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_,