noble's or prince's court contained the only theatre of the domain or principality. This sort of story, too, was admirably suited to Shakspeare's times, when the English court was still the foster-mother of the state and the muses; and when, in consequence, the courtiers, and men of rank and fashion, affected a display of wit, point, and sententious observation, that would be deemed intolerable at present,--but in which a hundred years of controversy, involving every great political, and every dear domestic, interest, had trained all but the lowest classes to participate. Add to this the very style of the sermons of the time, and the eagerness of the Protestants to distinguish themselves by long and frequent preaching, and it will be found that, from the reign of Henry VIII. to the abdication of James II. no country ever received such a national education as England. Hence the comic matter chosen in the first instance is a ridiculous imitation or apery of this constant striving after logical precision, and subtle opposition of thoughts, together with a making the most of every conception or image, by expressing it under the least expected property belonging to it, and this, again, rendered specially absurd by being applied to the most current subjects and occurrences. The phrases and modes of combination in argument were caught by the most ignorant from the custom of the age, and their ridiculous misapplication of them is most amusingly exhibited in Costard; whilst examples suited only to the gravest propositions and impersonations, or apostrophes to abstract thoughts impersonated, which are in fact the natural language only of the most vehement agitations of the mind, are adopted by the coxcombry of Armado as mere artifices of ornament. The same kind of intellectual action is exhibited in a more serious and elevated strain in many other parts of this play. Biron's speech at the end of the fourth act is an excellent specimen of it. It is logic clothed in rhetoric;--but observe how Shakspeare, in his two-fold being of poet and philosopher, avails himself of it to convey profound truths in the most lively images,--the whole remaining faithful to the character supposed to utter the lines, and the expressions themselves constituting a further developement of that character:-- Other slow arts entirely keep the brain: And therefore finding barren practisers, Scarce shew a harvest of their heavy toil: But love, first learned in a lady's eyes, Lives not alone immured in the brain; But, with the motion of all elements, Courses as swift as thought in every power; And gives to every power a double power, Above their functions and their offices. It adds a precious seeing to the eye, A lover's eyes will gaze an eagle blind; A lover's ear will hear the lowest sound, When the suspicious tread of theft is stopp'd: Love's feeling is more soft and sensible, Than are the tender horns of cockled snails; Love's tongue proves dainty Bacchus gross in taste; For valour, is not love a Hercules, Still climbing trees in the Hesperides? Subtle as Sphinx; as sweet and musical, As bright Apollo's lute, strung with his hair; And when love speaks, the voice of all the gods Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony. Never durst poet touch a pen to write, Until his ink were temper'd with love's sighs; O, then his lines would ravish savage ears, And plant in tyrants mild humility. From women's eyes this doctrine I derive: They sparkle still the right Promethean fire; They are the books, the arts, the academes, That shew, contain, and nourish all the world; Else, none at all in aught proves excellent; Then fools you were these women to forswear; Or, keeping what is sworn, you will prove fools. For wisdom's sake, a word that all men love; Or for love's sake, a word that loves all men; Or for men's sake, the authors of these women; Or women's sake, by whom we men are men; Let us once lose our oaths, to find ourselves, Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths: It is religion, to be thus forsworn: For charity itself fulfills the law: And who can sever love from charity?-- This is quite a study;--sometimes you see this youthful god of poetry connecting disparate thoughts purely by means of resemblances in the words expressing them,--a thing in character in lighter comedy, especially of that kind in which Shakspeare delights, namely, the purposed display of wit, though sometimes, too, disfiguring his graver scenes;--but more often you may see him doubling the natural connection or order of logical consequence in the thoughts by the introduction of an artificial and sought for resemblance in the words, as, for instance, in the third line of the play,-- And then grace us in the disgrace of death;-- this being a figure often having its force and propriety, as justified by the law of passion, which, inducing in the mind an unusual activity, seeks for means to waste its superfluity,--when in the highest degree--in lyric repetitions and sublime tautology--'(at her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down; at her feet he bowed, he fell; where he bowed, there he fell down dead)',--and, in lower degrees, in making the words themselves the subjects and materials of that surplus action, and for the same cause that agitates our limbs, and forces our very gestures into a tempest in states of high excitement. The mere style of narration in Love's Labour's Lost, like that of Ægeon in the first scene of the Comedy of Errors, and of the Captain in the second scene of Macbeth, seems imitated with its defects and its beauties from Sir Philip Sidney; whose Arcadia, though not then published, was already well known in manuscript copies, and could hardly have escaped the notice and admiration of Shakspeare as the friend and client of the Earl of Southampton. The chief defect consists in the parentheses and parenthetic thoughts and descriptions, suited neither to the passion of the speaker, nor the purpose of the person to whom the information is to be given, but manifestly betraying the author himself,--not by way of continuous undersong, but--palpably, and so as to show themselves addressed to the general reader. However, it is not unimportant to notice how strong a presumption the diction and allusions of this play afford, that, though Shakspeare's acquirements in the dead languages might not be such as we suppose in a learned education, his habits had, nevertheless, been scholastic, and those of a student. For a young author's first work almost always bespeaks his recent pursuits, and his first observations of life are either drawn from the immediate employments of his youth, and from the characters and images most deeply impressed on his mind in the situations in which those employments had placed him;--or else they are fixed on such objects and occurrences in the world, as are easily connected with, and seem to bear upon, his studies and the hitherto exclusive subjects of his meditation. Just as Ben Jonson, who applied himself to the drama after having served in Flanders, fills his earliest plays with true or pretended soldiers, the wrongs and neglects of the former, and the absurd boasts and knavery of their counterfeits. So Lessing's first comedies are placed in the universities, and consist of events and characters conceivable in an academic life. I will only further remark the sweet and tempered gravity, with which Shakspeare in the end draws the only fitting moral which such a drama afforded. Here Rosaline rises up to the full height of Beatrice:-- 'Ros'. Oft have I heard of you, my lord Biron, Before I saw you, and the world's large tongue Proclaims you for a man replete with mocks; Full of comparisons, and wounding flouts, Which you on all estates will execute That lie within the mercy of your wit: To weed this wormwood from your fruitful brain, And therewithal, to win me, if you please, (Without the which I am not to be won,) You shall this twelvemonth term from day to day Visit the speechless sick, and still converse With groaning wretches; and your talk shall be, With all the fierce endeavour of your wit, To enforce the pained impotent to smile. 'Biron'. To move wild laughter in the throat of death? It cannot be; it is impossible; Mirth cannot move a soul in agony. 'Ros'. Why, that's the way to choke a gibing spirit, Whose influence is begot of that loose grace, Which shallow laughing hearers give to fools: A jest's prosperity lies in the ear Of him that hears it, never in the tongue Of him that makes it: then, if sickly ears, Deaf'd with the clamors of their own dear groans, Will hear your idle scorns, continue then, And I will have you, and that fault withal; But, if they will not, throw away that spirit, And I shall find you empty of that fault, Right joyful of your reformation. Act v. sc. 2. In Biron's speech to the Princess: --and, therefore, like the eye, Full of _straying_ shapes, of habits, and of forms. Either read _stray_, which I prefer; or throw _full_ back to the preceding lines,-- like the eye, full Of straying shapes, &c. In the same scene: 'Biron'. And what to me, my love? and what to me? 'Ros'. You must be purged too, your sins are rank; You are attaint with fault and perjury: Therefore, if you my favour mean to get, A twelvemonth shall you spend, and never rest, But seek the weary beds of people sick. There can be no doubt, indeed, about the propriety of expunging this speech of Rosaline's; it soils the very page that retains it. But I do not agree with Warburton and others in striking out the preceding line also. It is quite in Biron's character; and Rosaline not answering it immediately, Dumain takes up the question for him, and, after he and Longaville are answered, Biron, with evident propriety, says;-- _Studies_ my mistress? &c. MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. Act i. sc. 1. 'Her'. O cross! too high to be enthrall'd to low-- 'Lys'. Or else misgraffed, in respect of years; 'Her'. O spite! too old to be engag'd to young-- 'Lys'. Or else it stood upon the choice of friends; 'Her'. O hell! to chuse love by another's eye! There is no authority for any alteration;--but I never can help feeling how great an improvement it would be, if the two former of Hermia's exclamations were omitted;--the third and only appropriate one would then become a beauty, and most natural. 'Ib.' Helena's speech:-- I wilt go tell him of fair Hermia's flight, &c. I am convinced that Shakspeare availed himself of the title of this play in his own mind, and worked upon it as a dream throughout, but especially, and, perhaps, unpleasingly, in this broad determination of ungrateful treachery in Helena, so undisguisedly avowed to herself, and this, too, after the witty cool philosophizing that precedes. The act itself is natural, and the resolve so to act is, I fear, likewise too true a picture of the lax hold which principles have on a woman's heart, when opposed to, or even separated from, passion and inclination. For women are less hypocrites to their own minds than men are, because in general they feel less proportionate abhorrence of moral evil in and for itself, and more of its outward consequences, as detection, and loss of character than men,--their natures being almost wholly extroitive. Still, however just in itself, the representation of this is not poetical; we shrink from it, and cannot harmonize it with the ideal. Act ii. sc. 1. Theobald's edition. _Through_ bush, _through_ briar--... _Through_ flood, _through_ fire-- What a noble pair of ears this worthy Theobald must have had! The eight amphimacers or cretics,-- Ovër hîll, ôvër dâle, Thôrö' bûsh, thôrö' brîar, Ovër pârk, ôvër pâle, Thôrö' flôôd, thôrö' fîre-- have a delightful effect on the ear in their sweet transition to the trochaic,-- Î dô wândër êv'ry whêrë Swîftër thân thë môônës sphêrë, &c.-- The last words as sustaining the rhyme, must be considered, as in fact they are, trochees in time. It may be worth while to give some correct examples in English of the principal metrical feet:-- Pyrrhic or Dibrach, u u =_body, spirit_. Tribrach, u u u =_nobody_, (hastily pronounced). Iambus u ' =_deli'ght_. Trochee, ' u =_li'ghtly_. Spondee, ' ' =_Go'd spa'ke_. The paucity of spondees in single words in English and, indeed, in the modern languages in general, makes, perhaps, the greatest distinction, metrically considered, between them and the Greek and Latin. Dactyl, ' u u = _me'rrily._ Anapæst, u u ' = _a propo's,_ or the first three syllables of _ceremo'ny_. Amphibrachys, u ' u = _deli'ghtful_. Amphimacer, ' u ' = _o'ver hi'll_. Antibacchius, u ' ' = _the Lo'rd Go'd_. Bacchius, ' ' u = _He'lve'llyn_. Molossus, ' ' ' = _Jo'hn Ja'mes Jo'nes._ These simple feet may suffice for understanding the metres of Shakspeare, for the greater part at least;--but Milton cannot be made harmoniously intelligible without the composite feet, the Ionics, Pæons, and Epitrites. 'Ib.' sc. 2. Titania's speech:--(Theobald adopting Warburton's reading.) Which she, with pretty and with swimming gate _Follying_ (her womb then rich with my young squire) Would imitate, &c. Oh! oh! Heaven have mercy on poor Shakspeare, and also on Mr. Warburton's mind's eye! Act v. sc. 1. Theseus' speech:--(Theobald.) And what poor [_willing_] duty cannot do, Noble respect takes it in might, not merit. To my ears it would read far more Shakspearian thus:-- And what poor duty cannot do, _yet would_, Noble respect, &c. 'Ib.' sc. 2. 'Puck.' Now the hungry lion roars, And the wolf behowls the moon; Whilst the heavy ploughman snores All with weary task foredone, &c. Very Anacreon in perfectness, proportion, grace, and spontaneity! So far it is Greek;--but then add, O! what wealth, what wild ranging, and yet what compression and condensation of, English fancy! In truth, there is nothing in Anacreon more perfect than these thirty lines, or half so rich and imaginative. They form a speckless diamond. COMEDY OF ERRORS. The myriad-minded man, our, and all men's, Shakspeare, has in this piece presented us with a legitimate farce in exactest consonance with the philosophical principles and character of farce, as distinguished from comedy and from entertainments. A proper farce is mainly distinguished from comedy by the license allowed, and even required, in the fable, in order to produce strange and laughable situations. The story need not be probable, it is enough that it is possible. A comedy would scarcely allow even the two Antipholises; because, although there have been instances of almost indistinguishable likeness in two persons, yet these are mere individual accidents, 'casus ludentis naturæ', and the 'verum' will not excuse the 'inverisimile'. But farce dares add the two Dromios, and is justified in so doing by the laws of its end and constitution. In a word, farces commence in a postulate, which must be granted. AS YOU LIKE IT. Act I. sc. 1. 'Oli'. What, boy! 'Orla'. Come, come, elder brother, you are too young in this. 'Oli'. Wilt thou lay hands on me, villain? There is a beauty here. The word 'boy' naturally provokes and awakens in Orlando the sense of his manly powers; and with the retort of 'elder brother,' he grasps him with firm hands, and makes him feel he is no boy. Ib. 'Oli'. Farewell, good Charles.--Now will I stir this gamester: I hope, I shall see an end of him; for my soul, yet I know not why, hates nothing more than him. Yet he's gentle; never school'd, and yet learn'd; full of noble device; of all sorts enchantingly beloved! and, indeed, so much in the heart of the world, and especially of my own people, who best know him, that I am altogether misprized: but it shall not be so long; this wrestler shall clear all. This has always appeared to me one of the most un-Shakspearian speeches in all the genuine works of our poet; yet I should be nothing surprized, and greatly pleased, to find it hereafter a fresh beauty, as has so often happened to me with other supposed defects of great men. (1810). It is too venturous to charge a passage in Shakspeare with want of truth to nature; and yet at first sight this speech of Oliver's expresses truths, which it seems almost impossible that any mind should so distinctly, so livelily, and so voluntarily, have presented to itself, in connection with feelings and intentions so malignant, and so contrary to those which the qualities expressed would naturally have called forth. But I dare not say that this seeming unnaturalness is not in the nature of an abused wilfulness, when united with a strong intellect. In such characters there is sometimes a gloomy self-gratification in making the absoluteness of the will ('sit pro ratione voluntas!') evident to themselves by setting the reason and the conscience in full array against it. (1818). Ib. sc. 2. 'Celia'. If you saw yourself with _your_ eyes, or knew yourself with _your_ judgment, the fear of your adventure would counsel you to a more equal enterprise. Surely it should be '_our_ eyes' and '_our_ judgment.' 'Ib.' sc. 3. 'Cel'. But is all this for your father? 'Ros'. No, some of it is for _my child's father_. Theobald restores this as the reading of the older editions. It may be so; but who can doubt that it is a mistake for 'my father's child,' meaning herself? According to Theobald's note, a most indelicate anticipation is put into the mouth of Rosalind without reason;--and besides, what a strange thought, and how out of place, and unintelligible! Act iv. sc. 2. Take thou no scorn To wear the horn, the lusty horn; It was a crest ere thou wast born. I question whether there exists a parallel instance of a phrase, that like this of 'horns' is universal in all languages, and yet for which no one has discovered even a plausible origin. TWELFTH NIGHT. Act I. sc. 1. Duke's speech:-- --so full of shapes _is_ fancy, That it alone is high fantastical. Warburton's alteration of _is_ into _in_ is needless. 'Fancy' may very well be interpreted 'exclusive affection,' or 'passionate preference.' Thus, bird-fanciers, gentlemen of the fancy, that is, amateurs of boxing, &c. The play of assimilation,--the meaning one sense chiefly, and yet keeping both senses in view, is perfectly Shakspearian. Act ii. sc. 3. Sir Andrew's speech:-- An explanatory note on _Pigrogromilus_ would have been more acceptable than Theobald's grand discovery that 'lemon' ought to be 'leman.' Ib. Sir Toby's speech: (Warburton's note on the Peripatetic philosophy.) Shall we rouse the night-owl in a catch, that will draw three souls out of one weaver? O genuine, and inimitable (at least I hope so) Warburton! This note of thine, if but one in five millions, would be half a one too much. 'Ib.' sc. 4. 'Duke'. My life upon't, young though thou art, thine eye Hath stay'd upon some favour that it loves; Hath it not, boy? 'Vio'. A little, by your favour. 'Duke'. What kind of woman is't? And yet Viola was to have been presented to Orsino as a eunuch!--Act i. sc. 2. Viola's speech. Either she forgot this, or else she had altered her plan. Ib. 'Vio'. A blank, my lord: she never told her love!-- But let concealment, &c. After the first line, (of which the last five words should be spoken with, and drop down in, a deep sigh) the actress ought to make a pause; and then start afresh, from the activity of thought, born of suppressed feelings, and which thought had accumulated during the brief interval, as vital heat under the skin during a dip in cold water. Ib. sc. 5. 'Fabian'. Though our silence be drawn from us by _cars_, yet peace. Perhaps, 'cables.' Act iii. sc. 1. 'Clown'. A sentence is but a _cheveril_ glove to a good wit. (Theobald's note.) Theobald's etymology of 'cheveril' is, of course quite right;--but he is mistaken in supposing that there were no such things as gloves of chicken-skin. They were at one time a main article in chirocosmetics. Act v. sc. 1. Clown's speech:-- So that, _conclusions to be as kisses_, if your four negatives make your two affirmatives, why, then, the worse for my friends, and the better for my foes. (Warburton reads 'conclusion to be asked, is.') Surely Warburton could never have wooed by kisses and won, or he would not have flounder-flatted so just and humorous, nor less pleasing than humorous, an image into so profound a nihility. In the name of love and wonder, do not four kisses make a double affirmative? The humour lies in the whispered 'No!' and the inviting 'Don't!' with which the maiden's kisses are accompanied, and thence compared to negatives, which by repetition constitute an affirmative. ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL. Act I. sc. 1. 'Count'. If the living be enemy to the grief, the excess makes it soon mortal. 'Bert'. Madam, I desire your holy wishes--. 'Laf'. How understand we that--? Bertram and Lafeu, I imagine, both speak together,--Lafeu referring to the Countess's rather obscure remark. Act. ii. sc. 1. (Warburton's note.) 'King'. --let _higher_ Italy (Those _'bated_, that inherit but the fall Of the last monarchy) see, that you come Not to woo honor, but to wed it. It would be, I own, an audacious and unjustifiable change of the text; but yet, as a mere conjecture, I venture to suggest 'bastards,' for ''bated.' As it stands, in spite of Warburton's note I can make little or nothing of it. Why should the king except the then most illustrious states, which, as being republics, were the more truly inheritors of the Roman grandeur?--With my conjecture, the sense would be;--'let higher, or the more northern part of Italy--(unless 'higher' be a corruption for 'hir'd,'--the metre seeming to demand a monosyllable) (those bastards that inherit the infamy only of their fathers) see, &c.' The following 'woo' and 'wed' are so far confirmative as they indicate Shakspeare's manner of connexion by unmarked influences of association from some preceding metaphor. This it is which makes his style so peculiarly vital and organic. Likewise 'those girls of Italy' strengthen the guess. The absurdity of Warburton's gloss, which represents the king calling Italy superior, and then excepting the only part the lords were going to visit, must strike every one. Ib. sc. 3. 'Laf'. They say, miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and _causeless_. Shakspeare, inspired, as it might seem, with all knowledge, here uses the word 'causeless' in its strict philosophical sense;--cause being truly predicable only of 'phenomena', that is, things natural, and not of 'noumena', or things supernatural. Act iii. sc. 5. 'Dia'. The Count Rousillon:--know you such a one? 'Hel'. But by the ear that hears most nobly of him; His face I know not. Shall we say here, that Shakspeare has unnecessarily made his loveliest character utter a lie?--Or shall we dare think that, where to deceive was necessary, he thought a pretended verbal verity a double crime, equally with the other a lie to the hearer, and at the same time an attempt to lie to one's own conscience? MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR. Act I. sc. 1. 'Shal'. The luce is the fresh fish, the salt fish is an old coat. I cannot understand this. Perhaps there is a corruption both of words and speakers. Shallow no sooner corrects one mistake of Sir Hugh's, namely, 'louse' for 'luce,' a pike, but the honest Welchman falls into another, namely, 'cod' ('baccalà') 'Cambrice' 'cot' for coat. 'Shal'. The luce is the fresh fish-- 'Evans'. The salt fish is an old cot. 'Luce is a fresh fish, and not a louse;' says Shallow. 'Aye, aye,' quoth Sir Hugh; 'the _fresh_ fish is the luce; it is an old cod that is the salt fish.' At all events, as the text stands, there is no sense at all in the words. 'Ib.' sc. 3. 'Fal'. Now, the report goes, she has all the rule of her husband's purse; she hath a legion of angels. 'Pist'. As many devils entertain; and 'To her, boy', say I. Perhaps it is-- As many devils enter (or enter'd) swine; and _to her, boy_, say I:-- a somewhat profane, but not un-Shakspearian, allusion to the 'legion' in St. Luke's 'gospel.' MEASURE FOR MEASURE. This play, which is Shakspeare's throughout, is to me the most painful--say rather, the only painful--part of his genuine works. The comic and tragic parts equally border on the [Greek (transliterated): misaeteon],--the one being disgusting, the other horrible; and the pardon and marriage of Angelo not merely baffles the strong indignant claim of justice--(for cruelty, with lust and damnable baseness, cannot be forgiven, because we cannot conceive them as being morally repented of;) but it is likewise degrading to the character of woman. Beaumont and Fletcher, who can follow Shakspeare in his errors only, have presented a still worse, because more loathsome and contradictory, instance of the same kind in the Night-Walker, in the marriage of Alathe to Algripe. Of the counterbalancing beauties of Measure for Measure, I need say nothing; for I have already remarked that the play is Shakspeare's throughout. Act iii. sc. 1. Ay, but to die, and go we know not where, &c. This natural fear of Claudio, from the antipathy we have to death, seems very little varied from that infamous wish of Mæcenas, recorded in the 101st epistle of Seneca: _Debilem facito manu, Debilem pede, coxa, &c._ Warburton's note. I cannot but think this rather an heroic resolve, than an infamous wish. It appears to me to be the grandest symptom of an immortal spirit, when even that bedimmed and overwhelmed spirit recked not of its own immortality, still to seek to be,--to be a mind, a will. As fame is to reputation, so heaven is to an estate, or immediate advantage. The difference is, that the self-love of the former cannot exist but by a complete suppression and habitual supplantation of immediate selfishness. In one point of view, the miser is more estimable than the spendthrift;--only that the miser's present feelings are as much of the present as the spendthrift's. But 'caeteris paribus', that is, upon the supposition that whatever is good or lovely in the one coexists equally in the other, then, doubtless, the master of the present is less a selfish being, an animal, than he who lives for the moment with no inheritance in the future. Whatever can degrade man, is supposed in the latter case, whatever can elevate him, in the former. And as to self;--strange and generous self! that can only be such a self by a complete divestment of all that men call self,--of all that can make it either practically to others, or consciously to the individual himself, different from the human race in its ideal. Such self is but a perpetual religion, an inalienable acknowledgment of God, the sole basis and ground of being. In this sense, how can I love God, and not love myself, as far as it is of God? 'Ib.' sc. 2. Pattern in himself to know, Grace to stand, and virtue go. Worse metre, indeed, but better English would be,-- Grace to stand, virtue to go. CYMBELINE. Act I. sc. 1. You do not meet a man, but frowns: our bloods No more obey the heavens, than our courtiers' Still seem, as does the king's. There can be little doubt of Mr. Tyrwhitt's emendations of 'courtiers' and 'king,' as to the sense;--only it is not impossible that Shakspeare's dramatic language may allow of the word, 'brows' or 'faces' being understood after the word 'courtiers',' which might then remain in the genitive case plural. But the nominative plural makes excellent sense, and is sufficiently elegant, and sounds to my ear Shakspearian. What, however, is meant by 'our bloods no more obey the heavens?'--Dr. Johnson's assertion that 'bloods' signify 'countenances,' is, I think, mistaken both in the thought conveyed--(for it was never a popular belief that the stars governed men's countenances,) and in the usage, which requires an antithesis of the blood,--or the temperament of the four humours, choler, melancholy, phlegm, and the red globules, or the sanguine portion, which was supposed not to be in our own power, but, to be dependent on the influences of the heavenly bodies,--and the countenances which are in our power really, though from flattery we bring them into a no less apparent dependence on the sovereign, than the former are in actual dependence on the constellations. I have sometimes thought that the word 'courtiers' was a misprint for 'countenances,' arising from an anticipation, by foreglance of the compositor's eye, of the word 'courtier' a few lines below. The written 'r' is easily and often confounded with the written 'n'. The compositor read the first syllable 'court', and--his eye at the same time catching the word 'courtier' lower down--he completed the word without reconsulting the copy. It is not unlikely that Shakspeare intended first to express, generally the same thought, which a little afterwards he repeats with a particular application to the persons meant;--a common usage of the pronominal 'our,' where the speaker does not really mean to include himself; and the word 'you' is an additional confirmation of the 'our' being used in this place, for men generally and indefinitely, just as 'you do not meet,' is the same as, 'one does not meet.' Act i. sc. 2. Imogen's speech:-- --My dearest husband, I something fear my father's wrath; but nothing (Always reserv'd my holy duty) what His rage can do on me. Place the emphasis on 'me;' for 'rage' is a mere repetition of 'wrath.' 'Cym'. O disloyal thing, That should'st repair my youth, thou heapest A year's age on me. How is it that the commentators take no notice of the un-Shakspearian defect in the metre of the second line, and what in Shakspeare is the same, in the harmony with the sense and feeling? Some word or words must have slipped out after 'youth,'--possibly 'and see':-- That should'st repair my youth!--and see, thou heap'st, &c. 'Ib.' sc. 4. Pisanio's speech:-- --For so long As he could make me with _this_ eye or ear Distinguish him from others, &c. But '_this_ eye,' in spite of the supposition of its being used [Greek (transliterated): deiktik_os], is very awkward. I should think that either 'or'--or 'the' was Shakspeare's word;-- As he could make me or with eye or ear. 'Ib.' sc. 7. Iachimo's speech:-- Hath nature given them eyes To see this vaulted arch, and the rich crop Of sea and land, which can distinguish 'twixt The fiery orbs above, and the twinn'd stones Upon the number'd beach. I would suggest 'cope' for 'crop.' As to 'twinn'd stones'--may it not be a bold _catachresis_ for muscles, cockles, and other empty shells with hinges, which are truly twinned? I would take Dr. Farmer's 'umber'd,' which I had proposed before I ever heard of its having been already offered by him: but I do not adopt his interpretation of the word, which I think is not derived from _umbra_, a shade, but from _umber_, a dingy yellow-brown soil, which most commonly forms the mass of the sludge on the sea shore, and on the banks of tide-rivers at low water. One other possible interpretation of this sentence has occurred to me, just barely worth mentioning;--that the 'twinn'd stones' are the _augrim_ stones upon the number'd beech, that is, the astronomical tables of beech-wood. Act v. sc. 5. 'Sooth'. When as a lion's whelp, &c. It is not easy to conjecture why Shakspeare should have introduced this ludicrous scroll, which answers no one purpose, either propulsive, or explicatory, unless as a joke on etymology. TITUS ANDRONICUS. Act I. sc. 1. Theobald's note: I never heard it so much as intimated, that he (Shakspeare) had turned his genius to stage-writing, before he associated with the players, and became one of their body. That Shakspeare never 'turned his genius to stage writing,' as Theobald most 'Theobaldice' phrases it, before he became an actor, is an assertion of about as much authority, as the precious story that he left Stratford for deerstealing, and that he lived by holding gentlemen's horses at the doors of the theatre, and other trash of that arch-gossip, old Aubrey. The metre is an argument against Titus Andronicus being Shakspeare's, worth a score such chronological surmises. Yet I incline to think that both in this play and in Jeronymo, Shakspeare wrote some passages, and that they are the earliest of his compositions. Act v. sc. 2. I think it not improbable that the lines from-- I am not mad; I know thee well enough;-- ... So thou destroy Rapine, and Murder there. were written by Shakspeare in his earliest period. But instead of the text-- Revenge, _which makes the foul offender quake. 'Tit.' Art thou_ Revenge? and art thou sent to me?-- the words in italics [between underscores] ought to be omitted. TROILUS AND CRESSIDA. Mr. Pope (after Dryden) informs us, that the story of Troilus and Cressida was originally the work of one Lollius, a Lombard: but Dryden goes yet further; he declares it to have been written in Latin verse, and that Chaucer translated it.--_Lollius was a historiographer of Urbino in Italy_. (Note in Stockdale's edition, 1807.) 'Lollius was a historiographer of Urbino in Italy.' So affirms the notary, to whom the Sieur Stockdale committed the _disfacimento_ of Ayscough's excellent edition of Shakspeare. Pity that the researchful notary has not either told us in what century, and of what history, he was a writer, or been simply content to depose, that Lollius, if a writer of that name existed at all, was a somewhat somewhere. The notary speaks of the _Troy Boke_ or Lydgate, printed in 1513. I have never seen it; but I deeply regret that Chalmers did not substitute the whole of Lydgate's works from the MSS. extant, for the almost worthless Gower. The Troilus and Cressida of Shakspeare can scarcely be classed with his dramas of Greek and Roman history; but it forms an intermediate link between the fictitious Greek and Roman histories, which we may call legendary dramas, and the proper ancient histories; that is, between the Pericles or Titus Andronicus, and the Coriolanus, or Julius Caesar. Cymbeline is a _congener_ with Pericles, and distinguished from Lear by not having any declared prominent object. But where shall we class the Timon of Athens? Perhaps immediately below Lear. It is a Lear of the satirical drama; a Lear of domestic or ordinary life;--a local eddy of passion on the high road of society, while all around is the week-day goings on of wind and weather; a Lear, therefore, without its soul-searching flashes, its ear-cleaving thunderclaps, its meteoric splendors,--without the contagion and the fearful sympathies of nature, the fates, the furies, the frenzied elements, dancing in and out, now breaking through, and scattering,--now hand in hand with,--the fierce or fantastic group of human passions, crimes, and anguishes, reeling on the unsteady ground, in a wild harmony to the shock and the swell of an earthquake. But my present subject was Troilus and Cressida; and I suppose that, scarcely knowing what to say of it, I by a cunning of instinct ran off to subjects on which I should find it difficult not to say too much, though certain after all that I should still leave the better part unsaid, and the gleaning for others richer than my own harvest. Indeed, there is no one of Shakspeare's plays harder to characterize. The name and the remembrances connected with it, prepare us for the representation of attachment no less faithful than fervent on the side of the youth, and of sudden and shameless inconstancy on the part of the lady. And this is, indeed, as the gold thread on which the scenes are strung, though often kept out of sight and out of mind by gems of greater value than itself. But as Shakspeare calls forth nothing from the mausoleum of history, or the catacombs of tradition, without giving, or eliciting, some permanent and general interest, and brings forward no subject which he does not moralize or intellectualize,--so here he has drawn in Cressida the portrait of a vehement passion, that, having its true origin and proper cause in warmth of temperament, fastens on, rather than fixes to, some one object by liking and temporary preference. There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out At every joint and motive of her body. This Shakspeare has contrasted with the profound affection represented in Troilus, and alone worthy the name of love;--affection, passionate indeed,--swoln with the confluence of youthful instincts and youthful fancy, and growing in the radiance of hope newly risen, in short enlarged by the collective sympathies of nature;--but still having a depth of calmer element in a will stronger than desire, more entire than choice, and which gives permanence to its own act by converting it into faith and duty. Hence with excellent judgment, and with an excellence higher than mere judgment can give, at the close of the play, when Cressida has sunk into infamy below retrieval and beneath hope, the same will, which had been the substance and the basis of his love, while the restless pleasures and passionate longings, like sea-waves, had tossed but on its surface,--this same moral energy is represented as snatching him aloof from all neighbourhood with her dishonour, from all lingering fondness and languishing regrets, whilst it rushes with him into other and nobler duties, and deepens the channel, which his heroic brother's death had left empty for its collected flood. Yet another secondary and subordinate purpose Shakspeare has inwoven with his delineation of these two characters,--that of opposing the inferior civilization, but purer morals, of the Trojans to the refinements, deep policy, but duplicity and sensual corruptions, of the Greeks. To all this, however, so little comparative projection is given,--nay, the masterly group of Agamemnon, Nestor, and Ulysses, and, still more in advance, that of Achilles, Ajax, and Thersites, so manifestly occupy the foreground, that the subservience and vassalage of strength and animal courage to intellect and policy seems to be the lesson most often in our poet's view, and which he has taken little pains to connect with the former more interesting moral impersonated in the titular hero and heroine of the drama. But I am half inclined to believe, that Shakspeare's main object, or shall I rather say, his ruling impulse, was to translate the poetic heroes of paganism into the not less rude, but more intellectually vigorous, and more _featurely_, warriors of Christian chivalry,--and to substantiate the distinct and graceful profiles or outlines of the Homeric epic into the flesh and blood of the romantic drama,--in short, to give a grand history-piece in the robust style of Albert Durer. The character of Thersites, in particular, well deserves a more careful examination, as the Caliban of demagogic life;--the admirable portrait of intellectual power deserted by all grace, all moral principle, all not momentary impulse;--just wise enough to detect the weak head, and fool enough to provoke the armed fist of his betters;--one whom malcontent Achilles can inveigle from malcontent Ajax, under the one condition, that he shall be called on to do nothing but abuse and slander, and that he shall be allowed to abuse as much and as purulently as he likes, that is, as he can;--in short, a mule,--quarrelsome by the original discord of his nature,--a slave by tenure of his own baseness,--made to bray and be brayed at, to despise and be despicable. 'Aye, Sir, but say what you will, he is a very clever fellow, though the best friends will fall out. There was a time when Ajax thought he deserved to have a statue of gold erected to him, and handsome Achilles, at the head of the Myrmidons, gave no little credit to his _friend Thersites_!' Act iv. sc. 5. Speech of Ulysses:-- O, these encounterers, so glib of tongue, That give a _coasting_ welcome ere it comes-- Should it be 'accosting?' 'Accost her, knight, accost!' in the Twelfth Night. Yet there sounds a something so Shakspearian in the phrase--'give a coasting welcome,' ('coasting' being taken as the epithet and adjective of 'welcome,') that had the following words been, 'ere _they land_,' instead of 'ere it comes,' I should have preferred the interpretation. The sense now is, 'that give welcome to a salute ere it comes.' CORIOLANUS. This play illustrates the wonderfully philosophic impartiality of Shakspeare's politics. His own country's history furnished him with no matter, but what was too recent to be devoted to patriotism. Besides, he knew that the instruction of ancient history would seem more dispassionate. In Coriolanus and Julius Caesar, you see Shakspeare's good-natured laugh at mobs. Compare this with Sir Thomas Brown's aristocracy of spirit. Act i. sc. 1. Coriolanus' speech:-- He that depends Upon your favours, swims with fins of lead, And hews down oaks with rushes. Hang ye! Trust ye? I suspect that Shakspeare wrote it transposed; Trust ye? Hang ye! Ib. sc. 10. Speech of Aufidius:-- Mine emulation Hath not that honor in't, it had; for where I thought to crush him in an equal force, True sword to sword; I'll potch at him some way, Or wrath, or craft may get him.--My valor (poison'd With only suffering stain by him) for him Shall fly out of itself: not sleep, nor sanctuary, Being naked, sick, nor fane, nor capitol, The prayers of priests, nor times of sacrifices, Embankments all of fury, shall lift up Their rotten privilege and custom 'gainst My hate to Marcius. I have such deep faith in Shakspeare's heart-lore, that I take for granted that this is in nature, and not as a mere anomaly; although I cannot in myself discover any germ of possible feeling, which could wax and unfold itself into such sentiment as this. However, I perceive that in this speech is meant to be contained a prevention of shock at the after-change in Aufidius' character. Act ii. sc, 1. Speech of Menenius:-- The most sovereign prescription in _Galen_, &c. Was it without, or in contempt of, historical information that Shakspeare made the contemporaries of Coriolanus quote Cato and Galen? I cannot decide to my own satisfaction. Ib. sc. 3. Speech of Coriolanus:-- Why in this wolvish gown should I stand here-- That the gown of the candidate was of whitened wool, we know. Does 'wolvish' or 'woolvish' mean 'made of wool?' If it means 'wolfish,' what is the sense? Act iv. sc. 7. Speech of Aufidius:-- All places yield to him ere he sits down, &c. I have always thought this in itself so beautiful speech, the least explicable from the mood and full intention of the speaker, of any in the whole works of Shakspeare. I cherish the hope that I am mistaken, and that, becoming wiser, I shall discover some profound excellence in that, in which I now appear to detect an imperfection. JULIUS CÆSAR. Act I. sc. 1. 'Mar.' What meanest _thou_ by that? Mend me, thou saucy fellow! The speeches of Flavius and Marullus are in blank verse. Wherever regular metre can be rendered truly imitative of character, passion, or personal rank, Shakspeare seldom, if ever, neglects it. Hence this line should be read:-- What mean'st by that? mend me, thou saucy fellow! I say regular metre: for even the prose has in the highest and lowest dramatic personage, a Cobbler or a Hamlet, a rhythm so felicitous and so severally appropriate, as to be a virtual metre. Ib. sc. 2. 'Bru.' A soothsayer bids you beware the Ides of March. If my ear does not deceive me, the metre of this line was meant to express that sort of mild philosophic contempt, characterizing Brutus even in his first casual speech. The line is a trimeter,--each _dipodia_ containing two accented and two unaccented syllables, but variously arranged, as thus;-- ^ -- -- ^ | -- ^ ^ -- | ^ -- ^ -- A soothsayer | bids you beware | the Ides of March. Ib. Speech of Brutus: Set honor in one eye, and death i' the other, And I will look on _both_ indifferently. Warburton would read 'death' for 'both;' but I prefer the old text. There are here three things, the public good, the individual Brutus' honor, and his death. The latter two so balanced each other, that he could decide for the first by equipoise; nay--the thought growing--that honor had more weight than death. That Cassius understood it as Warburton, is the beauty of Cassius as contrasted with Brutus. Ib. Caesar's speech:-- He loves no plays, As thou dost, Antony; he hears no music, &c. This is not a trivial observation, nor does our poet mean barely by it, that Cassius was not a merry, sprightly man; but that he had not a due temperament of harmony in his disposition. (Theobald's Note). O Theobald! what a commentator wast thou, when thou would'st affect to understand Shakspeare, instead of contenting thyself with collating the text! The meaning here is too deep for a line ten-fold the length of thine to fathom. Ib. sc. 3. Caesar's speech:-- Be _factious_ for redress of all these griefs; And I will set this foot of mine as far, As who goes farthest. I understand it thus: 'You have spoken as a conspirator; be so in _fact_, and I will join you. Act on your principles, and realize them in a fact.' Act ii. sc. 1. Speech of Brutus:-- It must be by his death; and, for my part, I know no personal cause to spurn at him, But for the general. He would be crown'd:-- How that might change his nature, there's the question. --And, to speak truth of Cæsar, I have not known when his affections sway'd More than his reason.--So Cæsar may; Then, lest he may, prevent. This speech is singular;--at least, I do not at present see into Shakspeare's motive, his _rationale_, or in what point of view he meant Brutus' character to appear. For surely--(this I mean is what I say to myself, with my present _quantum_ of insight, only modified by my experience in how many instances I have ripened into a perception of beauties, where I had before descried faults;) surely, nothing can seem more discordant with our historical preconceptions of Brutus, or more lowering to the intellect of the Stoico-Platonic tyrannicide, than the tenets here attributed to him--to him, the stern Roman republican; namely,--that he would have no objection to a king, or to Cæsar, a monarch in Rome, would Cæsar but be as good a monarch as he now seems disposed to be! How, too, could Brutus say that he found no personal cause--none in Cæsar's past conduct as a man? Had he not passed the Rubicon? Had he not entered Rome as a conqueror? Had he not placed his Gauls in the Senate?--Shakspeare, it may be said, has not brought these things forwards.--True;--and this is just the ground of my perplexity. What character did Shakspeare mean his Brutus to be? Ib. Speech of Brutus:-- For if thou _path_, thy native semblance on-- Surely, there need be no scruple in treating this 'path' as a mere misprint or mis-script for 'put.' In what place does Shakspeare,--where does any other writer of the same age--use 'path' as a verb for 'walk?' Ib. sc. 2. Caesar's speech:-- She dreamt last night, she saw my _statue_-- No doubt, it should be _statua_, as in the same age, they more often pronounced 'heroes' as a trisyllable than dissyllable. A modern tragic poet would have written,-- Last night she dreamt, that she my statue saw-- But Shakspeare never avails himself of the supposed license of transposition, merely for the metre. There is always some logic either of thought or passion to justify it. Act iii. sc. 1. Antony's speech:-- Pardon me, Julius--here wast thou bay'd, brave hart; Here didst thou fall, and here thy hunters stand Sign'd in thy spoil, and crimson'd in thy death. _O world! thou wast the forest to this hart, And this, indeed, O world! the heart of thee._ I doubt the genuineness of the last two lines;--not because they are vile; but first, on account of the rhythm, which is not Shakspearian, but just the very tune of some old play, from which the actor might have interpolated them;--and secondly, because they interrupt, not only the sense and connection, but likewise the flow both of the passion, and, (what is with me still more decisive) of the Shakspearian link of association. As with many another parenthesis or gloss slipt into the text, we have only to read the passage without it, to see that it never was in it. I venture to say there is no instance in Shakspeare fairly like this. Conceits he has; but they not only rise out of some word in the lines before, but also lead to the thought in the lines following. Here the conceit is a mere alien: Antony forgets an image, when he is even touching it, and then recollects it, when the thought last in his mind must have led him away from it. Act iv. sc. 3. Speech of Brutus:-- ----What, shall one of us, That struck the foremost man of all this world, But for _supporting robbers_. This seemingly strange assertion of Brutus is unhappily verified in the present day. What is an immense army, in which the lust of plunder has quenched all the duties of the citizen, other than a horde of robbers, or differenced only as fiends are from ordinarily reprobate men? Caesar supported, and was supported by, such as these;--and even so Buonaparte in our days. I know no part of Shakspeare that more impresses on me the belief of his genius being superhuman, than this scene between Brutus and Cassius. In the Gnostic heresy, it might have been credited with less absurdity than most of their dogmas, that the Supreme had employed him to create, previously to his function of representing, characters. ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA. Shakspeare can be complimented only by comparison with himself: all other eulogies are either heterogeneous, as when they are in reference to Spenser or Milton; or they are flat truisms, as when he is gravely preferred to Corneille, Racine, or even his own immediate successors, Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger and the rest. The highest praise, or rather form of praise, of this play, which I can offer in my own mind, is the doubt which the perusal always occasions in me, whether the Antony and Cleopatra is not, in all exhibitions of a giant power in its strength and vigour of maturity, a formidable rival of Macbeth, Lear, Hamlet, and Othello. 'Feliciter audax' is the motto for its style comparatively with that of Shakspeare's other works, even as it is the general motto of all his works compared with those of other poets. Be it remembered, too, that this happy valiancy of style is but the representative and result of all the material excellencies so expressed. This play should be perused in mental contrast with Romeo and Juliet;--as the love of passion and appetite opposed to the love of affection and instinct. But the art displayed in the character of Cleopatra is profound; in this, especially, that the sense of criminality in her passion is lessened by our insight into its depth and energy, at the very moment that we cannot but perceive that the passion itself springs out of the habitual craving of a licentious nature, and that it is supported and reinforced by voluntary stimulus and sought-for associations, instead of blossoming out of spontaneous emotion. Of all Shakspeare's historical plays, Antony and Cleopatra is by far the most wonderful. There is not one in which he has followed history so minutely, and yet there are few in which he impresses the notion of angelic strength so much;--perhaps none in which he impresses it more strongly. This is greatly owing to the manner in which the fiery force is sustained throughout, and to the numerous momentary flashes of nature counteracting the historic abstraction. As a wonderful specimen of the way in which Shakspeare lives up to the very end of this play, read the last part of the concluding scene. And if you would feel the judgment as well as the genius of Shakspeare in your heart's core, compare this astonishing drama with Dryden's All For Love. Act i. sc. 1. Philo's speech:-- His captain's heart, Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst The buckles on his breast, _reneges_ all temper-- It should be 'reneagues,' or 'reniegues,' as 'fatigues,' &c. 'Ib.' Take but good note, and you shall see in him The triple pillar of the world transform'd Into a strumpet's _fool_. Warburton's conjecture of 'stool' is ingenious, and would be a probable reading, if the scene opening had discovered Antony with Cleopatra on his lap. But, represented as he is walking and jesting with her, 'fool' must be the word. Warburton's objection is shallow, and implies that he confounded the dramatic with the epic style. The 'pillar' of a state is so common a metaphor as to have lost the image in the thing meant to be imaged. Ib. sc. 2. Much is breeding; Which, like the courser's hair, hath yet but life, And not a serpent's poison. This is so far true to appearance, that a horse-hair, 'laid,' as Hollinshed says, 'in a pail of water' will become the supporter of seemingly one worm, though probably of an immense number of small slimy water-lice. The hair will twirl round a finger, and sensibly compress it. It is a common experiment with school boys in Cumberland and Westmorland. Act ii. sc. 2. Speech of Enobarbus:-- Her gentlewomen, like the Nereids, So many _mermaids_, tended her i' th' eyes, And made their bends adornings. At the helm A seeming mermaid steers. I have the greatest difficulty in believing that Shakspeare wrote the first 'mermaids.' He never, I think, would have so weakened by useless anticipation the fine image immediately following. The epithet 'seeming' becomes so extremely improper after the whole number had been positively called 'so many mermaids.' TIMON OF ATHENS, Act I. sc. 1. 'Tim'. _The man is honest. 'Old Ath.' Therefore he will be_, Timon. His honesty rewards him in itself.-- Warburton's comment--'If the man be honest, for that reason he will be so in this, and not endeavour at the injustice of gaining my daughter without my consent'--is, like almost all his comments, ingenious in blunder: he can never see any other writer's thoughts for the mist-working swarm of his own. The meaning of the first line the poet himself explains, or rather unfolds, in the second. 'The man is honest!'--'True;--and for that very cause, and with no additional or extrinsic motive, he will be so. No man can be justly called honest, who is not so for honesty's sake, itself including its own reward.' Note, that 'honesty' in Shakspeare's age retained much of its old dignity, and that contradistinction of the 'honestum' from the 'utile', in which its very essence and definition consist. If it be 'honestum', it cannot depend on the 'utile'. 'Ib.' Speech of Apemantus, printed as prose in Theobald's edition:-- So, so! aches contract, and starve your supple joints! I may remark here the fineness of Shakspeare's sense of musical period, which would almost by itself have suggested (if the hundred positive proofs had not been extant,) that the word 'aches' was then 'ad libitum', a dissyllable--'aitches'. For read it, 'aches,' in this sentence, and I would challenge you to find any period in Shakspeare's writings with the same musical or, rather dissonant, notation. Try the one, and then the other, by your ear, reading the sentence aloud, first with the word as a dissyllable and then as a monosyllable, and you will feel what I mean. [1] Ib. sc. 2. Cupid's speech: Warburton's correction of-- There taste, touch, all pleas'd from thy table rise-- into Th' ear, taste, touch, smell, etc. This is indeed an excellent emendation. Act ii. sc. 1. Senator's speech:-- --nor then silenc'd with 'Commend me to your master'--and the cap Plays in the right hand, thus:-- Either, methinks, 'plays' should be 'play'd,' or 'and' should be changed to 'while.' I can certainly understand it as a parenthesis, an interadditive of scorn; but it does not sound to my ear as in Shakspeare's manner. Ib. sc. 2. Timon's speech: (Theobald.) And that unaptness made _you_ minister, Thus to excuse yourself. Read 'your';--at least I cannot otherwise understand the line. You made my chance indisposition and occasional unaptness your minister--that is, the ground on which you now excuse yourself. Or, perhaps, no correction is necessary, if we construe 'made you' as 'did you make;' 'and that unaptness did you make help you thus to excuse yourself.' But the former seems more in Shakspeare's manner, and is less liable to be misunderstood. [2] Act iii. sc. 3. Servant's speech:-- How fairly this lord strives to appear foul!--takes virtuous copies to be wicked; _like those that under hot, ardent, zeal would set whole realms on fire. Of such a nature is his politic love._ This latter clause I grievously suspect to have been an addition of the players, which had hit, and, being constantly applauded, procured a settled occupancy in the prompter's copy. Not that Shakspeare does not elsewhere sneer at the Puritans; but here it is introduced so _nolenter volenter_ (excuse the phrase) by the head and shoulders!--and is besides so much more likely to have been conceived in the age of Charles I. Act iv. sc. 2. Timon's speech:-- Raise me this beggar, and _deny't_ that lord.-- Warburton reads 'denude.' I cannot see the necessity of this alteration. The editors and commentators are, all of them, ready enough to cry out against Shakspeare's laxities and licenses of style, forgetting that he is not merely a poet, but a dramatic poet; that, when the head and the heart are swelling with fullness, a man does not ask himself whether he has grammatically arranged, but only whether (the context taken in) he has conveyed, his meaning. 'Deny' is here clearly equal to 'withhold;' and the 'it,' quite in the genius of vehement conversation, which a syntaxist explains by ellipses and _subauditurs_ in a Greek or Latin classic, yet triumphs over as ignorances in a contemporary, refers to accidental and artificial rank or elevation, implied in the verb 'raise.' Besides, does the word 'denude' occur in any writer before, or of, Shakspeare's age? [Footnote 1: It is, of course, a verse,-- Achès contract, and starve your supple joints,-- and is so printed in all later editions. But Mr. C. was reading it in prose in Theobald; and it is curious to see how his ear detected the rhythmical necessity for pronouncing 'aches' as a dissyllable, although the metrical necessity seems for the moment to have escaped him. Ed.] [Footnote 2: 'Your' is the received reading now. Ed.] ROMEO AND JULIET. I have previously had occasion to speak at large on the subject of the three unities of time, place, and action, as applied to the drama in the abstract, and to the particular stage for which Shakspeare wrote, as far as he can be said to have written for any stage but that of the universal mind. I hope I have in some measure succeeded in demonstrating that the former two, instead of being rules, were mere inconveniences attached to the local peculiarities of the Athenian drama; that the last alone deserved the name of a principle, and that in the preservation of this unity Shakspeare stood preeminent. Yet, instead of unity of action, I should greatly prefer the more appropriate, though scholastic and uncouth, words homogeneity, proportionateness, and totality of interest,--expressions, which involve the distinction, or rather the essential difference, betwixt the shaping skill of mechanical talent, and the creative, productive, life-power of inspired genius. In the former each part is separately conceived, and then by a succeeding act put together;--not as watches are made for wholesale,--(for there each part supposes a pre-conception of the whole in some mind)--but more like pictures on a motley screen. Whence arises the harmony that strikes us in the wildest natural landscapes,--in the relative shapes of rocks, the harmony of colours in the heaths, ferns, and lichens, the leaves of the beech and the oak, the stems and rich brown branches of the birch and other mountain trees, varying from verging autumn to returning spring,--compared with the visual effect from the greater number of artificial plantations?--From this, that the natural landscape is effected, as it were, by a single energy modified 'ab intra' in each component part. And as this is the particular excellence of the Shakspearian drama generally, so is it especially characteristic of the Romeo and Juliet. The groundwork of the tale is altogether in family life, and the events of the play have their first origin in family feuds. Filmy as are the eyes of party-spirit, at once dim and truculent, still there is commonly some real or supposed object in view, or principle to be maintained; and though but the twisted wires on the plate of rosin in the preparation for electrical pictures, it is still a guide in some degree, an assimilation to an outline. But in family quarrels, which have proved scarcely less injurious to states, wilfulness, and precipitancy, and passion from mere habit and custom, can alone be expected. With his accustomed judgment, Shakspeare has begun by placing before us a lively picture of all the impulses of the play; and, as nature ever presents two sides, one for Heraclitus, and one for Democritus, he has, by way of prelude, shown the laughable absurdity of the evil by the contagion of it reaching the servants, who have so little to do with it, but who are under the necessity of letting the superfluity of sensoreal power fly off through the escape-valve of wit-combats, and of quarrelling with weapons of sharper edge, all in humble imitation of their masters. Yet there is a sort of unhired fidelity, an 'ourishness' about all this that makes it rest pleasant on one's feelings. All the first scene, down to the conclusion of the Prince's speech, is a motley dance of all ranks and ages to one tune, as if the horn of Huon had been playing behind the scenes. Benvolio's speech-- Madam, an hour before the worshipp'd sun Peer'd forth the golden window of the east-- and, far more strikingly, the following speech of old Montague-- Many a morning hath he there been seen With tears augmenting the fresh morning dew-- prove that Shakspeare meant the Romeo and Juliet to approach to a poem, which, and indeed its early date, may be also inferred from the multitude of rhyming couplets throughout. And if we are right, from the internal evidence, in pronouncing this one of Shakspeare's early dramas, it affords a strong instance of the fineness of his insight into the nature of the passions, that Romeo is introduced already love-bewildered. The necessity of loving creates an object for itself in man and woman; and yet there is a difference in this respect between the sexes, though only to be known by a perception of it. It would have displeased us if Juliet had been represented as already in love, or as fancying herself so;--but no one, I believe, ever experiences any shock at Romeo's forgetting his Rosaline, who had been a mere name for the yearning of his youthful imagination, and rushing into his passion for Juliet. Rosaline was a mere creation of his fancy; and we should remark the boastful positiveness of Romeo in a love of his own making, which is never shown where love is really near the heart. When the devout religion of mine eye Maintains such falsehood, then turn tears to fires! ... One fairer than my love! the all-seeing sun Ne'er saw her match, since first the world begun. The character of the Nurse is the nearest of any thing in Shakspeare to a direct borrowing from mere observation; and the reason is, that as in infancy and childhood the individual in nature is a representative of a class, just as in describing one larch tree, you generalize a grove of them,--so it is nearly as much so in old age. The generalization is done to the poet's hand. Here you have the garrulity of age strengthened by the feelings of a long-trusted servant, whose sympathy with the mother's affections gives her privileges and rank in the household; and observe the mode of connection by accidents of time and place, and the childlike fondness of repetition in a second childhood, and also that happy, humble, ducking under, yet constant resurgence against, the check of her superiors!-- Yes, madam!--Yet I cannot choose but laugh, &c. In the fourth scene we have Mercutio introduced to us. O! how shall I describe that exquisite ebullience and overflow of youthful life, wafted on over the laughing waves of pleasure and prosperity, as a wanton beauty that distorts the face on which she knows her lover is gazing enraptured, and wrinkles her forehead in the triumph of its smoothness! Wit ever wakeful, fancy busy and procreative as an insect, courage, an easy mind that, without cares of its own, is at once disposed to laugh away those of others, and yet to be interested in them,--these and all congenial qualities, melting into the common 'copula' of them all, the man of rank and the gentleman, with all its excellencies and all its weaknesses, constitute the character of Mercutio! Act i. sc. 5. 'Tyb'. It fits when such a villain is a guest; I'll not endure him. 'Cap'. He shall be endur'd. What, goodman boy!--I say, he shall:--Go to;-- Am I the master here, or you?--Go to. You'll not endure him!--God shall mend my soul-- You'll make a mutiny among my guests! You will set cock-a-hoop! you'll be the man! 'Tyb'. Why, uncle, 'tis a shame. 'Cap'. Go to, go to, You are a saucy boy! &c.-- How admirable is the old man's impetuosity at once contrasting, yet harmonized, with young Tybalt's quarrelsome violence! But it would be endless to repeat observations of this sort. Every leaf is different on an oak tree; but still we can only say--our tongues defrauding our eyes--'This is another oak-leaf!' Act ii. sc. 2. The garden scene: Take notice in this enchanting scene of the contrast of Romeo's love with his former fancy; and weigh the skill shown in justifying him from his inconstancy by making us feel the difference of his passion. Yet this, too, is a love in, although not merely of, the imagination. Ib. 'Jul'. Well, do not swear; although I joy in thee, I have no joy in this contract to-night: It is too rash, too unadvis'd, too sudden, &c. With love, pure love, there is always an anxiety for the safety of the object, a disinterestedness, by which it is distinguished from the counterfeits of its name. Compare this scene with Act iii. sc. 1. of the Tempest. I do not know a more wonderful instance of Shakspeare's mastery in playing a distinctly rememberable variety on the same remembered air, than in the transporting love-confessions of Romeo and Juliet and Ferdinand and Miranda. There seems more passion in the one, and more dignity in the other; yet you feel that the sweet girlish lingering and busy movement of Juliet, and the calmer and more maidenly fondness of Miranda, might easily pass into each other. 'Ib.' sc. 3. The Friar's speech:-- The reverend character of the Friar, like all Shakspeare's representations of the great professions, is very delightful and tranquillizing, yet it is no digression, but immediately necessary to the carrying on of the plot. 'Ib.' sc. 4. 'Rom.' Good morrow to you both. What counterfeit did I give you? &c.-- Compare again, Romeo's half-exerted, and half real, ease of mind with his first manner when in love with Rosaline! His will had come to the clenching point. 'Ib.' sc. 6. 'Rom.' Do thou but close our hands with holy words, Then love-devouring death do what he dare, It is enough I may but call her mine. The precipitancy, which is the character of the play, is well marked in this short scene of waiting for Juliet's arrival. Act iii. sc. 1. 'Mer.' No, 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door; but 'tis enough: 'twill serve: ask for me to-morrow, and you shall find me a grave man, &c. How fine an effect the wit and raillery habitual to Mercutio, even struggling with his pain, give to Romeo's following speech, and at the same time so completely justifying his passionate revenge on Tybalt! 'Ib.' Benvolio's speech: But that he tilts With piercing steel at bold Mercutio's breast.-- This small portion of untruth in Benvolio's narrative is finely conceived. 'Ib.' sc. 2. Juliet's speech: For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night Whiter than new snow on a raven's back.-- Indeed the whole of this speech is imagination strained to the highest; and observe the blessed effect on the purity of the mind. What would Dryden have made of it?-- 'Ib.' 'Nurse'. Shame come to Romeo. 'Jul'. Blister'd be thy tongue For such a wish! Note the Nurse's mistake of the mind's audible struggles with itself for its decision 'in toto'. 'Ib.' sc. 3. Romeo's speech:-- 'Tis torture, and not mercy: heaven's here, Where Juliet lives, &c. All deep passions are a sort of atheists, that believe no future. 'Ib.' sc. 5. 'Cap'. Soft, take me with you, take me with you, wife-- How! will she none? &c. A noble scene! Don't I see it with my own eyes?--Yes! but not with Juliet's. And observe in Capulet's last speech in this scene his mistake, as if love's causes were capable of being generalized. Act iv. sc. 3. Juliet's speech:-- O, look! methinks I see my cousin's ghost Seeking out Romeo, that did spit his body Upon a rapier's point:--Stay, Tybalt, stay!-- Romeo, I come! this do I drink to thee. Shakspeare provides for the finest decencies. It would have been too bold a thing for a girl of fifteen;--but she swallows the draught in a fit of fright. Ib. sc. 5. As the audience know that Juliet is not dead, this scene is, perhaps, excusable. But it is a strong warning to minor dramatists not to introduce at one time many separate characters agitated by one and the same circumstance. It is difficult to understand what effect, whether that of pity or of laughter, Shakspeare meant to produce;--the occasion and the characteristic speeches are so little in harmony! For example, what the Nurse says is excellently suited to the Nurse's character, but grotesquely unsuited to the occasion. Act. v. sc. 1. Romeo's speech:-- O mischief! thou are swift To enter in the thoughts of desperate men! I do remember an apothecary, &c. This famous passage is so beautiful as to be self-justified; yet, in addition, what a fine preparation it is for the tomb scene! 'Ib.' sc. 3. Romeo's speech:-- Good gentle youth, tempt not a desperate man, Fly hence and leave me. The gentleness of Romeo was shown before, as softened by love; and now it is doubled by love and sorrow and awe of the place where he is. 'Ib.' Romeo's speech:-- How oft when men are at the point of death Have they been merry! which their keepers call A lightning before death. O, how may I Call this a lightning?--O, my love, my wife! &c. Here, here, is the master example how beauty can at once increase and modify passion! 'Ib.' Last scene. How beautiful is the close! The spring and the winter meet;--winter assumes the character of spring, and spring the sadness of winter. SHAKSPEARE'S ENGLISH HISTORICAL PLAYS. The first form of poetry is the epic, the essence of which may be stated as the successive in events and characters. This must be distinguished from narration, in which there must always be a narrator, from whom the objects represented receive a coloring and a manner;--whereas in the epic, as in the so called poems of Homer, the whole is completely objective, and the representation is a pure reflection. The next form into which poetry passed was the dramatic;--both forms having a common basis with a certain difference, and that difference not consisting in the dialogue alone. Both are founded on the relation of providence to the human will; and this relation is the universal element, expressed under different points of view according to the difference of religions, and the moral and intellectual cultivation of different nations. In the epic poem fate is represented as overruling the will, and making it instrumental to the accomplishment of its designs:-- [Greek (transliterated):--------Dios de teleieto boulae.] In the drama, the will is exhibited as struggling with fate, a great and beautiful instance and illustration of which is the Prometheus of Æschylus; and the deepest effect is produced, when the fate is represented as a higher and intelligent will, and the opposition of the individual as springing from a defect. In order that a drama may be properly historical, it is necessary that it should be the history of the people to whom it is addressed. In the composition, care must be taken that there appear no dramatic improbability, as the reality is taken for granted. It must, likewise, be poetical;--that only, I mean, must be taken which is the permanent in our nature, which is common, and therefore deeply interesting to all ages. The events themselves are immaterial, otherwise than as the clothing and manifestation of the spirit that is working within. In this mode, the unity resulting from succession is destroyed, but is supplied by a unity of a higher order, which connects the events by reference to the workers, gives a reason for them in the motives, and presents men in their causative character. It takes, therefore, that part of real history which is the least known, and infuses a principle of life and organization into the naked facts, and makes them all the framework of an animated whole. In my happier days, while I had yet hope and onward-looking thoughts, I planned an historical drama of King Stephen, in the manner of Shakspeare. Indeed it would be desirable that some man of dramatic genius should dramatize all those omitted by Shakspeare, as far down as Henry VII. Perkin Warbeck would make a most interesting drama. A few scenes of Marlow's Edward II. might be preserved. After Henry VIII., the events are too well and distinctly known, to be, without plump inverisimilitude, crowded together in one night's exhibition. Whereas, the history of our ancient kings--the events of their reigns, I mean,--are like stars in the sky;--whatever the real interspaces may be, and however great, they seem close to each other. The stars--the events--strike us and remain in our eye, little modified by the difference of dates. An historic drama is, therefore, a collection of events borrowed from history, but connected together in respect of cause and time, poetically and by dramatic fiction. It would be a fine national custom to act such a series of dramatic histories in orderly succession, in the yearly Christmas holidays, and could not but tend to counteract that mock cosmopolitism, which under a positive term really implies nothing but a negation of, or indifference to, the particular love of our country. By its nationality must every nation retain its independence;--I mean a nationality 'quoad' the nation. Better thus;--nationality in each individual, 'quoad' his country, is equal to the sense of individuality 'quoad' himself; but himself as subsensuous, and central. Patriotism is equal to the sense of individuality reflected from every other individual. There may come a higher virtue in both--just cosmopolitism. But this latter is not possible but by antecedence of the former. Shakspeare has included the most important part of nine reigns in his historical dramas--namely--King John, Richard II.--Henry IV. (two)--Henry V.--Henry VI. (three) including Edward V. and Henry VIII., in all ten plays. There remain, therefore, to be done, with exception of a single scene or two that should be adopted from Marlow--eleven reigns--of which the first two appear the only unpromising subjects;--and those two dramas must be formed wholly or mainly of invented private stories, which, however, could not have happened except in consequence of the events and measures of these reigns, and which should furnish opportunity both of exhibiting the manners and oppressions of the times, and of narrating dramatically the great events;--if possible--the death of the two sovereigns, at least of the latter, should be made to have some influence on the finale of the story. All the rest are glorious subjects; especially Henry 1st. (being the struggle between the men of arms and of letters, in the persons of Henry and Becket,) Stephen, Richard I., Edward II., and Henry VII. KING JOHN. Act. I. sc. 1. 'Bast'. James Gurney, wilt thou give us leave awhile? 'Gur'. Good leave, good Philip. 'Bast'. Philip? _sparrow_! James, &c. Theobald adopts Warburton's conjecture of '_spare me_.' O true Warburton! and the 'sancta simplicitas' of honest dull Theobald's faith in him! Nothing can be more lively or characteristic than 'Philip! Sparrow!' Had Warburton read old Skelton's 'Philip Sparrow,' an exquisite and original poem, and, no doubt, popular in Shakspeare's time, even Warburton would scarcely have made so deep a plunge into the _bathetic_ as to have deathified 'sparrow' into 'spare me!' Act iii. sc. 2. Speech of Faulconbridge:-- Now, by my life, this day grows wondrous hot; Some _airy_ devil hovers in the sky, &c. Theobald adopts Warburton's conjecture of 'fiery.' I prefer the old text; the word 'devil' implies 'fiery.' You need only read the line, laying a full and strong emphasis on 'devil,' to perceive the uselessness and tastelessness of Warburton's alteration. RICHARD II. I have stated that the transitional link between the epic poem and the drama is the historic drama; that in the epic poem a pre-announced fate gradually adjusts and employs the will and the events as its instruments, whilst the drama, on the other hand, places fate and will in opposition to each other, and is then most perfect, when the victory of fate is obtained in consequence of imperfections in the opposing will, so as to leave a final impression that the fate itself is but a higher and a more intelligent will. From the length of the speeches, and the circumstance that, with one exception, the events are all historical, and presented in their results, not produced by acts seen by, or taking place before, the audience, this tragedy is ill suited to our present large theatres. But in itself, and for the closet, I feel no hesitation in placing it as the first and most admirable of all Shakspeare's purely historical plays. For the two parts of Henry IV. form a species of themselves, which may be named the mixed drama. The distinction does not depend on the mere quantity of historical events in the play compared with the fictions; for there is as much history in Macbeth as in Richard, but in the relation of the history to the plot. In the purely historical plays, the history forms the plot; in the mixed, it directs it; in the rest, as Macbeth, Hamlet, Cymbeline, Lear, it subserves it. But, however unsuited to the stage this drama may be, God forbid that even there it should fall dead on the hearts of Jacobinized Englishmen! Then, indeed, we might say--'præteriit gloria mundi'! For the spirit of patriotic reminiscence is the all-permeating soul of this noble work. It is, perhaps, the most purely historical of Shakspeare's dramas. There are not in it, as in the others, characters introduced merely for the purpose of giving a greater individuality and realness, as in the comic parts of Henry IV., by presenting, as it were, our very selves. Shakspeare avails himself of every opportunity to effect the great object of the historic drama, that, namely, of familiarizing the people to the great names of their country, and thereby of exciting a steady patriotism, a love of just liberty, and a respect for all those fundamental institutions of social life, which bind men together:-- This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise; This fortress, built by nature for herself, Against infection, and the hand of war; This happy breed of men, this little world; This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a home, Against the envy of less happier lands; This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings, Fear'd by their breed, and famous by their birth, &c. Add the famous passage in King John:-- This England never did, nor ever shall, Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror, But when it first did help to wound itself. Now these her princes are come home again, Come the three corners of the world in arms, And we shall shock them: nought shall make us rue, If England to itself do rest but true. And it certainly seems that Shakspeare's historic dramas produced a very deep effect on the minds of the English people, and in earlier times they were familiar even to the least informed of all ranks, according to the relation of Bishop Corbett. Marlborough, we know, was not ashamed to confess that his principal acquaintance with English history was derived from them; and I believe that a large part of the information as to our old names and achievements even now abroad is due, directly or indirectly, to Shakspeare. Admirable is the judgment with which Shakspeare always in the first scenes prepares, yet how naturally, and with what concealment of art, for the catastrophe. Observe how he here presents the germ of all the after events in Richard's insincerity, partiality, arbitrariness, and favoritism, and in the proud, tempestuous, temperament of his barons. In the very beginning, also, is displayed that feature in Richard's character, which is never forgotten throughout the play--his attention to decorum, and high feeling of the kingly dignity. These anticipations show with what judgment Shakspeare wrote, and illustrate his care to connect the past and future, and unify them with the present by forecast and reminiscence. It is interesting to a critical ear to compare the six opening lines of the play-- Old John of Gaunt, time-honor'd Lancaster, Hast thou, according to thy oath and band, &c. each closing at the tenth syllable, with the rhythmless metre of the verse in Henry VI. and Titus Andronicus, in order that the difference, indeed, the heterogeneity, of the two may be felt 'etiam in simillimis prima superficie'. Here the weight of the single words supplies all the relief afforded by intercurrent verse, while the whole represents the mood. And compare the apparently defective metre of Bolingbroke's first line,-- Many years of happy days befall-- with Prospero's, Twelve years since, Miranda! twelve years since-- The actor should supply the time by emphasis, and pause on the first syllable of each of these verses. Act i. sc. 1. Bolingbroke's speech:-- First, (heaven be the record to my speech!) In the devotion of a subject's love, &c. I remember in the Sophoclean drama no more striking example of the [Greek (transliterated): To prepon kai semnon] than this speech; and the rhymes in the last six lines well express the preconcertedness of Bolingbroke's scheme so beautifully contrasted with the vehemence and sincere irritation of Mowbray. 'Ib.' Bolingbroke's speech:-- Which blood, like sacrificing Abel's, cries, Even from the tongueless caverns of the earth, To _me_, for justice and rough chastisement. Note the [Greek (transliterated): deinhon] of this 'to me,' which is evidently felt by Richard:-- How high a pitch his resolution soars! and the affected depreciation afterwards;-- As he is but my father's brother's son. 'Ib.' Mowbray's speech:-- In haste whereof, most heartily I pray Your highness to assign our trial day. The occasional interspersion of rhymes, and the more frequent winding up of a speech therewith--what purpose was this designed to answer? In the earnest drama, I mean. Deliberateness? An attempt, as in Mowbray, to collect himself and be cool at the close?--I can see that in the following speeches the rhyme answers the end of the Greek chorus, and distinguishes the general truths from the passions of the dialogue; but this does not exactly justify the practice, which is unfrequent in proportion to the excellence of Shakspeare's plays. One thing, however, is to be observed,--that the speakers are historical, known, and so far formal, characters, and their reality is already a fact. This should be borne in mind. The whole of this scene of the quarrel between Mowbray and Bolingbroke seems introduced for the purpose of showing by anticipation the characters of Richard and Bolingbroke. In the latter there is observable a decorous and courtly checking of his anger in subservience to a predetermined plan, especially in his calm speech after receiving sentence of banishment compared with Mowbray's unaffected lamentation. In the one, all is ambitious hope of something yet to come; in the other it is desolation and a looking backward of the heart. 'Ib.' sc. 2. 'Gaunt'. Heaven's is the quarrel; for heaven's substitute, His deputy anointed in his right, Hath caus'd his death: the which, if wrongfully, Let heaven revenge; for I may never lift An angry arm against his minister. Without the hollow extravagance of Beaumont and Fletcher's ultra-royalism, how carefully does Shakspeare acknowledge and reverence the eternal distinction between the mere individual, and the symbolic or representative, on which all genial law, no less than patriotism, depends. The whole of this second scene commences, and is anticipative of, the tone and character of the play at large. 'Ib.' sc. 3. In none of Shakspeare's fictitious dramas, or in those founded on a history as unknown to his auditors generally as fiction, is this violent rupture of the succession of time found:--a proof, I think, that the pure historic drama, like Richard II. and King John, had its own laws. 'Ib.' Mowbray's speech:-- A dearer _merit_ Have I deserved at your highness' hand. O, the instinctive propriety of Shakspeare in the choice of words! 'Ib.' Richard's speech: Nor never by advised purpose meet, To plot, contrive, or complot any ill, 'Gainst us, our state, our subjects, or our land. Already the selfish weakness of Richard's character opens. Nothing will such minds so readily embrace, as indirect ways softened down to their 'quasi'-consciences by policy, expedience, &c. 'Ib.' Mowbray's speech:-- ...All the world's my way. 'The world was all before him.'--'Milt'. 'Ib.' 'Boling'. How long a time lies in one little word! Four lagging winters, and four wanton springs, End in a word: such is the breath of kings. Admirable anticipation! 'Ib.' sc. 4. This is a striking conclusion of a first act,--letting the reader into the secret;--having before impressed us with the dignified and kingly manners of Richard, yet by well managed anticipations leading us on to the full gratification of pleasure in our own penetration. In this scene a new light is thrown on Richard's character. Until now he has appeared in all the beauty of royalty; but here, as soon as he is left to himself, the inherent weakness of his character is immediately shown. It is a weakness, however, of a peculiar kind, not arising from want of personal courage, or any specific defect of faculty, but rather an intellectual feminineness, which feels a necessity of ever leaning on the breast of others, and of reclining on those who are all the while known to be inferiors. To this must be attributed as its consequences all Richard's vices, his tendency to concealment, and his cunning, the whole operation of which is directed to the getting rid of present difficulties. Richard is not meant to be a debauchee; but we see in him that sophistry which is common to man, by which we can deceive our own hearts, and at one and the same time apologize for, and yet commit, the error. Shakspeare has represented this character in a very peculiar manner. He has not made him amiable with counterbalancing faults; but has openly and broadly drawn those faults without reserve, relying on Richard's disproportionate sufferings and gradually emergent good qualities for our sympathy; and this was possible, because his faults are not positive vices, but spring entirely from defect of character. Act. ii. sc. 1. 'K. Rich'. Can sick men play so nicely with their names? Yes! on a death-bed there is a feeling which may make all things appear but as puns and equivocations. And a passion there is that carries off its own excess by plays on words as naturally, and, therefore, as appropriately to drama, as by gesticulations, looks, or tones. This belongs to human nature as such, independently of associations and habits from any particular rank of life or mode of employment; and in this consist Shakspeare's vulgarisms, as in Macbeth's-- The devil damn thee black, thou cream-fac'd loon! &c. This is (to equivocate on Dante's words) in truth the _nobile volgare eloquenza_. Indeed it is profoundly true that there is a natural, an almost irresistible, tendency in the mind, when immersed in one strong feeling, to connect that feeling with every sight and object around it; especially if there be opposition, and the words addressed to it are in any way repugnant to the feeling itself, as here in the instance of Richard's unkind language: Misery makes sport to mock itself. No doubt, something of Shakspeare's punning must be attributed to his age, in which direct and formal combats of wit were a favourite pastime of the courtly and accomplished. It was an age more favourable, upon the whole, to vigour of intellect than the present, in which a dread of being thought pedantic dispirits and flattens the energies of original minds. But independently of this, I have no hesitation in saying that a pun, if it be congruous with the feeling of the scene, is not only allowable in the dramatic dialogue, but oftentimes one of the most effectual intensives of passion. 'Ib.' 'K. Rich'. Right; you say true: as Hereford's love, so his; As theirs, so mine; and all be as it is. The depth of this compared with the first scene;-- How high a pitch, &c. There is scarcely anything in Shakspeare in its degree, more admirably drawn than York's character;--his religious loyalty struggling with a deep grief and indignation at the king's follies; his adherence to his word and faith, once given in spite of all, even the most natural, feelings. You see in him the weakness of old age, and the overwhelmingness of circumstances, for a time surmounting his sense of duty,--the junction of both exhibited in his boldness in words and feebleness in immediate act; and then again his effort to retrieve himself in abstract loyalty, even at the heavy price of the loss of his son. This species of accidental and adventitious weakness is brought into parallel with Richard's continually increasing energy of thought, and as constantly diminishing power of acting;--and thus it is Richard that breathes a harmony and a relation into all the characters of the play. 'Ib.' sc. 2. 'Queen'. To please the king I did; to please myself I cannot do it; yet I know no cause Why I should welcome such a guest as grief, Save bidding farewell to so sweet a guest As my sweet Richard: yet again, methinks, Some unborn sorrow, ripe in sorrow's womb, Is coming toward me; and my inward soul With nothing trembles: at something it grieves, More than with parting from my lord the king. It is clear that Shakspeare never meant to represent Richard as a vulgar debauchee, but a man with a wantonness of spirit in external show, a feminine _friendism_, an intensity of woman-like love of those immediately about him, and a mistaking of the delight of being loved by him for a love of him. And mark in this scene Shakspeare's gentleness in touching the tender superstitions, the 'terræ incognitæ' of presentiments, in the human mind; and how sharp a line of distinction he commonly draws between these obscure forecastings of general experience in each individual, and the vulgar errors of mere tradition. Indeed, it may be taken once for all as the truth, that Shakspeare, in the absolute universality of his genius, always reverences whatever arises out of our moral nature; he never profanes his muse with a contemptuous reasoning away of the genuine and general, however unaccountable, feelings of mankind. The amiable part of Richard's character is brought full upon us by his queen's few words-- ... so sweet a guest As my sweet Richard;-- and Shakspeare has carefully shown in him an intense love of his country, well-knowing how that feeling would, in a pure historic drama, redeem him in the hearts of the audience. Yet even in this love there is something feminine and personal:-- Dear earth, I do salute thee with my hand, --As a long parted mother with her child Plays fondly with her tears, and smiles in meeting; So weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth, And do thee favour with my royal hands. With this is combined a constant overflow of emotions from a total incapability of controlling them, and thence a waste of that energy, which should have been reserved for actions, in the passion and effort of mere resolves and menaces. The consequence is moral exhaustion, and rapid alternations of unmanly despair and ungrounded hope,--every feeling being abandoned for its direct opposite upon the pressure of external accident. And yet when Richard's inward weakness appears to seek refuge in his despair, and his exhaustion counterfeits repose, the old habit of kingliness, the effect of flatterers from his infancy, is ever and anon producing in him a sort of wordy courage which only serves to betray more clearly his internal impotence. The second and third scenes of the third act combine and illustrate all this:-- 'Aumerle'. He means, my lord, that we are too remiss; Whilst Bolingbroke, through our security, Grows strong and great, in substance, and in friends. 'K. Rich'. Discomfortable cousin! know'st thou not, That when the searching eye of heaven is hid Behind the globe, and lights the lower world, Then thieves and robbers range abroad unseen, In murders and in outrage, bloody here; But when, from under this terrestrial ball, He fires the proud tops of the eastern pines, And darts his light through every guilty hole, Then murders, treasons, and detested sins, The cloke of night being pluckt from off their backs, Stand bare and naked, trembling at themselves? So when this thief, this traitor, Bolingbroke, &c. ... 'Aumerle'. Where is the Duke my father with his power? 'K. Rich'. No matter where; of comfort no man speak: Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs, Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth, &c. ... 'Aumerle'. My father hath a power, enquire of him; And learn to make a body of a limb. 'K. Rich'. Thou chid'st me well: proud Bolingbroke, I come To change blows with thee for our day of doom. This ague-fit of fear is over-blown; An easy task it is to win our own. ... 'Scroop'. Your uncle York hath join'd with Bolingbroke.-- ... 'K. Rich'. Thou hast said enough, Beshrew thee, cousin, which didst lead me forth Of that sweet way I was in to despair! What say you now? what comfort have we now? By heaven, I'll hate him everlastingly, That bids me be of comfort any more. ... Act iii. sc. 3. Bolingbroke's speech:-- Noble lord, Go to the rude ribs of that ancient castle, &c. Observe the fine struggle of a haughty sense of power and ambition in Bolingbroke with the necessity for dissimulation. 'Ib.' sc. 4. See here the skill and judgment of our poet in giving reality and individual life, by the introduction of accidents in his historic plays, and thereby making them dramas, and not histories. How beautiful an islet of repose--a melancholy repose, indeed--is this scene with the Gardener and his Servant. And how truly affecting and realizing is the incident of the very horse Barbary, in the scene with the Groom in the last act!-- 'Groom'. I was a poor groom of thy stable, King, When thou wert King; who, travelling towards York, With much ado, at length have gotten leave To look upon my sometime master's face. O, how it yearn'd my heart, when I beheld, In London streets, that coronation day, When Bolingbroke rode on roan Barbary! That horse, that thou so often hast bestrid; That horse, that I so carefully have dress'd! 'K. Rich'. Rode he on Barbary? Bolingbroke's character, in general, is an instance how Shakspeare makes one play introductory to another; for it is evidently a preparation for Henry IV., as Gloster in the third part of Henry VI. is for Richard III. I would once more remark upon the exalted idea of the only true loyalty developed in this noble and impressive play. We have neither the rants of Beaumont and Fletcher, nor the sneers of Massinger;--the vast importance of the personal character of the sovereign is distinctly enounced, whilst, at the same time, the genuine sanctity which surrounds him is attributed to, and grounded on, the position in which he stands as the convergence and exponent of the life and power of the state. The great end of the body politic appears to be to humanize, and assist in the progressiveness of, the animal man;--but the problem is so complicated with contingencies as to render it nearly impossible to lay down rules for the formation of a state. And should we be able to form a system of government, which should so balance its different powers as to form a check upon each, and so continually remedy and correct itself, it would, nevertheless, defeat its own aim;--for man is destined to be guided by higher principles, by universal views, which can never be fulfilled in this state of existence,--by a spirit of progressiveness which can never be accomplished, for then it would cease to be. Plato's Republic is like Bunyan's Town of Man-Soul,--a description of an individual, all of whose faculties are in their proper subordination and inter-dependence; and this it is assumed may be the prototype of the state as one great individual. But there is this sophism in it, that it is forgotten that the human faculties, indeed, are parts and not separate things; but that you could never get chiefs who were wholly reason, ministers who were wholly understanding, soldiers all wrath, labourers all concupiscence, and so on through the rest. Each of these partakes of, and interferes with, all the others. HENRY IV. PART I. Act I. sc. 1. King Henry's speech: No more the thirsty entrance of this soil Shall daub her lips with her own children's blood. A most obscure passage: but I think Theobalds' interpretation right, namely, that 'thirsty entrance' means the dry penetrability, or bibulous drought, of the soil. The obscurity of this passage is of the Shakspearian sort. 'Ib.' sc. 2. In this, the first introduction of Falstaff, observe the consciousness and the intentionality of his wit, so that when it does not flow of its own accord, its absence is felt, and an effort visibly made to recall it. Note also throughout how Falstaff's pride is gratified in the power of influencing a prince of the blood, the heir apparent, by means of it. Hence his dislike to Prince John of Lancaster, and his mortification when he finds his wit fail on him:-- 'P. John.' Fare you well, Falstaff: I, in my condition, Shall better speak of you than you deserve. 'Fal.' I would you had but the wit; 'twere better than your dukedom.--Good faith, this same young sober-blooded boy doth not love me;--nor a man cannot make him laugh. Act ii. sc. 1. Second Carrier's speech:-- ... breeds fleas like a _loach_. Perhaps it is a misprint, or a provincial pronunciation, for 'leach,' that is, blood-suckers. Had it been gnats, instead of fleas, there might have been some sense, though small probability, in Warburton's suggestion of the Scottish 'loch.' Possibly 'loach,' or 'lutch,' may be some lost word for dovecote, or poultry-lodge, notorious for breeding fleas. In Stevens's or my reading, it should properly be 'loaches,' or 'leeches,' in the plural; except that I think I have heard anglers speak of trouts like _a_ salmon. Act iii. sc. 1. 'Glend.' Nay, if you melt, then will she run mad. This 'nay' so to be dwelt on in speaking, as to be equivalent to a dissyllable--[Symbol: written as a U-shape, below the line], is characteristic of the solemn Glendower: but the imperfect line _She bids you_ Upon the wanton rushes lay you down, &c. is one of those fine hair-strokes of exquisite judgment peculiar to Shakspeare;--thus detaching the Lady's speech, and giving it the individuality and entireness of a little poem, while he draws attention to it. HENRY IV. PART II. Act ii. sc. 2. 'P. Hen'. Sup any women with him? 'Page'. None, my lord, but old mistress Quickly, and mistress Doll Tear-sheet. 'P. Hen'. This Doll Tear-sheet should be some road. I am sometimes disposed to think that this respectable young lady's name is a very old corruption for Tear-street--street-walker, 'terere stratum (viam.)' Does not the Prince's question rather show this?-- 'This Doll Tear-street should be some road?' Act iii. sc. 1. King Henry's speech: ...Then, _happy low, lie down_; Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. I know no argument by which to persuade any one to be of my opinion, or rather of my feeling; but yet I cannot help feeling that 'Happy low-lie-down!' is either a proverbial expression, or the burthen of some old song, and means, 'Happy the man, who lays himself down on his straw bed or chaff pallet on the ground or floor!' 'Ib.' sc. 2. Shallow's speech:-- _Rah, tah, tah_, would 'a say; _bounce_, would 'a say, &c That Beaumont and Fletcher have more than once been guilty of sneering at their great master, cannot, I fear, be denied; but the passage quoted by Theobald from the Knight of the Burning Pestle is an imitation. If it be chargeable with any fault, it is with plagiarism, not with sarcasm. HENRY V. Act I. sc. 2. Westmoreland's speech:-- They know your _grace_ hath cause, and means, and might; So hath your _highness_; never King of England Had nobles richer, &c. Does 'grace' mean the king's own peculiar domains and legal revenue, and 'highness' his feudal rights in the military service of his nobles?--I have sometimes thought it possible that the words 'grace' and 'cause' may have been transposed in the copying or printing;-- They know your cause hath grace, &c. What Theobald meant, I cannot guess. To me his pointing makes the passage still more obscure. Perhaps the lines ought to be recited dramatically thus:-- They know your Grace hath cause, and means, and might:-- So _hath_ your Highness--never King of England _Had_ nobles richer, &c. He breaks off from the grammar and natural order from earnestness, and in order to give the meaning more passionately. 'Ib.' Exeter's speech:-- Yet that is but a _crush'd_ necessity. Perhaps it may be 'crash' for 'crass' from 'crassus', clumsy; or it may be 'curt,' defective, imperfect: anything would be better than Warburton's ''scus'd,' which honest Theobald, of course, adopts. By the by, it seems clear to me that this speech of Exeter's properly belongs to Canterbury, and was altered by the actors for convenience. Act iv. sc. 3. K. Henry's speech:-- We would not _die_ in that man's company That fears his fellowship to die with us. Should it not be 'live' in the first line? 'Ib.' sc. 5. 'Const.' O diable! 'Orl.' O seigneur! le jour est perdu, tout est perdu! 'Dan.' Mort de ma vie!_ all is confounded, all! Reproach and everlasting shame Sit mocking in our plumes!--'O meschante fortune!' Do not run away! Ludicrous as these introductory scraps of French appear, so instantly followed by good, nervous mother-English, yet they are judicious, and produce the impression which Shakspeare intended,--a sudden feeling struck at once on the ears, as well as the eyes, of the audience, that 'here come the French, the baffled French braggards!'--And this will appear still more judicious, when we reflect on the scanty apparatus of distinguishing dresses in Shakspeare's tyring-room. HENRY VI. PART I. Act I. sc. 1. Bedford's speech:-- Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night! Comets, importing change of times and states, Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky; And with them scourge the bad revolting stars That have consented unto Henry's death! Henry the fifth, too famous to live long! England ne'er lost a king of so much worth. Read aloud any two or three passages in blank verse even from Shakspeare's earliest dramas, as Love's Labour's Lost, or Romeo and Juliet; and then read in the same way this speech, with especial attention to the metre; and if you do not feel the impossibility of the latter having been written by Shakspeare, all I dare suggest is, that you may have ears,--for so has another animal,--but an ear you cannot have, 'me judice'. RICHARD III. This play should be contrasted with Richard II. Pride of intellect is the characteristic of Richard, carried to the extent of even boasting to his own mind of his villany, whilst others are present to feed his pride of superiority; as in his first speech, act II. sc. 1. Shakspeare here, as in all his great parts, developes in a tone of sublime morality the dreadful consequences of placing the moral, in subordination to the mere intellectual, being. In Richard there is a predominance of irony, accompanied with apparently blunt manners to those immediately about him, but formalized into a more set hypocrisy towards the people as represented by their magistrates. LEAR. Of all Shakspeare's plays Macbeth is the most rapid, Hamlet the slowest, in movement. Lear combines length with rapidity,--like the hurricane and the whirlpool, absorbing while it advances. It begins as a stormy day in summer, with brightness; but that brightness is lurid, and anticipates the tempest. It was not without forethought, nor is it without its due significance, that the division of Lear's kingdom is in the first six lines of the play stated as a thing already determined in all its particulars, previously to the trial of professions, as the relative rewards of which the daughters were to be made to consider their several portions. The strange, yet by no means unnatural, mixture of selfishness, sensibility, and habit of feeling derived from, and fostered by, the particular rank and usages of the individual;--the intense desire of being intensely beloved,--selfish, and yet characteristic of the selfishness of a loving and kindly nature alone;--the self-supportless leaning for all pleasure on another's breast;--the craving after sympathy with a prodigal disinterestedness, frustrated by its own ostentation, and the mode and nature of its claims;--the anxiety, the distrust, the jealousy, which more or less accompany all selfish affections, and are amongst the surest contradistinctions of mere fondness from true love, and which originate Lear's eager wish to enjoy his daughter's violent professions, whilst the inveterate habits of sovereignty convert the wish into claim and positive right, and an incompliance with it into crime and treason;--these facts, these passions, these moral verities, on which the whole tragedy is founded, are all prepared for, and will to the retrospect be found implied, in these first four or five lines of the play. They let us know that the trial is but a trick; and that the grossness of the old king's rage is in part the natural result of a silly trick suddenly and most unexpectedly baffled and disappointed. It may here be worthy of notice, that Lear is the only serious performance of Shakspeare, the interest and situations of which are derived from the assumption of a gross improbability; whereas Beaumont and Fletcher's tragedies are, almost all of them, founded on some out of the way accident or exception to the general experience of mankind. But observe the matchless judgment of our Shakspeare. First, improbable as the conduct of Lear is in the first scene, yet it was an old story rooted in the popular faith,--a thing taken for granted already, and consequently without any of the effects of improbability. Secondly, it is merely the canvass for the characters and passions,--a mere occasion for,--and not, in the manner of Beaumont and Fletcher, perpetually recurring as the cause, and 'sine qua non' of,--the incidents and emotions. Let the first scene of this play have been lost, and let it only be understood that a fond father had been duped by hypocritical professions of love and duty on the part of two daughters to disinherit the third, previously, and deservedly, more dear to him;--and all the rest of the tragedy would retain its interest undiminished, and be perfectly intelligible. The accidental is nowhere the groundwork of the passions, but that which is catholic, which in all ages has been, and ever will be, close and native to the heart of man,--parental anguish from filial ingratitude, the genuineness of worth, though coffined in bluntness, and the execrable vileness of a smooth iniquity. Perhaps I ought to have added the Merchant of Venice; but here too the same remarks apply. It was an old tale; and substitute any other danger than that of the pound of flesh (the circumstance in which the improbability lies), yet all the situations and the emotions appertaining to them remain equally excellent and appropriate. Whereas take away from the Mad Lover of Beaumont and Fletcher the fantastic hypothesis of his engagement to cut out his own heart, and have it presented to his mistress, and all the main scenes must go with it. Kotzebue is the German Beaumont and Fletcher, without their poetic powers, and without their 'vis comica'. But, like them, he always deduces his situations and passions from marvellous accidents, and the trick of bringing one part of our moral nature to counteract another; as our pity for misfortune and admiration of generosity and courage to combat our condemnation of guilt, as in adultery, robbery, and other heinous crimes;--and, like them too, he excels in his mode of telling a story clearly and interestingly, in a series of dramatic dialogues. Only the trick of making tragedy-heroes and heroines out of shopkeepers and barmaids was too low for the age, and too unpoetic for the genius, of Beaumont and Fletcher, inferior in every respect as they are to their great predecessor and contemporary. How inferior would they have appeared, had not Shakspeare existed for them to imitate;--which in every play, more or less, they do, and in their tragedies most glaringly:--and yet--(O shame! shame!)--they miss no opportunity of sneering at the divine man, and sub-detracting from his merits! To return to Lear. Having thus in the fewest words, and in a natural reply to as natural a question,--which yet answers the secondary purpose of attracting our attention to the difference or diversity between the characters of Cornwall and Albany,--provided the premisses and 'data', as it were, for our after insight into the mind and mood of the person, whose character, passions, and sufferings are the main subject-matter of the play;--from Lear, the 'persona patiens' of his drama, Shakspeare passes without delay to the second in importance, the chief agent and prime mover, and introduces Edmund to our acquaintance, preparing us with the same felicity of judgment, and in the same easy and natural way, for his character in the seemingly casual communication of its origin and occasion. From the first drawing up of the curtain Edmund has stood before us in the united strength and beauty of earliest manhood. Our eyes have been questioning him. Gifted as he is with high advantages of person, and further endowed by nature with a powerful intellect and a strong energetic will, even without any concurrence of circumstances and accident, pride will necessarily be the sin that most easily besets him. But Edmund is also the known and acknowledged son of the princely Gloster: he, therefore, has both the germ of pride, and the conditions best fitted to evolve and ripen it into a predominant feeling. Yet hitherto no reason appears why it should be other than the not unusual pride of person, talent, and birth,--a pride auxiliary, if not akin, to many virtues, and the natural ally of honorable impulses. But alas! in his own presence his own father takes shame to himself for the frank avowal that he is his father,--he has 'blushed so often to acknowledge him that he is now brazed to it!' Edmund hears the circumstances of his birth spoken of with a most degrading and licentious levity,--his mother described as a wanton by her own paramour, and the remembrance of the animal sting, the low criminal gratifications connected with her wantonness and prostituted beauty, assigned as the reason, why 'the whoreson must be acknowledged!' This, and the consciousness of its notoriety; the gnawing conviction that every show of respect is an effort of courtesy, which recalls, while it represses, a contrary feeling;--this is the ever trickling flow of wormwood and gall into the wounds of pride,--the corrosive 'virus' which inoculates pride with a venom not its own, with envy, hatred, and a lust for that power which in its blaze of radiance would hide the dark spots on his disc,--with pangs of shame personally undeserved, and therefore felt as wrongs, and with a blind ferment of vindictive working towards the occasions and causes, especially towards a brother, whose stainless birth and lawful honours were the constant remembrancers of his own debasement, and were ever in the way to prevent all chance of its being unknown, or overlooked and forgotten. Add to this, that with excellent judgment, and provident for the claims of the moral sense,--for that which, relatively to the drama, is called poetic justice, and as the fittest means for reconciling the feelings of the spectators to the horrors of Gloster's after sufferings,--at least, of rendering them somewhat less unendurable; --(for I will not disguise my conviction, that in this one point the tragic in this play has been urged beyond the outermost mark and 'ne plus ultra' of the dramatic)--Shakspeare has precluded all excuse and palliation of the guilt incurred by both the parents of the base-born Edmund, by Gloster's confession that he was at the time a married man, and already blest with a lawful heir of his fortunes. The mournful alienation of brotherly love, occasioned by the law of primogeniture in noble families, or rather by the unnecessary distinctions engrafted thereon, and this in children of the same stock, is still almost proverbial on the continent,--especially, as I know from my own observation, in the south of Europe,--and appears to have been scarcely less common in our own island before the Revolution of 1688, if we may judge from the characters and sentiments so frequent in our elder comedies. There is the younger brother, for instance, in Beaumont and Fletcher's play of the Scornful Lady, on the one side, and Oliver in Shakspeare's As You Like It, on the other. Need it be said how heavy an aggravation, in such a case, the stain of bastardy must have been, were it only that the younger brother was liable to hear his own dishonour and his mother's infamy related by his father with an excusing shrug of the shoulders, and in a tone betwixt waggery and shame! By the circumstances here enumerated as so many predisposing causes, Edmund's character might well be deemed already sufficiently explained; and our minds prepared for it. But in this tragedy the story or fable constrained Shakspeare to introduce wickedness in an outrageous form in the persons of Regan and Goneril. He had read nature too heedfully not to know, that courage, intellect, and strength of character, are the most impressive forms of power, and that to power in itself, without reference to any moral end, an inevitable admiration and complacency appertains, whether it be displayed in the conquests of a Buonaparte or Tamerlane, or in the foam and the thunder of a cataract. But in the exhibition of such a character it was of the highest importance to prevent the guilt from passing into utter monstrosity,--which again depends on the presence or absence of causes and temptations sufficient to account for the wickedness, without the necessity of recurring to a thorough fiendishness of nature for its origination. For such are the appointed relations of intellectual power to truth, and of truth to goodness, that it becomes both morally and poetically unsafe to present what is admirable,--what our nature compels us to admire--in the mind, and what is most detestable in the heart, as co-existing in the same individual without any apparent connection, or any modification of the one by the other. That Shakspeare has in one instance, that of Iago, approached to this, and that he has done it successfully, is, perhaps, the most astonishing proof of his genius, and the opulence of its resources. But in the present tragedy, in which he was compelled to present a Goneril and a Regan, it was most carefully to be avoided;--and therefore the only one conceivable addition to the inauspicious influences on the preformation of Edmund's character is given, in the information that all the kindly counteractions to the mischievous feelings of shame, which might have been derived from co-domestication with Edgar and their common father, had been cut off by his absence from home, and foreign education from boyhood to the present time, and a prospect of its continuance, as if to preclude all risk of his interference with the father's views for the elder and legitimate son:-- He hath been out nine years, and away he shall again. Act i. sc. 1. 'Cor.' Nothing, my lord. 'Lear.' Nothing? 'Cor.' Nothing. 'Lear.' Nothing can come of nothing: speak again. 'Cor.' Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave My heart into my mouth: I love your majesty According to my bond; nor more, nor less. There is something of disgust at the ruthless hypocrisy of her sisters, and some little faulty admixture of pride and sullenness in Cordelia's 'Nothing;' and her tone is well contrived, indeed, to lessen the glaring absurdity of Lear's conduct, but answers the yet more important purpose of forcing away the attention from the nursery-tale, the moment it has served its end, that of supplying the canvass for the picture. This is also materially furthered by Kent's opposition, which displays Lear's moral incapability of resigning the sovereign power in the very act of disposing of it. Kent is, perhaps, the nearest to perfect goodness in all Shakspeare's characters, and yet the most individualized. There is an extraordinary charm in his bluntness, which is that only of a nobleman arising from a contempt of overstrained courtesy; and combined with easy placability where goodness of heart is apparent. His passionate affection for, and fidelity to, Lear act on our feelings in Lear's own favour: virtue itself seems to be in company with him. 'Ib.' sc. 2. Edmund's speech:-- Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take More composition and fierce quality Than doth, &c. Warburton's note upon a quotation from Vanini. Poor Vanini!--Any one but Warburton would have thought this precious passage more characteristic of Mr. Shandy than of atheism. If the fact really were so, (which it is not, but almost the contrary,) I do not see why the most confirmed theist might not very naturally utter the same wish. But it is proverbial that the youngest son in a large family is commonly the man of the greatest talents in it; and as good an authority as Vanini has said--'incalescere in venerem ardentius, spei sobolis injuriosum esse'. In this speech of Edmund you see, as soon as a man cannot reconcile himself to reason, how his conscience flies off by way of appeal to nature, who is sure upon such occasions never to find fault, and also how shame sharpens a predisposition in the heart to evil. For it is a profound moral, that shame will naturally generate guilt; the oppressed will be vindictive, like Shylock, and in the anguish of undeserved ignominy the delusion secretly springs up, of getting over the moral quality of an action by fixing the mind on the mere physical act alone. 'Ib.' Edmund's speech:-- This is the excellent foppery of the world! that, when we are sick in fortune, (often the surfeit of our own behaviour,) we make guilty of our disasters, the sun, the moon, and the stars, &c. Thus scorn and misanthropy are often the anticipations and mouth-pieces of wisdom in the detection of superstitions. Both individuals and nations may be free from such prejudices by being below them, as well as by rising above them. 'Ib.' sc. 3. The Steward should be placed in exact antithesis to Kent, as the only character of utter irredeemable baseness in Shakspeare. Even in this the judgment and invention of the poet are very observable;--for what else could the willing tool of a Goneril be? Not a vice but this of baseness was left open to him. 'Ib.' sc. 4. In Lear old age is itself a character,--its natural imperfections being increased by life-long habits of receiving a prompt obedience. Any addition of individuality would have been unnecessary and painful; for the relations of others to him, of wondrous fidelity and of frightful ingratitude, alone sufficiently distinguish him. Thus Lear becomes the open and ample play-room of nature's passions. Ib. 'Knight'. Since my young lady's going into France, Sir; the fool hath much pin'd away. The Fool is no comic buffoon to make the groundlings laugh,--no forced condescension of Shakspeare's genius to the taste of his audience. Accordingly the poet prepares for his introduction, which he never does with any of his common clowns and fools, by bringing him into living connection with the pathos of the play. He is as wonderful a creation as Caliban;--his wild babblings, and inspired idiocy, articulate and gauge the horrors of the scene. The monster Goneril prepares what is necessary, while the character of Albany renders a still more maddening grievance possible, namely, Regan and Cornwall in perfect sympathy of monstrosity. Not a sentiment, not an image, which can give pleasure on its own account, is admitted; whenever these creatures are introduced, and they are brought forward as little as possible, pure horror reigns throughout. In this scene and in all the early speeches of Lear, the one general sentiment of filial ingratitude prevails as the main spring of the feelings;--in this early stage the outward object causing the pressure on the mind, which is not yet sufficiently familiarized with the anguish for the imagination to work upon it. Ib. 'Gon.' Do you mark that, my lord? 'Alb.' I cannot be so partial, Goneril, To the great love I bear you. 'Gon'. Pray you content, &c. Observe the baffled endeavour of Goneril to act on the fears of Albany, and yet his passiveness, his 'inertia'; he is not convinced, and yet he is afraid of looking into the thing. Such characters always yield to those who will take the trouble of governing them, or for them. Perhaps, the influence of a princess, whose choice of him had royalized his state, may be some little excuse for Albany's weakness. 'Ib.' sc. 5. 'Lear'. O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven! Keep me in temper! I would not be mad!-- The mind's own anticipation of madness! The deepest tragic notes are often struck by a half sense of an impending blow. The Fool's conclusion of this act by a grotesque prattling seems to indicate the dislocation of feeling that has begun and is to be continued. Act ii. sc. 1. Edmund's speech:-- He replied, Thou unpossessing bastard! &c. Thus the secret poison in Edmund's own heart steals forth; and then observe poor Gloster's-- Loyal and _natural_ boy! as if praising the crime of Edmund's birth! 'Ib.' Compare Regan's-- What, did _my father's_ godson seek your life? He whom _my father_ named? with the unfeminine violence of her-- All vengeance comes too short, &c. and yet no reference to the guilt, but only to the accident, which she uses as an occasion for sneering at her father. Regan is not, in fact, a greater monster than Goneril, but she has the power of casting more venom. 'Ib.' sc. 2. Cornwall's speech:-- This is some fellow, Who, having been praised for bluntness, doth affect A saucy roughness, &c. In thus placing these profound general truths in the mouths of such men as Cornwall, Edmund, Iago, &c. Shakspeare at once gives them utterance, and yet shews how indefinite their application is. 'Ib.' sc. 3. Edgar's assumed madness serves the great purpose of taking off part of the shock which would otherwise be caused by the true madness of Lear, and further displays the profound difference between the two. In every attempt at representing madness throughout the whole range of dramatic literature, with the single exception of Lear, it is mere light-headedness, as especially in Otway. In Edgar's ravings Shakspeare all the while lets you see a fixed purpose, a practical end in view;-- in Lear's, there is only the brooding of the one anguish, an eddy without progression. 'Ib.' sc. 4. Lear's speech:-- The king would speak with Cornwall; the dear father Would with his daughter speak, &c. ... No, but not yet: may be he is not well, &c. The strong interest now felt by Lear to try to find excuses for his daughter is most pathetic. 'Ib.' Lear's speech:-- --Beloved Regan, Thy sister's naught;--O Regan, she hath tied Sharp-tooth'd unkindness, like a vulture, here. I can scarce speak to thee;--thou'lt not believe Of how deprav'd a quality--O Regan! 'Reg'. I pray you, Sir, take patience; I have hope, You less know how to value her desert, Than she to scant her duty. 'Lear' Say, how is that? Nothing is so heart-cutting as a cold unexpected defence or palliation of a cruelty passionately complained of, or so expressive of thorough hard-heartedness. And feel the excessive horror of Regan's 'O, Sir, you are old!'--and then her drawing from that universal object of reverence and indulgence the very reason for her frightful conclusion-- Say, you have wrong'd her! All Lear's faults increase our pity for him. We refuse to know them otherwise than as means of his sufferings, and aggravations of his daughters' ingratitude. 'Ib.' Lear's speech:-- O, reason not the need: our basest beggars Are in the poorest thing superfluous, &c. Observe that the tranquillity which follows the first stunning of the blow permits Lear to reason. Act iii. sc. 4. O, what a world's convention of agonies is here! All external nature in a storm, all moral nature convulsed,--the real madness of Lear, the feigned madness of Edgar, the babbling of the Fool, the desperate fidelity of Kent--surely such a scene was never conceived before or since! Take it but as a picture for the eye only, it is more terrific than any which a Michel Angelo, inspired by a Dante, could have conceived, and which none but a Michel Angelo could have executed. Or let it have been uttered to the blind, the howlings of nature would seem converted into the voice of conscious humanity. This scene ends with the first symptoms of positive derangement; and the intervention of the fifth scene is particularly judicious,--the interruption allowing an interval for Lear to appear in full madness in the sixth scene. 'Ib.' sc. 7. Gloster's blinding:-- What can I say of this scene?--There is my reluctance to think Shakspeare wrong, and yet-- Act iv. sc. 6. Lear's speech:-- Ha! Goneril!--with a white beard!--They flattered me like a dog; and told me, I had white hairs in my beard, ere the black ones were there. To say _Ay_ and _No_ to every thing I said!--Ay and No too was no good divinity. When the rain came to wet me once, &c. The thunder recurs, but still at a greater distance from our feelings. 'Ib.' sc. 7. Lear's speech:-- Where have I been? Where am I?--Fair daylight?-- I am mightily abused.--I should even die with pity To see another thus, &c. How beautifully the affecting return of Lear to reason, and the mild pathos of these speeches prepare the mind for the last sad, yet sweet, consolation of the aged sufferer's death! HAMLET. Hamlet was the play, or rather Hamlet himself was the character, in the intuition and exposition of which I first made my turn for philosophical criticism, and especially for insight into the genius of Shakspeare, noticed. This happened first amongst my acquaintances, as Sir George Beaumont will bear witness; and subsequently, long before Schlegel had delivered at Vienna the lectures on Shakspeare, which he afterwards published, I had given on the same subject eighteen lectures substantially the same, proceeding from the very same point of view, and deducing the same conclusions, so far as I either then agreed, or now agree, with him. I gave these lectures at the Royal Institution, before six or seven hundred auditors of rank and eminence, in the spring of the same year, in which Sir Humphry Davy, a fellow-lecturer, made his great revolutionary discoveries in chemistry. Even in detail the coincidence of Schlegel with my lectures was so extraordinary, that all who at a later period heard the same words, taken by me from my notes of the lectures at the Royal Institution, concluded a borrowing on my part from Schlegel. Mr. Hazlitt, whose hatred of me is in such an inverse ratio to my zealous kindness towards him, as to be defended by his warmest admirer, Charles Lamb--(who, God bless him! besides his characteristic obstinacy of adherence to old friends, as long at least as they are at all down in the world, is linked as by a charm to Hazlitt's conversation)--only as 'frantic;'--Mr. Hazlitt, I say, himself replied to an assertion of my plagiarism from Schlegel in these words;--"That is a lie; for I myself heard the very same character of Hamlet from Coleridge before he went to Germany, and when he had neither read nor could read a page of German!" Now Hazlitt was on a visit to me at my cottage at Nether Stowey, Somerset, in the summer of the year 1798, in the September of which year I first was out of sight of the shores of Great Britain. Recorded by me, S. T. Coleridge, 7th January, 1819. The seeming inconsistencies in the conduct and character of Hamlet have long exercised the conjectural ingenuity of critics; and, as we are always both to suppose that the cause of defective apprehension is in ourselves, the mystery has been too commonly explained by the very easy process of setting it down as in fact inexplicable, and by resolving the phenomenon into a misgrowth or 'lusus' of the capricious and irregular genius of Shakspeare. The shallow and stupid arrogance of these vulgar and indolent decisions I would fain do my best to expose. I believe the character of Hamlet may be traced to Shakspeare's deep and accurate science in mental philosophy. Indeed, that this character must have some connection with the common fundamental laws of our nature may be assumed from the fact, that Hamlet has been the darling of every country in which the literature of England has been fostered. In order to understand him, it is essential that we should reflect on the constitution of our own minds. Man is distinguished from the brute animals in proportion as thought prevails over sense: but in the healthy processes of the mind, a balance is constantly maintained between the impressions from outward objects and the inward operations of the intellect;--for if there be an overbalance in the contemplative faculty, man thereby becomes the creature of mere meditation, and loses his natural power of action. Now one of Shakspeare's modes of creating characters is, to conceive any one intellectual or moral faculty in morbid excess, and then to place himself, Shakspeare, thus mutilated or diseased, under given circumstances. In Hamlet he seems to have wished to exemplify the moral necessity of a due balance between our attention to the objects of our senses, and our meditation on the workings of our minds,--an 'equilibrium' between the real and the imaginary worlds. In Hamlet this balance is disturbed: his thoughts, and the images of his fancy, are far more vivid than his actual perceptions, and his very perceptions, instantly passing through the 'medium' of his contemplations, acquire, as they pass, a form and a colour not naturally their own. Hence we see a great, an almost enormous, intellectual activity, and a proportionate aversion to real action consequent upon it, with all its symptoms and accompanying qualities. This character Shakspeare places in circumstances, under which it is obliged to act on the spur of the moment:--Hamlet is brave and careless of death; but he vacillates from sensibility, and procrastinates from thought, and loses the power of action in the energy of resolve. Thus it is that this tragedy presents a direct contrast to that of Macbeth; the one proceeds with the utmost slowness, the other with a crowded and breathless rapidity. The effect of this overbalance of the imaginative power is beautifully illustrated in the everlasting broodings and superfluous activities of Hamlet's mind, which, unseated from its healthy relation, is constantly occupied with the world within, and abstracted from the world without,--giving substance to shadows, and throwing a mist over all common-place actualities. It is the nature of thought to be indefinite;--definiteness belongs to external imagery alone. Hence it is that the sense of sublimity arises, not from the sight of an outward object, but from the beholder's reflection upon it;--not from the sensuous impression, but from the imaginative reflex. Few have seen a celebrated waterfall without feeling something akin to disappointment: it is only subsequently that the image comes back full into the mind, and brings with it a train of grand or beautiful associations. Hamlet feels this; his senses are in a state of trance, and he looks upon external things as hieroglyphics. His soliloquy-- O! that this too too solid flesh would melt, &c. springs from that craving after the indefinite--for that which is not--which most easily besets men of genius; and the self-delusion common to this temper of mind is finely exemplified in the character which Hamlet gives of himself:-- --It cannot be But I am pigeon-livered, and lack gall To make oppression bitter. He mistakes the seeing his chains for the breaking them, delays action till action is of no use, and dies the victim of mere circumstance and accident. There is a great significancy in the names of Shakspeare's plays. In the Twelfth Night, Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, and Winter's Tale, the total effect is produced by a co-ordination of the characters as in a wreath of flowers. But in Coriolanus, Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, &c. the effect arises from the subordination of all to one, either as the prominent person, or the principal object. Cymbeline is the only exception; and even that has its advantages in preparing the audience for the chaos of time, place, and costume, by throwing the date back into a fabulous king's reign. But as of more importance, so more striking, is the judgment displayed by our truly dramatic poet, as well as poet of the drama, in the management of his first scenes. With the single exception of Cymbeline, they either place before us at one glance both the past and the future in some effect, which implies the continuance and full agency of its cause, as in the feuds and party-spirit of the servants of the two houses in the first scene of Romeo and Juliet; or in the degrading passion for shews and public spectacles, and the overwhelming attachment for the newest successful war-chief in the Roman people, already become a populace, contrasted with the jealousy of the nobles in Julius Caesar;--or they at once commence the action so as to excite a curiosity for the explanation in the following scenes, as in the storm of wind and waves, and the boatswain in the Tempest, instead of anticipating our curiosity, as in most other first scenes, and in too many other first acts;--or they act, by contrast of diction suited to the characters, at once to heighten the effect, and yet to give a naturalness to the language and rhythm of the principal personages, either as that of Prospero and Miranda by the appropriate lowness of the style,--or as in King John, by the equally appropriate stateliness of official harangues or narratives, so that the after blank verse seems to belong to the rank and quality of the speakers, and not to the poet;--or they strike at once the key-note, and give the predominant spirit of the play, as in the Twelfth Night and in Macbeth;--or finally, the first scene comprises all these advantages at once, as in Hamlet. Compare the easy language of common life, in which this drama commences, with the direful music and wild wayward rhythm and abrupt lyrics of the opening of Macbeth. The tone is quite familiar;--there is no poetic description of night, no elaborate information conveyed by one speaker to another of what both had immediately before their senses--(such as the first distich in Addison's Cato, which is a translation into poetry of 'Past four o'clock and a dark morning!');--and yet nothing bordering on the comic on the one hand, nor any striving of the intellect on the other. It is precisely the language of sensation among men who feared no charge of effeminacy for feeling, what they had no want of resolution to bear. Yet the armour, the dead silence, the watchfulness that first interrupts it, the welcome relief of the guard, the cold, the broken expressions of compelled attention to bodily feelings still under control--all excellently accord with, and prepare for, the after gradual rise into tragedy;--but, above all, into a tragedy, the interest of which is as eminently 'ad et apud infra', as that of Macbeth is directly 'ad extra'. In all the best attested stories of ghosts and visions, as in that of Brutus, of Archbishop Cranmer, that of Benvenuto Cellini recorded by himself, and the vision of Galileo communicated by him to his favourite pupil Torricelli, the ghost-seers were in a state of cold or chilling damp from without, and of anxiety inwardly. It has been with all of them as with Francisco on his guard,--alone, in the depth and silence of the night;--''twas bitter cold, and they were sick at heart, and _not a mouse stirring_.' The attention to minute sounds,--naturally associated with the recollection of minute objects, and the more familiar and trifling, the more impressive from the unusualness of their producing any impression at all--gives a philosophic pertinency to this last image; but it has likewise its dramatic use and purpose. For its commonness in ordinary conversation tends to produce the sense of reality, and at once hides the poet, and yet approximates the reader or spectator to that state in which the highest poetry will appear, and in its component parts, though not in the whole composition, really is, the language of nature. If I should not speak it, I feel that I should be thinking it;--the voice only is the poet's,--the words are my own. That Shakspeare meant to put an effect in the actor's power in the very first words--"Who's there?"--is evident from the impatience expressed by the startled Francisco in the words that follow--"Nay, answer me: stand and unfold yourself." A brave man is never so peremptory, as when he fears that he is afraid. Observe the gradual transition from the silence and the still recent habit of listening in Francisco's--"I think I hear them"--to the more cheerful call out, which a good actor would observe, in the--"Stand ho! Who is there?" Bernardo's inquiry after Horatio, and the repetition of his name and in his own presence indicate a respect or an eagerness that implies him as one of the persons who are in the foreground; and the scepticism attributed to him,-- Horatio says,'tis but our fantasy; And will not let belief take hold of him-- prepares us for Hamlet's after eulogy on him as one whose blood and judgment were happily commingled. The actor should also be careful to distinguish the expectation and gladness of Bernardo's 'Welcome, Horatio!' from the mere courtesy of his 'Welcome, good Marcellus!' Now observe the admirable indefiniteness of the first opening out of the occasion of all this anxiety. The preparation informative of the audience is just as much as was precisely necessary, and no more;--it begins with the uncertainty appertaining to a question:-- 'Mar'. What, has _this thing_ appear'd again to-night?-- Even the word 'again' has its 'credibilizing' effect. Then Horatio, the representative of the ignorance of the audience, not himself, but by Marcellus to Bernardo, anticipates the common solution--''tis but our fantasy!' upon which Marcellus rises into This dreaded sight, twice seen of us-- which immediately afterwards becomes 'this apparition,' and that, too, an intelligent spirit, that is, to be spoken to! Then comes the confirmation of Horatio's disbelief;-- Tush! tush! 'twill not appear!-- and the silence, with which the scene opened, is again restored in the shivering feeling of Horatio sitting down, at such a time, and with the two eye-witnesses, to hear a story of a ghost, and that, too, of a ghost which had appeared twice before at the very same hour. In the deep feeling which Bernardo has of the solemn nature of what he is about to relate, he makes an effort to master his own imaginative terrors by an elevation of style,--itself a continuation of the effort,--and by turning off from the apparition, as from something which would force him too deeply into himself, to the outward objects, the realities of nature, which had accompanied it:-- 'Ber'. Last night of all, When yon same star, that's westward from the pole, Had made his course to illume that part of heaven Where now it burns, Marcellus and myself, The bell then beating one-- This passage seems to contradict the critical law that what is told, makes a faint impression compared with what is beholden; for it does indeed convey to the mind more than the eye can see; whilst the interruption of the narrative at the very moment, when we are most intensely listening for the sequel, and have our thoughts diverted from the dreaded sight in expectation of the desired, yet almost dreaded, tale--this gives all the suddenness and surprise of the original appearance;-- 'Mar'. Peace, break thee off; look, where it comes again!-- Note the judgment displayed in having the two persons present, who, as having seen the Ghost before, are naturally eager in confirming their former opinions,--whilst the sceptic is silent, and after having been twice addressed by his friends, answers with two hasty syllables--'Most like,'--and a confession of horror: --It harrows me with fear and wonder. O heaven! words are wasted on those who feel, and to those who do not feel the exquisite judgment of Shakspeare in this scene, what can be said?--Hume himself could not but have had faith in this Ghost dramatically, let his anti-ghostism have been as strong as Samson against other ghosts less powerfully raised. Act i. sc. I. 'Mar'. Good now, sit down, and tell me, he that knows, Why this same strict and most observant watch, &c. How delightfully natural is the transition to the retrospective narrative! And observe, upon the Ghost's reappearance, how much Horatio's courage is increased by having translated the late individual spectator into general thought and past experience,--and the sympathy of Marcellus and Bernardo with his patriotic surmises in daring to strike at the Ghost; whilst in a moment, upon its vanishing, the former solemn awe-stricken feeling returns upon them:-- We do it wrong, being so majestical, To offer it the show of violence.-- 'Ib.' Horatio's speech:-- I have heard, The cock, that is the trumpet to the morn, Doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding throat Awake the god of day, &c. No Addison could be more careful to be poetical in diction than Shakspeare in providing the grounds and sources of its propriety. But how to elevate a thing almost mean by its familiarity, young poets may learn in this treatment of the cock-crow. 'Ib.' Horatio's speech:-- And, by my advice, Let us impart what we have seen to-night Unto young Hamlet; for, upon my life, The spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him. Note the inobtrusive and yet fully adequate mode of introducing the main character, 'young Hamlet,' upon whom is transferred all the interest excited for the acts and concerns of the king his father. 'Ib.' sc. 2. The audience are now relieved by a change of scene to the royal court, in order that Hamlet may not have to take up the leavings of exhaustion. In the king's speech, observe the set and pedantically antithetic form of the sentences when touching that which galled the heels of conscience,--the strain of undignified rhetoric,--and yet in what follows concerning the public weal, a certain appropriate majesty. Indeed was he not a royal brother?-- 'Ib.' King's speech:-- And now, Laertes, what's the news with you? &c. Thus with great art Shakspeare introduces a most important, but still subordinate character first, Laertes, who is yet thus graciously treated in consequence of the assistance given to the election of the late king's brother instead of his son by Polonius. Ib. 'Ham'. A little more than kin, and less than kind. 'King'. How is it that the clouds still hang on you? 'Ham'. Not so, my lord, I am too much i' the sun. Hamlet opens his mouth with a playing on words, the complete absence of which throughout characterizes Macbeth. This playing on words may be attributed to many causes or motives, as either to an exuberant activity of mind, as in the higher comedy of Shakspeare generally;--or to an imitation of it as a mere fashion, as if it were said--'Is not this better than groaning?'--or to a contemptuous exultation in minds vulgarized and overset by their success, as in the poetic instance of Milton's Devils in the battle;--or it is the language of resentment, as is familiar to every one who has witnessed the quarrels of the lower orders, where there is invariably a profusion of punning invective, whence, perhaps, nicknames have in a considerable degree sprung up;--or it is the language of suppressed passion, and especially of a hardly smothered personal dislike. The first, and last of these combine in Hamlet's case; and I have little doubt that Farmer is right in supposing the equivocation carried on in the expression 'too much i' the sun,' or son. Ib. 'Ham'. Ay, madam, it is common. Here observe Hamlet's delicacy to his mother, and how the suppression prepares him for the overflow in the next speech, in which his character is more developed by bringing forward his aversion to externals, and which betrays his habit of brooding over the world within him, coupled with a prodigality of beautiful words, which are the half embodyings of thought, and are more than thought, and have an outness, a reality 'sui generis', and yet retain their correspondence and shadowy affinity to the images and movements within. Note also Hamlet's silence to the long speech of the king which follows, and his respectful, but general, answer to his mother. 'Ib.' Hamlet's first soliloquy:-- O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew! &c. This 'tædium vitæ'; is a common oppression on minds cast in the Hamlet mould, and is caused by disproportionate mental exertion, which necessitates exhaustion of bodily feeling. Where there is a just coincidence of external and internal action, pleasure is always the result; but where the former is deficient, and the mind's appetency of the ideal is unchecked, realities will seem cold and unmoving. In such cases, passion combines itself with the indefinite alone. In this mood of his mind the relation of the appearance of his father's spirit in arms is made all at once to Hamlet:--it is--Horatio's speech, in particular--a perfect model of the true style of dramatic narrative;--the purest poetry, and yet in the most natural language, equally remote from the ink-horn and the plough. 'Ib.' sc. 3. This scene must be regarded as one of Shakspeare's lyric movements in the play, and the skill with which it is interwoven with the dramatic parts is peculiarly an excellence of our poet. You experience the sensation of a pause without the sense of a stop. You will observe in Ophelia's short and general answer to the long speech of Laertes the natural carelessness of innocence, which cannot think such a code of cautions and prudences necessary to its own preservation. 'Ib.' Speech of Polonius:--(in Stockdale's edition.) Or (not to crack the wind of the poor phrase,) Wronging it thus, you'll tender me a fool. I suspect this 'wronging' is here used much in the same sense as 'wringing' or 'wrenching;' and that the parenthesis should be extended to 'thus.' [1] 'Ib.' Speech of Polonius:-- --How prodigal the soul Lends the tongue vows:--these blazes, daughter, &c. A spondee has, I doubt not, dropped out of the text. Either insert 'Go to' after 'vows;'-- Lends the tongue vows:--Go to, these blazes, daughter-- or read Lends the tongue vows:--These blazes, daughter, mark you-- Shakspeare never introduces a catalectic line without intending an equivalent to the foot omitted in the pauses, or the dwelling emphasis, or the diffused retardation. I do not, however, deny that a good actor might by employing the last mentioned means, namely, the retardation, or solemn knowing drawl, supply the missing spondee with good effect. But I do not believe that in this or any other of the foregoing speeches of Polonius, Shakspeare meant to bring out the senility or weakness of that personage's mind. In the great ever-recurring dangers and duties of life, where to distinguish the fit objects for the application of the maxims collected by the experience of a long life, requires no fineness of tact, as in the admonitions to his son and daughter, Polonius is uniformly made respectable. But if an actor were even capable of catching these shades in the character, the pit and the gallery would be malcontent at their exhibition. It is to Hamlet that Polonius is, and is meant to be, contemptible, because in inwardness and uncontrollable activity of movement, Hamlet's mind is the logical contrary to that of Polonius, and besides, as I have observed before, Hamlet dislikes the man as false to his true allegiance in the matter of the succession to the crown. 'Ib.' sc. 4. The unimportant conversation with which this scene opens is a proof of Shakspeare's minute knowledge of human nature. It is a well established fact, that on the brink of any serious enterprise, or event of moment, men almost invariably endeavour to elude the pressure of their own thoughts by turning aside to trivial objects and familiar circumstances: thus this dialogue on the platform begins with remarks on the coldness of the air, and inquiries, obliquely connected, indeed, with the expected hour of the visitation, but thrown out in a seeming vacuity of topics, as to the striking of the clock and so forth. The same desire to escape from the impending thought is carried on in Hamlet's account of, and moralizing on, the Danish custom of wassailing: he runs off from the particular to the universal, and, in his repugnance to personal and individual concerns, escapes, as it were, from himself in generalizations, and smothers the impatience and uneasy feelings of the moment in abstract reasoning. Besides this, another purpose is answered;--for by thus entangling the attention of the audience in the nice distinctions and parenthetical sentences of this speech of Hamlet's, Shakspeare takes them completely by surprise on the appearance of the Ghost, which comes upon them in all the suddenness of its visionary character. Indeed, no modern writer would have dared, like Shakspeare, to have preceded this last visitation by two distinct appearances,--or could have contrived that the third should rise upon the former two in impressiveness and solemnity of interest. But in addition to all the other excellencies of Hamlet's speech concerning the wassel-music--so finely revealing the predominant idealism, the ratiocinative meditativeness, of his character--it has the advantage of giving nature and probability to the impassioned continuity of the speech instantly directed to the Ghost. The 'momentum' had been given to his mental activity; the full current of the thoughts and words had set in, and the very forgetfulness, in the fervour of his argumentation, of the purpose for which he was there, aided in preventing the appearance from benumbing the mind. Consequently, it acted as a new impulse,--a sudden stroke which increased the velocity of the body already in motion, whilst it altered the direction. The co-presence of Horatio, Marcellus, and Bernardo is most judiciously contrived; for it renders the courage of Hamlet and his impetuous eloquence perfectly intelligible. The knowledge,--the unthought of consciousness,--the sensation,--of human auditors,--of flesh and blood sympathists--acts as a support and a stimulation 'a tergo', while the front of the mind, the whole consciousness of the speaker, is filled, yea, absorbed, by the apparition. Add too, that the apparition itself has by its previous appearances been brought nearer to a thing of this world. This accrescence of objectivity in a Ghost that yet retains all its ghostly attributes and fearful subjectivity, is truly wonderful. 'Ib.' sc. 5. Hamlet's speech:-- O all you host of heaven! O earth! What else? And shall I couple hell?-- I remember nothing equal to this burst unless it be the first speech of Prometheus in the Greek drama, after the exit of Vulcan and the two Afrites. But Shakspeare alone could have produced the vow of Hamlet to make his memory a blank of all maxims and generalized truths, that 'observation had copied there,'--followed immediately by the speaker noting down the generalized fact, That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain! Ib. 'Mar'. Hillo, ho, ho, my lord! 'Ham'. Hillo, ho, ho, boy! come bird, come, &c. This part of the scene after Hamlet's interview with the Ghost has been charged with an improbable eccentricity. But the truth is, that after the mind has been stretched beyond its usual pitch and tone, it must either sink into exhaustion and inanity, or seek relief by change. It is thus, well known that persons conversant in deeds of cruelty, contrive to escape from conscience, by connecting something of the ludicrous with them, and by inventing grotesque terms and a certain technical phraseology to disguise the horror of their practices. Indeed, paradoxical as it may appear, the terrible by a law of the human mind always touches on the verge of the ludicrous. Both arise from the perception of something out of the common order of things--something, in fact, out of its place; and if from this we can abstract danger, the uncommonness will alone remain, and the sense of the ridiculous be excited. The close alliance of these opposites--they are not contraries--appears from the circumstance, that laughter is equally the expression of extreme anguish and horror as of joy: as there are tears of sorrow and tears of joy, so is there a laugh of terror and a laugh of merriment. These complex causes will naturally have produced in Hamlet the disposition to escape from his own feelings of the overwhelming and supernatural by a wild transition to the ludicrous,--a sort of cunning bravado, bordering on the flights of delirium. For you may, perhaps, observe that Hamlet's wildness is but half false; he plays that subtle trick of pretending to act only when he is very near really being what he acts. The subterraneous speeches of the Ghost are hardly defensible:--but I would call your attention to the characteristic difference between this Ghost, as a superstition connected with the most mysterious truths of revealed religion,--and Shakspeare's consequent reverence in his treatment of it,--and the foul earthly witcheries and wild language in Macbeth. Act ii. sc. 1. Polonius and Reynaldo. In all things dependent on, or rather made up of, fine address, the manner is no more or otherwise rememberable than the light motions, steps, and gestures of youth and health. But this is almost every thing:--no wonder, therefore, if that which can be put down by rule in the memory should appear to us as mere poring, maudlin, cunning,--slyness blinking through the watery eye of superannuation. So in this admirable scene, Polonius, who is throughout the skeleton of his own former skill and statecraft, hunts the trail of policy at a dead scent, supplied by the weak fever-smell in his own nostrils. 'Ib.' sc. 2. Speech of Polonius:-- My liege, and madam, to expostulate, &c. Warburton's note: Then as to the jingles, and play on words, let us but look into the sermons of Dr. Donne, (the wittiest man of that age) and we shall find them full of this vein. I have, and that most carefully, read Dr. Donne's sermons, and find none of these jingles. The great art of an orator--to make whatever he talks of appear of importance--this, indeed, Donne has effected with consummate skill. Ib. 'Ham'. Excellent well; You are a fishmonger. That is, you are sent to fish out this secret. This is Hamlet's own meaning. Ib. 'Ham'. For if the sun breeds maggots in a dead dog, Being a god, kissing carrion-- These purposely obscure lines, I rather think, refer to some thought in Hamlet's mind, contrasting the lovely daughter with such a tedious old fool, her father, as he, Hamlet, represents Polonius to himself:--'Why, fool as he is, he is some degrees in rank above a dead dog's carcase; and if the sun, being a god that kisses carrion, can raise life out of a dead dog,--why may not good fortune, that favours fools, have raised a lovely girl out of this dead-alive old fool?' Warburton is often led astray, in his interpretations, by his attention to general positions without the due Shakspearian reference to what is probably passing in the mind of his speaker, characteristic, and expository of his particular character and present mood. The subsequent passage,-- O Jephtha, judge of Israel! what a treasure hadst thou! is confirmatory of my view of these lines. Ib. 'Ham'. You cannot, Sir, take from me any thing that I will more willingly part withal; except my life, except my life, except my life. This repetition strikes me as most admirable. Ib. 'Ham'. Then are our beggars, bodies; and our monarchs, and out-stretched heroes, the beggars' shadows. I do not understand this; and Shakspeare seems to have intended the meaning not to be more than snatched at:--'By my fay, I cannot reason!' Ib. The rugged Pyrrhus--he whose sable arms, &c. This admirable substitution of the epic for the dramatic, giving such a reality to the impassioned dramatic diction of Shakspeare's own dialogue, and authorized, too, by the actual style of the tragedies before his time (Porrex and Ferrex, Titus Andronicus, &c.)--is well worthy of notice. The fancy, that a burlesque was intended, sinks below criticism: the lines, as epic narrative, are superb. In the thoughts, and even in the separate parts of the diction, this description is highly poetical: in truth, taken by itself, this is its fault that it is too poetical!--the language of lyric vehemence and epic pomp, and not of the drama. But if Shakspeare had made the diction truly dramatic, where would have been the contrast between Hamlet and the play in Hamlet? Ib. --had seen the _mobled_ queen, &c. A mob-cap is still a word in common use for a morning cap, which conceals the whole head of hair, and passes under the chin. It is nearly the same as the night-cap, that is, it is an imitation of it, so as to answer the purpose ('I am not drest for company'), and yet reconciling it with neatness and perfect purity. 'Ib.' Hamlet's soliloquy: O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I! &c. This is Shakspeare's own attestation to the truth of the idea of Hamlet which I have before put forth. Ib. The spirit that I have seen, May be a devil: and the devil hath power To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and, perhaps Out of my weakness, and my melancholy, (As he is very potent with such spirits) Abuses me to damn me. See Sir Thomas Brown: I believe----that those apparitions and ghosts of departed persons are not the wandering souls of men, but the unquiet walks of devils, prompting and suggesting us unto mischief, blood and villany, instilling and stealing into our hearts, that the blessed spirits are not at rest in their graves, but wander solicitous of the affairs of the world. 'Relig. Med'. Pt. I. Sect. 37. Act iii. sc. 1. Hamlet's soliloquy: To be, or not to be, that is the question, &c. This speech is of absolutely universal interest,--and yet to which of all Shakspeare's characters could it have been appropriately given but to Hamlet? For Jaques it would have been too deep, and for Iago too habitual a communion with the heart; which in every man belongs, or ought to belong, to all mankind. Ib. That undiscover'd country, from whose bourne No traveller returns.-- Theobald's note in defence of the supposed contradiction of this in the apparition of the Ghost. O miserable defender! If it be necessary to remove the apparent contradiction,--if it be not rather a great beauty,--surely, it were easy to say, that no traveller returns to this world, as to his home, or abiding-place. Ib. 'Ham'. Ha, ha! are you honest? 'Oph'. My lord? 'Ham'. Are you fair? Here it is evident that the penetrating Hamlet perceives, from the strange and forced manner of Ophelia, that the sweet girl was not acting a part of her own, but was a decoy; and his after speeches are not so much directed to her as to the listeners and spies. Such a discovery in a mood so anxious and irritable accounts for a certain harshness in him;--and yet a wild up-working of love, sporting with opposites in a wilful self-tormenting strain of irony, is perceptible throughout. 'I did love you once:'--'I lov'd you not:'--and particularly in his enumeration of the faults of the sex from which Ophelia is so free, that the mere freedom therefrom constitutes her character. Note Shakspeare's charm of composing the female character by the absence of characters, that is, marks and out-juttings. 'Ib.' Hamlet's speech:-- I say, we will have no more marriages: those that are married already, all but one, shall live: the rest shall keep as they are. Observe this dallying with the inward purpose, characteristic of one who had not brought his mind to the steady acting point. He would fain sting the uncle's mind;--but to stab his body!--The soliloquy of Ophelia, which follows, is the perfection of love--so exquisitely unselfish! 'Ib.' sc. 2. This dialogue of Hamlet with the players is one of the happiest instances of Shakspeare's power of diversifying the scene while he is carrying on the plot. Ib. 'Ham'. My lord, you play'd once i' the university, you say? (_To Polonius_.) To have kept Hamlet's love for Ophelia before the audience in any direct form, would have made a breach in the unity of the interest;--but yet to the thoughtful reader it is suggested by his spite to poor Polonius, whom he cannot let rest. 'Ib.' The style of the interlude here is distinguished from the real dialogue by rhyme, as in the first interview with the players by epic verse. Ib. 'Ros'. My lord, you once did love me. 'Ham'. So I do still, by these pickers and stealers. I never heard an actor give this word 'so' its proper emphasis. Shakspeare's meaning is--'lov'd you? Hum!--_so_ I do still, &c.' There has been no change in my opinion:--I think as ill of you as I did. Else Hamlet tells an ignoble falsehood, and a useless one, as the last speech to Guildenstern--'Why, look you now,' &c.--proves. 'Ib.' Hamlet's soliloquy:-- Now could I drink hot blood, And do such business as the bitter day Would quake to look on. The utmost at which Hamlet arrives, is a disposition, a mood, to do something:--but what to do, is still left undecided, while every word he utters tends to betray his disguise. Yet observe how perfectly equal to any call of the moment is Hamlet, let it only not be for the future. 'Ib.' sc. 4. Speech of Polonius. Polonius's volunteer obtrusion of himself into this business, while it is appropriate to his character, still itching after former importance, removes all likelihood that Hamlet should suspect his presence, and prevents us from making his death injure Hamlet in our opinion. 'Ib.' The king's speech:-- O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven, &c. This speech well marks the difference between crime and guilt of habit. The conscience here is still admitted to audience. Nay, even as an audible soliloquy, it is far less improbable than is supposed by such as have watched men only in the beaten road of their feelings. But the final--'all may be well!' is remarkable;--the degree of merit attributed by the self-flattering soul to its own struggle, though baffled, and to the indefinite half-promise, half-command, to persevere in religious duties. The solution is in the divine 'medium' of the Christian doctrine of expiation:--not what you have done, but what you are, must determine. 'Ib.' Hamlet's speech:-- Now might I do it, pat, now he is praying: And now I'll do it:--And so he goes to heaven: And so am I revenged? That would be scann'd, &c. Dr. Johnson's mistaking of the marks of reluctance and procrastination for impetuous, horror-striking, fiendishness!--Of such importance is it to understand the germ of a character. But the interval taken by Hamlet's speech is truly awful! And then-- My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words, without thoughts, never to heaven go,-- O what a lesson concerning the essential difference between wishing and willing, and the folly of all motive-mongering, while the individual self remains! 'Ib.' sc. 4. 'Ham'. A bloody deed;--almost as bad, good mother, As kill a king, and marry with his brother. 'Queen'. As kill a king? I confess that Shakspeare has left the character of the Queen in an unpleasant perplexity. Was she, or was she not, conscious of the fratricide? Act iv. sc. 2. 'Ros'. Take you me for a spunge, my lord? 'Ham'. Ay, Sir; that soaks up the King's countenance, his rewards, his authorities, &c. Hamlet's madness is made to consist in the free utterance of all the thoughts that had passed through his mind before;--in fact, in telling home-truths. Act. iv. sc. 5. Ophelia's singing. O, note the conjunction here of these two thoughts that had never subsisted in disjunction, the love for Hamlet, and her filial love, with the guileless floating on the surface of her pure imagination of the cautions so lately expressed, and the fears not too delicately avowed, by her father and brother concerning the dangers to which her honour lay exposed. Thought, affliction, passion, murder itself--she turns to favour and prettiness. This play of association is instanced in the close:-- My brother shall know of it, and I thank you for your good counsel. 'Ib.' Gentleman's speech:-- And as the world were now but to begin, Antiquity forgot, custom not known, The ratifiers and props of every ward-- They cry, &c. Fearful and self-suspicious as I always feel, when I seem to see an error of judgment in Shakspeare, yet I cannot reconcile the cool, and, as Warburton calls it, 'rational and consequential,' reflection in these lines with the anonymousness, or the alarm, of this Gentleman or Messenger, as he is called in other editions. 'Ib.' King's speech:-- There's such divinity doth hedge a king, That treason can but peep to what it would, Acts little of his will. Proof, as indeed all else is, that Shakspeare never intended us to see the King with Hamlet's eyes; though, I suspect, the managers have long done so. 'Ib.' Speech of Laertes:-- To hell, allegiance! vows, to the blackest devil! Laertes is a 'good' character, but, &c. (WARBURTON.) Mercy on Warburton's notion of goodness! Please to refer to the seventh scene of this act;-- I will do it; And for this purpose I'll anoint my sword, &c. uttered by Laertes after the King's description of Hamlet;-- He being remiss, Most generous, and free from all contriving, Will not peruse the foils. Yet I acknowledge that Shakspeare evidently wishes, as much as possible, to spare the character of Laertes,--to break the extreme turpitude of his consent to become an agent and accomplice of the King's treachery;--and to this end he re-introduces Ophelia at the close of this scene to afford a probable stimulus of passion in her brother. 'Ib.' sc. 6. Hamlet's capture by the pirates. This is almost the only play of Shakspeare, in which mere accidents, independent of all will, form an essential part of the plot;--but here how judiciously in keeping with the character of the over-meditative Hamlet, ever at last determined by accident or by a fit of passion! 'Ib.' sc. 7. Note how the King first awakens Laertes's vanity by praising the reporter, and then gratifies it by the report itself, and finally points it by-- Sir, this report of his Did Hamlet so envenom with his envy!-- 'Ib.' King's speech: For goodness, growing to a _pleurisy_, Dies in his own too much. Theobald's note from Warburton, who conjectures 'plethory.' I rather think that Shakspeare meant 'pleurisy,' but involved in it the thought of _plethora_, as supposing pleurisy to arise from too much blood; otherwise I cannot explain the following line-- And then this _should_ is like a spendthrift sigh, That hurts by easing. In a stitch in the side every one must have heaved a sigh that 'hurt by easing.' Since writing the above I feel confirmed that 'pleurisy' is the right word; for I find that in the old medical dictionaries the pleurisy is often called the 'plethory.' Ib. 'Queen'. Your sister's drown'd, Laertes. 'Laer'. Drown'd! O, where? That Laertes might be excused in some degree for not cooling, the Act concludes with the affecting death of Ophelia,--who in the beginning lay like a little projection of land into a lake or stream, covered with spray-flowers quietly reflected in the quiet waters, but at length is undermined or loosened, and becomes a faery isle, and after a brief vagrancy sinks almost without an eddy! Act v. sc. 1. O, the rich contrast between the Clowns and Hamlet, as two extremes! You see in the former the mockery of logic, and a traditional wit valued, like truth, for its antiquity, and treasured up, like a tune, for use. 'Ib.' sc. 1 and 2. Shakspeare seems to mean all Hamlet's character to be brought together before his final disappearance from the scene;--his meditative excess in the grave-digging, his yielding to passion with Laertes, his love for Ophelia blazing out, his tendency to generalize on all occasions in the dialogue with Horatio, his fine gentlemanly manners with Osrick, and his and Shakspeare's own fondness for presentiment: But thou would'st not think, how ill all's here about my heart: but it is no matter. [Footnote 1: It is so pointed in the modern editions.--Ed.] NOTES ON MACBETH. Macbeth stands in contrast throughout with Hamlet; in the manner of opening more especially. In the latter, there is a gradual ascent from the simplest forms of conversation to the language of impassioned intellect,--yet the intellect still remaining the seat of passion: in the former, the invocation is at once made to the imagination and the emotions connected therewith. Hence the movement throughout is the most rapid of all Shakspeare's plays; and hence also, with the exception of the disgusting passage of the Porter (Act ii. sc. 3.), which I dare pledge myself to demonstrate to be an interpolation of the actors, there is not, to the best of my remembrance, a single pun or play on words in the whole drama. I have previously given an answer to the thousand times repeated charge against Shakspeare upon the subject of his punning, and I here merely mention the fact of the absence of any puns in Macbeth, as justifying a candid doubt at least, whether even in these figures of speech and fanciful modifications of language, Shakspeare may not have followed rules and principles that merit and would stand the test of philosophic examination. And hence, also, there is an entire absence of comedy, nay, even of irony and philosophic contemplation in Macbeth,--the play being wholly and purely tragic. For the same cause, there are no reasonings of equivocal morality, which would have required a more leisurely state and a consequently greater activity of mind;--no sophistry of self-delusion,--except only that previously to the dreadful act, Macbeth mistranslates the recoilings and ominous whispers of conscience into prudential and selfish reasonings, and, after the deed done, the terrors of remorse into fear from external dangers,--like delirious men who run away from the phantoms of their own brains, or, raised by terror to rage, stab the real object that is within their reach:--whilst Lady Macbeth merely endeavours to reconcile his and her own sinkings of heart by anticipations of the worst, and an affected bravado in confronting them. In all the rest, Macbeth's language is the grave utterance of the very heart, conscience-sick, even to the last faintings of moral death. It is the same in all the other characters. The variety arises from rage, caused ever and anon by disruption of anxious thought, and the quick transition of fear into it. In Hamlet and Macbeth the scene opens with superstition; but, in each it is not merely different, but opposite. In the first it is connected with the best and holiest feelings; in the second with the shadowy, turbulent, and unsanctified cravings of the individual will. Nor is the purpose the same; in the one the object is to excite, whilst in the other it is to mark a mind already excited. Superstition, of one sort or another, is natural to victorious generals; the instances are too notorious to need mentioning. There is so much of chance in warfare, and such vast events are connected with the acts of a single individual,--the representative, in truth, of the efforts of myriads, and yet to the public and, doubtless, to his own feelings, the aggregate of all,--that the proper temperament for generating or receiving superstitious impressions is naturally produced. Hope, the master element of a commanding genius, meeting with an active and combining intellect, and an imagination of just that degree of vividness which disquiets and impels the soul to try to realize its images, greatly increases the creative power of the mind; and hence the images become a satisfying world of themselves, as is the case in every poet and original philosopher:--but hope fully gratified, and yet the elementary basis of the passion remaining, becomes fear; and, indeed, the general, who must often feel, even though he may hide it from his own consciousness, how large a share chance had in his successes, may very naturally be irresolute in a new scene, where he knows that all will depend on his own act and election. The Wierd Sisters are as true a creation of Shakspeare's, as his Ariel and Caliban,--fates, furies, and materializing witches being the elements. They are wholly different from any representation of witches in the contemporary writers, and yet presented a sufficient external resemblance to the creatures of vulgar prejudice to act immediately on the audience. Their character consists in the imaginative disconnected from the good; they are the shadowy obscure and fearfully anomalous of physical nature, the lawless of human nature,--elemental avengers without sex or kin: Fair is foul, and foul is fair; Hover thro' the fog and filthy air. How much it were to be wished in playing Macbeth, that an attempt should be made to introduce the flexile character-mask of the ancient pantomime;--that Flaxman would contribute his genius to the embodying and making sensuously perceptible that of Shakspeare! The style and rhythm of the Captain's speeches in the second scene should be illustrated by reference to the interlude in Hamlet, in which the epic is substituted for the tragic, in order to make the latter be felt as the real-life diction. In Macbeth, the poet's object was to raise the mind at once to the high tragic tone, that the audience might be ready for the precipitate consummation of guilt in the early part of the play. The true reason for the first appearance of the Witches is to strike the key-note of the character of the whole drama, as is proved by their re-appearance in the third scene, after such an order of the king's as establishes their supernatural power of information. I say information,--for so it only is as to Glamis and Cawdor; the 'king hereafter' was still contingent,--still in Macbeth's moral will; although, if he should yield to the temptation, and thus forfeit his free agency, the link of cause and effect 'more physico' would then commence. I need not say, that the general idea is all that can be required from the poet,--not a scholastic logical consistency in all the parts so as to meet metaphysical objectors. But O! how truly Shakspearian is the opening of Macbeth's character given in the 'unpossessedness' of Banquo's mind, wholly present to the present object,--an unsullied, unscarified mirror!--And how strictly true to nature it is, that Banquo, and not Macbeth himself, directs our notice to the effect produced on Macbeth's mind, rendered temptible by previous dalliance of the fancy with ambitious thoughts: Good Sir, why do you start; and seem to fear Things that do sound so fair? And then, again, still unintroitive, addresses the Witches:-- I' the name of truth, Are ye fantastical, or that indeed Which outwardly ye show? Banquo's questions are those of natural curiosity,--such as a girl would put after hearing a gipsy tell her schoolfellow's fortune;--all perfectly general, or rather planless. But Macbeth, lost in thought, raises himself to speech only by the Witches being about to depart:-- Stay, you imperfect speakers, tell me more:-- and all that follows is reasoning on a problem already discussed in his mind,--on a hope which he welcomes, and the doubts concerning the attainment of which he wishes to have cleared up. Compare his eagerness,--the keen eye with which he has pursued the Witches' evanishing-- Speak, I charge you! with the easily satisfied mind of the self-uninterested Banquo:-- The air hath bubbles, as the water has, And these are of them:--Whither are they vanish'd? and then Macbeth's earnest reply,-- Into the air; and what seem'd corporal, melted As breath into the wind.--_'Would they had staid!_ Is it too minute to notice the appropriateness of the simile 'as breath,' &c. in a cold climate? Still again Banquo goes on wondering like any common spectator: Were such things here as we do speak about? whilst Macbeth persists in recurring to the self-concerning:-- Your children shall be kings. 'Ban'. You shall be king. 'Macb'. And thane of Cawdor too: went it not so? So surely is the guilt in its germ anterior to the supposed cause, and immediate temptation! Before he can cool, the confirmation of the tempting half of the prophecy arrives, and the concatenating tendency of the imagination is fostered by the sudden coincidence:-- Glamis, and thane of Cawdor: The greatest is behind. Oppose this to Banquo's simple surprise:-- What, can the devil speak true? 'Ib.' Banquo's speech:-- That, trusted home, Might yet enkindle you unto the crown, Besides the thane of Cawdor. I doubt whether 'enkindle' has not another sense than that of 'stimulating;' I mean of 'kind' and 'kin,' as when rabbits are said to 'kindle.' However Macbeth no longer hears any thing 'ab extra':-- Two truths are told, As happy prologues to the swelling act Of the imperial theme. Then in the necessity of recollecting himself-- I thank you, gentlemen. Then he relapses into himself again, and every word of his soliloquy shows the early birthdate of his guilt. He is all-powerful without strength; he wishes the end, but is irresolute as to the means; conscience distinctly warns him, and he lulls it imperfectly:-- If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me Without my stir. Lost in the prospective of his guilt, he turns round alarmed lest others may suspect what is passing in his own mind, and instantly vents the lie of ambition: My dull brain was wrought With things _forgotten_;-- And immediately after pours forth the promising courtesies of a usurper in intention:-- Kind gentlemen, your pains Are register'd where every day I turn The leaf to read them. 'Ib.' Macbeth's speech: Presents _fears_ Are less than horrible imaginings. Warburton's note, and substitution of 'feats' for 'fears.' Mercy on this most wilful ingenuity of blundering, which, nevertheless, was the very Warburton of Warburton--his inmost being! 'Fears,' here, are present fear-striking objects, 'terribilia adstantia'. 'Ib.' sc. 4. O! the affecting beauty of the death of Cawdor, and the presentimental speech of the king: There's no art To find the mind's construction in the face: He was a gentleman on whom I built An absolute trust-- Interrupted by-- O worthiest cousin! on the entrance of the deeper traitor for whom Cawdor had made way! And here in contrast with Duncan's 'plenteous joys,' Macbeth has nothing but the common-places of loyalty, in which he hides himself with 'our duties.' Note the exceeding effort of Macbeth's addresses to the king, his reasoning on his allegiance, and then especially when a new difficulty, the designation of a successor, suggests a new crime. This, however, seems the first distinct notion, as to the plan of realizing his wishes; and here, therefore, with great propriety, Macbeth's cowardice of his own conscience discloses itself. I always think there is something especially Shakspearian in Duncan's speeches throughout this scene, such pourings forth, such abandonments, compared with the language of vulgar dramatists, whose characters seem to have made their speeches as the actors learn them. 'Ib.' Duncan's speech:-- Sons, kinsmen, thanes, And you whose places are the nearest, know, We will establish our estate upon Our eldest Malcolm, whom we name hereafter The Prince of Cumberland: which honour must Not unaccompanied, invest him only; But signs of nobleness, like stars, shall shine On all deservers. It is a fancy;--but I can never read this and the following speeches of Macbeth, without involuntarily thinking of the Miltonic Messiah and Satan. 'Ib.' sc. 5. Macbeth is described by Lady Macbeth so as at the same time to reveal her own character. Could he have everything he wanted, he would rather have it innocently;--ignorant, as alas! how many of us are, that he who wishes a temporal end for itself, does in truth will the means; and hence the danger of indulging fancies. Lady Macbeth, like all in Shakspeare, is a class individualized:--of high rank, left much alone, and feeding herself with day-dreams of ambition, she mistakes the courage of fantasy for the power of bearing the consequences of the realities of guilt. Hers is the mock fortitude of a mind deluded by ambition; she shames her husband with a superhuman audacity of fancy which she cannot support, but sinks in the season of remorse, and dies in suicidal agony. Her speech: Come, all you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, &c. is that of one who had habitually familiarized her imagination to dreadful conceptions, and was trying to do so still more. Her invocations and requisitions are all the false efforts of a mind accustomed only hitherto to the shadows of the imagination, vivid enough to throw the every-day substances of life into shadow, but never as yet brought into direct contact with their own correspondent realities. She evinces no womanly life, no wifely joy, at the return of her husband, no pleased terror at the thought of his past dangers; whilst Macbeth bursts forth naturally-- My dearest love-- and shrinks from the boldness with which she presents his own thoughts to him. With consummate art she at first uses as incentives the very circumstances, Duncan's coming to their house, &c. which Macbeth's conscience would most probably have adduced to her as motives of abhorrence or repulsion. Yet Macbeth is not prepared: We will speak further. 'Ib.' sc. 6. The lyrical movement with which this scene opens, and the free and unengaged mind of Banquo, loving nature, and rewarded in the love itself, form a highly dramatic contrast with the laboured rhythm and hypocritical over-much of Lady Macbeth's welcome, in which you cannot detect a ray of personal feeling, but all is thrown upon the 'dignities,' the general duty. 'Ib.' sc. 7. Macbeth's speech: We will proceed no further in this business: He hath honor'd me of late; and I have bought Golden opinions from all sorts of people, Which would be worn now in their newest gloss, Not cast aside so soon. Note the inward pangs and warnings of conscience interpreted into prudential reasonings. Act ii. sc. 1. Banquo's speech: A heavy summons lies like lead upon me, And yet I would not sleep. Merciful powers! Restrain in me the cursed thoughts, that nature Gives way to in repose. The disturbance of an innocent soul by painful suspicions of another's guilty intentions and wishes, and fear of the cursed thoughts of sensual nature. 'Ib.' sc. 2. Now that the deed is done or doing--now that the first reality commences, Lady Macbeth shrinks. The most simple sound strikes terror, the most natural consequences are horrible, whilst previously every thing, however awful, appeared a mere trifle; conscience, which before had been hidden to Macbeth in selfish and prudential fears, now rushes in upon him in her own veritable person: Methought I heard a voice cry-- Sleep no more! I could not say Amen, When they did say, God bless us! And see the novelty given to the most familiar images by a new state of feeling. 'Ib.' sc. 3. This low soliloquy of the Porter and his few speeches afterwards, I believe to have been written for the mob by some other hand, perhaps with Shakspeare's consent; and that finding it take, he with the remaining ink of a pen otherwise employed, just interpolated the words-- I'll devil-porter it no further: I had thought to have let in some of all professions, that go the primrose way to th' everlasting bonfire. Of the rest not one syllable has the ever-present being of Shakspeare. Act iii. sc. 1. Compare Macbeth's mode of working on the murderers in this place with Schiller's mistaken scene between Butler, Devereux, and Macdonald in Wallenstein. (Part II. act iv. sc. 2.) The comic was wholly out of season. Shakspeare never introduces it, but when it may react on the tragedy by harmonious contrast. 'Ib.' sc. 2. Macbeth's speech: But let the frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer, Ere we will eat our meal in fear, and sleep In the affliction of these terrible dreams That shake us nightly. Ever and ever mistaking the anguish of conscience for fears of selfishness, and thus as a punishment of that selfishness, plunging still deeper in guilt and ruin. 'Ib.' Macbeth's speech: Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck, Till thou applaud the deed. This is Macbeth's sympathy with his own feelings, and his mistaking his wife's opposite state. 'Ib.' sc. 4. 'Macb'. It will have blood, they say; blood will have blood: Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak; Augurs, and understood relations, have By magot-pies, and choughs, and rooks, brought forth The secret'st man of blood. The deed is done; but Macbeth receives no comfort,--no additional security. He has by guilt torn himself live-asunder from nature, and is, therefore, himself in a preter-natural state: no wonder, then, that he is inclined to superstition, and faith in the unknown of signs and tokens, and super-human agencies. Act iv. sc. 1. 'Len'. 'Tis two or three, my lord, that bring you word, Macduff is fled to England. 'Macb'. Fled to England? The acme of the avenging conscience. 'Ib.' sc. 2. This scene, dreadful as it is, is still a relief, because a variety, because domestic, and therefore soothing, as associated with the only real pleasures of life. The conversation between Lady Macduff and her child heightens the pathos, and is preparatory for the deep tragedy of their assassination. Shakspeare's fondness for children is every where shown;--in Prince Arthur, in King John; in the sweet scene in the Winter's Tale between Hermione and her son; nay, even in honest Evans's examination of Mrs. Page's schoolboy. To the objection that Shakspeare wounds the moral sense by the unsubdued, undisguised description of the most hateful atrocity--that he tears the feelings without mercy, and even outrages the eye itself with scenes of insupportable horror--I, omitting Titus Andronicus, as not genuine, and excepting the scene of Gloster's blinding in Lear, answer boldly in the name of Shakspeare, not guilty. 'Ib.' sc. 3. Malcolm's speech: Better Macbeth, Than such a one to reign. The moral is--the dreadful effects even on the best minds of the soul--sickening sense of insecurity. 'Ib.' How admirably Macduff's grief is in harmony with the whole play! It rends, not dissolves, the heart. 'The tune of it goes manly.' Thus is Shakspeare always master of himself and of his subject,--a genuine Proteus:--we see all things in him, as images in a calm lake, most distinct, most accurate,--only more splendid, more glorified. This is correctness in the only philosophical sense. But he requires your sympathy and your submission; you must have that recipiency of moral impression without which the purposes and ends of the drama would be frustrated, and the absence of which demonstrates an utter want of all imagination, a deadness to that necessary pleasure of being innocently--shall I say, deluded?--or rather, drawn away from ourselves to the music of noblest thought in harmonious sounds. Happy he, who not only in the public theatre, but in the labours of a profession, and round the light of his own hearth, still carries a heart so pleasure-fraught! Alas for Macbeth! Now all is inward with him; he has no more prudential prospective reasonings. His wife, the only being who could have had any seat in his affections, dies; he puts on despondency, the final heart-armour of the wretched, and would fain think every thing shadowy and unsubstantial, as indeed all things are to those who cannot regard them as symbols of goodness:-- Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. NOTES ON THE WINTER'S TALE. Although, on the whole, this play is exquisitely respondent to its title, and even in the fault I am about to mention, still a winter's tale; yet it seems a mere indolence of the great bard not to have provided in the oracular response (Act ii. sc. 2.) some ground for Hermione's seeming death and fifteen years voluntary concealment. This might have been easily effected by some obscure sentence of the oracle, as for example:-- 'Nor shall he ever recover an heir, if he have a wife before that recovery.' The idea of this delightful drama is a genuine jealousy of disposition, and it should be immediately followed by the perusal of Othello, which is the direct contrast of it in every particular. For jealousy is a vice of the mind, a culpable tendency of the temper, having certain well known and well defined effects and concomitants, all of which are visible in Leontes, and, I boldly say, not one of which marks its presence in Othello;--such as, first, an excitability by the most inadequate causes, and an eagerness to snatch at proofs; secondly, a grossness of conception, and a disposition to degrade the object of the passion by sensual fancies and images; thirdly, a sense of shame of his own feelings exhibited in a solitary moodiness of humour, and yet from the violence of the passion forced to utter itself, and therefore catching occasions to ease the mind by ambiguities, equivoques, by talking to those who cannot, and who are known not to be able to, understand what is said to them,--in short, by soliloquy in the form of dialogue, and hence a confused, broken, and fragmentary, manner; fourthly, a dread of vulgar ridicule, as distinct from a high sense of honour, or a mistaken sense of duty; and lastly, and immediately, consequent on this, a spirit of selfish vindictiveness. Act i. sc. 1--2. Observe the easy style of chitchat between Camillo and Archidamus as contrasted with the elevated diction on the introduction of the kings and Hermione in the second scene: and how admirably Polixenes' obstinate refusal to Leontes to stay-- There is no tongue that moves; none, none i' the world So soon as yours, could win me;-- prepares for the effect produced by his afterwards yielding to Hermione;--which is, nevertheless, perfectly natural from mere courtesy of sex, and the exhaustion of the will by former efforts of denial, and well calculated to set in nascent action the jealousy of Leontes. This, when once excited, is unconsciously increased by Hermione:-- Yet, good deed, Leontes, I love thee not a jar o' the clock behind What lady she her lord;-- accompanied, as a good actress ought to represent it, by an expression and recoil of apprehension that she had gone too far. At my request, he would not:-- The first working of the jealous fit;-- Too hot, too hot:-- The morbid tendency of Leontes to lay hold of the merest trifles, and his grossness immediately afterwards-- Padling palms and pinching fingers:-- followed by his strange loss of self-control in his dialogue with the little boy. Act iii. sc. 2. Paulina's speech: That thou betray'dst Polixenes,'twas nothing; That did but show thee, of a _fool_, inconstant, And damnable ingrateful.-- Theobald reads 'soul.' I think the original word is Shakspeare's. 1. My ear feels it to be Shakspearian; 2. The involved grammar is Shakspearian;--'show thee, being a fool naturally, to have improved thy folly by inconstancy;' 3. The alteration is most flat, and un-Shakspearian. As to the grossness of the abuse--she calls him 'gross and foolish' a few lines below. Act iv. sc. 2. Speech of Autolycus:-- For the life to come, I sleep out the thought of it. Fine as this is, and delicately characteristic of one who had lived and been reared in the best society, and had been precipitated from it by dice and drabbing; yet still it strikes against my feelings as a note out of tune, and as not coalescing with that pastoral tint which gives such a charm to this act. It is too Macbeth-like in the 'snapper up of unconsidered trifles.' 'Ib.' sc. 3. Perdita's speech:-- From Dis's waggon! daffodils. An epithet is wanted here, not merely or chiefly for the metre, but for the balance, for the aesthetic logic. Perhaps, 'golden' was the word which would set off the 'violets dim.' Ib. Pale primroses That die unmarried.-- Milton's-- And the rathe primrose that forsaken dies. 'Ib.' Perdita's speech:-- Even here undone: I was not much afraid; for once or twice I was about to speak, and tell him plainly, The self-same sun, that shines upon his court, Hides not his visage from our cottage, but Looks on alike. Wilt please you, Sir, be gone! (_To Florizel._) I told you, what would come of this. Beseech you, Of your own state take care: this dream of mine, Being awake, I'll queen it no inch farther, But milk my ewes, and weep. O how more than exquisite is this whole speech!--And that profound nature of noble pride and grief venting themselves in a momentary peevishness of resentment toward Florizel:-- --Wilt please you, Sir, be gone! 'Ib.' Speech of Autolycus:-- Let me have no lying; it becomes none but tradesmen, and they often give us soldiers the lie; but we pay them for it in stamped coin, not stabbing steel;--therefore they do not _give_ us the lie. As we _pay_ them, they, therefore, do not _give_ it us. NOTES ON OTHELLO Act I. sc. 1. Admirable is the preparation, so truly and peculiarly Shakspearian, in the introduction of Roderigo, as the dupe on whom Iago shall first exercise his art, and in so doing display his own character. Roderigo, without any fixed principle, but not without the moral notions and sympathies with honor, which his rank and connections had hung upon him, is already well fitted and predisposed for the purpose; for very want of character and strength of passion, like wind loudest in an empty house, constitute his character. The first three lines happily state the nature and foundation of the friendship between him and Iago,--the purse,--as also the contrast of Roderigo's intemperance of mind with Iago's coolness,--the coolness of a preconceiving experimenter. The mere language of protestation-- If ever I did dream of such a matter, abhor me,-- which falling in with the associative link, determines Roderigo's continuation of complaint-- Thou told'st me, thou didst hold him in thy hate-- elicits at length a true feeling of Iago's mind, the dread of contempt habitual to those, who encourage in themselves, and have their keenest pleasure in, the expression of contempt for others. Observe Iago's high self-opinion, and the moral, that a wicked man will employ real feelings, as well as assume those most alien from his own, as instruments of his purposes:-- --And, by the faith of man, I know my place, I am worth no worse a place. I think Tyrwhitt's reading of 'life' for 'wife'-- A fellow almost damn'd in a fair _wife_-- the true one, as fitting to Iago's contempt for whatever did not display power, and that intellectual power. In what follows, let the reader feel how by and through the glass of two passions, disappointed vanity and envy, the very vices of which he is complaining, are made to act upon him as if they were so many excellences, and the more appropriately, because cunning is always admired and wished for by minds conscious of inward weakness;--but they act only by half, like music on an inattentive auditor, swelling the thoughts which prevent him from listening to it. Ib. 'Rod'. What a full fortune does the 'thick-lips' owe, If he can carry't thus. Roderigo turns off to Othello; and here comes one, if not the only, seeming justification of our blackamoor or negro Othello. Even if we supposed this an uninterrupted tradition of the theatre, and that Shakspeare himself, from want of scenes, and the experience that nothing could be made too marked for the senses of his audience, had practically sanctioned it,--would this prove aught concerning his own intention as a poet for all ages? Can we imagine him so utterly ignorant as to make a barbarous negro plead royal birth,--at a time, too, when negros were not known except as slaves?--As for Iago's language to Brabantio, it implies merely that Othello was a Moor, that is, black. Though I think the rivalry of Roderigo sufficient to account for his wilful confusion of Moor and Negro,--yet, even if compelled to give this up, I should think it only adapted for the acting of the day, and should complain of an enormity built on a single word, in direct contradiction to Iago's 'Barbary horse.' Besides, if we could in good earnest believe Shakspeare ignorant of the distinction, still why should we adopt one disagreeable possibility instead of a ten times greater and more pleasing probability? It is a common error to mistake the epithets applied by the 'dramatis personae' to each other, as truly descriptive of what the audience ought to see or know. No doubt Desdemona saw Othello's visage in his mind; yet, as we are constituted, and most surely as an English audience was disposed in the beginning of the seventeenth century, it would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro. It would argue a disproportionateness, a want of balance, in Desdemona, which Shakspeare does not appear to have in the least contemplated. 'Ib.' Brabantio's speech:-- This accident is not unlike my dream:-- The old careful senator, being caught careless, transfers his caution to his dreaming power at least. 'Ib.' Iago's speech:-- --For their souls, Another of his fathom they have not, To lead their business:-- The forced praise of Othello followed by the bitter hatred of him in this speech! And observe how Brabantio's dream prepares for his recurrence to the notion of philtres, and how both prepare for carrying on the plot of the arraignment of Othello on this ground. 'Ib.' sc. 2. 'Oth'. 'Tis better as it is. How well these few words impress at the outset the truth of Othello's own character of himself at the end--'that he was not easily wrought!' His self-government contradistinguishes him throughout from Leontes. 'Ib.' Othello's speech:-- --And my demerits May speak, _unbonnetted_-- The argument in Theobald's note, where 'and bonnetted' is suggested, goes on the assumption that Shakspeare could not use the same word differently in different places; whereas I should conclude, that as in the passage in Lear the word is employed in its direct meaning, so here it is used metaphorically; and this is confirmed by what has escaped the editors, that it is not 'I,' but 'my demerits' that may speak unbonnetted,--without the symbol of a petitioning inferior. 'Ib.' Othello's speech:-- Please your grace, my ancient; A man he is of honesty and trust: To his conveyance I assign my wife. Compare this with the behaviour of Leontes to his true friend Camillo. 'Ib.' sc. 3. 'Bra'. Look to her, Moor; have a quick eye to see; She has deceiv'd her father, and may thee. 'Oth'. My life upon her faith. In real life, how do we look back to little speeches as presentimental of, or contrasted with, an affecting event! Even so, Shakspeare, as secure of being read over and over, of becoming a family friend, provides this passage for his readers, and leaves it to them. 'Ib.' Iago's speech:-- Virtue? a fig! 'tis in ourselves, that we are thus, or thus, &c. This speech comprises the passionless character of Iago. It is all will in intellect; and therefore he is here a bold partizan of a truth, but yet of a truth converted into a falsehood by the absence of all the necessary modifications caused by the frail nature of man. And then comes the last sentiment,-- Our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts, whereof I take this, that you call--love, to be a sect or scion! Here is the true Iagoism of, alas! how many! Note Iago's pride of mastery in the repetition of 'Go, make money!' to his anticipated dupe, even stronger than his love of lucre: and when Roderigo is completely won-- I am chang'd. I'll go sell all my land-- when the effect has been fully produced, the repetition of triumph-- Go to; farewell; put money enough in your purse! The remainder--Iago's soliloquy--the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity--how awful it is! Yea, whilst he is still allowed to bear the divine image, it is too fiendish for his own steady view,--for the lonely gaze of a being next to devil, and only not quite devil,--and yet a character which Shakspeare has attempted and executed, without disgust and without scandal! Dr. Johnson has remarked that little or nothing is wanting to render the Othello a regular tragedy, but to have opened the play with the arrival of Othello in Cyprus, and to have thrown the preceding act into the form of narration. Here then is the place to determine, whether such a change would or would not be an improvement;--nay, (to throw down the glove with a full challenge) whether the tragedy would or not by such an arrangement become more regular,--that is, more consonant with the rules dictated by universal reason, on the true common-sense of mankind, in its application to the particular case. For in all acts of judgment, it can never be too often recollected, and scarcely too often repeated, that rules are means to ends, and, consequently, that the end must be determined and understood before it can be known what the rules are or ought to be. Now, from a certain species of drama, proposing to itself the accomplishment of certain ends,--these partly arising from the idea of the species itself, but in part, likewise, forced upon the dramatist by accidental circumstances beyond his power to remove or control,--three rules have been abstracted;--in other words, the means most conducive to the attainment of the proposed ends have been generalized, and prescribed under the names of the three unities,--the unity of time, the unity of place, and the unity of action,--which last would, perhaps, have been as appropriately, as well as more intelligibly, entitled the unity of interest. With this last the present question has no immediate concern: in fact, its conjunction with the former two is a mere delusion of words. It is not properly a rule, but in itself the great end not only of the drama, but of the epic poem, the lyric ode, of all poetry, down to the candle-flame cone of an epigram,--nay of poesy in general, as the proper generic term inclusive of all the fine arts as its species. But of the unities of time and place, which alone are entitled to the name of rules, the history of their origin will be their best criterion. You might take the Greek chorus to a place, but you could not bring a place to them without as palpable an equivoque as bringing Birnam wood to Macbeth at Dunsinane. It was the same, though in a less degree, with regard to the unity of time:--the positive fact, not for a moment removed from the senses, the presence, I mean, of the same identical chorus, was a continued measure of time;--and although the imagination may supersede perception, yet it must be granted to be an imperfection--however easily tolerated--to place the two in broad contradiction to each other. In truth, it is a mere accident of terms; for the Trilogy of the Greek theatre was a drama in three acts, and notwithstanding this, what strange contrivances as to place there are in the Aristophanic Frogs. Besides, if the law of mere actual perception is once violated--as it repeatedly is even in the Greek tragedies--why is it more difficult to imagine three hours to be three years than to be a whole day and night? Observe in how many ways Othello is made, first, our acquaintance, then our friend, then the object of our anxiety, before the deeper interest is to be approached! Ib. 'Mont'. But, good lieutenant, is your general wiv'd? 'Cas'. Most fortunately: he hath achiev'd a maid That paragons description, and wild fame; One that excels the quirks of blazoning pens, And, in the essential vesture of creation, Does bear all excellency. Here is Cassio's warm-hearted, yet perfectly disengaged, praise of Desdemona, and sympathy with the 'most fortunately' wived Othello;--and yet Cassio is an enthusiastic admirer, almost a worshipper, of Desdemona. O, that detestable code that excellence cannot be loved in any form that is female, but it must needs be selfish! Observe Othello's 'honest,' and Cassio's 'bold' Iago, and Cassio's full guileless-hearted wishes for the safety and love-raptures of Othello and 'the divine Desdemona.' And also note the exquisite circumstance of Cassio's kissing Iago's wife, as if it ought to be impossible that the dullest auditor should not feel Cassio's religious love of Desdemona's purity. Iago's answers are the sneers which a proud bad intellect feels towards woman, and expresses to a wife. Surely it ought to be considered a very exalted compliment to women, that all the sarcasms on them in Shakspeare are put in the mouths of villains. Ib. 'Des'. I am not merry; but I do beguile, &c. The struggle of courtesy in Desdemona to abstract her attention. Ib. ('Iago aside'). He takes her by the palm: Ay, well said, whisper; with as little a web as this, will I ensnare as great a fly as Cassio. Ay, smile upon her, do, &c. The importance given to trifles, and made fertile by the villainy of the observer. 'Ib.' Iago's dialogue with Roderigo: This is the rehearsal on the dupe of the traitor's intentions on Othello. 'Ib.' Iago's soliloquy: But partly led to diet my revenge, For that I do suspect the lusty Moor Hath leap'd into my seat. This thought, originally by Iago's own confession a mere suspicion, is now ripening, and gnaws his base nature as his own 'poisonous mineral' is about to gnaw the noble heart of his general. 'Ib.' sc. 3. Othello's speech: I know, Iago, Thy honesty and love doth mince this matter, Making it light to Cassio. Honesty and love! Ay, and who but the reader of the play could think otherwise? 'Ib.' Iago's soliloquy: And what's he then that says--I play the villain? When this advice is free I give, and honest, Probable to thinking, and, indeed, the course To win the Moor again. He is not, you see, an absolute fiend; or, at least, he wishes to think himself not so. Act iii. sc. 3. 'Des.' Before Æmilia here, I give thee warrant of this place. The over-zeal of innocence in Desdemona. Ib. 'Enter Desdemona and Æmilia.' 'Oth.' If she be false, O, then, heaven mocks itself! I'll not believe it. Divine! The effect of innocence and the better genius! Act iv. sc. 3. 'Æmil.' Why, the wrong is but a wrong i' the world; and having the world for your labour,'tis a wrong in your own world, and you might quickly make it right. Warburton's note. What any other man, who had learning enough, might have quoted as a playful and witty illustration of his remarks against the Calvinistic 'thesis', Warburton gravely attributes to Shakspeare as intentional; and this, too, in the mouth of a lady's woman! Act v. last scene. Othello's speech:-- --Of one, whose hand, Like the base _Indian_, threw a pearl away Richer than all his tribe, &c. Theobald's note from Warburton. Thus it is for no-poets to comment on the greatest of poets! To make Othello say that he, who had killed his wife, was like Herod who killed Mariamne!--O, how many beauties, in this one line, were impenetrable to the ever thought-swarming, but idealess, Warburton! Othello wishes to excuse himself on the score of ignorance, and yet not to excuse himself,--to excuse himself by accusing. This struggle of feeling is finely conveyed in the word 'base,' which is applied to the rude Indian, not in his own character, but as the momentary representative of Othello's. 'Indian'--for I retain the old reading--means American, a savage 'in genere'. Finally, let me repeat that Othello does not kill Desdemona in jealousy, but in a conviction forced upon him by the almost superhuman art of Iago, such a conviction as any man would and must have entertained who had believed Iago's honesty as Othello did. We, the audience, know that Iago is a villain from the beginning; but in considering the essence of the Shakspearian Othello, we must perseveringly place ourselves in his situation, and under his circumstances. Then we shall immediately feel the fundamental difference between the solemn agony of the noble Moor, and the wretched fishing jealousies of Leontes, and the morbid suspiciousness of Leonatus, who is, in other respects, a fine character. Othello had no life but in Desdemona:--the belief that she, his angel, had fallen from the heaven of her native innocence, wrought a civil war in his heart. She is his counterpart; and, like him, is almost sanctified in our eyes by her absolute unsuspiciousness, and holy entireness of love. As the curtain drops, which do we pity the most? ... 'Extremum hunc'--.There are three powers:-- Wit, which discovers partial likeness hidden in general diversity; subtlety, which discovers the diversity concealed in general apparent sameness;-- and profundity, which discovers an essential unity under all the semblances of difference. Give to a subtle man fancy, and he is a wit; to a deep man imagination, and he is a philosopher. Add, again, pleasurable sensibility in the threefold form of sympathy with the interesting in morals, the impressive in form, and the harmonious in sound,--and you have the poet. But combine all,--wit, subtlety, and fancy, with profundity, imagination, and moral and physical susceptibility of the pleasurable,-- and let the object of action be man universal; and we shall have--O, rash prophecy! say, rather, we have--a SHAKSPEARE! NOTES ON BEN JONSON. It would be amusing to collect out of our dramatists from Elizabeth to Charles I proofs of the manners of the times. One striking symptom of general coarseness of manners, which may co-exist with great refinement of morals, as, alas! 'vice versa', is to be seen in the very frequent allusions to the olfactories with their most disgusting stimulants, and these, too, in the conversation of virtuous ladies. This would not appear so strange to one who had been on terms of familiarity with Sicilian and Italian women of rank; and bad as they may, too many of them, actually be, yet I doubt not that the extreme grossness of their language has impressed many an Englishman of the present era with far darker notions than the same language would have produced in the mind of one of Elizabeth's, or James's courtiers. Those who have read Shakspeare only, complain of occasional grossness in his plays; but compare him with his contemporaries, and the inevitable conviction is, that of the exquisite purity of his imagination. The observation I have prefixed to the Volpone is the key to the faint interest which these noble efforts of intellectual power excite, with the exception of the fragment of the Sad Shepherd; because in that piece only is there any character with whom you can morally sympathize. On the other hand, Measure for Measure is the only play of Shakspeare's in which there are not some one or more characters, generally many, whom you follow with affectionate feeling. For I confess that Isabella, of all Shakspeare's female characters, pleases me the least; and Measure for Measure is, indeed, the only one of his genuine works, which is painful to me. Let me not conclude this remark, however, without a thankful acknowledgment to the 'manes' of Ben Jonson, that the more I study his writings, I the more admire them; and the more my study of him resembles that of an ancient classic, in the 'minutiæ' of his rhythm, metre, choice of words, forms of connection, and so forth, the more numerous have the points of my admiration become. I may add, too, that both the study and the admiration cannot but be disinterested, for to expect therefrom any advantage to the present drama would be ignorance. The latter is utterly heterogeneous from the drama of the Shakspearian age, with a diverse object and contrary principle. The one was to present a model by imitation of real life, taking from real life all that in it which it ought to be, and supplying the rest;--the other is to copy what is, and as it is,--at best a tolerable, but most frequently a blundering, copy. In the former the difference was an essential element; in the latter an involuntary defect. We should think it strange, if a tale in dance were announced, and the actors did not dance at all;--and yet such is modern comedy. WHALLEY'S PREFACE. But Jonson was soon sensible, how inconsistent this medley of names and manners was in reason and nature; and with how little propriety it could ever have a place in a legitimate and just picture of real life. But did Jonson reflect that the very essence of a play, the very language in which it is written, is a fiction to which all the parts must conform? Surely, Greek manners in English should be a still grosser improbability than a Greek name transferred to English manners. Ben's 'personæ' are too often not characters, but derangements;--the hopeless patients of a mad-doctor rather,--exhibitions of folly betraying itself in spite of existing reason and prudence. He not poetically, but painfully exaggerates every trait; that is, not by the drollery of the circumstance, but by the excess of the originating feeling. But to this we might reply, that far from being thought to build his characters upon abstract ideas, he was really accused of representing particular persons then existing; and that even those characters which appear to be the most exaggerated, are said to have had their respective archetypes in nature and life. This degrades Jonson into a libeller, instead of justifying him as a dramatic poet. 'Non quod verum est, sed quod verisimile', is the dramatist's rule. At all events, the poet who chooses transitory manners, ought to content himself with transitory praise. If his object be reputation, he ought not to expect fame. The utmost he can look forwards to, is to be quoted by, and to enliven the writings of, an antiquarian. Pistol, Nym and 'id genus omne', do not please us as characters, but are endured as fantastic creations, foils to the native wit of Falstaff.--I say wit emphatically; for this character so often extolled as the masterpiece of humor, neither contains, nor was meant to contain, any humor at all. WHALLEY'S LIFE OF JONSON. It is to the honor of Jonson's judgment, that 'the greatest poet of our nation' had the same opinion of Donne's genius and wit; and hath preserved part of him from perishing, by putting his thoughts and satire into modern verse. 'Videlicet' Pope! He said further to Drummond, Shakspeare wanted art, and sometimes sense; for in one of his plays he brought in a number of men, saying they had suffered shipwreck in Bohemia, where is no sea near by a hundred miles. I have often thought Shakspeare justified in this seeming anachronism. In Pagan times a single name of a German kingdom might well be supposed to comprise a hundred miles more than at present. The truth is, these notes of Drummond's are more disgraceful to himself than to Jonson. It would be easy to conjecture how grossly Jonson must have been misunderstood, and what he had said in jest, as of Hippocrates, interpreted in earnest. But this is characteristic of a Scotchman; he has no notion of a jest, unless you tell him--'This is a joke!'--and still less of that finer shade of feeling, the half-and-half, in which Englishmen naturally delight. EVERY MAN OUT OF HIS HUMOUR. Epilogue. The throat of war be stopt within her land, And _turtle-footed_ peace dance fairie rings About her court. 'Turtle-footed' is a pretty word, a very pretty word: pray, what does it mean? Doves, I presume, are not dancers; and the other sort of turtle, land or sea, green-fat or hawksbill, would, I should suppose, succeed better in slow minuets than in the brisk rondillo. In one sense, to be sure, pigeons and ring-doves could not dance but with 'eclat'--'a claw?' POETASTER. Introduction. Light! I salute thee, but with wounded nerves, Wishing thy golden splendor pitchy darkness. There is no reason to suppose Satan's address to the sun in the Paradise Lost, more than a mere coincidence with these lines; but were it otherwise, it would be a fine instance, what usurious interest a great genius pays in borrowing. It would not be difficult to give a detailed psychological proof from these constant outbursts of anxious self-assertion, that Jonson was not a genius, a creative power. Subtract that one thing, and you may safely accumulate on his name all other excellencies of a capacious, vigorous, agile, and richly-stored intellect. Act i. sc. 1. 'Ovid'. While slaves be false, fathers hard, and bawds be whorish-- The roughness noticed by Theobald and Whalley, may be cured by a simple transposition:-- While fathers hard, slaves false, and bawds be whorish. Act iv. sc. 3. 'Crisp'. O--oblatrant--furibund--fatuate--strenuous. O--conscious. It would form an interesting essay, or rather series of essays, in a periodical work, were all the attempts to ridicule new phrases brought together, the proportion observed of words ridiculed which have been adopted, and are now common, such as 'strenuous', 'conscious', &c., and a trial made how far any grounds can be detected, so that one might determine beforehand whether a word was invented under the conditions of assimilability to our language or not. Thus much is certain, that the ridiculers were as often wrong as right; and Shakspeare himself could not prevent the naturalization of 'accommodation', 'remuneration', &c.; or Swift the gross abuse even of the word 'idea'. FALL OF SEJANUS. Act I. 'Arruntius'. The name Tiberius, I hope, will keep, howe'er he hath foregone The dignity and power. 'Silius'. Sure, while he lives. 'Arr'. And dead, it comes to Drusus. Should he fail, To the brave issue of Germanicus; And they are three: too many (ha?) for him To have a plot upon? 'Sil'. I do not know The heart of his designs; but, sure, their face Looks farther than the present. 'Arr'. By the gods, If I could guess he had but such a thought, My sword should cleave him down, &c. The anachronic mixture in this Arruntius of the Roman republican, to whom Tiberius must have appeared as much a tyrant as Sejanus, with his James-and-Charles-the-First zeal for legitimacy of descent in this passage, is amusing. Of our great names Milton was, I think, the first who could properly be called a republican. My recollections of Buchanan's works are too faint to enable me to judge whether the historian is not a fair exception. Act ii. Speech of Sejanus:-- Adultery! it is the lightest ill I will commit. A race of wicked acts Shall flow out of my anger, and o'erspread The world's wide face, which no posterity Shall e'er approve, nor yet keep silent, &c. The more we reflect and examine, examine and reflect, the more astonished shall we be at the immense superiority of Shakspeare over his contemporaries:--and yet what contemporaries!--giant minds indeed! Think of Jonson's erudition, and the force of learned authority in that age; and yet in no genuine part of Shakspeare's works is there to be found such an absurd rant and ventriloquism as this, and too, too many other passages ferruminated by Jonson from Seneca's tragedies and the writings of the later Romans. I call it ventriloquism, because Sejanus is a puppet, out of which the poet makes his own voice appear to come. Act v. Scene of the sacrifice to Fortune. This scene is unspeakably irrational. To believe, and yet to scoff at, a present miracle is little less than impossible. Sejanus should have been made to suspect priestcraft and a secret conspiracy against him. VOLPONE. This admirable, indeed, but yet more wonderful than admirable, play is from the fertility and vigour of invention, character, language, and sentiment the strongest proof, how impossible it is to keep up any pleasurable interest in a tale, in which there is no goodness of heart in any of the prominent characters. After the third act, this play becomes not a dead, but a painful, weight on the feelings. Zeluco is an instance of the same truth. Bonario and Celia should have been made in some way or other principals in the plot; which they might have been, and the objects of interest, without having been made characters. In novels, the person, in whose fate you are most interested, is often the least marked character of the whole. If it were possible to lessen the paramountcy of Volpone himself, a most delightful comedy might be produced, by making Celia the ward or niece of Corvino, instead of his wife, and Bonario her lover. EPICÆNE. This is to my feelings the most entertaining of old Ben's comedies, and, more than any other, would admit of being brought out anew, if under the management of a judicious and stage-understanding playwright; and an actor, who had studied Morose, might make his fortune. Act i. sc. 1. Clerimont's speech:-- He would have hanged a pewterer's 'prentice once on a Shrove Tuesday's riot, for being 'o that trade, when the rest were _quiet_. The old copies read 'quit', i. e. discharged from working, and gone to divert themselves. (Whalley's note.) It should be 'quit', no doubt; but not meaning 'discharged from working,' &c.--but quit, that is, acquitted. The pewterer was at his holiday diversion as well as the other apprentices, and they as forward in the riot as he. But he alone was punished under pretext of the riot, but in fact for his trade. Act ii. sc. 1. 'Morose'. Cannot I, yet, find out a more compendious method, than by this _trunk_, to save my servants the labour of speech, and mine ears the discord of sounds? What does 'trunk' mean here and in the 1st scene of the 1st act? Is it a large ear-trumpet?--or rather a tube, such as passes from parlour to kitchen, instead of a bell? Whalley's note at the end. Some critics of the last age imagined the character of Morose to be wholly out of nature. But to vindicate our poet, Mr. Dryden tells us from tradition, and we may venture to take his word, that Jonson was really acquainted with a person of this whimsical turn of mind: and as humor is a personal quality, the poet is acquitted from the charge of exhibiting a monster, or an extravagant unnatural caricatura. If Dryden had not made all additional proof superfluous by his own plays, this very vindication would evince that he had formed a false and vulgar conception of the nature and conditions of the drama and dramatic personation. Ben Jonson would himself have rejected such a plea:-- For he knew, poet never credit gain'd By writing _truths_, but things, like truths, well feign'd. By 'truths' he means 'facts.' Caricatures are not less so, because they are found existing in real life. Comedy demands characters, and leaves caricatures to farce. The safest and truest defence of old Ben would be to call the Epicæne the best of farces. The defect in Morose, as in other of Jonson's 'dramatis personæ', lies in this;--that the accident is not a prominence growing out of, and nourished by, the character which still circulates in it, but that the character, such as it is, rises out of, or, rather, consists in, the accident. Shakspeare's comic personages have exquisitely characteristic features; however awry, disproportionate, and laughable they may be, still, like Bardolph's nose, they are features. But Jonson's are either a man with a huge wen, having a circulation of its own, and which we might conceive amputated, and the patient thereby losing all his character; or they are mere wens themselves instead of men,--wens personified, or with eyes, nose, and mouth cut out, mandrake-fashion. 'Nota bene'. All the above, and much more, will have been justly said, if, and whenever, the drama of Jonson is brought into comparisons of rivalry with the Shakspearian. But this should not be. Let its inferiority to the Shakspearian be at once fairly owned,--but at the same time as the inferiority of an altogether different 'genus' of the drama. On this ground, old Ben would still maintain his proud height. He, no less than Shakspeare, stands on the summit of his hill, and looks round him like a master,--though his be Lattrig and Shakspeare's Skiddaw. THE ALCHEMIST. Act I. sc. 2. Face's speech:-- Will take his oath o' the Greek _Xenophon_, If need be, in his pocket. Another reading is 'Testament.' Probably, the meaning is,--that intending to give false evidence, he carried a Greek Xenophon to pass it off for a Greek Testament, and so avoid perjury--as the Irish do, by contriving to kiss their thumb-nails instead of the book. Act ii. sc. 2. Mammon's speech:-- I will have all my beds blown up; not stuft: Down is too hard. Thus the air-cushions, though perhaps only lately brought into use, were invented in idea in the seventeenth century! CATILINE'S CONSPIRACY. A fondness for judging one work by comparison with others, perhaps altogether of a different class, argues a vulgar taste. Yet it is chiefly on this principle that the Catiline has been rated so low. Take it and Sejanus, as compositions of a particular kind, namely, as a mode of relating great historical events in the liveliest and most interesting manner, and I cannot help wishing that we had whole volumes of such plays. We might as rationally expect the excitement of the Vicar of Wakefield from Goldsmith's History of England, as that of Lear, Othello, &c. from the Sejanus or Catiline. Act i. sc. 4. 'Cat'. Sirrah, what ail you? ('He spies one of his boys not answer'.) 'Pag'. Nothing. 'Best'. Somewhat modest. 'Cat'. Slave, I will strike your soul out with my foot, &c. This is either an unintelligible, or, in every sense, a most unnatural, passage,--improbable, if not impossible, at the moment of signing and swearing such a conspiracy, to the most libidinous satyr. The very presence of the boys is an outrage to probability. I suspect that these lines down to the words 'throat opens,' should be removed back so as to follow the words 'on this part of the house,' in the speech of Catiline soon after the entry of the conspirators. A total erasure, however, would be the best, or, rather, the only possible, amendment. Act ii. sc. 2. Sempronia's speech:-- --He is but a new fellow, An _inmate_ here in Rome, as Catiline calls him-- A 'lodger' would have been a happier imitation of the 'inquilinus' of Sallust. Act iv. sc. 6. Speech of Cethegus:-- Can these or such be any aids to us, &c. What a strange notion Ben must have formed of a determined, remorseless, all-daring, fool-hardiness, to have represented it in such a mouthing Tamburlane, and bombastic tongue-bully as this Cethegus of his! BARTHOLOMEW FAIR. Induction. Scrivener's speech:-- If there be never a _servant-monster_ i' the Fair, who can help it, he says, nor a nest of antiques? The best excuse that can be made for Jonson, and in a somewhat less degree for Beaumont and Fletcher, in respect of these base and silly sneers at Shakspeare, is, that his plays were present to men's minds chiefly as acted. They had not a neat edition of them, as we have, so as, by comparing the one with the other, to form a just notion of the mighty mind that produced the whole. At all events, and in every point of view, Jonson stands far higher in a moral light than Beaumont and Fletcher. He was a fair contemporary, and in his way, and as far as Shakspeare is concerned, an original. But Beaumont and Fletcher were always imitators of, and often borrowers from, him, and yet sneer at him with a spite far more malignant than Jonson, who, besides, has made noble compensation by his praises. Act ii. sc. 3. 'Just'. I mean a child of the horn-thumb, a babe _of booty_, boy, a cutpurse. Does not this confirm, what the passage itself cannot but suggest, the propriety of substituting 'booty' for 'beauty' in Falstaff's speech, Henry IV. Pt. I. act i. sc. 2. 'Let not us, &c.?' It is not often that old Ben condescends to imitate a modern author; but master Dan. Knockhum Jordan and his vapours are manifest reflexes of Nym and Pistol. Ib. sc. 5. 'Quarl'. She'll make excellent geer for the coachmakers here in Smithfield, to anoint wheels and axletrees with. Good! but yet it falls short of the speech of a Mr. Johnes, M. P., in the Common Council, on the invasion intended by Buonaparte: 'Houses plundered--then burnt;--sons conscribed--wives and daughters ravished, &c. &c.--"But as for you, you luxurious Aldermen! with your fat will he grease the wheels of his triumphal chariot!" Ib. sc. 6. 'Cok'. Avoid i' your satin doublet, Numps. This reminds me of Shakspeare's 'Aroint thee, witch!' I find in several books of that age the words _aloigne_ and _eloigne_--that is,--'keep your distance!' or 'off with you!' Perhaps 'aroint' was a corruption of 'aloigne' by the vulgar. The common etymology from _ronger_ to gnaw seems unsatisfactory. Act iii. sc. 4. 'Quarl', How now, Numps! almost tired i' your protectorship? overparted, overparted? An odd sort of prophetic ality in this Numps and old Noll! Ib. sc. 6. Knockhum's speech:-- He eats with his eyes, as well as his teeth. A good motto for the Parson in Hogarth's Election Dinner,--who shows how easily he might be reconciled to the Church of Rome, for he worships what he eats. Act v. sc. 5. 'Pup. Di'. It is not prophane. 'Lan'. It is not prophane, he says. 'Boy'. It is prophane. 'Pup'. It is not prophane. 'Boy'. It is prophane. 'Pup'. It is not prophane. 'Lan'. Well said, confute him with Not, still. An imitation of the quarrel between Bacchus and the Frogs in Aristophanes:-- [Greek (transliterated): Choros. alla maen kekraxomestha g', hoposon hae pharugx an aem_on chandanae, di' aemeras, brekekekex, koax, koax. Dionusos. touto gar ou nikaesete. Choros. oude maen haemas su pant_os. Dionusos. oude maen humeis ge dae m' oudepote.] THE DEVIL IS AN ASS. Act I. sc. 1. 'Pug'. Why any: Fraud, Or Covetousness, or lady Vanity, Or old Iniquity, _I'll call him hither_. The words in italics [between undescores] should probably be given to the master-devil, Satan. (Whalley's note.) That is, against all probability, and with a (for Jonson) impossible violation of character. The words plainly belong to Pug, and mark at once his simpleness and his impatience. Ib. sc. 4. Fitz-dottrel's soliloquy:- Compare this exquisite piece of sense, satire, and sound philosophy in 1616 with Sir M. Hale's speech from the bench in a trial of a witch many years afterwards. [1] Act ii. sc. 1. Meercraft's speech:-- Sir, money's a whore, a bawd, a drudge.-- I doubt not that 'money' was the first word of the line, and has dropped out:-- Money! Sir, money's a, &c. [Footnote 1: In 1664, at Bury St. Edmonds on the trial of Rose Cullender and Amy Duny. Ed.] THE STAPLE OF NEWS. Act IV. sc. 3. Pecunia's speech:-- No, he would ha' done, That lay not in his power: he had the use Of your bodies, Band and Wax, and sometimes Statute's. Read (1815), --he had the use of Your bodies, &c. Now, however, I doubt the legitimacy of my transposition of the 'of' from the beginning of this latter line to the end of the one preceding;--for though it facilitates the metre and reading of the latter line, and is frequent in Massinger, this disjunction of the preposition from its case seems to have been disallowed by Jonson. Perhaps the better reading is-- O' your bodies, &c.-- the two syllables being slurred into one, or rather snatched, or sucked, up into the emphasized 'your.' In all points of view, therefore, Ben's judgment is just; for in this way, the line cannot be read, as metre, without that strong and quick emphasis on 'your' which the sense requires;--and had not the sense required an emphasis on 'your,' the _tmesis_ of the sign of its cases 'of,' 'to,' &c. would destroy almost all boundary between the dramatic verse and prose in comedy:--a lesson not to be rash in conjectural amendments. 1818. Ib. sc. 4. 'P. jun.' I love all men of virtue, _frommy_ Princess.-- 'Frommy,' 'fromme', pious, dutiful, &c. Act v. sc. 4. Penny-boy sen. and Porter:-- I dare not, will not, think that honest Ben had Lear in his mind in this mock mad scene. THE NEW INN. Act I. sc. 1. Host's speech:-- A heavy purse, and then two turtles, _makes_.-- 'Makes', frequent in old books, and even now used in some counties for mates, or pairs. Ib. sc. 3. Host's speech:-- --And for a leap O' the vaulting horse, to _play_ the vaulting _house_.-- Instead of reading with Whalley 'ply' for 'play,' I would suggest 'horse' for 'house.' The meaning would then be obvious and pertinent. The punlet, or pun-maggot, or pun intentional, 'horse and house,' is below Jonson. The 'jeu-de-mots' just below-- Read a lecture Upon _Aquinas_ at St. Thomas à _Water_ings-- had a learned smack in it to season its insipidity. Ib. sc. 6. Lovel's speech:-- Then shower'd his bounties on me, like the Hours, That open-handed sit upon the clouds, And press the liberality of heaven Down to the laps of thankful men! Like many other similar passages in Jonson, this is [Greek (transliterated): eidos chalepon idein]--a sight which it is difficult to make one's self see,--a picture my fancy cannot copy detached from the words. Act ii. sc. 5. Though it was hard upon old Ben, yet Felton, it must be confessed, was in the right in considering the Fly, Tipto, Bat Burst, &c. of this play mere dotages. Such a scene as this was enough to damn a new play; and Nick Stuff is worse still,--most abominable stuff indeed! Act in. sc. 2. Lovel's speech:-- So knowledge first begets benevolence, Benevolence breeds friendship, friendship love.-- Jonson has elsewhere proceeded thus far; but the part most difficult and delicate, yet, perhaps, not the least capable of being both morally and poetically treated, is the union itself, and what, even in this life, it can be. NOTES ON BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. Seward's Preface. 1750. The King And No King, too, is extremely spirited in all its characters; Arbaces holds up a mirror to all men of virtuous principles but violent passions. Hence he is, as it were, at once magnanimity and pride, patience and fury, gentleness and rigor, chastity and incest, and is one of the finest mixtures of virtues and vices that any poet has drawn, &c. These are among the endless instances of the abject state to which psychology had sunk from the reign of Charles I. to the middle of the present reign of George III.; and even now it is but just awaking. Ib. Seward's comparison of Julia's speech in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, act iv. last scene-- Madam, 'twas Ariadne passioning, &c.-- with Aspatia's speech in the Maid's Tragedy-- I stand upon the sea-beach now, &c. (Act ii.) and preference of the latter. It is strange to take an incidental passage of one writer, intended only for a subordinate part, and compare it with the same thought in another writer, who had chosen it for a prominent and principal figure. Ib. Seward's preference of Alphonso's poisoning in A Wife for a Month, act i. sc. 1, to the passage in King John, act v. sc. 7,-- Poison'd, ill fare! dead, forsook, cast off! Mr. Seward! Mr. Seward! you may be, and I trust you are, an angel; but you were an ass. Ib. Every reader of _taste_ will see how superior this is to the quotation from Shakspeare. Of what taste? Ib. Seward's classification of the Plays:-- Surely Monsieur Thomas, The Chances, Beggar's Bush, and the Pilgrim, should have been placed in the very first class! But the whole attempt ends in a woeful failure. HARRIS'S COMMENDATORY POEM ON FLETCHER. I'd have a state of wit convok'd, which hath A _power_ to take up on common faith:-- This is an instance of that modifying of quantity by emphasis, without which our elder poets cannot be scanned. 'Power,' here, instead of being one long syllable--pow'r--must be sounded, not indeed as a spondee, nor yet as a trochee; but as--[Symbol: u-shape beneath line];--the first syllable is 1 1/4. We can, indeed, never expect an authentic edition of our elder dramatic poets (for in those times a drama was a poem), until some man undertakes the work, who has studied the philosophy of metre. This has been found the main torch of sound restoration in the Greek dramatists by Bentley, Porson, and their followers;--how much more, then, in writers in our own language! It is true that quantity, an almost iron law with the Greek, is in English rather a subject for a peculiarly fine ear, than any law or even rule; but, then, instead of it, we have, first, accent; secondly, emphasis; and lastly, retardation, and acceleration of the times of syllables according to the meaning of the words, the passion that accompanies them, and even the character of the person that uses them. With due attention to these,--above all, to that, which requires the most attention and the finest taste, the character, Massinger, for example, might be reduced to a rich and yet regular metre. But then the 'regulæ' must be first known;--though I will venture to say, that he who does not find a line (not corrupted) of Massinger's flow to the time total of a trimeter catalectic iambic verse, has not read it aright. But by virtue of the last principle--the retardation or acceleration of time--we have the proceleusmatic foot * * * *, and the 'dispondaeus' -- -- -- --, not to mention the 'choriambus', the ionics, paeons, and epitrites. Since Dryden, the metre of our poets leads to the sense: in our elder and more genuine bards, the sense, including the passion, leads to the metre. Read even Donne's satires as he meant them to be read, and as the sense and passion demand, and you will find in the lines a manly harmony. LIFE OF FLETCHER IN STOCKDALE'S EDITION. 1811. In general their plots are more regular than Shakspeare's.-- This is true, if true at all, only before a court of criticism, which judges one scheme by the laws of another and a diverse one. Shakspeare's plots have their own laws or regulæ, and according to these they are regular. MAID'S TRAGEDY. Act I. The metrical arrangement is most slovenly throughout. 'Strat'. As well as masque can be, &c. and all that follows to 'who is return'd'--is plainly blank verse, and falls easily into it. Ib. Speech of Melantius:-- These soft and silken wars are not for me: The music must be shrill, and all confus'd, That stirs my blood; and then I dance with arms. What strange self-trumpeters and tongue-bullies all the brave soldiers of Beaumont and Fletcher are! Yet I am inclined to think it was the fashion of the age from the Soldier's speech in the Counter Scuffle; and deeper than the fashion B. and F. did not fathom. Ib. Speech of Lysippus:-- Yes, but this lady Walks discontented, with her wat'ry eyes Bent on the earth, &c. Opulent as Shakspeare was, and of his opulence prodigal, he yet would not have put this exquisite piece of poetry in the mouth of a no-character, or as addressed to a Melantius. I wish that B. and F. had written poems instead of tragedies. Ib. 'Mel'. I might run fiercely, not more hastily, Upon my foe. Read I might run more fiercely, not more hastily.-- Ib. Speech of Calianax:-- Office! I would I could put it off! I am sure I sweat quite through my office! The syllable _off_ reminds the testy statesman of his robe, and he carries on the image. Ib. Speech of Melantius:-- --Would that blood, That sea of blood, that I have lost in fight, &c. All B. and F.'s generals are pugilists, or cudgel-fighters, that boast of their bottom and of the _claret_ they have shed. Ib. The Masque;--Cinthia's speech:-- But I will give a greater state and glory, And raise to time a _noble_ memory Of what these lovers are. I suspect that 'nobler,' pronounced as 'nobiler'--[Symbol (metrical): U-=shape below the line]--, was the poet's word, and that the accent is to be placed on the penultimate of 'memory.' As to the passage-- Yet, while our reign lasts, let us stretch our power, &c. removed from the text of Cinthia's speech by these foolish editors as unworthy of B. and F.--the first eight lines are not worse, and the last couplet incomparably better, than the stanza retained. Act ii. Amintor's speech:-- Oh, thou hast nam'd a word, that wipes away All thoughts revengeful! In that sacred name, 'The king,' there lies a terror. It is worth noticing that of the three greatest tragedians, Massinger was a democrat, Beaumont and Fletcher the most servile _jure divino_ royalist, and Shakspeare a philosopher;--if aught personal, an aristocrat. A KING AND NO KING. Act IV. Speech of Tigranes:-- She, that forgat the greatness of her grief And miseries, that must follow such mad passions, Endless and wild _as_ women! &c. Seward's note and suggestion of 'in.' It would be amusing to learn from some existing friend of Mr. Seward what he meant, or rather dreamed, in this note. It is certainly a difficult passage, of which there are two solutions;--one, that the writer was somewhat more injudicious than usual;--the other, that he was very, very much more profound and Shakspearian than usual. Seward's emendation, at all events, is right and obvious. Were it a passage of Shakspeare, I should not hesitate to interpret it as characteristic of Tigranes' state of mind,--disliking the very virtues, and therefore half-consciously representing them as mere products of the violence, of the sex in general in all their whims, and yet forced to admire, and to feel and to express gratitude for, the exertion in his own instance. The inconsistency of the passage would be the consistency of the author. But this is above Beaumont and Fletcher. THE SCORNFUL LADY. Act II. Sir Roger's speech:-- Did I for this consume my _quarters_ in meditations, vows, and woo'd her in heroical epistles? Did I expound the Owl, and undertake, with labor and expense, the recollection of those thousand pieces, consum'd in cellars and tobacco-shops, of that our honor'd Englishman, Nic. Broughton? &c. Strange, that neither Mr. Theobald, nor Mr. Seward, should have seen that this mock heroic speech is in full-mouthed blank verse! Had they seen this, they would have seen that 'quarters' is a substitution of the players for 'quires' or 'squares,' (that is) of paper:-- Consume my quires in meditations, vows, And woo'd her in heroical epistles. They ought, likewise, to have seen that the abbreviated 'Ni. Br.' of the text was properly 'Mi. Dr.'--and that Michael Drayton, not Nicholas Broughton, is here ridiculed for his poem The Owl and his Heroical Epistles. Ib. Speech of Younger Loveless:-- Fill him some wine. Thou dost not see me mov'd, &c. These Editors ought to have learnt, that scarce an instance occurs in B. and F. of a long speech not in metre. This is plain staring blank verse. THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY. I cannot but think that in a country conquered by a nobler race than the natives, and in which the latter became villeins and bondsmen, this custom, 'lex merchetae', may have been introduced for wise purposes,--as of improving the breed, lessening the antipathy of different races, and producing a new bond of relationship between the lord and the tenant, who, as the eldest born, would, at least, have a chance of being, and a probability of being thought, the lord's child. In the West Indies it cannot have these effects, because the mulatto is marked by nature different from the father, and because there is no bond, no law, no custom, but of mere debauchery. 1815. Act i. sc. 1. Rutilio's speech:-- Yet if you play not fair play, &c. Evidently to be transposed and read thus:-- Yet if you play not fair, above-board too, I'll tell you what--I've a foolish engine here:--I say no more--But if your Honor's guts are not enchanted-- Licentious as the comic metre of B. and F. is,--a far more lawless, and yet far less happy, imitation of the rhythm of animated talk in real life than Massinger's--still it is made worse than it really is by ignorance of the halves, thirds, and two-thirds of a line which B. and F. adopted from the Italian and Spanish dramatists. Thus in Rutilio's speech:-- Though I confess Any man would desire to have her, and by any means, &c. Correct the whole passage-- Though I confess Any man would Desire to have her, and by any means, At any rate too, yet this common hangman That hath whipt off a /THOUsand maids' HEADS/ already-- That he should glean the harvest, sticks in my stomach! [Between the two /, upper-case syllables have the stress, written as a horizontal line above them in the original text, and lower-case syllables are unstressed, written as a u-shape (the u-symbol previously described) above them. text Ed.] In all comic metres the gulping of short syllables, and the abbreviation of syllables ordinarily long by the rapid pronunciation of eagerness and vehemence, are not so much a license, as a law,--a faithful copy of nature, and let them be read characteristically, the times will be found nearly equal. Thus the three words marked above make a 'choriambus'--u u --, or perhaps a 'paeon primus'--u u u; a dactyl, by virtue of comic rapidity, being only equal to an iambus when distinctly pronounced. I have no doubt that all B. and F.'s works might be safely corrected by attention to this rule, and that the editor is entitled to transpositions of all kinds, and to not a few omissions. For the rule of the metre once lost--what was to restrain the actors from interpolation? THE ELDER BROTHER Act I. sc. 2. Charles's speech:-- --For what concerns tillage, Who better can deliver it than Virgil In his Georgicks? and to cure your herds, His Bucolicks is a master-piece. Fletcher was too good a scholar to fall into so gross a blunder, as Messrs. Sympson and Colman suppose. I read the passage thus:-- --For what concerns tillage, Who better can deliver it than Virgil, In his /GeORGicks/, _or_ to cure your herds; (His Bucolicks are a master-piece.) But when, &c. Jealous of Virgil's honor, he is afraid lest, by referring to the Georgics alone, he might be understood as undervaluing the preceding work. 'Not that I do not admire the Bucolics, too, in their way:--But when, &c.' Act iii. sc. 3. Charles's speech:-- --She has a face looks like a _story_; The _story_ of the heavens looks very like her. Seward reads 'glory;' and Theobald quotes from Philaster-- That reads the story of a woman's face.-- I can make sense of this passage as little as Mr. Seward;--the passage from Philaster is nothing to the purpose. Instead of 'a story,' I have sometimes thought of proposing 'Astræa.' Ib. Angellina's speech:-- --You're old and dim, Sir, And the shadow of the earth eclips'd your judgment. Inappropriate to Angellina, but one of the finest lines in our language. Act iv. sc. 3. Charles's speech:-- And lets the serious part of life run by As thin neglected sand, whiteness of name. You must be mine, &c. Seward's note, and reading-- --Whiteness of name, You must be mine! Nonsense! 'Whiteness of name,' is in apposition to 'the serious part of life,' and means a deservedly pure reputation. The following line--'You _must_ be mine!' means--'Though I do not enjoy you to-day, I shall hereafter, and without reproach.' THE SPANISH CURATE. Act IV. sc. 7. Amaranta's speech:-- And still I push'd him on, as he had been _coming_. Perhaps the true word is 'conning,' that is, learning, or reading, and therefore inattentive. WIT WITHOUT MONEY. Act I. Valentine's speech:-- One without substance, &c. The present text, and that proposed by Seward, are equally vile. I have endeavoured to make the lines sense, though the whole is, I suspect, incurable except by bold conjectural reformation. I would read thus:-- One without substance of herself, that's woman; Without the pleasure of her life, that's wanton; Tho' she be young, forgetting it; tho' fair, Making her glass the eyes of honest men, Not her own admiration. 'That's wanton,' or, 'that is to say, wantonness.' Act ii. Valentine's speech:-- Of half-a-crown a week for pins and puppets-- As there is a syllable wanting in the measure here. (Seward.) A syllable wanting! Had this Seward neither ears nor fingers? The line is a more than usually regular iambic hendecasyllable. Ib. With one man satisfied, with one rein guided; With one faith, one content, one bed; _Aged_, she makes the wife, preserves the fame and issue; A widow is, &c. Is 'apaid'--contented--too obsolete for B. and F.? If not, we might read it thus:-- Content with one faith, with one bed apaid, She makes the wife, preserves the fame and issue;-- Or it may be-- --with one breed apaid-- that is, satisfied with one set of children, in opposition to-- A widow is a Christmas-box, &c. Colman's note on Seward's attempt to put this play into metre. The editors, and their contemporaries in general, were ignorant of any but the regular iambic verse. A study of the Aristophanic and Plautine metres would have enabled them to reduce B. and F. throughout into metre, except where prose is really intended. THE HUMOROUS LIEUTENANT. Act I. sc. 1. Second Ambassador's speech:-- --When your angers, _Like_ so many brother billows, rose together, And, curling up _your_ foaming crests, defied, &c. This worse than superfluous 'like' is very like an interpolation of some matter of fact critic--all 'pus, prose atque venenum'. The 'your' in the next line, instead of 'their,' is likewise yours, Mr. Critic! Act ii: sc. 1. Timon's speech:-- Another of a new _way_ will be look'd at.-- We much suspect the poets wrote, 'of a new _day_.' So, immediately after, --Time may For all his wisdom, yet give us a day. (SEWARD'S NOTE.) For this very reason I more than suspect the contrary. Ib. sc. 3. Speech of Leucippe:-- I'll put her into action for a _wastcoat_.-- What we call a riding-habit,--some mannish dress. THE MAD LOVER. Act IV. Masque of beasts:-- --This goodly tree, An usher that still grew before his lady, Wither'd at root: this, for he could not wooe, A grumbling lawyer: &c. Here must have been omitted a line rhyming to 'tree;' and the words of the next line have been transposed:-- --This goodly tree, _Which leafless, and obscur'd with moss you see_, An usher this, that 'fore his lady grew, Wither'd at root: this, for he could not wooe, &c. THE LOYAL SUBJECT. It is well worthy of notice, and yet has not been, I believe, noticed hitherto, what a marked difference there exists in the dramatic writers of the Elizabetho-Jacobæan age--(Mercy on me! what a phrase for 'the writers during the reigns of Elizabeth and James I.!')--in respect of their political opinions. Shakspeare, in this as in all other things, himself and alone, gives the permanent politics of human nature, and the only predilection, which appears, shews itself in his contempt of mobs and the populacy. Massinger is a decided Whig;--Beaumont and Fletcher high-flying, passive-obedience, Tories. The Spanish dramatists furnished them with this, as with many other ingredients. By the by, an accurate and familiar acquaintance with all the productions of the Spanish stage previously to 1620, is an indispensable qualification for an editor of B. and F.;--and with this qualification a most interesting and instructive edition might be given. This edition of Colman's Stockdale, (1811,) is below criticism. In metre, B. and F. are inferior to Shakspeare, on the one hand, as expressing the poetic part of the drama, and to Massinger, on the other, in the art of reconciling metre with the natural rhythm of conversation,--in which, indeed, Massinger is unrivalled. Read him aright, and measure by time, not syllables, and no lines can be more legitimate,--none in which the substitution of equipollent feet, and the modifications by emphasis, are managed with such exquisite judgment. B. and F. are fond of the twelve syllable (not Alexandrine) line, as-- Too many fears' tis thought too: and to nourish those-- This has, often, a good effect, and is one of the varieties most common in Shakspeare. RULE A WIFE AND HAVE A WIFE. Act III. Old Woman's speech:-- --I fear he will knock my Brains out for lying. Mr. Seward discards the words 'for lying', because 'most of the things spoke of Estifania are true, with only a little exaggeration, and because they destroy all appearance of measure.' (Colman's note.) Mr. Seward had his brains out. The humor lies in Estifania's having ordered the Old Woman to tell these tales of her; for though an intriguer, she is not represented as other than chaste; and as to the metre, it is perfectly correct. Ib. 'Marg'. As you love me, give way. 'Leon'. It shall be better, I will give none, madam, &c. The meaning is: 'It shall be a better way, first;--as it is, I will not give it, or any that you in your present mood would wish.' THE LAWS OF CANDY. Act I. Speech of Melitus:-- Whose insolence and never yet match'd pride Can by no character be well express'd, But in her only name, the proud Erota. Colman's note. The poet intended no allusion to the word 'Erota' itself; but says that her very name, 'the proud Erota,' became a character and adage; as we say, a Quixote or a Brutus: so to say an 'Erota,' expressed female pride and insolence of beauty. Ib. Speech of Antinous:-- Of my peculiar honors, not deriv'd From 'successary', but purchas'd with my blood.-- The poet doubtless wrote 'successry,' which, though not adopted in our language, would be, on many occasions, as here, a much more significant phrase than ancestry. THE LITTLE FRENCH LAWYER. Act I. sc. 1. Dinant's speech:-- Are you become a patron too? 'Tis a new one, No more on't, &c. Seward reads:-- Are you become a patron too? _How long Have you been conning this speech?_ 'Tis a new one, &c. If conjectural emendation, like this, be allowed, we might venture to read:-- Are you become a patron _to a new tune_? or, Are you become a patron? 'Tis a new _tune_. Ib. 'Din'. Thou wouldst not willingly Live a protested coward, or be call'd one? 'Cler'. Words are but words. 'Din'. Nor wouldst thou take a blow? Seward's note. O miserable! Dinant sees through Cleremont's gravity, and the actor is to explain it. 'Words are but words,' is the last struggle of affected morality. VALENTINIAN. Act I. sc. 3. It is a real trial of charity to read this scene with tolerable temper towards Fletcher. So very slavish--so reptile--are the feelings and sentiments represented as duties. And yet remember he was a bishop's son, and the duty to God was the supposed basis. Personals, including body, house, home, and religion;--property, subordination, and inter-community;--these are the fundamentals of society. I mean here, religion negatively taken,--so that the person be not compelled to do or utter, in relation of the soul to God, what would be, in that person, a lie;--such as to force a man to go to church, or to swear that he believes what he does not believe. Religion, positively taken, may be a great and useful privilege, but cannot be a right,--were it for this only that it cannot be pre-defined. The ground of this distinction between negative and positive religion, as a social right, is plain. No one of my fellow-citizens is encroached on by my not declaring to him what I believe respecting the super-sensual; but should every man be entitled to preach against the preacher, who could hear any preacher? Now it is different in respect of loyalty. There we have positive rights, but not negative rights;--for every pretended negative would be in effect a positive;--as if a soldier had a right to keep to himself, whether he would, or would not, fight. Now, no one of these fundamentals can be rightfully attacked, except when the guardian of it has abused it to subvert one or more of the rest. The reason is, that the guardian, as a fluent, is less than the permanent which he is to guard. He is the temporary and mutable mean, and derives his whole value from the end. In short, as robbery is not high treason, so neither is every unjust act of a king the converse. All must be attacked and endangered. Why? Because the king, as 'a' to A., is a mean to A. or subordination, in a far higher sense than a proprietor, as 'b'. to B. is a mean to B. or property. Act ii. sc. 2. Claudia's speech:-- Chimney-pieces! &c. The whole of this speech seems corrupt; and if accurately printed,--that is, if the same in all the prior editions, irremediable but by bold conjecture. ''Till' my tackle,' should be, I think, 'while,' &c. Act iii. sc. 1. B. and F. always write as if virtue or goodness were a sort of talisman, or strange something, that might be lost without the least fault on the part of the owner. In short, their chaste ladies value their chastity as a material thing--not as an act or state of being; and this mere thing being imaginary, no wonder that all their women are represented with the minds of strumpets, except a few irrational humorists, far less capable of exciting our sympathy than a Hindoo, who has had a bason of cow-broth thrown over him;--for this, though a debasing superstition, is still real, and we might pity the poor wretch, though we cannot help despising him. But B. and F.'s Lucinas are clumsy fictions. It is too plain that the authors had no one idea of chastity as a virtue, but only such a conception as a blind man might have of the power of seeing, by handling an ox's eye. In The Queen of Corinth, indeed, they talk differently; but it is all talk, and nothing is real in it but the dread of losing a reputation. Hence the frightful contrast between their women (even those who are meant for virtuous) and Shakspeare's. So, for instance, The Maid in the Mill:--a woman must not merely have grown old in brothels, but have chuckled over every abomination committed in them with a rampant sympathy of imagination, to have had her fancy so drunk with the 'minutiæ' of lechery as this icy chaste virgin evinces hers to have been. It would be worth while to note how many of these plays are founded on rapes,--how many on incestuous passions, and how many on mere lunacies. Then their virtuous women are either crazy superstitions of a merely bodily negation of having been acted on, or strumpets in their imaginations and wishes, or, as in this Maid in the Mill, both at the same time. In the men, the love is merely lust in one direction,--exclusive preference of one object. The tyrant's speeches are mostly taken from the mouths of indignant denouncers of the tyrant's character, with the substitution of 'I' for 'he,' and the omission of the prefatory 'he acts as if he thought' so and so. The only feelings they can possibly excite are disgust at the Aeciuses, if regarded as sane loyalists, or compassion, if considered as Bedlamites. So much for their tragedies. But even their comedies are, most of them, disturbed by the fantasticalness, or gross caricature, of the persons or incidents. There are few characters that you can really like,--(even though you should have had erased from your mind all the filth, which bespatters the most likeable of them, as Piniero in The Island Princess for instance,)--scarcely one whom you can love. How different this from Shakspeare, who makes one have a sort of sneaking affection even for his Barnardines;--whose very Iagos and Richards are awful, and, by the counteracting power of profound intellects, rendered fearful rather than hateful;--and even the exceptions, as Goneril and Regan, are proofs of superlative judgment and the finest moral tact, in being left utter monsters, 'nulla virtute redemptæ,' and in being kept out of sight as much as possible,--they being, indeed, only means for the excitement and deepening of noblest emotions towards the Lear, Cordelia, &c. and employed with the severest economy! But even Shakspeare's grossness--that which is really so, independently of the increase in modern times of vicious associations with things indifferent,--(for there is a state of manners conceivable so pure, that the language of Hamlet at Ophelia's feet might be a harmless rallying, or playful teazing, of a shame that would exist in Paradise)--at the worst, how diverse in kind is it from Beaumont and Fletcher's! In Shakspeare it is the mere generalities of sex, mere words for the most part, seldom or never distinct images, all head-work, and fancy-drolleries; there is no sensation supposed in the speaker. I need not proceed to contrast this with B. and F. ROLLO. This is, perhaps, the most energetic of Fletcher's tragedies. He evidently aimed at a new Richard III. in Rollo;--but as in all his other imitations of Shakspeare, he was not philosopher enough to bottom his original. Thus, in Rollo, he has produced a mere personification of outrageous wickedness, with no fundamental characteristic impulses to make either the tyrant's words or actions philosophically intelligible. Hence, the most pathetic situations border on the horrible, and what he meant for the terrible, is either hateful, [Greek (transliterated): to misaeton], or ludicrous. The scene of Baldwin's sentence in the third act is probably the grandest working of passion in all B. and F.'s dramas;--but the very magnificence of filial affection given to Edith, in this noble scene, renders the after scene--(in imitation of one of the least Shakspearian of all Shakspeare's works, if it be his, the scene between Richard and Lady Anne,)--in which Edith is yielding to a few words and tears, not only unnatural, but disgusting. In Shakspeare, Lady Anne is described as a weak, vain, very woman throughout. Act i. sc. I. 'Gis'. He is indeed the perfect character Of a good man, and so his actions speak him. This character of Aubrey, and the whole spirit of this and several other plays of the same authors, are interesting as traits of the morals which it was fashionable to teach in the reigns of James I. and his successor, who died a martyr to them. Stage, pulpit, law, fashion,--all conspired to enslave the realm. Massinger's plays breathe the opposite spirit; Shakspeare's the spirit of wisdom which is for all ages. By the by, the Spanish dramatists--Calderon, in particular,--had some influence in this respect, of romantic loyalty to the greatest monsters, as well as in the busy intrigues of B. and F.'s plays. THE WILD GOOSE CHASE. Act II. sc. 1. Belleur's speech:-- --that wench, methinks, If I were but well set on, for she is _a fable_, If I were but hounded right, and one to teach me. Sympson reads 'affable,' which Colman rejects, and says, 'the next line seems to enforce' the reading in the text. Pity, that the editor did not explain wherein the sense, 'seemingly enforced by the next line,' consists. May the true word be 'a sable,' that is, a black fox, hunted for its precious fur? Or 'at-able,'--as we now say,--'she is come-at-able?' A WIFE FOR A MONTH. Act IV. sc. 1. Alphonso's speech:-- Betwixt the cold bear and the raging lion Lies my safe way. Seward's note and alteration to-- 'Twixt the cold bears, far from the raging lion-- This Mr. Seward is a blockhead of the provoking species. In his itch for correction, he forgot the words--'lies my safe way!' The Bear is the extreme pole, and thither he would travel over the space contained between it and 'the raging lion.' THE PILGRIM. Act IV. sc. 2. Alinda's interview with her father is lively, and happily hit off; but this scene with Roderigo is truly excellent. Altogether, indeed, this play holds the first place in B. and F.'s romantic entertainments, 'Lustspiele', which collectively are their happiest performances, and are only inferior to the romance of Shakspeare in the As you Like It, Twelfth Night, &c. Ib. 'Alin'. To-day you shall wed Sorrow, And Repentance will come to-morrow. Read 'Penitence,' or else-- Repentance, she will come to-morrow. THE QUEEN OF CORINTH. Act II. sc. 1. Merione's speech. Had the scene of this tragi-comedy been laid in Hindostan instead of Corinth, and the gods here addressed been the Veeshnoo and Co. of the Indian Pantheon, this rant would not have been much amiss. In respect of style and versification, this play and the following of Bonduca may be taken as the best, and yet as characteristic, specimens of Beaumont and Fletcher's dramas. I particularly instance the first scene of the Bonduca. Take Shakspeare's Richard II., and having selected some one scene of about the same number of lines, and consisting mostly of long speeches, compare it with the first scene in Bonduca,--not for the idle purpose of finding out which is the better, but in order to see and understand the difference. The latter, that of B. and F., you will find a Avell arranged bed of flowers, each having its separate root, and its position determined aforehand by the will of the gardener,--each fresh plant a fresh volition. In the former you see an Indian fig-tree, as described by Milton;--all is growth, evolution, [Greek (transliterated): genesis];--each line, each word almost, begets the following, and the will of the writer is an interfusion, a continuous agency, and not a series of separate acts. Shakspeare is the height, breadth, and depth of genius: Beaumont and Fletcher the excellent mechanism, in juxta-position and succession, of talent. THE NOBLE GENTLEMAN. Why have the dramatists of the times of Elizabeth, James I. and the first Charles become almost obsolete, with the exception of Shakspeare? Why do they no longer belong to the English, being once so popular? And why is Shakspeare an exception?--One thing, among fifty, necessary to the full solution is, that they all employed poetry and poetic diction on unpoetic subjects, both characters and situations, especially in their comedy. Now Shakspeare is all, all ideal,--of no time, and therefore for all times. Read, for instance, Marine's panegyric in the first scene of this play:-- Know The eminent court, to them that can be wise, And fasten on her blessings, is a sun, &c. What can be more unnatural and inappropriate--(not only is, but must be felt as such)--than such poetry in the mouth of a silly dupe? In short, the scenes are mock dialogues, in which the poet _solus_ plays the ventriloquist, but cannot keep down his own way of expressing himself. Heavy complaints have been made respecting the transprosing of the old plays by Cibber; but it never occurred to these critics to ask, how it came that no one ever attempted to transprose a comedy of Shakspeare's. THE CORONATION. Act I. Speech of Seleucus:-- Altho' he be my enemy, should any Of the gay flies that buz about the court, _Sit_ to catch trouts i' the summer, tell me so, I durst, &c. Colman's note. Pshaw! 'Sit' is either a misprint for 'set,' or the old and still provincial word for 'set,' as the participle passive of 'seat' or 'set.' I have heard an old Somersetshire gardener say:--"Look, Sir! I set these plants here; those yonder I 'sit' yesterday." Act ii. Speech of Arcadius:-- Nay, some will swear they love their mistress, Would hazard lives and fortunes, &c. Read thus:-- Nay, some will swear they love their mistress so, They would hazard lives and fortunes to preserve One of her hairs brighter than Berenice's, Or young Apollo's; and yet, after this, &c. '/They would HAzard/' [1]--furnishes an anapæst for an 'iambus'. 'And yet,' which must be read, /'ANyet'/, is an instance of the enclitic force in an accented monosyllable. /'And YET'/ is a complete 'iambus'; but 'anyet' is, like 'spirit', a dibrach u u, trocheized, however, by the 'arsis' or first accent damping, though not extinguishing, the second. [Footnote 1: As noted earlier in this text, the words between / marks are pronounced with stress on the upper-case syllables, and none on the lower-case syllables. In the original text, stress is indicated by a horizontal line over the syllable, and lack of stress by a u-shape, as the u u later in this paragraph. text Ed.] WIT AT SEVERAL WEAPONS. Act I. Oldcraft's speech: I'm arm'd at all points, &c. It would be very easy to restore all this passage to metre, by supplying a sentence of four syllables, which the reasoning almost demands, and by correcting the grammar. Read thus:-- Arm'd at all points 'gainst treachery, I hold My humor firm. If, living, I can see thee Thrive by thy wits, I shall have the more courage, Dying, to trust thee with my lands. If not, The best wit, I can hear of, carries them. For since so many in my time and knowledge, Rich children of the city, have concluded _For lack of wit_ in beggary, I'd rather Make a wise stranger my executor, Than a fool son my heir, and have my lands call'd After my wit than name: and that's my nature! Ib. Oldcraft's speech:-- To prevent which I have sought out a match for her.-- Read Which to prevent I've sought a match out for her. Ib. Sir Gregory's speech:-- --Do you think I'll have any of the wits hang upon me after I am married once? Read it thus:-- Do you think That I'll have any of the wits to hang Upon me after I am married once? and afterwards-- Is it a fashion in London, To marry a woman, and to never see her? The superfluous 'to' gives it the Sir Andrew Ague-cheek character. THE FAIR MAID OF THE INN. Act II. Speech of Albertus:-- But, Sir, By my life, I vow to take assurance from you, That right-hand never more shall strike my son, ... Chop his hand off! In this (as, indeed, in all other respects; but most in this) it is that Shakspeare is so incomparably superior to Fletcher and his friend,--in judgment! What can be conceived more unnatural and motiveless than this brutal resolve? How is it possible to feel the least interest in Albertus afterwards? or in Cesario after his conduct? THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN. On comparing the prison scene of Palamon and Arcite, Act ii. sc. 2, with the dialogue between the same speakers, Act i. sc. 2, I can scarcely retain a doubt as to the first act's having been written by Shakspeare. Assuredly it was not written by B. and F. I hold Jonson more probable than either of these two. The main presumption, however, for Shakspeare's share in this play rests on a point, to which the sturdy critics of this edition (and indeed all before them) were blind,--that is, the construction of the blank verse, which proves beyond all doubt an intentional imitation, if not the proper hand, of Shakspeare. Now, whatever improbability there is in the former, (which supposes Fletcher conscious of the inferiority, the too poematic _minus_-dramatic nature, of his versification, and of which there is neither proof, nor likelihood,) adds so much to the probability of the latter. On the other hand, the harshness of many of these very passages, a harshness unrelieved by any lyrical inter-breathings, and still more the want of profundity in the thoughts, keep me from an absolute decision. Act i. sc. 3. Emilia's speech:-- --Since his depart, his _sports_, Tho' craving seriousness and skill, &c. I conjecture 'imports,' that is, duties or offices of importance. The flow of the versification in this speech seems to demand the trochaic ending--/u/; while the text blends jingle and _hisses_ to the annoyance of less sensitive ears than Fletcher's--not to say, Shakspeare's. THE WOMAN HATER. Act. I. sc. 2. This scene from the beginning is prose printed as blank verse, down to the line-- E'en all the valiant stomachs in the court-- where the verse recommences. This transition from the prose to the verse enhances, and indeed forms, the comic effect. Lazarillo concludes his soliloquy with a hymn to the goddess of plenty. ON THE PROMETHEUS OF ÆSCHYLUS: An Essay, preparatory to a series of disquisitions respecting the Egyptian, in connection with the sacerdotal, theology, and in contrast with the mysteries of ancient Greece. Read at the Royal Society of Literature, May 18, 1825. The French 'savans' who went to Egypt in the train of Buonaparte, Denon, Fourrier, and Dupuis, (it has been asserted), triumphantly vindicated the chronology of Herodotus, on the authority of documents that cannot lie;--namely, the inscriptions and sculptures on those enormous masses of architecture, that might seem to have been built in the wish of rivalling the mountains, and at some unknown future to answer the same purpose, that is, to stand the gigantic tombstones of an elder world. It is decided, say the critics, whose words I have before cited, that the present division of the zodiac had been already arranged by the Egyptians fifteen thousand years before the Christian era, and according to an inscription 'which cannot lie' the temple of Esne is of eight thousand years standing. Now, in the first place, among a people who had placed their national pride in their antiquity, I do not see the impossibility of an inscription lying; and, secondly, as little can I see the improbability of a modern interpreter misunderstanding it; and lastly, the incredibility of a French infidel's partaking of both defects, is still less evident to my understanding. The inscriptions may be, and in some instances, very probably are, of later date than the temples themselves,--the offspring of vanity or priestly rivalry, or of certain astrological theories; or the temples themselves may have been built in the place of former and ruder structures, of an earlier and ruder period, and not impossibly under a different scheme of hieroglyphic or significant characters; and these may have been intentionally, or ignorantly, miscopied or mistranslated. But more than all the preceding,--I cannot but persuade myself, that for a man of sound judgment and enlightened common sense--a man with whom the demonstrable laws of the human mind, and the rules generalized from the great mass of facts respecting human nature, weigh more than any two or three detached documents or narrations, of whatever authority the narrator may be, and however difficult it may be to bring positive proofs against the antiquity of the documents--I cannot but persuade myself, I say, that for such a man, the relation preserved in the first book of the Pentateuch,--and which, in perfect accordance with all analogous experience, with all the facts of history, and all that the principles of political economy would lead us to anticipate, conveys to us the rapid progress in civilization and splendour from Abraham and Abimelech to Joseph and Pharaoh,--will be worth a whole library of such inferences. I am aware that it is almost universal to speak of the gross idolatry of Egypt; nay, that arguments have been grounded on this assumption in proof of the divine origin of the Mosaic monotheism. But first, if by this we are to understand that the great doctrine of the one Supreme Being was first revealed to the Hebrew legislator, his own inspired writings supply abundant and direct confutation of the position. Of certain astrological superstitions,--of certain talismans connected with star-magic,--plates and images constructed in supposed harmony with the movements and influences of celestial bodies,--there doubtless exist hints, if not direct proofs, both in the Mosaic writings, and those next to these in antiquity. But of plain idolatry in Egypt, or the existence of a polytheistic religion, represented by various idols, each signifying a several deity, I can find no decisive proof in the Pentateuch; and when I collate these with the books of the prophets, and the other inspired writings subsequent to the Mosaic, I cannot but regard the absence of any such proof in the latter, compared with the numerous and powerful assertions, or evident implications, of Egyptian idolatry in the former, both as an argument of incomparably greater value in support of the age and authenticity of the Pentateuch; and as a strong presumption in favour of the hypothesis on which I shall in part ground the theory which will pervade this series of disquisitions;--namely, that the sacerdotal religion of Egypt had, during the interval from Abimelech to Moses, degenerated from the patriarchal monotheism into a pantheism, cosmotheism, or worship of the world as God. The reason, or pretext, assigned by the Hebrew legislator to Pharaoh for leading his countrymen into the wilderness to join with their brethren, the tribes who still sojourned in the nomadic state, namely, that their sacrifices would be an abomination to the Egyptians, may be urged as inconsistent with, nay, as confuting this hypothesis. But to this I reply, first, that the worship of the ox and cow was not, in and of itself, and necessarily, a contravention of the first commandment, though a very gross breach of the second;--for it is most certain that the ten tribes worshipped the Jehovah, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, under the same or similar symbols:--secondly, that the cow, or Isis, and the Io of the Greeks, truly represented, in the first instance, the earth or productive nature, and afterwards the mundane religion grounded on the worship of nature, or the [Greek (transliterated): to pan], as God. In after times, the ox or bull was added, representing the sun, or generative force of nature, according to the habit of male and female deities, which spread almost over the whole world,--the positive and negative forces in the science of superstition;--for the pantheism of the sage necessarily engenders polytheism as the popular creed. But lastly, a very sufficient reason may, I think, be assigned for the choice of the ox or cow, as representing the very life of nature, by the first legislators of Egypt, and for the similar sacred character in the Brachmanic tribes of Hindostan. The progress from savagery to civilization is evidently first from the hunting to the pastoral state, a process which even now is going on, within our own times, among the South American Indians in the vast tracts between Buenos Ayres and the Andes: but the second and the most important step, is from the pastoral, or wandering, to the agricultural, or fixed, state. Now, if even for men born and reared under European civilization, the charms of a wandering life have been found so great a temptation, that few who have taken to it have been induced to return, (see the confession in the preamble to the statute respecting the gipsies); [1]--how much greater must have been the danger of relapse in the first formation of fixed states with a condensed population? And what stronger prevention could the ingenuity of the priestly kings--(for the priestly is ever the first form of government)--devise, than to have made the ox or cow the representatives of the divine principle in the world, and, as such, an object of adoration, the wilful destruction of which was sacrilege?--For this rendered a return to the pastoral state impossible; in which the flesh of these animals and the milk formed almost the exclusive food of mankind; while, in the meantime, by once compelling and habituating men to the use of a vegetable diet, it enforced the laborious cultivation of the soil, and both produced and permitted a vast and condensed population. In the process and continued subdivisions of polytheism, this great sacred Word,--for so the consecrated animals were called, [Greek (transliterated): ieroi logoi,]--became multiplied, till almost every power and supposed attribute of nature had its symbol in some consecrated animal from the beetle to the hawk. Wherever the powers of nature had found a cycle for themselves, in which the powers still produced the same phenomenon during a given period, whether in the motions of the heavenly orbs, or in the smallest living organic body, there the Egyptian sages predicated life and mind. Time, cyclical time, was their abstraction of the deity, and their holidays were their gods. The diversity between theism and pantheism may be most simply and generally expressed in the following 'formula', in which the material universe is expressed by W, and the deity by G. W-G=O; or the World without God is an impossible conception. This position is common to theist and pantheist. But the pantheist adds the converse-- G-W=O; for which the theist substitutes-- G-W=G; or that-- G=G, anterior and irrelative to the existence of the world, is equal to G+W. [2] 'Before the mountains were, Thou art.'--I am not about to lead the society beyond the bounds of my subject into divinity or theology in the professional sense. But without a precise definition of pantheism, without a clear insight into the essential distinction between it and the theism of the Scriptures, it appears to me impossible to understand either the import or the history of the polytheism of the great historical nations. I beg leave, therefore, to repeat, and to carry on my former position, that the religion of Egypt, at the time of the Exodus of the Hebrews, was a pantheism, on the point of passing into that polytheism, of which it afterwards afforded a specimen, gross and distasteful even to polytheists themselves of other nations. The objects which, on my appointment as Royal Associate of the Royal Society of Literature, I proposed to myself were, 1st. The elucidation of the purpose of the Greek drama, and the relations in which it stood to the mysteries on the one hand, and to the state or sacerdotal religion on the other:-- 2nd. The connection of the Greek tragic poets with philosophy as the peculiar offspring of Greek genius:-- 3rd. The connection of the Homeric and cyclical poets with the popular religion of the Greeks: and, lastly from all these,--namely, the mysteries, the sacerdotal religion, their philosophy before and after Socrates, the stage, the Homeric poetry and the legendary belief of the people, and from the sources and productive causes in the derivation and confluence of the tribes that finally shaped themselves into a nation of Greeks--to give a juster and more distinct view of this singular people, and of the place which they occupied in the history of the world, and the great scheme of divine providence, than I have hitherto seen,--or rather let me say, than it appears to me possible to give by any other process. The present Essay, however, I devote to the purpose of removing, or at least invalidating, one objection that I may reasonably anticipate, and which may be conveyed in the following question:--What proof have you of the fact of any connection between the Greek drama, and either the mysteries, or the philosophy, of Greece? What proof that it was the office of the tragic poet, under a disguise of the sacerdotal religion, mixed with the legendary or popular belief, to reveal as much of the mysteries interpreted by philosophy, as would counteract the demoralizing effects of the state religion, without compromising the tranquillity of the state itself, or weakening that paramount reverence, without which a republic, (such I mean, as the republics of ancient Greece were) could not exist? I know no better way in which I can reply to this objection, than by giving, as my proof and instance, the Prometheus of Æschylus, accompanied with an exposition of what I believe to be the intention of the poet, and the mythic import of the work; of which it may be truly said, that it is more properly tragedy itself in the plenitude of the idea, than a particular tragic poem; and as a preface to this exposition, and for the twin purpose of rendering it intelligible, and of explaining its connexion with the whole scheme of my Essays, I entreat permission to insert a quotation from a work of my own, which has indeed been in print for many years, but which few of my auditors will probably have heard of, and still fewer, if any, have read. "As the representative of the youth and approaching manhood of the human intellect we have ancient Greece, from Orpheus, Linus, Musaeus, and the other mythological bards, or, perhaps, the brotherhoods impersonated under those names, to the time when the republics lost their independence, and their learned men sank into copyists of, and commentators on, the works of their forefathers. That we include these as educated under a distinct providential, though not miraculous, dispensation, will surprise no one, who reflects, that in whatever has a permanent operation on the destinies and intellectual condition of mankind at large,--that in all which has been manifestly employed as a co-agent in the mightiest revolution of the moral world, the propagation of the Gospel, and in the intellectual progress of mankind in the restoration of philosophy, science, and the ingenuous arts--it were irreligion not to acknowledge the hand of divine providence. The periods, too, join on to each other. The earliest Greeks took up the religious and lyrical poetry of the Hebrews; and the schools of the prophets were, however partially and imperfectly, represented by the mysteries derived through the corrupt channel of the Phoenicians. With these secret schools of physiological theology, the mythical poets were doubtless in connexion, and it was these schools which prevented polytheism from producing all its natural barbarizing effects. The mysteries and the mythical hymns and pæans shaped themselves gradually into epic poetry and history on the one hand, and into the ethical tragedy and philosophy on the other. Under their protection, and that of a youthful liberty, secretly controlled by a species of internal theocracy, the sciences, and the sterner kinds of the fine arts, that is, architecture and statuary, grew up together, followed, indeed, by painting, but a statuesque, and austerely idealized, painting, which did not degenerate into mere copies of the sense, till the process for which Greece existed had been completed."[3] The Greeks alone brought forth philosophy in the proper and contra-distinguishable sense of the term, which we may compare to the coronation medal with its symbolic characters, as contrasted with the coins, issued under the same sovereign, current in the market. In the primary sense, philosophy had for its aim and proper subject the [Greek (transliterated): ta peri arch_on], 'de originibus rerum', as far as man proposes to discover the same in and by the pure reason alone. This, I say, was the offspring of Greece, and elsewhere adopted only. The predisposition appears in their earliest poetry. The first object, (or subject matter) of Greek philosophizing was in some measure philosophy itself;--not, indeed, as the product, but as the producing power--the productivity. Great minds turned inward on the fact of the diversity between man and beast; a superiority of kind in addition to that of degree; the latter, that is, the difference in degree comprehending the more enlarged sphere and the multifold application of faculties common to man and brute animals;--even this being in great measure a transfusion from the former, namely, from the superiority in kind;--for only by its co-existence with reason, free will, self-consciousness, the contra-distinguishing attributes of man, does the instinctive intelligence manifested in the ant, the dog, the elephant, &c. become human understanding. It is a truth with which Heraclitus, the senior, but yet contemporary, of Æschylus, appears, from the few genuine fragments of his writings that are yet extant, to have been deeply impressed,--that the mere understanding in man, considered as the power of adapting means to immediate purposes, differs, indeed, from the intelligence displayed by other animals, and not in degree only; but yet does not differ by any excellence which it derives from itself, or by any inherent diversity, but solely in consequence of a combination with far higher powers of a diverse kind in one and the same subject. Long before the entire separation of metaphysics from poetry, that is, while yet poesy, in all its several species of verse, music, statuary, &c. continued mythic;--while yet poetry remained the union of the sensuous and the philosophic mind;--the efficient presence of the latter in the 'synthesis' of the two, had manifested itself in the sublime 'mythus peri geneseos tou nou en anthropois' concerning the 'genesis', or birth of the 'nous' or reason in man. This the most venerable, and perhaps the most ancient, of Grecian 'myth', is a philosopheme, the very same in subject matter with the earliest record of the Hebrews, but most characteristically different in tone and conception;--for the patriarchal religion, as the antithesis of pantheism, was necessarily personal; and the doctrines of a faith, the first ground of which and the primary enunciation, is the eternal I AM, must be in part historic and must assume the historic form. Hence the Hebrew record is a narrative, and the first instance of the fact is given as the origin of the fact. That a profound truth--a truth that is, indeed, the grand and indispensable condition of all moral responsibility--is involved in this characteristic of the sacred narrative, I am not alone persuaded, but distinctly aware. This, hovever, does not preclude us from seeing, nay, as an additional mark of the wisdom that inspired the sacred historian, it rather supplies a motive to us, impels and authorizes us, to see, in the form of the vehicle of the truth, an accommodation to the then childhood of the human race. Under this impression we may, I trust, safely consider the narration,--introduced, as it is here introduced, for the purpose of explaining a mere work of the unaided mind of man by comparison,--as an [Greek (transliterated): eros hierogluphikon],--and as such (apparently, I mean, not actually) a 'synthesis' of poesy and philosophy, characteristic of the childhood of nations. In the Greek we see already the dawn of approaching manhood. The substance, the stuff, is philosophy; the form only is poetry. The Prometheus is a _philosophema_ [Greek (transliterated): tautaegorikon], --the tree of knowledge of good and evil,--an allegory, a [Greek (transliterated): propaideuma], though the noblest and the most pregnant of its kind. The generation of the [Greek (transliterated): nous], or pure reason in man. 1. It was superadded or infused, 'a supra' to mark that it was no mere evolution of the animal basis;--that it could not have grown out of the other faculties of man, his life, sense, understanding, as the flower grows out of the stem, having pre-existed potentially in the seed: 2. The [Greek: nous], or fire, was 'stolen,'--to mark its 'helero'--or rather its 'allo'-geneity, that is, its diversity, its difference in kind, from the faculties which are common to man with the nobler animals: 3. And stolen 'from Heaven,'--to mark its superiority in kind, as well as its essential diversity: 4. And it was a 'spark,'--to mark that it is not subject to any modifying reaction from that on which it immediately acts; that it suffers no change, and receives no accession, from the inferior, but multiplies it-self by conversion, without being alloyed by, or amalgamated with, that which it potentiates, ennobles, and transmutes: 5. And lastly, (in order to imply the homogeneity of the donor and of the gift) it was stolen by a 'god,' and a god of the race before the dynasty of Jove,--Jove the binder of reluctant powers, the coercer arid entrancer of free spirits under the fetters of shape, and mass, and passive mobility; but likewise by a god of the same race and essence with Jove, and linked of yore in closest and friendliest intimacy with him. This, to mark the pre-existence, in order of thought, of the 'nous', as spiritual, both to the objects of sense, and to their products, formed as it were, by the precipitation, or, if I may dare adopt the bold language of Leibnitz, by a coagulation of spirit. In other words this derivation of the spark from above, and from a god anterior to the Jovial dynasty--(that is, to the submersion of spirits in material forms),--was intended to mark the transcendancy of the 'nous', the contra-distinctive faculty of man, as timeless, [Greek (transliterated): achronon ti,] and, in this negative sense, eternal. It signified, I say, its superiority to, and its diversity from, all things that subsist in space and time, nay, even those which, though spaceless, yet partake of time, namely, souls or understandings. For the soul, or understanding, if it be defined physiologically as the principle of sensibility, irritability, and growth, together with the functions of the organs, which are at once the representatives and the instruments of these, must be considered 'in genere', though not in degree or dignity, common to man and the inferior animals. It was the spirit, the 'nous', which man alone possessed. And I must be permitted to suggest that this notion deserves some respect, were it only that it can shew a semblance, at least, of sanction from a far higher authority. The Greeks agreed with the cosmogonies of the East in deriving all sensible forms from the indistinguishable. The latter we find designated as the [Greek: to amorphon], the [Greek: hudor prokosmikon], the [Greek: chaos], as the essentially unintelligible, yet necessarily presumed, basis or sub-position of all positions. That it is, scientifically considered, an indispensable idea for the human mind, just as the mathematical point, &c. for the geometrician;--of this the various systems of our geologists and cosmogonists, from Burnet to La Place, afford strong presumption. As an idea, it must be interpreted as a striving of the mind to distinguish being from existence,--or potential being, the ground of being containing the possibility of existence, from being actualized. In the language of the mysteries, it was the 'esurience', the [Greek: pothos] or 'desideratum', the unfuelled fire, the Ceres, the ever-seeking maternal goddess, the origin and interpretation of whose name is found in the Hebrew root signifying hunger, and thence capacity. It was, in short, an effort to represent the universal ground of all differences distinct or opposite, but in relation to which all 'antithesis' as well as all 'antitheta', existed only potentially. This was the container and withholder, (such is the primitive sense of the Hebrew word rendered darkness (Gen. 1. 2.)) out of which light, that is, the 'lux lucifica', as distinguished from 'lumen seu lux phænomenalis', was produced;--say, rather, that which, producing itself into light as the one pole or antagonist power, remained in the other pole as darkness, that is, gravity, or the principle of mass, or wholeness without distinction of parts. And here the peculiar, the philosophic, genius of Greece began its f¦tal throb. Here it individualized itself in contra-distinction from the Hebrew archology, on the one side, and from the Ph¦nician, on the other. The Ph¦nician confounded the indistinguishable with the absolute, the 'Alpha' and 'Omega', the ineffable 'causa sui'. It confounded, I say, the multeity below intellect, that is, unintelligible from defect of the subject, with the absolute identity above all intellect, that is, transcending comprehension by the plenitude of its excellence. With the Phoenician sages the cosmogony was their theogony and 'vice versa'. Hence, too, flowed their theurgic rites, their magic, their worship ('cultus et apotheosis') of the plastic forces, chemical and vital, and these, or their notions respecting these, formed the hidden meaning, the soul, as it were, of which the popular and civil worship was the body with its drapery. The Hebrew wisdom imperatively asserts an unbeginning creative One, who neither became the world; nor is the world eternally; nor made the world out of himself by emanation, or evolution;--but who willed it, and it was! [Greek: Ta athea egeneto, kai egeneto chaos,]--and this chaos, the eternal will, by the spirit and the word, or express 'fiat',--again acting as the impregnant, distinctive, and ordonnant power,--enabled to become a world--[Greek: kosmeisthai.] So must it be when a religion, that shall preclude superstition on the one hand, and brute indifference on the other, is to be true for the meditative sage, yet intelligible, or at least apprehensible, for all but the fools in heart. The Greek philosopheme, preserved for us in the Æschylean Prometheus, stands midway betwixt both, yet is distinct in kind from either. With the Hebrew or purer Semitic, it assumes an X Y Z,--(I take these letters in their algebraic application)--an indeterminate 'Elohim', antecedent to the matter of the world, [Greek: hulae akosmos]--no less than to the [Greek: hulae kekosmaemenae.] In this point, likewise, the Greek accorded with the Semitic, and differed from the Phoenician--that it held the antecedent X Y Z to be super-sensuous and divine. But on the other hand, it coincides with the Ph¦nician in considering this antecedent ground of corporeal matter,--[Greek: t_on s_omat_on kai tou s_omatikou,]--not so properly the cause of the latter, as the occasion and the still continuing substance. 'Maleria substat adliuc'. The corporeal was supposed co-essential with the antecedent of its corporeity. Matter, as distinguished from body, was a 'non ens', a simple apparition, 'id quod mere videtur'; but to body the elder physico-theology of the Greeks allowed a participation in entity. It was 'spiritus ipse, oppressus, dormiens, et diversis modis somnians'. In short, body was the productive power suspended, and as it were, quenched in the product. This may be rendered plainer by reflecting, that, in the pure Semitic scheme there are four terms introduced in the solution of the problem, 1. the beginning, self-sufficing, and immutable Creator; 2. the antecedent night as the identity, or including germ, of the light and darkness, that is, gravity; 3. the chaos; and 4. the material world resulting from the powers communicated by the divine 'fiat'. In the Phoenician scheme there are in fact but two--a self-organizing chaos, and the omniforrn nature as the result. In the Greek scheme we have three terms, 1. the 'hyle', [Greek: hulae], which holds the place of the chaos, or the waters, in the true system; 2. [Greek: ta s_omata], answering to the Mosaic heaven and earth; and 3. the Saturnian [Greek: chronoi huperchonioi],--which answer to the antecedent darkness of the Mosaic scheme, but to which the elder physico-theologists attributed a self-polarizing power--a 'natura gemina quæ fit et facit, agit et patitur'. In other words, the 'Elohim' of the Greeks were still but a 'natura deorum', [Greek: to theion], in which a vague plurality adhered; or if any unity was imagined, it was not personal--not a unity of excellence, but simply an expression of the negative--that which was to pass, but which had not yet passed, into distinct form. All this will seem strange and obscure at first reading,--perhaps fantastic. But it will only seem so. Dry and prolix, indeed, it is to me in the writing, full as much as it can be to others in the attempt to understand it. But I know that, once mastered, the idea will be the key to the whole cypher of the Æschylean mythology. The sum stated in the terms of philosophic logic is this: First, what Moses appropriated to the chaos itself: what Moses made passive and a 'materia subjecta et lucis et tenebrarum', the containing [Greek: prothemenon] of the 'thesis' and 'antithesis';--this the Greek placed anterior to the chaos;--the chaos itself being the struggle between the 'hyperchronia', the [Greek: ideai pronomoi], as the unevolved, unproduced, 'prothesis', of which [Greek: idea kai nomos]--(idea and law)--are the 'thesis' and 'antithesis'. (I use the word 'produced' in the mathematical sense, as a point elongating itself to a bipolar line.) Secondly, what Moses establishes, not merely as a transcendant 'Monas', but as an individual [Greek: Henas] likewise;--this the Greek took as a harmony, [Greek: Theoi hathanatoi, to theion], as distinguished from [Greek: o Theos]--or, to adopt the more expressive language of the Pythagoreans and cabalists 'numen numerantis'; and these are to be contemplated as the identity. Now according to the Greek philosopheme or 'mythus', in these, or in this identity, there arose a war, schism, or division, that is, a polarization into thesis and antithesis. In consequence of this schism in the [Greek: to theion], the 'thesis' becomes 'nomos', or law, and the 'antithesis' becomes 'idea', but so that the 'nomos' is 'nomos', because, and only because, the 'idea' is 'idea': the 'nomos' is not idea, only because the idea has not become 'nomos'. And this 'not' must be heedfully borne in mind through the whole interpretation of this most profound and pregnant philosopheme. The 'nomos' is essentially idea, but existentially it is idea 'substans', that is, 'id quod stat subtus', understanding 'sensu generalissimo'. The 'idea', which now is no longer idea, has substantiated itself, become real as opposed to idea, and is henceforward, therefore, 'substans in substantiato'. The first product of its energy is the thing itself: 'ipsa se posuit et jam facta est ens positum'. Still, however, its productive energy is not exhausted in this product, but overflows, or is effluent, as the specific forces, properties, faculties, of the product. It reappears, in short, in the body, as the function of the body. As a sufficient illustration, though it cannot be offered as a perfect instance, take the following. 'In the world we see every where evidences of a unity, which the component parts are so far from explaining, that they necessarily presuppose it as the cause and condition of their existing as those parts, or even of their existing at all. This antecedent unity, or cause and principle of each union, it has since the time of Bacon and Kepler, been customary to call a law. This crocus, for instance, or any flower the reader may have in sight or choose to bring before his fancy;--that the root, stem, leaves, petals, &c. cohere as one plant, is owing to an antecedent power or principle in the seed, which existed before a single particle of the matters that constitute the size and visibility of the crocus had been attracted from the surrounding soil, air, and moisture. Shall we turn to the seed? Here too the same necessity meets us, an antecedent unity (I speak not of the parent plant, but of an agency antecedent in order of operance, yet remaining present as the conservative and reproductive power,) must here too be supposed. Analyze the seed with the finest tools, and let the solar microscope come in aid of your senses,--what do you find?--means and instruments, a wondrous fairy-tale of nature, magazines of food, stores of various sorts, pipes, spiracles, defences,--a house of many chambers, and the owner and inhabitant invisible.'[4] Now, compare a plant, thus contemplated, with an animal. In the former, the productive energy exhausts itself, and as it were, sleeps in the product or 'organismus'--in its root, stem, foliage, blossoms, seed. Its balsams, gums, resins, 'aromata', and all other bases of its sensible qualities, are, it is well known, mere excretions from the vegetable, eliminated, as lifeless, from the actual plant. The qualities are not its properties, but the properties, or far rather, the dispersion and volatilization of these extruded and rejected bases. But in the animal it is otherwise. Here the antecedent unity--the productive and self-realizing idea--strives, with partial success to re-emancipate itself from its product, and seeks once again to become 'idea': vainly indeed: for in order to this, it must be retrogressive, and it hath subjected itself to the fates, the evolvers of the endless thread--to the stern necessity of progression. 'Idea' itself it cannot become, but it may in long and graduated process, become an image, an ANALOGON, an anti-type of IDEA. And this [Greek: eid_olon] may approximate to a perfect likeness. 'Quod est simile, nequit esse idem'. Thus, in the lower animals, we see this process of emancipation commence with the intermediate link, or that which forms the transition from properties to faculties, namely, with sensation. Then the faculties of sense, locomotion, construction, as, for instance, webs, hives, nests, &c. Then the functions; as of instinct, memory, fancy, instinctive intelligence, or understanding, as it exists in the most intelligent animals. Thus the idea (henceforward no more idea, but irrecoverable by its own fatal act) commences the process of its own transmutation, as 'substans in substantiato', as the 'enteleche', or the 'vis formatrix', and it finishes the process as 'substans e substantiato', that is, as the understanding. If, for the purpose of elucidating this process, I might be allowed to imitate the symbolic language of the algebraists, and thus to regard the successive steps of the process as so many powers and dignities of the 'nomos' or law, the scheme would be represented thus [N^1 represents N superscript 1, i.e. N to the power of 1. text Ed.]:-- Nomos^1 = Product: N^2 = Property: N^3 = Faculty: N^4 = Function: N^5 = Understanding;-- which is, indeed, in one sense, itself a 'nomos', inasmuch as it is the index of the 'nomos', as well as its highest function; but, like the hand of a watch, it is likewise a 'nomizomenon'. It is a verb, but still a verb passive. On the other hand, idea is so far co-essential with 'nomos', that by its co-existence--(not confluence)--with the 'nomos' [Greek: hen nomizomenois] (with the 'organismus' and its faculties and functions in the man,) it becomes itself a 'nomos'. But, observe, a 'nomos autonomos', or containing its law in itself likewise;--even as the 'nomos' produces for its highest product the understanding, so the idea, in its opposition and, of course, its correspondence to the 'nomos', begets in itself an 'analogon' to product; and this is self-consciousness. But as the product can never become idea, so neither can the idea (if it is to remain idea) become or generate a distinct product. This 'analogon' of product is to be itself; but were it indeed and substantially a product, it would cease to be self. It would be an object for a subject, not (as it is and must be) an object that is its own subject, and 'vice versa'; a conception which, if the uncombining and infusile genius of our language allowed it, might be expressed by the term subject-object. Now, idea, taken in indissoluble connection with this 'analogon' of product is mind, that which knows itself, and the existence of which may be inferred, but cannot appear or become a 'phænomenon'. By the benignity of Providence, the truths of most importance in themselves, and which it most concerns us to know, are familiar to us, even from childhood. Well for us if we do not abuse this privilege, and mistake the familiarity of words which convey these truths for a clear understanding of the truths themselves! If the preceding disquisition, with all its subtlety and all its obscurity, should answer no other purpose, it will still have been neither purposeless, nor devoid of utility, should it only lead us to sympathize with the strivings of the human intellect, awakened to the infinite importance of the inward oracle [Greek: gn_othi seauton]--and almost instinctively shaping its course of search in conformity with the Platonic intimation:--[Greek: psuchaes phusin haxi_os logou katanoaesai oiei dunaton einai, haneu aes tou holou phuse_os]; but be this as it may, the ground work of the Æschylean 'mythus' is laid in the definition of idea and law, as correlatives that mutually interpret each the other;--an idea, with the adequate power of realizing itself being a law, and a law considered abstractedly from, or in the absence of, the power of manifesting itself in its appropriate product being an idea. Whether this be true philosophy, is not the question. The school of Aristotle would, of course, deny, the Platonic affirm it; for in this consists the difference of the two schools. Both acknowledge ideas as distinct from the mere generalizations from objects of sense: both would define an idea as an 'ens rationale', to which there can be no adequate correspondent in sensible experience. But, according to Aristotle, ideas are regulative only, and exist only as functions of the mind:--according to Plato, they are constitutive likewise, and one in essence with the power and life of nature;--[Greek: hen log'o z'oae aen, kai hae z'oae haen to ph'os t'on anthr'op'on]. And this I assert, was the philosophy of the mythic poets, who, like Æschylus, adapted the secret doctrines of the mysteries as the (not always safely disguised) antidote to the debasing influences of the religion of the state. But to return and conclude this preliminary explanation. We have only to substitute the term will, and the term constitutive power, for _nomos_ or law, and the process is the same. Permit me to represent the identity or 'prothesis' by the letter Z and the 'thesis' and 'antithesis' by X and Y respectively. Then I say X by not being Y, but in consequence of being the correlative opposite of Y, is will; and Y, by not being X, but the correlative and opposite of X, is nature,--'natura naturans', [Greek: no_mos physiko_s]. Hence we may see the necessity of contemplating the idea now as identical with the reason, and now as one with the will, and now as both in one, in which last case I shall, for convenience sake, employ the term 'Nous', the rational will, the practical reason. We are now out of the holy jungle of transcendental mataphysics; if indeed, the reader's patience shall have had strength and persistency enough to allow me to exclaim-- Ivimus ambo Per densas umbras: at tenet umbra Deum. Not that I regard the foregoing as articles of faith, or as all true;--I have implied the contrary by contrasting it with, at least, by shewing its disparateness from, the Mosaic, which, 'bona fide', I do regard as the truth. But I believe there is much, and profound, truth in it, 'supra captum [Greek: psilosoph'on], qui non agnoscunt divinum, ideoque nec naturam, nisi nomine, agnoscunt; sed res cunctas ex sensuali corporeo cogitant, quibus hac ex causa interiora clausa manent, et simul cum illis exteriora quæ proxima interioribus sunt'! And with no less confidence do I believe that the positions above given, true or false, are contained in the Promethean 'mythus'. In this 'mythus', Jove is the impersonated representation or symbol of the 'nomos'--'Jupiter est quodcunque vides'. He is the 'mens agitans molem', but at the same time, the 'molem corpoream ponens et constituens'. And so far the Greek philosopheme does not differ essentially from the cosmotheism, or identification of God with the universe, in which consisted the first apostacy of mankind after the flood, when they combined to raise a temple to the heavens, and which is still the favored religion of the Chinese. Prometheus, in like manner, is the impersonated representative of Idea, or of the same power as Jove, but contemplated as independent and not immersed in the product,--as law 'minus' the productive energy. As such it is next to be seen what the several significances of each must or may be according to the philosophic conception; and of which significances, therefore, should we find in the philosopheme a correspondent to each, we shall be entitled to assert that such are the meanings of the fable. And first of Jove:-- Jove represents 1. 'Nomos' generally, as opposed to Idea or 'Nous': 2. 'Nomos archinomos', now as the father, now as the sovereign, and now as the includer and representative of the 'nomoi ouoanioi kosmikoi', or 'dii majores', who, had joined or come over to Jove in the first schism: 3. 'Nomos damnaetaes'--the subjugator of the spirits, of the [Greek: ideai pronomoi], who, thus subjugated, became '[Greek: nomoi huponomioi hupospondoi], Titanes pacati, dii minores', that is, the elements considered as powers reduced to obedience under yet higher powers than themselves: 4. 'Nomos [Greek: politikos]', law in the Pauline sense, '[Greek: nomos allotrionomos]' in antithesis to '[Greek: nomos autonomos]'. [Footnote 1: The Act meant is probably the 5. Eliz. c. 20, enforcing the two previous Acts of Henry VIII. and Philip and Mary, and reciting that natural born Englishmen had 'become of the fellowship of the said vagabonds, by transforming or disguising themselves in their apparel,' &c.--Ed.] [Footnote 2: Mr. Coleridge was in the constant habit of expressing himself on paper by the algebraic symbols. They have an uncouth look in the text of an ordinary essay, and I have sometimes ventured to render them by the equivalent words. But most of the readers of these volumes will know that--means 'less by', or,' without'; + 'more by', or,' in addition to'; = 'equal to', or, 'the same as'.--Ed]. [Footnote 3: Friend, III. Essay, 9.] [Footnote 4: Aids to Reflection. Moral and Religious Aphorisms. Aphorism VI. Ed.] COROLLARY. It is in this sense that Jove's jealous, ever-quarrelsome, spouse represents the political sacerdotal 'cultus', the church, in short, of republican paganism;--a church by law established for the mere purposes of the particular state, unennobled by the consciousness of instrumentality to higher purposes;--at once unenlightened and unchecked by revelation. Most gratefully ought we to acknowledge that since the completion of our constitution in 1688, we may, with unflattering truth, elucidate the spirit and character of such a church by the contrast of the institution, to which England owes the larger portion of its superiority in that, in which alone superiority is an unmixed blessing,--the diffused cultivation of its inhabitants. But previously to this period, I shall offend no enlightened man if I say without distinction of parties--'intra muros peccatur et extra';--that the history of Christendom presents us with too many illustrations of this Junonian jealousy, this factious harrassing of the sovereign power as soon as the latter betrayed any symptoms of a disposition to its true policy, namely, to privilege and perpetuate that which is best,--to tolerate the tolerable,--and to restrain none but those who would restrain all, and subjugate even the state itself. But while truth extorts this confession, it, at the same time, requires that it should be accompanied by an avowal of the fact, that the spirit is a relic of Paganism; and with a bitter smile would an Æschylus or a Plato in the shades, listen to a Gibbon or a Hume vaunting the mild and tolerant spirit of the state religions of ancient Greece or Rome. Here we have the sense of Jove's intrigues with Europa, Io, &c. whom the god, in his own nature a general lover, had successively taken under his protection. And here, too, see the full appropriateness of this part of the 'mythus', in which symbol fades away into allegory, but yet in reference to the working cause, as grounded in humanity, and always existing either actually or potentially, and thus never ceases wholly to be a symbol or tautegory. Prometheus represents, 1. 'sensu generali', Idea [Greek: pronomos,] and in this sense he is a [Greek: 'theos homophulos'], a fellow-tribesman both of the 'dii majores', with Jove at their head, and of the Titans or 'dii pacati': 2. He represents Idea [Greek: 'philonomos, nomodeiktaes';] and in this sense the former friend and counsellor of Jove or 'Nous uranius': 3. [Greek: 'Logos philanthr'opos',] the divine humanity, the humane God, who retained unseen, kept back, or (in the 'catachresis' characteristic of the Phoenicio-Grecian mythology) stole, a portion or 'ignicula from the living spirit of law, which remained with the celestial gods unexpended [Greek: en t_o nomizesthai.] He gave that which, according to the whole analogy of things, should have existed either as pure divinity, the sole property and birth-right of the 'Dii Joviales', the 'Uranions', or was conceded to inferior beings as a 'substans in substantiato'. This spark divine Prometheus gave to an elect, a favored animal, not as a 'substans' or understanding, commensurate with, and confined by, the constitution and conditions of this particular organism, but as 'aliquid superstans, liberum, non subactum, invictum, impacatum, [Greek: mae nouizomenon.] This gift, by which we are to understand reason theoretical and practical, was therefore a [Greek: 'nomos autonomus']--unapproachable and unmodifiable by the animal basis--that is, by the pre-existing 'substans' with its products, the animal 'organismus' with its faculties and functions; but yet endowed with the power of potentiating, ennobling, and prescribing to, the substance; and hence, therefore, a [Greek: nomos nomopeithaes,] lex legisuada': 4. By a transition, ordinary even in allegory, and appropriate to mythic symbol, but especially significant in the present case--the transition, I mean, from the giver to the gift--the giver, in very truth, being the gift, 'whence the soul receives reason; and reason is her being,' says our Milton. Reason is from God, and God is reason, 'mens ipsissima'. 5. Prometheus represents, [Greek: nous en anthr'op'o--nous ag'onistaes]'. Thus contemplated, the 'Nous' is of necessity, powerless; for, all power, that is, productivity, or productive energy, is in Law, that is, [Greek: nomos allotrionomos]:[1] still, however, the Idea in the Law, the 'numerus numerans' become [Greek: nomos], is the principle of the Law; and if with Law dwells power, so with the knowledge or the Idea 'scientialis' of the Law, dwells prophecy and foresight. A perfect astronomical time-piece in relation to the motions of the heavenly bodies, or the magnet in the mariner's compass in relation to the magnetism of the earth, is a sufficient illustration. 6. Both [Greek: nomos] and Idea (or 'Nous') are the 'verbum'; but, as in the former, it is 'verbum fiat' 'the Word of the Lord,'--in the latter it must be the 'verbum fiet', or, 'the Word of the Lord in the mouth of the prophet.' 'Pari argumento', as the knowledge is therefore not power, the power is not knowledge. The [Greek: nomos], the [Greek: Zeus pantokrat'or], seeks to learn, and, as it were, to wrest the secret, the hateful secret, of his own fate, namely, the transitoriness adherent to all antithesis; for the identity or the absolute is alone eternal. This secret Jove would extort from the 'Nous', or Prometheus, which is the sixth representment of Prometheus. 7. Introduce but the least of real as opposed to 'ideal', the least speck of positive existence, even though it were but the mote in a sun beam, into the sciential 'contemplamen' or theorem, and it ceases to be science. 'Ratio desinit esse pura ratio et fit discursus, stat subter et fit [Greek: hypothetikon]:--non superstat'. The 'Nous' is bound to a rock, the immovable firmness of which is indissolubly connected with its barrenness, its non-productivity. Were it productive it would be 'Nomos'; but it is 'Nous', because it is not 'Nomos'. 8. Solitary [Greek: abat_o en eraemia]. Now I say that the 'Nous', notwithstanding its diversity from the 'Nomizomeni', is yet, relatively to their supposed original essence, [Greek: pasi tois nomizomenois tantogenaes], of the same race or 'radix': though in another sense, namely, in relation to the [Greek: pan theion]--the pantheistic 'Elohim', it is conceived anterior to the schism, and to the conquest and enthronization of Jove who succeeded. Hence the Prometheus of the great tragedian is [Greek: theos suggenaes]. The kindred deities come to him, some to soothe, to condole; others to give weak, yet friendly, counsels of submission; others to tempt, or insult. The most prominent of the latter, and the most odious to the imprisoned and insulated 'Nous', is Hermes, the impersonation of interest with the entrancing and serpentine 'Caduceus', and, as interest or motives intervening between the reason and its immediate self-determinations, with the antipathies to the [Greek: nomos autonomos]. The Hermes impersonates the eloquence of cupidity, the cajolement of power regnant; and in a larger sense, custom, the irrational in language, [Greek: rhaemata ta rhaetorika], the fluent, from [Greek: rheo]--the rhetorical in opposition to [Greek: logoi, ta noaeta]. But, primarily, the Hermes is the symbol of interest. He is the messenger, the inter-nuncio, in the low but expressive phrase, the go-between, to beguile or insult. And for the other visitors of Prometheus, the elementary powers, or spirits of the elements, 'Titanes pacati', [Greek: theoi huponomioi], vassal potentates, and their solicitations, the noblest interpretation will be given, if I repeat the lines of our great contemporary poet:-- Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own: Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind, And e'en with something of a mother's mind, And no unworthy aim, The homely nurse doth all she can To make her foster-child, her inmate, Man Forget the glories he hath known And that imperial palace whence he came:-- WORDSWORTH. which exquisite passage is prefigured in coarser clay, indeed, and with a less lofty spirit, but yet excellently in their kind, and even more fortunately for the illustration and ornament of the present commentary, in the fifth, sixth, and seventh stanzas of Dr. Henry More's poem on the Pre-existence of the Soul:-- Thus groping after our own center's near And proper substance, we grew dark, contract, Swallow'd up of earthly life! Ne what we were Of old, thro' ignorance can we detect. Like noble babe, by fate or friends' neglect Left to the care of sorry salvage wight, Grown up to manly years cannot conject His own true parentage, nor read aright What father him begot, what womb him brought to light. So we, as stranger infants elsewhere born, Cannot divine from what spring we did flow; Ne dare these base alliances to scorn, Nor lift ourselves a whit from hence below; Ne strive our parentage again to know, Ne dream we once of any other stock, Since foster'd upon Rhea's [1] knees we grow, In Satyrs' arms with many a mow and mock Oft danced; and hairy Pan our cradle oft hath rock'd! But Pan nor Rhea be our parentage! We been the offspring of the all seeing Nous, &c. To express the supersensual character of the reason, its abstraction from sensation, we find the Prometheus [Greek: aterpae]--while in the yearnings accompanied with the remorse incident to, and only possible in consequence of the Nous being, the rational, self-conscious, and therefore responsible will, he is [Greek: gupi diaknaiomenos] If to these contemplations we add the control and despotism exercised on the free reason by Jupiter in his symbolical character, as [Greek: nomos politikos];--by custom (Hermes); by necessity, [Greek: bia kai kratos];--by the mechanic arts and powers, [Greek: suggeneis t_o No_o] though they are, and which are symbolized in Hephaistos,--we shall see at once the propriety of the title, Prometheus, [Greek: desmotaes]. 9. Nature, or 'Zeus' as the [Greek: nomos en nomizomenois], knows herself only, can only come to a knowledge of herself, in man! And even in man, only as man is supernatural, above nature, noetic. But this knowledge man refuses to communicate; that is, the human understanding alone is at once self-conscious and conscious of nature. And this high prerogative it owes exclusively to its being an assessor of the reason. Yet even the human understanding in its height of place seeks vainly to appropriate the ideas of the pure reason, which it can only represent by 'idola'. Here, then, the 'Nous' stands as Prometheus [Greek: antipalos], 'renuens'--in hostile opposition to Jupitor 'Inquisitor'. 10. Yet finally, against the obstacles and even under the fostering influences of the 'Nomos', [Greek: tou nomimou], a son of Jove himself, but a descendant from Io, the mundane religion, as contra-distinguished from the sacerdotal 'cultus', or religion of the state, an Alcides 'Liberator' will arise, and the 'Nous', or divine principle in man, will be Prometheus [Greek: heleutheromenos]. Did my limits or time permit me to trace the persecutions, wanderings, and migrations of the Io, the mundane religion, through the whole map marked out by the tragic poet, the coincidences would bring the truth, the unarbitrariness, of the preceding exposition as near to demonstration as can rationally be required on a question of history, that must, for the greater part, be answered by combination of scattered facts. But this part of my subject, together with a particular exemplification of the light which my theory throws both on the sense and the beauty of numerous passages of this stupendous poem, I must reserve for a future communication. NOTES. [3] v. 15. [Greek: pharaggi]:--'in a coomb, or combe.' v. 17. [Greek: ex'oriazein gar patros logous baru]. [Greek: euoriazein], as the editor confesses, is a word introduced into the text against the authority of all editions and manuscripts. I should prefer [Greek: ex'oriazein], notwithstanding its being a [Greek: hapax legomenon]. The [Greek: eu]--seems to my tact too free and easy a word;--and yet our 'to trifle with' appears the exact meaning. [Footnote 1: I scarcely need say, that I use the word [Greek: allotrionomos] as a participle active, as exercising law on another, not as receiving law from another, though the latter is the classical force (I suppose) of the word.] [Footnote 2: Rhea (from [Greek: rheo], 'fluo'), that is, the earth as the transitory, the ever-flowing nature, the flux and sum of 'phenomena', or objects of the outward sense, in contradistinction from the earth as Vesta, as the firmamental law that sustains and disposes the apparent world! The Satyrs represent the sports and appetences of the sensuous nature ([Greek: phronaema sarkos])--Pan, or the total life of the earth, the presence of all in each, the universal 'organismus' of bodies and bodily energy.] [Footnote 3: Written in Bp. Blomfield's edition, and communicated by Mr. Cary. Ed.] NOTE ON CHALMERS'S LIFE OF DANIEL. The justice of these remarks cannot be disputed, though some of them are rather too figurative for sober criticism. Most genuine! A figurative remark! If this strange writer had any meaning, it must be:--Headly's criticism is just throughout, but conveyed in a style too figurative for prose composition. Chalmers's own remarks are wholly mistaken;--too silly for any criticism, drunk or sober, and in language too flat for any thing. In Daniel's Sonnets there is scarcely one good line; while his Hymen's Triumph, of which Chalmers says not one word, exhibits a continued series of first-rate beauties in thought, passion, and imagery, and in language and metre is so faultless, that the style of that poem may without extravagance be declared to be imperishable English. 1820. BISHOP CORBET. I almost wonder that the inimitable humour, and the rich sound and propulsive movement of the verse, have not rendered Corbet a popular poet. I am convinced that a reprint of his poems, with illustrative and chit-chat biographical notes, and cuts by Cruikshank, would take with the public uncommonly well. September, 1823. NOTES ON SELDEN'S TABLE TALK. [1] There is more weighty bullion sense in this book, than I ever found in the same number of pages of any uninspired writer. OPINION. Opinion and affection extremely differ. I may affect a woman best, but it does not follow I must think her the handsomest woman in the world. ... Opinion is something wherein I go about to give reason why all the world should think as I think. Affection is a thing wherein I look after the pleasing of myself. Good! This is the true difference betwixt the beautiful and the agreeable, which Knight and the rest of that [Greek: plaethos atheon] have so beneficially confounded, 'meretricibus scilicet et Plutoni'. O what an insight the whole of this article gives into a wise man's heart, who has been compelled to act with the many, as one of the many! It explains Sir Thomas More's zealous Romanism, &c. PARLIAMENT. Excellent! O! to have been with Selden over his glass of wine, making every accident an outlet and a vehicle of wisdom! POETRY. The old poets had no other reason but this, their verse was, sung to music; otherwise it had been a senseless thing to have fettered up themselves. No one man can know all things: even Selden here talks ignorantly. Verse is in itself a music, and the natural symbol of that union of passion with thought and pleasure, which constitutes the essence of all poetry, as contradistinguished from science, and distinguished from history civil or natural. To Pope's Essay on Man,--in short, to whatever is mere metrical good sense and wit, the remark applies. Ib. Verse proves nothing but the quantity of syllables; they are not meant for logic. True; they, that is, verses, are not logic; but they are, or ought to be, the envoys and representatives of that vital passion, which is the practical cement of logic; and without which logic must remain inert. [Footnote 1: These remarks on Selden, Wheeler, and Birch, were communicated by Mr. Gary. Ed.] NOTE ON THEOLOGICAL LECTURES OF BENJAMIN WHEELER, D. D. (Vol. I. p. 77.) A miracle, usually so termed, is the exertion of a supernatural power in some act, and contrary to the regular course of nature, &c. Where is the proof of this as drawn from Scripture, from fact recorded, or from doctrine affirmed? Where the proof of its logical possibility,--that is, that the word has any representable sense? Contrary to 2x2=4 is 2x2=5, or that the same fire acting at the same moment on the same subject should burn it and not burn it. The course of nature is either one with, or a reverential synonyme of, the ever present divine agency; or it is a self-subsisting derivative from, and dependent on, the divine will. In either case this author's assertion would amount to a charge of self-contradiction on the Author of all things. Before the spread of Grotianism, or the Old Bailey 'nolens volens' Christianity, such language was unexampled. A miracle is either 'super naturam', or it is simply 'praeter experientiam.' If nature be a collective term for the sum total of the mechanic powers,--that is, of the act first manifested to the senses in the conductor A, arriving at Z by the sensible chain of intermediate conductors, B, C, D, &c.;--then every motion of my arm is 'super naturam'. If this be not the sense, then nature is but a wilful synonyme of experience, and then the first noticed aerolithes, Sulzer's first observation of the galvanic arch, &c. must have been miracles. As erroneous as the author's assertions are logically, so false are they historically, in the effect, which the miracles in and by themselves did produce on those, who, rejecting the doctrine, were eye-witnesses of the miracles;--and psychologically, in the effect which miracles, as miracles, are calculated to produce on the human mind. Is it possible that the author can have attentively studied the first two or three chapters of St. John's gospel? There is but one possible tenable definition of a miracle,--namely, an immediate consequent from a heterogeneous antecedent. This is its essence. Add the words, 'praeter experientiam adhuc', or 'id temporis', and you have the full and popular or practical sense of the term miracle. [1] [Footnote A: See The Friend, Vol. III. Essay 2. Ed.] NOTE ON A SERMON ON THE PREVALENCE OF INFIDELITY AND ENTHUSIASM, BY WALTER BIRCH, B. D. In the description of enthusiasm, the author has plainly had in view individual characters, and those too in a light, in which they appeared to him; not clear and discriminate ideas. Hence a mixture of truth and error, of appropriate and inappropriate terms, which it is scarcely possible to disentangle. Part applies to fanaticism; part to enthusiasm; and no small portion of this latter to enthusiasm not pure, but as it exists in particular men, modified by their imperfections--and bad because not wholly enthusiasm. I regret this, because it is evidently the discourse of a very powerful mind;--and because I am convinced that the disease of the age is want of enthusiasm, and a tending to fanaticism. You may very naturally object that the senses, in which I use the two terms, fanaticism and enthusiasm, are private interpretations equally as, if not more than, Mr. Birch's. They are so; but the difference between us is, that without reference to either term, I have attempted to ascertain the existence and diversity of two states of moral being; and then having found in our language two words of very fluctuating and indeterminate use, indeed, but the one word more frequently bordering on the one state, the other on the other, I try to fix each to that state exclusively. And herein I follow the practice of all scientific men, whether naturalists or metaphysicians, and the dictate of common sense, that one word ought to have but one meaning. Thus by Hobbes and others of the materialists, compulsion and obligation were used indiscriminately; but the distinction of the two senses is the condition of all moral responsibility. Now the effect of Mr. Birch's use of the words is to continue the confusion. Remember we could not reason at all, if our conceptions and terms were not more single and definite than the things designated. Enthusiasm is the absorption of the individual in the object contemplated from the vividness or intensity of his conceptions and convictions: fanaticism is heat, or accumulation and direction, of feeling acquired by contagion, and relying on the sympathy of sect or confederacy; intense sensation with confused or dim conceptions. Hence the fanatic can exist only in a crowd, from inward weakness anxious for outward confirmation; and, therefore, an eager proselyter and intolerant. The enthusiast, on the contrary, is a solitary, who lives in a world of his own peopling, and for that cause is disinclined to outward action. Lastly, enthusiasm is susceptible of many degrees, (according to the proportionateness of the objects contemplated,) from the highest grandeur of moral and intellectual being, even to madness; but fanaticism is one and the same, and appears different only from the manners and original temperament of the individual. There is a white and a red heat; a sullen glow as well as a crackling flame; cold-blooded as well as hot-blooded fanaticism. Enthusiasts, [Greek: enthousiastai] from [Greek: entheos, ois ho theos enesi], or possibly from [Greek: en thusiais], those who, in sacrifice to, or at, the altar of truth or falsehood, are possessed by a spirit or influence mightier than their own individuality. 'Fanatici-qui circum fana favorem mutuo contrahunt el afflant'--those who in the same conventicle, or before the same shrine, relique or image, heat and ferment by co-acervation. I am fully aware that the words are used by the best writers indifferently, but such must be the case in very many words in a composite language, such as the English, before they are desynonymized. Thus imagination and fancy; chronical and temporal, and many others. FÉNÉLON ON CHARITY.[1] Note to pages 196,197. This chapter is plausible, shewy, insinuating, and (as indeed is the character of the whole work) 'makes the amiable.' To many,--to myself formerly,--it has appeared a mere dispute about words: but it is by no means of so harmless a character, for it tends to give a false direction to our thoughts, by diverting the conscience from the ruined and corrupted state, in which we are without Christ. Sin is the disease. What is the remedy? What is the antidote?--Charity?--Pshaw! Charity in the large apostolic sense of the term is the health, the state to be obtained by the use of the remedy, not the sovereign balm itself,--faith of grace,--faith in the God-manhood, the cross, the mediation, and perfected righteousness, of Jesus, to the utter rejection and abjuration of all righteousness of our own! Faith alone is the restorative. The Romish scheme is preposterous;--it puts the rill before the spring. Faith is the source,--charity, that is, the whole Christian life, is the stream from it. It is quite childish to talk of faith being imperfect without charity. As wisely might you say that a fire, however bright and strong, was imperfect without heat, or that the sun, however cloudless, was imperfect without beams. The true answer would be:--it is not faith,--but utter reprobate faithlessness, which may indeed very possibly coexist with a mere acquiescence of the understanding in certain facts recorded by the Evangelists. But did John, or Paul, or Martin Luther, ever flatter this barren belief with the name of saving faith? No. Little ones! Be not deceived. Wear at your bosoms that precious amulet against all the spells of antichrist, the 20th verse of the 2nd chapter of Paul's Epistle to the Galatians:--'I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless, I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life, which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me'. Thus we see even our faith is not ours in its origin: but is the faith of the Son of God graciously communicated to us. Beware, therefore, that you do not frustrate the grace of God: for if righteousness come by the Law, then Christ is dead in vain. If, therefore, we are saved by charity, we are saved by the keeping of the Law, which doctrine St. Paul declared to be an apostacy from Christ, and a bewitching of the soul from the truth. But, you will perhaps say, can a man be saved without charity?--The answer is, a man without charity cannot be saved: the faith of the Son of God is not in him. [Footnote 1: Communicated by Mr. Gillman. Ed.] CHANGE OF THE CLIMATES. The character and circumstances of the animal and vegetable remains discovered in the northern zone, in Siberia and other parts of Russia,--all with scarcely an exception belonging to 'genera' that are now only found in, and require, a tropical climate,--are such as receive no adequate solution from the hypothesis of their having been casually floated thither, and deposited, by the waters of a deluge, still less of the Noachian deluge, as related and described by the great Hebrew historian and legislator. In order to a full solution of this problem, two 'data' are requisite: 1. A total change of climate: 2. That this change shall have been, not gradual, but sudden, instantaneous, and incompatible with the life and subsistency of the animals and vegetables in these high latitudes, at that period, and previously, existing. Now these 'data' or conditions will be afforded, if we assume a total submersion of the surface of this planet, even of its highest mountains then and now existing, by a sudden contemporaneous mass of waters, and that the evaporation of these waters was aided by a steady wind, especially adapted to this purpose in a peculiarly dry atmosphere, and was (as it must of necessity have been) most rapid and intense at the equator and within the tropics proportionally. For--as it has been demonstrated by Dr. Wollaston's experiment, in which the evaporation, occasioned by boiling water at the mid point of a line of water, froze the fluid at the two ends, that is, at a given distance from the greatest intensity of the evaporative process,--the effect of an evaporation of the supposed power and rapidity would be to produce at certain distances from the 'maximum' point, north and south, a vast barrier of ice,--such as having once taken place, and being of such mass and magnitude as to be only in a small degree diminishable by the ensuing summer, must have become permanent, and beyond the power of all the known and ordinary dissolving agents of nature. That the situation of the magnetic poles of the earth, and the almost certain connection of magnetism with cold, no less than with metallic cohesion, co-operated in determining the distance of the barriers, or two poles, of evaporation, from its centre or the 'maximum' of its activity, is highly probable, and receives a strong confirmation from the open sea and diminished cold, both at the north and south zones, on the ulterior of the barrier, and towards the true or physical poles of the earth. Now the action of a powerful co-agent in the evaporative process, such as is assumed in this hypothesis, is a fact of history. 'And God remembered Noah, and every living thing, and all the cattle that was with him in the ark: and God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters assuaged'. Gen. viii. 1. I do not recollect the Hebrew word rendered 'assuaged;' but I will consult my learned friend Hyman Hurwitz on its radical, and its primary sense. At all events, the note by Pyle in Drs. Mant and D'Oyly's Bible is arbitrary, though excusable by the state of chemical science in his time. The problem of the multitude of 'genera' of animals, and their several exclusive acclimatements at the present period may, likewise, I persuade myself, receive a probable solution by an hypothesis legitimated by known laws and fair analogies. But of this hereafter. 1823. WONDERFULNESS OF PROSE. It has just struck my feelings that the Pherecydean origin of prose being granted, prose must have struck men with greater admiration than poetry. In the latter, it was the language of passion and emotion: it is what they themselves spoke and heard in moments of exultation, indignation, &c. But to hear an evolving roll, or a succession of leaves, talk continually the language of deliberate reason in a form of continued preconception, of a 'Z' already possessed when 'A' was being uttered,--this must have appeared godlike. I feel myself in the same state, when in the perusal of a sober, yet elevated and harmonious, succession of sentences and periods, I abstract my mind from the particular passage, and sympathize with the wonder of the common people who say of an eloquent man:--'He talks like a book!' NOTES ON TOM JONES. [1] Manners change from generation to generation, and with manners morals appear to change,--actually change with some, but appear to change with all but the abandoned. A young man of the present day who should act as Tom Jones is supposed to act at Upton, with Lady Bellaston, &c. would not be a Tom Jones; and a Tom Jones of the present day, without perhaps being in the ground a better man, would have perished rather than submit to be kept by a harridan of fortune. Therefore this novel is, and, indeed, pretends to be, no exemplar of conduct. But, notwithstanding all this, I do loathe the cant which can recommend Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe as strictly moral, though they poison the imagination of the young with continued doses of 'tinct. lyttae', while Tom Jones is prohibited as loose. I do not speak of young women;--but a young man whose heart or feelings can be injured, or even his passions excited, by aught in this novel, is already thoroughly corrupt. There is a cheerful, sun-shiny, breezy spirit that prevails everywhere, strongly contrasted with the close, hot, day-dreamy continuity of Richardson. Every indiscretion, every immoral act, of Tom Jones, (and it must be remembered that he is in every one taken by surprise--his inward principles remaining firm--) is so instantly punished by embarrassment and unanticipated evil consequences of his folly, that the reader's mind is not left for a moment to dwell or run riot on the criminal indulgence itself. In short, let the requisite allowance be made for the increased refinement of our manners,--and then I dare believe that no young man who consulted his heart and conscience only, without adverting to what the world would say--could rise from the perusal of Fielding's Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews, or Amelia, without feeling himself a better man;--at least, without an intense conviction that he could not be guilty of a base act. If I want a servant or mechanic, I wish to know what he does:--but of a friend, I must know what he is. And in no writer is this momentous distinction so finely brought forward as by Fielding. We do not care what Blifil does;--the deed, as separate from the agent, may be good or ill;--but Blifil is a villain;--and we feel him to be so from the very moment he, the boy Blifil, restores Sophia's poor captive bird to its native and rightful liberty. Book xiv. ch. 8. Notwithstanding the sentiment of the Roman satirist, which denies the divinity of fortune; and the opinion of Seneca to the same purpose; Cicero, who was, I believe, a wiser man than either of them, expressly holds the contrary; and certain it is there are some incidents in life so very strange and unaccountable, that it seems to require more than human skill and foresight in producing them. Surely Juvenal, Seneca, and Cicero, all meant the same thing, namely, that there was no chance, but instead of it providence, either human or divine. Book xv. ch. 9. The rupture with Lady Bellaston. Even in the most questionable part of Tom Jones, I cannot but think, after frequent reflection, that an additional paragraph, more fully and forcibly unfolding Tom Jones's sense of self-degradation on the discovery of the true character of the relation in which he had stood to Lady Bellaston, and his awakened feeling of the dignity of manly chastity, would have removed in great measure any just objections, at all events relatively to Fielding himself, and with regard to the state of manners in his time. Book xvi. ch. 5. That refined degree of Platonic affection which is absolutely detached from the flesh, and is indeed entirely and purely spiritual, is a gift confined to the female part of the creation; many of whom I have heard declare (and doubtless with great truth) that they would, with the utmost readiness, resign a lover to a rival, when such resignation was proved to be necessary for the temporal interest of such lover. I firmly believe that there are men capable of such a sacrifice, and this, without pretending to, or even admiring or seeing any virtue in, this absolute detachment from the flesh. [Footnote 1: Communicated by Mr. Gillman, Ed.] JONATHAN WILD. [1] Jonathan Wild is assuredly the best of all the fictions in which a villain is throughout the prominent character. But how impossible it is by any force of genius to create a sustained attractive interest for such a groundwork, and how the mind wearies of, and shrinks from, the more than painful interest, the [Greek: mis_eton], of utter depravity,--Fielding himself felt and endeavoured to mitigate and remedy by the (on all other principles) far too large a proportion, and too quick recurrence, of the interposed chapters of moral reflection, like the chorus in the Greek tragedy,--admirable specimens as these chapters are of profound irony and philosophic satire. Chap. VI. Book 2, on Hats,[Footnote 1]--brief as it is, exceeds any thing even in Swift's Lilliput, or Tale of the Tub. How forcibly it applies to the Whigs, Tories, and Radicals of our own times. Whether the transposition of Fielding's scorching wit (as B. III. c. xiv.) to the mouth of his hero be objectionable on the ground of incredulus odi', or is to be admired as answering the author's purpose by unrealizing the story, in order to give a deeper reality to the truths intended,--I must leave doubtful, yet myself inclining to the latter judgment. 27th Feb. 1832. [Footnote 1: Communicated by Mr. Gillman. Ed.] [Footnote 2: 'In which our hero makes a speech well worthy to be celebrated; and the behaviour of one of the gang, perhaps more unnatural than any other part of this history.'] BARRY CORNWALL.[1] Barry Cornwall is a poet, 'me saltem judice'; and in that sense of the term, in which I apply it to C. Lamb and W. Wordsworth. There are poems of great merit, the authors of which I should yet not feel impelled so to designate. The faults of these poems are no less things of hope, than the beauties; both are just what they ought to be,--that is, now. If B.C. be faithful to his genius, it in due time will warn him, that as poetry is the identity of all other knowledges, so a poet cannot be a great poet, but as being likewise inclusively an historian and naturalist, in the light, as well as the life, of philosophy: all other men's worlds are his chaos. Hints 'obiter' are:-- not to permit delicacy and exquisiteness to seduce into effeminacy. Not to permit beauties by repetition to become mannerisms. To be jealous of fragmentary composition,--as epicurism of genius, and apple-pie made all of quinces. 'Item', that dramatic poetry must be poetry hid in thought and passion,--not thought or passion disguised in the dress of poetry. Lastly, to be economic and withholding in similies, figures, &c. They will all find their place, sooner or later, each as the luminary of a sphere of its own. There can be no galaxy in poetry, because it is language,--'ergo' processive,--'ergo' every the smallest star must be seen singly. There are not five metrists in the kingdom, whose works are known by me, to whom I could have held myself allowed to have spoken so plainly. But B.C. is a man of genius, and it depends on himself--(competence protecting him from gnawing or distracting cares)--to become a rightful poet,--that is, a great man. Oh! for such a man worldly prudence is transfigured into the highest spiritual duty! How generous is self-interest in him, whose true self is all that is good and hopeful in all ages, as far as the language of Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton shall become the mother-tongue! A map of the road to Paradise, drawn in Purgatory, on the confines of Hell, by S.T.C. July 30, 1819. [Footnote 1: Written in Mr. Lamb's copy of the 'Dramatic Scenes'. Ed.] THE PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN'S ADDRESS TO THE CROSS. [1] O! That it were as it was wont to be, When thy old friends of fire, all full of thee, Fought against frowns with smiles; gave glorius chace To persecutions; and against the face Of death and fiercest dangers durst with brave And sober pace march on to meet a grave! On their bold breast about the world they bore thee, And to the teeth of hell stood up to teach thee, In centre of their inmost souls they wore thee, Where racks and torments strove in vain to reach thee! Powers of my soul, be proud, And speak aloud To the dear-bought nations this redeeming name, And in the wealth of one rich word proclaim New smiles to nature! May it be no wrong, Blest heavens! to you and your superior song, That we, dark sons of dust and sorrow, Awhile dare borrow The name of your delights and your desires, And fit it to so far inferior lyres!--Our lispings have their music too, Ye mighty orbs! as well as you; Nor yields the noblest nest Of warbling cherubs to the ear of love, A melody above The low fond murmurs from the loyal breast Of a poor panting turtle dove. We mortals too Have leave to do The same bright business, ye third heavens with you. [Footnote 1: This poem was found in Mr. Coleridge's hand-writing on a sheet of paper with other passages undoubtedly of his own composition. There is something, however, in it which leads me to think it transcribed or translated from some other writer, though I have been unable from recollection or inquiry to ascertain the fact. It is published here, therefore, expressly under caution. Ed.] FULLER'S HOLY STATE. B.I.c.9. Life of Eliezer. He will not truant it now in the afternoon, but with convenient speed returns to Abraham, who onely was worthy of such a servant, who onely was worthy of such a master. On my word, Eliezer did his business in an orderly and sensible manner; but what there is to call forth this hyper-encomiastic--'who only'--I cannot see. B.II.c.3. Life of Paracelsus. It is matter of regret with me, that Fuller, (whose wit, alike in quantity, quality, and perpetuity, surpassing that of the wittiest in a witty age, robbed him of the praise not less due to him for an equal superiority in sound, shrewd, good sense, and freedom of intellect,) had not looked through the two Latin folios of Paracelsus's Works. It is not to be doubted that a rich and delightful article would have been the result. For who like Fuller could have brought out and set forth, this singular compound of true philosophic genius with the morals of a quack and the manners of a king of the gypsies! Nevertheless, Paracelsus belonged to his age--the dawn of experimental science: and a well written critique on his life and writings would present, through the magnifying glass of a caricature, the distinguishing features of the Helmonts, Kirchers, &c. in short, of the host of naturalists of the sixteenth century. The period might begin with Paracelsus and end with Sir Kenelm Digby. N. B. The potential, ([Greek: Logos theanthropos]) the ground of the prophetic, directed the first thinkers, (the 'Mystæ') to the metallic bodies, as the key of all natural science. The then actual blended with this instinct all the fancies and fond desires, and false perspective of the childhood of intellect. The essence was truth, the form was folly: and this is the definition of alchemy. Nevertheless the very terms bear witness to the veracity of the original instinct. The world of sensible experience cannot be more luminously divided than into the modifying powers, [Greek: to allo],--that which differences, makes this other than that; and the [Greek: met allo]--that which is beyond, or deeper than the modification. 'Metallon' is strictly the base of the mode; and such have the metals been determined to be by modern chemistry. And what are now the great problems of chemistry? The difference of the metals themselves, their origin, the causes of their locations, of their co-existence in the same ore--as, for instance, iridium, osmium, palladium, rhodium, and iron with platinum. Were these problems solved, the results who dare limit? In addition to the 'méchanique céleste', we might have a new department of astronomy, the 'chymie céleste', that is, a philosophic astrology. And to this I do not hesitate to refer the whole connection between alchemy and astrology, the same divinity in the idea, the same childishness in the attempt to realize it. Nay, the very invocations of spirits were not without a ground of truth. The light was for the greater part suffocated and the rest fantastically refracted, but still it was light struggling in the darkness. And I am persuaded, that to the full triumph of science, it will be necessary that nature should be commanded more spiritually than hitherto, that is, more directly in the power of the will. B. IV. c. 19. The Prince. He sympathizeth with him that by a proxy is corrected for his offence. See Sir W. Scott's Fortunes of Nigel. In an oriental despotism one would not have been surprised at finding such a custom, but in a Christian court, and under the light of Protestantism, it is marvellous. It would be well to ascertain, if possible, the earliest date of this contrivance; whether it existed under the Plantagenets, or whether first under the Tudors, or lastly, whether it was a precious import from Scotland with gentle King Jamie. Ib. c. 21. The King. He is a mortal god. Compare the fulsome flattery of these and other passages in this volume (though modest to the common language of James's priestly courtiers) with the loyal but free and manly tone of Fuller's later works, towards the close of Charles the First's reign and under the Commonwealth and Protectorate. And doubtless this was not peculiar to Fuller: but a great and lasting change was effected in the mind of the country generally. The bishops and other church dignitaries tried for a while to renew the old king-godding 'mumpsimus'; but the second Charles laughed at them, and they quarrelled with his successor, and hated the hero who delivered them from him too thoroughly to have flattered him with any unction, even if William's Dutch phlegm had not precluded the attempt by making its failure certain. FULLER'S PROFANE STATE. B. V. c. 2. God gave magistrates power to punish them, else they bear the sword in vain. They may command people to serve God, who herein have no cause to complain. And elsewhere. The only serious 'macula' in Fuller's mind is his uniform support of the right and duty of the civil magistrate to punish errors in belief. Fuller would, indeed, recommend moderation in the practice; but of 'upas', 'woorara', and persecution, there are no moderate doses possible. FULLER'S APPEAL OF INJURED INNOCENCE. Part I. c. 5. Yet there want not learned writers (whom I need not name) of the opinion that even the instrumental penmen of the Scripture might commit [Greek: hamartaemata mnaemonika]: though open that window to profaneness, and it will be in vain to shut any dores; 'Let God be true, and every man a lyer'. It has been matter of complaint with hundreds, yea, it is an old cuckoo song of grim saints, that the Reformation came to its close long before it came to its completion. But the cause of this imperfection has been fully laid open by no party,--'scilicet', that in divines of both parties of the Reformers, the Protestants and the Detestants, there was the same relic of the Roman 'lues',--the habit of deciding for or against the orthodoxy of a position, not according to its truth or falsehood, not on grounds of reason or of history, but by the imagined consequences of the position. The very same principles on which the pontifical polemics vindicate the Papal infallibility, Fuller 'et centum alii' apply to the (if possible) still more extravagant notion of the absolute truth and divinity of every syllable of the text of the books of the Old and New Testament as we have it. Ib. Sure I am, that one of as much meekness, as some are of moroseness, even upright Moses himself, in his service of the essential and increated truth (of higher consequence than the historical truth controverted betwixt us) had notwithstanding 'a respect to the reward'. Heb. xi. 26. In religion the faith pre-supposed in the respect, and as its condition, gives to the motive a purity and an elevation which of itself, and where the recompense is looked for in temporal and carnal pleasures or profits, it would not have. FULLER'S CHURCH HISTORY. B. I. cent. 5. PELAGIUS:--Let no foreiner insult on the infelicity of our land in bearing this monster. It raises, or ought to raise, our estimation of Fuller's good sense and the general temperance of his mind, when we see the heavy weight of prejudices, the universal code of his age, incumbent on his judgment, and which nevertheless left sanity of opinion, the general character of his writings: this remark was suggested by the term 'monster' attached to the worthy Cambrian Pelagius--the teacher _Arminianismi ante Arminium_. B. II. cent. 6. s. 8. Whereas in Holy Writ, when the Apostles (and the Papists commonly call Augustine the English apostle, how properly we shall see hereafter,) went to a foreign nation, 'God gave them the language thereof, &c.' What a loss that Fuller has not made a reference to his authorities for this assertion! I am sure he could have found none in the New Testament, but facts that imply, and, in the absence of all such proof, prove the contrary. Ib. s. 6. Thus we see the whole week bescattered with Saxon idols, whose pagan gods were the godfathers of the days, and gave them their names. 'This some zealot may behold as the object of a necessary reformation, desiring to have the days of the week new dipt, and called after other names'. Though indeed this supposed scandal will not offend the wise, as beneath their notice, and cannot offend the ignorant, as above their knowledge. A curious prediction fulfilled a few years after in the Quakers, and well worthy of being extracted and addressed to the present Friends. Memorandum.--It is the error of the Friends, but natural and common to almost all sects,--the perversion of the wisdom of the first establishers of their sect into their own folly, by not distinguishing between the conditionally right and the permanently and essentially so. For example: It was right conditionally in the Apostles to forbid black puddings even to the Gentile Christians, and it was wisdom in them; but to continue the prohibition would be folly and Judaism in us. The elder church very sensibly distinguished episcopal from apostolic inspiration; the episcopal spirit, that which dictated what was fit and profitable for a particular community or church at a particular period,--from the apostolic and catholic spirit which dictated truth and duties of permanent and universal obligation. Ib. cent. 7. This Latin dedication is remarkably pleasing and elegant. Milton in his classical youth, the aera of Lycidas, might have written it--only he would have given it in Latin verse. B. x. cent. 17. Bp. of London. May your Majesty be pleased, that the ancient canon may be remembered, 'Schismatici contra episcopos non sunt audiendi'. And there is another decree of a very ancient council, that no man should be admitted to speak against that whereunto he hath formerly subscribed. And as for you, Doctor Reynolds, and your sociates, how much are you bound to his Majestie's clemencye, permitting you contrary to the statute 'primo Elizabethae', so freely to speak against the liturgie and discipline established. Faine would I know the end you aime at, and whether you be not of Mr. Cartwright's minde, who affirmed, that we ought in ceremonies rather to conforme to the Turks than to the Papists. I doubt you approve his position, because here appearing before his Majesty in Turkey-gownes, not in your scholastic habits, according to the order of the Universities. If any man, who like myself hath attentively read the Church history of the reign of Elizabeth, and the conference before, and with, her pedant successor, can shew me any essential difference between Whitgift and Bancroft during their rule, and Bonner and Gardiner in the reign of Mary, I will be thankful to him in my heart and for him in my prayers. One difference I see, namely, that the former professing the New Testament to be their rule and guide, and making the fallibility of all churches and individuals an article of faith, were more inconsistent, and therefore less excusable, than the Popish persecutors. 30 Aug. 1824. N.B. The crimes, murderous as they were, were the vice and delusion of the age, and it is ignorance to lack charity towards the persons, Papist or Protestant; but the tone, the spirit, characterizes, and belongs to, the individual: for example, the bursting spleen of this Bancroft, not so satisfied with this precious arbitrator for having pre-condemned his opponents, as fierce and surly with him for not hanging them up unheard. At the end. Next to Shakspeare, I am not certain whether Thomas Fuller, beyond all other writers, does not excite in me the sense and emotion of the marvellous;--the degree in which any given faculty or combination of faculties is possessed and manifested, so far surpassing what one would have thought possible in a single mind, as to give one's admiration the flavour and quality of wonder! Wit was the stuff and substance of Fuller's intellect. It was the element, the earthen base, the material which he worked in, and this very circumstance has defrauded him of his due praise for the practical wisdom of the thoughts, for the beauty and variety of the truths, into which he shaped the stuff. Fuller was incomparably the most sensible, the least prejudiced, great man of an age that boasted a galaxy of great men. He is a very voluminous writer, and yet in all his numerous volumes on so many different subjects, it is scarcely too much to say, that you will hardly find a page in which some one sentence out of every three does not deserve to be quoted for itself--as motto or as maxim. God bless thee, dear old man! may I meet with thee!--which is tantamount to--may I go to heaven! July, 1829. ASGILL'S ARGUMENT. 'That according to the covenant of eternal life revealed in the Scriptures, man may be translated from hence into that eternal life, without passing through death, although the human nature of Christ himself could not be thus translated till he had passed through death.' Edit. 1715. If I needed an illustrative example of the distinction between the reason and the understanding, between spiritual sense and logic, this treatise of Asgill's would supply it. Excuse the defect of all idea, or spiritual intuition of God, and allow yourself to bring Him as plaintiff or defendant into a common-law court,--and then I cannot conceive a clearer or cleverer piece of special pleading than Asgill has here given. The language is excellent--idiomatic, simple, perspicuous, at once significant and lively, that is, expressive of the thought, and also of a manly proportion of feeling appropriate to it. In short, it is the ablest attempt to exhibit a scheme of religion without ideas, that the inherent contradiction in the thought renders possible. It is of minor importance how a man represents to himself his redemption by the Word Incarnate,--within what scheme of his understanding he concludes it, or by what supposed analogies (though actually no better than metaphors) he tries to conceive it, provided he has a lively faith in Christ, the Son of the living God, and his Redeemer. The faith may and must be the same in all who are thereby saved; but every man, more or less, construes it into an intelligible belief through the shaping and coloring optical glass of his own individual understanding. Mr. Asgill has given a very ingenious common-law scheme. 'Valeat quantum valere potest'! It would make a figure before the Benchers of the Middle Temple. For myself, I prefer the belief that man was made to know that a finite free agent could not stand but by the coincidence, and independent harmony, of a separate will with the will of God. For only by the will of God can he obey God's will. Man fell as a soul to rise a spirit. The first Adam was a living soul; the last a life-making spirit. In the Word was life, and that life is the light of men. And as long as the light abides within its own sphere, that is, appears as reason,--so long it is commensurate with the life, and is its adequate representative. But not so, when this light shines downward into the understanding; for there it is always, more or less, refracted, and differently in every different individual; and it must be re-converted into life to rectify itself, and regain its universality, or 'all-commonness, Allgemeinheit', as the German more expressively says. Hence in faith and charity the church is catholic: so likewise in the fundamental articles of belief, which constitute the right reason of faith. But in the minor 'dogmata', in modes of exposition, and the vehicles of faith and reason to the understandings, imaginations, and affections of men, the churches may differ, and in this difference supply one object for charity to exercise itself on by mutual forbearance. O! there is a deep philosophy in the proverbial phrase,--'his heart sets his head right!' In our commerce with heaven, we must cast our local coins and tokens into the melting pot of love, to pass by weight and bullion. And where the balance of trade is so immensely in our favour, we have little right to complain, though they should not pass for half the nominal value they go for in our own market. P. 46. And I am so far from thinking this covenant of eternal life to be an allusion to the forms of title amongst men, that I rather adore it as the precedent for them all, from which our imperfect forms are taken: believing with that great Apostle, that 'the things on earth are but the patterns of things in the heavens, where the originals are kept'. Aye! this, this is the pinch of the argument, which Asgill should have proved, not merely asserted. Are these human laws, and these forms of law, absolutely good and wise, or only conditionally so--the limited powers and intellect, and the corrupt will of men being considered? P. 64. And hence, though the dead shall not arise with the same identity of matter with which they died, yet being in the same form, they will not know themselves from themselves, being the same to all uses, intents, and purposes.... But then as God, in the resurrection, is not bound to use the same matter, neither is he obliged to use a different matter. The great objection to this part of Asgill's scheme, which has had, and still, I am told, has, many advocates among the chief dignitaries of our church, is--that it either takes death as the utter extinction of being,--or it supposes a continuance, or at least a renewal, of consciousness after death. The former involves all the irrational, and all the immoral, consequences of materialism. But if the latter be granted, the proportionality, adhesion, and symmetry, of the whole scheme are gone, and the infinite quantity,--that is, immortality under the curse of estrangement from God,--is rendered a mere supplement tacked on to the finite, and comparatively insignificant, if not doubtful, evil, namely, the dissolution of the organic body. See what a poor hand Asgill makes of it, p. 26:-- And therefore to signify the height of this resentment, God raises man from the dead to demand further satisfaction of him. Death is a commitment to the prison of the grave till the judgment of the great day; and then the grand 'Habeas corpus' will issue 'to the earth and to the sea', to give up their dead; to remove the bodies, with the cause of their commitment: and as these causes shall appear, they shall either be released, or else sentenced to the common goal of hell, there to remain until satisfaction. P. 66. Thou wilt not leave my 'soul' in the grave.... And that it is translated 'soul', is an Anglicism, not understood in other languages, which have no other word for 'soul' but the same which is for life. How so? 'Seele', the soul, 'Leben', life, in German; [Greek: psychae] and [Greek: zo_ae], in Greek, and so on. P. 67. Then to this figure God added 'life', by breathing it into him from himself, whereby this inanimate body became a living one. And what was this life? Something, or nothing? And had not, first, the Spirit, and next the Word, of God infused life into the earth, of which man as an animal and all other animals were made,--and then, in addition to this, breathed into man a living soul, which he did not breathe into the other animals? P. 75.-78-81. 'ad finem': I have a great deal of business yet in this world, without doing of which heaven itself would be uneasy to me. And therefore do depend, that I shall not be taken hence in the midst of my days, before I have done all my heart's desire. But when that is done, I know no business I have with the dead, and therefore do as much depend that I shall not go hence by 'returning to the dust', which is the sentence of that law from which I claim a discharge: but that I shall make my 'exit' by way of translation, which I claim as a dignity belonging to that degree in the science of eternal life, of which I profess myself a graduate, according to the true intent and meaning of the covenant of eternal life revealed in the Scriptures. A man so [Greek: kat exochaen] clear-headed, so remarkable for the perspicuity of his sentences, and the luminous orderliness of his arrangement,--in short, so consummate an artist in the statement of his case, and in the inferences from his 'data', as John Asgill must be allowed by all competent judges to have been,--was he in earnest or in jest from p. 75 to the end of this treatise?--My belief is, that he himself did not know. He was a thorough humorist: and so much of will, with a spice of the wilful, goes to the making up of a humorist's creed, that it is no easy matter to determine, how far such a man might not have a pleasure in 'humming' his own mind, and believing, in order to enjoy a dry laugh at himself for the belief. But let us look at it in another way. That Asgill's belief, professed and maintained in this tract, is unwise and odd, I can more readily grant, than that it is altogether irrational and absurd. I am even strongly inclined to conjecture, that so early as St. Paul's apostolate there were persons (whether sufficiently numerous to form a sect or party, I cannot say), who held the same tenet as Asgill's, and in a more intolerant and exclusive sense; and that it is to such persons that St. Paul refers in the justly admired fifteenth chapter of the first epistle to the Corinthians; and that the inadvertence to this has led a numerous class of divines to a misconception of the Apostle's reasoning, and a misinterpretation of his words, in behoof of the Socinian notion, that the resurrection of Christ is the only argument of proof for the belief of a future state, and that this was the great end and purpose of this event. Now this assumption is so destitute of support from the other writers of the New Testament, and so discordant with the whole spirit and gist of St. Paul's views and reasoning every where else, that it is 'a priori' probable, that the apparent exception in this chapter is only apparent. And this the hypothesis, I have here advanced, would enable one to shew, and to exhibit the true bearing of the texts. Asgill contents himself with maintaining that translation without death is one, and the best, mode of passing to the heavenly state. 'Hinc itur ad astra'. But his earliest predecessors contended that it was the only mode, and to this St. Paul justly replies:'--If in this life only we have hope, we are of all men most miserable.' 1827. INTRODUCTION TO ASGILL'S DEFENCE UPON HIS EXPULSION FROM THE HOUSE OP COMMONS. EDIT. 1712. P. 28. For as every faith, or credit, that a man hath attained to, is the result of some knowledge or other; so that whoever hath attained that knowledge, hath that faith, (for whatever a man knows, he cannot but believe:) So this 'all faith' being the result of all knowledge,'tis easy to conceive that whoever had once attained to all that knowledge, nothing could be difficult to him. This whole discussion on faith is one of the very few instances, in which Asgill has got out of his depth. According to all usage of words, science and faith are incompatible in relation to the same object; while, according to Asgill, faith is merely the power which science confers on the will. Asgill says,--What we know, we must believe. I retort,--What we only believe, we do not know. The 'minor' here is excluded by, not included in, the 'major'. Minors by difference of quantity are included in their majors; but minors by difference of quality are excluded by them, or superseded. Apply this to belief and science, or certain knowledge. On the confusion of the second, that is, minors by difference of quality, with the first, or minors by difference of quantity, rests Asgill's erroneous exposition of faith. NOTES ON SIR THOMAS BROWN'S RELIGIO MEDICI, MADE DURING A SECOND PERUSAL. 1808. [1] Part I. S.1. For my religion, though there be several circumstances that might perswade the world I have none at all, 'as the generall scandall of my profession', &c. The historical origin of this scandal, which in nine cases out of ten is the honour of the medical profession, may, perhaps, be found in the fact, that Ænesidemus and Sextus Empiricus, the sceptics, were both physicians, about the close of the second century. [2] A fragment from the writings of the former has been preserved by Photius, and such as would leave a painful regret for the loss of the work, had not the invaluable work of Sextus Empiricus been still extant. S. 7. A third there is which I did never positively maintaine or practise, but have often wished it had been consonant to truth, and not offensive to my religion, and that is, the prayer for the dead, &c. Our church with her characteristic Christian prudence does not enjoin prayer for the dead, but neither does she prohibit it. In its own nature it belongs to a private aspiration; and being conditional, like all religious acts not expressed in Scripture, and therefore not combinable with a perfect faith, it is something between prayer and wish,--an act of natural piety sublimed by Christian hope, that shares in the light, and meets the diverging rays, of faith, though it be not contained in the focus. S. 13. He holds no counsell, but that mysticall one of the Trinity, wherein, though there be three persons, there is but one mind that decrees without contradiction, &c. Sir T.B. is very amusing. He confesses his part heresies, which are mere opinions, while his orthodoxy is full of heretical errors. His Trinity is a mere trefoil, a 3=1, which is no mystery at all, but a common object of the senses. The mystery is, that one is three, that is, each being the whole God. S. 18. 'Tis not a ridiculous devotion to say a prayer before a game at tables, &c. But a great profanation, methinks, and a no less absurdity. Would Sir T. Brown, before weighing two pigs of lead, A. and B., pray to God that A. might weigh the heavier? Yet if the result of the dice be at the time equally believed to be a settled and predetermined effect, where lies the difference? Would not this apply against all petitionary prayer?--St. Paul's injunction involves the answer:--'Pray always'. S. 22. They who to salve this would make the deluge particular, proceed upon a principle that I can no way grant, &c. But according to the Scripture, the deluge was so gentle as to leave uncrushed the green leaves on the olive tree. If then it was universal, and if (as with the longevity of the antediluvians it must have been) the earth was fully peopled, is it not strange that no buildings remain in the since then uninhabited parts--in America for instance? That no human skeletons are found may be solved from the circumstance of the large proportion of phosphoric acid in human bones. But cities and traces of civilization?--I do not know what to think, unless we might be allowed to consider Noah a 'homo repraesentativus', or the last and nearest of a series taken for the whole. S. 33. They that to refute the invocation of saints, have denied that they have any knowledge of our affairs below, have proceeded too farre, and must pardon my opinion, till I can throughly answer that piece of Scripture, 'At the conversion of a sinner the angels of Heaven rejoyce'. Take any moral or religious book, and, instead of understanding each sentence according to the main purpose and intention, interpret every phrase in its literal sense as conveying, and designed to convey, a metaphysical verity, or historical fact:--what a strange medley of doctrines should we not educe? And yet this is the way in which we are constantly in the habit of treating the books of the New Testament. S. 34. And, truely, for the first chapters of 'Genesis' I must confesse a great deal of obscurity; though divines have to the power of humane reason endeavored to make all go in a literall meaning, yet those allegoricall interpretations are also probable, and perhaps, the mysticall method of Moses bred up in the hieroglyphicall schooles of the Egyptians. The second chapter of Genesis from v. 4, and the third chapter are to my mind, as evidently symbolical, as the first chapter is literal. The first chapter is manifestly by Moses himself; but the second and third seem to me of far higher antiquity, and have the air of being translated into words from graven stones. S. 48. This section is a series of ingenious paralogisms. S. 49. Moses, that was bred up in all the learning of the Egyptians, committed a grosse absurdity in philosophy, when with these eyes of flesh he desired to see God, and petitioned his maker, that is, truth itself, to a contradiction. Bear in mind the Jehovah 'Logos', the [Symbol: 'O "omega N] [Greek: en kolp_o patros]--the person 'ad extra',--and few passages in the Old Testament are more instructive, or of profounder import. Overlook this, or deny it,--and none so perplexing or so irreconcilable with the known character of the inspired writer. S. 50. For that mysticall metall of gold, whose solary and celestiall nature I admire, &c. Rather anti-solar and terrene nature! For gold, most of all metals, repelleth light, and resisteth that power and portion of the common air, which of all ponderable bodies is most akin to light, and its surrogate in the realm of [Greek: antiph'os]; or gravity, namely, oxygen. Gold is 'tellurian' [Greek: kat exochaen] and if solar, yet as in the solidity and dark 'nucleus' of the sun. S. 52. I thank God that with joy I mention it, I was never afraid of hell, nor never grew pale at the description of that place; I have so fixed my contemplations on heaven, that I have almost forgot the idea of hell, &c. Excellent throughout. The fear of hell may, indeed, in some desperate cases, like the _moxa_, give the first rouse from a moral lethargy, or like the green venom of copper, by evacuating poison or a dead load from the inner man, prepare it for nobler ministrations and medicines from the realm of light and life, that nourish while they stimulate. S. 54. There is no salvation to those that believe not in Christ, &c. This is plainly confined to such as have had Christ preached to them;--but the doctrine, that salvation is in and by Christ only, is a most essential verity, and an article of unspeakable grandeur and consolation. Name--_nomen_, that is, [Greek: noumenon], in its spiritual interpretation, is the same as power, or intrinsic cause. What? Is it a few letters of the alphabet, the hearing of which in a given succession, that saves? S. 59. 'Before Abraham was, I am,' is the saying of Christ; yet is it true in some sense if I say it of myself, for I was not only before myself, but Adam, that is, in the idea of God, and the decree of that synod held from all eternity. And in this sense, I say, the world was before the creation, and at an end before it had a beginning; and thus was I dead before I was alive;--though my grave be England, my dying-place was Paradise, and Eve miscarried of me before she conceived of Cain. Compare this with s. 11, and the judicious remark there on the mere accommodation in the 'prae' of predestination. But the subject was too tempting for the rhetorician. Part II. s. 1. But as in casting account, three or four men together come short in account of one man placed by himself below them, &c. Thus 1,965. But why is the 1, said to be placed below the 965? S. 7. Let me be nothing, if within the compass of myself, I do not finde the battaile of Lepanto, passion against reason, 'reason against faith', faith against the devil, and my conscience against all. It may appear whimsical, but I really feel an impatient regret, that this good man had so misconceived the nature both of faith and reason as to affirm their contrariety to each other. Ib. For my originale sin, I hold it to bee washed away in my baptisme; for my actual transgressions, I compute and reckon with God, but from my last repentance, &c. This is most true as far as the imputation of the same is concerned. For where the means of avoiding its consequences have been afforded, each after transgression is actual, by a neglect of those means. S. 14. God, being all goodnesse, can love nothing but himself; he loves us but for that part which is, as it were, himselfe, and the traduction of his Holy Spirit. This recalls a sublime thought of Spinosa. Every true virtue is a part of that love, with which God loveth himself. [Footnote 1: Communicated by Mr. Wordsworth.--Ed.] [Footnote 2: A mistake as to Ænesidemus, who lived in the age of Augustus--Ed.] NOTES ON SIR THOMAS BROWNE'S GARDEN OF CYRUS, OR THE QUINCUNCIAL, ETC. PLANTATIONS OF THE ANCIENTS, ETC. Ch. III. That bodies are first spirits, Paracelsus could affirm, &c. Effects purely relative from properties merely comparative, such as edge, point, grater, &c. are not proper qualities: for they are indifferently producible 'ab extra', by grinding, &c., and 'ab intra', from growth. In the latter instance, they suppose qualities as their antecedents. Now, therefore, since qualities cannot proceed from quantity, but quantity from quality,--and as matter opposed to spirit is shape by modification of extension, or pure quantity,--Paracelsus's 'dictum' is defensible. Ib. The æquivocall production of things, under undiscerned principles, makes a large part of generation, &c. Written before Harvey's 'ab ovo omnia'. Since his work, and Lewenhock's 'Microscopium', the question is settled in physics; but whether in metaphysics, is not quite so clear. Ch. IV. And mint growing in glasses of water, until it arriveth at the weight of an ounce, in a shady place, will sometimes exhaust a pound of water. How much did Brown allow for evaporation? Ib. Things entering upon the intellect by a pyramid from without, and thence into the memory by another from within, the common decussation being in the understanding, &c. This nearly resembles Kant's intellectual 'mechanique'. The Platonists held three knowledges of God;--first, [Greek: parousia], his own incommunicable self-comprehension;--second, [Greek: kata noaesin]--by pure mind, unmixed with the sensuous;--third, [Greek: kat epistaemaen]--by discursive intelligential act. Thus a Greek philosopher:--[Greek: tous epistaemonikous logous muthous haegaesetai sunousa t'o patri kai sunesti'omenae hae psuchae en tae alaetheia tou ontos, kai en augae kathara].--Those notions of God which we attain by processes of intellect, the soul will consider as mythological allegories, when it exists in union with the Father, and is feasting with him in the truth of very being, and in the pure, unmixed, absolutely simple and elementary, splendor. Thus expound Exod. c. xxxiii. v. 10. 'And he said, thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live'. By the 'face of God,' Moses meant the [Greek: idea noaetikae] which God declared incompatible with human life, it implying [Greek: epaphae tou noaetou], or contact with the pure spirit. NOTES ON SIR THOMAS BROWNE'S VULGAR ERRORS. ADDRESS TO THE READER. Dr. Primrose, Is not this the same person as the physician mentioned by Mrs. Hutchinson in her Memoirs of her husband? Book I. c. 8. s. 1. The veracity and credibility of Herodotus have increased and increase with the increase of our discoveries. Several of his relations deemed fabulous, have been authenticated within the last thirty years from this present 1808. Ib. s. 2. Sir John Mandevill left a book of travels:--herein he often attesteth the fabulous relations of Ctesias. Many, if not most, of these Ctesian fables in Sir J. Mandevill were monkish interpolations. Ib. s. 13. Cardanus--is of singular use unto a prudent reader; but unto him that only desireth 'hoties', or to replenish his head with varieties,--he may become no small occasion of error. 'Hoties'--[Greek: hoti s]--'whatevers,' that is, whatever is written, no matter what, true or false,--'omniana'; 'all sorts of varieties,' as a dear young lady once said to me. Ib. c. ix. If Heraclitus with his adherents will hold the sun is no bigger than it appeareth. It is not improbable that Heraclitus meant merely to imply that we perceive only our own sensations, and they of course are what they are;--that the image of the sun is an appearance, or sensation in our eyes, and, of course, an appearance can be neither more nor less than what it appears to be;--that the notion of the true size of the sun is not an image, or belonging either to the sense, or to the sensuous fancy, but is an imageless truth of the understanding obtained by intellectual deductions. He could not possibly mean what Sir T. B. supposes him to have meant; for if he had believed the sun to be no more than a mile distant from us, every tree and house must have shown its absurdity. ... In the following books I have endeavoured, wherever the author himself is in a vulgar error, as far as my knowledge extends, to give in the margin, either the demonstrated discoveries, or more probable opinions, of the present natural philosophy;--so that, independently of the entertainingness of the thoughts and tales, and the force and splendor of Sir Thomas Browne's diction and manner, you may at once learn from him the history of human fancies and superstitions, both when he detects them, and when he himself falls into them,--and from my notes, the real truth of things, or, at least, the highest degree of probability, at which human research has hitherto arrived. ... Book II. c. i. Production of crystal. Cold is the attractive or astringent power, comparatively uncounteracted by the dilative, the diminution of which is the proportional increase of the contractive. Hence the astringent, or power of negative magnetism, is the proper agent in cold, and the contractive, or oxygen, an allied and consequential power. 'Crystallum, non ex aqua, sed ex substantia metallorum communi confrigeratum dico'. As the equator, or mid point of the equatorial hemispherical line, is to the centre, so water is to gold. Hydrogen is to the electrical azote, as azote to the magnetic hydrogen. Ib. Crystal--will strike fire--and upon collision with steel send forth its sparks, not much inferiourly to a flint. It being, indeed, nothing else but pure flint. C. iii. And the magick thereof (the lodestone) is not safely to be believed, which was delivered by Orpheus, that sprinkled with water it will upon a question emit a voice not much unlike an infant. That is:--to the twin counterforces of the magnetic power, the equilibrium of which is revealed in magnetic iron, as the substantial, add the twin counterforces or positive and negative poles of the electrical power, the indifference of which is realized in water, as the superficial--(whence Orpheus employed the term 'sprinkled,' or rather affused or superfused)--and you will hear the voice of infant nature;--that is, you will understand the rudimental products and elementary powers and constructions of the phenomenal world. An enigma this not unworthy of Orpheus, 'quicunque fuit', and therefore not improbably ascribed to him. N. B. Negative and positive magnetism are to attraction and repulsion, or cohesion and dispersion, as negative and positive electricity are to contraction and dilation. C. vii. s. 4. That camphire begets in men [Greek: taen anaphrodisian], observation will hardly confirm, &c. There is no doubt of the fact as to a temporary effect; and camphire is therefore a strong and immediate antidote to an overdose of 'cantharides'. Yet there are, doubtless, sorts and cases of [Greek: anaphrodisia], which camphire might relieve. Opium is occasionally an aphrodisiac, but far oftener the contrary. The same is true of 'bang', or powdered hemp leaves, and, I suppose, of the whole tribe of narcotic stimulants. Ib. s. 8. The yew and the berries thereof are harmless, we know. The berries are harmless, but the leaves of the yew are undoubtedly poisonous. See Withering's British Plants. Taxus. Book III. c. xiii. For although lapidaries and 'questuary' enquirers affirm it, &c. 'Questuary'--having gain or money for their object. B. VI. c. viii. The river Gihon, a branch of Euphrates and river of Paradise. The rivers from Eden were, perhaps, meant to symbolize, or rather expressed only, the great primary races of mankind. Sir T.B. was the very man to have seen this; but the superstition of the letter was then culminant. Ib. c. x. The chymists have laudably reduced their causes--(of colors)--unto 'sal', 'sulphur', and 'mercury', &c. Even now, after all the brilliant discoveries from Scheele, Priestley, and Cavendish, to Berzelius and Davy, no improvement has been made in this division,--not of primary bodies (those idols of the modern atomic chemistry), but of causes, as Sir T.B. rightly expresses them,--that is, of elementary powers manifested in bodies. Let mercury stand for the bi-polar metallic principle, best imaged as a line or 'axis' from north to south,--the north or negative pole being the cohesive or coherentific force, and the south or positive pole being the dispersive or incoherentific force: the first is predominant in, and therefore represented by, carbon,--the second by nitrogen; and the series of metals are the primary and, hence, indecomponible 'syntheta' and proportions of both. In like manner, sulphur represents the active and passive principle of fire: the contractive force, or negative electricity--oxygen--produces flame; and the dilative force, or positive electricity--hydrogen--produces warmth. And lastly, salt is the equilibrium or compound of the two former. So taken, salt, sulphur, and mercury are equivalent to the combustive, the combustible, and the combust, under one or other of which all known bodies, or ponderable substances, may be classed and distinguished. The difference between a great mind's and a little mind's use of history is this. The latter would consider, for instance, what Luther did, taught, or sanctioned: the former, what Luther,--a Luther,--would now do, teach, and sanction. This thought occurred to me at midnight, Tuesday, the 16th of March, 1824, as I was stepping into bed,--my eye having glanced on Luther's Table Talk. If you would be well with a great mind, leave him with a favorable impression of you;--if with a little mind, leave him with a favorable opinion of himself. It is not common to find a book of so early date as this (1658), at least among those of equal neatness of printing, that contains so many gross typographical errors;--with the exception of our earliest dramatic writers, some of which appear to have been never corrected, but worked off at once as the types were first arranged by the compositors. But the grave and doctrinal works are, in general, exceedingly correct, and form a striking contrast to modern publications, of which the late edition of Bacon's Works would be paramount in the infamy of multiplied unnoticed 'errata', were it not for the unrivalled slovenliness of Anderson's British Poets, in which the blunders are, at least, as numerous as the pages, and many of them perverting the sense, or killing the whole beauty, and yet giving or affording a meaning, however low, instead. These are the most execrable of all typographical errors. 1808. [The volume from which the foregoing notes have been taken, is inscribed in Mr. Lamb's writing-- 'C. Lamb, 9th March, 1804. Bought for S.T. Coleridge.' Under which in Mr. Coleridge's hand is written-- 'N.B. It was on the 10th; on which day I dined and punched at Lamb's, and exulted in the having procured the 'Hydriotaphia', and all the rest 'lucro apposita'. S.T.C.' That same night, the volume was devoted as a gift to a dear friend in the following letter.-Ed.] 10th, 1804, Sat. night, 12 o'clock. My dear--, Sir Thomas Brown is among my first favorites, rich in various knowledge, exuberant in conceptions and conceits, contemplative, imaginative; often truly great and magnificent in his style and diction, though doubtless too often big, stiff, and hyperlatinistic: thus I might without admixture of falsehood, describe Sir T. Brown, and my description would have only this fault, that it would be equally, or almost equally, applicable to half a dozen other writers, from the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth to the end of Charles II. He is indeed all this; and what he has more than all this peculiar to himself, I seem to convey to my own mind in some measure by saying,--that he is a quiet and sublime enthusiast with a strong tinge of the fantast,--the humourist constantly mingling with, and flashing across, the philosopher, as the darting colours in shot silk play upon the main dye. In short, he has brains in his head which is all the more interesting for a little twist in the brains. He sometimes reminds the reader of Montaigne, but from no other than the general circumstances of an egotism common to both; which in Montaigne is too often a mere amusing gossip, a chit-chat story of whims and peculiarities that lead to nothing,--but which in Sir Thomas Brown is always the result of a feeling heart conjoined with a mind of active curiosity,--the natural and becoming egotism of a man, who, loving other men as himself, gains the habit, and the privilege of talking about himself as familiarly as about other men. Fond of the curious, and a hunter of oddities and strangenesses, while he conceived himself, with quaint and humourous gravity a useful inquirer into physical truth and fundamental science,--he loved to contemplate and discuss his own thoughts and feelings, because he found by comparison with other men's, that they too were curiosities, and so with a perfectly graceful and interesting ease he put them too into his museum and cabinet of varieties. In very truth he was not mistaken:--so completely does he see every thing in a light of his own, reading nature neither by sun, moon, nor candle light, but by the light of the faery glory around his own head; so that you might say that nature had granted to him in perpetuity a patent and monopoly for all his thoughts. Read his 'Hydriotaphia' above all:--and in addition to the peculiarity, the exclusive Sir-Thomas-Brown-ness of all the fancies and modes of illustration, wonder at and admire his entireness in every subject, which is before him--he is 'totus in illo'; he follows it; he never wanders from it,--and he has no occasion to wander;--for whatever happens to be his subject, he metamorphoses all nature into it. In that 'Hydriotaphia' or Treatise on some Urns dug up in Norfolk--how earthy, how redolent of graves and sepulchres is every line! You have now dark mould, now a thigh-bone, now a scull, then a bit of mouldered coffin! a fragment of an old tombstone with moss in its 'hic jacet';--a ghost or a winding-sheet--or the echo of a funeral psalm wafted on a November wind! and the gayest thing you shall meet with shall be a silver nail or gilt 'Anno Domini' from a perished coffin top. The very same remark applies in the same force to the interesting, through the far less interesting, Treatise on the Quincuncial Plantations of the Ancients. There is the same attention to oddities, to the remotenesses and 'minutiæ' of vegetable terms,--the same entireness of subject. You have quincunxes in heaven above, quincunxes in earth below, and quincunxes in the water beneath the earth; quincunxes in deity, quincunxes in the mind of man, quincunxes in bones, in the optic nerves, in roots of trees, in leaves, in petals, in every thing. In short, first turn to the last leaf of this volume, and read out aloud to yourself the last seven paragraphs of Chap. v. beginning with the words 'More considerables,' &c. But it is time for me to be in bed, in the words of Sir Thomas, which will serve you, my dear, as a fair specimen of his manner.--'But the quincunx of heaven--(the Hyades or five stars about the horizon at midnight at that time)--runs low, and 'tis time we close the five ports of knowledge: we are unwilling to spin out our waking thoughts into the phantasmes of sleep, which often continueth præcogitations,--making tables of cobwebbes, and wildernesses of handsome groves. To keep our eyes open longer were but to act our Antipodes. The huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia.' Think you, my dear Friend, that there ever was such a reason given before for going to bed at midnight;--to wit, that if we did not, we should be acting the part of our Antipodes! And then 'the huntsmen are up in America.'--What life, what fancy!--Does the whimsical knight give us thus a dish of strong green tea, and call it an opiate! I trust that you are quietly asleep-- And that all the stars hang bright above your dwelling, Silent as tho' they watched the sleeping earth! S. T. COLERIDGE. FINIS. 
8956	----	THE LITERARY REMAINS OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE VOLUME THE THIRD COLLECTED AND EDITED BY HENRY NELSON COLERIDGE. 1838 TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE JOHN HOOKHAM FRERE THE THIRD AND FOURTH VOLUMES OF COLERIDGE'S REMAINS ARE RESPECTFULLY INSCRIBED. CONTENTS Preface Formula Fidei de SS. Trinitate Nightly Prayer Notes on 'The Book of Common Prayer' Notes on Hooker Notes on Field Notes on Donne Notes on Henry More Notes on Heinrichs Notes on Hacket Notes on Jeremy Taylor Notes on 'The Pilgrim's Progress' Notes on John Smith Letter to a Godchild PREFACE For a statement of the circumstances under which the collection of Mr. Coleridge's Literary Remains was undertaken, the Reader is referred to the Preface to the two preceding Volumes published in 1836. But the graver character of the general contents of this Volume and of that which will immediately follow it, seems to justify the Editor in soliciting particular attention to a few additional remarks. Although the Author in his will contemplated the publication of some at least of the numerous notes left by him on the margins and blank spaces of books and pamphlets, he most certainly wrote the notes themselves without any purpose beyond that of delivering his mind of the thoughts and aspirations suggested by the text under perusal. His books, that is, any person's books--even those from a circulating library--were to him, whilst reading them, as dear friends; he conversed with them as with their authors, praising, or censuring, or qualifying, as the open page seemed to give him cause; little solicitous in so doing to draw summaries or to strike balances of literary merit, but seeking rather to detect and appreciate the moving principle or moral life, ever one and single, of the work in reference to absolute truth. Thus employed he had few reserves, but in general poured forth, as in a confessional, all his mind upon every subject,--not keeping back any doubt or conjecture which at the time and for the purpose seemed worthy of consideration. In probing another's heart he laid his hand upon his own. He thought pious frauds the worst of all frauds, and the system of economizing truth too near akin to the corruption of it to be generally compatible with the Job-like integrity of a true Christian's conscience. Further, he distinguished so strongly between that internal faith which lies at the base of, and supports, the whole moral and religious being of man, and the belief, as historically true, of several incidents and relations found or supposed to be found in the text of the Scriptures, that he habitually exercised a liberty of criticism with respect to the latter, which will probably seem objectionable to many of his readers in this country. [1] His friends have always known this to be the fact; and he vindicated this so openly that it would be folly to attempt to conceal it: nay, he pleaded for it so earnestly--as the only middle path of safety and peace between a godless disregard of the unique and transcendant character of the Bible taken generally, and that scheme of interpretation, scarcely less adverse to the pure spirit of Christian wisdom, which wildly arrays our faith in opposition to our reason, and inculcates the sacrifice of the latter to the former,--that to suppress this important part of his solemn convictions would be to misrepresent and betray him. For he threw up his hands in dismay at the language of some of our modern divinity on this point;--as if a faith not founded on insight were aught else than a specious name for wilful positiveness;--as if the Father of Lights could require, or would accept, from the only one of his creatures whom he had endowed with reason the sacrifice of fools! Did Coleridge, therefore, mean that the doctrines revealed in the Scriptures were to be judged according to their supposed harmony or discrepancy with the evidence of the senses, or the deductions of the mere understanding from that evidence? Exactly the reverse: he disdained to argue even against Transubstantiation on such a ground, well knowing and loudly proclaiming its utter weakness and instability. But it was a leading principle in all his moral and intellectual views to assert the existence in all men equally of a power or faculty superior to, and independent of, the external senses: in this power or faculty he recognized that image of God in which man was made; and he could as little understand how faith, the indivisibly joint act or efflux of our reason and our will, should be at variance with one of its factors or elements, as how the Author and Upholder of all truth should be in contradiction to himself. He trembled at the dreadful dogma which rests God's right to man's obedience on the fact of his almighty power,--a position falsely inferred from a misconceived illustration of St. Paul's, and which is less humbling to the creature than blasphemous of the Creator; and of the awless doctrine that God might, if he had so pleased, have given to man a religion which to human intelligence should not be rational, and exacted his faith in it--Coleridge's whole middle and later life was one deep and solemn denial. He believed in no God in the very idea of whose existence absolute truth, perfect goodness, and infinite wisdom, were not elements essentially necessary and everlastingly copresent. Thus minded, he sought to justify the ways of God to man in the only way in which they can be justified to any one who deals honestly with his conscience, namely, by showing, where possible, their consequence from, and in all cases their consistency with, the ideas or truths of the pure reason which is the same in all men. With what success he laboured for thirty years in this mighty cause of Christian philosophy, the readers of his other works, especially the Aids to Reflection, will judge: if measured by the number of resolved points of detail his progress may seem small; but if tested by the weight and grasp of the principles which he has established, it may be confidently said that since Christianity had a name few men have gone so far. If ever we are to find firm footing in Biblical criticism between the extremes (how often meeting!) of Socinianism and Popery;--if the indisputable facts of physical science are not for ever to be left in a sort of admitted antagonism to the supposed assertions of Scripture;--if ever the Christian duty of faith in God through Christ is to be reconciled with the religious service of a being gifted by the same God with reason and a will, and subjected to a conscience,--it must be effected by the aid, and in the light, of those truths of deepest philosophy which in all Mr. Coleridge's works, published or unpublished, present themselves to the reader with an almost affecting reiteration. But to do justice to those works and adequately to appreciate the Author's total mind upon any given point, a cursory perusal is insufficient; study and comprehension are requisite to an accurate estimate of the relative value of any particular denial or assertion; and the apparently desultory and discontinuous form of the observations now presented to the Reader more especially calls for the exercise of his patience and thoughtful circumspection. With this view the Reader is requested to observe the dates which, in some instances, the Editor has been able to affix to the notes with certainty. Most of those on Jeremy Taylor belong to the year 1810, and were especially designed for the perusal of Charles Lamb. Those on Field were written about 1814; on Racket in 1818; on Donne in 1812 and 1829; on The Pilgrim's Progress in 1833; and on Hooker and the Book of Common Prayer between 1820 and 1830. Coleridge's mind was a growing and accumulating mind to the last, his whole life one of inquiry and progressive insight, and the dates of his opinions are therefore in some cases important, and in all interesting. The Editor is deeply sensible of his responsibility in publishing this Volume; as to which he can only say, in addition to a reference to the general authority given by the Author, that to the best of his knowledge and judgment he has not permitted any thing to appear before the public which Mr. Coleridge saw reason to retract; and further express his hope and belief that, with such allowance for defects inherent in the nature of the work as may rightfully be expected from every really liberal mind, nothing contained in the following pages can fairly be a ground of offence to any one. It only remains to be added that the materials used in the compilation of this Volume were for the greatest part communicated by Mr. Gillman; and that the rest were furnished by Mr. Wordsworth, the Rev. Derwent Coleridge, the Rev. Edward Coleridge, and the Editor. Lincoln's Inn, March 26, 1838 [Footnote 1: See 'Table Talk', p. 178, 2nd edit.] FORMULA FIDEI DE SANCTISSIMA TRINITATE. 1830. THE IDENTITY. The absolute subjectivity, whose only attribute is the Good; whose only definition is--that which is essentially causative of all possible true being; the ground; the absolute will; the adorable [Greek: pr_ópr_oton], which, whatever is assumed as the first, must be presumed as its antecedent; [Greek: theòs], without an article, and yet not as an adjective. See John i. 18. [Greek: theòn oudeìs he_órake p_ópote] as differenced from ib. 1, [Greek: kai theòs aen o lógos] But that which is essentially causative of all being must be causative of its own,--'causa sui', [Greek: autopát_or]. Thence THE IPSEITY. The eternally self-affirmant self-affirmed; the "I Am in that I Am," or the "I shall be that I will to be;" the Father; the relatively subjective, whose attribute is, the Holy One; whose definition is, the essential finific in the form of the infinite; 'dat sibi fines'. But the absolute will, the absolute good, in the eternal act of self-affirmation, the Good as the Holy One, co-eternally begets THE ALTERITY. The supreme being; [Greek: ho ont'os 'on]; the supreme reason; the Jehovah; the Son; the Word; whose attribute is the True (the truth, the light, the 'fiat'); and whose definition is, the 'pleroma' of being, whose essential poles are unity and distinctity; or the essential infinite in the form of the finite;--lastly, the relatively objective, 'deitas objectiva' in relation to the I Am as the 'deitas subjectiva'; the divine objectivity. N.B. The distinctities in the 'pleroma' are the eternal ideas, the subsistential truths; each considered in itself, an infinite in the form of the finite; but all considered as one with the unity, the eternal Son, they are the energies of the finific; [Greek: pánta di' autou egéneto--kaì ek tou plaer'ómatos autou haemeis pántes elábomen.] John i. 3 and 16. But with the relatively subjective and the relatively objective, the great idea needs only for its completion a co-eternal which is both, that is, relatively objective to the subjective, relatively subjective to the objective. Hence THE COMMUNITY. The eternal life, which is love; the Spirit; relatively to the Father, the Spirit of Holiness, the Holy Spirit; relatively to the Son, the Spirit of truth, whose attribute is Wisdom; 'sancta sophia'; the Good in the reality of the True, in the form of actual Life. Holy! Holy! Holy! [Greek: hilásthaetí moi]. A NIGHTLY PRAYER. 1831. Almighty God, by thy eternal Word my Creator, Redeemer and Preserver! who hast in thy free communicative goodness glorified me with the capability of knowing thee, the one only absolute Good, the eternal I Am, as the author of my being, and of desiring and seeking thee as its ultimate end;--who, when I fell from thee into the mystery of the false and evil will, didst not abandon me, poor self-lost creature, but in thy condescending mercy didst provide an access and a return to thyself, even to thee the Holy One, in thine only begotten Son, the way and the truth from everlasting, and who took on himself humanity, yea, became flesh, even the man Christ Jesus, that for man he might be the life and the resurrection!--O Giver of all good gifts, who art thyself the one only absolute Good, from whom I have received whatever good I have, whatever capability of good there is in me, and from thee good alone,--from myself and my own corrupted will all evil and the consequents of evil,--with inward prostration of will, mind, and affections I adore thy infinite majesty; I aspire to love thy transcendant goodness!--In a deep sense of my unworthiness, and my unfitness to present myself before thee, of eyes too pure to behold iniquity, and whose light, the beatitude of spirits conformed to thy will, is a consuming fire to all vanity and corruption;--but in the name of the Lord Jesus, of the dear Son of thy love, in whose perfect obedience thou deignest to behold as many as have received the seed of Christ into the body of this death;--I offer this my bounden nightly sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, in humble trust, that the fragrance of my Saviour's righteousness may remove from it the taint of my mortal corruption. Thy mercies have followed me through all the hours and moments of my life; and now I lift up my heart in awe and thankfulness for the preservation of my life through the past day, for the alleviation of my bodily sufferings and languors, for the manifold comforts which thou hast reserved for me, yea, in thy fatherly compassion hast rescued from the wreck of my own sins or sinful infirmities;--for the kind and affectionate friends thou hast raised up for me, especially for those of this household, for the mother and mistress of this family whose love to me hath been great and faithful, and for the dear friend, the supporter and sharer of my studies and researches; but above all, for the heavenly Friend, the crucified Saviour, the glorified Mediator, Christ Jesus, and for the heavenly Comforter, source of all abiding comforts, thy Holy Spirit! O grant me the aid of thy Spirit, that I may with a deeper faith, a more enkindled love, bless thee, who through thy Son hast privileged me to call thee Abba, Father! O, thou who hast revealed thyself in thy holy word as a God that hearest prayer; before whose infinitude all differences cease of great and small; who like a tender parent foreknowest all our wants, yet listenest well-pleased to the humble petitions of thy children; who hast not alone permitted, but taught us, to call on thee in all our needs,--earnestly I implore the continuance of thy free mercy, of thy protecting providence, through the coming night. Thou hearest every prayer offered to thee believingly with a penitent and sincere heart. For thou in withholding grantest, healest in inflicting the wound, yea, turnest all to good for as many as truly seek thee through Christ, the Mediator! Thy will be done! But if it be according to thy wise and righteous ordinances, O shield me this night from the assaults of disease, grant me refreshment of sleep unvexed by evil and distempered dreams; and if the purpose and aspiration of my heart be upright before thee who alone knowest the heart of man, O in thy mercy vouchsafe me yet in this my decay of life an interval of ease and strength; if so (thy grace disposing and assisting) I may make compensation to thy church for the unused talents thou hast entrusted to me, for the neglected opportunities, which thy loving-kindness had provided. O let me be found a labourer in the vineyard, though of the late hour, when the Lord and Heir of the vintage, Christ Jesus, calleth for his servant. 'Our Father', &c. To thee, great omnipresent Spirit, whose mercy is over all thy works, who now beholdest me, who hearest me, who hast framed my heart to seek and to trust in thee, in the name of my Lord and Saviour Christ Jesus, I humbly commit and commend my body, soul, and spirit. Glory be to thee, O God! NOTES ON THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER. PRAYER. A man may pray night and day, and yet deceive himself; but no man can be assured of his sincerity, who does not pray. Prayer is faith passing into act; a union of the will and the intellect realizing in an intellectual act. It is the whole man that prays. Less than this is wishing, or lip-work; a charm or a mummery. 'Pray always', says the Apostle;--that is, have the habit of prayer, turning your thoughts into acts by connecting them with the idea of the redeeming God, and even so reconverting your actions into thoughts. THE SACRAMENT OF THE EUCHARIST. The best preparation for taking this sacrament, better than any or all of the books or tracts composed for this end, is, to read over and over again, and often on your knees--at all events, with a kneeling and praying heart--the Gospel according to St. John, till your mind is familiarized to the contemplation of Christ, the Redeemer and Mediator of mankind, yea, and of every creature, as the living and self-subsisting Word, the very truth of all true being, and the very being of all enduring truth; the reality, which is the substance and unity of all reality; 'the light which lighteth every man', so that what we call reason, is itself a light from that light, 'lumen a luce', as the Latin more distinctly expresses this fact. But it is not merely light, but therein is life; and it is the life of Christ, the co-eternal son of God, that is the only true life-giving light of men. We are assured, and we believe that Christ is God; God manifested in the flesh. As God, he must be present entire in every creature;--(for how can God, or indeed any spirit, exist in parts?)--but he is said to dwell in the regenerate, to come to them who receive him by faith in his name, that is, in his power and influence; for this is the meaning of the word 'name' in Scripture when applied to God or his Christ. Where true belief exists, Christ is not only present with or among us;--for so he is in every man, even the most wicked;--but to us and for us. 'That was the true light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe in his name; which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.' John i. 9-14. Again 'We will come unto him, and make our abode with him.' John xiv. 23. As truly and as really as your soul resides constitutively in your living body, so truly, really, personally, and substantially does Christ dwell in every regenerate man. After this course of study, you may then take up and peruse sentence by sentence the communion service, the best of all comments on the Scriptures appertaining to this mystery. And this is the preparation which will prove, with God's grace, the surest preventive of, or antidote against, the freezing poison, the lethargizing hemlock, of the doctrine of the Sacramentaries, according to whom the Eucharist is a mere practical metaphor, in which things are employed instead of articulated sounds for the exclusive purpose of recalling to our minds the historical fact of our Lord's crucifixion; in short--(the profaneness is with them, not with me)--just the same as when Protestants drink a glass of wine to the glorious memory of William III! True it is, that the remembrance is one end of the sacrament; but it is, 'Do this in remembrance of me',--of all that Christ was and is, hath done and is still doing for fallen mankind, and of course of his crucifixion inclusively, but not of his crucifixion alone. 14 December, 1827. COMPANION TO THE ALTAR. First then, that we may come to this heavenly feast holy, and adorned with the wedding garment, Matt. xxii. 11, we must search our hearts, and examine our consciences, not only till we see our sins, but until we hate them. But what if a man, seeing his sin, earnestly desire to hate it? Shall he not at the altar offer up at once his desire, and the yet lingering sin, and seek for strength? Is not this sacrament medicine as well as food? Is it an end only, and not likewise the means? Is it merely the triumphal feast; or is it not even more truly a blessed refreshment for and during the conflict? This confession of sins must not be in general terms only, that we are sinners with the rest of mankind, but it must be a special declaration to God of all our most heinous sins in thought, word, and deed. Luther was of a different judgment. He would have us feel and groan under our sinfulness and utter incapability of redeeming ourselves from the bondage, rather than hazard the pollution of our imaginations by a recapitulation and renewing of sins and their images in detail. Do not, he says, stand picking the flaws out one by one, but plunge into the river, and drown them!--I venture to be of Luther's doctrine. COMMUNION SERVICE. In the first Exhortation, before the words 'meritorious Cross and Passion,' I should propose to insert 'his assumption of humanity, his incarnation, and.' Likewise a little lower down, after the word 'sustenance,' I would insert 'as.' For not in that sacrament exclusively, but in all the acts of assimilative faith, of which the Eucharist is a solemn, eminent, and representative instance, an instance and the symbol, Christ is our spiritual food and sustenance. MARRIAGE SERVICE. Marriage, simply as marriage, is not the means 'for the procreation of children,' but for the humanization of the offspring procreated. Therefore in the Declaration at the beginning, after the words, 'procreation of children,' I would insert, 'and as the means for securing to the children procreated enduring care, and that they may be' &c. COMMUNION OF THE SICK. Third rubric at the end. But if a man, either by reason of extremity of sickness, &c. I think this rubric, in what I conceive to be its true meaning, a precious document, as fully acquitting our Church of all Romish superstition, respecting the nature of the Eucharist, in relation to the whole scheme of man's redemption. But the latter part of it--'he doth eat and drink the Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ profitably to his soul's health, although he do not receive the Sacrament with his mouth'--seems to me very incautiously expressed, and scarcely to be reconciled with the Church's own definition of a sacrament in general. For in such a case, where is 'the outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace given?' [1] [Footnote 1: 'Should it occur to any one that the doctrine blamed in the text, is but in accordance with that of the Church of England, in her rubric concerning spiritual communion, annexed to the Office for Communion of the Sick: he may consider, whether that rubric, explained (as if possible it must be) in consistency with the definition of a sacrament in the Catechism, can be meant for any but rare and extraordinary cases: cases as strong in regard of the Eucharist, as that of martyrdom, or the premature death of a well-disposed catechumen, in regard of Baptism.' Keble's Pref. to Hooker, p. 85, n. 70. Ed.] XI SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY. Epistle.--1 Cor. xv. 1. Brethren, I declare unto you the Gospel which I preached unto you. Why should the obsolete, though faithful, Saxon translation of [Greek: euaggélion] be retained? Why not 'good tidings?' Why thus change a most appropriate and intelligible designation of the matter into a mere conventional name of a particular book? Ib. ... how that Christ died for our sins. But the meaning of [Greek: upèr ton hamarti_on haem_on] is, that Christ died through the sins, and for the sinners. He died through our sins, and we live through his righteousness. Gospel, Luke xviii. 14. This man went down to his house justified rather than the other. Not simply justified, observe; but justified rather than the other, [Greek: ae ekeinos],--that is, less remote from salvation. XXV. SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY. Collect. ... that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded. ... Rather--"that with that enlarged capacity, which without thee we cannot acquire, there may likewise be an increase of the gift, which from thee alone we can wholly receive." PS. VIII. v. 2. 'Out of the mouth of very babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength, because of thine enemies; that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger'. To the dispensations of the twilight dawn, to the first messengers of the redeeming word, the yet lisping utterers of light and life, a strength and a power were given 'because of the enemies', greater and of more immediate influence, than to the seers and proclaimers of a clearer day:--even as the first re-appearing crescent of the eclipsed moon shines for men with a keener brilliance, than the following larger segments, previously to its total emersion. Ib. v. 5. 'Thou madest him lower than the angels, to crown him with glory and worship'. Power + idea = angel. Idea - power = man, or Prometheus. PS. LXVIII. v. 34. 'Ascribe ye the power to God over Israel: his worship and strength is in the clouds'. The 'clouds' in the symbolical language of the Scriptures mean the events and course of things, seemingly effects of human will or chance, but overruled by Providence. PS. LXXII. This Psalm admits no other interpretation but of Christ, as the Jehovah incarnate. In any other sense, it would be a specimen of more than Persian or Moghul hyperbole and bombast, of which there is no other instance in Scripture, and which no Christian would dare to attribute to an inspired writer. We know, too, that the elder Jewish Church ranked it among the Messianic Psalms. N.B. The Word in St. John, and the Name of the Most High in the Psalms, are equivalent terms. v. 1. 'Give the king thy judgments, O God; and thy righteousness unto the king's son'. God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, the only begotten, the Son of God and God, King of Kings, and the Son of the King of Kings! PS. LXXIV. v. 2. 'O think upon thy congregation, whom thou hast purchased and redeemed of old'. The Lamb sacrificed from the beginning of the world, the God-Man, the Judge, the self-promised Redeemer to Adam in the garden! v. 15. 'Thou smotest the heads of Leviathan in pieces; and gavest him to be meat for the people in the wilderness'. Does this allude to any real tradition? [1] The Psalm appears to have been composed shortly before the captivity of Judah. [Footnote 1: According to Bishop Horne, the allusion is to the destruction of Pharaoh and his host in the Red Sea.--Ed.] PS. LXXXII. vv. 6-7. The reference which our Lord made to these mysterious verses, gives them an especial interest. The first apostasy, the fall of the angels, is, perhaps, intimated. PS. LXXXVII. I would fain understand this Psalm; but first I must collate it word by word with the original Hebrew. It seems clearly Messianic. PS. LXXXVIII. vv. 10--12. 'Dost than shew wonders among the dead, or shall the dead rise up again and praise thee?' &c. Compare Ezekiel xxxvii. PS. CIV. I think the Bible version might with advantage be substituted for this, which in some parts is scarcely intelligible. v. 6. 'the waters stand in the hills.' No; 'stood above the mountains'. The reference is to the Deluge. PS. CV. v. 3. 'Let the heart of them rejoice that seek the Lord.' If even to seek the Lord be joy, what will it be to find him? Seek me, O Lord, that I may be found by thee! PS. CX. v. 2. 'The Lord shall send the rod of thy power out of Sion'; (saying) 'Rule', &c. v. 3. Understand: 'Thy people shall offer themselves willingly in the day of conflict in holy clothing, in their best array, in their best arms and accoutrements. As the dew from the womb of the morning, in number and brightness like dew-drops; so shall be thy youth, or the youth of thee, the young volunteer warriors.' v. 5. 'He shall shake,' concuss, 'concutiet reges die iræ suæ,' v. 6. For 'smite in sunder, or wound, the heads;' some word answering to the Latin 'conquassare'. v. 7. For 'therefore,' translate 'then shall he lift up his head again;' that is, as a man languid and sinking from thirst and fatigue after refreshment. N.B. I see no poetic discrepancy between vv. 1 and 5. PS. CXVIII. To be interpreted of Christ's church. PS. CXXVI. v. 5. 'As the rivers in the south.' Does this allude to the periodical rains? [1] As a transparency on some night of public rejoicing, seen by common day, with the lamps from within removed--even such would the Psalms be to me uninterpreted by the Gospel. O honored Mr. Hurwitz! Could I but make you feel what grandeur, what magnificence, what an everlasting significance and import Christianity gives to every fact of your national history--to every page of your sacred records! [Footnote 1: See Horne in loc. note.--Ed.] ARTICLES OF RELIGION. XX. It is mournful to think how many recent writers have criminated our Church in consequence of their own ignorance and inadvertence in not knowing, or not noticing, the contra-distinction here meant between power and authority. Rites and ceremonies the Church may ordain 'jure proprio': on matters of faith her judgment is to be received with reverence, and not gainsaid but after repeated inquiries, and on weighty grounds. XXXVII. It is lawful for Christian men, at the commandment of the magistrate, to wear weapons, and to serve in the wars. This is a very good instance of an unseemly matter neatly wrapped up. The good men recoiled from the plain words: 'It is lawful for Christian men at the command of a king to slaughter as many Christians as they can!' Well! I could most sincerely subscribe to all these articles. September, 1831. NOTES ON HOOKER. [1] 'LIFE OF HOOKER' BY WALTON. p. 67. Mr. Travers excepted against Mr. Hooker, for that in one of his sermons he declared, 'That the assurance of what we believe by the word of God, is not to us so certain as that which we perceive by sense.' And Mr. Hooker confesseth he said so, and endeavours to justify it by the reasons following. There is, I confess, a shade of doubt on my mind as to this position of Hooker's. Yet I do not deny that it expresses a truth. The question in my mind is, only, whether it adequately expresses the whole truth. The ground of my doubt lies in my inability to compare two things that differ in kind. It is impossible that any conviction of the reason, even where no act of the will advenes as a co-efficient, should possess the vividness of an immediate object of the senses; for the vividness is given by sensation. Equally impossible is it that any truth of the super-sensuous reason should possess the evidence of the pure sense. Even the mathematician does not find the same evidence in the results of transcendental algebra as in the demonstrations of simple geometry. But has he less assurance? In answer to Hooker's argument I say,--that God refers to our sensible experience to aid our will by the vividness of sensible impressions, and also to aid our understanding of the truths revealed,--not to increase the conviction of their certainty where they have been understood. WALTON'S APPENDIX. Ib. p. 116. It is a strange blind story this of the last three books, and of Hooker's live relict, the Beast without Beauty. But Saravia?--If honest Isaac's account of the tender, confidential, even confessional, friendship of Hooker and Saravia be accurate, how chanced it that Hooker did not entrust the manuscripts to his friend who stood beside him in his last moments? At all events, Saravia must have known whether they had or had not received the author's last hand. Why were not Mr. Charke and the other Canterbury parson called to account, or questioned at least as to the truth of Mrs. Joan's story? Verily, I cannot help suspecting that the doubt cast on the authenticity of the latter books by the high church party originated in their dislike of portions of the contents.--In short, it is a blind story, a true Canterbury tale, dear Isaac! [2] OF THE LAWS OF ECCLESIASTICAL POLITY. Pref. c. iii. 7. p. 182. The next thing hereunto is, to impute all faults and corruptions, wherewith the world aboundeth, unto the kind of ecclesiastical government established. How readily would this, and indeed all the disputes respecting the powers and constitution of Church government have been settled, or perhaps prevented, had there been an insight into the distinct nature and origin of the National Church and the Church under Christ! [3] To the ignorance of this, all the fierce contentions between the Puritans and the Episcopalians under Elizabeth and the Stuarts, all the errors and exorbitant pretensions of the Church of Scotland, and the heats and antipathies of our present Dissenters, may be demonstrably traced. Ib. 9. p. 183. Pythagoras, by bringing up his scholars in the speculative knowledge of numbers, made their conceits therein so strong, that when they came to the contemplation of things natural, they imagined that in every particular thing they even beheld as it were with their eyes, how the elements of number gave essence and being to the works of nature: a thing in reason impossible; which notwithstanding, through their mis-fashioned pre-conceit, appeared unto them no less certain, than if nature had written it in the very foreheads of all the creatures of God. I am not so conversant with the volumes of Duns Scotus as to be able to pronounce positively whether he is an exception, but I can think of no other instance of high metaphysical genius in an Englishman. Judgment, solid sense, invention in specialties, fortunate anticipations and instructive foretact of truth,--in these we can shew giants. It is evident from this example from the Pythagorean school that not even our incomparable Hooker could raise himself to the idea, so rich in truth, which is contained in the words 'numero, pondere, et mensura generantur coeli et terra'. O, that Hooker had ever asked himself concerning will, absolute will, [Greek: ho arithmòs hyperaríthmiòs], 'numerus omues numeros ponens, nunquam positus!' [4] Ib. p. 183. When they of the 'Family of Love' have it once in their heads, that Christ doth not signify any one person, but a quality whereof many are partakers, &c. If the Familists thought of Christ as a quality, it was a grievous error indeed. But I have my doubts whether this was not rather an inference drawn by their persecutors. Ib. 15. p. 191. When instruction doth them no good, let them feel but the least degree of most mercifully-tempered severity, they fasten on the head of the Lord's vicegerents here on earth, whatsoever they any where find uttered against the cruelty of blood-thirsty men, and to themselves they draw all the sentences which Scripture hath in favor of innocency persecuted for the truth. How great the influence of the age on the strongest minds, when so eminently wise a man as Richard Hooker could overlook the obvious impolicy of inflicting punishments which the sufferer himself will regard as merits, and all who have any need to be deterred will extol as martyrdom! Even where the necessity could be plausibly pretended, it is war, not punitive law;--and then Augustine's argument for Sarah! Ib. c. iv. 1. p. 194. We require you to find out but one church upon the face of the whole earth, that hath been ordered by your discipline, or hath not been ordered by ours, that is to say, by episcopal regiment, sithence the time that the blessed apostles were here conversant. Hooker was so good a man that it would be wicked to suspect him of knowingly playing the sophist. And yet strange it is, that he should not have been aware that it was prelacy, not primitive episcopacy, the thing, not the name, that the reformers contended against, and, if the Catholic Church and the national Clerisy were (as both parties unhappily took for granted) one and the same, contended against with good reason. Knox's ecclesiastical polity (worthy of Lycurgus), adopted bishops under a different name, or rather under a translation instead of corruption of the name [Greek: epáskapoi]. He would have had superintendents. Ib. c. v. 2. p. 204. A law is the deed of the whole body politic, whereof if ye judge yourselves to be any part, then is the law even your deed also. This is a fiction of law for the purpose of giving to that, which is necessarily empirical, the form and consequence of a science, to the reality of which a code of laws can only approximate by compressing all liberty and individuality into a despotism. As Justinian to Alfred, and Constantinople, the Consuls and Senate of Rome to the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Common Council of London; so is the imperial Roman code to the common and statute law of England. The advocates of the discipline would, according to our present notions of civil rights, have been justified in putting fact against fiction, and might have challenged Hooker to shew, first, that the constitution of the Church in Christ was a congruous subject of parliamentary legislation; that the legislators were 'bona fide' determined by spiritual views, and that the jealousy and arbitrary principles of the Queen, aided by motives of worldly state policy,--for example, the desire of conciliating the Roman Catholic potentates by retaining all she could of the exterior of the Romish Church, its hierarchy, its ornaments, and its ceremonies,--were not the substitutes for the Holy Spirit in influencing the majorities in the two Houses of Parliament. It is my own belief that the Puritans and the Prelatists divided the truth between them; and, as half-truths are whole errors, were both equally in the wrong;--the Prelatists in contending for that as incident to the Church in Christ, that is, the collective number [Greek: t_on ekkaloumén_on] or 'ecclesia', which only belonged, but which rightfully did belong, to the National Church as a component estate of the realm, the 'enclesia';--the Puritans in requiring of the 'enclesia' what was only requisite or possible for the 'ecclesia'.[5] Archbishop Grindal is an illustrious exception. He saw the whole truth, and that the functions of the enclesiastic and those of the ecclesiastic were not the less distinct, because both were capable of being exercised by the same person; and _vice versa_, not the less compatible in the same subject because distinct in themselves. The Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench is a Fellow of the Royal Society. Ib. c. vi. 3. p. 209. God was not ignorant, that the priests and judges, whose sentence in matters of controversy he ordained should stand, both might and oftentimes would be deceived in their judgment. However, better it was in the eye of His understanding, that sometime an erroneous sentence definitive should prevail, till the same authority perceiving such oversight, might afterwards correct or reverse it, than that strifes should have respite to grow, and not come speedily to some end. It is difficult to say, which most shines through this whole passage, the spirit of wisdom or the spirit of meekness. The fatal error of the Romish Church did not consist in the inappellability of the Councils, or that an acquiescence in their decisions and decree was a duty binding on the conscience of the dissentients,--not I say in contending for a practical infallibility of Council or Pope; but in laying claim to an actual and absolute immunity from error, and consequently for the unrepealability of their decisions by any succeeding Council or Pope. Hence, even wise decisions--wise under the particular circumstances and times--degenerated into mischievous follies, by having the privilege of immortality without any exemption from the dotage of superannuation. Hence errors became like _glaciers_, or ice-bergs in the frozen ocean, unthawed by summer, and growing from the fresh deposits of each returning winter. Ib. 6. p. 212. An argument necessary and demonstrative is such, as being proposed unto any man, and understood, the mind cannot choose but inwardly assent. Any one such reason dischargeth, I grant, the conscience, and setteth it at full liberty. I would not concede even so much as this. It may well chance that even an argument demonstrative, if understood, may be adducible against some one sentence of a whole liturgy; and yet the means of removing it without a palpable overbalance of evil may not exist for a time; and either there is no command against schism, or we are bound in such small matters to offer the sacrifice of willing silence to the public peace of the Church. This would not, however, prevent a minister from pointing out the defect in his character as a doctor or learned theologian. Ib. c. viii. 1. p. 2-20. For adventuring to erect the discipline of Christ without the leave of the Christian magistrate, haply ye may condemn us as fools, in that we hazard thereby our estates and persons further than you which are that way more wise think necessary: but of any offence or sin therein committed against God, with what conscience can you accuse us, when your own positions are, that the things we observe should every of them be dearer unto us than ten thousand lives; that they are the peremptory commandments of God; that no mortal man can dispense with them, and that the magistrate grievously sinneth in not constraining thereunto? 'Hoc argumentum ad invidiam nimis sycophanticum est quam ut mihi placeat a tanto viro'. Besides, it contradicts Hooker's own very judicious rule, that to discuss and represent is the office of the learned, as individuals, because the truth may be entire in any one mind; but to do belongs to the supreme power as the will of the whole body politic, and in effective action individuals are mere fractions without any legitimate referee to add them together. Hooker's objection from the nobility and gentry of the realm is unanswerable and within half a century afterwards proved insurmountable. Imagine a sun containing within its proper atmosphere a multitude of transparent satellites, lost in the glory, or all joining to form the visible 'phasis' or disk; and then beyond the precincts of this sun a number of opake bodies at various distances, and having a common center of their own round which they revolve, and each more or less according to the lesser or greater distance partaking of the light and natural warmth of the sun, which I have been supposing; but not sharing in its peculiar influences, or in the solar life sustainable only by the vital air of the solar atmosphere. The opake bodies constitute the national churches, the sun the churches spiritual. The defect of the simile, arising necessarily out of the incompossibility of spiritual prerogatives with material bodies under the proprieties and necessities of space, is, that it does not, as no concrete or visual image can, represent the possible duplicity of the individuals, the aggregate of whom constitutes the national church, so that any one individual, or any number of such individuals, may at the same time be, by an act of their own, members of the church spiritual, and in every congregation may form an 'ecclesia' or Christian community; and how to facilitate and favor this without any schism from the 'enclesia', and without any disturbance of the body politic, was the problem which Grindal and the bishops of the first generation of the Reformed Church sought to solve, and it is the problem which every earnest Christian endued with competent gifts, and who is at the same time a patriot and a philanthropist, ought to propose to himself, as the 'ingens desiderium proborum'. 8th Sept, 1826. Ib. c. viii. 7. p. 232. Baptizing of infants, although confessed by themselves, to have been continued ever sithence the very apostles' own times, yet they altogether condemned. 'Quære'. I cannot say what the fanatic Anabaptists, of whom Hooker is speaking, may have admitted; but the more sober and learned Antipaedobaptists, who differed in this point only from the reformed churches, have all, I believe, denied the practice of infant baptism during the first century. B.J. c. ii. 1. p. 249. That which doth assign unto each thing the kind, that which doth moderate the force and power, that which doth appoint the form and measure, of working, the same we term a law. See the essays on method, in the 'Friend'. [6] Hooker's words literally and grammatically interpreted seem to assert the antecedence of the thing to its kind, that is, to its essential characters;--and to its force together with its form and measure of working, that is, to its specific and distinctive characters; in short, the words assert the pre-existence of the thing to all its constituent powers, qualities, and properties. Now this is either--first, equivalent to the assertion of a 'prima et nuda materia', so happily ridiculed by the author of 'Hudibras', [7] and which under any scheme of cosmogony is a mere phantom, having its whole and sole substance in an impotent effort of the imagination or sensuous fancy, but which is utterly precluded by the doctrine of creation which it in like manner negatives:--or secondly, the words assert a self-destroying absurdity, namely, the antecedence of a thing to itself; as if having asserted that water consisted of hydrogen = 77, and oxygen = 23, I should talk of water as existing before the creation of hydrogen and oxygen. All laws, indeed, are constitutive; and it would require a longer train of argument than a note can contain, to shew what a thing is; but this at least is quite certain, that in the order of thought it must be posterior to the law that constitutes it. But such in fact was Hooker's meaning, and the word, thing, is used 'proleptice' in favour of the imagination, as appears from the sentences that follow, in which the creative idea is declared to be the law of the things thereby created. A productive idea, manifesting itself and its reality in the product is a law; and when the product is phænomenal, (that is, an object of the outward senses) it is a law of nature. The law is 'res noumenon'; the thing is 'res phenomenon' [8] A physical law, in the right sense of the term, is the sufficient cause of the appearance,--'causa sub-faciens'. P.S. What a deeply interesting volume might be written on the symbolic import of the primary relations and dimensions of space--long, broad, deep, or depth; surface; upper, under, above and below, right, left, horizontal, perpendicular, oblique:--and then the order of causation, or that which gives intelligibility, and the reverse order of effects, or that which gives the conditions of actual existence! Without the higher the lower would want its intelligibility: without the lower the higher could not have existed. The infant is a riddle of which the man is the solution; but the man could not exist but with the infant as his antecedent. Ib. 2. p. 250. In which essential Unity of God, a Trinity personal nevertheless subsisteth, after a manner far exceeding the possibility of man's conceit. If 'conceit' here means conception, the remark is most true; for the Trinity is an idea, and no idea can be rendered by a conception. An idea is essentially inconceivable. But if it be meant that the Trinity is otherwise inconceivable than as the divine eternity and every attribute of God is and must be, then neither the commonness of the language here used, nor the high authority of the user, can deter me from denouncing it as untrue and dangerous. So far is it from being true, that on the contrary, the Trinity is the only form in which an idea of God is possible, unless indeed it be a Spinosistic or World-God. Ib. c. iv. 1. p. 264. But now that we may lift up our eyes (as it were) from the footstool to the throne of God, and leaving these natural, consider a little the state of heavenly and divine, creatures: touching angels which are spirits immaterial and intellectual, &c. All this disquisition on the angels confirms my remark that our admirable Hooker was a giant of the race Aristotle 'versus' Plato. Hooker was truly judicious,--the consummate 'synthesis' of understanding and sense. An ample and most ordonnant conceptionist, to the tranquil empyrean of ideas he had not ascended. Of the passages cited from Scripture how few would bear a strict scrutiny; being either, 1. divine appearances, Jehovah in human form; or 2. the imagery of visions and all symbolic; or 3. names of honor given to prophets, apostles, or bishops; or lastly, mere accommodations to popular notions! Ib. 3. p. 267. Since their fall, their practices have been the clean contrary unto those before mentioned. For being dispersed, some in the air, some on the earth, some in the water, some among the minerals, dens, and caves, that are under the earth; they have, by all means laboured to effect a universal rebellion against the laws, and as far as in them lieth, utter destruction of the works of God. Childish; but the childishness of the age, without which neither Hooker nor Luther could have acted on their contemporaries with the intense and beneficent energy with which, they (God be praised!) did act. Ib. p. 268. Thus much therefore may suffice for angels, the next unto whom in degree are men. St. Augustine well remarks that only three distinct 'genera' of living beings are conceivable: 1. the infinite rational: 2. the finite rational: 3. the finite irrational: that is, God, man, brute animal. 'Ergo', angels can only be with wings on their shoulders. Were our bodies transparent to our souls, we should be angels. Ib. c. x. 4. p. 303. It is no improbable opinion therefore which the arch-philosopher was of. There are, and can be, only two schools of philosophy, differing in kind and in source. Differences in degree and in accident, there may be many; but these constitute schools kept by different teachers with different degrees of genius, talent, and learning;--auditories of philosophizers, not different philosophies. Schools of psilology (the love of empty noise) and misosophy are here out of the question. Schools of real philosophy there are but two,--best named by the arch-philosopher of each, namely, Plato and Aristotle. Every man capable of philosophy at all (and there are not many such) is a born Platonist or a born Aristotelian. [9] Hooker, as may be discerned from the epithet of arch-philosopher applied to the Stagyrite, 'sensu monarchico', was of the latter family,--a comprehensive, vigorous, discreet, and discretive conceptualist,--but not an ideist. Ib. 8. p. 308. Of this point therefore we are to note, that sith men naturally have no free and perfect power to command whole politic multitudes of men, therefore utterly without our consent, we could in such sort be at no man's commandment living. And to be commanded we do consent, when that society whereof we are part hath at any time before consented, without revoking the same after by the like universal agreement. Wherefore as any man's deed past is good as long as himself continueth; so the act of a public society of men done five hundred years sithence standeth as theirs who presently are of the same societies, because corporations are immortal; we were then alive in our predecessors, and they in their successors do live still. Laws therefore human, of what kind soever, are available by consent. No nobler or clearer example than this could be given of what an idea is as contra-distinguished from a conception of the understanding, correspondent to some fact or facts, 'quorum notæ communes concapiuntur',--the common characters of which are taken together under one distinct exponent, hence named a conception; and conceptions are internal subjective words. Reflect on an original social contract, as an event or historical fact; and its gross improbability, not to say impossibility, will stare you in the face. But an ever originating social contract as an idea, which exists and works continually and efficaciously in the moral being of every free citizen, though in the greater number unconsciously, or with a dim and confused consciousness,--what a power it is! [10] As the vital power compared with the mechanic; as a father compared with a moulder in wax or clay, such is the power of ideas compared with the influence of conceptions and notions. Ib.15. p.316. ... I nothing doubt but that Christian men should much better frame themselves to those heavenly precepts, which our Lord and Saviour with so great instancy gave us concerning peace and unity, if we did all concur in desire to have the use of ancient Councils again renewed, rather than these proceedings continued, which either make all contentions endless, or bring them to one only determination, and that of all other the worst, which is by sword. This is indeed a subject that deserves a serious consideration: and it may be said in favour of Hooker's proposal, namely, that the use of ancient Councils be renewed, that a deep and universal sense of the abuse of Councils progressively from the Nicene to that of Trent, and our knowledge of the causes, occasions, and mode of such abuse, are so far presumptive for its non-recurrency as to render it less probable that honest men will pervert them from ignorance, and more difficult for unprincipled men to do so designedly. Something too must be allowed for an honourable ambition on the part of the persons so assembled, to disappoint the general expectation, and win for themselves the unique title of the honest Council. But still comes the argument, the blow of which I might more easily blunt than parry, that if Roman Catholic and Protestant, or even Protestant Episcopalian and Protestant Presbyterian divines were generally wise and charitable enough to form a Christian General Council, there would be no need of one. N.B. The reasoning in this note, as far as it is in discouragement of a recurrence to general Councils, does not, 'me saltem judice', conclude against the suffering our Convocation to meet. The virtual abrogation of this branch of our constitution I have long regarded as one of three or four Whig patriotisms, that have succeeded in de-anglicizing the mind of England. Ib. c. xi. 4. p. 323. So that nature even in this life doth plainly claim and call for a more divine perfection than either of these two that have been mentioned. Whenever I meet with an ambiguous or multivocal word, without its meaning being shown and fixed, I stand on my guard against a sophism. I dislike this term, 'nature,' in this place. If it mean the 'light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world', it is an inapt term; for reason is supernatural. Now that reason in man must have been first actuated by a direct revelation from God, I have myself proved, and do not therefore deny that faith as the means of salvation was first made known by revelation; but that reason is incapable of seeing into the fitness and superiority of these means, or that it is a mystery in any other sense than as all spiritual truths are mysterious, I do deny and deem it both a false and a dangerous doctrine. 15 Sept. 1826. Ib. 6. p.327. Concerning that faith, hope and charity, without which there can be no salvation; was there ever any mention made saving only in that law which God himself hath from heaven revealed? There is not in the world a syllable muttered with certain truth concerning any of these three, more than hath, been supernaturally received from the mouth of the eternal God. That reason could have discovered these divine truths is one thing; that when discovered by revelation, it is capable of apprehending the beauty and excellence of the things revealed is another. I may believe the latter, while I utterly reject the former. That all these cognitions, together with the fealty or faithfulness in the will whereby the mind of the flesh is brought under captivity to the mind of the spirit (the sensous understanding to the reason) are supernatural, I not only freely grant, but fervently contend. But why the very perfection of reason, namely, those ideas or truth-powers, in which both the spiritual light and the spiritual life are co-inherent and one, should be called super-rational, I do not see. For reason is practical as well as theoretical; or even though I should exclude the practical reason, and confine the term reason to the highest intellective power,--still I should think it more correct to describe the mysteries of faith as 'plusquam rationalia' than super-rational. But the assertions that provoke the remark arose for the greater part, and still arise, out of the confounding of the reason with the understanding. In Hooker, and the great divines of his age, it was merely an occasional carelessness in the use of the terms that reason is ever put where they meant the understanding; for, from other parts of their writings, it is evident that they knew and asserted the distinction, nay, the diversity of the things themselves; to wit, that there was in man another and higher light than that of the faculty judging according to sense, that is our understandings. But, alas! since the Revolution, it has ceased to be a mere error of language, and in too many it now amounts to a denial of reason! B. ii. c. v.3. p.379. To urge any thing as part of that supernatural and celestially revealed truth which God hath taught, and not to shew it in Scripture; this did the ancient Fathers evermore think unlawful, impious, execrable. Even this must be received 'cum grano salis.' To be sure, with the licences of interpretation, which the Fathers of the first three or four centuries allowed themselves, and with the 'arcana' of evolution by word, letter, allegory, yea, punning, which they applied to detached sentences or single phrases of Holy Writ, it would not be easy to imagine a position which they could not 'shew in Scripture.' Let this be elucidated by the texts even now cited by the Romish priests for the truth of purgatory, indulgence, image-worship, invocation of dead men, and the like. The assertion therefore must be thus qualified. The ancient Fathers anathematized any doctrine not consentaneous with Scripture and deducible from it, either 'pari ratione' or by consequence; as when Scripture clearly commands an end, but leaves the means to be determined according to the circumstances, as for example, the frequent assembly of Christians. The appointment of a Sunday or Lord's day is evidently the fittest and most effectual mean to this end; but yet it was not practicable, that is the mean did not exist till the Roman government became Christian. But as soon as this event took place, the duty of keeping the Sunday holy is truly, though implicitly, contained in the Apostolic text. Ib. vi. 3. p. 392. Again, with a negative argument, David is pressed concerning the purpose he had to build a temple unto the Lord: 'Thus saith the Lord, Thou shalt not build me a house to dwelt in. Wheresoever I have walked with all Israel, spake I one word to any of the judges of Israel, whom I commanded to feed my people, saying, Why have ye not built me a house?' The wisdom of the divine goodness both in the negative, the not having authorized any of the preceding Judges from Moses downwards to build a temple--and in the positive, in having commanded David to prepare for it, and Solomon to build it--I have not seen put in the full light in which it so well deserves to be. The former or negative, or the evils of a splendid temple-worship and its effects on the character of the priesthood,--evils, when not changed to good by becoming the antidote and preventive of far greater evils,--would require much thought both to set forth and to comprehend. But to give any reflecting reader a sense of the providential foresight evinced in the latter, and this foresight beyond the reach of any but the Omniscient, it will be only necessary to remind him of the separation of the ten tribes and the breaking up of the realm into the two kingdoms of Judah and Israel in the very next reign. Without the continuity of succession provided for by this vast and splendid temple, built and arranged under the divine sanction attested by miracles--what criterion would there have existed for the purity of this law and worship? what security for the preservation and incorruption of the inspired writings? Ib. vii. 3. p. 403. That there is a city of Rome, that Pius Quintus and Gregory the Thirteenth, and others, have been Popes of Rome, I suppose we are certainly enough persuaded. The ground of our persuasion, who never saw the place nor persons before named, can be nothing but man's testimony. Will any man here notwithstanding allege those mentioned human infirmities as reasons why these things should be mistrusted or doubted of? Yea, that which is more, utterly to infringe the force and strength of man's testimony, were to shake the very fortress of God's truth. In a note on a passage in Skelton's 'Deism Revealed', [11] I have detected the subtle sophism that lurks in this argument, as applied by later divines in vindication of proof by testimony, in relation to the miracles of the Old and New Testament. As thus applied, it is a [Greek: metábasis eis allo génos], though so unobvious, that a very acute and candid reasoner might use the argument without suspecting the paralogism. It is not testimony, as testimony, that necessitates us to conclude that there is such a city as Rome--but a reasoning, that forms a branch of mathematical science. So far is our conviction from being grounded on our confidence in human testimony that it proceeds on our knowledge of its fallible character, and therefore can find no sufficient reason for its coincidence on so vast a scale, but in the real existence of the object. That a thousand lies told by as many several and unconnected individuals should all be one and the same, is a possibility expressible only by a fraction that is already, to all intents and purposes, equal to nought. B. iii. c. iii. 1. p. 447. The mixture of those things by speech, which by nature are divided, is the mother of all error. 'The division in thought of those things which in nature are distinct, yet one, that is, distinguished without breach of unity, is the mother,'--so I should have framed the position. Will, reason, life,--ideas in relation to the mind, are instances; 'entiæ indivise interdistinctæ'; and the main arguments of the atheists, materialists, deniers of our Lord's divinity and the like, all rest on the asserting of division as a necessary consequence of distinction. B. v. c. xix. 3. vol. ii. p. 87. Of both translations the better I willingly acknowledge that which cometh nearer to the very letter of the original verity; yet so that the other may likewise safely enough be read, without any peril at all of gainsaying as much as the least jot or syllable of God's most sacred and precious truth. Hooker had far better have rested on the impossibility and the uselessness, if possible, of a faultless translation; and admitting certain mistakes, and oversights, have recommended them for notice at the next revision; and then asked, what objection such harmless trifles could be to a Church that never pretended to infallibility! But in fact the age was not ripe enough even for a Hooker to feel, much less with safety to expose, the Protestants' idol, that is, their Bibliolatry. Ib. c. xxii. 10. p. 125. Their only proper and direct proof of the thing in question had been to shew, in what sort and how far man's salvation doth necessarily depend upon the knowledge of the word of God; what conditions, properties, and qualities there are, whereby sermons are distinguished from other kinds of administering the word unto that purpose; and what special property or quality that is, which being no where found but in sermons, maketh them effectual to save souls, and leaveth all other doctrinal means besides destitute of vital efficacy. Doubtless, Hooker was a theological Talus, with a club of iron against, opponents with pasteboard helmets, and armed only with crabsticks! But yet, I too, too often find occasion to complain of him as abusing his superior strength. For in a good man it is an abuse of his intellectual superiority, not to use a portion of it in stating his Christian opponents' cause, his brethren's (though dissentient, and perhaps erring, yet still brethren's,) side of the question, not as they had stated and argued it, but as he himself with his higher gifts of logic and foresight could have set it forth. But Hooker flies off to the general, in which he is unassailable; and does not, as in candour he should have done, inquire whether the question would not admit of, nay, demand, a different answer, when applied solely or principally to the circumstances, the condition and the needs of the English parishes, and the population at large, at the particular time when the Puritan divines wrote, and he, Hooker, replied to them. Now let the cause be tried in this way, and I should not be afraid to attempt the proof of the paramount efficacy of preaching on the scheme, and in the line of argument laid down by himself in this section. In short, Hooker frequently finds it convenient to forget the homely proverb; 'the proof of the pudding is in the eating.' Whose parishes were the best disciplined, whose flocks the best fed, the soberest livers, and the most awakened and best informed Christians, those of the zealous preaching divines, or those of the prelatic clergy with their readers? In whose churches and parishes were all the other pastoral duties, catechizing, visiting the poor and the like, most strictly practised? Ib. 11. The people which have no way to come to the knowledge of God, no prophesying, no teaching, perish. But that they should of necessity perish, where any one way of knowledge lacketh, is more than the words of Solomon import. But what was the fact? Were those congregations that had those readers of whom the Puritans were speaking--were they, I say, equally well acquainted with, and practically impressed by, the saving truths of the Gospel? Were they not rather perishing for lack of knowledge? To reply,--It was their own fault; they ought to have been more regular in their attendance at church, and more attentive, when there, to what was there read,--is to my mind too shocking, nay, antichristian. Ib. 16. p.137. Now all these things being well considered, it shall be no intricate matter for any man to judge with indifferency, on which part the good of the church is most conveniently sought; whether on ours, whose opinion is such as hath been shewed, or else on theirs, who leaving no ordinary way of salvation for them unto whom the word of God is but only read, do seldom name them but with great disdain and contempt, who execute that service in the church of Christ. If so, they were much to be blamed. But surely this was not the case with the better and wiser part of those who, clinging to the tenets and feelings of the first Reformers, and honouring Archbishop Grindal as much as they dreaded his Arminian successors, were denominated Puritans! They limited their censures to exclusive reading,--to reading as the substitute for, and too often for the purpose of doing away with, preaching. Ib. lxv. 8. p.415. Thus was the memory of that sign which they had in baptism a kind of bar or prevention to keep them even from apostasy, whereinto the frailty of flesh and blood, overmuch fearing to endure shame, might peradventure the more easily otherwise have drawn them. I begin to fear that Hooker is not suited to my nature. I cannot bear round-abouts for the purpose of evading the short cut straight before my eyes. 'Exempli gratia;' I find myself tempted in this place to ejaculate Psha! somewhat abruptly, and ask, 'How many in twenty millions of Christian men and women ever reverted to the make-believe impression of the Cross on their forehead in unconscious infancy, by the wetted tip of the clergyman's finger as a preservative against anger and resentment? 'The whole church of God!' Was it not the same church which, neglecting and concealing the Scriptures of God, introduced the adoration of the Cross, the worshipping of relics, holy water, and all the other countless mummeries of Popery? Something might be pretended for the material images of the Cross worn at the bosom or hung up in the bed-chamber. These may, and doubtless often do, serve as silent monitors; but this eye-falsehood or pretence of making a mark that is not made, is a gratuitous superstition, that cannot be practised without serious danger of leading the vulgar to regard it as a charm. Hooker should have asked--Has it hitherto had this effect on Christians generally? Is it likely to produce this effect and this principally? In common honesty he must have answered, No!--Do I then blame the Church of England for retaining this ceremony? By no means. I justify it as a wise and pious condescension to the inveterate habits of a people newly dragged, rather than drawn, out of Papistry; and as a pledge that the founders and fathers of the Reformation in England regarded innovation as 'per se' an evil, and therefore requiring for its justification not only a cause, but a weighty cause. They did well and piously in deferring the removal of minor spots and stains to the time when the good effects of the more important reforms had begun to shew themselves in the minds and hearts of the laity.--But they do not act either wisely or charitably who would eulogize these 'maculæ' as beauty-spots and vindicate as good what their predecessors only tolerated as the lesser evil. 12th Aug. 1826. Ib. 15. p. 424. For in actions of this kind we are more to respect what the greatest part of men is commonly prone to conceive, than what some few men's wits may devise in construction of their own particular meanings. Plain it is, that a false opinion of some personal divine excellency to be in those things which either nature or art hath framed causeth always religious adoration. How strongly might this most judicious remark be turned against Hooker's own mode of vindicating this ceremony! Ib. lxvi. 2. p. 432. The Church had received from Christ a promise that such as have believed in him these signs and tokens should follow them. 'To cast out devils, to speak with tongues, to drive away serpents, to be free from the harm which any deadly poison could work, and to cure diseases by imposition of hands.' 'Mark xvi'. The man who verily and sincerely believes the narrative in St. John's Gospel of the feeding of five thousand persons with a few loaves and small fishes, and of the raising of Lazarus, in the plain and literal sense, cannot be reasonably suspected of rejecting, or doubting, any narrative concerning Christ and his Apostles, simply as miraculous. I trust, therefore, that no disbelief of, or prejudice against, miraculous events and powers will be attributed to me, as the ground or cause of my strong persuasion that the latter verses of the last chapter of St. Mark's Gospel were an additament of a later age, for which St. Luke's Acts of the Apostles misunderstood supplied the hints. Ib. lxxii. 15 & 16. p.539. If Richard Hooker had written only these two precious paragraphs, I should hold myself bound to thank the Father of lights and Giver of all good gifts for his existence and the preservation of his writings. B. viii. c. ix. 2. vol. iii. p. 537. As there could be in natural bodies no motion of anything, unless there were some which moveth all things, and continueth immoveable; even so in politic societies, there must be some unpunishable, or else no man shall suffer punishment. It is most painful to connect the venerable, almost sacred, name of Richard Hooker with such a specimen of puerile sophistry, scarcely worthy of a court bishop's trencher chaplain in the slavering times of our Scotch Solomon. It is, however, of some value, some interest at least, as a striking example of the confusion of an idea with a conception. Every conception has its sole reality in its being referable to a thing or class of things, of which, or of the common characters of which, it is a reflection. An idea is a power, [Greek: dúnamis noera], which constitutes its own reality, and is in order of thought necessarily antecedent to the things in which it is more or less adequately realized, while a conception is as necessarily posterior. SERMON OF THE CERTAINTY AND PERPETUITY OF FAITH IN THE ELECT. Vol. iii. p. 583. The following truly admirable discourse is, I think, the concluding sermon of a series unhappily not preserved. Ib. p.584. If it were so in matters of faith, then, as all men have equal certainty of this, so no believer should be more scrupulous and doubtful than another. But we find the contrary. The angels and spirits of the righteous in heaven have certainty most evident of things spiritual: but this they have by the light of glory. That which we see by the light of grace, though it be indeed more certain; yet it is not to us so evidently certain, as that which sense or the light of nature will not suffer a man to doubt of. Hooker's meaning is right; but he falls into a sad confusion of words, blending the thing and the relation of the mind to the thing. The fourth moon of Jupiter is certain in itself; but evident only to the astronomer with his telescope. Ib. p. 585-588. The other, which we call the certainty of adherence, is when the heart doth cleave and stick unto that which it doth believe. This certainty is greater in us than the other ... ('down to') the fourth question resteth, and so an end of this point. These paragraphs should be written in gold. O! may these precious words be written on my heart! 1. That we all need to be redeemed, and that therefore we are all in captivity to an evil: 2. That there is a Redeemer: 3. That the redemption relatively to each individual captive is, if not effected under certain conditions, yet manifestable as far as is fitting for the soul by certain signs and consequents:--and 4. That these signs are in myself; that the conditions under which the redemption offered to all men is promised to the individual, are fulfilled in myself; these are the four great points of faith, in which the humble Christian finds and feels a gradation from trembling hope to full assurance; yet the will, the act of trust, is the same in all. Might I not almost say, that it rather increases with the decrease of the consciously discerned evidence? To assert that I have the same assurance of mind that I am saved as that I need a Saviour, would be a contradiction to my own feelings, and yet I may have an equal, that is, an equivalent assurance. How is it possible that a sick man should have the same certainty of his convalescence as of his sickness? Yet he may be assured of it. So again, my faith in the skill and integrity of my physician may be complete, but the application of it to my own case may be troubled by the sense of my own imperfect obedience to his prescriptions. The sort of our beliefs and assurances is necessarily modified by their different subjects. It argues no want of saving faith on the whole, that I cannot have the same trust in myself as I have in my God. That Christ's righteousness can save me,--that Christ's righteousness alone can save--these are simple positions, all the terms of which are steady and copresent to my mind. But that I shall be so saved,--that of the many called I have been one of the chosen,--this is no mere conclusion of mind on known or assured premisses. I can remember no other discourse that sinks into and draws up comfort from the depths of our being below our own distinct consciousness, with the clearness and godly loving-kindness of this truly evangelical God-to-be-thanked-for sermon. But how large, how important a part of our spiritual life goes on like the circulation, absorptions, and secretions of our bodily life, unrepresented by any specific sensation, and yet the ground and condition of our total sense of existence! While I feel, acknowledge, and revere the almost measureless superiority of the sermons of the divines, who labored in the first, and even the first two centuries of the Reformation, from Luther to Leighton, over the prudential morals and apologizing theology that have characterized the unfanatical clergy since the Revolution in 1688, I cannot but regret, especially while I am listening to a Hooker, that they withheld all light from the truths contained in the words 'Satan', 'the Serpent', 'the Evil Spirit', and this last used plurally. A DISCOURSE OF JUSTIFICATION, WORKS, AND HOW THE FOUNDATION OF FAITH IS OVERTHROWN. Ib. s. 31. p. 659-661. But we say, our salvation is by Christ alone; therefore howsoever, or whatsoever, we add unto Christ in the matter of salvation, we overthrow Christ. Our case were very hard, if this argument, so universally meant as it is proposed, were sound and good. We ourselves do not teach Christ alone, excluding our own faith, unto justification; Christ alone, excluding our own work, unto sanctification; Christ alone, excluding the one or the other as unnecessary unto salvation. ... As we have received, so we teach that besides the bare and naked work, wherein Christ, without any other associate, finished all the parts of our redemption and purchased salvation himself alone; for conveyance of this eminent blessing unto us, many things are required, as, to be known and chosen of God _before_ the foundations of the world; _in_ the world to be called, justified, sanctified; _after_ we have left the world to be received into glory; Christ in every of these hath somewhat which he worketh alone. &c. &c. No where out of the Holy Scripture have I found the root and pith of Christian faith so clearly and purely propounded as in this section. God, whose thoughts are eternal, beholdeth the end, and in the completed work seeth and accepteth every stage of the process. I dislike only the word 'purchased;'--not that it is not Scriptural, but because a metaphor well and wisely used in the enforcement and varied elucidation of a truth, is not therefore properly employed in its exact enunciation. I will illustrate, amplify and _divide_ the word with Paul; but I will propound it collectively with John. If in this admirable passage aught else dare be wished otherwise, it is the division and yet confusion of time and eternity, by giving an anteriority to the latter. I am persuaded, that the practice of the Romish church tendeth to make vain the doctrine of salvation by faith in Christ alone; but judging by her most eminent divines, I can find nothing dissonant from the truth in her express decisions on this article. Perhaps it would be safer to say:--Christ alone saves us, working in us by the faith which includes hope and love. Ib. s. 34. p. 671. If it were not a strong deluding spirit which hath possession of their hearts; were it possible but that they should see how plainly they do herein gainsay the very ground of apostolic faith? ... The Apostle, as if he had foreseen how the Church of Rome would abuse the world in time by ambiguous terms, to declare in what sense the name of grace must be taken, when we make it the cause of our salvation, saith, 'He saved us according to his mercy', &c. In all Christian communities there have been and ever will be too many Christians in name only;--too many in belief and notion only: but likewise, I trust, in every acknowledged Church, Eastern or Western, Greek, Roman, Protestant, many of those in belief, more or less erroneous, who are Christians in faith and in spirit. And I neither do nor can think, that any pious member of the Church of Rome did ever in his heart attribute any merit to any work as being his work. [12] A grievous error and a mischievous error there was practically in mooting the question at all of the condignity of works and their rewards. In short, to attribute merit to any agent but God in Christ, our faith as Christians forbids us; and to dispute about the merit of works abstracted from the agent, common sense ought to forbid us. A SUPPLICATION MADE TO THE COUNCIL BY MASTER WALTER TRAVERS. Ib. p. 698. I said directly and plainly to all men's understanding, that it was not indeed to be doubted, but many of the Fathers were saved; but the means, said I, was not their ignorance, which excuseth no man with God, but their knowledge and faith of the truth, which, it appeareth, God vouchsafed them, by many notable monuments and records extant of it in all ages. Not certainly, if the ignorance proceeded directly or indirectly from a defect or sinful propensity of the will; but where no such cause is imaginable, in such cases this position of Master Travers is little less than blasphemous to the divine goodness, and in direct contradiction to an assertion of St. Paul's, [13] and to an evident consequence from our Saviour's own words on the polygamy of the fathers. [14] ANSWER TO TRAVERS. Ib. p. 719. The next thing discovered, is an opinion about the assurance of men's persuasion in matters of faith. I have taught, he saith, 'That the assurance of things which we believe by the word, is not so certain as of that we perceive by sense.' A useful instance to illustrate the importance of distinct, and the mischief of equivocal or multivocal, terms. Had Hooker said that the fundamental truths of religion, though perhaps even more certain, are less evident than the facts of sense, there could have been no misunderstanding. Thus the demonstrations of algebra possess equal certainty with those of geometry, but cannot lay claim to the same evidence. Certainty is positive, evidence relative; the former, strictly taken, insusceptible of more or less, the latter capable of existing in many different degrees. Writing a year or more after the preceding note, I am sorry to say that Hooker's reasoning on this point seems to me sophistical throughout. That a man must see what he sees is no persuasion at all, nor bears the remotest analogy to any judgment of the mind. The question is, whether men have a clearer conception and a more stedfast conviction of the objective reality to which the image moving their eye appertains, than of the objective reality of the things and states spiritually discovered by faith. And this Travers had a right to question wherever a saving faith existed. August, 1826. SERMON IV. A REMEDY AGAINST SORROW AND FEAR. Ib. p. 801. In spirit I am with you to the world's end. O how grateful should I be to be made intuitive of the truth intended in the words--'In spirit I am with you!' Ib. p. 808. Touching the latter affection of fear, which respecteth evils to come, as the other which we have spoken of doth present evils; first, in the nature thereof it is plain that we are not every future evil afraid. Perceive we not how they, whose tenderness shrinketh at the least rase of a needle's point, do kiss the sword that pierceth their souls quite thorow? In this and in sundry similar passages of this venerable writer there is [Greek: h_os emoige dokei], a very plausible, but even therefore the more dangerous, sophism; but the due detection and exposure of which would exceed the scanty space of a marginal comment. Briefly, what does Hooker comprehend in the term 'pain?' Whatsoever the soul finds adverse to her well being, or incompatible with her free action? In this sense Hooker's position is a mere truism. But if pain be applied exclusively to the soul finding itself as life, then it is an error. Ib. p. 811. Fear then in itself being mere nature cannot in itself be sin, which sin is not nature, but therefore an accessary deprivation. I suspect a misprint, and that it should be depravation'. But if not nature, then it must be a super-induced and incidental depravation of nature. The principal, namely fear, is nature; but the sin, that is, that it is a sinful fear, is but an accessary. [Footnote 1: The references are to Mr. Keble's edition (1836.)--Ed.] [Footnote 2: But see Mr. Keble's statement (Pref. xxix.), and the argument founded on discoveries and collation of MSS. since the note in the text was written.--Ed.] [Footnote 3: See Mr. Coleridge's work 'On the constitution of the Church and State according to the idea of each.'--Ed.] [Footnote 4: See E. P. I. ii. 3. p. 252.--Ed.] [Footnote 5: See the 'Church and State,' in which the 'ecclesia' or Church in Christ, is distinguished from the 'enclesia', or national Church.--Ed.] [Footnote 6: See the essays generally from the fourth to the ninth, both inclusively, in Vol. III. 3rd edition, more especially, the fifth essay.--Ed.] [Footnote 7: Part I. c. i. vv. 151--6.--Ed.] [Footnote 8: See the essay on the idea of the Prometheus of Æschylus. Literary Remains, Vol. II. p. 323.--Ed.] [Footnote 9: 'Every man is born an Aristotelian, or a Platonist. I do not think it possible that any one born an Aristotelian can become a Platonist; and I am sure no born Platonist can ever change into an Aristotelian. They are the two classes of men, beside which it is next to impossible to conceive a third. The one considers reason a quality, or attribute; the other considers it a power. I believe that Aristotle never could get to understand what Plato meant by an idea. ... Aristotle was, and still is, the sovereign lord of the understanding; the faculty judging by the senses. He was a conceptualist, and never could raise himself into that higher state, which was natural to Plato, and has been so to others, in which the understanding is distinctly contemplated, and, as it were, looked down upon, from the throne of actual ideas, or living, inborn, essential truths.' 'Table Talk', 2d Edit. p. 95.--Ed.] [Footnote 10: See the 'Church and State,' c. i.--Ed.] [Footnote 11: See 'post'.--Ed.] [Footnote 12: But see the language of the Council of Trent: Si quis dixerit justitiam acceptam non conservari 'atque etiam augeri coram. Deo per bona opera'; sed opera ipsa fructus solummodo et signa esse justificationis adeptæ,' non autem ipsius augendæ causam'; anathema sit. 'Sess'. VI. 'Can'. 24. ... Si quis dixerit hominis justificati 'bona opera' ita esse dona Dei, 'ut non sint etiam bona ipsius justificati merita'; aut ipsum justificatum 'bonis operibus', quæ ab eo per Dei gratiam, et Jesu Christi meritum, cujus vivum membrum est, fiunt, 'non vere mereri augmentum gratiæ, vitam æternam, et ipsius vitæ æternæ, si tamen in gratia decesserit, conscecutionem atque etiam gloriæ augmentum', anathema sit. 'Ib. Can.' 32.--Ed.] [Footnote 13: Rom. ii. 12.--Ed.] [Footnote 14: Matt. xix. 8.--Ed.] NOTES ON FIELD ON THE CHURCH. [1] 'Fly-leaf.--Hannah Scollock, her book, February 10', 1787. This, Hannah Scollock! may have been the case; Your writing therefore I will not erase. But now this book, once yours, belongs to me, The Morning Post's and Courier's S. T. C.;-- Elsewhere in College, knowledge, wit and scholerage To friends and public known, as S. T. Coleridge. Witness hereto my hand, on Ashly Green, One thousand, twice four hundred, and fourteen Year of our Lord--and of the month November, The fifteenth day, if right I do remember. 28 March, 1819. [2] MY DEAR DERWENT, This one volume, thoroughly understood and appropriated, will place you in the highest ranks of doctrinal Church of England divines (of such as now are), and in no mean rank as a true doctrinal Church historian. Next to this I recommend Baxter's own Life, edited by Sylvester, with my marginal notes. Here, more than in any of the prelatical and Arminian divines from Laud to the death of Charles II, you will see the strength and beauty of the Church of England, that is, its liturgy, homilies, and articles. By contrasting, too, its present state with that which such excellent men as Baxter, Calamy, and the so called Presbyterian or Puritan divines, would have made it, you will bless it as the bulwark of toleration. Thirdly, you must read Eichorn's Introduction to the Old and New Testament, and the Apocrypha, and his comment on the Apocalypse; to all which my notes and your own previous studies will supply whatever antidote is wanting;--these will suffice for your Biblical learning, and teach you to attach no more than the supportable weight to these and such like outward evidences of our holy and spiritual religion. So having done, you will be in point of professional knowledge such a clergyman as will make glad the heart of your loving father, S. T. COLERIDGE. N. B.--See Book iv Chap. 7, p. 351, both for a masterly confutation of the Paleyo-Grotian evidences of the Gospel, and a decisive proof in what light that system was regarded by the Church of England in its best age. Like Grotius himself, it is half way between Popery and Socinianism. B. i. c. 3. p. 5. But men desired only to be like unto God in omniscience and the general knowledge of all things which may be communicated to a creature, as in Christ it is to his human soul. Surely this is more than doubtful; and even the instance given is irreconcilable with Christ's own assertion concerning the last day, which must be understood of his human soul, by all who hold the faith delivered from the foundation, namely, his deity. Field seems to have excerpted this incautiously from the Schoolmen, who on this premiss could justify the communicability of adoration, as in the case of the saints. Omniscience, it may be proved, implies omnipotence. The fourth of the arguments in this section, and, as closely connected with it, the first (only somewhat differently stated) seem the strongest, or rather the only ones. For the second is a mere anticipation of the fourth, and all that is true in the third is involved in it. Ib. c. 5. p. 9. And began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. That is, I humbly apprehend, in other than the Hebrew and Syrochaldaic languages, which (with rare and reluctant exceptions in favor of the Greek) were appropriated to public prayer and exhortation, just as the Latin in the Romish Church. The new converts preached and prayed, each to his companions in his and their dialect;--they were all Jews, but had assembled from all the different provinces of the Roman and Parthian empires, as the Quakers among us to the yearly meeting in London; this was a sign, not a miracle. The miracle consisted in the visible and audible descent of the Holy Ghost, and in the fulfilment of the prophecy of Joel, as explained by St. Peter himself. 'Acts' ii. 15. Ib. p.10. 'Aliud est etymologia nominis et aliud significatio nominis. Etymologia attenditur secundum id it quo imponitur nomen ad significandum: nominis vero significatio secundum id ad quod significandum imponitur.' This passage from Aquinas would be an apt motto for a critique on Horne Tooke's Diversions of Purley. The best service of etymology is, when the sense of a word is still unsettled, and especially when two words have each two meanings; A=a-b, and B=a-b, instead of A=a and B=b. Thus reason and understanding as at present popularly confounded. Here the 'etyma,--ratio,' the relative proportion of thoughts and things,--and understanding, as the power which substantiates 'phænomena (substat eis)'--determine the proper sense. But most often the 'etyma' being equivalent, we must proceed 'ex arbitrio,' as 'law compels,' 'religion obliges;' or take up what had been begun in some one derivative. Thus 'fanciful' and 'imaginative,' are discriminated;--and this supplies the ground of choice for giving to fancy and imagination, each its own sense. Cowley is a fanciful writer, Milton an imaginative poet. Then I proceed with the distinction, how ill fancy assorts with imagination, as instanced in Milton's Limbo. [3] Ib. I should rather express the difference between the faithful of the Synagogue and those of the Church, thus:--That the former hoped generally by an implicit faith;--"It shall in all things be well with all that love the Lord; therefore it cannot but be good for us and well with us to rest with our forefathers." But the Christian hath an assured hope by an explicit and particular faith, a hope because its object is future, not because it is uncertain. The one was on the road journeying toward a friend of his father's, who had promised he would be kind to him even to the third and fourth generation. He comforts himself on the road, first, by means of the various places of refreshment, which that friend had built for travellers and continued to supply; and secondly, by anticipation of a kind reception at the friend's own mansion-house. But the other has received an express invitation to a banquet, beholds the preparations, and has only to wash and put on the proper robes, in order to sit down. Ib. p. 11. The reason why our translators, in the beginning, did choose rather to use the word 'congregation' than 'Church,' was not, as the adversary maliciously imagineth, for that they feared the very name of the Church; but because as by the name of religion and religious men, ordinarily in former times, men understood nothing but _factitias religiones_, as Gerson out of Anselme calleth them, that is, the professions of monks and friars, so, &c. For the same reason the word 'religion' for [Greek: Thraeskia] in St. James [4] ought now to be altered to ceremony or ritual. The whole version has by change of language become a dangerous mistranslation, and furnishes a favorite text to our moral preachers, Church Socinians and other christened pagans now so rife amongst us. What was the substance of the ceremonial law is but the ceremonial part of the Christian religion; but it is its solemn ceremonial law, and though not the same, yet one with it and inseparable, even as form and substance. Such is St. James's doctrine, destroying at one blow Antinomianism and the Popish popular doctrine of good works. Ib. c. 18. p. 27. But if the Church of God remains in Corinth, where there were 'divisions, sects, emulations', &c. ... who dare deny those societies to be the Churches of God, wherein the tenth part of these horrible evils and abuses is not to be found? It is rare to meet with sophistry in this sound divine; but here he seems to border on it. For first the Corinthian Church upon admonition repented of its negligence; and secondly, the objection of the Puritans was, that the constitution of the Church precluded discipline. B. II. c. 2. p. 31. 'Miscreant' is twice used in this page in its original sense of misbeliever. Ib. c. 4. p. 35. 'Discourse' is here used for the discursive acts of the understanding, even as 'discursive, is opposed to 'intuitive' by Milton [5] and others. Thus understand Shakspeare's "discourse of reason" for those discursions of mind which are peculiar to rational beings. B. III. c. 1.p. 53. The first publishers of the Gospel of Christ delivered a rule of faith to the Christian Churches which they founded, comprehending all those articles that are found in that 'epitome' of Christian religion, which we call the Apostles' Creed. This needs proof. I rather believe that the so called Apostles' Creed was really the Creed of the Roman or Western church, (and possibly in its present form, the catechismal rather than the baptismal creed),--and that other churches in the East had Creeds equally ancient, and, from their being earlier troubled with Anti Trinitarian heresies, more express on the divinity of Christ than the Roman. Ib. p. 58. Fourthly, that it is no less absurd to say, as the Papists do, that our satisfaction is required as a condition, without which Christ's satisfaction is not appliable unto us, than to say, Peter hath paid the debt of John, and he to whom it was due accepteth of the same payment, conditionally if he pay it himself also. This [6] propriation of a metaphor, namely, forgiveness of sin and abolition of guilt through the redemptive power of Christ's love and of his perfect obedience during his voluntary assumption of humanity, expressed, on account of the sameness of the consequences in both cases, by the payment of a debt for another, which debt the payer had not himself incurred,--the propriation of this, I say, by transferring the sameness from the consequents to the antecedents is the one point of orthodoxy (so called, I mean) in which I still remain at issue. It seems to me so evidently a [Greek: metábasis eis allo génos.] A metaphor is an illustration of something less known by a more or less partial identification of it with something better understood. Thus St. Paul illustrates the consequences of the act of redemption by four different metaphors drawn from things most familiar to those, for whom it was to be illustrated, namely, sin-offerings or sacrificial expiation; reconciliation; ransom from slavery; satisfaction of a just creditor by vicarious payment of the debt. These all refer to the consequences of redemption. Now, St. John without any metaphor declares the mode by and in which it is effected; for he identifies it with a fact, not with a consequence, and a fact too not better understood in the one case than in the other, namely, by generation and birth. There remains, therefore, only the redemptive act itself, and this is transcendant, ineffable, and 'a fortiori', therefore, inexplicable. Like the act of primal apostasy, it is in its own nature a mystery, known only through faith in the spirit. James owes John £100, which (to prevent James's being sent to prison) Henry pays for him; and John has no longer any claim. But James is cruel and ungrateful to Mary, his tender mother. Henry, though no relation, acts the part of a loving and dutiful son to Mary. But will this satisfy the mother's claims on James, or entitle him to her esteem, approbation, and blessing? If, indeed, by force of Henry's example or persuasion, or any more mysterious influence, James repents and becomes himself a good and dutiful child, then, indeed, Mary is wholly satisfied; but then the case is no longer a question of debt in that sense in which it can be paid by another, though the effect, of which alone St. Paul was speaking, is the same in both cases to James as the debtor, and to James as the undutiful son. He is in both cases liberated from the burthen, and in both cases he has to attribute his exoneration to the act of another; as cause simply in the payment of the debt, or as likewise 'causa causæ' in James's reformation. Such is my present opinion: God grant me increase of light either to renounce or confirm it. Perhaps the different terms of the above position may be more clearly stated thus: 1. 'agens causator' 2. 'actus causativus:' 3. 'effectus causatus:' 4. 'consequentia ab effecto.' 1. The co-eternal Son of the living God, incarnate, tempted, crucified, resurgent, communicant of his spirit, ascendant, and obtaining for his church the descent of the Holy Ghost. 2. A spiritual and transcendant mystery. 3. The being born anew, as before in the flesh to the world, so now in the spirit to Christ: where the differences are, the spirit opposed to the flesh, and Christ to the world; the 'punctum indifferens', or combining term, remaining the same in both, namely, a birth. 4. Sanctification from sin and liberation from the consequences of sin, with all the means and process of sanctification, being the same for the sinner relatively to God and his own soul, as the satisfaction of a creditor for a debt, or as the offering of an atoning sacrifice for a transgressor of the law; as a reconciliation for a rebellious son or a subject to his alienated parent or offended sovereign; and as a ransom is for a slave in a heavy captivity. Now my complaint is that our systematic divines transfer the paragraph 4 to the paragraphs 2 and 3, interpreting 'proprio sensu et ad totum 'what is affirmed 'sensu metaphorico et ad partem', that is, 'ad consequentia a regeneratione effecta per actum causativum primi agentis, uempe [Greek: Logou] redemptoris', and by this interpretation substituting an identification absolute for an equation proportional. 4th May, 1819. Ib. p. 62. Personality is nothing but the existence of nature itself. God alone had his nature in himself; that is, God alone contains in himself the ground of his own existence. But were this definition of Field's right, we might predicate personality of a worm, or wherever we find life. Better say,--personality is individuality existing in itself, but with a nature as its ground. Ib. p.66. Accursing Eutyches as a heretic. It puzzles me to understand what sense Field gave to the word, heresy. Surely every slight error, even though persevered in, is not to be held a heresy, or its asserters accursed. The error ought at least to respect some point of faith essential to the great ends of the Gospel. Thus the phrase 'cursing Eutyches,' is to me shockingly unchristian. I could not dare call even the opinion cursed, till I saw how it injured the faith in Christ, weakened our confidence in him, or lessened our love and gratitude. Ib. p.71. 'If ye be circumcised ye are fallen from grace, and Christ can profit you nothing.' It seems impossible but that these words had a relation to the particular state of feeling and belief, out of which the anxiety to be circumcised did in those particular persons proceed, and not absolutely, and at all times to the act itself, seeing that St. Paul himself circumcised Timothy from motives of charity and prudence. Ib. c.3. p.76. The things that pertain to the Christian faith and religion are of two sorts; for there are some things 'explicite', some things 'implicite credenda'; that is, there are some things that must be particularly and expressly known and believed, as that the Father is God, the Son is God and the Holy Ghost God, and yet they are not three Gods but one God; and some other, which though all men, at all times, be not bound upon the peril of damnation to know and believe expressly, yet whosoever will be saved must believe them at least 'implicite', and in generality, as that Joseph, Mary, and Jesus fled into Egypt. Merciful Heaven! Eternal misery and the immitigable wrath of God, and the inextinguishable fire of hell amid devils, parricides, and haters of God and all goodness--this is the verdict which a Protestant divine passes against the man, who though sincerely believing the whole Nicene creed and every doctrine and precept taught in the New Testament, and living accordingly, should yet have convinced himself that the first chapters of St. Matthew and St. Luke were not parts of the original Gospels! Ib. p.77. So in the beginning, Nestorius did not err, touching the unity of Christ's person in the diversity of the natures of God and man; but only disliked that Mary should be called the mother of God: which form of speaking when some demonstrated to be very fitting and unavoidable, if Christ were God and man in the unity of the same person, he chose rather to deny the unity of Christ's person than to acknowledge his temerity and rashness in reproving that form of speech, which the use of the church had anciently received and allowed. A false charge grounded on a misconception of the Syriac terms. Nestorius was perfectly justifiable in his rejection of the epithet [Greek: theotókos], as applied to the mother of Jesus. The Church was even then only too ripe for the idolatrous 'hyper-dulia' of the Virgin. Not less weak is Field's defence of the propriety of the term. Set aside all reference to this holy mystery, and let me ask, I trust without offence, whether by the same logic a mule's dam might not be called [Greek: hippotókos], because the horse and ass were united in one and the same subject. The difference in the perfect God and perfect man does not remove the objection: for an epithet, which conceals half of a truth, the power and special concerningness of which, relatively to our redemption by Christ, depends on our knowledge of the whole, is a deceptive and a dangerously deceptive epithet. Ib. c.20. p.110. Thus, then, the Fathers did sometimes, when they had particular occasions to remember the Saints, and to speak of them, by way of 'apostrophe', turn themselves unto them, and use words of doubtful compellation, praying them, if they have any sense of these inferior things, to be remembrancers to God for them. The distinct gradations of the process, by which commemoration and rhetorical apostrophes passed finally into idolatry, supply an analogy of mighty force against the heretical 'hypothesis 'of the modern Unitarians. Were it true, they would have been able to have traced the progress of the Christolatry from the lowest sort of 'Christodulia' with the same historical distinctness against the universal Church, that the Protestants have that of hierolatry against the Romanists. The gentle and soft censures which our divines during the reign of the Stuarts pass on the Roman Saint worship, or hieroduly, as an inconvenient superstition, must needs have alarmed the faithful adherents to the Protestantism of Edward VI. and the surviving exiles of bloody Queen Mary's times, and their disciples. Ib. p.111. The miracles that God wrought in times past by them made many to attribute more to them than was fit, as if they had a generality of presence, knowledge, and working; but the wisest and best advised never durst attribute any such thing unto them. To a truly pious mind awfully impressed with the surpassing excellency of God's ineffable love to fallen man, in the revelation of himself to the inner man through the reason and conscience by the spiritual light and substantiality--(for the conscience is to the spirit or reason what the understanding is to the sense, a substantiative power); this consequence of miracles is so fearful, that it cannot but redouble his zeal against that fashion of modern theologists which would convert miracles from a motive to attention and solicitous examination, and at best from a negative condition of revelation, into the positive foundation of Christian faith. Ib. c.22. p.116. But if this be as vile a slander as ever Satanist devised, the Lord reward them that have been the authors and advisers of it according to their works. O no! no! this the good man did not utter from his heart, but from his passion. A vile and wicked slander it was and is. O may God have turned the hearts of those who uttered it, or may it be among their unknown sins done in ignorance, for which the infinite merits of Christ may satisfy! I am most assured that if Dr. Field were now alive, or if any one had but said this to him, he would have replied--"I thank thee, brother, for thy Christian admonition. Add thy prayer, and pray God to forgive me my inconsiderate zeal!" Ib. c. 23. p. 119. For what rectitude is due to the specifical act of hating God? or what rectitude is it capable of? Is this a possible act to any man understanding by the word God what we mean by God? Ib. p. 129. It is this complicated dispute, as to the origin and permission of evil, which supplies to atheism its most plausible, because its only moral, arguments; but more especially to that species of atheism which existed in Greece in the form of polytheism, admitting moral and intelligent shapers and governors of the world, but denying an intelligent ground, or self-conscious Creator of the universe; their gods being themselves the offspring of chaos and necessity, that is, of matter and its essential laws or properties. The Leibnitzian distinction of the Eternal Reason, or nature of God, [Greek: tò theion](the [Greek: nous kaì anágkae] of Timæus Locrus) from the will or personal attributes of God--([Greek: thélaema kaì boúlaesis--agathou patròs agathòn boúlaema])--planted the germ of the only possible solution, or rather perhaps, in words less exceptionable and more likely to be endured in the schools of modern theology, brought forward the truth involved in Behmen's too bold distinction of God and the ground of God;--who yet in this is to be excused, not only for his good aim and his ignorance of scholastic terms, but likewise because some of the Fathers expressed themselves no less crudely in the other extreme; though it is not improbable that the meaning was the same in both. At least Behmen constantly makes self-existence a positive act, so as that by an eternal [Greek: perich_óraesis] or mysterious intercirculation God wills himself out of the 'ground' ([Greek: tò theion--tò hèn kaì pan],--'indifferentia absoluta realitatis infinitæ et infinitæ potentialitatis')--and again by his will, as God existing, gives being to the ground, [Greek: autogenàes--autophylàes--uhios heautou]. 'Solus Deus est;--itaque principium, qui ex seipso dedit sibi ipse principium. Deus ipse sui origo est, suæque causa substantiæ, id quod est, ex se et in se continens. Ex seipso procreatus ipse se fecit', &c., of Synesius, Jerome, Hilary, and Lactantius and others involve the same conception. Ib. c. 27. p. 140. The seventh is the heresy of Sabellius, which he saith was revived by Servetus. So it was indeed, that Servetus revived in our time the damnable heresy of Sabellius, long since condemned in the first ages of the Church. But what is that to us? How little approbation he found amongst us, the just and honourable proceeding against him at Geneva will witness to all posterity. Shocking as this act must and ought to be to all Christians at present; yet this passage and a hundred still stronger from divines and Church letters contemporary with Calvin, prove Servetus' death not to be Calvin's guilt especially, but the common 'opprobrium' of all European Christendom,--of the Romanists whose laws the Senate of Geneva followed, and from fear of whose reproaches (as if Protestants favoured heresy) they executed them,--and of the Protestant churches who applauded the act and returned thanks to Calvin and the Senate for it. [7] Ib. c. 30. p. 143. The twelfth heresy imputed to us is the heresy of Jovinian, concerning whom we must observe, that Augustine ascribeth unto him two opinions which Hierome mentioneth not; who yet was not likely to spare him, if he might truly have been charged with them. The first, that Mary ceased to be a virgin when she had borne Christ; the second, that all sins are equal. Neither this nor that is worthy the name of opinion; it is mere unscriptural, nay, anti-scriptural gossiping. Are we to blame, or not rather to praise, the anxiety manifested by the great divines of the church of England under the Stuarts not to remove further than necessary from the Romish doctrines? Yet one wishes a bolder method; for example, as to Mary's private history after the conception and birth of Christ, we neither know nor care about it. Ib. c. 31. p. 146. For the opinions wherewith Hierome chargeth him, this we briefly answer. First, if he absolutely denied that the Saints departed do pray for us, as it seemeth he did by Hierome's reprehension, we think he erred. Yet not heretically; and if he meant only that we being wholly ignorant, whether they do or no, ought to act as if we knew they did not, he is perfectly right; for whatever ye do, do it in faith. As to the ubiquity of saints, it is Jerome who is the heretic, nay, idolater, if he reduced his opinion to practice. It perplexes me, that Field speaks so doubtingly on a matter so plain as the incommunicability of omnipresence. Ib. c. 32. p. 147. Touching the second objection, that Bucer and Calvin deny original sin, though not generally, as did Zuinglius, yet at least in the children of the faithful. If he had said that these men affirm the earth doth move, and the heavens stand still, he might have as soon justified it against them, as this he now saith. Very noticeable. A similar passage occurs even so late as in Sir Thomas Brown, just at the dawn of the Newtonian system, and after Kepler. What a lesson of diffidence! [8] Ib. p. 148. For we do not deny the distinction of venial and mortal sins; but do think, that some sins are rightly said to be mortal and some venial; not for that some are worthy of eternal punishment and therefore named mortal, others of temporal only, and therefore judged venial as the Papists imagine: but for that some exclude grace out of that man in which they are found and so leave him in a state wherein he hath nothing in himself that can or will procure him pardon: and other, which though in themselves considered, and never remitted, they be worthy of eternal punishment, yet do not so far prevail as to banish grace, the fountain of remission of all misdoings. Would not the necessary consequence of this be, that there are no actions that can be pronounced mortal sins by mortals; and that what we might fancy venial might in individual cases be mortal and 'vice versa'. Ib. First, because every offence against God may justly be punished by him in the strictness of his righteous judgments with eternal death, yea, with annihilation; which appeareth to be most true, for that there is no punishment so evil, and so much to be avoided, as the least sin that may be imagined. So that a man should rather choose eternal death, yea, utter annihilation, than commit the least offence in the world. I admit this to be Scriptural; but what is wanted is, clearly to state the difference between eternal death and annihilation. For who would not prefer the latter, if the former mean everlasting misery? Ib. c. 41. p. 62. But he will say, Cyprian calleth the Roman Church the principal Church whence sacerdotal unity hath her spring; hereunto we answer, that the Roman Church, not in power of overruling all, but in order is the first and principal; and that therefore while she continueth to hold the truth, and encroacheth not upon the right of other Churches, she is to have the priority; but that in either of these cases she may be forsaken without breach of that unity, which is essentially required in the parts of the Church. This is too large a concession. The real ground of the priority of the Roman see was that Rome, for the first three or perhaps four centuries, was the metropolis of the Christian world. Afterwards for the very same reason the Patriarch of New Rome or Constantinople claimed it; and never ceased to assert at least a co-equality. Had the Apostolic foundation been the cause, Jerusalem and Antioch must have had priority; not to add that the Roman Church was not founded by either Paul or Peter as is evident from the epistle to the Romans. Append. B. III. p. 205. I do not think the attack on Transubstantiation the most successful point of the orthodox Protestant controversialists. The question is, what is meant in Scripture, as in 'John' vi. by Christ's body or flesh and blood. Surely not the visible, tangible, accidental body, that is, a cycle of images and sensations in the imagination of the beholders; but his supersensual body, the 'noumenon' of his human nature which was united to his divine nature. In this sense I understand the Lutheran ubiquity. But may not the "oblations" referred to by Field in the old canon of the Mass, have meant the alms, offerings always given at the Eucharist? If by "substance" in the enunciation of the article be meant 'id quod vere est', and if the divine nature be the sole 'ens vere ens', then it is possible to give a philosophically intelligible sense to Luther's doctrine of consubstantiation; at least to a doctrine that might bear the same name;--at all events the mystery is not greater than, if it be not rather the same as, the assumption of the human by the divine nature. Now for the possible conception of this we must accurately discriminate the 'incompossibile negativum' from the 'incompatibile privativum'. Of the latter are all positive imperfections, as error, vice, and evil passions; of the former simple limitation. Thus if '(per impossible)' human nature could make itself sinless and perfect, it would become or pass into God; and if God should abstract from human nature all imperfection, it might without impropriety be affirmed, even as Scripture doth affirm, that God assumed or took up into himself the human nature. Thus, to use a dim similitude and merely as a faint illustration, all materiality abstracted from a circle, it would become space, and though not infinite, yet one with infinite space. The mystery of omnipresence greatly aids this conception; 'totus in omni parte': and in truth this is the divine character of all the Christian mysteries, that they aid each other, and many incomprehensibles render each of them, in a certain qualified sense, less incomprehensible. Ib. p. 208. But first, it is impious to think of destroying Christ in any sort. For though it be true, that in sacrificing of Christ on the altar of the cross, the destroying and killing of him was implied, and this his death was the life of the world, yet all that concurred to the killing of him, as the Jews, the Roman soldiers, Pilate, and Judas sinned damnably, and so had done, though they had shed his blood with an intention and desire, that by it the world might be redeemed. Is not this going too far? Would it not imply almost that Christ himself could not righteously sacrifice himself, especially when we consider that the Romanists would have a right to say, that Christ himself had commanded it? But Bellarmine's conceit [9] is so absurd that it scarce deserves the compliment of a serious confutation. For if sacramental being be opposed to natural or material, as 'noumenon' to 'phænomenon', place is no attribute or possible accident of it 'in se'; consequently, no alteration of place relatively to us can affect, much less destroy, it; and even were it otherwise, yet translocation is not destruction; for the body of Christ, according to themselves, doth indeed nourish our souls, even as a fish eaten sustains another fish, but yet with this essential difference, that it ceases not to be and remain itself, and instead of being converted converts; so that truly the only things sacrificed in the strict sense are all the evil qualities or deficiencies which divide our souls from Christ. Ib. p. 218. That which we do is done in remembrance of that which was then done; for he saith, 'Do this in remembrance of me.' This is a 'metastasis' of Scripture. 'Do this in remembrance of me', that is, that which Christ was then doing. But Christ was not then suffering, or dying on the cross. Ib. p.223. That the Saints do pray for us 'in genere', desiring God to be merciful to us, and to do unto us whatsoever in any kind he knoweth needful for our good, there is no question made by us. To have placed this question in its true light, so as to have allowed the full force to the Scriptures asserting the communion of Saints and the efficacy of their intercession without undue concessions to the 'hierolatria' of the Romish church, would have implied an acquaintance with the science of transcendental analysis, and an insight into the philosophy of ideas not to be expected in Field, and which was then only dawning in the mind of Lord Bacon. The proper reply to Brerely would be this: the communion and intercession of Saints is an idea, and must be kept such. But the Romish church has changed it away into the detail of particular and individual conceptions, and imaginations, into names and fancies. N.B. Instead of the 'Roman Catholic' read throughout in this and all other works, and everywhere and on all occasions, unless where the duties of formal courtesy forbid, say, the 'Romish anti-Catholic Church;' Romish--to mark that the corruptions in discipline, doctrine and practice do for the worst and far larger part owe both their origin and their perpetuation to the court and local tribunals of the city of Rome, and are not and never have been the catholic, that is, universal faith of the Roman empire, or even of the whole Latin or Western church; and anti-Catholic,--because no other Church acts on so narrow and excommunicative a principle, or is characterized by such a jealous spirit of monopoly and particularism, counterfeiting catholicity by a negative totality and heretical self-circumscription, cutting off, or cutting herself off from, all the other members of Christ's Body. 12th March, 1824. It is of the utmost importance, wherever clear and distinct conceptions are required, to make out in the first instance whether the term in question, or the main terms of the question in dispute, represents or represent a fact or class of facts simply, or some self-established and previously known idea or principle, of which the facts are instances and realizations, or which is introduced in order to explain and account for the facts. Now the term 'merits,' as applied to Abraham and the saints, belongs to the former. It is a mere 'nomen appellativum' of the facts. Ib. c. 5. p. 252. The Papists and we agree that original sin is the privation of original righteousness; but they suppose there was in nature without that addition of grace, a power to do good, &c. Nothing seems wanting to this argument but a previous definition and explanation of the term, 'nature.' Field appears to have seen the truth, namely, that nature itself is a peccant (I had almost said an unnatural) state, or rather no State at all, [Greek: ou stásis all' apóstasis]. Ib. c. 6. p. 269. And surely the words of Augustine do not import that she had no sin, but that she overcame it, which argueth a conflict; neither doth he say he will acknowledge she was without sin, but that he will not move any question touching her, in this dispute of sins and sinners. Why not say at once, that this anti-Scriptural superstition had already begun? I scarcely know whether to be pleased or grieved with that edging on toward the Roman creed, that exceeding, almost Scriptural, tenderness for the divines of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, which distinguishes the Church of England dignitaries, from Elizabeth inclusively to our Revolution in 1688, from other Protestants. Ib. c. 10. p. 279. Derwent! should this page chance to fall under your eye, for my sake read, fag, subdue, and take up into your proper mind this chapter 10 of Free Will. Ib. p. 281. Of these five kinds of liberty, the two first agree only to God, so that in the highest degree [Greek: to autexoúsion], that is, freedom of will is proper to God only; and in this sense Calvin and Luther rightly deny that the will of any creature is or ever was free. I add, except as in God, and God in us. Now the latter alone is will; for it alone is 'ens super ens'. And here lies the mystery, which I dare not openly and promiscuously reveal. Ib. Yet doth not God's working upon the will take from it the power of dissenting, and doing the contrary; but so inclineth it, that having liberty to do otherwise, yet she will actually determine so. This will not do. Were it true, then my understanding would be free in a mathematical proportion; or the whole position amounts only to this, that the will, though compelled, is still the will. Be it so; yet not a free will. In short, Luther and Calvin are right so far. A creaturely will cannot be free; but the will in a rational creature may cease to be creaturely, and the creature, [Greek: apóstasis], finally cease in consequence; and this neither Luther nor Calvin seem to have seen. In short, where omnipotence is on one side, what but utter impotence can remain for the other? To make freedom possible, the 'antithesis' must be removed. The removal of this 'antithesis' of the creature to God is the object of the Redemption, and forms the glorious liberty of the Gospel. More than this I am not permitted to expose. Ib. p. 283. It is not given, nor is it wanting, to all men to have an insight into the mystery of the human will and its mode of inherence on the will which is God, as the ineffable 'causa sui'; but this chapter will suffice to convince you that the doctrines of Calvin were those of Luther in this point;--that they are intensely metaphysical, and that they are diverse 'toto genere' from the merely moral and psychological--tenets of the modern Calvinists. Calvin would have exclaimed, 'fire and fagots!' before he had gotten through a hundred pages of Dr. Williams's Modern Calvinism. Ib. c. 11. p. 296. Neither can Vega avoid the evidence of the testimonies of the Fathers, and the decree of the Council of Trent, so that he must be forced to confess that no man can so collectively fulfil the law as not to sin, and consequently, that no man can perform that the law requireth. The paralogism of Vega as to this perplexing question seems to lurk in the position that God gives a law which it is impossible we should obey collectively. But the truth is, that the law which God gave, and which from the essential holiness of his nature it is impossible he should not have given, man deprived himself of the ability to obey. And was the law of God therefore to be annulled? Must the sun cease to shine because the earth has become a morass, so that even that very glory of the sun hath become a new cause of its steaming up clouds and vapors that strangle the rays? God forbid! 'But for the law I had not sinned'. But had I not been sinful the law would not have occasioned me to sin, but would have clothed me with righteousness, by the transmission of its splendour. 'Let God be just, and every man a liar'. B. iv. c. 4. p. 346. The Church of God is named the 'Pillar of Truth;' not as if truth did depend on the Church, &c. Field might have strengthened his argument, by mention of the custom of not only affixing records and testimonials to the pillars, but books, &c. Ib. c. 7. p. 353. Others therefore, to avoid this absurdity, run into that other before mentioned, that we believe the things that are divine by the mere and absolute command of our will, not finding any sufficient motives and reasons of persuasion. Field, nor Count Mirandula have penetrated to the heart of this most fundamental question. In all proper faith the will is the prime agent, but not therefore the choice. You may call it reason if you will, but then carefully distinguish the speculative from the practical reason, and the reason itself from the understanding. Ib. c. 8. p. 356. 'Illius virtute' (saith he) 'illuminati, jam non aut nostro, aut aliorum judicio credimus a Deo esse Scripturam, sed supra humanum judicium certo certius constituimus, non secus ac si ipsius Dei numen illic intueremur, hominum ministerio ab ipsissimo Dei ore fluxisse.' Greatly doth this fine passage need explanation, that knowing what it doth mean, the reader may understand what it doth not mean, nor of necessity imply. Without this insight, our faith may be terribly shaken by difficulties and objections. For example; If all the Scripture, then each component part; thence every faithful Christian infallible, and so on. Ib. p. 357. In the second the light of divine reason causeth approbation of that they believe: in the third sort, the purity of divine understanding apprehendeth most certainly the things believed, and causeth a foretasting of those things that hereafter more fully shall be enjoyed. Here too Field distinguishes the understanding from the reason, as experience following perception of sense. But as perception through the mere presence of the object perceived, whether to the outward or inner sense, is not insight which belongs to the 'light of reason,' therefore Field marks it by 'purity' that is unmixed with fleshly sensations or the 'idola' of the bodily eye. Though Field is by no means consistent in his 'epitheta' of the understanding, he seldom confounds the word itself. In theological Latin, the understanding, as influenced and combined with the affections and desires, is most frequently expressed by 'cor', the heart. Doubtless the most convenient form of appropriating the terms would be to consider the understanding as man's intelligential faculty, whatever be its object, the sensible or the intelligible world; while reason is the tri-unity, as it were, of the spiritual eye, light, and object. Ib. c. 10. p. 358. Of the Papists preferring the Church's authority before the Scripture. Field, from the nature and special purpose of his controversy, is reluctant to admit any error in the Fathers,--too much so indeed; and this is an instance. We all know what we mean by the Scriptures, but how know we what they mean by the Church, which is neither thing nor person? But this is a very difficult subject. Ib. p. 359. First, so as if the Church might define contrary to the Scriptures, as she may contrary to the writings of particular men, how great soever. Verbally, the more sober divines of the Church of Rome do not assert this; but practically and by consequence they do. For if the Church assign a sense contradictory to the true sense of the Scripture, none dare gainsay it. [10] Ib. This we deny, and will in due place 'improve' their error herein. That is, prove against, detect, or confute. Ib. c. 11. p. 360. If the comparison be made between the Church consisting of all the believers that are and have been since Christ appeared in the flesh, so including the Apostles, and their blessed assistants the Evangelists, we deny not but that the Church is of greater authority, antiquity, and excellency than the Scriptures of the New Testament, as the witness is better than his testimony, and the law-giver greater than the laws made by him, as Stapleton allegeth. The Scriptures may be and are an intelligible and real one, but the Church on earth can in no sense be such in and through itself, that is, its component parts, but only by their common adherence to the body of truth made present in the Scripture. Surely you would not distinguish the Scripture from its contents? Ib. c. 12. p. 361. For the better understanding whereof we must observe, as Occam fitly noteth, that an article of faith is sometimes strictly taken only for one of those divine verities, which are contained in the Creed of the Apostles: sometimes generally for any catholic verity. I am persuaded, that this division will not bear to be expanded into all its legitimate consequences 'sine periculo vel fidei vel charitatis'. I should substitute the following: 1. The essentials of that saving faith, which having its root and its proper and primary seat in the moral will, that is, in the heart and affections, is necessary for each and every individual member of the church of Christ:-- 2. Those truths which are essential and necessary in order to the logical and rational possibility of the former, and the belief and assertion of which are indispensable to the Church at large, as those truths without which the body of believers, the Christian world, could not have been and cannot be continued, though it be possible that in this body this or that individual may be saved without the conscious knowledge of, or an explicit belief in, them. Ib. And therefore before and without such determination, men seeing clearly the deduction of things of this nature from the former, and refusing to believe them, are condemned of heretical pertinacy. Rather, I should think, of a nondescript lunacy than of heretical pravity. A child may explicitly know that 5 + 5 = 10, yet not see that therefore 10 - 5 = 5; but when he has seen it how he can refrain from believing the latter as much as the former, I have no conception. Ib. c. 16. p. 367. And the third of jurisdiction; and so they that have supreme power, that is, the Bishops assembled in a general Council, may interpret the Scriptures, and by their authority suppress all them that shall gainsay such interpretations, and subject every man that shall disobey such determinations as they consent upon, to excommunication and censures of like nature. This would be satisfactory, if only Field had cleared the point of the communion in the Lord's Supper; whether taken spiritually, though in consequence of excommunication not ritually, it yet sufficeth to salvation. If so, excommunication is merely declarative, and the evil follows not the declaration but that which is truly declared, as when Richard says that Francis deserves the gallows, as a robber. The gallows depends on the fact of the robbery, not on Richard's saying. Ib. c. 29. p. 391. In the 1 Cor. 15. the Greek, that now is, hath in all copies; 'the first man was of the earth, earthly; the second man is the Lord from heaven'. The latter part of this sentence Tertullian supposeth to have been corrupted, and altered by the Marcionites. Instead of that the Latin text hath; 'the second man was from heaven, heavenly', as Ambrose, Hierome, and many of the Fathers read also. There ought to be, and with any man of taste there can be, no doubt that our version is the true one. That of Ambrose and Jerome is worthy of mere rhetoricians; a flat formal play of 'antithesis' instead of the weight and solemnity of the other. [11] According to the former the scales are even, in the latter the scale of Christ drops down at once, and the other flies to the beam like a feather weighed against a mass of gold. Append. Part. I. s. 4. p. 752. And again he saith, that every soul, immediately upon the departure hence, is in this appointed invisible place, having there either pain, or ease and refreshing; that there the rich man is in pain, and the poor in a comfortable estate. For, saith he, why should we not think, that the souls are tormented, or refreshed in this invisible place, appointed for them in expectation of the future judgment? This may be adduced as an instance, specially, of the evil consequences of introducing the 'idolon' of time as an 'ens reale' into spiritual doctrines, thus understanding literally what St. Paul had expressed by figure and adaptation. Hence the doctrine of a middle state, and hence Purgatory with all its abominations; and an instance, generally, of the incalculable possible importance of speculative errors on the happiness and virtue of man-kind. [Footnote 1: Folio 1628.--Ed.] [Footnote 2: The following letter was written on, and addressed with, the book to the Rev. Derwent Coleridge.--Ed.] [Footnote 3: 'P. L.' III. 487.--Ed.] [Footnote 4: i. 27. See 'Aids to Reflection'. 3d edit. p. 17. n.--Ed.] [Footnote 5: ... whence the soul Reason receives, and reason is her being, Discursive or intuitive. 'P. L.' v. 426.--Ed.] [Footnote 6: The reader of the 'Aids to Reflection' will recognize in this note the rough original of the passages p. 313, &c. of the 3d edition of that work.--Ed.] [Footnote 7: See 'Table Talk', 2d edit. p. 283. Melancthon's words to Calvin are: 'Tuo judicio prorsus assentior. Affirmu etiam vestros magistratus juste fecisse, quod hominem blasphemum, re ordine judicata, interfecerunt.' 14th Oct. 1554.--Ed. [Footnote 8: "But to circle the earth, 'as the heavenly bodies do',' &c. 'So we may see that the opinion of Copernicus touching the rotation of the earth, which astronomy itself cannot correct, because it is not repugnant to any of the 'phænomena', yet 'natural history may correct'." 'Advancement of Learning', B. II.--Ed.] [Footnote 9: That Christ had a twofold being, natural and sacramental; that the Jews destroyed and sacrificed his natural being, and that Christian priests destroy and sacrifice in the Mass his sacramental being.--Ed.] [Footnote 10: 'Fides catholica', says Bellarmine, 'docet omnem virtutem esse bonam, omne vitium esse malum. Si autem erraret Papa præcipiendo vitia vel prohibendo virtutes, teneretur Ecclesia credere vitia esse bona et virtutes malas, nisi vellet contra conscientiam peccare.' 'De Pont. Roman'. IV. 5.--Ed.] [Footnote 11: The ordinary Greek text is: [Greek: ho deúteros anthropos, ho Kyrios ex ouranou]. The Vulgate is: 'primus homo de terra, terrenus; secundus homo de coelis, coelestis.'--Ed.] NOTES ON DONNE. [1] There have been many, and those illustrious, divines in our Church from Elizabeth to the present day, who, overvaluing the accident of antiquity, and arbitrarily determining the appropriation of the words 'ancient,' 'primitive,' and the like to a certain date, as for example, to all before the fourth, fifth, or sixth century, were resolute protesters against the corruptions and tyranny of the Romish hierarch, and yet lagged behind Luther and the Reformers of the first generation. Hence I have long seen the necessity or expedience of a threefold division of divines. There are many, whom God forbid that I should call Papistic, or, like Laud, Montague, Heylyn, and others, longing for a Pope at Lambeth, whom yet I dare not name Apostolic. Therefore I divide our theologians into, 1. Apostolic or Pauline: 2. Patristic: 3. Papal. Even in Donne, and still more in Bishops Andrews and Hackett, there is a strong Patristic leaven. In Jeremy Taylor this taste for the Fathers and all the Saints and Schoolmen before the Reformation amounted to a dislike of the divines of the continental Protestant Churches, Lutheran or Calvinistic. But this must, in part at least, be attributed to Taylor's keen feelings as a Carlist, and a sufferer by the Puritan anti-prelatic party. I would thus class the pentad of operative Christianity:-- 'Prothesis' Christ, the Word 'Thesis' 'Mesothesis' 'Antithesis' The Scriptures The Holy Spirit The Church 'Synthesis' The Preacher The Papacy elevated the Church to the virtual exclusion or suppression of the Scriptures: the modern Church of England, since Chillingworth, has so raised up the Scriptures as to annul the Church; both alike have quenched the Holy Spirit, as the 'mesothesis' of the two, and substituted an alien compound for the genuine Preacher, who should be the 'synthesis' of the Scriptures and the Church, and the sensible voice of the Holy Spirit. Serm. I. Coloss. i. 19, 20. p. 1. Ib. E. What could God pay for me? What could God suffer? God himself could not; and therefore God hath taken a body that could. God forgive me,--or those who first set abroad this strange [Greek: metábasis eis allo génos], this debtor and creditor scheme of expounding the mystery of Redemption, or both! But I never can read the words, 'God himself could not; and therefore took a body that could'--without being reminded of the monkey that took the cat's paw to take the chestnuts out of the fire, and claimed the merit of puss's sufferings. I am sure, however, that the ludicrous images, under which this gloss of the Calvinists embodies itself to my fancy, never disturb my recollections of the adorable mystery itself. It is clear that a body, remaining a body, can only suffer as a body: for no faith can enable us to believe that the same thing can be at once A. and not A. Now that the body of our Lord was not transelemented or transnatured by the 'pleroma' indwelling, we are positively assured by Scripture. Therefore it would follow from this most unscriptural doctrine, that the divine justice had satisfaction made to it by the suffering of a body which had been brought into existence for this special purpose, in lieu of the debt of eternal misery due from, and leviable on, the bodies and souls of all mankind! It is to this gross perversion of the sublime idea of the Redemption by the cross, that we must attribute the rejection of the doctrine of redemption by the Unitarian, and of the Gospel 'in toto' by the more consequent Deist. Ib. p. 2. C. And yet, even this dwelling fullness, even in this person Christ Jesus, by no title of merit in himself, but only 'quia complacuit', because it pleased the Father it should be so. This, in the intention of the preacher, may have been sound, but was it safe, divinity? In order to the latter, methinks, a less equivocal word than 'person' ought to have been adopted; as 'the body and soul of the man Jesus, considered abstractedly from the divine Logos, who in it took up humanity into deity, and was Christ Jesus.' Dare we say that there was no self-subsistent, though we admit no self-originated, merit in the Christ? It seems plain to me, that in this and sundry other passages of St. Paul, 'the Father' means the total triune Godhead. It appears to me, that dividing the Church of England into two æras--the first from Ridley to Field, or from Edward VI. to the commencement of the latter third of the reign of James I, and the second ending with Bull and Stillingfleet, we might characterize their comparative excellences thus: That the divines of the first æra had a deeper, more genial, and a more practical insight into the mystery of Redemption, in the relation of man toward both the act and the author, namely, in all the inchoative states, the regeneration and the operations of saving grace generally;--while those of the second æra possessed clearer and distincter views concerning the nature and necessity of Redemption, in the relation of God toward man, and concerning the connection of Redemption with the article of Tri-unity; and above all, that they surpassed their predecessors in a more safe and determinate scheme of the divine economy of the three persons in the one undivided Godhead. This indeed, was mainly owing to Bishop Bull's masterly work 'De Fide Nicæna', [2] which in the next generation Waterland so admirably maintained, on the one hand, against the philosophy of the Arians,--the combat ending in the death and burial of Arianism, and its descent and 'metempsychosis' into Socinianism, and thence again into modern Unitarianism,--and on the other extreme, against the oscillatory creed of Sherlock, now swinging to Tritheism in the recoil from Sabellianism, and again to Sabellianism in the recoil from Tritheism. Ib. First, we are to consider this fullness to have been in Christ, and then, from this fullness arose his merits; we can consider no merit in Christ himself before, whereby he should merit this fullness; for this fullness was in him before he merited any thing; and but for this fullness he had not so merited. 'Ille homo, ut in unitatem filii Dei assumeretur, unde meruit'? How did that man (says St. Augustine, speaking of Christ, as of the son of man), how did that man merit to be united in one person with the eternal Son of God? 'Quid egit ante? Quid credidit'? What had he done? Nay, what had he believed? Had he either faith or works before that union of both natures? Dr. Donne and St. Augustine said this without offence; but I much question whether the same would be endured now. That it is, however, in the spirit of Paul and of the Gospel, I doubt not to affirm, and that this great truth is obscured by what in my judgment is the post-Apostolic 'Christopædia', I am inclined to think. Ib. What canst thou imagine he could foresee in thee? a propensness, a disposition to goodness, when his grace should come? Either there is no such propensness, no such disposition in thee, or, if there be, even that propensness and disposition to the good use of grace, is grace; it is an effect of former grace, and his grace wrought before he saw any such propensness, any such disposition; grace was first, and his grace is his, it is none of thine. One of many instances in dogmatic theology, in which the half of a divine truth has passed into a fearful error by being mistaken for the whole truth. Ib. p. 6. D. God's justice required blood, but that blood is not spilt, but poured from that head to our hearts, into the veins and wounds of our own souls: there was blood shed, but no blood lost. It is affecting to observe how this great man's mind sways and oscillates between his reason, which demands in the word 'blood' a symbolic meaning, a spiritual interpretation, and the habitual awe for the letter; so that he himself seems uncertain whether he means the physical lymph, 'serum,' and globules that trickled from the wounds of the nails and thorns down the sides and face of Jesus, or the blood of the Son of Man, which he who drinketh not cannot live. Yea, it is most affecting to see the struggles of so great a mind to preserve its inborn fealty to the reason under the servitude to an accepted article of belief, which was, alas! confounded with the high obligations of faith;--faith the co-adunation of the finite individual will with the universal reason, by the submission of the former to the latter. To reconcile redemption by the material blood of Jesus with the mind of the spirit, he seeks to spiritualize the material blood itself in all men! And a deep truth lies hidden even in this. Indeed the whole is a profound subject, the true solution of which may best, God's grace assisting, be sought for in the collation of Paul with John, and specially in St. Paul's assertion that we are baptized into the death of Christ, that we may be partakers of his resurrection and life. [3] It was not on the visible cross, it was not directing attention to the blood-drops on his temples and sides, that our blessed Redeemer said, 'This is my body', and 'this is my blood! Ib. p. 9. A. But if we consider those who are in heaven, and have been so from the first minute of their creation, angels, why have they, or how have they any reconciliation? &c. The history and successive meanings of the term 'angels' in the Old and New Testaments, and the idea that shall reconcile all as so many several forms, and as it were perspectives, of one and the same truth--this is still a 'desideratum' in Christian theology. Ib. C. For, at the general resurrection, (which is rooted in the resurrection of Christ, and so hath relation to him) the creature 'shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God; for which the whole creation groans, and travails in pain yet'. (Rom. viii. 21.) This deliverance then from this bondage the whole creature hath by Christ, and that is their reconciliation. And then are we reconciled by the blood of his cross, when having crucified ourselves by a true repentance, we receive the real reconciliation in his blood in the sacrament. But the most proper and most literal sense of these words, is, that all things in heaven and earth be reconciled to God (that is, to his glory, to a fitter disposition to glorify him) by being reconciled to another in Christ; that in him, as head of the church, they in heaven, and we upon earth, be united together as one body in the communion of saints. A very meagre and inadequate interpretation of this sublime text. The philosophy of life, which will be the 'corona et finis coronans' of the sciences of comparative anatomy and zoology, will hereafter supply a fuller and nobler comment. Ib. p. 9. A. and B. The blood of the sacrifices was brought by the high priest 'in sanctum sanctorum', into the place of greatest holiness; but it was brought but once, 'in festo expiationis', in the feast of expiation; but in the other parts of the temple it was sprinkled every day. The blood of the cross of Christ Jesus hath had this effect 'in sancto sanctorum', &c. ... '(to)' Christ Jesus. A truly excellent and beautiful paragraph. Ib. C. If you will mingle a true religion, and a false religion, there is no reconciling of God and Belial in this text. For the adhering of persons born within the Church of Rome to the Church of Rome, our law says nothing to them if they come; but for reconciling to the Church of Rome, for persons born within the allegiance of the king, or for persuading of men to be so reconciled, our law hath called by an infamous and capital name of treason, and yet every tavern and ordinary is full of such traitors, &c. A strange transition from the Gospel to the English statute-book! But I may observe, that if this statement could be truly made under James I, there was abundantly ampler ground for it in the following reign. And yet with what bitter spleen does Heylyn, Laud's creature, arraign the Parliamentarians for making the same complaint! Serm. II. Isaiah vii. 14. p. 11. The fear of giving offence, especially to good men, of whose faith in all essential points we are partakers, may reasonably induce us to be slow and cautious in making up our minds finally on a religious question, and may, and ought to, influence us to submit our conviction to repeated revisals and rehearings. But there may arrive a time of such perfect clearness of view respecting the particular point, as to supersede all fear of man by the higher duty of declaring the whole truth in Jesus. Therefore, having now overpassed six-sevenths of the ordinary period allotted to human life,--resting my whole and sole hope of salvation and immortality on the divinity of Christ, and the redemption by his cross and passion, and holding the doctrine of the Triune God as the very ground and foundation of the Gospel faith,--I feel myself enforced by conscience to declare and avow, that, in my deliberate judgment, the 'Christopædia' prefixed to the third Gospel and concorporated with the first, but, according to my belief, in its present form the latest of the four, was unknown to, or not recognized by, the Apostles Paul and John; and that, instead of supporting the doctrine of the Trinity, and the Filial Godhead of the Incarnate Word, as set forth by John i 1, and by Paul, it, if not altogether irreconcilable with this faith, doth yet greatly weaken and bedim its evidence; and that, by the too palpable contradictions between the narrative in the first Gospel and that in the third, it has been a fruitful magazine of doubts respecting the historic character of the Gospels themselves. I have read most of the criticisms on this text, and my impression is, that no learned Jew can be expected to receive the common interpretation as the true primary sense of the words. The severely literal Aquila renders the Hebrew word [Greek: neanis]. But were it asked of me: Do you then believe our Lord to have been the Son of Mary by Joseph? I reply: It is a point of religion with me to have no belief one way or the other. I am in this way like St. Paul, more than content not to know Christ himself [Greek: katà sárka]. It is enough for me to know that the Son of God 'became flesh', [Greek: sàrx egéneto genómenos ek gynaikòs] [4] and more than this, it appears to me, was unknown to the Apostles, or, if known, not taught by them as appertaining to a saving faith in Christ. October 1831. Note the affinity in sound of 'son' and 'sun', 'Sohn' and 'Sonne', which is not confined to the Saxon and German, or the Gothic dialects generally. And observe 'conciliare versöhnen=confiliare, facere esse cum filio', one with the Son. Ib. p. 17. B. It is a singular testimony, how acceptable to God that state of virginity is. He does not dishonor physic that magnifies health; nor does he dishonor marriage, that praises virginity; let them embrace that state that can, &c. One of the sad relics of Patristic super-moralization, aggravated by Papal ambition, which clung to too many divines, especially to those of the second or third generation after Luther. Luther himself was too spiritual, of too heroic faith, to be thus blinded by the declamations of the Fathers, whom, with the exception of Augustine, he held in very low esteem. Ib. D. And Helvidius said, she had children after. 'Annon Scriptura ipsa'? And a 'heresy,' too! I think I might safely put the question to any serious, spiritual-minded, Christian: What one inference tending to edification, in the discipline of will, mind, or affections, he can draw from the speculations of the last two or three pages of this Sermon respecting Mary's pregnancy and parturition? _Can_--I write it emphatically--_can_ such points appertain to our faith as Christians, which every parent would decline speaking of before a family, and which, if the questions were propounded by another in the presence of my daughter, aye, or even of my, no less, in mind and imagination, innocent wife, I should resent as an indecency? Serm. III. Gal. iv. 4, 5. p. 20. 'God sent forth his Son made of a woman'. I never can admit that [Greek: genómenon] and [Greek: egéneto] in St. Paul and St. John are adequately, or even rightly, rendered by the English 'made.' Ib. p. 21, A. What miserable revolutions and changes, what downfalls, what break-necks and precipitations may we justly think ourselves ordained to, if we consider, that in our coming into this world out of our mothers' womb, we do not make account that a child comes right, except it come with the head forward, and thereby prefigure that headlong falling into calamities which it must suffer after? The taste for these forced and fantastic analogies, Donne, with the greater number of the learned prelatic divines from James I. to the Restoration, acquired from that too great partiality for the Fathers, from Irenæus to Bernard, by which they sought to distinguish themselves from the Puritans. Ib. C. That now they (the Jews,) express a kind of conditional acknowledgment of it, by this barbarous and inhuman custom of theirs, that they always keep in readiness the blood of some Christian, with which they anoint the body of any that dies amongst them, with these words; "If Jesus Christ were the Messias, then may the blood of this Christian avail thee to salvation!" Is it possible that Donne could have given credit to this absurd legend! It was, I am aware, not an age of critical 'acumen'; grit, bran, and flour, were swallowed in the unsifted mass of their erudition. Still that a man like Donne should have imposed on himself such a set of idle tales, as he has collected in the next paragraph for facts of history, is scarcely credible; that he should have attempted to impose them on others, is most melancholy. Ib. p. 22. D. E. He takes the name of the son of a woman, and 'wanes' the miraculous name of the son of a virgin.--Christ 'waned' the glorious name of Son of God, and the miraculous name of Son of a virgin too; which is not omitted to draw into doubt the perpetual virginity of the blessed virgin, the mother of Christ, &c. Very ingenious; but likewise very presumptuous, this arbitrary attribution of St. Paul's silence, and presumable ignorance of the virginity of Mary, to Christ's own determination to have the fact passed over. N.B. Is 'wane' a misprint for 'wave' or 'waive?' It occurs so often, as to render its being an 'erratum' improbable; yet I do not remember to have met elsewhere 'wane' used for 'decline' as a verb active. Ib. p. 23. A. If there were reason for it, it were no miracle. The announcement of the first comet, that had ever been observed, might excite doubt in the mind of an astronomer, to whom, from the place where he lived, it had not been visible. But his reason could have been no objection to it. Had God pleased, all women might have conceived, [Greek: aneu tou andròs], as many of the 'polypi' and 'planariæ' do. Not on any such ground do I suspend myself on this as an article of faith; but because I doubt the evidence. Ib. p. 25. A--E. Though we may think thus in the law of reason, yet, &c. It is, and has been, a misfortune, a grievous and manifold loss and hindrance for the interests of moral and spiritual truth, that even our best and most vigorous theologians and philosophers of the age from Edward VI. to James II. so generally confound the terms, and so too often confound the subjects themselves, reason and understanding; yet the diversity, the difference in kind, was known to, and clearly admitted by, many of them,--by Hooker for instance, and it is implied in the whole of Bacon's 'Novum Organum'. Instead of the 'law of reason,' Donne meant, and ought to have said, 'judging according to the ordinary presumptions of the understanding,' that is, the faculty which, generalizing particular experiences, judges of the future by analogy to the past. Taking the words, however, in their vulgar sense, I most deliberately protest against all the paragraphs in this page, from A to E, and should cite them, with a host of others, as sad effects of the confusion of the reason and the understanding, and of the consequent abdication of the former, instead of the bounden submission of the latter to a higher light. Faith itself is but an act of the will, assenting to the reason on its own evidence without, and even against, the understanding. This indeed is, I fully agree, to be brought into captivity to the faith. [5] Ib. p. 26. A. B. And therefore to be 'under the Law,' signifies here thus much; to be a debtor to the law of nature, to have a testimony in our hearts and consciences, that there lies a law upon us, which we have no power in ourselves to perform, &c. This exposition of the term 'law' in the epistles of St. Paul is most just and important. The whole should be adopted among the notes to the epistle to the Romans, in every Bible printed with notes. Ib. p. 27. A. And this was his first work, 'to redeem,' to vindicate them from the usurper, to deliver them from the intruder, to emancipate them from the tyrant, to cancel the covenant between hell and them, and restore them so far to their liberty, as that they might come to their first master, if they would; this was 'redeeming.' There is an absurdity in the notion of a finite divided from, and superaddible to, the infinite,--of a particular 'quantum' of power separated from, not included in, omnipotence, or all-power. But, alas! we too generally use the terms that are meant to express the absolute, as mere comparatives taken superlatively. In one thing only are we permitted and bound to assert a diversity, namely, in God and 'Hades', the good and the evil will. This awful mystery, this truth, at once certain and incomprehensible, is at the bottom of all religion; and to exhibit this truth free from the dark phantom of the Manicheans, or the two co-eternal and co-ordinate principles of good and evil, is the glory of the Christian religion. But this mysterious dividuity of the good and the evil will, the will of the spirit and the will of the flesh, must not be carried beyond the terms 'good' and 'evil.' There can be but one good will--the spirit in all;--and even so, all evil wills are one evil will, the devil or evil spirit. But then the One exists for us as finite intelligences, necessarily in a two-fold relation, universal and particular. The same Spirit within us pleads to the Spirit as without us; and in like manner is every evil mind in communion with the evil spirit. But, O comfort! the good alone is the actual, the evil essentially potential. Hence the devil is most appropriately named the 'tempter,' and the evil hath its essence in the will: it cannot pass out of it. Deeds are called evil in reference to the individual will expressed in them; but in the great scheme of Providence they are, only as far as they are good, coerced under the conditions of all true being; and the devil is the drudge of the All-good. Serm. IV. Luke ii. 29, 30. p. 29. Ib. p. 30. B. We shall consider that that preparation, and disposition, and acquiescence, which Simeon had in his epiphany, in his visible seeing of Christ then, is offered to us in this epiphany, in this manifestation and application of Christ in the sacrament; and that therefore every penitent, and devout, and reverent, and worthy receiver hath had in that holy action his 'now'; there are all things accomplished to him; and his 'for, for his eyes have seen his salvation'; and so may be content, nay glad, 'to depart in peace'. O! would that Donne, or rather that Luther before him, had carried out this just conception to its legitimate consequences;--that as the sacrament of the Eucharist is the epiphany for as many as receive it in faith, so the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Christ himself in the flesh, were the epiphanies, the sacramental acts and 'phænomena' of the 'Deus patiens', the visible words of the invisible Word that was in the beginning, symbols in time and historic fact of the redemptive functions, passions, and procedures of the Lamb crucified from the foundation of the world;--the incarnation, cross, and passion,--in short, the whole life of Christ in the flesh, dwelling a man among men, being essential and substantive parts of the process, the total of which they represented; and on this account proper symbols of the acts and passions of the Christ dwelling in man, as the Spirit of truth, and for as many as in faith have received him, in Seth and Abraham no less effectually than in John and Paul! For this is the true definition of a symbol, as distinguished from the thing, on the one hand, and from a mere metaphor, or conventional exponent of a thing, on the other. Had Luther mastered this great idea, this master-truth, he would never have entangled himself in that most mischievous Sacramentary controversy, or had to seek a murky hiding-hole in the figment of Consubstantiation. Ib. B. C. In the first part, then ... More he asks not, less he takes not for any man, upon any pretence of any unconditional decree. A beautiful paragraph, well worth extracting, aye, and re-preaching. Ib. p. 34. E. When thou comest to this seal of thy peace, the sacrament, pray that God will give thee that light that may direct and establish thee in necessary and fundamental things; that is, the light of faith to see that the Body and Blood of Christ is applied to thee in that action; but for the manner, how the Body and Blood of Christ is there, wait his leisure, if he have not yet manifested that to thee: grieve not at that, wonder not at that, press not for that; for he hath not manifested that, not the way, not the manner of his presence in the Sacrament to the Church. O! I have ever felt, and for many years thought that this 'rem credimus, modum nescimus,' is but a poor evasion. It seems to me an attempt so to admit an irrational proposition as to have the credit of denying it, or to separate an irrational proposition from its irrationality. I admit 2 + 2 = 5; how I do not pretend to know, but in some way not in contradiction to the multiplication table. To spiritual operations the very term 'mode' is perhaps inapplicable, for these are immediate. To the linking of this with that, of A. with Z. by 'intermedia,' the term 'mode,'--the question 'how?' is properly applied. The assimilation of the spirit of a man to the Son of God, to God as the Divine Humanity,--this spiritual transubstantiation, like every other process of operative grace, is necessarily modeless. The whole question is concerning the transmutation of the sensible elements. Deny this, and to what does the 'modum nescimus' refer? We cannot ask how that is done, which we declare not done at all. Admit this transmutation, and you necessarily admit by implication the Romish dogma, of the separation of a sensible thing from the sensible accidents which constitute all we ever meant by the thing. To rationalize this figment of his church, Bossuet has recourse to Spinosism, and dares make God the substance and sole 'ens reale' of all body, and by this very 'hypothesis' baffles his own end, and does away all miracle in the particular instance. Ib. p. 35. B. When I pray in my chamber, I build a temple there that hour; and that minute, when I cast out a prayer in the street, I build a temple there; and when my soul prays without any voice, my very body is then a temple. Good; but it would be better to regard solitary, family, and templar devotion as distinctions in sort, rather than differences in degree. All three are necessary. Ib. E. And that more fearful occasion of coming, when they came only to elude the law, and proceeding in their treacherous and traitorous religion in their heart, and yet communicating with us, draw God himself into their conspiracies; and to mock us, make a mock of God, and his religion too. What, then, was their guilt, who by terror and legal penalties tempted their fellow Christians to this treacherous mockery? Donne should have asked himself that question. Serm. V. Exod. iv. 13. p. 39. Ib. p. 39. C. D. It hath been doubted, and disputed, and denied too, that this text, 'O my Lord, send I pray thee by the hand of him whom thou wilt send', hath any relation to the sending of the Messiah, to the coming of Christ, to Christmas day; yet we forbear not to wait upon the ancient Fathers, and as they said, to say, that Moses 'at last' determines all in this, 'O my Lord', &c. It is a work, next to the great work of the redemption of the whole world, to redeem Israel out of Egypt; and therefore do both works at once, put both into one hand, and 'mitte quem missurus es, Send him whom I know thou wilt send'; him, whom, pursuing thine own decree, 'thou shouldest send'; send Christ, send him now, to redeem Israel from Egypt. This is one of the happier accommodations of the 'gnosis', that is, the science of detecting the mysteries of faith in the simplest texts of the Old Testament history, to the contempt or neglect of the literal and contextual sense. It was, I conceive, in part at least, this 'gnosis', and not knowledge, as our translation has it, that St. Paul warns against, and most wisely, as puffing up, inflating the heart with self-conceit, and the head with idle fancies. Ib. E. But as a thoughtful man, a pensive, a considerative man, that stands still for a while with his eyes fixed upon the ground before his feet, when he casts up his head, hath presently, instantly the sun or the heavens for his object; he sees not a tree, nor a house, nor a steeple by the way, but as soon as his eye is departed from the earth where it was long fixed, the next thing he sees is the sun or the heavens;--so when Moses had fixed himself long upon the consideration of his own insufficiency for this service, when he took his eye from that low piece of ground, himself, considered as he was then, he fell upon no tree, no house, no steeple, no such consideration as this--God may endow me, improve me, exalt me, enable me, qualify me with faculties fit for this service, but his first object was that which presented an infallibility with it, Christ Jesus himself, the Messias himself, &c. Beautifully imagined, and happily applied. Ib. p. 40. B. That 'germen Jehovæ', as the prophet Esay calls Christ, that offspring of Jehova, that bud, that blossom, that fruit of God himself, the Son of God, the Messiah, the Redeemer, Christ Jesus, grows upon every tree in this paradise, the Scripture; for Christ was the occasion before, and is the consummation after, of all Scripture. If this were meant to the exclusion or neglect of the primary sense,--if we are required to believe that the sacred writers themselves had such thoughts present to their minds,--it would, doubtless, throw the doors wide open to every variety of folly and fanaticism. But it may admit of a safe, sound, and profitable use, if we consider the Bible as one work, intended by the Holy Spirit for the edification of the Church in all ages, and having, as such, all its parts synoptically interpreted, the eldest by the latest, the last by the first, and the middle by both. Moses, or David, or Jeremiah (we might in this view affirm) meant so and so, according to the context, and the light under which, and the immediate or proximate purposes for which, he wrote: but we, who command the whole scheme of the great dispensation, may see a higher and deeper sense, of which the literal meaning was a symbol or type; and this we may justifiably call the sense of the spirit. Ib. p. 41. B. So in our liturgy 'we stand up at the profession of the creed' thereby to declare to God and his Church our readiness to stand to, and our readiness to proceed in, that profession. Another Church might sit down, thereby denoting a resolve to abide in this profession. These things are indifferent; but charity, love of peace, and on indifferent points to prefer another's liking to our own, and to observe an order once established for order's sake,--these are not indifferent. Ib. p. 42. C. This paragraph is excellent. Alas! how painfully applicable it is to some of our day! Ib. p. 46. C. Howsoever all intend that this is a name that denotes essence, being: Being is the name of God, and of God only. Rather, I should say, 'the eternal antecedent of being;' 'I that shall be in that I will to be'; the absolute will; the ground of being; the self-affirming 'actus purissimus'. Serm. VI. Isaiah liii. 1. p. 52. A noble sermon in thought and diction. Ib. p. 59. E. Therefore we have a clearer light than this; 'firmiorem propheticum sermonem', says St. Peter; 'we have a more sure word of the prophets'; that is, as St. Augustine reads that place, 'clariorem', a more manifest, a more evident, declaration in the prophets, than in nature, of the will of God towards man, &c. The sense of this text, as explained by the context, seems to me this;--that, in consequence of the fulfilment of so large a proportion of the oracles, the Christian Church has not only the additional light given by the teaching and miracles of Christ, but even the light vouchsafed to the old Church (the prophetic) stronger and clearer. Ib. p. 60. A. He spake personally, and he spake aloud, in the declaration of miracles; but 'quis credidit auditui Filii?' Who believed even his report? Did they not call his preaching sedition, and call his miracles conjuring? Therefore, we have a clearer, that is, a nearer light than the written Gospel, that is, the Church. True; yet he who should now venture to assert this truth, or even contend for a co-ordinateness of the Church and the Written Word, must bear to be thought a semi-Papist, an 'ultra' high-Churchman. Still the truth is the truth. Serm. VII. John x. 10. p. 62. Since the Revolution in 1688 our Church has been chilled and starved too generally by preachers and reasoners Stoic or Epicurean;--first, a sort of pagan morality was substituted for the righteousness by faith, and latterly, prudence or Paleyanism has been substituted even for morality. A Christian preacher ought to preach Christ alone, and all things in him and by him. If he find a dearth in this, if it seem to him a circumscription, he does not know Christ, as the 'pleroma', the fullness. It is not possible that there should be aught true, or seemly, or beautiful, in thought, will, or deed, speculative or practical, which may not, and which ought not to, be evolved out of Christ and the faith in Christ;--no folly, no error, no evil to be exposed, or warred against, which may not, and should not, be convicted and denounced from its contrariancy and enmity to Christ. To the Christian preacher Christ should be in all things, and all things in Christ: he should abjure every argument that is not a link in the chain, of which Christ is the staple and staple ring. Ib. p. 64. In this page Donne passes into rhetorical extravagance, after the manner of too many of the Fathers from Tertullian to Bernard. Ib. p. 66. A. Some of the later authors in the Roman Church ... have noted ('in several of the Fathers') some inclinations towards that opinion, that the devil retaining still his faculty of free-will, is therefore capable of repentance, and so of benefit by this coming of Christ. If this be assumed,--namely, the free-will of the devil,--as a consequence would indeed follow his capability of repenting, and the possibility that he may repent. But then he is no longer what we mean by the devil; he is no longer the evil spirit, but simply a wicked soul. Ib. p. 68. C. As though God had said 'Qui sum', my name is 'I am'; yet in truth it is 'Qui ero', my name is 'I shall be'. Nay, 'I will or shall be in that I will to be'. I am that only one who is self-originant, 'causa sui', whose will must be contemplated as antecedent in idea to or deeper than his own co-eternal being. But 'antecedent,' 'deeper,' &c. are mere 'vocabula impropria', words of accommodation, that may suggest the idea to a mind purified from the intrusive phantoms of space and time, but falsify and extinguish the truth, if taken as adequate exponents. Ib. p. 69. C. We affirm that it is not only as impious and irreligious a thing, but as senseless and as absurd a thing, to deny that the Son of God hath redeemed the world, as to deny that God hath created the world. A bold but a true saying. The man who, cannot see the redemptive agency in the creation has but a dim apprehension of the creative power. Ib. D. E. p. 70. A. These paragraphs exhibit a noble instance of giving importance to the single words of a text, each word by itself a pregnant text. Here, too, lies the excellence, the imitable, but alas! unimitated, excellence of our divines from Elizabeth to William III. Ib. D. O, that our clergy did but know and see that their tithes and glebes belong to them as officers and functionaries of the nationalty,--as clerks, and not exclusively as theologians, and not at all as ministers of the Gospel;--but that they are likewise ministers of the Church of Christ, and that their claims and the powers of that Church are no more alienated or affected by their being at the same time the established clergy, than they are by the common coincidence of being justices of the peace, or heirs to an estate, or stockholders! [6] The Romish divines placed the Church above the Scriptures; our present divines give it no place at all. But Donne and his great contemporaries had not yet learnt to be afraid of announcing and enforcing the claims of the Church, distinct from, and coordinate with, the Scriptures. This is one evil consequence, though most un-necessarily so, of the union of the Church of Christ with the national Church, and of the claims of the Christian pastor and preacher with the legal and constitutional rights and revenues of the officers of the national clerisy. Our clergymen in thinking of their legal rights, forget those rights of theirs which depend on no human law at all. Ib. p. 71. A. This is the difference between God's mercy and his judgments, that sometimes his judgments may he plural, complicated, enwrapped in one another; but his mercies are always so, and cannot be otherwise. A just sentiment beautifully expressed. Ib. C. Whereas the Christian religion is, as Gregory Nazianzen says, 'simplex et nuda, nisi prave in artem difficillimam converteretur': it is a plain, an easy, a perspicuous truth. A religion of ideas, spiritual truths, or truth-powers,--not of notions and conceptions, the manufacture of the understanding,--is therefore 'simplex et nuda', that is, immediate; like the clear blue heaven of Italy, deep and transparent, an ocean unfathomable in its depth, and yet ground all the way. Still as meditation soars upwards, it meets the arched firmament with all its suspended lamps of light. O, let not the 'simplex et nuda' of Gregory be perverted to the Socinian, 'plain and easy for the meanest understandings!' The truth in Christ, like the peace of Christ, passeth all understanding. If ever there was a mischievous misuse of words, the confusion of the terms, 'reason' and 'understanding,' 'ideas' and 'notions,' or 'conceptions,' is most mischievous; a Surinam toad with a swarm of toadlings sprouting out of its back and sides. Serm. VIII. Mat. v. 16. p. 77. Ib. C. Either of the names of this day were text enough for a sermon, Purification or Candlemas. Join we them together, and raise we only this one note from both, that all true purification is in the light, &c. The illustration of the name of the day contained in the first two or three paragraphs of this sermon would be censured as quaint by our modern critics. Would to heaven we had but even a few preachers capable of such quaintnesses! Ib. D. Every good work hath faith for the root; but every faith hath not good works for the fruit thereof. Faith, that is, fidelity--the fealty of the finite will and understanding to the reason, 'the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world', as one with, and representative of, the absolute will, and to the ideas or truths of the pure reason, the supersensuous truths, which in relation to the finite will, and as meant to determine the will, are moral laws, the voice and dictates of the conscience;--this faith is properly a state and disposition of the will, or rather of the whole man, the I, or finite will, self-affirmed. It is therefore the ground, the root, of which the actions, the works, the believings, as acts of the will in the understanding, are the trunk and the branches. But these must be in the light. The disposition to see must have organs, objects, direction, and an outward light. The three latter of these our Lord gives to his disciples in this blessed sermon on the Mount, preparatorily, and, as Donne rightly goes on to observe, presupposing faith as the ground and root. Indeed the whole of this and the next page affords a noble specimen, how a minister of the Church of England should preach the doctrine of good works, purified from the poison of the practical Romish doctrine of works, as the mandioc is evenomated by fire, and rendered safe, nutritious, a bread of life. To Donne's exposition the heroic Solifidian, Martin Luther himself, would have subscribed, hand and heart. Ib. p. 78. C. And therefore our latter men of the Reformation are not to be blamed, who for the most, pursuing St. Cyril's interpretation, interpret this universal 'light that lighteneth every man' to be the light of nature. The error here, and it is a grievous error, consists in the word 'nature.' There is, there can be, no light of nature: there may be a light in or upon nature; but this is the light that shineth down into the darkness, that is, the nature, and the darkness comprehendeth it not. All ideas, or spiritual truths, are supernatural. Ib. p. 79. Throughout this page, Donne rather too much plays the rhetorician. If the faith worketh the works, what is true of the former must be equally affirmed of the latter;--'causa causæ causa causati'. Besides, he falls into something like a confusion of faith with belief, taken as a conviction or assent of the judgment. The faith and the righteousness of a Christian are both alike his, and not his--the faith of Christ in him, the righteousness in and for him. 'I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet, not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me'. [7] Donne was a truly great man; but, after all, he did not possess that full, steady, deep, and yet comprehensive, insight into the nature of faith and works which was vouchsafed to Martin Luther. Donne had not attained to the reconciling of distinctity with unity,--ours, yet God's; God's, yet ours. Ib. D. 'Velle et nolle nostrum est', to assent, or to dis-assent, is our own. Is not this, even with the saving afterwards, too nakedly expressed? Ib. And certainly our works are more ours than our faith is; and man concurs otherwise in the acting and perpetration of a good work, than he doth in the reception and admission of faith. Why? Because Donne confounds the act of faith with the assent of the fancy and understanding to certain words and conceptions. Indeed, with all my reverence for Dr. Donne, I must warn against the contents of this page, as scarcely tenable in logic, unsound in metaphysics, and unsafe, slippery divinity; and principally in that he confounds faith-- essentially an act, the fundamental work of the Spirit--with belief, which is then only good when it is the effect and accompaniment of faith. Ib. p. 80. D. Because things good in their institution may he depraved in their practice--'ergone nihil ceremoniarum rudioribus dabitur, ad juvandam eorum imperitiam?' Some ceremonies may be for the conservation of order and civility, or to prevent confusion and unseemliness; others are the natural or conventional language of our feelings, as bending the knees, or bowing the head; and to neither of these two sorts do I object. But as to the 'adjuvandam rudiorum imperitiam', I protest against all such ceremonies, and the pretexts for them, 'in toto'. What? Can any ceremony be more instructive than the words required to explain the ceremony? I make but two exceptions, and those where the truths signified are so vital, so momentous, that the very occasion and necessity of explaining the sign are of the highest spiritual value. Yet, alas! to what gross and calamitous superstitions have not even the visible signs in Baptism and the Eucharist given occasion! Ib. p. 81. E. Blessed St. Augustine reports, (if that epistle be St. Augustine's) that when himself was writing to St. Hierome, to know his opinion of the measure and quality of the joy and glory of heaven, suddenly in his chamber there appeared 'ineffabile lumen', says he, an unspeakable, an unexpressible light, ... and out of that light issued this voice, 'Hieronymi anima sum', &c. The grave recital of this ridiculous legend is one instance of what I have called the Patristic leaven in Donne, who assuredly had no belief himself in the authenticity of this letter. But yet it served a purpose. As to Master Conradus, just above, who could read at night by the light at his fingers' ends, he must of course have very recently been shaking hands with Lucifer. Ib. p. 83. D. Eve's recognition upon the birth of her first son, 'Cain I have gotten, I possess a man from the Lord.' 'I have gotten the Jehovah-man', is, I believe, the true rendering and sense of the Hebrew words. Eve, full of the promise, supposed her first-born, the first-born on earth, to be the promised deliverer. Ib. p. 84. D. E. Serm. IX. Rom. xiii. 7. p. 86, Admirable passages. Ib. p. 90. A. That soul that is accustomed, &c. Ib. p. 94. A. B. Serm. XII. Mat. v. 2. p. 112. Ib. B. C. D. The disposition of our Church divines, under James I, to bring back the stream of the Reformation to the channel and within the banks formed in the first six centuries of the Church, and their alienation from the great patriarchs of Protestantism, Luther, Calvin, Zuinglius, and others, who held the Fathers of the 'ante'-Papal Church, with exception of Augustine, in light esteem, this disposition betrays itself here and in many other parts of Donne. For here Donne plays the Jesuit, disguising the truth, that even as early as the third century the Church had begun to Paganize Christianity, under the pretext, and no doubt in the hope, of Christianizing Paganism. The mountain would not go to Mahomet, and therefore Mahomet went to the mountain. Ib. p. 115. A. An excellent passage. Ib. p. 117. E. And therefore when the prophet says, 'Quis sapiens, et intelliget hæc? Who is so wise as to find out this way'? he places this cleanness which we inquire after in wisdom. What is wisdom? The primitive Church appropriated the name to the third 'hypostasis' of the Trinity; hence 'Sancta Sophia' became the distinctive name of the Holy Ghost; and the temple at Constantinople, dedicated by Justinian to the Holy Ghost, is called the Church--alas! now the mosque--of Santa Sophia. Now this suggests, or rather implies, a far better and more precise definition of wisdom than Donne's. The distinctive title of the Father, as the Supreme Will, is the Good; that of the only-begotten Word, as the Supreme Reason, ('Ens Realissimum', [Greek: Ho_O N], the Being) is the True; and the Spirit proceeding from the Good through the True is the Wisdom. Goodness in the form of truth is wisdom. Wisdom is the pure will, realizing itself intelligently, or the good manifesting itself as the truth, and realized in the act. Wisdom, life, love, beauty, the beauty of holiness, are all 'synonyma' of the Holy Spirit. 6, December, 1831. Ib. p. 121. A. The Arians' opinion, that God the Father only was invisible, but the Son 'and the Holy Ghost' might be seen. Here we have an instance, one of many, of the inconveniences and contradictions that arise out of the assumed contrary essences of body and soul; both substances, and independent of each other, yet so absolutely diverse as that the one is to be defined by the negation of the other. Serm. XIII. Job xvi. 17, 18, 19. p. 127. Ib. p. 129. A. B. C. Ib. pp. 134. 135. Truly excellent. Serm. XV. 1 Cor. xv. 26. p. 144. Ib. D. Who, then, is this enemy? an enemy that may thus far think himself equal to God, that as no man ever saw God, and lived; so no man ever saw this enemy, and lived; for it is death. This borders rather too closely on the Irish Franciscan's conclusion to his sermon of thanksgiving: "Above all, brethren, let us thankfully laud and extol God's transcendant mercy in putting death at the end of life, and thereby giving us all time for repentance!" Dr. Donne was an eminently witty man in a very witty age; but to the honour of his judgment let it be said, that though his great wit is evinced in numberless passages, in a few only is it shown off. This paragraph is one of those rare exceptions. N. B. Nothing in Scripture, nothing in reason, commands or authorizes us to assume or suppose any bodiless creature. It is the incommunicable attribute of God. But all bodies are not flesh, nor need we suppose that all bodies are corruptible. 'There are bodies celestial'. In the three following paragraphs of this sermon, we trace wild fantastic positions grounded on the arbitrary notion of man as a mixture of heterogeneous components, which Des Cartes shortly afterwards carried into its extremes. On this doctrine the man is a mere phenomenal result, a sort of brandy-sop or toddy-punch. It is a doctrine unsanctioned by, and indeed inconsistent with, the Scriptures. It is not true that body 'plus' soul makes man. Man is not the 'syntheton' or composition of body and soul, as the two component units. No; man is the unit, the 'prothesis', and body and soul are the two poles, the positive and negative, the 'thesis' and 'antithesis' of the man; even as attraction and repulsion are the two poles in and by which one and the same magnet manifests itself. Ib. p. 146. B. For it is not so great a depopulation to translate a city from merchants to husbandmen, from shops to ploughs, as it is from many husbandmen to one shepherd; and yet that hath been often done. For example, in the Highlands of Scotland in our own day. Ib. p. 148. A. The ashes of an oak in the chimney are no epitaph of that oak, to tell me how high or how large that was. It tells me not what flocks it sheltered while it stood, nor what men it hurt when it fell. The dust of great persons' graves is speechless too, it says nothing, it distinguishes nothing. As soon the dust of a wretch whom thou wouldst not, as of a prince whom thou couldst not, look upon, will trouble thine eyes, if the wind blow it thither; and when a whirlwind hath blown the dust of the churchyard unto the church, and the man sweeps out the dust of the church into the church-yard, who will undertake to sift those dusts again, and to pronounce;--this is the patrician, this is the noble, flour, and this the yeomanly, this the plebeian, bran. [8] Very beautiful indeed. Ib. p. 149. C. But when I lie under the hands of that enemy, that hath reserved himself to the last, to my last bed; then when I shall be able to stir no limb in any other measure than a fever or a palsy shall shake them; when everlasting darkness shall have an inchoation in the present dimness of mine eyes, and the everlasting gnashing in the present chattering of my teeth, and the everlasting worm in the present gnawing of the agonies of my body and anguishes of my mind; when the last enemy shall watch my remediless body, and my disconsolate soul there,--there, where not the physician in his way, perchance not the priest in his, shall be able to give any assistance; and when he hath sported himself with my misery, &c. This is powerful; but is too much in the style of the monkish preachers: 'Papam redolet'. Contrast with this Job's description of death, [9] and St. Paul's 'sleep in the Lord'. Ib. p. 150. A. Neither doth Calvin carry those emphatical words which are so often cited for a proof of the last resurrection,--'that he knows his Redeemer lives, that he knows he shall stand the last man upon earth, that though his body be destroyed, yet in his flesh and with his eyes shall he see God'--to any higher sense than so, that how low soever he be brought, to what desperate state soever he be reduced in the eyes of the world, yet he assures himself of a resurrection, a reparation, a restitution to his former bodily health, and worldly fortune which he had before. And such a resurrection we all know Job had. I incline to Calvin's opinion, but am not decided. 'After my skin', must be rendered 'according to, or as far as my skin is concerned.' 'Though the flies and maggots in my ulcers have destroyed my skin, yet still, and in my flesh, I shall see God as my Redeemer'. Now St. Paul says, that flesh and blood cannot ([Greek: sàrx kaì aima--ou dynantai]) inherit the kingdom of heaven, that is, the spiritual world. Besides how is the passage, as commonly interpreted, consistent with the numerous expressions of doubt and even of despondency in Job's speeches? [10] Ib. B. C. (Ezekiel's vision xxxvii.) I cannot but think that Dr. Donne, by thus antedating the distinct belief of the Jews in the resurrection, "which you all know already," destroys in great measure the force and sublimity of this vision. Besides, it does not seem, in the common people at least, to have been much more than a mongrel Egyptian-catacomb sort of faith, or rather superstition. _In fine_. This is one of Donne's least estimable discourses; the worst sermon on the best text. Yet what a Donne-like passage is this that follows! P. 146. A. Let the whole world be in thy consideration as one house; and then consider in that, in the peaceful harmony of creatures, in the peaceful succession, and connexion of causes and effects, the peace of nature. Let this kingdom, where God hath blessed thee with a being, be the gallery, the best room of that house, and consider in the two walls of that gallery, the Church and the state, the peace of a royal and religious wisdom. Let thine own family be a cabinet in this gallery, and find in all the boxes thereof, in the several duties of wife and children, and servants, the peace of virtue, and of the father and mother of all virtues, active discretion, passive obedience; and then lastly, let thine own bosom be the secret box and reserve in this cabinet, and then the gallery of the best home that can be had, peace with the creature, peace in the Church, peace in the state, peace in thy house, peace in thy heart, is a fair model, and a lovely design even of the heavenly Jerusalem, which is _visio pacis_, where there is no object but peace. Serm. XVI. John xi. 35. p. 153. Ib. C. The Masorites (the Masorites are the critics upon the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament) cannot tell us, who divided the chapters of the Old Testament into verses: neither can any other tell, who did it in the New Testament. [11] How should the Masorites, when the Hebrew Scriptures were not as far as we know divided into verses at all in their time? The Jews seem to have adopted the invention from the Christians, who were led to it in the construction of Concordances. Ib. p. 154. E. If they killed Lazarus, had not Christ done enough to let them see that he could raise him again? Malice, above all party-malice, is indeed a blind passion, but one can scarcely conceive the chief priests such dolts as to think that Christ could raise Lazarus again. Their malice blinded them as to the nature of the incident, made them suppose a conspiracy between Jesus and the family of Lazarus, a mock burial, in short; and this may be one, though it is not, I think, the principal, reason for this greatest miracle being omitted in the other Gospels. Ib. p. 155. B. Christ might ungirt himself, and give more scope and liberty to his passions than any other man; both because he had no original sin within to drive him, &c. How then is he said to have 'condemned sin in the flesh'? Without guilt, without actual sin, assuredly he was; but [Greek: egéneto sàrx], and what can we mean by original sin relatively to the flesh, but that man is born with an animal life and a material organism that render him temptible to evil, and which tends to dispose the life of the will to contradict the light of the reason? Did St. Paul by [Greek: homoi_ómati sarkòs hamartiás] mean a deceptive resemblance? [12] Ib. D. I can see no possible edification that can arise from these _ultra_-Scriptural speculations respecting our Lord. Ib. p. 157. A. Though the Godhead never departed from the carcase ... yet because the human soul was departed from it, he was no man. Donne was a poor metaphysician; that is, he never closely questioned himself as to the absolute meaning of his words. What did he mean by the 'soul?' what by the 'body?' [13] Ib. D. And I know that there are authors of a middle nature, above the philosophers, and below the Scriptures, the Apocryphal books. A whimsical instance of the disposition in the mind for every pair of opposites to find an intermediate,--a 'mesothesis' for every 'thesis' and 'antithesis'. Thus Scripture may be opposed to philosophy; and then the Apocryphal books will be philosophy relatively to Scripture, and Scripture relatively to philosophy. Ib. p. 159. B. And therefore the same author (Epiphanius) says, that because they thought it an uncomely thing for Christ to weep for any temporal thing, some men have expunged and removed that verse out of St. Luke's Gospel, that 'Jesus, when he saw that city, wept'. [14] This, by the by, rather indiscreetly lets out the liberties, which the early Christians took with their sacred writings. Origen, who, in answer to Celsus's reproach on this ground, confines the practice to the heretics, furnishes proofs of the contrary himself in his own comments. Ib. p. 161. D. That world, which finds itself in an authumn in itself, finds itself in a spring in our imaginations. Worthy almost of Shakspeare! Serm. XVII. Matt. xix. 17. p. 163. Ib. E. The words are part of a dialogue, of a conference, between Christ and a man who proposed a question to him; to whom Christ makes an answer by way of another question, 'Why callest thou me good?' &c. In the words, and by occasion of them, we consider the text, the context, and the pretext; not as three equal parts of the building; but the context, as the situation and prospect of the house, the pretext, as the access and entrance into the house, and then the text itself, as the house itself, as the body of the building: in a word, in the text the words; in the context the occasion of the words; in the pretext the purpose, the disposition of him who gave the occasion. What a happy example of elegant division of a subject! And so also the 'compendium' of Christianity in the preceding paragraph (D). Our great divines were not ashamed of the learned discipline to which they had submitted their minds under Aristotle and Tully, but brought the purified products as sacrificial gifts to Christ. They baptized the logic and manly rhetoric of ancient Greece. Ib. p. 164. A. B. Excellent illustration of fragmentary morality, in which each man takes his choice of his virtues and vices. Ib. D. Men perish with whispering sins, nay, with silent sins, sins that never tell the conscience they are sins, as often as with crying sins. Yea, I almost doubt whether the truth here so boldly asserted is not of more general necessity for ordinary congregations, than the denunciation of the large sins that cannot remain 'in incognito'. Ib. p. 165. A. 'Venit procurrens, he came running'. Nicodemus came not so, Nicodemus durst not avow his coming, and therefore he came creeping, and he came softly, and he came seldom, and he came by night. Ah! but we trust in God that he did in fact come. The adhesion, the thankfulness, the love which arise and live after the having come, whether from spontaneous liking, or from a beckoning hope, or from a compelling good, are the truest 'criteria' of the man's Christianity. Ib. B. When I have just reason to think my superiors would have it thus, this is music to my soul; when I hear them say they would have it thus, this is rhetoric to my soul; when I see their laws enjoin it to be thus, this is logic to my soul; but when I see them actually, really, clearly, constantly do thus, this is a demonstration to my soul, and demonstration is the powerfullest proof. The eloquence of inferiors is in words, the eloquence of superiors is in action. A just representation, I doubt not, of the general feeling and principle at the time Donne wrote. Men regarded the gradations of society as God's ordinances, and had the elevation of a self-approving conscience in every feeling and exhibition of respect for those of ranks superior to their own. What a contrast with the present times! Is not the last sentence beautiful? "The eloquence of inferiors is in words, the eloquence of superiors is in action." Ib. B. and C. He came to Christ, he ran to him; and when he was come, as St. Mark relates it, 'he fell upon his knees to Christ'. He stood not then Pharisaically upon his own legs, his own merits, though he had been a diligent observer of the commandments before, &c. All this paragraph is an independent truth; but I doubt whether in his desire to make every particle exemplary, to draw some Christian moral from it, Donne has not injudiciously attributed, _quasi per prolepsin_, merits inconsistent with the finale of a wealthy would-be proselyte. At all events, a more natural and, perhaps, not less instructive interpretation might be made of the sundry movements of this religiously earnest and zealous admirer of Christ, and worshipper of Mammon. O, I have myself known such! Ib. D. He was no ignorant man, and yet he acknowledged that he had somewhat more to learn of Christ than he knew yet. Blessed are they that inanimate all their knowledge, consummate all in Christ Jesus, &c. The whole paragraph is pure gold. Without being aware of this passage in Donne, I expressed the same conviction, or rather declared the same experience, in the appendix [15] to the Statesman's Manual. O! if only one day in a week, Christians would consent to have the Bible as the only book, and their minister's labour to make them find all substantial good of all other books in their Bibles! Ib. E. I remember one of the Panegyrics celebrates and magnifies one of the Roman emperors for this, that he would marry when he was young; that he would so soon confine and limit his pleasures, so soon determine his affections in one person. It is surely some proof of the moral effect which Christianity has produced, that in all Protestant countries, at least, a writer would be ashamed to assign this as a ground of panegyric; as if promiscuous intercourse with those of the other sex had been a natural good, a privilege, which there was a great merit in foregoing! O! what do not women owe to Christianity! As Christians only it is that they do, or ordinarily can, cease to be things for men, instead of co-persons in one spiritual union. Ib. p. 166. A. But such is often the corrupt inordinateness of greatness, that it only carries them so much beyond other men, but not so much nearer to God. Like a balloon, away from earth, but not a whit nearer the arch of heaven. There is a praiseworthy relativeness and life in the morality of our best old divines. It is not a cold law in brass or stone; but "this I may and should think of my neighbour, this of a great man," &c. Ib. p. 167. A. Christ was pleased to redeem this man from this error, and bring him to know truly what he was, that he was God. Christ therefore doth not rebuke this man, by any denying that he himself was good; for Christ doth assume that addition to himself, 'I am the good shepherd'. Neither doth God forbid that those good parts which are in men should be celebrated with condign praise. We see that God, as soon as he saw that any thing was good, he said so, he uttered it, he declared it, first of the light, and then of other creatures. God would be no author, no example of smothering the due praise of good actions. For surely that man hath no zeal to goodness in himself, that affords no praise to goodness in other men. Very fine. But I think another--not, however, a different--view might be taken respecting our Lord's intention in these words. The young noble, who came to him, had many praiseworthy traits of character; but he failed in the ultimate end and aim. What ought only to have been valued by him as means, was loved, and had a worth given to it, as an end in itself. Our Lord, who knew the hearts of men, instantly in the first words applies himself to this, and takes the occasion of an ordinary phrase of courtesy addressed to himself, to make the young man aware of the difference between a mere relative good and that which is absolutely good; that which may be called good, when regarded as a mean to good, but which must not be mistaken for, or confounded with, that which is good, and itself the end. Ib. B. C. D. All excellent, and D. most so. Thus, thus our old divines showed the depth of their love and appreciation of the Scriptures, and thus led their congregations to feel and see the same. Here is Donne's authority (_Deus non est ens_, &c.) for what I have so earnestly endeavored to show, that _Deus est ens super ens_, the ground of all being, but therein likewise absolute Being, in that he is the eternal self-affirmant, the I Am in that I Am; and that the key of this mystery is given to us in the pure idea of the will, as the alone _Causa Sui_. O! compare this manhood of our Church divinity with the feeble dotage of the Paleyan school, the 'natural' theology, or watchmaking scheme, that knows nothing of the maker but what can be proved out of the watch, the unknown nominative case of the verb impersonal _fit--et natura est_; the 'it,' in short, in 'it rains,' 'it snows,' 'it is cold,' and the like. When, after reading the biographies of Walton and his contemporaries, I reflect on the crowded congregations, on the thousands, who with intense interest came to their hour and two hour long sermons, I cannot but doubt the fact of any true progression, moral or intellectual, in the mind of the many. The tone, the matter, the anticipated sympathies in the sermons of an age form the best moral criterion of the character of that age. Ib. E. His name of Jehova we admire with a reverence. Say, rather, Jehova, his name. It is not so properly a name of God, as God the Name,--God's name and God. Ib. p. 169. A. Land, and money, and honour must be called goods, though but of fortune, &c. We should distinguish between the conditions of our possessing goods and the goods themselves. Health, for instance, is ordinarily a condition of that working and rejoicing for and in God, which are goods in the end, and of themselves. Health, competent fortune, and the like are good as the negations of the preventives of good; as clear glass is good in relation to the light, which it does not exclude. Health and ease without the love of God are plate glass in the darkness. Ib. p. 170. Much of this page consists of play on words; as, that which is useful as rain, and that which is of use as rain on a garden after drouth. There is also much sophistry in it. Pain is not necessarily an ultimate evil. As the mean of ultimate good, it may be a relative good; but surely that which makes pain, anguish, heaviness necessary in order to good, must be evil. And so the Scripture determines. They are the _wages of sin_; but God's infinite mercy raises them into sacraments, means of grace. Sin is the only absolute evil; God the only absolute good. But as myriads of things are good relatively through participation of God, so are many things evil as the fruits of evil. What is the apostasy, or fall of spirits? That that which from the essential perfection of the Absolute Good could not but be possible, that is, have a potential being, but never ought to have been actual, did nevertheless strive to be actual?--But this involved an impossibility; and it actualized only its own potentiality. What is the consequence of the apostasy? That no philosophy is possible of man and nature but by assuming at once a zenith and a nadir, God and 'Hades'; and an ascension from the one through and with a condescension from the other; that is, redemption by prevenient and then auxiliary grace. Ib. p. 171. B. So says St. Augustine, 'Audeo dicere', though it be boldly said, yet I must say it, 'utile esse cadere in aliquod manifestum peccatum', &c. No doubt, a sound sense may be forced into these words: but why use words, into which a sound sense must be forced? Besides, the subject is too deep and too subtle for a sermon. In the two following paragraphs, especially, Dr. Donne is too deep, and not deep enough. He treads waters, and dangerous waters. N. B. The Familists. Serm. XVIII. Acts, ii. 36. p. 175. Ib. B. I would paraphrase, or rather lead the way to this text, something as follows:-- Truth is a common interest; it is every man's duty to convey it to his brother, if only it be a truth that concerns or may profit him, and he be competent to receive it. For we are not bound to say the truth, where we know that we cannot convey it, but very probably may impart a falsehood instead; no falsehoods being more dangerous than truths misunderstood, nay, the most mischievous errors on record having been half-truths taken as the whole. But let it be supposed that the matter to be communicated is a fact of general concernment, a truth of deep and universal interest, a momentous truth involved in a most awe-striking fact, which all responsible creatures are competent to understand, and of which no man can safely remain in ignorance. Now this is the case with the matter, on which I am about to speak; 'therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly, that God hath made that same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ!' Ib. p. 176. A. B. C. True Christian love not only permits, but enjoins, courtesy. God himself, says Donne, gave us the example. Ib. p. 177. A. C. E. All excellent, and E. of deeper worth. All that is wanting here is to determine the true sense of 'knowing God,'--that sense in which it is revealed that to know God is life ever-lasting. Ib p. 178. A. Now the universality of this mercy hath God enlarged and extended very far, in that he proposes it even to our knowledge; 'sciant', let all know it. It is not only 'credant', let all believe it; for the infusing of faith is not in our power; but God hath put it in our power to satisfy their reason, &c. A question is here affirmatively started of highest importance and of deepest interest, that is, faith so distinguished from reason, 'credat' from 'sciat', that the former is an infused grace 'not in our power;' the latter an inherent quality or faculty, on which we are able to calculate as man with man. I know not what to say to this. Faith seems to me the coadunation of the individual will with the reason, enforcing adherence alike of thought, act, and affection to the Universal Will, whether revealed in the conscience, or by the light of reason, however the same may contravene, or apparently contradict, the will and mind of the flesh, the presumed experience of the senses and of the understanding, as the faculty, or intelligential yet animal instinct, by which we generalize the notices of the senses, and substantiate their 'spectra' or 'phænomena'. In this sense, therefore, and in this only, I agree with Donne. 'No man cometh to Christ unless the' 'Father lead him'. The corrupt will cannot, without prevenient as well as auxiliary grace, be unitively subordinated to the reason, and again, without this union of the moral will, the reason itself is latent. Nevertheless, I see no advantage in not saying the 'will,' or in substituting the term 'faith' for it. But the sad non-distinction of the reason and the understanding throughout Donne, and the confusion of ideas and conceptions under the same term, painfully inturbidates his theology. Till this distinction of the [Greek: nous] and the [Greek: phrónaema sarkòs] be seen, nothing can be seen aright. Till this great truth be mastered, and with the sight that is insight, other truths may casually take possession of the mind, but the mind cannot possess them. If you know not this, you know nothing; for if you know not the diversity of reason from the understanding, you know not reason; and reason alone is knowledge. All that follows in B. is admirable, worthy of a divine of the Church of England, the National and the Christian, and indeed proves that Donne was at least possessed by the truth which I have always labored to enforce, namely, that faith is the 'apotheosis' of the reason in man, the complement of reason, the will in the form of the reason. As the basin-water to the fountain shaft, such is will to reason in faith. The whole will shapes itself in the image of God wherein it had been created, and shoots on high toward, and in the glories of, Heaven! Ib. D. If we could have been in Paradise, and seen God take a clod of red earth, and make that wretched clod of contemptible earth such a body as should be fit to receive his breath, &c. A sort of pun on the Hebrew word 'Adam' or red earth, common in Donne's age, but unworthy of Donne, who was worthy to have seen deeper into the Scriptural sense of the 'ground,' the Hades, the multeity, the many 'absque numero el infra numerum', that which is below, as God is that which transcends, intellect. Ib. p. 179. B. We place in the School, for the most part, the infinite merit of Christ Jesus ... rather 'in pacto' than 'in persona', rather that this contract was thus made between the Father and the Son, than that whatsoever that person, thus consisting of God and Man, should do, should, only in respect of the person, be of an infinite value and extension to that purpose, &c. O, this is sad misty divinity! far too scholastical for the pulpit, far too vague and unphilosophic for the study. Ib. p. 180. A. 'Quis nisi infidelis negaverit apud inferos fuisse Christum?' says St. Augustine. Where? [16] Pearson expressly asserts and proves that the clause was in none of the ancient creeds or confessions. And even now the sense of these words, 'He descended into hell', is in no Reformed Church determined as an article of faith. Ib. p. 182. D. 'Audacter dicam', says St. Hierome, 'cum omnia posset Deus, suscitare virginem post ruinam non potest.' One instance among hundreds of the wantonness of phrase and fancy in the Fathers. What did Jerome mean? 'quod Deus membranam hymenis luniformem reproducere nequit?' No; that were too absurd. What then?--that God cannot make what has been not to have been? Well then, why not say that, since that is all you can mean? Serm. XIX. Rev. xx. 6. p. 183. The exposition of the text in this sermon is a lively instance how much excellent good sense a wise man, like Donne, can bring forth on a passage which he does not understand. For to say that it may mean either X, or Y, or Z, is to confess he knows not what it means; but that if it be X. then, &c.; if Y. then, &c.; and lastly if it be Z. then, &c.; that is to say, that he understands X, Y, and Z; but does not understand the text itself. Ib. p. 185. B. Seas of blood and yet but brooks, tuns of blood and yet but basons, compared with the sacrifices, the sacrifices of the blood of men, in the persecutions of the primitive Church. For every ox of the Jew, the Christian spent a man; and for every sheep and lamb, a mother and her child, &c. Whoo! Had the other nine so called persecutions been equal to the tenth, that of Diocletian, Donne's assertion here would be extravagant. Serra. XXXIV. Rom. viii. 16. p. 332. Ib. p. 335. A. But by what manner comes He from them? By proceeding. If this mystery be considered as words, or rather sounds vibrating on some certain ears, to which the belief of the hearers assigned a supernatural cause, well and good! What else can be said? Such were the sounds: what their meaning is, we know not; but such sounds not being in the ordinary course of nature, we of course attribute them to something extra-natural. But if God made man in his own image, therein as in a mirror, misty no doubt at best, and now cracked by peculiar and in-herited defects--yet still our only mirror--to contemplate all we can of God, this word 'proceeding' may admit of an easy sense. For if a man first used it to express as well as he could a notion found in himself as man 'in genere', we have to look into ourselves, and there we shall find that two facts of vital intelligence may be conceived; the first, a necessary and eternal outgoing of intelligence ([Greek: nous]) from being ([Greek:tò on]), with the will as an accompaniment, but not from it as a cause,--in order, though not necessarily in time, precedent. This is true filiation. The second is an act of the will and the reason, in their purity strict identities, and therefore not begotten or filiated, but proceeding from intelligent essence and essential intelligence combining in the act, necessarily and coeternally. For the coexistence of absolute spontaneity with absolute necessity is involved in the very idea of God, one of whose intellectual definitions is, the 'synthesis, generative ad extra, et annihilative, etsi inclusive, quoad se,' of all conceivable 'antitheses;' even as the best moral definition--(and, O! how much more godlike to us in this state of antithetic intellect is the moral beyond the intellectual!)--is, God is love. This is to us the high prerogative of the moral, that all its dictates immediately reveal the truths of intelligence, whereas the strictly intellectual only by more distant and cold deductions carries us towards the moral. For what is love? Union with the desire of union. God therefore is the cohesion and the oneness of all things; and dark and dim is that system of ethics, which does not take oneness as the root of all virtue. Being, Mind, Love in action, are ideas distinguishable though not divisible; but Will is incapable of distinction or division: it is equally implied in vital action, in essential intelligence, and in effluent love or holy action. Now will is the true principle of identity, of selfness, even in our common language. The will, therefore, being indistinguishably one, but the possessive powers triply distinguishable, do perforce involve the notion expressed by a Trinity of three Persons and one God. There are three Persons eternally coexisting, in whom the one Will is totally all in each; the truth of which mystery we may know in our own minds, but can understand by no analogy. For "the wind ministrant to divers at the same moment"--thence, to aid the fancy--borrows or rather steals from the mind the idea of 'total 'in omni parte',' which alone furnishes the analogy; but that both it and by it a myriad of other material images do enwrap themselves 'in hac veste non sua,' and would be even no objects of conception if they did not; yea, that even the very words, 'conception,' 'comprehension,' and all in all languages that answer to them, suppose this trans-impression from the mind, is an argument better than all analogy. Serm. XXXV. Mat. xii. 31. p. 341. Ib. p. 342. B. First then, for the first term, 'sin,' we use to ask in the school, whether any action of man's can have 'rationem demeriti;' whether it can be said to offend God, or to deserve ill of God? for whatsoever does so, must have some proportion with God. This appears to me to furnish an interesting example of the bad consequences in reasoning, as well as in morals, of the 'cui bono? cui malo?' system of ethics,--that system which places the good and evil of actions in their painful or pleasurable effects on the sensuous or passive nature of sentient beings, not in the will, the pure act itself. For, according to this system, God must be either a passible and dependent being,--that is, not God,--or else he must have no interest, arid therefore no motive or impulse, to reward virtue or punish vice. The veil which the Epicureans threw over their atheism was itself an implicit atheism. Nay, the world itself could not have existed; and as it does exist, the origin of evil (for if evil means no more than pain 'in genere', evil has a true being in the order of things) is not only a difficulty of impossible solution, but is a fact necessarily implying the non-existence of an omnipotent and infinite goodness,--that is, of God. For to say that I believe in a God, but not that he is omnipotent, omniscient, and all-good, is as mere a contradiction in terms as to say, I believe in a circle, but not that all the rays from its centre to its circumference are equal. I cannot read the profound truth so clearly expressed by Donne in the next paragraph--"it does not only want that rectitude, but it should have that rectitude, and therefore hath a sinful want"--without an uneasy wonder at its incongruity with the preceding dogmas. Serm. LXXI. Mat. iv. 18, 19, 20. p. 717. Ib. p.725. A. But still consider, that they did but leave their nets, they did not burn them. And consider, too, that they left but nets, those things which might entangle them, and retard them in their following of Christ, &c. An excellent paragraph grounded on a mere pun. Such was the taste of the age; and it is an awful joy to observe, that not great learning, great wit, great talent, not even (as far as without great virtue that can be) great genius, were effectual to preserve the man from the contagion, but only the deep and wise enthusiasm of moral feeling. Compare in this light Donne's theological prose even with that of the honest Knox; and, above all, compare Cowley with Milton. Serm. LXXII. Mat. iv. 18, 19, 20. p. 726. Ib. p.727. A.-E. It is amusing to see the use which the Christian divines make of the very facts in favour of their own religion, with which they triumphantly battered that of the heathens; namely, the gross and sinful anthropomorphitism of their representations of the Deity; and yet the heathen philosophers and priests--Plutarch for instance--tell us as plainly as Donne or Aquinas can do, that these are only accommodations to human modes of conception,--the divine nature being in itself impassible;--how otherwise could it be the prime agent? Paganism needs a true philosophical judge. Condemned it will be, perhaps, more heavily than by the present judges, but not from the same statutes, nor on the same evidence. 'In fine.' If our old divines, in their homiletic expositions of Scripture, wire-drew their text, in the anxiety to evolve out of the words the fulness of the meaning expressed, implied, or suggested, our modern preachers have erred more dangerously in the opposite extreme, by making their text a mere theme, or 'motto', for their discourse. Both err in degree; the old divines, especially the Puritans, by excess, the modern by defect. But there is this difference to the disfavor of the latter, that the defect in degree alters the kind. It was on God's holy word that our Hookers, Donnes, Andrewses preached; it was Scripture bread that they divided, according to the needs and seasons. The preacher of our days expounds, or appears to expound, his own sentiments and conclusions, and thinks himself evangelic enough if he can make the Scripture seem in conformity with them. Above all, there is something to my mind at once elevating and soothing in the idea of an order of learned men reading the many works of the wise and great, in many languages, for the purpose of making one book contain the life and virtue of all others, for their brethren's use who have but that one to read. What, then, if that one book be such, that the increase of learning is shown by more and more enabling the mind to find them all in it! But such, according to my experience--hard as I am on threescore--the Bible is, as far as all moral, spiritual, and prudential,--all private, domestic, yea, even political, truths arid interests are concerned. The astronomer, chemist, mineralogist, must go elsewhere; but the Bible is the book for the man. [Footnote 1: The LXXX Sermons, fol. 1640.--Ed.] [Footnote 2: "Mr. Coleridge's admiration of Bull and Waterland as high theologians was very great. Bull he used to read in the Latin 'Defensio Fidei Nicoenoe', using the Jesuit Zola's edition of 1784, which, I think, he bought at Rome. He told me once, that when he was reading a Protestant English Bishop's work on the Trinity, in a copy edited by an Italian Jesuit in Italy, he felt proud of the Church of England, and in good humour with the Church of Rome." 'Table Talk,' 2d edit. p. 41.--Ed.] [Footnote 3: Rom. vi. 3, 4, 5.--Ed.] [Footnote 4: John i 14. Gal. iv 4. Ed.] [Footnote 5: See the whole argument on the difference of the reason and the understanding, in the 'Aids to Reflection', 3d edit. pp. 206-227. Ed.] [Footnote 6: See the author's entire argument upon this subject in the 'Church and State'.--Ed.] [Footnote 7: Galat. ii 20.--Ed.] [Footnote 8: Compare 'Hamlet', Act V. sc. 1. This sermon was preached, March 8, 1628-9.--Ed.] [Footnote 9: C. iii. 13, &c.--Ed.] [Footnote 10: See, however, the author's expressions at, I believe, a rather later period. "I now think, after many doubts, that the passage; 'I know that my Redeemer liveth', &c. may fairly be taken as a burst of determination, a 'quasi' prophecy. I know not how this can be; but in spite of all my difficulties, this I do know, that I shall be recompensed!" 'Table Talk', 2d edit. p. 80.--Ed.] [Footnote 11: How so? Is it not admitted that Robert Stephens first divided the New Testament into verses in 1551? See the testimony to that effect of Henry Stephens, his son, in the Preface to his Concordance.--Ed. ] [Footnote 12: 'Rom'. viii. 3. Mr. C. afterwards expressed himself to the same effect: "Christ's body, as mere body, or rather carcase (for body is an associated word), was no more capable of sin or righteousness than mine or yours; that his humanity had a capacity of sin, follows from its own essence. He was of like passions as we, and was tempted. How could he be tempted, if he had no formal capacity of being seduced?" 'Table Talk', 2d edit. p. 261.--Ed.] [Footnote 13: See Hooker's admirable declaration of the doctrine:-- "These natures from the moment of their first combination have been and are for ever inseparable. For even when his soul forsook the tabernacle of his body, his Deity forsook neither body nor soul. If it had, then could we not truly hold either that the person of Christ was buried, or that the person of Christ did raise up itself from the dead. For the body separated from the Word can in no true sense be termed the person of Christ; nor is it true to say that the Son of God in raising up that body did raise up himself, if the body were not both with him and of him even during the time it lay in the sepulchre. The like is also to be said of the soul, otherwise we are plainly and inevitably Nestorians. The very person of Christ therefore for ever one and the self-same, was only touching bodily substance concluded within the grave, his soul only from thence severed, but by personal union his Deity still unseparably joined with both." E. P. V. 52. 4.--'Keble's edit'. Ed. ] [Footnote 14: xix. 41.--Ed. ] [Footnote 15: (C.) which should be (B.) "The object of the preceding discourse was to recommend the Bible as the end and centre of our reading and meditation. I can truly affirm of myself, that my studies have been profitable and availing to me only so far, as I have endeavored to use all my other knowledge as a glass enabling me to receive more light in a wider field of vision from the Word of God." Ed.] [Footnote 16: Ep. 99. See Pearson, Art. v.--Ed. ] HENRY MORE'S THEOLOGICAL WORKS. [1] There are three principal causes to which the imperfections and errors in the theological schemes and works of our elder divines, the glories of our Church,--men of almost unparalleled learning and genius, the rich and robust intellects from the reign of Elizabeth to the death of Charles II,--may, I think, be reasonably attributed. And striking, unusually striking, instances of all three abound in this volume; and in the works of no other divine are they more worthy of being regretted: for hence has arisen a depreciation of Henry More's theological writings, which yet contain more original, enlarged, and elevating views of the Christian dispensation than I have met with in any other single volume. For More had both the philosophic and the poetic genius, supported by immense erudition. But unfortunately the two did not amalgamate. It was not his good fortune to discover, as in the preceding generation William Shakspeare discovered, a mordaunt' or common base of both, and in which both the poetic and the philosophical power blended in one. These causes are,-- First, and foremost,--the want of that logical [Greek: propaidéia dokimastikàe], that critique of the human intellect, which, previously to the weighing and measuring of this or that, begins by assaying the weights, measures, and scales themselves; that fulfilment of the heaven-descended 'nosce teipsum', in respect to the intellective part of man, which was commenced in a sort of tentative broadcast way by Lord Bacon in his 'Novum Organum', and brought to a systematic completion by Immanuel Kant in his 'Kritik der reinen Vernunft, der Urtheilskrajt, und der metaphysiche Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft'. From the want of this searching logic, there is a perpetual confusion of the subjective with the objective in the arguments of our divines, together with a childish or anile overrating of human testimony, and an ignorance in the art of sifting it, which necessarily engendered credulity. Second,--the ignorance of natural science, their physiography scant in fact, and stuffed out with fables; their physiology imbrangled with an inapplicable logic and a misgrowth of 'entia rationalia', that is, substantiated abstractions; and their physiogony a blank or dreams of tradition, and such "intentional colours" as occupy space but cannot fill it. Yet if Christianity is to be the religion of the world, if Christ be that Logos or Word that 'was in the beginning', by whom all things 'became'; if it was the same Christ who said, 'Let there be light'; who in and by the creation commenced that great redemptive process, the history of life which begins in its detachment from nature, and is to end in its union with God;--if this be true, so true must it be that the book of nature and the book of revelation, with the whole history of man as the intermediate link, must be the integral and coherent parts of one great work: and the conclusion is, that a scheme of the Christian faith which does not arise out of, and shoot its beams downward into, the scheme of nature, but stands aloof as an insulated afterthought, must be false or distorted in all its particulars. In confirmation of this position, I may challenge any opponent to adduce a single instance in which the now exploded falsities of physical science, through all its revolutions from the second to the seventeenth century of the Christian æra, did not produce some corresponding warps in the theological systems and dogmas of the several periods. The third and last cause, and especially operative in the writings of this author, is the presence and regnancy of a false and fantastic philosophy, yet shot through with refracted light from the not risen but rising truth,--a scheme of physics and physiology compounded of Cartesian mechanics and empiricism (for it was the credulous childhood of experimentalism), and a corrupt, mystical, theurgical, pseudo-Platonism, which infected the rarest minds under the Stuart dynasty. The only not universal belief in witchcraft and apparitions, and the vindication of such monster follies by such men as Sir M. Hale, Glanville, Baxter, Henry More, and a host of others, are melancholy proofs of my position. Hence, in the first chapters of this volume, the most idle inventions of the ancients are sought to be made credible by the most fantastic hypotheses and analogies. To the man who has habitually contemplated Christianity as interesting all rational finite beings, as the very 'spirit of truth', the application of the prophecies as so many fortune-tellings and soothsayings to particular events and persons, must needs be felt as childish--like faces seen in the moon, or the sediments of a teacup. But reverse this, and a Pope and a Buonaparte can never be wanting,--the molehill becomes an Andes. On the other hand, there are few writers whose works could be so easily defecated as More's. Mere omission would suffice; and perhaps one half (an unusually large proportion) would come forth from the furnace pure gold; if but a fourth, how great a gain! EXPLANATION OF THE GRAND MYSTERY OF GODLINESS. Dedication. 'Servorum illius omnium indignissimus.' 'Servus indignissimus,' or 'omnino indignus', or any other positive self-abasement before God, I can understand; but how an express avowal of unworthiness, comparatively superlative, can consist with the Job-like integrity and sincerity of profession especially required in a solemn address to Him, to whom all hearts are open, this I do not understand in the case of such men as Henry More, Jeremy Taylor, Richard Baxter were, and by comparison at least with the multitude of evil doers, must have believed themselves to be. Ib. V. c.14. s.3. This makes me not so much wonder at that passage of Providence, which allowed so much virtue to the bones of the martyr Babylas, once bishop of Antioch, as to stop the mouth of Apollo Daphneus when Julian would have enticed him to open it by many a fat sacrifice. To say nothing of several other memorable miracles that were done by the reliques of saints and martyrs in those times. Strange lingering of childish credulity in the most learned and in many respects enlightened divines of the Protestant episcopal church even to the time of James II! The Popish controversy at that time made a great clearance. Ib. s. 9. At one time Professor Eichorn had persuaded me that the Apocalypse was authentic; that is, a Danielitic dramatic poem written by the Apostle and Evangelist John, and not merely under his name. But the repeated perusal of the vision has sadly unsettled my conclusion. The entire absence of all spirituality perplexes me, as forming so strong a contrast with the Gospel and Epistles of John; and then the too great appearance of an allusion to the fable of Nero's return to life and empire, to Simon Magus and Apollonius of Tyana on the one hand (that is the Eichornian hypothesis), and the insurmountable difficulties of Joseph Mede and others on to Bicheno and Faber on the other. In short, I feel just as both Luther and Calvin felt,--that is, I know not what to make of it, and so leave it alone. It is much to be regretted that we have no contemporary history of Apollonius, or of the reports concerning him, and the popular notions in his own time. For from the romance of Philostratus we cannot be sure as to the fact of the lies themselves. It may be a lie, that there ever was such or such a lie in circulation. Ib. c. 15. s. 2. Fourthly. The 'little horn', Dan. vii, that rules 'for a time and times and half a time', it is evident that it is not Antiochus Epiphanes, because this 'little horn' is part of the fourth beast--namely, the Roman. Is it quite clear that the Macedonian was not the fourth empire; 1. the Assyrian; 2. the Median; 3. the Persian; 4. the Macedonian? However, what a strange prophecy, that, 'e confesso' having been fulfilled, remains as obscure as before! Ib. s. 6 'And ye shall have the tribulation of ten days',--that is, the utmost extent of tribulation; beyond which there is nothing further, as there is no number beyond ten. It means, I think, the very contrary. 'Decent dierum' is used even in Terence for a very short time. [2] In the same way we say, a nine days' wonder. Ib. c. 16. s. 1. But for further conviction of the excellency of Mr. Mede's way above that of Grotius, I shall compare some of their main interpretations. Hard to say which of the two, Mede's or Grotius', is the more improbable. Beyond doubt, however, the Cherubim are meant as the scenic ornature borrowed from the Temple. Ib. s. 2. That this 'rider of the white horse' is Christ, they both agree in. The 'white horse' is, I conceive, Victory or Triumph--that is, of the Roman power--followed by Slaughter, Famine, and Pestilence. All this is plain enough. The difficulty commences after the writer is deserted by his historical facts, that is, after the sacking of Jerusalem. Ib. s. 5. It would be no easy matter to decide, whether Mede plus More was at a greater distance from the meaning, or Grotius from the poetry, of this eleventh chapter of the Revelations; whether Mede was more wild, or Grotius more tame, flat, and prosaic. Ib. c. 17. s. 8. The Old and New Testament, which by a 'prosopopoeia' are here called the 'two witnesses.' Where is the probability of this so long before the existence of the collection since called the New Testament? Ib. vi. c. l. s. 2. We may draw from this passage (1 'Thess'. iv. 16, 17.) the strongest support of the fact of the ascension of Christ, or at least of St. Paul's (and of course of the first generation of Christians') belief of it. For had they not believed his ascent, whence could they have derived the universal expectation of his descent,--his bodily, personal descent? The only scruple is, that all these circumstances were parts of the Jewish 'cabala' or idea of the Messiah by the spiritualists before the Christian æra, and therefore taken for granted with respect to Jesus as soon as he was admitted to be the Messiah. Ib. s. 6. But light-minded men, whose hearts are made dark with infidelity, care not what antic distortions they make in interpreting Scripture, so they bring it to any show of compliance with their own fancy and incredulity. Why so very harsh a censure? What moral or spiritual, or even what physical, difference can be inferred from all men's dying, this of one thing, that of another, a third, like the martyrs, burnt alive, or all in the same way? In any case they all die, and all pass to judgment. Ib. c. 15. With his 'semi'-Cartesian, 'semi'-Platonic, 'semi'-Christian notions, Henry More makes a sad jumble in his assertion of chronochorhistorical Christianity. One decisive reference to the ascension of the visible and tangible Jesus from the surface of the earth upward through the clouds, pointed out in the writings of St. Paul or in the Gospel, beginning as it certainly did, and as in the copy according to Mark it now does, with the baptism of John, or in the writings of the Apostle John, would have been more effective in flooring Old Nic of Amsterdam [3] and his familiars, than volumes of such "maybe's," "perhapses," and "should be rendered," as these. Ib. viii. c. 2. c. 6. I must confess our Saviour compiled no books, it being a piece of pedantry below so noble and divine a person, &c. Alas! all this is woefully beneath the dignity of Henry More, and shockingly against the majesty of the High and Holy One, so very unnecessarily compared with Hendrick Nicholas, of Amsterdam, mercer! Ib. x. c. 13. s. 5, 6. A new sect naturally attracts to itself a portion of the madmen of the time, and sets another portion into activity as alarmists and oppugnants. I cannot therefore pretend to say what More might not have found in the writings, or heard from the mouth, of some lunatic who called himself a Quaker. But I do not recollect, in any work of an acknowledged Friend, a denial of the facts narrated by the Evangelists, as having really taken place in the same sense as any other facts of history. If they were symbols of spiritual acts and processes, as Fox and Penn contended, they must have been, or happened;--else how could they be symbols? It is too true, however, that the positive creed of the Quakers is and ever has been extremely vague and misty. The deification of the conscience, under the name of the Spirit, seems the main article of their faith; and of the rest they form no opinion at all, considering it neither necessary nor desirable. I speak of Quakers in general. But what a lesson of experience does not this thirteenth chapter of so great and good a man as H. More afford to us, who know what the Quakers really are! Had the followers of George Fox, or any number of them collectively, acknowledged the mad notions of this Hendrick Nicholas? If not---- INQUIRY INTO THE MYSTERY OF INIQUITY. Part II. ii. c. 2. Confutation of Grotius on the 17th chapter of the Apocalypse. Has or has not Grotius been overrated? If Grotius applied these words ('magnus testis et historiarum diligentissimus inquisitor') to Epiphanius in honest earnest, and not ironically, he must have been greatly inferior in sound sense and critical tact both to Joseph Scaliger and to Rhenferd. Strange, that to Henry More, a poet and a man of fine imagination, it should never have occurred to ask himself, whether this scene, Patmos, with which the drama commences, was not a part of the poem, and, like all other parts, to be interpreted symbolically? That the poetic--and I see no reason for doubting the real--date of the Apocalypse is under Vespasian, is so evidently implied in the five kings preceding (for Galba, Otho, and Vitellius, were abortive emperors) that it seems to me quite lawless to deny it. That [Greek: Lateinos] is the meaning of the 666, (c. xiii. 18.) and the treasonable character of this, are both shown by Irenæus's pretended rejection, and his proposal of the perfectly senseless 'Teitan' instead. [Footnote 1: Folio. 1708.--Ed.] [Footnote 2: 'Decem dierum vix mihi est familia'. Heaut. v. i.--Ed.] [Footnote 3: Hendrick Nicholas and the Family of Love.--Ed.] HEINRICHS'S COMMENTARY ON THE APOCALYPSE. [1] P. 245. It seems clear that Irenæus invented the unmeaning 'Teitan', in order to save himself from the charge of treason, to which the 'Lateinos' might have exposed him. See Rabelais 'passim'. P.246. 'Nec magis blandiri poterit alterum illud nomen, Teitan, quod studiose commendavit Irenoeus'. No! 'non studiose, sed ironice commendavit Irenæus'. Indeed it is ridiculous to suppose that Irenæus was in earnest with 'Teitan'. His meaning evidently is:--if not 'Lateinos', which has a meaning, it is some one of the many names having the same numeral power, to which a meaning is to be found by the fulfillment of the prophecy. My own conviction is, that the whole is an ill-concerted conundrum, the secret of which died with the author. The general purpose only can be ascertained, namely, some test, partaking of religious obligation, of allegiance to the sovereignty of the Roman Emperor. If I granted for a moment the truth of Heinrichs's supposition, namely, that, according to the belief of the Apocalypt, the line of the Emperors would cease in Titus the seventh or complete number (Galba, Otho, and Vitellius, being omitted) by the advent of the Messiah;--if I found my judgment more coerced by his arguments than it is,--then I should use this book as evidence of the great and early discrepance between the Jewish-Christian Church and the Pauline; and my present very serious doubts respecting the identity of John the Theologian and John the Evangelist would become fixed convictions of the contrary. P. 91. Rev. xvii. 11. Among other grounds for doubting this interpretation (that 'the eighth' in v.11. is Satan), I object, 1. that it almost necessitates the substitution of the Coptic [Greek: aggelos] for [Greek: ogdoos] against all the MSS., and without any Patristic hint. For it seems a play with words unworthy the writer, to make Satan, who possessed all the seven, himself an 'eighth', and still worse if 'the eighth': 2. that it is not only a great and causeless inconcinnity in style, but a wanton adding of obscurity to the obscure to have, first, so carefully distinguished (c. xiii. 1-11.) the [Greek: drák_on] from the two [Greek: tháeria], and the one [Greek: thaeríon] from the other, and then to make [Greek: thaeríon] the appellative of the [Greek: drák_on]: as if having in one place told of Nicholas 'senior', Dick and another Dick his cousin, I should soon after talk of Dick, meaning old Nicholas by that name; that is, having discriminated Nicholas from Dick, then to say Dick, meaning Nicholas! Rev. xix. 9. These words might well bear a more recondite interpretation; that is, [Greek: outoi] (these blessed ones) are the true [Greek: lógoi] or [Greek: tékna Theou], as the Logos is the [Greek: huiòs Theou]. Ib. 10. According to the law of symbolic poetry this sociable angel (the Beatrice of the Hebrew Dante) ought to be, and I doubt not is, 'sensu symbolico', an angel; that is, the angel of the Church of Ephesus, John the Evangelist, according to the opinion of Eusebius. P. 294. Rev. xx. 'Millennium'. 'Die vorzüglichsten Bekenner Jesu sollen auferstehen, die übrigen Menschen sollen es nicht. Hiesse jenes, sie sollen noch nach ihrem Tode fortwürken, so wäre das letztere falsch: denn auch die übrigen würken nach ihrem Tode durch ihre schriften, ihre Andenken, ihre Beispiel.' 'Euge! Heinrichi'. O, the sublime bathos of thy prosaism--the muddy eddy of thy logic! Thou art the only man to understand a poet! I have too clearly before me the idea of a poet's genius to deem myself other than a very humble poet; but in the very possession of the idea, I know myself so far a poet as to feel assured that I can understand and interpret a poem in the spirit of poetry, and with the poet's spirit. Like the ostrich, I cannot fly, yet have I wings that give me the feeling of flight; and as I sweep along the plain, can look up toward the bird of Jove, and can follow him and say: "Sovereign of the air,--who descendest on thy nest in the cleft of the inaccessible rock, who makest the mountain pinnacle thy perch and halting-place, and, scanning with steady eye the orb of glory right above thee, imprintest thy lordly talons in the stainless snows, that shoot back and scatter round his glittering shafts,--I pay thee homage. Thou art my king. I give honor due to the vulture, the falcon, and all thy noble baronage; and no less to the lowly bird, the sky-lark, whom thou permittest to visit thy court, and chant her matin song within its cloudy curtains; yea the linnet, the thrush, the swallow, are my brethren:--but still I am a bird, though but a bird of the earth. "Monarch of our kind, I am a bird, even as thou; and I have shed plumes, which have added beauty to the beautiful, and grace to terror, waving over the maiden's brow and on the helmed head of the war-chief; and majesty to grief, drooping o'er the car of death!" [Footnote 1: Göttingen, 1821. The few following notes are, something out of order, inserted here in consequence of their connection with the immediately preceding remarks in the text.--Ed.] LIFE OF BISHOP HACKET. [1] Ib. p. 8. Yet he would often dispute the necessity of a country living for a London minister to retire to in hot summer time, out of the sepulchral air of a churchyard, where most of them are housed in the city, and found for his own part that by Whitsuntide he did 'rus anhelare', and unless he took fresh air in the vacation, he was stopt in his lungs and could not speak clear after Michaelmas. A plausible reason certainly why A. and B. should occasionally change posts, but a very weak one, methinks, for A.'s having both livings all the year through. Ib. p. 42-3. The Bishop was an enemy to all separation from the Church of England; but their hypocrisy he thought superlative that allowed the doctrine, and yet would separate for mislike of the discipline. ... And therefore he wished that as of old all kings and other Christians subscribed to the Conciliary Decrees, so now a law might pass that all justices of peace should do so in England, and then they would be more careful to punish the depravers of Church Orders. The little or no effect of recent experience and sufferings still more recent, in curing the mania of persecution! How was it possible that a man like Bishop Hacket should not have seen that if separation on account of the imposition of things by himself admitted to be indifferent, and as such justified, was criminal in those who did not think them indifferent,--how doubly criminal must the imposition have been, and how tenfold criminal the perseverance in occasioning separation; how guilty the imprisoning, impoverishing, driving into wildernesses their Christian brethren for admitted indifferentials in direct contempt of St. Paul's positive command to the contrary! HACKET'S SERMONS. Serm. I. Luke ii. 7. Moreover as the woman Mary did bring forth the son who bruised the serpent's head, which brought sin into the world by the woman Eve, so the Virgin Mary was the occasion of grace as the Virgin Eve was the cause of damnation. Eve had not known Adam as yet when she was beguiled and seduced the man; so Mary, &c. A Rabbinical fable or gloss on Gen. iii. 1. Hacket is offensively fond of these worse than silly vanities. Ib. p. 5. The more to illustrate this, you must know that there was a twofold root or foundation of the children of Israel for their temporal being: Abraham was the root of the people; the kingdom was rent from Saul, and therefore David was the root of the kingdom; among all the kings in the pedigree none but he hath the name; and Jesse begat David the king, and David the king begat Solomon; and therefore so often as God did profess to spare the people, though he were angry, he says he would do it for Abraham's sake: so often as he professeth to spare the kingdom of Judah, he says he would do it for his servant David's sake; so that 'ratione radicis', as Abraham and David are roots of the people and kingdom, especially Christ is called the Son of David, the Son of Abraham. A valuable remark, and confirmative of my convictions respecting the conversion of the Jews, namely, that whatever was ordained for them as 'Abrahamidæ' is not repealed by Christianity, but only what appertained to the republic, kingdom, or state. The modern conversions are, as it seems to me, in the face of God's commands. Ib. I come to the third strange condition of the birth; it was without travel, or the pangs of woman, as I will shew you out of these words; 'fasciis involvit', that 'she wrapt him in swaddling clouts, and laid him in a manger. Ipsa genitrix fuit obstetrix', says St. Cyprian. Mary was both the mother and the midwife of the child; far be it from us to think that the weak hand of the woman could facilitate the work which was guided only by the miraculous hand of God. The Virgin conceived our Lord without the lusts of the flesh, and therefore she had not the pangs and travel of woman upon her, she brought him forth without the curse of the flesh. These be the Fathers' comparisons. As bees draw honey from the flower without offending it, as Eve was taken out of Adam's side without any grief to him, as a sprig issues out of the bark of a tree, as the sparkling light from the brightness of the star, such ease was it to Mary to bring forth her first born son; and therefore having no weakness in her body, feeling no want of vigor, she did not deliver him to any profane hand to be drest, but by a special ability, above all that are newly delivered, she wrapt him in swaddling clouts. 'Gravida, sed non gravabatur'; she had a burden in her womb, before she was delivered, and yet she was not burdened for her journey which she took so instantly before the time of the child's birth. From Nazareth to Bethlem was above forty miles, and yet she suffered it without weariness or complaint, for such was the power of the Babe, that rather he did support the Mother's weakness than was supported; and as he lighted his Mother's travel by the way from Nazareth to Bethlem that it was not tedious to her tender age, so he took away all her dolour and imbecility from her travel in child-birth, and therefore 'she wrapt him in swaddling clouts'. A very different paragraph indeed, and quite on the cross road to Rome! It really makes me melancholy; but it is one of a thousand instances of the influence of Patristic learning, by which the Reformers of the Latin Church were distinguished from the renovators of the Christian religion. Can we wonder that the strict Protestants were jealous of the backsliding of the Arminian prelatical clergy and of Laud their leader, when so strict a Calvinist as Bishop Hacket could trick himself up in such fantastic rags and lappets of Popish monkery!--could skewer such frippery patches, cribbed from the tyring room of Romish Parthenolatry, on the sober gown and cassock of a Reformed and Scriptural Church! Ib. p. 7. But to say the truth, was he not safer among the beasts than he could be elsewhere in all the town of Bethlem? His enemies perchance would say unto him, as Jael did to Sisera, 'Turn in, turn in, my Lord', when she purposed to kill him; as the men of Keilah made a fair shew to give David all courteous hospitality, but the issue would prove, if God had not blessed him, that they meant to deliver him into the hands of Saul that sought his blood. So there was no trusting of the Bethlemites. Who knows, but that they would have prevented Judas, and betrayed him for thirty pieces of silver unto Herod? More humanity is to be expected from the beasts than from some men, and therefore she laid him in a manger. Did not the life of Archbishop Williams prove otherwise, I should have inferred from these Sermons that Hacket from his first boyhood had been used to make themes, epigrams, copies of verses, and the like, on all the Sunday feasts and festivals of the Church; had found abundant nourishment for this humour of points, quirks, and quiddities in the study of the Fathers and glossers; and remained a 'junior soph' all his life long. I scarcely know what to say: on the one hand, there is a triflingness, a shewman's or relique-hawker's gossip that stands in offensive contrast with the momentous nature of the subject, and the dignity of the ministerial office; as if a preacher having chosen the Prophets for his theme should entertain his congregation by exhibiting a traditional shaving rag of Isaiah's with the Prophet's stubble hair on the dried soap-sud. And yet, on the other hand, there is an innocency in it, a security of faith, a fulness evinced in the play and plash of its overflowing, that at other times give one the same sort of pleasure as the sight of blackberry bushes and children's handkerchief-gardens on the slopes of a rampart, the promenade of some peaceful old town, that stood the last siege in the Thirty Years' war! Ib. Serm. II. Luke ii. 8. Tiberius propounded his mind to the senate of Rome, that Christ, the great prophet in Jewry, should be had in the same honour with the other gods which they worshipped in the Capitol. The motion did not please them, says Eusebius; and this was all the fault, because he was a god not of their own, but of Tiberius' invention. Here, I own, the negative evidence of the silence of Seneca and Suetonius--above all, of Tacitus and Pliny--outweigh in my mind the positive testimony of Eusebius, which rested, I suspect, on the same ground with the letters of Pontius Pilate, so boldly appealed to by Tertullian. [2] Ib. Serm. III. Luke ii. 9. But our bodies shall revive out of that dust into which they were dissolved, and live for ever in the resurrection of the righteous. I never could satisfy myself as to the continuance and catholicity of this strange Egyptian tenet in the very face of St. Paul's indignant, 'Thou fool! not that, &c.' I have at times almost been tempted to conjecture that Paul taught a different doctrine from the Palestine disciples on this point, and that the Church preferred the sensuous and therefore more popular belief of the Evangelists' [Greek: katà sárka] to the more intelligible faith of the spiritual sage of the other Athens; for so Tarsus was called. And was there no symptom of a commencing relapse to the errors of that Church which had equalled the traditions of men, yea, the dreams of phantasts with the revelations of God, when a chosen elder with the law of truth before him, and professing to divide and distribute the bread of life, could, paragraph after paragraph, place such unwholesome vanities as these before his flock, without even a hint which might apprize them that the gew-gaw comfits were not part of the manna from heaven? All this superstitious trash about angels, which the Jews learned from the Persian legends, asserted as confidently as if Hacket had translated it word for word from one of the four Gospels! Salmasius, if I mistake not, supposes the original word to have been bachelors, young unmarried men. Others interpret angels as meaning the bishop and elders of the Church. More probably it was a proverbial expression derived from the Cherubim in the Temple: something as the country folks used to say to children, Take care, the Fairies will hear you! It was a common notion among the Jews, in the time of St. Paul, that their angels were employed in carrying up their prayers to the throne of God. Of course they must have been in special attendance in a house of prayer. After much search and much thought on the subject of angels as a diverse kind of finite beings, I find no sufficing reason to hold it for a revealed doctrine, and if not revealed it is assuredly no truth of philosophy, which, as I have elsewhere remarked, can conceive but three kinds; 1. the infinite reason; 2. the finite rational; and 3. the finite irrational--that is, God, man, and beast. What indeed, even for the vulgar, is or can an archangel be but a man with wings, better or worse than the wingless species according as the feathers are white or black? I would that the word had been translated instead of Anglicised in our English Bible. The following paragraph is one of Hacket's sweetest passages. It is really a beautiful little hymn. By this it appears how suitably a beam of admirable light did concur in the angels' message to set out the majesty of the Son of God: and I beseech you observe,--all you that would keep a good Christmas as you ought,--that the glory of God is the best celebration of his Son's nativity; and all your pastimes and mirth (which I disallow not, but rather commend in moderate use) must so be managed, without riot, without surfeiting, without excessive gaming, without pride and vain pomp, in harmlessness, in sobriety, as if the glory of the Lord were round about us. Christ was born to save them that were lost; but frequently you abuse his nativity with so many vices, such disordered outrages, that you make this happy time an occasion for your loss rather than for your salvation. Praise him in the congregation of the people! praise him in your inward heart! praise him with the sanctity of your life! praise him in your charity to them that need and are in want! This is the glory of God shining round, and the most Christian solemnizing of the birth of Jesus. SERMONS ON THE TEMPTATION. As the Temptation is found in the three Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, it must have formed part of the 'Prot-evangelion', or original Gospel;--from the Apostles, therefore, it must have come, and from some or all who had heard the account from our Lord himself. How, then, are we to understand it? To confute the whims and superstitious nugacities of these Sermons, and the hundred other comments and interpretations 'ejusdem farinæ', would be a sad waste of time. Yet some meaning, and that worthy of Christ, it must have had. The struggle with the suggestions of the evil principle, first, to force his way and compel belief by a succession of miracles, disjoined from moral and spiritual purpose,--miracles for miracles' sake;--second, doubts of his Messianic character and divinity, and temptations to try it by some ordeal at the risk of certain death;--third, to interpret his mission, as his countrymen generally did, to be one of conquest and royalty;--these perhaps--but I am lost in doubt. SERMON ON THE TRANSFIGURATION. Luke IX. 33. 'I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh'. Rom. ix. 3. St. Paul does not say, "I would desire to be accursed," nor does he speak of any deliberated result of his consideration; but represents a transient passion of his soul, an actual but undetermined impulse,--an impulse existing in and for itself in the moment of its ebullience, and not completed by an act and confirmation of the will,--as a striking proof of the exceeding interest which he continued to feel in the welfare of his countrymen, His heart so swelled with love and compassion for them, that if it were possible, if reason and conscience permitted it, 'Methinks,' says he, 'I could wish that myself were accursed, if so they might be saved.' Might not a mother, figuring to herself as possible and existing an impossible or not existing remedy for a dying child, exclaim, 'Oh, I could fly to the end of the earth to procure it!' Let it not be irreverent, if I refer to the fine passage in Shakspeare--Hotspur's rapture-like reverie--so often ridiculed by shallow wits. In great passion, the crust opake of present and existing weakness and boundedness is, as it were, fused and vitrified for the moment, and through the transparency the soul, catching a gleam of the infinity of the potential in the will of man, reads the future for the present. Percy is wrapt in the contemplation of the physical might inherent in the concentrated will; the inspired Apostle in the sudden sense of the depth of its moral strength. SERMON ON THE RESURRECTION. Acts II. 4. Thirdly, the necessity of it: 'for it was not possible that he should be holden of death'. One great error of textual divines is their inadvertence to the dates, occasion, object and circumstances, at and under which the words were written or spoken. Thus the simple assertion of one or two facts introductory to the teaching of the Christian religion is taken as comprising or constituting the Christian religion itself. Hence the disproportionate weight laid on the simple fact of the resurrection of Jesus, detached from the mysteries of the Incarnation and Redemption. Ib. St. Austin says, that Tully, in his '3 lib. de Republica', disputed against the reuniting of soul and body. His argument was, To what end? Where should they remain together? For a body cannot be assumed into heaven. I believe God caused those famous monuments of his wit to perish, because of such impious opinions wherewith they were farced. I believe, however, that these books have recently themselves enjoyed a resurrection by the labor of Angelo Mai. [3] Ib. And let any equal auditor judge if Job were not an Anti-Socinian; Job xix. 26. 'Though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God, whom I shall behold for myself, and mine eyes shall see, and not another'. This text rightly rendered is perhaps nothing to the purpose, but may refer to the dire cutaneous disease with which Job was afflicted. It may be merely an expression of Job's confidence of his being justified in the eyes of men, and in this life. [4] In the whole wide range of theological 'mirabilia', I know none stranger than the general agreement of orthodox divines to forget to ask themselves what they precisely meant by the word 'body.' Our Lord's and St. Paul's meaning is evident enough, that is, the personality. Ib. St. Chrysostom's judgment upon it ('having loosed the pains of death') is, that when Christ came out of the grave, death itself was delivered from pain and anxiety--[Greek: _odike katéchon autòn thánatos, kaì tà deinà epasche.] Death knew it held him captive whom it ought not to have seized upon, and therefore it suffered torments like a woman in travail till it had given him up again. Thus he. But the Scripture elsewhere testifies, that death was put to sorrow because it had lost its sting, rather than released from sorrow by our Saviour's resurrection. Most noticeable! See the influence of the surrounding myriotheism in the 'dea Mors!' Ib. Let any competent judge read Hacket's Life of Archbishop Williams, and then these Sermons, and so measure the stultifying, nugifying effect of a blind and uncritical study of the Fathers, and the exclusive prepossession in favor of their authority in the minds of many of our Church dignitaries in the reign of Charles I. HACKET'S LIFE OF LORD KEEPER WILLIAMS. [5] Prudence installed as virtue, instead of being employed as one of her indispensable handmaids, and the products of this exemplified and illustrated in the life of Archbishop Williams, as a work, I could warmly recommend to my dearest Hartley. Williams was a man bred up to the determination of being righteous, both honorably striving and selfishly ambitious, but all within the bounds and permission of the law, the reigning system of casuistry; in short, an egotist in morals, and a worldling in impulses and motives. And yet by pride and by innate nobleness of nature munificent and benevolent, with all the negative virtues of temperance, chastity, and the like,--take this man on his road to his own worldly aggrandizement. Winding his way through a grove of powerful rogues, by flattery, professions of devoted attachment, and by actual and zealous as well as able services, and at length becoming in fact nearly as great a knave as the knaves (Duke of Buckingham for example) whose favor and support he had been conciliating,--till at last in some dilemma, some strait between conscience and fear, and increased confidence in his own political strength, he opposes or hesitates to further some too foolish or wicked project of his patron knave, or affronts his pride by counselling a different course (not a less wicked, but one more profitable and conducive to his Grace's elevation);-and then is 'floored' or crushed by him, and falls unknown and unpitied. Such was that truly wonderful scholar and statesman, Archbishop Williams. Part 1. s. 61. 'And God forbid that any other course, should be attempted. For this liberty was settled on the subject, with such imprecations upon the infringers, that if they should remove these great landmarks, they must look for vengeance, as if entailed by public vows on them and their posterity.' These were the Dean's instructions, &c. He deserves great credit for them. They put him in strong contrast with Laud. Ib. s. 80. Thus for them both together he solicits:--My most noble lord, what true applause and admiration the King and your Honor have gained, &c. All this we, in the year 1833, should call abject and base; but was it so in Bishop Williams? In the history of the morality of a people, prudence, yea cunning, is the earliest form of virtue. This is expressed in Jacob, and in Ulysses and all the most ancient fables. It will require the true philosophic calm and serenity to distinguish and appreciate the character of the morality of our great men from Henry VIII to the close of James I,--'nullum numen abest, si sit prudentia',--and of those of Charles I to the Restoration. The difference almost amounts to contrast. Ib. s. 81-2. How is it that any deeply-read historian should not see how imperfect and precarious the rights of personal liberty were during this period; or, seeing it, refuse to do justice to the patriots under Charles I? The truth is, that from the reign of Edward I, (to go no farther backward), there was a spirit of freedom in the people at large, which all our kings in their senses were cautious not to awaken by too rudely treading on it; but for individuals, as such, there was none till the conflict with the Stuarts. Ib. s. 84. Of such a conclusion of state, 'quæ aliquando incognita, semper justa', &c. This perversion of words respecting the decrees of Providence to the caprices of James and his beslobbered minion the Duke of Buckingham, is somewhat nearer to blasphemy than even the euphuism of the age can excuse. Ib. s. 85. ... tuus, O Jacobe, quod optas Explorare labor, mihi jussa capessere fas est. In our times this would be pedantic wit: in the days of James I, and in the mouth of Archbishop Williams it was witty pedantry. Ib. s. 89. He that doth much in a short life products his mortality. 'Products' for 'produces;' that is, lengthens out, 'ut apud geometros'. But why Hacket did not say 'prolongs,' I know not. Ib. See what a globe of light there is in natural reason, which is the same in every man: but when it takes well, and riseth to perfection, it is called wisdom in a few. The good affirming itself--(the will, I am)--begetteth the true, and wisdom is the spirit proceeding. But in the popular acceptation, common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom. Ib. s. 92. A well-spirited clause, and agreeable to holy assurance, that truth is more like to win than love. Could the light of such a Gospel as we profess be eclipsed with the interposition of a single marriage? And yet Hacket must have lived to see the practical confutation of this shallow Gnathonism in the result of the marriage with the Papist Henrietta of France! Ib. s. 96. "Floud," says the Lord Keeper, "since I am no Bishop in your opinion, I will be no Bishop to you." I see the wit of this speech; but the wisdom, the Christianity, the beseemingness of it in a Judge and a Bishop,--what am I to say of that? Ib. And after the period of his presidency (of the Star Chamber), it is too well known how far the enhancements were stretched. 'But the wringing of the nose bringeth forth blood'. Prov. 30-33. We may learn from this and fifty other passages, that it did not require the factious prejudices of Prynne or Burton to look with aversion on the proceedings of Laud. Bishop Hacket was as hot a royalist as a loyal Englishman could be, yet Laud was 'allii nimis'. Ib. s. 97. New stars have appeared and vanished: the ancient asterisms remain; there's not an old star missing. If they had been, they would not have been old. This therefore, like many of Lord Bacon's illustrations, has more wit than meaning. But it is a good trick of rhetoric. The vividness of the image, 'per se', makes men overlook the imperfection of the simile. "You see my hand, the hand of a poor, puny fellow-mortal; and will you pretend not to see the hand of Providence in this business? He who sees a mouse must be wilfully blind if he does not see an elephant!" Ib. s. 100. The error of the first James,--an ever well-intending, well-resolving, but, alas! ill-performing monarch, a kind-hearted, affectionate, and fondling old man, really and extensively learned, yea, and as far as quick wit and a shrewd judgment go to the making up of wisdom, wise in his generation, and a pedant by the right of pedantry, conceded at that time to all men of learning (Bacon for example),--his error, I say, consisted in the notion, that because the stalk and foliage were originally contained in the seed, and were derived from it, therefore they remained so in point of right after their evolution. The kingly power was the seed; the House of Commons and the municipal charters and privileges the stock of foliage; the unity of the realm, or what we mean by the constitution, is the root. Meanwhile the seed is gone, and reappears as the crown and glorious flower of the plant. But James, in my honest judgment, was an angel compared with his son and grandsons. As Williams to Laud, so James I was to Charles I. Ib. Restraint is not a medicine to cure epidemical diseases. A most judicious remark. Ib. s. 103. The least connivance in the world towards the person of a Papist. It is clear to us that this illegal or 'præter'-legal and desultory toleration by connivance at particular cases,--this precarious depending on the momentary mood of the King, and this in a stretch of a questioned prerogative,--could neither satisfy nor conciliate the Roman-Catholic potentates abroad, but was sure to offend and alarm the Protestants at home. Yet on the other hand, it is unfair as well as unwise to censure the men of an age for want of that which was above their age. The true principle, much more the practicable rules, of toleration were in James's time obscure to the wisest; but by the many, laity no less than clergy, would have been denounced as soul-murder and disguised atheism. In fact--and a melancholy fact it is,--toleration then first becomes practicable when indifference has deprived it of all merit. In the same spirit I excuse the opposite party, the Puritans and Papaphobists. Ib. s. 104. It was scarcely to be expected that the passions of James's age would allow of this wise distinction between Papists, the intriguing restless partizans of a foreign potentate, and simple Roman-Catholics, who preferred the 'mumpsimus' of their grandsires to the corrected 'sumpsimus' of the Reformation. But that in our age this distinction should have been neglected in the Roman-Catholic Emancipation Bill! Ib. s. 105. But this invisible consistory shall be confusedly diffused over all the kingdom, that many of the subjects shall, to the intolerable exhausting of the wealth of the realm, pay double tithes, double offerings, double fees, in regard of their double consistory. And if Ireland be so poor as it is suggested, I hold, under correction, that this invisible consistory is the principal cause of the exhausting thereof. A memorable remark on the evil of the double priesthood in Ireland. Ib. Dr. Bishop, the new Bishop of Chalcedon, is to come to London privately, and I am much troubled at it, not knowing what to advise his majesty as things stand at this present. If you were shipped with the Infanta, the only counsel were to let the judges proceed with him presently; hang him out of the way, and the King to blame my lord of Canterbury or myself for it. Striking instance and illustration of the tricksy policy which in the seventeenth century passed for state wisdom even with the comparatively wise. But there must be a Ulysses before there can be an Aristides and Phocion. Poor King James's main errors arose out of his superstitious notions of a sovereignty inherent in the person of the king. Hence he would be a sacred person, though in all other respects he might be a very devil. Hence his yearning for the Spanish match; and the ill effects of his toleration became rightly attributed by his subjects to foreign influence, as being against his own acknowledged principle, not on a principle. Ib. s. 107. I have at times played with the thought, that our bishoprics, like most of our college fellowships, might advantageously be confined to single men, if only it were openly declared to be on ground of public expediency, and on no supposed moral superiority of the single state. Ib. s. 108. That a rector or vicar had not only an office in the church, but a freehold for life, by the common law, in his benefice. O! if Archbishop Williams had but seen in a clear point of view what he indistinctly aims at,--the essential distinction between the nationalty and its trustees and holders, and the Christian Church and its ministers. [6] Ib. s. 111. I will represent him (the archbishop of Spalato) in a line or two, that he was as indifferent, or rather dissolute, in practice as in opinion. For in the same chapter, art. 35, this is his Nicolaitan doctrine:--'A pluralitate uxorum natura humana non abhorret, imo fortasse neque ab earum communitate.' How so? The words mean only that the human animal is not withholden by any natural instinct from plurality or even community of females. It is not asserted, that reason and revelation do not forbid both the one and the other, or that man unwithholden would not be a Yahoo, morally inferior to the swallow. The emphasis is to be laid on 'natura', not on 'humana'. Humanity forbids plural and promiscuous intercourse, not however by the animal nature of man, but by the reason and religion that constitute his moral and spiritual nature. Ib. s. 112. But being thrown out into banishment, and hunted to be destroyed as a partridge in the mountain, he subscribed against his own hand, which yet did not prejudice Athanasius his innocency:--[Greek: tà gàr ek basánon parà tàen ex archaes gn_ómaen gignómena, tauta ou t_on phobaethént_on, alla t_on basanizónt_on estì bouláemata.] I have ever said this of Sir John Cheke. I regret his recantation as one of the cruelties suffered by him, and always see the guilt flying off from him and settling on his persecutors. Ib. s. 151. I conclude, therefore, that his Highness having admitted nothing in these oaths or articles, either to the prejudice of the true, or the equalizing or authorizing of the other, religion, but contained himself wholly within the limits of penal statutes and connivances, wherein the state hath ever challenged and usurped a directing power, &c. Three points seem wanting to render the Lord Keeper's argument air-tight;-- 1. the proof that a king of England even then had a right to dispense, not with the execution in individual cases of the laws, but with the laws themselves 'in omne futurum'; that is, to repeal laws by his own act; 2. the proof that such a tooth-and-talon drawing of the laws did not endanger the equalizing and final mastery of the unlawful religion; 3. the utter want of all reciprocity on the part of the Spanish monarch. In short, it is pardonable in Hacket, but would be contemptible in any other person, not to see this advice of the Lord Keeper's as a black blotch in his character, both as a Protestant Bishop and as a councillor of state in a free and Protestant country. Ib. s. 152. Yet opinions were so various, that some spread it for a fame, that, &c. Was it not required of--at all events usual for--all present at a Council to subscribe their names to the act of the majority? There is a modern case in point, I think, that of Sir Arthur Wellesley's signature to the Convention of Cintra. Ib. s. 164. For to forbid judges against their oath, and justices of peace (sworn likewise), not to execute the law of the land, is a thing unprecedented in this kingdom. 'Durus sermo', a harsh and bitter pill to be digested upon a sudden, and without some preparation. What a fine India-rubber conscience Hacket, as well as his patron, must have had! Policy with innocency,' 'cunning with conscience,' lead up the dance to the tune of ''Tantara' rogues all!' Upon my word, I can scarcely conceive a greater difficulty than for an honest, warm-hearted man of principle of the present day so to discipline his mind by reflection on the circumstances and received moral system of the Stuarts' age (from Elizabeth to the death of Charles I), and its proper place in the spiral line of ascension, as to be able to regard the Duke of Buckingham as not a villain, and to resolve many of the acts of those Princes into passions, conscience-warped and hardened by half-truths and the secular creed of prudence, as being itself virtue instead of one of her handmaids, when interpreted by minds constitutionally and by their accidental circumstances imprudent and rash, yet fearful and suspicious; and with casuists and codes of casuistry as their conscience-leaders! One of the favorite works of Charles I was Sanderson 'de Juramento'. Ib. s. 200. Wherefore he waives the strong and full defence he had made upon stopping of an original writ, and deprecates all offence by that maxim of the law which admits of a mischief rather than an inconvenience: which was as much as to say, that he thought it a far less evil to do the lady the probability of an injury (in her own name) than to suffer those two courts to clash together again. All this is a tangle of sophisms. The assumption is, it is better to inflict a private wrong than a public one: we ought to wrong one rather than many. But even then, it is badly stated. The principle is true only where the tolerating of the private wrong is the only means of preventing a greater public wrong. But in this case it was the certainty of the wrong of one to avoid the chance of an inconvenience that might perchance be the occasion of wrong to many, and which inconvenience both easily might and should have been remedied by rightful measures, by mutual agreement between the Bishop and Chancellor, and by the King, or by an act of Parliament. Ib. s. 203. 'Truly, Sir, this is my dark lantern, and I am not ashamed to inquire of a Dalilah to resolve a riddle; for in my studies of divinity I have gleaned up this maxim, 'licet uti alieno peccato';--though the Devil make her a sinner, I may make good use of her sin.' Prince, merrily, 'Do you deal in such ware?' 'In good faith, Sir,' says the Keeper, 'I never saw her face.' And Hacket's evident admiration, and not merely approbation, of this base Jesuitry,--this divinity which had taught the Archbishop 'licere uti alieno peccato'! But Charles himself was a student of such divinity, and yet (as rogues of higher rank comfort the pride of their conscience by despising inferior knaves) I suspect that the 'merrily' was the Sardonic mirth of bitter contempt; only, however, because he disliked Williams, who was simply a man of his age, his baseness being for us, not for his contemporaries, or even for his own mind. But the worst of all is the Archbishop's heartless disingenuousness and moon-like nodes towards his kind old master the King. How much of truth was there in the Spaniard's information respecting the intrigues of the Prince and the Duke of Buckingham? If none, if they were mere slanders, if the Prince had acted the filial part toward his father and King, and the Duke the faithful part towards his master and only too fond and affectionate benefactor, what more was needed than to expose the falsehoods? But if Williams knew that there was too great a mixture of truth in the charges, what a cowardly ingrate to his old friend to have thus curried favor with the rising sun by this base jugglery! Ib. s. 209. He was the topsail of the nobility, and in power and trust of offices far above all the nobility. James I was no fool, and though through weakness of character an unwise master, yet not an unthinking statesman; and I still want a satisfactory solution of the accumulation of offices on Buckingham. Ib. s. 212. Prudent men will continue the oblations of their forefathers' piety. The danger and mischief of going far back, and yet not half far enough! Thus Hacket refers to the piety of individuals our forefathers as the origin of Church property. Had he gone further back, and traced to the source, he would have found these partial benefactions to have been mere restitutions of rights co-original with their own property, and as a national reserve for the purposes of national existence--the condition 'sine qua non' of the equity of their proprieties; for without civilization a people cannot be, or continue to be, a nation. But, alas! the ignorance of the essential distinction of a national clerisy, the 'Ecclesia', from the Christian Church. The 'Ecclesia' has been an eclipse to the intellect of both Churchmen and Sectarians, even from Elizabeth to the present day, 1833. Ib. s. 214. And being threatened, his best mitigation was, that perhaps it was not safe for him to deny so great a lord; yet it was safest for his lordship to be denied. ... The king heard the noise of these crashes, and was so pleased, that he thanked God, before many witnesses, that he had put the Keeper into that place: 'For,' says he, 'he that will not wrest justice for Buckingham's sake, whom I know he loves, will never be corrupted with money, which he never loved.' Strange it must seem to us; yet it is evident that Hacket thought it necessary to make a mid something, half apology and half eulogy, for the Lord Keeper's timid half resistance to the insolence and iniquitous interference of the minion Duke. What a portrait of the times! But the dotage of the King in the maintenance of the man, whose insolence in wresting justice he himself admits! Yet how many points, both of the times and of the King's personal character, must be brought together before we can fairly solve the intensity of James's minionism, his kingly egotism, his weak kindheartedness, his vulgar coarseness of temper, his systematic jealousy of the ancient nobles, his timidity, and the like! Ib. 'Sir,' says the Lord Keeper, 'will you be pleased to listen to me, taking in the Prince's consent, of which I make no doubt, and I will shew how you shall furnish the second and third brothers with preferments sufficient to maintain them, that shall cost you nothing. ... If they fall to their studies, design them to the bishoprics of Durham and Winchester, when they become void. If that happen in their nonage, which is probable, appoint commendatories to discharge the duty for them for a laudable allowance, but gathering the fruits for the support of your grandchildren, till they come to virility to be consecrated,' &c. Williams could not have been in earnest in this villanous counsel, but he knew his man. This conceit of dignifying dignities by the Simoniacal prostitution of them to blood-royal was just suited to James's fool-cunningness. Part II. s. 74. ... To yield not only passive obedience (which is due) but active also, &c. 'Which is due.' What in the name of common sense can this mean, that is, speculatively? Practically, the meaning is clear enough, namely, that we should do what we can to escape hanging; but the distinction is for decorum, and so let it pass. Ib. s. 75. This is the venom of this new doctrine, that by making us the King's creatures, and in the state of minors or children, to take away all our property; which would leave us nothing of our own, and lead us (but that God hath given us just and gracious Princes) into slavery. And yet this just and gracious Prince prompts, sanctions, supports, and openly rewards this envenomer, in flat contempt of both Houses of Parliament,--protects and prefers him and others of the same principles and professions on account of these professions! And the Parliament and nation were inexcusable, forsooth, in not trusting to Charles's assurances, or rather the assurances put in his mouth by Hyde, Falkland, and others, that he had always abhorred these principles. Ib. s. 136. When they saw he was not 'selfish' (it is a word of their own new mint), &c. Singular! From this passage it would seem that our so very common word 'selfish' is no older than the latter part of the reign of Charles I. Ib. s. 137. Their political aphorisms are far more dangerous, that His Majesty is not the highest power in his realms; that he hath not absolute sovereignty; and that a Parliament sitting is co-ordinate with him in it. Hacket himself repeatedly implies as much; for would he deny that the King with the Lords and Commons is not more than the King without them? or that an act of Parliament is not more than a proclamation? Ib. s.154. What a venomous spirit is in that serpent Milton, that black-mouthed Zoilus, that blows his viper's breath upon those immortal devotions from the beginning to the end! This is he that wrote with all irreverence against the Fathers of our Church, and showed as little duty to the father that begat him: the same that wrote for the Pharisees, that it was lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause,--and against Christ, for not allowing divorces: the same, O horrid! that defended the lawfulness of the greatest crime that ever was committed, to put our thrice-excellent King to death: a petty schoolboy scribbler, that durst grapple in such a cause with the prince of the learned men of his age, Salmasius, [Greek: philosophiás pásaes aphroditae kaì lyra], as Eunapius says of Ammonius, Plutarch's scholar in Egypt, the delight, the music of all knowledge, who would have scorned to drop a pen-full of ink against so base an adversary, but to maintain the honor of so good a King ... Get thee behind me, Milton! Thou savourest not the things that be of truth and loyalty, but of pride, bitterness, and falsehood. There will be a time, though such a Shimei, a dead dog in Abishai's phrase, escape for a while ... It is no marvel if this canker-worm Milton, &c. A contemporary of Bishop Racket's designates Milton as the author of a profane and lascivious poem entitled Paradise Lost. The biographer of our divine bard ought to have made a collection of all such passages. A German writer of a Life of Salmasius acknowledges that Milton had the better in the conflict in these words: 'Hans (Jack) von Milton--not to be compared in learning and genius with the incomparable Salmasius, yet a shrewd and cunning lawyer,' &c. 'O sana posteritas!' Ib. s. 178. Dare they not trust him that never broke with them? And I have heard his nearest servants say, that no man could ever challenge him of the least lie. What! this after the publication of Charles's letters to the Queen! Did he not within a few months before his death enter into correspondence with, and sign contradictory offers to, three different parties, not meaning to keep any one of them; and at length did he not die with something very like a falsehood in his mouth in allowing himself to be represented as the author of the Icon Basilike? Ib. s. 180. If an under-sheriff had arrested Harry Martin for debt, and pleaded that he did not imprison his membership, but his Martinship, would the Committee for privileges be fobbed off with that distinction? To make this good in analogy, we must suppose that Harry Martin had notoriously neglected all the duties, while he perverted and abused all the privileges, of membership: and then I answer, that the Committee of privileges would have done well and wisely in accepting the under-sheriff's distinction, and, out of respect for the membership, consigning the Martinship to the due course of law. Ib. 'That every soul should be subject to the higher powers.' The higher power under which they lived was the mere power and will of Cæsar, bridled in by no law. False, if meant 'de jure'; and if 'de facto', the plural 'powers' would apply to the Parliament far better than to the King, and to Cromwell as well as to Nero. Every even decently good Emperor professed himself the servant of the Roman Senate. The very term 'Imperator', as Gravina observes, implies it; for it expresses a delegated and instrumental power. Before the assumption of the Tribunitial character by Augustus, by which he became the representative of the majority of the people,--'majestatem indutus est,--Senatus consulit, Populus jubet, imperent Consules', was the constitutional language. Ib. s. 190. Yet so much dissonancy there was between his tongue and his heart, that he triumphed in the murder of Cæsar, the only Roman that exceeded all their race in nobleness, and was next to Tully in eloquence. There is something so shameless in this self-contradiction as of itself almost to extinguish the belief that the prelatic royalists were conscientious in their conclusions. For if the Senate of Rome were not a lawful power, what could be? And if Cæsar, the thrice perjured traitor, was neither perjured nor traitor, only because he by his Gaulish troops turned a republic into a monarchy,--with what face, under what pretext, could Hacket abuse 'Sultan Cromwell?' [Footnote 1: By Thomas Plume. Folio, 1676.--Ed.] [Footnote 2: 'Ea omnia super Christo Pilatus, et ipse jam pro sua conscientia Christianus, Cæsari tum Tiberio nuntiavit.' Apologet, ii. 624. See the account in Eusebius. Hist. Eccl. ii. 2.--Ed.] [Footnote 3: See 'M. T. Ciceronis de Republica quæ supersunt. Zell. Stuttgardt'. 1827.--Ed.] [Footnote 4: See 'supra'.--Ed]. [Footnote 5: Folio. 1693.--Ed.] [Footnote 6: See The Church and State.--Ed.] NOTES ON JEREMY TAYLOR. I have not seen the late Bishop Heber's edition of Jeremy Taylor's 'Works'; but I have been informed that he did little more than contribute the 'Life', and that in all else it is a mere London booksellers' job. This, if true, is greatly to be regretted. I know no writer whose works more require, I need not say deserve, the annotations, aye, and occasional animadversions, of a sound and learned divine. One thing is especially desirable in reference to that most important, because (with the exception perhaps of the 'Holy Living and Dying') the most popular, of Taylor's works, 'The Liberty of Prophesying'; and this is a careful collation of the different editions, particularly of the first printed before the Restoration, and the last published in Taylor's lifetime, and after his promotion to the episcopal bench. Indeed, I regard this as so nearly concerning Taylor's character as a man, that if I find that it has not been done in Heber's edition, and if I find a first edition in the British Museum, or Sion College, or Dr. Williams's library, I will, God permitting, do it myself. There seems something cruel in giving the name, Anabaptist, to the English Anti-pædo-baptists; but still worse in connecting this most innocent opinion with the mad Jacobin ravings of the poor wretches who were called Anabaptists, in Munster, as if the latter had ever formed part of the Baptists' creeds. In short 'The Liberty of Prophesying' is an admirable work, in many respects, and calculated to produce a much greater effect on the many than Milton's treatise on the same subject: on the other hand, Milton's is throughout unmixed truth; and the man who in reading the two does not feel the contrast between the single-mindedness of the one, and the 'strabismus' in the other, is--in the road of preferment. GENERAL DEDICATION OF THE POLEMICAL DISCOURSES. [1] Vol. vii. p. ix. And the breath of the people is like the voice of an exterminating angel, not so killing but so secret. That is, in such wise. It would be well to note, after what time 'as' became the requisite correlative to 'so,' and even, as in this instance, the preferable substitute. We should have written 'as' in both places probably, but at all events in the latter, transplacing the sentences 'as secret though not so killing;' or 'not so killing, but quite as secret.' It is not generally true that Taylor's punctuation is arbitrary, or his periods reducible to the post-Revolutionary standard of length by turning some of his colons or semi-colons into full stops. There is a subtle yet just and systematic logic followed in his pointing, as often as it is permitted by the higher principle, because the proper and primary purpose, of our stops, and to which alone from their paucity they are adequate,--that I mean of enabling the reader to prepare and manage the proportions of his voice and breath. But for the true scheme of punctuation, [Greek: h_os emoige dokei], see the blank page over leaf which I will try to disblank into a prize of more worth than can be got at the E.O.'s and little goes of Lindley Murray. [2] Ib. p. xv. But the most complained that, in my ways to persuade a toleration, I helped some men too far, and that I armed the Anabaptists with swords instead of shields, with a power to offend us, besides the proper defensitives of their own ... But wise men understand the thing and are satisfied. But because all men are not of equal strength; I did not only in a discourse on purpose demonstrate the true doctrine in that question, but I have now in this edition of that book answered all their pretensions, &c. No; in the might of his genius he called up a spirit which he has in vain endeavored to lay, or exorcise from the conviction. Ib. p. xvii. For episcopacy relies not upon the authority of Fathers and Councils, but upon Scripture, upon the institution of Christ, or the institution of the Apostles, upon a universal tradition, and a universal practice, not upon the words and opinions of the doctors: it hath as great a testimony as Scripture itself hath, &c. We must make allowance for the intoxication of recent triumph and final victory over a triumphing and victorious enemy; or who but would start back at the aweless temerity of this assertion? Not to mention the evasion; for who ever denied the historical fact, or the Scriptural occurrence of the word expressing the fact, namely, 'episcopi, episcopatus?'? What was questioned by the opponents was, 1;--Who and what these 'episcopi' were; whether essentially different from the presbyter, or a presbyter by kind in his own 'ecclesia', and a president or chairman by accident in a synod of presbyters: 2;--That whatever the 'episcopi' of the Apostolic times were, yet were they prelates, lordly diocesans; were they such as the Bishops of the Church of England? Was there Scripture authority for Archbishops? 3;--That the establishment of Bishops by the Apostle Paul being granted (as who can deny it?)--yet was this done 'jure Apostolico' for the universal Church in all places and ages; or only as expedient for that time and under those circumstances; by Paul not as an Apostle, but as the head and founder of those particular churches, and so entitled to determine their bye laws? DEDICATION OF THE SACRED ORDER AND OFFICES OF EPISCOPACY. Ib. p. xxiii. But the interest of the Bishops is conjunct with the prosperity of the King, besides the interest of their own security, by the obligation of secular advantages. For they who have their livelihood from the King, and are in expectance of their fortune from him, are more likely to pay a tribute of exacter duty, than others, whose fortunes are not in such immediate dependency on His Majesty. The cat out of the bag! Consult the whole reigns of Charles I. and II. and the beginning of James II. Jeremy Taylor was at this time (blamelessly for himself and most honourably for his patrons) ambling on the high road of preferment; and to men so situated, however sagacious in other respects, it is not given to read the signs of the times. Little did Taylor foresee that to indiscreet avowals, like these, on the part of the court clergy, the exauctorations of the Bishops and the temporary overthrow of the Church itself would be in no small portion attributable. But the scanty measure and obscurity (if not rather, for so bright a luminary, the occultation) of his preferment after the Restoration is a problem, of which perhaps his virtues present the most probable solution. Ib. p. xxv. A second return that episcopacy makes to royalty, is that which is the duty of all Christians, the paying tributes and impositions. This is true; and it was an evil hour for the Church,--and led to the loss of its Convocation, the greatest and, in an enlarged state-policy, the most impolitic affront ever offered by a government to its own established Church,--in which the clergy surrendered their right of taxing themselves. Ib. p. xxvii. I mean the conversion of the kingdom from Paganism by St. Augustine, Archbishop of Canterbury; and the Reformation begun and promoted by Bishops. From Paganism in part; but in part from primitive Christianity to Popery. But neither this nor the following boast will bear narrow looking into, I suspect. 'In fine.' Like all Taylor's dedications and dedicatory epistles, this is easy, dignified, and pregnant. The happiest 'synthesis' of the divine, the scholar, and the gentleman was perhaps exhibited in him and Bishop Berkeley. Introd. p.3. In all those accursed machinations, which the device and artifice of hell hath invented for the supplanting of the Church, 'inimicus homo,' that old superseminator of heresies and crude mischiefs, hath endeavoured to be curiously compendious, and, with Tarquin's device, 'putare summa papaverum.' Quoere-spiritualiter papaveratorurn? Ib. His next onset was by Julian, and 'occidere presbyterium,' that was his province. To shut up public schools, to force Christians to ignorance, to impoverish and disgrace the clergy, to make them vile and dishonorable, these are his arts; and he did the devil more service in this fineness of undermining, than all the open battery of ten great rams of persecution. What felicity, what vivacity of expression! Many years ago Mr. Mackintosh gave it as an instance of my perverted taste, that I had seriously contended that in order to form a style worthy of Englishmen, Milton and Taylor must be studied instead of Johnson, Gibbon, and Junius; and now I see by his introductory Lecture given at Lincoln's Inn, and just published, he is himself imitating Jeremy Taylor, or rather copying his semi-colon punctuation, as closely as he can. Amusing it is to observe, how by the time the modern imitators are at the half-way of the long breathed period, the asthmatic thoughts drop down, and the rest is,--words! I have always been an obstinate hoper: and even this is a 'datum' and a symptom of hope to me, that a better, an ancestral, spirit is forming and will appear in the rising generation. Ib. p. 5. First, because here is a concourse of times; for now after that these times have been called the last times for 1600 years together, our expectation of the great revelation is very near accomplishing. Rather a whimsical consequence, that because a certain party had been deceiving themselves for sixteen centuries they were likely to be in the right at the beginning of the seventeenth. But indeed I question whether in all Taylor's voluminous writings there are to be found three other paragraphs so vague and misty-magnific as this is. It almost reminds me of the "very cloudy and mighty alarming" in Foote. S. i. p. 4. If there be such a thing as the power of the keys, by Christ concredited to his Church, for the binding and loosing delinquents and penitents respectively on earth, then there is clearly a court erected by Christ in his Church. We may, without any heretical division of person, economically distinguish our Lord's character as Jesus, and as Christ, so far that during his sojourn on earth, from his baptism at least to his crucifixion, he was in some respects his own Elias, bringing back the then existing Church to the point at which the Prophets had placed it; that is, distinguishing the 'ethica' from the 'politica,' what was binding on the Jews as descendants of Abraham and inheritors of the patriarchal faith from the statutes obligatory on them as members of the Jewish state. Jesus fulfilled the Law, which culminated in a pure religious morality in principles, affections, and acts; and this he consolidated and levelled into the ground-stead on which the new temple 'not made with hands,' wherein Himself, even Christ the Lord, is the Shechinah, was to rise and be raised. Thus he taught the spirit of the Mosaic Law, while by his acts, sufferings, death, resurrection, ascension, and demission of the Comforter, he created and realized the contents, objects, and materials of that redemptive faith, the everlasting Gospel, which from the day of Pentecost his elect disciples, [Greek: t_on mystaeri_ón hierokáerykes], Were Sent forth to disperse and promulgate with suitable gifts, powers, and evidences. In this view, I interpret our Lord's sayings concerning the Church, as applying wholly to the Synagogue or established Church then existing, while the binding and loosing refers, immediately and primarily as I conceive, to the miraculous gifts of healing diseases communicated to the Apostles; and I am not afraid to avow the conviction, that the first three Gospels are not the books of the New Testament, in which we should expect to find the peculiar doctrines of the Christian faith explicitly delivered, or forming the predominant subject or contents of the writing. S. viii. p. 25. Imposition of hands for Ordination does indeed give the Holy Ghost, but not as he is that promise which is called 'the promise of the truth'. Alas! but in what sense that does not imply some infusion of power or light, something given and inwardly received, which would not have existed in and for the recipient without this immission by the means or act of the imposition of the hands? What sense that does not amount to more and other than a mere delegation of office, a mere legitimating acceptance and acknowledgment, with respect to the person, of that which already is in him, can be attached to the words, 'Receive the Holy Ghost', without shocking a pious and single-minded candidate? The miraculous nature of the giving does not depend on the particular kind or quality of the gift received, much less demand that it should be confined to the power of working miracles. For "miraculous nature" read "supernatural character;" and I can subscribe this pencil note written so many years ago, even at this present time, 2d March, 1824. S. xxi. p. 91. 'Postquam unusquisque eos quos baptizabat suos putabat esse, non Christi, et diceretur in populis, Ego sum Pauli, Ego Apollo, Ego autem Cephæ, in toto orbe decretum est ut unus de presbyteris electus superponeretur cateris, ut schismatum semina tollerentur.' The natural inference would, methinks, be the contrary. There would be more persons inclined and more likely to attach an ambition to their belonging to a single eminent leader and head than to a body,--rather to Cæsar, Marius, or Pompey, than to the Senate. But I have ever thought that the best, safest, and at the same time sufficient, argument is, that by the nature of human affairs and the appointments of God's ordinary providence every assembly of functionaries will and must have a president; that the same qualities which recommended the individual to this dignity would naturally recommend him to the chief executive power during the intervals of legislation, and at all times in all points already ruled; that the most solemn acts, Confirmation and Ordination, would as naturally be confined to the head of the executive in the state ecclesiastic, as the sign manual and the like to the king in all limited monarchies; and that in course of time when many presbyteries would exist in the same district, Archbishops and Patriarchs would arise 'pari ratione' as Bishops did in the first instance. Now it is admitted that God's extraordinary appointments never repeal but rather perfect the laws of his ordinary providence: and it is enough that all we find in the New Testament tends to confirm and no where forbids, contradicts, or invalidates the course of government, which the Church, we are certain, did in fact pursue. Ib. s. xxxvi. p. 171. But those things which Christianity, as it prescinds from the interest of the republic, hath introduced, all them, and all the causes emergent from them, the Bishop is judge of.... Receiving and disposing the patrimony of the Church, and whatsoever is of the same consideration according to the fortyfirst canon of the Apostles. 'Præcipimus ut in potestate sua episcopus ecclesice res habeat'. Let the Bishops have the disposing of the goods of the Church; adding this reason: 'si enim animte hominum pretiosæ illi sint creditæ, multo magis eum oportet curam pecuniarum gerere'. He that is intrusted with our precious souls may much more be intrusted with the offertories of faithful people. Let all these belong to the overseer of the Church: to whom else so properly? but what is the nature of the power by which he is to enforce his orders? By secular power? Then the Bishop's power is no derivative from Christ's royalty; for his kingdom is not of the world; but the monies are Cæsar's; and the 'cura pecuniarum' must be vested where the donors direct, the law of the land permitting. Ib. Such are the delinquencies of clergymen, who are both clergy and subjects too; 'clerus Domini', and 'regis subditi': and for their delinquencies, which are 'in materia justiæ', the secular tribunal punishes, as being a violation of that right which the state must defend; but because done by a person who is a member of the sacred hierarchy, and hath also an obligation of special duty to his Bishop, therefore the Bishop also may punish him; and when the commonwealth hath inflicted a penalty, the Bishop also may impose a censure, for every sin of a clergyman is two. But why of a clergyman only? Is not every sheep of his flock a part of the Bishop's charge, and of course the possible object of his censure? The clergy, you say, take the oath of obedience. Aye! but this is the point in dispute. Ib. p. 172. So that ever since then episcopal jurisdiction hath a double part, an external and an internal: this is derived from Christ, that from the king, which because it is concurrent in all acts of jurisdiction, therefore it is that the king is supreme of the jurisdiction, namely, that part of it which is the external compulsory. If Christ delegated no external compulsory power to the Bishops, how came it the duty of princes to God to do so? It has been so since---yes! since the first grand apostasy from Christ to Constantine. Ib. s. xlviii. p. 248. Bishops 'ut sic' are not secular princes, must not seek for it; but some secular princes may be Bishops, as in Germany and in other places to this day they are. For it is as unlawful for a Bishop to have any land, as to have a country; and a single acre is no more due to the order than a province; but both these may be conjunct in the same person, though still, by virtue of Christ's precept, the functions and capacities must be distinguished. True; but who with more indignant scorn attacked this very distinction when applied by the Presbyterians to the kingship, when they professed to fight for the King against Charles? And yet they had on their side both the spirit of the English constitution and the language of the law. The King never dies; the King can do no wrong. Elsewhere, too, Taylor could ridicule the Romish prelate, who fought and slew men as a captain at the head of his vassals, and then in the character of a Bishop absolved his other homicidal self. However, whatever St. Peter might understand by Christ's words, St. Peter's three-crowned successors have been quite of Taylor's opinion that they are to be paraphrased thus:--"Simon Peter, as my Apostle, you are to make converts only by humility, voluntary poverty, and the words of truth and meekness; but if by your spiritual influence you can induce the Emperor Tiberius to make you Tetrarch of Galilee or Prefect of Judaea, then [Greek: katakyríeue]--you may lord it as loftily as you will, and deliver as Tetrarch or Prefect those stiff-necked miscreants to the flames for not having been converted by you as an Apostle." Ib. p. 276. I end with the golden rule of Vincentius Lirinensis:--'magnopere curandum est ut id teneamus, quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est.' Alas! this golden rule comes full and round from the mouth; nor do I deny that it is pure gold: but like too many other golden rules, in order to make it cover the facts which the orthodox asserter of episcopacy at least, and the chaplain of Archbishop Laud and King Charles the Martyr must have held himself bound to bring under it, it must be made to display another property of the sovereign metal, its malleableness to wit; and must be beaten out so thin, that the weight of truth in the portion appertaining to each several article in the orthodox systems of theology will be so small, that it may better be called gilt than gold; and if worth having at all, it will be for its show, not for its substance. For instance, the 'aranea theologica' may draw out the whole web of the Westminster Catechism from the simple creed of the beloved Disciple,--'whoever believeth with his heart, and professeth with his mouth, that Jesus is Lord and Christ,'--shall be saved. If implicit faith only be required, doubtless certain doctrines, from which all other articles of faith imposed by the Lutheran, Scotch, or English Churches, may be deduced, have been believed 'ubique, semper, et ab omnibus.' But if explicit and conscious belief be intended, I would rather that the Bishop than I should defend the golden rule against Semler. APOLOGY FOR AUTHORIZED AND SET FORMS OF LITURGY. Preface, s. vi. p. 286. Not like women or children when they are affrighted with fire in their clothes. We shaked off the coal indeed, but not our garments, lest we should have exposed our Churches to that nakedness which the excellent men of our sister Churches complained to be among themselves. O, what convenient things metaphors and similes are, so charmingly indeterminate! On the general reader the literal sense operates: he shivers in sympathy with the poor shift-less matron, the Church of Geneva. To the objector the answer is ready--it was speaking metaphorically, and only meant that she had no shift on the outside of her gown, that she made a shift without an over-all. Compare this sixth section with the manful, senseful, irrebuttable fourth section--a folio volume in a single paragraph! But Jeremy Taylor would have been too great for man, had he not occasionally fallen below himself. Ib. s. x. p. 288. And since all that cast off the Roman yoke thought they had title enough to be called Reformed, it was hard to have pleased all the private interests and peevishness of men that called themselves friends; and therefore that only in which the Church of Rome had prevaricated against the word of God, or innovated against Apostolical tradition, all that was pared away. Aye! here is the 'ovum,' as Sir Everard Home would say, the 'proto'-parent of the whole race of controversies between Protestant and Protestant; and each had Gospel on their side. Whatever is not against the word of God is for it,--thought the founders of the Church of England. Whatever is not in the word of God is a word of man, a will-worship presumptuous and usurping,--thought the founders of the Church of Scotland and Geneva. The one proposed to themselves to be reformers of the Latin Church, that is, to bring it back to the form which it had during the first four centuries; the latter to be the renovators of the Christian religion as it was preached and instituted by the Apostles and immediate followers of Christ thereunto specially inspired. Where the premisses are so different, who can wonder at the difference in the conclusions? Ib. s. xii. ib. It began early to discover its inconvenience; for when certain zealous persons fled to Frankfort to avoid the funeral piles kindled by the Roman Bishops in Queen Mary's time, as if they had not enemies enough abroad, they fell foul with one another, and the quarrel was about the Common Prayer Book. But who began the quarrel? Knox and his recent biographer lay it to Dr. Cox and the Liturgists. Ib. s. xiii. p. 289. Here therefore it became law, was established by an act of Parliament, was made solemn by an appendant penalty against all that on either hand did prevaricate a sanction of so long and so prudent consideration. Truly evangelical way of solemnizing a party measure, and sapientizing Calvin's 'tolerabiles ineptias' by making them 'ineptias usque ad carcerem et verbera intolerantes!' Ib. s. xiv. ib. But the Common Prayer Book had the fate of St. Paul; for when it had scaped the storms of the Roman See, yet a viper sprung out of Queen Mary's fires, &c. As Knox and his friends confined themselves to the inspired word, whether vipers or no, they were not adders at all events. Ib. xxvi. p. 296. For, if we deny to the people a liberty of reading the Scriptures, may they not complain, as Isaac did against the inhabitants of the land, that the Philistines had spoiled his well and the fountains of living water? If a free use to all of them and of all Scriptures were permitted, should not the Church herself have more cause to complain of the infinite licentiousness and looseness of interpretations, and of the commencement of ten thousand errors, which would certainly be consequent to such permission? Reason and religion will chide us in the first, reason and experience in the latter ... The Church with great wisdom hath first held this torch out; and though for great reasons intervening and hindering, it cannot be reduced to practice, yet the Church hath shewn her desire to avoid the evil that is on both hands, and she hath shewn the way also, if it could have been insisted in. If there were not, at the time this Preface, or this paragraph at least, was written or published, some design on foot or 'sub lingua' of making advances to the continental catholicism for the purpose of conciliating the courts of Austria, France and Spain, in favor of the Cavalier and Royalist party at home and abroad, this must be considered as a useless and worse than useless avowal. The Papacy at the height of its influence never asserted a higher or more anti-Protestant right than this of dividing the Scriptures into permitted and forbidden portions. If there be a functionary of divine institution, synodical or unipersonal, who with the name of the 'Church' has the right, under circumstances of its own determination, to forbid all but such and such parts of the Bible, it must possess potentially, and under other circumstances, a right of withdrawing the whole book from the unlearned, who yet cannot be altogether unlearned; for the very prohibition supposes them able to do what, a few centuries before, the majority of the clergy themselves were not qualified to do, that is, read their Bible throughout. Surely it would have been politic in the writer to have left out this sentence, which his Puritan adversaries could not fail to translate into the Church shewing her teeth though she dared not bite. I bitterly regret these passages; neither our incomparable Liturgy, nor this full, masterly, and unanswerable defence of it, requiring them. Ib. s. xlv, p. 308. So that the Church of England, in these manners of dispensing the power of the keys, does cut off all disputings and impertinent wranglings, whether the priest's power were judicial or declarative; for possibly it is both, and it is optative too, and something else yet; for it is an emanation from all the parts of his ministry, and he never absolves, but he preaches or prays, or administers a sacrament; for this power of remission is a transcendent, passing through all the parts of the priestly offices. For the keys of the kingdom of heaven are the promises and the threatenings of the Scripture, and the prayers of the Church, and the Word, and the Sacraments, and all these are to be dispensed by the priest, and these keys are committed to his ministry, and by the operation of them all he opens and shuts heaven's gates ministerially. No more ingenious way of making nothing of a thing than by making it every thing. Omnify the disputed point into a transcendant, and you may defy the opponent to lay hold of it. He might as well attempt to grasp an 'aura electrica'. Apology, &c. s. ii. p. 320. And it may be when I am a little more used to it, I shall not wonder at a synod, in which not one Bishop sits in the capacity of a Bishop, though I am most certain this is the first example in England since it was first christened. Is this quite fair? Is it not, at least logically considered and at the commencement of an argument, too like a 'petitio principii' or 'presumptio rei litigatae'? The Westminster divines were confessedly not prelates, but many in that assembly were, in all other points, orthodox and affectionate members of the Establishment, who with Bedell, Lightfoot, and Usher, held them to be Bishops in the primitive sense of the term, and who yet had no wish to make any other change in the hierarchy than that of denominating the existing English prelates Archbishops. They thought that what at the bottom was little more than a question of names among Episcopalians, ought not to have occasioned such a dispute; but yet the evil having taken place, they held a change of names not too great a sacrifice, if thus the things themselves could be preserved, and Episcopacy maintained against the Independents and Presbyterians. Ib. s. v. p. 321. It is a thing of no present importance, but as a point of history, it is worth a question whether there were any divines in the Westminster Assembly who adopted by anticipation the notions of the Seekers, Quakers and others 'ejusdem farin�.' Baxter denies it. I understand the controversy to have been, whether the examinations at the admission to the ministry did or not supersede the necessity of any directive models besides those found in the sacred volumes:--if not necessary, whether there was any greater expedience in providing by authority forms of prayer for the minister than forms of sermons. Reading, whether of prayers or sermons, might be discouraged without encouraging unpremeditated praying and preaching. But the whole question as between the prelatists and the Assembly divines has like many others been best solved by the trial. A vast majority among the Dissenters themselves consider the antecedents to the sermon, with exception of their congregational hymns, as the defective part of their public service, and admit the superiority of our Liturgy. P.S.--It seems to me, I confess, that the controversy could never have risen to the height it did, if all the parties had not thrown too far into the back ground the distinction in nature and object between the three equally necessary species of worship, that is, public, family, and private or solitary, devotion. Though the very far larger proportion of the blame falls on the anti-Liturgists, yet on the other hand, too many of our Church divines--among others that exemplar' of a Churchman and a Christian, the every way excellent George Herbert--were scared by the growing fanaticism of the Geneva malcontents into the neighbourhood of the opposite extreme; and in their dread of enthusiasm, will-worship, insubordination, indecency, carried their preference of the established public forms of prayer almost to superstition by exclusively both using and requiring them even on their own sick-beds. This most assuredly was neither the intention nor the wish of the first compilers. However, if they erred in this, it was an error of filial love excused, and only not sanctioned, by the love of peace and unity, and their keen sense of 'the beauty of holiness' displayed in their mother Church. I mention this the rather, because our Church, having in so incomparable a way provided for our public devotions, and Taylor having himself enriched us with such and so many models of private prayer and devotional exercise--(from which, by the by, it is most desirable that a well arranged collection should be made; a selection is requisite rather from the opulence, than the inequality, of the store;)--we have nothing to wish for but a collection of family and domestic prayers and thanksgivings equally (if that be not too bold a wish) appropriate to the special object, as the Common Prayer Book is for a Christian community, and the collection from Taylor for the Christian in his closet or at his bed side. Here would our author himself again furnish abundant materials for the work. For surely, since the Apostolic age, never did the spirit of supplication move on the deeps of a human soul with a more genial life, or more profoundly impregnate the rich gifts of a happy nature, than in the person of Jeremy Taylor! To render the fruits available for all, we need only a combination of Christian experience with that finer sense of propriety which we may venture to call devotional taste in the individual choosing, or chosen, to select, arrange and methodize; and no less in the dignitaries appointed to revise and sanction the collections. Perhaps another want is a scheme of Christian psalmody fit for all our congregations, and which should not exceed 150 or 200 psalms and hymns. Surely if the Church does not hesitate in the titles of the Psalms and of the chapters of the Prophets to give the Christian sense and application, there can be no consistent objection to do the same in its spiritual songs. The effect on the morals, feelings, and information of the people at large is not to be calculated. It is this more than any other single cause that has saved the peasantry of Protestant Germany from the contagion of infidelity. Ib. s. xvii. p. 325. Thus the Holy Ghost brought to their memory all things which Jesus spake and did, and, by that means, we come to know all that the Spirit knew to be necessary for us. Alas! it is one of the sad effects or results of the enslaving Old Bailey fashion of defending, or, as we may well call it, apologizing for, Christianity,--introduced by Grotius and followed up by the modern 'Alogi', whose wordless, lifeless, spiritless, scheme of belief it alone suits,--that we dare not ask, whether the passage here referred to must necessarily be understood as asserting a miraculous remembrancing, distinctly sensible by the Apostles; whether the gift had any especial reference to the composition of the Gospels; whether the assumption is indispensable to a well grounded and adequate confidence in the veracity of the narrators or the verity of the narration; if not, whether it does not unnecessarily entangle the faith of the acute and learned inquirer in difficulties, which do not affect the credibility of history in its common meaning--rather indeed confirm our reliance on its authority in all the points of agreement, that is, in every point which we are in the least concerned to know,--and expose the simple and unlearned Christian to objections best fitted to perplex, because easiest to be understood, and within the capacity of the shallowest infidel to bring forward and exaggerate; and lastly, whether the Scriptures must not be read in that faith which comes from higher sources than history, that is, if they are read to any good and Christian purpose. God forbid that I should become the advocate of mechanical infusions and possessions, superseding the reason and responsible will. The light 'a priori', in which, according to my conviction, the Scriptures must be read and tried, is no other than the earnest, 'What shall I do to be saved?' with the inward consciousness,--the gleam or flash let into the inner man through the rent or cranny of the prison of sense, however produced by earthquake, or by decay,--as the ground and antecedent of the question; and with a predisposition towards, and an insight into, the 'a priori' probability of the Christian dispensation as the necessary consequents. This is the holy spirit in us praying to the Spirit, without which 'no man can say that Jesus is the Lord:' a text which of itself seems to me sufficient to cover the whole scheme of modern Unitarianism with confusion, when compared with that other,--'I am the Lord (Jehovah): that is my name; and my glory will I not give to another'. But in the Unitarian's sense of 'Lord,' and on his scheme of evidence, it might with equal justice be affirmed, that no man can say that Tiberius was the Emperor but by the Holy Ghost. Ib. s. xxix. p. 331. And that this is for this reason called 'a gift and grace,' or issue of the Spirit, is so evident and notorious, that the speaking of an ordinary revealed truth, is called in Scripture, 'a speaking by the spirit', 1 Cor. xii. 8. 'No man can say that Jesus is the Lord but by the Holy Ghost'. For, though the world could not acknowledge Jesus for the Lord without a revelation, yet now that we are taught this truth by Scripture, and by the preaching of the Apostles, to which they were enabled by the Holy Ghost, we need no revelation or enthusiasm to confess this truth, which we are taught in our creeds and catechisms, &c. I do not, nay I dare not, hesitate to denounce this assertion as false in fact and the paralysis of all effective Christianity. A greater violence offered to Scripture words is scarcely conceivable. St. Paul asserts that 'no man can.' Nay, says Taylor, every man that knows his catechism can; but unless some six or seven individuals had said it by the Holy Ghost some seventeen or eighteen hundred years ago, no man could say so. Ib. s. xxxii. p. 334. And yet, because the Holy Ghost renewed their memory, improved their understanding, supplied to some their want of human learning, and so assisted them that they should not commit an error in fact or opinion, neither in the narrative nor dogmatical parts, therefore they wrote by the spirit. And where is the proof?--and to what purpose, unless a distinct and plain diagnostic were given of the divinities and the humanities which Taylor himself expressly admits in the text of the Scriptures? And even then what would it avail unless the interpreters and translators, not to speak of the copyists in the first and second centuries, were likewise assisted by inspiration? As to the larger part of the Prophetic books, and the whole of the Apocalypse, we must receive them as inspired truths, or reject them as simple inventions or enthusiastic delusions. But in what other book of Scripture does the writer assign his own work to a miraculous dictation or infusion? Surely the contrary is implied in St. Luke's preface. Does the hypothesis rest on one possible construction of a single passage in St. Paul, 2 'Tim'. iii. 16.? And that construction resting materially on a [Greek: kai (theópneustos, kai _ophélimos)] not found in the oldest MSS., when the context would rather lead us to understand the words as parallel with the other assertion of the Apostle, that all good works are given from God,--that is, 'Every divinely inspired writing is profitable, &c'. Finally, will not the certainty of the competence and single mindedness of the writers suffice; this too confirmed by the high probability, bordering on certainty, that God's especial grace worked in them; and that an especial providence watched over the preservation of writings, which, we know, both are and have been of such pre-eminent importance to Christianity, and yet by natural means? But alas! any thing will be pretended, rather than admit the necessity of internal evidence, or than acknowledge, among the external proofs, the convictions and spiritual experiences of believers, though they should be common to all the faithful in all ages of the Church! But in all superstition there is a heart of unbelief, and, 'vice versa', where an individual's belief is but a superficial acquiescence, credulity is the natural result and accompaniment, if only he be not required to sink into the depths of his being, where the sensual man can no longer draw breath. It is not the profession of Socinian tenets, but the spirit of Socinianism in the Church itself that alarms me. This, this, is the dry rot in the beams and timbers of the Temple! Ib. s. li. p. 348. So that let the devotion be ever so great, set forms of prayer will be expressive enough of any desire, though importunate as extremity itself. This, and much of the same import in this treatise, is far more than Taylor, mature in experience and softened by afflictions, would have written. Besides, it is in effect, though not in logic, a deserting of his own strong and unshaken ground of the means and ends of public worship. Ib. s. s. lxix. lxx. pp. 359-60. These two sections are too much in the vague mythical style of the Italian and Jesuit divines, and the argument gives to these a greater advantage against our Church than it gains over the Sectarians in its support. We well know who and how many the compilers of our Liturgy were under Edward VI, and know too well what the weather-cock Parliaments were, both then and under Elizabeth, by which the compilation was made law. The argument therefore should be inverted;--not that the Church (A. B., C. D., F. L., &c.) compiled it; 'ergo', it is unobjectionable; but (and truly we may say it) it is so unobjectionable, so far transcending all we were entitled to expect from a few men in that state of information and such difficulties, that we are justified in concluding that the compilers were under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. But the same order holds good even with regard to the Scriptures. We cannot rightly affirm they were inspired, and therefore they must be believed; but they are worthy of belief, because excellent in so universal a sense to ends commensurate with the whole moral, and therefore the whole actual, world, that as sure as there is a moral Governor of the world, they must have been in some sense or other, and that too an efficient sense, inspired. Those who deny this, must be prepared to assert, that if they had what appeared to them good historic evidence of a miracle, in the world of the senses, they would receive the hideous immoral doctrines of Mahomet or Brahma, and thus disobey the express commands both of the Old and New Testament. Though an angel should come from heaven and work all miracles, yet preach another doctrine, we are to hold him accursed. 'Gal.' i. 8. Ib. s. lxxv. p. 356. When Christ was upon the Mount, he gave it for a pattern, &c. I cannot thoroughly agree with Taylor in all he says on this point. The Lord's Prayer is an encyclopedia of prayer, and of all moral and religious philosophy under the form of prayer. Besides this, that nothing shall be wanting to its perfection, it is itself singly the best and most divine of prayers. But had this been the main and primary purpose, it must have been thenceforward the only prayer permitted to Christians; and surely some distinct references to it would have been found in the Apostolic writings. Ib. s. lxxx. p. 358. Now then I demand, whether the prayer of Manasses be so good a prayer as the Lord's prayer? Or is the prayer of Judith, or of Tobias, or of Judas Maccabeus, or of the son of Sirach, is any of these so good? Certainly no man will say they are; and the reason is, because we are not sure they are inspired by the Holy Spirit of God. How inconsistent Taylor often is, the result of the system of economizing truth! The true reason is the inverse. The prayers of Judith and the rest are not worthy to be compared with the Lord's Prayer; therefore neither is the spirit in which they were conceived worthy to be compared with the spirit from which the Lord's Prayer proceeded: and therefore with all fulness of satisfaction we receive the latter, as indeed and in fact our Lord's dictation. In all men and in all works of great genius the characteristic fault will be found in the characteristic excellence. Thus in Taylor, fulness, overflow, superfluity. His arguments are a procession of all the nobles and magnates of the land in their grandest, richest, and most splendid 'paraphernalia': but the total impression is weakened by the multitudes of lacqueys and ragged intruders running in and out between the ranks. As far as the Westminster divines were the antagonists to be answered--and with the exception of these, and those who like Baxter, Calamy, and Bishop Reynolds, contended for a reformation or correction only of the Church Liturgy, there were none worth answering,--the question was, not whether the use of one and the same set of prayers on all days in all churches was innocent, but whether the exclusive imposition of the same was comparatively expedient and conducive to edification? Let us not too severely arraign the judgment or the intentions of the good men who determined for the negative. If indeed we confined ourselves to the comparison between our Liturgy, and any and all of the proposed substitutes for it, we could not hesitate: but those good men, in addition to their prejudices, had to compare the lives, the conversation, and the religious affections and principles of the prelatic and anti-prelatic parties in general. And do not we ourselves now do the like? Are we not, and with abundant reason, thankful that Jacobinism is rendered comparatively feeble and its deadly venom neutralized, by the profligacy and open irreligion of the majority of its adherents? Add the recent cruelties of the Star Chamber under Laud;--(I do not say the intolerance; for that which was common to both parties, must be construed as an error in both, rather than a crime in either);--and do not forget the one great inconvenience to which the prelatic divines were exposed from the very position which it was the peculiar honor of the Church of England to have taken and maintained, namely, the golden mean;--(for in consequence of this their arguments as Churchmen would often have the appearance of contrasting with their grounds of controversy as Protestants,)--and we shall find enough to sanction our charity as brethren, without detracting a tittle from our loyalty as members of the established Church. As to this Apology, the victory doubtless remains with Taylor on the whole; but to have rendered it full and triumphant, it would have been necessary to do what perhaps could not at that time, and by Jeremy Taylor, have been done with prudence; namely, not only to disprove in part, but likewise in part to explain, the alleged difference of the spiritual fruits in the ministerial labors of the high and low party in the Church,--(for remember that at this period both parties were in the Church, even as the Evangelical, Reformed and Pontifical parties before the establishment of a schism by the actually schismatical Council of Trent,)--and thus to demonstrate that the differences to the disadvantage of the established Church, as far as they were real, were as little attributable to the Liturgy, as the wound in the heel of Achilles to the shield and breast-plate which his immortal mother had provided for him from the forge divine. Ib. s. lxxxvi. p. 361. That the Apostles did use the prayer their Lord taught them, I think needs not much be questioned. 'Ad contra', see above. But that they did not till the siege of Jerusalem deviate unnecessarily from the established usage of the Synagogue is beyond rational doubt. We may therefore safely maintain that a set form was sanctioned by Apostolic practice; though the form was probably settled after the converts from Paganism began to be the majority of Christians. Ib. s. lxxxvii. p. 361. Now that they tied themselves to recitation of the very words of Christ's prayer 'pro loco et tempore', I am therefore easy to believe, because I find they were strict to a scruple in retaining the sacramental words which Christ spake when he instituted the blessed Sacrament. Not a case in point. Besides it assumes the controverted sense of [Greek: ohut_os] as "in these words" 'versus' "to this purport." Grotius and Lightfoot, however, have settled this dispute by proving that the Lord's prayer is a selection of prayers from the Jewish ritual: and a most happy and valuable inference against novelties obtruded for novelty's sake does Grotius draw from this fact. When I consider the manner in which the Jews usually quoted or referred to particular passages of Scripture, it does not seem altogether improbable that the several articles of the 'Oratio Dominica' might have been the initial sentences of several prayers; but I have not the least doubt that by the loud utterance of the 'My God! my God! why hast thou forsaken me?' our blessed Redeemer referred to and recalled to John and Mary that most wonderful and prophetic twenty-second Psalm. And what a glorious light does not this throw on the whole scene of the crucifixion, and in what additional loveliness does it not present the god-like character of the crucified Son of Man! With the very facts before them, of which the former and larger portion of the Psalm referred to resembles a detailed history rather than a prophecy,--with what force, and with what lively consolation and infusion of stedfast hope and faith, when all human grounds of hope had sunk from under them, must not the obvious and inevitable inference have flashed on the convictions of the holy mother and the beloved disciple! "If all we now behold was pre-ordained and so distinctly predicted; if the one mournful half of the prophecy has been so entirely and minutely fulfilled, after so great a lapse of ages, dare we, can we, doubt for a moment that the glorious remainder will with equal fidelity be accomplished?" Thus to his very last moments did our Lord (setting as it beseemed the sun of righteousness to set) manifest with a wider and wider face of glory his self-oblivious love. In the act he was offering, he himself was a sacrifice of love for the whole creation; and yet the cup overflowed into particular streams; first, for his enemies, his persecutors, and murderers; then for his friends and humanly nearest relative; 'Woman, behold thy son!' O what a transfer! Nor does the proposed interpretation preclude any inward and mysterious sense of the words 'My God! my God!'--though I confess I have never yet met with a single plausible resolution of the words into any one of the mysteries of the Trinity, or the Incarnation, or the Passion. Nay, were there any necessity for supposing such an allusion, which there is not, the obvious interpretation would, I fear, too dangerously favor the heresy of those who divided and severed the divinity from the humanity; so that not the incarnate God, very God of very God, would have atoned for us on the cross, but the incarnating man; a heresy which either denies or reduces to an absurdity the whole doctrine of redemption, that is, Christianity itself, which rests on the two articles of faith; first, the necessity, and secondly, the reality of a Redeemer--both articles alike incompatible with redemption by a mere man. Ib. s. lxxxviii. p. 362. And I the rather make the inference from the preceding argument because of the cognation one hath with the other; for the Apostles did also in the consecration of the Eucharist use the Lord's Prayer; and that together with the words of institution was the only form of consecration, saith St. Gregory; and St. Jerome affirms, that the Apostles, by the command of their Lord, used this prayer in the benediction of the elements. This section is an instance of impolitic management of a cause, into which Jeremy Taylor was so often seduced by the fertility of his intellect and the opulence of his erudition. An antagonist by exposing the improbability of the tradition, (and most improbable it surely is), and the little credit due to Saint Gregory and Saint Jerome (not forgetting a Miltonic sneer at their saintship), might draw off the attention from the unanswerable parts of Taylor's reasoning and leave an impression of his having been confuted. Ib. s. lxxxix. p. 362. But besides this, when the Apostles had received great measures of the spirit, and by their gift of prayer composed more forms for the help and comfort of the Church, &c. Who would not suppose, that the first two lines were an admitted point of history, instead of a bare conjecture in the form of a bold assertion? O, dearest man! so excellent a cause did not need such Bellarminisms. Ib. p. 363. And the Fathers of the Council of Antioch complain against Paulus Samosatenus, 'quod Psalmos et cantus, qui ad Domini nostri Jesu Christi honorem decantari solent, tanquam recentiores, et a viris recentioris memori� editos, exploserit.' This Sam-in-satin-hose, or Paul, the same-as-Satan-is, might, I think, have found his confutation in Pliny's Letter to Trajan. 'Carmen Christo, quasi Deo, dicere secum invicem.' Ib. s. xc. p. 364. Which together with the [Greek: tà apomnaemoneúmata t_on propháeton], the 'lectionarium' of the Church, the books of the Apostles and Prophets spoken of by Justin Martyr, and said to be used in the Christian congregations, are the constituent parts of liturgy. An ingenious but not tenable solution of Justin Martyr's [Greek: apomnaemoneúmata t_on apostól_on] which were presumably a Gospel not the same, and yet so nearly the same, as our Matthew, that its history and character involve one of the hardest problems of Christian antiquity. By the by, one cause of the small impression--(small in proportion to their vast superiority in knowledge and genius)--which Jeremy Taylor and his compeers made on the religious part of the community by their controversial writings during the life of Charles I is to be found in their undue predilection for Patristic learning and authority. This originated in the wish to baffle the Papists at their own weapons; but it could not escape notice, that the latter, though regularly beaten, were yet not so beaten, but that they always kept the field: and when the same mode of warfare was employed against the Puritans, it was suspected as Papistical. Ib. s. xci. pp. 364-5. For the offices of prose we find but small mention of them in the very first time, save only in general terms, and that such there were, and that St. James, St. Mark, St. Peter, and others of the Apostles and Apostolical men, made Liturgies; and if these which we have at this day were not theirs, yet they make probation that these Apostles left others, or else they were impudent people that prefixed their names so early, and the Churches were very incurious to swallow such a bole, if no pretension could have been reasonably made for their justification. A rash and dangerous argument. 1810. A many-edged weapon, which might too readily be turned against the common faith by the common enemy. For if these Liturgies were rightly attributed to St. James, St. Mark, St. Peter, and others of the Apostles and Apostolical men, how could they have been superseded? How could the Church have excluded them from the Canon? But if falsely, and yet for a time and at so early an age generally believed to have been composed by St. James and the rest, it is to be feared that the difference will not stop at the point to which Paul of Samosata carried it;--a fearful consideration for a Christian of the Grotian and Paleyan school. It would not, however, shake my nerves, I confess. The Epistles of St. Paul, and the Gospel, Epistles, and Apocalypse of St. John, contain an evidence of their authenticity, which no uncertainty of ecclesiastic history, no proof of the frequency and success of forgery or ornamental titles (as the Wisdom of Solomon) mistaken for matter of fact, can wrest from me; and with these for my guides and sanctions, what one article of Christian faith could be taken from me, or even unsettled? It seems to me, as it did to Luther, incomparably more probable that the eloquent treatise, entitled an Epistle to the Hebrews, was written by Apollos than by Paul; and what though it was written by neither? It is demonstrable that it was composed before the siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple; and scarcely less satisfactory is the internal evidence that it was composed by an Alexandrian. These two 'data' are sufficient to establish the fact, that the Pauline doctrine at large was common to all Christians at that early period, and therefore the faith delivered by Christ. And this is all I want; nor this for my own assurance, but as arming me with irrefragable arguments against those psilanthropists who as falsely, as arrogantly, call themselves Unitarians, on the one hand; and against the infidel fiction, that Christianity owes its present shape to the genius and rabbinical 'cabala' of Paul on the other: while at the same time it weakens the more important half of the objection to, or doubt concerning, the authenticity of St. Peter's Epistles. To this too I attach a high controversial value (for the beauty and excellence of the Epistles themselves are not affected by the question); and I receive them as authentic, for they have all the circumstantial evidence that I have any right to expect. But I feel how much more genial my conviction would become, should I discover, or have pointed out to me, any positive internal evidence equivalent to that which determines the date of the Epistle to the Hebrews, or even to that which leaves no doubt on my mind that the writer was an Alexandrian Jew. This, my dear Lamb, is one of the advantages which the previous evidence supplied by the reason and the conscience secures for us. We learn what in its nature 'passes all understanding', and what belongs to the understanding, and on which, therefore, the understanding may and ought to act freely and fearlessly: while those who will admit nothing above the understanding ([Greek: phrónaema sarkòs]), which in its nature has no legitimate object but history and outward 'phoenomena', stand in slavish dread like a child at its house of cards, lest a single card removed may endanger the whole foundationless edifice. 1819. Ib. s. xcii. p. 365. Now here dear Jeremy Taylor begins to be himself again; for with all his astonishing complexity, yet versatile agility, of powers, he was too good and of too catholic a spirit to be a good polemic. Hence he so continually is now breaking, now varying, the thread of the argument: and hence he is so again and again forgetting that he is reasoning against an antagonist, and falls into conversation with him as a friend,--I might almost say, into the literary chit-chat and un with holding frankness of a rich genius whose sands are seed-pearl. Of his controversies, those against Popery are the most powerful, because there he had subtleties and obscure reading to contend against; and his wit, acuteness, and omnifarious learning found stuff to work on. Those on Original Sin are the most eloquent. But in all alike it is the digressions, overgrowths, parenthetic 'obiter et in transitu' sentences, and, above all, his anthropological reflections and experiences--(for example, the inimitable account of a religious dispute, from the first collision to the spark, and from the spark to the world in flames, in his 'Dissuasive from Popery'),--these are the costly gems which glitter, loosely set, on the chain armour of his polemic Pegasus, that expands his wings chiefly to fly off from the field of battle, the stroke of whose hoof the very rock cannot resist, but beneath the stroke of which the opening rock sends forth a Hippocrene. The work in which all his powers are confluent, in which deep, yet gentle, the full stream of his genius winds onward, and still forming peninsulas in its winding course--distinct parts that are only not each a perfect whole--or in less figurative style--(yet what language that does not partake of poetic eloquence can convey the characteristics of a poet and an orator?)--the work which I read with most admiration, but likewise with most apprehension and regret, is the 'Liberty of Prophesying'. If indeed, like some Thessalian drug, or the strong herb of Anticyra, ... that helps and harms, Which life and death have sealed with counter charms-- it could be administered by special prescription, it might do good service as a narcotic for zealotry, or a solvent for bigotry. The substance of the preceding tract may be comprised as follows: 1. During the period immediately following our Lord's Ascension, or the so called Apostolic age, all the gifts of the Spirit, and of course the gift of prayer, as graces bestowed, not merely or principally for the benefit of the Apostles and their contemporaries, but likewise and eminently for the advantage of all after-ages, and as means of establishing the foundations of Christianity, differed in kind, degree, mode, and object, from those ordinary graces promised to all true believers of all times; and possessed a character of extraordinary partaking of the nature of miracles, to which no believer under the present and regular dispensations of the Spirit can make pretence without folly and presumption. 2. Yet it is certain that even the first miraculous gifts and graces bestowed on the Apostles themselves supervened on, but did not supersede, their natural faculties and acquired knowledge, nor enable them to dispense with the ordinary means and instruments of cultivating the one, and applying the other, by study, reading, past experience, and whatever else Providence has appointed for all men as the conditions and efficients of moral and intellectual progression. The capabilities of deliberating, selecting, and aptly disposing of our thoughts and works are God's good gifts to man, which the superadded graces of the Spirit, vouchsafed to Christians, work on and with, call forth and perfect. Therefore deliberation, selection, and method become duties, inasmuch as they are the bases and recipients of the Spirit, even as the polished crystal is of the light. But if the Prophets and Apostles did not (as Taylor demonstrates that they did not) find in miraculous aids any such infusions of light as precluded or rendered superfluous the exertion of their natural faculties and personal attainments, then 'a fortiori' not the possessors or legatees of the ordinary graces bequeathed by Christ to his Church as the usufructuary property of all its members; and he who wilfully lays aside all premeditation, selection, and ordonnance, that he may enter unprepared on the highest and most awful function of the soul,--that of public prayer,--is guilty of no less indecency and irreverence than if, having to present a petition as the representative of a community before the throne, he purposely put off his seemly garments in order to enter into the presence of the monarch naked or in rags: and expects no less an absurdity than to become a passive 'automaton', in which the Holy Spirit is to play the ventriloquist. 3. If, then, each congregation is to receive a prepared form of prayer from its head or minister, why not rather from the collective wisdom of the Church represented in the assembled heads and spiritual Fathers? 4. This is admitted by implication by the Westminster Assembly. But they are not contented with the existing form, and therefore substitute for it a Directory as the fruits of their meditations and counsels. The whole question, then, is now reduced to the comparative merits and fitness of the Directory and the book of Common Prayer; and how complete the victory of the latter, how glaring the defects, how many the deficiencies, of the former, Jeremy Taylor evinces unanswerably. Such is the substance of this Tract. What the author proposed to prove he has satisfactorily proved. The faults of the work are: 1. The intermixture of weak and strong arguments, and the frequent interruption of the stream of his logic by doubtful, trifling, and impolitic interruptions; arguments resting in premisses denied by the antagonists, and yet taken for granted; in short, appendages that cumber, accessions that subtract, and confirmations that weaken:-- 2. That he commences with a proper division of the subject into two distinct branches, that is, extempore prayer as opposed to set forms, and, The Directory, as prescribing a form opposed to the existing Liturgy; but that in the sequel he blends and confuses and intermingles one with the other, and presses most and most frequently on the first point, which a vast majority of the party he is opposing had disowned and reprobated no less than himself, and which, though easiest to confute, scarcely required confutation. DISCOURSE OF THE LIBERTY OF PROPHESYING, WITH ITS JUST LIMITS AND TEMPER. Epistle Dedicatory, p. cccciii. And first I answer, that whatsoever is against the foundation of faith is out of the limits of my question, and does not pretend to compliance or toleration. But as all truths hang together, what error is there which may not be proved to be against the foundation of faith? An inquisitor might make the same code of toleration, and in the next moment light the faggots around a man who had denied the infallibility of Pope and Council. Ib. p. ccccxxix. Indeed if by a heresy we mean that which is against an article of creed, and breaks part of the covenant made between God and man by the mediation of Jesus Christ, I grant it to be a very grievous crime, a calling God's veracity into question, &c. How can he be said to question God's veracity, whose belief is that God never declared it,--who perhaps disbelieves it, because he thinks it opposite to God's honor? For example:--Original sin, in the literal sense of the article, was held by both Papists and Protestants (with exception of the Socinians) as the fundamental article of Christianity; and yet our Jeremy Taylor himself attacked and reprobated it. Why? because he thought it dishonored God. Why may not another man believe the same of the Incarnation, and affirm that it is equal to a circle assuming the essence of a square, and yet remaining a circle? But so it is; we spoil our cause, because we dare not plead it 'in toto'; and a half truth serves for a proof of the opposite falsehood. Jeremy Taylor dared not carry his argument into all its consequences. LIBERTY OF PROPHESYING. S. i. p. 443. Of the nature of faith, and that its duty is completed in believing the articles of the Apostle's creed. This section is for the most part as beautifully written as it was charitably conceived; yet how vain the attempt! Jeremy Taylor ought to have denied that Christian faith is at all intellectual primarily, but only probably; as, 'coecteris paribus', it is probable that a man with a pure heart will believe an intelligent Creator. But the faith resides in the predisposing purity of heart, that is, in the obedience of the will to the uncorrupted conscience. For take Taylor's instances; and I ask whether the words or the sense be meant? Surely the latter. Well then, I understand, and so did the dear Bishop, by these texts the doctrine of a Redeemer, who by his agonies of death actually altered the relations of the spirits of all men to their Maker, redeemed them from sin and death eternal, and brought life and immortality into the world. But the Socinian uses the same texts; and means only that a good and gifted teacher of pure morality died a martyr to his opinions, and by his resurrection proved the possibility of all men rising from the dead. He did nothing;--he only taught and afforded evidence. Can two more diverse opinions be conceived? God here; mere man there. Here a redeemer from guilt and corruption, and a satisfaction for offended holiness; there a mere declarer that God imputed no guilt wherever, with or without Christ, the person had repented of it. What could Jeremy Taylor say for the necessity of his sense (which is mine) but what might be said for the necessity of the Nicene Creed? And then as to Rom. x. 9, how can the text mean any thing, unless we know what St. Paul implied in the words 'the Lord Jesus'. From other parts of his writings we know that he meant by the word 'Lord' his divinity or at least essential superhumanity. But the Socinian will not allow this; or, allowing it, denies St. Paul's authority in matters of speculative faith. As well then might I say, it is sufficient for you to believe and repeat the words 'forte miles reddens'; and though one of you mean by it "Perhaps I may be balloted for the militia," and the other understands it to mean, that "Reading is forty miles from London," you are still co-symbolists and believers! While a third person may say, I believe, but do not comprehend, the words; that is, I believe that the person who first used them meant something that is true,--what I do not know; that is, I believe his veracity. O! had this work been published when Charles I, Archbishop Laud, whose chaplain Taylor was, and the other Star Chamber inquisitors, were sentencing Prynne, Bastwick, Leighton, and others, to punishments that have left a brand-mark on the Church of England, the sophistry might have been forgiven for the sake of the motive, which would then have been unquestionable. Or if Jeremy Taylor had not in effect retracted after the Restoration;--if he had not, as soon as the Church had gained its power, most basely disclaimed and disavowed the principle of toleration, and apologized for the publication by declaring it to have been a 'ruse de guerre', currying pardon for his past liberalism by charging, and most probably slandering, himself with the guilt of falsehood, treachery, and hypocrisy, his character as a man would at least have been stainless. Alas, alas, most dearly do I love Jeremy Taylor; most religiously do I venerate his memory! But this is too foul a blotch of leprosy to be forgiven. He who pardons such an act in such a man partakes of its guilt. Ib. s. vii. p. 346-7. In the pursuance of this great truth, the Apostles, or the holy men, their contemporaries and disciples, composed a creed to be a rule of faith to all Christians; as appears in Irenæus, Tertullian, St. Cyprian, St. Austin, Ruffinus, and divers others; which creed, unless it had contained all the entire object of faith, and the foundation of religion, &c. Jeremy Taylor does not appear to have been a critical scholar. His reading had been oceanic; but he read rather to bring out the growths of his own fertile and teeming mind than to inform himself respecting the products of those of other men. Hence his reliance on the broad assertions of the Fathers; yet it is strange that he should have been ignorant that the Apostles' Creed was growing piecemeal for several centuries. Ib. p. 447. All catechumens in the Latin Church coming to baptism were interrogated concerning their faith, and gave satisfaction on the recitation of this Creed. I very much doubt this, and rather believe that our present Apostles' Creed was no more than the first instruction of the catechumens prior to baptism; and (as I conclude from Eusebius) that at baptism they professed a more mysterious faith;--the one being the milk, the other the strong meat. Where is the proof that Tertullian was speaking of this Creed? Eusebius speaks in as high terms of the 'Symbolum Fidei', and, defending himself against charges of heresy, says, "Did I not at my baptism, in the 'Symbolum Fidei', declare my belief in Christ as God and the co-eternal Word?" The true Creed it was impiety to write down; but such was never the case with the present or initiating Creed. Strange, too, that Jeremy Taylor, who has in this very work written so divinely of tradition, should assume as a certainty that this Creed was in a proper sense Apostolic. Is then the Creed of greater authority than the inspired Scriptures? And can words in the Creed be more express than those of St. Paul to the Colossians, speaking of Christ as the creative mind of his Father, before all worlds, 'begotten before all things created?' Ib. s. x. p. 449. This paragraph is indeed a complexion, as Taylor might call it, of sophisms. Thus;--unbelief from want of information or capacity, though with the disposition of faith, is confounded with disbelief. The question is not, whether it may not be safe for a man to believe simply that Christ is his Saviour, but whether it be safe for a man to disbelieve the article in any sense which supposes an essential supra-humanity in Christ,--any sense that would not have been equally applicable to John, had God chosen to raise him instead of his cousin? Ib. s. xi. p. 450. Neither are we obliged to make these Articles more particular and minute than the Creed. For since the Apostles, and indeed our blessed Lord himself, promised heaven to them who believed him to be the Christ that was to come into the world, and that he who believes in him should be partaker of the resurrection and life eternal, he will be as good as his word. Yet because this article was very general, and a complexion rather than a single proposition, the Apostles and others our Fathers in Christ did make it more explicit: and though they have said no more than what lay entire and ready formed in the bosom of the great Article, yet they made their extracts to great purpose and absolute sufficiency; and therefore there needs no more deductions or remoter consequences from the first great Article than the Creed of the Apostles. Most true; but still the question returns, what was meant by the phrase 'the' Christ? Contraries cannot both be true. 'The Christ' could not be both mere man and incarnate God. One or the other must believe falsely on this great key-stone of all the intellectual faith in Christianity. For so it is; alter it, and everything alters; as is proved in Trinitarianism and Socinianism. No two religions can be more different;--I know of no two equally so. Ib. s. xii. p. 451. The Church hath power to intend our faith, but not to extend it; to make our belief more evident, but not more large and comprehensive. This and the preceding pages are scarcely honest. For Jeremy Taylor begins with admitting that the Creed might have been composed by others. He has no proof of that most absurd fable of the twelve Apostles clubbing to make it; yet here all he says assumes its inspiration as a certain fact. Ib. p. 454. But for the present there is no insecurity in ending there where the Apostles ended, in building where they built, in resting where they left us, unless the same infallibility which they had had still continued, which I think I shall hereafter make evident it did not. What a tangle of contradictions Taylor thrusts himself into by the attempt to support a true system, a full third of which he was afraid to mention, and another third was by the same fear induced to deny--at least to take for granted the contrary: for example, the absolute plenary inspiration and infallibility of the Apostles and Evangelists; and yet that their whole function, as far as the consciences of their followers were concerned, was to repeat the two or three sentences, that 'Jesus was Christ' (so says one of the Evangelists), 'the Christ of God' (so says another), 'the Christ the Son of the living God' (so says a third), that he rose from the dead, and for the remission of sins, to as many as believed and professed that he was the Christ or the Lord, and died and rose for the remission of sins. Surely no miraculous communication of God's infallibility was necessary for this. But if this infallibility was stamped on all they said and wrote, is it credible that any part should not be equally binding? I declare I can make nothing out of this section, but that it is necessary for men to believe the Apostles' Creed; but what they believe by it is of no consequence. For instance; what if I chose to understand by the word 'dead' a state of trance or suspended animation;--language furnishing plenty of analogies--dead in a swoon--dead drunk--and so on;--should I still be a Christian? 'Born of the Virgin Mary.' What if, as Priestley and others, I interpreted it as if we should say, 'the former Miss Vincent was his mother.' I need not say that I disagree with Taylor's premisses only because they are not broad enough, and with his aim and principal conclusion only because it does not go far enough. I would have the law grounded wholly in the present life, religion only on the life to come. Religion is debased by temporal motives, and law rendered the drudge of prejudice and passion by pretending to spiritual aims. But putting this aside, and judging of this work solely as a chain of reasoning, I seem to find one leading error in it; namely, that Taylor takes the condition of a first admission into the Church of Christ for the fullness of faith which was to be gradually there acquired. The simple acknowledgment, that they accepted Christ as their Lord and King was the first lisping of the infant believer at which the doors were opened, and he began the process of growth in the faith. Ib. s. ii. p. 457. The great heresy that troubled them was the doctrine of the necessity of keeping the law of Moses, the necessity of circumcision, against which doctrine they were therefore zealous, because it was a direct overthrow to the very end and excellency of Christ's coming. The Jewish converts were still bound to the rite of circumcision, not indeed as under the Law, or by the covenant of works, but as the descendants of Abraham, and by that especial covenant which St. Paul rightly contends was a covenant of grace and faith. But the heresy consisted wholly in the attempt to impose this obligation on the Gentile converts, in the infatuation of some of the Galatians, who, having no pretension to be descendants of Abraham, could, as the Apostle urges, only adopt the rite as binding themselves under the law of works, and thereby apostatizing from the covenant of faith by free grace. And this was the decision of the Apostolic Council at Jerusalem. Acts' xv. Rhenferd, in his Treatise on the Ebionites and other pretended heretics in Palestine, so grossly and so ignorantly calumniated by Epiphanius, has written excellently well on this subject. Jeremy Taylor is mistaken throughout. Ib. s. iv. p. 459. And so it was in this great question of circumcision. It is really wonderful that a man like Bishop Taylor could have read the New Testament, and have entertained a doubt as to the decided opinion of all the Apostles, that every born Jew was bound to be circumcised. Opinion? The very doubt never suggested itself. When something like this opinion was slanderously attributed to Paul, observe the almost ostentatious practical contradiction of the calumny which was adopted by him at the request and by the advice of the other Apostles. ('Acts', xxi. 21-26.) The rite of circumcision, I say, was binding on all the descendants of Abraham through Isaac for all time even to the end of the world; but the whole law of Moses was binding on the Jewish Christians till the heaven and the earth--that is, the Jewish priesthood and the state--had passed away in the destruction of the temple and city; and the Apostles observed every tittle of the Law. Ib. s. vi. p. 460. The heresy of the Nicolaitans. Heresy is not a proper term for a plainly anti-Christian sect. Nicolaitans is the literal Greek translation of Balaamites; destroyers of the people. 'Rev'. ii. 14, 15. Ib. s. viii. p. 461. For heresy is not an error of the understanding, but an error of the will. Most excellent. To this Taylor should have adhered, and to its converse. Faith is not an accuracy of logic, but a rectitude of heart. Ib. p. 462. It was the heresy of the Gnostics, that it was no matter how men lived, so they did but believe aright. I regard the extinction of all the writings of the Gnostics among the heaviest losses of Ecclesiastical literature. We have only the account of their inveterate enemies. Individual madmen there have been in all ages, but I do not believe that any sect of Gnostics ever held this opinion in the sense here supposed. Ib. And, indeed, if we remember that St. Paul reckons heresy amongst the works of the flesh, and ranks it with all manner of practical impieties, we shall easily perceive that if a man mingles not a vice with his opinion,--if he be innocent in his life, though deceived in his doctrine,--his error is his misery not his crime; it makes him an argument of weakness and an object of pity, but not a person sealed up to ruin and reprobation. O admirable! How could Taylor, after this, preach and publish his Sermon in defence of persecution, at least against toleration! Ib. s. xxii. p. 479. Ebion, Manes. No such man as Ebion ever, as I can see, existed; [3] and Manes is rather a doubtful 'ens'. Ib. s. xxxi. p. 487. But I shall observe this, that although the Nicene Fathers in that case, at that time, and in that conjuncture of circumstances, did well, &c. What Bull and Waterland have urged in defence of the Nicene Fathers is (like every thing else from such men) most worthy of all attention. They contend that no other term but [Greek: homoousía] could secure the Christian faith against both the two contrary errors, Tritheism with subversion of the unity of the Godhead on the one hand, and creature-worship on the other. For, to use Waterland's mode of argument, [4] either Eusebius of Nicomedia with the four other dissenters at Nice were right or wrong in their assertion, that Christ could not be of the [Greek: ousía] of the self-originated First by derivation, as a son from a father:--if they were right, they either must have discovered some third distinct and intelligible form of origination in addition to 'begotten' and 'created', or they had not and could not. Now the latter was notoriously the fact. Therefore to deny the [Greek: homoousía] was implicitly to deny the generation of the second Person, and thus to assert his creation. But if he was a creature, he could not be adorable without idolatry. Nor did the chain of inevitable consequences stop here. His characteristic functions of Redeemer, Mediator, King, and final Judge, must all cease to be attributable to Christ; and the conclusion is, that between the Homoousian scheme and mere Psilanthropism there is no intelligible 'medium'. If this, then, be not a fundamental article of faith, what can be? To this reasoning I really can discern no fair reply within the sphere of conceptual logic, if it can be made evident that the term [Greek: homooúsios] is really capable of achieving the end here set forth. One objection to the term is, that it was not translatable into the language of the Western Church. Consubstantial is not the translation: 'substantia' answers to [Greek: hypóstasis], not to [Greek: ousía]; and hence, when [Greek: hypóstasis] was used by the Nicene Fathers in distinction from [Greek: ousía], the Latin Church was obliged to render it by some other word, and thus introduced that most unhappy and improper term 'persona'. Would you know my own inward judgment on this question, it is this: first, that this pregnant idea, the root and form of all ideas, is not within the sphere of conceptual logic,--that is, of the understanding,--and is therefore of necessity inexpressible; for no idea can be adequately represented in words:--secondly, that I agree with Bull and Waterland against Bishop Taylor, that there was need of a public and solemn decision on this point:--but, lastly, that I am more than doubtful respecting the fitness or expediency of the term [Greek: homooúsios], and hold that the decision ought to have been negative. For at first all parties agreed in the positive point, namely, that Christ was the Son of God, and that the Son of God was truly God, "or very God of very God." All that was necessary to be added was, that the only begotten Son of God was not created nor begotten in time. More than this might be possible, and subject of insight; but it was not determinable by words, and was therefore to be left among the rewards of the Spirit to the pure in heart in inward vision and silent contemplation. Ib. s. xl. p. 495. All that is necessary to give a full and satistory import to this excellent paragraph, and to secure it from all inconvenient consequences, is to understand the distinction between the objective and general revelation, by which the whole Church is walled around and kept together ('principium totalitatis et cohæsionis'), and the subjective revelation, the light from the life ('John' i. 4.), by which the individual believers, each according to the grace given, grow in faith. For the former, the Apostles' Creed, in its present form, is more than enough; for the latter, it might be truly said in the words of the fourth Gospel, that all the books which the world could contain would not suffice to set forth explicitly that mystery in which all treasures of knowledge are hidden, 'reconduntur'. From the Apostles' Creed, nevertheless, if regarded in the former point of view, several clauses must be struck out, not as false, but as not necessary. "I believe that Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate, rose from the dead on the third day; and I receive him as the Christ, the Son of the living God, who died for the remission of the sins of as many as believe in the Father through him, in whom we have the promise of life everlasting." This is the sufficient creed. More than this belongs to the Catechism, and then to the study of the Scriptures. Ib. s. vi. p. 506. So did the ancient Papias understand Christ's millenary reign upon earth, and so depressed the hopes of Christianity and their desires to the longing and expectation of temporal pleasures and satisfactions. And he was followed by Justin Martyr, Irenæus, Tertullian, Lactantius, and indeed, the whole Church generally, till St. Austin and St. Jerome's time, who, first of any whose works are extant, did reprove the error. Bishop Taylor is, I think, mistaken in two points; first, that the Catholic Millenaries looked forward to carnal pleasures in the kingdom of Christ;--for even the Jewish Rabbis of any note represented the 'Millenium' as the preparative and transitional state to perfect spiritualization:--second, that the doctrine of Christ's reign upon earth rested wholly or principally on the twentieth chapter of the Revelations, which actually, in my judgment, opposes it. I more than suspect that Austin's and Jerome's strongest ground for rejecting the second coming of our Lord in his kingly character, was, that they were tired of waiting for it. How can we otherwise interpret the third and fourth clauses of the Lord's Prayer, or, perhaps, the [Greek: en toi kairoi toútoi], 'in hoc seculo', (x. 30) of St. Mark? If the first three Gospels, joined with the unbroken faith and tradition of the Church for nearly three centuries, can decide the question, the Millenarians have the best of the argument. Vol. viii. s. ix. p. 22. One thing only I observe (and we shall find it true in most writings, whose authority is urged in questions of theology), that the authority of the tradition is not it which moves the assent, but the nature of the thing; and because such a canon is delivered, they do not therefore believe the sanction or proposition so delivered, but disbelieve the tradition if they do not like the matter, and so do not judge of the matter by the tradition, but of the tradition by the matter. This just and acute remark is, in fact, no less applicable to Scripture in all doctrinal points, and if infidelity is not to overspread England as well as France, the same criterion (that is, the internal evidence) must be extended to all points, to the narratives no less than to the precept. The written words must be tried by the Word from the beginning, in which is life, and that life the light of men. Reduce it to the noetic pentad, or universal form of contemplation, except where all the terms are absolute, and consequently there is no 'punctum indifferens,--in divinis tetras, in omnibus aliis pentas,' and the form stands thus. [5] Ib. s. iii. p. 36. So that it cannot make it divine and necessary to be heartily believed. It may make it lawful, not make it true; that is, it may possibly, by such means, become a law, but not a truth. This is a sophism which so evident a truth did not need. Apply the reasoning to an act of Parliament previously to the royal sanction. Will it hold good to say, if it was law after the sanction, it was law before? The assertion of the Papal theologians is, that the divine providence may possibly permit even the majority of a legally convened Council to err; but by force of a divine promise cannot permit both a majority and the Pope to err on the same point. The flaw in this is, that the Romish divines rely on a conditional promise unconditionally. To Taylor's next argument the Romish respondent would say, that an exception, grounded on a specific evident necessity, does not invalidate the rule in the absence of any equally evident necessity. Taylor's argument is a [Greek: metábasis eis allo génos]. It is not the truth, but the sign or mark, by which the Church at large may know that it is truth, which is here provided for; that is, not the truth simply, but the obligation of receiving it as such. Ten thousand may apprehend the latter, only ten of whom might be capable of determining the former. Ib. 5. So that now (that we may apply this) there are seven general Councils, which by the Church of Rome are condemned of error ... The council of Ariminum, consisting of six hundred Bishops. It is the mark of a faction that it never hesitates to sacrifice a greater good common to them and to their opponents to a lesser advantage obtained over those opponents. Never was there a stranger instance of imprudence, at least, than the act of the Athanasian party in condemning so roundly the great Council of Ariminum as heretical, and for little more than the charitable wish of the many hundred Bishops there assembled to avoid a word that had set all Christendom by the ears. They declared that [Greek: ho agénnaetos patàer, kaì ho achron_os gennaetòs uhiòs, kaì tò pneuma ekporeuómenon] were substantially (hypostatik_os) distinct, but nevertheless, one God; and though there might be some incautious phrases used by them, the good Bishops declared that if their decree was indeed Arian, or introduced aught to the derogation of the Son's absolute divinity, it was against their knowledge and intention, and that they renounced it. Ib. s. x. p. 46. Gratian says, that the Council means by a concubine a wife married 'sine dote et solennitate'; but this is daubing with untempered mortar. Here I think Taylor wrong and Gratian right; for not a hundred years ago the very same decree was passed by the Lutheran clergy in Prussia, determining that left-hand marriages were to be discouraged, but did not exclude from communion. These marriages were invented for the sake of poor nobles: they could have but that one wife, and the children followed the rank and title of the mother, not of the father. Ib. s. vii. p. 56. Thirdly; for 'pasce oves', there is little in that allegation besides the boldness of the objectors. I have ever thought that the derivation of the Papal monarchy from the thrice repeated command, 'pasce oves', the most brazen of all the Pope's bulls. It was because Peter had given too good proof that he was more disposed to draw the sword for Christ than to perform the humble duties of a shepherd, that our Lord here strongly, though tenderly, reminds him of his besetting temptation. The words are most manifestly a reproof and a warning, not a commission. In like manner the very letter of the famous paronomastic text proves that Peter's confession, not Peter himself, was the rock. His name was, perhaps, not so much stone as stoner; not so much rock as rockman; and Jesus hearing this unexpected confession of his mysterious Sonship (for this is one of the very few cases in which the internal evidence decides for the superior fidelity of the first Gospel), and recognizing in it an immediate revelation from heaven, exclaims, "Well, art thou the man of the rock; 'and upon this rock will I build my church,'" not on this man. Add too, that the law revealed to Moses and the confession of the divine attributes, are named the rock, both in the Pentateuch and in the Psalms. Mark has simply, 'Thou art the Christ'; Luke, 'The Christ of God'; [6] but that Jesus was the Messiah had long been known by the Apostles, at all events conjectured. Had not John so declared him at the baptism? Besides, it was included among the opinions concerning our Lord which led to his question, the aim of which was not simply as to the Messiahship, but that the Messiah, instead of a mere descendant of David, destined to reestablish and possess David's throne, was the Jehovah himself, 'the Son of the living God; God manifested in the flesh'. 1 'Tim'. iii. 16. Ib. s. viii. p. 62. And yet again, another degree of uncertainty is, to whom the Bishops of Rome do succeed. For St. Paul was as much Bishop of Rome as St. Peter was; there he presided, there he preached, and he it was that was the doctor of the uncircumcision and of the Gentiles, St. Peter of the circumcision and of the Jews only; and therefore the converted Jews at Rome might with better reason claim the privilege of St. Peter, than the Romans and the Churches in her communion, who do not derive from Jewish parents. I wonder that Taylor should have introduced so very strong an argument merely 'obiter'. If St. Peter ever was at Rome, it must have been for the Jewish converts or _convertendi_ exclusively, and on what do the earliest Fathers rest the fact of Peter's being at Rome? Do they appeal to any document? No; but to their own arbitrary and most improbable interpretation of the word Babylon in St. Peter's first epistle. [7] I am too deeply impressed with the general difficulty arising out of the strange eclipse of all historic documents, of all particular events, from the arrival of St. Paul at Rome as related by St. Luke and the time when Justin Martyr begins to shed a scanty light, to press any particular instance of it. Yet, if Peter really did arrive at Rome, and was among those destroyed by Nero, it is strange that the Bishop and Church of Rome should have preserved no record of the particulars. Ib. s. xv. p. 71. But what shall we think of that decretal of Gregory the Third, who wrote to Boniface his legate in Germany, 'quod illi, quorum uxores infirmitate aliqua morbida debitum reddere noluerunt, aliis poterant nubere.' Supposing the 'noluerunt' to mean 'nequeunt', or at least any state of mind and feeling that does not exclude moral attachment, I, as a Protestant, abominate this decree of Gregory III; for I place the moral, social, and spiritual helps and comforts as the proper and essential ends of Christian marriage, and regard the begetting of children as a contingent consequence. But on the contrary tenet of the Romish Church, I do not see how Gregory could consistently decree otherwise. Ib. s. iii. p. 82. Nor that Origen taught the pains of hell not to have an eternal duration. And yet there can be no doubt that Taylor himself held with Origen on this point. But, 'non licebat dogmatizare oppositum, quia determinatum fuerat.' Ib. p. 84. And except it be in the Apostles' Creed and articles of such nature, there is nothing which may with any color be called a consent, much less tradition universal. It may be well to remember, whenever Taylor speaks of the Apostles' Creed, that Pearson's work on that Creed was not then published. Nothing is more suspicious than copies of creeds in the early Fathers; it was so notoriously the custom of the transcribers to make them square with those in use in their own time. Ib. s. iv. Such as makes no invasion upon their great reputation, which I desire should be preserved as sacred as it ought. The vision of the mitre dawned on Taylor; and his recollection of Laud came to the assistance of the Fathers; of many of whom in his heart Taylor, I think, entertained a very mean opinion. How could such a man do otherwise? I could forgive them their nonsense and even their economical falsehoods; but their insatiable appetite for making heresies, and thus occasioning the neglect or destruction of so many valuable works, Origen's for instance, this I cannot forgive or forget. Ib. s. i. p. 88. Of the incompetency of the Church, in its diffusive capacity, to be judge of controversies; and the impertinency of that pretence of the Spirit. Now here begin my serious differences with Jeremy Taylor, which may be characterized in one sentence; ideas 'versus' conceptions and images. I contend that the Church in the Christian sense is an idea;--not therefore a chimera, or a fancy, but a real being and a most powerful reality. Suppose the present state of science in this country, with this only difference that the Royal and other scientific societies were not founded: might I not speak of a scientific public, and its influence on the community at large? Or should I be talking of a chimera, a shadow, or a non-entity? Or when we speak with honest pride of the public spirit of this country as the power which supported the nation through the gigantic conflict with France, do we speak of nothing, because we cannot say,--"It is in this place or in that catalogue of names?" At the same time I most readily admit that no rule can be grounded formally on the supposed assent of this ideal Church, the members of which are recorded only in the book of life at any one moment. In Taylor's use and application of the term, Church, the visible Christendom, and in reply to the Romish divines, his arguments are irrefragable. Ib. s. ii. p. 93, So that if they read, study, pray, search records, and use all the means of art and industry in the pursuit of truth, it is not with a resolution to follow that which shall seem truth to them, but to confirm what before they did believe. Alas, if Protestant and Papist were named by individuals answering or not answering to this description, what a vast accession would not the Pope's muster-roll receive! In the instance of the Council of Trent, the iniquity of the Emperor and the Kings of France and Spain consisted in their knowledge that the assembly at Trent had no pretence to be a general Council, that is, a body representative of the Catholic or even of the Latin Church. It may be, and in fact it is, very questionable whether any Council, however large and fairly chosen, is not an absurdity except under the universal faith that the Holy Ghost miraculously dictates all the decrees: and this is irrational, where the same superseding Spirit does not afford evidence of its presence by producing unanimity. I know nothing, if I may so say, more ludicrous than the supposition of the Holy Ghost contenting himself with a majority, in questions respecting faith, or decrees binding men to inward belief, which again binds a Christian to outward profession. Matters of discipline and ceremony, having peace and temporal order for their objects, are proper enough for a Council; but these do not need any miraculous interference. Still if any Council is admitted in matters of doctrine, those who have appealed to it must abide by the determination of the majority, however they might prefer the opinion of the minority, just as in acts of Parliament. Ib. s. xi. p. 98. Of some causes of error in the exercise of reason, which are inculpate in themselves. It is a lamentable misuse of the term, reason,--thus to call by that name the mere faculty of guessing and babbling. The making reason a faculty, instead of a light, and using the term as a mere synonyme of the understanding, and the consequent ignorance of the true nature of ideas, and that none but ideas are objects of faith--are the grounds of all Jeremy Taylor's important errors. Ib. But men may understand what they please, especially when they are to expound oracles. If this sentence had occurred in Hume or Voltaire! Ib. s. iii. p. 103. And then if ever truth be afflicted, she shall also be destroyed. Here and in many other passages of his other works Jeremy Taylor very unfairly states this argument of the anti-prelatic party. It was not that the Church of England was afflicted (the Puritans themselves had been much more afflicted by the prelates); but that having appealed to the decision of the sword, the cause was determined against it. But in fact it is false that the Puritans ever did argue as Taylor represents them. Laud and his confederates had begun by incarcerating, scourging, and inhumanly mutilating their fellow Christians for not acceding to their fancies, and proceeded to goad and drive the King to levy or at least maintain war against his Parliament: and the Parliamentary party very naturally cited their defeat and the overthrow of the prelacy as a judgment on their blood-thirstiness, not as a proof of their error in questions of theology. Ib. s. iv. p. 105. All that I shall say, &c. 'ad finem'. An admirable paragraph. Taylor is never more himself, never appears greater, or wiser, than when he enters on this topic, namely, the many and various causes beside truth which occasion men to hold an opinion for truth. Ib. s. vii. p. 111. Of such men as these it was said by St. Austin: 'Cæteram turbam non intelligendi vivacitas, sed credendi simplicitas tutissimam facit.' Such charity is indeed notable policy: salvation made easy for the benefit of obedient dupes. Ib. s. ii. p. 119. I deny not but certain and known idolatry, or any other sort of practical impiety with its principiant doctrine, may be punished corporally, because it is no other but matter of fact. In the Jewish theocracy, I admit; because the fact of idolatry was a crime, namely, 'crimen læsæ majestatis', an overt act subversive of the fundamental law of the state, and breaking asunder the 'vinculum et copulam unitatis et cohæsionis'. But in making the position general, Taylor commits the 'sophisma omissi essentialis'; he omits the essential of the predicate, namely, criminal;--not its being a fact rendering it punishable, but its being a criminal fact. Ib. s. iii. Oh that this great and good man, who saw and has expressed so large a portion of the truth,--(if by the Creed I might understand the true Apostles', that is, the Baptismal Creed, free from the additions of the first five centuries, I might indeed say the whole truth),--had but brought it back to the great original end and purpose of historical Christianity, and of the Church visible, as its exponent, not as a 'hortus siccus' of past revelations,--but an ever enlarging inclosed 'area' of the opportunity of individual conversion to, and reception of, the spirit of truth! Then, instead of using this one truth to inspire a despair of all truth, a reckless scepticism within, and a boundless compliance without, he would have directed the believer to seek for light where there was a certainty of finding it, as far as it was profitable for him, that is, as far as it actually was light for him. The visible Church would be a walled Academy, a pleasure garden, in which the intrants having presented their 'symbolum portae', or admission-contract, walk at large, each seeking private audience of the invisible teacher,--alone now, now in groups,--meditating or conversing,--gladly listening to some elder disciple, through whom (as ascertained by his intelligibility to me) I feel that the common Master is speaking to me,--or lovingly communing with a class-fellow, who, I have discovered, has received the same lesson from the inward teaching with myself,--while the only public concerns in which all, as a common weal, exercised control and vigilance over each, are order, peace, mutual courtesy and reverence, kindness, charity, love, and the fealty and devotion of all and each to the common Master and Benefactor! Ib. s. viii. p. 124. It is characteristic of the man and the age, Taylor's high-strained reverential epithets to the names of the Fathers, and as rare and naked mention of Luther, Melancthon, Calvin--the least of whom was not inferior to St. Augustin, and worth a brigade of the Cyprians, Firmilians, and the like. And observe, always 'Saint' Cyprian! Ib. s. xii. p. 128-9. Gibbon's enumeration of the causes, not miraculous, of the spread of Christianity during the first three centuries is far from complete. This, however, is not the greatest defect of this celebrated chapter. The proportions of importance are not truly assigned; nay, the most effective causes are only not omitted--mentioned, indeed, but 'quasi in transitu', not developed or distinctly brought out: for example, the zealous despotism of the Cæsars, with the consequent exclusion of men of all ranks from the great interests of the public weal, otherwise than as servile instruments; in short, the direct contrary of that state and character of men's minds, feelings, hopes and fancies, which elections, Parliaments, Parliamentary reports, and newspapers produce in England; and this extinction of patriotism aided by the melting down of states and nations in the one vast yet heterogeneous Empire;--the number and variety of the parts acting only to make each insignificant in its own eyes, and yet sufficient to preclude all living interest in the peculiar institutions and religious forms of Rome; which beginning in a petty district, had, no less than the Greek republics, its mythology and [Greek: thraeskeia] intimately connected with localities and local events. The mere habit of staring or laughing at nine religions must necessarily end in laughing at the tenth, that is, the religion of the man's own birth-place. The first of these causes, that is, the detachment of all love and hope from the things of the visible world, and from temporal objects not merely selfish, must have produced in thousands a tendency to, and a craving after, an internal religion, while the latter occasioned an absolute necessity of a mundane as opposed to a national or local religion. I am far from denying or doubting the influence of the excellence of the Christian faith in the propagation of the Christian Church or the power of its evidences; but still I am persuaded that the necessity of some religion, and the untenable nature and obsolete superannuated character of all the others, occasioned the conversion of the largest though not the worthiest part of the new-made Christians. Here, though exploded in physics, we have recourse to the 'horror vacui' as an efficient cause. This view of the subject can offend or startle those only who, in their passion for wonderment, virtually exclude the agency of Providence from any share in the realizing of its own benignant scheme; as if the disposition of events by which the whole world of human history, from north and south, east and west, directed their march to one central point, the establishment of Christendom, were not the most stupendous of miracles! It is a yet sadder consideration, that the same men who can find God's presence and agency only in sensuous miracles, wholly misconceive the characteristic purpose and proper objects of historic Christianity and of the outward and visible Church, of which historic Christianity is the ground and the indispensable condition; but this is a subject delicate and dangerous, at all events requiring a less scanty space than the margins of these honestly printed pages. Ib. s. iv. p. 133. The death of Ananias and Sapphira, and the blindness of Elymas the sorcerer, amount not to this, for they were miraculous inflictions. One great difficulty respecting, not the historic truth (of which there can be no rational doubt), but the miraculous nature, of the sudden deaths of Ananias and Sapphira is derived from the measure which gave occasion to it, namely, the sale of their property by the new converts of Palestine, in order to establish that community of goods, which, according to a Rabbinical tradition, existed before the Deluge, and was to be restored by the children of Seth (one of the names which the Jewish Christians assumed) before the coming of the Son of Man. Now this was a very gross and carnal, not to say fanatical, misunderstanding of our Lord's words, and had the effect of reducing the Churches of the Circumcision to beggary, and of making them an unnecessary burthen on the new Churches in Greece and elsewhere. See Rhenferd as to this. The fact of Elymas, however, concludes the miraculous nature of the deaths of Ananias and Sapphira, which, taken of themselves, would indeed have always been supposed, but could scarcely have been proved, the result of a miraculous or superhuman power. There are for me, I confess, great difficulties in this incident, especially when it is compared with our Lord's reply to the Apostles' proposal of calling down fire from heaven. 'The Son of Man is not come to destroy', &c. At all events it is a subject that demands and deserves deep consideration. Ib. s. i. p. 141. The religion of Jesus Christ is 'the form of sound doctrine and wholesome words', which is set down in Scripture indefinitely, actually conveyed to us by plain places, and separated as for the question of necessary or not necessary by the Symbol of the Apostles. I cannot refrain from again expressing my surprise at the frequency and the undoubting positiveness of this assertion in so great a scholar, so profound a Patrician, as Jeremy Taylor was. He appears 'bona fide' to have believed the absurd fable of this Creed having been a pic-nic to which each of the twelve Apostles contributed his 'symbolum'. Had Jeremy Taylor taken it for granted so completely and at so early an age, that he read without attending to the various passages in the Fathers and ecclesiastical historians, which shew the gradual formation of this Creed? It is certainly possible, and I see no other solution of the problem. Ib. s. ix. p. 153. 'Judge not, that ye be not judged'. The dread of these words is, I fear, more influential on my spirit than either the duty of charity or my sense of Taylor's high merits, in enabling me to struggle against the strong inclination to pass the sentence of dishonesty on the reasoning in this paragraph. Had I met the passage in Richard Baxter or in Bishop Hall, it would have made no such unfavourable impression. But Taylor was so acute a logician, and had made himself so completely master of the subject, that it is hard to conceive him blind to sophistry so glaring. I am myself friendly to Infant Baptism, but for that reason feel more impatience of any unfairness in its defenders. Ib. Ad. iii. and xiii. p. 178. But then, that God is not as much before hand with Christian as with Jewish infants is a thing which can never be believed by them who understand that in the Gospel God opened all his treasures of mercies, and unsealed the fountain itself; whereas, before, he poured forth only rivulets of mercy and comfort. This is mere sophistry; and I doubt whether Taylor himself believed it a sufficient reply to his own argument. There is no doubt that the primary purpose of Circumcision was to peculiarize the Jews by an indelible visible sign; and it was as necessary that Jewish infants should be known to be Jews as Jewish men. Then humanity and mere safety determined that the bloody rite should be performed in earliest infancy, as soon as the babe might be supposed to have gotten over the fever of his birth. This is clear; for women had no correspondent rite, but the same result was obtained by the various severe laws concerning their marriage with aliens and other actions. Ib. p. 180. And as those persons who could not be circumcised (I mean the females), yet were baptized, as is notorious in the Jews' books and story. Yes, but by no command of God, but only their own fancies. Ib. Ad. iv. p. 181. 'Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, shall not enter therein': receive it as a little child receives it, that is, with innocence, and without any let or hinderance. Is it not evident that Christ here converted negatives into positives? As a babe is without malice negatively, so you must be positively and by actuation, that is, full of love and meekness; as the babe is unresisting, so must you be docile, and so on. Ib. Ad. v. And yet, notwithstanding this terrible paragraph, Taylor believed that infants were not a whit the worse off for not being baptized. Strange contradiction! They are born in sin, and Baptism is the only way of deliverance; and yet it is not. For the infant is 'de se' of the kingdom of heaven. Christ blessed them, not in order to make them so, but because they already were so. So that this argument seems more than all others demonstrative for the Anabaptist, and to prove that Baptism derives all its force if it be celestial magic, or all its meaning if it be only a sacrament and symbol, from the presumption of actual sin in the person baptized. Ib. Ad. xv. p. 186. And he that hath without difference commanded that all nations should be baptized, hath without difference commanded all sorts of persons. Even so our Lord commanded all men to repent, did he therefore include babes of a month old? [8] Yes, when they became capable of repentance. And even so babes are included in the general command of Baptism, that is, as soon as they are baptizable. But Baptism supposed both repentance and a promise; babes are not capable of either, and therefore not of Baptism. For the physical element was surely only the sign and seal of a promise by a counter promise and covenant. The rite of Circumcision is wholly inapplicable; for there a covenant was between Abraham and God, not between God and the infant. "Do so and so to all your male children, and I will favor them. Mark them before the world as a peculiar and separate race, and I will then consider them as my chosen people." But Baptism is personal, and the baptized a subject not an object; not a thing, but a person; that is, having reason, or actually and not merely potentially. Besides, Jeremy Taylor was too sound a student of Erasmus and Grotius not to know the danger of screwing up St. Paul's accommodations of Jewish rites, meant doubtless as inducements of rhetoric and innocent compliances with innocent and invincible prejudices, into articles of faith. The conclusions are always true; but all the arguments are not and were never intended to be reducible into syllogisms demonstrative. Ib. Ad. xviii. p. 191. But let us hear the answer. First, it is said, that Baptism and the Spirit signify the same thing; for by water is meant the effect of the Spirit. By the 'effect,' the Anabaptist clearly means the 'causa causans', the 'act of the Spirit.' As well might Taylor say that a thought is not thinking, because it is the effect of thinking. Had Taylor been right, the water to be an apt sign ought to have been dirty water; for that would be the 'res effecta'. But it is pure water, therefore 'res agens'. Ib. p. 192. For it is certain and evident, that regeneration or new birth is here enjoined to all as of absolute and indispensable necessity. Yet Taylor himself has denied it over and over again in his tracts on Original Sin; and how is it in harmony with the words of Christ--'Of such are the kingdom of heaven'? Are we not regenerated back to a state of spiritual infancy? Yet for such Anti-pædobaptists as hold the dogma of original guilt it is doubtless a fair argument; but Taylor ought not to have used it as certain and evident in itself, and not merely 'ad hominem et per accidens'. As making a bow is in England the understood conventional mark or visible language of reverence, so in the East was Baptism the understood outward and visible mark of conversion and initiation. So much for the visible act: then for the particular meaning affixed to it by Christ. This was [Greek: metánoia], an adoption of a new principle of action and consequent reform of conduct; a cleansing, but especially a cleansing away of the carnal film from the mind's eye. Hence the primitive Church called baptism [Greek: ph_os], light, and the Eucharist [Greek: z_oàe], life. Baptism, therefore, was properly the sign, the 'precursor', or rather the first act, the 'initium', of that regeneration of which the whole spiritual life of a Christian is the complete process; the Eucharist indicating the means, namely, the continued assimilation of and to the Divine Humanity. Hence the Eucharist was called the continuation of the Incarnation. Ib. And yet it does not follow that they should all be baptized with the Holy Ghost and with fire. But it is meant only that that glorious effect should be to them a sign of Christ's eminency above him; they should see from him a Baptism greater than that of John. This is exactly of a piece with that gloss of the Socinians in evasion of St. Paul's words concerning Christ's emptying himself of the form of God, and becoming a servant, which all the world of Christians had interpreted of the Incarnation. But no! it only referred to the miracle of his transfiguration! ... 'credat Judæus Apella! Non ego'. St. John could not mean this, unless he denied the distinct personality of the Holy Ghost. For it was the Holy Ghost that then descended 'as the substitute of Christ; nor does St. Luke even hint that it was understood to be a Baptism, even if we suppose the 'tongues of fire' to be anything visual, and not as we say, Victory sate on his helmet like an eagle. The spirit of eloquence descended into them like a tongue of fire, and that they spoke different languages is, I conceive, no where said; but only that being rustic Galileans they yet spake a dialect intelligible to all the Jews from the most different provinces. For it is clear they were all Jews, and, as Jews, had doubtless a 'lingua communis' which all understood when spoken, though persons of education only could speak it. Even so a German boor understands, but yet cannot talk in, High German, that is, the language of his Bible and Hymn-book. So it is with the Scotch of Aberdeen with regard to pure English. In short Taylor's arguments press on the Anabaptists, only as far as the Anabaptists baptize at all; they are in fact attacks on Baptism; and it would only follow from them that the Baptist is more rational than the Pædobaptist, but that the Quaker is more consistent than either. To pull off your hat is in Europe a mark of respect. What, if a parent in his last will should command his children and posterity to pull off their hats to their superiors,--and in course of time these children or descendants emigrated to China, or some place, where the same ceremony either meant nothing, or an insult. Should we not laugh at them if they did not interpret the words into, Pay reverence to your superiors. Even so Baptism was the Jewish custom, and natural to those countries; but with us it would be a more significant rite if applied as penance for excess of zeal and acts of bigotry, especially as sprinkling. Ib. p. 196. But farther yet I demand, can infants receive Christ in the Eucharist? Surely the wafer and the tea-spoonful of wine might be swallowed by an infant, as well as water be sprinkled upon him. But if the former is not the Eucharist because without faith and repentance, so cannot the latter, it would seem, be Baptism. For they are declared equal adjuncts of both Sacraments. The argument therefore is a mere 'petitio principii sub lite'. Ib. Ad. ix. p. 197. The promise of the Holy Ghost is made to all, to us and to our children: and if the Holy Ghost belongs to them, then Baptism belongs to them also. If this be not rank enthusiasm I know not what is. The Spirit is promised to them, first, as protection and providence, and as internal operation when those faculties are developed, in and by which the Spirit co-operates. Can Taylor shew an instance in Scripture in which the Holy Spirit is said to operate simply, and without the co-operation of the subject? Ib. Ad. xix. p. 199. And when the boys in the street sang Hosanna to the Son of David, our blessed Lord said that if they had held their peace, the stones of the street would have cried out Hosanna. By the same argument I could defend the sprinkling of mules and asses with holy water, as is done yearly at Rome on St. Antony's day, I believe. For they are capable of health and sickness, of restiveness and of good temper, and these are all emanations from their Creator. Besides in the great form of Baptism the words are not [Greek: en onómati], but [Greek: eis tò onoma], and many learned men have shewn that they may mean 'into the power or influence' of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. But spiritual influences suppose capability in act of receiving them; and we must either pretend to believe that the soul of the babe, that is, his consciousness, is acted on without his consciousness, or that the instrumental cause is antecedent by years to its effect, which would be a conjunction disjunctive with a vengeance. Again, Baptism is nothing except as followed by the Spirit; but it is irrational to say, that the Spirit acts on the mere potentialities of an infant. For wherein is the Spirit, as used in Scripture in appropriation to Christians, different from God's universal providence and goodness, but that the latter like the sun may shine on the wicked and on the good, on the passive and on those who by exercise increase its effect; whereas the former always implies a co-operant subject, that is, a developed reason. When God gave his Spirit miraculously to the young child, Daniel, he at the same time miraculously hastened the development of his understanding. Ib. Ad. xxviii. p. 205. But we see also that although Christ required faith of them who came to be healed, yet when any were brought, or came in behalf of others, he only required faith of them who came, and their faith did benefit to others.... But this instance is so certain a reproof of this objection of theirs, which is their principal, which is their all, that it is a wonder to me they should not all be convinced at the reading and observing of it. So far from certainty, I find no strength at all in this reproof. Doubtless Christ at a believer's request might heal his child's or his servant's bodily sickness; for this was an act of power, requiring only an object. But is it any where said, that at a believer's request he gave the Spirit and the graces of faith to an unbeliever without any mental act, or moral co-operation of the latter? This would have been a proof indeed; but Taylor's instance is a mere 'ad aliud'. Ib. Ad. xxxi. p. 207. And although there are some effects of the Holy Spirit which require natural capacities to be their foundation; yet those are the [Greek: energáemata] or powers of working: but the [Greek: charísmata], and the inheritance and the title to the promises require nothing on our part, but that we can receive them. The Bishop flutters about and about, but never fairly answers the question, What does Baptism do? The Baptist says it attests forgiveness of sins, as the reward of faith and repentance. This is intelligible; but as to the [Greek: charísmata]--the children of believers, if so taught and educated, are surely entitled to the promises; and what analogy is there in this to any one act of power and gift of powers mentioned as [Greek: charísmata], when the word is really used in contradistinction from [Greek: energáemata] Baptism is spoken of many times by St. Paul properly as well as metaphorically, and in the former sense it is never described as a [Greek: chárisma] on a passive recipient, while in the latter sense it always respects an [Greek: enérgaema] of the Spirit of God, and a [Greek: synérgaema] in the spirit of the recipient. All that Taylor can make out is, that Baptism effects a potentiality in a potentiality, or a chalking of chalk to make white white. Ib. p. 210. And if it be questioned by wise men whether the want of it do not occasion their eternal loss, and it is not questioned whether Baptism does them any hurt or no, then certainly to baptize them is the surer way without all peradventure. Now this is the strongest argument of all against Infant Baptism, and that which alone weighed at one time with me, namely, that it supposes and most certainly encourages a belief concerning God, the most blasphemous and intolerable; and no human wit can express this more forcibly and affectingly than Taylor himself has done in his Letter to a Lady on Original Sin. It is too plain to be denied that the belief of the strict necessity of Infant Baptism, and the absolute universality of the practice did not commence till the dogma of original guilt had begun to despotize in the Church: while that remained uncertain and sporadic, Infant Baptism was so too; some did it, many did not. But as soon as Original Sin in the sense of actual guilt became the popular creed, then all did it. [9] Ib. s. xvi. p. 224. And although they have done violence to all philosophy and the reason of man, and undone and cancelled the principles of two or three sciences, to bring in this article; yet they have a divine revelation, whose literal and grammatical sense, if that sense were intended, would warrant them to do violence to all the sciences in the circle. And indeed that Transubstantiation is openly and violently against natural reason is no argument to make them disbelieve it, who believe the mystery of the Trinity in all those niceties of explication which are in the School (and which now-a-days pass for the doctrine of the Church), with as much violence to the principles of natural and supernatural philosophy as can be imagined to be in the point of Transubstantiation. This is one of the many passages in Taylor's works which lead me to think that his private opinions were favorable to Socinianism. Observe, to the views of Socinus, not to modern Unitarianism, as taught by Priestley and Belsham. And doubtless Socinianism would much more easily bear a doubt, whether the difference between it and the orthodox faith was not more in words than in the things meant, than the Arian hypothesis. A mere conceptualist, at least, might plausibly ask whether either party, the Athanasian or the Socinian, had a sufficiently distinct conception of what the one meant by the hypostatical union of the Divine Logos with the man Jesus; or the other of his plenary, total, perpetual, and continuous inspiration, to have any well-grounded assurance, that they do not mean the same thing. Moreover, no one knew better than Jeremy Taylor that this apparent soar of the hooded falcon, faith, to the very empyrean of bibliolatry amounted in fact to a truism of which the following syllogism is a fair illustration. All stones are men: all men think: 'ergo', all stones think. The 'major' is taken for granted, the minor no one denies; and then the conclusion is good logic, though a very foolish untruth. Or, if an oval were demonstrated by Euclid to be a circle, it would be a circle; and if it were a demonstrable circle, it would be a circle, though the strait lines drawable from the centre to the circumference are unequal. If we were quite certain that an omniscient Being, incapable of deceiving, or being deceived, had assured us that 5 X 5 = 6 X 3, and that the two sides of a certain triangle were together less than the third, then we should be warranted in setting at nought the science of arithmetic and geometry. On another occasion, as when it was the good Bishop's object to expose the impudent assertions of the Romish Church since the eleventh century, he would have been the first to have replied by a counter syllogism. If we are quite certain that any writing pretending to divine origin contains gross contradictions to demonstrable truths 'in eodem genere', or commands that outrage the clearest principles of right and wrong; then we may be equally certain that the pretence is a blasphemous falsehood, inasmuch as the compatibility of a document with the conclusions of self-evident reason, and with the laws of conscience, is a condition 'a priori' of any evidence adequate to the proof of its having been revealed by God. This principle is clearly laid down both by Moses and by St. Paul. If a man pretended to be a prophet, he was to predict some definite event that should take place at some definite time, at no unreasonable distance: and if it were not fulfilled, he was to be punished as an impostor. But if he accompanied his prophecy with any doctrine subversive of the exclusive Deity and adorability of the one God of heaven and earth, or any seduction to a breach of God's commandments, he was to be put to death at once, all other proof of his guilt and imposture being superfluous. [10] So St. Paul. If any man preach another Gospel, though he should work all miracles, though he had the appearance and evinced the superhuman powers of an angel from heaven--he was at once, in contempt of all imaginable sensuous miracles, to be holden accursed. [11] Ib. s. xviii. p. 225. And now for any danger to men's persons for suffering such a doctrine, this I shall say, that if they who do it are not formally guilty of idolatry, there is no danger that they whom they persuade to it, should be guilty ... When they believe it to be no idolatry, then their so believing it is sufficient security from that crime, which hath so great a tincture and residency in the will, that from thence only it hath its being criminal. Will not this argument justify all idolaters? For surely they believe themselves worshippers either of the Supreme Being under a permitted form, or of some son of God (as Apollo) to whom he has delegated such and such powers. If this be the case, there is no such crime as idolatry: yet the second commandment expressly makes the worshipping of God in or before a visual image of him not only idolatry, but the most hateful species of it. Now do they not worship God in the visible form of bread, and prostrate themselves before pictures of the Trinity? Are we so mad as to suppose that the pious heathens thought the statue of Jupiter, Jove himself? No; and yet these heathens were idolaters. But there was no such being as Jupiter. No! Was there no King of Kings and Lord of Lords; and does the name Jove instead of Jehovah (perhaps the same word too) make the difference? Were Marcus Antoninus and Epictetus idolaters? UNUM NECESSARIUM; OR THE DOCTRINE AND PRACTICE OF REPENTANCE. 1. The first great divines among the Reformers, Luther, Calvin, and their compeers and successors, had thrown the darkness of storms on an awful fact of human nature, which in itself had only the darkness of negations. What was certain, but incomprehensible, they rendered contradictory and absurd by a vain attempt at explication. It was a fundamental fact, and of course could not be comprehended; for to comprehend, and thence to explain, is the same as to perceive, and thence to point out, a something before the given fact, and Standing to it in the relation of cause to effect. Thus they perverted original sin into hereditary guilt, and made God act in the spirit of the cruellest laws of jealous governments towards their enemies, upon the principle of treason in the blood. This was brought in to explain their own explanation of God's ways, and then too often God's alleged way in this case was adduced to justify the cruel state law of treason in the blood. 2. In process of time, good men and of active minds were shocked at this; but, instead of passing back to the incomprehensible fact, with a vault over the unhappy idol forged for its comprehension, they identified the two in name; and while in truth their arguments applied only to a false theory, they rejected the fact for the sake of the mis-solution, and fell into far worse errors. For the mistaken theorist had built upon a foundation, though but a superstructure of chaff and straw; but the opponents built on nothing. Aghast at the superstructure, these latter ran away from that which is the sole foundation of all human religion. 3. Then came the persecutions of the Arminians in Holland; then the struggle in England against the Arminian Laud and all his party--terrible persecutors in their turn of the Calvinists and systematic divines; then the Civil War and the persecutions of the Church by the Puritans in their turn; and just in this state of heated feelings did Taylor write these Works, which contain dogmas subversive of true Christian faith, namely, his 'Unum Necessarium', or Doctrine and Practice of Repentance, which reduces the cross of Christ to nothing, especially in the seventh chapter of the same, and the after defences of it in his Letters on Original Sin to a Lady, and to the Bishop of Rochester; and the Liberty of Prophesying, which, putting toleration on a false ground, has left no ground at all for right or wrong in matters of Christian faith. In the marginal notes, which I have written in these several treatises on Repentance, I appear to myself to have demonstrated that Taylor's system has no one advantage over the Lutheran in respect of God's attributes; that it is 'bona fide' Pelagianism (though he denies it; for let him define that grace which Pelagius would not accept, because incompatible with free will and merit, and profess his belief in it thus defined, and every one of his arguments against absolute decrees tell against himself); and lastly, that its inevitable logical consequences are Socinianism and 'quæ sequuntur'. In Tillotson the face of Arminianism looked out fuller, and Christianity is represented as a mere arbitrary contrivance of God, yet one without reason. Let not the surpassing eloquence of Taylor dazzle you, nor his scholastic retiary versatility of logic illaqueate your good sense. Above all do not dwell too much on the apparent absurdity or horror of the dogma he opposes, but examine what he puts in its place, and receive candidly the few hints which I have admarginated for your assistance, being in the love of truth and of Christ, Your Brother. I have omitted one remark, probably from over fullness of intention to have inserted it. 1. The good man and eloquent expresses his conjectural belief that, if Adam had not fallen, Christ would still have been necessary, though not perhaps by Incarnation. Now, in the first place, this is only a play thought of himself, and Scotus, and perhaps two or three others in the Schools; no article of faith or of general presumption; consequently it has little serious effect even on the guessers themselves. In the next place, if it were granted, yet it would be a necessity wholly 'ex parte Dei', not at all 'ex parte Hominis':--for what does it amount to but this--that God having destined a creature for two states, the earthly rational, and the heavenly spiritual, and having chosen to give him, in the first instance, faculties sufficient only for the first state, must afterwards superinduce those sufficient for the second state, or else God would at once and the same time destine and not destine. This therefore is a mere fancy, a theory, but not a binding religion; no covenant. 2. But the Incarnation, even after the fall of Adam, he clearly makes to be specifically of no necessity. It was only not to take away peevishly the estate of grace from the poor innocent children, because of the father,--according to the good Bishop, a poor ignorant, who before he ate the apple of knowledge did not know what right and wrong was; and Christ's Incarnation would have been no more necessary then than it was before, according to Taylor's belief. Here again the Incarnation is wholly a contrivance 'ex parte Dei', and no way resulting from any default of man. 3. Consequently Taylor neither saw nor admitted any 'a priori' necessity of the Incarnation from the nature of man, and which, being felt by man in his own nature, is itself the greatest of proofs for the admission of it, and the strongest pre-disposing cause of the admission of all proof positive. Not having this, he was to seek 'ab extra' for proofs in facts, in historical evidence in the world of sense. The same causes produce the same effects. Hence Grotius, Taylor, and Baxter (then, as appears in his Life, in a state of uneasy doubt), were the first three writers of evidences of the Christian religion, such as have been since followed up by hundreds,--nine-tenths of them Socinians or Semi-Socinians, and which, taking head and tail, I call the Grotio-Paleyan way. 4. Hence the good man was ever craving for some morsel out of the almsbasket of all external events, in order to prove to himself his own immortality; and, with grief and shame I tell it, became evidence and authority in Irish stories of ghosts, and apparitions, and witches. Let those who are astonished refer to Glanville on Witches, and they will be more astonished still. The fact now stated at once explains and justifies my anxiety in detecting the errors of this great and excellent genius at their fountain head,--the question of Original Sin: for how important must that error be which ended in bringing Bishop Jeremy Taylor forward as an examiner, judge, and witness in an Irish apparition case! Ib. s. xxxviii. p. 278. Although God exacts not an impossible law under eternal and insufferable pains, yet he imposes great holiness in unlimited and indefinite measures, with a design to give excellent proportions of reward answerable to the greatness of our endeavour. Hell is not the end of them that fail in the greatest measures of perfection; but great degrees of heaven shall be their portion who do all that they can always, and offend in the fewest instances. It is not to be denied that one if not more of the parables appears to sanction this, but the same parables would by consequence seem to favour a state of Purgatory. From John, Paul, and the philosophy of the doctrine, I should gather a different faith, and find a sanction for this too in one of the parables, namely, that of the labourer at the eleventh hour. Heaven, bliss, union with God through Christ, do not seem to me comparative terms, or conceptions susceptible of degree. But it is a difficult question. The first Fathers of the Reformation, and the early Fathers of the primitive Church, present different systems, and in a very different spirit. Ib. p. 324-328. Descriptions of repentance taken from the Holy Scriptures. This is a beautiful collection of texts. Still the pious but unconverted Jew (a Moses Mendelsohn, for instance), has a right to ask, What then did Christ teach or do, such and of such additional moment as to be rightfully entitled the founder of a new law, instead of being, like Isaiah and others, an enforcer and explainer of the old? If Christianity, or the 'opus operans' of Redemption, was synchronous with the Fall of man, then the same answer must be returned to the passages here given from the Old Testament as to those from the New; namely, that Sanctification is the result of Redemption, not its efficient cause or previous condition. Assuredly [Greek: metanóaesis] and Sanctification differ only as the plant and the growth or growing of the plant. But the words of the Apostle (it will be said) are exhortative and dehortative. Doubtless! and so would be the words of a wise physician addressed to a convalescent. Would this prove that the patient's revalescence had been independent of the medicines given him? The texts are addressed to the free will, and therefore concerning possible objects of free will. No doubt! Should that process, the end and virtue of which is to free the will, destroy the free will? But I cannot make it out to my understanding, how the two are compatible.--Answer; the spirit knows the things of the spirit. Here lies the sole true ground of Latitudinarianism, Arminian, or Socinian; and this is the sole and sufficient confutation; 'spiritualia spiritus cognoscit'. Would you understand with your ears instead of hearing with your understanding? Now, as the ears to the understanding, so is the understanding to the spirit. This Plato knew; and art thou a master in Israel, and knowest it not? Ib. p. 330. 'Who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant, wherewith he was sanctified, an unholy thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace'. By this passage we must interpret the words "sin wilfully," in reference to an unpardonable sin, in the preceding sentence. Of the moral capacity of sinful habits. Ib. s. ii. p. 432. Probably from the holiness of his own life, Taylor has but just fluttered about a bad habit, not fully described it. He has omitted, or rather described contradictorily, the case of those with whom the objections to sin are all strengthened, the dismal consequences more glaring and always present to them as an avenging fury, the sin loathed, detested, hated; and yet, spite of all this, nay, the more for all this, perpetrated. Both lust and intemperance would furnish too many instances of these most miserable victims. Ib. s. xxxix. p. 456. For every vicious habit being radicated in the will, and being a strong love, inclination and adhesion to sin, unless the natural being of this love be taken off, the enmity against God remains. But the most important question is as to those vicious habits in which there is no love to sin, but only a dread and recoiling from intolerable pain, as in the case of the miserable drunkard! I trust that these epileptic agonies are rather the punishments than the augumenters of his guilt. The annihilation of the wicked is a fearful thought, yet it would solve many difficulties both in natural religion and in Scripture. And Taylor in his Arminian dread of Calvinism is always too shy of this "grace of God:" he never denies, yet never admits, it any separate operancy 'per se'. And this, I fancy, is the true distinction of Arminianisrn and Calvinism in their moral effects. Arminianism is cruel to individuals, for fear of damaging the race by false hopes and improper confidences; while Calvinism is horrible for the race, but full of consolation to the suffering individual. The next section is, taken together, one of the many instances that confirm my opinion that Calvinism (Archbishop Leighton's for example), compared with Taylor's Arminianism, is as the lamb in the wolf's skin to the wolf in the lamb's skin: the one is cruel in the phrases, the other in the doctrine. Ib. s. lvi. p. 469. But if a single act of contrition cannot procure pardon of sins that are habitual, then a wicked man that returns not till it be too late to root out vicious habits, must despair of salvation. I answer, &c. Would not Taylor's purposes have been sufficiently attained by pressing the contrast between attrition and contrition with faith, and the utter improbability that the latter (which alone can be efficient), shall be vouchsafed to a sinner who has continued in his sins in the flattery of a death-bed repentance; a blasphemy that seems too near that against the Holy Ghost? My objection to Taylor is, that he seems to reduce the death of Christ almost to a cypher; a contrivance rather to reconcile the attributes of God, than an act of infinite love to save sinners. But the truth is, that this is the peccant part of Arminianism, and Tillotson is yet more open than Taylor. Forbid me, common goodness, that I should think Tillotson conscious of Socinianism! but that his tenets involved it, I more than suspect. See his Discourses on Transubstantiation, and those near it in the same volume. Ib. lxiv. p. 478. Now there is no peradventure, but new-converted persons, heathens newly giving up their names to Christ and being baptized, if they die in an hour, and were baptized half an hour after they believe in Christ, are heirs of salvation. This granted, I should little doubt of confuting all the foregoing, as far as I object to it. I would rather be 'durus pater infantum', like Austin, than 'durus pater ægrotantium'. Taylor considers all Christians who are so called. Ib. s. lxvi. p. 481. All this paragraph is as just as it is fine and lively, but far from confirming Taylor's doctrine. The case is as between one individual and a general rule. I know God's mercy and Christ's merits; but whether your heart has true faith in them, I cannot know. 'Be it unto thee according to thy faith', said Christ: so should his ministers say. All these passages, however, are utterly irreconcilable with the Roman doctrine, that the priest's absolution is operant, and not simply declarative. As to the decisions of Paulinus and Asterius, it is to be feared that they had the mortmain bequests and compensations in view more than the words of St. Paul, or the manifest purposes of redemption by faith. Yea, Taylor himself has his 'redime peccata eleemosynis'. By the by, I know of few subjects that have been more handled and less rationally treated than this of alms-giving. Every thing a rich man purchases beyond absolute necessaries, ought to be purchased in the spirit of alms, that is, as the most truly beneficial way of disparsing that wealth, of which he is the steward, not owner. Ib. St. Paul taught us this secret, that sins are properly made habitual upon the stock of impunity. 'Sin taking occasion by the law wrought in me all concupiscence'; [Greek: 'aphormàen labousa'], 'apprehending impunity,' [Greek: 'dià taes entolaes'], 'by occasion of the commandment,' that is, so expressed and established as it was; because in the commandment forbidding to lust or covet, there was no penalty annexed or threatened in the sanction or in the explication. Murder was death, and so was adultery and rebellion. Theft was punished severely too; and so other things in their proportion; but the desires God left under a bare restraint, and affixed no penalty in the law. Now sin, that is, men that had a mind to sin, taking occasion hence, &c. This is a very ingenious and very plausible exposition of St. Paul's words; but surely, surely, it is not the right one. I find both the meaning and the truth of the Apostle's words in the vividness and consequently attractive and ad-(or in-)sorbent power given to an image or thought by the sense of its danger, by the consciousness of its being forbidden,--which, in an unregenerate and unassisted will, struggling with, or even exciting, the ever ready inclination of corrupted nature, produces a perplexity and confusion which again increase the person's susceptibility of the soliciting image or fancy so intensified. Guilt and despair add a stimulus and sting to lust. See Iago in Shakspeare. Ib. s. xi. p. 500. It was not well with thee when thou didst first enter into the suburbs of hell by single actions of sin, &c. Aye! this is excellent indeed, and worthy of a guardian angel of the Church. When Jeremy Taylor escapes from the Mononomian Romaism, which netted him in his too eager recoil from the Antinomian boar, brought forth and foddered (as he imagined) in Calvin's stye; when from this wiry net he escapes into the devotional and the dietetic, as into a green meadow-land, with springs, and rivulets, and sheltering groves, where he leads his flock like a shepherd;--then it is that he is most himself,--then only he is all himself, the whole Jeremy Taylor; or if there be one other subject graced by the same total heautophany, it is in the pouring forth of his profound common sense on the ways and weaknesses of men and conflicting sects, as for instance, in the admirable birth, parentage, growth, and consummation of a religious controversy in his 'Dissuasive from Popery'. Ib. s. xiii. p. 502. Let every old man that repents of the sins of his evil life be very diligent in the search of the particulars; that by drawing them into a heap, and spreading them before his eyes, he may be mightily ashamed at their number and burthen. I dare not condemn, but I am doubtful of this as a universal rule. If there be a true hatred of sin, the precious time and the spiritual 'nisus' will, I think, be more profitably employed in enkindling meditation on holiness, and thirstings after the mind of Christ. Ib. ss. xxxi-xxxv. pp..517, 518. Scarce a word in all this but for form's sake concerning the merits and sacrifice of the Incarnate God! Surely Luther would not have given this advice to a dying penitent, but have directed him rather to employ his little time in agony of prayer to Christ, or in earnest meditations on the astounding mystery of his death. In Taylor man is to do every thing. Vol. IX. s. xi. p. 5. For God was so exasperated with mankind, that being angry he would still continue that punishment even to the lesser sins and sinners, which he only had first threatened to Adam; and so Adam brought it upon them. And such a phrase as this used by a man in a refutation of Original Sin, on the ground of its incompatibility with God's attributes! "Exasperated" with those whom Taylor declares to have been innocent and most unfortunate, the two things that most conciliate love and pity! Ib. p. 6. If the sequel of the paragraph, comparing God to David in one of his worst actions, be not blasphemy, the reason is that the good man meant it not as such. 'In facto est, sed non' in agents. Ib. ss. xvi. xvii. pp. 8, 9. For the further explication of which it is observable that the word 'sinner' and 'sin' in Scripture is used for any person, that hath a fault or a legal impurky, a debt, a vitiosity, defect, or imposition, &c. These facts, instead of explaining away Original Sin, are unintelligible, nay, absurd and immoral, except as shadows, types, and symbols of it, and of the Redemption from it. Observe, too, that Taylor never dares explain what he means by "Adam was mortal of himself and we are mortal from him:" he did not dare affirm that soul and body are alike material and perishable, even as the lute and the potentiality of music in the lute. And yet if he believed the contrary, then, in his construction of the doctrine of Original Sin, what has Christ done? St. John died in the same sense as Abel died: and in the sense of the Church of England neither died, but only slept in the Lord. This same system forced Taylor into the same error which Warburton afterwards dressed up with such trappings and trammels of erudition, in direct contempt of the plain meaning of the Church's article; and he takes it for granted, in many places, that the Jews under Moses knew only of temporal life and the death of the body. Lastly, he greatly degrades the mind of man by causelessly representing death as an evil in itself, which, if it be considered as a crisis, or phenomenal change, incident to a progressive being, ought as little to be thought so, as the casting of the caterpillar's skin to make room for the wings of the butterfly. It is the unveiling of the Psyche. I do not affirm this as an article of Christian faith; but I say that no candid writer ought to hide himself in double meanings. Either he should have used the term 'death' ('ex Adamo') as loss of body, or as change of mode of being and of its circumstances; and again this latter as either evil for all, or as evil or good according to the moral habits of each individual. Observe, however, once for all, that I do not pretend to account for Original Sin. I declare it to be an unaccountable fact. How can we explain a 'species', when we are wholly in the dark as to the 'genus'? Now guilt itself, as well as all other immediate facts of free will, is absolutely inexplicable; of course original guilt. If we will perversely confound the intelligible with the sensible world, misapply the logic appropriate to _phænomena_ and the categories, or forms, which are empty except as substantialized in facts of experience, in order to use them as the Procrustes' bed of faith respecting noumena: if in short, we will strive to understand that of which we can only know [Greek: hoti estì], we may and must make as wild work with reason, will, conscience, guilt, and virtue, as with Original Sin and Redemption. On every subject first ask, Is it among the [Greek: aisthaetà], or the [Greek: noúmena]? Ib. s. xxiii. p. 12. It could not make us heirs of damnation. This I shall the less need to insist upon, because, of itself, it seems so horrid to impute to the goodness and justice of God to be author of so great calamity to innocents, &c. Never was there a more hazardous way of reasoning, or rather of placing human ignorance in the judgment seat over God's wisdom. The whole might be closely parodied in support of Atheism: rather, this is but a paraphrase of the old atheistic arguments. Either God could not, or would not, prevent the moral and physical evils of the universe, including the everlasting anguish of myriads of millions: therefore he is either not all-powerful or not all-good: but a being deficient in power or goodness is not God:--_Ergo, &c._ Ib. s. xxv. p. 13. I deny not but all persons naturally are so, that they cannot arrive at heaven; but unless some other principle be put into them, or some great grace done for them, must for ever stand separate from seeing the face of God. But this is but accidentally occasioned by the sin of Adam. Just so might I say, that without the great grace of air done for them no living beings could live. If it mean more, pray where was the grace in creating a being, who without an especial grace must pass into utter misery? If Taylor reply; but the grace was added in Christ: why so say the Calvinists. According to Taylor there is no fall of man; but only an act and punishment of a man, which punishment consisted in his living in the kitchen garden, instead of the flower garden and orchard: and Cain was as likely to have murdered Abel before, as after, the eating of the forbidden fruit. But the very name of the fruit confutes Taylor. Adam altered his nature by it. Cain did not. What Adam did, I doubt not, we all do. Time is not with things of spirit. Ib. s. xxvii. p. 14. Is hell so easy a pain, or are the souls of children of so cheap, so contemptible a price, that God should so easily throw them into hell? This is an argument against the 'sine qua non' of Baptism, not against Original Sin. Ib. s. lxvii. p. 49. Origen said enough to be mistaken in the question. [Greek: Hharà tò Adàm koinàe pánt'on esti. Kaì tà katà taes gynaikòs, ouk esti kath aes ou légetai.] 'Adam's curse is common to all. And there is not a woman on earth, to whom may not be said those things which were spoken to this woman.' Origen's words ought to have prevented all mistake, for he plainly enough overthrows the phantom of hereditary guilt; and as to guilt from a corruption of nature, it is just such guilt as the carnivorous appetites of a weaned lion, or the instinct of a brood of ducklings to run to water. What then is it? It is an evil, and therefore seated in the will; common to all men, the beginning of which no man can determine in himself or in others. How comes this? It is a mystery, as the will itself. Deeds are in time and space, therefore have a beginning. Pure action, that is, the will, is a 'noumenon', and irreferable to time. Thus Origen calls it neither hereditary nor original, but universal sin. The curse of Adam is common to all men, because what Adam did, we all do: and thus of Eve. You may substitute any woman in her place, and the same words apply. This is the true solution of this unfortunate question. The [Greek: pr'oton pseudos] is in the dividing the will from the acts of the will. The will is 'ego-agens'. Ib. s. lxxxii. p. 52. This paragraph, though very characteristic of the Author, is fitter for a comedy than for a grave discourse. It puts one in mind of the play--"More sacks in the mill! Heap, boys, heap!" Ib. s. lxxxiv. p. 56. 'Præposterum est' (said Paulus the lawyer) 'ante nos locupletes dici quam acquisiverimus'. We cannot be said to lose what we never had; and our fathers' goods were not to descend upon us, unless they were his at his death. Take away from me the knowledge that he was my father, dear Bishop, and this will be true. But as it stands, the whole is, "says Paulus the Lawyer;" and, "Well said, Lawyer!" say I. Ib. p. 57. Which though it was natural, yet from Adam it began to be a curse; just as the motion of a serpent upon his belly, which was concreated with him, yet upon this story was changed into a malediction and an evil adjunct. How? I should really like to understand this. Ib. ch. vii. p. 73 'in initio'. In this most eloquent treatise we may detect sundry logical lapses, sometimes in the statement, sometimes in the instances, and once or twice in the conclusions. But the main and pervading error lies in the treatment of the subject 'in genere' by the forms and rules of conceptual logic; which deriving all its material from the senses, and borrowing its forms from the sense ([Greek: aisthaesis katharà]) or intuitive faculty, is necessarily inapplicable to spiritual mysteries, the very definition or contra-distinguishing character of which is that they transcend the sense, and therefore the understanding, the faculty, as Archbishop Leighton and Immanuel Kant excellently define it, which judges according to sense. In the Aids to Reflection, [12] I have shewn that the proper function of the understanding or mediate faculty is to collect individual or sensible concretes into kinds and sorts ('genera et species') by means of their common characters ('notæ communes'); and to fix and distinguish these conceptions (that is, generalized perceptions) by words. Words are the only immediate objects of the understanding. Spiritual verities, or truths of reason 'respective ad realia', and herein distinguished from the merely formal, or so called universal truths, are differenced from the conceptions of the understanding by the immediatcy of the knowledge, and from the immediate truths of sense,--that is, from both pure and mixed intuitions,--by not being sensible, that is, not representable by figure, measurement or weight; nor connected with any affection of our sensibility, such as color, taste, odors, and the like. And such knowledges we, when we speak correctly, name ideas. Now Original Sin, that is, sin that has its origin in itself, or in the will of the sinner, but yet in a state or condition of the will not peculiar to the individual agent, but common to the human race, is an idea: and one diagnostic or contra-distinguishing mark appertaining to all ideas, is, that they are not adequately expressible by words. An idea can only be expressed (more correctly suggested) by two contradictory positions; as for example; the soul is all in every part;--nature is a sphere, the centre of which is everywhere, and its circumference no where, and the like. Hence many of Bishop Taylor's objections, grounded on his expositions of the doctrine, prove nothing more than that the doctrine concerns an idea. But besides this, Taylor everywhere assumes the consequences of Original Sin as superinduced on a pre-existing nature, in no essential respect differing from our present nature;--for instance, on a material body, with its inherent appetites and its passivity to material agents;--in short, on an animal nature in man. But this very nature, as the antagonist of the spirit or supernatural principle in man, is in fact the Original Sin,--the product of the will indivisible from the act producing it; just as in pure geometry the mental construction is indivisible from the constructive act of the intuitive faculty. Original Sin, as the product, is a fact concerning which we know by the light of the idea itself, that it must originate in a self-determination of a will. That which we do not know is how it originates, and this we cannot explain; first, from the necessity of the subject, namely, the will; and secondly, because it is an idea, and all ideas are inconceivable. It is an idea, because it is not a conception. Ib. s. ii. p. 74, 75. And they are injurious to Christ, who think that from Adam we might have inherited immortality. Christ was the giver and preacher of it; 'he brought life and immortality to light through the gospel'. It is a singular benefit given by God to mankind through Jesus Christ. And none inherit it but those who are born of Christ; 'ergo', bad men and infidels are not immortal. Immortality is one thing, a happy immortality another. St. Paul meant the latter: Taylor either the former, or his words have no meaning at all; for no man ever thought or dreamed that we inherited heaven from Adam, but that as sons of Adam, that is, as men, we have souls that do not perish with the body. I often suspect that Taylor, in 'abditis fidei' [Greek: es_oterikaes], inclined to the belief that there is no other immortality but heaven, and that hell is a 'pæna damni negativa, haud privativa'. I own myself strongly inclined to it;--but so many texts against it! I am confident that the doctrine would be a far stronger motive than the present; for no man will believe eternal misery of himself, but millions would admit, that if they did not amend their lives they would be undeserving of living for ever. Ib. s. vi. p. 77. [Greek: hina màe plaemmúra tòn en haemin katapontísae logismòn eis tòn taes hamartiás buthón.] "Lest the tumultuous crowd throw the reason within us over bridge into the gulf of sin." What a vivid figure! It is enough to make any man set to work to read Chrysostom. Ib. ... 'peccantes mente sub una.' Note Prudentius's use of 'mente sub una' for 'in one person.' Ib. p. 78. For even now we see, by a sad experience, that the afflicted and the miserable are not only apt to anger and envy, but have many more desires and more weaknesses, and consequently more aptnesses to sin in many instances than those who are less troubled. And this is that which was said by Arnobius; 'proni ad culpas, et ad libidinis varios appetitos vitio sumus infirmitatis ingenitæ'. No. Arnobius never said so good and wise a thing in his lifetime. His quoted words have no such profound meaning. Ib. s. vii. p. 78. That which remained was a reasonable soul, fitted for the actions of life and reason, but not of anything that was supernatural. What Taylor calls reason I call understanding, and give the name reason to that which Taylor would have called spirit. Ib. s. xii. p. 84. And all that evil which is upon us, being not by any positive infliction, but by privative, or the taking away gifts, and blessings, and graces from us, which God, not having promised to give, was neither naturally, nor by covenant, obliged to give,--it is certain he could not be obliged to continue that to the sons of a sinning father, which to an innocent father he was not obliged to give. Oh! certainly not, if hell were not attached to acts and omissions, which without these very graces it is morally impossible for men to avoid. Why will not Taylor speak out? Ib. s. xiv. p. 85. The doctrine of the ancient Fathers was that free will remained in us after the Fall. Yea! as the locomotive faculty in a man in a strait waistcoat. Neither St. Augustine nor Calvin denied the remanence of the will in the fallen spirit; but they, and Luther as well as they, objected to the flattering epithet 'free' will. In the only Scriptural sense, as concerning the unregenerate, it is implied in the word will, and in this sense, therefore, it is superfluous and tautologic; and, in any other sense, it is the fruit and final end of Redemption,--the glorious liberty of the Gospel. Ib. s. xvi. p. 92. For my part I believe this only as certain, that nature alone cannot bring them to heaven, and that Adam left us in a state in which we could not hope for it. This is likewise my belief, and that man must have had a Christ, even if Adam had continued in Paradise--if indeed the history of Adam be not a 'mythos'; as, but for passages in St. Paul, we should most of us believe; the serpent speaking, the names of the trees, and so on; and the whole account of the creation in the first chapter of Genesis seems to me clearly to say:--"The literal fact you could not comprehend if it were related to you; but you may conceive of it as if it had taken place thus and thus." Ib. s. 1. p. 166. That in some things our nature is cross to the divine commandment, is not always imputable to us, because our natures were before the commandment. This is what I most complain of in Jeremy Taylor's ethics; namely, that he constantly refers us to the deeds or 'phenomena' in time, the effluents from the source, or like the 'species' of Epicurus; while the corrupt nature is declared guiltless and irresponsible; and this too on the pretext that it was prior in time to the commandment, and therefore not against it. But time is no more predicable of eternal reason than of will; but not of will; for if a will be at all, it must be 'ens spirituale'; and this is the first negative definition of spiritual--whatever having true being is not contemplable in the forms of time and space. Now the necessary consequence of Taylor's scheme is a conscience-worrying, casuistical, monkish work-holiness. Deeply do I feel the difficulty and danger that besets the opposite scheme; and never would I preach it, except under such provisos as would render it perfectly compatible with the positions previously established by Taylor in this chapter, s. xliv. p. 158. 'Lastly; the regenerate not only hath received the Spirit of God, but is wholly led by him,' &c. Ib. If this Treatise of Repentance contain Bishop Taylor's habitual and final convictions, I am persuaded that in some form or other he believed in a Purgatory. In fact, dreams and apparitions may have been the pretexts, and the immense addition of power and wealth which the belief entailed on the priesthood, may have been their motives for patronizing it; but the efficient cause of its reception by the churches is to be found in the preceding Judaic legality and monk-moral of the Church, according to which the fewer only could hope for the peace of heaven as their next immediate state. The holiness that sufficed for this would evince itself (it was believed) by the power of working miracles. Ib. s. lii. p. 208. 'It shall not be pardoned in this world nor in the world to come'; that is, neither to the Jews nor to the Gentiles. For 'sæculum hoc', this world, in Scripture, is the period of the Jews' synagogue, and [Greek: mellon aion], the world to come, is taken for the Gospel, or the age of the Messias, frequently among the Jews. This is, I think, a great and grievous mistake. The Rabbis of best name divide into two or three periods, the difference being wholly in the words; for the dividers by three meant the same as those by two. The first was the 'dies expectationis', or 'hoc sæculum,' [Greek: en touto kairo]: the second 'dies Messiæ', the time of the Messiah, that is, the 'millenium': the third the 'sæculum futurum', or future state, which last was absolutely spiritual and celestial. But many Rabbis made the 'dies Messiæ' part, that is, the consummation of this world, the conclusive Sabbath of the great week, in which they supposed the duration of the earth or world of the senses to be comprised; but all agreed that the 'dies', or thousand years, of the Messiah was a transitional state, during which the elect were gradually defecated of body, and ripened for the final or spiritual state. During the 'millenium' the will of God will be done on earth, no less, though in a lower glory, than it will be done hereafter in heaven. Now it is to be carefully observed that the Jewish doctors or Rabbis (all such at least as remained unconverted) had no conception or belief of a suffering Messiah, or of a period after the birth of the Messiah, previous to the kingdom, and of course included in the time of expectation. The appearance of the Messiah and his assumption of the throne of David were to be contemporaneous. The Christian doctrine of a suffering Messiah, or of Christ as the high priest and intercessor, has of course introduced a modification of the Jewish scheme. But though there is a seeming discrepance in different texts in the first three Gospels, yet the Lord's Prayer appears to determine the question in favour of the elder and present Rabbinical belief; that is, it does not date the 'dies Messiae,' or kingdom of the Lord, from his Incarnation, but from a second coming in power and glory, and hence we are taught to pray for it as an event yet future. Nay, our Lord himself repeatedly speaks of the Son of Man in the third person, as yet to come. Assuredly our Lord ascended the throne and became a King on his final departure from his disciples. But it was the throne of his Father, and he an invisible King, the sovereign Providence to whom all power was committed. And this celestial kingdom cannot be identified with that under which the divine will will be done on earth as it is in heaven; that is, when on this earth the Church militant shall be one in holiness with the triumphant Church. The difficulties, I confess, are great; and for those who believe the first Gospel (and this in its present state) to have been composed by the Apostle Matthew, or at worst to be a literal and faithful translation from a Hebrew (Syro-Chaldaic) Gospel written by him, and who furthermore contend for its having been word by word dictated by an infallible Spirit, the necessary duty of reconciling the different passages in the first Gospel with each other, and with others in St. Luke's, is, 'me saltern judice', a most Herculean one. The most consistent and rational scheme is, I am persuaded, that which is adopted in the Apocalypse. The new creation, commencing with our Lord's resurrection, and measured as the creation of this world ('hujus sæculi', [Greek: toutou ai_onos]) was by the doctors of the Jewish church--namely, as a week--divided into two principal epochs,--the six sevenths or working days, during which the Gospel was gradually to be preached in all the world, and the number of the elect filled up,--and the seventh, the Sabbath of the Messiah, or the kingdom of Christ on earth in a new Jerusalem. But as the Jewish doctors made the day (or one thousand years) of Messiah, a part, because the consummation, of this world, [Greek: toutou aionos toutou kairou], so the first Christians reversely made the kingdom commence on the first (symbolical) day of the sacred week, the last or seventh day of which was to be the complete and glorious manifestation of this kingdom. If any one contends that the kingdom of the Son of Man, and the re-descent of our Lord with his angels in the clouds, are to be interpreted spiritually, I have no objection; only you cannot pretend that this was the interpretation of the disciples. It may be the right, but it was not the Apostolic belief. Ib. s. 1. p. 257. For this was giving them pardon, by virtue of those words of Christ, 'Whose sins ye remit, they are remitted;' that is, if ye, who are the stewards of my family, shall admit any one to the kingdom of Christ on earth, they shall be admitted to the participation of Christ's kingdom in heaven; and what ye bind here shall be bound there; that is, if they be unworthy to partake of Christ here, they shall be accounted unworthy to partake of Christ hereafter. Then without such a gift of reading the hearts of men, as priests do not now pretend to, this text means almost nothing. A wicked shall not, but a good man shall, be admitted to heaven; for if you have with good reason rejected any one here, I will reject him hereafter, amounts to no more than the rejection or admission of men according to their moral fitness or unfitness, the truth or unsoundness of their faith and repentance. I rather think that the promise, like the miraculous insight which it implies, was given to the Apostles and first disciples exclusively, and that it referred almost wholly to the admission of professed converts to the Church of Christ. 'In fine'. I have written but few marginal notes to this long Treatise, for the whole is to my feeling and apprehension so Romish, so anti-Pauline, so unctionless, that it makes my very heart as dry as the desert sands, when I read it. Instead of partial animadversions, I prescribe the chapter on the Law and the Gospel, in Luther's 'Table Talk', as the general antidote. [13] VINDICATION OF THE GLORY OF THE DIVINE ATTRIBUTES IN THE QUESTION OF ORIGINAL SIN. Ib. Obj. iv. p. 346. But if Original Sin be not a sin properly, why are children baptized? And what benefit comes to them by Baptism? I answer, as much as they need, and are capable of. The eloquent man has plucked just prickles enough out of the dogma of Original Sin to make a thick and ample crown of thorns for his opponents; and yet left enough to tear his own clothes off his back, and pierce through the leather jerkin of his closeliest wrought logic. In this answer to this objection he reminds me of the renowned squire, who first scratched out his eyes in a quickset hedge, and then leaped back and scratched them in again. So Jeremy Taylor first pulls out the very eyes of the doctrine, leaves it blind and blank, and then leaps back into it and scratches them in again, but with a most opulent squint that looks a hundred ways at once, and no one can tell which it really looks at. Ib. By Baptism children are made partakers of the Holy Ghost and of the grace of God; which I desire to be observed in opposition to the Pelagian heresy, who did suppose nature to be so perfect, that the grace of God was not necessary, and that by nature alone, they could go to heaven; which because I affirm to be impossible, and that Baptism is therefore necessary, because nature is insufficient and Baptism is the great channel of grace, &c. What then of the poor heathens, that is, of five-sixths of all mankind. Would more go to hell by nature alone? If so: where is God's justice in Taylor's plan more than in Calvin's? Ib. Obj. v. p. 355. Although I have shewn the great excess and abundance of grace by Christ over the evil that did descend by Adam; yet the proportion and comparison lies in the main emanation of death from one, and life from the other. Does Jeremy Taylor then believe that the sentence of death on Adam and his sons extended to the soul; that death was to be absolute cessation of being! Scarcely I hope. But if bodily only, where is the difference between 'ante' and 'post Christum?' Ib. p. 356. Not that God could be the author of a sin to any, but that he appointed the evil which is the consequent of sin, to be upon their heads who descended from the sinner. Rare justice! and this too in a tract written to rescue God's justice from the Supra- and Sub-lapsarians! How quickly would Taylor have detected in an adversary the absurd realization contained in this and the following passages of the abstract notion, sin, from the sinner: as if sin were any thing but a man sinning, or a man who has sinned! As well might a sin committed in Sirius or the planet Saturn justify the infliction of conflagration on the earth and hell-fire on all its rational inhabitants. Sin! the word sin! for abstracted from the sinner it is no more: and if not abstracted from him, it remains separate from all others. Ib. p. 358. The consequent of this discourse must needs at least be this; that it is impossible that the greatest part of mankind should be left in the eternal bonds of hell by Adam; for then quite contrary to the discourse of the Apostle, there had been abundance of sin, but a scarcity of grace. And yet Jeremy Taylor will not be called a Pelagian. Why? Because without grace superadded by Christ no man could be saved: that is, all men must go to hell, and this not for any sin, but from a calamity, the consequences of another man's sin, of which they were even ignorant. God would not condemn them the sons of Adam for sin, but only inflicted on them an evil, the necessary effect of which was that they should all troop to the devil! And this is Jeremy Taylor's defence of God's justice! The truth is Taylor was a Pelagian, believed that without Christ thousands, Jews and heathens, lived wisely and holily, and went to heaven; but this he did not dare say out, probably not even to himself; and hence it is that he flounders backward and forward, now upping and now downing. In truth, this eloquent Treatise may be compared to a statue of Janus, with one face fixed on certain opponents, full of life and force, a witty scorn on the lip, a brow at once bright and weighty with satisfying reason: the other looking at the something instead of that which had been confuted, maimed, noseless, and weather-bitten into a sort of visionary confusion and indistinctness. [14] It looks like this--aye and very like that--but how like it is, too, such another thing! AN ANSWER TO A LETTER WRITTEN BY THE RIGHT REV. THE LORD BISHOP OF ROCHESTER, CONCERNING THE CHAPTER OF ORIGINAL SIN, IN THE "UNUM NECESSARIUM." Ib. p. 367. And they who are born eunuchs should be less infected by Adam's pollution, by having less of concupiscence in the great instance of desires. The fact happens to be false: and then the vulgarity, most unworthy of our dear Jeremy Taylor, of taking the mode of the manifestation of the disobedience of the will to the reason, for the disobedience itself. St. James would have taught him that he who offendeth against one, offendeth against all; and that there is some truth in the Stoic paradox that all crimes are equal. Equal is indeed a false phrase; and therein consists the paradox, which in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred is the same as the falsehood. The truth is they are all the same in kind; but unequal in degree. They are all alike, though not equally, against the conscience. Ib. p. 369. So that there is no necessity of a third place; but it concludes only that in the state of separation from God's presence there is great variety of degrees and kinds of evil, and every one is not the extreme. What is this? If hell be a state, and not a mere place, and a particular state, its meaning must in common sense be a state of the worst sort. If then there be a mere 'pæna damni', that is, the not being so blest as some others may be; this is a different state 'in genere' from the 'pæna sensus': 'ergo', not hell; 'ergo' rather a third state; or else heaven. For every angel must be in it, than whom another angel is happier; that is negatively damned, though positively very happy. Ib. p. 370-1. Just so it is in infants: hell was not made for man, but for devils; and therefore it must be something besides mere nature that can bear any man thither: mere nature goes neither to heaven or hell. And how came the devils there? If it be hard to explain how Adam fell; how much more hard to solve how purely spiritual beings could fall? And nature! What? so much of nature, and no kind of attempt at a definition of the word? Pray what is nature? Ib. p. 371. I do not say that we, by that sin (original) deserved that death, neither can death be properly a punishment of us, till we superadd some evil of our own; yet Adam's sin deserved it, so that it was justly left to fall upon us, we, as a consequent and punishment of his sin, being reduced to our natural portion. How? What is this but flying to the old Supra-lapsarian blasphemy of a right of property in God over all his creatures, and destroying that sacred distinction between person and thing which is the light and the life of all law human and divine? Mercy on us! Is not agony, is not the stone, is not blindness, is not ignorance, are not headstrong, inherent, innate, and connate, passions driving us to sin when reason is least able to withhold us,--are not all these punishments, grievous punishments, and are they not inflicted on the innocent babe? Is not this the result infused into the 'milk not mingled' of St. Peter; [15] spotting the immaculate begotten, souring and curdling the innocence 'without sin or malice'? [16] And if this be just, and compatible with God's goodness, why all this outcry against St. Austin and the Calvinists and the Lutherans, whose whole addition is a lame attempt to believe guilt, where they cannot find it, in order to justify a punishment which they do find? Ib. p. 379. But then for the evil of punishment, that may pass further than the action. If it passes upon the innocent, it is not a punishment to them, but an evil inflicted by right of dominion; but yet by reason of the relation of the afflicted to him that sinned, to him it is a punishment. Here the snake peeps out, and now takes its tail into its mouth. Right of dominion! Nonsense! Things are not objects of right or wrong. Power of dominion I understand, and right of judgment I understand; but right of dominion can have no immediate, but only a relative, sense. I have a right of dominion over this estate, that is, relatively to all other persons. But if there be a 'jus dominandi' over rational and free agents, then why blame Calvin? For all attributes are then merged in blind power: and God and fate are the same: [Greek: Zeùs kaì Moira kaì aeerophoitis Erinnús] Strange Trinity! God, Necessity, and the Devil. But Taylor's scheme has far worse consequences than Calvin's: for it makes the whole scheme of Redemption a theatrical scenery. Just restore our bodies and corporeal passions to a perfect 'equilibrium' and fortunate instinct, and, there being no guilt or defect in the soul, the Son of God, the Logos, and Supreme Reason, might have remained unincarnate, uncrucified. In short, Socinianism is as inevitable a deduction from Taylor's scheme as Deism or Atheism is from Socinianism. 'In fine'. The whole of Taylor's confusion originated in this;--first, that he and his adversaries confound original with hereditary sin; but chiefly that neither he nor his adversaries had considered that guilt must be a 'noumenon'; but that our images, remembrances, and consciousnesses of our actions are 'phænomena'. Now the 'phænomenon' is in time, and an effect: but the 'noumenon' is not in time any more than it is in space. The guilt has been before we are even conscious of the action; therefore an original sin (that is, a sin universal and essential to man as man, and yet guilt, and yet choice, and yet amenable to punishment), may be at once true and yet in direct contradiction to all our reasonings derived from 'phænomena', that is, facts of time and space. But we ought not to apply the categories of appearance to the [Greek: ontos onta] of the intelligible or causative world. This (I should say of Original Sin) is mystery! We do not so properly believe it, as we know it. What is actual must be possible. But if we will confound actuals with reals, and apply the rules of the latter to cases of the former, we must blame ourselves for the clouds and darkness and storms of opposing winds, which the error will not fail to raise. By the same process an Atheist may demonstrate the contradictory nature of eternity, of a being at once infinite and of resistless causality, and yet intelligent. Jeremy Taylor additionally puzzled himself with Adam, instead of looking into the fact in himself. How came it that Taylor did not apply the same process to the congeneric question of the freedom of the will? In half a dozen syllogisms he must have gyved and hand-cuffed himself into blank necessity and mechanic motions. All hangs together. Deny Original Sin, and you will soon deny free will;--then virtue and vice;--and God becomes 'Abracadabra'; a sound, nothing else. SECOND LETTER TO THE BISHOP OF ROCHESTER. Ib. p. 390-1. To this it is answered as you see, there is a double guilt; a guilt of person, and of nature. That is taken away, this is not: for sacraments are given to persons, not to natures. I need no other passage but this to convince me that Jeremy Taylor, the angle in which the two 'apices' of logic and rhetoric meet, consummate in both, was yet no metaphysician. Learning, fancy, discursive intellect, 'tria juncta in uno', and of each enough to have alone immortalized a man, he had; but yet [Greek: ouden metà physin]. Images, conceptions, notions, such as leave him but one rival, Shakspeare, there were; but no ideas. Taylor was a Gassendist. O! that he had but meditated in the silence of his spirit on the mystery of an 'I AM'! He would have seen that a person, 'quoad' person, can have nothing common or generic; and that where this finds place, the person is corrupted by introsusception of a nature, which becomes evil thereby, and on this relation only is an evil nature. The nature itself, like all other works of God, is good, and so is the person in a yet higher sense of the word, good, like all offsprings of the Most High. But the combination is evil, and this not the work of God; and one of the main ends and results of the doctrine of Original Sin is to silence and confute the blasphemy that makes God the author of sin, without avoiding it by fleeing to the almost equal blasphemy against the conscience, that sin in the sense of guilt does not exist. THE REAL PRESENCE AND SPIRITUAL OF CHRIST IN THE BLESSED SACRAMENT, PROVED AGAINST THE DOCTRINE OF TRANSUBSTANTIATION. Perhaps the most wonderful of all Taylor's works. He seems, if I may so say, to have transubstantiated his vast imagination and fancy into subtlety not to be evaded, acuteness to which nothing remains unpierceable, and indefatigable agility of argumentation. Add to these an exhaustive erudition, and that all these are employed in the service of reason and common sense; whereas in some of his Tracts he seems to wield all sorts of wisdom and wit in defence of all sorts of folly and stupidity. But these were 'ad popellum', and by virtue of the 'falsitas dispensativa', which he allowed himself. Epist. dedicatory. The question of transubstantiation. I have no doubt that if the Pythagorean bond had successfully established itself, and become a powerful secular hierarchy, there would have been no lack of furious partizans to assert, yea, and to damn and burn such as dared deny, that one was the same as two; two being two in the same sense as one is one; that consequently 2+2=2 and 1+1=4. But I should most vehemently doubt that this was the intention of Pythagoras, or the sense in which the mysterious dogma was understood by the thinking part of his disciples, who nevertheless were its professed believers. I should be prepared to find that the true import and purport of the article was no more than this;--that the one in order to its manifestation must appear in and as two; that the act of re-union was simultaneous with that of the self-production, (in the geometrical use of the word 'produce,' as when a point produces, or evolves, itself on each side into a bipolar line), and that the Triad is therefore the necessary form of the Monad. Even so is the dispute concerning Transubstantiation. I can easily believe that a thousand monks and friars would pretend, as Taylor says, to 'disbelieve their eyes and ears, and defy their own reason,' and to receive the dogma in the sense, or rather in the nonsense, here ascribed to it by him, namely, that the phenomenal bread and wine were the phenomenal flesh and blood. But I likewise know that the respectable Roman Catholic theologians state the article free from a contradiction in terms at least; namely, that in the consecrated elements the 'noumena' of the phenomenal bread and wine are the same with that which was the 'noumenon' of the phenomenal flesh and blood of Christ when on earth. Let M represent a slab or plane of mahogany, and m its ordinary supporter or under-prop; and let S represent a slab or plane of silver, and s its supporter. Now to affirm that M = S is a contradiction, or that m = s; but it is no contradiction to say, that on certain occasions (S having been removed) s is substituted for m, and that what was M/m, is by the command of the common master changed into M/s. It may be false in fact, but it is not a self-contradiction in the terms. The mode in which s subsists in M/s may be inconceivable, but not more so than the mode in which m subsists in M/m, or that in which s subsisted in S/s. I honestly confess that I should confine my grounds of opposition to the article thus stated to its unnecessariness, to the want of sufficient proofs from Scripture that I am bound to believe or trouble my head with it. I am sure that Bishop Bull, who really did believe the Trinity, without either Tritheism or Sabellianism, could not consistently have used the argument of Taylor or of Tillotson in proof of the absurdity of Transubstantiation. Ib. p. ccccxvi. But for our dear afflicted mother, she is under the portion of a child in the state of discipline, her government indeed hindered, but her worshippings the same, the articles as true, and those of the church of Rome as false as ever. O how much there is in these few words,--the sweet and comely sophistry, not of Taylor, but of human nature. Mother! child! state of discipline! government hindered! that is to say, in how many instances, scourgings hindered, dungeoning in dens foul as those of hell, mutilation of ears and noses, and flattering the King mad with assertions of his divine right to govern without a Parliament, hindered. The best apology for Laud, Sheldon, and their fellows will ever be that those whom they persecuted were as great persecutors as themselves, and much less excusable. Ib. s. ii. p. 422. 'In Synaxi Transubstantiationem sero definivit Ecclesia; diu satis erat credere, sive sub pane consecrate, sive quocunque modo adesse verum corpus Christi;' so said the great Erasmus. 'Verum corpus,' that is, 'res ipsissima,' or the thing in its actual self, opposed [Greek: to phainomen'o]. Ib. s. vi. p. 425. Now that the spiritual is also a real presence, and that they are hugely consistent, is easily credible to them that believe the gifts of the Holy Ghost are real graces, and a spirit is a proper substance. But how the body of Christ, as opposed to his Spirit and to his Godhead, can be taken spiritually, 'hic labor, hoc opus est.' Plotinus says, [Greek: kai hae hylae as'ómatos]; so we must say here [Greek: kaì tò s'oma as'ómaton]. Ib. s. vii. p. 426. So we may say of the blessed Sacrament; Christ is more truly and really present in spiritual presence than in corporal; in the heavenly effect than in the natural being. But the presence of Christ is not in question, but the presence of Christ's body and blood. Now that Christ effected much for us by coming in the body, which could not or would not have been effected had he not assumed the body, we all, Socinians excepted, believe; but that his body effected it, other than as Christ in the body, where shall we find? how can we understand? Ib. p. 427. So when it is said, 'Flesh and blood shall not inherit the kingdom of God,' that is, corruption shall not inherit; and in the resurrection, our bodies are said to be spiritual, that is, not in substance, but in effect and operation. This is, in the first place, a wilful interpretation, and secondly, it is absurd; for what sort of flesh and blood would incorruptible flesh and blood be? As well might we speak of marble flesh and blood. But in Taylor's mind, as seen throughout, the logician was predominant over the philosopher, and the fancy outbustled the pure intuitive imagination. In the sense of St. Paul, as of Plato and all other dynamic philosophers, flesh and blood is 'ipso facto' corruption, that is, the spirit of life in the mid or balancing state between fixation and reviviscence. 'Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?' is a Hebraism for 'this death which the body is.' For matter itself is but 'spiritus in coagulo,' and organized matter the coagulum in the act of being restored; it is then repotentiating. Stop its self-destruction as matter, and you stop its self-reproduction as a vital organ. In short, Taylor seems to fall into the very fault he reproves in Bellarmine, and with this additional evil, that his reasoning looks more like tricking or explaining away a mystery. For wherein does the Sacrament of the Eucharist differ from that of Baptism, nay, even of grace before meat, when performed fervently and in faith? Here too Christ is present in the hearts of the faithful by blessing and grace. I see at present no other way of interpreting the text so as not to make the Sacrament a mere arbitrary 'memento,' but by an implied negative. In propriety, the word is confined to no portion of corporality in particular. "This (the bread and wine) are as truly my flesh and blood as the 'phænomena' which you now behold and name as such." Ib. s. ix. p. 429. From this paragraph I conclude, though not without some perplexity, that by 'the body and blood verily and indeed taken,' we are not to understand body and blood in their limited sense, as contradistinguished from the soul or Godhead of Christ, but as a 'periphrasis' for Christ himself, or at least Christ's humanity. Taylor, however, has misconstrued Phavorinus' meaning though not his words. 'Spiritualia eterna quoad spiritum.' But this is the very depth of the purified Platonic philosophy. Ib. s. x. p. 430. But because the words do perfectly declare our sense, and are owned publicly in our doctrine and manner of speaking, it will be in vain to object against us those words of the Fathers, which use the same expressions: for if by virtue of those words 'really,' 'substantially,' 'corporally,' 'verily and indeed,' and 'Christ's body and blood,' the Fathers shall be supposed to speak for Transubstantiation, they may as well suppose it to be our doctrine too; for we use the same words, and therefore those authorities must signify nothing against us, unless these words can be proved in them to signify more than our sense of them does import; and by this truth, many, very many of their pretences are evacuated. A sophism, dearest Jeremy. We use the words because these early Fathers used them, and have forced our own definitions on them. But should we have chosen these words to express our opinion by, if there had been no controversy on the subject? But the Fathers chose and selected these words as the most obvious and natural. Ib. s. xi. p. 431. It is much insisted upou that it be inquired whether, when we say we believe Christ's body to be really in the Sacrament, we mean 'that body, that flesh, that was born of the Virgin Mary, that was crucified, dead, and buried?' I answer, that I know none else that he had or hath: there is but one body of Christ natural and glorified. This may be true, or at least intelligible, of Christ's humanity or personal identity as [Greek: nóaeton ti], but applied to the phenomenal flesh and blood, it is nonsense. For if every atom of the human frame be changed by succession in eleven or twelve years, the body born of the Virgin could not be the body crucified, much less the body crucified be the body glorified, spiritual and incorruptible. I construe the words of Clement of Alexandria, quoted by Taylor below, [17] literally, and they perfectly express my opinion; namely, that Christ, both in the institution of the Eucharist and in the sixth chapter of John, spoke of his humanity as a 'noumenon,' not of the specific flesh and blood which were its 'phænomena' at the last supper and on the cross. But Jeremy Taylor was a semi-materialist, and though no man better managed the logic of substance and accidents, he seems to have formed no clear metaphysical notion of their actual meaning. Taken notionally, they are mere interchangeable relations, as in concentric circles the outmost circumference is the substance, the other circles its accidents; but if I begin with the second and exclude the first from my thoughts, then this is substance and the interior ones accidents, and so on; but taken really, we mean the complex action of co-agents on our senses, and accident as only an agent acting on us. Thus we say, the beer has turned sour: sour is the accident of the substance beer. But, in fact, a new agent, oxygen, has united itself with other agents in the joint composition, the essence of which new comer is to be sour: at all events, Taylor's construction is a mere assertion, meaning no more than 'in this sense only can I subscribe to the words of Bertram, Jerome, and Clement.' If a re-union of the Lutheran and English Churches with the Roman were desirable and practicable, the best way, [Greek: h_os emoige dokei,] would be, that any remarkable number should offer union on a given profession of faith chiefly negative, as we protest against the authority of the Church in temporals; that the words agreed to by Beza and Espencoeus, on the part of the Reformers and Romanists respectively, at Poissy, used with implicit faith, shall suffice. 'Credimus in usu coentæ Dominicæ vere, reipsa, substantialiter, seu in substantia, verum corpus et sanguinem Christi spirituali et ineffabili modo esse, exhiberi, sumi a fidelibus communicantibus.' Ib. s. in. p. 434. The other Schoolman I am to reckon in this account, is Gabriel Biel. Taylor should have informed the reader that Gabriel Biel is but the echo of Occam, and that both were ante-Lutheran Protestants in heart, and as far as they dared, in word likewise. Ib. s. vi. p. 436. So that if, according to the Casuists, especially of the Jesuits' order, it be lawful to follow the opinion of any one probable doctor, here we have five good men and true, besides Occam, Bassolis, and Mechior Camus, to acquit us from our search after this question in Scripture. Taylor might have added Erasmus, who, in one of his letters, speaking of Oecolampadius's writings on the Eucharist, says '"ut seduci posse videantur etiam electi,"' and adds, that he should have embraced his interpretations, '"nisi obstaret consensus Ecclesiæ;"' that is, Oecolampadius has convinced me, and I should avow my conviction, but for motives of personal prudence and regard for the public peace. OF THE SIXTH CHAPTER OF ST. JOHN'S GOSPEL. Ib. p. 436. I cannot but think that the same mysterious truth, whatever it be, is referred to in the Eucharist and in this chapter of St. John; and I wonder that Taylor, who makes the Eucharist a spiritual sumption of Christ, should object to it. A = C and B = C, therefore A = B. [18] Ib. s. iv. p. 440. The error on both sides, Roman and Protestant, originates in the confusion of sign or figure with symbol, which latter is always an essential part of that, of the whole of which it is the representative. Not seeing this, and therefore seeing no 'medium' between the whole thing and the mere metaphor of the thing, the Romanists took the former or positive pole of the error, the Protestants the latter or negative pole. The Eucharist is a symbolic, or solemnizing and 'totum in parte' acting of an act, which in a true member of Christ's body is supposed to be perpetual. Thus the husband and wife exercise the duties of their marriage contract of love, protection, obedience, and the like, all the year long, and yet solemnize it by a more deliberate and reflecting act of the same love on the anniversary of their marriage. Ib. s. ix p. 447-8. That which neither can feel or be felt, see or be seen, move or be moved, change or be changed, neither do or suffer corporally, cannot certainly be eaten corporally; but so they affirm concerning the body of our blessed Lord; it cannot do or suffer corporally in the Sacrament, therefore it cannot be eaten corporally, any more than a man can chew a spirit, or eat a meditation, or swallow a syllogism into his belly. Absurd as the doctrine of Transubstantiation may thus be made, yet Taylor here evidently confounds a spirit, 'ens realissimum,' with a mere notion or 'ens logicum.' On this ground of the spirituality of all powers [Greek: donámeis], it would not be difficult to evade many of Taylor's most plausible arguments. Enough, however, and more than enough would be left in their full force. Ib. p. 448. Besides this, I say this corporal union of our bodies to the body of God incarnate, which these great and witty dreamers dream of, would make man to be God. But yet not God, nor absolutely. 'I am in my Father, even so ye are in me.' Ib. s. xxii. p. 456. By this time I hope I may conclude, that Transubstantiation is not taught by our blessed Lord in the sixth chapter of St. John: 'Johannes de tertia et Eucharistica cæna nihil quidem scribit, eo quod cæteri tres Evangelistæ ante ilium eam plene descripsissent.' They are the words of Stapleton and are good evidence against them. I cannot satisfy my mind with this reason, though the one commonly assigned both before and since Stapleton: and yet ignorant, when, why, and for whom John wrote his Gospel, I cannot substitute a better or more probable one. That John believed the command of the Eucharist to have ceased with the destruction of the Jewish state, and the obligation of the cup of blessing among the Jews,--or that he wrote it for the Greeks, unacquainted with the Jewish custom,--would be not improbable, did we not know that the Eastern Church, that of Ephesus included, not only continued this Sacrament, but rivalled the Western Church in the superstition thereof. Ib. s. i. p. 503. Now I argue thus: if we eat Christ's natural body, we eat it either naturally or spiritually: if it be eaten only spiritually, then it is spiritually digested, &c. What an absurdity in the word 'it' in this passage and throughout! Vol. X. s. iii. p. 3. The accidents, proper to a substance, are for the manifestation, a notice of the substance, not of themselves; for as the man feels, but the means by which he feels is the sensitive faculty, so that which is felt, is the substance, and the means by which it is felt is the accident. This is the language of common sense, rightly so called, that is, truth without regard or reference to error; thus only differing from the language of genuine philosophy, which is truth intentionally guarded against error. But then in order to have supported it against an acute antagonist, Taylor must, I suspect, have renounced his Gassendis and other Christian 'Epicuri.' His antagonist would tell him; when a man strikes me with a stick, I feel the stick, and infer the man; but 'pari ratione,' I feel the blow, and infer the stick; and this is tantamount to,--I feel, and by a mechanism of my thinking organ attribute causation to precedent or co-existent images; and this no less in states in which you call the images unreal, that is, in dreams, than when they are asserted by you to have an outward reality. Ib. p. 4. But when a man, by the ministry of the senses, is led into the apprehension of a wrong object, or the belief of a false proposition, then he is made to believe a lie, &c. There are no means by which a man without chemical knowledge could distinguish two similarly shaped lumps, one of sugar and another of sugar of lead. Well! a lump of sugar of lead lies among other artefacts on the shelf of a collector; and with it a label, "Take care! this is not sugar, though it looks so, but crystallized oxide of lead, and it is a deadly poison." A man reads this label, and yet takes and swallows the lump. Would Taylor assert that the man was made to swallow a poison? Now this (would the Romanist say) is precisely the case of the consecrated elements, only putting food and antidote for poison; that is, as far as this argument of Jeremy Taylor is concerned. Ib. p. 5. Just upon this account it is, that St. John's argument had been just nothing in behalf of the whole religion: for that God was incarnate, that Jesus Christ did such miracles, that he was crucified, that he arose again, and ascended into heaven, that he preached these sermons, that he gave such commandments, he was made to believe by sounds, by shapes, by figures, by motions, by likenesses, and appearances, of all the proper accidents. A Socinian might turn this argument with equal force at least, but I think with far greater, against the Incarnation. But it is a sophism, that actually did lead, to Socinianism: for surely bread and wine are less disparate from flesh and blood, than a human body from the Omnipresent Spirit. The disciples would, according to Taylor, Tillotson, and the other Latitudinarian common sense divines, have been justified in answering: "All our senses tell us you are only a man: how should, we believe you when you say the contrary? If we are not to believe all our senses, much less can we believe that we actually hear you." And Taylor in my humble judgment gives a force and extension to the words of St. John, quoted before,--'That which was from the beginning, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have beheld, and our hands have handled of the word of life' (1 Ep.1.),--far greater than they either can, or were meant to, bear. It is beyond all doubt, that the words refer to, and were intended to confute, the heresy which was soon after a prominent doctrine of the Gnostics; namely, that the body of Christ was a phantom. To this St. John replies: I have myself had every proof to the contrary: first, the proof of the senses; secondly, Christ's own assurance. Now this was unanswerable by the Gnostics, without one or the other of two pretences; either that St. John and the other known and appointed Apostles and delegates of the Word were liars; or that the Epistle was spurious. The first was too intolerable: therefore they adopted the second. Observe, the heretics, whom St. John confutes, did not deny the actual presence of the Word with the appearance of a human body, much less the truth of the wonders performed by the Word in this super-human and unearthly 'vice-corpus,' or 'quasi corpus:' least of all, would they assert either that the assurances of the Word were false in themselves, or that the sense of hearing might have been permitted to deceive the beloved Apostle, (which would have been virtual falsehood and a subornation of falsehood), however liable to deception the senses might be generally, and as sole and primary proofs unsupported by antecedent grounds, 'præcognitis vel preconcessis.' And that St. John never thought of advancing the senses to any such dignity and self-sufficiency as proofs, it would be easy to shew from twenty passages of his Gospel. I say, again and again, that I myself greatly prefer the general doctrine of our own Church respecting the Eucharist,--'rem credimus, modum nescimus,'--to either Tran- (or Con-) substantiation, on the one hand, or to the mere 'signum memoriæ causa' of the Sacramentaries. But nevertheless, I think that the Protestant divines laid too much stress on the abjuration of the metaphysical part of the Roman article; as if, even with the admission of Transubstantiation, the adoration was not forbidden and made idolatrous by the second commandment. Ib. s. vi. p. 9. And yet no sense can be deceived in that which it always perceives alike: 'The touch can never be deceived.' Every common juggler falsifies this assertion when he makes the pressure from a shilling seem the shilling itself. "Are you sure you feel it?" "Yes." "Then open your hand. Presto! 'Tis gone." From this I gather that neither Taylor nor Aristotle ever had the nightmare. Ib. p.10. The purpose of which discourse is this: that no notices are more evident and more certain than the notices of sense; but if we conclude contrary to the true dictate of senses, the fault is in the understanding, collecting false conclusions from right premises. It follows, therefore, that in the matter of the Eucharist we ought to judge that which our senses tell us. Very unusually lax reasoning for Jeremy Taylor, whose logic is commonly legitimate even where his metaphysic is unsatisfactory. What Romanist ever asserted that a communicant's palate deceived him, when it reported the taste of bread or of wine in the elements? Ib. s. i. p. 16. When we discourse of mysteries of faith and articles of religion, it is certain that the greatest reason in the world, to which all other reasons must yield, is this--'God hath said it, therefore it is true.' Doubtless: it is a syllogism demonstrative. All that God says is truth, is necessarily true. But God hath said this; 'ergo,' &c. But how is the 'minor' to be proved, that God hath said this? By reason? But it is against reason. By the senses? But it is against the senses. Ib. s. xii. p. 27. First; for Christ's body, his natural body, is changed into a spiritual body, and it is not now a natural body, but a spiritual, and therefore cannot be now in the Sacrament after a natural manner, because it is so no where, and therefore not there: 'It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.' But mercy on me! was this said of the resurgent body of Jesus? a spiritual body, of which Jesus said it was not a spirit. If tangible by Thomas's fingers, why not by his teeth, that is, manducable? Ib. s. xxviii. p. 44. So that if there were a plain revelation of Transubstantiation, then this argument were good ... when there are so many seeming impossibilities brought against the Holy Trinity ... And therefore we have found difficulties, and shall for ever, till, in this article, the Church returns to her ancient simplicity of expression. Taylor should have said, it would have very greatly increased the difficulty of proving that it was really revealed, but supposing that certain, then doubtless it must be believed as far as nonsense can be believed, that is, negatively. From the Apostles' Creed it may be possible to deduce the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity; but assuredly it is not fully expressed therein: and what can Taylor mean by the Church returning to her first simplicity in this article? What less could she say if she taught the doctrine at all, than that the Word and the Spirit are spoken of every where in Scripture as individuals, each distinct from the other, and both from the Father: that of both all the divine attributes are predicated, except self-origination; that the Spirit is God, and the Word is God, and that they with the Father are the one God? And what more does she say now? But Taylor, like Swift, had a strong tendency to Sabellianism. It is most dangerous, and, in its distant consequences, subversive of all Christianity to admit, as Taylor does, that the doctrine of the Trinity is at all against, or even above, human reason in any other sense, than as eternity and Deity itself are above it. In the former, as well as the latter, we can prove that so it must be, and form clear notions by negatives and oppositions. Ib. s. xxix. p. 45. Now concerning this, it is certain it implies a contradiction, that two bodies should be in one place, or possess the place of another, till that be cast forth. So far from it that I believe the contrary; and it would puzzle Taylor to explain a thousand 'phænomena' in chemistry on his certainty. But Taylor assumed matter to be wholly quantitative, which granted, his opinion would become certain. Ib. s. xxxii. p. 49. The door might be made to yield to his Creator as easily as water, which is fluid, be made firm under his feet; for consistence or lability are not essential to wood and water. Here the common basis of water, ice, vapour, steam, 'aqua crystallina', and (possibly) water-gas is called water, and confounded with the species water, that is, the common base 'plus' a given proportion of caloric. To the species water continuity and lability are essential. Ib. p. 50. The words in the text are [Greek: kekleismén_on t_on thyr_on] in the past tense, the gates or doors having been shut; but that they were shut in the instant of Christ's entry, it says not: they might of course, if Christ had so pleased, have been insensibly opened, and shut in like manner again; and, if the words be observed, it will appear that St. John mentioned the shutting the doors in relation to the Apostles' fear, not to Christ's entering: he intended not (so far as appears) to declare a miracle. Thank God! Here comes common sense. Ib. ss. xvi-xvii. pp. 71-73. All most excellent; but O! that Taylor's stupendous wit, subtlety, acuteness, learning and inexhaustible copiousness of argumentation would but tell us what he himself, Dr. Jeremy Taylor, means by eating Christ's body by faith: his body, not his soul or Godhead. Eat a body by faith! A DISSUASIVE FROM POPERY. Part I. Ib. s. ii. p. 137. The sentence of the Fathers in the third general Council, that at Ephesus;--'that it should not be lawful for any man to publish or compose another faith or creed than that which was defined by the Nicene Council.' Upon what ground then does the Church of England reconcile with this decree its reception of the so called Athanasian creed? Ib. s. iv. p. 145. We consider that the doctrines upon which it (Purgatory) is pretended reasonable, are all dubious, and disputable at the very best. Such are ... that the taking away the guilt of sins does not suppose the taking away the obligation to punishment; that is, that when a man's sin is pardoned, he may be punished without the guilt of that sin as justly as with it. The taking away the guilt does not, however, imply of necessity the natural removal of the consequences of sin. And in this sense, I suppose, the subtler Romanists would defend this accursed doctrine. A man may have bitterly repented and thoroughly reformed the sin of drunkenness, and by this genuine 'metanoia' and faith in Christ crucified have obtained forgiveness of the guilt, and yet continue to suffer a heavy punishment in a schirrous liver or incurable dyspepsy. But who authorized the Popes to extend this to the soul? Ib. p. 153. St. Ambrose saith that 'death is a haven of rest.' Consider the strange and oftentimes awful dreams accompanying the presence of irritating matter in the lower abdomen, and the seeming appropriation of particular sorts of dream images and incidents to affections of particular organs and 'viscera.' Do the material causes act positively, so that with the removal of the body by death the total cause is removed, and of course the effects? Or only negatively and indirectly, by lessening and suspending that continuous texture of organic sensation, which, by drawing outward the attention of the soul, sheaths her from her own state and its corresponding activities?--A fearful question, which I too often agitate, and which agitates me even in my dreams, when most commonly I am in one of Swedenborg's hells, doubtful whether I am once more to be awaked, and thinking our dreams to be the true state of the soul disembodied when not united with Christ. On awaking from such dreams, I never fail to find some local pain, 'circa-' or 'infra-'umbilical, with kidney affections, and at the base of the bladder. PART II.--INTRODUCTION. P. 227. But yet because I will humour J.S. for this once; even here also 'The Dissuasive' relies upon a first and self-evident principle as any is in Christianity, and that is, 'Quod primum verum.' I am surprised to meet such an assertion in so acute a logician and so prudent an advocate as Jeremy Taylor. If the 'quod primum verum' mean the first preaching or first institution of Christianity by its divine Founder, it is doubtless an evident inference from the assumed truth of Christianity, or, if you please, evidently implied therein; but surely the truth of the Christian system, composed of historical narrations, doctrines, precepts, and arguments, is no self-evident position, still less, if there be any tenable distinction between the words, a primary truth. How then can an inference from a particular, a variously proveable and proof-requiring, position be itself a universal and self-evident one? But if 'quod primum verum' means 'quod prius verius,' this again is far from being of universal application, much less self-evident. Astrology was prior to astronomy; the Ptolemaic to the Newtonian scheme. It must therefore be confined to history: yet even thus, it is not for any practicable purpose necessarily or always true. Increase in other knowledge, physical, anthropological, and psychological, may enable an historian of A.D. 1800 to give a much truer account of certain events and characters than the contemporary chroniclers had given, who lived in an age of ignorance and superstition. But confine the position within yet narrower bounds, namely, to Christian antiquity. In addition to all other objections, it has this great defect; that it takes for granted the very point in dispute, whether Christianity was an 'opus simul et in toto perfectum,' or whether the great foundations only were laid by Christ while on earth, and by the Apostles, and the superstructure or progression of the work entrusted to the successors of the Apostles; and whether for that purpose Christ had not promised that his Spirit should be always with the Church. Now this growth of truth, not only in each individual Christian who is indeed a Christian, but likewise in the Church of Christ, from age to age, has been affirmed and defended by sundry Latitudinarian, Grotian and Sociman divines even among Protestants: the contrary, therefore, and an inference from the supposition of the contrary, can never be pronounced self-evident or primary. Jeremy Taylor had nothing to do with these mock axioms, but to ridicule them, as in other instances he has so effectually done. It was sufficient and easy to shew, that, true or false, the position was utterly inapplicable to the facts of the Roman Church; that, instead of passing, like the science of the material heaven, from dim to clear, from guess to demonstration, from mischievous fancies to guiding, profitable and powerful truths, it had overbuilt the divinest truths by the silliest and not seldom wicked forgeries, usurpations and superstitions. J.S.'s very notion of proving a mass of histories by simple logic, he would have found exposed to his hand with exquisite truth and humour by Lucian. 1810. In the preceding note I think I took Taylor's words in too literal a sense; the remarks, however, on the common maxim, 'In rebus fidei, quod prius verius,' seem to me just and valuable. 2. March, 1824. Ib. p. 297. When he talks of being infallible, if the notion be applied to his Church, then he means an infallibility antecedent, absolute, unconditionate, such as will not permit the Church ever to err. Taylor himself was infected with the spirit of casuistry, by which saving faith is placed in the understanding, and the moral act in the outward deed. How infinitely safer the true Lutheran doctrine: God cannot be mocked; neither will truth, as a mere conviction of the understanding, save, nor error condemn;--to love truth sincerely is spiritually to have truth; and an error becomes a personal error, not by its aberration from logic or history, but so far as the causes of such error are in the heart, or may be traced back to some antecedent un-Christian wish or habit;--to watch over the secret movements of the heart, remembering ever how deceitful a thing it is, and that God cannot be mocked, though we may easily dupe ourselves: these, as the ground-work with prayer, study of the Scriptures, and tenderness to all around us, as the consequents, are the Christian's rule, and supersede all books of casuistry, which latter serve only to harden our feelings and pollute the imagination. To judge from the Roman casuists, nay, I ought to say, from Taylor's own 'Ductor Dubitantium,' one would suppose that a man's points of belief and smallest determinations of outward conduct,--however pure and charitable his intentions, and however holy or blameless the inward source of those intentions or convictions in his past and present state of moral being,--were like the performance of an electrical experiment, and would blow a man's salvation into atoms from a mere unconscious mistake in the arrangement and management of the apparatus. See Livy's account of Tullus Hostilius's unfortunate experiment with one of Numa's sacrificial ceremonies. The trick not being performed 'secundum artem,' Jupiter enraged shot him dead.[A] Before God our deeds, which for him can have no value, gain acceptance in proportion as they are evolutions of our spiritual life. He beholds our deeds in our principles. For men our deeds have value as efficient causes, worth as symptoms. They infer our principles from our deeds. Now, as religion or the love of God cannot subsist apart from charity or the love of our neighbour, our conduct must be conformable to both. Ib. p. 305. Only for their comfort this they might have also observed in that book,--that there is not half so much excuse for the Papists as there is for the Anabaptists; and yet it was but an excuse at the best, as appears in those full answers I have given to all their arguments, in the last edition of that book, among the polemical discourses in folio. Nay, dear Bishop! but such an excuse, as compared with your after attempt to evacuate it, resembles a coat of mail of your own forging, which you boil, in order to melt it away into invisibility. You only hide it by foam and bubbles, by wavelets and steam-clouds, of ebullient rhetoric: I speak of the Anabaptists as Anti-pædobaptists. Ib. s. i. p. 337. 'Henceforth I call you not servants, for the servant knoweth not what his Lord doth; but I have called you friends, for all things I have heard from the Father I have made known to you.' I never thought of this text before, but it seems to me a stronger passage in favour of Psilanthropism, or modern Socinianism,--a doctrine which of all heresies I deem the most fundamental and the worst (the impurities of madmen out of the question),--than I have ever seen, and far stronger than that concerning the day of judgment, which in its apparent sense is clearly high Arianism, or teaching the super-angelical, yet infra-divine, nature of Christ. We must interpret it [Greek: kat' analogían píste_os], not as 'all things' absolutely, but as 'all things' concerning your interests, 'all things' that it behoves you to know. Else it would contradict Christ's words, 'None knoweth the Father but the Son,' that is, truly and totally. For Christ does not promise in this life to give us the same degree of knowledge as he himself possessed, but only a 'quantum sufficit' of the kind. This is clear by St. John's 'all things,' which assuredly did not include either the discoveries of Newton or of Davy. 14 August, 1811. Ib. s. iii. p. 348. The Churches have troubled themselves with infinite variety of questions, and divided their precious unity, and destroyed charity, and instead of contending against the devil and all his crafty methods, they have contended against one another, and excommunicated one another, and anathematized and damned one another; and no man is the better after all, but most men are very much the worse; and the Churches are in the world still divided about questions that commenced twelve or thirteen ages since, and they are like to be so for ever, till Elias come, &c. I remember no passages of the Fathers nearer to inspired Scripture than this and similar ones of Jeremy Taylor, in which, quitting the acute logician, he combines his heart with his head, and utters general, and inclusive, and reconciling truths of charity and of common sense. All amounts but to this:--what is binding on all must be possible to all. But conformity of intellectual conclusions is not possible. Faith therefore cannot reside totally in the understanding. But to do what we believe we ought to do is possible to all, therefore binding on all; therefore the 'unum necessarium' of Christian faith. Talk not of bad conscience; it is like bad sense, that is, no sense; and we all know that we may wilfully lie till we involuntarily believe the lie as truth; but 'causa causæ est causa vera causati.' Ib. p. 347. But if you mean the Catholic Church, then, if you mean her, an abstracted separate being from all particulars, you pursue a cloud, and fall in love with an idea and a child of fancy. Here Taylor uses 'idea' as opposed to image or distinct phantasm; and this is with few exceptions his general sense, and even the exceptions are only metaphors from the general sense, that is, images so faint, indefinite and fluctuating as to be almost no images, that is, ideas; as we say of a very thin body, it is a ghost or spirit, the lowest degree of one kind being expressed by the opposite kind. Ib. p. 380. 'Miracles' were, in the beginning of Christianity, a note of true believers: Christ told us so. And he also taught us that Anti-Christ should be revealed in lying signs and wonders, and commanded us, by that token, to take heed of them. An excellent distinction between a note or mark by which a thing already proved may be known, and the proofs of the thing. Thus the poisonous qualities of the nightshade are established by the proper proofs, and the marks by which a plant may be known to be the nightshade, are the number, position, colour, and so on, of its filaments, petals, and the rest. Ib. The 'spirit of prophecy' is also a pretty sure note of the true Church, and yet...I deny not but there have been some prophets in the Church of Rome: Johannes de Rupe Scissa, Anselmus, Marsicanus, Robert Grosthead, Bishop of Lincoln, St. Hildegardis, Abbot Joachim, whose prophecies and pictures prophetical were published by Theophrastus Paracelsus, and John Adrasder, and by Paschalinus Regiselmus, at Venice, 1589; but (as Ahab said concerning Micaiah) these do not prophesy good concerning Rome, but evil, &c. This paragraph is an exquisite specimen of grave and dignified irony, 'telum quod cedere simulat retorquentis'. In contrast with this stands the paragraph on note 15, (p. 381.) which is a coarse though not unmerited sneer, or, as a German would have expressed himself, 'an of-Jeremy-Taylor-unworthy,though a-not-of-the-Roman-Catholic-Papicolar- polemics-unmerited, sneer.' Ib. p. 381. ... excepting only some Popes have been remarked by their own histories for funest and direful deaths. In the adoption of this word 'funest' into the English language by 'apocope' of the final 'us', Taylor is supported by 'honest' and 'modest;' but then the necessity of pronouncing funest should have excluded it, the superlative final being an objection to all of them, though outweighed in the others. A common reader would pronounce it 'funest,' and perhaps mistake it for 'funniest.' Ib. p. 382. ... sacraments, 'which to be seven', is with them an article of faith. The fastidious exclusion of this and similar idioms in modern writing occasions unnecessary embarrassment for the writer, both in narration and argumenting, and contributes to the monotony of our style. Ib. The Fathers and Schoolmen differ greatly in the definition of a Sacrament. Had it been in other respects advisable, it would, I think, have been theologically convenient, if our Reformers had contra-distinguished Baptism and the Lord's Supper by the term Mysteries, and allowed the name of Sacrament to Ordination, Confirmation, and Marriage. Ib. s. iii. p. 388. And he did so to the Jews ... tradition was not relied upon; it was not trusted with any law of faith or manners. This all the later Jews deny, affirming an oral communication from Moses to the Seventy, on as lame pretences as the Roman Catholics, and for the same vile purposes as reproved by Christ, who, if he had believed the story, would not have condemned traditions of men generally without exception, and would not have proved the immortality of the Patriarchs by a text which seems to have had no such primary intention, though it may contain the deduction 'potentialiter'. But Taylor's 1st and 7th arguments following are, the former weak and incorrect, the latter 'dictum et vulgatum, sed non probatum, ne dicam improbatum'. Who doubts that all that is indispensable to the salvation of each and every one is contained in the New Testament? But is it not contained in the first chapter of St. John's Gospel? Is it not contained in the eleventh of the Acts, and in a score other separable portions? Necessary, indispensable, and the like, are multivocal terms. Dogs have survived (and without any noticeable injury) the excision of the spleen. Dare we conclude from this fact that the spleen is not necessary to the continuance of the canine race? What is not indispensable for even the majority of individual believers may be necessary for the Church. Instead, therefore, of these terms, put 'true,' 'important,' and 'constitutive,' that is, appertaining to the chain ('ad catenam auream') of truths interdependent and rendered mutually intelligible, which constitute the system of the Christian religion, including not alone the faith and morals of individuals, but the 'organismus' likewise of the Church, as a body spiritual, yet outward and historical; and this again not as an aggregate or sum total, like a corn-sheaf, but a unity. Let the question, I say, be thus restated, and then let the cause come to trial between the Romish and the Protestant divines. N. B. As a running comment on all these marginal notes, let it be understood that I hold the far greater part--the only not all of what our great Author urges, to apply with irrefutable force against the doctrine and practice of the Romish Church, as it in fact exists, and no less against the Familists and 'istius farinæ enthusiastas'. I contend only, that he himself, in several assertions, lies open to attack from the supporters of a scheme of faith, as unlike either the Romish or the Fanatical, as Taylor's own, and which scheme, namely, the co-ordinate authority of the Word, the Spirit and the Church, I believe to be the true Apostolic and Catholic doctrine, and that to this scheme his objections do not apply. When I can bring myself to believe that from the mere perusal of the New Testament a man might have sketched out by anticipation the constitution, discipline, creeds, and sacramental ritual of the Episcopal Reformed Church of England; or that it is not a true and orthodox Church, because this is incredible; then I may perhaps be inclined to echo Chillingworth. As I cannot think that it detracts from a dial that in order to tell the time the sun must shine upon it; so neither does it detract from the Scriptures, that though the best and holiest they are yet Scripture, and require a pure heart and the consequent assistances of God's enlightening grace in order to understand them to edification. 1812. I still agree with the preceding note, and add that Jeremy Taylor should have cited the Arians and Socinians on the other side. But the Romish Papal hierarchy cannot for shame say, or only from want of shame can pretend to say, what a Catholic would be entitled to urge on the triple link of the Scripture, the Spirit, and the Church. 27 April, 1826. Ib. s. vi. p. 392. From this principle, as it is promoted by the Fanatics, they derive a wandering, unsettled, and a dissolute religion, &c. The evils of the Fanatic persuasion here so powerfully, so exquisitely, stated and enforced by our all-eloquent Bishop, supply no proof or even presumption against the tenet of the Spirit rightly expressed. For catholicity is the distinctive mark, the 'conditio sine qua non', of a spiritual teaching; and if men that dream with their eyes open mistake for this the very contrary, that is, their own particular fancies, or perhaps sensations, who can help it? Ib. s. vii. p. 394. They affirm that the Scriptures are full, that they are a perfect rule, that they contain all things necessary to salvation; and from hence they confuted all heresies. Yes, the heretics were so confuted, I grant; because these would not acknowledge any other authority but that of the Scriptures, and these too forged or corrupted by themselves; but by the Scriptures that remained unaltered the early Fathers of the Church both demonstrated the omissions and interpolations of the heretical canons and the false doctrines of the heresy itself. But so far from following the same rule to the members of the true Church, they made the applicability of this way of proof the criterion of a heretic. Ib. p. 394. 'Which truly they then preached, but afterwards by the will of God delivered to us in the Scriptures, which was to be the pillar and ground to our faith.' Lessing has shown this to be a false and even ungrammatical rendering of Irenæus's words. The 'columen et fundamentum fidei', are the Creed, or economy of salvation. Ib. vii. p. 395. Extracts from Clement's 'Stromata'. It would require a volume to shew the qualifications with which these 'excerpta' must be read. There is no one source of error and endless controversy more fruitful than this custom of quoting detached sentences. I would pledge myself in the course of a single morning to bring an equal number of passages from the same (Ante-Nicene) Fathers in proof of the Roman Catholic theory. One palpable cheat in these transcripts is the neglect of appreciating the words, 'inspired,' 'a 'Spiritu dicta'', and the like, in the Patristic use; as if the Fathers did not frequently apply the same terms to the discourses of the Bishops, their contemporaries, and to writings not canonical. It is wonderful how so acute and learned a man as Taylor could have read Tertullian, Irenæus and Clemens Alexandrinus, and not have seen that the passages are all against him so far as they all make the Scriptures subsidiary only to the Spirit in the Church and the Baptismal creed, the [Greek: kan_òn píste_os], 'regula fidei', or 'æconomia salutis'. Ib. p. 396. ... that the tradition ecclesiastical, that is, the whole doctrine taught by the Church of God, and preached to all men, is in the Scripture. It is only by the whole context and purpose of the work, and this too interpreted by the known doctrine of the age, that the intent of the sentences here quoted can be determined, relatively to the point in question. But even as they stand here, they do not assert that the 'Traditio Ecclesiastica' was grounded on, or had been deduced from, the Scriptures; nor that by Scripture Clemens meant principally the New Testament; and that the Scriptures contain the Tradition Ecclesiastical or Catholic Faith the Romish divines admit and contend. Ib. p. 399. Extract from Origen. As our Saviour imposed silence upon the Sadducees by the word of his doctrine, and faithfully convinced that false opinion which they thought to be truth; so also shall the followers of Christ do, by the examples of Scripture, by which according to sound doctrine every voice of Pharaoh ought to be silent. Does not this prove too much; namely, that nothing exists in the New which does not likewise exist in the Old Testament? One objection to Jeremy Taylor's argument here must, I think, strike every reflecting mind; namely, that in order to a fair and full view of the sentiments of the Fathers of the first four centuries, all they declare of the Church, and her powers and prerogatives, ought to have been likewise given. As soon as I receive any writing as inspired by the Spirit of Truth, of course I must believe it on its own authority. But how am I assured that it is an inspired work? Now do not these Fathers reply, By the Church? To the Church it belongs to declare what books are Holy Scriptures, and to interpret their right sense. Is not this the common doctrine among the Fathers? And how was the Church to judge? First, by the same spirit surviving in her; and secondly by the accordance of the Book itself with the canon of faith, that is the Baptismal Creed. And what was this? 'Traditio Ecclesiastica'. As to myself, I agree with Taylor against the Romanists, that the Bible is for us the only rule of faith; but I do not adopt his mode of proving it. In the earliest period of Christianity the Scriptures of the New Testament and the Ecclesiastical Tradition were reciprocally tests of each other; but for the Christians of the second century the Scriptures were tried by the Ecclesiastical Tradition, while for us the order is reversed, and we must try the Ecclesiastical Tradition by the Scriptures. Therefore I do not expect to find the proofs of the supremacy of Scripture in the early Fathers, nor do we need their authority. Our proofs are stronger without it. Ib. p. 403. Which words I the rather remark, because this article of the consubstantiality of Christ with the Father is brought as an instance (by the Romanists) of the necessity of tradition, to make up the insufficiency of Scripture. How shall I make this rhyme to Taylor's own assertion, in the last paragraph of sect. xix. of his Episcopacy Asserted, [20] in which he clearly refers to this very question as relying on tradition for its clearness? Jeremy Taylor was a true Father of the Church, and would furnish as fine a subject for a 'concordantia discordantiarum' as St. Austin himself. For the exoteric and esoteric he was a very Pythagoras. Ib. p. 406. ... for one or two of them say, Theophilus spake against Origen, for broaching fopperies of his own, and particularly, that Christ's flesh was consubstantial with the Godhead. Origen doubtless meant the 'caro noumenon', and was quite right. But never was a great man so misunderstood as Origen. Ib. p. 408. n. 'Sed et alia, quoe absque auctoritate et testimoniis Scripturarum, quasi traditione Apostolica, sponte reperiunt atque contingunt, percutit gladius Dei'. "Those things which they make and find, as it were, by Apostolical tradition, without the authority and testimonies of Scripture, the word of God smites." Is it clear that 'Scripturarum' depends on 'auctoritate'? It may well mean they who without the authority of the Church, or Scriptural testimony pretend to an Apostolical Tradition. Ib. p. 411. But lastly, if in the plain words of Scripture be contained all that is simply necessary to all, then it is clear, by Bellarmine's confession, that St. Austin affirmed that the plain places of Scripture are sufficient to all laics and all idiots, or private persons, and then it is very ill done to keep them from the knowledge and use of the Scriptures, which contain all their duty both of faith and good life; so it is very unnecessary to trouble them with any thing else, there being in the world no such treasure and repository of faith and manners, and that so plain, that it was intended for all men, and for all such men is sufficient. "Read the Holy Scriptures wherein you shall find some things to be holden, and some to be avoided." And yet in the preface to his Apology for authorized and set forms of Liturgy, [21] Taylor regrets that the Church of England was not able to confine the laity to such selections of Holy Writ as are in her Liturgy. But Laud was then alive: and Taylor partook of his 'trepidatiunculæ' towards the Church of Rome. Ib. p. 412. And all these are nothing else, but a full subscription to, and an excellent commentary upon, those words of St. Paul, 'Let no man pretend to be wise above what is written.' Had St. Paul anything beyond the Law and the Prophets in his mind? Ib. p. 416. St. Paul's way of teaching us to expound Scripture is, that he that prophesies should do it [Greek: kat' analogían píste_os], according to the analogy of faith. Yet in his Liberty of Prophesying [22] Taylor turns this way into mere ridicule. I love thee, Jeremy! but an arrant theological barrister that thou wast, though thy only fees were thy desires of doing good in 'questionibus singulis'. Ib. s. iii. p. 419. Only, because we are sure there was some false dealing in this matter, and we know there might be much more than we have discovered, we have no reason to rely upon any tradition for any part of our faith, any more than we could do upon Scripture, if one book or chapter of it should be detected to be imposture. What says Jeremy Taylor then to the story of the woman taken in adultery, ('John, c. viii. 3-11'.) which Chrysostom disdains to comment on? If true, how could it be omitted in so many, and these the most authentic, copies? And if this for fear of scandal, why not others? And who does not know that falsehood may be effected as well by omissions as by interpolations? But if false,--then--but Taylor draws the consequence himself. Ib. p. 427. So that the tradition concerning the Scriptures being extrinsical to Scripture is also extrinsical to the question: this tradition cannot be an objection against the sufficiency of Scripture to salvation, but must go before this question. For no man inquires whether the Scriptures contain all things necessary to salvation, unless he believe that there are Scriptures, that these are they, and that they are the word of God. All this comes to us by tradition, that is, by universal undeniable testimony. Very just, and yet this idle argument is the favourite, both shield and sword, of the Romanists: as if I should pretend to learn the Roman history from tradition, because by tradition I know such histories to have been written by Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus! Ib. p. 435. The more natural consequence is that their proposition is either mistaken or uncertain, or not an article of faith (which is rather to be hoped, lest we condemn all the Greek Churches as infidels or perverse heretics), or else that it can be derived from Scripture, which last is indeed the most probable, and pursuant to the doctrine of those wiser Latins who examined things by reason and not by prejudice. It is remarkable that both Stillingfleet and Taylor favoured the Greek opinion. But Bull's 'Defensio Fidei Nicænæ' was not yet published. It is to me evident that if the Holy Ghost does not proceed through and from the Son as well as from the Father, then the Son is not the adequate substantial idea of the Father. But according to St. Paul, he is--'ergo, &c'. N.B. These "'ergos, &c'." in legitimate syllogisms, where the 'major' and 'minor' have been conceded, are binding on all human beings, with the single anomaly of the Quakers. For with them nothing is more common than to admit both 'major' and 'minor', and, when you add the inevitable consequence, to say "Nay! I do not think so, Friend! Thou art worldly wise, Friend!" For example: 'major', it is agreed on both sides that we ought not to withhold from a man what he has a just right to: 'minor', property in land being the creature of law, a just right in respect of landed property is determined by the law of the land:--"agreed, such is the fact:" 'ergo:' the clergyman has a just right to the tithe. "Nay, nay; this is vanity, and tithes an abomination of Judaism!" Ib. s. v. p. 492. And since that villain of a man, Pope Hildebrand, as Cardinal Beno relates in his Life, could, by shaking of his sleeve make sparks of fire fly from it. If this was fact, was it an idiosyncrasy, as I have known those who by combing their hair can elicit sparks with a crackling as from a cat's back rubbed. It is very possible that the sleeve might be silk, tightened either on a very hairy arm, or else on woollen, and by shaking it might be meant stripping the silk suddenly off, which would doubtless produce flashes and sparks. Vol. XI. s. x. p. 1. As a general remark suggested indeed by this section, but applicable to very many parts of Taylor's controversial writings, both against the anti-Prelatic and the Romish divines, especially to those in which our incomparable Church-aspist attempts, not always successfully, to demonstrate the difference between the dogmas and discipline of the ancient Church, and those which the Romish doctors vindicate by them,--I would say once for all, that it was the fashion of the Arminian court divines of Taylor's age, that is, of the High Church party, headed by Archbishop Laud, to extol, and (in my humble judgment) egregiously to overrate, the example and authority of the first four, nay, of the first six centuries; and at all events to take for granted the Evangelical and Apostolical character of the Church to the death of Athanasius. Now so far am I from conceding this, that before the first Council of Nicaea, I believe myself to find the seeds and seedlings of all the worst corruptions of the Latin Church of the thirteenth century, and not a few of these even before the close of the second. One pernicious error of the primitive Church was the conversion of the ethical ideas, indispensable to the science of morals and religion, into fixed practical laws and rules for all Christians, in all stages of spiritual growth, and under all circumstances; and with this the degradation of free and individual acts into corporate Church obligations. Another not less pernicious was the gradual concentration of the Church into a priesthood, and the consequent rendering of the reciprocal functions of love and redemption and counsel between Christian and Christian exclusively official, and between disparates, namely, the priest and the layman. Ib. B. II. s. ii. p. 58. Often have I welcomed, and often have I wrestled with, the thought of writing an essay on the day of judgment. Are the passages in St. Peter's Epistle respecting the circumstances of the last day and the final conflagration, and even St. Paul's, to be regarded as apocalyptic and a part of the revelation by Christ, or are they, like the dogma of a personal Satan, accommodations of the current popular creed which they continued to believe? Ib. s. iii. p. 105. And therefore St. Paul left an excellent precept to the Church to avoid 'profanas vocum novitates', 'the prophane newness of words;' that is, it is fit that the mysteries revealed in Scripture should be preached and taught in the words of the Scripture, and with that simplicity, openness, easiness, and candor, and not with new and unhallowed words, such as that of Transubstantiation. Are not then Trinity, Tri-unity, 'hypostasis, perichoresis, diphysis', and others, excluded? Yet Waterland very ingeniously, nay more, very honestly and sensibly, shews the necessity of these terms 'per accidens'. The 'profanum' fell back on the heretics who had occasioned the necessity. Ib. p. 106. "The oblation of a cake was a figure of the Eucharistical bread which the Lord commanded to do in remembrance of his passion." These are Justin's words in that place. Justin Martyr could have meant no more, and the Greek construction means no more, than that the cake we offer is the representative, substitute, and 'fac-simile' of the bread which Christ broke and delivered. I find no necessary absurdity in Transubstantiation. For substance is but a notion 'thought on' to the aggregate of accidents--'hinzugedacht'--conceived, not perceived, and conceived always in universals, never in 'concreto'. Therefore, X. Y. Z. being unknown quantities, Y. may be as well annexed by the choice of the mind as the imagined 'substratum' as X. For we cannot distinguish substance from substance any more than X. from X. The substrate or 'causa invisibilis' may be the 'noumenon' or actuality, 'das Ding in sich', of Christ's humanity, as well as the 'Ding in sich' of which the sensation, bread, is the appearance. But then, on the other hand, there is not a word of sense possible to prove that it is really so; and from the not impossible to the real is a strange 'ultra'-Rhodian leap. And it is opposite both to the simplicity of Evangelical meaning, and anomalous from the interpretation of all analogous phrases which all men expound as figures,--'I am the gate, I am the way, I am the vine', and the like,--and to Christ's own declarations that his words were to be understood spiritually, that is, figuratively. Ib. s. vi. p. 164. However, if you will not commit downright idolatry, as some of their saints teach you, then you must be careful to observe these plain distinctions; and first be sure to remember that when you worship an image, you do it not materially but formally; not as it is of such a substance, but as it is a sign; next take care that you observe what sort of image it is, and then proportion your right kind to it, that you do not give 'latria' to that where 'hyperdulia' is only due; and be careful that if 'dulia' only be due, that your worship be not 'hyperdulical', &c. A masterly specimen of grave dignified irony. Indeed, Jeremy Taylor's 'Works' would be of more service to an English barrister than those of Demosthenes, Æschines, and Cicero taken together. Ib. s. vii. p. 168. A man cannot well understand an essence, and hath no idea of it in his mind, much less can a painter's pencil do it. Noticeable, that this is the only instance I have met in any English classic before the Revolution of the word 'idea' used as synonymous with a mental image. Taylor himself has repeatedly placed the two in opposition; and even here I doubt whether he has done otherwise. I rather think he meant by the word 'idea' a notion under an indefinite and confused form, such as Kant calls a 'schema'or vague outline, an imperfect embryo of a concrete, to the individuation of which the mind gives no conscious attention; just as when I say--"any thing," I may imagine a poker or a plate; but I pay no attention to its being this rather than that; and the very image itself is so wandering and unstable that at this moment it may be a dim shadow of the one, and in the next of some other thing. In this sense, idea is opposed to image in degree instead of kind; yet still contra-distinguished, as is evident by the sequel, "much less can a painter's pencil do it:" for were it an image, 'individui et concreti', then the painter's pencil could do it as well as his fancy or better. A DISCOURSE OF CONFIRMATION. Of all Taylor's works, the Discourse of Confirmation seems to me the least judicious; and yet that is not the right word either. I mean, however, that one is puzzled to know for what class of readers or auditors it was intended. He announces his subject as one of such lofty claims; he begins with positions taken on such high ground, no less than the superior dignity and spiritual importance of Confirmation above Baptism itself--whether considered as a sacramental rite and mystery distinct from Baptism, or as its completory and crowning part (the 'finis coronans opus')--that we are eager to hear the proof. But proofs differ in their value according to our previous valuation of authorities. What would pass for a very sufficient proof, because grounded on a reverend authority, with a Romanist, would be a mere fancy-medal and of no currency with a Bible Protestant. And yet for Protestants, and those too laymen (for we can hardly suppose that Taylor thought his Episcopal brethren in need of it), must this Discourse have been intended; and in this point of view, surely never did so wise a man adopt means so unsuitable to his end, or frame a discourse so inappropriate to his audience. The authorities of the Fathers are, indeed, as strong and decisive in favour of the Bishop's position as the warmest advocate of Confirmation could wish; but this very circumstance was calculated to create a prejudice against the doctrine in the mind of a zealous Protestant, from the contrast in which the unequivocal and explicit declarations of the Fathers stand with the remote, arbitrary, and fine-drawn inferences from the few passages of the New Testament which can be forced into an implied sanction of a rite no where mentioned, and as a distinct and separate ministration, utterly, as I conceive, unknown in the Apostolic age. How much more rational and convincing (as to me it seems) would it have been to have shewn, that when from various causes the practice of Infant Baptism became general in the Church, Confirmation or the acknowledgment 'in propria persona' of the obligations that had been incurred by proxy was introduced; and needed no other justification than its own evident necessity, as substantiating the preceding form as to the intended effects of Baptism on the believer himself, and then to have shewn the great uses and spiritual benefits of the institution. But this would not do. Such was the spirit of the age that nothing less than the assertion of a divine origin,--of a formal and positive institution by Christ himself, or by the Apostles in their Apostolic capacity as legislators for the universal Church in all ages, could serve; and accordingly Bishops, liturgies, tithes, monarchy, and what not, were, 'de jure divino', with celestial patents, wrapped up in the womb of this or that text of Scripture to be exforcipated by the logico-obstetric skill of High Church doctors and ultra-loyal court chaplains. THE EPISTLE DEDICATORY TO THE DUKE OF ORMONDE. Ib. p. ccxvii. This very poor church. With the exception of Spain, the Church establishment in Ireland is now, I conceive, the richest in Europe; though by the most iniquitous measure of the Irish Parliament, most iniquitously permitted to acquire the force of law at the Union, the Irish Church was robbed of the tithes from all pasture lands. What occasioned so great a change in its favour since the time of Charles II? 1810. Ib. p. ccxviii. And amidst these and very many more inconveniences it was greatly necessary that God should send us such a king. Such a king! O sorrow and shame! Why, why, O Genius! didst thou suffer thy darling son to crush the fairest flower of thy garland beneath a mitre of Charles's putting on! Ib. p. ccxix. For besides that the great usefulness of this ministry will greatly endear the Episcopal order, to which (that I may use St. Hierom's words) "if there be not attributed a more than common power and authority, there will be as many schisms as priests," &c. On this ground the Romish divines justify the Papacy. The fact of the Scottish Church is the sufficient answer to both. Episcopacy needs not rash assertions for its support. Ib. p. ccxx. For it is a sure rule in our religion, and is of an eternal truth, that "they who keep not the unity of the Church, have not the Spirit of God." Contrast with this our xixth and xxth Articles on the Church. The Irish Roman Catholic Bishops, methinks, must have read this with delight. What an over hasty simpleton that James II. was! Had he waited and caressed the Bishops, they would have taken the work off his hands. Ib. p. 229. Introduction. It has been my conviction that in respect of the theory of the Faith, (though God be praised! not in the practical result,) the Papal and the Protestant communions are equi-distant from the true idea of the Gospel Institute, though erring from opposite directions. The Romanists sacrifice the Scripture to the Church virtually annulling the former: the Protestants reversed this practically, and even in theory, (see the above-mentioned Articles,) annulling the latter. The consequence has been, as might have been predicted, the extinction of the Spirit (the indifference or 'mesothesis') in both considered as bodies: for I doubt not that numerous individuals in both Churches live in communion with the Spirit. Towards the close of the reign of our first James, and during the period from the accession of Charles I to the restoration of his profligate son, there arose a party of divines, Arminians (and many of them Latitudinarians) in their creed, but devotees of the throne and the altar, soaring High Churchmen and ultra royalists. Much as I dislike their scheme of doctrine and detest their principles of government both in Church and State, I cannot but allow that they formed a galaxy of learning and talent, and that among them the Church of England finds her stars of the first magnitude. Instead of regarding the Reformation established under Edward VI as imperfect, they accused the Reformers, some of them openly, but all in their private opinions, of having gone too far; and while they were willing to keep down (and if they could not reduce him to a primacy of honor to keep out) the Pope, and to prune away the innovations in doctrine brought in under the Papal domination, they were zealous to restore the hierarchy, and to substitute the authority of the Fathers, Canonists and Councils of the first six or seven centuries, and the least Papistic of the later Doctors and Schoolmen, for the names of Luther, Melancthon, Bucer, Calvin and the systematic theologians who rejected all testimony but that of their Bible. As far as the principle, on which Archbishop Laud and his followers acted, went to re-actuate the idea of the Church, as a co-ordinate and living Power by right of Christ's institution and express promise, I go along with them; but I soon discover that by the Church they meant the Clergy, the hierarchy exclusively, and then I fly off from them in a tangent. For it is this very interpretation of the Church that, according to my conviction, constituted the first and fundamental apostasy; and I hold it for one of the greatest mistakes of our polemic divines in their controversies with the Romanists, that they trace all the corruptions of the Gospel faith to the Papacy. Meantime can we be surprised that our forefathers under the Stuarts were alarmed, and imagined that the Bishops and court preachers were marching in quick time with their faces towards Rome, when, to take one instance of a thousand, a great and famous divine, like Bishop Taylor, asserts the inferiority, in rank and efficacy, of Baptism to Confirmation, and grounds this assertion so strange to all Scriptural Protestants on a text of Cabasilas--a saying of Rupertus--a phrase of St. Denis--and a sentence of Saint Bernard in a Life of Saint Malachias!--for no Benedictine can be more liberal in his attribution of saintship than Jeremy Taylor, or more reverently observant of the beatifications and canonizations of the Old Lady of the scarlet petticoat. P. S. If the reader need other illustrations, I refer him to Bishop Hackett's 'Sermons on the Advent and Nativity', which might almost pass for the orations of a Franciscan brother, whose reading had been confined to the 'Aurea Legenda'. It would be uncandid not to add that this indiscreet traffickery with Romish wares was in part owing to the immense reading of these divines. Ib. s. i. p. 247. Acts viii. 14-17. This is an argument indeed, and one that of itself would suffice to decide the question, if only it could be proved, or even made probable, that by the Holy Ghost in this place was meant that receiving of the Spirit to which Confirmation is by our Church declared to be the means and vehicle. But this I suspect cannot be done. The whole passage to which sundry chapters in St. Paul's Epistles seem to supply the comment, inclines and almost compels me to understand by the Holy Ghost in this narrative the miraculous gifts, [Greek: tas dynámeis], collectively. And in no other sense can I understand the sentence 'the Holy Ghost was not yet fallen upon any of them'. But the subject is beset with difficulties from the paucity of particular instances recorded by the inspired historian, and from the multitude and character of these instances found in the Fathers and Ecclesiastical historians. Ib. s. ii. p. 254. Still they are all [Greek: dynámeis], exhibitable powers, faculties. Were it otherwise what strange and fearful consequences would follow from the assertion, 'the Holy Spirit was not yet fallen upon any of them'. That we misunderstand the gift of tongues, and that it did not mean the power of speaking foreign languages unlearnt, I am strongly persuaded. Yea, but this is not the question. If my heart, bears me witness that I love my brother, that I love my merciful Saviour, and call Jesus Lord and the Anointed of God with joy of heart, I am encouraged by Scripture to infer that the Spirit abideth in me; besides that I know that of myself, and estranged from the Holy Spirit, I cannot even think a thought acceptable before God. But how will this help me to believe that I received this Spirit through the Bishop's hands laid on my head at Confirmation: when perhaps I am distinctly conscious, that I loved my Saviour, freely forgave, nay, tenderly yearned for the weal of, them that hated me before my Confirmation,--when, indeed, I must have been the most uncharitable of men if I did not admit instances of the most exemplary faith, charity, and devotion in Christians who do not practise the imposition of hands in their Churches. What! did those Christians, of whom St. Luke speaks, not love their brethren? 'In fine'. I have had too frequent experience of professional divines, and how they identify themselves with the theological scheme to which they have been articled, and I understand too well the nature and the power, the effect and the consequences, of a wilful faith,--where the sensation of positiveness is substituted for the sense of certainty, and the stubborn clutch for quiet insight,--to wonder at any degree of hardihood in matters of belief. Therefore the instant and deep-toned affirmative to the question "And do you actually believe the presence of the material water in the baptizing of infants or adults is essential to their salvation, so indispensably so that the omission of the water in the Baptism of an infant who should die the day after would exclude that infant from the kingdom of heaven, and whatever else is implied in the loss of salvation?" I should not be surprised, I say, to hear this question answered with an emphatic, "Yes, Sir! I do actually believe this, for thus I find it written, and herein begins my right to the name of a Christian, that I have exchanged my reason for the Holy Scriptures: I acknowledge no reason but the Bible." But as this intrepid respondent, though he may dispense with reason, cannot quite so easily free himself from the obligations of common sense and the canons of logic,--both of which demand consistency, and like consequences from like premisses 'in rebus ejusdem generis', in subjects of the same class,--I do find myself tempted to wonder, some small deal, at the unscrupulous substitution of a few drops of water sprinkled on the face for the Baptism, that is, immersion or dipping, of the whole person, even if the rivers or running waters had been thought non-essential. And yet where every word in any and in all the four narratives is so placed under the logical press as it is in this Discourse by Jeremy Taylor, and each and every incident pronounced exemplary, and for the purpose of being imitated, I should hold even this hazardous. But I must wonder a very great deal, and in downright earnest, at the contemptuous language which the same men employ in their controversies with the Romish Church, respecting the corporal presence in the consecrated bread and wine, and the efficacy of extreme unction. For my own part, the assertion that what is phenomenally bread and wine is substantially the Body and Blood of Christ, does not shock my common sense more than that a few drops of water sprinkled on the face should produce a momentous change, even a regeneration, in the soul; and does not outrage my moral feelings half as much. P. S. There is one error of very ill consequence to the reputation of the Christian community, which Taylor shares with the Romish divines, namely, the quoting of opinions, and even of rhetorical flights, from the writings of this and that individual, with 'Saint' prefixed to his name, as expressing the faith of the Church during the first five or six centuries. Whereas it would not, perhaps, be very difficult to convince an unprejudiced man and a sincere Christian of the impossibility that even the decrees of the General Councils should represent the Catholic faith, that is, the belief essential to, or necessarily consequent on, the faith in Christ common to all the elect. [Footnote 1: The references are here given to Heber's edition, 1822. Ed.] [Footnote 2: The page however remains a blank. But a little essay on punctuation by the Author is in the Editor's possession, and will be published hereafter.--Ed.] [Footnote 3: See Euseb. 'Hist.' iii. 27.--Ed.] [Footnote 4: 'Vindication, &c. Quer.' 13, 14, 15.--Ed.] [Footnote 5: See the form previously exhibited in this volume, p. 93.--Ed.] [Footnote 6: 'Mark' viii. 29. 'Luke' ix. 20.--Ed.] [Footnote 7: 1 'Pet'. v. 13.--Ed.] [Footnote 8: Lightfoot and Wall use this strong argument for the lawfulness and implied duty of Infant Baptism in the Christian Church. It was the universal practice of the Jews to baptize the infant children of proselytes as well as their parents. Instead, therefore, of Christ's silence as to infants by name in his commission to baptize all nations being an argument that he meant to exclude them, it is a sign that he meant to include them. For it was natural that the precedent custom should prevail, unless it were expressly forbidden. The force of this, however, is limited to the ceremony;--its character and efficacy are not established by it.--Ed.] [Footnote 9: The Author's views of Baptism are stated more fully and methodically in the 'Aids to Reflection'; but even that statement is imperfect, and consequently open to objection, as was frequently admitted by Mr. C. himself. The Editor is unable to say what precise spiritual efficacy the Author ultimately ascribed to Infant Baptism; but he was certainly an advocate for the practice, and appeared as sponsor at the font for more than one of his friends' children. See his 'Letter to a Godchild', printed, for this purpose, at the end of this volume; his 'Sonnet on his Baptismal Birthday', ('Poet. Works', ii. p. 151.) in the tenth line of which, in many copies, there was a misprint of 'heart' for 'front;' and the 'Table Talk', 2nd edit. p. 183. Ed.] [Footnote 10: 'Deut.' xiii. 1-5. xviii. 22.--Ed.] [Footnote 11: 'Galat.' i. 8, 9.--Ed.] [Footnote 12: Pp. 206-227. Ed.] [Footnote 13: With reference to all these notes on Original Sin, see 'Aids to Reflection', p. 250-286.--Ed.] [Footnote 14: 'Aids to Reflection', p. 274.--Ed.] [Footnote 15: Ante. 'Vindication, &c.' p. 357-8.] [Footnote 16: Ibid.] [Footnote 17: 'Dupliciter vero sanguis Christi et caro intelligitur, spiritualis ilia atque divina, de qua ipse dixit, Caro mea vere est cibus, &c., vel caro et sanguis, quæ crucifixa est, et qui militis effusus est lancea.' In 'Epist. Ephes.' c.i.] [Footnote 18: See 'Table Talk', p. 72, second edit. Ed.] [Footnote 19: 'Ipsum regem tradunt, volventem commentaries Numæ, quum ibi occulta solennia sacrificia Jovi Elicio facta invenisset, operatum his sacris se abdidisse; sed non rite initum aut curatum id sacrum esse; nee solum nullam ei oblatam Cælestium speciem, sed ira Jovis, sollicitati prava religione, fulmine ictum cum domo conflagrasse.' L. i. c. xxxi.--Ed.] [Footnote 20: "This also rests upon the practice apostolical and traditive interpretation of holy Church, and yet cannot be denied that so it ought to be, by any man that would not have his Christendom suspected. To these I add the communion of women, the distinction of books apocryphal from canonical, that such books were written by such Evangelists and Apostles, the whole tradition of Scripture itself, the Apostles' Creed, &c. ... These and divers others of greater consequence, (which I dare not specify for fear of being misunderstood,) rely but upon equal faith with this of Episcopacy," &c.--Ed.] [Footnote 21: S. xxvi.] [Footnote 22: S. iv. 4.--Ed.] NOTES ON THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. I know of no book, the Bible excepted, as above all comparison, which I, according to my judgment and experience, could so safely recommend as teaching and enforcing the whole saving truth according to the mind that was in Christ Jesus, as the Pilgrim's Progress. It is, in my conviction, incomparably the best 'Summa Theologiæ Evangelicæ' ever produced by a writer not miraculously inspired. June 14, 1830. It disappointed, nay surprised me, to find Robert Southey express himself so coldly respecting the style and diction of the Pilgrim's Progress. I can find nothing homely in it but a few phrases and single words. The conversation between Faithful and Talkative [1] is a model of unaffected dignity and rhythmical flow. SOUTHEY'S LIFE OF BUNYAN. P. xiv. "We intended not," says Baxter, "to dig down the banks, or pull up the hedge, and lay all waste and common, when we desired the Prelates' tyranny might cease." No; for the intention had been under the pretext of abating one tyranny to establish a far severer and more galling in its stead: in doing this the banks had been thrown down, and the hedge destroyed; and while the bestial herd who broke in rejoiced in the havoc, Baxter, and other such erring though good men, stood marvelling at the mischief, which never could have been effected, if they had not mainly assisted in it. But the question is, would these 'erring good' men have been either willing or able to assist in this work, if the more erring Lauds and Sheldons had not run riot in the opposite direction? And as for the 'bestial herd,'--compare the whole body of Parliamentarians, all the fanatical sects included, with the royal and prelatical party in the reign of Charles II. These were, indeed, a bestial herd. See Baxter's unwilling and Burnet's honest description of the moral discipline throughout the realm under Cromwell. Ib. p. xv. They passed with equal facility from strict Puritanism to the utmost license of practical and theoretical impiety, as Antinomians or as Atheists, and from extreme profligacy to extreme superstition in any of its forms. 'They!' How many? and of these how many that would not have been in Bedlam, or fit for it, under some other form? A madman falls into love or religion, and then, forsooth! it is love or religion that drove him mad. Ib. p. xxi. In an evil hour were the doctrines of the Gospel sophisticated with questions which should have been left in the Schools for those who are unwise enough to employ themselves in excogitations of useless subtlety. But what, at any rate, had Bunyan to do with the Schools? His perplexities clearly rose out of the operations of his own active but unarmed mind on the words of the Apostle. If anything is to be arraigned, it must be the Bible in English, the reading of which is imposed (and, in my judgment, well and wisely imposed) as a duty on all who can read. Though Protestants, we are not ignorant of the occasional and partial evils of promiscuous Bible-reading; but we see them vanish when we place them beside the good. Ib. p. xxiv. False notions of that corruption of our nature which it is almost as perilous to exaggerate as to dissemble. I would have said "which it is almost as perilous to misunderstand as to deny." Ib. p. xli. &c. But the wickedness of the tinker has been greatly over-charged; and it is taking the language of self-accusation too literally, to pronounce of John Bunyan that he was at any time depraved. The worst of what he was in his worst days is to be expressed in a single word ... he had been a blackguard, &c. All this narrative, with the reflections on the facts, is admirable and worthy of Robert Southey: full of good sense and kind feeling--the wisdom of love. Ib. p. lxi. But the Sectaries had kept their countrymen from it (the Common Prayer Book), while they had the power, and Bunyan himself in his sphere laboured to dissuade them from it. Surely the fault lay in the want, or in the feeble and inconsistent manner, of determining and supporting the proper powers of the Church. In fact, the Prelates and leading divines of the Church were not only at variance with each other, but each with himself. One party, the more faithful and less modified disciples of the first Reformers, were afraid of bringing anything into even a semblance of a co-ordination with the Scriptures; and, with the _terriculum_ of Popery ever before their eyes, timidly and sparingly allowed to the Church any even subordinate power beyond that of interpreting the Scriptures; that is, of finding the ordinances of the Church implicitly contained in the ordinances of the inspired writers. But as they did not assume infallibility in their interpretations, it amounted to nothing for the consciences of such men as Bunyan and a thousand others. The opposite party, Laud, Taylor, and the rest, with a sufficient dislike of the Pope (that is, at Rome) and of the grosser theological corruptions of the Romish Church, yet in their hearts as much averse to the sentiments and proceedings of Luther, Calvin, John Knox, Zuinglius, and their fellows, and proudly conscious of their superior learning, sought to maintain their ordinances by appeals to the Fathers, to the recorded traditions and doctrine of the Catholic priesthood during the first five or six centuries, and contended for so much that virtually the Scriptures were subordinated to the Church, which yet they did not dare distinctly to say out. The result was that the Anti-Prelatists answered them in the gross by setting at nought their foundation, that is, the worth, authority and value of the Fathers. So much for their variance with each other. But each vindicator of our established Liturgy and Discipline was divided in himself: he minced this out of fear of being charged with Popery, and that he dared not affirm for fear of being charged with disloyalty to the King as the head of the Church. The distinction between the Church of which the king is the rightful head, and the Church which hath no head but Christ, never occurred either to them or to their antagonists; and as little did they succeed in appropriating to Scripture what belonged to Scripture, and to the Church what belonged to the Church. All things in which the temporal is concerned may be reduced to a pentad, namely, prothesis, thesis, antithesis, mesothesis and synthesis. So here-- 'Prothesis' Christ, the Word 'Thesis' 'Mesothesis' 'Antithesis' The Scriptures The Holy Spirit The Church 'Synthesis' The Preacher [2] Ib. p. lxiii. "But there are two ways of obeying," he observed; "the one to do that which I in my conscience do believe that I am bound to do, actively; and where I cannot obey actively, there I am willing to lie down, and to suffer what they shall do unto me." Genuine Christianity worthy of John and Paul! Ib. p. lxv. I am not conscious of any warping power that could have acted for so very long a period; but from sixteen to now, sixty years of age, I have retained the very same convictions respecting the Stuarts and their adherents. Even to Lord Clarendon I never could quite reconcile myself. How often the pen becomes the tongue of a systematic dream,--a somniloquist! The sunshine, that is, the comparative power, the distinct contra-distinguishing judgment of realities as other than mere thoughts, is suspended. During this state of continuous, not single-mindedness, but one-side-mindedness, writing is manual somnambulism; the somnial magic superinduced on, without suspending, the active powers of the mind. Ib. p. lxxix. "They that will have heaven, they must run for it, because the devil, the law, sin, death and hell, follow them. There is never a poor soul that is going to heaven, but the devil, the law, sin, death and hell make after that soul. 'The devil, your adversary, as a roaring lion, goeth about seeking whom he may devour.' And I will assure you the devil is nimble; he can run apace; he is light of foot; he hath overtaken many; he hath turned up their heels, and hath given them an everlasting fall. Also the law! that can shoot a great way: have a care thou keep out of the reach of those great guns the Ten Commandments! Hell also hath a wide mouth," &c. It is the fashion of the day to call every man, who in his writings or discourses gives a prominence to the doctrines on which, beyond all others, the first Reformers separated from the Romish communion, a Calvinist. Bunyan may have been one, but I have met with nothing in his writings (except his Anti-pædobaptism, to which too he assigns no saving importance) that is not much more characteristically Lutheran; for instance, this passage is the very echo of the chapter on the Law and Gospel, in Luther's 'Table Talk'. It would be interesting, and I doubt not, instructive, to know the distinction in Bunyan's mind between the devil and hell. Ib. p. xcvii. Bunyan concludes with something like a promise of a third part. There appeared one after his death, and it has had the fortune to be included in many editions of the original work. It is remarkable that Southey should not have seen, or having seen, have forgotten to notice, that this third part is evidently written by some Romish priest or missionary in disguise. LIFE OF BUNYAN. [3] The early part of his life was an open course of wickedness. Southey, in the Life prefixed to his edition of the Pilgrim's Progress, has, in a manner worthy of his head and heart, reduced this oft repeated charge to its proper value. Bunyan was never, in our received sense of the word, wicked. He was chaste, sober, honest; but he was a bitter blackguard; that is, damned his own and his neighbour's eyes on slight or no occasion, and was fond of a row. In this our excellent Laureate has performed an important service to morality. For the transmutation of actual reprobates into saints is doubtless possible; but like the many recorded facts of corporeal alchemy, it is not supported by modern experiments. THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. Part i. p. II. As I walked through the wilderness of this world. That in the Apocalypse the wilderness is the symbol of the world, or rather of the worldly life, Bunyan discovered by the instinct of a similar genius. The whole Jewish history, indeed, in all its details is so admirably adapted to, and suggestive of, symbolical use, as to justify the belief that the spiritual application, the interior and permanent sense, was in the original intention of the inspiring Spirit, though it might not have been present, as an object of distinct consciousness, to the inspired writers. Ib. ... where was a den. The jail. Mr. Bunyan wrote this precious book in Bedford jail, where he was confined on account of his religion. The following anecdote is related of him. A Quaker came to the jail, and thus addressed him: "Friend Bunyan, the Lord sent me to seek for thee, and I have been through several counties in search of thee, and now I am glad I have found thee." To which Mr. Bunyan replied, "Friend, thou dost not speak the truth in saying the Lord sent thee to seek me; for the Lord well knows that I have been in this jail for some years; and if he had sent thee, he would have sent thee here directly." 'Note in Edwards'. This is a valuable anecdote, for it proves, what might have been concluded 'a priori', that Bunyan was a man of too much genius to be a fanatic. No two qualities are more contrary than genius and fanaticism. Enthusiasm, indeed, [Greek: o theòs en haemin], is almost a synonyme of genius; the moral life in the intellectual light, the will in the reason; and without it, says Seneca, nothing truly great was ever achieved by man. Ib. p. 12. And not being able longer to contain, he brake out with a lamentable cry, saying, "What shall I do?" Reader, was this ever your case? Did you ever see your sins, and feel the burden of them, so as to cry out in the anguish of your soul, What must I do to be saved? If not, you will look on this precious book as a romance or history, which no way concerns you; you can no more understand the meaning of it than if it were wrote in an unknown tongue, for you are yet carnal, dead in your sins, lying in the arms of the wicked one in false security. But this book is spiritual; it can only be understood by spiritually quickened souls who have experienced that salvation in the heart, which begins with a sight of sin, a sense of sin, a fear of destruction and dread of damnation. Such and such only commence Pilgrims from the City of Destruction to the heavenly kingdom. 'Note in Edwards'. Most true. It is one thing to perceive and acknowledge this and that particular deed to be sinful, that is, contrary to the law of reason or the commandment of God in Scripture, and another thing to feel sin within us independent of particular actions, except as the common ground of them. And it is this latter without which no man can become a Christian. Ib. p. 39. Now whereas thou sawest that as soon as the first began to sweep, the dust did so fly about that the room by him could not be cleansed, but that thou wast almost choked therewith; this is to show thee, that the Law, instead of cleansing the heart (by its working) from sin, doth revive, put strength into, and increase it in the soul, even as it doth discover and forbid it; for it doth not give power to subdue. See Luther's 'Table Talk'. The chapters in that work named "Law and Gospel," contain the very marrow of divinity. Still, however, there remains much to be done on this subject; namely, to show how the discovery of sin by the Law tends to strengthen the sin; and why it must necessarily have this effect, the mode of its action on the appetites and impetites through the imagination and understanding; and to exemplify all this in our actual experience. Ib. p. 40. Then I saw that one came to Passion, and brought him a bag of treasure, and poured it down at his feet; the which he took up, and rejoiced therein, and withal laughed Patience to scorn; but I beheld but awhile, and he had lavished all away, and had nothing left him but rags. One of the not many instances of faulty allegory in 'The Pilgrim's Progress'; that is, it is no allegory. The beholding "but awhile," and the change into "nothing but rags," is not legitimately imaginable. A longer time and more interlinks are requisite. It is a hybrid compost of usual images and generalized words, like the Nile-born nondescript, with a head or tail of organized flesh, and a lump of semi-mud for the body. Yet, perhaps, these very defects are practically excellencies in relation to the intended readers of 'The Pilgrim's Progress'. Ib. p. 43. The Interpreter answered, "This is Christ, who continually, with the oil of his grace, maintains the work already begun in the heart; by the means of which, notwithstanding what the Devil can do, the souls of his people prove gracious still. And in that thou sawest that the man stood behind the wall to maintain the fire, this is to teach thee, that it is hard for the tempted to see how this work of grace is maintained in the soul." This is beautiful; yet I cannot but think it would have been still more appropriate, if the waterpourer had been a Mr. Legality, a prudentialist offering his calculation of consequences as the moral antidote to guilt and crime; and if the oil-instillator, out of sight and from within, had represented the corrupt nature of man, that is, the spiritual will corrupted by taking up a nature into itself. Ib. What, then, has the sinner who is the subject of grace no hand in keeping up the work of grace in the heart? No! It is plain Mr. Bunyan was not an Arminian. 'Note in Edwards'. If by metaphysics we mean those truths of the pure reason which always transcend, and not seldom appear to contradict, the understanding, or (in the words of the great Apostle) spiritual verities which can only be spiritually discerned--and this is the true and legitimate meaning of metaphysics, [Greek: metà tà physikà]--then I affirm, that this very controversy between the Arminians and the Calvinists, in which both are partially right in what they affirm, and both wholly wrong in what they deny, is a proof that without metaphysics there can be no light of faith. Ib. p. 45. I left off to watch and be sober; I laid the reins upon the neck of my lusts This single paragraph proves, in opposition to the assertion in the preceding note in Edwards, that in Bunyan's judgment there must be at least a negative co-operation of the will of man with the divine grace, an energy of non-resistance to the workings of the Holy Spirit. But the error of the Calvinists is, that they divide the regenerate will in man from the will of God, instead of including it. Ib. p. 49. So I saw in my dream, that just as Christian came up with the Cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his back, and began to tumble; and so continued to do, till it came to the mouth of the sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no more. 'We know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding' (or discernment of reason) 'that we may know him that is true, and we are in him that is true, even in his son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life. Little children, keep yourselves from idols'. 1. John, v. 20, 21. Alas! how many Protestants make a mental idol of the Cross, scarcely less injurious to the true faith in the Son of God than the wooden crosses and crucifixes of the Romanists!--and this, because they have not been taught that Jesus was both the Christ and the great symbol of Christ. Strange, that we can explain spiritually, what to take up the cross of Christ, to be crucified with Christ, means;--yet never ask what the Crucifixion itself signifies, but rest satisfied in the historic image. That one declaration of the Apostle, that by wilful sin we 'crucify the Son of God afresh', might have roused us to nobler thoughts. Ib. p. 52. And besides, say they, if we get into the way, what matters which way we get in? If we are in, we are in. Thou art but in the way, who, as we perceive, came in at the gate: and we are also in the way, that came tumbling over the wall: wherein now is thy condition better than ours? The allegory is clearly defective, inasmuch as 'the way' represents two diverse meanings; 1. the outward profession of Christianity, and 2. the inward and spiritual grace. But it would be very difficult to mend it. 1830. In this instance (and it is, I believe, the only one in the work,) the allegory degenerates into a sort of pun, that is, in the two senses of the word 'way,' and thus supplies Formal and Hypocrite with an argument which Christian cannot fairly answer, or rather one to which Bunyan could not make his Christian return the proper answer without contradicting the allegoric image. For the obvious and only proper answer is: No! you are not in the same 'way' with me, though you are walking on the same 'road.' But it has a worse defect, namely, that it leaves the reader uncertain as to what the writer precisely meant, or wished to be understood, by the allegory. Did Bunyan refer to the Quakers as rejecting the outward Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord's Supper? If so, it is the only unspiritual passage in the whole beautiful allegory, the only trait of sectarian narrow-mindedness, and, in Bunyan's own language, of legality. But I do not think that this was Bunyan's intention. I rather suppose that he refers to the Arminians and other Pelagians, who rely on the coincidence of their actions with the Gospel precepts for their salvation, whatever the ground or root of their conduct may be; who place, in short, the saving virtue in the stream, with little or no reference to the source. But it is the faith acting in our poor imperfect deeds that alone saves us; and even this faith is not ours, but the faith of the Son of God in us. 'I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.' Gal. ii. 20. Illustrate this by a simile. Labouring under chronic 'bronchitis', I am told to inhale chlorine as a specific remedy; but I can do this only by dissolving a saturated solution of the gas in warm water, and then breathing the vapour. Now what the aqueous vapour or steam is to the chlorine, that our deeds, our outward life, [Greek: bíos], is to faith. Ib. p. 55. And the other took directly up the way to Destruction, which led him into a wide field, full of dark mountains, where he stumbled and fell, and rose no more. This requires a comment. A wide field full of mountains and of dark mountains, where Hypocrite stumbled and fell! The images here are unusually obscure. Ib. p. 70. They showed him Moses' rod, the hammer and nail with which Jael slew Sisera. I question whether it would be possible to instance more strikingly the power of a predominant idea (that true mental kaleidoscope with richly-coloured glass) on every object brought before the eye of the mind through its medium, than this conjunction of Moses' rod with the hammer of the treacherous assassin Jael, and similar encomiastic references to the same detestable murder, by Bunyan and men like Bunyan, good, pious, purely-affectioned disciples of the meek and holy Jesus; yet the erroneous preconception that whatever is uttered by a Scripture personage is, in fact, uttered by the infallible Spirit of God, makes Deborahs of them all. But what besides ought we to infer from this and similar facts? Surely, that the faith in the heart overpowers and renders innocent the errors of the understanding and the delusions of the imagination, and that sincerely pious men purchase, by inconsistency, exemption from the practical consequences of particular errors. Ib. p. 76. All this is true, and much more which thou hast left out, &c. This is the best way; to own Satan's charges, if they be true; yea, to exaggerate them also, to exalt the riches of the grace of Christ above all, in pardoning all of them freely. 'Note in Edwards'. That is, to say what we do not believe to be true! 'Will ye speak wickedly for God, and talk deceitfully for him?' said righteous Job. Ib. p. 83. One thing I would not let slip: I took notice that now poor Christian was so confounded, that he did not know his own voice; and thus I perceived it: just when he was come over against the mouth of the burning pit, one of the wicked ones got behind him, and stepped up softly to him, and whisperingly suggested many grievous blasphemies to him, which he verily thought had proceeded from his own mind. There is a very beautiful letter of Archbishop Leighton's to a lady under a similar distemperature of the imagination. [4] In fact, it can scarcely not happen under any weakness and consequent irritability of the nerves to persons continually occupied with spiritual self-examination. No part of the pastoral duties requires more discretion, a greater practical psychological science. In this, as in what not? Luther is the great model; ever reminding the individual that not he, but Christ, is to redeem him; and that the way to be redeemed is to think with will, mind, and affections on Christ, and not on himself. I am a sin-laden being, and Christ has promised to loose the whole burden if I but entirely trust in him. To torment myself with the detail of the noisome contents of the fardel will but make it stick the closer, first to my imagination and then to my unwilling will. Ib. For that he perceived God was with them, though in that dark and dismal state; and why not, thought he, with me, though by reason of the impediment that attends this place, I cannot perceive it? But it may be asked, Why doth the Lord suffer his children to walk in such darkness? It is for his glory: it tries their faith in him, and excites prayer to him: but his love abates not in the least towards them, since he lovingly inquires after them, 'Who is there among you that feareth the Lord and walketh in darkness, and hath no light?' Then he gives most precious advice to them: 'Let him trust in the Lord', and 'stay himself upon his God'. Yes! even in the sincerest believers, being men of reflecting and inquiring minds, there will sometimes come a wintry season, when the vital sap of faith retires to the root, that is, to atheism of the will. 'But though he slay me, yet will I cling to him.' Ib. p. 85. And as for the other (Pope), though he be yet alive, he is, by reason of age, and also of the many shrewd brushes that he met with in his younger days, grown so crazy and stiff in his joints, that he can now do little more than sit in his cave's mouth, grinning at pilgrims as they go by, and biting his nails because he cannot come at them. O that Blanco White would write in Spanish the progress of a pilgrim from the Pope's cave to the Evangelist's wicket-gate and the Interpreter's house! 1836. Ib. p. 104. And let us assure ourselves that, at the day of doom, men shall be judged according to their fruit. It will not be said then, "Did you believe?" but "Were you doers or talkers only?" and accordingly shall be judged. All the doctors of the Sorbonne could not have better stated the Gospel 'medium' between Pelagianism and Antinomian-Solifidianism, more properly named Sterilifidianism. It is, indeed, faith alone that saves us; but it is such a faith as cannot be alone. Purity and beneficence are the 'epidermis,' faith and love the 'cutis vera' of Christianity. Morality is the outward cloth, faith the lining; both together form the wedding-garment given to the true believer in Christ, even his own garment of righteousness, which, like the loaves and fishes, he mysteriously multiplies. The images of the sun in the earthly dew-drops are unsubstantial phantoms; but God's thoughts are things: the images of God, of the Sun of Righteousness, in the spiritual dew-drops are substances, imperishable substances. Ib. p. 154. Fine-spun speculations and curious reasonings lead men from simple truth and implicit faith into many dangerous and destructive errors. The Word records many instances of such for our caution. Be warned to study simplicity and godly sincerity. 'Note in Edwards on Doubting Castle.' And pray what does implicit faith lead men into? Transubstantiation and all the abominations of priest-worship. And where is the Scriptural authority for this implicit faith? Assuredly not in St. John, who tells us that Christ's life is and manifests itself in us as the light of man; that he came to bring light as well as immortality. Assuredly not in St. Paul, who declares all faith imperfect and perilous without insight and understanding; who prays for us that we may comprehend the deep things even of God himself. For the Spirit discerned, and the Spirit by which we discern, are both God; the Spirit of truth through and in Christ from the Father. Mournful are the errors into which the zealous but unlearned preachers among the dissenting Calvinists have fallen respecting absolute election, and discriminative, yet reasonless, grace:--fearful this divorcement of the Holy Will, the one only Absolute Good, that, eternally affirming itself as the I AM, eternally generateth the Word, the absolute Being, the Supreme Reason, the Being of all Truth, the Truth of all Being:--fearful the divorcement from the reason; fearful the doctrine which maketh God a power of darkness, instead of the God of light, the Father of the light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world! This we know and this we are taught by the holy Apostle Paul; that without will there is no ground or base of sin; that without the law this ground or base cannot become sin; (hence we do not impute sin to the wolf or the tiger, as being without or below the law;) but that with the law cometh light into the will; and by this light the will becometh a free, and therefore a responsible, will. Yea! the law is itself light, and the divine light becomes law by its relation and opposition to the darkness; the will of God revealed in its opposition to the dark and alien will of the fallen Spirit. This freedom, then, is the free gift of God; but does it therefore cease to be freedom? All the sophistry of the Predestinarians rests on the false notion of eternity as a sort of time antecedent to time. It is timeless, present with and in all times. There is an excellent discourse of the great Hooker's, affixed with two or three others to his Ecclesiastical Polity, on the final perseverance of Saints; [5] but yet I am very desirous to meet with some judicious experimental treatise, in which the doctrine, with the Scriptures on which it is grounded, is set forth more at large; as likewise the rules by which it may be applied to the purposes of support and comfort, without danger of causing presumption and without diminishing the dread of sin. Above all, I am anxious to see the subject treated with as little reference as possible to the divine predestination and foresight; the argument from the latter being a mere identical proposition followed by an assertion of God's prescience. Those who will persevere, will persevere, and God foresees; and as to the proof from predestination, that is, that he who predestines the end necessarily predestines the adequate means, I can more readily imagine logical consequences adverse to the sense of responsibility than Christian consequences, such as an individual may apply for his own edification. And I am persuaded that the doctrine does not need these supports, according, I mean, to the ordinary notion of predestination. The predestinative force of a free agent's own will in certain absolute acts, determinations, or elections, and in respect of which acts it is one either with the divine or the devilish will; and if the former, the conclusions to be drawn from God's goodness, faithfulness, and spiritual presence; these supply grounds of argument of a very different character, especially where the mind has been prepared by an insight into the error and hollowness of the antithesis between liberty and necessity. Ib. p. 178. But how contrary to this is the walk and conduct of some who profess to be pilgrims, and yet can wilfully and deliberately go upon the Devil's ground, and indulge themselves in carnal pleasures and sinful diversions. 'Note in Edwards on the Enchanted Ground'. But what pleasures are carnal,--what are sinful diversions,--so I mean as that I may be able to determine what are not? Shew us the criterion, the general principle; at least explain whether each individual case is to be decided for the individual by his own experience of the effects of the pleasure or the diversion, in dulling or distracting his religious feelings; or can a list, a complete list, of all such pleasures be made beforehand? PART III. 'In initio'. I strongly suspect that this third part, which ought not to have been thus conjoined with Bunyan's work, was written by a Roman Catholic priest, for the very purpose of counteracting the doctrine of faith so strongly enforced in the genuine Progress. Ib. p. 443, in Edwards. Against all which evils fasting is the proper remedy. It would have been well if the writer had explained exactly what he meant by the fasting, here so strongly recommended; during what period of time abstinence from food is to continue and so on. The effects, I imagine, must in good measure depend on the health of the individual. In some constitutions, fasting so disorders the stomach as to produce the very contrary of good;--confusion of mind, loose imaginations against the man's own will, and the like. 'In fine'. One of the most influential arguments, one of those the force of which I feel even more than I see, for the divinity of the New Testament, and with especial weight in the writings of John and Paul, is the unspeakable difference between them and all other the earliest extant writings of the Christian Church, even those of the same age (as, for example, the Epistle of Barnabas,) or of the next following,--a difference that transcends all degree, and is truly a difference in kind. Nay, the catalogue of the works written by the Reformers and in the two centuries after the Reformation, contain many many volumes far superior in Christian light and unction to the best of the Fathers. How poor and unevangelic is Hermas in comparison with our Pilgrim's Progress! [Footnote 1: P. 98, &c. of the edition by Murray and Major, 1830 Ed.] [Footnote 2: See 'ante'. Ed.] [Footnote 3: Prefixed to an edition of the Pilgrim's Progress, by R. Edwards, 1820. Ed.] [Footnote 4: The second of two 'Letters written to persons under trouble of mind.' Ed.] [Footnote 5: Sermon of the certainty and perpetuity of faith in the elect. Vol. iii. p. 583. Keale's edit. Ed.] NOTES ON SELECT DISCOURSES BY JOHN SMITH. [1] It would make a delightful and instructive essay, to draw up a critical and (where possible) biographical account of the Latitudinarian party at Cambridge, from the close of the reign of James I to the latter half of Charles II. The greater number were Platonists, so called at least, and such they believed themselves to be, but more truly Plotinists. Thus Cudworth, Dr. Jackson (chaplain of Charles I, and vicar of Newcastle-on-Tyne), Henry More, this John Smith, and some others. Taylor was a Gassendist, or 'inter Epicureos evangelizantes', and, as far as I know, he is the only exception. They were all alike admirers of Grotius, which in Jeremy Taylor was consistent with the tone of his philosophy. The whole party, however, and a more amiable never existed, were scared and disgusted into this by the catachrestic language and skeleton half-truths of the systematic divines of the Synod of Dort on the one hand, and by the sickly broodings of the Pietists and Solomon's-Song preachers on the other. What they all wanted was a pre-inquisition into the mind, as part organ, part constituent, of all knowledge, an examination of the scales, weights and measures themselves abstracted from the objects to be weighed or measured by them; in short, a transcendental æsthetic, logic, and noetic. Lord Herbert was at the entrance of, nay, already some paces within, the shaft and adit of the mine, but he turned abruptly back, and the honour of establishing a complete [Greek: propaideía] of philosophy was reserved for Immanuel Kant, a century or more afterwards. From the confounding of Plotinism with Platonism, the Latitudinarian divines fell into the mistake of finding in the Greek philosophy many anticipations of the Christian Faith, which in fact were but its echoes. The inference is as perilous as inevitable, namely, that even the mysteries of Christianity needed no revelation, having been previously discovered and set forth by unaided reason. ... The argument from the mere universality of the belief, appears to me far stronger in favour of a surviving soul and a state after death, than for the existence of the Supreme Being. In the former, it is one doctrine in the Englishman and in the Hottentot; the differences are accidents not affecting the subject, otherwise than as different seals would affect the same wax, though Molly, the maid, used her thimble, and Lady 'Virtuosa' an 'intaglio' of the most exquisite workmanship. Far otherwise in the latter. 'Mumbo Jumbo', or the 'cercocheronychous Nick-Senior', or whatever score or score thousand invisible huge men fear and fancy engender in the brain of ignorance to be hatched by the nightmare of defenceless and self-conscious weakness--these are not the same as, but are 'toto genere' diverse from, the 'una et unica substantia' of Spinosa, or the World-God of the Stoics. And each of these again is as diverse from the living Lord God, the creator of heaven and earth. Nay, this equivoque on God is as mischievous as it is illogical: it is the sword and buckler of Deism. OF THE EXISTENCE AND NATURE OF GOD. Besides, when we review our own immortal souls and their dependency upon some Almighty mind, we know that we neither did nor could produce ourselves, and withal know that all that power which lies within the compass of ourselves will serve for no other purpose than to apply several pre-existent things one to another, from whence all generations and mutations arise, which are nothing else but the events of different applications and complications of bodies that were existent before; and therefore that which produced that substantial life and mind by which we know ourselves, must be something much more mighty than we are, and can be no less indeed than omnipotent, and must also be the first architect and [Greek: daemiourgòs] of all other beings, and the perpetual supporter of them. A Rhodian leap! Where our knowledge of a cause is derived from our knowledge of the effect, which is falsely (I think) here supposed, nothing can be logically, that is, apodeictically, inferred, but the adequacy of the former to the latter. The mistake, common to Smith, with a hundred other writers, arises out of an equivocal use of the word 'know.' In the scientific sense, as implying insight, and which ought to be the sense of the word in this place, we might be more truly said to know the soul by God, than to know God by the soul. ... So the Sibyl was noted by Heraclitus as [Greek: mainomén_o stómati gelastà kaì akall_ópista phtheggoménae] 'as one speaking ridiculous and unseemly speeches with her furious mouth.' This fragment is misquoted and misunderstood: for--[Greek: gelastà] it should be [Greek: amuristà]. unperfumed, inornate lays, not redolent of art.--Render it thus: ... Not her's To win the sense by words of rhetoric, Lip-blossoms breathing perishable sweets; But by the power of the informing Word Roll sounding onward through a thousand years Her deep prophetic bodements. [Greek: Stómati mainomén_o] is with ecstatic mouth. ... If the ascetic virtues, or disciplinary exercises, derived from the schools of philosophy (Pythagorean, Platonic and Stoic) were carried to an extreme in the middle ages, it is most certain that they are at present in a far more grievous disproportion underrated and neglected. The 'regula maxima' of the ancient [Greek: askaesis] was to conquer the body by abstracting the attention from it. Our maxim is to conciliate the body by attending to it, and counteracting or precluding one set of sensations by another, the servile dependence of the mind on the body remaining the same. Instead of the due subservience of the body to the mind (the favorite language of our Sidneys and Miltons) we hear nothing at present but of health, good digestion, pleasurable state of general feeling, and the like. [Footnote 1: Of Queen's College, Cambridge, 1660.] TO ADAM STEINMETZ K------. [1] MY DEAR GODCHILD, I offer up the same fervent prayer for you now, as I did kneeling before the altar, when you were baptized into Christ, and solemnly received as a living member of His spiritual body, the Church. Years must pass before you will be able to read with an understanding heart what I now write; but I trust that the all-gracious God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, who, by his only begotten Son, (all mercies in one sovereign mercy!) has redeemed you from the evil ground, and willed you to be born out of darkness, but into light--out of death, but into life--out of sin, but into righteousness, even into the 'Lord our Righteousness'; I trust that He will graciously hear the prayers of your dear parents, and be with you as the spirit of health and growth in body and mind. My dear Godchild!--You received from Christ's minister at the baptismal font, as your Christian name, the name of a most dear friend of your father's, and who was to me even as a son, the late Adam Steinmetz, whose fervent aspiration and ever-paramount aim, even from early youth, was to be a Christian in thought, word, and deed--in will, mind, and affections. I too, your Godfather, have known what the enjoyments and advantages of this life are, and what the more refined pleasures which learning and intellectual power can bestow; and with all the experience which more than threescore years can give, I now, on the eve of my departure, declare to you (and earnestly pray that you may hereafter live and act on the conviction) that health is a great blessing,--competence obtained by honorable industry a great blessing,--and a great blessing it is to have kind, faithful, and loving friends and relatives; but that the greatest of all blessings, as it is the most ennobling of all privileges, is to be indeed a Christian. But I have been likewise, through a large portion of my later life, a sufferer, sorely afflicted with bodily pains, languors, and bodily infirmities; and, for the last three or four years, have, with few and brief intervals, been confined to a sick-room, and at this moment, in great weakness and heaviness, write from a sick-bed, hopeless of a recovery, yet without prospect of a speedy recovery; and I, thus on the very brink of the grave, solemnly bear witness to you that the Almighty Redeemer, most gracious in His promises to them that truly seek Him, is faithful to perform what He hath promised, and has preserved, under all my pains and infirmities, the inward peace that passeth all understanding, with the supporting assurance of a reconciled God, who will not withdraw His Spirit from me in the conflict, and in His own time will deliver me from the Evil One! O, my dear Godchild! eminently blessed are those who begin early to seek, fear, and love their God, trusting wholly in the righteousness and mediation of their Lord, Redeemer, Saviour, and everlasting High Priest, Jesus Christ! O, preserve this as a legacy and bequest from your unseen Godfather and friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. July 13, 1834. [2] [Footnote 1: See 'ante', p. 291. Ed.] [Footnote 2: He died on the 25th day of the same month.] END OF VOL. III. CORRIGENDA. Pages 32, 33, insert _men_ between the pages. Page 41. N. after _see post_, add _Vol. IV._ 330, line 7 from bottom, _for_ result _read_ rennet. 
8489	----	[The Greek transliterations throughout this file are either missing or very suspect.] [Illustration: F. Finden sculp. _London, John Murray, Albernarle St. 1837_] [autographed: Dear Sir, Your obliged servant. S. T. Coleridge] SPECIMENS OF THE TABLE TALK OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. TO JAMES GILLMAN, ESQUIRE, OF THE GROVE, HIGHGATE, AND TO MRS. GILLMAN, This Volume IS GRATEFULLY INSCRIBED. PREFACE. * * * * * It is nearly fifteen years since I was, for the first time, enabled to become a frequent and attentive visitor in Mr. Coleridge's domestic society. His exhibition of intellectual power in living discourse struck me at once as unique and transcendant; and upon my return home, on the very first evening which I spent with him after my boyhood, I committed to writing, as well as I could, the principal topics of his conversation in his own words. I had no settled design at that time of continuing the work, but simply made the note in something like a spirit of vexation that such a strain of music as I had just heard, should not last forever. What I did once, I was easily induced by the same feeling to do again; and when, after many years of affectionate communion between us, the painful existence of my revered relative on earth was at length finished in peace, my occasional notes of what he had said in my presence had grown to a mass, of which this volume contains only such parts as seem fit for present publication. I know, better than any one can tell me, how inadequately these specimens represent the peculiar splendour and individuality of Mr. Coleridge's conversation. How should it be otherwise? Who could always follow to the turning-point his long arrow-flights of thought? Who could fix those ejaculations of light, those tones of a prophet, which at times have made me bend before him as before an inspired man? Such acts of spirit as these were too subtle to be fettered down on paper; they live--if they can live any where--in the memories alone of those who witnessed them. Yet I would fain hope that these pages will prove that all is not lost;--that something of the wisdom, the learning, and the eloquence of a great man's social converse has been snatched from forgetfulness, and endowed with a permanent shape for general use. And although, in the judgment of many persons, I may incur a serious responsibility by this publication; I am, upon the whole, willing to abide the result, in confidence that the fame of the loved and lamented speaker will lose nothing hereby, and that the cause of Truth and of Goodness will be every way a gainer. This sprig, though slight and immature, may yet become its place, in the Poet's wreath of honour, among flowers of graver hue. If the favour shown to several modern instances of works nominally of the same description as the present were alone to be considered, it might seem that the old maxim, that nothing ought to be said of the dead but what is good, is in a fair way of being dilated into an understanding that every thing is good that has been said by the dead. The following pages do not, I trust, stand in need of so much indulgence. Their contents may not, in every particular passage, be of great intrinsic importance; but they can hardly be without some, and, I hope, a worthy, interest, as coming from the lips of one at least of the most extraordinary men of the age; whilst to the best of my knowledge and intention, no living person's name is introduced, whether for praise or for blame, except on literary or political grounds of common notoriety. Upon the justice of the remarks here published, it would be out of place in me to say any thing; and a commentary of that kind is the less needed, as, in almost every instance, the principles upon which the speaker founded his observations are expressly stated, and may be satisfactorily examined by themselves. But, for the purpose of general elucidation, it seemed not improper to add a few notes, and to make some quotations from Mr. Coleridge's own works; and in doing so, I was in addition actuated by an earnest wish to call the attention of reflecting minds in general to the views of political, moral, and religious philosophy contained in those works, which, through an extensive, but now decreasing, prejudice, have hitherto been deprived of that acceptance with the public which their great preponderating merits deserve, and will, as I believe, finally obtain. And I can truly say, that if, in the course of the perusal of this little work, any one of its readers shall gain a clearer insight into the deep and pregnant principles, in the light of which Mr. Coleridge was accustomed to regard God and the World,--I shall look upon the publication as fortunate, and consider myself abundantly rewarded for whatever trouble it has cost me. A cursory inspection will show that this volume lays no claim to be ranked with those of Boswell in point of dramatic interest. Coleridge differed not more from Johnson in every characteristic of intellect, than in the habits and circumstances of his life, during the greatest part of the time in which I was intimately conversant with him. He was naturally very fond of society, and continued to be so to the last; but the almost unceasing ill health with which he was afflicted, after fifty, confined him for many months in every year to his own room, and, most commonly, to his bed. He was then rarely seen except by single visiters; and few of them would feel any disposition upon such occasions to interrupt him, whatever might have been the length or mood of his discourse. And indeed, although I have been present in mixed company, where Mr. Coleridge has been questioned and opposed, and the scene has been amusing for the moment--I own that it was always much more delightful to me to let the river wander at its own sweet will, unruffled by aught but a certain breeze of emotion which the stream itself produced. If the course it took was not the shortest, it was generally the most beautiful; and what you saw by the way was as worthy of note as the ultimate object to which you were journeying. It is possible, indeed, that Coleridge did not, in fact, possess the precise gladiatorial power of Johnson; yet he understood a sword-play of his own; and I have, upon several occasions, seen him exhibit brilliant proofs of its effectiveness upon disputants of considerable pretensions in their particular lines. But he had a genuine dislike of the practice in himself or others, and no slight provocation could move him to any such exertion. He was, indeed, to my observation, more distinguished from other great men of letters by his moral thirst after the Truth--the ideal truth--in his own mind, than by his merely intellectual qualifications. To leave the everyday circle of society, in which the literary and scientific rarely-- the rest never--break through the spell of personality;--where Anecdote reigns everlastingly paramount and exclusive, and the mildest attempt to generalize the Babel of facts, and to control temporary and individual phenomena by the application of eternal and overruling principles, is unintelligible to many, and disagreeable to more;--to leave this species of converse--if converse it deserves to be called--and pass an entire day with Coleridge, was a marvellous change indeed. It was a Sabbath past expression deep, and tranquil, and serene. You came to a man who had travelled in many countries and in critical times; who had seen and felt the world in most of its ranks and in many of its vicissitudes and weaknesses; one to whom all literature and genial art were absolutely subject, and to whom, with a reasonable allowance as to technical details, all science was in a most extraordinary degree familiar. Throughout a long-drawn summer's day would this man talk to you in low, equable, but clear and musical, tones, concerning things human and divine; marshalling all history, harmonizing all experiment, probing the depths of your consciousness, and revealing visions of glory and of terror to the imagination; but pouring withal such floods of light upon the mind, that you might, for a season, like Paul, become blind in the very act of conversion. And this he would do, without so much as one allusion to himself, without a word of reflection on others, save when any given act fell naturally in the way of his discourse,--without one anecdote that was not proof and illustration of a previous position;--gratifying no passion, indulging no caprice, but, with a calm mastery over your soul, leading you onward and onward for ever through a thousand windings, yet with no pause, to some magnificent point in which, as in a focus, all the party-coloured rays of his discourse should converge in light. In all this he was, in truth, your teacher and guide; but in a little while you might forget that he was other than a fellow student and the companion of your way,--so playful was his manner, so simple his language, so affectionate the glance of his pleasant eye! There were, indeed, some whom Coleridge tired, and some whom he sent asleep. It would occasionally so happen, when the abstruser mood was strong upon him, and the visiter was narrow and ungenial. I have seen him at times when you could not incarnate him,--when he shook aside your petty questions or doubts, and burst with some impatience through the obstacles of common conversation. Then, escaped from the flesh, he would soar upwards into an atmosphere almost too rare to breathe, but which seemed proper to _him_, and there he would float at ease. Like enough, what Coleridge then said, his subtlest listener would not understand as a man understands a newspaper; but upon such a listener there would steal an influence, and an impression, and a sympathy; there would be a gradual attempering of his body and spirit, till his total being vibrated with one pulse alone, and thought became merged in contemplation;-- And so, his senses gradually wrapt In a half sleep, he'd dream of better worlds, And dreaming hear thee still, O singing lark, That sangest like an angel in the clouds! But it would be a great mistake to suppose that the general character of Mr. Coleridge's conversation was abstruse or rhapsodical. The contents of the following pages may, I think, be taken as pretty strong presumptive evidence that his ordinary manner was plain and direct enough; and even when, as sometimes happened, he seemed to ramble from the road, and to lose himself in a wilderness of digressions, the truth was, that at that very time he was working out his fore-known conclusion through an almost miraculous logic, the difficulty of which consisted precisely in the very fact of its minuteness and universality. He took so large a scope, that, if he was interrupted before he got to the end, he appeared to have been talking without an object; although, perhaps, a few steps more would have brought you to a point, a retrospect from which would show you the pertinence of all he had been saying. I have heard persons complain that they could get no answer to a question from Coleridge. The truth is, he answered, or meant to answer, so fully that the querist should have no second question to ask. In nine cases out of ten he saw the question was short or misdirected; and knew that a mere _yes_ or _no_ answer could not embrace the truth--that is, the whole truth--and might, very probably, by implication, convey error. Hence that exhaustive, cyclical mode of discoursing in which he frequently indulged; unfit, indeed, for a dinner- table, and too long-breathed for the patience of a chance visiter,--but which, to those who knew for what they came, was the object of their profoundest admiration, as it was the source of their most valuable instruction. Mr. Coleridge's affectionate disciples learned their lessons of philosophy and criticism from his own mouth. He was to them as an old master of the Academy or Lyceum. The more time he took, the better pleased were such visiters; for they came expressly to listen, and had ample proof how truly he had declared, that whatever difficulties he might feel, with pen in hand, in the expression of his meaning, he never found the smallest hitch or impediment in the utterance of his most subtle reasonings by word of mouth. How many a time and oft have I felt his abtrusest thoughts steal rhythmically on my soul, when chanted forth by him! Nay, how often have I fancied I heard rise up in answer to his gentle touch, an interpreting music of my own, as from the passive strings of some wind-smitten lyre! Mr. Coleridge's conversation at all times required attention, because what he said was so individual and unexpected. But when he was dealing deeply with a question, the demand upon the intellect of the hearer was very great; not so much for any hardness of language, for his diction was always simple and easy; nor for the abstruseness of the thoughts, for they generally explained, or appeared to explain, themselves; but preeminently on account of the seeming remoteness of his associations, and the exceeding subtlety of his transitional links. Upon this point it is very happily, though, according to my observation, too generally, remarked, by one whose powers and opportunities of judging were so eminent that the obliquity of his testimony in other respects is the more unpardonable;--"Coleridge, to many people--and often I have heard the complaint--seemed to wander; and he seemed then to wander the most, when, in fact, his resistance to the wandering instinct was greatest,--viz. when the compass and huge circuit, by which his illustrations moved, travelled farthest into remote regions, before they began to revolve. Long before this coming round commenced, most people had lost him, and naturally enough supposed that he had lost himself. They continued to admire the separate beauty of the thoughts, but did not see their relations to the dominant theme. * * * * However, I can assert, upon my long and intimate knowledge of Coleridge's mind, that logic the most severe was as inalienable from his modes of thinking, as grammar from his language." [Footnote: Tait's Mag. Sept. 1834, p. 514.] True: his mind was a logic-vice; let him fasten it on the tiniest flourish of an error, he never slacked his hold, till he had crushed body and tail to dust. He was _always_ ratiocinating in his own mind, and therefore sometimes seemed incoherent to the partial observer. It happened to him as to Pindar, who in modern days has been called a rambling rhapsodist, because the connections of his parts, though never arbitrary, are so fine that the vulgar reader sees them not at all. But they are there nevertheless, and may all be so distinctly shown, that no one can doubt their existence; and a little study will also prove that the points of contact are those which the true genius of lyric verse naturally evolved, and that the entire Pindaric ode, instead of being the loose and lawless out-burst which so many have fancied, is, without any exception, the most artificial and highly wrought composition which Time has spared to us from the wreck of the Greek Muse. So I can well remember occasions, in which, after listening to Mr. Coleridge for several delightful hours, I have gone away with divers splendid masses of reasoning in my head, the separate beauty and coherency of which I deeply felt, but how they had produced, or how they bore upon, each other, I could not then perceive. In such cases I have mused sometimes even for days afterwards upon the words, till at length, spontaneously as it seemed, "the fire would kindle," and the association, which had escaped my utmost efforts of comprehension before, flash itself all at once upon my mind with the clearness of noon-day light. It may well be imagined that a style of conversation so continuous and diffused as that which I have just attempted to describe, presented remarkable difficulties to a mere reporter by memory. It is easy to preserve the pithy remark, the brilliant retort, or the pointed anecdote; these stick of themselves, and their retention requires no effort of mind. But where the salient angles are comparatively few, and the object of attention is a long-drawn subtle discoursing, you can never recollect, except by yourself thinking the argument over again. In so doing, the order and the characteristic expressions will for the most part spontaneously arise; and it is scarcely credible with what degree of accuracy language may thus be preserved, where practice has given some dexterity, and long familiarity with the speaker has enabled, or almost forced, you to catch the outlines of his manner. Yet with all this, so peculiar were the flow and breadth of Mr. Coleridge's conversation, that I am very sensible how much those who can best judge will have to complain of my representation of it. The following specimens will, I fear, seem too fragmentary, and therefore deficient in one of the most distinguishing properties of that which they are designed to represent; and this is true. Yet the reader will in most instances have little difficulty in understanding the course which the conversation took, although my recollections of it are thrown into separate paragraphs for the sake of superior precision. As I never attempted to give dialogue--indeed, there was seldom much dialogue to give --the great point with me was to condense what I could remember on each particular topic into intelligible _wholes_ with as little injury to the living manner and diction as was possible. With this explanation, I must leave it to those who still have the tones of "that old man eloquent" ringing in their ears, to say how far I have succeeded in this delicate enterprise of stamping his winged words with perpetuity. In reviewing the contents of the following pages, I can clearly see that I have admitted some passages which will be pronounced illiberal by those who, in the present day, emphatically call themselves liberal--_the_ liberal. I allude of course to Mr. Coleridge's remarks on the Reform Bill and the Malthusian economists. The omission of such passages would probably have rendered this publication more generally agreeable, and my disposition does not lead me to give gratuitous offence to any one. But the opinions of Mr. Coleridge on these subjects, however imperfectly expressed by me, were deliberately entertained by him; and to have omitted, in so miscellaneous a collection as this, what he was well known to have said, would have argued in me a disapprobation or a fear, which I disclaim. A few words, however, may be pertinently employed here in explaining the true bearing of Coleridge's mind on the politics of our modern days. He was neither a Whig nor a Tory, as those designations are usually understood; well enough knowing that, for the most part, half-truths only are involved in the Parliamentary tenets of one party or the other. In the common struggles of a session, therefore, he took little interest; and as to mere personal sympathies, the friend of Frere and of Poole, the respected guest of Canning and of Lord Lansdowne, could have nothing to choose. But he threw the weight of his opinion--and it was considerable--into the Tory or Conservative scale, for these two reasons:--First, generally, because he had a deep conviction that the cause of freedom and of truth is now seriously menaced by a democratical spirit, growing more and more rabid every day, and giving no doubtful promise of the tyranny to come; and secondly, in particular, because the national Church was to him the ark of the covenant of his beloved country, and he saw the Whigs about to coalesce with those whose avowed principles lead them to lay the hand of spoliation upon it. Add to these two grounds, some relics of the indignation which the efforts of the Whigs to thwart the generous exertions of England in the great Spanish war had formerly roused within him; and all the constituents of any active feeling in Mr. Coleridge's mind upon matters of state are, I believe, fairly laid before the reader. The Reform question in itself gave him little concern, except as he foresaw the present attack on the Church to be the immediate consequence of the passing of the Bill; "for let the form of the House of Commons," said he, "be what it may, it will be, for better or for worse, pretty much what the country at large is; but once invade that truly national and essentially popular institution, the Church, and divert its funds to the relief or aid of individual charity or public taxation--how specious soever that pretext may be--and you will never thereafter recover the lost means of perpetual cultivation. Give back to the Church what the nation originally consecrated to its use, and it ought then to be charged with the education of the people; but half of the original revenue has been already taken by force from her, or lost to her through desuetude, legal decision, or public opinion; and are those whose very houses and parks are part and parcel of what the nation designed for the general purposes of the Clergy, to be heard, when they argue for making the Church support, out of her diminished revenues, institutions, the intended means for maintaining which they themselves hold under the sanction of legal robbery?" Upon this subject Mr. Coleridge did indeed feel very warmly, and was accustomed to express himself accordingly. It weighed upon his mind night and day, and he spoke upon it with an emotion, which I never saw him betray upon any topic of common politics, however decided his opinion might be. In this, therefore, he was _felix opportunitate mortis; non enim vidit_----; and the just and honest of all parties will heartily admit over his grave, that as his principles and opinions were untainted by any sordid interest, so he maintained them in the purest spirit of a reflective patriotism, without spleen, or bitterness, or breach of social union. It would require a rare pen to do justice to the constitution of Coleridge's mind. It was too deep, subtle, and peculiar, to be fathomed by a morning visiter. Few persons knew much of it in any thing below the surface; scarcely three or four ever got to understand it in all its marvellous completeness. Mere personal familiarity with this extraordinary man did not put you in possession of him; his pursuits and aspirations, though in their mighty range presenting points of contact and sympathy for all, transcended in their ultimate reach the extremest limits of most men's imaginations. For the last thirty years of his life, at least, Coleridge was really and truly a philosopher of the antique cast. He had his esoteric views; and all his prose works from the "Friend" to the "Church and State" were little more than feelers, pioneers, disciplinants for the last and complete exposition of them. Of the art of making hooks he knew little, and cared less; but had he been as much an adept in it as a modern novelist, he never could have succeeded in rendering popular or even tolerable, at first, his attempt to push Locke and Paley from their common throne in England. A little more working in the trenches might have brought him closer to the walls with less personal damage; but it is better for Christian philosophy as it is, though the assailant was sacrificed in the bold and artless attack. Mr. Coleridge's prose works had so very limited a sale, that although published in a technical sense, they could scarcely be said to have ever become _publici juris_. He did not think them such himself, with the exception, perhaps, of the "Aids to Reflection," and generally made a particular remark if he met any person who professed or showed that he had read the "Friend" or any of his other books. And I have no doubt that had he lived to complete his great work on "Philosophy reconciled with Christian Religion," he would without scruple have used in that work any part or parts of his preliminary treatises, as their intrinsic fitness required. Hence in every one of his prose writings there are repetitions, either literal or substantial, of passages to be found in some others of those writings; and there are several particular positions and reasonings, which he considered of vital importance, reiterated in the "Friend," the "Literary Life," the "Lay Sermons," the "Aids to Reflection," and the "Church and State." He was always deepening and widening the foundation, and cared not how often he used the same stone. In thinking passionately of the principle, he forgot the authorship--and sowed beside many waters, if peradventure some chance seedling might take root and bear fruit to the glory of God and the spiritualization of Man. His mere reading was immense, and the quality and direction of much of it well considered, almost unique in this age of the world. He had gone through most of the Fathers, and, I believe, all the Schoolmen of any eminence; whilst his familiarity with all the more common departments of literature in every language is notorious. The early age at which some of these acquisitions were made, and his ardent self-abandonment in the strange pursuit, might, according to a common notion, have seemed adverse to increase and maturity of power in after life: yet it was not so; he lost, indeed, for ever the chance of being a popular writer; but Lamb's _inspired charity-boy_ of twelve years of age continued to his dying day, when sixty-two, the eloquent centre of all companies, and the standard of intellectual greatness to hundreds of affectionate disciples far and near. Had Coleridge been master of his genius, and not, alas! mastered by it;-- had he less romantically fought a single-handed fight against the whole prejudices of his age, nor so mercilessly racked his fine powers on the problem of a universal Christian philosophy,--he might have easily won all that a reading public can give to a favourite, and have left a name--not greater nor more enduring indeed--but--better known, and more prized, than now it is, amongst the wise, the gentle, and the good, throughout all ranks of society. Nevertheless, desultory as his labours, fragmentary as his productions at present may seem to the cursory observer--my undoubting belief is, that in the end it will be found that Coleridge did, in his vocation, the day's work of a giant. He has been melted into the very heart of the rising literatures of England and America; and the principles he has taught are the master-light of the moral and intellectual being of men, who, if they shall fail to save, will assuredly illustrate and condemn, the age in which they live. As it is, they 'bide their time. Coleridge himself--blessings on his gentle memory!--Coleridge was a frail mortal. He had indeed his peculiar weaknesses as well as his unique powers; sensibilities that an averted look would rack, a heart which would have beaten calmly in the tremblings of an earthquake. He shrank from mere uneasiness like a child, and bore the preparatory agonies of his death- attack like a martyr. Sinned against a thousand times more than sinning, he himself suffered an almost life-long punishment for his errors, whilst the world at large has the unwithering fruits of his labours, his genius, and his sacrifice. _Necesse est tanquam immaturam mortem ejus defleam; si tamen fas est aut flere, aut omnino mortem vocare, qua tanti viri mortalitas magis finita quam vita est. Vivit enim, vivetque semper, atque etiam latius in memoria hominum et sermone versabitur, postquam ab oculis recessit._ * * * * * Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the youngest child of the Reverend John Coleridge, Vicar of the Parish of Ottery St. Mary, in the county of Devon, and master of Henry the Eighth's Free Grammar School in that town. His mother's maiden name was Ann Bowdon. He was born at Ottery on the 21st of October, 1772, "about eleven o'clock in the forenoon," as his father the vicar has, with rather a curious particularity, entered it in the register. He died on the 25th of July, 1834, in Mr. Gillman's house, in the Grove, Highgate, and is buried in the old church-yard, by the road side. [Greek: ----] H. N. C. CONTENTS * * * * * Character of Othello Schiller's Robbers Shakspeare Scotch Novels Lord Byron John Kemble Mathews Parliamentary Privilege Permanency and Progression of Nations Kant's Races of Mankind Materialism Ghosts Character of the Age for Logic Plato and Xenophon Greek Drama Kotzebue Burke St. John's Gospel Christianity Epistle to the Hebrews The Logos Reason and Understanding Kean Sir James Mackintosh Sir H. Davy Robert Smith Canning National Debt Poor Laws Conduct of the Whigs Reform of the House of Commons Church of Rome Zendavesta Pantheism and Idolatry Difference between Stories of Dreams and Ghosts Phantom Portrait Witch of Endor Socinianism Plato and Xenophon Religions of the Greeks Egyptian Antiquities Milton Virgil Granville Penn and the Deluge Rainbow English and Greek Dancing Greek Acoustics Lord Byron's Versification and Don Juan Parental Control in Marriage Marriage of Cousins Differences of Character Blumenbach and Kant's Races Iapetic and Semitic Hebrew Solomon Jewish History Spinozistic and Hebrew Schemes Roman Catholics Energy of Man and other Animals Shakspeare _in minimis_ Paul Sarpi Bartram's Travels The Understanding Parts of Speech Grammar Magnetism Electricity Galvanism Spenser Character of Othello Hamlet Polonius Principles and Maxims Love Measure for Measure Ben Jonson Beaumont and Fletcher Version of the Bible Craniology Spurzheim Bull and Waterland The Trinity Scale of Animal Being Popedom Scanderbeg Thomas à Becket Pure Ages of Greek, Italian, and English Luther Baxter Algernon Sidney's Style Ariosto and Tasso Prose and Poetry The Fathers Rhenferd Jacob Behmen Non-perception of Colours Restoration Reformation William III. Berkeley Spinosa Genius Envy Love Jeremy Taylor Hooker Ideas Knowledge Painting Prophecies of the Old Testament Messiah Jews The Trinity Conversion of the Jews Jews in Poland Mosaic Miracles Pantheism Poetic Promise Nominalists and Realists British Schoolmen Spinosa Fall of Man Madness Brown and Darwin Nitrous Oxide Plants Insects Men Dog Ant and Bee Black, Colonel Holland and the Dutch Religion Gentilizes Women and Men Biblical Commentators Walkerite Creed Horne Tooke Diversions of Purley Gender of the Sun in German Horne Tooke Jacobins Persian and Arabic Poetry Milesian Tales Sir T. Monro Sir S. Raffles Canning Shakspeare Milton Homer Reason and Understanding Words and Names of Things The Trinity Irving Abraham Isaac Jacob Origin of Acts Love Lord Eldon's Doctrine as to Grammar Schools Democracy The Eucharist St. John, xix. 11. Divinity of Christ Genuineness of Books of Moses Mosaic Prophecies Talent and Genius Motives and Impulses Constitutional and functional Life Hysteria Hydro-carbonic Gas Bitters and Tonics Specific Medicines Epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians Oaths Flogging Eloquence of Abuse The Americans Book of Job Translation of the Psalms Ancient Mariner Undine Martin Pilgrim's Progress Prayer Church-singing Hooker Dreams Jeremy Taylor English Reformation Catholicity Gnosis Tertullian St. John Principles of a Review Party Spirit Southey's Life of Bunyan Laud Puritans and Cavaliers Presbyterians, Independents, and Bishops Study of the Bible Rabelais Swift Bentley Burnet Giotto Painting Seneca Plato Aristotle Duke of Wellington Monied Interest Canning Bourrienne Jews The Papacy and the Reformation Leo X. Thelwall Swift Stella Iniquitous Legislation Spurzheim and Craniology French Revolution, 1830 Captain B. Hall and the Americans English Reformation Democracy Idea of a State Church Government French Gendarmerie Philosophy of young Men at the present Day Thucydides and Tacitus Poetry Modern Metre Logic Varro Socrates Greek Philosophy Plotinus Tertullian Scotch and English Lakes Love and Friendship opposed Marriage Characterlessness of Women Mental Anarchy Ear and Taste for Music different English Liturgy Belgian Revolution Galileo, Newton, Kepler, Bacon The Reformation House of Commons Government Earl Grey Government Popular Representation Napier Buonaparte Southey Patronage of the Fine Arts Old Women Pictures Chillingworth Superstition of Maltese, Sicilians, and Italians Asgill The French The Good and the True Romish Religion England and Holland Iron Galvanism Heat National Colonial Character, and Naval Discipline England Holland and Belgium Greatest Happiness Principle Hobbism The Two Modes of Political Action Truths and Maxims Drayton and Daniel Mr. Coleridge's System of Philosophy Keenness and Subtlety Duties and Needs of an Advocate Abolition of the French Hereditary Peerage Conduct of Ministers on the Reform Bill Religion Union with Ireland Irish Church A State Persons and Things History Beauty Genius Church State Dissenters Gracefulness of Children Dogs Ideal Tory and Whig The Church Ministers and the Reform Bill Disfranchisement Genius feminine Pirates Astrology Alchemy Reform Bill Crisis John, Chap. III. Ver. 4. Dictation and Inspiration Gnosis New Testament Canon Unitarianism--Moral Philosophy Moral Law of Polarity Epidemic Disease Quarantine Harmony Intellectual Revolutions Modern Style Genius of the Spanish and Italians Vico Spinosa Colours Destruction of Jerusalem Epic Poem Vox Populi Vox Dei Black Asgill and Defoe Horne Tooke Fox and Pitt Horner Adiaphori Citizens and Christians Professor Park English Constitution Democracy Milton and Sidney De Vi Minimorum Hahnemann Luther Sympathy of old Greek and Latin with English Roman Mind War Charm for Cramp Greek Dual, neuter pleural *sic*, and verb singular Theta Talented Homer Valcknaer Principles and Facts Schmidt Puritans and Jacobins Wordsworth French Revolution Infant Schools Mr. Coleridge's Philosophy Sublimity Solomon Madness C. Lamb Faith and Belief Dobrizhoffer Scotch and English Criterion of Genius Dryden and Pope Milton's disregard of Painting Baptismal Service Jews' Division of the Scripture Sanskrit Hesiod Virgil Genius Metaphysical Don Quixote Steinmetz Keats Christ's Hospital Bowyer St. Paul's Melita English and German Best State of Society Great Minds Androgynous Philosopher's Ordinary Language Juries Barristers' and Physicians' Fees Quacks Cæsarean Operation Inherited Disease Mason's Poetry Northern and Southern States of the American Union All and the Whole Ninth Article Sin and Sins Old Divines Preaching extempore Church of England Union with Ireland Faust Michael Scott, Goethe, Schiller, and Wordsworth Beaumont and Fletcher Ben Jonson Massinger House of Commons appointing the officers of the Army and Navy Penal Code in Ireland Churchmen Coronation Oaths Divinity Professions and Trades Modern Political Economy National Debt Property Tax Duty of Landholders Massinger Shakspeare Hieronimo Love's Labour Lost Gifford's Massinger Shakspeare The Old Dramatists Statesmen Burke Prospect of Monarchy or Democracy The Reformed House of Commons United States of America Captain B. Hall Northern and Southern States Democracy with Slavery Quakers Land and Money Methods of Investigation Church of Rome Celibacy of the Clergy Roman Conquest of Italy Wedded Love in Shakspeare and his Contemporary Dramatists Tennyson's Poems Rabelais and Luther Wit and Madness Colonization Machinery Capital Roman Conquest Constantine Papacy and the Schoolmen Civil War of the Seventeenth Century Hampden's Speech Reformed House of Commons Food Medicine Poison Obstruction Wilson Shakspeare's Sonnets Wickliffe Love Luther Reverence for Ideal Truths Johnson the Whig Asgill James I. Sir P. Sidney Things are finding their Level German Goethe God's Providence Man's Freedom Dom Miguel and Dom Pedro Working to better one's condition Negro Emancipation Fox and Pitt Revolution Virtue and Liberty Epistle to the Romans Erasmus Luther Negro Emancipation Hackett's Life of Archbishop Williams Charles I. Manners under Edward III. Richard II. and Henry VIII. Hypothesis Suffiction Theory Lyell's Geology Gothic Architecture Gerard's Douw's "Schoolmaster" and Titian's "Venus" Sir J. Scarlett Mandeville's Fable of the Bees Bestial Theory Character of Bertram Beaumont and Fletcher's Dramas Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides Milton Style Cavalier Slang Junius Prose and Verse Imitation and Copy Dr. Johnson Boswell Burke Newton Milton Painting Music Poetry Public Schools Scott and Coleridge Nervous Weakness Hooker and Bull Faith Quakers Philanthropists Jews Sallust Thucydides Herodotus Gibbon Key to the Decline of the Roman Empire Dr. Johnson's Political Pamphlets Taxation Direct Representation Universal Suffrage Right of Women to vote Horne Tooke Etymology of the final _Ive_ "The Lord" in the English Version of the Psalms, etc. Scotch Kirk and Irving Milton's Egotism Claudian Sterne Humour and Genius Great Poets good Men Diction of the Old and New Testament Version Hebrew Vowels and Consonants Greek Accent and Quantity Consolation in Distress Mock Evangelicals Autumn Day Rosetti on Dante Laughter: Farce and Tragedy Baron Von Humboldt Modern Diplomatists Man cannot be stationary Fatalism and Providence Characteristic Temperament of Nations Greek Particles Latin Compounds Propertius Tibullus Lucan Statius Valerius Flaccus Claudian Persius Prudentius Hermesianax Destruction of Jerusalem Epic Poem German and English Paradise Lost Modern Travels The Trinity Incarnation Redemption Education Elegy Lavacrum Pallados Greek and Latin Pentameter Milton's Latin Poems Poetical Filter Gray and Cotton Homeric Heroes in Shakspeare Dryden Dr. Johnson Scott's Novels Scope of Christianity Times of Charles I. Messenger of the Covenant Prophecy Logic of Ideas and of Syllogisms W. S. Lander's Poetry Beauty Chronological Arrangement of Works Toleration Norwegians Articles of Faith Modern Quakerism Devotional Spirit Sectarianism Origen Some Men like Musical Glasses Sublime and Nonsense Atheist Proof of Existence of God Kant's attempt Plurality of Worlds A Reasoner Shakspeare's Intellectual Action Crabbe and Southey Peter Simple and Tom Cringle's Log Chaucer Shakspeare Ben Jonson Beaumont and Fletcher Daniel Massinger Lord Byron and H. Walpole's "Mysterious Mother" Lewis's Jamaica Journal Sicily Malta Sir Alexander Ball Cambridge Petition to admit Dissenters Corn Laws Christian Sabbath High Prizes and Revenues of the Church Sir Charles Wetherell's Speech National Church Dissenters Papacy Universities Schiller's Versification German Blank Verse Roman Catholic Emancipation Duke of Wellington Coronation Oath Corn Laws Modern Political Economy Socinianism Unitarianism Fancy and Imagination Mr. Coleridge's System Biographia Literaria Dissenters Lord Brooke Barrow and Dryden Peter Wilkins and Stothard Fielding and Richardson Bishop Sandford Roman Catholic Religion Euthanasia Recollections, by Mr. Justice Coleridge Address to a God-child TABLE TALK December 29, 1822 CHARACTER OF OTHELLO--SCHILLER'S ROBBERS-SHAKSPEARE --SCOTCH NOVELS--LORD BYRON--JOHN KEMMBLE--MATHEWS Othello must not be conceived as a negro, but a high and chivalrous Moorish chief. Shakspeare learned the sprit of the character from the Spanish poetry, which was prevalent in England in his time.[1] Jelousy does not strike me as the point in his passion; I take it to be rather an agony that the creature, whom he had believed angelic, with whom he had garnered up his heart, and whom he could not help still loving, should be proved impure and worthless. It was the struggle _not_ to love her. It was a moral indignation and regret that virture should so fall:--"But yet the _pity_ of it, Iago!--O Iago! the _pity_ of it, Iago!" In addition to this, his hourour was concerned: Iago would not have succeeded but by hinting that this honour was compromised. There is no ferocity in Othello; his mind is majestic and composed. He deliberately determines to die; and speaks his last speech with a view of showing his attachment to the Venetian state, though it had superseded him. [Footnote 1: Caballaeros Granadinos, Aunque Moros, hijos d'algo--ED.] * * * * * Schiller has the material Sublime; to produce an effect he sets you a whole town on fire, and throws infants with their mothers into the flames, or locks up a father in an old tower.[1] But Shakspeare drops a handkerchief, and the same or greater effects follow. [Footnote 1: This expression--"material sublime"--like a hundred others which have slipped into general use, came originally from Mr. Coleridege, and was by him, in the first instatnce, applied to Schiller's Robbers-- See Act iv, sc. 5.--ED.] Lear is the most tremendous effort of Shakspeare as a poet; Hamlet as a philosopher or meditater; and Othello is the union of the two. There is something gigantic and unformed in the former two; but in the latter, every thing assumes its due place and proportion, and the whole mature powers of his mind are displayed in admirable equilibrium. I think Old Mortality and Guy Mannering the best of the Scotch novels. It seems, to my ear, that there is a sad want of harmony in Lord Byron's verses. Is it not unnatural to be always connecting very great intellectual power with utter depravity? Does such a combination often really exist in rerum naturae? I always had a great liking--I may say, a sort of nondescript reverence-- for John Kemble. What a quaint creature he was! I remember a party, in which he was discoursing in his measured manner after dinner, when the servant announced his carriage. He nodded, and went on. The announcement took place twice afterwards; Kemble each time nodding his head a little more impatiently, but still going on. At last, and for the fourth time, the servant entered, and said,--"Mrs. Kemble says, sir, she has the rheumat_ise_, and cannot stay." "Add_ism!_" dropped John, in a parenthesis, and proceeded quietly in his harangue. * * * * * Kemble would correct any body, at any time, and in any place. Dear Charles Mathews--a true genius in his line, in my judgment--told me he was once performing privately before the King. The King was much pleased with the imitation of Kemble, and said,--"I liked Kemble very much. He was one of my earliest friends. I remember once he was talking, and found himself out of snuff. I offered him my box. He declined taking any--'he, a poor actor, could not put his fingers into a royal box.' I said, 'Take some, pray; you will obl_ee_ge me.' Upon which Kemble replied,--'It would become your royal mouth better to say, obl_i_ge me;' and took a pinch." * * * * * It is not easy to put me out of countenance, or interrupt the feeling of the time by mere external noise or circumstance; yet once I was thoroughly _done up_, as you would say. I was reciting, at a particular house, the "Remorse;" and was in the midst of Alhadra's description of the death of her husband, [1] when a scrubby boy, with a shining face set in dirt, burst open the door and cried out,--"Please, ma'am, master says, Will you ha'; or will you _not_ ha', the pin-round?" [Footnote 1: "ALHADRA. This night your chieftain arm'd himself, And hurried from me. But I follow'd him At distance, till I saw him enter _there_! NAOMI. The cavern? ALHADRA. Yes, the mouth of yonder cavern. After a while I saw the son of Valdez Rush by with flaring torch: he likewise enter'd. There was another and a longer pause; And once, methought, I heard the clash of swords! And soon the son of Valdez re-appear'd: He flung his torch towards the moon in sport, And seem'd as he were mirthful! I stood listening, Impatient for the footsteps of my husband. NAOMI. Thou calledst him? ALHADRA. I crept into the cavern-- 'Twas dark and very silent. What saidst thou? No! No! I did not dare call Isidore, Lest I should hear no answer! A brief while, Belike, I lost all thought and memory Of that for which I came! After that pause, O Heaven! I heard a groan, and follow'd it; And yet another groan, which guided me Into a strange recess--and there was light, A hideous light! his torch lay on the ground; Its flame burnt dimly o'er a chasm's brink: I spake; and whilst I spake, a feeble groan Came from that chasm! it was his last--his death-groan! NAOMI. Comfort her, Allah! ALHADRA. I stood in unimaginable trance And agony that cannot be remember'd, Listening with horrid hope to hear a groan! But I had heard his last;--my husband's death-groan! NAOMI. Haste! let us onward! ALHADRA. I look'd far down the pit-- My sight was bounded by a jutting fragment; And it was stain'd with blood. Then first I shriek'd; My eyeballs burnt, my brain grew hot as fire, And all the hanging drops of the wet roof Turn'd into blood--I saw them turn to blood! And I was leaping wildly down the chasm, When on the further brink I saw his sword, And it said, Vengeance!--Curses on my tongue! The moon hath moved in heaven, and I am here, And he hath not had vengeance!--Isidore! Spirit of Isidore, thy murderer lives! Away, away!"--Act iv. sc. 3.] _January_ 1. 1823. PARLIAMENTARY PRIVILEGE.---PERMANENCY AND PROGRESSION OF NATIONS.--KANT'S RACES OF MANKIND. Privilege is a substitution for Law, where, from the nature of the circumstances, a law cannot act without clashing with greater and more general principles. The House of Commons must, of course, have the power of taking cognizance of offences against its own rights. Sir Francis Burdett might have been properly sent to the Tower for the speech he made in the House [1]; but when afterwards he published it in Cobbett, and they took cognizance of it as a breach of privilege, they violated the plain distinction between privilege and law. As a speech in the House, the House could alone animadvert upon it, consistently with the effective preservation of its most necessary prerogative of freedom of debate; but when that speech became a book, then the law was to look to it; and there being a law of libel, commensurate with every possible object of attack in the state, privilege, which acts, or ought to act, only as a substitute for other laws, could have nothing to do with it. I have heard that one distinguished individual said,--"That he, for one, would not shrink from affirming, that if the House of Commons chose to _burn_ one of their own members in Palace Yard, it had an inherent power and right by the constitution to do so." This was said, if at all, by a moderate-minded man; and may show to what atrocious tyranny some persons may advance in theory, under shadow of this word privilege. [Footnote 1: March 12. 1810. Sir Francis Burdett made a motion in the House of Commons for the discharge of Mr. Gale Jones, who had been committed to Newgate by a resolution of the House on the 21st of February preceding. Sir Francis afterwards published, in Cobbett's Political Register, of the 24th of the same month of March, a "Letter to his Constituents, denying the power of the House of Commons to imprison the people of England," and he accompanied the letter with an argument in support of his position. On the 27th of March a complaint of breach of privilege, founded on this publication, was made in the House by Mr. (now Sir Thomas) Lethbridge, and after several long debates, a motion that Sir Francis Burdett should be committed to the Tower was made on the 5th of April, 1810, by Sir Robert Salisbury, and carried by a majority of 38.--ED.] * * * * * There are two principles in every European and Christian state: Permanency and Progression.[1] In the civil wars of the seventeenth century in England, which are as new and fresh now as they were a hundred and sixty years ago, and will be so for ever to us, these two principles came to a struggle. It was natural that the great and the good of the nation should he found in the ranks of either side. In the Mohammedan states, there is no principle of permanence; and, therefore, they sink directly. They existed, and could only exist, in their efforts at progression; when they ceased to conquer, they fell in pieces. Turkey would long since have fallen, had it not been supported by the rival and conflicting interests of Christian Europe. The Turks have no church; religion and state are one; hence there is no counterpoise, no mutual support. This is the very essence of their Unitarianism. They have no past; they are not an historical people; they exist only in the present. China is an instance of a permanency without progression. The Persians are a superior race: they have a history and a literature; they were always considered by the Greeks as quite distinct from the other barbarians. The Afghans are a remarkable people. They have a sort of republic. Europeans and Orientalists may be well represented by two figures standing back to back: the latter looking to the east, that is, backwards; the former looking westward, or forwards. [Footnote 1: See this position stated and illustrated in detail in Mr. Coleridge's work, "On the Constitution of the Church and State, according to the Idea of each," p. 21. 2d edit. 1830. Well acquainted as I am with the fact f the comparatively small acceptation which Mr. Coleridge's prose works have ever found in the literary world, and with the reasons, and, what is more, with the causes, of it, I still wonder that this particular treatise has not been more noticed: first, because it is a little book; secondly, because it is, or at least nineteen-twentieths of it are, written in a popular style; and thirdly, because it is the only work, that I know or have ever heard mentioned, that even attempts a solution of the difficulty in which an ingenious enemy of the church of England may easily involve most of its modern defenders in Parliament, or through the press, upon their own principles and admissions. Mr. Coleridge himself prized this little work highly, although he admitted its incompleteness as a composition:--"But I don't care a rush about it," he said to me, "as an author. The saving distinctions are plainly stated in it, and I am sure nothing is wanted to make them _tell_, but that some kind friend should steal them from their obscure hiding-place, and just tumble them down before the public as _his own_."--ED.] * * * * * Kant assigns three great races of mankind. If two individuals of distinct races cross, a third, or _tertium aliquid_, is _invariably_ produced, different from either, as a white and a negro produce a mulatto. But when different varieties of the same race cross, the offspring is according to what we call chance; it is now like one, now like the other parent. Note this, when you see the children of any couple of distinct European complexions,--as English and Spanish, German and Italian, Russian and Portuguese, and so on. _January_ 3. 1823. MATERIALISM.--GHOSTS. Either we have an immortal soul, or we have not. If we have not, we are beasts; the first and wisest of beasts, it may be; but still true beasts. [1] We shall only differ in degree, and not in kind; just as the elephant differs from the slug. But by the concession of all the materialists of all the schools, or almost all, we are not of the same kind as beasts--and this also we say from our own consciousness. Therefore, methinks, it must be the possession of a soul within us that makes the difference. [Footnote 1: "Try to conceive a _man_ without the ideas of God, eternity, freedom, will, absolute truth; of the good, the true, the beautiful, the infinite. An _animal_ endowed with a memory of appearances and facts might remain. But the _man_ will have vanished, and you have instead a creature more subtle than any beast of the field, but likewise cursed above every beast of the field; upon the belly must it go, and dust must it eat all the days of its life."--_Church and State_, p. 54. n.] * * * * * Read the first chapter of Genesis without prejudice, and you will be convinced at once. After the narrative of the creation of the earth and brute animals, Moses seems to pause, and says:--"And God said, Let us make man in _our image_, after _our likeness_." And in the next chapter, he repeats the narrative:--"And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life;" and then he adds these words,--"_and man became a living soul_." Materialism will never explain those last words. * * * * * Define a vulgar ghost with reference to all that is called ghost-like. It is visibility without tangibility; which is also the definition of a shadow. Therefore, a vulgar ghost and a shadow would be the same; because two different things cannot properly have the same definition. A _visible substance_ without susceptibility of impact, I maintain to be an absurdity. Unless there be an external substance, the bodily eye _cannot_ see it; therefore, in all such cases, that which is supposed to be seen is, in fact, _not_ seen, but is an image of the brain. External objects naturally produce sensation; but here, in truth, sensation produces, as it were, the external object. In certain states of the nerves, however, I do believe that the eye, although not consciously so directed, may, by a slight convulsion, see a portion of the body, as if opposite to it. The part actually seen will by common association seem the whole; and the whole body will then constitute an external object, which explains many stories of persons seeing themselves lying dead. Bishop Berkeley once experienced this. He had the presence of mind to ring the bell, and feel his pulse; keeping his eye still fixed on his own figure right opposite to him. He was in a high fever, and the brain image died away as the door opened. I observed something very like it once at Grasmere; and was so conscious of the cause, that I told a person what I was experiencing, whilst the image still remained. Of course, if the vulgar ghost be really a shadow, there must be some substance of which it is the shadow. These visible and intangible shadows, without substances to cause them, are absurd. January 4. 1828. CHARACTER OF THE AGE FOR LOGIC.--PLATO AND XENOPHON.----GREEK DRAMA.---- KOTZEBUE.--BURKE.--PLAGIARISTS. This is not a logical age. A friend lately gave me some political pamphlets of the times of Charles I. and the Cromwellate. In them the premisses are frequently wrong, but the deductions are almost always legitimate; whereas, in the writings of the present day, the premisses are commonly sound, but the conclusions false. I think a great deal of commendation is due to the University of Oxford for preserving the study of logic in the schools. It is a great mistake to suppose geometry any substitute for it. * * * * * Negatively, there may be more of the philosophy of Socrates in the Memorabilia of Xenophon than in Plato: that is, there is less of what does not belong to Socrates; but the general spirit of, and impression left by, Plato, are more Socratic.[1] [Footnote 1: See p. 26. Mr. Coleridge meant in both these passages, that Xenophon had preserved the most of the _man_ Socrates; that he was the best Boswell; and that Socrates, as a _persona dialogi_, was little more than a poetical phantom in Plato's hands. On the other hand, he says that Plato is more _Socratic_, that is, more of a philosopher in the Socratic _mode_ of reasoning (Cicero calls the Platonic writings generally, _Socratici libri_); and Mr. C. also says, that in the metaphysical disquisitions Plato is Pythagorean, meaning, that he worked on the supposed ideal or transcendental principles of the extraordinary founder of the Italian school.] * * * * * In �schylus religion appears terrible, malignant, and persecuting: Sophocles is the mildest of the three tragedians, but the persecuting aspect is still maintained: Euripides is like a modern Frenchman, never so happy as when giving a slap at the gods altogether. * * * * * Kotzebue represents the petty kings of the islands in the Pacific Ocean exactly as so many Homeric chiefs. Riches command universal influence, and all the kings are supposed to be descended from the gods. * * * * * I confess I doubt the Homeric genuineness of [Greek: dakruoen gelaschsa]. [1] It sounds to me much more like a prettiness of Bion or Moschus. [Footnote 1: [Greek: hos eipon, alochoio thilaes en chersin ethaeke paid eon hae d ara min chaeodei dexato cholpo, dachruoen gelasasa.]--Illiad. Z. vi. 482] * * * * * The very greatest writers write best when calm, and exerting themselves upon subjects unconnected with party. Burke rarely shows all his powers, unless where he is in a passion. The French Revolution was alone a subject fit for him. We are not yet aware of all the consequences of that event. We are too near it. * * * * * Goldsmith did every thing happily. * * * * * You abuse snuff! Perhaps it is the final cause of the human nose. * * * * * A rogue is a roundabout fool; a fool _in circumbendibus_. * * * * * _Omne ignotum pro magnifico_. A dunghill at a distance sometimes smells like musk, and a dead dog like elder-flowers. * * * * * Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from,--as pickpockets are observed commonly to walk with their hands in their breeches' pockets. _January 6_. 1823. ST. JOHN'S GOSPEL.--CHRISTIANITY--EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS.--THE LOGOS.-- REASON AND UNDERSTANDING. St. John had a twofold object in his Gospel and his Epistles,--to prove the divinity, and also the actual human nature and bodily suffering, of Jesus Christ,--that he was God and Man. The notion that the effusion of blood and water from the Saviour's side was intended to prove the real _death_ of the sufferer originated, I believe, with some modern Germans, and seems to me ridiculous: there is, indeed, a very small quantity of water occasionally in the præcordia: but in the pleura, where wounds are not generally mortal, there is a great deal. St. John did not mean, I apprehend, to insinuate that the spear-thrust made the _death_, merely as such, certain or evident, but that the effusion showed the human nature. "I saw it," he would say, "with my own eyes. It was real blood, composed of lymph and crassamentum, and not a mere celestial ichor, as the Phantasmists allege." * * * * * I think the verse of the three witnesses (1 John, v. 7.) spurious, not only because the balance of external authority is against it, as Porson seems to have shown; but also, because, in my way of looking at it, it spoils the reasoning. * * * * * St. John's logic is Oriental, and consists chiefly in position and parallel; whilst St. Paul displays all the intricacies of the Greek system. * * * * * Whatever may be thought of the genuineness or authority of any part of the book of Daniel, it makes no difference in my belief in Christianity; for Christianity is within a man, even as he is a being gifted with reason; it is associated with your mother's chair, and with the first-remembered tones of her blessed voice. * * * * * I do not believe St. Paul to be the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Luther's conjecture is very probable, that it was by Apollos, an Alexandrian Jew. The plan is too studiously regular for St. Paul. It was evidently written during the yet existing glories of the Temple. For three hundred years the church did not affix St. Paul's name to it; but its apostolical or catholic character, independently of its genuineness as to St. Paul, was never much doubted. * * * * * The first three Gospels show the history, that is, the fulfilment of the prophecies in the facts. St. John declares explicitly the doctrine, oracularly, and without comment, because, being pure reason, it can only be proved by itself. For Christianity proves itself, as the sun is seen by its own light. Its evidence is involved in its existence. St. Paul writes more particularly for the dialectic understanding; and proves those doctrines, which were capable of such proof, by common logic. * * * * * St. John used the term [Greek: ho Logos] technically. Philo-Judæus had so used it several years before the probable date of the composition of this Gospel; and it was commonly understood amongst the Jewish Rabbis at that time, and afterwards, of the manifested God. * * * * * Our translators, unfortunately, as I think, render the clause [Greek: pros ton Theos] "_with_ God;" that would be right, if the Greek were [Greek: syn to Theo].[1] By the preposition [Greek: pros] in this place, is meant the utmost possible _proximity_, without _confusion_; likeness, without sameness. The Jewish Church understood the Messiah to be a divine person. Philo expressly cautions against any one's supposing the Logos to be a mere personification, or symbol. He says, the Logos is a substantial, self- existent Being. The Gnostics, as they were afterwards called, were a kind of Arians; and thought the Logos was an after-birth. They placed [Greek: Abyssos] and [Greek: Sigae] (the Abyss and Silence) before him. Therefore it was that St. John said, with emphasis, [Greek: en archae aen ho Logos]-- "In the _beginning_ was the Word." He was begotten in the first simultaneous burst of Godhead, if such an expression may be pardoned, in speaking of eternal existence. [Footnote 1: John, ch. i. v. 1, 2.] * * * * * The Understanding suggests the materials of reasoning: the Reason decides upon them. The first can only say,--This _is_, or _ought_ to be so. The last says,--It _must_ be so.[1] [Footnote 1: I have preserved this, and several other equivalent remarks, out of a dutiful wish to popularize, by all the honest means in my power, this fundamental distinction; a thorough mastery of which Mr. Coleridge considered necessary to any sound system of psychology; and in the denial or neglect of which, he delighted to point out the source of most of the vulgar errors in philosophy and religion. The distinction itself is implied throughout almost all Mr. C.'s works, whether in verse or prose; but it may be found minutely argued in the "Aids to Reflection," p. 206, &c. 2d edit. 1831.--ED.] _April_ 27. 1823. KEAN.--SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH.--SIR H. DAVY.--ROBERT SMITH.--CANNING.-- NATIONAL DEBT.--POOR LAWS. Kean is original; but he copies from himself. His rapid descents from the hyper-tragic to the infra-colloquial, though sometimes productive of great effect, are often unreasonable. To see him act, is like reading Shakspeare by flashes of lightning. I do not think him thorough-bred gentleman enough to play Othello. * * * * * Sir James Mackintosh is the king of the men of talent. He is a most elegant converger. How well I remember his giving breakfast to me and Sir Humphry Davy, at that time an unknown young man, and our having a very spirited talk about Locke and Newton, and so forth! When Davy was gone, Mackintosh said to me, "That's a very extraordinary young man; but he is gone wrong on some points." But Davy was, at that time at least, a man of genius; and I doubt if Mackintosh ever heartily appreciated an eminently original man. He is uncommonly powerful in his own line; but it is not the line of a first- rate man. After all his fluency and brilliant erudition, you can rarely carry off any thing worth preserving. You might not improperly write on his forehead, "Warehouse to let!" He always dealt too much in generalities for a lawyer. He is deficient in power in applying his principles to the points in debate. I remember Robert Smith had much more logical ability; but Smith aimed at conquest by any gladiatorial shift; whereas Mackintosh was uniformly candid in argument. I am speaking now from old recollections. * * * * * Canning is very irritable, surprisingly so for a wit who is always giving such hard knocks. He should have put on an ass's skin before he went into parliament. Lord Liverpool is the single stay of this ministry; but he is not a man of a directing mind. He cannot ride on the whirlwind. He serves as the isthmus to connect one half of the cabinet with the other. He always gives you the common sense of the matter, and in that it is that his strength in debate lies. * * * * * The national debt has, in fact, made more men rich than have a right to be so, or, rather, any ultimate power, in case of a struggle, of actualizing their riches. It is, in effect, like an ordinary, where three hundred tickets have been distributed, but where there is, in truth, room only for one hundred. So long as you can amuse the company with any thing else, or make them come in successively, all is well, and the whole three hundred fancy themselves sure of a dinner; but if any suspicion of a hoax should arise, and they were all to rush into the room at once, there would be two hundred without a potato for their money; and the table would be occupied by the landholders, who live on the spot. * * * * * Poor-laws are the inevitable accompaniments of an extensive commerce and a manufacturing system. In Scotland, they did without them, till Glasgow and Paisley became great manufacturing places, and then people said, "We must subscribe for the poor, or else we shall have poor-laws." That is to say, they enacted for themselves a poor-law in order to avoid having a poor-law enacted for them. It is absurd to talk of Queen Elizabeth's act as creating the poor-laws of this country. The poor-rates are the consideration paid by, or on behalf of, capitalists for having labour at demand. It is the price, and nothing else. The hardship consists in the agricultural interest having to pay an undue proportion of the rates; for although, perhaps, in the end, the land becomes more valuable, yet, at the first, the landowners have to bear all the brunt. I think there ought to be a fixed revolving period for the equalization of rates. _April_ 28. 1823. CONDUCT OF THE WHIGS.--REFORM OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. The conduct of the Whigs is extravagantly inconsistent. It originated in the fatal error which Fox committed, in persisting, after the first three years of the French Revolution, when every shadow of freedom in France had vanished, in eulogizing the men and measures of that shallow-hearted people. So he went on gradually, further and further departing from all the principles of English policy and wisdom, till at length he became the panegyrist, through thick and thin, of a military frenzy, under the influence of which the very name of liberty was detested. And thus it was that, in course of time, Fox's party became the absolute abettors of the Buonapartean invasion of Spain, and did all in their power to thwart the generous efforts of this country to resist it. Now, when the invasion is by a Bourbon, and the cause of the Spanish nation neither united nor, indeed, sound in many respects, the Whigs would precipitate this country into a crusade to fight up the cause of a faction. I have the honour of being slightly known to my lord Darnley. In 1808-9, I met him accidentally, when, after a few words of salutation, he said to me, "Are you mad, Mr. Coleridge?"--"Not that I know, my lord," I replied; "what have I done which argues any derangement of mind?"--"Why, I mean," said he, "those letters of yours in the Courier, 'On the Hopes and Fears of a People invaded by foreign Armies.' The Spaniards are absolutely conquered; it is absurd to talk of their chance of resisting."--"Very well, my lord," I said, "we shall see. But will your lordship permit me, in the course of a year or two, to retort your question upon you, if I should have grounds for so doing?"--"Certainly!" said he; "that is fair!" Two years afterwards, when affairs were altered in Spain, I met Lord Darnley again, and, after some conversation, ventured to say to him, "Does your lordship recollect giving me leave to retort a certain question upon you about the Spaniards? Who is mad now?"--"Very true, very true, Mr. Coleridge," cried he: "you are right. It is very extraordinary. It was a very happy and hold guess." Upon which I remarked, "I think '_guess_' is hardly a fair term. For, has any thing happened that has happened, from any other causes, or under any other conditions, than such as I laid down Beforehand?" Lord Darnley, who was always very courteous to me, took this with a pleasant nod of his head. * * * * * Many votes are given for reform in the House of Commons, which are not honest. Whilst it is well known that the measure will not he carried in parliament, it is as well to purchase some popularity by voting for it. When Hunt and his associates, before the Six Acts, created a panic, the ministers lay on their oars for three or four months, until the general cry, even from the opposition, was, "Why don't the ministers come forward with some protective measure?" The present Ministry exists on the weakness and desperate character of the Opposition. The sober part of the nation are afraid of the latter getting into power, lest they should redeem some of their pledges. * * * * * _April_ 29. 1823. CHURCH OF ROME. The present adherents of the church of Rome are not, in my judgment, Catholics. We are the Catholics. We can prove that we hold the doctrines of the primitive church for the first three hundred years. The council of Trent made the Papists what they are. [1] A foreign Romish bishop has declared, that the Protestants of his acquaintance were more like what he conceived the enlightened Catholics to have been before the council of Trent, than the best of the latter in his days. Perhaps you will say, this bishop was not a _good Catholic_.[2] I cannot answer for that. The course of Christianity and the Christian church may not unaptly be likened to a mighty river, which filled a wide channel, and bore along with its waters mud, and gravel, and weeds, till it met a great rock in the middle of its stream. By some means or other, the water flows purely, and separated from the filth, in a deeper and narrower course on one side of the rock, and the refuse of the dirt and troubled water goes off on the other in a broader current, and then cries out, "_We_ are the river!" [Footnote 1: See Aids to Reflection, p. 180. note.] [Footnote 2: Mr. Coleridge named him, but the name was strange to me, and I have been unable to recover it--ED.] * * * * * A person said to me lately, "But you will, for civility's sake, _call_ them _Catholics_, will you not?" I answered, that I would not; for I would not tell a lie upon any, much less upon so solemn an occasion. "The adherents of the church of Rome, I repeat, are not _Catholic_ Christians. If they are, then it follows that we Protestants are heretics and schismatics, as, indeed, the Papists very logically, from their own premisses, call us. And '_Roman_ Catholics' makes no difference. Catholicism is not capable of degrees or local apportionments. There can be but one body of Catholics, _ex vi termini_. To talk strictly of _Irish_ or _Scotch Roman_ Catholics is a mere absurdity." * * * * * It is common to hear it said, that, if the legal disabilities are removed, the Romish church will lose ground in this country. I think the reverse: the Romish religion is, or, in certain hands, is capable of being made, so flattering to the passions and self-delusion of men, that it is impossible to say how far it would spread, amongst the higher orders of society especially, if the secular disadvantages now attending its profession were removed.[1] [Footnote 1: Here, at least, the prophecy has been fulfilled. The wisdom of our ancestors, in the reign of King William III., would have been jealous of the daily increase in the numbers of the Romish church in England, of which every attentive observer must be aware. See _Sancti Dominici Pallium_, in vol. ii. p. 80. of Mr. Coleridge's Poems.-Ed.] April 30. 1823. ZENDAVESTA.--PANTHEISM AND IDOLATRY. The Zendavesta must, I think, have been copied in parts from the writings of Moses. In the description of the creation, the first chapter of Genesis is taken almost literally, except that the sun is created _before_ the light, and then the herbs and the plants after the sun; which are precisely the two points they did not understand, and therefore altered as errors.[1] There are only two acts of creation, properly so called, in the Mosaic account,--the material universe and man. The intermediate acts seem more as the results of secondary causes, or, at any rate, of a modification of prepared materials. [Footnote 1: The Zend, or Zendavesta, is the sacred book ascribed to Zoroaster, or Zerdusht, the founder or reformer of the Magian religion. The modern edition or paraphrase of this work, called the Sadda, written in the Persian of the day, was, I believe, composed about three hundred years ago --Ed.] * * * * * Pantheism and idolatry naturally end in each other; for all extremes meet. The Judaic religion is the exact medium, the true compromise. _May_ 1. 1823. DIFFERENCE BETWEEN STORIES OF DREAMS AND GHOSTS. --PHANTOM PORTRAIT.--WITCH OF ENDOR.--SOCINIANISM. There is a great difference in the credibility to be attached to stories of dreams and stories of ghosts. Dreams have nothing in them which are absurd and nonsensical; and, though most of the coincidences may be readily explained by the diseased system of the dreamer, and the great and surprising power of association, yet it is impossible to say whether an inner sense does not really exist in the mind, seldom developed, indeed, but which may have a power of presentiment. [1] All the external senses have their correspondents in the mind; the eye can see an object before it is distinctly apprehended;--why may there not be a corresponding power in the soul? The power of prophecy might have been merely a spiritual excitation of this dormant faculty. Hence you will observe that the Hebrew seers sometimes seem to have required music, as in the instance of Elisha before Jehoram:--"But now bring me a minstrel. And it came to pass, when the minstrel played, that the hand of the Lord came upon him." [2] Every thing in nature has a tendency to move in cycles; and it would be a miracle if, out of such myriads of cycles moving concurrently, some coincidences did not take place. No doubt, many such take place in the daytime; but then our senses drive out the remembrance of them, and render the impression hardly felt; but when we sleep, the mind acts without interruption. Terror and the heated imagination will, even in the daytime, create all sorts of features, shapes, and colours out of a simple object possessing none of them in reality. But ghost stories are absurd. Whenever a real ghost appears,--by which I mean some man or woman dressed up to frighten another,--if the supernatural character of the apparition has been for a moment believed, the effects on the spectator have always been most terrible,--convulsion, idiocy, madness, or even death on the spot. Consider the awful descriptions in the Old Testament of the effects of a spiritual presence on the prophets and seers of the Hebrews; the terror, the exceeding great dread, the utter loss of all animal power. But in our common ghost stories, you always find that the seer, after a most appalling apparition, as you are to believe, is quite well the next day. Perhaps, he may have a headach; but that is the outside of the effect produced. Alston, a man of genius, and the best painter yet produced by America, when he was in England told me an anecdote which confirms what I have been saying. It was, I think, in the university of Cambridge, near Boston, that a certain youth took it into his wise head to endeavour to convert a Tom-Painish companion of his by appearing as a ghost before him. He accordingly dressed himself up in the usual way, having previously extracted the ball from the pistol which always lay near the head of his friend's bed. Upon first awaking, and seeing the apparition, the youth who was to be frightened, A., very coolly looked his companion the ghost in the face, and said, "I know you. This is a good joke; but you see I am not frightened. Now you may vanish!" The ghost stood still. "Come," said A., "that is enough. I shall get angry. Away!" Still the ghost moved not. "By ----," ejaculated A., "if you do not in three minutes go away, I'll shoot you." He waited the time, deliberately levelled the pistol, fired, and, with a scream at the immobility of the figure, became convulsed, and afterwards died. The very instant he believed it _to be_ a ghost, his human nature fell before it. [Footnote 1: See this point suggested and reasoned with extraordinary subtlety in the third essay (marked C), in the Appendix to the Statesman's Manual, Or first Lay Sermon, p. 19, &c. One beautiful paragraph I will venture to quote:-- "Not only may we expect that men of strong religious feelings, but little religious knowledge, will occasionally be tempted to regard such occurrences as supernatural visitations; but it ought not to surprise us if such dreams should sometimes be confirmed by the event, as though they had actually possessed a character of divination. For who shall decide how far a perfect reminiscence of past experiences (of many, perhaps, that had escaped our reflex consciousness at the time)--who shall determine to what extent this reproductive imagination, unsophisticated by the will, and undistracted by intrusions from the senses, may or may not be concentred and sublimed into foresight and presentiment? There would be nothing herein either to foster superstition on the one hand, or to justify contemptuous disbelief on the other. Incredulity is but Credulity seen from behind, bowing and nodding assent to the Habitual and the Fashionable"-ED.] [Footnote 2: 2 Kings, iii. 15., and see 1 Sam. x. 5.--ED.] * * * * * [What follows in the text within commas was written about this time, and communicated to me by Mr. Justice Coleridge.--ED.] "Last Thursday my uncle, S. T. C., dined with us, and several men came to meet him. I have heard him more brilliant, but he was very fine, and delighted every one very much. It is impossible to carry off, or commit to paper, his long trains of argument; indeed, it is not always possible to understand them, he lays the foundation so deep, and views every question in so original a manner. Nothing can be finer than the principles which he lays down in morals and religion. His deep study of Scripture is very astonishing; the rest of the party were but as children in his hands, not merely in general views of theology, but in nice verbal criticism. He thinks it clear that St. Paul did not write the Epistle to the Hebrews, but that it must have been the work of some Alexandrian Greek, and he thinks Apollos. It seemed to him a desirable thing for Christianity that it should have been written by some other person than St. Paul; because, its inspiration being unquestioned, it added another independent teacher and expounder of the faith. "We fell upon ghosts, and he exposed many of the stories physically and metaphysically. He seemed to think it impossible that you should really see with the bodily eye what was impalpable, unless it were a shadow; and if what you fancied you saw with the bodily eye was in fact only an impression on the imagination, then you were seeing something _out of your senses_, and your testimony was full of uncertainty. He observed how uniformly, in all the best-attested stories of spectres, the appearance might be accounted for from the disturbed state of the mind or body of the seer, as in the instances of Dion and Brutus. Upon some one's saying that he _wished_ to believe these stories true, thinking that they constituted a useful subsidiary testimony of another state of existence, Mr. C. differed, and said, he thought it a dangerous testimony, and one not wanted: it was Saul, with the Scriptures and the Prophet before him, calling upon the witch of Endor to certify him of the truth! He explained very ingeniously, yet very naturally, what has often startled people in ghost stories--such as Lord Lyttelton's--namely, that when a real person has appeared, habited like the phantom, the ghost-seer has immediately seen two, the real man and the phantom. He said that such must be the case. The man under the morbid delusion sees with the eye of the imagination, and sees with the bodily eye too; if no one were really present, he would see the spectre with one, and the bed-curtains with the other. When, therefore, a real person comes, he sees the real man as he would have seen any one else in the same place, and he sees the spectre not a whit the less: being perceptible by different powers of vision, so to say, the appearances do not interfere with each other. "He told us the following story of the Phantom Portrait [1]:-- "A stranger came recommended to a merchant's house at Lubeck. He was hospitably received; but, the house being full, he was lodged at night in an apartment handsomely furnished, but not often used. There was nothing that struck him particularly in the room when left alone, till he happened to cast his eyes on a picture, which immediately arrested his attention. It was a single head; but there was something so uncommon, so frightful and unearthly, in its expression, though by no means ugly, that he found himself irresistibly attracted to look at it. In fact, he could not tear himself from the fascination of this portrait, till his imagination was filled by it, and his rest broken. He retired to bed, dreamed, and awoke from time to time with the head glaring on him. In the morning, his host saw by his looks that he had slept ill, and inquired the cause, which was told. The master of the house was much vexed, and said that the picture ought to have been removed, that it was an oversight, and that it always was removed when the chamber was used. The picture, he said, was, indeed, terrible to every one; but it was so fine, and had come into the family in so curious a way, that he could not make up his mind to part with it, or to destroy it. The story of it was this:--'My father,' said he, 'was at Hamburgh on business, and, whilst dining at a coffee-house, he observed a young man of a remarkable appearance enter, seat himself alone in a corner, and commence a solitary meal. His countenance bespoke the extreme of mental distress, and every now and then he turned his head quickly round, as if he heard something, then shudder, grow pale, and go on with his meal after an effort as before. My father saw this same man at the same place for two or three successive days; and at length became so much interested about him, that he spoke to him. The address was not repulsed, and the stranger seemed to find some comfort in the tone of sympathy and kindness which my father used. He was an Italian, well informed, poor but not destitute, and living economically upon the profits of his art as a painter. Their intimacy increased; and at length the Italian, seeing my father's involuntary emotion at his convulsive turnings and shuddering, which continued as formerly, interrupting their conversation from time to time, told him his story. He was a native of Rome, and had lived in some familiarity with, and been much patronized by, a young nobleman; but upon some slight occasion they had fallen out, and his patron, besides using many reproachful expressions, had struck him. The painter brooded over the disgrace of the blow. He could not challenge the nobleman, on account of his rank; he therefore watched for an opportunity, and assassinated him. Of course he fled from his country, and finally had reached Hamburgh. He had not, however, passed many weeks from the night of the murder, before, one day, in the crowded street, he heard his name called by a voice familiar to him: he turned short round, and saw the face of his victim looking at him with a fixed eye. From that moment he had no peace: at all hours, in all places, and amidst all companies, however engaged he might be, he heard the voice, and could never help looking round; and, whenever he so looked round, he always encountered the same face staring close upon him. At last, in a mood of desperation, he had fixed himself face to face, and eye to eye, and deliberately drawn the phantom visage as it glared upon him; and _this_ was the picture so drawn. The Italian said he had struggled long, but life was a burden which he could now no longer bear; and he was resolved, when he had made money enough to return to Rome, to surrender himself to justice, and expiate his crime on the scaffold. He gave the finished picture to my father, in return for the kindness which he had shown to him.'" [Footnote 1: This is the story which Mr. Washington Irving has dressed up very prettily in the first volume of his "Tales of a Traveller," pp. 84-119.; professing in his preface that he could not remember whence he had derived the anecdote.--ED.] * * * * * I have no doubt that the Jews believed generally in a future state, independently of the Mosaic law. The story of the witch of Endor is a proof of it. What we translate "_witch_," or "familiar spirit," is, in the Hebrew, Ob, that is, a bottle or bladder, and means a person whose belly is swelled like a leathern bottle by divine inflation. In the Greek it is [Greek: engastrimuthos], a ventriloquist. The text (1 Sam. ch. xxviii.) is a simple record of the facts, the solution of which the sacred historian leaves to the reader. I take it to have been a trick of ventriloquism, got up by the courtiers and friends of Saul, to prevent him, if possible, from hazarding an engagement with an army despondent and oppressed with bodings of defeat. Saul is not said to have seen Samuel; the woman only pretends to see him. And then what does this Samuel do? He merely repeats the prophecy known to all Israel, which the true Samuel had uttered some years before. Read Captain Lyon's account of the scene in the cabin with the Esquimaux bladder, or conjurer; it is impossible not to be reminded of the witch of Endor. I recommend you also to look at Webster's admirable treatise on Witchcraft. * * * * * The pet texts of a Socinian are quite enough for his confutation with acute thinkers. If Christ had been a mere man, it would have been ridiculous in _him_ to call himself "the Son of man;" but being God and man, it then became, in his own assumption of it, a peculiar and mysterious title. So, if Christ had been a mere man, his saying, "My Father is greater than I," (John, xv. 28.) would have been as unmeaning. It would be laughable enough, for example, to hear me say, "My 'Remorse' succeeded, indeed, but Shakspeare is a greater dramatist than I." But how immeasurably more foolish, more monstrous, would it not be for a _man_, however honest, good, or wise, to say, "But Jehovah is greater than I!" _May_ 8. 1824. PLATO AND XENOPHON.--RELIGIONS OF THE GREEKS.--EGYPTIAN ANTIQUITIES.-- MILTON.--VIRGIL. Plato's works are logical exercises for the mind. Little that is positive is advanced in them. Socrates may be fairly represented by Plato in the more moral parts; but in all the metaphysical disquisitions it is Pythagoras. Xenophon's representation of his master is quite different.[1] [Footnote 1: See p. 9. n.--ED.] * * * * * Observe the remarkable contrast between the religion of the tragic and other poets of Greece. The former are always opposed in heart to the popular divinities. In fact, there are the popular, the sacerdotal, and the mysterious religions of Greece, represented roughly by Homer, Pindar, and �schylus. The ancients had no notion of a _fall_ of man, though they had of his gradual degeneracy. Prometheus, in the old mythus, and for the most part in AEschylus, is the Redeemer and the Devil jumbled together. * * * * * I cannot say I expect much from mere Egyptian antiquities. Almost every thing really, that is, intellectually, great in that country seems to me of Grecian origin. * * * * * I think nothing can be added to Milton's definition or rule of poetry,-- that it ought to be simple, sensuous, and impassioned; that is to say, single in conception, abounding in sensible images, and informing them all with the spirit of the mind. Milton's Latin style is, I think, better and easier than his English. His style, in prose, is quite as characteristic of him as a philosophic republican, as Cowley's is of _him_ as a first-rate gentleman. If you take from Virgil his diction and metre, what do you leave him? * * * * * _June_ 2. 1824. CRANVILLE PENN AND THE DELUGE.--RAINBOW. I confess I have small patience with Mr. Granville Penn's book against Professor Buckland. Science will be superseded, if every phenomenon is to be referred in this manner to an actual miracle. I think it absurd to attribute so much to the Deluge. An inundation, which left an olive-tree standing, and bore up the ark peacefully on its bosom, could scarcely have been the sole cause of the rents and dislocations observable on the face of the earth. How could the tropical animals, which have been discovered in England and in Russia in a perfectly natural state, have been transported thither by such a flood? Those animals must evidently have been natives of the countries in which they have been found. The climates must have been altered. Assume a sudden evaporation upon the retiring of the Deluge to have caused an intense cold, the solar heat might not be sufficient afterwards to overcome it. I do not think that the polar cold is adequately explained by mere comparative distance from the sun. * * * * * You will observe, that there is no mention of rain previously to the Deluge. Hence it may be inferred, that the rainbow was exhibited for the first time after God's covenant with Noah. However, I only suggest this. * * * * * The Earth with its scarred face is the symbol of the Past; the Air and Heaven, of Futurity. _June_ 5. 1824. ENGLISH AND GREEK DANCING.--GREEK ACOUSTICS. The fondness for dancing in English women is the reaction of their reserved manners. It is the only way in which they can throw themselves forth in natural liberty. We have no adequate conception of the perfection of the ancient tragic dance. The pleasure which the Greeks received from it had for its basis Difference and the more unfit the vehicle, the more lively was the curiosity and intense the delight at seeing the difficulty overcome. * * * * * The ancients certainly seem to have understood some principles in acoustics which we have lost, or, at least, they applied them better. They contrived to convey the voice distinctly in their huge theatres by means of pipes, which created no echo or confusion. Our theatres--Drury Lane and Covent Garden--are fit for nothing: they are too large for acting, and too small for a bull-fight. * * * * * _June_ 7. 1824. LORD BYRON'S VERSIFICATION, AND DON JUAN. How lamentably the _art_ of versification is neglected by most of the poets of the present day!--by Lord Byron, as it strikes me, in particular, among those of eminence for other qualities. Upon the whole, I think the part of Don Juan in which Lambro's return to his home, and Lambro himself, are described, is the best, that is, the most individual, thing in all I know of Lord B.'s works. The festal abandonment puts one in mind of Nicholas Poussin's pictures.[1] [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge particularly noticed, for its classical air, the 32d stanza of this Canto (the third):-- "A band of children, round a snow-white ram, There wreathe his venerable horns with flowers, While, peaceful as if still an unwean'd lamb, The patriarch of the flock all gently cowers His sober head, majestically tame, Or eats from out the palm, or playful lowers His brow, as if in act to butt, and then Yielding to their small hands, draws back again." But Mr. C. said that _then_, and _again_, made no rhyme to his ear. Why should not the old form _agen_ be lawful in verse? We wilfully abridge ourselves of the liberty which our great poets achieved and sanctioned for us in innumerable instances.--ED.] _June_ 10. 1824. PARENTAL CONTROL IN MARRIAGE.--MARRIAGE OF COUSINS.--DIFFERENCE OF CHARACTER. Up to twenty-one, I hold a father to have power over his children as to marriage; after that age, authority and influence only. Show me one couple unhappy merely on account of their limited circumstances, and I will show you ten that are wretched from other causes. * * * * * If the matter were quite open, I should incline to disapprove the intermarriage of first cousins; but the church has decided otherwise on the authority of Augustine, and that seems enough upon such a point. * * * * * You may depend upon it, that a slight contrast of character is very material to happiness in marriage. _February_ 24. 1827. BLUMENBACH AND KANT'S RACES.--IAPETIC AND SEMITIC.--HEBREW.--SOLOMON. Blumenbach makes five races; Kant, three. Blumenbach's scale of dignity may be thus figured:-- 1. Caucasian or European. 2. Malay ================= 2. American 3. Negro ========================== 3. Mongolian, Asiatic There was, I conceive, one great Iapetic original of language, under which Greek, Latin, and other European dialects, and, perhaps, Sanscrit, range as species. The Iapetic race, [Greek: Iaones]; separated into two branches; one, with a tendency to migrate south-west,--Greeks, Italians, &c.; and the other north-west,--Goths, Germans, Swedes, &c. The Hebrew is Semitic. * * * * * Hebrew, in point of force and purity, seems at its height in Isaiah. It is most corrupt in Daniel, and not much less so in Ecclesiastes; which I cannot believe to have been actually composed by Solomon, but rather suppose to have been so attributed by the Jews, in their passion for ascribing all works of that sort to their _grand monurque_. _March_ 10. 1827. JEWISH HISTORY.--SPINOZISTIC AND HEBREW SCHEMES. The people of all other nations, but the Jewish, seem to look backwards and also to exist for the present; but in the Jewish scheme every thing is prospective and preparatory; nothing, however trifling, is done for itself alone, but all is typical of something yet to come. * * * * * I would rather call the book of Proverbs Solomonian than as actually a work of Solomon's. So I apprehend many of the Psalms to be Davidical only, not David's own compositions. * * * * * You may state the Pantheism of Spinosa, in contrast with the Hebrew or Christian scheme, shortly, as thus:-- Spinosism. W-G = 0; _i.e._ the World without God is an impossible idea. G-W = 0; _i.e._ God without the World is so likewise. Hebrew or Christian scheme. W-G = 0; _i.e._ The same as Spinosa's premiss. But G-W = G; _i.e._ God without the World is God the self-subsistent. * * * * * _March_ 12. 1827. ROMAN CATHOLICS.--ENERGY OF MAN AND OTHER ANIMALS.--SHAKSPEARE _IN MINIMIS_.--PAUL SARPI.--BARTRAM'S TRAVELS. I have no doubt that the real object closest to the hearts of the leading Irish Romanists is the destruction of the Irish Protestant church, and the re-establishment of their own. I think more is involved in the manner than the matter of legislating upon the civil disabilities of the members of the church of Rome; and, for one, I should he willing to vote for a removal of those disabilities, with two or three exceptions, upon a solemn declaration being made legislatively in parliament, that at no time, nor under any circumstances, could or should a branch of the Romish hierarchy, as at present constituted, become an estate of this realm.[1] [Footnote 1: See Church and State, second part, p. 189.] * * * * * Internal or mental energy and external or corporeal modificability are in inverse proportions. In man, internal energy is greater than in any other animal; and you will see that he is less changed by climate than any animal. For the highest and lowest specimens of man are not one half as much apart from each other as the different kinds even of dogs, animals of great internal energy themselves. * * * * * For an instance of Shakspeare's power _in minimis_, I generally quote James Gurney's character in King John. How individual and comical he is with the four words allowed to his dramatic life! [1] And pray look at Skelton's Richard Sparrow also! Paul Sarpi's History of the Council of Trent deserves your study. It is very interesting. [Footnote 1: "_Enter Lady FALCONBRIDGE and JAMES GURNEY._ BAST. O me! it is my mother:--How now, good lady? What brings you here to court so hastily? LADY F. Where is that slave, thy brother? where is he? That holds in chase mine honour up and down? BAST. My brother Robert? Old Sir Robert's son? Colbrand the giant, that same mighty man? Is it Sir Robert's son that you seek so? LADY F. Sir Robert's son! Ay, thou unreverend boy, Sir Robert's son: why scorn'st thou at Sir Robert? He is Sir Robert's son; and so art thou. BAST. James Gurney, wilt thou give us leave a while? GUR. _Good leave, good Philip._ BAST. Philip?--Sparrow! James, There's toys abroad; anon I'll tell thee more. [_Exit_ GURNEY." The very _exit Gurney_ is a stroke of James's character.--ED.]] * * * * * The latest book of travels I know, written in the spirit of the old travellers, is Bartram's account of his tour in the Floridas. It is a work of high merit every way.[1] [Footnote 1: "Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the extensive territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws, &c. By William Bartram." Philadelphia, 1791. London, 1792. 8vo. The expedition was made at the request of Dr. Fothergill, the Quaker physician, in 1773, and was particularly directed to botanical discoveries.--ED.] * * * * * _March_ 13. 1827. THE UNDERSTANDING. A pun will sometimes facilitate explanation, as thus;--the Understanding is that which _stands under_ the phenomenon, and gives it objectivity. You know _what_ a thing is by it. It is also worthy of remark, that the Hebrew word for the understanding, _Bineh_, comes from a root meaning _between_ or _distinguishing_. * * * * * _March_ 18. 1827. PARTS OF SPEECH.--GRAMMAR. There are seven parts of speech, and they agree with the five grand and universal divisions into which all things finite, by which I mean to exclude the idea of God, will be found to fall; that is, as you will often see it stated in my writings, especially in the Aids to Reflection[1]:-- Prothesis. 1. Thesis. Mesothesis. Antithesis. 2. 4. 3. Synthesis. 5. Conceive it thus:-- 1. Prothesis, the noun-verb, or verb-substantive, _I am_, which is the previous form, and implies identity of being and act. 2. Thesis, the noun. 3. Antithesis, the verb. Note, each of these may be converted; that is, they are only opposed to each other. 4. Mesothesis, the infinitive mood, or the indifference of the verb and noun, it being either the one or the other, or both at the same time, in different relations. 5. Synthesis, the participle, or the community of verb and noun; being and acting at once. Now, modify the noun by the verb, that is, by an act, and you have-- 6. The adnoun, or adjective. Modify the verb by the noun, that is, by being, and you have-- 7. The adverb. Interjections are parts of sound, not of speech. Conjunctions are the same as prepositions; but they are prefixed to a sentence, or to a member of a sentence, instead of to a single word. The inflections of nouns are modifications as to place; the inflections of verbs, as to time. The genitive case denotes dependence; the dative, transmission. It is absurd to talk of verbs governing. In Thucydides, I believe, every case has been found absolute.[2] Dative:--[Greek: ----] Thuc.VIII. 24. This is the Latin usage. Accusative.--I do not remember an instance of the proper accusative absolute in Thucydides; but it seems not uncommon in other authors: [Greek: ----] Yet all such instances may be nominatives; for I cannot find an example of the accusative absolute in the masculine or feminine gender, where the difference of inflexion would show the case.--ED.] The inflections of the tenses of a verb are formed by adjuncts of the verb substantive. In Greek it is obvious. The E is the prefix significative of a past time. [Footnote 1: P. 170. 2d edition.] [Footnote 2: Nominative absolute:--[Greek: theon de phozos ae anthropon nomos, oudeis apeirge, to men krinontes en homoio kai sezein kai mae--ton de hamartaematon.]--Thuc. II. 53.] _June 15. 1827. MAGNETISM.--ELECTRICITY.--GALVANISM. Perhaps the attribution or analogy may seem fanciful at first sight, but I am in the habit of realizing to myself Magnetism as length; Electricity as breadth or surface; and Galvanism as depth. _June 24. 1827._ SPENSER.--CHARACTER Of OTHELLO.--HAMLET.--POLONIUS.--PRINCIPLES AND MAXIMS.--LOVE.--MEASURE FOR MEASURE.--BEN JONSON.--BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.-- VERSION OF THE BIBLE.--SPURZHEIM.--CRANIOLOGY. Spenser's Epithalamion is truly sublime; and pray mark the swan-like movement of his exquisite Prothalamion. [1] His attention to metre and rhythm is sometimes so extremely minute as to be painful even to my ear, and you know how highly I prize good versification. [Footnote 1: How well I remember this Midsummer-day! I shall never pass such another. The sun was setting behind Caen Wood, and the calm of the evening was so exceedingly deep that it arrested Mr. Coleridge's attention. We were alone together in Mr. Gillman's drawing-room, and Mr. C. left off talking, and fell into an almost trance-like state for ten minutes whilst contemplating the beautiful prospect before us. His eyes swam in tears, his head inclined a little forward, and there was a slight uplifting of the fingers, which seemed to tell me that he was in prayer. I was awestricken, and remained absorbed in looking at the man, in forgetfulness of external nature, when he recovered himself, and after a word or two fell by some secret link of association upon Spenser's poetry. Upon my telling him that I did not very well recollect the Prothalamion: "Then I must read you a bit of it," said he; and, fetching the book from the next room, he recited the whole of it in his finest and most musical manner. I particularly bear in mind the sensible diversity of tone and rhythm with which he gave:-- "Sweet Thames! run softly till I end my song," the concluding line of each of the ten strophes of the poem. When I look upon the scanty memorial, which I have alone preserved of this afternoon's converse, I am tempted to burn these pages in despair. Mr. Coleridge talked a volume of criticism that day, which, printed verbatim as he spoke it, would have made the reputation of any other person but himself. He was, indeed, particularly brilliant and enchanting; and I left him at night so thoroughly _magnetized_, that I could not for two or three days afterwards reflect enough to put any thing on paper,--ED.] * * * * * I have often told you that I do not think there is any jealousy, properly so called, in the character of Othello. There is no predisposition to suspicion, which I take to be an essential term in the definition of the word. Desdemona very truly told Emilia that he was not jealous, that is, of a jealous habit, and he says so as truly of himself. Iago's suggestions, you see, are quite new to him; they do not correspond with any thing of a like nature previously in his mind. If Desdemona had, in fact, been guilty, no one would have thought of calling Othello's conduct that of a jealous man. He could not act otherwise than he did with the lights he had; whereas jealousy can never be strictly right. See how utterly unlike Othello is to Leontes, in the Winter's Tale, or even to Leonatus, in Cymbeline! The jealousy of the first proceeds from an evident trifle, and something like hatred is mingled with it; and the conduct of Leonatus in accepting the wager, and exposing his wife to the trial, denotes a jealous temper already formed. * * * * * Hamlet's character is the prevalence of the abstracting and generalizing habit over the practical. He does not want courage, skill, will, or opportunity; but every incident sets him thinking; and it is curious, and at the same time strictly natural, that Hamlet, who all the play seems reason itself, should he impelled, at last, by mere accident to effect his object. I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so. * * * * * A Maxim is a conclusion upon observation of matters of fact, and is merely retrospective: an Idea, or, if you like, a Principle, carries knowledge within itself, and is prospective. Polonius is a man of maxims. Whilst he is descanting on matters of past experience, as in that excellent speech to Laertes before he sets out on his travels, he is admirable; but when he comes to advise or project, he is a mere dotard. [1] You see Hamlet, as the man of ideas, despises him. [Footnote 1: Act i. sc. 3] * * * * * A man of maxims only is like a Cyclops with one eye, and that eye placed in the back of his head. * * * * * In the scene with Ophelia, in the third act,[1] Hamlet is beginning with great and unfeigned tenderness; but, perceiving her reserve and coyness, fancies there are some listeners, and then, to sustain his part, breaks out into all that coarseness. Love is the admiration and cherishing of the amiable qualities of the beloved person, upon the condition of yourself being the object of their action. The qualities of the sexes correspond. The man's courage is loved by the woman, whose fortitude again is coveted by the man. His vigorous intellect is answered by her infallible tact. Can it be true, what is so constantly affirmed, that there is no sex in souls?--I doubt it, I doubt it exceedingly. [2] [Footnote 1: Sc. 1.] [Footnote 2: Mr. Coleridge was a great master in the art of love, but he had not studied in Ovid's school. Hear his account of the matter:-- "Love, truly such, is itself not the most common thing in the world, and mutual love still less so. But that enduring personal attachment, so beautifully delineated by Erin's sweet melodist, and still more touchingly, perhaps, in the well-known ballad, 'John Anderson, my Jo, John,' in addition to a depth and constancy of character of no every-day occurrence, supposes a peculiar sensibility and tenderness of nature; a constitutional communicativeness and utterancy of heart and soul; a delight in the detail of sympathy, in the outward and visible signs of the sacrament within,--to count, as it were, the pulses of the life of love. But, above all, it supposes a soul which, even in the pride and summer-tide of life, even in the lustihood of health and strength, had felt oftenest and prized highest that which age cannot take away, and which in all our lovings is _the_ love; I mean, that willing sense of the unsufficingness of the self for itself, which predisposes a generous nature to see, in the total being of another, the supplement and completion of its own; that quiet perpetual seeking which the presence of the beloved object modulates, not suspends, where the heart momently finds, and, finding again, seeks on; lastly, when 'life's changeful orb has passed the full,' a confirmed faith in the nobleness of humanity, thus brought home and pressed, as it were, to the very bosom of hourly experience; it supposes, I say, a heartfelt reverence for worth, not the less deep because divested of its solemnity by habit, by familiarity, by mutual infirmities, and even by a feeling of modesty which will arise in delicate minds, when they are conscious of possessing the same, or the correspondent, excellence in their own characters. In short, there must be a mind, which, while it feels the beautiful and the excellent in the beloved as its own, and by right of love appropriates it, can call goodness its playfellow; and dares make sport of time and infirmity, while, in the person of a thousand-foldly endeared partner, we feel for aged virtue the caressing fondness that belongs to the innocence of childhood, and repeat the same attentions and tender courtesies which had been dictated by the same affection to the same object when attired in feminine loveliness or in manly beauty." (Poetical Works, vol. ii. p. 120.)--ED.] Measure for Measure is the single exception to the delightfulness of Shakspeare's plays. It is a hateful work, although Shakspearian throughout. Our feelings of justice are grossly wounded in Angelo's escape. Isabella herself contrives to be unamiable, and Claudio is detestable. * * * * * I am inclined to consider The Fox as the greatest of Ben Jonson's works. But his smaller works are full of poetry. * * * * * Monsieur Thomas and the little French Lawyer are great favourites of mine amongst Beaumont and Fletcher's plays. How those plays overflow with wit! And yet I scarcely know a more deeply tragic scene any where than that in Rollo, in which Edith pleads for her father's life, and then, when she cannot prevail, rises up and imprecates vengeance on his murderer. [1] [Footnote 1: Act iii. sc. 1.:-- "ROLLO. Hew off her hands! HAMOND. Lady, hold off! EDITH. No! hew 'em; Hew off my innocent hands, as he commands you! They'll hang the faster on for death's convulsion.-- Thou seed of rocks, will nothing move thee, then? Are all my tears lost, all my righteous prayers Drown'd in thy drunken wrath? I stand up thus, then, Thou boldly bloody tyrant, And to thy face, in heav'n's high name defy thee! And may sweet mercy, when thy soul sighs for it,-- When under thy black mischiefs thy flesh trembles,-- When neither strength, nor youth, nor friends, nor gold, Can stay one hour; when thy most wretched conscience, Waked from her dream of death, like fire shall melt thee,-- When all thy mother's tears, thy brother's wounds, Thy people's fears, and curses, and my loss, My aged father's loss, shall stand before thee-- ROLLO. Save him, I say; run, save him, save her father; Fly and redeem his head! EDITH. May then that pity," &c.] * * * * * Our version of the Bible is to be loved and prized for this, as for a thousand other things,--that it has preserved a purity of meaning to many terms of natural objects. Without this holdfast, our vitiated imaginations would refine away language to mere abstractions. Hence the French have lost their poetical language; and Mr. Blanco White says the same thing has happened to the Spanish. * * * * * I have the perception of individual images very strong, but a dim one of the relation of place. I remember the man or the tree, but where I saw them I mostly forget.[1] [Footnote 1: There was no man whose opinion in morals, or even in a matter of general conduct in life, if you furnished the pertinent circumstances, I would have sooner adopted than Mr. Coleridge's; but I would not take him as a guide through streets or fields or earthly roads. He had much of the geometrician about him; but he could not find his way. In this, as in many other peculiarities of more importance, he inherited strongly from his learned and excellent father, who deserves, and will, I trust, obtain, a separate notice for himself when his greater son's life comes to be written. I believe the beginning of Mr. C.'s liking for Dr. Spurzheim was the hearty good humour with which the Doctor bore the laughter of a party, in the presence of which he, unknowing of his man, denied any _Ideality_, and awarded an unusual share of _Locality_, to the majestic silver-haired head of my dear uncle and father-in-law. But Mr. Coleridge immediately shielded the craniologist under the distinction preserved in the text, and perhaps, since that time, there may be a couple of organs assigned to the latter faculty.--ED.] * * * * * Craniology is worth some consideration, although it is merely in its rudiments and guesses yet. But all the coincidences which have been observed could scarcely be by accident. The confusion and absurdity, however, will be endless until some names or proper terms are discovered for the organs, which are not taken from their mental application or significancy. The forepart of the head is generally given up to the higher intellectual powers; the hinder part to the sensual emotions. * * * * * Silence does not always mark wisdom. I was at dinner, some time ago, in company with a man, who listened to me and said nothing for a long time; but he nodded his head, and I thought him intelligent. At length, towards the end of the dinner, some apple dumplings were placed on the table, and my man had no sooner seen them, than he burst forth with--"Them's the jockies for me!" I wish Spurzheim could have examined the fellow's head. * * * * * Some folks apply epithets as boys do in making Latin verses. When I first looked upon the Falls of the Clyde, I was unable to find a word to express my feelings. At last, a man, a stranger to me, who arrived about the same time, said:--"How majestic!"--(It was the precise term, and I turned round and was saying--"Thank you, Sir! that _is_ the exact word for it"--when he added, _eodem flatu_)--"Yes! how very _pretty_!" * * * * * _July_ 8. 1827. BULL AND WATERLAND.--THE TRINITY. Bull and Waterland are the classical writers on the Trinity.[1] In the Trinity there is, 1. Ipseity. 2. Alterity. 3. Community. You may express the formula thus:-- God, the absolute Will or Identity, = Prothesis. The Father = Thesis. The Son = Antithesis. The Spirit = Synthesis. [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge's admiration of Bull and Waterland as high theologians was very great. Bull he used to read in the Latin Defensio Fidei Nicaenae, using the Jesuit Zola's edition of 1784, which, I think, he bought at Rome. He told me once, that when he was reading a Protestant English Bishop's work on the Trinity, in a copy edited by an Italian Jesuit in Italy, he felt proud of the church of England, and in good humour with the church of Rome.--ED.] * * * * * The author of the Athanasian Creed is unknown. It is, in my judgment, heretical in the omission, or implicit denial, of the Filial subordination in the Godhead, which is the doctrine of the Nicene Creed, and for which Bull and Waterland have so fervently and triumphantly contended; and by not holding to which, Sherlock staggered to and fro between Tritheism and Sabellianism. This creed is also tautological, and, if not persecuting, which I will not discuss, certainly containing harsh and ill-conceived language. * * * * * How much I regret that so many religious persons of the present day think it necessary to adopt a certain cant of manner and phraseology as a token to each other. They must _improve_ this and that text, and they must do so and so in a _prayerful_ way; and so on. Why not use common language? A young lady the other day urged upon me that such and such feelings were the _marrow_ of all religion; upon which I recommended her to try to walk to London upon her marrow-bones only. * * * * * _July_ 9. 1827. SCALE OF ANIMAL BEING. In the very lowest link in the vast and mysterious chain of Being, there is an effort, although scarcely apparent, at individualization; but it is almost lost in the mere nature. A little higher up, the individual is apparent and separate, but subordinate to any thing in man. At length, the animal rises to be on a par with the lowest power of the human nature. There are some of our natural desires which only remain in our most perfect state on earth as means of the higher powers' acting.[1] [Footnote 1: These remarks seem to call for a citation of that wonderful passage, transcendant alike in eloquence and philosophic depth, which the readers of the Aids to Reflection have long since laid up in cedar:-- "Every rank of creatures, as it ascends in the scale of creation, leaves death behind it or under it. The metal at its height of being seems a mute prophecy of the coming vegetation, into a mimic semblance of which it crystallizes. The blossom and flower, the acme of vegetable life, divides into correspondent organs with reciprocal functions, and by instinctive motions and approximations seems impatient of that fixture, by which it is differenced in kind from the flower-shaped Psyche that flutters with free wing above it. And wonderfully in the insect realm doth the irritability, the proper seat of instinct, while yet the nascent sensibility is subordinate thereto,--most wonderfully, I say, doth the muscular life in the insect, and the musculo-arterial in the bird, imitate and typically rehearse the adaptive understanding, yea, and the moral affections and charities of man. Let us carry ourselves back, in spirit, to the mysterious week, the teeming work-days of the Creator, as they rose in vision before the eye of the inspired historian "of the generations of the heaven and earth, in the days that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens." And who that hath watched their ways with an understanding heart, could, as the vision evolving still advanced towards him, contemplate the filial and loyal bee; the home building, wedded, and divorceless swallow; and, above all, the manifoldly intelligent ant tribes, with their commonwealth and confederacies, their warriors and miners, the husband-folk, that fold in their tiny flocks on the honied leaf, and the virgin sisters with the holy instincts of maternal love, detached and in selfless purity, and not say to himself, Behold the shadow of approaching Humanity, the sun rising from behind, in the kindling morn of creation! Thus all lower natures find their highest good in semblances and seekings of that which is higher and better. All things strive to ascend, and ascend in their striving. And shall man alone stoop? Shall his pursuits and desires, the reflections of his inward life, be like the reflected image of a tree on the edge of a pool, that grows downward, and seeks a mock heaven in the unstable element beneath it, in neighbourhood with the slim water-weeds and oozy bottom-grass that are yet better than itself and more noble, in as far as substances that appear as shadows are preferable to shadows mistaken for substance? No! it must be a higher good to make you happy. While you labour for any thing below your proper humanity, you seek a happy life in the region of death. Well saith the moral poet:-- 'Unless above himself he can Erect himself, how mean a thing is man!'" P. 105. 2d ed.--ED.] July 12. 1827. POPEDOM.--SCANDERBEG.--THOMAS � BECKET.--PURE AGES OF GREEK, ITALIAN, AND ENGLISH.--LUTHER.--BAXTER.--ALGERNON SIDNEY'S STYLE.--ARIOSTO AND TASSO.-- PROSE AND POETRY.--THE FATHERS.--RHENFERD.--JACOB BEHMEN. What a grand subject for a history the Popedom is! The Pope ought never to have affected temporal sway, but to have lived retired within St. Angelo, and to have trusted to the superstitious awe inspired by his character and office. He spoiled his chance when he meddled in the petty Italian politics. * * * * * Scanderbeg would be a very fine subject for Walter Scott; and so would Thomas à Becket, if it is not rather too much for him. It involves in essence the conflict between arms, or force, and the men of letters. * * * * * Observe the superior truth of language, in Greek, to Theocritus inclusively; in Latin, to the Augustan age exclusively; in Italian, to Tasso exclusively; and in English, to Taylor and Barrow inclusively. * * * * * Luther is, in parts, the most evangelical writer I know, after the apostles and apostolic men. * * * * * Pray read with great attention Baxter's Life of himself. It is an inestimable work. [1] I may not unfrequently doubt Baxter's memory, or even his competence, in consequence of his particular modes of thinking; but I could almost as soon doubt the Gospel verity as his veracity. [Footnote 1: This, a very thick folio of the old sort, was one of Mr. Coleridge's text books for English church history. He used to say that there was _no_ substitute for it in a course of study for a clergyman or public man, and that the modern political Dissenters, who affected to glory in Baxter as a leader, would read a bitter lecture on themselves in every page of it. In a marginal note I find Mr. C. writing thus: "Alas! in how many respects does my lot resemble Baxter's! But how much less have my bodily evils been, and yet how very much greater an impediment have I suffered them to be! But verily Baxter's labours seem miracles of supporting grace."--ED.] * * * * * I am not enough read in Puritan divinity to know the particular objections to the surplice, over and above the general prejudice against the _retenta_ of Popery. Perhaps that was the only ground,--a foolish one enough. In my judgment Bolingbroke's style is not in any respect equal to that of Cowley or Dryden. Read Algernon Sidney; his style reminds you as little of books as of blackguards. What a gentleman he was! * * * * * Burke's Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful seems to me a poor thing; and what he says upon Taste is neither profound nor accurate. * * * * * Well! I am for Ariosto against Tasso; though I would rather praise Aristo's poetry than his poem. * * * * * I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order;--poetry = the _best_ words in the best order. * * * * * I conceive Origen, Jerome, and Augustine to be the three great fathers in respect of theology, and Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, and Chrysostom in respect of rhetoric. * * * * * Rhenferd possessed the immense learning and robust sense of Selden, with the acuteness and wit of Jortin. * * * * * Jacob Behmen remarked, that it was not wonderful that there were separate languages for England, France, Germany, &c.; but rather that there was not a different language for every degree of latitude. In confirmation of which, see the infinite variety of languages amongst the barbarous tribes of South America. _July_ 20. 1827. NON-PERCEPTION OF COLOURS. What is said of some persons not being able to distinguish colours, I believe. It may proceed from general weakness, which will render the differences imperceptible, just as the dusk or twilight makes all colours one. This defect is most usual in the blue ray, the negative pole. * * * * * I conjecture that when finer experiments have been applied, the red, yellow, and orange rays will be found as capable of communicating magnetic action as the other rays, though, perhaps, under different circumstances. Remember this, if you are alive twenty years hence, and think of me. _July_ 21. 1827. RESTORATION.--REFORMATION. The elements had been well shaken together during the civil wars and interregnum under the Long Parliament and Protectorate; and nothing but the cowardliness and impolicy of the Nonconformists, at the Restoration, could have prevented a real reformation on a wider basis. But the truth is, by going over to Breda with their stiff flatteries to the hollow-hearted King, they put Sheldon and the bishops on the side of the constitution. * * * * * The Reformation in the sixteenth century narrowed Reform. As soon as men began to call themselves names, all hope of further amendment was lost. _July_ 23. 1827. WILLIAM III.--BERKELEY.--SPINOSA.--GENIUS.--ENVY.--LOVE. William the Third was a greater and much honester man than any of his ministers. I believe every one of them, except Shrewsbury, has now been detected in correspondence with James. * * * * * Berkeley can only be confuted, or answered, by one sentence. So it is with Spinosa. His premiss granted, the deduction is a chain of adamant. * * * * * Genius may co-exist with wildness, idleness, folly, even with crime; but not long, believe me, with selfishness, and the indulgence of an envious disposition. Envy is *[Greek: kakistos kai dikaiotatos theos], as I once saw it expressed somewhere in a page of Stobaeus: it dwarfs and withers its worshippers. * * * * * The man's desire is for the woman; but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.[1] [Footnote 1: "A woman's friendship," I find written by Mr. C. on a page dyed red with an imprisoned rose-leaf, "a woman's friendship borders more closely on love than man's. Men affect each other in the reflection of noble or friendly acts; whilst women ask fewer proofs, and more signs and expressions of attachment."--ED.] August 29. 1827. JEREMY TAYLOR.--HOOKER.--IDEAS.--KNOWLEDGE. Jeremy Taylor is an excellent author for a young man to study, for the purpose of imbibing noble principles, and at the same time of learning to exercise caution and thought in detecting his numerous errors. * * * * * I must acknowledge, with some hesitation, that I think Hooker has been a little over-credited for his judgment. Take as an instance of an idea the continuity and coincident distinctness of nature; or this,--vegetable life is always striving to be something that it is not; animal life to be itself.[1] Hence, in a plant the parts, as the root, the stem, the branches, leaves, &c. remain after they have each produced or contributed to produce a different _status_ of the whole plant: in an animal nothing of the previous states remains distinct, but is incorporated into, and constitutes progressively, the very self. [Footnote 1: The reader who has never studied Plato, Bacon, Kant, or Coleridge in their philosophic works, will need to be told that the word Idea is not used in this passage in the sense adopted by "Dr. Holofernes, who in a lecture on metaphysics, delivered at one of the Mechanics' Institutions, explodes all _ideas_ but those of sensation; whilst his friend, deputy Costard, has no _idea_ of a better-flavoured haunch of venison, than he dined off at the London Tavern last week. He admits (for the deputy has travelled) that the French have an excellent _idea_ of cooking in general; but holds that their most accomplished _maîtres de cuisine_ have no more _idea_ of dressing a turtle, than the Parisian gourmands themselves have any _real idea_ of the true _taste_ and _colour_ of the fat." Church and State, p. 78. No! what Mr. Coleridge meant by an idea in this place may be expressed in various ways out of his own works. I subjoin a sufficient definition from the Church and State, p. 6. "That which, contemplated _objectively_, (that is, as existing _externally_ to the mind,) we call a law; the same contemplated _subjectively_, (that is, as existing in a subject or mind,) is an idea. Hence Plato often names Ideas, Laws; and Lord Bacon, the British Plato, describes the laws of the material universe as the ideas in nature. "Quod in natura _naturata_ Lex, in natura _naturante_ Idea dicitur." A more subtle limitation of the word may be found in the last paragraph of Essay (E) in the Appendix to the Statesman's Manual.--ED.] * * * * * To know any thing for certain is to have a clear insight into the inseparability of the predicate from the subject (the matter from the form), and _vice versâ_. This is a verbal definition,--a _real_ definition of a thing absolutely known is impossible. I _know_ a circle, when I perceive that the equality of all possible radii from the centre to the circumference is inseparable from the idea of a circle. _August_ 30. 1827. PAINTING. Painting is the intermediate somewhat between a thought and a thing. April 13. 1830. PROPHECIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.--MESSIAH.--JEWS.--THE TRINITY. If the prophecies of the Old Testament are not rightly interpreted of Jesus our Christ, then there is no prediction whatever contained in it of that stupendous event--the rise and establishment of Christianity--in comparison with which all the preceding Jewish history is as nothing. With the exception of the book of Daniel, which the Jews themselves never classed among the prophecies, and an obscure text of Jeremiah, there is not a passage in all the Old Testament which favours the notion of a temporal Messiah. What moral object was there, for which such a Messiah should come? What could he have been but a sort of virtuous Sesostris or Buonaparte? * * * * * I know that some excellent men--Israelites without guile--do not, in fact, expect the advent of any Messiah; but believe, or suggest, that it may possibly have been God's will and meaning, that the Jews should remain a quiet light among the nations for the purpose of pointing at the doctrine of the unity of God. To which I say, that this truth of the essential unity of God has been preserved, and gloriously preached, by Christianity alone. The Romans never shut up their temples, nor ceased to worship a hundred or a thousand gods and goddesses, at the bidding of the Jews; the Persians, the Hindus, the Chinese, learned nothing of this great truth from the Jews. But from Christians they did learn it in various degrees, and are still learning it. The religion of the Jews is, indeed, a light; but it is as the light of the glow-worm, which gives no heat, and illumines nothing but itself. * * * * * It has been objected to me, that the vulgar notions of the Trinity are at variance with this doctrine; and it was added, whether as flattery or sarcasm matters not, that few believers in the Trinity thought of it as I did. To which again humbly, yet confidently, I reply, that my superior light, if superior, consists in nothing more than this,--that I more clearly see that the doctrine of Trinal Unity is an absolute truth transcending my human means of understanding it, or demonstrating it. I may or may not be able to utter the formula of my faith in this mystery in more logical terms than some others; but this I say, Go and ask the most ordinary man, a professed believer in this doctrine, whether he believes in and worships a plurality of Gods, and he will start with horror at the bare suggestion. He may not be able to explain his creed in exact terms; but he will tell you that he _does_ believe in one God, and in one God only,-- reason about it as you may. * * * * * What all the churches of the East and West, what Romanist and Protestant believe in common, that I call Christianity. In no proper sense of the word can I call Unitarians and Socinians believers in Christ; at least, not in the only Christ of whom I have read or know any thing. April 14, 1830. CONVERSION OF THE JEWS.--JEWS IN POLAND. There is no hope of converting the Jews in the way and with the spirit unhappily adopted by our church; and, indeed, by all other modern churches. In the first age, the Jewish Christians undoubtedly considered themselves as the seed of Abraham, to whom the promise had been made; and, as such, a superior order. Witness the account of St. Peter's conduct in the Acts [1], and the Epistle to the Galatians.[2] St. Paul protested against this, so far as it went to make Jewish observances compulsory on Christians who were not of Jewish blood, and so far as it in any way led to bottom the religion on the Mosaic covenant of works; but he never denied the birthright of the chosen seed: on the contrary, he himself evidently believed that the Jews would ultimately be restored; and he says,--If the Gentiles have been so blest by the rejection of the Jews, how much rather shall they be blest by the conversion and restoration of Israel! Why do we expect the Jews to abandon their national customs and distinctions? The Abyssinian church said that they claimed a descent from Abraham; and that, in virtue of such ancestry, they observed circumcision: but declaring withal, that they rejected the covenant of works, and rested on the promise fulfilled in Jesus Christ. In consequence of this appeal, the Abyssinians were permitted to retain their customs. If Rhenferd's Essays were translated--if the Jews were made acquainted with the real argument--if they were addressed kindly, and were not required to abandon their distinctive customs and national type, but were invited to become Christians _as of the seed of Abraham_--I believe there would be a Christian synagogue in a year's time. As it is, the Jews of the lower orders are the very lowest of mankind; they have not a principle of honesty in them; to grasp and be getting money for ever is their single and exclusive occupation. A learned Jew once said to me, upon this subject:--"O Sir! make the inhabitants of Hollywell Street and Duke's Place Israelites first, and then we may debate about making them Christians."[3] In Poland, the Jews are great landholders, and are the worst of tyrants. They have no kind of sympathy with their labourers and dependants. They never meet them in common worship. Land, in the hand of a large number of Jews, instead of being, what it ought to be, the organ of permanence, would become the organ of rigidity, in a nation; by their intermarriages within their own pale, it would be in fact perpetually entailed. Then, again, if a popular tumult were to take place in Poland, who can doubt that the Jews would be the first objects of murder and spoliation? [Footnote 1: Chap. xv.] [Footnote 2 : Chap. ii.] [Footnote 3: Mr. Coleridge had a very friendly acquaintance with several learned Jews in this country, and he told me that, whenever he had fallen in with a Jew of thorough education and literary habits, he had always found him possessed of a strong natural capacity for metaphysical disquisitions. I may mention here the best known of his Jewish friends, one whom he deeply respected, Hyman Hurwitz.--ED.] April 17. 1830. MOSAIC MIRACLES.--PANTHEISM. In the miracles of Moses, there is a remarkable intermingling of acts, which we should now-a-days call simply providential, with such as we should still call miraculous. The passing of the Jordan, in the 3d chapter of the book of Joshua, is perhaps the purest and sheerest miracle recorded in the Bible; it seems to have been wrought for the miracle's sake, and so thereby to show to the Jews--the descendants of those who had come out of Egypt-- that the _same_ God who had appeared to their fathers, and who had by miracles, in many respects providential only, preserved them in the wilderness, was _their_ God also. The manna and quails were ordinary provisions of Providence, rendered miraculous by certain laws and qualities annexed to them in the particular instance. The passage of the Red Sea was effected by a strong wind, which, we are told, drove hack the waters; and so on. But then, again, the death of the first-born was purely miraculous. Hence, then, both Jews and Egyptians might take occasion to learn, that it was _one and the same God_ who interfered specially, and who governed all generally. * * * * * Take away the first verse of the hook of Genesis, and then what immediately follows is an exact history or sketch of Pantheism. Pantheism was taught in the mysteries of Greece; of which the Samothracian or Cabeiric were probably the purest and the most ancient. _April_ 18. 1830. POETIC PROMISE. In the present age it is next to impossible to predict from specimens, however favourable, that a young man will turn out a great poet, or rather a poet at all. Poetic taste, dexterity in composition, and ingenious imitation, often produce poems that are very promising in appearance. But genius, or the power of doing something new, is another thing. Mr. Tennyson's sonnets, such as I have seen, have many of the characteristic excellencies of those of Wordsworth and Southey. _April 19. 1830._ It is a small thing that the patient knows of his own state; yet some things he _does_ know better than his physician. * * * * * I never had, and never could feel, any horror at death, simply as death. * * * * * Good and bad men are each less so than they seem. _April 30. 1830._ NOMINALISTS AND REALISTS.--BRITISH SCHOOLMEN.--SPINOSA. The result of my system will be, to show, that, so far from the world being a goddess in petticoats, it is rather the Devil in a strait waistcoat. * * * * * The controversy of the Nominalists and Realists was one of the greatest and most important that ever occupied the human mind. They were both right, and both wrong. They each maintained opposite poles of the same truth; which truth neither of them saw, for want of a higher premiss. Duns Scotus was the head of the Realists; Ockham,[1] his own disciple, of the Nominalists. Ockham, though certainly very prolix, is a most extraordinary writer. [Footnote 1: John Duns Scotus was born in 1274, at Dunstone in the parish of Emildune, near Alnwick. He was a fellow of Merton College, and Professor of Divinity at Oxford. After acquiring an uncommon reputation at his own university, he went to Paris, and thence to Cologne, and there died in 1308, at the early age of thirty-four years. He was called the Subtle Doctor, and found time to compose works which now fill twelve volumes in folio. See the Lyons edition, by Luke Wadding, in 1639. William Ockham was an Englishman, and died about 1347; but the place and year of his birth are not clearly ascertained. He was styled the Invincible Doctor, and wrote bitterly against Pope John XXII. We all remember Butler's account of these worthies:-- "He knew what's what, and that's as high As metaphysic wit can fly; In school divinity as able As he that hight Irrefragable, A second Thomas, or at once To name them all, another _Dunse_; Profound in all the Nominal And Real ways beyond them all; For he a rope of sand could twist As tough as learned Sorbonist." HUDIBRAS. Part I. Canto I. v. 149. The Irrefragable Doctor was Alexander Hales, a native of Gloucestershire, who died in 1245. Amongst his pupils at Paris, was Fidanza, better known by the name of Bonaventura, the Seraphic Doctor. The controversy of the Realists and the Nominalists cannot he explained in a note; but in substance the original point of dispute may be thus stated. The Realists held _generally_ with Aristotle, that there were universal _ideas_ or essences impressed upon matter, and covëal with, and inherent in, their objects. Plato held that these universal forms existed as exemplars in the divine mind previously to, and independently of, matter; but both maintained, under one shape or other, the real existence of universal forms. On the other hand, Zeno and the old Stoics denied the existence of these universals, and contended that they were no more than mere tenms and nominal representatives of their particular objects. The Nominalists were the followers of Zeno, and held that universal forms are merely modes of conception, and exist solely in and for the mind. It does not require much reflection to see how great an influence these different systems might have upon the enunciation of the higher doctrines of Christianity.--ED.] * * * * * It is remarkable, that two thirds of the eminent schoolmen were of British birth. It was the schoolmen who made the languages of Europe what they now are. We laugh at the quiddities of those writers now, but, in truth, these quiddities are just the parts of their language which we have rejected; whilst we never think of the mass which we have adopted, and have in daily use. * * * * * One of the scholastic definitions of God is this,--_Deus est, cui omne quod est est esse omne quod est:_ as long a sentence made up of as few words, and those as oligosyllabic, as any I remember. By the by, that _oligosyllabic_ is a word happily illustrative of its own meaning, _ex opposito_. * * * * * Spinosa, at the very end of his life, seems to have gained a glimpse of the truth. In the last letter published in his works, it appears that he began to suspect his premiss. His _unica substantia_ is, in fact, a mere notion, --a _subject_ of the mind, and no _object_ at all. * * * * * Plato's works are preparatory exercises for the mind. He leads you to see, that propositions involving in themselves contradictory conceptions, are nevertheless true; and which, therefore, must belong to a higher logic-- that of ideas. They are contradictory only in the Aristotelian logic, which is the instrument of the understanding. I have read most of the works of Plato several times with profound attention, but not all his writings. In fact, I soon found that I had read Plato by anticipation. He was a consummate genius.[1] [Footnote 1: "This is the test and character of a truth so affirmed (--a truth of the reason, an Idea)--that in its own proper form it is _inconceivable_. For to _conceive_, is a function of the understanding, which can he exercised only on subjects subordinate thereto. And yet to the forms of the understanding all truth must be reduced, that is to be fixed as an object of reflection, and to be rendered _expressible_. And here we have a second test and sign of a truth so affirmed, that it can come forth out of the moulds of the understanding only in the disguise of two contradictory conceptions, each of which is partially true, and the conjunction of both conceptions becomes the representative or _expression_ (--the _exponent_) of a truth beyond conception and inexpressible. Examples: _before_ Abraham WAS, I AM. God is a circle, the centre of which is every where, and the circumference no where. The soul is all in every part." Aids to Reflection, n. 224.n. See also _Church and State_, p. 12.--ED.] * * * * * My mind is in a state of philosophical doubt as to animal magnetism. Von Spix, the eminent naturalist, makes no doubt of the matter, and talks coolly of giving doses of it. The torpedo affects a third or external object, by an exertion of its own will: such a power is not properly electrical; for electricity acts invariably under the same circumstances. A steady gaze will make many persons of fair complexions blush deeply. Account for that. [1] [Footnote 1: I find the following remarkable passage in p. 301. vol. i. of the richly annotated copy of Mr. Southey's Life of Wesley, which Mr. C. bequeathed as his "darling book and the favourite of his library" to its great and honoured author and donor:-- "The coincidence throughout of all these Methodist cases with those of the Magnetists makes me wish for a solution that would apply to all. Now this sense or appearance of a sense of the distant, both in time and space, is common to almost all the _magnetic_ patients in Denmark, Germany, France, and North Italy, to many of whom the same or a similar solution could not apply. Likewise, many cases have been recorded at the same time, in different countries, by men who had never heard of each other's names, and where the simultaneity of publication proves the independence of the testimony. And among the Magnetisers and Attesters are to be found names of men, whose competence in respect of integrity and incapability of intentional falsehood is fully equal to that of Wesley, and their competence in respect of physio- and psychological insight and attainments incomparably greater. Who would dream, indeed, of comparing Wesley with a Cuvier, Hufeland, Blumenbach, Eschenmeyer, Reil, &c.? Were I asked, what _I_ think, my answer would be,--that the evidence enforces scepticism and a _non liquet_;--too strong and consentaneous for a candid mind to be satisfied of its falsehood, or its solvibility on the supposition of imposture or casual coincidence;--too fugacious and unfixable to support any theory that supposes the always potential, and, under certain conditions and circumstances, occasionally active, existence of a correspondent faculty in the human soul. And nothing less than such an hypothesis would be adequate to the _satisfactory_ explanation of the facts;--though that of a _metastasis_ of specific functions of the nervous energy, taken in conjunction with extreme nervous excitement, _plus_ some delusion, _plus_ some illusion, _plus_ some imposition, _plus_ some chance and accidental coincidence, might determine the direction in which the scepticism should vibrate. Nine years has the subject of Zoo-magnetism been before me. I have traced it historically, collected a mass of documents in French, German, Italian, and the Latinists of the sixteenth century, have never neglected an opportunity of questioning eye-witnesses, _ex. gr._ Tieck, Treviranus, De Prati, Meyer, and others of literary or medical celebrity, and I remain where I was, and where the first perusal of Klug's work had left me, without having moved an inch backward or forward. The reply of Treviranus, the famous botanist, to me, when he was in London, is worth recording:--'Ich habe gesehen was (ich weiss das) ich nicht würde geglaubt haben auf _ihren_ erzählung,' &c. 'I have seen what I am certain I would not have believed on your telling; and in all reason, therefore, I can neither expect nor wish that you should believe on _mine_.'"--ED.] _May_ 1. 1830. FALL OF MAN.--MADNESS.--BROWN AND DARWIN.--NITROUS OXIDE. A Fall of some sort or other--the creation, as it were, of the non- absolute--is the fundamental postulate of the moral history of man. Without this hypothesis, man is unintelligible; with it, every phenomenon is explicable. The mystery itself is too profound for human insight. * * * * * Madness is not simply a bodily disease. It is the sleep of the spirit with certain conditions of wakefulness; that is to say, lucid intervals. During this sleep, or recession of the spirit, the lower or bestial states of life rise up into action and prominence. It is an awful thing to be eternally tempted by the perverted senses. The reason may resist--it does resist--for a long time; but too often, at length, it yields for a moment, and the man is mad for ever. An act of the will is, in many instances, precedent to complete insanity. I think it was Bishop Butler who said, that he was "all his life struggling against the devilish suggestions of his senses," which would have maddened him, if he had relaxed the stern wakefulness of his reason for a single moment. * * * * * Brown's and Darwin's theories are both ingenious; but the first will not account for sleep, and the last will not account for death: considerable defects, you must allow. * * * * * It is said that every excitation is followed by a commensurate exhaustion. That is not so. The excitation caused by inhaling nitrous oxide is an exception at least; it leaves no exhaustion on the bursting of the bubble. The operation of this gas is to prevent the decarbonating of the blood; and, consequently, if taken excessively, it would produce apoplexy. The blood becomes black as ink. The voluptuous sensation attending the inhalation is produced by the compression and resistance. _May_ 2. 1830. PLANTS.--INSECTS.--MEN.--DOG.--ANT AND BEE. Plants exist _in_ themselves. Insects _by_, or by means of, themselves. Men, _for_ themselves. The perfection of irrational animals is that which is best for _them_; the perfection of man is that which is absolutely best. There is growth only in plants; but there is irritability, or, a better word, instinctivity, in insects. * * * * * You may understand by _insect_, life in sections--diffused generally over all the parts. * * * * * The dog alone, of all brute animals, has a [*Greek: storgae], or affection _upwards_ to man. * * * * * The ant and the bee are, I think, much nearer man in the understanding or faculty of adapting means to proximate ends than the elephant.[1] [Footnote 1: I remember Mr. C. was accustomed to consider the ant, as the most intellectual, and the dog as the most affectionate, of the irrational creatures, so far as our present acquaintance with the facts of natural history enables us to judge.--ED.] _May_ 3. 1830. BLACK COLONEL. What an excellent character is the black Colonel in Mrs. Bennett's "Beggar Girl!"[1] If an inscription be put upon my tomb, it may be that I was an enthusiastic lover of the church; and as enthusiastic a hater of those who have betrayed it, be they who they may.[2] [Footnote 1: This character was frequently a subject of pleasant description and enlargement with Mr. Coleridge, and he generally passed from it to a high commendation of Miss Austen's novels, as being in their way perfectly genuine and individual productions.--ED.] [Footnote 2: This was a strong way of expressing a deep-rooted feeling. A better and a truer character would be, that Coleridge was a lover of the church, and a defender of the faith! This last expression is the utterance of a conviction so profound that it can patiently wait for time to prove its truth.--ED.] _May_ 4. 1830. HOLLAND AND THE DUTCH. Holland and the Netherlands ought to be seen once, because no other country is like them. Every thing is artificial. You will be struck with the combinations of vivid greenery, and water, and building; but every thing is so distinct and rememberable, that you would not improve your conception by visiting the country a hundred times over. It is interesting to see a country and a nature _made_, as it were, by man, and to compare it with God's nature.[1] If you go, remark, (indeed you will be forced to do so in spite of yourself,) remark, I say, the identity (for it is more than proximity) of a disgusting dirtiness in all that concerns the dignity of, and reverence for, the human person; and a persecuting painted cleanliness in every thing connected with property. You must not walk in their gardens; nay, you must hardly look into them. [Footnote 1: In the summer of 1828, Mr. Coleridge made an excursion with Mr. Wordsworth in Holland, Flanders, and up the Rhine, as far as Bergen. He came back delighted, especially with his stay near Bonn, but with an abiding disgust at the filthy habits of the people. Upon Cologne, in particular, he avenged himself in two epigrams. See Poet. Works, vol. ii. p. 144.--ED.] * * * * * The Dutch seem very happy and comfortable, certainly; but it is the happiness of _animals_. In vain do you look for the sweet breath of hope and advancement among them. [1]In fact, as to their villas and gardens, they are not to be compared to an ordinary London merchant's box. [Footnote 1: "For every gift of noble origin Is breathed upon by Hope's perpetual breath." _Wordsworth._] _May 5. 1830._ RELIGION GENTILIZES.--WOMEN AND MEN.--BIBLICAL COMMENTATORS.--WALKERITE CREED. You may depend upon it, religion is, in its essence, the most gentlemanly thing in the world. It will _alone_ gentilize, if unmixed with cant; and I know nothing else that will, _alone_. Certainly not the army, which is thought to be the grand embellisher of manners. * * * * * A woman's head is usually over ears in her heart. Man seems to have been designed for the superior being of the two; but as things are, I think women are generally better creatures than men. They have, taken universally, weaker appetites and weaker intellects, but they have much stronger affections. A man with a bad heart has been sometimes saved by a strong head; but a corrupt woman is lost for ever. * * * * * I never could get much information out of the biblical commentators. Cocceius has told me the most; but he, and all of them, have a notable trick of passing _siccissimis pedibus_ over the parts which puzzle a man of reflection. The Walkerite creed, or doctrine of the New Church, as it is called, appears to be a miscellany of Calvinism and Quakerism; but it is hard to understand it. * * * * * _May_ 7, 1830. HORNE TOOKE.----DIVERSIONS OF PURLEY.----GENDER OF THE SUN IN GERMAN. Horne Tooke was pre-eminently a ready-witted man. He had that clearness which is founded on shallowness. He doubted nothing; and, therefore, gave you all that he himself knew, or meant, with great completeness. His voice was very fine, and his tones exquisitely discriminating. His mind had no progression or developement. All that is worth any thing (and that is but little) in the Diversions of Purley is contained in a short pamphlet-letter which he addressed to Mr. Dunning; then it was enlarged to an octavo, hut there was not a foot of progression beyond the pamphlet; at last, a quarto volume, 1 believe, came out; and yet, verily, excepting newspaper lampoons and political insinuations, there was no addition to the argument of the pamphlet, It shows a base and unpoetical mind to convert so beautiful, so divine, a subject as language into the vehicle or make-weight of political squibs. All that is true in Horne Tooke's book is taken from Lennep, who gave it for so much as it was worth, and never pretended to make a system of it. Tooke affects to explain the origin and whole philosophy of language by what is, in fact, only a mere accident of the history of one language, or one or two languages. His abuse of Harris is most shallow and unfair. Harris, in the Hermes, was dealing--not very profoundly, it is true,--with the philosophy of language, the moral, physical, and metaphysical causes and conditions of it, &c. Horne Tooke, in writing about the formation of words only, thought he was explaining the philosophy of language, which is a very different thing. In point of fact, he was very shallow in the Gothic dialects. I must say, all that _decantata fabula_ about the genders of the sun and moon in German seems to me great stuff. Originally, I apprehend, in the _Platt-Deutsch_ of the north of Germany there were only two definite articles--_die_ for masculine and feminine, and _das_ for neuter. Then it was _die sonne_, in a masculine sense, as we say with the same word as article, _the_ sun. Luther, in constructing the _Hoch-Deutsch_ (for really his miraculous and providential translation of the Bible was the fundamental act of construction of the literary German), took for his distinct masculine article the _der_ of the _Ober-Deutsch_, and thus constituted the three articles of the present High German, _der, die, das_. Naturally, therefore, it would then have been, _der sonne_; but here the analogy of the Greek grammar prevailed, and as _sonne_ had the arbitrary feminine termination of the Greek, it was left with its old article _die_, which, originally including masculine and feminine both, had grown to designate the feminine only. To the best of my recollection, the Minnesingers and all the old poets always use the sun as masculine; and, since Luther's time, the poets feel the awkwardness of the classical gender affixed to the sun so much, that they more commonly introduce Phoebus or some other synonyme instead. I must acknowledge my doubts, whether, upon more accurate investigation, it can be shown that there ever was a nation that considered the sun in itself, and apart from language, as the feminine power. The moon does not so clearly demand a feminine as the sun does a masculine sex: it might be considered negatively or neuter;--yet if the reception of its light from the sun were known, that would have been a good reason for making her feminine, as being the recipient body. * * * * * As our _the_ was the German _die_, so I believe our _that_ stood for _das_, and was used as a neuter definite article. The _Platt-Deutsch_ was a compact language like the English, not admitting much agglutination. The _Ober-Deutsch_ was fuller and fonder of agglutinating words together, although it was not so soft in its sounds. _May 8. 1830._ HORNE TOOKE.--JACOBINS. Horne Tooke said that his friends might, if they pleased, go as far as Slough,--he should go no farther than Hounslow; but that was no reason why he should not keep them company so far as their roads were the same. The answer is easy. Suppose you know, or suspect, that a man is about to commit a robbery at Slough, though you do not mean to be his accomplice, have you a moral right to walk arm in arm with him to Hounslow, and, by thus giving him your countenance, prevent his being taken up? The history of all the world tells us, that immoral means will ever intercept good ends. * * * * * Enlist the interests of stern morality and religious enthusiasm in the cause of political liberty, as in the time of the old Puritans, and it will be irresistible; but the Jacobins played the whole game of religion, and morals, and domestic happiness into the hands of the aristocrats. Thank God! that they did so. England was saved from civil war by their enormous, their providential, blundering. * * * * * Can a politician, a statesman, slight the feelings and the convictions of the whole matronage of his country? The women are as influential upon such national interests as the men. * * * * * Horne Tooke was always making a butt of Mr. Godwin; who, nevertheless, had that in him which Tooke could never have understood. I saw a good deal of Tooke at one time: he left upon me the impression of his being a keen, iron man. _May_ 9. 1830. PERSIAN AND ARABIC POETRY.--MILESIAN TALES. I must acknowledge I never could see much merit in the Persian poetry, which I have read in translation. There is not a ray of imagination in it, and but a glimmering of fancy. It is, in fact, so far as I know, deficient in truth. Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense, at all events; just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house, at least. The Arabian Nights' Tales are a different thing --they are delightful, but I cannot help surmising that there is a good deal of Greek fancy in them. No doubt we have had a great loss in the Milesian Tales.[1] The book of Job is pure Arab poetry of the highest and most antique cast. Think of the sublimity, I should rather say the profundity, of that passage in Ezekiel, [2]"Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest." I know nothing like it. [Footnote 1: The Milesiacs were so called, because written or composed by Aristides of Miletus, and also because the scene of all or most of them was placed in that rich and luxurious city. Harpocration cites the sixth book of this collection. Nothing, I believe, is now known of the age or history of this Aristides, except what may be inferred from the fact that Lucius Cornelius Sisenna translated the tales into Latin, as we learn from Ovid:-- Junxit Aristides _Milesia crimina_ secum-- and afterwards, Vertit Aristidem Sisenna, nec obfuit illi Historiae turpes inseruisse jocos:-- _Fasti_, ii. 412-445. and also from the incident mentioned in the _Plutarchian_ life of Crassus, that after the defeat at Carrhae, a copy of the Milesiacs of Aristides was found in the baggage of a Roman officer, and that Surena (who, by the by, if history has not done him injustice, was not a man to be over scrupulous in such a case,) caused the book to be brought into the senate house of Seleucia, and a portion of it read aloud, for the purpose of insulting the Romans, who, even during war, he said, could not abstain from the perusal of such _infamous compositions_,--c. 32. The immoral character of these tales, therefore, may be considered pretty clearly established; they were the Decameron and Heptameron of antiquity.--ED.] [Footnote 2: Chap. xxxvii. v. 3.] _May_ 11. 1830. SIR T. MONRO.--SIR S. RAFFLES.--CANNING. Sir Thomas Monro and Sir Stamford Raffles were both great men; but I recognise more genius in the latter, though, I believe, the world says otherwise. * * * * * I never found what I call an idea in any speech or writing of ----'s. Those enormously prolix harangues are a proof of weakness in the higher intellectual grasp. Canning had a sense of the beautiful and the good; --- rarely speaks but to abuse, detract, and degrade. I confine myself to institutions, of course, and do not mean personal detraction. In my judgment, no man can rightly apprehend an abuse till he has first mastered the idea of the use of an institution. How fine, for example, is the idea of the unhired magistracy of England, taking in and linking together the duke to the country gentleman in the primary distribution of justice, or in the preservation of order and execution of law at least throughout the country! Yet some men never seem to have thought of it for one moment, but as connected with brewers, and barristers, and tyrannical Squire Westerns! From what I saw of Homer, I thought him a superior man, in real intellectual greatness. * * * * * Canning flashed such a light around the constitution, that it was difficult to see the ruins of the fabric through it. _May_ 12. 1830. SHAKSPEARE.--MILTON.--HOMER. Shakspeare is the Spinosistic deity--an omnipresent creativeness. Milton is the deity of prescience; he stands _ab extra_, and drives a fiery chariot and four, making the horses feel the iron curb which holds them in. Shakspeare's poetry is characterless; that is, it does not reflect the individual Shakspeare; but John Milton himself is in every line of the Paradise Lost. Shakspeare's rhymed verses are excessively condensed,-- epigrams with the point every where; but in his blank dramatic verse he is diffused, with a linked sweetness long drawn out. No one can understand Shakspeare's superiority fully until he has ascertained, by comparison, all that which he possessed in common with several other great dramatists of his age, and has then calculated the surplus which is entirely Shakspeare's own. His rhythm is so perfect, that you may be almost sure that you do not understand the real force of a line, if it does not run well as you read it. The necessary mental pause after every hemistich or imperfect line is always equal to the time that would have been taken in reading the complete verse. * * * * * I have no doubt whatever that Homer is a mere concrete name for the rhapsodies of the Iliad.[1] Of course there was _a_ Homer, and twenty besides. I will engage to compile twelve books with characters just as distinct and consistent as those in the Iliad, from the metrical ballads, and other chronicles of England, about Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. I say nothing about moral dignity, but the mere consistency of character. The different qualities were traditional. Tristram is always courteous, Lancelot invincible, and so on. The same might be done with the Spanish romances of the Cid. There is no subjectivity whatever in the Homeric poetry. There is a subjectivity of the poet, as of Milton, who is himself before himself in everything he writes; and there is a subjectivity of the _persona_, or dramatic character, as in all Shakspeare's great creations, Hamlet, Lear, &c. [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge was a decided Wolfian in the Homeric question; but he had never read a word of the famous Prolegomena, and knew nothing of Wolf's reasoning, but what I told him of it in conversation. Mr. C. informed me, that he adopted the conclusion contained in the text upon the first perusal of Vico's Scienza Nuova; "not," he said, "that Vico has reasoned it out with such learning and accuracy as you report of Wolf, but Vico struck out all the leading hints, and I soon filled up the rest out of my own head."-- ED.] _May_ 14. 1830. REASON AND UNDERSTANDING.--WORDS AND NAMES OF THINGS. Until you have mastered the fundamental difference, in kind, between the reason and the understanding as faculties of the human mind, you cannot escape a thousand difficulties in philosophy. It is pre-eminently the _Gradus ad Philosophiam_. * * * * * The general harmony between the operations of the mind and heart, and the words which express them in almost all languages, is wonderful; whilst the endless discrepancies between the names of _things_ is very well deserving notice. There are nearly a hundred names in the different German dialects for the alder-tree. I believe many more remarkable instances are to be found in Arabic. Indeed, you may take a very pregnant and useful distinction between _words_ and mere arbitrary _names of things_. _May 15. 1830._ THE TRINITY.--IRVING. The Trinity is, 1. the Will; 2. the Reason, or Word; 3. the Love, or Life. As we distinguish these three, so we must unite them in one God. The union must be as transcendant as the distinction. Mr. Irving's notion is tritheism,--nay, rather in terms, tri-daemonism. His opinion about the sinfulness of the humanity of our Lord is absurd, if considered in one point of view; for body is not carcass. How can there be a sinful carcass? But what he says is capable of a sounder interpretation. Irving caught many things from me; but he would never attend to any thing which he thought he could not use in the pulpit. I told him the certain consequence would be, that he would fall into grievous errors. Sometimes he has five or six pages together of the purest eloquence, and then an outbreak of almost madman's babble.[1] [Footnote 1: The admiration and sympathy which Mr. Coleridge felt and expressed towards the late Mr. Irving, at his first appearance in London, were great and sincere; and his grief at the deplorable change which followed was in proportion. But, long after the tongues shall have failed and been forgotten, Irving's name will live in the splendid eulogies of his friend. See _Church and State_, p. 180. n.--ED.] _May 16. 1830._ ABRAHAM.--ISAAC.--JACOB. How wonderfully beautiful is the delineation of the characters of the three patriarchs in Genesis! To be sure, if ever man could, without impropriety, be called, or supposed to be, "the friend of God," Abraham was that man. We are not surprised that Abimelech and Ephron seem to reverence him so profoundly. He was peaceful, because of his conscious relation to God; in other respects, he takes fire, like an Arah sheikh, at the injuries suffered by Lot, and goes to war with the combined kinglings immediately. * * * * * Isaac is, as it were, a faint shadow of his father Abraham. Born in possession of the power and wealth which his father had acquired, he is always peaceful and meditative; and it is curious to observe his timid and almost childish imitation of Abraham's stratagem about his wife. [1] Isaac does it before-hand, and without any apparent necessity. [Footnote 1: Gen. xxvi. 6.] * * * * * Jacob is a regular Jew, and practises all sorts of tricks and wiles, which, according to our modern notions of honour, we cannot approve. But you will observe that all these tricks are confined to matters of prudential arrangement, to worldly success and prosperity (for such, in fact, was the essence of the birthright); and I think we must not exact from men of an imperfectly civilized age the same conduct as to mere temporal and bodily abstinence which we have a right to demand from Christians. Jacob is always careful not to commit any violence; he shudders at bloodshed. See his demeanour after the vengeance taken on the Schechemites. [1] He is the exact compound of the timidity and gentleness of Isaac, and of the underhand craftiness of his mother Rebecca. No man could be a bad man who loved as he loved Rachel. I dare say Laban thought none the worse of Jacob for his plan of making the ewes bring forth ring-streaked lambs. [Footnote 1: Gen. xxxiv.] _May 17. 1830._ ORIGIN OF ACTS.--LOVE. If a man's conduct cannot be ascribed to the angelic, nor to the bestial within him, what is there left for us to refer to it, but the fiendish? Passion without any appetite is fiendish. * * * * * The best way to bring a clever young man, who has become sceptical and unsettled, to reason, is to make him _feel_ something in any way. Love, if sincere and unworldly, will, in nine instances out of ten, bring him to a sense and assurance of something real and actual; and that sense alone will make him _think_ to a sound purpose, instead of dreaming that he is thinking. * * * * * "Never marry but for love," says William Penn in his Reflexions and Maxims; "but see that thou lovest what is lovely." _May 18. 1830._ LORD ELDON'S DOCTRINE AS TO GRAMMAR SCHOOLS.--DEMOCRACY. Lord Eldon's doctrine, that grammar schools, in the sense of the reign of Edward VI. and Queen Elizabeth, must necessarily mean schools for teaching Latin and Greek, is, I think, founded on an insufficient knowledge of the history and literature of the sixteenth century. Ben Jonson uses the term "grammar" without any reference to the learned languages. * * * * * It is intolerable when men, who have no other knowledge, have not even a competent understanding of that world in which they are always living, and to which they refer every thing. * * * * * Although contemporary events obscure past events in a living man's life, yet as soon as he is dead, and his whole life is a matter of history, one action stands out as conspicuously as another. A democracy, according to the prescript of pure reason, would, in fact, be a church. There would he focal points in it, but no superior. _May 20. 1830._ THE EUCHARIST.--ST. JOHN, xix. 11.--GENUINENESS OF BOOKS OF MOSES.-- DIVINITY OF CHRIST.--MOSAIC PROPHECIES. No doubt, Chrysostom, and the other rhetorical fathers, contributed a good deal, by their rash use of figurative language, to advance the superstitious notion of the eucharist; but the beginning had been much earlier. [1] In Clement, indeed, the mystery is treated as it was treated by Saint John and Saint Paul; but in Hermas we see the seeds of the error, and more clearly in Irenaeus; and so it went on till the idea was changed into an idol. [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge made these remarks upon my quoting Selden's well-known saying (Table Talk), "that transubstantiation was nothing but rhetoric turned into logic."--ED.] * * * * * The errors of the Sacramentaries, on the one hand, and of the Romanists on the other, are equally great. The first have volatilized the eucharist into a metaphor; the last have condensed it into an idol. Jeremy Taylor, in his zeal against transubstantiation, contends that the latter part of the sixth chapter of St. John's Gospel has no reference to the eucharist. If so, St. John wholly passes over this sacred mystery; for he does not include it in his notice of the last supper. Would not a total silence of this great apostle and evangelist upon this mystery be strange? A mystery, I say; for it _is_ a mystery; it is the only mystery in our religious worship. When many of the disciples left our Lord, and apparently on the very ground that this saying was hard, he does not attempt to detain them by any explanation, but simply adds the comment, that his words were spirit. If he had really meant that the eucharist should he a mere commemorative celebration of his death, is it conceivable that he would let these disciples go away from him upon such a gross misunderstanding? Would he not have said, "You need not make a difficulty; I only mean so and so?" * * * * * Arnauld, and the other learned Romanists, are irresistible against the low sacramentary doctrine. * * * * * The sacrament of baptism applies itself, and has reference to the faith or conviction, and is, therefore, only to be performed once;--it is the light of man. The sacrament of the eucharist is a symbol of _all_ our religion;-- it is the life of man. It is commensurate with our will, and we must, therefore, want it continually. * * * * * The meaning of the expression, [Greek: ei m_e _en soi didomenon an_othen], "except it were given thee _from above_," in the 19th chapter of St. John, ver. 11., seems to me to have been generally and grossly mistaken. It is commonly understood as importing that Pilate could have no power to deliver Jesus to the Jews, unless it had been given him _by God_, which, no doubt, is true; but if that is the meaning, where is the force or connection of the following clause, [Greek: dia touto], "_therefore_ he that delivered me unto thee hath the greater sin?" In what respect were the Jews more sinful in delivering Jesus up, _because_ Pilate could do nothing except by God's leave? The explanation of Erasmus and Clarke, and some others, is very dry- footed. I conceive the meaning of our Lord to have been simply this, that Pilate would have had no power or jurisdiction--[Greek: exousian]--over him, if it had not been given by the Sanhedrin, the [Greek: an_o boul_e], and _therefore_ it was that the Jews had the greater sin. There was also this further peculiar baseness and malignity in the conduct of the Jews. The mere assumption of Messiahship, as such, was no crime in the eyes of the Jews; they hated Jesus, because he would not be _their sort_ of Messiah: on the other hand, the Romans cared not for his declaration that he was the Son of God; the crime in _their_ eyes was his assuming to be a king. Now, here were the Jews accusing Jesus before the Roman governor of _that_ which, in the first place, they knew that Jesus denied in the sense in which they urged it, and which, in the next place, had the charge been true, would have been so far from a crime in their eyes, that the very gospel history itself, as well as all the history to the destruction of Jerusalem, shows it would have been popular with the whole nation. They wished to destroy him, and for that purpose charge him falsely with a crime which yet was no crime in their own eyes, if it had been true; but only so as against the Roman domination, which they hated with all their souls, and against which they were themselves continually conspiring! * * * * * Observe, I pray, the manner and sense in which the high-priest understands the plain declaration of our Lord, that he was the Son of God. [Footnote: Matt. xxvi. v. 63. Mark, xiv. 61.] "I adjure thee by the living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son of God," or "the Son of the Blessed," as it is in Mark. Jesus said, "I am,--and hereafter ye shall see the Son of man (or me) sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven." Does Caiaphas take this explicit answer as if Jesus meant that he was full of God's spirit, or was doing his commands, or walking in his ways, in which sense Moses, the prophets, nay, all good men, were and are the sons of God? No, no! He tears his robes in sunder, and cries out, "He hath spoken blasphemy. What further need have we of witnesses? Behold, now ye have heard his blasphemy." What blasphemy, I should like to know, unless the assuming to be the "Son of God" was assuming to be of the _divine nature_? * * * * * One striking proof of the genuineness of the Mosaic books is this,--they contain precise prohibitions--by way of predicting the consequences of disobedience--of all those things which David and Solomon actually did, and gloried in doing,--raising cavalry, making a treaty with Egypt, laying up treasure, and polygamising. Now, would such prohibitions have been fabricated in those kings' reigns, or afterwards? Impossible. * * * * * The manner of the predictions of Moses is very remarkable. He is like a man standing on an eminence, and addressing people below him, and pointing to things which he can, and they cannot, see. He does not say, You will act in such and such a way, and the consequences will be so and so; but, So and so will take place, because you will act in such a way! May 21. 1830. TALENT AND GENIUS.--MOTIVES AND IMPULSES. Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason and imagination, rarely or never. * * * * * Motives imply weakness, and the existence of evil and temptation. The angelic nature would act from impulse alone. A due mean of motive and impulse is the only practicable object of our moral philosophy. _May_ 23. 1830. CONSTITUTIONAL AND FUNCTIONAL LIFE.--HYSTERIA.--HYDRO-CARBONIC GAS.-- BITTERS AND TONICS.--SPECIFIC MEDICINES. It is a great error in physiology not to distinguish between what may be called the general or fundamental life--the _principium vitae_, and the functional life--the life in the functions. Organization must presuppose life as anterior to it: without life, there could not be or remain any organization; but then there is also _a_ life in the organs, or functions, distinct from the other. Thus, a flute presupposes,--demands the existence of a musician as anterior to it, without whom no flute could ever have existed; and yet again, without the instrument there can be no music. * * * * * It often happens that, on the one hand, the _principium vitae_, or constitutional life, may be affected without any, or the least imaginable, affection of the functions; as in inoculation, where one pustule only has appeared, and no other perceptible symptom, and yet this has so entered into the constitution, as to indispose it to infection under the most accumulated and intense contagion; and, on the other hand, hysteria, hydrophobia, and gout will disorder the functions to the most dreadful degree, and yet often leave the life untouched. In hydrophobia, the mind is quite sound; but the patient feels his muscular and cutaneous life forcibly removed from under the control of his will. * * * * * Hysteria may be fitly called _mimosa_, from its counterfeiting so many diseases,--even death itself. * * * * * Hydro-carbonic gas produces the most death-like exhaustion, without any previous excitement. I think this gas should be inhaled by way of experiment in cases of hydrophobia. There is a great difference between bitters and tonics. Where weakness proceeds from excess of irritability, there bitters act beneficially; because all bitters are poisons, and operate by stilling, and depressing, and lethargizing the irritability. But where weakness proceeds from the opposite cause of relaxation, there tonics are good; because they brace up and tighten the loosened string. Bracing is a correct metaphor. Bark goes near to be a combination of a bitter and a tonic; but no perfect medical combination of the two properties is yet known. * * * * * The study of specific medicines is too much disregarded now. No doubt the hunting after specifics is a mark of ignorance and weakness in medicine, yet the neglect of them is proof also of immaturity; for, in fact, all medicines will be found specific in the perfection of the science. _May_ 25. 1830. EPISTLES TO THE EPHESIANS AND COLOSSIANS.--OATHS. The Epistle to the Ephesians is evidently a catholic epistle, addressed to the whole of what might be called St. Paul's diocese. It is one of the divinest compositions of man. It embraces every doctrine of Christianity;-- first, those doctrines peculiar to Christianity, and then those precepts common to it with natural religion. The Epistle to the Colossians is the overflowing, as it were, of St. Paul's mind upon the same subject. * * * * * The present system of taking oaths is horrible. It is awfully absurd to make a man invoke God's wrath upon himself, if he speaks false; it is, in my judgment, a sin to do so. The Jews' oath is an adjuration by the judge to the witness: "In the name of God, I ask you." There is an express instance of it in the high-priest's adjuring or exorcising Christ by the living God, in the twenty-sixth chapter of Matthew, and you will observe that our Lord answered the appeal.[1] You may depend upon it, the more oath-taking, the more lying, generally among the people. [Footnote 1: See this instance cited, and the whole history and moral policy of the common system of judicial swearing examined with clearness and good feeling, in Mr. Tyler's late work on Oaths.--ED.] May 27. 1830. FLOGGING.--ELOQUENCE OF ABUSE. I had _one_ just flogging. When I was about thirteen, I went to a shoemaker, and begged him to take me as his apprentice. He, being an honest man, immediately brought me to Bowyer, who got into a great rage, knocked me down, and even pushed Crispin rudely out of the room. Bowyer asked me why I had made myself such a fool? to which I answered, that I had a great desire to be a shoemaker, and that I hated the thought of being a clergyman. "Why so?" said he.--"Because, to tell you the truth, sir," said I, "I am an infidel!" For this, without more ado, Bowyer flogged me,-- wisely, as I think,--soundly, as I know. Any whining or sermonizing would have gratified my vanity, and confirmed me in my absurdity; as it was, I was laughed at, and got heartily ashamed of my folly. * * * * * How rich the Aristophanic Greek is in the eloquence of abuse!-- [Greek: 'O Bdelyre, kanaischunte, kai tolmaere su, Kai miare, kai pammiare, kai miarotate.][1] We are not behindhand in English. Fancy my calling you, upon a fitting occasion,--Fool, sot, silly, simpleton, dunce, blockhead, jolterhead, clumsy-pate, dullard, ninny, nincompoop, lackwit, numpskull, ass, owl, loggerhead, coxcomb, monkey, shallow-brain, addle-head, tony, zany, fop, fop-doodle; a maggot-pated, hare-brained, muddle-pated, muddle-headed, Jackan-apes! Why I could go on for a minute more! [Footnote 1: In The Frogs.--ED.] _May_ 28. 1830. THE AMERICANS. I deeply regret the anti-American articles of some of the leading reviews. The Americans regard what is said of them in England a thousand times more than they do any thing said of them in any other country. The Americans are excessively pleased with any kind or favourable expressions, and never forgive or forget any slight or abuse. It would be better for them if they were a trifle thicker-skinned. * * * * * The last American war was to us only something to talk or read about; but to the Americans it was the cause of misery in their own homes. * * * * * I, for one, do not call the sod under my feet my country. But language, religion, laws, government, blood,--identity in these makes men of one country. _May_ 29. 1830. BOOK OF JOB. The Book of Job is an Arab poem, antecedent to the Mosaic dispensation. It represents the mind of a good man not enlightened by an actual revelation, but seeking about for one. In no other book is the desire and necessity for a Mediator so intensely expressed. The personality of God, the I AM of the Hebrews, is most vividly impressed on the book, in opposition to pantheism. * * * * * I now think, after many doubts, that the passage, "I know that my Redeemer liveth," &c. may fairly be taken as a burst of determination, a _quasi_ prophecy. [1] "I know not _how_ this can be; but in spite of all my difficulties, this I _do_ know, that I shall be recompensed." [Footnote 1: Chap. xix. 25, 26.] * * * * * It should be observed, that all the imagery in the speeches of the men is taken from the East, and is no more than a mere representation of the forms of material nature. But when God speaks, the tone is exalted; and almost all the images are taken from Egypt, the crocodile, the war-horse, and so forth. Egypt was then the first monarchy that had a splendid court. * * * * * Satan, in the prologue, does not mean the devil, our Diabolus. There is no calumny in his words. He is rather the _circuitor_, the accusing spirit, a dramatic attorney-general. But after the prologue, which was necessary to bring the imagination into a proper state for the dialogue, we hear no more of this Satan. * * * * * Warburton's notion, that the Book of Job was of so late a date as Ezra, is wholly groundless. His only reason is this appearance of Satan. _May_ 30. 1830. TRANSLATION OF THE PSALMS. I wish the Psalms were translated afresh; or, rather, that the present version were revised. Scores of passages are utterly incoherent as they now stand. If the primary visual images had been oftener preserved, the connection and force of the sentences would have been better perceived.[1] [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge, like so many of the elder divines of the Christian church, had an _affectionate_ reverence for the moral and evangelical portion of the Book of Psalms. He told me that, after having studied every page of the Bible with the deepest attention, he had found no other part of Scripture come home so closely to his inmost yearnings and necessities. During many of his latter years he used to read ten or twelve verses every evening, ascertaining (for his knowledge of Hebrew was enough for that) the exact visual image or first radical meaning of every noun substantive; and he repeatedly expressed to me his surprise and pleasure at finding that in nine cases out of ten the bare primary sense, if literally rendered, threw great additional light on the text. He was not disposed to allow the prophetic or allusive character so largely as is done by Horne and others; but he acknowledged it in some instances in the fullest manner. In particular, he rejected the local and temporary reference which has been given to the 110th Psalm, and declared his belief in its deep mystical import with regard to the Messiah. Mr. C. once gave me the following note upon the _22d_ Psalm written by him, I believe, many years previously, but which, he said, he approved at that time. It will find as appropriate a niche here as any where else:-- "I am much delighted and instructed by the hypothesis, which I think probable, that our Lord in repeating _Eli, Eli, lama sabacthani_, really recited the whole or a large part of the 22d Psalm. It is impossible to read that psalm without the liveliest feelings of love, gratitude, and sympathy. It is, indeed, a wonderful prophecy, whatever might or might not have been David's notion when he composed it. Whether Christ did audibly repeat the whole or not, it is certain. I think, that he did it mentally, and said aloud what was sufficient to enable his followers to do the same. Even at this day to repeat in the same manner but the first line of a common hymn would be understood as a reference to the whole. Above all, I am thankful for the thought which suggested itself to my mind, whilst I was reading this beautiful psalm, namely, that we should not exclusively think of Christ as the Logos united to human nature, but likewise as a perfect man united to the Logos. This distinction is most important in order to conceive, much more, appropriately to _feel_, the conduct and exertions of Jesus."--ED.] _May_ 31. 1830. ANCIENT MARINER.--UNDINE.--MARTIN.--PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. Mrs. Barbauld once told me that she admired the Ancient Mariner very much, but that there were two faults in it,--it was improbable, and had no moral. As for the probability, I owned that that might admit some question; but as to the want of a moral, I told her that in my own judgment the poem had too much; and that the only, or chief fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader as a principle or cause of action in a work of such pure imagination. It ought to have had no more moral than the Arabian Nights' tale of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well, and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a genie starts up, and says he _must_ kill the aforesaid merchant, _because_ one of the date shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie's son.[1] I took the thought of "_grinning for joy_," in that poem, from my companion's remark to me, when we had climbed to the top of Plinlimmon, and were nearly dead with thirst. We could not speak from the constriction, till we found a little puddle under a stone. He said to me,--"You grinned like an idiot!" He had done the same. [Footnote 1: "There he found, at the foot of a great walnut-tree, a fountain of a very clear running water, and alighting, tied his horse to a branch of a tree, and sitting clown by the fountain, took some biscuits and dates out of his portmanteau, and, as he ate his dates, threw the shells about on both sides of him. When he had done eating, being a good Mussulman, he washed his hands, his face, and his feet, and said his prayers. He had not made an end, but was still on his knees, when he saw a genie appear, all white with age, and of a monstrous bulk; who, advancing towards him with a cimetar in his hand, spoke to him in a terrible voice thus:--'Rise up, that I may kill thee with this cimetar as you have killed my son!' and accompanied these words with a frightful cry. The merchant being as much frightened at the hideous shape of the monster as at these threatening words, answered him trembling:--'Alas! my good lord, of what crime can I be guilty towards you that you should take away my life?'--'I will,' replies the genie, 'kill thee, as thou hast killed my son!'--'O heaven!' says the merchant, 'how should I kill your son? I did not know him, nor ever saw him.'--'Did not you sit down when you came hither?' replies the genie. 'Did not you take dates out of your portmanteau, and, as you ate them, did not you throw the shells about on both sides?'--'I did all that you say,' answers the merchant, 'I cannot deny it.'--'If it be so,' replied the genie, 'I tell thee that thou hast killed my son; and the way was thus: when you threw the nutshells about, my son was passing by, and you threw one of them into his eye, which killed him, _therefore_ I must kill thee.'--'Ah! my good lord, pardon me!' cried the merchant.--'No pardon,' answers the genie, 'no mercy! Is it not just to kill him that has killed another?'--'I agree to it,' says the merchant, 'but certainly I never killed your son, and if I have, it was unknown to me, and I did it innocently; therefore I beg you to pardon me, and suffer me to live.'--'No, no,' says the genie, persisting in his resolution, 'I must kill thee, since thou hast killed my son;' and then taking the merchant by the arm, threw him with his face upon the ground, and lifted up his cimetar to cut off his head!"--The Merchant and the Genie. First night.--Ed.] * * * * * Undine is a most exquisite work. It shows the general want of any sense for the fine and the subtle in the public taste, that this romance made no deep impression. Undine's character, before she receives a soul, is marvellously beautiful.[1] [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge's admiration of this little romance was unbounded. He read it several times in German, and once in the English translation, made in America, I believe; the latter he thought inadequately done. Mr. C. said that there was something in Undine even beyond Scott,--that Scott's best characters and conceptions were _composed_; by which I understood him to mean that Baillie Nicol Jarvie, for example, was made up of old particulars, and received its individuality from the author's power of fusion, being in the result an admirable product, as Corinthian brass was said to be the conflux of the spoils of a city. But Undine, he said, was one and single in projection, and had presented to his imagination, what Scott had never done, an absolutely new idea--ED.] * * * * * It seems to me, that Martin never looks at nature except through bits of stained glass. He is never satisfied with any appearance that is not prodigious. He should endeavour to school his imagination into the apprehension of the true idea of the Beautiful.[1] The wood-cut of Slay-good[2] is admirable, to be sure; but this new edition of the Pilgrim's Progress is too fine a book for it. It should be much larger, and on sixpenny coarse paper. The Pilgrim's Progress is composed in the lowest style of English, without slang or false grammar. If you were to polish it, you would at once destroy the reality of the vision. For works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain. This wonderful work is one of the few books which may be read over repeatedly at different times, and each time with a new and a different pleasure. I read it once as a theologian--and let me assure you, that there is great theological acumen in the work--once with devotional feelings--and once as a poet. I could not have believed beforehand that Calvinism could be painted in such exquisitely delightful colours.[3] [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge said this, after looking at the engravings of Mr. Martin's two pictures of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and the Celestial City, published in the beautiful edition of the Pilgrim's Progress by Messrs. Murray and Major, in 1830. I wish Mr. Martin could have heard the poet's lecture: he would have been flattered, and at the same time, I believe, instructed; for in the philosophy of painting Coleridge was a master.--ED.] [Footnote 2: P. 350., by S. Mosses from a design by Mr. W. Harvey. "When they came to the place where he was, they found him with one _Feeble-mind_ in his hand, whom his servants had brought unto him, having taken him in the way. Now the giant was rifling him, with a purpose, after that, to pick his bones; for he was of the nature of flesh eaters."--ED.] [Footnote 3: I find written on a blank leaf of my copy of this edition of the P.'s P. the following note by Mr. C.:--"I know of no book, the Bible excepted as above all comparison, which I, according to _my_ judgment and experience, could so safely recommend as teaching and enforcing the whole saving truth according to the mind that was in Christ Jesus, as the Pilgrim's Progress. It is, in my conviction, incomparably the best _summa theologiae evangalicae_ ever produced by a writer not miraculously inspired." June 14. 1830.--ED.] _June_ 1. 1830. PRAYER.--CHURCH-SINGING.--HOOKER.--DREAMS. There are three sorts of prayer:--1. Public; 2. Domestic; 3. Solitary. Each has its peculiar uses and character. I think the church ought to publish and authorise a directory of forms for the latter two. Yet I fear the execution would be inadequate. There is a great decay of devotional unction in the numerous books of prayers put out now-a-days. I really think the hawker was very happy, who blundered New Form of Prayer into New _former_ Prayers.[1] I exceedingly regret that our church pays so little attention to the subject of congregational singing. See how it is! In that particular part of the public worship in which, more than in all the rest, the common people might, and ought to, join,--which, by its association with music, is meant to give a fitting vent and expression to the emotions,--in that part we all sing as Jews; or, at best, as mere men, in the abstract, without a Saviour. You know my veneration for the Book of Psalms, or most of it; but with some half dozen exceptions, the Psalms are surely not adequate vehicles of Christian thanksgiving and joy! Upon this deficiency in our service, Wesley and Whitfield seized; and you know it is the hearty congregational singing of Christian hymns which keeps the humbler Methodists together. Luther did as much for the Reformation by his hymns as by his translation of the Bible. In Germany, the hymns are known by heart by every peasant: they advise, they argue from the hymns, and every soul in the church praises God, like a Christian, with words which are natural and yet sacred to his mind. No doubt this defect in our service proceeded from the dread which the English Reformers had of being charged with introducing any thing into the worship of God but the text of Scripture. [Footnote 1: "I will add, at the risk of appearing to dwell too long on religious topics, that on this my first introduction to Coleridge he reverted with strong compunction to a sentiment which he had expressed in earlier days upon prayer. In one of his youthful poems, speaking of God, he had said-- --'Of whose all-seeing eye Aught to demand were impotence of mind.' This sentiment he now so utterly condemned, that, on the contrary, he told me, as his own peculiar opinion, that the act of praying was the very highest energy of which the human heart was capable, praying, that is, with the total concentration of the faculties; and the great mass of worldly men and of learned men he pronounced absolutely incapable of prayer."--_Tait's Magazine_, September, 1834, p. 515. Mr. Coleridge within two years of his death very solemnly declared to me his conviction upon the same subject. I was sitting by his bedside one afternoon, and he fell, an unusual thing for him, into a long account of many passages of his past life, lamenting some things, condemning others, but complaining withal, though very gently, of the way in which many of his most innocent acts had been cruelly misrepresented. "But I have no difficulty," said he, "in forgiveness; indeed, I know not how to say with sincerity the clause in the Lord's Prayer, which asks forgiveness _as we forgive_. I feel nothing answering to it in my heart. Neither do I find, or reckon, the most solemn faith in God as a real object, the most arduous act of the reason and will. O no, my dear, it is _to pray, to pray_ as God would have us; this is what at times makes me turn cold to my soul. Believe me, to pray with all your heart and strength, with the reason and the will, to believe vividly that God will listen to your voice through Christ, and verily do the thing he pleaseth thereupon--this is the last, the greatest achievement of the Christian's warfare upon earth. _Teach_ us to pray, O Lord!" And then he burst into a flood of tears, and begged me to pray for him. O what a sight was there!--ED.] * * * * * Hooker said,--That by looking for that in the Bible which it is impossible that _any book_ can have, we lose the benefits which we might reap from its being the best of all books. * * * * * You will observe, that even in dreams nothing is fancied without an antecedent _quasi_ cause. It could not be otherwise. _June_ 4. 1830. JEREMY TAYLOR.--ENGLISH REFORMATION. Taylor's was a great and lovely mind; yet how much and injuriously was it perverted by his being a favourite and follower of Laud, and by his intensely popish feelings of church authority. [1] His Liberty of Prophesying is a work of wonderful eloquence and skill; but if we believe the argument, what do we come to? Why to nothing more or less than this, that--so much can be said for every opinion and sect,--so impossible is it to settle any thing by reasoning or authority of Scripture,--we must appeal to some positive jurisdiction on earth, _ut sit finis controversiarum_. In fact, the whole book is the precise argument used by the Papists to induce men to admit the necessity of a supreme and infallible head of the church on earth. It is one of the works which preeminently gives countenance to the saying of Charles or James II., I forget which:--"When you of the Church of England contend with the Catholics, you use the arguments of the Puritans; when you contend with the Puritans, you immediately adopt all the weapons of the Catholics." Taylor never speaks with the slightest symptom of affection or respect of Luther, Calvin, or any other of the great reformers--at least, not in any of his learned works; but he _saints_ every trumpery monk and friar, down to the very latest canonizations by the modern popes. I fear you will think me harsh, when I say that I believe Taylor was, perhaps unconsciously, half a Socinian in heart. Such a strange inconsistency would not be impossible. The Romish church has produced many such devout Socinians. The cross of Christ is dimly seen in Taylor's works. Compare him in this particular with Donne, and you will feel the difference in a moment. Why are not Donne's volumes of sermons reprinted at Oxford?[2] [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge placed Jeremy Taylor amongst the four great geniuses of old English literature. I think he used to reckon Shakspeare and Bacon, Milton and Taylor, four-square, each against each. In mere eloquence, he thought the Bishop without any fellow. He called him Chrysostom. Further, he loved the man, and was anxious to find excuses for some weak parts in his character. But Mr. Coleridge's assent to Taylor's views of many of the fundamental positions of Christianity was very limited; and, indeed, he considered him as the least sound in point of doctrine of any of the old divines, comprehending, within that designation, the writers to the middle of Charles II.'s reign. He speaks of Taylor in "The Friend" in the following terms:--"Among the numerous examples with which I might enforce this warning, I refer, not without reluctance, to the most eloquent, and one of the most learned, of our divines; a rigorist, indeed, concerning the authority of the church, but a latitudinarian in the articles of its faith; who stretched the latter almost to the advanced posts of Socinianism, and strained the former to a hazardous conformity with the assumptions of the Roman hierarchy." Vol. ii. p. 108.--ED.] [Footnote 2: Why not, indeed! It is really quite unaccountable that the sermons of this great divine of the English church should be so little known as they are, even to very literary clergymen of the present day. It might have been expected, that the sermons of the greatest preacher of his age, the admired of Ben Jonson, Selden, and all that splendid band of poets and scholars, would even as curiosities have been reprinted, when works, which are curious for nothing, are every year sent forth afresh under the most authoritative auspices. Dr. Donne was educated at both universities, at Hart Hall, Oxford, first, and afterwards at Cambridge, but at what college Walton does not mention--ED.] * * * * * In the reign of Edward VI., the Reformers feared to admit almost any thing on human authority alone. They had seen and felt the abuses consequent on the popish theory of Christianity; and I doubt not they wished and intended to reconstruct the religion and the church, as far as was possible, upon the plan of the primitive ages? But the Puritans pushed this bias to an absolute bibliolatry. They would not put on a corn-plaster without scraping a text over it. Men of learning, however, soon felt that this was wrong in the other extreme, and indeed united itself to the very abuse it seemed to shun. They saw that a knowledge of the Fathers, and of early tradition, was absolutely necessary; and unhappily, in many instances, the excess of the Puritans drove the men of learning into the old popish extreme of denying the Scriptures to be capable of affording a rule of faith without the dogmas of the church. Taylor is a striking instance how far a Protestant might be driven in this direction. _June_ 6. 1830. CATHOLICITY.--GNOSIS.--TERTULLIAN.--ST. JOHN. In the first century, catholicity was the test of a book or epistle-- whether it were of the Evangelicon or Apostolicon--being canonical. This catholic spirit was opposed to the gnostic or peculiar spirit,--the humour of fantastical interpretation of the old Scriptures into Christian meanings. It is this gnosis, or _knowingness,_ which the Apostle says puffeth up,--not _knowledge_, as we translate it. The Epistle of Barnabas, of the genuineness of which I have no sort of doubt, is an example of this gnostic spirit. The Epistle to the Hebrews is the only instance of gnosis in the canon: it was written evidently by some apostolical man before the destruction of the Temple, and probably at Alexandria. For three hundred years, and more, it was not admitted into the canon, especially not by the Latin church, on account of this difference in it from the other Scriptures. But its merit was so great, and the gnosis in it is so kept within due bounds, that its admirers at last succeeded, especially by affixing St. Paul's name to it, to have it included in the canon; which was first done, I think, by the council of Laodicea in the middle of the fourth century. Fortunately for us it was so. * * * * * I beg Tertullian's pardon; but amongst his many _bravuras_, he says something about St. Paul's autograph. Origen expressly declares the reverse. * * * * * It is delightful to think, that the beloved apostle was born a Plato. To him was left the almost oracular utterance of the mysteries of the Christian religion while to St. Paul was committed the task of explanation, defence, and assertion of all the doctrines, and especially of those metaphysical ones touching the will and grace;[1] for which purpose his active mind, his learned education, and his Greek logic, made him pre-eminently fit. [Footnote 1: "The imperative and oracular form of the inspired Scripture is the form of reason itself, in all things purely rational and moral."--_Statesman's Manual_, p. 22.] June 7. 1830. PRINCIPLES OF A REVIEW.--PARTY-SPIRIT. Notwithstanding what you say, I am persuaded that a review would amply succeed even now, which should be started upon a published code of principles, critical, moral, political, and religious; which should announce what sort of books it would review, namely, works of literature as contradistinguished from all that offspring of the press, which in the present age supplies food for the craving caused by the extended ability of reading without any correspondent education of the mind, and which formerly was done by conversation, and which should really give a fair account of what the author intended to do, and in his own words, if possible, and in addition, afford one or two fair specimens of the execution,--itself never descending for one moment to any personality. It should also be provided before the commencement with a dozen powerful articles upon fundamental topics to appear in succession. You see the great reviewers are now ashamed of reviewing works in the old style, and have taken up essay writing instead. Hence arose such publications as the Literary Gazette and others, which are set up for the purpose--not a useless one--of advertizing new books of all sorts for the circulating libraries. A mean between the two extremes still remains to be taken. * * * * * Party men always hate a slightly differing friend more than a downright enemy. I quite calculate on my being one day or other holden in worse repute by many Christians than the Unitarians and open infidels. It must be undergone by every one who loves the truth for its own sake beyond all other things. * * * * * Truth is a good dog; but beware of barking too close to the heels of an error, lest you get your brains kicked out. _June_ 10. 1830. SOUTHEY'S LIFE OF BUNYAN.--LAUD.--PURITANS AND CAVALIERS.--PRESBYTERIANS, INDEPENDENTS, AND BISHOPS. Southey's Life of Bunyan is beautiful. I wish he had illustrated that mood of mind which exaggerates, and still more, mistakes, the inward depravation, as in Bunyan, Nelson, and others, by extracts from Baxter's Life of himself. What genuine superstition is exemplified in that bandying of texts and half texts, and demi-semi-texts, just as memory happened to suggest them, or chance brought them before Bunyan's mind! His tract, entitled, "Grace abounding to the Chief of Sinners"[1] is a study for a philosopher. [Footnote 1: "Grace abounding to the Chief of Sinners, in a faithful Account of the Life and Death of John Bunyan, &c." Is it not, however, an historical error to call the Puritans dissenters? Before St. Bartholomew's day, they were essentially a part of the church, and had as determined opinions in favour of a church establishment as the bishops themselves. * * * * * Laud was not exactly a Papist to be sure; but he was on the road with the church with him to a point, where declared popery would have been inevitable. A wise and vigorous Papist king would very soon, and very justifiably too, in that case, have effected a reconciliation between the churches of Rome and England, when the line of demarcation had become so very faint. * * * * * The faults of the Puritans were many; but surely their morality will, in general, bear comparison with that of the Cavaliers after the Restoration. * * * * * The Presbyterians hated the Independents much more than they did the bishops, which induced them to cooperate in effecting the Restoration. * * * * * The conduct of the bishops towards Charles, whilst at Breda, was wise and constitutional. They knew, however, that when the forms of the constitution were once restored, all their power would revive again as of course. June 14. 1830. STUDY OF THE BIBLE. Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being _vulgar_, in point of style. June 15. 1830. RABELAIS.--SWIFT.--BENTLEY.--SUBNET. Rabelais is a most wonderful writer. Pantagruel is the Reason; Panurge the Understanding,--the pollarded man, the man with every faculty except the reason. I scarcely know an example more illustrative of the distinction between the two. Rabelais had no mode of speaking the truth in those days but in such a form as this; as it was, he was indebted to the King's protection for his life. Some of the commentators talk about his book being all political; there are contemporary politics in it, of course, but the real scope is much higher and more philosophical. It is in vain to look about for a hidden meaning in all that he has written; you will observe that, after any particularly deep thrust, as the Papimania[1] for example, Rabelais, as if to break the blow, and to appear unconscious of what he has done, writes a chapter or two of pure buffoonery. He, every now and then, flashes you a glimpse of a real face from his magic lantern, and then buries the whole scene in mist. The morality of the work is of the most refined and exalted kind; as for the manners, to be sure, I cannot say much. Swift was _anima Rabelaisii habitans in sicco_,--the soul of Rabelais dwelling in a dry place. Yet Swift was rare. Can any thing beat his remark on King William's motto, --_Recepit, non rapuit_,--"that the receiver was as bad as the thief?" [Footnote 1: B. iv. c. 48. "Comment Pantagruel descendit en l'Isle de Papimanes." See the five following chapters, especially c. 50.; and note also c. 9. of the fifth book; "Comment nous fut monstré Papegaut à grande difficulté."--ED.] * * * * * The effect of the Tory wits attacking Bentley with such acrimony has been to make them appear a set of shallow and incompetent scholars. Neither Bentley nor Burnet suffered from the hostility of the wits. Burnet's "History of his own Times" is a truly valuable book. His credulity is great, but his simplicity is equally great; and he never deceives you for a moment. _June_ 25. 1830. GIOTTO.--PAINTING. The fresco paintings by Giotto[1] and others, in the cemetery at Pisa, are most noble. Giotto was a contemporary of Dante: and it is a curious question, whether the painters borrowed from the poet, or _vice versa_. Certainly M. Angelo and Raffael fed their imaginations highly with these grand drawings, especially M. Angelo, who took from them his bold yet graceful lines. [Footnote 1: Giotto, or Angiolotto's birth is fixed by Vasari in 1276, but there is some reason to think that he was born a little earlier. Dante, who was his friend, was born in 1265. Giotto was the pupil of Cimabue, whom he entirely eclipsed, as Dante testifies in the well-known lines in the Purgatorio:-- "O vana gloria dell'umane posse! Com' poco verde in su la cima dura, Se non e giunta dall' etati grosse! Credette Cirnabue nella pintura Tener lo campo: ed ora ha Giotto il grido, Si che la fama di colui oscura."--C. xi. v. 91. His six great frescos in the cemetery at Pisa are upon the sufferings and patience of Job.--ED.] * * * * * People may say what they please about the gradual improvement of the Arts. It is not true of the substance. The Arts and the Muses both spring forth in the youth of nations, like Minerva from the front of Jupiter, all armed: manual dexterity may, indeed, he improved by practice. * * * * * Painting went on in power till, in Raffael, it attained the zenith, and in him too it showed signs of a tendency downwards by another path. The painter began to think of overcoming difficulties. After this the descent was rapid, till sculptors began to work inveterate likenesses of perriwigs in marble,--as see Algarotti's tomb in the cemetery at Pisa,--and painters did nothing but copy, as well as they could, the external face of nature. Now, in this age, we have a sort of reviviscence,--not, I fear, of the power, but of a taste for the power, of the early times. _June_ 26. 1830. SENECA. You may get a motto for every sect in religion, or line of thought in morals or philosophy, from Seneca; but nothing is ever thought _out_ by him. _July_ 2. 1830. PLATO.--ARISTOTLE. Every man is born an Aristotelian, or a Platonist. I do not think it possible that any one born an Aristotelian can become a Platonist; and I am sure no born Platonist can ever change into an Aristotelian. They are the two classes of men, beside which it is next to impossible to conceive a third. The one considers reason a quality, or attribute; the other considers it a power. I believe that Aristotle never could get to understand what Plato meant by an idea. There is a passage, indeed, in the Eudemian Ethics which looks like an exception; but I doubt not of its being spurious, as that whole work is supposed by some to be. With Plato ideas are constitutive in themselves.[1] Aristotle was, and still is, the sovereign lord of the understanding; the faculty judging by the senses. He was a conceptualist, and never could raise himself into that higher state, which was natural to Plato, and has been so to others, in which the understanding is distinctly contemplated, and, as it were, looked down upon from the throne of actual ideas, or living, inborn, essential truths. Yet what a mind was Aristotle's--only not the greatest that ever animated the human form!--the parent of science, properly so called, the master of criticism, and the founder or editor of logic! But he confounded science with philosophy, which is an error. Philosophy is the middle state between science, or knowledge, and sophia, or wisdom. [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge said the Eudemian Ethics; but I half suspect he must have meant the Metaphysics, although I do not know that _all_ the fourteen books under that title have been considered non-genuine. The [Greek: Aethicha Eusaemeia] are not Aristotle's. To what passage in particular allusion is here made, I cannot exactly say; many might be alleged, but not one seems to express the true Platonic idea, as Mr. Coleridge used to understand it; and as, I believe, he ultimately considered ideas in his own philosophy. Fourteen or fifteen years previously, he seems to have been undecided upon this point. "Whether," he says, "ideas are regulative only, according to Aristotle and Kant, or likewise _constitutive_, and one with the power and life of nature, according to Plato and Plotinus [Greek:--eg logo zoae aeg, chai ae zoae aeg to phos tog agthwpog] is the highest problem of philosophy, and not part of its nomenclature." Essay (E) in the Appendix to the _Statesman's Manual_, 1816.--ED.] _July_ 4. 1830. DUKE OF WELLINGTON.--MONEYED INTEREST.--CANNING. I sometimes fear the Duke of Wellington is too much disposed to imagine that he can govern a great nation by word of command, in the same way in which he governed a highly disciplined army. He seems to be unaccustomed to, and to despise, the inconsistencies, the weaknesses, the bursts of heroism followed by prostration and cowardice, which invariably characterise all popular efforts. He forgets that, after all, it is from such efforts that all the great and noble institutions of the world have come; and that, on the other hand, the discipline and organization of armies have been only like the flight of the cannon-ball, the object of which is destruction.[1] [Footnote 1: Straight forward goes The lightning's path, and straight the fearful path Of the cannon-ball. Direct it flies and rapid, Shattering that it may reach, and shattering what it reaches. _Wallenstein_, Part I, act i, sc. 4] * * * * * The stock-jobbing and moneyed interest is so strong in this country, that it has more than once prevailed in our foreign councils over national honour and national justice. The country gentlemen are not slow to join in this influence. Canning felt this very keenly, and said he was unable to contend against the city trained-bands. _July_ 6, 1830. BOURRIENNE. Bourienne is admirable. He is the French Pepys,--a man with right feelings, but always wishing to participate in what is going on, be it what it may. He has one remark, when comparing Buonaparte with Charlemagne, the substance of which I have attempted to express in "The Friend"[1] but which Bourrienne has condensed into a sentence worthy of Tacitus, or Machiavel, or Bacon. It is this; that Charlemagne was above his age, whilst Buonaparte was only above his competitors, but under his age! Bourrienne has done more than any one else to show Buonaparte to the world as he really was,--always contemptible, except when acting a part, and that part not his own. [Footnote 1: Vol. i. Essay 12. p. 133.] _July_ 8. 1830. JEWS. The other day I was what you would call _floored_ by a Jew. He passed me several times crying out for old clothes in the most nasal and extraordinary tone I ever heard. At last I was so provoked, that I said to him, "Pray, why can't you say 'old clothes' in a plain way as I do now?" The Jew stopped, and looking very gravely at me, said in a clear and even fine accent, "Sir, I can say 'old clothes' as well as you can; but if you had to say so ten times a minute, for an hour together, you would say _Ogh Clo_ as I do now;" and so he marched off. I was so confounded with the justice of his retort, that I followed and gave him a shilling, the only one I had. * * * * * I have had a good deal to do with Jews in the course of my life, although I never borrowed any money of them. Once I sat in a coach opposite a Jew--a symbol of old clothes' bags--an Isaiah of Hollywell Street. He would close the window; I opened it. He closed it again; upon which, in a very solemn tone, I said to him, "Son of Abraham! thou smellest; son of Isaac! thou art offensive; son of Jacob! thou stinkest foully. See the man in the moon! he is holding his nose at thee at that distance; dost thou think that I, sitting here, can endure it any longer?" My Jew was astounded, opened the window forthwith himself, and said, "he was sorry he did not know before I was so great a gentleman." _July_ 24. 1830. THE PAPACY AND THE REFORMATION.--LEO X. During the early part of the middle ages, the papacy was nothing, in fact, but a confederation of the learned men in the west of Europe against the barbarism and ignorance of the times. The Pope was chief of this confederacy; and so long as he retained that character exclusively, his power was just and irresistible. It was the principal mean of preserving for us and for our posterity all that we now have of the illumination of past ages. But as soon as the Pope made a separation between his character as premier clerk in Christendom and as a secular prince; as soon as he began to squabble for towns and castles; then he at once broke the charm, and gave birth to a revolution. From that moment, those who remained firm to the cause of truth and knowledge became necessary enemies to the Roman See. The great British schoolmen led the way; then Wicliffe rose, Huss, Jerome, and others;--in short, every where, but especially throughout the north of Europe, the breach of feeling and sympathy went on widening,--so that all Germany, England, Scotland, and other countries started like giants out of their sleep at the first blast of Luther's trumpet. In France, one half of the people--and that the most wealthy and enlightened-- embraced the Reformation. The seeds of it were deeply and widely spread in Spain and in Italy; and as to the latter, if James I. had been an Elizabeth, I have no doubt at all that Venice would have publicly declared itself against Rome. It is a profound question to answer, why it is, that since the middle of the sixteenth century the Reformation has not advanced one step in Europe. * * * * * In the time of Leo X. atheism, or infidelity of some sort, was almost universal in Italy amongst the high dignitaries of the Romish church. _July_ 27. 1830. THELWALL.--SWIFT.--STELLA. John Thelwall had something very good about him. We were once sitting in a beautiful recess in the Quantocks, when I said to him, "Citizen John, this is a fine place to talk treason in!"--"Nay! Citizen Samuel," replied he, "it is rather a place to make a man forget that there is any necessity for treason!" Thelwall thought it very unfair to influence a child's mind by inculcating any opinions before it should have come to years of discretion, and be able to choose for itself. I showed him my garden, and told him it was my botanical garden. "How so?" said he, "it is covered with weeds."--"Oh," I replied, "_that_ is only because it has not yet come to its age of discretion and choice. The weeds, you see, have taken the liberty to grow, and I thought it unfair in me to prejudice the soil towards roses and strawberries." * * * * * I think Swift adopted the name of Stella, which is a man's name, with a feminine termination, to denote the mysterious epicene relation in which poor Miss Johnston stood to him. _July_ 28. 1830. INIQUITOUS LEGISLATION. That legislation is iniquitous which sets law in conflict with the common and unsophisticated feelings of our nature. If I were a clergyman in a smuggling town, I would _not_ preach against smuggling. I would not be made a sort of clerical revenue officer. Let the government, which by absurd duties fosters smuggling, prevent it itself, if it can. How could I show my hearers the immorality of going twenty miles in a boat, and honestly buying with their money a keg of brandy, except by a long deduction which they could not understand? But were I in a place where wrecking went on, see if I would preach on any thing else! _July_ 29. 1830. SPURZHEIM AND CRANIOLOOY. Spurzheim is a good man, and I like him; but he is dense, and the most ignorant German I ever knew. If he had been content with stating certain remarkable coincidences between the moral qualities and the configuration of the skull, it would have been well; but when he began to map out the cranium dogmatically, he fell into infinite absurdities. You know that every intellectual act, however you may distinguish it by name in respect of the originating faculties, is truly the act of the entire man; the notion of distinct material organs, therefore, in the brain itself, is plainly absurd. Pressed by this, Spurzheim has, at length, been guilty of some sheer quackery; and ventures to say that he has actually discovered a different material in the different parts or organs of the brain, so that he can tell a piece of benevolence from a bit of destructiveness, and so forth. Observe, also, that it is constantly found, that so far from there being a concavity in the interior surface of the cranium answering to the convexity apparent on the exterior--the interior is convex too. Dr. Baillie thought there was something in the system, because the notion of the brain being an extendible net helped to explain those cases where the intellect remained after the solid substance of the brain was dissolved in water.[1] That a greater or less development of the forepart of the head is generally coincidedent with more or less of reasoning power, is certain. The line across the forehead, also, denoting musical power, is very common. [Footnote 1: "The very marked, _positive_ as well as comparative, magnitude and prominence of the bump, entitled _benevolence_ (see Spurzheim's _map of the human skull_) on the head of the late Mr. John Thurtell, has woefully unsettled the faith of many ardent phrenologists, and strengthened the previous doubts of a still greater number into utter disbelief. On _my_ mind this fact (for a _fact_ it is) produced the directly contrary effect; and inclined me to suspect, for the first time, that there may be some truth in the Spurzheimian scheme. Whether future craniologists may not see cause to _new-name_ this and one or two others of these convex gnomons, is quite a different question. At present, and according to the present use of words, any such change would be premature; and we must be content to say, that Mr. Thurtell's benevolence was insufficiently modified by the unprotrusive and unindicated convolutes of the brain, that secrete honesty and common sense. The organ of destructiveness was indirectly _potentiated_ by the absence or imperfect development of the glands of reason and conscience in this '_unfortunate gentleman.'"--_Aids to Reflection_, p. 143. n.] _August_ 20. 1830. FRENCH REVOLUTION, 1830.--CAPTAIN R. AND THE AMERICANS. The French must have greatly improved under the influence of a free and regular government (for such it, in general, has been since the restoration), to have conducted themselves with so much moderation in success as they seem to have done, and to be disposed to do. * * * * * I must say I cannot see much in Captain B. Hall's account of the Americans, but weaknesses--some of which make me like the Yankees all the better. How much more amiable is the American fidgettiness and anxiety about the opinion of other nations, and especially of the English, than the sentiments of the rest of the world.[1] As to what Captain Hall says about the English loyalty to the person of the King--I can only say, I feel none of it. I respect the man while, and only while, the king is translucent through him: I reverence the glass case for the Saint's sake within; except for that it is to me mere glazier's work,-- putty, and glass, and wood. [Footnote 1: "There exists in England a _gentlemanly_ character, a _gentlemanly_ feeling, very different even from that which is most like it,--the character of a well-born Spaniard, and unexampled in the rest of Europe. This feeling _originated_ in the fortunate circumstance, that the titles of our English nobility follow the law of their property, and are inherited by the eldest sons only. From this source, under the influences of our constitution and of our astonishing trade, it has diffused itself in different modifications through the whole country. The uniformity of our dress among all classes above that of the day labourer, while it has authorized all ranks to assume the appearance of gentlemen, has at the same time inspired the wish to conform their manners, and still more their ordinary actions in social intercourse, to their notions of the gentlemanly the most commonly received attribute of which character is a certain generosity in trifles. On the other hand, the encroachments of the lower classes on the higher, occasioned and favoured by this resemblance in exteriors, by this absence of any cognizable marks of distinction, have rendered each class more reserved and jealous in their general communion; and, far more than our climate or natural temper, have caused that haughtiness and reserve in our outward demeanour, which is so generally complained of among foreigners. Far be it from me to depreciate the value of this gentlemanly feeling: I respect it under all its forms and varieties, from the House of Commons * to the gentleman in the one-shilling gallery. It is always the ornament of virtue, and oftentimes a support; but it is a wretched substitute for it. Its _worth_, as a moral good, is by no means in proportion to its _value_ as a social advantage. These observations are not irrelevant: for to the want of reflection that this diffusion of gentlemanly feeling among us is not the growth of our moral excellence, but the effect of various accidental advantages peculiar to England; to our not considering that it is unreasonable and uncharitable to expect the same consequences, where the same causes have not existed to produce them; and lastly, to our prorieness to regard the absence of this character (which, as I have before said, does, for the greater part, and in the common apprehension, consist in a certain frankness and generosity in the detail of action) as decisive against the sum total of personal or national worth; we must, I am convinced, attribute a large portion of that conduct, which in many instances has left the inhabitants of countries conquered or appropriated by Great Britain doubtful whether the various solid advantages which they have derived from our protection and just government were not bought dearly by the wounds inflicted on their feelings and prejudices, by the contemptuous and insolent demeanour of the English, as individuals."--_Friend_, vol. iii. p, 322. This was written long before the Reform Act.--ED.] _September 8. 1830._ ENGLISH REFORMATION. The fatal error into which the peculiar character of the English Reformation threw our Church, has borne bitter fruit ever since,--I mean that of its clinging to court and state, instead of cultivating the people. The church ought to be a mediator between the people and the government, between the poor and the rich. As it is, I fear the Church has let the hearts of the common people be stolen from it. See how differently the Church of Rome--wiser in its generation--has always acted in this particular. For a long time past the Church of England seems to me to have been blighted with prudence, as it is called. I wish with all my heart we had a little zealous imprudence. _September 19. 1830._ DEMOCRACY.----IDEA OF A STATE.----CHURCH. It has never yet been seen, or clearly announced, that democracy, as such, is no proper element in the constitution of a state. The idea of a state is undoubtedly a government [Greek: ek ton aristou]--an aristocracy. Democracy is the healthful life-blood which circulates through the veins and arteries, which supports the system, but which ought never to appear externally, and as the mere blood itself. A state, in idea, is the opposite of a church. A state regards classes, and not individuals; and it estimates classes, not by internal merit, but external accidents, as property, birth, &c. But a church does the reverse of this, and disregards all external accidents, and looks at men as individual persons, allowing no gradation of ranks, but such as greater or less wisdom, learning, and holiness ought to confer. A church is, therefore, in idea, the only pure democracy. The church, so considered, and the state, exclusively of the church, constitute together the idea of a state in its largest sense. _September_ 20. 1830. GOVERNMENT.----FRENCH GEND'ARMERIE. All temporal government must rest on a compromise of interests and abstract rights. Who would listen to the county of Bedford, if it were to declare itself disannexed from the British empire, and to set up for itself? * * * * * The most desirable thing that can happen to France, with her immense army of gensd'armes, is, that the service may at first become very irksome to the men themselves, and ultimately, by not being called into real service, fall into general ridicule, like our trained bands. The evil in France, and throughout Europe, seems now especially to be, the subordination of the legislative power to the direct physical force of the people. The French legislature was weak enough before the late revolution; now it is absolutely powerless, and manifestly depends even for its existence on the will of a popular commander of an irresistible army. There is now in France a daily tendency to reduce the legislative body to a mere deputation from the provinces and towns. September 21. 1830. PHILOSOPHY OF YOUNG MEN AT THE PRESENT DAY. I do not know whether I deceive myself, but it seems to me that the young men, who were my contemporaries, fixed certain principles in their minds, and followed them out to their legitimate consequences, in a way which I rarely witness now. No one seems to have any distinct convictions, right or wrong; the mind is completely at sea, rolling and pitching on the waves of facts and personal experiences. Mr. ---- is, I suppose, one of the rising young men of the day; yet he went on talking, the other evening, and making remarks with great earnestness, some of which were palpably irreconcilable with each other. He told me that facts gave birth to, and were the absolute ground of, principles; to which I said, that unless he had a principle of selection, he would not have taken notice of those facts upon which he grounded his principle. You must have a lantern in your hand to give light, otherwise all the materials in the world are useless, for you cannot find them; and if you could, you could not arrange them. "But then," said Mr. ----, "_that_ principle of selection came from facts!"--"To be sure!" I replied; "but there must have been again an antecedent light to see those antecedent facts. The relapse may be carried in imagination backwards for ever,--but go back as you may, you cannot come to a man without a previous aim or principle." He then asked me what I had to say to Bacon's induction: I told him I had a good deal to say, if need were; but that it was perhaps enough for the occasion to remark, that what he was evidently taking for the Baconian _in_duction was mere _de_duction--a very different thing.[1] [Footnote 1: As far as I can judge, the most complete and masterly thing ever done by Mr. Coleridge in prose, is the analysis and reconcilement of the Platonic and Baconian methods of philosophy, contained in the third volume of the Friend, from p. 176 to 216. No edition of the Novum Organum should ever be published without a transcript of it.--ED.] _September_ 22. 1830. THUCYDIDES AND TACITUS.----POETRY.----MODERN METRE. The object of Thucydides was to show the ills resulting to Greece from the separation and conflict of the spirits or elements of democracy and oligarchy. The object of Tacitus was to demonstrate the desperate consequences of the loss of liberty on the minds and hearts of men. * * * * * A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket: let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection; and trust more to your imagination than to your memory. * * * * * Really the metre of some of the modern poems I have read, bears about the same relation to metre properly understood, that dumb bells do to music; both are for exercise, and pretty severe too, I think. * * * * * Nothing ever left a stain on that gentle creature's mind, which looked upon the degraded men and things around him like moonshine on a dunghill, which shines and takes no pollution. All things are shadows to him, except those which move his affections. September 23. 1830. LOGIC. There are two kinds of logic: 1. Syllogistic. 2. Criterional. How any one can by any spinning make out more than ten or a dozen pages about the first, is inconceivable to me; all those absurd forms of syllogisms are one half pure sophisms, and the other half mere forms of rhetoric. All syllogistic logic is--1. _Se_clusion; 2. _In_clusion; 3. _Con_clusion; which answer to the understanding, the experience, and the reason. The first says, this _ought_ to be; the second adds, this _is_; and the last pronounces, this must be so. The criterional logic, or logic of premisses, is, of course, much the most important; and it has never yet been treated. * * * * * The object of rhetoric is persuasion,--of logic, conviction,--of grammar, significancy. A fourth term is wanting, the rhematic, or logic of sentences. _September_ 24. 1830. VARRO.--SOCRATES.--GREEK PHILOSOPHY.--PLOTINUS.--TERTULLIAN. What a loss we have had in Varro's mythological and critical works! It is said that the works of Epicurus are probably amongst the Herculanean manuscripts. I do not feel much interest about them, because, by the consent of all antiquity, Lucretius has preserved a complete view of his system. But I regret the loss of the works of the old Stoics, Zeno and others, exceedingly. * * * * * Socrates, as such, was only a poetical character to Plato, who worked upon his own ground. The several disciples of Socrates caught some particular points from him, and made systems of philosophy upon them according to their own views. Socrates himself had no system. * * * * * I hold all claims set up for Egypt having given birth to the Greek philosophy, to be groundless. It sprang up in Greece itself, and began with physics only. Then it took in the idea of a living cause, and made pantheism out of the two. Socrates introduced ethics, and taught duties; and then, finally, Plato asserted or re-asserted the idea of a God the maker of the world. The measure of human philosophy was thus full, when Christianity came to add what before was wanting--assurance. After this again, the Neo-Platonists joined theurgy with philosophy, which ultimately degenerated into magic and mere mysticism. Plotinus was a man of wonderful ability, and some of the sublimest passages I ever read are in his works. I was amused the other day with reading in Tertullian, that spirits or demons dilate and contract themselves, and wriggle about like worms-- lumbricix similes. _September_ 26. 1830. SCOTCH AND ENGLISH LAKES. The five finest things in Scotland are--1. Edinburgh; 2. The antechamber of the Fall of Foyers; 3. The view of Loch Lomond from Inch Tavannach, the highest of the islands; 4. The Trosachs; 5. The view of the Hebrides from a point, the name of which I forget. But the intervals between the fine things in Scotland are very dreary;--whereas in Cumberland and Westmoreland there is a cabinet of beauties,--each thing being beautiful in itself, and the very passage from one lake, mountain, or valley, to another, is itself a beautiful thing again. The Scotch lakes are so like one another, from their great size, that in a picture you are obliged to read their names; but the English lakes, especially Derwent Water, or rather the whole vale of Keswick, is so rememberable, that, after having been once seen, no one ever requires to be told what it is when drawn. This vale is about as large a basin as Loch Lomond; the latter is covered with water; but in the former instance, we have two lakes with a charming river to connect them, and lovely villages at the foot of the mountain, and other habitations, which give an air of life and cheerfulness to the whole place. * * * * * The land imagery of the north of Devon is most delightful. _September_ 27. 1830. LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP OPPOSED.--MARRIAGE.--CHARACTERLESSNESS OF WOMEN. A person once said to me, that he could make nothing of love, except that it was friendship accidentally combined with desire. Whence I concluded that he had never been in love. For what shall we say of the feeling which a man of sensibility has towards his wife with her baby at her breast! How pure from sensual desire! yet how different from friendship! Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole. Luther has sketched the most beautiful picture of the nature, and ends, and duties of the wedded life I ever read. St. Paul says it is a great symbol, not mystery, as we translate it.[1] [Footnote 1: Greek: ---- ] * * * * * "Most women have no character at all," said Pope[1] and meant it for satire. Shakspeare, who knew man and woman much better, saw that it, in fact, was the perfection of woman to be characterless. Every one wishes a Desdemona or Ophelia for a wife,--creatures who, though they may not always understand you, do always feel you, and feel with you. [Footnote 1: "Nothing so true as what you once let fall-- 'Most women have no character at all,'-- Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear, And best distinguish'd by black, brown, and fair." _Epist. to a Lady_, v. I.], _September_ 28. 1830. MENTAL ANARCHY. Why need we talk of a fiery hell? If the will, which is the law of our nature, were withdrawn from our memory, fancy, understanding, and reason, no other hell could equal, for a spiritual being, what we should then feel, from the anarchy of our powers. It would be conscious madness--a horrid thought! October 5. 1830. EAR AND TASTE FOR MUSIC DIFFERENT.----ENGLISH LITURGY.----BELGIAN REVOLUTION. In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly. * * * * * An ear for music is a very different thing from a taste for music. I have no ear whatever; I could not sing an air to save my life; but I have the intensest delight in music, and can detect good from bad. Naldi, a good fellow, remarked to me once at a concert, that I did not seem much interested with a piece of Rossini's which had just been performed. I said, it sounded to me like nonsense verses. But I could scarcely contain myself when a thing of Beethoven's followed. * * * * * I never distinctly felt the heavenly superiority of the prayers in the English liturgy, till I had attended some kirks in the country parts of Scotland, I call these strings of school boys or girls which we meet near London--walking advertisements. * * * * * The Brussels riot--I cannot bring myself to dignify it with a higher name --is a wretched parody on the last French revolution. Were I King William, I would banish the Belgians, as Coriolanus banishes the Romans in Shakspeare.[1] It is a wicked rebellion without one just cause. [Footnote 1: "You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate As reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prize As the dead carcasses of unburied men That do corrupt my air, I banish you; And here remain with _your uncertainty!_" Act iii. sc. 3.] _October_ 8. 1830. GALILEO, NEWTON, KEPLER, BACON. Galileo was a great genius, and so was Newton; but it would take two or three Galileos and Newtons to make one Kepler.[1] It is in the order of Providence, that the inventive, generative, constitutive mind--the Kepler-- should come first; and then that the patient and collective mind--the Newton--should follow, and elaborate the pregnant queries and illumining guesses of the former. The laws of the planetary system are, in fact, due to Kepler. There is not a more glorious achievement of scientific genius upon record, than Kepler's guesses, prophecies, and ultimate apprehension of the law[2] of the mean distances of the planets as connected with the periods of their revolutions round the sun. Gravitation, too, he had fully conceived; but, because it seemed inconsistent with some received observations on light, he gave it up, in allegiance, as he says, to Nature. Yet the idea vexed and haunted his mind; _"Vexat me et lacessit,"_ are his words, I believe. We praise Newton's clearness and steadiness. He was clear and steady, no doubt, whilst working out, by the help of an admirable geometry, the idea brought forth by another. Newton had his ether, and could not rest in--he could not conceive--the idea of a law. He thought it a physical thing after all. As for his chronology, I believe, those who are most competent to judge, rely on it less and less every day. His lucubrations on Daniel and the Revelations seem to me little less than mere raving. [Footnote 1: Galileo Galilei was born at Pisa, on the 15th of February, 1564. John Kepler was born at Weil, in the duchy of Wirtemberg, on the 2lst of December, 1571.--ED.] [Footnote 2: Namely, that the squares of their times vary as the cubes of their distances,--ED.] * * * * * Personal experiment is necessary, in order to correct our own observation of the experiments which Nature herself makes for us--I mean, the phenomena of the universe. But then observation is, in turn, wanted to direct and substantiate the course of experiment. Experiments alone cannot advance knowledge, without observation; they amuse for a time, and then pass off the scene and leave no trace behind them. * * * * * Bacon, when like himself--for no man was ever more inconsistent--says, _"Prudens qiuestio--dimidium scientiæ est."_ _October_ 20. 1830. THE REFORMATION. At the Reformation, the first reformers were beset with an almost morbid anxiety not to be considered heretical in point of doctrine. They knew that the Romanists were on the watch to fasten the brand of heresy upon them whenever a fair pretext could be found; and I have no doubt it was the excess of this fear which at once led to the burning of Servetus, and also to the thanks offered by all the Protestant churches, to Calvin and the Church of Geneva, for burning him. _November_ 21. 1830. HOUSE OF COMMONS. ---- never makes a figure in quietude. He astounds the vulgar with a certain enormity of exertion; he takes an acre of canvass, on which he scrawls every thing. He thinks aloud; every thing in his mind, good, bad, or indifferent, out it comes; he is like the Newgate gutter, flowing with garbage, dead dogs, and mud. He is preeminently a man of many thoughts, with no ideas: hence he is always so lengthy, because he must go through every thing to see any thing. * * * * * It is a melancholy thing to live when there is no vision in the land. Where are our statesmen to meet this emergency? I see no reformer who asks himself the question, _What_ is it that I propose to myself to effect in the result? Is the House of Commons to be re-constructed on the principle of a representation of interests, or of a delegation of men? If on the former, we may, perhaps, see our way; if on the latter, you can never, in reason, stop short of universal suffrage; and in that case, I am sure that women have as good a right to vote as men.[1] [Footnote 1: In Mr. Coleridge's masterly analysis and confutation of the physiocratic system of the early French revolutionists, in the Friend, he has the following passage in the nature of a _reductio ad absurdum_. "Rousseau, indeed, asserts that there is an inalienable sovereignty inherent in every human being possessed of reason; and from this the framers of the Constitution of 1791 deduce, that the people itself is its own sole rightful legislator, and at most dare only recede so far from its right as to delegate to chosen deputies the power of representing and declaring the general will. But this is wholly without proof; for it has been already fully shown, that, according to the principle out of which this consequence is attempted to be drawn, it is not the actual man, but the abstract reason alone, that is the sovereign and rightful lawgiver. The confusion of two things so different is so gross an error, that the Constituent Assembly could scarce proceed a step in their declaration of rights, without some glaring inconsistency. Children are excluded from all political power; are they not human beings in whom the faculty of reason resides? Yes! but|in _them_ the faculty is not yet adequately developed. But are not gross ignorance, inveterate superstition, and the habitual tyranny of passion and sensuality, equally preventives of the developement, equally impediments to the rightful exercise, of the reason, as childhood and early youth? Who would not rely on the judgment of a well-educated English lad, bred in a virtuous and enlightened family, in preference to that of a brutal Russian, who believes that he can scourge his wooden idol into good humour, or attributes to himself the merit of perpetual prayer, when he has fastened the petitions, which his priest has written for him, on the wings of a windmill? Again: women are likewise excluded; a full half, and that assuredly the most innocent, the most amiable half, of the whole human race is excluded, and this too by a Constitution which boasts to have no other foundations but those of universal reason! Is reason, then, an affair of sex? No! but women are commonly in a state of dependence, and are not likely to exercise their reason with freedom. Well! and does not this ground of exclusion apply with equal or greater force to the poor, to the infirm, to men in embarrassed circumstances, to all, in short, whose maintenance, be it scanty, or be it ample, depends on the will of others? How far are we to go? Where must we stop? What classes should we admit? Whom must we disfranchise? The objects concerning whom we are to determine these questions, are all human beings, and differenced from each other by _degrees_ only, these degrees, too, oftentimes changing. Yet the principle on which the whole system rests, is that reason is not susceptible of degree. Nothing, therefore, which subsists wholly in degrees, the changes of which do not obey any necessary law, can be the object of pure science, or determinate by mere reason,"--Vol. i. p. 341, ED.] _March_ 20. 1831. GOVERNMENT.--EARL GREY. Government is not founded on property, taken merely as such, in the abstract; it is founded on _unequal_ property; the inequality is an essential term in the position. The phrases--higher, middle, and lower classes, with reference to this point of representation--are delusive; no such divisions as classes actually exist in society. There is an indissoluble blending and interfusion of persons from top to bottom; and no man can trace a line of separation through them, except such a confessedly unmeaning and unjustifiable line of political empiricism as 10_l_. householders. I cannot discover a ray of principle in the government plan, --not a hint of the effect of the change upon the balance of the estates of the realm,--not a remark on the nature of the constitution of England, and the character of the property of so many millions of its inhabitants. Half the wealth of this country is purely artificial,--existing only in and on the credit given to it by the integrity and honesty of the nation. This property appears, in many instances, a heavy burthen to the numerical majority of the people, and they believe that it causes all their distress: and they are now to have the maintenance of this property committed to their good faith--the lamb to the wolves! Necker, you remember, asked the people to come and help him against the aristocracy. The people came fast enough at his bidding; but, somehow or other, they would not go away again when they had done their work. I hope Lord Grey will not see himself or his friends in the woeful case of the conjuror, who, with infinite zeal and pains, called up the devils to do something for him. They came at the word, thronging about him, grinning, and howling, and dancing, and whisking their long tails in diabolic glee; but when they asked him what he wanted of them, the poor wretch, frightened out his of wits, could only stammer forth,--"I pray you, my friends, be gone down again!" At which the devils, with one voice, replied,-- "Yes! yes! we'll go down! we'll go down!-- But we'll take _you_ with us to swim or to drown!"[1] [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge must have been thinking of that "very pithy and profitable" ballad by the Laureate, wherein is shown how a young man "would read unlawful books, and how he was punished:"-- "The _young_ man, he began to read He knew not what, but he would proceed, When there was heard a sound at the door, Which as he read on grew more and more. "And more and more the knocking grew, The young man knew not what to do: But trembling in fear he sat within, _Till the door was broke, and the devil came in_. "'What would'st thou with me?' the wicked one cried; But not a word the young man replied; Every hair on his head was standing upright, And his limbs like a palsy shook with affright. "'What would'st thou with me?' cried the author of ill; But the wretched young man was silent still," &c. The catastrophe is very terrible, and the moral, though addressed by the poet to young men only, is quite as applicable to old men, as the times show. "Henceforth let all young men take heed How in a conjuror's books they read!" _Southey's Minor Poems_, vol. iii. p. 92.--ED.] * * * * * _June_ 25. 1831. GOVERNMENT.--POPULAR REPRESENTATION. The three great ends which a statesman ought to propose to himself in the government of a nation, are,--1. Security to possessors; 2. Facility to acquirers; and; 3. Hope to all. * * * * * A nation is the unity of a people. King and parliament are the unity made visible. The king and the peers are as integral portions of this manifested unity as the commons.[1] In that imperfect state of society in which our system of representation began, the interests of the country were pretty exactly commensurate with its municipal divisions. The counties, the towns, and the seaports, accurately enough represented the only interests then existing; that is say,--the landed, the shop-keeping or manufacturing, and the mercantile. But for a century past, at least, this division has become notoriously imperfect, some of the most vital interests of the empire being now totally unconnected with any English localities. Yet now, when the evil and the want are known, we are to abandon the accommodations which the necessity of the case had worked out for itself, and begin again with a rigidly territorial plan of representation! The miserable tendency of all is to destroy our nationality, which consists, in a principal degree, in our representative government, and to convert it into a degrading delegation of the populace. There is no unity for a people but in a representation of national interests; a delegation from the passions or wishes of the individuals themselves is a rope of sand. Undoubtedly it is a great evil, that there should be such an evident discrepancy between the law and the practice of the constitution in the matter of the representation. Such a direct, yet clandestine, contravention of solemn resolutions and established laws is immoral, and greatly injurious to the cause of legal loyalty and general subordination in the minds of the people. But then a statesman should consider that these very contraventions of law in practice point out to him the places in the body politic which need a remodelling of the law. You acknowledge a certain necessity for indirect representation in the present day, and that such representation has been instinctively obtained by means contrary to law; why then do you not approximate the useless law to the useful practice, instead of abandoning both law and practice for a completely new system of your own? [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge was very fond of quoting George Withers's fine lines:-- "Let not your king and parliament in one, Much less apart, mistake themselves for that Which is most worthy to be thought upon: Nor think _they_ are, essentially, The STATE. Let them not fancy that th' authority And privileges upon them bestown, Conferr'd are to set up a majesty, A power, or a glory, of their own! But let them know, 't was for a deeper life, Which they but _represent_-- That there's on earth a yet auguster thing, Veil'd though it be, than parliament and king!"--ED.] * * * * * The malignant duplicity and unprincipled tergiversations of the specific Whig newspapers are to me detestable. I prefer the open endeavours of those publications which seek to destroy the church, and introduce a republic in effect: there is a sort of honesty in _that_ which I approve, though I would with joy lay down my life to save my country from the consummation which is so evidently desired by that section of the periodical press. _June_ 26. 1831. NAPIER.--BUONAPARTE.--SOUTHEY. I have been exceedingly impressed with the evil precedent of Colonel Napier's History of the Peninsular War. It is a specimen of the true French military school; not a thought for the justice of the war,--not a consideration of the damnable and damning iniquity of the French invasion. All is looked at as a mere game of exquisite skill, and the praise is regularly awarded to the most successful player. How perfectly ridiculous is the prostration of Napier's mind, apparently a powerful one, before the name of Buonaparte! I declare I know no book more likely to undermine the national sense of right and wrong in matters of foreign interference than this work of Napier's. If A. has a hundred means of doing a certain thing, and B. has only one or two, is it very wonderful, or does it argue very transcendant superiority, if A. surpasses B.? Buonaparte was the child of circumstances, which he neither originated nor controlled. He had no chance of preserving his power but by continual warfare. No thought of a wise tranquillization of the shaken elements of France seems ever to have passed through his mind; and I believe that at no part of his reign could be have survived one year's continued peace. He never had but one obstacle to contend with--physical force; commonly the least difficult enemy a general, subject to courts- martial and courts of conscience, has to overcome. * * * * * Southey's History[1] is on the right side, and starts from the right point; but he is personally fond of the Spaniards, and in bringing forward their nationality in the prominent manner it deserves, he does not, in my judgment, state with sufficient clearness the truth, that the nationality of the Spaniards was not founded on any just ground of good government or wise laws, but was, in fact, very little more than a rooted antipathy to all strangers as such. In this sense every thing is national in Spain. Even their so called Catholic religion is exclusively national in a genuine Spaniard's mind; he does not regard the religious professions of the Frenchman or Italian at all in the same light with his own. [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge said that the conclusion of this great work was the finest specimen of historic eulogy he had ever read in English;--that it was more than a campaign to the duke's fame.--ED.] _July_ 7. 1831. PATRONAGE OF THE FINE ARTS.--OLD WOMEN. The darkest despotisms on the Continent have done more for the growth and elevation of the fine arts than the English government. A great musical composer in Germany and Italy is a great man in society, and a real dignity and rank are universally conceded to him. So it is with a sculptor, or painter, or architect. Without this sort of encouragement and patronage such arts as music and painting will never come into great eminence. In this country there is no general reverence for the fine arts; and the sordid spirit of a money-amassing philosophy would meet any proposition for the fostering of art, in a genial and extended sense, with the commercial maxim,--_Laissez faire_. Paganini, indeed, will make a fortune, because he can actually sell the tones of his fiddle at so much a scrape; but Mozart himself might have languished in a garret for any thing that would have been done for him here. * * * * * There are three classes into which all the women past seventy that ever I knew were to be divided:--1. That dear old soul; 2. That old woman; 3. That old witch. _July_ 24. 1831. PICTURES.[1] Observe the remarkable difference between Claude and Teniers in their power of painting vacant space. Claude makes his whole landscape a _plenum:_ the air is quite as substantial as any other part of the scene. Hence there are no true distances, and every thing presses at once and equally upon the eye. There is something close and almost suffocating in the atmosphere of some of Claude's sunsets. Never did any one paint air, the thin air, the absolutely apparent vacancy between object and object, so admirably as Teniers. That picture of the Archers[2] exemplifies this excellence. See the distances between those ugly louts! how perfectly true to the fact! But oh! what a wonderful picture is that Triumph of Silenus![3] It is the very revelry of hell. Every evil passion is there that could in any way be forced into juxtaposition with joyance. Mark the lust, and, hard by, the hate. Every part is pregnant with libidinous nature without one spark of the grace of Heaven. The animal is triumphing--not over, but--in the absence, in the non-existence, of the spiritual part of man. I could fancy that Rubens had seen in a vision-- All the souls that damned be Leap up at once in anarchy, Clap their hands, and dance for glee! That landscape[4] on the other side is only less magnificent than dear Sir George Beaumont's, now in the National Gallery. It has the same charm. Rubens does not take for his subjects grand or novel conformations of objects; he has, you see, no precipices, no forests, no frowning castles,-- nothing that a poet would take at all times, and a painter take in these times. No; he gets some little ponds, old tumble-down cottages, that ruinous château, two or three peasants, a hay-rick, and other such humble images, which looked at in and by themselves convey no pleasure and excite no surprise; but he--and he Peter Paul Rubens alone--handles these every- day ingredients of all common landscapes as they are handled in nature; he throws them into a vast and magnificent whole, consisting of heaven and earth and all things therein. He extracts the latent poetry out of these common objects,--that poetry and harmony which every man of genius perceives in the face of nature, and which many men of no genius are taught to perceive and feel after examining such a picture as this. In other landscape painters the scene is confined and as it were imprisoned;--in Rubens the landscape dies a natural death; it fades away into the apparent infinity of space. So long as Rubens confines himself to space and outward figure--to the mere animal man with animal passions--he is, I may say, a god amongst painters. His satyrs, Silenuses, lions, tigers, and dogs, are almost godlike; but the moment he attempts any thing involving or presuming the spiritual, his gods and goddesses, his nymphs and heroes, become beasts, absolute, unmitigated beasts. [Footnote 1: All the following remarks in this section were made at the exhibition of ancient masters at the British Gallery in Pall Mall. The recollection of those two hours has made the rooms of that Institution a melancholy place for me. Mr. Coleridge was in high spirits, and seemed to kindle in his mind at the contemplation of the splendid pictures before him. He did not examine them all by the catalogue, but anchored himself before some three or four great works, telling me that he saw the rest of the Gallery _potentially_. I can yet distinctly recall him, half leaning on his old simple stick, and his hat off in one hand, whilst with the fingers of the other he went on, as was his constant wont, figuring in the air a commentary of small diagrams, wherewith, as he fancied, he could translate to the eye those relations of form and space which his words might fail to convey with clearness to the ear. His admiration for Rubens showed itself in a sort of joy and brotherly fondness; he looked as if he would shake hands with his pictures. What the company, which by degrees formed itself round this silver-haired, bright-eyed, music-breathing, old man, took him for, I cannot guess; there was probably not one there who knew him to be that Ancient Mariner, who held people with his glittering eye, and constrained them, like three years' children, to hear his tale. In the midst of his speech, he turned to the right hand, where stood a very lovely young woman, whose attention he had involuntarily arrested;--to her, without apparently any consciousness of her being a stranger to him, he addressed many remarks, although I must acknowledge they were couched in a somewhat softer tone, as if he were soliciting her sympathy. He was, verily, a gentle-hearted man at all times; but I never was in company with him in my life, when the entry of a woman, it mattered not who, did not provoke a dim gush of emotion, which passed like an infant's breath over the mirror of his intellect.--ED.] [Footnote 2: "Figures shooting at a Target," belonging, I believe, to Lord Bandon.--ED.] [Footnote 3: This belongs to Sir Robert Peel.--ED.] [Footnote 4: "Landscape with setting Sun,"--Lord Farnborough's picture.--ED.] * * * * * The Italian masters differ from the Dutch in this--that in their pictures ages are perfectly ideal. The infant that Raffael's Madonna holds in her arms cannot be guessed of any particular age; it is Humanity in infancy. The babe in the manger in a Dutch painting is a fac-simile of some real new-born bantling; it is just like the little rabbits we fathers have all seen with some dismay at first burst. * * * * * Carlo Dolce's representations of our Saviour are pretty, to be sure; but they are too smooth to please me. His Christs are always in sugar-candy. * * * * * That is a very odd and funny picture of the Connoisseurs at Rome[1] by Reynolds. [Footnote 1: "Portraits of distinguished Connoisseurs painted at Rome,"--belonging to Lord Burlington.--ED.] * * * * * The more I see of modern pictures, the more I am convinced that the ancient art of painting is gone, and something substituted for it,--very pleasing, but different, and different in kind and not in degree only. Portraits by the old masters,--take for example the pock-fritten lady by Cuyp[1]--are pictures of men and women: they fill, not merely occupy, a space; they represent individuals, but individuals as types of a species. Modern portraits--a few by Jackson and Owen, perhaps, excepted--give you not the man, not the inward humanity, but merely the external mark, that in which Tom is different from Bill. There is something affected and meretricious in the Snake in the Grass[2] and such pictures, by Reynolds. [Footnote 1: I almost forget, but have some recollection that the allusion is to Mr. Heneage Finch's picture of a Lady with a Fan.--ED.] [Footnote 2: Sir Robert Peel's.--ED.] July 25. 1831. CHILLINGWORTH.--SUPERSTITION OF MALTESE, SICILIANS, AND ITALIANS. It is now twenty years since I read Chillingworth's book[1]; but certainly it seemed to me that his main position, that the mere text of the Bible is the sole and exclusive ground of Christian faith and practice, is quite untenable against the Romanists. It entirely destroys the conditions of a church, of an authority residing in a religious community, and all that holy sense of brotherhood which is so sublime and consolatory to a meditative Christian. Had I been a Papist, I should not have wished for a more vanquishable opponent in controversy. I certainly believe Chillingworth to have been in some sense a Socinian. Lord Falkland, his friend, said so in substance. I do not deny his skill in dialectics; he was more than a match for Knott[2] to be sure. I must be bold enough to say, that I do not think that even Hooker puts the idea of a church on the true foundation. [Footnote 1: "The Religion of Protestants a safe Way to Salvation; or, an Answer to a Booke entitled 'Mercy and Truth; or, Charity maintained by Catholicks,' which pretends to prove the contrary."] [Footnote 2: Socinianism, or some inclination that way, is an old and clinging charge against Chillingworth. On the one hand, it is well known that he subscribed the articles of the church of England, in the usual form, on the 20th of July, 1638; and on the other, it is equally certain that within two years immediately previous, he wrote the letter to some unnamed correspondent, beginning "Dear Harry," and printed in all the Lives of Chillingworth, in which letter he sums up his arguments upon the Arian doctrine in this passage:--"In a word, whosoever shall freely and impartially consider of this thing, and how on the other side the ancient fathers' weapons against the Arrians are in a manner only places of Scripture (and these now for the most part discarded as importunate and unconcluding), and how in the argument drawn from the authority of the ancient fathers, they are almost always defendants, and scarse ever opponents, _he shall not choose but confesses or at least be very inclinable to beleeve, that the doctrine of Arrius is eyther a truth, or at least no damnable heresy_." The truth is, however, that the Socinianism of Chillingworth, such as it may have been, had more reference to the doctrine of the redemption of man than of the being of God. Edward Knott's real name was Matthias Wilson.--ED.] * * * * * The superstition of the peasantry and lower orders generally in Malta, Sicily, and Italy exceeds common belief. It is unlike the superstition of Spain, which is a jealous fanaticism, having reference to their catholicism, and always glancing on heresy. The popular superstition of Italy is the offspring of the climate, the old associations, the manners, and the very names of the places. It is pure paganism, undisturbed by any anxiety about orthodoxy, or animosity against heretics. Hence, it is much more good-natured and pleasing to a traveller's feelings, and certainly not a whit less like the true religion of our dear Lord than the gloomy idolatry of the Spaniards. * * * * * I well remember, when in Valetta in 1805, asking a boy who waited on me, what a certain procession, then passing, was, and his answering with great quickness, that it was Jesus Christ, _who lives here (sta di casa qui)_, and when he comes out, it is in the shape of a wafer. But, "Eccelenza," said he, smiling and correcting himself, "non è Cristiano."[1] [Footnote 1: The following anecdote related by Mr. Coleridge, in April, 1811, was preserved and communicated to me by Mr. Justice Coleridge:--"As I was descending from Mount AEtna with a very lively talkative guide, we passed through a village (I think called) Nicolozzi, when the host happened to be passing through the street. Every one was prostrate; my guide became so; and, not to be singular, I went down also. After resuming our journey, I observed in my guide an unusual seriousness and long silence, which, after many _hums_ and _hahs_, was interrupted by a low bow, and leave requested to ask a question. This was of course granted, and the ensuing dialogue took place. Guide. "Signor, are you then a Christian?" Coleridge. "I hope so." G. "What! are all Englishmen Christians?" C. "I hope and trust they are." G. "What! are you not Turks? Are you not damned eternally?" C. "I trust not, through Christ." G. "What! you believe in Christ then?" C. "Certainly." This answer produced another long silence. At length my guide again spoke, still doubting the grand point of my Christianity. G. "I'm thinking, Signor, what is the difference between you and us, that you are to be certainly damned?" C. "Nothing very material; nothing that can prevent our both going to heaven, I hope. We believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost." G. (interrupting me) "Oh those damned priests! what liars they are! But (pausing) we can't do without them; we can't go to heaven without them. But tell me, Signor, what _are_ the differences?" C. "Why, for instance, we do not worship the Virgin." G. "And why not, Signor?" C. "Because, though holy and pure, we think her still a woman, and, therefore, do not pay her the honour due to God." G. "But do you not worship Jesus, who sits on the right hand of God?" C. "We do." G. "Then why not worship the Virgin, who sits on the left?" C. "I did not know she did. If you can show it me in the Scriptures, I shall readily agree to worship her." "Oh," said my man, with uncommon triumph, and cracking his fingers, "sicuro, Signor! sicuro, Signor!""--ED.] _July_ 30. 1831. ASGILL.--THE FRENCH. Asgill was an extraordinary man, and his pamphlet[1] is invaluable. He undertook to prove that man is literally immortal; or, rather, that any given living man might probably never die. He complains of the cowardly practice of dying. He was expelled from two Houses of Commons for blasphemy and atheism, as was pretended;--really I suspect because he was a staunch Hanoverian. I expected to find the ravings of an enthusiast, or the sullen snarlings of an infidel; whereas I found the very soul of Swift--an intense half self-deceived humorism. I scarcely remember elsewhere such uncommon skill in logic, such lawyer-like acuteness, and yet such a grasp of common sense. Each of his paragraphs is in itself a whole, and yet a link between the preceding and following; so that the entire series forms one argument, and yet each is a diamond in itself. [Footnote 1: "An argument proving, that, according to the covenant of eternal life, revealed in the Scriptures, man may be translated from hence, without passing through death, although the human nature of Christ himself could not be thus translated, till he had passed through death." Asgill died in the year 1738, in the King's Bench prison, where he had been a prisoner for debt thirty years.--ED.] * * * * * Was there ever such a miserable scene as that of the exhibition of the Austrian standards in the French house of peers the other day?[1] Every other nation but the French would see that it was an exhibition of their own falsehood and cowardice. A man swears that the property intrusted to him is burnt, and then, when he is no longer afraid, produces it, and boasts of the atmosphere of "_honour_," through which the lie did not transpire. Frenchmen are like grains of gunpowder,--each by itself smutty and contemptible, but mass them together and they are terrible indeed. [Footnote 1: When the allies were in Paris in 1815, all the Austrian standards were reclaimed. The answer was that they had been burnt by the soldiers at the Hôtel des Invalides. This was untrue. The Marquis de Semonville confessed with pride that he, knowing of the fraud, had concealed these standards, taken from Mack at Ulm in 1805, in a vault under the Luxemburg palace. "An inviolable asylum," said the Marquis in his speech to the peers, "formed in the vault of this hall has protected this treasure from every search. Vainly, during this long space of time, have the most authoritative researches endeavoured to penetrate the secret. It would have been culpable to reveal it, as long as we were liable to the demands of haughty foreigners. No one in this atmosphere of honour is capable of so great a weakness," &c.--ED.] _August_ 1. 1831. As there is much beast and some devil in man; so is there some angel and some God in him. The beast and the devil may be conquered, but in this life never destroyed. * * * * * I will defy any one to answer the arguments of a St. Simonist, except on the ground of Christianity--its precepts and its assurances. _August_ 6. 1831. THE GOOD AND THE TRUE.--ROMISH RELIGION. There is the love of the good for the good's sake, and the love of the truth for the truth's sake. I have known many, especially women, love the good for the good's sake; but very few, indeed, and scarcely one woman, love the truth for the truth's sake. Yet; without the latter, the former may become, as it has a thousand times been, the source of persecution of the truth,--the pretext and motive of inquisitorial cruelty and party zealotry. To see clearly that the love of the good and the true is ultimately identical--is given only to those who love both sincerely and without any foreign ends. * * * * * Look through the whole history of countries professing the Romish religion, and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action--that the end will sanction any means. _August_ 8. 1831. ENGLAND AND HOLLAND. The conduct of this country to King William of Holland has been, in my judgment, base and unprincipled beyond any thing in our history since the times of Charles the Second. Certainly, Holland is one of the most important allies that England has; and we are doing our utmost to subject it, and Portugal, to French influence, or even dominion! Upon my word, the English people, at this moment, are like a man palsied in every part of his body but one, in which one part he is so morbidly sensitive that he cannot bear to have it so much as breathed upon, whilst you may pinch him with a hot forceps elsewhere without his taking any notice of it. _August_ 8. 1831. IRON.--GALVANISM.--HEAT. Iron is the most ductile of all hard metals, and the hardest of all ductile metals. With the exception of nickel, in which it is dimly seen, iron is the only metal in which the magnetic power is visible. Indeed, it is almost impossible to purify nickel of iron. * * * * * Galvanism is the union of electricity and magnetism, and, by being continuous, it exhibits an image of life;--I say, an image only: it is life in death. * * * * * Heat is the mesothesis or indifference of light and matter. _August_ 14. 1831. NATIONAL COLONIAL CHARACTER, AND NAVAL DISCIPLINE. The character of most nations in their colonial dependencies is in an inverse ratio of excellence to their character at home. The best people in the mother-country will generally be the worst in the colonies; the worst at home will be the best abroad. Or, perhaps, I may state it less offensively thus:--The colonists of a well governed-country will degenerate; those of an ill-governed country will improve. I am now considering the natural tendency of such colonists if left to themselves; of course, a direct act of the legislature of the mother-country will break in upon this. Where this tendency is exemplified, the cause is obvious. In countries well governed and happily conditioned, none, or very few, but those who are desperate through vice or folly, or who are mere trading adventurers, will be willing to leave their homes and settle in another hemisphere; and of those who do go, the best and worthiest are always striving to acquire the means of leaving the colony, and of returning to their native land. In ill-governed and ill-conditioned countries, on the contrary, the most respectable of the people are willing and anxious to emigrate for the chance of greater security and enlarged freedom; and if they succeed in obtaining these blessings in almost any degree, they have little inducement, on the average, to wish to abandon their second and better country. Hence, in the former case, the colonists consider themselves as mere strangers, sojourners, birds of passage, and shift to live from hand to mouth, with little regard to lasting improvement of the place of their temporary commerce; whilst, in the latter case, men feel attached to a community to which they are individually indebted for otherwise unattainable benefits, and for the most part learn to regard it as their abode, and to make themselves as happy and comfortable in it as possible. I believe that the internal condition and character of the English and French West India islands of the last century amply verified this distinction; the Dutch colonists most certainly did, and have always done. Analogous to this, though not founded on precisely the same principle, is the fact that the severest naval discipline is always found in the ships of the freest nations, and the most lax discipline in the ships of the most oppressed. Hence, the naval discipline of the Americans is the sharpest; then that of the English;[1] then that of the French (I speak as it used to be); and on board a Spanish ship, there is no discipline at all. At Genoa, the word "Liberty" is, or used to be, engraved on the chains of the galley-slaves, and the doors of the dungeons. [Footnote 1: This expression needs explanation. It _looks_ as if Mr. Coleridge rated the degree of liberty enjoyed by the English, _after_ that of the citizens of the United States; but he meant no such thing. His meaning was, that the form of government of the latter was more democratic, and formally assigned more power to each individual. The Americans, as a nation, had no better friend in England than Coleridge; he contemplated their growth with interest, and prophesied highly of their destiny, whether under their present or other governments. But he well knew their besetting faults and their peculiar difficulties, and was most deliberately of opinion that the English had, for 130 years last past, possessed a measure of individual freedom and social dignity which had never been equalled, much less surpassed, in any other country ancient or modern. There is a passage in Mr. Coleridge's latest publication (Church and State}, which clearly expresses his opinion upon this subject: "It has been frequently and truly observed that in England, where the ground-plan, the skeleton, as it were, of the government is a monarchy, at once buttressed and limited by the aristocracy (the assertions of its popular character finding a better support in the harangues and theories of popular men, than in state documents, and the records of clear history), afar greater degree of liberty is, and long has been, enjoyed, than ever existed in, the ostensibly freest, that is, most democratic, commonwealths of ancient or modern times; greater, indeed, and with a more decisive predominance of the spirit of freedom, than the wisest and most philanthropic statesmen of antiquity, or than the great commonwealth's men,--the stars of that narrow interspace of blue sky between the black clouds of the first and second Charles's reigns--believed compatible, the one with the safety of the state, the other with the interests of morality. Yes! for little less than a century and a half, Englishmen have, collectively and individually, lived and acted with fewer restraints on their free-agency, than the citizens of any known republic, past or present." (p. 120.) Upon which he subjoins the following note: "It will be thought, perhaps, that the United States of North America should have been excepted. But the identity of stock, language, customs, manners, and laws scarcely allows us to consider this an exception, even though it were quite certain both that it is and that it will continue such. It was at all events a remark worth remembering, which I once heard from a traveller (a prejudiced one, I must admit), that where every man may take, liberties, there is little liberty for any man; or, that where every man takes liberties, no man can enjoy any." (p. 121.) See also a passage to the like effect in the _Friend_, vol. i. p. 129--ED.] August 15. 1831. ENGLAND.--HOLLAND AND BELGIUM. I cannot contain my indignation at the conduct of our government towards Holland. They have undoubtedly forgotten the true and well-recognized policy of this country in regard to Portugal in permitting the war faction in France to take possession of the Tagus, and to bully the Portuguese upon so flimsy--indeed, false--a pretext[1] yet, in this instance, something may be said for them. Miguel is such a wretch, that I acknowledge a sort of morality in leaving him to be cuffed and insulted; though, of course, this is a poor answer to a statesman who alleges the interest and policy of the country. But, as to the Dutch and King William: the first, as a nation, the most ancient ally, the _alter idem_ of England, the best deserving of the cause of freedom and religion and morality of any people in Europe; and the second, the very best sovereign now in Christendom, with, perhaps, the single exception of the excellent king of Sweden[2]--was ever any thing so mean and cowardly as the behaviour of England! The Five Powers have, throughout this conference, been actuated exclusively by a selfish desire to preserve peace--I should rather say, to smother war --at the expense of a most valuable but inferior power. They have over and over again acknowledged the justice of the Dutch claims, and the absurdity of the Belgian pretences; but as the Belgians were also as impudent as they were iniquitous,--as they would not yield _their_ point, why then--that peace may be preserved--the Dutch must yield theirs! A foreign prince comes into Belgium, pending these negotiations, and takes an unqualified oath to maintain the Belgian demands:--what could King William or the Dutch do, if they ever thereafter meant to call themselves independent, but resist and resent this outrage to the uttermost? It was a crisis in which every consideration of state became inferior to the strong sense and duty of national honour. When, indeed, the French appear in the field, King William retires. "I now see," he may say, "that the powers of Europe are determined to abet the Belgians. The justice of such a proceeding I leave to their conscience and the decision of history. It is now no longer a question whether I am tamely to submit to rebels and a usurper; it is no longer a quarrel between Holland and Belgium: it is an alliance of all Europe against Holland,--in which case I yield. I have no desire to sacrifice my people." [Footnote 1: Meaning, principally, the whipping, so richly deserved, inflicted on a Frenchman called Bonhomme, for committing a disgusting breach of common decency in the cathedral of Coimbra, during divine service in Passion Week.--ED.]; [Footnote 2: "Every thing that I have heard or read of this sovereign has contributed to the impression on my mind, that he is a good and a wise man, and worthy to be the king of a virtuous people, the purest specimen of the Gothic race."--_Church and State_, p. 125. n.--ED.] * * * * * When Leopold said that he was called to "_reign over_ four millions of noble Belgians," I thought the phrase would have been more germane to the matter, if he had said that he was called to "_rein in_ four million restive asses." _August_ 20. 1831. GREATEST HAPPINESS PRINCIPLE.----HOBBISM. O. P. Q. in the Morning Chronicle is a clever fellow. He is for the greatest possible happiness for the greatest possible number, and for the longest possible time! So am I; so are you, and every one of us, I will venture to say, round the tea-table. First, however, what does O. P. Q. mean by the word _happiness_? and, secondly, how does he propose to make other persons agree in _his_ definition of the term? Don't you see the ridiculous absurdity of setting up _that_ as a principle or motive of action, which is, in fact, a necessary and essential instinct of our very nature--an inborn and inextinguishable desire? How can creatures susceptible of pleasure and pain do otherwise than desire happiness? But, _what_ happiness? That is the question. The American savage, in scalping his fallen enemy, pursues _his_ happiness naturally and adequately. A Chickasaw, or Pawnee Bentham, or O. P. Q., would necessarily hope for the most frequent opportunities possible of scalping the greatest possible number of savages, for the longest possible time. There is no escaping this absurdity, unless you come back to a standard of reason and duty, imperative upon our merely pleasurable sensations. Oh! but, says O. P. Q., I am for the happiness of _others!_ Of others! Are you, indeed? Well, I happen to be one of those _others_, and, so far as I can judge from what you show me of your habits and views, I would rather be excused from your banquet of happiness. _Your_ mode of happiness would make _me_ miserable. To go about doing as much _good_ as possible to as many men as possible, is, indeed, an excellent object for a man to propose to himself; but then, in order that you may not sacrifice the real good and happiness of others to your particular views, which may be quite different from your neighbour's, you must do _that_ good to others which the reason, common to all, pronounces to be good for all. In this sense your fine maxim is so very true as to be a mere truism. * * * * * So you object, with old Hobbes, that I do good actions _for_ the pleasure of a good conscience; and so, after all, I am only a refined sensualist! Heaven bless you, and mend your logic! Don't you see that if conscience, which is in its nature a consequence, were thus anticipated and made an antecedent--a party instead of a judge--it would dishonour your draft upon it--it would not pay on demand? Don't you see that, in truth, the very fact of acting with this motive properly and logically destroys all claim upon conscience to give you any pleasure at all? August 22. 1831. THE TWO MODES OF POLITICAL ACTION. There are many able and patriotic members in the House of Commons--Sir Robert Inglis, Sir Robert Peel, and some others. But I grieve that they never have the courage or the wisdom--I know not in which the failure is-- to take their stand upon duty, and to appeal to all men as men,--to the Good and the True, which exist for _all_, and of which _all_ have an apprehension. They always set to work--especially, his great eminence considered, Sir Robert Peel--by addressing themselves to individual interests; the measure will be injurious to the linen-drapers, or to the bricklayers; or this clause will bear hard on bobbin-net or poplins, and so forth. Whereas their adversaries--the demagogues--always work on the opposite principle: they always appeal to men as men; and, as you know, the most terrible convulsions in society have been wrought by such phrases as _Rights of Man_, _Sovereignty of the People_, _&c_., which no one understands, which apply to no one in particular, but to all in general.[1] The devil works precisely in the same way. He is a very clever fellow; I have no acquaintance with him, but I respect his evident talents. Consistent truth and goodness will assuredly in the end overcome every thing; but inconsistent good can never be a match for consistent evil. Alas! I look in vain for some wise and vigorous man to sound the word Duty in the ears of this generation. [Footnote 1: "It is with nations as with individuals. In tranquil moods and peaceable times we are quite _practical_; facts only, and cool common sense, are then in fashion. But let the winds of passion swell, and straightway men begin to generalize, to connect by remotest analogies, to express the most universal positions of reason in the most glowing figures of fancy; in short, to feel particular truths and mere facts as poor, cold, narrow, and incommensurate with their feelings."--_Statesman's Manual_, p. 18. "It seems a paradox only to the unthinking, and it is a fact that none but the unread in history will deny, that, in periods of popular tumult and innovation, the more abstract a notion is, the more readily has it been found to combine, the closer has appeared its affinity, with the feelings of a people, and with all their immediate impulses to action. At the commencement of the French Revolution, in the remotest villages every tongue was employed in echoing and enforcing the almost geometrical abstractions of the physiocratic politicians and economists. The public roads were crowded with armed enthusiasts, disputing on the inalienable sovereignty of the people, the imprescriptible laws of the pure reason, and the universal constitution, which, as rising out of the nature and rights of man as man, all nations alike were under the obligation of adopting."-- _Statesman's Manual_.] _August_ 24. 1831. TRUTHS AND MAXIMS. The English public is not yet ripe to comprehend the essential difference between the reason and the understanding--between a principle and a maxim-- an eternal truth and a mere conclusion generalized from a great number of facts. A man, having seen a million moss roses all red, concludes from his own experience and that of others that all moss roses are red. That is a maxim with him--the _greatest_ amount of his knowledge upon the subject. But it is only true until some gardener has produced a white moss rose,-- after which the maxim is good for nothing. Again, suppose Adam watching the sun sinking under the western horizon for the first time; he is seized with gloom and terror, relieved by scarce a ray of hope that he shall ever see the glorious light again. The next evening, when it declines, his hopes are stronger, but still mixed with fear; and even at the end of a thousand years, all that a man can feel is a hope and an expectation so strong as to preclude anxiety. Now compare this in its highest degree with the assurance which you have that the two sides of any triangle are together greater than the third. This, demonstrated of one triangle, is seen to be eternally true of all imaginable triangles. This is a truth perceived at once by the intuitive reason, independently of experience. It is and must ever be so, multiply and vary the shapes and sizes of triangles as you may. * * * * * It used to be said that four and five _make_ nine. Locke says, that four and five _are_ nine. Now I say, that four and five _are not_ nine, but that they will _make_ nine. When I see four objects which will form a square, and five which will form a pentagon, I see that they are two different things; when combined, they will form a third different figure, which we call nine. When separate they _are not_ it, but will _make_ it. _September_ 11. 1831. DRAYTON AND DANIEL. Drayton is a sweet poet, and Selden's notes to the early part of the Polyolbion are well worth your perusal. Daniel is a superior man; his diction is pre-eminently pure,--of that quality which I believe has always existed somewhere in society. It is just such English, without any alteration, as Wordsworth or Sir George Beaumont might have spoken or written in the present day. Yet there are instances of sublimity in Drayton. When deploring the cutting down of some of our old forests, he says, in language which reminds the reader of Lear, written subsequently, and also of several passages in Mr. Wordsworth's poems:-- ----"our trees so hack'd above the ground, That where their lofty tops the neighbouring countries crown'd, Their trunks (like aged folks) now bare and naked stand, _As for revenge to Heaven each held a wither'd hand._" [1] That is very fine. [Footnote 1: Polyol VII. "He (Drayton) was a poet by nature, and carefully improved his talent; one who sedulously laboured to deserve the approbation of such as were capable of appreciating and cared nothing for the censures which others might pass upon him." 'Like me that list,' he says, ----'my honest rhymes Nor care for critics, nor regard the times.' And though he is not a poet _virum volitarc per ora_, nor one of those whose better fortune it is to live in the hearts of their devoted admirers,--yet what he deemed his greatest work will be preserved by its subject; some of his minor poems have merit enough in their execution to ensure their preservation; and no one who studies poetry as an art will think his time misspent in perusing the whole, if he have any real love for the art he is pursuing. The youth who enters upon that pursuit without a feeling of respect and gratitude for those elder poets, who by their labours have prepared the way for him, is not likely to produce any thing himself that will be held in remembrance by posterity."-_The Doctor_, &c. c. 36. P.I. I heartily trust that the author or authors, as the case may be, of this singularly thoughtful and diverting book will in due time continue it. Let some people say what they please, there has not been the fellow of it published for many a long day.--ED.] _September_ 12. 1831. MR. COLERIDGE'S SYSTEM OF PHILOSOPHY. My system, if I may venture to give it so fine a name, is the only attempt, I know, ever made to reduce all knowledges into harmony. It opposes no other system, but shows what was true in each; and how that which was true in the particular, in each of them became error, _because_ it was only half the truth. I have endeavoured to unite the insulated fragments of truth, and therewith to frame a perfect mirror. I show to each system that I fully understand and rightfully appreciate what that system means; but then I lift up that system to a higher point of view, from which I enable it to see its former position, where it was, indeed, but under another light and with different relations;--so that the fragment of truth is not only acknowledged, but explained. Thus the old astronomers discovered and maintained much that was true; but, because they were placed on a false ground, and looked from a wrong point of view, they never did, they never could, discover the truth--that is, the whole truth. As soon as they left the earth, their false centre, and took their stand in the sun, immediately they saw the whole system in its true light, and their former station remaining, but remaining as a part of the prospect. I wish, in short, to connect by a moral _copula_ natural history with political history; or, in other words, to make history scientific, and science historical--to take from history its accidentality, and from science its fatalism. * * * * * I never from a boy could, under any circumstances, feel the slightest dread of death as such. In all my illnesses I have ever had the most intense desire to be released from this life, unchecked by any but one wish, namely, to be able to finish my work on Philosophy. Not that I have any author's vanity on the subject: God knows that I should be absolutely glad, if I could hear that the thing had already been done before me. * * * * * Illness never in the smallest degree affects my intellectual powers. I can _think_ with all my ordinary vigour in the midst of pain; but I am beset with the most wretched and unmanning reluctance and shrinking from action. I could not upon such occasions take the pen in hand to write down my thoughts for all the wide world. _October 26._ 1831. KEENNESS AND SUBTLETY. Few men of genius are keen; but almost every man of genius is subtle. If you ask me the difference between keenness and subtlety, I answer that it is the difference between a point and an edge. To split a hair is no proof of subtlety; for subtlety acts in distinguishing differences--in showing that two things apparently one are in fact two; whereas, to split a hair is to cause division, and not to ascertain difference. _October_ 27. 1831. DUTIES AND NEEDS OF AN ADVOCATE. There is undoubtedly a limit to the exertions of an advocate for his client. He has a right, it is his bounden duty, to do every thing which his client might honestly do, and to do it with all the effect which any exercise of skill, talent, or knowledge of his own may be able to produce. But the advocate has no right, nor is it his duty, to do that for his client which his client _in foro conscientiae_ has no right to do for himself; as, for a gross example, to put in evidence a forged deed or will, knowing it to be so forged. As to mere confounding of witnesses by skilful cross-examination, I own I am not disposed to be very strict. The whole thing is perfectly well understood on all hands, and it is little more in general than a sort of cudgel-playing between the counsel and the witness, in which, I speak with submission to you, I think I have seen the witness have the best of it as often as his assailant. It is of the utmost importance in the administration of justice that knowledge and intellectual power should be as far as possible equalized between the crown and the prisoner, or plaintiff and defendant. Hence especially arises the necessity for an order of advocates,--men whose duty it ought to be to know what the law allows and disallows; but whose interests should be wholly indifferent as to the persons or characters of their clients. If a certain latitude in examining witnesses is, as experience seems to have shown, a necessary mean towards the evisceration of the truth of matters of fact, I have no doubt, as a moralist, in saying, that such latitude within the bounds, now existing is justifiable. We must be content with a certain quantum in this life, especially in matters of public cognizance; the necessities of society demand it; we must not be righteous overmuch, or wise overmuch; and, as an old father says, in what vein may there not be a plethora, when the Scripture tells us that there may under circumstances be too much of virtue and of wisdom? Still I think that, upon the whole, the advocate is placed in a position unfavourable to his moral being, and, indeed, to his intellect also, in its higher powers. Therefore I would recommend an advocate to devote a part of his leisure time to some study of the metaphysics of the mind, or metaphysics of theology; something, I mean, which shall call forth all his powers, and centre his wishes in the investigation of truth alone, without reference to a side to be supported. No studies give such a power of distinguishing as metaphysical, and in their natural and unperverted tendency they are ennobling and exalting. Some such studies are wanted to counteract the operation of legal studies and practice, which sharpen, indeed, but, like a grinding-stone, narrow whilst they sharpen. _November_ 19. 1831. ABOLITION OF THE FRENCH HEREDITARY PEERAGE. I cannot say what the French peers _will_ do; but I can tell you what they _ought_ to do. "So far," they might say, "as our feelings and interests, as individuals, are concerned in this matter--if it really be the prevailing wish of our fellow-countrymen to destroy the hereditary peerage--we shall, without regret, retire into the ranks of private citizens: but we are bound by the provisions of the existing constitution to consider ourselves collectively as essential to the well-being of France: we have been placed here to defend what France, a short time ago at least, thought a vital part of its government; and, if we did not defend it, what answer could we make hereafter to France itself, if she should come to see, what we think to be an error, in the light in which we view it? We should be justly branded as traitors and cowards, who had deserted the post which we were specially appointed to maintain. As a House of Peers, therefore,--as one substantive branch of the legislature, we can never, in honour or in conscience, consent to a measure of the impolicy and dangerous consequences of which we are convinced. "If, therefore, this measure is demanded by the country, let the king and the deputies form themselves into a constituent assembly; and then, assuming to act in the name of the total nation, let them decree the abolition. In that case we yield to a just, perhaps, but revolutionary, act, in which we do not participate, and against which we are, upon the supposition, quite powerless. If the deputies, however, consider themselves so completely in the character of delegates as to be at present absolutely pledged to vote without freedom of deliberation, let a concise, but perspicuous, summary of the ablest arguments that can be adduced on either side be drawn up, and printed, and circulated throughout the country; and then, after two months, let the deputies demand fresh instructions upon this point. One thing, as men of honour, we declare beforehand--that, come what will, none of us who are now peers will ever accept a peerage created _de novo_ for life." _November_ 20. 1831. CONDUCT OF MINISTERS ON THE REFORM BILL.--THE MULTITUDE. The present ministers have, in my judgment, been guilty of two things preeminently wicked, _sensu politico_, in their conduct upon this Reform Bill. First, they have endeavoured to carry a fundamental change in the material and mode of action of the government of the country by so exciting the passions, and playing upon the necessary ignorance of the numerical majority of the nation, that all freedom and utility of discussion, by competent heads, in the proper place, should be precluded. In doing this they have used, or sanctioned the use of, arguments which may he applied with equal or even greater force to the carrying of any measure whatever, no matter how atrocious in its character or destructive in its consequences. They have appealed directly to the argument of the greater number of voices, no matter whether the utterers were drunk or sober, competent or not competent; and they have done the utmost in their power to rase out the sacred principle in politics of a representation of interests, and to introduce the mad and barbarizing scheme of a delegation of individuals. And they have done all this without one word of thankfulness to God for the manifold blessings of which the constitution as settled at the Revolution, imperfect as it may be, has been the source or vehicle or condition to this great nation,--without one honest statement of the manner in which the anomalies in the practice grew up, or any manly declaration of the inevitable necessities of government which those anomalies have met. With no humility, nor fear, nor reverence, like Ham the accursed, they have beckoned, with grinning faces, to a vulgar mob, to come and insult over the nakedness of a parent; when it had become them, if one spark of filial patriotism had burnt within their breasts, to have marched with silent steps and averted faces to lay their robes upon his destitution! Secondly, they have made the _king_ the prime mover in all this political wickedness: they have made the _king_ tell his people that they were deprived of their rights, and, by direct and necessary implication, that they and their ancestors for a century past had been slaves: they have made the king vilify the memory of his own brother and father. Rights! There are no rights whatever without corresponding duties. Look at the history of the growth of our constitution, and you will see that our ancestors never upon any occasion stated, as a ground for claiming any of their privileges, an abstract right inherent in themselves; you will nowhere in our parliamentary records find the miserable sophism of the Rights of Man. No! they were too wise for that. They took good care to refer their claims to custom and prescription, and boldly--sometimes very impudently--asserted them upon traditionary and constitutional grounds. The Bill is bad enough, God knows; but the arguments of its advocates, and the manner of their advocacy, are a thousand times worse than the Bill itself; and you will live to think so. I am far, very far, from wishing to indulge in any vulgar abuse of the vulgar. I believe that the feeling of the multitude will, in most cases, be in favour of something good; but this it is which I perceive, that they are always under the domination of some one feeling or view;--whereas truth, and, above all, practical wisdom, must be the result of a wide comprehension of the more and the less, the balance and the counter- balance. _December_ 3. 1831. RELIGION. A religion, that is, a true religion, must consist of ideas and facts both; not of ideas alone without facts, for then it would be mere Philosophy;-- nor of facts alone without ideas, of which those facts are the symbols, or out of which they arise, or upon which they are grounded, for then it would be mere History. _December_ 17. 1831. UNION WITH IRELAND.--IRISH CHURCH. I am quite sure that no dangers are to be feared by England from the disannexing and independence of Ireland at all comparable with the evils which have been, and will yet be, caused to England by the Union. We have never received one particle of advantage from our association with Ireland, whilst we have in many most vital particulars violated the principles of the British constitution solely for the purpose of conciliating the Irish agitators, and of endeavouring--a vain endeavour--to find room for them under the same government. Mr. Pitt has received great credit for effecting the Union; but I believe it will sooner or later be discovered that the manner in which, and the terms upon which, he effected it, made it the most fatal blow that ever was levelled against the peace and prosperity of England. From it came the Catholic Bill. From the Catholic Bill has come this Reform Bill! And what next? * * * * * The case of the Irish Church is certainly anomalous, and full of practical difficulties. On the one hand, it is the only church which the constitution can admit; on the other, such are the circumstances, it is a church that cannot act as a church towards five sixths of the persons nominally and legally within its care. _December_ 18. 1831. A STATE.--PERSONS AND THINGS.--HISTORY. The difference between an inorganic and an organic body lies in this:--In the first--a sheaf of corn--the whole is nothing more than a collection of the individual parts or phenomena. In the second--a man--the whole is the effect of, or results from, the parts; it--the whole--is every thing, and the parts are nothing. A State is an idea intermediate between the two--the whole being a result from, and not a mere total of, the parts, and yet not so merging the constituent parts in the result, but that the individual exists integrally within it. Extremes, especially in politics, meet. In Athens each individual Athenian was of no value; but taken altogether, as Demus, they were every thing in such a sense that no individual citizen was any thing. In Turkey there is the sign of unity put for unity. The Sultan seems himself the State; but it is an illusion: there is in fact in Turkey no State at all: the whole consists of nothing but a vast collection of neighbourhoods. * * * * * When the government and the aristocracy of this country had subordinated _persons to things_, and treated the one like the other,--the poor, with some reason, and almost in self-defence, learned to set up _rights_ above _duties_. The code of a Christian society is, _Debeo, et tu debes_--of Heathens or Barbarians, _Teneo, teneto et tu, si potes_.[1] [Footnote 1: "And this, again, is evolved out of the yet higher idea of _person_ in contradistinction from _thing_, all social law and justice being grounded on the principle that a person can never, but by his own fault, become a thing, or, without grievous wrong, be treated as such; and the distinction consisting in this, that a thing may be used altogether, and merely as the _means_ to an end; but the person must always be included in the _end_; his interest must always form a part of the object,--a _mean_ to which he, by consent, that is, by his own act, makes himself. We plant a tree, and we fell it; we breed the sheep, and we shear, or we kill it,--in both cases wholly as means to _our_ ends: for trees and animals are things. The woodcutter and the hind are likewise employed as _means_; but on agreement, and that too an agreement of reciprocal advantage, which includes them as well as their employer in the _end_; for they are persons. And the government under which the contrary takes place is not worthy to be called a state, if, as in the kingdom of Dahomey, it be unprogressive; or only by anticipation, where, as in Russia, it is in advance to a better and more _manworthy_ order of things."--_Church and State_, p. 10.] * * * * * If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us! _December_ 27. 1831. BEAUTY.--GENIUS. The old definition of beauty in the Roman school of painting was, _il più nell' uno_--multitude in unity; and there is no doubt that such is the principle of beauty. And as one of the most characteristic and infallible criteria of the different ranks of men's intellects, observe the instinctive habit which all superior minds have of endeavouring to bring, and of never resting till they have brought, into unity the scattered facts which occur in conversation, or in the statements of men of business. To attempt to argue any great question upon facts only, is absurd; you cannot state any fact before a mixed audience, which an opponent as clever as yourself cannot with ease twist towards another bearing, or at least meet by a contrary fact, as it is called. I wonder why facts were ever called stubborn things: I am sure they have been found pliable enough lately in the House of Commons and elsewhere. Facts, you know, are not truths; they are not conclusions; they are not even premisses, but in the nature and parts of premisses. The truth depends on, and is only arrived at, by a legitimate deduction from _all_ the facts which are truly material. * * * * * _December_ 28. 1831. CHURCH.--STATE.--DISSENTERS. Even to a church,--the only pure democracy, because in it persons are alone considered, and one person _à priori_ is equal to another person,--even to a church, discipline is an essential condition. But a state regards classes, and classes as they represent classified property; and to introduce a system of representation which must inevitably render all discipline impossible, what is it but madness-the madness of ignorant vanity, and reckless obstinacy? * * * * * I have known, and still know, many Dissenters, who profess to have a zeal for Christianity; and I dare say they have. But I have known very few Dissenters indeed, whose hatred to the Church of England was not a much more active principle of action with them than their love for Christianity. The Wesleyans, in uncorrupted parts of the country, are nearly the only exceptions. There never was an age since the days of the apostles, in which the catholic spirit of religion was so dead, and put aside for love of sects and parties, as at present. * * * * * _January_ 1. 1832. GRACEFULNESS OF CHILDREN.--DOGS. How inimitably graceful children are in general before they learn to dance! * * * * * There seems a sort of sympathy between the more generous dogs and little children. I believe an instance of a little child being attacked by a large dog is very rare indeed. _January_ 28. 1832. IDEAL TORY AND WHIG. The ideal Tory and the ideal Whig (and some such there have really been) agreed in the necessity and benefit of an exact balance of the three estates: but the Tory was more jealous of the balance being deranged by the people; the Whig, of its being deranged by the Crown. But this was a habit, a jealousy only; they both agreed in the ultimate preservation of the balance; and accordingly they might each, under certain circumstances, without the slightest inconsistency, pass from one side to the other, as the ultimate object required it. This the Tories did at the Revolution, but remained Tories as before. I have half a mind to write a critical and philosophical essay on Whiggism, from Dryden's Achitophel (Shaftesbury), the first Whig, (for, with Dr. Johnson's leave, the devil is no such cattle,) down to ----, who, I trust, in God's mercy to the interests of peace, union, and liberty in this nation, will be the last. In it I would take the last years of Queen Anne's reign as the zenith, or palmy state, of Whiggism in its divinest _avatar_ of common sense, or of the understanding, vigorously exerted in the right direction on the right and proper objects of the understanding; and would then trace the rise, the occasion, the progress, and the necessary degeneration of the Whig spirit of compromise, even down to the profound ineptitudes of their party in these days. A clever fellow might make something of this hint. How Asgill would have done it! _February_ 22. 1832. THE CHURCH. The church is the last relic of our nationality. Would to God that the bishops and the clergy in general could once fully understand that the Christian church and the national church are as little to be confounded as divided! I think the fate of the Reform Bill, in itself, of comparatively minor importance; the fate of the national church occupies my mind with greater intensity. _February_ 24. 1832. MINISTERS AND THE REFORM BILL. I could not help smiling, in reading the report of Lord Grey's speech in the House of Lords, the other night, when he asked Lord Wicklow whether he seriously believed that he, Lord Grey, or any of the ministers, intended to subvert the institutions of the country. Had I been in Lord Wicklow's place, I should have been tempted to answer this question something in the following way:--"Waiving the charge in an offensive sense of personal consciousness against the noble earl, and all but one or two of his colleagues, upon my honour, and in the presence of Almighty God, I answer, Yes! You have destroyed the freedom of parliament; you have done your best to shut the door of the House of Commons to the property, the birth, the rank, the wisdom of the people, and have flung it open to their passions and their follies. You have disfranchised the gentry, and the real patriotism of the nation: you have agitated and exasperated the mob, and thrown the balance of political power into the hands of that class (the shopkeepers) which, in all countries and in all ages, has been, is now, and ever will be, the least patriotic and the least conservative of any. You are now preparing to destroy for ever the constitutional independence of the House of Lords; you are for ever displacing it from its supremacy as a co-ordinate estate of the realm; and whether you succeed in passing your bill by actually swamping our votes by a batch of new peers, or by frightening a sufficient number of us out of our opinions by the threat of one,--equally you will have superseded the triple assent which the constitution requires to the enactment of a valid law, and have left the king alone with the delegates of the populace!" _March_ 3. 1832. DISFRANCHISEMENT. I am afraid the Conservative party see but one half of the truth. The mere extension of the franchise is not the evil; I should be glad to see it greatly extended;--there is no harm in that _per se_; the mischief is that the franchise is nominally extended, but to such classes, and in such a manner, that a practical disfranchisement of all above, and a discontenting of all below, a favoured class are the unavoidable results. _March_ 17. 1832. GENIUS FEMININE.----PIRATES. ----'s face is almost the only exception I know to the observation, that something feminine--not _effeminate_, mind--is discoverable in the countenances of all men of genius. Look at that face of old Dampier, a rough sailor, but a man of exquisite mind. How soft is the air of his countenance, how delicate the shape of his temples! * * * * * I think it very absurd and misplaced to call Raleigh and Drake, and others of our naval heroes of Elizabeth's age, pirates. No man is a _pirate_, unless his contemporaries agree to call him so. Drake said,--"The subjects of the king of Spain have done their best to ruin my country: _ergo_, I will try to ruin the king of Spain's country." Would it not be silly to call the Argonauts pirates in our sense of the word? _March_ 18. 1832. ASTROLOGY.--ALCHEMY. It is curious to mark how instinctively the reason has always pointed out to men the ultimate end of the various sciences, and how immediately afterwards they have set to work, like children, to realize that end by inadequate means. Now they applied to their appetites, now to their passions, now to their fancy, now to the understanding, and lastly, to the intuitive reason again. There is no doubt but that astrology of some sort or other would be the last achievement of astronomy: there must he chemical relations between the planets; the difference of their magnitudes compared with that of their distances is not explicable otherwise; but this, though, as it were, blindly and unconsciously seen, led immediately to fortune- telling and other nonsense. So alchemy is the theoretic end of chemistry: there must be a common law, upon which all can become each and each all; but then the idea was turned to the coining of gold and silver. _March_ 20. 1832. REFORM BILL.--CRISIS. I have heard but two arguments of any weight adduced in favour of passing this Reform Bill, and they are in substance these:--1. We will blow your brains out if you don't pass it. 2. We will drag you through a horsepond if you don't pass it; and there is a good deal of force in both. * * * * * Talk to me of your pretended crisis! Stuff! A vigorous government would in one month change all the data for your reasoning. Would you have me believe that the events of this world are fastened to a revolving cycle with God at one end and the Devil at the other, and that the Devil is now uppermost! Are you a Christian, and talk about a crisis in that fatalistic sense! _March_ 31. 1832. JOHN, CHAP. III. VER. 4.--DICTATION AND INSPIRATION.--GNOSIS--NEW TESTAMENT CANON. I certainly understand the [Greek: ti emoi kai soi gynai] in the second chapter[1] of St. John's Gospel, as having a _liquid increpationis_ in it-- a mild reproof from Jesus to Mary for interfering in his ministerial acts by requests on her own account. I do not think that [Greek: gynai] was ever used by child to parent as a common mode of address: between husband and wife it was; but I cannot think that [Greek: m_eter] and [Greek: gynai] were equivalent terms in the mouth of a son speaking to his mother. No part of the Christopaedia is found in John or Paul; and after the baptism there is no recognition of any maternal authority in Mary. See the two passages where she endeavours to get access to him when he is preaching:--"Whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and my mother"[2] and also the recommendation of her to the care of John at the crucifixion. [Footnote 1: Verse 4.] [Footnote 2: Mark, ch. iii. ver. 35.] * * * * * There may be dictation without inspiration, and inspiration without dictation; they have been and continue to be grievously confounded. Balaam and his ass were the passive organs of dictation; but no one, I suppose, will venture to call either of those worthies inspired. It is my profound conviction that St. John and St. Paul were divinely inspired; but I totally disbelieve the dictation of any one word, sentence, or argument throughout their writings. Observe, there was revelation. All religion is revealed;-- _revealed_ religion is, in my judgment, a mere pleonasm. Revelations of facts were undoubtedly made to the prophets; revelations of doctrines were as undoubtedly made to John and Paul;--but is it not a mere matter of our very senses that John and Paul each dealt with those revelations, expounded them, insisted on them, just exactly according to his own natural strength of intellect, habit of reasoning, moral, and even physical temperament? We receive the books ascribed to John and Paul as their books on the judgment of men, for whom no miraculous discernment is pretended; nay, whom, in their admission and rejection of other books, we believe to have erred. Shall we give less credence to John and Paul themselves? Surely the heart and soul of every Christian give him sufficient assurance that, in all things that concern him as a _man_, the words that he reads are spirit and truth, and could only proceed from Him who made both heart and soul.-- Understand the matter so, and all difficulty vanishes: you read without fear, lest your faith meet with some shock from a passage here and there which you cannot reconcile with immediate dictation, by the Holy Spirit of God, without an absurd violence offered to the text. You read the Bible as the best of all books, but still as a book; and make use of all the means and appliances which learning and skill, under the blessing of God, can afford towards rightly apprehending the general sense of it--not solicitous to find out doctrine in mere epistolary familiarity, or facts in clear _ad hominem et pro tempore_ allusions to national traditions. * * * * * Tertullian, I think, says he had seen the autograph copies of some of the apostles' writings. The truth is, the ancient Church was not guided by the mere fact of the genuineness of a writing in pronouncing it canonical;-- its catholicity was the test applied to it. I have not the smallest doubt that the Epistle of Barnabas is genuine; but it is not catholic; it is full of the [Greek: gn_osis], though of the most simple and pleasing sort. I think the same of Hermas. The Church would never admit either into the canon, although the Alexandrians always read the Epistle of Barnabas in their churches for three hundred years together. It was upwards of three centuries before the Epistle to the Hebrews was admitted, and this on account of its [Greek: gn_osis]; at length, by help of the venerable prefix of St. Paul's name, its admirers, happily for us, succeeded. * * * * * So little did the early bishops and preachers think their Christian faith wrapped up in, and solely to be learned from, the New Testament,--indeed, can it be said that there was any such collection for three hundred years? --that I remember a letter from ----[1] to a friend of his, a bishop in the East, in which he most evidently speaks of the _Christian_ Scriptures as of works of which the bishop knew little or nothing. [Footnote 1: I have lost the name which Mr. Coleridge mentioned.--ED.] _April_ 4. 1832. UNITARIANISM.--MORAL PHILOSOPHY. I make the greatest difference between _ans_ and _isms_. I should deal insincerely with you, if I said that I thought Unitarianism was Christianity. No; as I believe and have faith in the doctrine, it is not the truth in Jesus Christ; but God forbid that I should doubt that you, and many other Unitarians, as you call yourselves, are, in a practical sense, very good Christians. We do not win heaven by logic. By the by, what do you mean by exclusively assuming the title of Unitarians? As if Tri-Unitarians were not necessarily Unitarians, as much (pardon the illustration) as an apple-pie must of course be a pie! The schoolmen would, perhaps, have called you Unicists; but your proper name is Psilanthropists--believers in the mere human nature of Christ. Upon my word, if I may say so without offence, I really think many forms of Pantheistic Atheism more agreeable to an imaginative mind than Unitarianism as it is professed in terms: in particular, I prefer the Spinosistic scheme infinitely. The early Socinians were, to be sure, most unaccountable logicians; but, when you had swallowed their bad reasoning, you came to a doctrine on which the _heart_, at least, might rest for some support. They adored Jesus Christ. Both Laelius and Faustus Socinus laid down the adorability of Jesus in strong terms. I have nothing, you know, to do with their logic. But Unitarianism is, in effect, the worst of one kind of Atheism, joined to the worst of one kind of Calvinism, like two asses tied tail to tail. It has no covenant with God; and looks upon prayer as a sort of self-magnetizing--a getting of the body and temper into a certain _status_, desirable _per se_, but having no covenanted reference to the Being to whom the prayer is addressed. * * * * * The sum total of moral philosophy is found in this one question, Is _Good_ a superfluous word,--or mere lazy synonyme for the pleasurable, and its causes;--at most, a mere modification to express degree, and comparative duration of pleasure?--Or the question may be more unanswerably stated thus, Is _good_ superfluous as a word exponent of a _kind_?--If it be, then moral philosophy is but a subdivision of physics. If not, then the writings of Paley and all his predecessors and disciples are false and _most_ pernicious; and there is an emphatic propriety in the superlative, and in a sense which of itself would supply and exemplify the difference between _most_ and _very_. _April_ 5. 1832. MORAL LAW OF POLARITY. It is curious to trace the operation of the moral law of polarity in the history of politics, religion, &c. When the maximum of one tendency has been attained, there is no gradual decrease, but a direct transition to its minimum, till the opposite tendency has attained its maximum; and then you see another corresponding revulsion. With the Restoration came in all at once the mechanico-corpuscular philosophy, which, with the increase of manufactures, trade, and arts, made every thing in philosophy, religion, and poetry objective; till, at length, attachment to mere external worldliness and forms got to its maximum,--when out burst the French revolution; and with it every thing became immediately subjective, without any object at all. The Rights of Man, the Sovereignty of the People, were subject and object both. We are now, I think, on the turning point again. This Reform seems the _ne plus ultra_ of that tendency of the public mind which substitutes its own undefined notions or passions for real objects and historical actualities. There is not one of the ministers--except the one or two revolutionists among them--who has ever given us a hint, throughout this long struggle, as to _what_ he really does believe will be the product of the bill; what sort of House of Commons it will make for the purpose of governing this empire soberly and safely. No; they have actualized for a moment a wish, a fear, a passion, but not an idea. _April_ 1. 1832. EPIDEMIC DISEASE.--QUARANTINE. There are two grand divisions under which all contagious diseases may be classed:--1. Those which spring from organized living beings, and from the life in them, and which enter, as it were, into the life of those in whom they reproduce themselves--such as small-pox and measles. These become so domesticated with the habit and system, that they are rarely received twice. 2. Those which spring from dead organized, or unorganized matter, and which may be comprehended under the wide term _malaria_. You may have passed a stagnant pond a hundred times without injury: you happen to pass it again, in low spirits and chilled, precisely at the moment of the explosion of the gas: the malaria strikes on the cutaneous or veno-glandular system, and drives the blood from the surface; the shivering fit comes on, till the musculo-arterial irritability re-acts, and then the hot fit succeeds; and, unless bark or arsenic--particularly bark, because it is a bitter as well as a tonic--be applied to strengthen the veno- glandular, and to moderate the musculo-arterial, system, a man may have the ague for thirty years together. But if, instead of being exposed to the solitary malaria of a pond, a man, travelling through the Pontine Marshes, permits his animal energies to flag, and surrenders himself to the drowsiness which generally attacks him, then blast upon blast strikes upon the cutaneous system, and passes through it to the musculo-arterial, and so completely overpowers the latter that it cannot re-act, and the man dies at once, instead of only catching an ague. There are three factors of the operation of an epidemic or atmospheric disease. The first and principal one is the predisposed state of the body; secondly, the specific _virus_ in the atmosphere; and, thirdly, the accidental circumstances of weather, locality, food, occupation, &c. Against the second of these we are powerless: its nature, causes, and sympathies are too subtle for our senses to find data to go upon. Against the first, medicine may act profitably. Against the third, a wise and sagacious medical police ought to be adopted; but, above all, let every man act like a Christian, in all charity, and love, and brotherly kindness, and sincere reliance on God's merciful providence. Quarantine cannot keep out an atmospheric disease; but it can, and does always, increase the predisposing causes of its reception. _April_ 10. 1832. HARMONY. All harmony is founded on a relation to rest--on relative rest. Take a metallic plate, and strew sand on it; sound an harmonic chord over the sand, and the grains will whirl about in circles, and other geometrical figures, all, as it were, depending on some point of sand relatively at rest. Sound a discord, and every grain will whisk about without any order at all, in no figures, and with no points of rest. The clerisy of a nation, that is, its learned men, whether poets, or philosophers, or scholars, are these points of relative rest. There could be no order, no harmony of the whole, without them. April 21. 1832. INTELLECTUAL REVOLUTIONS.--MODERN STYLE. There have been three silent revolutions in England:--first, when the professions fell off from the church; secondly, when literature fell off from the professions; and, thirdly, when the press fell off from literature. * * * * * Common phrases are, as it were, so stereotyped now by conventional use, that it is really much easier to write on the ordinary politics of the day in the common newspaper style, than it is to make a good pair of shoes. An apprentice has as much to learn now to be a shoemaker as ever he had; but an ignorant coxcomb, with a competent want of honesty, may very effectively wield a pen in a newspaper office, with infinitely less pains and preparation than were necessary formerly. _April_ 23. 1832. GENIUS OF THE SPANISH AND ITALIANS.--VICO.--SPINOSA. The genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at all acute; hence there is so much humour and so little wit in their literature. The genius of the Italians, on the contrary, is acute, profound, and sensual, but not subtle; hence what they think to be humorous is merely witty. * * * * * To estimate a man like Vico, or any great man who has made discoveries and committed errors, you ought to say to yourself--"He did so and so in the year 1720, a Papist, at Naples. Now, what would he not have done if he had lived now, and could have availed himself of all our vast acquisitions in physical science?" * * * * * After the _Scienza Nuova_[1] read Spinosa, _De Monarchia ex rationis praescripto_[2].They differed--Vico in thinking that society tended to monarchy; Spinosa in thinking it tended to democracy. Now, Spinosa's ideal democracy was realized by a contemporary--not in a nation, for that is impossible, but in a sect--I mean by George Fox and his Quakers.[3] [Footnote 1: See Michelet's Principes de la Philosophie de l'Histoire, &c. Paris, 1827. An admirable analysis of Vico.--ED.] [Footnote 2: Tractatus Politici, c. vi.] [Footnote 3: Spinosa died in 1677; Fox in 1681.--ED.] _April_ 24. 1832. COLOURS. Colours may best be expressed by a heptad, the largest possible formula for things finite, as the pentad is the smallest possible form. Indeed, the heptad of things finite is in all cases reducible to the pentad. The adorable tetractys, or tetrad, is the formula of God; which, again, is reducible into, and is, in reality, the same with, the Trinity. Take colours thus:-- Prothesis, Red, or Colour [Greek: kat exoch_en]. ^ /1\ / \ Mesothesis, or Indifference of / \ Red and Yellow = Orange. 4/ \5 Indigo, Violet = Indifference /Synthesis\ of Red and Blue. /--6 \ Thesis = Yellow. 2 3 Blue = Antithesis. \Green indi-/ \componi- / \ble / \ / \ / To which you must add \7/ which is spurious or artificial v synthesis of Yellow and Blue. Green, decom- ponible _April_ 28. 1832. DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM.--EPIC POEM. The destruction of Jerusalem is the only subject now remaining for an epic poem; a subject which, like Milton's Fall of Man, should interest all Christendom, as the Homeric War of Troy interested all Greece. There would be difficulties, as there are in all subjects; and they must he mitigated and thrown into the shade, as Milton has done with the numerous difficulties in the Paradise Lost. But there would be a greater assemblage of grandeur and splendour than can now be found in any other theme. As for the old mythology, _incredulus odi;_ and yet there must be a mythology, or a _quasi_-mythology, for an epic poem. Here there would be the completion of the prophecies--the termination of the first revealed national religion under the violent assault of Paganism, itself the immediate forerunner and condition of the spread of a revealed mundane religion; and then you would have the character of the Roman and the Jew, and the awfulness, the completeness, the justice. I schemed it at twenty-five; but, alas! _venturum expectat_. _April_ 29. 1832. VOX POPULI, VOX DEI.--BLACK. I never said that the _vox populi_ was of course the _vox Dei_. It may be; but it may be, and with equal probability, _a priori_, _vox Diaboli_. That the voice of ten millions of men calling for the same thing is a spirit, I believe; but whether that be a spirit of Heaven or Hell, I can only know by trying the thing called for by the prescript of reason and God's will. * * * * * Black is the negation of colour in its greatest energy. Without lustre, it indicates or represents vacuity, as, for instance, in the dark mouth of a cavern; add lustre, and it will represent the highest degree of solidity, as in a polished ebony box. * * * * * In finite forms there is no real and absolute identity. God alone is identity. In the former, the prothesis is a bastard prothesis, a _quasi_ identity only. April 30. 1832. ASGILL AND DEFOE. I know no genuine Saxon English superior to Asgill's. I think his and Defoe's irony often finer than Swift's. May 1. 1832. HORNE TOOKE.--FOX AND PITT Horne Tooke's advice to the Friends of the People was profound:--"If you wish to be powerful, pretend to be powerful." * * * * * Fox and Pitt constantly played into each other's hands. Mr. Stuart, of the Courier, who was very knowing in the politics of the day, soon found out the gross lies and impostures of that club as to its numbers, and told Fox so. Yet, instead of disclaiming them and exposing the pretence, as he ought to have done, Fox absolutely exaggerated their numbers and sinister intentions; and Pitt, who also knew the lie, took him at his word, and argued against him triumphantly on his own premisses. Fox's Gallicism, too, was a treasury of weapons to Pitt. He could never conceive the French right without making the English wrong. Ah! I remember-- --it vex'd my soul to see So grand a cause, so proud a realm With Goose and Goody at the helm; Who long ago had fall'n asunder But for their rivals' baser blunder, The coward whine and Frenchified Slaver and slang of the other side! _May_ 2. 1832. HORNER. I cannot say that I thought Mr. Horner a man of genius. He seemed to me to be one of those men who have not very extended minds, but who know what they know very well--shallow streams, and clear because they are shallow. There was great goodness about him. _May_ 3. 1832. ADIAPHORI.--CITIZENS AND CHRISTIANS. ------ is one of those men who go far to shake my faith in a future state of existence; I mean, on account of the difficulty of knowing where to place him. I could not bear to roast him; he is not so bad as all that comes to: but then, on the other hand, to have to sit down with such a fellow in the very lowest pothouse of heaven is utterly inconsistent with the belief of that place being a place of happiness for me. * * * * * In two points of view I reverence man; first, as a citizen, a part of, or in order to, a nation; and, secondly, as a Christian. If men are neither the one nor the other, but a mere aggregation of individual bipeds, who acknowledge no national unity, nor believe with me in Christ, I have no more personal sympathy with them than with the dust beneath my feet. May 21. 1832. PROFESSOR PARK.--ENGLISH CONSTITUTION--DEMOCRACY.--MILTON AND SIDNEY. Professor Park talks[1] about its being very _doubtful_ whether the constitution described by Blackstone ever in fact existed. In the same manner, I suppose, it is doubtful whether the moon is made of green cheese, or whether the souls of Welchmen do, in point of fact, go to heaven on the backs of mites. Blackstone's was the age of shallow law. Monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, as _such_, exclude each the other: but if the elements are to interpenetrate, how absurd to call a lump of sugar hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon! nay, to take three lumps, and call the first hydrogen; the second, oxygen; and the third, carbon! Don't you see that each is in all, and all in each? The democracy of England, before the Reform Bill, was, where it ought to be, in the corporations, the vestries, the joint-stock companies, &c. The power, in a democracy, is in focal points, without a centre; and in proportion as such democratical power is strong, the strength of the central government ought to be intense--otherwise the nation will fall to pieces. We have just now incalculably increased the democratical action of the people, and, at the same time, weakened the executive power of the government. [Footnote 1: In his "Dogmas of the Constitution, four Lectures on the Theory and Practice of the Constitution, delivered at the King's College, London," 1832. Lecture I. There was a stiffness, and an occasional uncouthness in Professor Park's style; but his two works, the one just mentioned, and his "Contre-Projet to the Humphreysian Code," are full of original views and vigorous reasonings. To those who wished to see the profession of the law assume a more scientific character than for the most part it has hitherto done in England, the early death of John James Park was a very great loss.--ED.] * * * * * It was the error of Milton, Sidney, and others of that age, to think it possible to construct a purely aristocratical government, defecated of all passion, and ignorance, and sordid motive. The truth is, such a government would be weak from its utter want of sympathy with the people to be governed by it. _May_ 25. 1832. DE VI MINIMORUM.--HAHNEMANN.--LUTHER. Mercury strongly illustrates the theory _de vi minimorum_. Divide five grains into fifty doses, and they may poison you irretrievably. I don't believe in all that Hahnemann says; but he is a fine fellow, and, like most Germans, is not altogether wrong, and like them also, is never altogether right. * * * * * Six volumes of translated selections from Luther's works, two being from his Letters, would be a delightful work. The translator should be a man deeply imbued with his Bible, with the English writers from Henry the Seventh to Edward the Sixth, the Scotch divines of the 16th century, and with the old racy German.[1] Hugo de Saint Victor, Luther's favourite divine, was a wonderful man, who, in the 12th century, the jubilant age of papal dominion, nursed the lamp of Platonic mysticism in the spirit of the most refined Christianity.[2] [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge was fond of pressing this proposed publication:--"I can scarcely conceive," he says in the Friend, "a more delightful volume than might be made from Luther's letters, especially those that were written from the Warteburg, if they were translated in the simple, sinewy, idiomatic, _hearty_ mother tongue of the original. A difficult task I admit, and scarcely possible for any man, however great his talents in other respects, whose favourite reading has not lain among the English writers from Edward the Sixth to Charles the First." Vol. i. p. 235. n.-- ED.] [Footnote 2: This celebrated man was a Fleming, and a member of the Augustinian society of St. Victor. He died at Paris in 1142, aged forty-four. His age considered, it is sufficient praise for him that Protestants and Romanists both claim him for their own on the subject of transubstantiation.--ED.] _June_ 9. 1832. SYMPATHY OF OLD GREEK AND LATIN WITH ENGLISH.--ROMAN MIND.--WAR. If you take Sophocles, Catullus, Lucretius, the better parts of Cicero, and so on, you may, just with two or three exceptions arising out of the different idioms as to cases, translate page after page into good mother English, word by word, without altering the order; but you cannot do so with Virgil or Tibullus: if you attempt it, you will make nonsense. * * * * * There is a remarkable power of the picturesque in the fragments we have of Ennius, Actius, and other very old Roman writers. This vivid manner was lost in the Augustan age. * * * * * Much as the Romans owed to Greece in the beginning, whilst their mind was, as it were, tuning itself to an after-effort of its own music, it suffered more in proportion by the influence of Greek literature subsequently, when it was already mature and ought to have worked for itself. It then became a superfetation upon, and not an ingredient in, the national character. With the exception of the stern pragmatic historian and the moral satirist, it left nothing original to the Latin Muse.[1] A nation, to be great, ought to be compressed in its increment by nations more civilized than itself--as Greece by Persia; and Rome by Etruria, the Italian states, and Carthage. I remember Commodore Decatur saying to me at Malta, that he deplored the occupation of Louisiana by the United States, and wished that province had been possessed by England. He thought that if the United States got hold of Canada by conquest or cession, the last chance of his country becoming a great compact nation would be lost. [Footnote 1: Perhaps it left letter-writing also. Even if the Platonic epistles are taken as genuine, which Mr. Coleridge, to my surprise, was inclined to believe, they can hardly interfere, I think, with the uniqueness of the truly incomparable collections from the correspondence of Cicero and Pliny.--ED.] * * * * * War in republican Rome was the offspring of its intense aristocracy of spirit, and stood to the state in lieu of trade. As long as there was any thing _ab extra_ to conquer, the state advanced: when nothing remained but what was Roman, then, as a matter of course, civil war began. _June_ 10. 1832. CHARM FOR CRAMP. When I was a little hoy at the Blue-coat School, there was a charm for one's foot when asleep; and I believe it had been in the school since its foundation, in the time of Edward the Sixth. The march of intellect has probably now exploded it. It ran thus:-- Foot! foot! foot! is fast asleep! Thumb! thumb! thumb! in spittle we steep: Crosses three we make to ease us, Two for the thieves, and one for Christ Jesus! And the same charm served for a cramp in the leg, with the following substitution:-- The devil is tying a knot in my leg! Mark, Luke, and John, unloose it I beg!-- Crosses three, &c. And really upon getting out of bed, where the cramp most frequently occurred, pressing the sole of the foot on the cold floor, and then repeating this charm with the acts configurative thereupon prescribed, I can safely affirm that I do not remember an instance in which the cramp did not go away in a few seconds. I should not wonder if it were equally good for a stitch in the side; but I cannot say I ever tried it for _that_. July 7. 1832. GREEK.--DUAL, NEUTER PLURAL, AND VERB SINGULAR.--THETA. It is hardly possible to conceive a language more perfect than the Greek. If you compare it with the modern European tongues, in the points of the position and relative bearing of the vowels and consonants on each other, and of the variety of terminations, it is incalculably before all in the former particulars, and only equalled in the last by German. But it is in variety of termination alone that the German surpasses the other modern languages as to sound; for, as to position, Nature seems to have dropped an acid into the language, when a-forming, which curdled the vowels, and made all the consonants flow together. The Spanish is excellent for variety of termination; the Italian, in this particular, the most deficient. Italian prose is excessively monotonous. * * * * * It is very natural to have a dual, duality being a conception quite distinct from plurality. Most very primitive languages have a dual, as the Greek, Welch, and the native Chilese, as you will see in the Abbé Raynal. The neuter plural governing, as they call it, a verb singular is one of the many instances in Greek of the inward and metaphysic grammar resisting successfully the tyranny of formal grammar. In truth, there may be _Multeity_ in things; but there can only be _Plurality_ in persons. Observe also that, in fact, a neuter noun in Greek has no real nominative case, though it has a formal one, that is to say, the same word with the accusative. The reason is--a _thing_ has no subjectivity, or nominative case: it exists only as an object in the accusative or oblique case. It is extraordinary that the Germans should not have retained or assumed the two beautifully discriminated sounds of the soft and hard _theta_; as in _thy thoughts_--_the thin ether that_, &c. How particularly fine the hard _theta_ is in an English termination, as in that grand word--Death-- for which the Germans gutturize a sound that puts you in mind of nothing but a loathsome toad. _July_ 8. 1832. TALENTED. I regret to see that vile and barbarous vocable _talented_, stealing out of the newspapers into the leading reviews and most respectable publications of the day. Why not _shillinged, farthinged, tenpenced,_ &c.? The formation of a participle passive from a noun is a licence that nothing but a very peculiar felicity can excuse. If mere convenience is to justify such attempts upon the idiom, you cannot stop till the language becomes, in the proper sense of the word, corrupt. Most of these pieces of slang come from America.[1] [Footnote 1: See "_eventuate_," in Mr. Washington Irving's "Tour On the Prairies," _passim_.--ED.] * * * * * Never take an iambus as a Christian name. A trochee, or tribrach, will do very well. Edith and Rotha are my favourite names for women. _July_ 9. 1832. HOMER.--VALCKNAER. I have the firmest conviction that _Homer_ is a mere traditional synonyme with, or figure for, the Iliad. You cannot conceivefor a moment any thing about the poet, as you call him, apart from that poem. Difference in men there was in a degree, but not in kind; one man was, perhaps, a better poet than another; but he was a poet upon the same ground and with the same feelings as the rest. The want of adverbs in the Iliad is very characteristic. With more adverbs there would have been some subjectivity, or subjectivity would have made them. The Greeks were then just on the verge of the bursting forth of individuality. Valckenaer's treatise[1] on the interpolation of the Classics by the later Jews and early Christians is well worth your perusal as a scholar and critic. [Footnote 1: _Diatribe de Aristobulo Judaeo_.--ED.] July 13. 1832. PRINCIPLES AND FACTS.--SCHMIDT. I have read all the famous histories, and, I believe, some history of every country and nation that is, or ever existed; but I never did so for the story itself as a story. The only thing interesting to me was the principles to be evolved from, and illustrated by, the facts.[1] After I had gotten my principles, I pretty generally left the facts to take care of themselves. I never could remember any passages in books, or the particulars of events, except in the gross. I can refer to them. To be sure, I must be a different sort of man from Herder, who once was seriously annoyed with himself, because, in recounting the pedigree of some German royal or electoral family, he missed some one of those worthies and could not recall the name. [Footnote 1: "The true origin of human events is so little susceptible of that kind of evidence which can _compel_ our belief; so many are the disturbing forces which, in every cycle or ellipse of changes, modify the motion given by the first projection; and every age has, or imagines it has, its own circumstances, which render past experience no longer applicable to the present case; that there will never be wanting answers, and explanations, and specious flatteries of hope, to persuade and perplex its government, that the history of the past is inapplicable to _their_ case. And no wonder, if we read history for the facts, instead of reading it for the sake of the general principles, which are to the facts as the root and sap of a tree to its leaves: and no wonder if history so read should find a dangerous rival in novels; nay, if the latter should be preferred to the former, on the score even of probability. I well remember that, when the examples of former Jacobins, as Julius Caesar, Cromwell, and the like, were adduced in France and England, at the commencement of the French consulate, it was ridiculed as pedantry and pedants' ignorance, to fear a repetition of usurpation and military despotism at the close of the _enlightened eighteenth century_! Even so, in the very dawn of the late tempestuous day, when the revolutions of Corcyra, the proscriptions of the reformers Marius, Cæsar, &c., and the direful effects of the levelling tenets in the peasants' war in Germany (differenced from the tenets of the first French constitution only by the mode of wording them, the figures of speech being borrowed in the one instance from theology, and in the other from modern metaphysics), were urged on the convention and its vindicators; the magi of the day, the true citizens of the world, the _plusquam perfecti_ of patriotism, gave us set proofs that similar results were impossible, and that it was an insult to so philosophical an age, to so enlightened a nation, to dare direct the public eye towards them as to lights of warning."--_Statesman's Manual_, p. 14.] * * * * * Schmidt[1] was a Romanist; but I have generally found him candid, as indeed almost all the Austrians are. They are what is called _good Catholics_; but, like our Charles the Second, they never let their religious bigotry interfere with their political well-doing. Kaiser is a most pious son of the church, yet he always keeps his papa in good order. [Footnote 1: Michael Ignatius Schmidt, the author of the History of the Germans. He died in the latter end of the last century.--ED.] _July_ 20. 1832. PURITANS AND JACOBINS. It was God's mercy to our age that our Jacobins were infidels and a scandal to all sober Christians. Had they been like the old Puritans, they would have trodden church and king to the dust--at least for a time. * * * * * For one mercy I owe thanks beyond all utterance,--that, with all my gastric and bowel distempers, my head hath ever been like the head of a mountain in blue air and sunshine. _July_ 21. 1832. WORDSWORTH. I have often wished that the first two books of the Excursion had been published separately, under the name of "The Deserted Cottage." They would have formed, what indeed they are, one of the most beautiful poems in the language. * * * * * Can dialogues in verse be defended? I cannot but think that a great philosophical poet ought always to teach the reader himself as from himself. A poem does not admit argumentation, though it does admit development of thought. In prose there may be a difference; though I must confess that, even in Plato and Cicero, I am always vexed that the authors do not say what they have to say at once in their own persons. The introductions and little urbanities are, to be sure, very delightful in their way; I would not lose them; but I have no admiration for the practice of ventriloquizing through another man's mouth. * * * * * I cannot help regretting that Wordsworth did not first publish his thirteen books on the growth of an individual mind--superior, as I used to think, upon the whole, to the Excursion. You may judge how I felt about them by my own poem upon the occasion.[1] Then the plan laid out, and, I believe, partly suggested by me, was, that Wordsworth should assume the station of a man in mental repose, one whose principles were made up, and so prepared to deliver upon authority a system of philosophy. He was to treat man as man, --a subject of eye, ear, touch, and taste, in contact with external nature, and informing the senses from the mind, and not compounding a mind out of the senses; then he was to describe the pastoral and other states of society, assuming something of the Juvenalian spirit as he approached the high civilization of cities and towns, and opening a melancholy picture of the present state of degeneracy and vice; thence he was to infer and reveal the proof of, and necessity for, the whole state of man and society being subject to, and illustrative of, a redemptive process in operation, showing how this idea reconciled all the anomalies, and promised future glory and restoration. Something of this sort was, I think, agreed on. It is, in substance, what I have been all my life doing in my system of philosophy. [Footnote 1: Poetical Works, vol. i. p. 206. It is not too much to say of this beautiful poem, and yet it is difficult to say more, that it is at once worthy of the poet, his subject, and his object:-- "An Orphic song indeed, A song divine of high and passionate thoughts, To their own music chanted."--ED.] * * * * * I think Wordsworth possessed more of the genius of a great philosophic poet than any man I ever knew, or, as I believe, has existed in England since Milton; but it seems to me that he ought never to have abandoned the contemplative position, which is peculiarly--perhaps I might say exclusively--fitted for him. His proper title is _Spectator ab extra_. * * * * * _July_ 23. 1832. FRENCH REVOLUTION. No man was more enthusiastic than I was for France and the Revolution: it had all my wishes, none of my expectations. Before 1793, I clearly saw and often enough stated in public, the horrid delusion, the vile mockery, of the whole affair.[1] When some one said in my brother James's presence[2] that I was a Jacobin, he very well observed,--"No! Samuel is no Jacobin; he is a hot-headed Moravian!" Indeed, I was in the extreme opposite pole. [Footnote 1: "Forgive me, Freedom! O forgive those dreams! I hear thy voice, I hear thy loud lament, From bleak Helvetia's icy cavern sent-- I hear thy groans upon her blood-stain'd streams! Heroes, that for your peaceful country perish'd, And ye that, fleeing, spot your mountain snows With bleeding wounds; forgive me, that I cherish'd One thought that ever blest your cruel foes! To scatter rage and traitorous guilt, Where Peace her jealous home had built; A patriot race to disinherit Of all that made her stormy wilds so dear: And with inexpiable spirit To taint the bloodless freedom of the mountaineer-- O France, that mockest Heaven, adult'rous, blind, And patriot only in pernicious toils, Are these thy boasts, champion of human-kind? To mix with kings in the low lust of sway, Yell in the hunt and share the murderous prey-- To insult the shrine of Liberty with spoils From freemen torn--to tempt and to betray?-- The Sensual and the Dark rebel in vain, Slaves by their own compulsion! In mad game They burst their manacles, and wear the name Of freedom, graven on a heavier chain! O Liberty! with profitless endeavour Have I pursued thee many a weary hour; But thou nor swell'st the victor's train, nor ever Didst breathe thy soul in forms of human power. Alike from all, howe'er they praise thee, (Nor prayer, nor boastful name delays thee,) Alike from priestcraft's harpy minions, And factious blasphemy's obscener slaves, _Thou speedest on thy subtle pinions, The guide of homeless winds, and playmate of the waves!_" France, an Ode. Poetical Works, vol. i. p. 130.] [Footnote 2: A soldier of the old cavalier stamp, to whom the King was the symbol of the majesty, as the Church was of the life, of the nation, and who would most assuredly have taken arms for one or the other against all the Houses of Commons or committees of public safety in the world.--ED.] _July_ 24. 1832. INFANT SCHOOLS. I have no faith in act of parliament reform. All the great--the permanently great--things that have been achieved in the world have been so achieved by individuals, working from the instinct of genius or of goodness. The rage now-a-days is all the other way: the individual is supposed capable of nothing; there must be organization, classification, machinery, &c., as if the capital of national morality could be increased by making a joint stock of it. Hence you see these infant schools so patronized by the bishops and others, who think them a grand invention. Is it found that an infant-school child, who has been bawling all day a column of the multiplication-table, or a verse from the Bible, grows up a more dutiful son or daughter to its parents? Are domestic charities on the increase amongst families under this system? In a great town, in our present state of society, perhaps such schools may be a justifiable expedient--a choice of the lesser evil; but as for driving these establishments into the country villages, and breaking up the cottage home education, I think it one of the most miserable mistakes which the well-intentioned people of the day have yet made; and they have made, and are making, a good many, God knows. _July_ 25. 1832. MR. COLERIDGE'S PHILOSOPHY.--SUBLIMITY.--SOLOMON.--MADNESS.--C. LAMB-- SFORZA's DECISION. The pith of my system is to make the senses out of the mind--not the mind out of the senses, as Locke did. * * * * * Could you ever discover any thing sublime, in our sense of the term, in the classic Greek literature? never could. Sublimity is Hebrew by birth. * * * * * I should conjecture that the Proverbs and Ecclesiastes were written, or, perhaps, rather collected, about the time of Nehemiah. The language is Hebrew with Chaldaic endings. It is totally unlike the language of Moses on the one hand, and of Isaiah on the other. * * * * * Solomon introduced the commercial spirit into his kingdom. I cannot think his idolatry could have been much more, in regard to himself, than a state protection or toleration of the foreign worship. * * * * * When a man mistakes his thoughts for persons and things, he is mad. A madman is properly so defined. * * * * * Charles Lamb translated my motto _Sermoni propriora_ by--_properer for a sermon_! * * * * * I was much amused some time ago by reading the pithy decision of one of the Sforzas of Milan, upon occasion of a dispute for precedence between the lawyers and physicians of his capital;--_Paecedant fures--sequantur carnifices_. I hardly remember a neater thing. _July_ 28. 1832. FAITH AND BELIEF. The sublime and abstruse doctrines of Christian belief belong to the church; but the faith of the individual, centered in his heart, is or may be collateral to them.[1] Faith is subjective. I throw myself in adoration before God; acknowledge myself his creature,--simple, weak, lost; and pray for help and pardon through Jesus Christ: but when I rise from my knees, I discuss the doctrine of the Trinity as I would a problem in geometry; in the same temper of mind, I mean, not by the same process of reasoning, of course. [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge used very frequently to insist upon the distinction between belief and faith. He once told me, with very great earnestness, that if he were that moment convinced--a conviction, the possibility of which, indeed, he could not realize to himself--that the New Testament was a forgery from beginning to end--wide as the desolation in his moral feelings would be, he should not abate one jot of his faith in God's power and mercy through some manifestation of his being towards man, either in time past or future, or in the hidden depths where time and space are not. This was, I believe, no more than a vivid expression of what he always maintained, that no man had attained to a full faith who did not _recognize_ in the Scriptures a correspondency to his own nature, or see that his own powers of reason, will, and understanding were preconfigured to the reception of the Christian doctrines and promises.--ED.] _August_ 4. 1832. DOBRIZHOFFER.[1] I hardly know any thing more amusing than the honest German Jesuitry of Dobrizhoffer. His chapter on the dialects is most valuable. He is surprised that there is no form for the infinitive, but that they say,--I wish, (go, or eat, or drink, &c.) interposing a letter by way of copula,--forgetting his own German and the English, which are, in truth, the same. The confident belief entertained by the Abipones of immortality, in connection with the utter absence in their minds of the idea of a God, is very remarkable. If Warburton were right, which he is not, the Mosaic scheme would be the exact converse. My dear daughter's translation of this book[2] is, in my judgment, unsurpassed for pure mother English by any thing I have read for a long time. [Footnote 1: "He was a man of rarest qualities, Who to this barbarous region had confined A spirit with the learned and the wise Worthy to take its place, and from mankind Receive their homage, to the immortal mind Paid in its just inheritance of fame. But he to humbler thoughts his heart inclined: From Gratz amid the Styrian hills he came, And Dobrizhofter was the good man's honour'd name. "It was his evil fortune to behold The labours of his painful life destroyed; His flock which he had brought within the fold Dispers'd; the work of ages render'd void, And all of good that Paraguay enjoy'd By blind and suicidal power o'erthrown. So he the years of his old age employ'd, A faithful chronicler, in handing down Names which he lov'd, and things well worthy to be known. "And thus when exiled from the dear-loved scene, In proud Vienna he beguiled the pain Of sad remembrance: and the empress-queen, That great Teresa, she did not disdain In gracious mood sometimes to entertain Discourse with him both pleasurable and sage; And sure a willing ear she well might deign To one whose tales may equally engage The wondering mind of youth, the thoughtful heart of age. "But of his native speech, because well-nigh Disuse in him forgetfulness had wrought, In Latin he composed his history; A garrulous, but a lively tale, and fraught With matter of delight, and food for thought. And if he could in Merlin's glass have seen By whom his tomes to speak our tongue were taught, The old man would have felt as pleased, I ween, As when he won the ear of that great empress-queen. "Little he deem'd, when with his Indian band He through the wilds set forth upon his way, A poet then unborn, and in a land Which had proscribed his order, should one day Take up from thence his moralizing lay, And, shape a song that, with no fiction drest, Should to his worth its grateful tribute pay, And sinking deep in many an English breast, Foster that faith divine that keeps the heart at rest." _Southey's Tale of Paraguay_, canto iii. st. 16.] [Footnote 2: "An Account of the Abipones, an Equestrian People of Paraguay, From the Latin of Martin Dobrizhoffer, eighteen Years a Missionary in that Country."--Vol. ii. p. 176.] _August_ 6. 1832. SCOTCH AND ENGLISH.--CRITERION OF GENIUS.--DRYDEN AND POPE. I have generally found a Scotchman with a little literature very disagreeable. He is a superficial German or a dull Frenchman. The Scotch will attribute merit to people of any nation rather than the English; the English have a morbid habit of petting and praising foreigners of any sort, to the unjust disparagement of their own worthies. * * * * * You will find this a good gage or criterion of genius,--whether it progresses and evolves, or only spins upon itself. Take Dryden's Achitophel and Zimri,--Shaftesbury and Buckingham; every line adds to or modifies the character, which is, as it were, a-building up to the very last verse; whereas, in Pope's Timon, &c. the first two or three couplets contain all the pith of the character, and the twenty or thirty lines that follow are so much evidence or proof of overt acts of jealousy, or pride, or whatever it may be that is satirized. In like manner compare Charles Lamb's exquisite criticisms on Shakspeare with Hazlitt's round and round imitations of them. _August_ 7. 1832. MILTON'S DISREGARD OF PAINTING. It is very remarkable that in no part of his writings does Milton take any notice of the great painters of Italy, nor, indeed, of painting as an art; whilst every other page breathes his love and taste for music. Yet it is curious that, in one passage in the Paradise Lost, Milton has certainly copied the _fresco_ of the Creation in the Sistine Chapel at Rome. I mean those lines,-- ----"now half appear'd The tawny lion, pawing to get free His hinder parts, then springs as broke from bonds, And rampant shakes his brinded mane;--"&c.[1] an image which the necessities of the painter justified, but which was wholly unworthy, in my judgment, of the enlarged powers of the poet. Adam bending over the sleeping Eve in the Paradise Lost[2] and Dalilah approaching Samson, in the Agonistes[3] are the only two proper pictures I remember in Milton. [Footnote 1: Par. Lost, book vii. ver. 463.] [Footnote 2: ----"so much the more His wonder was to find unwaken'd Eve With tresses discomposed, and glowing cheek, As through unquiet rest: he on his side Leaning, half raised, with looks of cordial love Hung over her enamour'd, and beheld Beauty, which, whether waking or asleep, Shot forth peculiar graces; then, with voice Mild, as when Zephyrus on Flora breathes, Her hand soft touching, whisper'd thus: Awake, My fairest," &c. Book v. ver. 8.] [Footnote 3: "But who is this, what thing of sea or land? Female of sex it seems, That so bedeck'd, ornate, and gay, Comes this way sailing Like a stately ship Of Tarsus, bound for the isles Of Javan or Gadire, With all her bravery on, and tackle trim, Sails fill'd, and streamers waving, Courted by all the winds that hold them play; An amber-scent of odorous perfume Her harbinger, a damsel train behind!"] August 9. 1832. BAPTISMAL SERVICE.--JEWS' DIVISION OF THE SCRIPTURE.--SANSKRIT. I think the baptismal service almost perfect. What seems erroneous assumption in it to me, is harmless. None of the services of the church affect me so much as this. I never could attend a christening without tears bursting forth at the sight of the helpless innocent in a pious clergyman's arms. * * * * * The Jews recognized three degrees of sanctity in their Scriptures:--first, the writings of Moses, who had the [Greek: autopsia]; secondly, the Prophets; and, thirdly, the Good Books. Philo, amusingly enough, places his works somewhere between the second and third degrees. * * * * * The claims of the Sanskrit for priority to the Hebrew as a language are ridiculous. August 11. 1832. HESIOD.--VIRGIL.--GENIUS METAPHYSICAL.--DON QUIXOTE. I like reading Hesiod, meaning the Works and Days. If every verse is not poetry, it is, at least, good sense, which is a great deal to say. * * * * * There is nothing real in the Georgies, except, to be sure, the verse.[1] Mere didactics of practice, unless seasoned with the personal interests of the time or author, are inexpressibly dull to me. Such didactic poetry as that of the Works and Days followed naturally upon legislation and the first ordering of municipalities. [Footnote 1: I used to fancy Mr. Coleridge _paulo iniquior Virgilio_, and told him so; to which he replied, that, like all Eton men, I swore _per Maronem_. This was far enough from being the case; but I acknowledge that Mr. C.'s apparent indifference to the tenderness and dignity of Virgil excited my surprise.--ED.] * * * * * All genius is metaphysical; because the ultimate end of genius is ideal, however it may be actualized by incidental and accidental circumstances. * * * * * Don Quixote is not a man out of his senses, but a man in whom the imagination and the pure reason are so powerful as to make him disregard the evidence of sense when it opposed their conclusions. Sancho is the common sense of the social man-animal, unenlightened and unsanctified by the reason. You see how he reverences his master at the very time he is cheating him. _August_ 14. 1832. STEINMETZ.--KEATS. Poor dear Steinmetz is gone,--his state of sure blessedness accelerated; or, it may be, he is buried in Christ, and there in that mysterious depth grows on to the spirit of a just man made perfect! Could I for a moment doubt this, the grass would become black beneath my feet, and this earthly frame a charnel-house. I never knew any man so illustrate the difference between the feminine and the effeminate. * * * * * A loose, slack, not well-dressed youth met Mr. ---- and myself in a lane near Highgate.---- knew him, and spoke. It was Keats. He was introduced to me, and staid a minute or so. After he had left us a little way, he came back and said: "Let me carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand!"--"There is death in that hand," I said to ----, when Keats was gone; yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself distinctly. _August_ 16. 1832. CHRIST'S HOSPITAL.--BOWYER. The discipline at Christ's Hospital in my time was ultra-Spartan;--all domestic ties were to be put aside. "Boy!" I remember Bowyer saying to me once when I was crying the first day of my return after the holidays, "Boy! the school is your father! Boy! the school is your mother! Boy! the school is your brother! the school is your sister! the school is your first cousin, and your second cousin, and all the rest of your relations! Let's have no more crying!" * * * * * No tongue can express good Mrs. Bowyer. Val. Le Grice and I were once going to be flogged for some domestic misdeed, and Bowyer was thundering away at us by way of prologue, when Mrs. B. looked in, and said, "Flog them soundly, sir, I beg!" This saved us. Bowyer was so nettled at the interruption that he growled out, "Away, woman! away!" and we were let off. _August_ 28. 1832. ST. PAUL'S MELITA. The belief that Malta is the island on which St. Paul was wrecked is so rooted in the common Maltese, and is cherished with such a superstitious nationality, that the Government would run the chance of exciting a tumult, if it, or its representatives, unwarily ridiculed it. The supposition itself is quite absurd. Not to argue the matter at length, consider these few conclusive facts:--The narrative speaks of the "barbarous people," and "barbarians,"[1] of the island. Now, our Malta was at that time fully peopled and highly civilized, as we may surely infer from Cicero and other writers.[2] A viper comes out from the sticks upon the fire being lighted: the men are not surprised at the appearance of the snake, but imagine first a murderer, and then a god from the harmless attack. Now in our Malta there are, I may say, no snakes at all; which, to be sure, the Maltese attribute to St. Paul's having cursed them away. Melita in the Adriatic was a perfectly barbarous island as to its native population, and was, and is now, infested with serpents. Besides the context shows that the scene is in the Adriatic. [Footnote 1: Acts xxviii. 2. and 4. Mr. C. seemed to think that the Greek words had reference to something more than the fact of the islanders not speaking Latin or Greek; the classical meaning of [Greek: Barbaroi].-ED.] [Footnote 2: Upwards of a century before the reign of Nero, Cicero speaks at considerable length of our Malta in one of the Verrine orations. See Act. ii. lib. iv. c. 46. "Insula est Melita, judices," &c. There was a town, and Verres had established in it a manufactory of the fine cloth or cotton stuffs, the _Melitensis vestis_, for which the island is uniformly celebrated:-- "Fertilis est Melite sterili vicina Cocyrae Insula, quam Libyci verberat unda freti." Ovid. Fast. iii. 567. And Silius Italicus has-- ----"telaque _superba_ _Lanigera_ Melite." Punic. xiv. 251. Yet it may have been cotton after all--the present product of Malta. Cicero describes an _ancient_ temple of Juno situated on a promontory near the town, so famous and revered, that, even in the time of Masinissa, at least 150 years B.C., that prince had religiously restored some relics which his admiral had taken from it. The plunder of this very temple is an article of accusation against Verres; and a deputation of Maltese (_legati Melitenses_) came to Rome to establish the charge. These are all the facts, I think, which can be gathered from Cicero; because I consider his expression of _nudatae urbes_, in the working up of this article, a piece of rhetoric. Strabo merely marks the position of Melita, and says that the lap-dogs called [Greek: kunidia Melitaia] were sent from this island, though some writers attribute them to the other Melite in the Adriatic, (lib. vi.) Diodorus, however, a Sicilian himself by birth, gives the following remarkable testimony as to the state of the island in his time, which, it will be remembered, was considerably before the date of St. Paul's shipwreck. "There are three islands to the south of Sicily, each of which has a city or town ([Greek: polin]), and harbours fitted for the safe reception of ships. The first of these is Melite, distant about 800 stadia from Syracuse, and possessing several harbours of surpassing excellence. Its inhabitants are rich and luxurious ([Greek: tous katoikountas tais ousiais eudaimonas]). There are artizans of every kind ([Greek: pantodapous tais exgasias]); the best are those who weave cloth of a singular fineness and softness. The houses are worthy of admiration for their superb adornment with eaves and brilliant white-washing ([Greek: oikias axiologous kai kateskeuasmenas philotimos geissois kai koniamasi pezittotezon])."-- Lib. v. c. 12. Mela (ii. c. 7.) and Pliny (iii. 14.) simply mark the position.--ED.] * * * * * The Maltese seem to have preserved a fondness and taste for architecture from the time of the knights--naturally enough occasioned by the incomparable materials at hand.[1] [Footnote 1: The passage which I have cited from Diodorus shows that the origin was much earlier.--ED.] _August_ 19. 1832. ENGLISH AND GERMAN.--BEST STATE OF SOCIETY. It may be doubted whether a composite language like the English is not a happier instrument of expression than a homogeneous one like the German. We possess a wonderful richness and variety of modified meanings in our Saxon and Latin quasi-synonymes, which the Germans have not. For "the pomp and _prodigality_ of Heaven," the Germans must have said "_the spendthriftness_."[1] Shakspeare is particularly happy in his use of the Latin synonymes, and in distinguishing between them and the Saxon. [Footnote 1: _Verschwendung_, I suppose.--ED.] * * * * * That is the most excellent state of society in which the patriotism of the citizen ennobles, but does not merge, the individual energy of the man. September 1. 1832. GREAT MINDS ANDROGYNOUS.--PHILOSOPHER'S ORDINARY LANGUAGE. In chemistry and nosology, by extending the degree to a certain point, the constituent proportion may be destroyed, and a new kind produced. * * * * * I have known _strong_ minds with imposing, undoubting, Cobbett-like manners, but I have never met a _great_ mind of this sort. And of the former, they are at least as often wrong as right. The truth is, a great mind must be androgynous. Great minds--Swedenborg's for instance--are never wrong but in consequence of being in the right, but imperfectly. * * * * * A philosopher's ordinary language and admissions, in general conversation or writings _ad populum_, are as his watch compared with his astronomical timepiece. He sets the former by the town-clock, not because he believes it right, but because his neighbours and his cook go by it. _January_ 2. 1833. JURIES.--BARRISTERS' AND PHYSICIANS' FEES.--QUACKS.--CAESAREAN OPERATION.-- INHERITED DISEASE. I certainly think that juries would be more conscientious, if they were allowed a larger discretion. But, after all, juries cannot be better than the mass out of which they are taken. And if juries are not honest and single-minded, they are the worst, because the least responsible, instruments of judicial or popular tyranny. I should he sorry to see the honorary character of the fees of barristers and physicians done away with. Though it seems a shadowy distinction, I believe it to be beneficial in effect. It contributes to preserve the idea of a profession, of a class which belongs to the public,--in the employment and remuneration of which no law interferes, but the citizen acts as he likes _in foro conscientiae_. * * * * * There undoubtedly ought to be a declaratory act withdrawing expressly from the St. John Longs and other quacks the protection which the law is inclined to throw around the mistakes or miscarriages of the regularly educated practitioner. * * * * * I think there are only two things wanting to justify a surgeon in performing the Caesarean operation: first, that he should possess infallible knowledge of his art: and, secondly, that he should be infallibly certain that he is infallible. * * * * * Can any thing he more dreadful than the thought that an innocent child has inherited from you a disease or a weakness, the penalty in yourself of sin or want of caution? * * * * * In the treatment of nervous cases, he is the best physician, who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope. _January_ 3. 1833. MASON'S POETRY. I cannot bring myself to think much of Mason's poetry. I may be wrong; but all those passages in the Caractacus, which we learn to admire at school, now seem to me one continued _falsetto_. _January_ 4. 1833. NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN STATES OF THE AMERICAN UNION.--ALL AND THE WHOLE. Naturally one would have thought that there would have been greater sympathy between the northern and north-western states of the American Union and England, than between England and the Southern states. There is ten times as much English blood and spirit in New England as in Virginia, the Carolinas, &c. Nevertheless, such has been the force of the interests of commerce, that now, and for some years past, the people of the North hate England with increasing bitterness, whilst, amongst those of the south, who are Jacobins, the British connection has become popular. Can there ever be any thorough national fusion of the Northern and Southern states? I think not. In fact, the Union will be shaken almost to dislocation whenever a very serious question between the states arises. The American Union has no _centre_, and it is impossible now to make one. The more they extend their borders into the Indians' land, the weaker will the national cohesion be. But I look upon the states as splendid masses to be used, by and by, in the composition of two or three great governments. * * * * * There is a great and important difference, both in politics and metaphysics, between _all_ and _the whole_. The first can never be ascertained as a standing quantity; the second, if comprehended by insight into its parts, remains for ever known. Mr. Huskisson, I thought, satisfactorily refuted the ship owners; and yet the shipping interest, who must know where the shoe pinches, complain to this day. _January_ 7, 1833. NINTH ARTICLE.--SIN AND SINS.--OLD DIVINES.--PREACHING EXTEMPORE. "Very far gone," is _quam longissime_ in the Latin of the ninth article,-- as far gone as possible, that is, as was possible for _man_ to go; as far as was compatible with his having any redeemable qualities left in him. To talk of man's being _utterly_ lost to good, is absurd; for then he would be a devil at once. * * * * * One mistake perpetually made by one of our unhappy parties in religion,-- and with a pernicious tendency to Antinomianism,--is to confound _sin_ with _sins_. To tell a modest girl, the watchful nurse of an aged parent, that she is full of _sins_ against God, is monstrous, and as shocking to reason as it is unwarrantable by Scripture. But to tell her that she, and all men and women, are of a sinful nature, and that, without Christ's redeeming love and God's grace, she cannot be emancipated from its dominion, is true and proper.[1] [Footnote 1: In a marginal scrap Mr. C. wrote:--"What are the essential doctrines of our religion, if not sin and original sin, as the necessitating occasion, and the redemption of sinners by the Incarnate Word as the substance of the Christian dispensation? And can these be intelligently believed without knowledge and steadfast meditation. By the unlearned, they may be worthily received, but not by the unthinking and self-ignorant, Christian."--ED.] * * * * * No article of faith can be truly and duly preached without necessarily and simultaneously infusing a deep sense of the indispensableness of a holy life. * * * * * How pregnant with instruction, and with knowledge of all sorts, are the sermons of our old divines! in this respect, as in so many others, how different from the major part of modern discourses! * * * * * Every attempt, in a sermon, to cause emotion, except as the consequence of an impression made on the reason, or the understanding, or the will, I hold to be fanatical and sectarian. * * * * * No doubt preaching, in the proper sense of the word, is more effective than reading; and, therefore, I would not prohibit it, but leave a liberty to the clergyman who feels himself able to accomplish it. But, as things now are, I am quite sure I prefer going to church to a pastor who reads his discourse: for I never yet heard more than one preacher without book, who did not forget his argument in three minutes' time; and fall into vague and unprofitable declamation, and, generally, very coarse declamation too. These preachers never progress; they eddy round and round. Sterility of mind follows their ministry. _January_ 20. 1833. CHURCH OF ENGLAND. When the Church at the Reformation ceased to be extra-national, it unhappily became royal instead; its proper bearing is intermediate between the crown and the people, with an inclination to the latter. * * * * * The present prospects of the Church weigh heavily on my soul. Oh! that the words of a statesman-like philosophy could win their way through the ignorant zealotry and sordid vulgarity of the leaders of the day! _February_ 5. 1833. UNION WITH IRELAND. If any modification of the Union takes place, I trust it will be a total divorce _a vinculo matrimonii_. I am sure we have lived a cat and dog life of it. Let us have no silly saving of one crown and two legislatures; that would be preserving all the mischiefs without any of the goods, if there are any, of the union. I am deliberately of opinion, that England, in all its institutions, has received injury from its union with Ireland. My only difficulty is as to the Protestants, to whom we owe protection. But I cannot forget that the Protestants themselves have greatly aided in accelerating the present horrible state of things, by using that as a remedy and a reward which should have been to them an opportunity.[1] If the Protestant Church in Ireland is removed, of course the Romish Church must be established in its place. There can be no resisting it in common reason. How miserably imbecile and objectless has the English government of Ireland been for forty years past! Oh! for a great man--but one really great man,-- who could feel the weight and the power of a principle, and unflinchingly put it into act! But truly there is no vision in the land, and the people accordingly perisheth. See how triumphant in debate and in action O'Connell is! Why? Because he asserts a broad principle, and acts up to it, rests all his body on it, and has faith in it. Our ministers--true Whigs in that-- have faith in nothing but expedients _de die in diem_. Indeed, what principles of government can _they_ have, who in the space of a month recanted a life of political opinions, and now dare to threaten this and that innovation at the huzza of a mob, or in pique at a parliamentary defeat? [Footnote 1: "Whatever may be thought of the settlement that followed the battle of the Boyne and the extinction of the war in Ireland, yet when this had been made and submitted to, it would have been the far wiser policy, I doubt not, to have provided for the safety of the constitution by improving the quality of the elective franchise, leaving the eligibility open, or like the former, limited only by considerations of property. Still, however, the scheme of exclusion and disqualification had its plausible side. The ink was scarcely dry on the parchment-rolls and proscription-lists of the Popish parliament. The crimes of the man were generalized into attributes of his faith; and the Irish catholics collectively were held accomplices in the perfidy and baseness of the king. Alas! his immediate adherents had afforded too great colour to the charge. The Irish massacre was in the mouth of every Protestant, not as an event to be remembered, but as a thing of recent expectation, fear still blending with the sense of deliverance. At no time, therefore, could the disqualifying system have been enforced with so little reclamation of the conquered party, or with so little outrage on the general feeling of the country. There was no time, when it was so capable of being indirectly useful as a _sedative_ in order to the application of the remedies directly indicated, or as a counter-power reducing to inactivity whatever disturbing forces might have interfered with their operation. And had this use been made of these exclusive laws, and had they been enforced as the precursors and negative conditions,--but, above all, as _bonâ fide_ accompaniments, of a process of _emancipation_, properly and worthily so named, the code would at this day have been remembered in Ireland only as when, recalling a dangerous fever of our boyhood, we think of the nauseous drugs and drenching-horn, and congratulate ourselves that our doctors now-a-days know how to manage these things less coarsely. But this angry code was neglected as an opportunity, and mistaken for a _substitute_: _et hinc illae* lacrymae!_"--Church and State, p. 195.] * * * * * I sometimes think it just possible that the Dissenters may once more be animated by a wiser and nobler spirit, and see their dearest interest in the church of England as the bulwark and glory of Protestantism, as they did at the Revolution. But I doubt their being able to resist the low factious malignity to the church which has characterized them as a body for so many years. _February_ 16. 1833. FAUST.----MICHAEL SCOTT, GOETHE, SCHILLER, AND WORDSWORTH. Before I had ever seen any part of Goethe's Faust[1], though, of course, when I was familiar enough with Marlowe's, I conceived and drew up the plan of a work, a drama, which was to be, to my mind, what the Faust was to Goethe's. My Faust was old Michael Scott; a much better and more likely original than Faust. He appeared in the midst of his college of devoted disciples, enthusiastic, ebullient, shedding around him bright surmises of discoveries fully perfected in after-times, and inculcating the study of nature and its secrets as the pathway to the acquisition of power. He did not love knowledge for itself--for its own exceeding great reward--but in order to be powerful. This poison-speck infected his mind from the beginning. The priests suspect him, circumvent him, accuse him; he is condemned, and thrown into solitary confinement: this constituted the _prologus_ of the drama. A pause of four or five years takes place, at the end of which Michael escapes from prison, a soured, gloomy, miserable man. He will not, cannot study; of what avail had all his study been to him? His knowledge, great as it was, had failed to preserve him from the cruel fangs of the persecutors; he could not command the lightning or the storm to wreak their furies upon the heads of those whom he hated and contemned, and yet feared. Away with learning! away with study! to the winds with all pretences to knowledge! We _know_ nothing; we are fools, wretches, mere beasts. Anon I began to tempt him. I made him dream, gave him wine, and passed the most exquisite of women before him, but out of his reach. Is there, then, no knowledge by which these pleasures can be commanded? _That way_ lay witchcraft, and accordingly to witchcraft Michael turns with all his soul. He has many failures and some successes; he learns the chemistry of exciting drugs and exploding powders, and some of the properties of transmitted and reflected light: his appetites and his curiosity are both stimulated, and his old craving for power and mental domination over others revives. At last Michael tries to raise the Devil, and the Devil comes at his call. My Devil was to be, like Goethe's, the universal humorist, who should make all things vain and nothing worth, by a perpetual collation of the great with the little in the presence of the infinite. I had many a trick for him to play, some better, I think, than any in the Faust. In the mean time, Michael is miserable; he has power, but no peace, and he every day more keenly feels the tyranny of hell surrounding him. In vain he seems to himself to assert the most absolute empire over the Devil, by imposing the most extravagant tasks; one thing is as easy as another to the Devil. "What next, Michael?" is repeated every day with more imperious servility. Michael groans in spirit; his power is a curse: he commands women and wine! but the women seem fictitious and devilish, and the wine does not make him drunk. He now begins to hate the Devil, and tries to cheat him. He studies again, and explores the darkest depths of sorcery for a receipt to cozen hell; but all in vain. Sometimes the Devil's finger turns over the page for him, and points out an experiment, and Michael hears a whisper--"Try _that_, Michael!" The horror increases; and Michael feels that he is a slave and a condemned criminal. Lost to hope, he throws himself into every sensual excess,--in the mid-career of which he sees Agatha, my Margaret, and immediately endeavours to seduce her. Agatha loves him; and the Devil facilitates their meetings; but she resists Michael's attempts to ruin her, and implores him not to act so as to forfeit her esteem. Long struggles of passion ensue, in the result of which his affections are called forth against his appetites, and, love-born, the idea of a redemption of the lost will dawns upon his mind. This is instantaneously perceived by the Devil; and for the first time the humorist becomes severe and menacing. A fearful succession of conflicts between Michael and the Devil takes place, in which Agatha helps and suffers. In the end, after subjecting him to every imaginable horror and agony, I made him triumphant, and poured peace into his soul in the conviction of a salvation for sinners through God's grace. The intended theme of the Faust is the consequences of a misology, or hatred and depreciation of knowledge caused by an originally intense thirst for knowledge baffled. But a love of knowledge for itself, and for pure ends, would never produce such a misology, but only a love of it for base and unworthy purposes. There is neither causation nor progression in the Faust; he is a ready-made conjuror from the very beginning; the _incredulus odi_ is felt from the first line. The sensuality and the thirst after knowledge are unconnected with each other. Mephistopheles and Margaret are excellent; but Faust himself is dull and meaningless. The scene in Auerbach's cellars is one of the best, perhaps the very best; that on the Brocken is also fine; and all the songs are beautiful. But there is no whole in the poem; the scenes are mere magic-lantern pictures, and a large part of the work is to me very flat. The German is very pure and fine. The young men in Germany and England who admire Lord Byron, prefer Goethe to Schiller; but you may depend upon it, Goethe does not, nor ever will, command the common mind of the people of Germany as Schiller does. Schiller had two legitimate phases in his intellectual character:--the first as author of the Robbers--a piece which must not be considered with reference to Shakspeare, but as a work of the mere material sublime, and in that line it is undoubtedly very powerful indeed. It is quite genuine, and deeply imbued with Schiller's own soul. After this he outgrew the composition of such plays as the Robbers, and at once took his true and only rightful stand in the grand historical drama--the Wallenstein;--not the intense drama of passion,--he was not master of that--but the diffused drama of history, in which alone he had ample scope for his varied powers. The Wallenstein is the greatest of his works; it is not unlike Shakspeare's historical plays--a species by itself. You may take up any scene, and it will please you by itself; just as you may in Don Quixote, which you read _through_ once or twice only, but which you read _in_ repeatedly. After this point it was, that Goethe and other writers injured by their theories the steadiness and originality of Schiller's mind; and in every one of his works after the Wallenstein you may perceive the fluctuations of his taste and principles of composition. He got a notion of re-introducing the characterlessness of the Greek tragedy with a chorus, as in the Bride of Messina, and he was for infusing more lyric verse into it. Schiller sometimes affected to despise the Robbers and the other works of his first youth; whereas he ought to have spoken of them as of works not in a right line, but full of excellence in their way. In his ballads and lighter lyrics Goethe is most excellent. It is impossible to praise him too highly in this respect. I like the Wilhelm Meister the best of his prose works. But neither Schiller's nor Goethe's prose style approaches to Lessing's, whose writings, for _manner_, are absolutely perfect. Although Wordsworth and Goethe are not much alike, to be sure, upon the whole; yet they both have this peculiarity of utter non-sympathy with the subjects of their poetry. They are always, both of them, spectators _ab extra_,--feeling _for_, but never _with_, their characters. Schiller is a thousand times more _hearty_ than Goethe. I was once pressed--many years ago--to translate the Faust; and I so far entertained the proposal as to read the work through with great attention, and to revive in my mind my own former plan of Michael Scott. But then I considered with myself whether the time taken up in executing the translation might not more worthily be devoted to the composition of a work which, even if parallel in some points to the Faust, should be truly original in motive and execution, and therefore more interesting and valuable than any version which I could make; and, secondly, I debated with myself whether it became my moral character to render into English--and so far, certainly, lend my countenance to language--much of which I thought vulgar, licentious, and blasphemous. I need not tell you that I never put pen to paper as a translator of Faust. I have read a good deal of Mr. Hayward's version, and I think it done in a very manly style; but I do not admit the argument for prose translations. I would in general rather see verse attempted in so capable a language as ours. The French cannot help themselves, of course, with such a language as theirs. [Footnote 1: "The poem was first published in 1790, and forms the commencement of the seventh volume of _Goethe's Schriften, Wien und Leipzig, bey J. Stahel and G. J. Goschen_, 1790. This edition is now before me. The poem entitled, _Faust, ein Fragment_ (not _Doktor Faust, ein Trauerspiel_, as Döring says), and contains no prologue or dedication of any sort. It commences with the scene in Faust's study, _antè_, p. 17., and is continued, as now, down to the passage ending, _antè_, p. 26. line 5. In the original, the line-- "Und froh ist, wenn er Regenwürmer findet," ends the scene. The next scene is one between Faust and Mephistopheles, and begins thus:-- "Und was der ganzen Menschheit zugetheilt ist," _i. e._ with the passage (_antè_, p. 70.) beginning, "I will enjoy, in my own heart's core, all that is parcelled out among mankind," &c. All that intervenes, in later editions, is wanting. It is thenceforth continued, as now, to the end of the cathedral scene (_antè_, p. (170)), except that the whole scene, in which Valentine is killed, is wanting. Thus Margaret's prayer to the Virgin and the cathedral scene come together, and form the conclusion of the work. According to Düring's Verzeichniss, there was no new edition of Faust until 1807. According to Dr. Sieglitz, the first part of Faust first appeared, in its present shape, in the collected edition of Goethe's works, which was published in 1808.--_Hayward's Translation of Faust_, second edition, note, p. 215.] _February_ 17. 1833. BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.--BEN JONSON.--MASSINGER. In the romantic drama Beaumont and Fletcher are almost supreme. Their plays are in general most truly delightful. I could read the Beggar's Bush from morning to night. How sylvan and sunshiny it is! The Little French Lawyer is excellent. Lawrit is conceived and executed from first to last in genuine comic humour. Monsieur Thomas is also capital. I have no doubt whatever that the first act and the first scene of the second act of the Two Noble Kinsmen are Shakspeare's. Beaumont and Fletcher's plots are, to be sure, wholly inartificial; they only care to pitch a character into a position to make him or her talk; you must swallow all their gross improbabilities, and, taking it all for granted, attend only to the dialogue. How lamentable it is that no gentleman and scholar can he found to edit these beautiful plays![1] Did the name of criticism ever descend so low as in the hands of those two fools and knaves, Seward and Simpson? There are whole scenes in their edition which I could with certainty put back into their original verse, and more that could he replaced in their native prose. Was there ever such an absolute disregard of literary fame as that displayed by Shakspeare, and Beaumont and Fletcher?[2] [Footnote 1: I believe Mr. Dyce could edit Beaumont and Fletcher as well as any man of the present or last generation; but the truth is, the limited sale of the late editions of Ben Jonson, Shirley, &c., has damped the spirit of enterprise amongst the respectable publishers. Still I marvel that some cheap reprint of B. and F. is not undertaken.--ED.] [Footnote 2: "The men of the greatest genius, as far as we can judge from their own works, or from the accounts of their contemporaries, appear to have been of calm and tranquil temper, in all that related to themselves. In the inward assurance of permanent fame, they seem to have been either indifferent or resigned, with regard to immediate reputation." * * * * * "Shakspeare's evenness and sweetness of temper were almost proverbial in his own age. That this did not arise from ignorance of his own comparative greatness, we have abundant proof in his sonnets, which could scarcely have been known to Mr. Pope, when he asserted, that our great bard 'grew immortal in his own despite.'"--_Biog. Lit._ vol. i, p. 32.] * * * * * In Ben Jonson you have an intense and burning art. Some of his plots, that of the Alchemist, for example, are perfect. Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher would, if united, have made a great dramatist indeed, and yet not have come near Shakspeare; but no doubt Ben Jonson was the greatest man after Shakspeare in that age of dramatic genius. The styles of Massinger's plays and the Sampson Agonistes are the two extremes of the arc within which the diction of dramatic poetry may oscillate. Shakspeare in his great plays is the midpoint. In the Samson Agonistes, colloquial language is left at the greatest distance, yet something of it is preserved, to render the dialogue probable: in Massinger the style is differenced, but differenced in the smallest degree possible, from animated conversation by the vein of poetry. There's such a divinity doth hedge our Shakspeare round, that we cannot even imitate his style. I tried to imitate his manner in the Remorse, and, when I had done, I found I had been tracking Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger instead. It is really very curious. At first sight, Shakspeare and his contemporary dramatists seem to write in styles much alike: nothing so easy as to fall into that of Massinger and the others; whilst no one has ever yet produced one scene conceived and expressed in the Shakspearian idiom. I suppose it is because Shakspeare is universal, and, in fact, has no _manner_; just as you can so much more readily copy a picture than Nature herself. _February_ 20. 1833. HOUSE OF COMMONS APPOINTING THE OFFICERS OF THE ARMY AND NAVY. I was just now reading Sir John Cam Hobhouse's answer to Mr. Hume, I believe, upon the point of transferring the patronage of the army and navy from the Crown to the House of Commons. I think, if I had been in the House of Commons, I would have said, "that, ten or fifteen years ago, I should have considered Sir J. C. H.'s speech quite unanswerable,--it being clear constitutional law that the House of Commons has not, nor ought to have, any share, directly or indirectly, in the appointment of the officers of the army or navy. But now that the King had been reduced, by the means and procurement of the Honourable Baronet and his friends, to a puppet, which, so far from having any independent will of its own, could not resist a measure which it hated and condemned, it became a matter of grave consideration whether it was not necessary to vest the appointment of such officers in a body like the House of Commons, rather than in a junta of ministers, who were obliged to make common cause with the mob and democratic press for the sake of keeping their places." _March_ 9. 1833. PENAL CODE IN IRELAND.--CHURCHMEN. The penal code in Ireland, in the beginning of the last century, was justifiable, as a temporary mean of enabling government to take breath and look about them; and if right measures had been systematically pursued in a right spirit, there can be no doubt that all, or the greater part, of Ireland would have become Protestant. Protestantism under the Charter Schools was greatly on the increase in the early part of that century, and the complaints of the Romish priests to that effect are on record. But, unfortunately, the drenching-horn was itself substituted for the medicine. * * * * * There seems to me, at present, to be a curse upon the English church, and upon the governors of all institutions connected with the orderly advancement of national piety and knowledge; it is the curse of prudence, as they miscall it--in fact, of fear. Clergymen are now almost afraid to explain in their pulpits the grounds of their being Protestants. They are completely cowed by the vulgar harassings of the press and of our Hectoring sciolists in Parliament. There should be no _party_ politics in the pulpit to be sure; but every church in England ought to resound with national politics,--I mean the sacred character of the national church, and an exposure of the base robbery from the nation itself--for so indeed it is[1]--about to be committed by these ministers, in order to have a sop to throw to the Irish agitators, who will, of course, only cut the deeper, and come the oftener. You cannot buy off a barbarous invader. [Footnote 1: "That the maxims of a pure morality, and those sublime truths of the divine unity and attributes, which a Plato found it hard to learn, and more difficult to reveal; that these should have become the almost hereditary property of childhood and poverty, of the hovel and the workshop; that even to the unlettered they sound as _common-place_; this is a phenomenon which must withhold all but minds of the most vulgar cast from undervaluing the services even of the pulpit and the reading-desk. Yet he who should confine the efficiency of an established church to these, can hardly be placed in a much higher rank of intellect. That to every parish throughout the kingdom there is transplanted a germ of civilization; that in the remotest villages there is a nucleus, round which the capabilities of the place may crystallize and brighten; a model sufficiently superior to excite, yet sufficiently near to encourage and facilitate imitation; _this_ unobtrusive, continuous agency of a Protestant church establishment, _this_ it is, which the patriot and the philanthropist, who would fain unite the love of peace with the faith in the progressive amelioration of mankind, cannot estimate at too high a price. 'It cannot be valued with the gold of Ophir, with the precious onyx, or the sapphire. No mention shall be made of coral or of pearls; for the price of wisdom is above rubies.'--The clergyman is with his parishioners and among them; he is neither in the cloistered cell, nor in the wilderness, but a neighbour and family man, whose education and rank admit him to the mansion of the rich landholder, while his duties make him the frequent visitor of the farm-house and the cottage. He is, or he may become, connected with the families of his parish or its vicinity by marriage. And among the instances of the blindness, or at best of the short-sightedness, which it is the nature of cupidity to inflict, I know few more striking than the clamours of the farmers against church property. Whatever was not paid to the clergyman would inevitably at the next lease be paid to the landholder; while, as the case at present stands, the revenues of the church are in some sort the reversionary property of every family that may have a member educated for the church, or a daughter that may marry a clergyman. Instead of being _foreclosed_ and immovable, it is, in fact, the only species of landed property that is essentially moving and circulative. That there exist no inconveniences who will pretend to assert?--But I have yet to expect the proof, that the inconveniences are greater in this than in any other species; or that either the farmers or the clergy would be benefited by forcing the latter to become either _Trullibers_ or salaried _placemen_."--_Church and State_, p. 90.] _March_ 12. 1833. CORONATION OATHS. Lord Grey has, in Parliament, said two things: first, that the Coronation Oaths only bind the King in his executive capacity; and, secondly, that members of the House of Commons are bound to represent by their votes the wishes and opinions of their constituents, and not their own. Put these two together, and tell me what useful part of the constitutional monarchy of England remains. It is clear that the Coronation Oaths would be no better than Highgate oaths. For in his executive capacity the King _cannot_ do any thing, against the doing of which the oaths bind him; it is _only_ in his legislative character that he possesses a free agency capable of being bound. The nation meant to bind _that_. _March_ 14. 1833. DIVINITY.--PROFESSIONS AND TRADES. Divinity is essentially the first of the professions, because it is necessary for all at all times; law and physic are only necessary for some at some times. I speak of them, of course, not in their abstract existence, but in their applicability to man. * * * * * Every true science bears necessarily within itself the germ of a cognate profession, and the more you can elevate trades into professions the better. _March_ 17. 1833. MODERN POLITICAL ECONOMY. What solemn humbug this modern political economy is! What is there true of the little that is true in their dogmatic books, which is not a simple deduction from the moral and religious _credenda_ and _agenda_ of any good man, and with which we were not all previously acquainted, and upon which every man of common sense instinctively acted? I know none. But what they truly state, they do not truly understand in its ultimate grounds and causes; and hence they have sometimes done more mischief by their half- ignorant and half-sophistical reasonings about, and deductions from, well- founded positions, than they could have done by the promulgation of positive error. This particularly applies to their famous ratios of increase between man and the means of his subsistence. Political economy, at the highest, can never be a pure science. You may demonstrate that certain properties inhere in the arch, which yet no bridge-builder _can_ ever reduce into brick and mortar; but an abstract conclusion in a matter of political economy, the premisses of which neither exist now, nor ever will exist within the range of the wildest imagination, is not a truth, but a chimera--a practical falsehood. For there are no theorems in political economy--but problems only. Certain things being actually so and so; the question is, _how_ to _do_ so and so with them. Political _philosophy_, indeed, points to ulterior ends, but even those ends are all practical; and if you desert the conditions of reality, or of common probability, you may show forth your eloquence or your fancy, but the utmost you can produce will be a Utopia or Oceana. You talk about making this article cheaper by reducing its price in the market from 8_d_. to 6_d_. But suppose, in so doing, you have rendered your country weaker against a foreign foe; suppose you have demoralized thousands of your fellow-countrymen, and have sown discontent between one class of society and another, your article is tolerably dear, I take it, after all. Is not its real price enhanced to every Christian and patriot a hundred-fold? * * * * * _All_ is an endless fleeting abstraction; _the whole_ is a reality. _March_ 31. 1833. NATIONAL DEBT.--PROPERTY TAX.--DUTY OF LANDHOLDERS. What evil results now to this country, taken at large, from the actual existence of the National Debt? I never could get a plain and practical answer to that question. I do not advert to the past loss of capital, although it is hard to see how that capital can be said to have been unproductive, which produces, in the defence of the nation itself, the conditions of the permanence and productivity of all other capital. As to taxation to pay the interest, how can the country suffer by a process, under which the money is never one minute out of the pockets of the people? You may just as well say that a man is weakened by the circulation of his blood. There may, certainly, be particular local evils and grievances resulting from the mode of taxation or collection; but how can that debt be in any proper sense a burthen to the nation, which the nation owes to itself, and to no one but itself? It is a juggle to talk of the nation owing the capital or the interest to the stockholders; it owes to itself only. Suppose the interest to be owing to the Emperor of Russia, and then you would feel the difference of a debt in the proper sense. It is really and truly nothing more in effect than so much moneys or money's worth, raised annually by the state for the purpose of quickening industry.[1] I should like to see a well graduated property tax, accompanied by a large loan. One common objection to a property tax is, that it tends to diminish the accumulation of capital. In my judgment, one of the chief sources of the bad economy of the country now is the enormous aggregation of capitals. When shall we return to a sound conception of the right to property-- namely, as being official, implying and demanding the performance of commensurate duties! Nothing but the most horrible perversion of humanity and moral justice, under the specious name of political economy, could have blinded men to this truth as to the possession of land,--the law of God having connected indissolubly the cultivation of every rood of earth with the maintenance and watchful labour of man. But money, stock, riches by credit, transferable and convertible at will, are under no such obligations; and, unhappily, it is from the selfish autocratic possession of _such_ property, that our landholders have learnt their present theory of trading with that which was never meant to be an object of commerce. [Footnote 1: See the splendid essay in the Friend (vol. ii, p. 47.) on the vulgar errors respecting taxes and taxation. "A great statesman, lately deceased, in one of his anti-ministerial harangues against some proposed impost, said, 'The nation has been already bled in every vein, and is faint with loss of blood.' This blood, however, was circulating in the mean time through the whole body of the state, and what was received into one chamber of the heart was instantly sent out again at the other portal. Had he wanted a metaphor to convey the possible injuries of taxation, he might have found one less opposite to the fact, in the known disease of aneurism, or relaxation of the coats of particular vessels, by a disproportionate accumulation of blood in them, which sometimes occurs when the circulation has been suddenly and violently changed, and causes helplessness, or even mortal stagnation, though the total quantity of blood remains the same in the system at large. "But a fuller and fairer symbol of taxation, both in its possible good and evil effects, is to be found in the evaporation of waters from the surface of the earth. The sun may draw up the moisture from the river, the morass, and the ocean, to be given back in genial showers to the garden, to the pasture, and the corn field; but it may, likewise, force away the moisture from the fields of tillage, to drop it on the stagnant pool, the saturated swamp, or the unprofitable sand-waste. The gardens in the south of Europe supply, perhaps, a not less apt illustration of a system of finance judiciously conducted, where the tanks or reservoirs would represent the capital of a nation, and the hundred rills, hourly varying their channels and directions under the gardener's spade, give a pleasing image of the dispersion of that capital through the whole population by the joint effect of taxation and trade. For taxation itself is a part of commerce, and the government maybe fairly considered as a great manufacturing house, carrying on, in different places, by means of its partners and overseers, the trades of the shipbuilder, the clothier, the iron-founder," &c. &c.--ED.] _April_ 5. 1833. MASSINGER.--SHAKSPEARE.--HIERONIMO. To please me, a poem must be either music or sense; if it is neither, I confess I cannot interest myself in it. * * * * * The first act of the Virgin Martyr is as fine an act as I remember in any play. The Very Woman is, I think, one of the most perfect plays we have. There is some good fun in the first scene between Don John, or Antonio, and Cuculo, his master[1]; and can any thing exceed the skill and sweetness of the scene between him and his mistress, in which he relates his story?[2] The Bondman is also a delightful play. Massinger is always entertaining; his plays have the interest of novels. But, like most of his contemporaries, except Shakspeare, Massinger often deals in exaggerated passion. Malefort senior, in the Unnatural Combat, however he may have had the moral will to be so wicked, could never have actually done all that he is represented as guilty of, without losing his senses. He would have been, in fact, mad. Regan and Goneril are the only pictures of the unnatural in Shakspeare; the pure unnatural--and you will observe that Shakspeare has left their hideousness unsoftened or diversified by a single line of goodness or common human frailty. Whereas in Edmund, for whom passion, the sense of shame as a bastard, and ambition, offer some plausible excuses, Shakspeare has placed many redeeming traits. Edmund is what, under certain circumstances, any man of powerful intellect might be, if some other qualities and feelings were cut off. Hamlet is, inclusively, an Edmund, but different from him as a whole, on account of the controlling agency of other principles which Edmund had not. It is worth while to remark the use which Shakspeare always makes of his bold villains as vehicles for expressing opinions and conjectures of a nature too hazardous for a wise man to put forth directly as his own, or from any sustained character. [Footnote 1: Act iii. sc. 2.] [Footnote 2: Act iv. sc. 3.:-- "ANT. Not far from where my father lives, a lady, A neighbour by, bless'd with as great a beauty As nature durst bestow without undoing, Dwelt, and most happily, as I thought then, And bless'd the home a thousand times she dwelt in. This beauty, in the blossom of my youth, When my first fire knew no adulterate incense, Nor I no way to flatter, but my fondness; In all the bravery my friends could show me, In all the faith my innocence could give me, In the best language my true tongue could tell me, And all the broken sighs my sick heart lent me, I sued and served: long did I love this lady, Long was my travail, long my trade to win her; With all the duty of my soul, I served her. ALM. How feelingly he speaks! (_Aside_.) And she loved you too? It must be so. ANT. I would it had, dear lady; This story had been needless, and this place, I think, unknown to me. ALM. Were your bloods equal? ANT. Yes; and I thought our hearts too. ALM. Then she must love. ANT. She did--but never me; she could not love me, She would not love, she hated; more, she scorn'd me, And in so poor and base a way abused me, For all my services, for all my bounties, So bold neglects flung on me-- ALM. An ill woman! Belike you found some rival in your love, then? ANT. How perfectly she points me to my story! (_Aside_.) Madam, I did; and one whose pride and anger, Ill manners, and worse mien, she doted on, Doted to my undoing, and my ruin. And, but for honour to your sacred beauty, And reverence to the noble sex, though she fall, As she must fall that durst be so unnoble, I should say something unbeseeming me. What out of love, and worthy love, I gave her, Shame to her most unworthy mind! to fools, To girls, and fiddlers, to her boys she flung, And in disdain of me. ALM. Pray you take me with you. Of what complexion was she? ANT. But that I dare not Commit so great a sacrilege 'gainst virtue, She look'd not much unlike--though far, far short, Something, I see, appears--your pardon, madam-- Her eyes would smile so, but her eyes could cozen; And so she would look sad; but yours is pity, A noble chorus to my wretched story; Hers was disdain and cruelty. ALM. Pray heaven, Mine be no worse! he has told me a strange story, (_Aside_.)" &c.--ED.] * * * * * The parts pointed out in Hieronimo as Ben Jonson's bear no traces of his style; but they are very like Shakspeare's; and it is very remarkable that every one of them re-appears in full form and development, and tempered with mature judgment, in some one or other of Shakspeare's great pieces.[1] [Footnote 1: By Hieronimo Mr. Coleridge meant The Spanish Tragedy, and not the previous play, which is usually called The First Part of Jeronimo. The Spanish Tragedy is, upon the authority of Heywood, attributed to Kyd. It is supposed that Ben Jonson originally performed the part of Hieronimo, and hence it has been surmised that certain passages and whole scenes connected with that character, and not found in some of the editions of the play, are, in fact, Ben Jonson's own writing. Some of these supposed interpolations are amongst the best things in the Spanish Tragedy; the style is singularly unlike Jonson's, whilst there are turns and particular images which do certainly seem to have been imitated by or from Shakspeare. Mr. Lamb at one time gave them to Webster. Take this, passage, in the fourth act:-- "HIERON. What make you with your torches in the dark? PEDRO. You bid us light them, and attend you here. HIERON. No! you are deceived; not I; you are deceived. Was I so mad to bid light torches now? Light me your torches at the mid of noon, When as the sun-god rides in all his glory; Light me your torches then. PEDRO. Then we burn day-light. HIERON. _Let it be burnt; Night is a murd'rous slut, That would not have her treasons to be seen; And yonder pale-faced Hecate there, the moon, Doth give consent to that is done in darkness; And all those stars that gaze upon her face Are aglets on her sleeve, pins on her train; And those that should be powerful and divine, Do sleep in darkness when they most should shine._ PEDRO. Provoke them not, fair sir, with tempting words. The heavens are gracious, and your miseries and sorrow Make you speak you know not what HIERON. _Villain! thou liest, and thou dost nought But tell me I am mad: thou liest, I am not mad; I know thee to be Pedro, and he Jaques; I'll prove it thee; and were I mad, how could I? Where was she the same night, when my Horatio was murder'd! She should have shone then; search thou the book: Had the moon shone in my boy's face, there was a kind of grace, That I know--nay, I do know, had the murderer seen him, His weapon would have fallen, and cut the earth, Had he been framed of nought but blood and death," &c._ Again, in the fifth act:-- "HIERON. But are you sure that they are dead? CASTILE. Ay, slain, too sure. HIERON. What, and yours too? VICEROY. Ay, all are dead; not one of them survive. HIBRON. Nay, then I care not--come, we shall be friends; Let us lay our heads together. See, here's a goodly noose will hold them all. VICEROY. O damned devil! how secure he is! HIERON. Secure! why dost thou wonder at it? _I tell thee, Viceroy, this day I've seen Revenge, d in that sight am grown a prouder monarch Than ever sate under the crown of Spain. Had I as many lives at there be stars,_, _As many heavens to go to as those lives, I'd give them all, ay, and my soul to boot, But I would see thee ride in this red pool. Methinks, since I grew inward with revenge, I cannot look with scorn enough on death._ KING. What! dost thou mock us, slave? Bring tortures forth. HIERON. _Do, do, do; and meantime I'll torture you. You had a son as I take it, and your son Should have been married to your daughter: ha! was it not so? You had a son too, he was my liege's nephew. He was proud and politic--had he lived, He might have come to wear the crown of Spain: I think 't was so--'t was I that killed him; Look you--this same hand was it that stabb'd His heart--do you see this hand? For one Horatio, if you ever knew him-- A youth, one that they hang'd up in his father's garden-- One that did force your valiant son to yield_," &c.--ED. ] _April_ 7. 1833. LOVE'S LABOUR LOST.--GIFFORD'S MASSINGER.--SHAKSPEARE.--THE OLD DRAMATISTS. I think I could point out to a half line what is really Shakspeare's in Love's Labour Lost, and some other of the not entirely genuine plays. What he wrote in that play is of his earliest manner, having the all-pervading sweetness which he never lost, and that extreme condensation which makes the couplets fall into epigrams, as in the Venus and Adonis, and Rape of Lucrece. [1] In the drama alone, as Shakspeare soon found out, could the sublime poet and profound philosopher find the conditions of a compromise. In the Love's Labour Lost there are many faint sketches of some of his vigorous portraits in after-life--as for example, in particular, of Benedict and Beatrice.[2] [Footnote 1: "In Shakspeare's _Poems_ the creative power and the intellectual energy wrestle as in a war embrace. Each in its excess of strength seems to threaten the extinction of the other. At length, in the drama, they were reconciled, and fought each with its shield before the breast of the other. Or like two rapid streams, that, at their first meeting within narrow and rocky banks, mutually strive to repel each other, and intermix reluctantly, and in tumult; but soon finding a wider channel and more yielding shores, blend, and dilate, and flow on in one current, and with one voice."--_Biog. Lit._ vol. ii. p. 21.] [Footnote 2: Mr. Coleridge, of course, alluded to Biron and Rosaline; and there are other obvious prolusions, as the scene of the masque with the courtiers, compared with the play in A Midsummer Night's Dream.--ED.] * * * * * Gifford has done a great deal for the text of Massinger, but not as much as might easily be done. His comparison of Shakspeare with his contemporary dramatists is obtuse indeed.[1] [Footnote 1: See his _Introduction to Massinger, vol_.i. p. 79., in which, amongst other most extraordinary assertions, Mr. Gifford pronounces that _rhythmical modulation is not one of Shakspeare's merits!_--ED.] * * * * * In Shakspeare one sentence begets the next naturally; the meaning is all inwoven. He goes on kindling like a meteor through the dark atmosphere; yet, when the creation in its outline is once perfect, then he seems to rest from his labour, and to smile upon his work, and tell himself that it is very good. You see many scenes and parts of scenes which are simply Shakspeare's, disporting himself in joyous triumph and vigorous fun after a great achievement of his highest genius. * * * * * The old dramatists took great liberties in respect of bringing parties in scene together, and representing one as not recognizing the other under some faint disguise. Some of their finest scenes are constructed on this ground. Shakspeare avails himself of this artifice only twice, I think,--in Twelfth Night, where the two are with great skill kept apart till the end of the play; and in the Comedy of Errors, which is a pure farce, and should be so considered. The definition of a farce is, an improbability or even impossibility granted in the outset, see what odd and laughable events will fairly follow from it! _April _8. 1833. STATESMEN.--BURKE. I never was much subject to violent political humours or accesses of feelings. When I was very young, I wrote and spoke very enthusiastically, but it was always on subjects connected with some grand general principle, the violation of which I thought I could point out. As to mere details of administration, I honestly thought that ministers, and men in office, must, of course, know much better than any private person could possibly do; and it was not till I went to Malta, and had to correspond with official characters myself, that I fully understood the extreme shallowness and ignorance with which men of some note too were able, after a certain fashion, to carry on the government of important departments of the empire. I then quite assented to Oxenstiern's saying, _Nescis, mi fili, quam parva sapientia regitur mundus_. * * * * * Burke was, indeed, a great man. No one ever read history so philosophically as he seems to have done. Yet, until he could associate his general principles with some sordid interest, panic of property, jacobinism, &c., he was a mere dinner bell. Hence you will find so many half truths in his speeches and writings. Nevertheless, let us heartily acknowledge his transcendant greatness. He would have been more influential if he had less surpassed his contemporaries, as Fox and Pitt, men of much inferior minds in all respects. * * * * * As a telegraph supposes a correspondent telescope, so a scientific lecture requires a scientific audience. _April _9. 1833. PROSPECT OF MONARCHY OR DEMOCRACY.--THE REFORMED HOUSE OF COMMONS. I have a deep, though paradoxical, conviction that most of the European nations are more or less on their way, unconsciously indeed, to pure monarchy; that is, to a government in which, under circumstances of complicated and subtle control, the reason of the people shall become efficient in the apparent will of the king.[1] As it seems to me, the wise and good in every country will, in all likelihood, become every day more and more disgusted with the representative form of government, brutalized as it is, and will be, by the predominance of democracy in England, France, and Belgium. The statesmen of antiquity, we know, doubted the possibility of the effective and permanent combination of the three elementary forms of government; and, perhaps, they had more reason than we have been accustomed to think. [Footnote 1: This is backing Vico against Spinosa. It must, however, be acknowledged that at present the prophet of democracy has a good right to be considered the favourite.--ED.] * * * * * You see how this House of Commons has begun to verify all the ill prophecies that were made of it--low, vulgar, meddling with every thing, assuming universal competency, flattering every base passion, and sneering at every thing noble, refined, and truly national! The direct and personal despotism will come on by and by, after the multitude shall have been gratified with the ruin and the spoil of the old institutions of the land. As for the House of Lords, what is the use of ever so much fiery spirit, if there be no principle to guide and to sanctify it? _April _10. 1833. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.--CAPTAIN B. HALL.--NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN STATES. --DEMOCRACY WITH SLAVERY.--QUAKERS. The possible destiny of the United States of America,--as a nation of a hundred millions of freemen,--stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, living under the laws of Alfred, and speaking the language of Shakspeare and Milton, is an august conception. Why should we not wish to see it realized? America would then be England viewed through a solar microscope; Great Britain in a state of glorious magnification! How deeply to be lamented is the spirit of hostility and sneering which some of the popular books of travels have shown in treating of the Americans! They hate us, no doubt, just as brothers hate; but they respect the opinion of an Englishman concerning themselves ten times as much as that of a native of any other country on earth. A very little humouring of their prejudices, and some courtesy of language and demeanour on the part of Englishmen, would work wonders, even as it is, with the public mind of the Americans. * * * * * Captain Basil Hall's book is certainly very entertaining and instructive; but, in my judgment, his sentiments upon many points, and more especially his mode of expression, are unwise and uncharitable. After all, are not most of the things shown up with so much bitterness by him mere national foibles, parallels to which every people has and must of necessity have? * * * * * What you say about the quarrel in the United States is sophistical. No doubt, taxation may, and perhaps in some cases must, press unequally, or apparently so, on different classes of people in a state. In such cases there is a hardship; but, in the long run, the matter is fully compensated to the over-taxed class. For example, take the householders of London, who complain so bitterly of the house and window taxes. Is it not pretty clear that, whether such householder be a tradesman, who indemnifies himself in the price of his goods,--or a letter of lodgings, who does so in his rent, --or a stockholder, who receives it back again in his dividends,--or a country gentleman, who has saved so much fresh levy on his land or his other property,--one way or other, it comes at last pretty nearly to the same thing, though the pressure for the time may be unjust and vexatious, and fit to be removed? But when New England, which may be considered a state in itself, taxes the admission of foreign manufactures in order to cherish manufactures of its own, and thereby forces the Carolinians, another state of itself, with which there is little intercommunion, which has no such desire or interest to serve, to buy worse articles at a higher price, it is altogether a different question, and is, in fact, downright tyranny of the worst, because of the most sordid, kind. What would you think of a law which should tax every person in Devonshire for the pecuniary benefit of every person in Yorkshire? And yet that is a feeble image of the actual usurpation of the New England deputies over the property of the Southern States. * * * * * There are two possible modes of unity in a State; one by absolute coordination of each to all, and of all to each; the other by subordination of classes and offices. Now, I maintain that there never was an instance of the first, nor can there be, without slavery as its condition and accompaniment, as in Athens. The poor Swiss cantons are no exception. The mistake lies in confounding a state which must be based on classes and interests and unequal property, with a church, which is founded on the person, and has no qualification but personal merit. Such a community _may_ exist, as in the case of the Quakers; but, in order to exist, it must be compressed and hedged in by another society--_mundus mundulus in mundo immundo_. * * * * * The free class in a slave state is always, in one sense, the most patriotic class of people in an empire; for their patriotism is not simply the patriotism of other people, but an aggregate of lust of power and distinction and supremacy. _April _11. 1833. LAND AND MONEY. Land was the only species of property which, in the old time, carried any respectability with it. Money alone, apart from some tenure of land, not only did not make the possessor great and respectable, but actually made him at once the object of plunder and hatred. Witness the history of the Jews in this country in the early reigns after the Conquest. * * * * * I have no objection to your aspiring to the political principles of our old Cavaliers; but embrace them all fully, and not merely this and that feeling, whilst in other points you speak the canting foppery of the Benthamite or Malthusian schools. _April _14. 1833. METHODS OF INVESTIGATION. There are three ways of treating a subject:-- In the first mode, you begin with a definition, and that definition is necessarily assumed as the truth. As the argument proceeds, the conclusion from the first proposition becomes the base of the second, and so on. Now, it is quite impossible that you can be sure that you have included all the necessary, and none but the necessary, terms in your definition; as, therefore, you proceed, the original speck of error is multiplied at every remove; the same infirmity of knowledge besetting each successive definition. Hence you may set out, like Spinosa, with all but the truth, and end with a conclusion which is altogether monstrous; and yet the mere deduction shall be irrefragable. Warburton's "Divine Legation" is also a splendid instance of this mode of discussion, and of its inability to lead to the truth: in fact, it is an attempt to adopt the mathematical series of proof, in forgetfulness that the mathematician is sure of the truth of his definition at each remove, because he _creates _it, as he can do, in pure figure and number. But you cannot _make _any thing true which results from, or is connected with, real externals; you can only _find _it out. The chief use of this first mode of discussion is to sharpen the wit, for which purpose it is the best exercitation. 2. The historical mode is a very common one: in it the author professes to find out the truth by collecting the facts of the case, and tracing them downwards; but this mode is worse than the other. Suppose the question is as to the true essence and character of the English constitution. First, where will you begin your collection of facts? where will you end it? What facts will you select, and how do you know that the class of facts which you select are necessary terms in the premisses, and that other classes of facts, which you neglect, are not necessary? And how do you distinguish phenomena which proceed from disease or accident from those which are the genuine fruits of the essence of the constitution? What can be more striking, in illustration of the utter inadequacy of this line of investigation for arriving at the real truth, than the political treatises and constitutional histories which we have in every library? A Whig proves his case convincingly to the reader who knows nothing beyond his author; then comes an old Tory (Carte, for instance), and ferrets up a hamperful of conflicting documents and notices, which proves _his _case _per contra_. A. takes this class of facts; B. takes that class: each proves something true, neither proves _the_ truth, or any thing like _the _truth; that is, the whole truth. 3. You must, therefore, commence with the philosophic idea of the thing, the true nature of which you wish to find out and manifest. You must carry your rule ready made, if you wish to measure aright. If you ask me how I can know that this idea--my own invention--is the truth, by which the phenomena of history are to be explained, I answer, in the same way exactly that you know that your eyes were made to see with; and that is, because you _do _see with them. If I propose to you an idea or self-realizing theory of the constitution, which shall manifest itself as in existence from the earliest times to the present,--which shall comprehend within it _all _the facts which history has preserved, and shall give them a meaning as interchangeably causals or effects;--if I show you that such an event or reign was an obliquity to the right hand, and how produced, and such other event or reign a deviation to the left, and whence originating,--that the growth was stopped here, accelerated there,--that such a tendency is, and always has been, corroborative, and such other tendency destructive, of the main progress of the idea towards realization;--if this idea, not only like a kaleidoscope, shall reduce all the miscellaneous fragments into order, but shall also minister strength, and knowledge, and light to the true patriot and statesmen for working out the bright thought, and bringing the glorious embryo to a perfect birth;--then, I think, I have a right to say that the idea which led to this is not only true, but the truth, the only truth. To set up for a statesman upon historical knowledge only, is as about as wise as to set up for a musician by the purchase of some score flutes, fiddles, and horns. In order to make music, you must know how to play; in order to make your facts speak truth, you must know what the truth is which _ought_ to be proved,--the ideal truth,--the truth which was consciously or unconsciously, strongly or weakly, wisely or blindly, intended at all times.[1] [Footnote 1: I have preserved this passage, conscious, the while, how liable it is to be misunderstood, or at least not understood. The readers of Mr. Coleridge's works generally, or of his "Church and State" in particular, will have no difficulty in entering into his meaning; namely, that no investigation in the non-mathematical sciences can be carried on in a way deserving to be called philosophical, unless the investigator have in himself a mental initiative, or, what comes to the same thing, unless he set out with an intuition of the ultimate aim or idea of the science or aggregation of facts to be explained or interpreted. The analysis of the Platonic and Baconian methods in "The Friend," to which I have before referred, and the "Church and State," exhibit respectively a splendid vindication and example of Mr. Coleridge's mode of reasoning on this subject.--ED.] _April _18. 1833. CHURCH OF ROME.--CELIBACY OF THE CLERGY. In my judgment, Protestants lose a great deal of time in a false attack when they labour to convict the Romanists of false doctrines. Destroy the _Papacy_, and help the priests to wives, and I am much mistaken if the doctrinal errors, such as there really are, would not very soon pass away. They might remain _in terminis_, but they would lose their sting and body, and lapse back into figures of rhetoric and warm devotion, from which they, most of them,--such as transubstantiation, and prayers for the dead and to saints,--originally sprang. But, so long as the Bishop of Rome remains Pope, and has an army of Mamelukes all over the world, we shall do very little by fulminating against mere doctrinal errors. In the Milanese, and elsewhere in the north of Italy, I am told there is a powerful feeling abroad against the Papacy. That district seems to be something in the state of England in the reign of our Henry the Eighth. How deep a wound to morals and social purity has that accursed article of the celibacy of the clergy been! Even the best and most enlightened men in Romanist countries attach a notion of impurity to the marriage of a clergyman. And can such a feeling be without its effect on the estimation of the wedded life in general? Impossible! and the morals of both sexes in Spain, Italy, France, &c. prove it abundantly. The Papal church has had three phases,--anti-Caesarean, extra-national, anti-Christian. _April _20. 1833. ROMAN CONQUEST OF ITALY. The Romans would never have subdued the Italian tribes if they had not boldly left Italy and conquered foreign nations, and so, at last, crushed their next-door neighbours by external pressure. _April _24. 1833. WEDDED LOVE IN SHAKSPEARE AND HIS CONTEMPORARY DRAMATISTS.--TENNYSON'S POEMS. Except in Shakspeare, you can find no such thing as a pure conception of wedded love in our old dramatists. In Massinger, and Beaumont and Fletcher, it really is on both sides little better than sheer animal desire. There is scarcely a suitor in all their plays, whose _abilities_ are not discussed by the lady or her waiting-woman. In this, as in all things, how transcendant over his age and his rivals was our sweet Shakspeare! * * * * * I have not read through all Mr. Tennyson's poems, which have been sent to me; but I think there are some things of a good deal of beauty in what I have seen. The misfortune is, that he has begun to write verses without very well understanding what metre is. Even if you write in a known and approved metre, the odds are, if you are not a metrist yourself, that you will not write harmonious verses; but to deal in new metres without considering what metre means and requires, is preposterous. What I would, with many wishes for success, prescribe to Tennyson,--indeed without it he can never be a poet in act,--is to write for the next two or three years in none but one or two well-known and strictly defined metres, such as the heroic couplet, the octave stanza, or the octo-syllabic measure of the Allegro and Penseroso. He would, probably, thus get imbued with a sensation, if not a sense, of metre without knowing it, just as Eton boys get to write such good Latin verses by conning Ovid and Tibullus. As it is, I can scarcely scan some of his verses. _May _1. 1833. RABELAIS AND LUTHER.--WIT AND MADNESS. I think with some interest upon the fact that Rabelais and Luther were born in the same year.[1] Glorious spirits! glorious spirits! ----"Hos utinam inter Heroas natum me!" [Footnote 1: They were both born within twelve months of each other, I believe; but Luther's birth was in November, 1484, and that of Rabelais is generally placed at the end of the year preceding.--ED.] * * * * * "Great wits are sure to madness near allied," says Dryden, and true so far as this, that genius of the highest kind implies an unusual intensity of the modifying power, which detached from the discriminative and reproductive power, might conjure a platted straw into a royal diadem: but it would be at least as true, that great genius is most alien from madness,--yea, divided from it by an impassable mountain,-- namely, the activity of thought and vivacity of the accumulative memory, which are no less essential constituents of "great wit." _May _4. 1833. COLONIZATION.--MACHINERY.--CAPITAL. Colonization is not only a manifest expedient for, but an imperative duty on, Great Britain. God seems to hold out his finger to us over the sea. But it must be a national colonization, such as was that of the Scotch to America; a colonization of hope, and not such as we have alone encouraged and effected for the last fifty years, a colonization of despair. * * * * * The wonderful powers of machinery can, by multiplied production, render the mere _arte facta _of life actually cheaper: thus money and all other things being supposed the same in value, a silk gown is five times cheaper now than in Queen Elizabeth's time; but machinery cannot cheapen, in any thing like an equal degree, the immediate growths of nature or the immediate necessaries of man. Now the _arte facta _are sought by the higher classes of society in a proportion incalculably beyond that in which they are sought by the lower classes; and therefore it is that the vast increase of mechanical powers has not cheapened life and pleasure to the poor as it has done to the rich. In some respects, no doubt, it has done so, as in giving cotton dresses to maid-servants, and penny gin to all. A pretty benefit truly! * * * * * I think this country is now suffering grievously under an excessive accumulation of capital, which, having no field for profitable operation, is in a state of fierce civil war with itself. _May _6. 1833. ROMAN CONQUEST.--CONSTANTINE.--PAPACY AND THE SCHOOLMEN. The Romans had no national clerisy; their priesthood was entirely a matter of state, and, as far back as we can trace it, an evident stronghold of the Patricians against the increasing powers of the Plebeians. All we know of the early Romans is, that, after an indefinite lapse of years, they had conquered some fifty or sixty miles round their city. Then it is that they go to war with Carthage, the great maritime power, and the result of that war was the occupation of Sicily. Thence they, in succession, conquered Spain, Macedonia, Asia Minor, &c., and so at last contrived to subjugate Italy, partly by a tremendous back blow, and partly by bribing the Italian States with a communication of their privileges, which the now enormously enriched conquerors possessed over so large a portion of the civilized world. They were ordained by Providence to conquer and amalgamate the materials of Christendom. They were not a national people; they were truly-- _Romanos rerum dominos--_ --and that's all. * * * * * Under Constantine the spiritual power became a complete reflex of the temporal. There were four patriarchs, and four prefects, and so on. The Clergy and the Lawyers, the Church and the State, were opposed. * * * * * The beneficial influence of the Papacy upon the whole has been much over- rated by some writers; and certainly no country in Europe received less benefit and more harm from it than England. In fact, the lawful kings and parliaments of England were always essentially Protestant in feeling for a national church, though they adhered to the received doctrines of the Christianity of the day; and it was only the usurpers, John, Henry IV., &c., that went against this policy. All the great English schoolmen, Scotus Erigena[1], Duns Scotus, Ockham, and others, those morning stars of the Reformation, were heart and soul opposed to Rome, and maintained the Papacy to be Antichrist. The Popes always persecuted, with rancorous hatred, the national clerisies, the married clergy, and disliked the universities which grew out of the old monasteries. The Papacy was, and is, essentially extra- national, and was always so considered in this country, although not believed to be anti-Christian. [Footnote 1: John Scotus, or Erigena, was born, according to different authors, in Wales, Scotland, or Ireland; but I do not find any account making him an Englishman of Saxon blood. His death is uncertainly placed in the beginning of the ninth century. He lived in well-known intimacy with Charles the Bald, of France, who died about A. D. 874. He resolutely resisted the doctrine of transubstantiation, and was publicly accused of heresy on that account. But the king of France protected him--ED.] _May_ 8. 1833. CIVIL WAR OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.--HAMPDEN'S SPEECH. I know no portion of history which a man might write with so much pleasure as that of the great struggle in the time of Charles I., because he may feel the profoundest respect for both parties. The side taken by any particular person was determined by the point of view which such person happened to command at the commencement of the inevitable collision, one line seeming straight to this man, another line to another. No man of that age saw _the_ truth, the whole truth; there was not light enough for that. The consequence, of course, was a violent exaggeration of each party for the time. The King became a martyr, and the Parliamentarians traitors, and _vice versâ_. The great reform brought into act by and under William the Third combined the principles truly contended for by Charles and his Parliament respectively: the great revolution of 1831 has certainly, to an almost ruinous degree, dislocated those principles of government again. As to Hampden's speech[1], no doubt it means a declaration of passive obedience to the sovereign, as the creed of an English Protestant individual: every man, Cromwell and all, would have said as much; it was the antipapistical tenet, and almost vauntingly asserted on all occasions by Protestants up to that time. But it implies nothing of Hampden's creed as to the duty of Parliament. [Footnote 1: On his impeachment with the other four members, 1642. See the "Letter to John Murray, Esq. _touching_ Lord Nugent," 1833. It is extraordinary that Lord N. should not see the plain distinction taken by Hampden, between not obeying an unlawful command, and rebelling against the King because of it. He approves the one, and condemns the other. His words are, "to _yield obedience to_ the commands of a King, if against the true religion, against the ancient and fundamental laws of the land, is another sign of an ill subject:"--"To _resist_ the lawful power of the King; to raise insurrection against the King; admit him adverse in his religion; _to conspire against his sacred person, or any ways to rebel, though commanding things against our consciences in exercising religion, or against the rights and privileges of the subject_, is an absolute sign of the disaffected and traitorous subject."--ED.] _May_ 10. 1833. REFORMED HOUSE OF COMMONS. Well, I think no honest man will deny that the prophetic denunciations of those who seriously and solemnly opposed the Reform Bill are in a fair way of exact fulfilment! For myself, I own I did not expect such rapidity of movement. I supposed that the first parliament would contain a large number of low factious men, who would vulgarize and degrade the debates of the House of Commons, and considerably impede public business, and that the majority would be gentlemen more fond of their property than their politics. But really the truth is something more than this. Think of upwards of 160 members voting away two millions and a half of tax on Friday[1], at the bidding of whom, shall I say? and then no less than 70 of those very members rescinding their votes on the Tuesday next following, nothing whatever having intervened to justify the change, except that they had found out that at least seven or eight millions more must go also upon the same principle, and that the revenue was cut in two! Of course I approve the vote of rescission, however dangerous a precedent; but what a picture of the composition of this House of Commons! [Footnote 1: On Friday, the 26th of April, 1833, Sir William Ingilby moved and carried a resolution for reducing the duty on malt from 28s. 8d. to l0s. per quarter. One hundred and sixty-two members voted with him. On Tuesday following, the 30th of April, seventy-six members only voted against the rescission of the same resolution.--ED.] _May_ 13. 1833. FOOD.--MEDICINE.--POISON.--OBSTRUCTION. 1. That which is digested wholly, and part of which is assimilated, and part rejected, is--Food. 2. That which is digested wholly, and the whole of which is partly assimilated, and partly not, is--Medicine. 3. That which is digested, but not assimilated, is--Poison. 4. That which is neither digested nor assimilated is--Mere Obstruction. As to the stories of slow poisons, I cannot say whether there was any, or what, truth in them; but I certainly believe a man may be poisoned by arsenic a year after he has taken it. In fact, I think that is known to have happened. May 14. 1833. WILSON.--SHAKSPEARE'S SONNETS.--LOVE. Professor Wilson's character of Charles Lamb in the last Blackwood, _Twaddle on Tweed-side_[1], is very sweet indeed, and gratified me much. It does honour to Wilson, to his head and his heart. [Footnote 1: "Charles Lamb ought really not to abuse Scotland in the pleasant way he so often does in the sylvan shades of Enfield; for Scotland loves Charles Lamb; but he is wayward and wilful in his wisdom, and conceits that many a Cockney is a better man even than Christopher North. But what will not Christopher forgive to genius and goodness! Even Lamb, bleating libels on his native land. Nay, he learns lessons of humanity even from the mild malice of Elia, and breathes a blessing on him and his household in their bower of rest." Some of Mr. Coleridge's poems were first published with some of C. Lamb's at Bristol in 1797. The remarkable words on the title-page have been aptly cited in the New Monthly Magazine for February, 1835, p. 198.: "Duplex nobis vinculum, et amicitiae et similium junctarumque Camcoenarum,--quod utinam neque mors solvat, neque temporis longinquitas." And even so it came to pass after thirty seven years more had passed over their heads,--ED.] * * * * * How can I wish that Wilson should cease to write what so often soothes and suspends my bodily miseries, and my mental conflicts! Yet what a waste, what a reckless spending, of talent, ay, and of genius, too, in his I know not how many years' management of Blackwood! If Wilson cares for fame, for an enduring place and prominence in literature, he should now, I think, hold his hand, and say, as he well may,-- "Militavi non sine gloria: Nunc arma defunctumque bello Barbiton hic paries habebit." Two or three volumes collected out of the magazine by himself would be very delightful. But he must not leave it for others to do; for some recasting and much condensation would be required; and literary executors make sad work in general with their testators' brains. * * * * * I believe it possible that a man may, under certain states of the moral feeling, entertain something deserving the name of love towards a male object--an affection beyond friendship, and wholly aloof from appetite. In Elizabeth's and James's time it seems to have been almost fashionable to cherish such a feeling; and perhaps we may account in some measure for it by considering how very inferior the women of that age, taken generally, were in education and accomplishment of mind to the men. Of course there were brilliant exceptions enough; but the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher-- the most popular dramatists that ever wrote for the English stage--will show us what sort of women it was generally pleasing to represent. Certainly the language of the two friends, Musidorus and Pyrocles, in the Arcadia, is such as we could not now use except to women; and in Cervantes the same tone is sometimes adopted, as in the novel of the Curious Impertinent. And I think there is a passage in the New Atlantis[1] of Lord Bacon, in which he speaks of the possibility of such a feeling, but hints the extreme danger of entertaining it, or allowing it any place in a moral theory. I mention this with reference to Shakspeare's sonnets, which have been supposed, by some, to be addressed to William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, whom Clarendon calls[2] the most beloved man of his age, though his licentiousness was equal to his virtues. I doubt this. I do not think that Shakespeare, merely because he was an actor, would have thought it necessary to veil his emotions towards Pembroke under a disguise, though he might probably have done so, if the real object had perchance been a Laura or a Leonora. It seems to me that the sonnets could only have come from a man deeply in love, and in love with a woman; and there is one sonnet which, from its incongruity, I take to be a purposed blind. These extraordinary sonnets form, in fact, a poem of so many stanzas of fourteen lines each; and, like the passion which inspired them, the sonnets are always the same, with a variety of expression,--continuous, if you regard the lover's soul,--distinct, if you listen to him, as he heaves them sigh after sigh. These sonnets, like the Venus and Adonis, and the Rape of Lucrece, are characterized by boundless fertility and laboured condensation of thought, with perfection of sweetness in rhythm and metre. These are the essentials in the budding of a great poet. Afterwards habit and consciousness of power teach more ease--_praecipitandum liberum spiritum_. [Footnote 1: I cannot fix upon any passage in this work, to which it can be supposed that Mr. Coleridge alluded, unless it be the speech of Joabin the Jew; but it contains nothing coming up to the meaning in the text. The only approach to it seems to be:--"As for masculine love, they have no touch of it; and yet there are not so faithful and inviolate friendships in the world again as are there; and to speak generally, as I said before, I have not read of any such chastity in any people as theirs."--ED.] [Footnote 2: "William Earl of Pembroke was next, a man of another mould and making, and of another fame and reputation with all men, being the most universally beloved and esteemed of any man of that age." ......."He indulged to himself the pleasures of all kinds, almost in all excesses."--_Hist. of the Rebellion_, book i. He died in 1630, aged fifty years. The dedication by T. T. (Thomas Thorpe) is to "the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets, Mr. W. H." and Malone is inclined to think that William Hughes is meant. As to Mr. W. H. being the _only_ begetter of these sonnets, it must be observed, that at least the last twenty-eight are beyond dispute addressed to a woman. I suppose the twentieth sonnet was the particular one conceived by Mr. C. to be a blind; but it seems to me that many others may be so construed, if we set out with a conviction that the real object of the poet was a woman.--ED.] * * * * * Every one who has been in love, knows that the passion is strongest, and the appetite weakest, in the absence of the beloved object, and that the reverse is the case in her presence. _May_ 15. 1833. WICLIFFE.--LUTHER.--REVERENCE FOR IDEAL TRUTHS.--JOHNSON THE WHIG.-- ASGILL.--JAMES I. Wicliffe's genius was, perhaps, not equal to Luther's; but really the more I know of him from Vaughan and Le Bas, both of whose books I like, I think him as extraordinary a man as Luther upon the whole. He was much sounder and more truly catholic in his view of the Eucharist than Luther. And I find, not without some pleasure, that my own view of it, which I was afraid was original, was maintained in the tenth century, that is to say, that the body broken had no reference to the human body of Christ, but to the Caro Noumenon, or symbolical Body, the Rock that followed the Israelites. Whitaker beautifully says of Luther;--_Felix ille, quem Dominus eo honore dignatus est, ut homines nequissimos suos haberet inimicos_. * * * * * There is now no reverence for any thing; and the reason is, that men possess conceptions only, and all their knowledge is conceptional only. Now as, to conceive, is a work of the mere understanding, and as all that can be conceived may be comprehended, it is impossible that a man should reverence that, to which he must always feel something in himself superior. If it were possible to conceive God in a strict sense, that is, as we conceive a horse or a tree, even God himself could not excite any reverence, though he might excite fear or terror, or perhaps love, as a tiger or a beautiful woman. But reverence, which is the synthesis of love and fear, is only due from man, and, indeed, only excitable in man, towards ideal truths, which are always mysteries to the understanding, for the same reason that the motion of my finger behind my back is a mystery to you now--your eyes not being made for seeing through my body. It is the reason only which has a sense by which ideas can be recognized, and from the fontal light of ideas only can a man draw intellectual power. * * * * * Samuel Johnson[1], whom, to distinguish him from the Doctor, we may call the Whig, was a very remarkable writer. He may be compared to his contemporary De Foe, whom he resembled in many points. He is another instance of King William's discrimination, which was so much superior to that of any of his ministers, Johnson was one of the most formidable advocates for the Exclusion Bill, and he suffered by whipping and imprisonment under James accordingly. Like Asgill, he argues with great apparent candour and clearness till he has his opponent within reach, and then comes a blow as from a sledge-hammer. I do not know where I could put my hand upon a book containing so much sense and sound constitutional doctrine as this thin folio of Johnson's Works; and what party in this country would read so severe a lecture in it as our modern Whigs! A close reasoner and a good writer in general may be known by his pertinent use of connectives. Read that page of Johnson; you cannot alter one conjunction without spoiling the sense. It is a linked strain throughout. In your modern books, for the most part, the sentences in a page have the same connection with each other that marbles have in a bag; they touch without adhering. Asgill evidently formed his style upon Johnson's, but he only imitates one part of it. Asgill never rises to Johnson's eloquence. The latter was a sort of Cobbett-Burke. James the First thought that, because all power in the state seemed to proceed _from_ the crown, all power therefore remained in the crown;--as if, because the tree sprang from the seed, the stem, branches, leaves, and fruit were all contained in the seed. The constitutional doctrine as to the relation which the king bears to the other components of the state is in two words this:--He is a representative of the whole of that, of which he is himself a part. [Footnote 1: Dryden's Ben Jochanan, in the second part of Absalom and Achitophel. He was born in 1649, and died in 1703. He was a clergyman. In 1686, when the army was encamped on Hounslow Heath, he published "A humble and hearty Address to all English Protestants in the present Army." For this he was tried and sentenced to be pilloried in three places, pay a fine, and be whipped from Newgate to Tyburn. An attempt was also made to degrade him from his orders, but this failed through an informality. After the Revolution he was preferred.--ED.] _May_ 17. 1833. SIR P. SIDNEY.--THINGS ARE FINDING THEIR LEVEL. When Sir Philip Sidney saw the enthusiasm which agitated every man, woman, and child in the Netherlands against Philip and D'Alva, he told Queen Elizabeth that it was the spirit of God, and that it was invincible. What is the spirit which seems to move and unsettle every other man in England and on the Continent at this time? Upon my conscience, and judging by St. John's rule, I think it is a special spirit of the devil--and a very vulgar devil too! * * * * * Your modern political economists say that it is a principle in their science--that all things _find_ their level;--which I deny; and say, on the contrary, that the true principle is, that all things are _finding_ their level like water in a storm. _May_ 18. 1833. GERMAN.--GOETHE.--GOD'S PROVIDENCE.--MAN'S FREEDOM. German is inferior to English in modifications of expression of the affections, but superior to it in modifications of expression of all objects of the senses. * * * * * Goethe's small lyrics are delightful. He showed good taste in not attempting to imitate Shakspeare's Witches, which are threefold,--Fates, Furies, and earthly Hags o' the caldron. * * * * * Man does not move in cycles, though nature does. Man's course is like that of an arrow; for the portion of the great cometary ellipse which he occupies is no more than a needle's length to a mile. In natural history, God's freedom is shown in the law of necessity. In moral history, God's necessity or providence is shown in man's freedom. _June_ 8. 1833. DOM MIGUEL AND DOM PEDRO.--WORKING TO BETTER ONE'S CONDITION.--NEGRO EMANCIPATION.--FOX AND PITT.--REVOLUTION. There can be no doubt of the gross violations of strict neutrality by this government in the Portuguese affair; but I wish the Tories had left the matter alone, and not given room to the people to associate them with that scoundrel Dom Miguel. You can never interest the common herd in the abstract question; with them it is a mere quarrel between the men; and though Pedro is a very doubtful character, he is not so bad as his brother; and, besides, we are naturally interested for the girl. * * * * * It is very strange that men who make light of the direct doctrines of the Scriptures, and turn up their noses at the recommendation of a line of conduct suggested by religious truth, will nevertheless stake the tranquillity of an empire, the lives and properties of millions of men and women, on the faith of a maxim of modern political economy! And this, too, of a maxim true only, if at all, of England or a part of England, or some other country;--namely, that the desire of bettering their condition will induce men to labour even more abundantly and profitably than servile compulsion,--to which maxim the past history and present state of all Asia and Africa give the lie. Nay, even in England at this day, every man in Manchester, Birmingham, and in other great manufacturing towns, knows that the most skilful artisans, who may earn high wages at pleasure, are constantly in the habit of working but a few days in the week, and of idling the rest. I believe St. Monday is very well kept by the workmen in London. The love of indolence is universal, or next to it. * * * * * Must not the ministerial plan for the West Indies lead necessarily to a change of property, either by force or dereliction? I can't see any way of escaping it. * * * * * You are always talking of the _rights_ of the negroes. As a rhetorical mode of stimulating the people of England _here_, I do not object; but I utterly condemn your frantic practice of declaiming about their rights to the blacks themselves. They ought to be forcibly reminded of the state in which their brethren in Africa still are, and taught to be thankful for the providence which has placed them within reach of the means of grace. I know no right except such as flows from righteousness; and as every Christian believes his righteousness to be imputed, so must his right be an imputed right too. It must flow out of a duty, and it is under that name that the process of humanization ought to begin and to be conducted throughout. * * * * * Thirty years ago, and more, Pitt availed himself, with great political dexterity, of the apprehension, which Burke and the conduct of some of the clubs in London had excited, and endeavoured to inspire into the nation a panic of property. Fox, instead of exposing the absurdity of this by showing the real numbers and contemptible weakness of the disaffected, fell into Pitt's trap, and was mad enough to exaggerate even Pitt's surmises. The consequence was, a very general apprehension throughout the country of an impending revolution, at a time when, I will venture to say, the people were more heart-whole than they had been for a hundred years previously. After I had travelled in Sicily and Italy, countries where there were real grounds for fear, I became deeply impressed with the difference. Now, after a long continuance of high national glory and influence, when a revolution of a most searching and general character is actually at work, and the old institutions of the country are all awaiting their certain destruction or violent modification--the people at large are perfectly secure, sleeping or gambolling on the very brink of a volcano. _June_ 15. 1833. VIRTUE AND LIBERTY.--EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS.--ERASMUS.----LUTHER. The necessity for external government to man is in an inverse ratio to the vigour of his self-government. Where the last is most complete, the first is least wanted. Hence, the more virtue the more liberty. * * * * * I think St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans the most profound work in existence; and I hardly believe that the writings of the old Stoics, now lost, could have been deeper. Undoubtedly it is, and must be, very obscure to ordinary readers; but some of the difficulty is accidental, arising from the form in which the Epistle appears. If we could now arrange this work in the way in which we may be sure St. Paul would himself do, were he now alive, and preparing it for the press, his reasoning would stand out clearer. His accumulated parentheses would be thrown into notes, or extruded to the margin. You will smile, after this, if I say that I think I understand St. Paul; and I think so, because, really and truly, I recognize a cogent consecutiveness in the argument--the only evidence I know that you understand any book. How different is the style of this intensely passionate argument from that of the catholic circular charge called the Epistle to the Ephesians!--and how different that of both from the style of the Epistles to Timothy and Titus, which I venture to call [Greek: epistolal panloeideiz] Erasmus's paraphrase of the New Testament is clear and explanatory; but you cannot expect any thing very deep from Erasmus. The only fit commentator on Paul was Luther--not by any means such a gentleman as the Apostle, but almost as great a genius. _June_ 17. 1833. NEGRO EMANCIPATION. Have you been able to discover any principle in this Emancipation Bill for the Slaves, except a principle of fear of the abolition party struggling with a dread of causing some monstrous calamity to the empire at large? Well! I will not prophesy; and God grant that this tremendous and unprecedented act of positive enactment may not do the harm to the cause of humanity and freedom which I cannot but fear! But yet, what can be hoped, when all human wisdom and counsel are set at nought, and religious faith-- the only miraculous agent amongst men--is not invoked or regarded! and that most unblest phrase--the Dissenting _interest_--enters into the question! _June_ 22. 1833. HACKET'S LIFE OF ARCHBISHOP WILLIAMS.--CHARLES I.--MANNERS UNDER EDWARD III., RICHARD II., AND HENRY VIII. What a delightful and instructive hook Bishop Hacket's Life of Archbishop Williams is! You learn more from it of that which is valuable towards an insight into the times preceding the Civil War than from all the ponderous histories and memoirs now composed about that period. * * * * * Charles seems to have been a very disagreeable personage during James's life. There is nothing dutiful in his demeanour. * * * * * I think the spirit of the court and nobility of Edward III. and Richard II. was less gross than that in the time of Henry VIII.; for in this latter period the chivalry had evaporated, and the whole coarseness was left by itself. Chaucer represents a very high and romantic style of society amongst the gentry. _June_ 29. 1833. HYPOTHESIS.--SUFFICTION.--THEORY.--LYELL'S GEOLOGY.--GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE. --GERARD DOUW's "SCHOOLMASTER" AND TITIAN'S "VENUS."--SIR J. SCARLETT. It seems to me a great delusion to call or suppose the imagination of a subtle fluid, or molecules penetrable with the same, a legitimate hypothesis. It is a mere _suffiction_. Newton took the fact of bodies falling to the centre, and upon that built up a legitimate hypothesis. It was a subposition of something certain. But Descartes' vortices were not an hypothesis; they rested on no fact at all; and yet they did, in a clumsy way, explain the motions of the heavenly bodies. But your subtle fluid is pure gratuitous assumption; and for what use? It explains nothing. Besides, you are endeavouring to deduce power from mass, in which you expressly say there is no power but the _vis inertiae_: whereas, the whole analogy of chemistry proves that power produces mass. * * * * * The use of a theory in the real sciences is to help the investigator to a complete view of all the hitherto discovered facts relating to the science in question; it is a collected view, [Greek: the_orhia], of all he yet knows in _one_. Of course, whilst any pertinent facts remain unknown, no theory can be exactly true, because every new fact must necessarily, to a greater or less degree, displace the relation of all the others. A theory, therefore, only helps investigation; it cannot invent or discover. The only true theories are those of geometry, because in geometry all the premisses are true and unalterable. But, to suppose that, in our present exceedingly imperfect acquaintance with the facts, any theory in chemistry or geology is altogether accurate, is absurd:--it cannot be true. Mr. Lyell's system of geology is just half the truth, and no more. He affirms a great deal that is true, and he denies a great deal which is equally true; which is the general characteristic of all systems not embracing the whole truth. So it is with the rectilinearity or undulatory motion of light;--I believe both; though philosophy has as yet but imperfectly ascertained the conditions of their alternate existence, or the laws by which they are regulated. * * * * * Those who deny light to be matter do not, therefore, deny its corporeity. * * * * * The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable. It is no doubt a sublimer effort of genius than the Greek style; but then it depends much more on execution for its effect. I was more than ever impressed with the marvellous sublimity and transcendant beauty of King's College Chapel.[1] It is quite unparalleled. I think Gerard Douw's "Schoolmaster," in the Fitzwilliam Museum, the finest thing of the sort I ever saw;--whether you look at it at the common distance, or examine it with a glass, the wonder is equal. And that glorious picture of the Venus--so perfectly beautiful and perfectly innocent--as if beauty and innocence could not be dissociated! The French thing below is a curious instance of the inherent grossness of the French taste. Titian's picture is made quite bestial. [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge visited Cambridge upon the occasion of the scientific meeting there in June, 1833.--"My emotions," he said, "at revisiting the university were at first, overwhelming. I could not speak for an hour; yet my feelings were upon the whole very pleasurable, and I have not passed, of late years at least, three days of such great enjoyment and healthful excitement of mind and body. The bed on which I slept--and slept soundly too--was, as near as I can describe it, a couple of sacks full of potatoes tied together. I understand the young men think it hardens them. Truly I lay down at night a man, and arose in the morning a bruise." He told me "that the men were much amused at his saying that the fine old Quaker philosopher Dalton's face was like All Souls' College." The two persons of whom he spoke with the greatest interest were Mr. Faraday and Mr. Thirlwall; saying of the former, "that he seemed to have the true temperament of genius, that carrying-on of the spring and freshness of youthful, nay, boyish feelings, into the matured strength of manhood!" For, as Mr. Coleridge had long before expressed the same thought,--"To find no contradiction in the union of old and new; to contemplate the Ancient of Days and all his works with feelings as fresh as if all had then sprung forth at the first creative fiat, this characterizes the mind that feels the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it. To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which everyday for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar; 'With sun and moon and stars throughout the year, And man and woman;'-- this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish genius from talent. And therefore is it the prime merit of genius, and its most unequivocal mode of manifestation, so to represent familiar objects as to awaken in the minds of others a kindred feeling concerning them, and that freshness of sensation which is the constant accompaniment of mental, no less than of bodily, convalescence. Who has not a thousand times seen snow fall on water? Who has not watched it with a new feeling, from the time that he has read Burns's comparison of sensual pleasure 'To snow that falls upon a river, A moment white--then gone for ever!'" _Biog. Lit_. vol. i, p. 85.--ED.] * * * * * I think Sir James Scarlett's speech for the defendant, in the late action of Cobbett v. The Times, for a libel, worthy of the best ages of Greece or Rome; though, to be sure, some of his remarks could not have been very palatable to his clients. * * * * * I am glad you came in to punctuate my discourse, which I fear has gone on for an hour without any stop at all. _July_ 1. 1833. MANDEVILLE'S FABLE OF THE BEES.--BESTIAL THEORY.--CHARACTER OF BERTRAM.-- BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER'S DRAMAS.--�SCHYLUS, SOPHOCLES, EURIPIDES,--MILTON. If I could ever believe that Mandeville really meant any thing more by his Fable of the Bees than a _bonne bouche_ of solemn raillery, I should like to ask those man-shaped apes who have taken up his suggestions in earnest, and seriously maintained them as bases for a rational account of man and the world--how they explain the very existence of those dexterous cheats, those superior charlatans, the legislators and philosophers, who have known how to play so well upon the peacock-like vanity and follies of their fellow mortals. By the by, I wonder some of you lawyers (_sub rosa_, of course) have not quoted the pithy lines in Mandeville upon this registration question:-- "The lawyers, of whose art the basis Was raising feuds and splitting cases, _Oppos'd all Registers_, that cheats Might make more work with dipt estates; As 'twere unlawful that one's own Without a lawsuit should be known! They put off hearings wilfully, To finger the refreshing fee; And to defend a wicked cause Examined and survey'd the laws, As burglars shops and houses do, To see where best they may break through." There is great Hudibrastic vigour in these lines; and those on the doctors are also very terse. * * * * * Look at that head of Cline, by Chantrey! Is that forehead, that nose, those temples and that chin, akin to the monkey tribe? No, no. To a man of sensibility no argument could disprove the bestial theory so convincingly as a quiet contemplation of that fine bust. * * * * * I cannot agree with the solemn abuse which the critics have poured out upon Bertram in "All's Well that ends Well." He was a young nobleman in feudal times, just bursting into manhood, with all the feelings of pride of birth and appetite for pleasure and liberty natural to such a character so circumstanced. Of course he had never regarded Helena otherwise than as a dependant in the family; and of all that which she possessed of goodness and fidelity and courage, which might atone for her inferiority in other respects, Bertram was necessarily in a great measure ignorant. And after all, her _prima facie_ merit was the having inherited a prescription from her old father the doctor, by which she cures the king,--a merit, which supposes an extravagance of personal loyalty in Bertram to make conclusive to him in such a matter as that of taking a wife. Bertram had surely good reason to look upon the king's forcing him to marry Helena as a very tyrannical act. Indeed, it must be confessed that her character is not very delicate, and it required all Shakspeare's consummate skill to interest us for her; and he does this chiefly by the operation of the other characters,--the Countess, Lafeu, &c. We get to like Helena from their praising and commending her so much. * * * * * In Beaumont and Fletcher's tragedies the comic scenes are rarely so interfused amidst the tragic as to produce a unity of the tragic on the whole, without which the intermixture is a fault. In Shakspeare, this is always managed with transcendant skill. The Fool in Lear contributes in a very sensible manner to the tragic wildness of the whole drama. Beaumont and Fletcher's serious plays or tragedies are complete hybrids,--neither fish nor flesh,--upon any rules, Greek, Roman, or Gothic: and yet they are very delightful notwithstanding. No doubt, they imitate the ease of gentlemanly conversation better than Shakspeare, who was unable _not_ to be too much associated to succeed perfectly in this. When I was a boy, I was fondest of �schylus; in youth and middle age I preferred Euripides; now in my declining years I admire Sophocles. I can now at length see that Sophocles is the most perfect. Yet he never rises to the sublime simplicity of �schylus--simplicity of design, I mean--nor diffuses himself in the passionate outpourings of Euripides. I understand why the ancients called Euripides the most tragic of their dramatists: he evidently embraces within the scope of the tragic poet many passions,-- love, conjugal affection, jealousy, and so on, which Sophocles seems to have considered as incongruous with the ideal statuesqueness of the tragic drama. Certainly Euripides was a greater poet in the abstract than Sophocles. His choruses may be faulty as choruses, but how beautiful and affecting they are as odes and songs! I think the famous [Greek: Euippoy Xene], in Oedipus Coloneus[1] cold in comparison with many of the odes of Euripides, as that song of the chorus in the Hippolytus--[Greek: "Eoos," Eoos[2]] and so on; and I remember a choric ode in the Hecuba, which always struck me as exquisitely rich and finished; I mean, where the chorus speaks of Troy and the night of the capture.[3] There is nothing very surprising in Milton's preference of Euripides, though so unlike himself. It is very common--very natural--for men to _like_ and even admire an exhibition of power very different in kind from any thing of their own. No jealousy arises. Milton preferred Ovid too, and I dare say he admired both as a man of sensibility admires a lovely woman, with a feeling into which jealousy or envy cannot enter. With Aeschylus or Sophocles he might perchance have matched himself. In Euripides you have oftentimes a very near approach to comedy, and I hardly know any writer in whom you can find such fine models of serious and dignified conversation. [Footnote 1: Greek: Euíppoy, Xége, tmsde chosas Tchoy tà chzátista gãs esaula tdn àxgaeta Kolanón'--ch. t. l. v. 668] [Footnote 2: Greek: "Exos" Exos, ó chat' ômmátton s tázeos póthon eisagog glycheïan Psuchä cháriu oûs èpithtzateúsei mae moi totè sèn chachõ phaneiaes maeô ãrruthmos ëlthois--x.t.l v.527] [Footnote 3: I take it for granted that Mr. Coleridge alluded to the chorus,-- [Greek: Su men, _o patrhis Ilias t_on aporhth_et_on polis ouketi lexei toion El- lan_on nephos amphi se krhuptei, dorhi d_e, dorhi perhsan--k. t. l.] v. 899. Thou, then, oh, natal Troy! no more The city of the unsack'd shalt be, So thick from dark Achaia's shore The cloud of war hath covered thee. Ah! not again I tread thy plain-- The spear--the spear hath rent thy pride; The flame hath scarr'd thee deep and wide; Thy coronal of towers is shorn, And thou most piteous art--most naked and forlorn! I perish'd at the noon of night! When sleep had seal'd each weary eye; When the dance was o'er, And harps no more Rang out in choral minstrelsy. In the dear bower of delight My husband slept in joy; His shield and spear Suspended near, Secure he slept: that sailor band Full sure he deem'd no more should stand Beneath the walls of Troy. And I too, by the taper's light, Which in the golden mirror's haze Flash'd its interminable rays, Bound up the tresses of my hair, That I Love's peaceful sleep might share. I slept; but, hark! that war-shout dread, Which rolling through the city spread; And this the cry,--"When, Sons of Greece, When shall the lingering leaguer cease; When will ye spoil Troy's watch-tower high, And home return?"--I heard the cry, And, starting from the genial bed, Veiled, as a Doric maid, I fled, And knelt, Diana, at thy holy fane, A trembling suppliant--all in vain.] JULY 3. 1833. STYLE.--CAVALIER SLANG.--JUNTOS.--PROSE AND VERSE.--IMITATION AND COPY. The collocation of words is so artificial in Shakspeare and Milton, that you may as well think of pushing a[1] brick out of a wall with your forefinger, as attempt to remove a word out of any of their finished passages.[2] A good lecture upon style might he composed, by taking on the one hand the slang of L'Estrange, and perhaps, even of Roger North,[3] which became so fashionable after the Restoration as a mark of loyalty; and on the other, the Johnsonian magniloquence or the balanced metre of Junius; and then showing how each extreme is faulty, upon different grounds. It is quite curious to remark the prevalence of the Cavalier slang style in the divines of Charles the Second's time. Barrow could not of course adopt such a mode of writing throughout, because he could not in it have communicated his elaborate thinkings and lofty rhetoric; but even Barrow not unfrequently lets slip a phrase here and there in the regular Roger North way--much to the delight, no doubt, of the largest part of his audience and contemporary readers. See particularly, for instances of this, his work on the Pope's supremacy. South is full of it. The style of Junius is a sort of metre, the law of which is a balance of thesis and antithesis. When he gets out of this aphorismic metre into a sentence of five or six lines long, nothing can exceed the slovenliness of the English. Horne Tooke and a long sentence seem the only two antagonists that were too much for him. Still the antithesis of Junius is a real antithesis of images or thought; but the antithesis of Johnson is rarely more than verbal. The definition of good prose is--proper words in their proper places;--of good verse--the most proper words in their proper places. The propriety is in either case relative. The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in general, a fault. In the very best styles, as Southey's, you read page after page, understanding the author perfectly, without once taking notice of the medium of communication;--it is as if he had been speaking to you all the while. But in verse you must do more;--there the words, the _media_, must be beautiful, and ought to attract your notice--yet not so much and so perpetually as to destroy the unity which ought to result from the whole poem. This is the general rule, but, of course, subject to some modifications, according to the different kinds of prose or verse. Some prose may approach towards verse, as oratory, and therefore a more studied exhibition of the _media_ may be proper; and some verse may border more on mere narrative, and there the style should be simpler. But the great thing in poetry is, _quocunque modo_, to effect a unity of impression upon the whole; and a too great fulness and profusion of point in the parts will prevent this. Who can read with pleasure more than a hundred lines or so of Hudibras at one time? Each couplet or quatrain is so whole in itself, that you can't connect them. There is no fusion,--just as it is in Seneca. [Footnote 1: They led me to the sounding shore-- Heavens! as I passed the crowded way, My bleeding lord before me lay-- I saw--I saw--and wept no more, Till, as the homeward breezes bore The bark returning o'er the sea, My gaze, oh Ilion, turn'd on thee! Then, frantic, to the midnight air, I cursed aloud the adulterous pair:-- "They plunge me deep in exile's woe; They lay my country low: Their love--no love! but some dark spell, In vengeance breath'd, by spirit fell. Rise, hoary sea, in awful tide, And whelm that vessel's guilty pride; Nor e'er, in high Mycene's hall, Let Helen boast in peace of mighty Ilion's fall." The translation was given to me by Mr. Justice Coleridge.--ED.] [Footnote 2: "The amotion or transposition will alter the thought, or the feeling, or at least the tone. They are as pieces of mosaic work, from which you cannot strike the smallest block without making a hole in the picture."-- _Quarterly Review_, No. CIII. p. 7.] [Footnote 3: But Mr. Coleridge took a great distinction between North and the other writers commonly associated with him. In speaking of the Examen and the Life of Lord North, in the Friend, Mr. C. calls them "two of the most interesting biographical works in our language, both for the weight of the matter, and the _incuriosa felicitas_ of the style. The pages are all alive with the genuine idioms of our mother tongue. A fastidious taste, it is true, will find offence in the occasional vulgarisms, or what we now call _slang_, which not a few of our writers, shortly after the Restoration of Charles the Second, seem to have affected as a mark of loyalty. These instances, however, are but a trifling drawback. They are not _sought for_, as is too often and too plainly done by L'Estrange, Collyer, Tom Brown, and their imitators. North never goes out of his way, either to seek them, or to avoid them; and, in the main, his language gives us the very nerve, pulse, and sinew of a hearty, healthy, conversational _English_."--Vol. ii. p. 307.--ED.] * * * * * Imitation is the mesothesis of likeness and difference. The difference is as essential to it as the likeness; for without the difference, it would be copy or facsimile. But to borrow a term from astronomy, it is a librating mesothesis: for it may verge more to likeness as in painting, or more to difference, as in sculpture. JULY 4. 1833. DR. JOHNSON.--BOSWELL.--BURKE.--NEWTON.--MILTON. Dr. Johnson's fame now rests principally upon Boswell. It is impossible not to be amused with such a book. But his _bow-wow_ manner must have had a good deal to do with the effect produced;--for no one, I suppose, will set Johnson before Burke,--and Burke was a great and universal talker;--yet now we hear nothing of this except by some chance remarks in Boswell. The fact is, Burke, like all men of genius who love to talk at all, was very discursive and continuous; hence he is not reported; he seldom said the sharp short things that Johnson almost always did, which produce a more decided effect at the moment, and which are so much more easy to carry off.[1] Besides, as to Burke's testimony to Johnson's powers, you must remember that Burke was a great courtier; and after all, Burke said and wrote more than once that he thought Johnson greater in talking than writing, and greater in Boswell than in real life.[2] [Footnote 1: Burke, I am persuaded, was not so continuous a talker as Coleridge. Madame de Stael told a nephew of the latter, at Coppet, that Mr. C. was a master of monologue, _mais qu'il ne savait pas le dialogue_. There was a spice of vindictiveness in this, the exact history of which is not worth explaining. And if dialogue must be cut down in its meaning to small talk, I, for one, will admit that Coleridge, amongst his numberless qualifications, possessed it not. But I am sure that he could, when it suited him, converse as well as any one else, and with women he frequently did converse in a very winning and popular style, confining them, however, as well as he could, to the detail of facts or of their spontaneous emotions. In general, it was certainly otherwise. "You must not be surprised," he said to me, "at my talking so long to you--I pass so much of my time in pain and solitude, yet everlastingly thinking, that, when you or any other persons call on me, I can hardly help easing my mind by pouring forth some of the accumulated mass of reflection and feeling, upon an apparently interested recipient." But the principal reason, no doubt, was the habit of his intellect, which was under a law of discoursing upon all subjects with reference to ideas or ultimate ends. You might interrupt him when you pleased, and he was patient of every sort of conversation except mere personality, which he absolutely hated.--ED.] [Footnote 2: This was said, I believe, to the late Sir James Mackintosh.--ED.] * * * * * Newton _was_ a great man, but you must excuse me if I think that it would take many Newtons to make one Milton. _July_ 6. 1833. PAINTING.----MUSIC.----POETRY. It is a poor compliment to pay to a painter to tell him that his figure stands out of the canvass, or that you start at the likeness of the portrait. Take almost any daub, cut it out of the canvass, and place the figure looking into or out of a window, and any one may take it for life. Or take one of Mrs. Salmon's wax queens or generals, and you will very sensibly feel the difference between a copy, as they are, and an imitation, of the human form, as a good portrait ought to be. Look at that flower vase of Van Huysum, and at these wax or stone peaches and apricots! The last are likest to their original, but what pleasure do they give? None, except to children.[1] Some music is above me; most music is beneath me. I like Beethoven and Mozart--or else some of the aërial compositions of the elder Italians, as Palestrina[2] and Carissimi.--And I love Purcell. The best sort of music is what it should be--sacred; the next best, the military, has fallen to the lot of the Devil. Good music never tires me, nor sends me to sleep. I feel physically refreshed and strengthened by it, as Milton says he did. I could write as good verses now as ever I did, if I were perfectly free from vexations, and were in the _ad libitum_ hearing of fine music, which has a sensible effect in harmonizing my thoughts, and in animating and, as it were, lubricating my inventive faculty. The reason of my not finishing Christabel is not, that I don't know how to do it--for I have, as I always had, the whole plan entire from beginning to end in my mind; but I fear I could not carry on with equal success the execution of the idea, an extremely subtle and difficult one. Besides, after this continuation of Faust, which they tell me is very poor, who can have courage to attempt[3] a reversal of the judgment of all criticism against continuations? Let us except Don Quixote, however, although the second part of that transcendant work is not exactly _uno flatu_ with the original conception. [Footnote 1: This passage, and those following, will evidence, what the readers even of this little work must have seen, that Mr. Coleridge had an eye, almost exclusively, for the ideal or universal in painting and music. He knew nothing of the details of handling in the one, or of rules of composition in the other. Yet he was, to the best of my knowledge, an unerring judge of the merits of any serious effort in the fine arts, and detected the leading thought or feeling of the artist, with a decision which used sometimes to astonish me. Every picture which I have looked at in company with him, seems now, to my mind, translated into English. He would sometimes say, after looking for a minute at a picture, generally a modern one, "There's no use in stopping at this; for I see the painter had no idea. It is mere mechanical drawing. Come on; _here_ the artist _meant_ something for the mind." It was just the same with his knowledge of music. His appetite for what he thought good was literally inexhaustible. He told me he could listen to fine music for twelve hours together, and go away _refreshed_. But he required in music either thought or feeling; mere addresses to the sensual ear he could not away with; hence his utter distaste for Rossini, and his reverence for Beethoven and Mozart--ED.] [Footnote 2: Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was born about 1529, and died in 1594. I believe he may be considered the founder or reformer of the Italian church music. His masses, motets, and hymns are tolerably well known amongst lovers of the old composers; but Mr. Coleridge used to speak with delight of some of Palestrina's madrigals which he heard at Rome. Giacomo Carissimi composed about the years 1640--1650. His style has been charged with effeminacy; but Mr. C. thought it very graceful and chaste. Henry Purcell needs no addition in England.--ED.] [Footnote 3: "The thing attempted in Christabel is the most difficult of execution in the whole field of romance--witchery by daylight--and the success is complete."--_Quarterly Review_, No. CIII. p. 29.] _July 8. 1833._ PUBLIC SCHOOLS. I am clear for public schools as the general rule; but for particular children private education may be proper. For the purpose of moving at ease in the best English society,--mind, I don't call the London exclusive clique the best English society,--the defect of a public education upon the plan of our great schools and Oxford and Cambridge is hardly to be supplied. But the defect is visible positively in some men, and only negatively in others. The first _offend_ you by habits and modes of thinking and acting directly attributable to their private education; in the others you only regret that the freedom and facility of the established and national mode of bringing up is not _added_ to their good qualities. * * * * * I more than doubt the expediency of making even elementary mathematics a part of the routine in the system of the great schools. It is enough, I think, that encouragement and facilities should be given; and I think more will be thus effected than by compelling all. Much less would I incorporate the German or French, or any modern language, into the school labours. I think that a great mistake.[1] [Footnote 1: "One constant blunder"--I find it so pencilled by Mr. C. on a margin--"of these New-Broomers--these Penny Magazine sages and philanthropists, in reference to our public schools, is to confine their view to what schoolmasters teach the boys, with entire oversight of all that the boys are excited to learn from each other and of themselves--with more geniality even because it is not a part of their compelled school knowledge. An Eton boy's knowledge of the St. Lawrence, Mississippi, Missouri, Orellana, &c. will be, generally, found in exact proportion to his knowledge of the Ilissus, Hebrus, Orontes, &c.; inasmuch as modern travels and voyages are more entertaining and fascinating than Cellarius; or Robinson Crusoe, Dampier, and Captain Cook, than the Periegesis. Compare the _lads_ themselves from Eton and Harrow, &c. with the alumni of the New-Broom Institution, and not the lists of school-lessons; and be that comparison the criterion.--ED.] August 4, 1833. SCOTT AND COLERIDGE. Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself were exact, but harmonious, opposites in this;--that every old ruin, hill, river, or tree called up in his mind a host of historical or biographical associations,--just as a bright pan of brass, when beaten, is said to attract the swarming bees;--whereas, for myself, notwithstanding Dr. Johnson, I believe I should walk over the plain of Marathon without taking more interest in it than in any other plain of similar features. Yet I receive as much pleasure in reading the account of the battle, in Herodotus, as any one can. Charles Lamb wrote an essay [1] on a man who lived in past time:--I thought of adding another to it on one who lived not in time at all, past, present, or future,--but beside or collaterally. [Footnote 1: I know not when or where; but are not all the writings of this exquisite genius the effusions of one whose spirit lived in past time? The place which Lamb holds, and will continue to hold, in English literature, seems less liable to interruption than that of any other writer of our day.--ED.] August 10. 1833. NERVOUS WEAKNESS.----HOOKER AND BULL.-----FAITH.----A POET'S NEED OF PRAISE. A PERSON, nervously weak, has a sensation of weakness which is as bad to him as muscular weakness. The only difference lies in the better chance of removal. * * * * * The fact, that Hooker and Bull, in their two palmary works respectively, are read in the Jesuit Colleges, is a curious instance of the power of mind over the most profound of all prejudices. There are permitted moments of exultation through faith, when we cease to feel our own emptiness save as a capacity for our Redeemer's fulness. * * * * * There is a species of applause scarcely less genial to a poet, than the vernal warmth to the feathered songsters during their nest-breeding or incubation; a sympathy, an expressed hope, that is the open air in which the poet breathes, and without which the sense of power sinks back on itself, like a sigh heaved up from the tightened chest of a sick man. _August_ 14. 1833. QUAKERS.--PHILANTHROPISTS.--JEWS. A quaker is made up of ice and flame. He has no composition, no mean temperature. Hence he is rarely interested about any public measure but he becomes a fanatic, and oversteps, in his irrespective zeal, every decency and every right opposed to his course. * * * * * I have never known a trader in philanthropy who was not wrong in heart somewhere or other. Individuals so distinguished are usually unhappy in their family relations,--men not benevolent or beneficent to individuals, but almost hostile to them, yet lavishing money and labour and time on the race, the abstract notion. The cosmopolitism which does not spring out of, and blossom upon, the deep-rooted stem of nationality or patriotism, is a spurious and rotten growth. * * * * * When I read the ninth, tenth, and eleventh chapters of the Epistle to the Romans to that fine old man Mr. ----, at Ramsgate, he shed tears. Any Jew of sensibility must be deeply impressed by them. * * * * * The two images farthest removed from each other which can be comprehended under one term, are, I think, Isaiah [1]--"Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth!"--and Levi of Holywell Street--"Old clothes!"--both of them Jews, you'll observe. _Immane quantum discrepant!_ [Footnote 1: I remember Mr. Coleridge used to call Isaiah his ideal of the Hebrew prophet. He studied that part of the Scripture with unremitting attention and most reverential admiration. Although Mr. C. was remarkably deficient in the technical memory of words, he could say a great deal of Isaiah by heart, and he delighted in pointing out the hexametrical rhythm of numerous passages in the English version:-- "Hear, O heavens, and give ear, | O earth: for the Lord hath spoken. I have nourished and brought up children, | and they have rebelled against me. The ox knoweth his owner, | and the ass his master's crib: But Israel doth not know, | my people doth not consider."--ED.] _August_ 15. 1833. SALLUST.--THUCYDIDES.--HERODOTUS.--GIBBON.--KEY TO THE DECLINE OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE. I consider the two works of Sallust which have come down to us entire, as romances founded on facts; no adequate causes are stated, and there is no real continuity of action. In Thucydides, you are aware from the beginning that you are reading the reflections of a man of great genius and experience upon the character and operation of the two great political principles in conflict in the civilized world in his time; his narrative of events is of minor importance, and it is evident that he selects for the purpose of illustration. It is Thucydides himself whom you read throughout under the names of Pericles, Nicias, &c. But in Herodotus it is just the reverse. He has as little subjectivity as Homer, and, delighting in the great fancied epic of events, he narrates them without impressing any thing as of his own mind upon the narrative. It is the charm of Herodotus that he gives you the spirit of his age--that of Thucydides, that he reveals to you his own, which was above the spirit of his age. The difference between the composition of a history in modern and ancient times is very great; still there are certain principles upon which the history of a modern period may be written, neither sacrificing all truth and reality, like Gibbon, nor descending into mere biography and anecdote. Gibbon's style is detestable, but his style is not the worst thing about him. His history has proved an effectual bar to all real familiarity with the temper and habits of imperial Rome. Few persons read the original authorities, even those which are classical; and certainly no distinct knowledge of the actual state of the empire can be obtained from Gibbon's rhetorical sketches. He takes notice of nothing but what may produce an effect; he skips on from eminence to eminence, without ever taking you through the valleys between: in fact, his work is little else but a disguised collection of all the splendid anecdotes which he could find in any book concerning any persons or nations from the Antonines to the capture of Constantinople. When I read a chapter in Gibbon, I seem to be looking through a luminous haze or fog:--figures come and go, I know not how or why, all larger than life, or distorted or discoloured; nothing is real, vivid, true; all is scenical, and, as it were, exhibited by candlelight. And then to call it a History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire! Was there ever a greater misnomer? I protest I do not remember a single philosophical attempt made throughout the work to fathom the ultimate causes of the decline or fall of that empire. How miserably deficient is the narrative of the important reign of Justinian! And that poor scepticism, which Gibbon mistook for Socratic philosophy, has led him to misstate and mistake the character and influence of Christianity in a way which even an avowed infidel or atheist would not and could not have done. Gibbon was a man of immense reading; but he had no philosophy; and he never fully understood the principle upon which the best of the old historians wrote. He attempted to imitate their artificial construction of the whole work--their dramatic ordonnance of the parts--without seeing that their histories were intended more as documents illustrative of the truths of political philosophy than as mere chronicles of events. The true key to the declension of the Roman empire--which is not to be found in all Gibbon's immense work--may be stated in two words:--the _imperial_ character overlaying, and finally destroying, the _national_ character. Rome under Trajan was an empire without a nation. _August_ 16. 1833. DR. JOHNSON'S POLITICAL PAMPHLETS.--TAXATION.-DIRECT REPRESENTATION.--- UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE.---RIGHT OF WOMEN TO VOTE----HORNE TOOKE.----ETYMOLOGY OF THE FINAL IVE. I like Dr. Johnson's political pamphlets better than any other parts of his works:-particularly his "Taxation no Tyranny" is very clever and spirited, though he only sees half of his subject, and that not in a very philosophical manner. Plunder--Tribute--Taxation--are the three gradations of action by the sovereign on the property of the subject. The first is mere violence, bounded by no law or custom, and is properly an act only between conqueror and conquered, and that, too, in the moment of victory. The second supposes law; but law proceeding only from, and dictated by, one party, the conqueror; law, by which he consents to forego his right of plunder upon condition of the conquered giving up to him, of their own accord, a fixed commutation. The third implies compact, and negatives any right to plunder,--taxation being professedly for the direct benefit of the party taxed, that, by paying a part, he may through the labours and superintendence of the sovereign be able to enjoy the rest in peace. As to the right to tax being only commensurate with direct representation, it is a fable, falsely and treacherously brought forward by those who know its hollowness well enough. You may show its weakness in a moment, by observing that not even the universal suffrage of the Benthamites avoids the difficulty;--for although it may be allowed to be contrary to decorum that women should legislate; yet there can be no reason why women should not choose their representatives to legislate;--and if it be said that they are merged in their husbands, let it be allowed where the wife has no separate property; but where she has a distinct taxable estate, in which her husband has no interest, what right can her husband have to choose for her the person whose vote may affect her separate interest?--Besides, at all events, an unmarried woman of age, possessing one thousand pounds a year, has surely as good a moral right to vote, if taxation without representation is tyranny, as any ten-pounder in the kingdom. The truth, of course, is, that direct representation is a chimera, impracticable in fact, and useless or noxious if practicable. Johnson had neither eye nor ear; for nature, therefore, he cared, as he knew, nothing. His knowledge of town life was minute; but even that was imperfect, as not being contrasted with the better life of the country. Horne Tooke was once holding forth on language, when, turning to me, he asked me if I knew what the meaning of the final _ive_ was in English words. I said I thought I could tell what he, Horne Tooke himself, thought. "Why, what?" said he. "_Vis_," I replied; and he acknowledged I had guessed right. I told him, however, that I could not agree with him; but believed that the final _ive_ came from _ick_--_vicus_, [Greek: --] a'txaq; the root denoting collectivity and community, and that it was opposed to the final _ing_, which signifies separation, particularity, and individual property, from _ingle_, a hearth, or one man's place or seat: [Greek: --] oi'xo?, _vicus_, denoted an aggregation of _ingles_. The alteration of the _c_ and _k_ of the root into the _v_ was evidently the work of the digammate power, and hence we find the _icus_ and _ivus_ indifferently as finals in Latin. The precise difference of the etymologies is apparent in these phrases:--- The lamb is spor_tive;_ that is, has a nature or habit of sporting: the lamb is sport_ing;_ that is, the animal is now performing a sport. Horne Tooke upon this said nothing to my etymology; but I believe he found that he could not make a fool of me, as he did of Godwin and some other of his butts. August 17. 1833. "THE LORD" IN THE ENGLISH VERSION OF THE PSALMS, ETC.----SCOTCH KIRK AND IRVING. It is very extraordinary that, in our translation of the Psalms, which professes to be from the Hebrew, the name Jehovah--[Hebrew: --] 'O -- The Being, or God--should be omitted, and, instead of it, the [Hebrew: --] Ktlpio?, or Lord, of the Septuagint be adopted. The Alexandrian Jews had a superstitious dread of writing the name of God, and put [Greek: Kurhios] not as a translation, but as a mere mark or sign--every one readily understanding for what it really stood. We, who have no such superstition, ought surely to restore the Jehovah, and thereby bring out in the true force the overwhelming testimony of the Psalms to the divinity of Christ, the Jehovah or manifested God.[1] [Footnote 1: I find the same remark in the late most excellent Bishop Sandford's diary, under date 17th December, 1827:--"[Greek: CHairhete en t_o Kurhi_o Kurhios] idem significat quod [Hebrew: --] apud Hebraeos. Hebraei enim nomine [Hebrew: --] sanctissimo nempe Dei nomine, nunquam in colloquio utebantur, sed vice ejus [Hebrew: --] pronuntiabant, quod LXX per [Greek: Kurhios] exprimebant."--_Remains of Bishop Sandford_, vol. i. p. 207. Mr. Coleridge saw this work for the first time many months after making the observation in the text. Indeed it was the very last book he ever read. He was deeply interested in the picture drawn of the Bishop, and said that the mental struggles and bodily sufferings indicated in the Diary had been his own for years past. He conjured me to peruse the Memoir and the Diary with great care:--"I have received," said he, "much spiritual comfort and strength from the latter. O! were my faith and devotion, like my sufferings, equal to that good man's! He felt, as I do, how deep a depth is prayer in faith." In connection with the text, I may add here, that Mr. C. said, that long before he knew that the late Bishop Middleton was of the same opinion, he had deplored the misleading inadequacy of our authorized version of the expression, [Greek: pr_ototokos pas_es ktise_os] in the Epistle to the Colossians, i. 15.: [Greek: hos estin eik_on tou THeou tou aoratou, pr_ototokos pas_es ktise_os.] He rendered the verse in these words:--"Who is the manifestation of God the invisible, the begotten antecedently to all creation;" observing, that in [Greek: pr_ototokos] there was a double superlative of priority, and that the natural meaning of "_first-born of every creature_,"--the language of our version,--afforded no premiss for the causal [Greek: hoti] in the next verse. The same criticism may be found in the Stateman's Manual, p. 56. n.; and see Bishop Sandford's judgment to the same effect, vol. i. p. 165.--ED.] * * * * * I cannot understand the conduct of the Scotch Kirk with regard to poor Irving. They might with ample reason have visited him for the monstrous indecencies of those exhibitions of the spirit;--perhaps the Kirk would not have been justified in overlooking such disgraceful breaches of decorum; but to excommunicate him on account of his language about Christ's body was very foolish. Irving's expressions upon this subject are ill judged, inconvenient, in had taste, and in terms false: nevertheless his apparent meaning, such as it is, is orthodox. Christ's body--as mere body, or rather carcass (for body is an associated word), was no more capable of sin or righteousness than mine or yours;--that his humanity had a capacity of sin, follows from its own essence. He was of like passions as we, and was tempted. How could he be tempted, if he had no formal capacity of being seduced? It is Irving's error to use declamation, high and passionate rhetoric, not introduced and pioneered by calm and clear logic, which is--to borrow a simile, though with a change in the application, from the witty-wise, but not always wisely-witty, Fuller--like knocking a nail into a board, without wimbling a hole for it, and which then either does not enter, or turns crooked, or splits the wood it pierces. August 18. 1833. MILTON'S EGOTISM.--CLAUDIAN.--STERNE. In the Paradise Lost--indeed in every one of his poems--it is Milton himself whom you see; his Satan, his Adam, his Raphael, almost his Eve--are all John Milton; and it is a sense of this intense egotism that gives me the greatest pleasure in reading Milton's works. The egotism of such a man is a revelation of spirit. * * * * * Claudian deserves more attention than is generally paid to him. He is the link between the old classic and the modern way of thinking in verse. You will observe in him an oscillation between the objective poetry of the ancients and the subjective mood of the moderns. His power of pleasingly reproducing the same thought in different language is remarkable, as it is in Pope. Read particularly the Phoenix, and see how the single image of renascence is varied.[1] [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge referred to Claudian's first Idyll:--"Oceani summo circumfluus cequore lucus Trans Indos Eurumque viret," &c. See the lines-- "Hic neque concepto fetu, nec semine surgit; Sed pater est prolesque sibi, nulloque creante Emeritos artus foecunda morte reformat, Et petit alternam totidem per funera vitam. ... Et cumulum texens pretiosa fronde Sabaeum Componit bustumque sibi partumque futurum. ... O senium positure rogo, falsisque sepulcris Natales habiture vices, qui saepe renasci Exitio, proprioque soles pubescere leto, Accipe principium rursus. ... Parturiente rogo-- ... Victuri cineres-- ... Qm fuerat genitor, natus nunc prosilit idem, Succeditque novus--- ... O felix, haeresque tui! quo solvimur omnes, Hoc tibi suppeditat vires; praebetur origo Per cinerem; moritur te non pereunte senectus."--ED.] * * * * * I think highly of Sterne--that is, of the first part of Tristram Shandy: for as to the latter part about the widow Wadman, it is stupid and disgusting; and the Sentimental Journey is poor sickly stuff. There is a great deal of affectation in Sterne, to be sure; but still the characters of Trim and the two Shandies[1] are most individual and delightful. Sterne's morals are bad, but I don't think they can do much harm to any one whom they would not find bad enough before. Besides, the oddity and erudite grimaces under which much of his dirt is hidden take away the effect for the most part; although, to be sure, the book is scarcely readable by women. [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge considered the character of the father, the elder Shandy, as by much the finer delineation of the two. I fear his low opinion of the Sentimental Journey will not suit a thorough Sterneist; but I could never get him to modify his criticism. He said, "The oftener you read Sterne, the more clearly will you perceive the _great_ difference between Tristram Shandy and the Sentimental Journey. There is truth and reality in the one, and little beyond a clever affectation in the other."--ED.] August 20. 1833. HUMOUR AND GENIUS.--GREAT POETS GOOD MEN.--DICTION OF THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENT VERSION.--HEBREW.--VOWELS AND CONSONANTS. Men of humour are always in some degree men of genius; wits are rarely so, although a man of genius may amongst other gifts possess wit, as Shakspeare. * * * * * Genius must have talent as its complement and implement, just as in like manner imagination must have fancy. In short, the higher intellectual powers can only act through a corresponding energy of the lower. * * * * * Men of genius are rarely much annoyed by the company of vulgar people, because they have a power of looking _at_ such persons as objects of amusement of another race altogether. * * * * * I quite agree with Strabo, as translated by Ben Jonson in his splendid dedication of the Fox[1]--that there can be no great poet who is not a good man, though not, perhaps, a _goody_ man. His heart must be pure; he must have learned to look into his own heart, and sometimes to look _at_ it; for how can he who is ignorant of his own heart know any thing of, or be able to move, the heart of any one else? [Footnote 1: [Greek: 'H de (arhet_e) poi_etou synezeyktai t_e tou anthrh_opou kai ouch oion te agathon genesthai poi_et_en, m_e prhoterhon gen_ethenta angrha agathon.]--Lib. I. p. 33. folio. "For, if men will impartially, and not asquint, look toward the offices and function of a poet, they will easily conclude to themselves the impossibility of any man's being the good poet without first being a good man."] * * * * * I think there is a perceptible difference in the elegance and correctness of the English in our versions of the Old and New Testament. I cannot yield to the authority of many examples of usages which may be alleged from the New Testament version. St. Paul is very often most inadequately rendered, and there are slovenly phrases which would never have come from Ben Jonson or any other good prose writer of that day. * * * * * Hebrew is so simple, and its words are so few and near the roots, that it is impossible to keep up any adequate knowledge of it without constant application. The meanings of the words are chiefly traditional. The loss of Origen's Heptaglott Bible, in which he had written out the Hebrew words in Greek characters, is the heaviest which biblical literature has ever experienced. It would have fixed the sounds as known at that time. * * * * * Brute animals have the vowel sounds; man only can utter consonants. It is natural, therefore, that the consonants should be marked first, as being the framework of the word; and no doubt a very simple living language might be written quite intelligibly to the natives without any vowel sounds marked at all. The words would be traditionally and conventionally recognized as in short hand--thus--_Gd crtd th Hvn nd th Rth_. I wish I understood Arabic; and yet I doubt whether to the European philosopher or scholar it is worth while to undergo the immense labour of acquiring that or any other Oriental tongue, except Hebrew. _August_ 23. 1833. GREEK ACCENT AND QUANTITY. The distinction between accent and quantity is clear, and was, no doubt, observed by the ancients in the recitation of verse. But I believe such recitation to have been always an artificial thing, and that the common conversation was entirely regulated by accent. I do not think it possible to _talk_ any language without confounding the quantity of syllables with their high or low tones[1]; although you may _sing_ or _recitative_ the difference well enough. Why should the marks of accent have been considered exclusively necessary for teaching the pronunciation to the Asiatic or African Hellenist, if the knowledge of the acuted syllable did not also carry the stress of time with it? If _[Greek: **anthropos]_ was to be pronounced in common conversation with a perceptible distinction of the length of the penultima as well as of the elevation of the antepenultima, why was not that long quantity also marked? It was surely as important an ingredient in the pronunciation as the accent. And although the letter omega might in such a word show the quantity, yet what do you say to such words as [Greek: lelonchasi, tupsasa], and the like--the quantity of the penultima of which is not marked to the eye at all? Besides, can we altogether disregard the practice of the modern Greeks? Their confusion of accent and quantity in verse is of course a barbarism, though a very old one, as the _versus politici_ of John Tzetzes [2] in the twelfth century and the Anacreontics prefixed to Proclus will show; but these very examples prove _a fortiori_ what the common pronunciation in prose then was. [Footnote 1: This opinion, I need not say, is in direct opposition to the conclusion of Foster and Mitford, and scarcely reconcilable with the apparent meaning of the authorities from the old critics and grammarians. Foster's opponent was for rejecting the accents and attending only to the syllabic quantity;--Mr. C. would, _in prose_, attend to the accents only as indicators of the quantity, being unable to conceive any practical distinction between time and tone in common speech. Yet how can we deal with the authority of Dionysius of Halicarnassus alone, who, on the one hand, discriminates quantity so exquisitely as to make four degrees of _shortness_ in the penultimates of _[Greek: --hodos hr odos, tz opos]_ and _[Greek: --stz ophos]_, and this expressly _[Greek: --eu logois psilois]_, or plain prose, as well as in verse; and on the other hand declares, according to the evidently correct interpretation of the passage, that the difference between music and ordinary speech consists in the number only, and not in the quality, of tones:--_[Greek: **to Poso diallattousa taes su odais kahi oznauois, kahi ouchi to Poio_. (Pezhi Sun. c. 11.?]) The extreme sensibility of the Athenian ear to the accent in prose is, indeed, proved by numerous anecdotes, one of the most amusing of which, though, perhaps, not the best authenticated as a fact, is that of Demosthenes in the Speech for the Crown, asking, "Whether, O Athenians, does Aeschines appear to you to be the mercenary (_[Greek: **misthothos]_} of Alexander, or his guest or friend (_[Greek: **xenos]_)?" It is said that he pronounced _[Greek: **misthothos]_ with a false accent on the antepenultima, as _[Greek: **misthotos]_, and that upon the audience immediately crying out, by way of correction, _[Greek: **misthothos]_, with an emphasis, the orator continued coolly,--_[Greek: **achoueis a legousi]_--"You yourself hear what they say!" Demosthenes is also said, whether affectedly, or in ignorance, to have sworn in some speech by _[Greek: Asklaepios]_, throwing the accent falsely on the antepenultima, and that, upon being interrupted for it, he declared, in his justification, that the pronunciation was proper, for that the divinity was _[Greek: aepios]_, mild. The expressions in Plutarch are very striking:--"[Greek: **Thozuxon ekinaesen, omnue dhe kahi thon' Asklaepion, pzopasoxunon' Asklaepion, kai pazedeiknuen autohn ozthos legonta' einai gahz tohn thehon aepion' kahi epi outo polakis hethozuzaethae." Dec. Orat._--Ed.] [Footnote 2: See his Chiliads. The sort of verses to which Mr. Coleridge alluded are the following, which those who consider the scansion to be accentual, take for tetrameter catalectic iambics, like-- [Greek: ----] ( _Chil_. I. I 'll climb the frost | y mountains high |, and there I 'll coin | the weather; I'll tear the rain | bow from the sky |, and tie both ends | together. Some critics, however, maintain these verses to be trochaics, although very loose and faulty. See Foster, p. 113. A curious instance of the early confusion of accent and quantity may be seen in Prudentius, who shortens the penultima in _eremus_ and _idola_, from [Greek: ezaemos] and [Greek: eidola]. Cui jejuna _eremi_ saxa loquacibus Exundant scatebris, &c. _Cathemer_. V. 89. --cognatumque malum, pigmenta, Camoenas, _Idola_, conflavit fallendi trina potestas. _Cont. Symm_. 47.--ED.] _August 24. 1833._ CONSOLATION IN DISTRESS.---MOCK EVANGELICALS.--AUTUMN DAY. I am never very forward in offering spiritual consolation to any one in distress or disease. I believe that such resources, to be of any service, must be self-evolved in the first instance. I am something of the Quaker's mind in this, and am inclined to _wait_ for the spirit. * * * * * The most common effect of this mock evangelical spirit, especially with young women, is self-inflation and busy-bodyism. * * * * * How strange and awful is the synthesis of life and death in the gusty winds and falling leaves of an autumnal day! August 25. 1833. ROSETTI ON DANTE.--LAUGHTER: FARCE AND TRAGEDY. Rosetti's view of Dante's meaning is in great part just, but he has pushed it beyond all bounds of common sense. How could a poet--and such a poet as Dante--have written the details of the allegory as conjectured by Rosetti? The boundaries between his allegory and his pure picturesque are plain enough, I think, at first reading. * * * * * To resolve laughter into an expression of contempt is contrary to fact, and laughable enough. Laughter is a convulsion of the nerves; and it seems as if nature cut short the rapid thrill of pleasure on the nerves by a sudden convulsion of them, to prevent the sensation becoming painful. Aristotle's definition is as good as can be:--surprise at perceiving any thing out of its usual place, when the unusualness is not accompanied by a sense of serious danger. _Such_ surprise is always pleasurable; and it is observable that surprise accompanied with circumstances of danger becomes tragic. Hence farce may often border on tragedy; indeed, farce is nearer tragedy in its essence than comedy is. August 28. 1833. BARON VON HUMBOLDT.--MODERN DIPLOMATISTS. Baron von Humboldt, brother of the great traveller, paid me the following compliment at Rome:--"I confess, Mr. Coleridge, I had my suspicions that you were here in a political capacity of some sort or other; but upon reflection I acquit you. For in Germany and, I believe, elsewhere on the Continent, it is generally understood that the English government, in order to divert the envy and jealousy of the world at the power, wealth, and ingenuity of your nation, makes a point, as a _ruse de guerre_, of sending out none but fools of gentlemanly birth and connections as diplomatists to the courts abroad. An exception is, perhaps, sometimes made for a clever fellow, if sufficiently libertine and unprincipled." Is the case much altered now, do you know? * * * * * What dull coxcombs your diplomatists at home generally are. I remember dining at Mr. Frere's once in company with Canning and a few other interesting men. Just before dinner Lord ---- called on Frere, and asked himself to dinner. From the moment of his entry he began to talk to the whole party, and in French--all of us being genuine English--and I was told his French was execrable. He had followed the Russian army into France, and seen a good deal of the great men concerned in the war: of none of those things did he say a word, but went on, sometimes in English and sometimes in French, gabbling about cookery and dress and the like. At last he paused for a little--and I said a few words remarking how a great image may be reduced to the ridiculous and contemptible by bringing the constituent parts into prominent detail, and mentioned the grandeur of the deluge and the preservation of life in Genesis and the Paradise Lost [1], and the ludicrous effect produced by Drayton's description in his Noah's Flood:-- "And now the beasts are walking from the wood, As well of ravine, as that chew the cud. The king of beasts his fury doth suppress, And to the Ark leads down the lioness; The bull for his beloved mate doth low, And to the Ark brings on the fair-eyed cow," &c. Hereupon Lord ---- resumed, and spoke in raptures of a picture which he had lately seen of Noah's Ark, and said the animals were all marching two and two, the little ones first, and that the elephants came last in great majesty and filled up the fore-ground. "Ah! no doubt, my Lord," said Canning; "your elephants, wise fellows! staid behind to pack up their trunks!" This floored the ambassador for half an hour. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries almost all our ambassadors were distinguished men. [2] Read Lloyd's State Worthies. The third-rate men of those days possessed an infinity of knowledge, and were intimately versed not only in the history, but even in the heraldry, of the countries in which they were resident. Men were almost always, except for mere compliments, chosen for their dexterity and experience--not, as now, by parliamentary interest. [Footnote 1: Genesis, c. vi. vii. Par. Lost, book xi. v. 728, &c.] [Footnote 2: Yet Diego de Mendoza, the author of Lazarillo de Tormes, himself a veteran diplomatist, describes his brethren of the craft, and their duties, in the reigns of Charles the Emperor and Philip the Second, in the following terms:-- O embajadores, puros majaderos, Que si los reyes quieren engañar, Comienzan por nosotros los primeros. _Nuestro mayor negocio es, no dañar, Y jamas hacer cosa, ni dezilla, Que no corramos riesgo de enseñar._ What a pity it is that modern diplomatists, who, for the most part, very carefully observe the precept contained in the last two lines of this passage, should not equally bear in mind the importance of the preceding remark--_that their principal business is just to do no mischief_.--ED.] * * * * * The sure way to make a foolish ambassador is to bring him up to it. What can an English minister abroad really want but an honest and bold heart, a love for his country and the ten commandments? Your art diplomatic is stuff:--no truly greatly man now would negotiate upon any such shallow principles. August 30. 1833. MAN CANNOT BE STATIONARY.--FATALISM AND PROVIDENCE.--SYMPATHY IN JOY. If a man is not rising upwards to be an angel, depend upon it, he is sinking downwards to be a devil. He cannot stop at the beast. The most savage of men are not beasts; they are worse, a great deal worse. * * * * * The conduct of the Mohammedan and Western nations on the subject of contagious plague illustrates the two extremes of error on the nature of God's moral government of the world. The Turk changes Providence into fatalism; the Christian relies upon it--when he has nothing else to rely on. He does not practically rely upon it at all. * * * * * For compassion a human heart suffices; but for full and adequate sympathy with joy an angel's only. And ever remember, that the more exquisite and delicate a flower of joy, the tenderer must be the hand that plucks it. _September_ 2. 1833. CHARACTERISTIC TEMPERAMENT OF NATIONS.--GREEK PARTICLES.--LATIN COMPOUNDS.- -PROPERTIUS.--TIBULLUS.--LUCAN.--STATIUS.--VALERIUS FLACCUS.--CLAUDIAN.-- PERSIUS.------PRUDENTIUS.--HERMESIANAX. The English affect stimulant nourishment--beef and beer. The French, excitants, irritants--nitrous oxide, alcohol, champagne. The Austrians, sedatives--hyoscyamus. The Russians, narcotics--opium, tobacco, and beng. * * * * * It is worth particular notice how the style of Greek oratory, so full, in the times of political independence, of connective particles, some of passion, some of sensation only, and escaping the classification of mere grammatical logic, became, in the hands of the declaimers and philosophers of the Alexandrian era, and still later, entirely deprived of this peculiarity. So it was with Homer as compared with Nonnus, Tryphiodorus, and the like. In the latter there are in the same number of lines fewer words by one half than in the Iliad. All the appoggiaturas of time are lost. All the Greek writers after Demosthenes and his contemporaries, what are they but the leavings of tyranny, in which a few precious things seem sheltered by the mass of rubbish! Yet, whenever liberty began but to hope and strive, a Polybius appeared. Theocritus is almost the only instance I know of a man of true poetic genius nourishing under a tyranny. The old Latin poets attempted to compound as largely as the Greek; hence in Ennius such words as _belligerentes_, &c. In nothing did Virgil show his judgment more than in rejecting these, except just where common usage had sanctioned them, as _omnipotens_ and a few more. He saw that the Latin was too far advanced in its formation, and of too rigid a character, to admit such composition or agglutination. In this particular respect Virgil's Latin is very admirable and deserving preference. Compare it with the language of Lucan or Statius, and count the number of words used in an equal number of lines, and observe how many more short words Virgil has. * * * * * I cannot quite understand the grounds of the high admiration which the ancients expressed for Propertius, and I own that Tibullus is rather insipid to me. Lucan was a man of great powers; but what was to be made of such a shapeless fragment of party warfare, and so recent too! He had fancy rather than imagination, and passion rather than fancy. His taste was wretched, to be sure; still the Pharsalia is in my judgment a very wonderful work for such a youth as Lucan[1] was. I think Statius a truer poet than Lucan, though he is very extravagant sometimes. Valerius Flaccus is very pretty in particular passages. I am ashamed to say, I have never read Silius Italicus. Claudian I recommend to your careful perusal, in respect of his being properly the first of the moderns, or at least the transitional link between the Classic and the Gothic mode of thought. I call Persius hard--not obscure. He had a bad style; but I dare say, if he had lived[2], he would have learned to express himself in easier language. There are many passages in him of exquisite felicity, and his vein of thought is manly and pathetic. Prudentius[3] is curious for this,--that you see how Christianity forced allegory into the place of mythology. Mr. Frere [Greek: ho philokalos, ho kalokagathos] used to esteem the Latin Christian poets of Italy very highly, and no man in our times was a more competent judge than he. [Footnote 1: Lucan died by the command of Nero, A.D. 65, in his twenty-sixth year. I think this should be printed at the beginning of every book of the Pharsalia.--ED.] [Footnote 2: Aulus Persius Flaccus died in the 30th year of his age, A.D. 62.--ED.] [Footnote 3: Aurelius Prudentius Clemens was born A.D. 348, in Spain.--ED.] * * * * * How very pretty are those lines of Hermesianax in Athenaeus about the poets and poetesses of Greece![1] [Footnote 1: See the fragment from the Leontium:-- [Greek: HOi_en men philos huios an_egagen Oiagrhoio Agrhiop_en, THr_essan steilamenos kithar_en Aidothen k. t. l.] _Athen_. xiii. s. 71--ED] September 4. 1833. DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM.--EPIC POEM.--GERMAN AND ENGLISH.--MODERN TRAVELS.--PARADISE LOST. I have already told you that in my opinion the destruction of Jerusalem is the only subject now left for an epic poem of the highest kind. Yet, with all its great capabilities, it has this one grand defect--that, whereas a poem, to be epic, must have a personal interest,--in the destruction of Jerusalem no genius or skill could possibly preserve the interest for the hero from being merged in the interest for the event. The fact is, the event itself is too sublime and overwhelming. * * * * * In my judgment, an epic poem must either be national or mundane. As to Arthur, you could not by any means make a poem on him national to Englishmen. What have _we_ to do with him? Milton saw this, and with a judgment at least equal to his genius, took a mundane theme--one common to all mankind. His Adam and Eve are all men and women inclusively. Pope satirizes Milton for making God the Father talk like a school divine.[1] Pope was hardly the man to criticize Milton. The truth is, the judgment of Milton in the conduct of the celestial part of his story is very exquisite. Wherever God is represented as directly acting as Creator, without any exhibition of his own essence, Milton adopts the simplest and sternest language of the Scriptures. He ventures upon no poetic diction, no amplification, no pathos, no affection. It is truly the Voice or the Word of the Lord coming to, and acting on, the subject Chaos. But, as some personal interest was demanded for the purposes of poetry, Milton takes advantage of the dramatic representation of God's address to the Son, the Filial Alterity, and in _those addresses_ slips in, as it were by stealth, language of affection, or thought, or sentiment. Indeed, although Milton was undoubtedly a high Arian in his mature life, he does in the necessity of poetry give a greater objectivity to the Father and the Son, than he would have justified in argument. He was very wise in adopting the strong anthropomorphism of the Hebrew Scriptures at once. Compare the Paradise Lost with Klopstock's Messiah, and you will learn to appreciate Milton's judgment and skill quite as much as his genius. [Footnote 1: "Milton's strong pinion now not Heav'n can bound, Now, serpent-like, in prose he sweeps the ground; In quibbles angel and archangel join, And God the Father turns a school divine." 1 Epist. 2d book of Hor. v. 99.] * * * * * The conquest of India by Bacchus might afford scope for a very brilliant poem of the fancy and the understanding. * * * * * It is not that the German can express external imagery more _fully_ than English; but that it can flash more images _at once_ on the mind than the English can. As to mere power of expression, I doubt whether even the Greek surpasses the English. Pray, read a very pleasant and acute dialogue in Schlegel's Athenaeum between a German, a Greek, a Roman, Italian, and a Frenchman, on the merits of their respective languages. * * * * * I wish the naval and military officers who write accounts of their travels would just spare us their sentiment. The Magazines introduced this cant. Let these gentlemen read and imitate the old captains and admirals, as Dampier, &c. October 15. 1833. THE TRINITY.--INCARNATION.--REDEMPTION.--EDUCATION. The Trinity is the idea: the Incarnation, which implies the Fall, is the fact: the Redemption is the mesothesis of the two--that is--the religion. * * * * * If you bring up your children in a way which puts them out of sympathy with the religious feelings of the nation in which they live, the chances are, that they will ultimately turn out ruffians or fanatics--and one as likely as the other. October 23. 1833. ELEGY.--LAVACRUM PALLADOS.--GREEK AND LATIN PENTAMETER.--MILTON'S LATIN POEMS.--POETICAL FILTER.--GRAY AND COTTON. Elegy is the form of poetry natural to the reflective mind. It _may_ treat of any subject, but it must treat of no subject _for itself_; but always and exclusively with reference to the poet himself. As he will feel regret for the past or desire for the future, so sorrow and love become the principal themes of elegy. Elegy presents every thing as lost and gone, or absent and future. The elegy is the exact opposite of the Homeric epic, in which all is purely external and objective, and the poet is a mere voice. The true lyric ode is subjective too; but then it delights to present things as actually existing and visible, although associated with the past, or coloured highly by the subject of the ode itself. * * * * * I think the Lavacrum Pallados of Callimachus very beautiful indeed, especially that part about the mother of Tiresias and Minerva.[1] I have a mind to try how it would bear translation; but what metre have we to answer in feeling to the elegiac couplet of the Greeks? I greatly prefer the Greek rhythm of the short verse to Ovid's, though, observe, I don't dispute his taste with reference to the genius of his own language. Augustus Schlegel gave me a copy of Latin elegiacs on the King of Prussia's going down the Rhine, in which he had almost exclusively adopted the manner of Propertius. I thought them very elegant. [Footnote 1: Greek: Paides, Athanaia numphan mian en poka Th_ezais po_olu ti kai pezi d_e philato tan hetezan, mateza Teizesiao, kai oupoka ch_ozis egento k.t.l. v 57, &c.] * * * * * You may find a few minute faults in Milton's Latin verses; but you will not persuade me that, if these poems had come down to us _as_ written in the age of Tiberius, we should not have considered them to be very beautiful. * * * * * I once thought of making a collection,--to be called "The Poetical Filter,"--upon the principle of simply omitting from the old pieces of lyrical poetry which we have, those parts in which the whim or the bad taste of the author or the fashion of his age prevailed over his genius. You would be surprised at the number of exquisite _wholes_ which might be made by this simple operation, and, perhaps, by the insertion of a single line or half a line, out of poems which are now utterly disregarded on account of some odd or incongruous passages in them;--just as whole volumes of Wordsworth's poems were formerly neglected or laughed at, solely because of some few wilfulnesses, if I may so call them, of that great man--whilst at the same time five sixths of his poems would have been admired, and indeed popular, if they had appeared without those drawbacks, under the name of Byron or Moore or Campbell, or any other of the fashionable favourites of the day. But he has won the battle now, ay! and will wear the crown, whilst English is English. * * * * * I think there is something very majestic in Gray's Installation Ode; but as to the Bard and the rest of his lyrics, I must say I think them frigid and artificial. There is more real lyric feeling in Cotton's Ode on Winter.[1] [Footnote 1: Let me borrow Mr. Wordsworth's account of, and quotation from, this poem:-- "Finally, I will refer to Cotton's 'Ode upon Winter,' an admirable composition, though stained with some peculiarities of the age in which he lived, for a general illustration of the characteristics of Fancy. The middle part of this ode contains a most lively description of the entrance of Winter, with his retinue, as 'a palsied king,' and yet a military monarch, advancing for conquest with his army; the several bodies of which, and their arms and equipments, are described with a rapidity of detail, and a profusion of _fanciful_ comparisons, which indicate, on the part of the poet, extreme activity of intellect, and a correspondent hurry of delightful feeling. He retires from the foe into his fortress, where-- a magazine Of sovereign juice is cellared in; Liquor that will the siege maintain Should Phoebus ne'er return again." Though myself a water-drinker, I cannot resist the pleasure of transcribing what follows, as an instance still more happy of Fancy employed in the treatment of feeling than, in its preceding passages, the poem supplies of her management of forms. 'Tis that, that gives the Poet rage, And thaws the gelly'd blood of Age; Matures the Young, restores the Old, And makes the fainting coward bold. It lays the careful head to rest, Calms palpitations in the breast, Renders our lives' misfortune sweet; * * * * * Then let the _chill_ Scirocco blow, And gird us round with hills of snow; Or else go whistle to the shore, And make the hollow mountains roar: Whilst we together jovial sit Careless, and crowned with mirth and wit; Where, though bleak winds confine us home, Our fancies round the world shall roam. We'll think of all the friends we know, And drink to all worth drinking to; When, having drunk all thine and mine, We rather shall want healths than wine. But where friends fail us, we'll supply Our friendships with our charity; Men that remote in sorrows live Shall by our lusty brimmers thrive. We'll drink the wanting into wealth, And those that languish into health, Th' afflicted into joy, th' opprest Into security and rest. The worthy in disgrace shall find Favour return again more kind, And in restraint who stifled lie Shall taste the air of liberty. The brave shall triumph in success, The lovers shall have mistresses, Poor unregarded virtue, praise, And the neglected poet, bays. Thus shall our healths do others good, Whilst we ourselves do all we would; For, freed from envy and from care, What would we be but what we are? _Preface to the editions of Mr. W.'s Poems, in_ 1815 and 1820.--ED.] _November_ 1. 1833. HOMERIC HEROES IN SHAKSPEARE.--DRYDEN.--DR. JOHNSON.--SCOTT'S NOVELS.-- SCOPE OF CHRISTIANITY. Compare Nestor, Ajax, Achilles, &c. in the Troilus and Cressida of Shakspeare with their namesakes in the Iliad. The old heroes seem all to have been at school ever since. I scarcely know a more striking instance of the strength and pregnancy of the Gothic mind. Dryden's genius was of that sort which catches fire by its own motion; his chariot wheels _get_ hot by driving fast. * * * * * Dr. Johnson seems to have been really more powerful in discoursing _vivâ voce_ in conversation than with his pen in hand. It seems as if the excitement of company called something like reality and consecutiveness into his reasonings, which in his writings I cannot see. His antitheses are almost always verbal only; and sentence after sentence in the Rambler may be pointed out to which you cannot attach any definite meaning whatever. In his political pamphlets there is more truth of expression than in his other works, for the same reason that his conversation is better than his writings in general. He was more excited and in earnest. * * * * * When I am very ill indeed, I can read Scott's novels, and they are almost the only books I can then _read_. I cannot at such times read the Bible; my mind reflects on it, but I can't bear the open page. * * * * * Unless Christianity be viewed and felt in a high and comprehensive way, how large a portion of our intellectual and moral nature does it leave without object and action! * * * * * Let a young man separate I from Me as far as he possibly can, and remove Me till it is almost lost in the remote distance. "I am me," is as bad a fault in intellectuals and morals as it is in grammar, whilst none but one--God-- can say, "I am I," or "That I am." _November_ 9. 1833. TIMES OF CHARLES I. How many books are still written and published about Charles the First and his times! Such is the fresh and enduring interest of that grand crisis of morals, religion, and government! But these books are none of them works of any genius or imagination; not one of these authors seems to be able to throw himself back into that age; if they did, there would be less praise and less blame bestowed on both sides. _December_ 21. 1833. MESSENGER OF THE COVENANT--PROPHECY.--LOGIC OF IDEAS AND OF SYLLOGISMS. When I reflect upon the subject of the messenger of the covenant, and observe the distinction taken in the prophets between the teaching and suffering Christ,--the Priest, who was to precede, and the triumphant Messiah, the Judge, who was to follow,--and how Jesus always seems to speak of the Son of Man in a future sense, and yet always at the same time as identical with himself; I sometimes think that our Lord himself in his earthly career was the Messenger; and that the way is _now still preparing_ for the great and visible advent of the Messiah of Glory. I mention this doubtingly. * * * * * What a beautiful sermon or essay might be written on the growth of prophecy!--from the germ, no bigger than a man's hand, in Genesis, till the column of cloud gathers size and height and substance, and assumes the shape of a perfect man; just like the smoke in the Arabian Nights' tale, which comes up and at last takes a genie's shape.[1] [Footnote 1: The passage in Mr. Coleridge's mind was, I suppose, the following:--"He (the fisherman) set it before him, and while he looked upon it attentively, there came out a very thick smoke, which obliged him to retire two or three paces from it. The smoke ascended to the clouds, and extending itself along the sea, and upon the shore, formed a great mist, which, we may well imagine, did mightily astonish the fisherman. When the smoke was all out of the vessel, it reunited itself, and became a solid body, of which there was formed a genie twice as high as the greatest of giants." _Story of the Fisherman_. Ninth Night.--ED.] * * * * * The logic of ideas is to that of syllogisms as the infinitesimal calculus to common arithmetic; it proves, but at the same time supersedes. _January_ 1. 1834. LANDOR'S POETRY.--BEAUTY.--CHRONOLOGICAL ARRANGEMENT OF WORKS. What is it that Mr. Landor wants, to make him a poet? His powers are certainly very considerable, but he seems to be totally deficient in that modifying faculty, which compresses several units into one whole. The truth is, he does not possess imagination in its highest form,--that of stamping _il più nell' uno_. Hence his poems, taken as wholes, are unintelligible; you have eminences excessively bright, and all the ground around and between them in darkness. Besides which, he has never learned, with all his energy, how to write simple and lucid English. * * * * * The useful, the agreeable, the beautiful, and the good, are distinguishable. You are wrong in resolving beauty into expression or interest; it is quite distinct; indeed it is opposite, although not contrary. Beauty is an immediate presence, between (_inter_) which and the beholder _nihil est_. It is always one and tranquil; whereas the interesting always disturbs and is disturbed. I exceedingly regret the loss of those essays on beauty, which I wrote in a Bristol newspaper. I would give much to recover them. * * * * * After all you can say, I still think the chronological order the best for arranging a poet's works. All your divisions are in particular instances inadequate, and they destroy the interest which arises from watching the progress, maturity, and even the decay of genius. _January_ 3. 1834. TOLERATION.--NORWEGIANS. I have known books written on Tolerance, the proper title of which would be--intolerant or intolerable books on tolerance. Should not a man who writes a book expressly to inculcate tolerance learn to treat with respect, or at least with indulgence, articles of faith which tens of thousands ten times told of his fellow-subjects or his fellow-creatures believe with all their souls, and upon the truth of which they rest their tranquillity in this world, and their hopes of salvation in the next,--those articles being at least maintainable against his arguments, and most certainly innocent in themselves?--Is it fitting to run Jesus Christ in a silly parallel with Socrates--the Being whom thousand millions of intellectual creatures, of whom I am a humble unit, take to be their Redeemer, with an Athenian philosopher, of whom we should know nothing except through his glorification in Plato and Xenophon?--And then to hitch Latimer and Servetus together! To be sure there was a stake and a fire in each case, but where the rest of the resemblance is I cannot see. What ground is there for throwing the odium of Servetus's death upon Calvin alone?--Why, the mild Melancthon wrote to Calvin[1], expressly to testify his concurrence in the act, and no doubt he spoke the sense of the German reformers; the Swiss churches _advised_ the punishment in formal letters, and I rather think there are letters from the English divines, approving Calvin's conduct!-- Before a man deals out the slang of the day about the great leaders of the Reformation, he should learn to throw himself back to the age of the Reformation, when the two great parties in the church were eagerly on the watch to fasten a charge of heresy on the other. Besides, if ever a poor fanatic thrust, himself into the fire, it was Michael Servetus. He was a rabid enthusiast, and did every thing he could in the way of insult and ribaldry to provoke the feeling of the Christian church. He called the Trinity _triceps monstrum et Cerberum quendam tripartitum_, and so on. Indeed, how should the principle of religious toleration have been acknowledged at first?--It would require stronger arguments than any which I have heard as yet, to prove that men in authority have not a right, involved in an imperative duty, to deter those under their control from teaching or countenancing doctrines which they believe to be damnable, and even to punish with death those who violate such prohibition. I am sure that Bellarmine would have had small difficulty in turning Locke round his fingers' ends upon this ground. A _right_ to protection I can understand; but a _right_ to toleration seems to me a contradiction in terms. Some criterion must in any case be adopted by the state; otherwise it might be compelled to admit whatever hideous doctrine and practice any man or number of men may assert to be his or their religion, and an article of his or their faith. It was the same Pope who commanded the Romanists of England to separate from the national church, which previously their own consciences had not dictated, nor the decision of any council,--and who also commanded them to rebel against Queen Elizabeth, whom they were bound to obey by the laws of the land; and if the Pope had authority for one, he must have had it for the other. The only true argument, as it seems to me, apart from Christianity, for a discriminating toleration is, that _it is of no use_ to attempt to stop heresy or schism by persecution, unless, perhaps, it be conducted upon the plan of direct warfare and massacre. You _cannot_ preserve men in the faith by such means, though you may stifle for a while any open appearance of dissent. The experiment has now been tried, and it has failed; and that is by a great deal the best argument for the magistrate against a repetition of it. I know this,--that if a parcel of fanatic missionaries were to go to Norway, and were to attempt to disturb the fervent and undoubting Lutheranism of the fine independent inhabitants of the interior of that country, I should be right glad to hear that the busy fools had been quietly shipped off--any where. I don't include the people of the seaports in my praise of the Norwegians;--I speak of the agricultural population. If that country could be brought to maintain a million more of inhabitants, Norway might defy the world; it would be [Greek: autarhk_as] and impregnable; but it is much under-handed now. [Footnote 1: Melancthon's words are:--"Tuo judicio prorsus assentior. Affirmo etiam vestros magistratus juste fecisse quod hominem blasphemum, re ordine judicata, _interfecerunt_." 14th Oct. 1554.--ED.] _January_ 12. 1834. ARTICLES OF FAITH.--MODERN QUAKERISM.--DEVOTIONAL SPIRIT.--SECTARIANISM.--ORIGEN. I have drawn up four or perhaps five articles of faith, by subscription, or rather by assent, to which I think a large comprehension might take place. My articles would exclude Unitarians, and I am sorry to say, members of the church of Rome, but with this difference--that the exclusion of Unitarians would be necessary and perpetual; that of the members of the church of Rome depending on each individual's own conscience and intellectual light. What I mean is this:--that the Romanists hold the faith in Christ,--but unhappily they also hold certain opinions, partly ceremonial, partly devotional, partly speculative, which have so fatal a facility of being degraded into base, corrupting, and even idolatrous practices, that if the Romanist will make _them_ of the essence of his religion, he must of course be excluded. As to the Quakers, I hardly know what to say. An article on the sacraments would exclude them. My doubt is, whether Baptism and the Eucharist are properly any _parts_ of Christianity, or not rather Christianity itself;--the one, the initial conversion or light,--the other, the sustaining and invigorating life;--both together the [Greek: ph_os ahi z_oh_a], which are Christianity. A line can only begin once; hence, there can be no repetition of baptism; but a line may be endlessly prolonged by continued production; hence the sacrament of love and life lasts for ever. But really there is no knowing what the modern Quakers are, or believe, excepting this--that they are altogether degenerated from their ancestors of the seventeenth century. I should call modern Quakerism, so far as I know it as a scheme of faith, a Socinian Calvinism. Penn himself was a Sabellian, and seems to have disbelieved even the historical fact of the life and death of Jesus;--most certainly Jesus of Nazareth was not Penn's Christ, if he had any. It is amusing to see the modern Quakers appealing now to history for a confirmation of their tenets and discipline--and by so doing, in effect abandoning the strong hold of their founders. As an _imperium in imperio_, I think the original Quakerism a conception worthy of Lycurgus. Modern Quakerism is like one of those gigantic trees which are seen in the forests of North America,--apparently flourishing, and preserving all its greatest stretch and spread of branches; but when you cut through an enormously thick and gnarled bark, you find the whole inside hollow and rotten. Modern Quakerism, like such a tree, stands upright by help of its inveterate bark alone. _Bark_ a Quaker, and he is a poor creature. * * * * * How much the devotional spirit of the church has suffered by that necessary evil, the Reformation, and the sects which have sprung up subsequently to it! All our modern prayers seem tongue-tied. We appear to be thinking more of avoiding an heretical expression or thought than of opening ourselves to God. We do not pray with that entire, unsuspecting, unfearing, childlike profusion of feeling, which so beautifully shines forth in Jeremy Taylor and Andrewes and the writings of some of the older and better saints of the Romish church, particularly of that remarkable woman, St. Theresa.[1] And certainly Protestants, in their anxiety to have the historical argument on their side, have brought down the origin of the Romish errors too late. Many of them began, no doubt, in the Apostolic age itself;--I say errors-- not heresies, as that dullest of the fathers, Epiphanius, calls them. Epiphanius is very long and fierce upon the Ebionites. There may have been real heretics under that name; but I believe that, in the beginning, the name was, on account of its Hebrew meaning, given to, or adopted by, some poor mistaken men--perhaps of the Nazarene way--who sold all their goods and lands, and were then obliged to beg. I think it not improbable that Barnabas was one of these chief mendicants; and that the collection made by St. Paul was for them. You should read Rhenferd's account of the early heresies. I think he demonstrates about eight of Epiphanius's heretics to be mere nicknames given by the Jews to the Christians. Read "Hermas, or the Shepherd," of the genuineness of which and of the epistle of Barnabas I have no doubt. It is perfectly orthodox, but full of the most ludicrous tricks of gnostic fancy--the wish to find the New Testament in the Old. This gnosis is perceptible in the Epistle to the Hebrews, but kept exquisitely within the limit of propriety. In the others it is rampant, and most truly "puffeth up," as St. Paul said of it. What between the sectarians and the political economists, the English are denationalized. England I see as a country, but the English nation seems obliterated. What could redintegrate us again? Must it be another threat of foreign invasion? [Footnote 1: She was a native of Avila in Old Castile, and a Carmelite nun. Theresa established an order which she called the "Reformed," and which became very powerful. Her works are divided into ten books, of which her autobiography forms a remarkable part. She died in 1582, and was canonised by Gregory XV. in 1622--ED.] * * * * * I never can digest the loss of most of Origen's works: he seems to have been almost the only very great scholar and genius combined amongst the early Fathers. Jerome was very inferior to him. _January_ 20. 1834. SOME MEN LIKE MUSICAL GLASSES.--SUBLIME AND NONSENSE.--ATHEIST. Some men are like musical glasses;--to produce their finest tones, you must keep them wet. * * * * * Well! that passage is what I call the sublime dashed to pieces by cutting too close with the fiery four-in-hand round the corner of nonsense. * * * * * How did the Atheist get his idea of that God whom he denies? _February_ 22. 1834. PROOF OF EXISTENCE OF GOD.--KANT'S ATTEMPT.--PLURALITY OF WORLDS. Assume the existence of God,--and then the harmony and fitness of the physical creation may be shown to correspond with and support such an assumption;--but to set about _proving_ the existence of a God by such means is a mere circle, a delusion. It can be no proof to a good reasoner, unless he violates all syllogistic logic, and presumes his conclusion. Kant once set about proving the existence of God, and a masterly effort it was.* But in his later great work, the "Critique of the Pure Reason," he saw its fallacy, and said of it--that _if_ the existence could he _proved_ at all, it must be on the grounds indicated by him. * * * * * I never could feel any force in the arguments for a plurality of worlds, in the common acceptation of that term. A lady once asked me--"What then could be the intention in creating so many great bodies, so apparently useless to us?" I said--I did not know, except perhaps to make dirt cheap. The vulgar inference is _in alio genere_. What in the eye of an intellectual and omnipotent Being is the whole sidereal system to the soul of one man for whom Christ died? _March_ 1. 1834. A REASONER. I am by the law of my nature a reasoner. A person who should suppose I meant by that word, an arguer, [1] would not only not understand me, but would understand the contrary of my meaning. I can take no interest whatever in hearing or saying any thing merely as a fact--merely as having happened. It must refer to something within me before I can regard it with any curiosity or care. My mind is always energic--I don't mean energetic; I require in every thing what, for lack of another word, I may call _propriety_,--that is, a reason why the thing _is_ at all, and why it is _there_ or _then_ rather than elsewhere or at another time. [Footnote 1: In his essay, "_Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseyns Gottes_."--"The only possible argument or ground of proof for a demonstration of the existence of God." It was published in 1763; the "Critique" in 1781.--ED.] _March_ 5. 1834. SHAKSPEARE'S INTELLECTUAL ACTION.--CRABBE AND SOUTHEY.--PETER SIMPLE AND TOM CRINGLE'S LOG. Shakspeare's intellectual action is wholly unlike that of Ben Jonson or Beaumont and Fletcher. The latter see the totality of a sentence or passage, and then project it entire. Shakspeare goes on creating, and evolving B. out of A., and C. out of B., and so on, just as a serpent moves, which makes a fulcrum of its own body, and seems for ever twisting and untwisting its own strength. * * * * * I think Crabbe and Southey are something alike; but Crabbe's poems are founded on observation and real life--Southey's on fancy and books. In facility they are equal, though Crabbe's English is of course not upon a level with Southey's, which is next door to faultless. But in Crabbe there is an absolute defect of the high imagination; he gives me little or no pleasure: yet, no doubt, he has much power of a certain kind, and it is good to cultivate, even at some pains, a catholic taste in literature. I read all sorts of books with some pleasure except modern sermons and treatises on political economy. * * * * * I have received a great deal of pleasure from some of the modern novels, especially Captain Marryat's "Peter Simple." That book is nearer Smollett than any I remember. And "Tom Cringle's Log" in Blackwood is also most excellent. _March_ 15. 1834. CHAUCER.--SHAKSPEARE.--BEN JONSON.--BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.--DANIEL.--MASSINGER. I take unceasing delight in Chaucer. His manly cheerfulness is especially delicious to me in my old age.[1] How exquisitely tender he is, and yet how perfectly free from the least touch of sickly melancholy or morbid drooping! The sympathy of the poet with the subjects of his poetry is particularly remarkable in Shakspeare and Chaucer; but what the first effects by a strong act of imagination and mental metamorphosis, the last does without any effort, merely by the inborn kindly joyousness of his nature. How well we seem to know Chaucer! How absolutely nothing do we know of Shakspeare! I cannot in the least allow any necessity for Chaucer's poetry, especially the Canterbury Tales, being considered obsolete. Let a few plain rules be given for sounding the final _è_ of syllables, and for expressing the termination of such words as _ocëan_, and _natiön_, &c. as dissyllables,-- or let the syllables to be sounded in such cases be marked by a competent metrist. This simple expedient would, with a very few trifling exceptions, where the errors are inveterate, enable any reader to feel the perfect smoothness and harmony of Chaucer's verse. [Footnote 1: Eighteen years before, Mr. Coleridge entertained the same feelings towards Chaucer:--"Through all the works of Chaucer there reigns a cheerfulness, a manly hilarity, which makes it almost impossible to doubt a correspondent habit of feeling in the author himself." _Biog. Lit_., vol. i. p. 32.--ED.] * * * * * As to understanding his language, if you read twenty pages with a good glossary, you surely can find no further difficulty, even as it is; but I should have no objection to see this done:--Strike out those words which are now obsolete, and I will venture to say that I will replace every one of them by words still in use out of Chaucer himself, or Gower his disciple. I don't want this myself: I rather like to see the significant terms which Chaucer unsuccessfully offered as candidates for admission into our language; but surely so very slight a change of the text may well be pardoned, even by black--_letterati_, for the purpose of restoring so great a poet to his ancient and most deserved popularity. * * * * * Shakspeare is of no age. It is idle to endeavour to support his phrases by quotations from Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, &c. His language is entirely his own, and the younger dramatists imitated him. The construction of Shakspeare's sentences, whether in verse or prose, is the necessary and homogeneous vehicle of his peculiar manner of thinking. His is not the style of the age. More particularly, Shakspeare's blank verse is an absolutely new creation. Read Daniel[1]--the admirable Daniel--in his "Civil Wars," and "Triumphs of Hymen." The style and language are just such as any very pure and manly writer of the present day--Wordsworth, for example--would use; it seems quite modern in comparison with the style of Shakspeare. Ben Jonson's blank verse is very masterly and individual, and perhaps Massinger's is even still nobler. In Beaumont and Fletcher it is constantly slipping into lyricisms. I believe Shakspeare was not a whit more intelligible in his own day than he is now to an educated man, except for a few local allusions of no consequence. As I said, he is of no age--nor, I may add, of any religion, or party, or profession. The body and substance of his works came out of the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind: his observation and reading, which was considerable, supplied him with the drapery of his figures.[2] [Footnote 1: "This poet's well-merited epithet is that of the '_well-languaged Daniel_;' but, likewise, and by the consent of his contemporaries, no less than of all succeeding critics, the 'prosaic Daniel.' Yet those who thus designate this wise and amiable writer, from the frequent incorrespondency of his diction with his metre, in the majority of his compositions, not only deem them valuable and interesting on other accounts, but willingly admit that there are to be found throughout his poems, and especially in his _Epistles_ and in his _Hymen's Triumph_, many and exquisite specimens of that style, which, as the neutral ground of prose and verse, is common to both."--_Biog. Lit_., vol. ii. p. 82.] [Footnote 2: Mr. Coleridge called Shakspeare "_the myriad-minded man_," [Greek: au_az muzioyous]--" a phrase," said he, "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 Shakspeare _de jure singulari, et ex privilegio naturae." See Biog. Lit., vol. ii. p. 13.--ED.] * * * * * As for editing Beaumont and Fletcher, the task would be one _immensi laboris_. The confusion is now so great, the errors so enormous, that the editor must use a boldness quite unallowable in any other case. All I can say as to Beaumont and Fletcher is, that I can point out well enough where something has been lost, and that something so and so was probably in the original; but the law of Shakspeare's thought and verse is such, that I feel convinced that not only could I detect the spurious, but supply the genuine, word. _March_ 20. 1834. LORD BYRON AND H. WALPOLE'S "MYSTERIOUS MOTHER."--LEWIS'S "JAMAICA JOURNAL." Lord Byron, as quoted by Lord Dover[1], says, that the "Mysterious Mother" raises Horace Walpole above every author living in his, Lord Byron's, time. Upon which I venture to remark, first, that I do not believe that Lord Byron spoke sincerely; for I suspect that he made a tacit exception in favour of himself at least;--secondly, that it is a miserable mode of comparison which does not rest on difference of kind. It proceeds of envy and malice and detraction to say that A. is higher than B., unless you show that they are _in pari materia_;--thirdly, that the "Mysterious Mother" is the most disgusting, vile, detestable composition that ever came from the hand of man. No one with a spark of true manliness, of which Horace Walpole had none, could have written it. As to the blank verse, it is indeed better than Rowe's and Thomson's, which was execrably bad:--any approach, therefore, to the manner of the old dramatists was of course an improvement; but the loosest lines in Shirley are superior to Walpole's best. [Footnote 1: In the memoir prefixed to the correspondence with Sir H. Mann. Lord Byron's words are:--"He is the _ultimus Romanorum_, the author of the 'Mysterious Mother,' a tragedy of the highest order, and not a puling love play. He is the father of the first romance, and of the last tragedy, in our language; and surely worthy of a higher place than any living author, be he who he may."--_Preface to Marino Faliero_. Is not "Romeo and Juliet" a love play? --But why reason about such insincere, splenetic trash?--ED.] * * * * * Lewis's "Jamaica Journal" is delightful; it is almost the only unaffected book of travels or touring I have read of late years. You have the man himself, and not an inconsiderable man,--certainly a much finer mind than I supposed before from the perusal of his romances, &c. It is by far his best work, and will live and be popular. Those verses on the Hours are very pretty; but the Isle of Devils is, like his romances,--a fever dream-- horrible, without point or terror. _April_ 16. 1834. SICILY.--MALTA--SIR ALEXANDER BALL. I found that every thing in and about Sicily had been exaggerated by travellers, except two things--the folly of the government and the wretchedness of the people. _They_ did not admit of exaggeration. Really you may learn the fundamental principles of political economy in a very compendious way, by taking a short tour through Sicily, and simply reversing in your own mind every law, custom, and ordinance you meet with. I never was in a country in which every thing proceeding from man was so exactly wrong. You have peremptory ordinances _against_ making roads, taxes on the passage of common vegetables from one miserable village to another, and so on. By the by, do you know any parallel in modern history to the absurdity of our giving a legislative assembly to the Sicilians? It exceeds any thing I know. This precious legislature passed two bills before it was knocked on the head: the first was, to render lands inalienable; and the second, to cancel all debts due before the date of the bill. And then consider the gross ignorance and folly of our laying a tax upon the Sicilians! Taxation in its proper sense can only exist where there is a free circulation of capital, labour, and commodities throughout the community. But to tax the people in countries like Sicily and Corsica, where there is no internal communication, is mere robbery and confiscation. A crown taken from a Corsican living in the sierras would not get back to him again in ten years. * * * * * It is interesting to pass from Malta to Sicily--from the highest specimen of an inferior race, the Saracenic, to the most degraded class of a superior race, the European. * * * * * No tongue can describe the moral corruption of the Maltese when the island was surrendered to us. There was not a family in it in which a wife or a daughter was not a kept mistress. A marquis of ancient family applied to Sir Alexander Ball to be appointed his valet. "My valet!" said Ball, "what can you mean, Sir?" The marquis said, he hoped he should then have had the honour of presenting petitions to his Excellency. "Oh, that is it, is it!" said Sir Alexander: "my valet, Sir, brushes my clothes, and brings them to me. If he dared to meddle with matters of public business, I should kick him down stairs." In short, Malta was an Augean stable, and Ball had all the inclination to be a Hercules.[1] His task was most difficult, although his qualifications were most remarkable. I remember an English officer of very high rank soliciting him for the renewal of a pension to an abandoned woman who had been notoriously treacherous to us. That officer had promised the woman as a matter of course--she having sacrificed her daughter to him. Ball was determined, as far as he could, to prevent Malta from being made a nest of home patronage. He considered, as was the fact, that there was a contract between England and the Maltese. Hence the government at home, especially Dundas, disliked him, and never allowed him any other title than that of Civil Commissioner. We have, I believe, nearly succeeded in alienating the hearts of the inhabitants from us. Every officer in the island ought to be a Maltese, except those belonging to the immediate executive: 100_l_. per annum to a Maltese, to enable him to keep a gilt carriage, will satisfy him where an Englishman must have 2000_l_. [Footnote 1: I refer the reader to the five concluding essays of the third volume of the "Friend," as a specimen of what Mr. C. might have done as a biographer if an irresistible instinct had not devoted him to profounder labours. As a sketch--and it pretends to nothing more--is there any thing more perfect in our literature than the monument raised in those essays to the memory of Sir Alexander Ball?--and there are some touches added to the character of Nelson, which the reader, even of Southey's matchless Life of our hero, will find both new and interesting.--ED.] _May_ 1. 1834. CAMBRIDGE PETITION TO ADMIT DISSENTERS. There are, to my grief, the names of some men to the Cambridge petition for admission of the Dissenters to the University, whose cheeks I think must have burned with shame at the degrading patronage and befouling eulogies of the democratic press, and at seeing themselves used as the tools of the open and rancorous enemies of the church. How miserable to be held up for the purpose of inflicting insult upon men, whose worth and ability and sincerity you well know,--and this by a faction banded together like obscene dogs and cats and serpents, against a church which you profoundly revere! The _time_--the _time_--the _occasion_ and the _motive_ ought to have been argument enough, that even if the measure were right or harmless in itself, not _now_, nor with such as _these_, was it to be effected! _May_ 3. 1834. CORN LAWS. Those who argue that England may safely depend upon a supply of foreign corn, if it grow none or an insufficient quantity of its own, forget that they are subjugating the necessaries of life itself to the mere luxuries or comforts of society. Is it not certain that the price of corn abroad will be raised upon us as soon as it is once known that we _must_ buy?--and when that fact is known, in what sort of a situation shall we be? Besides this, the argument supposes that agriculture is not a positive good to the nation, taken in and by itself, as a mode of existence for the people, which supposition is false and pernicious; and if we are to become a great horde of manufacturers, shall we not, even more than at present, excite the ill will of all the manufacturers of other nations? It has been already shown, in evidence which is before all the world, that some of our manufacturers have acted upon the accursed principle of deliberately injuring foreign manufactures, if they can, even to the ultimate disgrace of the country and loss to themselves. _May_ 19. 1834. CHRISTIAN SABBATH. How grossly misunderstood the genuine character of the Christian sabbath, or Lord's day, seems to be even by the church! To confound it with the Jewish sabbath, or to rest its observance upon the fourth commandment, is, in my judgment, heretical, and would so have been considered in the primitive church. That cessation from labour on the Lord's day could not have been absolutely incumbent on Christians for two centuries after Christ, is apparent; because during that period the greater part of the Christians were either slaves or in official situations under Pagan masters or superiors, and had duties to perform for those who did not recognize the day. And we know that St. Paul sent back Onesimus to his master, and told every Christian slave, that, being a Christian, he was free in his mind indeed, but still must serve his earthly master, although he might laudably seek for his personal freedom also. If the early Christians had refused to work on the Lord's day, rebellion and civil war must have been the immediate consequences. But there is no notice of any such cessation. The Jewish sabbath was commemorative of the termination of the great act of creation; it was to record that the world had not been from eternity, nor had arisen as a dream by itself, but that God had created it by distinct acts of power, and that he had hallowed the day or season in which he rested or desisted from his work. When our Lord arose from the dead, the old creation was, as it were, superseded, and the new creation then began; and therefore the first day and not the last day, the commencement and not the end, of the work of God was solemnized. Luther, in speaking of the _good by itself_, and the good _for its expediency alone_, instances the observance of the Christian day of rest,-- a day of repose from manual labour, and of activity in spiritual labour,--a day of joy and co-operation in the work of Christ's creation. "Keep it holy"--says he--"for its use' sake,--both to body and soul! But if any where the day is made holy for the mere day's sake,--if any where any one sets up its observance upon a Jewish foundation, then I order you to work on it, to ride on it, to dance on it, to feast on it--to do any thing that shall reprove this encroachment on the Christian spirit and liberty." The early church distinguished the day of Christian rest so strongly from a fast, that it was unlawful for a man to bewail even _his own sins_, as such only, on that day. He was to bewail the sins of _all_, and to pray as one of the whole of Christ's body. And the English Reformers evidently took the same view of the day as Luther and the early church. But, unhappily, our church, in the reigns of James and Charles the First, was so identified with the undue advancement of the royal prerogative, that the puritanical Judaizing of the Presbyterians was but too well seconded by the patriots of the nation, in resisting the wise efforts of the church to prevent the incipient alteration in the character of the day of rest. After the Restoration, the bishops and clergy in general adopted the view taken and enforced by their enemies. By the by, it is curious to observe, in this semi-infidel and Malthusian Parliament, how the Sabbatarian spirit unites itself with a rancorous hostility to that one institution, which alone, according to reason and experience, can insure the continuance of any general religion at all in the nation at large. Some of these gentlemen, who are for not letting a poor labouring man have a dish of baked potatoes on a Sunday, _religionis gratia_--(God forgive that audacious blasphemy!)--are foremost among those who seem to live but in vilifying, weakening, and impoverishing the national church. I own my indignation boils over against such contemptible fellows. I sincerely wish to preserve a decent quiet on Sunday. I would prohibit compulsory labour, and put down operas, theatres, &c., for this plain reason--that if the rich be allowed to play, the poor will be forced, or, what comes to the same thing, will be induced, to work. I am not for a Paris Sunday. But to stop coaches, and let the gentleman's carriage run, is monstrous. _May_ 25. 1834. HIGH PRIZES AND REVENUES OF THE CHURCH. Your argument against the high prizes in the church might be put strongly thus:--Admit that in the beginning it might have been fairly said, that some eminent rewards ought to be set apart for the purpose of stimulating and rewarding transcendant merit; what have you to say now, after centuries of experience to the contrary?--_Have_ the high prizes been given to the highest genius, virtue, or learning? Is it not rather the truth, as Jortin said, that twelve votes in a contested election will do more to make a man a bishop than an admired commentary on the twelve minor prophets?--To all which and the like I say again, that you ought not to reason from the abuse, which may be rectified, against the inherent uses of the thing. _Appoint_ the most deserving--and the prize _will_ answer its purpose. As to the bishops' incomes,--in the first place, the net receipts--that which the bishops may spend--have been confessedly exaggerated beyond measure; but, waiving that, and allowing the highest estimate to be correct, I should like to have the disposition of the episcopal revenue in any one year by the late or the present Bishop of Durham, or the present Bishops of London or Winchester, compared with that of the most benevolent nobleman in England of any party in politics. I firmly believe that the former give away in charity of one kind or another, public, official, or private, three times as much in proportion as the latter. You may have a hunks or two now and then; but so you would much more certainly, if you were to reduce the incomes to 2000_l_. per annum. As a body, in my opinion the clergy of England do in truth act as if their property were impressed with a trust to the utmost extent that can be demanded by those who affect to believe, ignorantly or not, that lying legend of a tripartite or quadripartite division of the tithe by law. _May 31. 1834._ SIR C. WETHERELL'S SPEECH.--NATIONAL CHURCH.--DISSENTERS.--PAPACY.---- UNIVERSITIES. I think Sir Charles Wetherell's speech before the Privy Council very effective. I doubt if any other lawyer in Westminster Hall could have done the thing so well. * * * * * The National Church requires, and is required by, the Christian Church, for the perfection of each. For if there were no national Church, the mere spiritual Church would either become, like the Papacy, a dreadful tyranny over mind and body;--or else would fall abroad into a multitude of enthusiastic sects, as in England in the seventeenth century. It is my deep conviction that, in a country of any religion at all, liberty of conscience can only be permanently preserved by means and under the shadow of a national church--a political establishment connected with, but distinct from, the spiritual Church. * * * * * I sometimes hope that the undisguised despotism of temper of the Dissenters may at last awaken a jealousy in the laity of the Church of England. But the apathy and inertness are, I fear, too profound--too providential. * * * * * Whatever the Papacy may have been on the Continent, it was always an unqualified evil to this country. It destroyed what was rising of good, and introduced a thousand evils of its own. The Papacy was and still is essentially extra-national;--it affects, _temporally_, to do that which the spiritual Church of Christ can alone do--to break down the natural distinctions of nations. Now, as the Roman Papacy is in itself local and peculiar, of course this attempt is nothing but a direct attack on the political independence of other nations. The institution of Universities was the single check on the Papacy. The Pope always hated and maligned the Universities. The old coenobitic establishments of England were converted--perverted, rather--into monasteries and other monking receptacles. You see it was at Oxford that Wicliffe alone found protection and encouragement. _June_ 2. 1834. SCHILLER'S VERSIFICATION.--GERMAN BLANK VERSE. Schiller's blank verse is bad. He moves in it as a fly in a glue bottle. His thoughts have their connection and variety, it is true, but there is no sufficiently corresponding movement in the verse. How different from Shakspeare's endless rhythms! There is a nimiety--a too-muchness--in all Germans. It is the national fault. Leasing had the best notion of blank verse. The trochaic termination of German words renders blank verse in that language almost impracticable. We have it in our dramatic hendecasyllable; but then we have a power of interweaving the iambic close _ad libitum._ _June_ 14. 1834. ROMAN CATHOLIC EMANCIPATION.--DUKE OF WELLINGTON.--CORONATION OATH. The Roman Catholic Emancipation Act--carried in the violent, and, in fact, unprincipled manner it was--was in effect a Surinam toad;--and the Reform Bill, the Dissenters' admission to the Universities, and the attack on the Church, are so many toadlets, one after another detaching themselves from their parent brute. * * * * * If you say there is nothing in the Romish religion, sincerely felt, inconsistent with the duties of citizenship and allegiance to a territorial Protestant sovereign, _cadit quæstio_. For if _that_ is once admitted, there can be no answer to the argument from numbers. Certainly, if the religion of the majority of the _people_ be innocuous to the interests of the _nation_, the majority have a natural right to be trustees of the nationalty--that property which is set apart for the nation's use, and rescued from the gripe of private hands. But when I say--_for the nation's use_.--I mean the very reverse of what the Radicals mean. They would convert it to relieve taxation, which I call a private, personal, and perishable use. A nation's uses are immortal. * * * * * How lamentable it is to hear the Duke of Wellington expressing himself doubtingly on the abominable sophism that the Coronation Oath only binds the King as the executive power--thereby making a Highgate oath of it. But the Duke is conscious of the ready retort which his language and conduct on the Emancipation Bill afford to his opponents. He is hampered by that affair. _June_ 20. 1834. CORN LAWS.--MODERN POLITICAL ECONOMY. In the argument on the Corn Laws there is a [Greek: metazasis eis allo gevos]. It may be admitted that the great principles of commerce require the interchange of commodities to be free; but commerce, which is barter, has no proper range beyond luxuries or conveniences;--it is properly the complement to the full existence and development of a state. But how can it be shown that the principles applicable to an interchange of conveniences or luxuries apply also to an interchange of necessaries? No state can be such properly, which is not self-subsistent at least; for no state that is not so, is essentially independent. The nation that cannot even exist without the commodity of another nation, is in effect the slave of that other nation. In common times, indeed, pecuniary interest will prevail, and prevent a ruinous exercise of the power which the nation supplying the necessary must have over the nation which has only the convenience or luxury to return; but such interest, both in individuals and nations, will yield to many stronger passions. Is Holland any authority to the contrary? If so, Tyre and Sidon and Carthage were so! Would you put England on a footing with a country, which can be overrun in a campaign, and starved in a year? * * * * * The entire tendency of the modern or Malthusian political economy is to denationalize. It would dig up the charcoal foundations of the temple of Ephesus to burn as fuel for a steam-engine! _June_ 21. 1834. Mr. ----, in his poem, makes trees coeval with Chaos;--which is next door to Hans Sachse[1] who, in describing Chaos, said it was so pitchy dark, that even the very _cats_ ran against each other! [Footnote 1: Hans Sachse was born 1494, and died 1576.--ED], _June_ 23. 1834. SOCINIANISM.--UNITARIANISM.--FANCY AND IMAGINATION. Faustus Socinus worshipped Jesus Christ, and said that God had given him the power of being omnipresent. Davidi, with a little more acuteness, urged that mere audition or creaturely presence could not possibly justify worship from men;--that a man, how glorified soever, was no nearer God in essence than the vulgarest of the race. Prayer, therefore, was inapplicable. And how could a _man_ be a mediator between God and man? How could a _man_ with sins himself offer any compensation for, or expiation of, sin, unless the most arbitrary caprice were admitted into the counsels of God?--And so, at last, you see, it was discovered by the better logicians amongst the Socinians, that there was no such thing as sin at all. It is wonderful how any Socinian can read the works of Philo Judæus without some pause of doubt in the truth of his views as to the person of Christ. Whether Philo wrote on his own ground as a Jew, or borrowed from the Christians, the testimony as to the then Jewish expectation and belief, is equally strong. You know Philo calls the Logos [Greek: yios Theoy], the _Son of God_, and [Greek: agap_athon te non], _beloved Son_. He calls him [Greek: arhchierheus], _high priest_, [Greek: deuterhos Thehos], _second divinity_, [Greek: ei an Theoy], _image of God_, and describes him as [Greek: eggutat_o m_adenhos ovtos methorhioy diast_amatos], the _nearest possible to God without any intervening separation_. And there are numerous other remarkable expressions of the same sort. My faith is this:--God is the Absolute Will: it is his Name and the meaning of it. It is the Hypostasis. As begetting his own Alterity, the Jehovah, the Manifested--He is the Father; but the Love and the Life--the Spirit-- proceeds from both. I think Priestley must be considered the author of the modern Unitarianism. I owe, under God, my return to the faith, to my having gone much further than the Unitarians, and so having come round to the other side. I can truly say, I never falsified the Scripture. I always told them that their interpretations of the Scripture were intolerable upon any principles of sound criticism; and that, if they were to offer to construe the will of a neighbour as they did that of their Maker, they would be scouted out of society. I said then plainly and openly, that it was clear enough that John and Paul were not Unitarians. But at that time I had a strong sense of the repugnancy of the doctrine of vicarious atonement to the moral being, and I thought nothing could counterbalance that. "What care I," I said, "for the Platonisms of John, or the Rabbinisms of Paul?-- My conscience revolts!" That was the ground of my Unitarianism. Always believing in the government of God, I was a fervent Optimist. But as I could not but see that the present state of things was not the best, I was necessarily led to look forward to some future state. * * * * * You may conceive the difference in kind between the Fancy and the Imagination in this way,--that if the check of the senses and the reason were withdrawn, the first would become delirium, and the last mania. The Fancy brings together images which have no connection natural or moral, but are yoked together by the poet by means of some accidental coincidence; as in the well-known passage in Hudibras: "The sun had long since in the lap Of Thetis taken out his nap, And like a lobster boyl'd, the morn From black to red began to turn."[1] The Imagination modifies images, and gives unity to variety; it sees all things in one, _il più nell' uno_. There is the epic imagination, the perfection of which is in Milton; and the dramatic, of which Shakspeare is the absolute master. The first gives unity by throwing back into the distance; as after the magnificent approach of the Messiah to battle[2], the poet, by one touch from himself-- --"far off their coming shone!"-- makes the whole one image. And so at the conclusion of the description of the appearance of the entranced angels, in which every sort of image from all the regions of earth and air is introduced to diversify and illustrate,--the reader is brought back to the single image by-- "He call'd so loud, that all the hollow deep Of Hell resounded."[3] The dramatic imagination does not throw back, but brings close; it stamps all nature with one, and that its own, meaning, as in Lear throughout. [Footnote 1: Part II. c. 2. v.29.] [Footnote 2: ----"Forth rush'd with whirlwind sound The chariot of Paternal Deity, Flashing thick flames, wheel within wheel undrawn, Itself instinct with spirit, but convoy'd By four cherubic shapes; four faces each Had wonderous; as with stars their bodies all And wings were set with eyes; with eyes the wheels Of beryl, and careering fires between; Over their heads a crystal firmament, Whereon a sapphire throne, inlaid with pure Amber, and colours of the showery arch. He, in celestial panoply all arm'd Of radiant Urim, work divinely wrought, Ascended; at his right hand Victory Sat eagle-wing'd; beside him hung his bow And quiver, with three-bolted thunder stored; And from about him fierce effusion roll'd Of smoke, and bickering flame, and sparkles dire; Attended with ten thousand thousand saints, He onward came; _far off their coming shone;_ And twenty thousand (I their number heard) Chariots of God, half on each hand, were seen: He on the wings of cherub rode sublime On the crystalline sky, in sapphire throned, Illustrious far and wide; but by his own First seen."--P. L. b. vi. v. 749, &c.] [Footnote 3: ----"and call'd His legions, angel forms, who lay intranced Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks In Vallombrosa, where th' Etrurian shades, High over arch'd, embower; or scatter'd sedge Afloat, when with fierce winds Orion arm'd Hath vex'd the Red Sea coast, whose waves o'erthrew Busiris, and his Memphian chivalry, While with perfidious hatred they pursued The sojourners of Goshen, who beheld From the safe shore their floating carcasses And broken chariot wheels; so thick bestrewn, Abject and lost lay these, covering the flood, Under amazement of their hideous change. _He call'd so loud, that all the hollow deep Of Hell resounded_."--P. L. b. i. v. 300, &c.] * * * * * At the very outset, what are we to think of the soundness of this modern system of political economy, the direct tendency of every rule of which is to denationalize, and to make the love of our country a foolish superstition? _June_ 28. 1834. MR. COLERIDGE'S SYSTEM.--BIOGRAPHIA LITERAHIA.--DISSENTERS. You may not understand my system, or any given part of it,--or by a determined act of wilfulness, you may, even though perceiving a ray of light, reject it in anger and disgust:--but this I will say,--that if you once master it, or any part of it, you cannot hesitate to acknowledge it as the truth. You cannot be sceptical about it. The metaphysical disquisition at the end of the first volume of the "Biographia Literaria" is unformed and immature;--it contains the fragments of the truth, but it is not fully thought out. It is wonderful to myself to think how infinitely more profound my views now are, and yet how much clearer they are withal. The circle is completing; the idea is coming round to, and to be, the common sense. * * * * * The generation of the modern worldly Dissenter was thus: Presbyterian, Arian, Socinian, and last, Unitarian. * * * * * Is it not most extraordinary to see the Dissenters calling themselves the descendants of the old Nonconformists, and yet clamouring for a divorce of Church and State? Why--Baxter, and the other great leaders, would have thought a man an atheist who had proposed such a thing. _They_ were rather for merging the State _in_ the Church. But these our modern gentlemen, who are blinded by political passion, give the kiss of alliance to the harlot of Rome, and walk arm in arm with those who deny the God that redeemed them, if so they may but wreak their insane antipathies on the National Church! Well! I suppose they have counted the cost, and know what it is they would have, and can keep. _July_ 5. 1834. LORD BROOKE.--BARROW AND DRYDEN.--PETER WILKINS AND STOTHARD.--FIELDING AND RICHARDSON.--BISHOP SANDFORD.--ROMAN CATHOLIC RELIGION. I do not remember a more beautiful piece of prose in English than the consolation addressed by Lord Brooke (Fulke Greville) to a lady of quality on certain conjugal infelicities. The diction is such that it might have been written now, if we could find any one combining so thoughtful a head with so tender a heart and so exquisite a taste. * * * * * Barrow often debased his language merely to evidence his loyalty. It was, indeed, no easy task for a man of so much genius, and such a precise mathematical mode of thinking, to adopt even for a moment the slang of L'Estrange and Tom Brown; but he succeeded in doing so sometimes. With the exception of such parts, Barrow must be considered as closing the first great period of the English language. Dryden began the second. Of course there are numerous subdivisions. * * * * * Peter Wilkins is to my mind a work of uncommon beauty; and yet Stothard's illustrations have _added_ beauties to it. If it were not for a certain tendency to affectation, scarcely any praise could be too high for Stothard's designs. They give me great pleasure. I believe that Robinson Crusoe and Peter Wilkins could only have been written by islanders. No continentalist could have conceived either tale. Davis's story is an imitation of Peter Wilkins; but there are many beautiful things in it; especially his finding his wife crouching by the fireside--she having, in his absence, plucked out all her feathers--to be like him! It would require a very peculiar genius to add another tale, _ejusdem generis_, to Robinson Crusoe and Peter Wilkins. I once projected such a thing; but the difficulty of a pre-occupied ground stopped me. Perhaps La Motte Fouqué might effect something; but I should fear that neither he, nor any other German, could entirely understand what may be called the "_desert island_" feeling. I would try the marvellous line of Peter Wilkins, if I attempted it, rather than the _real_ fiction of Robinson Crusoe. * * * * * What a master of composition Fielding was! Upon my word, I think the Oedipus Tyrannus, the Alchemist, and Tom Jones the three most perfect plots ever planned. And how charming, how wholesome, Fielding always is! To take him up after Richardson, is like emerging from a sick room heated by stoves, into an open lawn, on a breezy day in May. * * * * * I have been very deeply interested in the account of Bishop Sandford's life, published by his son. He seems to have been a thorough gentleman upon the model of St. Paul, whose manners were the finest of any man's upon record. * * * * * I think I could have conformed to the then dominant Church before the Reformation. The errors existed, but they had not been riveted into peremptory articles of faith before the Council of Trent. If a Romanist were to ask me the question put to Sir Henry Wotton, [1]I should content myself by answering, that I could not exactly say when my religion, as he was pleased to call it, began--but that it was certainly some sixty or seventy years before _his_, at all events--which began at the Council of Trent. [Footnote 1: "Having, at his being in Rome, made acquaintance with a pleasant priest, who invited him, one evening, to hear their vesper music at church; the priest, seeing Sir Henry stand obscurely in a corner, sends to him by a boy of the choir this question, writ in a small piece of paper;--'Where was your religion to be found before Luther?' To which question Sir Henry presently underwrit;--'My religion was to be found then, where yours is not to be found now--in the written word of God.'"--_Isaak Walton's Life of Sir Henry Wotton_.] _July_ 10. 1834. _EUTHANASIA._ I am, dying, but without expectation of a speedy release. Is it not strange that very recently by-gone images, and scenes of early life, have stolen into my mind, like breezes blown from the spice-islands of Youth and Hope-- those twin realities of this phantom world! I do not add Love,--for what is Love but Youth and Hope embracing, and so seen as _one?_ I say _realities_; for reality is a thing of degrees, from the Iliad to a dream; [Greek: *ai g_or t onar e Di s esti]. Yet, in a strict sense, reality is not predicable at all of aught below Heaven. "Es enim _in coelis_, Pater noster, qui tu vere _es!_" Hooker wished to live to finish his Ecclesiastical Polity;--so I own I wish life and strength had been spared to me to complete my Philosophy. For, as God hears me, the originating, continuing, and sustaining wish and design in my heart were to exalt the glory of his name; and, which is the same thing in other words, to promote the improvement of mankind. But _visum aliter Deo_, and his will be done. * * * * * ** This note may well finish the present specimens. What followed was for the memory of private friends only. Mr. Coleridge was then extremely ill; but certainly did not believe his end to be quite so near at hand as it was.--ED. The following Recollections of Mr. Coleridge, written in May, 1811, have been also communicated to me by my brother, Mr. Justice Coleridge:-- "20_th April_, 1811, _at Richmond_. "We got on politics, and he related some curious facts of the Prince and Perceval. Then, adverting to the present state of affairs in Portugal, he said that he rejoiced not so much in the mere favourable turn, as in the end that must now be put to the base reign of opinion respecting the superiority and invincible skill of the French generals. Brave as Sir John Moore was, he thought him deficient in that greater and more essential manliness of soul which should have made him not hold his enemy in such fearful respect, and which should have taught him to care less for the opinion of the world at home. "We then got, I know not how, to German topics. He said that the language of their literature was entirely factitious, and had been formed by Luther from the two dialects, High and Low German; that he had made it, grammatically, most correct, more so, perhaps, than any other language; it was equal to the Greek, except in harmony and sweetness. And yet the Germans themselves thought it sweet;--Klopstock had repeated to him an ode of his own to prove it, and really had deceived himself, by the force of association, into a belief that the harsh sounds, conveying, indeed, or being significant of, sweet images or thoughts, were themselves sweet. Mr. C. was asked what he thought of Klopstock. He answered, that his fame was rapidly declining in Germany; that an Englishman might form a correct notion of him by uniting the moral epigram of Young, the bombast of Hervey, and the minute description of Richardson. As to sublimity, he had, with all Germans, one rule for producing it;--it was, to take something very great, and make it very small in comparison with that which you wish to elevate. Thus, for example, Klopstock says,--'As the gardener goes forth, and scatters from his basket seed into the garden; so does the Creator scatter worlds with his right hand.' Here _worlds_, a large object, are made small in the hands of the Creator; consequently, the Creator is very great. In short, the Germans were not a poetical nation in the very highest sense. Wieland was their best poet: his subject was bad, and his thoughts often impure; but his language was rich and harmonious, and his fancy luxuriant. Sotheby's translation had not at all caught the manner of the original. But the Germans were good metaphysicians and critics: they criticised on principles previously laid down; thus, though they might be wrong, they were in no danger of being self-contradictory, which was too often the case with English critics. "Young, he said, was not a poet to be read through at once. His love of point and wit had often put an end to his pathos and sublimity; but there were parts in him which must be immortal. He (Mr. C.) loved to read a page of Young, and walk out to think of him. "Returning to the Germans, he said that the state of their religion, when he was in Germany, was really shocking. He had never met one clergyman a Christian; and he found professors in the universities lecturing against the most material points in the Gospel. He instanced, I think, Paulus, whose lectures he had attended. The object was to resolve the miracles into natural operations; and such a disposition evinced was the best road to preferment. He severely censured Mr. Taylor's book, in which the principles of Paulus were explained and insisted on with much gratuitous indelicacy. He then entered into the question of Socinianism, and noticed, as I recollect, the passage in the Old Testament; 'The people bowed their faces, and _worshipped_ God and the king.' He said, that all worship implied the presence of the object worshipped: the people worshipped, bowing to the sensuous presence of the one, and the conceived omnipresence of the other. He talked of his having constantly to defend the Church against the Socinian Bishop of Llandaff, Watson. The subject then varied to Roman Catholicism, and he gave us an account of a controversy he had had with a very sensible priest in Sicily on the worship of saints. He had driven the priest from one post to another, till the latter took up the ground, that though the saints were not omnipresent, yet God, who was so, imparted to them the prayers offered up, and then they used their interference with Him to grant them. 'That is, father, (said C. in reply)--excuse my seeming levity, for I mean no impiety--that is; I have a deaf and dumb wife, who yet understands me, and I her, by signs. You have a favour to ask of me, and want my wife's interference; so you communicate your request to me, who impart it to her, and she, by signs back again, begs me to grant it.' The good priest laughed, and said, '_Populus milt decipi, et decipiatur!_' "We then got upon the Oxford controversy, and he was decidedly of opinion that there could be no doubt of Copleston's complete victory. He thought the Review had chosen its points of attack ill, as there must doubtless be in every institution so old much to reprehend and carp at. On the other hand, he thought that Copleston had not been so severe or hard upon them as he might have been; but he admired the critical part of his work, which he thought very highly valuable, independently of the controversy. He wished some portion of mathematics was more essential to a degree at Oxford, as he thought a gentleman's education incomplete without it, and had himself found the necessity of getting up a little, when he could ill spare the time. He every day more and more lamented his neglect of them when at Cambridge, "Then glancing off to Aristotle, he gave a very high character of him. He said that Bacon objected to Aristotle the grossness of his examples, and Davy now did precisely the same to Bacon: both were wrong; for each of those philosophers wished to confine the attention of the mind in their works to the _form_ of reasoning only, by which other truths might be established or elicited, and therefore the most trite and common-place examples were in fact the best. He said that during a long confinement to his room, he had taken up the Schoolmen, and was astonished at the immense learning and acute knowledge displayed by them; that there was scarcely any thing which modern philosophers had proudly brought forward as their own, which might not be found clearly and systematically laid down by them in some or other of their writings. Locke had sneered at the Schoolmen unfairly, and had raised a foolish laugh against them by citations from their _Quid libet_ questions, which were discussed on the eyes of holydays, and in which the greatest latitude was allowed, being considered mere exercises of ingenuity. We had ridiculed their _quiddities_, and why? Had we not borrowed their _quantity_ and their _quality_, and why then reject their _quiddity_, when every schoolboy in logic must know, that of every thing may be asked, _Quantum est? Quale est?_ and _Quid est?_ the last bringing you to the most material of all points, its individual being. He afterwards stated, that in a History of Speculative Philosophy which he was endeavouring to prepare for publication, he had proved, and to the satisfaction of Sir James Mackintosh, that there was nothing in Locke which his best admirers most admired, that might not be found more clearly and better laid down in Descartes or the old Schoolmen; not that he was himself an implicit disciple of Descartes, though he thought that Descartes had been much misinterpreted. "When we got on the subject of poetry and Southey, he gave us a critique of the Curse of Kehama, the fault of which he thought consisted in the association of a plot and a machinery so very wild with feelings so sober and tender: but he gave the poem high commendation, admired the art displayed in the employment of the Hindu monstrosities, and begged us to observe the noble feeling excited of the superiority of virtue over vice; that Kehama went on, from the beginning to the end of the poem, increasing in power, whilst Kailyal gradually lost her hopes and her protectors; and yet by the time we got to the end, we had arrived at an utter contempt and even carelessness of the power of evil, as exemplified in the almighty Rajah, and felt a complete confidence in the safety of the unprotected virtue of the maiden. This he thought the very great merit of the poem. "When we walked home with him to the inn, he got on the subject of the English Essay for the year at Oxford, and thought some consideration of the corruption of language should he introduced into it. [Footnote: On Etymology.] It originated, he thought, in a desire to abbreviate all expression as much as possible; and no doubt, if in one word, without violating idiom, I can express what others have done in more, and yet be as fully and easily understood, I have manifestly made an improvement; but if, on the other hand, it becomes harder, and takes more time to comprehend a thought or image put in one word by Apuleius than when expressed in a whole sentence by Cicero, the saving is merely of pen and ink, and the alteration is evidently a corruption." _"April_ 21.--Richmond._ "Before breakfast we went into Mr. May's delightful book-room, where he was again silent in admiration of the prospect. After breakfast, we walked to church. He seemed full of calm piety, and said he always felt the most delightful sensations in a Sunday church-yard,--that it struck him as if God had given to man fifty-two springs in every year. After the service, he was vehement against the sermon, as common-place, and invidious in its tone towards the poor. Then he gave many texts from the lessons and gospel of the day, as affording fit subjects for discourses. He ridiculed the absurdity of refusing to believe every thing that you could not understand; and mentioned a rebuke of Dr. Parr's to a man of the name of Frith, and that of another clergyman to a young man, who said he would believe nothing which he could not understand:--'Then, young man, your creed will be the shortest of any man's I know.' "As we walked up Mr. Cambridge's meadows towards Twickenham, he criticised Johnson and Gray as poets, and did not seem to allow them high merit. The excellence of verse, he said, was to be untranslatable into any other words without detriment to the beauty of the passage;--the position of a single word could not be altered in Milton without injury. Gray's personifications, he said, were mere printer's devils' personifications-- persons with a capital letter, abstract qualities with a small one. He thought Collins had more genius than Gray, who was a singular instance of a man of taste, poetic feeling, and fancy, without imagination. He contrasted Dryden's opening of the 10th satire of Juvenal with Johnson's:-- "'Let observation, with extensive view, Survey mankind from Ganges to Peru.' which was as much as to say,-- "'Let observation with extensive observation observe mankind.' "After dinner he told us a humorous story of his enthusiastic fondness for Quakerism, when he was at Cambridge, and his attending one of their meetings, which had entirely cured him. When the little children came in, he was in raptures with them, and descanted upon the delightful mode of treating them now, in comparison with what he had experienced in childhood. He lamented the haughtiness with which Englishmen treated all foreigners abroad, and the facility with which our government had always given up any people which had allied itself to us, at the end of a war; and he particularly remarked upon our abandonment of Minorca. These two things, he said, made us universally disliked on the Continent; though, as a people, most highly respected. He thought a war with America inevitable; and expressed his opinion, that the United States were unfortunate in the prematureness of their separation from this country, before they had in themselves the materials of moral society--before they had a gentry and a learned class,--the former looking backwards, and giving the sense of stability--the latter looking forwards, and regulating the feelings of the people. "Afterwards, in the drawing-room, he sat down by Professor Rigaud, with whom he entered into a discussion of Kant's System of Metaphysics. The little knots of the company were speedily silent: Mr. C.'s voice grew louder; and abstruse as the subject was, yet his language was so ready, so energetic, and so eloquent, and his illustrations so very neat and apposite, that the ladies even paid him the most solicitous and respectful attention. They were really entertained with Kant's Metaphysics! At last I took one of them, a very sweet singer, to the piano-forte; and, when there was a pause, she began an Italian air. She was anxious to please him, and he was enraptured. His frame quivered with emotion, and there was a titter of uncommon delight on his countenance. When it was over, he praised the singer warmly, and prayed she might finish those strains in heaven! "This is nearly all, except some anecdotes, which I recollect of our meeting with this most interesting, most wonderful man. Some of his topics and arguments I have enumerated; but the connection and the words are lost. And nothing that I can say can give any notion of his eloquence and manner,--of the hold which he soon got on his audience--of the variety of his stores of information--or, finally, of the artlessness of his habits, or the modesty and temper with which he listened to, and answered arguments, contradictory to his own."--J. T. C. The following address has been printed before; but it cannot be too widely circulated, and it will form an appropriate conclusion to this volume. _To Adam Steinmetz K----._ MY DEAR GODCHILD, I offer up the same fervent prayer for you now, as I did kneeling before the altar, when you were baptized into Christ, and solemnly received as a living member of his spiritual body, the Church. Years must pass before you will be able to read, with an understanding heart, what I now write. But I trust that the all-gracious God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Mercies, who, by his only-begotten Son, (all mercies in one sovereign mercy!) has redeemed you from the evil ground, and willed you to be born out of darkness, but into light--out of death, but into life--out of sin, but into righteousness, even into the Lord our Righteousness; I trust that He will graciously hear the prayers of your dear parents, and be with you as the spirit of health and growth in body and mind! My dear Godchild!--You received from Christ's minister at the baptismal font, as your Christian name, the name of a most dear friend of your father's, and who was to me even as a son, the late Adam Steinmetz, whose fervent aspiration, and ever-paramount aim, even from early youth, was to be a Christian in thought, word, and deed--in will, mind, and affections. I too, your Godfather, have known what the enjoyments and advantages of this life are, and what the more refined pleasures which learning and intellectual power can bestow; and with all the experience that more than threescore years can give, I now, on the eve of my departure, declare to you, (and earnestly pray that you may hereafter live and act on the conviction,) that health is a great blessing,--competence obtained by honourable industry a great blessing,--and a great blessing it is to have kind, faithful, and loving friends and relatives; but that the greatest of all blessings, as it is the most ennobling of all privileges, is to be indeed a Christian. But I have been likewise, through a large portion of my later life, a sufferer, sorely afflicted with bodily pains, languors, and manifold infirmities; and, for the last three or four years, have, with few and brief intervals, been confined to a sick-room, and, at this moment, in great weakness and heaviness, write from a sick-bed, hopeless of a recovery, yet without prospect of a speedy removal; and I, thus on the very brink of the grave, solemnly bear witness to you, that the Almighty Redeemer, most gracious in his promises to them that truly seek him, is faithful to perform what he hath promised, and has preserved, under all my pains and infirmities, the inward peace that passeth all understanding, with the supporting assurance of a reconciled God, who will not withdraw his spirit from me in the conflict, and in his own time will deliver me from the Evil One! O, my dear Godchild! eminently blessed are those who begin early to seek, fear, and love their God, trusting wholly in the righteousness and mediation of their Lord, Redeemer, Saviour, and everlasting High Priest, Jesus Christ! O preserve this as a legacy and bequest from your unseen Godfather and friend, S. T. COLERIDGE. _Grove, Highgate, July_ 13. 1834. He died on the 25th day of the same month. INDEX. * * * * * A. Abraham. Abuse, Eloquence of. Acoustics. Acts, Origin of. Adiaphori. Advocate, Duties and Needs of an. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Alchemy. All and the Whole. America, United States of. American Union, Northern and Southern States of the. Americans, the. Anarchy, Mental. Ancient Mariner. Animal Being, Scale of. Ant and Bee. Architecture, Gothic. Ariosto and Tasso. Aristotle. Army and Navy, House of Commons appointing the Officers of the. Article, Ninth. Asgill. -----and Defoe. Astrology. Atheist. Autumn Day. B. Bacon. Ball, Sir Alexander. Baptismal Service. Barrow and Dryden. _Bartram's Travels_. Baxter. Beaumont and Fletcher. ----'s Dramas. Beauty. Behmen, Jacob. Bentley. Berkeley. Bertram, Character of. Bestial Theory. Bible, Study of the. ----, Version of the. Biblical Commentators. Biographia Literaria. Bitters and Tonics. Black. Black, Colonel. Blumenbach and Kant's Races. Books of Moses, Genuineness of. Boswell. Bourrienne. Bowyer. British Schoolmen. Brooke, Lord. Brown and Darwin. Bull and Waterland. Burke. Burnet. Buonaparte. Byron, Lord. ----and H. Walpole's "Mysterious Mother." ----, his Versification, and Don Juan. C. Caesarean Operation. Cambridge Petition to admit Dissenters. Canning. Capital. Catholicity. Cavalier Slang. Character, Differences of. Charles I. Chaucer. Children, Gracefulness of, Chillingworth, Christ, Divinity of, Christ's Hospital, Christian Sabbath, Christianity, ----, Scope of, Church, ----, High Prizes and Revenues of the, ----, National, ----of England, ----of Rome, Churchmen, Church Singing, Citizens and Christians, Claudian, Clergy, Celibacy of the, Coleridge's (Mr.) System, Colonization, Colours, ----, Non-perception of, Commons, House of, ----, the Reformed House of, Compounds, Latin, Consolation in Distress, Constantine, Constitution, English, Corn Laws, Coronation Oaths, Crabbe and Southey, Cramp, Charm for, Craniology, Crisis, D. Dancing, English and Greek, Daniel, Davy, Sir H., Democracy, ----, with Slavery, Devotional Spirit, De vi Minimorum, Dictation and Inspiration, Diction of the Old and New Testament Version, Diplomatists, modern, Disfranchisement, Dissenters, Diversions of Purley, Divines, old, Divinity, Dobrizhoffer, Dog, Don Quixote, Douw's (Gerard) "Schoolmaster," and Titian's "Venus," Dramatists, the Old, Drayton and Daniel, Dreams, ----and Ghosts, Difference between Stories of, Dryden, ----and Pope, Dual, Neuter plural, and Verb singular, E. Education, Egyptian Antiquaries, Eldon's (Lord) Doctrine as to Grammar Schools, Electricity, Elegy, Energy of Man and other Animals, England, ----and Holland, English and German, Envy, Epidemic Disease, Epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians, ----to the Hebrews, ----to the Romans, Erasmus, Etymology of the final _Ive_, Eucharist, the, Euripides, Euthanasia, Evangelicals, Mock, F. Faith, ----, Articles of, ----and Belief Fantasy and Imagination, Fatalism and Providence, Fathers, the, Faust, Fees, Barristers' and Physicians', Fielding and Richardson, Fine Arts, Patronage of the, Flaccus, Valerius, Flogging, Food, Fox and Pitt, French, the, ----Gendarmerie, ----Hereditary Peerage, Abolition of the, G. Galileo, Newton, Kepler, Bacon, Galvanism, Gas, Hydro-carbonic, Gender of the Sun in German, Genius, Genius, Criterion of. ----, Feminine. ----, Metaphysical. ----of the Spanish and Italians. German. ----Blank Verse. ----and English. Ghosts, Gibbon, Gifford's Massier, Giotto, Gnosis, God, Proof of Existence of, ----'s Providence, Goethe, Good and the True, the, Government, Grammar, Gray and Cotton Great Minds androgynous, ----Poets, good Men, Greek, ----, Italian, and English, pure Ages of, ----Accent and Quantity, ----Drama, ----Particles, Grey, Earl, H. Hacket's Life of Archbishop Williams, Hahnemann, Hall, Captain B., ----and the Americans, Hamlet, Hampden's Speech, Harmony, Heat, Hebrew, Hermesianax, Herodotus, Hesiod, Hieronimo, History, ----, Jewish, Hobbism, Holland and Belgium, ----and the Dutch, Homer, Homeric Heroes in Shakspeare, Hooker, Hooker and Bull, Horner, Humour and Genius, Hypothesis, Hysteria, I. Iapetic and Semitic, Ideal Tory and Whig, Ideal Truths, Reverence for, Ideas, Imitation and Copy, Incarnation, Inherited Disease, Insects, Interest, Monied, Investigation, Methods of, Ireland, Union with, Irish Church, Iron, Irving, Isaac, Italy, Roman Conquest of, J. Jacob, Jacobins, James I, Jerusalem, Destruction of, Jews, ----, Conversion of the, ----, Division of the Scripture, ----, in Poland, Job, Book of, Johnson, Dr., ----, his Political Pamphlets, ----, the Whig, Jonson, Ben, Junius, Juries, K. Kant's Attempt, Kant's Races of Mankind, Kean, Keats, Keenness and Subtlety, Kemble, John, Kepler, Knowledge, Kotzebue, L. Lakes, Scotch and English, Lamb, C., Land and Money, Landholders, Duty of, Landor's (W. S.) Poetry, Laud, Laughter, Farce and Tragedy, Lavacrum Pallados, Legislation, Iniquitous, Leo X., Lewis's Jamaica Journal, Life, Constitutional and Functional, Liturgy, English, Logic, ----, Character of the Age for, Logic of Ideas and of Syllogisms. Logos, the. "Lord, the," in the English Version of the Psalms. Love. ----and Friendship opposed. Love's Labour Lost. Lucan. Luther. Lyell's Geology. M. Machinery. Mackintosh, Sir James. Madness. Magnetism. Malta. Man cannot be stationary. ----Fall of. ----'s Freedom. Mandeville's Fable of the Bees. Manners under Edward III., Richard II., and Henry VIII. Marriage. ----Parental Control in. ----of Cousins. Martin. Mason's Poetry. Massier. Materialism. Mathews. Measure for Measure. Medicine. Medicines, Specific. Men. Messenger of the Covenant. Messiah. Metre, Modern. Miguel, Dom, and Dom Pedro. Milesian Tales. Milton. ----and Sydney. ----'s disregard of Painting. ----'s Egotism. ----'s Latin Poems. Ministers and the Reform Bill. Monarchy or Democracy, Prospect of. Monro, Sir T. Mosaic Miracles. ----Prophecies. Motives and Impulses. Music. ----, Ear and Taste for, different. Musical Glasses, some Men like. N. Napier. National Colonial Character and Naval Discipline. ----Debt. Nations, Characteristic Temperament of. Negro Emancipation. Nervous Weakness. New Testament Canon. Newton. Nitrous Oxide. Nominalists and Realists. Northern and Southern States. Norwegians. O. Oath, Coronation. Oaths. Obstruction. Origen. Othello, Character of. P. Painting. Pantheism. ----and Idolatry. Papacy. ----, the, and the Reformation. ----and the Schoolmen. Paradise Lost. Park, Professor. Parliamentary Privilege. Party Spirit. Penal Code in Ireland. Penn, Granville, and the Deluge. Pentameter, Greek and Latin. Permanency and Progression of Nations. Persius. Persons and Things. Peter Simple, and Tom Cringle's Log. Phantom Portrait. Philanthropists. Philosopher's ordinary Language. Philosophy, Greek. ----, Moral. ----, Mr. Coleridge's System of. ----of young Men of the present Day. Pictures. Pilgrim's Progress. Pirates. Plants. Plato. ----and Xenophon. Plotinus. Poem, Epic. Poetic Promise. Poetical Filter. Poetry. ----, Persian and Arabic. Poison. Polarity, Moral Law of. Political Action, the two Modes of. Political Economy, Modern. Polonius. Poor Laws. Popedom. Prayer. Preaching extempore. Presbyterians, Independents, and Bishops. Principle, Greatest Happiness. Principles and Facts. ----and Maxims. Professions and Trades. Propertius. Property Tax. Prophecies of the Old Testament. Prophecy. Prose and Poetry. ----and Verse. Prudentius. Psalms, Translation of the. Puritans and Cavaliers. ----and Jacobins. Q. Quacks. Quakerism, Modern. Quakers. Quarantine. R. Rabelais. ----and Luther. Raffles, Sir S. Rainbow. Reason and Understanding. Reasoner, a. Redemption. Reform of the House of Commons. ----Bill. ----, Conduct of Ministers on the. Reformation. ----, English. Religion. Religion gentilizes. ----of the Greeks. -----, Roman Catholic. -----, Romish Representation, Popular. ----, Direct. Restoration. Review, Principles of a. Revolution. ----, Belgian. ----, French. ----, Intellectual. Rhenferd. Roman Conquest. ----Empire. Key to the Decline of the. ----Mind. ----Catholics. ----Catholic Emancipation. Rosetti on Dante. S. Sallust. Sandford, Bishop. Sanskrit. Sarpi, Paul. Scanderbeg. Scarlett, Sir J. Schemes, Spinozistic and Hebrew. Schiller. ----'s Robbers. ----'s Versification. Schmidt. Schools, Infant. ----, Public. Scotch and English. ----Kirk and Irving. ----Novels. Scott, Michael. ----and Coleridge. ----'s Novels. Sectarianism. Seneca. Shakspeare. ----, _in Minimis_. ----'s Intellectual Action. ----'s Sonnets. Sicily. Sidney, Sir P. Sin and Sins. Smith, Robert. Society, best State of. Socinianism. Socrates. Solomon. Sophocles. Southey. ----'s Life of Bunyan. Speech, Parts of. Spenser. Spinosa. Spurzheim. Spurzheim and Craniology. St. John. ----'s Gospel. ----, Chap. xix. Ver. 11. ----, Chap. iii. Ver. 4. St. Paul's Melita. State. ----, a. ----, Idea of a. Statesmen. Statius. Steinmetz. Stella. Sterne. Style. ----, Algernon Sydney's. ----, Modern. Sublime and Nonsense. Sublimity. Suffiction. Superstition of Maltese, Sicilians, and Italians. Swift. Sympathy of old Greek and Latin with English, 168. T. Talent and Genius. Talented. Taxation. Taylor, Jeremy. Tennyson's Poems. Tertullian. Thelwall. Theory. Theta. Things are finding their Level. Thomas à Becket. Thucydides. ----and Tacitus. Tibullus. Times of Charles I. Toleration. Tooke, Horne. Travels, Modern. Trinity, the. Truths and Maxims. U. Understanding, the. Undine. Unitarianism. Universal Suffrage. Universities. V. Valcknaer. Varro. Vico. Virgil. Virtue and Liberty. Von Humboldt, Baron. Vote, Right of Women to. Vowels and Consonants. Vox Populi, Vox Dei. W. Walkerite Creed. War. ----, Civil, of the Seventeenth Century. Wedded Love in Shakspeare and his contemporary Dramatists. Wellington, Duke of. Wetherell's (Sir Charles) Speech. Whigs, Conduct of the. Wicliffe. Wilkins, Peter, and Stothard. William III. Wilson. Wit and Madness. Witch of Endor. Women, Characterlessness of. ----, Old. ----and Men. Words and Names of Things. Wordsworth. Works, Chronological Arrangement of. Working to better one's condition. Worlds, Plurality of. Z. Zendavesta. THE END. 
6081	----	BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA By Samuel Taylor Coleridge LIST OF CONTENTS CHAP. I Motives to the present work--Reception of the Author's first publication--Discipline of his taste at school--Effect of contemporary writers on youthful minds--Bowles's Sonnets-- Comparison between the poets before and since Pope II Supposed irritability of genius brought to the test of facts--Causes and occasions of the charge--Its injustice III The Author's obligations to Critics, and the probable occasion--Principles of modern criticism--Mr. Southey's works and character IV The Lyrical Ballads with the Preface--Mr. Wordsworth's earlier poems--On Fancy and Imagination--The investigation of the distinction important to the Fine Arts V On the law of Association--Its history traced from Aristotle to Hartley VI That Hartley's system, as far as it differs from that of Aristotle, is neither tenable in theory, nor founded in facts VII Of the necessary consequences of the Hartleian Theory--Of the original mistake or equivocation which procured its admission--Memoria technica VIII The system of Dualism introduced by Des Cartes--Refined first by Spinoza and afterwards by Leibnitz into the doctrine of Harmonia praestabilita--Hylozoism--Materialism --None of these systems, or any possible theory of Association, supplies or supersedes a theory of Perception, or explains the formation of the Associable XI Is Philosophy possible as a science, and what are its conditions?--Giordano Bruno--Literary Aristocracy, or the existence of a tacit compact among the learned as a privileged order--The Author's obligations to the Mystics- To Immanuel Kant--The difference between the letter and The spirit of Kant's writings, and a vindication of Prudence in the teaching of Philosophy--Fichte's attempt to complete the Critical system-Its partial success and ultimate failure--Obligations to Schelling; and among English writers to Saumarez X A Chapter of digression and anecdotes, as an interlude preceding that on the nature and genesis of the Imagination or Plastic Power--On Pedantry and pedantic expressions-- Advice to young authors respecting publication--Various anecdotes of the Author's literary life, and the progress of his opinions in Religion and Politics XI An affectionate exhortation to those who in early life feel themselves disposed to become authors XII A Chapter of requests and premonitions concerning the perusal or omission of the chapter that follows XIII On the Imagination, or Esemplastic power XIV Occasion of the Lyrical Ballads, and the objects originally proposed--Preface to the second edition--The ensuing controversy, its causes and acrimony--Philosophic definitions of a Poem and Poetry with scholia XV The specific symptoms of poetic power elucidated in a Critical analysis of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, and Rape of Lucrece XVI Striking points of difference between the Poets of the present age and those of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries--Wish expressed for the union of the characteristic merits of both XVII Examination of the tenets peculiar to Mr. Wordsworth-- Rustic life (above all, low and rustic life) especially unfavourable to the formation of a human diction-The best parts of language the product of philosophers, not of clowns or shepherds--Poetry essentially ideal and generic-- The language of Milton as much the language of real life, yea, incomparably more so than that of the cottager XVIII Language of metrical composition, why and wherein essentially different from that of prose--Origin and elements of metre --Its necessary consequences, and the conditions thereby imposed on the metrical writer in the choice of his diction XIX Continuation--Concerning the real object, which, it is probable, Mr. Wordsworth had before him in his critical preface--Elucidation and application of this XX The former subject continued--The neutral style, or that common to Prose and Poetry, exemplified by specimens from Chaucer, Herbert, and others XXI Remarks on the present mode of conducting critical journals XXII The characteristic defects of Wordsworth's poetry, with the principles from which the judgment, that they are defects, is deduced--Their proportion to the beauties--For the greatest part characteristic of his theory only SATYRANE'S LETTERS XXIII Critique on Bertram XXIV Conclusion So wenig er auch bestimmt seyn mag, andere zu belehren, so wuenscht er doch sich denen mitzutheilen, die er sich gleichgesinnt weis, (oder hofft,) deren Anzahl aber in der Breite der Welt zerstreut ist; er wuenscht sein Verhaeltniss zu den aeltesten Freunden dadurch wieder anzuknuepfen, mit neuen es fortzusetzen, und in der letzten Generation sich wieder andere fur seine uebrige Lebenszeit zu gewinnen. Er wuenscht der Jugend die Umwege zu ersparen, auf denen er sich selbst verirrte. (Goethe. Einleitung in die Propylaeen.) TRANSLATION. Little call as he may have to instruct others, he wishes nevertheless to open out his heart to such as he either knows or hopes to be of like mind with himself, but who are widely scattered in the world: he wishes to knit anew his connections with his oldest friends, to continue those recently formed, and to win other friends among the rising generation for the remaining course of his life. He wishes to spare the young those circuitous paths, on which he himself had lost his way. BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA CHAPTER I Motives to the present work--Reception of the Author's first publication--Discipline of his taste at school--Effect of contemporary writers on youthful minds--Bowles's Sonnets--Comparison between the poets before and since Pope. It has been my lot to have had my name introduced both in conversation, and in print, more frequently than I find it easy to explain, whether I consider the fewness, unimportance, and limited circulation of my writings, or the retirement and distance, in which I have lived, both from the literary and political world. Most often it has been connected with some charge which I could not acknowledge, or some principle which I had never entertained. Nevertheless, had I had no other motive or incitement, the reader would not have been troubled with this exculpation. What my additional purposes were, will be seen in the following pages. It will be found, that the least of what I have written concerns myself personally. I have used the narration chiefly for the purpose of giving a continuity to the work, in part for the sake of the miscellaneous reflections suggested to me by particular events, but still more as introductory to a statement of my principles in Politics, Religion, and Philosophy, and an application of the rules, deduced from philosophical principles, to poetry and criticism. But of the objects, which I proposed to myself, it was not the least important to effect, as far as possible, a settlement of the long continued controversy concerning the true nature of poetic diction; and at the same time to define with the utmost impartiality the real poetic character of the poet, by whose writings this controversy was first kindled, and has been since fuelled and fanned. In the spring of 1796, when I had but little passed the verge of manhood, I published a small volume of juvenile poems. They were received with a degree of favour, which, young as I was, I well know was bestowed on them not so much for any positive merit, as because they were considered buds of hope, and promises of better works to come. The critics of that day, the most flattering, equally with the severest, concurred in objecting to them obscurity, a general turgidness of diction, and a profusion of new coined double epithets [1]. The first is the fault which a writer is the least able to detect in his own compositions: and my mind was not then sufficiently disciplined to receive the authority of others, as a substitute for my own conviction. Satisfied that the thoughts, such as they were, could not have been expressed otherwise, or at least more perspicuously, I forgot to inquire, whether the thoughts themselves did not demand a degree of attention unsuitable to the nature and objects of poetry. This remark however applies chiefly, though not exclusively, to the Religious Musings. The remainder of the charge I admitted to its full extent, and not without sincere acknowledgments both to my private and public censors for their friendly admonitions. In the after editions, I pruned the double epithets with no sparing hand, and used my best efforts to tame the swell and glitter both of thought and diction; though in truth, these parasite plants of youthful poetry had insinuated themselves into my longer poems with such intricacy of union, that I was often obliged to omit disentangling the weed, from the fear of snapping the flower. From that period to the date of the present work I have published nothing, with my name, which could by any possibility have come before the board of anonymous criticism. Even the three or four poems, printed with the works of a friend [2], as far as they were censured at all, were charged with the same or similar defects, (though I am persuaded not with equal justice),--with an excess of ornament, in addition to strained and elaborate diction. I must be permitted to add, that, even at the early period of my juvenile poems, I saw and admitted the superiority of an austerer and more natural style, with an insight not less clear, than I at present possess. My judgment was stronger than were my powers of realizing its dictates; and the faults of my language, though indeed partly owing to a wrong choice of subjects, and the desire of giving a poetic colouring to abstract and metaphysical truths, in which a new world then seemed to open upon me, did yet, in part likewise, originate in unfeigned diffidence of my own comparative talent.--During several years of my youth and early manhood, I reverenced those who had re-introduced the manly simplicity of the Greek, and of our own elder poets, with such enthusiasm as made the hope seem presumptuous of writing successfully in the same style. Perhaps a similar process has happened to others; but my earliest poems were marked by an ease and simplicity, which I have studied, perhaps with inferior success, to impress on my later compositions. At school, (Christ's Hospital,) I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though at the same time, a very severe master, the Reverend James Bowyer. He early moulded my taste to the preference of Demosthenes to Cicero, of Homer and Theocritus to Virgil, and again of Virgil to Ovid. He habituated me to compare Lucretius, (in such extracts as I then read,) Terence, and above all the chaster poems of Catullus, not only with the Roman poets of the, so called, silver and brazen ages; but with even those of the Augustan aera: and on grounds of plain sense and universal logic to see and assert the superiority of the former in the truth and nativeness both of their thoughts and diction. At the same time that we were studying the Greek tragic poets, he made us read Shakespeare and Milton as lessons: and they were the lessons too, which required most time and trouble to bring up, so as to escape his censure. I learned from him, that poetry, even that of the loftiest and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes. In the truly great poets, he would say, there is a reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of every word; and I well remember that, availing himself of the synonymes to the Homer of Didymus, he made us attempt to show, with regard to each, why it would not have answered the same purpose; and wherein consisted the peculiar fitness of the word in the original text. In our own English compositions, (at least for the last three years of our school education,) he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image, unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might have been conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words [3]. Lute, harp, and lyre, Muse, Muses, and inspirations, Pegasus, Parnassus, and Hippocrene were all an abomination to him. In fancy I can almost hear him now, exclaiming "Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse, boy, Muse? Your nurse's daughter, you mean! Pierian spring? Oh aye! the cloister-pump, I suppose!" Nay certain introductions, similes, and examples, were placed by name on a list of interdiction. Among the similes, there was, I remember, that of the manchineel fruit, as suiting equally well with too many subjects; in which however it yielded the palm at once to the example of Alexander and Clytus, which was equally good and apt, whatever might be the theme. Was it ambition? Alexander and Clytus!--Flattery? Alexander and Clytus!--anger--drunkenness--pride--friendship--ingratitude--late repentance? Still, still Alexander and Clytus! At length, the praises of agriculture having been exemplified in the sagacious observation that, had Alexander been holding the plough, he would not have run his friend Clytus through with a spear, this tried, and serviceable old friend was banished by public edict in saecula saeculorum. I have sometimes ventured to think, that a list of this kind, or an index expurgatorius of certain well-known and ever-returning phrases, both introductory, and transitional, including a large assortment of modest egoisms, and flattering illeisms, and the like, might be hung up in our Law-courts, and both Houses of Parliament, with great advantage to the public, as an important saving of national time, an incalculable relief to his Majesty's ministers, but above all, as insuring the thanks of country attornies, and their clients, who have private bills to carry through the House. Be this as it may, there was one custom of our master's, which I cannot pass over in silence, because I think it imitable and worthy of imitation. He would often permit our exercises, under some pretext of want of time, to accumulate, till each lad had four or five to be looked over. Then placing the whole number abreast on his desk, he would ask the writer, why this or that sentence might not have found as appropriate a place under this or that other thesis: and if no satisfying answer could be returned, and two faults of the same kind were found in one exercise, the irrevocable verdict followed, the exercise was torn up, and another on the same subject to be produced, in addition to the tasks of the day. The reader will, I trust, excuse this tribute of recollection to a man, whose severities, even now, not seldom furnish the dreams, by which the blind fancy would fain interpret to the mind the painful sensations of distempered sleep; but neither lessen nor dim the deep sense of my moral and intellectual obligations. He sent us to the University excellent Latin and Greek scholars, and tolerable Hebraists. Yet our classical knowledge was the least of the good gifts, which we derived from his zealous and conscientious tutorage. He is now gone to his final reward, full of years, and full of honours, even of those honours, which were dearest to his heart, as gratefully bestowed by that school, and still binding him to the interests of that school, in which he had been himself educated, and to which during his whole life he was a dedicated thing. From causes, which this is not the place to investigate, no models of past times, however perfect, can have the same vivid effect on the youthful mind, as the productions of contemporary genius. The discipline, my mind had undergone, Ne falleretur rotundo sono et versuum cursu, cincinnis, et floribus; sed ut inspiceret quidnam subesset, quae, sedes, quod firmamentum, quis fundus verbis; an figures essent mera ornatura et orationis fucus; vel sanguinis e materiae ipsius corde effluentis rubor quidam nativus et incalescentia genuina;--removed all obstacles to the appreciation of excellence in style without diminishing my delight. That I was thus prepared for the perusal of Mr. Bowles's sonnets and earlier poems, at once increased their influence, and my enthusiasm. The great works of past ages seem to a young man things of another race, in respect to which his faculties must remain passive and submiss, even as to the stars and mountains. But the writings of a contemporary, perhaps not many years older than himself, surrounded by the same circumstances, and disciplined by the same manners, possess a reality for him, and inspire an actual friendship as of a man for a man. His very admiration is the wind which fans and feeds his hope. The poems themselves assume the properties of flesh and blood. To recite, to extol, to contend for them is but the payment of a debt due to one, who exists to receive it. There are indeed modes of teaching which have produced, and are producing, youths of a very different stamp; modes of teaching, in comparison with which we have been called on to despise our great public schools, and universities, in whose halls are hung Armoury of the invincible knights of old-- modes, by which children are to be metamorphosed into prodigies. And prodigies with a vengeance have I known thus produced; prodigies of self-conceit, shallowness, arrogance, and infidelity! Instead of storing the memory, during the period when the memory is the predominant faculty, with facts for the after exercise of the judgment; and instead of awakening by the noblest models the fond and unmixed love and admiration, which is the natural and graceful temper of early youth; these nurslings of improved pedagogy are taught to dispute and decide; to suspect all but their own and their lecturer's wisdom; and to hold nothing sacred from their contempt, but their own contemptible arrogance; boy-graduates in all the technicals, and in all the dirty passions and impudence of anonymous criticism. To such dispositions alone can the admonition of Pliny be requisite, Neque enim debet operibus ejus obesse, quod vivit. An si inter eos, quos nunquam vidimus, floruisset, non solum libros ejus, verum etiam imagines conquireremus, ejusdem nunc honor prasentis, et gratia quasi satietate languescet? At hoc pravum, malignumque est, non admirari hominem admiratione dignissimum, quia videre, complecti, nec laudare tantum, verum etiam amare contingit. I had just entered on my seventeenth year, when the sonnets of Mr. Bowles, twenty in number, and just then published in a quarto pamphlet, were first made known and presented to me, by a schoolfellow who had quitted us for the University, and who, during the whole time that he was in our first form (or in our school language a Grecian,) had been my patron and protector. I refer to Dr. Middleton, the truly learned, and every way excellent Bishop of Calcutta: qui laudibus amplis Ingenium celebrare meum, calamumque solebat, Calcar agens animo validum. Non omnia terra Obruta; vivit amor, vivit dolor; ora negatur Dulcia conspicere; at fiere et meminisse relictum est. It was a double pleasure to me, and still remains a tender recollection, that I should have received from a friend so revered the first knowledge of a poet, by whose works, year after year, I was so enthusiastically delighted and inspired. My earliest acquaintances will not have forgotten the undisciplined eagerness and impetuous zeal, with which I laboured to make proselytes, not only of my companions, but of all with whom I conversed, of whatever rank, and in whatever place. As my school finances did not permit me to purchase copies, I made, within less than a year and a half, more than forty transcriptions, as the best presents I could offer to those, who had in any way won my regard. And with almost equal delight did I receive the three or four following publications of the same author. Though I have seen and known enough of mankind to be well aware, that I shall perhaps stand alone in my creed, and that it will be well, if I subject myself to no worse charge than that of singularity; I am not therefore deterred from avowing, that I regard, and ever have regarded the obligations of intellect among the most sacred of the claims of gratitude. A valuable thought, or a particular train of thoughts, gives me additional pleasure, when I can safely refer and attribute it to the conversation or correspondence of another. My obligations to Mr. Bowles were indeed important, and for radical good. At a very premature age, even before my fifteenth year, I had bewildered myself in metaphysics, and in theological controversy. Nothing else pleased me. History, and particular facts, lost all interest in my mind. Poetry--(though for a school-boy of that age, I was above par in English versification, and had already produced two or three compositions which, I may venture to say, without reference to my age, were somewhat above mediocrity, and which had gained me more credit than the sound, good sense of my old master was at all pleased with,)--poetry itself, yea, novels and romances, became insipid to me. In my friendless wanderings on our leave-days [4], (for I was an orphan, and had scarcely any connections in London,) highly was I delighted, if any passenger, especially if he were dressed in black, would enter into conversation with me. For I soon found the means of directing it to my favourite subjects Of providence, fore-knowledge, will, and fate, Fixed fate, free will, fore-knowledge absolute, And found no end in wandering mazes lost. This preposterous pursuit was, beyond doubt, injurious both to my natural powers, and to the progress of my education. It would perhaps have been destructive, had it been continued; but from this I was auspiciously withdrawn, partly indeed by an accidental introduction to an amiable family, chiefly however, by the genial influence of a style of poetry, so tender and yet so manly, so natural and real, and yet so dignified and harmonious, as the sonnets and other early poems of Mr. Bowles. Well would it have been for me, perhaps, had I never relapsed into the same mental disease; if I had continued to pluck the flower and reap the harvest from the cultivated surface, instead of delving in the unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic lore. And if in after time I have sought a refuge from bodily pain and mismanaged sensibility in abstruse researches, which exercised the strength and subtilty of the understanding without awakening the feelings of the heart; still there was a long and blessed interval, during which my natural faculties were allowed to expand, and my original tendencies to develop themselves;--my fancy, and the love of nature, and the sense of beauty in forms and sounds. The second advantage, which I owe to my early perusal, and admiration of these poems, (to which let me add,) though known to me at a somewhat later period, the Lewesdon Hill of Mr. Crowe bears more immediately on my present subject. Among those with whom I conversed, there were, of course, very many who had formed their taste, and their notions of poetry, from the writings of Pope and his followers; or to speak more generally, in that school of French poetry, condensed and invigorated by English understanding, which had predominated from the last century. I was not blind to the merits of this school, yet, as from inexperience of the world, and consequent want of sympathy with the general subjects of these poems, they gave me little pleasure, I doubtless undervalued the kind, and with the presumption of youth withheld from its masters the legitimate name of poets. I saw that the excellence of this kind consisted in just and acute observations on men and manners in an artificial state of society, as its matter and substance; and in the logic of wit, conveyed in smooth and strong epigrammatic couplets, as its form: that even when the subject was addressed to the fancy, or the intellect, as in the Rape of the Lock, or the Essay on Man; nay, when it was a consecutive narration, as in that astonishing product of matchless talent and ingenuity Pope's Translation of the Iliad; still a point was looked for at the end of each second line, and the whole was, as it were, a sorites, or, if I may exchange a logical for a grammatical metaphor, a conjunction disjunctive, of epigrams. Meantime the matter and diction seemed to me characterized not so much by poetic thoughts, as by thoughts translated into the language of poetry. On this last point, I had occasion to render my own thoughts gradually more and more plain to myself, by frequent amicable disputes concerning Darwin's Botanic Garden, which, for some years, was greatly extolled, not only by the reading public in general, but even by those, whose genius and natural robustness of understanding enabled them afterwards to act foremost in dissipating these "painted mists" that occasionally rise from the marshes at the foot of Parnassus. During my first Cambridge vacation, I assisted a friend in a contribution for a literary society in Devonshire: and in this I remember to have compared Darwin's work to the Russian palace of ice, glittering, cold and transitory. In the same essay too, I assigned sundry reasons, chiefly drawn from a comparison of passages in the Latin poets with the original Greek, from which they were borrowed, for the preference of Collins's odes to those of Gray; and of the simile in Shakespeare How like a younker or a prodigal The scarfed bark puts from her native bay, Hugg'd and embraced by the strumpet wind! How like the prodigal doth she return, With over-weather'd ribs and ragged sails, Lean, rent, and beggar'd by the strumpet wind! (Merch. of Ven. Act II. sc. 6.) to the imitation in the Bard; Fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyr blows While proudly riding o'er the azure realm In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes, Youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm; Regardless of the sweeping whirlwind's sway, That hush'd in grim repose, expects it's evening prey. (in which, by the bye, the words "realm" and "sway" are rhymes dearly purchased)--I preferred the original on the ground, that in the imitation it depended wholly on the compositor's putting, or not putting, a small capital, both in this, and in many other passages of the same poet, whether the words should be personifications, or mere abstractions. I mention this, because, in referring various lines in Gray to their original in Shakespeare and Milton, and in the clear perception how completely all the propriety was lost in the transfer, I was, at that early period, led to a conjecture, which, many years afterwards was recalled to me from the same thought having been started in conversation, but far more ably, and developed more fully, by Mr. Wordsworth;--namely, that this style of poetry, which I have characterized above, as translations of prose thoughts into poetic language, had been kept up by, if it did not wholly arise from, the custom of writing Latin verses, and the great importance attached to these exercises, in our public schools. Whatever might have been the case in the fifteenth century, when the use of the Latin tongue was so general among learned men, that Erasmus is said to have forgotten his native language; yet in the present day it is not to be supposed, that a youth can think in Latin, or that he can have any other reliance on the force or fitness of his phrases, but the authority of the writer from whom he has adopted them. Consequently he must first prepare his thoughts, and then pick out, from Virgil, Horace, Ovid, or perhaps more compendiously from his Gradus, halves and quarters of lines, in which to embody them. I never object to a certain degree of disputatiousness in a young man from the age of seventeen to that of four or five and twenty, provided I find him always arguing on one side of the question. The controversies, occasioned by my unfeigned zeal for the honour of a favourite contemporary, then known to me only by his works, were of great advantage in the formation and establishment of my taste and critical opinions. In my defence of the lines running into each other, instead of closing at each couplet; and of natural language, neither bookish, nor vulgar, neither redolent of the lamp, nor of the kennel, such as I will remember thee; instead of the same thought tricked up in the rag-fair finery of, ------thy image on her wing Before my fancy's eye shall memory bring,-- I had continually to adduce the metre and diction of the Greek poets, from Homer to Theocritus inclusively; and still more of our elder English poets, from Chaucer to Milton. Nor was this all. But as it was my constant reply to authorities brought against me from later poets of great name, that no authority could avail in opposition to Truth, Nature, Logic, and the Laws of Universal Grammar; actuated too by my former passion for metaphysical investigations; I laboured at a solid foundation, on which permanently to ground my opinions, in the component faculties of the human mind itself, and their comparative dignity and importance. According to the faculty or source, from which the pleasure given by any poem or passage was derived, I estimated the merit of such poem or passage. As the result of all my reading and meditation, I abstracted two critical aphorisms, deeming them to comprise the conditions and criteria of poetic style;--first, that not the poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry;--secondly, that whatever lines can be translated into other words of the same language, without diminution of their significance, either in sense or association, or in any worthy feeling, are so far vicious in their diction. Be it however observed, that I excluded from the list of worthy feelings, the pleasure derived from mere novelty in the reader, and the desire of exciting wonderment at his powers in the author. Oftentimes since then, in pursuing French tragedies, I have fancied two marks of admiration at the end of each line, as hieroglyphics of the author's own admiration at his own cleverness. Our genuine admiration of a great poet is a continuous undercurrent of feeling! it is everywhere present, but seldom anywhere as a separate excitement. I was wont boldly to affirm, that it would be scarcely more difficult to push a stone out from the Pyramids with the bare hand, than to alter a word, or the position of a word, in Milton or Shakespeare, (in their most important works at least,) without making the poet say something else, or something worse, than he does say. One great distinction, I appeared to myself to see plainly between even the characteristic faults of our elder poets, and the false beauty of the moderns. In the former, from Donne to Cowley, we find the most fantastic out-of-the-way thoughts, but in the most pure and genuine mother English, in the latter the most obvious thoughts, in language the most fantastic and arbitrary. Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract [5] meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery. The reader must make himself acquainted with the general style of composition that was at that time deemed poetry, in order to understand and account for the effect produced on me by the Sonnets, the Monody at Matlock, and the Hope, of Mr. Bowles; for it is peculiar to original genius to become less and less striking, in proportion to its success in improving the taste and judgment of its contemporaries. The poems of West, indeed, had the merit of chaste and manly diction; but they were cold, and, if I may so express it, only dead-coloured; while in the best of Warton's there is a stiffness, which too often gives them the appearance of imitations from the Greek. Whatever relation, therefore, of cause or impulse Percy's collection of Ballads may bear to the most popular poems of the present day; yet in a more sustained and elevated style, of the then living poets, Cowper and Bowles [6] were, to the best of my knowledge, the first who combined natural thoughts with natural diction; the first who reconciled the heart with the head. It is true, as I have before mentioned, that from diffidence in my own powers, I for a short time adopted a laborious and florid diction, which I myself deemed, if not absolutely vicious, yet of very inferior worth. Gradually, however, my practice conformed to my better judgment; and the compositions of my twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth years--(for example, the shorter blank verse poems, the lines, which now form the middle and conclusion of the poem entitled the Destiny of Nations, and the tragedy of Remorse)--are not more below my present ideal in respect of the general tissue of the style than those of the latest date. Their faults were at least a remnant of the former leaven, and among the many who have done me the honour of putting my poems in the same class with those of my betters, the one or two, who have pretended to bring examples of affected simplicity from my volume, have been able to adduce but one instance, and that out of a copy of verses half ludicrous, half splenetic, which I intended, and had myself characterized, as sermoni propiora. Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, which will itself need reforming. The reader will excuse me for noticing, that I myself was the first to expose risu honesto the three sins of poetry, one or the other of which is the most likely to beset a young writer. So long ago as the publication of the second number of the Monthly Magazine, under the name of Nehemiah Higginbottom, I contributed three sonnets, the first of which had for its object to excite a good-natured laugh at the spirit of doleful egotism, and at the recurrence of favourite phrases, with the double defect of being at once trite and licentious;--the second was on low creeping language and thoughts, under the pretence of simplicity; the third, the phrases of which were borrowed entirely from my own poems, on the indiscriminate use of elaborate and swelling language and imagery. The reader will find them in the note [7] below, and will I trust regard them as reprinted for biographical purposes alone, and not for their poetic merits. So general at that time, and so decided was the opinion concerning the characteristic vices of my style, that a celebrated physician (now, alas! no more) speaking of me in other respects with his usual kindness, to a gentleman, who was about to meet me at a dinner party, could not however resist giving him a hint not to mention 'The house that Jack built' in my presence, for "that I was as sore as a boil about that sonnet;" he not knowing that I was myself the author of it. CHAPTER II Supposed irritability of men of genius brought to the test of facts--Causes and occasions of the charge--Its injustice. I have often thought, that it would be neither uninstructive nor unamusing to analyze, and bring forward into distinct consciousness, that complex feeling, with which readers in general take part against the author, in favour of the critic; and the readiness with which they apply to all poets the old sarcasm of Horace upon the scribblers of his time ------genus irritabile vatum. A debility and dimness of the imaginative power, and a consequent necessity of reliance on the immediate impressions of the senses, do, we know well, render the mind liable to superstition and fanaticism. Having a deficient portion of internal and proper warmth, minds of this class seek in the crowd circum fana for a warmth in common, which they do not possess singly. Cold and phlegmatic in their own nature, like damp hay, they heat and inflame by co-acervation; or like bees they become restless and irritable through the increased temperature of collected multitudes. Hence the German word for fanaticism, (such at least was its original import,) is derived from the swarming of bees, namely, schwaermen, schwaermerey. The passion being in an inverse proportion to the insight,--that the more vivid, as this the less distinct--anger is the inevitable consequence. The absense of all foundation within their own minds for that, which they yet believe both true and indispensable to their safety and happiness, cannot but produce an uneasy state of feeling, an involuntary sense of fear from which nature has no means of rescuing herself but by anger. Experience informs us that the first defence of weak minds is to recriminate. There's no philosopher but sees, That rage and fear are one disease; Tho' that may burn, and this may freeze, They're both alike the ague. But where the ideas are vivid, and there exists an endless power of combining and modifying them, the feelings and affections blend more easily and intimately with these ideal creations than with the objects of the senses; the mind is affected by thoughts, rather than by things; and only then feels the requisite interest even for the most important events and accidents, when by means of meditation they have passed into thoughts. The sanity of the mind is between superstition with fanaticism on the one hand, and enthusiasm with indifference and a diseased slowness to action on the other. For the conceptions of the mind may be so vivid and adequate, as to preclude that impulse to the realizing of them, which is strongest and most restless in those, who possess more than mere talent, (or the faculty of appropriating and applying the knowledge of others,)--yet still want something of the creative and self-sufficing power of absolute genius. For this reason therefore, they are men of commanding genius. While the former rest content between thought and reality, as it were in an intermundium of which their own living spirit supplies the substance, and their imagination the ever-varying form; the latter must impress their preconceptions on the world without, in order to present them back to their own view with the satisfying degree of clearness, distinctness, and individuality. These in tranquil times are formed to exhibit a perfect poem in palace, or temple, or landscape-garden; or a tale of romance in canals that join sea with sea, or in walls of rock, which, shouldering back the billows, imitate the power, and supply the benevolence of nature to sheltered navies; or in aqueducts that, arching the wide vale from mountain to mountain, give a Palmyra to the desert. But alas! in times of tumult they are the men destined to come forth as the shaping spirit of ruin, to destroy the wisdom of ages in order to substitute the fancies of a day, and to change kings and kingdoms, as the wind shifts and shapes the clouds [8]. The records of biography seem to confirm this theory. The men of the greatest genius, as far as we can judge from their own works or from the accounts of their contemporaries, appear to have been of calm and tranquil temper in all that related to themselves. In the inward assurance of permanent fame, they seem to have been either indifferent or resigned with regard to immediate reputation. Through all the works of Chaucer there reigns a cheerfulness, a manly hilarity which makes it almost impossible to doubt a correspondent habit of feeling in the author himself. Shakespeare's evenness and sweetness of temper were almost proverbial in his own age. That this did not arise from ignorance of his own comparative greatness, we have abundant proof in his Sonnets, which could scarcely have been known to Pope [9], when he asserted, that our great bard-- ------grew immortal in his own despite. (Epist. to Augustus.) Speaking of one whom he had celebrated, and contrasting the duration of his works with that of his personal existence, Shakespeare adds: Your name from hence immortal life shall have, Tho' I once gone to all the world must die; The earth can yield me but a common grave, When you entombed in men's eyes shall lie. Your monument shall be my gentle verse, Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read; And tongues to be your being shall rehearse, When all the breathers of this world are dead: You still shall live, such virtue hath my pen, Where breath most breathes, e'en in the mouth of men. SONNET LXXXI. I have taken the first that occurred; but Shakespeare's readiness to praise his rivals, ore pleno, and the confidence of his own equality with those whom he deemed most worthy of his praise, are alike manifested in another Sonnet. Was it the proud full sail of his great verse, Bound for the praise of all-too-precious you, That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse, Making their tomb, the womb wherein they grew? Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write Above a mortal pitch that struck me dead? No, neither he, nor his compeers by night Giving him aid, my verse astonished. He, nor that affable familiar ghost, Which nightly gulls him with intelligence, As victors of my silence cannot boast; I was not sick of any fear from thence! But when your countenance fill'd up his line, Then lack'd I matter, that enfeebled mine. S. LXXXVI. In Spenser, indeed, we trace a mind constitutionally tender, delicate, and, in comparison with his three great compeers, I had almost said, effeminate; and this additionally saddened by the unjust persecution of Burleigh, and the severe calamities, which overwhelmed his latter days. These causes have diffused over all his compositions "a melancholy grace," and have drawn forth occasional strains, the more pathetic from their gentleness. But no where do we find the least trace of irritability, and still less of quarrelsome or affected contempt of his censurers. The same calmness, and even greater self-possession, may be affirmed of Milton, as far as his poems, and poetic character are concerned. He reserved his anger for the enemies of religion, freedom, and his country. My mind is not capable of forming a more august conception, than arises from the contemplation of this great man in his latter days;--poor, sick, old, blind, slandered, persecuted,-- Darkness before, and danger's voice behind,-- in an age in which he was as little understood by the party, for whom, as by that against whom, he had contended; and among men before whom he strode so far as to dwarf himself by the distance; yet still listening to the music of his own thoughts, or if additionally cheered, yet cheered only by the prophetic faith of two or three solitary individuals, he did nevertheless ------argue not Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot Of heart or hope; but still bore up and steer'd Right onward. From others only do we derive our knowledge that Milton, in his latter day, had his scorners and detractors; and even in his day of youth and hope, that he had enemies would have been unknown to us, had they not been likewise the enemies of his country. I am well aware, that in advanced stages of literature, when there exist many and excellent models, a high degree of talent, combined with taste and judgment, and employed in works of imagination, will acquire for a man the name of a great genius; though even that analogon of genius, which, in certain states of society, may even render his writings more popular than the absolute reality could have done, would be sought for in vain in the mind and temper of the author himself. Yet even in instances of this kind, a close examination will often detect, that the irritability, which has been attributed to the author's genius as its cause, did really originate in an ill conformation of body, obtuse pain, or constitutional defect of pleasurable sensation. What is charged to the author, belongs to the man, who would probably have been still more impatient, but for the humanizing influences of the very pursuit, which yet bears the blame of his irritability. How then are we to explain the easy credence generally given to this charge, if the charge itself be not, as I have endeavoured to show, supported by experience? This seems to me of no very difficult solution. In whatever country literature is widely diffused, there will be many who mistake an intense desire to possess the reputation of poetic genius, for the actual powers, and original tendencies which constitute it. But men, whose dearest wishes are fixed on objects wholly out of their own power, become in all cases more or less impatient and prone to anger. Besides, though it may be paradoxical to assert, that a man can know one thing and believe the opposite, yet assuredly a vain person may have so habitually indulged the wish, and persevered in the attempt, to appear what he is not, as to become himself one of his own proselytes. Still, as this counterfeit and artificial persuasion must differ, even in the person's own feelings, from a real sense of inward power, what can be more natural, than that this difference should betray itself in suspicious and jealous irritability? Even as the flowery sod, which covers a hollow, may be often detected by its shaking and trembling. But, alas! the multitude of books and the general diffusion of literature, have produced other and more lamentable effects in the world of letters, and such as are abundant to explain, though by no means to justify, the contempt with which the best grounded complaints of injured genius are rejected as frivolous, or entertained as matter of merriment. In the days of Chaucer and Gower, our language might (with due allowance for the imperfections of a simile) be compared to a wilderness of vocal reeds, from which the favourites only of Pan or Apollo could construct even the rude syrinx; and from this the constructors alone could elicit strains of music. But now, partly by the labours of successive poets, and in part by the more artificial state of society and social intercourse, language, mechanized as it were into a barrel-organ, supplies at once both instrument and tune. Thus even the deaf may play, so as to delight the many. Sometimes (for it is with similes, as it is with jests at a wine table, one is sure to suggest another) I have attempted to illustrate the present state of our language, in its relation to literature, by a press-room of larger and smaller stereotype pieces, which, in the present Anglo-Gallican fashion of unconnected, epigrammatic periods, it requires but an ordinary portion of ingenuity to vary indefinitely, and yet still produce something, which, if not sense, will be so like it as to do as well. Perhaps better: for it spares the reader the trouble of thinking; prevents vacancy, while it indulges indolence; and secures the memory from all danger of an intellectual plethora. Hence of all trades, literature at present demands the least talent or information; and, of all modes of literature, the manufacturing of poems. The difference indeed between these and the works of genius is not less than between an egg and an egg-shell; yet at a distance they both look alike. Now it is no less remarkable than true, with how little examination works of polite literature are commonly perused, not only by the mass of readers, but by men of first rate ability, till some accident or chance [10] discussion have roused their attention, and put them on their guard. And hence individuals below mediocrity not less in natural power than in acquired knowledge; nay, bunglers who have failed in the lowest mechanic crafts, and whose presumption is in due proportion to their want of sense and sensibility; men, who being first scribblers from idleness and ignorance, next become libellers from envy and malevolence,--have been able to drive a successful trade in the employment of the booksellers, nay, have raised themselves into temporary name and reputation with the public at large, by that most powerful of all adulation, the appeal to the bad and malignant passions of mankind [11]. But as it is the nature of scorn, envy, and all malignant propensities to require a quick change of objects, such writers are sure, sooner or later, to awake from their dream of vanity to disappointment and neglect with embittered and envenomed feelings. Even during their short-lived success, sensible in spite of themselves on what a shifting foundation it rests, they resent the mere refusal of praise as a robbery, and at the justest censures kindle at once into violent and undisciplined abuse; till the acute disease changing into chronical, the more deadly as the less violent, they become the fit instruments of literary detraction and moral slander. They are then no longer to be questioned without exposing the complainant to ridicule, because, forsooth, they are anonymous critics, and authorized, in Andrew Marvell's phrase, as "synodical individuals" to speak of themselves plurali majestatico! As if literature formed a caste, like that of the Paras in Hindostan, who, however maltreated, must not dare to deem themselves wronged! As if that, which in all other cases adds a deeper dye to slander, the circumstance of its being anonymous, here acted only to make the slanderer inviolable! [12] Thus, in part, from the accidental tempers of individuals--(men of undoubted talent, but not men of genius)--tempers rendered yet more irritable by their desire to appear men of genius; but still more effectively by the excesses of the mere counterfeits both of talent and genius; the number too being so incomparably greater of those who are thought to be, than of those who really are men of genius; and in part from the natural, but not therefore the less partial and unjust distinction, made by the public itself between literary and all other property; I believe the prejudice to have arisen, which considers an unusual irascibility concerning the reception of its products as characteristic of genius. It might correct the moral feelings of a numerous class of readers, to suppose a Review set on foot, the object of which should be to criticise all the chief works presented to the public by our ribbon-weavers, calico-printers, cabinet-makers, and china-manufacturers; which should be conducted in the same spirit, and take the same freedom with personal character, as our literary journals. They would scarcely, I think, deny their belief, not only that the genus irritabile would be found to include many other species besides that of bards; but that the irritability of trade would soon reduce the resentments of poets into mere shadow-fights in the comparison. Or is wealth the only rational object of human interest? Or even if this were admitted, has the poet no property in his works? Or is it a rare, or culpable case, that he who serves at the altar of the Muses, should be compelled to derive his maintenance from the altar, when too he has perhaps deliberately abandoned the fairest prospects of rank and opulence in order to devote himself, an entire and undistracted man, to the instruction or refinement of his fellow-citizens? Or, should we pass by all higher objects and motives, all disinterested benevolence, and even that ambition of lasting praise which is at once the crutch and ornament, which at once supports and betrays, the infirmity of human virtue,--is the character and property of the man, who labours for our intellectual pleasures, less entitled to a share of our fellow feeling, than that of the wine-merchant or milliner? Sensibility indeed, both quick and deep, is not only a characteristic feature, but may be deemed a component part, of genius. But it is not less an essential mark of true genius, that its sensibility is excited by any other cause more powerfully than by its own personal interests; for this plain reason, that the man of genius lives most in the ideal world, in which the present is still constituted by the future or the past; and because his feelings have been habitually associated with thoughts and images, to the number, clearness, and vivacity of which the sensation of self is always in an inverse proportion. And yet, should he perchance have occasion to repel some false charge, or to rectify some erroneous censure, nothing is more common than for the many to mistake the general liveliness of his manner and language, whatever is the subject, for the effects of peculiar irritation from its accidental relation to himself. [13] For myself, if from my own feelings, or from the less suspicious test of the observations of others, I had been made aware of any literary testiness or jealousy; I trust, that I should have been, however, neither silly nor arrogant enough to have burthened the imperfection on genius. But an experience--(and I should not need documents in abundance to prove my words, if I added)--a tried experience of twenty years, has taught me, that the original sin of my character consists in a careless indifference to public opinion, and to the attacks of those who influence it; that praise and admiration have become yearly less and less desirable, except as marks of sympathy; nay that it is difficult and distressing to me to think with any interest even about the sale and profit of my works, important as, in my present circumstances, such considerations must needs be. Yet it never occurred to me to believe or fancy, that the quantum of intellectual power bestowed on me by nature or education was in any way connected with this habit of my feelings; or that it needed any other parents or fosterers than constitutional indolence, aggravated into languor by ill-health; the accumulating embarrassments of procrastination; the mental cowardice, which is the inseparable companion of procrastination, and which makes us anxious to think and converse on any thing rather than on what concerns ourselves; in fine, all those close vexations, whether chargeable on my faults or my fortunes, which leave me but little grief to spare for evils comparatively distant and alien. Indignation at literary wrongs I leave to men born under happier stars. I cannot afford it. But so far from condemning those who can, I deem it a writer's duty, and think it creditable to his heart, to feel and express a resentment proportioned to the grossness of the provocation, and the importance of the object. There is no profession on earth, which requires an attention so early, so long, or so unintermitting as that of poetry; and indeed as that of literary composition in general, if it be such as at all satisfies the demands both of taste and of sound logic. How difficult and delicate a task even the mere mechanism of verse is, may be conjectured from the failure of those, who have attempted poetry late in life. Where then a man has, from his earliest youth, devoted his whole being to an object, which by the admission of all civilized nations in all ages is honourable as a pursuit, and glorious as an attainment; what of all that relates to himself and his family, if only we except his moral character, can have fairer claims to his protection, or more authorize acts of self-defence, than the elaborate products of his intellect and intellectual industry? Prudence itself would command us to show, even if defect or diversion of natural sensibility had prevented us from feeling, a due interest and qualified anxiety for the offspring and representatives of our nobler being. I know it, alas! by woful experience. I have laid too many eggs in the hot sands of this wilderness, the world, with ostrich carelessness and ostrich oblivion. The greater part indeed have been trod under foot, and are forgotten; but yet no small number have crept forth into life, some to furnish feathers for the caps of others, and still more to plume the shafts in the quivers of my enemies, of them that unprovoked have lain in wait against my soul. Sic vos, non vobis, mellificatis, apes! CHAPTER III The Author's obligations to critics, and the probable occasion--Principles of modern criticism--Mr. Southey's works and character. To anonymous critics in reviews, magazines, and news-journals of various name and rank, and to satirists with or without a name in verse or prose, or in verse-text aided by prose-comment, I do seriously believe and profess, that I owe full two-thirds of whatever reputation and publicity I happen to possess. For when the name of an individual has occurred so frequently, in so many works, for so great a length of time, the readers of these works--(which with a shelf or two of beauties, elegant Extracts and Anas, form nine-tenths of the reading of the reading Public [14])--cannot but be familiar with the name, without distinctly remembering whether it was introduced for eulogy or for censure. And this becomes the more likely, if (as I believe) the habit of perusing periodical works may be properly added to Averroes' catalogue of Anti-Mnemonics, or weakeners of the memory [15]. But where this has not been the case, yet the reader will be apt to suspect that there must be something more than usually strong and extensive in a reputation, that could either require or stand so merciless and long-continued a cannonading. Without any feeling of anger therefore--(for which indeed, on my own account, I have no pretext)--I may yet be allowed to express some degree of surprise, that, after having run the critical gauntlet for a certain class of faults which I had, nothing having come before the judgment-seat in the interim, I should, year after year, quarter after quarter, month after month--(not to mention sundry petty periodicals of still quicker revolution, "or weekly or diurnal")--have been, for at least seventeen years consecutively, dragged forth by them into the foremost ranks of the proscribed, and forced to abide the brunt of abuse, for faults directly opposite, and which I certainly had not. How shall I explain this? Whatever may have been the case with others, I certainly cannot attribute this persecution to personal dislike, or to envy, or to feelings of vindictive animosity. Not to the former, for with the exception of a very few who are my intimate friends, and were so before they were known as authors, I have had little other acquaintance with literary characters, than what may be implied in an accidental introduction, or casual meeting in a mixed company. And as far as words and looks can be trusted, I must believe that, even in these instances, I had excited no unfriendly disposition. Neither by letter, nor in conversation, have I ever had dispute or controversy beyond the common social interchange of opinions. Nay, where I had reason to suppose my convictions fundamentally different, it has been my habit, and I may add, the impulse of my nature, to assign the grounds of my belief, rather than the belief itself; and not to express dissent, till I could establish some points of complete sympathy, some grounds common to both sides, from which to commence its explanation. Still less can I place these attacks to the charge of envy. The few pages which I have published, are of too distant a date, and the extent of their sale a proof too conclusive against their having been popular at any time, to render probable, I had almost said possible, the excitement of envy on their account; and the man who should envy me on any other, verily he must be envy-mad! Lastly, with as little semblance of reason, could I suspect any animosity towards me from vindictive feelings as the cause. I have before said, that my acquaintance with literary men has been limited and distant; and that I have had neither dispute nor controversy. From my first entrance into life, I have, with few and short intervals, lived either abroad or in retirement. My different essays on subjects of national interest, published at different times, first in the Morning Post and then in the Courier, with my courses of Lectures on the principles of criticism as applied to Shakespeare and Milton, constitute my whole publicity; the only occasions on which I could offend any member of the republic of letters. With one solitary exception in which my words were first misstated and then wantonly applied to an individual, I could never learn that I had excited the displeasure of any among my literary contemporaries. Having announced my intention to give a course of Lectures on the characteristic merits and defects of English poetry in its different aeras; first, from Chaucer to Milton; second, from Dryden inclusively to Thomson; and third, from Cowper to the present day; I changed my plan, and confined my disquisition to the former two periods, that I might furnish no possible pretext for the unthinking to misconstrue, or the malignant to misapply my words, and having stamped their own meaning on them, to pass them as current coin in the marts of garrulity or detraction. Praises of the unworthy are felt by ardent minds as robberies of the deserving; and it is too true, and too frequent, that Bacon, Harrington, Machiavel, and Spinoza, are not read, because Hume, Condillac, and Voltaire are. But in promiscuous company no prudent man will oppugn the merits of a contemporary in his own supposed department; contenting himself with praising in his turn those whom he deems excellent. If I should ever deem it my duty at all to oppose the pretensions of individuals, I would oppose them in books which could be weighed and answered, in which I could evolve the whole of my reasons and feelings, with their requisite limits and modifications; not in irrecoverable conversation, where however strong the reasons might be, the feelings that prompted them would assuredly be attributed by some one or other to envy and discontent. Besides I well know, and, I trust, have acted on that knowledge, that it must be the ignorant and injudicious who extol the unworthy; and the eulogies of critics without taste or judgment are the natural reward of authors without feeling or genius. Sint unicuique sua praemia. How then, dismissing, as I do, these three causes, am I to account for attacks, the long continuance and inveteracy of which it would require all three to explain? The solution seems to be this,--I was in habits of intimacy with Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Southey! This, however, transfers, rather than removes the difficulty. Be it, that, by an unconscionable extension of the old adage, noscitur a socio, my literary friends are never under the water-fall of criticism, but I must be wet through with the spray; yet how came the torrent to descend upon them? First then, with regard to Mr. Southey. I well remember the general reception of his earlier publications; namely, the poems published with Mr. Lovell under the names of Moschus and Bion; the two volumes of poems under his own name, and the Joan of Arc. The censures of the critics by profession are extant, and may be easily referred to:--careless lines, inequality in the merit of the different poems, and (in the lighter works) a predilection for the strange and whimsical; in short, such faults as might have been anticipated in a young and rapid writer, were indeed sufficiently enforced. Nor was there at that time wanting a party spirit to aggravate the defects of a poet, who with all the courage of uncorrupted youth had avowed his zeal for a cause, which he deemed that of liberty, and his abhorrence of oppression by whatever name consecrated. But it was as little objected by others, as dreamed of by the poet himself, that he preferred careless and prosaic lines on rule and of forethought, or indeed that he pretended to any other art or theory of poetic diction, except that which we may all learn from Horace, Quinctilian, the admirable dialogue, De Oratoribus, generally attributed to Tacitus, or Strada's Prolusions; if indeed natural good sense and the early study of the best models in his own language had not infused the same maxims more securely, and, if I may venture the expression, more vitally. All that could have been fairly deduced was, that in his taste and estimation of writers Mr. Southey agreed far more with Thomas Warton, than with Dr. Johnson. Nor do I mean to deny, that at all times Mr. Southey was of the same mind with Sir Philip Sidney in preferring an excellent ballad in the humblest style of poetry to twenty indifferent poems that strutted in the highest. And by what have his works, published since then, been characterized, each more strikingly than the preceding, but by greater splendour, a deeper pathos, profounder reflections, and a more sustained dignity of language and of metre? Distant may the period be, but whenever the time shall come, when all his works shall be collected by some editor worthy to be his biographer, I trust that an appendix of excerpta of all the passages, in which his writings, name, and character have been attacked, from the pamphlets and periodical works of the last twenty years, may be an accompaniment. Yet that it would prove medicinal in after times I dare not hope; for as long as there are readers to be delighted with calumny, there will be found reviewers to calumniate. And such readers will become in all probability more numerous, in proportion as a still greater diffusion of literature shall produce an increase of sciolists, and sciolism bring with it petulance and presumption. In times of old, books were as religious oracles; as literature advanced, they next became venerable preceptors; they then descended to the rank of instructive friends; and, as their numbers increased, they sank still lower to that of entertaining companions; and at present they seem degraded into culprits to hold up their hands at the bar of every self-elected, yet not the less peremptory, judge, who chooses to write from humour or interest, from enmity or arrogance, and to abide the decision "of him that reads in malice, or him that reads after dinner." The same retrograde movement may be traced, in the relation which the authors themselves have assumed towards their readers. From the lofty address of Bacon: "these are the meditations of Francis of Verulam, which that posterity should be possessed of, he deemed their interest:" or from dedication to Monarch or Pontiff, in which the honour given was asserted in equipoise to the patronage acknowledged: from Pindar's ------'ep' alloi-- si d'alloi megaloi: to d'eschaton kory- phoutai basilensi. Maeketi paptaine porsion. Eiae se te touton upsou chronon patein, eme te tossade nikaphorois omilein, prophanton sophian kath' El- lanas eonta panta.--OLYMP. OD. I. there was a gradual sinking in the etiquette or allowed style of pretension. Poets and Philosophers, rendered diffident by their very number, addressed themselves to "learned readers;" then aimed to conciliate the graces of "the candid reader;" till, the critic still rising as the author sank, the amateurs of literature collectively were erected into a municipality of judges, and addressed as the Town! And now, finally, all men being supposed able to read, and all readers able to judge, the multitudinous Public, shaped into personal unity by the magic of abstraction, sits nominal despot on the throne of criticism. But, alas! as in other despotisms, it but echoes the decisions of its invisible ministers, whose intellectual claims to the guardianship of the Muses seem, for the greater part, analogous to the physical qualifications which adapt their oriental brethren for the superintendence of the Harem. Thus it is said, that St. Nepomuc was installed the guardian of bridges, because he had fallen over one, and sunk out of sight; thus too St. Cecilia is said to have been first propitiated by musicians, because, having failed in her own attempts, she had taken a dislike to the art and all its successful professors. But I shall probably have occasion hereafter to deliver my convictions more at large concerning this state of things, and its influences on taste, genius and morality. In the Thalaba, the Madoc, and still more evidently in the unique [16] Cid, in the Kehama, and, as last, so best, the Roderick; Southey has given abundant proof, se cogitare quam sit magnum dare aliquid in manus hominum: nec persuadere sibi posse, non saepe tractandum quod placere et semper et omnibus cupiat. But on the other hand, I conceive, that Mr. Southey was quite unable to comprehend, wherein could consist the crime or mischief of printing half a dozen or more playful poems; or to speak more generally, compositions which would be enjoyed or passed over, according as the taste and humour of the reader might chance to be; provided they contained nothing immoral. In the present age periturae parcere chartae is emphatically an unreasonable demand. The merest trifle he ever sent abroad had tenfold better claims to its ink and paper than all the silly criticisms on it, which proved no more than that the critic was not one of those, for whom the trifle was written; and than all the grave exhortations to a greater reverence for the public--as if the passive page of a book, by having an epigram or doggerel tale impressed on it, instantly assumed at once loco-motive power and a sort of ubiquity, so as to flutter and buz in the ear of the public to the sore annoyance of the said mysterious personage. But what gives an additional and more ludicrous absurdity to these lamentations is the curious fact, that if in a volume of poetry the critic should find poem or passage which he deems more especially worthless, he is sure to select and reprint it in the review; by which, on his own grounds, he wastes as much more paper than the author, as the copies of a fashionable review are more numerous than those of the original book; in some, and those the most prominent instances, as ten thousand to five hundred. I know nothing that surpasses the vileness of deciding on the merits of a poet or painter,--(not by characteristic defects; for where there is genius, these always point to his characteristic beauties; but)--by accidental failures or faulty passages; except the impudence of defending it, as the proper duty, and most instructive part, of criticism. Omit or pass slightly over the expression, grace, and grouping of Raffael's figures; but ridicule in detail the knitting-needles and broom-twigs, that are to represent trees in his back grounds; and never let him hear the last of his galli-pots! Admit that the Allegro and Penseroso of Milton are not without merit; but repay yourself for this concession, by reprinting at length the two poems on the University Carrier! As a fair specimen of his Sonnets, quote "A Book was writ of late called Tetrachordon;" and, as characteristic of his rhythm and metre, cite his literal translation of the first and second Psalm! In order to justify yourself, you need only assert, that had you dwelt chiefly on the beauties and excellencies of the poet, the admiration of these might seduce the attention of future writers from the objects of their love and wonder, to an imitation of the few poems and passages in which the poet was most unlike himself. But till reviews are conducted on far other principles, and with far other motives; till in the place of arbitrary dictation and petulant sneers, the reviewers support their decisions by reference to fixed canons of criticism, previously established and deduced from the nature of man; reflecting minds will pronounce it arrogance in them thus to announce themselves to men of letters, as the guides of their taste and judgment. To the purchaser and mere reader it is, at all events, an injustice. He who tells me that there are defects in a new work, tells me nothing which I should not have taken for granted without his information. But he, who points out and elucidates the beauties of an original work does indeed give me interesting information, such as experience would not have authorized me in anticipating. And as to compositions which the authors themselves announce with Haec ipsi novimus esse nihil, why should we judge by a different rule two printed works, only because the one author is alive, and the other in his grave? What literary man has not regretted the prudery of Spratt in refusing to let his friend Cowley appear in his slippers and dressing gown? I am not perhaps the only one who has derived an innocent amusement from the riddles, conundrums, tri-syllable lines, and the like, of Swift and his correspondents, in hours of languor, when to have read his more finished works would have been useless to myself, and, in some sort, an act of injustice to the author. But I am at a loss to conceive by what perversity of judgment, these relaxations of his genius could be employed to diminish his fame as the writer of Gulliver, or the Tale of a Tub. Had Mr. Southey written twice as many poems of inferior merit, or partial interest, as have enlivened the journals of the day, they would have added to his honour with good and wise men, not merely or principally as proving the versatility of his talents, but as evidences of the purity of that mind, which even in its levities never dictated a line which it need regret on any moral account. I have in imagination transferred to the future biographer the duty of contrasting Southey's fixed and well-earned fame, with the abuse and indefatigable hostility of his anonymous critics from his early youth to his ripest manhood. But I cannot think so ill of human nature as not to believe, that these critics have already taken shame to themselves, whether they consider the object of their abuse in his moral or his literary character. For reflect but on the variety and extent of his acquirements! He stands second to no man, either as an historian or as a bibliographer; and when I regard him as a popular essayist,--(for the articles of his compositions in the reviews are, for the greater part, essays on subjects of deep or curious interest rather than criticisms on particular works)--I look in vain for any writer, who has conveyed so much information, from so many and such recondite sources, with so many just and original reflections, in a style so lively and poignant, yet so uniformly classical and perspicuous; no one, in short, who has combined so much wisdom with so much wit; so much truth and knowledge with so much life and fancy. His prose is always intelligible and always entertaining. In poetry he has attempted almost every species of composition known before, and he has added new ones; and if we except the highest lyric,--(in which how few, how very few even of the greatest minds have been fortunate)--he has attempted every species successfully; from the political song of the day, thrown off in the playful overflow of honest joy and patriotic exultation, to the wild ballad; from epistolary ease and graceful narrative, to austere and impetuous moral declamation; from the pastoral charms and wild streaming lights of the Thalaba, in which sentiment and imagery have given permanence even to the excitement of curiosity; and from the full blaze of the Kehama,--(a gallery of finished pictures in one splendid fancy piece, in which, notwithstanding, the moral grandeur rises gradually above the brilliance of the colouring and the boldness and novelty of the machinery)--to the more sober beauties of the Madoc; and lastly, from the Madoc to his Roderick, in which, retaining all his former excellencies of a poet eminently inventive and picturesque, he has surpassed himself in language and metre, in the construction of the whole, and in the splendour of particular passages. Here then shall I conclude? No! The characters of the deceased, like the encomia on tombstones, as they are described with religious tenderness, so are they read, with allowing sympathy indeed, but yet with rational deduction. There are men, who deserve a higher record; men with whose characters it is the interest of their contemporaries, no less than that of posterity, to be made acquainted; while it is yet possible for impartial censure, and even for quick-sighted envy, to cross-examine the tale without offence to the courtesies of humanity; and while the eulogist, detected in exaggeration or falsehood, must pay the full penalty of his baseness in the contempt which brands the convicted flatterer. Publicly has Mr. Southey been reviled by men, who, as I would fain hope for the honour of human nature, hurled fire-brands against a figure of their own imagination; publicly have his talents been depreciated, his principles denounced; as publicly do I therefore, who have known him intimately, deem it my duty to leave recorded, that it is Southey's almost unexampled felicity, to possess the best gifts of talent and genius free from all their characteristic defects. To those who remember the state of our public schools and universities some twenty years past, it will appear no ordinary praise in any man to have passed from innocence into virtue, not only free from all vicious habit, but unstained by one act of intemperance, or the degradations akin to intemperance. That scheme of head, heart, and habitual demeanour, which in his early manhood, and first controversial writings, Milton, claiming the privilege of self-defence, asserts of himself, and challenges his calumniators to disprove; this will his school-mates, his fellow-collegians, and his maturer friends, with a confidence proportioned to the intimacy of their knowledge, bear witness to, as again realized in the life of Robert Southey. But still more striking to those, who by biography or by their own experience are familiar with the general habits of genius, will appear the poet's matchless industry and perseverance in his pursuits; the worthiness and dignity of those pursuits; his generous submission to tasks of transitory interest, or such as his genius alone could make otherwise; and that having thus more than satisfied the claims of affection or prudence, he should yet have made for himself time and power, to achieve more, and in more various departments, than almost any other writer has done, though employed wholly on subjects of his own choice and ambition. But as Southey possesses, and is not possessed by, his genius, even so is he master even of his virtues. The regular and methodical tenor of his daily labours, which would be deemed rare in the most mechanical pursuits, and might be envied by the mere man of business, loses all semblance of formality in the dignified simplicity of his manners, in the spring and healthful cheerfulness of his spirits. Always employed, his friends find him always at leisure. No less punctual in trifles, than steadfast in the performance of highest duties, he inflicts none of those small pains and discomforts which irregular men scatter about them, and which in the aggregate so often become formidable obstacles both to happiness and utility; while on the contrary he bestows all the pleasures, and inspires all that ease of mind on those around him or connected with him, which perfect consistency, and (if such a word might be framed) absolute reliability, equally in small as in great concerns, cannot but inspire and bestow; when this too is softened without being weakened by kindness and gentleness. I know few men who so well deserve the character which an antient attributes to Marcus Cato, namely, that he was likest virtue, in as much as he seemed to act aright, not in obedience to any law or outward motive, but by the necessity of a happy nature, which could not act otherwise. As son, brother, husband, father, master, friend, he moves with firm yet light steps, alike unostentatious, and alike exemplary. As a writer, he has uniformly made his talents subservient to the best interests of humanity, of public virtue, and domestic piety; his cause has ever been the cause of pure religion and of liberty, of national independence and of national illumination. When future critics shall weigh out his guerdon of praise and censure, it will be Southey the poet only, that will supply them with the scanty materials for the latter. They will likewise not fail to record, that as no man was ever a more constant friend, never had poet more friends and honourers among the good of all parties; and that quacks in education, quacks in politics, and quacks in criticism were his only enemies. [17] CHAPTER IV The Lyrical Ballads with the Preface--Mr. Wordsworth's earlier poems--On fancy and imagination--The investigation of the distinction important to the Fine Arts. I have wandered far from the object in view, but as I fancied to myself readers who would respect the feelings that had tempted me from the main road; so I dare calculate on not a few, who will warmly sympathize with them. At present it will be sufficient for my purpose, if I have proved, that Mr. Southey's writings no more than my own furnished the original occasion to this fiction of a new school of poetry, and to the clamours against its supposed founders and proselytes. As little do I believe that Mr. Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads were in themselves the cause. I speak exclusively of the two volumes so entitled. A careful and repeated examination of these confirms me in the belief, that the omission of less than a hundred lines would have precluded nine-tenths of the criticism on this work. I hazard this declaration, however, on the supposition, that the reader has taken it up, as he would have done any other collection of poems purporting to derive their subjects or interests from the incidents of domestic or ordinary life, intermingled with higher strains of meditation which the poet utters in his own person and character; with the proviso, that these poems were perused without knowledge of, or reference to, the author's peculiar opinions, and that the reader had not had his attention previously directed to those peculiarities. In that case, as actually happened with Mr. Southey's earlier works, the lines and passages which might have offended the general taste, would have been considered as mere inequalities, and attributed to inattention, not to perversity of judgment. The men of business who had passed their lives chiefly in cities, and who might therefore be expected to derive the highest pleasure from acute notices of men and manners conveyed in easy, yet correct and pointed language; and all those who, reading but little poetry, are most stimulated with that species of it, which seems most distant from prose, would probably have passed by the volumes altogether. Others more catholic in their taste, and yet habituated to be most pleased when most excited, would have contented themselves with deciding, that the author had been successful in proportion to the elevation of his style and subject. Not a few, perhaps, might, by their admiration of the Lines written near Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the Wye, those Left upon a Yew Tree Seat, The Old Cumberland Beggar, and Ruth, have been gradually led to peruse with kindred feeling The Brothers, the Hart-leap Well, and whatever other poems in that collection may be described as holding a middle place between those written in the highest and those in the humblest style; as for instance between the Tintern Abbey, and The Thorn, or Simon Lee. Should their taste submit to no further change, and still remain unreconciled to the colloquial phrases, or the imitations of them, that are, more or less, scattered through the class last mentioned; yet even from the small number of the latter, they would have deemed them but an inconsiderable subtraction from the merit of the whole work; or, what is sometimes not unpleasing in the publication of a new writer, as serving to ascertain the natural tendency, and consequently the proper direction of the author's genius. In the critical remarks, therefore, prefixed and annexed to the Lyrical Ballads, I believe, we may safely rest, as the true origin of the unexampled opposition which Mr. Wordsworth's writings have been since doomed to encounter. The humbler passages in the poems themselves were dwelt on and cited to justify the rejection of the theory. What in and for themselves would have been either forgotten or forgiven as imperfections, or at least comparative failures, provoked direct hostility when announced as intentional, as the result of choice after full deliberation. Thus the poems, admitted by all as excellent, joined with those which had pleased the far greater number, though they formed two-thirds of the whole work, instead of being deemed (as in all right they should have been, even if we take for granted that the reader judged aright) an atonement for the few exceptions, gave wind and fuel to the animosity against both the poems and the poet. In all perplexity there is a portion of fear, which predisposes the mind to anger. Not able to deny that the author possessed both genius and a powerful intellect, they felt very positive,--but yet were not quite certain that he might not be in the right, and they themselves in the wrong; an unquiet state of mind, which seeks alleviation by quarrelling with the occasion of it, and by wondering at the perverseness of the man, who had written a long and argumentative essay to persuade them, that Fair is foul, and foul is fair; in other words, that they had been all their lives admiring without judgment, and were now about to censure without reason. [18] That this conjecture is not wide from the mark, I am induced to believe from the noticeable fact, which I can state on my own knowledge, that the same general censure has been grounded by almost every different person on some different poem. Among those, whose candour and judgment I estimate highly, I distinctly remember six who expressed their objections to the Lyrical Ballads almost in the same words, and altogether to the same purport, at the same time admitting, that several of the poems had given them great pleasure; and, strange as it might seem, the composition which one cited as execrable, another quoted as his favourite. I am indeed convinced in my own mind, that could the same experiment have been tried with these volumes, as was made in the well known story of the picture, the result would have been the same; the parts which had been covered by black spots on the one day, would be found equally albo lapide notatae on the succeeding. However this may be, it was assuredly hard and unjust to fix the attention on a few separate and insulated poems with as much aversion, as if they had been so many plague-spots on the whole work, instead of passing them over in silence, as so much blank paper, or leaves of a bookseller's catalogue; especially, as no one pretended to have found in them any immorality or indelicacy; and the poems, therefore, at the worst, could only be regarded as so many light or inferior coins in a rouleau of gold, not as so much alloy in a weight of bullion. A friend whose talents I hold in the highest respect, but whose judgment and strong sound sense I have had almost continued occasion to revere, making the usual complaints to me concerning both the style and subjects of Mr. Wordsworth's minor poems; I admitted that there were some few of the tales and incidents, in which I could not myself find a sufficient cause for their having been recorded in metre. I mentioned Alice Fell as an instance; "Nay," replied my friend with more than usual quickness of manner, "I cannot agree with you there!--that, I own, does seem to me a remarkably pleasing poem." In the Lyrical Ballads, (for my experience does not enable me to extend the remark equally unqualified to the two subsequent volumes,) I have heard at different times, and from different individuals, every single poem extolled and reprobated, with the exception of those of loftier kind, which as was before observed, seem to have won universal praise. This fact of itself would have made me diffident in my censures, had not a still stronger ground been furnished by the strange contrast of the heat and long continuance of the opposition, with the nature of the faults stated as justifying it. The seductive faults, the dulcia vitia of Cowley, Marine, or Darwin might reasonably be thought capable of corrupting the public judgment for half a century, and require a twenty years war, campaign after campaign, in order to dethrone the usurper and re-establish the legitimate taste. But that a downright simpleness, under the affectation of simplicity, prosaic words in feeble metre, silly thoughts in childish phrases, and a preference of mean, degrading, or at best trivial associations and characters, should succeed in forming a school of imitators, a company of almost religious admirers, and this too among young men of ardent minds, liberal education, and not ------with academic laurels unbestowed; and that this bare and bald counterfeit of poetry, which is characterized as below criticism, should for nearly twenty years have well-nigh engrossed criticism, as the main, if not the only, butt of review, magazine, pamphlet, poem, and paragraph; this is indeed matter of wonder. Of yet greater is it, that the contest should still continue as undecided as [19] that between Bacchus and the frogs in Aristophanes; when the former descended to the realms of the departed to bring back the spirit of old and genuine poesy;-- CH. Brekekekex, koax, koax. D. All' exoloisth' auto koax. Ouden gar est' all', hae koax. Oimozet' ou gar moi melei. CH. Alla maen kekraxomestha g', oposon hae pharynx an haemon chandanae di' haemeras, brekekekex, koax, koax! D. Touto gar ou nikaesete. CH. Oude men haemas su pantos. D. Oude maen humeis ge dae m' oudepote. Kekraxomai gar, kan me deae, di' haemeras, eos an humon epikrataeso tou koax! CH. Brekekekex, KO'AX, KOAX! During the last year of my residence at Cambridge, 1794, I became acquainted with Mr. Wordsworth's first publication entitled Descriptive Sketches; and seldom, if ever, was the emergence of an original poetic genius above the literary horizon more evidently announced. In the form, style, and manner of the whole poem, and in the structure of the particular lines and periods, there is a harshness and acerbity connected and combined with words and images all a-glow, which might recall those products of the vegetable world, where gorgeous blossoms rise out of a hard and thorny rind and shell, within which the rich fruit is elaborating. The language is not only peculiar and strong, but at times knotty and contorted, as by its own impatient strength; while the novelty and struggling crowd of images, acting in conjunction with the difficulties of the style, demands always a greater closeness of attention, than poetry,--at all events, than descriptive poetry--has a right to claim. It not seldom therefore justified the complaint of obscurity. In the following extract I have sometimes fancied, that I saw an emblem of the poem itself, and of the author's genius as it was then displayed.-- 'Tis storm; and hid in mist from hour to hour, All day the floods a deepening murmur pour; The sky is veiled, and every cheerful sight Dark is the region as with coming night; Yet what a sudden burst of overpowering light! Triumphant on the bosom of the storm, Glances the fire-clad eagle's wheeling form; Eastward, in long perspective glittering, shine The wood-crowned cliffs that o'er the lake recline; Those Eastern cliffs a hundred streams unfold, At once to pillars turned that flame with gold; Behind his sail the peasant strives to shun The west, that burns like one dilated sun, Where in a mighty crucible expire The mountains, glowing hot, like coals of fire. The poetic Psyche, in its process to full development, undergoes as many changes as its Greek namesake, the butterfly [20]. And it is remarkable how soon genius clears and purifies itself from the faults and errors of its earliest products; faults which, in its earliest compositions, are the more obtrusive and confluent, because as heterogeneous elements, which had only a temporary use, they constitute the very ferment, by which themselves are carried off. Or we may compare them to some diseases, which must work on the humours, and be thrown out on the surface, in order to secure the patient from their future recurrence. I was in my twenty-fourth year, when I had the happiness of knowing Mr. Wordsworth personally, and while memory lasts, I shall hardly forget the sudden effect produced on my mind, by his recitation of a manuscript poem, which still remains unpublished, but of which the stanza and tone of style were the same as those of The Female Vagrant, as originally printed in the first volume of the Lyrical Ballads. There was here no mark of strained thought, or forced diction, no crowd or turbulence of imagery; and, as the poet hath himself well described in his Lines on revisiting the Wye, manly reflection and human associations had given both variety, and an additional interest to natural objects, which, in the passion and appetite of the first love, they had seemed to him neither to need nor permit. The occasional obscurities, which had risen from an imperfect control over the resources of his native language, had almost wholly disappeared, together with that worse defect of arbitrary and illogical phrases, at once hackneyed and fantastic, which hold so distinguished a place in the technique of ordinary poetry, and will, more or less, alloy the earlier poems of the truest genius, unless the attention has been specially directed to their worthlessness and incongruity [21]. I did not perceive anything particular in the mere style of the poem alluded to during its recitation, except indeed such difference as was not separable from the thought and manner; and the Spenserian stanza, which always, more or less, recalls to the reader's mind Spenser's own style, would doubtless have authorized, in my then opinion, a more frequent descent to the phrases of ordinary life, than could without an ill effect have been hazarded in the heroic couplet. It was not however the freedom from false taste, whether as to common defects, or to those more properly his own, which made so unusual an impression on my feelings immediately, and subsequently on my judgment. It was the union of deep feeling with profound thought; the fine balance of truth in observing, with the imaginative faculty in modifying, the objects observed; and above all the original gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world around forms, incidents, and situations, of which, for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dew drops. This excellence, which in all Mr. Wordsworth's writings is more or less predominant, and which constitutes the character of his mind, I no sooner felt, than I sought to understand. Repeated meditations led me first to suspect,--(and a more intimate analysis of the human faculties, their appropriate marks, functions, and effects matured my conjecture into full conviction,)--that Fancy and Imagination were two distinct and widely different faculties, instead of being, according to the general belief, either two names with one meaning, or, at furthest, the lower and higher degree of one and the same power. It is not, I own, easy to conceive a more apposite translation of the Greek phantasia than the Latin imaginatio; but it is equally true that in all societies there exists an instinct of growth, a certain collective, unconscious good sense working progressively to desynonymize [22] those words originally of the same meaning, which the conflux of dialects supplied to the more homogeneous languages, as the Greek and German: and which the same cause, joined with accidents of translation from original works of different countries, occasion in mixed languages like our own. The first and most important point to be proved is, that two conceptions perfectly distinct are confused under one and the same word, and--this done--to appropriate that word exclusively to the one meaning, and the synonyme, should there be one, to the other. But if,--(as will be often the case in the arts and sciences,)--no synonyme exists, we must either invent or borrow a word. In the present instance the appropriation has already begun, and been legitimated in the derivative adjective: Milton had a highly imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful mind. If therefore I should succeed in establishing the actual existence of two faculties generally different, the nomenclature would be at once determined. To the faculty by which I had characterized Milton, we should confine the term 'imagination;' while the other would be contra-distinguished as 'fancy.' Now were it once fully ascertained, that this division is no less grounded in nature than that of delirium from mania, or Otway's Lutes, laurels, seas of milk, and ships of amber, from Shakespeare's What! have his daughters brought him to this pass? or from the preceding apostrophe to the elements; the theory of the fine arts, and of poetry in particular, could not but derive some additional and important light. It would in its immediate effects furnish a torch of guidance to the philosophical critic; and ultimately to the poet himself. In energetic minds, truth soon changes by domestication into power; and from directing in the discrimination and appraisal of the product, becomes influencive in the production. To admire on principle, is the only way to imitate without loss of originality. It has been already hinted, that metaphysics and psychology have long been my hobby-horse. But to have a hobby-horse, and to be vain of it, are so commonly found together, that they pass almost for the same. I trust therefore, that there will be more good humour than contempt, in the smile with which the reader chastises my self-complacency, if I confess myself uncertain, whether the satisfaction from the perception of a truth new to myself may not have been rendered more poignant by the conceit, that it would be equally so to the public. There was a time, certainly, in which I took some little credit to myself, in the belief that I had been the first of my countrymen, who had pointed out the diverse meaning of which the two terms were capable, and analyzed the faculties to which they should be appropriated. Mr. W. Taylor's recent volume of synonymes I have not yet seen [23]; but his specification of the terms in question has been clearly shown to be both insufficient and erroneous by Mr. Wordsworth in the Preface added to the late collection of his Poems. The explanation which Mr. Wordsworth has himself given, will be found to differ from mine, chiefly, perhaps as our objects are different. It could scarcely indeed happen otherwise, from the advantage I have enjoyed of frequent conversation with him on a subject to which a poem of his own first directed my attention, and my conclusions concerning which he had made more lucid to myself by many happy instances drawn from the operation of natural objects on the mind. But it was Mr. Wordsworth's purpose to consider the influences of fancy and imagination as they are manifested in poetry, and from the different effects to conclude their diversity in kind; while it is my object to investigate the seminal principle, and then from the kind to deduce the degree. My friend has drawn a masterly sketch of the branches with their poetic fruitage. I wish to add the trunk, and even the roots as far as they lift themselves above ground, and are visible to the naked eye of our common consciousness. Yet even in this attempt I am aware that I shall be obliged to draw more largely on the reader's attention, than so immethodical a miscellany as this can authorize; when in such a work (the Ecclesiasical Polity) of such a mind as Hooker's, the judicious author, though no less admirable for the perspicuity than for the port and dignity of his language,--and though he wrote for men of learning in a learned age,--saw nevertheless occasion to anticipate and guard against "complaints of obscurity," as often as he was to trace his subject "to the highest well-spring and fountain." Which, (continues he) "because men are not accustomed to, the pains we take are more needful a great deal, than acceptable; and the matters we handle, seem by reason of newness (till the mind grow better acquainted with them) dark and intricate." I would gladly therefore spare both myself and others this labour, if I knew how without it to present an intelligible statement of my poetic creed,--not as my opinions, which weigh for nothing, but as deductions from established premises conveyed in such a form, as is calculated either to effect a fundamental conviction, or to receive a fundamental confutation. If I may dare once more adopt the words of Hooker, "they, unto whom we shall seem tedious, are in no wise injured by us, because it is in their own hands to spare that labour, which they are not willing to endure." Those at least, let me be permitted to add, who have taken so much pains to render me ridiculous for a perversion of taste, and have supported the charge by attributing strange notions to me on no other authority than their own conjectures, owe it to themselves as well as to me not to refuse their attention to my own statement of the theory which I do acknowledge; or shrink from the trouble of examining the grounds on which I rest it, or the arguments which I offer in its justification. CHAPTER V On the law of Association--Its history traced from Aristotle to Hartley. There have been men in all ages, who have been impelled as by an instinct to propose their own nature as a problem, and who devote their attempts to its solution. The first step was to construct a table of distinctions, which they seem to have formed on the principle of the absence or presence of the Will. Our various sensations, perceptions, and movements were classed as active or passive, or as media partaking of both. A still finer distinction was soon established between the voluntary and the spontaneous. In our perceptions we seem to ourselves merely passive to an external power, whether as a mirror reflecting the landscape, or as a blank canvass on which some unknown hand paints it. For it is worthy of notice, that the latter, or the system of Idealism may be traced to sources equally remote with the former, or Materialism; and Berkeley can boast an ancestry at least as venerable as Gassendi or Hobbes. These conjectures, however, concerning the mode in which our perceptions originated, could not alter the natural difference of Things and Thoughts. In the former, the cause appeared wholly external, while in the latter, sometimes our will interfered as the producing or determining cause, and sometimes our nature seemed to act by a mechanism of its own, without any conscious effort of the will, or even against it. Our inward experiences were thus arranged in three separate classes, the passive sense, or what the School-men call the merely receptive quality of the mind; the voluntary; and the spontaneous, which holds the middle place between both. But it is not in human nature to meditate on any mode of action, without inquiring after the law that governs it; and in the explanation of the spontaneous movements of our being, the metaphysician took the lead of the anatomist and natural philosopher. In Egypt, Palestine, Greece, and India the analysis of the mind had reached its noon and manhood, while experimental research was still in its dawn and infancy. For many, very many centuries, it has been difficult to advance a new truth, or even a new error, in the philosophy of the intellect or morals. With regard, however, to the laws that direct the spontaneous movements of thought and the principle of their intellectual mechanism there exists, it has been asserted, an important exception most honourable to the moderns, and in the merit of which our own country claims the largest share. Sir James Mackintosh,--(who, amid the variety of his talents and attainments, is not of less repute for the depth and accuracy of his philosophical inquiries than for the eloquence with which he is said to render their most difficult results perspicuous, and the driest attractive,)--affirmed in the Lectures, delivered by him in Lincoln's Inn Hall, that the law of association as established in the contemporaneity of the original impressions, formed the basis of all true psychology; and that any ontological or metaphysical science, not contained in such (that is, an empirical) psychology, was but a web of abstractions and generalizations. Of this prolific truth, of this great fundamental law, he declared Hobbes to have been the original discoverer, while its full application to the whole intellectual system we owed to Hartley; who stood in the same relation to Hobbes as Newton to Kepler; the law of association being that to the mind, which gravitation is to matter. Of the former clause in this assertion, as it respects the comparative merits of the ancient metaphysicians, including their commentators, the School-men, and of the modern and British and French philosophers from Hobbes to Hume, Hartley, and Condillac, this is not the place to speak. So wide indeed is the chasm between Sir James Mackintosh's philosophical creed and mine, that so far from being able to join hands, we could scarcely make our voices intelligible to each other: and to bridge it over would require more time, skill, and power than I believe myself to possess. But the latter clause involves for the greater part a mere question of fact and history, and the accuracy of the statement is to be tried by documents rather than reasoning. First, then, I deny Hobbes's claim in toto: for he had been anticipated by Des Cartes, whose work De Methodo, preceded Hobbes's De Natura Humana, by more than a year. But what is of much more importance, Hobbes builds nothing on the principle which he had announced. He does not even announce it, as differing in any respect from the general laws of material motion and impact: nor was it, indeed, possible for him so to do, compatibly with his system, which was exclusively material and mechanical. Far otherwise is it with Des Cartes; greatly as he too in his after writings (and still more egregiously his followers De la Forge, and others) obscured the truth by their attempts to explain it on the theory of nervous fluids, and material configurations. But, in his interesting work, De Methodo, Des Cartes relates the circumstance which first led him to meditate on this subject, and which since then has been often noticed and employed as an instance and illustration of the law. A child who with its eyes bandaged had lost several of his fingers by amputation, continued to complain for many days successively of pains, now in this joint and now in that, of the very fingers which had been cut off. Des Cartes was led by this incident to reflect on the uncertainty with which we attribute any particular place to any inward pain or uneasiness, and proceeded after long consideration to establish it as a general law: that contemporaneous impressions, whether images or sensations, recall each other mechanically. On this principle, as a ground work, he built up the whole system of human language, as one continued process of association. He showed in what sense not only general terms, but generic images,--under the name of abstract ideas,--actually existed, and in what consist their nature and power. As one word may become the general exponent of many, so by association a simple image may represent a whole class. But in truth Hobbes himself makes no claims to any discovery, and introduces this law of association, or (in his own language) discursion of mind, as an admitted fact, in the solution alone of which, and this by causes purely physiological, he arrogates any originality. His system is briefly this; whenever the senses are impinged on by external objects, whether by the rays of light reflected from them, or by effluxes of their finer particles, there results a correspondent motion of the innermost and subtlest organs. This motion constitutes a representation, and there remains an impression of the same, or a certain disposition to repeat the same motion. Whenever we feel several objects at the same time, the impressions that are left, (or in the language of Mr. Hume, the ideas,) are linked together. Whenever therefore any one of the movements, which constitute a complex impression, is renewed through the senses, the others succeed mechanically. It follows of necessity, therefore, that Hobbes, as well as Hartley and all others who derive association from the connection and interdependence of the supposed matter, the movements of which constitute our thoughts, must have reduced all its forms to the one law of Time. But even the merit of announcing this law with philosophic precision cannot be fairly conceded to him. For the objects of any two ideas need not have co-existed in the same sensation in order to become mutually associable. The same result will follow when one only of the two ideas has been represented by the senses, and the other by the memory. Long however before either Hobbes or Des Cartes the law of association had been defined, and its important functions set forth by Ludovicus Vives. Phantasia, it is to be noticed, is employed by Vives to express the mental power of comprehension, or the active function of the mind; and imaginatio for the receptivity (via receptiva) of impressions, or for the passive perception. The power of combination he appropriates to the former: "quae singula et simpliciter acceperat imaginatio, ea conjungit et disjungait phantasia." And the law by which the thoughts are spontaneously presented follows thus: "quae simul sunt a phantasia comprehensa, si alterutrum occurrat, solet secum alterum representare." To time therefore he subordinates all the other exciting causes of association. The soul proceeds "a causa ad effectum, ab hoc ad instrumentum, a parte ad totum;" thence to the place, from place to person, and from this to whatever preceded or followed, all as being parts of a total impression, each of which may recall the other. The apparent springs "saltus vel transitus etiam longissimos," he explains by the same thought having been a component part of two or more total impressions. Thus "ex Scipione venio in cogitationem potentiae Turcicae, propter victorias ejus de Asia, in qua regnabat Antiochus." But from Vives I pass at once to the source of his doctrines, and (as far as we can judge from the remains yet extant of Greek philosophy) as to the first, so to the fullest and most perfect enunciation of the associative principle, namely, to the writings of Aristotle; and of these in particular to the treatises De Anima, and "De Memoria," which last belongs to the series of essays entitled in the old translations Parva Naturalia. In as much as later writers have either deviated from, or added to his doctrines, they appear to me to have introduced either error or groundless supposition. In the first place it is to be observed, that Aristotle's positions on this subject are unmixed with fiction. The wise Stagyrite speaks of no successive particles propagating motion like billiard balls, as Hobbes; nor of nervous or animal spirits, where inanimate and irrational solids are thawed down, and distilled, or filtrated by ascension, into living and intelligent fluids, that etch and re-etch engravings on the brain, as the followers of Des Cartes, and the humoral pathologists in general; nor of an oscillating ether which was to effect the same service for the nerves of the brain considered as solid fibres, as the animal spirits perform for them under the notion of hollow tubes, as Hartley teaches--nor finally, (with yet more recent dreamers) of chemical compositions by elective affinity, or of an electric light at once the immediate object and the ultimate organ of inward vision, which rises to the brain like an Aurora Borealis, and there, disporting in various shapes,--as the balance of plus and minus, or negative and positive, is destroyed or re-established,--images out both past and present. Aristotle delivers a just theory without pretending to an hypothesis; or in other words a comprehensive survey of the different facts, and of their relations to each other without supposition, that is, a fact placed under a number of facts, as their common support and explanation; though in the majority of instances these hypotheses or suppositions better deserve the name of upopoiaeseis, or suffictions. He uses indeed the word kinaeseis, to express what we call representations or ideas, but he carefully distinguishes them from material motion, designating the latter always by annexing the words en topo, or kata topon. On the contrary, in his treatise De Anima, he excludes place and motion from all the operations of thought, whether representations or volitions, as attributes utterly and absurdly heterogeneous. The general law of association, or, more accurately, the common condition under which all exciting causes act, and in which they may be generalized, according to Aristotle is this. Ideas by having been together acquire a power of recalling each other; or every partial representation awakes the total representation of which it had been a part. In the practical determination of this common principle to particular recollections, he admits five agents or occasioning causes: first, connection in time, whether simultaneous, preceding, or successive; second, vicinity or connection in space; third, interdependence or necessary connection, as cause and effect; fourth, likeness; and fifth, contrast. As an additional solution of the occasional seeming chasms in the continuity of reproduction he proves, that movements or ideas possessing one or the other of these five characters had passed through the mind as intermediate links, sufficiently clear to recall other parts of the same total impressions with which they had co-existed, though not vivid enough to excite that degree of attention which is requisite for distinct recollection, or as we may aptly express it, after consciousness. In association then consists the whole mechanism of the reproduction of impressions, in the Aristotelian Psychology. It is the universal law of the passive fancy and mechanical memory; that which supplies to all other faculties their objects, to all thought the elements of its materials. In consulting the excellent commentary of St. Thomas Aquinas on the Parva Naturalia of Aristotle, I was struck at once with its close resemblance to Hume's Essay on Association. The main thoughts were the same in both, the order of the thoughts was the same, and even the illustrations differed only by Hume's occasional substitution of more modern examples. I mentioned the circumstance to several of my literary acquaintances, who admitted the closeness of the resemblance, and that it seemed too great to be explained by mere coincidence; but they thought it improbable that Hume should have held the pages of the Angelic Doctor worth turning over. But some time after Mr. Payne showed Sir James Mackintosh some odd volumes of St. Thomas Aquinas, partly perhaps from having heard that he had in his Lectures passed a high encomium on this canonized philosopher; but chiefly from the fact, that the volumes had belonged to Mr. Hume, and had here and there marginal marks and notes of reference in his own hand writing. Among these volumes was that which contains the Parva Naturalia, in the old Latin version, swathed and swaddled in the commentary afore mentioned It remains then for me, first to state wherein Hartley differs from Aristotle; then, to exhibit the grounds of my conviction, that he differed only to err: and next as the result, to show, by what influences of the choice and judgment the associative power becomes either memory or fancy; and, in conclusion, to appropriate the remaining offices of the mind to the reason, and the imagination. With my best efforts to be as perspicuous as the nature of language will permit on such a subject, I earnestly solicit the good wishes and friendly patience of my readers, while I thus go "sounding on my dim and perilous way." CHAPTER VI That Hartley's system, as far as it differs from that of Aristotle, is neither tenable in theory, nor founded in facts. Of Hartley's hypothetical vibrations in his hypothetical oscillating ether of the nerves, which is the first and most obvious distinction between his system and that of Aristotle, I shall say little. This, with all other similar attempts to render that an object of the sight which has no relation to sight, has been already sufficiently exposed by the younger Reimarus, Maasz, and others, as outraging the very axioms of mechanics in a scheme, the merit of which consists in its being mechanical. Whether any other philosophy be possible, but the mechanical; and again, whether the mechanical system can have any claim to be called philosophy; are questions for another place. It is, however, certain, that as long as we deny the former, and affirm the latter, we must bewilder ourselves, whenever we would pierce into the adyta of causation; and all that laborious conjecture can do, is to fill up the gaps of fancy. Under that despotism of the eye (the emancipation from which Pythagoras by his numeral, and Plato by his musical, symbols, and both by geometric discipline, aimed at, as the first propaideuma of the mind)--under this strong sensuous influence, we are restless because invisible things are not the objects of vision; and metaphysical systems, for the most part, become popular, not for their truth, but in proportion as they attribute to causes a susceptibility of being seen, if only our visual organs were sufficiently powerful. From a hundred possible confutations let one suffice. According to this system the idea or vibration a from the external object A becomes associable with the idea or vibration m from the external object M, because the oscillation a propagated itself so as to re-produce the oscillation m. But the original impression from M was essentially different from the impression A: unless therefore different causes may produce the same effect, the vibration a could never produce the vibration m: and this therefore could never be the means, by which a and m are associated. To understand this, the attentive reader need only be reminded, that the ideas are themselves, in Hartley's system, nothing more than their appropriate configurative vibrations. It is a mere delusion of the fancy to conceive the pre-existence of the ideas, in any chain of association, as so many differently coloured billiard-balls in contact, so that when an object, the billiard-stick, strikes the first or white ball, the same motion propagates itself through the red, green, blue and black, and sets the whole in motion. No! we must suppose the very same force, which constitutes the white ball, to constitute the red or black; or the idea of a circle to constitute the idea of a triangle; which is impossible. But it may be said, that by the sensations from the objects A and M, the nerves have acquired a disposition to the vibrations a and m, and therefore a need only be repeated in order to re-produce m. Now we will grant, for a moment, the possibility of such a disposition in a material nerve, which yet seems scarcely less absurd than to say, that a weather-cock had acquired a habit of turning to the east, from the wind having been so long in that quarter: for if it be replied, that we must take in the circumstance of life, what then becomes of the mechanical philosophy? And what is the nerve, but the flint which the wag placed in the pot as the first ingredient of his stone broth, requiring only salt, turnips, and mutton, for the remainder! But if we waive this, and pre-suppose the actual existence of such a disposition; two cases are possible. Either, every idea has its own nerve and correspondent oscillation, or this is not the case. If the latter be the truth, we should gain nothing by these dispositions; for then, every nerve having several dispositions, when the motion of any other nerve is propagated into it, there will be no ground or cause present, why exactly the oscillation m should arise, rather than any other to which it was equally pre-disposed. But if we take the former, and let every idea have a nerve of its own, then every nerve must be capable of propagating its motion into many other nerves; and again, there is no reason assignable, why the vibration m should arise, rather than any other ad libitum. It is fashionable to smile at Hartley's vibrations and vibratiuncles; and his work has been re-edited by Priestley, with the omission of the material hypothesis. But Hartley was too great a man, too coherent a thinker, for this to have been done, either consistently or to any wise purpose. For all other parts of his system, as far as they are peculiar to that system, once removed from their mechanical basis, not only lose their main support, but the very motive which led to their adoption. Thus the principle of contemporaneity, which Aristotle had made the common condition of all the laws of association, Hartley was constrained to represent as being itself the sole law. For to what law can the action of material atoms be subject, but that of proximity in place? And to what law can their motions be subjected but that of time? Again, from this results inevitably, that the will, the reason, the judgment, and the understanding, instead of being the determining causes of association, must needs be represented as its creatures, and among its mechanical effects. Conceive, for instance, a broad stream, winding through a mountainous country with an indefinite number of currents, varying and running into each other according as the gusts chance to blow from the opening of the mountains. The temporary union of several currents in one, so as to form the main current of the moment, would present an accurate image of Hartley's theory of the will. Had this been really the case, the consequence would have been, that our whole life would be divided between the despotism of outward impressions, and that of senseless and passive memory. Take his law in its highest abstraction and most philosophical form, namely, that every partial representation recalls the total representation of which it was a part; and the law becomes nugatory, were it only for its universality. In practice it would indeed be mere lawlessness. Consider, how immense must be the sphere of a total impression from the top of St. Paul's church; and how rapid and continuous the series of such total impressions. If, therefore, we suppose the absence of all interference of the will, reason, and judgment, one or other of two consequences must result. Either the ideas, or reliques of such impression, will exactly imitate the order of the impression itself, which would be absolute delirium: or any one part of that impression might recall any other part, and--(as from the law of continuity, there must exist in every total impression, some one or more parts, which are components of some other following total impression, and so on ad infinitum)--any part of any impression might recall any part of any other, without a cause present to determine what it should be. For to bring in the will, or reason, as causes of their own cause, that is, as at once causes and effects, can satisfy those only who, in their pretended evidences of a God, having first demanded organization, as the sole cause and ground of intellect, will then coolly demand the pre-existence of intellect, as the cause and ground-work of organization. There is in truth but one state to which this theory applies at all, namely, that of complete light-headedness; and even to this it applies but partially, because the will and reason are perhaps never wholly suspended. A case of this kind occurred in a Roman Catholic town in Germany a year or two before my arrival at Goettingen, and had not then ceased to be a frequent subject of conversation. A young woman of four or five and twenty, who could neither read, nor write, was seized with a nervous fever; during which, according to the asseverations of all the priests and monks of the neighbourhood, she became possessed, and, as it appeared, by a very learned devil. She continued incessantly talking Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, in very pompous tones and with most distinct enunciation. This possession was rendered more probable by the known fact that she was or had been a heretic. Voltaire humorously advises the devil to decline all acquaintance with medical men; and it would have been more to his reputation, if he had taken this advice in the present instance. The case had attracted the particular attention of a young physician, and by his statement many eminent physiologists and psychologists visited the town, and cross-examined the case on the spot. Sheets full of her ravings were taken down from her own mouth, and were found to consist of sentences, coherent and intelligible each for itself, but with little or no connection with each other. Of the Hebrew, a small portion only could be traced to the Bible; the remainder seemed to be in the Rabbinical dialect. All trick or conspiracy was out of the question. Not only had the young woman ever been a harmless, simple creature; but she was evidently labouring under a nervous fever. In the town, in which she had been resident for many years as a servant in different families, no solution presented itself. The young physician, however, determined to trace her past life step by step; for the patient herself was incapable of returning a rational answer. He at length succeeded in discovering the place, where her parents had lived: travelled thither, found them dead, but an uncle surviving; and from him learned, that the patient had been charitably taken by an old Protestant pastor at nine years old, and had remained with him some years, even till the old man's death. Of this pastor the uncle knew nothing, but that he was a very good man. With great difficulty, and after much search, our young medical philosopher discovered a niece of the pastor's, who had lived with him as his house-keeper, and had inherited his effects. She remembered the girl; related, that her venerable uncle had been too indulgent, and could not bear to hear the girl scolded; that she was willing to have kept her, but that, after her patron's death, the girl herself refused to stay. Anxious inquiries were then, of course, made concerning the pastor's habits; and the solution of the phenomenon was soon obtained. For it appeared, that it had been the old man's custom, for years, to walk up and down a passage of his house into which the kitchen door opened, and to read to himself with a loud voice, out of his favourite books. A considerable number of these were still in the niece's possession. She added, that he was a very learned man and a great Hebraist. Among the books were found a collection of Rabbinical writings, together with several of the Greek and Latin Fathers; and the physician succeeded in identifying so many passages with those taken down at the young woman's bedside, that no doubt could remain in any rational mind concerning the true origin of the impressions made on her nervous system. This authenticated case furnishes both proof and instance, that reliques of sensation may exist for an indefinite time in a latent state, in the very same order in which they were originally impressed; and as we cannot rationally suppose the feverish state of the brain to act in any other way than as a stimulus, this fact (and it would not be difficult to adduce several of the same kind) contributes to make it even probable, that all thoughts are in themselves imperishable; and, that if the intelligent faculty should be rendered more comprehensive, it would require only a different and apportioned organization,--the body celestial instead of the body terrestrial,--to bring before every human soul the collective experience of its whole past existence. And this, this, perchance, is the dread book of judgment, in the mysterious hieroglyphics of which every idle word is recorded! Yea, in the very nature of a living spirit, it may be more possible that heaven and earth should pass away, than that a single act, a single thought, should be loosened or lost from that living chain of causes, with all the links of which, conscious or unconscious, the free-will, our only absolute Self, is coextensive and co-present. But not now dare I longer discourse of this, waiting for a loftier mood, and a nobler subject, warned from within and from without, that it is profanation to speak of these "mysteries tois maede phantasteisin, os kalon to taes dikaiosynaes kai sophrosynaes prosopon, kai oute hesperos oute eoos outo kala. To gar horon pros to horomenon syngenes kai homoion poiaesamenon dei epiballein tae thea, ou gar an popote eiden ophthalmos haelion, haelioeidaes mae gegenaemenos oude to kalon an idae psychae, mae kagae genomenae--to those to whose imagination it has never been presented, how beautiful is the countenance of justice and wisdom; and that neither the morning nor the evening star are so fair. For in order to direct the view aright, it behoves that the beholder should have made himself congenerous and similar to the object beheld. Never could the eye have beheld the sun, had not its own essence been soliform," (i.e. pre-configured to light by a similarity of essence with that of light) "neither can a soul not beautiful attain to an intuition of beauty." CHAPTER VII Of the necessary consequences of the Hartleian Theory--Of the original mistake or equivocation which procured its admission--Memoria technica. We will pass by the utter incompatibility of such a law--if law it may be called, which would itself be a slave of chances--with even that appearance of rationality forced upon us by the outward phaenomena of human conduct, abstracted from our own consciousness. We will agree to forget this for the moment, in order to fix our attention on that subordination of final to efficient causes in the human being, which flows of necessity from the assumption, that the will and, with the will, all acts of thought and attention are parts and products of this blind mechanism, instead of being distinct powers, the function of which it is to control, determine, and modify the phantasmal chaos of association. The soul becomes a mere ens logicum; for, as a real separable being, it would be more worthless and ludicrous than the Grimalkins in the cat-harpsichord, described in the Spectator. For these did form a part of the process; but, to Hartley's scheme, the soul is present only to be pinched or stroked, while the very squeals or purring are produced by an agency wholly independent and alien. It involves all the difficulties, all the incomprehensibility (if it be not indeed, os emoige dokei, the absurdity), of intercommunion between substances that have no one property in common, without any of the convenient consequences that bribed the judgment to the admission of the Dualistic hypothesis. Accordingly, this caput mortuum of the Hartleian process has been rejected by his followers, and the consciousness considered as a result, as a tune, the common product of the breeze and the harp though this again is the mere remotion of one absurdity to make way for another, equally preposterous. For what is harmony but a mode of relation, the very esse of which is percipi?--an ens rationale, which pre-supposes the power, that by perceiving creates it? The razor's edge becomes a saw to the armed vision; and the delicious melodies of Purcell or Cimarosa might be disjointed stammerings to a hearer, whose partition of time should be a thousand times subtler than ours. But this obstacle too let us imagine ourselves to have surmounted, and "at one bound high overleap all bound." Yet according to this hypothesis the disquisition, to which I am at present soliciting the reader's attention, may be as truly said to be written by Saint Paul's church, as by me: for it is the mere motion of my muscles and nerves; and these again are set in motion from external causes equally passive, which external causes stand themselves in interdependent connection with every thing that exists or has existed. Thus the whole universe co-operates to produce the minutest stroke of every letter, save only that I myself, and I alone, have nothing to do with it, but merely the causeless and effectless beholding of it when it is done. Yet scarcely can it be called a beholding; for it is neither an act nor an effect; but an impossible creation of a something nothing out of its very contrary! It is the mere quick-silver plating behind a looking-glass; and in this alone consists the poor worthless I! The sum total of my moral and intellectual intercourse, dissolved into its elements, is reduced to extension, motion, degrees of velocity, and those diminished copies of configurative motion, which form what we call notions, and notions of notions. Of such philosophy well might Butler say-- The metaphysic's but a puppet motion That goes with screws, the notion of a notion; The copy of a copy and lame draught Unnaturally taken from a thought That counterfeits all pantomimic tricks, And turns the eyes, like an old crucifix; That counterchanges whatsoe'er it calls By another name, and makes it true or false; Turns truth to falsehood, falsehood into truth, By virtue of the Babylonian's tooth. The inventor of the watch, if this doctrine be true, did not in reality invent it; he only looked on, while the blind causes, the only true artists, were unfolding themselves. So must it have been too with my friend Allston, when he sketched his picture of the dead man revived by the bones of the prophet Elijah. So must it have been with Mr. Southey and Lord Byron, when the one fancied himself composing his Roderick, and the other his Childe Harold. The same must hold good of all systems of philosophy; of all arts, governments, wars by sea and by land; in short, of all things that ever have been or that ever will be produced. For, according to this system, it is not the affections and passions that are at work, in as far as they are sensations or thoughts. We only fancy, that we act from rational resolves, or prudent motives, or from impulses of anger, love, or generosity. In all these cases the real agent is a something-nothing-everything, which does all of which we know, and knows nothing of all that itself does. The existence of an infinite spirit, of an intelligent and holy will, must, on this system, be mere articulated motions of the air. For as the function of the human understanding is no other than merely to appear to itself to combine and to apply the phaenomena of the association; and as these derive all their reality from the primary sensations; and the sensations again all their reality from the impressions ab extra; a God not visible, audible, or tangible, can exist only in the sounds and letters that form his name and attributes. If in ourselves there be no such faculties as those of the will, and the scientific reason, we must either have an innate idea of them, which would overthrow the whole system; or we can have no idea at all. The process, by which Hume degraded the notion of cause and effect into a blind product of delusion and habit, into the mere sensation of proceeding life (nisus vitalis) associated with the images of the memory; this same process must be repeated to the equal degradation of every fundamental idea in ethics or theology. Far, very far am I from burthening with the odium of these consequences the moral characters of those who first formed, or have since adopted the system! It is most noticeable of the excellent and pious Hartley, that, in the proofs of the existence and attributes of God, with which his second volume commences, he makes no reference to the principle or results of the first. Nay, he assumes, as his foundations, ideas which, if we embrace the doctrines of his first volume, can exist no where but in the vibrations of the ethereal medium common to the nerves and to the atmosphere. Indeed the whole of the second volume is, with the fewest possible exceptions, independent of his peculiar system. So true is it, that the faith, which saves and sanctifies, is a collective energy, a total act of the whole moral being; that its living sensorium is in the heart; and that no errors of the understanding can be morally arraigned unless they have proceeded from the heart. But whether they be such, no man can be certain in the case of another, scarcely perhaps even in his own. Hence it follows by inevitable consequence, that man may perchance determine what is a heresy; but God only can know who is a heretic. It does not, however, by any means follow that opinions fundamentally false are harmless. A hundred causes may co-exist to form one complex antidote. Yet the sting of the adder remains venomous, though there are many who have taken up the evil thing, and it hurted them not. Some indeed there seem to have been, in an unfortunate neighbour nation at least, who have embraced this system with a full view of all its moral and religious consequences; some-- ------who deem themselves most free, When they within this gross and visible sphere Chain down the winged thought, scoffing ascent, Proud in their meanness; and themselves they cheat With noisy emptiness of learned phrase, Their subtle fluids, impacts, essences, Self-working tools, uncaus'd effects, and all Those blind omniscients, those almighty slaves, Untenanting creation of its God! Such men need discipline, not argument; they must be made better men, before they can become wiser. The attention will be more profitably employed in attempting to discover and expose the paralogisms, by the magic of which such a faith could find admission into minds framed for a nobler creed. These, it appears to me, may be all reduced to one sophism as their common genus; the mistaking the conditions of a thing for its causes and essence; and the process, by which we arrive at the knowledge of a faculty, for the faculty itself. The air I breathe is the condition of my life, not its cause. We could never have learned that we had eyes but by the process of seeing; yet having seen we know that the eyes must have pre-existed in order to render the process of sight possible. Let us cross-examine Hartley's scheme under the guidance of this distinction; and we shall discover, that contemporaneity, (Leibnitz's Lex Continui,) is the limit and condition of the laws of mind, itself being rather a law of matter, at least of phaenomena considered as material. At the utmost, it is to thought the same, as the law of gravitation is to loco-motion. In every voluntary movement we first counteract gravitation, in order to avail ourselves of it. It must exist, that there may be a something to be counteracted, and which, by its re-action, may aid the force that is exerted to resist it. Let us consider what we do when we leap. We first resist the gravitating power by an act purely voluntary, and then by another act, voluntary in part, we yield to it in order to alight on the spot, which we had previously proposed to ourselves. Now let a man watch his mind while he is composing; or, to take a still more common case, while he is trying to recollect a name; and he will find the process completely analogous. Most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed, how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no unapt emblem of the mind's self-experience in the act of thinking. There are evidently two powers at work, which relatively to each other are active and passive; and this is not possible without an intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and passive. In philosophical language, we must denominate this intermediate faculty in all its degrees and determinations, the IMAGINATION. But, in common language, and especially on the subject of poetry, we appropriate the name to a superior degree of the faculty, joined to a superior voluntary control over it. Contemporaneity, then, being the common condition of all the laws of association, and a component element in the materia subjecta, the parts of which are to be associated, must needs be co-present with all. Nothing, therefore, can be more easy than to pass off on an incautious mind this constant companion of each, for the essential substance of all. But if we appeal to our own consciousness, we shall find that even time itself, as the cause of a particular act of association, is distinct from contemporaneity, as the condition of all association. Seeing a mackerel, it may happen, that I immediately think of gooseberries, because I at the same time ate mackerel with gooseberries as the sauce. The first syllable of the latter word, being that which had coexisted with the image of the bird so called, I may then think of a goose. In the next moment the image of a swan may arise before me, though I had never seen the two birds together. In the first two instances, I am conscious that their co-existence in time was the circumstance, that enabled me to recollect them; and equally conscious am I that the latter was recalled to me by the joint operation of likeness and contrast. So it is with cause and effect: so too with order. So I am able to distinguish whether it was proximity in time, or continuity in space, that occasioned me to recall B on the mention of A. They cannot be indeed separated from contemporaneity; for that would be to separate them from the mind itself. The act of consciousness is indeed identical with time considered in its essence. I mean time per se, as contra-distinguished from our notion of time; for this is always blended with the idea of space, which, as the opposite of time, is therefore its measure. Nevertheless the accident of seeing two objects at the same moment, and the accident of seeing them in the same place are two distinct or distinguishable causes: and the true practical general law of association is this; that whatever makes certain parts of a total impression more vivid or distinct than the rest, will determine the mind to recall these in preference to others equally linked together by the common condition of contemporaneity, or (what I deem a more appropriate and philosophical term) of continuity. But the will itself by confining and intensifying [25] the attention may arbitrarily give vividness or distinctness to any object whatsoever; and from hence we may deduce the uselessness, if not the absurdity, of certain recent schemes which promise an artificial memory, but which in reality can only produce a confusion and debasement of the fancy. Sound logic, as the habitual subordination of the individual to the species, and of the species to the genus; philosophical knowledge of facts under the relation of cause and effect; a cheerful and communicative temper disposing us to notice the similarities and contrasts of things, that we may be able to illustrate the one by the other; a quiet conscience; a condition free from anxieties; sound health, and above all (as far as relates to passive remembrance) a healthy digestion; these are the best, these are the only Arts of Memory. CHAPTER VIII The system of Dualism introduced by Des Cartes--Refined first by Spinoza and afterwards by Leibnitz into the doctrine of Harmonia praestabilita--Hylozoism--Materialism--None of these systems, or any possible theory of association, supplies or supersedes a theory of perception, or explains the formation of the associable. To the best of my knowledge Des Cartes was the first philosopher who introduced the absolute and essential heterogenity of the soul as intelligence, and the body as matter. The assumption, and the form of speaking have remained, though the denial of all other properties to matter but that of extension, on which denial the whole system of Dualism is grounded, has been long exploded. For since impenetrability is intelligible only as a mode of resistance; its admission places the essence of matter in an act or power, which it possesses in common with spirit; and body and spirit are therefore no longer absolutely heterogeneous, but may without any absurdity be supposed to be different modes, or degrees in perfection, of a common substratum. To this possibility, however, it was not the fashion to advert. The soul was a thinking substance, and body a space-filling substance. Yet the apparent action of each on the other pressed heavy on the philosopher on the one hand; and no less heavily on the other hand pressed the evident truth, that the law of causality holds only between homogeneous things, that is, things having some common property; and cannot extend from one world into another, its contrary. A close analysis evinced it to be no less absurd than the question whether a man's affection for his wife lay North-east, or South-west of the love he bore towards his child. Leibnitz's doctrine of a pre-established harmony; which he certainly borrowed from Spinoza, who had himself taken the hint from Des Cartes's animal machines, was in its common interpretation too strange to survive the inventor--too repugnant to our common sense; which is not indeed entitled to a judicial voice in the courts of scientific philosophy; but whose whispers still exert a strong secret influence. Even Wolf, the admirer and illustrious systematizer of the Leibnitzian doctrine, contents himself with defending the possibility of the idea, but does not adopt it as a part of the edifice. The hypothesis of Hylozoism, on the other side, is the death of all rational physiology, and indeed of all physical science; for that requires a limitation of terms, and cannot consist with the arbitrary power of multiplying attributes by occult qualities. Besides, it answers no purpose; unless, indeed, a difficulty can be solved by multiplying it, or we can acquire a clearer notion of our soul by being told that we have a million of souls, and that every atom of our bodies has a soul of its own. Far more prudent is it to admit the difficulty once for all, and then let it lie at rest. There is a sediment indeed at the bottom of the vessel, but all the water above it is clear and transparent. The Hylozoist only shakes it up, and renders the whole turbid. But it is not either the nature of man, or the duty of the philosopher to despair concerning any important problem until, as in the squaring of the circle, the impossibility of a solution has been demonstrated. How the esse assumed as originally distinct from the scire, can ever unite itself with it; how being can transform itself into a knowing, becomes conceivable on one only condition; namely, if it can be shown that the vis representativa, or the Sentient, is itself a species of being; that is, either as a property or attribute, or as an hypostasis or self subsistence. The former--that thinking is a property of matter under particular conditions,--is, indeed, the assumption of materialism; a system which could not but be patronized by the philosopher, if only it actually performed what it promises. But how any affection from without can metamorphose itself into perception or will, the materialist has hitherto left, not only as incomprehensible as he found it, but has aggravated it into a comprehensible absurdity. For, grant that an object from without could act upon the conscious self, as on a consubstantial object; yet such an affection could only engender something homogeneous with itself. Motion could only propagate motion. Matter has no Inward. We remove one surface, but to meet with another. We can but divide a particle into particles; and each atom comprehends in itself the properties of the material universe. Let any reflecting mind make the experiment of explaining to itself the evidence of our sensuous intuitions, from the hypothesis that in any given perception there is a something which has been communicated to it by an impact, or an impression ab extra. In the first place, by the impact on the percipient, or ens representans, not the object itself, but only its action or effect, will pass into the same. Not the iron tongue, but its vibrations, pass into the metal of the bell. Now in our immediate perception, it is not the mere power or act of the object, but the object itself, which is immediately present. We might indeed attempt to explain this result by a chain of deductions and conclusions; but that, first, the very faculty of deducing and concluding would equally demand an explanation; and secondly, that there exists in fact no such intermediation by logical notions, such as those of cause and effect. It is the object itself, not the product of a syllogism, which is present to our consciousness. Or would we explain this supervention of the object to the sensation, by a productive faculty set in motion by an impulse; still the transition, into the percipient, of the object itself, from which the impulse proceeded, assumes a power that can permeate and wholly possess the soul, And like a God by spiritual art, Be all in all, and all in every part. And how came the percipient here? And what is become of the wonder- promising Matter, that was to perform all these marvels by force of mere figure, weight and motion? The most consistent proceeding of the dogmatic materialist is to fall back into the common rank of soul-and- bodyists; to affect the mysterious, and declare the whole process a revelation given, and not to be understood, which it would be profane to examine too closely. Datur non intelligitur. But a revelation unconfirmed by miracles, and a faith not commanded by the conscience, a philosopher may venture to pass by, without suspecting himself of any irreligious tendency. Thus, as materialism has been generally taught, it is utterly unintelligible, and owes all its proselytes to the propensity so common among men, to mistake distinct images for clear conceptions; and vice versa, to reject as inconceivable whatever from its own nature is unimaginable. But as soon as it becomes intelligible, it ceases to be materialism. In order to explain thinking, as a material phaenomenon, it is necessary to refine matter into a mere modification of intelligence, with the two-fold function of appearing and perceiving. Even so did Priestley in his controversy with Price. He stripped matter of all its material properties; substituted spiritual powers; and when we expected to find a body, behold! we had nothing but its ghost--the apparition of a defunct substance! I shall not dilate further on this subject; because it will, (if God grant health and permission), be treated of at large and systematically in a work, which I have many years been preparing, on the Productive Logos human and divine; with, and as the introduction to, a full commentary on the Gospel of St. John. To make myself intelligible as far as my present subject requires, it will be sufficient briefly to observe.--1. That all association demands and presupposes the existence of the thoughts and images to be associated.--2. That the hypothesis of an external world exactly correspondent to those images or modifications of our own being, which alone, according to this system, we actually behold, is as thorough idealism as Berkeley's, inasmuch as it equally, perhaps in a more perfect degree, removes all reality and immediateness of perception, and places us in a dream-world of phantoms and spectres, the inexplicable swarm and equivocal generation of motions in our own brains.--3. That this hypothesis neither involves the explanation, nor precludes the necessity, of a mechanism and co-adequate forces in the percipient, which at the more than magic touch of the impulse from without is to create anew for itself the correspondent object. The formation of a copy is not solved by the mere pre-existence of an original; the copyist of Raffael's Transfiguration must repeat more or less perfectly the process of Raffael. It would be easy to explain a thought from the image on the retina, and that from the geometry of light, if this very light did not present the very same difficulty. We might as rationally chant the Brahim creed of the tortoise that supported the bear, that supported the elephant, that supported the world, to the tune of "This is the house that Jack built." The sic Deo placitum est we all admit as the sufficient cause, and the divine goodness as the sufficient reason; but an answer to the Whence and Why is no answer to the How, which alone is the physiologist's concern. It is a sophisma pigrum, and (as Bacon hath said) the arrogance of pusillanimity, which lifts up the idol of a mortal's fancy and commands us to fall down and worship it, as a work of divine wisdom, an ancile or palladium fallen from heaven. By the very same argument the supporters of the Ptolemaic system might have rebuffed the Newtonian, and pointing to the sky with self-complacent grin [26] have appealed to common sense, whether the sun did not move and the earth stand still. CHAPTER IX Is Philosophy possible as a science, and what are its conditions?--Giordano Bruno--Literary Aristocracy, or the existence of a tacit compact among the learned as a privileged order--The Author's obligations to the Mystics--to Immanuel Kant--The difference between the letter and the spirit of Kant's writings, and a vindication of prudence in the teaching of Philosophy--Fichte's attempt to complete the Critical system--Its partial success and ultimate failure--Obligations to Schelling; and among English writers to Saumarez. After I had successively studied in the schools of Locke, Berkeley, Leibnitz, and Hartley, and could find in none of them an abiding place for my reason, I began to ask myself; is a system of philosophy; as different from mere history and historic classification, possible? If possible, what are its necessary conditions? I was for a while disposed to answer the first question in the negative, and to admit that the sole practicable employment for the human mind was to observe, to collect, and to classify. But I soon felt, that human nature itself fought up against this wilful resignation of intellect; and as soon did I find, that the scheme, taken with all its consequences and cleared of all inconsistencies, was not less impracticable than contranatural. Assume in its full extent the position, nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu, assume it without Leibnitz's qualifying praeter ipsum intellectum, and in the same sense, in which the position was understood by Hartley and Condillac: and then what Hume had demonstratively deduced from this concession concerning cause and effect, will apply with equal and crushing force to all the other eleven categorical forms [27], and the logical functions corresponding to them. How can we make bricks without straw;--or build without cement? We learn all things indeed by occasion of experience; but the very facts so learned force us inward on the antecedents, that must be presupposed in order to render experience itself possible. The first book of Locke's Essay, (if the supposed error, which it labours to subvert, be not a mere thing of straw, an absurdity which, no man ever did, or indeed ever could, believe,) is formed on a sophisma heterozaetaeseos, and involves the old mistake of Cum hoc: ergo, propter hoc. The term, Philosophy, defines itself as an affectionate seeking after the truth; but Truth is the correlative of Being. This again is no way conceivable, but by assuming as a postulate, that both are ab initio, identical and coinherent; that intelligence and being are reciprocally each other's substrate. I presumed that this was a possible conception, (i.e. that it involved no logical inconsonance,) from the length of time during which the scholastic definition of the Supreme Being, as actus purissimus sine ulla potentialitate, was received in the schools of Theology, both by the Pontifician and the Reformed divines. The early study of Plato and Plotinus, with the commentaries and the THEOLOGIA PLATONICA of the illustrious Florentine; of Proclus, and Gemistius Pletho; and at a later period of the De Immenso et Innumerabili and the "De la causa, principio et uno," of the philosopher of Nola, who could boast of a Sir Philip Sidney and Fulke Greville among his patrons, and whom the idolaters of Rome burnt as an atheist in the year 1600; had all contributed to prepare my mind for the reception and welcoming of the Cogito quia Sum, et Sum quia Cogito; a philosophy of seeming hardihood, but certainly the most ancient, and therefore presumptively the most natural. Why need I be afraid? Say rather how dare I be ashamed of the Teutonic theosophist, Jacob Behmen? Many, indeed, and gross were his delusions; and such as furnish frequent and ample occasion for the triumph of the learned over the poor ignorant shoemaker, who had dared think for himself. But while we remember that these delusions were such, as might be anticipated from his utter want of all intellectual discipline, and from his ignorance of rational psychology, let it not be forgotten that the latter defect he had in common with the most learned theologians of his age. Neither with books, nor with book-learned men was he conversant. A meek and shy quietest, his intellectual powers were never stimulated into feverous energy by crowds of proselytes, or by the ambition of proselyting. Jacob Behmen was an enthusiast, in the strictest sense, as not merely distinguished, but as contra-distinguished, from a fanatic. While I in part translate the following observations from a contemporary writer of the Continent, let me be permitted to premise, that I might have transcribed the substance from memoranda of my own, which were written many years before his pamphlet was given to the world; and that I prefer another's words to my own, partly as a tribute due to priority of publication; but still more from the pleasure of sympathy in a case where coincidence only was possible. Whoever is acquainted with the history of philosophy, during the last two or three centuries, cannot but admit that there appears to have existed a sort of secret and tacit compact among the learned, not to pass beyond a certain limit in speculative science. The privilege of free thought, so highly extolled, has at no time been held valid in actual practice, except within this limit; and not a single stride beyond it has ever been ventured without bringing obloquy on the transgressor. The few men of genius among the learned class, who actually did overstep this boundary, anxiously avoided the appearance of having so done. Therefore the true depth of science, and the penetration to the inmost centre, from which all the lines of knowledge diverge to their ever distant circumference, was abandoned to the illiterate and the simple, whom unstilled yearning, and an original ebulliency of spirit, had urged to the investigation of the indwelling and living ground of all things. These, then, because their names had never been enrolled in the guilds of the learned, were persecuted by the registered livery-men as interlopers on their rights and privileges. All without distinction were branded as fanatics and phantasts; not only those, whose wild and exorbitant imaginations had actually engendered only extravagant and grotesque phantasms, and whose productions were, for the most part, poor copies and gross caricatures of genuine inspiration; but the truly inspired likewise, the originals themselves. And this for no other reason, but because they were the unlearned, men of humble and obscure occupations. When, and from whom among the literati by profession, have we ever heard the divine doxology repeated, I thank thee, O Father! Lord of Heaven and Earth! because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes [28]. No; the haughty priests of learning not only banished from the schools and marts of science all who had dared draw living waters from the fountain, but drove them out of the very Temple, which mean time the buyers, and sellers, and money-changers were suffered to make a den of thieves. And yet it would not be easy to discover any substantial ground for this contemptuous pride in those literati, who have most distinguished themselves by their scorn of Behmen, Thaulerus, George Fox, and others; unless it be, that they could write orthographically, make smooth periods, and had the fashions of authorship almost literally at their fingers' ends, while the latter, in simplicity of soul, made their words immediate echoes of their feelings. Hence the frequency of those phrases among them, which have been mistaken for pretences to immediate inspiration; as for instance, "It was delivered unto me; "--"I strove not to speak;"-"I said, I will be silent;"--"But the word was in my heart as a burning fire;"--"and I could not forbear." Hence too the unwillingness to give offence; hence the foresight, and the dread of the clamours, which would be raised against them, so frequently avowed in the writings of these men, and expressed, as was natural, in the words of the only book, with which they were familiar [29]. "Woe is me that I am become a man of strife, and a man of contention,--I love peace: the souls of men are dear unto me: yet because I seek for light every one of them doth curse me!" O! it requires deeper feeling, and a stronger imagination, than belong to most of those, to whom reasoning and fluent expression have been as a trade learnt in boyhood, to conceive with what might, with what inward strivings and commotion, the perception of a new and vital truth takes possession of an uneducated man of genius. His meditations are almost inevitably employed on the eternal, or the everlasting; for "the world is not his friend, nor the world's law." Need we then be surprised, that, under an excitement at once so strong and so unusual, the man's body should sympathize with the struggles of his mind; or that he should at times be so far deluded, as to mistake the tumultuous sensations of his nerves, and the co-existing spectres of his fancy, as parts or symbols of the truths which were opening on him? It has indeed been plausibly observed, that in order to derive any advantage, or to collect any intelligible meaning, from the writings of these ignorant Mystics, the reader must bring with him a spirit and judgment superior to that of the writers themselves: And what he brings, what needs he elsewhere seek? --a sophism, which I fully agree with Warburton, is unworthy of Milton; how much more so of the awful Person, in whose mouth he has placed it? One assertion I will venture to make, as suggested by my own experience, that there exist folios on the human understanding, and the nature of man, which would have a far juster claim to their high rank and celebrity, if in the whole huge volume there could be found as much fulness of heart and intellect, as burst forth in many a simple page of George Fox, Jacob Behmen, and even of Behmen's commentator, the pious and fervid William Law. The feeling of gratitude, which I cherish toward these men, has caused me to digress further than I had foreseen or proposed; but to have passed them over in an historical sketch of my literary life and opinions, would have seemed to me like the denial of a debt, the concealment of a boon. For the writings of these Mystics acted in no slight degree to prevent my mind from being imprisoned within the outline of any single dogmatic system. They contributed to keep alive the heart in the head; gave me an indistinct, yet stirring and working presentiment, that all the products of the mere reflective faculty partook of death, and were as the rattling twigs and sprays in winter, into which a sap was yet to be propelled from some root to which I had not penetrated, if they were to afford my soul either food or shelter. If they were too often a moving cloud of smoke to me by day, yet they were always a pillar of fire throughout the night, during my wanderings through the wilderness of doubt, and enabled me to skirt, without crossing, the sandy deserts of utter unbelief. That the system is capable of being converted into an irreligious Pantheism, I well know. The Ethics of Spinoza, may, or may not, be an instance. But at no time could I believe, that in itself and essentially it is incompatible with religion, natural or revealed: and now I am most thoroughly persuaded of the contrary. The writings of the illustrious sage of Koenigsberg, the founder of the Critical Philosophy, more than any other work, at once invigorated and disciplined my understanding. The originality, the depth, and the compression of the thoughts; the novelty and subtlety, yet solidity and importance of the distinctions; the adamantine chain of the logic; and I will venture to add--(paradox as it will appear to those who have taken their notion of Immanuel Kant from Reviewers and Frenchmen)--the clearness and evidence, of the Critique of the Pure Reason; and Critique of the Judgment; of the Metaphysical Elements of Natural Philosophy; and of his Religion within the bounds of Pure Reason, took possession of me as with the giant's hand. After fifteen years' familiarity with them, I still read these and all his other productions with undiminished delight and increasing admiration. The few passages that remained obscure to me, after due efforts of thought, (as the chapter on original apperception,) and the apparent contradictions which occur, I soon found were hints and insinuations referring to ideas, which KANT either did not think it prudent to avow, or which he considered as consistently left behind in a pure analysis, not of human nature in toto, but of the speculative intellect alone. Here therefore he was constrained to commence at the point of reflection, or natural consciousness: while in his moral system he was permitted to assume a higher ground (the autonomy of the will) as a postulate deducible from the unconditional command, or (in the technical language of his school) the categorical imperative, of the conscience. He had been in imminent danger of persecution during the reign of the late king of Prussia, that strange compound of lawless debauchery and priest-ridden superstition: and it is probable that he had little inclination, in his old age, to act over again the fortunes, and hair-breadth escapes of Wolf. The expulsion of the first among Kant's disciples, who attempted to complete his system, from the University of Jena, with the confiscation and prohibition of the obnoxious work by the joint efforts of the courts of Saxony and Hanover, supplied experimental proof, that the venerable old man's caution was not groundless. In spite therefore of his own declarations, I could never believe, that it was possible for him to have meant no more by his Noumenon, or Thing in itself, than his mere words express; or that in his own conception he confined the whole plastic power to the forms of the intellect, leaving for the external cause, for the materiale of our sensations, a matter without form, which is doubtless inconceivable. I entertained doubts likewise, whether, in his own mind, he even laid all the stress, which he appears to do, on the moral postulates. An idea, in the highest sense of that word, cannot be conveyed but by a symbol; and, except in geometry, all symbols of necessity involve an apparent contradiction. Phonaese synetoisin: and for those who could not pierce through this symbolic husk, his writings were not intended. Questions which cannot be fully answered without exposing the respondent to personal danger, are not entitled to a fair answer; and yet to say this openly, would in many cases furnish the very advantage which the adversary is insidiously seeking after. Veracity does not consist in saying, but in the intention of communicating, truth; and the philosopher who cannot utter the whole truth without conveying falsehood, and at the same time, perhaps, exciting the most malignant passions, is constrained to express himself either mythically or equivocally. When Kant therefore was importuned to settle the disputes of his commentators himself, by declaring what he meant, how could he decline the honours of martyrdom with less offence, than by simply replying, "I meant what I said, and at the age of near fourscore, I have something else, and more important to do, than to write a commentary on my own works." Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre, or Lore of Ultimate Science, was to add the key-stone of the arch: and by commencing with an act, instead of a thing or substance, Fichte assuredly gave the first mortal blow to Spinozism, as taught by Spinoza himself; and supplied the idea of a system truly metaphysical, and of a metaphysique truly systematic: (i.e. having its spring and principle within itself). But this fundamental idea he overbuilt with a heavy mass of mere notions, and psychological acts of arbitrary reflection. Thus his theory degenerated into a crude [30] egoismus, a boastful and hyperstoic hostility to Nature, as lifeless, godless, and altogether unholy: while his religion consisted in the assumption of a mere Ordo ordinans, which we were permitted exoterice to call GOD; and his ethics in an ascetic, and almost monkish, mortification of the natural passions and desires. In Schelling's Natur-Philosophie, and the System des transcendentalen Idealismus, I first found a genial coincidence with much that I had toiled out for myself, and a powerful assistance in what I had yet to do. I have introduced this statement, as appropriate to the narrative nature of this sketch; yet rather in reference to the work which I have announced in a preceding page, than to my present subject. It would be but a mere act of justice to myself, were I to warn my future readers, than an identity of thought, or even similarity of phrase, will not be at all times a certain proof that the passage has been borrowed from Schelling, or that the conceptions were originally learnt from him. In this instance, as in the dramatic lectures of Schlegel to which I have before alluded, from the same motive of self-defence against the charge of plagiarism, many of the most striking resemblances, indeed all the main and fundamental ideas, were born and matured in my mind before I had ever seen a single page of the German Philosopher; and I might indeed affirm with truth, before the more important works of Schelling had been written, or at least made public. Nor is this coincidence at all to be wondered at. We had studied in the same school; been disciplined by the same preparatory philosophy, namely, the writings of Kant; we had both equal obligations to the polar logic and dynamic philosophy of Giordano Bruno; and Schelling has lately, and, as of recent acquisition, avowed that same affectionate reverence for the labours of Behmen, and other mystics, which I had formed at a much earlier period. The coincidence of Schelling's system with certain general ideas of Behmen, he declares to have been mere coincidence; while my obligations have been more direct. He needs give to Behmen only feelings of sympathy; while I owe him a debt of gratitude. God forbid! that I should be suspected of a wish to enter into a rivalry with Schelling for the honours so unequivocally his right, not only as a great and original genius, but as the founder of the Philosophy of Nature, and as the most successful improver of the Dynamic System [31] which, begun by Bruno, was re-introduced (in a more philosophical form, and freed from all its impurities and visionary accompaniments) by Kant; in whom it was the native and necessary growth of his own system. Kant's followers, however, on whom (for the greater part) their master's cloak had fallen without, or with a very scanty portion of, his spirit, had adopted his dynamic ideas, only as a more refined species of mechanics. With exception of one or two fundamental ideas, which cannot be withheld from Fichte, to Schelling we owe the completion, and the most important victories, of this revolution in philosophy. To me it will be happiness and honour enough, should I succeed in rendering the system itself intelligible to my countrymen, and in the application of it to the most awful of subjects for the most important of purposes. Whether a work is the offspring of a man's own spirit, and the product of original thinking, will be discovered by those who are its sole legitimate judges, by better tests than the mere reference to dates. For readers in general, let whatever shall be found in this or any future work of mine, that resembles, or coincides with, the doctrines of my German predecessor, though contemporary, be wholly attributed to him: provided, that the absence of distinct references to his books, which I could not at all times make with truth as designating citations or thoughts actually derived from him; and which, I trust, would, after this general acknowledgment be superfluous; be not charged on me as an ungenerous concealment or intentional plagiarism. I have not indeed (eheu! res angusta domi!) been hitherto able to procure more than two of his books, viz. the first volume of his collected Tracts, and his System of Transcendental Idealism; to which, however, I must add a small pamphlet against Fichte, the spirit of which was to my feelings painfully incongruous with the principles, and which (with the usual allowance afforded to an antithesis) displayed the love of wisdom rather than the wisdom of love. I regard truth as a divine ventriloquist: I care not from whose mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed, if only the words are audible and intelligible. "Albeit, I must confess to be half in doubt, whether I should bring it forth or no, it being so contrary to the eye of the world, and the world so potent in most men's hearts, that I shall endanger either not to be regarded or not to be understood." And to conclude the subject of citation, with a cluster of citations, which as taken from books, not in common use, may contribute to the reader's amusement, as a voluntary before a sermon: "Dolet mihi quidem deliciis literarum inescatos subito jam homines adeo esse, praesertim qui Christianos se profitentur, et legere nisi quod ad delectationem facit, sustineant nihil: unde et discipline severiores et philosophia ipsa jam fere prorsus etiam a doctis negliguntur. Quod quidem propositum studiorum, nisi mature corrigitur, tam magnum rebus incommodum dabit, quam dedit barbaries olim. Pertinax res barbaries est, fateor: sed minus potent tamen, quam illa mollities et persuasa prudentia literarum, si ratione caret, sapientiae virtutisque specie mortales misere circumducens. Succedet igitur, ut arbitror, haud ita multo post, pro rusticana seculi nostri ruditate captatrix illa communi-loquentia robur animi virilis omne, omnem virtutem masculam, profligatura nisi cavetur." A too prophetic remark, which has been in fulfilment from the year 1680, to the present 1815. By persuasa prudentia, Grynaeus means self- complacent common sense as opposed to science and philosophic reason. Est medius ordo, et velut equestris, ingeniorum quidem sagacium, et commodorum rebus humanis, non tamen in primam magnitudinem patentium. Eorum hominum, ut sic dicam, major annona est. Sedulum esse, nihil temere loqui, assuescere labori, et imagine prudentiae et modistiae tegere angustiores partes captus, dum exercitationem ac usum, quo isti in civilibus rebus pollent, pro natura et magnitudine ingenii plerique accipiunt. "As therefore physicians are many times forced to leave such methods of curing as themselves know to be the fittest, and being overruled by the patient's impatiency, are fain to try the best they can: in like sort, considering how the case doth stand with this present age, full of tongue and weak of brain, behold we would (if our subject permitted it) yield to the stream thereof. That way we would be contented to prove our thesis, which being the worse in itself, is notwithstanding now by reason of common imbecility the fitter and likelier to be brooked." If this fear could be rationally entertained in the controversial age of Hooker, under the then robust discipline of the scholastic logic, pardonably may a writer of the present times anticipate a scanty audience for abstrusest themes, and truths that can neither be communicated nor received without effort of thought, as well as patience of attention. "Che s'io non erro al calcolar de' punti, Par ch' Asinina Stella a noi predomini, E'l Somaro e'l Castron si sian congiunti. Il tempo d'Apuleio piu non si nomini: Che se allora un sol huom sembrava un Asino, Mille Asini a' miei di rassembran huomini!" CHAPTER X A chapter of digression and anecdotes, as an interlude preceding that on the nature and genesis of the Imagination or Plastic Power--On pedantry and pedantic expressions--Advice to young authors respecting publication--Various anecdotes of the Author's literary life, and the progress of his opinions in Religion and Politics. "Esemplastic. The word is not in Johnson, nor have I met with it elsewhere." Neither have, I. I constructed it myself from the Greek words, eis en plattein, to shape into one; because, having to convey a new sense, I thought that a new term would both aid the recollection of my meaning, and prevent its being confounded with the usual import of the word, imagination. "But this is pedantry!" Not necessarily so, I hope. If I am not misinformed, pedantry consists in the use of words unsuitable to the time, place, and company. The language of the market would be in the schools as pedantic, though it might not be reprobated by that name, as the language of the schools in the market. The mere man of the world, who insists that no other terms but such as occur in common conversation should be employed in a scientific disquisition, and with no greater precision, is as truly a pedant as the man of letters, who either over-rating the acquirements of his auditors, or misled by his own familiarity with technical or scholastic terms, converses at the wine-table with his mind fixed on his museum or laboratory; even though the latter pedant instead of desiring his wife to make the tea should bid her add to the quant. suff. of thea Sinensis the oxyd of hydrogen saturated with caloric. To use the colloquial (and in truth somewhat vulgar) metaphor, if the pedant of the cloister, and the pedant of the lobby, both smell equally of the shop, yet the odour from the Russian binding of good old authentic-looking folios and quartos is less annoying than the steams from the tavern or bagnio. Nay, though the pedantry of the scholar should betray a little ostentation, yet a well-conditioned mind would more easily, methinks, tolerate the fox brush of learned vanity, than the sans culotterie of a contemptuous ignorance, that assumes a merit from mutilation in the self-consoling sneer at the pompous incumbrance of tails. The first lesson of philosophic discipline is to wean the student's attention from the degrees of things, which alone form the vocabulary of common life, and to direct it to the kind abstracted from degree. Thus the chemical student is taught not to be startled at disquisitions on the heat in ice, or on latent and fixible light. In such discourse the instructor has no other alternative than either to use old words with new meanings (the plan adopted by Darwin in his Zoonomia;) or to introduce new terms, after the example of Linnaeus, and the framers of the present chemical nomenclature. The latter mode is evidently preferable, were it only that the former demands a twofold exertion of thought in one and the same act. For the reader, or hearer, is required not only to learn and bear in mind the new definition; but to unlearn, and keep out of his view, the old and habitual meaning; a far more difficult and perplexing task, and for which the mere semblance of eschewing pedantry seems to me an inadequate compensation. Where, indeed, it is in our power to recall an unappropriate term that had without sufficient reason become obsolete, it is doubtless a less evil to restore than to coin anew. Thus to express in one word all that appertains to the perception, considered as passive and merely recipient, I have adopted from our elder classics the word sensuous; because sensual is not at present used, except in a bad sense, or at least as a moral distinction; while sensitive and sensible would each convey a different meaning. Thus too have I followed Hooker, Sanderson, Milton and others, in designating the immediateness of any act or object of knowledge by the word intuition, used sometimes subjectively, sometimes objectively, even as we use the word, thought; now as the thought, or act of thinking, and now as a thought, or the object of our reflection; and we do this without confusion or obscurity. The very words, objective and subjective, of such constant recurrence in the schools of yore, I have ventured to re-introduce, because I could not so briefly or conveniently by any more familiar terms distinguish the percipere from the percipi. Lastly, I have cautiously discriminated the terms, the reason, and the understanding, encouraged and confirmed by the authority of our genuine divines and philosophers, before the Revolution. ------both life, and sense, Fancy and understanding; whence the soul Reason receives, and reason is her bring, Discursive or intuitive: discourse [32] Is oftest yours, the latter most is ours, Differing but in degree, in kind the same. I say, that I was confirmed by authority so venerable: for I had previous and higher motives in my own conviction of the importance, nay, of the necessity of the distinction, as both an indispensable condition and a vital part of all sound speculation in metaphysics, ethical or theological. To establish this distinction was one main object of The Friend; if even in a biography of my own literary life I can with propriety refer to a work, which was printed rather than published, or so published that it had been well for the unfortunate author, if it had remained in manuscript. I have even at this time bitter cause for remembering that, which a number of my subscribers have but a trifling motive for forgetting. This effusion might have been spared; but I would fain flatter myself, that the reader will be less austere than an oriental professor of the bastinado, who during an attempt to extort per argumentum baculinum a full confession from a culprit, interrupted his outcry of pain by reminding him, that it was "a mere digression!" "All this noise, Sir! is nothing to the point, and no sort of answer to my questions!" "Ah! but," (replied the sufferer,) "it is the most pertinent reply in nature to your blows." An imprudent man of common goodness of heart cannot but wish to turn even his imprudences to the benefit of others, as far as this is possible. If therefore any one of the readers of this semi-narrative should be preparing or intending a periodical work, I warn him, in the first place, against trusting in the number of names on his subscription list. For he cannot be certain that the names were put down by sufficient authority; or, should that be ascertained, it still remains to be known, whether they were not extorted by some over zealous friend's importunity; whether the subscriber had not yielded his name, merely from want of courage to answer, no; and with the intention of dropping the work as soon as possible. One gentleman procured me nearly a hundred names for THE FRIEND, and not only took frequent opportunity to remind me of his success in his canvass, but laboured to impress my mind with the sense of the obligation, I was under to the subscribers; for, (as he very pertinently admonished me,) "fifty-two shillings a year was a large sum to be bestowed on one individual, where there were so many objects of charity with strong claims to the assistance of the benevolent." Of these hundred patrons ninety threw up the publication before the fourth number, without any notice; though it was well known to them, that in consequence of the distance, and the slowness and irregularity of the conveyance, I was compelled to lay in a stock of stamped paper for at least eight weeks beforehand; each sheet of which stood me in five pence previously to its arrival at my printer's; though the subscription money was not to be received till the twenty-first week after the commencement of the work; and lastly, though it was in nine cases out of ten impracticable for me to receive the money for two or three numbers without paying an equal sum for the postage. In confirmation of my first caveat, I will select one fact among many. On my list of subscribers, among a considerable number of names equally flattering, was that of an Earl of Cork, with his address. He might as well have been an Earl of Bottle, for aught I knew of him, who had been content to reverence the peerage in abstracto, rather than in concretis. Of course THE FRIEND was regularly sent as far, if I remember right, as the eighteenth number; that is, till a fortnight before the subscription was to be paid. And lo! just at this time I received a letter from his Lordship, reproving me in language far more lordly than courteous for my impudence in directing my pamphlets to him, who knew nothing of me or my work! Seventeen or eighteen numbers of which, however, his Lordship was pleased to retain, probably for the culinary or post-culinary conveniences of his servants. Secondly, I warn all others from the attempt to deviate from the ordinary mode of publishing a work by the trade. I thought indeed, that to the purchaser it was indifferent, whether thirty per cent of the purchase-money went to the booksellers or to the government; and that the convenience of receiving the work by the post at his own door would give the preference to the latter. It is hard, I own, to have been labouring for years, in collecting and arranging the materials; to have spent every shilling that could be spared after the necessaries of life had been furnished, in buying books, or in journeys for the purpose of consulting them or of acquiring facts at the fountain head; then to buy the paper, pay for the printing, and the like, all at least fifteen per cent beyond what the trade would have paid; and then after all to give thirty per cent not of the net profits, but of the gross results of the sale, to a man who has merely to give the books shelf or warehouse room, and permit his apprentice to hand them over the counter to those who may ask for them; and this too copy by copy, although, if the work be on any philosophical or scientific subject, it may be years before the edition is sold off. All this, I confess, must seem a hardship, and one, to which the products of industry in no other mode of exertion are subject. Yet even this is better, far better, than to attempt in any way to unite the functions of author and publisher. But the most prudent mode is to sell the copy-right, at least of one or more editions, for the most that the trade will offer. By few only can a large remuneration be expected; but fifty pounds and ease of mind are of more real advantage to a literary man, than the chance of five hundred with the certainty of insult and degrading anxieties. I shall have been grievously misunderstood, if this statement should be interpreted as written with the desire of detracting from the character of booksellers or publishers. The individuals did not make the laws and customs of their trade, but, as in every other trade, take them as they find them. Till the evil can be proved to be removable, and without the substitution of an equal or greater inconvenience, it were neither wise nor manly even to complain of it. But to use it as a pretext for speaking, or even for thinking, or feeling, unkindly or opprobriously of the tradesmen, as individuals, would be something worse than unwise or even than unmanly; it would be immoral and calumnious. My motives point in a far different direction and to far other objects, as will be seen in the conclusion of the chapter. A learned and exemplary old clergyman, who many years ago went to his reward followed by the regrets and blessings of his flock, published at his own expense two volumes octavo, entitled, A NEW THEORY OF REDEMPTION. The work was most severely handled in THE MONTHLY or CRITICAL REVIEW, I forget which; and this unprovoked hostility became the good old man's favourite topic of conversation among his friends. "Well!" (he used to exclaim,) "in the second edition, I shall have an opportunity of exposing both the ignorance and the malignity of the anonymous critic." Two or three years however passed by without any tidings from the bookseller, who had undertaken the printing and publication of the work, and who was perfectly at his ease, as the author was known to be a man of large property. At length the accounts were written for; and in the course of a few weeks they were presented by the rider for the house, in person. My old friend put on his spectacles, and holding the scroll with no very firm hand, began--"Paper, so much: O moderate enough--not at all beyond my expectation! Printing, so much: well! moderate enough! Stitching, covers, advertisements, carriage, and so forth, so much."--Still nothing amiss. Selleridge (for orthography is no necessary part of a bookseller's literary acquirements) L3. 3s. "Bless me! only three guineas for the what d'ye call it--the selleridge?" "No more, Sir!" replied the rider. "Nay, but that is too moderate!" rejoined my old friend. "Only three guineas for selling a thousand copies of a work in two volumes?" "O Sir!" (cries the young traveller) "you have mistaken the word. There have been none of them sold; they have been sent back from London long ago; and this L3. 3s. is for the cellaridge, or warehouse-room in our book cellar." The work was in consequence preferred from the ominous cellar of the publisher's to the author's garret; and, on presenting a copy to an acquaintance, the old gentleman used to tell the anecdote with great humour and still greater good nature. With equal lack of worldly knowledge, I was a far more than equal sufferer for it, at the very outset of my authorship. Toward the close of the first year from the time, that in an inauspicious hour I left the friendly cloisters, and the happy grove of quiet, ever honoured Jesus College, Cambridge, I was persuaded by sundry philanthropists and Anti-polemists to set on foot a periodical work, entitled THE WATCHMAN, that, according to the general motto of the work, all might know the truth, and that the truth might make us free! In order to exempt it from the stamp-tax, and likewise to contribute as little as possible to the supposed guilt of a war against freedom, it was to be published on every eighth day, thirty-two pages, large octavo, closely printed, and price only four-pence. Accordingly with a flaming prospectus,--"Knowledge is Power," "To cry the state of the political atmosphere,"--and so forth, I set off on a tour to the North, from Bristol to Sheffield, for the purpose of procuring customers, preaching by the way in most of the great towns, as an hireless volunteer, in a blue coat and white waistcoat, that not a rag of the woman of Babylon might be seen on me. For I was at that time and long after, though a Trinitarian (that is ad normam Platonis) in philosophy, yet a zealous Unitarian in religion; more accurately, I was a Psilanthropist, one of those who believe our Lord to have been the real son of Joseph, and who lay the main stress on the resurrection rather than on the crucifixion. O! never can I remember those days with either shame or regret. For I was most sincere, most disinterested. My opinions were indeed in many and most important points erroneous; but my heart was single. Wealth, rank, life itself then seemed cheap to me, compared with the interests of what I believed to be the truth, and the will of my Maker. I cannot even accuse myself of having been actuated by vanity; for in the expansion of my enthusiasm I did not think of myself at all. My campaign commenced at Birmingham; and my first attack was on a rigid Calvinist, a tallow-chandler by trade. He was a tall dingy man, in whom length was so predominant over breadth, that he might almost have been borrowed for a foundery poker. O that face! a face kat' emphasin! I have it before me at this moment. The lank, black, twine-like hair, pingui-nitescent, cut in a straight line along the black stubble of his thin gunpowder eye-brows, that looked like a scorched after-math from a last week's shaving. His coat collar behind in perfect unison, both of colour and lustre, with the coarse yet glib cordage, which I suppose he called his hair, and which with a bend inward at the nape of the neck,--the only approach to flexure in his whole figure,--slunk in behind his waistcoat; while the countenance lank, dark, very hard, and with strong perpendicular furrows, gave me a dim notion of some one looking at me through a used gridiron, all soot, grease, and iron! But he was one of the thorough-bred, a true lover of liberty, and, as I was informed, had proved to the satisfaction of many, that Mr. Pitt was one of the horns of the second beast in THE REVELATIONS, that spake as a dragon. A person, to whom one of my letters of recommendation had been addressed, was my introducer. It was a new event in my life, my first stroke in the new business I had undertaken of an author, yea, and of an author trading on his own account. My companion after some imperfect sentences and a multitude of hums and has abandoned the cause to his client; and I commenced an harangue of half an hour to Phileleutheros, the tallow-chandler, varying my notes, through the whole gamut of eloquence, from the ratiocinative to the declamatory, and in the latter from the pathetic to the indignant. I argued, I described, I promised, I prophesied; and beginning with the captivity of nations I ended with the near approach of the millennium, finishing the whole with some of my own verses describing that glorious state out of the Religious Musings: ------Such delights As float to earth, permitted visitants! When in some hour of solemn jubilee The massive gates of Paradise are thrown Wide open, and forth come in fragments wild Sweet echoes of unearthly melodies, And odours snatched from beds of amaranth, And they, that from the crystal river of life Spring up on freshened wing, ambrosial gales! My taper man of lights listened with perseverant and praiseworthy patience, though, as I was afterwards told, on complaining of certain gales that were not altogether ambrosial, it was a melting day with him. "And what, Sir," he said, after a short pause, "might the cost be?" "Only four-pence,"--(O! how I felt the anti-climax, the abysmal bathos of that four-pence!)--"only four-pence, Sir, each number, to be published on every eighth day."--"That comes to a deal of money at the end of a year. And how much, did you say, there was to be for the money?"--"Thirty-two pages, Sir, large octavo, closely printed."--"Thirty and two pages? Bless me! why except what I does in a family way on the Sabbath, that's more than I ever reads, Sir! all the year round. I am as great a one, as any man in Brummagem, Sir! for liberty and truth and all them sort of things, but as to this,--no offence, I hope, Sir,--I must beg to be excused." So ended my first canvass: from causes that I shall presently mention, I made but one other application in person. This took place at Manchester to a stately and opulent wholesale dealer in cottons. He took my letter of introduction, and, having perused it, measured me from head to foot and again from foot to head, and then asked if I had any bill or invoice of the thing. I presented my prospectus to him. He rapidly skimmed and hummed over the first side, and still more rapidly the second and concluding page; crushed it within his fingers and the palm of his hand; then most deliberately and significantly rubbed and smoothed one part against the other; and lastly putting it into his pocket turned his back on me with an "over-run with these articles!" and so without another syllable retired into his counting house. And, I can truly say, to my unspeakable amusement. This, I have said, was my second and last attempt. On returning baffled from the first, in which I had vainly essayed to repeat the miracle of Orpheus with the Brummagem patriot, I dined with the tradesman who had introduced me to him. After dinner he importuned me to smoke a pipe with him, and two or three other illuminati of the same rank. I objected, both because I was engaged to spend the evening with a minister and his friends, and because I had never smoked except once or twice in my lifetime, and then it was herb tobacco mixed with Oronooko. On the assurance, however, that the tobacco was equally mild, and seeing too that it was of a yellow colour; not forgetting the lamentable difficulty, I have always experienced, in saying, "No," and in abstaining from what the people about me were doing,--I took half a pipe, filling the lower half of the bowl with salt. I was soon however compelled to resign it, in consequence of a giddiness and distressful feeling in my eyes, which, as I had drunk but a single glass of ale, must, I knew, have been the effect of the tobacco. Soon after, deeming myself recovered, I sallied forth to my engagement; but the walk and the fresh air brought on all the symptoms again, and, I had scarcely entered the minister's drawing-room, and opened a small pacquet of letters, which he had received from Bristol for me; ere I sank back on the sofa in a sort of swoon rather than sleep. Fortunately I had found just time enough to inform him of the confused state of my feelings, and of the occasion. For here and thus I lay, my face like a wall that is white-washing, deathly pale and with the cold drops of perspiration running down it from my forehead, while one after another there dropped in the different gentlemen, who had been invited to meet, and spend the evening with me, to the number of from fifteen to twenty. As the poison of tobacco acts but for a short time, I at length awoke from insensibility, and looked round on the party, my eyes dazzled by the candles which had been lighted in the interim. By way of relieving my embarrassment one of the gentlemen began the conversation, with "Have you seen a paper to-day, Mr. Coleridge?" "Sir!" I replied, rubbing my eyes, "I am far from convinced, that a Christian is permitted to read either newspapers or any other works of merely political and temporary interest." This remark, so ludicrously inapposite to, or rather, incongruous with, the purpose, for which I was known to have visited Birmingham, and to assist me in which they were all then met, produced an involuntary and general burst of laughter; and seldom indeed have I passed so many delightful hours, as I enjoyed in that room from the moment of that laugh till an early hour the next morning. Never, perhaps, in so mixed and numerous a party have I since heard conversation, sustained with such animation, enriched with such variety of information and enlivened with such a flow of anecdote. Both then and afterwards they all joined in dissuading me from proceeding with my scheme; assured me in the most friendly and yet most flattering expressions, that neither was the employment fit for me, nor I fit for the employment. Yet, if I determined on persevering in it, they promised to exert themselves to the utmost to procure subscribers, and insisted that I should make no more applications in person, but carry on the canvass by proxy. The same hospitable reception, the same dissuasion, and, that failing, the same kind exertions in my behalf, I met with at Manchester, Derby, Nottingham, Sheffield,--indeed, at every place in which I took up my sojourn. I often recall with affectionate pleasure the many respectable men who interested themselves for me, a perfect stranger to them, not a few of whom I can still name among my friends. They will bear witness for me how opposite even then my principles were to those of Jacobinism or even of democracy, and can attest the strict accuracy of the statement which I have left on record in the tenth and eleventh numbers of THE FRIEND. From this rememberable tour I returned with nearly a thousand names on the subscription list of THE WATCHMAN; yet more than half convinced, that prudence dictated the abandonment of the scheme. But for this very reason I persevered in it; for I was at that period of my life so completely hag-ridden by the fear of being influenced by selfish motives, that to know a mode of conduct to be the dictate of prudence was a sort of presumptive proof to my feelings, that the contrary was the dictate of duty. Accordingly, I commenced the work, which was announced in London by long bills in letters larger than had ever been seen before, and which, I have been informed, for I did not see them myself, eclipsed the glories even of the lottery puffs. But alas! the publication of the very first number was delayed beyond the day announced for its appearance. In the second number an essay against fast days, with a most censurable application of a text from Isaiah for its motto, lost me near five hundred of my subscribers at one blow. In the two following numbers I made enemies of all my Jacobin and democratic patrons; for, disgusted by their infidelity, and their adoption of French morals with French psilosophy; and perhaps thinking, that charity ought to begin nearest home; Instead of abusing the government and the Aristocrats chiefly or entirely, as had been expected of me, I levelled my attacks at "modern patriotism," and even ventured to declare my belief, that whatever the motives of ministers might have been for the sedition, or as it was then the fashion to call them, the gagging bills, yet the bills themselves would produce an effect to be desired by all the true friends of freedom, as far as they should contribute to deter men from openly declaiming on subjects, the principles of which they had never bottomed and from "pleading to the poor and ignorant, instead of pleading for them." At the same time I avowed my conviction, that national education and a concurring spread of the Gospel were the indispensable condition of any true political melioration. Thus by the time the seventh number was published, I had the mortification--(but why should I say this, when in truth I cared too little for any thing that concerned my worldly interests to be at all mortified about it?)--of seeing the preceding numbers exposed in sundry old iron shops for a penny a piece. At the ninth number I dropt the work. But from the London publisher I could not obtain a shilling; he was a ------ and set me at defiance. From other places I procured but little, and after such delays as rendered that little worth nothing; and I should have been inevitably thrown into jail by my Bristol printer, who refused to wait even for a month, for a sum between eighty and ninety pounds, if the money had not been paid for me by a man by no means affluent, a dear friend, who attached himself to me from my first arrival at Bristol, who has continued my friend with a fidelity unconquered by time or even by my own apparent neglect; a friend from whom I never received an advice that was not wise, nor a remonstrance that was not gentle and affectionate. Conscientiously an opponent of the first revolutionary war, yet with my eyes thoroughly opened to the true character and impotence of the favourers of revolutionary principles in England, principles which I held in abhorrence,--(for it was part of my political creed, that whoever ceased to act as an individual by making himself a member of any society not sanctioned by his Government, forfeited the rights of a citizen)--a vehement Anti-Ministerialist, but after the invasion of Switzerland, a more vehement Anti-Gallican, and still more intensely an Anti-Jacobin, I retired to a cottage at Stowey, and provided for my scanty maintenance by writing verses for a London Morning Paper. I saw plainly, that literature was not a profession, by which I could expect to live; for I could not disguise from myself, that, whatever my talents might or might not be in other respects, yet they were not of the sort that could enable me to become a popular writer; and that whatever my opinions might be in themselves, they were almost equi-distant from all the three prominent parties, the Pittites, the Foxites, and the Democrats. Of the unsaleable nature of my writings I had an amusing memento one morning from our own servant girl. For happening to rise at an earlier hour than usual, I observed her putting an extravagant quantity of paper into the grate in order to light the fire, and mildly checked her for her wastefulness; "La, Sir!" (replied poor Nanny) "why, it is only Watchmen." I now devoted myself to poetry and to the study of ethics and psychology; and so profound was my admiration at this time of Hartley's ESSAY ON MAN, that I gave his name to my first-born. In addition to the gentleman, my neighbour, whose garden joined on to my little orchard, and the cultivation of whose friendship had been my sole motive in choosing Stowey for my residence, I was so fortunate as to acquire, shortly after my settlement there, an invaluable blessing in the society and neighbourhood of one, to whom I could look up with equal reverence, whether I regarded him as a poet, a philosopher, or a man. His conversation extended to almost all subjects, except physics and politics; with the latter he never troubled himself. Yet neither my retirement nor my utter abstraction from all the disputes of the day could secure me in those jealous times from suspicion and obloquy, which did not stop at me, but extended to my excellent friend, whose perfect innocence was even adduced as a proof of his guilt. One of the many busy sycophants of that day,--(I here use the word sycophant in its original sense, as a wretch who flatters the prevailing party by informing against his neighbours, under pretence that they are exporters of prohibited figs or fancies,--for the moral application of the term it matters not which)--one of these sycophantic law-mongrels, discoursing on the politics of the neighbourhood, uttered the following deep remark: "As to Coleridge, there is not so much harm in him, for he is a whirl-brain that talks whatever comes uppermost; but that ------! he is the dark traitor. You never hear HIM say a syllable on the subject." Now that the hand of Providence has disciplined all Europe into sobriety, as men tame wild elephants, by alternate blows and caresses; now that Englishmen of all classes are restored to their old English notions and feelings; it will with difficulty be credited, how great an influence was at that time possessed and exerted by the spirit of secret defamation,--(the too constant attendant on party-zeal)--during the restless interim from 1793 to the commencement of the Addington administration, or the year before the truce of Amiens. For by the latter period the minds of the partizans, exhausted by excess of stimulation and humbled by mutual disappointment, had become languid. The same causes, that inclined the nation to peace, disposed the individuals to reconciliation. Both parties had found themselves in the wrong. The one had confessedly mistaken the moral character of the revolution, and the other had miscalculated both its moral and its physical resources. The experiment was made at the price of great, almost, we may say, of humiliating sacrifices; and wise men foresaw that it would fail, at least in its direct and ostensible object. Yet it was purchased cheaply, and realized an object of equal value, and, if possible, of still more vital importance. For it brought about a national unanimity unexampled in our history since the reign of Elizabeth; and Providence, never wanting to a good work when men have done their parts, soon provided a common focus in the cause of Spain, which made us all once more Englishmen by at once gratifying and correcting the predilections of both parties. The sincere reverers of the throne felt the cause of loyalty ennobled by its alliance with that of freedom; while the honest zealots of the people could not but admit, that freedom itself assumed a more winning form, humanized by loyalty and consecrated by religious principle. The youthful enthusiasts who, flattered by the morning rainbow of the French revolution, had made a boast of expatriating their hopes and fears, now, disciplined by the succeeding storms and sobered by increase of years, had been taught to prize and honour the spirit of nationality as the best safeguard of national independence, and this again as the absolute pre-requisite and necessary basis of popular rights. If in Spain too disappointment has nipped our too forward expectations, yet all is not destroyed that is checked. The crop was perhaps springing up too rank in the stalk to kern well; and there were, doubtless, symptoms of the Gallican blight on it. If superstition and despotism have been suffered to let in their wolvish sheep to trample and eat it down even to the surface, yet the roots remain alive, and the second growth may prove the stronger and healthier for the temporary interruption. At all events, to us heaven has been just and gracious. The people of England did their best, and have received their rewards. Long may we continue to deserve it! Causes, which it had been too generally the habit of former statesmen to regard as belonging to another world, are now admitted by all ranks to have been the main agents of our success. "We fought from heaven; the stars in their courses fought against Sisera." If then unanimity grounded on moral feelings has been among the least equivocal sources of our national glory, that man deserves the esteem of his countrymen, even as patriots, who devotes his life and the utmost efforts of his intellect to the preservation and continuance of that unanimity by the disclosure and establishment of principles. For by these all opinions must be ultimately tried; and, (as the feelings of men are worthy of regard only as far as they are the representatives of their fixed opinions,) on the knowledge of these all unanimity, not accidental and fleeting, must be grounded. Let the scholar, who doubts this assertion, refer only to the speeches and writings of Edmund Burke at the commencement of the American war and compare them with his speeches and writings at the commencement of the French revolution. He will find the principles exactly the same and the deductions the same; but the practical inferences almost opposite in the one case from those drawn in the other; yet in both equally legitimate and in both equally confirmed by the results. Whence gained he the superiority of foresight? Whence arose the striking difference, and in most instances even, the discrepancy between the grounds assigned by him and by those who voted with him, on the same questions? How are we to explain the notorious fact, that the speeches and writings of Edmund Burke are more interesting at the present day than they were found at the time of their first publication; while those of his illustrious confederates are either forgotten, or exist only to furnish proofs, that the same conclusion, which one man had deduced scientifically, may be brought out by another in consequence of errors that luckily chanced to neutralize each other. It would be unhandsome as a conjecture, even were it not, as it actually is, false in point of fact to attribute this difference to the deficiency of talent on the part of Burke's friends, or of experience, or of historical knowledge. The satisfactory solution is, that Edmund Burke possessed and had sedulously sharpened that eye, which sees all things, actions, and events, in relation to the laws that determine their existence and circumscribe their possibility. He referred habitually to principles. He was a scientific statesman; and therefore a seer. For every principle contains in itself the germs of a prophecy; and, as the prophetic power is the essential privilege of science, so the fulfilment of its oracles supplies the outward and, (to men in general,) the only test of its claim to the title. Wearisome as Burke's refinements appeared to his parliamentary auditors, yet the cultivated classes throughout Europe have reason to be thankful, that he ------went on refining, And thought of convincing, while they thought of dining. Our very sign-boards, (said an illustrious friend to me,) give evidence, that there has been a Titian in the world. In like manner, not only the debates in parliament, not only our proclamations and state papers, but the essays and leading paragraphs of our journals are so many remembrancers of Edmund Burke. Of this the reader may easily convince himself, if either by recollection or reference he will compare the opposition newspapers at the commencement and during the five or six following years of the French revolution with the sentiments, and grounds of argument assumed in the same class of journals at present, and for some years past. Whether the spirit of jacobinism, which the writings of Burke exorcised from the higher and from the literary classes, may not, like the ghost in Hamlet, be heard moving and mining in the underground chambers with an activity the more dangerous because less noisy, may admit of a question. I have given my opinions on this point, and the grounds of them, in my letters to judge Fletcher occasioned by his charge to the Wexford grand jury, and published in the Courier. Be this as it may, the evil spirit of jealousy, and with it the Cerberean whelps of feud and slander, no longer walk their rounds, in cultivated society. Far different were the days to which these anecdotes have carried me back. The dark guesses of some zealous Quidnunc met with so congenial a soil in the grave alarm of a titled Dogberry of our neighbourhood, that a spy was actually sent down from the government pour surveillance of myself and friend. There must have been not only abundance, but variety of these "honourable men" at the disposal of Ministers: for this proved a very honest fellow. After three weeks' truly Indian perseverance in tracking us, (for we were commonly together,) during all which time seldom were we out of doors, but he contrived to be within hearing,--(and all the while utterly unsuspected; how indeed could such a suspicion enter our fancies?)--he not only rejected Sir Dogberry's request that he would try yet a little longer, but declared to him his belief, that both my friend and myself were as good subjects, for aught he could discover to the contrary, as any in His Majesty's dominions. He had repeatedly hid himself, he said, for hours together behind a bank at the sea-side, (our favourite seat,) and overheard our conversation. At first he fancied, that we were aware of our danger; for he often heard me talk of one Spy Nozy, which he was inclined to interpret of himself, and of a remarkable feature belonging to him; but he was speedily convinced that it was the name of a man who had made a book and lived long ago. Our talk ran most upon books, and we were perpetually desiring each other to look at this, and to listen to that; but he could not catch a word about politics. Once he had joined me on the road; (this occurred, as I was returning home alone from my friend's house, which was about three miles from my own cottage,) and, passing himself off as a traveller, he had entered into conversation with me, and talked of purpose in a democrat way in order to draw me out. The result, it appears, not only convinced him that I was no friend of jacobinism; but, (he added,) I had "plainly made it out to be such a silly as well as wicked thing, that he felt ashamed though he had only put it on." I distinctly remembered the occurrence, and had mentioned it immediately on my return, repeating what the traveller with his Bardolph nose had said, with my own answer; and so little did I suspect the true object of my "tempter ere accuser," that I expressed with no small pleasure my hope and belief, that the conversation had been of some service to the poor misled malcontent. This incident therefore prevented all doubt as to the truth of the report, which through a friendly medium came to me from the master of the village inn, who had been ordered to entertain the Government gentleman in his best manner, but above all to be silent concerning such a person being in his house. At length he received Sir Dogberry's commands to accompany his guest at the final interview; and, after the absolving suffrage of the gentleman honoured with the confidence of Ministers, answered, as follows, to the following queries: D. "Well, landlord! and what do you know of the person in question? L. I see him often pass by with maister ----, my landlord, (that is, the owner of the house,) and sometimes with the new-comers at Holford; but I never said a word to him or he to me. D. But do you not know, that he has distributed papers and hand-bills of a seditious nature among the common people? L. No, your Honour! I never heard of such a thing. D. Have you not seen this Mr. Coleridge, or heard of, his haranguing and talking to knots and clusters of the inhabitants?--What are you grinning at, Sir? L. Beg your Honour's pardon! but I was only thinking, how they'd have stared at him. If what I have heard be true, your Honour! they would not have understood a word he said. When our Vicar was here, Dr. L. the master of the great school and Canon of Windsor, there was a great dinner party at maister's; and one of the farmers, that was there, told us that he and the Doctor talked real Hebrew Greek at each other for an hour together after dinner. D. Answer the question, Sir! does he ever harangue the people? L. I hope your Honour an't angry with me. I can say no more than I know. I never saw him talking with any one, but my landlord, and our curate, and the strange gentleman. D. Has he not been seen wandering on the hills towards the Channel, and along the shore, with books and papers in his hand, taking charts and maps of the country? L. Why, as to that, your Honour! I own, I have heard; I am sure, I would not wish to say ill of any body; but it is certain, that I have heard--D. Speak out, man! don't be afraid, you are doing your duty to your King and Government. What have you heard? L. Why, folks do say, your Honour! as how that he is a Poet, and that he is going to put Quantock and all about here in print; and as they be so much together, I suppose that the strange gentleman has some consarn in the business."--So ended this formidable inquisition, the latter part of which alone requires explanation, and at the same time entitles the anecdote to a place in my literary life. I had considered it as a defect in the admirable poem of THE TASK, that the subject, which gives the title to the work, was not, and indeed could not be, carried on beyond the three or four first pages, and that, throughout the poem, the connections are frequently awkward, and the transitions abrupt and arbitrary. I sought for a subject, that should give equal room and freedom for description, incident, and impassioned reflections on men, nature, and society, yet supply in itself a natural connection to the parts, and unity to the whole. Such a subject I conceived myself to have found in a stream, traced from its source in the hills among the yellow-red moss and conical glass-shaped tufts of bent, to the first break or fall, where its drops become audible, and it begins to form a channel; thence to the peat and turf barn, itself built of the same dark squares as it sheltered; to the sheepfold; to the first cultivated plot of ground; to the lonely cottage and its bleak garden won from the heath; to the hamlet, the villages, the market-town, the manufactories, and the seaport. My walks therefore were almost daily on the top of Quantock, and among its sloping coombes. With my pencil and memorandum-book in my hand, I was making studies, as the artists call them, and often moulding my thoughts into verse, with the objects and imagery immediately before my senses. Many circumstances, evil and good, intervened to prevent the completion of the poem, which was to have been entitled THE BROOK. Had I finished the work, it was my purpose in the heat of the moment to have dedicated it to our then committee of public safety as containing the charts and maps, with which I was to have supplied the French Government in aid of their plans of invasion. And these too for a tract of coast that, from Clevedon to Minehead, scarcely permits the approach of a fishing-boat! All my experience from my first entrance into life to the present hour is in favour of the warning maxim, that the man, who opposes in toto the political or religious zealots of his age, is safer from their obloquy than he who differs from them but in one or two points, or perhaps only in degree. By that transfer of the feelings of private life into the discussion of public questions, which is the queen bee in the hive of party fanaticism, the partisan has more sympathy with an intemperate opposite than with a moderate friend. We now enjoy an intermission, and long may it continue! In addition to far higher and more important merits, our present Bible societies and other numerous associations for national or charitable objects, may serve perhaps to carry off the superfluous activity and fervour of stirring minds in innocent hyperboles and the bustle of management. But the poison-tree is not dead, though the sap may for a season have subsided to its roots. At least let us not be lulled into such a notion of our entire security, as not to keep watch and ward, even on our best feelings. I have seen gross intolerance shown in support of toleration; sectarian antipathy most obtrusively displayed in the promotion of an undistinguishing comprehension of sects: and acts of cruelty, (I had almost said,) of treachery, committed in furtherance of an object vitally important to the cause of humanity; and all this by men too of naturally kind dispositions and exemplary conduct. The magic rod of fanaticism is preserved in the very adyta of human nature; and needs only the re-exciting warmth of a master hand to bud forth afresh and produce the old fruits. The horror of the Peasants' war in Germany, and the direful effects of the Anabaptists' tenets, (which differed only from those of jacobinism by the substitution of theological for philosophical jargon,) struck all Europe for a time with affright. Yet little more than a century was sufficient to obliterate all effective memory of these events. The same principles with similar though less dreadful consequences were again at work from the imprisonment of the first Charles to the restoration of his son. The fanatic maxim of extirpating fanaticism by persecution produced a civil war. The war ended in the victory of the insurgents; but the temper survived, and Milton had abundant grounds for asserting, that "Presbyter was but OLD PRIEST writ large!" One good result, thank heaven! of this zealotry was the re-establishment of the church. And now it might have been hoped, that the mischievous spirit would have been bound for a season, "and a seal set upon him, that he should deceive the nation no more." [33] But no! The ball of persecution was taken up with undiminished vigour by the persecuted. The same fanatic principle that, under the solemn oath and covenant, had turned cathedrals into stables, destroyed the rarest trophies of art and ancestral piety, and hunted the brightest ornaments of learning and religion into holes and corners, now marched under episcopal banners, and, having first crowded the prisons of England, emptied its whole vial of wrath on the miserable Covenanters of Scotland [34]. A merciful providence at length constrained both parties to join against a common enemy. A wise government followed; and the established church became, and now is, not only the brightest example, but our best and only sure bulwark, of toleration!--the true and indispensable bank against a new inundation of persecuting zeal--Esto perpetua! A long interval of quiet succeeded; or rather, the exhaustion had produced a cold fit of the ague which was symptomatized by indifference among the many, and a tendency to infidelity or scepticism in the educated classes. At length those feelings of disgust and hatred, which for a brief while the multitude had attached to the crimes and absurdities of sectarian and democratic fanaticism, were transferred to the oppressive privileges of the noblesse, and the luxury; intrigues and favouritism of the continental courts. The same principles, dressed in the ostentatious garb of a fashionable philosophy, once more rose triumphant and effected the French revolution. And have we not within the last three or four years had reason to apprehend, that the detestable maxims and correspondent measures of the late French despotism had already bedimmed the public recollections of democratic phrensy; had drawn off to other objects the electric force of the feelings which had massed and upheld those recollections; and that a favourable concurrence of occasions was alone wanting to awaken the thunder and precipitate the lightning from the opposite quarter of the political heaven? In part from constitutional indolence, which in the very hey-day of hope had kept my enthusiasm in check, but still more from the habits and influences of a classical education and academic pursuits, scarcely had a year elapsed from the commencement of my literary and political adventures before my mind sank into a state of thorough disgust and despondency, both with regard to the disputes and the parties disputant. With more than poetic feeling I exclaimed: The sensual and the dark rebel in vain, Slaves by their own compulsion! In mad game They break their manacles, to wear the name Of freedom, graven on a heavier chain. O Liberty! with profitless endeavour Have I pursued thee many a weary hour; But thou nor swell'st the victor's pomp, nor ever Didst breathe thy soul in forms of human power! Alike from all, howe'er they praise thee, (Nor prayer nor boastful name delays thee) From Superstition's harpy minions And factious Blasphemy's obscener slaves, Thou speedest on thy cherub pinions, The guide of homeless winds and playmate of the waves! I retired to a cottage in Somersetshire at the foot of Quantock, and devoted my thoughts and studies to the foundations of religion and morals. Here I found myself all afloat. Doubts rushed in; broke upon me "from the fountains of the great deep," and fell "from the windows of heaven." The fontal truths of natural religion and the books of Revelation alike contributed to the flood; and it was long ere my ark touched on an Ararat, and rested. The idea of the Supreme Being appeared to me to be as necessarily implied in all particular modes of being as the idea of infinite space in all the geometrical figures by which space is limited. I was pleased with the Cartesian opinion, that the idea of God is distinguished from all other ideas by involving its reality; but I was not wholly satisfied. I began then to ask myself, what proof I had of the outward existence of anything? Of this sheet of paper for instance, as a thing in itself, separate from the phaenomenon or image in my perception. I saw, that in the nature of things such proof is impossible; and that of all modes of being, that are not objects of the senses, the existence is assumed by a logical necessity arising from the constitution of the mind itself,--by the absence of all motive to doubt it, not from any absolute contradiction in the supposition of the contrary. Still the existence of a Being, the ground of all existence, was not yet the existence of a moral creator, and governour. "In the position, that all reality is either contained in the necessary being as an attribute, or exists through him, as its ground, it remains undecided whether the properties of intelligence and will are to be referred to the Supreme Being in the former or only in the latter sense; as inherent attributes, or only as consequences that have existence in other things through him [35]. Were the latter the truth, then notwithstanding all the pre-eminence which must be assigned to the Eternal First from the sufficiency, unity, and independence of his being, as the dread ground of the universe, his nature would yet fall far short of that, which we are bound to comprehend in the idea of GOD. For, without any knowledge or determining resolve of its own, it would only be a blind necessary ground of other things and other spirits; and thus would be distinguished from the FATE of certain ancient philosophers in no respect, but that of being more definitely and intelligibly described." For a very long time, indeed, I could not reconcile personality with infinity; and my head was with Spinoza, though my whole heart remained with Paul and John. Yet there had dawned upon me, even before I had met with the CRITIQUE OF THE PURE REASON, a certain guiding light. If the mere intellect could make no certain discovery of a holy and intelligent first cause, it might yet supply a demonstration, that no legitimate argument could be drawn from the intellect against its truth. And what is this more than St. Paul's assertion, that by wisdom,--(more properly translated by the powers of reasoning)--no man ever arrived at the knowledge of God? What more than the sublimest, and probably the oldest, book on earth has taught us, Silver and gold man searcheth out: Bringeth the ore out of the earth, and darkness into light. But where findeth he wisdom? Where is the place of understanding? The abyss crieth; it is not in me! Ocean echoeth back; not in me! Whence then cometh wisdom? Where dwelleth understanding? Hidden from the eyes of the living Kept secret from the fowls of heaven! Hell and death answer; We have heard the rumour thereof from afar! GOD marketh out the road to it; GOD knoweth its abiding place! He beholdeth the ends of the earth; He surveyeth what is beneath the heavens! And as he weighed out the winds, and measured the sea, And appointed laws to the rain, And a path to the thunder, A path to the flashes of the lightning! Then did he see it, And he counted it; He searched into the depth thereof, And with a line did he compass it round! But to man he said, The fear of the Lord is wisdom for thee! And to avoid evil, That is thy understanding. [36] I become convinced, that religion, as both the cornerstone and the key-stone of morality, must have a moral origin; so far at least, that the evidence of its doctrines could not, like the truths of abstract science, be wholly independent of the will. It were therefore to be expected, that its fundamental truth would be such as might be denied; though only, by the fool, and even by the fool from the madness of the heart alone! The question then concerning our faith in the existence of a God, not only as the ground of the universe by his essence, but as its maker and judge by his wisdom and holy will, appeared to stand thus. The sciential reason, the objects of which are purely theoretical, remains neutral, as long as its name and semblance are not usurped by the opponents of the doctrine. But it then becomes an effective ally by exposing the false show of demonstration, or by evincing the equal demonstrability of the contrary from premises equally logical [37]. The understanding meantime suggests, the analogy of experience facilitates, the belief. Nature excites and recalls it, as by a perpetual revelation. Our feelings almost necessitate it; and the law of conscience peremptorily commands it. The arguments, that at all apply to it, are in its favour; and there is nothing against it, but its own sublimity. It could not be intellectually more evident without becoming morally less effective; without counteracting its own end by sacrificing the life of faith to the cold mechanism of a worth less because compulsory assent. The belief of a God and a future state, (if a passive acquiescence may be flattered with the name of belief,) does not indeed always beget a good heart; but a good heart so naturally begets the belief, that the very few exceptions must be regarded as strange anomalies from strange and unfortunate circumstances. From these premises I proceeded to draw the following conclusions. First, that having once fully admitted the existence of an infinite yet self-conscious Creator, we are not allowed to ground the irrationality of any other article of faith on arguments which would equally prove that to be irrational, which we had allowed to be real. Secondly, that whatever is deducible from the admission of a self-comprehending and creative spirit may be legitimately used in proof of the possibility of any further mystery concerning the divine nature. Possibilitatem mysteriorum, (Trinitatis, etc.) contra insultus Infidelium et Haereticorum a contradictionibus vindico; haud quidem veritatem, quae revelatione sola stabiliri possit; says Leibnitz in a letter to his Duke. He then adds the following just and important remark. "In vain will tradition or texts of scripture be adduced in support of a doctrine, donec clava impossibilitatis et contradictionis e manibus horum Herculum extorta fuerit. For the heretic will still reply, that texts, the literal sense of which is not so much above as directly against all reason, must be understood figuratively, as Herod is a fox, and so forth." These principles I held, philosophically, while in respect of revealed religion I remained a zealous Unitarian. I considered the idea of the Trinity a fair scholastic inference from the being of God, as a creative intelligence; and that it was therefore entitled to the rank of an esoteric doctrine of natural religion. But seeing in the same no practical or moral bearing, I confined it to the schools of philosophy. The admission of the Logos, as hypostasized (that is, neither a mere attribute, nor a personification) in no respect removed my doubts concerning the Incarnation and the Redemption by the cross; which I could neither reconcile in reason with the impassiveness of the Divine Being, nor in my moral feelings with the sacred distinction between things and persons, the vicarious payment of a debt and the vicarious expiation of guilt. A more thorough revolution in my philosophic principles, and a deeper insight into my own heart, were yet wanting. Nevertheless, I cannot doubt, that the difference of my metaphysical notions from those of Unitarians in general contributed to my final re-conversion to the whole truth in Christ; even as according to his own confession the books of certain Platonic philosophers (libri quorundam Platonicorum) commenced the rescue of St. Augustine's faith from the same error aggravated by the far darker accompaniment of the Manichaean heresy. While my mind was thus perplexed, by a gracious providence for which I can never be sufficiently grateful, the generous and munificent patronage of Mr. Josiah, and Mr. Thomas Wedgwood enabled me to finish my education in Germany. Instead of troubling others with my own crude notions and juvenile compositions, I was thenceforward better employed in attempting to store my own head with the wisdom of others. I made the best use of my time and means; and there is therefore no period of my life on which I can look back with such unmingled satisfaction. After acquiring a tolerable sufficiency in the German language [38] at Ratzeburg, which with my voyage and journey thither I have described in The Friend, I proceeded through Hanover to Goettingen. Here I regularly attended the lectures on physiology in the morning, and on natural history in the evening, under Blumenbach, a name as dear to every Englishman who has studied at that university, as it is venerable to men of science throughout Europe! Eichhorn's lectures on the New Testament were repeated to me from notes by a student from Ratzeburg, a young man of sound learning and indefatigable industry, who is now, I believe, a professor of the oriental languages at Heidelberg. But my chief efforts were directed towards a grounded knowledge of the German language and literature. From professor Tychsen I received as many lessons in the Gothic of Ulphilas as sufficed to make me acquainted with its grammar, and the radical words of most frequent occurrence; and with the occasional assistance of the same philosophical linguist, I read through [39] Ottfried's metrical paraphrase of the gospel, and the most important remains of the Theotiscan, or the transitional state of the Teutonic language from the Gothic to the old German of the Swabian period. Of this period--(the polished dialect of which is analogous to that of our Chaucer, and which leaves the philosophic student in doubt, whether the language has not since then lost more in sweetness and flexibility, than it has gained in condensation and copiousness)--I read with sedulous accuracy the Minnesinger (or singers of love, the Provencal poets of the Swabian court) and the metrical romances; and then laboured through sufficient specimens of the master singers, their degenerate successors; not however without occasional pleasure from the rude, yet interesting strains of Hans Sachs, the cobbler of Nuremberg. Of this man's genius five folio volumes with double columns are extant in print, and nearly an equal number in manuscript; yet the indefatigable bard takes care to inform his readers, that he never made a shoe the less, but had virtuously reared a large family by the labour of his hands. In Pindar, Chaucer, Dante, Milton, and many more, we have instances of the close connection of poetic genius with the love of liberty and of genuine reformation. The moral sense at least will not be outraged, if I add to the list the name of this honest shoemaker, (a trade by the by remarkable for the production of philosophers and poets). His poem entitled THE MORNING STAR, was the very first publication that appeared in praise and support of Luther; and an excellent hymn of Hans Sachs, which has been deservedly translated into almost all the European languages, was commonly sung in the Protestant churches, whenever the heroic reformer visited them. In Luther's own German writings, and eminently in his translation of the Bible, the German language commenced. I mean the language as it is at present written; that which is called the High-German, as contra- distinguished from the Platt-Teutsch, the dialect on the flat or northern countries, and from the Ober-Teutsch, the language of the middle and Southern Germany. The High German is indeed a lingua communis, not actually the native language of any province, but the choice and fragrancy of all the dialects. From this cause it is at once the most copious and the most grammatical of all the European tongues. Within less than a century after Luther's death the German was inundated with pedantic barbarisms. A few volumes of this period I read through from motives of curiosity; for it is not easy to imagine any thing more fantastic, than the very appearance of their pages. Almost every third word is a Latin word with a Germanized ending, the Latin portion being always printed in Roman letters, while in the last syllable the German character is retained. At length, about the year 1620, Opitz arose, whose genius more nearly resembled that of Dryden than any other poet, who at present occurs to my recollection. In the opinion of Lessing, the most acute of critics, and of Adelung, the first of Lexicographers, Opitz, and the Silesian poets, his followers, not only restored the language, but still remain the models of pure diction. A stranger has no vote on such a question; but after repeated perusal of the works of Opitz my feelings justified the verdict, and I seemed to have acquired from them a sort of tact for what is genuine in the style of later writers. Of the splendid aera, which commenced with Gellert, Klopstock, Ramler, Lessing, and their compeers, I need not speak. With the opportunities which I enjoyed, it would have been disgraceful not to have been familiar with their writings; and I have already said as much as the present biographical sketch requires concerning the German philosophers, whose works, for the greater part, I became acquainted with at a far later period. Soon after my return from Germany I was solicited to undertake the literary and political department in the Morning Post; and I acceded to the proposal on the condition that the paper should thenceforwards be conducted on certain fixed and announced principles, and that I should neither be obliged nor requested to deviate from them in favour of any party or any event. In consequence, that journal became and for many years continued anti-ministerial indeed, yet with a very qualified approbation of the opposition, and with far greater earnestness and zeal both anti-Jacobin and anti-Gallican. To this hour I cannot find reason to approve of the first war either in its commencement or its conduct. Nor can I understand, with what reason either Mr. Perceval, (whom I am singular enough to regard as the best and wisest minister of this reign,) nor the present Administration, can be said to have pursued the plans of Mr. Pitt. The love of their country, and perseverant hostility to French principles and French ambition are indeed honourable qualities common to them and to their predecessor. But it appears to me as clear as the evidence of the facts can render any question of history, that the successes of the Perceval and of the existing ministry have been owing to their having pursued measures the direct contrary to Mr. Pitt's. Such for instance are the concentration of the national force to one object; the abandonment of the subsidizing policy, so far at least as neither to goad nor bribe the continental courts into war, till the convictions of their subjects had rendered it a war of their own seeking; and above all, in their manly and generous reliance on the good sense of the English people, and on that loyalty which is linked to the very [40] heart of the nation by the system of credit and the interdependence of property. Be this as it may, I am persuaded that the Morning Post proved a far more useful ally to the Government in its most important objects, in consequence of its being generally considered as moderately anti- ministerial, than if it had been the avowed eulogist of Mr. Pitt. The few, whose curiosity or fancy should lead them to turn over the journals of that date, may find a small proof of this in the frequent charges made by the Morning Chronicle, that such and such essays or leading paragraphs had been sent from the Treasury. The rapid and unusual increase in the sale of the Morning Post is a sufficient pledge, that genuine impartiality with a respectable portion of literary talent will secure the success of a newspaper without the aid of party or ministerial patronage. But by impartiality I mean an honest and enlightened adherence to a code of intelligible principles previously announced, and faithfully referred to in support of every judgment on men and events; not indiscriminate abuse, not the indulgence of an editor's own malignant passions, and still less, if that be possible, a determination to make money by flattering the envy and cupidity, the vindictive restlessness and self-conceit of the half-witted vulgar; a determination almost fiendish, but which, I have been informed, has been boastfully avowed by one man, the most notorious of these mob-sycophants! From the commencement of the Addington administration to the present day, whatever I have written in THE MORNING POST, or (after that paper was transferred to other proprietors) in THE COURIER, has been in defence or furtherance of the measures of Government. Things of this nature scarce survive that night That gives them birth; they perish in the sight; Cast by so far from after-life, that there Can scarcely aught be said, but that they were! Yet in these labours I employed, and, in the belief of partial friends wasted, the prime and manhood of my intellect. Most assuredly, they added nothing to my fortune or my reputation. The industry of the week supplied the necessities of the week. From government or the friends of government I not only never received remuneration, nor ever expected it; but I was never honoured with a single acknowledgment, or expression of satisfaction. Yet the retrospect is far from painful or matter of regret. I am not indeed silly enough to take as any thing more than a violent hyperbole of party debate, Mr. Fox's assertion that the late war (I trust that the epithet is not prematurely applied) was a war produced by the Morning Post; or I should be proud to have the words inscribed on my tomb. As little do I regard the circumstance, that I was a specified object of Buonaparte's resentment during my residence in Italy in consequence of those essays in the Morning Post during the peace of Amiens. Of this I was warned, directly, by Baron Von Humboldt, the Prussian Plenipotentiary, who at that time was the minister of the Prussian court at Rome; and indirectly, through his secretary, by Cardinal Fesch himself. Nor do I lay any greater weight on the confirming fact, that an order for my arrest was sent from Paris, from which danger I was rescued by the kindness of a noble Benedictine, and the gracious connivance of that good old man, the present Pope. For the late tyrant's vindictive appetite was omnivorous, and preyed equally on a Duc d'Enghien [41], and the writer of a newspaper paragraph. Like a true vulture [42], Napoleon with an eye not less telescopic, and with a taste equally coarse in his ravin, could descend from the most dazzling heights to pounce on the leveret in the brake, or even on the field mouse amid the grass. But I do derive a gratification from the knowledge, that my essays contributed to introduce the practice of placing the questions and events of the day in a moral point of view; in giving a dignity to particular measures by tracing their policy or impolicy to permanent principles, and an interest to principles by the application of them to individual measures. In Mr. Burke's writings indeed the germs of almost all political truths may be found. But I dare assume to myself the merit of having first explicitly defined and analyzed the nature of Jacobinism; and that in distinguishing the Jacobin from the republican, the democrat, and the mere demagogue, I both rescued the word from remaining a mere term of abuse, and put on their guard many honest minds, who even in their heat of zeal against Jacobinism, admitted or supported principles from which the worst parts of that system may be legitimately deduced. That these are not necessary practical results of such principles, we owe to that fortunate inconsequence of our nature, which permits the heart to rectify the errors of the understanding. The detailed examination of the consular Government and its pretended constitution, and the proof given by me, that it was a consummate despotism in masquerade, extorted a recantation even from the Morning Chronicle, which had previously extolled this constitution as the perfection of a wise and regulated liberty. On every great occurrence I endeavoured to discover in past history the event, that most nearly resembled it. I procured, wherever it was possible, the contemporary historians, memorialists, and pamphleteers. Then fairly subtracting the points of difference from those of likeness, as the balance favoured the former or the latter, I conjectured that the result would be the same or different. In the series of essays entitled "A comparison of France under Napoleon with Rome under the first Caesars," and in those which followed "On the probable final restoration of the Bourbons," I feel myself authorized to affirm, by the effect produced on many intelligent men, that, were the dates wanting, it might have been suspected that the essays had been written within the last twelve months. The same plan I pursued at the commencement of the Spanish revolution, and with the same success, taking the war of the United Provinces with Philip II as the ground work of the comparison. I have mentioned this from no motives of vanity, nor even from motives of self defence, which would justify a certain degree of egotism, especially if it be considered, how often and grossly I have been attacked for sentiments, which I have exerted my best powers to confute and expose, and how grievously these charges acted to my disadvantage while I was in Malta. Or rather they would have done so, if my own feelings had not precluded the wish of a settled establishment in that island. But I have mentioned it from the full persuasion that, armed with the two-fold knowledge of history and the human mind, a man will scarcely err in his judgment concerning the sum total of any future national event, if he have been able to procure the original documents of the past, together with authentic accounts of the present, and if he have a philosophic tact for what is truly important in facts, and in most instances therefore for such facts as the dignity of history has excluded from the volumes of our modern compilers, by the courtesy of the age entitled historians. To have lived in vain must be a painful thought to any man, and especially so to him who has made literature his profession. I should therefore rather condole than be angry with the mind, which could attribute to no worthier feelings than those of vanity or self-love, the satisfaction which I acknowledged myself to have enjoyed from the republication of my political essays (either whole or as extracts) not only in many of our own provincial papers, but in the federal journals throughout America. I regarded it as some proof of my not having laboured altogether in vain, that from the articles written by me shortly before and at the commencement of the late unhappy war with America, not only the sentiments were adopted, but in some instances the very language, in several of the Massachusetts state papers. But no one of these motives nor all conjointly would have impelled me to a statement so uncomfortable to my own feelings, had not my character been repeatedly attacked, by an unjustifiable intrusion on private life, as of a man incorrigibly idle, and who intrusted not only with ample talents, but favoured with unusual opportunities of improving them, had nevertheless suffered them to rust away without any efficient exertion, either for his own good or that of his fellow creatures. Even if the compositions, which I have made public, and that too in a form the most certain of an extensive circulation, though the least flattering to an author's self-love, had been published in books, they would have filled a respectable number of volumes, though every passage of merely temporary interest were omitted. My prose writings have been charged with a disproportionate demand on the attention; with an excess of refinement in the mode of arriving at truths; with beating the ground for that which might have been run down by the eye; with the length and laborious construction of my periods; in short with obscurity and the love of paradox. But my severest critics have not pretended to have found in my compositions triviality, or traces of a mind that shrunk from the toil of thinking. No one has charged me with tricking out in other words the thoughts of others, or with hashing up anew the cramben jam decies coctam of English literature or philosophy. Seldom have I written that in a day, the acquisition or investigation of which had not cost me the previous labour of a month. But are books the only channel through which the stream of intellectual usefulness can flow? Is the diffusion of truth to be estimated by publications; or publications by the truth, which they diffuse or at least contain? I speak it in the excusable warmth of a mind stung by an accusation, which has not only been advanced in reviews of the widest circulation, not only registered in the bulkiest works of periodical literature, but by frequency of repetition has become an admitted fact in private literary circles, and thoughtlessly repeated by too many who call themselves my friends, and whose own recollections ought to have suggested a contrary testimony. Would that the criterion of a scholar's utility were the number and moral value of the truths, which he has been the means of throwing into the general circulation; or the number and value of the minds, whom by his conversation or letters, he has excited into activity, and supplied with the germs of their after-growth! A distinguished rank might not indeed, even then, be awarded to my exertions; but I should dare look forward with confidence to an honourable acquittal. I should dare appeal to the numerous and respectable audiences, which at different times and in different places honoured my lecture rooms with their attendance, whether the points of view from which the subjects treated of were surveyed,--whether the grounds of my reasoning were such, as they had heard or read elsewhere, or have since found in previous publications. I can conscientiously declare, that the complete success of the REMORSE on the first night of its representation did not give me as great or as heart-felt a pleasure, as the observation that the pit and boxes were crowded with faces familiar to me, though of individuals whose names I did not know, and of whom I knew nothing, but that they had attended one or other of my courses of lectures. It is an excellent though perhaps somewhat vulgar proverb, that there are cases where a man may be as well "in for a pound as for a penny." To those, who from ignorance of the serious injury I have received from this rumour of having dreamed away my life to no purpose, injuries which I unwillingly remember at all, much less am disposed to record in a sketch of my literary life; or to those, who from their own feelings, or the gratification they derive from thinking contemptuously of others, would like job's comforters attribute these complaints, extorted from me by the sense of wrong, to self conceit or presumptuous vanity, I have already furnished such ample materials, that I shall gain nothing by withholding the remainder. I will not therefore hesitate to ask the consciences of those, who from their long acquaintance with me and with the circumstances are best qualified to decide or be my judges, whether the restitution of the suum cuique would increase or detract from my literary reputation. In this exculpation I hope to be understood as speaking of myself comparatively, and in proportion to the claims, which others are entitled to make on my time or my talents. By what I have effected, am I to be judged by my fellow men; what I could have done, is a question for my own conscience. On my own account I may perhaps have had sufficient reason to lament my deficiency in self-control, and the neglect of concentering my powers to the realization of some permanent work. But to verse rather than to prose, if to either, belongs the voice of mourning for Keen pangs of Love, awakening as a babe Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart; And fears self-willed that shunned the eye of hope; And hope that scarce would know itself from fear; Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain, And genius given and knowledge won in vain; And all which I had culled in wood-walks wild, And all which patient toil had reared, and all, Commune with thee had opened out--but flowers Strewed on my corpse, and borne upon my bier, In the same coffin, for the self-same grave! These will exist, for the future, I trust, only in the poetic strains, which the feelings at the time called forth. In those only, gentle reader, Affectus animi varios, bellumque sequacis Perlegis invidiae, curasque revolvis inanes, Quas humilis tenero stylus olim effudit in aevo. Perlegis et lacrymas, et quod pharetratus acuta Ille puer puero fecit mihi cuspide vulnus. Omnia paulatim consumit longior aetas, Vivendoque simul morimur, rapimurque manendo. Ipse mihi collatus enim non ille videbor; Frons alia est, moresque alii, nova mentis imago, Vox aliudque sonat--Jamque observatio vitae Multa dedit--lugere nihil, ferre omnia; jamque Paulatim lacrymas rerum experientia tersit. CHAPTER XI An affectionate exhortation to those who in early life feel themselves disposed to become authors. It was a favourite remark of the late Mr. Whitbread's, that no man does any thing from a single motive. The separate motives, or rather moods of mind, which produced the preceding reflections and anecdotes have been laid open to the reader in each separate instance. But an interest in the welfare of those, who at the present time may be in circumstances not dissimilar to my own at my first entrance into life, has been the constant accompaniment, and (as it were) the under-song of all my feelings. Whitehead exerting the prerogative of his laureateship addressed to youthful poets a poetic Charge, which is perhaps the best, and certainly the most interesting, of his works. With no other privilege than that of sympathy and sincere good wishes, I would address an affectionate exhortation to the youthful literati, grounded on my own experience. It will be but short; for the beginning, middle, and end converge to one charge: never pursue literature as a trade. With the exception of one extraordinary man, I have never known an individual, least of all an individual of genius, healthy or happy without a profession, that is, some regular employment, which does not depend on the will of the moment, and which can be carried on so far mechanically that an average quantum only of health, spirits, and intellectual exertion are requisite to its faithful discharge. Three hours of leisure, unannoyed by any alien anxiety, and looked forward to with delight as a change and recreation, will suffice to realize in literature a larger product of what is truly genial, than weeks of compulsion. Money, and immediate reputation form only an arbitrary and accidental end of literary labour. The hope of increasing them by any given exertion will often prove a stimulant to industry; but the necessity of acquiring them will in all works of genius convert the stimulant into a narcotic. Motives by excess reverse their very nature, and instead of exciting, stun and stupify the mind. For it is one contradistinction of genius from talent, that its predominant end is always comprised in the means; and this is one of the many points, which establish an analogy between genius and virtue. Now though talents may exist without genius, yet as genius cannot exist, certainly not manifest itself, without talents, I would advise every scholar, who feels the genial power working within him, so far to make a division between the two, as that he should devote his talents to the acquirement of competence in some known trade or profession, and his genius to objects of his tranquil and unbiassed choice; while the consciousness of being actuated in both alike by the sincere desire to perform his duty, will alike ennoble both. "My dear young friend," (I would say) "suppose yourself established in any honourable occupation. From the manufactory or counting house, from the law-court, or from having visited your last patient, you return at evening, Dear tranquil time, when the sweet sense of Home Is sweetest------ to your family, prepared for its social enjoyments, with the very countenances of your wife and children brightened, and their voice of welcome made doubly welcome, by the knowledge that, as far as they are concerned, you have satisfied the demands of the day by the labour of the day. Then, when you retire into your study, in the books on your shelves you revisit so many venerable friends with whom you can converse. Your own spirit scarcely less free from personal anxieties than the great minds, that in those books are still living for you! Even your writing desk with its blank paper and all its other implements will appear as a chain of flowers, capable of linking your feelings as well as thoughts to events and characters past or to come; not a chain of iron, which binds you down to think of the future and the remote by recalling the claims and feelings of the peremptory present. But why should I say retire? The habits of active life and daily intercourse with the stir of the world will tend to give you such self-command, that the presence of your family will be no interruption. Nay, the social silence, or undisturbing voices of a wife or sister will be like a restorative atmosphere, or soft music which moulds a dream without becoming its object. If facts are required to prove the possibility of combining weighty performances in literature with full and independent employment, the works of Cicero and Xenophon among the ancients; of Sir Thomas More, Bacon, Baxter, or to refer at once to later and contemporary instances, Darwin and Roscoe, are at once decisive of the question." But all men may not dare promise themselves a sufficiency of self- control for the imitation of those examples: though strict scrutiny should always be made, whether indolence, restlessness, or a vanity impatient for immediate gratification, have not tampered with the judgment and assumed the vizard of humility for the purposes of self- delusion. Still the Church presents to every man of learning and genius a profession, in which he may cherish a rational hope of being able to unite the widest schemes of literary utility with the strictest performance of professional duties. Among the numerous blessings of Christianity, the introduction of an established Church makes an especial claim on the gratitude of scholars and philosophers; in England, at least, where the principles of Protestantism have conspired with the freedom of the government to double all its salutary powers by the removal of its abuses. That not only the maxims, but the grounds of a pure morality, the mere fragments of which ------the lofty grave tragedians taught In chorus or iambic, teachers best Of moral prudence, with delight received In brief sententious precepts; [43] and that the sublime truths of the divine unity and attributes, which a Plato found most hard to learn and deemed it still more difficult to reveal; that these should have become the almost hereditary property of childhood and poverty, of the hovel and the workshop; that even to the unlettered they sound as common place, is a phaenomenon, which must withhold all but minds of the most vulgar cast from undervaluing the services even of the pulpit and the reading desk. Yet those, who confine the efficiency of an established Church to its public offices, can hardly be placed in a much higher rank of intellect. That to every parish throughout the kingdom there is transplanted a germ of civilization; that in the remotest villages there is a nucleus, round which the capabilities of the place may crystallize and brighten; a model sufficiently superior to excite, yet sufficiently near to encourage and facilitate, imitation; this, the unobtrusive, continuous agency of a protestant church establishment, this it is, which the patriot, and the philanthropist, who would fain unite the love of peace with the faith in the progressive melioration of mankind, cannot estimate at too high a price. It cannot be valued with the gold of Ophir, with the precious onyx, or the sapphire. No mention shall be made of coral, or of pearls: for the price of wisdom is above rubies. The clergyman is with his parishioners and among them; he is neither in the cloistered cell, nor in the wilderness, but a neighbour and a family-man, whose education and rank admit him to the mansion of the rich landholder, while his duties make him the frequent visitor of the farmhouse and the cottage. He is, or he may become, connected, with the families of his parish or its vicinity by marriage. And among the instances of the blindness, or at best of the short-sightedness, which it is the nature of cupidity to inflict, I know few more striking than the clamours of the farmers against Church property. Whatever was not paid to the clergyman would inevitably at the next lease be paid to the landholder, while, as the case at present stands, the revenues of the Church are in some sort the reversionary property of every family, that may have a member educated for the Church, or a daughter that may marry a clergyman. Instead of being foreclosed and immovable, it is in fact the only species of landed property, that is essentially moving and circulative. That there exist no inconveniences, who will pretend to assert? But I have yet to expect the proof, that the inconveniences are greater in this than in any other species; or that either the farmers or the clergy would be benefited by forcing the latter to become either Trullibers or salaried placemen. Nay, I do not hesitate to declare my firm persuasion, that whatever reason of discontent the farmers may assign, the true cause is this; that they may cheat the parson, but cannot cheat the steward; and that they are disappointed, if they should have been able to withhold only two pounds less than the legal claim, having expected to withhold five. At all events, considered relatively to the encouragement of learning and genius, the establishment presents a patronage at once so effective and unburdensome, that it would be impossible to afford the like or equal in any but a Christian and Protestant country. There is scarce a department of human knowledge without some bearing on the various critical, historical, philosophical and moral truths, in which the scholar must be interested as a clergyman; no one pursuit worthy of a man of genius, which may not be followed without incongruity. To give the history of the Bible as a book, would be little less than to relate the origin or first excitement of all the literature and science, that we now possess. The very decorum, which the profession imposes, is favourable to the best purposes of genius, and tends to counteract its most frequent defects. Finally, that man must be deficient in sensibility, who would not find an incentive to emulation in the great and burning lights, which in a long series have illustrated the church of England; who would not hear from within an echo to the voice from their sacred shrines, Et Pater Aeneas et avunculus excitat Hector. But, whatever be the profession or trade chosen, the advantages are many and important, compared with the state of a mere literary man, who in any degree depends on the sale of his works for the necessaries and comforts of life. In the former a man lives in sympathy with the world, in which he lives. At least he acquires a better and quicker tact for the knowledge of that, with which men in general can sympathize. He learns to manage his genius more prudently and efficaciously. His powers and acquirements gain him likewise more real admiration; for they surpass the legitimate expectations of others. He is something besides an author, and is not therefore considered merely as an author. The hearts of men are open to him, as to one of their own class; and whether he exerts himself or not in the conversational circles of his acquaintance, his silence is not attributed to pride, nor his communicativeness to vanity. To these advantages I will venture to add a superior chance of happiness in domestic life, were it only that it is as natural for the man to be out of the circle of his household during the day, as it is meritorious for the woman to remain for the most part within it. But this subject involves points of consideration so numerous and so delicate, and would not only permit, but require such ample documents from the biography of literary men, that I now merely allude to it in transitu. When the same circumstance has occurred at very different times to very different persons, all of whom have some one thing in common; there is reason to suppose that such circumstance is not merely attributable to the persons concerned, but is in some measure occasioned by the one point in common to them all. Instead of the vehement and almost slanderous dehortation from marriage, which the Misogyne, Boccaccio [44] addresses to literary men, I would substitute the simple advice: be not merely a man of letters! Let literature be an honourable augmentation to your arms; but not constitute the coat, or fill the escutcheon! To objections from conscience I can of course answer in no other way, than by requesting the youthful objector (as I have already done on a former occasion) to ascertain with strict self-examination, whether other influences may not be at work; whether spirits, "not of health," and with whispers "not from heaven," may not be walking in the twilight of his consciousness. Let him catalogue his scruples, and reduce them to a distinct intelligible form; let him be certain, that he has read with a docile mind and favourable dispositions the best and most fundamental works on the subject; that he has had both mind and heart opened to the great and illustrious qualities of the many renowned characters, who had doubted like himself, and whose researches had ended in the clear conviction, that their doubts had been groundless, or at least in no proportion to the counter-weight. Happy will it be for such a man, if among his contemporaries elder than himself he should meet with one, who, with similar powers and feelings as acute as his own, had entertained the same scruples; had acted upon them; and who by after-research (when the step was, alas! irretrievable, but for that very reason his research undeniably disinterested) had discovered himself to have quarrelled with received opinions only to embrace errors, to have left the direction tracked out for him on the high road of honourable exertion, only to deviate into a labyrinth, where when he had wandered till his head was giddy, his best good fortune was finally to have found his way out again, too late for prudence though not too late for conscience or for truth! Time spent in such delay is time won: for manhood in the meantime is advancing, and with it increase of knowledge, strength of judgment, and above all, temperance of feelings. And even if these should effect no change, yet the delay will at least prevent the final approval of the decision from being alloyed by the inward censure of the rashness and vanity, by which it had been precipitated. It would be a sort of irreligion, and scarcely less than a libel on human nature to believe, that there is any established and reputable profession or employment, in which a man may not continue to act with honesty and honour; and doubtless there is likewise none, which may not at times present temptations to the contrary. But wofully will that man find himself mistaken, who imagines that the profession of literature, or (to speak more plainly) the trade of authorship, besets its members with fewer or with less insidious temptations, than the Church, the law, or the different branches of commerce. But I have treated sufficiently on this unpleasant subject in an early chapter of this volume. I will conclude the present therefore with a short extract from Herder, whose name I might have added to the illustrious list of those, who have combined the successful pursuit of the Muses, not only with the faithful discharge, but with the highest honours and honourable emoluments of an established profession. The translation the reader will find in a note below [45]. "Am sorgfaeltigsten, meiden sie die Autorschaft. Zu frueh oder unmaessig gebraucht, macht sie den Kopf wueste and das Herz leer; wenn sie auch sonst keine ueble Folgen gaebe. Ein Mensch, der nur lieset um zu druecken, lieset wahrscheinlich uebel; und wer jeden Gedanken, der ihm aufstosst, durch Feder and Presse versendet, hat sie in kurzer Zeit alle versandt, und wird bald ein blosser Diener der Druckerey, ein Buchstabensetzer werden." CHAPTER XII A chapter of requests and premonitions concerning the perusal or omission of the chapter that follows. In the perusal of philosophical works I have been greatly benefited by a resolve, which, in the antithetic form and with the allowed quaintness of an adage or maxim, I have been accustomed to word thus: until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding. This golden rule of mine does, I own, resemble those of Pythagoras in its obscurity rather than in its depth. If however the reader will permit me to be my own Hierocles, I trust, that he will find its meaning fully explained by the following instances. I have now before me a treatise of a religious fanatic, full of dreams and supernatural experiences. I see clearly the writer's grounds, and their hollowness. I have a complete insight into the causes, which through the medium of his body has acted on his mind; and by application of received and ascertained laws I can satisfactorily explain to my own reason all the strange incidents, which the writer records of himself. And this I can do without suspecting him of any intentional falsehood. As when in broad day-light a man tracks the steps of a traveller, who had lost his way in a fog or by a treacherous moonshine, even so, and with the same tranquil sense of certainty, can I follow the traces of this bewildered visionary. I understand his ignorance. On the other hand, I have been re-perusing with the best energies of my mind the TIMAEUS of Plato. Whatever I comprehend, impresses me with a reverential sense of the author's genius; but there is a considerable portion of the work, to which I can attach no consistent meaning. In other treatises of the same philosopher, intended for the average comprehensions of men, I have been delighted with the masterly good sense, with the perspicuity of the language, and the aptness of the inductions. I recollect likewise, that numerous passages in this author, which I thoroughly comprehend, were formerly no less unintelligible to me, than the passages now in question. It would, I am aware, be quite fashionable to dismiss them at once as Platonic jargon. But this I cannot do with satisfaction to my own mind, because I have sought in vain for causes adequate to the solution of the assumed inconsistency. I have no insight into the possibility of a man so eminently wise, using words with such half-meanings to himself, as must perforce pass into no meaning to his readers. When in addition to the motives thus suggested by my own reason, I bring into distinct remembrance the number and the series of great men, who, after long and zealous study of these works had joined in honouring the name of Plato with epithets, that almost transcend humanity, I feel, that a contemptuous verdict on my part might argue want of modesty, but would hardly be received by the judicious, as evidence of superior penetration. Therefore, utterly baffled in all my attempts to understand the ignorance of Plato, I conclude myself ignorant of his understanding. In lieu of the various requests which the anxiety of authorship addresses to the unknown reader, I advance but this one; that he will either pass over the following chapter altogether, or read the whole connectedly. The fairest part of the most beautiful body will appear deformed and monstrous, if dissevered from its place in the organic whole. Nay, on delicate subjects, where a seemingly trifling difference of more or less may constitute a difference in kind, even a faithful display of the main and supporting ideas, if yet they are separated from the forms by which they are at once clothed and modified, may perchance present a skeleton indeed; but a skeleton to alarm and deter. Though I might find numerous precedents, I shall not desire the reader to strip his mind of all prejudices, nor to keep all prior systems out of view during his examination of the present. For in truth, such requests appear to me not much unlike the advice given to hypochondriacal patients in Dr. Buchan's domestic medicine; videlicet, to preserve themselves uniformly tranquil and in good spirits. Till I had discovered the art of destroying the memory a parte post, without injury to its future operations, and without detriment to the judgment, I should suppress the request as premature; and therefore, however much I may wish to be read with an unprejudiced mind, I do not presume to state it as a necessary condition. The extent of my daring is to suggest one criterion, by which it may be rationally conjectured beforehand, whether or no a reader would lose his time, and perhaps his temper, in the perusal of this, or any other treatise constructed on similar principles. But it would be cruelly misinterpreted, as implying the least disrespect either for the moral or intellectual qualities of the individuals thereby precluded. The criterion is this: if a man receives as fundamental facts, and therefore of course indemonstrable and incapable of further analysis, the general notions of matter, spirit, soul, body, action, passiveness, time, space, cause and effect, consciousness, perception, memory and habit; if he feels his mind completely at rest concerning all these, and is satisfied, if only he can analyse all other notions into some one or more of these supposed elements with plausible subordination and apt arrangement: to such a mind I would as courteously as possible convey the hint, that for him the chapter was not written. Vir bonus es, doctus, prudens; ast haud tibi spiro. For these terms do in truth include all the difficulties, which the human mind can propose for solution. Taking them therefore in mass, and unexamined, it required only a decent apprenticeship in logic, to draw forth their contents in all forms and colours, as the professors of legerdemain at our village fairs pull out ribbon after ribbon from their mouths. And not more difficult is it to reduce them back again to their different genera. But though this analysis is highly useful in rendering our knowledge more distinct, it does not really add to it. It does not increase, though it gives us a greater mastery over, the wealth which we before possessed. For forensic purposes, for all the established professions of society, this is sufficient. But for philosophy in its highest sense as the science of ultimate truths, and therefore scientia scientiarum, this mere analysis of terms is preparative only, though as a preparative discipline indispensable. Still less dare a favourable perusal be anticipated from the proselytes of that compendious philosophy, which talking of mind but thinking of brick and mortar, or other images equally abstracted from body, contrives a theory of spirit by nicknaming matter, and in a few hours can qualify its dullest disciples to explain the omne scibile by reducing all things to impressions, ideas, and sensations. But it is time to tell the truth; though it requires some courage to avow it in an age and country, in which disquisitions on all subjects, not privileged to adopt technical terms or scientific symbols, must be addressed to the Public. I say then, that it is neither possible nor necessary for all men, nor for many, to be philosophers. There is a philosophic (and inasmuch as it is actualized by an effort of freedom, an artificial) consciousness, which lies beneath or (as it were) behind the spontaneous consciousness natural to all reflecting beings. As the elder Romans distinguished their northern provinces into Cis-Alpine and Trans-Alpine, so may we divide all the objects of human knowledge into those on this side, and those on the other side of the spontaneous consciousness; citra et trans conscientiam communem. The latter is exclusively the domain of pure philosophy, which is therefore properly entitled transcendental, in order to discriminate it at once, both from mere reflection and representation on the one hand, and on the other from those flights of lawless speculation which, abandoned by all distinct consciousness, because transgressing the bounds and purposes of our intellectual faculties, are justly condemned, as transcendent [46]. The first range of hills, that encircles the scanty vale of human life, is the horizon for the majority of its inhabitants. On its ridges the common sun is born and departs. From them the stars rise, and touching them they vanish. By the many, even this range, the natural limit and bulwark of the vale, is but imperfectly known. Its higher ascents are too often hidden by mists and clouds from uncultivated swamps, which few have courage or curiosity to penetrate. To the multitude below these vapours appear, now as the dark haunts of terrific agents, on which none may intrude with impunity; and now all aglow, with colours not their own, they are gazed at as the splendid palaces of happiness and power. But in all ages there have been a few, who measuring and sounding the rivers of the vale at the feet of their furthest inaccessible falls have learned, that the sources must be far higher and far inward; a few, who even in the level streams have detected elements, which neither the vale itself nor the surrounding mountains contained or could supply [47]. How and whence to these thoughts, these strong probabilities, the ascertaining vision, the intuitive knowledge may finally supervene, can be learnt only by the fact. I might oppose to the question the words with which [48] Plotinus supposes Nature to answer a similar difficulty. "Should any one interrogate her, how she works, if graciously she vouchsafe to listen and speak, she will reply, it behoves thee not to disquiet me with interrogatories, but to understand in silence, even as I am silent, and work without words." Likewise in the fifth book of the fifth Ennead, speaking of the highest and intuitive knowledge as distinguished from the discursive, or in the language of Wordsworth, "The vision and the faculty divine;" he says: "it is not lawful to inquire from whence it sprang, as if it were a thing subject to place and motion, for it neither approached hither, nor again departs from hence to some other place; but it either appears to us or it does not appear. So that we ought not to pursue it with a view of detecting its secret source, but to watch in quiet till it suddenly shines upon us; preparing ourselves for the blessed spectacle as the eye waits patiently for the rising sun." They and they only can acquire the philosophic imagination, the sacred power of self-intuition, who within themselves can interpret and understand the symbol, that the wings of the air-sylph are forming within the skin of the caterpillar; those only, who feel in their own spirits the same instinct, which impels the chrysalis of the horned fly to leave room in its involucrum for antenna, yet to come. They know and feel, that the potential works in them, even as the actual works on them! In short, all the organs of sense are framed for a corresponding world of sense; and we have it. All the organs of spirit are framed for a correspondent world of spirit: though the latter organs are not developed in all alike. But they exist in all, and their first appearance discloses itself in the moral being. How else could it be, that even worldlings, not wholly debased, will contemplate the man of simple and disinterested goodness with contradictory feelings of pity and respect? "Poor man! he is not made for this world." Oh! herein they utter a prophecy of universal fulfilment; for man must either rise or sink. It is the essential mark of the true philosopher to rest satisfied with no imperfect light, as long as the impossibility of attaining a fuller knowledge has not been demonstrated. That the common consciousness itself will furnish proofs by its own direction, that it is connected with master-currents below the surface, I shall merely assume as a postulate pro tempore. This having been granted, though but in expectation of the argument, I can safely deduce from it the equal truth of my former assertion, that philosophy cannot be intelligible to all, even of the most learned and cultivated classes. A system, the first principle of which it is to render the mind intuitive of the spiritual in man (i.e. of that which lies on the other side of our natural consciousness) must needs have a great obscurity for those, who have never disciplined and strengthened this ulterior consciousness. It must in truth be a land of darkness, a perfect Anti-Goshen, for men to whom the noblest treasures of their own being are reported only through the imperfect translation of lifeless and sightless motions. Perhaps, in great part, through words which are but the shadows of notions; even as the notional understanding itself is but the shadowy abstraction of living and actual truth. On the IMMEDIATE, which dwells in every man, and on the original intuition, or absolute affirmation of it, (which is likewise in every man, but does not in every man rise into consciousness) all the certainty of our knowledge depends; and this becomes intelligible to no man by the ministry of mere words from without. The medium, by which spirits understand each other, is not the surrounding air; but the freedom which they possess in common, as the common ethereal element of their being, the tremulous reciprocations of which propagate themselves even to the inmost of the soul. Where the spirit of a man is not filled with the consciousness of freedom (were it only from its restlessness, as of one still struggling in bondage) all spiritual intercourse is interrupted, not only with others, but even with himself. No wonder then, that he remains incomprehensible to himself as well as to others. No wonder, that, in the fearful desert of his consciousness, he wearies himself out with empty words, to which no friendly echo answers, either from his own heart, or the heart of a fellow being; or bewilders himself in the pursuit of notional phantoms, the mere refractions from unseen and distant truths through the distorting medium of his own unenlivened and stagnant understanding! To remain unintelligible to such a mind, exclaims Schelling on a like occasion, is honour and a good name before God and man. The history of philosophy (the same writer observes) contains instances of systems, which for successive generations have remained enigmatic. Such he deems the system of Leibnitz, whom another writer (rashly I think, and invidiously) extols as the only philosopher, who was himself deeply convinced of his own doctrines. As hitherto interpreted, however, they have not produced the effect, which Leibnitz himself, in a most instructive passage, describes as the criterion of a true philosophy; namely, that it would at once explain and collect the fragments of truth scattered through systems apparently the most incongruous. The truth, says he, is diffused more widely than is commonly believed; but it is often painted, yet oftener masked, and is sometimes mutilated and sometimes, alas! in close alliance with mischievous errors. The deeper, however, we penetrate into the ground of things, the more truth we discover in the doctrines of the greater number of the philosophical sects. The want of substantial reality in the objects of the senses, according to the sceptics; the harmonies or numbers, the prototypes and ideas, to which the Pythagoreans and Platonists reduced all things: the ONE and ALL of Parmenides and Plotinus, without [49] Spinozism; the necessary connection of things according to the Stoics, reconcilable with the spontaneity of the other schools; the vital-philosophy of the Cabalists and Hermetists, who assumed the universality of sensation; the substantial forms and entelechies of Aristotle and the schoolmen, together with the mechanical solution of all particular phaenomena according to Democritus and the recent philosophers--all these we shall find united in one perspective central point, which shows regularity and a coincidence of all the parts in the very object, which from every other point of view must appear confused and distorted. The spirit of sectarianism has been hitherto our fault, and the cause of our failures. We have imprisoned our own conceptions by the lines, which we have drawn, in order to exclude the conceptions of others. J'ai trouve que la plupart des Sectes ont raison dans une bonne partie de ce qu'elles avancent, mais non pas tant en ce qu'elles nient. A system, which aims to deduce the memory with all the other functions of intelligence, must of course place its first position from beyond the memory, and anterior to it, otherwise the principle of solution would be itself a part of the problem to be solved. Such a position therefore must, in the first instance be demanded, and the first question will be, by what right is it demanded? On this account I think it expedient to make some preliminary remarks on the introduction of Postulates in philosophy. The word postulate is borrowed from the science of mathematics [50]. In geometry the primary construction is not demonstrated, but postulated. This first and most simple construction in space is the point in motion, or the line. Whether the point is moved in one and the same direction, or whether its direction is continually changed, remains as yet undetermined. But if the direction of the point have been determined, it is either by a point without it, and then there arises the straight line which incloses no space; or the direction of the point is not determined by a point without it, and then it must flow back again on itself, that is, there arises a cyclical line, which does enclose a space. If the straight line be assumed as the positive, the cyclical is then the negation of the straight. It is a line, which at no point strikes out into the straight, but changes its direction continuously. But if the primary line be conceived as undetermined, and the straight line as determined throughout, then the cyclical is the third compounded of both. It is at once undetermined and determined; undetermined through any point without, and determined through itself. Geometry therefore supplies philosophy with the example of a primary intuition, from which every science that lays claim to evidence must take its commencement. The mathematician does not begin with a demonstrable proposition, but with an intuition, a practical idea. But here an important distinction presents itself. Philosophy is employed on objects of the inner SENSE, and cannot, like geometry, appropriate to every construction a correspondent outward intuition. Nevertheless, philosophy, if it is to arrive at evidence, must proceed from the most original construction, and the question then is, what is the most original construction or first productive act for the inner sense. The answer to this question depends on the direction which is given to the inner sense. But in philosophy the inner sense cannot have its direction determined by an outward object. To the original construction of the line I can be compelled by a line drawn before me on the slate or on sand. The stroke thus drawn is indeed not the line itself, but only the image or picture of the line. It is not from it, that we first learn to know the line; but, on the contrary, we bring this stroke to the original line generated by the act of the imagination; otherwise we could not define it as without breadth or thickness. Still however this stroke is the sensuous image of the original or ideal line, and an efficient mean to excite every imagination to the intuition of it. It is demanded then, whether there be found any means in philosophy to determine the direction of the inner sense, as in mathematics it is determinable by its specific image or outward picture. Now the inner sense has its direction determined for the greater part only by an act of freedom. One man's consciousness extends only to the pleasant or unpleasant sensations caused in him by external impressions; another enlarges his inner sense to a consciousness of forms and quantity; a third in addition to the image is conscious of the conception or notion of the thing; a fourth attains to a notion of his notions--he reflects on his own reflections; and thus we may say without impropriety, that the one possesses more or less inner sense, than the other. This more or less betrays already, that philosophy in its first principles must have a practical or moral, as well as a theoretical or speculative side. This difference in degree does not exist in the mathematics. Socrates in Plato shows, that an ignorant slave may be brought to understand and of himself to solve the most difficult geometrical problem. Socrates drew the figures for the slave in the sand. The disciples of the critical philosophy could likewise (as was indeed actually done by La Forge and some other followers of Des Cartes) represent the origin of our representations in copper-plates; but no one has yet attempted it, and it would be utterly useless. To an Esquimaux or New Zealander our most popular philosophy would be wholly unintelligible. The sense, the inward organ, for it is not yet born in him. So is there many a one among us, yes, and some who think themselves philosophers too, to whom the philosophic organ is entirely wanting. To such a man philosophy is a mere play of words and notions, like a theory of music to the deaf, or like the geometry of light to the blind. The connection of the parts and their logical dependencies may be seen and remembered; but the whole is groundless and hollow, unsustained by living contact, unaccompanied with any realizing intuition which exists by and in the act that affirms its existence, which is known, because it is, and is, because it is known. The words of Plotinus, in the assumed person of Nature, hold true of the philosophic energy. To theoroun mou, theoraema poiei, osper oi geometrai theorountes graphousin; all' emon mae graphousaes, theorousaes de, uphistantai ai ton somaton grammai. With me the act of contemplation makes the thing contemplated, as the geometricians contemplating describe lines correspondent; but I not describing lines, but simply contemplating, the representative forms of things rise up into existence. The postulate of philosophy and at the same time the test of philosophic capacity, is no other than the heaven-descended KNOW THYSELF! (E coelo descendit, Gnothi seauton). And this at once practically and speculatively. For as philosophy is neither a science of the reason or understanding only, nor merely a science of morals, but the science of BEING altogether, its primary ground can be neither merely speculative nor merely practical, but both in one. All knowledge rests on the coincidence of an object with a subject. (My readers have been warned in a former chapter that, for their convenience as well as the writer's, the term, subject, is used by me in its scholastic sense as equivalent to mind or sentient being, and as the necessary correlative of object or quicquid objicitur menti.) For we can know that only which is true: and the truth is universally placed in the coincidence of the thought with the thing, of the representation with the object represented. Now the sum of all that is merely OBJECTIVE, we will henceforth call NATURE, confining the term to its passive and material sense, as comprising all the phaenomena by which its existence is made known to us. On the other hand the sum of all that is SUBJECTIVE, we may comprehend in the name of the SELF or INTELLIGENCE. Both conceptions are in necessary antithesis. Intelligence is conceived of as exclusively representative, nature as exclusively represented; the one as conscious, the other as without consciousness. Now in all acts of positive knowledge there is required a reciprocal concurrence of both, namely of the conscious being, and of that which is in itself unconscious. Our problem is to explain this concurrence, its possibility and its necessity. During the act of knowledge itself, the objective and subjective are so instantly united, that we cannot determine to which of the two the priority belongs. There is here no first, and no second; both are coinstantaneous and one. While I am attempting to explain this intimate coalition, I must suppose it dissolved. I must necessarily set out from the one, to which therefore I give hypothetical antecedence, in order to arrive at the other. But as there are but two factors or elements in the problem, subject and object, and as it is left indeterminate from which of them I should commence, there are two cases equally possible. 1. EITHER THE OBJECTIVE IS TAKEN AS THE FIRST, AND THEN WE HAVE TO ACCOUNT FOR THE SUPERVENTION OF THE SUBJECTIVE, WHICH COALESCES WITH IT. The notion of the subjective is not contained in the notion of the objective. On the contrary they mutually exclude each other. The subjective therefore must supervene to the objective. The conception of nature does not apparently involve the co-presence of an intelligence making an ideal duplicate of it, that is, representing it. This desk for instance would (according to our natural notions) be, though there should exist no sentient being to look at it. This then is the problem of natural philosophy. It assumes the objective or unconscious nature as the first, and as therefore to explain how intelligence can supervene to it, or how itself can grow into intelligence. If it should appear, that all enlightened naturalists, without having distinctly proposed the problem to themselves, have yet constantly moved in the line of its solution, it must afford a strong presumption that the problem itself is founded in nature. For if all knowledge has, as it were, two poles reciprocally required and presupposed, all sciences must proceed from the one or the other, and must tend toward the opposite as far as the equatorial point in which both are reconciled and become identical. The necessary tendency therefore of all natural philosophy is from nature to intelligence; and this, and no other is the true ground and occasion of the instinctive striving to introduce theory into our views of natural phaenomena. The highest perfection of natural philosophy would consist in the perfect spiritualization of all the laws of nature into laws of intuition and intellect. The phaenomena (the material) most wholly disappear, and the laws alone (the formal) must remain. Thence it comes, that in nature itself the more the principle of law breaks forth, the more does the husk drop off, the phaenomena themselves become more spiritual and at length cease altogether in our consciousness. The optical phaenomena are but a geometry, the lines of which are drawn by light, and the materiality of this light itself has already become matter of doubt. In the appearances of magnetism all trace of matter is lost, and of the phaenomena of gravitation, which not a few among the most illustrious Newtonians have declared no otherwise comprehensible than as an immediate spiritual influence, there remains nothing but its law, the execution of which on a vast scale is the mechanism of the heavenly motions. The theory of natural philosophy would then be completed, when all nature was demonstrated to be identical in essence with that, which in its highest known power exists in man as intelligence and self-consciousness; when the heavens and the earth shall declare not only the power of their maker, but the glory and the presence of their God, even as he appeared to the great prophet during the vision of the mount in the skirts of his divinity. This may suffice to show, that even natural science, which commences with the material phaenomenon as the reality and substance of things existing, does yet by the necessity of theorizing unconsciously, and as it were instinctively, end in nature as an intelligence; and by this tendency the science of nature becomes finally natural philosophy, the one of the two poles of fundamental science. 2. OR THE SUBJECTIVE IS TAKEN AS THE FIRST, AND THE PROBLEM THEN IS, HOW THERE SUPERVENES TO IT A COINCIDENT OBJECTIVE. In the pursuit of these sciences, our success in each, depends on an austere and faithful adherence to its own principles, with a careful separation and exclusion of those, which appertain to the opposite science. As the natural philosopher, who directs his views to the objective, avoids above all things the intermixture of the subjective in his knowledge, as for instance, arbitrary suppositions or rather suflictions, occult qualities, spiritual agents, and the substitution of final for efficient causes; so on the other hand, the transcendental or intelligential philosopher is equally anxious to preclude all interpellation of the objective into the subjective principles of his science, as for instance the assumption of impresses or configurations in the brain, correspondent to miniature pictures on the retina painted by rays of light from supposed originals, which are not the immediate and real objects of vision, but deductions from it for the purposes of explanation. This purification of the mind is effected by an absolute and scientific scepticism, to which the mind voluntarily determines itself for the specific purpose of future certainty. Des Cartes who (in his meditations) himself first, at least of the moderns, gave a beautiful example of this voluntary doubt, this self-determined indetermination, happily expresses its utter difference from the scepticism of vanity or irreligion: Nec tamen in Scepticos imitabar, qui dubitant tantum ut dubitent, et praeter incertitudinem ipsam nihil quaerunt. Nam contra totus in eo eram ut aliquid certi reperirem [51]. Nor is it less distinct in its motives and final aim, than in its proper objects, which are not as in ordinary scepticism the prejudices of education and circumstance, but those original and innate prejudices which nature herself has planted in all men, and which to all but the philosopher are the first principles of knowledge, and the final test of truth. Now these essential prejudices are all reducible to the one fundamental presumption, THAT THERE EXIST THINGS WITHOUT US. As this on the one hand originates, neither in grounds nor arguments, and yet on the other hand remains proof against all attempts to remove it by grounds or arguments (naturam furca expellas tamen usque redibit;) on the one hand lays claim to IMMEDIATE certainty as a position at once indemonstrable and irresistible, and yet on the other hand, inasmuch as it refers to something essentially different from ourselves, nay even in opposition to ourselves, leaves it inconceivable how it could possibly become a part of our immediate consciousness; (in other words how that, which ex hypothesi is and continues to be extrinsic and alien to our being, should become a modification of our being) the philosopher therefore compels himself to treat this faith as nothing more than a prejudice, innate indeed and connatural, but still a prejudice. The other position, which not only claims but necessitates the admission of its immediate certainty, equally for the scientific reason of the philosopher as for the common sense of mankind at large, namely, I AM, cannot so properly be entitled a prejudice. It is groundless indeed; but then in the very idea it precludes all ground, and separated from the immediate consciousness loses its whole sense and import. It is groundless; but only because it is itself the ground of all other certainty. Now the apparent contradiction, that the former position, namely, the existence of things without us, which from its nature cannot be immediately certain, should be received as blindly and as independently of all grounds as the existence of our own being, the Transcendental philosopher can solve only by the supposition, that the former is unconsciously involved in the latter; that it is not only coherent but identical, and one and the same thing with our own immediate self consciousness. To demonstrate this identity is the office and object of his philosophy. If it be said, that this is idealism, let it be remembered that it is only so far idealism, as it is at the same time, and on that very account, the truest and most binding realism. For wherein does the realism of mankind properly consist? In the assertion that there exists a something without them, what, or how, or where they know not, which occasions the objects of their perception? Oh no! This is neither connatural nor universal. It is what a few have taught and learned in the schools, and which the many repeat without asking themselves concerning their own meaning. The realism common to all mankind is far elder and lies infinitely deeper than this hypothetical explanation of the origin of our perceptions, an explanation skimmed from the mere surface of mechanical philosophy. It is the table itself, which the man of common sense believes himself to see, not the phantom of a table, from which he may argumentatively deduce the reality of a table, which he does not see. If to destroy the reality of all, that we actually behold, be idealism, what can be more egregiously so, than the system of modern metaphysics, which banishes us to a land of shadows, surrounds us with apparitions, and distinguishes truth from illusion only by the majority of those who dream the same dream? "I asserted that the world was mad," exclaimed poor Lee, "and the world said, that I was mad, and confound them, they outvoted me." It is to the true and original realism, that I would direct the attention. This believes and requires neither more nor less, than the object which it beholds or presents to itself, is the real and very object. In this sense, however much we may strive against it, we are all collectively born idealists, and therefore and only therefore are we at the same time realists. But of this the philosophers of the schools know nothing, or despise the faith as the prejudice of the ignorant vulgar, because they live and move in a crowd of phrases and notions from which human nature has long ago vanished. Oh, ye that reverence yourselves, and walk humbly with the divinity in your own hearts, ye are worthy of a better philosophy! Let the dead bury the dead, but do you preserve your human nature, the depth of which was never yet fathomed by a philosophy made up of notions and mere logical entities. In the third treatise of my Logosophia, announced at the end of this volume, I shall give (Deo volente) the demonstrations and constructions of the Dynamic Philosophy scientifically arranged. It is, according to my conviction, no other than the system of Pythagoras and of Plato revived and purified from impure mixtures. Doctrina per tot manus tradita tandem in vappam desiit! The science of arithmetic furnishes instances, that a rule may be useful in practical application, and for the particular purpose may be sufficiently authenticated by the result, before it has itself been fully demonstrated. It is enough, if only it be rendered intelligible. This will, I trust, have been effected in the following Theses for those of my readers, who are willing to accompany me through the following chapter, in which the results will be applied to the deduction of the Imagination, and with it the principles of production and of genial criticism in the fine arts. THESIS I Truth is correlative to being. Knowledge without a correspondent reality is no knowledge; if we know, there must be somewhat known by us. To know is in its very essence a verb active. THESIS II All truth is either mediate, that is, derived from some other truth or truths; or immediate and original. The latter is absolute, and its formula A. A.; the former is of dependent or conditional certainty, and represented in the formula B. A. The certainty, which adheres in A, is attributable to B. SCHOLIUM. A chain without a staple, from which all the links derived their stability, or a series without a first, has been not inaptly allegorized, as a string of blind men, each holding the skirt of the man before him, reaching far out of sight, but all moving without the least deviation in one straight line. It would be naturally taken for granted, that there was a guide at the head of the file: what if it were answered, No! Sir, the men are without number, and infinite blindness supplies the place of sight? Equally inconceivable is a cycle of equal truths without a common and central principle, which prescribes to each its proper sphere in the system of science. That the absurdity does not so immediately strike us, that it does not seem equally unimaginable, is owing to a surreptitious act of the imagination, which, instinctively and without our noticing the same, not only fills up the intervening spaces, and contemplates the cycle (of B. C. D. E. F. etc.) as a continuous circle (A.) giving to all collectively the unity of their common orbit; but likewise supplies, by a sort of subintelligitur, the one central power, which renders the movement harmonious and cyclical. THESIS III We are to seek therefore for some absolute truth capable of communicating to other positions a certainty, which it has not itself borrowed; a truth self-grounded, unconditional and known by its own light. In short, we have to find a somewhat which is, simply because it is. In order to be such, it must be one which is its own predicate, so far at least that all other nominal predicates must be modes and repetitions of itself. Its existence too must be such, as to preclude the possibility of requiring a cause or antecedent without an absurdity. THESIS IV That there can be but one such principle, may be proved a priori; for were there two or more, each must refer to some other, by which its equality is affirmed; consequently neither would be self-established, as the hypothesis demands. And a posteriori, it will be proved by the principle itself when it is discovered, as involving universal antecedence in its very conception. SCHOLIUM. If we affirm of a board that it is blue, the predicate (blue) is accidental, and not implied in the subject, board. If we affirm of a circle that it is equi-radial, the predicate indeed is implied in the definition of the subject; but the existence of the subject itself is contingent, and supposes both a cause and a percipient. The same reasoning will apply to the indefinite number of supposed indemonstrable truths exempted from the profane approach of philosophic investigation by the amiable Beattie, and other less eloquent and not more profound inaugurators of common sense on the throne of philosophy; a fruitless attempt, were it only that it is the two-fold function of philosophy to reconcile reason with common sense, and to elevate common sense into reason. THESIS V Such a principle cannot be any THING or OBJECT. Each thing is what it is in consequence of some other thing. An infinite, independent [52] thing, is no less a contradiction, than an infinite circle or a sideless triangle. Besides a thing is that, which is capable of being an object which itself is not the sole percipient. But an object is inconceivable without a subject as its antithesis. Omne perceptum percipientem supponit. But neither can the principle be found in a subject as a subject, contra-distinguished from an object: for unicuique percipienti aliquid objicitur perceptum. It is to be found therefore neither in object nor subject taken separately, and consequently, as no other third is conceivable, it must be found in that which is neither subject nor object exclusively, but which is the identity of both. THESIS VI This principle, and so characterised manifests itself in the SUM or I AM; which I shall hereafter indiscriminately express by the words spirit, self, and self-consciousness. In this, and in this alone, object and subject, being and knowing, are identical, each involving and supposing the other. In other words, it is a subject which becomes a subject by the act of constructing itself objectively to itself; but which never is an object except for itself, and only so far as by the very same act it becomes a subject. It may be described therefore as a perpetual self-duplication of one and the same power into object and subject, which presuppose each other, and can exist only as antitheses. SCHOLIUM. If a man be asked how he knows that he is? he can only answer, sum quia sum. But if (the absoluteness of this certainty having been admitted) he be again asked, how he, the individual person, came to be, then in relation to the ground of his existence, not to the ground of his knowledge of that existence, he might reply, sum quia Deus est, or still more philosophically, sum quia in Deo sum. But if we elevate our conception to the absolute self, the great eternal I AM, then the principle of being, and of knowledge, of idea, and of reality; the ground of existence, and the ground of the knowledge of existence, are absolutely identical, Sum quia sum [53]; I am, because I affirm myself to be; I affirm myself to be, because I am. THESIS VII If then I know myself only through myself, it is contradictory to require any other predicate of self, but that of self-consciousness. Only in the self-consciousness of a spirit is there the required identity of object and of representation; for herein consists the essence of a spirit, that it is self-representative. If therefore this be the one only immediate truth, in the certainty of which the reality of our collective knowledge is grounded, it must follow that the spirit in all the objects which it views, views only itself. If this could be proved, the immediate reality of all intuitive knowledge would be assured. It has been shown, that a spirit is that, which is its own object, yet not originally an object, but an absolute subject for which all, itself included, may become an object. It must therefore be an ACT; for every object is, as an object, dead, fixed, incapable in itself of any action, and necessarily finite. Again the spirit (originally the identity of object and subject) must in some sense dissolve this identity, in order to be conscious of it; fit alter et idem. But this implies an act, and it follows therefore that intelligence or self-consciousness is impossible, except by and in a will. The self-conscious spirit therefore is a will; and freedom must be assumed as a ground of philosophy, and can never be deduced from it. THESIS VIII Whatever in its origin is objective, is likewise as such necessarily finite. Therefore, since the spirit is not originally an object, and as the subject exists in antithesis to an object, the spirit cannot originally be finite. But neither can it be a subject without becoming an object, and, as it is originally the identity of both, it can be conceived neither as infinite nor finite exclusively, but as the most original union of both. In the existence, in the reconciling, and the recurrence of this contradiction consists the process and mystery of production and life. THESIS IX This principium commune essendi et cognoscendi, as subsisting in a WILL, or primary ACT of self-duplication, is the mediate or indirect principle of every science; but it is the immediate and direct principle of the ultimate science alone, i.e. of transcendental philosophy alone. For it must be remembered, that all these Theses refer solely to one of the two Polar Sciences, namely, to that which commences with, and rigidly confines itself within, the subjective, leaving the objective (as far as it is exclusively objective) to natural philosophy, which is its opposite pole. In its very idea therefore as a systematic knowledge of our collective KNOWING, (scientia scientiae) it involves the necessity of some one highest principle of knowing, as at once the source and accompanying form in all particular acts of intellect and perception. This, it has been shown, can be found only in the act and evolution of self-consciousness. We are not investigating an absolute principium essendi; for then, I admit, many valid objections might be started against our theory; but an absolute principium cognoscendi. The result of both the sciences, or their equatorial point, would be the principle of a total and undivided philosophy, as, for prudential reasons, I have chosen to anticipate in the Scholium to Thesis VI and the note subjoined. In other words, philosophy would pass into religion, and religion become inclusive of philosophy. We begin with the I KNOW MYSELF, in order to end with the absolute I AM. We proceed from the SELF, in order to lose and find all self in GOD. THESIS X The transcendental philosopher does not inquire, what ultimate ground of our knowledge there may lie out of our knowing, but what is the last in our knowing itself, beyond which we cannot pass. The principle of our knowing is sought within the sphere of our knowing. It must be some thing therefore, which can itself be known. It is asserted only, that the act of self-consciousness is for us the source and principle of all our possible knowledge. Whether abstracted from us there exists any thing higher and beyond this primary self-knowing, which is for us the form of all our knowing must be decided by the result. That the self-consciousness is the fixed point, to which for us all is mortised and annexed, needs no further proof. But that the self- consciousness may be the modification of a higher form of being, perhaps of a higher consciousness, and this again of a yet higher, and so on in an infinite regressus; in short, that self-consciousness may be itself something explicable into something, which must lie beyond the possibility of our knowledge, because the whole synthesis of our intelligence is first formed in and through the self-consciousness, does not at all concern us as transcendental philosophers. For to us, self-consciousness is not a kind of being, but a kind of knowing, and that too the highest and farthest that exists for us. It may however be shown, and has in part already been shown earlier, that even when the Objective is assumed as the first, we yet can never pass beyond the principle of self-consciousness. Should we attempt it, we must be driven back from ground to ground, each of which would cease to be a ground the moment we pressed on it. We must be whirled down the gulf of an infinite series. But this would make our reason baffle the end and purpose of all reason, namely, unity and system. Or we must break off the series arbitrarily, and affirm an absolute something that is in and of itself at once cause and effect (causa sui), subject and object, or rather the absolute identity of both. But as this is inconceivable, except in a self-consciousness, it follows, that even as natural philosophers we must arrive at the same principle from which as transcendental philosophers we set out; that is, in a self-consciousness in which the principium essendi does not stand to the principlum cognoscende in the relation of cause to effect, but both the one and the other are co-inherent and identical. Thus the true system of natural philosophy places the sole reality of things in an ABSOLUTE, which is at once causa sui et effectus, pataer autopator, uios heautou--in the absolute identity of subject and object, which it calls nature, and which in its highest power is nothing else than self-conscious will or intelligence. In this sense the position of Malebranche, that we see all things in God, is a strict philosophical truth; and equally true is the assertion of Hobbes, of Hartley, and of their masters in ancient Greece, that all real knowledge supposes a prior sensation. For sensation itself is but vision nascent, not the cause of intelligence, but intelligence itself revealed as an earlier power in the process of self-construction. Makar, ilathi moi; Pater, ilathi moi Ei para kosmon, Ei para moiran Ton son ethigon! Bearing then this in mind, that intelligence is a self-development, not a quality supervening to a substance, we may abstract from all degree, and for the purpose of philosophic construction reduce it to kind, under the idea of an indestructible power with two opposite and counteracting forces, which by a metaphor borrowed from astronomy, we may call the centrifugal and centripetal forces. The intelligence in the one tends to objectize itself, and in the other to know itself in the object. It will be hereafter my business to construct by a series of intuitions the progressive schemes, that must follow from such a power with such forces, till I arrive at the fulness of the human intelligence. For my present purpose, I assume such a power as my principle, in order to deduce from it a faculty, the generation, agency, and application of which form the contents of the ensuing chapter. In a preceding page I have justified the use of technical terms in philosophy, whenever they tend to preclude confusion of thought, and when they assist the memory by the exclusive singleness of their meaning more than they may, for a short time, bewilder the attention by their strangeness. I trust, that I have not extended this privilege beyond the grounds on which I have claimed it; namely, the conveniency of the scholastic phrase to distinguish the kind from all degrees, or rather to express the kind with the abstraction of degree, as for instance multeity instead of multitude; or secondly, for the sake of correspondence in sound in interdependent or antithetical terms, as subject and object; or lastly, to avoid the wearying recurrence of circumlocutions and definitions. Thus I shall venture to use potence, in order to express a specific degree of a power, in imitation of the Algebraists. I have even hazarded the new verb potenziate, with its derivatives, in order to express the combination or transfer of powers. It is with new or unusual terms, as with privileges in courts of justice or legislature; there can be no legitimate privilege, where there already exists a positive law adequate to the purpose; and when there is no law in existence, the privilege is to be justified by its accordance with the end, or final cause, of all law. Unusual and new-coined words are doubtless an evil; but vagueness, confusion, and imperfect conveyance of our thoughts, are a far greater. Every system, which is under the necessity of using terms not familiarized by the metaphysics in fashion, will be described as written in an unintelligible style, and the author must expect the charge of having substituted learned jargon for clear conception; while, according to the creed of our modern philosophers, nothing is deemed a clear conception, but what is representable by a distinct image. Thus the conceivable is reduced within the bounds of the picturable. Hinc patet, qui fiat, ut cum irrepraesentabile et impossibile vulgo ejusdem significatus habeantur, conceptus tam continui, quam infiniti, a plurimis rejiciantur, quippe quorum, secundum leges cognitionis intuitivae, repraesentatio est impossibilis. Quanquam autem harum e non paucis scholis explosarum notionum, praesertim prioris, causam hic non gero, maximi tamen momendi erit monuisse. gravissimo illos errore labi, qui tam perverse argumentandi ratione utuntur. Quicquid enim repugnat legibus intellectus et rationis, utique est impossibile; quod autem, cum rationis purae sit objectum, legibus cognitionis intuitivae tantummodo non subest, non item. Nam hic dissensus inter facultatem sensitivam et intellectualem, (quarum indolem mox exponam,) nihil indigitat, nisi, quas mens ab intellectu acceptas fert ideas abstractas, illas in concreto exsequi et in intuitus commutare saepenumero non posse. Haec autem reluctantia subjectiva mentitur, ut plurimum, repugnantiam aliquam objectivam, et incautos facile fallit, limitibus, quibus mens humana circumscribitur, pro iis habitis, quibus ipsa rerum essentia continetur. [54] Critics, who are most ready to bring this charge of pedantry and unintelligibility, are the most apt to overlook the important fact, that, besides the language of words, there is a language of spirits--(sermo interior)--and that the former is only the vehicle of the latter. Consequently their assurance, that they do not understand the philosophic writer, instead of proving any thing against the philosophy, may furnish an equal, and (caeteris paribus) even a stronger presumption against their own philosophic talent. Great indeed are the obstacles which an English metaphysician has to encounter. Amongst his most respectable and intelligent judges, there will be many who have devoted their attention exclusively to the concerns and interests of human life, and who bring with them to the perusal of a philosophic system an habitual aversion to all speculations, the utility and application of which are not evident and immediate. To these I would in the first instance merely oppose an authority, which they themselves hold venerable, that of Lord Bacon: non inutiles Scientiae existimandae sunt, quarum in se nullus est usus, si ingenia acuant et ordinent. There are others, whose prejudices are still more formidable, inasmuch as they are grounded in their moral feelings and religious principles, which had been alarmed and shocked by the impious and pernicious tenets defended by Hume, Priestley, and the French fatalists or necessitarians; some of whom had perverted metaphysical reasonings to the denial of the mysteries and indeed of all the peculiar doctrines of Christianity; and others even to the subversion of all distinction between right and wrong. I would request such men to consider what an eminent and successful defender of the Christian faith has observed, that true metaphysics are nothing else but true divinity, and that in fact the writers, who have given them such just offence, were sophists, who had taken advantage of the general neglect into which the science of logic has unhappily fallen, rather than metaphysicians, a name indeed which those writers were the first to explode as unmeaning. Secondly, I would remind them, that as long as there are men in the world to whom the Gnothi seauton is an instinct and a command from their own nature, so long will there be metaphysicians and metaphysical speculations; that false metaphysics can be effectually counteracted by true metaphysics alone; and that if the reasoning be clear, solid and pertinent, the truth deduced can never be the less valuable on account of the depth from which it may have been drawn. A third class profess themselves friendly to metaphysics, and believe that they are themselves metaphysicians. They have no objection to system or terminology, provided it be the method and the nomenclature to which they have been familiarized in the writings of Locke, Hume, Hartley, Condillac, or perhaps Dr. Reid, and Professor Stewart. To objections from this cause, it is a sufficient answer, that one main object of my attempt was to demonstrate the vagueness or insufficiency of the terms used in the metaphysical schools of France and Great Britain since the revolution, and that the errors which I propose to attack cannot subsist, except as they are concealed behind the mask of a plausible and indefinite nomenclature. But the worst and widest impediment still remains. It is the predominance of a popular philosophy, at once the counterfeit and the mortal enemy of all true and manly metaphysical research. It is that corruption, introduced by certain immethodical aphorisming eclectics, who, dismissing not only all system, but all logical connection, pick and choose whatever is most plausible and showy; who select, whatever words can have some semblance of sense attached to them without the least expenditure of thought; in short whatever may enable men to talk of what they do not understand, with a careful avoidance of every thing that might awaken them to a moment's suspicion of their ignorance. This alas! is an irremediable disease, for it brings with it, not so much an indisposition to any particular system, but an utter loss of taste and faculty for all system and for all philosophy. Like echoes that beget each other amongst the mountains, the praise or blame of such men rolls in volleys long after the report from the original blunderbuss. Sequacitas est potius et coitio quam consensus: et tamen (quod pessimum est) pusillanimitas ista non sine arrogantia et fastidio se offert. [55] I shall now proceed to the nature and genesis of the Imagination; but I must first take leave to notice, that after a more accurate perusal of Mr. Wordsworth's remarks on the Imagination, in his preface to the new edition of his poems, I find that my conclusions are not so consentient with his as, I confess, I had taken for granted. In an article contributed by me to Mr. Southey's Omniana, On the soul and its organs of sense, are the following sentences. "These (the human faculties) I would arrange under the different senses and powers: as the eye, the ear, the touch, etc.; the imitative power, voluntary and automatic; the imagination, or shaping and modifying power; the fancy, or the aggregative and associative power; the understanding, or the regulative, substantiating and realizing power; the speculative reason, vis theoretica et scientifica, or the power by which we produce or aim to produce unity, necessity, and universality in all our knowledge by means of principles a priori [56]; the will, or practical reason; the faculty of choice (Germanice, Willkuehr) and (distinct both from the moral will and the choice,) the sensation of volition, which I have found reason to include under the head of single and double touch." To this, as far as it relates to the subject in question, namely the words (the aggregative and associative power) Mr. Wordsworth's "objection is only that the definition is too general. To aggregate and to associate, to evoke and to combine, belong as well to the Imagination as to the Fancy." I reply, that if, by the power of evoking and combining, Mr. Wordsworth means the same as, and no more than, I meant by the aggregative and associative, I continue to deny, that it belongs at all to the Imagination; and I am disposed to conjecture, that he has mistaken the copresence of Fancy with Imagination for the operation of the latter singly. A man may work with two very different tools at the same moment; each has its share in the work, but the work effected by each is distinct and different. But it will probably appear in the next chapter, that deeming it necessary to go back much further than Mr. Wordsworth's subject required or permitted, I have attached a meaning to both Fancy and Imagination, which he had not in view, at least while he was writing that preface. He will judge. Would to Heaven, I might meet with many such readers! I will conclude with the words of Bishop Jeremy Taylor: "He to whom all things are one, who draweth all things to one, and seeth all things in one, may enjoy true peace and rest of spirit." [57] CHAPTER XIII On the imagination, or esemplastic power O Adam, One Almighty is, from whom All things proceed, and up to him return, If not deprav'd from good, created all Such to perfection, one first matter all, Endued with various forms, various degrees Of substance, and, in things that live, of life; But more refin'd, more spiritous and pure, As nearer to him plac'd, or nearer tending, Each in their several active spheres assigu'd, Till body up to spirit work, in bounds Proportion'd to each kind. So from the root Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves More aery: last the bright consummate flower Spirits odorous breathes: flowers and their fruit, Man's nourishment, by gradual scale sublim'd, To vital spirits aspire: to animal: To intellectual!--give both life and sense, Fancy and understanding; whence the soul REASON receives, and reason is her being, Discursive or intuitive. [58] "Sane dicerentur si res corporales nil nisi materiale continerent, verissime in fluxu consistere, neque habere substantiale quicquam, quemadmodum et Platonici olim recte agnovere." "Hinc igitur, praeter pure mathematica et phantasiae subjecta, collegi quaedam metaphysica solaque mente perceptibilia, esse admittenda et massae materiali principium quoddam superius et, ut sic dicam, formale addendum: quandoquidem omnes veritates rerum corporearum ex solis axiomatibus logisticis et geometricis, nempe de magno et parvo, toto et parte, figura et situ, colligi non possint; sed alia de causa et effectu, actioneque et passione, accedere debeant, quibus ordinis rerum rationes salventur. Id principium rerum, an entelecheian an vim appellemus, non refert, modo meminerimus, per solam Virium notionem intelligibiliter explicari." [59] Sebomai noeron Kruphian taxin Chorei TI MESON Ou katachuthen. [60] Des Cartes, speaking as a naturalist, and in imitation of Archimedes, said, give me matter and motion and I will construct you the universe. We must of course understand him to have meant; I will render the construction of the universe intelligible. In the same sense the transcendental philosopher says; grant me a nature having two contrary forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity, and I will cause the world of intelllgences with the whole system of their representations to rise up before you. Every other science presupposes intelligence as already existing and complete: the philosopher contemplates it in its growth, and as it were represents its history to the mind from its birth to its maturity. The venerable sage of Koenigsberg has preceded the march of this master-thought as an effective pioneer in his essay on the introduction of negative quantities into philosophy, published 1763. In this he has shown, that instead of assailing the science of mathematics by metaphysics, as Berkeley did in his ANALYST, or of sophisticating it, as Wolf did, by the vain attempt of deducing the first principles of geometry from supposed deeper grounds of ontology, it behoved the metaphysician rather to examine whether the only province of knowledge, which man has succeeded in erecting into a pure science, might not furnish materials, or at least hints, for establishing and pacifying the unsettled, warring, and embroiled domain of philosophy. An imitation of the mathematical method had indeed been attempted with no better success than attended the essay of David to wear the armour of Saul. Another use however is possible and of far greater promise, namely, the actual application of the positions which had so wonderfully enlarged the discoveries of geometry, mutatis mutandis, to philosophical subjects. Kant having briefly illustrated the utility of such an attempt in the questions of space, motion, and infinitely small quantities, as employed by the mathematician, proceeds to the idea of negative quantities and the transfer of them to metaphysical investigation. Opposites, he well observes, are of two kinds, either logical, that is, such as are absolutely incompatible; or real, without being contradictory. The former he denominates Nihil negativum irrepraesentabile, the connection of which produces nonsense. A body in motion is something--Aliquid cogitabile; but a body, at one and the same time in motion and not in motion, is nothing, or, at most, air articulated into nonsense. But a motory force of a body in one direction, and an equal force of the same body in an opposite direction is not incompatible, and the result, namely, rest, is real and representable. For the purposes of mathematical calculus it is indifferent which force we term negative, and which positive, and consequently we appropriate the latter to that, which happens to be the principal object in our thoughts. Thus if a man's capital be ten and his debts eight, the subtraction will be the same, whether we call the capital negative debt, or the debt negative capital. But in as much as the latter stands practically in reference to the former, we of course represent the sum as 10-8. It is equally clear that two equal forces acting in opposite directions, both being finite and each distinguished from the other by its direction only, must neutralize or reduce each other to inaction. Now the transcendental philosophy demands; first, that two forces should be conceived which counteract each other by their essential nature; not only not in consequence of the accidental direction of each, but as prior to all direction, nay, as the primary forces from which the conditions of all possible directions are derivative and deducible: secondly, that these forces should be assumed to be both alike infinite, both alike indestructible. The problem will then be to discover the result or product of two such forces, as distinguished from the result of those forces which are finite, and derive their difference solely from the circumstance of their direction. When we have formed a scheme or outline of these two different kinds of force, and of their different results, by the process of discursive reasoning, it will then remain for us to elevate the thesis from notional to actual, by contemplating intuitively this one power with its two inherent indestructible yet counteracting forces, and the results or generations to which their inter-penetration gives existence, in the living principle and in the process of our own self-consciousness. By what instrument this is possible the solution itself will discover, at the same time that it will reveal to and for whom it is possible. Non omnia possumus omnes. There is a philosophic no less than a poetic genius, which is differenced from the highest perfection of talent, not by degree but by kind. The counteraction then of the two assumed forces does not depend on their meeting from opposite directions; the power which acts in them is indestructible; it is therefore inexhaustibly re-ebullient; and as something must be the result of these two forces, both alike infinite, and both alike indestructible; and as rest or neutralization cannot be this result; no other conception is possible, but that the product must be a tertium aliquid, or finite generation. Consequently this conception is necessary. Now this tertium aliquid can be no other than an inter-penetration of the counteracting powers, partaking of both. * * * * * * Thus far had the work been transcribed for the press, when I received the following letter from a friend, whose practical judgment I have had ample reason to estimate and revere, and whose taste and sensibility preclude all the excuses which my self-love might possibly have prompted me to set up in plea against the decision of advisers of equal good sense, but with less tact and feeling. "Dear C. "You ask my opinion concerning your Chapter on the Imagination, both as to the impressions it made on myself, and as to those which I think it will make on the Public, i.e. that part of the public, who, from the title of the work and from its forming a sort of introduction to a volume of poems, are likely to constitute the great majority of your readers. "As to myself, and stating in the first place the effect on my understanding, your opinions and method of argument were not only so new to me, but so directly the reverse of all I had ever been accustomed to consider as truth, that even if I had comprehended your premises sufficiently to have admitted them, and had seen the necessity of your conclusions, I should still have been in that state of mind, which in your note in Chap. IV you have so ingeniously evolved, as the antithesis to that in which a man is, when he makes a bull. In your own words, I should have felt as if I had been standing on my head. "The effect on my feelings, on the other hand, I cannot better represent, than by supposing myself to have known only our light airy modern chapels of ease, and then for the first time to have been placed, and left alone, in one of our largest Gothic cathedrals in a gusty moonlight night of autumn. 'Now in glimmer, and now in gloom;' often in palpable darkness not without a chilly sensation of terror; then suddenly emerging into broad yet visionary lights with coloured shadows of fantastic shapes, yet all decked with holy insignia and mystic symbols; and ever and anon coming out full upon pictures and stone-work images of great men, with whose names I was familiar, but which looked upon me with countenances and an expression, the most dissimilar to all I had been in the habit of connecting with those names. Those whom I had been taught to venerate as almost super-human in magnitude of intellect, I found perched in little fret-work niches, as grotesque dwarfs; while the grotesques, in my hitherto belief, stood guarding the high altar with all the characters of apotheosis. In short, what I had supposed substances were thinned away into shadows, while everywhere shadows were deepened into substances: If substance might be call'd that shadow seem'd, For each seem'd either! "Yet after all, I could not but repeat the lines which you had quoted from a MS. poem of your own in the FRIEND, and applied to a work of Mr. Wordsworth's though with a few of the words altered: ------An Orphic tale indeed, A tale obscure of high and passionate thoughts To a strange music chanted! "Be assured, however, that I look forward anxiously to your great book on the CONSTRUCTIVE PHILOSOPHY, which you have promised and announced: and that I will do my best to understand it. Only I will not promise to descend into the dark cave of Trophonius with you, there to rub my own eyes, in order to make the sparks and figured flashes, which I am required to see. "So much for myself. But as for the Public I do not hesitate a moment in advising and urging you to withdraw the Chapter from the present work, and to reserve it for your announced treatises on the Logos or communicative intellect in Man and Deity. First, because imperfectly as I understand the present Chapter, I see clearly that you have done too much, and yet not enough. You have been obliged to omit so many links, from the necessity of compression, that what remains, looks (if I may recur to my former illustration) like the fragments of the winding steps of an old ruined tower. Secondly, a still stronger argument (at least one that I am sure will be more forcible with you) is, that your readers will have both right and reason to complain of you. This Chapter, which cannot, when it is printed, amount to so little as an hundred pages, will of necessity greatly increase the expense of the work; and every reader who, like myself, is neither prepared nor perhaps calculated for the study of so abstruse a subject so abstrusely treated, will, as I have before hinted, be almost entitled to accuse you of a sort of imposition on him. For who, he might truly observe, could from your title-page, to wit, "My Literary Life and Opinions," published too as introductory to a volume of miscellaneous poems, have anticipated, or even conjectured, a long treatise on Ideal Realism which holds the same relation in abstruseness to Plotinus, as Plotinus does to Plato. It will be well, if already you have not too much of metaphysical disquisition in your work, though as the larger part of the disquisition is historical, it will doubtless be both interesting and instructive to many to whose unprepared minds your speculations on the esemplastic power would be utterly unintelligible. Be assured, if you do publish this Chapter in the present work, you will be reminded of Bishop Berkeley's Siris, announced as an Essay on Tar-water, which beginning with Tar ends with the Trinity, the omne scibile forming the interspace. I say in the present work. In that greater work to which you have devoted so many years, and study so intense and various, it will be in its proper place. Your prospectus will have described and announced both its contents and their nature; and if any persons purchase it, who feel no interest in the subjects of which it treats, they will have themselves only to blame. "I could add to these arguments one derived from pecuniary motives, and particularly from the probable effects on the sale of your present publication; but they would weigh little with you compared with the preceding. Besides, I have long observed, that arguments drawn from your own personal interests more often act on you as narcotics than as stimulants, and that in money concerns you have some small portion of pig-nature in your moral idiosyncrasy, and, like these amiable creatures, must occasionally be pulled backward from the boat in order to make you enter it. All success attend you, for if hard thinking and hard reading are merits, you have deserved it. "Your affectionate, etc." In consequence of this very judicious letter, which produced complete conviction on my mind, I shall content myself for the present with stating the main result of the chapter, which I have reserved for that future publication, a detailed prospectus of which the reader will find at the close of the second volume. The Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phaenomenon of the will, which we express by the word Choice. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association. CHAPTER XIV Occasion of the Lyrical Ballads, and the objects originally proposed--Preface to the second edition--The ensuing controversy, its causes and acrimony--Philosophic definitions of a Poem and Poetry with scholia. During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm, which accidents of light and shade, which moon-light or sunset diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The thought suggested itself--(to which of us I do not recollect)--that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its vicinity, where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them, when they present themselves. In this idea originated the plan of the LYRICAL BALLADS; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand. With this view I wrote THE ANCIENT MARINER, and was preparing among other poems, THE DARK LADIE, and the CHRISTABEL, in which I should have more nearly realized my ideal, than I had done in my first attempt. But Mr. Wordsworth's industry had proved so much more successful, and the number of his poems so much greater, that my compositions, instead of forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous matter. Mr. Wordsworth added two or three poems written in his own character, in the impassioned, lofty, and sustained diction, which is characteristic of his genius. In this form the LYRICAL BALLADS were published; and were presented by him, as an experiment, whether subjects, which from their nature rejected the usual ornaments and extra-colloquial style of poems in general, might not be so managed in the language of ordinary life as to produce the pleasurable interest, which it is the peculiar business of poetry to impart. To the second edition he added a preface of considerable length; in which, notwithstanding some passages of apparently a contrary import, he was understood to contend for the extension of this style to poetry of all kinds, and to reject as vicious and indefensible all phrases and forms of speech that were not included in what he (unfortunately, I think, adopting an equivocal expression) called the language of real life. From this preface, prefixed to poems in which it was impossible to deny the presence of original genius, however mistaken its direction might be deemed, arose the whole long-continued controversy. For from the conjunction of perceived power with supposed heresy I explain the inveteracy and in some instances, I grieve to say, the acrimonious passions, with which the controversy has been conducted by the assailants. Had Mr. Wordsworth's poems been the silly, the childish things, which they were for a long time described as being had they been really distinguished from the compositions of other poets merely by meanness of language and inanity of thought; had they indeed contained nothing more than what is found in the parodies and pretended imitations of them; they must have sunk at once, a dead weight, into the slough of oblivion, and have dragged the preface along with them. But year after year increased the number of Mr. Wordsworth's admirers. They were found too not in the lower classes of the reading public, but chiefly among young men of strong sensibility and meditative minds; and their admiration (inflamed perhaps in some degree by opposition) was distinguished by its intensity, I might almost say, by its religious fervour. These facts, and the intellectual energy of the author, which was more or less consciously felt, where it was outwardly and even boisterously denied, meeting with sentiments of aversion to his opinions, and of alarm at their consequences, produced an eddy of criticism, which would of itself have borne up the poems by the violence with which it whirled them round and round. With many parts of this preface in the sense attributed to them and which the words undoubtedly seem to authorize, I never concurred; but on the contrary objected to them as erroneous in principle, and as contradictory (in appearance at least) both to other parts of the same preface, and to the author's own practice in the greater part of the poems themselves. Mr. Wordsworth in his recent collection has, I find, degraded this prefatory disquisition to the end of his second volume, to be read or not at the reader's choice. But he has not, as far as I can discover, announced any change in his poetic creed. At all events, considering it as the source of a controversy, in which I have been honoured more than I deserve by the frequent conjunction of my name with his, I think it expedient to declare once for all, in what points I coincide with the opinions supported in that preface, and in what points I altogether differ. But in order to render myself intelligible I must previously, in as few words as possible, explain my views, first, of a Poem; and secondly, of Poetry itself, in kind, and in essence. The office of philosophical disquisition consists in just distinction; while it is the privilege of the philosopher to preserve himself constantly aware, that distinction is not division. In order to obtain adequate notions of any truth, we must intellectually separate its distinguishable parts; and this is the technical process of philosophy. But having so done, we must then restore them in our conceptions to the unity, in which they actually co-exist; and this is the result of philosophy. A poem contains the same elements as a prose composition; the difference therefore must consist in a different combination of them, in consequence of a different object being proposed. According to the difference of the object will be the difference of the combination. It is possible, that the object may be merely to facilitate the recollection of any given facts or observations by artificial arrangement; and the composition will be a poem, merely because it is distinguished from prose by metre, or by rhyme, or by both conjointly. In this, the lowest sense, a man might attribute the name of a poem to the well-known enumeration of the days in the several months; "Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November," etc. and others of the same class and purpose. And as a particular pleasure is found in anticipating the recurrence of sounds and quantities, all compositions that have this charm super-added, whatever be their contents, may be entitled poems. So much for the superficial form. A difference of object and contents supplies an additional ground of distinction. The immediate purpose may be the communication of truths; either of truth absolute and demonstrable, as in works of science; or of facts experienced and recorded, as in history. Pleasure, and that of the highest and most permanent kind, may result from the attainment of the end; but it is not itself the immediate end. In other works the communication of pleasure may be the immediate purpose; and though truth, either moral or intellectual, ought to be the ultimate end, yet this will distinguish the character of the author, not the class to which the work belongs. Blest indeed is that state of society, in which the immediate purpose would be baffled by the perversion of the proper ultimate end; in which no charm of diction or imagery could exempt the BATHYLLUS even of an Anacreon, or the ALEXIS of Virgil, from disgust and aversion! But the communication of pleasure may be the immediate object of a work not metrically composed; and that object may have been in a high degree attained, as in novels and romances. Would then the mere superaddition of metre, with or without rhyme, entitle these to the name of poems? The answer is, that nothing can permanently please, which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise. If metre be superadded, all other parts must be made consonant with it. They must be such, as to justify the perpetual and distinct attention to each part, which an exact correspondent recurrence of accent and sound are calculated to excite. The final definition then, so deduced, may be thus worded. A poem is that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species--(having this object in common with it)--it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part. Controversy is not seldom excited in consequence of the disputants attaching each a different meaning to the same word; and in few instances has this been more striking, than in disputes concerning the present subject. If a man chooses to call every composition a poem, which is rhyme, or measure, or both, I must leave his opinion uncontroverted. The distinction is at least competent to characterize the writer's intention. If it were subjoined, that the whole is likewise entertaining or affecting, as a tale, or as a series of interesting reflections; I of course admit this as another fit ingredient of a poem, and an additional merit. But if the definition sought for be that of a legitimate poem, I answer, it must be one, the parts of which mutually support and explain each other; all in their proportion harmonizing with, and supporting the purpose and known influences of metrical arrangement. The philosophic critics of all ages coincide with the ultimate judgment of all countries, in equally denying the praises of a just poem, on the one hand, to a series of striking lines or distiches, each of which, absorbing the whole attention of the reader to itself, becomes disjoined from its context, and forms a separate whole, instead of a harmonizing part; and on the other hand, to an unsustained composition, from which the reader collects rapidly the general result unattracted by the component parts. The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasureable activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself. Like the motion of a serpent, which the Egyptians made the emblem of intellectual power; or like the path of sound through the air;--at every step he pauses and half recedes; and from the retrogressive movement collects the force which again carries him onward. Praecipitandus est liber spiritus, says Petronius most happily. The epithet, liber, here balances the preceding verb; and it is not easy to conceive more meaning condensed in fewer words. But if this should be admitted as a satisfactory character of a poem, we have still to seek for a definition of poetry. The writings of Plato, and Jeremy Taylor, and Burnet's Theory of the Earth, furnish undeniable proofs that poetry of the highest kind may exist without metre, and even without the contradistringuishing objects of a poem. The first chapter of Isaiah--(indeed a very large portion of the whole book)--is poetry in the most emphatic sense; yet it would be not less irrational than strange to assert, that pleasure, and not truth was the immediate object of the prophet. In short, whatever specific import we attach to the word, Poetry, there will be found involved in it, as a necessary consequence, that a poem of any length neither can be, nor ought to be, all poetry. Yet if an harmonious whole is to be produced, the remaining parts must be preserved in keeping with the poetry; and this can be no otherwise effected than by such a studied selection and artificial arrangement, as will partake of one, though not a peculiar property of poetry. And this again can be no other than the property of exciting a more continuous and equal attention than the language of prose aims at, whether colloquial or written. My own conclusions on the nature of poetry, in the strictest use of the word, have been in part anticipated in some of the remarks on the Fancy and Imagination in the early part of this work. What is poetry?--is so nearly the same question with, what is a poet?--that the answer to the one is involved in the solution of the other. For it is a distinction resulting from the poetic genius itself, which sustains and modifies the images, thoughts, and emotions of the poet's own mind. The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which I would exclusively appropriate the name of Imagination. This power, first put in action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, control, laxis effertur habenis, reveals "itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant" qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self-possession with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement; and while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter; and our admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry. Doubtless, as Sir John Davies observes of the soul--(and his words may with slight alteration be applied, and even more appropriately, to the poetic Imagination)-- Doubtless this could not be, but that she turns Bodies to spirit by sublimation strange, As fire converts to fire the things it burns, As we our food into our nature change. From their gross matter she abstracts their forms, And draws a kind of quintessence from things; Which to her proper nature she transforms To bear them light on her celestial wings. Thus does she, when from individual states She doth abstract the universal kinds; Which then re-clothed in divers names and fates Steal access through the senses to our minds. Finally, Good Sense is the Body of poetic genius, Fancy its Drapery, Motion its Life, and Imagination the Soul that is everywhere, and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole. CHAPTER XV The specific symptoms of poetic power elucidated in a critical analysis of Shakespeare's VENUS AND ADONIS, and RAPE of LUCRECE. In the application of these principles to purposes of practical criticism, as employed in the appraisement of works more or less imperfect, I have endeavoured to discover what the qualities in a poem are, which may be deemed promises and specific symptoms of poetic power, as distinguished from general talent determined to poetic composition by accidental motives, by an act of the will, rather than by the inspiration of a genial and productive nature. In this investigation, I could not, I thought, do better, than keep before me the earliest work of the greatest genius, that perhaps human nature has yet produced, our myriad-minded [61] Shakespeare. I mean the VENUS AND ADONIS, and the LUCRECE; works which give at once strong promises of the strength, and yet obvious proofs of the immaturity, of his genius. From these I abstracted the following marks, as characteristics of original poetic genius in general. 1. In the VENUS AND ADONIS, the first and most obvious excellence is the perfect sweetness of the versification; its adaptation to the subject; and the power displayed in varying the march of the words without passing into a loftier and more majestic rhythm than was demanded by the thoughts, or permitted by the propriety of preserving a sense of melody predominant. The delight in richness and sweetness of sound, even to a faulty excess, if it be evidently original, and not the result of an easily imitable mechanism, I regard as a highly favourable promise in the compositions of a young man. The man that hath not music in his soul can indeed never be a genuine poet. Imagery,--(even taken from nature, much more when transplanted from books, as travels, voyages, and works of natural history),--affecting incidents, just thoughts, interesting personal or domestic feelings, and with these the art of their combination or intertexture in the form of a poem,--may all by incessant effort be acquired as a trade, by a man of talent and much reading, who, as I once before observed, has mistaken an intense desire of poetic reputation for a natural poetic genius; the love of the arbitrary end for a possession of the peculiar means. But the sense of musical delight, with the power of producing it, is a gift of imagination; and this together with the power of reducing multitude into unity of effect, and modifying a series of thoughts by some one predominant thought or feeling, may be cultivated and improved, but can never be learned. It is in these that "poeta nascitur non fit." 2. A second promise of genius is the choice of subjects very remote from the private interests and circumstances of the writer himself. At least I have found, that where the subject is taken immediately from the author's personal sensations and experiences, the excellence of a particular poem is but an equivocal mark, and often a fallacious pledge, of genuine poetic power. We may perhaps remember the tale of the statuary, who had acquired considerable reputation for the legs of his goddesses, though the rest of the statue accorded but indifferently with ideal beauty; till his wife, elated by her husband's praises, modestly acknowledged that she had been his constant model. In the VENUS AND ADONIS this proof of poetic power exists even to excess. It is throughout as if a superior spirit more intuitive, more intimately conscious, even than the characters themselves, not only of every outward look and act, but of the flux and reflux of the mind in all its subtlest thoughts and feelings, were placing the whole before our view; himself meanwhile unparticipating in the passions, and actuated only by that pleasurable excitement, which had resulted from the energetic fervour of his own spirit in so vividly exhibiting what it had so accurately and profoundly contemplated. I think, I should have conjectured from these poems, that even then the great instinct, which impelled the poet to the drama, was secretly working in him, prompting him--by a series and never broken chain of imagery, always vivid and, because unbroken, often minute; by the highest effort of the picturesque in words, of which words are capable, higher perhaps than was ever realized by any other poet, even Dante not excepted; to provide a substitute for that visual language, that constant intervention and running comment by tone, look and gesture, which in his dramatic works he was entitled to expect from the players. His Venus and Adonis seem at once the characters themselves, and the whole representation of those characters by the most consummate actors. You seem to be told nothing, but to see and hear everything. Hence it is, from the perpetual activity of attention required on the part of the reader; from the rapid flow, the quick change, and the playful nature of the thoughts and images; and above all from the alienation, and, if I may hazard such an expression, the utter aloofness of the poet's own feelings, from those of which he is at once the painter and the analyst; that though the very subject cannot but detract from the pleasure of a delicate mind, yet never was poem less dangerous on a moral account. Instead of doing as Ariosto, and as, still more offensively, Wieland has done, instead of degrading and deforming passion into appetite, the trials of love into the struggles of concupiscence; Shakespeare has here represented the animal impulse itself, so as to preclude all sympathy with it, by dissipating the reader's notice among the thousand outward images, and now beautiful, now fanciful circumstances, which form its dresses and its scenery; or by diverting our attention from the main subject by those frequent witty or profound reflections, which the poet's ever active mind has deduced from, or connected with, the imagery and the incidents. The reader is forced into too much action to sympathize with the merely passive of our nature. As little can a mind thus roused and awakened be brooded on by mean and indistinct emotion, as the low, lazy mist can creep upon the surface of a lake, while a strong gale is driving it onward in waves and billows. 3. It has been before observed that images, however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words, do not of themselves characterize the poet. They become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion; or by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion; or when they have the effect of reducing multitude to unity, or succession to an instant; or lastly, when a human and intellectual life is transferred to them from the poet's own spirit, Which shoots its being through earth, sea, and air. In the two following lines for instance, there is nothing objectionable, nothing which would preclude them from forming, in their proper place, part of a descriptive poem: Behold yon row of pines, that shorn and bow'd Bend from the sea-blast, seen at twilight eve. But with a small alteration of rhythm, the same words would be equally in their place in a book of topography, or in a descriptive tour. The same image will rise into semblance of poetry if thus conveyed: Yon row of bleak and visionary pines, By twilight glimpse discerned, mark! how they flee From the fierce sea-blast, all their tresses wild Streaming before them. I have given this as an illustration, by no means as an instance, of that particular excellence which I had in view, and in which Shakespeare even in his earliest, as in his latest, works surpasses all other poets. It is by this, that he still gives a dignity and a passion to the objects which he presents. Unaided by any previous excitement, they burst upon us at once in life and in power,-- "Full many a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye." "Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to come-- * * * * * * * * * * * * The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured, And the sad augurs mock their own presage; Incertainties now crown themselves assur'd, And Peace proclaims olives of endless age. Now with the drops of this most balmy time My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes, Since spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme, While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes. And thou in this shalt find thy monument, When tyrants' crests, and tombs of brass are spent." As of higher worth, so doubtless still more characteristic of poetic genius does the imagery become, when it moulds and colours itself to the circumstances, passion, or character, present and foremost in the mind. For unrivalled instances of this excellence, the reader's own memory will refer him to the LEAR, OTHELLO, in short to which not of the "great, ever living, dead man's" dramatic works? Inopem em copia fecit. How true it is to nature, he has himself finely expressed in the instance of love in his 98th Sonnet. From you have I been absent in the spring, When proud-pied April drest in all its trim, Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing; That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him. Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell Of different flowers in odour and in hue, Could make me any summer's story tell, Or from their proud lap pluck them, where they grew Nor did I wonder at the lilies white, Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose; They were, tho' sweet, but figures of delight, Drawn after you, you pattern of all those. Yet seem'd it winter still, and, you away, As with your shadow, I with these did play!" Scarcely less sure, or if a less valuable, not less indispensable mark Gonimon men poiaetou------ ------hostis rhaema gennaion lakoi, will the imagery supply, when, with more than the power of the painter, the poet gives us the liveliest image of succession with the feeling of simultaneousness:-- With this, he breaketh from the sweet embrace Of those fair arms, which bound him to her breast, And homeward through the dark laund runs apace;-- * * * * * * Look! how a bright star shooteth from the sky, So glides he in the night from Venus' eye. 4. The last character I shall mention, which would prove indeed but little, except as taken conjointly with the former;--yet without which the former could scarce exist in a high degree, and (even if this were possible) would give promises only of transitory flashes and a meteoric power;--is depth, and energy of thought. No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language. In Shakespeare's poems the creative power and the intellectual energy wrestle as in a war embrace. Each in its excess of strength seems to threaten the extinction of the other. At length in the drama they were reconciled, and fought each with its shield before the breast of the other. Or like two rapid streams, that, at their first meeting within narrow and rocky banks, mutually strive to repel each other and intermix reluctantly and in tumult; but soon finding a wider channel and more yielding shores blend, and dilate, and flow on in one current and with one voice. The VENUS AND ADONIS did not perhaps allow the display of the deeper passions. But the story of Lucretia seems to favour and even demand their intensest workings. And yet we find in Shakespeare's management of the tale neither pathos, nor any other dramatic quality. There is the same minute and faithful imagery as in the former poem, in the same vivid colours, inspirited by the same impetuous vigour of thought, and diverging and contracting with the same activity of the assimilative and of the modifying faculties; and with a yet larger display, a yet wider range of knowledge and reflection; and lastly, with the same perfect dominion, often domination, over the whole world of language. What then shall we say? even this; that Shakespeare, no mere child of nature; no automaton of genius; no passive vehicle of inspiration, possessed by the spirit, not possessing it; first studied patiently, meditated deeply, understood minutely, till knowledge, become habitual and intuitive, wedded itself to his habitual feelings, and at length gave birth to that stupendous power, by which he stands alone, with no equal or second in his own class; to that power which seated him on one of the two glory-smitten summits of the poetic mountain, with Milton as his compeer not rival. While the former darts himself forth, and passes into all the forms of human character and passion, the one Proteus of the fire and the flood; the other attracts all forms and things to himself, into the unity of his own ideal. All things and modes of action shape themselves anew in the being of Milton; while Shakespeare becomes all things, yet for ever remaining himself. O what great men hast thou not produced, England, my country!--Truly indeed-- We must be free or die, who speak the tongue, Which Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold, Which Milton held. In everything we are sprung Of earth's first blood, have titles manifold. CHAPTER XVI Striking points of difference between the Poets of the present age and those of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries--Wish expressed for the union of the characteristic merits of both. Christendom, from its first settlement on feudal rights, has been so far one great body, however imperfectly organized, that a similar spirit will be found in each period to have been acting in all its members. The study of Shakespeare's poems--(I do not include his dramatic works, eminently as they too deserve that title)--led me to a more careful examination of the contemporary poets both in England and in other countries. But my attention was especially fixed on those of Italy, from the birth to the death of Shakespeare; that being the country in which the fine arts had been most sedulously, and hitherto most successfully cultivated. Abstracted from the degrees and peculiarities of individual genius, the properties common to the good writers of each period seem to establish one striking point of difference between the poetry of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and that of the present age. The remark may perhaps be extended to the sister art of painting. At least the latter will serve to illustrate the former. In the present age the poet--(I would wish to be understood as speaking generally, and without allusion to individual names)--seems to propose to himself as his main object, and as that which is the most characteristic of his art, new and striking images; with incidents that interest the affections or excite the curiosity. Both his characters and his descriptions he renders, as much as possible, specific and individual, even to a degree of portraiture. In his diction and metre, on the other hand, he is comparatively careless. The measure is either constructed on no previous system, and acknowledges no justifying principle but that of the writer's convenience; or else some mechanical movement is adopted, of which one couplet or stanza is so far an adequate specimen, as that the occasional differences appear evidently to arise from accident, or the qualities of the language itself, not from meditation and an intelligent purpose. And the language from Pope's translation of Homer, to Darwin's Temple of Nature [62], may, notwithstanding some illustrious exceptions, be too faithfully characterized, as claiming to be poetical for no better reason, than that it would be intolerable in conversation or in prose. Though alas! even our prose writings, nay even the style of our more set discourses, strive to be in the fashion, and trick themselves out in the soiled and over-worn finery of the meretricious muse. It is true that of late a great improvement in this respect is observable in our most popular writers. But it is equally true, that this recurrence to plain sense and genuine mother English is far from being general; and that the composition of our novels, magazines, public harangues, and the like is commonly as trivial in thought, and yet enigmatic in expression, as if Echo and Sphinx had laid their heads together to construct it. Nay, even of those who have most rescued themselves from this contagion, I should plead inwardly guilty to the charge of duplicity or cowardice, if I withheld my conviction, that few have guarded the purity of their native tongue with that jealous care, which the sublime Dante in his tract De la volgare Eloquenza, declares to be the first duty of a poet. For language is the armoury of the human mind; and at once contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future conquests. Animadverte, says Hobbes, quam sit ab improprietate verborum pronum hominihus prolabi in errores circa ipsas res! Sat [vero], says Sennertus, in hac vitae brevitate et naturae obscuritate, rerum est, quibus cognoscendis tempus impendatur, ut [confusis et multivotis] sermonibus intelligendis illud consumere opus non sit. [Eheu! quantas strages paravere verba nubila, quae tot dicunt ut nihil dicunt;--nubes potius, e quibus et in rebus politicis et in ecclesia turbines et tonitrua erumpunt!] Et proinde recte dictum putamus a Platone in Gorgia: os an ta onomata eidei, eisetai kai ta pragmata: et ab Epicteto, archae paideuseos hae ton onomaton episkepsis: et prudentissime Galenus scribit, hae ton onomaton chraesis tarachtheisa kai taen ton pragmaton epitarattei gnosin. Egregie vero J. C. Scaliger, in Lib. I. de Plantis: Est primum, inquit, sapientis officium, bene sentire, ut sibi vivat: proximum, bene loqui, ut patriae vivat. Something analogous to the materials and structure of modern poetry I seem to have noticed--(but here I beg to be understood as speaking with the utmost diffidence)--in our common landscape painters. Their foregrounds and intermediate distances are comparatively unattractive: while the main interest of the landscape is thrown into the background, where mountains and torrents and castles forbid the eye to proceed, and nothing tempts it to trace its way back again. But in the works of the great Italian and Flemish masters, the front and middle objects of the landscape are the most obvious and determinate, the interest gradually dies away in the background, and the charm and peculiar worth of the picture consists, not so much in the specific objects which it conveys to the understanding in a visual language formed by the substitution of figures for words, as in the beauty and harmony of the colours, lines, and expression, with which the objects are represented. Hence novelty of subject was rather avoided than sought for. Superior excellence in the manner of treating the same subjects was the trial and test of the artist's merit. Not otherwise is it with the more polished poets of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, especially those of Italy. The imagery is almost always general: sun, moon, flowers, breezes, murmuring streams, warbling songsters, delicious shades, lovely damsels cruel as fair, nymphs, naiads, and goddesses, are the materials which are common to all, and which each shaped and arranged according to his judgment or fancy, little solicitous to add or to particularize. If we make an honourable exception in favour of some English poets, the thoughts too are as little novel as the images; and the fable of their narrative poems, for the most part drawn from mythology, or sources of equal notoriety, derive their chief attractions from the manner of treating them; from impassioned flow, or picturesque arrangement. In opposition to the present age, and perhaps in as faulty an extreme, they placed the essence of poetry in the art. The excellence, at which they aimed, consisted in the exquisite polish of the diction, combined with perfect simplicity. This their prime object they attained by the avoidance of every word, which a gentleman would not use in dignified conversation, and of every word and phrase, which none but a learned man would use; by the studied position of words and phrases, so that not only each part should be melodious in itself, but contribute to the harmony of the whole, each note referring and conducting to the melody of all the foregoing and following words of the same period or stanza; and lastly with equal labour, the greater because unbetrayed, by the variation and various harmonies of their metrical movement. Their measures, however, were not indebted for their variety to the introduction of new metres, such as have been attempted of late in the Alonzo and Imogen, and others borrowed from the German, having in their very mechanism a specific overpowering tune, to which the generous reader humours his voice and emphasis, with more indulgence to the author than attention to the meaning or quantity of the words; but which, to an ear familiar with the numerous sounds of the Greek and Roman poets, has an effect not unlike that of galloping over a paved road in a German stage-waggon without springs. On the contrary, the elder bards both of Italy and England produced a far greater as well as more charming variety by countless modifications, and subtle balances of sound in the common metres of their country. A lasting and enviable reputation awaits that man of genius, who should attempt and realize a union;--who should recall the high finish, the appropriateness, the facility, the delicate proportion, and above all, the perfusive and omnipresent grace, which have preserved, as in a shrine of precious amber, the Sparrow of Catullus, the Swallow, the Grasshopper, and all the other little loves of Anacreon; and which, with bright, though diminished glories, revisited the youth and early manhood of Christian Europe, in the vales of [63] Arno, and the groves of Isis and of Cam; and who with these should combine the keener interest, deeper pathos, manlier reflection, and the fresher and more various imagery, which give a value and a name that will not pass away to the poets who have done honour to our own times, and to those of our immediate predecessors. CHAPTER XVII Examination of the tenets peculiar to Mr. Wordsworth--Rustic life (above all, low and rustic life) especially unfavourable to the formation of a human diction--The best parts of language the product of philosophers, not of clowns or shepherds--Poetry essentially ideal and generic--The language of Milton as much the language of real life, yea, incomparably more so than that of the cottager. As far then as Mr. Wordsworth in his preface contended, and most ably contended, for a reformation in our poetic diction, as far as he has evinced the truth of passion, and the dramatic propriety of those figures and metaphors in the original poets, which, stripped of their justifying reasons, and converted into mere artifices of connection or ornament, constitute the characteristic falsity in the poetic style of the moderns; and as far as he has, with equal acuteness and clearness, pointed out the process by which this change was effected, and the resemblances between that state into which the reader's mind is thrown by the pleasurable confusion of thought from an unaccustomed train of words and images; and that state which is induced by the natural language of impassioned feeling; he undertook a useful task, and deserves all praise, both for the attempt and for the execution. The provocations to this remonstrance in behalf of truth and nature were still of perpetual recurrence before and after the publication of this preface. I cannot likewise but add, that the comparison of such poems of merit, as have been given to the public within the last ten or twelve years, with the majority of those produced previously to the appearance of that preface, leave no doubt on my mind, that Mr. Wordsworth is fully justified in believing his efforts to have been by no means ineffectual. Not only in the verses of those who have professed their admiration of his genius, but even of those who have distinguished themselves by hostility to his theory, and depreciation of his writings, are the impressions of his principles plainly visible. It is possible, that with these principles others may have been blended, which are not equally evident; and some which are unsteady and subvertible from the narrowness or imperfection of their basis. But it is more than possible, that these errors of defect or exaggeration, by kindling and feeding the controversy, may have conduced not only to the wider propagation of the accompanying truths, but that, by their frequent presentation to the mind in an excited state, they may have won for them a more permanent and practical result. A man will borrow a part from his opponent the more easily, if he feels himself justified in continuing to reject a part. While there remain important points in which he can still feel himself in the right, in which he still finds firm footing for continued resistance, he will gradually adopt those opinions, which were the least remote from his own convictions, as not less congruous with his own theory than with that which he reprobates. In like manner with a kind of instinctive prudence, he will abandon by little and little his weakest posts, till at length he seems to forget that they had ever belonged to him, or affects to consider them at most as accidental and "petty annexments," the removal of which leaves the citadel unhurt and unendangered. My own differences from certain supposed parts of Mr. Wordsworth's theory ground themselves on the assumption, that his words had been rightly interpreted, as purporting that the proper diction for poetry in general consists altogether in a language taken, with due exceptions, from the mouths of men in real life, a language which actually constitutes the natural conversation of men under the influence of natural feelings. My objection is, first, that in any sense this rule is applicable only to certain classes of poetry; secondly, that even to these classes it is not applicable, except in such a sense, as hath never by any one (as far as I know or have read,) been denied or doubted; and lastly, that as far as, and in that degree in which it is practicable, it is yet as a rule useless, if not injurious, and therefore either need not, or ought not to be practised. The poet informs his reader, that he had generally chosen low and rustic life; but not as low and rustic, or in order to repeat that pleasure of doubtful moral effect, which persons of elevated rank and of superior refinement oftentimes derive from a happy imitation of the rude unpolished manners and discourse of their inferiors. For the pleasure so derived may be traced to three exciting causes. The first is the naturalness, in fact, of the things represented. The second is the apparent naturalness of the representation, as raised and qualified by an imperceptible infusion of the author's own knowledge and talent, which infusion does, indeed, constitute it an imitation as distinguished from a mere copy. The third cause may be found in the reader's conscious feeling of his superiority awakened by the contrast presented to him; even as for the same purpose the kings and great barons of yore retained, sometimes actual clowns and fools, but more frequently shrewd and witty fellows in that character. These, however, were not Mr. Wordsworth's objects. He chose low and rustic life, "because in that condition the essential passions of the heart find a better soil, in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater simplicity, and consequently may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings; and from the necessary character of rural occupations are more easily comprehended, and are more durable; and lastly, because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature." Now it is clear to me, that in the most interesting of the poems, in which the author is more or less dramatic, as THE BROTHERS, MICHAEL, RUTH, THE MAD MOTHER, and others, the persons introduced are by no means taken from low or rustic life in the common acceptation of those words! and it is not less clear, that the sentiments and language, as far as they can be conceived to have been really transferred from the minds and conversation of such persons, are attributable to causes and circumstances not necessarily connected with "their occupations and abode." The thoughts, feelings, language, and manners of the shepherd- farmers in the vales of Cumberland and Westmoreland, as far as they are actually adopted in those poems, may be accounted for from causes, which will and do produce the same results in every state of life, whether in town or country. As the two principal I rank that independence, which raises a man above servitude, or daily toil for the profit of others, yet not above the necessity of industry and a frugal simplicity of domestic life; and the accompanying unambitious, but solid and religious, education, which has rendered few books familiar, but the Bible, and the Liturgy or Hymn book. To this latter cause, indeed, which is so far accidental, that it is the blessing of particular countries and a particular age, not the product of particular places or employments, the poet owes the show of probability, that his personages might really feel, think, and talk with any tolerable resemblance to his representation. It is an excellent remark of Dr. Henry More's, that "a man of confined education, but of good parts, by constant reading of the Bible will naturally form a more winning and commanding rhetoric than those that are learned: the intermixture of tongues and of artificial phrases debasing their style." It is, moreover, to be considered that to the formation of healthy feelings, and a reflecting mind, negations involve impediments not less formidable than sophistication and vicious intermixture. I am convinced, that for the human soul to prosper in rustic life a certain vantage-ground is prerequisite. It is not every man that is likely to be improved by a country life or by country labours. Education, or original sensibility, or both, must pre-exist, if the changes, forms, and incidents of nature are to prove a sufficient stimulant. And where these are not sufficient, the mind contracts and hardens by want of stimulants: and the man becomes selfish, sensual, gross, and hard- hearted. Let the management of the Poor Laws in Liverpool, Manchester, or Bristol be compared with the ordinary dispensation of the poor rates in agricultural villages, where the farmers are the overseers and guardians of the poor. If my own experience have not been particularly unfortunate, as well as that of the many respectable country clergymen with whom I have conversed on the subject, the result would engender more than scepticism concerning the desirable influences of low and rustic life in and for itself. Whatever may be concluded on the other side, from the stronger local attachments and enterprising spirit of the Swiss, and other mountaineers, applies to a particular mode of pastoral life, under forms of property that permit and beget manners truly republican, not to rustic life in general, or to the absence of artificial cultivation. On the contrary the mountaineers, whose manners have been so often eulogized, are in general better educated and greater readers than men of equal rank elsewhere. But where this is not the case, as among the peasantry of North Wales, the ancient mountains, with all their terrors and all their glories, are pictures to the blind, and music to the deaf. I should not have entered so much into detail upon this passage, but here seems to be the point, to which all the lines of difference converge as to their source and centre;--I mean, as far as, and in whatever respect, my poetic creed does differ from the doctrines promulgated in this preface. I adopt with full faith, the principle of Aristotle, that poetry, as poetry, is essentially ideal, that it avoids and excludes all accident; that its apparent individualities of rank, character, or occupation must be representative of a class; and that the persons of poetry must be clothed with generic attributes, with the common attributes of the class: not with such as one gifted individual might possibly possess, but such as from his situation it is most probable before-hand that he would possess. If my premises are right and my deductions legitimate, it follows that there can be no poetic medium between the swains of Theocritus and those of an imaginary golden age. The characters of the vicar and the shepherd-mariner in the poem of THE BROTHERS, and that of the shepherd of Green-head Ghyll in the MICHAEL, have all the verisimilitude and representative quality, that the purposes of poetry can require. They are persons of a known and abiding class, and their manners and sentiments the natural product of circumstances common to the class. Take Michael for instance: An old man stout of heart, and strong of limb. His bodily frame had been from youth to age Of an unusual strength: his mind was keen, Intense, and frugal, apt for all affairs, And in his shepherd's calling he was prompt And watchful more than ordinary men. Hence he had learned the meaning of all winds, Of blasts of every tone; and oftentimes When others heeded not, He heard the South Make subterraneous music, like the noise Of bagpipers on distant Highland hills. The Shepherd, at such warning, of his flock Bethought him, and he to himself would say, `The winds are now devising work for me!' And truly, at all times, the storm, that drives The traveller to a shelter, summoned him Up to the mountains: he had been alone Amid the heart of many thousand mists, That came to him and left him on the heights. So lived he, until his eightieth year was past. And grossly that man errs, who should suppose That the green valleys, and the streams and rocks, Were things indifferent to the Shepherd's thoughts. Fields, where with cheerful spirits he had breathed The common air; the hills, which he so oft Had climbed with vigorous steps; which had impressed So many incidents upon his mind Of hardship, skill or courage, joy or fear; Which, like a book, preserved the memory Of the dumb animals, whom he had saved, Had fed or sheltered, linking to such acts, So grateful in themselves, the certainty Of honourable gain; these fields, these hills Which were his living Being, even more Than his own blood--what could they less? had laid Strong hold on his affections, were to him A pleasurable feeling of blind love, The pleasure which there is in life itself. On the other hand, in the poems which are pitched in a lower key, as the HARRY GILL, and THE IDIOT BOY, the feelings are those of human nature in general; though the poet has judiciously laid the scene in the country, in order to place himself in the vicinity of interesting images, without the necessity of ascribing a sentimental perception of their beauty to the persons of his drama. In THE IDIOT BOY, indeed, the mother's character is not so much the real and native product of a "situation where the essential passions of the heart find a better soil, in which they can attain their maturity and speak a plainer and more emphatic language," as it is an impersonation of an instinct abandoned by judgment. Hence the two following charges seem to me not wholly groundless: at least, they are the only plausible objections, which I have heard to that fine poem. The one is, that the author has not, in the poem itself, taken sufficient care to preclude from the reader's fancy the disgusting images of ordinary morbid idiocy, which yet it was by no means his intention to represent. He was even by the "burr, burr, burr," uncounteracted by any preceding description of the boy's beauty, assisted in recalling them. The other is, that the idiocy of the boy is so evenly balanced by the folly of the mother, as to present to the general reader rather a laughable burlesque on the blindness of anile dotage, than an analytic display of maternal affection in its ordinary workings. In THE THORN, the poet himself acknowledges in a note the necessity of an introductory poem, in which he should have portrayed the character of the person from whom the words of the poem are supposed to proceed: a superstitious man moderately imaginative, of slow faculties and deep feelings, "a captain of a small trading vessel, for example, who, being past the middle age of life, had retired upon an annuity, or small independent income, to some village or country town of which he was not a native, or in which he had not been accustomed to live. Such men having nothing to do become credulous and talkative from indolence." But in a poem, still more in a lyric poem--and the Nurse in ROMEO AND JULIET alone prevents me from extending the remark even to dramatic poetry, if indeed even the Nurse can be deemed altogether a case in point--it is not possible to imitate truly a dull and garrulous discourser, without repeating the effects of dullness and garrulity. However this may be, I dare assert, that the parts--(and these form the far larger portion of the whole)--which might as well or still better have proceeded from the poet's own imagination, and have been spoken in his own character, are those which have given, and which will continue to give, universal delight; and that the passages exclusively appropriate to the supposed narrator, such as the last couplet of the third stanza [64]; the seven last lines of the tenth [65]; and the five following stanzas, with the exception of the four admirable lines at the commencement of the fourteenth, are felt by many unprejudiced and unsophisticated hearts, as sudden and unpleasant sinkings from the height to which the poet had previously lifted them, and to which he again re-elevates both himself and his reader. If then I am compelled to doubt the theory, by which the choice of characters was to be directed, not only a priori, from grounds of reason, but both from the few instances in which the poet himself need be supposed to have been governed by it, and from the comparative inferiority of those instances; still more must I hesitate in my assent to the sentence which immediately follows the former citation; and which I can neither admit as particular fact, nor as general rule. "The language, too, of these men has been adopted (purified indeed from what appear to be its real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust) because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived; and because, from their rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the action of social vanity, they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions." To this I reply; that a rustic's language, purified from all provincialism and grossness, and so far reconstructed as to be made consistent with the rules of grammar--(which are in essence no other than the laws of universal logic, applied to psychological materials)--will not differ from the language of any other man of common sense, however learned or refined he may be, except as far as the notions, which the rustic has to convey, are fewer and more indiscriminate. This will become still clearer, if we add the consideration--(equally important though less obvious)--that the rustic, from the more imperfect development of his faculties, and from the lower state of their cultivation, aims almost solely to convey insulated facts, either those of his scanty experience or his traditional belief; while the educated man chiefly seeks to discover and express those connections of things, or those relative bearings of fact to fact, from which some more or less general law is deducible. For facts are valuable to a wise man, chiefly as they lead to the discovery of the indwelling law, which is the true being of things, the sole solution of their modes of existence, and in the knowledge of which consists our dignity and our power. As little can I agree with the assertion, that from the objects with which the rustic hourly communicates the best part of language is formed. For first, if to communicate with an object implies such an acquaintance with it, as renders it capable of being discriminately reflected on, the distinct knowledge of an uneducated rustic would furnish a very scanty vocabulary. The few things and modes of action requisite for his bodily conveniences would alone be individualized; while all the rest of nature would be expressed by a small number of confused general terms. Secondly, I deny that the words and combinations of words derived from the objects, with which the rustic is familiar, whether with distinct or confused knowledge, can be justly said to form the best part of language. It is more than probable, that many classes of the brute creation possess discriminating sounds, by which they can convey to each other notices of such objects as concern their food, shelter, or safety. Yet we hesitate to call the aggregate of such sounds a language, otherwise than metaphorically. The best part of human language, properly so called, is derived from reflection on the acts of the mind itself. It is formed by a voluntary appropriation of fixed symbols to internal acts, to processes and results of imagination, the greater part of which have no place in the consciousness of uneducated man; though in civilized society, by imitation and passive remembrance of what they hear from their religious instructors and other superiors, the most uneducated share in the harvest which they neither sowed, nor reaped. If the history of the phrases in hourly currency among our peasants were traced, a person not previously aware of the fact would be surprised at finding so large a number, which three or four centuries ago were the exclusive property of the universities and the schools; and, at the commencement of the Reformation, had been transferred from the school to the pulpit, and thus gradually passed into common life. The extreme difficulty, and often the impossibility, of finding words for the simplest moral and intellectual processes of the languages of uncivilized tribes has proved perhaps the weightiest obstacle to the progress of our most zealous and adroit missionaries. Yet these tribes are surrounded by the same nature as our peasants are; but in still more impressive forms; and they are, moreover, obliged to particularize many more of them. When, therefore, Mr. Wordsworth adds, "accordingly, such a language"--(meaning, as before, the language of rustic life purified from provincialism)--"arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and a far more philosophical language, than that which is frequently substituted for it by Poets, who think that they are conferring honour upon themselves and their art in proportion as they indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression;" it may be answered, that the language, which he has in view, can be attributed to rustics with no greater right, than the style of Hooker or Bacon to Tom Brown or Sir Roger L'Estrange. Doubtless, if what is peculiar to each were omitted in each, the result must needs be the same. Further, that the poet, who uses an illogical diction, or a style fitted to excite only the low and changeable pleasure of wonder by means of groundless novelty, substitutes a language of folly and vanity, not for that of the rustic, but for that of good sense and natural feeling. Here let me be permitted to remind the reader, that the positions, which I controvert, are contained in the sentences--"a selection of the real language of men;"--"the language of these men" (that is, men in low and rustic life) "has been adopted; I have proposed to myself to imitate, and, as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men." "Between the language of prose and that of metrical composition, there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference:" it is against these exclusively that my opposition is directed. I object, in the very first instance, to an equivocation in the use of the word "real." Every man's language varies, according to the extent of his knowledge, the activity of his faculties, and the depth or quickness of his feelings. Every man's language has, first, its individualities; secondly, the common properties of the class to which he belongs; and thirdly, words and phrases of universal use. The language of Hooker, Bacon, Bishop Taylor, and Burke differs from the common language of the learned class only by the superior number and novelty of the thoughts and relations which they had to convey. The language of Algernon Sidney differs not at all from that, which every well-educated gentleman would wish to write, and (with due allowances for the undeliberateness, and less connected train, of thinking natural and proper to conversation) such as he would wish to talk. Neither one nor the other differ half as much from the general language of cultivated society, as the language of Mr. Wordsworth's homeliest composition differs from that of a common peasant. For "real" therefore, we must substitute ordinary, or lingua communis. And this, we have proved, is no more to be found in the phraseology of low and rustic life than in that of any other class. Omit the peculiarities of each and the result of course must be common to all. And assuredly the omissions and changes to be made in the language of rustics, before it could be transferred to any species of poem, except the drama or other professed imitation, are at least as numerous and weighty, as would be required in adapting to the same purpose the ordinary language of tradesmen and manufacturers. Not to mention, that the language so highly extolled by Mr. Wordsworth varies in every county, nay in every village, according to the accidental character of the clergyman, the existence or non-existence of schools; or even, perhaps, as the exciteman, publican, and barber happen to be, or not to be, zealous politicians, and readers of the weekly newspaper pro bono publico. Anterior to cultivation the lingua communis of every country, as Dante has well observed, exists every where in parts, and no where as a whole. Neither is the case rendered at all more tenable by the addition of the words, "in a state of excitement." For the nature of a man's words, where he is strongly affected by joy, grief, or anger, must necessarily depend on the number and quality of the general truths, conceptions and images, and of the words expressing them, with which his mind had been previously stored. For the property of passion is not to create; but to set in increased activity. At least, whatever new connections of thoughts or images, or--(which is equally, if not more than equally, the appropriate effect of strong excitement)--whatever generalizations of truth or experience the heat of passion may produce; yet the terms of their conveyance must have pre-existed in his former conversations, and are only collected and crowded together by the unusual stimulation. It is indeed very possible to adopt in a poem the unmeaning repetitions, habitual phrases, and other blank counters, which an unfurnished or confused understanding interposes at short intervals, in order to keep hold of his subject, which is still slipping from him, and to give him time for recollection; or, in mere aid of vacancy, as in the scanty companies of a country stage the same player pops backwards and forwards, in order to prevent the appearance of empty spaces, in the procession of Macbeth, or Henry VIII. But what assistance to the poet, or ornament to the poem, these can supply, I am at a loss to conjecture. Nothing assuredly can differ either in origin or in mode more widely from the apparent tautologies of intense and turbulent feeling, in which the passion is greater and of longer endurance than to be exhausted or satisfied by a single representation of the image or incident exciting it. Such repetitions I admit to be a beauty of the highest kind; as illustrated by Mr. Wordsworth himself from the song of Deborah. At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at her feet he bowed, he fell: where he bowed, there he fell down dead. Judges v. 27. CHAPTER XVIII Language of metrical composition, why and wherein essentially different from that of prose--Origin and elements of metre--Its necessary consequences, and the conditions thereby imposed on the metrical writer in the choice of his diction. I conclude, therefore, that the attempt is impracticable; and that, were it not impracticable, it would still be useless. For the very power of making the selection implies the previous possession of the language selected. Or where can the poet have lived? And by what rules could he direct his choice, which would not have enabled him to select and arrange his words by the light of his own judgment? We do not adopt the language of a class by the mere adoption of such words exclusively, as that class would use, or at least understand; but likewise by following the order, in which the words of such men are wont to succeed each other. Now this order, in the intercourse of uneducated men, is distinguished from the diction of their superiors in knowledge and power, by the greater disjunction and separation in the component parts of that, whatever it be, which they wish to communicate. There is a want of that prospectiveness of mind, that surview, which enables a man to foresee the whole of what he is to convey, appertaining to any one point; and by this means so to subordinate and arrange the different parts according to their relative importance, as to convey it at once, and as an organized whole. Now I will take the first stanza, on which I have chanced to open, in the Lyrical Ballads. It is one the most simple and the least peculiar in its language. "In distant countries have I been, And yet I have not often seen A healthy man, a man full grown, Weep in the public roads, alone. But such a one, on English ground, And in the broad highway, I met; Along the broad highway he came, His cheeks with tears were wet Sturdy he seemed, though he was sad; And in his arms a lamb he had." The words here are doubtless such as are current in all ranks of life; and of course not less so in the hamlet and cottage than in the shop, manufactory, college, or palace. But is this the order, in which the rustic would have placed the words? I am grievously deceived, if the following less compact mode of commencing the same tale be not a far more faithful copy. "I have been in a many parts, far and near, and I don't know that I ever saw before a man crying by himself in the public road; a grown man I mean, that was neither sick nor hurt," etc., etc. But when I turn to the following stanza in The Thorn: "At all times of the day and night This wretched woman thither goes; And she is known to every star, And every wind that blows And there, beside the Thorn, she sits, When the blue day-light's in the skies, And when the whirlwind's on the hill, Or frosty air is keen and still, And to herself she cries, Oh misery! Oh misery! Oh woe is me! Oh misery!" and compare this with the language of ordinary men; or with that which I can conceive at all likely to proceed, in real life, from such a narrator, as is supposed in the note to the poem; compare it either in the succession of the images or of the sentences; I am reminded of the sublime prayer and hymn of praise, which Milton, in opposition to an established liturgy, presents as a fair specimen of common extemporary devotion, and such as we might expect to hear from every self-inspired minister of a conventicle! And I reflect with delight, how little a mere theory, though of his own workmanship, interferes with the processes of genuine imagination in a man of true poetic genius, who possesses, as Mr. Wordsworth, if ever man did, most assuredly does possess, "The Vision and the Faculty divine." One point then alone remains, but that the most important; its examination having been, indeed, my chief inducement for the preceding inquisition. "There neither is nor can be any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition." Such is Mr. Wordsworth's assertion. Now prose itself, at least in all argumentative and consecutive works, differs, and ought to differ, from the language of conversation; even as [66] reading ought to differ from talking. Unless therefore the difference denied be that of the mere words, as materials common to all styles of writing, and not of the style itself in the universally admitted sense of the term, it might be naturally presumed that there must exist a still greater between the ordonnance of poetic composition and that of prose, than is expected to distinguish prose from ordinary conversation. There are not, indeed, examples wanting in the history of literature, of apparent paradoxes that have summoned the public wonder as new and startling truths, but which, on examination, have shrunk into tame and harmless truisms; as the eyes of a cat, seen in the dark, have been mistaken for flames of fire. But Mr. Wordsworth is among the last men, to whom a delusion of this kind would be attributed by anyone, who had enjoyed the slightest opportunity of understanding his mind and character. Where an objection has been anticipated by such an author as natural, his answer to it must needs be interpreted in some sense which either is, or has been, or is capable of being controverted. My object then must be to discover some other meaning for the term "essential difference" in this place, exclusive of the indistinction and community of the words themselves. For whether there ought to exist a class of words in the English, in any degree resembling the poetic dialect of the Greek and Italian, is a question of very subordinate importance. The number of such words would be small indeed, in our language; and even in the Italian and Greek, they consist not so much of different words, as of slight differences in the forms of declining and conjugating the same words; forms, doubtless, which having been, at some period more or less remote, the common grammatic flexions of some tribe or province, had been accidentally appropriated to poetry by the general admiration of certain master intellects, the first established lights of inspiration, to whom that dialect happened to be native. Essence, in its primary signification, means the principle of individuation, the inmost principle of the possibility of any thing, as that particular thing. It is equivalent to the idea of a thing, whenever we use the word, idea, with philosophic precision. Existence, on the other hand, is distinguished from essence, by the superinduction of reality. Thus we speak of the essence, and essential properties of a circle; but we do not therefore assert, that any thing, which really exists, is mathematically circular. Thus too, without any tautology we contend for the existence of the Supreme Being; that is, for a reality correspondent to the idea. There is, next, a secondary use of the word essence, in which it signifies the point or ground of contra-distinction between two modifications of the same substance or subject. Thus we should be allowed to say, that the style of architecture of Westminster Abbey is essentially different from that of St. Paul, even though both had been built with blocks cut into the same form, and from the same quarry. Only in this latter sense of the term must it have been denied by Mr. Wordsworth (for in this sense alone is it affirmed by the general opinion) that the language of poetry (that is the formal construction, or architecture, of the words and phrases) is essentially different from that of prose. Now the burden of the proof lies with the oppugner, not with the supporters of the common belief. Mr. Wordsworth, in consequence, assigns as the proof of his position, "that not only the language of a large portion of every good poem, even of the most elevated character, must necessarily, except with reference to the metre, in no respect differ from that of good prose, but likewise that some of the most interesting parts of the best poems will be found to be strictly the language of prose, when prose is well written. The truth of this assertion might be demonstrated by innumerable passages from almost all the poetical writings, even of Milton himself." He then quotes Gray's sonnet-- "In vain to me the smiling mornings shine, And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire; The birds in vain their amorous descant join, Or cheerful fields resume their green attire. These ears, alas! for other notes repine; _A different object do these eyes require; My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine; And in my breast the imperfect joys expire._ Yet morning smiles the busy race to cheer, And new-born pleasure brings to happier men; The fields to all their wonted tribute bear; To warm their little loves the birds complain: _I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear, And weep the more, because I weep in vain."_ and adds the following remark:--"It will easily be perceived, that the only part of this Sonnet which is of any value, is the lines printed in italics; it is equally obvious, that, except in the rhyme, and in the use of the single word `fruitless' for fruitlessly, which is so far a defect, the language of these lines does in no respect differ from that of prose." An idealist defending his system by the fact, that when asleep we often believe ourselves awake, was well answered by his plain neighbour, "Ah, but when awake do we ever believe ourselves asleep?" Things identical must be convertible. The preceding passage seems to rest on a similar sophism. For the question is not, whether there may not occur in prose an order of words, which would be equally proper in a poem; nor whether there are not beautiful lines and sentences of frequent occurrence in good poems, which would be equally becoming as well as beautiful in good prose; for neither the one nor the other has ever been either denied or doubted by any one. The true question must be, whether there are not modes of expression, a construction, and an order of sentences, which are in their fit and natural place in a serious prose composition, but would be disproportionate and heterogeneous in metrical poetry; and, vice versa, whether in the language of a serious poem there may not be an arrangement both of words and sentences, and a use and selection of (what are called) figures of speech, both as to their kind, their frequency, and their occasions, which on a subject of equal weight would be vicious and alien in correct and manly prose. I contend, that in both cases this unfitness of each for the place of the other frequently will and ought to exist. And first from the origin of metre. This I would trace to the balance in the mind effected by that spontaneous effort which strives to hold in check the workings of passion. It might be easily explained likewise in what manner this salutary antagonism is assisted by the very state, which it counteracts; and how this balance of antagonists became organized into metre (in the usual acceptation of that term), by a supervening act of the will and judgment, consciously and for the foreseen purpose of pleasure. Assuming these principles, as the data of our argument, we deduce from them two legitimate conditions, which the critic is entitled to expect in every metrical work. First, that, as the elements of metre owe their existence to a state of increased excitement, so the metre itself should be accompanied by the natural language of excitement. Secondly, that as these elements are formed into metre artificially, by a voluntary act, with the design and for the purpose of blending delight with emotion, so the traces of present volition should throughout the metrical language be proportionately discernible. Now these two conditions must be reconciled and co- present. There must be not only a partnership, but a union; an interpenetration of passion and of will, of spontaneous impulse and of voluntary purpose. Again, this union can be manifested only in a frequency of forms and figures of speech, (originally the offspring of passion, but now the adopted children of power), greater than would be desired or endured, where the emotion is not voluntarily encouraged and kept up for the sake of that pleasure, which such emotion, so tempered and mastered by the will, is found capable of communicating. It not only dictates, but of itself tends to produce a more frequent employment of picturesque and vivifying language, than would be natural in any other case, in which there did not exist, as there does in the present, a previous and well understood, though tacit, compact between the poet and his reader, that the latter is entitled to expect, and the former bound to supply this species and degree of pleasurable excitement. We may in some measure apply to this union the answer of Polixenes, in the Winter's Tale, to Perdita's neglect of the streaked gilliflowers, because she had heard it said, "There is an art, which, in their piedness, shares With great creating nature. POL. Say there be; Yet nature is made better by no mean, But nature makes that mean; so, o'er that art, Which, you say, adds to nature, is an art, That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry A gentler scion to the wildest stock; And make conceive a bark of baser kind By bud of nobler race. This is an art, Which does mend nature,--change it rather; but The art itself is nature." Secondly, I argue from the effects of metre. As far as metre acts in and for itself, it tends to increase the vivacity and susceptibility both of the general feelings and of the attention. This effect it produces by the continued excitement of surprise, and by the quick reciprocations of curiosity still gratified and still re-excited, which are too slight indeed to be at any one moment objects of distinct consciousness, yet become considerable in their aggregate influence. As a medicated atmosphere, or as wine during animated conversation, they act powerfully, though themselves unnoticed. Where, therefore, correspondent food and appropriate matter are not provided for the attention and feelings thus roused there must needs be a disappointment felt; like that of leaping in the dark from the last step of a stair-case, when we had prepared our muscles for a leap of three or four. The discussion on the powers of metre in the preface is highly ingenious and touches at all points on truth. But I cannot find any statement of its powers considered abstractly and separately. On the contrary Mr. Wordsworth seems always to estimate metre by the powers, which it exerts during, (and, as I think, in consequence of) its combination with other elements of poetry. Thus the previous difficulty is left unanswered, what the elements are, with which it must be combined, in order to produce its own effects to any pleasurable purpose. Double and tri-syllable rhymes, indeed, form a lower species of wit, and, attended to exclusively for their own sake, may become a source of momentary amusement; as in poor Smart's distich to the Welsh Squire who had promised him a hare: "Tell me, thou son of great Cadwallader! Hast sent the hare? or hast thou swallow'd her?" But for any poetic purposes, metre resembles, (if the aptness of the simile may excuse its meanness), yeast, worthless or disagreeable by itself, but giving vivacity and spirit to the liquor with which it is proportionally combined. The reference to THE CHILDREN IN THE WOOD by no means satisfies my judgment. We all willingly throw ourselves back for awhile into the feelings of our childhood. This ballad, therefore, we read under such recollections of our own childish feelings, as would equally endear to us poems, which Mr. Wordsworth himself would regard as faulty in the opposite extreme of gaudy and technical ornament. Before the invention of printing, and in a still greater degree, before the introduction of writing, metre, especially alliterative metre, (whether alliterative at the beginning of the words, as in PIERCE PLOUMAN, or at the end, as in rhymes) possessed an independent value as assisting the recollection, and consequently the preservation, of any series of truths or incidents. But I am not convinced by the collation of facts, that THE CHILDREN IN THE WOOD owes either its preservation, or its popularity, to its metrical form. Mr. Marshal's repository affords a number of tales in prose inferior in pathos and general merit, some of as old a date, and many as widely popular. TOM HICKATHRIFT, JACK THE GIANT-KILLER, GOODY TWO-SHOES, and LITTLE RED RIDING-HOOD are formidable rivals. And that they have continued in prose, cannot be fairly explained by the assumption, that the comparative meanness of their thoughts and images precluded even the humblest forms of metre. The scene of GOODY TWO-SHOES in the church is perfectly susceptible of metrical narration; and, among the thaumata thaumastotata even of the present age, I do not recollect a more astonishing image than that of the "whole rookery, that flew out of the giant's beard," scared by the tremendous voice, with which this monster answered the challenge of the heroic TOM HICKATHRIFT! If from these we turn to compositions universally, and independently of all early associations, beloved and admired; would the MARIA, THE MONK, or THE POOR MAN'S ASS of Sterne, be read with more delight, or have a better chance of immortality, had they without any change in the diction been composed in rhyme, than in their present state? If I am not grossly mistaken, the general reply would be in the negative. Nay, I will confess, that, in Mr. Wordsworth's own volumes, the ANECDOTE FOR FATHERS, SIMON LEE, ALICE FELL, BEGGARS, and THE SAILOR'S MOTHER, notwithstanding the beauties which are to be found in each of them where the poet interposes the music of his own thoughts, would have been more delightful to me in prose, told and managed, as by Mr. Wordsworth they would have been, in a moral essay or pedestrian tour. Metre in itself is simply a stimulant of the attention, and therefore excites the question: Why is the attention to be thus stimulated? Now the question cannot be answered by the pleasure of the metre itself; for this we have shown to be conditional, and dependent on the appropriateness of the thoughts and expressions, to which the metrical form is superadded. Neither can I conceive any other answer that can be rationally given, short of this: I write in metre, because I am about to use a language different from that of prose. Besides, where the language is not such, how interesting soever the reflections are, that are capable of being drawn by a philosophic mind from the thoughts or incidents of the poem, the metre itself must often become feeble. Take the last three stanzas of THE SAILOR'S MOTHER, for instance. If I could for a moment abstract from the effect produced on the author's feelings, as a man, by the incident at the time of its real occurrence, I would dare appeal to his own judgment, whether in the metre itself he found a sufficient reason for their being written metrically? And, thus continuing, she said, "I had a Son, who many a day Sailed on the seas; but he is dead; In Denmark he was cast away; And I have travelled far as Hull to see What clothes he might have left, or other property. The Bird and Cage they both were his 'Twas my Son's Bird; and neat and trim He kept it: many voyages This Singing-bird hath gone with him; When last he sailed he left the Bird behind; As it might be, perhaps, from bodings of his mind. He to a Fellow-lodger's care Had left it, to be watched and fed, Till he came back again; and there I found it when my Son was dead; And now, God help me for my little wit! I trail it with me, Sir! he took so much delight in it." If disproportioning the emphasis we read these stanzas so as to make the rhymes perceptible, even tri-syllable rhymes could scarcely produce an equal sense of oddity and strangeness, as we feel here in finding rhymes at all in sentences so exclusively colloquial. I would further ask whether, but for that visionary state, into which the figure of the woman and the susceptibility of his own genius had placed the poet's imagination,--(a state, which spreads its influence and colouring over all, that co-exists with the exciting cause, and in which "The simplest, and the most familiar things Gain a strange power of spreading awe around them,") [67] I would ask the poet whether he would not have felt an abrupt downfall in these verses from the preceding stanza? "The ancient spirit is not dead; Old times, thought I, are breathing there; Proud was I that my country bred Such strength, a dignity so fair: She begged an alms, like one in poor estate; I looked at her again, nor did my pride abate." It must not be omitted, and is besides worthy of notice, that those stanzas furnish the only fair instance that I have been able to discover in all Mr. Wordsworth's writings, of an actual adoption, or true imitation, of the real and very language of low and rustic life, freed from provincialisms. Thirdly, I deduce the position from all the causes elsewhere assigned, which render metre the proper form of poetry, and poetry imperfect and defective without metre. Metre, therefore, having been connected with poetry most often and by a peculiar fitness, whatever else is combined with metre must, though it be not itself essentially poetic, have nevertheless some property in common with poetry, as an intermedium of affinity, a sort, (if I may dare borrow a well-known phrase from technical chemistry), of mordaunt between it and the super-added metre. Now poetry, Mr. Wordsworth truly affirms, does always imply passion: which word must be here understood in its most general sense, as an excited state of the feelings and faculties. And as every passion has its proper pulse, so will it likewise have its characteristic modes of expression. But where there exists that degree of genius and talent which entitles a writer to aim at the honours of a poet, the very act of poetic composition itself is, and is allowed to imply and to produce, an unusual state of excitement, which of course justifies and demands a correspondent difference of language, as truly, though not perhaps in as marked a degree, as the excitement of love, fear, rage, or jealousy. The vividness of the descriptions or declamations in Donne or Dryden, is as much and as often derived from the force and fervour of the describer, as from the reflections, forms or incidents, which constitute their subject and materials. The wheels take fire from the mere rapidity of their motion. To what extent, and under what modifications, this may be admitted to act, I shall attempt to define in an after remark on Mr. Wordsworth's reply to this objection, or rather on his objection to this reply, as already anticipated in his preface. Fourthly, and as intimately connected with this, if not the same argument in a more general form, I adduce the high spiritual instinct of the human being impelling us to seek unity by harmonious adjustment, and thus establishing the principle that all the parts of an organized whole must be assimilated to the more important and essential parts. This and the preceding arguments may be strengthened by the reflection, that the composition of a poem is among the imitative arts; and that imitation, as opposed to copying, consists either in the interfusion of the same throughout the radically different, or of the different throughout a base radically the same. Lastly, I appeal to the practice of the best poets, of all countries and in all ages, as authorizing the opinion, (deduced from all the foregoing,) that in every import of the word essential, which would not here involve a mere truism, there may be, is, and ought to be an essential difference between the language of prose and of metrical composition. In Mr. Wordsworth's criticism of Gray's Sonnet, the reader's sympathy with his praise or blame of the different parts is taken for granted rather perhaps too easily. He has not, at least, attempted to win or compel it by argumentative analysis. In my conception at least, the lines rejected as of no value do, with the exception of the two first, differ as much and as little from the language of common life, as those which he has printed in italics as possessing genuine excellence. Of the five lines thus honourably distinguished, two of them differ from prose even more widely, than the lines which either precede or follow, in the position of the words. "A different object do these eyes require; My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine; And in my breast the imperfect joys expire." But were it otherwise, what would this prove, but a truth, of which no man ever doubted?--videlicet, that there are sentences, which would be equally in their place both in verse and prose. Assuredly it does not prove the point, which alone requires proof; namely, that there are not passages, which would suit the one and not suit the other. The first line of this sonnet is distinguished from the ordinary language of men by the epithet to morning. For we will set aside, at present, the consideration, that the particular word "smiling" is hackneyed, and, as it involves a sort of personification, not quite congruous with the common and material attribute of "shining." And, doubtless, this adjunction of epithets for the purpose of additional description, where no particular attention is demanded for the quality of the thing, would be noticed as giving a poetic cast to a man's conversation. Should the sportsman exclaim, "Come boys! the rosy morning calls you up:" he will be supposed to have some song in his head. But no one suspects this, when he says, "A wet morning shall not confine us to our beds." This then is either a defect in poetry, or it is not. Whoever should decide in the affirmative, I would request him to re-peruse any one poem, of any confessedly great poet from Homer to Milton, or from Aeschylus to Shakespeare; and to strike out, (in thought I mean), every instance of this kind. If the number of these fancied erasures did not startle him; or if he continued to deem the work improved by their total omission; he must advance reasons of no ordinary strength and evidence, reasons grounded in the essence of human nature. Otherwise, I should not hesitate to consider him as a man not so much proof against all authority, as dead to it. The second line, "And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire;--" has indeed almost as many faults as words. But then it is a bad line, not because the language is distinct from that of prose; but because it conveys incongruous images; because it confounds the cause and the effect; the real thing with the personified representative of the thing; in short, because it differs from the language of good sense! That the "Phoebus" is hackneyed, and a school-boy image, is an accidental fault, dependent on the age in which the author wrote, and not deduced from the nature of the thing. That it is part of an exploded mythology, is an objection more deeply grounded. Yet when the torch of ancient learning was re-kindled, so cheering were its beams, that our eldest poets, cut off by Christianity from all accredited machinery, and deprived of all acknowledged guardians and symbols of the great objects of nature, were naturally induced to adopt, as a poetic language, those fabulous personages, those forms of the [68]supernatural in nature, which had given them such dear delight in the poems of their great masters. Nay, even at this day what scholar of genial taste will not so far sympathize with them, as to read with pleasure in Petrarch, Chaucer, or Spenser, what he would perhaps condemn as puerile in a modern poet? I remember no poet, whose writings would safelier stand the test of Mr. Wordsworth's theory, than Spenser. Yet will Mr. Wordsworth say, that the style of the following stanza is either undistinguished from prose, and the language of ordinary life? Or that it is vicious, and that the stanzas are blots in THE FAERY QUEEN? "By this the northern wagoner had set His sevenfold teme behind the stedfast starre, That was in ocean waves yet never wet, But firme is fixt and sendeth light from farre To all that in the wild deep wandering arre And chearfull chaunticlere with his note shrill Had warned once that Phoebus' fiery carre In hast was climbing up the easterne hill, Full envious that night so long his roome did fill." "At last the golden orientall gate Of greatest heaven gan to open fayre, And Phoebus fresh, as brydegrome to his mate, Came dauncing forth, shaking his deawie hayre, And hurl'd his glist'ring beams through gloomy ayre: Which when the wakeful elfe perceived, streightway He started up, and did him selfe prepayre In sun-bright armes and battailous array; For with that pagan proud he combat will that day." On the contrary to how many passages, both in hymn books and in blank verse poems, could I, (were it not invidious), direct the reader's attention, the style of which is most unpoetic, because, and only because, it is the style of prose? He will not suppose me capable of having in my mind such verses, as "I put my hat upon my head And walk'd into the Strand; And there I met another man, Whose hat was in his hand." To such specimens it would indeed be a fair and full reply, that these lines are not bad, because they are unpoetic; but because they are empty of all sense and feeling; and that it were an idle attempt to prove that "an ape is not a Newton, when it is self-evident that he is not a man." But the sense shall be good and weighty, the language correct and dignified, the subject interesting and treated with feeling; and yet the style shall, notwithstanding all these merits, be justly blamable as prosaic, and solely because the words and the order of the words would find their appropriate place in prose, but are not suitable to metrical composition. The CIVIL WARS of Daniel is an instructive, and even interesting work; but take the following stanzas, (and from the hundred instances which abound I might probably have selected others far more striking): "And to the end we may with better ease Discern the true discourse, vouchsafe to shew What were the times foregoing near to these, That these we may with better profit know. Tell how the world fell into this disease; And how so great distemperature did grow; So shall we see with what degrees it came; How things at full do soon wax out of frame." "Ten kings had from the Norman Conqu'ror reign'd With intermix'd and variable fate, When England to her greatest height attain'd Of power, dominion, glory, wealth, and state; After it had with much ado sustain'd The violence of princes, with debate For titles and the often mutinies Of nobles for their ancient liberties." "For first, the Norman, conqu'ring all by might, By might was forc'd to keep what he had got; Mixing our customs and the form of right With foreign constitutions, he had brought; Mast'ring the mighty, humbling the poorer wight, By all severest means that could be wrought; And, making the succession doubtful, rent His new-got state, and left it turbulent." Will it be contended on the one side, that these lines are mean and senseless? Or on the other, that they are not prosaic, and for that reason unpoetic? This poet's well-merited epithet is that of the "well-languaged Daniel;" but likewise, and by the consent of his contemporaries no less than of all succeeding critics, "the prosaic Daniel." Yet those, who thus designate this wise and amiable writer from the frequent incorrespondency of his diction to his metre in the majority of his compositions, not only deem them valuable and interesting on other accounts; but willingly admit, that there are to be found throughout his poems, and especially in his EPISTLES and in his HYMEN'S TRIUMPH, many and exquisite specimens of that style which, as the neutral ground of prose and verse, is common to both. A fine and almost faultless extract, eminent as for other beauties, so for its perfection in this species of diction, may be seen in Lamb's DRAMATIC SPECIMENS, a work of various interest from the nature of the selections themselves, (all from the plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries),--and deriving a high additional value from the notes, which are full of just and original criticism, expressed with all the freshness of originality. Among the possible effects of practical adherence to a theory, that aims to identify the style of prose and verse,--(if it does not indeed claim for the latter a yet nearer resemblance to the average style of men in the viva voce intercourse of real life)--we might anticipate the following as not the least likely to occur. It will happen, as I have indeed before observed, that the metre itself, the sole acknowledged difference, will occasionally become metre to the eye only. The existence of prosaisms, and that they detract from the merit of a poem, must at length be conceded, when a number of successive lines can be rendered, even to the most delicate ear, unrecognizable as verse, or as having even been intended for verse, by simply transcribing them as prose; when if the poem be in blank verse, this can be effected without any alteration, or at most by merely restoring one or two words to their proper places, from which they have been transplanted [69] for no assignable cause or reason but that of the author's convenience; but if it be in rhyme, by the mere exchange of the final word of each line for some other of the same meaning, equally appropriate, dignified and euphonic. The answer or objection in the preface to the anticipated remark "that metre paves the way to other distinctions," is contained in the following words. "The distinction of rhyme and metre is regular and uniform, and not, like that produced by (what is usually called) poetic diction, arbitrary, and subject to infinite caprices, upon which no calculation whatever can be made. In the one case the reader is utterly at the mercy of the poet respecting what imagery or diction he may choose to connect with the passion." But is this a poet, of whom a poet is speaking? No surely! rather of a fool or madman: or at best of a vain or ignorant phantast! And might not brains so wild and so deficient make just the same havoc with rhymes and metres, as they are supposed to effect with modes and figures of speech? How is the reader at the mercy of such men? If he continue to read their nonsense, is it not his own fault? The ultimate end of criticism is much more to establish the principles of writing, than to furnish rules how to pass judgment on what has been written by others; if indeed it were possible that the two could be separated. But if it be asked, by what principles the poet is to regulate his own style, if he do not adhere closely to the sort and order of words which he hears in the market, wake, high-road, or plough-field? I reply; by principles, the ignorance or neglect of which would convict him of being no poet, but a silly or presumptuous usurper of the name. By the principles of grammar, logic, psychology. In one word by such a knowledge of the facts, material and spiritual, that most appertain to his art, as, if it have been governed and applied by good sense, and rendered instinctive by habit, becomes the representative and reward of our past conscious reasonings, insights, and conclusions, and acquires the name of Taste. By what rule that does not leave the reader at the poet's mercy, and the poet at his own, is the latter to distinguish between the language suitable to suppressed, and the language, which is characteristic of indulged, anger? Or between that of rage and that of jealousy? Is it obtained by wandering about in search of angry or jealous people in uncultivated society, in order to copy their words? Or not far rather by the power of imagination proceeding upon the all in each of human nature? By meditation, rather than by observation? And by the latter in consequence only of the former? As eyes, for which the former has pre-determined their field of vision, and to which, as to its organ, it communicates a microscopic power? There is not, I firmly believe, a man now living, who has, from his own inward experience, a clearer intuition, than Mr. Wordsworth himself, that the last mentioned are the true sources of genial discrimination. Through the same process and by the same creative agency will the poet distinguish the degree and kind of the excitement produced by the very act of poetic composition. As intuitively will he know, what differences of style it at once inspires and justifies; what intermixture of conscious volition is natural to that state; and in what instances such figures and colours of speech degenerate into mere creatures of an arbitrary purpose, cold technical artifices of ornament or connection. For, even as truth is its own light and evidence, discovering at once itself and falsehood, so is it the prerogative of poetic genius to distinguish by parental instinct its proper offspring from the changelings, which the gnomes of vanity or the fairies of fashion may have laid in its cradle or called by its names. Could a rule be given from without, poetry would cease to be poetry, and sink into a mechanical art. It would be morphosis, not poiaesis. The rules of the Imagination are themselves the very powers of growth and production. The words to which they are reducible, present only the outlines and external appearance of the fruit. A deceptive counterfeit of the superficial form and colours may be elaborated; but the marble peach feels cold and heavy, and children only put it to their mouths. We find no difficulty in admitting as excellent, and the legitimate language of poetic fervour self-impassioned, Donne's apostrophe to the Sun in the second stanza of his PROGRESS OF THE SOUL. "Thee, eye of heaven! this great Soul envies not; By thy male force is all, we have, begot. In the first East thou now beginn'st to shine, Suck'st early balm and island spices there, And wilt anon in thy loose-rein'd career At Tagus, Po, Seine, Thames, and Danow dine, And see at night this western world of mine: Yet hast thou not more nations seen than she, Who before thee one day began to be, And, thy frail light being quench'd, shall long, long outlive thee." Or the next stanza but one: "Great Destiny, the commissary of God, That hast mark'd out a path and period For every thing! Who, where we offspring took, Our ways and ends see'st at one instant: thou Knot of all causes! Thou, whose changeless brow Ne'er smiles nor frowns! O! vouchsafe thou to look, And shew my story in thy eternal book," etc. As little difficulty do we find in excluding from the honours of unaffected warmth and elevation the madness prepense of pseudopoesy, or the startling hysteric of weakness over-exerting itself, which bursts on the unprepared reader in sundry odes and apostrophes to abstract terms. Such are the Odes to jealousy, to Hope, to Oblivion, and the like, in Dodsley's collection and the magazines of that day, which seldom fail to remind me of an Oxford copy of verses on the two SUTTONS, commencing with "Inoculation, heavenly maid! descend!" It is not to be denied that men of undoubted talents, and even poets of true, though not of first-rate, genius, have from a mistaken theory deluded both themselves and others in the opposite extreme. I once read to a company of sensible and well-educated women the introductory period of Cowley's preface to his "Pindaric Odes," written in imitation of the style and manner of the odes of Pindar. "If," (says Cowley), "a man should undertake to translate Pindar, word for word, it would be thought that one madman had translated another as may appear, when he, that understands not the original, reads the verbal traduction of him into Latin prose, than which nothing seems more raving." I then proceeded with his own free version of the second Olympic, composed for the charitable purpose of rationalizing the Theban Eagle. "Queen of all harmonious things, Dancing words and speaking strings, What god, what hero, wilt thou sing? What happy man to equal glories bring? Begin, begin thy noble choice, And let the hills around reflect the image of thy voice. Pisa does to Jove belong, Jove and Pisa claim thy song. The fair first-fruits of war, th' Olympic games, Alcides, offer'd up to Jove; Alcides, too, thy strings may move, But, oh! what man to join with these can worthy prove? Join Theron boldly to their sacred names; Theron the next honour claims; Theron to no man gives place, Is first in Pisa's and in Virtue's race; Theron there, and he alone, Ev'n his own swift forefathers has outgone." One of the company exclaimed, with the full assent of the rest, that if the original were madder than this, it must be incurably mad. I then translated the ode from the Greek, and as nearly as possible, word for word; and the impression was, that in the general movement of the periods, in the form of the connections and transitions, and in the sober majesty of lofty sense, it appeared to them to approach more nearly, than any other poetry they had heard, to the style of our Bible, in the prophetic books. The first strophe will suffice as a specimen: "Ye harp-controlling hymns! (or) ye hymns the sovereigns of harps! What God? what Hero? What Man shall we celebrate? Truly Pisa indeed is of Jove, But the Olympiad (or the Olympic games) did Hercules establish, The first-fruits of the spoils of war. But Theron for the four-horsed car, That bore victory to him, It behoves us now to voice aloud: The Just, the Hospitable, The Bulwark of Agrigentum, Of renowned fathers The Flower, even him Who preserves his native city erect and safe." But are such rhetorical caprices condemnable only for their deviation from the language of real life? and are they by no other means to be precluded, but by the rejection of all distinctions between prose and verse, save that of metre? Surely good sense, and a moderate insight into the constitution of the human mind, would be amply sufficient to prove, that such language and such combinations are the native product neither of the fancy nor of the imagination; that their operation consists in the excitement of surprise by the juxta-position and apparent reconciliation of widely different or incompatible things. As when, for instance, the hills are made to reflect the image of a voice. Surely, no unusual taste is requisite to see clearly, that this compulsory juxtaposition is not produced by the presentation of impressive or delightful forms to the inward vision, nor by any sympathy with the modifying powers with which the genius of the poet had united and inspirited all the objects of his thought; that it is therefore a species of wit, a pure work of the will, and implies a leisure and self-possession both of thought and of feeling, incompatible with the steady fervour of a mind possessed and filled with the grandeur of its subject. To sum up the whole in one sentence. When a poem, or a part of a poem, shall be adduced, which is evidently vicious in the figures and centexture of its style, yet for the condemnation of which no reason can be assigned, except that it differs from the style in which men actually converse, then, and not till then, can I hold this theory to be either plausible, or practicable, or capable of furnishing either rule, guidance, or precaution, that might not, more easily and more safely, as well as more naturally, have been deduced in the author's own mind from considerations of grammar, logic, and the truth and nature of things, confirmed by the authority of works, whose fame is not of one country nor of one age. CHAPTER XIX Continuation--Concerning the real object which, it is probable, Mr. Wordsworth had before him in his critical preface--Elucidation and application of this. It might appear from some passages in the former part of Mr. Wordsworth's preface, that he meant to confine his theory of style, and the necessity of a close accordance with the actual language of men, to those particular subjects from low and rustic life, which by way of experiment he had purposed to naturalize as a new species in our English poetry. But from the train of argument that follows; from the reference to Milton; and from the spirit of his critique on Gray's sonnet; those sentences appear to have been rather courtesies of modesty, than actual limitations of his system. Yet so groundless does this system appear on a close examination; and so strange and overwhelming [70] in its consequences, that I cannot, and I do not, believe that the poet did ever himself adopt it in the unqualified sense, in which his expressions have been understood by others, and which, indeed, according to all the common laws of interpretation they seem to bear. What then did he mean? I apprehend, that in the clear perception, not unaccompanied with disgust or contempt, of the gaudy affectations of a style which passed current with too many for poetic diction, (though in truth it had as little pretensions to poetry, as to logic or common sense,) he narrowed his view for the time; and feeling a justifiable preference for the language of nature and of good sense, even in its humblest and least ornamented forms, he suffered himself to express, in terms at once too large and too exclusive, his predilection for a style the most remote possible from the false and showy splendour which he wished to explode. It is possible, that this predilection, at first merely comparative, deviated for a time into direct partiality. But the real object which he had in view, was, I doubt not, a species of excellence which had been long before most happily characterized by the judicious and amiable Garve, whose works are so justly beloved and esteemed by the Germans, in his remarks on Gellert, from which the following is literally translated. "The talent, that is required in order to make, excellent verses, is perhaps greater than the philosopher is ready to admit, or would find it in his power to acquire: the talent to seek only the apt expression of the thought, and yet to find at the same time with it the rhyme and the metre. Gellert possessed this happy gift, if ever any one of our poets possessed it; and nothing perhaps contributed more to the great and universal impression which his fables made on their first publication, or conduces more to their continued popularity. It was a strange and curious phaenomenon, and such as in Germany had been previously unheard of, to read verses in which everything was expressed just as one would wish to talk, and yet all dignified, attractive, and interesting; and all at the same time perfectly correct as to the measure of the syllables and the rhyme. It is certain, that poetry when it has attained this excellence makes a far greater impression than prose. So much so indeed, that even the gratification which the very rhymes afford, becomes then no longer a contemptible or trifling gratification." [71] However novel this phaenomenon may have been in Germany at the time of Gellert, it is by no means new, nor yet of recent existence in our language. Spite of the licentiousness with which Spenser occasionally compels the orthography of his words into a subservience to his rhymes, the whole FAIRY QUEEN is an almost continued instance of this beauty. Waller's song GO, LOVELY ROSE, is doubtless familiar to most of my readers; but if I had happened to have had by me the Poems of Cotton, more but far less deservedly celebrated as the author of the VIRGIL TRAVESTIED, I should have indulged myself, and I think have gratified many, who are not acquainted with his serious works, by selecting some admirable specimens of this style. There are not a few poems in that volume, replete with every excellence of thought, image, and passion, which we expect or desire in the poetry of the milder muse; and yet so worded, that the reader sees no one reason either in the selection or the order of the words, why he might not have said the very same in an appropriate conversation, and cannot conceive how indeed he could have expressed such thoughts otherwise without loss or injury to his meaning. But in truth our language is, and from the first dawn of poetry ever has been, particularly rich in compositions distinguished by this excellence. The final e, which is now mute, in Chaucer's age was either sounded or dropt indifferently. We ourselves still use either "beloved" or "belov'd" according as the rhyme, or measure, or the purpose of more or less solemnity may require. Let the reader then only adopt the pronunciation of the poet and of the court, at which he lived, both with respect to the final e and to the accentuation of the last syllable; I would then venture to ask, what even in the colloquial language of elegant and unaffected women, (who are the peculiar mistresses of "pure English and undefiled,") what could we hear more natural, or seemingly more unstudied, than the following stanzas from Chaucer's TROILUS AND CRESEIDE. "And after this forth to the gate he wente, Ther as Creseide out rode a ful gode pass, And up and doun there made he many' a wente, And to himselfe ful oft he said, Alas! Fro hennis rode my blisse and my solas As woulde blisful God now for his joie, I might her sene agen come in to Troie! And to the yondir hil I gan her Bide, Alas! and there I toke of her my leve And yond I saw her to her fathir ride; For sorow of whiche mine hert shall to-cleve; And hithir home I came whan it was eve, And here I dwel, out-cast from ally joie, And steal, til I maie sene her efte in Troie. "And of himselfe imaginid he ofte To ben defaitid, pale and woxin lesse Than he was wonte, and that men saidin softe, What may it be? who can the sothe gesse, Why Troilus hath al this hevinesse? And al this n' as but his melancolie, That he had of himselfe suche fantasie. Anothir time imaginin he would That every wight, that past him by the wey, Had of him routhe, and that thei saien should, I am right sory, Troilus wol dey! And thus he drove a daie yet forth or twey, As ye have herde: suche life gan he to lede As he that stode betwixin hope and drede: For which him likid in his songis shewe Th' encheson of his wo as he best might, And made a songe of words but a fewe, Somwhat his woful herte for to light, And whan he was from every mann'is sight With softe voice he of his lady dere, That absent was, gan sing as ye may here: * * * * * * This song, when he thus songin had, ful Bone He fil agen into his sighis olde And every night, as was his wonte to done; He stode the bright moone to beholde And all his sorowe to the moone he tolde, And said: I wis, whan thou art hornid newe, I shall be glad, if al the world be trewe!" Another exquisite master of this species of style, where the scholar and the poet supplies the material, but the perfect well-bred gentleman the expressions and the arrangement, is George Herbert. As from the nature of the subject, and the too frequent quaintness of the thoughts, his TEMPLE; or SACRED POEMS AND PRIVATE EJACULATIONS are Comparatively but little known, I shall extract two poems. The first is a sonnet, equally admirable for the weight, number, and expression of the thoughts, and for the simple dignity of the language. Unless, indeed, a fastidious taste should object to the latter half of the sixth line. The second is a poem of greater length, which I have chosen not only for the present purpose, but likewise as a striking example and illustration of an assertion hazarded in a former page of these sketches namely, that the characteristic fault of our elder poets is the reverse of that, which distinguishes too many of our more recent versifiers; the one conveying the most fantastic thoughts in the most correct and natural language; the other in the most fantastic language conveying the most trivial thoughts. The latter is a riddle of words; the former an enigma of thoughts. The one reminds me of an odd passage in Drayton's IDEAS As other men, so I myself do muse, Why in this sort I wrest invention so; And why these giddy metaphors I use, Leaving the path the greater part do go; I will resolve you: I am lunatic! [72] The other recalls a still odder passage in THE SYNAGOGUE: or THE SHADOW OF THE TEMPLE, a connected series of poems in imitation of Herbert's TEMPLE, and, in some editions, annexed to it. O how my mind Is gravell'd! Not a thought, That I can find, But's ravell'd All to nought! Short ends of threds, And narrow shreds Of lists, Knots, snarled ruffs, Loose broken tufts Of twists, Are my torn meditations ragged clothing, Which, wound and woven, shape a suit for nothing: One while I think, and then I am in pain To think how to unthink that thought again. Immediately after these burlesque passages I cannot proceed to the extracts promised, without changing the ludicrous tone of feeling by the interposition of the three following stanzas of Herbert's. VIRTUE. Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, The bridal of the earth and sky, The dew shall weep thy fall to-night; For thou must die. Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye Thy root is ever in its grave, And thou must die. Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses, A box, where sweets compacted lie My music shews, ye have your closes, And all must die. THE BOSOM SIN: A SONNET BY GEORGE HERBERT. Lord, with what care hast thou begirt us round, Parents first season us; then schoolmasters Deliver us to laws; they send us bound To rules of reason, holy messengers, Pulpits and Sundays, sorrow dogging sin, Afflictions sorted, anguish of all sizes, Fine nets and stratagems to catch us in, Bibles laid open, millions of surprises; Blessings beforehand, ties of gratefulness, The sound of Glory ringing in our ears Without, our shame; within, our consciences; Angels and grace, eternal hopes and fears. Yet all these fences and their whole array One cunning bosom-sin blows quite away. LOVE UNKNOWN. Dear friend, sit down, the tale is long and sad And in my faintings, I presume, your love Will more comply than help. A Lord I had, And have, of whom some grounds, which may improve, I hold for two lives, and both lives in me. To him I brought a dish of fruit one day, And in the middle placed my heart. But he (I sigh to say) Look'd on a servant, who did know his eye, Better than you know me, or (which is one) Than I myself. The servant instantly, Quitting the fruit, seiz'd on my heart alone, And threw it in a font, wherein did fall A stream of blood, which issued from the side Of a great rock: I well remember all, And have good cause: there it was dipt and dyed, And wash'd, and wrung: the very wringing yet Enforceth tears. "Your heart was foul, I fear." Indeed 'tis true. I did and do commit Many a fault, more than my lease will bear; Yet still ask'd pardon, and was not denied. But you shall hear. After my heart was well, And clean and fair, as I one eventide (I sigh to tell) Walk'd by myself abroad, I saw a large And spacious furnace flaming, and thereon A boiling caldron, round about whose verge Was in great letters set AFFLICTION. The greatness shew'd the owner. So I went To fetch a sacrifice out of my fold, Thinking with that, which I did thus present, To warm his love, which, I did fear, grew cold. But as my heart did tender it, the man Who was to take it from me, slipt his hand, And threw my heart into the scalding pan; My heart that brought it (do you understand?) The offerer's heart. "Your heart was hard, I fear." Indeed 'tis true. I found a callous matter Began to spread and to expatiate there: But with a richer drug than scalding water I bath'd it often, ev'n with holy blood, Which at a board, while many drank bare wine, A friend did steal into my cup for good, Ev'n taken inwardly, and most divine To supple hardnesses. But at the length Out of the caldron getting, soon I fled Unto my house, where to repair the strength Which I had lost, I hasted to my bed: But when I thought to sleep out all these faults, (I sigh to speak) I found that some had stuff'd the bed with thoughts, I would say thorns. Dear, could my heart not break, When with my pleasures ev'n my rest was gone? Full well I understood who had been there: For I had given the key to none but one: It must be he. "Your heart was dull, I fear." Indeed a slack and sleepy state of mind Did oft possess me; so that when I pray'd, Though my lips went, my heart did stay behind. But all my scores were by another paid, Who took my guilt upon him. "Truly, Friend, "For aught I hear, your Master shews to you "More favour than you wot of. Mark the end. "The font did only what was old renew "The caldron suppled what was grown too hard: "The thorns did quicken what was grown too dull: "All did but strive to mend what you had marr'd. "Wherefore be cheer'd, and praise him to the full "Each day, each hour, each moment of the week "Who fain would have you be new, tender quick." CHAPTER XX The former subject continued--The neutral style, or that common to Prose and Poetry, exemplified by specimens from Chaucer, Herbert, and others. I have no fear in declaring my conviction, that the excellence defined and exemplified in the preceding chapter is not the characteristic excellence of Mr. Wordsworth's style; because I can add with equal sincerity, that it is precluded by higher powers. The praise of uniform adherence to genuine, logical English is undoubtedly his; nay, laying the main emphasis on the word uniform, I will dare add that, of all contemporary poets, it is his alone. For, in a less absolute sense of the word, I should certainly include Mr. Bowies, Lord Byron, and, as to all his later writings, Mr. Southey, the exceptions in their works being so few and unimportant. But of the specific excellence described in the quotation from Garve, I appear to find more, and more undoubted specimens in the works of others; for instance, among the minor poems of Mr. Thomas Moore, and of our illustrious Laureate. To me it will always remain a singular and noticeable fact; that a theory, which would establish this lingua communis, not only as the best, but as the only commendable style, should have proceeded from a poet, whose diction, next to that of Shakespeare and Milton, appears to me of all others the most individualized and characteristic. And let it be remembered too, that I am now interpreting the controverted passages of Mr. Wordsworth's critical preface by the purpose and object, which he may be supposed to have intended, rather than by the sense which the words themselves must convey, if they are taken without this allowance. A person of any taste, who had but studied three or four of Shakespeare's principal plays, would without the name affixed scarcely fail to recognise as Shakespeare's a quotation from any other play, though but of a few lines. A similar peculiarity, though in a less degree, attends Mr. Wordsworth's style, whenever he speaks in his own person; or whenever, though under a feigned name, it is clear that he himself is still speaking, as in the different dramatis personae of THE RECLUSE. Even in the other poems, in which he purposes to be most dramatic, there are few in which it does not occasionally burst forth. The reader might often address the poet in his own words with reference to the persons introduced: "It seems, as I retrace the ballad line by line That but half of it is theirs, and the better half is thine." Who, having been previously acquainted with any considerable portion of Mr. Wordsworth's publications, and having studied them with a full feeling of the author's genius, would not at once claim as Wordsworthian the little poem on the rainbow? "The Child is father of the Man, etc." Or in the LUCY GRAY? "No mate, no comrade Lucy knew; She dwelt on a wide moor; The sweetest thing that ever grew Beside a human door." Or in the IDLE SHEPHERD-BOYS? "Along the river's stony marge The sand-lark chants a joyous song; The thrush is busy in the wood, And carols loud and strong. A thousand lambs are on the rocks, All newly born! both earth and sky Keep jubilee, and more than all, Those boys with their green coronal; They never hear the cry, That plaintive cry! which up the hill Comes from the depth of Dungeon-Ghyll." Need I mention the exquisite description of the Sea-Loch in THE BLIND HIGHLAND BOY. Who but a poet tells a tale in such language to the little ones by the fire-side as-- "Yet had he many a restless dream; Both when he heard the eagle's scream, And when he heard the torrents roar, And heard the water beat the shore Near where their cottage stood. Beside a lake their cottage stood, Not small like our's, a peaceful flood; But one of mighty size, and strange; That, rough or smooth, is full of change, And stirring in its bed. For to this lake, by night and day, The great Sea-water finds its way Through long, long windings of the hills, And drinks up all the pretty rills And rivers large and strong: Then hurries back the road it came Returns on errand still the same; This did it when the earth was new; And this for evermore will do, As long as earth shall last. And, with the coming of the tide, Come boats and ships that sweetly ride, Between the woods and lofty rocks; And to the shepherds with their flocks Bring tales of distant lands." I might quote almost the whole of his RUTH, but take the following stanzas: But, as you have before been told, This Stripling, sportive, gay, and bold, And, with his dancing crest, So beautiful, through savage lands Had roamed about with vagrant bands Of Indians in the West. The wind, the tempest roaring high, The tumult of a tropic sky, Might well be dangerous food For him, a Youth to whom was given So much of earth--so much of heaven, And such impetuous blood. Whatever in those climes he found Irregular in sight or sound Did to his mind impart A kindred impulse, seemed allied To his own powers, and justified The workings of his heart. Nor less, to feed voluptuous thought, The beauteous forms of nature wrought, Fair trees and lovely flowers; The breezes their own languor lent; The stars had feelings, which they sent Into those magic bowers. Yet in his worst pursuits, I ween, That sometimes there did intervene Pure hopes of high intent For passions linked to forms so fair And stately, needs must have their share Of noble sentiment." But from Mr. Wordsworth's more elevated compositions, which already form three-fourths of his works; and will, I trust, constitute hereafter a still larger proportion;--from these, whether in rhyme or blank verse, it would be difficult and almost superfluous to select instances of a diction peculiarly his own, of a style which cannot be imitated without its being at once recognised, as originating in Mr. Wordsworth. It would not be easy to open on any one of his loftier strains, that does not contain examples of this; and more in proportion as the lines are more excellent, and most like the author. For those, who may happen to have been less familiar with his writings, I will give three specimens taken with little choice. The first from the lines on the BOY OF WINANDER-MERE,--who "Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls, That they might answer him.--And they would shout Across the watery vale, and shout again, With long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild Of mirth and jocund din! And when it chanced, That pauses of deep silence mocked his skill, Then sometimes in that silence, while he hung Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise Has carried far into his heart the voice Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene [73] Would enter unawares into his mind With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received Into the bosom of the steady lake." The second shall be that noble imitation of Drayton [74] (if it was not rather a coincidence) in the lines TO JOANNA. --"When I had gazed perhaps two minutes' space, Joanna, looking in my eyes, beheld That ravishment of mine, and laughed aloud. The Rock, like something starting from a sleep, Took up the Lady's voice, and laughed again! That ancient woman seated on Helm-crag Was ready with her cavern; Hammar-scar And the tall Steep of Silver-How sent forth A noise of laughter; southern Lougbrigg heard, And Fairfield answered with a mountain tone. Helvellyn far into the clear blue sky Carried the lady's voice!--old Skiddaw blew His speaking trumpet!--back out of the clouds From Glaramara southward came the voice: And Kirkstone tossed it from its misty head!" The third, which is in rhyme, I take from the SONG AT THE FEAST OF BROUGHAM CASTLE, upon the restoration of Lord Clifford, the Shepherd, to the Estates and Honours of his Ancestors. ------"Now another day is come, Fitter hope, and nobler doom; He hath thrown aside his crook, And hath buried deep his book; Armour rusting in his halls On the blood of Clifford calls,-- 'Quell the Scot,' exclaims the Lance! Bear me to the heart of France, Is the longing of the Shield-- Tell thy name, thou trembling Field!-- Field of death, where'er thou be, Groan thou with our victory! Happy day, and mighty hour, When our Shepherd, in his power, Mailed and horsed, with lance and sword, To his ancestors restored, Like a re-appearing Star, Like a glory from afar, First shall head the flock of war!" "Alas! the fervent harper did not know, That for a tranquil Soul the Lay was framed, Who, long compelled in humble walks to go, Was softened into feeling, soothed, and tamed. Love had he found in huts where poor men lie; His daily teachers had been woods and rills, The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is among the lonely hills." The words themselves in the foregoing extracts, are, no doubt, sufficiently common for the greater part.--But in what poem are they not so, if we except a few misadventurous attempts to translate the arts and sciences into verse? In THE EXCURSION the number of polysyllabic (or what the common people call, dictionary) words is more than usually great. And so must it needs be, in proportion to the number and variety of an author's conceptions, and his solicitude to express them with precision.--But are those words in those places commonly employed in real life to express the same thought or outward thing? Are they the style used in the ordinary intercourse of spoken words? No! nor are the modes of connections; and still less the breaks and transitions. Would any but a poet--at least could any one without being conscious that he had expressed himself with noticeable vivacity--have described a bird singing loud by, "The thrush is busy in the wood?"--or have spoken of boys with a string of club-moss round their rusty hats, as the boys "with their green coronal?"--or have translated a beautiful May-day into "Both earth and sky keep jubilee!"--or have brought all the different marks and circumstances of a sealoch before the mind, as the actions of a living and acting power? Or have represented the reflection of the sky in the water, as "That uncertain heaven received into the bosom of the steady lake?" Even the grammatical construction is not unfrequently peculiar; as "The wind, the tempest roaring high, the tumult of a tropic sky, might well be dangerous food to him, a youth to whom was given, etc." There is a peculiarity in the frequent use of the asymartaeton (that is, the omission of the connective particle before the last of several words, or several sentences used grammatically as single words, all being in the same case and governing or governed by the same verb) and not less in the construction of words by apposition ("to him, a youth"). In short, were there excluded from Mr. Wordsworth's poetic compositions all, that a literal adherence to the theory of his preface would exclude, two thirds at least of the marked beauties of his poetry must be erased. For a far greater number of lines would be sacrificed than in any other recent poet; because the pleasure received from Wordsworth's poems being less derived either from excitement of curiosity or the rapid flow of narration, the striking passages form a larger proportion of their value. I do not adduce it as a fair criterion of comparative excellence, nor do I even think it such; but merely as matter of fact. I affirm, that from no contemporary writer could so many lines be quoted, without reference to the poem in which they are found, for their own independent weight or beauty. From the sphere of my own experience I can bring to my recollection three persons of no every-day powers and acquirements, who had read the poems of others with more and more unallayed pleasure, and had thought more highly of their authors, as poets; who yet have confessed to me, that from no modern work had so many passages started up anew in their minds at different times, and as different occasions had awakened a meditative mood. CHAPTER XXI Remarks on the present mode of conducting critical journals. Long have I wished to see a fair and philosophical inquisition into the character of Wordsworth, as a poet, on the evidence of his published works; and a positive, not a comparative, appreciation of their characteristic excellencies, deficiencies, and defects. I know no claim that the mere opinion of any individual can have to weigh down the opinion of the author himself; against the probability of whose parental partiality we ought to set that of his having thought longer and more deeply on the subject. But I should call that investigation fair and philosophical in which the critic announces and endeavours to establish the principles, which he holds for the foundation of poetry in general, with the specification of these in their application to the different classes of poetry. Having thus prepared his canons of criticism for praise and condemnation, he would proceed to particularize the most striking passages to which he deems them applicable, faithfully noticing the frequent or infrequent recurrence of similar merits or defects, and as faithfully distinguishing what is characteristic from what is accidental, or a mere flagging of the wing. Then if his premises be rational, his deductions legitimate, and his conclusions justly applied, the reader, and possibly the poet himself, may adopt his judgment in the light of judgment and in the independence of free-agency. If he has erred, he presents his errors in a definite place and tangible form, and holds the torch and guides the way to their detection. I most willingly admit, and estimate at a high value, the services which the EDINBURGH REVIEW, and others formed afterwards on the same plan, have rendered to society in the diffusion of knowledge. I think the commencement of the EDINBURGH REVIEW an important epoch in periodical criticism; and that it has a claim upon the gratitude of the literary republic, and indeed of the reading public at large, for having originated the scheme of reviewing those books only, which are susceptible and deserving of argumentative criticism. Not less meritorious, and far more faithfully and in general far more ably executed, is their plan of supplying the vacant place of the trash or mediocrity, wisely left to sink into oblivion by its own weight, with original essays on the most interesting subjects of the time, religious, or political; in which the titles of the books or pamphlets prefixed furnish only the name and occasion of the disquisition. I do not arraign the keenness, or asperity of its damnatory style, in and for itself, as long as the author is addressed or treated as the mere impersonation of the work then under trial. I have no quarrel with them on this account, as long as no personal allusions are admitted, and no re-commitment (for new trial) of juvenile performances, that were published, perhaps forgotten, many years before the commencement of the review: since for the forcing back of such works to public notice no motives are easily assignable, but such as are furnished to the critic by his own personal malignity; or what is still worse, by a habit of malignity in the form of mere wantonness. "No private grudge they need, no personal spite The viva sectio is its own delight! All enmity, all envy, they disclaim, Disinterested thieves of our good name: Cool, sober murderers of their neighbour's fame!" S. T. C. Every censure, every sarcasm respecting a publication which the critic, with the criticised work before him, can make good, is the critic's right. The writer is authorized to reply, but not to complain. Neither can anyone prescribe to the critic, how soft or how hard; how friendly, or how bitter, shall be the phrases which he is to select for the expression of such reprehension or ridicule. The critic must know, what effect it is his object to produce; and with a view to this effect must he weigh his words. But as soon as the critic betrays, that he knows more of his author, than the author's publications could have told him; as soon as from this more intimate knowledge, elsewhere obtained, he avails himself of the slightest trait against the author; his censure instantly becomes personal injury, his sarcasms personal insults. He ceases to be a critic, and takes on him the most contemptible character to which a rational creature can be degraded, that of a gossip, backbiter, and pasquillant: but with this heavy aggravation, that he steals the unquiet, the deforming passions of the world into the museum; into the very place which, next to the chapel and oratory, should be our sanctuary, and secure place of refuge; offers abominations on the altar of the Muses; and makes its sacred paling the very circle in which he conjures up the lying and profane spirit. This determination of unlicensed personality, and of permitted and legitimate censure, (which I owe in part to the illustrious Lessing, himself a model of acute, spirited, sometimes stinging, but always argumentative and honourable, criticism) is beyond controversy the true one: and though I would not myself exercise all the rights of the latter, yet, let but the former be excluded, I submit myself to its exercise in the hands of others, without complaint and without resentment. Let a communication be formed between any number of learned men in the various branches of science and literature; and whether the president and central committee be in London, or Edinburgh, if only they previously lay aside their individuality, and pledge themselves inwardly, as well as ostensibly, to administer judgment according to a constitution and code of laws; and if by grounding this code on the two-fold basis of universal morals and philosophic reason, independent of all foreseen application to particular works and authors, they obtain the right to speak each as the representative of their body corporate; they shall have honour and good wishes from me, and I shall accord to them their fair dignities, though self-assumed, not less cheerfully than if I could inquire concerning them in the herald's office, or turn to them in the book of peerage. However loud may be the outcries for prevented or subverted reputation, however numerous and impatient the complaints of merciless severity and insupportable despotism, I shall neither feel, nor utter aught but to the defence and justification of the critical machine. Should any literary Quixote find himself provoked by its sounds and regular movements, I should admonish him with Sancho Panza, that it is no giant but a windmill; there it stands on its own place, and its own hillock, never goes out of its way to attack anyone, and to none and from none either gives or asks assistance. When the public press has poured in any part of its produce between its mill-stones, it grinds it off, one man's sack the same as another, and with whatever wind may happen to be then blowing. All the two-and-thirty winds are alike its friends. Of the whole wide atmosphere it does not desire a single finger-breadth more than what is necessary for its sails to turn round in. But this space must be left free and unimpeded. Gnats, beetles, wasps, butterflies, and the whole tribe of ephemerals and insignificants, may flit in and out and between; may hum, and buzz, and jar; may shrill their tiny pipes, and wind their puny horns, unchastised and unnoticed. But idlers and bravadoes of larger size and prouder show must beware, how they place themselves within its sweep. Much less may they presume to lay hands on the sails, the strength of which is neither greater nor less than as the wind is, which drives them round. Whomsoever the remorseless arm slings aloft, or whirls along with it in the air, he has himself alone to blame; though, when the same arm throws him from it, it will more often double than break the force of his fall. Putting aside the too manifest and too frequent interference of national party, and even personal predilection or aversion; and reserving for deeper feelings those worse and more criminal intrusions into the sacredness of private life, which not seldom merit legal rather than literary chastisement, the two principal objects and occasions which I find for blame and regret in the conduct of the review in question are first, its unfaithfulness to its own announced and excellent plan, by subjecting to criticism works neither indecent nor immoral, yet of such trifling importance even in point of size and, according to the critic's own verdict, so devoid of all merit, as must excite in the most candid mind the suspicion, either that dislike or vindictive feelings were at work; or that there was a cold prudential pre-determination to increase the sale of the review by flattering the malignant passions of human nature. That I may not myself become subject to the charge, which I am bringing against others, by an accusation without proof, I refer to the article on Dr. Rennell's sermon in the very first number of the EDINBURGH REVIEW as an illustration of my meaning. If in looking through all the succeeding volumes the reader should find this a solitary instance, I must submit to that painful forfeiture of esteem, which awaits a groundless or exaggerated charge. The second point of objection belongs to this review only in common with all other works of periodical criticism: at least, it applies in common to the general system of all, whatever exception there may be in favour of particular articles. Or if it attaches to THE EDINBURGH REVIEW, and to its only corrival (THE QUARTERLY), with any peculiar force, this results from the superiority of talent, acquirement, and information which both have so undeniably displayed; and which doubtless deepens the regret though not the blame. I am referring to the substitution of assertion for argument; to the frequency of arbitrary and sometimes petulant verdicts, not seldom unsupported even by a single quotation from the work condemned, which might at least have explained the critic's meaning, if it did not prove the justice of his sentence. Even where this is not the case, the extracts are too often made without reference to any general grounds or rules from which the faultiness or inadmissibility of the qualities attributed may be deduced; and without any attempt to show, that the qualities are attributable to the passage extracted. I have met with such extracts from Mr. Wordsworth's poems, annexed to such assertions, as led me to imagine, that the reviewer, having written his critique before he had read the work, had then pricked with a pin for passages, wherewith to illustrate the various branches of his preconceived opinions. By what principle of rational choice can we suppose a critic to have been directed (at least in a Christian country, and himself, we hope, a Christian) who gives the following lines, portraying the fervour of solitary devotion excited by the magnificent display of the Almighty's works, as a proof and example of an author's tendency to downright ravings, and absolute unintelligibility? "O then what soul was his, when on the tops Of the high mountains he beheld the sun Rise up, and bathe the world in light! He looked-- Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth, And ocean's liquid mass, beneath him lay In gladness and deep joy. The clouds were touched, And in their silent faces did he read Unutterable love. Sound needed none, Nor any voice of joy: his spirit drank The spectacle! sensation, soul, and form, All melted into him; they swallowed up His animal being; in them did he live, And by them did he live: they were his life." Can it be expected, that either the author or his admirers, should be induced to pay any serious attention to decisions which prove nothing but the pitiable state of the critic's own taste and sensibility? On opening the review they see a favourite passage, of the force and truth of which they had an intuitive certainty in their own inward experience confirmed, if confirmation it could receive, by the sympathy of their most enlightened friends; some of whom perhaps, even in the world's opinion, hold a higher intellectual rank than the critic himself would presume to claim. And this very passage they find selected, as the characteristic effusion of a mind deserted by reason!--as furnishing evidence that the writer was raving, or he could not have thus strung words together without sense or purpose! No diversity of taste seems capable of explaining such a contrast in judgment. That I had over-rated the merit of a passage or poem, that I had erred concerning the degree of its excellence, I might be easily induced to believe or apprehend. But that lines, the sense of which I had analysed and found consonant with all the best convictions of my understanding; and the imagery and diction of which had collected round those convictions my noblest as well as my most delightful feelings; that I should admit such lines to be mere nonsense or lunacy, is too much for the most ingenious arguments to effect. But that such a revolution of taste should be brought about by a few broad assertions, seems little less than impossible. On the contrary, it would require an effort of charity not to dismiss the criticism with the aphorism of the wise man, in animam malevolam sapientia haud intrare potest. What then if this very critic should have cited a large number of single lines and even of long paragraphs, which he himself acknowledges to possess eminent and original beauty? What if he himself has owned, that beauties as great are scattered in abundance throughout the whole book? And yet, though under this impression, should have commenced his critique in vulgar exultation with a prophecy meant to secure its own fulfilment? With a "This won't do!" What? if after such acknowledgments extorted from his own judgment he should proceed from charge to charge of tameness and raving; flights and flatness; and at length, consigning the author to the house of incurables, should conclude with a strain of rudest contempt evidently grounded in the distempered state of his own moral associations? Suppose too all this done without a single leading principle established or even announced, and without any one attempt at argumentative deduction, though the poet had presented a more than usual opportunity for it, by having previously made public his own principles of judgment in poetry, and supported them by a connected train of reasoning! The office and duty of the poet is to select the most dignified as well as "The gayest, happiest attitude of things." The reverse, for in all cases a reverse is possible, is the appropriate business of burlesque and travesty, a predominant taste for which has been always deemed a mark of a low and degraded mind. When I was at Rome, among many other visits to the tomb of Julius II. I went thither once with a Prussian artist, a man of genius and great vivacity of feeling. As we were gazing on Michael Angelo's MOSES, our conversation turned on the horns and beard of that stupendous statue; of the necessity of each to support the other; of the super-human effect of the former, and the necessity of the existence of both to give a harmony and integrity both to the image and the feeling excited by it. Conceive them removed, and the statue would become un-natural, without being super-natural. We called to mind the horns of the rising sun, and I repeated the noble passage from Taylor's HOLY DYING. That horns were the emblem of power and sovereignty among the Eastern nations, and are still retained as such in Abyssinia; the Achelous of the ancient Greeks; and the probable ideas and feelings, that originally suggested the mixture of the human and the brute form in the figure, by which they realized the idea of their mysterious Pan, as representing intelligence blended with a darker power, deeper, mightier, and more universal than the conscious intellect of man; than intelligence;--all these thoughts and recollections passed in procession before our minds. My companion who possessed more than his share of the hatred, which his countrymen bore to the French, had just observed to me, "a Frenchman, Sir! is the only animal in the human shape, that by no possibility can lift itself up to religion or poetry:" when, lo! two French officers of distinction and rank entered the church! "Mark you," whispered the Prussian, "the first thing which those scoundrels will notice--(for they will begin by instantly noticing the statue in parts, without one moment's pause of admiration impressed by the whole)--will be the horns and the beard. And the associations, which they will immediately connect with them will be those of a he-goat and a cuckold." Never did man guess more luckily. Had he inherited a portion of the great legislator's prophetic powers, whose statue we had been contemplating, he could scarcely have uttered words more coincident with the result: for even as he had said, so it came to pass. In THE EXCURSION the poet has introduced an old man, born in humble but not abject circumstances, who had enjoyed more than usual advantages of education, both from books and from the more awful discipline of nature. This person he represents, as having been driven by the restlessness of fervid feelings, and from a craving intellect to an itinerant life; and as having in consequence passed the larger portion of his time, from earliest manhood, in villages and hamlets from door to door, "A vagrant Merchant bent beneath his load." Now whether this be a character appropriate to a lofty didactick poem, is perhaps questionable. It presents a fair subject for controversy; and the question is to be determined by the congruity or incongruity of such a character with what shall be proved to be the essential constituents of poetry. But surely the critic who, passing by all the opportunities which such a mode of life would present to such a man; all the advantages of the liberty of nature, of solitude, and of solitary thought; all the varieties of places and seasons, through which his track had lain, with all the varying imagery they bring with them; and lastly, all the observations of men, "Their manners, their enjoyments, and pursuits, Their passions and their feelings=" which the memory of these yearly journeys must have given and recalled to such a mind--the critic, I say, who from the multitude of possible associations should pass by all these in order to fix his attention exclusively on the pin-papers, and stay-tapes, which might have been among the wares of his pack; this critic, in my opinion, cannot be thought to possess a much higher or much healthier state of moral feeling, than the Frenchmen above recorded. CHAPTER XXII The characteristic defects of Wordsworth's poetry, with the principles from which the judgment, that they are defects, is deduced--Their proportion to the beauties--For the greatest part characteristic of his theory only. If Mr. Wordsworth have set forth principles of poetry which his arguments are insufficient to support, let him and those who have adopted his sentiments be set right by the confutation of those arguments, and by the substitution of more philosophical principles. And still let the due credit be given to the portion and importance of the truths, which are blended with his theory; truths, the too exclusive attention to which had occasioned its errors, by tempting him to carry those truths beyond their proper limits. If his mistaken theory have at all influenced his poetic compositions, let the effects be pointed out, and the instances given. But let it likewise be shown, how far the influence has acted; whether diffusively, or only by starts; whether the number and importance of the poems and passages thus infected be great or trifling compared with the sound portion; and lastly, whether they are inwoven into the texture of his works, or are loose and separable. The result of such a trial would evince beyond a doubt, what it is high time to announce decisively and aloud, that the supposed characteristics of Mr. Wordsworth's poetry, whether admired or reprobated; whether they are simplicity or simpleness; faithful adherence to essential nature, or wilful selections from human nature of its meanest forms and under the least attractive associations; are as little the real characteristics of his poetry at large, as of his genius and the constitution of his mind. In a comparatively small number of poems he chose to try an experiment; and this experiment we will suppose to have failed. Yet even in these poems it is impossible not to perceive that the natural tendency of the poet's mind is to great objects and elevated conceptions. The poem entitled FIDELITY is for the greater part written in language, as unraised and naked as any perhaps in the two volumes. Yet take the following stanza and compare it with the preceding stanzas of the same poem. "There sometimes doth a leaping fish Send through the tarn a lonely cheer; The crags repeat the raven's croak, In symphony austere; Thither the rainbow comes--the cloud-- And mists that spread the flying shroud; And sun-beams; and the sounding blast, That, if it could, would hurry past; But that enormous barrier holds it fast." Or compare the four last lines of the concluding stanza with the former half. "Yes, proof was plain that, since the day On which the Traveller thus had died, The Dog had watched about the spot, Or by his Master's side: How nourish'd here through such long time He knows, who gave that love sublime,-- And gave that strength of feeling, great Above all human estimate!" Can any candid and intelligent mind hesitate in determining, which of these best represents the tendency and native character of the poet's genius? Will he not decide that the one was written because the poet would so write, and the other because he could not so entirely repress the force and grandeur of his mind, but that he must in some part or other of every composition write otherwise? In short, that his only disease is the being out of his element; like the swan, that, having amused himself, for a while, with crushing the weeds on the river's bank, soon returns to his own majestic movements on its reflecting and sustaining surface. Let it be observed that I am here supposing the imagined judge, to whom I appeal, to have already decided against the poet's theory, as far as it is different from the principles of the art, generally acknowledged. I cannot here enter into a detailed examination of Mr. Wordsworth's works; but I will attempt to give the main results of my own judgment, after an acquaintance of many years, and repeated perusals. And though, to appreciate the defects of a great mind it is necessary to understand previously its characteristic excellences, yet I have already expressed myself with sufficient fulness, to preclude most of the ill effects that might arise from my pursuing a contrary arrangement. I will therefore commence with what I deem the prominent defects of his poems hitherto published. The first characteristic, though only occasional defect, which I appear to myself to find in these poems is the inconstancy of the style. Under this name I refer to the sudden and unprepared transitions from lines or sentences of peculiar felicity--(at all events striking and original)--to a style, not only unimpassioned but undistinguished. He sinks too often and too abruptly to that style, which I should place in the second division of language, dividing it into the three species; first, that which is peculiar to poetry; second, that which is only proper in prose; and third, the neutral or common to both. There have been works, such as Cowley's Essay on Cromwell, in which prose and verse are intermixed (not as in the Consolation of Boetius, or the ARGENIS of Barclay, by the insertion of poems supposed to have been spoken or composed on occasions previously related in prose, but) the poet passing from one to the other, as the nature of the thoughts or his own feelings dictated. Yet this mode of composition does not satisfy a cultivated taste. There is something unpleasant in the being thus obliged to alternate states of feeling so dissimilar, and this too in a species of writing, the pleasure from which is in part derived from the preparation and previous expectation of the reader. A portion of that awkwardness is felt which hangs upon the introduction of songs in our modern comic operas; and to prevent which the judicious Metastasio (as to whose exquisite taste there can be no hesitation, whatever doubts may be entertained as to his poetic genius) uniformly placed the aria at the end of the scene, at the same time that he almost always raises and impassions the style of the recitative immediately preceding. Even in real life, the difference is great and evident between words used as the arbitrary marks of thought, our smooth market-coin of intercourse, with the image and superscription worn out by currency; and those which convey pictures either borrowed from one outward object to enliven and particularize some other; or used allegorically to body forth the inward state of the person speaking; or such as are at least the exponents of his peculiar turn and unusual extent of faculty. So much so indeed, that in the social circles of private life we often find a striking use of the latter put a stop to the general flow of conversation, and by the excitement arising from concentred attention produce a sort of damp and interruption for some minutes after. But in the perusal of works of literary art, we prepare ourselves for such language; and the business of the writer, like that of a painter whose subject requires unusual splendour and prominence, is so to raise the lower and neutral tints, that what in a different style would be the commanding colours, are here used as the means of that gentle degradation requisite in order to produce the effect of a whole. Where this is not achieved in a poem, the metre merely reminds the reader of his claims in order to disappoint them; and where this defect occurs frequently, his feelings are alternately startled by anticlimax and hyperclimax. I refer the reader to the exquisite stanzas cited for another purpose from THE BLIND HIGHLAND BOY; and then annex, as being in my opinion instances of this disharmony in style, the two following: "And one, the rarest, was a shell, Which he, poor child, had studied well: The shell of a green turtle, thin And hollow;--you might sit therein, It was so wide, and deep." "Our Highland Boy oft visited The house which held this prize; and, led By choice or chance, did thither come One day, when no one was at home, And found the door unbarred." Or page 172, vol. I. "'Tis gone forgotten, let me do My best. There was a smile or two-- I can remember them, I see The smiles worth all the world to me. Dear Baby! I must lay thee down: Thou troublest me with strange alarms; Smiles hast thou, sweet ones of thine own; I cannot keep thee in my arms; For they confound me: as it is, I have forgot those smiles of his!" Or page 269, vol. I. "Thou hast a nest, for thy love and thy rest And though little troubled with sloth Drunken lark! thou would'st be loth To be such a traveller as I. Happy, happy liver! _With a soul as strong as a mountain river Pouring out praise to th' Almighty giver,_ Joy and jollity be with us both! Hearing thee or else some other, As merry a brother I on the earth will go plodding on By myself cheerfully till the day is done." The incongruity, which I appear to find in this passage, is that of the two noble lines in italics with the preceding and following. So vol. II. page 30. "Close by a Pond, upon the further side, He stood alone; a minute's space I guess, I watch'd him, he continuing motionless To the Pool's further margin then I drew; He being all the while before me full in view." Compare this with the repetition of the same image, the next stanza but two. "And, still as I drew near with gentle pace, Beside the little pond or moorish flood Motionless as a Cloud the Old Man stood, That heareth not the loud winds when they call; And moveth altogether, if it move at all." Or lastly, the second of the three following stanzas, compared both with the first and the third. "My former thoughts returned; the fear that kills; And hope that is unwilling to be fed; Cold, pain, and labour, and all fleshly ills; And mighty Poets in their misery dead. But now, perplex'd by what the Old Man had said, My question eagerly did I renew, 'How is it that you live, and what is it you do?' "He with a smile did then his words repeat; And said, that gathering Leeches far and wide He travell'd; stirring thus about his feet The waters of the Ponds where they abide. `Once I could meet with them on every side; 'But they have dwindled long by slow decay; 'Yet still I persevere, and find them where I may.' While he was talking thus, the lonely place, The Old Man's shape, and speech, all troubled me In my mind's eye I seemed to see him pace About the weary moors continually, Wandering about alone and silently." Indeed this fine poem is especially characteristic of the author. There is scarce a defect or excellence in his writings of which it would not present a specimen. But it would be unjust not to repeat that this defect is only occasional. From a careful reperusal of the two volumes of poems, I doubt whether the objectionable passages would amount in the whole to one hundred lines; not the eighth part of the number of pages. In THE EXCURSION the feeling of incongruity is seldom excited by the diction of any passage considered in itself, but by the sudden superiority of some other passage forming the context. The second defect I can generalize with tolerable accuracy, if the reader will pardon an uncouth and new-coined word. There is, I should say, not seldom a matter-of-factness in certain poems. This may be divided into, first, a laborious minuteness and fidelity in the representation of objects, and their positions, as they appeared to the poet himself; secondly, the insertion of accidental circumstances, in order to the full explanation of his living characters, their dispositions and actions; which circumstances might be necessary to establish the probability of a statement in real life, where nothing is taken for granted by the hearer; but appear superfluous in poetry, where the reader is willing to believe for his own sake. To this actidentality I object, as contravening the essence of poetry, which Aristotle pronounces to be spoudaiotaton kai philosophotaton genos, the most intense, weighty and philosophical product of human art; adding, as the reason, that it is the most catholic and abstract. The following passage from Davenant's prefatory letter to Hobbes well expresses this truth. "When I considered the actions which I meant to describe; (those inferring the persons), I was again persuaded rather to choose those of a former age, than the present; and in a century so far removed, as might preserve me from their improper examinations, who know not the requisites of a poem, nor how much pleasure they lose, (and even the pleasures of heroic poesy are not unprofitable), who take away the liberty of a poet, and fetter his feet in the shackles of an historian. For why should a poet doubt in story to mend the intrigues of fortune by more delightful conveyances of probable fictions, because austere historians have entered into bond to truth? An obligation, which were in poets as foolish and unnecessary, as is the bondage of false martyrs, who lie in chains for a mistaken opinion. But by this I would imply, that truth, narrative and past, is the idol of historians, (who worship a dead thing), and truth operative, and by effects continually alive, is the mistress of poets, who hath not her existence in matter, but in reason." For this minute accuracy in the painting of local imagery, the lines in THE EXCURSION, pp. 96, 97, and 98, may be taken, if not as a striking instance, yet as an illustration of my meaning. It must be some strong motive--(as, for instance, that the description was necessary to the intelligibility of the tale)--which could induce me to describe in a number of verses what a draughtsman could present to the eye with incomparably greater satisfaction by half a dozen strokes of his pencil, or the painter with as many touches of his brush. Such descriptions too often occasion in the mind of a reader, who is determined to understand his author, a feeling of labour, not very dissimilar to that, with which he would construct a diagram, line by line, for a long geometrical proposition. It seems to be like taking the pieces of a dissected map out of its box. We first look at one part, and then at another, then join and dove-tail them; and when the successive acts of attention have been completed, there is a retrogressive effort of mind to behold it as a whole. The poet should paint to the imagination, not to the fancy; and I know no happier case to exemplify the distinction between these two faculties. Master-pieces of the former mode of poetic painting abound in the writings of Milton, for example: "The fig-tree; not that kind for fruit renown'd, "But such as at this day, to Indians known, "In Malabar or Decan spreads her arms "Branching so broad and long, that in the ground "The bended twigs take root, and daughters grow "About the mother tree, a pillar'd shade "High over-arch'd and ECHOING WALKS BETWEEN; "There oft the Indian herdsman, shunning heat, "Shelters in cool, and tends his pasturing herds "At hoop-holes cut through thickest shade." This is creation rather than painting, or if painting, yet such, and with such co-presence of the whole picture flashed at once upon the eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura. But the poet must likewise understand and command what Bacon calls the vestigia communia of the senses, the latency of all in each, and more especially as by a magical penny duplex, the excitement of vision by sound and the exponents of sound. Thus, "The echoing walks between," may be almost said to reverse the fable in tradition of the head of Memnon, in the Egyptian statue. Such may be deservedly entitled the creative words in the world of imagination. The second division respects an apparent minute adherence to matter- of-fact in character and Incidents; a biographical attention to probability, and an anxiety of explanation and retrospect. Under this head I shall deliver, with no feigned diffidence, the results of my best reflection on the great point of controversy between Mr. Wordsworth and his objectors; namely, on the choice of his characters. I have already declared, and, I trust justified, my utter dissent from the mode of argument which his critics have hitherto employed. To their question, "Why did you choose such a character, or a character from such a rank of life?"--the poet might in my opinion fairly retort: why with the conception of my character did you make wilful choice of mean or ludicrous associations not furnished by me, but supplied from your own sickly and fastidious feelings? How was it, indeed, probable, that such arguments could have any weight with an author, whose plan, whose guiding principle, and main object it was to attack and subdue that state of association, which leads us to place the chief value on those things on which man differs from man, and to forget or disregard the high dignities, which belong to Human Nature, the sense and the feeling, which may be, and ought to be, found in all ranks? The feelings with which, as Christians, we contemplate a mixed congregation rising or kneeling before their common Maker, Mr. Wordsworth would have us entertain at all times, as men, and as readers; and by the excitement of this lofty, yet prideless impartiality in poetry, he might hope to have encouraged its continuance in real life. The praise of good men be his! In real life, and, I trust, even in my imagination, I honour a virtuous and wise man, without reference to the presence or absence of artificial advantages. Whether in the person of an armed baron, a laurelled bard, or of an old Pedlar, or still older Leech-gatherer, the same qualities of head and heart must claim the same reverence. And even in poetry I am not conscious, that I have ever suffered my feelings to be disturbed or offended by any thoughts or images, which the poet himself has not presented. But yet I object, nevertheless, and for the following reasons. First, because the object in view, as an immediate object, belongs to the moral philosopher, and would be pursued, not only more appropriately, but in my opinion with far greater probability of success, in sermons or moral essays, than in an elevated poem. It seems, indeed, to destroy the main fundamental distinction, not only between a poem and prose, but even between philosophy and works of fiction, inasmuch as it proposes truth for its immediate object, instead of pleasure. Now till the blessed time shall come, when truth itself shall be pleasure, and both shall be so united, as to be distinguishable in words only, not in feeling, it will remain the poet's office to proceed upon that state of association, which actually exists as general; instead of attempting first to make it what it ought to be, and then to let the pleasure follow. But here is unfortunately a small hysteron-proteron. For the communication of pleasure is the introductory means by which alone the poet must expect to moralize his readers. Secondly: though I were to admit, for a moment, this argument to be groundless: yet how is the moral effect to be produced, by merely attaching the name of some low profession to powers which are least likely, and to qualities which are assuredly not more likely, to be found in it? The Poet, speaking in his own person, may at once delight and improve us by sentiments, which teach us the independence of goodness, of wisdom, and even of genius, on the favours of fortune. And having made a due reverence before the throne of Antonine, he may bow with equal awe before Epictetus among his fellow-slaves ------"and rejoice In the plain presence of his dignity." Who is not at once delighted and improved, when the Poet Wordsworth himself exclaims, "Oh! many are the Poets that are sown By Nature; men endowed with highest gifts The vision and the faculty divine, Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse, Nor having e'er, as life advanced, been led By circumstance to take unto the height The measure of themselves, these favoured Beings, All but a scattered few, live out their time, Husbanding that which they possess within, And go to the grave, unthought of. Strongest minds Are often those of whom the noisy world Hears least." To use a colloquial phrase, such sentiments, in such language, do one's heart good; though I for my part, have not the fullest faith in the truth of the observation. On the contrary I believe the instances to be exceedingly rare; and should feel almost as strong an objection to introduce such a character in a poetic fiction, as a pair of black swans on a lake, in a fancy landscape. When I think how many, and how much better books than Homer, or even than Herodotus, Pindar or Aeschylus, could have read, are in the power of almost every man, in a country where almost every man is instructed to read and write; and how restless, how difficultly hidden, the powers of genius are; and yet find even in situations the most favourable, according to Mr. Wordsworth, for the formation of a pure and poetic language; in situations which ensure familiarity with the grandest objects of the imagination; but one Burns, among the shepherds of Scotland, and not a single poet of humble life among those of English lakes and mountains; I conclude, that Poetic Genius is not only a very delicate but a very rare plant. But be this as it may, the feelings with which, "I think of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy, The sleepless Soul, that perished in his pride; Of Burns, who walk'd in glory and in joy Behind his plough, upon the mountain-side"-- are widely different from those with which I should read a poem, where the author, having occasion for the character of a poet and a philosopher in the fable of his narration, had chosen to make him a chimney-sweeper; and then, in order to remove all doubts on the subject, had invented an account of his birth, parentage and education, with all the strange and fortunate accidents which had concurred in making him at once poet, philosopher, and sweep! Nothing, but biography, can justify this. If it be admissible even in a novel, it must be one in the manner of De Foe's, that were meant to pass for histories, not in the manner of Fielding's: In THE LIFE OF MOLL FLANDERS, Or COLONEL JACK, not in a TOM JONES, or even a JOSEPH ANDREWS. Much less then can it be legitimately introduced in a poem, the characters of which, amid the strongest individualization, must still remain representative. The precepts of Horace, on this point, are grounded on the nature both of poetry and of the human mind. They are not more peremptory, than wise and prudent. For in the first place a deviation from them perplexes the reader's feelings, and all the circumstances which are feigned in order to make such accidents less improbable, divide and disquiet his faith, rather than aid and support it. Spite of all attempts, the fiction will appear, and unfortunately not as fictitious but as false. The reader not only knows, that the sentiments and language are the poet's own, and his own too in his artificial character, as poet; but by the fruitless endeavours to make him think the contrary, he is not even suffered to forget it. The effect is similar to that produced by an Epic Poet, when the fable and the characters are derived from Scripture history, as in THE MESSIAH of Klopstock, or in CUMBERLAND'S CALVARY; and not merely suggested by it as in the PARADISE LOST of Milton. That illusion, contradistinguished from delusion, that negative faith, which simply permits the images presented to work by their own force, without either denial or affirmation of their real existence by the judgment, is rendered impossible by their immediate neighbourhood to words and facts of known and absolute truth. A faith, which transcends even historic belief, must absolutely put out this mere poetic analogon of faith, as the summer sun is said to extinguish our household fires, when it shines full upon them. What would otherwise have been yielded to as pleasing fiction, is repelled as revolting falsehood. The effect produced in this latter case by the solemn belief of the reader, is in a less degree brought about in the instances, to which I have been objecting, by the balked attempts of the author to make him believe. Add to all the foregoing the seeming uselessness both of the project and of the anecdotes from which it is to derive support. Is there one word, for instance, attributed to the pedlar in THE EXCURSION, characteristic of a Pedlar? One sentiment, that might not more plausibly, even without the aid of any previous explanation, have proceeded from any wise and beneficent old man, of a rank or profession in which the language of learning and refinement are natural and to be expected? Need the rank have been at all particularized, where nothing follows which the knowledge of that rank is to explain or illustrate? When on the contrary this information renders the man's language, feelings, sentiments, and information a riddle, which must itself be solved by episodes of anecdote? Finally when this, and this alone, could have induced a genuine Poet to inweave in a poem of the loftiest style, and on subjects the loftiest and of most universal interest, such minute matters of fact, (not unlike those furnished for the obituary of a magazine by the friends of some obscure "ornament of society lately deceased" in some obscure town,) as "Among the hills of Athol he was born There, on a small hereditary Farm, An unproductive slip of rugged ground, His Father dwelt; and died in poverty; While He, whose lowly fortune I retrace, The youngest of three sons, was yet a babe, A little One--unconscious of their loss. But ere he had outgrown his infant days His widowed Mother, for a second Mate, Espoused the teacher of the Village School; Who on her offspring zealously bestowed Needful instruction." "From his sixth year, the Boy of whom I speak, In summer tended cattle on the Hills; But, through the inclement and the perilous days Of long-continuing winter, he repaired To his Step-father's School,"-etc. For all the admirable passages interposed in this narration, might, with trifling alterations, have been far more appropriately, and with far greater verisimilitude, told of a poet in the character of a poet; and without incurring another defect which I shall now mention, and a sufficient illustration of which will have been here anticipated. Third; an undue predilection for the dramatic form in certain poems, from which one or other of two evils result. Either the thoughts and diction are different from that of the poet, and then there arises an incongruity of style; or they are the same and indistinguishable, and then it presents a species of ventriloquism, where two are represented as talking, while in truth one man only speaks. The fourth class of defects is closely connected with the former; but yet are such as arise likewise from an intensity of feeling disproportionate to such knowledge and value of the objects described, as can be fairly anticipated of men in general, even of the most cultivated classes; and with which therefore few only, and those few particularly circumstanced, can be supposed to sympathize: In this class, I comprise occasional prolixity, repetition, and an eddying, instead of progression, of thought. As instances, see pages 27, 28, and 62 of the Poems, vol. I. and the first eighty lines of the VIth Book of THE EXCURSION. Fifth and last; thoughts and images too great for the subject. This is an approximation to what might be called mental bombast, as distinguished from verbal: for, as in the latter there is a disproportion of the expressions to the thoughts so in this there is a disproportion of thought to the circumstance and occasion. This, by the bye, is a fault of which none but a man of genius is capable. It is the awkwardness and strength of Hercules with the distaff of Omphale. It is a well-known fact, that bright colours in motion both make and leave the strongest impressions on the eye. Nothing is more likely too, than that a vivid image or visual spectrum, thus originated, may become the link of association in recalling the feelings and images that had accompanied the original impression. But if we describe this in such lines, as "They flash upon that inward eye, Which is the bliss of solitude!" in what words shall we describe the joy of retrospection, when the images and virtuous actions of a whole well-spent life, pass before that conscience which is indeed the inward eye: which is indeed "the bliss of solitude?" Assuredly we seem to sink most abruptly, not to say burlesquely, and almost as in a medley, from this couplet to-- "And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils." Vol. I. p. 328. The second instance is from vol. II. page 12, where the poet having gone out for a day's tour of pleasure, meets early in the morning with a knot of Gipsies, who had pitched their blanket-tents and straw-beds, together with their children and asses, in some field by the road-side. At the close of the day on his return our tourist found them in the same place. "Twelve hours," says he, "Twelve hours, twelve bounteous hours are gone, while I Have been a traveller under open sky, Much witnessing of change and cheer, Yet as I left I find them here!" Whereat the poet, without seeming to reflect that the poor tawny wanderers might probably have been tramping for weeks together through road and lane, over moor and mountain, and consequently must have been right glad to rest themselves, their children and cattle, for one whole day; and overlooking the obvious truth, that such repose might be quite as necessary for them, as a walk of the same continuance was pleasing or healthful for the more fortunate poet; expresses his indignation in a series of lines, the diction and imagery of which would have been rather above, than below the mark, had they been applied to the immense empire of China improgressive for thirty centuries: "The weary Sun betook himself to rest:-- --Then issued Vesper from the fulgent west, Outshining, like a visible God, The glorious path in which he trod. And now, ascending, after one dark hour, And one night's diminution of her power, Behold the mighty Moon! this way She looks, as if at them--but they Regard not her:--oh, better wrong and strife, Better vain deeds or evil than such life! The silent Heavens have goings on The stars have tasks!--but these have none!" The last instance of this defect,(for I know no other than these already cited) is from the Ode, page 351, vol. II., where, speaking of a child, "a six years' Darling of a pigmy size," he thus addresses him: "Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind, That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep, Haunted for ever by the Eternal Mind,-- Mighty Prophet! Seer blest! On whom those truths do rest, Which we are toiling all our lives to find! Thou, over whom thy Immortality Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave, A Present which is not to be put by!" Now here, not to stop at the daring spirit of metaphor which connects the epithets "deaf and silent," with the apostrophized eye: or (if we are to refer it to the preceding word, "Philosopher"), the faulty and equivocal syntax of the passage; and without examining the propriety of making a "Master brood o'er a Slave," or "the Day" brood at all; we will merely ask, what does all this mean? In what sense is a child of that age a Philosopher? In what sense does he read "the eternal deep?" In what sense is he declared to be "for ever haunted" by the Supreme Being? or so inspired as to deserve the splendid titles of a Mighty Prophet, a blessed Seer? By reflection? by knowledge? by conscious intuition? or by any form or modification of consciousness? These would be tidings indeed; but such as would pre-suppose an immediate revelation to the inspired communicator, and require miracles to authenticate his inspiration. Children at this age give us no such information of themselves; and at what time were we dipped in the Lethe, which has produced such utter oblivion of a state so godlike? There are many of us that still possess some remembrances, more or less distinct, respecting themselves at six years old; pity that the worthless straws only should float, while treasures, compared with which all the mines of Golconda and Mexico were but straws, should be absorbed by some unknown gulf into some unknown abyss. But if this be too wild and exorbitant to be suspected as having been the poet's meaning; if these mysterious gifts, faculties, and operations, are not accompanied with consciousness; who else is conscious of them? or how can it be called the child, if it be no part of the child's conscious being? For aught I know, the thinking Spirit within me may be substantially one with the principle of life, and of vital operation. For aught I know, it might be employed as a secondary agent in the marvellous organization and organic movements of my body. But, surely, it would be strange language to say, that I construct my heart! or that I propel the finer influences through my nerves! or that I compress my brain, and draw the curtains of sleep round my own eyes! Spinoza and Behmen were, on different systems, both Pantheists; and among the ancients there were philosophers, teachers of the EN KAI PAN, who not only taught that God was All, but that this All constituted God. Yet not even these would confound the part, as a part, with the whole, as the whole. Nay, in no system is the distinction between the individual and God, between the Modification, and the one only Substance, more sharply drawn, than in that of Spinoza. Jacobi indeed relates of Lessing, that, after a conversation with him at the house of the Poet, Gleim, (the Tyrtaeus and Anacreon of the German Parnassus,) in which conversation Lessing had avowed privately to Jacobi his reluctance to admit any personal existence of the Supreme Being, or the possibility of personality except in a finite Intellect, and while they were sitting at table, a shower of rain came on unexpectedly. Gleim expressed his regret at the circumstance, because they had meant to drink their wine in the garden: upon which Lessing in one of his half-earnest, half-joking moods, nodded to Jacobi, and said, "It is I, perhaps, that am doing that," i.e. raining!--and Jacobi answered, "or perhaps I;" Gleim contented himself with staring at them both, without asking for any explanation. So with regard to this passage. In what sense can the magnificent attributes, above quoted, be appropriated to a child, which would not make them equally suitable to a bee, or a dog, or afield of corn: or even to a ship, or to the wind and waves that propel it? The omnipresent Spirit works equally in them, as in the child; and the child is equally unconscious of it as they. It cannot surely be, that the four lines, immediately following, are to contain the explanation? "To whom the grave Is but a lonely bed without the sense or sight Of day or the warm light, A place of thought where we in waiting lie;"-- Surely, it cannot be that this wonder-rousing apostrophe is but a comment on the little poem, "We are Seven?"--that the whole meaning of the passage is reducible to the assertion, that a child, who by the bye at six years old would have been better instructed in most Christian families, has no other notion of death than that of lying in a dark, cold place? And still, I hope, not as in a place of thought! not the frightful notion of lying awake in his grave! The analogy between death and sleep is too simple, too natural, to render so horrid a belief possible for children; even had they not been in the habit, as all Christian children are, of hearing the latter term used to express the former. But if the child's belief be only, that "he is not dead, but sleepeth:" wherein does it differ from that of his father and mother, or any other adult and instructed person? To form an idea of a thing's becoming nothing; or of nothing becoming a thing; is impossible to all finite beings alike, of whatever age, and however educated or uneducated. Thus it is with splendid paradoxes in general. If the words are taken in the common sense, they convey an absurdity; and if, in contempt of dictionaries and custom, they are so interpreted as to avoid the absurdity, the meaning dwindles into some bald truism. Thus you must at once understand the words contrary to their common import, in order to arrive at any sense; and according to their common import, if you are to receive from them any feeling of sublimity or admiration. Though the instances of this defect in Mr. Wordsworth's poems are so few, that for themselves it would have been scarcely just to attract the reader's attention toward them; yet I have dwelt on it, and perhaps the more for this very reason. For being so very few, they cannot sensibly detract from the reputation of an author, who is even characterized by the number of profound truths in his writings, which will stand the severest analysis; and yet few as they are, they are exactly those passages which his blind admirers would be most likely, and best able, to imitate. But Wordsworth, where he is indeed Wordsworth, may be mimicked by copyists, he may be plundered by plagiarists; but he cannot be imitated, except by those who are not born to be imitators. For without his depth of feeling and his imaginative power his sense would want its vital warmth and peculiarity; and without his strong sense, his mysticism would become sickly--mere fog, and dimness! To these defects which, as appears by the extracts, are only occasional, I may oppose, with far less fear of encountering the dissent of any candid and intelligent reader, the following (for the most part correspondent) excellencies. First, an austere purity of language both grammatically and logically; in short a perfect appropriateness of the words to the meaning. Of how high value I deem this, and how particularly estimable I hold the example at the present day, has been already stated: and in part too the reasons on which I ground both the moral and intellectual importance of habituating ourselves to a strict accuracy of expression. It is noticeable, how limited an acquaintance with the masterpieces of art will suffice to form a correct and even a sensitive taste, where none but master-pieces have been seen and admired: while on the other hand, the most correct notions, and the widest acquaintance with the works of excellence of all ages and countries, will not perfectly secure us against the contagious familiarity with the far more numerous offspring of tastelessness or of a perverted taste. If this be the case, as it notoriously is, with the arts of music and painting, much more difficult will it be, to avoid the infection of multiplied and daily examples in the practice of an art, which uses words, and words only, as its instruments. In poetry, in which every line, every phrase, may pass the ordeal of deliberation and deliberate choice, it is possible, and barely possible, to attain that ultimatum which I have ventured to propose as the infallible test of a blameless style; namely: its untranslatableness in words of the same language without injury to the meaning. Be it observed, however, that I include in the meaning of a word not only its correspondent object, but likewise all the associations which it recalls. For language is framed to convey not the object alone but likewise the character, mood and intentions of the person who is representing it. In poetry it is practicable to preserve the diction uncorrupted by the affectations and misappropriations, which promiscuous authorship, and reading not promiscuous only because it is disproportionally most conversant with the compositions of the day, have rendered general. Yet even to the poet, composing in his own province, it is an arduous work: and as the result and pledge of a watchful good sense of fine and luminous distinction, and of complete self-possession, may justly claim all the honour which belongs to an attainment equally difficult and valuable, and the more valuable for being rare. It is at all times the proper food of the understanding; but in an age of corrupt eloquence it is both food and antidote. In prose I doubt whether it be even possible to preserve our style wholly unalloyed by the vicious phraseology which meets us everywhere, from the sermon to the newspaper, from the harangue of the legislator to the speech from the convivial chair, announcing a toast or sentiment. Our chains rattle, even while we are complaining of them. The poems of Boetius rise high in our estimation when we compare them with those of his contemporaries, as Sidonius Apollinaris, and others. They might even be referred to a purer age, but that the prose, in which they are set, as jewels in a crown of lead or iron, betrays the true age of the writer. Much however may be effected by education. I believe not only from grounds of reason, but from having in great measure assured myself of the fact by actual though limited experience, that, to a youth led from his first boyhood to investigate the meaning of every word and the reason of its choice and position, logic presents itself as an old acquaintance under new names. On some future occasion, more especially demanding such disquisition, I shall attempt to prove the close connection between veracity and habits of mental accuracy; the beneficial after-effects of verbal precision in the preclusion of fanaticism, which masters the feelings more especially by indistinct watch-words; and to display the advantages which language alone, at least which language with incomparably greater ease and certainty than any other means, presents to the instructor of impressing modes of intellectual energy so constantly, so imperceptibly, and as it were by such elements and atoms, as to secure in due time the formation of a second nature. When we reflect, that the cultivation of the judgment is a positive command of the moral law, since the reason can give the principle alone, and the conscience bears witness only to the motive, while the application and effects must depend on the judgment when we consider, that the greater part of our success and comfort in life depends on distinguishing the similar from the same, that which is peculiar in each thing from that which it has in common with others, so as still to select the most probable, instead of the merely possible or positively unfit, we shall learn to value earnestly and with a practical seriousness a mean, already prepared for us by nature and society, of teaching the young mind to think well and wisely by the same unremembered process and with the same never forgotten results, as those by which it is taught to speak and converse. Now how much warmer the interest is, how much more genial the feelings of reality and practicability, and thence how much stronger the impulses to imitation are, which a contemporary writer, and especially a contemporary poet, excites in youth and commencing manhood, has been treated of in the earlier pages of these sketches. I have only to add, that all the praise which is due to the exertion of such influence for a purpose so important, joined with that which must be claimed for the infrequency of the same excellence in the same perfection, belongs in full right to Mr. Wordsworth. I am far however from denying that we have poets whose general style possesses the same excellence, as Mr. Moore, Lord Byron, Mr. Bowles, and, in all his later and more important works, our laurel-honouring Laureate. But there are none, in whose works I do not appear to myself to find more exceptions, than in those of Wordsworth. Quotations or specimens would here be wholly out of place, and must be left for the critic who doubts and would invalidate the justice of this eulogy so applied. The second characteristic excellence of Mr. Wordsworth's work is: a correspondent weight and sanity of the Thoughts and Sentiments,--won, not from books; but--from the poet's own meditative observation. They are fresh and have the dew upon them. His muse, at least when in her strength of wing, and when she hovers aloft in her proper element, Makes audible a linked lay of truth, Of truth profound a sweet continuous lay, Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes! Even throughout his smaller poems there is scarcely one, which is not rendered valuable by some just and original reflection. See page 25, vol. II.: or the two following passages in one of his humblest compositions. "O Reader! had you in your mind Such stores as silent thought can bring, O gentle Reader! you would find A tale in every thing;" and "I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds With coldness still returning; Alas! the gratitude of men Has oftener left me mourning;" or in a still higher strain the six beautiful quatrains, page 134. "Thus fares it still in our decay: And yet the wiser mind Mourns less for what age takes away Than what it leaves behind. The Blackbird in the summer trees, The Lark upon the hill, Let loose their carols when they please, Are quiet when they will. With Nature never do they wage A foolish strife; they see A happy youth, and their old age Is beautiful and free! But we are pressed by heavy laws; And often glad no more, We wear a face of joy, because We have been glad of yore. If there is one, who need bemoan His kindred laid in earth, The household hearts that were his own, It is the man of mirth. My days, my Friend, are almost gone, My life has been approved, And many love me; but by none Am I enough beloved;" or the sonnet on Buonaparte, page 202, vol. II. or finally (for a volume would scarce suffice to exhaust the instances,) the last stanza of the poem on the withered Celandine, vol. II. p. 312. "To be a Prodigal's Favorite--then, worse truth, A Miser's Pensioner--behold our lot! O Man! That from thy fair and shining youth Age might but take the things Youth needed not." Both in respect of this and of the former excellence, Mr. Wordsworth strikingly resembles Samuel Daniel, one of the golden writers of our golden Elizabethan age, now most causelessly neglected: Samuel Daniel, whose diction bears no mark of time, no distinction of age which has been, and as long as our language shall last, will be so far the language of the to-day and for ever, as that it is more intelligible to us, than the transitory fashions of our own particular age. A similar praise is due to his sentiments. No frequency of perusal can deprive them of their freshness. For though they are brought into the full day-light of every reader's comprehension; yet are they drawn up from depths which few in any age are privileged to visit, into which few in any age have courage or inclination to descend. If Mr. Wordsworth is not equally with Daniel alike intelligible to all readers of average understanding in all passages of his works, the comparative difficulty does not arise from the greater impurity of the ore, but from the nature and uses of the metal. A poem is not necessarily obscure, because it does not aim to be popular. It is enough, if a work be perspicuous to those for whom it is written, and "Fit audience find, though few." To the "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of early Childhood" the poet might have prefixed the lines which Dante addresses to one of his own Canzoni-- "Canzone, i' credo, che saranno radi Color, che tua ragione intendan bene, Tanto lor sei faticoso ed alto." "O lyric song, there will be few, I think, Who may thy import understand aright: Thou art for them so arduous and so high!" But the ode was intended for such readers only as had been accustomed to watch the flux and reflux of their inmost nature, to venture at times into the twilight realms of consciousness, and to feel a deep interest in modes of inmost being, to which they know that the attributes of time and space are inapplicable and alien, but which yet can not be conveyed, save in symbols of time and space. For such readers the sense is sufficiently plain, and they will be as little disposed to charge Mr. Wordsworth with believing the Platonic pre-existence in the ordinary interpretation of the words, as I am to believe, that Plato himself ever meant or taught it. Polla oi ut' anko- nos okea belae endon enti pharetras phonanta synetoisin; es de to pan hermaeneon chatizei; sophos o pol- la eidos phua; mathontes de labroi panglossia, korakes os, akranta garueton Dios pros ornicha theion. Third (and wherein he soars far above Daniel) the sinewy strength and originality of single lines and paragraphs: the frequent curiosa felicitas of his diction, of which I need not here give specimens, having anticipated them in a preceding page. This beauty, and as eminently characteristic of Wordsworth's poetry, his rudest assailants have felt themselves compelled to acknowledge and admire. Fourth; the perfect truth of nature in his images and descriptions as taken immediately from nature, and proving a long and genial intimacy with the very spirit which gives the physiognomic expression to all the works of nature. Like a green field reflected in a calm and perfectly transparent lake, the image is distinguished from the reality only by its greater softness and lustre. Like the moisture or the polish on a pebble, genius neither distorts nor false-colours its objects; but on the contrary brings out many a vein and many a tint, which escape the eye of common observation, thus raising to the rank of gems what had been often kicked away by the hurrying foot of the traveller on the dusty high road of custom. Let me refer to the whole description of skating, vol. I. page 42 to 47, especially to the lines "So through the darkness and the cold we flew, And not a voice was idle. with the din Meanwhile the precipices rang aloud; The leafless trees and every icy crag Tinkled like iron; while the distant hills Into the tumult sent an alien sound Of melancholy, not unnoticed, while the stars, Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west The orange sky of evening died away." Or to the poem on THE GREEN LINNET, vol. I. page 244. What can be more accurate yet more lovely than the two concluding stanzas? "Upon yon tuft of hazel trees, That twinkle to the gusty breeze, Behold him perched in ecstasies, Yet seeming still to hover; There! where the flutter of his wings Upon his back and body flings Shadows and sunny glimmerings, That cover him all over. While thus before my eyes he gleams, A Brother of the Leaves he seems; When in a moment forth he teems His little song in gushes As if it pleased him to disdain And mock the Form which he did feign While he was dancing with the train Of Leaves among the bushes." Or the description of the blue-cap, and of the noontide silence, page 284; or the poem to the cuckoo, page 299; or, lastly, though I might multiply the references to ten times the number, to the poem, so completely Wordsworth's, commencing "Three years she grew in sun and shower"-- Fifth: a meditative pathos, a union of deep and subtle thought with sensibility; a sympathy with man as man; the sympathy indeed of a contemplator, rather than a fellow-sufferer or co-mate, (spectator, haud particeps) but of a contemplator, from whose view no difference of rank conceals the sameness of the nature; no injuries of wind or weather, or toil, or even of ignorance, wholly disguise the human face divine. The superscription and the image of the Creator still remain legible to him under the dark lines, with which guilt or calamity had cancelled or cross-barred it. Here the Man and the Poet lose and find themselves in each other, the one as glorified, the latter as substantiated. In this mild and philosophic pathos, Wordsworth appears to me without a compeer. Such as he is: so he writes. See vol. I. page 134 to 136, or that most affecting composition, THE AFFLICTION OF MARGARET ---- OF ----, page 165 to 168, which no mother, and, if I may judge by my own experience, no parent can read without a tear. Or turn to that genuine lyric, in the former edition, entitled, THE MAD MOTHER, page 174 to 178, of which I cannot refrain from quoting two of the stanzas, both of them for their pathos, and the former for the fine transition in the two concluding lines of the stanza, so expressive of that deranged state, in which, from the increased sensibility, the sufferer's attention is abruptly drawn off by every trifle, and in the same instant plucked back again by the one despotic thought, bringing home with it, by the blending, fusing power of Imagination and Passion, the alien object to which it had been so abruptly diverted, no longer an alien but an ally and an inmate. "Suck, little babe, oh suck again! It cools my blood; it cools my brain; Thy lips, I feel them, baby! They Draw from my heart the pain away. Oh! press me with thy little hand; It loosens something at my chest About that tight and deadly band I feel thy little fingers prest. The breeze I see is in the tree! It comes to cool my babe and me." "Thy father cares not for my breast, 'Tis thine, sweet baby, there to rest; 'Tis all thine own!--and if its hue Be changed, that was so fair to view, 'Tis fair enough for thee, my dove! My beauty, little child, is flown, But thou wilt live with me in love; And what if my poor cheek be brown? 'Tis well for me, thou canst not see How pale and wan it else would be." Last, and pre-eminently, I challenge for this poet the gift of Imagination in the highest and strictest sense of the word. In the play of fancy, Wordsworth, to my feelings, is not always graceful, and sometimes recondite. The likeness is occasionally too strange, or demands too peculiar a point of view, or is such as appears the creature of predetermined research, rather than spontaneous presentation. Indeed his fancy seldom displays itself, as mere and unmodified fancy. But in imaginative power, he stands nearest of all modern writers to Shakespeare and Milton; and yet in a kind perfectly unborrowed and his own. To employ his own words, which are at once an instance and an illustration, he does indeed to all thoughts and to all objects-- "------add the gleam, The light that never was, on sea or land, The consecration, and the Poet's dream." I shall select a few examples as most obviously manifesting this faculty; but if I should ever be fortunate enough to render my analysis of Imagination, its origin and characters, thoroughly intelligible to the reader, he will scarcely open on a page of this poet's works without recognising, more or less, the presence and the influences of this faculty. From the poem on the YEW TREES, vol. I. page 303, 304. "But worthier still of note Are those fraternal Four of Borrowdale, Joined in one solemn and capacious grove; Huge trunks!--and each particular trunk a growth Of intertwisted fibres serpentine Up-coiling, and inveterately convolved; Not uninformed with phantasy, and looks That threaten the profane;--a pillared shade, Upon whose grassless floor of red-brown hue, By sheddings from the pinal umbrage tinged Perennially--beneath whose sable roof Of boughs, as if for festal purpose, decked With unrejoicing berries--ghostly shapes May meet at noontide; FEAR and trembling HOPE, SILENCE and FORESIGHT; DEATH, the Skeleton, And TIME, the Shadow; there to celebrate, As in a natural temple scattered o'er With altars undisturbed of mossy stone, United worship; or in mute repose To lie, and listen to the mountain flood Murmuring from Glazamara's inmost caves." The effect of the old man's figure in the poem of RESOLUTION AND INDEPENDENCE, vol. II. page 33. "While he was talking thus, the lonely place, The Old Man's shape, and speech, all troubled me In my mind's eye I seemed to see him pace About the weary moors continually, Wandering about alone and silently." Or the 8th, 9th, 19th, 26th, 31st, and 33rd, in the collection of miscellaneous sonnets--the sonnet on the subjugation of Switzerland, page 210, or the last ode, from which I especially select the two following stanzas or paragraphs, page 349 to 350. "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar. Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing Boy; But He beholds the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy! The Youth who daily further from the East Must travel, still is Nature's Priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended; At length the Man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day." And page 352 to 354 of the same ode. "O joy! that in our embers Is something that doth live, That nature yet remembers What was so fugitive! The thought of our past years in me doth breed Perpetual benedictions: not indeed For that which is most worthy to be blest; Delight and liberty, the simple creed Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest, With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:-- Not for these I raise The song of thanks and praise; But for those obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things, Fallings from us, vanishings; Blank misgivings of a Creature Moving about in worlds not realized, High instincts, before which our mortal Nature Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised! But for those first affections, Those shadowy recollections, Which, be they what they may, Are yet the fountain light of all our day, Are yet a master light of all our seeing; Uphold us--cherish--and have power to make Our noisy years seem moments in the being Of the eternal Silence; truths that wake To perish never; Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour, Nor Man nor Boy, Nor all that is at enmity with joy, Can utterly abolish or destroy! Hence, in a season of calm weather, Though inland far we be, Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither; Can in a moment travel thither,-- And see the children sport upon the shore, And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore." And since it would be unfair to conclude with an extract, which, though highly characteristic, must yet, from the nature of the thoughts and the subject, be interesting or perhaps intelligible, to but a limited number of readers; I will add, from the poet's last published work, a passage equally Wordsworthian; of the beauty of which, and of the imaginative power displayed therein, there can be but one opinion, and one feeling. See White Doe, page 5. "Fast the church-yard fills;--anon Look again and they all are gone; The cluster round the porch, and the folk Who sate in the shade of the Prior's Oak! And scarcely have they disappeared Ere the prelusive hymn is heard;-- With one consent the people rejoice, Filling the church with a lofty voice! They sing a service which they feel: For 'tis the sun-rise now of zeal; And faith and hope are in their prime In great Eliza's golden time." "A moment ends the fervent din, And all is hushed, without and within; For though the priest, more tranquilly, Recites the holy liturgy, The only voice which you can hear Is the river murmuring near. --When soft!--the dusky trees between, And down the path through the open green, Where is no living thing to be seen; And through yon gateway, where is found, Beneath the arch with ivy bound, Free entrance to the church-yard ground-- And right across the verdant sod, Towards the very house of God; Comes gliding in with lovely gleam, Comes gliding in serene and slow, Soft and silent as a dream. A solitary Doe! White she is as lily of June, And beauteous as the silver moon When out of sight the clouds are driven And she is left alone in heaven! Or like a ship some gentle day In sunshine sailing far away A glittering ship that hath the plain Of ocean for her own domain." * * * * * * "What harmonious pensive changes Wait upon her as she ranges Round and through this Pile of state Overthrown and desolate! Now a step or two her way Is through space of open day, Where the enamoured sunny light Brightens her that was so bright; Now doth a delicate shadow fall, Falls upon her like a breath, From some lofty arch or wall, As she passes underneath." The following analogy will, I am apprehensive, appear dim and fantastic, but in reading Bartram's Travels I could not help transcribing the following lines as a sort of allegory, or connected simile and metaphor of Wordsworth's intellect and genius.--"The soil is a deep, rich, dark mould, on a deep stratum of tenacious clay; and that on a foundation of rocks, which often break through both strata, lifting their backs above the surface. The trees which chiefly grow here are the gigantic, black oak; magnolia grandi-flora; fraximus excelsior; platane; and a few stately tulip trees." What Mr. Wordsworth will produce, it is not for me to prophesy but I could pronounce with the liveliest convictions what he is capable of producing. It is the FIRST GENUINE PHILOSOPHIC POEM. The preceding criticism will not, I am aware, avail to overcome the prejudices of those, who have made it a business to attack and ridicule Mr. Wordsworth's compositions. Truth and prudence might be imaged as concentric circles. The poet may perhaps have passed beyond the latter, but he has confined himself far within the bounds of the former, in designating these critics, as "too petulant to be passive to a genuine poet, and too feeble to grapple with him;----men of palsied imaginations, in whose minds all healthy action is languid;----who, therefore, feed as the many direct them, or with the many are greedy after vicious provocatives." So much for the detractors from Wordsworth's merits. On the other hand, much as I might wish for their fuller sympathy, I dare not flatter myself, that the freedom with which I have declared my opinions concerning both his theory and his defects, most of which are more or less connected with his theory, either as cause or effect, will be satisfactory or pleasing to all the poet's admirers and advocates. More indiscriminate than mine their admiration may be: deeper and more sincere it cannot be. But I have advanced no opinion either for praise or censure, other than as texts introductory to the reasons which compel me to form it. Above all, I was fully convinced that such a criticism was not only wanted; but that, if executed with adequate ability, it must conduce, in no mean degree, to Mr. Wordsworth's reputation. His fame belongs to another age, and can neither be accelerated nor retarded. How small the proportion of the defects are to the beauties, I have repeatedly declared; and that no one of them originates in deficiency of poetic genius. Had they been more and greater, I should still, as a friend to his literary character in the present age, consider an analytic display of them as pure gain; if only it removed, as surely to all reflecting minds even the foregoing analysis must have removed, the strange mistake, so slightly grounded, yet so widely and industriously propagated, of Mr. Wordsworth's turn for simplicity! I am not half as much irritated by hearing his enemies abuse him for vulgarity of style, subject, and conception, as I am disgusted with the gilded side of the same meaning, as displayed by some affected admirers, with whom he is, forsooth, a "sweet, simple poet!" and so natural, that little master Charles and his younger sister are so charmed with them, that they play at "Goody Blake," or at "Johnny and Betty Foy!" Were the collection of poems, published with these biographical sketches, important enough, (which I am not vain enough to believe,) to deserve such a distinction; even as I have done, so would I be done unto. For more than eighteen months have the volume of Poems, entitled SIBYLLINE LEAVES, and the present volume, up to this page, been printed, and ready for publication. But, ere I speak of myself in the tones, which are alone natural to me under the circumstances of late years, I would fain present myself to the Reader as I was in the first dawn of my literary life: When Hope grew round me, like the climbing vine, And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seem'd mine! For this purpose I have selected from the letters, which I wrote home from Germany, those which appeared likely to be most interesting, and at the same time most pertinent to the title of this work. SATYRANE'S LETTERS LETTER I On Sunday morning, September 16, 1798, the Hamburg packet set sail from Yarmouth; and I, for the first time in my life, beheld my native land retiring from me. At the moment of its disappearance--in all the kirks, churches, chapels, and meeting-houses, in which the greater number, I hope, of my countrymen were at that time assembled, I will dare question whether there was one more ardent prayer offered up to heaven, than that which I then preferred for my country. "Now then," (said I to a gentleman who was standing near me,) "we are out of our country." "Not yet, not yet!" he replied, and pointed to the sea; "This, too, is a Briton's country." This bon mot gave a fillip to my spirits, I rose and looked round on my fellow-passengers, who were all on the deck. We were eighteen in number, videlicet, five Englishmen, an English lady, a French gentleman and his servant, an Hanoverian and his servant, a Prussian, a Swede, two Danes, and a Mulatto boy, a German tailor and his wife, (the smallest couple I ever beheld,) and a Jew. We were all on the deck; but in a short time I observed marks of dismay. The lady retired to the cabin in some confusion, and many of the faces round me assumed a very doleful and frog-coloured appearance; and within an hour the number of those on deck was lessened by one half. I was giddy, but not sick, and the giddiness soon went away, but left a feverishness and want of appetite, which I attributed, in great measure, to the saeva Mephitis of the bilge-water; and it was certainly not decreased by the exportations from the cabin. However, I was well enough to join the able-bodied passengers, one of whom observed not inaptly, that Momus might have discovered an easier way to see a man's inside, than by placing a window in his breast. He needed only have taken a saltwater trip in a packet-boat. I am inclined to believe, that a packet is far superior to a stage- coach, as a means of making men open out to each other. In the latter the uniformity of posture disposes to dozing, and the definitiveness of the period, at which the company will separate, makes each individual think more of those to whom he is going, than of those with whom he is going. But at sea, more curiosity is excited, if only on this account, that the pleasant or unpleasant qualities of your companions are of greater importance to you, from the uncertainty how long you may be obliged to house with them. Besides, if you are countrymen, that now begins to form a distinction and a bond of brotherhood; and if of different countries, there are new incitements of conversation, more to ask and more to communicate. I found that I had interested the Danes in no common degree. I had crept into the boat on the deck and fallen asleep; but was awakened by one of them, about three o'clock in the afternoon, who told me that they had been seeking me in every hole and corner, and insisted that I should join their party and drink with them. He talked English with such fluency, as left me wholly unable to account for the singular and even ludicrous incorrectness with which he spoke it. I went, and found some excellent wines and a dessert of grapes with a pine-apple. The Danes had christened me Doctor Teology, and dressed as I was all in black, with large shoes and black worsted stockings, I might certainly have passed very well for a Methodist missionary. However I disclaimed my title. What then may you be? A man of fortune? No!--A merchant? No!--A merchant's traveller? No!--A clerk? No!--Un Philosophe, perhaps? It was at that time in my life, in which of all possible names and characters I had the greatest disgust to that of "un Philosophe." But I was weary of being questioned, and rather than be nothing, or at best only the abstract idea of a man, I submitted by a bow, even to the aspersion implied in the word "un Philosophe."--The Dane then informed me, that all in the present party were Philosophers likewise. Certes we were not of the Stoick school. For we drank and talked and sung, till we talked and sung all together; and then we rose and danced on the deck a set of dances, which in one sense of the word at least, were very intelligibly and appropriately entitled reels. The passengers, who lay in the cabin below in all the agonies of sea- sickness, must have found our bacchanalian merriment ------a tune Harsh and of dissonant mood from their complaint. I thought so at the time; and, (by way, I suppose, of supporting my newly assumed philosophical character,) I thought too, how closely the greater number of our virtues are connected with the fear of death, and how little sympathy we bestow on pain, where there is no danger. The two Danes were brothers. The one was a man with a clear white complexion, white hair, and white eyebrows; looked silly, and nothing that he uttered gave the lie to his looks. The other, whom, by way of eminence I have called the Dane, had likewise white hair, but was much shorter than his brother, with slender limbs, and a very thin face slightly pockfretten. This man convinced me of the justice of an old remark, that many a faithful portrait in our novels and farces has been rashly censured for an outrageous caricature, or perhaps nonentity. I had retired to my station in the boat--he came and seated himself by my side, and appeared not a little tipsy. He commenced the conversation in the most magnific style, and, as a sort of pioneering to his own vanity, he flattered me with such grossness! The parasites of the old comedy were modest in the comparison. His language and accentuation were so exceedingly singular, that I determined for once in my life to take notes of a conversation. Here it follows, somewhat abridged, indeed, but in all other respects as accurately as my memory permitted. THE DANE. Vat imagination! vat language! vat vast science! and vat eyes! vat a milk-vite forehead! O my heafen! vy, you're a Got! ANSWER. You do me too much honour, Sir. THE DANE. O me! if you should dink I is flattering you!--No, no, no! I haf ten tousand a year--yes, ten tousand a year--yes, ten tousand pound a year! Vel--and vat is dhat? a mere trifle! I 'ouldn't gif my sincere heart for ten times dhe money. Yes, you're a Got! I a mere man! But, my dear friend! dhink of me, as a man! Is, is--I mean to ask you now, my dear friend--is I not very eloquent? Is I not speak English very fine? ANSWER. Most admirably! Believe me, Sir! I have seldom heard even a native talk so fluently. THE DANE. (Squeezing my hand with great vehemence.) My dear friend! vat an affection and fidelity ve have for each odher! But tell me, do tell me,--Is I not, now and den, speak some fault? Is I not in some wrong? ANSWER. Why, Sir! perhaps it might be observed by nice critics in the English language, that you occasionally use the word "is" instead of "am." In our best companies we generally say I am, and not I is or I'se. Excuse me, Sir! it is a mere trifle. THE DANE. O!--is, is, am, am, am. Yes, yes--I know, I know. ANSWER. I am, thou art, he is, we are, ye are, they are. THE DANE. Yes, yes,--I know, I know--Am, am, am, is dhe praesens, and is is dhe perfectum--yes, yes--and are is dhe plusquam perfectum. ANSWER. And art, Sir! is--? THE DANE. My dear friend! it is dhe plusquam perfectum, no, no--dhat is a great lie; are is dhe plusquam perfectum--and art is dhe plasquam plue-perfectum--(then swinging my hand to and fro, and cocking his little bright hazel eyes at me, that danced with vanity and wine)--You see, my dear friend that I too have some lehrning? ANSWER. Learning, Sir? Who dares suspect it? Who can listen to you for a minute, who can even look at you, without perceiving the extent of it? THE DANE. My dear friend!--(then with a would-be humble look, and in a tone of voice as if he was reasoning) I could not talk so of prawns and imperfectum, and futurum and plusquamplue perfectum, and all dhat, my dear friend! without some lehrning? ANSWER. Sir! a man like you cannot talk on any subject without discovering the depth of his information. THE DANE. Dhe grammatic Greek, my friend; ha! ha! Ha! (laughing, and swinging my hand to and fro--then with a sudden transition to great solemnity) Now I will tell you, my dear friend! Dhere did happen about me vat de whole historia of Denmark record no instance about nobody else. Dhe bishop did ask me all dhe questions about all dhe religion in dhe Latin grammar. ANSWER. The grammar, Sir? The language, I presume-- THE DANE. (A little offended.) Grammar is language, and language is grammar-- ANSWER. Ten thousand pardons! THE DANE. Vell, and I was only fourteen years-- ANSWER. Only fourteen years old? THE DANE. No more. I vas fourteen years old--and he asked me all questions, religion and philosophy, and all in dhe Latin language--and I answered him all every one, my dear friend! all in dhe Latin language. ANSWER. A prodigy! an absolute prodigy! THE DANE. No, no, no! he was a bishop, a great superintendent. ANSWER. Yes! a bishop. THE DANE. A bishop--not a mere predicant, not a prediger. ANSWER. My dear Sir! we have misunderstood each other. I said that your answering in Latin at so early an age was a prodigy, that is, a thing that is wonderful; that does not often happen. THE DANE. Often! Dhere is not von instance recorded in dhe whole historia of Denmark. ANSWER. And since then, Sir--? THE DANE. I was sent ofer to dhe Vest Indies--to our Island, and dhere I had no more to do vid books. No! no! I put my genius anodher way--and I haf made ten tousand pound a year. Is not dhat ghenius, my dear friend?--But vat is money?--I dhink dhe poorest man alive my equal. Yes, my dear friend; my little fortune is pleasant to my generous heart, because I can do good--no man with so little a fortune ever did so much generosity--no person--no man person, no woman person ever denies it. But we are all Got's children. Here the Hanoverian interrupted him, and the other Dane, the Swede, and the Prussian, joined us, together with a young Englishman who spoke the German fluently, and interpreted to me many of the Prussian's jokes. The Prussian was a travelling merchant, turned of threescore, a hale man, tall, strong, and stout, full of stories, gesticulations, and buffoonery, with the soul as well as the look of a mountebank, who, while he is making you laugh, picks your pocket. Amid all his droll looks and droll gestures, there remained one look untouched by laughter; and that one look was the true face, the others were but its mask. The Hanoverian was a pale, fat, bloated young man, whose father had made a large fortune in London, as an army-contractor. He seemed to emulate the manners of young Englishmen of fortune. He was a good-natured fellow, not without information or literature; but a most egregious coxcomb. He had been in the habit of attending the House of Commons, and had once spoken, as he informed me, with great applause in a debating society. For this he appeared to have qualified himself with laudable industry: for he was perfect in Walker's Pronouncing Dictionary, and with an accent, which forcibly reminded me of the Scotchman in Roderic Random, who professed to teach the English pronunciation, he was constantly deferring to my superior judgment, whether or no I had pronounced this or that word with propriety, or "the true delicacy." When he spoke, though it were only half a dozen sentences, he always rose: for which I could detect no other motive, than his partiality to that elegant phrase so liberally introduced in the orations of our British legislators, "While I am on my legs." The Swede, whom for reasons that will soon appear, I shall distinguish by the name of Nobility, was a strong-featured, scurvy-faced man, his complexion resembling in colour, a red hot poker beginning to cool. He appeared miserably dependent on the Dane; but was, however, incomparably the best informed and most rational of the party. Indeed his manners and conversation discovered him to be both a man of the world and a gentleman. The Jew was in the hold: the French gentleman was lying on the deck so ill, that I could observe nothing concerning him, except the affectionate attentions of his servant to him. The poor fellow was very sick himself, and every now and then ran to the side of the vessel, still keeping his eye on his master, but returned in a moment and seated himself again by him, now supporting his head, now wiping his forehead and talking to him all the while in the most soothing tones. There had been a matrimonial squabble of a very ludicrous kind in the cabin, between the little German tailor and his little wife. He had secured two beds, one for himself and one for her. This had struck the little woman as a very cruel action; she insisted upon their having but one, and assured the mate in the most piteous tones, that she was his lawful wife. The mate and the cabin boy decided in her favour, abused the little man for his want of tenderness with much humour, and hoisted him into the same compartment with his sea-sick wife. This quarrel was interesting to me, as it procured me a bed, which I otherwise should not have had. In the evening, at seven o'clock, the sea rolled higher, and the Dane, by means of the greater agitation, eliminated enough of what he had been swallowing to make room for a great deal more. His favourite potation was sugar and brandy, i.e. a very little warm water with a large quantity of brandy, sugar, and nutmeg His servant boy, a black-eyed Mulatto, had a good-natured round face, exactly the colour of the skin of the walnut-kernel. The Dane and I were again seated, tete-a-tete, in the ship's boat. The conversation, which was now indeed rather an oration than a dialogue, became extravagant beyond all that I ever heard. He told me that he had made a large fortune in the island of Santa Cruz, and was now returning to Denmark to enjoy it. He expatiated on the style in which he meant to live, and the great undertakings which he proposed to himself to commence, till, the brandy aiding his vanity, and his vanity and garrulity aiding the brandy, he talked like a madman--entreated me to accompany him to Denmark--there I should see his influence with the government, and he would introduce me to the king, etc., etc. Thus he went on dreaming aloud, and then passing with a very lyrical transition to the subject of general politics, he declaimed, like a member of the Corresponding Society, about, (not concerning,) the Rights of Man, and assured me that, notwithstanding his fortune, he thought the poorest man alive his equal. "All are equal, my dear friend! all are equal! Ve are all Got's children. The poorest man haf the same rights with me. Jack! Jack! some more sugar and brandy. Dhere is dhat fellow now! He is a Mulatto--but he is my equal.--That's right, Jack! (taking the sugar and brandy.) Here you Sir! shake hands with dhis gentleman! Shake hands with me, you dog! Dhere, dhere!--We are all equal my dear friend! Do I not speak like Socrates, and Plato, and Cato--they were all philosophers, my dear philosophe! all very great men!--and so was Homer and Virgil--but they were poets. Yes, yes! I know all about it!--But what can anybody say more than this? We are all equal, all Got's children. I haf ten tousand a year, but I am no more dhan de meanest man alive. I haf no pride; and yet, my dear friend! I can say, do! and it is done. Ha! ha! ha! my dear friend! Now dhere is dhat gentleman (pointing to Nobility) he is a Swedish baron--you shall see. Ho! (calling to the Swede) get me, will you, a bottle of wine from the cabin. SWEDE.--Here, Jack! go and get your master a bottle of wine from the cabin. DANE. No, no, no! do you go now--you go yourself you go now! SWEDE. Pah!--DANE. Now go! Go, I pray you." And the Swede went!! After this the Dane commenced an harangue on religion, and mistaking me for un philosophe in the continental sense of the word, he talked of Deity in a declamatory style, very much resembling the devotional rants of that rude blunderer, Mr. Thomas Paine, in his Age of Reason, and whispered in my ear, what damned hypocrism all Jesus Christ's business was. I dare aver, that few men have less reason to charge themselves with indulging in persiflage than myself. I should hate it, if it were only that it is a Frenchman's vice, and feel a pride in avoiding it, because our own language is too honest to have a word to express it by. But in this instance the temptation had been too powerful, and I have placed it on the list of my offences. Pericles answered one of his dearest friends, who had solicited him on a case of life and death, to take an equivocal oath for his preservation: Debeo amicis opitulari, sed usque ad Deos [75]. Friendship herself must place her last and boldest step on this side the altar. What Pericles would not do to save a friend's life, you may be assured, I would not hazard merely to mill the chocolate-pot of a drunken fool's vanity till it frothed over. Assuming a serious look, I professed myself a believer, and sunk at once an hundred fathoms in his good graces. He retired to his cabin, and I wrapped myself up in my great coat, and looked at the water. A beautiful white cloud of foam at momently intervals coursed by the side of the vessel with a roar, and little stars of flame danced and sparkled and went out in it: and every now and then light detachments of this white cloud-like foam darted off from the vessel's side, each with its own small constellation, over the sea, and scoured out of sight like a Tartar troop over a wilderness. It was cold, the cabin was at open war with my olfactories, and I found reason to rejoice in my great coat, a weighty high-caped, respectable rug, the collar of which turned over, and played the part of a night-cap very passably. In looking up at two or three bright stars, which oscillated with the motion of the sails, I fell asleep, but was awakened at one o'clock, Monday morning, by a shower of rain. I found myself compelled to go down into the cabin, where I slept very soundly, and awoke with a very good appetite at breakfast time, my nostrils, the most placable of all the senses, reconciled to, or indeed insensible of the mephitis. Monday, September 17th, I had a long conversation with the Swede, who spoke with the most poignant contempt of the Dane, whom he described as a fool, purse-mad; but he confirmed the boasts of the Dane respecting the largeness of his fortune, which he had acquired in the first instance as an advocate, and afterwards as a planter. From the Dane and from himself I collected that he was indeed a Swedish nobleman, who had squandered a fortune, that was never very large, and had made over his property to the Dane, on whom he was now utterly dependent. He seemed to suffer very little pain from the Dane's insolence. He was in a high degree humane and attentive to the English lady, who suffered most fearfully, and for whom he performed many little offices with a tenderness and delicacy which seemed to prove real goodness of heart. Indeed his general manners and conversation were not only pleasing, but even interesting; and I struggled to believe his insensibility respecting the Dane philosophical fortitude. For though the Dane was now quite sober, his character oozed out of him at every pore. And after dinner, when he was again flushed with wine, every quarter of an hour or perhaps oftener he would shout out to the Swede, "Ho! Nobility, go--do such a thing! Mr. Nobility!--tell the gentlemen such a story, and so forth;" with an insolence which must have excited disgust and detestation, if his vulgar rants on the sacred rights of equality, joined to his wild havoc of general grammar no less than of the English language, had not rendered it so irresistibly laughable. At four o'clock I observed a wild duck swimming on the waves, a single solitary wild duck. It is not easy to conceive, how interesting a thing it looked in that round objectless desert of waters. I had associated such a feeling of immensity with the ocean, that I felt exceedingly disappointed, when I was out of sight of all land, at the narrowness and nearness, as it were, of the circle of the horizon. So little are images capable of satisfying the obscure feelings connected with words. In the evening the sails were lowered, lest we should run foul of the land, which can be seen only at a small distance. And at four o'clock, on Tuesday morning, I was awakened by the cry of "land! land!" It was an ugly island rock at a distance on our left, called Heiligeland, well known to many passengers from Yarmouth to Hamburg, who have been obliged by stormy weather to pass weeks and weeks in weary captivity on it, stripped of all their money by the exorbitant demands of the wretches who inhabit it. So at least the sailors informed me.--About nine o'clock we saw the main land, which seemed scarcely able to hold its head above water, low, flat, and dreary, with lighthouses and land-marks which seemed to give a character and language to the dreariness. We entered the mouth of the Elbe, passing Neu-werk; though as yet the right bank only of the river was visible to us. On this I saw a church, and thanked God for my safe voyage, not without affectionate thoughts of those I had left in England. At eleven o'clock on the same morning we arrived at Cuxhaven, the ship dropped anchor, and the boat was hoisted out, to carry the Hanoverian and a few others on shore. The captain agreed to take us, who remained, to Hamburg for ten guineas, to which the Dane contributed so largely, that the other passengers paid but half a guinea each. Accordingly we hauled anchor, and passed gently up the river. At Cuxhaven both sides of the river may be seen in clear weather; we could now see the right bank only. We passed a multitude of English traders that had been waiting many weeks for a wind. In a short time both banks became visible, both flat and evidencing the labour of human hands by their extreme neatness. On the left bank I saw a church or two in the distance; on the right bank we passed by steeple and windmill and cottage, and windmill and single house, windmill and windmill, and neat single house, and steeple. These were the objects and in the succession. The shores were very green and planted with trees not inelegantly. Thirty-five miles from Cuxhaven the night came on us, and, as the navigation of the Elbe is perilous, we dropped anchor. Over what place, thought I, does the moon hang to your eye, my dearest friend? To me it hung over the left bank of the Elbe. Close above the moon was a huge volume of deep black cloud, while a very thin fillet crossed the middle of the orb, as narrow and thin and black as a ribbon of crape. The long trembling road of moonlight, which lay on the water and reached to the stern of our vessel, glimmered dimly and obscurely. We saw two or three lights from the right bank, probably from bed-rooms. I felt the striking contrast between the silence of this majestic stream, whose banks are populous with men and women and children, and flocks and herds--between the silence by night of this peopled river, and the ceaseless noise, and uproar, and loud agitations of the desolate solitude of the ocean. The passengers below had all retired to their beds; and I felt the interest of this quiet scene the more deeply from the circumstance of having just quitted them. For the Prussian had during the whole of the evening displayed all his talents to captivate the Dane, who had admitted him into the train of his dependents. The young Englishman continued to interpret the Prussian's jokes to me. They were all without exception profane and abominable, but some sufficiently witty, and a few incidents, which he related in his own person, were valuable as illustrating the manners of the countries in which they had taken place. Five o'clock on Wednesday morning we hauled the anchor, but were soon obliged to drop it again in consequence of a thick fog, which our captain feared would continue the whole day; but about nine it cleared off, and we sailed slowly along, close by the shore of a very beautiful island, forty miles from Cuxhaven, the wind continuing slack. This holm or island is about a mile and a half in length, wedge-shaped, well wooded, with glades of the liveliest green, and rendered more interesting by the remarkably neat farm-house on it. It seemed made for retirement without solitude--a place that would allure one's friends, while it precluded the impertinent calls of mere visitors. The shores of the Elbe now became more beautiful, with rich meadows and trees running like a low wall along the river's edge; and peering over them, neat houses and, (especially on the right bank,) a profusion of steeple-spires, white, black, or red. An instinctive taste teaches men to build their churches in flat countries with spire-steeples, which, as they cannot be referred to any other object, point, as with silent finger, to the sky and stars, and sometimes, when they reflect the brazen light of a rich though rainy sun-set, appear like a pyramid of flame burning heavenward. I remember once, and once only, to have seen a spire in a narrow valley of a mountainous country. The effect was not only mean but ludicrous, and reminded me against my will of an extinguisher; the close neighbourhood of the high mountain, at the foot of which it stood, had so completely dwarfed it, and deprived it of all connection with the sky or clouds. Forty-six English miles from Cuxhaven, and sixteen from Hamburg, the Danish village Veder ornaments the left bank with its black steeple, and close by it is the wild and pastoral hamlet of Schulau. Hitherto both the right and left bank, green to the very brink, and level with the river, resembled the shores of a park canal. The trees and houses were alike low, sometimes the low trees over-topping the yet lower houses, sometimes the low houses rising above the yet lower trees. But at Schulau the left bank rises at once forty or fifty feet, and stares on the river with its perpendicular facade of sand, thinly patched with tufts of green. The Elbe continued to present a more and more lively spectacle from the multitude of fishing boats and the flocks of sea gulls wheeling round them, the clamorous rivals and companions of the fishermen; till we came to Blankaness, a most interesting village scattered amid scattered trees, over three hills in three divisions. Each of the three hills stares upon the river, with faces of bare sand, with which the boats with their bare poles, standing in files along the banks, made a sort of fantastic harmony. Between each facade lies a green and woody dell, each deeper than the other. In short it is a large village made up of individual cottages, each cottage in the centre of its own little wood or orchard, and each with its own separate path: a village with a labyrinth of paths, or rather a neighbourhood of houses! It is inhabited by fishermen and boat-makers, the Blankanese boats being in great request through the whole navigation of the Elbe. Here first we saw the spires of Hamburg, and from hence, as far as Altona, the left bank of the Elbe is uncommonly pleasing, considered as the vicinity of an industrious and republican city--in that style of beauty, or rather prettiness, that might tempt the citizen into the country, and yet gratify the taste which he had acquired in the town. Summer-houses and Chinese show-work are everywhere scattered along the high and green banks; the boards of the farm-houses left unplastered and gaily painted with green and yellow; and scarcely a tree not cut into shapes and made to remind the human being of his own power and intelligence instead of the wisdom of nature. Still, however, these are links of connection between town and country, and far better than the affectation of tastes and enjoyments for which men's habits have disqualified them. Pass them by on Saturdays and Sundays with the burghers of Hamburg smoking their pipes, the women and children feasting in the alcoves of box and yew, and it becomes a nature of its own. On Wednesday, four o'clock, we left the vessel, and passing with trouble through the huge masses of shipping that seemed to choke the wide Elbe from Altona upward, we were at length landed at the Boom House, Hamburg. LETTER II To a lady. RATZEBURG. Meine liebe Freundinn, See how natural the German comes from me, though I have not yet been six weeks in the country!--almost as fluently as English from my neighbour the Amtsschreiber, (or public secretary,) who as often as we meet, though it should be half a dozen times in the same day, never fails to greet me with--"---ddam your ploot unt eyes, my dearest Englander! vhee goes it!"--which is certainly a proof of great generosity on his part, these words being his whole stock of English. I had, however, a better reason than the desire of displaying my proficiency: for I wished to put you in good humour with a language, from the acquirement of which I have promised myself much edification and the means too of communicating a new pleasure to you and your sister, during our winter readings. And how can I do this better than by pointing out its gallant attention to the ladies? Our English affix, ess, is, I believe, confined either to words derived from the Latin, as actress, directress, etc., or from the French, as mistress, duchess, and the like. But the German, inn, enables us to designate the sex in every possible relation of life. Thus the Amtmann's lady is the Frau Amtmanninn--the secretary's wife, (by the bye, the handsomest woman I have yet seen in Germany,) is die allerliebste Frau Amtsschreiberinn--the colonel's lady, die Frau Obristinn or Colonellinn--and even the parson's wife, die Frau Pastorinn. But I am especially pleased with their Freundinn, which, unlike the amica of the Romans, is seldom used but in its best and purest sense. Now, I know it will be said, that a friend is already something more than a friend, when a man feels an anxiety to express to himself that this friend is a female; but this I deny--in that sense at least in which the objection will be made. I would hazard the impeachment of heresy, rather than abandon my belief that there is a sex in our souls as well as in their perishable garments; and he who does not feel it, never truly loved a sister--nay, is not capable even of loving a wife as she deserves to be loved, if she indeed be worthy of that holy name. Now I know, my gentle friend, what you are murmuring to yourself--"This is so like him! running away after the first bubble, that chance has blown off from the surface of his fancy; when one is anxious to learn where he is and what he has seen." Well then! that I am settled at Ratzeburg, with my motives and the particulars of my journey hither, will inform you. My first letter to him, with which doubtless he has edified your whole fireside, left me safely landed at Hamburg on the Elbe Stairs, at the Boom House. While standing on the stairs, I was amused by the contents of the passage-boat which crosses the river once or twice a day from Hamburg to Haarburg. It was stowed close with all people of all nations, in all sorts of dresses; the men all with pipes in their mouths, and these pipes of all shapes and fancies--straight and wreathed, simple and complex, long and short, cane, clay, porcelain, wood, tin, silver, and ivory; most of them with silver chains and silver bole-covers. Pipes and boots are the first universal characteristic of the male Hamburgers that would strike the eye of a raw traveller. But I forget my promise of journalizing as much as possible.--Therefore, Septr. 19th Afternoon. My companion, who, you recollect, speaks the French language with unusual propriety, had formed a kind of confidential acquaintance with the emigrant, who appeared to be a man of sense, and whose manners were those of a perfect gentleman. He seemed about fifty or rather more. Whatever is unpleasant in French manners from excess in the degree, had been softened down by age or affliction; and all that is delightful in the kind, alacrity and delicacy in little attentions, etc., remained, and without bustle, gesticulation, or disproportionate eagerness. His demeanour exhibited the minute philanthropy of a polished Frenchman, tempered by the sobriety of the English character disunited from its reserve. There is something strangely attractive in the character of a gentleman when you apply the word emphatically, and yet in that sense of the term which it is more easy to feel than to define. It neither includes the possession of high moral excellence, nor of necessity even the ornamental graces of manner. I have now in my mind's eye a person whose life would scarcely stand scrutiny even in the court of honour, much less in that of conscience; and his manners, if nicely observed, would of the two excite an idea of awkwardness rather than of elegance: and yet every one who conversed with him felt and acknowledged the gentleman. The secret of the matter, I believe to be this--we feel the gentlemanly character present to us, whenever, under all the circumstances of social intercourse, the trivial not less than the important, through the whole detail of his manners and deportment, and with the ease of a habit, a person shows respect to others in such a way, as at the same time implies in his own feelings an habitual and assured anticipation of reciprocal respect from them to himself. In short, the gentlemanly character arises out of the feeling of Equality acting, as a Habit, yet flexible to the varieties of Rank, and modified without being disturbed or superseded by them. This description will perhaps explain to you the ground of one of your own remarks, as I was englishing to you the interesting dialogue concerning the causes of the corruption of eloquence. "What perfect gentlemen these old Romans must have been! I was impressed, I remember, with the same feeling at the time I was reading a translation of Cicero's philosophical dialogues and of his epistolary correspondence: while in Pliny's Letters I seemed to have a different feeling--he gave me the notion of a very fine gentleman." You uttered the words as if you had felt that the adjunct had injured the substance and the increased degree altered the kind. Pliny was the courtier of an absolute monarch--Cicero an aristocratic republican. For this reason the character of gentleman, in the sense to which I have confined it, is frequent in England, rare in France, and found, where it is found, in age or the latest period of manhood; while in Germany the character is almost unknown. But the proper antipode of a gentleman is to be sought for among the Anglo-American democrats. I owe this digression, as an act of justice to this amiable Frenchman, and of humiliation for myself. For in a little controversy between us on the subject of French poetry, he made me feel my own ill behaviour by the silent reproof of contrast, and when I afterwards apologized to him for the warmth of my language, he answered me with a cheerful expression of surprise, and an immediate compliment, which a gentleman might both make with dignity and receive with pleasure. I was pleased therefore to find it agreed on, that we should, if possible, take up our quarters in the same house. My friend went with him in search of an hotel, and I to deliver my letters of recommendation. I walked onward at a brisk pace, enlivened not so much by anything I actually saw, as by the confused sense that I was for the first time in my life on the continent of our planet. I seemed to myself like a liberated bird that had been hatched in an aviary, who now, after his first soar of freedom, poises himself in the upper air. Very naturally I began to wonder at all things, some for being so like and some for being so unlike the things in England--Dutch women with large umbrella hats shooting out half a yard before them, with a prodigal plumpness of petticoat behind--the women of Hamburg with caps plaited on the caul with silver, or gold, or both, bordered round with stiffened lace, which stood out before their eyes, but not lower, so that the eyes sparkled through it--the Hanoverian with the fore part of the head bare, then a stiff lace standing up like a wall perpendicular on the cap, and the cap behind tailed with an enormous quantity of ribbon which lies or tosses on the back: "Their visnomies seem'd like a goodly banner Spread in defiance of all enemies." The ladies all in English dresses, all rouged, and all with bad teeth: which you notice instantly from their contrast to the almost animal, too glossy mother-of-pearl whiteness and the regularity of the teeth of the laughing, loud-talking country-women and servant-girls, who with their clean white stockings and with slippers without heel quarters, tripped along the dirty streets, as if they were secured by a charm from the dirt: with a lightness too, which surprised me, who had always considered it as one of the annoyances of sleeping in an Inn, that I had to clatter up stairs in a pair of them. The streets narrow; to my English nose sufficiently offensive, and explaining at first sight the universal use of boots; without any appropriate path for the foot-passengers; the gable ends of the houses all towards the street, some in the ordinary triangular form and entire as the botanists say; but the greater number notched and scolloped with more than Chinese grotesqueness. Above all, I was struck with the profusion of windows, so large and so many, that the houses look all glass. Mr. Pitt's window tax, with its pretty little additionals sprouting out from it like young toadlets on the back of a Surinam toad, would certainly improve the appearance of the Hamburg houses, which have a slight summer look, not in keeping with their size, incongruous with the climate, and precluding that feeling of retirement and self-content, which one wishes to associate with a house in a noisy city. But a conflagration would, I fear, be the previous requisite to the production of any architectural beauty in Hamburg: for verily it is a filthy town. I moved on and crossed a multitude of ugly bridges, with huge black deformities of water wheels close by them. The water intersects the city everywhere, and would have furnished to the genius of Italy the capabilities of all that is most beautiful and magnificent in architecture. It might have been the rival of Venice, and it is huddle and ugliness, stench and stagnation. The Jungfer Stieg, (that is, Young Ladies' Walk), to which my letters directed me, made an exception. It was a walk or promenade planted with treble rows of elm trees, which, being yearly pruned and cropped, remain slim and dwarf-like. This walk occupies one side of a square piece of water, with many swans on it perfectly tame, and, moving among the swans, shewy pleasure-boats with ladies in them, rowed by their husbands or lovers.------ (Some paragraphs have been here omitted.)------thus embarrassed by sad and solemn politeness still more than by broken English, it sounded like the voice of an old friend when I heard the emigrant's servant inquiring after me. He had come for the purpose of guiding me to our hotel. Through streets and streets I pressed on as happy as a child, and, I doubt not, with a childish expression of wonderment in my busy eyes, amused by the wicker waggons with movable benches across them, one behind the other, (these were the hackney coaches;) amused by the sign-boards of the shops, on which all the articles sold within are painted, and that too very exactly, though in a grotesque confusion, (a useful substitute for language in this great mart of nations;) amused with the incessant tinkling of the shop and house door bells, the bell hanging over each door and struck with a small iron rod at every entrance and exit;--and finally, amused by looking in at the windows, as I passed along; the ladies and gentlemen drinking coffee or playing cards, and the gentlemen all smoking. I wished myself a painter, that I might have sent you a sketch of one of the card parties. The long pipe of one gentleman rested on the table, its bole half a yard from his mouth, fuming like a censer by the fish-pool--the other gentleman, who was dealing the cards, and of course had both hands employed, held his pipe in his teeth, which hanging down between his knees, smoked beside his ancles. Hogarth himself never drew a more ludicrous distortion both of attitude and physiognomy, than this effort occasioned nor was there wanting beside it one of those beautiful female faces which the same Hogarth, in whom the satirist never extinguished that love of beauty which belonged to him as a poet, so often and so gladly introduces, as the central figure, in a crowd of humorous deformities, which figures, (such is the power of true genius!) neither acts, nor is meant to act as a contrast; but diffuses through all, and over each of the group, a spirit of reconciliation and human kindness; and, even when the attention is no longer consciously directed to the cause of this feeling, still blends its tenderness with our laughter: and thus prevents the instructive merriment at the whims of nature or the foibles or humours of our fellow-men from degenerating into the heart-poison of contempt or hatred. Our hotel DIE WILDE MAN, (the sign of which was no bad likeness of the landlord, who had ingrafted on a very grim face a restless grin, that was at every man's service, and which indeed, like an actor rehearsing to himself, he kept playing in expectation of an occasion for it)--neither our hotel, I say, nor its landlord were of the genteelest class. But it has one great advantage for a stranger, by being in the market place, and the next neighbour of the huge church of St. Nicholas: a church with shops and houses built up against it, out of which wens and warts its high massy steeple rises, necklaced near the top with a round of large gilt balls. A better pole-star could scarcely be desired. Long shall I retain the impression made on my mind by the awful echo, so loud and long and tremulous, of the deep-toned clock within this church, which awoke me at two in the morning from a distressful dream, occasioned, I believe, by the feather bed, which is used here instead of bed-clothes. I will rather carry my blanket about with me like a wild Indian, than submit to this abominable custom. Our emigrant acquaintance was, we found, an intimate friend of the celebrated Abbe de Lisle: and from the large fortune which he possessed under the monarchy, had rescued sufficient not only for independence, but for respectability. He had offended some of his fellow-emigrants in London, whom he had obliged with considerable sums, by a refusal to make further advances, and in consequence of their intrigues had received an order to quit the kingdom. I thought it one proof of his innocence, that he attached no blame either to the alien act, or to the minister who had exerted it against him; and a still greater, that he spoke of London with rapture, and of his favourite niece, who had married and settled in England, with all the fervour and all the pride of a fond parent. A man sent by force out of a country, obliged to sell out of the stocks at a great loss, and exiled from those pleasures and that style of society which habit had rendered essential to his happiness, whose predominant feelings were yet all of a private nature, resentment for friendship outraged, and anguish for domestic affections interrupted--such a man, I think, I could dare warrant guiltless of espionnage in any service, most of all in that of the present French Directory. He spoke with ecstasy of Paris under the Monarchy: and yet the particular facts, which made up his description, left as deep a conviction on my mind, of French worthlessness, as his own tale had done of emigrant ingratitude. Since my arrival in Germany, I have not met a single person, even among those who abhor the Revolution, that spoke with favour, or even charity of the French emigrants. Though the belief of their influence in the organization of this disastrous war (from the horrors of which, North Germany deems itself only reprieved, not secured,) may have some share in the general aversion with which they are regarded: yet I am deeply persuaded that the far greater part is owing to their own profligacy, to their treachery and hardheartedness to each other, and the domestic misery or corrupt principles which so many of them have carried into the families of their protectors. My heart dilated with honest pride, as I recalled to mind the stern yet amiable characters of the English patriots, who sought refuge on the Continent at the Restoration! O let not our civil war under the first Charles be paralleled with the French Revolution! In the former, the character overflowed from excess of principle; in the latter from the fermentation of the dregs! The former, was a civil war between the virtues and virtuous prejudices of the two parties; the latter, between the vices. The Venetian glass of the French monarchy shivered and flew asunder with the working of a double poison. Sept. 20th. I was introduced to Mr. Klopstock, the brother of the poet, who again introduced me to Professor Ebeling, an intelligent and lively man, though deaf: so deaf, indeed, that it was a painful effort to talk with him, as we were obliged to drop our pearls into a huge ear-trumpet. From this courteous and kind-hearted man of letters, (I hope, the German literati in general may resemble this first specimen), I heard a tolerable Italian pun, and an interesting anecdote. When Buonaparte was in Italy, having been irritated by some instance of perfidy, he said in a loud and vehement tone, in a public company--"'tis a true proverb, gli Italiani tutti ladroni"--(that is, the Italians all plunderers.) A lady had the courage to reply, "Non tutti; ma BUONA PARTE," (not all, but a good part, or Buonaparte.) This, I confess, sounded to my ears, as one of the many good things that might have been said. The anecdote is more valuable; for it instances the ways and means of French insinuation. Hoche had received much information concerning the face of the country from a map of unusual fulness and accuracy, the maker of which, he heard, resided at Duesseldorf. At the storming of Duesseldorf by the French army, Hoche previously ordered, that the house and property of this man should be preserved, and intrusted the performance of the order to an officer on whose troop he could rely. Finding afterwards, that the man had escaped before the storming commenced, Hoche exclaimed, "HE had no reason to flee! It is for such men, not against them, that the French nation makes war, and consents to shed the blood of its children." You remember Milton's sonnet-- "The great Emathian conqueror bid spare The house of Pindarus when temple and tower Went to the ground"------ Now though the Duesseldorf map-maker may stand in the same relation to the Theban bard, as the snail, that marks its path by lines of film on the wall it creeps over, to the eagle that soars sunward and beats the tempest with its wings; it does not therefore follow, that the Jacobin of France may not be as valiant a general and as good a politician, as the madman of Macedon. From Professor Ebeling's Mr. Klopstock accompanied my friend and me to his own house, where I saw a fine bust of his brother. There was a solemn and heavy greatness in his countenance, which corresponded to my preconceptions of his style and genius.--I saw there, likewise, a very fine portrait of Lessing, whose works are at present the chief object of my admiration. His eyes were uncommonly like mine, if anything, rather larger and more prominent. But the lower part of his face and his nose--O what an exquisite expression of elegance and sensibility!--There appeared no depth, weight, or comprehensiveness in the forehead.--The whole face seemed to say, that Lessing was a man of quick and voluptuous feelings; of an active but light fancy; acute; yet acute not in the observation of actual life, but in the arrangements and management of the ideal world, that is, in taste, and in metaphysics. I assure you, that I wrote these very words in my memorandum-book with the portrait before my eyes, and when I knew nothing of Lessing but his name, and that he was a German writer of eminence. We consumed two hours and more over a bad dinner, at the table d'hote. "Patience at a German ordinary, smiling at time." The Germans are the worst cooks in Europe. There is placed for every two persons a bottle of common wine--Rhenish and Claret alternately; but in the houses of the opulent, during the many and long intervals of the dinner, the servants hand round glasses of richer wines. At the Lord of Culpin's they came in this order. Burgundy--Madeira--Port--Frontiniac--Pacchiaretti--Old Hock--Mountain--Champagne--Hock again--Bishop, and lastly, Punch. A tolerable quantum, methinks! The last dish at the ordinary, viz. slices of roast pork, (for all the larger dishes are brought in, cut up, and first handed round and then set on the table,) with stewed prunes and other sweet fruits, and this followed by cheese and butter, with plates of apples, reminded me of Shakespeare [76], and Shakespeare put it in my head to go to the French comedy. Bless me! why it is worse than our modern English plays! The first act informed me, that a court martial is to be held on a Count Vatron, who had drawn his sword on the Colonel, his brother-in-law. The officers plead in his behalf--in vain! His wife, the Colonel's sister, pleads with most tempestuous agonies--in vain! She falls into hysterics and faints away, to the dropping of the inner curtain! In the second act sentence of death is passed on the Count--his wife, as frantic and hysterical as before: more so (good industrious creature!) she could not be. The third and last act, the wife still frantic, very frantic indeed!--the soldiers just about to fire, the handkerchief actually dropped; when reprieve! reprieve! is heard from behind the scenes: and in comes Prince Somebody, pardons the Count, and the wife is still frantic, only with joy; that was all! O dear lady! this is one of the cases, in which laughter is followed by melancholy: for such is the kind of drama, which is now substituted every where for Shakespeare and Racine. You well know, that I offer violence to my own feelings in joining these names. But however meanly I may think of the French serious drama, even in its most perfect specimens; and with whatever right I may complain of its perpetual falsification of the language, and of the connections and transitions of thought, which Nature has appropriated to states of passion; still, however, the French tragedies are consistent works of art, and the offspring of great intellectual power. Preserving a fitness in the parts, and a harmony in the whole, they form a nature of their own, though a false nature. Still they excite the minds of the spectators to active thought, to a striving after ideal excellence. The soul is not stupefied into mere sensations by a worthless sympathy with our own ordinary sufferings, or an empty curiosity for the surprising, undignified by the language or the situations which awe and delight the imagination. What, (I would ask of the crowd, that press forward to the pantomimic tragedies and weeping comedies of Kotzebue and his imitators), what are you seeking? Is it comedy? But in the comedy of Shakespeare and Moliere the more accurate my knowledge, and the more profoundly I think, the greater is the satisfaction that mingles with my laughter. For though the qualities which these writers pourtray are ludicrous indeed, either from the kind or the excess, and exquisitely ludicrous, yet are they the natural growth of the human mind and such as, with more or less change in the drapery, I can apply to my own heart, or at least to whole classes of my fellow-creatures. How often are not the moralist and the metaphysician obliged for the happiest illustrations of general truths and the subordinate laws of human thought and action to quotations, not only from the tragic characters, but equally from the Jaques, Falstaff, and even from the fools and clowns of Shakespeare, or from the Miser, Hypochondriast, and Hypocrite, of Moliere! Say not, that I am recommending abstractions: for these class-characteristics, which constitute the instructiveness of a character, are so modified and particularized in each person of the Shakesperian Drama, that life itself does not excite more distinctly that sense of individuality which belongs to real existence. Paradoxical as it may sound, one of the essential properties of geometry is not less essential to dramatic excellence, and, (if I may mention his name without pedantry to a lady,) Aristotle has accordingly required of the poet an involution of the universal in the individual. The chief differences are, that in geometry it is the universal truth itself, which is uppermost in the consciousness, in poetry the individual form in which the truth is clothed. With the ancients, and not less with the elder dramatists of England and France, both comedy and tragedy were considered as kinds of poetry. They neither sought in comedy to make us laugh merely, much less to make us laugh by wry faces, accidents of jargon, slang phrases for the day, or the clothing of commonplace morals in metaphors drawn from the shops or mechanic occupations of their characters; nor did they condescend in tragedy to wheedle away the applause of the spectators, by representing before them fac-similes of their own mean selves in all their existing meanness, or to work on their sluggish sympathies by a pathos not a whit more respectable than the maudlin tears of drunkenness. Their tragic scenes were meant to affect us indeed, but within the bounds of pleasure, and in union with the activity both of our understanding and imagination. They wished to transport the mind to a sense of its possible greatness, and to implant the germs of that greatness during the temporary oblivion of the worthless "thing, we are" and of the peculiar state, in which each man happens to be; suspending our individual recollections and lulling them to sleep amid the music of nobler thoughts. Hold!--(methinks I hear the spokesman of the crowd reply, and we will listen to him. I am the plaintiff, and he the defendant.) DEFENDANT. Hold! are not our modern sentimental plays filled with the best Christian morality? PLAINTIFF. Yes! just as much of it, and just that part of it, which you can exercise without a single Christian virtue--without a single sacrifice that is really painful to you!--just as much as flatters you, sends you away pleased with your own hearts, and quite reconciled to your vices, which can never be thought very ill of, when they keep such good company, and walk hand in hand with so much compassion and generosity; adulation so loathsome, that you would spit in the man's face who dared offer it to you in a private company, unless you interpreted it as insulting irony, you appropriate with infinite satisfaction, when you share the garbage with the whole stye, and gobble it out of a common trough. No Caesar must pace your boards--no Antony, no royal Dane, no Orestes, no Andromache! D. No: or as few of them as possible. What has a plain citizen of London, or Hamburg, to do with your kings and queens, and your old school-boy Pagan heroes? Besides, every body knows the stories; and what curiosity can we feel---- P. What, Sir, not for the manner?--not for the delightful language of the poet?--not for the situations, the action and reaction of the passions? D. You are hasty, Sir! the only curiosity, we feel, is in the story: and how can we be anxious concerning the end of a play, or be surprised by it, when we know how it will turn out? P. Your pardon, for having interrupted you! we now understand each other. You seek then, in a tragedy, which wise men of old held for the highest effort of human genius, the same gratification, as that you receive from a new novel, the last German romance, and other dainties of the day, which can be enjoyed but once. If you carry these feelings to the sister art of Painting, Michael Angelo's Sixtine Chapel, and the Scripture Gallery of Raphael can expect no favour from you. You know all about them beforehand; and are, doubtless, more familiar with the subjects of those paintings, than with the tragic tales of the historic or heroic ages. There is a consistency, therefore, in your preference of contemporary writers: for the great men of former times, those at least who were deemed great by our ancestors, sought so little to gratify this kind of curiosity, that they seemed to have regarded the story in a not much higher light, than the painter regards his canvass: as that on, not by, which they were to display their appropriate excellence. No work, resembling a tale or romance, can well show less variety of invention in the incidents, or less anxiety in weaving them together, than the DON QUIXOTE of Cervantes. Its admirers feel the disposition to go back and re-peruse some preceding chapter, at least ten times for once that they find any eagerness to hurry forwards: or open the book on those parts which they best recollect, even as we visit those friends oftenest whom we love most, and with whose characters and actions we are the most intimately acquainted. In the divine Ariosto, (as his countrymen call this, their darling poet,) I question whether there be a single tale of his own invention, or the elements of which, were not familiar to the readers of "old romance." I will pass by the ancient Greeks, who thought it even necessary to the fable of a tragedy, that its substance should be previously known. That there had been at least fifty tragedies with the same title, would be one of the motives which determined Sophocles and Euripides, in the choice of Electra as a subject. But Milton-- D. Aye Milton, indeed!--but do not Dr. Johnson and other great men tell us, that nobody now reads Milton but as a task? P. So much the worse for them, of whom this can be truly said! But why then do you pretend to admire Shakespeare? The greater part, if not all, of his dramas were, as far as the names and the main incidents are concerned, already stock plays. All the stories, at least, on which they are built, pre-existed in the chronicles, ballads, or translations of contemporary or preceding English writers. Why, I repeat, do you pretend to admire Shakespeare? Is it, perhaps, that you only pretend to admire him? However, as once for all, you have dismissed the well-known events and personages of history, or the epic muse, what have you taken in their stead? Whom has your tragic muse armed with her bowl and dagger? the sentimental muse I should have said, whom you have seated in the throne of tragedy? What heroes has she reared on her buskins? D. O! our good friends and next-door neighbours--honest tradesmen, valiant tars, high-spirited half-pay officers, philanthropic Jews, virtuous courtezans, tender-hearted braziers, and sentimental rat- catchers!--(a little bluff or so, but all our very generous, tender- hearted characters are a little rude or misanthropic, and all our misanthropes very tender-hearted.) P. But I pray you, friend, in what actions great or interesting, can such men be engaged? D. They give away a great deal of money; find rich dowries for young men and maidens who have all other good qualities; they brow-beat lords, baronets, and justices of the peace, (for they are as bold as Hector!)--they rescue stage coaches at the instant they are falling down precipices; carry away infants in the sight of opposing armies; and some of our performers act a muscular able-bodied man to such perfection, that our dramatic poets, who always have the actors in their eye, seldom fail to make their favourite male character as strong as Samson. And then they take such prodigious leaps!! And what is done on the stage is more striking even than what is acted. I once remember such a deafening explosion, that I could not hear a word of the play for half an act after it: and a little real gunpowder being set fire to at the same time, and smelt by all the spectators, the naturalness of the scene was quite astonishing! P. But how can you connect with such men and such actions that dependence of thousands on the fate of one, which gives so lofty an interest to the personages of Shakespeare, and the Greek Tragedians? How can you connect with them that sublimest of all feelings, the power of destiny and the controlling might of heaven, which seems to elevate the characters which sink beneath its irresistible blow? D. O mere fancies! We seek and find on the present stage our own wants and passions, our own vexations, losses, and embarrassments. P. It is your own poor pettifogging nature then, which you desire to have represented before you?--not human nature in its height and vigour? But surely you might find the former with all its joys and sorrows, more conveniently in your own houses and parishes. D. True! but here comes a difference. Fortune is blind, but the poet has his eyes open, and is besides as complaisant as fortune is capricious. He makes every thing turn out exactly as we would wish it. He gratifies us by representing those as hateful or contemptible whom we hate and wish to despise. P. (aside.) That is, he gratifies your envy by libelling your superiors. D. He makes all those precise moralists, who affect to be better than their neighbours, turn out at last abject hypocrites, traitors, and hard-hearted villains; and your men of spirit, who take their girl and their glass with equal freedom, prove the true men of honour, and, (that no part of the audience may remain unsatisfied,) reform in the last scene, and leave no doubt in the minds of the ladies, that they will make most faithful and excellent husbands: though it does seem a pity, that they should be obliged to get rid of qualities which had made them so interesting! Besides, the poor become rich all at once; and in the final matrimonial choice the opulent and high-born themselves are made to confess; that VIRTUE IS THE ONLY TRUE NOBILITY, AND THAT A LOVELY WOMAN IS A DOWRY OF HERSELF!! P. Excellent! But you have forgotten those brilliant flashes of loyalty, those patriotic praises of the King and Old England, which, especially if conveyed in a metaphor from the ship or the shop, so often solicit and so unfailingly receive the public plaudit! I give your prudence credit for the omission. For the whole system of your drama is a moral and intellectual Jacobinism of the most dangerous kind, and those common-place rants of loyalty are no better than hypocrisy in your playwrights, and your own sympathy with them a gross self-delusion. For the whole secret of dramatic popularity consists with you in the confusion and subversion of the natural order of things, their causes and their effects; in the excitement of surprise, by representing the qualities of liberality, refined feeling, and a nice sense of honour, (those things rather which pass among you for such), in persons and in classes of life where experience teaches us least to expect them; and in rewarding with all the sympathies, that are the dues of virtue, those criminals whom law, reason, and religion have excommunicated from our esteem! And now--good night! Truly! I might have written this last sheet without having gone to Germany; but I fancied myself talking to you by your own fireside, and can you think it a small pleasure to me to forget now and then, that I am not there? Besides, you and my other good friends have made up your minds to me as I am, and from whatever place I write you will expect that part of my "Travels" will consist of excursions in my own mind. LETTER III RATZEBURG. No little fish thrown back again into the water, no fly unimprisoned from a child's hand, could more buoyantly enjoy its element, than I this clean and peaceful house, with this lovely view of the town, groves, and lake of Ratzeburg, from the window at which I am writing. My spirits certainly, and my health I fancied, were beginning to sink under the noise, dirt, and unwholesome air of our Hamburg hotel. I left it on Sunday, Sept. 23rd, with a letter of introduction from the poet Klopstock, to the Amtmann of Ratzeburg. The Amtmann received me with kindness, and introduced me to the worthy pastor, who agreed to board and lodge me for any length of time not less than a month. The vehicle, in which I took my place, was considerably larger than an English stage-coach, to which it bore much the same proportion and rude resemblance, that an elephant's ear does to the human. Its top was composed of naked boards of different colours, and seeming to have been parts of different wainscots. Instead of windows there were leathern curtains with a little eye of glass in each: they perfectly answered the purpose of keeping out the prospect and letting in the cold. I could observe little therefore, but the inns and farmhouses at which we stopped. They were all alike, except in size: one great room, like a barn, with a hay-loft over it, the straw and hay dangling in tufts through the boards which formed the ceiling of the room, and the floor of the loft. From this room, which is paved like a street, sometimes one, sometimes two smaller ones, are enclosed at one end. These are commonly floored. In the large room the cattle, pigs, poultry, men, women, and children, live in amicable community; yet there was an appearance of cleanliness and rustic comfort. One of these houses I measured. It was an hundred feet in length. The apartments were taken off from one corner. Between these and the stalls there was a small interspace, and here the breadth was forty-eight feet, but thirty-two where the stalls were; of course, the stalls were on each side eight feet in depth. The faces of the cows, etc. were turned towards the room; indeed they were in it, so that they had at least the comfort of seeing each other's faces. Stall-feeding is universal in this part of Germany, a practice concerning which the agriculturist and the poet are likely to entertain opposite opinions--or at least, to have very different feelings. The woodwork of these buildings on the outside is left unplastered, as in old houses among us, and, being painted red and green, it cuts and tesselates the buildings very gaily. From within three miles of Hamburg almost to Molln, which is thirty miles from it, the country, as far as I could see it, was a dead flat, only varied by woods. At Molln it became more beautiful. I observed a small lake nearly surrounded with groves, and a palace in view belonging to the King of Great Britain, and inhabited by the Inspector of the Forests. We were nearly the same time in travelling the thirty-five miles from Hamburg to Ratzeburg, as we had been in going from London to Yarmouth, one hundred and twenty-six miles. The lake of Ratzeburg runs from south to north, about nine miles in length, and varying in breadth from three miles to half a mile. About a mile from the southernmost point it is divided into two, of course very unequal, parts by an island, which, being connected by a bridge and a narrow slip of land with the one shore, and by another bridge of immense length with the other shore, forms a complete isthmus. On this island the town of Ratzeburg is built. The pastor's house or vicarage, together with the Amtmann's Amtsschreiber's, and the church, stands near the summit of a hill, which slopes down to the slip of land and the little bridge, from which, through a superb military gate, you step into the island-town of Ratzeburg. This again is itself a little hill, by ascending and descending which, you arrive at the long bridge, and so to the other shore. The water to the south of the town is called the Little Lake, which however almost engrosses the beauties of the whole the shores being just often enough green and bare to give the proper effect to the magnificent groves which occupy the greater part of their circumference. From the turnings, windings, and indentations of the shore, the views vary almost every ten steps, and the whole has a sort of majestic beauty, a feminine grandeur. At the north of the Great Lake, and peeping over it, I see the seven church towers of Luebec, at the distance of twelve or thirteen miles, yet as distinctly as if they were not three. The only defect in the view is, that Ratzeburg is built entirely of red bricks, and all the houses roofed with red tiles. To the eye, therefore, it presents a clump of brick-dust red. Yet this evening, Oct. 10th, twenty minutes past five, I saw the town perfectly beautiful, and the whole softened down into complete keeping, if I may borrow a term from the painters. The sky over Ratzeburg and all the east was a pure evening blue, while over the west it was covered with light sandy clouds. Hence a deep red light spread over the whole prospect, in undisturbed harmony with the red town, the brown-red woods, and the yellow-red reeds on the skirts of the lake. Two or three boats, with single persons paddling them, floated up and down in the rich light, which not only was itself in harmony with all, but brought all into harmony. I should have told you that I went back to Hamburg on Thursday (Sept. 27th) to take leave of my friend, who travels southward, and returned hither on the Monday following. From Empfelde, a village half way from Ratzeburg, I walked to Hamburg through deep sandy roads and a dreary flat: the soil everywhere white, hungry, and excessively pulverised; but the approach to the city is pleasing. Light cool country houses, which you can look through and see the gardens behind them, with arbours and trellis work, and thick vegetable walls, and trees in cloisters and piazzas, each house with neat rails before it, and green seats within the rails. Every object, whether the growth of nature or the work of man, was neat and artificial. It pleased me far better, than if the houses and gardens, and pleasure fields, had been in a nobler taste: for this nobler taste would have been mere apery. The busy, anxious, money-loving merchant of Hamburg could only have adopted, he could not have enjoyed the simplicity of nature. The mind begins to love nature by imitating human conveniences in nature; but this is a step in intellect, though a low one--and were it not so, yet all around me spoke of innocent enjoyment and sensitive comforts, and I entered with unscrupulous sympathy into the enjoyments and comforts even of the busy, anxious, money-loving merchants of Hamburg. In this charitable and catholic mood I reached the vast ramparts of the city. These are huge green cushions, one rising above the other, with trees growing in the interspaces, pledges and symbols of a long peace. Of my return I have nothing worth communicating, except that I took extra post, which answers to posting in England. These north German post chaises are uncovered wicker carts. An English dust-cart is a piece of finery, a chef d'auvre of mechanism, compared with them and the horses!--a savage might use their ribs instead of his fingers for a numeration table. Wherever we stopped, the postilion fed his cattle with the brown rye bread of which he eat himself, all breakfasting together; only the horses had no gin to their water, and the postilion no water to his gin. Now and henceforward for subjects of more interest to you, and to the objects in search of which I left you: namely, the literati and literature of Germany. Believe me, I walked with an impression of awe on my spirits, as W----and myself accompanied Mr. Klopstock to the house of his brother, the poet, which stands about a quarter of a mile from the city gate. It is one of a row of little common-place summer-houses, (for so they looked,) with four or five rows of young meagre elm trees before the windows, beyond which is a green, and then a dead flat intersected with several roads. Whatever beauty, (thought I,) may be before the poet's eyes at present, it must certainly be purely of his own creation. We waited a few minutes in a neat little parlour, ornamented with the figures of two of the Muses and with prints, the subjects of which were from Klopstock's odes. The poet entered. I was much disappointed in his countenance, and recognised in it no likeness to the bust. There was no comprehension in the forehead, no weight over the eye-brows, no expression of peculiarity, moral or intellectual, on the eyes, no massiveness in the general countenance. He is, if anything, rather below the middle size. He wore very large half-boots, which his legs filled, so fearfully were they swollen. However, though neither W---- nor myself could discover any indications of sublimity or enthusiasm in his physiognomy, we were both equally impressed with his liveliness, and his kind and ready courtesy. He talked in French with my friend, and with difficulty spoke a few sentences to me in English. His enunciation was not in the least affected by the entire want of his upper teeth. The conversation began on his part by the expression of his rapture at the surrender of the detachment of French troops under General Humbert. Their proceedings in Ireland with regard to the committee which they had appointed, with the rest of their organizing system, seemed to have given the poet great entertainment. He then declared his sanguine belief in Nelson's victory, and anticipated its confirmation with a keen and triumphant pleasure. His words, tones, looks, implied the most vehement Anti-Gallicanism. The subject changed to literature, and I inquired in Latin concerning the history of German poetry and the elder German poets. To my great astonishment he confessed, that he knew very little on the subject. He had indeed occasionally read one or two of their elder writers, but not so as to enable him to speak of their merits. Professor Ebeling, he said, would probably give me every information of this kind: the subject had not particularly excited his curiosity. He then talked of Milton and Glover, and thought Glover's blank verse superior to Milton's. W---- and myself expressed our surprise: and my friend gave his definition and notion of harmonious verse, that it consisted, (the English iambic blank verse above all,) in the apt arrangement of pauses and cadences, and the sweep of whole paragraphs, "with many a winding bout Of linked sweetness long drawn out," and not in the even flow, much less in the prominence of antithetic vigour, of single lines, which were indeed injurious to the total effect, except where they were introduced for some specific purpose. Klopstock assented, and said that he meant to confine Glover's superiority to single lines. He told us that he had read Milton, in a prose translation, when he was fourteen [77]. I understood him thus myself, and W---- interpreted Klopstock's French as I had already construed it. He appeared to know very little of Milton or indeed of our poets in general. He spoke with great indignation of the English prose translation of his MESSIAH. All the translations had been bad, very bad--but the English was no translation--there were pages on pages not in the original--and half the original was not to be found in the translation. W---- told him that I intended to translate a few of his odes as specimens of German lyrics--he then said to me in English, "I wish you would render into English some select passages of THE MESSIAH, and revenge me of your countryman!". It was the liveliest thing which he produced in the whole conversation. He told us, that his first ode was fifty years older than his last. I looked at him with much emotion--I considered him as the venerable father of German poetry; as a good man; as a Christian; seventy-four years old; with legs enormously swollen; yet active, lively, cheerful, and kind, and communicative. My eyes felt as if a tear were swelling into them. In the portrait of Lessing there was a toupee periwig, which enormously injured the effect of his physiognomy--Klopstock wore the same, powdered and frizzled. By the bye, old men ought never to wear powder--the contrast between a large snow-white wig and the colour of an old man's skin is disgusting, and wrinkles in such a neighbourhood appear only channels for dirt. It is an honour to poets and great men, that you think of them as parts of nature; and anything of trick and fashion wounds you in them, as much as when you see venerable yews clipped into miserable peacocks.--The author of THE MESSIAH should have worn his own grey hair.--His powder and periwig were to the eye what Mr. Virgil would be to the ear. Klopstock dwelt much on the superior power which the German language possessed of concentrating meaning. He said, he had often translated parts of Homer and Virgil, line by line, and a German line proved always sufficient for a Greek or Latin one. In English you cannot do this. I answered, that in English we could commonly render one Greek heroic line in a line and a half of our common heroic metre, and I conjectured that this line and a half would be found to contain no more syllables than one German or Greek hexameter. He did not understand me [78]: and I, who wished to hear his opinions, not to correct them, was glad that he did not. We now took our leave. At the beginning of the French Revolution Klopstock wrote odes of congratulation. He received some honorary presents from the French Republic, (a golden crown I believe), and, like our Priestley, was invited to a seat in the legislature, which he declined. But when French liberty metamorphosed herself into a fury, he sent back these presents with a palinodia, declaring his abhorrence of their proceedings: and since then he has been perhaps more than enough an Anti-Gallican. I mean, that in his just contempt and detestation of the crimes and follies of the Revolutionists, he suffers himself to forget that the revolution itself is a process of the Divine Providence; and that as the folly of men is the wisdom of God, so are their iniquities instruments of his goodness. From Klopstock's house we walked to the ramparts, discoursing together on the poet and his conversation, till our attention was diverted to the beauty and singularity of the sunset and its effects on the objects around us. There were woods in the distance. A rich sandy light, (nay, of a much deeper colour than sandy,) lay over these woods that blackened in the blaze. Over that part of the woods which lay immediately under the intenser light, a brassy mist floated. The trees on the ramparts, and the people moving to and fro between them, were cut or divided into equal segments of deep shade and brassy light. Had the trees, and the bodies of the men and women, been divided into equal segments by a rule or pair of compasses, the portions could not have been more regular. All else was obscure. It was a fairy scene!--and to increase its romantic character, among the moving objects, thus divided into alternate shade and brightness, was a beautiful child, dressed with the elegant simplicity of an English child, riding on a stately goat, the saddle, bridle, and other accoutrements of which were in a high degree costly and splendid. Before I quit the subject of Hamburg, let me say, that I remained a day or two longer than I otherwise should have done, in order to be present at the feast of St. Michael, the patron saint of Hamburg, expecting to see the civic pomp of this commercial Republic. I was however disappointed. There were no processions, two or three sermons were preached to two or three old women in two or three churches, and St. Michael and his patronage wished elsewhere by the higher classes, all places of entertainment, theatre, etc. being shut up on this day. In Hamburg, there seems to be no religion at all; in Luebec it is confined to the women. The men seemed determined to be divorced from their wives in the other world, if they cannot in this. You will not easily conceive a more singular sight, than is presented by the vast aisle of the principal church at Luebec, seen from the organ loft: for being filled with female servants and persons in the same class of life, and all their caps having gold and silver cauls, it appears like a rich pavement of gold and silver. I will conclude this letter with the mere transcription of notes, which my friend W---- made of his conversations with Klopstock, during the interviews that took place after my departure. On these I shall make but one remark at present, and that will appear a presumptuous one, namely, that Klopstock's remarks on the venerable sage of Koenigsburg are to my own knowledge injurious and mistaken; and so far is it from being true, that his system is now given up, that throughout the Universities of Germany there is not a single professor who is not either a Kantean or a disciple of Fichte, whose system is built on the Kantean, and presupposes its truth; or lastly who, though an antagonist of Kant, as to his theoretical work, has not embraced wholly or in part his moral system, and adopted part of his nomenclature. "Klopstock having wished to see the CALVARY of Cumberland, and asked what was thought of it in England, I went to Remnant's (the English bookseller) where I procured the Analytical Review, in which is contained the review of Cumberland's CALVARY. I remembered to have read there some specimens of a blank verse translation of THE MESSIAH. I had mentioned this to Klopstock, and he had a great desire to see them. I walked over to his house and put the book into his hands. On adverting to his own poem, he told me he began THE MESSIAH when he was seventeen; he devoted three entire years to the plan without composing a single line. He was greatly at a loss in what manner to execute his work. There were no successful specimens of versification in the German language before this time. The first three cantos he wrote in a species of measured or numerous prose. This, though done with much labour and some success, was far from satisfying him. He had composed hexameters both Latin and Greek as a school exercise, and there had been also in the German language attempts in that style of versification. These were only of very moderate merit.--One day he was struck with the idea of what could be done in this way--he kept his room a whole day, even went without his dinner, and found that in the evening he had written twenty-three hexameters, versifying a part of what he had before written in prose. From that time, pleased with his efforts, he composed no more in prose. Today he informed me that he had finished his plan before he read Milton. He was enchanted to see an author who before him had trod the same path. This is a contradiction of what he said before. He did not wish to speak of his poem to any one till it was finished: but some of his friends who had seen what he had finished, tormented him till he had consented to publish a few books in a journal. He was then, I believe, very young, about twenty-five. The rest was printed at different periods, four books at a time. The reception given to the first specimens was highly flattering. He was nearly thirty years in finishing the whole poem, but of these thirty years not more than two were employed in the composition. He only composed in favourable moments; besides he had other occupations. He values himself upon the plan of his odes, and accuses the modern lyrical writers of gross deficiency in this respect. I laid the same accusation against Horace: he would not hear of it--but waived the discussion. He called Rousseau's ODE TO FORTUNE a moral dissertation in stanzas. I spoke of Dryden's ST. CECILIA; but he did not seem familiar with our writers. He wished to know the distinctions between our dramatic and epic blank verse. He recommended me to read his HERMANN before I read either THE MESSIAH or the odes. He flattered himself that some time or other his dramatic poems would be known in England. He had not heard of Cowper. He thought that Voss in his translation of THE ILIAD had done violence to the idiom of the Germans, and had sacrificed it to the Greeks, not remembering sufficiently that each language has its particular spirit and genius. He said Lessing was the first of their dramatic writers. I complained of NATHAN as tedious. He said there was not enough of action in it; but that Lessing was the most chaste of their writers. He spoke favourably of Goethe; but said that his SORROWS OF WERTER was his best work, better than any of his dramas: he preferred the first written to the rest of Goethe's dramas. Schiller's ROBBERS he found so extravagant, that he could not read it. I spoke of the scene of the setting sun. He did not know it. He said Schiller could not live. He thought DON CARLOS the best of his dramas; but said that the plot was inextricable.--It was evident he knew little of Schiller's works: indeed, he said, he could not read them. Buerger, he said, was a true poet, and would live; that Schiller, on the contrary, must soon be forgotten; that he gave himself up to the imitation of Shakespeare, who often was extravagant, but that Schiller was ten thousand times more so. He spoke very slightingly of Kotzebue, as an immoral author in the first place, and next, as deficient in power. At Vienna, said he, they are transported with him; but we do not reckon the people of Vienna either the wisest or the wittiest people of Germany. He said Wieland was a charming author, and a sovereign master of his own language: that in this respect Goethe could not be compared to him, nor indeed could any body else. He said that his fault was to be fertile to exuberance. I told him the OBERON had just been translated into English. He asked me if I was not delighted with the poem. I answered, that I thought the story began to flag about the seventh or eighth book; and observed, that it was unworthy of a man of genius to make the interest of a long poem turn entirely upon animal gratification. He seemed at first disposed to excuse this by saying, that there are different subjects for poetry, and that poets are not willing to be restricted in their choice. I answered, that I thought the passion of love as well suited to the purposes of poetry as any other passion; but that it was a cheap way of pleasing to fix the attention of the reader through a long poem on the mere appetite. Well! but, said he, you see, that such poems please every body. I answered, that it was the province of a great poet to raise people up to his own level, not to descend to theirs. He agreed, and confessed, that on no account whatsoever would he have written a work like the OBERON. He spoke in raptures of Wieland's style, and pointed out the passage where Retzia is delivered of her child, as exquisitely beautiful. I said that I did not perceive any very striking passages; but that I made allowance for the imperfections of a translation. Of the thefts of Wieland, he said, they were so exquisitely managed, that the greatest writers might be proud to steal as he did. He considered the books and fables of old romance writers in the light of the ancient mythology, as a sort of common property, from which a man was free to take whatever he could make a good use of. An Englishman had presented him with the odes of Collins, which he had read with pleasure. He knew little or nothing of Gray, except his ELEGY written in a country CHURCH-YARD. He complained of the fool in LEAR. I observed that he seemed to give a terrible wildness to the distress; but still he complained. He asked whether it was not allowed, that Pope had written rhymed poetry with more skill than any of our writers--I said I preferred Dryden, because his couplets had greater variety in their movement. He thought my reason a good one; but asked whether the rhyme of Pope were not more exact. This question I understood as applying to the final terminations, and observed to him that I believed it was the case; but that I thought it was easy to excuse some inaccuracy in the final sounds, if the general sweep of the verse was superior. I told him that we were not so exact with regard to the final endings of the lines as the French. He did not seem to know that we made no distinction between masculine and feminine (i.e. single or double,) rhymes: at least he put inquiries to me on this subject. He seemed to think that no language could be so far formed as that it might not be enriched by idioms borrowed from another tongue. I said this was a very dangerous practice; and added, that I thought Milton had often injured both his prose and verse by taking this liberty too frequently. I recommended to him the prose works of Dryden as models of pure and native English. I was treading upon tender ground, as I have reason to suppose that he has himself liberally indulged in the practice." The same day I dined at Mr. Klopstock's, where I had the pleasure of a third interview with the poet. We talked principally about indifferent things. I asked him what he thought of Kant. He said that his reputation was much on the decline in Germany. That for his own part he was not surprised to find it so, as the works of Kant were to him utterly incomprehensible--that he had often been pestered by the Kanteans; but was rarely in the practice of arguing with them. His custom was to produce the book, open it and point to a passage, and beg they would explain it. This they ordinarily attempted to do by substituting their own ideas. I do not want, I say, an explanation of your own ideas, but of the passage which is before us. In this way I generally bring the dispute to an immediate conclusion. He spoke of Wolfe as the first Metaphysician they had in Germany. Wolfe had followers; but they could hardly be called a sect, and luckily till the appearance of Kant, about fifteen years ago, Germany had not been pestered by any sect of philosophers whatsoever; but that each man had separately pursued his inquiries uncontrolled by the dogmas of a master. Kant had appeared ambitious to be the founder of a sect; that he had succeeded: but that the Germans were now coming to their senses again. That Nicolai and Engel had in different ways contributed to disenchant the nation; but above all the incomprehensibility of the philosopher and his philosophy. He seemed pleased to hear, that as yet Kant's doctrines had not met with many admirers in England--did not doubt but that we had too much wisdom to be duped by a writer who set at defiance the common sense and common understandings of men. We talked of tragedy. He seemed to rate highly the power of exciting tears--I said that nothing was more easy than to deluge an audience, that it was done every day by the meanest writers. I must remind you, my friend, first, that these notes are not intended as specimens of Klopstock's intellectual power, or even "colloquial prowess," to judge of which by an accidental conversation, and this with strangers, and those too foreigners, would be not only unreasonable, but calumnious. Secondly, I attribute little other interest to the remarks than what is derived from the celebrity of the person who made them. Lastly, if you ask me, whether I have read THE MESSIAH, and what I think of it? I answer--as yet the first four books only: and as to my opinion--(the reasons of which hereafter)--you may guess it from what I could not help muttering to myself, when the good pastor this morning told me, that Klopstock was the German Milton--"a very German Milton indeed!!!" Heaven preserve you, and S. T. COLERIDGE. CHAPTER XXIII Quid quod praefatione praemunierim libellum, qua conor omnem offendiculi ansam praecidere? [79] Neque quicquam addubito, quin ea candidis omnibus faciat satis. Quid autem facias istis, qui vel ob ingenii pertinaciam sibi satisfieri nolint, vel stupidiores sint, quam ut satisfactionem intelligant? Nam quemadmodum Simonides dixit, Thessalos hebetiores esse, quam ut possint a se decipi, ita quosdam videas stupidiores, quam ut placari queant. Adhaec, non mirum est invenire quod calumnietur, qui nihil aliud quaerit, nisi quod calumnietur. ERASMUS ad Dorpium, Theologum. In the rifacimento of THE FRIEND, I have inserted extracts from the CONCIONES AD POPULUM, printed, though scarcely published, in the year 1795, in the very heat and height of my anti-ministerial enthusiasm: these in proof that my principles of politics have sustained no change.--In the present chapter, I have annexed to my Letters from Germany, with particular reference to that, which contains a disquisition on the modern drama, a critique on the Tragedy of BERTRAM, written within the last twelve months: in proof, that I have been as falsely charged with any fickleness in my principles of taste.--The letter was written to a friend: and the apparent abruptness with which it begins, is owing to the omission of the introductory sentences. You remember, my dear Sir, that Mr. Whitbread, shortly before his death, proposed to the assembled subscribers of Drury Lane Theatre, that the concern should be farmed to some responsible individual under certain conditions and limitations: and that his proposal was rejected, not without indignation, as subversive of the main object, for the attainment of which the enlightened and patriotic assemblage of philodramatists had been induced to risk their subscriptions. Now this object was avowed to be no less than the redemption of the British stage not only from horses, dogs, elephants, and the like zoological rarities, but also from the more pernicious barbarisms and Kotzebuisms in morals and taste. Drury Lane was to be restored to its former classical renown; Shakespeare, Jonson, and Otway, with the expurgated muses of Vanbrugh, Congreve, and Wycherley, were to be reinaugurated in their rightful dominion over British audiences; and the Herculean process was to commence, by exterminating the speaking monsters imported from the banks of the Danube, compared with which their mute relations, the emigrants from Exeter 'Change, and Polito (late Pidcock's) show-carts, were tame and inoffensive. Could an heroic project, at once so refined and so arduous, be consistently entrusted to, could its success be rationally expected from, a mercenary manager, at whose critical quarantine the lucri bonus odor would conciliate a bill of health to the plague in person? No! As the work proposed, such must be the work-masters. Rank, fortune, liberal education, and (their natural accompaniments, or consequences) critical discernment, delicate tact, disinterestedness, unsuspected morals, notorious patriotism, and tried Maecenasship, these were the recommendations that influenced the votes of the proprietary subscribers of Drury Lane Theatre, these the motives that occasioned the election of its Supreme Committee of Management. This circumstance alone would have excited a strong interest in the public mind, respecting the first production of the Tragic Muse which had been announced under such auspices, and had passed the ordeal of such judgments: and the tragedy, on which you have requested my judgment, was the work on which the great expectations, justified by so many causes, were doomed at length to settle. But before I enter on the examination of BERTRAM, or THE CASTLE OF ST. ALDOBRAND, I shall interpose a few words, on the phrase German Drama, which I hold to be altogether a misnomer. At the time of Lessing, the German stage, such as it was, appears to have been a flat and servile copy of the French. It was Lessing who first introduced the name and the works of Shakespeare to the admiration of the Germans; and I should not perhaps go too far, if I add, that it was Lessing who first proved to all thinking men, even to Shakespeare's own countrymen, the true nature of his apparent irregularities. These, he demonstrated, were deviations only from the accidents of the Greek tragedy; and from such accidents as hung a heavy weight on the wings of the Greek poets, and narrowed their flight within the limits of what we may call the heroic opera. He proved, that, in all the essentials of art, no less than in the truth of nature, the Plays of Shakespeare were incomparably more coincident with the principles of Aristotle, than the productions of Corneille and Racine, notwithstanding the boasted regularity of the latter. Under these convictions were Lessing's own dramatic works composed. Their deficiency is in depth and imagination: their excellence is in the construction of the plot; the good sense of the sentiments; the sobriety of the morals; and the high polish of the diction and dialogue. In short, his dramas are the very antipodes of all those which it has been the fashion of late years at once to abuse and enjoy, under the name of the German drama. Of this latter, Schiller's ROBBERS was the earliest specimen; the first fruits of his youth, (I had almost said of his boyhood), and as such, the pledge, and promise of no ordinary genius. Only as such, did the maturer judgment of the author tolerate the Play. During his whole life he expressed himself concerning this production with more than needful asperity, as a monster not less offensive to good taste, than to sound morals; and, in his latter years, his indignation at the unwonted popularity of the ROBBERS seduced him into the contrary extremes, viz. a studied feebleness of interest, (as far as the interest was to be derived from incidents and the excitement of curiosity); a diction elaborately metrical; the affectation of rhymes; and the pedantry of the chorus. But to understand the true character of the ROBBERS, and of the countless imitations which were its spawn, I must inform you, or at least call to your recollection, that, about that time, and for some years before it, three of the most popular books in the German language were, the translations Of YOUNG'S NIGHT THOUGHTS, HERVEY'S MEDITATIONS, and RICHARDSON'S CLARISSA HARLOW. Now we have only to combine the bloated style and peculiar rhythm of Hervey, which is poetic only on account of its utter unfitness for prose, and might as appropriately be called prosaic, from its utter unfitness for poetry; we have only, I repeat, to combine these Herveyisms with the strained thoughts, the figurative metaphysics and solemn epigrams of Young on the one hand; and with the loaded sensibility, the minute detail, the morbid consciousness of every thought and feeling in the whole flux and reflux of the mind, in short the self-involution and dreamlike continuity of Richardson on the other hand; and then to add the horrific incidents, and mysterious villains, (geniuses of supernatural intellect, if you will take the authors' words for it, but on a level with the meanest ruffians of the condemned cells, if we are to judge by their actions and contrivances)--to add the ruined castles, the dungeons, the trap-doors, the skeletons, the flesh-and-blood ghosts, and the perpetual moonshine of a modern author, (themselves the literary brood of the CASTLE OF OTRANTO, the translations of which, with the imitations and improvements aforesaid, were about that time beginning to make as much noise in Germany as their originals were making in England),--and as the compound of these ingredients duly mixed, you will recognize the so-called German drama. The olla podrida thus cooked up, was denounced, by the best critics in Germany, as the mere cramps of weakness, and orgasms of a sickly imagination on the part of the author, and the lowest provocation of torpid feeling on that of the readers. The old blunder, however, concerning the irregularity and wildness of Shakespeare, in which the German did but echo the French, who again were but the echoes of our own critics, was still in vogue, and Shakespeare was quoted as authority for the most anti-Shakespearean drama. We have indeed two poets who wrote as one, near the age of Shakespeare, to whom, (as the worst characteristic of their writings), the Coryphaeus of the present drama may challenge the honour of being a poor relation, or impoverished descendant. For if we would charitably consent to forget the comic humour, the wit, the felicities of style, in other words, all the poetry, and nine-tenths of all the genius of Beaumont and Fletcher, that which would remain becomes a Kotzebue. The so-called German drama, therefore, is English in its origin, English in its materials, and English by re-adoption; and till we can prove that Kotzebue, or any of the whole breed of Kotzebues, whether dramatists or romantic writers, or writers of romantic dramas, were ever admitted to any other shelf in the libraries of well-educated Germans than were occupied by their originals, and apes' apes in their mother country, we should submit to carry our own brat on our own shoulders; or rather consider it as a lack-grace returned from transportation with such improvements only in growth and manners as young transported convicts usually come home with. I know nothing that contributes more to a clearer insight into the true nature of any literary phaenomenon, than the comparison of it with some elder production, the likeness of which is striking, yet only apparent, while the difference is real. In the present case this opportunity is furnished us, by the old Spanish play, entitled Atheista Fulminato, formerly, and perhaps still, acted in the churches and monasteries of Spain, and which, under various names (Don Juan, the Libertine, etc.) has had its day of favour in every country throughout Europe. A popularity so extensive, and of a work so grotesque and extravagant, claims and merits philosophical attention and investigation. The first point to be noticed is, that the play is throughout imaginative. Nothing of it belongs to the real world, but the names of the places and persons. The comic parts, equally with the tragic; the living, equally with the defunct characters, are creatures of the brain; as little amenable to the rules of ordinary probability, as the Satan Of PARADISE LOST, or the Caliban of THE TEMPEST, and therefore to be understood and judged of as impersonated abstractions. Rank, fortune, wit, talent, acquired knowledge, and liberal accomplishments, with beauty of person, vigorous health, and constitutional hardihood,--all these advantages, elevated by the habits and sympathies of noble birth and national character, are supposed to have combined in Don Juan, so as to give him the means of carrying into all its practical consequences the doctrine of a godless nature, as the sole ground and efficient cause not only of all things, events, and appearances, but likewise of all our thoughts, sensations, impulses and actions. Obedience to nature is the only virtue: the gratification of the passions and appetites her only dictate: each individual's self-will the sole organ through which nature utters her commands, and "Self-contradiction is the only wrong! For, by the laws of spirit, in the right Is every individual character That acts in strict consistence with itself." That speculative opinions, however impious and daring they may be, are not always followed by correspondent conduct, is most true, as well as that they can scarcely in any instance be systematically realized, on account of their unsuitableness to human nature and to the institutions of society. It can be hell, only where it is all hell: and a separate world of devils is necessary for the existence of any one complete devil. But on the other hand it is no less clear, nor, with the biography of Carrier and his fellow atheists before us, can it be denied without wilful blindness, that the (so called) system of nature (that is, materialism, with the utter rejection of moral responsibility, of a present Providence, and of both present and future retribution) may influence the characters and actions of individuals, and even of communities, to a degree that almost does away the distinction between men and devils, and will make the page of the future historian resemble the narration of a madman's dreams. It is not the wickedness of Don Juan, therefore, which constitutes the character an abstraction, and removes it from the rules of probability; but the rapid succession of the correspondent acts and incidents, his intellectual superiority, and the splendid accumulation of his gifts and desirable qualities, as co-existent with entire wickedness in one and the same person. But this likewise is the very circumstance which gives to this strange play its charm and universal interest. Don Juan is, from beginning to end, an intelligible character: as much so as the Satan of Milton. The poet asks only of the reader, what, as a poet, he is privileged to ask: namely, that sort of negative faith in the existence of such a being, which we willingly give to productions professedly ideal, and a disposition to the same state of feeling, as that with which we contemplate the idealized figures of the Apollo Belvidere, and the Farnese Hercules. What the Hercules is to the eye in corporeal strength, Don Juan is to the mind in strength of character. The ideal consists in the happy balance of the generic with the individual. The former makes the character representative and symbolical, therefore instructive; because, mutatis mutandis, it is applicable to whole classes of men. The latter gives it living interest; for nothing lives or is real, but as definite and individual. To understand this completely, the reader need only recollect the specific state of his feelings, when in looking at a picture of the historic (more properly of the poetic or heroic) class, he objects to a particular figure as being too much of a portrait; and this interruption of his complacency he feels without the least reference to, or the least acquaintance with, any person in real life whom he might recognise in this figure. It is enough that such a figure is not ideal: and therefore not ideal, because one of the two factors or elements of the ideal is in excess. A similar and more powerful objection he would feel towards a set of figures which were mere abstractions, like those of Cipriani, and what have been called Greek forms and faces, that is, outlines drawn according to a recipe. These again are not ideal; because in these the other element is in excess. "Forma formans per formam formatam translucens," [80] is the definition and perfection of ideal art. This excellence is so happily achieved in the Don Juan, that it is capable of interesting without poetry, nay, even without words, as in our pantomime of that name. We see clearly how the character is formed; and the very extravagance of the incidents, and the super-human entireness of Don Juan's agency, prevents the wickedness from shocking our minds to any painful degree. We do not believe it enough for this effect; no, not even with that kind of temporary and negative belief or acquiescence which I have described above. Meantime the qualities of his character are too desirable, too flattering to our pride and our wishes, not to make up on this side as much additional faith as was lost on the other. There is no danger (thinks the spectator or reader) of my becoming such a monster of iniquity as Don Juan! I never shall be an atheist! I shall never disallow all distinction between right and wrong! I have not the least inclination to be so outrageous a drawcansir in my love affairs! But to possess such a power of captivating and enchanting the affections of the other sex!--to be capable of inspiring in a charming and even a virtuous woman, a love so deep, and so entirely personal to me!--that even my worst vices, (if I were vicious), even my cruelty and perfidy, (if I were cruel and perfidious), could not eradicate the passion!--to be so loved for my own self, that even with a distinct knowledge of my character, she yet died to save me!--this, sir, takes hold of two sides of our nature, the better and the worse. For the heroic disinterestedness, to which love can transport a woman, can not be contemplated without an honourable emotion of reverence towards womanhood: and, on the other hand, it is among the miseries, and abides in the dark ground-work of our nature, to crave an outward confirmation of that something within us, which is our very self, that something, not made up of our qualities and relations, but itself the supporter and substantial basis of all these. Love me, and not my qualities, may be a vicious and an insane wish, but it is not a wish wholly without a meaning. Without power, virtue would be insufficient and incapable of revealing its being. It would resemble the magic transformation of Tasso's heroine into a tree, in which she could only groan and bleed. Hence power is necessarily an object of our desire and of our admiration. But of all power, that of the mind is, on every account, the grand desideratum of human ambition. We shall be as Gods in knowledge, was and must have been the first temptation: and the coexistence of great intellectual lordship with guilt has never been adequately represented without exciting the strongest interest, and for this reason, that in this bad and heterogeneous co-ordination we can contemplate the intellect of man more exclusively as a separate self-subsistence, than in its proper state of subordination to his own conscience, or to the will of an infinitely superior being. This is the sacred charm of Shakespeare's male characters in general. They are all cast in the mould of Shakespeare's own gigantic intellect; and this is the open attraction of his Richard, Iago, Edmund, and others in particular. But again; of all intellectual power, that of superiority to the fear of the invisible world is the most dazzling. Its influence is abundantly proved by the one circumstance, that it can bribe us into a voluntary submission of our better knowledge, into suspension of all our judgment derived from constant experience, and enable us to peruse with the liveliest interest the wildest tales of ghosts, wizards, genii, and secret talismans. On this propensity, so deeply rooted in our nature, a specific dramatic probability may be raised by a true poet, if the whole of his work be in harmony: a dramatic probability, sufficient for dramatic pleasure, even when the component characters and incidents border on impossibility. The poet does not require us to be awake and believe; he solicits us only to yield ourselves to a dream; and this too with our eyes open, and with our judgment perdue behind the curtain, ready to awaken us at the first motion of our will: and meantime, only, not to disbelieve. And in such a state of mind, who but must be impressed with the cool intrepidity of Don john on the appearance of his father's ghost: "GHOST.--Monster! behold these wounds! "D. JOHN.--I do! They were well meant and well performed, I see. "GHOST.------Repent, repent of all thy villanies. My clamorous blood to heaven for vengeance cries, Heaven will pour out his judgments on you all. Hell gapes for you, for you each fiend doth call, And hourly waits your unrepenting fall. You with eternal horrors they'll torment, Except of all your crimes you suddenly repent. (Ghost sinks.) "D. JOHN.--Farewell, thou art a foolish ghost. Repent, quoth he! what could this mean? Our senses are all in a mist sure. "D. ANTONIO.--(one of D. Juan's reprobate companions.) They are not! 'Twas a ghost. "D. LOPEZ.--(another reprobate.) I ne'er believed those foolish tales before. "D. JOHN.--Come! 'Tis no matter. Let it be what it will, it must be natural. "D. ANT.--And nature is unalterable in us too. "D. JOHN.--'Tis true! The nature of a ghost can not change our's." Who also can deny a portion of sublimity to the tremendous consistency with which he stands out the last fearful trial, like a second Prometheus? "Chorus of Devils. "STATUE-GHOST.--Will you not relent and feel remorse? "D. JOHN.--Could'st thou bestow another heart on me I might. But with this heart I have, I can not. "D. LOPEZ.--These things are prodigious. "D. ANTON.--I have a sort of grudging to relent, but something holds me back. "D. LOP.--If we could, 'tis now too late. I will not. "D. ANT.--We defy thee! "GHOST.--Perish ye impious wretches, go and find the punishments laid up in store for you! (Thunder and lightning. D. Lop. and D. Ant. are swallowed up.) "GHOST To D. JOHN.--Behold their dreadful fates, and know that thy last moment's come! "D. JOHN.--Think not to fright me, foolish ghost; I'll break your marble body in pieces and pull down your horse. (Thunder and lightning--chorus of devils, etc.) "D. JOHN.--These things I see with wonder, but no fear. Were all the elements to be confounded, And shuffled all into their former chaos; Were seas of sulphur flaming round about me, And all mankind roaring within those fires, I could not fear, or feel the least remorse. To the last instant I would dare thy power. Here I stand firm, and all thy threats contemn. Thy murderer (to the ghost of one whom he had murdered) Stands here! Now do thy worst!" (He is swallowed up in a cloud of fire.) In fine the character of Don John consists in the union of every thing desirable to human nature, as means, and which therefore by the well known law of association becomes at length desirable on their own account. On their own account, and, in their own dignity, they are here displayed, as being employed to ends so unhuman, that in the effect, they appear almost as means without an end. The ingredients too are mixed in the happiest proportion, so as to uphold and relieve each other--more especially in that constant interpoise of wit, gaiety, and social generosity, which prevents the criminal, even in his most atrocious moments, from sinking into the mere ruffian, as far at least, as our imagination sits in judgment. Above all, the fine suffusion through the whole, with the characteristic manners and feelings, of a highly bred gentleman gives life to the drama. Thus having invited the statue-ghost of the governor, whom he had murdered, to supper, which invitation the marble ghost accepted by a nod of the head, Don John has prepared a banquet. "D. JOHN.--Some wine, sirrah! Here's to Don Pedro's ghost--he should have been welcome. "D. LOP.--The rascal is afraid of you after death. (One knocks hard at the door.) "D. JOHN.--(to the servant)--Rise and do your duty. "SERV.--Oh the devil, the devil! (Marble ghost enters.) "D. JOHN.--Ha! 'tis the ghost! Let's rise and receive him! Come, Governour, you are welcome, sit there; if we had thought you would have come, we would have staid for you. * * * * * * Here, Governour, your health! Friends, put it about! Here's excellent meat, taste of this ragout. Come, I'll help you, come eat, and let old quarrels be forgotten. (The ghost threatens him with vengeance.) "D. JOHN.--We are too much confirmed--curse on this dry discourse. Come, here's to your mistress, you had one when you were living: not forgetting your sweet sister. (devils enter.) "D. JOHN.--Are these some of your retinue? Devils, say you? I'm sorry I have no burnt brandy to treat 'em with, that's drink fit for devils," etc. Nor is the scene from which we quote interesting, in dramatic probability alone; it is susceptible likewise of a sound moral; of a moral that has more than common claims on the notice of a too numerous class, who are ready to receive the qualities of gentlemanly courage, and scrupulous honour, (in all the recognised laws of honour,) as the substitutes of virtue, instead of its ornaments. This, indeed, is the moral value of the play at large, and that which places it at a world's distance from the spirit of modern jacobinism. The latter introduces to us clumsy copies of these showy instrumental qualities, in order to reconcile us to vice and want of principle; while the Atheista Fulminato presents an exquisite portraiture of the same qualities, in all their gloss and glow, but presents them for the sole purpose of displaying their hollowness, and in order to put us on our guard by demonstrating their utter indifference to vice and virtue, whenever these and the like accomplishments are contemplated for themselves alone. Eighteen years ago I observed, that the whole secret of the modern jacobinical drama, (which, and not the German, is its appropriate designation,) and of all its popularity, consists in the confusion and subversion of the natural order of things in their causes and effects: namely, in the excitement of surprise by representing the qualities of liberality, refined feeling, and a nice sense of honour (those things rather which pass amongst us for such) in persons and in classes where experience teaches us least to expect them; and by rewarding with all the sympathies which are the due of virtue, those criminals whom law, reason, and religion have excommunicated from our esteem. This of itself would lead me back to BERTRAM, or the CASTLE OF ST. ALDOBRAND; but, in my own mind, this tragedy was brought into connection with THE LIBERTINE, (Shadwell's adaptation of the Atheista Fulminato to the English stage in the reign of Charles the Second,) by the fact, that our modern drama is taken, in the substance of it, from the first scene of the third act of THE LIBERTINE. But with what palpable superiority of judgment in the original! Earth and hell, men and spirits are up in arms against Don John; the two former acts of the play have not only prepared us for the supernatural, but accustomed us to the prodigious. It is, therefore, neither more nor less than we anticipate when the Captain exclaims: "In all the dangers I have been, such horrors I never knew. I am quite unmanned:" and when the Hermit says, that he had "beheld the ocean in wildest rage, yet ne'er before saw a storm so dreadful, such horrid flashes of lightning, and such claps of thunder, were never in my remembrance." And Don John's burst of startling impiety is equally intelligible in its motive, as dramatic in its effect. But what is there to account for the prodigy of the tempest at Bertram's shipwreck? It is a mere supernatural effect, without even a hint of any supernatural agency; a prodigy, without any circumstance mentioned that is prodigious; and a miracle introduced without a ground, and ending without a result. Every event and every scene of the play might have taken place as well if Bertram and his vessel had been driven in by a common hard gale, or from want of provisions. The first act would have indeed lost its greatest and most sonorous picture; a scene for the sake of a scene, without a word spoken; as such, therefore, (a rarity without a precedent), we must take it, and be thankful! In the opinion of not a few, it was, in every sense of the word, the best scene in the play. I am quite certain it was the most innocent: and the steady, quiet uprightness of the flame of the wax-candles, which the monks held over the roaring billows amid the storm of wind and rain, was really miraculous. The Sicilian sea coast: a convent of monks: night: a most portentous, unearthly storm: a vessel is wrecked contrary to all human expectation, one man saves himself by his prodigious powers as a swimmer, aided by the peculiarity of his destination-- "PRIOR.------All, all did perish FIRST MONK.--Change, change those drenched weeds-- PRIOR.--I wist not of them--every soul did perish-- Enter third Monk hastily. "THIRD MONK.--No, there was one did battle with the storm With careless desperate force; full many times His life was won and lost, as tho' he recked not-- No hand did aid him, and he aided none-- Alone he breasted the broad wave, alone That man was saved." Well! This man is led in by the monks, supposed dripping wet, and to very natural inquiries he either remains silent, or gives most brief and surly answers, and after three or four of these half-line courtesies, "dashing off the monks" who had saved him, he exclaims in the true sublimity of our modern misanthropic heroism-- "Off! ye are men--there's poison in your touch. But I must yield, for this" (what?) "hath left me strengthless." So end the three first scenes. In the next (the Castle of St. Aldobrand,) we find the servants there equally frightened with this unearthly storm, though wherein it differed from other violent storms we are not told, except that Hugo informs us, page 9-- "PIET.--Hugo, well met. Does e'en thy age bear Memory of so terrible a storm? HUGO.--They have been frequent lately. PIET.--They are ever so in Sicily. HUGO.--So it is said. But storms when I was young Would still pass o'er like Nature's fitful fevers, And rendered all more wholesome. Now their rage, Sent thus unseasonable and profitless, Speaks like the threats of heaven." A most perplexing theory of Sicilian storms is this of old Hugo! and what is very remarkable, not apparently founded on any great familiarity of his own with this troublesome article. For when Pietro asserts the "ever more frequency" of tempests in Sicily, the old man professes to know nothing more of the fact, but by hearsay. "So it is said."--But why he assumed this storm to be unseasonable, and on what he grounded his prophecy, (for the storm is still in full fury), that it would be profitless, and without the physical powers common to all other violent sea-winds in purifying the atmosphere, we are left in the dark; as well concerning the particular points in which he knew it, during its continuance, to differ from those that he had been acquainted with in his youth. We are at length introduced to the Lady Imogine, who, we learn, had not rested "through" the night; not on account of the tempest, for "Long ere the storm arose, her restless gestures Forbade all hope to see her blest with sleep." Sitting at a table, and looking at a portrait, she informs us--First, that portrait-painters may make a portrait from memory, "The limner's art may trace the absent feature." For surely these words could never mean, that a painter may have a person sit to him who afterwards may leave the room or perhaps the country? Secondly, that a portrait-painter can enable a mourning lady to possess a good likeness of her absent lover, but that the portrait- painter cannot, and who shall-- "Restore the scenes in which they met and parted?" The natural answer would have been--Why the scene-painter to be sure! But this unreasonable lady requires in addition sundry things to be painted that have neither lines nor colours-- "The thoughts, the recollections, sweet and bitter, Or the Elysian dreams of lovers when they loved." Which last sentence must be supposed to mean; when they were present, and making love to each other.--Then, if this portrait could speak, it would "acquit the faith of womankind." How? Had she remained constant? No, she has been married to another man, whose wife she now is. How then? Why, that, in spite of her marriage vow, she had continued to yearn and crave for her former lover-- "This has her body, that her mind: Which has the better bargain?" The lover, however, was not contented with this precious arrangement, as we shall soon find. The lady proceeds to inform us that during the many years of their separation, there have happened in the different parts of the world, a number of "such things;" even such, as in a course of years always have, and till the Millennium, doubtless always will happen somewhere or other. Yet this passage, both in language and in metre, is perhaps amongst the best parts of the play. The lady's love companion and most esteemed attendant, Clotilda, now enters and explains this love and esteem by proving herself a most passive and dispassionate listener, as well as a brief and lucky querist, who asks by chance, questions that we should have thought made for the very sake of the answers. In short, she very much reminds us of those puppet-heroines, for whom the showman contrives to dialogue without any skill in ventriloquism. This, notwithstanding, is the best scene in the Play, and though crowded with solecisms, corrupt diction, and offences against metre, would possess merits sufficient to out-weigh them, if we could suspend the moral sense during the perusal. It tells well and passionately the preliminary circumstances, and thus overcomes the main difficulty of most first acts, to wit, that of retrospective narration. It tells us of her having been honourably addressed by a noble youth, of rank and fortune vastly superior to her own: of their mutual love, heightened on her part by gratitude; of his loss of his sovereign's favour; his disgrace; attainder; and flight; that he (thus degraded) sank into a vile ruffian, the chieftain of a murderous banditti; and that from the habitual indulgence of the most reprobate habits and ferocious passions, he had become so changed, even in appearance, and features, "That she who bore him had recoiled from him, Nor known the alien visage of her child, Yet still she (Imogine) lov'd him." She is compelled by the silent entreaties of a father, perishing with "bitter shameful want on the cold earth," to give her hand, with a heart thus irrecoverably pre-engaged, to Lord Aldobrand, the enemy of her lover, even to the very man who had baffled his ambitious schemes, and was, at the present time, entrusted with the execution of the sentence of death which had been passed on Bertram. Now, the proof of "woman's love," so industriously held forth for the sympathy, if not for the esteem of the audience, consists in this, that, though Bertram had become a robber and a murderer by trade, a ruffian in manners, yea, with form and features at which his own mother could not but "recoil," yet she (Lady Imogine) "the wife of a most noble, honoured Lord," estimable as a man, exemplary and affectionate as a husband, and the fond father of her only child--that she, notwithstanding all this, striking her heart, dares to say to it-- "But thou art Bertram's still, and Bertram's ever." A Monk now enters, and entreats in his Prior's name for the wonted hospitality, and "free noble usage" of the Castle of St. Aldobrand for some wretched shipwrecked souls, and from this we learn, for the first time, to our infinite surprise, that notwithstanding the supernaturalness of the storm aforesaid, not only Bertram, but the whole of his gang, had been saved, by what means we are left to conjecture, and can only conclude that they had all the same desperate swimming powers, and the same saving destiny as the hero, Bertram himself. So ends the first act, and with it the tale of the events, both those with which the tragedy begins, and those which had occurred previous to the date of its commencement. The second displays Bertram in disturbed sleep, which the Prior, who hangs over him, prefers calling a "starting trance," and with a strained voice, that would have awakened one of the seven sleepers, observes to the audience-- "How the lip works! How the bare teeth do grind! And beaded drops course [81] down his writhen brow!" The dramatic effect of which passage we not only concede to the admirers of this tragedy, but acknowledge the further advantages of preparing the audience for the most surprising series of wry faces, proflated mouths, and lunatic gestures that were ever "launched" on an audience to "sear the sense." [82] "PRIOR.--I will awake him from this horrid trance. This is no natural sleep! Ho, wake thee, stranger!" This is rather a whimsical application of the verb reflex we must confess, though we remember a similar transfer of the agent to the patient in a manuscript tragedy, in which the Bertram of the piece, prostrating a man with a single blow of his fist, exclaims--"Knock me thee down, then ask thee if thou liv'st." Well; the stranger obeys, and whatever his sleep might have been, his waking was perfectly natural; for lethargy itself could not withstand the scolding Stentorship of Mr. Holland, the Prior. We next learn from the best authority, his own confession, that the misanthropic hero, whose destiny was incompatible with drowning, is Count Bertram, who not only reveals his past fortunes, but avows with open atrocity, his Satanic hatred of Imogine's lord, and his frantick thirst of revenge; and so the raving character raves, and the scolding character scolds--and what else? Does not the Prior act? Does he not send for a posse of constables or thief-takers to handcuff the villain, or take him either to Bedlam or Newgate? Nothing of the kind; the author preserves the unity of character, and the scolding Prior from first to last does nothing but scold, with the exception indeed of the last scene of the last act, in which, with a most surprising revolution, he whines, weeps, and kneels to the condemned blaspheming assassin out of pure affection to the high-hearted man, the sublimity of whose angel-sin rivals the star-bright apostate, (that is, who was as proud as Lucifer, and as wicked as the Devil), and, "had thrilled him," (Prior Holland aforesaid), with wild admiration. Accordingly in the very next scene, we have this tragic Macheath, with his whole gang, in the Castle of St. Aldobrand, without any attempt on the Prior's part either to prevent him, or to put the mistress and servants of the Castle on their guard against their new inmates; though he (the Prior) knew, and confesses that he knew, that Bertram's "fearful mates" were assassins so habituated and naturalized to guilt, that-- "When their drenched hold forsook both gold and gear, They griped their daggers with a murderer's instinct;" and though he also knew, that Bertram was the leader of a band whose trade was blood. To the Castle however he goes, thus with the holy Prior's consent, if not with his assistance; and thither let us follow him. No sooner is our hero safely housed in the Castle of St. Aldobrand, than he attracts the notice of the lady and her confidante, by his "wild and terrible dark eyes," "muffled form," "fearful form," [83] "darkly wild," "proudly stern," and the like common-place indefinites, seasoned by merely verbal antitheses, and at best, copied with very slight change, from the Conrade of Southey's JOAN OF ARC. The lady Imogine, who has been, (as is the case, she tells us, with all soft and solemn spirits,) worshipping the moon on a terrace or rampart within view of the Castle, insists on having an interview with our hero, and this too tete-a-tete. Would the reader learn why and wherefore the confidante is excluded, who very properly remonstrates against such "conference, alone, at night, with one who bears such fearful form;" the reason follows--"why, therefore send him!" I say, follows, because the next line, "all things of fear have lost their power over me," is separated from the former by a break or pause, and besides that it is a very poor answer to the danger, is no answer at all to the gross indelicacy of this wilful exposure. We must therefore regard it as a mere after-thought, that a little softens the rudeness, but adds nothing to the weight, of that exquisite woman's reason aforesaid. And so exit Clotilda and enter Bertram, who "stands without looking at her," that is, with his lower limbs forked, his arms akimbo, his side to the lady's front, the whole figure resembling an inverted Y. He is soon however roused from the state surly to the state frantick, and then follow raving, yelling, cursing, she fainting, he relenting, in runs Imogine's child, squeaks "mother!" He snatches it up, and with a "God bless thee, child! Bertram has kissed thy child,"--the curtain drops. The third act is short, and short be our account of it. It introduces Lord St. Aldobrand on his road homeward, and next Imogine in the convent, confessing the foulness of her heart to the Prior, who first indulges his old humour with a fit of senseless scolding, then leaves her alone with her ruffian paramour, with whom she makes at once an infamous appointment, and the curtain drops, that it may be carried into act and consummation. I want words to describe the mingled horror and disgust with which I witnessed the opening of the fourth act, considering it as a melancholy proof of the depravation of the public mind. The shocking spirit of jacobinism seemed no longer confined to politics. The familiarity with atrocious events and characters appeared to have poisoned the taste, even where it had not directly disorganized the moral principles, and left the feelings callous to all the mild appeals, and craving alone for the grossest and most outrageous stimulants. The very fact then present to our senses, that a British audience could remain passive under such an insult to common decency, nay, receive with a thunder of applause, a human being supposed to have come reeking from the consummation of this complex foulness and baseness, these and the like reflections so pressed as with the weight of lead upon my heart, that actor, author, and tragedy would have been forgotten, had it not been for a plain elderly man sitting beside me, who, with a very serious face, that at once expressed surprise and aversion, touched my elbow, and, pointing to the actor, said to me in a half-whisper--"Do you see that little fellow there? he has just been committing adultery!" Somewhat relieved by the laugh which this droll address occasioned, I forced back my attention to the stage sufficiently to learn, that Bertram is recovered from a transient fit of remorse by the information, that St. Aldobrand was commissioned (to do, what every honest man must have done without commission, if he did his duty) to seize him and deliver him to the just vengeance of the law; an information which, (as he had long known himself to be an attainted traitor and proclaimed outlaw, and not only a trader in blood himself, but notoriously the Captain of a gang of thieves, pirates, and assassins), assuredly could not have been new to him. It is this, however, which alone and instantly restores him to his accustomed state of raving, blasphemy, and nonsense. Next follows Imogine's constrained interview with her injured husband, and his sudden departure again, all in love and kindness, in order to attend the feast of St. Anselm at the convent. This was, it must be owned, a very strange engagement for so tender a husband to make within a few minutes after so long an absence. But first his lady has told him that she has "a vow on her," and wishes "that black perdition may gulf her perjured soul,"--(Note: she is lying at the very time)--if she ascends his bed, till her penance is accomplished. How, therefore, is the poor husband to amuse himself in this interval of her penance? But do not be distressed, reader, on account of the St. Aldobrand's absence! As the author has contrived to send him out of the house, when a husband would be in his, and the lover's way, so he will doubtless not be at a loss to bring him back again as soon as he is wanted. Well! the husband gone in on the one side, out pops the lover from the other, and for the fiendish purpose of harrowing up the soul of his wretched accomplice in guilt, by announcing to her, with most brutal and blasphemous execrations, his fixed and deliberate resolve to assassinate her husband; all this too is for no discoverable purpose on the part of the author, but that of introducing a series of super-tragic starts, pauses, screams, struggling, dagger-throwing, falling on the ground, starting up again wildly, swearing, outcries for help, falling again on the ground, rising again, faintly tottering towards the door, and, to end the scene, a most convenient fainting fit of our lady's, just in time to give Bertram an opportunity of seeking the object of his hatred, before she alarms the house, which indeed she has had full time to have done before, but that the author rather chose she should amuse herself and the audience by the above-described ravings and startings. She recovers slowly, and to her enter, Clotilda, the confidante and mother confessor; then commences, what in theatrical language is called the madness, but which the author more accurately entitles, delirium, it appearing indeed a sort of intermittent fever with fits of lightheadedness off and on, whenever occasion and stage effect happen to call for it. A convenient return of the storm, (we told the reader before-hand how it would be), had changed-- "The rivulet, that bathed the convent walls, Into a foaming flood: upon its brink The Lord and his small train do stand appalled. With torch and bell from their high battlements The monks do summon to the pass in vain; He must return to-night." Talk of the Devil, and his horns appear, says the proverb and sure enough, within ten lines of the exit of the messenger, sent to stop him, the arrival of Lord St. Aldobrand is announced. Bertram's ruffian band now enter, and range themselves across the stage, giving fresh cause for Imogine's screams and madness. St. Aldobrand, having received his mortal wound behind the scenes, totters in to welter in his blood, and to die at the feet of this double-damned adultress. Of her, as far as she is concerned in this fourth act, we have two additional points to notice: first, the low cunning and Jesuitical trick with which she deludes her husband into words of forgiveness, which he himself does not understand; and secondly, that everywhere she is made the object of interest and sympathy, and it is not the author's fault, if, at any moment, she excites feelings less gentle, than those we are accustomed to associate with the self-accusations of a sincere religious penitent. And did a British audience endure all this?--They received it with plaudits, which, but for the rivalry of the carts and hackney coaches, might have disturbed the evening-prayers of the scanty week day congregation at St. Paul's cathedral. Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. Of the fifth act, the only thing noticeable, (for rant and nonsense, though abundant as ever, have long before the last act become things of course,) is the profane representation of the high altar in a chapel, with all the vessels and other preparations for the holy sacrament. A hymn is actually sung on the stage by the chorister boys! For the rest, Imogine, who now and then talks deliriously, but who is always light-headed as far as her gown and hair can make her so, wanders about in dark woods with cavern-rocks and precipices in the back-scene; and a number of mute dramatis personae move in and out continually, for whose presence, there is always at least this reason, that they afford something to be seen, by that very large part of a Drury Lane audience who have small chance of hearing a word. She had, it appears, taken her child with her, but what becomes of the child, whether she murdered it or not, nobody can tell, nobody can learn; it was a riddle at the representation, and after a most attentive perusal of the Play, a riddle it remains. "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." Our whole information [84] is derived from the following words-- "PRIOR.--Where is thy child? CLOTIL.--(Pointing to the cavern into which she has looked) Oh he lies cold within his cavern-tomb! Why dost thou urge her with the horrid theme? PRIOR.--(who will not, the reader may observe, be disappointed of his dose of scolding) It was to make (query wake) one living cord o' th' heart, And I will try, tho' my own breaks at it. Where is thy child? IMOG.--(with a frantic laugh) The forest fiend hath snatched him-- He (who? the fiend or the child?) rides the night-mare thro' the wizard woods." Now these two lines consist in a senseless plagiarism from the counterfeited madness of Edgar in Lear, who, in imitation of the gypsy incantations, puns on the old word mair, a hag; and the no less senseless adoption of Dryden's forest fiend, and the wisard stream by which Milton, in his Lycidas, so finely characterizes the spreading Deva, fabulosus amnis. Observe too these images stand unique in the speeches of Imogine, without the slightest resemblance to anything she says before or after. But we are weary. The characters in this act frisk about, here, there, and every where, as teasingly as the Jack o' Lantern-lights which mischievous boys, from across a narrow street, throw with a looking-glass on the faces of their opposite neighbours. Bertram disarmed, outheroding Charles de Moor in the Robbers, befaces the collected knights of St. Anselm, (all in complete armour) and so, by pure dint of black looks, he outdares them into passive poltroons. The sudden revolution in the Prior's manners we have before noticed, and it is indeed so outre, that a number of the audience imagined a great secret was to come out, viz.: that the Prior was one of the many instances of a youthful sinner metamorphosed into an old scold, and that this Bertram would appear at last to be his son. Imogine re-appears at the convent, and dies of her own accord. Bertram stabs himself, and dies by her side, and that the play may conclude as it began, to wit, in a superfetation of blasphemy upon nonsense, because he had snatched a sword from a despicable coward, who retreats in terror when it is pointed towards him in sport; this felo de se, and thief-captain--this loathsome and leprous confluence of robbery, adultery, murder, and cowardly assassination,--this monster, whose best deed is, the having saved his betters from the degradation of hanging him, by turning Jack Ketch to himself; first recommends the charitable Monks and holy Prior to pray for his soul, and then has the folly and impudence to exclaim-- "I die no felon's death, A warriour's weapon freed a warriour's soul!" 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 bad 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.]