Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ faster on for death's convulsion.—

       Thou seed of rocks, will nothing move thee, then?

       Are all my tears lost, all my righteous prayers

       Drown'd in thy drunken wrath? I stand up thus, then,

       Thou boldly bloody tyrant,

       And to thy face, in heav'n's high name defy thee!

       And may sweet mercy, when thy soul sighs for it—

       When under thy black mischiefs thy flesh trembles—

       When neither strength, nor youth, nor friends, nor gold,

       Can stay one hour; when thy most wretched conscience,

       Waked from her dream of death, like fire shall melt thee—

       When all thy mother's tears, thy brother's wounds,

       Thy people's fears, and curses, and my loss,

       My aged father's loss, shall stand before thee—

      ROLLO. Save him, I say; run, save him, save her father;

       Fly and redeem his head!

      EDITH. May then that pity," &c.]

      * * * * *

      Our version of the Bible is to be loved and prized for this, as for a thousand other things—that it has preserved a purity of meaning to many terms of natural objects. Without this holdfast, our vitiated imaginations would refine away language to mere abstractions. Hence the French have lost their poetical language; and Mr. Blanco White says the same thing has happened to the Spanish.

      * * * * *

      I have the perception of individual images very strong, but a dim one of the relation of place. I remember the man or the tree, but where I saw them I mostly forget.[1]

      [Footnote 1: There was no man whose opinion in morals, or even in a matter of general conduct in life, if you furnished the pertinent circumstances, I would have sooner adopted than Mr. Coleridge's; but I would not take him as a guide through streets or fields or earthly roads. He had much of the geometrician about him; but he could not find his way. In this, as in many other peculiarities of more importance, he inherited strongly from his learned and excellent father, who deserves, and will, I trust, obtain, a separate notice for himself when his greater son's life comes to be written. I believe the beginning of Mr. C.'s liking for Dr. Spurzheim was the hearty good humour with which the Doctor bore the laughter of a party, in the presence of which he, unknowing of his man, denied any Ideality, and awarded an unusual share of Locality, to the majestic silver-haired head of my dear uncle and father-in-law. But Mr. Coleridge immediately shielded the craniologist under the distinction preserved in the text, and perhaps, since that time, there may be a couple of organs assigned to the latter faculty.—ED.]

      * * * * *

      Craniology is worth some consideration, although it is merely in its rudiments and guesses yet. But all the coincidences which have been observed could scarcely be by accident. The confusion and absurdity, however, will be endless until some names or proper terms are discovered for the organs, which are not taken from their mental application or significancy. The forepart of the head is generally given up to the higher intellectual powers; the hinder part to the sensual emotions.

      * * * * *

      Silence does not always mark wisdom. I was at dinner, some time ago, in company with a man, who listened to me and said nothing for a long time; but he nodded his head, and I thought him intelligent. At length, towards the end of the dinner, some apple dumplings were placed on the table, and my man had no sooner seen them, than he burst forth with—"Them's the jockies for me!" I wish Spurzheim could have examined the fellow's head.

      * * * * *

      Some folks apply epithets as boys do in making Latin verses. When I first looked upon the Falls of the Clyde, I was unable to find a word to express my feelings. At last, a man, a stranger to me, who arrived about the same time, said:—"How majestic!"—(It was the precise term, and I turned round and was saying—"Thank you, Sir! that is the exact word for it"—when he added, eodem flatu)—"Yes! how very pretty!"

      * * * * *

      July 8. 1827.

      BULL AND WATERLAND.—THE TRINITY.

      Bull and Waterland are the classical writers on the Trinity.[1]

      In the Trinity there is, 1. Ipseity. 2. Alterity. 3. Community. You may express the formula thus:—

      God, the absolute Will or Identity, = Prothesis. The Father = Thesis. The

       Son = Antithesis. The Spirit = Synthesis.

      [Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge's admiration of Bull and Waterland as high theologians was very great. Bull he used to read in the Latin Defensio Fidei Nicaenae, using the Jesuit Zola's edition of 1784, which, I think, he bought at Rome. He told me once, that when he was reading a Protestant English Bishop's work on the Trinity, in a copy edited by an Italian Jesuit in Italy, he felt proud of the church of England, and in good humour with the church of Rome.—ED.]

      * * * * *

      The author of the Athanasian Creed is unknown. It is, in my judgment, heretical in the omission, or implicit denial, of the Filial subordination in the Godhead, which is the doctrine of the Nicene Creed, and for which Bull and Waterland have so fervently and triumphantly contended; and by not holding to which, Sherlock staggered to and fro between Tritheism and Sabellianism. This creed is also tautological, and, if not persecuting, which I will not discuss, certainly containing harsh and ill-conceived language.

      * * * * *

      How much I regret that so many religious persons of the present day think it necessary to adopt a certain cant of manner and phraseology as a token to each other. They must improve this and that text, and they must do so and so in a prayerful way; and so on. Why not use common language? A young lady the other day urged upon me that such and such feelings were the marrow of all religion; upon which I recommended her to try to walk to London upon her marrow-bones only.

      * * * * *

      July 9. 1827.

      SCALE OF ANIMAL BEING.

      In the very lowest link in the vast and mysterious chain of Being, there is an effort, although scarcely apparent, at individualization; but it is almost lost in the mere nature. A little higher up, the individual is apparent and separate, but subordinate to any thing in man. At length, the animal rises to be on a par with the lowest power of the human nature. There are some of our natural desires which only remain in our most perfect state on earth as means of the higher powers' acting.[1]

      [Footnote 1: These remarks seem to call for a citation of that wonderful passage, transcendant alike in eloquence and philosophic depth, which the readers of the Aids to Reflection have long since laid up in cedar:—

      "Every rank of creatures, as it ascends in the scale of creation, leaves death behind it or under it. The metal at its height of being seems a mute СКАЧАТЬ