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1811-1812

From all that meets or eye or ear,

There falls a genial holy fear,

Which, like the heavy dew of morn,

Refreshes while it bows the heart forlorn!

S. T. C.

TIME REAL AND IMAGINARY

How marked the contrast between troubled manhood, and joyously-active youth in the sense of time! To the former, time like the sun in an empty sky is never seen to move, but only to have moved. There, there it was, and now 'tis here, now distant! yet all a blank between. To the latter it is as the full moon in a fine breezy October night, driving on amid clouds of all shapes and hues, and kindling shifting colours, like an ostrich in its speed, and yet seems not to have moved at all. This I feel to be a just image of time real and time as felt, in two different states of being. The title of the poem therefore (for poem it ought to be) should be time real and time felt (in the sense of time) in active youth, or activity with hope and fullness of aim in any period, and in despondent, objectless manhood—time objective and subjective.

[The riddle is hard to read, but the underlying thought seems to be that in youth the sense of time is like the apparent motion of the moon through clouds, ever driving on, but ever seeming to stand still; whereas the sense of time in manhood is like the sun, which seems to be stationary, and yet, at short intervals, is seen to have moved. This is time felt in two different states of being. Time real is, as it were, sun or moon which move independently of our perceptions of their movements. The note (1811), no doubt, contains the germ of "Time Real and Imaginary" first published in "Sibylline Leaves" in 1817, which Coleridge in his Preface describes as a "school-boy poem," and interprets thus: "By imaginary time I meant the state of a schoolboy's mind when, on his return to school, he projects his being in his day-dreams, and lives in his next holidays, six months hence!" The explanation was probably an afterthought. "The two lovely children" who "run an endless race" may have haunted his schoolboy dreams, may perhaps have returned to the dreams of his troubled manhood, bringing with them the sense rather than the memory of youth, intermingled with a consciousness that youth was gone for ever, but the composition of the poem dates from 1811, or possibly 1815, when the preparation of the poems for the press would persuade him once more to express his thoughts in verse.]

TIME REAL AND IMAGINARY; AN ALLEGORY

On the wide level of a mountain's head,

(I knew not where, but 'twas some faery place)

Their pinions, ostrich-like, for sails outspread,

Two lovely children run an endless race,

A sister and a brother!

This far outstript the other;

Yet ever runs she with reverted face,

And looks and listens for the boy behind:

For he, alas! is blind!

O'er rough and smooth with even step he passed,

And knows not whether he be first or last.

[P. W., 1893, p. 187. See, too, Editor's Note, p. 638.]

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 circumstance 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 classification of these strange sensations, the organic material analogous (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.

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.]

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 passed 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.

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.

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.]

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 læta 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.

SELF-ABSORPTION AND SELFISHNESS

One source of calumny (I say source, because allophoby from hëautopithygmy 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 attitudes we take for anthropic.

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 scrape 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 canvassing 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.

"BUT LOVE IS INDESTRUCTIBLE"

All mere passions, like spirits and apparitions, have their hour of cock-crow, in which they must vanish. But pure love is, therefore, no mere passion; and it is a test of its being love, that no reason can be assigned why it should disappear. Shall we not always, in this life at least, remain animæ dimidiatæ?—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.

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.]

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, proneness and quickness to look into, to analyse, 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 circumstances 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, God 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.

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.

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?

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 glass 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 appetite; 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.

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.

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 association, cause and effect, &c.

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 God has chosen to reveal.

C'EST MAGNIFIQUE, MAIS CE N'EST PAS LA POÉSIE

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-glass of factitious 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.

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 passive—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.

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 asserted 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).