Anima Poetae Part 29

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 gla.s.s 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 _appet.i.te_; 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 a.s.sociation, 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 G.o.d has chosen to reveal.

[Sidenote: C'EST MAGNIFIQUE, MAIS CE N'EST PAS LA POeSIE]

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-gla.s.s of fact.i.tious 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 pa.s.sive--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 a.s.serted 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 pa.s.sing 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 const.i.tuent 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.]

Vults, heu, blanda severi Majestas, placidaeque decus pondusque senectae!

Non omnia terrae Obruta! vivit amor, vivit dolor! Ora negatum Dulcia conspicere; at flere et meminisse relictum est.

Jamque observatio vitae 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 cla.s.sical gem. To a translator of genius, and who possessed the English language as unembarra.s.sed 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]