Anima Poetae Part 30

Zephyrs that captive roam among these boughs, Strive ye in vain to thread the leafy maze?

Or have ye lim'd your wings with honey-dew?

Unfelt ye murmur restless o'er my head And rock the feeding drone or bustling bees That blend their eager, earnest, happy hum!

[Sidenote: WHAT MAN HAS MADE OF MAN]

Gravior terras infestat Echidna, Cur sua vipereae jaculantur toxica linguae Atque homini sit h.o.m.o serpens. O prodiga culpae Germina, naturaeque uteri fatalia monstra!

Queis nimis innocuo volupe est in sanguine rictus Tingere, fraternasque fibras cognataque per se Viscera, et arrosae deglubere funera famae.

Quae morum ista lues!

25th Feb. 1819 Five years since the preceding lines were written on this leaf!! Ah! how yet more intrusively has the hornet scandal since then scared away the bee of poetic thought and silenced its "eager, earnest, happy hum"!

[Sidenote: SAVE ME FROM MY FRIENDS]

The sore evil now so general, alas! only not universal, of supporting our religion, just as a keen party-man would support his party in Parliament. All must be defended which can give a momentary advantage over any one opponent, no matter how naked it lays the cause open to another, perhaps, more formidable opponent--no matter how incompatible the two a.s.sumptions may be. We rejoice, not because our religion is the truth, but because the truth appears to be our religion. Talk with any dignified orthodoxist in the sober way of farther preferment and he will concrete all the grounds of Socinianism, talk Paley and the Resurrection as a proof and as the only proper _proof_ of our immortality, will give to external evidence and miracles the same self-grounded force, the same fundamentality. Even so the old Puritans felt towards the Papists.

Because so much was wrong, everything was wrong, and by denying all reverence to the fathers and to the constant tradition of the Catholic Churches, they undermined the wall of the city in order that it might fall on the heads of the Romanists--thoughtless that by this very act they made a Breach for the Arian and Socinian to enter.

[Sidenote: DRIP DRIP DRIP DRIP]

The ear-deceiving imitation of a steady soaking rain, while the sky is in full uncurtainment of sprinkled stars and milky stream and dark blue inters.p.a.ce. The rain had held up for two hours or more, but so deep was the silence of the night that the _drip_ from the leaves of the garden trees _copied_ a steady shower.

[Sidenote: REMEDIUM AMORIS]

So intense are my affections, and so despotically am I governed by them (not indeed so much as I once was, but still far, far too much) that I should be the most wretched of men if my love outlived my esteem. But this, thank Heaven! is the antidote. The bitterer the tear of anguish at the clear detection of misapplied attachment, the calmer I am afterwards. It is a funeral tear for an object no more.

[Sidenote: THE CONCLUSION OF THE WHOLE MATTER]

February 23, 1816.

I thought I expressed my thoughts well when I said, "There is no superst.i.tion but what has a religion as its base [or radical], and religion is only reason, seen perspectively by a finite intellect."

[Sidenote: THE POWER OF WORDS]

It is a common remark, in medical books for instance, that there are certain niceties which words, from their always abstract and so far general nature, cannot convey. Now this I am disposed to deny, that is, in any comparative sense. In my opinion there is nothing which, being equally known as any other thing, may not be conveyed by words with equal clearness. But the question of the source of the remark is, to whom? If I say that in jaundice the skin looks yellow, my words have no meaning for a man who has no sense of colours. Words are but remembrances, though remembrance may be so excited, as by the _a priori_ powers of the mind to produce a _tertium aliquid_. The utmost, therefore that should be said is that every additament of perception requires a new word, which (like all other words) will be intelligible to all who have seen the subject recalled by it, and who have learnt that such a word or phrase was appropriated to it; and this may be attained either by a new word, as _platinum_, _t.i.tanium_, _osmium_, etc., for the new metals, or an epithet peculiarising the application of an old word. For instance, no one can have attended to the brightness of the eyes in a healthy person in high spirits and particularly delighted by some occurrence, and that of the eye of a person deranged or predisposed to derangement, without observing the difference; and, in this case, the phrase "a maniacal glitter of the eye" conveys as clear a notion as that jaundice is marked by yellow. There is, doubtless, a difference, but no other than that of the _commencement_ of particular knowledge by the application of universal knowledge (that is to all who have the senses and common faculties of men), and the next step of knowledge when it particularises itself. But the defect is not in words, but in the imperfect knowledge of those to whom they are addressed. Then proof is obvious. Desire a physician or metaphysician, or a lawyer to mention the most perspicuous book in their several knowledges. Then bid them read that book to a sensible carpenter or shoemaker, and a great part will be as unintelligible as a technical treatise on carpentering to the lawyer or physician, who had not been brought up in a carpenter's shop or looked at his tools.

I have dwelt on this for more reasons than one: first, because a remark that seems at first sight the same, namely, that "everything clearly perceived may be conveyed in simple common language," without taking in the "to whom?" is the disease of the age--an arrogant pusillanimity, a hatred of all information that cannot be obtained without thinking; and, secondly, because the pretended imperfection of language is often a disguise of muddy thoughts; and, thirdly, because to the mind itself it is made an excuse for indolence in determining what the fact or truth is which is the premise. For whether there does or does not exist a term in our present store of words significant thereof--if not, a word must be made--and, indeed, all wise men have so acted from Moses to Aristotle and from Theophrastus to Linnaeus.

The sum, therefore, is this. The conveyal of knowledge by words is in direct proportion to the stores and faculties of observation (internal or external) of the person who hears or reads them. And this holds equally whether I distinguish the green gra.s.s from the white lily and the yellow crocus, which all who have eyes understand, because all are equal to me in the knowledge of the facts signified--or of the difference between the apprehensive, perceptive, conceptive, and conclusive powers which I might [try to enunciate to] Doctors of Divinity and they would translate the words by _Abra Ca Dabra_.

[Sidenote: FLOWERS OF SPEECH Sunday, April 30, 1816]

Reflections on my four gaudy flower-pots, compared with the former flower-poems. After a certain period, crowded with counterfeiters of poetry, and ill.u.s.trious with true poets, there is formed for common use a vast _garden_ of language, all the showy and all the odorous words and cl.u.s.ters of words are brought together, and to be plucked by mere mechanic and pa.s.sive memory. In such a state, any man of common poetical reading, having a strong desire (to be?--O no! but--) to be thought a poet will present a flower-pot gay and gaudy, but the _composition_!

That is wanting. We carry on judgment of times and circ.u.mstances into our pleasures. A flower-pot which would have enchanted us before flower gardens were common, for the very beauty of the component flowers, will be rightly condemned as common-place, out of place (for such is a common-place poet)--it involves a contradiction both in terms and thought. So Homer's Juno, Minerva, etc., are read with delight--but Blackmore? This is the reason why the judgment of those who are newlings in poetic reading is not to be relied on. The positive, which belongs to all, is taken as the comparative, which is the individual's praise. A good ear which had never heard music--with what raptures would it praise one of Shield's or Arne's Pasticcios and Centos! But it is the human mind it praises, not the individual. Hence it may happen (I believe has happened) that fashionableness may produce popularity. "The Beggar's Pet.i.tion" is a fair instance, and what if I dared to add Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard"?

[Sidenote: SPIRITUAL BLINDNESS]

Men who direct what they call their understanding or common-sense by rules abstracted from sensuous experience in moral and super-sensuous truths remind one of the zemmi (mus [Greek: typhlos] or _typhlus_), "a kind of rat in which the skin (conjunctiva) is not even transparent over the eye, but is there covered with hairs as in the rest of the body. The eye (= the understanding), which is scarcely the size of the poppy-seed, is perfectly useless." An eel (_muroena coecilia_) and the myxine (_gastobranchus coecus_) are blind in the same manner, through the opacity of the conjunctiva.

[Sidenote: INSECTS]

Sir G. Staunton a.s.serts that, in the forests of Java, spiders' webs are found of so strong a texture as to require a sharp-cutting instrument to make way through them. Pity that he did not procure a specimen and bring it home with him. It would be a pleasure to see a sailing-boat rigged with them--twisting the larger threads into ropes and weaving the smaller into a sort of silk canvas resembling the indestructible white cloth of the arindy or _palma Christi_ silkworm.

The _Libellulidae_ fly all ways without needing to turn their bodies--onward, backward, right and left--with more than swallow-rivalling rapidity of wing, readiness of evolution, and indefatigable continuance.

The merry little gnats (_Tipulidae minimae_) I have myself often watched in an April shower, evidently "dancing the hayes" in and out between the falling drops, unwetted, or, rather, un-down-dashed by rocks of water many times larger than their whole bodies.

[Sidenote: OF STYLE Sunday, January 25, 1817]

A valuable remark has just struck me on reading Milton's beautiful pa.s.sage on true eloquence, his apology for Smectymnuus. "For me, reader, though I cannot say," etc.--first, to shew the vastly greater numbers of admirable pa.s.sages, in our elder writers, that may be gotten by heart as the most exquisite poems; and to point out the great intellectual advantage of this reading, over the gliding smoothly on through a whole volume of equability. But still, it will be said, there is an antiquity, an oddness in the style. Granted; but hear this same pa.s.sage from the Smectymnuus, or this, or this. Every one would know at first hearing that they were not written by Gibbon, Hume, Johnson, or Robertson. But why? Are they not pure English? Aye! incomparably more so! Are not the words precisely appropriate, so that you cannot change them without changing the force and meaning? Aye! But are they not even now intelligible to man, woman, and child? Aye! there is no riddle-my-ree in them. What, then, is it? The unnatural, false, affected style of the moderns that makes sense and simplicity _oddness_.

[Sidenote: OBDUCTa FRONTE SENECTUS]

Even to a sense of shrinking, I felt in this man's face and figure what a shape comes to view when age has dried away the mask from a bad, depraved man, and flesh and colour no longer conceal or palliate the traits of the countenance. Then shows itself the indurated nerve; stiff and rigid in all its ugliness the inflexible muscle; then quiver the naked lips, the cold, the loveless; then blinks the turbid eye, whose glance no longer pliant _fixes_, abides in its evil expression. Then lie on the powerless forehead the wrinkles of suspicion and fear, and conscience-stung watchfulness. Contrast this with the countenance of Mrs. Gillman's mother as she once described it to me. This for "Puff and Slander,"[G] Highgate, 1817.

[Sidenote: A "KINGDOM-OF-HEAVENITE"]

When the little creature has slept out its sleep and stilled its hunger at the mother's bosom (that very hunger a mode of love all made up of kisses), and coos, and wantons with pleasure, and laughs, and plays bob-cherry with his mother, that is all, all to it. It understands not either itself or its mother, but it clings to her, and has an undeniable right to cling to her, seeks her, thanks her, loves her without forethought and without an afterthought.

[Sidenote: A DIVINE EPIGRAM]

_Nec mihi, Christe, tua sufficiunt sine te, nec tibi placent mea sine me_, exclaims St. Bernard. _Nota Bene._--This single epigram is worth (shall I say--O far rather--is a sufficient antidote to) a waggon-load of Paleyan moral and political philosophies.

[Sidenote: SERIORES ROSae]

We all look up to the blue sky for comfort, but nothing appears there, nothing comforts, nothing answers us, and so we die.

Lie with the ear upon a dear friend's grave.

On the same man, as in a vineyard, grow far different grapes--on the sunny south nectar, and on the bleak north verjuice.

The blossom gives not only future fruit, but present honey. We may take the one, the other nothing injured.