'TATe TaACHSRr COUUttW ;;ANTA BARBARA. CAL.ll .jos:^^ ^p Samuel Caplor CoIcrtUffc. LETTERS OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLE- RIDGE. Edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge. With i6 Portraits and other Illustrations. 2 vols. 8vo, $6.00. ANIMA POET/E. Edited by Ernest Hart- ley Coleridge. 8vo, ^2.50. HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO., Boston and New York. ANIMA POET^ FROM THE UNPUBLISHED NOTE-BOOKS OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE EDITED BY ERNEST HARTLEY COLERIDGE BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY ^ "no When shall I find time and ease to reduce my pocket- books and memorandums to an Index or Memorice Memo- randorum ? If — aye ! and alas ! — if I could see the last sheet of my Assertio Fidei Christiance, et eterni temporizantis, havmg previously beheld my elements of Discourse, Locric,' Dialectic, and Noetic, or Canon, Criterion, and Organ^on,' with the philosophic Glossary — in one printed volume,' and the Exercises in Reasoning as another — if — what then ? Why, then I would publish all that remained unused, Travels and all, under the title of Excursions Abroad and at Home, what I have seen and what I have thought, with a little of what I have felt, in the words in which I told and talked them to my pocket-books, the confidants who have not betrayed me, the friends whose silence was riot detraction, and the inmates before whom I was not ashamed to complain, to yearn, to weep, or even to pray ! To which are added marginal notes from many old books and one or two new ones, sifted through the Mogul Sieve of Duty towards my Neighbor — by 'fia-rijcre. 21 June, 1823. PREFACE Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Tay- preface lor Coleridge^ which the poet's nephew and son-in-law, Henry Nelson Coleridge, published in 1835, was a popular book from the first, and has won the approval of two generations of readers. Unlike the Biographia Literaria^ or the original and revised versions of The Friend, which never had their day at all, or the Aids to Reflection, which passed through many editions, but now seems to have delivered its message, the Table Talk is still well-known and widely read, and that not only by students of literature. The task which the editor set himself was a difficult one, but it lay within the powers of an attentive listener, jjossessed of a good memory and those rarer gifts of a refined and scholarly taste, a sound and luminous common sense. He does not attempt to reproduce Coleridge's conversa- tion or monologue or impassioned harangue, but he preserves and notes down the detached frag- ments of knowledge and wisdom which fell from time to time from the master's lips. Here are " the balmy sunny islets of the blest and the intelligible," an unvexed and harborous archi- pelago. Very sparingly, if at all, have those pithy " sentences " and weighty paragraphs been trimmed or pruned by the pious solicitude of the memorialist, but it must be borne in mind that the unities are more or less consciously observed, V PREFACE alike in tlie matter of tlie discourse and the artistic presentation to the reader. There is, in short, not merely a " mechanic " but an " organic regularity " in the composition of the work as a whole. A " myriad-minded " sage, who has seen men and cities, who has read widely and shaped his thoughts in a peculiar mould, is pouring out his stores of knowledge, the garnered fruit of a life of study and meditation, for the benefit of an apt learner, a discreet and appreciative disciple. A day comes when the marvellous lips are con- strained to an endless silence, and it becomes the duty and privilege of the beloved and hon- ored pupil to " snatch from forgetf ulness " and to hand down to posterity the great tradition of his master's eloquence. A labor of love so use- ful and so fascinating was accomplished by the gifted editor of the Table TalTc^ and it was ac- complished once for all. The compilation of a new Table Talk, if it were possible, would be a mistake and an impertinence. The present collection of hitherto unpublished aphorisms, reflections, confessions, and solilo- quies, which for want of a better name I have entitled Anima Poetce, does not in any way challenge comparison with the Tahle Talk. It is, indeed, essentially different, not only in the sources from which it has been compiled but in constitution and in aim. " Since I left you," writes Coleridge in a letter to Wordsworth of May 12, 1812, " my pocket- books have been my sole confidants." Doubt- less, in earlier and happier days, he had been eager not merely to record, but to communicate to the few who would listen or might understand vi PREFACE the ceaseless and curious workings of his ever- shaping imagination, but from youth to age note- books and pocket-books were his silent confidants, his " never- failing friends " by night and day. More than fifty of these remarkable documents are extant. The earliest of the series, which dates from 1795, and which is known as the " Gutch Memorandum Book," was purchased in 1868 by the trustees of the British Museum, and is now exhibited in the King's Library. It consists, for the most part, of fragments of prose and verse thrown off at the moment, and stored up for future use in poem or lecture or sermon. A few of these fragments were printed in the Literary Remains (4 vols., 1836-39), and others are to be found (pp. 103, 5, 6, 9 et passim^ in Herr Brandl's Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the English Romantic School. The poetical frag- ments are printed in extenso in Coleridge's Poet- ical Works (Macmillan, 1893), pp. 453-58. A few specimens of the prose fragments have been included in the first chapter of this work. One of the latest notebooks, an unfinished folio, con- tains the Autobiographic Note of 1832, portions of which were printed in Gilhnan's Life of Cole- ridge^ pp. 9-33, and a mass of unpublished mat- ter, consisting mainly of religious exercises and biblical criticism. Of the intervening collection of pocket-books, notebooks, copy-books, of all shapes, sizes, and bindings, a detailed description would be tedious and out of place. Their contents may be roughly divided into diaries of tours in Germany, the Lake District, Scotland, Sicily, and Italy ; notes for projected and accomplished works, rough vii PREFACE drafts of poems, schemes of metre and metrical experiments ; notes for lectures on Shakspere and other dramatists ; quotations from books of travel, from Greek, Latin, German, and Italian classics, with and without critical comments ; innumerable •fragments of metaphysical and theological spec- idation ; and commingled with this unassorted medley of facts and thoughts and fancies an occasional and intermitted record of jjersonal feeling, of love and friendship, of disappointment and regret, of penitence and resolve, of faith and hope in the Unseen. Hitherto, but little use has been made of this life-long accumulation of literary material. A few specimens, " Curiosities of Literature " they might have been called, were contributed by Coleridge himself to Southey's Omniana of 1812, and a further selection of some fifty fragments, gleaned from notebooks 21| and 22, and from a third unnumbered MS. book now in my pos- session, were printed by H. N. Coleridge in the first volume of the Literary Remains under the heading Omniana, 1809-1816. The Omniana of 1812 were, in many instances, re-written by Coleridge before they were included in Southey's volumes, and in the later issue, here and there, the editor has given shape and articulation to an unfinished or half-formed sentence. The earlier and later Omniana, together with the fragments which were published by Allsop in his Letters, Conversation, and Recollections of S. T. Cole- ridge, in 1836, were included by the late Thomas Ashe in his reprint of the Tahlc Talk, Bell and Co., 1884. Some fourteen or fifteen notes of singular viii PREFACE interest and beauty, which belong to the years preface 1804, 1812, 182G, 1829, etc., were printed by James GiUman in his unfinished " Life of Cole- ridge," and it is evident that he contemplated a more extended use of the notebooks in the con- struction of his second volume, or, possibly, the publication of a supplementary volume of notes or Omniana. Transcripts which were made for this purpose are extant, and have been placed at my disposal by the kindness of Mrs. Henry Watson, who inherited them from her grand- mother, Mrs. Gillman. I may add that a few quotations from diaries of tours in the Lake Country and on the Conti- nent are to be found in the footnotes appended to the two volumes of Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge which were issued in the spring of the present year. To publish the notebooks in extenso woidd be impracticable, if even after the lapse of sixty years since the death of the writer it were permissible. They are private memoranda-books and rightly and properly have been regarded as a sacred trust by their several custodians. But it is none the less certain that in disburthening himself of the ideas and imaginations which pressed upon his consciousness, in committing them to writ- ing and carefully preserving them through all his wanderings, Coleridge had no mind that they should perish utterly. The invisible pageantry of thought and passion which forever floated into his spiritual ken, the perpetual hope, the half belief that the veil of the senses would be rent in twain, and that he and not another would be the first to lay bare the mysteries of being, and to ix PREFACE solve the problem of tlie ages — of these was the breath of his soul. It was his fate to wrestle from night to morn with the Angel of the Vision, and of that unequal combat he has left, by way of warning or encouragement, a broken but an inspired and inspiring record. " Hints and first thoughts " he bade us regard the contents of his memorandum-books — " cogitabilia rather than cogitata a me, not fixed opinions," and yet acts of obedience to the apostolic command of " Try all things : hold fast that which is good " — say, rather, acts of obedience to the compulsion of his own genius to " take a pen and write in a book all the words of the vision." The aim of the present work, however imper- fectly accomplished, has been to present in a compendious shape a collection of unpublished aphorisms and sentences, and at the same time to enable the reader to form some estimate of those strange self-communings to which Coleridge de- voted so much of his intellectual energies, and by means of which he hoped to pass through the mists and shadows of words and thoughts to a steadier contemplation, to the apprehension if not the comprehension, of the mysteries of Truth and Being. The various excerpts which I have selected for publication are arranged, as far as possible, in chronological order. They begin with the beginning of Coleridge's literary career, and are carried down to the summer of 1828, when he accomj^anied Wordsworth and his daughter Dora on a six months' tour on the Continent. The series of notebooks which belong to the remaining years of his life (1828-1834) were PREFACE devoted for the most part to a commentary preface on the Old and New Testament, to theological controversy, and to metaphysical disquisition. Whatever interest they may have possessed, or still possess, ajDpeals to the student, not to the ofeneral reader. With his inveterate love of hu- morous or facetious titles, Coleridge was pleased to designate these serious and abstruse disserta- tions as " The Flycatchei's." My especial thanks are due to Amy, Lady Coleridge, who, in accordance with the known wishes of the late Lord Coleridge, has afforded me every facility for collating my own tran- scripts of the notebooks, and those which were made by my father and other members of my family, with the original MSS. now in her pos- session. I have also to thank Miss Edith Coleridge for valuable assistance in the preparation of the present work for the press. The death of my friend, Mr. James Dykes Campbell, has deprived me of aid which he alone could give. It was due to his suggestion and encourage- ment that I began to compile these pages, and only a few days before his death he promised me (it was all he could undertake) to "run through the proofs with my pencil in my hand." He has passed away multls Jlebilis, but he lived to accomplish his own work both as critic and biographer, and to leave to all who follow in his footsteps a type and example of honest work- manship and of literary excellence. Ernest Hartley Coleridge. xi ANIMA POET^ CHAPTER I. 1797-1801. Youth ! for years so many and sweet, 'T is known, that Thou and I were one. S. T. C. " We should judge of absent things by the ab- past and sent. Objects which are present are apt to pro- duce perceptions too strong to be impartially compared with those recalled only by the mem- ory." — Sir J. Stewart. True ! and O how often the very opposite is true likewise, namely, that the objects of memory are, often, so dear and vivid, that present things are injured by being compared with them, vivid from dearness! [The comment is of later date than the quota- tion.] Love, a myrtle wand, Is transformed by the love Aaron touch of jealousy into a serpent so vast as to swallow up every other stinging woe, and makes us mourn the exchangfe. Love that soothes misfortune and buoys up to virtue — the pillow of sorrows, the wings of vir- tue. Disappointed love not uncommonly causes 1 ANIMA POET^ misogyny, even as extreme thirst is supposed to be the cause of hydrophobia. Love transforms the soul into a conformity with the object loved. DUTY AND From the narrow path of virtue Pleasure ENCE^^ leads us to more flowery fields, and there Pain meets and chides our wandering. Of how many pleasures, of what lasting happiness, is Pain the parent and Woe the womb I Real pain can alone cure us of imaginary ills. We feel a thousand miseries till we are lucky enough to feel misery. Misfortunes prepare the heart for the enjoy- ment of happiness in a better state. The life of a religious benevolent man is an April day. His pains and sorrows [what are they but] the fertilizing rain ? The sunshine blends with every shower, and look ! how full and lovely it lies on yonder hill ! Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like playthings by the bedside of a child deadly sick. Human happiness, like the aloe, is a flower of slow growth. What we must do let us love to do. It is a no- ble chymistry that turns necessity into pleasure. INFANCY 1 The first smile — what kind of reason it AND IN- FANTS displays. The first smile after sickness. 2 ANBIA POET^ 2. Asleep with the polyanthus held fast in its hand, its bells di-opping over the rosy face. 3. Stretching after the stars. 4. Seen asleep by the light of glow-worms. 5. Sports of infants; their excessive activity, the means being the end. Nature, how lovely a school- mistress ! . . . Children at houses of industry. 6. Infant beholding its new-born sister. 7. Kissing itself in the looking-glass. 8. The Lapland infant seeing the sun. 9. An infant's prayer on its mother's lap. Mother directing a baby's hand. (Hartley's " love to Papa," scrawls pothooks and reads what he meant by them.) 10. The infants of kings and nobles. (" Prin- cess unkissed and foully husbanded I ") 11. The souls of infants, a vision {vide Swe- denborg). 12. Some tales of an infant. 13. SropyT/. The absurdity of the Darwinian system (instanced by) birds and alligators. 14. The wisdom and graciousness of God in the infancy of the human species, — its beauty, long continuance, etc. (Children in the wind, — hair floating, tossing, a miniature of the agitated trees below which they played. The elder whirl- ing for joy the one in petticoats, a fat baby eddy- ing half willingly, half by the force of the gust, driven backward, struggling forward, — both drunk with the pleasure, both shouting their hymn of joy.) [Letters of S. T. C, 1895, i. 408.] 15. Poor William seeking his mother, in love with her picture, and having that union of beauty and filial affection that the Virgin Mary may be supposed to give. ANBIA POET^ Poetry, like schoolboys, by too frequent and severe correction, lilay be cowed into dulness ! Peculiar, not far-fetched ; natural, but not ob- vious ; delicate, not affected ; dignified, not swell- ing ; fiery, but not mad ; rich in imagery, but not loaded with it, — in short, a union of har- mony and good sense, of persjiicuity and concise- ness. Thought is the body of such an ode, en- thusiasm the soul, and imagery the drapery. Dr. Darwin's poetry is nothing but a succes- sion of landscapes or paintings. It arrests the attention too often, and so prevents the rapidity necessary to pathos. The elder languages were fitter for poetry be- cause they expressed only jjrominent ideas with clearness, the others but darkly. . . . Poetry gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood. It was so by me with Gray's " Bard " and Collins' Odes. The " Bard " once intoxicated me, and now I read it without pleasure. From this cause it is that what I call metaphysical poetry gives me so much delight. [Compare Lecture vi., 1811-12, Bell & Co., p. 70 ; and TalU Talk, Oct. 23, 1833, Bell & Co., p. 264.] coMPARi- Poetry which excites us to artificial feelings makes us callous to real ones. SONS AND CON- TRASTS The whale is followed by waves. I would glide down the rivulet of quiet life, a trout. 4 ANIMA POETiE Australls [Southey] may be compared to an ostrich. He cannot fly, but he has such other qualities that he needs it not. Mackintosh intertrudes, not introduces, his beauties. Snails of intellect who see only by their feel- ers. Pygmy minds, measuring others by their own standard, cry, What a monster, when they view a man ! Our constitution is to some like cheese, — the rotten parts they like the best. Her eyes sparkled as if they had been cut out of a diamond quarry in some Golconda of Fairy- land, and cast such meaning glances as would have vitrified the flint in a murderer's blunder- buss. [A task] as difficult as to separate two dew- drops blended together on a bosom of a new- blown rose. I discovered unprovoked malice in his hard heart, like a huge toad in the centre of a marble rock. Men anxious for this world are like owls that wake all night to catch mice. At Genoa the word Liberty is engraved on 6 VISIBLE AND IN- VISIBLE ANIMA POET^ the chains of the galley slaves and the doors of prisons. Gratitude, worse than witchcraft, conjures up the pale, meagre ghosts of dead forgotten kind- nesses to haimt and trouble [his memory]. The sot, rolling on his sofa, stretching and yawning, exclaimed, " Utinam hoc esset laho- rare.''^ Truth still more than Justice [is] blind, and needs Wisdom for her guide. OF THINGS [A proof of] the severity of the winter, — the kingfisher [by] its slow, short flight permitting you to observe all its colors, almost as if it had been a flower. Little daisy, — very late spring, March. Quid si -vavat ? Do all things in faith. Never i^luch ajloioer again! Mem. May 20, The nigfhtingales in a cluster or little wood of 1799 & C3 _ _ blossomed trees, and a bat wheeling incessantly round and round ! The noise of the frogs was not unpleasant, like the humming of spinning wheels in a large manufactory, — now and then a distinct sound, sometimes like a duck, and sometimes like the shrill notes of sea-fowl. [This note was written one day later than S. T. C.'s last letter from Germany, May 19, 1799.] O Heavens ! when I think how perishable 6 ANIMA POET.E things, how imperishable thoughts seem to be ! For what is forgetfuhiess ? lienew the state of affection or bodily feeling [so as to be the] same or similar, sometimes dimly similar, and, in- stantly, the trains of forgotten thoughts rise from their living catacombs ! Few moments in life are so interesting as those [Sock- of our affectionate reception from a stranger who tober,' 1799 is the dear friend of your dear friend ! How often you have been the subject of conversation, and how affectionately ! [The note commemorates his first introduction to Mary and Sarah Hutchinson.] The immovableness of all things through which Friday so many men were moving, — a harsh contrast Nov.'":,' compared with the universal motion, the har- ^^^ monious system of motions in the country, and everywhere in Nature. In the dim light Lon- don appeared to be a huge place of sepulchres through which hosts of spirits were gliding. Eidicule the rage for quotations by quoting from " My Lady's Handkerchief." Analyze the causes that the ludicrous weakens memory, and laughter, mechanically, makes it difficult to re- member a good story. Sara sent twice for the measure of George's ^ neck. He wondered that Sara should be such a fool, as she might have measured William's or Coleridge's, — as " all poets' throttles were of one size." ^ Presumably George Dyer. 7 ANIMA POET^ Hazlitt, the painter, told me that a picture never looked so well as when the pallet was by the side of it. Association, with the glow of production. Mr. J. Cairns, in the Gentleman^ s Diary for 1800, supposes that the Nazarites, who, under the law of Moses, had their heads [shaved], must have used some sort of wigs ! Slanting pillars of misty light moved along under the sun hid by clouds. Leaves of trees upturned by the stirring wind in twilight, — an image of paleness, wan affright. A child scolding a flower in the words in which he had been himself scolded and whipped, is poetry, — passion past with pleasure. July 20, Poor fellow at a distance, — idle ? in this hay- time when wages are so high ? [We] come near [and] then [see that he is] pale, can scarce speak or throw out his fishing-rod. [This incident is fully described by Words- worth in the last of the four poems on " Naming of Places." — Poetical TFo/■^•s of W. Words- worth, 1889, p. 144.] September The beards of thistle and dandelions flying ' about the lonely mountains like life, — and I saw them through the trees skimming the lake like swallows. [" And, in our vacant mood, Not seldom did we stop to watch some tuft 8 ANIMA POET^ Of dandeHon seed or thistle's beard, That skimmed the surface of the dead calm lake, Suddenly halting now — a lifeless stand ! And starting off again with freak as sudden ; In all its sportive wanderings, all the while, Making report of an invisible breeze That was its wings, its chariot, and its horse, Its playmate, rather say, its moving soul." lUd., p. 143.] Luther, — a hero, fettered, indeed, with preju- dices, — but with those very fetters he would knock out the brains of a modern fort esprit. Comment. Frightening by his prejudices, as a spirit does by clanking his chains. Not only words, as far as relates to speaking, but the knowledge of words as distinct compo- nent parts, which we learn by learning to read, — what an immense effect it must have on our reasoning faculties ! Logical in opposition to real. Children, in making new words, always do it 1797-1801 analogously. Explain this. Hot-headed men confuse, your cool-headed gentry jumble. The man of warm feelings only produces order and true connection. In what a jmnble M. and H. write, every third paragraph beginning with " Let us now return," or " We come now to the consideration of such a thing " — that is, what / said I woidd come to in the contents prefixed to the chapter. Dec. 19 The thin scattered rain-clouds were scudding isoo ANIMA POET^ along the sky ; above them, with a visible inter- space, the crescent moon hung, and partook not of the motion ; her own hazy light filled up the concave, as if it had been painted and the colors had run. " He to whom all things are one, who draweth all things to one, and seeth all things in one, may enjoy true peace of mind and rest of spirit." — Jekome Taylor's Via Pads. To each reproach that thunders from without may remorse groan an echo. A prison without ransom, anguish without patience, a sick-bed in the house of contempt. To think of a thing is different from to per- ceive it, as " to walk " is from to " feel the ground under you ; " perhaps in the same way too, — namely, a succession of perceptions accom- panied by a sense of nisus and purpose. Space, is it merely another word for the per- ception of a capability of additional magnitude, or does this very perception presuppose the idea of space? The latter is Kant's opinion. A babe who had never known greater cruelty than that of being snatched away by its mother for half a moment from the breast in order to be kissed. To attempt to subordinate the idea of time to that of likeness. 10 ANIMA POETyE Every man asks how ? This power to instruct is the true substratum of philosophy. " Godwin's philosophy is contained in these words : Rationem defectus esse defectum ratio- nis." HOBBES. Hartley, just able to speak a few words, making a fireplace of stones, with stones for fire, — four stones for the fireplace, two for the fire, — seems to illustrate a theory of language, the use of ar- bitrary symbols in imagination. Hartley walked remarkably soon and, therefore, learnt to talk re- markably late. Anti-optimism ! Praise be our Maker, and to the honor of human nature is it, that we may truly call this an inhuman opinion. Man strives after good. Materialists unwilling to admit the mysterious element of our nature make it all mysterious — nothing mysterious in nerves, eyes, etc., but that nerves think, etc. ! Stir up the sediment into the transparent water, and so make all opaque. As we recede from anthropomorphism we must 1797-I80i go either to the Trinity or Pantheism. The Fa- thers who were Unitarians were antlu^opomor- phites. Empirics are boastful and egotists because egotism they introduce real or apparent novelty, which isoi^^'^^' excites great opposition [while] personal opposi- tion creates re-action (which is of course a con- 11 ANIMA POETiE sciousness of power) associated with the person re-acting. Paracelsus was a boaster, it is true ; so were the French Jacobins, and Wolff, though not a boaster, was persecuted into a habit of ego- tism in his philosophical writings ; so Dr. John Brown, and Milton in his prose works ; and those, in similar circumstances, who, from pru- dence, abstain from egotism in their writings are still egotists among their friends. It would be unnatural effort not to be so, and egotism in such cases is by no means offensive to a kind and dis- cerning man. Some flatter themselves that they abhor ego- tism, and do not suffer it to appear jjrijna facie, either in their writings or conversation, how- ever much and however personally they or their opinions have been opposed. What now ? Ob- serve, watch those men ; their habits of feeling and thinking are made up of contemj^t, which is the concentrated vinegar of egotism, — it is Icet'i- tia mixta cwn odio, a notion of the weakness of another conjoined with a notion of our own com- parative strength, though that weakness is still strong enough to be troublesome to us, though not formidable. " And the deep power of Joy We see into the Life of Things." By deep feeling we make our ideas dim, and tliis is what we mean by our life, ourselves. I think of the wall. It is before me a distinct image. Here I necessarily think of the idea and the thinking / as two distinct and opposite things. Now let me think of myself, of the thinking being. The idea becomes dim, whatever it be — 12 ANIMA POET^ SO dim tliat I know not wliat it is ; but the feel- ing is deep and steady, and this I call / — iden- tifying the percipient and the perceived. " O Thou ! whose fancies from afar are brought." Hartley, looking out of my study window, March 17, fixed his eyes steadily and for some time on the Tuesday opposite prospect and said, " Will yon mountains always be ? " I showed him the w^hol^ magnifi- cent prospect in a looking-glass, and held it up, so that the whole was like a canopy or ceiling over his head, and \& struggled to express him- self concerning the difference between the thing and the image almost with convidsive effort. I never before saw such an abstract of thinlcing as a pirre act and energy, — of thinking as distin- guished from thought. BRUNO Monday, April, 1801, and Tuesday, read two giordano works of Giordano Bruno, '^dth one title-page Jordani Brunt Nolani de 3Io7iade, Numero et Figura liber consequens. Qulnque de Minimo^ Magno et Men&ura. Item. De Innvmerahili- bus Immenso, et Infigiirahili sen de Universo et Mundis libri octo. Francofurti, Apud Joan. Wechelum et Petriim Fischerum consortes, 1591. Then follows the dedication, then the index of contents of the whole volume, at the end of which index is a Latin ode, conceived with great dignity and grandeur of thought. Then the work De Monade^ Numero et Figura secretloris nemjie Physiccc, Mathematical et 3Tetaphysicai elc- menta commences, which, as well as the eight 13 ANIMA POETiE books De Innumerabili,, etc., is a poem in Latin hexameters, divided (each book) into chapters, and to each chapter is affixed a prose commen- tary. If the five books de lllnimo^ etc., to which this book is consequent, are of the same 1797-1801 character, I lost nothing" in not having it. As to the work De Monade, it was far too nmnerical, lineal, and Pythagorean for my compensation. It read very much like Thomas Taylor and Pro- clus, etc. I by no means think it certain that there is no meaning in these works. Nor do I presmne even to suppose that the meaning is of no value (till I understand a man's ignorance I presume myself ignorant of his understanding), but it is for others, at present, not for me. Sir -J P. Sidney and Fulk Greville shut the doors at their philosophical conferences with Bruno. If his conversation resembled this book, I shoidd have thought he would have talked with a trum- pet. The poems and commentaries in the De Im- menso et Innimiembili are of a different charac- ter. The commentary is a very sublime enuncia- tion of the dignity of the human soul, according to the principles of Plato. [Here follows the passage, " Anima Sa^nens . . . ubique totus,^^ quoted in T/ie Friend (^Coleridge s WorTcs^ ii. 109), together with a brief resume of Bruno's other works. See, too, BiograpJda Diteraria, chapter ix. (^Coleridge's Works, iii. 249).] OBSEKVA- The spring with the little tiny cone of loose REFLEc- sand ever rising and sinking at the bottom, but its surface without a wrinkle. 14 ANIMA POET^ Nortliern lights remarkably fine — chiefly a Monday, ,11 • 1 . • • 1 IP September purple-olue — in shooting pyramids, moved irom 14^ lyoi over Bassenthwaite behind Skiddaw. Derwent's birthday, one year old. Observed the great half moon setting behind September • • .15 1801 the mountain ridge, and watched the shapes its ' various segments presented as it slowly sunk — first the foot of a boot, all but the heel — then a little pyramid A — then a star of the first mag- nitude, indeed, it was not distinguishable from the evening star at its largest — then rapidly a smaller, a small, a very small star — and, as it diminished in size, so it grew paler in tint. And now where is it ? Unseen — but a little fleecy cloud hangs above the mountain ridge, and is rich in amber light. I do not wish you to act from those truths. No ! still and always act from your feelings ; but only meditfite often on these truths, that sometime or other they may become your feelings. The state should be to the religions under its protection as a well-drawn picture, equally eye- ing all in the room. Quaere, whether or no too great definiteness of terms in any language may not consume too much of the vital and idea-creating force in dis- tinct, clear, full-made images, and so prevent originality. For original might be distinguished from positive thought. The thing that causes i7istability in a particu- 15 ANIMA POET^ lar state, of itself causes stability. For instance, wet soap slips off tlie ledge — detain it till it dries a little, and it sticks. Is there anything in the idea that citizens are fonder of good eating and rustics of strong drink — the one from the rarity of all such things, the other from the uniformity of his life ? October On the Greta, over the bridge by Mr. Ed- 19, 1801 mundson's father-in-law, the ashes — their leaves of that light yellow which autumn gives them — 1797-1801 cast a reflection on the river like a painter's sun- shine. October My birthday. The snow fell on Skiddaw and Grysdale Pike for the first time. [A life-long mistake. He was born October 21, 1772.] Tuesday All the mountains black and tremendously |^pas°i,' obscure, except Swinside. At this time I saw, 22^*1801 °^® after the other, nearly in the same place, two perfect moon-rainbows, the one foot in the field below my garden, the other in the field nearest but two to the church. It was gray-moonlight- mist-color. Friday morning, Mary Hutchinson arrives. The art of a great man, and of evidently su- perior faculties, to be often ohlirjed to people, often his inferiors — in this way the enthusiasm of affection may be excited. Pity where we can help and our kelp is accepted with gratitude, conjoined with admiration, breeds an enthusiastic 16 ANIMA POETyE affection. The same pity conjoined with admira- tion, where neither our help is accepted nor effi- cient, breeds dyspathy and fear. Nota bene to make a detailed comparison, in the manner of Jeremy Taylor, between the searching for the first cause of a thing and the seeking the fountains of the Nile — so many streams, each with its particular fountain — and, at last, it all comes to a name. The sold a mummy embalmed by Hope in the catacombs. To write a series of love poems truly Sapphic, save that they shall have a large interfusion of moral sentiment and calm imagery — love in all the moods of mind, philosophic, fantastic — in moods of high enthusiasm, of simple feeling, of mysticism, of religion — comprise in it all the practice and all the philosophy of love ! 'O fivpioyovi — hyperbole from Naucratius' pan- egyric of Theodorus Chersites. Shaksi^ere, item, 6 TToWoarbs xat iroXveiSr]'; ry TroLKiXocrTpocfxo crocfiia. 6 /u,€yaXo(;6pcovoTaTOS Trj<; aXyjOetas Krjpv$. — LORD Bacon. [Compare Blogirrphia Literaria^ cap. xv., " our myriad-minded Shakspere," and footnote. *AvT/p fjivpLovov^, a phrase which I have borrowed from a Greek monk, who applies it to a Patriarch of Constantinople. I might have said that I have reclaimed rather than borrowed it ; for it seems to belong to Shakspere, de jure singularly et ex privilegio naturce. Coleridge's Worhs^ iii. 375.] 17 CHAPTER n. 1802-1803 1802-180S. 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 No one can leap over his own shadow, but poets leap over death. AND FAXCIES 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 unmovable. No impatience will quicken the loiterer ; no terror, no delight, rein in the flyer ; and no regret set in motion the station- ary. "VYouldst be happy, take the delayer for thy counsellor ; do not choose the flyer for thy friend, nor the ever-remainer for thine enemy. Vastum, incultum, solitudo mera, et incrinitis- sima nuditas. {^Crinitus^ covered with hair, is to be found in Cicero, nuditas in Quintilian, but incrinitis- sima 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. 18 ANIMA POET^ Dimness of vision, mist, etc., magnify the pow- ers 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 ex- quisite torture. What, then, is sympathy if the feelings be not disclosed ? An inward reverber- ation 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 sub- ject of uncommon interest and intellectual en- ergy. 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 disap- pointed, gives the passion to friendship. Hartley, at Mr. Clarkson's, sent for a candle. October, 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 sopietimes pretty, and these turn ugly, and they seem when 19 ANIMA POET^ 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, judg- ment with imagination and taste, good sense with strong feeling, etc. If it be false, as assuredly it is, the opinion has deprived us of a test which every man might apply. [Hence] Locke's opin- ions of Blackmore, Hume's of Milton and Shak- spere. October 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 num- berless 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, ' Prhmis ves- trum non sum, neque imtis.^ I am none of the best, I am none of the meanest of you." — Burton. " Et pour moi, le bonheur n'a commence que lorsque je I'ai en perdu. Je mettrais volontiers sur la porte du Paradis le vers que le Dante a mis sur celle de I'Enfer, * Lasciate ogiii speranza voi ch' entrate.' " 20 ANIMA POET^ "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 lihenesses ; among men, too often by differences. Hence the soothing, love-kindling effect of rural nature — the bad passions of human societies. And why is differ- ence linked with hatred ? Regular post — its influence on the general tran- literature of the country ; turns two thirds of the nation into writers. faper^' SCRIPTS FROM MY POCKET- BOOKS Socinianism, moonlight; methodism, a stove, O for some sun to unite heat and light ! I intend to examine minutely the nature, Nov. 25, cause, birth, and growth of the verbal imagina- tion, in the possession of which Barrow excels almost every other writer of prose. Remember the pear-trees in the lovely vale of Sunday, Teme. Every season Nature converts me fi-om 19^''^'" ^^ 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 dcanj) 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. 21 ANIMA POET^ 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. Eepose 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 nisiis 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, To fall asleep. Is not a real event in the 1 SOS «/ X body well represented by this phrase ? Is it in excess when on first drojyping asleep we fall down precipices, or sink down, all things sinking beneath us, or drop down ? Is there not a dis- 22 ANIMA POET^ ease 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 distem- pered sleep," in the sonnet, " No more my vi- sionary soul shall dwell," attributed by Southey to Fa veil. — Life and Correspondence of R. Southey, i. 224.] [He] drew out the secrets from men's hearts, a treach- as the Egyptian enchanters by particular strains kxave of music draw out serpents from their lurking- places. The rocks and stones put on a vital resem- country blance, and life itself seemed, thereby, to forego town its restlessness, to anticijsate in its own nature an infinite repose, and to become, as it were, compatible with immovability. Bright reflections, in the canal, of the blue and green vitriol bottles in the druggists' shojjs in London. A curious, and more than curious, fact, that when the country does not benefit, it dejiraves. Hence the violent, vindictive passions and the outrageous and dark and wild cruelties of very many country io\k. [On the other hand] the continual sight of human faces and human houses, as in China, emasculates [and de- ni^lit, " He who cannot wait for his reward has, in i803 23 ANIMA POETyE 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 lis- tened 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 wdiich 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 Eivers Greta and Otter. [Letters of S. T. C, 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 sj)ot of light travel slowly and sadly along the mountain's breast, when all beside has been dark with the storm. A PRINCI- PLE OF CRITICISM WORDS- WORTH AND THE PRELUDE Never to lose an opportunity of reasoning against the head-dimming, heart-damping prin- ciple of judging a work by its defects, not its beauties. Every work must have the former, — we know it a jyviori^ — but every work has not the latter, and he, therefore, who discovers them, tells you something that you could not with cer- tainty, or even with probability, have anticipated. I am sincerely glad that he has bidden fare- well to all small poems, and is devoting himself to his great work, grandly imprisoning, while it deifies, his attention and feelings within the 24 ANIMA POETiE sacred circle and temple-walls of great objects and elevated conceptions. In those little poems, Lis own corrections coming of necessity so often — at tlie 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. Without drawing, I feel myself but half in- the in- vested with language. Music, too, is wanting to cable me. But yet, though one should unite poetr}', draftsman's skill, and music, the greater and, perhaps, nobler — certainly all the subtler — parts of one's nature must be solitary. IVIan ex- ists herein to himself and to God alone — yea ! in how much only to God ! how much lies helow his own consciousness ! The tree or seaweed 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. 25 ANIMA POET^ TIME AN Nothing affects me much at tlie moment it OF GKiEF 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 though 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 On St. Herbert's Island, I saw a large spider SPIDER with most beautiful legs, floating in the air on his back by a single thread which he was spin- ning 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 COM- One excellent use of communication of sorrow BLE ' 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 ob- scure feelings. Perhaps, at certain moments, a 26 ANIMA POET^ single, almost insignificant sorrow may, by asso- ciation, bring together all the little relicts of pain and discomfort, bodily and mental, that we have endured even from infancy. One may best judge of men by their pleasures, noscitub Who has not known men who have passed the ^ ^^^"^ day in honorable toil with honor and ability, and at night sought the vilest jsleasure 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 in- stant action as an automatic trick) ; but a man's pleasures — children, books, friends, nature, the Muse — O, these deceive not. Even among good and sensible men, how com- tempera- mon it is that one attaches himself scrupulously to jIokals^^ the rigid performance of some minor virtue, or l]!^*o^^^' makes a point of carrying some virtue into all its minutiae, and is just as lax in a similar point, jprofessedly lax. What this is depends, seem- ingly, 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 mo- tives — in short, whenever his only motives are the amusement, the momentary pleasure given, etc., a medley of good nature, diseased proneness to sympathy, and a habit of heing 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 liimseK to utter, nay, publish, the harshest censure of men as moralists and as literati, and that, too, on his simple ij)se dixit, without assigning any reason, 27 ANIMA POET^E and often without having any, save that he him- self 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 col- lation 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 J r A drizzling rain. Heavy masses of shapeless vapor upon the mountains (O the perpetual forms of Borrowdale !), yet it is no unbroken tale of dull sadness. Slanting piUars travel across the lake at long intervals, the vaporous mass whitens in large stains of light — on the lake- ward ridge of that huge armchair 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 colors — 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 colors seem to be colors upon a ground, not colored things. Little wool-packs of white bright vapor 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 ai'e singing in the tender rain, as if it wei*e the rain of April, and the decaying foliage were flowers and blos- soms. 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 28 ANIMA POET.E of Borrowclale consubstantiates with the mist and cloud, even as the pillar'd smoke — a shade 1 deeper and a determinate form. -^ A most unpleasant dispute with Wordsworth teleo- and Hazlitt. I spoke, I fear, too contemptuously ; but they spoke so irreverently, so malignantly of ^'".^ LOGY AND 5 XATUKK JRSHIP t'RUTEsT the Divine Wisdom that it overset me. Hazlitt, October how easily raised to rage and hatred seli-pro- jected ! but who shall find the force that can drag him out of the depths into one expression of kindness, into the showing of one gleam of the light of love on his countenance. Peace be M'ith him I 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 hecoming a pedant your- self in a bad cause — even by that very act be- coming one. But, surel}^ always to look at tlie\ 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 grandeurV and unity of the imagination. O dearest Wil- liam! would Ray or Durham have spoken of God as you spoke of Nature ? Hazlitt to the feelings of anger and hatred, w, li. 29 ANIMA POETyE 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 oRi- I sate for my picture [to Hazlitt] — heard EVIL from Southey the " Institution of the Jesuits," OotoW '^' - a u- have their influence on me, and [so, too, has the ^^^^^ association with] good and sensible men. I feel a pleasure upon me, and I am, to the outward view, cheerful, and have myself no distinct con- sciousness of the contrary, for I use my facul- ties, not, indeed, at once, but freely. But, oh ! I am never happy, never deeply gladdened. I know not — I have forgotten — what the jot/ is of which the heart is full, as of a deep and quiet fountain overflowing insensibly, or the gladness of joy when the fountain overflows ebullient. The most common appearance in wintry wea- ther is that of the sun under a sharp, defined level line of a stormy cloud, that stretches one third or one half round the circle of the horizon, thrice the height of the space that intervenes between it and the horizon, which last is about half again as broad as the sun. [At length] out comes the sim, a mass of brassy light, him- self lost and diffused in his [own] strong splen- dor. Compare this with the beautiful summer set of colors without cloud. Even in the most tranquil dreams, one is much less a mere spectator [than in reveries or day-dreams]. One seems always about to do, [to be] suffering, or thinking, or talking. I do 71 ANIMA POET^ not recollect [in dreams] that state of feeling, so common wlien awake, of thinking on one subject and looking at another ; or [of looking] at a whole prospect, till at last, perhaps, or by inter- vals, at least, you only look passively at the prospect. MCLTUM At Dresden there is a cherry-stone engraved with eighty-five portraits. Christ and the Twelve Apostles form one group, the table and supper all drawn by the letters of the text — at once portraits and language. This is a universal particular language — Koman Catholic language with a vengeance. The beautifully white sails of the Mediterra- nean, so carefully, when in port, put up into clean bags; and the interesting circumstance of the Speronara's sailing without a compass — by an obscure sense of time. THROUGH So far from deeming it, in a religious point FAITH ^^ of view, criminal to spread doubts of God, im- mortality, and virtue (that 3=1) in the minds of individuals, I seem to see in it a duty — lest men by taking the ivords for granted never attain the feeling of the tvue faith. They only forbear, that is, even to suspect that the idea is errone- ous or the communicators deceivers, but do not believe the idea itself. Whereas to doubt has more of faith, nay even to disbelieve, than that blank negation of all such thoughts and feelings which is the lot of the herd of church-and-meet- ing-trotters. 72 ANIMA POETiE The Holy Ghost, say the harmonists, left an apoi,- all the solecisms, Hebraisms, and low Judaic cottlk prejudices as evidences of the credibility of the Apostles. So, too, the Theopneusty left Cottle his Bristolisms, not to take away the credit from him and give it to the Muses. His fine mind met vice and vicious thoughts for the by accident only, as a poet running through j^ aL'"'" terminations in the heat of composing a rhyme ^^^^^ " poem on the purest and best subjects, startles and half vexedly turns away from a foul or im- pure word. The gracious promises and sweetnesses and aids of religion are alarming and distressful to a trifling, light, fluttering gay child of fashion and vanity, as its threats and reproaches and warn- ings, — as a little bird which fears as much when you come to give it food as when you come with a desire to kill or imprison it. That is a striking legend of Caracciolo and his floating corse, that came to ask the King of Naples' pardon. Final causes answer to why ? not to how ? and whoever supposed that they did ? O those crinlded, ever-varying circles which the moonlight makes in the not calm, yet not wavy sea ! Quarantine, Malta, Saturday, Nov. 10, 1804. Hard to express that sense of the analogy or 73 ANIMA POET^ THE CREA- likeness of a things which enables a symbol to TIVE . ° 1.1 ri 1- 'IP POWER OF represent it so that we think of the thing itself, yet knowing that the thing is not present to us. AND IMAGES Surely on this universal fact of words and images depends, by more or less mediations, the imita- tion, instead of the cop]/ which is illustrated, in very nature Shaksperianlzed — that Proteus essence that could assume the very form, but yet known and felt not to be the thing by that difference of the substance which made every atom of the form another thing, that likeness not identity — an exact web, every line of direction miraculously the same, but the one worsted, the other silk. SHAK- Rival editors have recourse to necromancy to ^^D^^ know from Shakspere himself who of them is MALONE |.|jg fittest to edit and illustrate him. Describe the meeting, the ceremonies of conjuration, the appearance of the spirit, the effect on the rival invokers. When they have resumed courage, the arbiter appointed by them asks the question. They listen, — Malone leaps up while the rest lay their heads at the same instant that the arbiter reechoes the words of the spirit, " Let Malone ! " The spirit shudders, then exclaims in the dread and angry utterance of the dead, " No ! no ! Let me alone, I said, inexorable boobies ! " O that eternal bricker-up of Sljakspere ! Registers, memorandum-books — and that Bill, Jack, and Harry ; Tom, Walter, and Gregory ; Charles, Dick, and Jim, lived at that house, but that nothing more is known of them. But, oh ! the importance when half a dozen players'-bills 74 ANIMA POET.E can be made to stretch through half a hundred or more of pages, though there is not one word in them that by any force can be made either to illustrate the times or life or writings of Shak- spere, or, indeed, of any time. And yet, no edition but this gentleman's name hurs upon it — hurglossa with a vengeance. Like the genitive plural of a Greek adjective, it is Malone, Malone, Malone, MaXdv, MaAwr, MaAwv. [Edmund Malone's Variorum edition of Shakspere was published in 1790.] It is a remark that I have made many times, of the and many times, I guess, shall repeat, that women kess of are infinitely fonder of clinging to and beating j)°'^g^u ^ about, hanging upon and keeping up, and reluc- n. I'^'O* tantly letting fall any doleful or painful or un- pleasant subject, than men of the same class and rank. A young man newly arrived in the West ne qvvd Indies, who happened to be sitting next to a certain Captain Reignia, observed by way of introducing a conversation, "It is, a very fine day, sir ! " " Yes, sir," was the abrupt rejjly, " and be damned to it ; it is never otherwise in this damned rascally climate." I addressed a butterfly on a pea-blossom thus : we ask " Beautiful Psyche, soul of a blossom, that art Whence, visiting and hovering o'er thy foi'mer friends ^^.^ ^^'"^^^ whom thou hast left ! " Had I forgot the cater- whither pillar? or did I dream like a mad metaphysician that the caterpillar's hunger for jjlants was self- 75 ANIMA POETiE love, recollection, and a lust that in its next state refined itself into love ? Dec. 12, 1804. COROL- LARY Different means to the same end seem to con- stitute analogy. Seeing and touching are anal- ogous senses with respect to magnitude, figure, etc. ; they would, and to a certain extent do, supply each other's place. The air-vessels of fish and of insects are analogous to lungs — the end the same, however different the means. No one would say,^ " Lungs are analogous to lungs," and it seems to me either inaccurate or involving some true conception obscurely, when we speak of planets by analogy of ours — for here, know- ing nothing but likeness, we presume the differ- ence from the remoteness and difficulty, in the vulgar apprehension, of considering those pin- points as worlds. So, likewise, instead of the phrase " analogy of the past," applied to histori- cal reasoning, nine times out of ten I should say, " by the example of the past." This may appear verbal trifling, but " animadverte quam sit ah improprietate verhorum pronum hominibus pro- hib'i in errores circa resy In short, analogy always implies a difference in kind and not merely in degree. There is an analogy between dimness and numbness, and a certain state of the sense of hearing correspondent to these, which produces confusion with magniJicatio7i, for which we have no name. But between light green and dark green, between a mole and a lynceus, there is a gradation, no analogy. Between beasts and men, when the same actions are performed by both, are the means analogous or different only in degree ? That is 76 ANIMA POETJE the question ! The sameness of the end and the equal fitness of the means prove no identity of means. I can only read, but understand no arithmetic. Yet, by Napier's tables or the Housekeepers' Almanack., I may even arrive at the conclusion quicker than a tolerably expert mathematician. Yet, still, reading and reckon- ing are utterly different things. In Reimarus on The Instincts of Animals, thomas Tom Wedgwood's gromid-principle of the influx wood and of memory on perception is fully and beautifully detailed. [" Observations Moral and Philosophical on the Instinct of Animals, their Industry and their Manners," by Herman Samuel Keimarus, was published in 1770. See Biograplda Literaria, chaj^ter vi., and note, by Mrs. H. N. Coleridge, in the Appendix, Coleridge's Works, Harper & Brothers, iii. 225, 717.] KKIMARUS It is often said that books are companions, "in'c illa They are so, dear, very dear companions. But nIlia I often, when I read a book that delights me on the whole, feel a pang that the author is not present, that I cannot object to him this and that, express my sympathy and gratitude for this jiart, and mention some facts that self-evidently overset a second, start a doubt about a third, or confirm and carry [on] a fourth thought. At times I become restless, for my nature is very social. "Well" (says Lady Ball), "the Catholic oorrit- Ti<) <*i'Ti ^' religion is better than none." Why, to be i-kssima sure, it is called a religion, but the question is, 77 ANIMA POET.E Is it a religion ? Sugar of lead ! — better than no sugar ! Put oil of vitriol into my salad — well, better than no oil at all ! Or a fellow vends a poison under the name of James' powders — well, we must get the best we can — better that than none ! So did not our noble ancestors reason or feel, or we should now be slaves and even as the Sicilians are at this day, or worse, for even they liave been made less foolish, in spite of themselves, by others' wisdom. KEiMARus I have read with wonder and delight that "in. passage of Reimarus in which he speaks of the of'anI- immense multitude of plants, and the curious, MALs" regular choice of different hei"bivorous animals with respect to them, and the following pages in which he treats of the pairing of insects and the equally wonderful processes of egg-laying and so forth. All in motion ! the sea-fish to the shores and rivers — the land crab to the sea- shore! I would fain describe all the creation thus agitated by the one or other of the three instincts, — self-preservation, childing, and child- preservation. Set this by Darwin's theory of the maternal instinct — O mercy ! the blindness of the man ! and it is imagination, forsooth ! that misled him — too much poetry in his philoso- phy ! this abject deadness of all that sense of the obscure and indefinite, this superstitious fetich-worship of lazy or fascinated fancy! O this, indeed, deserves to be dwelt on. Think of all this as an absolute revelation, a real presence of Deity, and compare it with his- torical traditionary religion. There are two reve- 78 ANIMA POET^ lations, — the material and the moral, — and the former is not to be seen but by the latter. As St. Paul has so well observed : " By worldly wis- dom no man ever arrived at God ; " but having seen Him by the moral sense, then we under- stand the outward world. Even as with books, no book of itself teaches a language in the first instance ; but having by sympathy of soid learnt it, we then understand the book — that is, the Deus minor in His work. The hirschhafer (stag-beetle) in its worm state makes its bed-chamber, prior to its meta- morphosis, half as long as itself. Why ? There was a stiff horn turned imder its belly, which in the fly state must project and harden, and this required exactly that length. The sea-snail creeps out of its house, which, thus hollowed, lifts him aloft, and is his boat and cork jacket ; the Nautilus, additionally, spreads a thin skin as a saiL All creatures obey the great game-laws of Nature, and fish with nets of such meshes as per- mit many to escape, and preclude the taking of many. So two races are saved, the one by tak- ing part, and the other by part not being taken. Wonderful, perplexing divisibility of life ! It entomo- is related by D. Unzer, an authority wholly to be veksus relied on, that an ohricurm (earwig) cut in half <^^t«logt ate its own hinder part ! Will it be the reverse with Great Britain and America ? The head of the rattlesnake severed from the body bit it and 79 ANIMA POETiE squirted out its poison, as its related by Beverly in liis History of Virginia. Lyonnet, in his In- sect. Tlieol., tells us that he tore a wasp in half, and three days after the fore half bit whatever was presented to it of its former food, and the hind half darted out its sting at being touched. Stranger still, a turtle has been known to live six months with his head off, and to wander about, yea, six hours after its heart and intestines (all but the lungs) were taken out ! How shall we think of this compatibility with the monad soul? If I say. What has spirit to do with space ? what odd dreams it would suggest ! — or is every animal a republic in se f or is there one Breeze of Life, " at once the soid of each, and God of all " ? Is it not strictly analogous to generation, and no more contrary to unity than it ? But IT ? Ay ! there 's the twist in the logic. Is not the reproduction of the lizard a complete generation ? O, it is easy to dream — and, surely, better — of these things than of a X20,000 prize in the lottery, or of a place at Court. Dec. 13, 1804. FOR THE To trace the if not absolute birth, yet the IN AB^"^^ growth and endurancy, of language from the sENCE " mother talking to the child at her breast — O what a subject for some hapj)y moment of deep feeling and strong imagination ! Of the Quintetta in the Syracuse opera and the pleasure of the voices, — one and not one ; they leave, seek, pursue, oppose, fight with, strengthen, annihilate each other ; awake, en- liven, soothe, flatter, and embrace each other 80 ANIMA POET^ again, till at length they die away in one tone. There is no sweeter image of wayward yet fond lovers, of seeking and finding, of the love-quar- rel and the making-up, of the losing and the yearning regret, of the doubtful, the complete recognition, and of the total melting union. Words are not interpreters, but fellow-combat- ants. Title for a Medical Romance : — The adventures, rivalry, warfare, and final union and partnership of Dr. Hocus and Dr. Pocus. Idly talk they who speak of poets as mere indulgers of fancy, imagination, superstition, etc. They are the bridlers by delight, the purifi- ers ; they that combine all these with reason and order — the true j)rotoplasts — Gods of Love who tame the chaos. To deduce instincts from obscure recollections of a preexisting state — I have often thought of it. " Ey ! " I have said, when I have seen cer- tain tempers and actions in Hartley, " that is I in my future state." So I think, oftentimes, that my children are my soul ; that multitude and division are not [O mystery I] necessarily subversive of unity. I am sure that two very different meanings, if not more, lurk in the word One. The drollest explanation of Instinct Is that of Myllus, who attributes every act to pain, and all the wonderful webs and envelopes of spiders, 81 ANIMA POET^ caterpillars, etc., absolutely to fits of colic or paroxysms of dry belly-aclie ! This tarantula-dance of repetitions and verti- ginous argumentation iyi circulo, begun in im- posture and self -consummated in madness ! While the whole planet (jqiioad its Lord or, at least, Lord-Lieutenancy) is in stir and bustle, why should not I keep in time with the tune, and, like old Diogenes, roll my tub about ? I cannot too often remember that to be deeply interested and to be highly satisfied are not always commensurate. Ajjply this to the affect- ing and yet unnatural passages of the Stranger or of John Bull, and to the finest passages in Shakspere, such as the death of Cleopatra or Hamlet. A SUN-DOG Saw the limb of a rainbow, footing itself on 18^' ' the sea at a small apparent distance from the shore, a thing of itself — no substrate cloud or even mist visible — but the distance glimmered through it as through a thin semi-transparent hoop. SQUARE, THE CIR- CLE, THE PYRAMID THE To be and to act, two in intellect (that mother of orderly multitude, and half sister of Wisdom and Madness), but one in essence := to rest, and to move = D and a O • and out of the infinite combinations of these, from the more and the less, now of one, now of the other, all pleasing figures, and the sources of all pleasure arise. But the pyramid, that base of steadfastness that 82 ANIMA POETiE rises, yet never deserts itself nor can, approaches to the O- Sunday. Midnight. Malta. De- cember 16, 1804. I can make out no other affinity [in the pyra- the mid] to the circle but by taking its evanescence as the central point, and so, having thus gained a melting of the radii in the circumference [by proceeding to], looh it into the object. Extrava- gance ! Why ? Does not every one do this in looking at any conspicuous three stars together? does not every one see by the inner vision a tri- angle ? However, this is in art ; but the protot}"pe in nature is, indeed, loveliness. In Nature there are no straight lines, or [such straight lines as there are] have the soul of curves, from activity and positive raj^id energy. Or, whether the line seem curve or straight, yet Acre, in nature, is motion, — motion in its most significant form. It is motion in that form which has been chosen to express motion in general, hierogljqjhical from preeminence [and by this very preeminence, in the particular instance, made significant of mo- tion in its totality]. Hence, though it chance that a line in nature should be perfectly straight, there is no need here of any curve whose effect is that of embleming motion and counteracting actual solidity by that emblem. For here the line [in contradistinction to the line in art] is actual motion, and therefore a balancing FUjiirite of rest and solidity. But I will study the wood- fire this evening in the Palace. I see now that the eye refuses to decide whether it be surface or convexity, for the 83 PYRAMID IN Aur ANIMA POET^ Wednes- exquisite oneness of the flame makes even its n o'clock, angles so different from the angles of tangible Dec. 19 substances. Its exceeding oneness added to its very subsistence in motion is the very soul of the loveliest curve — it does not need its body, as it were. Its sharpest point is, however, rounded, and, besides, it is cased within its own . penumbra. FOR THE How beautiful a circumstance, the improve- iN AB- ment of the flower, from the root up to that Fridsf " crown of its life and labors, that bridal chamber morning, of its beauty and its twofold love, the nuptial 8 o'clock and the parental — the womb, the cradle, and the nursery of the garden ! Qulsque sui faher — a pretty simile this would make to a young lady producing beauty by moral feeling. Nature may be personified as the Tvo\vii.y]^avo