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

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      CHAPTER V

       Table of Contents

       September 1806—December 1807

      Alas! for some abiding-place of love,

       O'er which my spirit, like the mother dove,

       Might brood with warming wings!

      S. T. C.

      DREAMS AND SHADOWS

      I had a confused shadow rather than an image in my recollection, like that from a thin cloud, as if the idea were descending, though still in some measureless height.

      As when the taper's white cone of flame is seen double, till the eye moving brings them into one space and then they become one—so did the idea in my imagination coadunate with your present form soon after I first gazed upon you.

      And in life's noisiest hour

       There whispers still the ceaseless love of thee,

       The heart's self-solace and soliloquy.

      You mould my hopes, you fashion me within,

       And to the leading love-throb in my heart

       Through all my being, all my pulses beat.

       You lie in all my many thoughts like light,

       Like the fair light of dawn, or summer light,

       On rippling stream, or cloud-reflecting lake—

       And looking to the Heaven that beams above you,

       How do I bless the lot that made me love you!

      KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING

      In all processes of the understanding the shortest way will be discovered the last and this, perhaps, while it constitutes the great advantage of having a teacher to put us on the shortest road at the first, yet sometimes occasions a difficulty in the comprehension, inasmuch as the longest way is more near to the existing state of the mind, nearer to what if left to myself, on starting the thought, I should have thought next. The shortest way gives me the knowledge best, but the longest makes me more knowing.

      PARTISANS AND RENEGADES

      When a party man talks as if he hated his country, saddens at her prosperous events, exults in her disasters and yet, all the while, is merely hating the opposite party, and would himself feel and talk as a patriot were he in a foreign land [he is a party man]. The true monster is he (and such alas! there are in these monstrous days, "vollendeter Sündhaftigkeit"), who abuses his country when out of his country.

      POPULACE AND PEOPLE

      Oh the profanation of the sacred word the People! Every brutal Burdett-led mob, assembled on some drunken St. Monday of faction, is the People forsooth, and each leprous ragamuffin, like a circle in geometry, is, at once, one and all, and calls its own brutal self, "us the People." And who are the friends of the People? Not those who would wish to elevate each of them, or, at least, the child who is to take his place in the flux of life and death, into something worthy of esteem and capable of freedom, but those who flatter and infuriate them, as they are. A contradiction in the very thought! For if, really, they are good and wise, virtuous and well-informed, how weak must be the motives of discontent to a truly moral being—but if the contrary, and the motives for discontent proportionably strong, how without guilt and absurdity appeal to them as judges and arbiters? He alone is entitled to a share in the government of all, who has learnt to govern himself. There is but one possible ground of a right of freedom—viz., to understand and revere its duties.

      [Vide Life of S. T. C., by James Gillman, 1838, p. 223.]

      FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE." May 28, 1807 Bristol

      How villainously these metallic pencils have degenerated, not only in the length and quantity, but what is far worse, in the quality of the metal! This one appears to have no superiority over the worst sort sold by the Maltese shopkeepers.

      Blue sky through the glimmering interspaces of the dark elms at twilight rendered a lovely deep yellow-green—all the rest a delicate blue.

      The hay-field in the close hard by the farm-house—babe, and totterer little more [than a babe]—old cat with her eyes blinking in the sun and little kittens leaping and frisking over the hay-lines.

      What an admirable subject for an Allston would Tycho Brahe be, listening with religious awe to the oracular gabble of the idiot, whom he kept at his feet, and used to feed with his own hands!

      The sun-flower ought to be cultivated, the leaves being excellent fodder, the flowers eminently melliferous, and the seeds a capital food for poultry, none nourishing quicker or occasioning them to lay more eggs.

      Serpentium allapsus timet. Quære—allapse of serpents. Horace.—What other word have we? Pity that we dare not Saxonise as boldly as our forefathers, by unfortunate preference, Latinised. Then we should have on-glide, angleiten; onlook anschauen, etc.

      I moisten the bread of affliction with the water of adversity.

      If kings are gods on earth, they are, however, gods of earth.

      Parisatis poisoned one side of the knife with which he carved, and eat of the same joint the next slice unhurt—a happy illustration of affected self-inclusion in accusation.

      It is possible to conceive a planet without any general atmosphere, but in which each living body has its peculiar atmosphere. To hear and understand, one man joins his atmosphere to that of another, and, according to the sympathies of their nature, the aberrations of sound will be greater or less, and their thoughts more or less intelligible. A pretty allegory might be made of this.

      Two faces, each of a confused countenance. In the eyes of the one, muddiness and lustre were blended; and the eyes of the other were the same, but in them there was a red fever that made them appear more fierce. And yet, methought, the former struck a greater trouble, a fear and distress of the mind; and sometimes all the face looked meek and mild, but the eye was ever the same.

      [Qu. S. T. C. and De Quincey?]

      Shadow—its being subsists in shaped and definite nonentity.

      Plain sense, measure, clearness, dignity, grace over all—these made the genius of Greece.

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