Anima Poetae Part 9

The old stump of the tree, with briar-roses and bramble leaves wreathed round and round--a bramble arch--a foxglove in the centre.

The palm, still faithful to forsaken deserts, an emblem of hope.

The stedfast rainbow in the fast-moving, fast-hurrying hail-mist! What a congregation of images and feelings, of fantastic permanence amidst the rapid change of tempest--quietness the daughter of storm.

[Sidenote: "POEM ON SPIRIT, OR ON SPINOZA"]

I would make a pilgrimage to the deserts of Arabia to find the man who could make me understand how the _one can be many_. Eternal, universal mystery! It seems as if it were impossible, yet it _is_, and it is everywhere! It is indeed a contradiction in _terms_, and only in terms.

It is the co-presence of feeling and life, limitless by their very essence, with form by its very essence limited, determinable, definite.

[Sidenote: TRANS-SUBSTANTIATION]

Meditate on trans-substantiation! What a conception of a miracle! Were one a Catholic, what a sublime oration might one not make of it?

Perpetual, [Greek: pan]topical, yet offering no violence to the sense, exercising no domination over the free-will--a miracle always existing, yet perceived only by an act of the free-will--the beautiful fuel of the fire of faith--the fire must be pre-existent or it is not fuel, yet it feeds and supports and is necessary to feed and support the fire that converts it into his own nature.

[Sidenote: THE DANGER OF THE MEAN]

Errors beget opposite errors, for it is our imperfect nature to run into extremes. But this trite, because ever-recurring, truth is not the whole. Alas! those are endangered who have avoided the extremes, as if among the Tartars, in opposition to a faction that had unnaturally lengthened their noses into monstrosity, there should arise another who had cut off theirs flat to the face, Socinians in physiognomy. The few who retained their noses as nature made them and reason dictated would a.s.suredly be persecuted by the noseless party as adherents of the rhinocerotists or monster-nosed men, which is the case of those [Greek: archaspistai] [braves] of the English Church, called Evangelicals.

Excess of Calvinism produced Arminianism, and those not in excess must therefore be Calvinists!

[Sidenote: ALAS! THEY HAD BEEN FRIENDS IN YOUTH]

To a former friend who pleaded how near he formerly had been, how near and close a friend! Yes! you were, indeed, near to my heart and native to my soul--a part of my being and its natural, even as the chaff to corn. But since that time, through whose fault I will be mute, I have been thrashed out by the flail of experience. Because you have been, therefore, never more can you be a part of the grain.

[Sidenote: Oct. 31, 1803 AVE PH[OE]BE IMPERATOR]

The full moon glided behind a black cloud. And what then? and who cared?

It was past seven o'clock in the morning. There is a small cloud in the east, not larger than the moon and ten times brighter than she! So pa.s.ses night, and all her favours vanish in our minds ungrateful!

[Sidenote: THE ONE AND THE GOOD]

In the chapter on abstract ideas I might introduce the subject by quoting the eighth Proposition of Proclus' "Elements of Theology." The whole of religion seems to me to rest on and in the question: The One and The Good--are these words or realities? I long to read the schoolmen on the subject.

[Sidenote: A MORTAL AGONY OF THOUGHT]

There are thoughts that seem to give me a power over my own life. I could kill myself by persevering in the thought. Mem., to describe as accurately as may be the approximating symptoms. I met something very like this observation where I should least have expected such a coincidence of sentiment, such sympathy with so wild a feeling of mine--in p. 71 of Blount's translation of "The Spanish Rogue," 1623.

CHAPTER III

_1804_

"Home-sickness is no baby-pang."--S. T. C.

[Sidenote: THE UNDISCIPLINED WILL]

This evening, and indeed all this day, I ought to have been reading and filling the margins of Malthus. ["An Essay on the Principles of Population, &c., London," 1803, 4to. The copy annotated by Coleridge is now in the British Museum.]

I had begun and found it pleasant. Why did I neglect it? Because I ought not to have done this. The same applies to the reading and writing of letters, essays, etc. Surely this is well worth a serious a.n.a.lysis, that, by understanding, I may attempt to heal it. For it is a deep and wide disease in my moral nature, at once elm-and-oak-rooted. Is it love of liberty, of spontaneity or what? These all express, but do not explain the fact.

[Sidenote: Tuesday morning, January 10, 1804]

After I had got into bed last night I said to myself that I had been pompously enunciating as a difficulty, a problem of easy and common solution--viz., that it was the effect of a.s.sociation. From infancy up to manhood, under parents, schoolmasters, inspectors, etc., our pleasures and pleasant self-chosen pursuits (self-chosen because pleasant, and not originally pleasant because self-chosen) have been forcibly interrupted, and dull, unintelligible rudiments, or painful tasks imposed upon us instead. Now all duty is felt as a _command_, and every command is of the nature of an offence. Duty, therefore, by the law of a.s.sociation being felt as a command from without, would naturally call up the sensation of the pain roused from the commands of parents and schoolmasters. But I awoke this morning at half-past one, and as soon as disease permitted me to think at all, the shallowness and sophistry of this solution flashed upon me at once. I saw that the phenomenon occurred far, far too early: I have observed it in infants of two or three months old, and in Hartley I have seen it turned up and layed bare to the unarmed eye of the merest common sense. The fact is that interruption of itself is painful, because and as far as it acts as _disruption_. And thus without any reference to or distinct recollection of my former theory I saw great reason to attribute the effect, wholly, to the streamy nature of the a.s.sociative faculty, and the more, as it is evident that they labour under this defect who are most reverie-ish and streamy--Hartley, for instance, and myself. This seems to me no common corroboration of my former thought or the origin of moral evil in general.

[Sidenote: COGITARE EST LABORARE]

A time will come when pa.s.siveness will attain the dignity of worthy activity, when men shall be as proud within themselves of having remained in a state of deep tranquil emotion, whether in reading or in hearing or in looking, as they now are in having figured away for an hour. Oh! how few can trans.m.u.te activity of mind into emotion! Yet there are as active as the stirring tempest and playful as the may-blossom in a breeze of May, who can yet for hours together remain with _hearts_ broad awake, and the _understanding_ asleep in all but its retentiveness and _receptivity_. Yea, and (in) the latter (state of mind) evince as great genius as in the former.

[Sidenote: A SHEAF OF ANECDOTES, Sunday morning, Feb. 5, 1804]

I called on Charles Lamb fully expecting him to be out, and intending all the way, to write to him. I found him at home, and while sitting and talking to him, took the pen and note-paper and began to write.

As soon as Holcroft heard that Mary Wollstonecraft was dead, he took a chaise and came with incredible speed to "have Mrs. G.o.dwin opened for a remarkable woman!"

[Sidenote: Sunday morning, Feb. 13, 1804]

Lady Beaumont told me that when she was a child, previously to her saying her prayers, she endeavoured to think of a mountain or great river, or something great, in order to raise up her soul and kindle it.

Rickman has a tale about George Dyer and his "Ode to the Hero Race."

"Your Aunt, Sir," said George to the Man of Figures, "your Aunt is a very sensible woman. Why I read Sir, my Ode to her and she said that it was a very pretty Thing. There are very few women, Sir! that possess that fine discrimination, Sir!"

The huge Organ Pipe at Exeter, larger than the largest at Haarlem, at first was dumb. Green determined to make it speak, and tried all means in vain, till at last he made a second pipe precisely alike, and placed it at its side. _Then_ it spoke.

Sir George Beaumont found great advantage in learning to draw from Nature through gauze spectacles.

At Gottingen, at Blumenbach's lectures on Psychology, when some anatomical preparations were being handed round, there came in and seated himself by us Englishmen a _Hospitator_, one, that is, who attends one or two lectures unbidden and unforbidden and gratis, as a stranger, and on a claim, as it were, of hospitality. This _Hospes_ was the uncouthest, strangest fish, pretending to human which I ever beheld.

I turned to Greenough and "Who broke his bottle?" I whispered.