distinct means! How trivial! Would to God it were only habitual! O what is sadder than that the crambe bis cocta of the understanding should be and remain a foreign dish to the efficient will—that the best and loftiest precepts of wisdom should be trivial, and the worst and lowest modes of folly habitual.
VERBAL CONCEITS
I have learnt, sometimes not at all, and seldom harshly, to chide those conceits of words which are analogous to sudden fleeting affinities of mind. Even, as in a dance, you touch and join and off again, and rejoin your partner that leads down with you the dance, in spite of these occasional off-starts—for they, too, not merely conform to, but are of and in and help to form the delicious harmony. Shakspere is not a thousandth part so faulty as the ○○○ believe him. "Thus him that over-rul'd I over-sway'd," etc., etc. I noticed this to that bubbling ice-spring of cold-hearted, mad-headed fanaticism, the late Dr. Geddes, in the "Heri vidi fragilem frangi, hodie mortalem mori."
[Dr. Alexander Geddes, 1737-1802, was, inter alia, author of a revised translation of the Scriptures.]
THE BRIGHT BLUE SEA
How often I have occasion to notice with pure delight the depth of the exceeding blueness of the Mediterranean from my window! It is often, indeed, purple; but I am speaking of its blueness—a perfect blue, so very pure an one. The sea is like a night-sky; and but for its planities, it were as if the night-sky were a thing that turned round and lay in the day-time under the paler Heaven. And it is on this expanse that the vessels have the fine white dazzling cotton sails.
THE BIRTH OF THE IDEA
Centuries before their mortal incarnation, Jove was wont to manifest to the gods the several creations as they emerged from the divine ideal. Now it was reported in heaven that an unusually fair creation of a woman was emerging, and Venus, fearful that her son should become enamoured as of yore with Psyche (what time he wandered alone, his bow unslung, and using his darts only to cut out her name on rocks and trees, or, at best, to shoot hummingbirds and birds of Paradise to make feather-chaplets for her hair, and the world, meanwhile, grown loveless, hardened into the Iron Age), entreats Jove to secrete this form [of perilous beauty]. But Cupid, who had heard the report, and fondly expected a re-manifestation of Psyche, hid himself in the hollow of the sacred oak beneath which the Father of Gods had withdrawn as to an unapproachable adytum, and beheld the Idea emerging in its First Glory. Forthwith the wanton was struck blind by the splendour ere yet the blaze had defined itself with form, and now his arrows strike but vaguely.
THE CONVERSION OF CERES
I have somewhere read, or I have dreamt, a wild tale of Ceres' loss of Proserpine, and her final recovery of her daughter by means of Christ when He descended into hell, at which time she met Him and abjured all worship for the future.
It were a quaint mythological conceit to feign that the gods of Greece and Rome were some of the best of the fallen spirits, and that of their number Apollo, Mars, and the Muses were converted to Christianity, and became different saints.
AS THE SPARKS FLY UPWARD
The ribbed flame—its snatches of impatience, that half-seem, and only seem that half, to baffle its upward rush—the eternal unity of individualities whose essence is in their distinguishableness, even as thought and fancies in the mind; the points of so many cherubic swords snatched back, but never discouraged, still fountaining upwards:—flames self-snatched up heavenward, if earth supply the fuel, heaven the dry light air—themselves still making the current that will fan and spread them—yet all their force in vain, if of itself—and light dry air, heaped fuel, fanning breeze as idle, if no inward spark lurks there, or lurks unkindled. Such a spark, O man! is thy Free Will—the star whose beams are Virtue!
CHAPTER IV
1805
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide, wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.
S. T. C.
THE SENSE OF MAGNITUDE Tuesday, Jan. 15, 1805
This evening there was the most perfect and the brightest halo circling the roundest and brightest moon I ever beheld. So bright was the halo, so compact, so entire a circle, that it gave the whole of its area, the moon itself included, the appearance of a solid opaque body, an enormous planet. It was as if this planet had a circular trough of some light-reflecting fluid for its rim (that is the halo) and its centre (that is the moon) a small circular basin of some fluid that still more copiously reflected, or that even emitted light; and as if the interspatial area were somewhat equally substantial but sullen. Thence I have found occasion to meditate on the nature of the sense of magnitude and its absolute dependence on the idea of substance; the consequent difference between magnitude and spaciousness, the dependence of the idea on double-touch, and thence to evolve all our feelings and ideas of magnitude, magnitudinal sublimity, &c., from a scale of our own bodies. For why, if form constituted the sense, that is, if it were pure vision, as a perceptive sense abstracted from feeling in the organ of vision, why do I seek for mountains, when in the flattest countries the clouds present so many and so much more romantic and spacious forms, and the coal-fire so many, so much more varied and lovely forms? And whence arises the pleasure from musing on the latter? Do I not, more or less consciously, fancy myself a Lilliputian to whom these would be mountains, and so, by this factitious scale, make them mountains, my pleasure being consequently playful, a voluntary poem in hieroglyphics or picture-writing—"phantoms of sublimity," which I continue to know to be phantoms? And form itself, is not its main agency exerted in individualising the thing, making it this and that, and thereby facilitating the shadowy measurement of it by the scale of my own body?
Yon long, not unvaried, ridge of hills, that runs out of sight each way, it is spacious, and the pleasure derivable from it is from its running, its motion, its assimilation to action; and here the scale is taken from my life and soul, and not from my body. Space is the Hebrew name for God, and it is the most perfect image of soul, pure soul, being to us nothing but unresisted action. Whenever action is resisted, limitation begins—and limitation is the first constituent of body—the more omnipresent it is in a given space, the more that space is body or matter—and thus all body necessarily presupposes soul, inasmuch as all resistance presupposes action. Magnitude, therefore, is the intimate blending, the most perfect union, through its whole sphere, in every minutest part of it, of action and resistance to action. It is spaciousness in which space is filled up—that is, as we well say, transmitted by incorporate accession, not destroyed. In all limited things, that is, in all forms, it is at least fantastically stopped, and, thus, from the positive grasp to the mountain, from the mountain to the cloud, from the cloud to the blue depth of sky, which, as on the top of Etna, in a serene atmosphere, seems to go behind the sun, all is graduation, that precludes division, indeed, but not distinction; and he who endeavours to overturn a distinction by showing that there is no chasm, by the old sophism of the cumulus or the horse's tail, is still diseased with the formication,2 the (what is the nosological name of it? the hairs or dancing infinites of black specks seeming always to be before the eye), the araneosis of corpuscular materialism.—S. T. .
STRAY THOUGHTS FOR THE "SOOTHER
