The Complete Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Illustrated Edition). Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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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 only some) the temptation to become intensely and wholly conscious of its distinctness and, as a result, to be betrayed into the wretchedness of division? Grosser natures, wholly swallowed up in selfishness which does not rise to self-love, never even acquire that sense of distinctness, while, to others, love is the first step to re-union. It is a by-word that religious enthusiasm borders on and tends to sensuality—possibly because all our powers work together, and as a consequence of striding too vastly up the ladder of existence, a great round of the ladder is omitted, namely, love to some, Eine verschiedene, of our own kind. Then let Religion love, else will it not only partake of, instead of being partaken by, and so co-adunated with, the summit of love, but will necessarily include the nadir of love, that is, appetite. Hence will it tend to dissensualise its nature into fantastic passions, the idolatry of Paphian priestesses.
IN WONDER ALL PHILOSOPHY BEGAN
Time, space, duration, action, active passion passive, activeness, passiveness, reaction, causation, affinity—here assemble all the mysteries known. All is known-unknown, say, rather, merely known. All is unintelligible, and yet Locke and the stupid adorers of that fetish earth-clod take all for granted. By the bye, in poetry as well as metaphysics, that which we first meet with in the dawn of our mind becomes ever after fetish, to the many at least. Blessed he who first sees the morning star, if not the sun, or purpling clouds his harbingers. Thence is fame desirable to a great man, and thence subversion of vulgar fetishes becomes a duty.
Rest, motion! O ye strange locks of intricate simplicity, who shall find the key? He shall throw wide open the portals of the palace of sensuous or symbolical truth, and the Holy of Holies will be found in the adyta. Rest = enjoyment and death. Motion = enjoyment and life. O the depth of the proverb, "Extremes meet"!
IN A TWINKLING OF THE EYE
The "break of the morning"—and from inaction a nation starts up into motion and wide fellow-consciousness! The trumpet of the Archangel—and a world with all its troops and companies of generations starts up into a hundredfold expansion, power multiplied into itself cubically by the number of all its possible acts—all the potential springing into power. Conceive a bliss from self-conscience, combining with bliss from increase of action; the first dreaming, the latter dead-asleep in a grain of gunpowder—conceive a huge magazine of gunpowder and a flash of lightning awakes the whole at once. What an image of the resurrection, grand from its very inadequacy. Yet again, conceive the living, moving ocean—its bed sinks away from under and the whole world of waters falls in at once on a thousand times vaster mass of intensest fire, and the whole prior orbit of the planet's successive revolutions is possessed by it at once (Potentia fit actus) amid the thunder of rapture.
SINE QUÂ NON
Form is factitious being, and thinking is the process; imagination the laboratory in which the thought elaborates essence into existence. A philosopher, that is, a nominal philosopher without imagination, is a coiner. Vanity, the froth of the molten mass, is his stuff, and verbiage the stamp and impression. This is but a deaf metaphor—better say that he is guilty of forgery. He presents the same sort of paper as the honest barterer, but when you carry it to the bank it is found to be drawn to Outis, Esq. His words had deposited no forms there, payable at sight—or even at any imaginable time from the date of the draft.
SOLVITUR SUSPICIENDO
The sky, or rather say, the æther at Malta, with the sun apparently suspended in it, the eye seeming to pierce beyond and, as it were, behind it—and, below, the æthereal sea, so blue, so ein zerflossenes, the substantial image, and fixed real reflection of the sky! O! I could annihilate in a deep moment all possibility of the needle-point, pin's-head system of the atomists by one submissive gaze!
A GEM OF MORNING
A dewdrop, the pearl of Aurora, is indeed a true unio. I would that unio were the word for the dewdrop, and the pearl be called unio marinus.
VER, ZER, AND AL
O for the power to persuade all the writers of Great Britain to adopt the ver, zer, and al of the German! Why not verboil, zerboil; verrend, zerrend? I should like the very words verflossen, zerflossen, to be naturalised:
And as I looked now feels my soul creative throes,
And now all joy, all sense zerflows.
I do not know, whether I am in earnest or in sport while I recommend this ver and zer; that is, I cannot be sure whether I feel, myself, anything ridiculous in the idea, or whether the feeling that seems to imply this be not the effect of my anticipation of and sympathy with the ridicule of, perhaps, all my readers.
THE LOVER'S HUMILITY
To you there are many like me, yet to me there is none like you, and you are always like yourself. There are groves of night-flowers, yet the night-flower sees only the moon.
CHAPTER VI
1808-1809
Yea, oft alone,
Piercing the long-neglected holy cave
The haunt obscure of old Philosophy,
He bade with lifted torch its starry walls
Sparkle, as erst they sparkled to the flame
Of odorous lamps tended by Saint and Sage.
S. T. C.
INOPEM ME COPIA FECIT
If one thought leads to another, so often does it blot out another. This I find when having lain musing on my sofa, a number of interesting thoughts having suggested themselves, I conquer my bodily indolence, and rise to record them in these books, alas! my only confidants. The first thought leads me on indeed to new ones; but nothing but the faint memory of having had these remains of the other, which had been even more interesting to me. I do not know whether this be an idiosyncrasy, a peculiar disease, of my particular memory—but so it is with me—my thoughts crowd each other to death.
A NEUTRAL PRONOUN
Quære—whether we may not, nay ought not, to use a neutral pronoun relative, or representative, to the word "Person," where it hath been used in the sense of homo, mensch, or noun of the common gender, in order to avoid particularising man or woman, or in order to express either sex indifferently? If this be incorrect in syntax, the whole use of the word Person is lost in a number of instances, or only retained by some stiff and strange position of words, as—"not letting the person be aware, wherein offence has been given"—instead of—"wherein he or she has offended." In my [judgment] both the specific intention and general etymon of "Person" in such sentences, fully authorise