one most lovely child, about two years or two and a half, and had repeated to her, in my dream, "The dews were falling fast," &c., and I was sorely frightened by the sneering and fiendish malignity of the beautiful creature, but from the beginning there had been a terror about it and proceeding from it. I shall hereafter, read the Vision in "Macbeth" with increased admiration.
["Quam nihil ad genium Papiniane tuum," was the motto of The Lyrical Ballads.]
That deep intuition of our oneness, is it not at the bottom of many of our faults as well as virtues? the dislike that a bad man should have any virtues, a good man any faults? And yet, too, a something noble and incentive is in this.
THE OMNISCIENT THE COMFORTER
What comfort in the silent eye upraised to God! "Thou knowest." O! what a thought! Never to be friendless, never to be unintelligible! The omnipresence has been generally represented as a spy, a sort of Bentham's Panopticon.4 O to feel what the pain is to be utterly unintelligible and then—"O God, thou understandest!"
POETS AS CRITICS OF POETS
The question should be fairly stated, how far a man can be an adequate, or even a good (as far as he goes) though inadequate critic of poetry who is not a poet, at least, in posse? Can he be an adequate, can he be a good critic, though not commensurate [with the poet criticised]? But there is yet another distinction. Supposing he is not only not a poet, but is a bad poet! What then?
IMMATURE CRITICS March 16, 1805
[The] cause of the offence or disgust received by the mean in good poems when we are young, and its diminution and occasional evanescence when we are older in true taste [is] that, at first, we are from various causes delighted with generalities of nature which can all be expressed in dignified words; but, afterwards, becoming more intimately acquainted with Nature in her detail, we are delighted with distinct, vivid ideas, and with vivid ideas most when made distinct, and can most often forgive and sometimes be delighted with even a low image from art or low life when it gives you the very thing by an illustration, as, for instance, Cowper's stream "inlaying" the level vale as with silver, and even Shakspere's "shrill-tongued Tapster's answering shallow wits" applied to echoes in an echofull place.
ATTENTION AND SENSATION March 17, 1805
Of the not being able to know whether you are smoking in the dark or when your eyes are shut: item, of the ignorance in that state of the difference of beef, veal, &c.—it is all attention. Your ideas being shut, other images arise which you must attend to, it being the habit of a seeing man to attend chiefly to sight. So close your eyes, (and) you attend to the ideal images, and, attending to them, you abstract your attention. It is the same when deeply thinking in a reverie, you no longer hear distinct sound made to you. But what a strange inference that there were no sounds!
ST. COLUMBA
I love St. Combe or Columba and he shall be my saint. For he is not in the Catalogue of Romish Saints, having never been canonised at Rome, and because this Apostle of the Picts lived and gave his name to an island on the Hebrides, and from him Switzerland was christianised.
EXPERIENCE AND BOOK KNOWLEDGE Midnight, April 5, 1805
"I will write," I said, "as truly as I can from experience, actual individual experience, not from book-knowledge." But yet it is wonderful how exactly the knowledge from good books coincides with the experience of men of the world. How often, when I was younger, have I noticed the deep delight of men of the world who have taken late in life to literature, on coming across a passage the force of which had either escaped me altogether, or which I knew to be true from books only and at second hand! Experience is necessary, no doubt, if only to give a light and shade in the mind, to give to some one idea a greater vividness than to others, and thereby to make it a Thing of Time and actual reality. For all ideas being equally vivid, the whole becomes a dream. But, notwithstanding this and other reasons, I yet believe that the saws against book-knowledge are handed down to us from times when books conveyed only abstract science or abstract morality and religion. Whereas, in the present day, what is there of real life, in all its goings on, trades, manufactures, high life, low life, animate and inanimate that is not to be found in books? In these days books are conversation. And this, I know, is for evil as well as good, but for good, too, as well as evil.
DUTY AND SELF INTEREST Sunday morning 4 o'clock, April 7, 1805
How feebly, how unlike an English cock, that cock crows and the other answers! Did I not particularly notice the unlikeness on my first arrival at Malta? Well, to-day I will disburthen my mind. Yet one thing strikes me, the difference I find in myself during the past year or two. My enthusiasm for the happiness of mankind in particular places and countries, and my eagerness to promote it, seems to decrease, and my sense of duty, my hauntings of conscience, from any stain of thought or action to increase in the same ratio. I remember having written a strong letter to my most dear and honoured Wordsworth in consequence of his "Ode to Duty," and in that letter explained this as the effect of selfness in a mind incapable of gross self-interest—I mean, the decrease of hope and joy, the soul in its round and round flight forming narrower circles, till at every gyre its wings beat against the personal self. But let me examine this more accurately. It may be that the phenomena will come out more honourable to our nature.
EVIL PRODUCES EVIL
It is as trite as it is mournful (but yet most instructive), and by the genius that can produce the strongest impressions of novelty by rescuing the stalest and most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission—admitted so instantly as never to be reflected on, never by that sole key of reflection admitted into the effective, legislative chamber of the heart—so true that they lose all the privileges of Truth, and, as extremes meet by being truisms, correspond in utter inefficiency with universally acknowledged errors (in Algebraic symbols Truisms = Falsehoodisms = ○○)—by that genius, I say, might good be worked in considering the old, old Methusalem saw that "evil produces evil." One error almost compels another. Tell one lie, tell a hundred. Oh, to show this, a priori, by bottoming it in all our faculties and by experience of touching examples!
JOHN WORDSWORTH Monday, April 8, 1805
The favourite object of all Oriental tales, and that which, whist it inspired their authors in the East, still inspires their readers everywhere, is the impossibility of baffling Destiny—the perception that what we considered as the means of one thing becomes, in a strange manner, the direct means of the reverse. O dear John Wordsworth! what joy at Grasmere that you were made Captain of the Abergavenny, and so young too! Now it was next to certain that you would in a few years settle in your native hills and be verily one of the Concern! Then came your share in the brilliant action with Linois. (I was at Grasmere in spirit only, but in spirit I was one of the rejoicers—as joyful as any, and, perhaps, more joyous!) This, doubtless, not only enabled you to lay in a larger and more advantageous cargo, but procured you a voyage to India instead of China, and in this circumstance a next to certainty of independence—and all these were decoys of Death! Well, but a nobler feeling than these vain regrets would become the friend of the man whose last words were: "I have done my duty! let her go!" Let us do our duty! all else is a dream, life and death alike a dream. This short sentence would comprise, I believe, the sum of all profound philosophy, of ethics and metaphysics conjointly, from Plato to Fichte!
[Vide Letters of S. T. C., 1895, ii. 495, note.]
LOVE THE DIVINE ESSENCE
The best, the truly lovely in each and all, is God. Therefore the truly beloved is the
