Anima Poetae Part 22

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, appet.i.te. Hence will it tend to dissensualise its nature into fantastic pa.s.sions, the idolatry of Paphian priestesses.

[Sidenote: IN WONDER ALL PHILOSOPHY BEGAN]

Time, s.p.a.ce, duration, action, active pa.s.sion pa.s.sive, activeness, pa.s.siveness, reaction, causation, affinity--here a.s.semble 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 ma.s.s 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 QUa NON]

Form is fact.i.tious 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 ma.s.s, 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 aether at Malta, with the sun apparently suspended in it, the eye seeming to pierce beyond and, as it were, behind it--and, below, the aethereal 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 antic.i.p.ation 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 p.r.o.nOUN]

Quaere--whether we may not, _nay_ ought not, to use a neutral p.r.o.noun relative, or representative, to the word "Person," where it hath been used in the sense of _h.o.m.o_, _mensch_, or noun of the common gender, in order to avoid particularising man or woman, or in order to express either s.e.x 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 pa.s.s] 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 a.s.sociations 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 a.s.sociations 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 G.o.d, grovel in the mire and grunt the language of the swinish slaves of the Circe, of vulgar generality and still more vulgar a.s.sociation? 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 superst.i.tion, 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 n.o.bly-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!

a.s.suredly 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 c.o.c.k-my-head-and-eye, pert-bashful darling, that makes our kitchen its chosen cage.