[Sidenote: AURI SACRA FAMES]
O! The impudence of those who dare hold property to be the great binder-up of the affections of the young to the old, &c., and G.o.dwin"s folly in his book! Two brothers in this country fought in the mourning coach, and stood with black eyes and their black clothes all blood over their father"s grave.
[Sidenote: EARLY DEATH November 1803]
Poor Miss Dacre! born with a spinal deformity, that prophesied the early death it occasioned. Such are generally gentle and innocent beings. G.o.d seems to stamp on their foreheads the seal of death, in sign of appropriation. No evil dares approach the sacred hieroglyphic on this seal of redemption; we on earth interpret early death, but the heavenly spirits, that minister around us, read in it "Abiding innocence."
Something to me delicious in the thought that one who dies a baby presents to the glorified Saviour and Redeemer that same sweet face of infancy which He blessed when on earth, and sanctified with a kiss, and solemnly p.r.o.nounced to be the type and sacrament of regeneration.
[Sidenote: THE NIGHT SIDE OF NATURE November 9, Wednesday night, 45 min.
past 6]
The town, with lighted windows and noise of the _clogged_ pa.s.sengers in the streets--sound of the unseen river. Mountains scarcely perceivable except by eyes long used to them, and supported by the images of memory flowing in on the impulses of immediate impression. On the sky, black clouds; two or three dim, untwinkling stars, like full stops on damp paper, and large stains and spreads of sullen white, like a tunic of white wool seen here and there through a torn and tattered cloak of black. Whence do these stains of white proceed all over the sky, so long after sunset, and from their indifference of place in the sky, seemingly unaffected by the west?
[Sidenote: November 10, 1/2 past 2 o"clock, morning]
Awoke, after long struggles, from a persecuting dream. The tale of the dream began in two _images_, in two sons of a n.o.bleman, desperately fond of shooting, brought out by the footman to resign their property, and to be made believe that they had none. They were far too cunning for that, and as they struggled and resisted their cruel wrongers, and my interest for them, I suppose, increased, I became they--the duality vanished--Boyer and Christ"s Hospital became concerned; yet, still, the former story was kept up, and I was conjuring him, as he met me in the street, to have pity on a n.o.bleman"s orphan, when I was carried up to bed, and was struggling up against some unknown impediment--when a noise of one of the doors awoke me. Drizzle; the sky uncouthly marbled with white vapours and large black clouds, their surface of a fine woolly grain, but in the height and key-stone of the arch a round s.p.a.ce of sky with dim watery stars, like a friar"s crown; the seven stars in the central seen through white vapour that, entirely shapeless, gave a whiteness to the circle of the sky, but stained with exceedingly thin and subtle flakes of black vapour, might be happily said in language of Boccace (describing Demogorgon, in his _Genealogia De Gli Dei_) to be _vest.i.to d"una pallidezza affumicata_.
[Sidenote: Tuesday night, 1/4 after 7]
The sky covered with stars, the wind up--right opposite my window, over Brandelhow, as its centre, and extending from the gorge to Whinlatter, an enormous black cloud, exactly in the shape of an egg--this, the only cloud in all the sky, impressed me with a demoniacal grandeur. O for change of weather!
[Sidenote: Sunday morning, Nov. 13, 1/2 past 2]
The sky, in upon Grysdale Pike and onward to the Withop Fells, floored with flat, smooth, dark or dingy clouds, elsewhere starry. Though seven stars and all the rest in the height of the heaven be dimmed, those in the descent bright and frosty. The river has a loud voice, self-biographer of to-day"s rain and thunder-showers. The owls are silent; they have been very musical. All weathers on Sat.u.r.day the twelfth, storm and frost, sunshine, lightning and what not! G.o.d be praised, though sleepless, am marvellously bettered, and I take it for granted that the barometer has risen. I have been reading Barrow"s treatise "On the Pope"s Supremacy," and have made a note on the _L"Estrangeism_ of his style whenever his thoughts rendered it possible for the words to be pert, frisky and vulgar--which, luckily, could not be often, from the gravity of his subjects, the solidity and appropriateness of his thoughts, and that habitual geometrical _precision_ of mind which demanded the most _appropriate_ words. He seems to me below South in dignity; at least, South never sinks so low as B. sometimes.
[Sidenote: AN OPTICAL ILLUSION]
A pretty optical fact occurred this morning. As I was returning from Fletcher"s, up the back lane and just in sight of the river, I saw, floating high in the air, somewhere over Mr. Banks", a n.o.ble kite. I continued gazing at it for some time, when, turning suddenly round, I saw at an equi-distance on my right, that is, over the middle of our field, a pair of kites floating about. I looked at them for some seconds, when it occurred to me that I had never before seen two kites together, and instantly the vision disappeared. It was neither more nor less than two pair of leaves, each pair on a separate stalk, on a young fruit tree that grew on the other side of the wall, not two yards from my eye. The leaves being alternate, did, when I looked at them as leaves, strikingly resemble wings, and they were the only leaves on the tree. The magnitude was given by the imagined distance, that distance by the former adjustment of the eye, which _remained_ in consequence of the deep impression, the length of time I had been looking at the kite, the pleasure, &c., and [the fact that] a new object [had] impressed itself on the eye.
[Sidenote: THE INWARD LIGHT]
In Plotinus the system of the Quakers is most beautifully expressed in the fifth book of the Fifth Ennead (he is speaking of "the inward light"): "It is not lawful to enquire from whence it originated, for it neither approached hither, nor again departs from hence to some other place, but it either appears to us, or does not appear. So that we ought not to pursue it as if with a view of discerning its latent original, but to abide in quiet till it suddenly shines upon us, preparing ourselves for the blessed spectacle, like the eye waiting for the rising sun."
[Sidenote: PARS ALTERA MEI]
My nature requires another nature for its support, and reposes only in another from the necessary indigence of its being. Intensely similar yet not the same [must that other be]; or, may I venture to say, the same indeed, but dissimilar, as the same breath sent with the same force, the same pauses, and the same melody pre-imaged in the mind, into the flute and the clarion shall be the same _soul diversely incarnate_.
[Sidenote: NOT THE BEAUTIFUL BUT THE GOOD]
"ALL things desire that which is first from a necessity of nature, prophesying, as it were, that they cannot subsist without the energies of that first nature. But beauty is not first, it happens only to intellect, and creates restlessness and seeking; but good, which is present from the beginning and unceasingly to our innate appet.i.te, abides with us even in sleep, and never seizes the mind with astonishment, and requires no peculiar reminiscence to convince us of its presence."--PLOTINUS.
This is just and profound, yet perfect beauty being an abstract of good, in and for that particular form excites in me no pa.s.sion but that of an admiration so quiet as scarcely to admit of the name _pa.s.sion_, but one that, partic.i.p.ating in the same root of soul, does yet spring up with excellences that I have not. To this I am driven by a desire of self-completion with a restless and inextinguishable love. G.o.d is not all things, for in this case He would be indigent of all; but all things are G.o.d, and eternally indigent of G.o.d. And in the original meaning of the word _essence_ as predicable of that concerning which you can say, This is he, or That is he (this or that rather than any other), in this sense of the word essence, I perfectly coincide with the Platonists and Plotinists that, if we add to the nature of G.o.d either essence or intellect or beauty, we deprive Him of being the Good himself, the only One, the purely and absolutely One.
[Sidenote: A MOON-SET Friday, Nov. 25, 1803, morning 45 minutes past]
After a night of storm and rain, the sky calm and white, by blue vapour thinning into formlessness instead of clouds, the mountains of height covered with snow, the secondary mountains black. The moon descending aslant the [V]^A, through the midst of which the great road winds, set exactly behind Whinlatter Point, marked A. She being an egg, somewhat uncouthly shaped, perhaps, but an ostrich"s egg rather than any other (she is two nights more than a half-moon), she set behind the black point, fitted herself on to it like a cap of fire, then became a crescent, then a mountain of fire in the distance, then the peak itself on fire, one steady flame; then stars of the first, second and third magnitude, and vanishing, upboiled a swell of light, and in the next second the whole sky, which had been _sable blue_ around the yellow moon, whitened and brightened for as large a s.p.a.ce as would take the moon half an hour to descend through.
[Sidenote: THE DEATH OF ADAM A DREAM Dec. 6, 1803]
Adam travelling in his old age came to a set of the descendants of Cain, ignorant of the origin of the world, and treating him as a madman, killed him. A sort of dream which I had this night.
[Sidenote: A MAN"S A MAN FOR ALL THAT]
We ought to suspect reasoning founded wholly on the difference of man from man, not on their commonnesses, which are infinitely greater. So I doubt the wisdom of the treatment of sailors and criminals, because it is wholly grounded on their vices, as if the vices formed the whole or major part of their being.
[Sidenote: A DEFENCE OF METAPHYSIC]
Abstruse reasoning is to the inductions of common sense what reaping is to delving. But the implements with which we reap, how are they gained?
by delving. Besides, what is common sense now was abstract reasoning with earlier ages.
[Sidenote: A SUNSET]
A beautiful sunset, the sun setting behind Newlands across the foot of the lake. The sky is cloudless, save that there is a cloud on Skiddaw, one on the highest mountains in Borrowdale, some on Helvellyn, and that the sun sets in a glorious cloud. These clouds are of various shapes, various colours, and belong to their mountains and have nothing to do with the sky. N.B.--There is something metallic, silver playfully and imperfectly gilt and highly polished, or, rather, something mother-of-pearlish, in the sun-gleams on ice, thin ice.
[Sidenote: EXTREMES MEET]
I have repeatedly said that I could make a volume if only I had noted down, as they occurred to my recollection, the instances of the proverb "Extremes Meet." This night, Sunday, December 11, 1803, half-past eleven, I have determined to devote the last nine pages of my pocket-book to a collection of the same.
1. The parching air Burns frore and cold performs the effect of fire.
_Paradise Lost_, ii. 594.
2. Insects by their smallness, the mammoth by its hugeness, terrible.
3. In the foam-islands in a fiercely boiling pool, at the bottom of a waterfall, there is sameness from infinite change.
4. The excess of humanity and disinterestedness in polite society, the desire not to give pain, for example, not to talk of your own diseases and misfortunes, and to introduce nothing but what will give pleasure, destroy all humanity and disinterestedness, by making it intolerable, through desuetude, to listen to the complaints of our equals, or of any, where the listening does not gratify or excite some vicious pride and sense of superiority.
5. It is difficult to say whether a perfectly unheard-of subject or a _crambe bis cocta_, if chosen by a man of genius, would excite in the higher degree the sense of novelty. Take, as an instance of the latter, the "Orestes" of Sotheby.
6. Dark with excess of light.