Coleridge and Wordsworth: Lyrical Ballads & Other Poems. William Wordsworth

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      [Sockburn] October 1799

      Few moments in life are so interesting as those of our affectionate reception from a stranger who is the dear friend of your dear friend! How often you have been the subject of conversation, and how affectionately!

      [The note commemorates his first introduction to Mary and Sarah Hutchinson.]

      Friday evening, Nov, 27, 1799

      The immoveableness of all things through which so many men were moving—a harsh contrast compared with the universal motion, the harmonious system of motions in the country, and everywhere in Nature. In the dim light London appeared to be a huge place of sepulchres through which hosts of spirits were gliding.

      Ridicule the rage for quotations by quoting from "My Baby's Handkerchief." Analyse the causes that the ludicrous weakens memory, and laughter, mechanically, makes it difficult to remember a good story.

Sara sent twice for the measure of George's1 neck. He wondered that Sara should be such a fool, as she might have measured William's or Coleridge's—as "all poets' throttles were of one size."

      Hazlitt, the painter, told me that a picture never looked so well as when the pallet was by the side of it. Association, with the glow of production.

      Mr. J. Cairns, in the Gentleman's Diary for 1800, supposes that the Nazarites, who, under the law of Moses, had their heads [shaved] must have used some sort of wigs!

      Slanting pillars of misty light moved along under the sun hid by clouds.

      Leaves of trees upturned by the stirring wind in twilight—an image of paleness, wan affright.

      A child scolding a flower in the words in which he had been himself scolded and whipped, is poetry—passion past with pleasure.

      July 20, 1800

      Poor fellow at a distance—idle? in this hay-time when wages are so high? [We] come near [and] then [see that he is] pale, can scarce speak or throw out his fishing rod.

      [This incident is fully described by Wordsworth in the last of the four poems on "Naming of Places."

      —Poetical Works of W. Wordsworth, 1889, p. 144.]

      September 1, [1800]

      The beards of thistle and dandelions flying about the lonely mountains like life—and I saw them through the trees skimming the lake like swallows.

      ["And, in our vacant mood,

       Not seldom did we stop to watch some tuft

       Of dandelion seed or thistle's beard,

       That skimmed the surface of the dead calm lake,

       Suddenly halting now—a lifeless stand!

       And starting off again with freak as sudden;

       In all its sportive wanderings, all the while,

       Making report of an invisible breeze

       That was its wings, its chariot and its horse,

       Its playmate, rather say, its moving soul."

      Ibid. p. 143.]

      Luther—a hero, fettered, indeed, with prejudices—but with those very fetters he would knock out the brains of a modern Fort Esprit.

      Comment. Frightening by his prejudices, as a spirit does by clanking his chains.

      Not only words, as far as relates to speaking, but the knowledge of words as distinct component parts, which we learn by learning to read—what an immense effect it must have on our reasoning faculties! Logical in opposition to real.

      1797-1801

      Children, in making new words, always do it analogously. Explain this.

      Hot-headed men confuse, your cool-headed gentry jumble. The man of warm feelings only produces order and true connection. In what a jumble M. and H. write, every third paragraph beginning with "Let us now return," or "We come now to the consideration of such a thing"—that is, what I said I would come to in the contents prefixed to the chapter.

      Dec. 19, 1800

      The thin scattered rain-clouds were scudding along the sky; above them, with a visible interspace, the crescent moon hung, and partook not of the motion; her own hazy light filled up the concave, as if it had been painted and the colours had run.

      "He to whom all things are one, who draweth all things to one, and seeth all things in one, may enjoy true peace of mind and rest of spirit."—Jeremy Taylor's Via Pacis.

      To each reproach that thunders from without may remorse groan an echo.

      A prison without ransom, anguish without patience, a sick bed in the house of contempt.

      To think of a thing is different from to perceive it, as "to walk" is from to "feel the ground under you;" perhaps in the same way too—namely, a succession of perceptions accompanied by a sense of nisus and purpose.

      Space, is it merely another word for the perception of a capability of additional magnitude, or does this very perception presuppose the idea of space? The latter is Kant's opinion.

      A babe who had never known greater cruelty than that of being snatched away by its mother for half a moment from the breast in order to be kissed.

      To attempt to subordinate the idea of time to that of likeness.

      Every man asks how? This power to instruct is the true substratum of philosophy.

      Godwin's philosophy is contained in these words: Rationem defectus esse defectum rationis.—Hobbes.

      Hartley just able to speak a few words, making a fire-place of stones, with stones for fire—four stones for the fire-place, two for the fire—seems to illustrate a theory of language, the use of arbitrary symbols in imagination. Hartley walked remarkably soon and, therefore, learnt to talk remarkably late.

      Anti-optimism! Praised be our Maker, and to the honour of human nature is it, that we may truly call this an inhuman opinion. Man strives after good.

      Materialists unwilling to admit the mysterious element of our nature make it all mysterious—nothing mysterious in nerves, eyes, &c., but that nerves think, etc.! Stir up the sediment into the transparent water, and so make all opaque.

      1797-1801

      As we recede from anthropomorphism we must go either to the Trinity or Pantheism. The Fathers who were Unitarians were anthropomorphites.

      EGOTISM January 1801

      Empirics are boastful and egotists because they introduce real or apparent novelty, which excites great СКАЧАТЬ