Anima Poetae Part 20

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 Ma.s.sY 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 a.s.sist 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 s.p.a.ce 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 const.i.tutes 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 Sundhaftigkeit"), 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, a.s.sembled on some drunken St. Monday of faction, is the People forsooth, and each leprous ragam.u.f.fin, 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 ent.i.tled 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 quant.i.ty, 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 inters.p.a.ces 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. Quaere--_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 G.o.ds on earth, they are, however, G.o.ds 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 l.u.s.tre 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 nonent.i.ty.