chit-chat.
We imagine ourselves discoverers, and that we have struck a light, when, in reality, at most, we have but snuffed a candle.
A thief in the candle, consuming in a blaze the tallow belonging to the wick which has sunk out of sight, is an apt simile for a plagiarist from a dead author.
An author with a new play which has been hissed off the stage is not unlike a boy who has launched on a pond a ship of his own making, and tries to prove to his schoolfellows that it ought to have sailed.
Repose after agitation is like the pool under a waterfall, which the waterfall has made.
Something inherently mean in action! Even the creation of the universe disturbs my idea of the Almighty's greatness—would do so but that I perceive that thought with Him creates.
The great federal republic of the universe.
T. Wedgwood's objection to my "Things and Thoughts," because "thought always implies an act or nisus of mind" is not well founded. A thought and thoughts are quite different words from Thought, as a fancy from Fancy, a work from Work, a life from Life, a force and forces from Force, a feeling, a writing [from Feelings, Writings.]
May 10, 1803
To fall asleep. Is not a real event in the body well represented by this phrase? Is it in excess when on first dropping asleep we fall down precipices, or sink down, all things sinking beneath us, or drop down? Is there not a disease from deficiency of this critical sensation when people imagine that they have been awake all night, and actually lie dreaming, expecting and wishing for the critical sensation?
[Compare the phrase, "precipices of distempered sleep," in the sonnet, "No more my visionary soul shall dwell," attributed by Southey to Favell.—Life and Corresp. of R. Southey, i. 224.]
A TREACHEROUS KNAVE
[He] drew out the secrets from men's hearts as the Egyptian enchanters by particular strains of music draw out serpents from their lurking-places.
COUNTRY AND TOWN
The rocks and stones put on a vital resemblance and life itself seemed, thereby, to forego its restlessness, to anticipate in its own nature an infinite repose, and to become, as it were, compatible with immoveability.
Bright reflections, in the canal, of the blue and green vitriol bottles in the druggists' shops in London.
A curious, and more than curious, fact, that when the country does not benefit, it depraves. Hence the violent, vindictive passions and the outrageous and dark and wild cruelties of very many country folk. [On the other hand] the continual sight of human faces and human houses, as in China, emasculates [and degrades.]
Monday night, June 8, 1803
"He who cannot wait for his reward has, in reality, not earned it." These words I uttered in a dream, in which a lecture I was giving—a very profound one, as I thought—was not listened to, but I was quizzed.
Tuesday night, July 19, 1803
Intensely hot day; left off a waistcoat and for yarn wore silk stockings. Before nine o'clock, had unpleasant chillness; heard a noise which I thought Derwent's in sleep, listened, and found it was a calf bellowing. Instantly came on my mind that night I slept out at Ottery, and the calf in the field across the river whose lowing so deeply impressed me. Chill + child and calf-lowing—probably the Rivers Greta and Otter. [Letters of S.T.C., 1895, i. 14, note.]
October, 1803
A smile, as foreign or alien to, as detached from the gloom of the countenance, as I have seen a small spot of light travel slowly and sadly along the mountain's breast, when all beside has been dark with the storm.
A PRINCIPLE OF CRITICISM.
Never to lose an opportunity of reasoning against the head-dimming, heart-damping principle of judging a work by its defects, not its beauties. Every work must have the former—we know it a priori—but every work has not the latter, and he, therefore, who discovers them, tells you something that you could not with certainty, or even with probability, have anticipated.
WORDSWORTH AND THE PRELUDE
I am sincerely glad that he has bidden farewell to all small poems, and is devoting himself to his great work, grandly imprisoning, while it deifies, his attention and feelings within the sacred circle and temple-walls of great objects and elevated conceptions. In those little poems, his own corrections coming of necessity so often—at the end of every fourteen or twenty lines, or whatever the poem might chance to be—wore him out; difference of opinion with his best friends irritated him, and he wrote, at times, too much with a sectarian spirit, in a sort of bravado. But now he is at the helm of a noble bark; now he sails right onward; it is all open ocean and a steady breeze, and he drives before it, unfretted by short tacks, reefing and unreefing the sails, hauling and disentangling the ropes. His only disease is the having been out of his element; his return to it is food to famine; it is both the specific remedy and the condition of health.
THE INCOMMUNICABLE
Without drawing, I feel myself but half invested with language. Music, too, is wanting to me. But yet, though one should unite poetry, draftsman's skill, and music, the greater and, perhaps, nobler, certainly all the subtler, parts of one's nature must be solitary. Man exists herein to himself and to God alone—yea! in how much only to God! how much lies below his own consciousness!
The tree or sea-weed like appearance of the side of the mountain, all white with snow, made by little bits of snow loosened. Introduce this and the stones leaping rabbit-like down on my sopha of sods. [Vide p. 60.]
The sunny mist, the luminous gloom of Plato.
TIME AN ELEMENT OF GRIEF
Nothing affects me much at the moment it happens. It either stupefies me, and I, perhaps, look at a merry-make and dance-the-hay of flies, or listen entirely to the loud click of the great clock, or I am simply indifferent, not without some sense of philosophical self-complacency. For a thing at the moment is but a thing of the moment; it must be taken up into the mind, diffuse itself through the whole multitude of shapes and thoughts, not one of which it leaves untinged, between [not one of] which and it some new thought is not engendered. Now this is a work of time, but the body feels it quicker with me.
THE POET AND THE SPIDER
On St. Herbert's Island, I saw a large spider with most beautiful legs, floating in the air on his back by a single thread which he was spinning out, and still, as he spun, heaving on the air, as if the air beneath was a pavement elastic to his strokes. From the top of a very high tree he had spun his line; at length reached the bottom, tied his thread round a piece of grass, and reascended to spin another—a net to hang, as a fisherman's sea-net hangs, in the sun and wind to dry.
THE COMMUNICABLE
One excellent use of communication of sorrow to a friend is this, that in relating what ails us, we ourselves first know exactly what the real grief is, and see it for itself in its own form and limits. Unspoken grief is a misty medley of which the real affliction only plays the first fiddle, blows the horn to a scattered mob of obscure feelings. Perhaps, at certain moments, a single, almost insignificant sorrow may, by association, bring together all the little relicts
