The Complete Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Illustrated Edition). Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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superstitit aliquid. Est super stitio alicujus quod in externo, id est, in apparenti non apparet."
What is outness, external and the like, but either the generalisation of apparence or the result of a given degree, a comparative intensity of the same? "I see it in my mind's eye," exclaims Hamlet, when his thoughts were in his own purview the same phantom, yea! in a higher intensity, became his father's ghost and marched along the platform. I quoted your own exposition, and dare you with these opinions charge others with superstition? You who deny aught permanent in our being, you with whom the soul, yea, the soul of the soul, our conscience and morality, are but the tune from a fragile barrel-organ played by air and water, and whose life, therefore, must of course be a pointing to—as of a Marcellus or a Hamlet—"Tis here! 'Tis gone!" Were it possible that I could actually believe such a system, I should not be scared from striking it, from its being so majestical!
THE GREATER DAMNATION
The old law of England punishes those who dig up the bones of the dead for superstitious or magical purposes, that is, in order to injure the living. What then are they guilty of who uncover the dormitories of the departed, and throw their souls into hell, in order to cast odium on a living truth?
DARWIN'S BOTANICAL GARDEN
Darwin possesses the epidermis of poetry but not the cutis; the cortex without the liber, alburnum, lignum, or medulla. And no wonder! for the inner bark or liber, alburnum, and wood are one and the same substance, in different periods of existence.
SEVENTEEN HUNDRED AND SIXTY YARDS NOT EXACTLY A MILE
"It is a mile and a half in height." "How much is that in yards or feet?" The mind rests satisfied in producing a correspondency in its own thoughts, and in the exponents of those thoughts. This seems to be a matter purely analytic, not yet properly synthetic. It is rather an interchange of equivalent acts, but not the same acts. In the yard I am prospective; in the mile I seem to be retrospective. Come, a hundred strides more, and we shall have come a mile. This, if true, may be a subtlety, but is it necessarily a trifle? May not many common but false conclusions originate in the neglect of this distinction—in the confounding of objective and subjective logic?
OF A TOO WITTY BOOK
I like salt to my meat so well that I can scarce say grace over meat without salt. But salt to one's salt! Ay! a sparkling, dazzling, lit-up saloon or subterranean minster in a vast mine of rock-salt—what of it?—full of white pillars and aisles and altars of eye-dazzling salt. Well, what of it?—'twere an uncomfortable lodging or boarding-house—in short, all my eye. Now, I am content with a work if it be but my eye and Betty Martin, because, having never heard any charge against the author of the adage, candour obliges me to conclude that Eliza Martin is "sense for certain." In short, never was a metaphor more lucky, apt, ramescent, and fructiferous—a hundred branches, and each hung with a different graft-fruit—than salt as typical of wit—the uses of both being the same, not to nourish, but to season and preserve nourishment. Yea! even when there is plenty of good substantial meat to incorporate with, stout aitch-bone and buttock, still there may be too much; and they who confine themselves to such meals will contract a scorbutic habit of intellect (i.e., a scurvy taste), and, with loose teeth and tender gums, become incapable of chewing and digesting hard matters of mere plain thinking.
SPOOKS
It is thus that the Glanvillians reason. First, they assume the facts as objectively as if the question related to the experimentable of our senses. Secondly, they take the imaginative possibility—that is, that the [assumed] facts involve no contradiction, [as if it were] a scientific possibility. And, lastly, they [advocate] them as proofs of a spiritual world and our own immortality. This last [I hold to] be the greatest insult to conscience and the greatest incongruity with the objects of religion.
N.B.—It is amusing, in all ghost stories, etc., that the recorders are "the farthest in the world from being credulous," or "as far from believing such things as any man."
If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke—Aye! and what then?
The more exquisite and delicate a flower of joy, the tenderer must be the hand that plucks it.
Floods and general inundations render for the time even the purest springs turbid.
For compassion a human heart suffices; but for full, adequate sympathy with joy, an angel's.
FOOTNOTES:
7 A projected satire, of which, perhaps, the lines headed "A Character" were an instalment. See P. W., 1893, pp. 195-642. Letters of S. T. C., 1895, ii. 631.
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