Anima Poetae Part 28

[_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 circ.u.mstance 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 cla.s.sification of these strange sensations, the organic material a.n.a.logous (_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 pa.s.sed 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 laeta 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 _heautopithygmy_ 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 att.i.tudes 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 sc.r.a.pe 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 canva.s.sing 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 pa.s.sions, like spirits and apparitions, have their hour of c.o.c.k-crow, in which they must vanish. But pure love is, therefore, no _mere_ pa.s.sion; and it is a test of its being love, that no reason can be a.s.signed _why_ it should disappear. Shall we not always, in this life at least, remain _animae dimidiatae_?--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, p.r.o.neness and quickness to look into, to a.n.a.lyse, 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 circ.u.mstances 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, G.o.d 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?