Wordsworth & Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems. William Wordsworth
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though it makes all things—wealth, pleasure, ambition—worthless, yea, noisome for themselves; yet for itself can it produce all efforts, even if only to secure its name from scoffs as the child and parent of slothfulness. Works, therefore, of general profit—works of abstruse thought [will be born of love]; activity, and, above all, virtue and chastity [will come forth from his presence].
The moulting peacock, with only two of his long tail-feathers remaining, and those sadly in tatters, yet, proudly as ever, spreads out his ruined fan in the sun and breeze.
Yesterday I saw seven or eight water-wagtails following a feeding horse in the pasture, fluttering about and hopping close by his hoofs, under his belly, and even so as often to tickle his nostrils with their pert tails. The horse shortens the grass and they get the insects.
Sic accipite, sic credite, ut mereamini intelligere: fides enim debet præcedere intellectum, ut sit intellectus fidei præmium.
S. August. Sermones De Verb. Dom.
Yet should a friend think foully of that wherein the pride of thy spirit's purity is in shrine.
O the agony! the agony!
Nor Time nor varying Fate,
Nor tender Memory, old or late,
Nor all his Virtues, great though they be,
Nor all his Genius can free
His friend's soul from the agony!
[So receive, so believe [divine ideas] that ye may earn the right to understand them. For faith should go before understanding, in order that understanding may be the reward of faith.]
Ὁτε ενθουσιασμος επινευσιν τινα θειαν ἑχειν δοκει και τω μαντικω γενει πλησιαζειν. Strabo Geographicus.
Though Genius, like the fire on the altar, can only be kindled from heaven, yet it will perish unless supplied with appropriate fuel to feed it; or if it meet not with the virtues whose society alone can reconcile it to earth, it will return whence it came, or, at least, lie hid as beneath embers, till some sudden and awakening gust of regenerating Grace, αναζωπυρει, rekindles and reveals it anew.
[Now the inspiration of genius seems to bear the stamp of Divine assent, and to attain to something of prophetic strain.]
FALLINGS FROM US, VANISHINGS
I trust you are very happy in your domestic being—very; because, alas! I know that to a man of sensibility and more emphatically if he be a literary man, there is no medium between that and "the secret pang that eats away the heart." ... Hence, even in dreams of sleep, the soul never is, because it either cannot or dare not be any one thing, but lives in approaches touched by the outgoing pre-existent ghosts of many feelings. It feels for ever as a blind man with his protruded staff dimly through the medium of the instrument by which it pushes off, and in the act of repulsion—(O for the eloquence of Shakspere, who alone could feel and yet know how to embody those conceptions with as curious a felicity as the thoughts are subtle!)—as if the finger which I saw with eyes, had, as it were, another finger, invisible, touching me with a ghostly touch, even while I feared the real touch from it. What if, in certain cases, touch acted by itself, co-present with vision, yet not coalescing? Then I should see the finger as at a distance, and yet feel a finger touching which was nothing but it, and yet was not it. The two senses cannot co-exist without a sense of causation. The touch must be the effect of that finger [which] I see, and yet it is not yet near to me, and therefore it is not it, and yet it is it. Why it is is in an imaginary pre-duplication!
N.B.—There is a passage in the second part of Wallenstein expressing, not explaining, the same feeling. "The spirits of great events stride on before the events"—it is in one of the last two or three scenes:—
"As the sun,
Ere it is risen, sometimes paints its image
In the atmosphere, so often do the spirits
Of great events, stride on before the events."
[Wallenstein, Part II., act v. sc. 1. P. W., 1893, p. 351.]
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CLERICAL ERRORS
It is worth noting and endeavouring to detect the Law of the Mind, by which, in writing earnestly while we are thinking, we omit words necessary to the sense. It will be found, I guess, that we seldom omit the material word, but generally the word by which the mind expresses its modification of the verbum materiale. Thus, in the preceding page, 7th line, medium is the materiale: that was its own brute, inert sense—but the no is the mind's action, its use of the word.
I think this a hint of some value. Thus, the is a word in constant combination with the passive or material words; but to is an act of the mind, and I had written the detect instead of to detect. Again, when my sense demanded "the" to express a distinct modification of some verbum materiale, I remember to have often omitted it in writing. The principle is evident—the mind borrows the materia from without, and is passive with regard to it as the mere subject "stoff"—a simple event of memory takes place; but having the other in itself, the inward Having with its sense of security passes for the outward Having—or is all memory an anxious act, and thereby suspended by vivid security? or are both reasons the same? or if not, are they consistent, and capable of being co-or sub-ordinated? It will be lucky if some day, after having written on for two or three sheets rapidly and as a first copy, without correcting, I should by chance glance on this note, not having thought at all about it during or before the time of writing; and then to examine every word omitted.
BIBLIOLOGICAL MEMORANDA
To spend half-an-hour in Cuthill's shop, examining Stephen's Thesaurus, in order to form an accurate idea of its utilities above Scapula, and to examine the Budæo-Tusan-Constantine, whether it be the same or as good as Constantine, and the comparative merits of Constantine with Scapula.
3. To examine Bosc relatively to Brunck, and to see after the new German Anthologia.
4. Before I quit town, to buy Appendix (either No. 1430 or 1431), 8s. or 18s. What a difference! ten shillings, because the latter, the Parma Anacreon, is on large paper, green morocco; the former is neat in red morocco, but the type the same.
5. To have a long morning's ramble with De Quincey, first to Egerton's, and then to the book haunts.
6. To see if I can find that Arrian with Epictetus which I admired so much at Mr. Leckie's.
7. To find out D'Orville's Daphnis, and the price. Is there no other edition? no cheap German?
8. To write out the passage from Strada's Prolusions at Cuthill's.
9. Aristotle's Works, and to hunt for Proclus.
10. In case of my speedy death, it would answer to buy a £100 worth of carefully-chosen books, in order to attract attention to my library and to give accession to the value of books by their co-existing with co-appurtenants—as, for instance, Plato, Aristotle; Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus: Schoolmen, Interscholastic; Bacon, Hobbes; Locke, Berkeley; Leibnitz, Spinoza; Kant and the critical Fichte, and Wissenschaftslehre, Schelling, &c.
[The first edition of Robert Constantin's Lexicon Græco-Lat. was published at Geneva in 1564. A second ed. post correctiones G. Budæi et J. Tusani, at Basle, in 1584.]
παντα ῥει
Our mortal existence, what is it but a stoppage in the blood of life, a brief eddy from wind or concourse of currents in the ever-flowing ocean of pure Activity, who beholds pyramids, yea, Alps and Andes, giant pyramids, the work of fire that raiseth monuments, like a generous victor o'er its own conquest, the tombstones of a world destroyed! Yet these, too, float adown the sea of Time, and melt away as mountains of floating ice.
DISTINCTION IN UNION
Has every finite being (or