The Complete Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Illustrated Edition). Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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spreads light and joy and hope and certitude through all things—while a devil is a mere solution of an enigma, an assumption to silence our uneasiness. That end answered (and most easily are such ends answered), we have no further concern with it.
PSYCHOLOGY IN YOUTH AND MATURITY
The great change—that in youth and early manhood we psychologise and with enthusiasm but all out of ourselves, and so far ourselves only as we descry therein some general law. Our own self is but the diagram, the triangle which represents all triangles. Afterward we pyschologise out of others, and so far as they differ from ourselves. O how hollowly!
HAIL AND FAREWELL!
We have been for many years at a great distance from each other, but that may happen with no real breach of friendship. All intervening nature is the continuum of two good and wise men. We are now separated. You have combined arsenic with your gold, Sir Humphry! You are brittle, and I will rather dine with Duke Humphry than with you.
A GENUINE "ANECDOTE"
Sara Coleridge says, on telling me of the universal sneeze produced on the lasses while shaking my carpet, that she wishes my snuff would grow, as I sow it so plentifully!
[This points to the summer of 1810, the five months spent at Greta Hall previous to the departure south with Basil Montagu.]
SPIRITUAL RELIGION
A thing cannot be one and three at the same time! True! but time does not apply to God. He is neither one in time nor three in time, for he exists not in time at all—the Eternal!
The truly religious man, when he is not conveying his feelings and beliefs to other men, and does not need the medium of words—O! how little does he find in his religious sense either of form or of number—it is infinite! Alas! why do we all seek by instinct for a God, a supersensual, but because we feel the insufficiency, the unsubstantiality of all forms, and formal being for itself. And shall we explain a by x and then x by a—give a soul to the body, and then a body to the soul—ergo, a body to the body—feel the weakness of the weak, and call in the strengthener, and then make the very weakness the substratum of the strength? This is worse than the poor Indian! Even he does not make the tortoise support the elephant, and yet put the elephant under the tortoise!
But we are too social, we become in a sort idolaters—for the means we are obliged to use to excite notions of truth in the minds of others we by witchcraft of slothful association impose on ourselves for the truths themselves. Our intellectual bank stops payment, and we pass an act by acclamation that hereafter the paper promises shall be the gold and silver itself—and ridicule a man for a dreamer and reviver of antiquated dreams who believes that gold and silver exist. This may do as well in the market, but O! for the universal, for the man himself the difference is woeful.
TRUTH
The immense difference between being glad to find Truth it, and to find it Truth! O! I am ashamed of those who praise me! For I know that as soon as I tell them my mind on another subject, they will shrink and abhor me. For not because I enforced a truth were they pleased in the first instance, but because I had supported a favourite notion of theirs which they loved for its and their sake, and therefore would be glad to find it true—not that loving Truth they loved this opinion as one of its forms and consequences. The root! the root must be attacked!
A TIME TO CRY OUT
Among the evils that attend a conscientious author who writes in a corrupt age, is the necessity he is under of exposing himself even to plausible charges of envy, mortified vanity, and, above all, of self-conceit before those whose bad passions would make even the most improbable charges plausible.
What can he do? Tell the truth, and the whole truth plainly, and with the natural affection which it inspires, and keeping off (difficult task!) all scorn (for to suppress resentment is easy), let him trust the bread to the waters in the firm faith that wisdom shall be justified by her children. Vanity! self-conceit! What vanity, what self-conceit? What say I more than this? Ye who think and feel the same will love and esteem me by the law of sympathy, and value me according to the comparative effect I have made on your intellectual powers, in enabling you better to defend before others, or more clearly to onlook (anschauen) in yourselves the truths to which your noblest being bears witness. The rest I leave to the judgment of posterity, utterly unconcerned whether my name be attached to these opinions or (my writings forgotten) another man's.
But what can I say, when I have declared my abhorrence of the Edinburgh Review? In vain should I tell my critics that were I placed on the rack I could not remember ten lines of my own poems, and that on seeing my own name in their abuse, I regard it only as a symbol of Wordsworth and Southey, and that I am well aware that from utter disregard and oblivion of anything and all things which they can know of me by experience, my name is mentioned only because they have heard that I was Wordsworth's and Southey's friend.
HINTS FOR "THE FRIEND"
The brightest luminaries of earth give names to the dusky spots in the selenography of Helvetius.
The intrepidity of a pure conscience and a simple principle [may be] compared to a life-boat, and somewhat in the detail, stemming with a little rudder the tumbling ruins of the sea, rebounding from the rocks and shelves in fury.
Duns Scotus affirms that the certainty of faith is the greatest certainty—a dark speech which is explained and proved by the dependence of the theoretic powers on the practical. But Aristotle admits that demonstrated truths are inferior in kind of certainty to the indemonstrable out of which the former are deduced.
Faithful, confident reliance on man and on God is the last and hardest virtue! And wherefore? Because we must first have earned a FAITH in ourselves. Let the conscience pronounce: "Trust in thyself!" Let the whole heart be able to say, "I trust in myself," and those whomever we love we shall rely on, in proportion to that love.
A testy patriot might be pardoned for saying with Falstaff, when Dame Quickly told him "She came from the two parties, forsooth," "The Devil take one party and his Dam the other." John Bull has suffered more for their sake, more than even the supererogatory cullibility of his disposition is able to bear.
Lavater fixed on the simplest physiognomy in his whole congregation, and pitched his sermon to his comprehension. Narcissus either looks at or thinks of his looking glass, for the same wise purpose I presume.
Reviewers resemble often the English jury and the Italian conclave, they are incapable of eating till they have condemned or craned.
The Pope [may be compared to] an old lark, who, though he leaves off soaring and singing in the height, yet has his spurs grow longer and sharper the older he grows.
Let us not, because the foliage waves in necessary obedience to every breeze, fancy that the tree shakes also. Though the slender branch bend, one moment to the East and another to the West, its motion is circumscribed by its connection with the unyielding trunk.
A HINT FOR "CHRISTABEL"
My first cries mingled with my mother's death-groan, and she beheld the vision of glory, ere I the earthly sun. When I first looked up to Heaven consciously, it was to look up after, or for, my mother.
"ALL THOUGHTS ALL PASSIONS ALL DELIGHTS"
The two sweet silences—first in the purpling dawn of love-troth, when the heart of each ripens in the other's looks within the unburst calyx, and fear becomes so sweet that it seems but a fear of losing hope in certainty; the second, when the sun is setting in the calm eve of confident love, and [the lovers] in mute recollection enjoy each other. "I fear to speak, I fear to hear you speak, so deeply do I now enjoy your presence, so totally possess you in myself, myself in you. The very sound would break the union and separate you-me into you and me. We both, and this sweet room, its books, its furniture, and the shadows on the wall slumbering with the low, quiet fire are all our thought, one harmonious imagery of forms distinct on the still substance of one deep feeling, love and joy—a lake, or, if a stream, yet flowing so