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"In a half sleep, he dreams of better worlds,

And dreaming hears thee still, O singing lark,

That singest like an angel in the clouds!"

S. T. C.

THOUGHTS AND FANCIES

No one can leap over his own shadow, but poets leap over death.

The old world begins a new year. That is ours, but this is from God.

We may think of time as threefold. Slowly comes the Future, swift the Present passes by, but the Past is unmoveable. No impatience will quicken the loiterer, no terror, no delight rein in the flyer, and no regret set in motion the stationary. Wouldst be happy, take the delayer for thy counsellor; do not choose the flyer for thy friend, nor the ever-remainer for thine enemy.

LIMBO

Vastum, incultum, solitudo mera, et incrinitissima nuditas.

[Crinitus, covered with hair, is to be found in Cicero, nuditas in Quintilian, but incrinitissima is, probably, Coleridgian Latinity.]

[An old man gloating over his past vices may be compared to the] devil at the very end of hell, warming himself at the reflection of the fire in the ice.

Dimness of vision, mist, &c., magnify the powers of sight, numbness adds to those of touch. A numb limb seems twice its real size.

Take away from sounds the sense of outness, and what a horrible disease would every minute become! A drive over a pavement would be exquisite torture. What, then, is sympathy if the feelings be not disclosed? An inward reverberation of the stifled cry of distress.

Metaphysics make all one's thoughts equally corrosive on the body, by inducing a habit of making momently and common thought the subject of uncommon interest and intellectual energy.

A kind-hearted man who is obliged to give a refusal or the like which will inflict great pain, finds a relief in doing it roughly and fiercely. Explain this and use it in Christabel.

The unspeakable comfort to a good man's mind, nay, even to a criminal, to be understood—to have some one that understands one—and who does not feel that, on earth, no one does? The hope of this, always more or less disappointed, gives the passion to friendship.

October,1802

Hartley, at Mr. Clarkson's, sent for a candle. The seems made him miserable. "What do you mean, my love?" "The seems, the seems. What seems to be and is not, men and faces, and I do not [know] what, ugly, and sometimes pretty, and these turn ugly, and they seem when my eyes are open and worse when they are shut—and the candle cures the seems."

Great injury has resulted from the supposed incompatibility of one talent with another, judgment with imagination and taste, good sense with strong feeling, &c. If it be false, as assuredly it is, the opinion has deprived us of a test which every man might apply. [Hence] Locke's opinions of Blackmore, Hume's of Milton and Shakspere.

October 25, 1802

I began to look through Swift's works. First volume, containing "Tale of a Tub," wanting. Second volume—the sermon on the Trinity, rank Socinianism, purus putus Socinianism, while the author rails against the Socinians for monsters.

The first sight of green fields with the numberless nodding gold cups, and the winding river with alders on its banks, affected me, coming out of a city confinement, with the sweetness and power of a sudden strain of music.

Mem. to end my preface with "in short, speaking to the poets of the age, 'Primus vestrûm non sum, neque imus.' I am none of the best, I am none of the meanest of you."—Burton.

"Et pour moi, le bonheur n'a commencé que lorsque je l'ai eu perdu. Je mettrais volontiers sur la porte du Paradis le vers que le Dante a mis sur celle de l'Enfer.

'Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch' entrate.'"

Were I Achilles, I would have had my leg cut off, and have got rid of my vulnerable heel.

In natural objects we feel ourselves, or think of ourselves, only by likenesses—among men, too often by differences. Hence the soothing, love-kindling effect of rural nature—the bad passions of human societies. And why is difference linked with hatred?

TRANSCRIPTS FROM MY VELVET-PAPER POCKET-BOOKS

Regular post—its influence on the general literature of the country; turns two-thirds of the nation into writers.

Socinianism, moonlight; methodism, a stove. O for some sun to unite heat and light!

Nov. 25, 1802

I intend to examine minutely the nature, cause, birth and growth of the verbal imagination, in the possession of which Barrow excels almost every other writer of prose.

Sunday, December 19

Remember the pear trees in the lovely vale of Teme. Every season Nature converts me from some unloving heresy, and will make a Catholic of me at last.

A fine and apposite quotation, or a good story, so far from promoting, are wont to damp the easy commerce of sensible chit-chat.

We imagine ourselves discoverers, and that we have struck a light, when, in reality, at most, we have but snuffed a candle.

A thief in the candle, consuming in a blaze the tallow belonging to the wick which has sunk out of sight, is an apt simile for a plagiarist from a dead author.

An author with a new play which has been hissed off the stage is not unlike a boy who has launched on a pond a ship of his own making, and tries to prove to his schoolfellows that it ought to have sailed.

Repose after agitation is like the pool under a waterfall, which the waterfall has made.

Something inherently mean in action! Even the creation of the universe disturbs my idea of the Almighty's greatness—would do so but that I perceive that thought with Him creates.

The great federal republic of the universe.

T. Wedgwood's objection to my "Things and Thoughts," because "thought always implies an act or nisus of mind" is not well founded. A thought and thoughts are quite different words from Thought, as a fancy from Fancy, a work from Work, a life from Life, a force and forces from Force, a feeling, a writing [from Feelings, Writings.]

May 10, 1803

To fall asleep. Is not a real event in the body well represented by this phrase? Is it in excess when on first dropping asleep we fall down precipices, or sink down, all things sinking beneath us, or drop down? Is there not a disease from deficiency of this critical sensation when people imagine that they have been awake all night, and actually lie dreaming, expecting and wishing for the critical sensation?

[Compare the phrase, "precipices of distempered sleep," in the sonnet, "No more my visionary soul shall dwell," attributed by Southey to Favell.—Life and Corresp. of R. Southey, i. 224.]

A TREACHEROUS KNAVE

[He] drew out the secrets from men's hearts as the Egyptian enchanters by particular strains of music draw out serpents from their lurking-places.

COUNTRY AND TOWN

The rocks and stones put on a vital resemblance and life itself seemed, thereby, to forego its restlessness, to anticipate in its own nature an infinite repose, and to become, as it were, compatible with immoveability.

Bright reflections, in the canal, of the blue and green vitriol bottles in the druggists' shops in London.

A curious, and more than curious, fact, that when the country does not benefit, it depraves. Hence the violent, vindictive passions and the outrageous and dark and wild cruelties of very many country folk. [On the other hand] the continual sight of human faces and human houses, as in China, emasculates [and degrades.]

Monday night, June 8, 1803

"He who cannot wait for his reward has, in reality, not earned it." These words I uttered in a dream, in which a lecture I was giving—a very profound one, as I thought—was not listened to, but I was quizzed.

Tuesday night, July 19, 1803

Intensely hot day; left off a waistcoat and for yarn wore silk stockings. Before nine o'clock, had unpleasant chillness; heard a noise which I thought Derwent's in sleep, listened, and found it was a calf bellowing. Instantly came on my mind that night I slept out at Ottery, and the calf in the field across the river whose lowing so deeply impressed me. Chill + child and calf-lowing—probably the Rivers Greta and Otter. [Letters of S.T.C., 1895, i. 14, note.]

October, 1803

A smile, as foreign or alien to, as detached from the gloom of the countenance, as I have seen a small spot of light travel slowly and sadly along the mountain's breast, when all beside has been dark with the storm.

A PRINCIPLE OF CRITICISM.

Never to lose an opportunity of reasoning against the head-dimming, heart-damping principle of judging a work by its defects, not its beauties. Every work must have the former—we know it a priori—but every work has not the latter, and he, therefore, who discovers them, tells you something that you could not with certainty, or even with probability, have anticipated.

WORDSWORTH AND THE PRELUDE

I am sincerely glad that he has bidden farewell to all small poems, and is devoting himself to his great work, grandly imprisoning, while it deifies, his attention and feelings within the sacred circle and temple-walls of great objects and elevated conceptions. In those little poems, his own corrections coming of necessity so often—at the end of every fourteen or twenty lines, or whatever the poem might chance to be—wore him out; difference of opinion with his best friends irritated him, and he wrote, at times, too much with a sectarian spirit, in a sort of bravado. But now he is at the helm of a noble bark; now he sails right onward; it is all open ocean and a steady breeze, and he drives before it, unfretted by short tacks, reefing and unreefing the sails, hauling and disentangling the ropes. His only disease is the having been out of his element; his return to it is food to famine; it is both the specific remedy and the condition of health.

THE INCOMMUNICABLE

Without drawing, I feel myself but half invested with language. Music, too, is wanting to me. But yet, though one should unite poetry, draftsman's skill, and music, the greater and, perhaps, nobler, certainly all the subtler, parts of one's nature must be solitary. Man exists herein to himself and to God alone—yea! in how much only to God! how much lies below his own consciousness!

The tree or sea-weed like appearance of the side of the mountain, all white with snow, made by little bits of snow loosened. Introduce this and the stones leaping rabbit-like down on my sopha of sods. [Vide p. 60.]

The sunny mist, the luminous gloom of Plato.

TIME AN ELEMENT OF GRIEF

Nothing affects me much at the moment it happens. It either stupefies me, and I, perhaps, look at a merry-make and dance-the-hay of flies, or listen entirely to the loud click of the great clock, or I am simply indifferent, not without some sense of philosophical self-complacency. For a thing at the moment is but a thing of the moment; it must be taken up into the mind, diffuse itself through the whole multitude of shapes and thoughts, not one of which it leaves untinged, between [not one of] which and it some new thought is not engendered. Now this is a work of time, but the body feels it quicker with me.

THE POET AND THE SPIDER

On St. Herbert's Island, I saw a large spider with most beautiful legs, floating in the air on his back by a single thread which he was spinning out, and still, as he spun, heaving on the air, as if the air beneath was a pavement elastic to his strokes. From the top of a very high tree he had spun his line; at length reached the bottom, tied his thread round a piece of grass, and reascended to spin another—a net to hang, as a fisherman's sea-net hangs, in the sun and wind to dry.

THE COMMUNICABLE

One excellent use of communication of sorrow to a friend is this, that in relating what ails us, we ourselves first know exactly what the real grief is, and see it for itself in its own form and limits. Unspoken grief is a misty medley of which the real affliction only plays the first fiddle, blows the horn to a scattered mob of obscure feelings. Perhaps, at certain moments, a single, almost insignificant sorrow may, by association, bring together all the little relicts of pain and discomfort, bodily and mental, that we have endured even from infancy.

NOSCITUR A SOCIIS

One may best judge of men by their pleasures. Who has not known men who have passed the day in honourable toil with honour and ability, and at night sought the vilest pleasure in the vilest society? This is the man's self. The other is a trick learnt by heart (for we may even learn the power of extemporaneous elocution and instant action as an automatic trick); but a man's pleasures—children, books, friends, nature, the Muse—O these deceive not.

TEMPERAMENT AND MORALS October, 1803

Even among good and sensible men, how common it is that one attaches himself scrupulously to the rigid performance of some minor virtue or makes a point of carrying some virtue into all its minutiæ, and is just as lax in a similar point, professedly lax. What this is depends, seemingly, on temperament. A makes no conscience of a little flattery in cases where he is certain that he is not acting from base or interested motives—in short, whenever his only motives are the amusement, the momentary pleasure given, &c., a medley of good nature, diseased proneness to sympathy, and a habit of being wiser behind the curtain than his own actions before it. B would die rather than deviate from truth and sincerity in this instance, but permits himself to utter, nay, publish the harshest censure of men as moralists and as literati, and that, too, on his simple ipse dixit, without assigning any reason, and often without having any, save that he himself believes it—believes it because he dislikes the man, and dislikes him probably for his looks, or, at best, for some one fault without any collation of the sum total of the man's qualities. Yet A and B are both good men, as the world goes. They do not act from conscious self-love, and are amenable to principles in their own minds.

BRIGHT OCTOBER October 21, 1803, Friday morning

A drizzling rain. Heavy masses of shapeless vapour upon the mountains (O the perpetual forms of Borrowdale!) yet it is no unbroken tale of dull sadness. Slanting pillars travel across the lake at long intervals, the vaporous mass whitens in large stains of light—on the lakeward ridge of that huge arm-chair of Lodore fell a gleam of softest light, that brought out the rich hues of the late autumn. The woody Castle Crag between me and Lodore is a rich flower-garden of colours—the brightest yellows with the deepest crimsons and the infinite shades of brown and green, the infinite diversity of which blends the whole, so that the brighter colours seem to be colours upon a ground, not coloured things. Little woolpacks of white bright vapour rest on different summits and declivities. The vale is narrowed by the mist and cloud, yet through the wall of mist you can see into a bower of sunny light, in Borrowdale; the birds are singing in the tender rain, as if it were the rain of April, and the decaying foliage were flowers and blossoms. The pillar of smoke from the chimney rises up in the mist, and is just distinguishable from it, and the mountain forms in the gorge of Borrowdale consubstantiate with the mist and cloud, even as the pillar'd smoke—a shade deeper and a determinate form.

TELEOLOGY AND NATURE WORSHIP A PROTEST October 26, 1803

A most unpleasant dispute with Wordsworth and Hazlitt. I spoke, I fear, too contemptuously; but they spoke so irreverently, so malignantly of the Divine Wisdom that it overset me. Hazlitt, how easily raised to rage and hatred self-projected! but who shall find the force that can drag him up out of the depth into one expression of kindness, into the showing of one gleam of the light of love on his countenance. Peace be with him! But thou, dearest Wordsworth—and what if Ray, Durham, Paley have carried the observation of the aptitude of things too far, too habitually into pedantry? O how many worse pedantries! how few so harmless, with so much efficient good! Dear William, pardon pedantry in others, and avoid it in yourself, instead of scoffing and reviling at pedantry in good men and a good cause and becoming a pedant yourself in a bad cause—even by that very act becoming one. But, surely, always to look at the superficies of objects for the purpose of taking delight in their beauty, and sympathy with their real or imagined life, is as deleterious to the health and manhood of intellect as, always to be peering and unravelling contrivance may be to the simplicity of the affection and the grandeur and unity of the imagination. O dearest William! would Ray or Durham have spoken of God as you spoke of Nature?

W. H.

Hazlitt to the feelings of anger and hatred, phosphorus—it is but to open the cork and it flames—but to love and serviceable friendship, let them, like Nebuchadnezzar, heat the furnace with a sevenfold heat, this triune, Shadrach, Meshach, Abed-nego, will shiver in the midst of it.

THE ORIGIN OF EVIL Thursday October 27, 1803

I sate for my picture [to Hazlitt]—heard from Southey the "Institution of the Jesuits," during which some interesting idea occurred to me, and has escaped. I made out, however, the whole business of the origin of evil satisfactorily to my own mind, and forced H. to confess that the metaphysical argument reduced itself to this, Why did not infinite Power always exclusively produce such beings as in each moment of their duration were infinite? why, in short, did not the Almighty create an absolutely infinite number of Almighties? The hollowness and impiety of the argument will be felt by considering that, suppose a universal happiness, a perfection of the moral as well as natural world, still the whole objection applies just as forcibly as at this moment. The malignity of the Deity (I shudder even at the assumption of this affrightful and Satanic language) is manifested in the creation of archangels and cherubs and the whole company of pure Intelligences burning in their unquenchable felicity, equally as in the creation of Neros and Tiberiuses, of stone and leprosy. Suppose yourself perfectly happy, yet, according to this argument, you ought to charge God with malignity for having created you—your own life and all its comforts are in the indictment against the Creator—for surely even a child would be ashamed to answer, "No! I should still exist, only in that case, instead of being a man, I should be an infinite being." As if the word I here had even the remotest semblance of a meaning. Infinitely more absurd than if I should write the fraction ¹⁄₁₀₀₀ on a slate, then rub it out with my sponge, and write in the same place the integral number 555,666,879, and then observe that the former figure was greatly improved by the measure, that it was grown a far finer figure!—conceiting a change where there had been positive substitution. Thus, then, it appears that the sole justification of those who, offended by the vice and misery of the created world, as far as we know it, impeach the power and goodness of the Almighty, making the proper cause of such vice and misery to have been a defect either of power or goodness—it appears, I say, that their sole justification rests on an argument which has nothing to do with vice and misery, as vice and misery—on an argument which would hold equally good in heaven as in hell—on an argument which it might be demonstrated no human being in a state of happiness could ever have conceived—an argument which a millennium would annihilate, and which yet would hold equally good then as now! But even in point of metaphysic the whole rests at last on the conceivable. Now, I appeal to every man's internal consciousness, if he will but sincerely and in brotherly simplicity silence the bustle of argument in his mind and the ungenial feelings that mingle with and fill up the mob, and then ask his own intellect whether, supposing he could conceive the creation of positively infinite and co-equal beings, and whether, supposing this not only possible but real, this has exhausted his notion of creatability? whether the intellect, by an unborn and original law of its essence, does not demand of infinite power more than merely infinity of number, infinity of sorts and orders? Let him have created this infinity of infinites, still there is space in the imagination for the creation of finites; but instead of these, let him again create infinites; yet still the same space is left, it is no way filled up. I feel, too, that the whole rests on a miserable sophism of applying to an Almighty Being such words as all. Why were not all Gods? But there is no all in creation. It is composed of infinites, and the imagination, bewildered by heaping infinites on infinites and wearying of demanding increase of number to a number which it conceives already infinite, deserted by images and mocked by words, whose sole substance is the inward sense of difficulty that accompanies all our notions of infinity applied to numbers—turns with delight to distinct images and clear ideas, contemplates a world, an harmonious system, where an infinity of kinds subsist each in a multitude of individuals apportionate to its kind in conformity to laws existing in the divine nature, and therefore in the nature of things. We cannot, indeed, prove this in any other way than by finding it as impossible to deny omniform, as eternal, agency to God—by finding it impossible to conceive that an omniscient Being should not have a distinct idea of finite beings, or that distinct ideas in the mind of God should be without the perfection of real existence, that is, imperfect. But this is a proof subtle indeed, yet not more so than the difficulty. The intellect that can start the one can understand the other, if his vices do not prevent him. Admit for a moment that "conceive" is equivalent to creation in the divine nature, synonymous with "to beget" (a feeling of which has given to marriage a mysterious sanctity and sacramental significance in the mind of many great and good men)—admit this, and all difficulty ceases, all tumult is hushed, all is clear and beautiful. We sit in the dark, but each by the side of his little fire, in his own group, and lo! the summit of the distant mountain is smitten with light. All night long it has dwelt there, and we look at it and know that the sun is not extinguished, that he is elsewhere bright and vivifying, that he is coming to us, to make our fires needless; yet, even now, that our cold and darkness are so called only in comparison with the heat and light of the coming day, never wholly deserted of the rays.

This I wrote on Friday morning, forty minutes past three o'clock, the sky covered with one cloud that yet lies in dark and light shades, and though one smooth cloud, by the dark colour, it appears to be steppy.

A DREAM AND A PARENTHESIS Friday morning, 5 o'clock

Dozing, dreamt of Hartley as at his christening—how, as he was asked who redeemed him, and was to say, "God the Son," he went on humming and hawing in one hum and haw (like a boy who knows a thing and will not make the effort to recollect) so as to irritate me greatly. Awakening gradually, I was able completely to detect that it was the ticking of my watch, which lay in the pen-place in my desk, on the round table close by my ear, and which, in the diseased state of my nerves, had fretted on my ears. I caught the fact while Hartley's face and moving lips were yet before my eyes, and his hum and haw and the ticking of the watch were each the other, as often happens in the passing off of sleep—that curious modification of ideas by each other which is the element of bulls. I arose instantly and wrote it down. It is now ten minutes past five.

To return to the question of evil—woe to the man to whom it is an uninteresting question, though many a mind over-wearied by it may shun it with dread. And here—N.B.—scourge with deserved and lofty scorn those critics who laugh at the discussion of old questions: God, right and wrong, necessity and arbitrement, evil, &c. No! forsooth, the question must be new, spicy hot gingerbread, from a French constitution to a balloon, change of ministry, or, Which had the best of it in the parliamentary duel, Wyndham or Sheridan? or, at the best, a chymical thing [or] whether the new celestial bodies shall be called planets or asteroids—something new [it must be], something out of themselves—for whatever is in them is deep within them—must be old as elementary nature [but] to find no contradiction in the union of old and novel—to contemplate the Ancient of Days with feelings new as if they then sprang forth at His own Fiat—this marks the mind that feels the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it. But to return to the question. The whole rests on the sophism of imaginary change in a case of positive substitution. This, I fully believe, settles the question. The assertion that there is in the essence of the divine nature a necessity of omniform harmonious action, and that order and system (not number—in itself base, disorderly and irrational) define the creative energy, determine and employ it, and that number is subservient to order, regulated, organised, made beautiful and rational, an object both of imagination and intellect by order—this is no mere assertion, it is strictly in harmony with the fact. For the world appears so, and it is proved by whatever proves the being of God. Indeed, it is involved in the idea of God.

THE AIM OF HIS METAPHYSIC

What is it that I employ my metaphysics on? To perplex our clearest notions and living moral instincts? To extinguish the light of love and of conscience, to put out the life of arbitrement, to make myself and others worthless, soulless, Godless? No, to expose the folly and the legerdemain of those who have thus abused the blessed organ of language, to support all old and venerable truths, to support, to kindle, to project, to make the reason spread light over our feelings, to make our feelings diffuse vital warmth through our reason—these are my objects and these my subjects. Is this the metaphysic that bad spirits in hell delight in?

IN THE VISIONS OF THE NIGHT Nov. 2, 1803, Wednesday morning, 20 minutes past 2 o'clock

The voice of the Greta and the cock-crowing. The voice seems to grow like a flower on or about the water beyond the bridge, while the cock-crowing is nowhere particular—it is at any place I imagine and do not distinctly see. A most remarkable sky! the moon, now waned to a perfect ostrich egg, hangs over our house almost, only so much beyond it, garden-ward, that I can see it, holding my head out of the smaller study window. The sky is covered with whitish and with dingy cloudage, thin dingiest scud close under the moon, and one side of it moving, all else moveless; but there are two great breaks of blue sky, the one stretches over our house and away toward Castlerigg, and this is speckled and blotched with white cloud; the other hangs over the road, in the line of the road, in the shape of an ellipse or shuttle, I do not know what to call it—this is unspeckled, all blue, three stars in it—more in the former break, all unmoving. The water leaden-white, even as the grey gleam of water is in latest twilight. Now while I have been writing this and gazing between-whiles (it is forty minutes past two), the break over the road is swallowed up, and the stars gone; the break over the house is narrowed into a rude circle, and on the edge of its circumference one very bright star. See! already the white mass, thinning at its edge, fights with its brilliance. See! it has bedimmed it, and now it is gone, and the moon is gone. The cock-crowing too has ceased. The Greta sounds on for ever. But I hear only the ticking of my watch in the pen-place of my writing-desk and the far lower note of the noise of the fire, perpetual, yet seeming uncertain. It is the low voice of quiet change, of destruction doing its work by little and little.

AURI SACRA FAMES

O! The impudence of those who dare hold property to be the great binder-up of the affections of the young to the old, &c., and Godwin's folly in his book! Two brothers in this country fought in the mourning coach, and stood with black eyes and their black clothes all blood over their father's grave.

EARLY DEATH November 1803

Poor Miss Dacre! born with a spinal deformity, that prophesied the early death it occasioned. Such are generally gentle and innocent beings. God seems to stamp on their foreheads the seal of death, in sign of appropriation. No evil dares approach the sacred hieroglyphic on this seal of redemption; we on earth interpret early death, but the heavenly spirits, that minister around us, read in it "Abiding innocence."

Something to me delicious in the thought that one who dies a baby presents to the glorified Saviour and Redeemer that same sweet face of infancy which He blessed when on earth, and sanctified with a kiss, and solemnly pronounced to be the type and sacrament of regeneration.

THE NIGHT SIDE OF NATURE November 9, Wednesday night, 45 min. past 6

The town, with lighted windows and noise of the clogged passengers in the streets—sound of the unseen river. Mountains scarcely perceivable except by eyes long used to them, and supported by the images of memory flowing in on the impulses of immediate impression. On the sky, black clouds; two or three dim, untwinkling stars, like full stops on damp paper, and large stains and spreads of sullen white, like a tunic of white wool seen here and there through a torn and tattered cloak of black. Whence do these stains of white proceed all over the sky, so long after sunset, and from their indifference of place in the sky, seemingly unaffected by the west?

November 10, 1/2 past 2 o'clock, morning

Awoke, after long struggles, from a persecuting dream. The tale of the dream began in two images, in two sons of a nobleman, desperately fond of shooting, brought out by the footman to resign their property, and to be made believe that they had none. They were far too cunning for that, and as they struggled and resisted their cruel wrongers, and my interest for them, I suppose, increased, I became they—the duality vanished—Boyer and Christ's Hospital became concerned; yet, still, the former story was kept up, and I was conjuring him, as he met me in the street, to have pity on a nobleman's orphan, when I was carried up to bed, and was struggling up against some unknown impediment—when a noise of one of the doors awoke me. Drizzle; the sky uncouthly marbled with white vapours and large black clouds, their surface of a fine woolly grain, but in the height and key-stone of the arch a round space of sky with dim watery stars, like a friar's crown; the seven stars in the central seen through white vapour that, entirely shapeless, gave a whiteness to the circle of the sky, but stained with exceedingly thin and subtle flakes of black vapour, might be happily said in language of Boccace (describing Demogorgon, in his Genealogia De Gli Dei) to be vestito d'una pallidezza affumicata.

Tuesday night, 1/4 after 7

The sky covered with stars, the wind up—right opposite my window, over Brandelhow, as its centre, and extending from the gorge to Whinlatter, an enormous black cloud, exactly in the shape of an egg—this, the only cloud in all the sky, impressed me with a demoniacal grandeur. O for change of weather!

Sunday morning, Nov. 13, ¹⁄₂ past 2

The sky, in upon Grysdale Pike and onward to the Withop Fells, floored with flat, smooth, dark or dingy clouds, elsewhere starry. Though seven stars and all the rest in the height of the heaven be dimmed, those in the descent bright and frosty. The river has a loud voice, self-biographer of to-day's rain and thunder-showers. The owls are silent; they have been very musical. All weathers on Saturday the twelfth, storm and frost, sunshine, lightning and what not! God be praised, though sleepless, am marvellously bettered, and I take it for granted that the barometer has risen. I have been reading Barrow's treatise "On the Pope's Supremacy," and have made a note on the L'Estrangeism of his style whenever his thoughts rendered it possible for the words to be pert, frisky and vulgar—which, luckily, could not be often, from the gravity of his subjects, the solidity and appropriateness of his thoughts, and that habitual geometrical precision of mind which demanded the most appropriate words. He seems to me below South in dignity; at least, South never sinks so low as B. sometimes.

AN OPTICAL ILLUSION

A pretty optical fact occurred this morning. As I was returning from Fletcher's, up the back lane and just in sight of the river, I saw, floating high in the air, somewhere over Mr. Banks', a noble kite. I continued gazing at it for some time, when, turning suddenly round, I saw at an equi-distance on my right, that is, over the middle of our field, a pair of kites floating about. I looked at them for some seconds, when it occurred to me that I had never before seen two kites together, and instantly the vision disappeared. It was neither more nor less than two pair of leaves, each pair on a separate stalk, on a young fruit tree that grew on the other side of the wall, not two yards from my eye. The leaves being alternate, did, when I looked at them as leaves, strikingly resemble wings, and they were the only leaves on the tree. The magnitude was given by the imagined distance, that distance by the former adjustment of the eye, which remained in consequence of the deep impression, the length of time I had been looking at the kite, the pleasure, &c., and [the fact that] a new object [had] impressed itself on the eye.

THE INWARD LIGHT

In Plotinus the system of the Quakers is most beautifully expressed in the fifth book of the Fifth Ennead (he is speaking of "the inward light"): "It is not lawful to enquire from whence it originated, for it neither approached hither, nor again departs from hence to some other place, but it either appears to us, or does not appear. So that we ought not to pursue it as if with a view of discerning its latent original, but to abide in quiet till it suddenly shines upon us, preparing ourselves for the blessed spectacle, like the eye waiting for the rising sun."

PARS ALTERA MEI

My nature requires another nature for its support, and reposes only in another from the necessary indigence of its being. Intensely similar yet not the same [must that other be]; or, may I venture to say, the same indeed, but dissimilar, as the same breath sent with the same force, the same pauses, and the same melody pre-imaged in the mind, into the flute and the clarion shall be the same soul diversely incarnate.

NOT THE BEAUTIFUL BUT THE GOOD

"ALL things desire that which is first from a necessity of nature, prophesying, as it were, that they cannot subsist without the energies of that first nature. But beauty is not first, it happens only to intellect, and creates restlessness and seeking; but good, which is present from the beginning and unceasingly to our innate appetite, abides with us even in sleep, and never seizes the mind with astonishment, and requires no peculiar reminiscence to convince us of its presence."—Plotinus.

This is just and profound, yet perfect beauty being an abstract of good, in and for that particular form excites in me no passion but that of an admiration so quiet as scarcely to admit of the name passion, but one that, participating in the same root of soul, does yet spring up with excellences that I have not. To this I am driven by a desire of self-completion with a restless and inextinguishable love. God is not all things, for in this case He would be indigent of all; but all things are God, and eternally indigent of God. And in the original meaning of the word essence as predicable of that concerning which you can say, This is he, or That is he (this or that rather than any other), in this sense of the word essence, I perfectly coincide with the Platonists and Plotinists that, if we add to the nature of God either essence or intellect or beauty, we deprive Him of being the Good himself, the only One, the purely and absolutely One.

A MOON-SET Friday, Nov. 25, 1803, morning 45 minutes past

After a night of storm and rain, the sky calm and white, by blue vapour thinning into formlessness instead of clouds, the mountains of height covered with snow, the secondary mountains black. The moon descending aslant the ∨^A, through the midst of which the great road winds, set exactly behind Whinlatter Point, marked A. She being an egg, somewhat uncouthly shaped, perhaps, but an ostrich's egg rather than any other (she is two nights more than a half-moon), she set behind the black point, fitted herself on to it like a cap of fire, then became a crescent, then a mountain of fire in the distance, then the peak itself on fire, one steady flame; then stars of the first, second and third magnitude, and vanishing, upboiled a swell of light, and in the next second the whole sky, which had been sable blue around the yellow moon, whitened and brightened for as large a space as would take the moon half an hour to descend through.

THE DEATH OF ADAM A DREAM Dec. 6, 1803

Adam travelling in his old age came to a set of the descendants of Cain, ignorant of the origin of the world, and treating him as a madman, killed him. A sort of dream which I had this night.

A MAN'S A MAN FOR ALL THAT

We ought to suspect reasoning founded wholly on the difference of man from man, not on their commonnesses, which are infinitely greater. So I doubt the wisdom of the treatment of sailors and criminals, because it is wholly grounded on their vices, as if the vices formed the whole or major part of their being.

A DEFENCE OF METAPHYSIC

Abstruse reasoning is to the inductions of common sense what reaping is to delving. But the implements with which we reap, how are they gained? by delving. Besides, what is common sense now was abstract reasoning with earlier ages.

A SUNSET

A beautiful sunset, the sun setting behind Newlands across the foot of the lake. The sky is cloudless, save that there is a cloud on Skiddaw, one on the highest mountains in Borrowdale, some on Helvellyn, and that the sun sets in a glorious cloud. These clouds are of various shapes, various colours, and belong to their mountains and have nothing to do with the sky. N.B.—There is something metallic, silver playfully and imperfectly gilt and highly polished, or, rather, something mother-of-pearlish, in the sun-gleams on ice, thin ice.

EXTREMES MEET

I have repeatedly said that I could make a volume if only I had noted down, as they occurred to my recollection, the instances of the proverb "Extremes Meet." This night, Sunday, December 11, 1803, half-past eleven, I have determined to devote the last nine pages of my pocket-book to a collection of the same.

1.

The parching air

Burns frore and cold performs the effect of fire.

Paradise Lost, ii. 594.

2. Insects by their smallness, the mammoth by its hugeness, terrible.

3. In the foam-islands in a fiercely boiling pool, at the bottom of a waterfall, there is sameness from infinite change.

4. The excess of humanity and disinterestedness in polite society, the desire not to give pain, for example, not to talk of your own diseases and misfortunes, and to introduce nothing but what will give pleasure, destroy all humanity and disinterestedness, by making it intolerable, through desuetude, to listen to the complaints of our equals, or of any, where the listening does not gratify or excite some vicious pride and sense of superiority.

5. It is difficult to say whether a perfectly unheard-of subject or a crambe bis cocta, if chosen by a man of genius, would excite in the higher degree the sense of novelty. Take, as an instance of the latter, the "Orestes" of Sotheby.

6. Dark with excess of light.

7. Self-absorption and worldly-mindedness (N.B.—The latter a most philosophical word).

8. The dim intellect sees an absolute oneness, the perfectly clear intellect knowingly perceives it. Distinction and plurality lie in the betwixt.

9. The naked savage and the gymnosophist.

10. Nothing and intensest absolute being.

11. Despotism and ochlocracy.

ABSTRUSE RESEARCH

A dirty business! "How," said I, with a great effort to conquer my laziness and a great wish to rest in the generality, "what do you include under the words 'dirty business'"? I note this in order to remember the reluctance the mind has in general to analysis.

The soul within the body—can I, any way, compare this to the reflection of the fire seen through my window on the solid wall, seeming, of course, within the solid wall, as deep within as the distance of the fire from the wall. I fear I can make nothing out of it; but why do I always hurry away from any interesting thought to do something uninteresting? As, for instance, when this thought struck me, I turned off my attention suddenly and went to look for the copy of Wolff which I had missed. Is it a cowardice of all deep feeling, even though pleasurable? or is it laziness? or is it something less obvious than either? Is it connected with my epistolary embarrassments?

["The window of my library at Keswick is opposite to the fireplace. At the coming on of evening, it was my frequent amusement to watch the image or reflection of the fire that seemed burning in the bushes or between the trees in different parts of the garden."—The Friend. Coleridge's Works, ii. 135.]

As I was sitting at the foot of my bed, reading with my face downwards, I saw a phantom of my face upon the nightcap which lay just on the middle of my pillow—it was indistinct but of bright colours, and came only as my head bent low. Was it the action of the rays of my face upon my eyes? that is, did my eyes see my face, and from the sidelong and faint action of the rays place the image in that situation? But I moved the nightcap and I lost it.

Dec. 19, 1803, morning

I have only to shut my eyes to feel how ignorant I am whence these forms and coloured forms, and colours distinguishable beyond what I can distinguish, derive their birth. These varying and infinite co-present colours, what are they? I ask, to what do they belong in my waking remembrance? and almost never receive an answer. Only I perceive and know that whatever I change, in any part of me, produces some change in these eye-spectra; as, for instance, if I press my legs or change sides.

OF STREAMY ASSOCIATION

I will at least make the attempt to explain to myself the origin of moral evil from the streamy nature of association, which thinking curbs and rudders. Do not the bad passions in dreams throw light and show of proof upon this hypothesis? If I can but explain those passions I shall gain light, I am sure. A clue! a clue! a Hecatomb à la Pythagoras, if it unlabyrinth me.

December 28, 1803, 11 o'clock

I note the beautiful luminous shadow of my pencil-point which follows it from the candle, or rather goes before it and illuminates the word I am writing. But, to resume, take in the blessedness of innocent children, the blessedness of sweet sleep, do they or do they not contradict the argument of evil from streamy associations? I hope not, but all is to be thought over and into. And what is the height and ideal of mere association? Delirium. But how far is this state produced by pain and denaturalisation? And what are these? In short, as far as I can see anything in this total mist, vice is imperfect yet existing volition, giving diseased currents of association, because it yields on all sides and yet is—so, too, think of madness!

A DOUBTFUL EXPERIMENT

December 30th, half-past one o'clock, or, rather, Saturday morning, December 31st, put rolled bits of paper, many tiny bits of wick, some tallow, and the soap together. The whole flame, equal in size to half-a-dozen candles, did not give the light of one, and the letters of the book looked by the unsteady flare just as through tears or in dizziness—every line of every letter dislocated into angles, or like the mica in crumbly stones.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MOTION

The experiment over leaf illustrates my idea of motion, namely, that it is a presence and absence rapidly alternating, so that the fits of absence exist continuously in the feeling, and the fits of presence vice versâ continuedly in the eye. Of course I am speaking of motion psychologically, not physically, what it is in us, not what the supposed mundane cause may be. I believe that what we call motion is our consciousness of motion arising from the interruption of motion, the action of the soul in suffering resistance. Free unresisted action, the going forth of the soul, life without consciousness, is, properly, infinite, that is unlimited. For whatever resists limits, and whatever is unresisted is unlimited. This, psychologically speaking, is space, while the sense of resistance or limitation is time, and motion is a synthesis of the two. The closest approach of time to space forms co-existent multitude.

RECOLLECTION AND REMEMBRANCE

There is an important distinction between the memory or reminiscent faculty of sensation which young children seem to possess in so small a degree, from their perpetual desire to have a tale repeated to them, and the memory of words and images which the very same children manifestly possess in an unusual degree, even to sealing-wax accuracy of retention and representation.

THE ETHICS OF SPINOZA

If Spinoza had left the doctrine of miracles untouched, and had not written so powerfully in support of universal toleration, his ethics would never have brought on him the charge of Atheism. His doctrine, in this respect, is truly and severely orthodox, in the reformed Church; neither do I know that the Church of Rome has authoritatively decided between the Spinosists and Scotists in their great controversy on the nature of the being which creatures possess.

A UNITARIAN SCHOOLMAN

Creation is explained by Joannes Scotus Erigena as only a manifestation of the unity of God in forms—et fit et facit, et creat et creatur. Lib. 4. p. 7.

P. 8. A curious and highly-philosophical account of the Trinity, and completely Unitarian. God is, is wise, and is living. The essence we call Father, the wisdom Son, the life the Holy Spirit. And he positively affirms that these three exist only as distinguishable relations—habitudines; and he states the whole doctrine to be an invention and condescension of Theology to the intellect of man, which must define, and consequently personify, in order to understand, and must have some phantom of understanding in order to keep alive in the heart the substantial faith. They are fuel to the sacred fire—in the empyrean it may burn without fuel, and they who do so are seraphs.

A CROWD OF THOUGHTS

A fine epitheton of man would be "Lord of fire and light." All other creatures whose existence we perceive are mere alms-receivers of both.

A company of children driving a hungry, hard-skinned ass out of a corn-field. The ass cannot by such weaklings be driven so hard but he will feed as he goes.

Such light as lovers love, when the waxing moon steals in behind a black, black cloud, emerging soon enough to make the blush visible which the long kiss had kindled.

All notions [remain] hushed in the phantasms of place and time that still escape the finest sieve and most searching winnow of our reason and abstraction.

A rosemary tree, large as a timber tree, is a sweet sign of the antiquity and antique manners of the house against which it groweth. "Rosemary" (says Parkinson, Theatrum Botanicum [London, 1640] p. 76) "is a herb of as great use with us in these days as any whatsoever, not only for physical but civil purposes—the civil uses, as all know, are at weddings, funerals, &c., to bestow on friends."

Great harm is done by bad poets in trivialising beautiful expressions and images and associating disgust and indifference with the technical forms of poetry.

Advantage of public schools. [They teach men to be] content with school praise when they publish. Apply this to Cottle and J. Jennings.

Religious slang operates better on women than on men. N.B.—Why? I will give over—it is not tanti!

Poem. Ghost of a mountain—the forms, seizing my body as I passed, became realities—I a ghost, till I had reconquered my substance.

The sopha of sods. Lack-wit and the clock find him at last in the Yorkshire cave, where the waterfall is.

[The reference is, no doubt, to Wordsworth's "Idiot Boy," which was composed at Nether Stowey, in 1798. In a letter addressed to John Wilson of June 5, 1802, Wordsworth discusses and discards the use of the word "lackwit" as an equivalent to "idiot." The "Sopha of Sods" was on Latrigg. In her journal for August, 1800, Dorothy Wordsworth records the making of a seat on Windybrow, a part of Latrigg. Possibly this was the "Sopha of Sods."—Life of W. Wordsworth, 1889, i. 268, 403.]

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.

"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.

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, πανtopical, 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.

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 assuredly be persecuted by the noseless party as adherents of the rhinocerotists or monster-nosed men, which is the case of those αρχασπισται [braves] of the English Church, called Evangelicals. Excess of Calvinism produced Arminianism, and those not in excess must therefore be Calvinists!

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.

Oct. 31, 1803 AVE PHŒBE 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 passes night, and all her favours vanish in our minds ungrateful!

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.

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.